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 Beatitudes (Brian Zahnd Version)

I’m not sure what social media Brian Zahnd is on these days, but he shared his own retelling of Jesus’ Beatitudes on Facebook yesterday and they’re beautiful enough that I’d like to capture them here.

The Beatitudes (BZV)

Blessed are those who are poor at being spiritual,
For the kingdom of heaven is well-suited for ordinary people.

Blessed are the depressed who mourn and grieve,
For they create space to encounter comfort from another.

Blessed are the gentle and trusting, who are not grasping and clutching,
For God will personally guarantee their share as heaven comes to earth.

Blessed are those who ache for the world to be made right,
For them the government of God is a dream come true.

Blessed are those who give mercy,
For they will get it back when they need it most.

Blessed are those who have a clean window in their soul,
For they will perceive God when and where others don’t.

Blessed are the bridge-builders in a war-torn world,
For they are God’s children working in the family business.

Blessed are those who are mocked and misunderstood for the right reasons,
For the kingdom of heaven comes to earth amidst such persecution.

Defenselessness is what makes love indestructible

Fr. Matt Tebbe has a long Facebook post laying out how White Evangelicals in America have a supremacy problem. It’s a good read and compellingly argued, but what I want to share here is the comment conversation between Fr. Matt and Fr. Kenneth Tanner.

Fr. Kenneth:

The healing of this comes by revelation that Jesus Christ is humble and lowly of heart: the infant in the feed box, the criminal on the tree; to worship this God is to be in union with poverty.

This God joins us in the poverty of the grave, and only from that solidarity (with everyone) can we truly know anyone well or live well or die well. Trust in the story of Jesus is the undoing of supremacy.

If you want to know how a Christian can be attracted or seduced by worldly powers, just take a look at what they trust about Jesus Christ.

Fr. Matt:

yes and

Jesus has been (ab)used for centuries, seized and made king, crowned the face and name of supremacist demagoguery and oppression.

Jesus is largely rejected - his life and teaching - in two ways:

  1. that doesn’t work anymore and
  2. Jesus’s teaching isn’t possible/realistic to be obeyed - rather - it functions to bring us to the end of ourselves so we can be ‘saved by faith through grace’.

The paschal mystery is indeed the hope of the world- overcoming the slavery to death in our bodies as we live in love - and what we need in this moment is a robust political theology that makes this embodiment material, concrete, specific, tangible.

And back to Fr. Kenneth:

and that fruit is borne by bearing accurate witness to Jesus Christ … I’m not convinced the American Church knows the story of Jesus, and so we trust in false gods … good politics has its roots in good Christology

to put a finer point on it … God is revealed to us in poverty and surrender; God is poverty … defenselessnees is what makes love indestructible

I am so thankful for these men and their teaching.

Review: The Widening of God's Mercy by Drs. Christopher and Richard Hays

There was no small amount of buzz accompanying the announcement of The Widening of God’s Mercy’s publication. Father and son, both Biblical scholars of some renown, publishing a volume where the elder would reverse his public and well-known position about same-sex relationships is not an event that most anyone had on their Evangelical Christianity 2024 bingo card. I was not immune to the anticipation, immediately pre-ordering the book. My eagerness was tempered only by the depth of my to-read shelf, which means I am only now reading and commenting on this book.

[Note: I found out only hours before writing this post that Dr. Richard Hays passed away less than two weeks ago at the age of 76, as the result of pancreatic cancer. May he rest in peace and rise in glory.]

The Widening of God’s Mercy, written by Dr. Richard B. Hays and his son Dr. Christopher B. Hayes, describes a stunning change of position on Christian acceptance of same-sex relationships. Richard had, in his 1996 book The Moral Vision of the New Testament, argued against their acceptance. His book has been used as a primary authority by many evangelicals over the past three decades, interpreting a handful of New Testament verses seemingly opposed to homosexuality as conclusive. And so this book comes as a genuine surprise. The book is concise, clear, easily readable, generous, and contrite. And yet for the life of me I can’t understand why this was their chosen approach to the question.

Widening makes the case that a careful reading of the Bible will show, contrary to traditional theological assertion, that God frequently changes his mind, being influenced by humans who appeal to God. The book is structured in three parts. The first part deals with Old Testament texts; the second with the New Testament, and the brief third part drawing conclusions.

Old Testament

The OT section is the most convincing in that respect, discussing texts from Genesis through the Prophets where the text blatantly describes God changing his mind. Traditional interpreters might argue instead that since God is, per theological agreement, unchangeable, that these texts must mean something more like humans came to a new understanding that looked like God changing God’s mind. Drs. Hays choose instead to take the text at face value: God changes his mind, and almost always in favor of more mercy and more inclusion. Good enough so far.

New Testament

The New Testament doesn’t include (at least to my recollection) any passages that explicitly describe God “changing his mind”. The second section of this book instead reviews a multitude of cases in the Gospels where Jesus brings a new, more expansive, more merciful interpretation of the OT law. Healing is appropriate on the Sabbath. Women are treated as fully equal to men. Prostitutes and sinners are embraced, not rejected.

It then spends its most significant time in Acts, examining Peter’s vision and experience with Cornelius, resulting in the church’s acceptance of Gentiles. This is the key interpretive text for the Hays’ as they argue for LGBTQ inclusion. They suggest three steps discerned from the Acts account of the subsequent Jerusalem Council that could be used for the church today in similar re-evaluations of understanding:

  1. The community’s discernment depends on imaginative reinterpretation of scripture.
  2. The community’s discernment depends on paying attention to stories about where God was currently at work.
  3. The discernment is made in and by the community.

This, too, is good as far as it goes. The church community should work together with the Spirit to discern God at work and how our understanding of God’s work needs to change over time.

And yet…

But this is where the book’s argument struggles. The section on the NT never argues that the NT accounts represent God changing his mind. It argues for the church’s “creative reinterpretation” of Scripture based on the leading of the Spirit, but the authors don’t try to argue that this represents a change of God’s mind. One could just as reasonably argue (as I think is more common) that God’s mind has always been for mercy and inclusion, but that humans have progressively had a clearer understanding of God’s mind over time.

If God’s change of mind is how we understand these interpretive evolutions, I am also left wishing for more insight into how we know that God’s mind has changed. What’s the trigger? The authors point to a series of interpretive changes of the past — they mention the acceptance of slavery as an example — but leave the how to the reader’s imagination. (They also ignore the many historic voices who spoke out against slavery even when the official voice of the church accepted it. Had God’s mind already changed and the church was just slow to catch up?)

Let me explain. No, it’s too much, let me sum up.

Am I happy where the authors have landed in their views of sexuality? Yes. Is it very heartening to see men admit their change of heart in public? For sure. But is their argument compelling? In my opinion, no, it’s not. I am sympathetic to arguments that God can change. It’s certainly the easiest way to deal with all the texts that say God changes his mind, and also the easiest way to think, say, about the efficacy of prayer. But the book fails to tie that idea to believers’ renewed understandings in the New Testament, and progressive revelation seems to me a much more reasonable interpretation given the textual evidence.

Curiosity → Attention → Love

I’ve been letting that quote from Ta-Nehisi Coates rattle around in my head a bit the last 24 hours, and it brought this quote to mind from the wonderful movie Lady Bird:

Sister Sarah Joan (SSJ): “You clearly love Sacramento.”
Lady Bird (LB): “I do?”
SSJ: “You write about Sacramento so affectionately, and with such care.”
LB: “Well, I was just describing it.”
SSJ: “Well, it comes across as love”.
LB: “Sure, I guess I pay attention.”
SSJ: “Don’t you think maybe they are the same thing — love and attention?”

Coates laments the lack of curiosity by those in great power of those with none. Another way to say that, I think, is that the lack of curiosity is demonstrated in a lack of attention. And, to riff on the thought from Lady Bird, that lack of attention reveals a lack of love.

To put it conversely: curiosity about our neighbor should result in paying attention to our neighbor, which should then result in us loving our neighbor.

Amen.

(Personal commentary: my wife is such an excellent model of this for me. She’s inordinately curious about people, including/especially our immediate physical neighbors. That curiosity results in attention and actual demonstrated love for those people. I could learn a lot from her.)

On Jimmy Carter and Evangelical salvation anxiety

Former president Jimmy Carter’s state funeral is today. Carter, perhaps one of the most famously evangelical Christians of the 1970s, continued to work in service to God and his neighbor for the four decades after he left the White House. Whether it was building houses with Habitat for Humanity or teaching Sunday School at his local Baptist church, he maintained the humble integrity that was the hallmark of his presidency.

To recognize this, Christianity Today editor Russell Moore (a famous evangelical and Baptist of the current decade) writes in CT today arguing for Carter’s salvation. That, 50 years after his election to the presidency, this is still the topic of debate in the evangelical world highlights the level of anxiety rampant in evangelicalism, even (or maybe especially) in determinism-friendly Calvinist evangelicalism, about salvation assurance coming through having the right doctrine and cultural positions.

I keenly remember this discussion in family settings when I was a kid. My grandparents were all faithful members of mainline Protestant churches (United Methodist and ELCA), and from the midst of our most fundamentalist evangelicalism there were anguished family discussions about whether or not they were “really saved” because they couldn’t/didn’t articulate the Gospel message the way we learned and shared it. As a young teenager I knew enough that I was supposed to be concerned for them, and suspicious of the churches they attended.

My paternal grandfather passed away in 2010, and opportunity of his funeral and the family gatherings around it gave me the chance to hear stories I’d never heard before. I knew my grandpa as a hard working, blue collar guy who loved his family and liked to tell a good joke. I knew from our visits to their house that he was a diligent member of his Lutheran church, with a big cross necklace hanging over his necktie as he headed out the door on Sunday morning. But then I heard about his other practical service. He was a zillion-gallon blood donor. For years he arranged rides so that mentally impaired residents of the local group home could attend church. And I started to ask myself: if evangelicals suspected this man, who faithfully loved his family, was baptized, confessed the historic creeds, participated in the Eucharist regularly, and served his neighbors, was likely “not saved” because he didn’t articulate the same Gospel presentation or support the same political party they did, maybe something was wrong with their (our) evaluation grid.

I was a couple years into my early evangelical deconstruction at that point, but the realization triggered by my grandpa was a significant further step in that direction. Is God really going to put on eternal blast those faithful folks who just didn’t articulate “the gospel” quite right? And how right do you have to be to be “right enough”? (There’s that evangelical anxiety!) And if we can logically posit that even the theologian who has it the most right (I think at this point I was using Al Mohler or John Piper in this argument) is wrong about maybe 10% of his theology, how does he know which 10%? And why doesn’t that inspire a little more humility in his approach to others? And does it really make sense then to believe or fear that there’s some threshold of theological accuracy to pass the heavenly gate?

Fast-forward to today. I now, too, am a member of a mainline Protestant church. I am quite convinced that the hallmarks of a “real faith” are a love for God demonstrated in a loving service to those around us, not in some doctrinal or political purity test. I’m also pretty convinced that, through Jesus, eternal reconciliation is coming for everyone, but that’s a different post.

If you are still anxiously in the middle of the evangelical game of trying to establish a level of doctrinal understanding and correctness that’s “good enough” for God and your church leaders, friends, it’s time to take a lesson from WOPR: the only winning move is not to play.