‘But the most important thing to say at the end of this discussion, and of this section of the book, is that heaven and hell are not, so to speak, what the whole game is about.
This is one of the central surprises in the Christian hope. The whole point of my argument so far is that the question of what happens to me after death is not the major, central, framing question that centuries of theological tradition have supposed. The NT, true to its OT roots, regularly insists that the major, central, framing question is that of God’s purpose of rescue and re-creation for the whole world, the entire cosmos. The destiny of individual human beings must be understood with that context- not simply in the sense that we are only part of a much larger picture but also in the sense that part of the whole part of being saved saved in the present is so that we can play a vital role within the larger picture and purpose.
And that in turn makes us realize that the question of our own destiny, in terms of the alternatives of joy or woe, is probably the wrong way of looking at the whole question.
To insist on heaven and hell as the ultimate question- to insist, in other words, that what happens eventually to individual humans is the most important thing in the world- maybe to make a mistake similar to the one made by the Jewish people in the 1st Century, the mistake that both Jesus and Paul addressed. Israel believed (so Paul tells us, and he should know) that the purposes of the creator God all came down to this question: how is God going to rescue Israel?
What the Gospel of Jesus revealed however, was that the purposes of God were reaching out to a different question: how is God going to rescue the world through Israel and thereby rescue Israel itself as part of the process but not as the point of it all? ’
Wednesday, December 16, 2009
Beginning at the Beginning 2
One of my blogs earlier this month was about the importance of beginning at the beginning when it comes to trying to understand God's story with us. It wasn’t a very good blog I don’t think- not very clear. This, however, is a good example of the danger I was trying to point out when we begin the Bible in Genesis 3, and forget about the first two chapter:
‘Mention salvation, and almost all Western Christians assume that you mean going to heaven when you die. But a moment’s thought, in the light of all we have said so far, reveals that this simply cannot be right. Salvation means, of course, rescue. But what are we ultimately rescued from? The obvious answer is death. But if, when we die, all that happens is that our bodies decompose while our souls (or whatever word we want to use for our continuous existence) go elsewhere, this doesn’t mean we’ve been rescued from death.
It simply means that we’ve died.’
'And if God’s good creation- of the world, of life as we know it, of our glorious and remarkable bodies, brains, and bloodstreams- really is good, and if God wants to reaffirm that goodness in a wonderful act of new creation at the last, then to see death of the body and the escape of the soul as salvation is not simply slightly off course, in need of a few subtle alterations and modifications. It is totally and utterly wrong. It is colluding with death. It is conniving at death’s destruction of God’s good, image-bearing human creatures while consoling ourselves with the thought that the really important bit of ourselves is saved from this wicked, nasty body and this sad, dark world of space, time, and matter!
As we have seen, the whole of the bible, from Genesis to Revelation, speaks out against such nonsense. It is however, what most Western Christians, including most Bible Christians of whatever sort, actually believe. This is a serious state of affairs reinforced not only in popular teaching but also in liturgies, public prayers hymns and homilies of every kind.
Another difficulty I have with so many theologies and lifestyles that begin their world in Genesis 3, is that it teaches us (at least subconsciously) that God’s original plan failed, that we are a Plan B of sorts:
‘To snatch souls away to a disembodied heaven would destroy the whole point. God is to become king of the whole world at last. And he will do this not by declaring that the inner dynamic of creation (that is to be ruled by humans) was a mistake, nor by declaring that the inner dynamic of his covenant (that Israel would be the means of saving the nations) was a failure, but rather by fulfilling them both. That is more or less what Paul’s letter to the Romans is all about’
‘The point is this. When God saves people in this life, by working through his Spirit to bring them to faith and by leading them to follow Jesus in discipleship, prayer, holiness, hope, and love, such people are designed- it isn’t too strong a word- to be a sign and foretaste of what God wants to do for the entire cosmos. What’s more, such people are not just to be a sign and foretaste of that ultimate salvation, they are to be part of the means by which God makes this happen in both the present and the future.’
‘Mention salvation, and almost all Western Christians assume that you mean going to heaven when you die. But a moment’s thought, in the light of all we have said so far, reveals that this simply cannot be right. Salvation means, of course, rescue. But what are we ultimately rescued from? The obvious answer is death. But if, when we die, all that happens is that our bodies decompose while our souls (or whatever word we want to use for our continuous existence) go elsewhere, this doesn’t mean we’ve been rescued from death.
It simply means that we’ve died.’
'And if God’s good creation- of the world, of life as we know it, of our glorious and remarkable bodies, brains, and bloodstreams- really is good, and if God wants to reaffirm that goodness in a wonderful act of new creation at the last, then to see death of the body and the escape of the soul as salvation is not simply slightly off course, in need of a few subtle alterations and modifications. It is totally and utterly wrong. It is colluding with death. It is conniving at death’s destruction of God’s good, image-bearing human creatures while consoling ourselves with the thought that the really important bit of ourselves is saved from this wicked, nasty body and this sad, dark world of space, time, and matter!
As we have seen, the whole of the bible, from Genesis to Revelation, speaks out against such nonsense. It is however, what most Western Christians, including most Bible Christians of whatever sort, actually believe. This is a serious state of affairs reinforced not only in popular teaching but also in liturgies, public prayers hymns and homilies of every kind.
Another difficulty I have with so many theologies and lifestyles that begin their world in Genesis 3, is that it teaches us (at least subconsciously) that God’s original plan failed, that we are a Plan B of sorts:
‘To snatch souls away to a disembodied heaven would destroy the whole point. God is to become king of the whole world at last. And he will do this not by declaring that the inner dynamic of creation (that is to be ruled by humans) was a mistake, nor by declaring that the inner dynamic of his covenant (that Israel would be the means of saving the nations) was a failure, but rather by fulfilling them both. That is more or less what Paul’s letter to the Romans is all about’
‘The point is this. When God saves people in this life, by working through his Spirit to bring them to faith and by leading them to follow Jesus in discipleship, prayer, holiness, hope, and love, such people are designed- it isn’t too strong a word- to be a sign and foretaste of what God wants to do for the entire cosmos. What’s more, such people are not just to be a sign and foretaste of that ultimate salvation, they are to be part of the means by which God makes this happen in both the present and the future.’
Evangelism
‘The word evangelism still sends shivers down the spines of many people. There are various reasons for this. Some people have been scared off by frightening or bullying harangues or tactless and offensive or embarrassing and naïve presentations of the gospel. Others have never suffered such indignities but heard or read about them and are glad to have a good excuse to pour scorn on all evangelism- as though, because some people do it badly, nobody should ever do it at all.’
‘Much evangelism has, of course, consisted of taking the traditional framework of a heaven-and-hell expectation and persuading people that it’s time they consider the heaven option and grab it while they have the chance. What’s stopping them getting there is sin; the solution is provided in Jesus Christ; all the have to do is to accept it!
Millions of Christians today are Christians because they heard that message and responded to it. Am I therefore saying-since plainly I think that way of putting things is at best lopsided- that they have been deceived or mistaken?
No.
God gloriously honours all kinds of ways of announcing the good news. I do not suppose for a moment that my own way of preaching or talking to individuals about God is perfect and without flaws, and yet God (I believe) has graciously honoured some at least of what I do. No doubt he would have been far more honoured if I had done it better and more prayerfully. No doubt the flaws in my own preaching, and the difficult flaws in other presentations, will eventually show up in the Christian lives of those who come to faith as a result, and no doubt we all ought to polish up and improve what we do for the sake of our hearers and the honour of God. But, as every generation knows, it isn’t the quality of the preaching that counts but the faithfulness of God…God works as a result of prayers and faithfulness, not technique and cleverness.
But none of this is an excuse for not understanding what happens when we evangelize or not shaping the way we do it in accordance with the full biblical gospel.’
‘Much evangelism has, of course, consisted of taking the traditional framework of a heaven-and-hell expectation and persuading people that it’s time they consider the heaven option and grab it while they have the chance. What’s stopping them getting there is sin; the solution is provided in Jesus Christ; all the have to do is to accept it!
Millions of Christians today are Christians because they heard that message and responded to it. Am I therefore saying-since plainly I think that way of putting things is at best lopsided- that they have been deceived or mistaken?
No.
God gloriously honours all kinds of ways of announcing the good news. I do not suppose for a moment that my own way of preaching or talking to individuals about God is perfect and without flaws, and yet God (I believe) has graciously honoured some at least of what I do. No doubt he would have been far more honoured if I had done it better and more prayerfully. No doubt the flaws in my own preaching, and the difficult flaws in other presentations, will eventually show up in the Christian lives of those who come to faith as a result, and no doubt we all ought to polish up and improve what we do for the sake of our hearers and the honour of God. But, as every generation knows, it isn’t the quality of the preaching that counts but the faithfulness of God…God works as a result of prayers and faithfulness, not technique and cleverness.
But none of this is an excuse for not understanding what happens when we evangelize or not shaping the way we do it in accordance with the full biblical gospel.’
Tuesday, December 15, 2009
So What?
To me, this is what distinguishes Wright’s book with others like it. It is one thing to disagree with something. It is another thing to articulate why you disagree (although sometimes discussing this is not worth the hassle...). It is, additionally, an entirely other (and much more admirable) thing to then articulate what you believe instead. Wright does all three with an eloquence, love, respect and authority that unfortunately are not often found in discussions on these topics.
Perhaps most importantly, the book does not end there. He beings the book to a wonderfully relevant conclusion by asking 'so what?'.
‘We have now reached the point where we must ask: So what? Is all this talk about God’s ultimate future, about ‘life after life after death,’ simply a matter of tidying up our beliefs about what will happen in the very end, or does it have any practical consequences here and now?’
‘When the NT strikes the great Easter bell, the main resonances it sets up are not simply about ourselves and about whatever future world God is ultimately going to make, when heaven and earth are joined together and renewed at last from top to bottom. Precisely because the resurrection has happened as an event within our own world, its implications and effects are to be felt within our own world, here and now.’
‘The whole point of what Jesus was up to was that he was doing, close up, in the present, what he was promising long-term, in the future. And what he was promising for that future, and doing in that present, was not saving souls for a disembodied eternity but rescuing people from the corruption and decay of the way of the world presently is so they could enjoy, already in the present, that renewal of creation which is God’s ultimate purpose- and so they could thus become colleagues and partners in that larger project’
‘The promise of new creation…is not and cannot be simply about straightening out ideas about life after death. It is about the mission of the church…it’s not falling back into the tired old split-level world where some people believe in evangelism in terms of saving souls for a timeless eternity and other people believe in mission in terms of working for justice, peace and hope in the present world. That great divide has nothing to do with Jesus and the NT and everything to do with the silent enslavement of many Christians (both conservative and radical) to the Platonic ideology of the Enlightenment’
‘What you do for the Lord is not in vain. You are not oiling the wheels of a machine that’s about to roll over a cliff. You are not restoring a great painting that’s shortly going to be thrown on the fire. You are not planting roses in a garden that’s about to be dug up for a building site. You are- strange though it may seem, almost as hard to believe as the resurrection itself- accomplishing something that will become in due course part of God’s new world. Every act of love, gratitude and kindness; every work of art or music inspired by the love of God and delight in the beauty of his creation; every minute spent teaching a severely handicapped child to read or to walk; every act of care and nature, of comfort and support, for one’s fellow human beings and for that matter one’s fellow nonhuman creatures; and of course every prayer, all Spirit-led teaching, every deed that spreads the gospel, builds up the church, embraces and embodies holiness rather than corruption, and makes the name of Jesus honoured in the world- all of this will find its way, through the resurrecting power of God, into the new creation that God will one day make…
I have no idea precisely what this will mean in practice. I am putting up a signpost, not offering a photograph of what we will find once we get to where the signpost is pointing’
NB- anyone who has just read the above quote and finishes frustrated at the apparent lack of a photograph needs their head seen to and a large dose of mystery.
‘But if God really does intend to redeem rather than reject his created world of space, time, and matter, we are faced with the question: what might it look like to celebrate that redemption, that healing and transformation, in the present, and thereby appropriately to anticipate God’s final intention?’
‘We cannot get off the hook of present responsibility, as many Christians try to do, not least within some parts of fundamentalism, by declaring that the world is currently in such a mess and there’s nothing that can be done about it until the Lord returns. That is classic dualism. Many people embrace it enthusiastically. It leaves the church with nothing to do in the present except care for the wounded as best we can while we wait for a different kind of salvation altogether.’
‘Much conservative theology, not least in the United States, where it counts heavily at the moment, has also served to reinforce the dominance of the West. The Cold War years enabled the United States to build up its persona as God’s answer to communism. Many conservative churches there still live by the belief that what’s good for America is good for God- with the result, for instance, that if their country needs to produce more acid rain in order to keep up car production, then God must be happy with it and anyone who talks about polultion or is disappointed that the president didn’t sign the Kyoto protocol is somehow anti-Christian or is simply producing a ‘baptized neosocialism,’ as one reviewer accused me of. Rampant belief in the rapture lends strong support to this, as we saw earlier: Armageddon is coming, so who cares what state the planet is in? The irony is that those American churches that protest most vocally against the teaching of Darwinism in their schools are often, in their public policies, supporting a kind of economic Darwinism, the survival of the fittest in world markets, and military power.’
Perhaps most importantly, the book does not end there. He beings the book to a wonderfully relevant conclusion by asking 'so what?'.
‘We have now reached the point where we must ask: So what? Is all this talk about God’s ultimate future, about ‘life after life after death,’ simply a matter of tidying up our beliefs about what will happen in the very end, or does it have any practical consequences here and now?’
‘When the NT strikes the great Easter bell, the main resonances it sets up are not simply about ourselves and about whatever future world God is ultimately going to make, when heaven and earth are joined together and renewed at last from top to bottom. Precisely because the resurrection has happened as an event within our own world, its implications and effects are to be felt within our own world, here and now.’
‘The whole point of what Jesus was up to was that he was doing, close up, in the present, what he was promising long-term, in the future. And what he was promising for that future, and doing in that present, was not saving souls for a disembodied eternity but rescuing people from the corruption and decay of the way of the world presently is so they could enjoy, already in the present, that renewal of creation which is God’s ultimate purpose- and so they could thus become colleagues and partners in that larger project’
‘The promise of new creation…is not and cannot be simply about straightening out ideas about life after death. It is about the mission of the church…it’s not falling back into the tired old split-level world where some people believe in evangelism in terms of saving souls for a timeless eternity and other people believe in mission in terms of working for justice, peace and hope in the present world. That great divide has nothing to do with Jesus and the NT and everything to do with the silent enslavement of many Christians (both conservative and radical) to the Platonic ideology of the Enlightenment’
‘What you do for the Lord is not in vain. You are not oiling the wheels of a machine that’s about to roll over a cliff. You are not restoring a great painting that’s shortly going to be thrown on the fire. You are not planting roses in a garden that’s about to be dug up for a building site. You are- strange though it may seem, almost as hard to believe as the resurrection itself- accomplishing something that will become in due course part of God’s new world. Every act of love, gratitude and kindness; every work of art or music inspired by the love of God and delight in the beauty of his creation; every minute spent teaching a severely handicapped child to read or to walk; every act of care and nature, of comfort and support, for one’s fellow human beings and for that matter one’s fellow nonhuman creatures; and of course every prayer, all Spirit-led teaching, every deed that spreads the gospel, builds up the church, embraces and embodies holiness rather than corruption, and makes the name of Jesus honoured in the world- all of this will find its way, through the resurrecting power of God, into the new creation that God will one day make…
I have no idea precisely what this will mean in practice. I am putting up a signpost, not offering a photograph of what we will find once we get to where the signpost is pointing’
NB- anyone who has just read the above quote and finishes frustrated at the apparent lack of a photograph needs their head seen to and a large dose of mystery.
‘But if God really does intend to redeem rather than reject his created world of space, time, and matter, we are faced with the question: what might it look like to celebrate that redemption, that healing and transformation, in the present, and thereby appropriately to anticipate God’s final intention?’
‘We cannot get off the hook of present responsibility, as many Christians try to do, not least within some parts of fundamentalism, by declaring that the world is currently in such a mess and there’s nothing that can be done about it until the Lord returns. That is classic dualism. Many people embrace it enthusiastically. It leaves the church with nothing to do in the present except care for the wounded as best we can while we wait for a different kind of salvation altogether.’
‘Much conservative theology, not least in the United States, where it counts heavily at the moment, has also served to reinforce the dominance of the West. The Cold War years enabled the United States to build up its persona as God’s answer to communism. Many conservative churches there still live by the belief that what’s good for America is good for God- with the result, for instance, that if their country needs to produce more acid rain in order to keep up car production, then God must be happy with it and anyone who talks about polultion or is disappointed that the president didn’t sign the Kyoto protocol is somehow anti-Christian or is simply producing a ‘baptized neosocialism,’ as one reviewer accused me of. Rampant belief in the rapture lends strong support to this, as we saw earlier: Armageddon is coming, so who cares what state the planet is in? The irony is that those American churches that protest most vocally against the teaching of Darwinism in their schools are often, in their public policies, supporting a kind of economic Darwinism, the survival of the fittest in world markets, and military power.’
Transformation of the Body
‘We begin once more with Paul. I stressed in the previous chapter that when Paul speaks in Philippians 3 of being “citizens of heaven” he doesn’t mean that we shall retire when we have finished our work here. He says in the next line that Jesus will come from heaven in order to transform the present humble body into a glorious body like his own and that he will do this by the power through which he makes all things subject to himself. This little statement contains in a nutshell more or less all Paul’s thought on the subject. The risen Jesus is both the model for the Christian’s future body and the means by which it comes about’
‘The Resurrection body of Jesus, which at the moment is almost unimaginable to us in it glory and power, will be the model for out own’
‘Who will be raised from the dead? All people, according to John and perhaps Paul, but for Paul at least there is a special sense of resurrection that clearly applies to those who are in Christ and indwelt by the Spirit…
Where will the resurrection take place? On the new earth, joined as it will then be to the new heaven…in this new world there will be no problem of overcrowding (as some, at the risk of bathos, have ventured to suggest). Apart from the question of whether every human will be raised or some, we need to remind ourselves that roughly half the humans who have ever lived are alive at the moment….In any case, if we take seriously the promise of new heavens and new earth, none of this is a problem. God is the creator, and his new world will be exactly what we need and want, with the love and beauty of this present world taken up and transformed’
‘All we can surmise from the picture of Jesus’s resurrection is that just as his wounds were still visible, not now as sources of pain and death but as signs of his victory, so the Christian’s risen body will bear such marks of his or her loyalty to God’s particular calling as are appropriate, not least where that has involved suffering
In particular, this new body will be immortal. That is, it will have passed beyond death not just in the temporal sense (that it happens to have gone through a particular moment and event) but also in the ontological sense of no longer being subject to sickness, injury, decay and death itself’
‘At this point we must notice that once again our language gets us into trouble. The word immortality is often used to mean “disembodied immortality,” and it is sometimes then used in a sharp contrast with resurrection. As a result, we easily forget Paul’s point about the resurrection body. It will be a body, but it will not be subject to mortality. An “immortal body” is something most people find so strange that they don’t even pause to wonder if that’s what Paul and the other early Christians were talking about. But it is.
There is a world of difference between this belief and a belief in an “immortal soul”. Platonist believe that all humans have an immortal element within them, normally referred to so “soul”…In the NT however, immortality is something that only God possesses by nature and that he then shares, as a gift of grace rather than an innate possession, with his people.
Why will we be given new bodies? According to the early Christians, the purpose of this new body will be to rule wisely over God’s new world. Forget those images about lounging around playing harps. There will be work to do and we shall relish doing it. All the skills and talents we have out to God’s service in this present life- and perhaps to the interests and likings we gave up because they conflicted with out vocation- will be enhanced and ennobled and given back to us to be exercised to his glory. This is perhaps the most mysterious, and lest explored, aspect of the resurrection life’
‘If, as we have already seen, the biblical view of God’s future is of the renewal of the entire cosmos, there will be plenty to be done, entire new projects to undertake. In terms of the vision of original creation in Genesis 1 and 2, the garden will need to be tended once more and the animals renamed. These are only images, of course, but like all other future-orientated language they serve as true signposts to a larger reality- a reality to which most Christians give little or no thought’
‘The Resurrection body of Jesus, which at the moment is almost unimaginable to us in it glory and power, will be the model for out own’
‘Who will be raised from the dead? All people, according to John and perhaps Paul, but for Paul at least there is a special sense of resurrection that clearly applies to those who are in Christ and indwelt by the Spirit…
Where will the resurrection take place? On the new earth, joined as it will then be to the new heaven…in this new world there will be no problem of overcrowding (as some, at the risk of bathos, have ventured to suggest). Apart from the question of whether every human will be raised or some, we need to remind ourselves that roughly half the humans who have ever lived are alive at the moment….In any case, if we take seriously the promise of new heavens and new earth, none of this is a problem. God is the creator, and his new world will be exactly what we need and want, with the love and beauty of this present world taken up and transformed’
‘All we can surmise from the picture of Jesus’s resurrection is that just as his wounds were still visible, not now as sources of pain and death but as signs of his victory, so the Christian’s risen body will bear such marks of his or her loyalty to God’s particular calling as are appropriate, not least where that has involved suffering
In particular, this new body will be immortal. That is, it will have passed beyond death not just in the temporal sense (that it happens to have gone through a particular moment and event) but also in the ontological sense of no longer being subject to sickness, injury, decay and death itself’
‘At this point we must notice that once again our language gets us into trouble. The word immortality is often used to mean “disembodied immortality,” and it is sometimes then used in a sharp contrast with resurrection. As a result, we easily forget Paul’s point about the resurrection body. It will be a body, but it will not be subject to mortality. An “immortal body” is something most people find so strange that they don’t even pause to wonder if that’s what Paul and the other early Christians were talking about. But it is.
There is a world of difference between this belief and a belief in an “immortal soul”. Platonist believe that all humans have an immortal element within them, normally referred to so “soul”…In the NT however, immortality is something that only God possesses by nature and that he then shares, as a gift of grace rather than an innate possession, with his people.
Why will we be given new bodies? According to the early Christians, the purpose of this new body will be to rule wisely over God’s new world. Forget those images about lounging around playing harps. There will be work to do and we shall relish doing it. All the skills and talents we have out to God’s service in this present life- and perhaps to the interests and likings we gave up because they conflicted with out vocation- will be enhanced and ennobled and given back to us to be exercised to his glory. This is perhaps the most mysterious, and lest explored, aspect of the resurrection life’
‘If, as we have already seen, the biblical view of God’s future is of the renewal of the entire cosmos, there will be plenty to be done, entire new projects to undertake. In terms of the vision of original creation in Genesis 1 and 2, the garden will need to be tended once more and the animals renamed. These are only images, of course, but like all other future-orientated language they serve as true signposts to a larger reality- a reality to which most Christians give little or no thought’
Judgement- who gets f'd and who doesn't?
One of the chapters in the book is called ‘Jesus, the Coming Judge’. This chapter too was helpful to me. The idea of judgment is one I’ve struggled with greatly- especially when it’s used in a vindictive subtle F you to those who the teacher/preacher looks down upon…or to scare us into a guilt laden ‘Oh my God is going to smite me’ lifestyle. I’ve also had difficulty with statements such as ‘God MUST be _________’. Surely God is bigger than the words we choose to define him?! (I hope my masters will center around that idea):
‘We need to remind ourselves that throughout the Bible, not least in the Psalms, God’s judgment is a good thing, something to be celebrated, longed for, yearned for. It causes people to shout for joy and the trees of the field to clap their hands. In a world of systematic injustice, bullying, violence, arrogance and oppression, the thought that there might come a day when the wicked are firmly put in their place and the poor and weak are given their due is the best news there can be. Faced with a world of rebellion, a world full of exploitation and wickedness, a good God must be a God of judgment. ’
‘The main point to notice, once more, is that all the future judgment is highlighted basically as good news, not bad. Why so? It is good news, first, because the one through whom God’s justice will finally sweep the world is not a hard-hearted, arrogant, or vengeful tyrant but rather the Man of Sorrows, who was acquainted with grief; the Jesus who loved sinners and died for them…’
‘In particular, the present rule of the ascended Jesus Christ and the assurance of his final appearing in judgment should give us- which goodness knows we need today- some clarity and realism in our political discourse. Far too often Christians slide into a vaguely spiritualised version of one or other major political system or party. What would happen if we were to take seriously our stated belief that Jesus Christ is already the Lord of the world and that at his name, one day, every knee would bow?
You might suppose that this would merely inject a note of pietism and make us then avoid the real issues- or indeed, to attempt a theocratic takeover. But to think in either of those ways would show how deeply we have been conditioned by the Enlightenment split between religion and politics. What happens if we reintegrate them? As with specifically Christian work, so with political work done in Jesus’s name: confessing Jesus as the ascended and coming Lord frees us from needing to pretend that this or that program or leader has the key to utopia (if only we would elect him or her). Equally, it frees up our corporate life from the despair that comes when we realize that once again our political systems let us down. The ascension and appearing of Jesus constitutes a radical challenge to the entire structure of the Enlightenment (and of course several other movements). And since our present Western politics is very much the creation of the Enlightenment, we should think seriously about the ways in which, as thinking Christians, we can and should bring that challenge to bear.
I know this is giving a huge hostage to fortune, raising questions to which I certainly don’t know the answers, but I do know that unless I point all this out one might easily get the impression that these ancient doctrines are of theoretical or abstract interest only.
They aren’t.
People who believe that Jesus is already Lord and that he will appear again as judge of the world are called and equipped (to put it mildly) to think and act quite differently in the world from those who don’t’.
‘I believe we can today restate the doctrine of final judgment I find it quite impossible, reading the NT on the one hand and the newspaper on the other, to suppose that there will be no ultimate condemnation, no final loss, no human beings to whom, as C.S Lewis put it, God will eventually say “Thy will be done”.
I wish it were otherwise,
but one cannot forever whistle “There’s a kindeness in God’s mercy” in the darkness of Hiroshima, of Auschwitz, of the murder of children and the careless greed that enslaves millions with debts not their own. Humankind cannot, alas, bear very much reality, and the massive denial of reality by the cheap and cheerful universalism of Western liberalism has a lot to answer for’.
While I think I agree with what he’s saying above, I am aware that it’s not helpful to stop with the quote here (as many justice/hell/fire and brimstone/let them burn they deserve it frameworks would cry out for [Wright refers to them, perhaps more lovingly, as overenthusiastic preachers and teachers]) but to continue…
‘But if there is indeed final condemnation for those who, by their idolatry, dehumanize themselves and drag others down with them, the account I have suggested of how this works in practice provides a somewhat different picture from those normally imagined.
The traditional view is that those who spurn God’s salvation, who refuse to turn from idolatry and wickedness, are held forever in conscious torment. Sometimes this is
sharpened up by overenthusiastic preachers and teachers who claim to know precisely which sorts of behavior are bound to lead to hell and which, thought reprehensible, are still forgivable.' (Ricky Gervais deals with this humorously in his latest audio books- all of which everyone should buy)
‘The description of the New Jerusalem in chapters 21 and 22 (of Rev) is quite clear that some categories of people are ‘outside’: the dogs the fornicators, those who speak and make lies.
But then,
just when we have in out minds a picture of two nice, tidy categories,
the insiders and the outsiders,
we find that the river of the water of life flows out of the city; that growing on either bank is the tree of life, not a single tree but a great many ; and that ‘the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations’.
There is a great mystery here, and all our speaking about God’s eventual future must make room for it. This is not at all to cast doubt on the reality of final judgment for those who resolutely worshiped and served the idols that dehumanize us and deface God’s world. It is to say that God is always the God of surprises.’
He also talks of different problems which can arise when we’re childish with our understanding of hell and judgment:
‘Just as many who were brought up to think of God as a bearded old gentleman sitting on a cloud decided that when they stopped believing in such a thing they had therefore stopped believing in God, so many who were taught to think of hell as a literal underground location full of worms and fire, or for that matter as a kind of torture chamber at the center of God’s castle of heavenly delights, decided that when they stopped believing in that, so they stopped beleving in hell.
The first group decided that because they couldn't believe in childish image of God, they must be atheists. The second decided that because they couldn’t believe in childish images of hell, they must be universalists.
There are of course better reasons for becoming an atheist and better reasons for becoming a universailst…but , at least at a popular level, it is not the serious early Christian doctrine of final judgment that has been rejected but rather one or other gross caricature’
‘We need to remind ourselves that throughout the Bible, not least in the Psalms, God’s judgment is a good thing, something to be celebrated, longed for, yearned for. It causes people to shout for joy and the trees of the field to clap their hands. In a world of systematic injustice, bullying, violence, arrogance and oppression, the thought that there might come a day when the wicked are firmly put in their place and the poor and weak are given their due is the best news there can be. Faced with a world of rebellion, a world full of exploitation and wickedness, a good God must be a God of judgment. ’
‘The main point to notice, once more, is that all the future judgment is highlighted basically as good news, not bad. Why so? It is good news, first, because the one through whom God’s justice will finally sweep the world is not a hard-hearted, arrogant, or vengeful tyrant but rather the Man of Sorrows, who was acquainted with grief; the Jesus who loved sinners and died for them…’
‘In particular, the present rule of the ascended Jesus Christ and the assurance of his final appearing in judgment should give us- which goodness knows we need today- some clarity and realism in our political discourse. Far too often Christians slide into a vaguely spiritualised version of one or other major political system or party. What would happen if we were to take seriously our stated belief that Jesus Christ is already the Lord of the world and that at his name, one day, every knee would bow?
You might suppose that this would merely inject a note of pietism and make us then avoid the real issues- or indeed, to attempt a theocratic takeover. But to think in either of those ways would show how deeply we have been conditioned by the Enlightenment split between religion and politics. What happens if we reintegrate them? As with specifically Christian work, so with political work done in Jesus’s name: confessing Jesus as the ascended and coming Lord frees us from needing to pretend that this or that program or leader has the key to utopia (if only we would elect him or her). Equally, it frees up our corporate life from the despair that comes when we realize that once again our political systems let us down. The ascension and appearing of Jesus constitutes a radical challenge to the entire structure of the Enlightenment (and of course several other movements). And since our present Western politics is very much the creation of the Enlightenment, we should think seriously about the ways in which, as thinking Christians, we can and should bring that challenge to bear.
I know this is giving a huge hostage to fortune, raising questions to which I certainly don’t know the answers, but I do know that unless I point all this out one might easily get the impression that these ancient doctrines are of theoretical or abstract interest only.
They aren’t.
People who believe that Jesus is already Lord and that he will appear again as judge of the world are called and equipped (to put it mildly) to think and act quite differently in the world from those who don’t’.
‘I believe we can today restate the doctrine of final judgment I find it quite impossible, reading the NT on the one hand and the newspaper on the other, to suppose that there will be no ultimate condemnation, no final loss, no human beings to whom, as C.S Lewis put it, God will eventually say “Thy will be done”.
I wish it were otherwise,
but one cannot forever whistle “There’s a kindeness in God’s mercy” in the darkness of Hiroshima, of Auschwitz, of the murder of children and the careless greed that enslaves millions with debts not their own. Humankind cannot, alas, bear very much reality, and the massive denial of reality by the cheap and cheerful universalism of Western liberalism has a lot to answer for’.
While I think I agree with what he’s saying above, I am aware that it’s not helpful to stop with the quote here (as many justice/hell/fire and brimstone/let them burn they deserve it frameworks would cry out for [Wright refers to them, perhaps more lovingly, as overenthusiastic preachers and teachers]) but to continue…
‘But if there is indeed final condemnation for those who, by their idolatry, dehumanize themselves and drag others down with them, the account I have suggested of how this works in practice provides a somewhat different picture from those normally imagined.
The traditional view is that those who spurn God’s salvation, who refuse to turn from idolatry and wickedness, are held forever in conscious torment. Sometimes this is
sharpened up by overenthusiastic preachers and teachers who claim to know precisely which sorts of behavior are bound to lead to hell and which, thought reprehensible, are still forgivable.' (Ricky Gervais deals with this humorously in his latest audio books- all of which everyone should buy)
‘The description of the New Jerusalem in chapters 21 and 22 (of Rev) is quite clear that some categories of people are ‘outside’: the dogs the fornicators, those who speak and make lies.
But then,
just when we have in out minds a picture of two nice, tidy categories,
the insiders and the outsiders,
we find that the river of the water of life flows out of the city; that growing on either bank is the tree of life, not a single tree but a great many ; and that ‘the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations’.
There is a great mystery here, and all our speaking about God’s eventual future must make room for it. This is not at all to cast doubt on the reality of final judgment for those who resolutely worshiped and served the idols that dehumanize us and deface God’s world. It is to say that God is always the God of surprises.’
He also talks of different problems which can arise when we’re childish with our understanding of hell and judgment:
‘Just as many who were brought up to think of God as a bearded old gentleman sitting on a cloud decided that when they stopped believing in such a thing they had therefore stopped believing in God, so many who were taught to think of hell as a literal underground location full of worms and fire, or for that matter as a kind of torture chamber at the center of God’s castle of heavenly delights, decided that when they stopped believing in that, so they stopped beleving in hell.
The first group decided that because they couldn't believe in childish image of God, they must be atheists. The second decided that because they couldn’t believe in childish images of hell, they must be universalists.
There are of course better reasons for becoming an atheist and better reasons for becoming a universailst…but , at least at a popular level, it is not the serious early Christian doctrine of final judgment that has been rejected but rather one or other gross caricature’
Heaven ON EARTH, escaping from evil, left behind and a whole lot of other nonsense
Another key to Wright’s thoughts is found in response to the once again, all too frequent thinking that the world is evil and one day we will simply escape it. This is one of those ideas which for years has rubbed me the wrong way, often leaving me frustrated, as I wasn’t sure why I thought this beyond the obvious objection of people becoming lazy and treating the world as if it wasn’t a gift from God and as if one of the first things god asked us wasn’t to look after it all:
‘The early Christians did not believe in progress. They did not think the world was getting better and better under its own steam- or even under the steady influence of God. They know God had to do something fresh to put it to rights.
But neither did they believe that the world was getting worse and worse and that their task was to escape it altogether. They were not dualists.
Since most people who think about these things today tend toward one or other of those two points of view, it comes as something as a surprise to discover that the early Christians held quite a different view. They believed that God was going to do for the whole cosmos what he had done for Jesus at Easter. This is such a surprising belief, and so little reflected on even in Christian circles, still less outside the church,that we must set it out step by step and show how the different early writers developed different images that together add up to a stunning picture of a future for which, so they insisted, the whole world was waiting on tiptoe.’
‘The world is created good but incomplete. One day, when all forces of rebellion have been defeated and the creation responds freely and gladly to the love of its Creator, God will fill it with himself so that it will both remain an independent being, other than God, and also be flooded with Gods own life. This is part of the paradox of love, in which love freely given creates a context for love to be freely returned, and so on in a cycle where complete freedom and complete union do not cancel each other out but rather celebrate each other and make one another whole’
‘At no point in the gospels of Acts does anyone say anything remotely like “Jesus has gone into heaven, so let’s be sure we can follow him.” They say, rather, Jesus is in heaven, ruling the whole world, and he will one day return to make that rule complete“’
‘The second coming of Jesus Christ has become the favourite topic of a large swath of North American Christianity, particularly but not exclusively in the fundamentalist and dispensationalist segment. Growing out of some millennium movements of the 19th century, particularly those associated with J.N darby and the Plymouth Brethren, a belief has arisen, and taken hold of millions of minds and hearts, that we are living in the end times, in which all the great prophecies are to be fulfilled at last. Central to these prophecies, it is believed, is the promise that Jesus will return in person, snatching the true believers away from this wicked world to be with him and then, after an interval of ungodliness, returning to reign over the world forever. The attempt to correlate these prophecies with the geopolitical events of the 1960s and 1970s, which echoed a height in Hal Lindseay’s bestselling book, The Late Great Planet Earth, has somewhat palled, but its place has been taken by the fictional scenarios offered by a series of books …called Left Behind…
So-called end-time speculation, which is the daily bread of many in the American religious right, is not unconnected to the agenda of some of America’s leading politicians. More of that anon. For many millions of believing Christians in today’s world, the second coming is part of a scenario in which the present world is doomed to destruction while the chosen few are snatched up to heaven
‘The early Christians did not believe in progress. They did not think the world was getting better and better under its own steam- or even under the steady influence of God. They know God had to do something fresh to put it to rights.
But neither did they believe that the world was getting worse and worse and that their task was to escape it altogether. They were not dualists.
Since most people who think about these things today tend toward one or other of those two points of view, it comes as something as a surprise to discover that the early Christians held quite a different view. They believed that God was going to do for the whole cosmos what he had done for Jesus at Easter. This is such a surprising belief, and so little reflected on even in Christian circles, still less outside the church,that we must set it out step by step and show how the different early writers developed different images that together add up to a stunning picture of a future for which, so they insisted, the whole world was waiting on tiptoe.’
‘The world is created good but incomplete. One day, when all forces of rebellion have been defeated and the creation responds freely and gladly to the love of its Creator, God will fill it with himself so that it will both remain an independent being, other than God, and also be flooded with Gods own life. This is part of the paradox of love, in which love freely given creates a context for love to be freely returned, and so on in a cycle where complete freedom and complete union do not cancel each other out but rather celebrate each other and make one another whole’
‘At no point in the gospels of Acts does anyone say anything remotely like “Jesus has gone into heaven, so let’s be sure we can follow him.” They say, rather, Jesus is in heaven, ruling the whole world, and he will one day return to make that rule complete“’
‘The second coming of Jesus Christ has become the favourite topic of a large swath of North American Christianity, particularly but not exclusively in the fundamentalist and dispensationalist segment. Growing out of some millennium movements of the 19th century, particularly those associated with J.N darby and the Plymouth Brethren, a belief has arisen, and taken hold of millions of minds and hearts, that we are living in the end times, in which all the great prophecies are to be fulfilled at last. Central to these prophecies, it is believed, is the promise that Jesus will return in person, snatching the true believers away from this wicked world to be with him and then, after an interval of ungodliness, returning to reign over the world forever. The attempt to correlate these prophecies with the geopolitical events of the 1960s and 1970s, which echoed a height in Hal Lindseay’s bestselling book, The Late Great Planet Earth, has somewhat palled, but its place has been taken by the fictional scenarios offered by a series of books …called Left Behind…
So-called end-time speculation, which is the daily bread of many in the American religious right, is not unconnected to the agenda of some of America’s leading politicians. More of that anon. For many millions of believing Christians in today’s world, the second coming is part of a scenario in which the present world is doomed to destruction while the chosen few are snatched up to heaven
Life after life after death
Wright presents an idea which so many people ascribe to today when it comes to heaven- that when we die we go straight to our final destination with Jesus and everything’s just great. He goes to great lengths throughout the book to dispel this- frequently talking of how our ‘final destination’ is actually life after life after death. (He would also probably have problems with the semantics of ‘final destination’)
‘When Jesus tells the brigand that he will join him in paradise that very day, paradise clearly cannot be their ultimate destination, as Luke’s next chapter makes clear. Paradise is, rather, the blissful garden where God’s people rest prior to the resurrection. When Jesus declares that there are many dwelling places in his father’s house, the word for dwelling place is mno, which denotes a temporary lodging…in terms of the discussion in the previous chapter, the early Christians hold firmly to a two-step belief about the future: first, death and whatever lies immediately beyond; second, a new bodily existence in a newly remade world’
‘My proposition is that the traditional picture of people going to either heaven or hell as a one-stage postmortem journey (with or without the option of some kind of purgatory or continuing journey as an intermediate stage) represents a serious distortion and diminution of the Christian hope’
‘Resurrection itself then appears as what the word always meant, whether (like the ancient pagans) people disbelieved it or whether (like many ancient Jews) they affirmed it. It wasn’t a way of talking about life after death. It was a way of talking about a new bodily life after whatever state of existence one might enter immediately upon death. It was, in other words, life after life after death’
‘When Jesus tells the brigand that he will join him in paradise that very day, paradise clearly cannot be their ultimate destination, as Luke’s next chapter makes clear. Paradise is, rather, the blissful garden where God’s people rest prior to the resurrection. When Jesus declares that there are many dwelling places in his father’s house, the word for dwelling place is mno, which denotes a temporary lodging…in terms of the discussion in the previous chapter, the early Christians hold firmly to a two-step belief about the future: first, death and whatever lies immediately beyond; second, a new bodily existence in a newly remade world’
‘My proposition is that the traditional picture of people going to either heaven or hell as a one-stage postmortem journey (with or without the option of some kind of purgatory or continuing journey as an intermediate stage) represents a serious distortion and diminution of the Christian hope’
‘Resurrection itself then appears as what the word always meant, whether (like the ancient pagans) people disbelieved it or whether (like many ancient Jews) they affirmed it. It wasn’t a way of talking about life after death. It was a way of talking about a new bodily life after whatever state of existence one might enter immediately upon death. It was, in other words, life after life after death’
Surprised by Hope
So I’m coming to the end of a fantastic book- Surprised by Hope by N.T Wright and wanted to ‘blog the shit out of it’. There is so much in the book that I think it’ll take a while to get through here- I’ll probably come back to a lot of my/his thoughts as I post and re-post…
This book concerns itself mainly with Heaven- what it is (and what it isn’t) and how what we believe about it and what we learn from Scripture affects us in the here and now. I have thoroughly enjoyed reading it. Up to now I have never really been concerned with Heaven- not really excited about it and not truly yearning or even looking forward to it. To me it was all mystery. God was big enough for me to be ok with knowing nothing about it. I had mainly come to this position because of the ludicrous nonsense I have heard from others about what Heaven definitely is (somewhere else where we have no bodies, where we just sing songs all the time and forget about people we loved who we mysteriously can’t locate there!?!?) It was one of those things, like so much else for me, where I knew what I was hearing had to be untrue, but I couldn’t articulate why and perhaps more importantly, couldn’t begin to work out what I did believe about it. Since reading this book, I am beginning to understand where a lot of the Eschatological BS comes from and why it is inaccurate and dangerous. Mainly though, I have come to see that actually, while a lot of talk about Heaven is a mystery, the Bible does actually have some things to say about Heaven that doesn’t come from the ridiculously unhelpful book that is Revelation!!
I find that when it comes to writing books on Theology, it is very easy to write against something- what is wrong with a certain set of beliefs. It is much more difficult to articulate what you then think is more accurate. Wright does both beautifully. Not only that, but he also asks and begins to answer the only really important question- so what?
I think I’m just going to quote him a lot and throw in some of my own thoughts if I have any (it’s cold, so we’ll see)
‘Frankly, what we have at the moment isn’t, as the old liturgies used to say, the “the sure and certain Hope of the resurrection of the dead” but the vague and fuzzy optimism that somehow things may work out in the end’
‘What we say about death and resurrection gives shape and colour to everything else. If we are not careful, we will offer merely a “hope” that is no longer a surprise, no longer able to transform lives and communities in the present, no longer generated by the resurrection of Jesus himself and looking forward to the promised new heavens and new earth’
‘The mystery of the ascensions is of course just that, a mystery. It demands that we think what is, to many today, almost unthinkable: that when the Bible speaks of heaven and earth it is not talking about two localities related to each other within the same space-time continuum or about a nonphysical world contrasted with a physical one but about two different kinds of what we call space, two different kinds of what we call matter, and also quite possibly (thought this does not necessarily follow from the other two) two different kinds of what we call time. We post-Enlightenment Westerners are such wretched flatlanders. Although New Age thinkers, and indeed quite a lot of contemporary novelists, are quite capable of taking us into other parallel worlds, spaces, and times, we retreat into our rationalistic closed-system universe as we think about Jesus. C.S. Lewis of course did a great job in the Narnia stories and elsewhere of imagining how two worlds could relate and interlock. But the generations that grew up knowing its way around Narnia does not usually know how to make the transition from a children’s story to the real world of grown-up Christian devotion and theology’
‘despite widespread opinion to the contrary, during his early ministry Jesus said nothing about his return. I have argued this position at length and in detail in my various books about Jesus and don’t have space to substantiate it here…the fact that Jesus didn’t teach it doesn’t mean it isn’t true…so if the gospel accounts of Jesus’ teaching do not refer to the second coming, where does the idea come from? Quite simply, from the rest of the NT’
‘What we have here, with minor variations, is a remarkably unanimous view spread throughout the early Christinaity known to us. There will come a time, which might indeed come at any time, when, in the great renewal of the world that Easter itself foreshadowed, Jesus himself will be personally present and will be the agent and model of the transformation that will happen both to the whole world and also to believers. This expectation and hope, expressed so clearly in the NT, continues undiminished in the second and subsequent centuries. Mainstream Christians throughout the early period were not worried by the fact that the event had not happened within a generation. The idea that the problem of ‘delay’ set out in 2 Peter 3 was widespread in second-generation Christianity is a modern scholars’ myth rather than a historical reality. Nor was the idea of Jesus’s ‘appearing’ or ‘coming’ simply part of a tradition that was passed on uncritically without later generations really tuning in to what it was saying. As with the ascension, so with Jesus’s appearing: it was seen as a vital part of a full presentation of the Jesus who was and is and is to come. Without it the church’s proclamation makes no sense. take it away, and all sorts of things tart to unravel. The early Christians saw this as clearly as anyone since, and we would do well to learn form them’
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
Where does the bible begin again?
So I was playing football manager 10 (which is unreal and in which Michael Kerr stands even less of a chance than he did with fm09) and decided to listen to Rob Bell (marshill.org). I haven't listened to him in a very long time- partly because I wanted to give it a rest due to my addictiveness and partly just because I hadn't. This changed though recently when someone mentioned to me that he had heard through the dripping evangelical grapevine that Rob's theology had gone off. I'm not really sure what that means, but if it means what I think, I would reply 'whose hasn't?'
Anyway, it made me think 'o yeah...Rob Bell'. And listening to it tonight while bringing Gourcuff to Arsenal made me think about something which I've wanted to write about for a very long time (since I had a talk with Darrin about it driving one day) and which effects absolutely everything in our lives.
The question is- where does the Bible begin- does it begin at the beginning, or does it begin a few chapters in? How we see this (and for most of us I think it's subconscious) effects a whole lotta stuff- how we view ourselves/mankind/sin/redemption/God's story/salvation/heaven/end times/evangelism....
(disclaimer: while most of this has been sitting inside my head for a very long time, it had taken listening to Rob to get me to try and articulate it, so if parts of it sound like Rob Bell, well, that's because it is)
If the story begins in Genesis 3 (most of the time here when i refer to Genesis 3, you could simply read 'the sin part' of Genesis), then the primary issue becomes the removal of sin- people are sinners- how do we get rid of the sin problem? (answer- so are you and we don't). How do we get rid of sin- Jesus gets rid of sin. The bumper sticker comes to mind 'Christians aren't perfect, just forgiven'. That is true and despite my general distaste for bumper stickers in general and 'Christian' bumper stickers (whole other blog about how the word Christian had become an adjective instead of a noun...disgusting) in particular, I have an especially large problem with the word 'just'...really....JUST forgiven...but I digress.
But that's it? Christians aren't perfect, just forgiven. I would have to ask- then what? Is that all Jesus did? A simple problem solver?
However, if we start at the beginning (imagine that!) then we're shown part of a story were I am not God's plan B. Where we are not created differently to Adam. The story then becomes more about the restoration of Shalom (which does not exclude Genesis 3- it does include the beginning, removal and freedom from/of sin...but it includes so much more- all things).
If we start in 3, the fundamental posture towards people can be making sure they know what they aren't- aren't good enough, pure enough, holy enough, acceptable enough, sanctified enough, blessed enough, doing your quiet times enough (enough for what by the way?), trying hard enough (hard enough for what? for approval...!!??)
If we begin in Genesis 1, it seems more likely our posture towards people will be making sure they know what they are- you are a child of a Father who loves you more than you will ever understand and there's nothing you can do about it and there's nothing you need to do for it.
Fundamentally different
With a Genesis 3 beginning of our understanding of how God is and works, there may always be a danger that we feel the need to go up to someone you have never met and convince them how hateful, wretched and sinful they are. And if I can just get them to feel bad enough bout themselves I might be able to (fill in the blank- give them a pamphlet, invite them to a meeting, have coffee with them) and get them ‘in’ (no wonder some places find it difficult to keep those converts…)
Maybe it’s easier to begin in the beginning, because maybe it’s more helpful to learn how we got where we are. Rather then just focusing on how to get somewhere else- unfortunately some glad morning we will not fly away (but that also is a whole other blog(s) once I’ve finished this NT Wright book on heaven).
Because with a Genesis 3 beginning, God’s beautiful, , holistic, loving, exciting act of redemption is not located here amongst us, but rather somewhere else. The real point of the story is not somewhere else. Also, I’m not really sure if clouds and harps and up there sounds that exciting.
I have so much more to say about this but this, and I realize that this may not make sense toe veryone, but it will have to be a start.
If we start the movie late, a whole lot of things w ill not make sense. When we miss the beginning it makes it even harder to immerse out ourselves in a movie which ischallenging enough. Also, when we miss the beginning, the end is never as good.
Anyway, it made me think 'o yeah...Rob Bell'. And listening to it tonight while bringing Gourcuff to Arsenal made me think about something which I've wanted to write about for a very long time (since I had a talk with Darrin about it driving one day) and which effects absolutely everything in our lives.
The question is- where does the Bible begin- does it begin at the beginning, or does it begin a few chapters in? How we see this (and for most of us I think it's subconscious) effects a whole lotta stuff- how we view ourselves/mankind/sin/redemption/God's story/salvation/heaven/end times/evangelism....
(disclaimer: while most of this has been sitting inside my head for a very long time, it had taken listening to Rob to get me to try and articulate it, so if parts of it sound like Rob Bell, well, that's because it is)
If the story begins in Genesis 3 (most of the time here when i refer to Genesis 3, you could simply read 'the sin part' of Genesis), then the primary issue becomes the removal of sin- people are sinners- how do we get rid of the sin problem? (answer- so are you and we don't). How do we get rid of sin- Jesus gets rid of sin. The bumper sticker comes to mind 'Christians aren't perfect, just forgiven'. That is true and despite my general distaste for bumper stickers in general and 'Christian' bumper stickers (whole other blog about how the word Christian had become an adjective instead of a noun...disgusting) in particular, I have an especially large problem with the word 'just'...really....JUST forgiven...but I digress.
But that's it? Christians aren't perfect, just forgiven. I would have to ask- then what? Is that all Jesus did? A simple problem solver?
However, if we start at the beginning (imagine that!) then we're shown part of a story were I am not God's plan B. Where we are not created differently to Adam. The story then becomes more about the restoration of Shalom (which does not exclude Genesis 3- it does include the beginning, removal and freedom from/of sin...but it includes so much more- all things).
If we start in 3, the fundamental posture towards people can be making sure they know what they aren't- aren't good enough, pure enough, holy enough, acceptable enough, sanctified enough, blessed enough, doing your quiet times enough (enough for what by the way?), trying hard enough (hard enough for what? for approval...!!??)
If we begin in Genesis 1, it seems more likely our posture towards people will be making sure they know what they are- you are a child of a Father who loves you more than you will ever understand and there's nothing you can do about it and there's nothing you need to do for it.
Fundamentally different
With a Genesis 3 beginning of our understanding of how God is and works, there may always be a danger that we feel the need to go up to someone you have never met and convince them how hateful, wretched and sinful they are. And if I can just get them to feel bad enough bout themselves I might be able to (fill in the blank- give them a pamphlet, invite them to a meeting, have coffee with them) and get them ‘in’ (no wonder some places find it difficult to keep those converts…)
Maybe it’s easier to begin in the beginning, because maybe it’s more helpful to learn how we got where we are. Rather then just focusing on how to get somewhere else- unfortunately some glad morning we will not fly away (but that also is a whole other blog(s) once I’ve finished this NT Wright book on heaven).
Because with a Genesis 3 beginning, God’s beautiful, , holistic, loving, exciting act of redemption is not located here amongst us, but rather somewhere else. The real point of the story is not somewhere else. Also, I’m not really sure if clouds and harps and up there sounds that exciting.
I have so much more to say about this but this, and I realize that this may not make sense toe veryone, but it will have to be a start.
If we start the movie late, a whole lot of things w ill not make sense. When we miss the beginning it makes it even harder to immerse out ourselves in a movie which ischallenging enough. Also, when we miss the beginning, the end is never as good.
Monday, September 28, 2009
my three pillars
so we move in just over 3 months. It's pretty crazy- such a big decision. It is also very bitter sweet- it's sweet because it's a new chapter in Sheena's and my life together. We're excited to move home and be part of life there- family, community, university etc. It is bitter though because we're not leaving Reno because we're unhappy (it'd be so much easier to leave if we hated this place, but we don't).
The past while now I've been reminded of the similarities for me between now (moving home) and when i moved to Reno in 2006. My last year at home (2005/6) was one of the biggest wastes and missed opportunities I think I have had in my life so far. It was my last year in uni and I was living with my brother, some of the greatest friends anyone could ask for, and Erasto, a random Mexican!! The year was fantastic, absolutely incredible- having a hand in showing the light to my roommate and helping him move from being a vegetarian to a meat eater again I think was the highlight of my year. But there was so many more- Steve's endless supplies of movies, finding James drinking hard alcohol in his room on his own at night, seeing my brother grow exponentially, prayers every morning, the eternal dish struggle that plagues pretty much every house, locking people in bathrooms with a wardrobe, watching football game after football game with the Prince of Mexico, the endless parties and the subsequent endless complaints that resulted in numerous police and university official visits!! It was a great year- a year to be envied.
Unfortunately, I feel like I missed out on a lot of it simply because I wasn't present. For most of the year I was so desperate to leave something beautiful for something beautiful. It seemed like most of my time (at least most of my head time) was consumed with Sheena and moving to Reno in a very unhealthy way. While it was one of the best and most memorable years in my life, where I received infinitely, I feel that I wasn't present enough to give as much as I could have.
Subsequently, I am deeply aware of doing the same thing this time around. Of thinking of home- of my family, of greystown, of live football, of my friends, of the dreams I have for Sheena and I, of going back to school, of getting to coach basketball again, of community- and missing the last months I have here in Reno. As a result, I've become reasonably good at taking captive some of my thoughts (for once) when it comes to day dreaming about moving- not only am I not present when i do this, but the dreams and expectations more often than not tend to be very unrealistic (hence my breakdown at Christmas).
Instead, during the healthy times when I do get to think on my own, I've been reflecting backwards. I've been here in Reno for 1229 days and during my time here God has taught me more than I thought was possible. I feel that for me, for now, it's more healthy and fair to those around me that I contemplate this instead of the future. As I've reflected back on the past 3+ years I think that most of what I have learnt revolves around 3 different (but very connected) things- 3 pillars if you will.
I've been trying to articulate to myself what these pillars look like more and more. I feel that they are very important for me especially, but also for others. I think this for a number of reasons. To start with, they are something that I want the rest of my life to revolve around- clear focal points that can keep me grounded in who God loves me to be. I also feel the same for Sheena and our future family- that this is primarily where I will live these things out on a day to day basis. But I also feel that they are for others too- as all truth is God's truth and should be proclaimed, so...
1. REMEMBER (http://moreaboutthetone.blogspot.com/2009/04/zakar.html). This was one of my first ever blog posts and I'm not going to paste it in- go and read it! Basically however, the idea is pretty simple- remember! I figure if it's important enough for God to spend what seems like most of the Bible asking us to do, it's probably quite important.
This is my central pillar- the one that is most important to me- so important, in fact, that it has inspired a tattoo which i want (but am terrified to get!)
The past while now I've been reminded of the similarities for me between now (moving home) and when i moved to Reno in 2006. My last year at home (2005/6) was one of the biggest wastes and missed opportunities I think I have had in my life so far. It was my last year in uni and I was living with my brother, some of the greatest friends anyone could ask for, and Erasto, a random Mexican!! The year was fantastic, absolutely incredible- having a hand in showing the light to my roommate and helping him move from being a vegetarian to a meat eater again I think was the highlight of my year. But there was so many more- Steve's endless supplies of movies, finding James drinking hard alcohol in his room on his own at night, seeing my brother grow exponentially, prayers every morning, the eternal dish struggle that plagues pretty much every house, locking people in bathrooms with a wardrobe, watching football game after football game with the Prince of Mexico, the endless parties and the subsequent endless complaints that resulted in numerous police and university official visits!! It was a great year- a year to be envied.
Unfortunately, I feel like I missed out on a lot of it simply because I wasn't present. For most of the year I was so desperate to leave something beautiful for something beautiful. It seemed like most of my time (at least most of my head time) was consumed with Sheena and moving to Reno in a very unhealthy way. While it was one of the best and most memorable years in my life, where I received infinitely, I feel that I wasn't present enough to give as much as I could have.
Subsequently, I am deeply aware of doing the same thing this time around. Of thinking of home- of my family, of greystown, of live football, of my friends, of the dreams I have for Sheena and I, of going back to school, of getting to coach basketball again, of community- and missing the last months I have here in Reno. As a result, I've become reasonably good at taking captive some of my thoughts (for once) when it comes to day dreaming about moving- not only am I not present when i do this, but the dreams and expectations more often than not tend to be very unrealistic (hence my breakdown at Christmas).
Instead, during the healthy times when I do get to think on my own, I've been reflecting backwards. I've been here in Reno for 1229 days and during my time here God has taught me more than I thought was possible. I feel that for me, for now, it's more healthy and fair to those around me that I contemplate this instead of the future. As I've reflected back on the past 3+ years I think that most of what I have learnt revolves around 3 different (but very connected) things- 3 pillars if you will.
I've been trying to articulate to myself what these pillars look like more and more. I feel that they are very important for me especially, but also for others. I think this for a number of reasons. To start with, they are something that I want the rest of my life to revolve around- clear focal points that can keep me grounded in who God loves me to be. I also feel the same for Sheena and our future family- that this is primarily where I will live these things out on a day to day basis. But I also feel that they are for others too- as all truth is God's truth and should be proclaimed, so...
1. REMEMBER (http://moreaboutthetone.blogspot.com/2009/04/zakar.html). This was one of my first ever blog posts and I'm not going to paste it in- go and read it! Basically however, the idea is pretty simple- remember! I figure if it's important enough for God to spend what seems like most of the Bible asking us to do, it's probably quite important.
This is my central pillar- the one that is most important to me- so important, in fact, that it has inspired a tattoo which i want (but am terrified to get!)
στοργή
φιλία
זכר
ἔρως
ἀγάπη
so yeah, that's the tattoo- it's going to be on the inside of my right arm and I can't wait...kinda!
2. WHOLEISM. I think this is a word I made up. I think this is the hardest pillar for me because the other two pillars definitely come more naturally to me. This is something that God had been growing in my brain for quite a while and I was able to more concretely articulate with my last talk/discussion I lead at RCF. We talked about our bodies being a temple although I felt that the usual stuff about it only really being about sexual things was saddening. So, I deconstructed it a little. We ended up asking ourselves crazy questions- questions which I feel are perhaps as important to Jesus as any of the sexual questions. Questions like- if our body is a temple then...
what about what we eat? do we just pile shit into our bodies all day? What about how much we eat? What about why we eat? What about what we do after we eat? And what about drinking? What about how much we drink? What about why we drink? What about sleeping? What about sleeping in all day and still waking up tired? What about staying up till ridiculously late times every day and always being tired? Doesn't that affect everything? What about exercise? What about being lazy? What about playing video games all day and not even breathing fresh air? What about the video games we play? What about the movies we watch? What about what these things do to our brains and thought processes directly or indirectly? What about the toxins we unnecessarily put into the world that harm us and everything around us? What about the lifestyles we live that allow the state of the earth to get crappier and crappier...
...if our body IS a temple...
And this conversation I had with High Schoolers has haunted me ever since. I've come to realise that the life Jesus calls us to isn't a simple 'make a decision and then try and screw up as little as possible'. I've also come to realise that it also isn't a life where the only difference between my life and joe blogs next door's life is that I don't sleep in on a Sunday...it effects EVERYTHING. I strongly believe God may be as interested in our 'eternal' destination as He is in every single other little detail in my daily life. This is why i ran for a while, this is why I try to eat a little more healthier (which, let's be honest, when you ate as unhealthily as I did, the only way is up anyway!). This is why I try to get out of bed in the mornings even when I don't have to. This is why I don't really watch TV. This is why I try a lot of things (or even try not to do a lot of things)- not because it makes God love me more, not because they are, in and of themselves, bad things, but because how I engage with these issues is as important to God as a prayer I said in France when I was 15.
3. BLESSED TO BE A BLESSING. I learnt this from Darrin M. When God begins to really get the ball rolling with Abraham, he blesses the shit out of him. And it seems like the main reasons God did this (one of the rare times God gives us a reason!) was so that Abraham could be a blessing: blessed to be a blessing.
Genesis 12:1-3
And crikey- have I been blessed- with a hot, loving, supportive friend and wife- with an infinite of true, real friends, with a family of which I would change nothing about, with a great and free education, with a healthy body, with cheap rent for 7 years...I could go on and on and on and on (but this post if way too long already).
And as a result, I'm called/asked/get to be a blessing to others. I feel like this is maybe the easiest one for me- sometimes I forget, and it's really easy to be lazy and play fm all week and eat pizza forever, but being generous, being a blessing to others, for me, is much easier.
So there we have it, it was good for me to write this down- I feel like I am not done with this post and will probably come back to it now and again. And although I'm not obsessing about next year, I am excited to see how these three pillars morph and take more and more practicality and shape in Belfast!
Me
Monday, August 17, 2009
the Law
So I'm reading a new book -Christ's Fulfillment of Torah and Temple- Salvation according to Thomas Aquinas. I've started it under John's recommendation to help me begin to systematise my thoughts and theology in a healthy way (I am oh too familiar with how unhealthy oversystemising can be...so helpfully that realization will allow me to keep a sense of wonder and awe and prevent me from putting God into too many boxes...)
anyway, I've always had a bit of difficulty when it came to understand 'the Law' when I came to look at it in the Bible and try to think of how it apples to me today and some of what I have found here has been helpful. Levering talks of how Aquinas divides the Mosaic Law into three kinds of precepts- moral, ceremonial and judicial and he talks of how the latter two came to an end with Christ.
I find this helpful, although I still have questions and difficulties- how do we decide which laws fit into which category? He explains the separations, and on the face of it the whole idea seems quite straightforward. But as I began to think about it more and try to put a day-to-day practical face on the idea, I had difficulty doing so- what would a good example be of some of the ceremonial and judicial laws which are no longer relevant but which we still strive after today?
I have a feeling that a lot of the unnecessary, painful, ridiculous, religious (in a bad sense) and just plain hairpullingly stupid things that I see going on in the Church and world around me (and within me) has got to come about from us following ideas, principles (laws if you will) that have already been fulfilled by Jesus- I just have a hard time thinking of an example (0r 10).
I plan to give this more thought because I feel that this is key to my past experience with the church and maybe even evangelical Christianity- I just cannot fully articulate it yet...
anyway, I've always had a bit of difficulty when it came to understand 'the Law' when I came to look at it in the Bible and try to think of how it apples to me today and some of what I have found here has been helpful. Levering talks of how Aquinas divides the Mosaic Law into three kinds of precepts- moral, ceremonial and judicial and he talks of how the latter two came to an end with Christ.
I find this helpful, although I still have questions and difficulties- how do we decide which laws fit into which category? He explains the separations, and on the face of it the whole idea seems quite straightforward. But as I began to think about it more and try to put a day-to-day practical face on the idea, I had difficulty doing so- what would a good example be of some of the ceremonial and judicial laws which are no longer relevant but which we still strive after today?
I have a feeling that a lot of the unnecessary, painful, ridiculous, religious (in a bad sense) and just plain hairpullingly stupid things that I see going on in the Church and world around me (and within me) has got to come about from us following ideas, principles (laws if you will) that have already been fulfilled by Jesus- I just have a hard time thinking of an example (0r 10).
I plan to give this more thought because I feel that this is key to my past experience with the church and maybe even evangelical Christianity- I just cannot fully articulate it yet...
Monday, May 18, 2009
Love
is content to wait
takes things slowly
looks good without makeup
doesn't worry that it might not have anything to say right now
looks you in the eye during the awkward, difficult silences
is quietly hopeful
does not love with an agenda or selfish desires
breaks down and builds up
keeps even the hardest moments in perspective
lives and dies
wins
knows where the lines are but is not defined by them
is ok when feelings cant be put into words
shows we are lovable
risks
hardly thinks of itself
helps, at times to forget about our problems
and makes other problems beautiful
is not afraid to ask questions
and is not scared of not getting an answer right away
takes things slowly
looks good without makeup
doesn't worry that it might not have anything to say right now
looks you in the eye during the awkward, difficult silences
is quietly hopeful
does not love with an agenda or selfish desires
breaks down and builds up
keeps even the hardest moments in perspective
lives and dies
wins
knows where the lines are but is not defined by them
is ok when feelings cant be put into words
shows we are lovable
risks
hardly thinks of itself
helps, at times to forget about our problems
and makes other problems beautiful
is not afraid to ask questions
and is not scared of not getting an answer right away
Sheena
So Sheena has been encouraging me to write about me and my own thoughts instead of just always quoting from books. While I agree with her, it is definitely more difficult, for a lot of different reasons. So as an attempt to get there, I thought I'd begin that journey by quoting myself from my old journals
I like to re-read through my old journals every now and then, for a lot of different reasons. I thought I'd share my first mention of Sheena in a Matthew Dick journal- from the summer of confusion that was 2004:
"17/7
Why?
I am writing about what has been begging of me for what seems like an eternity, yet it has been, comparatively, for a moment.
A time when I have made a decision not to, I have. I am afraid to mention particulars- even here- and why? Even if someone where to read this...part of me wishes someone would, then I could talk to them...
It is consuming, everything has become secondary, everything but You- and that is why I have come to You now, when there seems to be no-one else.
I am feeling trapped- trapped by expectations- of mine and of others- by decisions I have made and possibly regret?
I don't even really know her, yet she is always in my thoughts, indirectly in my plans. A beauty with which I have never truly conversed, until now. a beauty within and without. I struggle to write of feelings, perhaps a first- afraid, of what, perhaps more relevant- of whom?
Help me here- I don't ask that you take this away, for I fear the knowledge, or lack thereof, of never knowing if she feels the same would be worse than the personal denial itself.
A loneliness has begun to show itself- has it been here the whole time- or is it presenting itself because of these new desires- new thoughts? Is this ridiculous? Perhaps this is the reason of the fear of someone else reading this- that what I have is an immature, storybook, unrealistic (unGodly?) love for someone?
Love, I wrote it! Yet I hardly know her- but never have I been engulfed with the thoughts (not even images) of one whom I know so little. I decided to write here to see where I ended, my thoughts would become somewhat clearer, even less numerous.
Is it becoming a sign from You to help me with the Affiliate decision- or will this just pass away like it did at Christmas- a large, large part, no, all my being, begs that it won't pass- and with more than my being I cry out that I will not be rejected- but for that to happen I would have to build more of a relationship- something hard to do without hurting people, especially amongst the mutterings, her past, raised eyebrows, envy, commitments made before my arrival, before I began to know her, set-ups, match making, obsessions with relationships to an extents where people will make sacrifices which would not normally be made. Are these barriers of You or of you?
I am ready to explode- this is totally illogical, unreasonable or is it?
Is this why you sent me this summer, or am I totally missing the plot- it's hard to HIYA here with my mind elsewhere.
I won't talk to the one closest to me here because I...well I don't know why- it seems she has plans for me and anything which doesn't fit into it, she doesn't want to know about it.
I have thought all day about her, spending next summer with her, yet not an impure thought and this realisation only occurs now as I write- just being with her, spending time, time...so precious, so often wasted, over-valued, under-valued?
When I'm down...
Is this the first time I have been completely honest with my pen? Yet I can't even write her name...?!"
I like to re-read through my old journals every now and then, for a lot of different reasons. I thought I'd share my first mention of Sheena in a Matthew Dick journal- from the summer of confusion that was 2004:
"17/7
Why?
I am writing about what has been begging of me for what seems like an eternity, yet it has been, comparatively, for a moment.
A time when I have made a decision not to, I have. I am afraid to mention particulars- even here- and why? Even if someone where to read this...part of me wishes someone would, then I could talk to them...
It is consuming, everything has become secondary, everything but You- and that is why I have come to You now, when there seems to be no-one else.
I am feeling trapped- trapped by expectations- of mine and of others- by decisions I have made and possibly regret?
I don't even really know her, yet she is always in my thoughts, indirectly in my plans. A beauty with which I have never truly conversed, until now. a beauty within and without. I struggle to write of feelings, perhaps a first- afraid, of what, perhaps more relevant- of whom?
Help me here- I don't ask that you take this away, for I fear the knowledge, or lack thereof, of never knowing if she feels the same would be worse than the personal denial itself.
A loneliness has begun to show itself- has it been here the whole time- or is it presenting itself because of these new desires- new thoughts? Is this ridiculous? Perhaps this is the reason of the fear of someone else reading this- that what I have is an immature, storybook, unrealistic (unGodly?) love for someone?
Love, I wrote it! Yet I hardly know her- but never have I been engulfed with the thoughts (not even images) of one whom I know so little. I decided to write here to see where I ended, my thoughts would become somewhat clearer, even less numerous.
Is it becoming a sign from You to help me with the Affiliate decision- or will this just pass away like it did at Christmas- a large, large part, no, all my being, begs that it won't pass- and with more than my being I cry out that I will not be rejected- but for that to happen I would have to build more of a relationship- something hard to do without hurting people, especially amongst the mutterings, her past, raised eyebrows, envy, commitments made before my arrival, before I began to know her, set-ups, match making, obsessions with relationships to an extents where people will make sacrifices which would not normally be made. Are these barriers of You or of you?
I am ready to explode- this is totally illogical, unreasonable or is it?
Is this why you sent me this summer, or am I totally missing the plot- it's hard to HIYA here with my mind elsewhere.
I won't talk to the one closest to me here because I...well I don't know why- it seems she has plans for me and anything which doesn't fit into it, she doesn't want to know about it.
I have thought all day about her, spending next summer with her, yet not an impure thought and this realisation only occurs now as I write- just being with her, spending time, time...so precious, so often wasted, over-valued, under-valued?
When I'm down...
Is this the first time I have been completely honest with my pen? Yet I can't even write her name...?!"
Tash
“So I went over much grass and many flowers and among all kinds of wholesome and delectable trees till lo! In a narrow place between two rocks there came to meet me a great Lion. The speed of him was like the ostrich, and his size was an elephant’s; his hair was like pure gold and the brightness of his eyes, like gold that is liquid in the furnace. He was more terrible than the Flaming Mountain of Lagour, and in beauty he surpassed all that is in the world, even as the rose in bloom surpasses the dust of the desert.
Then I fell at his feet and thought, Surely this is the hour of death, for the Lion (who is worthy of all honour) will know that I have served Tash all my days and not him. Nevertheless, it is better to see the Lion and die than to be Tisroc of the world and live and not to have seen him.
But the Glorious One bent down his golden head and touched my forehead with his tongue and said, Son, thou are welcome. But I said, Alas, Lord, I am no son of Thine but the servant of Tash. He answered, Child, all the service thou hast done to Tash, I account as service to me.
Then by reason of my great desire for wisdom and understanding, I overcame my fear and questioned the Glorious One and said, Lord, is it then true that thou and Tash are one? The Lion growled so that the earth shook (but his wrath was not against me) and said, It is false.
Not because he and I are one, but because we are opposites, I take to me the services which thou hast done to him, for I and he are of such different kinds that no service which is vile can be done to me, and none which is not vile can be done to him. Therefore if any man swear by Tash and keep his oath for the oath’s sake, it is by me that he has truly sworn, though he know it not, and it is I who reward him. And if any man do a cruelty in my name, then thought he says the name Aslan, it is Tash whom he serves and by Tash his deed is accepted.
Dost thou understand, Child? I said, Lord, thou knowest how much I understand. But I said also (for the truth constrained me), Yet I have been seeking Tash all my days. Beloved, said the Glorious One, unless thy desire had been for me thou shouldst not have sought so long and so truly. For all find what they truly seek."
Then I fell at his feet and thought, Surely this is the hour of death, for the Lion (who is worthy of all honour) will know that I have served Tash all my days and not him. Nevertheless, it is better to see the Lion and die than to be Tisroc of the world and live and not to have seen him.
But the Glorious One bent down his golden head and touched my forehead with his tongue and said, Son, thou are welcome. But I said, Alas, Lord, I am no son of Thine but the servant of Tash. He answered, Child, all the service thou hast done to Tash, I account as service to me.
Then by reason of my great desire for wisdom and understanding, I overcame my fear and questioned the Glorious One and said, Lord, is it then true that thou and Tash are one? The Lion growled so that the earth shook (but his wrath was not against me) and said, It is false.
Not because he and I are one, but because we are opposites, I take to me the services which thou hast done to him, for I and he are of such different kinds that no service which is vile can be done to me, and none which is not vile can be done to him. Therefore if any man swear by Tash and keep his oath for the oath’s sake, it is by me that he has truly sworn, though he know it not, and it is I who reward him. And if any man do a cruelty in my name, then thought he says the name Aslan, it is Tash whom he serves and by Tash his deed is accepted.
Dost thou understand, Child? I said, Lord, thou knowest how much I understand. But I said also (for the truth constrained me), Yet I have been seeking Tash all my days. Beloved, said the Glorious One, unless thy desire had been for me thou shouldst not have sought so long and so truly. For all find what they truly seek."
The Greatest Calling?
When you were born
Our hearts were so full of happiness
That there was no room in us
for words.
When you were growing
Our hearts were so full of care for you
That we spoke soothingly
And sometimes sharply,
Fearful for your safety,
But always- in the deepest places
of our hearts
We spoke lovingly.
Today, as we watch you
Moving forward with your friends
We marvel at all you have done
And become.
Our spirits sing praise to God
For the gift that is you.
And, though our hearts
Have stretched to love others,
yet, there is a place within us
That is yours, and only yours
Always.
For the light you have shone on us
For the life you have called us to,
For the special gift of God you are
now, and will ever be
Thank You
Our hearts were so full of happiness
That there was no room in us
for words.
When you were growing
Our hearts were so full of care for you
That we spoke soothingly
And sometimes sharply,
Fearful for your safety,
But always- in the deepest places
of our hearts
We spoke lovingly.
Today, as we watch you
Moving forward with your friends
We marvel at all you have done
And become.
Our spirits sing praise to God
For the gift that is you.
And, though our hearts
Have stretched to love others,
yet, there is a place within us
That is yours, and only yours
Always.
For the light you have shone on us
For the life you have called us to,
For the special gift of God you are
now, and will ever be
Thank You
Tuesday, May 5, 2009
The First of the Misnamed Parables...the good samaritan
'I suppose I had best lay my cards face up right here. To me, the central figure in the parable is not the Samaritan. He is simply one of the three characters in the story who have the opportunity to display neighbourliness as Jesus defines it. The defining character- the one to whom the other three respond by being non-neighbour or neighbor- is the man who fell among thieves. The actual Christ-figure in the story, therefore is yet another loser, yet another down-and outer who, by just lying there in his lostness and proximity to death...is in fact the closest thing to Jesus in the parable.
That runs counter, of course, to the better part of two thousand years' worth of interpretation, but I shall insist on it. This parable, like so many of Jesus' most telling ones, has been egregiously misnamed. It is not primarily about the Samaritan but about the man on the ground (just as the Prodigal Son is not about a boy's sins but about his father's forgiveness, and just as the Laborers in the Vineyard is not about the workers but about the beneficent vineyard-owner)...
What I am most concerned to skewer at this point is precisely the theological mischief caused by the misnaming of this parable. Calling it the Good Samaritan inevitably sets up its hearers to take it as a story whose hero offers them a good example for imitation. I am, of course, aware of the fact that Jesus ends the parable precisely on the note of imitation: "You, too, go and do likewise." But the common, good-works interpretation of the imitation to which Jesus invites us all too easily gives the Gospel a fast shuffle. True enough, we are called to imitation. But imitation of what, exactly? Is it not the imitatio Christi, the following of Jesus? And is not that following of him far more than just a matter of doing kind acts? Is it not the following of him into the only mystery that can save the world, namely, his passion, death, and Resurrection? Is it not, tout court, the taking up of his cross?
Therefore, if you want to say that the parable of the Good Samaritan tells us to imitate the Samaritan in his sharing of the passion and near-death of the man who fell among thieves- if you want to read his selfless actions as so many ways in which he took the outcastness and lostness of the Christ-figure on the ground into his own outcast and losing life- then I will let you have imitation as one of the main themes of the parable. But please note that such an interpretations is not at all what people generally have in mind when the subjects of imitating the Good Samaritan is broached to them. What their minds instantly go to is something quite different, something that is utterly destructive of the notion of grace that works only by death and resurrection. Because what they imagine themselves called upon to imitate is not a mystery of lostness and death graspable only by left-handed faith; rather it is a mere plausibility- a sensible if slightly heroic career of successful care-giving based on the performances of right-handed good works.
What is wrong with that? Quite simply, it blows the Good News right out of the water. For if the world could have been saved by providing good examples to which we could respond with appropiately good works, it would have been saved an hour and twenty minutes after Moses came down from Mt. Sinai...
Jesus' whole parable, especially with its piling up of detail after detail of extreme, even irrational, behaviour on the part of the Samaritan, points not to the meritorious exercises of good will but to the sharing of the passion as the main thrust of the story. What is to be imitated in the Samaritan's action is not his moral uprightness in doing good deeds but his spiritual insight into the truly bizarre working of the mystery of redemption. The lawyer is told by Jesus, in effect, to stop trying to live and to be willing to die...'
That runs counter, of course, to the better part of two thousand years' worth of interpretation, but I shall insist on it. This parable, like so many of Jesus' most telling ones, has been egregiously misnamed. It is not primarily about the Samaritan but about the man on the ground (just as the Prodigal Son is not about a boy's sins but about his father's forgiveness, and just as the Laborers in the Vineyard is not about the workers but about the beneficent vineyard-owner)...
What I am most concerned to skewer at this point is precisely the theological mischief caused by the misnaming of this parable. Calling it the Good Samaritan inevitably sets up its hearers to take it as a story whose hero offers them a good example for imitation. I am, of course, aware of the fact that Jesus ends the parable precisely on the note of imitation: "You, too, go and do likewise." But the common, good-works interpretation of the imitation to which Jesus invites us all too easily gives the Gospel a fast shuffle. True enough, we are called to imitation. But imitation of what, exactly? Is it not the imitatio Christi, the following of Jesus? And is not that following of him far more than just a matter of doing kind acts? Is it not the following of him into the only mystery that can save the world, namely, his passion, death, and Resurrection? Is it not, tout court, the taking up of his cross?
Therefore, if you want to say that the parable of the Good Samaritan tells us to imitate the Samaritan in his sharing of the passion and near-death of the man who fell among thieves- if you want to read his selfless actions as so many ways in which he took the outcastness and lostness of the Christ-figure on the ground into his own outcast and losing life- then I will let you have imitation as one of the main themes of the parable. But please note that such an interpretations is not at all what people generally have in mind when the subjects of imitating the Good Samaritan is broached to them. What their minds instantly go to is something quite different, something that is utterly destructive of the notion of grace that works only by death and resurrection. Because what they imagine themselves called upon to imitate is not a mystery of lostness and death graspable only by left-handed faith; rather it is a mere plausibility- a sensible if slightly heroic career of successful care-giving based on the performances of right-handed good works.
What is wrong with that? Quite simply, it blows the Good News right out of the water. For if the world could have been saved by providing good examples to which we could respond with appropiately good works, it would have been saved an hour and twenty minutes after Moses came down from Mt. Sinai...
Jesus' whole parable, especially with its piling up of detail after detail of extreme, even irrational, behaviour on the part of the Samaritan, points not to the meritorious exercises of good will but to the sharing of the passion as the main thrust of the story. What is to be imitated in the Samaritan's action is not his moral uprightness in doing good deeds but his spiritual insight into the truly bizarre working of the mystery of redemption. The lawyer is told by Jesus, in effect, to stop trying to live and to be willing to die...'
Friday, May 1, 2009
Inspiration and it's Critics
During my studies at undergrad, I always struggled with such topics as 'The Search for the Historical Jesus' or some of the Jesus Seminar stuff.
For those of us who are quite unfamiliar, according to Wiki,
While I try to have a trampoline understanding of God rather than a wall (see Rob Bell), I feel that the inspiration of Scripture is a Truth I hold onto which I am not yet willing to really deconstruct or question seriously. For now, a bit like the trinity, not only am I quite content to trust those before me who have articulated such doctrine, but more importantly, I really don't worry about it all too much because for me, my relationship with God is more personal and experiential than it is logical or reasonable.
However, I was reminded of my Jesus Seminar frustrations when I agreed with Capon,
'As far as I am concerned, the Jesus of the Gospels is the only available Jesus there is and it is idle to postulate any other, no matter how likely such a Jesus may seem on the grounds of form criticism or historical surmise. For my money, it was over the literary presentation of this Jesus of the Gospels that the Holy Spirit brooded when inspiring the Scriptures; the same cannot be said for subsequent literary efforts on Jesus' behalf. If the presentation we accept by trusting biblical inspiration is in error, then not only are we stuck with it; we will never even (on any basis "inspired" or "factual") be able to say exactly what it is in error about'
For those of us who are quite unfamiliar, according to Wiki,
The Jesus Seminar is a group of about 150 individuals, including scholars with advanced degrees in biblical studies, religious studies or related fields as well as published authors who are notable in the field of religion, founded in 1985 by the late Robert Funk and John Dominic Crossan under the auspices of the Westar Institute.[1] One of the most active groups in biblical criticism,[2] the seminar uses votes with colored beads to decide their collective view of the historicity of Jesus, specifically what he may or may not have said and done as a historical figure.[3] In addition, the seminar popularizes the quest for the historical Jesus. The public is welcome to attend the twice-yearly meetings. They produced new translations of the New Testament and apocrypha to use as textual sources.
The seminar's reconstruction of the historical Jesus portrays him as an itinerant Hellenistic Jewish sage who did not die as a substitute for sinners nor rise from the dead, but preached a "social gospel" in startling parables and aphorisms. An iconoclast, Jesus broke with established Jewish theological dogmas and social conventions both in his teachings and behaviors, often by turning common-sense ideas upside down, confounding the expectations of his audience: He preached of "Heaven's imperial rule" (traditionally translated as "Kingdom of God") as being already present but unseen; he depicts God as a loving father; he fraternizes with outsiders and criticizes insiders.
While my classes and teaching on all this may not have been as extreme as the description above, I always got bothered with what they were saying fundamentally about the Bible and about it's inspiration specifically.While I try to have a trampoline understanding of God rather than a wall (see Rob Bell), I feel that the inspiration of Scripture is a Truth I hold onto which I am not yet willing to really deconstruct or question seriously. For now, a bit like the trinity, not only am I quite content to trust those before me who have articulated such doctrine, but more importantly, I really don't worry about it all too much because for me, my relationship with God is more personal and experiential than it is logical or reasonable.
However, I was reminded of my Jesus Seminar frustrations when I agreed with Capon,
'As far as I am concerned, the Jesus of the Gospels is the only available Jesus there is and it is idle to postulate any other, no matter how likely such a Jesus may seem on the grounds of form criticism or historical surmise. For my money, it was over the literary presentation of this Jesus of the Gospels that the Holy Spirit brooded when inspiring the Scriptures; the same cannot be said for subsequent literary efforts on Jesus' behalf. If the presentation we accept by trusting biblical inspiration is in error, then not only are we stuck with it; we will never even (on any basis "inspired" or "factual") be able to say exactly what it is in error about'
Thursday, April 30, 2009
Why I want to study and teach theology
'A certain couple once built a house. They set it on solid foundations and made it proof against all weathers. But in their haste to take up occupancy, they made no provision for access to the front door. To enter, they simply leaped up onto the doorstill and yanked themselves in. As they began to feel more at home, however, they decided to make their comings and goings more convenient. First, they built a short flight of steps. These served well for a while, but eventually they replaced them with a small, plainish porch on which they could sit and contemplate the excellences of their house. In good weather, they even entertained friends there with wine, cheese, and conversation.
Soon enough, though, they tore down this porch and built a much lager one. They gave it a roof supported by carpenter Gothic columns; they surrounded it with intricate railing; they provided it with a wide, low-pitched staircase; and they decorated it everywhere with gingerbread ornamentation.
Many years passed, during which they enjoyed both the porch and the house. But then, on a cold and stormy night, the woman came to the man as he sat by the fire and shook a sheaf of bills in front of him. "Have you ever considered," she said annoyedly, "how much we spend on the upkeep of our porch? For something that's usable only four months of the year- and not even then, if one of us is sick- the cost-benefit ratio is appalling. Between the dry rot and the peeling paint, not to mention the lawsuit your friend Arthur brought against us when he caught his ankle in the gap left by those missing boards, it's more trouble than it's worth. Tear it down and let's go back to the way we started: no porch, no steps, no nothing; just up into the house by one leap."
My parable, obviously, is about the relationship between faith and theologizing. Equally obviously, it is more an allegory than a parable...the house in which the couple lived represents faith- the simple act of deciding to trust Jesus...on the other hand, the various accesses, plain steps or fancy porches, that they added to their house stand for out attempts at theologizing- that is, for any and all of the explanations we come up with when we try to render our house of faith more intelligible, more attractive, or more acceptable to the intellectual tastes of our neighbours or friends.
Inevitably, any author who tries to interpret Jesus' parables will spend most of his time on the porch. He will, of course, take it for granted that there is a house of faith to which the porch should remain firmly attached, and he will, if he is wise, make it clear that only the house can provide a completely safe place in which to live. Nevertheless, since the woman in my parable came to such a dim view of porches, a few comments on her objections would seem to be in order...
It is tempting simply to agree with her. So much of what both the world and the Church consider to be essential message of the Gospel is simply interpretation. It is generally assumed that Christianity teaches that people cannot be saved unless they accept some correct, or at least some Official Boy Scout, understanding of what Jesus did or said. Take the atonement, for example- the scriptural insistence that our sins are forgiven by trusting a Jesus who died on the cross and rose from the dead. The usual view is that this trust inevitably involves accepting some intellectual formulation of how Jesus' death and resurrection could possibly have achieved such a happy issue out of all our afflictions. You know: he was able to bring it off because he was both God and man and so he could bridge the gulf that sin had put between the two; or, his death was effective because it was a ransom paid to the devil; or, it did the job because the power of his sacrificial example softened even hard hearts and moved people to better behaviour; or, his resurrection solved the problem of sin because it brought about a new creation in which sin had no place. The point is not whether any of those interpretations is true, or even adequate (some are more so, some less); it is that none of them is strictly necessary for laying hold of the atonement Jesus offers. All you need for that is to believe in him...your subsequent understanding of how such a simple yes can do so vast a work may make you glad, sad, scared, or mad; but in no case can it be what saves you- or, for that matter, condemns you...
Still, interpretation, like porch-building, is practically inevitable. We are, after all, thinking beings, and we think about everything we do, up to and including the act of faith: almost no one lives out an entire lifetime simply by leaping into the ungarnished doorway of the house of faith. Accordingly, the woman in my parable was advocating a rather more austere lifestyle than most of us are in fact willing to put up with. Let's see, then- assuming that her husband took exception to her comprehensive demolition plans- what might be said for his more tolerant view of the situation.
...To begin with, it is mostly just a fun thing to do in good company on a warm afternoon when your kidney stones are not acting up. If it is taken much more seriously than that- if it is seen as the center from which life derives meaning- it will fail us in precise proportion to our need to make it succeed...
Once someone devises a system or theme for building the porch to his faith, the temptation is to continue the work of construction whether it serves the purposes of the house or not. Hence all the theologies that manage to take the Gospel of grace- of forgiveness freely offered to everyone on the basis of no works at all- and convert it into the bad news of a religion that offers salvation only to the well-behaved. Hence, too, all the moralistic interpretations of the parables: sermons on the duty of contentment from the Laborers in the Vineyard, and little lessons in loveliness from the parable of the Good Samaritan...
Still, having made those concessions, the man in my parable would insist that porch-building, whether it is inevitable, worthwhile, tasteful, expensive, or not, is a fact. Most people who have faith have some intellectual structure tacked in front of it. But precisely because that is true, those who invite others to visit or stay in their house of faith are faced with a difficulty: the only way to get guests to the door is to walk them across the porch. Theologizing may not be a saving proposition, but it lies between almost everybody and the Saving Proposition Himself.
Accordingly, he would point out that there is something to be said, no matter how much or how little porch you have on your faith, for keeping that structure as attractive and sound as you can...above all, its floorboards must be all in place and all nailed down tight. It will not do for anyone to leave spaces in the decking- to install only the scriptural boards he likes and to omit those he doesn't'. A theological porch must include every side of every scriptural paradox. A system, for example, that is all love and no wrath is no better than one that is all wrath and no love. In either case, the unsuspecting guest is liable to break an ankle because of what was left out.
But enough. My parable was as much, ro more, for me as for you. If you will try not to insist that my porch be exactly like yours, I shall resist the temptaion to force mine on you. All i really care about is that both our structures have no missing boards...'
Soon enough, though, they tore down this porch and built a much lager one. They gave it a roof supported by carpenter Gothic columns; they surrounded it with intricate railing; they provided it with a wide, low-pitched staircase; and they decorated it everywhere with gingerbread ornamentation.
Many years passed, during which they enjoyed both the porch and the house. But then, on a cold and stormy night, the woman came to the man as he sat by the fire and shook a sheaf of bills in front of him. "Have you ever considered," she said annoyedly, "how much we spend on the upkeep of our porch? For something that's usable only four months of the year- and not even then, if one of us is sick- the cost-benefit ratio is appalling. Between the dry rot and the peeling paint, not to mention the lawsuit your friend Arthur brought against us when he caught his ankle in the gap left by those missing boards, it's more trouble than it's worth. Tear it down and let's go back to the way we started: no porch, no steps, no nothing; just up into the house by one leap."
My parable, obviously, is about the relationship between faith and theologizing. Equally obviously, it is more an allegory than a parable...the house in which the couple lived represents faith- the simple act of deciding to trust Jesus...on the other hand, the various accesses, plain steps or fancy porches, that they added to their house stand for out attempts at theologizing- that is, for any and all of the explanations we come up with when we try to render our house of faith more intelligible, more attractive, or more acceptable to the intellectual tastes of our neighbours or friends.
Inevitably, any author who tries to interpret Jesus' parables will spend most of his time on the porch. He will, of course, take it for granted that there is a house of faith to which the porch should remain firmly attached, and he will, if he is wise, make it clear that only the house can provide a completely safe place in which to live. Nevertheless, since the woman in my parable came to such a dim view of porches, a few comments on her objections would seem to be in order...
It is tempting simply to agree with her. So much of what both the world and the Church consider to be essential message of the Gospel is simply interpretation. It is generally assumed that Christianity teaches that people cannot be saved unless they accept some correct, or at least some Official Boy Scout, understanding of what Jesus did or said. Take the atonement, for example- the scriptural insistence that our sins are forgiven by trusting a Jesus who died on the cross and rose from the dead. The usual view is that this trust inevitably involves accepting some intellectual formulation of how Jesus' death and resurrection could possibly have achieved such a happy issue out of all our afflictions. You know: he was able to bring it off because he was both God and man and so he could bridge the gulf that sin had put between the two; or, his death was effective because it was a ransom paid to the devil; or, it did the job because the power of his sacrificial example softened even hard hearts and moved people to better behaviour; or, his resurrection solved the problem of sin because it brought about a new creation in which sin had no place. The point is not whether any of those interpretations is true, or even adequate (some are more so, some less); it is that none of them is strictly necessary for laying hold of the atonement Jesus offers. All you need for that is to believe in him...your subsequent understanding of how such a simple yes can do so vast a work may make you glad, sad, scared, or mad; but in no case can it be what saves you- or, for that matter, condemns you...
Still, interpretation, like porch-building, is practically inevitable. We are, after all, thinking beings, and we think about everything we do, up to and including the act of faith: almost no one lives out an entire lifetime simply by leaping into the ungarnished doorway of the house of faith. Accordingly, the woman in my parable was advocating a rather more austere lifestyle than most of us are in fact willing to put up with. Let's see, then- assuming that her husband took exception to her comprehensive demolition plans- what might be said for his more tolerant view of the situation.
...To begin with, it is mostly just a fun thing to do in good company on a warm afternoon when your kidney stones are not acting up. If it is taken much more seriously than that- if it is seen as the center from which life derives meaning- it will fail us in precise proportion to our need to make it succeed...
Once someone devises a system or theme for building the porch to his faith, the temptation is to continue the work of construction whether it serves the purposes of the house or not. Hence all the theologies that manage to take the Gospel of grace- of forgiveness freely offered to everyone on the basis of no works at all- and convert it into the bad news of a religion that offers salvation only to the well-behaved. Hence, too, all the moralistic interpretations of the parables: sermons on the duty of contentment from the Laborers in the Vineyard, and little lessons in loveliness from the parable of the Good Samaritan...
Still, having made those concessions, the man in my parable would insist that porch-building, whether it is inevitable, worthwhile, tasteful, expensive, or not, is a fact. Most people who have faith have some intellectual structure tacked in front of it. But precisely because that is true, those who invite others to visit or stay in their house of faith are faced with a difficulty: the only way to get guests to the door is to walk them across the porch. Theologizing may not be a saving proposition, but it lies between almost everybody and the Saving Proposition Himself.
Accordingly, he would point out that there is something to be said, no matter how much or how little porch you have on your faith, for keeping that structure as attractive and sound as you can...above all, its floorboards must be all in place and all nailed down tight. It will not do for anyone to leave spaces in the decking- to install only the scriptural boards he likes and to omit those he doesn't'. A theological porch must include every side of every scriptural paradox. A system, for example, that is all love and no wrath is no better than one that is all wrath and no love. In either case, the unsuspecting guest is liable to break an ankle because of what was left out.
But enough. My parable was as much, ro more, for me as for you. If you will try not to insist that my porch be exactly like yours, I shall resist the temptaion to force mine on you. All i really care about is that both our structures have no missing boards...'
Monday, April 27, 2009
The Treasure and the Pearl
"All the children of Adam- all human beings, at all times, and in all places- are in the kingdom business, shopping night and day for the mystery of the city of God. Oh, true enough, like any random group of shoppers, they have their share of gullibility, questionable taste, and proneness to buy what's in the store rather than wait for what they're really looking for. But they are shopping. And they are, as often as not, quite willing to put their money where their heart's desire is. They are not simply a bunch of cheapskates; and they do not, given half a chance to see some first-rate goods, simply fob off the storekeeper with an 'Oh, we're just looking'...
...It is catholic not only because the mystery it proclaims is already hidden everywhere but because the market for the mystery is a catholic market".
...It is catholic not only because the mystery it proclaims is already hidden everywhere but because the market for the mystery is a catholic market".
Forgiveness and Permission and our addiction to Eschatology
"A good many Christian theologians, even among those who know Greek, have managed to miss the point completely. Indeed, the first objection usually raised to letting evil be- let alone to forgiving it- takes the form of agitated moralistic hand-wringing: 'But if you simply tell people in advance that they're going to be forgiven, won't they just go straight out and take that as permission to sin? Don't we have to keep them scared out of their wits by continually harping on the big difference between forgiveness and permission? '
I have a number of replies to that. The first is, 'What big difference? In Greek, the same word is used for both.' The second is, 'There's no difference between them at all. If you're an utterly serious forgiver, and if you make your forgiving disposition known to a solid brass snake-in-the-grass, he will obviously play you for the sucker you are as often as he feels like it: what do you think the world, the flesh, and the devil thought about a Jesus who died on the cross instead of nuking his enemies?' The third is, 'What on earth are you talking about? God, in the act of creating you, gave you permission to do any damned fool thing you could manage to bring off. Forgiveness neither increases nor decreases the level of God's permissiveness; instead, it just fishes us out of the otherwise inescapable quicksand we so stupidly got ourselves into and says "There! Isn't that better!" ' My fourth and final reply, though, is, ' Of course there's a difference; and it's a whopping one. But since that makes no difference at all to either the farmer in the parable or to Jesus on the cross- or, for that matter, to any Christian committed to forgiving his skunk of a brother seventy times seven times- why harp on it?'
'...Oh, of course. I know that by now you are mighty tired of all this emphasis on the Divine Sweetness. You are just itching to remind me that at the harvest, the weeds are going to be bound up in bundles and burned in an appropriately eschatological fire. And so they are. And to finish off the text, so is the wheat going to be gatehered into the barn. But if I may try your patience just one minute more, let me ask you to consider the proportions of this parable as Jesus first tells it. The words that you have all along been holding your breath to hear constitute only two thirds of its final verse. The rest of the parabel- Matthew 13:24-30a- is entirely about the aphesis of evil, not about the avenging of it...
...the human race is hooked on eschatology: give us one drag on it, and we proceed to party away our whole forigven life in fantasies about a final score-settling session that none of us, except for forgiveness, could possibly survive'
I have a number of replies to that. The first is, 'What big difference? In Greek, the same word is used for both.' The second is, 'There's no difference between them at all. If you're an utterly serious forgiver, and if you make your forgiving disposition known to a solid brass snake-in-the-grass, he will obviously play you for the sucker you are as often as he feels like it: what do you think the world, the flesh, and the devil thought about a Jesus who died on the cross instead of nuking his enemies?' The third is, 'What on earth are you talking about? God, in the act of creating you, gave you permission to do any damned fool thing you could manage to bring off. Forgiveness neither increases nor decreases the level of God's permissiveness; instead, it just fishes us out of the otherwise inescapable quicksand we so stupidly got ourselves into and says "There! Isn't that better!" ' My fourth and final reply, though, is, ' Of course there's a difference; and it's a whopping one. But since that makes no difference at all to either the farmer in the parable or to Jesus on the cross- or, for that matter, to any Christian committed to forgiving his skunk of a brother seventy times seven times- why harp on it?'
'...Oh, of course. I know that by now you are mighty tired of all this emphasis on the Divine Sweetness. You are just itching to remind me that at the harvest, the weeds are going to be bound up in bundles and burned in an appropriately eschatological fire. And so they are. And to finish off the text, so is the wheat going to be gatehered into the barn. But if I may try your patience just one minute more, let me ask you to consider the proportions of this parable as Jesus first tells it. The words that you have all along been holding your breath to hear constitute only two thirds of its final verse. The rest of the parabel- Matthew 13:24-30a- is entirely about the aphesis of evil, not about the avenging of it...
...the human race is hooked on eschatology: give us one drag on it, and we proceed to party away our whole forigven life in fantasies about a final score-settling session that none of us, except for forgiveness, could possibly survive'
More weeds and wheat- the problem of evil...
'The weeds may not be real wheat, but they look just like it; if the servants can be inveigled into taking up arms against them, a truly catholic and actual disaster can be brewed.
And one almost is. Coming to the farmer, the servants are totally preoccupied with the problem of evil, "you sowed good seed in you field, didn't you, Sir?" they ask him. "Where then did the weeds come from?" Just like two thousand years' worth of Christian theologians- though more excusably, perhaps, since the workers were ignorant of the crucifixion- their first intellectual efforts are directed, not to finding out how they should act in the presence of evil, but to looking for an explanation of it that they can understand'
And one almost is. Coming to the farmer, the servants are totally preoccupied with the problem of evil, "you sowed good seed in you field, didn't you, Sir?" they ask him. "Where then did the weeds come from?" Just like two thousand years' worth of Christian theologians- though more excusably, perhaps, since the workers were ignorant of the crucifixion- their first intellectual efforts are directed, not to finding out how they should act in the presence of evil, but to looking for an explanation of it that they can understand'
Wednesday, April 22, 2009
Pulling Weeds
As I finished The Colours of God, the parable of the weeds from Matthew 13 was very much in my mind. They provided me with some interesting insight and things to ponder.
They talked of how God says to us here that we don't have the capacity to make a distinction between what is truly good and what is truly evil; between the wheat and the weeds, 'In other words, God is saying, "I'm not wigged out by the fact that there's evil and good growing together. As a matter of fact, in your well-intentioned attempts to root out the weeds, you're actually pulling out more of the good than the bad- please, just leave the whole field alone." He's telling us not to be weed-pullers...hands off, trying to rid the world of all evil and start getting okay with living in a world of risk and potential harm. God is telling us to relax and just go in and enjoy the field...'
Then as I re-continued this current book (see last post) I came upon additional thoughts which I thought I'd share (although he's making perhaps a different point, he is talking about the same story),
'As the parable develops it's point, though, the enemy turns out not to need anything more than negative power. He has to act only minimally on his own to wreak havoc in the world; mostly he depends on the force of goodness, insofar as he can sucker them into taking up arms against the confusion he has introduced, to do his work. That is precisely why the enemy goes away after sowing the weeds: he has no need whatsoever to hang around. Unable to take positive action anyway- having no real power to muck up the operation- he simply sprinkles around a generous helping of darkness and waits for the children of light to get flustered enough to do the job for him. Goodness itself, in other words, if it is sufficiently committed to plausible, right-handed, strong-arm methods, will in the very name of goodness do all and more than all that evil ever had in mind'.
They talked of how God says to us here that we don't have the capacity to make a distinction between what is truly good and what is truly evil; between the wheat and the weeds, 'In other words, God is saying, "I'm not wigged out by the fact that there's evil and good growing together. As a matter of fact, in your well-intentioned attempts to root out the weeds, you're actually pulling out more of the good than the bad- please, just leave the whole field alone." He's telling us not to be weed-pullers...hands off, trying to rid the world of all evil and start getting okay with living in a world of risk and potential harm. God is telling us to relax and just go in and enjoy the field...'
Then as I re-continued this current book (see last post) I came upon additional thoughts which I thought I'd share (although he's making perhaps a different point, he is talking about the same story),
'As the parable develops it's point, though, the enemy turns out not to need anything more than negative power. He has to act only minimally on his own to wreak havoc in the world; mostly he depends on the force of goodness, insofar as he can sucker them into taking up arms against the confusion he has introduced, to do his work. That is precisely why the enemy goes away after sowing the weeds: he has no need whatsoever to hang around. Unable to take positive action anyway- having no real power to muck up the operation- he simply sprinkles around a generous helping of darkness and waits for the children of light to get flustered enough to do the job for him. Goodness itself, in other words, if it is sufficiently committed to plausible, right-handed, strong-arm methods, will in the very name of goodness do all and more than all that evil ever had in mind'.
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