A Brief Thought on Carrying our Crosses

Whichever passage in the synoptics you read it in, Christ's call to people to take up their cross and follow him is a stark commandment. Here is the passage in Luke's gospel:

23 And he said to all, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his crossdaily and follow me. 24 For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will save it. 25 For what does it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses or forfeits himself? 26 For whoever is ashamed of me and of my words, of him will the Son of Man be ashamedwhen he comes in his glory and the glory of the Father and of the holy angels. 27 But I tell you truly, there are some standing here who will not taste death until they see the kingdom of God." (Luke 9:23-27)

Christ is here murdering our self-justifications: what God wants from us is to try our best; it is our heart that counts; I keep the whole law!; and the ways in general that we compartmentalize our lives. Christ's call is total. There is no equivocation here. He does not stutter and he is not apologetic about what he asks. There is no hedging. Cross. Everyday. Unashamed. 

Part of me reads this and gets excited; part of me reads this and is filled with dread. I want so badly to lay down my life for Christ, to put sin to death in my life, to live for his glory, and the prospects of a life lived in service to those ends is exciting. I dread this passage because I am so terrible at doing all of those things. Most days I think nothing of the cross, nothing of the strangeness of Christianity and the humiliation of following Christ.

In this passage in Matthew's gospel Peter takes Jesus aside after he has foretold his crucifixion and rebukes him telling him that there is no way this can happen. God wouldn't let something bad happen to someone good, right? In response, Jesus calls Peter Satan. The cross is how we come close to Christ. This perverse symbol of human depravity is what cancels our depravity. We cannot remove the cross and its shame. We cannot remove the real blood and the real death that stands at the center of our confession. 

I think that along with excitement and dread this passage ought also to induce in us a great sense of gratitude. The way of Christ is the cross; the way of the Christ-follower is the cross. True. But by God's mercy the work of the cross is counted toward us, the righteousness of Christ is imputed as our own. 

Human Toby reads this passage and thinks, "No freaking way. I cannot do this. I cannot lay down my life like this, I can't shoulder a cross everyday. I can't give up my life everyday." And God in his mercy says, "You're right. That's the point." Jesus does what we could never do. Our Older Brother laid down his life everyday before he laid down his life on the Day. Our older brother shouldered a cross everyday before he shouldered the Cross. And we, in the great transfer, have been crucified with him and we no longer live. And our life in this flesh is lived by faith, including the faith to believe that we are both to take up a cross everyday and that our Lord has given us an easy yoke and a light burden.

I am so grateful for the cross.  

The Hammer of God

I just finished an extraordinary novel by Bo Giertz, a Swedish Lutheran pastor from the mid-twentieth century. The book is called The Hammer of God and is actually a collection of three novellas, all somewhat related to the other. Each short story is about young pastors recently entered into parish ministry and the challenges, revelations, temptations, and victories they experience. The first is set in 1820, the second in 1880, and the third in 1940-1. The pattern is fairly easy to discern, right around 60 years in between each story.

This is straight up theological fiction, much in the manner of Marilynne Robinson and her incredible Gilead novels (there is a third on the way!). It is difficult in these books to draw a line between story and theology, and it is clear that one was not intended.

The three stories are parallel in a number of ways. As I have said, each focuses on a young pastor freshly out of seminary in their first ministry assignment, and the challenges they face as they learn what it is to shepherd God's people. Each is something of a religious liberal, spouting the "new ideas" of their time. Each receives an awakening through witnessing the death of a traditional believer, or a conversation with an elder, or through reading the Word of God seriously for the first time. After the awakening each emphasizes strict obedience to Christ and is dismissive of their elder pastors as libertines (for having a bit of brandy at night, or some such minor infraction) and basically make the new believer error of imagining themselves to have discovered Christianity. Thus they fall into self-righteousness. They are then guided by these elder pastors into the grace of Jesus as superior to the works-based Christianity they preach. 

As I started the third novella earlier this week I was a little frustrated. Not this again, I thought. Liberal pastor, awakening, struggle with legalism, finding grace with the aid of a wiser older pastor. But then it occurred to me that Giertz's point in writing three such stories from contextually different vantage points is to emphasize the eternal nature of this battle and this progression for young, university-educated ministers. When new converts become really excited about Christianity they often become very legalistic. They judge everyone who has a drink or watches an R-rated movie (two pastimes I prefer to combine), and they mistake their ignorant zeal for true faith. What needs to happen is almost a second conversion. Away from works to the great grace of Jesus Christ. And from there you live righteously to glorify your savior, not to satisfy your own sense of religious duty. 

What is more, in a culture that deifies youth and youthful pursuits and zeal, it is these seasoned pastors who have often experienced the same cycle in their own faith who guide these young ministers into true, grace-based faith in Jesus. What young people need is not necessarily more zeal, but much, much more wisdom. And wisdom only comes with gray hairs. Giertz, a young man himself when he wrote this book, keeps this in view.

Though it is never explicitly mentioned, the title of the book comes from the prophet Jeremiah: "Is not my word like fire," declares the Lord, "and like a hammer that breaks the rock in pieces?" (23.29). And indeed each pastor chronicled in this book must confront the Word of God, both what it says about salvation and how they will choose to read it. The last story focuses on a young pastor who had believed that Scripture must be read historically. What he meant by this was for himself unclear and it caused certain of his parishioners to chuck any doctrine they found unpalatable on the premise that it was merely historically arbitrary and no longer required of believers (sound familiar?). He is rebuked in this belief at a church service for "readers," congregants who read the Bible and take its commands seriously, after the man he has invited to speak, a new convert, talks about how everyone must be guided by the light of conscience rather than God's Word. After he speaks and they sing a hymn, an older pastor from a neighboring parish gets up to speak and these are his words. I found them wholly beautiful, and they make a fitting epitaph for my review of this book:

"The stone foundation of the human heart and the Rock of Atonement on Golgotha are the two mountains on which a man's destiny is determined. If he remains on the stone foundation of his natural state, he is lost. Only one way leads from the stony foundation to the Rock of Atonement, a firm stone bridge built once and for all. It is the Word. Just as only the divine word can convict man of sin and lay bare the soul to its rocky base, so nothing but the Word can reveal the truth about the Redeemer. The external Word is as inescapably necessary for the gospel as it is for the law. No one who is awakened in earnest would ever be able to believe in the forgiveness of his sins, if God had not built a bridge leading to the Rock of Atonement. The supports on which it rests are baptism, the Lord's Supper, and absolution; the arches are wrought by the Holy Word with its message of redemption. On that bridge a sinner can pass from the stony ground that condemns to the Rock of Salvation. But should a single one of the arches be allowed to fall, then is man condemned to remain eternally under the law's condemnation, either as a despairing sinner or as a self-righteous Pharisee."

Canon Revisited

One of the first things I am interested in when I read a contemporary academic book is why the author felt it necessary to write this book. Surely other things have been written on the subject, often a lot of other things, and what is it that makes this work stand out from the crowd. In other words, why is this better or different than something written 50 years ago on the subject?

Entry points into already extensively charted territory are what make the life of a modern academic particularly difficult. Universities demand production of articles and books and producers demand novelty and so it winds up that many books that ought not to be published get published.

What drew me to Dr. Michael Kruger’s book Canon Revisited was that he was attempting to answer a question that very much has intrigued me for a long time and a question to which I had never received a satisfying answer: why do the 27 books that we have in the New Testament comprise the New Testament? This may seem like a simple question, so let me tease out why it vexes me like it does.

After Dan Brown’s ludicrous DaVinci Code was published, it caused a flurry of scribbling about the date of the formation of the Christian canon and how widespread fidelity to and belief in that canon was in early Christian history. Brown’s contention was that heterodox Christianity had ruled the day until the mean patriarchal Romans took over and burned all the evidence of alternate gospels and enshrined the alpha-male version of Christianity in opposition to the feminine divine so prevalent in actual early Christianity. (Seriously, this was chick lit at its worst.)

The premise of the book, however laughable and far-fetched, had the virtue of exciting interest in otherwise hardly marketable topics, and in my early Christianity history class at Colorado State that year (where we actually read the book!) I wrote a paper about the historical belief in Christ’s divinity in the early church that taught me a lot. (Confirming me in my orthodoxy might be the exact opposite of the effect desired by Dan Brown when he wrote the book, a fact that pleases me very much.) I still have the paper and still enjoy reading it from time to time, though the writing style of my 20 year old self can be a bit painful to witness.

My point is that the question of early Christian belief in Christ’s divinity and even in the historical acceptance of the canon of Scripture we read today has been settled in my mind for a long time, and though I know there are many challenges to the canon from historical standpoints, by my lights the orthodox have arguments just as persuasive as the detractors. Everyone who writes on the canon writes from a position of faith, after all.

But the question that still vexed me was different than the one I answered when I was young: I wasn’t merely interested in the fact of early Christian acceptance of the canon; the question I wanted answered was why these books are all Scripture and why the canon has been closed. For example, if we found another letter of St. Paul’s in some ancient Persian library why would we not consider it for inclusion in the canon? If another gospel account was shown to bear apostolic authority and was orthodox, say The Gospel According to Bartholomew, why would that not be considered? And what about books like 2 & 3 John, whose authorship is dubious, or the epistle of James, which Martin Luther famously lamented was part of the canon at all. How do we know these books, and none other, constitute God’s word to his Church?

That is the question Dr. Kruger set out to answer in this book and, while I still have questions and am not fully satisfied, I was cheered to read in his introduction that historical questions regarding the canon are not the only ones to concern ourselves with, important as they are, we must also be vigilant in pursuing the theological questions of canon.

In a series of posts to follow I will engage with this work of Kruger’s, mostly summarizing his contentions, but also seeking answers to some of the questions this book raises that I hadn’t anticipated.

James Wood and Biblical Fiction

I am reading a bookof essays right now by James Wood, the literary critic for the New Yorker. Wood's writing is downright beautiful and he is humane and generous while remaining knife-edge in his criticism. Too much criticism takes this sort of mathematical form: introduce the author and the book while making it quite clear that you are familiar with a larger body of the author's work, name one or two points of agreement with a quick quote, and then deconstruct all the reasons why you think the work ultimately fails. Criticism designed to praise a work inverts the last two steps. Then you end with some reasoned thought about how, were the author only as insightful as you, the work under consideration certainly would have been better. Not that there is anything wrong with this format, this very post will probably hew somewhere close to this model, but it gets that formulaic feeling. Wood avoids that in most of his writing. He is surprising, thoughtful, genuinely well read. The book of essays I hold in my hand ranges from Sir Thomas More to Flaubert to Gogol to Mann to Pynchon. I first read Wood when hewas reviewing Marilynne Robinson's work and it made my soul hurt. 

Wood is a writer who had faith and lost it. Yet he seems, at times, to deeply regret this fact. He participated in a forum a few years ago with fellow New Yorker columnist Malcolm Gladwell and The Nation's Christine Smallwood, all of whom are onetime evangelicals who lost their faith or never really had it to begin with. For Gladwell and Wood, in particular, this loss wasn't an exuberant moment of freedom where they finally gained the wherewithal to live happy and fulfilled lives, but a moment of deep regret and longing. Gladwell, as I recall, it having been a number of years since I've watched the video, was the most pessimistic of the group, seeming to imagine himself some special article of Providence: the man who would believe if he only could. In other words, he longed to believe, wishing it were true, but couldn't find the faith. I remember listening and longing to comfort him with the words of another doubter: "Lord, I believe; help thou my unbelief."

As sad as it can be to watch the growth of the sentimental and nostaglic atheist in our culture, the development is not entirely surprising. The Christian faith shaped more than doctrinal belief in the European West since our culture's dawn. Christianity also shaped our rituals and communal practices. As we have stripped away doctrine, ritual and community have gone with it. This absence leaves a yawning gap and one which culture free from religion has no way to bridge. And the rising emphasis on the individual (one of the aftereffects of the Reformation) will simply not do the trick. 

For Wood, this nostalgia for the lost cultural language of Christianity causes him to wish for the form of Christianity (community, shared practice, etc.) without the content. You can see this in his recent New Yorker article on the anniversary of The Book of Common Prayer. He treasures the beauty of Cranmer's collection, but dismisses the belief that fathered such beauty. But if you dismiss a house built on stone, as the wise Gospel Storyteller told it, you are left with nothing but sand to build on.

Which brings me to the book of essays I am reading now. The collection is called The Broken Estate and in the introduction Wood takes some time to explain the title. The old estate was the Christian understanding of truth, mediated through Scripture, and this estate was broken, as Wood explains, by the novel. He ends the introduction, thus: "For it was not just the ascent of science but perhaps the ascent of the novel that helped to kill off Jesus' divinity, when the novel gave us a new sense of the real, a new sense of how the real disposes itself in a narrative--and then in turn a new skepticism toward the real as we encounter it in narrative." I don't take Wood to be gloating in this passage, merely denoting what he sees to be a historical truth: Flaubert did as much to undo Christianity as Darwin.

According to Wood, it was in the nineteenth century when the "Gospel's began to be read, by both writers and theologians, as a set of fictional tales" that the authority of Scripture and the gospel narratives were undermined. The novel, which reached its Western apex in the nineteenth century, helped blur the lines between truth and reality. When the same principles of fiction reading were applied to the stories of Scripture that were applied to the stories of Jane Austen, the supernatural power of Scripture was replaced with a novelistic reading of Jesus of Nazareth and his zany Galilean adventures (sorry, I couldn't resist). 

In one sense, Wood's reading is indisputable, in that the rise of fiction did coincide with a downplaying of the inerrancy of Scripture and a reconsideration of the divinity of Christ in the popular consciousness. But was the relationship between the two causal? Religious belief has declined in our era corresponding to the rise of the internet. Are these two things related? Maybe. But there is no necessary causal relation between the two. And my feeling is that there is no necessary relationship between the rise of fiction and the decline of belief in inerrancy. Coleridge, whom Wood quotes, might have been interested in reading Scripture using the tools provided by other literary forms, but this does not mean that you necessarily deny the truth claims of those stories. Thinking that it does requires an almost willful blindness to the fact that for centuries before the estate-breaking nineteenth century people already knew to read the Bible largely as a story. Pedantic theologians aside, and there were many of those in the nineteenth century as well (see George Eliot's wonderfully awful Dr. Casaubon in Middlemarch), it would come as no surprise to a reader of the Bible that the book is comprised largely of stories. I would even go so far as to say that the Bible writers themselves were largely aware that they were writing stories. The epistles of the first Christ followers at the back of the book aside, pretty much everything in the Bible consists of stories. Jesus himself seems to have preferred to tell stories in his teaching, and it is not anachronistic to point out that people understood that these stories were fictional. No one was out trying to track down the prodigal son or find the guy who found the pearl of great price. It is our modern ignorance of the Bible that reduces it to a theological handbook. It is not for nothing that the reformers spoke of the arc of redemptive history. They understood the Christian faith was a part of the past, the present, and the future, and not only a set of received doctrine. The implication that the use of stories, true stories as the Bible claims to be, became discredited by an accumulation of fake stories is silly and frankly demeaning to the intelligence of the people who read the Bible for centuries before Austen and the Brontes and Dickens came onto the scene. 

Stories, whether fake or true, follow largely the same pattern. The goal, generally speaking, is twofold: to engage readers so that they continue to read, and to recount something memorable. A bullet point version of history would be intolerable, and a bullet point version of Sherlock Holmes impossible. We demand to be engaged. And the Bible writers knew this. So they wrote with poetry and grace and elegance as they told impossible truths of God and his dealings with mankind. And they wrote four histories of the man who was God; four histories wildly different in style, but brimming with life even at this distant remove as they worked to sharpen the curve on that arc of redemptive history.

In making this critique, I am not entirely sure if I am merely critiquing the way the period of the nineteenth century allowed questions of fiction to simplistically subvert the notion of Biblical truth or the way Wood seems to view this critique as valid on its face. In any event, neither Wood nor the nineteenth century show much historical charity, historical knowledge, or--and this might be the most egregious condemnation for when speaking of fiction--imagination. 

The Fear of the Lord, Part Two

In the last post I started talking about the fear of the Lord and how that functions in the life of a follower of Christ. I gave a basic definition of what it is to fear God and in this post I will examine a short passage from Luke’s gospel where Jesus himself addresses the concept of fearing the Lord. As always, any time we can get theology from Jesus, we ought to take advantage of this.

I will begin in the first verse where the word fear shows up directly:

I tell you, my friends, do not fear those who kill the body, and after that have nothing more that they can do. But I will warn you whom to fear: fear him who after he has killed, has authority to cast into hell. Yes, I tell you, fear him! Are not five sparrows sold for two pennies? And not even one of them is forgotten before God. Why, even the hairs of your head are all numbered. Fear not; you are of more value than many sparrows.  Luke 12:4-7

We see the apparent contradiction even within this passage: Let me tell you who to fear, but don’t be afraid. Jesus has just told his disciples what I find to be one of the most frightening promises in Scripture—that everything we do in this life will one day come to light, so that what was whispered in private will be shouted from a housetop. In light of this haunting truth, we must fear the consequences of those seemingly private actions, thoughts, and words. The person or entity that we should fear is God himself. We need not waste time fearing only him who has the power to kill us physically, because there is judgment to come that is greater than whatever we experience in our temporal existence on this fallen earth. And we should fear the God who is able to throw us into hell and has warned us of the final spiritual realities of this existence. Indeed.

Yet then it seems as if Jesus’ tone changes. He goes from talking about God throwing us into hell for our sins both private and public to a discussion of insignificant aviary life. These tiny creatures that we view so inconsequentially are known by God and, presumably, beloved by Him. How much more, then, are we known and loved by God? God not only knows us and loves us, he knows the very number of the hairs on our heads. I am at that stage in life where I will notice myself losing hair from time to time. My pillow acts as a collection agency for hairs God has decided He doesn’t want to keep track of anymore. So if God, who loves sparrows, appears to love us infinitely more and places this immense value on us (not because we are good, but because He is good) then how can we be afraid?

Jesus didn’t forget what he was talking about a second before that. He wasn’t hedging by adding in the bit about the sparrows and the hairs on our heads. He didn’t mention hell and then feel mean so he brought up this bit about not really needing to be afraid. He meant both: fear God because he is great; fear God because of the enormity of his power; fear him for his dominion over both heaven and hell. But if you are his child, beloved by him, you are also freed from fear.

Most particularly, we are freed from fear of anything in this world. We need not fear men who can only kill our bodies, because there is One who has greater power than even that. This is one of the most persistent messages in Scripture concerning fear. The prophet Isaiah refers to fear of the Lord as freeing the Israelites from the fear of the surrounding nations multiple times. And this might be the greatest freedom afforded us by a healthy fear of the Lord—a freedom to be free from worry and fear that this world presses upon us. We have Someone greater to fear and he loved us enough to go the cross for us. How amazing is that?

Next time, fear and action.

Propositions vs Relationship

I was watching a video recently on the Internet that was a round table discussion of the British scholar, author, and Cambridge professor C.S. Lewis and his intellectual life. Lewis is a hero to many in my generation and had a towering intellect. Perhaps his most prominent scholarly work was the sixteenth-century prose and poetry book for the Oxford History of English Literature (OHEL) series. For the project he read every book from the sixteenth-century that was in his university library. And, I imagine Cambridge had a pretty extensive collection.

One of the men in the discussion I watched is a Lewis scholar named Alan Jacobs who wrote the best biography of Lewis I have ever read, The Narnian. In the video he says that when Lewis came to put his faith into Christianity it was not a matter of an intellectual assent to a series of propositions, but rather something larger, something almost undefinable--faith. In other words, becoming a Christian is not exactly like filling out a checklist, finding that you agree with everything on it, and then checking the box at the bottom that says you would like to become a Christian now. There was something else necessary, for everyone from one of the intellectual giants of his age to every believer in my small church in the middle of Kansas.

Truth (with a capital-T), therefore, is not only a matter of intellectual assent to propositions, but something else. This may sound confusing and is in many ways. Truth is not something neat and tidy and easy to express. Jesus told Thomas in the Gospel of John that he is truth (14:6). Certainly Jesus is not here saying that he is a proposition or even a combination of propositions. Again, James tells the early Christians that mere belief in God, intellectual assent to the question of his existence, is insufficient and, indeed, signifies nothing since even the demons believe in the existence of God (2:19).

My point is not to say that propositions are of no value. The Christian faith through the Bible makes many propositional claims that the faith hinges on-- the virgin birth of Jesus, his sinless life, death and resurrection, to name a few of the major ones. My point is only to say that faith is more than propositional assent. This is why a popular term for Biblical truth-- inerrant-- is insufficient. An author I am reading on scriptural interpretation, Dan McCartney, says rather humorously that “a telephone directory might be inerrant, but its ‘truth’ is not likely to set anyone free” (Understand 38).

Doctrine is important but insufficient. Truth contains doctrine, but overwhelms it as well. Christian Truth has as much to do with relationship as it does with proposition and doctrine. We cannot neglect this fact both in our own spiritual lives and as we reach out to the people God has placed in our lives. If our faith is resting on intellectual assent to a handful of religious propositions and has nothing to do with a relationship with God then there is something missing. Likewise, our mission to our friends is not merely to get them to acknowledge doctrinal truth, but inspire them to a relationship with the God of the universe who made them and loves them and died for them. Propositions without relationship is meaningless.

The Insufficiency of Bible-based Morality

The pastor of my church recently shared a statistic about the percentage of people in the preceding four generations who have claimed a Bible-based framework for their morality. Though the dates of a given generation seem to differ from source to source, here are the numbers he gave: the Builders (1927-1945), 65%; the Boomers (1946-1964), 35%; the Busters (1965-1983), 16%; the Millennials (1984-2000), 4%. Other than showing me that Clara and I happen to belong to a different generation (my wife, the Buster), I wanted to take a minute to speak about this statistic and how it can be misleading.

Every culture organizes itself around what is often called a social contract. These are not literal contracts we sign when we reach maturity, but they are the implicit structures our society has constructed which we transgress at the risk of being ostracized, outcast, or imprisoned. These are the basic dos and don’ts that we hold everyone to equally. These change along different cultures and different periods. Most cultures hold to some of the basics—don’t murder, don’t steal, don’t act so as to put others at risk of harm, etc. Some exist only uniquely—for a few hundred years of English history attendance at the local Anglican parish was compulsory. And, for most of our nation’s history, the governing social contract was derived from the morality of the Bible. And, as a Bible-believing, faithful Christian I believe this to have been a pretty good thing. I like the system of morality within the Bible and think it sets up a culture for a lot of benefits. Indeed, think what you like about America, but we enjoy unique liberties, privileges, and prosperities that are largely derived from holding to this social contract for as long as we did. We are all, like it or not, the product of this system of morality and our country would be unrecognizable were it not for this framework that, until recently, seemed to hold sway.

However, there is a world of difference between adhering to a Bible-based system of morality with a view to constructing a prosperous, diligent, and innovative culture behind this system, and people being saved by the grace of God offered to us through the death and resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ. In other words, a Bible-based moral system is not indicative of a culture that has accepted the Lordship of God. There are many reasons for adapting a particular social contract that have nothing to do with seeking salvation only through the mercy of a beneficent God.

I fear that as Christians we sometimes conflate these two things; we imagine that if people are adhering to the moral system our work as Christians is accomplished. This is a grievous error and causes the church to fall into all manner of wrong-thinking about this world. The following scriptural passage from the apostle Paul to the Corinthians is clarifying:

The natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned.

1 Corinthians 2:14 (ESV)

What the apostle Paul is saying in this passage is that people outside of the church do not understand the same things about truth, wisdom, and morality as “spiritual” people, those who have received the grace of God, are able to freely discern. Too often I feel as if we try and legislate and institute our morality as if this were the chief mission of God’s people on this planet. But, for the large part, our morality is incoherent to people who do not know God and have not been given faith to believe the gospel. This is not to say that all people are not born with a moral compass—everyone certainly is born with the capacity to discern moral truths—but our specifically Christian, “spiritually discerned” truths are folly to people who do not have the Spirit of God.

While some would look at the statistic I gave in the first paragraph and despair, I see reason for hope. As our pastor pointed out when he shared this statistic, this puts the church right back into the place it was in when the New Testament was being written. There are, of course, some downfalls to rejecting the Bible-based system of morality and these losses are to be lamented, but my hope for our nation is not a system of morality, but for the church to hold forth the Jesus of the gospels and for him to seek and save that which is lost.

This is every Christian’s greater hope. We do not seek for vindication on this earth; we do not feel like we have to fight all of our own battles; we can trust and hope in a God who we believe is eternal and not far from each of us, a God who thunders in the heavens and will one day make all things new.