N.T. Wright on Reaction to the New Perspective on Paul

From Wright's "Redemption from the New Perspective? Towards a Multi-Layered Pauline Theology of the Cross":

I am saddened that many have imagined they have nothing to learn from Sanders’s massive scholarship and have run howling back into the arms of Luther. In some cases—these are, I think, the saddest of all—they have been reduced to appealing over the head of the New Testament to the tradition of the sixteenth century, which is all the more ironic when we reflect that Luther, Melanchthon, Calvin, and the rest would certainly have advised us to read the New Testament even better than they did, not to set up their own work as a new authoritative tradition, a fixed lens through which the Bible would have to be viewed for ever afterwards.

Absolutely true. By the way, Wright's paper offers an excellent introduction to what the New Perspective is and how it developed.

Check it out.

Charlie Peacock at Trinity House

About a week ago, Cecile and I were invited to see Charlie Peacock at Trinity House Theatre. I'd been there once before, to see a production of T.S. Eliot's "The Cocktail Party," but had forgotten how small and intimate the setting was.

It was a really, really wonderful evening. Charlie has been moving toward piano jazz in his songwriting, and my own musical tastes have moved in that direction. Plus, his lyrics are real and honest, dealing with the realities of life from a Christian perspective, rather than being simply vehicles for worship or evangelism. He did new music as well as reinterpretations of some of his old songs. At any rate, someone recorded a bit of the concert and uploaded the recordings to YouTube. Charlie emailed those of us who signed up for his mailing list and linked to the videos, so evidently he's okay with them being up there. So here they are, for you to get a taste of what the night was like:

In the Light:

Down in the Lowlands

More of Charlie's new music may be found at his MySpace Music Page.

Many thanks to the generosity of Bob and Ideal Systems for the invitation to the concert.

My Own Paraphrase of the Lord's Prayer

O Father in heaven (may Your name be glorified!)
May Your reign be established and Your will accomplished
In this earth, just as it is in Your heaven.
Please give me today just what I need for today,
And forgive my sins, in exactly the same way
That I forgive those who have wronged and hurt me.
Please lead me, not into testing and trial,
But rather delivering me from the Evil One.
For the rule, and the authority, and the glory
Are all Yours forever. Amen.

This is a paraphrase I've made of the Lord's prayer for myself. I'll go line by line by way of explanation:

O Father in heaven (may your name be glorified!)
I've put the second phrase in parentheses, not because it's unimportant, but because I see it more as an expression of honor than as the actual predicate of the expression. In other words, it's like "O King live forever!" in such passages as 1 Kings 1:31, Nehemiah 2:3, and Daniel 2:4--an introductory formula. This allows the first actual predicate of the prayer to be:

May Your reign be established and Your will accomplished
In this earth, just as it is in Your heaven.
The "kingdom" of God refers not to a geographical entity, but to God's rule and reign: the "coming" of God's kingdom is the establishment of His rule. Our prayer is that He rules over this earth just as He rules over heaven. "Earth" here actually refers to dirt; I've written "in this earth" rather than "on this earth" to suggest a reference not only to our planet but to my own piece of flesh: I need Him to rule over me, first and foremost.

Please give me today just what I need for today,
I've individualized this text, not because I don't recognize the corporate nature of the prayer, but because I need to focus on my own responsibilities as a part of that corporate body. "Bread" refers to our basic needs--not everything we may want. We're asking not only for provision but also for the moderation of our own desires.

And forgive my sins, in exactly the same way
That I forgive those who have wronged and hurt me.
The Greek here for "debt" can be used metaphorically for a moral fault; since we don't have that kind of wordplay in the English translation, I want to be very clear and call a sin for what it is. We are too ready to bend our sins into something more acceptable with language: adultery becomes an "affair," for example. But being forgiven involves our willingness to forgive (illustrated graphically by the parable of the unmerciful servant). I've chosen not to use "sin" here, because we generally don't think in terms of people "sinning" against us, but rather of wronging and hurting us. My obligation to forgive others doesn't end if I call someone else's actions by another name. I need to forgive those who have hurt me, because I want forgiveness for how I've hurt God.

Please lead me, not into testing and trial,
But rather delivering me from the Evil One.
Here, I want to focus on being led by God. I'm asking Him to lead me, and asking him not to lead me into tests and trials (the Greek for "temptation" is equally well translated this way)--not because I think that He is likely to do that, but because I'm praying for His mercy and covering and guidance throughout my path. This is praying according to the Lord's will: I know that He wants to deliver me from the paths I would foolishly take on my own, so for me to pray this is to pray exactly what God wants for me.

For the rule, and the authority, and the glory
Are all Yours forever. Amen.
I know that this is a later scribal gloss, but I think it is a harmless wrapping-up of the prayer that brings us back to the beginning: to the glory and rule of God. The prayer, overall, is basically a submission of self to God's rule, provision, forgiveness, protection, and guidance.

Loving the Real Church

Scot McKnight writes a wonderful, brief post dealing with our often misguided attempts to "defend" the church by attacking other parts of it. He writes, "We must learn not to love the ‘idea’ of the church, but the ‘real’ church."

None of us will ever create the ideal church that exists only in our minds by hacking off other parts that we consider unseemly. Much less will we ever create God's ideal of the church. In fact, I'm not sure God has an "ideal" of the church. I think when God entrusted the work of the church to us human beings, he knew exactly what would happen. It doesn't come as a surprise to him. And yet our job is still to love one another, as Christ has loved us.

Sigh.

And we thought it was Bill who had, er, veracity issues.

What's the Atmosphere in Your Home?

Jim Martin writes a terrific post about the emotional atmosphere in homes. This might possibly be one of the most important and neglected issues that almost all of us deal with. None of us control the atmosphere in our homes totally (unless, perhaps, in a negative way). But we all contribute.

Check it out.


For more on marriage, check out my book, Marriage, Family, and the Image of God .

Ruth Tucker on Jesus and Leadership

Ruth Tucker writes a wonderfully provocative piece: Acknowledging Jesus as a Failed Leader. We get so used to calling Jesus the perfect everything that we forget that He wasn't actually trying to be everything. He was being precisely, and only, what the Father sent Him to the earth for, and His mission had little to do with contemporary ideas of "leadership."

Good stuff. Check it out.

HT: JollyBlogger

Settling for Mr. Good Enough?

The March Issue of Atlantic Monthly has an article by Lori Gottlieb entitled, "Marry Him!" on "settling." As in, a woman lowering her expectations and marrying a guy who she doesn't see as her one and only perfect "soul mate." I agree with the general point and many of the specific assertions of the article.

Thing is, I find the language insulting and demeaning.

Gottlieb writes from the perspective of a 40-year-old single woman who has realized the pitfalls of "waiting for Mr. Right," recognized the benefits of marriage, even if it isn't to the idyllic man of a woman's dreams, and cautiously advocates settling "young, when settling involves constructing a family environment with a perfectly acceptable man who may not trip your romantic trigger—as opposed to doing it older, when settling involves selling your very soul in exchange for damaged goods." She correctly recognizes that marriage isn't mostly about romantic bliss; it's about "having a teammate" to go through life with, to share responsibilities and chores. She's absolutely right.

The problem is that the language of "settling" is, well, unsettling. I kept reading through the article looking for clues that this was all tongue in cheek, that all this talk of settling was really a matter of being both realistic and simply fair to any real live flawed human man who might actually be interested in marriage. There was one, just one, nearing the conclusion of the article, tucked away in a parenthesis:

Unless you meet the man of your dreams (who, by the way, doesn’t exist, precisely because you dreamed him up), there’s going to be a downside to getting married, but a possibly more profound downside to holding out for someone better.

The man of a woman's dreams doesn't exist, can't exist; and yet men are faulted for not being that. Even though Gottlieb pokes holes in the fairy tale that some day your prince will come, she also makes it clear that settling is still settling to her. The images of men that she discusses are all in some degree repulsive, which I get is her point, but it still puts the woman in the place of looking down her nose at her prospects and giving in to the inevitable with a weary sigh. Any faults that the woman has are attributed to age and motherhood, and Gottlieb discusses the unfair nature of the fact that women lose their appeal earlier than men do (although this is largely due to the fact that women are attracted to older men; whose fault is that?). Gottlieb simply doesn't deal with the issue of how pretentious it is for a woman to set such impossible standards in the first place. What woman could live up to such standards from a man?

Gottlieb argues that men don't settle, and when they do, they don't seem to mind it. She's missed the point entirely. Men settle all the time. Where does she think the stereotype of the Man Afraid of Commitment, the Sweaty Groom Looking for a Way Out, comes from? But men don't generally call it settling, because they don't generally have such Impossible Dreams floating around in their heads in the first place. They don't think of it as settling. They think of it as being realistic. "Dude, you're not going to do better than her," is a perfectly plausible and common conversation for men to have.

So my advice to women would be, don't settle. Because as long as you're thinking of it as "settling," you're demeaning the person you're committing your life to. First, get rid of the notion that one man is going to bring you unending happiness, that all your problems are due to not having him, or once you have him, that all your problems are due to his flaws. Dump the ego trip that says that anything other than the Prince Charming in your brain (to whom you've probably attributed self-contradictory attributes, anyway) is beneath you. Recognize that you're a human being, and any guy you meet is a human being, and if you find someone who treats you with kindness and respect and sticks in there through the long haul, then you're pretty lucky.

Then, you won't have to settle.

 

 

For more on marriage, check out my book, Marriage, Family, and the Image of God .

 

What's in a name?

Sorry, nothing profound here about names or naming things. I'm just in the middle of rethinking some things on this blog, and I'm rethinking the name. "The Schooley Files" was originally the name of an old website on which I had published some papers, most of which now appear as posts or series here. I'd come up with the name in imitation of a now-apparently-defunct website called "The David Ponter Papers." It just seemed like an intriguing title, and after all, that's what the site was: contents of my files that I thought other people might find worth reading.

It seems to me, though, that very few bloggers, at least of the type I frequent, have the main author's name as part of the title of the blog, and I'm wondering if it comes off as conceited to readers. The thing is, I don't really know what else to call it. My own bent would be to use a Greek word as a title, like Aletheia (Truth) or Dikaiosune (Righteousness, Justice). I could make a cool banner graphic screening in the Greek lettering in the background. But the words wouldn't resonate for most people, and there would be problems in spelling and therefore finding it (should I choose to use it as a domain name).

Nothing else comes to mind. I don't want to pigeonhole myself ("The Arminian Advocate," "The Pentecostal Scholar"--ugh!) and I'm not blogging on behalf of a church or larger organization that might lend itself as a ready name.

So I'm open to suggestions. Any impressions that the blog overall gives you? (This lends itself to something with "shudder" in the title....) Or maybe I'm making much ado about nothing.

Os Guinness's Review of Crazy for God

Os Guinness reviews Frank Schaeffer's Crazy for God, and in the process, lends the word of a witness to many of the events in it. I'll not summarize or quote from it; its power lies in reading it in full. Please do.

Thanks to Julie R. Neidlinger for the tip.

There's a great interview with Larry Norman by Dale Ahlquist, president of the American Chesterton Society, which is devoted to writer and Christian philosopher G.K. Chesterton. Apparently, Larry was a great fan of Chesterton. He also has some great things to say about the Christian music industry, Rich Mullins, and Malcolm Muggeridge.

See You Later, Larry

Larry Norman died early last Sunday morning. He's been ill for a long time, and the news of his passing is no surprise. I think I'm saddest mostly because if I hadn't happened to be browsing the iMonk, I wouldn't have known. I wonder how long it would have taken to find out. It pains me to think of how much he meant to so many, and how little he is known now.

Larry virtually single-handedly invented what he called "Jesus music," which later morphed into "Christian rock" and then "Contemporary Christian music," in the late '60s and early '70s. His aim was to reach out to a disaffected generation in terms that they would understand, without worrying about whether those terms would be acceptable to established believers. They weren't. Norman's music was banned from Christian bookstores and vilified from pulpits. He was thought to be trying to bring the devil into the Church, when what he was doing was trying to bring Jesus into the world.

He chose a hard road. He could have soft-pedaled his message and sought acceptance in the secular recording industry. His talent was easily among the greatest of his generation, not merely among Christian artists. In Another Land, the final recording of the "Trilogy" that began with Only Visiting This Planet, deserves a place among the great recordings of the 1970s, containing everything from driving rock to blues to lush orchestral pieces, and even a piano jazz song ("The Sun Began to Rain"). Yet Larry had ongoing struggles with his record companies from the time that Capital Records censored the intended title of his album with the band People!: "We Need a Whole Lot More of Jesus (And a Lot Less Rock and Roll)."

Or Larry could have soft-pedaled his music to seek acceptance within the church. His label, Solid Rock Records, had produced many of the early Jesus Music pioneers: Randy Stonehill, Tom Howard, Mark Heard, Daniel Amos (psst--that last is a band, not a person). And the venture fell apart, partly due to Larry's disappointment that this younger generation of artists were becoming complaisant in the Christian world, refusing to play to secular venues on the one hand, and neglecting to give the gospel in confrontational terms in between songs. Larry simply wasn't content to lapse into Christian celebrity, and so he kept to an iconoclastic path, one that left him in relative obscurity (apart from the following he had made in his early days) and relative poverty.

Larry's music, and that of other Jesus Music pioneers, was a tremendous influence on me in my youth. I am saddened by our loss, but glad to know that he is finally in the presence of our Lord. I look forward to the day when I'm there, too. It'll be nice to meet him.

What Does "Church" Mean?

Lately I've seen a number of discussions involving the meaning of the word, "Church." The general tenor is that a) the church is the people, not the building; and b) expressions such as "I'm going to church" reflect a lapse into thinking that it is the building after all, and not the people, a lapse which we should be avoiding.

All of this is far too simplistic. Are we talking about the biblical use of the term, the historical use of the term, the contemporary use of the term, or what we think the contemporary use of the term ought to be? Is there one acceptable use, or many? Should it be qualified by context?

For one thing, such debates ignore what is known as "lexical range." Very few words have only one acceptable meaning. Most of them are technical terms, which are coined and defined precisely so as to exclude any ambiguity. That's why legal and medical terminology uses Latin so much: language in these disciplines needs to be precise. But language as it is used in everyday situations is much broader than that. There is a range of meaning that any word can have, based on context. "I set the chess set on the TV set while I watched a set of tennis." Words don't have just one definition.

So the very question, "Is the church the people or the building?" is quite possibly a false dichotomy. It may easily refer to both, and does so in contemporary usage, whether we may like it or not. It may be better, or more biblical, for us to view the church as the people, more so than the building, but that's not the same thing as asking what the word means.

It's also worth pointing out that the phrase, "I'm going to church," doesn't necessarily reflect a focus on the building rather than the people. As a matter of fact, you'll notice that when we're going to a service, we say, "I'm going to church," but if we need to go to the same place at a time when a service is not taking place, we say, "I'm going to the church." This is not helpful if we're trying to establish that the one legitimate meaning of "church" is people, not place, but it does reflect a distinction that we are making in our minds. Going to the church is not exactly the same thing as going to church.

When people are trying to discuss the "real" meaning of words like that, what they're most often trying to do is to discuss the biblical meaning, with the underlying idea that we ought to be speaking, and therefore thinking, biblically. That's fair enough. The word used in the New Testament for Church is ἐκκλησία, ekklesia, Strong's 1577. While the root of the word may be literally translated "called out," and some have taken that to mean that the church is composed of those people who have been "called out" of the world, the usage of the word is much more mundane than that: in first-century Greek, ἐκκλησία was used for any sort of public gathering. So as believers in Jesus began meeting together, they naturally called one another the ἐκκλησία, the gathering, the assembly. It was not a technical term: the same word is used in the Greek New Testament for a mob in Acts 19:32 and a legal assembly (i.e., a session of court) in Acts 19:39. In time, the word began being used for Christians in general, and later in church history, for the places and finally buildings in which Christians gathered together.

The point I would like to make is that the biblical use of ἐκκλησία does not simply refer to the people of God. It refers to the people of God as they are assembled together. First Corinthians 11:18 makes reference to this explicitly: "When you come together as a church." Even references to the larger church composed of all believers have in view the idea of all these believers considered corporately as a single group, or body. It is for this reason that I, as an individual believer, and therefore a part of the church universal, can still say that I am "going to church"--because it is in the gathering together that individual believers become the church. We simply are not "the church" apart from one another.

Chuck Colson was once asked where his church was, and he replied, "All over the city," with the idea in mind that the church was the people. I understand his point, but I don't think it was quite correct. The church is the church only insofar as it coalesces, comes together as one. As long as we are separate individuals, each pursuing our own lives and our own relationships with Jesus, we are not "the church." It is not true, as I have heard some people say, that "I can have church out alone under a tree just as much as in a church building with a bunch of people." You may be able to have just as intense a worship experience, but that is not the same thing. The church is the church as it comes together. We need one another to be the church. We must be a part of one another to be the church. We must seek unity under the lordship of Christ to be the church. And it is that church against which "the gates of hell will not prevail."

Screwtape on Frames of Reference

In civilised life domestic hatred usually expresses itself by saying things which would appear quite harmless on paper (the words are not offensive) but in such a voice, or at such a moment, that they are not far short of a blow in the face. To keep this game up you and Glubose must see to it that each of these two fools has a sort of double standard. Your patient must demand that all his own utterances are to be taken at their face value and judged simply on the actual words, while at the same time judging all his mother's utterances with the fullest and most oversensitive interpretation of the tone and the context and the suspected intention. She must be encouraged to do the same to him. Hence from every quarrel they can both go away convinced, or very nearly convinced, that they are quite innocent. You know the kind of thing: "I simply ask her what time dinner will be and she flies into a temper." Once this habit is well established you have the delightful situation of a human saying things with the express purpose of offending and yet having a grievance when offence is taken.
--Screwtape

So, yes. There's a flip side.

Frames of Reference

"Words, words. They're all we have to go on."
--Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead

I recently had a misunderstanding with someone that's gotten me to think about the nature of communication. The odd thing about it was that the point I was trying to make had to do with exactly that--the difference between what a person thinks he has communicated to someone else and what that someone else thinks has been communicated to him. The difference between giving and receiving communication.

We've probably all had the experience of having someone say something that hit us as being insulting or rude or otherwise inappropriate, and when we call them on it, they respond, "No, no, that isn't what I meant at all." The conversation can go in many directions at that point, but isn't the feeling we usually have, when this protest is made to us, something along the lines of, "Well of course you did! What else could you possibly have meant?" We just simply cannot believe that anyone could have said those words and not meant them exactly the way they came across to us.

Of course, there will be those times in which the errant communicator is indeed, shall we say, fibbing about his original intentions. But I am also convinced that there are times when the EC truly did not mean what we so forcefully heard. Why is that? How is it that someone can say something, in all sincerity meaning one thing, and someone else can hear that same thing and just as sincerely feel that it means something completely different?

"It is impossible to say just what I mean!"
--J. Alfred Prufrock

Communication is a tricky thing. A communicator, attempting to convey a thought, a feeling, an idea, starts out with a particular frame of reference, a matrix of understanding that is a conglomeration of his personality and entire life experience, and more specifically, his experience of how words have been used toward and around him. He shapes this thought into words, the symbols by which we attempt communication, within this matrix; he says what he says because it makes sense to him to say it that way; to him, that's what the words he comes up with mean.

But the recipient takes these words into a completely different personality and life experience, into a different experience of how words have been used toward and around him. He receives the sounds, or the sight of print on paper, or on a screen, and has to create meaning out of these raw sensory impressions, and the meaning he creates has as much to do with his own matrix of understanding as it does with the actual words that have been used. To the extent that the two frames of reference are similar, the communication will be understood in the same sense as it was intended. To the extent that they differ, communication will be impeded.

It's most obvious when people speak different languages. Here, there is no common frame of reference at all, at least where language is concerned. But also, there is no real issue of misunderstanding, because there is no illusion of understanding at all. The dangerous situation--which is by far also the most common--is a partially shared frame of reference. We have just enough similar life and language experience to be dangerous. We know each other well enough to think that we know everything--or at least enough to understand what they said! And so we react, based not on the actual words that were said, but by what those words would have meant if we had ever uttered them. Coming out of our own frame of reference, saying such a thing might have been unthinkable, or would have been spoken only with a completely different intent. But we really have no way of ever experiencing anyone else's frame of reference. The closest we get to it, aside from shared experiences (we both know what "As you wish" means because we've both seen The Princess Bride), is--talking: i.e., communication, language. The very thing that seems to be the impediment is the only clue we have into one another's world.

Perhaps what we most suffer from is a lack of empathy. We simply don't have the imagination to conceive of another way of looking at life, at people, at language. Our way seems so obvious, so right! The problem is that everyone else stubbornly refuses to agree with God and me! Or perhaps it is merely inconvenient. It's easier simply to think that the other person is wrong than to think that they view things from a different point of view. It's easier simply to react than to give the other person the benefit of the doubt, to imagine what might have caused them to articulate what they did. I've found myself in the position of being a translator on numerous occasions, not between different languages, but between different frames of reference, trying to get two people to see things from one another's point of view, and it can be exhausting. But really, if we're to love our neighbor as ourselves, isn't that exactly what is being asked of us?

"That was when I learned that words are no good; that words dont ever fit even what they are trying to say at."
--Addie Bundren

Of course, I can only hope that anyone could possibly understand this.

Listlessness

It's the obligatory "Why I haven't been posting post."

There's been a lot going on recently. My mother had major back surgery, and just as she was getting over it (quickly and wonderfully, I should add) my son suffered a broken arm, and we found out he had a bone cyst, and there was plenty of drama over the sling that the ER originally put him in, before we took him back and they replaced it with a shoulder stabilizer. (Evidently casts are now passe.) And there's also been drama over the work situation that I also make a point of not discussing here.

Anyway, I've had several ideas for posts, including

• a snarky take on the media's questioning whether we (Americans) are "ready" for the first African-American, or woman, or Mormon (too late) president, as though we couldn't possibly decide on any other basis;
• a humorous commentary in dialogue on people who essentially hold to inerrancy but quibble over the term;
• a few things that I've forgotten about now

but I either never started them or started and abandoned them. I'm simply mentally and emotionally exhausted.

So in lieu of having something actually to say, I offer my first attempt at painting. Just did it on a lark. It's quite amateurish, but it was fun to do. And that, not the outcome, was the point.

A Couple of Minor Tweaks

[Note: since making these changes and composing this post, I've finally taken a look at the site in Explorer, and found that my font changes don't seem to have any effect in that browser. So at least 2/3 of my readers--that's right, both of you--would have had no clue regarding what I was talking about. Sorry about that. Plus, in my first paragraph, I morphed from talking about what I had changed and why into talking about how to accomplish this wonderful feat in your own Blogger pages, without telling you that that's what I was describing. So there might have been hapless readers desperately trying to figure out how to do what I was describing in order to see the wonderful changes I said I had made. Well, probably not, but if you were by any chance, you have my deepest regret and sympathy. I've now carved that first paragraph into two, and added an explanatory line, to make things clearer.

On the brighter side, the printing trick seemed to have worked in both browsers. Not that anyone is going to want to print out this stuff. But still.]

I've made a couple of minor alterations to this site that I hope improve readability and usefulness. First, I've chosen 'Lucida Grande' and 'Lucida Sans Unicode' as the preferred fonts (Mac and PC, respectively) for most of the text. They're the closest thing to Optima that I can find that would be in common usage. The varying thickness of the lines gives it the readability of a typical serif font, but without all the actual serifs that sometimes don't come out well when viewing on-screen.

[If you want to achieve this stunning effect on your own Blogspot blog, here's how to do it.] Unfortunately, Blogger doesn't actually offer these two Lucida fonts as options in the "Fonts and Colors" screen of its Template tab, so you have to alter the HTML template itself. In the "Edit HTML" area, scroll down a bit to get to the "Variable definitions" section; then, in the description of fonts, change whatever sections you want from the current settings to "'Lucida Grande', 'Lucida Sans Unicode', Verdana, Sans-Serif". Make sure you back up your template before doing this; if you run into problems, check punctuation.

The other alteration is less apparent, unless you choose to print out a page. If you click on "Print Preview" from the File menu, you'll see that the blog header, sidebar, and other extraneous material will not print; instead, the main body will expand to fill the page. If you would like to do something similar on your Blogger blog, here's the code I used:

<style type='text/css' media='print'&rt;
#outer-wrapper { width: 100% }
#main-wrapper { width: 95% }
#sidebar { display:none }
#header { display:none }
#h2 { display:none }
.post-footer { display:none }
.comment-footer { display:none }
#blog-pager { display:none }
.post-feeds { display:none }
#footer { font-size:x-small }
#navbar-iframe { display:none !important }
</style>

What this is doing is adding a new CSS style sheet that only applies to printing. You can choose whatever aspects of your page you want to hide from printed output. Add this code in at the very end of the <head> section, just before the </head> code.

A Footnote

On my last post, I made the statement, "We must face facts. We will never impose the Kingdom of God on this world by force, and if it ever happens that we could actually do it by the democratic process and majority vote, we would find that we hardly needed to." I am concerned that the phrase, "We will never impose the Kingdom of God on this world by force," could be taken to mean, "I wish that we could impose the Kingdom of God by force, but alas, that is an unfortunate impossibility." That desire is certainly attributed to Evangelical Christians by many (Margaret Atwood is a prime example). Not only do I repudiate that idea, but I think that it is incomprehensible if one has a proper understanding of the Kingdom.

I'll leave a thoroughgoing analysis of the Kingdom to Scot McKnight. The most important thing is that God's Kingdom is not a set of laws or social conditions that could ever be imposed. The Kingdom is composed of people who freely receive Jesus' grace and are transformed by it. While it is true that a mass of people who were transformed by Jesus' grace would have profound effects on the society of which they were a part (witness the Christianizing of the Roman Empire), the reverse attempt to transform society by fiat, without the inward work of Jesus' grace on individuals, would merely create a cruel facade resembling only slightly the effects that true inward transformation of people would produce (uh, witness the Christianizing of the Roman Empire). Indeed, the world described by Atwood would be as horrifying to most Evangelicals--more so, in some ways--as it would to non-Christians.

So not only cannot the Kingdom be imposed by force; the Kingdom by its very nature is antithetical to the idea of imposition by force. The King, after all, had force imposed on Him, with tragic, if temporary, results. Our job is not to emulate the crucifiers, but rather the Crucified.

Let's Stop Looking for a Political Messiah

There was only one Messiah, and He will never be elected to the White House.

At the time He came, there were certain social problems going on, mostly related to pagans dominating the governmental and social spheres of life, lording it over God's chosen people, imposing hated taxation on them, offending their sense of decency and moral values, and threatening their unique way of life with a ubiquitous cultural diversity. They were longing for someone to break the hold of the hated pagan government and to reestablish their own separate identity; to stand against the moral filth that society was bringing to their doorstep; someone to put power in the hands of the righteous once again. And when the Messiah came, He did miracles and healings and called people to repentance, and so some were wondering if He was the one they had been hoping for. But He seemed more interested in criticizing the religious establishment than in opposing the pagan rulers, and eventually they decided that He was not the one they had been hoping for after all, and had him executed. His interrogator asked Him straight out if He were a King, and He replied that He was, but not over a this-worldly kingdom. The people had been looking for a political messiah, and He was not what they were expecting, so they rejected Him.

We may scoff at their blindness. But the lure of a political messiah is strangely attractive. Believers of both the Left and the Right (yes, Virginia, the other side does exist) have too often been enticed into believing that a politician, or a political movement, or a political stance, will accomplish the will of God on earth. The painful, slow way of reaching people's hearts, seeing them change from the inside out; we just get impatient, weary of it. The babies are being killed! the poor are being oppressed! We need to change things now!

But it's a trap. C.S. Lewis has Screwtape articulate the devil's strategy, advising Wormwood to guide his newly-Christian "patient" into one political avenue or another--it doesn't really matter which:

Whichever he adopts, your main task will be the same. Let him begin by treating the Patriotism or the Pacifism as a part of his religion. Then let him, under the influence of partisan spirit, come to regard it as the most important part. Then quietly and gradually nurse him on to the stage at which the religion becomes merely part of the "cause", in which Christianity is valued chiefly because of the excellent arguments it can produce in favour of the British war-effort or of Pacifism. The attitude which you want to guard against is that in which temporal affairs are treated primarily as material for obedience. Once you have made the World an end, and faith a means, you have almost won your man, and it makes very little difference what kind of worldly end he is pursuing. Provided that meetings, pamphlets, policies, movements, causes, and crusades, matter more to him than prayers and sacraments and charity, he is ours—and the more "religious" (on those terms) the more securely ours. I could show you a pretty cageful down here. The Screwtape Letters, No. 8

We must face facts. We will never impose the Kingdom of God on this world by force, and if it ever happens that we could actually do it by the democratic process and majority vote, we would find that we hardly needed to. Outlawing abortion or racial discrimination would not be necessary if people simply quit committing these sins. Change the hearts of people and their behavior will change. To the moral, no laws are necessary; to the reprobate, no laws will suffice. Jesus provided for us the model that we find so, so difficult to implement. Strength in weakness. Change society through its most powerless members. The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church.

The real issue is faith. Is our faith centered on 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, or on Golgotha?


HT: Largely inspired by a good piece by Bob Mitton on making voting a spiritual discipline, casting votes based on careful consideration of the issues, and without regard to the "electability" of the candidate, because when all is said and done, God is still on the throne.

Note: I have published a footnote to this post, in order to correct a possible misunderstanding.

David Fitch and Confessions of a Missional Pastor

David Fitch writes an interesting piece called Confessions of a Missional Pastor. I appreciate his honesty in describing how difficult it is to attain a missional ideal. My own observation is that it is much more difficult to attain a missional ideal than it is to rail against "the institutional church." (This is no swipe against David; it's just an observation borne of seeing that sort of thing in many circumstances.) To generalize, it's much harder to attain any sort of ideal than it is to rail against the perceived reason for falling short.

Let's be blunt. The failures of the church are not the Pope's fault.
They are not Luther's fault.
They are not Calvin's fault.
They are not Wesley's fault.
They are not Edwards's fault.
They are not Finney's fault.
They are not liberalism's fault.
They are not Evangelicalism's fault.
They are not Modernism's fault.
They are not Postmodernism's fault.
They are not megachurches's fault.
They are not the United States's fault.
They are not those-other-kinds-of-Christians's fault.

They are the fault of human nature. Fallen nature. Sin nature. What we say we believe in, what most of us acknowledge that we have not fully overcome, but then think we can overcome by breaking away from some organization and "starting fresh."

The failure is not in the organization. The failure is in the fact that all organizations are populated by people. The small organization that one forms when "starting fresh" is still populated by people, and sooner or later, it will be beset by the same problems that beset larger organizations.

I think the goals that David sets out are noble. I think I agree with just about all of them. I hope he understands that these struggles are simply the result of working with, and being, people. Because the alternative is to get disenchanted, leave, go somewhere else with another smaller group, and "start fresh." And perhaps, never accomplish anything at all.