If humans hadn't sinned, would Christ have still come?

I love this bit from Ilia Delio in The Not-Yet God, summarizing a thought from Franciscan theologian Duns Scotus:

The reason for the incarnation, then, is not sin but love. Christ is first in God’s intention to love. The incarnation is the unrepeatable, unique, and single defining act of God’s love. Thus, even if sin had not entered the universe through the human person, Christ would have come.

That’s good news, my friends.

Freedom from the compulsion to pretend: Mtr. Kelli Joyce on gender traditions and the fruit of the spirit

Continuing from yesterday’s post, I want to excerpt one more wonderful section from the conversation between Fr. David W. Johnston and Mtr. Kelli Joyce. This time it’s about ’traditional masculinity’, freedom in Christ, human flourishing, and the Fruit of the Spirit. (Emphasis throughout is mine.)

Johnston: And so what I hear you saying is that for for any any young men who might be watching this, if you want to if you want to go have a beer with your friends and tell jokes, do it unto the glory of God, right?

Joyce: Absolutely. I mean, this is the thing. Jokes are great. Cruelty is not. You can do unfunny cruelty and you can do uncruel jokes, right? A cold one with the bros? Go for it.

Johnston: With any of those things that are traditionally masculine or feminine, like you know, if you like working out or mixed martial arts, I mean, yeah, that’s fine. Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, self-control.

Joyce: No one thing can get a seal of approval as “that’s good” or “that’s bad”. That’s the whole point of the freedom in Christ: I can’t tell you for sure if beer and jokes are fine because it might be and might not be depending on how you’re doing it, who you’re doing it with, what your relationship to alcohol is, you know, these kinds of things. Same with mixed martial arts or whatever. If you are doing it from a place that is compatible with those fruits of the spirit, do it to the glory of God. And if you’re doing it in some way that is making you less joyful or making you afraid or making you feel insecure, right, then those are things to look at, not because mixed martial arts is bad, right? But because God wants you to have abundant life.

Johnston: From my point of view as somebody who in a lot of ways embodies a lot of very stereotypical uh, masculine traits, still remember like wondering like, well, is there something wrong with me? Cuz I could not care less about cars. I have a son who’s like, “Oh, that’s a cool car.” And I’m like so bored. I’m like, “My favorite car is affordable, predictable, good gas mileage, public transportation.”

…What I see that’s getting coded or trying to Trojan horse into some of that “this is traditional masculinity” is a pass for things that are not the fruit of the spirit. For cruelty, demeaning people, pride, looking at women with lust, you know objects to puff up male pride… I think Christianity does offer us a way of life like you’re talking about, that abundant life. And so that if one wants to embrace very traditional masculinity or femininity, that is okay. And Jesus has shown us what that looks like. Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, gentleness, self-control.

Joyce: I think that sometimes there is slippage between conversations about what kind of person one may be, is allowed to be, and what kind of person one must be. I think for me the important thing is of course there’s room to like cars, but there’s room to not like cars. The thing that is important is not that one deny interests because they’re masculine or pretend to have them because they’re masculine. Right? Like, what if we could be free of feeling compulsion to pretend in either direction, right? That we don’t like what we do, that we do like what we don’t. What if we were our whole, full, authentic selves, exactly as we were created to be, in relationship, but not competing and not trying to become someone over and against somebody else, just being who we are?

Mtr. Kelli Joyce on the Fruit of the Spirit and gender expression

If you’ve got 45 minutes to listen to a couple Episcopal priests talk about Galatians, the Fruit of the Spirit, and gender expression, by all means spend it on this video:

Fr. David W. Johnston and Mtr. Kelli Joyce have some wonderful thoughts here. There are a couple portions I want to highlight over a couple of blog posts. First, on the “crisis of masculinity” and gender expression, here’s what Mtr. Kelli has to say (36:40 - 39:00 in the video, minor transcript edits for clarity, emphasis mine):

In terms of the crisis of masculinity, it seems like this could be understood almost like how Paul talks about the law. There was this thing that was provided when we needed it, which told us “here’s how you be”. And now there’s freedom, and it’s a freedom we didn’t have before, which is not some new homogenized other way of being that says you have to stop being everything you were, but that says what is important here is that whatever you are is following Christ.

And so I think, to me, I think that there are healthy and Christ-honoring ways of expressing something that looks like traditional masculinity, and healthy and Christ-honoring ways of expressing something that looks very much like traditional femininity. I think that there are sinful and sin-warped ways of doing both of those things. And so what seems important to me is not about pursuing or avoiding a certain kind of gender expression, or restraining that to a certain kind of person or a certain kind of body, but about saying “who has God made me to be?”, “what brings me joy?”, “What feels like I am living out the self I was given by God in creation?”, and “how does that enable me, personally, in my context as who I am, from where I’m standing, to follow Christ?”.

So, to me, there can be virtuous masculinity, virtuous femininity, kind of a virtuous gender neutrality. But the important piece there is the virtue, and not that there is some sort of binding need to have one or the other kind of gender expression. Because nobody has a perfectly anything gender expression. Everybody has traits that are from a mix of these two big categories that we talk about and think about. And that’s OK. In Christ those things are not what define our relationship to God or our relationship to other members of the body. It is who we are together by the power of the Spirit.

Yes and amen.

Self-justification is the heavy burden because there is no end to carrying it

Further on in Rowan Williams’ Where God Happens he recounts a saying attributed to the desert father John the Dwarf:

We have put aside the easy burden, which is self-accusation, and weighed ourselves down with the heavy one, self-justification.

That is, as they say, a word. It may seem counterintuitive, he says, but it’s not:

Self-justification is the heavy burden because there is no end to carrying it; there will always be some new situation where we need to establish our position and dig a trench for the ego to defend. But how on earth can you say that self-accusation is a light burden? We have to remember the fundamental principle of letting go of our fear. Self-accusation, honesty about our failings, is a light burden because whatever we have to face in ourselves, however painful is the recognition, however hard it is to feel at times that we have to start all over again, we know that the burden is already known and accepted by God’s mercy. We do not have to create, sustain, and save ourselves; God has done, is doing, and will do all. We have only to be still, as Moses says to the people of Israel on the shore of the Red Sea. [Emphasis mine.]

Williams then takes that individual application and scales it up to the church:

Once again, we can think of what the church would be like if it were indeed a community not only where each saw his or her vocation as primarily to put the neighbor in touch with God but where it was possible to engage each other in this kind of quest for the truth of oneself, without fear, without the expectation of being despised or condemned for not having a standard or acceptable spiritual life. There would need to be some very fearless people around, which is why a church without some quite demanding forms of long-term spiritual discipline—whether in traditional monastic life or not—is going to be a frustrating place to live. [Emphasis mine again]

This put me in mind of a lunch I had with a pastor several years ago. Over chips and salsa I was expressing concern over some area of my life, I don’t remember which, and I despairingly ended up quoting Romans: “should I continue in sin that grace should abound?”

He took a sip of his iced tea, smiled at me and responded “well, that’s generally been my experience, yes.” In generosity of spirit and freedom from fear he encouraged me not with any judgment, but with acknowledgement that he, too, was in need of God’s forgiveness.

This is the fearlessness I aspire to in my own life and interactions with others. Not to diminish the significance of sin, but to acknowledge that no amount of self-justification will suffice to make it right, and that I should put that heavy burden down.

Something has happened that makes the entire process of self-justification irrelevant

I’m reading Rowan Williams’ Where God Happens: Discovering Christ in One Another, and this bit is just beautiful:

The church is a community that exists because something has happened that makes the entire process of self-justification irrelevant. God’s truth and mercy have appeared in concrete form in Jesus and, in his death and resurrection, have worked the transformation that only God can perform, told us what only God can tell us: that he has already dealt with the dreaded consequences of our failure, so that we need not labor anxiously to save ourselves and put ourselves right with God.

The church’s rationale is to be a community that demonstrates this decisive transformation as really experienceable. And since one of the chief sources of the anxiety from which the gospel delivers us is the need to protect our picture of ourselves as right and good, one of the most obvious characteristics of the church ought to be a willingness to abandon anything like competitive virtue (or competitive suffering or competitive victimage, competitive tolerance or competitive intolerance or whatever).”

The danger of sharpening the self-will of nations through religion

I’m slowly working through Niebuhr’s Moral Man and Immoral Society and goodness his observations are timely for today. I don’t know where he’s going with the second half of the book, but I’m looking forward to finding out.

This bit on the relationship of patriotism and religion is particularly relevant right now:

Patriotism is a form of piety which exists partly through the limitation of the imagination, and that limitation may be expressed by savants as well as by saints…

But since the claims of religion are more absolute than those of any secular culture the danger of sharpening the self-will of nations through religion is correspondingly greater.

Even when the religious sense of the absolute expresses itself, not in the sublimation of the will, but in the subjection of the individual will to the divine will, and in the judgment upon the will from the divine perspective, it may still offer perils to the highest social and moral life, even though it will produce some choice fruits of morality. One interesting aspect of the religious yearning after the absolute is that, in the contrast between the divine and the human, all lesser contrasts between good and evil on the human and historic level are obscured. Sin finally becomes disobedience to God and nothing else. Only rebellion against God, and only the impertinence of self-will in the sight of God, are regarded as sinful.

— Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society, chapter 3, emphasis mine

This turned the light bulb on for me as to how so many Christians in my evangelical background are willing to turn a blind eye to social ills as long as personal piety is maintained.

Joyful and Unprofitable Pursuits

We will not be saved by our money, our weapons, or our technological virtuosity; we might be rescued by the joyful and unprofitable pursuits of love, beauty, and contemplation. No doubt this will all seem foolish to the shamans and magicians of pecuniary enchantment. But there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of on Wall Street or in Silicon Valley.

— Eugene McCarraher, from the prologue to The Enchantments of Mammon

Phew, already can tell this is gonna be a great book and I’m only through the prologue.

The great privilege of great power is an incuriosity about those who lack it.

…I don’t really care much for hearing “both sides” or “opposing points of view,” so much as I care about understanding the literary tools deployed to advance those views—the discipline of voice, the use of verbs, the length and brevity of sentences, and the curiosity of mind behind those sentences. It is this last I find so often lacking. Great canons angle toward great power, and the great privilege of great power is an incuriosity about those who lack it. That incuriosity is what afflicts the dullest critics of safe spaces and the like. But if these writers, teachers, and administrators could part with the privilege of their own ignorance, they would see that they too need safe spaces—and that, for their own sakes, they have made a safe space of nearly the entire world.

—Ta-Nehisi Coates, from The Message [emphasis mine]

A Christian is distinguished by his radical esteem for the Incarnation

A Christian is not distinguished by his political views, or moral decisions, or habitual conduct, or personal piety, or, least of all, by his churchly activities. A Christian is distinguished by his radical esteem for the Incarnation - to use the traditional jargon - by his reverence for the life of God in the whole of Creation, even and, in a sense, especially, Creation in the travail of sin.

The characteristic place to find a Christian is among his very enemies.

The first place to look for Christ is in Hell.

— William Stringfellow, from A Private and Public Faith

"Leave it to good old Jesus and the rest of His family..."

Chris Green writes about the communion of the saints and Jesus not just loving us but liking us. It’s all wonderful stuff and worth a read, but his last quote, from the late Russian human rights activist Alexei Navalny, is timely and worth quoting in full:

You lie in your bunk looking up at the one above and ask yourself whether you are a Christian in your heart of hearts. It is not essential for you to believe some old guys in the desert once lived to be eight hundred years old, or that the sea was literally parted in front of someone. But are you a disciple of the religion whose founder sacrificed himself for others, paying the price for their sins? Do you believe in the immortality of the soul and the rest of that cool stuff? If you can honestly answer yes, what is there left for you to worry about? Why, under your breath, would you mumble a hundred times something you read from a hefty tome you keep in your bedside table? Don’t worry about the morrow, because the morrow is perfectly capable of taking care of itself. My job is to seek the Kingdom of God and His righteousness, and leave it to good old Jesus and the rest of his family to deal with everything else. They won’t let me down and will sort out all my headaches. As they say in prison here: they will take my punches for me.

Amen.