Music

I like classical music. I’m not an aficionado, but have learned to listen for themes and variations. So one evening, alone in the hospital, I found the TV music channel and began to listen to a Saint Saens Symphony. What happened next could easily be attributed to the fact that I was loaded with pain killing drugs. You can make up your mind about that.

The presence of Jesus came into the room and settled in the chair next to my bed. He did not acknowledge me at all; he simply sat with his eyes closed and listened to the music. So Jesus and I sat in the twilight and listened to Saint Saens together. I found it a bit disconcerting. But my theology has taught me that while Jesus is divine, he is also fully human. So there is no reason why he could not enjoy human art at a level beyond my comprehension, able to discern between pure beauty and the sense of longing that pervades all art since the fall. And as divine, he fathoms the physics of music: why hair on a string, or pursed lips on a tube, or a vibrating reed can reach the human mind and enter the emotions. And moreover, as divine, he himself is the agent of the music brought forth before the worlds were created, when the morning stars sang together. August Rush revealed more than he knew when he said, “Music is all around us; all you have to do is listen.”

But if Jesus is the agent, his Father is the author and source of the joy and music of all creation. He drew up a plan with a billion blueprints, handed it to the Son, and said “Make it so,” And the Son made it so. And because of the plan, the Son obeys, praises, and loves the Father. So Jesus and I sat in the twilight and listened to Saint Saens and loved the Father together.

When the music was done, the presence faded. But I heard a small voice in my spirit: “You haven’t heard anything yet. Be patient.” And I began to think about the hosts of just men made perfect, able to sing and make music in a sinless state, one in which music would no longer strain in longing, but find its fulfillment—when music will find music. I then considered myriads of angels, finally freed from the obligation to be messengers and protectors of the fallen race, and loosed to chords and variations impossible to imagine. At that point I grew short of breath. I had reached too high. The best Christian this side of death could not stand in that glory. I sank back down into the twilight and pain, and to the world in which “I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep.” And I will be patient.

Streams, Trees, and Gadgets

A few days ago I had lunch with Anne and her tennis buddies. At the table next to us was a pretty, well-dressed woman with her teen-aged son. He sat across the table from her with his smart phone on and his ear buds embedded, bobbing his head and offering an occasional surly grunt to her conversation. She obviously wanted to spend some time with him, but couldn’t get across the electronic divide. I felt sorry for her.

I need to make it clear that, in spite of my sarcasm about the technological revolution, I appreciate electronic progress. I obviously am using a computer right now, and am a regular Facebook denizen. I am at the age at which I am glad for medical advances. My concern is a common one: do we control our technology, or does it control us? Here is a test anyone can use to make that determination.

Drive to the mountains (I’m thinking Appalachians). Find a trail head. Leave anything that beeps, rings, chirps or flashes in the car. Walk on the trail @one mile. Turn off the trail and walk @100 yards, far enough to not be seen, but not far enough to lose the trail. Sit down with your back to a tree, be quiet, and listen.

Listen to the small sounds—chipmunks scurrying, birds fluttering in the brush, dead twigs falling on the forest floor. Absorb the fear that something larger than a chipmunk may be out there—that’s part of the experience. Listen to the stream bouncing over rocks somewhere downhill. Think about how young and excited it is, hurrying to grow and meet other streams, rushing into the flat lands where (not foreseen in its exuberance) it will become a river, flowing past cities where it will learn the taint of pollution, over the fall line, and as age creeps on, will slowly trudge through the marshes until it finds rest in the ocean.

Look up at the trees. They are God’s perfect worshipers. Rooted in the soil left by their predecessors, they strive for heaven and wave their branches at the slightest impulse of the wind—the ruach of God. If the wind blows while you are sitting, you are doubly blessed. If it rains on you, you are thrice blessed. Think of the blessings of nourishment and refreshing that come to you from heaven and from others. Acknowledge that you are small and dependent.

Get up, dust off your butt, go back to your car and reignite your gadgets. If you found the whole experiment distasteful and boring, you are in bondage to stuff. But if something ignited in you, if you enjoyed it, you may find that you have a heart instead of a circuit board.

Babel and the Glory of God

Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost. As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.

The Presbyterian church in which I was raised practiced what was for them a high church liturgy. I grew up with the Lord’s Prayer, the Creed, the Doxology, and the Gloria Patri, quoted here in its old form. I still associate the word “glory” with the vacant spaces and smells of that old sanctuary, other-worldly and comforting at the same time. But as I’ve aged, I’ve found there is more to the word than a feeling. Let’s explore it for a bit.

We usually think of God’s glory as light, effulgence, radiance, that which is observable around that which is too bright to be seen directly. This is a redemptive concept, in that God condescends to reveal Himself in ways that we can perceive, while His very essence would overpower us. Certain groups of Christians, notably charismatics, center much of their worship around touching the glory of God and experiencing its healing and transforming power. This is a valid description of glory.

Of course, there is another, almost opposite, description. God is often portrayed in the Old Testament as dwelling in “clouds and thick darkness.” In the presence of sin and rebellion, God hides Himself and protects His absolute purity and holiness behind a veil. The cherubim that covered the mercy seat were not only his bright golden chariot, they were also His armed guards that shrouded Him in mists. This darkness in response to human depravity is also a valid form of His glory.

The Hebrew word for glory (kabadh) is instructive. Its root meaning is “to be heavy.” The feelings aroused by the word are similar to those felt by Isaiah in the presence of God: overwhelmed, smothered, not just humbled, but humiliated, at a loss, undone. We might call it oppressive. I prefer the term “ponderous.” It is insurmountable, fixed, immutable, an obstacle against which fallen man pounds his fists.

The New Testament also reveals this dual nature of the glory of God. The disciples saw the effulgent glory of the Son at His transfiguration and at the resurrection. But the disciples also encountered “clouds and thick darkness.” They were constantly confounded as their preconceptions and expectations crashed against the truth of Christ’s words and Person (“you have heard it said, but I say unto you…”). It wasn’t until the Holy Spirit opened their inner eyes through a new birth that they were able to “walk in the light as He is in the light.”

Culturally speaking, whether or not a people see the glory of God as light or darkness depends on their response to His revealed moral law and to the Christ who perfectly kept it on their behalf. A nation that openly flaunts its rebellion against God’s purposes will find Him resistant to theirs. I am one of those unlikable Christians who believes there is a relationship between the sins of the culture and the rise of violence within it. I will not bother to discuss those here. There is a deeper attitude from which they all spring.

That attitude is hubris, an arrogance that, after thousands of years, still afflicts humanity with an obsession with utopia. We can waste time debating whether our founding fathers were evangelicals or children of the Enlightenment, but whether they were influenced by the Reformation or by John Locke, they were anything but utopians. They envisioned government as a tool to protect us from one another so we could live free lives; hopefully, lives of service to God and to one another. In every way they tried to curtail unlimited authority, and never saw governmental (or ecclesiastical) authority as the chief means of achieving a utopian dream of human excellence.

I hear hubris at both ends of the political spectrum. One promises the brave new world of a universal village, seeking to answer Jack Nicholson’s clueless question, “Why can’t we all just get along?” The other is a new nationalism accompanied by a lot of chest thumping and grunts. Both make promises that can’t be kept. Both ignore the curse that hangs over man. I believe that God will honor a culture that above all lays down its arrogance, admits its limitations, and manifests some humility and the need for divine intervention.

God resists hubris because He will have no perfect kingdoms in competition with His own. He responds to it by surrounding it with His glory cloud of darkness. The result is the confusion of tongues. No man can understand his fellow. The stronger the arrogance, the more division and incoherence emerge. We are building a tower to heaven, and wonder why when we ask our neighbor to pass the hammer, he tosses us a brick. The cherubim are dispatching shadows.

Because God is always present, his glory is always with us. To the humble, it will be light and redemption; to the arrogant, clouds and darkness-- but the glory of God nonetheless.

A Short Blog About a Mountain

In June 2007 Anne and I flew to Seattle for a family gathering. We arrived at the airport around ten or eleven at night, rented a car, and headed down I-5 to find our motel. As I was driving and looking for road signs, I saw something above the highway that took my breath away—a huge white shape with a pinkish hue that demanded my attention and overpowered the landscape. I knew rationally that I was looking at Mt. Rainier. I knew that the northwest was famous for these old volcanoes that randomly dwarf the Cascades and their foothills. I also knew that we were there when the nights were shortest and that the mountain was reflecting a far off sunset.

So much for knowledge. Emotionally I was in a different place. I have to call my primary feeling fear. The thing was too big, too close, too smothering, too terribly out of place to someone who lived most of his life near the Appalachians. At the same time, I realized I was seeing something incredibly beautiful. I was drawn to it. It bordered on something personal, beyond rock and snow. There should have been a voice, or music.

OK. If you know me, you’re probably afraid I’ve imbibed to much Tolkien. But stay with me. What I realized then, and have again since, is that terror and beauty are not opposites; they are manifestations of the same experience, or of the same ultimate reality, of God; and it is the constant need of fallen humanity to deprive Him of both, to make Him tame and ugly.

God is to feared because He is immutable, unbending in His requirement that we keep His law, “who will by no means clear the guilty,” and who offers us forgiveness only because He meets the demands of His own justice, which never wavers. This is fear that arises out of the relationship of God and man.

But there is another reason we fear God. We understand that beauty is the quality that anything possesses as it moves toward its own ideal or its own perfection. The more something fulfills its purpose and becomes what it was meant to be, the more beautiful it is. God is the completely beautiful because He is completely perfect. That beauty is fearful because it uncovers our imperfection, but for those who love God, to behold the Terrible Beauty means to be transformed by it, to become what we were meant to be.

Paul and the Gap

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, who was usually confident and forceful, in this letter to the Corinthians described his attitude during his first visit to them as one of weakness and fear. Why would an apostle with such an assurance of the call of God confess weakness? He certainly was not intimidated by his hearers, because the rest of the epistle is a straightforward attack on their carnality and immaturity.

The underlying key to his fear was the fact that the Corinthian congregation was primarily Greek; folks who, though not with the sophistication of the Athenians, still revered and expected persuasiveness and rhetorical skill from their teachers. Paul had the training that made him capable of both.

His fear was that his ability as a preacher and theologian would get in the way of the pure gospel of the Lord Jesus. He knew that “plausible words of wisdom” would cloud the power of the Holy Spirit and, while tickling the minds of the Corinthians, would leave their souls empty. He knew that the release of the Spirit’s power to change hearts was directly connected to an accurate portrayal of what God had done not merely through Christ, but through “Christ crucified.” Paul could not allow his hearers for a moment the impression that Christ was a great teacher or example, or the logos only, or one emanation in the Gnostic chain of being.

Paul had to be perfectly clear about his message from the beginning. He had to present Christ to them as Son of God, redeemer, substitute, ransom, reconciler, savior, and Lord, but above all, Christ as crucified. Christ crucified was a brutal shock to the neat and orderly quest for beauty that existed in the Greek mind. It disturbed religious complacency and was an indication that there was something terribly wrong with humanity, so terrible that it needed a terrible remedy. Paul trembled because he wanted his preaching to be so true to the gospel that repentance and faith would follow, and no hearer would escape its clarity, or be misled by eloquence. And it is likely true that Paul wanted his own heart to be so full of the presence of Christ that he would not be tempted to fall back on his natural ability to explain and persuade.

This gap between the head and the heart continues to manifest itself in the life of the church. Several years ago I read about the number of pastors and church leaders who drop out of ministry in their fifties and sixties, not because of heresy or immorality, but because of burnout. The article stated that the ministries of these men had outrun their spiritual capacity. They had developed proper exegetical and rhetorical skills and learned to rely on them in the pulpit and in counsel, but on the inside their reliance on the Holy Spirit was neglected.

I also remember a discussion about this issue with my pastor in a former church, a man who fortunately understood about the gap. He said that many a preacher reads a text, runs it through the sieve of proper word study, proper theology, proper homiletics, and produces an impeccable intellectual creation with some appropriate illustrations to engage the emotions. But he seldom takes the time to let the Holy Spirit work the passage into his own heart to create repentance or joy or awe, and the hearers may learn something, but have not touched the life of God in their leader.

Of course the gap not only applies to leaders, but to all Christians. It’s sometimes referred to as the “evangelical disease:” the presumption that because I walked the aisle and prayed the prayer forty years ago, I must be OK with God even if I only give Him an occasional passing greeting. More simply, it’s the assumption that because I know something, I am living it.

Let me give a suggestion in light of the “impending distress.” The nation is in a mess within and without. Our great ship of state (forgive the clichés) has loosed its moorings and is floating in uncertainty. Everyone is thinking and analyzing overtime. The left, the right, the middle, and the lunatic fringe are shouting their agendas, and are less and less heard. But we don’t need just knowledge; we need light and life.

There is a short phrase in 1 Samuel 30: “And David strengthened himself in the Lord his God.” David was in distress. His family was in danger, he was homeless, and Israel was on the verge of losing a war. At a time when the logical thing was to figure things out, he turned from his mind to his heart and to a relationship that transcended circumstances. I wonder if the best thing Christians can do now is to leave the arguments that separate us from the culture and from each other, and turn to the glory of the person Christ, to strengthen ourselves in him—not just so we can achieve peace, but also so we can be refilled with the light and life that the world needs.

Word of Faith, Theology, and Jesus

The secret things belong to the Lord our God; but the things that are revealed belong to us and to our children forever, that we may do all the words of this law.

-Deuteronomy 29:29

I’ve been wanting to do a blog on Word of Faith teaching, because I occasionally come across it, and it frankly makes me uncomfortable. I assume that my readers are familiar with it. In summary, it stresses that God is completely and inherently good; and prosperity, health, and well-being are the will of God for all people, especially Christians. The reason that we do not attain to his will is because of lack of faith and negative speech and attitudes. My difficulty with Faith teaching is that God becomes passive, a force whose goodness can be tapped by human effort. The times that I have tried it created more stress for me than peace.

I think of faith, not as a metaphysical force, but as trust (which is included in the Greek pistis). I also believe what to Faith teachers is a heresy: that there is a purpose for suffering in the Christian’s life. Trying to write about such emotional and deeply personal commitments on the part of some Christians is difficult. If I try to deal with the teaching itself, I will simply get on the hamster wheel of an endless argument that exists because there are deeper issues that have to be faced before we can get off the wheel. What is really at stake here is not how we can get things from God, but how we view Him. So allow me to indulge in some Systematic Theology before going any further.

When theologians talk about God, particularly God as Trinity, they first distinguish between the “economic” Trinity and the “essential” Trinity. “Economic” is not in this case a reference to finance. It comes from the Greek word for “house” or “household,” and refers to a self-contained system of order, the cosmos, or the world. My mother would have said it is a “high-fallutin’ word” for existence as we know it. When theologians speak of the economic Trinity, therefore, they mean God as he relates to mankind in judgment, redemption, and salvation. It has to do with the Trinity and its operations as they are revealed to us at our level of understanding. The “essential” Trinity, however, refers to God as He exists in Himself, shrouded in cloud and mystery, His “secret” self beyond our capacity to conceive or reason. Because God in His essence defies our understanding, we never contemplate the essential Trinity without confronting a paradox.

When the early church began to struggle with heretical definitions of the Godhead and produced the Nicene Creed, it presented us with an inevitable paradox. The Trinity is not three gods; it is not one God in three modes. The Trinity is three Persons in One Essence. No one has ever improved on the Nicene formula. If you can do better, you are wrong. Notice that Nicaea produced a creed, or a confession, but not an explanation. It was to be confessed, not understood. That is because it was a confrontation with the essential Trinity.

Likewise, Chalcedon produced a creed that dealt with the God-man nature of Christ. It confessed that Christ was fully man, fully God, without confusion of the natures, and yet existing as One Person. Again, a paradox, and a confession, not an explanation. Let me say this again: our understanding is necessary when facing God as judge and redeemer, but it fails us when facing God as God in His own inscrutable being. Additionally, we are required by truth to maintain the integrity of a divine paradox by refusing to choose either of its opposites at the expense of the other. Nicaea dealt with the paradox of the One and the Many, and Chalcedon with that of the human and the divine. In both cases orthodoxy required a balance, while heresy flourished at the extremes.

Systematic Theology may be no more than a continuation of the Norman plot to impose Latin words on us poor Anglo-Saxons. So let me state the above in short words, and paraphrase CS Lewis: divine paradoxes are like the ends of strings, and the two separate strings that we see hanging down before our eyes are actually the ends of the same string looped in the cloud above us, but we can’t see the loop. If we pull one end, the other disappears. It is safer to hold to both at once.

I think I started with some comments about the Word of Faith movement, so I should probably get back there. One theme runs through the teaching of the movement: it is always the will of God to see us healthy and wealthy. It should be evident now that as soon as an attribute as high and mysterious as the will of God is mentioned, we are back in the realm of the essential Trinity, and if so, we should expect to find a paradox; and that is exactly what we find. On one hand, if God wills something, that something will occur because God is God, but that something may not be what we classify as “good.” On the other hand, if God is good, and only wills the good, then the fact that the “good” does not always occur in our lives means that some other forces are at work to frustrate his will. Theology would call this the paradox of God’s Sovereignty and God’s Goodness.

As with other divine paradoxes, the dangers are at the extremes. Some Calvinists take sovereignty to such a degree that it become dour fatalism, and at its worst is callous and indifferent to human suffering. Goodness is redefined as whatever God chooses to do. Word of Faith teaching is at the other end. Because God wills the good, and it does not occur, then God is thwarted, and sovereignty passes from his hands into the hands of the believer who learns how to tap into the will of God. I believe both are errors.

I have now gone as far as Systematic Theology can carry us. It is after all, systematic. It can define how God relates to us, but is not itself relational. It can define the Persons of the Trinity, but is not personal. It can describe divine mysteries, but is not in the least mysterious. So since we are Christians, it might be a good idea to turn to Christ. And there we find something transcendent. Jesus apparently lived in what to us are paradoxes with no stress or difficulty at all. Take a look at this:

Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? And not one of them will fall to the ground without your Father’s will. But even the hairs of your head are all numbered. Fear not therefore; you are of more value than many sparrows. (Matthew 10:29-31)

Do you see that? Sovereignty and goodness at rest. No stress, no quest for balance, just peace. Jesus bundled up these attributes of God that perplex us into one word: “Father.” With that word, everything falls into place. What we treat as concepts are really aspects of a whole and intact Personality, and therefore we need fellowship with the Father more than we need answers (see 1 John 1: 1-4). In His presence fear of His purpose and my need to control Him both vanish.

But there is more. Christ not only pointed to the Father as the resolution of all paradoxes. He Himself became the resolution of all perceived contradictions. When He prayed, “Not my will, but yours be done,” sovereign predestination and redemptive goodness were united, all history paused at their union, and those things that we call extremes were absorbed into the great Center of the cross. Fatalism and our desire to manipulate God both died there.

My friends and I used to joke that the answer to every question we were asked in Sunday School was, “Jesus.” Maybe we really were not so far from the truth.

The Old Testament and Some Other Stuff

I’ve developed a habit of reading the Bible when I get up in the morning. When I was young and zealous, I would read 3 chapters in the Old Testament, and 2 in the New. That way I would cover the Old Testament in a year, and the New two and a half times a year. Today I pretty much read one chapter in each Testament, and often not even that, because my mind goes up a rabbit trail before I get to the New Testament reading. I’ve fixed that by occasionally starting with the New Testament and wandering off before getting to the Old.

My point, from which I have already wandered, is that the Old Testament habitually frustrates me. That’s because I grew up sitting in a circle with a teacher holding up pictures of the Red Sea parting, or David holding Goliath’s head (the boys loved that, especially because the girls were grossed out). We learned that those Old Testament characters were super heroes who always obeyed God and dwelt in a supernatural realm that we would experience if we obeyed God too.

But my reading of the Old Testament as an adult has violated my expectations. Every page is filled with moral failures, rebellion, and unbelief. Adam falls. Abraham begets Ishmael. Jacob connives. Moses strikes the rock. The people indulge in pagan idolatry even before they get to the promised land. For four hundred years the nation shifts from idolatry to conquest to repentance and back again. Saul completely fails. David is a murderer and an adulterer. Solomon begins well but condones idolatry to keep his harem happy. The northern kingdom goes completely pagan. Its prophets whine and complain. Judah’s religious preferences depend on who’s on the throne at the time. And even after deportation and restoration, Nehemiah has to slap people around because of lapses against the Mosaic law. I’ve come to believe that Old Testament Judaism was definitely ordained by God simply because no one trying to manufacture a religion would portray its adherents in such a negative light. A charlatan would have given us the Sunday School Old Testament.

My frustration with the Old Testament is of course based on faulty expectations from my childhood. Let me suggest some other perceptions that have been a help to me. The first I gleaned from a former pastor who pointed out that the Old Testament (duh) is about God. He is the hero, and the only hero. Against a background of human depravity and failure he keeps showing up with unmerited grace and deliverance, for his own purposes. He pours out this grace on the nation, but also on individuals. Adam is clothed. Abraham receives the promise for his descendants. Jacob is humbled and becomes a prince of God. Moses sees God face to face. Israel enters the land under Joshua. God raises up deliverers in the period of the Judges. David becomes an example of humility and gives us the penitential Psalms. Solomon is given insights that passed to us through the Wisdom Literature. God does miracles in the lives of common people through the prophets of the northern kingdom. God moves a pagan ruler to bring Israel back from captivity and reestablishes his law through Ezra and Nehemiah.

The Old Testament is about extremes: darkness and light, life and death, depravity and mercy, sin and grace. I don’t like it, because I prefer the mediocrity of a sweet and predictable God with easy morals who tolerates about everything and kills giants. I would like to be Daniel without spending time in the lion’s den. The Old Testament tells me that God by definition is God, and he is an extremist. Extreme sin, extreme guilt, extreme failure on the human side; and extreme grace, forgiveness, and acceptance on his side. Without that perception, the Old Testament constantly frustrates my expectations.

Another concept that I bring to my understanding of the Old Testament is that of the Remnant. Paul states in 1 Corinthians 1 and 2 that God makes “foolish the wisdom of the world,” and that God has chosen “what is foolish in the world to shame the wise,” and “what is weak in the world to shame the strong.” God in building his kingdom by-passes what would be my obvious choices and calls out those least likely to be noticed as kingdom material at all. This was a pattern in the Old Testament. Israel is called out of the world. Judah is called out of Israel. David’s line is called out of Judah. At one point the prophet Elijah complained that he was the only faithful follower of God in the northern kingdom. God reminded him that there were still “seven thousand who had not bowed the knee to Baal.” There is no indication that these seven thousand came from a particular class (prophets, priests), but were common folks scattered throughout Israel and known only to God. These unknowns apparently were in existence through Old Testament history, so that when we open the New Testament we find some of their spiritual descendants. After three hundred years of Greek and Roman influence, after all the corruption and intrigues of the Hasmonean period, we find some common folks who would argue with angels, but not for a moment question their existence (see Luke 1 and 2). These were salt of the earth, down to earth, maybe naïve, but stubborn believers in God. They represented the faithful Remnant.

I hope it is helpful for my reader to apply these presuppositions to his reading of the Old Testament. Now I’m faced with another question: do these presuppositions apply only to the Old Testament? It is common to blame the failures of its characters on incomplete revelation; that is, they behaved badly because they only knew types of shadows that pointed to the fullness that the New Testament revealed. By that argument, those who believed the gospel of Jesus lived instantly on a higher moral ground. I’m not so sure about that. Before the death of its first leaders, the church was dealing with moral depravity, heresy, infighting, struggles for power, legalism, mysticism, Gnosticism, pride of gifting and ministry, and party spirit. This seems a bit familiar.

Church history fairs no better: heresy, divisions, diverse traditions, powerful movements of God that hardened into monuments to the past, inquisitions, auto de fes, the Great Schism, the wars following the Reformation, my own English ancestors who slaughtered each other for forty years in a religious frenzy, and then sat down, had a cup of tea, and decided to all get along. It’s a bit embarrassing. Not to mention the American church, carrying the same divisions, but eschewing slaughter, limits itself to irritating one another on Facebook.

To be fair, there may be a deeper reason for this, perhaps locked in the New Testament itself. The gospel is so counter-intuitive, so alarming, so expansive, that no one human mind can take it all in. Hence, varieties of interpretations arise based on what part of the gospel one is focused upon. I have no idea what has happened to Bruce McLaren and Emergence (I feel no obligation to keep informed), but I do know that his A Generous Orthodoxy had an impact on me. In it he analyzed the strengths of the seven or eight major divisions of Christendom. When I finished, I realized that his outline was based on the whole Christ event—incarnation, life, death, resurrection, ascension, second coming. Each division of the church focused on no more than two of these, but usually just one; the point being that there is a fullness of Christ expressed by the church universal, but compartmentalized.

But it is simply impossible to take all of Christendom into one’s heart and experience. The best we can do is to be faithful in our own tradition, but keep its walls porous. I grew up Presbyterian, and spent thirty years in the charismatic movement. That means that I am most comfortable with an esoteric group of charismatic Calvinists. Yes, they really are out there, under the suspicion of both charismatics and Calvinists: God’s tongue-speaking elect. I’ve tried other avenues, especially Anglicanism, which I dearly love. But I never could get the nuances, the inside humor, or the via media. I was outside looking in, hoping to find CS Lewis. So I’m back to the Puritans, although I will read Athanasius and St. John of the Cross out of reverence for traditions outside my own. (I do draw the line at Word of Faith books. I am not that porous.)

Thank God for blogging, which allows us to say whatever we want without documentation or the rigidity of a formal essay. I say that because I am aware that I am off my initial subject, and will now try to wander back.

Let’s go back to the alarming notion that God is God. History is exactly where he wants it, and it is moving according to his purposes. I am having trouble finding the exact word to describe how I think he works. “Sneaky” is not bad, “stealthy” might be better, but both are a bit pejorative. I prefer something more like “counter-intuitive” even though it is becoming a cliché. God seems to enjoy moving outside our boxes and definitions and structures. For instance, I have read, but not confirmed, that numbers of Moslems in the heart of the Middle East have had direct encounters with Isa through dreams and visions. As jihad expands, something unpredictable is going on at its center. Even if these reports are overstated, they are still a good example of not only God’s sovereignty, but of his sense of humor. As in the Old Testament, there is still in the world this contrast of sin, heresy, depravity, etc., and unmerited grace, mercy, deliverance working in the world, unexpected, unearned, and based solely on God’s desire to show off.

Likewise, the concept of the Remnant is equally valid in the New Testament age. While structures and confessions are absolutely necessary for the purity and continuation of the visible church, there is still a company within it who are united in love to Christ, and who are known only to Christ. They include a babushka before her icon, a nun with her rosary, a Pentecostal gentleman waving his handkerchief in the aisle, a Presbyterian seminary student struggling with Hebrew verbs, and a host more. These love God and leave a residue of love in the lives of others. They form the Kingdom of God. God sees them. They are the church. The external structures they represent, while necessary, are shadows to God. As in the Old Testament, God still has a remnant.

In summary: God is not worried. Everything is OK.

Grace and Offense

“Then David comforted his wife, Bathsheba, and went in to her, and lay with her; and she bore a son, and called his name Solomon. And the Lord loved him, and sent a message to Nathan the prophet; so he called his name Jedidiah, because of the Lord.”

-2 Samuel 12: 24-25

Church folks are familiar with this story. David has firmly taken the throne of Israel and is expanding the kingdom, and is concluding a war with Ammon. While walking on the roof of the palace, he sees a woman bathing on a rooftop below. In an act of lust and power, he has her brought to his bed. She conceives a child, and in desperation, David recalls her husband Uriah from the war, hoping that he will sleep with his wife, and the child can be passed off as his. Uriah as an honorable man refuses to take advantage of the amenities of home while his fellow soldiers are in the field. David has him killed in the subsequent battle and takes Bathsheba into the palace.

Nathan the prophet confronts David (who repents) and predicts the death of the child and a season of discipline at the hand of God. The child dies, and a series of disasters fall on David’s family and the kingdom: rape, fratricide, an attempted coup and the death of Absalom, and recurring rebellion and tension between Judah and the other tribes of Israel. David bears with all this patiently. But the innocence of the “sweet psalmist” and the humility he manifested during Saul’s reign are sullied.

In the middle of the author’s narrative comes the passage I quoted above. It is counter-intuitive and breaks the logical flow of the story. Bathsheba is called David’s “wife,” indicating that both God and the prophet accepted her new status. Bathsheba becomes queen (earlier wives are not mentioned), and becomes an influence at court in David’s latter reign and the beginning of Solomon’s. In addition, her second “legal” child is special to God and called Jedidiah (“beloved of God”) by the prophet, and is heir apparent to the throne. If we were to “type” this passage, we would say that God is comforting David with a coming day of peace (“Solomon” is a derivative of shalom), pointing to the final eschatological kingdom of the Messiah, and a promise that David’s line would continue forever.

My teachers of old told me to never to preach a sermon or do a Bible study without a practical application. OK. But at that point we run into several dangers. One of the most common ways to apply the gritty stories of the Old Testament is to moralize, to look for some timeless (but trite) truth that we can apply to our own lives. Sunday School teachers of small children have reinforced this approach for decades. The moral of the story of Abraham and Sarah and Hagar is that we should never run ahead of God. David and Goliath teach us that even the weakest person can overcome huge obstacles. Daniel in the lions’ den warns us to be faithful to God no matter what (I never heard the part about the children of Daniel’s persecutors whose bone were broken before they hit the floor). The moral point of the passage we are considering is that no matter how tough times get, there is a bright future.

Moralising is a shallow way to deal with earthy biblical passages, and can be found in any secular self-help literature. A much safer and rewarding approach to Old Testament interpretation is to see God, not the human characters, as the central actor in the biblical narrative. Since the Bible declares itself to be the Word of God, it only makes sense to look for what it tells us about Him. And since Jesus is declared to be the living Word, it is correct exegesis to look for Him through its pages, including the old covenant. I have already alluded to the fact that Christ is revealed through the reign of the “king of peace,” and that there is a hint of the coming of Messiah in the propagation of David’s line. In addition, David himself is a representation of a coming Priest-King. There is also a fresh revelation of the grace of God manifested in the midst of human sin. One might even make reference to the doctrine of election.

All these theological points exceed moralizing, but I want to suggest that while they satisfy the intellect, the Word of God has not yet reached the heart. There is still one more interpretive step. The next question is not “What do I think?” but “How do I engage personally with Christ in the text?” At this point I have to ask how I really feel when I read 2 Samuel 12:24-25. And I have to answer: I feel irritated. I know it is politically incorrect to quote Gone with the Wind, but my response at first is, “It ain’t fittin’, it ain’t fittin’, it just ain’t fittin'." It is not just right of God to exalt the child of a relationship that began in murder and adultery. It is not right to raise the woman involved into a place of preeminence. It is not right for David not to be impeached, deposed, or stoned. It is obviously not right for God to bring such grace into the midst of such wickedness. Every time I read this passage, the Pharisee in me rises up not only in indignation, but with anger at God. Now I am getting somewhere. The Word of God has backed me in to corner and said, “Gotcha!” Now the Word has exposed my heart.

I also feel surprised; surprised by an unwarranted, unmerited, bright and shining grace that obliterates all the darkness of lust and evil intent. I am consequently forced to back off and sulk, or accept the impossible reality that you and I are Jedidiah, beloved in spite of and far beyond our dark histories, because a greater than Solomon has come.

Tributes

Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide. -John Adams (Works)

I never wanted to watch the Hunger Games movies. They sounded too brutal. But after some friends assured us that the series contained some redemptive themes, we borrowed the first release from the library, and of course got hooked. In a futuristic setting, an oppressive regime punishes a past rebellion by selecting citizens at random to fight one another to the death in a controlled arena. These citizen warriors are called "Tributes." The victor is lauded and rewarded, and the public is treated to the annual spectacle with its attendant celebrations. Of course the series ends with a long expected revolution.

HG Wells wrote The Time Machine in 1895. His protagonist travels thousands of years into earth’s future, where he finds the Eloi, a naïve race of pleasure seekers who live off ample vegetation and have a remarkable lack of curiosity or intellectual ability. The hero eventually finds that there is a race of underground troglodytes (Morlochs) who capture and feed on the Eloi like cattle. In some movie versions, the Traveler leads a rebellion, and everyone (except the Morlochs) lives happily ever after. But the book sees the Traveler flee in his machine without a resolution.

I loved Watership Down (Richard Adams, 1972). I read it several times. In it a small group of discontented rabbits escape a warren that is run like a fascist police state, and set out on their quest for freedom and security. On their way they stop over at a warren of very friendly rabbits, well fed, and given to poetry and philosophical speculation, with just a hint of resignation and fatalism. The bubble bursts, however, when a random rabbit, feeding in the field, is caught in a snare, and is ignored by his fellow philosophers. Turns out, the local farmer who owns the land keeps the warren fed on fresh vegetables, and harvests it according to his need. Our heroes beg their new friends to leave, to no avail. The warren is willing to pay the price for its prosperity.

These communities I described are diverse: a dystopia, a utopia, a cornucopia. So, what do they have in common? They are willing to pay the price, not just to maintain the status quo, but to protect their underlying worldviews. Some things are apparently worth the sacrifice.

Western liberal democracies are committed to compassion, love, openness, welcome for the oppressed and disenfranchised. They also have great faith in the innate goodness of man. I am writing this a couple of days after Brussels (March 2016). I have not heard any rhetoric from western leaders that varies from these themes. There are flowers and notes and burning candles in public places, just as in Paris, New York, San Bernardino, Boston, London, Madrid, Turkey, and places we have already forgotten. The Eiffel Tower is tri-colored again, and I keep hearing the word “solidarity.”

Worldview? Solidarity? I keep thinking about the victims, which is too weak a term. Let’s call them what they are: sacrifices, collateral damage, the acceptable statistical price to pay for the western view of mankind. But could we please recognize that fact, and honor the dead and wounded with something more than candles and flowers. A memorial in national capitals would be nice, with room for additional names. And let’s dump “victims.” “Heroes of the Republic” would be nice. How about “Random Citizen Soldiers,” “Keepers of the Flame.”

But I prefer “Tributes.”

Boredom

“But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony.” -GK Chesterton

Blogging is difficult these days because I find that have become boring. Not that I find that a bad thing. Boring is peaceful. Boring is the result of tasting what the author of Hebrews called “entering the rest.” Boring is drinking the same cup of coffee and praying the same prayers in the morning before Anne stirs. Boring is hearing the Canadian geese honking over the house at 7:14 AM, every day. Nevertheless, it is hard to communicate when one is boring. I have no great revelations or 6 steps to a deeper walk with God. There is nothing exciting or even disconcerting in me right now.

Boring, by the way, is not the result of getting older. “Older” simply means settling down into what I knew in the beginning before I discovered passion and excitement. It is the essence of what youth would be if youth were stable. I know that the ups and downs of amplitude waves, when averaged out, produce a straight line. It’s that line beginning in youth that is the sum of our lives, the thing that holds it all together, or in my case, since I am a Christian, the Person who holds it all together.

The Song of Songs is the story of the beloved learning to trust her lover. In the beginning she sums up her love like this: “My beloved is mine, and I am his.” Her place in the relationship comes first. She could have easily written a book on “how to make your man stay at home.” After several cycles of embraces and separations, she utters one of the most beautiful confessions in the Bible: “I am my beloved’s, and his desire is toward me.” He is all. She is at peace in the security of his love. The book ends with the pair going out, arm in arm, to see if the vineyards are ready for harvest. That, my friends, is boring.

Here are some boring things I have rediscovered. First, the whole of Christianity can be summed up in the phrase, “Repent, and believe the gospel.” Simply put, (1) I am not God; (2) He is.

Second, God without my permission has given me four things that are essential to my well-being. They are not my doing; they are his gifts. The New Testament church found them after Pentecost, lying at their feet, tenderly wrapped and addressed to them. They are (1) the preached word, which I need because I forget the truth at least weekly; (2) the Lord’s Supper, the visible word, a pledge of Christ’s sacrifice and of his union with me; (3) fellowship with other believers, whose gifts complement mine, and whose perceptions correct my warped ones; (4) prayer, both corporate and personal.

My suspicion is that these things are boring. They are not exhilarating, relevant, subjective, moralistic, individualistic, and contain no clue as to which current presidential candidate will usher in the Second Coming. They are repetitive, like eating.

(At this point I lost my thread of thought, and began to stare out the window, munching on cheese crackers and thinking about whether or not to weed the fescue in my Bermuda grass, or just hope it’s all the same color green eventually. I’m remembering people I have loved and still love, thinking I may go sit next to Anne on the couch and fall asleep. It’s quiet in the house. May the Lord bless us and Bore us all to Death.)

Advances in the Study of Greek

Review of Constantine Campbell's Advances in the Study of Greek: New Insights for Reading the New Testament (Zondervan, Grand Rapids, 2015)

I am beginning this blog with a deceptive title, but I had to name it something. This is not a review. Reviews are written by peers who are qualified intellectually to take on a discussion of something like Campbell's work. I am not. Neither is this a response or a reply, for the same reason. This blog is at a much more emotional level, like the reaction of a man who finds after 40 years that he has been using the wrong grade motor oil in his cars and wondering why his engines failed, or like that of a man who has been driving to work for twenty minutes over the years only to find out that an unknown shortcut would have lowered it to fifteen, if only he had known about it.

I also need to tell the reader that this blog is esoteric. It is aimed at pastors and teachers who remember "lego, -eis, -ei, -omen, ete, and -ousi" and who parsed and declined faithfully in pursuit of the deeper meanings of the very words of God. Anyone else is certainly welcome to come along.

Advances in the Study of Greek is an examination of the recent impact of both secular and Christian studies in linguistic theory on our understanding of New Testament (Koine) Greek. Readers may recognize names like Chomsky and Nida, but the other scholars mentioned in Advances will probably not be well known to the average pastor. More recent studies (meaning from the late 1800's to the present) are challenging the way Greek has been taught in Christian colleges and seminaries. At present there is overlap between the old and newer methods. But the times they are a'changing. Here are some major points:

(1) New Testament Greek needs to be de-Latinized. I took two years of Latin in high school (back when a foreign language was required!). When I took classical Greek in college, I found it relatively easy, because we squeezed Greek into the Latin system of conjugations and declensions. That worked fine until we came to those weird moods (optative) and voices (middle), and a host of deponent verbs (passive forms translated as active). I was taught that those forms were, well, weird, and I should accept that fact and move on. That was the result of insisting that Greek follow a Latin paradigm. There is of course a historic reason for this. While there were a number of Greek scholars during the Middle Ages, the fall of Constantinople and the rise of Protestantism @1500 meant a wider audience for Greek studies. And since the West had preserved Latin in the church and university, it was natural to use a Western approach to Greek, which to my understanding included Eastern concepts such as complete/incomplete action (difficult for the Western mind to grasp).

At any rate, breaking the Latin mold freed Koine Greek to be itself. Some modern scholars are questioning whether there is any such thing as deponent verbs, and are looking at the middle voice as something more than an unexplainable half breed between the active and passive forms. In fact, the middle (in which the subject participates in the action of the verb) may be a “normal” voice, and the passive an extension of it. Scholars are also questioning whether the perfect tense is really perfect, and whether the aorist is merely punctiliar in time. OK. I’m now over my head. The point is that de-Latinizing Koine Greek has allowed the language to speak on its own terms and a newer method of teaching and learning is developing.

(2) Koine Greek needs to be put into its context historically and grammatically. Prior to the late 19th Century, New Testament Greek was considered a “Holy Ghost” language. But the discovery of “everyday” documents on papyrus and clay show that the same Greek was the lingua franca of the Roman world, and the New Testament was written in a totally comprehensible common language. It was also a language that had evolved over time. That means that my practice of reaching for Liddell and Scott’s classical Greek lexicon (the Greek of Plato and the dramatists) when preparing a sermon was a major no-no.

Likewise, grammatical context is important. Any word can have multiple meanings, but it does not have all those meanings in every context. When I used to do exegesis I developed the habit of listing all possible meanings in the lexicon and reading them into a word in the text without considering the context, or transposing the meaning from the same word in another verse. That too is a no-no. This is common sense, but the practice is an indication of too loose an approach to biblical language, a type of linguistic mysticism.

(3) Pronunciation has evolved over time. This was a real shocker to me. I was taught to use classic Latin pronunciation of the Greek text. (I once took a class with Phillip Hughes, an Australian who used a different system that made the dative singular of “pas” sound like the English “panty,” a bit disconcerting. He always read the Greek text out loud himself before we translated, because he couldn’t handle our barbarisms.) But I digress. According to Campbell, there was a radical shift in pronunciation between the Homeric/classical periods and the rise of the Koine. Spelling errors on papyrus and clay receipts, invoices, and personal letters show that vowel sounds were overlapping and merging. Campbell believes that Koine was pronounced much more like modern Greek than classical.

Using modern pronunciation means that most vowels and diphthongs (except a, e, ei, and ou) sound like the letter “i” in “pin.” Delta sounds phonetically like “dh” (th as in “then”), and initial gamma before some vowels is like the consonant “y.” Beta is pronounced like “v,” as it is in the Cyrillic alphabet. So “boulomai” is “voolomi,” “ginomai” becomes “yinomi,” and “didomi’” is “dhidhomi.” Of course this means that all my years of dazzling parishioners and students with high sounding Greek words were filled with inaccuracies.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

The fact is that most of us who took courses in biblical languages simply learned how to use resources that told us in our own language what term meant in another. We learned to use lexicons and word study books that translated meanings into our own language. What Campbell and others are trying to do is to get us into the heart of another language and (if even briefly) allow us to see reality through those thought forms. Anyone who has taken Koine Greek in the past and is committed both to biblical inerrancy and precise exegesis needs to read Campbell’s book.

Keep Yourselves in the Love of God

-But you, beloved, building up yourselves in your most holy faith and praying in the Holy Spirit, keep yourselves in the love of God, waiting for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ that leads to eternal life. -Jude 20-21 ESV

In recent days I have found myself coming back to this phrase in Jude: "Keep yourselves in the love of God." This certainly does not mean that God's love for me is variable or that I have to earn it. God's love is a burning light around me at my best and at my worst. Jude must mean that I have a responsibility to line up my subjective inner response to God with the objective reality, so that I walk in spiritual health. I, like many, have been beset during my Christian journey with the distractions of the world, the flesh, and the devil, that breed fear and disappointment and unreal expectations that have kept me from resting in the truth of the love of God consistently. The Bible describes the Christian life as warfare, and this struggle, this "striving to enter the rest," is the front line. I don't think my experience is unique.

Somewhere I have a plaque that says, "We crucify ourselves between two thieves: regret for the past and fear for the future." These are two of the enemy's weapons, and they are useful to him as I age, because I have more of a history to regret, and more infirmity to fear. Knowledge of God's love is their only antidote, a love which turns regret into strengthened character, and fear into hope.

Jude gives some practical ways to keep ourselves in the love of God, in a string of participial phrases. Let's take a look at them.

"... building yourselves up in your most holy faith..." I do not think Jude is primarily referring to my own inner faith here. That would be a redundancy. Inner faith only increases as it contemplates that which is other. The subjective responds to the objective. So I take "faith" here in the sense of "the faith," the body of truth that Paul refers to in 1 Corinthians 16:13 and "the faith" encompassed in Jesus' initial message: "Repent and believe the gospel." To repent means I assent to my own depravity; it means I assent to God's right to be offended by it. To repent means that I accept the immutability of God and his unbending unwillingness to grade on a curve or be the tolerant old grandfather of popular theology.

But then I am called upon to "believe the gospel." There I discover a wonder that far outshines mere tolerance: GOD MEETS HIS OWN DEMAND. God becomes incarnate. God dies. God assumes the judgment. God buries judgment in the tomb. God comes to life with his arms opened wide. That is the gospel, and in it I find the love of God of which Jude speaks. This is what I am called to contemplate over and over. Here is freedom. Everyday I am called to again "repent and believe the gospel." And when I do I am kept in the love of God.

"...praying in the Holy Spirit..." Some may limit this phrase to praying in tongues, and while that has value, I would not limit it to that. I find that when I pray my mind is constantly chattering; in fact, I talk to myself far too much. To pray in the Spirit is to enter a place of quiet in which I can hear him speak. I have found recently, and far too late in my life, that if I quit reasoning and ask God for a solution to a problem or a question, he really does answer (we don’t receive because we don’t ask). My responsibility is to be quiet enough to hear the Spirit’s voice. And when I do hear, his reply is always related to the gospel and the love of God. Ultimately, that love is the answer.

“...waiting for the mercy of the Lord Jesus Christ that leads to eternal life...” This of course does not mean that God’s mercy is only in the future, or that his mercy towards us increases over time. It does mean that God’s mercy will never fail, and that the mercy we receive in the gospel will reach its objective in our perfection and freedom from sin. The present mercy of God is eschatological. A perfect ending leads to hope, and hope verifies that “God’s love has been poured into our hearts” (Romans 5:5).

Summary: Jude exhorted us to keep ourselves in the love of God because he understood the nature of the Christian’s battle against our regrets and fears that cause us to doubt that love. We can do so by meditating on both our own inability and the power of the gospel. Quietly hearing the Spirit’s voice and waiting patiently for the gospel’s consummation keep us focused on God’s love for us.

**May God’s Christmas blessing rest on those of you that read this. Let’s continue to pray for one another. This has been an eventful year for us--sold our house in Kodak, lived in an apartment for 6 months, moved to Charlotte on the tail end of hurricane Joaquin, jumped through all the usual hoops: tags, address changes, hanging pictures, finding places to shop, new church, new friends. You may not know that we are in a mixed community on the east side. Making friends and praying for an inlet for the gospel through real relationships. The job at the Billy Graham Library (part time) is one of the best I’ve had, but I am having some difficulty staying on my feet for long periods. More a matter of dizziness than pain. Anne is still doing her insurance business, keeping up with TN clients and a few new ones here. She is playing some tennis, but looking for permanent courts. We have found the parks in Mint Hill and walk a lot. David and Channon are in San Pedro, CA. They are doing great. Good job and location. Beth is likewise, and only 9 miles away. Blessing to everybody, Rick**

Immensity

O God, thou art terrible out of thy holy places. -Psalm 68:35

I glean most of my knowledge of science in waiting rooms. At a doctor's office last week I picked up a copy of the Smithsonian and tried to work my way through a description of post-Einstein physics, which I can summarize hazily in purely layman's terms. Like Charlie Brown, I can only see a chickie and a duckie. According to this article, Einstein's discovery that gravity bends light opened the door to the fact that gravity also bends space itself, and (this is very simplistic) "waves" of space are created by the gravitational influence of objects light years away, which we have the capacity to measure. I also read somewhere that space not only "bends," it is expanding. Let me say that again. Material objects are not just moving out from a central point in space; the universe, space itself, is expanding. My mind, which dwells in time and space, asks, though I try to prevent it, "into what?" Whoa.

In a National Geographic that I picked up in the barber shop I found an article about the opposite: inner or atomic space. This article reported that if the nucleus of an average atom were the size of a beach ball perched in New York City, the nearest electron would be in Philadelphia. That's a lot of empty space. What keeps my posterior from sinking into my chair is not matter at all; it is energy. This has something to do with E=MC squared. Again, whoa.

Now I believe these discoveries are manifestations of the work of God. I know the materialist will argue the opposite, and I do not have the skill for that debate. Creationist Ken Ham once pointed out that every time we push the majesty of God out to its limits in our minds, God ups the ante. That is certainly happening rapidly in our shifting understanding of the universe. As a Christian, I take the existence of such a God on faith (Hebrews 11:3), defining faith here not as mindless credulity, but as the power of truth that breaks through my sinful desire to have a meaningless universe so I can be God. Sorry that is pejorative to the materialist. But sin is a darkness that pervades everything. Faith is a gift that turns on the light.

I said my purpose here is not to enter into the creation debate. My purpose is to remind the Christian with just Whom he is in relationship. CS Lewis commented once that we should not be intimidated with mere immensity. I agree to a point, but sometimes contemplating God's immensity helps. I find it comforting, when I awaken early in the morning wondering if Social Security is about to mess up my Medicare D billing, to remember that the God who finds great joy in the Horsehead Nebula can most likely deliver me from my fear of bureaucracy. We give Him too little credit for His ability to carry out His preordained and loving purpose in our lives.

So far I have been speaking of what theologians call the economic nature of God--that which we know of Him based on nature and on revelation. But there is a deeper reality in God ( the "essential" nature), the reality that God only knows within Himself, and which we will begin to taste when death has purified us. We do not touch that reality well with our reason. We come closer to sensing His essence when we experience Love or Joy. There we sense an Immensity beyond comprehension.

I said earlier that my purpose is to remind Christians with Whom they are in relationship. For those of us who are believers, a reminder of the immensity and power of God is a comfort. But that is not all the story. That same God is as morally perfect as He is omnipotent. That means that flippancy and presumption have no place in our approach to Him. When, in His incarnation, He said "Repent and believe the gospel," that is what He meant. We are called upon to do both repeatedly. Repentance means to change one's mind, and is related to confession, which means to agree with God. It is the end of resistance and subterfuge, and is a great relief because it brings us into the stream of what God knows about us already. To believe the gospel means that everything necessary to our salvation and well being rests upon Christ and Christ alone.

Repentance and belief rely upon on each other. Repentance forces us to Christ, and the grace of Christ working through the gospel reveals the depravity that leads to repentance. Both are great and Immense works within us, comparable to death and resurrection. Repentance without the gospel produces melancholy and legalism; the gospel without deep repentance produces easy believism and a Jesus who is more like a cosmic Dr. Phil who exists to get us good parking places.

We never outgrow the cycle of repentance and belief. All our attempts to find other "lifes" beyond that cycle (deeper life, higher life, union life, the Spirit filled life, etc.) lead at least to disappointment and at most to idolatry. The all powerful God of Immensity uses repentance and belief to work Immense change in us. "For God, who said, 'Let light shine out of darkness,' has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ."

What Is Discernment?

When I was a young pastor, there was a new convert in our church who realized that he had been chosen to be one of the two witnesses mentioned in Revelation 11. I had some issues with this, because while he was enthusiastic about breathing fire, he showed some reluctance about being killed and having his body exposed in the street for three and a half days. In addition, I have known at least four of these future witnesses, and by the rules of simple arithmetic, somebody is wrong. I have not heard from this man for years, and I am assuming that he has matured, moved on in the faith, and has given up nonsense.

Why is this? Why do Christians wander into strange teachings and just plain foolishness? One reason is that some are not grounded in the Scriptures. The answer to that is good teaching and sound study habits. Another reason is youth and immaturity. The answer to that is mentoring and a lot of patience. But there is a deeper reason why Christians are open to deception. James 1:14 says, "Each person is tempted when he lured and enticed by his own desire." The fact is that we are all sinners, and there is still in our nature the temptation to short circuit God's plan for us, to know mysteries that other Christians do not, and to pursue ideas and practices that are based on our own understanding rather than on a humble awareness of our need for grace. The assumption that we cannot be deceived is itself a deception.

Definition

The Bible calls the capacity to distinguish between God's light and our confusion "discernment." It is a fairly easy term to define. The Greek word most commonly used in the New Testament means to "judge through," to judge rightly, to perceive truth, or to distinguish between good and evil. Simply, it means to recognize the truth of God, both in doctrine and experience, and to recognize its opposites: error and deception in both our thoughts and actions.

But while defining discernment is fairly easy, practicing it is a more difficult matter. If it is the pursuit of truth, we then have to ask, "what is truth?" Where do we begin to build a foundation? The best way to know what is false is to know the "feel" of the real, just as bank tellers spot counterfeit bills by handling real money. So, where do we begin to define truth?

The Source of Discernment

As a Protestant believer I affirm the following as a basis for discernment: the heart of truth is the Word of God. The heart of the Word of God is the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ. The heart of the gospel is the unconditional love of God for His redeemed people. There is no better starting point.

To develop this idea, let's look at Paul's comments in Philippians 1:9. "And it is my prayer that your love may abound more and more, with (in) knowledge and all discernment...." The word for discernment here is a bit different from the more common word. Basically, it means to perceive or understand, and to grow in insight through experience. The important thing is to see that the source of true discernment is love. Or to put it better, love is the soil in which discernment grows, the environment in which it flourishes. Discernment is only as strong as the love that supports it. Paul repeats this same idea in Ephesians 2:17-18: "...that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may have strength to comprehend (discern) with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth...."

That means that true discernment will be motivated by love, and the truth it seeks will manifest love (for God, for neighbor). We might even say that love contains within itself the power of discernment. This is especially true when we look at love's opposites. 1 Corinthians 13 tells us that love in not arrogant and rude, selfish and irritable, or vindictive. Any approach to doctrine or action that begins with the self is sure to breed deception.

The Apostle John points out another opposite of love: "There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear." (1 John 4:18) Modern Christians are fascinated with conspiracy theories, signs of the end times, fear of the government, fear of the Illuminati, fear of Islam, and fear of secular humanism, all in spite of the fact that Jesus proclaimed that He had overcome the world and was the sovereign Lord of all history. When He described "people fainting with fear and foreboding of what is coming on the world," (Luke 21:26) He was speaking of unbelievers, not His ransomed people.

To base an attempt to discern truth or action on fear will lead to deception, and anyone who deliberately gives counsel or draws conclusions for other Christians on the basis of conspiracies, hidden agendas, or secret truths never understood before, is ministering fear, not the encouragement that comes from the Word of God and the presence of His Holy Spirit with us.

To summarize, discernment of God's truth and will is based on love, and grows from and with it. Where arrogance or fear are substituted for love, deception is not far behind.

The Fruits of Discernment

To this point, we have been defining discernment in terms of its source, its environment, or the soil in which it grows. Now continuing this analogy which treats discernment as a living organism (a tree or a plant), let's look at what discernment produces. What are its fruits? If these fruits, or results, are present, then there is a good chance that real discernment is operating. Paul lists four of these in the same passage we've been considering, Philippians 1:9-11.

First fruit: "...that you may approve what is excellent...." True spiritual discernment will strive to surpass distracting pitfalls and find not only the truth of God in a teaching or a situation, but the highest or the best. One Bible dictionary rightly translates "excellent" as "the thing that really matters." Therefore, discernment looks not just for the good, but for the best. This is one of the most subtle facts about discernment; it finds that the good thing is often a distraction from the best. That means that discerning an idea or issue takes time, and does not assume an immediate answer.

A good example of this is the temptation of Jesus. There was nothing innately evil in His desire to turn stones into bread. He was hungry, He was the eternal Lord of creation, which included stones and bread, and had a divine right to meet His human needs. We might say that the impulse was in some sense "good."

That's true only if we look at that impulse as an isolated event. But when it is put into the context of Satan's agenda, we see it as a prelude to a second impulse, the desire to prove His divinity by a supernatural act (throwing Himself off the Temple) that would short-circuit His Father's path to His glorification through humiliation. This attempt to exalt Himself outside the Father's plan would have led ultimately to the unthinkable adoration of Satan by the Son of God.

My point here is that something "good" may be a prelude to something far worse. True discernment by-passes the good to find the excellent, the "thing that really matters." As hard as it sounds, sometimes discernment has to wade its way from the "good" that may have pride lurking beneath it, to the best, which fulfils James' injunction: "God resists the proud and gives grace to the humble." (4:6)

Before moving to the next point, let me add a word of comfort. All Christians fail in discernment, and like all spiritual virtues, it must be learned. God still guides and controls our maturing. Moses failed in discernment when he killed the Egyptian in hopes of starting a movement that would free his people. Instead he was rejected by them and incurred the wrath of Pharaoh. The result was a time of separation in which he learned that God was the true deliverer, and that God needed a broken vessel more than he needed a zealot. God used Moses' failure to work true maturity and discernment in him. Be encouraged! God works the same way in all of us, and He is faithful to complete what He begins.

Second fruit: "...and so be pure and blameless for the day of Christ...." Let's examine these words for a moment. "Pure" ("sincere" in the KJV) literally means to be judged or tested by the light of the sun. Paul says in 2 Corinthians 2:17, "...in the sight of God we speak in Christ." Discernment, therefore, is finding that which will stand up under God's gaze. In the first part of this verse, the apostles declares, "We are not, like so many, peddlers of God's word, but as men of sincerity...." Any esoteric revelation or hitherto hidden steps to spirituality that come with a price cannot stand the light of God's gaze; and any "truth" that is only for the specially enlightened appeals to the ego, and will remain obscure and avoid the light. True discernment will recognize the inherent darkness in both of these.

The other word that Paul uses in this phrase is "blameless," or "without offense." It literally means, "something that will not cause someone to stumble." Spiritual discernment recognizes that anything that damages a little one (believer) is deception, not truth. False teaching and practices leave in their wake believers who are depressed and guilt-ridden because they cannot achieve what is promised by having a secret revelation, more faith, or the key to victorious living. Holding out performance based acceptance feeds guilt and uncertainty, and leads the believer away from his humble rest at the feet of Jesus, who is his only and perfect victory. Anything outside the finished work of Christ for us is a return to law, and law brings bondage.

Third fruit: ..."filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ...." Righteousness does not mean our righteousness based on our efforts or works. It means the righteousness that is imputed or reckoned to us on the basis of Christ's substitution for us. Paul is referring to the same transaction that he describes in 2 Corinthians 5:21: "For his sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God." God imputed (reckoned) our sin to Jesus, and he bore both sin and its penalty. Likewise God imputed the righteousness of Christ to us, and accepts us as His sons and daughters through Him.

True discernment will recognize that any teaching or practice that moves off gospel ground is deception. The gospel (the story of what Jesus has done and its application to us) saves totally. Puritan John Flavel wrote, "All that was to be done by way of impetration and meritorious redemption is fully done; no hand can come after his; angels can add nothing to it. 'That is perfected to which nothing is wanting, and to which nothing can be added.' Such is the work of Christ finished. Whatever the law demanded is perfectly paid; whatever a sinner needs is perfectly obtained and purchased; nothing can be added to what Christ has done; he put the last hand to it, when he said, it is finished." (Flavel, Works, The Fountain of Life, Kindle 11374)

There is no such thing as the gospel plus something, the gospel plus works, the gospel plus faith (faith flows from the gospel), the gospel plus a deeper revelation, the gospel plus a more surrendered life (the gospel compels us to surrender), the gospel plus social action. All additions to the gospel that intend to help save us are misleading. There is nothing higher, or deeper, or broader than the gospel, and all legitimate means of growing as Christians are part of it.

Unfortunately, evangelicals for years have been preaching the gospel as merely the first step on the Christian ladder. Supposedly, once we have passed it, we can move on to higher rungs. Instead of the sum total of all we are, the gospel is something we took care of back when we were born again. Michael Horton put it this way in Christless Christianity : "We got in by grace but now we need to stay in (or at least become first-class, sold-out, victorious, fully surrendered Christians) by following various steps, lists, and practices. There was this brief and shining moment of grace, but now the rest of the Christian life is about our experience, feelings, commitment, and obedience." (Kindle 120) Anything that calls us to a higher place in God that leaves the gospel behind is ultimately a move towards darkness and desperation. True discernment will always begin and end with the cross.

Fourth fruit: "...to the glory and praise of God." The word "glory" is almost impossible to define, because it is an attribute of an infinitely perfect God, who rules all His creation according to His sovereign will, and in addition reaches down to redeem and reconcile lost and rebellious sinners to Himself.

Our response to such a God is to "give Him glory." We usually identify this action as worship, and that is entirely appropriate. But the term can also mean "give Him credit" for everything He is and does. We give Him credit primarily in His dual role as Lord and Savior.

First, God is Lord, meaning that He is sovereign King over all the universe, over history, and over our individual lives. That means that any teaching that makes us responsible to save ourselves or solve our own problems or move in a self-motivated direction without His guidance is deception. Anything that implies that we are masters of our own fate is deception. Anything that calls us to do something for God, rather than His carrying out His plans through us is deception. "For from him, and through him, and for him, are all things."

Secondly, we give credit to God as our Savior. This has already been covered in our discussion of righteousness. So let me reiterate by saying that anything that removes Christ from His place as perfect and only Mediator between God and man is deception.

Summary

Spiritual discernment is the Christian's ability to distinguish truth from error, deliberate fraud, or nonsense (in teaching or in practice). It's tools are the Bible, experience, and the inner witness of the Holy Spirit. Discernment grows as the Christian grows, and is rooted and flourishes in love. The more love for God and man increase, the more discernment increases. Discernment protects us from missing God, yet at the same time God uses our failures to discern properly to mature us.

True discernment bears fruit, and that fruit is evidence that we are discerning correctly. True discernment will 1) choose the best instead of the good, 2) recognize what can stand the gaze of God and not cause another to stumble, 3) confess that all our righteousness is Christ's righteousness imputed to us, and 4) give glory to God as our Savior and Lord.

There is one question I ask when confronted with a new teaching or a new spiritual practice: "So what?" If the answer is not rooted in love, or if it fails to lead to the fruit Paul described in Philippians, it is deception.

More Thinking About Church

"Dad, I'm a wine and cheese girl in a beer and pizza town."

-My daughter Beth after moving from Charleston (SC) to St. Louis

I've called this blog "More Thinking About Church" because I think obsessively about the church, and this blog is more thinking about it. These thoughts grow out of a sense in the last few years of not quite belonging to said institution, and yet very much belonging, a paradox based on having trouble with different church structures. Anyway, I had an epiphany the other day, which some of you may choose to call a duh moment. I realized that during my lifetime I have experienced not one, but two types of church structure, and as I have begun to unmuddle them, I have reached, if not enlightenment, at least some degree of peace.

Constitutional Model

The first of these structures I want to call the "constitutional" church, meaning a church based on a traditional denominational system of theology, usually in written form, to which the leaders (clergy) owe allegiance, and of which they are representatives. This form covers a wide range of traditions. A Roman priest who is saying mass is not merely an individual who claims to be hearing directly from God; he is a representative of the whole weighty 2000 year history and dogma of Catholicism, and while he may express personal opinions, his primary vocation is to be an agent of the authority behind him. Likewise a Presbyterian pastor is (or used to be) a faithful spokesperson for Calvinism and the Westminster Confession. When I use the term “constitutional,” I therefore mean a church in which the tradition, history, and doctrine of an ecclesiastical body is more important than the vision or personality of its clergy. Normally constitutional leaders are trained in the theology of their respective denominations, biblical languages and exegesis, preaching, liturgy, and pastoral care and counseling, all of which are to be applied in the context of a higher allegiance.

A historic outgrowth of the constitutional church is (was) the parish model of church organization. In the parish system, one man shepherds a local congregation of laymen which is small enough for him to manage, and large enough to support him financially. He is not too concerned about church growth because it is accomplished by creating new parishes rather than expanding the membership of the local church. The priest/pastor knows his flock. He preaches, teaches, administers the sacraments, marries and buries its members. He knows his people, is in their homes, and is unhurried enough to sit on the porch and talk to brother Hobart about his wife, his kids, his job, his political and social concerns, and the weather. He does all this in the name of the Bishop, Presbytery, or Convention, and incarnates their invisible presence. This does not mean, however, that he is micro-managed. Within denominational limits, he has the autonomy to apply Scripture and doctrine to the needs of his particular congregation. His people are as much his study as Bible and theology. He is very much a man in the middle.

The greatest strength of the parish system is its sense of security, warmth, and longevity, based on the shepherd-sheep relationship. People in a parish church know their priest/pastor.

There are some problems, however. One is that when the shepherd-sheep relationship is broken, contention arises, because there are personal commitments involved. Barna tells us that the average stay of a second pastor in a Protestant church is about 18 months. He is already doomed because he is not number one. Pastor number three generally does well, because he is not number two, and is perceived as a healer after the turmoil blamed on number two. (I know some wise Baptist pastors who covet the number three spot.) The problem here is not personalities, but the system.

A second problem is staleness and resistance to change. Security resists spiritual renewal. This is often connected to what is happening in the general culture, and I will come back to that later.

A third problem occurs when there is a shift, inconsistency, or hypocrisy concerning the constitution of the larger body (in doctrine or practice). This has been an issue in the major Protestant denominations for decades. The result is contention and restiveness in local parishes. It destroys the sense of security and often sets parishioners at odds with their clergy. In this case unrest flows into the church from the top.

Fourth, mentoring of younger potential leaders is weak. This is because promising candidates for ministry are trained in denominational seminaries and sent to other parishes. Therefore, future ministry in the parish seldom comes up from the grass roots.

Apostolic Model

I have tried hard to avoid this term, but I am going to persevere with it. By "apostolic" I am in no way connecting it to Jesus Only Pentecostals, nor to Catholic apostolic succession, nor to "continuing church" Anglicanism. I am using it in the modern charismatic sense, describing a church founded and led by a highly gifted individual with a passion for renewal and a vision for what the church should and can be, with a capacity to gather followers who are infected with the same vision. We might call this individual an ecclesiastical entrepreneur, but I'm sticking with "apostle."

Apostolic churches are usually large and intend to keep growing. They are generally committed to multiplication by division; that is, as they grow they create sub-units or campuses which are themselves large by the parish standard. Leaders of sub-units are directly connected to the founder, and represent his vision. Leaders are consequently raised up within the local church structure, and mentoring is much more important than in the parish model. The most serious problem with the apostolic model is obvious. It centers on the vision and energy of one man. If he is solid doctrinally and ethically, the church will be. If he is in heresy, the church will be heretical. Consider the number of churches of this type that emphasize self-esteem, positive thinking, and faith as a metaphysical force to which God Himself must submit. Powerful leaders produce powerful ideas. Thank God for a handful of apostolic churches that are rooted in Reformation and/or evangelical mainline understanding of the gospel.

Another problem in this type of church is more subjective: Stress. Apostolic churches are by nature entrepreneurial, which means they can never sit still, but are always on the way somewhere, readjusting, and honing their vision. There is the underlying assumption that the Kingdom of God can always be done better, and that the church in time and space (read: parish model) has failed. Being a loyal member can be exhausting.

A third problem results from the large size of most apostolic churches: pastoral care. Leaders in theses churches are often stretched too thin, and the everyday shepherding of individuals (the strength of the parish model) suffers. The solution to this problem is generally small groups or house churches, overseen by laymen who have had some training, but not at the level of a parish priest or pastor. That means that there is no one in leadership who exactly fits the old role, and an unspoken (or forgotten) question is, “Who exactly is my pastor?”

A Balance?

Is there a way to combine these two structures? I personally don't think so. At least, not in any given time. But over time, there is a definite balance. Jesus mentored twelve men, who in turn mentored others. The expansion of the New Testament church was based on the mentoring principle. But within a generation, Jesus' mentorees were writing what became the constitution of the new movement, and it became the foundation of the early church parish system. The Reformation saw the rise of what I am calling "apostolic" men, and again, within a generation there were a host of written Confessions that became the basis of the Lutheran, Reformed, and Baptist churches.

Safe, secure, and prosperous times in a culture will support the parish system. Insecurity and the collapse of a moral consensus in a culture will see the rise of Christian entrepreneurs. I was raised in the parish system and trained in it. I would much prefer to sit on the back porch sipping lemonade, and looking at Hobart’s corn crop and the homes of his children on the edge of his land. But Hobart today is a different man. He is working two jobs to stay in the middle class, his wife has a home business, his son is struggling with his sexual identity, his daughter is in treatment for oxycodone addiction, and in place of the corn field is a new sub-division.

The culture is in foment, and the church follows. It is exhausting, and explains the exodus of a number of evangelicals to “high” churches, especially Orthodoxy. I know the tug, and the desire for peace in the storm. It reminds me of my favorite Joseph Sobran quote: “It is exalting to belong to a church 500 years behind the times, and sublimely indifferent to fashion; it is humiliating to belong to a church 5 minutes behind the time, huffing and puffing to catch up.” But culturally, we seem to be in an apostolic time.

But, oh, I do miss the old parish system in which I grew up, predictable and secure.