"Is Jesus the only way?" conversation openers

"I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me." -- Jesus (John 14:6)

Jesus' bold saying is a challenge to modern and post-modern minds. There is a tension between the ideal of truth and policy of tolerating all. Below are some notes on the more common objections I've heard to Jesus' claim, and ways to move the conversation forward. 

Objection: There are lots of great teachers

There may be a lot of great teachers from a human point of view, but God raised only one of them from the dead. God made clear which of the great teachers is the way to resurrection and life. We aren't left guessing about it or trying to see who has a better argument (or arguer). Once God has weighed in on the question, human arguments are pointless. 

Objection: There are good atheists too; they should go to heaven

Heaven is God's home. If someone hates God but thinks God owes them admission to his home, God may not think the same way about that. (This is in the context of the "atheists" who are intentionally spiteful about God and believers, the atheists of the "it's cool to be cruel" school.) 

Objection: It's not fair to have eternal fate depend on some obscure belief

God raised Jesus from the dead, and probably every adult in the world has heard that by now. There's no barrier to hearing it: anyone who knows even the barest basics about the major religions knows that. God loves everyone, and desires to save everyone, and sent a savior for everyone. 

After the initial round of discussion, the next move is explaining more about the good news: it means we can trust God. It means God loves us. It means he hasn't abandoned us to pointless lives that are nasty, brutish, and short. Or wherever the good news intersects the listener's felt needs.

The viral memories and the hidden vices

If my memories had view-counters like a video on the web, some memories would hardly have any views and others would be well-worn, their view-counters easily spinning up to double digits or more. As relentless as an ad algorithm, my mind can replay some of these memories when at rest. 

After some work trying to root out pockets of sin, it's clear that the worst parts of me tend to hide behind the best, or camouflage themselves that way: 

• If I want to be the MVP, I am likely to undervalue the contributions of others, or not make space for them. 
• If I am being helpful and kind, are my motives always pure, or is there some hope of being noticed and valued? 
• If I am being funny, have I done it at someone else's expense? 
• If I am noticing faults in others, am I doing it to think better of myself? 
• Am I a peacemaker, or am I avoiding conflict? 
• Am I patient, or am I undecided on the next step? 
• Am I overworked in one area of life, or am I avoiding unpleasant tasks in another area? 
• Am I focused on justice, or am I having trouble forgiving? 

When I look for my own vices, I might do well to see what's hiding behind my virtues. "Simultaneously saints and sinners," as they say in some circles. 

The commandment to be holy: How?

The Old Testament often repeated the command to Be holy as the Lord God is holy. The New Testament is clear that this applies to us also (1 Peter 1:16). But how do we become holy in that way? 

Of course we stay back from sin. I'm here considering times when we have done that, but still do not find ourselves having become a fountain of God-pleasing graceful thoughts, words, and actions. 

When the New Testament repeats the Levitical command to be holy, we do get some guidance, both in resisting our sinful tendencies, and in devoting ourselves to the brotherly love of fellowship (see 1 Peter 1). 

I'd also consider the Sabbath as a help for holiness. The Sabbath is a holy day, not because work is bad, not because work is illegitimate, but because the blessings of God deserve a time of focus. The Sabbath is especially useful for gratitude and for rest. Busy-ness can be opposed to holiness. So can tiredness and stress. And I'll speak for myself here that rest can be an act of faith: a recognition that my busy-ness is not always the solution, an act of trust that God is, after all, God. 

In the Bible we see that some "most holy" things can convey some holiness from God, as a bridge between God's ultimate holiness and this world. (Deeper dive here.) In the current Christian culture it's probably useful to add that book study is not the only means of time with God. Prayer and meditation, gratitude, and fellowship are worthy pursuits. For any who would hesitate about fellowship, consider  the apostle Paul's blessing of "the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit." I read that to mean both the fellowship with the Holy Spirit, and with each other through the Holy Spirit. It is a help to holiness when we listen to another person's cares, or otherwise arrange to be present in a way that encourages and uplifts. 

"Leadership and Self-Deception" - Christian repentance in a secular management book

My pastor recently recommended the book Leadership and Self-Deception (The Arbinger Institute (c) 2000, 3d ed 2018), which I read this past week. While the book does not acknowledge Christianity anywhere in the text, many teachings of Christianity are strong and plain, and I can see why the book would receive a pastoral recommendation*. It is a book that takes one premise and runs with it: "If we say we have no sin we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. But if we confess our sins ..." (That quotation from the New Testament forms the invitation to an honest and humble self-examination, confession, and repentance in many a Christian order of worship, for anyone unfamiliar with the words. While that Biblical quote does not appear in the book, it would be difficult to find a more accurate summary of the book.) It is fascinating that a book with such a thoroughly Christian premise should make its way onto a business best-sellers list. 

Without ever using the word "sin," the book describes our human tendency to fail at kindness, but then justify our lack of mercy by dwelling on the faults of those we resisted the urge to help. We easily become entrenched in the habit -- and justification -- of indifference toward others. It reviews the compulsive fault-finding that come from a decision to count ourselves as better than others, or others as less virtuous than ourselves, even if the decision was not consciously made. It walks the reader through the relentless slide from self-justification to provocation and mutual distrust, and the too common, too human end result of people considering their ill-treatment of others to be a proof of virtue. It exposes the self-deception at the heart of our self-justification and fault-finding. 

Without ever using the word "confession," the book describes the profound and positive changes that come from questioning our own virtue. It identifies that self-questioning humility as the key step in freeing ourselves from the distorted thinking that spring from our self-justification. 

Without ever using the word "repentance," it speaks extensively of the need for a new mindset that honestly acknowledges our own faults, and recognizes the equal humanity of those whose faults we so eagerly seek. 

The strongest point of the book may be the examples (less-than-deftly-written, but very relatable examples) of how we talk ourselves into thinking the worst of others and the best of ourselves. It also follows through with convincing instances of the havoc that self-justification wreaks on human relationships whenever it is left unchecked. It includes a worthwhile study on how often 2 people (or groups) can be locked into a mutually-reinforcing cycle in which each provokes the other, yet can only see their own wounds and the others' faults. And it describes ways to extract ourselves from the mess in order to lead clean and honest lives, not locked into the need to justify ourselves or find fault with others, but again free to act in kindness towards all. 

Much to my surprise, that business book may be the best modern study of confession and repentance that I have read. As a Christian I may wish for an acknowledgement of God, or forgiveness. But for a business book, it makes a remarkable start. 

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* Based on some cursory research, it looks like the key person at The Arbinger Institute spent some time teaching at Brigham Young, so I would hazard a guess he might be Mormon. It would explain the yes-and-no fit to Christianity as I know it. 

In gratitude for fathers: Happy Father's Day!

Though my own father passed away many years ago, I am still grateful for the kindness and support he provided over the years. 

To all fathers who have stepped up, great and small: Happy Father's Day! 

God's love in action: "Family Promise" (addressing family homelessness)

Many humanitarian organizations have good intentions. Good intentions do not always translate into good results. The God's Love In Action series focuses on people or organizations that seem to be able to translate those good intentions into results. 

Family Promise is an organization that tackles a particular type of homelessness: when families with minor children become unable to maintain a home. Sometimes Family Promise manages to prevent evictions. Sometimes a family is placed with a church. (My own congregation participates in Family Promise, where any families currently in service literally stay in our building for a week before transferring to the next congregation, while members of the congregation arrange meals, help meet basic needs, and even spend the night in the facility with them. Families on the verge of homelessness can then have their food and shelter provided for free while they stabilize. 

Family Promise also has other services to make families more financially stable. There are expectations for the family to begin saving and to build enough of a financial cushion to weather a financial surprise. There is training in financial literacy. 

And there is a reasonable amount of success in stabilizing families who then return to self-sufficiency. Family Promise seems to have hit that workable blend of supporting people while equipping them for a responsible and dignified life. 

God's love in action: finding the approaches that work

Previously in the "God's love in action" series, I'd looked at how Habitat for Humanity works. Specifically, we focused on why their approach seems to be more successful than other approaches to the same problem. This post continues in the vein of looking at largescale solutions not only for good intentions, but for measurable success in tackling the problem. 

I have heard it said that, as Christians, we are not called to be successful; we are called to be faithful. But if "success" is measured in actually helping the people we intend to help, then part of being faithful includes being successful in actually helping people. If we get bad results, then good intentions will require us to try other approaches. 

We don't often think of 12-step groups as a Christian outreach program. But 100 years ago they were exactly that. The leaders in outreach to alcoholics were Christian ministries. And one particular program called "The Oxford Group" was the direct forerunner of Alcoholics Anonymous. 

There's still a lot of spiritual work to be done in addiction recovery. But it has resisted mass solutions, and so far people recover one person at a time. For those who recover successfully, there are several things vital to recovery: a wide support system constructed to provide regular face-to-face contact with people who will listen and care, a dedicated contact person who is more experienced and on call to offer guidance; a roadmap of how to lose the dysfunctional coping skills and gain experience with healthier ones; and the concept of individual responsibility as each person takes ownership for their own life. There is also an expectation that people will "pass it on" and be there for the next person who needs help. All that is woven into a framework where spirituality is welcome and religion is, for many, necessary. 

It surprised me at first to see some things in common between Habitat for Humanity and AA (and other 12-step programs). They both focus on re-attaching people to a community, re-attaching people to a support system. They both focus on learning individual responsibility, but not learning it alone or without help. They both take seriously the need for practice and experience with new skills, for guidance with expectations of growing responsibility. 

We live in a world where there is no shortage of good intentions, but few programs have good results. The approach of building a community with structured responsibility seems to have promise, and it might be worth applying it to other large-scale problems. We have plenty of them. 

Pursuing a knowledge of God, and pursuing godliness

Today, on Trinity Sunday, I am reminded of how eagerly we can pursue a knowledge of God, how thirsty we are for a deeper understanding of God. But the pictures we draw of God often pursue the lines of our curiosity, not the lines of his gifts and his self-disclosure. I am as prone to curiosity as the next person. But if I were to try to draw God based on Scripture taken as God's self-revelation, I might get something more like this: 

Let me be the first to say: It's incomplete, and could also use some editing for more appropriate parallels. With that out of the way, here is what it's trying to convey: 

The general form is ripples going out from the center, and the center is God. The rippling outward indicates God's reach throughout creation and specifically to the creatures who are made in God's image. Streaming out from God, we see water representing God's actions to cleanse us and renew us, foremost of which is the work of Christ; and flames representing the Spirit's presence with us. 

The center, God as the origin of all things, contains three attributes that come up as key in Scripture. At the center is "holy," as Scripture repeatedly says "Be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy." While it is God's attribute first, it is something that he means for us to share. At one side is "mercy," where Scripture tells us to be merciful as our Father in heaven is merciful (again, a key attribute that God means for us to share with him). On the other side is "wisdom," where Scripture tells us that the wisdom of God is communicated to us by the Spirit of God: wisdom, understanding, counsel, might, knowledge, fear of the Lord (reverence), joy in his presence. Once again, this is an attribute God means for us to share. 

At the top are the well-known gifts of the Spirit: faith, hope, and love. At the bottom we see the fruits of the Spirit. 

The graphic has some significant shortcomings (beyond the amateur art): though it is already crowded enough, still "Jesus" and "the Holy Spirit" are not explicitly named anywhere. That is not a small shortcoming, and so I can consider this to be a not-quite-beta version of the drawing, since it requires reading the accompanying text to get to material that is so vital. 

For all that it lacks, there are many passages of Scripture that could be explained with reference to this visual, where the authors are saying: God is this way, he is transforming us to be like him. 

If on Trinity Sunday I find myself drawing three circles to describe the person and work of God, these  particular three circles show how God's character has ripple-effects in our lives. The traits I would most focus on today are the ones he wants to share with us. The work of the Word and Spirit are to bring exactly that fellowship -- and transformation -- into our lives. 

Thank you for your patience with this series, now concluded. Several of my other series over the years have been driving at the same point. Related series include On being like God, and Rethinking the Shape of the Trinity, of which the most closely-related post in the series is part 4, which originally appeared in the Trinity Blogging Summit in 2009. 

The power of God's nature

(Next-to-last post in the current series)

So far we have looked at various passages in which the "Spirit of God" and "Word of God" are used in ways that can test our assumptions about them. 

First, the New Testament authors really do speak as if they mean it literally that God's Spirit is the spirit that comes to live in us, giving us new life. Consider St Paul here, speaking while the literal Temple in Jerusalem still stood, where the presence of God was expected to dwell: 

"Don't you know that you are the temple of God, and that the Spirit of God dwells in you?" (1 Corinthians 3:16)

Again, consider the New Testament authors speaking as if the spiritual life is new in a way that leaves us immature, where three different letters, generally understood to be by three different authors, all pick up "milk" as a metaphor to point out immaturity or tender new life: 

"I fed you with milk, not solid food" (Paul, 1 Corinthians 3:2)

"You need milk, not solid food, for everyone who lives on milk is unskilled in the word of righteousness, since he is a child." (Hebrews 5:12-13)

"Like newborn infants, long for the pure spiritual milk (1 Peter 2:2)

The New Testament authors speak as if our Christian walk is not so much a matter of needing more information, and more a matter of living according to the character and spirit of God. In the New Testament epistles, Sts. John, Peter, and Paul all address our character coming to be like God's character not because we studied or tried hard enough, but because we have a fundamental connection to God who is like that: 

Beloved, we are God's children now, and what we will be has not yet appeared; but we know that when he appears we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is. And everyone who thus hopes in him purifies himself as he is pure. (1 John 3:2-3)

"as he who called you is holy, you also be holy in all your conduct, since it is written, “You shall be holy, for I am holy.” (1 Peter 1:16 )

But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law. (Galatians 5:22-23)

And of course the apostles' teaching in this matter follows Jesus' own teaching. We often read Jesus' teaching as if he is saying to try really hard to be perfect. But again we see Jesus basing his teaching on children being like their father: 

"But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven. For he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust. 

For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you greet only your brothers, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? 

You therefore must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect. (Matthew 5:44-48)

Only one entry left in the current series. Thank you for your patience! 

The power of God's word, and how the messenger may need to get out of the way

Because the Word of God affects us in different ways, I want to be sure to make my point without detracting from other ones that could be made. 

For example, the word of God can be strikingly beautiful. We can feel the way certain words fill our soul with a longing for holiness, or an awe and reverence for the majesty of God's creative power. When the word of God is beautiful, that beauty goes beyond shallow appearance, instead fulfilling the promise of beauty as the marker of its deeper source, like a tree in a desert that signals the presence of water. And again, the word of God can be wise with a wisdom that makes us pause, requires us to expand our thinking and return to it with humility. 

That needs saying before I move onto how Paul communicated about the power of the Word of God. There are times when words of beauty and eloquence are a distraction. There are times when we hear wisdom and power that come from the art of rhetoric, pointing (at best) to human wisdom. While we love and pursue wisdom, the highest form of it is not man-made. 

And I, when I came to you, brothers, did not come proclaiming to you the testimony of God with lofty speech or wisdom. For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified. And I was with you in weakness and in fear and much trembling, and my speech and my message were not in plausible words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power, so that your faith might not rest in the wisdom of men but in the power of God. (1 Corinthians 2:1-5)

Paul focuses on "Jesus Christ and him crucified" as the message of God's power. Paul was concerned that any eloquence or artistry could leave people doubting. That is, they might not doubt whether they believed but why they believed. Is Paul just a persuasive speaker, or is the message itself powerful? Paul got out of the way of the message: Christ crucified is the message of the power of God. 

Paul continues the message of the power of God by describing the work of the Spirit, too: 

But, as it is written, “What no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man imagined, what God has prepared for those who love him”— these things God has revealed to us through the Spirit. For the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God. For who knows a person's thoughts except the spirit of that person, which is in him? So also no one comprehends the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God. Now we have received not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, that we might understand the things freely given us by God. (1 Corinthians 2:9-12)

This is not often how we speak of the Spirit of God, as simply the spirit within God that knows the inner thoughts of God in the same way our spirit within us knows our thoughts. Paul explains that spirit within God, knowing the mind of God, is the same Spirit we receive so "that we might understand the things freely given us by God." 

Here Paul comes very close to the point that Jesus made when speaking to Nicodemus of the importance the Spirit of God as a living and active force in our own lives and our own understanding. 

(Two more posts are planned to wrap up the current series: a post on the Holy Spirit planned for next week on Pentecost, and the ultimate point of the series planned for the following week on Trinity Sunday.)

Jesus' teaching on new life in the Gospel of John

(Continuing the current series ...)

Matthew, Mark, and Luke all repeat at least some of Jesus' parables of the seed, but the entire Gospel of John has no seed parables at all. There is majority agreement that the Gospel of John was the last written of the four gospels in the canon of Scripture. In some ways it skips (or assumes) material covered by the earlier gospels. And so rather than telling us about the disciples hearing parables and later asking questions in private, the fourth gospel tells us about one of the Jewish leaders visiting Jesus at night to ask questions in private. Here the Gospel of John recounts Jesus' teaching about the new life: 

Jesus answered him, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God.” 

Nicodemus said to him, “How can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter a second time into his mother's womb and be born?” 

Jesus answered, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God. That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit. Do not marvel that I said to you, ‘You must be born again.’  (John 3:3-7)

I know some televangelists gave the phrase "born again" a bad taste by using it in a way that seemed fairly far from Jesus' original spirituality. But Jesus' point remains -- as does his choice of description. We are not in need of an information transfer from God. Instead we are in need of a life transfusion, a spirit transfusion. We are born of flesh, and flesh is perishable. To be children of God, we need a spiritual life -- not in the sense of an emotional life, not as a euphemism for an intellectual life, but the particular type of spiritual life that brings the Spirit of God to us as a living force in our own lives. 

The power of the Word of God: Jesus' parables of the seeds

When Peter described us as being born of imperishable seed from the Word of God, that was not an innovation on his part. Jesus often equated the word of God with seeds. 

Probably the best-known instance is the parable of the sower, recorded in the gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke. Mark and Luke's retellings make the point plainly: 

Now the parable is this: The seed is the Word of God. (Jesus, Luke 8:11)

The sower sows the word. (Jesus, Mark 4:14)

Matthew's retelling does not introduce a single central saying that what is sown is the word, instead including that in the explanation of each of the four types of the soil, as someone who "hears the word and ...", each time equating what is sown with the word. 

Jesus tells other parables in which the the point of the parable is carried by focusing on a seed. Matthew has an entire collection of parables of either seed or small living things that grow or multiply (the sower, the wheat and the tares, the mustard seed, the yeast) to describe how the kingdom of God takes root and grows. 

For anyone reading, I appreciate the patience with the slow build here. There are too many individual parts to cover them all at the same time without the individual points being lost in the list of points. 

The power of the Word of God is not in information: continuing with St John

This continues a short series on the power of the Word of God. 

As a short recap of the prior post: When we look at words we are accustomed to looking for their meaning, and with good reason: words are typically meant to carry meaning. But in the previous post we reviewed St Peter's claims about the Word of God, where his argument did not depend on the content of God's Word but on the character of God's Word: God's word is imperishable and God's word is holy, so as it takes root in us we are reborn -- not as creatures of more information, but as creatures of different character, with holiness and the hope of an incorruptible new nature. To be sure, gaining knowledge -- or better yet, wisdom -- is worthwhile. So there is a temptation to define our spiritual growth in terms of gaining information, while St Peter's argument suggests that our growth is in gaining holiness or godliness. Peter also frames his argument that our growth is in a new life received from God's Word, where that new life is not received as information but as a seed. 

St Peter is not the only New Testament writer who speaks of the Word of God in unexpected terms. St John begins his gospel with an extended passage building up to how "the Word became flesh and dwelt among us ... full of grace and truth" (John 1:14). So John also speaks of the Word of God in ways that challenge our assumptions about the Word of God. This passage in John's gospel has long been key to the Christian understanding of Christ having an existence long before the Word became flesh and lived among us. 

Again in John's writing the Word of God is portrayed less as information and more as creative force and source of life. Here we find some dispute over the translation ("him" or "it" to refer to the Word). Let me offer a translation that could be read without red-flagging by either side of that particular dispute: 

All things were made by the same (Word), and without the same there was not made anything that was made. In the same was life, and the life was the light of men. (John 1:4)

Land where you will on the best pronoun to use for the Word, it's not up for dispute that the passage describes the Word as a creative force bringing life and light. 

Again in John's writing, the key property of the Word of God is not the information carried, but the generation of new life. 

More to come, but in reasonable-sized steps. 

The power of the Word of God is not rhetorical: Let's start with St Peter

When we think about powerful words, we may think of rhetoric: skillful persuasion. There is a tendency to think of evangelism and even faith itself in terms of persuasion. To be sure, persuasion done well can help build understanding and overcome barriers. But the power is not wholly in persuasion, not even in the skill of the persuader. The Bible often discusses the power of God's word in terms that go beyond persuasion, and are not even in the same category as persuasion. In this post I'll look at St Peter. 

Peter writes about the word of God in terms that moderns instinctively, unconsciously reinterpret. Consider when he says

you have been born again, not of perishable seed but of imperishable, through the living and abiding word of God; for “All flesh is like grass and all its glory like the flower of grass. The grass withers, and the flower falls, but the word of the Lord remains forever.” And this word is the good news that was preached to you. (1 Peter 1:23-25)

Peter quotes an older scripture contrasting things that are failing and decaying -- grass, flowers, human flesh -- and what is imperishable: the word of God. Peter's point is not simply that the word of God is imperishable, but that this imperishable quality in God's word is what matters when we are born again, because this is how some of God's attributes become our own. 

To take Peter's points in an order we might expect to construct an argument, he says: 

1. the word of God is imperishable, 
2. this same word of God was preached to them, causing them to be born again, and so 
3. they are born again of what is imperishable. 

Parts of this argument are often taken as analogy, simile, or metaphor. But there is no sign in the text that he meant it as analogy, or simile, or metaphor. The argument has no force if one part is meant literally (they did have the good news preached to them in words), but the bridges back to his wider focus -- that we now have an imperishable aspect to us -- are mere rhetorical flourishes. 

The Scriptural language of being "born again" and "children of God" speak of a change of nature in which we are no longer merely beings of flesh and children of men, but also children of God. We easily assume that what is spiritual is figurative, because we often must speak of the spiritual figuratively. But if we speak of the spiritual connection between our spirits and the Spirit of God, we must consider the possibility that this connection from spirit to Spirit is not merely figurative. If an author means to convey that God is with us and transforms us in a way that touches our natures, what language could he use to persuade us it was more than figurative? 

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I'm feeling a series coming on. I hope to continue this next week. 

Evil as "lack of good" is only part of the story

In Christian circles, evil has long been understood as the lack of good. Evil, we believe, is not a thing in itself, much like darkness is not a thing in itself but the absence of light. 

So far so good. But nature abhors a vacuum. When there is a lack of good, the vacancy does not remain empty. When a nation lacks god, it tends to create idols. If it lacks faith in any god, humans do not stop having a need for hope and trust. We may place that hope and trust in other things, or we may opt for cynicism, but the unmet need is going to make itself known either way. Love can also be replaced by different substitutes. The non-religious often consider sex to be the most available substitute for love, and hope that one will lead to the other. The religious (or the checklist-oriented seculars) may fall back on a dependency on rules, and so legalism becomes a cold substitute for love. 

This vacuum-effect plays out in so many ways. Someone may need respect -- and decide to buy the appearance of success, or pursue relative respect by congratulating themselves or putting down others. Someone may want a sense of well-being and obtain it through spending, or self-medication. Someone may want a life full of friends, and fill the emptiness by binge-watching content designed to camouflage emotional emptiness and fill it with the company of phantom friends. 

But the substitutes tend to leave us hungry for the real thing. Faith, hope, and love remain. The greatest of these is love. 

Today, may I notice if I have been using an artificial sweetener in my spiritual life, and seek the Lord. 

And on the third day ...

On Good Friday, we have a solemn service in remembrance of Jesus' death. And we do achieve solemnity. But we probably do not come anywhere close to the devastation and grief that the apostles felt when they first laid Jesus in the tomb. 

Because for whatever solemnity we observe on Friday, we likely have already made some preparations for the feast on Sunday. 

Whenever in life I find myself at the tomb, caught up in the devastation and grief, may I remember Good Friday -- and how hard it is to be overwhelmed with defeat when we are looking forward to a victory feast. 

Christ is risen!

He is risen indeed. Alleluia!

Schrodinger's Theology

This is a conversational response to a post over at Ken Schenck's blog, "The war of the 2 natures". As Mr Schenck writes, "After reading about the crazy battles that resulted in what we now call orthodoxy, there seem two possible conclusions: 1) God was behind the scenes making sure the right answers won out or 2) it's all a crap shoot and orthodox Christianity is a sham." I don't think that either of those statements represents the actual situation in which we find ourselves. To make this post accessible I'll back up the conversation enough to be self-introducing ... 

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Knowing God may be the highest goal of human thought. And there are countless people who have sought knowledge of God in nature, in meditation, from prophets or even from the Messiah, and (in absence of these) from holy texts. But eventually we come to a problem: after we run through all the material that we can learn from those sources, we have some questions that none of our sources directly answers. We may get hints or glimpses. We may get likelihood. We may even get strong probability. But once we have gone beyond what is spelled out by trusted materials, we rarely get certainty. I'll come back to this point as I wrap up. 

This isn't a new thought to the modern age; even in the apostolic age St Paul wrote that "we see through a glass, darkly." While that won't stop us trying to see, it rightly leads to humility about the precision of our speculations. It's like the recognition of significant digits in science: it's not right to claim a precision that outpaces our data. (Deeper dive on that.) 

With the common claim that "the winners write the history books," is the underlying cynicism justified in the case of Christian beliefs? What do we make of the early controversies in the church? 

I'd like to look at some of the ways in which the church has approached questions, going from more conclusive to less conclusive: 

• Some questions were addressed by Jesus during his earthly ministry. Almost all Christians consider these to be definitive answers. 
• Some questions were addressed by the apostles during their lifetimes. Since they knew Jesus in person, these are often considered definitive answers, especially when the answers were included in the canon of Scripture. Granted, some groups allow variation for how firmly various New Testament writings are accepted, with some groups having different status for the once-disputed books of the New Testament from the days when the canon of Scripture was still under review. 
• Some questions are addressed directly by Scripture and there is only one view in Scripture. 
• Some questions had clear and widespread support from the earliest church while the opposing view was a late-introduced novelty. There was an ancient test whether beliefs had been held "everywhere, always, and by all," with the understanding that there could be asterisks for outliers, while providing a framework to objectively identify those outliers. 
• Some questions are not addressed directly by Scripture, and are instead inferred. These are answered based on a preponderance of evidence from Scripture and compatibility with known facts. 
• And some controversies are not answered directly by Scriptures, and the preponderance of evidence is not clean or not conclusive. 

From the earlier approaches, the church of Christ has a great body of teachings which are held solidly, without being open to the charge that it's merely a winner's privilege. 

In the later categories we get into more contested territory. This tends to happens when we are asking questions that Scripture never directly addresses, for example the relationship of the human and divine within Christ. It is especially problematic when we are asking questions that Jesus never addressed, that were never considered during the apostolic age, and where the earliest church is silent. In these cases we are left with a handful of tangential verses as we try to infer where they lead, with little to no guidance from trusted sources. I'll come back to that. 

Mr Schenck notes that "[t]he century between Nicaea (325) and Chalcedon (451) primarily argued over the two natures of Christ". I've mentioned before that I mark Chalcedon (451 A.D.) as the date when the "one holy catholic and apostolic church" became damaged; as a result the answers to those doctrinal questions (and new questions since) have been problematic. (Deeper dive on that.) After Chalcedon, those particular points of orthodoxy were upheld less by consensus and more by risk of excommunication. In my opinion, that is the point at which we ought to have admitted we outran our data, and come back to "seeing through a glass darkly." I would not say that every view advanced on the topic held equal validity; some views ultimately might have been considered out-of-bounds. But there is room for a collegial approach where the School of Alexandria has one view and the School of Rome holds another, on how the human and divine interact. 

To go back to the point I mentioned at the outset: We have some questions that none of the holy texts directly answers. We may get hints or glimpses. We may get likelihood. We may even get strong probability. But beyond what is spelled out by trusted materials, we no longer get certainty. The issue to me is not whether the right or wrong arguments won out; it's why we define "orthodoxy" so much in terms of issues that are beyond the scope of what we were given, where there is no indication that either Christ or his apostles considered the question (as we frame it) important. The problem goes deeper than whether we have the right answers to the questions we are asking. I'm fairly sure our relentless pursuit of non-Scriptural questions means we are not pursuing the best questions. 

Knowing God may be the highest goal of human thought. But are we pursuing that knowledge through how God has revealed himself, and letting his self-revelation set the curriculum for what we learn? What would happen if we tried? I believe we are called to the theology that Christ has taught, and the orthodoxy that the apostles proclaimed. 

"The abundance of the heart" for good or evil

How can you speak good, when you are evil? For out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks. (Matthew 12:34)

There were people who had seen Jesus heal a man who was blind and mute, and saw that Jesus had driven out a demon from the man. So Jesus' opponents accused that he was demonic, to explain why he had power over the demons. Did they believe themselves and their accusations? Only God knows that. I suspect that the decision to be "against" whatever Jesus did put them in a tough spot: they had to oppose whatever he did. 

This is the conversation in which Jesus reminds us: we know a tree by its fruit. The surrounding material is "A tree is known by its fruit.... The good person out of his good treasure brings forth good, and the evil person out of his evil treasure brings forth evil." (Matthew 12:35)

In the face of a miraculous good, the response of his opponents was an accusation of absolute evil. This pattern isn't uncommon, when evil accuses those who do good. Someone whose own conscience is uneasy may produce a steady stream of accusations against others. And the easily misled will be misled. 

When we say that someone "speaks from the heart" we generally mean they speak honestly and earnestly. Yet it is possible that someone can be honestly and earnestly a mess. 

"Speaking from the heart" reveals the heart. And our human hearts are not always an oasis of love. Whenever we dwell on fear or anger, we tend to speak words of fear or anger. Whenever we think too much of our own value, we speak too much of our own value. Whenever we think about enmity towards other people, we tend to speak about enmity toward other people. It's not as if our thoughts and words are far separate. 

Or as St Paul once said to identify better things and "think on these things." (Philippians 4:8)

Recognizing the strategies of evil, the better to resist it

In the season of Lent, we turn to resisting the powers of evil. I'd like to start by surveying some tools and strategies of evil that we see in the Bible: 

1. Deception - whether outright lies, half-truths, or omissions, the intent is to mislead (see Genesis 3). As Jesus said of the devil: Lies are his native language (John 8:44).
2. Confusion - a half-truth can be more confusing than an outright lie (see Genesis 3). While an outright lie might lead to the target shutting down the conversation or walking away, a half-truth can lead to a follow-up conversation and leaves the door open. Paul points out that God is not the author of confusion (1 Cor 14:33)
3. Doubt - the goal may be to create doubt about someone's allegiance or intentions (again, see Genesis 3). 
4. Enmity and divisions - Following from the prior point (Genesis 3), doubt about someone's allegiance or intentions creates a division. Jesus is clear that he desires our unity (John 17). 
5. Accusations - One of the titles of the evil one is the Accuser (Revelation 12:10). It is an ironic thing when evil brings a temptation but then blames their victim if the temptation succeeds. When we see someone who has taken the bait of temptation, we are called to restore them gently and privately (Matthew 18:15-20). 
6. Some calamities - In the book of Job, we see that some calamities are to bring the temptation to fall away from trusting God
7. Other general temptations - Genesis 3 is not the only time we see the powers of evil bringing temptation. In the New Testament we see the tempter with Jesus in the wilderness (Matthew 4, Mark 1, Luke 4), starting off with the simple temptation to be self-serving with powers that are given him for the service of others. 

There are probably more. Feel free to add more in the comments! 

The faces of evil

This past Monday I was called for jury duty, which normally makes for an uninteresting morning in the jury pool followed by (usually) a week on call or (sometimes) a trip to a courtroom for voir dire, in which some lawyer (usually the prosecutor) decides they don't want a professional programmer/analyst on the jury. 

On Monday, the immense size of the potential-juror pool was the first sign of a high-stakes case. In round numbers, 100 of us were packed into the courtroom. The trial was for murder, and was legally a capital murder case because the victim was under 10 years of age. (That's based on the cutoff age in state law; the victim was roughly a year and a half old.) The state was not seeking the death penalty so the other allowable consequence under state law was life in prison. 

Whenever sitting through voir dire, it's interesting to focus on which arguments the lawyers are test driving. Clearly, the defense was arguing insanity. The defense seemed to be trying to carry the argument by shifting the mood to a blameless acceptance of an unfortunate tragedy, with the main tool being the defense attorney's stage presence. The defendant's unremorseful face wasn't helping the defense lawyer. When the defense lawyer asked the jury pool which of us simply did not care about the reason why a toddler was killed, I raised my juror number card -- I had plenty of company in that -- and was disqualified from the case. (Under state law, the insanity defense requires that at the time the actions took place, the person did not understand that the actions were wrong. If the defendant did not understand that that was wrong, that seemed possibly worse. A good percentage of the jury pool was disqualified for having that opinion.) 

As the non-selected jurors like me were dismissed, I had a lot of time to consider the faces of evil. The defendant who seemed unremorseful. The defense attorney who seemed cheerfully, craftily misleading,  and who seemed openly impatient when the prosecutor and judge had to call her back to the legal side of what she was allowed to say to the jury pool. The whispers in the jury pool about how unfortunate that the death penalty hadn't been sought and whether anything could be done for justice. My own growing feeling that, if the death penalty had been available, I might have been okay with that, even with the awareness that self-righteousness is one of the most common "winning" temptations for truly horrific acts. 

There is no one righteous; no, not one. 

The jury did return a conviction at the end of the week-long trial. That may be the closest to justice we can manage as mortals.