Iron in Fire

Adoption Through the Word: A Sermon on John 1:1-14

2012-01-23T17:02:00.000-08:00

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. [...] Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of all humanity. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. […] The true light that gives light to everyone was coming into the world. [...] He came to his own, but his own didn't receive him. Yet to all who did receive him, to those who had faith in his name, he gave the right to become children of God [...] The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth. (John 1:1, 3-5, 9, 11-14)

The story the Bible tells about us doesn't start with us at all; it begins with an eternal God who shows himself as holy love. He doesn't need anything, but he creates a whole universe anyway, through the 'Word' that was always with him^¹. It's a work of art, a masterpiece displaying his glory. He creates it because he wants to share the life he has in himself. So he creates us to be his image in the world^², and he gives us authority to represent him and to take care of the earth. He gives us everything we have and everything we are, all as a gift. He offers us endless life and happiness with him, chances to grow and learn and explore, and he offers us his love. It's the start of the happiest story ever.

But it's also the start of the saddest story ever. Because we decide that, even though he's given us so much and we should be grateful, we want just a little bit more, and we want it on our terms, not his. And so, whether we realize what we're doing or not, we decide that if his gifts come at the 'price' of gratitude and obedience, we want out. We want to break his rules and make our own, and that's just what we decide to do.

But what happens when we aren't grateful? What happens when we give in to temptation and the easy way out? What happens if we look the one who holds everything together square in the eye and tell him that we'd like him to back off? We told the Way that he wasn't worth following, and we got lost. We told the Truth that he wasn't worth knowing, and we find ourselves in a world of lies. We told the Life that he wasn't worth living up to, and we get hurt and suffer and die. We told the Light that he wasn't worth seeing, and our lives are painted in shades of gray. And because he'd given us the whole world, we dropped it – and it cracked.

We've got a serious problem, and there's no denying it. You know, all of us like to think we're good people. But we aren't the measure of all things^³, and we aren't the standard of what's good. God is. And the standard he sets is perfect truthful love for him and for each other. The Bible says, “God looks down from heaven on all humanity to see if there are any who understand, any who seek God. Everyone has turned away, all have become corrupt; there is no one who does good, not even one.”^⁴

But thank God he isn't done with us. The Bible says that he chose a man of real faith, and God told that man that his family would be a blessing to the whole world.^⁵ And out of that family, God made a new people.

That people found itself in slavery in a foreign land, but God reached down, broke their chains, and led them out to freedom. But even the chosen people rebelled, and the Law God gave them became a spotlight on their own sins. God's chosen people, more often than not, were God's chosen problem. God wanted them to see him for who he was, and they let themselves be led astray by counterfeits. But they were still God's way of healing a broken world.

Then when the people went really sour, God let another nation lead them off as captives, away from the homeland God gave them. Eventually the people realized where they'd gone wrong, and God brought them back to the land and let them rebuild. But the people knew things weren't set right yet. They were still waiting for God to really set them free.

And then God acted, but not like any of us thought he would. The Bible says that when the time was right, God's own Message came down to save us. No one saw it coming when God's very own living Autobiography came to earth wearing human skin and pitched his tent down here with the rest of us. And that man, God's Word for us, was named Jesus.

He was the Chosen One, the 'Anointed One' – or, in Greek, the 'Christ'. He came to show us in his human life what it looks like to live out perfect love. He came to lead us in a exodus out of sin and into the promised land of new life; he came to bring us home from exile, back to the God we left.

Jesus announced that it's time to give up disobedience and turn back to God, because God is taking charge through him.^⁶ He invited people to turn away from their selfishness and follow him, even if it meant suffering or being an outcast.^⁷ He explained that God didn't send him to condemn the world, but to rescue it; and anyone who trusted and followed him would be saved and live forever with the God who loves us.^⁸ Jesus said we needed a radical change of who we'd become, a change so dramatic that he compared it to being born all over again and getting a new life and identity from a new parent: God himself.^⁹

To address the consequences of what we've done, Jesus made his way to Jerusalem, where he was sentenced to death. And not just any death: crucifixion, a painful, bloody, shameful death called “the slaves' punishment”, a death so awful you just couldn't mention it in good company. And that's how Jesus, God's own gift of Life, died.

He gave his innocent life freely in our place as a display of God's infinite love for each and every one of us.^¹⁰ The Bible summarizes it in just a few words: “God demonstrates his own love for us in this: while we were still sinners, Christ died for us”.^¹¹ We should have been punished, we should have paid the price, but Jesus died to save us and set us free.

But at the time, it must have been difficult to see that. Crucifixion was the end of many people who claimed to be God's Chosen One – and weren't. But after Jesus was buried, suddenly his grave was empty. His heartbroken followers didn't understand – and then he showed up again, very not-dead. Alive again, he visited people who believed already and some who hadn't. They were convinced.

The message had so much going against it. It was an offensive story about a guy from the backwoods of the Roman world who gets put to death in the most shameful way and then comes back to permanent bodily life – something no one but the Jews thought was either possible or desirable. The message was a threat to the ruling authorities, and if it wasn't true they could have easily stopped it by pointing to the body. And even though it cost them their lives and their comfort, those who knew the facts for sure spent the rest of their lives spreading the news. And it did spread, and it's still spreading today. The good news is true: Jesus who was crucified, was raised from the dead!

Death didn't have the last word. Jesus wasn't wrong at all; God gave his stamp of approval on Jesus by bringing him back to life. The Jews had long been waiting for God to set up his rule on earth. When God raised Jesus, the message was that it was starting there and then for those willing to follow Jesus, and that it'd come to completion when Jesus came back again. In the meantime, Jesus told his followers to go invite other people to follow him; he told his followers to baptize people as a sign of sharing in his death and resurrection^¹², and he told his followers to teach them, to gather them into communities that can grow together, and to show them the way to live.^¹³ And we need to live this way if we want to grow to be the people God always planned for us to be, the kind of people who are ready to live with God.

Jesus promised that we'd have God's own Spirit to guide us through life,^¹⁴ and his earliest followers wrote down in the Bible what the Spirit taught them.^¹⁵ And what they learned was that we can be forgiven for everything we've ever done wrong, thanks to Jesus. We need to turn from our disobedient ways and start following his ways. He asks us to love him, to trust him, and to obey him, just like we always should have. We can be forgiven if we ask to be forgiven. If we accept Jesus publicly as Lord and we believe that God raised him from the dead, we can be saved.^¹⁶

It's not a matter of earning it; we couldn't if we tried. It's grace given freely.^¹⁷ When we receive it, we commit to follow Jesus. That isn't always easy. There's a reason he compared it to taking up a cross and being led off to die like he did.^¹⁸ But it's the way that brings us to everlasting joy, and I can testify that Jesus has brought it to my own life. It's the opportunity to live with God forever when he raises us up. When we receive and follow Jesus, we become a new kind of people: God's children, destined for a bright future. He's offering a new birth, a new life with a clean slate. Everything else is a matter of learning to live like Jesus, being light to the world just like he's the Light of the World.^¹⁹

Maybe some of you have never really met Jesus. Maybe you realize that you've never received him and haven't yet had that new birth. If that's you, I want to encourage you to receive him in your lives, to really put your heart and soul into loving him and following him. Come to Jesus. Pray, ask him to take your life and reshape it. Let him be Lord of your life. Accept the gifts he's offering you. Just trust in him, put your faith in him, and he'll lead you and show you how to live. He'll give you the Holy Spirit, and “those who are led by the Spirit of God are the children of God”.^²⁰

Or maybe you've received him, but you realize you've been trying to live this life on your own. You don't have to. When a crowd asked one of Jesus' first followers what they had to do, he told them, “Repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. The promise is for you and your children and for all who are far off – for all whom the Lord our God will call.”^²¹ And when they listened, they received baptism as “the washing of rebirth”^²² and “devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching and to fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer”.^²³ Do that. Turn your back on your own ways; turn to God's instead, be baptized, and join together with other followers on a regular basis. Pray with one another, grow together, and listen to what Jesus has to teach you.

Or maybe you've been baptized, and maybe you've joined a local community of followers, but you realize that you need to follow Jesus more closely and more faithfully. That's where all of us should be, because none of us have grown all we can. Look to Jesus. Turn to him. Ask God for help, and study what the Bible says about how we should live – and live like that, as God's Spirit gives you the strength. Live as a child of God, born again from above. And know that “if we are children, then we are heirs – heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ, if indeed we share in his sufferings so that we may also share in his glory”.^²⁴ Amen.

1 John 1:3

2 Genesis 1:26

3 Cf. Protagoras

4 Psalm 53:2-3

5 Genesis 22:18

6 Matthew 3:2

7 Matthew 16:24

8 John 3:16-17

9 John 3:3

10 1 John 3:16

11 Romans 5:8

12 Romans 6:3-5

13 Matthew 28:19-20

14 John 14:26

15 2 Timothy 3:16-17

16 Romans 10:9

17 Ephesians 1:6

18 Matthew 16:24

19 Matthew 5:14; John 8:12, 9:5

20 Romans 8:14

21 Acts 2:38-39

22 Titus 3:5

23 Acts 2:42

24 Romans 8:17

With Glorious Clouds Emcompassed 'Round

2011-11-08T20:12:00.000-08:00

I found this hymn, #22 in the Methodist Pocket Hymn-Book (1791), to be quite beautiful and moving:

With glorious clouds encompassed 'round,
Whom angels dimly see,
Will the unsearchable be found,
Or God appear to me?

Will he forsake his throne above,
Himself to worms impart?
Answer thou man of grief and love,
And speak it to my heart.

In manifested love explain
Thy wonderful design:
What meant the suffering son of man?
The streaming blood divine?

Didst thou not in our flesh appear,
And live and die below,
That I may now perceive thee near,
And my Redeemer know?

Come then, and to my soul reveal
The heights and depths of grace,
The wounds which all my sorrows heal,
That dear disfigured face.

Before my eyes of faith confessed,
Stand forth a slaughtered Lamb:
And wrap me in thy crimson vest,
And tell me all thy name.

Jehovah in thy person show,
Jehovah crucified!
And then the pardoning God I know,
And feel the blood applied.

I view the Lamb in his own light,
Whom angels dimly see:
And gaze transported at the sight,
To all eternity.

Revisiting Heaven's Gates and Hell's Flames

2011-08-24T16:00:00.001-07:00

Last night, my best friend and I attended a performance of a traveling evangelistic drama called Heaven's Gates and Hell's Flames, presented by Reality Outreach Ministries. As I expected, I was somewhat troubled by what I saw and heard there. The general premise is simple. The show opens with a dramatic portrayal of the crucifixion and resurrection. An actor portraying Jesus stumbles up the aisle toward the stage, lugging a cross. As crowds gather at the foot of the stage, jeering the Messiah, Romans whip and crucify Jesus while an actor portraying a maniacally cackling Satan (complete with three demonic minions) eggs them on, handing them various implements. The effect is enhanced by strobe lights and music, of course. After all but Jesus (crumpled on the ground) and Satan have departed, Satan prods the body of Jesus with glee and then exits stage right. (I should mention that stage left is decked out in purple and gold to signify the gates of heaven, whereas stage right is decorated in glittering red to represent hell.) A short time after Satan leaves, Jesus rises slowly to his feet and likewise exits stage right, implicitly for a Harrowing of Hell sequence. (Not exactly a customary feature of evangelical thought.) As triumphant music plays, Jesus shoves Satan down a flight of stairs, tramples him at center stage, snatches a set of keys from him, and then sends Satan running back to hell as Jesus triumphantly displays the keys to the audience. It was a somewhat debased Christus Victor atonement model, I realized as I watched.

The bulk of the rest of the show consists in a series of skits in which assorted groups of characters (both Christians and non-Christians) die sudden deaths and find themselves in a sort of antechamber, faced with a cohort of angels, one of whom stands stoically on a dais behind a pedestal holding the Book of Life. All characters plead with that angel to find their names written in the Book of Life; the non-Christian characters, of course, are considerably more perturbed and panicked than their Christian counterparts. When the names of Christian characters are located, the angel points toward stage left, the lights get very bright, and Jesus appears at the gate of heaven to welcome the exuberant Christians in. On the other hand, when the names of non-Christian characters are not located, the angel points toward stage right, the lights grow very dim, other angels cross swords to block the path to heaven, and Satan and his minions emerge from stage right to taunt, mock, and drag the victim off to the fiery blazes of hell.

This occupies the bulk of the experience. After the final skit, in which a middle-aged mother is dragged off to hell in front of her crying daughter's eyes but the very young daughter is welcomed (rather somberly, I might add) into heaven, the drama itself concludes. At that point last night, a representative from Reality Outreach Ministries appeared on stage to summon people to come forth for an altar call. After continual refrains of "one more, just one more", the crowd was led in a "sinner's prayer" to "accept Jesus as their personal Lord and Savior". These apparent new converts were told that this would free them from their problems - most notably, a destiny of hellfire, but also of, say, the need to take medication - and, as an almost offhand comment, it was mentioned that they ought to seek out a "Bible-believing Christian church", begin reading the Bible, and find a Bible study to join. (Not, of course, that the apparent new converts were given any counsel on, say, identifying a "Bible-believing Christian church"...) And that was it.

I scarcely know where to begin in listing my objections to the evangelistic methods here portrayed. First, I deem it noteworthy that all characters were apparently either white American suburban evangelical Protestants or white American suburban non-Christians, with no middle ground or additional categories. In particular, I don't think it unfair to say that all Christian characters portrayed could justly be classified as Fundamentalist Christians, though the characterization typically underdetermined that. There were no clear examples of Roman Catholic Christians, Orthodox Christians, devout mainline Protestant Christians, or even non-Fundamentalist Evangelical Christians. Furthermore, all characters - including ardent non-Christians, once they arrived before the angels - spoke the same idiosyncratic dialect of Christianese. I have seldom encountered a group of Christians whose dominant imagery is that of the Book of Life, but here it was portrayed as the universal Christian language, since even 'informed' non-Christians had to explain to fellow non-Christians about the Book of Life, and several Christian characters mentioned having heard recent sermons devoted to the Book of Life.

In keeping with this particularly Fundamentalist vision of Christianity, the portrayal of the 'world' tended to be one that plays specifically to American Fundamentalist perceptions of culture. The first skit portraying non-Christians was one that depicted a raucous party filled with debauchery, frenzied dancing, heavy drinking, and ultimately use of powerful illegal drugs obtained by two naive and apparently promiscuous girls from a sleazy drug dealer offering "salvation" in "little white packages". Because, as we all know, most non-Christians are quite prepared to snort unidentified powder given to them by a complete stranger... right? Other non-Christians were portrayed as power-hungry, status-obsessed, materialistic, and complacent. And for many non-Christians, that may well be the case. (Painful to admit, the same is equally true for a great many Christians.) I noted with interest that not a single non-Christian was portrayed as having any intellectual reasons to disbelieve - say, a disbelief in the resurrection. No Christian ever had to defend their faith, nor did it seem likely that any of the characters actually could have, even within the context of the skits. That was somewhat disheartening. All the Christian characters ever had to do was reiterate that Jesus is the way and that he heals all wounds. For that matter, quite a few of the Christian characters came off as, well, jerks. And I'm saying that as a fellow Christian! Some of the Christians practically taunted non-believers with hell and judgment, and after death, they were so caught up in the excitement of their personal salvation and the beautiful place waiting for them that they just plain stopped caring about the plight of their non-Christian friends, sometimes even treating it somewhat flippantly. Not cool, guys. Not cool at all.

In a later skit, one woman put off a co-worker's evangelistic efforts by saying that Christians are hypocrites because she had seen some professing Christians in a bar doing a bit of "social drinking". Not to be outdone in judgmentalism, her Christian co-worker promptly retorted that not all professing Christians are really Christians, with the implication that any true Christian would never be seen in a bar with friends. The same message was reinforced in other skits later by Christians who had visited bars before their conversion but never after conversion. In short: any alcohol use at all is an evil, evil sin that shows that you aren't truly a Christian. Ye shall know them by their complete and utter abstinence from the stuff Jesus provided at Cana, after all. This, of course, is just plainly wrong. The Bible urges sobriety and responsibility to be guiding principles. The Bible warns against the very real dangers of abusing alcohol and allowing ourselves to become impaired. It says nothing against genuinely responsible use of alcohol... which even the perfect Son of God drank. But, of course, surely the characters in this drama have Jesus beat when it comes to holiness.

Another observation: the understanding of the Christian narrative itself here was radically askew, though (alas!) not in a way totally out of keeping with lowest-common-denominator American evangelicalism. The destination of each character was to be either in a seemingly self-absorbed heaven or an everlasting burning hell. Everything in this life was reduced to just an opportunity to decide between one of those two entirely unearthly destinations. Resurrection of the dead? Absent. New heavens and new earth? No. God's kingdom? Gone. Any task for the church other than offering cosmic fire insurance policies? None whatsoever. This is not the teaching of Jesus. This is not the teaching of the apostles. This is not the faith delivered once for all to the saints. This is not the Christianity for which martyrs gave their lives. This is a borderline-Gnostic concoction of our own devising, and it is a massively truncated version of the Christian story. And that's even apart from the massively crude visions of both heaven and hell! (Seriously, people, Satan does not rule over hell, and he does not get the opportunity to personally micromanage every single person's case. He is not God's opposite-but-equal force, nor is he - or any particular view of hell itself, for that matter - a core component of the gospel, as a perusal of the ancient creeds will bear out.)

Indeed, not only was the Christian narrative misrepresented, so was the Christian life. Every Christian character was effectively portrayed as fully sanctified. No Christian character struggled with faith. No Christian character doubted. No Christian character sinned. Nor did the evangelist afterwards give the impression that things would ever be difficult. The message was one of "accepting Jesus into your heart" and thereby being set immediately and miraculously free from every struggle and every hardship. Including, as I indicated earlier, the need to use any prescription drugs. I would love to believe that the evangelist was talking about prescription drug abuse. But how can I believe that, when the consistent portrayal of Christians throughout the entire performance was people who live blessed lives without any struggle? What, for Christ's sake (literally!), of the cross? Did the evangelist have any idea just what damage he could be doing, by (hopefully inadvertently) encouraging people to needlessly reject a God-given provision for healing?

Christianity was reduced to a simple formula and a panacea, where all one has to do is pray a simple prayer and then just... wait to die? There was no portrayal of baptism, for one. Or of the eucharist, for another matter. And that is just plain wrong. Not a single character ever mentioned either, nor did the evangelist. What's more troubling, there was no hint whatsoever that "accepting Jesus into your heart" is merely the beginning of a journey of discipleship. This right here is what terrifies me, for the sake of all those who came forward for the altar call last night. Are these people being prepared to be disciples, or merely statistical marks in a heavenly ledger? Are they being equipped? Do they even know that there's more? How can they grow in grace if they don't? How are they being prepared to stand firm, if they don't know that there will be storms? How can they not fall away easily? And how can those who do this sort of evangelism stand with a clear conscience before the judgment seat of God when their failures lead to the stumbling of so many babes in Christ? While they all prayed the simple (simplistic) "sinner's prayer", I prayed that God might in his grace direct these people to local churches that can supply the dire, dire lack in this drama's presentation of the gospel.

A number of times in the performance and in the evangelistic message afterwards, one encounters a very annoying yet obscenely popular Christian maxim: Christianity isn't a religion, it's a personal relationship with Jesus! This always gets on my nerves. A great deal. Christianity is a religion. Period. The only way to escape that conclusion is to define religion in a highly self-serving way that characterizes it as, for instance, an exclusively human, ritual-laden, impotent striving to reach out to God in unauthorized ways. But that simply is not the definition of religion! "Religion" and "relationship" are not utterly separate categories. In the first-century Mediterranean world, religions were all about the relationship between divine benefactors and human clients. The same was true of Zeus-worship, of the imperial cult, of Second Temple Judaism, and, yes, of early Christianity. And so it remains today. This may not be a "personal relationship", whatever is meant by that. (I suspect that the phrase had its origination for a good purpose - to insist that one cannot delegate one's need to serve the Lord to someone else - but twenty-first century models of 'personal relationships' carry a lot of baggage that's quite foreign to anything that the apostles would have experienced.) But it is a relationship - and it is religion. It's time to get over our allergies to the word.

Another concern: the evangelist and some of the Christian characters mentioned "God's love" quite a few times. But from the warped presentation of the Christian story that they offered, I had a hard time seeing where it fit in. The depiction of God was hardly a very loving one - or, at least, that was not made clear to the audience. See, no explanation was ever offered of why anyone would go to hell. All that was said is that it's for everyone who doesn't "accept Jesus as their personal Lord and Savior". Vague mentions were made by a few Christian characters of having been forgiven of their sins. But what is sin? Why does it need to be forgiven? Why does it merit hell - particularly the grotesque notion of hell depicted on stage - when unforgiven? And how is Jesus and his death on the cross relevant to dealing with it? The drama didn't say. Neither did the evangelist, to my recollection. And without that crucial context, God hardly seemed loving at all. He seemed capricious, harsh, and perhaps insane. That may be why I inadvertently found myself silently cheering for the Satan character by about the middle of the performance. Tip: If your evangelistic drama makes it even possible to root for Satan, then you might be doing something wrong.

Think I'm blowing the portrayal of God's character a bit out of proportion? In one of the earlier skits, a non-Christian woman falls at the feet of Jesus, repents of her sins, and begs him to be her Lord and Savior. And Jesus turns and promptly walks away without so much as a clear look of compassion on his face. This is a caricature of even much conservative evangelical thought on the afterlife. Many conservative evangelicals would be more inclined to say that repentance simply isn't a possibility after death. That wasn't what was portrayed here. Rather, a person's apparently sincere repentance and faith were outright rejected by Jesus. The idea represented is one that exists in conservative evangelical Christian thought, but even there, it seems quite hard-line. (Also, the depiction of young children being sent screaming and crying into hell did not exactly help.) While the words "God's love" showed up quite a bit, the dominant atmosphere of the whole performance was fear and terror, designed specifically to coerce conversion as a 'get-out-of-hell free' card.

The evangelist's methods after the drama also rubbed me the wrong way. While I saw no reason to believe that he wasn't quite sincere, his tactics for badgering people into making a 'decision for Christ' reminded me of two things: Elmer Gantry, and Charles G. Finney's Lectures on Revival of Religion. Right on the heels of a tearful separation of mother and daughter in the afterlife, he specifically addressed his message - numerous times - chiefly to "moms" and "dads", and also "teenagers". In addition, I lost track of how many times he urged that there would surely be just "one more person" needed to come down before they could proceed. I also noticed quite a number of Mennonite girls in bonnets going down for the altar call. I couldn't help but wonder how many of the people going down front were really doing this for the first time, and really were not Christians before, or really were making a decision to become Christians on this occasion - and, furthermore, would really stick with it and become disciples. Plausibly, only a fraction of the crowd.

Now, please do not misunderstand me. It's easy to read everything I've just written and think that I've completely written off this ministry and its efforts. It's easy to take all my criticism and think that I'm dismissing the possibility that some people will really begin their journey of authentic discipleship and true love for God at an event like this. But that's not true. I know that that can happen. I know it because I am one of those people. I became a Christian at a local performance of Heaven's Gates and Hell's Flames in or around the year 1998. That is where my Christian journey began, and had I not attended it, I can't really say for sure when or even if I would have come to Christ. I remember that it was the final skit that got to me. I didn't want to go to hell. The fear of hell, moreso than the fear of God, gripped my heart. And I resolved in that moment that if turning to Jesus was what it would take to get some heavenly fire insurance, then it would just have to be worth it. So that is precisely what I did. If God hadn't led me to a nurturing church, it would have been so easy for me to simply fall away and never grow. Or, if my fear of hell hadn't been transformed through gratitude into a real love for God, it would have been easy for me to be spiritually infantilized at best or to simply apostatize at worst. Or, if I hadn't eventually attained a greater (though of course imperfect) theological maturity to see beyond the immensely crude half-gospel portrayed in the drama, much the same could have been the result. Nevertheless, God can work through ignoble means and base motives - if that's all we're willing to offer him. I'm grateful to have heard the Christian message, even in a distorted and garbled form, and to have been spurred to act on it, even through shoddy and shameful motives. So yes, real good can be done by Heaven's Gates and Hell's Flames, and if even one of those conversions was authentic, then I truly believe that the angels in heaven rejoiced over it. But I still can't help but wonder, given how rightfully offputting a crude threatening with hellfire is when stripped of context, whether the net effect is positive or negative for the goals of God's kingdom.

I am no advocate of a Christianity that pretends that there is no hell, no devil, no sin, no judgment, or anything of that sort. Far from it. I do advocate a Christianity that hews closely to what the Bible says about those topics without proclaiming as gospel truth more than we really know. And I do advocate a Christianity that keeps a sense of balance while presenting the real gist of the Christian story, the story of God's love and justice and his righteous kingdom and the need for discipleship that doesn't kowtow to popular ideologies of power but that shows forth a Christian life that's really shaped by the cross and by the resurrection. I advocate a Christianity that would hopefully be recognized by Jesus, by Peter, by Paul, and by the blessed men and women who came after them and strove valiantly for the faith. I advocate an evangelism that can actually prepare new Christians for discipleship, not mislead them and strand them and leave them as though stillborn. And in that, I fear that I'm an advocate for something that Heaven's Gates and Hell's Flames just doesn't deliver, to its detriment.

Christ is Our Worthiness

2011-04-19T11:49:00.001-07:00

[Originally posted at Study and Faith.]

What I wanted to share for thought today consists of a few stanzas from a wonderful classic hymn, "Come Ye Sinners, Poor and Needy" by Joseph Hart (1712-1768):

View Him prostrate in the garden,
On the ground your Maker lies.
On the bloody tree behold Him;
Sinner, will this not suffice?
Lo! th' incarnate God ascended,
Pleads the merit of His blood:
Venture on Him, venture wholly,
Let no other trust intrude.
Let not conscience make you linger,
Nor of fitness fondly dream;
All the fitness He requireth
Is to feel your need of Him.

I find this to be a powerful, moving hymn with a view-enlarging message. Christ has suffered, Christ has died - what more could we possibly require to free us from our guilt and shame and sin? The one who suffered for us was and is God indeed, and he presents his blood in the heavenly tabernacle as an atonement; what ground is there for dividing our trust between Him and any other cause? Let us place our faith firmly in him. And although it's so tempting to shrink back in fear, believing our sins to be too great or supposing that we need some worthiness of our own before we can approach, we have this promise: All we need to enter into this forgiveness, to be set free, is to know that we need Christ and to surrender ourselves to him. And in turn, God accounts our faith - our feeble, barren, trembling trust - as righteousness in his sight, a righteousness that obscures and replaces our sins and works in us to bear good fruit. We need no other worthiness than to turn to Christ and follow.

Prudentius on Sin's Stains and God's Power to Cleanse

2011-03-03T15:58:00.000-08:00

Lately I've been doing a bit of reading from Aurelius Prudentius Clemens, an early-fifth-century Latin Christian poet. He's got some really good stuff. I've found some inspiring, striking, and moving portions in his Liber Cathemerinon, a book of lengthy hymns for various occasions throughout the day and throughout the year. And I wanted to share a bit of it.

Into our thoughts now turn Thy gaze;
Examine every word and deed;
Behold the many stains of sin,
Which Thy pure light alone can cleanse.
Oh grant that we may ever keep
Our souls as bright and free from soil,
As when the waters on us flowed
From holy Jordan's cleansing stream.
If by the clouds of earth's black night
Our souls since then have been obscured,
Do Thou, O King of the morning star,
Disperse the gloom with Thy bright glance.
O Lord divine, as Thou canst change
Foul pitch to milky white, and make
Of ebony a crystal clear,
So wash away our dark misdeeds.
(Liber Cathemerinon 2.57-72)

I find this such a true, honest, and striking plea. Sin has stained us. A lot. And it's stained all of us; not a single one of us is unblemished. Those of us who have been baptized as Christians are rendered clean by Christ's atoning sacrifice, and we must continually pray that God will grant us the grace so that we can resist the pull to wallow in sin again. But Prudentius recognizes that, well, our souls do still get obscured. We do fall. And so we can always pray to God to penetrate our darkness with a single luminous glance; before God's eyes, all things are laid bare. And God is a God who changes things; God can take the dirty and make it clean. He's a God of purification. Nothing is ever too filthy or murky for him to cleanse. And that's the God upon whom we can always rely to "wash away our dark misdeeds" when we see the error of our ways and come back to him. Know this: you are never, never, never too far gone for God's grace to reach you.

Finding God in All Religions?

2011-02-09T11:53:00.000-08:00

I've been thinking lately about a comment that a friend of mine made fairly recently, essentially to this effect: "Why do we have to choose just one religious tradition to be in? I find God in all of them! God isn't different in any of the religions, just the way in which we relate to God. I find beautiful ways of really relating to God in all of them. But I don't accept any religious tenets that claim an exclusive place for any one religious tradition." I was indeed surprised by some of my other professing Christian friends who wholeheartedly supported her sentiment.

Now, the first question I had about her initial statement was.... which god? Are we talking about Thor, the hammer-wielding Norse god of thunder? Are we perhaps talking about Poseidon, the Greek god of the seas? Or the Sumerian deity Enki, lord of mischief, waters, and creation? And what then of the Assyrian patron god Ashur, and the Aztec sun god Huitzilopochtli, and the Moabite god Chemosh, and the lion-headed Meroitic god Apedemak, and the Canaanite orchard goddess Nikkal-wa-Ib, and the Nabatean god Al-Qaum? Is it any of these gods that my friend finds at the heart of Islam and Confucianism and Kemetic Revivalism (Egyptian Reconstructionist Paganism) and Christianity? That doesn't seem especially likely. I rather doubt that, for instance, the "God" she finds in "all religions" is any of those; I doubt she has any of them specifically in mind. Unfortunately, my friend simply ignored my question.

But seriously, which god? Which god is the one my friend can find in all religions? Now, perhaps someone would charge me with being a bit tendentious here. After all, perhaps my friend really meant "all major religions". But isn't that rather provincialist? After all, there may be just a handful of prominent world religions today, but it's a matter of pure chronological contingency that she happens to live in a world in which a significant portion of the population adheres to Abrahamic monotheism, and none of those ancient polytheistic faiths are still around as statistically influential options. But surely my friend doesn't mean to discriminate against Reconstructionist Pagans, does she? That certainly doesn't sound like her. She prides herself on being a beacon of tolerance and love, not one of those bigoted exclusivist dullards like, well, virtually everyone who's ever lived.

So perhaps the god she has in mind is the God of Abraham. Let's explore that option for a moment. Is the God of Abraham - the one who created heaven and earth from nothing with a simple divine edict, and who has an exclusive and absolute claim on the ultimate loyalty of all humanity, who acts in history, and who is a just judge of the sins of the nations - the deity that she finds in, say, Asatru (Norse Reconstructionist Paganism)? It's hard to see where. Which of those gods is he? Which of them created heaven and earth from nothing with just a command? Which of them claims the right of exclusive worship? Which of them is a judge of the actions of people in distant lands? Well... none of them. So how, exactly, does my friend find the God of Abraham in Norse Reconstructionist Paganism, or in its ancient Norse precursor? But perhaps we should try another religion - say, Confucianism. Is the God of Abraham the deity she finds in Confucianism? Where exactly does she find a deity in Confucianism anyway? The same goes for, say, Theraveda Buddhism, which also doesn't focus on any god. Does my friend find the God of Abraham in Theraveda Buddhism? If she does, where does she find him? How does Theraveda Buddhism offer a means of relating to the God of Abraham when Theraveda Buddhism doesn't put the focus on any gods at all? Or how does Asatru offer a means of relating to the God of Abraham when it explicitly offers you many gods, but one of the defining characteristics of the God of Abraham is that he refuses to share his servants with other putative deities? And even supposing that you could find the God of Abraham hidden somewhere in Theraveda Buddhism and in Confucianism and in Asatru; what on earth would make anyone think that those religious traditions offer means of relating to the God of Abraham that are every bit as good and valid and useful as those offered by religious traditions that are explicitly devoted to the God of Abraham?

What about, say, Brahman, the impersonal sole reality that constitutes all things in many of the philosophical traditions of Hinduism? Is that the 'god' that my friend finds in all religions? The first thing I should add in response to that notion is that I have to wholeheartedly agree with contemporary philosopher Peter Van Inwagen when he argues that words like brahman that refer to impersonal abstractions like this are just plain wrongly translated if they're rendered as 'God'. As he remarks about those who hold that, in Eastern religious traditions, God is an 'impersonal first principle': "I think it would be plausible to maintain that the person who said this was translating some Hindi or Pali or Sanskrit word into English as 'God' when he ought to be translating it in some other way. (And why not say this, if the history of the word he is translating as 'God' has no connection with the history of the English word or with the history of Deus or theos or elohim?)" (Peter Van Inwagen, The Problem of Evil, p. 156 n. 1). Even setting that problem aside, does my friend find Brahman in Islam and in Aztec religion alike? Where? I mean, I suppose that if you believe in Brahman, you could believe that Allah is a manifestation of Brahman, and that so is Huitzilopochtli. But that wouldn't be bridging different religions at all. It would be standing quite firmly within a Hindu tradition. And it would involve saying, for instance, that neither Muslims nor Aztecs really understand what they worship, and that they have most of their religion all wrong (though it works anyway)... but we, the knowers of Brahman, understand Allah better than Muslims do and Huitzilopochtli better than the Mexica did. And while that may not be a soteriologically exclusivist claim, it's certainly exclusivist in some sense that might make my friend a bit queasy.

Here's the thing. If you're finding 'God' in all religious traditions, then it isn't any of the gods they worship. There is no god worshipped in common in all religious traditions, especially since some of those traditions don't worship gods at all. There's not much overlap in the world's numerous pantheons. Furthermore, if you're finding 'God' in all of these traditions, then you're not standing in all of them at once; you're standing in something novel of your own making. You don't get to call yourself a Christian or a Muslim if you believe that you can please the God of heaven and earth by cutting out a victim's heart and lofting it up to Huitzilopochtli. That's just not what Christianity is, and that's just not what Islam is. For all its breadth, Christianity is a specific religious tradition; it has boundaries. The same goes for Islam. One cannot be a Christian and a Buddhist, for instance, without using at least one (and probably both) of those words in a way that is, quite frankly, dishonest. To be a Christian, a real Christian who stands in solidarity with the broad Christian tradition in all of its historic richness, involves believing that the created world is good and that we really do have selves and that our final state will be one of living in resurrected and glorified bodies in a community that worships one (and only one) personal God. To be a Buddhist, a real Buddhist who stands in solidarity with that tradition, involves believing that our existence in this world is suffering caused by desire, and that we have no permanent selves, and that our final state is to break the cycle of birth and death and new birth by achieving nirvana, which is likely not a state in which we can worship a single personal God. Those are two radically incompatible pictures of the world and humanity and God and our destiny. One cannot truly be a Christian and at the same time truly be a Buddhist. And that's simply one example.

So there's a very good reason why a person can't be part of all religious traditions, or even many of them. Most of them are, as defined by their essential beliefs, non-overlapping. (That isn't, of course, to say that some minor beliefs from other traditions can't be accepted, so long as the coherence of the whole system is kept in tact without violence done to the major essential beliefs and practices.) To attempt to be part of all of them is to be part of none of them - which, in many cases, is simply to create a new one, the religion of Kyle-ism or Lucinda-ism or some other novel -ism, tailor-made by its founder as a private religion exalted above all the many historic religious traditions. For my part, I may be an arrogant man, but I'm not arrogant enough to class myself as a peer to Jesus and Siddhartha Gautama and Muhammad and Moses and Baha'u'llah and Confucius and Lao Tzu and all the other principal religious figures in human history! But that is precisely what is done by those who try to break free from being part of just one religious tradition; they create their own novelty to put alongside the rest. And furthermore, even if their newly created religion is very soteriologically inclusive ("Oh it doesn't matter who you are or what you've done or what you believe or what you do, you can relate to God just fine. Please, Mr. Stalin, take your place next to Mr. Gandhi. I'm not yet sure what exactly it is that you'll both be doing when it's all said and done - do I believe in heaven and hell, or just heaven, or nirvana, or Valhalla, or...? - but I'm quite sure that you're both perfectly fine as you are. Now Mr. Stalin, I'd like to ask you not to order any more ethnic purges. But if you do, just remember that God and/or Brahman and/or Chemosh will love, accept, or tolerate you anyway. You just relate to God/Brahman/Chemosh/Whatever in a different, more ethnic-purging-type way than I do, and that's fine because what matters is that we all love each other. Oh, I'm sorry, Mr. LaVey, I didn't mean to offend you! It's fine if you relate to God/Brahman/Chemosh/Whatever by seeking vengeance on those who wrong you. Just so long as you aren't against gay marriage or a grown woman's rights to decide whether or not to kill her children before they exit the confines of her body, of course."), it still has to be 'exclusive' in some way by saying that someone (actually, a lot of someones) is just plain wrong.

Ultimately, I just don't think that my friend's pluralistic proposal can work. Not because it's impractical, but because it runs into far too many intellectual difficulties, to say nothing of the moral ramifications or the spiritual implications. For these and other reasons, I don't think any faithful Christian should accept this kind of pluralism; it is not only clearly wrong, but also incompatible with the historic Christian faith delivered once and for all to the holy church of God (Jude 3).

A Eucharistic Meditation

2011-02-06T09:27:00.000-08:00

What is the staple of life? As I contemplate it, it seems that it must be the meal. For the meal, in its highest form, is an occasion of fellowship and sharing with others while, together, we rejoicingly co-partake in that which sustains us in being. A meal is sustenance - that is, life - in community - that is, love. The meal, in its highest form, is life renewed and shared in love. And the eucharist is the highest of meals. For in the eucharist, the fellowship and sharing is the communion of the baptized, the togetherness of those who have tasted the heavenly gift, the mutual sharing of the sons and daughters of God destined for unfathomably glory. And in the eucharist, the sustenance of abundant life given/received, renewed, and shared in divine love is none other than the very substance of Life and Love made flesh and blood and revealed to us in the most basic of food and drink - bread and wine. That in which we partake through the eucharist is not merely a means of sustaining physical life; it is that means subsumed into the very reality - it is Life itself in whom we as the Living Community, living together, share. It is the 'medicine of immortality' shared in common by the inheritors of immortality, who in this meal have the sacred opportunity to partake in the Wellspring of Immortality - the Crucified and Risen Messiah, whose atoning passion we proclaim before the world every time we faithfully celebrate this act through this meal. This meal is our redeemed sharing in the death whereby Christ trampled down death and thereby ushered us into the freedom of the children of God. This meal is the Divine Life made flesh and blood and given as flesh and blood through bread and wine so that we might in the meal be made participants by grace in that Divine Life, that our table-fellowship might be a communal participation in the Eternal Community that is God in Trinity.

This eucharist, our meal of thanksgiving, looks to the past and to the future. It looks to the rescue of the Israelites from their bondage of Egypt and to the meal that celebrated God's mighty liberating act - which itself looked forward to our rescue from the bondage of sin and this eucharistic meal that celebrates God's mighty liberating act for us in Christ. It looks back to the manna, the bread of angels, that sustained the Israelites in their wanderings through the wilderness, just as this eucharistic meal - which is Christ, the "bread of heaven", given for us, broken for us, poured out for us - sustains the church of God in our wanderings through what remains of "the present evil age" as we yearn and plead for God's kingdom to come on earth as it is in heaven. It looks back to the Last Supper, when Christ in anticipation of his death took the Passover and made it new, made it fresh, made it signify yet again a new deliverance of God. It looks also forward to the marriage supper of the Lamb, that banquet on God's holy mountain when ultimate victory over sin and death and all the powers of darkness and pain will be celebrated and announced, and when the union of Christ and his holy church will be made full, fuller than our wildest imagination. It looks forward as an anticipation, a participating shadow, of every meal in the glory of the kingdom of God, of dining in the unmediated presence of Love, of Life.

Thank you, O Lord, for this meal! When I partake of this most holy sacrament... why do not my knees give way when I approach the table of the Lord? Can I not see that this is the body and blood of God's Messiah, broken and poured forth as a sacrifice and libation to remedy my sin, our sin? Are my senses so dulled that I fail to perceive that what I take in my hand and place in my mouth is the source of life? How can I bear it? How can I survive taking it into me, sinner that I am - save that you, O Lord, have cleansed me and prepared me by your Spirit? Little wonder that your apostle warned of partaking lightly, and so eating and drinking judgment to ourselves! But Lord, how I feel such delight when I behold a banquet of mere food, and yet so often fail to rejoice all the more greatly when I see that your own body and blood are set before me - the food of the kingdom! And Lord, how I dare to approach without the gravest trepidation when I contemplate that this food signifies the very death of the Son of God! Forgive me, Lord, for not perceiving the sacred mystery as fully as I ought! If I did, I should walk to the table trembling in awe-filled jubilation.

Can even the cherubim or the seraphim grasp what transpires at the Lord's Table? (For note: it is not we who have invited him to our table; it is he who has invited us to his.) Can even they perceive the full depth and breadth of this meal and what is represents? How much less can we! And yet, while we do not understand its mystery, still we are called to consume its mystery - and thus to be consumed by it, by the joy and redemption found only in Life, in Love. O Lord, you who go so far as to give your own divine self to us as a meal, consume us in living love to be vessels of life and love who spread love and restore life wherever we go - not on our mission, but on yours!

Deliverance Past and Present

2011-01-21T19:48:00.000-08:00

During the course I'm taking this term (Church History I), each student signs up for a day to deliver a brief morning devotional before class gets underway. Recently I had my turn and chose to focus a bit on Habakkuk 3, so there are a variety of thoughts I've been having about it, which I'll have to spread over several posts. The opening verses of Habakkuk 3 make clear that the chapter is a prayer to God crossed with a song celebrating God's strength and power. And the basic point it makes is a very simple one: long ago God saved his people from their troubles by kicking some serious butt, but now the prophet and the people are once again in trouble and their only hope is for God to once again kick some serious butt and rescue them. Or in other words: "Yahweh, I have heard of your fame; I stand in awe of your deeds, Yahweh. Repeat them in our day, in our time make them known; in wrath remember mercy" (Habakkuk 3:2).

Most of the rest of the chapter (3:3-15) is a powerful, gripping, awe-inspiring roar of God's power to deliver - our God is mighty to save! Habakkuk 3:3-15 is a picture of a God you really, really, really don't want to mess with. His footsteps shake the earth with plague; he looks all the peoples of the world... and they flinch. He shoots his arrows everywhere, carving through the land with rivers. When the mountains see him on the warpath, they squirm and quake. When the heavenly bodies see his arrows and his spear, they hold still for fear. He makes the oceans churn, trampling them underfoot. That is the God of Habbakuk - and that is our God, too. No wonder Habakkuk says that when he heard about what God once did, his lips quivered and his legs trembled (3:16)!

And yet what does he then say? He says that he waits patiently for God to do it again. Habakkuk's prayer/psalm is an impassioned cry to God: "When we were in trouble before, you bailed us out! Please, please God - we need an encore now!" And yet... he waits patiently! He waits patiently for God to make good on that prayer. Habakkuk has faith that God will punish and drive off the invaders. And so no matter how dire things get until then - even if everything they rely on is gone and they're left with nothing - Habakkuk says that even then he "will rejoice in Yahweh, [he] will be joyful in God [his] Savior" (3:18). Even when all the nations of the earth are arrayed against him, Habakkuk trusts that Yahweh, the God of Israel, will be his strength and give him the power to "tread on the heights" (3:19).

Habakkuk can trust that he's praying to the very same God who once did all of those things - and who hasn't lost his touch. Habakkuk can trust that God will carry through. Habakkuk can cry out for the God of then to be the God of now, for the God of deliverance past to be the God of deliverance present.

And I have to ask myself, do I honestly have that faith? Do I have the faith to believe that when I pray, the God whose throne of grace I boldly approach (alright, so usually I approach it timidly) is a God who not only is the greatest of Deliverers, but who is still in the deliverance business? Do I have the faith to believe that maybe, just maybe, my prayers are being heard... and I might get a response more explosive and earth-shattering and breathtaking than I ever thought possible?

Honestly, I don't know that I do. I'd like to, though. I want to have Habakkuk's faith. I want to have the faith to look back on what God has done for his people when they needed him, and to cry out, "I need that now too!", and then to wait patiently in the assurance that I'm in good hands. I was not brought up to trust; I was trained to be anxious and paranoid and fearful. When it comes to developing Habakkuk's sort of faith, I have a long way to go and, honestly, very little clue where or how to practically begin. But imagine what the church could be like as a whole if we could read the Old Testament and the New Testament and the stories of God's powerful acts in the two thousand years since then... and confidently, joyfully, expectantly, rightly pray, "Today as well!"

Happy New Year!

2011-01-01T00:09:00.000-08:00

[Originally posted at Study and Faith]

Happy New Year, everyone! In celebration of the new year, I'd like to reprint here the words of a little-known New Year's hymn. (There really are such things, you know.) The title is simply 'Hymn I', and it's taken from John Wesley, A Collection of Hymns for the Nativity of Our Lord: and for New-Year's-Day (London, UK: Thomas Cordeux, 1810), 19-20. I hope you won't mind if I modernize the spelling and remove a few minor eccentricities in punctuation.

Wisdom ascribe, and might and praise,
To God who lengthens out our days,
Who spares us yet another year
And lets us see his goodness here;
Happy and wise the time redeem,
And live, my friends, and die to him.

How often when his arm was bared,
Has he our sinful Israel spared!
Let me alone, his mercy cried,
And turned the vengeful bolt aside,
Indulged another kind reprieve,
And strangely suffered us to live.

Laid to the root with conscious awe,
But now the threatening axe we saw,
We saw when Jesus stepped between,
To part the punishment and sin
He pleaded for the blood-bought race,
And God vouchsafed a longer space!

Still in the doubtful balance weighed,
We trembled while the remnant prayed;
The Father heard his Spirit groan
And answered mild, It is my Son!
He let the prayer of faith prevail,
And mercy turned the hovering scale.

Merciful God, how shall we raise
Our hearts to pay thee all thy praise!
Our hearts shall beat for thee alone,
Our lives shall make thy goodness known
Our souls and bodies shall be thine,
A living sacrifice divine.

I and my house will serve the Lord,
Led by the Spirit and the Word;
We plight our faith assembled here,
To serve our God the ensuing year;
And vow when time shall be no more,
Through all eternity to adore.

Technical Difficulties, Please Stand By

2010-12-27T10:14:00.000-08:00

[Originally posted at Study and Faith]

Hello, everyone. Just wanted to put up a notice that I seem to have encountered some hardware... difficulties... with my laptop. The sort of difficulties that have the unpleasant side effect of preventing me from accessing the Internet with it. (Technically, I can open an Internet window, I just can't make it larger than a tab.) Right now I'm using one of my previous computers, which is currently held together with substantial quantities of tape. Because of this issue, I most likely won't be posting much for the next week or two until I can (hopefully) get the issue straightened out. [...] In the meantime, please feel free to look over the many other posts I've made [both here and at my other blog] in the past month and give feedback to your heart's content.

The Communion of Saints: A Wesleyan Poem

2010-12-22T08:53:00.000-08:00

[Originally posted at Study and Faith]

I found this a few weeks ago in John and Charles Wesley, Hymns and Sacred Poems, 4^th ed (Bristol, UK: Felix Farley, 1743), 301-311. It was printed as a six part poem, and I'd like to transcribe it here with minor alterations (mostly updates to spelling):

Father, Son, and Spirit hear
Faith's effectual, fervent prayer,
Hear, and our petitions seal,
Let us now the answer feel.
Mystically one with thee,
Transcript of the Trinity,
Thee let all our nature own,
One in three and three in one.

If we now begin to be
Partners with thy saints and thee,
If we have our sins forgiven,
Fellow-citizens of heaven,
Still the fellowship increase,
Knit us in the bond of peace,
Join, our newborn spirits join
Each to each, and all to thine.

Build us in one body up,
Called in one high calling's hope;
One the Spirit whom we claim,
One the pure baptismal flame,
One the faith, and common Lord,
One the Father lives, adored,
Over, through, and in us all,
God incomprehensible!

One with God, the Source of bliss,
Ground of our communion this;
Life of all that live below,
Let thine emanations flow,
Rise eternal in our heart:
Thou our long-sought Eden art;
Father, Son, and Holy Ghost,
Be to us what Adam lost.

Bold we ask through Christ the Son,
Thou, O Christ, art all our own;
Our exalted flesh we see
To the Godhead joined in thee.
Glorious now thy heaven we share,
Thou art here, and we are there,
We participate of thine,
Human nature of divine.

Live we now in Christ our head,
Quickened by thy life and fed;
Christ, from whom the Spirit flows,
Into thee thy body grows;
While we feel the vital blood,
While the circulating flood,
Christ, through every member rolls,
Soul of all believing souls.

Daily growth the members find,
Fitly with each other joined;
Closely all compacted rise;
Every joint its strength supplies,
Life to every part conveys,
'Til the whole receive increase,
All complete the body prove,
Perfectly built up with love.

Christ, the true, the heavenly vine,
If thy grace hath made us thine,
Branches of a poisoned root,
Fallen Adam's evil fruit;
If we now transplanted are,
If we of thy nature share,
Hear us, Lord, and let us be
Fully grafted into thee.

Still may we continue thus,
We in thee, and thou in us;
Let us fresh supplies receive,
From thee, in thee ever live;
Share the fatness of the root,
Blossum, bud, and bring forth fruit,
With immortal vigor rise,
Towering 'til we reach the skies.

Christ, to all believers known,
Living, precious cornerstone,
Christ, by mortals disallowed,
Chosen and esteemed of God;
Lively stones we come to thee,
Built together let us be,
Saved by grace through faith alone:
Faith it is that makes us one.

Other ground can no man lay,
Jesus takes our sins away!
Jesus the foundation is:
This shall stand, and only this:
Fitly framed in him we are,
All the building rises fair:
Let it to a temple rise,
Worthy him who fills the skies.

Husband of thy church below,
Christ, if thee our Lord we know,
Unto thee betrothed in love,
Always faithful let us prove,
Never rob thee of our heart,
Never give the creature part;
Only thou possess the whole,
Take our body, spirit, soul.

Steadfast let us cleave to thee,
Love the mystic union be;
Union to the world unknown!
Joined to God, in spirit one,
Wait we 'til the Spouse shall come,
'Til the Lamb shall take us home,
For his heaven the Bride prepare,
Solemnize our nuptials there.

Christ, our Head, gone up on high,
Be thou in thy Spirit nigh,
Advocate to God, give ear
To thine own effectual prayer:
Hear the sounds thou once didst breathe
In thy days of flesh beneath,
Now, O Jesus, let them be
Strongly echoed back to thee.

We, O Christ, have thee received,
We the gospel-word believed,
Justly then we claim a share
In thine everlasting prayer.
One the Father is with thee;
Knit us in like unity;
Make us, O uniting Son,
One as thou and he are one.

If thy love to us hath given
All the glory of his heaven,
(From eternity thine own,
Glory here in grace begun)
Let us now the gift receive,
By the vital union live,
Joined to God, and perfect be,
Mystically one in thee.

Let it hence to all be known,
Thou art with thy Father one,
One with him in us be shewed,
Very God of very God;
Sent, our spirits to unite,
Sent to make us sons of light,
Sent, that we his grace may prove,
All the riches of his love.

Thee he loved e'er time begun,
Thee the co-eternal Son;
He hath to thy merit given
Us, the adopted heirs of heaven.
Thou hast willed that we should rise,
See thy glory in the skies,
See thee by all heaven adored,
Be forever with our Lord.

Thou the Father seest alone,
Thou to us hast made him known:
Sent from him we know thou art,
We have found thee in our heart:
Thou the Father hast declared:
He is here our great reward,
Ours his nature and his name;
Thou art ours with him the fame.

Still, O Lord, (for Thine we are)
Still to us his name declare;
Thy revealing Spirit give,
Whom the world cannot receive:
Fill us with the Father's love,
Never from our souls remove,
Dwell in us, and we shall be
Thine to all eternity.

Christ, from whom all blessings flow,
Perfecting the saints below,
Hear us, who thy nature share,
Who thy mystic body are:
Join us, in one spirit join,
Let us still receive of thine,
Still for more on thee we call,
Thee, who fillest all in all.

Closer knit to thee our head,
Nourish us, O Christ, and feed,
Let us daily growth receive,
More and more in Jesus live:
Jesus! We thy members are,
Cherish us with kindest care,
Of thy flesh, and of thy bone:
Love, forever love thine own.

Move, and actuate, and guide,
Diverse gifts to each divide;
Placed according to thy will,
Let us all our work fulfill;
Never from our office move,
Needful to the others prove,
Use the grace on each bestowed,
Tempered by the art of God.

Sweetly now we all agree,
Touched with softest sympathy,
Kindly for each other care:
Every member feels its share:
Wounded by the grief of one,
All the suffering members groan;
Honored if one member is,
All partake the common bliss.

Many are we now, and one,
We who Jesus have put on:
There is neither bond nor free,
Male nor female, Lord, in thee.
Love, like Death, hath us destroyed,
Rendered all distinctions void:
Names, and sects, and parties fall;
Thou, O Christ, art all in all!

King of saints, to whom are given
All in earth and all in heaven,
Reconciled through thee alone,
Joined, and gathered into one:
Heirs of glory, sons of grace,
Lo! to thee our hopes we raise,
Raise and fix our hopes on thee,
Full of immortality!

Absent in our flesh from home,
We are to Mt. Zion come:
Heaven is our soul's abode,
City of the living God;
Entered there our seats we claim
In the New Jerusalem,
Join the countless angel choir,
Greet the firstborn sons of fire.

We our elder brethren meet,
We are made with them to fit,
Sweetest fellowship we prove
With the General Church above;
Saints, who now their names behold
In the Book of Life enrolled,
Spirits of the righteous, made
Perfect here in Christ their Head.

We with them to God are come,
God who speaks the General Doom,
Jesus Christ, who stands between
Angry heaven, and guilty men,
Undertakes to buy our peace,
Gives the covenant of grace,
Ratifies, and makes it good,
Signs and seals it with his blood.

Life his healing blood imparts,
Sprinkled on our peaceful hearts:
Abel's blood for vengeance cried,
Jesus' speaks us justified:
Speaks, and calls for better things,
Makes us prophets, priests, and kings,
Asks that we with him may reign--
Earth and heaven say, "Amen!"

Come, ye kindred souls above,
Man provokes you unto love;
Saints and angels hear the call,
Praise the common Lord of all:
Him let earth and heaven proclaim,
Earth and heaven record his name,
Let us both in this agree,
Both his one great family.

Hosts of heaven begin the song,
Praise him with a tuneful tongue,
(Sounds like yours we cannot raise,
We can only lisp his praise)
Us repenting sinners see,
Jesus died to set us free,
Sing ye over us forgiven;
Shout for joy, ye hosts of heaven!

Be it unto angels known,
By the church, what God hath done:
Depths of love and wisdom see
In a dying deity!
Gaze, ye firstborn seraphs, gaze!
Never can ye sound his grace:
Lost in wonder, look no more;
Fall, and silently adore.

Ministerial spirits know,
Execute your charge below:
You our Father hath prepared,
Fenced us with a flaming guard:
Bid you all our ways attend,
Safe convey us to the end,
On your wings our souls remove,
Waft us to the realms of love.

Happy souls whose course is run,
Who the fight of faith have won,
Parted by an earlier death,
Think ye of your friends beneath?
Have ye your own flesh forgot?
By a common ransom bought?
Can death's interposing tide
Spirits one in Christ divide?

No: for us you ever wait,
'Til we make your bliss complete,
'Til your fellow-servants come,
'Til your brethren hasten home:
You in Paradise remain,
For your testimony slain,
Nobly who for Jesus' stood,
Bold to seal the truth with blood.

Ever now your speaking cries
From beneath the altar rise,
Loudly call for vengeance due,
"Come, Thou Holy God, and true!
Lord, how long thou dost delay!
Come to judgment, come away!
Hasten, Lord, the General Doom!
Come away, to judgment come!"

Wait, ye righteous spirits, wait,
Soon arrives your glorious state;
Robed in white a season rest,
Blessed, if not completely blessed.
When the number is fulfilled,
When the witnesses are killed,
When we all from earth are driven,
Then with us ye mount to heaven.

Jesus hear, and bow the skies,
Hark! we all unite our cries;
Take us to our heavenly home,
Quickly let thy kingdom come!
"Jesus, come," the Spirit cries,
"Jesus, come," the Bride replies;
One triumphant church above,
Join us all in perfect love.

New Blog Alert

2010-12-22T08:46:00.000-08:00

Just wanted to add a notice here that, in addition to this blog, I've added another one. Study and Faith is a blog devoted to exploring issues relating to cordial dialogue between Evangelicals and Latter-day Saints (Mormons). Now, on this blog, I try to only post when I have a sense that the Spirit may be leading me to do so. That's one reason why I haven't added anything in the past five weeks. At Study and Faith, however, I try to post on a fairly regular basis - maybe once every other day or so. I'd really like to invite all the readers I have here to subscribe to that blog as well. Of most relevance to readers here, especially those who aren't especially drawn to LDS-Evangelical dialogue, I'm doing a series there where I work my way through a variety of Evangelical documents like the Lausanne Covenant.

On Proclamation and Persuasion

2010-11-14T15:00:00.000-08:00

In the year 1989, the second major International Congress on World Evangelization met in Manila in the Philippines to take up where they'd left off at the first such congress, which met in 1974 in Lausanne, Switzerland. Where the first International Congress on World Evangelization released a document called the Lausanne Covenant, the second such Congress released a document called the Manila Manifesto. I happen to think that both of these documents are powerfully written and right on the money, and today I'd like to ponder one of my favorite quotes from the Manila Manifesto. It says:

The good news must be boldly proclaimed, wherever possible, in church and in public halls, on radio and television, and in the open air, because it is God's power for salvation and we are under obligation to make it known. In our preaching we must faithfully declare the truth which God has revealed in the Bible and struggle to relate it to our own context.
We also affirm that apologetics, namely "the defence and confirmation of the gospel", is integral to the biblical understanding of mission and essential for effective witness in the modern world. Paul "reasoned" with people out of the Scriptures, with a view to "persuading" them of the truth of the gospel. So must we. In fact, all Christians should be ready to give a reason for the hope that is in them.

I really want to leap into that second paragraph there, but I think maybe we should take our time and go in order. What do we need to do? We need to proclaim the good news. First of all, let's stop there for a moment. How often do we think of the Christian message as "news" these days? It seems these days that most folks consider it totally 'old hat', yesterday's news, but outdated for today. But it isn't! And it isn't just a 'lifestyle' either; it's a 'message', something you can say or write. And we're supposed to say it! We're supposed to talk about it! But why? Well, first of all, because it's good news. It isn't just some interesting story that you might find tucked on page C5 in the local newspaper. This is front-page stuff, and anyone who's got a good grasp on reality and who reads that headline in faith - "Jesus, Promised Messiah, Dies to Save Everything, Defeats Death; Declared by God to be King over Heaven and Earth" - should have the same reaction that a parent might get when they've lost their toddler in a dangerous part of town, and then find the child happily standing on a street corner, safe and sound; or that a person might feel when they've been suffering for ages from a painful, lethal disease, and suddenly the doctor announces that the medicine is working and they're going to be cured. This is powerful news, wonderful news, marvelous, miraculous, stunningly significant news!

Where should we talk about the good news? Is it something that we should chit-chat about amongst ourselves in cozy, air-conditioned and heated church buildings, and then leave thinking that it can wait again until next week? No! We definitely must talk about it in church. But we also should be talking about it in public halls; it should be on the radio and the television - the real deal, not the counterfeit 'get rich quick: use God for fun and profit!!!' schemes of so many popular televangelists - and it should be spoken in the open air. Indoors and outdoors, in person or on the media, and these days even on the Internet, we need to be sharing the message. From hi-tech to low-tech, leave no tech unused!

So that answers the what and the where, but why? Why should we be spreading this message around? Because it saves. A compassionate person who knows what can help other people will judiciously share that news with others. If I've found out about a really great bargain at the local store and I know that my neighbor is in real need of what the store's got, I should let them know! And more than that, the good news isn't just good news that saves; it's God's power for salvation. The message we're spreading? That is the saving, freeing, liberating might of a God who could easily call entire galaxies into existence from absolutely nothing without the slightest strain or effort. And is it just a nice thing for us to spread it, something we could do if we wanted to be especially nice? No. No, we are obligated to make it known, to make absolutely sure that the whole world has heard the message, whether they believe it or not. It's not an option, like, "Oh, well I could either be a Christian who stays real quiet about it, or I could be a Christian who tells other people about the news." That's not a choice we have. The first person is by definition not being a faithful disciple of Jesus. Only the second one is. This is not a suggestion, it's an order.

When we declare the message, we need to faithfully declare it as truth. It sometimes seems these days that "truth" is not a popular idea. Some folks think that there's something very evil about claiming to have the truth. After all, if on some issue we have the truth, and other people have different ideas, then those ideas are... wait for it... wrong! (Any of you pass out from the sheer shock of it all?) But let's face it, virtually everyone should recognize that there's such a thing as truth. For instance, take the statement "Grover Cleveland lived in the United States of America". That is actually saying something about the way reality is (or, in this case, was). Once you understand what it means, then it's obvious that it can be either true or false. If it's true, then it's true, period. If it's false, then it's false, period. But what it can't be is true-for-me and false-for-you. You might not believe it to be true, but that doesn't make Grover Cleveland suddenly a Pakistani shepherd! Or take another statement: "There is no such thing as absolute truth." First, you have to understand what the terms mean - for instance, that by "absolute truth" we're meaning a statement that has a truth-value independently of any contingent being's assessment of it's truth-value - and then you can see that either it's absolutely true that there's no such thing as absolute truth (in which case, there really is, so then it's false after all), or it's false that there's no such thing as absolute truth (in which case, there really is such a thing as absolute truth). And what Christians are declaring is just such a message. It makes a claim about the way things really are. It could be true; or, it could be partly true and partly false; or, it could just be wrong. But there's nothing somehow bad about claiming that something is absolutely true, though there is, I think, something bad about not being willing to hear what other people have to say on the issue and being willing to be somehow affected by it.

Furthermore, this truth is truth which God has revealed in the Bible. I've known a lot of professing Christians who have said to me that they don't really care what the Bible says on [pick an issue of choice], for some reason that usually amounts to, "Well I don't like not being the boss." And that is a sad, sad, sad thing, because that is not the heart of a disciple. That is not the attitude that Jesus had towards the Scriptures, and it isn't the attitude that a disciple of Jesus should have towards the Scriptures either. Now, before you get too far, does this mean that every Christian has to be a biblical inerrantist, so that if - for example - there's some mistake somewhere in 2 Chronicles, then Jesus didn't rise from the dead and doesn't now rule as Lord? Think for just a moment how ridiculous that is. Instead of worrying about whether the Bible is inerrant, what Christians can and should agree on is that it's authoritative. We do not get to just make up whatever we want. If the Bible says, 'X is a sin', and if our best methods of sifting the text give us every reason to believe that that's still true today, then it's time to face the facts, quit living in la-la land, and deal with it.

And thus, Christians are called to struggle to take what the Bible actually says - which of course requires that we do the serious work required to understand it, rather than being lazy like so many Christians who think that real study of the Bible is and should be forever beyond them because it goes over their head now and they don't really care enough to try to learn something for a change - and accept that that's really what it says, and that the Bible is not something we can discard at random. But then we must also struggle to take what we've seen there and figure out how to apply that to where we are today. A lot of Christians have a "the Bible said it, I believe it, that settles it" mentality. And I'm not saying that there isn't some truth in there. But it also isn't sufficient. Very, very few Christians believe that everything in the Bible is equally applicable to today's situation in the exact same way. The Bible itself says otherwise, since obviously the Old Testament distinguishes between the circumcised people of God and those 'uncircumcised Philistines', while the New Testament says that you can be part of the people of God and keep your foreskin too, so long as you have the reality to which circumcision was pointing all along: namely, a heart, a center of being and willing, that's allowed the Spirit of God to come to it and to remove everything that might hinder it from being a public witness to a covenant made with God. And then there are the sacrificial laws, and plenty of others. Is this always an easy task? No. And that's especially true for people who don't study how to do it. But as Christians, we need to be able to faithfully relate the Bible to our context in ways that are accurate to how God would intend us to do it.

But that's not all! The Manila Manifesto next goes on to talk about something called apologetics. That's not a very common word; what does it mean? Well, the Manifesto defines it as "the defence and confirmation of the gospel". The word 'apologetics' comes from the Greek word apologia, meaning 'defense'. It's the name of one of Plato's works, the Apology, which was not about Socrates saying he was sorry for being so annoying all the time, but instead was about Socrates' speech in his defense when he was on trial. There are a lot of people out there these days who would love to put Christianity on trial, whether in the media or in the classroom or just in general. Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, etc., etc., etc.... there are a lot of them. And beneath all the plentiful rhetoric and bluster and irrational outrage, sometimes - whether intentionally or by accident - they actually make a case (almost always a weak one) against the Christian faith. You could say that they're acting as the prosecution. And Christians are called upon to speak up for the defense, to answer the charges. And even more than that, Christians are at times called upon to make their own positive case for Christianity and against other rival ideas. Christians are called to argue. That doesn't mean that we're called to be abrasive, arrogant, annoying, loud, or obnoxious; it means that we're called to present our case, our reasons, for the position we've taken.

Now, one of the phrases that gets bandied around pretty often is, "You can't argue somebody into the kingdom." And that's true. There's no amount of arguing that can bring somebody to faith, all on its own and without the involvement of the Spirit and their own free will. You also can't love somebody into the kingdom. There's no amount of love you can give that is sure to bring somebody to faith in Jesus, apart from the work of the Spirit and their own choice in the matter. The same is true of preaching. The same is true of quoting the Bible. The same is true of, well, anything you can do. So does that mean you shouldn't preach, or love, or witness? Nope! The Spirit can use those fruitfully to bring a person to the point where they have the option of whether or not to respond - and the same goes for arguing/apologetics.

Another thing that gets thrown around a lot is, "Oh, well, you just have to have faith." And it's true; we do need to have faith. But that means real faith, not misdefined faith. Faith essentially means our trust and our loyalty to someone or something. When we have faith in God, we're loyal to him (which is why obedience is a crucial component of a living faith, and why "faith without works is dead" - James 2:26); we also trust in God, which means not only that we trust in his capacity to save us and his love for us, but also that we trust him to be faithful to his promises and to be truthful to us when he speaks. Nothing in that means that we're supposed to do things contrary to reason. Nothing in that means that we should just will ourselves to believe things really really hard. Faith is a proper component in a rational life - and, as my favorite quote from Galileo runs in part, "I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with senses, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use." We can, at least in part, use reason to help us realize that God exists, that God can be trusted, and that he actually has (or hasn't) said what we think he's said. Nowhere does the Bible command us to believe things without good reason; nowhere. It is, after all, a book where God tells people, "Come now, let us reason together" (Isaiah 1:18). If faith were believing things for no good reason, the Bible would not have told us to be faithful!

But back to the Manila Manifesto. We've mentioned what apologetics is and looked at two common objections to it, and both fail. Furthermore, as the Manifesto itself points out, apologetics is very, very biblical! Over and over again in Acts, we see Paul going into new places and immediately reasoning with people to try to rationally persuade them that the Christian message is true. In Thessalonica, Paul "went into the synagogue, and on three Sabbath days he reasoned with them from the Scriptures, explaining and proving that the Messiah had to suffer and rise from the dead" (Acts 17:2-3). In Athens, Paul "reasoned in the synagogue with both Jews and God-fearing Greeks, as well as in the marketplace day by day with those who happened to be there. A group of Epicurean and Stoic philosophers began to debate with him" (Acts 17:17-18). In Corinth, too, Paul "reasoned in the synagogue, trying to persuade Jews and Greeks" (Acts 18:4). At Ephesus, Paul "went into the synagogue and reasoned with the Jews" (Acts 18:19). And Paul is not alone! An Alexandrian Jew named Apollos became a Christian and swiftly was noted as a very capable apologist; the Bible says that Apollos "was a great help to those who by grace had believed" precisely because Apollos "vigorously refuted his Jewish opponents in public debate, proving from the Scriptures that Jesus was the Messiah" (Acts 18:27-28).

Now, not all people were convinced, even by Paul and Apollos, and the Parable of the Soils helps us understand why. But note the contrast between the people in Thessalonica and the people in Berea who eagerly accepted Paul's message, after they checked it against Scripture and saw that it matched up - and the Bible praises the Bereans for that. This work was not without success! So the alleged ineffectiveness of apologetics also can't be used to discredit it. The Bible is pretty clear that apologetics is a good thing. This is why the Manila Manifesto is able to say that apologetics is "integral to the biblical understanding of mission". The evangelists of the early church did not simply walk around proclaiming the message; they made a case for the message; they offered people reasons why they ought to accept it. A crucial aspect of the mission that the Church has is apologetics.

Evangelism used to be very apologetic in nature - and we still often need the same today, where it's called for. And it's for good reason that the Manila Manifesto says that apologetics is "essential for effective witness in the modern world", and that "all Christians should be ready to give a reason for the hope that is in them". (The last quote, by the way, draws on 1 Peter 3:15: "Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have"; the word 'reason' here is apologia, the Greek word from which we get 'apologetics'.) This is not an option; this is not something that is good for some Christians who are really into that sort of stuff. Apologetics of some sort is a task given to all Christians in some capacity, just as serving others and witnessing are. Now, not all of us have an equal capacity for all of those, nor do all of us have a particular desire to do all of those. But we all have all of those callings. And apologetics is also important. In today's world, Christianity has many challengers. There are plenty of worldviews that reject important aspects of the Christian message; Christianity is not the only message vying for your obedience, or my obedience, or your neighbor's obedience. There's Islam, and Buddhism, and atheism (including, of course, the 'new atheism'), and scientism/verificationism, and relativism and various strains of postmodern thought, and a wide range of others; and then within the church, many of the ancient heresies still exist - both at the lay level in regular churches, as well as in unorthodox religious movements that some people call "cults" (though I don't think that's an accurate use of the word) - to compete with the orthodox faith that was "once for all entrusted to God's holy people" (Jude 3). And Christians need to be equipped to deal with living in the presence of other religions and other worldviews. That is not just recommended; it is essential for effective witness - because many people these days are not in a position where they will simply come to faith the moment they hear someone mention Jesus. They may need some persuading as a part of the evangelistic process that, by the grace of God and through the work of his Spirit on that person's heart, may in due time bring them to a point where they, too, are ready to begin a life of Christian discipleship. So, to reiterate:

The good news must be boldly proclaimed, wherever possible,
in church and in public halls, on radio and television, and in the open air,
because it is God's power for salvation and we are under obligation to make it known.
In our preaching we must faithfully declare the truth which God has revealed in the Bible
and struggle to relate it to our own context.
We also affirm that apologetics, namely "the defence and confirmation of the gospel",
is integral to the biblical understanding of mission and essential for effective witness in the modern world.
Paul "reasoned" from people out of the Scriptures, with a view to "persuading" them of the truth of the gospel.
So must we. In fact, all Christians should be ready to give a reason for the hope that is in them.

The Trinity and Creation Out of Nothing

2010-11-08T17:53:00.000-08:00

Today I'd like to start talking about some things that Christians* believe - some things that a lot of people assume are just dusty, archaic, impractical ideas that people debate for no good reason and which don't have any real significance, but which really make all the difference in the world.

[* I'm talking about "what Christians believe" here, and what I mean is what has been handed down as agreed-upon Christian doctrine from ancient times all the way up to the present; these things are shared by Roman Catholics, by Orthodox (Greek, Russian, or otherwise), by all sorts of Protestants, and even sometimes by other Christian groups outside of those broad families. These are truly ecumenical doctrines, and they are definitely not theological novelties. Speaking of these as what Christians believe isn't meant here to suggest automatically that someone who rejects some of these beliefs is therefore obviously not saved. They may very well be; they may be true disciples of Christ for all I know. But they don't hold to the historic orthodox faith, which is what I'm concerned with here.]

One thing that Christians have historically believed is the doctrine, or teaching, of creatio ex nihilo. That's a fancy Latin phrase meaning "creation out of nothing". Now, that doesn't mean that God took a big fistful of a stuff called 'nothing', and then poof! he turned it into a universe. That's crazy talk. What it does mean is this. The world has, in some sense, a beginning. Christians have often held that it had a first period of time to its existence, and in many respects it's gotten some strong scientific support from modern cosmology. So 'before' that beginning to the world, God was all there was. It's not like, pre-universe, there was God plus a lot of other stuff lying around. No, God is the only eternal reality, not God plus matter. There was nothing that just happened, lucky for God, to be there so that God could make stuff with it. When it came to creating the world, it was entirely God's decision for there to exist anything but God. If God had wanted, he was totally free to not create anything. And if he'd made that call, then eternally there would be only God - and that's it, because that's enough. (More on that in a moment.) God has no equals. Nothing but God's own self, or aspects of his own self, can be co-equal with God, because only God is a necessary being. And God did not need anything outside of himself in order to create. That's the main lesson we get from creatio ex nihilo - as opposed to the idea, which the early Christians rejected, of creatio ex materia, which would have meant that God had some matter existing eternally and independently alongside of God that he used to make the world. Like I said, there was no such matter; God made that, too. And what that teaches us is that everything that exists is dependent on God. Nothing is independent of him. We are dependent on God for our existence. God created us, and he is absolutely responsible for the fact that we exist; we are dependent and contingent and merely temporal, while God is independent and necessary and eternal. Like Christian philosopher Peter Van Inwagen said:

To say that God is the creator of all things besides himself is not to say that he formed them out of some pre-existent stuff, like the cosmic craftsman of the Timaeus. If there is a God, then there never was a chaos of prime matter that existed independently of his power and his will, waiting through an eternity of years for him to impress form on it. This could not be, for, if there is a God, nothing does or could exist independently of his will or independently of his creative power. God creates things from the ground up, ontologically speaking. His creation is, as they say, ex nihilo.¹

Two other Christian philosophers have similarly noted:

For the author of Genesis 1, no preexistent material seems to be assumed, no warring gods or primordial dragons are present - only God, who is said to "create" (bara, a word used only with God as its subject and which does not presuppose a material substratum) "the heavens and the earth" (eth hassamayim we'eth ha'arets, a Hebrew expression for the totality of the world or, more simply, the universe). Moreover, this act of creation took place "in the beginning" (bereshith, used here as in Is 46:10 to indicate an absolute beginning). The author thereby implies creatio ex nihilo (creation out of nothing) in the temporal sense that God brought the universe into being without a material cause at some point in the finite past.²

So God did not need anything outside of himself to create, but Christians also believe that God did not need anything outside of himself for any other reason either - including his own happiness, or fulfillment, or for relationships. God is not just a God of love; God is essentially love. He doesn't need or require us, because everything needed for relationship, he has eternally had within his own being, within his self. What Christian teaching says that? Turns out it's a pretty famous one: the Trinity. That's right, the doctrine of the Trinity isn't just some academic thing that theologians talked about and argued over for ages simply to hear themselves talk or find something to fight over. It's actually important! It's important because, for one, it shows us that relationship isn't something that required creation. It's not as if God was forced to create because he got bored. God could never be bored because God's life is the eternally blessed communion of the Father with the Son and the Spirit, of the Son with the Father and the Spirit, and of the Spirit with the Father and the Son. And it's not as if God felt lonely; how could God feel lonely when he is, in his very character, relational within himself? So what this shows us is, first, that God does not need us for companionship or for anything else. God has everything it takes to be completely and perfectly fulfilled, and he had it eternally and necessarily. If he didn't, then he wouldn't be eternally and necessarily perfect, which is also something that Christians believe about God. What it also shows us is that God is and has always been perfect relationship in himself, from before the world began, and that when he freely chose to create a world, he created it in a way that reflects his nature. We were not made to be alone, because God is not alone. We were made to be in community because God himself is Community. And God created us so that he could enter into contingent and free relationships with us - not because he needed to, but because he freely chose to - and so that he can by grace bring us as contingent partners to share in the community of the Trinity. Think about that. God called us so that by grace we can share in the relationships that are from everlasting to everlasting, so that we can be brought into the communion of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit! This participation in God's inner life, as participants who have been freely invited by God from the outside, is a large part of what ancient Greek-speaking Christians - as well as Orthodox Christians today - call theosis, 'deification'/'divinization'. That doesn't mean that we become God by nature - we don't get to be omnipotent, for example, nor do we get to become the source of all things that exist, or uncreated, or anything like that - but it does mean that we get to share in some profound ways in who God is, as an act of God's grace.

Now, all those ancient heresies that some people who haven't done their history homework think were valid forms of Christian belief but were oh-so-brutally repressed by those evil orthodox Christians who wanted to control everyone? ("Help! Help! I'm being repressed!") Those heresies don't give you this. Take Sabellianism, for example. That's an ancient heresy, also known as 'modalism', that taught that there was really only one person who was God, and that when you saw the 'Father' and the 'Son' and the 'Holy Spirit' in the Bible, this was just one divine person playing a bunch of different roles, like a guy with a puppet in each hand, pretending to have real conversations with them - but really, there's only one center of consciousness there, only one person, so there's no actual relationship going on. That's what a lot of Christians mistakenly think the Trinity is, but it isn't. Jesus was not praying to himself, he was praying to a distinct person: his Father. There are real relationships between them. If Sabellianism were true, then if God hadn't created, he might well have gotten lonely; he could not have had a relationship unless he created something to have one with. And in a real sense, that would mean that God would have been in need, and therefore not perfect. And that God could never have a rich enough inner life to invite us to share in; it would forever be closed to us. Not only would that God be too small, so would the salvation he offers. Sadly, modalism of some form is still with us today in the teachings of the United Pentecostal Church International as well as other Oneness Pentecostal groups, as well as in the personal beliefs of a lot of well-meaning Christians who haven't been taught well enough to know better.

Or take Arianism, for example. This was the heresy that the Council of Nicaea fought in the year 325. Arius, a church elder from Alexandria in Egypt, taught that the Father was the uncreated God, but that the Son was a lesser created god who wasn't eternal like the Father. And because the Son was of a different essence from the Father, the Son couldn't know the Father perfectly; there are some things about God, in other words, that even Jesus doesn't get, and so he can't perfectly reveal God to us. What's worse, only God is eternally perfectly good; all other created agents can choose to fall away. What this meant for Arius was that it's theoretically possible for Jesus to rebel against the Father just like Satan did - and if he does, then say goodbye to your salvation. (Oh, and also, since only the one true God is worthy of worship, if you've ever worshipped Jesus, you're an idolater. Congratulations! The early Arians actually tried to hang on to some form of worship of Jesus, but they ultimately couldn't escape the logical consequences of their views.) And if you believe that Jesus is the Word/Reason (Logos) and Wisdom of God, like the New Testament says and the church recognized, then to believe that Jesus is a created being means that God was once totally speechless, irrational, and foolish until he created Jesus. This is why early Arians had to resort to saying that God had an uncreated Word/Wisdom as well as a created word/wisdom, and that Jesus is the second one instead of the first.

Note that this all means that Arianism has nothing better to offer than Sabellianism here. God in eternity is still a solitary individual without a robust inner life of relationship and community, and he can't bring us into a divine community by grace. Add to that all the other problems with what Arius was teaching, and you can see why the church had to make a big fuss about it! So when the Nicene Creed said that the Son is "of the same essence as the Father", using the Greek word homoousios, they were safeguarding what they knew about Jesus and his eternal relationship to the Father, as well as the fact that the church had always worshipped the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit (which is why when some heretics decided to concede when it came to Jesus and go after the Spirit instead - they were called 'Pneumatomachians', or 'those who fight against the Spirit' - they didn't get any further). Sadly, forms of Arianism are still with us today among Jehovah's Witnesses, Christadelphians, and a bunch of other sects, as well as probably a lot of uninformed Christians in the pews.

Sabellianism can't give you a God of eternal community. Neither can Arianism. Neither can other anti-Trinitarian ideas such as tritheism, which is any belief that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are three totally separate gods. Aside from the fact that this is obviously not what Christians have ever believed, each of these 'gods' would be incomplete without the others. None of them has relationship within his own self, his own divine essence. And so while they might be able to invite you to join their society and become a peer, it isn't their inner life that you're entering into. And there's also the possibility that, unless they are necessarily always in agreement, they'll fight and break off their relationships - and then where would we be? But if they are necessarily in agreement, and if they do share an inner life, and if they're all co-eternal and mutually related, then really they aren't three gods but one God, just as the doctrine of the Trinity says.

None of these false theologies, these heresies, can give you what orthodox Christianity can. And in my opinion, not only is the doctrine of the Trinity better grounded in what the Bible teaches, but the doctrine of the Trinity is simply more beautiful, more promising, and more meaningful. There really are practical implications to believing in these things; don't let anyone try to tell you otherwise. Only the doctrine of the Trinity, coupled with creatio ex nihilo, speaks to you about one God who has no needs, who exists eternally as Community - which means that our relationships on earth are a reflection of something divine. And only these doctrines affirm God's true freedom, independence, and unique eternity in creating. And only these doctrines offer you the hope of being invited to participate by grace in the Community of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, in which they eternally participate by nature.

¹Peter Van Inwagen, The Problem of Evil: The Gifford Lectures Delivered at the University of St Andrews in 2003 (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2006), 29.
² J. P. Moreland and William Lane Craig, Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2003), 554.

So This Guy Goes Out to Sow Some Seed...

2010-11-08T16:32:00.001-08:00

Alright, alright, listen up, I've got a story for you, so get this image in your head: So there's this guy, alright? He's out working hard in the field sowing seed; it's planting time. Think of him out there, hard at work beneath the hot sun. He's got this big bag that's full of the stuff he's sowing, and he just reaches in, grabs handful after handful, and tosses it all over the dirt; he figures he can come back later and plow it all into the earth. So this guy, he doesn't worry about where it lands; there's plenty of seed to go around. Now some of his seed is gonna just land on the path in the field where he's walking, or right next to the path - somewhere that isn't for planting. The seed lands on that ground, but that kind of ground can't receive it, can't take it in. Does the seed make any difference to the ground at all? No way. It just lies there, inert, useless, until finally some birds swoop down from the sky and peck it up. Then what's the deal with that ground? Absolutely nothing. One thing's for sure: nothing's gonna grow there.

But okay, okay, the path isn't the only place seed can land, is it? Some of the field is pretty rocky - just a layer of topsoil over a layer of hard rock. So some of the seed lands there and gets plowed in, and that's good, right? But what happens once the seed gets in there? It doesn't get in very deep, does it? Well the top layer of soil gets pretty hot from the sunlight, so the seed germinates real quick and starts growing, it shoots up fast like it's eager to get to the surface. But look! Where do the roots go? The rock blocks them from getting deep into the dirt to get nutrients. So then there's this plant there for a while, it grows up quickly and all that, but it's got terrible roots! Now maybe when it's raining and cool out, that's no problem, you don't need good roots to deal with most of that. But what happens to the plant when it gets hot and dry and the sun's just beating down on this poor thing? There's not much moisture in that dry soil! So the plant gets all dried out and withers up. What good is that to the farmer? None at all.

Now alright, not all soil is rocky. There's some much better dirt the seed can land on, and some probably would, right? Now in a lot of fields, you're gonna have some patches with these nasty thorny bushes growin' in 'em, so what about the seed that lands in those parts? Well it'll sure sink into the soil, that's a plus, and it might not grow as fast as the seed that falls in rocky soil, but it'll have much better roots. But look! These thorns are gonna keep growing, and if you watch, they'll grow up over some of the plants and hog all the sunlight, and their roots will wrap around the roots of the good plants and get in there with 'em and hog all the water, too! So maybe those plants will grow, but bit by bit the plants get just strangled by these thorns. So what good is the plant? What kind of crop are you gonna get from something that's dying because other stuff is stealing its sun and water? That's not gonna help the farmer either!

But don't you worry about the farmer; see, this guy knows what he's doing. What's left of the field is good soil, right, it doesn't have rocks or any other plants growing there. So what's to stop the seed from sprouting? Nothing! That's the beauty of it. In good soil, this stuff he's planting just flourishes! It grows and grows and grows - and it's good stuff! The seed gets into the soil, it gets down in there, the soil receives it. The sprouting seed works its roots all throughout the soil so that it can draw up enough water into itself - and that way when hot, dry days come along, the plants won't wither up and give in; they'll keep growing anyway! See, this soil is good soil, so it doesn't put up much resistance to the roots. And since this soil is good soil, there aren't any weeds or thorns or thistles or any of that junk growing there. This is not land where the sower's crop has to share space with anything else, or compete with anything else. No, the sower's crop gets the whole plot to itself! And what happens when the crop gets the plot all to itself like that? It grows and grows and grows and grows until it matures and turns into a bountiful, flourishing crop, bearing its fruit in abundance - so much so that it more than compensates for the seed the sower lost on all the ground that wasn't good for it! Now we can see that the sower wasn't crazy, casting his seed from one and to the other without worrying which kind of ground it was gonna fall on. He knew what he was doing all along!

So that's my story, but what's it meant? The seed he's planting is the announcement we've all been waiting for. We live in a good world, but bad things, horrible things, happen because we decided we didn't want to live under God's rule; we didn't want God to be king over us. And so we rebelled. But God always promised that he wouldn't leave us to our own devices forever; he'd show us the error of our ways and would come and invite us back and establish his rule again, bit by bit. And the announcement we've been waiting for is that God's coming to reign at last, and so we'd better be ready to live that way, and not like the rebels we've been. That's the message that a wandering sage named Jesus started to spread thousands of years ago among the people God had chosen to bless the whole world through. And that's the message that Jesus sent his students to spread after they'd learned about it from him. But that's not all there was to the message. Jesus also told a lot of stories to show people what God's rule is like - and as it turns out, it looks a whole lot different than pretty much everybody had always figured it would. Instead of looking like God storming in and smashing up on everybody who's been picking on his people, it looked a lot like God sneaking in and letting all those bad guys - and even his own people! - smash him up instead. It looked a lot like a big failure, but it would turn out to be the great victory. And this topsy-turvy reign of God was going to come, Jesus said, through him! So that's the message that this sower is spreading: "Hey, you! You've been living like a rebel, not like a loyalist to God - and he's on his way to stop your great secession, so if you know what's up, you'll do an about-face pronto. God's rule has shown up on your doorstep, and you didn't even know it because it didn't look a thing like you wanted it to! And God started it through Jesus, his anointed son - the one you've been waiting for is here!"

So the sower, then, is anybody who spreads this message - but even if they get it exactly right, even if they're as convincing as could be, plenty of people are still going to miss out. Some people, like the dirt alongside the path, are packed so hard that there's no room for the message to even get into them. They aren't open to it. It takes effort to get your head around this shocking news, and they just aren't willing. So the message may hit their ears, but it won't stick around. The subtle powers that don't want God's rule to come can easily swoop in and snatch it away. And then some people, like the thin dirt on top of rocks, do accept the message gladly, but they don't really get it. They've got something in them that won't let it get any deeper, so the message does good in their lives when things are well and cool and all that jazz... but the moment things get too hot to handle, these fair-weather followers fall to the wayside. They're in for the good, but as soon as they realize that the message calls for putting up with a lot of hot, dry days, they drop it like a hot potato. And then there are other folks, like the thorn-infested plots, who don't have that problem. It's not that these people don't let the message in, it's not that the good news doesn't set up shop there. Don't get me wrong, it does, but they've got a whole 'nother problem. The kingdom message ain't the only message vying for their attention, and they've let a bunch of other messages - like the familiar story that it's all about take, take, take; or the story that he who has the best toys wins; or any of those old lies - set up shop there too! There's competition - and God's rule wants the whole plot, not just what other things leave aside. So these folks are trying to invest their resources in God's kingdom plus all this other junk, and that's a loser's bid. Can't pull it off. So they may have received the message, but they didn't really get it and follow through, and so it won't bear fruit there.

But then there are other folks who are like good soil. When the good news gets to them, they really get it. The message gets into them, so the anti-God forces out there can't just swipe it away and pretend it never happened. The message gets its roots deep into them; there's nothing blocking it, because these folks aren't shallow. For these people, it's about more than an emotional high. God's rule isn't about signing up and feeling splendiferous for the rest of your life; it's about dying and rising with Jesus the Messiah. It's about becoming like Jesus in his agonies and his tears and his anguish so that we can become like him in his victories and his shouts of joy and his indestructible life of power becoming fuller, not emptier, when poured out in love. So the message gets its roots into these people, and then when they suffer for trusting Jesus and giving him their loyalty as their Lord - because that's what faith is all about - they don't dry up, give up, wither up; they stick with it no matter how many difficult days come through. And the message that brooks no competitors finally finds that these people have no plans to provide it with competitors. Their lives, their plots, have no thorns, no other things striving against the rule of God. You can't serve God and something else that isn't God, be it Mammon or Pleasure or Convenience or Independence or Selfhood or any of those other lame counterfeits that only look so tempting because we haven't yet really seen for ourselves how the reign of God is so fully of the realities of which all rival masters are cheap replicas. "Accept no substitutes" is the wisdom these 'good soil' people live by. Their lives are devoted to God's rule, no matter what comes their way, and they're willing to go through the effort to grasp the message in both their minds and in their acts. So what's the consequence of that? These are fruitful people! You just won't believe how productive they are when you really see them as they are. And when it comes to God and his rule, these people are the ones God has good reason to consider finally useful - because they yielded to his message.

So what's the point of this whole story? First of all, now that you've heard the message, what kind of soil are you going to be? Are you like the soil of the path - never yielding, never receiving, never comprehending, and so never finding out what it's like to even have growth? Or are you maybe like the rocky soil - so shallow that while your growth looks amazing at first and everybody's impressed, it turns out that you never really got the meaning after all, or else you would've let the message penetrate you deeper, and now that times are tough, you're ready to throw in the towel? Or are you maybe instead like the thorny ground - you've received the good news, you're planning on sticking with it, but there are so many other things you want to serve too, so instead of giving everything over to God's rule, this message has to compete with all the clutter in your life? Or are you - praise God! - like the good soil - yielding to the message, taking it in, letting it get deeply into you, not keeping anything back from it, so that when all's said and done, you're the one with real results to show for it all? Be those people; don't be the other people. And if you're like those people, the 'good soil' people, then you'll want to go and share this message with others. Go, do it, and do it as effectively as you can! Train well, go forth, and serve! But don't labor under the delusion that if you were only a bit more persuasive or skilled, everyone would accept the message. Many just aren't ready for it - but those who are, are blessed indeed.

Some Brief Remarks on Being Forsaken by God

2010-10-07T19:35:00.000-07:00

If you've ever felt forsaken by God... rest assured that God knows exactly what that's like. That sounds odd, doesn't it? But according to a very persuasive case made by a New Testament scholar whom I rather respect, that's precisely what Jesus meant to convey when, on the cross, he cried out the famed line from Psalm 22:1, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"

In his 2008 book Jesus and the God of Israel: God Crucified and Other Studies on the New Testament's Christology of Divine Identity, Richard Bauckham included a very curious final chapter entitled "God's Self-Identification with the Godforsaken in the Gospel of Mark". And in it, he pointed out that the meaning of being forsaken by God is that "he has allowed this to happen and does nothing to help" (257). Of course, that doesn't mean that he's entirely absent, or that he's really forgotten us, or that he's delivered us up for good, or anything like that. But by this definition, Jesus really was forsaken by God on the cross. This isn't a loss of faith; actually, Psalm 22:1 constitutes an expression of faith, since it appeals to God to remain faithful even in the starkest of circumstances. But Bauckham also argues that in quoting Psalm 22:1, Jesus wasn't just expressing something about his own situation at the time; he was identifying himself with God's people and indeed with everyone who has ever experienced God's apparent absence.

But as I've mentioned before, Jesus is intrinsic to the unique divine identity - or, in layman's terms, Jesus is God. And the Gospel of Mark bears that view out. So in a very real sense, Jesus' crucifixion isn't just God identifying with our pains, our sufferings, our shame - as radical as all of that is. No, there's more. God actually put himself in the place of everyone who's ever searched for God and found nothing. God put himself in the place of being forsaken by God. That's... a really radical idea. I mean... God being God-forsaken? But that's the paradoxical culmination of the Gospel of Mark, it seems. In Jesus, God bore our sins, our shame, our suffering... and he even bore the absence of God for us. Which means, likewise paradoxically, that the very moment when God was most revealing his ultimate love to all humanity was a moment of God's own apparent absence. "God redeems and renews humanity in this way, by entering the situation of humanity at the deepest level of the human plight: the absence of God" (268). The darkness itself was the brightest light there could ever be.

I'm not sure whether that thought would have comforted me when I, too, was apparently forsaken by God during some of my times of deepest, crushing depression, the times that nearly drove me to overcoming my cowardice enough to take the plunge into the abyss. I suspect that I was so inconsolable that no realization would truly have alleviated it much. But, on the other hand, I don't know that. And there's a real sense in which it should be a great comfort. The God to whom I'm crying out, begging, pleading, ranting, cursing, cajoling, idly threatening... that's the same God who has been in that very same situation of reaching out to God and touching only a dreadful, enigmatic, terrifying lack. God knows what it's like to be abandoned - even abandoned, for all intents and purposes in the here-and-now, by God! God empathizes more intensely than I can fathom. He can, in Christ, actually identify with that situation every bit as deeply, and no doubt so much more so, than I can. And if perhaps one of the benefits of suffering is that, if we bear with it rightly, we can identify more closely with the crucified Christ in his own sufferings and thus, by sharing with him, be united more nearly to him... then perhaps... perhaps one could go so far as to say that the experience of the apparent divine absence could function the same way? Could it be that these 'dark nights of the soul' are not just an opportunity to curb spiritual pride (for which purpose I lost the felt presence of God for several years), but a further opportunity to engage in a very different sort of spiritual experience: the identification with the crucified Christ in his Godforsakenness, just as he identifies with us in ours? Ah, if only I had had the capability to make such use of my own 'dark nights' during those times! But should I ever pass through a similar time, I pray that God will grant me the wisdom to follow through and thus grow in faith rather than weaken in it. And I pray, too, that any other sufferings I must endure will present themselves to me, not merely as trials and tribulations, but as similar opportunities to find the crucified Christ there amidst it all.

Hail, the Lord Jesus, God Incarnate!

2010-09-22T16:04:00.000-07:00

This post is going to be a bit different than most here, because it isn't really about Christian 'spirituality' at all, at least not in the conventional sense of ethics or 'practical' theology. Two days ago, a Christian apologetics and interfaith dialogue group I founded at my alma mater hosted a five-person panel discussion on the deity of Jesus. Via the wonders of technology (a.k.a. Skype), I was able to be one of the panelists, and so I give two mini-presentations defending the traditional Christian belief that Jesus really is God. (I had to keep them quite short in order to ensure that I could deliver them in the time permitted, so there's much more that could have been said.) Another of the panelists took my view, while another took what could maybe be understood as a qualified Arian stance of sorts, and the other two panelists were a Conservative Jew and a deist. What follows is the text I prepared to answer the two questions around which the panel presentations revolved:

Does the New Testament teach that Jesus is God?

To tackle this question, we need to know how Jewish thinkers of the time talked about the unique identity of the God they worshipped. Jews during the Second Temple Period said that their God was the unique Creator of all things, and that everything else was made by him. They said that their God was the only true King over all things. One way they symbolized this was that God's throne was usually the only one in the highest heaven, far above the angels, and only God sat on that throne. They also said that only their God had always existed and always would, that their God had a unique name that picked him out from everything else, and that only this God should be worshipped.

In Jewish writings of that time, every other being is clearly distinguished from God because God has these traits and they don't. However, those Jewish writings could also talk about God's Wisdom and God's Word sharing these traits with him. For instance, both Wisdom and Word are said to be involved in creation. Wisdom is also shown sitting on God's throne with him and sharing in his rule over the universe. So there's strong Jewish precedent for distinctions within God's own identity.

With this in mind, I think it's clear that the New Testament says that Jesus shares all of these traits - and if that's the case, then the statement they must be making is that he shares the very identity of the God of Israel. Only God created all things and did so completely without any outside help, but Hebrews 1:2 says that the Father made the whole universe through the Son, and John 1:3 says that absolutely nothing was created except through God's Word - which the Gospel of John identifies with Jesus. (Just two verses earlier, John explicitly refers to the Word as "God".) Hebrews 1:10 quotes the Hebrew Bible to say that "in the beginning [Jesus] laid the foundations of the earth".

Only God rules over all things from his heavenly throne, but Ephesians 1:20-21 says that Jesus is sitting on God's throne at the Father's right hand and that from there, Jesus is ruling over all things. Hebrews 1:3 also says that the Son sustains everything in existence and is seated at the right hand of the Father. And at the end of the Gospel of Matthew, right after the resurrected Jesus accepts worship from his followers, Jesus claims that he has total authority over everything in heaven and on earth. Jesus is also portrayed as having an eternal indestructible life in Hebrews 7:16, and Hebrews 13:8 famously announced that "Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever".

Jesus is also portrayed as bearing God's unique name in several passages, such as when Philippians 2:9 says that Jesus has "the name that is above every name", which can only be God's name. In addition to that, the New Testament frequently quotes passages from the Hebrew Bible about Israel's God and applies them directly to Jesus, including passages in which God's sacred name appears in the Hebrew text. Finally, when it comes to worship, I already mentioned that Jesus is worshipped in the Gospel of Matthew, but Hebrews 1:6 portrays God the Father as ordering all the angels to worship Jesus.

So to look back at the ways Jews in the Second Temple Period identified the one and only true God, we find that the New Testament applies them all to Jesus. We could probably find at least some of these in nearly every book of the New Testament. In other words, the New Testament does teach that Jesus is included in God's identity - which means that it's accurate, though maybe imprecise, to say that Jesus is God.

Was the historical Jesus really God?

There's no way to conclusively prove this from historical argument alone. Our first question is, did Jesus include himself in the divine identity? The earliest layer of tradition behind the Gospels, commonly known as "Q", seems to suggest that he did. In Matthew 11:19, Jesus says that "Wisdom" - by which he means himself - "will be vindicated by its deeds". In Matthew 12:42, Jesus describes himself as "one greater than Solomon", which because of the way Solomon was understood in Jewish tradition implies that Jesus is again claiming to be God's Wisdom. In Matthew 8:20, Jesus alludes to the portrayal of God's Wisdom in Sirach 24:7 and onward, which shaped his mission; and where Sirach 6 urges readers to take up Wisdom's yoke, Jesus urges his followers to take up his own yoke. All this but that last one is considered Q-material, whereas the part about Jesus' yoke is probably independent. For that matter, we know that the earliest Christians proclaimed Jesus as Lord and invoked his name in baptism and other religious rituals, frequently in language that identified him as divine. It's extremely likely that Jesus' presentation of himself as Wisdom goes beyond even the different Gospel sources and comes originally from the historical Jesus himself. Considering how Jewish tradition of that time understood God's Wisdom, the odds are quite good that Jesus understood himself as included in God's own identity somehow.

But if so, was he right? Or was Jesus just misguided? It seems pretty tough for a man to honestly believe that he helped God create all things, that he descended to earth from heaven, and that he's guaranteed to one day rule over the entire universe from God's own throne. Unless that person happens to be right, it seems fair to question his grip on reality. Since millions and even billions of people ever since have seen great insight and outstanding teaching in Jesus' words and actions, the latter seems rather unlikely. More importantly than that, though, Jesus vindicated what he was saying by rising from the dead. While the resurrection is an issue all its own, I'd like to just quickly note that the same disciples who abandoned Jesus before the crucifixion came to strongly believe shortly afterwards that Jesus had bodily risen from the dead - and believed it so strongly that most of them gave their lives for it. Even some people who originally rejected Jesus, such as Paul and Jesus' own brother James, came to believe strongly that he was the risen Lord and Messiah because - as they said - he had appeared to them after his resurrection and set them straight; they, too, died for the gospel they preached. In addition, we have no evidence at all that the Jewish and Roman authorities even tried to deny that Jesus' burial place no longer contained his body, and the earliest alternative stories already assume that Jesus' tomb was empty shortly after his body was placed there. To this day, nearly two thousand years later, no one has ever presented a convincing rival explanation other than the Christian one: that God raised Jesus from the dead. The evidence even persuaded a prominent Jewish theologian named Pinchas Lapide that Jesus rose from the dead; he just gives it a much different meaning. But in light of what Jesus taught about himself, Lapide's version seems much less likely than the one that Christians have been spreading throughout the entire world ever since it happened: God raised Jesus from the dead because Jesus really is the promised Messiah, really is the world's rightful Lord, and really is intrinsic to God's own identity - just like Jesus claimed, just like the earliest Christians claimed about him, and just like Christians have been claiming ever since.

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Several days later, I accepted a challenge to debate a Muslim fellow on essentially the same topic on one of the Internet's more successful theology discussion forums. Because here I had a bit more space and freedom, I was able to flesh out my case a bit more in my opening statement, which I here repost in a slightly modified form:

Was Jesus God, according to the Bible?

To approach what a text means to assert about a topic, it's always good to know how that topic was understood by the culture in which the text was first written and first heard, especially if we value authorial intent. In Second Temple Judaism, which was the Judaism (or Judaisms, in some respects) as thought and practiced in Jesus' day and earlier, Jews distinguished their God from all other reality by means of a few identifying characteristics that drew a clear-cut line between God on the one hand and the entire creation on the other. First, God was the unaided Creator of all other things. Isaiah 44:24, for instance, identifies Israel's God as the one "who made all things, who alone stretched out the heavens" and who alone "spread out the earth". The late first century work of 2 Enoch says, in both alternative recensions, that God had "no advisor/counselor and no successor" (33:4), while 4 Ezra 3:4 clearly states that Israel's God "formed the earth [...] without help".

Second, the God of Israel was the only one with rightful authority over absolutely everything created. This authority, moreover, was symbolized by the fact that God's throne in the highest heaven was above all the angels (Isaiah 6:1; 1 Enoch 14:18-22; 2 Enoch 20:3J). Whereas God sits enthroned in the position of a ruler in that heaven, even the highest angels - such as Raphel (Tobit 12:15), Gabriel (Luke 1:19), and Michael (Testament of Abraham 7:11) - are consistently portrayed as standing in his presence, which was the posture of servants of the king.

Third, the God of Israel had always existed and always would. He is "God who lives forever" (Tobit 13:1), "him who lives forever" (1 Enoch 5:1), "the Eternal" (Sirach 18:1), "the Eternal One" (Testament of Moses 10:7), and the one who is "almighty and eternal, Israel's savior from all evil" (2 Maccabees 1:25).

Fourth, and very importantly, the God of Israel had a very unique name: YHWH. (This name's original pronounciation is no longer known, but today is usually vocalized as either 'Jehovah' or 'Yahweh'.) This name is clearly not actually shared by any other being who isn't God; to actually possess the name of YHWH as one's own is to obviously be God.

Fifth, these Jewish writers consistently said that only Israel's God deserves to be worshipped by created beings. Any other being who isn't God, no matter how exalted, does not deserve to be worshipped, for that is idolatry. So routinely in this literature, we see humans tempted to worship angels, for instance, and being rebuffed with exhortations to worship God instead (Tobit 12:16; Revelation 19:10 and 22:8-9; Ascension of Isaiah 7:21; Apocalypse of Zephaniah 6:14-15).

So those are five lines that distinguish between God on the one hand and everything else that isn't God on the other. But already within this literature of the Second Temple Period, we see qualifications being made in the literary tradition: while none of these angels or exalted humans are within the divine identity, certain attributes of God can themselves be ascribed these traits, and thus be included in God's own identity; they are not created beings (that is, there never was a point at which they did not exist, nor does their existence seem to be contingent on an act of divine will in the way that the existence of the angels or the universe is), but are in some sense the uncreated God. Needless to say, God's Wisdom and God's Word are prime examples, since both are ascribed a role in creation (see, among many other passages, Wisdom 7:22 with regard to God's Wisdom and 2 Baruch 14:7 with regard to God's Word). Furthermore, God's Wisdom has a unique association with the throne of God in a couple Second Temple Jewish works (see Wisdom 9:4; 1 Enoch 84:2-3), such that as New Testament scholar Richard Bauckham observes, "Wisdom is depicted sitting on the great divine throne beside God, participating in the exercise of sovereignty by playing the role of advisor or counsellor to the king" (Jesus and the God of Israel: God Crucified and Other Studies on the New Testament's Christology of Divine Identity, p. 17).

So when it comes to the New Testament, if the authors there had wanted to place Jesus within the divine identity without claiming that he exhausted the divine identity, there are a few ways they could do that aside from directly calling him "God" from time to time. First, they could describe him as the Wisdom of God or the Word of God, either directly or indirectly. Second, they could attribute to Jesus all the key traits that to Second Temple Jewish ears would have made God unique in his identity, thereby ascribing to Jesus the identity of the God of Israel. And third - though this could arguably in some ways be subsumed under the second - they could apply texts from the Hebrew Bible about the God of Israel directly to Jesus, thereby placing him in God's shoes, as it were.

With regard to the first, clearly this is done on several occasions. Description of Jesus as God's Word is quite evident, since in the famed Johannine Prologue (John 1:1-18), John opens by declaring that "in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with the God, and the Word was God" (John 1:1) and goes on to announce that this same Word "became flesh and dwelt among us" (John 1:14) in the person of Jesus. Similarly, Revelation 19:13 names Christ "the Word of God" rather explicitly. It's for this reason that later traditions, such as found in Islam, likewise refer to Christ as God's Word (e.g., Surah 4:171), albeit without maintaining a Second Temple Jewish awareness of the implications of that claim. Finding clear references to Jesus as God's Wisdom is a bit trickier. However, Sirach 24:7ff. speaks of Wisdom as being unable to find a resting place until it arrives in Jerusalem, and this has clear echoes in Matthew 8:20, as well as the entire geographical shape of Jesus' mission. In Matthew 12:42, after making a clear reference to Solomon's wisdom, Jesus claims that he is "one greater than Solomon". As New Testament scholar Ben Witherington III rightly says:

One must ask, for a person like Jesus who spoke in the Wisdom tradition, a tradition which continued to attribute a wide variety of works to Solomon right up to the turn of the era, who or what could be greater than Solomon? Surely the implication is the presence of Wisdom herself. (Jesus the Sage: The Pilgrimage of Wisdom, p. 202)

Similarly, Jesus refers to himself as Wisdom in Matthew 11:19, and in Matthew 11:29-30, Jesus takes up the language of Sirach 6:24-29 about Wisdom's yoke and casts himself in Wisdom's role. Also, Hebrews 1:3 refers to Jesus as the apaugasma of God's glory, using an exceptionally rare Greek word borrowed from Wisdom 7:26 and its description of Wisdom.

The second available means of displaying the deity of Christ - that is, by ascribing to Jesus the distinctive identifying traits of God - also happens quite clearly. First, where creation is said to have been God's solo job, without any aid, advisor, or instrument, we know that the New Testament declared that "in these last days [the Father] spoke to us through a Son [Jesus], whom he made heir of all things and through whom he created the cosmos" (Hebrews 1:3), and that "all things came to be through him, and without him nothing was made that has been made" (John 1:3), and that "all things were created through [Jesus] and for [Jesus]" (Colossians 1:16; the same verse describes even various angelic ranks as having been created by Jesus). The language of John 1:3 in particular seems reminiscent of the way in which YHWH's supreme role in the act of creation is depicted in the Dead Sea Scrolls: "He establishes all things by his design, and without him nothing is done" (1QS 11:11). Quoting from the Old Testament, Hebrews 1:10 states that "in the beginning [Jesus] laid the foundations of the earth". Clearly, no one outside of God's identity had a role in creation; yet Jesus had a role in creation; and therefore Jesus is intrinsic to God's own identity.

Moreover, Jesus is routinely depicted as occupying a place at God's throne which not even the highest angels (who were, in Second Temple Judaism, the highest created beings and thus served as a boundary marker between God and creation) could reach. Hebrews 1:3, a verse already mentioned, declares that after providing "purification for sins", Jesus as heavenly high priest "took his seat at the right hand of the Majesty on high". Later in the same discourse, the author declares that Jesus "sat down at the right hand of the throne of the Majesty in heaven" (Hebrews 8:1); and, again, that Jesus "sat down at the right hand of the throne of God" (Hebrews 12:2). Ephesians 1:20-21 likewise says that the Father "seated [Jesus] at the Father's right hand in the heavenly realms, far above all rule and authority, power and dominion, and every title that can be given, not only in the present age but also in the one to come". As if this were not enough, both Revelation 22:1 and 22:3 both speak very explicitly of "the throne of God and of the Lamb" - that is, one throne shared by both the Father and the Son. Earlier, Revelation 7:17 describes Jesus as being "at the center of the throne", and in Revelation 3:21, Jesus himself says quite unambiguously, "I overcame and sat down with my Father on his throne". Moving away from the throne imagery, in Matthew 28:18 the risen Jesus claims to have "all authority in heaven and on earth". No one outside God's identity reigns with this authority from the highest throne of heaven; yet Jesus reigns with this authority and sits on that throne; and therefore Jesus is intrinsic to God's own identity.

Beyond this, Jesus is portrayed as the eternal, everlasting one, just as God is. In Hebrews 7:16, for example, we read about Christ's innate "indestructible life" by virtue of which he holds the everlasting priesthood. The language used for Melchizedek (e.g., "without mother, without father, without genealogy") in Hebrews - the point of which is to actually apply it to Jesus as its true fulfillment, rather than to make a statement about the historical Melchizedek - is what New Testament scholar Jerome H. Neyrey refers to as "Hellenistic god-talk", language developed by Greeks to speak of divinity but also used by Jews to describe their God, since these alpha-privative Greek words would often have seemed quite inappropriate for any other being in a Second Temple Jewish worldview. Thus, Neyrey states:

I must conclude that the author of Hebrews acclaims Jesus as a "true god" because of his full eternity in the past and imperishability in the future. [...] ...Jesus is called "God" because he enjoys the primary characteristics of a true deity: he is (1) uncreated and ungenerated in the past, without mother or father or genealogy; and (2) imperishable, without end, and eternal. Since these temporal characteristics are unique to true deities, we learn that the author of Hebrews consciously knows what he is doing; the designation of Jesus as "God" has substance. (Render to God: New Testament Understandings of the Divine, pp. 237, 242)

Moreover - in another passage also cited by Neyrey and others to much the same effect - Hebrews 13:8 ascribes eternity to Christ in acclaiming him "the same yesterday, today, and forever". No one outside of God's identity is eternal and imperishable; yet Jesus is eternal and imperishable; and therefore Jesus is intrinsic to God's own identity.

Additionally, Jesus is shown to bear God's unique name. For instance, Philippians 2:9 identifies Jesus as having "the name that is above every name". Similar phrasing is used in Hebrews 1:4 in giving to Jesus a name superior to any name possessed by any of the angels. Of passages like these, and in particular of Philippians 2:9, New Testament scholar Richard Bauckham writes that "it is inconceivable that any Jewish writer could use this phrase for a name other than God's own unique name" (Jesus and the God of Israel, p. 199). The conclusion is clear that Jesus bears YHWH's name, and thus plausibly Philippians 2:11 should be read as bearing the sense that "every tongue [will] confess that Jesus Christ is YHWH, to the glory of God the Father". This is not an idiosyncratic reading by any means. Another New Testament scholar, Gordon Fee, wrote in his magisterial tome on Paul's view of Jesus that this name "can hardly be anything other than a reference to the Divine Name in the [Old Testament]" (Pauline Christology: An Exegetical-Theological Study, p. 397), while New Testament scholar Ben Witherington III concurs that this must be "the name of God in the Old Testament, i.e., LORD, which is the LXX equivalent to Yahweh" (Jesus the Sage, p. 265). No one outside of God's identity possesses this sacred name as his or her own; yet Jesus bears this name, and someday all of creation will confess it; and therefore Jesus is intrinsic to God's own identity.

So far as these identifying traits of God are concerned, Jesus is portrayed in the New Testament as a proper recipient of worship, which is another clear prerogative exclusively reserved for YHWH the God of Israel. In Second Temple Jewish literature, exalted beings like angels are portrayed as rebuffing attempts to worship them; Jesus, however, never does this. On the contrary, in Matthew 28:17, the risen Jesus receives and accepts worship from his devotees. In Hebrews 1:6, the Father proclaims the Son as his "firstborn", his heir, and then demands that all the angels actually worship Jesus. Is God ordering idolatry here? By no means! Rather, Jesus is a proper object of worship; worshipping Jesus is portrayed in the New Testament as wholly right, and we know historically that this practice dates back to the earliest roots of the Christian movement. Yet, in Richard Bauckham's terms, "worship is acknowledgement of God's sole deity" (Jesus and the God of Israel, p. 234). And there are numerous occasions on which Jesus receives worship, and so I rest content with these two. No one outside of God's identity is rightly worshipped; yet Jesus is rightly worshipped; and therefore Jesus is intrinsic to God's own identity.

Thus, as far as the first two ways in which the New Testament authors could have included Jesus in God's identity, it seems quite clear that they have. The third, however, may in fact be no less prevalent in the New Testament, and that is quoting Old Testament passages about YHWH and declaring that Jesus is their referent, thus effectively declaring him to be (in some sense) YHWH. Beginning in an unusual place, 1 Peter 2:3-4 says that Christians "have tasted that the Lord is good" and are "com[ing] to him, the Living Stone rejected by men but chosen by God". Clearly, the "Lord" (Gk. kurios) in 1 Peter 2:3 is Jesus; but the language is taken from the Greek rendering of Psalm 34:8, which urges the Israelites to "taste and see that YHWH [= 'LORD'] is good". Similarly, 1 Peter 3:14-15 quotes from Isaiah 8:12 and then calls readers to "in your heart set apart [or, sanctify/regard as holy] Christ as Lord"; yet the attentive reader's mind would have been called to the next phrase found in Isaiah 8:13, which says that the one we are to set apart, sanctify, and regard as holy is none other than YHWH. The next verse, Isaiah 8:14, says that YHWH "will be a stone that causes men to stumble and a rock that makes them fall", while 1 Peter 2:8 applies these words to Jesus as the "stone that causes men to stumble and a rock that makes them fall". Moving away from that one epistle, we find the same phenomenon elsewhere. In 1 Thessalonians 3:13, Paul blesses the letter's recipients with a wish that they be "blameless and holy in the presence of our God and Father when our Lord Jesus comes with all his holy ones", alluding to a prophetic declaration that "YHWH my God will come, and all the holy ones with him" (Zechariah 14:5). Likewise, where Isaiah beheld the glory of God himself (Isaiah 6:1-10), the Gospel of John quotes from the same chapter and explains that Isaiah made these statements upon seeing Jesus' glory (John 12:41). And where Psalm 102:25-27 was clearly addressed to YHWH as to the only one who "laid the foundations of the earth" and can remain after the heavens are rolled up like a scroll, Hebrews 1:10-12 has no qualms about applying these words directly to Jesus as the one who laid the foundations of the earth and could easily endure after the heavens are rolled up like a scroll - for Jesus is included in the very identity of YHWH, the eternal creator. And where Psalm 68:18 speaks of YHWH ascending on high and leading captivity captive - thus doing wonderful things on behalf of his people - Paul exegetes this very christologically in Ephesians 4:7-10, indicating that Christ was the YHWH of whom the psalmist sang.

Quite clearly, then, the New Testament depicts Jesus as God's Word and God's Wisdom, two figures in Jewish literature of the time who were clearly uncreated and included in God's identity. In the same manner, the New Testament independently depicts Jesus as being included in God's identity by ascribing to Jesus all the major identifying traits that set God apart from everything that isn't God. Likewise, the New Testament takes passages from the Hebrew Bible that clearly referred to only YHWH and applies them to Jesus, thus identifying him as the YHWH of those texts. These three factors all give strong reason to conclude that the New Testament includes Jesus within the unique identity of the God of Israel - and this is what it means to say, "Jesus is God". Indeed, the doctrine of the Trinity, when stripped of philosophical terms like ousia and hypostasis, is simply the claim that there is one and only one God, YHWH, and that there are three distinct persons/individuals - the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit - who each have the identity of this one God.

That being said, there are also a few instances in which the New Testament does directly refer to Jesus using the Greek word theos, 'god'. Most prominent, of course, is John 1:1, which declares that "in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with the God, and the Word was God". As is now widely recognized, the 'ho theos' of John 1:1b indicates the Father, while the 'theos' of John 1:1c is what Philip Harner referred to as a "qualitative anarthrous predicate noun"; and, in that same classic 1973 article on the subject, he surveyed clauses that John could have written in that place and concluded that, given these options, the meaning of what was actually written must be that "the logos had the nature of theos (rather than something else)" (p. 85); he went on to reiterate that "John evidently wished to say that the logos was no less than theos, just as ho theos (by implication) had the nature of theos" (p. 86 n. 30) before finally concluding that the sense of the passage is that "the Word had the same nature of God" (p. 87). And because God's nature, in this sense, is unique to the Creator and is not shared by any created being (and nor are there a multiplicity of gods, ontologically speaking), this must be taken with the force that the Word is indeed God, in the sense in which we are here using such locutions.

Finally, I'll conclude with a relatively brief mention of John 20:28, in which Thomas, one of Jesus' disciples, finally encounters the risen Jesus and exclaims in reference to him, "My Lord and my God!" (or, in Greek, 'ho kurios mou kai ho theos mou'). This cannot be understood as a split reference to Jesus at first and the Father a few words later, nor can this be construed as simply an impious exclamation, since such would have been blasphemy that Jesus would not have tolerated. Rather, as Ben Witherington III rightly notes:

The confession "My Lord and my God!" recapitulates some of the claims about God's Son/Wisdom made in the prologue in John 1. Jesus is not just the believer's Lord but also the believer's God, and so an appropriate object of worship, even before the ascension. (John's Wisdom: A Commentary on the Fourth Gospel, p. 344)

This verse, it should be noted, is very close to the Greek translation of Psalm 35:23, where YHWH is acclaimed by the psalmist as "my God and my Lord" ('ho theos mou kai ho kurios mou'), and also bears a resemblance to Revelation 4:11 in which the elders acclaim the Father as "our Lord and God" ('ho kurios kai ho theos hemon'). My conclusion, then, is that in the sense relevant to this debate, the Bible does indeed portray Jesus as God - meaning, as specified previously, that it depicts Jesus as included within the divine identity that was regarded as unique to the God of Israel.

A Glimpse, Perhaps, of What's to Come

2010-09-16T09:48:00.000-07:00

This morning in chapel, while the Spirit was with us as we sang "Lord, Let Your Glory Fall", I got to thinking about how this place, in ways I can't always grasp, just feels like a wonderful foretaste of our eschatological worship. What I mean by that is that when I'm here in this community, engaging in corporate worship in song and prayer and exultation, I feel as though I have almost a window - dim though it undoubtedly is - into what 'the end' will look like. I feel as though I can begin to imagine what the whole crowd of the redeemed might look like after the general resurrection, when we finally have the opportunity to worship before the throne.

I can picture myself in the most beautiful meadow on a plateau higher than Mt. Everest, surrounded by myriads upon myriads, legions upon legions, millions upon millions of fellow believers, beneath the immeasurably, ineffably radiant throne of the omnipotent God of heaven and earth, which towers high above the heavens; I envision myself crowned and adorned with a white robe woven of what looks to be pure light. We sing one song with our hands raised high into the air, but in a thousand thousand different languages - and one might say that the song thunders out from us, but in comparison to the voice of that throng, thunder is merely a whisper lost in the wind. Immediately to my left, I hear the same song belted out passionately in Hebrew, pronounced in a dialect more ancient that I can fully grasp - and yet, by the power of the Spirit, I catch every word with an understanding more perfectly than I've understood even a single word of English on earth in the present age. I glance left with an assured grin and immediately recognize Isaac the son of Abraham; to his left are an Ethiopian woman, a Japanese bishop, and Apollos, singing the very same song in Ge'ez, Japanese, and Koine Greek respectively. I glance right and see John Calvin and Jacobus Arminius, their hands clasped together in joy and brotherly love, as they raise a Latin chant and fix their eyes on the sovereign God who loves us and invited us to this place to share in his life. In front of them, I see an array of musicians. David strums his harp with all his might, casting off his crown before the throne of God; the rest of us do the same. Next to him I see my great-great-great uncle Peter Bissing, playing the dulcette he invented. On the other side of Peter are a Kenyan man on traditional African drums, Ludwig van Beethoven on the piano, and a hundred other musicians from every tribe and nation, playing instruments the name of which I'd never even heard before. And however jarring the combination of those instruments might have been before, now all fits together into a beautiful universe of sounds, punctuated by the blast from the archangel Gabriel's shofar. As we sing, I turn around for a moment and find myself face-to-face with Thomas Aquinas on one hand and a humble Pakistani shepherd and his wife on the other. And as they look each other in the eyes, I see afresh what love really means. Turning just a bit farther, I can reach out and touch the wounds of Thomas of Marash, a bishop who underwent intense torture during over two decades of imprisonment in Armenia around the turn of the fourth century. Though with earthly eyes I might have beheld those wounds as hideous blemishes, in the resurrection they became radiant emblems of divine glory. To either side of him, I see Pope Urban VIII and Galileo Galilei, bearing the same expression of unadulterated love on their faces as if with one face.

As the song comes to its climax, the entirety of the air flares into golden flame that at once bursts into a trillion trillion fires and more, each a radically different hue from the next, filled with colors that no one on earth has ever seen or conceived. The Spirit of God rushes through the crowd, filling our lungs to capacity and beyond, sweeping over every inch of skin, enlivening our senses. We praise with one voice and thousands of languages the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Then, after hearing eight homilies from Phoebe Palmer, Pope John Paul II, John Chrysostom, Hannah the mother of Samuel, Ulrich Zwingli, Habakkuk, Teresa of Avila, and Brahmabandhav Upadhyay, we pray once more... and then behold upon the throne the unveiled glory of God shining from the face of Jesus Christ and from his Father without any barrier, any obstacle, any impurity to prevent us from receiving grace after grace after grace. And as we fall to our knees, we hear the seraphim shout, "Qadosh! Qadosh! Qadosh!", and we join in the cry. And with each iteration of the refrain, we behold a new facet of God's glory; we learn something new about God, participate in something new about God as he pours his boundless life out into us. And in that joy, in that beatific vision, time becomes utterly inconsequential in light of the neverending brilliance set before us. And amidst that blinding light, Jesus breaks bread and pours wine and passes it to the Twelve, and they distribute its bounty to all of us - and in that bread and that wine, in which we can perceive the fullness of flavor of every good thing in all the earth, we encounter yet another mystery that we still are only beginning to grasp.

That, at least, is how I foresee it. And may I participate in advance, to whatever extent I can, to that reality in the here-and-now! When you contemplate what that worship among that crowd might look like, what do you see?

The Great Faithfulness of God

2010-09-15T18:58:00.000-07:00

Great is Thy faithfulness, O God my Father;
There is no shadow of turning with Thee.
Thou changest not; Thy compassions, they fail not;
As Thou hast been, Thou forever wilt be.

How amazing it is to worship a God who never changes, a God who's always constant as purest unmitigated act. How amazing it is to know that God's compassions never fail! How amazing it is to know that God's track record of faithfulness is unblemished, and that this gives us absolute assurance that his track record of faithfulness will be flawless tomorrow, and the day after that, and the day after that, and so on, ad infinitum!

Great is Thy faithfulness! Great is Thy faithfulness!
Morning by morning, new mercies I see!
All I have needed, Thy hand hath provided;
Great is Thy faithfulness, Lord, unto me!

God's faithfulness truly is great. But to be honest, I don't see God's new mercies morning by morning. I usually don't see much that's pleasant in the morning (and I don't drink coffee). How different my days might be if I resolved to greet every morning by finding a new gift from God!

Summer and winter, springtime and harvest,
Sun, moon, and stars in their courses above,
Join with all nature in manifold witness
To Thy great faithfulness, mercy, and love.

The great God who is faithful to us is the great God who sustains the regularity of nature, the great God on whose constant activities all 'laws of nature' depend. The constant course of the planets and stars in their grand revolutions, marking off cosmic time by definite periods - that is the faithfulness of God. The seasons on which we rely as we consider the patterns of the years to come - that, too, is the faithfulness of God. The faithfulness of God is the guarantee of an orderly cosmos rather than a disorderly chaos; the same faithfulness of God that gives us a cosmos is a testimony on the grandest scale to the faithfulness, mercy, and love of God.

Great is Thy faithfulness! Great is Thy faithfulness!
Morning by morning, new mercies I see!
All I have needed, Thy hand hath provided;
Great is Thy faithfulness, Lord, unto me!

Great is God's faithfulness - but not so much with mine. All I have needed, God's hand has provided; great is his faithfulness unto me. But I have a problem. My faith isn't terribly strong, I'll admit. And if there's one thing that comes difficult to me, it's trusting God. I have a very difficult time saying, "God will provide." When I say that to myself, the other voice inside me says, "Yeeeeeeeah, like that's gonna happen." And I have a tough time recognizing what I do have as a gift from God; I'm much more naturally inclined to look at it as the product of purely human striving. I pray that God might give me eyes to see all things as his providence.

Pardon for sin and a peace that endureth;
Thy own dear presence to cheer and to guide;
Strength for today and bright hope for tomorrow;
Blessings all mine, with ten thousand beside!

God is faithful to pardon my sin - and I've had plenty to pardon. God is faithful to give me peace - not a temporary peace, a peace that succumbs to the vicissitudes of day-to-day life, but rather a peace that outlasts them all because it runs so much deeper than it all. And God's peace runs so much deeper than them all because it springs from his "own dear presence" that cheers us and guides us. God's dear presence can offer strength for today and bright hope for tomorrow - and I need plenty of both. The song proclaims that these five things - pardon, peace, presence, strength, and hope - are all already mine in Christ - and so are ten thousand others! I can scarcely even begin to imagine the other riches God has in store.

Great is Thy faithfulness! Great is Thy faithfulness!
Morning by morning, new mercies I see!
All I have needed, Thy hand hath provided;
Great is Thy faithfulness, Lord, unto me!

At the Orientation Worship Service, I think it was, several of the new students stood to bear testimony of what God is doing in their lives. And one really stuck out. A man from India told of how he came to America to study here, and when he arrived in the airport, he had a certain small amount of money - and spent every last bit of it before he even got out of the airport. And he detailed how, despite all apparent possibility or sense, he relied on God every step of the way and got gift after gift. He said that he has no idea where all the money to pay for his education here came from, but by the provision of God, it came indeed. Oh for the faith to depend on God that totally! Oh for the faith to be at peace in the midst of trials and know that God will provide, whether I can see how or not! I am by nature obsessed with planning for the future; I'm obsessed with being in control so as not to have the rug swept out from underneath my feet. But the lesson I most need to learn - especially here at seminary, where my financial situation is hardly sturdy by any human reckoning - is to trust in God to provide a way for me to fulfill his will, whyever it is he's called me here.

Because great is his faithfulness. Great is his faithfulness! Morning by morning, new mercies I'll see. All I have need of, his hand will provide. Great is his faithfulness, even to me.

Drench Us in Your Spirit, O Lord

2010-09-15T18:06:00.000-07:00

"Because of his great love for us, God - who is rich in mercy - made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions; it is by grace you have been saved. And God raised us up with Christ and seated us with him in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus, in order that in the coming ages he might show the incomparable riches of his grace, expressed in his kindness to us in Christ Jesus."
(Ephesians 2:5-7)

Tonight, like last night, I went to a tent meeting; a revival of sorts, if you will. An alumna of the seminary delivered an insightful message on being baptized in the Holy Spirit. Last night's message, delivered by one of our seminary's professors, was about the outpouring of the Holy Spirit. And both tonight and last night, the Holy Spirit was there. Both nights, I could feel the Spirit upon me - though as a Christian, the Spirit is with me whether I feel him or not. That's a lesson I'd really do well to learn. There is nothing I have to do to 'earn' God's Spirit; there is nothing I have to do to 'earn' God's favor. Why? Because in Christ, I have already been raised up from death (spiritual, not physical - physical resurrection from physical death is what God has yet in store for me); in Christ, I have already been seated with Christ in the heavenly realms. I - however relatively insignificant or completely unworthy I'm so often tempted to feel - have a throne already reserved for me in heaven as Christ's joint-heir, as someone adopted by the Father through participation in the Son's natural sonship by virtue of the Spirit of sonship that the Father has poured out into my life through his beloved Son. I have been called by grace to share by grace in the overflowing of the Trinitarian mystery of love. There's nothing I still have to do to 'earn' that. What room is there to speak of earning anything, when God's incomparable riches are promised as grace?

But as I said, the Spirit was with me and upon me tonight. Tonight our speaker - who spoke a fair deal on Ephesians 2:6-7 - invited us to step out into the aisle or to come up front and to pray for one another. That aisle, that front, represented - and in some inexpressable way, I might say, partook in - the river of baptism. (As our speaker says, when it comes to the baptism of the Spirit, God does not merely sprinkle us, he drenches us and soaks us and immerses us. God does not seek to dispense his Spirit with an eyedropper.) And as I stood in that aisle, worshipping God and crying out for his Spirit, one of my friends here came to me and prayed over me and with me for that Spirit to be present in me in a new way. And when I, in turn, laid hands on him and prayed for him to likewise receive the Spirit... I could tell that something fresh was happening. The words I spoke came welling up within me from somewhere I simply couldn't locate; the words I spoke took me completely by surprise, rushing out with power I could never have mustered from within myself alone, from within my dryness, my inner wastelands; the words I prayed were, I believe, words set into my heart to be spoken as a blessing for him. And I hope that they richly blessed him indeed, for I know that the speaking of them certainly blessed me. (Last night, too, some of the words I spoke felt as if they carried a power not my own.)

Our speaker, too, prayed over me later to receive greater assurance and to be drenched in the Spirit of God. She prayed, too, that I might be filled with a consuming love for those around me, a consuming love for those I encounter, a consuming love for others. And that caught me by surprise a bit, because to be perfectly honest, I've always struggled so much with having a passion to love others. For large stretches of my life, I've honestly felt dead inside. My natural state towards the world around me is a gray-tinged apathy. Even towards God, I find it terribly difficult to muster up much feeling. And that has been perhaps one of the things I've struggled with most in my Christian walk. (That, and the fact that I have faith perhaps one percent the size of a mustard seed, but that's perhaps for a different time.) But tonight, as I looked around and my community engaged in worship and prayer and encountering the Spirit of God, I couldn't help but feel my heart cry out, "This is family. These are my brothers, my sisters, in Christ. These are fellow children of God."

I have no idea right now what this post is 'about'. I'm not even certain that's any of my concern anymore. But I feel that if I don't take the time to put these words down... well, I fear I might lose them to the murky mire of my oft-splintered memory. And I don't want to lose what I gained tonight, what I found tonight. I don't want to lose that timeless time gripped in worship of our God. I don't want to lose the fact that, for the most part, everything beyond that tent seemed to pale in comparison with what was going on there. What I want to do is somehow to take what was in that tent and bring it with me to share with the world.

Heavenly Father, God who reigns in majesty and marvelous light from the throne of grace, surrounded by legions of angelic servants and the vast throngs of your children, send your Spirit down upon us through Jesus, your Son, with whom we died and with whom we were buried and with whom we were raised and with whom we were seated in the heavenly places.

Let our hearts and souls be not dry, but let this unimaginable thirst be amplified as we cry out for more and more of your Spirit. Send your Spirit down upon us, and let us forever yearn for more of it - for however much of your life is in us, you promise us always more.

Lord, let us never forget who you've made us to be; let us leave darkness and shame behind as you bring us into your kingdom of endless light, and let us forever look at the world from that vantage point.

Anoint us, O great God of heaven, anoint us and soak us and drench us and baptize us with your Spirit - not for our sakes along, but so that your Spirit might overflow from our hearts into the lives of those around us, so that we might spread your light and your glory and your holiness throughout the world.

In the name of Jesus Christ our risen Lord and everlasting King, we cling in faith to the promise you gave to us, Father, and we plead earnestly with you to baptize us with your Spirit of Glory so that we might become all flame.

Amen.

A Return to Blogging

2010-09-04T09:34:00.001-07:00

The past month has certainly been an eventful one. I wasn't able, unfortunately, to make time for blogging during my two-week vacation in Ireland (6-20 August 2010), during which I saw some of the most beautiful scenery I've seen in a very long time. The week after that was kept busy with preparations for a lengthy journey to seminary. Now that I've completed the New Student Orientation process and made plenty of new friends, I hope to blog more regularly. Especially because I can tell from the atmosphere here that this seminary will be a very healthy spiritual atmosphere.

I became most convinced of this during the several chapel services I attended during orientation. This is because of one thing above all else: the Spirit of the Lord is mightily present in the worship of this community. I could scarcely even hope to worthily articulate what I mean to express. Suffice it to say, nevertheless, that at the very first such chapel service (on 2 September 2010), as we -- a crowd of passionately God-fearing Christians drawn from all nations -- sang with one voice and one heart the praises of our God, the Holy Spirit was there. There in power and love. Present to me in a way that I haven't experienced him in the past four years. Present as tangibly as the air that fills my lungs. Present to receive from us the worship that we offered passionately in song and in proclamation. Present to welcome, to invite, to convict, and to grant grace. I, for one, was moved to tears and a trembling voice -- an exceptionally rare experience for me. And the next day, too, did God accept our worship and make himself known, not only as we sang together with uplifted hands but also as we broke bread together and as we prayed together. There is scarcely anything so moving as the presence of the Spirit as hundreds and hundreds of faithful followers of the Lord Jesus Christ gather together around a cross to pray in unison the Lord's Prayer.

Throughout the whole experience over those two days, my mind was simply bombarded with ideas and inspiration. It's my hope that, despite my failing memory for anything not found in a book, I can eventually recover even half of those thoughts in order to expound upon them further, both for my own reflection and perhaps for the use of anyone who might stumble across what I write.

Until then, God bless you all.

We Believe...

2010-07-30T07:39:00.000-07:00

I'm not really feeling up to any exceptionally deep posts today - feeling sort of down at the moment - but since it's been a while since my last post, I figure it can't hurt to put something new up. What I've decided to post is simply the Nicene Creed (as revised at the First Council of Constantinople in AD 381):

We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, of all that is, visible and invisible.
And [we believe] in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, of one essence with the Father. Through him all things were made. For us and for our salvation, he came down from heaven, was incarnate of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary, and was made human. For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate. He suffered and was buried, and he rose again on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures, and he ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father, and he will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, and his kingdom will have no end.
And [we believe] in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life, who proceeds from the Father, who with the Father and the Son is worshipped and glorified, who has spoken through the prophets.
And [we believe] in one holy, universal, and apostolic church.
We acknowledge one baptism for the forgiveness of sins.
We look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the age to come. Amen.

This is perhaps the single document that, more than any other outside of the Bible itself, has united Christians ever since. It is truly the ecumenical creed, the declaration that can be voiced equally by Protestant Christians, Roman Catholic Christians, and Eastern Orthodox Christians. (Well, actually, Protestantism and Roman Catholicism have inherited a slightly amended version that Eastern Orthodoxy can't quite accept, and that division is highly unfortunate.)

This is the creed. Whenever I read its words, I feel a warmth inside that cries out, "Oh holy truth!" This is the faith received by the church for well over 1500 years. One God who created all other things. The Trinity - Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The eternal relations within the Trinity. The incarnation. The virgin birth. The atonement and crucifixion. The resurrection of Christ. His ascension into heaven. His present position of authority, honor, and glory. His future return. The judgment. The resurrection of the dead. Everlasting life for the believer. The ultimate unity of Christ's people. Baptism, the sign of entrance into Christ's community. All sketched in brief, but all potently present in these words.

To me, it's beautiful. This is the ancient symbol that marked off those who submitted themselves to the apostles' teaching from those who wandered in error or unbelief. It wasn't the first such statement - one can compare it to the briefer 'rules of faith' mentioned by some of the earlier Church Fathers - but this is the one that was inherited, as this, by the entire church. The heart of Christian teaching.

Embrace it. Enter it. Live it.

Sounding the Depths of God's Love

2010-07-18T11:47:00.000-07:00

Yesterday after a Bible study at my alma mater, a few friends of mine and I stayed around for a bit to sing some classic hymns together. One of the ones we selected - a beautiful one indeed - was Charles Wesley's hymn "And Can It Be That I Should Gain?" Now, I don't have any great insights or anything (do I ever?), but I did find much charm in the second verse, which begins with the lines:

'Tis mystery all: th' Immortal dies!
Who can explore his strange design?
In vain the firstborn seraph tries
To sound the depths of love divine.

I really love that verse. First of all, it opens up with a proclamation of one of the central mysteries of the Christian faith. By "mystery", of course, we don't generally mean something contrary to reason, or anything like that. What we mean is a great and very sacred thing that, once hidden from the world and very dimly accessible at best to the comparatively dim light of human reasoning capabilities, is now openly shown to all who will receive it through the revelation of Jesus Christ in the new covenant. (This is likewise the proper sense in which the doctrine of the Trinity should be held to be a "mystery".) What mystery is this, then? "Th' Immortal dies!" Those words bring back to mind so many paradoxes from the discourses of Melito, second-century bishop of Sardis:

What new mystery, then, is this?
The Judge is judged, and holds his peace.
The Invisible One is seen, and is not ashamed.
The Incomprehensible is laid hold upon, and is not indignant.
The Illimitable is circumscribed, and does not resist.
The Impassible suffers, and does not avenge.
The Immortal dies, and answers not a word.
The Celestial is laid in the grave, and endures!
What new mystery is this?

Needless to say, it's no wonder that Melito was held in the early church to be a very passionate and skilled preacher. But as Melito and Charles Wesley saw, it truly is a mystery that Jesus Christ, who by all rights of his divinity had better claim to pure deathlessness, would have died - and done so for us. (Of course, as Christians thought through the implications of the incarnation, they realized that we should say that Jesus Christ died by virtue of his human nature, but not by virtue of his divine nature, and yet that it is the person Jesus Christ, both fully divine and fully human, who truly died.) The Immortal One died for us - and "who can explore his strange design?" Why would he do this? Of course, we know the answer, but who can truly understand it? We may apprehend God's love, but who can comprehend it? Who can appreciate the depths of it fully?

The next two lines answer rather negatively. "In vain the firstborn seraph tries / To sound the depths of love divine". The seraphim - six-winged fiery angels - are perhaps among the most glorious created beings; Isaiah 6 depicts the seraphim perpetually flying around God's throne and proclaiming his holiness, and I think it safe to say that on each flight, they discover something new about God. And yet even the firstborn seraph - the oldest created being who's spent the most time in God's intimate presence, forever learning about God through ages past - would try in vain to "sound the depths of love divine". Even that firstborn seraph, we sing with Wesley, cannot reach the bottomless depths of God's love. The phrase "sound the depths" derives from the old practice of using a plumb line to measure the depth of water; even this firstborn seraph would be helpless to, with all his might, sink a weight to the bottom of God's love. It's bottomless; there can be no sounding the depths of God's love.

And that's the beauty. The self-sacrifice of Jesus Christ shows us that God's very nature and eternal being are characterized by love; and it shows us that, though we're to live eternally, we will never, ever reach the point at which we can rightly say, "Well, we've at last got God's love figured out now. Turns out he loves us exactly yea much and no more. Glad that's finally settled." By no means! We, like the firstborn seraph, will never reach that point; there is no such point. God's love is endless, and we will be forever lost in it - or, phrased better yet, forever found in it. Just as the seraphim endlessly cry "Holy, holy, holy" with the freshness of infinite discovery, so too might we rightly spend all of eternity by crying out - with ever-increasing excitement and freshness and newness:

"Loving, Loving, Loving is Yahweh, the God of Hosts!
Heaven and earth are awash in his endless glory."

On Life-Giving Faith

2010-07-08T11:08:00.000-07:00

Today I was stumbling around on the Internet looking at classic Christian writings - you know, the usual - when I happened upon a line that really struck me. It came from a series of sermons by Cyril of Alexandria. Cyril was a pretty interesting guy. He was the bishop of Alexandria in Egypt from 412 to 444. One thing he's mostly known for is his feud with the bishop of Constantinople, a heretic named Nestorius who was eventually deposed at the Council of Ephesus in 431. But that's neither here nor there. Cyril also did a lot of writing and preaching, and we actually still have some of his sermons. And it's while reading some of his sermons on the Gospel of Luke that I found something cool.

Sermon #46 dealt with the story of how Jesus raised a little girl from the dead. And in that story, the girl's dad had come to Jesus in deep distress because his daughter was fading fast. And as he and Jesus got close to the house, someone came out and told him not to bother, because the girl was dead now, and so there was no point in troubling Jesus since there was no longer anything he could do to help. And yea, verily, Jesus saith unto him, "Pssh! Just you watch!" ...Alright, so that might be from Today's Lamely Paraphrased Version. What Jesus actually said was, "Fear not. Only believe, and she will live." And because they trusted him, he raised the girl from the dead.

That line, "Only believe and she will live", really captured Cyril's attention. And what he said captured mine. Cyril concluded his message by saying:

Faith, then, in every way, is the cause of life, as that which slays sin, the mother and nurse of death. Excellently, therefore, said Christ to the ruler of the synagogue of the Jews, when his daughter was dead: "Fear not; only believe, and she shall live." For, as I said, Christ makes those live who approach him by faith, in that he is life: "for in him we live and move, and are" [Acts 17:28]; and he will raise the dead "suddenly, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump" [1 Corinthians 15:52], as it is written. And having this hope in him, we shall both attain to the city that is above, and reign as kings with him, by whom and with whom, to God the Father be praise and dominion, with the Holy Ghost, for ever and ever, Amen.

I really love all of that. But it's the first sentence of the paragraph that gripped me. "Faith is in every way the cause of life, as that which slays sin, the mother and nurse of death". First of all, it really struck me that Cyril described sin as "the mother and nurse of death". I think it really captures what James was getting at when he said that "sin, when it is full-grown, gives birth to death" (James 1:15). Why is sin so dangerous, so problematic? Because it gives birth to death. It's death's mom, death's nurse. You can't cling to sin and escape its offspring. Sin lays its eggs in you. Those little vices we like to cling to? They hatch and destroy us. As much as we may cherish them, they bring destruction. No good ultimately comes from them. Like I quoted C. S. Lewis saying a while back, "In each of us there is something growing up which will of itself be Hell unless it is nipped in the bud."

But where sin gives birth to death, faith gives birth to life. Like Jesus said, "The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they might have life, and have it to the full" (John 10:10). Abundant life. Rich life. True life, pure life, vibrant life, flourishing life. That's what Jesus promises through faith in him. Jesus didn't come to squelch our fun. Jesus didn't come to turn our lives into dreary, puritanical gloom. Jesus came to give us a life we can truly cherish, a life of deep joy - not only now, but in the age to come. And what he asks is for us to trust him to deliver on that promise. That's what faith is: trust and loyalty. Because God is the God of love and life, we need to stick close to him if we want to experience the deepest depths of love and life, not only now, but also in the age to come. Because God is our Creator and our Redeemer, we need to trust that he knows what's best for us and how we're supposed to work - and that's why we follow what sometimes seem like some odd "rules": because they're guidelines to proper human functioning and flourishing, and while it might not always be fun and games in the present while we're still readjusting and growing into this new pattern of life, in the end we know that this new pattern of life will be so much fuller than what we once had. And because Jesus is who he is, we need to trust in him to have the love and the power to deliver on that promise.

That's what faith is all about. And that's why faith gives life: because the faith of which we speak is faith in Jesus, who promises to set us free from death and deliver us into abundant life. By slaying our captor (sin), which wanted to be our executioner from the inside out, faith in Jesus sets us free to, like Cyril says, "attain to the city that is above and reign as kings with [Jesus]". From death into glorious life.

O Lord, may I learn to have the faith in you that will put sin to death and free me to enter into the rich glory you've promised for your people. Let sin, the mother and nurse of death, be slain in me; let faith give birth in me to a thousand treasures of fullness in its place. To you, O ever-faithful and life-giving Lord, be all glory and praise, both now and forever. Amen.

On Glorying in the Cross

2010-04-12T18:56:00.000-07:00

So this morning I was looking around in Thomas Aquinas' biblical commentaries to see if I'd find anything cool. Last night I was at a hymnsing, and we sang the awesome hymn "When I Survey the Wondrous Cross" by Isaac Watts, with the famous second stanza:

Forbid it, Lord, that I should boast,
Save in the death of Christ my God!
All the vain things that charm me most,
I sacrifice them to His blood.

I've always found that to be really deep and moving, and anyway the hymnal listed Galatians 6:14 ("May I never boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world") as a Scripture reference, so those of us at the hymnsing spent a bit of time talking about the verse. And like I said, this morning I was looking through Aquinas' commentaries and I decided to check out what he had to say about the verse. And lemme tell you, when I got to his comments on it in his fourth lecture on Galatians 6... to say I was moved wouldn't do it justice. Here, read for yourself:

Notice that where the worldly philosopher felt shame, there the Apostle found his treasure; what the former regarded as foolish became for the Apostle wisdom and glory, as Augustine says. For each person glories in that through which he is considered great. Thus a person who regards himself as great in his riches, glories in them; and so on for other things. For one who regards himself to be great in nothing but Christ glories in Christ alone. But the Apostle was such a one; hence he says, "I live now not I, but Christ lives in me" [Galatians 2:20].
Accordingly he glories in nothing but Christ and particularly in the Cross of Christ, and this because in it are found all the things about which men usually glory. For some glory in the friendship of the great, such as of kings and princes; and this friendship the Apostle found most of all in the Cross, because there an obvious sign of divine friendship is shown: "But God commends his charity towards us, because when as yet we were sinners according to the time, Christ died for us" [Romans 5:8]. For nothing shows his mercy to us as much as the death of Christ. Hence Gregory: "O inestimable love of charity! To redeem the servant, he delivered his Son."
Again, some glory in knowledge; and of this the Apostle found a more excellent one in the Cross: "For I judged not myself to know anything among you but Jesus Christ and him crucified" [1 Corinthians 2:2], for in the Cross is the perfection of all law and the whole art of living well. Again, some glory in power; and of this the Apostle found the highest form through the Cross: "The word of the cross to them, indeed, that perish is foolishness; but to them that are saved, that is, to us, it is the power of God" [1 Corinthians 1:18]. Again, some glory in newly-found freedom; and this the Apostle obtained through the Cross: "Our old man is crucified with him that the body of sin may be destroyed, to the end that we may serve sin no longer" [Romans 6:6].
Again, some glory into being accepted into some famous fellowship; but by the Cross of Christ, we are accepted into the heavenly ranks: "Making peace through the blood of his cross, both as to the things that are on earth and the things that are in heaven" [Colossians 1:20]. Again, some glory in the triumphal banners of conquest; but the Cross is the triumphal ensign of Christ's conquest over the demons: "And despoiling the principalities and powers, he has exposed them confidently in open show, triumphing over them in himself" [Colossians 2:15]; "Blessed be the wood by which justice comes" [Wisdom 14:7].

...Wow. I never really thought this deeply about just the first portion of that one verse, but it's amazing how much it can hold! Think about it: anything I could possibly justifiably boast in, I'll find more of it in the crucified and risen Christ than I ever could apart from him.

Are connections in high places the sort of thing I'd be likely to boast about? Why sell out to the world, when by being a Christian I have a direct hotline to the omnipotent God, and in fact have been given the indwelling Spirit of sonship?

How about prestigious club membership? In Christ I'm part of the communion of saints and am destined to have intimate fellowship with the cherubim and seraphim; what country club can compete with that?

What about triumphant victory? Christ beat the tar out of the powers of darkness, both on the cross and in his resurrection, and he shares that victory with us! It may be lost on me under this mortal veil of darkness, but the victory that I can personally claim through Christ makes all the conquests of Alexander the Great look like a mere pittance.

How about liberty and freedom? Some people might boast in being free and unoppressed in this human realm; that was probably far more the case in Paul's day, when slavery was yet endemic and a slave who bought his freedom really could have something to boast about. But how tiny that seems next to the idea of being set free from sin!

Or what about knowledge? Some people - that'd be me, folks - are inclined to boast in having a lot of knowledge about this or that. And those truly are good things, gifts of God... but may I never lose sight of the fact that not only do I have those treasures of earthly knowledge, but in Christ I additionally have knowledge of sacred mysteries revealed to the people of God, mysteries unattainable by my human faculties apart from grace. And that knowledge of those mysteries - mysteries like the fact that God's very nature is self-giving love, that God's character is cruciform - is so much greater than, say, verifying the existence of the Higgs boson or cataloguing the lost works from the Library of Alexandria or solving Fermat's Last Theorem or resolving the ontological status of mathematical objects. (And trust me that all of those things would be pretty cool achievements.)

Or what about wealth? There are a lot of people who could boast about that. But in Christ are all the unsearchable riches of God! How idiotic would I be to gain the wealth of all the universe and miss out on the vastly greater treasure and even lose my soul?

So if I know all this, why am I so tempted to boast in everything else? In all my natural capacities and gifts, in my connections, in my accomplishments... why am I so tempted to make such a huge fuss about myself and my works, and so little fuss about Jesus Christ and him crucified? Like Thomas Aquinas goes on to say, "a person who glories in something treasures it and desires to make it known".

O Lord, may I - like your servant Paul - learn to glory first and foremost in nothing but you and your cross, so that I may treasure your sacrifice above all else and above all else yearn with an undying passion to declare it to all people. Amen.

Thoughts on Worship and Hell

2010-03-27T17:21:00.001-07:00

Lately I've been reading a lot of essays by C. S. Lewis, collected in a neat volume called God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics. See, the interesting thing is that C. S. Lewis is such a popular Christian author even today, and so many of his books are total classics; but up until this past fall, when I tackled my copy of The C. S. Lewis Signature Classics, I never read his stuff. A few years earlier, I got a few pages into The Screwtape Letters and found myself bored. But this time around, I've developed my endurance quite a bit since then, and I loved it - although Lewis and I would never have seen even close to eye-to-eye on the philosophy of time. So anyway, now I'm working on God in the Dock, and as I was finishing up one of the essays, I came across a very striking passage:

Be sure there is something inside you which, unless it is altered, will put it out of God's power to prevent your being eternally miserable. While that something remains there can be no Heaven for you, just as there can be no sweet smells for a man with a cold in the nose, and no music for a man who is deaf. It's not a question of God 'sending' us to Hell. In each of us there is something growing up which will of itself be Hell unless it is nipped in the bud. (God in the Dock, pp. 154-155)

The last sentence there really struck me most of all. When we worship and obey God, we don't do it for him in the sense that we're supplying a need in him, something he's lacking that we can offer. He doesn't gain anything from our worship. God is completely self-sufficient in himself. He didn't need to create, and he doesn't gain anything new in himself by doing so. We worship God, not for his gain, but because it's the right thing to do. This is one reason why worship should never be based on feeling or emotion, although those can be (but aren't always) byproducts of worship. I worship God because it's simply right to do so, because of who he is. But on another level, in worshipping and obeying God, I do benefit myself. And no, that doesn't make it self-serving, because that benefit isn't the reason why I do any of it - or, at least, it ought not be. But I benefit myself because it's what I was made to do. I was created by God to be a God-worshipping being. Like Thomas Aquinas said, God is the proper end of man - and that's "end" in the sense of "goal", not in the sense of "conclusion". And in fulfilling my purpose, in fulfilling the function for which I was made, I gain the greatest benefit of all: complete and utter fulfillment. The way I get it now is, of course, just a shadow of what's to come; my worship of God in the present is an imperfect, shadowy reflection of the worship I'll be able to give him when all's said and done, when God makes all things new.

Some people say, "You are what you eat." But far truer than that is, "You become like what you worship." We were made in the image of God, and our destiny is to be more perfectly conformed to the true image, Christ. This is why idolatry is so dangerous. When we worship the living God, we become more greatly conformed to the ultimate source of all Life, all Love, and all Truth. And so, when we set aside all our defenses and really let God transform us as we worship him, we become increasingly like that source. But when we worship what isn't God, when we 'exchange the truth of God for a lie, and worship and serve created things rather than the Creator' (cf. Romans 1:25), what we're being conformed to is at best a shadow, not the real thing. If I devote myself to something that's at best a copy, I'll always have that thing standing as an obstacle between myself and the reality. And if I devote myself to what's imperfect, how on earth can I ever be conformed to the image of perfection; how can I ever be perfect as my Father in heaven is perfect (Matthew 5:48)? But the thing is, we all commit a sort of idolatry: suitheism, the elevation of ourselves as our own little gods. Because every act of pride, every sin, is in effect a declaration that God is not the true lawmaker and that we know better how to run our lives; and that act of declaring ourselves the ultimate authorities on ourselves is idolatrous. And when we fall into the trap of worship of self, we get stuck in an infinitely vicious recursive loop. And if we're meant to be productive, then--figuratively speaking--that sort of self-worship strikes me as the ultimate in spiritual incest, if you'll pardon the somewhat disturbing imagery.

God doesn't lay down the law arbitrarily, as though it's fun to do so or anything like that; his commandments are a glimpse at the operating manual for our nature, the operating manual that comes with being made in his image. They're a guide to true human flourishing, to entering into the realm directed and guided and enlivened and illuminated by his Spirit. So when part of that operating manual says to be oriented out from ourselves and towards him, I don't think that's because of any neediness on his part--far from it! It's because it's not only the right thing to do, but it also happens to be ultimately good for us.

We're flawed. If you don't think you are, then the only advice I can give you is to do some serious reading of Paul's ethical exhortations and then to find somewhere quiet to do a whole lot of serious introspection. The best cure for delusions of perfection is a thorough self-examination in light of what we're supposed to be. For those of us with a more realistic image of ourselves, and especially those of us who can grasp that this problem isn't just a trifling matter, I think it's easier to see Lewis' point. Apart from Christ, I have some flaw deep inside of me that's killing me; it's like a fatal poison or terminal illness. It's like chronic pain for the soul, a metaphor I can definitely relate to. And I think that Lewis may very well be right: that flaw, that pride - because some form of pride is, I think, the ultimate ground of every sin - is something that will never let us be at peace until it's dealt with. In the life we're called to live, there's no room for pride or pretensions of autonomy; we have to concede that we haven't been put at the top of the pecking order, and in fact that we didn't pick our station in the great chain of being at all. We also have to put aside all our silly notions of second-guessing God - and, let's be honest, we all do it on a pretty regular basis. Unless we do all that, we'll never be fit to live the true life, the life we're meant to live.

So like Lewis said, that flaw, left unchecked, will keep on being magnified through our self-worship; just like a proper fraction multiplied by itself keeps getting smaller and smaller, so too does our deficiency get magnified every time we worship ourselves. And left unchecked, that shrivelling up will be hell. I'm enchanted by the way Lewis portrays hell in The Great Divorce, as the uttermost in smallness, where what was once a magnificent human being has, because of its orientation inward, just collapsed in on itself and diminished. And if God is the ground of all being and the ultimate source of existence, and if our sin and imperfection is a diminishment of being - again I borrow from Thomas Aquinas - then that continual process will bring us to asymptotically approach nothingness, just as even the continual multiplication of 0.99999 will eventually get closer and closer and closer to zero.

Perhaps it was Lewis who somewhere also said that to a reprobate man (or woman), the atmosphere of heaven would be more hell than hell itself; it's not the right polarity for him (or her), and it's simply too rich and too solid, the way Lewis portrayed the heavenly life in The Great Divorce. Just as some people can't handle natural food or natural air, and so can only stomach weaker things, so none of us, because of our sinfulness, are able of ourselves to handle the life we were meant to have, and can only be acclimatized properly through grace; like Lewis' fictional tourists from hell to heaven, so if a sinner were thrust into the sort of life we'll live in God's presence someday, it would be unbearably heavy and oppressive; it would be like putting a toddler in the middle of an NFL game. If we - spiritually speaking - purposefully infantilize ourselves and spurn the grace and love of God, we'll never be hardy enough for what we were made to do and be; we will forever be wasting away. We need to put off that weakness, extirpate that cancerous seed of hell within ourselves - or, to put it more truly, to throw down our shields and cooperate as Christ treats it throughout our lives so that it won't dominate our futures in the world to come. It's just like Lewis ended that essay: "The matter is serious: let us put ourselves in His hands at once--this very day, this hour" (God in the Dock, p. 155).

Amen.

Short Thought on Love

2010-03-19T07:53:00.000-07:00

As a Christian, I believe that God is Love. It says so in the Bible, after all (1 John 4:16). Lately I've been reading a book called Encountering the Mystery by the Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I, and one of my favorite lines so far in the book has been, "Love is the ultimate content of freedom and of eternity" (125).

As I was contemplating that this morning, and thinking about God as Love, a thought crossed my mind: the most God-like thing anyone can ever do is love. If Love is who God is, then to be not merely godly but in fact God-like, love those around you. Love everyone. Love the broken, reach out in love to everyone who has needs. Love can restore the world, because love is a divine act, the ultimate divine act. Love is the essence of our theosis, our divinization. Athanasius once said, God "was made man that we might be made god" (On the Incarnation 54.3). To paraphrase that, Love was made man that we might be made love, that every action of ours might be so saturated with love that no single word could ever sum us up as well as "love" can. Insofar as we truly love, we're conformed ever more to the image of the Holy Trinity, that eternal community of enduring, flawless Love. "Whoever lives in love lives in God" (1 John 4:16). Every act of love is, one could perhaps say, another step along the path of becoming a god by participation in the Divine Love that timelessly antedates all created things and encompasses the whole of creation. Love is the heartbeat of heaven and earth, and love will always, without a doubt, have the final word.

O holy fire of love divine, blaze in us. Consume all that is not born of love; purify us to be living icons of Love, the expression in our day of the true Love who came to dwell among us so many centuries ago. Let us be living, breathing mirrors of divine love in a world that so desperately needs to know love, to know Love. Amen.

How I Worship

2010-03-17T20:05:00.001-07:00

So this evening I was at a praise and worship service on campus. It was quite good. Nothing, you know, out-of-the-ordinary as far as worship goes, but worship itself is pretty darn out-of-the-ordinary earthshaking, if you ask me, even if one doesn't always feel it. Anyway, as I was pouring my heart out before God in song, my mind - which refuses to not multitask - turned to a somewhat related subject, and that was the form that my own personal piety tends to take. I've been thinking about this kind of often lately, mainly because my roommate comes from a very, very, very charismatic background, and so his style of worship is quite different from mine; mine also differs from another good friend of mine who's very attached to traditional hymns and austere Reformed worship.

So anyway, I got to thinking that I suppose one could say that I've got a fairly eclectic approach to piety. First of all, pretty much every time I pray, I make the sign of the cross over myself. A lot of people I know would probably consider this weird. I know my roommate sure would, because if it isn't charismatic, he generally considers it very odd. I used to make the sign of the cross in the Latin style, but ever since I went to Greece, I became accustomed to doing it according to their custom. I think I like it even better than the Latin style because my one teacher explained that the union of three fingers in the act was a reminder of the Holy Trinity, a reminder that Father, Son, and Spirit were all involved in the redemptive act that saved me. And, of course, the act of making the sign of the cross serves as a reminder to myself to stay focused on what it's all about, resolving to focus on "Jesus Christ and him crucified" (1 Corinthians 2:2). I'd actually say that my whole approach to being a Christian is self-consciously focused on Christ, and specifically on the crucifixion and resurrection. For me, that's the real center of it all, that's what it's all about. When I think about Christianity, that's what comes to mind, and few things move me quite the way that the cross and the risen savior do.

Aside from the whole "sign of the cross" thing, I also like to incorporate traditional prayers. Two that I like to use are the Hebrew phrase Bo, Ruach Elohim, u'male et nafshi ("Come, Spirit of God, and fill my soul") and the Jesus Prayer, which I recite in Latin (Domine Jesu Christi, Filii Dei, miserere mei, peccatoris - "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner") because it's cool and I haven't gotten around the memorizing it in Greek. My chapel at college has a cool meditation room - or used to, until it got co-opted as an office without anyone in the administration bothering to ask if any students actually used it, which we do. And in years past, whenever I needed some decent space to pray for a while in solitude, just me with God, I'd go in there, and the meditation room had a cool oval-shaped rug. And I'd often spend at least some of the time in there, just circumambulating (you know, walking around) the perimeter of that rug, reciting one of those two lines over and over again. And no, it wasn't some mindless "vain repitition" like Jesus charged the Pharisees with; it was more like the Trisagion ("Holy, holy, holy...") on the lips of the seraphim. With each repitition, I'd try to sync it up to my breathing, try to get a feel for the rhythm, try to let the words and their meaning just saturate my soul. Sometimes I'd even use a rosary for it, but not usually, because the number of times never really mattered. I'd just do it until I no longer felt led to. And to me, that was really meaningful. I love the sounds of those languages, and I can't wait to learn more of them so that I can use them to reach out to God even more. It helps me connect.

When I pray, I often open with an invocation that would probably run along the lines, "O Lord, Yahweh, God of heaven and earth, Most Holy Trinity--Father, Son, and Holy Spirit--sovereign King, to Thee I raise my voice and boldly approach the throne of grace, seeking pardon for my sins and the strength to carry your message and glorify your name", or something like that. I sometimes don't feel led to open that way, and that's fine. Generally speaking, I'll frequently address God as the Trinity, because I think that the Trinitarian dimension is so often lost in prayer today. And the doctrine of the Trinity is so near and dear to my heart; I get really passionate about the recognition of that sacred mystery, that proclamation that God is Love because God is eternal community, and he made us in his image to be communal beings and to participate in his own inner life; God is Love, and although love exists perfectly within the Trinity, love flowed out in creation to form and summon us to join God in that love. I realize that God as Trinity probably never gets a moment's thought from many Christians, but... I just gotta say, I think they're missing out on something rich, deep, and beautiful. And I also try to address God by name, as "Yahweh" (or "Jehovah", or however precisely I'm in the mood to vocalize the sacred Tetragrammaton), because I know that I worship a particular God, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. And not only do I want to glorify his name, I want to guard even in my personal prayer life against even the intimation of heresy. Aside from my personal love of truth, part of this is to cultivate the habit of theologically grounded prayer so that, when I pray in public or lead corporate prayer, I'll avoid leading any astray into error through the way I pray, but rather my prayers will be edifying in love and in truth.

I also love the Lord's Prayer. I try to structure my whole prayer life on its pattern, but to be honest I usually forget. When I start praying, I frequently launch into petitions for forgiveness or restoration, and I shouldn't. The Lord's Prayer is supposed to teach me how to prioritize, to put God and his kingdom's interests first and myself afterwards. But when I pray at night, whether or not I remembered to pattern my whole prayer after the Pater noster ("Our Father", in Latin), I'll usually conclude my prayer with a pretty close rendition of it, with a few tweaks. If I've got the energy - which I seldom do - I'll expand it quite a bit; if not, I'll usually qualify the "give us this day our daily bread" to "give us this next day our daily nourishment", and when praying for forgiveness as I forgive others, I'll generally add the plea for God to give me a heart for forgiveness so that I'll more readily forgive. That's not one of my strong suits, and I'll be honest and say that I have a whole lot of baggage from years of bitterness, pain, and even rage and hatred that I'm still working to sort out.

I get a lot of spiritual inspiration in places that many other Christians might find weird. For example, one of the ways that I usually get touched is through reading serious biblical studies or theology. Weird, right? I mean, if I mentioned that to my roommate, he'd give me one of those infamous looks that say, "I may speak in tongues and be into faith healing, but you're waaaaay nuttier than I am, dude." (I get those looks a lot.) But, no, seriously, lately I've drawn quite a bit of spiritual inspiration from things in Thomas Aquinas. The theology I study often finds ways to subtly filter in as a backdrop for my prayer and my worship. The Augustinian and Thomist tradition of viewing the Holy Spirit as Gift and Love is a huge part of this, but also Thomas' stuff on the virtues or other things. And I've totally lost track of the times that I've been reading some thick academic tome about, I dunno, Christology in Philippians or whatever, and I'll latch onto something that jumps out at me, and it'll be really spiritually meaningful to me. I love those moments. Theology isn't just for the head; it's for heart, soul, mind, all of it. The horizons it opens up are virtually unspeakable. But while reading some classic C. S. Lewis, I found some words that just might do:

For my own part, I tend to find the doctrinal books often more helpful in devotion than the devotional books, and I rather suspect that the same experience may await many others. I believe that many who find that 'nothing happens' when they sit down, or kneel down, to a book of devotion, would find that the heart sings unbidden while they are working their way through a tough bit of theology with a pipe in their teeth and a pencil in their hand. (C. S. Lewis, God in the Dock: Essays in Theology and Ethics, p. 205)

Right on, Lewis, right on. I'd actually say that relatively few books that I read don't leave some sort of spiritual imprint, however relatively minor, even if it's just bringing to mind once more a line of thought that I'd been entertaining for a while but hadn't dwelled on lately. And one of the most spiritually moving acts I can do is just read and meditate on the Nicene Creed. I also draw a lot of inspiration from some of the classic spiritual writers. St. John of the Cross (The Dark Night of the Soul) and Thomas a Kempis (The Imitation of Christ) are pretty powerful in my book, but I'm also deeply in love with the Church Fathers. (There's also the Bible, of course, but that goes without saying, and I usually get most from the Bible when I meditate on a passage with a lot of this other material in mind--it's very fruitful that way.)

So what about music? Well, as far as worship goes, I like a reasonably wide variety. I do like a lot of contemporary worship music, especially the upbeat stuff. I also absolutely love a whole bunch of classic hymns... especially the upbeat stuff. Slow and mournful is good as well, for certain things. I try not to get exclusively caught up in any one tradition of the Christian faith to the point where I lose sight of the treasures of God to be uncovered in the others as well. Needless to say, a lot of my favorite music is centered on the crucifixion and resurrection, as well as the incarnation. (This would be a good point to mention that I really love the liturgical year, although I don't often get as into Advent or Lent as I'd like. But seriously, I really love to mentally connect the liturgical calendar to the crucial events in salvation history, because it makes it feel so... so present.) I of course love depth to my songs, because those depths are where I meet with God and he meets with me. I really love Wesleyan hymns, but plenty of others also. Among hymns that aren't either explicitly Trinitarian or else devoted to the incarnation, the passion, or the resurrection, one of my favorites is probably "Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing". That hymn seriously rocks. The "prone to wander" lines really speak to the overall pattern of my Christian life, while I really feel impressed by the first verse's lines "Teach me some melodious sonnet, / Sung by flaming tongues above". I love songs that use spectacularly awesome imagery, and fire imagery is a favorite.

Sometimes when I'm singing, various images will come to mind. You know, settings and stuff, I guess. I suppose that my mind is way too busy to remain dormant, and since as a human I'm a pretty visual being, visualization is definitely involved when I worship. One of those images, of course, is being at the gates of heaven, I guess. I mean, the mental image is dominated by whiteness, gold, and bright light, and often includes the outline of a throne and a sense of awe and jubilation. I also love nature imagery. Sometimes I envision the night sky as seen clearly in the countryside, arching overhead as I gaze up from a meadow in reverence of the majesty of God displayed in creation. (I love Chris Rice's song "My Cathedral" because it captures so well how I feel here.) I also sometimes use images drawn from places I've been, like Sounion in Greece (excellent nature scene) and the Hagia Sophia in Turkey. I love being in Orthodox churches - and if the Hagia Sophia were ever restored, it'd definitely be the exemplar - because the iconography is designed to turn one's mind to the communion of the saints. That's sort of the whole point, which really hit me in the Hagia Sophia because of the seraphim flanking the dome where the icon of Christ would ordinarily be. The whole thing is designed to evoke the image of the throne room in heaven, and all around us are images of our elder brothers and sisters in the faith, who form with us the communion of saints. And it serves as a really potent visual reminder that our worship here is inextricably tied to their worship, and that the whole church throughout all time and all space offers up a truly unified worship to the same Lord.

And finally, this post wouldn't be complete - well, I mean, it'll never actually be "complete" - without mention of another really pivotal aspect of my spiritual life: the Eucharist. Communion doesn't happen nearly enough. It is, without a doubt, mind-blowing. I... I can honestly hardly speak of it. The sacred mystery of the sacrament strikes me as practically beyond words. I mean, when I kneel at the altar rail and smell the bread and the wine (alright, my denomination uses grape juice, but close enough), it's a full-scale involvement with all my senses from there on out. Taste, touch, smell, sight, and sound--all of it. And to meditate through that on the immense sacrifice that's the cornerstone of my faith... it usually moves me to tears of joy, tears of gratitude, tears of... of significance.

That's just a fairly loose overview of where I get a lot of my inspiration and practices, I suppose. I'm not sure it really does it justice, but it feels really good to get that out there.

The Triumph of the New Life

2010-02-08T18:00:00.000-08:00

So yesterday, I came across a quote that really struck me as cool, and it got me thinking.

Christ overcame the world by casting out the ruler of the world: "Now shall the ruler of this world be cast out" (John 12:31); "He disarmed the principalities and powers" (Colossians 2:15). This shows us that the devil is also to be overcome by us: "Will you play with him as with a bird, or will you put him on a leash for your maidens?" (Job 41:5), which understood literally means that after the passion of Christ, the little boys and young handmaids of Christ will make him [the devil] their plaything. (Super evangelium S. Joannis lectura, section 2176; trans. Fabian Larcher)

That's from Thomas Aquinas, a thirteenth-century theologian/priest/monk/professor/saint (and a whole lot more besides); it's specifically from a series of lectures he did on the Gospel of John, and I stumbled across it because I'm hoping to refer to those lectures in an upcoming paper on the doctrine of the eternal procession of the Holy Spirit in Thomas Aquinas' Trinitarian theology. But that topic is obviously not what this post is about. Instead, it's about the idea that Jesus has defeated the powers of evil, and that we share in his triumph.

We're probably all familiar with the idea that Jesus has in some sense won a huge victory. After all, like Paul said in one of the passages Thomas Aquinas already cited, "Having disarmed the powers and authorities, he made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross" (Colossians 2:15). Thomas' specific comments on that passage in his commentary on Colossians are pretty verbose and most consist of quoting other Bible passages, but the basic idea is that Christ whupped the demonic powers somethin' fierce on Calvary that day and freed us and our forebears in the faith from the bondage of Satan, death, and sin. There's a strong tradition of viewing the atonement at least partially as Christus Victor, Christ the Victor, so that the atonement is Christ decisively beating the forces of evil by his death on the cross. (I'm not saying, like Gustaf Aulen did in his 'classic' study of the idea, that this way of seeing things exhausts the atonement; there are certainly elements of penal substitution or satisfaction involved, or something along those lines. Just to make sure I'm clear, you know.)

And we often think of ourselves as in some sense victorious. After all, Paul says, "Thanks be to God! He gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ" (1 Corinthians 15:57), and who hasn't heard Eugene Bartlett's 20th-century hymn "Victory in Jesus"?

O victory in Jesus,
My Savior, forever.
He sought me and bought me
With his redeeming blood;
He loved me 'ere I knew him,
And all my love is due him;
He plunged me to victory
Beneath the cleansing flood.

But how often do we really think about the idea of sharing Christ's victory in any concrete way? I mean, yeah, we often think of it in abstract ways, like freedom from death--though even that's kinda tough to wrap your head around. That's what I love about the passage I quoted from Thomas Aquinas. I've never before thought of the idea of Christ's victory--and ours with him--as being so complete as to basically declaw, de-fang, and domesticate even the demons. Mostly, I just really love the triumphant imagery of Satan being so thoroughly defeated in the end that even little kids could basically put him on a leash and take him for a walk. In today's Christian circles, we're sometimes so worried about staving off Satan's attacks, real or perceived, that we come to fear him. And we should be wary, we should be vigilant. Don't mistake my words as an excuse to lose focus. Satan ain't no tame beast--yet. (Even though Thomas Aquinas' statement could be understood that way, I must admit.) But when I think of Satan's power being that restricted in the age to come, when I think of our victory being that total, I can't help but laugh for joy and shout praise to the Lord who fought the battle that won the victory and to the Father who passed it on to us, the faithful.

Don't let your guard down. Don't think that the forces of evil are obliterated and that we're already in paradise. There are still plenty of dangers out there for us. But don't make the opposite mistake of thinking that "Satan is alive and well on planet earth", to borrow the title of a horrible end-times book; he may be kicking, but after the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, Satan is definitely not doing "well". And while there remain threats out there, if we're faithful, we have nothing to fear.

Human Weakness and Arts and Crafts

2010-02-08T17:34:00.000-08:00

The other night, as I was resting in bed waiting to fall asleep, I was praying for God to pardon my habitual weakness of spirit and my tendency to stray. I know for a fact the actions I in fact enact (say that ten times fast!) frequently fall short of the divine majesty and what my Lord deserves from me. With all the good he's done for me, he's worth far more than I give in return. And then a thought occurred to me, a little scenario if you will.

Imagine a celebrated artist. His works fill an entire gallery. Think of the greatest pieces you've ever beheld--by Picasso, da Vinci, Michelangelo, van Gogh, Monet, whomever inspires you most--and this artist's work surpasses them with a beauty unparalleled. He plans, he says, to soon unveil his crowning achievement.

Imagine, too, that this artist is a kind man who has recently taken responsibility for an entire orphanage full of young children with severe disabilities. Imagine that he comes to each child, smiles, and encourages them to try their hand at arts and crafts.

And then I imagine the children coming back to him over the next few weeks, offering their pieces. Their craftsmanship is, by any strictly artistic standard, quite poor. Imagine hundreds of little arts-and-crafts 'disasters'. Disfigured popsicle-stick... shapes... dripping with glue and smeared with globs of paint. Torn pages from a coloring book, and the children ignored the lines completely. Each child proudly hands their work to this brilliant artist, saying, "I made this for you." And he smiles--no, grins, beams--as he takes each with thanks.

Imagine, then, that the time finally comes to unveil his greatest work yet. And as the curtain at last falls away, all the observers can see that this grand sculpture is composed of the children's art projects, all fitted together in a way that only a true master could achieve. And while their individual contributions, taken alone, might be meagre efforts unworthy of the prestige of the gallery, the entire ensemble crafted by the artist's care is no less than the greatest masterpiece in art history. And he turns to the children, all of whom beam with delight, and celebrates with them their joint artistic triumph.

That's the thought that crossed my mind a few nights ago as I contemplated the matter, and it made me realize something. First of all, while God deserves my best, and while my best will undoubtedly fall short of his glorious name, he's asked for my contribution, knowing fully well my limitations. The life I give over to him isn't a burden on him, some unwanted gift; it's exactly what he asked for, and God looks at the heart moreso than the results. We may not live perfect, unmarred lives, and while we do need to turn from sin and back to God on a regular basis, there's no need to live in shame because of how feeble our offering is. God asked for it; he wants it, and who am I to refuse?

The second beautiful truth that warmed my heart when I considered it is that our imperfect contributions are nevertheless the building blocks of the new world that God is building. We as craftsmen and craftswomen may not know where exactly our little baked brick will fit into the palace that God's constructing for us, but when all is said and done, I believe that we'll be able to look on the whole thing as an unparalleled beauty that confers the beauty of the whole on the parts themselves. In other words, I think that when we see history in retrospect, even our own personal life stories, we'll be able to say, "Oh that's what all that was about," and we'll rejoice in how God has chosen to forge our little pieces into a whole that's greater than just the sum of the parts. Where will my life fit? I don't know. But I do know that if I faithfully turn over my life to God, he will use it for his glory, and it'll be part of something amazing. And it will be the grounds for an eternal celebration of love.

Now to get back to the crafts project of my life.

The Acropolis and the Mission of the Church

2010-01-18T16:49:00.000-08:00

Yeah, I know, weird title. A few months ago - early September 2009, to be exact - I finally got to study for a while in Greece. I remember seeing Athens for the first time, walking through the streets of such a famous historical city. I can't remember, though, whether it was that day or the next or the one after that, but I'm pretty sure I remember when I first saw it. The sight everybody wants to see when they go there. The Acropolis. I stopped there on the sidewalk, gazed at it for a while, took a picture or two, I think. I mean, there it was. The Acropolis. And as I stood there thinking about it, a familiar sentence floated across my mind...

"You are the light of the world. A city on a hill cannot be hidden."

It's from Matthew 5:14, of course. Jesus was giving his famous Sermon on the Mount. He was talking to his followers, his disciples, about the role he wanted them to play, as his people, in society, no matter where they went. All that stuff about salt and light, and a city on a hilltop.

Back in those times, people were pretty picky about where they wanted to build cities. Many ancient cities were situated on one or more hills, so that they'd be higher in elevation than the surrounding area. Jerusalem was built that way; that's why the Bible talks so much about "Mount Zion". And that's no doubt the image that Jesus wanted his followers to get. When he talked about a city on a hilltop, that was the one they'd be most familiar with. But other cities were built like that, too. The word "acropolis" literally means "city on the edge", more or less, but it was used to refer to the original part of the city that was especially high, the "highest city". Athens is built that way. So is Corinth, for that matter. I remember standing on the Acrocorinth, looking for miles across both land and sea. In Italy, Rome was famously built on seven hills, so it isn't just a Greek and Jewish thing.

But Greece is where I got to experience living in the shadow of a place like that. The Athenian acropolis is the one I got to know. And I learned a lot from it. Here's one of those pictures I mentioned:

For starters, the Acropolis is a major landmark. It's not just a landmark, it's basically the landmark. (Well, alright, Mt. Lycabettus has some claim to that, too.) And despite all the buildings in Athens, one of the best ways to get your bearings is to catch a glimpse of the Acropolis. Once you've done that, you can find your way around with much greater ease. At night, it can be easy to get disoriented, but fortunately the Acropolis is lit up all throughout the night. I wish I'd thought to take a good picture of it in the dark.

The point, though, is this. If you're lost, you can always look to the Acropolis to help you find your way. It shines in the darkness; no matter how dark things get, there's still light at the Acropolis. It's a beacon to weary, confused travelers. It's stood the test of time and will continue to stand. And - at least before the advent of buildings like we have today - there's no way to hide the Acropolis from view. Look in its direction, and you can't possibly miss it. There's no confusing the Acropolis for another landmark, not when you see its distinguishing marks (e.g., the Parthenon and the Erechtheum, for Athens).

What if the church - you know, we Christian folk - were really like that? What if anyone who were lost could look to us and figure out where they stand? What if we really were a reliable landmark like that? And what if we really did shine brighter and brighter, even in the darkest hour? What if we were as steadfast as the Parthenon? What if there were just no hiding us? What if we couldn't be confused with everything around us? (After all, you can't navigate by landmarks very well if you mix them up! The same seems true in spiritual things.)

We haven't always lived up to that too well. But we were meant to. It's our challenge and our mission. Can we, both as a church and as individual Christians, live like the Acropolis? Will we be the shining city set on a hill that Jesus called us to be? If we've been "rescued [...] from the dominion of darkness" to inherit "the kingdom of light" (Colossians 1:12-13) and are therefore now "children of light" (Ephesians 5:8), why don't we "shine like stars in the world" (Philippians 2:15)? Why aren't we a rock-solid landmark helping people find their way to God?

Well, sometimes we are. Sometimes we do shine, and sometimes we are a good reference point. But we're still frail, still subject to sin, still all over the map. We do ungodly things, go our own way, and just generally mess things up. Still, we also have to confess that we haven't done our best, haven't given this whole 'city-on-a-hill' thing our A-game. I certainly haven't.

But I'm resolving to do better. I'm resolving to do my part, be it meagre or be it large, to live up to Jesus' charge to his followers. That means making myself a walking, living, breathing acropolis--an unhidden, unmistakable, unambiguous landmark to help the lost find their way, even in days of dire darkness.

It won't be easy. I know I'll err, I'll waver, I'll crumble or hide from time to time. The lights will flicker, I'm sure. But if I'm not striving after this 'city-on-a-hill' life, then I'm not being as faithful a disciple as I want to be, need to be.

Will you join me?

Brief Introduction

2010-01-18T16:36:00.000-08:00

So, welcome to Iron in Fire. It was a bit tough finding a fitting name for this blog. So why "Iron in Fire"? It comes from a beautiful sentence in the classic devotional work The Imitation of Christ, traditionally ascribed to Thomas a Kempis: "As iron cast into fire loses its rust and becomes glowing white, so he who turns completely to God is stripped of his sluggishness and changed into a new man" (2.4). And that's really where we are, or at least are striving to be -- turning to God and being transformed by the encounter. This blog is, at least ideally, about being a Christian and what it's all about. Just the occasional spiritual thought, reflection, idea, etc.

So who blogs here? Well...

JB: I'm first and foremost a Christian, and specifically an evangelical Christian. I'm also a seminary student with a Bachelor of Arts degree (summa cum laude) in religion and philosophy, though I minored in mathematics; I started this blog while finishing up my undergraduate program. I spend a fair bit of time reading in fields like theology, philosophy, New Testament studies, church history, etc., and I also really love interfaith dialogue. I also have a blog called Study and Faith, devoted to dialogue between Evangelicals and Latter-day Saints. But here, I'm going to try not to get bogged down in doctrinal minutiae too much for a change, or to use words that nobody but me and my fellow uber-geeks can understand. When it comes to being a Christian - doing the right thing and all that - I have to confess that my track record could best be summed up as 'not very good'... but by the grace of God I'm working on it.