The Authority to Question

My God, My God! Why have you forsaken me?

Eugene Peterson on the Bell-Hell controversy:

I don’t agree with everything Rob Bell says. But I think they’re worth saying. I think he puts a voice into the whole evangelical world which, if people will listen to it, will put you on your guard against judging people too quickly, making rapid dogmatic judgments on people. I don’t like it when people use hell and the wrath of God as weaponry against one another.

The whole interview is short, and really worth a read for its concise power. But because of its conciseness, many of Bell's detractors seem overly-confused. So let me try to clarify.

Questions. Are. Biblical.

To not allow questions is un-Godly.

Peterson is not saying that if you don't agree with Rob Bell's conclusions, then you are a moron in need of a shrink. Nor is he arguing the time-worn Na-na-nana-boo-boo defense. Pastor Peterson is merely stating the fact that dogmatism has no room in a living, breathing community.

photo © 2009 Scott McLeod | more info (via: Wylio)

See, in the end it doesn't truly matter what our beliefs on hell are* - because they are not central to the Gospel. Jesus is. And Jesus and God are bigger than our questions, bigger than our doubts, bigger than our insecurities, and bigger than our securities.

The bible is God's story with us. And as it is the finite and limited and suffering and broken humanity coming into contact with the infinite and great and holy God, it leaves us with many, many questions. Not nice questions. Not tidy questions. Not easily answered questions. And certainly not binary, yes-or-no questions.

photo © 2008 ryuu ji | more info (via: Wylio)Anybody who thinks differently either has his ears and eyes closed to the suffering of the world (think Japan. Think of the thousands dying this morning from starvation while we suffocate on pizza. Think of bombs or mines going off on children this afternoon. Think of cancer-survivors in your family. Think of abandoned and neglected on your block), or has her eyes and ears closed to half of the Bible.

The searing suffering of Job and the Psalms. The madness of Ecclesiastes. The Father of Nations who dared ask the Lord to spare Sodom. The Jesus who dared ask his Father to spare his fate.

To ask questions of authority - whether that authority is God or the Church Fathers or, in this case, a particular strain of Catholic and Protestant theology - is necessary. It's part of our Christian walk as we follow the steps of Jesus.

But to tell us that we can't ask questions?...

A place where there is certitude - as Peterson notes, perhaps a bit irritably - is when Jesus confronts the religious leaders of his day. Not for being lax, not for their questions. But because they put restrictions on the people which limit their access to God (whom Jesus himself delivers them to):

They tie up heavy, cumbersome loads and put them on other people’s shoulders, but they themselves are not willing to lift a finger to move them...
“Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You shut the door of the kingdom of heaven in people’s faces. You yourselves do not enter, nor will you let those enter who are trying to.
“Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You travel over land and sea to win a single convert, and when you have succeeded, you make them twice as much a child of hell as you are.

Matthew 23

A favorite passage of the Doctrinal Police, however, is in Galatians 1:

But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach a gospel other than the one we preached to you, let them be under God’s curse! As we have already said, so now I say again: If anybody is preaching to you a gospel other than what you accepted, let them be under God’s curse!

But the immediate and proper context makes it clear that this isn't about points of doctrine (which is unfortunately how it became standardly interpreted in the Greek-and-Roman-influenced West), it's about more burdens between Jesus and his followers. For instance, in the next chapter we find this:

You and I are Jews by birth, not ‘sinners’ like the Gentiles. Yet we know that a person is made right with God by faith in Jesus Christ, not by obeying the law. And we have believed in Christ Jesus, so that we might be made right with God because of our faith in Christ, not because we have obeyed the law. For no one will ever be made right with God by obeying the law...
My old self has been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me. So I live in this earthly body by trusting in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. I do not treat the grace of God as meaningless. For if keeping the law could make us right with God, then there was no need for Christ to die. (NLT)

But of course you don't need to go there or the next chapter, since just before the curse verse is this gem:

I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting the one who called you to live in the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel — which is really no gospel at all. Evidently some people are throwing you into confusion and are trying to pervert the gospel of Christ.**

It's Christ - Jesus - who is in the center of this all. It's not Christ's gospel, per se. And it's certainly not, "My interpretation of the Bible." It's the Good News of the Ascension of the New and Real Lord, Jesus Christ.

Now: why do I care? I'm not a pastor. I don't have a financial stake in the Evangelical field. Why am I up at the Lordforsakenhourof 1:30am writing this?

I can't help it. Christians are my family - brothers and sisters. Even when we have spats. Even when I disagree strongly with my literal blood brothers, we're still familia. So I want to go beyond the simple talking points and certainly beyond the anger and frustration. (not so sure I can do so at 1:30, though...). Galatians 3 saiz:

For you are all children of God through faith in Christ Jesus. And all who have been united with Christ in baptism have put on Christ, like putting on new clothes. There is no longer Jew or Gentile, slave or free, male and female. For you are all one in Christ Jesus.

-------------------------------------------------

* I don't want to say they're not important. They are. But they're not the end-game. They're not the litmus test. There is no indication of that whatsoever in the Bible and to point to that being the case is stretching.

** All the translations are in NIV unless otherwise mentioned.

ReMix: Weapons of Our Warfare: Faith

Marchers united for peace in Monterrey, Mexico

Still fighting the good fight.

I'm foolish enough to believe in a sense that I was saved (and maybe even buried a bit) by Calvinism. While watching others succumb to the pressures of being anything they wanted to be, I was free to believe in my own depravity - that no matter how hard I tried, I wouldn't amount to anything that God didn't design for me from before the beginning of time.

Of course, with age comes an appreciation that not everything is so black and white, so clearly delineated between evil and good, between obvious sin and definite salvation (and often the things you assumed to be obviously good turned out to be nebulously nefarious).

Just as human nature is neither completely good nor bad (nor, and this is central to this entire series, is any one human completely good or evil - although it may appear that some have fully lost their humanity), so the issue of faith is not the same one that I grew up on, nor that Martin Luther was so sure it was. Luther and some of his Reformation brothers reacted to the excesses of the Catholic Church of the time by considering faith as the antithesis of works. Solo fide*, they argued. You need nothing else to be in God's good graces.

I would argue that although that my be true as far as receiving grace, being a citizen of God's Kingdom (or a Christ-follower, however you want to pose it) encompasses work. And hard work. Fact of the matter is that faith and works are inseparable.

Lemme post an example from another prominent reformer, the OTHER Martin Luther:

Something is happening in Memphis; something is happening in our world. And you know, if I were standing at the beginning of time, with the possibility of taking a kind of general and panoramic view of the whole of human history up to now, and the Almighty said to me, "Martin Luther King, which age would you like to live in?"

King ponders for a few moments what it would be like to spend time in Ancient Egypt, Greece, Rome, in the Renaissance, at the forefront of the Reformation, during the Emancipation, and by the side of FDR. But then:

Strangely enough, I would turn to the Almighty, and say, "If you allow me to live just a few years in the second half of the 20th century, I will be happy."

Now that's a strange statement to make, because the world is all messed up. The nation is sick. Trouble is in the land; confusion all around... But I know, somehow, that only when it is dark enough can you see the stars. And I see God working in this period of the twentieth century in a way that men, in some strange way, are responding.

Something is happening in our world. The masses of people are rising up. And wherever they are assembled today, whether they are in Johannesburg, South Africa; Nairobi, Kenya; Accra, Ghana; New York City; Atlanta, Georgia; Jackson, Mississippi; or Memphis, Tennessee -- the cry is always the same: "We want to be free."

And another reason that I'm happy to live in this period is that we have been forced to a point where we are going to have to grapple with the problems that men have been trying to grapple with through history, but the demands didn't force them to do it. Survival demands that wegrapple with them. Men, for years now, have been talking about war and peace. But now, no longer can they just talk about it. It is no longer a choice between violence and nonviolence in this world; it's nonviolence or nonexistence. That is where we are today.

And also in the human rights revolution, if something isn't done, and done in a hurry, to bring the colored peoples of the world out of their long years of poverty, their long years of hurt and neglect, the whole world is doomed...

I can remember -- I can remember when Negroes were just going around as Ralph [Abernathy] has said, so often, scratching where they didn't itch, and laughing when they were not tickled. But that day is all over. We mean business now, and we are determined to gain our rightful place in God's world.

And that's all this whole thing is about. We aren't engaged in any negative protest and in any negative arguments with anybody. We are saying that we are determined to be men. We are determined to be people... We are saying that we are God's children. And that we are God's children, we don't have to live like we are forced to live.

Faith is hope with legs. Biblical book of Hebrews (via Eugene Peterson's The Message translation) tells us, "The fundamental fact of existence is that this trust in God, this faith, is the firm foundation under everything that makes life worth living. It's our handle on what we can't see."

Christian faith isn't sitting around and intellectually agreeing or disagreeing with some sort of random (and weird) "fact." Nor is it arguing with someone who agrees with different "facts" than you do. It also isn't fancy feelings. And it certainly isn't about self-determinism.

True faith, like true religion, according to Jesus' brother, the respected Elder James works it out:

Dear friends, do you think you'll get anywhere in this if you learn all the right words but never do anything? Does merely talking about faith indicate that a person really has it? For instance, you come upon an old friend dressed in rags and half-starved and say, "Good morning, friend! Be clothed in Christ! Be filled with the Holy Spirit!" and walk off without providing so much as a coat or a cup of soup—where does that get you? Isn't it obvious that God-talk without God-acts is outrageous nonsense?

I can already hear one of you agreeing by saying, "Sounds good. You take care of the faith department, I'll handle the works department."

... You can no more show me your works apart from your faith than I can show you my faith apart from my works. Faith and works, works and faith, fit together hand in glove.

It's good to have hope - to have a reason to press forward in our battles - but then we must act on our hope. Saying that "I believe that the homeless should be taken care of" will not take care of the homeless. Enacted faith says that, "I believe things can change for the better. And these are ways in which I have acted in that hope."

Faith is also - contrary to modern, Western thought - communal. The one in faith does not walk alone, but shares the burden of the struggle with others who do not always have the same perspective, but can add extra input and aid to a more well-rounded perspective. The result, if properly executed, is rewarding, refreshing, reinvesting, redeeming, creative, creating, and invigorating.

So is our beautiful but messy, hard but shared work resting squarely in faith.

*Remarkably, but not so much for me, I originally wrote, Solo Fido. That, I'm afraid, is more of a pet-land controversy...

For Your Lenten Consideration...

Renowned pastor, author and Bible translator Eugene Peterson meditating on the so-called "middle voice" - which lays somewhere between the active and the passive voice in ancient Greek grammar.

My grammar book said, "The middle voice is that use of the verb which describes the subjects as participating in the results of the action." I read that now, and it reads like a description of Christian prayer -- "the subject as participating in the results of the action." I do not control the action; that is a pagan concept of prayer putting the gods to work in my incantations or rituals. I am not controlled by the action; that is a Hindu concept of prayer in which I slump passively into the impersonal and fated will of gods and goddesses. I enter into the action begun by another, my creating and saving Lord, and find myself participating in the results of the actions. I neither do it, nor have it done to me; I will to participate in what is willed.

- Eugene Peterson, quoted by Philip Yancey in Prayer: Does It Make Any Difference?

Resurrection life

Easter would hardly have been, for two thousand years, the spring and center of Christian life and prayer, would hardly have provided the focus of Christian worship and the form of Christian hope, if the word Easter were simply the name of something that once happened in the past.

Nicholas Lash, Easter in Ordinary
(source)

I'm going to do a little teaching on Thursday night to my old youth group. I miss teaching in the Church context. But at the same time, I feel like this time right now, God is teaching me so much and that my vocation is only beginning to be illuminated. And I feel a bit shaken. Like there's so little I know, even though I've been a Christian for some 26 years. I feel a bit of trembling and shaking.

I'm going to be drawing largely on N. T. Wright (largely The Challenge of Jesus) and Eugene Peterson (in this case, almost exclusively Living the Resurrection) to talk about the resurrection of Jesus (spiritual, intellectual and physical new life-after-death) and his followers and what that means in day-to-day life (hint: it has nothing to do with the Left Behind books or why we should fight for or against anybody in the Middle East [militaristically, that is]).

Please stay tuned for further ruminations throughout the week. Both of you.

Happy Holy...., No, wait... Merry Holy... No, that doesn't seem to work either... Blessed Ho... Hmmmm....

(How do you greet people during these more somber hol(y)idays anyway? As if the name Good Friday isn't ironic enough.)

I was going to link to an article written by Eugene Peterson, who gave us The Message paraphrase / translation of the Bible and is one of my favorites writers at this moment for his simplicity of prose and for living that simplicity. But she already did (see what happens when you email someone your ideas? haHa!).

Right now, however, we Christians from what I understand, should live in somber silence. I know I've done my fair share of non-Shabot-union work today. But even within those moments I've tried to get myself into a place of mourning Christ's death, mourning my sinfulness, mourning my world's fallenness (admittedly easy to do when you work at a homeless soup kitchen on some particular days - like this one - and are constantly at a loss for our own humanity to our own bodies and each other) and yet expectant of hope. Hope that a resurrection from the dead will occur; hope that tomorrow, the Son shall rise with healing in his wings; hope that we shall taste life, gushing out as a river from now through eternity. And that hope should fuel us to great acts and leaps of love.

I need more Holy Saturdays if that's the case.

The second short meditation I wanted to kind of zero-in on was a statement of Jesus about Jerusalem. It's an observation from N. T. Wright again, specifically his The Challenge of Jesus. He notes the curious processional riddle of Jesus, comparing himself to a hen and Jerusalem - the holy kingdom city - to chickens he wants to protect. From the New International Version:

O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were not willing. Look, your house is left to you desolate.
(Matthew 24:37 & Luke 13:34)

The picture, Wright notes,

is of a farmyard fire; the hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and when the fire has run its course, there will be found a dead hen scorched and blackened, but with live chicks under her wing. Jesus seems to be indicating his hope that he would take upon himself the judgment that was hanging over the nation and city. (86)

Was Jesus being cryptic? Were his own people turning their collective back on him? Was he still to suffer as the mother hen, only with no chicks to protect, a wasted sacrifice? No, I say, for even though the tree (of Israel) itself is holy and will be made whole and reconciled again, the shoot (of the Gentile church) is alive and kicking. And I'm a part of that!