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Forgiveness, Blessing, and… Wrath?

May 26, 2011 in Bible Thoughts, Church with 1 Comment

Yesterday I shared some thoughts about the importance of resurrection in our understanding of the call to forgive. The economy of the world is not the container within which justice will be done. God must intervene. God must reverse the judgments of the world.

The powerful must be thrown down from their thrones.

The dead must be raised.

This brings up one particularly challenging dynamic in the story: the idea that our forgiveness and blessing of those who have wronged us might play into an economy of reversal. Paul puts it like this in Romans 12:

Do not repay evil for evil to anyone, respecting what is right in the sight of all people…. Never take your own revenge, beloved, but leave room for the wrath of God, for it is written, “Vengeance is mine, I will repay,” says the Lord. But “If your enemy hungers–feed him! If she thirsts–give her something to drink! For doing thus you will heap burning coals upon his head.” Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.

Some of this is more palatable to us than other parts.

The idea that our calling is never to get drawn into the game of retribution is crucial. Echoing the sermon on the mount, where Jesus tells people to go the extra mile and give tunic as well as cloak, Paul says that defending ourselves in kind is out, and repaying evil with blessing is a vital element of our calling.

As Paul contextualizes Proverbs 25:21 in the letter to Rome, he writes it into the narrative of the cross by which he believes God has saved the world. Through the goodness of self-giving love, the sin and death of the world have been overcome.

But then there’s the other part.

The bit about heaping up burning coals on their heads.

Here we perhaps catch a glimpse of something that reminds us of the peculiar position we are in, most of us, as people with access to computers and internets, and education, and money. We forget that the Bible was written in a time when only a few could even hope for the sort of freedom we enjoy. We live in a time when justice is assumed to be the norm from which only a few deviate.

The space we are called to leave for God’s wrath seems unbecoming because the reality of injustice is an idea that we are too far removed from to know deep in our bones.

Of course, there is another reason many of us don’t like the idea as well: we hope that God’s capacity for forgiveness is larger than ours. We hope that our own failures to give up a grudge don’t reflect the truest intent of the heart of God. We hope that the capacious forgiveness and reconciliation on offer in the cross will break even the hardest of hearts and that God’s work of reconciliation will outstrip all our own feeble attempts.

But there seems to be a storyline in this world in which the powerful and the true enemies continue to see the very work of God before their eyes, continue to see the cross of Christ embodied in a blessing, persecuted people–and continue to pour out their evil upon this incarnation of good.

The people of God, in forgiving and blessing in the midst of persecution, are reenacting the Jesus story, the Jesus who offered forgiveness from the cross. This is our calling–to renarrate the life of Jesus in our lives, in our communities.

And, it is possible for this incarnation of Christ to be spurned and treated with contempt–and for the wrath of God to be kindled, a wrath that will be made known in the end.

This is tricky.

If we bless in hopes of bringing condemnation, it is no blessing but a curse. So our gifts must, it seems to me, be offered as genuine offers of forgiveness and blessing–even as Jesus’ own cry on Golgotha; an offer that can be embraced in repentance or spurned unto judgment.

Forgiveness and Resurrection

May 25, 2011 in Bible Thoughts, Church with 4 Comments

Yesterday I did a little co-conspiring with Mark Scandrette and the guys from ikon here in San Francisco. We recorded a podcast about forgiveness (stay tuned for download details).

The conversation generated a number of thoughts and questions, not all of them worked out in our short time recording. Perhaps one of the most important has to do with entrusting judgment to God. At some level, especially for people who have been badly wounded, abused, left behind after a loved one has been killed, forgiveness will be tied to a conviction that the God of all the earth will do what is right.

Is that really the God who composes the Christian story? Is that really the God who beckons us to forgive and even to bless those who persecute us?

In my estimation, we have too often surrendered a major resource for answering this question because we have built our theology of forgiveness so much around the cross that we have neglected the crucial place of the resurrection.

Resurrection means not only that God has accepted and forgiven us in Christ. This much is true. But it also means, more generally, that the economy of this world is not equipped to bring about the just judgment of God.

The God of all the earth will do what is right, but this mortal life and its systems of power and even of justice are not the heavenly court.

Resurrection promises that there will be reversal. Injustice cannot escape the righteous judgment of God.

Reluctant Pilgrim

May 24, 2011 in Book Reviews, Church, Culture with 3 Comments

Death, communion, and the people of God. That’s my title for it. But Enuma Okoro and her editors went with Reluctant Pilgrim: A Moody, Somewhat Self-Indulgent Introvert’s Search for Spiritual Community (Fresh Air Books, 2010).

It is a beautifully poetic memoir of a 30-something who has weathered the storms of death, of love lost, of God distant. (You can read an excerpt here.)

I have noticed a trend toward young writers setting their pens to tell the stories of their lives. A couple of common threads recur in these writers’ journeys.

Often, they process the reality of their pain and loss in ways that would be deemed blasphemous by the church. These people continue to believe in God by fighting with God, by writing of a God who’s not afraid of PG-13 language on the lips of people who are struggling with God and/or the world that too often seems to fail to reflect God’s presence.

These are folks who have known rejection from the church, or the need to reject the church, only to continue clinging to God; or, as it turns out in the end, discovering that God has been clinging to them all along.

The particular place where Enuma knows herself to be clung to and met by God is the Eucharist. The supper recurs as a motif throughout the book, bookending her story at one end as a childhood of simple faith and love of both heavenly and earthly Father and at the other as a marker of God’s provision for the longing hearts of all God’s broken and beautiful children.

The book chronicles three stages of life. The first processes the death of her father as the inauguration of a distancing from God. The middle speaks of a year of anticipatory introspection. And at that year’s end we learn of a new kindling of the heart toward the church and God.

In story after story we learn of a broken family and a family of privilege. We learn of a revered daddy and of a father selfish in his brokenness. We learn of the power of friendship of the power of being alone. We learn of longings for community among God’s people, and of the God who sometimes does, sometimes doesn’t provide it.

What is the great lesson she learns as she lives and assesses this story of hers?

Grace.

Embodied in that body broken for you and in that cup of the covenant for forgiveness of sins is grace. It is God waiting to lavish love to all.

At several points along the way I found myself cheering the narrative language: the need to believe a new story about ourselves, to reframe our lives within a new narrative (a narrative of grace, it would seem). Here, though, is a story that tells the Story.

That story of Eucharist and cross embodies itself, at last, in community.

Raw, brutally honest, and funny; at times sad to the point of tears; often poetic in the richness of the writing, Reluctant Pilgrim carries within it the power to offer hope: hope not only that God is present in the messes of life, but that through and out of those messes God is refracting the light of God’s goodness to the world.

Disclaimer: In accordance with Federal guidelines, I hereby disclose to you, the unsuspecting reader, that I was provided with a free copy of this book for review. I did not, however, promise, intimate, or otherwise bind myself to giving a positive review of it.

Come Quickly

May 23, 2011 in Bible Thoughts, Church, Culture with 6 Comments

Amidst all the hubbub and Twitter noise that preceded the predicted day of rapture this past Saturday, perhaps the best of the lot was this:

I do not believe that the rapture will happen on Saturday. But not a week goes by that I do not pray, Come quickly, Lord Jesus.

This world is not what it should be. But we must never think either that such is the end of the story or that God is giving up on this world to take us to another or that we will be the means by which all is gradually made better until all is right with the world.

Yes, we are ambassadors for the King and therefore agents of the Kingdom. But the kingdom comes with the return of the King Himself.

Amen, come quickly Lord Jesus.

Apologetic Ruminations About Judgment Day

May 21, 2011 in Bible Thoughts, Church, Culture with 9 Comments

Today is May 21, 2011.

Or, it will be when this post goes live. If you’re reading this, one of three things is true: (a) judgment day has started at 6 pm on the other side of the world, you’re scared spitless, and are looking for guidance; (b) judgment day has happened and you’ve been left behind, out of step with what I consider to be good biblical theology about the End (God didn’t listen to me?!); or (c) what I anticipate, which is that this judgment day thing did not arrive at the date broadcast by some.

I confess, I haven’t been very Christian in my assessments of the prophesied gloom and doom. In addition to snarkily wondering about issues such as timezones, I created a hash tag on twitter: #ItllSurviveSaturday where I was encouraging folks to reflect on things that are so great that they would survive any judgment and comprise part of the world to come.

With all of this outstanding fun to be had, what need could there possibly be for apologic ruminations?

First, of course, there was the humbling experience of someone on my FB wall commenting that he was praying about how to love the people who are going to be so bitterly disappointed when it doesn’t materialize. Many people are giving everything in faith that this is the day. Many will be spiritually, financially, socially, and otherwise crushed if Jesus does not return.

More than that, however, I have been humbled by the fact that the crazy hermeneutics entailed in calculating this random date in 2011 for the end of the world might have a strong claim to being much more in step with biblical precedent for fulfilling scripture than my willful refusal to heed the numerology.

Remember when Jeremiah predicted a 70 year stint in exile followed by glorious restoration? Not so, says Daniel, a few hundred years later, make that 70 weeks of years!

We might think of Matthew’s fulfillment citations, his creative employment of OT texts as finding “fulfillment” in Jesus even when they are not prophecies of the future or of a coming Messiah.

We might think of the need we have to apply new readings to Revelation because this return did not, in fact, come quickly as John anticipated. We might think of the mockery endured by the 2d generation of Christians who had to answer for the fact that Jesus did not come back so quickly–and they began to reinterpret their own hopes: “The Lord is not slow as some consider slowness… remember: with the Lord a year is as a thousand days and a thousand days as a year!” (2 Peter 3).

I am convinced that after the fact we will all look back on the climactic moment of God’s restoration of the cosmos in Christ and revise much of how we read what came before. This was the effect of the first coming, and it will be the effect of the second.

And so I must concede that my grounds for judging this reading hermeneutically inadequate (it relies on passages and numbers and ideas that could never mean what Camping claims)–will themselves be undone when the event actually transpires.

I apologize for my academic snobbery that will, in fact, be put to shame when we no longer see dimly.

But even this realization reinforces my conviction that no one will be able to guess ahead of time, either. And so I approach this day with expectation that the prediction of the return will amount to nothing more than much ado about not so much at all.

Different Kind of Small Group

May 20, 2011 in Church, Humor with 1 Comment

Atonement: I’ve Got a Problem–But So Do You

May 19, 2011 in Bible Thoughts, Church with 26 Comments

As I mentioned a couple days ago, I had a chance to listen to the Roger Olson interview on Homebrewed Christianity’s podcast. He articulated something that I’ve heard from quite a number of theologians. It’s a beautiful answer to the problem of God giving God’s Son to die for us, an answer to accusations that the cross is tantamount to divine child abuse.

It goes something like this: the idea that God is abusing his Son misses the point that Jesus is God. This is not God sacrificing some human, but God giving Godself for humanity.

This is a challenge to me on two fronts.

First, as a biblical scholar, this is not the language that the NT uses to describe the relationship between Jesus and God as it comes to describe the cross.

Even the high Christology of John puts it like this: “God so loved the world, that He gave his one and only son.” Indeed, John’s Jesus says that the Father loves him because he does the Father’s will–going to the cross to die for his friends.

Mark is more stark, with Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane praying for deliverance from the cross.

In the “high Christology” passage of Philippians 2 says that Jesus’ exaltation comes because he was obedient to the point of death on the cross. This is the same act of which Paul speaks in Rom 5–the one act of obedience through which the many are made righteous.

Jesus is pleasing to the Father, to God, precisely because as Son he obeys the command of the Other, the Father, to die.

When, for example, feminist critics of atonement complain about the atonement as divine child abuse, they are basing their hermeneutical dissatisfaction on a more accurate exegesis of the New Testament than the theologians who defend the cross by saying that God gave Godself.

It is, in fact, God the Father “who did not spare his own son but delivered him up for us all.” Those are strong and troubling words, and I’m not sure that we can hear them on the basis of the Trinitarian objection. This is not self-giving love in that Trinitarian sense, but the sacrificial love that gives the most dearly loved other for the sake of salvation.

The second reason I am hesitant to jump on board with the Trinitarian answer to the problem of atonement is this: the suffering of Jesus the son is the story of the other sons and daughters of God as well.

It’s all well and good to say that God gave Godself, not another, to suffer on behalf of the world.

But what, then, are we to do with Romans 8? There, the way that we know we are children heading toward eternal inheritance is that we are suffering with the Suffering Child.

The Trinitarian formulation makes this worse, to my mind. God chooses to suffer of God’s own accord. As incarnate God, Jesus executes this divine decision. And then, God calls those who are not God to suffer if they want to be like the God who chose suffering freely. The Messiah suffers of his own decision, but those who would follow him are bound to follow the order that Jesus had from within (not from without): to take up their crosses.

Or, again, if it’s out of character for God to give up another, to not spare this human Messiah, what then are we to make of the God “who did not spare the natural branches” for the sake of the gentiles?

To remove the scandal of the Messiah’s death by pushing the Messiah back into the divine person only takes the problem of the suffering people of God and edges it back one notch. Left behind is still the entire NT ethic that insists that the identity of us–those who are not members of the Eternal Ontological Trinity–is also cross shaped.

If the only answer to the divine child abuse accusation is to appeal to the Trinity, doesn’t that make God a divine child abuser for having us, his earthly children, suffer with Christ if, indeed, we are to be glorified with him?

So yes, my late high Christology causes me a problem. I can’t simply say that when the NT says “the Father gave the son” that this really means “God gave Godself.” But the Trinitarian answer has its problem as well.

The Church’s Jesus Interprets Everything

May 18, 2011 in Bible Thoughts, Church with 12 Comments

Last week I posted a bit on “the church’s Jesus,” in part to throw my lot in with those who see Jesus as God’s agent rather than with those who see Jesus as an interesting historical phenomenon.

The first thing I said was that the church’s Jesus is the agent of Israel’s God. And this has some ramifications that we need to get more comfortable with.

In particular, to say that Jesus is the consummate act of Israel’s God on earth, that Jesus is the revelation of God, that “however many promises God has made they are yes in him”–to say these things is to claim (whether we know it or not) that Jesus is the hermeneutical key for making sense of the entire Biblical story.

Let me say that in a bit more accessible manner: if we really think Jesus is the Messiah, we should be reading the Old Testament in the same creative ways that the New Testament writers do.

Really, this creeps people out.

In Luke 24 we hear of what it means that the OT anticipates a coming Messiah: that the Christ must suffer, die, be raised, and repentance for forgiveness of sins be proclaimed in his name to all nations.

If this is true, it means that other story lines in the OT (like the ones where an earthly king conquers all the nations, like the ones where the Messiah is glorified by the subjugation of the nations, like the ones where the physical land of Israel takes pride of place as the possession of God’s people) are dead-ends. Or, perhaps better, swept up into a story that transforms them.

Knowing that the identity marker of the people of God is union with Christ, we eschew the identity markers of circumcision and food laws–i.e., of ethnic Israel.

Knowing that the defining moment in the story is the crucifixion and resurrection, we structure our lives and ethics to publicly placard to the world that we are the cross people, living in hope of resurrection. That means, of course, that we do not structure our lives by such things as avoidance of icons or sabbath keeping–which would be aimed to show the world that we are the first Exodus people. No, we’re the second Exodus people.

Knowing that Jesus is the defining moment of the story, we reread the psalms, incorporating ourselves into the story of the singers, and Jesus into the Lord whose name is praised.

Jesus becomes our hermeneutic. Luther was half right when he said that the “canon within the canon” is what places Christ front and center (paraphrase). The other half is this: where Christ is not front and center we have both the freedom and obligation to put him there.

That means reinterpreting the scriptures of Israel in light of the Christ event; and it might even mean reinterpreting parts of the NT (James, anyone?) in light of the same.

If It Makes You a Jerk, It’s Not Good Theology

May 16, 2011 in Bible Thoughts, Church with 16 Comments

It happened again.

Another story of Presbyterians going Presbyterian on one of their own.

The story is old. It goes something like this: Inerrantist, complementarian, Presbyterian, covenant theologian, willing to sign off on the 80+ pages of the Westminster Confession of Faith, has his ordination stymied by a theological debate.

Seriously.

I’ve pretty much come to the point where I’d think that if anyone is willing to sign off on your 80+ pages of theology that you should grab them and never let them go.

But that’s not how the conservative Presbyterian world works. That’s not the fruit of traditional Reformed Theology.

And what I say to them I say to all of us: If the fruit of our theology is that it makes people jerks, it is not good theology.

At some point, we have to step back and say that it’s not merely that people take the theology in a wrong direction, or that people with good theology nevertheless behave badly. There is something in the culture of the places that cling to Reformed or Neo-Reformed theology that makes them rabid about theology.

And these worlds aren’t alone. Lots of us move in or through ecclesiastical circles where there is a viciousness to the theological conversation, or a viciousness in the pursuit of holiness.

I am thankful for the Reformation. It opened up the doors for much-needed reform to come to the church. And that good reform did come both to the Roman Catholic church and through the newly birthed Protestant churches.

But one of its most unfortunate legacies was its providing us a theological justification for separating our theology and teaching from our ethics and behavior. Faith is one thing. Works is something else. The faith we profess is crucial. The works we perform will all need to be forgiven.

And with that, we surrendered our calling to judge by fruit. We are not to believe every prophet. We are not to believe every teacher. And while many of us have strong standards of judgment, ours are not the ones Jesus erected.

For us, the standard of judgment has to do with theological correctness, with correspondence to our system of doctrine. False teachers are run out of town when they say the wrong thing about the Bible or what God was thinking about before creation, or sex.

But Jesus tells us that the reason to run someone out of town is not their theological system but their fruit.

And what we too often, too willfully, forget, is that contentiousness and divisions are the very fruit of the flesh that demonstrate a person’s walking by the flesh and not by the Spirit.

In other words, if the fruit of your theology is that it creates a community of jerks, your teaching has gone awry.

Contentiousness should be a wake up call for us. When we find ourselves in worlds where fights recur, something has gone amiss–we should examine how we’re defining the gospel and thus ourselves as God’s people, and figure out what went wrong.

tMG Church 4-14-2011

May 14, 2011 in Church, Culture with 1 Comment

When the Church of the Mountain Goats gathered in Baltimore on April 14, pastor John preached a phenomenal sermon.

[Here, jrdk is being a bit tongue-in-cheek, please don't write the management complaining about his ecclesiology. --ed.]

After the song Damn These Vampires (which does use the word damn, but really, if you’re going to wish for God to damn something shouldn’t it be the forces of darkness that destroy people’s lives?), he introduced the next song as follows:

This song is about how if you have survived some personal trauma–which I’m afraid that the great secret of life is you have.

That’s the thing. There’s a line that’s either Salinger or Beckett I’m not quite sure, but it’s “You’re on earth, buddy, there’s no cure for that.”…Beckett…

What binds us, especially those of us who get really into music, is that we share some kind of wound. And we sort of come to shows or write songs in order to open the wound back up and watch it bleed awhile. And sort of… and hang out together and say to one another, “It’s ok that it looks like that. And there’s nothing wrong with that.”

Right?

At the same time you harbor a dream of being like the normal people who you imagine exist who probably don’t–right so… And you think, “O some day I will be free of this wound that I carry. This song is called, “Never Quite Free.”

If you listen to it, there is riotous cheering when he says that the great secret of life is that we all endure trauma; there are shouts when he talks about gathering to open the wound and watch it bleed. They cheer when he says it’s ok, there’s nothing wrong with that.

Take note, young preacher: the celebration comes, in large part, in the gathering sharing the brokenness together. The great preachers don’t pretend to hold it all together, to have the perfect embodiment of easy answers.

The great preachers acknowledge that the brokenness of the world is their brokenness as well.

Also note: he preached his sermon in 1 minute, and 1/3 of that was an illustration.

ὁ ἀναγινώσκων νοείτω

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