theology
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“Do you really think I’d make that up?”
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“I did that because I love you.”
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“You’re too sensitive.”
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“It’s not that bad. Other people have it much worse.”
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“I don’t know why you’re making such a big deal out of this.”
High enough anxiety
Earlier today a post came across Bluesky that stopped me short. Canadian author Ryan North put it this way:
All pleasures are guilty pleasures if you have high enough anxiety
Now, as far as I know, North is just trying (with some reasonable success) to be funny. But as a former evangelical this single line sums up the angst of modern neo-Calvinism as well as anything I’ve ever seen.
The core conflict of the neo-Reformed theology I spent most of my adult life with was that for all the assertions that God controls and predestines everything, serious believers should have an ongoing concern, verging on fear, that they are not doing enough. Not living piously enough. Not evangelizing enough. Not spending enough time in prayer and Scripture. Not having theological arguments honed well enough. In one breath the pastor would say “you can’t do anything about whether you’re one of the elect or not, it’s all God’s decision if you are saved” and in the next would say “if you’re not doing X or Y or Z you should probably be worried about whether or not you’re actually one of God’s elect”.
Neo-Reformed guiding light John Piper is a sterling example of this sort of divinely-inspired angst. Listen to any sermon of his, read any book, watch any interview, and you will get the sense of a man who is driven with a wretched, endless anxiety about his relationship to God. He’s always on edge, always afraid that he (and by extension, you, his listener) might be knowingly or unknowingly Wasting Your Life or Wasting Your Cancer or wasting your Retirement or missing What Jesus Demands or not Delighting In God or not Desiring God enough. Joy comes with the companion fear that the joy might be misplaced or appreciated a little too much. There is very little chill or rest or peace or pleasure that comes across there.
And let’s face it, friends: if you take the evangelical teaching on eternal conscious torment seriously, it’s hard to see how you could not live that anxiously all the time. Is there even a minute chance that you, or someone you love, is going to experience ultimate torture for all eternity? How could that not make you anxious? How could you ever enjoy life?
My therapist likes to say that there are two basic types of religion: one that has a goal to control, and one who has a goal of life enhancement. It’s a sign of how steeped I was in anxious evangelicalism that I had a visceral reaction to “life enhancement” as a religious goal. Isn’t that self-centered? Wouldn’t that make God mad? Shouldn’t we be God-centered instead?
It took several years of detox under other Christian teachers to find that I could actually be a Christian with a level of peace and chill that seems more in line with what Jesus seemed to be hoping for his followers. It doesn’t include the fear that God is going to eternally torture anyone. It does allow me to think about sin, healing, forgiveness, and godliness in terms of how our behavior encourages or hampers human flourishing. Suddenly the Gospel feels like real “good news” - not in the “hey if you’re desperately lucky and get stuff right you might avoid eternal damnation but you’re not gonna be sure about that until you die” sense but in the “wow that makes me smile and breathe easier” sense.
Friends, if you find yourself in a church that stokes your anxiety about whether or not God loves and will accept you: it doesn’t have to be that way. Jesus came that we might have abundant life (which sounds an awful lot like “life enhancement”, now that I think about it), and gave us peace. Let’s not let anxious teaching rob that from us.
Image credit: Anxiety by Nick Youngson CC BY-SA 3.0 Alpha Stock Images
Sin as Debt: Thoughts after reading David Graeber's Debt: The First 5000 Years
I’ve been reading the anthropologist David Graeber’s book Debt: The First 5000 Years this week. It’s a remarkable and thought-provoking work. He frames up the topic by relating a conversation he once had with an attorney who worked on behalf of anti-poverty groups. When he described his own work toward relieving Third World debt, she was confounded. “But, they’d borrowed the money! Surely one has to pay one’s debts.” Graeber notes that, even in standard economic theory, this statement isn’t always true - a lender is expected to assume some level of risk, “because otherwise what reason would lenders have not to make a stupid loan?” “Surely one has to pay one’s debts,” Graeber observes, isn’t actually an economic statement.
Rather, it’s a moral statement. After all, isn’t paying one’s debts what morality is supposed to be all about? Giving people what is due them. Accepting one’s responsibilities. Fulfilling one’s obligations to others, just as one would expect them to fulfill their obligations to you. What could be a more obvious example of shirking one’s responsibilities than reneging on a promise, or refusing to pay a debt?
Graeber latches on to this connection between morality and debt, continuing:
If history shows anything, it is that there’s no better way to justify relations founded on violence, to make such relations seem moral, than by reframing them in the language of debt — above all, because it immediately makes it seem that it’s the victim who’s doing something wrong. Mafiosi understand this. So do the commanders of conquering armies. For thousands of years, violent men have been able to tell their victims that those victims owe them something. If nothing else, they “owe them their lives” (a telling phrase) because they haven’t been killed.
I’d recommend Graeber’s book even just as an economic treatise. He challenges the basic capitalist assumptions that we Westerns have been raised with and points toward other, better ideas. (First up, he suggests: a Biblical-style Year of Jubilee where debts are forgiven. But I digress.) But when Graeber starts talking about debt obligation as a moral question, my mind immediately went to theology.
He paid a debt He did not owe, I owed a debt I could not pay…
Within the Western church and especially among American Evangelicalism, the language of debt is inescapable. The essential message of salvation is framed up in just those terms: the sinner owing an infinite debt to God for offending God’s perfection; Jesus living perfectly and then dying to pay that debt on our behalf. So when Graeber devotes a chapter to “The Moral Ground of Economic Relations”, my ears perk up.
How do societies actually work?
First, he says, at the most basic level society functions on what he calls “baseline communism”:
the understanding that unless people consider themselves enemies, if the need is considered great enough, or the cost considered reasonable enough, the principle of “from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs” will be assumed to apply.
This can be seen in the societal expectation for things as mundane as bumming a cigarette or asking for someone to pass the salt, and as great as the expectation that an able-bodied man will risk his life to save a child in peril. Society is based on this expectation of mutual contribution, he says, providing anthropological examples from cultures across the world to justify the claim. Relationships color our commercial exchanges, too - for example, merchants reducing prices for the needy.
This is one of the same reasons why shopkeepers in poor neighborhoods are almost never of the same ethnic group as their customers; it would be almost impossible for a merchant who grew up in the neighborhood to make money, as they would be under constant pressure to give financial breaks… to their impoverished relatives and school chums.
“Exchange… implies formal equality [between parties]… This is precisely why kings have such trouble with it.” It was about this point that my ears really perked up. “When objects of material wealth pass back and forth between superiors and inferiors as gifts or payments, the key principle seems to be that the sorts of things given on each side should be considered fundamentally different in quality, their relative value impossible to quantify — the result being that there is no way to even conceive of a squaring of accounts.” This rings true to how we talk about the debt of sin to God. But if squaring accounts with God is inconceivable, then how is it moral to even suggest that it is the sinner’s responsibility to do so, on pain of eternal damnation? Isn’t this argument, as Graeber described early on, the violent powerful party using the language of morality to convince the victim that they are the ones in the wrong?
What, then, is debt?
Graeber is answering this with economics in mind, but read this argument with soteriology in mind, too.
Debt is a very specific thing, and it arises from very specific situations. It first requires a relationship between two people who do not consider each other fundamentally different sorts of being, who are at least potential equals, who are equals in those ways that are really important, and who are not currently in a state of equality—but for whom there is some way to set matters straight.
If we accept Graeber’s definition here, it would be impossible for a human to be “in debt” to an omnipotent God for his sins, if only because God and the human are in no sense potential equals. He continues:
This means that there is no such thing as a genuinely unpayable debt. If there was no conceivable way to salvage the situation, we wouldn’t be calling it a “debt.”… This is what makes situations of effectively unpayable debt so difficult and so painful. Since creditor and debtor are ultimately equals, if the debtor cannot do what it takes to restore herself to equality, there is obviously something wrong with her; it must be her fault.
But aren’t all human interactions forms of exchange? Graeber says no, because many forms of human interaction are within in the framework of reciprocal relationship that glues our society together. Exchange is different:
…exchange implies equality, but it also implies separation. It’s precisely when the money changes hands, when the debt is canceled, that equality is restored and both parties can walk away and have nothing further to do with each other.
Debt is what happens in between: when the two parties cannot yet walk away from each other, because they are not yet equal. But it is carried out in the shadow of eventual equality. Because achieving that equality, however, destroys the very reason for having a relationship, just about everything interesting happens in between.
So once debts are resolved and the parties can walk away, what basis do we have for societal relationships? Graeber asks. As a preliminary answer, he quotes from 16th century monk François Rabelais’s book Gargantua and Pantagruel, where Pantagruel quotes the Apostle Paul: “owe no man anything, save mutual love and affection”— and the response to this freedom is genuine love and thanksgiving in return.
OK, Chris, where is all this going?
So, back to sin and salvation, humans and God. If Graeber is right here about debt and relationships, it doesn’t make sense for Christians to talk about sin as a debt owed to God. After all, we are not equals with God who just need to get our accounts balanced. The same evangelicals who would press hardest on our unpayable debt to God would also stress the infinite distinction between the omnipotent God and the miserable mortal creature. And if the payment of the debt then gives those equal parties the opportunity to “walk away”, with no further obligation to have a relationship, why would this paid-off state be desirable? In Graeber’s anthropological framework, God lording this debt of sin over pitiful humans is more akin to the vile Mafioso than a loving creator and savior.
At this point I would anticipate Evangelical readers to object that the “anthro” in Graeber’s expertise means “man”, and God isn’t man, and therefore this whole line of my reasoning is bunk. But I think we can do better than that. The Bible talks about God in human terms, using human analogies. So if this book that Christians profess as God-breathed uses human illustrations, we should evaluate them that way rather than just write them off when they don’t support our other theological assumptions.
A Better Metaphor
This post is already far too long, so let me just briefly suggest that a better metaphor for the problem of sin is the one our Orthodox brethren have proclaimed for centuries: sin as a disease that humans are unable to get rid of, and salvation the healing and cure. This metaphor better represents the actual dynamics of the God/human relationship. It establishes humans not as beings who must be failed and immoral because we just can’t manage to repay that debt, but as beloved children, stained and sick, who have a relationship permanently maintained by a loving parent who holds the cure.
…in the Orthodox model, sin is missing the mark; it is a distortion or a disease that needs therapy. Sin has no temporal and eternal debt per se, nor must it be “worked” off. One does not do “penance” in the Orthodox Church, but rather one seeks to be healed of their passions, their imperfections. Thus we use the language that compares the Church to a hospital and views sin in medical terms: sickness and cure. — Orthodox Catechism Project
This is really good news: that God loves us, calls us his children, and seeks to heal us of our compulsion to behave in ways that are not compatible with human flourishing.
A few thoughts on formation
Sunday in an adult forum discussion at church we talked about how our theology is formed by prayer, and our prayer shaped by our singing, and today that leads me down the rabbit hole thinking about formation.
When I was in first grade my church started an AWANA program. Being the over-achieving type, I started with the kindergarten-level book, started memorizing bible verses, caught up the year I’d missed, and kept memorizing all the way through high school. I have written before about the misgivings I have about the way AWANA selectively chooses memory verses to push a specific theological perspective. But for better or worse, I was formed by those verses. They are phrases that immediately jump to mind in any appropriate (and sometimes inappropriate) situation. The beautiful cadences of the King James Version are forever burned into my neural pathways.
There were other formative works. As a tween I read the covers off the paperback box set of The Chronicles of Narnia. I was reminded of this last week on Thanksgiving when a friend’s daughter tried to pull a classic children’s prank on me. I really should’ve given her the joy of pulling one over on the old guy, but I’m too competitive for that, so instead of biting on the joke I gave a sideways answer, deflating her 10-year-old anticipation just a bit. Her mom then asked me what the discussion was about, and I related the story, chuckling “do you think I didn’t try that same prank when I was your age?” Immediately my friend spoke a line that reminded me that she, too, was formed by those books. “Do not cite the Deep Magic to me… I was there when it was written.” This is the power of formation. You don’t go searching for a line like that deep within your memory banks when it’s needed. It’s already so ingrained in your mind that it’s just the first, most natural thing to come out.
It need not be from sacred or serious sources. (I can’t hear someone say “bye, boys” without at least silently tagging on “Have fun storming the castle!”, nor can I hear someone say that they’ll “ping” someone without mentally following up “one ping only, please” in my best Connery-esque pseudo-Russian accent.) This brings me back to the prayer book.
I was first introduced to the Book of Common Prayer through Brian Zahnd and his prayer school. Brian is doing an interesting mix of evangelical, Pentecostal, contemplative, and traditional prayers within his prayer approach, and while I haven’t adopted it for the long term, it was my first taste of what my now-Episcopal self knows to be classic texts from the prayer book.
Most merciful God, we confess that we have sinned against you, in thought, word, and deed, by what we have done, and by what we have left undone.
We have not loved you with our whole heart; we have not loved our neighbors as ourselves. We are truly sorry and we humbly repent.
For the sake of your son Jesus Christ have mercy on us and forgive us, that we may delight i your will and walk in your ways to the glory of your name. Amen.
I remember coming upon those words for the very first time and thinking “wow, this is so beautifully… comprehensive”. It covers things clearly, specifically, with reference to scripture, without dropping down into excruciating detail about each individual sin… what a brilliant confession! Really wise words! Oh naive evangelical that I was, not knowing the riches shared by those who had gone before.
Over the past 18 months in the Episcopal church there are new words forming me.
We believe in God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all that is, seen and unseen…
It is good, and a right and joyful thing, always and everywhere, to give thanks to you, Father almighty, Creator of heaven and earth…
The gifts of God for the people of God. Take them in remembrance that Christ died for you, and feed on him in your hearts by faith, with thanksgiving.
The body of Christ, the bread of heaven…
Keep watch, dear Lord, with those who work, or watch, or weep this night, and give your angels charge over those who sleep….
As Rich Mullins said in an appropriately-named song: I did not make it—no, it is making me.
And I have now written an entire post about formation without even touching the topic of singing… that will have to keep for another time.
"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.
Recommended podcast: Chris E. W. Green's Speakeasy Theology
Lately I’ve really been enjoying Bishop Chris E. W. Green’s podcast called Speakeasy Theology. Green is a bishop in the Communion of Evangelical Episcopal Churches and Professor of Public Theology at Southeastern University in Lakeland, FL. Green’s background is Pentecostal, but his move into the CEEC has put him in an interesting place where he is deeply invested in the Episcopal tradition while still embracing a strong Spirit-filled embodiment of faith.
His podcast isn’t particularly fancy or polished. It does have theme music, but generally consists of Green in conversation with one or two others, delving into some aspect of theology and/or practice. I particularly appreciate his humble approach to these conversations. While many podcast hosts and theologians would work to make their own points and push their own agenda, he is very willing to just ask questions and let his guests provoke the conversation in the direction they want to go.
A couple recent episodes that stuck out to me: first, God Is More Exciting Than Anything with Dr. Jane Williams. Dr. Williams talks about loving theology, loving prayer, loving God, and serving the church. Green doesn’t do extensive introductions of his guests on the podcast, so as I listened all I gathered at the beginning is that Dr. Williams is a British professor of theology. As the discussion went on, Green asked some questions about advice on the life of a Bishop, and the impact on the Bishop’s family, and what a Bishop should prioritize, and as he listened to her advice with great esteem, I thought wait, I need to connect some dots here. So I Googled Dr. Jane Williams, and found that in addition to being a professor of theology, she’s been married for more than 40 years to Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury. (Lightbulb!) What stuck out to me about this interview, beside the wonderful conversation and counsel from Dr. Williams, was that she was presented (deservedly) entirely on her own authority and merit, with no reference to her husband. This felt like a beautiful and, sadly, remarkable display of respect by Dr. Green.
The second episode I want to recommend is titled The Difference is Doxological, Green’s conversation with Richard Beck. Beck is a professor of experimental psychology at Abilene Christian University and a long-time blogger. (I’ve read Beck for a long time and blogged about his thoughts frequently enough he has his own tag on my blog.) Beck’s specialty is the intersection between psychology and theology, and his discussion with Green is a wonderful hour wrestling with how we think about the acknowledged work of God in people’s lives vs. the work that God does through the common grace of psychological practice. Beck also talks about his own faith journey of deconstruction and rebuilding, giving his long-time readers like Green and me some good background for his blogging.
I’ve recommended Chris Green’s books here before, and I’m happy to recommend the podcast, too. It’s worth a listen.
You can become more holy by becoming more merciful
Fr. Matt Tebbe is one of my favorite writers at the moment. A former evangelical turned Episcopal priest, Matt has a keen eye for the systems at work in our world and a voice for calling them out clearly. The other day he turned his thoughts to God’s mercy:
You can approach God’s holiness in your sin because God’s holiness moves towards you first. Any suggestion that God can’t look upon you or is far from you or doesn’t want to be with you in your sin: what do we see in Christ?
In him the fullness of God was pleased to dwell. And Christ moves toward- not away- from sinners.
You can become more holy by becoming more merciful: with yourself and others.
In my previous evangelical life, it was always the other direction that was emphasized: God, in his (always his) holiness, is offended by you and your miserable, sinful, inept little self. When Jesus touched a sick person, they said, that sick person must’ve been miraculously healed an instant before Jesus hand actually reached them, because Jesus could never have broken the law by touching a sick person. (Such mental gymnastics!) Then I read Richard Beck say that Jesus was so full of life and health that of course he touched the sick person because Jesus' life and health overwhelmed and pushed that sickness right out of them.
What a blessing to finally see God’s love and mercy and goodness in a restorative and healing way! And thanks Matt for reminding us of it.
David Bentley Hart’s “The Experience of God”
With some of my recent reading getting my mental wheels turning about the nature of who God is, I figured it was a reasonable time to pull The Experience of God off my shelf. Right off the bat in the introduction, Hart promises what I was hoping for: “My intention is simply to offer a definition of the word ‘God’…” Unfortunately, 332 pages later, what David Bentley Hart has written isn’t at all simple, and approaches a definition of “God” only from an oblique angle.
Hart structures the book in three major parts. In the first, he clarifies that the “God” he is describing is the ultimate deity, the prime mover, from which all other creation and being have their source. It is here even in the beginning section that he starts taking aim at what appears to be his actual target with this book: the arguments of the popular atheists of the late 20th and early 21st century. (Richard Dawkins is a regular whipping boy.)
The second section (comprising the bulk of the book) is structured around three characteristics which Hart points to as the core aspects of God: being, consciousness, and bliss. Each of these (long) chapters seems less interested in enlightening the reader on who God is than in disputing with the atheists and materialists. God is the root of being, declares Hart, and anyone who says differently is just stupid. There is no materialist explanation for consciousness, says Hart, and the materialists who argue for an evolutionary reason and dismiss God are illogical and foolish. There is no evolutionary reason for a search for beauty, truth, and goodness, says Hart, and those who would try to argue thus are intellectually dishonest. So it goes.
Hart’s arguments are at his strongest when he’s arguing for something instead of railing against something. The first part of his chapter on bliss was particularly good in that regard. Sadly, most of the book goes the other direction.
It’s very hard to review Hart without taking his blustery style into consideration. He’s never met a big word he didn’t like. He makes huge sweeping assertions without any hint of supporting justification. He seems to think that just by declaring something “obviously” wrong that it’s obvious to everyone and doesn’t need explained. In doing so he dismissively waves away not just the weak sauce of people like Dawkins but also more substantive scientists and thinkers who deserve better. Hart falls almost into self-parody at the beginning of chapter six: “[W]e should not mistake every pronouncement made in an authoritative tone of voice for an established truth.” While aiming this at popular atheists, it’s an argument that is equally valid against Hart himself.
There’s an old joke about a preacher, who at one point in his sermon notes has written: “weak point, pound pulpit”. As a lay theologian and not much of a philosopher at all, my trouble with Hart’s book is that he does so much pulpit pounding it makes me suspect the strength of his points. Even in places where I find myself in agreement with his conclusions I have a hard time feeling like the book was beneficial.
Henri Nouwen: An alert and aware spiritual life
Currently reading Henri Nouwen’s Reaching Out: The Three Movements of the Spiritual Life. What a wonderful little book! This bit in particular hit home today:
Not too long ago a priest told me that he cancelled his subscription to the New York Times because he felt that the endless stories about war, crime, power games, and political manipulation only disturbed his mind and heart and prevented him from meditation and prayer.
That is a sad story because it suggests that only by denying the world can you live in it, that only by surrounding yourself by an artificial, self-induced quietude can you live a spiritual life. A real spiritual life is exactly the opposite: it makes us so alert and aware of the world around us, that all that is and happens becomes part of our contemplation and meditation and invites us to a free and fearless response.
As timely in 2024 as it was when Nouwen wrote it in 1975. And I both understand the plight of the priest in his story and desire to have, as Nouwen says, a free and fearless response to all that happens around me.
Lamb of the Free by Andrew Remington Rillera
I have a small handful of theological books in my past that I look back on as turning points - books that spoke to me at my particular place and time, opened my eyes, and set my thinking about God in a new direction. The first of those is NT Wright’s Surprised By Hope; the second is Ilia Delio’s The Unbearable Wholeness of Being. I’ll give it a week or two before I inscribe this in stone, but I’m inclined to think that Andrew Rillera’s Lamb of the Free is the next one. Let me try to explain.
In the Protestant church (at least), there has been much ink spilled over the years to systematize atonement theories, that is, to organize all the teaching about Jesus’ death and how it works to save us into some sort of coherent, synthesized framework. In the conservative evangelical world of my first 40 years as a Christian, the predominant, nay, the only acceptable atonement theory is penal substitutionary atonement, usually abbreviated PSA. PSA says that each of us, as a sinner, deserve God’s punishment, but that Jesus died in our place, taking that wrath upon himself. The children’s bibles usually summarize it as “Jesus died so I don’t have to”.
Rillera says that PSA fails to pay attention to how sacrifices worked in the Old Testament, and as such then horribly misreads the New Testament (particularly Paul and Hebrews). This may be the book that inspires me to go back to where I always get bogged down in the Bible In A Year reading plans, and do a close reading of Leviticus.
Rillera starts right off the bat in chapter 1 by making the assertion that
There is no such thing as a substitutionary death sacrifice in the Torah.
He notes that “for sins that called for capital punishment, of for the sinner to be “cut off”, there is no sacrifice that can be made to rectify the situation”, and that far from animal blood on the altar being a substitute for human blood, human blood actually defiled the altar rather than purifying it. Neither was that animal sacrifice about the animal suffering; to maltreat the animal “would be to render it ineligible to be offered to God”, no longer being “without blemish”. Already you can see the distinctions being drawn between this close reading of Levitical sacrifices and the usual broad arguments made in favor of PSA.
Lamb of the Free takes 4 chapters - a full 150 pages - to review OT sacrifices. I’m not going to try to summarize it here. But I have a new understanding and appreciation for paying attention to those details now! Then in chapter 5 he turns the corner to talk about Jesus, and summarizes his arguments thusly:
(1) According to the Gospels, Jesus’s life and ministry operated entirely consistent with and within OT purity laws and concern for the sanctuary.
(2) Jesus was a source of contagious holiness that nullified the sources of the major ritual impurities as well as moral impurity.
(3) Thus, Jesus was not anti-purity and he was not rejecting the temple per se.
(4) Jesus’ appropriation of the prophetic critique of sacrifice fits entirely within the framework of the grave consequences of moral impurity. That is, like the prophets, Jesus is not critiquing sacrifice per se, but rather moral impurity, which will cause another exile and the destruction of the sanctuary.
(5) But, his followers will be able to experience the moral purification he offers.
(6)The only sacrificial interpretation of Jesus’s death that is attributed to Jesus himself occurs at the Lord’s Supper. At this meal Jesus combines two communal well-being sacrifices… to explain the importance of his death. However, the notion of kipper [atonement] is not used in any of these accounts…
There’s a lot there, and Rillera unpacks it through the second half of the book. (I was particularly enthusiastic at his point (2), as it dovetails neatly with Richard Beck’s Unclean, where Beck argues that Jesus’ holiness was of such a quality that indeed, sin didn’t stick to him, but rather his holiness “stuck to”, and purified, other people’s sin and sickness.) Rillera says that Jesus’ death conquered death because even death was transformed by Jesus’ touch, and that Jesus came and died not as a substitution but rather as a peace offering from God to humankind. (His unpacking of Romans 3:25-26 and the word hilastērion was particularly wonderful here.) Jesus’ suffering under sin and death was in solidarity with humankind, and uniquely served to ultimately purify humankind from death and sin. (Really, I’m trying to write a single blog post here and summarize a 300 page book. If you’ve gotten this far and you’re still interested, go buy the book and read it. If you want to read it but it’s too pricy for you, let me know and I’ll send you a copy. I’m serious.)
I’ll wrap this up with a beautiful paragraph from a chapter near the end titled “When Jesus’s Death is Not a Sacrifice”. In examining 1 Peter 2, Rillera says this:
First Peter says that Jesus dies as an “example so that you should follow his steps”. In short, Jesus’s death is a participatory reality; it is something we are called to follow and share in experientially ourselves. The logic is not: Jesus died so I don’t have to. It is: Jesus died (redeeming us from slavery and forming us into a kingdom of priests in 2:5, 9) so that we, together, can follow in his steps and die with him and like him; the just for the unjust (3:18) and trusting in a God who judges justly (2:23; 4:19). This is what it means to “suffer…for being a ‘Christian’” (4:15-16). It does not particularly matter why a Christ-follower is suffering or being persecuted; it only matters that they bear the injustice of the world in a Christ-like, and therefore, a Servant-like manner.
There are a dozen other bits I’d love to share - maybe in another post soon. But for now, I’m thankful for Andrew Remington Rillera and his wonderful work in Lamb of the Free. I’ll be thinking about this for a long time.
Some quick thoughts as I synthesize Beck and Delio this morning...
Richard Beck has a post this week addressing “intellectual problems with petitionary prayer”, or to put the question another way: how does prayer “work”? He critiques a vision of God sitting at a distance from the world and being convinced to reach in and intervene in a Creation that otherwise ticks on autonomously. He calls this the “magic domino theory” - the idea that prayer is to get God to reach in and tip over the magic domino that knocks over other dominos to make things happen.
Beck’s latest book, as I understand it (having read his posts about it but not the book itself) argues for a re-enchanted view of the world. In this post he builds off of Gerard Manley Hopkins' line that “the world is charged with the grandeur of God”:
God isn’t at a distance. God’s energy and power suffuses creation. Creation isn’t ticking along autonomously, like a machine. Creation is alive and exists in an on-going radical dependence upon God. We are continuously bathed in God’s sustaining light and love, and should God ever look away from us we would cease to be.
Now I love this, but I am also internally screaming “but what does this really MEAN?” After a lifetime in fundamentalist evangelicalism being told to accept a broad disconnect between the reality of creation and the “mystery” of God in it, I need something more tangible.
This is where I appreciate being able to read Ilia Delio alongside Beck. Delio, I think, would agree with Beck’s vision of creation being imbued with God’s presence. But she would then start to talk about what that permeation might actually mean at a level of quantum mechanics. And this is so helpful to me because even though, to adapt Arthur C. Clarke, sufficiently advanced science is indistinguishable from magic, I need to at least conceptually be able to ground that “magic” (or to use Beck’s word, “enchanted”) view of God’s interaction with creation in the real, scientific world somehow.
And even though my understanding of quantum physics is quite limited, Delio’s push to bring theology into discussion with modern cosmology has been a key to my ability to stay within the stream of Christianity. I couldn’t deal any more with the disconnected, capricious, judgmental God that evangelicalism gave me. But that we could personify “God” as a conceptualization of the mysterious relational charge running through the fabric of the universe? That somehow uniquely enlightened and enlivened Jesus of Nazareth? That’s an approach that can unite my head and my heart as I (like everyone else) try to grapple with the mysteries of life.
A couple recommended newsletter reads
Quick recommendations for a couple things I’ve read lately that are worth a few minutes of your time:
Diana Butler Bass’s most recent newsletter essay On Statues, History, Politics, and Division. In discussing the removal of Confederate statues across the South, she hits on a resonant phrase.
Not long after the Richmond bronzes and marbles had been removed, I was in the city speaking at a church. The pastor, a religious leader who agreed with their removal, asked me: “Have you driven down Monument Avenue yet?”
“No,” I replied, “I’ve haven’t been there recently.”
“It is stark, emotionally powerful in a different way,” he said. “You look down the road and the statues are all gone. There are empty altars everywhere.”
Empty altars everywhere. That captures the spirit of the age, doesn’t it?
Second: Andrew Osenga’s latest, American Christianity is a CyberTruck. He looks at the sad scandal of Robert Morris and some online discussion of a modern worship song that says “praise is the water my enemies drown in” and pulls the threads together this way:
The commercialization of Christian culture has led us to sacrifice wisdom for influence, and thus we are losing both.
These songs and leaders (and books and conferences, etc etc) might get us where we want to go - a big church, a #1 single, a senate seat - but to anybody outside our little circle, it just looks ridiculous.
They don’t take our faith seriously, because we have not taken our faith seriously.
The CyberTruck might get you to Target, but people are going to roll their eyes when you get there.
I don’t know what kind of car Jesus would drive, but I do know that He has asked me to love my enemies, to pray for those who persecute me, to give what I can to the poor, and to pick up my cross and follow Him.
What if the world saw a young pastor turn himself in for his sexual abuse, offer his guilty plea, do his jail time and then live the rest of his life quietly doing good and serving others? What fruit might grow from that true repentance?
What if, rather than weapons or drowning, our big sing-along songs were about loving those who persecute us? How might that change the nature of our cultural conversations?
In many ways it feels like the sun is setting on a particular era of American Christian empire. Its leaders are crumbling like pillars of sand and the institutions feel like empty shopping malls.
In the grief and pain of so much damage, may our tears water new fruits of kindness and humility, thoughtfulness and wisdom. The world doesn’t need Jesus-brand products, it needs to see Jesus in our eyes, hear Him in our language, and feel Him in our actions.
Yes and amen.
2024 Reads: A Window to the Divine by Zachary Hayes, OFM
I just finished up a slow read of a wonderful little book. A Window to the Divine: Creation Theology by Franciscan theologian Zachary Hayes draws from Teilhard and Whitehead to suggest that we need to recognize that our approach to synthesizing modern science and creation theology needs some updating. As he notes,
…the worldview mediated to both believer and unbeliever alike by our modern culture is radically different from that which provided some key structural elements for our familiar theological vision and language.
After all, he asks,
If scientific or prescientific views of the world inter into the structure of a theology in some way, and if believers forget where a style of theology has come from and what elements have entered into its structure, what would one expect to happen when the scientific vision of the world begins to change?
In the first chapter, Hayes examines the relationship between theology and science, noting that they exist to answer very different sorts of questions. They need not exist in opposition to each other, he says.
…we will not expect science to prove faith claims, nor will we expect theology to prove the claims of science. But we will attempt to allow religious faith to express itself in terms relevant to its cultural context, which, at least in the Western world of the present, is strongly conditioned by scientific insights.
Hayes goes on to briefly examine the creation texts, suggesting a theological interpretation of the beginning of Genesis that is focused far more on God as the source and origin of creation rather than on a scientific explanation of how things came into being. He takes a chapter to discuss the origin of humans (all from Adam? or from multiple parents?) and how that view interacts with Romans 5. (As in Adam all sinned, so in Christ all will be saved…) Hayes suggests that these texts, too, should be read etiologically, that is, as discussing the cause or origin of sin and salvation, not of some literal genetic propagation of sinfulness. He bogs down a bit in a very Roman Catholic discussion of Original Sin, trying to briefly address both Augustine and the Council of Trent.
The last chapter, though, is worth the whole read, as he pulls the threads together. I will quote more liberally here, it’s just too good.
First, about sin:
Human history is a history of response, both negative and positive, to the lure of God’s love… Sin is not a mere infringement of a law extrinsic to our nature. It is a failure to realize the potential of our nature itself. If our nature is fundamentally a potential to expand, sin is a contraction… Sin is the resistance to expansion through union with others. It is the attempt to create human history in alienation from the only end that we ultimately have… Sin is a failure in the collaborative effort to move toward full personalization in human community.
And then regarding grace:
The history of God’s grace and human response finds a distinctive form of self-consciousness in the history of the Bible, and an unsurpassed level of realization in the person and destiny of Jesus Christ… God, who is love community, calls forth love community in creation through free response of human persons to the offer of divine grace.
And then, finally, about the relation of theology and science, and why it matters:
Theology need not fear science nor tremble before the power of reason. Rather both theology and science need to stand in awe in the face of the mystery that is our world and in the even greater mystery of God to which the world points…
We have no reason to assume that the mere fact of human life is the goal of the universe. What is important above all is a quality of life, not the mere fact of life. With this in mind, we can see that it is a more significant question to ask whether this sort of world is apt for the accomplishment of God’s purpose. It is, indeed, a cosmos that challenges humanity in mind and in will, and that is capable of eliciting both awe and wonder. It is a cosmos that draws humanity out of the narrow point from which it begins to expand to the mystery of the world and thus to move towards the Ground of the world. It is a world apt to stretch the finite spirit to the limits of its possibility to bring forth not only the fact of life, but a Godlike quality of life that is a created sharing in the loving thought of God from which the whole of creation emerges.
Beautiful stuff.
Bringing joy to people IS bringing glory to God
Crisanne Werner has a lovely essay up on Substack today about her changing understanding of how the experience of music, and specifically playing music, relates to her spirituality as she goes through a sort of deconstruction.
I, too, have had music be a core part of my spiritual experience for most all of my life. As a worship leader in evangelical churches, I have far too many times heard (and probably used) the “audience of One” phrase that Crisanne wrestles with in her essay. But I love where she lands with it:
…music can, and should, bring glory to God. It shouldn’t be manipulated by false humility; it should have an altruistic motivation. But something that didn’t occur to me as a teen/young adult, was that bringing joy to people is bringing glory to God. Using music to evoke emotions that people otherwise wouldn’t have access to is a gift to them. A gift of love. It falls firmly under the umbrella of loving God and loving others. Other people’s music is that same sort of gift to me- my life, especially my spiritual life, is parched without music. And, despite the proliferation of electronic recordings, nothing moves the soul more than an in-person experience. … On that church stage this weekend, I was fully at peace with my motivation of helping the congregation enter beauty and joy. I was at peace with my audience being One plus three hundred.
I met Crisanne at a retreat last fall and quickly learned that beneath her quiet veneer was a depth of brave wisdom just waiting to come out. I’ve so enjoyed reading her Substack this year. What a treat.
Reimagining Orthodoxy
Dr. Chris Green shared part of an essay today on a theology of disagreement. There’s a ton of good stuff in it. For example, early on:
Truth be told, what seem to be theological disagreements very often arise from and are borne along by other conflicts rooted deeply in hidden personal and interpersonal anxieties and ambitions. But at least some of our theological disagreements, I want to insist, are in fact the upshot of the Spirit’s transforming work taking shape in our as-yet-unperfected lives, moving us toward the “fullness of Christ” in which we find shalom.
This represents a beautiful freedom that I never found in my life in the American evangelical church.
But further, I want to commend to your thinking what he says about orthodoxy. In the evangelical and fundamentalist church, “orthodoxy” tends to be a cudgel used to keep unwanted questions and questioners away, and to scare the flock away from being tempted toward theological ideas that stray from the party line. Green, though, quotes Rowan Williams to suggest a different approach:
[W]e must reimagine the nature and purpose of orthodoxy. Instead of conceiving of it as a wholly-realized, already-perfected system of thought, we need to recognize it as a fullness of meaning toward which we strive, knowing full well we cannot master it even when in the End we know as we are known. Because the Church’s integrity is gift, not achievement, we can never know in advance “what will be drawn out of us by the pressure of Christ’s reality, what the full shape of a future orthodoxy might be.”
He continues, quoting Williams further:
Orthodoxy is not a system first and foremost of things you’ve got to believe, things you’ve got to tick off, but is a fullness, a richness of understanding. Orthodox is less an attempt just to make sure everybody thinks the same, and more like an attempt to keep Christian language as rich, as comprehensive as possible. Not comprehensive in the sense of getting everything in somehow, but comprehensive in the sense of keeping a vision of the whole universe in God’s purpose and action together.
A lot to chew on there, but I love the vision of orthodoxy as a commitment to keeping a vision for God’s continuing purpose and action to which we are only slowly understanding. Beautiful stuff.
You get the feeling from reading them that we might be loved
This old concert recording of Rich Mullins at a Wheaton College chapel service in 1997 is an internet classic, but listening through it again today I was struck by his wisdom about the love of God:
I am at an academic place so I need to speak highly of serious stuff. Although I have trouble with serious stuff, I have to admit, because I just think life’s too short to get too heavy about everything. And I think there are easier ways to lose money than by farming, and I think there are easier ways to become boring than by becoming academic. And I think, you know, the thing everybody really wants to know anyway is not what the Theory of Relativity is. But I think what we all really want to know anyway is whether we are loved or not. And that’s why I like the Scriptures, because you get the feeling from reading them that we might be. And if we were able to really know that, we wouldn’t worry about the rest of the stuff. The rest of it would be more fun, I think. Cause right now we take it so seriously, I think, because of our basic insecurity about whether we are loved are not.
I think you should study because your folks have probably sunk a lot of money into this, and it’d be ungrateful not to. But your life doesn’t depend on it. That was what I loved about being a student in my 40s as opposed to in my 20s is I had the great knowledge that you could live for at least half a century and not know a thing and get along pretty well.
Playing the Jeremiah 17:9 Card
“The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked; Who can know it?” – Jeremiah 17:9, NKJV
I had someone play the Jeremiah 17:9 card on me the other day. We were winding up a long email conversation wherein I finally was able to make clear that the standard evangelical hermeneutical approach to the Scriptures isn’t particularly appealing to me any more - that there are other approaches I find more compelling. (Brian Zahnd’s post Jesus Is What God Has To Say captures it pretty well for me right now at a high level.)
Once I got that message across, the message from my conversation partner was simple: beware your motives and understanding, because, after all, the heart is deceitful above all things!
In the evangelical circles I’ve spent my life in, Jeremiah 17:9 is used as a sort of ultimate trump card. If a discussion starts to go sideways, if someone comes to a logical conclusion that something they’ve been taught just can’t be correct, if someone questions how God could possibly be in the right for, say, ordering the murder of innocent children, this is the fallback. Of course your heart rebels against that thought. Your heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked! You need to accept that what we are teaching you is correct and ignore any prompting inside you that says otherwise!
There are problems, thought, with the Jeremiah 17:9 card.
Logical Coherence
First: playing the Jeremiah 17:9 card is logically incoherent. How did the card player become convinced of the rightness of their position in the first place? Undoubtedly through some combination of study, reasoning, and internal desire (even if subconscious) to hold that position. So how does the card player know that it isn’t his own heart that is deceiving him rather than yours deceiving you? If our heart (i.e. our reasoning as supplemented and powered by our instincts) is deceitful, what basis do you have for claiming that yours is so much less deceitful than mine that your conclusion is right and mine is wrong?
Other Bible Verses
I don’t recommend pulling single verses from their context and using them to justify positions. It’s a bad way to understand the Bible. But if you’re going to play that game, there is a broad selection of other verses about the heart that might provide an alternative perspective to Jeremiah 17:9.
Proverbs 4:23: “Above all else, guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it." - This sounds like your heart has something good in it that needs to be protected!
Psalm 51:10: “Create in me a pure heart, O God, and renew a steadfast spirit within me." - The psalmist sure seems to think that purity of heart is a goal worth asking for and attaining to.
Proverbs 3:3: “Let love and faithfulness never leave you; bind them around your neck, write them on the tablet of your heart." - We can have love and faithfulness written on our heart!
Ezekiel 36:26: “I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh." - If God gives me a new heart and a new spirit, maybe that new heart is good?
2 Corinthians 9:7: “Each of you should give what you have decided in your heart to give, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver." - This one is kinda fun… decide in your heart what to give! God will be happy with this!
Psalm 119:11: “I have hidden your word in my heart that I might not sin against you." - This one speaks directly to the effects of discipleship upon the heart - the heart is improved and the result is less sinning!
Hebrews 3:12: “See to it, brothers and sisters, that none of you has a sinful, unbelieving heart that turns away from the living God." - The existence of a “sinful, unbelieving heart” implies the existence of a holy, believing heart that is turned toward God.
Proverbs 23:15: “My son, if your heart is wise, then my heart will be glad indeed." - Solomon suggests that a heart can be wise!
I hope the point here is clear - if you want to play the game of cherry picking to proof-text your point, why is the Jeremiah 17:9 card a more valid and applicable cherry than any of these verses?
Potential for Gaslighting and Abuse
Gaslighting is a strategy in which a perpetrator bends another person’s sense of reality and belief system, making that person second-guess themselves in a way that is beneficial to the perpetrator. Typical gaslighting phrases include things like this:
It’s not hard to see how “the heart is deceitful above all things” could fit right in to a gaslighting strategy. A spiritual leader abuses a person in some way. That person responds with a concern. This doesn’t feel right. Something is off here. The leader points right to Jeremiah. Your heart is deceitful and desperately wicked. Don’t trust it. And the abuse continues as the victim is further confused between the truth of the matter clear to their conscience and the deception and malpractice of their abuser.
Finally
A robust examination of discernment - how it works, how we integrate our instinctual “gut feelings”, how we experience the influence of the Holy Spirit, how we come to understand God’s Word and leading through the wisdom of community - would require far more words than I could write here. Whatever discernment is, though, it’s certainly not so simply summed up as “your heart is deceitful, don’t trust it”.
Instead of living in a constant spirit of fear, Christians should live in a spirit of confidence that God is guiding them. If you’ve made it this far, you’ll forgive me one proof-text for this that also suggests God wants us to use our minds, too.
For God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind.
2 Timothy 1:7, NKJV
_Playing card illustration via the Redemption CCG Fandom wiki._
My own personal Philippians 3
If someone else thinks they have reasons to put confidence in the flesh, I have more: circumcised on the eighth day, of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews; in regard to the law, a Pharisee; as for zeal, persecuting the church; as for righteousness based on the law, faultless.
But whatever were gains to me I now consider loss for the sake of Christ. What is more, I consider everything a loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things.
–The Apostle Paul, Letter to the Philippians
I have many times read this passage and heard it taught with the message “your family history and good works don’t matter, only giving up everything and serving Jesus matters”. As I read it today, though, where I am in my Christian journey, it hits a little bit different.
My own personal Philippians 3
If anyone thinks they have confidence in their evangelical Christian credentials, I have more.
I prayed to ask Jesus into my heart when I was 3. I was baptized by immersion at a Christian & Missionary Alliance church after giving testimony to my faith when I was 7 or 8.
My church started AWANA clubs when I was in first grade. I completed 3 years worth of Sparks club in 2 years to get the associated trophy. I completed every year of AWANA after that, all the way through high school, memorizing hundreds of Bible verses. I was given the AWANA Citation Award at AWANA national Bible Quizzing and Olympics. My team didn’t win the Olympics, but won the sportsmanship award, which is probably even more meritorious.
I was homeschooled in a Christian homeschool grades 1 through 12. I learned from the best Christian curricula. I soaked up Ken Ham’s creation science videos in Sunday School and youth group. As a 7th grader I sent a letter to my best friend, aghast that he entertained the possibility of “long-day” creation. I quoted 2 Timothy 4 to him and said I would be one of the ones who stood up when others were going wobbly.
I attended an IBLP Basic Seminar when I was in high school. I bought and took home a cassette tape of their Gothard-blessed choir arrangements of hymns, excited to have Godly music to listen to. I attended a church with the authors of a Quiverfull book and the midwife who reported in Gothard’s newsletter that a Cabbage Patch Kids doll was being used by the devil to prevent a healthy home birth.
I was fully invested in the political implications of my evangelical faith. I speed-dialed Rush Limbaugh and tried to convince his call screener that I should talk to Rush about the dangers of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. I bought a constitutional law overview book written by Michael Farris and was jittery with excitement when I got to hear him speak and shake his hand. I marched in a parade carrying a campaign sign for a Republican Senate candidate.
I sat in years of adult “precept by precept, line by line” Bible study. I went through Evangelism Explosion training, memorized all the cards, and went door-to-door asking people “if you died tonight, and God asked ‘why should I let you into my heaven?’, what would you say?”.
I passed up full-ride scholarship offers to public universities and instead took out loans to attend a Christian university. I lived in a dormitory that only allowed opposite-gender visits for 3 hours on Friday nights and 3 hours on Sunday afternoons under supervision. I took 15 credits of Bible and Christian ethics along with my engineering classes in order to graduate.
I started leading worship in church when I was in high school. I led worship at church and in college chapel during my college years. I joined a Baptist church within the first month of moving to Iowa and within the first year was leading worship there. I formed the team, led practices, led the music at multiple services every week for years. I met weekly with the church staff to evaluate the previous week’s services and plan for the upcoming week.
I became a deacon at that Baptist church before the age of 30. Then I became an elder. I attended the Emmaus Bible College pastor’s conference, the Moody Bible Institute pastor’s conference, and the Desiring God pastor’s conference. I led Bible studies, did in-home pastoral care visits, tracked giving and sent out yearly giving receipts.
I was part of an elder team that planted a new church in an under-churched neighborhood near downtown in our city. I did tech setup and tear-down and led worship there every week for two years.
I moved to a larger Evangelical Free church. I served on the worship team there and became the interim music ministry leader when the staff worship pastor left. For multiple years we did three-service weekends spanning Saturday night and Sunday morning with full band and tech team.
I read hundreds of books on theology and the church. I read John Piper, Tim Keller, Don Carson, Francis Schaeffer, Mark Driscoll, Russell Moore, and N. T. Wright. I led book discussions, wrote blog posts about them, and bought extra copies to give away to others.
I had three children and raised them in the church. I pushed for us to homeschool them. I dragged them to church every time we went. I did read-alouds of the Jesus Storybook Bible and all the Chronicles of Narnia with them. I drove them to youth group, encouraged them to volunteer, taught them instruments or got them lessons so they could join the worship team themselves.
But Jesus
Somewhere in all those years, Jesus stepped in.
Jesus opened my eyes to his love for every person. Even and especially for those who didn’t look like me or believe the way I did.
Jesus made it clear to me that all my book learning and ability to argue people into a corner was a harsh cacophony if I didn’t actually love those people and want their best.
Jesus showed me that God loves my loved ones even more than I do, and that God’s love is the same in kind, and infinitely greater in quality and quantity, as my own love for family is.
Jesus made it clear to me that so much of the memorization and learning and doctrine we were so proud of as evangelicals manifested as unloving, judgmental, manipulative gate-keeping to those who weren’t in our little club.
Jesus helped me see that God’s plan for the universe is so much greater and more redemptive than rescuing a small fraction of holy humans out of a burning earth into an ethereal heavenly plane.
Jesus made it clear to me that his desire is for followers who love God and love their neighbor rather than those who cling to power through politics, nationalism, racism, and misogyny.
Jesus showed me that loving my neighbor might actually mean directly caring for my literal next-door neighbors more than it means laboring to support church programs while I hold good intentions in my heart for others and invite them to those programs.
Whatever my accomplishments were to me, I now count them as nothing compared to knowing the freedom and confidence that Jesus has given me as I now know him as the true representation of God, a God who fully knows, loves, and embraces each one of us just as we are.
Amen.
Stanley Hauerwas on sin, character formation, and fear
From Chapter 3 of Stanley Hauerwas’ book on Christian ethics The Peaceable Kingdom, this wonderful insight into how we can think about sin as interacting with our own power, control, and self-direction (emphasis mine):
We are rooted in sin just to the extent we think we have the inherent power to claim our life - our character - as our particular achievement. In other words, our sin - our fundamental sin - is the assumption that we are the creators of the history through which we acquire and possess our character. Sin is the form our character takes as a result of our fear that we will be “nobody” if we lose control of our lives.
Moreover our need to be in control is the basis for the violence of our lives. For since our “control” and “power” cannot help but be built on an insufficient basis, we must use force to maintain the illusion that we are in control. We are deeply afraid of losing what unity of self we have achieved. Any idea or person threatening that unity must be either manipulated or eliminated…
This helps us understand why we are so resistant to the training offered by the gospel, for we simply cannot believe that the self might be formed without fear of the other.
This gets to the heart of a lot of the discussions I’ve had with my Dad lately about the first step in making a positive spiritual change (which might be what Hauerwas here calls “the training offered by the gospel”) is to be freed from fear. One needs to be secure in their standing with God and with their community to be able to change and grow. (The counter-example here is frequently seen: spiritual communities that make any interest in ideas outside the accepted orthodoxy grounds for exclusion and expulsion.)
Hauerwas continues:
Our sin lies precisely in our unbelief - our distrust that we are creatures of a gracious creator known only to the extent we accept the invitation to become part of his kingdom. It is only be learning to make that story - that story of God - our own that we gain the freedom necessary to make our life our own. Only then can I learn to accept what has happened to me (which includes what I have done) without resentment. It is then that I am able to accept my body, my psychological conditioning, my implicit distrust of others and myself, as mine, as part of my story. And the acceptance of myself as a sinner is made possible only because it is an acceptance of God’s acceptance. This I am able to see myself as a sinner and yet to go on.
This does not mean that tragedy is eliminated from our lives; rather we have the means to recognize and accept the tragic without turning to violence. For finally our freedom is learning how to exist in the world, a violent world, in peace with ourselves and others. The violence of the world is but the mirror of the violence of our lives. We say we desire peace, but we have not the souls for it. We fear the boredom a commitment to peace would entail. As a result the more we seek to bring “under our control”, the more violent we have to become to protect what we have. And the more violent we allow ourselves to become, the more vulnerable we are to challenges.
This is growth toward wholeness: “the means to recognize and accept the tragic without turning to violence”.
For what does “peace with ourselves” involve? It surely does not mean that we will live untroubled - though it may be true that no one can really harm a just person. Nor does it mean that we are free of self-conflict, for we remain troubled sinners - indeed, that may well be the best description of the redeemed. To be “at peace with ourselves” means we have the confidence, gained through participation in the adventure we call God’s kingdom, to trust ourselves and others. Such confidence becomes the source of our character and our freedom as we are loosed from a debilitating preoccupation with ourselves. Moreover by learning to be at peace with ourselves, we find we can live at peace with one another. And this freedom, after all, is the only freedom worth having.
Capon’s Wager on God’s Love
I have on occasion paraphrased something Fr. Robert Capon wrote about God’s love as ”if God is a bastard, we’re all in trouble”. I went digging for the original quote today and came up short of any such choice phrase, but for reference, here’s the longer quote from Between Noon and Three which makes that point, if just a bit less colorfully:
…I have, in this parable, been working only one side of the street — in my effort to do justice to grace, I have neglected justice itself. I am fully aware that in doing so, I have laid myself open to the charge of granting not only screwing licenses but also franchises for far worse things: for pride and prejudice, for torture and exploitation — in short, for getting away with murder.
In my defense, let me point out that Scripture lays itself open to the same charge — and that the other side of the street has been worked so long, so hard, and so often that most people don’t even know there is a sunny side…
But there’s more to it than that. I have expounded Saint Paul to you as saying that not only are we dead to sin but that God is dead to it too — that he has put himself out of commission on the whole subject of blame. And so, indeed, he has: ”I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more.”
I am fully aware that the Scriptures are paradoxical — that God speaks with a forked tongue — and that every lovely thing he says on the side of leniency can be matched by a dozen stringencies that will curl your hair. But I am also convinced that each of us has to make a decision about such utterances. When someone tells you many different things about his attitude toward you, you must first look at him long and long, and decide for yourself whether you care about him at all. But if you finally come to the conclusion that you do care, you must then decide which of his words you will take as his governing word. You ask me why I think God’s leniency governs his severity? Why grace is his sovereign attribute? Well, all I can say to you is that having been a father who has spoken out of both sides of his mouth to six children for twenty-six years — and having all those years believed in a heavenly Father who saves us not by sitting in his penthouse issuing edicts but by sending us the warm, furry body of a Son who drank the nights away with us and died obscurely of the foolishness of it all — all I can say is that I put my bet on the left fork of the tongue. It is my best hope that when my children think of everything I have said and done to them, they choose to remember the times of my severity when I just gave them a kiss on the cheek, poured myself a Scotch, and shut up. And it is my last hope that God hopes the same for himself.
So I really do make no apology for landing on the sunny side of the street. I am sorry if I have offended you; but to me there are some things that simply override everything that comes before or after. And I am sorrier still if you do not feel the same way. For without that ultimate cassation — without that final quashing of the subpoena, that throwing of the prosecution’s case out of court which is the only music there is for the ears of the hopelessly guilty — you and I, Virginia, are simply sunk.
— Fr. Robert F. Capon, Between Noon and Three, Chapter 17
On LGBTQIA+ Affirmation
June 2022 was quite a month for me. It started with the death of a long-time friend. It ended with my being on a phone call with my father while he experienced a stroke-like event. (Turns out: not a stroke. He’s home, and doing ok. Hallelujah.) In the middle was a thing called Pride Month, which had a little more visibility at our home than usual. Two of my kids identify as LGBTQIA+ and have embraced visibility more this year than ever before. (I got their permission to say this here.) So, one of these things is not like the other, but stick with me here and I’ll connect the dots.
Part 1: Online Community
Since Geof died last month, the online community he fostered for nearly 20 years (referred to as “RMFO” for reasons long since forgotten) has been renewed. I have hosted two Zoom “happy hour” calls, and both times 15-20 people have joined, chatted for 2-3 hours, and left with a request that we schedule another one. We have spent these hours catching up on life and recounting our own personal histories as they interact with the RMFO community: singles who met their future spouses in the group; couples once struggling to conceive who now have teenagers; marriages, divorces, job changes, moves, faith evolutions. Online friendships have led to “real-life” friendships, meet-ups, and job opportunities. At the end of the first call I realized that, while I had long considered many of these people meaningful to me, the call helped me realize that I was meaningful to them, too. My thought last week as I closed out the second call: this is the closest thing I’ve had to a healthy, functioning community in my adult life.
During last week’s call I talked about how my own personal views on some issues have evolved over the years, and how I have struggled to find an in-person community (specifically, a church community) where that evolution was welcome. Share those views too loudly and you will be welcome to find some other church to serve and worship at. Five years of quiet discomfort weren’t enough to dislodge me from my last church; their tepid COVID response was the straw that gave me the courage to break the proverbial camel’s back. Two years later I still haven’t found a new place to join. If I’m honest, I haven’t really looked too hard.
Part 2: My Dad
My dad is talking a little slower thanks to the medications he’s on after his health scare, but he’s not talking any less. When we talked last week after he got home from the hospital, we spent a while comparing current reading lists and discussing how some of the books I have given him over the years have helped guide his journey out of a fundamentalist faith into something much more open and gracious. That’s his story to tell, not mine. But what he said toward the end of the call stuck with me: that coming close to death now makes him unwilling to stay quiet on the topics important to him. And I thought to myself: that’s a lesson I should take to heart here in my 40s.
Part 3: Chuck Pearson
Chuck Pearson is a friend of one of the RMFO guys — someone I have never met but have followed on Twitter for years. Last week he posted a beautiful essay about his journey leaving a tenured professorship at a Southern Baptist university when he knew he would eventually be required to sign a “personal lifestyle statement” that would “[force] him to disown his LGBTQ+ friends and family”. Chuck ultimately found a post at another university, but still sat quiet about the topic of LGBTQ+ inclusion:
Ultimately, it stayed private because I didn’t want to burn those bridges. Even as I made that realization that I had to choose between two sides I cared about deeply, I couldn’t bring myself to take that final step of declaring my choice.
In his essay, Chuck quotes from an Alan Jacobs essay from 2014 that argues for Christians to stand firm against the cultural evolution of views on sexuality. Here is Jacobs' conclusion [preserving the emphasis from the original post]:
Either throughout your history or at some significant point in your history you let your views on a massively important issue be shaped largely by what was acceptable in the cultural circles within which you hoped to be welcome. How do you plan to keep that from happening again?
Clearly Jacobs has in mind a call to resist the desire to be welcomed by “the world” by accepting “worldly” views on sexuality. But for me his question takes the exact opposite orientation. How long have I been convinced about full acceptance of LGBTQIA+ people in the church but been afraid to say so, knowing that it would make me unwelcome in the evangelical church circles I have run in my entire life? Far too long.
Conclusion
So let me make a long-overdue statement as clearly as I can. I am a Christian, and I affirm those who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, and asexual as they are, unconditionally, including their full inclusion into the assembled body of Christ known as the local church. I know there are those who would say I cannot hold that view and be a Christian. I reject that assertion.
There are multiple serious approaches to the Scripture on the topic which I will not go into here. Suffice it for now to say that you cannot read Scripture as a flat text. It is the product of thousands of years of God’s progressive revelation as understood and recorded by humans. In the end you have to come to some conclusion on which texts capture most clearly the essence of who God is, and use those as the framework from which to understand the rest.
And so, to quote Brian Zahnd:
God is like Jesus.
God has always been like Jesus.
There has never been a time when God was not like Jesus.
We have not always known what God is like—
But now we do.
Jesus taught these two principles in summation of all the teaching: love God with everything you have, and love your neighbor as yourself. He embraced the outsiders and rebuked the self-righteous. He called us to follow Him in lives of self-sacrificial love.
In addition to Jesus’ teaching, we have the witness of the Holy Spirit in the lives of our LGBTQIA+ brothers and sisters — so many dear, tender souls who consistently model what it means to follow Jesus, even in the midst of a church that rarely welcomes them. And to that I can only respond as the Apostle Peter did after first seeing the conversion of Gentiles to Christ: “Can anyone object to their being baptized, now that they have received the Holy Spirit just as we did?” (Acts 10:47)
Rachel Held Evans summarized it this way: “The apostles remembered what many modern Christians tend to forget—that what makes the gospel offensive isn’t who it keeps out but who it lets in.”
To this I say: Amen. May it be so.