Ephesians 2:8-9 is the most succinct summary I’ve been able to find of the critical Christian doctrine about our salvation that we call justification by faith: “For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith —and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God— not by works, so that no one can boast.” Throughout Paul’s New Testament epistles, faith and works are put into contrast. Paul emphatically makes the argument that no work we perform will ever be adequate to earn God’s favor. Our one critical task is to accept the faith that God freely gives to us as a gift and live the rest of our lives on the foundation of this faith. But what is this faith that we receive from God? Many Christians have been taught that faith means simply “believing in things you cannot prove.” Under this definition, “faith” very quickly turns into a set of propositional statements about Jesus that we’re supposed to accept without proof: born of a virgin, died on the cross for our sins, raised from the dead, coming again at the end of time, etc. To have faith comes to mean simply that you agree with whatever the Bible says about Jesus. I don’t think this is unimportant, but is it really what the Bible is talking about when it says the word faith?

Here’s the problem with this definition of faith: it’s really a work even though it’s not supposed to be. I am saved by works rather than faith if my salvation is contingent on anything I do, whether it’s living a life free of sin, faithfully partaking of the sacraments of penance and Eucharist every week, making a “decision” for Christ, or believing all the right opinions about theology. Calvinism tries to get around this logical problem by saying that God predestines us ahead of time to have the right opinions about Him so that we can fulfill the requirements of His entrance exam for heaven. But what if the reason that faith saves us is completely different? What if faith saves us from the anxiety of trying to measure up to God’s entrance exam and all the sins we fall into as a result of rebelling against our self-perceived need to prove our worth to God?

Faith is truly not a work derived in us if it is the result of God winning our trust that He really is perfectly gracious. We don’t have to invent a doctrine of predestination to explain how our fulfillment of God’s entrance exam is His work and not ours if there is no entrance exam. That’s what is most difficult to accept. If there were an entrance exam, I could figure out what it is and how to fulfill its terms while maintaining my own autonomy. It is much harder to trust God and renounce my control over the situation. And that is the one requirement: to repent of trying to prove my worth to God so that I can receive my worth from Him as a gift and then spend the rest of my life proving God’s worth to everyone I meet.

People who really trust that God’s grace is sufficient for them are not going to exploit it by continuing to live selfishly because self-preservation is ultimately a lack of trust. To trust God means letting Him reign over everything about me. I may not always obey God perfectly; I will still fall into sin; but I know most fundamentally that I am insufficient and untrustworthy as an autonomous individual. I need God. I trust Him to be my guide and master. The more this trust shapes who I am, the more the Holy Spirit is able to transform all the ugly qualities about my character that I would otherwise be defensive about. When we are grounded in this trust, God empowers us to “participate in the divine nature” (2 Peter 1:4). He draws us into His light, an experience that would be terrifying without trust.

The reason I can enter into God’s presence and participate in His divine nature is because of Christ’s sacrifice for my sins. It is not that God needed Christ to die in order to tolerate my presence as a sinner, but rather that I needed Christ to die in order to tolerate God’s perfect holiness without fleeing in terror. Hebrews 10:19-21 is very helpful in explaining this distinction:

Therefore, brothers and sisters, since we have confidence to enter the Most Holy Place by the blood of Jesus, ²⁰ by a new and living way opened for us through the curtain, that is, his body, ²¹ and since we have a great priest over the house of God, ²² let us draw near to God with a sincere heart and with the full assurance that faith brings, having our hearts sprinkled to cleanse us from a guilty conscience and having our bodies washed with pure water. ²³ Let us hold unswervingly to the hope we profess, for he who promised is faithful.

Notice what the writer doesn’t say. He doesn’t say that we can enter God’s presence because God has been satisfied by the blood of Jesus. He says that Jesus’ blood serves the purpose of giving us confidence and sprinkling our hearts to cleanse us from a guilty conscience. Jesus’ cross is not God’s personal anger management strategy in response to our sin as so many Christian pastors have mistakenly described it. God doesn’t have emotional needs like that since He is perfectly holy and loving. The cross is rather the means by which God wins our trust, because He can say, “Look, I paid for your sin, so stop lying, stop hiding from me, and accept my love.” If we trust God, then His love is infinite comfort; if we refuse to trust Him, the same love becomes torture from which we flee, seeking some outer darkness to hide in. We may never have all the right opinions about God, but trust is what saves us from the misery of rejecting His grace, and trusting in our opinions about God rather than God Himself is damnation.

In Matthew 19, Jesus is responding to a question about divorce. In verses 4-6, he lays out the traditional understanding of gender presented by the Torah. God created people male and female. Men leave their fathers and mothers in order to become one flesh with a woman, the implication being that their genders perfectly complement one another in a way that they can be united. Several NC preachers used Matthew 19 as a text last month to preach in defense of traditional marriage, which works as long as you stop before verse 10, because that’s where Jesus’ disciples say, “If this is the situation between a husband and wife, it is better not to marry.” Then Jesus says that his disciples should emulate eunuchs, whom he categorizes into three types: “There are eunuchs who were born that way, and there are eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by others—and there are those who choose to live like eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven.”

Eunuchs in the ancient world were men who were castrated so that they could guard the king’s wives and concubines without being tempted to have sex with them. They were thus men who lacked the one definitive aspect of manhood. A eunuch who is “born that way” is definitively neither male nor female, whether it’s a hardware or software question. The use of the term signifies simply one who is incapable of impregnating a woman. Why would God create someone like that if His entire purpose in creating men and women is to marry them off and make babies with them? The problem is that Jesus’ words don’t always fit very neatly into the agenda of the Young Reformed and Restless movement to restore the “traditional”  gender roles of the (Eisenhower-era middle-upper-class) family.

In Matthew 19:11-12, Jesus effectively makes eunuchs the vanguard of His movement, whether they are non-gendered because of God’s choice, somebody else’s choice, or their own choice. Jesus says that “not everyone can accept” the calling to be a eunuch, but “the one who can accept this should accept it.” Of course, the implication is that eunuchs are celibate, but it’s significant that Jesus elevates to elite status a category of people who were explicitly prohibited from entering the temple in Deuteronomy 23:1 (“No one who has been emasculated by crushing or cutting may enter the assembly of the Lord”). Jesus could have honored celibacy without equating it with a ritually unclean category of person. Instead he chooses to champion non-gendered people.

I don’t know why God creates people who fall outside of gender normality. I do sense from other stories in the Bible that God actively resists our tendency to moralize normality. When we try to say it’s a sin for someone to be born with hormones or organs that are not normal, that’s what we’re doing. The problem with moralizing normality is not only that it results in the persecution of those who are born different, but it cheapens morality as well since what we’re usually doing is designing our moral system around the purpose of validating our own default “normal” behavior. Perhaps God puts people in our lives who fall outside the norms of identity to force us to refine our moral imagination.

In any case, I don’t think that transgender identity can be reduced to a social fad. Maybe some hippie parents out there want to give their children names like Moonbeam and raise them in a “post-gender” kind of way. I’m not comfortable with that because that seems to go beyond accepting those who fall outside the norm and fetishizing difference as an ideal. If you have a boy who can’t imagine being anything other than a boy, isn’t it going to mess him up for you to try and make him into Ziggy Stardust just as badly as if he were hormonally female and you tried to beat him into being manly? Bottom line is we don’t know where other people are coming from or what’s going on inside their bodies. What we do know if we take Jesus at His word is that “there are eunuchs who were born that way.”

For any Bible nerds out there, the Greek for Jesus’ phrase “son of hell” in Matthew 23:15 is huios geenes. In other words, Jesus is not talking about the neutral afterlife oblivion of a Greek Hades or Hebrew Sheol. He is talking about Gehenna, the valley of child sacrifice outside of Jerusalem that was the word 1st century Jews used for a place of eternal torture. No pun intended, but it’s a pretty damning indictment to call someone else a “son of hell.” And the people Jesus gives this awful title are the opposite of the depravity-soaked sinners that Paul calls “children of wrath” in Ephesians 2:3. Being a slave to “the passions of our flesh” is inhabiting one kind of hell. But based on Matthew 23:14, the preceding verse, the kind of hell Jesus describes here is the bitter existence of those who have made themselves the gatekeepers of heaven: “You lock people out of the kingdom of heaven. For you do not go in yourselves, and when others are going in, you stop them.” We become sons of hell when we devote our lives to locking people out of the kingdom of heaven.

Now I’m not going to pretend that Matthew 23:14-15 is all that the Bible has to say about heaven and hell, that the whole gospel is a message of “tolerating diversity,” and we can disregard the wrath that consumes us when we abandon ourselves to “the lusts of our hearts” (Romans 1:24). But there is a tremendous danger to which the Pharisees bear witness, and I’m flabbergasted at the way that Christians who claim to be “Biblical” seem to have blotted the Pharisees entirely out of their Bibles. Most of what Jesus says in the four gospels occurs in the context of arguing with the people he called sons of hell. His witness cannot be detached from their counter-witness. Christians’ lives should not only be an emulation of Christ, but also a contrast to the Pharisees who opposed Him. The Pharisees show that God’s law without Christ’s atonement does not suffice. Jesus’ cross saves us from being “sons of hell” who lock others out of heaven just as much as it saves us from being “children of wrath” whose slavery to sin locks us out of God’s glory. The more Christians act like sons of hell, the more they show themselves to be unsaved.

The peril to which the sons of hell bear witness is the intoxicating attraction of locking others out of the kingdom of heaven. It gives us an extraordinary sense of power to feel that we have the authority to damn other people. And it makes sense that a “gospel” which accentuates clear “us” and “them” categories between elect and damned would be attractive to people who are bewildered by the confusion of navigating a religiously pluralistic society. But once we are seduced by the power of damning others, it’s hard to escape the gravity of the black hole that creates. The way that sons of hell  prove their worth and fidelity to God is through their zeal to damn. It becomes no longer sufficient to damn homosexuals, Palestinians, illegal aliens, or people of other religions. Christians who are unwilling to damn others must be damned themselves, as well as Christians who are willing to associate with other Christians who refuse to damn. I wish I were creating a straw man here, but I’ve actually watched religious leaders use the homosexuality issue primarily as a guilt-by-association tactic, accusing each other not of being homosexuals or blessing homosexuality, but of associating with Christians who have inadequately expressed their condemnation of homosexuality. This profoundly bitter fruit has been an enormous witness in my life and the lives of many young evangelicals like me who have been shaped permanently by this age of culture wars.

But I thank God for this bitter fruit. And I thank God for witnesses like Fred Phelps. Part of what I accept as an evangelical Christian is that everything I need to know is in the Bible. But it’s not as straightforward and self-evident as many Christians would like it to be. Luke 6:44 tells me that “each tree is recognized by its fruit.” The Pharisees who argued with and ultimately crucified Jesus were zealous students of the Hebrew scriptures, but the way they applied what they learned made them into sons of hell and a counter-example God gave us to avoid. When Christians pay attention to the witness of the sons of hell, we can be made “competent as ministers of a new covenant —not of the letter but of the Spirit; for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life” (2 Corinthians 3:6). With that competence, I pray that we would have the courage to follow in the footsteps of Josef Akrouche and witness to the truth that God hates no one.

In the summer of 2008, I was interning at a church in downtown Durham, NC. That summer, both Matthew 9:13 and Matthew 12:7 came up in our gospel readings two weeks apart, which piqued my interest. At the time, we were collaborating with another church to hold a summer camp for disadvantaged children. One morning, there was a homeless man asleep in the parking lot. The ladies from the church asked me to wake the man up and send him on his way, so I tapped him on the shoulder and he went ballistic, cussing and threatening me in a demonic rage. I figured I should move away, so I turned around to leave and then the Lord spoke to me in a way that makes me tremble to this day. The homeless man said, “Where’s your fucking mercy, man?” Even though God dropped the f-bomb, it was one of the holiest moments I’ve experienced. In obedience to God’s command, I sat on the ground in front of the homeless man, determined to let him hit me or do whatever he was going to do to me. Then Julius, a volunteer from the church, came and tried talking gently to the homeless man who screamed the word !@#$%^&* at him several dozen times. It was the first time I’d ever seen a black person called that word to his face, but Julius never flinched or wavered in his gentleness. The police had to be called, but Julius kept his cool the entire time. And I realized that he was embodying the way of mercy God had wanted me to witness.

Since God got my attention four summers ago, I have been trying to find out what it means that God desires mercy rather than sacrifice. Both times Jesus quoted the verse in response to the way Pharisees had used their sacrifices (dissociating with sinners, avoiding “work” on the Sabbath) as the basis for judging other people. And when I look at our society today, I see the same dynamic at work, among, for instance, middle-upper-class Christians who see their sexual chastity as a sacrifice which gives them the right not to worry about poor people whose plight is the product of sexual immorality. In addition, our culture teaches us that people who pay their dues by suffering through law school or medical school or business school deserve to make oodles and oodles more money than all the lazy kids who didn’t sacrifice sufficiently in high school or college to get good grades. Furthermore, if I sacrifice an extravagant lifestyle and save up my money, then I earn the right to hoard my wealth and not feel bad about my selfishness. Being stingy and severe with myself becomes the reason why I shouldn’t have to be generous to other people. What American evangelicals call morality is thoroughly shaped by sacrifice. Through our abstinence from sex, drugs, worldly music, bad words, and biology textbooks, we gain the mandate to be the world’s critics, just like the Pharisees who judged Jesus.

A more subtle form of sacrifice occurs in our conception of God’s nature. When people make God into a Santa Claus of cheap grace, it’s  obvious that they’re worshiping a God of their own creation. But there’s also a hidden appeal to a God who is severe and capricious enough that worshiping Him constitutes an intellectual sacrifice. When we hear week after week about a God who is really angry with (most of) humanity, we get a double benefit because we can congratulate ourselves on sitting through a “tough sermon” which is really just an affirmation of the harshness with which we view other people. In the parable of the talents, the servant who buried his talent in the mud justifies his action by saying, “Master, I knew that you are a hard man, harvesting where you have not sown and gathering where you have not scattered seed” (Matt 25:24). In the same way, the fake “sacrifice” of making our God into a “hard man” who hates the world leaves us in a comfortable nihilism with respect to the world’s problems. We can bury the call to establish His kingdom on Earth and focus all our energy on keeping our own castle “family safe and kid friendly.”

But what does it look like if our lives are shaped by mercy rather than sacrifice? In his book, The Principle of Mercy, Jon Sobrino explores Jesus’ Good Samaritan story. He observes that the Samaritan stopped, not “to comply with a commandment, but only because he was moved by mercy” (26). The difference between the Samaritan and the priest and the Levite was not that he had better ethical principles or a more disciplined set of daily spiritual practices than they did. He was just a person whose heart could be moved by mercy. Whatever daily sacrifices the priest and Levite were making as part of their religion had not carved enough space in their hearts for compassion. In fact, their sacrifices probably substituted for mercy. The same dialectic occurs in the story of the prodigal son in which the older brother’s sacrifice-engendered entitlement becomes the reason he hates his father’s mercy.

Mercy and sacrifice produce completely different conceptions of holiness. Under the paradigm of sacrifice, holiness has to do with proving my fidelity to God. It is about showing God that I love Him enough to go without food for a day, slaughter a bull, or donate $5 million to my church’s capital campaign. None of these are wrong per se, but when holiness is understood according to sacrifice, it has to do with loving God to the exclusion of loving my neighbor. The ancient Israelite prophets constantly harped on their people for trying to pit love of God against love of neighbor:

“The multitude of your sacrifices— what are they to me?” says the Lord. “I have more than enough of burnt offerings, of rams and the fat of fattened animals… Learn to do right; seek justice. Defend the oppressed.” [Isaiah 1:11, 17]

“Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, with ten thousand rivers of olive oil?… He has shown you, O mortal, what is good. And what does the Lord require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.” [Micah 6:7-8]

In contrast, a paradigm of mercy understands holiness as the perfect integration of the two components of Jesus’ Great Commandment exemplified in the words of 1 John 4:12: “No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us.” Loving God and loving neighbor can never be separated; each is always already assumed in the authentic exercise of the other. The goal of the holiness we practice in praying, fasting, singing praise songs, donating blood, making meals for homeless people, and every other possible act of piety and mercy is not to prove anything to God (sacrifice) but to give God’s love complete dominion over our hearts (mercy). John Wesley used the term “Christian perfection” to describe the complete saturation of God’s love in the human heart that is the asymptotic ideal towards which the arc of holiness strives. The Samaritan is not merely an exemplar of compassion but of holiness as well, because obedience to the Holy Spirit is not measured by the stringency of our sacrifices but the degree to which God’s mercy can move us.

It is true that sacrifice can be extremely beneficial when it is a means of submitting ourselves more completely to God’s mercy. Fasting for example can teach us to be weak and dependent on God to help us battle our terrible enemy, pride. But if God desires mercy instead of sacrifice, then we can expect the commands He gives us in the Bible not to be arbitrary loyalty tests that “glorify Him” in a way that has nothing to do with mercy. Rather, it’s reasonable to assume that what He tells us to do has the ultimate purpose of removing every obstacle to the reign of His mercy in our hearts and over all things.

The idea started with a book that United Methodist pastor Mike Slaughter wrote called Change the World: Recovering the Message and Mission of Jesus. Here’s a summary Slaughter wrote to explain where he’s coming from:

Clearly, something is not working. Despite the church’s place of prominence in American culture and the ubiquity of the church in every American town, misconceptions about the faith of Jesus Christ run rampant today. Christians are known more for exclusivity than for love, more for pot lucks than for solving world hunger. It’s time for churches to get over the cruise-ship mentality of being a program-provider, and reconnect with the true message and mission of Jesus: to bring good news to the poor, release to the captives, and freedom to the oppressed. The church is called to be a mission outpost, living out Christ’s ideals in today’s world.

At Burke United Methodist Church this Saturday, we are planning to put together 20,000 dehydrated meals, 100 health kits, 200 school kits, and 100 birthing kits to send to people in need all over the world. We will also have a blood drive, a three-point contest to raise money for mosquito nets to stop malaria, as well as food, music, a number of children’s activities, and, of course, a bounce house! My hope as a pastor is that this event would be more than just a way for to accrue community service hours. Every time we have an opportunity to serve others, the Holy Spirit can use it to transform us into more imaginatively generous people. That is what I hope your experience will be if you come to change the world at Burke United Methodist Church this weekend.

2) On my 18th birthday, she smashed the cake she baked for me into my face like they do in Mexican restaurants.

3) Every day she hit the reset button on our relationship, even when she had been really upset with me the night before. Even on the occasions when I got grounded for doing seriously bad things, she never stayed angry with me overnight.

4) When I used to wet my bed, she would wake up late at night and take me into the bathroom to go pee-pee.

5) Every success that I had was the best thing that had ever happened to her, and every time anyone ever did anything mean to me, there had never been a crueler injustice in all the history of the world.

6) When I was in middle school, I used to get bullied a lot so I would get on the phone in the office after lunch and call my home to tell her I was having a bad day.Whenever I had a day like that, she would always bake a chocolate cake for me that she pulled out of the oven right when I got home.

7) She was the first person who ever let me preach to her. She lets me ramble on and on about theology over the phone for half an hour when I think she doesn’t understand anything I’m talking about and then after I pause she asks a question that indicates that she was with me the whole time.

8) When I was at the lowest point in my life, she never got tired of taking the same 3 mile walk and having the same exact conversation every day for about two months.

9) She baked 1000 rice krispie treats for me when I organized an evangelism rally at the University of Virginia on Valentine’s Day, 1997.

10) When I was little, we would lie in her bed and watch “Little House on the Prairie” and “Murder She Wrote” together.

11) In every phone conversation over the last two years since I moved away from Durham where she lives, she tries to manipulate me into moving back to NC even if it means I have to turn Baptist again to get a preaching gig.

12) She has the world’s corniest looking hats that she used to wear every time we would go on family vacations anywhere it was sunny.

1 Peter 2:13-16 provides Christians with a framework for how we should conduct ourselves in the secular world: “Submit yourselves for the Lord’s sake to every human authority… For it is God’s will that by doing good you should silence the ignorant talk of foolish people. Live as free people, but do not use your freedom as a cover-up for evil; live as God’s slaves. Show proper respect to everyone, love the family of believers, fear God, honor the emperor.” Peter does not let Christians off the hook for whatever ignorant things that foolish people have to say about us, let alone people who have legitimate grievances. We are responsible for changing their minds, not by coming up with air-tight arguments for our views or by pointing out our opponents’ hypocrisies, but by doing good. Furthermore, Peter exhorts his audience to honor a Roman emperor who was actively persecuting and martyring them. What does “honoring the emperor” look like when our president makes decisions that we disagree with? We don’t have to bite our tongues, but however we express ourselves should be in a way that “shows proper respect to everyone.” Christians furthermore have no business supporting the voices in our culture that speak dishonorably, regardless of whether we share their political views.

The culture wars’  greatest liability for the church lies in the thoroughly un-Christlike outrage industrial complex whose pundits, bloggers, and radio personalities deliberately use inflammatory, hyperbolic language to build their market profile. The best thing Christians could do for our witness is to completely dissociate ourselves from these outrage specialists. Rush Limbaugh for instance changed the entire tenor of the conversation about contraception when he called Sandra Fluke a slut. And then Glenn Beck completely mocked the ecclesial boundaries of the Roman church by writing “We are all Catholics now” as though his opportunistic political solidarity granted him special dispensation to partake in the sacraments of an entirely different religion from his Mormon faith. Any ability for Catholic voices to share thoughtful discourse about the sacramental theology of the body underlying their views on contraception was completely drowned out by the loudmouths of the outrage industrial complex.

Imagine how differently the contraception conversation would have gone if Cardinal Timothy Dolan had kept a better handle on his image by refusing to do photo ops with Glenn Beck and not allowing the church’s cause to be co-opted by professional agitators whose business model depends upon being the opposite of Christlike in how they present themselves. At least partly as a result of the church’s willingness to collaborate with outrage specialists, the “Catholic war against women” meme has stuck. Though the media has certainly gone for maximized drama in how it has reported on the Vatican’s conflict with the nuns and Girl Scouts, imagine how the meme might have evolved differently if Cardinal Dolan had made it a point to fly down to Georgetown for a public news conference with Sandra Fluke in support of her human dignity after Limbaugh’s astonishing attack on her.

Christians must not allow professional agitators to hijack our messaging. We should also  follow Peter’s exhortation to “love the family of believers.” Conservative and progressive Christians alike must stop publicly denigrating each other. As one who falls slightly on the progressive side of the spectrum, I know that I have fallen into the trap of not even trying to understand the perspective of Christians who do not share my views. We must live and speak as if all Christians share the same fundamental goal of seeing God’s mercy reign over all the Earth, even if some of our brothers and sisters seem like they don’t. Progressive Christians in particular should be chastened by the words of Gay Christian Network executive director Justin Lee, who had this to say about his fellow North Carolinians who voted overwhelmingly against his ability to marry: “The people on both sides who voted on this amendment honestly believed they were doing the right thing. Whichever side you’re on, if you caricature those who disagree with you as merely bigoted, stupid, homophobic, sinful, or evil, you’ve greatly underestimated them as people.”

I was recently exposed to the beautiful verse of James 3:17 that describes “the wisdom that comes from heaven [which] is first of all pure; then peace-loving, considerate, submissive, full of mercy and good fruit, impartial and sincere.” Imagine if this beautiful wisdom were what Christians exuded in how we talked about the affairs of our nation. Deflating the often legitimately earned negative stereotypes about  Christianity in our culture will take millions of Christians doing good and speaking with a wisdom that is peace-loving, considerate, submissive, merciful, impartial, and sincere. At the very least, we can silence the ignorant talk that comes out of our own foolish mouths.

1) Mercy not sacrifice
In two places in the gospel of Matthew, Jesus quotes Hosea 6:6 to the Pharisees: “I desire mercy not sacrifice.” To me, this simple verse is paradigmatic of the whole gospel. Sacrifice is the approach to religion in which I seek to justify myself before God whether it’s through slaughtering a bull, faithfully observing a set of rituals, agreeing with the right set of doctrinal propositions, or, most recently, voting for the right set of issues. American Christianity has become largely a religion of self-justification. This creates an army of self-righteous, nasty people. Mercy, on the other hand, is what happens to me when, instead of justifying myself, I accept God’s merciful justification through Christ’s sacrifice on my behalf. When God’s mercy reigns over me, I renounce the need to be right that is the basic slavery of the human condition. I show mercy to others with the hope that eventually God’s mercy would reign over all humanity so that none of us would seek our justification within ourselves.

2) Trust not opinion
One of the basic tenets of Protestant Christianity is that our faith in Jesus Christ is what saves us. However, there is a lot of confusion about what this means. Because faith and belief are similar words, many Christians have come to assume that we are saved by having the right set of opinions about Jesus (He was born of a virgin, He died for my sins, He rose from the dead, etc). But the Greek word pistis which we translate as faith is much more about trust than it is about agreeing with a set of propositional statements. Trusting Jesus with our salvation precludes trusting our opinions about Him to do the work of saving us.

3) Mystery not certitude
The basic difference between God and an idol is that God is infinite while an idol is finite. As human beings with finite minds, the best we can hope for in comprehending God is to remove the obstacles that keep us from fully beholding His beautiful mystery. If we seek to have complete certitude in our knowledge about God, then the object we know everything about is not God, but an idol we have created. The reason we prefer certitude over mystery is because our certitude gives us power over the “god” that it creates.

4) Gift not reward
It’s pretty incredible how many Christians talk catechistically about God’s grace being an unmerited gift but then act as if what they have received from God is a reward they earned by believing correctly. The way you can tell whether people actually live under grace or not is whether they talk about pulling themselves up by their bootstraps and expect others to do the same. People who see their lives as a perpetual gift from God want for others to also receive gifts that they don’t deserve. It’s impossible for someone truly living under grace to compartmentalize this grace as a purely “spiritual” matter of eternal destiny while the rest of life is supposed to follow a completely different set of rules based on meritocracy.

5) Deliverance not punishment
I haven’t fleshed this out fully yet, but Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross is the satisfaction of our need to have peace with God, not the satisfaction of God’s need to punish us. God needs nothing. He is perfect and holy and thus a terror to sinners like us without the assurance that Christ’s atonement provides. The fact of Christ’s punishment on our behalf serves the purpose of our deliverance from fear and the defensiveness of self-justification. God does not need to punish us, but facing His presence will be eternal punishment to us without the gracious means of reconciliation that He has provided. God loves us with infinite intensity, and He provides Jesus’ cross to make His love safe and eternally bearable for us.

6) Kingdom not stadium
Our purpose as witnesses of Christ is to build the kingdom of God, not to fill the seats of our stadiums. I worry that we have replaced the kingdom with pep rallies and personality cults. The kingdom is a reality that transcends each of our faith communities. As an evangelist, my hope should be not to bring others into “my” church but to help them to see and interpret their lives with kingdom eyes. God’s kingdom is so much bigger than the stadium I’m trying to fill.

7) Journey not decision
In the 18th and 19th century, Christian conversions often happened in the context of camp meetings and revivals in which preachers had one shot at saving souls. I really think the hellfire and brimstone theology we’ve inherited is based upon the 19th century need to terrorize listeners into despairing and throwing themselves on the mercy of God since the circuit riding preacher could only come through town ever so often. The result of this one-shot approach to conversion is the idea that salvation happens at a single instant in time as the result of a decision rather than a journey of turning one’s life from slavery to sin into slavery to Christ. But if God saves me as the result of a “decision” that I make, then this calls into question whether it’s really unmerited grace or a reward that I earn through my decision. I consider it much more accurate to think of salvation as a journey of awakening into the riches of God’s mercy.

8) Restoration not escape
This will end up being mostly a recapitulation of what NT Wright said in Surprised by Hope. For far too long, Christians have justified a nihilistic attitude about our world with the pious-sounding statement that “we’re just pilgrims with a home in a different place.” Everything in the Bible says that God’s kingdom is not an escape to somewhere else, but a reign that will be restored “on Earth as it is in heaven.” The resurrection of Jesus Christ foretells God’s  re-creation of the heavens and the Earth. We are called to live in God’s new reality right here right now, not to wait for what Woody Guthrie called “pie in the sky by and by.”

9) Servanthood not leadership
Churches today are obsessed with the concept of leadership. Every pastor is supposed to give a William Wallace speech every Sunday that casts a perfect vision that hypnotizes people into serving God and their neighbor in a way that snaps perfectly into place according to the congregation’s missional context and its pool of gifts. Do we ever worry that our emulation of the corporate world rubs against Jesus’ injunction in Mark 10 not to lord it over each other like the Gentile princes? We try to get around this problem by clipping the word “servant” onto the front of leadership, but “servant leadership” has no meaning if it is not most essentially servanthood and not leadership. The best leader I can be is one who serves the vision God has cultivated among His people so translucently that Jesus’ disciples realize they’re following Him and not me.

10) Weakness not power
Paul writes in 2 Corinthians 10 that “God’s power is made perfect in our weakness.” And yet Christians today uncritically seek worldly power. The measure of a pastor’s legitimacy, for instance, is defined strictly according to worldly power: the size of your audience (yes, I’m a slave to this rubric like many of my peers). It’s intoxicating to have the kind of power that evangelical Christians have in our society today, but it’s also an enormous counter-witness to the gospel. The first Christians were “cut to the heart” in Acts 2 not because they were attracted to a wildly successful young singles program but because they were moved by the tragic beauty of the cross. The cross is no longer “foolishness” to today’s Christians because it has been packaged it into a Powerpoint-friendly doctrinal formula which conceals the radical weakness that is its power.

11) Vulnerability not inerrancy
The holiest people I know often seem uncertain about whether they’re right or wrong. I don’t think they are just being disingenuously self-deprecating. It actually makes sense that the closer you get to God, the more acutely you would be aware of your inadequacies. Based on my encounter with holy people today and among the church’s historical saints, I don’t think the goal of holiness is to become perfectly unimpeachable in what we say and do. That is the pharisaic approach that only leads us to bitter, fearful self-justification. The goal is rather to become perfectly vulnerable before God and others, destroying all the insecurities that make us defensive so we can be nothing but an instrument of the Holy Spirit.

12) Emancipation not conquest
For most of the past 500 years, Western Europeans have used the pretext of “evangelism” to justify conquering and enslaving other nations of people from Africa, Latin America, and Asia in particular. The goal of true evangelism is emancipation not conquest. As long as I need to be superior to the person I share the gospel with, what I am doing is imperialism and not evangelism. If my evangelism is truly about spreading the emancipation that Christ has provided, then it shouldn’t bother me if I am evangelized myself God is constantly evangelizing and emancipating all of us, using believers and non-believers alike to turn us to Him.

So much good could be done with sixty percent:
sixty percent whose lives say Jesus,
sixty percent who love mercy most,
sixty percent who give ten percent,
out of which ninety percent goes to the ones who cannot repay.

Imagine if sixty percent came every Sunday,
if sixty percent were eager to help,
if sixty percent spent all of their efforts
searching for people who needed a hug.

What if God had sixty percent
whose greatest concern was chasing down the other forty,
who wanted love to always be the last word,
who could breathe only peace, patience, kindness, gentleness, and self-control?

What if sixty percent chose beauty to be their power?