For Us

If God is for us, who can be against us?

Perception, especially in the Christian faith, is everything. One such perception dawned on me when I read these words in Romans 8 this week. I tend to see God as a stationary Person whom I must approach to find forgiveness, encouragement, or solace. After all, Jesus spoke of himself as the "way," which implies that I must go on a some form of mini-journey to find him.

But for a moment, this verse in Romans pulled back a veil, and I saw things in reverse. I realized that I am not a Christian because I am for God, but because he is for me. We "love him because he first loved us." Or to use spatial language, we believe in him because he first moved towards us.

He moved towards us in the Incarnation. That was wholly his initiative. While the Jews may have prayed for deliverance and for a manifestation of the rightness of their revelation, the actual fact of the Incarnation was startling to the point of offense. And it certainly made no impact on philosophical pagans, for whom salvation was the escape of the spirit from the confines of human flesh.

He moved towards us in the earthly life of Jesus. The Jews defined ritual cleanliness as the opposite of uncleanness--hence the stringent laws about the place (or dis-placement) of lepers in the society. Yet Jesus walked into groups of lepers and touched them. The healing power within him was stronger than the effect of the disease upon him. Reversing the Old Testament principle of defilement, the light of Christ overcame the darkness. And he approached them.

He moved towards us in his cross and resurrection. I don't want to belabor the doctrine of the atonement here; but I want to point out that in these events God the Father made it possible for himself to dwell with and in beings who still struggle with uncleanness and are intellectually finite. A way has been opened for us to fellowship with him as we are, while being changed by it.

The gospel is certainly not something we earn. By definition it is the evangelium, the "good news." And it is good news because it is the initiative of God, his willingness to run to us when we are running from him. Without his initiative, their is no hope of salvation.

We've all seen romantic moments in a movie, or in a commercial, in which a husband gives his wife a gift beyond his means, but which demonstrates his love. Her response: "O George, what have you done?" The question sounds like an accusation. But it is the opposite-- a question based on the joy of experiencing something too good to be true. Incarnation, life, death, resurrection--I found myself asking in my last reading of Romans 8, "O God, what have you done?"

Year's End

I got up this morning to a sheet of ice over the roads. No way I'm getting to work. So it seemed like a good time to begin on the "obligatory" end of the year review. First, external events.

Four events stick in my mind. In the summer we rented a condo at Hilton Head, which we shared with David and Beth. Had good times on the beach and struggled with a catamaran. The best times were sitting around the table on the deck in the mornings and watching the squirrels and the turtles and sharing with each other. Over the weekend of July 4th Anne and I borrowed her brother's lake house in NC and invited the Kelloggs to stay with us. They mentored us in our younger days. John is in his eighties now, and flies to Africa 3 or 4 times a year. God has opened a wide ministry for him there. His counsel to us has stuck with me: "Be expectant, but lay down your expectations." It takes a lifetime to come to that conclusion.

In October we went to Salt Lake City for a Max conference. Were very busy, and did not see as much of the area as I would have liked. But what we did see was impressive: very clean city with beautiful surroundings and friendly people. We did spend a few hours poking around Temple Square. It gave me a bad case of the heebee-jeebees, seeing the glint in the eyes of true believers and statues of Joseph Smith, et.al. Not to deny the influence of Mormonism on American culture--we stayed in the downtown flagship Marriott. Nice.

The big event of the year was just a couple of weeks ago--David and Channon's wedding. David in our minds is one of the most loving and caring people on earth, and we've prayed for a long time for love in his life and an end to loneliness. This sure seems to be the real deal. We love Channon and look forward to getting to know her better.

As for internal events: I suppose I should divide these into negatives and positives. On the negative side, I have had an ongoing battle with depression this year. It is exacerbated by the fact that depression can be as homey and friendly as an old blanket--all warm and cozy and debilitating as hell. Breaking away from it is like slogging through a swamp to dry land.

I have a plaque in our bathroom that reads, "We crucify ourselves between two thieves: regret for the past, and fear of the future." That pretty well sums in up. I have spent hours analyzing my past, trying to make some sense of events, especially during the last few years. It's a hopeless task. The past can be viewed through so many perceptions that in the end only God knows what it means. I suppose he is much more concerned with the finished product than the chain of events. "Forgetting those things that are behind...."

As for the future--Anne and I did not plan well for retirement (if that is even a value anymore), and the crash of 2008 hurt what we did have. Like most Americans, Social Security will sustain us only at a subsistence level. I see a cliff looming ahead as we get older. I counter this fear by reminding myself that God has never ceased to provide for us any time in the past or present.

As for the present: I enjoy getting up and going to work every day. The best part of my job is my relationship to my fellow workers. We are all supportive and know each other well enough to give counsel. I would miss that if I left. On the other hand, I am more aware than ever that "all men are liars." I am constantly disappointed with our clients--misdemeanor probationers. It's easy to believe that the entire county is hyped up on uppers or downers, is consciously deceitful, and obsessed with an entitlement mentality. Responsibility is a foreign idea. Oxycontin is like candy in the high school. Bottom line: the culture is sick and the judicial system is broken. Deeper bottom line: Jesus really is the hope of the world. Everything else is some kind of delusional band-aid. Feel like I'm
wasting my time and trying to put a good face on it with half-measures.

Well, there's that. On the positive side, Anne and I have enjoyed our experience with Max International this year. Max is a network marketing company that manufactures a supplement that increases the strongest anti-oxidant in the body by 200-300%. Increases energy and retards aging. We've had a good personal experience with it. After the bad experience many of us had with the big "A" in the 1970's, this company has been refreshing. We're impressed with the corporate leadership and with our local team. It is gradually generating some extra income for the coming years.

Of course network marketing can be a bit weird. Large numbers of associates are Christians--and network marketing by its nature can take on the earmarks of the church. There are apostolic fathers, mentors, discipleship, enthusiastic meetings, and evangelistic techniques, plus a payoff in material blessings. There is a thin line between a business that applies biblical principles and a cult. A thin line that I intend to keep an eye on.

And on the positive side, there is Jesus. Light of the world who meets me every morning. He is solid and "there." Buber's Thou. Increasingly the world system around me is becoming meaningless, and he is becoming the source of all meaning. There just isn't any meaning or purpose anywhere else. There is great joy in him, and I know it would increase if I ceased to grieve for the passing away of the world. Thanks to contributors to that joy this year: the elders of our church, Solzhenitsyn, Oswald Chambers, Fr. Steve Freeman (great blog), Alexander Schmemann (For the Life of the World), John Kellogg, Anne's love, David's caring, Beth's wisdom, all Facebook friends, and my co-workers. What a hodge-podge of God's mystery and delight!

Merry Christmas, everybody.

The Gates

Just finished reading John Connolly’s The Gates, a book for older children (and adults). In it the powers of hell try to invade earth by a combination of clumsy witchcraft and the Hadron Particle Collider—science and demons intertwined in ways that are reminiscent of warnings from CS Lewis.

Connolly is a word master and just plain funny. Here is a sample:

Nurd, the Scourge of Five Deities, sat on his gilded throne, his servant Wormwood at his feet, his kingdom spread before him, and yawned.

“Bored, Your Scourgeness?” inquired Wormwood.

“Actually,” said Nurd, “I am extremely excited. I cannot remember the last time I felt so enthused about anything.”

“Really?” asked Wormwood hopefully, and received a painful tap on the head from Nurd’s Scepter of Terrible and Awesome Might for his trouble.

“No, you idiot,” said Nurd, “Of course I’m bored. What else is there to be?”

Connolly blows off God in the first couple of chapters, caricaturing him as an old man with a beard who created the world in seven days, and in whom no self respecting person with a knowledge of science can believe. Then he goes on to give a description of hell as another dimension attempting to break into ours. Why heaven cannot be making a similar attempt he does not say.

Connolly’s Satan (The Great Malevolence) hates mankind with a perfect hatred—because men are happy and productive and love flowers. Man as man is the object of his scorn. The biblical notion that Satan hates man because of the Image he reflects is not on Connolly’s radar. Here is a repeated theme of the modern novel—Satan without God, hell without heaven, and evil resisted and overcome by man without any help from You-Know-Who.

Heaven still manages to sneak into the book through the back door, however. In the end, a child’s courage saves the world, along with a demon who joins the forces of light and sacrifices himself to save the others. Child-like faith. Conversion to the other side. Self-sacrifice. Hmmm. Truth pervades all art worth the name, maybe even against its will.

Still a fun read!

To Life

You must be born again.
I have come that they may have life, and have it more abundantly.-Jesus

Old things have passed aways; behold, all things are made new.-St. Paul

"L'Chaiim"--"to life!" The Old Testament spoke of life as an experience, not as an abstract principle that could be separated from physical existence. Life for the Hebrew was holistic, because all of life came from God, and was seamless because it had a unified center.

The Greeks, on the other hand, needed two words to encompass "life." Bios was the favored word. It meant "living" in the sense of "livelihood," and at a higher level meant "life-style" or manner of living. It had philosophical implications. What is the "good" life? How does one find the good, the true, and the beautiful? How does one lead a temperate, well-balanced life? What is the place of truth and virtue, of honor and duty? These phrases remind us not only of the ancient Greeks, but of their Enlightenment descendants, the "Renaissance men," and the southern gentlemen that were part of my own youth.

The other term for life was Zoe--a word with a more scientific nuance. It meant life, not as a value or a quantity of virtue, but life as opposed to death, animate as opposed to inanimate, flora and fauna as opposed to earth and rocks. Zoe was simply defined and discernible. Bios required exploration and was a complex concept. Bios was the preferred term when discussions about existence became serious. It was the term for philosophical speculation.

Yet when Jesus and the New Testament broke into a culture that had been under Greek influence for three hundred years, the two terms were turned on their heads. Bios at its best meant "making a living," and at its worst a dead pursuit of arrogant and self-centered man (Luke 8:14, 2 Tim. 2:4, 1 John 2:16). Zoe was their chosen word for "life," and it pervaded the words of Jesus in the Gospels. He dismissed bios as the hopeless quest of men who did not need to be reformed, or disciplined, or cleaned up--they were instead men who needed to be resurrected, brought from death to life. Jesus proclaimed the joy of an alien life, a restoration of the chaiim that flowed between God and man, between gift and thankfulness in the first garden.

Alexander Schmemann pointed out somewhere that when Jesus was crucified, all the hope that had ever been in bios died. Man at his best chose to kill God. The cross was the suicide of bios. The placard above his head represented the great cultures of his day: the power of military might and shrewd administrative ability of the practical Roman mind; the philosophical Greeks; and the peak of monotheistic revelation, the chosen ones, the apex of morality broken into ten thousand minute fragments--all conspired to destroy God in the name of saving bios. Its salvation was its death.

Zoe is the life of God in his creatures, placed in fallen man by the Holy Spirit. That is not quite saying it right. Because zoe is not an abstraction, it is a Person--God united with man through Christ in a union that was meant from the beginning. Adam lost that union when he chose to pursue the life that came from God without God--and broke the world into life as an end in itself, and life as religious duty--sacred and secular (Schmemann).

The past pulls us back into bios; the future draws us forward to zoe. Bios is spoken in the indicative; zoe uses the imperative and the subjunctive (Rosenstock). Bios abstracts; zoe is relational. Bios is a given, something into which we are born; zoe is a gift. It can only be received, not earned. But zoe can be neglected, and must be fed. Objectively, that is done by word and sacrament in the church (John 6:35), and subjectively by seeing the life of God in all things, from the glimpse of the image of God in broken people, to the utility of computer files. Zoe desires to wake the trees and give the beasts a rudimentary ability to speak (CS Lewis, Randy Alcorn). It is released, above all, by thankfulness for all things, suffering as well as pleasure.

I must admit that I have never heard (or preached) a sermon on the topic. I am afraid we evangelicals are guilty of leading people to a zoe encounter with the risen Christ, followed by a lifelong rehearsal of the rules and principles that govern the bios of the church. Or as Paul said, “having begun in the Spirit, are you now made perfect by the flesh?”. “We (evangelicals) begin with Christ” said Neil Silverburg, “and we end with Moses.” We pass out band-aids in full view of an empty tomb.

Personally, I am a bit tired after 67 years of seminars on Christian principles, how to be a man, how to adjust my finances, how to love my wife, how to raise my children, how to, how to...all commendable things, which have not been unhelpful. But my heart wants joy more than knowledge, exuberance above principles, relationship above all else.

There are, of course, dangers in what I am saying. One is that we don’t take bios seriously enough, which leads to mystical hedonism, the view that, since I am a new creation, what the “old man” does is his business. So I can let lust, greed, and rage loose, because that is not who I really am. Paul was accused of holding such a position, and answered simply with, “God forbid!” Paul also pointed out that whatever enslaves you is your true master.

The other is taking bios too seriously, or morbid involvement. I think of an old friend who wanted to ride in an ambulance so he could face “real” life. Morbid involvement is based on the fear that, if we get too enthralled with zoe, we will lose touch with the world. The truth is that zoe calls us to carry life into everything we touch. (The Jews fled from lepers lest they be made unclean; Jesus walked into their midst, touching them and overcoming their uncleanness with his own zoe.) Zoe is simply a word describing how we were originally meant to live, in love with man and with nature, and sharing with God as we go.

There may be reasons why evangelicals lapse from an exciting honeymoon to the drudgery of married life (speaking metaphorically). I think the central one is their emphasis on the work of the cross. Of course life springs, perhaps above all, from the cross. But it also springs from the incarnation, the resurrection, and the ascension. “Christ was born to die” is an evangelical mantra, and a travesty. Christ was born to live, to touch humanity, to die, to rise, and to reign forever at the right hand of the Father, and to bring us up to where he is. Those are all sources of zoe, which is another way of saying that Christ is the fountainhead of all life.

“In him was life, and the life was the light of men.”

Planetary Consciousness

The service of the land is an inexorable duty laid upon Man, and it is surprising that it was not included in the Ten Commandments. The reason must be that it was prior to the Commandments, since it was already decreed in Genesis that Adam was put into Eden to dress it and to keep it, and that Man was given dominion over the Earth and all its creatures for that purpose. In attaining planetary consciousness we come back again to this primordial commandment; we have now to dress and to keep the planet, the whole planet.

-Eugen Rosenstock, “Planetary Man”

Several years ago I stated in a blog that there is a tension, maybe even a contradiction, in my outlook as an American citizen and my outlook as a Christian. I want to pick up that theme again.

As a citizen, I am somewhere to the right of the Constitution Party. Because I affirm the doctrine of original sin (I might as well say total depravity), I believe government should be small and controlled by intricate systems of checks and balances--within by the classic balance of its own powers (judicial, legislative, etc), and without by other spheres or institutions, notably the church and the family. Add to this the balance of central and local governments. I have no doubt that the collapse of the balance of powers in our culture is on the increase, and government is no longer protector, but nanny and priest. I am delighted to see groups like the Tea Party, who are trying to articulate a building frustration. If their cry becomes articulate, there will be hell to pay for one side or the other. Big government scares me, and talk about world government raises specters that would make the Lubyanka cringe. In fact, to me the words world or planet are spooky in themselves.

And there seems to be an inevitability in the whole process. One-world market and one-world communications transcend political boundaries, and perhaps pave the way for the politicians to catch up, and open the door for the inexorable rise of anti-Christ. The solution for Rick the citizen is to hold to the past. I read somewhere that the Church of the Middle Ages saw its very existence as an inhibitor of the rise of the Beast--a persuasive argument for its perpetuation. We certainly have our Protestant, evangelical, dispensational version of the same scenario. Preach the gospel, maintain limited government, resist socialism, affirm isolationism, curtail world-wide anything, and we will not be dragged into the future horrors of the Great Tribulation. Two things stand out in this agenda: the believer and the citizen become one and the same, and the past is our hope and the future our nemesis. With those realizations, the Christian in me parts company with the citizen.

In passing, it is worth pointing out that all good things come of God, and all good things are counterfeited. One-world market and communications have brought great good for man in the sovereign purposes of God. But that is an issue for another time. My real concern is with the Christian attitude towards the future. The past helps me find and know myself among others with their own pasts, but the future is what draws me and ultimately defines me. If the future is the perfect, then it draws what is not yet perfect into itself. The eschaton will reveal who I really am, and the future man who is already born in me struggles towards it and will never be fulfilled without it. That means that the Incarnation was not only God entering human space, but the future entering human time and calling us forward. The first Coming was not just a promise, but a seed, of the second. How can I possibly want to hold it at bay?

I began this blog with a quote from Rosenstock, to which I should probably turn my attention. Here is a Christian using a term that is worthy of Hilary Clinton: "planetary consciousness." Rosenstock realized as early as the 1940's that political barriers were hazing, and that "we can no longer sacrifice ourselves to dale and grove, nor to the idol of Western Civilization, nor to upholding the schism between Western and Eastern Christendom, nor to European hegemony...." Many things of the past will die or drop off as God calls the world into the future, parallel to the transformation that occurs in each individual Christian in microcosm. Doubtless rebellious man will counterfeit God's plan. But that should not stop us from longing for the time that the lion lies down with the lamb and a little child leads us. In fact, "longing" is too weak a word. "Taking responsibility" for the earth that groans for the manifestation of the sons of God is a better term.

Taking responsibility may include thinking "green," and taking part in movements that lift human oppression, but I believe that it primarily means accepting the fact that we Christians are already part of a planetary movement known as the church. The West is no longer the model for Christendom. There are mass conversions in South America and India. There are miracles in Africa. The Chinese church is full of a power that puts the West to shame. The American church is looking for a new expression of itself (or resisting it). There is a foment going on that requires looking forward, not backwards. The future is pulling, and pulling; and it is glorious, and not our enemy.

So back to the original point: here I am, stuck between past and future, pessimism and optimism, and hoping the two resolve themselves, or flow together in a way not yet foreseen. For the time being I'll live with it.

Thoughts on Family, Sex, and Marriage

It is obvious that American culture has gone through a massive shift in family and sexual values for the last decades. It is also obvious that the church is not dealing with the changes well. She is either following the culture or looking longingly to the 1950’s and hoping to turn back the clock. Being “conservative” is merely foot-dragging. Are there any positive things she can do to strengthen her own view of the sanctity of marriage and family? Here are some thoughts.

Number One: The church can no longer depend on the culture or the status quo to confirm its faith, because cultural values and family are no longer vitally inter-connected.

In The Origins of Speech, Rosenstock took issue with most anthropologists, who believe that primitive tribes were formed by associations of family groups seeking security and protection. Rosenstock reversed this order. He believed that tribes saw the family as a necessary means of creating, first, sexual order. No man could have any woman he wanted at any time, without chaos and fighting among males. Tribes also found that incest and rape produced poor offspring. The result was the rise of family groups with taboos against incest in particular. But, second, and at a deeper level, tribes discovered that the family was the best means for propagating the values of the culture. The best citizen was also a good father, whether it was a Roman patrician passing on the rules of the Republic to his children, or an Amazonian tribesman showing his son how to artfully shrink an enemy’s head; and the culture pressured parents to fulfill this role.

I question if this connection still holds in America. Children are taught cultural values by mass media and by the public school, values which may or may not be those of their parents. I have wondered if there are initial and confirming rites in secularism as there are in most world religions, and I’ve decided that the first day of school and graduation fit the bill. Mommy takes junior to the bus and turns him over to the state to arrange his values to the cultural norm, and the state turns him loose to be a model citizen at the end of the process. I am desperately biting my tongue so as to not make a moral judgment at this point; I just want to point out that the family is not necessary to the culture for the propagation of its values. That means that defining “family” is no longer important to cultural survival. It also means that the accompanying sexual mores are not governed by survival pressures. Now the individual is free to choose family style and sexual preference without a larger societal frame of reference. This is not to say that large numbers of people will not opt for the security and commitment of family life—but it is an option, not a requirement for passing the culture's values to the next generation.

The church, therefore, must determine if the family (even more than clergy, doctrine, and programs) is still her primary means of propagating her values, and if so, how to perpetuate those values in a religious sub-culture that is voluntary. There will be very little outside support.

Number Two: The church needs to define “marriage” for its members.

The definition of marriage will be different than the culture’s, because it will presuppose the existence of God—a God who is in his triune relationship an archetype for the family, and because it presupposes a Christ who looks at his church as his bride.

If the Persons of the Trinity are committed to one another in love, and if Christ calls the church into union with himself, then marriage, as a mirror of the archetypes, is a lifelong covenant, made before God and the church. The members of that covenant will be changed and grow in love within it, until death. All covenants, by the way, have sacramental rituals that seal or validate them—from dinner after signing a business contract, to baptism and the Eucharist as the sacraments of our union with Christ. I believe that sex is the sacramental seal of marriage vows—initially on the wedding night (parallel to baptism), and repeatedly afterwards (parallel to the Supper). That doesn’t mean that sex can’t be fun, or earthy, or even fumbled. It does mean that there is a serious commitment hovering behind it. It’s interesting that the Old Testament penalty for pre-marital sex was marriage (if you’re going to act married, then so be it), while the penalty for adultery (covenant breaking) was death. This understanding of marriage and sex of course has no meaning without a sound faith in the blessed triune nature of God and Christ’s passionate love for his church. Those positive truths need to be taught and lived before young believers early and consistently. They lay a much better foundation than saying, “Don’t have sex before marriage or God will be mad at you.”

3. The church needs to take seriously Paul’s admonition in 1 Corinthians 7:9, “It is better to marry than to burn.”

First, “burning” is not an innately evil thing to be shunned, not should it be confused with lust. “Burning” is Paul’s word for normal sexual desire. Lust is its perversion. Lust is to sex what gluttony is to eating, drunkenness to a glass of wine, and rage to anger. “Burning” is a real force that is not going to be suppressed or treated like some kind of teen-age disease in moralistic sermons.

Second, the church opts for the wrong side in the present conflict between the biological and economic clocks. In Old Testament times, these clocks were synchronized. A young man learned a trade, usually in the context of the family business, and was able to be self-sufficient at the same time his libido was peaking. This is not true today. Middle and upper class young people will be in their upper twenties before they finish their master’s, or their residency, or grad school, etc. The church consistently follows the culture and says “wait.” The church is biased against young marriages—an admission that she has not adequately instructed her children. She offers no solution to “burning.” But she will certainly cluck with disapproval if the young find ways to alleviate the pressure. This is a clear rejection of apostolic counsel. That means that the church will have to support young marriage and weave the economic clock into it, not the other way around.

The Grail

This past weekend I re-watched The Fisher King with Jeff Bridges and Robin Williams. It's one of my favorite movies. Williams plays a college professor turned into one of New York's homeless as the result of a tragedy in his life. He tells the following story, which may or may not be true to the Arthurian legend, but certainly defines the Christian ministry (and I am paraphrasing). I don't believe I can add to it:

"When the king was a boy, he went into the forest to seek his destiny. During his time there, he was given a vision of the Holy Grail, and accepted as his life's mission the quest to find it. Over the years, after many disappointments, the king became discouraged and more reclusive. It seemed he would never find the Grail, and would end his life a failure.

"One day the court fool came in the king's quarters, and being a simple man, did not see a king, but a man in deep emotional pain. He asked, 'What may I do to help you with your pain, sire?' The king answered, 'You can pour me a drink of cool water.'

"The fool reached for a cup, and filling it with water, handed it the king. As he sipped, the king suddenly realized that it was the Grail he was holding, and that it had been in his chamber all that time.

"The king said, 'I've sent my brightest and bravest men to search for this. How did you find it?' The Fool laughed and said 'I don't know. I only knew that you were thirsty.'"