“What would really satisfy us would be a God who said of anything we happened to like doing, “What does it matter so long as they are contented?” We want, in fact, not so much a Father in Heaven as a grandfather in heaven –a senile benevolence who, as they say, “liked to see young people enjoying themselves and whose plan for the universe was simply that it might be truly said at the end of each day, “a good time was had by all.”
CS Lewis The Problem of Pain p. 35, 36
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I read this piece entitled Reformed-Masochism a few days ago and a conversation with a colleague reminded me of it. The article essentially notes that in his experience of Reformed communities a sermon, lesson, or presentation was evaluated based on how “convicted” it made members of the group feel. The more guilty you felt when you left the better you felt about the entire experience. The author suspected something is wrong with this, and I think he’s right. That wasn’t my experience growing up in a Christian Reformed Church, but most of the CRCs I grew up in were not “normal” so I can’t testify one way or the other regarding the CRC. I have seen this dynamic, however.
Some might try to defend this based on the second question and answer of the Heidelberg Catechism. Sometimes the structure of the catechism is alliterated as “Guilt, Grace, Gratitude”. I don’t like that scheme as much as “Misery, Deliverance, Gratitude” even though there isn’t alliteration. Why? Our misery is broader than our guilt.
Guilt can be understood objectively and subjectively. Objectively when a judge pronounces a suspect “guilty”, that is a legal status that is pronounced upon a person. Subjectively most of us understand guilt to be an emotional recognition of moral or personal failure either to a standard but most often with respect to a relationship.
Ron Nydam, the professor of Pastoral Care at Calvin Seminary has often stated that for this present generation of young adults (subjective) guilt is an acheivement, not a liability. Culturally we have done a lot of work to reduce the levels of experiential guilt in people’s lives. A couple of months ago I remember an illustration from a Tim Keller sermon where he noted that someone in a novel expressed the idea that his lack of experience of (subjective) guilt was increasingly troublesome because the presence of subjective guilt indicated that in this person’s life there existed apart from himself meaning and a moral universe. His insight was that to not experience emotional guilt was to be disconnected from a larger, meaningful whole. (This was in Tim Keller’s Easter sermon 2009. The illustrations on this point start around minute 11 in the sermon. )Someone who is completely guilt free is quite likely so narcissistic that they will little more than an selfish, self-absorbed, angry center.
At the same time, the subtle shift from “misery” to “guilt” in the understanding of the second Q/A of the catechism is a problem. We don’t just suffer from guilt. To a degree a lack of experiential guilt is a trouble sign that a person has lost contact with a larger moral universe, yet we misery is a far broader term and awareness of misery puts us in contact with much other loss within the age of decay that we should be aware of. Guilt is a subset of misery.
Part of what this Reformed Masochism reflects is an assumption that the only path to understanding the blessings of deliverance (second step in hc q/a 2) is first going through guilt. That isn’t necessarily so. I don’t want to downplay the truth that often we can not be mentally, experientially delivered from all we are enslaved by (see past postings on sin) until we begin to understand how deep our enslavement goes and how lost our predicament is. Our experience of God’s deliverance of us is deeply tied to our lost estate but guilt is only one of the senses available to us through which we experience that lost estate.
It is probably true that the aspect of our misery that provides the most efficacious insight of our lost condition is likely culturally contextual. Note in Peter’s sermon in Acts 2 the punchline Peter delivers to the diaspora Jews gathered on Pentecost was that Yhwh’s servant had come to them in Jerusalem and they turned him over to the Gentiles to be killed. This in Acts 2 caused an immediate and passionate reaction of horror and guilt. Paul’s sermon in Acts 17 in Athens doesn’t play to or assume any guilt (as an experience of moral failure) at all.
Recently Internet Monk gathered a group of pastors, a number of which were church planters, from different denominations and asked them to briefly present the gospel. What they delivered is noteworthy on this regard. I don’t recall any of them starting from guilt or making it the center piece of their presentation. They tended to work on other aspects of lostness that are experiential. Whether conciously or unconciously all of these pastors instinctively knew that their audience isn’t itching about guilt. This is a departure from an assumption among many who would assert that before you can deliver “good news” (satisfaction addressing our moral debt) you must first establish the bad news (the reality of your moral debt). Many “gospel presentations” have taken this approach and instinctively people who are actively doing evangelism has seen that this doesn’t get traction in a generation for whom delivery from moral guilt is not a large felt need.
I do not want to overplay this point, however, because I think we’re going to likely see a larger backlash against blue-state-moralism as this takes hold culturally and coming generations tend to rebel against the previous stakeholders. Lots of blue-state-moralism can get very preachy, legalistic and holier-than-thou with respect to a great number of behaviors despite their desire to not be judgmental. I don’t expect the experiential guilt market to evaporate completely. It will likely just re-morph in some different ways.
The Reformed Masochism article was right to challenge this tradition. There is nothing wrong with preaching that convicts us of our sin and helps us come to terms emotionally with our failures, moral and otherwise, yet the task of the preacher is ultimately to offer good news, that in fact deliverance has been completed and that our experience of this deliverance propels us towards the coming resurrection in service that labors not in vain. There are also other paths to having the eyes of our heart enlightened to the glorious inheritance that is our hope. Lately I’ve been working more on the themes of deliverance from the age of decay and joy in the new relational polarity of the life of God.
I have too often said “even God can’t change the past”. Now I’m not so sure.
I read Mark 7 for family devotions to the kids. The chapter ends with Jesus healing a deaf man. The text talks about the fact that the man could not hear, and could not speak plainly.
We watched this season of The Amazing Race where one of the contestants was a deaf man racing with him mother. This prompted a number of conversations with the children regarding deafness and why he spoke as he did. Since he couldn’t hear himself speak he wasn’t able to develop speech patterns that we are accustomed to. The physical abnormality cause the verbal abnormality through the process of history.
In the story Jesus not only heals the man’s ears, but he miraculously reverses history by causing he man to speak properly, instantly. This struck me for the first time. Jesus actually accomplished in the man the undoing of his broken history. Jesus undoes the history caused by his physical deafness, not only restoring (redemptively) that which was broken likely from prior to birth, but simultaneously reversing this history of loss that resulted in his inability to speak.
To me this gives amazing comfort. So much of our loss, so much of our pain is an accumulation of broken history. Tim Keller often quotes CS Lewis in saying that God will make all that is sad come untrue, but this is the first Biblical passage where I see it clearly illustrated.
God can even change the past.
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Repost from October 18, 2008. Posted this on Calvin-in-Common to a fellow with whom I tend to get into religious discussions with. Some of what I address here relates to the topics we’ve discussed over time. Updated Aug 1 2014.
Probably the best way for me to begin is to share with you some of my own thinking lately on some of the matters you shared as well as other related matters. My thought journey, as has yours, is shaped by my work, my reading, and my experiences both private and public.
Thinking in “Ages”
Lately I’ve been pondering the NT’s conception of “ages”. In the NT it is very clear that we live in what is sometimes described by Paul as “the present, evil age” and we await “the age to come”. (I’ll get to a bit of the issue of whether the relationship between NT books in a bit.) In the Synoptics the term used is “kingdom of God/heaven”, in John the English translation “eternal life” (which frustrates me) is more literally from Greek “the life of the age (to come)”. Paul uses a number of phrases, but one of his most dominant is “in Christ”. Paul also strongly uses the comparisons of perishable/imperishable, flesh/spirit (he uses is contrast in multiple different ways and they are sometimes tricky to discern), but again often “the present age” and “the age to come”. Part of what I’m learning I need to do in ministry is to give my people a vocabulary that tracks with them but also communicates more accurately some of these concepts so lately my term has been “the age of decay” which I take from Romans 8:21.
The Speed of Time Continue reading
The Christian Reformed Church fought a protracted, bloody, civil war over Women in Church Office (WICO) that got started in my childhood years and has continued through today. My mother was an “elder-adjunct” at Northside Chapel and during high school, Calvin College and Seminary the battles raged on. Last year I was a delegate to the first CRC Synod where women served as full delegates, not just advisors.
There is still so much pain and tension in so many places from this war that there is definitely a chill over public talk about WICO. What that means is that there is plenty of presumptive enlightened or biblically faithful “us” talk vs. neanderthal or apostate “them” talk that goes on in private. This retards progress in the CRC’s official position which is that churches and members can maintain either an egalatarian or complementarian perspective.
I’m on the egalatarian side of the dispute but I want the CRC to be able to do what it said it wants to do on this, to make room for both positions. This conflict has become a “defeater issue” conflict. People immediately write the other side off on the basis of this one issue and in the context of church life it is a tragedy. The biggest difficulty for the CRC on this subject now is that because of the war we can’t keep talking about the issue and what that means for the complementarians is that they are too often effectively silenced and community suffers.
In my parents and grandparents generation the conflict in the CRC was over common grace and the split was with the PRC. My grandmother’s family was divided and greatly sorrowed by that split. Some of the stories from that are just so tragic.
In a couple of blog postings, however, not from the CRC I see communication over the divide that seems to be producing more light than heat. http://www.whitbyforum.com/2009/05/great-debate.html and http://ancienthebrewpoetry.typepad.com/ancient_hebrew_poetry/2009/05/complementarian-and-egalitarian-marriage-models-compared-.html I’m glad for this.
I know that some on the complementarian side might assert that since “my side won” I can now afford to be generous in a way they can’t. Maybe that’s true. I certainly can’t stop them from thinking that. Others in the egalatarian camp might see even this post as treachery. The win is fragile, skirmishes abound, there can be no let down for the cause…
One of the things that disturbs me most about the thinking on both sides is how much they defer to myth of progress thinking. I was thrilled to see NT Wright address this directly in his book Surprised by Hope. Also in this YouTube Video I find this so pervasive and it is frankly a greater danger than whatever you imagine gender roles should be. It is more than a defeater issue, it is an alien salvation narrative. Conservatives slide into slippery slope metaphors, throw up their hands and flee the field of engagement to cloister themselves into ever smaller and more isolated affiliations. Winners betray their belief in somehow connecting this change with the year on the calendar.
The mysteries of relational identity will continue to give us important work to do and new fields to explore. I welcome these new discussions and especially the spirit of submission that many of them seem to express. I read the great mandate of Ephesians as “submit to one another”. More exploration of this is welcome.
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Word-gardening for Kingdom Traction
In Sacramento the CRC pastors meet once a month to spend time together working on our mutual effort. Each month one of us is responsible for the topic, discussion, whatever. This is my month so this is what I prepared for our discussion.
Word-gardening for Kingdom traction
Finding words for gardening
Words matter and as word gardeners of people cultivate vocabularies. If you’re a word-gardener of a community part of your task is to cultivate a vocabulary within that community that illuminates the Bible and helps people access it as they increasingly find their lives within its sweeping narrative. Like gardening, this requires constant attention and diligence. There is planning, cultivating, planting, watering, regular weeding, harvesting, tearing out, and starting the process all over again.
Over the last two years I have taken to preaching and teaching over extended periods serially through books in the Bible. I must confess I got into this out of weariness and sloth. I’ve been tending this area of God’s garden for a dozen years now and I get tired of thinking up new themes and topics for lots of little short series. I decided that I would stick to a few books and keep trundling onward. I would interrupt this progress for liturgical seasons and special things that needed attention, but I would stick to the progress of a few canonical books for the most part. They can still be packaged in smaller thematic series.
What I discovered in the process was that I was becoming far more familiar with the vocabulary of the Bible, its authors, and had to work harder to deliver this vocabulary to my people as I learned the Biblical vocabulary. Gardens may be old, and the species of plants worked in the garden may be old, but many of the individual plants are young and the gardener must work so that they thrive.
I decided to work Luke during our regular 11:00 Worship services. I skipped the birth narratives because it wasn’t Christmas (a mistake I won’t make again) and jumped into the book. Very quickly you get to Jesus’ rejection at Nazareth. Jesus selectively pieces together a manifesto out of the book of Isaiah that draws the serious ire of the folks in Nazareth. (Kenneth Bailey’s treatment of this in Jesus through Middle Eastern Eyes is instructive, as well as Joel Green’s.) The passage is shocking because Jesus doesn’t conclude the sermon by saying “three years from now I’m going to do this…” or “thousands of years from now God is going to accomplish this through me” but says “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” I found that puzzling, but the sermon had to be preached and there was other work to do, so I moved along in the book.
Figuring out Jesus
Next in Luke we start rumbling around with the Galilean crowds, meeting new people and healing them. As I worked through the texts I had to grapple with the idea that the content of the sermon in Nazareth was in fact what Jesus was proclaiming in all the synagogues of Galilee. This preaching was also, clearly connected with the miracles he was doing. All of this was described as proclaiming the good news of the kingdom of God.
Certain issues, like weeds and draining immediately had to be dealt with in my garden. The Biblical language was not new to me and not new to many of my people. All of these terms have been floating around for quite a while. The terms had been appropriated and subtexted by countless people, interpretations and assumptions. I wanted to find a vocabulary that would be intelligible, fresh, faithful, specific and practical for my small garden.
I have for years attempted to communicate the concept of realized eschatology. I’ve used various diagrams and illustrations of the two ages, the “now and the not yet”. It’s not an easy thing to communicate or to grasp for any of us. I always knew it was behind a lot of the New Testament language but I have to confess I didn’t appreciate how deeply that structure permeated not only Paul but also the gospels.
The other issue I had with my concept of realized eschatology was that in my mind it hinged on the crucifixion. The new age began, I thought, with Jesus’ death, and not before. Jesus’ words in Nazareth began to give me trouble. I would usually kind of fudge on “today” by thinking that three years is not a long time to stretch it to. But as I kept working through story after story in Luke I realized that Jesus wasn’t stopping with this language. He kept driving that nail harder and deeper.
The miracles of Jesus too always present an issue. How are we to understand them? Were these simply acts of benevolence to relieve suffering? Was Jesus simply trying to “draw a crowd” in a “Purpose Driven Church” sort of way? If he were simply trying to relieve suffering there would have been various other ways to go about it. If Jesus were critically interested in combating disease in the Galilee it seems that the introduction of principles of sanitation along with the gift of antibiotics would have far outstripped the incidental remedies that his approach involved. Was modernization in fact more powerful than Jesus in relieving human suffering? He seemed to be after something else in what he was doing.
My observations regarding his healing miracles would in fact have been analogous to the demands of the Jewish nationalists in what they desired from Jesus. “Do you really want to set the captives free? Then free a nation of people like Moses or the Maccabees!” Jesus (not in Luke) coddles a Roman occupational commander and heals his servant/slave to continue in his bondage. Is this Jesus’ version of Lincoln’s emancipation proclamation that frees slaves in rebel states but leaves them slaves in border states?
The Age of Decay
At each point I see connections between Jesus’ manifesto in Luke 4 and everything else going on in the book. Jesus is announcing things in the present tense, not the future. He is doing miracles and is very clear that these are declarations and tightly bound to what he is teaching. He will also send the disciples out to do the same. They are to “proclaim” in both word and in deed. What exactly, however are they proclaiming? We instinctively and correctly would talk about “the kingdom of God” in Luke but I find that concept to be fuzzy in the minds of our people. It’s hard to get a sense of it.
What I decided to do was essentially to do retool the two age language and use “age of decay” for our present condition. I listened to a lecture given at Calvin College from John Polkinghorne who talks about physics and the possibility of resurrection and what that would need to tackle. Polkinghorne talked about how all the way down to the atomic level the universe is breaking down, decaying, losing energy. This over the course of months started a process of lights going on all over the New Testament, especially Paul in terms of this concept of “decay”. You find this language in Paul all the time with the word phthora or phtheiro. The two places where it is key is Romans 8:21 and 1 Corinthians 15.
Now I pastor an older congregation, and I’m not getting any younger myself. This is personal and easily illustrated. We are aging. Fruit on a counter breaks down. Relationships break down. Institutions and businesses we build break down. Governments break down. Everything around us is in a constant state of break down. Everything we build up will go to corruption. The universe itself is in the process. Our sun will run out of fuel. The universe continues to expand and will given time move farther and farther away from itself, losing energy, getting colder and colder and deader. We learn this watching public television and the cheerful physicists console us with the promse that we will long be mouldering in the ground before these things happen. Gee, thanks.
What was it that Jesus was proclaiming? He proclaimed, in the present tense, 2000 years ago, the end of the age of decay. THAT is shocking. Now our hope is not an escapism where we leave materiality (although there is plenty of gnosticism around both in church and out of it). Our hope is for the renewal of the universe, all the way down to the atomic level, and all the way up to the galaxies.
Now opening up your imagination to this suddenly makes every other salvation narrative being shopped around today in all the places we live, work, think, and play seem like chump change. People want to talk about reforming politics, or feeding the hungry, or ending war, or giving opportunity to the poor. All of those are good things, but without them being somehow located within this broader narrative, all you’re really attempting to do is give people an experiential upgrade in the midst of decay and utter loss. So you bring a village clean water only to have all the people die of whatever. The truth is that all of humanity, all human civilization, all human culture, all music, all culinary excellence, all art, all love, everything, everything is undergoing a 100% global holocaust without this broader narrative. What the Bible audaciously declares, however, is that in fact all that is good in human history, all the art, all the love, all the excellence, everything gets brought to the King of King’s feet. (Read Mouw’s treatment of Isaiah 60.)
Now suddenly hosts of things that Jesus says and does suddenly make better sense. When Jesus advises people to not keep their treasure where moth and rust consume, he’s talking “age of decay” language. When Paul talks about an inheritance awaiting us in heaven, he’s talking about it coming down to earth to renew it, preserved from the age of decay. Paul speaks with earnestness in Ephesians about all of this accomplished and how we ourselves are seated with him in the heavenlies this all fits well with the language of “age of decay” and “age to come.” I also find it vital to give people a corrected Greek version of John’s “eternal life” because that mentally gets gnostically translated by most of our listeners into “going to heaven” when what is translated is really “life of the age (to come)”. For lots of good stuff on this read NT Wright’s Surprised by Hope.
Despite all of this good stuff I really didn’t have an answer to Jesus’ present tense in Luke 4.
The Relational Polarity of “the age of decay” vs. “the age to come”
In my journey through Luke I quickly came upon Jesus’ ethical teachings in Luke 6. Jesus says the most radical things about love. This of course has gotten people’s attention for centuries. All this talk about turning the other cheek, giving without expecting return, etc. A good friend in church has long challenged me on this stuff as simply being a lot of nice religious sentiment but annoyingly impractical. He rightly notes that this kind of behavior tends to get one abused and poor. I found that instinctively I wanted to argue with him that somehow following Jesus in these things “worked” and how I understood this was that somehow there is a payoff for this such as “witness” or “making other people better” or “converting people” and these things do happen sometime. What is interesting about these teaches by Jesus that I had never put together is that he keeps connecting them to the Father’s behavior. Do these things to be perfect, like your Father in heaven. I also always understood “perfect” in terms of “moral”.
I remember CS Lewis in Mere Christianity talking a lot about Jesus inviting us into his life. Lewis, and Keller following him also talk about the Dance of God, this way of relating of constant deferring and submitting to one another within the Trinity.
Now also when we talk about “ages” we talk about an aspect of reality, a mode of being, a governing situation that goes down to the atomic level but in the way Jesus seems to talk about it it seems that from within the context of one age you can appropriate the other. For example in the Lord’s Prayer we request the age to come from here within the age of decay “thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven”. In other words, “heaven” right now is in a sense more in the age to come while earth is in the age of decay but we ourselves can enter into the kingdom of God/life of the age in present tense. Again, think about what you learned about realized eschatology: it has come, it is here, it is coming, all at the same time.
What if in fact the age of decay and the age to come are in fact deeply connected to relational patterns. There is the “me” and “you” and the “us” and “them”. There are always two poles. What if what Jesus in fact is telling us to do is to live into the relational polarity of the age to come while we are still in the midst of the age of decay. The relational polarity of the trinity, of the age to come, of the kingdom is “your wellbeing at my expense”, grace, agape, self-donating love while the relational polarity of the age of decay is reversed: “my wellbeing at your expense”, dog eat dog, the world we know so well.
What in fact is Jesus doing then with what he teaches. He is doing exactly what he does with is proclamation and with his miracles and his work of generosity. He is inviting us into the life of God, the relational polarity of the age to come, the life of the Trinity, the life of grace.
Now the problem that my friend pointed out still holds true. If you live into the age to come in the context of the age of decay what do you get? You actually get exactly what Jesus got. You get abused, wrongly arrested, beaten, broke, poor, killed. This is also exactly what Jesus tells his disciples to expect.
How can you responsibly advise people to live this way? This is where the resurrection comes in. The resurrection (ala NT Wright again) is the vindication by the father of Jesus and the vindication of his ministry and his teaching. What arises out of this narrative? Exactly what the Bible keeps saying about it. We follow Jesus into his voluntary suffering, living by the relational polarity of the age to come in the midst of the age of decay, which yields suffering only to be vindicated in the resurrection which is the dawning of creation 2.0, the fullness, the renewal of the material world there present 2000 years ago in the flesh of the resurrected Jesus Christ. That renewed flesh “incorruptible” “undecayable” is the first fruits of the renewed universe.
OK, here is your question:
If we are word-gardeners of people, and our fundamental job is proclamation/witnesses to the resurrection, creation 2.0, (this corresponds to word/deed) how can we cultivate a world-view catalyzing vocabulary through which our people bless the city?
The difficulty here is that there are numerous false gospels out of which the people fall into bondage. These two are most common in our context:
1. American Evangelicalism is prone towards a Gnostic, soul-escapism that undervalues God’s good material world and shuns the city. Certainly some fine things come out of this in terms of helping people be free of areas of private sin and captivity but in the end falls victim to a shell of Christendom moralism and world-escapism that neither proclaims the good news of the end of the age of decay nor the freedom of creation 2.0. It does not embody the relational polarity of the life of God. This tends to be stronger in the suburbs.
2. In our urban communities there is a strong political activism that imagines world salvation comes through adopting a gospel of self-expression. There are elements of care for the poor and for the planet. There are other issues, however.
a. A bondage to a new form of moralism and religion which is just as antagonistic and exclusive as the older forms they despise that may well lead to other forms of tyranny. If you are world savers then enemies of your world salvation project cannot be loved, only reprogrammed if possible and exiled or eliminated if that doesn’t work.
b. A naivety regarding human depravity and our capacity for evil and bondage to ourselves.
c. The blue-state-gospel not only is another form of religious bondage but it can’t compare to Jesus’ declaration of the end of the age of decay. No blue-state-gospel ever arrives: it is in continual tyranny to the next thing, it is fueled by anger and fear (listen to how they motivate), and all of its successes are destroyed by the age of decay.
Only the gospel offers that we labor not in vain. (I’ve got a blog posting on this with quotes from NT Wright and Philip Yancey http://leadingchurch.com/wordpress/?p=171) The work that we do, which so often seems so half fruitful, that falls seemingly stillborn from our hands, through the resurrection comes to glory.
Many of the people will come out of areas naturally predisposed to hearing us and understanding us as promoting either 1 or 2. As we spoke of before we are repeated condemned by some for not being involved in the culture war to “take back” America. We get condemned by the others for violating gate keeping defeater issues. We need an alternative identity crafted by a distinctive vocabulary that shows we are not 1 or 2 yet also energizes our people in fact to proclamation/witness to the resurrection/creation 2.0. That’s our challenge. How are you doing it?