Category Archives: Life as the church

The sad history of Christians co-opted by the powerful

A life in the Spirit, Building community, Doing Theology, Life as the church, Spiritual direction, , , ,

The good things Jesus creates and recreates in the world are always threatened by some power that wants to co-opt them or just eliminate their alternativity. The history of the church being co-opted keeps repeating itself.

Way back in 1990 I had the amazing privilege to travel to Honduras and El Salvador with MCC where I met some Jesus followers who were hard to co-opt. It was the first of several immersion trips that have changed and enriched my life. The visit took place two years before the civil war in El Salvador (1969-92) officially ended, and ten years after Oscar Romero was martyred. It was less than a year after six Jesuit priests were murdered for speaking out against the government of El Salvador and advocating for the poor.

Jon Sobrino in 2015

On the trip I met the seventh priest, Jon Sobrino, who had been teaching missionary students in Thailand about liberation theology when his housemates and caretakers were attacked and killed. He was gracious, sober, and still grieving the loss. When he heard we were Americans, before long he said, “I can never go there again.” He had recently been interviewed on U.S. TV about the scandalous actions of the death squad. “It is too, debilitating, too tempting” he said, or something to that effect. “It is a spiritual desert which thinks it is an oasis.” Sobrino could not be co-opted by the media machine, or wealthy donors, or the colossally power. But people tried to exploit him for his story, to reduce his suffering to “news.”

Ever since then, he has been an inspiration for soul-keeping for me, as in “What does it profit you to gain the whole world, at the cost of your soul?” I wish for you the same conviction and courage Sobrino continues to display.

In the history of Christianity, it is amazing how the best people are often co-opted by the established powers: the government, the media, corporations, the church, etc. They lose the battle Sobrino has regularly won. They bend their freedom to the rules. They dim their inspiration for the fearful. They lose their courage in the face of the gullible herd. They let their joy be stolen and their best selves conformed and compromised. Or they just get rolled over, as many would say is just what happened to Jesus.

I’m especially thinking of two of my favorite examples from the past: Teresa of Kolkata and Francis of Assisi. I’ll mention the Evangelicals, too. The movement Francis led (d. 1226 at the beginning of European capitalism) is quickly taken over and neutered by the church even before he dies. Teresa (d. 1997 during the flowering of neoliberalism) is boxed like another brand by the media machine and I think the exposure dims her light. The American Evangelical church plummeted in influence and authority when it was co-opted by the empire’s ways and means, especially during the pandemic. It’s division into “left” and “right” has to be one of the main reasons there are more “nones” than white Evangelicals for he first time this year.

Teresa

Mother Teresa’s media presence was wildly successful in raising consciousness and funding her work. But I still wonder if her conversion of the journalist Malcolm Muggeridge was also a means of him converting her, too. His book Something Beautiful for God (1971) still sells over 100 copies a month in its “beatification edition” from 2003! He was a boon to her and she to him, as far as making money goes.

I love how she gets her message out. But I wonder what the screen is doing to her: the faux intimacy, the chattiness, the objectification and reductionism. Perhaps her faith transcends the screen. Or maybe the screen reduces it to another story in its world of truthiness. Here is an example of her on screen with Muggeridge from 1971. [link]

Francis

In 1266, a generation after St. Francis died, the general chapter meeting in Paris ordered Franciscans everywhere to destroy their writings about Francis written before the minister general’s, that is Bonaventure’s, new biography was published. It was a breathtaking attempt to “control the narrative.” Twenty years earlier, the chapter had asked people who had known Francis to write down all their memories, which they did, copies of which survived the purge. These surviving records are what Jean Paul Sabatier rediscovered and included in his biography of Francis in 1894. I recently read an annotated version by John Sweeny: The Road to Assisi: The Essential Biography of St. Francis: 120th Anniversary Edition. It is an inspiring and sobering book.

Francis died a sad, transcendent man. His prolonged stay in Syria after inserting himself into the battles of the Fifth Crusade, created a rumor he was dead and caused a brother to go find him.  Upon his return, Francis found the “Cardinal Protector” of the Franciscans, Ugolino di Conti (later Pope Gregory IX) had imposed the Benedictine rule on Clare’s community and influenced the men Francis left in charge to loosen their vow of poverty and act more like other monks.

Sabatier says:

It was the first movement of the old spirit against the new. It was the effort of people who unconsciously, I am willing to assume, made religion an affair of rite and observance, instead of seeing it, like St. Francis, as the conquest of freedom that makes us free in all things. This is the freedom that leads each soul to obey the divine and mysterious power that the flowers in the field adore, that the birds of the air bless, that the symphony of the stars praises, and that Jesus of Nazareth called Abba, or, Father.

For the last five ears of his life Francis endured the incremental co-option of his brotherhood into the orders of the church, their freedom mediated by the Pope. By the time of Bonaventure, his life was a glorious but impractical relic. Sick, exhausted, and leaning into death, bearing the wounds of stigmata, Francis began to move toward his desired resting place at Portiuncula. He said good-bye to Mt. Verna and spent time recuperating at San Damiano with Clare’s community. As he gained strength there, he composed the famous “Canticle of the Sun.” Here are the SVD Brothers and their recent version. [link]

Just four years after Francis dictated his last will and died, Pope Gregory declared the Brothers Minor were not bound to observe it. His reinterpretation of the rule Francis never wanted to write, resulted in a divided order: the “Brothers of the Common Observance” and the “Spirituals.” The latter were disciplined and one was even killed for wanting to be a Francis-like Franciscan. Francis’ first disciple, Bernard of Quintavalle, went into hiding for two years as he was being hunted.

Evangelicals

You may see your own experience in the lives of these saints. You may have tried on a simple faith and watched it eroded by the ways of the world. You may have been in a freedom-feeling community and watched it driven into the divisions of politics and power-seeking. I have experienced several versions of those ills. Next year I expect a book to come out that recounts the life and transition of a church I loved and led for decades. In some sense, I think it may be the same old story.

The Evangelicals, as a movement, began with a fervor for truth and a passion for evangelism. They made a huge difference in the world and continue to do so. But then Jerry Falwell (d. 2007) and others decided they needed to “take back” America. I think, as Sabatier might, they did that because America had taken them back. Their conformity to the ways to the empire led Falwell’s descendants to back the godless Trump to lead them. And their leaders have become more Trumpy ever since.

I keep asking Francis’ question these days, “Who are you Lord? And who am I?” I still burst into songs in the sunlight. I still feel my freedom in Christ and exercise it. I still care about and care for the poor. But am I just a part of the American story? Just another part of the news cycle? Did the powers succeed in taking over and ordering my world? Do I despair of an alternative now that an author will consign my past to history, into some reduction, like Bonaventure tried to do with Francis? We need to keep praying those questions.

Meanwhile, Jon Sobrino keeps getting disciplined by Rome for sticking with his decidedly anti-establishment teaching, saying things like,

[R]eality is known—in this case oppression and liberation, suffering and hope—in the disposition of taking charge of these realities in a praxis (en la disposición a
encargarse de ellas en una praxis), to carry these realities (a cargar con ellas)—running risks and the persecution that reality generates—and shouldering the weight of these realities (dejándose cargar por ellas)—accepting gratefully the kindness, generosity, and solidarity that there is in reality, and above all in the underside of history.

Jesus, Teresa, and Francis all built an alternative from the underside of history. No matter how many times those kind of people get rolled over, they are likely to rise again. Brother stone will cry out in praise or sister bird will sing the truth if the humans are silenced. But the Spirit incarnate in the body of Christ is hard to control for long. I don’t think the powers will keep it down. The creation will have to keep groaning as God awaits the next outburst of the light of the world from the Lord’s co-workers.

Division Test : Rivalry poisons God’s farm

A life in the Spirit, Building community, Life as the church, Music, , , ,

This was a message for the church in September of 2001, not long after 9/11

It happened again. I sat in front of MTV gape-jawed the other day. I flipped to it during the commercials on another channel and I happened upon a new video of an Elton John song called “I Want Love.”

I admit, I am regularly tormented by MTV, but I don’t think I have ever seen or heard such a misleading, stick-in-your-head little pop poem as this song — and Elton is probably scheduled to perform it at the Kimmel Arts Center when he’s over there to help open it in December! I’m almost afraid to play it for you, but I have to. Because we need to be able to differentiate between the love of Christ and this false love Elton is overwhelmed by. And even though our scripture is not speaking directly about this tonight, at the base of what Paul is talking about in 1 Corinthians 3 is his own torment about the plight of the Elton Johns of the world and their influence. Listen to cravings Elton describes as he sings through the vacant eyes of Robert Downey Jr.

Elton John and Bernie Taupin are probably writing about the “love” of drugs and how the obsession with them kills people on the inside with easy ecstasy. Robert Downey Jr. had about ruined his career with drug use and this video is the start of his resurrection. Maybe all the MTV viewers get this backstory, but I am afraid more of them admired the song for  “owning” the “reality” of being isolated from true love and being “brave” about it, as follows:

I want love on my own terms. Don’t be nice to me because I can’t feel anything. I’m dead in places where other people are liberated. Don’t make me submit to anything. Don’t ask me to be surrounded by anything. It is what it is.

That’s the kind of  I-want-it-the-way-I-want-it “love” scaring Paul when he is writing to the Corinthian church. In chapter 13 he gives them a little love song of his own, which is a worthy alternative to Elton’s. But here, in chapter 3, he is just trying to get people to look at the symptoms of caving-in to what is worst about us as people. He is not judging people, or saying we should never struggle, he’s just trying to get the love of Jesus at the center of inevitable troubles we face and cause.

Elton’s kind of “love,” the kind of relating he’s describing, kills souls, as I think Elton knows. He can see it makes him dead in places where other men feel liberated. I see that kind of unlove killing whole churches which should be all about liberation. When struggle turns to strife and trouble turns to trauma, we’re into the kind of thinking and acting that killed Jesus. Thank God Jesus rises again! That’s chapter 15.

So let’s check out 1 Corinthians 3. Here’s an outline of what Paul is saying to them, and, by extension, to us:

  1. The jealousy and strife you are demonstrating are killers. Rivalry is killing the world. (1-4)
  2. So let me help you out with some Jesus-type-thinking. How the world was designed to work looks like this: We are all fellow-workers with God as he recreates the world in what might be likened to a huge farm reclamation project. So don’t mess up the parts of the farm that are already reclaimed. (5-17)
  3. To sum it up, here is the reality you live in. You’ve got it all when you have Jesus, so don’t settle for less. Why would we compare and grasp for more when God has already given us everything in Jesus? Pass the division test. (18-23)

The jealousy and strife you are demonstrating are killers. Rivalry is killing the world. (vv. 1-4)

Paul says (I’m paraphrasing):

“People, I won’t talk to you as if you are spiritual because you are worldly–mere infants in Christ.  I gave you milk, not solid food, because  you weren’t ready for solids yet. And you apparently are still not ready.  You’re still stuck in pre-Jesus habits of the heart. For since there is jealousy and quarreling among you, are you not just like the world has always been? Are you not acting like humans out of relationship with God? When one of you says, ‘I follow Paul,’ and another, ‘I follow Apollos,’ what’s new about you?”

Can we agree on this? Jealousy and strife are killers. Rivalry is killing the world. One thing, among many things, that has really made me stop and think since September 11 is that many people are amazed that anyone could hate the U.S. so much as to bomb the Trade Centers. It is as if seeing people fight each other surprises them; it’s as if they missed the history of the last century. It is like they never heard themselves going off on their children, or never had anyone go off on them, or never stopped talking to someone because they would just as soon they moved away and were never heard from again. It is like they didn’t know that thousands of children die each day of starvation because no one cares for them. It is like they never heard of the Native American eradication project in the 1800’s in our own country.

We can be so blind. We really need a savior. Jealousy and quarreling should surprise no one. They are our mother’s milk. Most of us think fighting our rivals is an essential way to get justice, even as a way to have a self. We don’t think anything bad is happening among us sometimes, because we think it is “normal.” But it kills us and it kills the church.

The whole point of being the church is to undo this “carnality, this being-a-human-without-God-lifestyle” in us. The love of Jesus is at work among us to free us from being stuck in the world-as-usual. Paul is telling these good people that the rivalries they think are normal and right are going to kill their church. They will close the door to the Holy Spirit in their hearts and close the door to the Holy Spirit in the midst of them as a church if they keep it up. We need to be open to the Spirit of God to feel anything but we are pitted against this group, or excluded from that group, or suspicious or jealous of that group.

We have a lot of love here, but you can see how much we need the Holy Spirit of God as people assess their rivals and feel jealous or opposed to others. Just listen to some innuendo or actual quotes I’ve heard lately:

The artists in our church don’t care about racial reconciliation.
Center City people talk about living simply but they obviously don’t.
I haven’t been to worship in ages because there aren’t any good churches in Philadelphia.
A few people in the church make all the decisions.
I’m not in a cell because I doubt that people would be deep enough to handle how I share my soul.
I’m not going clear up to Germantown. No one goes there.
I don’t fit in because everyone is so young.
I don’t fit because everyone is a Democrat.
I don’t fit in because I am not such an evangelical Christian.

It goes on.

I don’t know whether those things are true or not. But I do know they cause strife. You may have gotten a little steam building up in you just thinking someone said one of them. They make for quarreling. And I know, even deeper, that they are often spoken under the spell of jealousy.

Jealousy is hostility toward someone, often a knee-jerk feeling about a rival who seems to have an advantage over you. I think we are all born jealous of God’s advantage over us. Jealousy let loose in God’s church, where the Holy Spirit resides, is a disaster. It is the anti-love that acts like a computer worm taking over your reactions. Jealousy makes you suspicious, it makes you guarded and defensive. Jealousy makes you competitive, makes your rivalries more important than your contribution to building community. Jealousy makes what others seem to have and what you lack the most important thing to you.

Paul says, “I can’t even talk about God to you! When you pass the division test, maybe we can get somewhere. But as long as jealousy is making you all rivals and not family, we’re back at square one, and even that square is in danger.”

So let me help you out with some Jesus-type-thinking. How the world was designed to work looks like this: We are all fellow-workers with God as he recreates the world in what might be likened to a huge farm reclamation project. So don’t mess up the parts of the farm that are already reclaimed. (vv. 5-17)

This is the idea: God is reclaiming the world from the wilderness. In Jesus, he is the sower, seeds are growing, and the farm is being tilled in territory that was once overgrown with weeds, infested and unproductive. It is like God’s farm, the earth, was overtaken by the jungle, like one of those Mayan cities in Yucatan that Gwen and I saw. One temple near Copan was so covered by vegetation that it looked like steep hill, not a pyramid (like in the pic). The Corinthian church is like part of God’s farm that has been placed back in cultivation and it is growing good things. Paul says, you’ve got to keep it free of weeds. Rivalry is like kudzu. It takes you over. It tangles you up and chokes out love. If you are one of those people who are forming a group around yourself, or even if you just are stubborn enough to want “love” the way you want it, you are like some big thistle of division planted in the middle of everyone’s life.

There is a lot more in these verses we could learn about, but the main thing I want to emphasize is this picture of what life is all about, because farming with God is what our church is all about. Farming is such a great organic picture and we want to thrive with the life of the Spirit growing in us. Being God’s farm is what being a cell, being a congregation and being a network of congregations is all about.

Let’s concentrate on the small group, the cell. Being God’s farm is what a cell is all about. We were discussing this at our meeting the other night. We aren’t similar people in our cell. Some of us would be natural rivals. But we are together because our common faith and love has given us this radical notion that we can grow something new in the world. It crosses divisions. We are God’s fellow-workers in this. So take note about how you relate to cells. If you like to go there and argue so you can feel like someone, you could be a weed. If you want them to give you love the way you want it and get mad if they disappoint you, you could be a thistle. If you can’t even get next to a group of people face to face at all and love them for Jesus sake and for the sake of reclaiming the farm with him, you may need to check out how he wants you to get involved another way.

To sum it up, here is the reality you live in. You’ve got it all when you have Jesus, so don’t settle for less. Why would we compare and grasp for more when God has already given us everything in Jesus? Pass the division test. (vv. 18-23)

Paul thinks his argument is pretty compelling. And don’t misunderstand him, he writes in a particular style that seems sort of combative. But it is just a style. He’s trying to get across God’s heart, not just win an argument. He says, in essence: If you are hearing me, if you agree that division kills and God has a plan for his farm, then, let’s give up the rivalries! All things are ours, whether Paul or Apollos or Peter or the world or life or death or the present or the future–all are ours. We are of Christ, and Christ is of God.

Jesus has opened up the way to eternity. The best is ours — even the best of these different groups in Corinth, the best of Paul or Apollos or Peter, or whoever or whatever, is ours. We don’t have to fight for it. God is delivering what is best to us. He started by giving himself in His son.

I think this is a profound way to live and I am trying to go with it. For instance: Periodically people ask me “what are you guys?” Maybe they mean, “What denomination are you against?” If they wonder if we are Presbyterians, I say, “Basically.” Baptists? “Of course.” Pentecostal? “Yes.” 

When I answer that way I am not being cute, because all are mine. One woman asked me if I were a priest. “Pastor” didn’t make any sense to her. So I finally said, “Sure, I’m sort of a priest.” I am of Christ. Who cares about being this or that other, I have the best of them all.

We are looking to be the new humanity without race or class, where there is no Jew or Arab, low-class or high-class, majority or minority, male or female, simple-liver or entrepreneur but Christ is all and is in all. In our church, where Jesus is in his temple, we are trying to get our minds and hearts around something bigger and deeper. Sometimes we call it the “both/and,” but that is too philosophical. In Christ it is just all – no balance necessary because Jesus personally holds everything together in love.

I don’t know what all this is meaning “practically” to you.

  • I at least think it should mean you look around the room tonight with Jesus eyes rather than the old, killer-instinct eyes of sorting out your rivals.
  • We should at least ask ourselves if we can pass a basic division test to see if we are more than just pre-Jesus humans.
  • At best it could practically mean that we can all breathe easier, now. We’ve got it all. All we can do is get better at accessing all that God is trying to get to us.

So we can let go of that painful, disappointing process of trying to find ourselves in comparison to another person, for better or worse. And we can stop trying to get for ourselves the life that God is desperate to give to us. We’ve got it. Connected to Jesus we have access to all of it, and it is just going to get more complete. I want that love.

Francis and the Living Stone

A life in the Spirit, Building community, Film/TV, Life as the church, , ,

As I rummaged around in past messages I prepared for the church, I came across this one from 2000 focusing on Francis of Assisi and building a church of “living stones.” My interest was heightened because I am reading a classic book about him: The Road to Assisi: The Essential Biography of St. Francis. I thought you might like to be reminded of him, too. In these days of strained community, he is an inspiration.

Bernardo becoming a living stone

Francis of Assisi and others who went before him in what is called the “monastic movement” became strange mentors to me as a follower of Jesus. Francis’ life and his legacy, in particular, reached across 700 years and lit a fire in me that hasn’t died out yet. I read a book about him once called The Last Christian and I can appreciate what the author was saying. He had a very passionate, New Testament, close to the earth, filled-with-the-Spirit kind of life.

In his early twenties Francis liberally used his privilege as a rich man’s son, and was quite the life of the party in Assisi. He was known for his poetry, songs, and for leading the scandalous line dance called the farandole. Call it unfortunate or blessed, he and his friends made up a generation of young warriors who were sent off by their fathers to pillage a neighboring walled city. The war, and Francis’ sickness (or was it a desertion?), left him a changed young man.

In the middle of his desperation, God somehow revealed himself. She didn’t reveal herself through the church — the institution which had blessed the war and received the spoils. It was through nature. Whenever you see a lawn ornament of Saint Francis (and I have one in my living room, if you’d like to), there is always a bird perched on him somewhere and often a bunny at his feet. That’s much cuter than necessary, since his most spectacular association with animals is with a man-eating wolf. But it is a reminder that he sort of got the message straight from God, through the sun, moon, stars, fire and water.

In my twenties I discovered a movie about St. Francis that brought him home to me even more. The 1970’s was a time when a lot of people were acting out how sick they were of their parents’ materialism and war, and a lot of them were again finding Jesus outside the established church. I was very influenced by the whole movement of the Spirit that was going on. Then I saw this movie that put it all together for me. Here was the Francis, about whom I’d read, in a movie directed by Franco Zeffirelli with a lot of hippie trappings called Brother Sun, Sister Moon.

But it wasn’t just the cool-at-the-time packaging of Francis that got to me, it was the timeless content. The word of Jesus breathed truth into the first century, into the 1200’s, and into 1975, and the Spirit of God is doing it today. I hope the following clip from the movie helps draw you into what God is doing in every age.

In this scene, Francis quotes from our scripture for today from 1 Peter. “You also, like living stones, are being built into a spiritual house.”  After Francis left his parents to live free as a beggar, he heard a message from God, “Rebuild my church.” He took this message quite literally and started rebuilding a run-down church building out in the country. As Zeffirelli tells it (and who knows exactly how something happened in the 12th century?) Francis’ old drinking buddies and friends began to come looking for him. They found him doing this project. In the clip we’re going to see, one of his future main men, Bernardo, comes to see him. Bernardo has just returned from the Crusades and is disillusioned. He has a choice to make – follow his desire to be real, or get roped into the politics and power-grabbing of the powers that be.

During their conversation, Francis apparently begins to see that the idea of rebuilding the church is not much about buildings at all, it is about people built into a spiritual house. It is about a new community based on Jesus and his ways, not just on his own personal convictions about rejecting the ways of the world. You can see the light dawn as Francis talks to Bernardo about a building stone he’d like to have. Bernardo gets the idea that the cornerstone he’s talking about just might be himself.

Obviously, it is a very European message coming from this movie. At the time of Francis there were already a world-full of acceptable versions and depths of Christianity around. I don’t think one size fits all. Sentiments from medieval Europe may not play too well in Asia or Texas or even in my neighborhood. But in every culture and every style of thinking, I believe Peter is saying the same thing. It is the same thing Francis heard, that Bernardo heard, that I hope you will dare to hear again tonight. It is the bookend phrases of our passage tonight. Very simple:

As you come to him, the living Stone–rejected by men but chosen by God and precious to him– you also, like living stones, are being built into a spiritual house to be a holy priesthood…Once you were not a people, but now you are the people of God; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy. Dear friends, I urge you, as aliens and strangers in the world, to abstain from sinful desires, which war against your soul.

The living stone rejected

Jesus rejected, Francis rejected, Bernardo getting on the wrong side of Emperor Otto of Brunswick, you chosen by God but rejected by people — this is normative. Followers of Jesus inevitably are called out of the world as it is, as it lives without Jesus as king, and they are built into what amounts to a countercultural community – not anti-cultural or supra-cultural community, just a group of strange people. People filled with eternity are foreigners in this passing away world. Whenever the body of Christ gets comfortable in the easy chair of any culture, it loses its heart. If it isn’t strange to the world it is strange to God.

It is so hard to be strange, that evangelists have often offered workarounds. In Mexico they made it easy for Aztecs to follow Jesus by amalgamating European saints to Aztec gods. In the U.S. they made the church as individualistic as the Declaration of Independence and as bottom-line-oriented as our brand of capitalism. Presenting Jesus in the robes of any culture, kills the whole thing, as far as I can see. I tie my heart together with the people all through the history of the church who have gathered together around Jesus to listen to him, no matter what habits they had from the culture they came from. They did not hate themselves or their ancestry; they just loved Jesus more. Jesus is transcultural – he’s alive in all cultures and subject to none. That’s what I hope you will go for, too.

Peter teaches like we are his family or comrades:

Brothers and sisters, my friends, we were chosen, made alive, and we are being built into the place where the Spirit of God lives. We are the people of God, now. We received his mercy. It makes us strange. So come out that world and don’t go back to be it. When you interact, love it like God does, and to call people into life with you.

This scripture has huge implications, but two main ones stick out.

We all need to keep letting our minds get changed about who we are.

This is the main thing a culture defines for you – who you are. Culture is just “how we do things, what kind of people we are.” So we say, “I am an American. We know we  organize our country around the pursuit of profit and property. We die for individual freedom. Etc.

But the main thing Jesus defines for you is also – who am I? I am a child of God, a member of his family, a part of his household. I am a citizen of the kingdom. I am a valued part of the body of Christ. This mercy I have received demands a response. Etc.

Our pre-Jesus culture and the desires it built into us, needs to get subordinated to the king. There’s a big interior process that needs to keep maturing.

How we decide what to do needs to be transformed, too.

What we do gets launched from our identities as one of the people of God. We are not just our own. We were bought by Jesus and we were transferred to his kingdom and we were given an assignment in the family business. It isn’t all about you; it is also all about God and all of us. That’s going to make a big difference in how you spend your time and decide your schedule. When we decide what to do, we will consider the people of God in general, and the people of God specific – our Church and our church.

Some people see this as an imposition on their freedom, if they still see life as coming from themselves instead of from God and through his body. They make transactions with their time and resources between the church and themselves because the church is something and they are something else.

But once we were no people, but now we are the people of God; that truth demands attention. We have the constant challenge of seeing how we, in union with God, interact as a body and interface with the people we meet — especially those driven by society meeting the undriven.

I’m boiling down a huge discussion topic, maybe you should talk about it in your cells again. I just hope you get this. We are into something new, strange, other-worldly and laced with the Spirit of God.  It feels real to me, and exciting, like I found a piece of meat I could really sink my teeth into (apologies to vegetarians). Peter is talking about life with substance, real people, being the real people of God with Jesus in their midst. I’m as hungry for that as Francis ever was.

I think the communion table is the perfect symbol at the center of this countercultural community that God keeps forming in every era and in every territory and tribe that will welcome him. Tonight we are very much a community gathered around Jesus. As we hand one another bread and then the cup we reaffirm that our desires have been freed from sin and the bondage of living without God in the world, and as we take the body and blood of Jesus from one another we are reaffirming that we are the people of God, one with the whole body throughout the world and throughout time, and one with one another, especially, face-to-face.

Clinging to what is good: And other crucial verbs

A life in the Spirit, Doing Theology, Spiritual direction, , , , ,

Laboring under nouns

John McWhorter’s latest essay was all about verbs. I was happy to have his brilliance confirm my general resistance to how “nounal” Americans are. Like Adam wandering around Eden, we like to wall off a garden and name everything in it. Nouns feel settled and powerful, I think.

I am still healing from a rash of labeling which has been clinging to me for a couple of years – still finding negative nouns stuck on me like a stubborn tag on a piece of plastic from the dollar store. McWhorter wishes we’d get over being nouns and labelling others and move onto verbs, move on to something else, something deeper. He writes:

[L]ife is about much else, and what ultimately conveys this “else” is verbs. What makes all those animals [Adam named] interesting is when they do things like walking, drinking and looking. Verbs can be said to be the core of what language is, Human Expression 1.0.

Although this might seem a revelation to English speakers, it would be intuitive to speakers of, for instance, many Native American languages. In some of them, names can be verbs, as in “Dances With Wolves” with Lakota, a language I wrote about here not long ago. The Lushootseed language of Washington State takes this concept beyond mere names, such that some specialists think it doesn’t have nouns at all, just verbs: The word for “coyote” is the phrase “is a coyote.” In other languages, it’s adjectives that are elusive, with verbs taking over their jobs. In Japanese, today’s cup of tea “hots,” and yesterday’s cup “hotted.” In Fongbe, a language spoken in Togo and Benin, all the adjectives are actually verbs except for a mere 18.

McWhorter’s essay was one in a series of encouragements to live into crucial verbs I’d like to share with you.

Clinging to movement

I got started on the Bible study below because, while I was praying, I was hit by a snippet of Romans 12: “Cling to what is good.” I’d been labelled a few unwelcome things and I was dwelling on them. I was complaining to God about my feelings. God’s apparent reply was, “Cling to what is good,” or where did that even come from? How did a snippet invade my wound licking?

I did not immediately go to the Bible, since I carry a lot of the Bible with me — and the actual text does not always match what the Spirit is saying to me. So I delayed a bit and heard what I needed to hear, which was, “Cling to what is good in you.” That was important, because I was clinging to what was bad in me, as far as someone else was concerned. And in some cases I was clinging to the bad they did to me which had sunk into me.

What’s more I heard, “Cling to what is clinging to you.” That felt good, too, since I’m not always a good clinger. But my good God is clinging to me, coming right next to me and putting his arm around me in Jesus, and is nearer than my own breath by her Spirit.

Call it a coincidence, but I then came across a song by Lauren Daigle, about whom I know very little, and it was just the right thing to sing. I listened. Then I learned her song and sang it into my Smule collection to solidify it in my heart.

Living in verbs

I finally visited Romans 12, in which I have spent hours of meditation over the years. I followed a hunch I think McWhorter planted in me. Although I am not an expert in Greek, I was taught how Greek verbs are formed back in college. They are complex and evocative. They are also central to what amounts to Greek sentences — sometimes they are a whole English sentence in one word.

I thought my precious clause, “Cling to what is good,” might be part of a string of verbs in Romans 12:9-21. I was right. The passage is mostly a string of participles, almost like a bulleted list, which English translators turn into a bunch of sentences that often obscure their meaning. They make paragraphs out of little explosions, sentences out of expostulations popping off the page, much like I imagine God speaking the world into being out of nothing. Those verbs are better to be experienced than analyzed, as if they were a bunch of nouns.

I would not want to present this interpretation to my college Greek professor (she was tough!), or to my seminary Biblical theology prof (he was tougher!). But I think I am getting to the meaning and movement of this wonderful section of the Bible better than the New International Version! This portion said a lot to me. Maybe it will move you, too.

If we are living out our new life in the Spirit
as members of the body of Christ, we will be

    • Loving authentically
    • Detesting evil-sowers
    • Clinging to what is good
    • Nurturing family love in the Body
    • Honoring others with the first place
    • Working with diligence, not slothfully
    • Letting our fervor boil
    • Serving the Lord
    • Rejoicing in hope
    • Enduring affliction
    • Persevering in prayer
    • Contributing to the needs in the church
    • Pursuing hospitality
    • Blessing those who persecute us
    • Blessing and not cursing
    • Rejoicing with those rejoicing
    • Lamenting with those lamenting
    • Protecting community
    • Maintaining equality
    • Practicing humility
    • Refusing to repay evil for evil
    • Living out what everyone can see is good
    • Dwelling in peace with everyone, if possible
    • Reserving vengeance for God’s discretion
    • Sharing resources with enemies
    • Providing warmth and light in the cold of night
    • Repelling the attacks of evil
    • Overcoming evil with good

I was kind of thrilled to see, after I put this together, that the section begins with clinging to what is good and ends with overcoming evil with good. Cling to the good at work in you, it is overcoming evil and seeding the creation with renewed life.

I remembered that the good in me is able to overcome whatever I think is evil or whatever might objectively be so. Cling to the good at work in you, it is overcoming evil and seeding the creation with renewed life.

I remembered that the work for me is finished; I received the goodness of God and I have experienced it. I am living in it now and can be assured I will find it wherever I go next. But that work of good in me has a multiplying and dying creation pulsing all around it. It is alive and completing its purpose wherever I live. Cling to the good at work in you, it is overcoming evil and seeding the creation with renewed life.

If you go back to the bullets above, try, at least for the first round, to experience the good work of the Spirit all those verbs represent. Jesus is alive. Don’t turn them all back into nouns that label who you or others aren’t or what you or others don’t do. Cling to the good at work in you, it is overcoming evil and seeding the creation with renewed life.

The Upside-down Apocalypse: Power fantasies be damned

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Commons crew and the book

I get a good impression of Jeremy Duncan whenever I meet him at Jesus Collective events. I think he and his crew are doing an inventive and reparative job at Commons Church in Calgary, which he founded. Now he has written an inventive and reparative book called Upside-down Apocalypse: Grounding Revelation in the Gospel of Peace. Once I started it, I could not put it down. What’s more, I could not resist telling anyone who would listen about the book I wish I’d read when I first started getting into the  Bible.

If you ever listened to me speak or write when I was a pastor, you didn’t hear too much about the last book in the New Testament: Revelation. I basically assigned it to obscurity in seminary. In high school I read (and was inspired by) a best selling book about Revelation and the “end times” called The Late Great Planet Earth by Hal Lindsay. It ultimately soured me on the prevailing interpretation of apocalyptic literature among Evangelicals.

Lindsay made a career out of teaching his misreading of the Bible. I was so intrigued by his best-selling first book, I actually looked up the Bible verses he quoted. I discovered that even a cursory reading revealed he was making stuff up. When I read Revelation, I did not understand it well, but I did get the idea it was mainly about encouraging the Jesus-followers of John’s day (and, by extension, me) to hang in there even if the world seemed like a disaster. It did seem like a disaster, but not really for the reasons Lindsay and the Left Behind writers were popularizing.

Free the Revelation!

I would have done better if I had owned a copy of Pastor Duncan’s book. He articulates what I only suspected and frees Revelation from its bondage in conspiratorial, power-seeking, Empire-spawned speculation. Jarrod McKenna kind of skewers people who get it wrong in the Prologue:

All that Christ embodied and instructed is sidelined with pietistic sincerity as Christians vote, act, and desire for history to side with their end-time speculations. Most telling of all, these so-called revelations don’t reveal but rather obscure Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus of the gospels is displaced by diabolical readings of a murderous messiah who saves not with provocative, nonviolent, suffering love but like a Marvel villain wanting to make his enemies bleed.

Duncan brings Jesus out of obscurity and restores his central place in the book of Revelation. Here is his central premise, which you did hear if you ever heard me speak:

If we are going to read the Scriptures well, we need to read them on their terms. And even though the New Testament is written by a collection of authors addressing various contexts, two presuppositions hold all these diverse texts together. First, God is love. And second, the person of Jesus is the closest we will ever come to seeing that love embodied in human history. These are the assumptions that sit behind everything we read in the New Testament, including the book of Revelation.

If you put on this Jesus lens and read Revelation you see the Lord John knew and wrote about in his Gospel and Letters. It is easy to find Him in Revelation, even if you’ve been flooded with the cinematic gore of “end times” hysteria.

Restore “apocalypse!”

Duncan starts by retrieving the word “apocalypse” from its twisted use as a “disaster” or “final reckoning.” As he was doing it, I found myself having a hard time accepting its true meaning. Maybe you were influenced, like I was, by brilliant uses of the corrupted definition like in the movie Apocalypse Now. The opening scene, above, is etched in my memory as an appropriate way to see Vietnam. R.E.M. later similarly protested with “It’s the End of the World as We Know It.”

When John titles his prophetic writing Apocalypse he is not talking about a huge crisis or the end of the world. The word means the “uncovering of something hidden.” An apocalypse, Duncan says, tells us two things: “First, there is more to the story, and second, the more will change everything we thought we knew.”

John uses the common form of apocalyptic literature and, first, turns it upside down to fit how Jesus turns the common imagination  of God upside down. “Jesus shows us the complete nonviolence of a God who would rather endure death than inflict it,” Duncan says. The second way John uses the form for his own ends is to reveal Christ, to give witness to “the unveiling of Jesus’s victory that turns our expectations of power upside down, replacing them with divine renewal.”

Reassert the structure.

Like I told you, I did not study Revelation too hard, so I am glad Jeremy did. One of my big takeaways from his book centers on how John’s prophecy is actually structured. It is usually seen as a linear story leading from the present and looking into the future, right up to the end of time. But as early as 270 A.D. Victorinus taught the book was synchronous, not successive. Like the Hebrew prophets often do, John tells one story three times, with an expanding scope: local, national and cosmic.

John borrows his structure from the book of Isaiah. Like Isaiah, he starts small and builds from the lived experience of individuals. Duncan sees the synchronous stories as three “rounds.”

The first round opens with seven letters to seven churches, “addressing everyday experiences of injustice and anxiety and Christ’s call to live with each other well.” Like the other rounds, it begins with a vision and ends with Jesus enthroned in the world:

To the one who conquers I will give a place with me on my throne, just as I myself conquered and sat down with my Father on his throne. (3:21)

In the second round, John pushes out the story further. Like in the first round (1:10), the second round begins with John “in the Spirit” in 4:2, receiving his further word from the Lord. If Jesus is Lord, that understanding does not stop at the heart level; it must change society, too. Directly opposed to the wicked Roman emperor, Domitian (ruled 81-96 AD), a wounded lamb comes to sit on the throne.

Then the seventh angel blew his trumpet, and there were loud voices in heaven, saying,

“The kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord
and of his Messiah,
and he will reign forever and ever.”

Then the twenty-four elders who sit on their thrones before God fell on their faces and worshiped God,  singing,

“We give you thanks, Lord God Almighty,
who are and who were,
for you have taken your great power
and begun to reign. (11:15-17)

Our worship leader had us singing with those elders on Easter Sunday last week.

In the third round the camera is pulled back to view the whole cosmos as God sets her sites on the final defeat of evil. At 11:18 the final cycle begins. At that point, the nations are angry over the reign of God. Just like when the rulers killed Jesus, there is a contest between God and those who destroy creation. Unlike Isaiah, who saw a day when God would destroy evil among us, Duncan says Jesus transforms that vision into a day when God saves the world by destroying the evil in us. These famous words end the final round:

And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Look! God’s dwelling place is now among the people, and he will dwell with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God. ‘He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death’ or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.”

He who was seated on the throne said, “I am making everything new!” Then he said, “Write this down, for these words are trustworthy and true.”

He said to me: “It is done. I am the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End. To the thirsty I will give water without cost from the spring of the water of life. (21:3-6)

Most of the book has to do with an explication of these three rounds. I hope this little taste entices you to pick it up and do some Bible study with a Jesus lens.

Renew your hope!

I think Duncan is especially interested in the second round. The first round represents the too-small, individualized Christianity where most churches are stuck these days. And the third round is so cosmic it does not need to be understood, fully, just anticipated with gratitude. But in the second round we see that our struggles for transformation are not futile but elemental to faithfully living in the upside down kingdom revealed in John’s upside-down apocalypse.

After showing how John is writing to people under the tyranny of Domitian, Duncan shows how he cleverly sets up his readers to see that fighting Rome with Rome’s tools corrupts us and produces Domitian-like leaders and strategies.

Just as we are ready to despair, and as the scene turns from worship to tears, the Lamb emerges to take the scroll from the one who sits on the throne. The true son who “did not consider equality with God something to be used for his own advantage” (Philippians 2:6), who did indeed ascend to the heavens, but who made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant unto death – even death on a cross (2:7-8). God is not like Domitian. Jesus is not the imperial child. Destiny is not written by the violent.

In self-giving love, Jesus unveils the hidden, authentic history of the world. Faithfulness was not the illusion. Power was.

Reading that quote made me want to read the book again! In the age of Trump (and who is this Harlan Crow billionaire with a collection of dictator statues?), many Christians are coopted by the pursuit of power on the political right and the left. And many more people, it seems, are long-gone from the bankrupt church and fully given over to acquiring power in an attempt to dominate some piece of what remains of the empire. John’s Revelation was a corrective to the despair of his time and Duncan’s restoration of Revelation is a similar blessing. As we read his book, may our hearts again feel the strength to take our stand in an evil day and open our souls to hope again.

Slow resurrection breeds deeply rooted hope

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My God, my God, this scene is long

Remember Game of Thrones? About 6 years ago Jon Snow got resurrected.

I can’t make sense of the well-blended pastiche of Western Culture that is GOT. But I can tell you John Snow’s resurrection was quite a media event. It was such a common topic SNL made fun of it (in an unfunny skit). The point of the skit is that the scene was incredibly slow.

The resurrection scene was so laborious and long that it was kind of boring, especially since you knew if they started it they were going to finish it. “Just get on with it and let’s do dragons!”

Resurrection is so much the essential Christian event, having it rendered on TV made me queasy. But I think many church people could relate to a laborious drama leading to resurrection: “Lent then Holy Week?!” Most people decided a long time ago that processs is just too much. “Just get on with it and get to the resurrection!”

One of my favorite quotes from Paul Tournier’s book, Creative Suffering, is “All liberating growth takes time.” I think it makes sense that Lent is long. We are not instantly ready for resurrection. It has to grow on us — and in us.

But I can feel it when people say, “It seems like my whole life is Lent and there are only random moments of resurrection!” The whole Christian year, even, feels like that — we have an incarnation day and a resurrection day, then a whole lot of trouble in between. It just does not seem right.

Slow resurrection

Hearing that kind of complaint in myself and others, I tried to listen to it hard. I came to another question: What if the suffering is not long, it is the resurrection that is slow? What if we just need to reframe the issue? Are we really bored? Or are we just resistant to the creative suffering we need to endure to develop. Like Tournier implies, it takes time. What if our slow resurrection is a good journey after all?

It did take a couple of days for Jesus to get to resurrection himself, after all.

The church doesn’t teach this much any more, but the “harrowing of hell” was an exciting topic for centuries during the early days of the church. The story goes like this. Between his death on the cross and his resurrection, Jesus used the “keys of death and Hades” he holds (Revelation 1:18) to free righteous people from the past who were waiting for the Messiah. The Apostle Paul tells us that Jesus “descended into the lower parts of the earth” (Ephesians 4:9) – the lower parts were understood to be the “abode of the dead,” a place Greeks called “Hades.” The Apostle Peter tells us that Jesus “preached to the dead” (1 Peter 4:6) and “to the spirits in prison” (1 Peter 3:18). Their “Lent” was long!

On Holy Saturday – the day before Jesus’ resurrection, the scene of Jesus descending into Hades (or Hell) was often vividly described in the old days. Jesus unlocks the door to Hades to announce his victory over death, Satan, and all the powers of Hell. He then releases Adam and Eve and all the “just” who were waiting for their redemption. A number of paintings and icons, especially from the Eastern churches, depict the scene. Christus Victor!

Descent to Hell, by Duccio in 1308-11

If you feel like your resurrection is taking too long, welcome to humanity. But I hope you can see that Jesus came to find you and walk with you on your long jounrey a long time ago. He is with you in the time between your death by sin and your entrance into the fullness of your resurrection life. He has descended to your level, too.

We’d prefer it to be instant, like everything else.

When I was in the Baptist church as a child, we highly anticipated the song we would sing every Easter: Up From the Grave He Arose, we called it. The tune for that line felt very dramatic and everyone sang it loud, which was exciting.

It is an instant song, “Well then, up from the grave he arose. Just like that!” As if Mary ran and told the disciples, “I was just weeping by the tomb and up from the grave he arose!” It kind of implies we ought to be rising up just like that too. I think some of us have. But for the rest of us, our partner doesn’t look at us and say, “Well, will you look at that, you rose!” We may, in fact, be more resurrected than we were last year, but sometimes it feels like the same damned things keep happening. That’s slow.

We may think, “Why is this scene so slow! Let’s pep this up. Make something happen; I am at the end of my attention span!” At least quit talking and sing a song! Singing Up From the Grave He Arose can still revive my interest. I’m glad Easter comes to keep me engaged in my own process of getting a life.

By the way, my childhood song has a worldwide following. I wish the Indians below did not look like they had been recently colonized, but I still find their sincerity irresistible.

I have to say these regular Americans singing it are much more my wavelength. This is how you should sing the old song, IMO.

Development takes time

All liberating growth takes time. My psychotherapy and spiritual direction clients are experiencing slow resurrection. It is always amazing to watch a loved one dip their toes into their mental and spiritual health and then be drawn into deep currents of love and hope. The writer of Ted Lasso and Shrinking recently had an interview on NPR in which he talked about his own slow resurrection of sorts. It is happening everywhere, right now, and is happening in many of you reading this.

Resurrection is more a relentless growing. Hope is not instantly accrued. I think the Apostle Paul is sharing his own experience when he says:

Therefore, since we are justified by faith,
we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ,
through whom we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand,
and we boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God.
And not only that, but we also boast in our afflictions,
knowing that affliction produces endurance,
and endurance produces character,
and character produces hope,
and hope does not put us to shame,
because God’s love has been poured into our hearts
through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.
Romans 5:1-5

Hope takes time. Sharing the glory of God develops. But when that grace has taken root and been nurtured, it has a way of sinking in. Resurrection is like the roots of the best kind of weed trees growing through our concrete defenses, finding a path to dirt and water through stones, harrowing parts of us that just need more light and air.

When we think of “harrowing,” we often think of some traumatic experience: “Saw III was harrowing!” But the word comes from a herding practice. Harrowing is removing dead thatch, which lifts vegetation up and levels mole hills. So we’re saying, Saw III really stirred me up and flattened me!” The process allows the turf to breathe and water to penetrate. It reduces disease by exposing fungi and bacteria to sunlight which is essential for the health of the pasture. Like Jesus was stirring up hell, his Spirit is harrowing us and bringing light to our darkness.

In the quote above, Paul is encouraging people in a young church in very uncertain times to stick with it. Turn toward sureness, not certainty. Turn toward being assured — saying, “Sure,” not being right. Be watched over. Stand in the grace and turn into the hope of the fulness of glory that is already here and yet to come. Learn to trust it.

If we go into every day turning toward hope, I think each day can surprise us with resurrection: “Thank you God. Up from the grave I arose. Up from the grave she arose. My God! There is hope for everyone!” I have spent a couple of hard years learning that lesson, again. I keep talking about Mahalia Jackson singing about how God sent the angel and said, “Touch her.” And she sang, “I rose up this morning and I want to thank God!”

Each day may seem like it is long: arguing with a mate, being abused or discriminated against, failing, feeling ashamed or disappointing, fearful. It can all feel SO long! But each morning we rise up! Hope can be reborn and strengthened! Jesus is risen!

Jesus is the victor: Be recreated for Lent

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I had a happy time in my Jesus Collective Hub the other day. I love the fool’s errand we are on: trying to have a Jesus-centered outlook which manages to respect but not join the powers tearing apart the church and whole societies these days. We’re not succeeding, but it feels like the right thing to try.

 

In every generation of the church, there has been an argument about something, and great teachers have generally arisen to help us figure out how to keep going. For instance, the Apostle Paul’s letters in the New Testament usually hone in on a current problem he needs to solve.  His approach is different in different contexts — like the difference between a problem your mother might have had as a child and one you are having now, or the difference between an email you’d write to your work group and the one you’d write to your best friend. Just so, the letter to the church in Ephesus feels different than the letters to the church in Corinth. As a teacher in the church myself (I wanted to be like Paul), I think the greatest skill I needed to develop was to listen in love to all the varying viewpoints people have and to try to knit them into a mutually accepting whole, leaning toward a consensus direction while accommodating both the newest and stubbornest differences.

 

The different ways to see the atonement have provided people a reason to have an argument over the years. The views have matured over time and have been expressed differently in many contexts. All of them have their own beauty to respect, don’t they? In the past four weeks I have been meditating on the four main “theories,” and I am going to get to the fifth in a minute. But I want to acknowledge the need for “third way” thinking before I do, just like the Jesus Collective is trying to develop for our current problems.

 

The same damned argument

The present polarization in the United States does not seem like a new phenomenon to me. I am sort of stuck in the 11-1200’s in my readings right now (good book), so everything seems to go back there for me. But I honestly think the differences between Marjorie Taylor Greene and Kamala Harris seem a lot like what Christians were arguing about way back then, too (the women are both Evangelicals, at some level, after all).

Greene represents people who are afraid tradition is being run over by newfangled thinking. They still have a view of the atonement in which God beats the devil, using deception to do it, as necessary, for the sake of purity and goodness. So she will also work with God as he does what it takes to defeat evil.

Harris represents people on the side of human individuality, science and progress. Those people have a view of the atonement in which God unleashes people from guilt and frees them to appreciate the wonder of creation, especially the value of each human. So she will keep at it until the world is safe for all God’s children.

How we put those potentially polar positions together takes a third way, not a triumph by one side.

Paul manages to be on both sides of redundant church and societal arguments. For instance, he tells the Ephesian church: 

Finally, be strong in the Lord and in the strength of his power; put on the whole armor of God, so that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil, for our struggle is not against blood and flesh but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places. Therefore take up the whole armor of God, so that you may be able to withstand on the evil day and, having prevailed against everything, to stand firm. – Ephesians 6:10-13

 

I think Greene thinks Harris is with the devil, so she is putting on her armor to stand against her in this evil day. I don’t think she read all of Ephesians well, but I could see how she might get where she is.


Then Paul tells the church in Corinth 

So if anyone is in Christ, that person is a new creation: everything old has passed away; look, new things have come into being! All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and has given us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting the message of reconciliation to us. — 2 Corinthians 5:17-19

 

I think Harris thinks Green is in the way of new things that need to come, especially the need to reconcile elements of a pluralistic society and to protect against people being trespassed upon. I am not sure Jesus is at the center of her thinking, but I respect her goals.

 

Christus Victor launches a new/old way

 

Gustaf Aulen (1879-1977)

In the atonement explanation named “Christus Victor” (Christ the Victor) Gustaf Aulen went back to the Bible and the Early Church to verify the transcendent way Jesus worked to saved humankind — and creation with us. I am not sure he intended to do this, but he opened up a new way to see an old thought and many people latched onto it as a way to stop having the arguments of the past over and over again. We are still having the same damned arguments, but Christus Victor provides a view that incorporates previous explanations of the atonement and frees up imagination locked in entrenched views from Eurocentric philosophy and politics.

 

In 1931 Gustaf Aulen published a book of his lectures titled Christus Victor: An Historical Study of the Three Main Types of the Idea of Atonement. We’ve explored all the main types, so far; I split Aulen’s third one into two parts. He saw his book as a defense of the “classical” view of the atonement he found in Paul, Irenaeus and Luther. (Of course Luther — the Swedish state church theologians at the time all needed to adhere to “evangelical faith,” which was, basically, Lutheranism). In the course of offering his defense against egocentric, humanistic, and idealistic theology, Aulen ends up offering a new way of seeing — at least it seemed new enough to get a name that stuck: the “Christus Victor theory.”

 

Aulen  stressed a Bible-based, dramatic view of God and the work of Jesus. That is, God in Christ personally participates in the drama Christianity is. The Gospel is a story about how God entered into our place and time and saved us. This view is more popular all the time, it seems. A church plant in Philly affiliated with my denomination was called Story Philly. Evangelical author, Donald Miller, wrote a book called Storyline: Finding Your subplot in God’s Story.

 

The main plot of the story is clear in the Bible. In Christ, God “rescued us from the power of darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of his beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins” (Col 1:13–14). The order of the action is important: God has rescued us; God has transferred us; in Christ we have redemption and forgiveness. Paul does not write, “God has forgiven us so that he may then rescue us” (as in the penal substitution theory). Rather, God rescues us out of darkness and brings us into the kingdom of his beloved Son and that rescue act is our salvation. By his gracious initiative, God brings us into the realm of life where we find that our sins are forgiven. 

 

I’m not sure Aulen would approve of where his work has led, especially since he thought he was talking about something old, not new. But it has provided a fresh way to meet the evils of the modern and postmodern world. Paul’s statement that “God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself” (in 2 Corinthians, above) provides a new launchpad. That phrase epitomizes Aulen’s view that the atonement is “dramatic,” “dualistic,” and “objective.” It is dramatic and dualistic, because it is the story about a conflict between God and the powers of evil, sin, and death, in which God triumphs over “the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places” (in Ephesians above). It is objective, because it is about God’s action, not ours. God took the initiative to decisively change the relationship between God and the world (see Marianne Meye Thompson). I think Aulen caught the wind of the Spirit which has been blowing for a hundred years as the modern era comes to a close. Others are moved along with it, as well.

 

The Powers

 

World War I, the Great Depression, massive industrialization and huge governments and corporations ignited new imagination for what Aulen (and Paul) called “the powers.”

It was not just theologians having a discussion about “the powers.” Here is a quote from John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1939) — it may seem familiar after peeking into Silicon Valley Bank recently and getting a glimpse of the faceless “power” it represents.

 

But the bank is only made of man. No, you’re wrong there—quite wrong there. The bank is something else than men. It happens that every man in a bank hates what the bank does, and yet the bank does it. The bank is something more than men, I tell you. It’s the monster. Men made it, but they can’t control it.

 

I think most people want a world without militarism, poverty, sexual exploitation, white supremacy and the despoiling of nature. Yet we find it very difficult to have such a world. Our social, economic and political structures powerfully resist transformation! Steinbeck made that reality vivid when he described the banking system as a monster that cannot be controlled.

The American theologian Walter Wink (who died in 2012) made it his life’s work to help us understand these monsters and how to loosen their hold. He freed the core truths of  biblical faith from endless argument and made them tools for change agents to use, both in the church and in society (Gingerich summary). I am not sure he is a direct theological descendant of Aulen, but I think he is moving in the new stream of freedom Aulen undammed.

 

Wink shows how the language of “principalities and powers” in the New Testament (e.g. Eph. 6, above) refers to human social dynamics—institutions, belief systems, and traditions. He calls these social constructs “manifestations of power,” and insists they always have an inner and an outer aspect.

 

Every Power tends to have a visible pole, an outer form—be it a church, a nation, an economy—and an invisible pole, an inner spirit or driving force that animates, legitimates, and regulates its physical manifestation in the world. Neither pole is the cause of the other. Both come into existence together and cease to exist together. (Naming the Powers).

 

In Wink’s view, we need an integrated, inner-outer awareness in order to understand the world we live in and act effectively as agents for healing and transformation. “Any attempt to transform a social system without addressing both its spirituality and its outer forms is doomed to failure.” What’s more, in Wink’s understanding, all systems of power have the potential to be just or unjust, violent or nonviolent. “The Powers are good. The Powers are fallen. The Powers must be redeemed” (Engaging the Powers).  (Nice summary artricle).

 

The Gospel of Peace.

 

Kamala Harris and Marjorie Taylor Greene are on the outs with God if they profess to follow Jesus but continue to create and serve a domination system which has been overturned by the work of Jesus. An alternative way to live is being taught for people with ears to hear. We have prophets of the new creation arising everywhere, just like Gustaf Aulen. They are peacemakers — see J. Denny Weaver’s The Nonviolent Atonement (2001). They are social investigators — watch Rene Girard reimagine Jesus as the final Scapegoat. They are feminists and womanists — listen to Joanne Carlson Brown and Rebecca Parker take down anyone who can’t see Jesus as the Liberator.

 

Aulen and the rest are all following a very basic, maybe the most basic, atonement explanation, as Paul taught the church in Ephesus:

 

[Jesus] is our peace; in his flesh he has made both into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us, abolishing the law with its commandments and ordinances, that he might create in himself one new humanity in place of the two, thus making peace, and might reconcile both to God in one body through the cross, thus putting to death that hostility through it.  — Ephesians 2:14-16

 

The “powers” which create the systems of domination they control and defend have been abolished. We are free to live now and forever. Whenever we see the latest powermonger creating their territory in the name of something good (like an end to racism, climate action, evangelism, etc.), we need to reassert the Lord’s basic work: reconciliation to God and others, not a more robust hostility that defeats our enemies.

If the resurrection of Jesus did not free us from sin and death to effect reconciliation and participate in the new creation, who is Jesus? Even if you are a leader of the country with the largest military in history, which is the biggest polluter in history and whose marketing machine overwhelms whole economies worldwide, reconciliation is still a top priority;  persistently planting the seeds of a new creation is a preoccupation. For us small people, who think we are comparatively powerless, the call is still the same. We live in the new creation; what else is there to do but live with Jesus?

Jesus our substitute: Receive the grace for Lent

A life in the Spirit, Doing Theology, Spiritual direction, , , , , , , , , , ,

UC Riverside, where I got my B.A. in history and met my lovely wife, is just down the hill from Arrowhead Springs, now the former headquarters of Campus Crusade for Christ. So our college campus was crusaded quite a bit by young men, primarily. They dutifully delivered the Four Spiritual Laws from their holy mountain.

Cru people in their Four Laws T-shirts.

Not long after one of my dorm mates had become a Christian in a rather random, personal way, he was accosted on campus by these Evangelicals. They were talking about Jesus, so he thought he should talk to them, since he was now a Christian. Then he couldn’t figure out how to get away from them as they made their pitch, going through their boiled down, mass-produced elevator speech about  substitutionary atonement. When he got back to the dorm, he was furious with me. “This is what you got me into?” I think he waved the booklet in front of my face.

I don’t think I had a lot of answers for him. But since he was smart and mad, I listened to his critique. And then we all got into a study of the booklet which is still making an impact on me, and which leads me to this fourth exploration of atonement explanations for Lent.

What do Gospel charts teach?

The Four Spiritual Laws tract starts with: “Just as there are physical laws that govern the physical universe, so there are spiritual laws that govern your relationship with God.” We thought:

  • Laws? We’d already picked up on Paul’s disdain for law.
  • Laws that govern? We were pretty sure God was governing the universe personally and couldn’t figure out if we needed laws to govern our relationship with God if Jesus wasn’t doing that himself.

When we got to the page above, we were not immediately confused because we trusted Jesus to be the way to eternal life. But the chart just did not sit quite right.

  • We already knew there were other ways to describe what Jesus did in the Bible.
  • We weren’t sure there was a gulf that needed a bridge, since we lived in Creation.
  • And even then, “pay the penalty for our sins” just seemed strangely violent if God loves us and has a wonderful plan for our life, yet is also obliged to roast us in hell if we don’t find it and follow it.

But, honestly, I think the biggest problem we had was when we got to the train. The train made me feel, in particular, like I was getting the wool pulled over my eyes.

  • We definitely did not think we could accept a Christianity supposedly based on fact. Even as undergrads we knew that facts are rather squishy; even we debated the relative meanings of words all day. And none of us could really think of the Bible as “fact” that did not need a second opinion from God and others.
  • We tried having each car at the front of the train. Faith probably got the most votes. But we also thought “God is love” was more connected to feeling, so maybe the caboose should be first.
  • But then we thought a train going somewhere was too linear and that was our problem to begin with. So we put the train cars on a circular track and that made the most sense. At one time or another, they each took the lead.

The problem with penance

As far as the various explanations of the atonement, the one which might be best attested in the Bible is substitution. Paul did not turn it into a graphic, but he describes it well. Before Anselm, the explanation had a more personal, metaphorical feel to it, something like a parable Jesus might teach. Then the Reformers get a hold of it in the 15-1600’s.

The Protestant Reformers refine Anselm’s “satisfaction  theory,” which also has a substitutionary feel to it, and focus it on justice. The gist is: There are laws God needs to follow to be authentically just. And one of them is that sin must be punished. Plus there is a more personal “law:” humans need to feel sorry for breaking the law, not just do penance and think that takes care of their sin.

Penance might be a word you can’t even define now, but it was a big deal then. Martin Luther got a protest going against the corrupt Church of his time when he could no longer stomach the “penance” system. You’ll see a theme start growing here: penance, penalty, penal substitution. “Penal” means: “relating to, used for, or prescribing the punishment of offenders under the legal system.” The gospel of the reformers who win the Reformation wars is, “Humankind is on the wrong side of the law. Jesus stands in for them and receives their punishment. He endures God’s wrath. Just be sorry and stop sinning.”

Luther was a  33-year-old theology professor at Wittenberg University on October 31, 1517 when he walked over to the main church and nailed a paper of 95 theses to the door, hoping to spark an academic discussion about their contents. He had said more provocative things in a lecture earlier, but this posting became a key event that ignited the Reformation. The first thesis of his 95 was about penance.

The penance system Luther experienced got started because the early church was trying to figure out what to do with people who were baptized into Christ and then sinned. Tertullian (c.155-c.220 AD) decided they were forgiven for original sin and saved, but they needed to satisfy the debts they incurred subsequently. The church was an alternative community, so they basically came up with their own “penitentiary.” What should a person pay to get back into the good graces of the Church and be restored to fellowship after they have sinned? They work out a major application of “step three” in Matthew 18: “If that person refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church, and if the offender refuses to listen even to the church, let such a one be to you as a gentile and a tax collector.”

There were (and still are) three main steps to penance: confess to the priest, be absolved in the name of Jesus and the Church, and do something to demonstrate you’re seriously sorry and intend to no longer sin. Sometimes this was just, “Say this prayer,” or “Give alms.” But sometimes it was like a court sentence where you were out of the church and brought back in incrementally — at some point you can stand in the back of the meeting, then you are able to sit in the audience, finally you get the OK to take communion again. You can see this was mainly “doing penance,” not necessarily feeling penitent. By the time of Luther, the church was offering indulgences for donations to shorten time in purgatory where dead people with built up sin had to stay before they’d worked it off and achieved heaven. (I was surprised by a recent Netflix movie about this). I think this felt like drive-through forgiveness to Luther. Plus the whole process was administered by a faceless institution that ran like the Roman Empire.

The reformers were trying to make things work better according to the Bible and not according to some development fund manager in Rome. Their movement unwittingly rode the wave of the communication revolution the printing press brought in (Luther might have had tons of Instagram followers). I also think they were the flower of the individualism tree that was planted when Aristotle became the continent’s favorite philosopher.

Penal substitution wins at Dort

100 years after Luther went public, Calvinists are becoming the premier interpreters of the Reformation. John Calvin was trained as a lawyer and it shows in his theology and ministry — and even more in his descendants. Calvin turns justification by faith into the legal argument it remains. Mary Lane Potter says, “Calvin’s theology may be accurately described as a lifelong meditation on the law of God.” His successors take obedience to the law to a new extreme. I think their behavior points out why I think penal substitution is not adequate to stand on its own or to be made into a reductionistic booklet.

You’ve probably never heard of the Synod of Dort in 1618-19 (short for Dortrecht, in the Netherlands). It is a meeting called by the Dutch Protestant Church for  Calvinist leaders from across Europe to affirm the famous five points that undergird orthodox Calvinism. You can summarize the five articles in their statement with TULIP if you mix up the original order:

  • Total Depravity – “Man” (not trying to fix the sexist language for them) is completely touched/affected by sin in all that he is (in nature he is completely fallen), but is not as bad as he could be (in action, for example, not all people murder, etc.). Furthermore, this total depravity means that the unregenerate will not, of their own free will, choose to receive Christ.
  • Unconditional Election – God elects a person based upon nothing in that person because there is nothing in him that would make him worthy of being chosen; rather, God’s election is based on what is in God. God chose us because he decided to bestow his love and grace upon us, not because we are worthy, in and of ourselves, of being saved.
  • Limited Atonement – Christ bore the sin only of the elect, not everyone who ever lived. Christ’s blood was sufficient for all, but not all sin was imputed to Christ. Christ’s blood is sufficient to cover all people. But the sufficiency relates to his divine value which is different than our legal debt. Sin is a debt since it is breaking the Law of God. In limited atonement, Calvinists are saying that there was a limit to whose sins were imputed to Christ in a legal sense.
  • Irresistible Grace – The term suggests a mechanical and coercive force upon an unwilling subject, but this is not the case. Instead, it is the act of God making the person willing to receive him. It does not mean that a person cannot resist God’s will.  It means that when God moves to save/regenerate a person, the sinner cannot thwart God’s movement and he will be regenerated
  • Perseverance of the Saints – We are so secure in Christ, that we cannot fall away.

The other advantage of the TULIP acronym is that it arranges the five points of Calvinism logically and progressively and gives a read out of substitutionary atonement, with each point contingent on the other, as follows. If humans are totally depraved, then they are unable to make an initial response to God. God must call people to salvation through unconditional election. God must also provide the way of salvation by the death of Jesus Christ. He makes salvation secure by the effectual call of the Holy Spirit. He keeps his saved ones secure so they will inherit the eternal life he has promised them.

The Synod of Dort sounds like a theological study group. But it is also (and, I think, primarily), a legal, political meeting. With the synod, the Calvinists anathemize the Arminians who rose up to protest the increasing legalism and politicization of the Calvinists. Arminius was a Dutch Reformed theologian whose followers published Remonstrance in 1610, which is the opposite of TULIP.

A portrait of Johan van Oldenbarnevelt by Michiel Jansz van Miereveld

The acts of the Synod were tied to political intrigues that arose during the Twelve Years’ Truce, a pause in the Dutch war with Spain. The Arminians were accused of propagating false doctrine AND perceived as ready to compromise with the Spanish. The Dutch Calvinists were not ready to deal. So Arminianism was considered by some to be not only theologically unsound but also political treason. The synod concludes with exile for theological opponents and execution for traitors — another episode in the ongoing Wars of Religion in Europe.

After the Synod rejected the teachings of the Remonstrants as falling outside the bounds of the Reformed confessions, a political condemnation of the statesman Johan van Oldenbarnevelt followed. He was a high official and had been the protector of the Remonstrants. For the crime of general perturbation in the state of the nation, both in Church and State (treason), he was beheaded on May 13, 1619, only four days after the final meeting of the Synod. With this process, the Dutch Reformed Church rid itself of Arminianism, but the ideas escaped to England where they were embedded in the budding movement called Methodism.

The fact that the application of the synod’s findings were implemented by judges and resulted in execution exemplifies my problem with today’s prevailing doctrine of penal substitution. It continues to be exclusive and interested in not only God’s sovereignty but its own. The teaching of it continues to be like an ongoing legal argument, as most people who have argued about predestination in a Bible study will attest. I see the Calvinists as the descendants of Constantine, who conquered in the name of the cross, the symbol of power over the powerless.

Give us a plan for our dialogue, Lord

The fiercely argued ascendancy of substitutionary atonement as the premier explanation of the gospel remains. Richard Rohr shows that Arminians vs. Calvinists is not a new argument in the church. Augustine and his followers fought with the “Pelagians” (like John Cassian), and Dominicans argued with Franciscans (Rohr).

We need to keep having loving dialogue because we are not all built the same way and differing views need to be integrated in the peace of Christ, not allowed to become red or blue talking points. I connect the players in the Synod of Dort with Jeffrey Russell’s helpful distinction of the movements of “prophecy” and “order” in the medieval church, the Arminians being more on the “prophecy” side. I think the Calvinists are part of the general takeover of Eurocentric thinking in the 1600’s and onward by the “scientific” left brain; but the left brain is necessary to the whole, just should not rule.

The church has always had a helpful dialogue about the many, deep meanings of the atonement, which describe the grace of God — a grace which speaks to individuals and people groups in all ages and all places. The work of Jesus is bigger than our understanding and perfectly obvious to our needy hearts. The idea of “substitutionary atonement” is in the Bible and in the dialogue of the Church from earliest history [atonement explanations]. I’m not a fan of the corrupted version made in the image of Eurocentric thinking from the 1600’s. But I accept the grace of God in Jesus who bears my sins and sets me free from guilt.

So let’s end with a meditation on the death of Jesus for us, a song that came out in 1609, a decade before Dort. Maybe it unites us all — it has quite a diverse background. The tune is by the German Protestant composer, Hans Leo Hassler. The words we sing are a rewrite by a 26 year old Presbyterian minister in 1830. The original lyrics were attributed to the warrior mystic Bernard of Clairvaux, but are now attributed of Arnulf of Lueven (ca 1250), Lueven being a town just a couple of hours south of Dortrecht in Belgium. The original poem is long and includes all sorts of body parts, but the head is what became most vivid and lasting.

Here is the second verse for your prayer:

What Thou, my Lord, hast suffered
Was all for sinners’ gain;
Mine, mine was the transgression,
But Thine the deadly pain.
Lo, here I fall, my Savior!
‘Tis I deserve Thy place;
Look on me with Thy favor,
Vouchsafe to me Thy grace.

Jesus satisfies your debt: Rest in the honor for Lent

A life in the Spirit, Doing Theology, Spiritual direction, , , , ,

Teach me to seek you, and reveal yourself to me as I seek,
because I can neither seek you if you do not teach me how,
nor find you unless you reveal yourself.
Let me seek you in desiring you; let me desire you in seeking you;
let me find you in loving you; let me love you in finding you.”
– Anselm of Canterbury, Proslogion, 1 (1078, in Bec)

I am revisiting the historical explanations of the atonement during Lent. So I dug deeper into the  life and work of Anselm of Canterbury (1033-1109) who lived through one of my favorite European centuries. Why don’t you use his prayer (above), which is very characteristic of him, and see if you can feel it the way he might?

Meditations of St Anselm 12 century. Bodleian Library, Oxford.
Anselm’s Meditations became one of the great medieval texts of spiritual comfort.

I took up a lot of my spiritual director’s time talking about Anselm this week, and I am tempted to go on and on with you because I feel full of revelation. Previously, I pictured Anselm as a stuffy, rule-bound academic who made life hard for Abelard. As it turns out, he is a super influential revolutionary attempting to integrate a tsunami of new thinking  into his faith and life. If that is not enough, he is a church leader living in the center of one of the most tumultuous political actions in history: the Norman Conquest of England, and made some significant, gutsy moves that got him exiled a couple of times. What’s more, he opposed the First Crusade (1096-9) on moral grounds, even though he was a staunch supporter of the pope. I asked my wife, “Why isn’t there a movie about this guy?”

You live in a time of change, too

In the 11th century an intellectual and spiritual revolution began to burn in Europe and Anselm helped light the fire. So much change has happened in our world in the last four years, you must feel something burning, too. Anselm’s era is supercharged with change. What will become capitalism is taking root as European towns form. Universities begin to develop. Foreign trade increases and foreign ideas come with it. Foreign wars are fomented.

In the church, the dominant “Augustinian” traditions are challenged by the rediscovery of the works of “The Philosopher,” Aristotle. In Anselm’s time, teachers were astonished when Europeans became aware of over a thousand documents from ancient Greek writers, notably Aristotle, in Arab libraries throughout Spain. They had been lost after the Roman Empire went Christian and a wide-scale destruction of “un-Christian” books and libraries occurred. In many places there had grown a contempt for learning, free inquiry and rationality itself. (Some things just keep happening again and again!) Anselm was basically writing in the spirit of a 1619 Project on behalf of overlooked, unjustly dishonored ancient philosophers who rose from the vaults of the heathen Moors in Al-Andalus.

Aristotle presented a version of rationalism which was so compelling teachers in the gestating universities scrambled to recast their disciplines in light of it. It was change as big as the advent of the personal computer, the cell phone or A.I. Anselm was the first and foremost thinker to apply Aristotle’s rationalism to Christian faith. He thought of it as using reason after attending to the primacy of faith. He started a way of thinking and teaching about God (later called “scholasticism”) which gave birth to an “Age of Reason” later on (See Aristotle’s Children by Richard Rubenstein).

The “Platonic” side of Greek philosophy, represented by Augustine (354-430) dominated the Early Middle Ages. It taught that truth resides in God’s mind and is generally beyond our complete understanding. (Plato is Socrates’ disciple and Aristotle’s mentor, all in Athens about 470-322 B.C.). Contrary to Plato, underlying all Aristotle’s works — whether on politics, poetics, ethics, logic or natural science — is the conviction that human beings are rational creatures capable of making reasonable choices. They can use their intelligence to examine the world, discern patterns in nature and figure out how things work.  Aristotle’s common-sensical, nonmystical, and optimistic view of the world enters the culture at a time it can flourish. Anselm helps knit it into a new common sense.

Even though Anselm was obsessed with learning and teaching, his exploration of all this newness is always about seeking to know God better. He wrote,

I do not seek to understand, in order that I may believe; but I believe, that I may understand. For I believe this too, that unless I believed, I should not understand (Proslogion, 1).

In this, he is following Augustine. But as Proslogion continues, his writing shows the innovation Aristotle brings to reasoning which will reorganize all further philosophy in Europe. God gave Anselm a daring, inquisitive brain and he considered it his calling to use it, even though his monasteries kept calling him into leadership.

How did Jesus save us?

For the rest of Lent, maybe you could follow your best feelings and thoughts — even if they make you a rebel against your prevailing way of life or the constraining intellectual laziness of your church and culture. Anselm could be your guide in this. He meditated on the cross and the atonement it promises, and came up with a new way to see it — theologians call it the “satisfaction theory.”

I used to see Anselm’s “proof” of why Jesus (the God-man) is crucial to our salvation as some petty, stale philosophy. But now I see it as being way out front of the zeitgeist that was about to envelope his continent. He uses a newly-rational process, to offer a somewhat-capitalist view of Christ’s work, which contradicts what almost everyone thinks about the Lord.  His focus on God’s honor matches how his Norman overlords see their honor. But Anselm is not locked in his era. He posits a theory that calls his context into humility before God, both church and kingdom, daring to go against entrenched teaching backed by powerful people.

Anselm’s philosophizing generally starts with a question which has come up during his meditation. Much of his atonement view evolved from pondering what is owed to Caesar and what to Christ, as well as the role of obedience in the redemption of humanity. Cur Deus Homo is the result. It has been called a defense of God’s actions in the face of the evil of the world. But I am not sure Anselm is being defensive. I think he sincerely wants to come up with the best answer for himself and everyone else. Why did God become human? Why did the incarnation occur? You can read a nice summary of the whole argument,  here, and see of variations of an answer, here.

Anselm thinks the incarnation is a gracious way to protect humanity from bearing the requirement to honor God — since we don’t meet the requirement and God is loving, but also just! You might say it is a worship-based argument, which would be appropriate, since Anselm had devoted his life to building it on a foundation of meditation and worship. Unlike the popular “ransom” theory which prevailed at the time, the way Anselm reasons it, Jesus is not bait to trick the devil, since God doesn’t need to make deals with the devil (way beneath God’s honor), and Jesus is not sent on a mission where he is predestined for sacrifice (there is no compulsion, no murder by God, humanity does the killing). Jesus dies because he has lived a life for humanity that honors God. The powers-that-be kill him for doing it. Jesus must be human to offer God the honor due and must be God to endure the infinite punishment due humankind for not doing it. Humanity owes a debt of honor to God which they cannot pay (Forgive us our debts…).

God wills to create a humanity that honors him and attains blessedness. Therefore, God must necessarily become incarnate and redeem humanity when it falls. What follows from all of this is that redemption, while it is achieved by Christ, is entered into only through being joined to Christ through the Spirit. Participation in Christ as the one who obeys and the one who undoes the consequences of not honoring God is indispensable. Jesus “satisfies” the need to honor God and so do we by participating in his work.

St. Anselm Triptych (2011) in Bec Abbey, Normandy

Does this mean anything personal?

I also told my spiritual director that I did not think many people would want to read this piece but I really felt like writing it. As I meditated on “why?” I came back to my admiration for Anselm’s timely influence. Right now, the church seems neutered by politics, TikTok, and self protection. We are submerged under mistrust. The present world is awash with climate change, scientific beauties and monstrosities, newly authoritarian governments, the unknown ramifications of the pandemic, and much more. It is a crazy place where faith in Jesus has almost no influence spiritually or otherwise. What should we say and do?

I am inspired by Anselm’s example. His life and writing are an exercise in trust. He calls people to honor God through Jesus Christ, in his own crazy era, with the gifts he has. He takes the core doctrine of Christianity, the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus, and dares to use his power and influence to change the subject and undo the moribund thinking of the church, which has been more afraid of wrong thinking than producing Spirit-inspired thinking.

I think Anselm’s argument style and some unprocessed influence by his background and context, make his argument less than fully satisfying. But it is still a great argument and it is way better than the prevailing, somewhat superstitious, teaching that dominated the church in his day. He’s fresh, he is alive, he is listening to God. Aren’t we all a bit too anxious, occupied, insecure and afraid to listen to God these days?

Plus, I think Jesus pictured as an uncoerced, obedient person who gets killed because of his uncompromising trust in God is very attractive. He despises the shame. Maybe Anselm’s “life verse” was from John 8, where Jesus says,

But because I tell the truth, you do not believe me. Which of you convicts me of sin? If I tell the truth, why do you not believe me? Whoever is from God hears the words of God. The reason you do not hear them is that you are not from God.”

The Jews answered him, “Are we not right in saying that you are a Samaritan and have a demon?” Jesus answered, “I do not have a demon, but I honor my Father, and you dishonor me. Yet I do not seek my own glory; there is one who seeks it, and he is the judge. Very truly, I tell you, whoever keeps my word will never see death.” (John 8:45-51)

I still think John 8 is one of the most interesting, funny, and relevant chapters of the Bible. It is all about lies. And in the middle of it, Jesus is defending his honor, and God’s. He accuses his detractors of being on the father of lies’ murderous side. By the end of the argument, they pick up stones to kill him. They did not succeed then, but they will before long.

Lord, have mercy! We are small boats tossing on a sea of lies. We have to keep finding ways to deal with our anxiety as the earth and society fall apart around us, as the church is clearing out, and as its voice is overtaken by liars. I think Anselm was moved by the Spirit to follow Jesus in honoring God, no matter what. As we realize we can’t really do that effectively or completely, we have the God-man who can and did do it and continues with us to do so. Jesus welcomes us into the transcendent reality of life in the Spirit and the hope in God’s ongoing creative work.

I hope we think that truth into the language of our new era as we respect the old era, and rest in how Jesus satisfies the demands we feel to make the world right. With that hope, Anselm might add to the prayer with which we started:

Help me to honor you as I stand in Christ
who has satisfied the consequences of how I have not honored you.
Teach me to honor you
as you as you honor me with your loving and true presence.

Jesus wants to ransom you: Get rescued for Lent

A life in the Spirit, Doing Theology, Poetry, Spiritual direction, , , , ,

When I discovered John Donne’s sonnet in my college literature anthology, it preoccupied me for months. I even turned it into a song for my Music 1 course. My TA thought the tune was a little strange, but I still sing it in my head.

Batter my heart, three-person’d God, for you
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend
Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
I, like an usurp’d town to another due,
Labor to admit you, but oh, to no end;
Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captiv’d, and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearly I love you, and would be lov’d fain,
But am betroth’d unto your enemy;
Divorce me, untie or break that knot again,
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.

— John Donne (1572-1631), Holy Sonnet XIV (pub.  1633)

I still sing this poem because I often need to. Like Donne, from the first days of my faith I doubted the primacy of my mind when it came to my relationship with God — reason is about as good as the reasoner. I was more concerned with the irrational thinking (and the habits associated with it) that felt like a prison. So I loved Donne’s image of God battering on the big oak doors of my heart like always happened in movies about knights and sieges. And I secretly loved the erotic imagery of a passion so insistent I could use it as a touchstone memory of ecstasy.

The prison

Donne’s sonnet helps me put the proper passion into the work of Jesus. God comes to free me from my prison: sin, unbelief, death and, ultimately, sadness, physical pain and mental illness. He’s not doing the paperwork, he’s risking his life for a lover.

Since, therefore, the children share flesh and blood, he himself likewise shared the same things, so that through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil, and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by the fear of death. – Hebrews 2:14-15

God shares our flesh and blood. The other day at Chuck E. Cheese, my son was recounting his astonishment when he opened his birthday-present-subscription to The New Yorker and read about the condition of gold miners in South Africa. I’m not sure we needed more evidence of the evil in the world than driving up Roosevelt Boulevard offers every day, but there it was, brazenly at work among the poor in South Africa. And there it is in the fact Russia has stolen children from Ukrainian parents! And there it is in the mirror most of the time. It appears we are all betrothed to God’s enemy whether we choose it or not. John says, “the whole world is in the power of the evil one” (1 John 5:19).

But God is with us. So the apostle, Paul, writes to his protégé and instructs him to act

with gentleness correcting those who are in opposition, if perhaps God may grant them repentance leading to the knowledge of the truth, and they may come to their senses and escape from the snare of the devil, having been held captive by him to do his will. — 2 Tim 2:25-6

The preacher last Sunday deftly sidestepped the skepticism people have about the devil. He didn’t exactly say there wasn’t one, he just implied it didn’t make much difference if I said there wasn’t. I did not mind that much (John might mind, however). I think he was working with what was in front of him. Powerful and power-grabbing people from the U.S. Empire think there is no legitimate opposition to their authority, which is why we will likely be ruled by AI and overrun by nanotechnology before long, if Antarctica does not melt first. Who needs a devil?

I’m fine with the origin of evil being mysterious. The effects of it are ever-present. We’re surrounded and often manacled. I think any spiritually aware person is amazed at how free they can be and still feel pushed around by sin, death, and suspicious spirits. If Jesus does not ransom and rescue us, we’re in trouble.

The ransom

Paul basically assumes his readers in Corinth know God ransomed them from the prison of sin and death by the work of Jesus in his crucifixion and resurrection. He writes, “You were bought with a price; therefore glorify God in your body” (1 Cor 6:20). Then he assumes it again in the next chapter: “You were bought with a price; do not become slaves of humans” (7:23).

Icon: “Origen Teaching the Saints,” Eileen McGuckin

Origen (c. 185–c. 253), the famous scholar from the early church in Alexandria, is often accused of popularizing a “ransom view” of the atonement. I think post-1900s theologians are more likely the culprits. They needed a neat way to explain church history according to Enlightenment theories. I think they put the word “atonement” at the top of their chart like it was a genus and went looking for species; the “ransom theory” became one of many. Origen describes his idea of ransom but I doubt he was being too specific, since even in First Principles he assumes most concepts can be considered in a literal, moral, and spiritual/allegorical way. Origen was primarily an ascetic, so he was probably enjoying the feeling of being ransomed and feeling the desperate need for it, just like John Donne.

But he did say:

To whom gave he his life “a ransom for many?” It cannot have been to God. Was it not then to the evil one? For he held us until the ransom for us, even the soul of Jesus, was paid to him, being deceived into thinking that he could be its lord, and not seeing that he could not bear the torment of holding it.  (apparently in his Commentary on Romans, but I did not find the source online for you).

Whether we need to credit Origen or not, for the next 1000 years this understanding of the atonement is probably the most popular. Many people think “ransom” is a better metaphor than a doctrine, but most people just take it for how it is taught by the big names, like Augustine, who in the 400’s says,

“The Redeemer came and the deceiver was overcome. What did our Redeemer do to our Captor? In payment for us He set the trap, His Cross, with His blood for bait. He [Satan] could indeed shed that blood; but he deserved not to drink it. By shedding the blood of One who was not his debtor, he was forced to release his debtors” (Serm. cxxx, part 2).

People have always had some problems with this explanation of the Lord’s work for the basic reason it is a theory of how the atonement works, not a story. Rather than being a drama or a revelation of mystery, the work of Christ becomes a mechanism to be explained when the philosophers get a hold of it.

What’s more, there is nothing in the New Testament that specifically says Satan was the one to whom ransom was paid. But that is a bit like saying there is nothing in the U.S. Constitution that grants women political rights. Origen and Augustine were offering an amendment to the Bible and the church folded it in.

The ransomed ransom

I welcome being ransomed, me and John Donne. I don’t need a theory to approve my eligibility for rescue. I need to be rescued. Every day in psychotherapy I become better acquainted with the many variations of our captivity. We can’t rescue ourselves or each other effectively. We need Jesus, our ransom and rescuer. I am less interested in how, exactly, the ransoming occurs. I am more interested in the passion I feel being enacted on my behalf. It is good to know Jesus is tirelessly beating on the castle door.

I think Lent is a good time to get out of prison and help set others free. Jesus taught:

Whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first must be slave of all. For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many”—Mark 10:42-45

A lot of people looking for a theory have an “Aha” moment when they hear Jesus giving his life as a ransom, “So THAT’s how it works!” But it seems clear that Jesus thinks his disciples won’t get how things work until they enact a passion like his. Be loved and love. Be ransomed and be a ransom.  Be suffered for and suffer. In my experience, I feel more ransomed when I ransom. Like the abused often become abusers, the ransomed become ransom.

So for Lent, how about being ransomed? If you just made up your own tune for John Donne’s sonnet, it might lead to feeling rescued.