Disaster and Delight

            Perhaps ordering one’s day according to the criterion, “What’s the next disaster I have to prevent?” is not the most constructive approach to life.  It does, however, loom large in my own choice of activity.

            Getting out of bed prevents being fired for not showing up.  One’s morning ablutions prevent being fired (or worse, rejected) for having a disgusting appearance.  Picking up groceries prevents death by starvation, at least for now.  Having a job at all prevents being thrown out onto the street, at least until my credit cards completely max out:  when that happens, who knows?

            Of the myriad of other looming, but less imminent, disasters swirling about, I occasionally grab one and mitigate it while it chews on my soul.  A quick piece of calligraphy here, playing the ‘cello there, writing a document, translating some German—each activity quiets another accusing voice somewhere in the choir, while still letting me know it wasn’t enough, I didn’t finish, the work really wasn’t great, and there’s always more.

            But to leave the description there paints a false picture.  Every day is full of delights straight from God’s hand to my heart. 

            A friend referred on Facebook to an article posted by Fuller Seminary that spoke of Advent as a time of lament and longing for the not-yet second coming of Christ to set all this crooked world straight.  This opened up for me a whole new aspect in which to celebrate Advent, namely, by joining God in lamenting the world’s fallenness, my fallenness, and knowing that I’m not alone in it.  A gift of liverwurst and rye from a friend, and having an abundance of tea to drink with it, bring a foretaste of eternal joy and peace.  Clever jokes on “The Simpsons” make me laugh.

            Pursuing delight in the necessities of life changes them.  They, also, are God’s gifts, after all.  And in his hand is glorious delight forever.

Book Review

What We Talk About When We Talk About God, Rob Bell (New York: 2013, Harper One)

            Rob Bell continues to write about God more like a journalist for National Geographic reporting on his travels to an exotic and seldom-explored land than like a philosophical academic piecing together an exposition of difficult but important concepts.  Readers expecting a theology of boundaries and rigid structures will be disappointed or annoyed.  Readers who are open to seeing Bell’s portrait of a dear friend, painted in broad strokes, will find here a record of love and joy.  This is a faithful and true record of walking with God rather than dissecting him.

            To read this book as objective theology can lead to at least two errors:  rejecting it as a sloppy amalgam of sentimental heresies or accepting it as a rejection of careful orthodoxy.

            Bell’s service to academic theology here is at least twofold:  1) he puts the reader back into the position of walking with God rather than examining him under a microscope; and 2) he describes dynamics of God’s action that more academic theologies often ignore.  Indeed, the central thesis of the book asserts and expounds this gap in the usual treatments of God’s character.  That God is with us, for us, and ahead of us (the theses of the three central chapters) forms the basis of his case that many both inside and outside the church have badly misunderstood God.

            His target is not standard orthodox Christian theology, but the distorted impressions of it that non-Christians or burned-out Christians often have.  One could complain that he is attacking a straw man, but he gives us reason to believe that this particular straw man is very powerful in our culture.

            Read Rob Bell’s work for what it is, not for what it isn’t.  Listen to what he intends to do, imperfect as it is, for he has a heart for God and for God’s people.

From a Facebook Conversation

Essay for Bill LaBarre on “Method” for determining what to believe.

I can only interpret "method" as "what I do."  It does not produce proof or utter certainty in the Cartesian sense:  those are forms of control, and as described above regarding the respective positions of 1) God and 2) creatures [us], control of any sort is out of the question.  But, such as it is, this is my “method”.  I listen to the gospel proclamations of the church and meditate on them.  Yes, I have a Bible, but in order to get somewhat beyond my own cultural limitations regarding “what it means to read this book,” I listen to others in the body of Christ (i.e., the Church) who have gifts of understanding and ministry that differ from mine.  They see things that I don’t see until they show me.  Further, I listen to (read) what other Christians from other places and times have written.  Further again, I listen to what non-Christians say regarding their objections to the faith.  This also involves the application and continuing reapplication of reason and observation.  Theology must be tossed back into the refining furnace again and again.

In the complexity of the gospel message there are threads that are more central and others that are more peripheral.  I try to see the harmonies and the dissonances that are in my understanding of the message, and then occasionally pick apart my construct and re-weave to produce a pattern that is more faithful to the central themes.

The most central theme is Jesus the Christ, not a doctrine, but a person.  Of course there are doctrines about Him, but even they point away from themselves back to this person.  Listening here means prayer and getting away from my internal noises.  Listening also means writing small essays like this one, listening to the resonance of these words and whether they faithfully echo my faulty perceptions through the Spirit of God in Christ.

Faith is less a content of belief (although it is that, also) than it is a mode of perception.  The passage from Hebrews 11 that you quoted does not oppose faith to knowledge, but to grasping for control.  It opposes my conceptual control with trust.

Faith thus described still ought to make sense.  We should expect that it does.  God commands us to worship Him with our minds as well as with heart, soul, and strength.  This means that we use them, not leave them at the door of the church.

But faith, as a mode of perception and thinking, also conforms to the nature of our position relative to God.  Demands that God meet our cultural (largely Cartesian) requirements for certain knowledge are inappropriate at several levels.  Aside from being personally insulting and presumptuous, they miss the nature of the object being studied.  If our seeking after knowledge does not conform to the nature of the task at hand, we can no more expect correct results than if we take a magnifying glass to the smell of roses to find what musical key it is in.  Again, this is a category error. 

Instead, the exercise of faith brings the entire man both physically and spiritually into the appropriate place of perception and thought, namely into the activity of worship where God promises to meet His people.  There we hear the proclamation of the gospel from the pulpit (as described in a comment above), and we hear God’s words riding on the words of the liturgy, on the music of the hymns, on the words of the sermon.  God confronts me in my sin, and even more so in the proclamation of forgiveness that we hear in worship.  He confronts me in my incapacity to meet the demands of life, but even more He appears in the prayers of the people as the faithful One who gives us not only the obvious blessings but also the sometimes painful blessings of growth.  He appears in my hunger to touch and hear Him, but He appears even more in the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper as a fore-taste and promise that He is with us spiritually now and will return physically.

This exercise of faith is not mere credulity.  It is an experiment, like sitting in a garden and letting the scent of the flowers approach you so that you can savor them before you make decisions about them.  It asks not merely about the structure of the rose, but about its beauty as such.  It does not merely examine behaviors, but asks if those behaviors betoken a deeper significance.  It is an exercise in humility and openness.

Nor can we, by our actions and attitudes, force God’s hand.  Again, that is to strive for control.

You can probably see why “method” is an awkward word to apply here.  What method do you use for having fun with a friend, or to get to know a prospective friend better?  It’s more like that than physics or biology or geometry.  I can’t construct a satisfactory theology from first principles (after the manner of Euclid) or force God to open up so I can study him (as if He were an oyster).  All I can do is present myself and see what happens.  Sometimes I’m very disappointed with the results.  And then He puts before me a glass of water, or the color red, or a friend’s smile, and these non-proofs, this utter lack of philosophical evidence, convinces me again.

I've been published!

     I'm now a published author!  A slightly re-written version of my Ph.D. thesis, titled Freedom and Fellowship:  Karl Barth's Doctrine of Conversion, is available at Amazon.  The URL is    http://www.amazon.com/Freedom-Fellowship-Barths-Doctrine-Conversion/dp/3659262870/ref=sr_1_12?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1354396050&sr=1-12&keywords=John+Yates   They are only charging $101 per copy which is a steal [but I won't specify who is stealing what from whom].

     The short description of the book is as follows:

One of the services that Karl Barth has rendered to us is to ask incisive questions about the way we have been doing theology. He has a knack for spotting and inspecting the cultural baggage we so easily bring with us when we read the Scriptures. If we learn no other lesson from Barth, we will do well to pick up his habit of refining our theological method in the fire and light of God’s voice speaking in the voices of the prophets and apostles concerning His self-revelation in Jesus Christ. This book examines several faults with Western individualism. It offers a relational model of personhood as a more biblical alternative and shows that Barth works in terms of such a model, rejecting individualism. Thus his theology achieves a fuller and more biblical understanding of conversion than analyses that assume individualism.

      Hope you enjoy reading it even more than I enjoyed writing it.  ;-)

Re-reading

     I'm re-reading a couple of books that merit your attention, especially if you have not read them the first time.  They fit the oxymoron "Modern Classic" as much as any book can.
     Ender's Game, by Orson Scott Card, is more than an engaging sci-fi tale:  it delves into the psychology of leadership and, to a lesser extent, the psychology of childhood.  Further, it's extremely popular among 12-to-18-year-olds, and is thus a window into their souls as well.
     The date of The Distinctives of the Old Testament, by Norman H. Snaith (1964), could easily lead one to ignore it in favor of more recent scholarship.  That would be a mistake.  The book relies on deep and broad readings of the Old Testament and comparisons with other religions and cultures that the OT confronted.  The chapter headings describe dimensions of God that are either entirely absent or vastly different in the gods proclaimed elsewhere:  holiness, righteousness, covenant-love, election-love, and more.  These distinctives still help us describe to the world around us just who our God is.  The book has a readable style and rewards the reader with deeper and broader insights that examine our presuppositions and help us to move to more biblically sound views.

Does The Son Elect? A Partial Response to Daniel Kirk

Daniel Kirk is reading through Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics and asking some interesting critical questions.  Regarding §33.2,”The Eternal Will of God in the Election of Jesus Christ,” he asks, “Question 1:  Is it faithful to Scripture to say that the Son, Jesus Christ, elects, such that in the God-man the one who elects and the one who is elected are one?”

The article makes several good points.  The NT writers tend to mean the Father when they use the word “God,” and “when election is assigned to a person, it is most often the Father (e.g., 1 Peter 1:1-2) rather than the Son.”  Ephesians, as he says, presents election as the action of the Father.  He says,

I don’t think that John 1:1, “the Word was God,” provides the kind of leverage Barth demands of it to assign to the son what is clearly assigned to the Father throughout scripture.

Dr. Kirk treats Barth’s doctrine of election as a re-reading of the New Testament documents through somewhat anachronistic Trinitarian lenses: 

It’s all well and good for us, in our more developed Trinitarian Theology, to think “Father, Son, and Spirit” when we think “God.” However, this is not what the NT writers were thinking. For them, when they say “God” they mean the one to whom we refer to as “Father.”

Certainly the use of these or any other anachronistic lenses, whatever they might reveal, would obscure the first century context of the texts and produce a lopsided exegesis.  Wrenching the texts from their own era does them no service.

But Barth does not, as it were, funnel 4^th century Trinitarian formulations through John 1 to deconstruct traditional doctrines of election and then construct his own.  He starts, instead, with the New Testament’s own pervasive view of Jesus as the full revelation of God, asking whether the traditional doctrines of election departed from this view as their starting point.  That is, if Jesus Christ is the revelation of who God is, then is he not also the revelation of the electing God?  If he is God incarnate, is he not also the incarnation of the electing God?

If it is not the biggest question in Barth’s theology, then there is at least none bigger than this:  Is there some other Word of God besides Jesus of Nazareth?  Barth’s consistent answer is:  No!  (emphasis his, repeatedly through his works)

The very best of the older theologians have taught us that in the word which calls and justifies and sanctifies us, the word which forms the content of the biblical witness, we must recognize in all seriousness the Word of God.  Beside and above and behind this Word there is no other.  … Again, they have warned us most seriously that in respect of the knowledge of god and man we must not turn aside in the slightest degree from the knowledge of Jesus Christ, either to the right hand or to the left.  (C.D. II/2, 150)

And yet, when it came to the doctrine of election,

Suddenly there seemed to be some other eternity apart fro the eternity of the eternal life whose revelation and promise and gift in the promised and temporally incarnate Word they elsewhere attest loudly and impressively enough.  And in this eternity there seemed to be some other mystery apart from the mystery whose proclamation and disclosure they can confirm elsewhere with clear texts from the New Testament.  … In the sphere of predestination there arose all at once a different order, even though it had appeared elsewhere that according to the biblical testimony upon which the Church is founded there can be no question of the recognition of any such order. (C.D. II/2, 151)

It is not by beginning with a Trinitarian structure in which Jesus is the Son, but with the claim that Jesus is the full and only Word, i.e., Revelation, of God that Barth argues for the view of Jesus Christ as electing God as well as elect man.

Barth is not imposing 4^th century Christology on the NT but using the Christology of the NT itself.  In addition to John 1:1 f., Barth could well have cited John 1:18, John 14:6 (interpreted not only as a soteriological claim, but also an epistemic one), Col. 1:15-19, Heb. 1:3, and Mt. 11:27.

Still, given that the doctrine of Revelation, and not per se the doctrine of the Trinity, is Barth’s starting point, we are left with a multitude of perplexing questions, not least of which is:  Even if we grant that Jesus is the electing God, what are the relations within the Trinity in the action of election?  Dr. Kirk continues to give insightful discussion regarding such matters.

Reading

I'm reading J. R. Daniel Kirk's book Jesus Have I Loved, but Paul? and am about halfway through.  It's a good read, examining both Jesus and Paul in terms of their narratives, and showing that they were pursuing the same goals.  The nature of those goals wasn't always what we assume.

Sermon on Ps. 32 (preached July 8)

            Last month I was at our denomination’s General Synod in Chicago, which faced several issues that people are deeply divided on.  One of the comments I kept hearing was, “Trust the process.”  “Trust the process.”  Embedded in that comment is the assurance that Jesus has given us the church as his body; that, as members of that body, we need each other, not just in spite of, but also because of our differences; and that Christ himself is at work in and alongside and through our process of engaging each other.  The process may be painful and slow, and we may think the results are wrong—but Jesus is Lord of the Church, and we can trust him.

            Psalm 32 is what Walter Bruggemann calls a psalm of disorientation.  It talks about our alienation from God, and it isn’t entirely polite.  It doesn’t put on a smiley face and pretend life is going smoothly, just to keep from rocking the boat.  This psalm’s insistence on dealing with the messiness of life is what makes it useful.

            The psalm has more interesting content than one can cover in a single sermon, so today we will focus on the three places the word “Selah” appears, which are at the end of verses 4, 5, and 7.  The word “Selah” is a bit obscure, but it means something like “pause for meditation,” so that is what we will do.

            The psalmist begins by proclaiming,

How blessed is the one whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered!

How blessed is the person to whom the Lord does not impute iniquity, and in whose spirit there is no deceit.

            Yes, a good position to be in.  “Blessed” here means “in an enviable state; to be congratulated.”  We want to get there.  We want the fellowship with God and with each other that results from being in this state.  Conveniently, the psalmist describes how he got there.

            He begins by describing the results of not facing sin. 

When I kept silent, my body wasted away through my groaning all day long.  For day and night Your hand was heavy upon me;  My vitality was drained away as with the fever heat of summer.  Selah

God’s hand was so heavy on him that he physically lost weight.  He was tormented day and night by his isolation from God, and his vitality was drained away.

            1. God lets us feel the weight of our wrongness to bring us to himself.  If we try to ignore what God brings to our attention, he doesn’t give up.

            The three words used here for our alienation from God are “transgression,” which has overtones of revolt and rebellion, “sin,” which means missing the mark, and a word translated sometimes as “iniquity” and sometimes as “guilt,” and contains the idea of being twisted or perverted and deserving punishment.

            The combination of these words paints a picture of someone who tries to live by his own wisdom instead of by God’s, to be the judge of right and wrong, to have his own vision of what life can and should be, to seek out truth the best he can, and to surround himself with good and loveable people.  He may be very gifted at this.  And that just makes it worse.  It is worse because he can delude himself into thinking that he can be in control of his world, and that such control is a good thing.  It isn’t.  Inevitably, he comes to the end of himself, and the longer he is able to keep up the illusion of control, the bigger will be the crash of that world he has tried to maintain.  Much better for him if God confronts him before such a crash, much better if God’s hand is “heavy upon him,” making him miserable away from God so that he will seek his home in God.

            And what does God use?  The very things that the psalmist saw as his strength, his “vitality,” God dries up.  They are no longer a source of strength or reassurance. 

            What are the things that constitute our vitality?  These would be the elements that enable us to enjoy life or the goals we have for life.  Physical health is fundamental for life, but so are financial freedom, legal freedom, and social connections.  Denver, for example, also has a practically endless list of opportunities for living interesting lives.  It offers music, art, sports, commerce, a pretty good economy, interesting and likeable people, and a great deal of physical beauty. 

            But that same abundant opportunity makes us frustrated when lack of time or lack of money or other circumstance keeps us from taking advantage of those good things.  Life can take such turns that deny us access to the good things we thought were just normal.  Not being able to get to them is just—wrong, it seems.  But here we are, cut off from the things that gave life meaning and strength.

            And that turn of life, sudden or not, faces us with a new set of circumstances that we don’t know or like.  Loss of financial flexibility, loss of a friendship, poor performance at work, advancing age, poor health, or just not having the time any more—any of these is a door into a dark room containing – what? – we don’t know, and we don’t like it.

            This is quite a let-down.  All the momentum you once had seeps away.  You once felt like the rapids of the Colorado River, and now you feel like a swamp.  With mosquitoes.  And mud that won’t come off.

            What happened? 

            One possibility is that we have lived as if the good things of life are ultimate things.  Our jobs, our money, our sports, our wine, our books; looking good, being smart, friends and family, having a good church that proclaims the gospel and ministers to the poor—all these are good things.  Every one of them can be an idol, even the church.  God may step in to separate us from one of these if it comes between us and him.

            Another possibility is that God is at work to change something deep within us, where the darkness has taken hold and God is saying, “It’s time for that to come out.”

            In the middle of his pain, the psalmist turns to God.

I acknowledged my sin to You, And my iniquity I did not hide; I said, “ I will confess my transgressions to the Lord”; And You forgave the guilt of my sin.  Selah.

            2. I confessed and you forgave

            a) God faces us with reality.  The first reality, of course, is himself.

            God & his character, God as creator, we in his image & therefore both relational and necessarily dependent.

            So what is our twistedness/rebellion/failure?  It is the twisted, rebellious, doomed-to-failure attempt to be god ourselves.

            Confession:  I stop hiding my sin, but then God hides it!

            b) God forgives us.  We use that word, “forgive,” a lot, but what does it actually mean?  What is the picture of that in your head?  Is it where someone just doesn’t think about the offence any more, or pretends that it didn’t happen?  The Hebrew is different.  The picture there is that of lifting the twistedness away.  God does something positive about the rebellion/perversion/failure.  These are a burden on our back, and God lifts them off.

            How does he do that?  By taking these burdens on himself.  He bears what we could not, so that we no longer have to.  Our rebellion/perversion/failure is not chiefly our problem any more, because God has made it his problem.  And we see him work out the solution of that problem in the incarnation, when God becomes a man for our sakes.

            In Jesus of Nazareth we see God, the Son of God, living a human life as we have not and cannot, as a son always dedicated to his Father, and then dying as a result of our alienation from the Father.  It is not quite true to say that he died so that we don’t have to.  Rather, he died so that in his death we died with him, so that in his resurrection we have a new creation, and it is no longer we who live, but Christ lives in us.  He took upon himself the burden of our rebellion/perversion/failure, and in his death he annihilated it and us.  In his resurrection we have new life.

            Our life is derivative.  We have it in his connection to us and our lives are hidden with Christ in God.  The psalmist puts it this way:

You are my hiding place; You preserve me from trouble; You surround me with songs of deliverance. Selah.

            3. God is our hiding place, our preserver, and he surrounds us with songs of deliverance.

            St. Paul, in Colossians 3, says,

Therefore if you have been raised up with Christ, keep seeking the things above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God.  Set your mind on the things above, not on the things that are on earth.  For you have died and your life is hidden with Christ in God.

            God is waking us up from our self-imposed illusions to face reality.  Do you want to know the truth about who you are, about why you are here and where you are going, about what you mean?  These things are hidden from the world where they are safe.  That doesn’t mean we can’t see them, because God reveals them to us in Christ.  In Christ God reveals himself to us, and there he also reveals ourselves to us.  In Colossians he says, “Keep seeking the things above.”  The psalmist says the same thing somewhat differently:

I will instruct you and teach you in the way which you should go; I will counsel you with My eye upon you.  Do not be as the horse or as the mule which have no understanding, Whose trappings include bit and bridle to hold them in check, Otherwise they will not come near to you.

            Un-learning our old, false views about ourselves and learning the correct view from Christ is a life-long pursuit.  It isn’t easy, and, as the psalmist describes, it comes with pain—and the more we resist God’s instruction and guidance, the more pain it will involve.

            One of the hardest parts of this is to trust God.  We have acquired reflexes and habits of self-defense to protect ourselves from the things that hurt us early on.  We have learned not to hope too much, or trust too much, or love too much, because we have been hurt.  We are curved in upon ourselves, with our backs turned to the threats that endanger us.  We have to unlearn these reactions and stop protecting ourselves, trusting instead for God to protect us.

            We also have to un-learn the old, false images of God that we have acquired.  He is joyful about us, and sings songs of deliverance around us, songs of celebration.

            In a way, Psalm 32 gives us a process for dealing with our alienation from God, for dealing with our disorientation in a very confusing world.  We need to spend time here.  We need to trust the process—not because it relieves us of all pain, not because it is a mechanism for self-improvement, and definitely not because it is a way to manipulate God.  We need to trust the process because we trust God who is at work in it, in us, singing songs of deliverance.

Amen. ✠