When we wonder why the language of traditional Christianity has lost it’s liberating power for nuclear man, we have to realize that most Christian preaching is still based on the presupposition that man sees himself as meaningfully integrated with a history in which God came to us in the past, is living under us in the present, and will come to liberate us in the future. But when man’s historical consciousness is broken, the whole Christian message seems like a lecture about the great pioneers to a boy on an acid trip.

- Fr. Henri Nouwen, The Wounded Healer

Tonight I listened to a few clips of old sermons (Because apparently that’s how I spend my Friday nights) and was struck by one common feature: The rhetoric of Evangelicalism in the last century was dominated by a concern for the future. The ultimate future. The great end of things.

“If you left here and were hit by a bus, where would you go?”

…

“With every eye closed and every head bowed”

And so as the youth group sniffles and the band plays “turn your eyes upon Jesus” one more time, everyone signs a commitment card and they go home, assured that their hearts belong to Jesus and their future looks bright. Their past has been re-narrated as a downward spiral from which they have just been delivered, and the future they can expect is one of ever increasing sanctification until the day they see God.

And that one moment of ultimate existential terror passes.

I think many of us might see several issues with such a rhetoric, no matter how common it is in our churches (not least an ethical objection). However I want to bring Nowen’s words to bare upon it.

If we presuppose a broken historical consciousness, one of two things is likely to happen:

1. The story is collapsed into that one singular moment, and so the young person is simultaneously crushed with guilt and offered the escape from such a feeling.

2. The story is instantly rejected because the past has no value and the future is fixed in it’s uncertainty as to make the narrative meaningless. Or at least unworkable.

The first, I suggest, is a common response for those who have at least some understanding of history, possibly a second hand knowledge.

The second might be a common reaction of those with more experience, who have the ability to see their present as an overall positive result of their past.

By no means are these all the ways someone might respond to a Youth Group evangelistic talk, but I think you get the idea that a person’s pre-existing interpretation of their existence shapes how the rhetoric is accepted. Or even if it is at all.

However true it might be that Christians were once lost in sin and are now saved and headed to the Everlasting Kingdom (Colossians 1:21-22), that Biblical truth rests upon an understanding of human life as being more than the experience of it in the present.

The instant availability of every kind of media content to many people at little cost has altered this irreparably.

I think some find this a challenge to their faith and so decry it, warning of the evils of media consumption and being over-available and the rest. It is apparently evil to have too many good things available in one moment. What we need to do, it is argued, is to return to a prior mindset, one which already has a well developed Christian narrative to cultivate discipleship and foster community.

I almost see the point in that.

But I must disagree. The loss of the power of the Youth Group Story does not mean the power of the Gospel is lost. Nor does it mean the young people of today are any more lost than the ones who held a different set of assumptions. As if, somehow, the generation you were born into makes you less able to be saved.

Thats exactly what we communicate when we tell young people that their cultural norms are somehow worse than the ones of their parent’s generation.

This is simply not the case. It is God who does the saving and God who does the sanctifying and God who redeems all things to the glory of his name. With this liberating story to quench our souls in, perhaps we would no longer feel the need to have names on cards or butts on pews, but tell the thirsting souls around us of the great, rich, beautiful and blessed life beyond any one imagination and outside any one person’s power to create.

Because if all that matters is this present moment, then I think the Christian story has a great deal more to offer to this present moment than even the varied voices and faces I can access from the palm of my hand.

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“You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden. Nor do people light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on a stand, and it gives light to all in the house.
In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven.

But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth.”

-Jesus

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I fancy that Alyosha was more of a realist than any one. Oh! no doubt, in the monastery he fully believed in miracles, but, to my thinking, miracles are never a stumbling-block to the realist. It is not miracles that dispose realists to belief. The genuine realist, if he is an unbeliever, will always find strength and ability to disbelieve in the miraculous, and if he is confronted with a miracle as an irrefutable fact he would rather disbelieve his own senses than admit the fact. Even if he admits it, he admits it as a fact of nature till then unrecognized by him. Faith does not, in the realist, spring from the miracle but the miracle from faith. If the realist once believes, then he is bound by his very realism to admit the miraculous also.

-Dostoyevsky, Brothers Karamazov

There is, I think, a strange and frustrating tendency abounding that supposes people who believe in God have quite abandoned all reason, condemning them to the asylum. It is presumed that those who closely examine the world and observe people and their ways will come to the necessary conclusion that there is no God, nor miracles nor soul nor everlasting life. These things are wish fulfilment for tragic and brief lives of suffering, they snap.

Now that we live in a comfortable world free from the threat of near extinction or war or famine, we can dispense with the primitive presupposition of a Deity governing all things.

I’ve never found that story compelling. Partly, I suppose I dislike being considered a fool for my faith. But to a greater extent, I find this story stinks like a kind of chronological chauvinism, presuming those who have gone before us were less right than we are now.

I know I’m guilty of that. I think of the way I have often regarded those of my parent’s generation, or the one before: unquestioningly assuming the mood of the day, that we are in and those before are out.

How dissatisfyingly narrow minded.

There is a reason you will rarely see me write of evidence or proof for the existence of God, or for the claims of the Bible: I do not believe these means always reach the truth. Especially the kind of truth that matters to our most basic existential needs.

Case in point: the progression from human being as image-bearer of God, to human being as outgrown ape is a most devastating kind of truth. In seeking to answer the question of our form, the answer to a far more significant question has been abandoned: our function.

Or, for what reason am I?

At this point one might accuse me of leaping back to a prescientific world where such a question, born of existential angst, needed a clerical figure to answer and thus keep me in line.

It was of such a dilemma that Dostoyevsky, the great storyteller, wrote. The young monk in his story is a child of the day, a realist who believes what he can see, yet not for one moment does this result in his apostasy, but propels him toward the fanciful and miraculous. Dostoyevsky thus illustrates a different kind of relationship between reason and faith.

It is that relationship that I hope to explore here, on this blog.

In a place where mind and body, and feeling and passion and duty and love and anger and frustration and memory and tradition are deep wells, from which we draw the many flavoured waters of abundant life.

And as far as I have experienced, it is the Christian faith which most openly welcomes such a way of being. Such a way, if you’ll humour me, of being human.

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Truly wonderful.

It is a prayer which takes courage and faith and strong stomach to utter. It is not a prayer for the good life or for success, but to do all things and be all things to the glory of God. For those who have faith, this is the very best. For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for Christ’s sake and the gospel’s will save it.

I am no longer my own, but thine.
Put me to what thou wilt, rank me with whom thou wilt.
Put me to doing, put me to suffering.
Let me be employed for thee or laid aside for thee,
exalted for thee or brought low for thee.
Let me be full, let me be empty.
Let me have all things, let me have nothing.
I freely and heartily yield all things to thy pleasure and disposal.
And now, O glorious and blessed God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit,

thou art mine, and I am thine.

So be it.

And the covenant which I have made on earth,
let it be ratified in heaven.

Amen.

(Book of Offices of the British Methodist Church, 1936)

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Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man.

Go away from me, for I am selfish and self-seeking
Self-admiring and self-satisfied,
Self-concerned and self-obsessed.

Go away from me, for I use others for me own comfort
The cheap labour of those in other countries
The  desperation of the poor which drives them to servitude.

Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man.

Go away from me, for I am so drawn to other things
Shining bau-bauls and loud, sweetly singing toys.
Objects which neither look nor see, neither know nor feel.

Go away from me, for I prefer the creature to the creator
I will praise a man’s work, but I will forget the man.
I will joyfully give thanks for your great gifts,
but I will not remember you in the time of temptation

Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man.

Go away from me, for I am full of doubt
And fear fills my heart each day
And darkness each night.

Go away from me, for I am given over to wickedness
And all my thoughts are of harm to others
And all my actions say that I do not fear God

Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man.

And I have forgotten you
Bending my knee to all the deities of the day
And presumed upon your blessing
Assured myself that it would cost me nothing
And  despised those on whom my life depends.

I am a killer and adulterer
A thief and  liar,
And I want always what is not mine.

So, Lord, please depart from me.
I cannot bear your light
I cannot stand your presence
Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man.

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We all want to hold in the everlasting gaze
Enchanted in the rapture of his sentimental sway
But underneath the wheels lie the skulls of every c.o.g.
The fickle fascination of an everlasting god

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It is good that one should wait quietly
for the salvation of the LORD.
It is good for a man that he bear
the yoke in his youth.

I’ve been reading a commentary by Robin Parry on Lamentations. It’s in a fairly new series called ‘Two Horizons’ which offers both a commentary on the text, and a series of essays exploring the theological implications of the text from a variety of angles. I have especially enjoyed Parry’s treatment of Lamentations as a worshipper’s text and his exploration of how it can inform Christian worship.

He even manages to go beyond relating The Man in Lamentations 3 to Jesus to letting the mourning of the text speak as the mourning of all humanity over their Godforsakenness.

I especially enjoyed his exploration of the Old Testament idea of God forsaking his people. This is uncomfortable language in the light of Jeremiah 29:11, where God promises to ‘never leave nor forsake’ his people. Contrast that with these words of the Lamentation:

The LORD has done what he purposed;
he has carried out his word,
which he commanded long ago;
he has thrown down without pity;
he has made the enemy rejoice over you
and exalted the might of your foes.

(Lamentations 2:17)

Parry reminds us that such language does not indicate the absence of God, “if anything, the problem is not that God is absent so much as that he is present as enemy-of-Israel” (p. 197). God in interaction with his people never leaves or forsakes them, rather he deals with them as the stipulations of the Covenant demand for the sake of the glory of his name. Parry suggests that what we read as abandonment language in the Old Testament is from the experience of Israel rather than the true dealing of God with them.

However I must raise one criticism against Parry: I would have liked him to have reflected on this motif as far as it informs the Church today. He mentions that the New Testament instances of God’s judgement being poured out in the present age upon churches (Revelation 3:16) and individuals (Acts 5:1-11). My complaint is that he only spends a couple of pages on the subject, and much of that is referencing historic uses of Lamentations as a warning to Churches (Eusebius, Gregory of Nyssa, Matthew Henry, Calvin) rather than exploring the idea of Covenant discipline in the light of the New Covenant of Christ.

I have am inclined to believe that the Christian Tradition does warrant such a reading of Lamentations. Granted, Parry DOES flesh out a framework for using the text in the Christian community in order to respond to suffering, I remain a little frustrated that the precise New Covenant grounding for such an interaction is left a little hollow. I don’t see him connecting God as enemy-of-Israel to God as enemy-of-the-Church.

Or perhaps the reader might think I’m missing the point of Christ’s covenant.

In either case, I’d appreciate a discussion on the matter and perhaps some kind of reading list.

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This is what my Friday evening looks like.

At this time of year these views become rare and precious. The sun is all too quick to vanish from the horizon, as if we’ve done something to offend her. She keeps her distance and skirts along the bottom of the sky, never staying for long.

I hope she forgives us soon. It’s getting really cold.

That was my friday evening. What’s yours?

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Come hither, all ye that have strayed and lost your way, whatever your error and sin may have been, whether it be one which in human eyes is more more pardonable and yet perhaps more dreadful, or one more dreadful in human eyes and yet perhaps more pardonable, one which was revealed here on earth, or one which is concealed here yet known in heaven–did ye find forgiveness here on earth and yet no rest in your inward mind, or found ye no forgiveness because ye sought it not or sought it in vain–oh, turn about and come hither, here is rest!

Kierkegaard Training in Christianity

Image courtesy of DeviantArt

Picking up a discussion of Kierkegaard’s of the Gospel, I want to follow him into the realm of real experience. He has thus far spoken in terms of feeling helpless and abandoned, alone and forsaken. The words of grace of such as they was to tell of the bountiful mercy offered to all. Here, he moves from the more subjective realm of feelings and yearnings to begin to show the reality of the Christian faith in a more specific way, a way which is more immediately perceivable.

I was tempted to say more ‘real’ here. That is to say, this discussion makes Christianity ‘real’ or ‘realistic’, but I do not think it helpful to think of feelings as unreal. Much LESS do I think Kierkegaard would regard feelings so flippantly. This is because our experience of reality is often shaped by the wrongdoing of others, and Kierkegaard wants to show also how Jesus offers rest FROM others, before he speaks of personal fault.

As far as I read Kierkegaard I find it easier to relate to this experience of Jesus, as one who offers rest and return from sin as I suppose it is an experience I am all too familiar with. It was not always so, and indeed my first encounter with Jesus was as Saviour from enemies and wrongdoers.

Yet here he is concerned with the human encounter with evil and participation in it. Notice above how he frames sin in an objective fashion, that is to say that the disapproval or approval of others does not constitute sin. He seems to place the conscience over sin, though. Forgiveness is a subjective matter of inner peace. The rest offered is apparently the rest from the guilty feelings of sin.

Does this mean that the one who feels no guilt might have no need of a Saviour?

No, I think not. If Kierkegaard has established a moral objectivity to sin, then one’s feeling of guilt and restless conscience is the result of a real wrongdoing or offence against that moral objective. To use an illustration: The wound is a problem because, firstly, it hurts. Indeed, if one did not smart from a cut it would worsen and kill us.

So does Jesus offer just an appeased conscience?

The invitation halts at the parting of the ways where there path of sin again veers, for the last time, and is lost to view… in perdition. Oh, turn about, come hither! Shrink not at the difficulty of the journey back, however hard it be; fear not the toilsome path of conversion, however laboriously it leads to salvation.

This is where Kierkegaard begins to offer something truly unique to us. This talk of conversion is linked not with a decision nor a feeling of forgiveness, but with a hard slog against sin. He pictures Jesus standing at the place where the path forks and the sinner ventures into a lonely desolate place. For Kierkegaard, the call to convert is the call to turn away from sin and back to the right path.

It is tempting to accuse Kierkegaard of making Christianity into an intellectual or emotional crutch, especially with his discussion on the guilt of sin.

Yet now has he given the seeker an unbearable burden?

No, since what he has described before, Christ as comforter and friend, is no less true here.

Be not in despair at every relapse, which the God of patience possesses patience enough to forgive and which a sinner might well have patience enough to be humbled under. Nay, fear nothing and despair not. He who says “Come hither,” is with you on your way; from Him come help and forgiveness in the path of conversion which leads to Him; and with Him there is rest.

Notice the use of the idea of conversion.

It has, in this instance, nothing to do with learning a creed or undergoing some religious instruction. No, conversion is the path away from sin, from death. In this we see the substance of Christianity is then not belief or learning but action and obeying. Indeed we’ve seen how Kierkegaard presents Jesus to us as a contemporary person, a real man with whom we share our life. So how could conversion be concerned with the learning of a creed? It must be conversion as allegiance to this Man, and obedience to Him and a coming to Him for rest and consolation.

Conversion then, is a becoming. It is a willing after Christ and following that call back down the road of perdition. And for the journey we are given that same Christ as our comforter.

If this is truly the case, how then do we view ourselves?

Am I a Christian?

What about our friends?

Churches?

Who then could be saved? Who would ever be a Christian.

Kierkegaard leaves us with Jesus, he is the one who has done all things necessary and thus does all things necessary FOR US. And WE experience it, apparently in real time in real ways.

He goes–yet no, he has gone, but infinitely farther than [anyone else]. He went, in sooth, the infinitely long way from being God to becoming man, and that way He went in search of sinners.

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They need not go away; you give them something to eat.

Two weeks ago I posted a short reflection on Matthew 14, where Jesus feeds the five thousand. At that time I was most struck by the huge demand Jesus placed on his disciples, rowing across lakes and ministering to the sick and giving out food. I lamented that these feats seem impossible because of my own lack of faith.

Today we continued to reflect on this passage using the Ignatian practices of meditating on the Scriptures. Again, I found myself in the story as one of the disciples. I felt sympathy and confusion to hear of John the Baptist’s death: What could he have done to deserve beheading? What about his followers? What about us, as Jesus’ followers?

Yet these thoughts are hurried away at the sight of the needy crowds. Perhaps it would have been the young men who greeted us, those who could hurry around the lake in time for us to arrive. I am awestruck as Jesus boldly preaches and heals the sick, unashamed of his mission even at this dangerous time. I love seeing Jesus work, aiding him and aiding others.

The sun begins to decline and someone mentions that the crowds ought to go from this desolate place to find food.

Again I hear him ask me to feed them. Yet this time I am not hot with anger.

No, my stomach sinks with embarrassment: I have nothing to give! I anticipate his disappointment.

Yet it is not so with Jesus.

And my heart warms. He accepts my offering.

Because my offering is not for others, it is for him. And with it, he is able to do far more.

He asked me to feed the people. Yet he provides the food.

I was struck in hearing this passage for the third time, how Jesus did not depend on my faith or my level of trust or how much I believed he could do. He asked and I obeyed to the best of my ability. This is true faith. It is not perfection, but it is enough for Jesus.

That makes all the difference for me.

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