The God of the American evangelical gospel is mostly a duality of Father and Son with the Holy Spirit basically filling in the gaps of the story kind of like the way that God fills in the gaps that cannot be explained by science in modernity. Evangelicals tend to frame the problem of Christian salvation in terms of a fundamental dualism to God’s nature (wrath vs. mercy, holiness vs. love, justice vs. grace) that involves a Marcionist split between the Old Testament Father (who is wrathful, holy, and just) and the New Testament Son (who is merciful, loving, and gracious).

This Marcionist dualism (or shall I say bitheism) is expressed most clearly in the claim that while the gracious/merciful Jesus is the one who “eats and drinks with sinners” (Matthew 9:11), His wrathful/holy Father cannot tolerate the presence of our sin (He has an allergy), so He needs Jesus to fumigate our souls of sin with His blood. That way, He will only see Jesus instead of us and pretend that we never made any mistakes after we die and go to face Him.

In such a schema, the Holy Spirit’s sole purpose is to enable totally wicked and hell-destined human beings to get out of the doghouse with the wrathful Father by responding appropriately to the action of the merciful Son on the cross. A common piety for evangelical sensibilities is to say that salvation is not really about us; it’s about God bringing glory to Himself. In the post-Anselmian Western church, God’s glory is understood in terms of rectifying the dishonor that has been shown to God by human sin either through the sacrifice of Jesus’ cross or through the eternal damnation of sinners (it makes no difference to God which of these as long as the debt gets paid).

But what happens if we take the promise God makes in Joel 2:28 as our starting premise? “I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh.” I realize that all is the least favorite word in the Bible of many evangelicals (isn’t that universalism?). But suppose that God really is pouring His Spirit on all flesh. Does it seem very evident from looking around? I preached about this last night. We live in a world where God’s Pentecost is being perpetually sabotaged by Satan’s scandal. The pouring out of God’s Spirit doesn’t make the nightly news; it doesn’t make it into our Facebook status updates; because the scandals of our world are so much more delicious, and our consciousness has been almost entirely consumed by them.

Could it be the case that the problem is our lack of awareness of the Spirit that God is actively pouring out on our flesh? Look at what Peter says at the conclusion of his first Pentecost sermon when his listeners ask what they must do to be saved: “Repent, and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ so that your sins may be forgiven; and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit” (Acts 2:38).

Our sin is the obstacle that prevents us from receiving the Spirit that God is constantly giving. The same Greek word lambano is used for “receive” and “take.” One of the options that the lexicon offers is “to appropriate to one’s self.” So when Peter says “receive,” he is talking about an ability that we are given, not just a gift that is dumped in our laps, though the ability itself is also a gift.

To evangelicals reading this passage who define salvation exclusively in personal afterlife insurance terms, receiving the gift of the Holy Spirit is no more than a fringe benefit of salvation; the focus is on the forgiveness of sins (and the avoidance of damnation which has to be added/eisegeted parenthetically to that). But the most straightforward reading of Peter’s sentence would leave us with the conclusion that the forgiveness of our sins serves the purpose of enabling us to receive the Holy Spirit, which is our salvation.

This makes perfect sense if we read it alongside Romans where the law of the spirit is at war with the law of the flesh. If the flesh is death and the spirit is life, then receiving the Holy Spirit that has been poured out on our flesh signifies entering into eternal life. Crucifying our sin with Christ and emerging from His empty tomb in our new resurrected selves is what needs to happen so that… we can be kissed by the Holy Spirit’s Pentecostal tongues of fire that make us fully alive, eternal creatures who glorify God.

Our salvation is in fact about God’s glory, but it’s a much richer glory than the “glory” of a marketplace of honor where every debt has been paid. God is most fundamentally an artist. Like every artist, God is glorified by the beauty of His art. The early Christian saint Irenaeus captures the essence of Christian salvation in two sentences: “The glory of God is man fully alive. The life of a man is the vision of God.” Our salvation is to receive the gift of the One who not only sent His Son to crucify our sin and resurrect us from its shame, but is also pouring out His Spirit on all flesh that we might be made fully into His children and incorporated into the body of His Son. When Pentecost becomes our daily reality, we glorify God and enjoy the eternal life of delighting in His beauty.

It all started when T.C. Moore wrote the following as his facebook status update:

There’s a peculiar tribe of radicals discovering they are not alone. They come from all different traditions and expressions of the church, but they share many common characteristics:
Their message is centered on Jesus the Messiah; their definition of power is the cruciform love of God revealed on the Cross; they proclaim Jesus Lord and King, not Caesar; they won’t bow down to nationalistic idolatry, nor will they be co-opted by any of the powers that be; their Gospel is good news to those on the margins; they live in authentic community in eschatological hope; they embody the life of the age to come; they live as pilgrims and sojourners in this world, because God is building a new city among them; they live in solidarity with the hurting, and celebrate the new covenant with joy; God is using them to renew all things.

They are Jesus-disciples, and they are turning the world upside-down.

This sounded a lot like what 1 Corinthians 1:28 says, so I shared it with T.C. and Zach. Essentially what we’re talking about is a specific set of priorities in thinking about the shape of the kingdom of God and the vocation of Christian disciples. When Jesus calls us to take up our crosses and follow Him, He’s not just telling us to engage in “self-sacrifice” through accruing a certain quota of volunteer service hours or smiling pleasantly a certain number of times at people who are being unpleasant to us. Taking up your cross is not about carrying a heavy load; it’s about renouncing your social status.

To take up your cross in a literal, 1st century sense would mean to join the procession of those who have been condemned to die in their march out of the city gates, which in figurative 21st century terms would mean to join the company of those who are despised by the world, the modern-day equivalents of “the prostitutes and tax collectors [who] are entering the kingdom of heaven ahead of [those who think they are the gatekeepers of heaven]” (Matthew 21:31). I’ll let you fill in those blanks. It means that we sit at the feet of those who are despised by the world and allow them to teach and judge us.

In 1 Corinthians 6:4, Paul makes a very interesting statement that I happen to think has been mistranslated by just about every English version of the Bible. The Corinthians had been in a power struggle which has gotten ugly and turned litigious. Particularly scandalous to Paul is that believers have gone outside of the church to the pagan courts to rule in their disputes. Paul says in Greek, βιωτικὰ μὲν οὖν κριτήρια ἐὰν ἔχητε, τοὺς ἐξουθενημένους ἐν τῇ ἐκκλησίᾳ τούτους καθίζετε.

The NRSV translates this: “If you have ordinary cases, then, do you appoint as judges those who have no standing in the church?” The NIV says, “Therefore, if you have disputes about such matters, do you ask for a ruling from those whose way of life is scorned in the church?” It is very telling about the Bible translators of the NRSV and NIV that they could not conceive of the possibility that when Paul uses the phrase ἐξουθενημένους (“despised ones”), he might not be making his own moralistic judgment about the people he’s talking about. They must not have looked back to 1 Corinthians 1:28 where Paul uses the same word in a slightly different form, ἐξουθενημένα, to talk about the people whom God has anointed to “bring to nothing the things that are.”

If we take Paul’s statement at face value without making a moralistic judgment about the ἐξουθενημένους, then what Paul is saying literally is this: “Therefore if you have disputes about daily life, then let the despised ones in your church be the judges.” Recall that 1 Corinthians is the book where Paul exclaims, “Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world?” (1 Corinthians 1:20). We think we’re so sophisticated, but the truth is that outsiders who have no status and thus no artifice could probably do a better job of resolving our silly squabbles with one another better than we could. And it’s their lack of worldly dignity and anxiety over appearances that makes the despised ones people we should listen to and take seriously.

When Jesus says, “Whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant,and whoever wants to be first must be slave of all” (Mark 10:43-44), He’s not commanding us to put on some latex gloves and dish out soup for poor people once a month so that we can feel good about ourselves. He’s telling us to put ourselves beneath “the least of our brothers and sisters” with whom He directly identifies Himself (Matthew 25:40). Let the despised ones be your judges!

Jesus is the king who makes Himself the despised one (Philippians 2:7) so that His disciples would learn to “do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit [but] rather, in humility value others above yourselves” (Philippians 2:3). To follow our despised messiah, we need to proactively examine ourselves for “selfish ambitions” and “vain conceits” that are corrupting our motives for what we do. The freedom of discipleship requires our utter abandonment of worldly dignity, which all too often has a lot more currency inside the church than without. We need to be unashamed to be despised by others even within the church who have turned church into a place where worldly status is affirmed and reinforced rather than subverted and eschewed.

In any case, T.C. and Zach and I decided to band together in some fashion with other bloggers and rebel Christians who understand their Christian vocation similarly and are willing to be despised. I’m not sure where this will evolve. We’ll have to listen to the Holy Spirit. When John Wesley decided on April 2, 1739 to preach outside of the official Anglican pulpit in the streets and fields of England, he wrote in his journal: “At four in the afternoon I submitted to be more vile, and proclaimed in the highways the glad tidings of salvation.” Wesley was a despised one; there have been many others.

Oh and the Hebrew on the emblem is bani b’li shem, which means “sons with no name,” a phrase that expresses the aristocratic presumption that if you don’t belong to a family with a name, you’re clearly a bad or at least untrustworthy person. In the South particularly, we talk about whether so-and-so is “from a good family.” Job uses this phrase in Job 30:8 to describe the filthy peasants whose company he has been reduced to after he loses his princely wealth and status. Basically, it’s another way of saying ἐξουθενημένα. How does the NRSV translate this phrase? “A senseless, disreputable brood.” Yup. That’s us!

I’ve been engaged in solidarity work with Latin America since I graduated college in 2000 through various positions in NGO’s, labor unions, campus anti-sweatshop campaigns, etc. Through this work in conjunction with its social justice-oriented faith-based supporters, I was introduced to the liberation theology of Gustavo Gutierrez, Leonardo Boff, Jon Sobrino, Jose Miguez Bonino, Elsa Tamez, and others. It was huge for me to hear a different side of Jesus’ cross as solidarity with what liberation theologians call the “pueblo crucificado,” the idea that Jesus died not only to pay for individual peoples’ sins but also to show the victims of the world’s structural sin that He absorbed the full weight of their oppression into His flesh and He was standing with them.

Though I’m not as familiar with emergent theology as I am with liberation theology, it seems from what I’ve encountered that emergent theology has been heavily influenced by liberation theology though of course it’s been appropriated for a different purpose given the particular white Christian theological battle into which emergent theology is deployed.

I don’t have time to do justice to the history of liberation theology, but it basically rose up in the context of the Roman Catholics’ second Vatican Council in the late Sixties. There was a movement early on to establish kingdom-oriented Christian Base Communities on the local level where people would live in conformity with the model of Acts 2 where the disciples shared their possessions and made sure that everyone in their community was cared for. But the Christian Base Community movement never really seemed to catch on too well.

Then in the 1980′s, two things happened at the same time. First, the US government got heavily involved in fighting communism in Central America, which involved supporting military dictatorships that massacred their people in Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador and supporting a rebel group called the Contras that engaged in acts of terrorism and sabotage to overthrow the socialist Sandinista government in Nicaragua. At the same time, a massive influx of right-wing Pentecostal missionaries from the US flooded Latin America. There were confirmed meetings between the Reagan administration and Pentecostal church officials and a lot of rumors about the level of coordination between them, though it’s an overly cynical error to lump the Reagan Contra regime and the Pentecostal missionary movement too closely together.

In any case, today Latino liberation theology seems to have become a theology that purports to be derived in the experience of the poor in Latin America when it really comes from those members of the Latin American privileged class who want to support the poor, while Pentecostalism has exploded as the form of Christianity that dominates the street of the pueblo. The relationship between liberation theology and the white emergentsia is like the relationship between hip-hop and suburban white kids. The crisis that Pentecostalism poses to the white emergentsia’s sense of legitimacy is analogous to the crisis white suburban teenagers would have if black people stopped listening to hip-hop and took up disco or something.

The Guatemalan dictator Efrain Rios-Montt is probably the most famous example of Latin American Pentecostalism that makes white emergentsia cringe. He took over Guatemala in a coup in 1982, basing his policy on his apocalyptic interpretations of the book of Revelation. He would hold national prayer meetings in the soccer stadiums in Guatemala City while his troops were slaughtering indigenous rebels in the mountains. He’s finally under house arrest but has never had to really pay for the crimes against humanity that he committed which were all endorsed by the elders of his Pentecostal megachurch.

There’s a tendency for white emergentsia like me and Tony to assume that patriarchal, egomaniacal autocrats like Rios-Montt are quintessential representatives of Latin American Pentecostalism. That, I suspect, is the basis for Tony’s cringe-worthy paternalistic statement that he “think[s] the nascent Pentecostalism practiced in much of the Global South would benefit from being in dialogue with the older, more developed theologies of the West.” It doesn’t make his statement right, but I think it’s helpful to acknowledge the probable back-story.

It’s very easy for white post-evangelicals who organize the world into a Cold War between us and the fundamentalists (e.g. Tony’s statement that “conservative, Reformed, penal substitutionary, anti-gay, anti-women evangelicals have been consistently kicking our asses in the public square”) to appropriate a surface-level assessment of Latin American Pentecostalism in which it’s entirely a conspiracy of the most egregious Reagan era far-right culture warriors in Pentecostal-land like Pat Robertson to keep the brown people poor by hypnotizing them with cheap, shiny magic tricks.

Basically we superimpose our intra-racial white religious battles on the entirety of the rest of the world assuming that they have to be on our side or the other side and they have to share the existential concerns of white Christianity. It doesn’t occur to us that Latin American Pentecostalism may have been kindled by white right-wing (or perhaps not even political at all) Pentecostal missionaries but it doesn’t necessarily have to share their political perspective because of the entirely different context in which it has been planted.

White rich people are going to appropriate an apocalyptic theology that feasts on signs and wonders in a completely different way with completely different motives than poor brown people. It also doesn’t occur to us that this may be a legitimate movement of the Holy Spirit and not just a Ralph Reed-orchestrated conspiracy to turn Latin America into a giant oil field and coffee plantation for the Koch Brothers to own.

One of the reasons I can’t buy into the oversimplified suspicion of Pentecostalism any more is because God decided to make me start speaking in tongues last fall, which I still haven’t figured out what to do with. It’s completely out of sync with who I always thought I was. Plus, I’ve been introduced to Pentecostals in the US like Jonathan Martin and Brian Zahnd who are preaching a purer gospel than I’ve found anywhere else. I’m definitely very ignorant of what’s really going on with Pentecostals in Latin America, but God has made it impossible for me to see them as “the other side.”

So all this is just to say there’s a lot more to learn and a lot more context to Tony Jones’s comments than just “privileged white guy acting ignorant.” Did he make some boneheaded statements? Yes. Did he handle things with the right posture and tone? No, and I haven’t either on many occasions. So instead of using this controversy as an opportunity to showcase how much more progressive and enlightened you are in your anti-oppression training than Tony Jones is, let’s dig into the underlying issues and try to find what God has to teach us.

I guess I just needed to call myself out for being a hypocrite with how angry I get that our national media destroys our democracy by fixating on scandals to the exclusion of any intelligent policy conversation. Guess I’m the same way. I don’t understand why the latest imbecilic statement from my favorite Seattle megachurch pastor gets my blood pumping more than wholesome stories about people helping other people. But I don’t think I’m the only one. It’s part of the deformity we’ve received from our information age.

In any case, our congregation has a bunch of unglamorous but very useful mission projects that we’re doing for Change the World. Every year, we pack up thousands of dehydrated meals to send to Africa. We also collect items for school and birthing kits and put them together to send to the Global South. This year, I’m very excited because for the first time, we’re doing a project with our community garden we started two summers ago.

The bed on the left is dill and the bed on the right is cilantro. Those are our spring crops. We will be harvesting them and planting some summer crops like tomatoes and cucumbers this Saturday. Then we will take the dill and cilantro to the Robinson Square subsidized housing community in nearby Fairfax where a bunch of families from all over the world live. Places like Pakistan, Vietnam, Somalia, etc. I’m hoping that having herbs to cook with will be a nice treat for them.

Oftentimes when we share free food with people who need help, it’s cans of beanie weanie or spam and things like that we would never eat in our own homes. So I had a sense that our immigrant brothers and sisters at Robinson Square probably wouldn’t get a lot of dill or cilantro if they’re having to utilize the local food banks. I think God not only wants them to have food, but to be able to cook tasty food.

It’s not anything all that revolutionary or glamorous, but there’s a freaking boatload of dill in that bed. We may have to dry it and grind it into powder before we deliver it because it’s going to take up a lot of space otherwise. Will several pounds of dill leaves bring an end to world hunger? No. Will it cause the Palestinians and Israelis to make peace with one another? Not a chance. But it might bring a smile to a woman from east Africa when she gets to cook with it. And that changes the world.

I just came across this video from Nathan Blanc, a 19 year old Israeli who has refused the mandatory time of service in the Israeli military because of his objection to the occupation of Palestine. Israeli law does not allow for conscientious objectors so they are sent to prison if they refuse to serve. Hear what he has to say and judge for yourself, and then check out this link to an article about other Israeli youth who are picking prison over occupation.

The IRS scandal has to do with the open cynicism in the world of political “non-profits.” Basically you can get non-profit status for an organization that puts out political advertising during election season as long as your advertising has to do with “promoting social welfare” and not with supporting a particular candidate (wink wink nudge nudge).

If you’re promoting a candidate, then your organization has to report itself in a different tax category with a different set of regulations. So you circumvent this regulation by attacking the opposing candidate’s position on a particular issue and give your front organization a name like Americans for the Right to Eat Coal for Breakfast so that you’re not supporting a candidate per se; you’re just passionate about your “issue.” I can’t think of anything in tour political discourse more contrary to our “social welfare” than these attack ads.

The other thing that has destroyed our democracy is our media’s addiction to scandal. Instead of having intelligent (and boring) conversations about the relative merits of different policy, the pundits would much rather talk about political gamesmanship and strategy and turn the whole thing into a horse race. One of the fuels for this fire are the information leaks that the press is able to obtain from government officials “on condition of anonymity.”

Now maybe I just don’t have the right perspective on journalism, but I have a real ethical problem with anonymous sources. I don’t feel like there were as many anonymous sources 15 years ago in the news as there are today. And it seems to me that the increasing use of anonymous sources is directly related to the conversion of news into entertainment and the parallel conversion of governance into a horse race. The show Scandal is such a perfect illustration of our cultural ethos. It’s about a government that doesn’t do any governing because all that exists are scandals and press conferences and coverups.

The Justice Department investigation had to do with an anonymous source that leaked classified information about a foiled terrorist plot that was stopped by the CIA. There was a scandal when the leak happened because it seemed like a clumsy way for the administration to get credit for fighting terrorism. Now there’s a scandal about the investigation of the leak. So the political beneficiaries of these two scandals get to double-dip.

My friend John Meunier in the context of a completely unrelated discussion draws a distinction between polemical and constructive conversation:

Polemics — as I understand the word — implies a level of combative argumentation over a controversial topic in which the goal is to win the point. As I use the term “constructive,” I mean… the shared effort to inquire and learn in which all sides start with the assumption that they might in the end discover that their position is untenable or must be changed.

Our country’s political discourse has become entirely polemical. There is no longer a good-faith effort to seek solutions for our country’s problems constructively, which would require knowing that you are coming at these problems from very different perspectives but having the basic insight that you’ve got some blind-spots and things to learn from those who see the world differently. Instead, almost all of the energy is being channeled into pummeling the other side’s image through scandals so that they’re in a weaker negotiating position.

I’ve shared before that the Greek word for devil is diabolos which is a compound word built from the words ballo (to throw) and dia (amidst). People who delight in scandal are diabolical by definition. I don’t know how much uglier it will get. Rene Girard theorizes about how scandal escalates in a society to the point that a scapegoat is needed upon which all the collective fury can be released so that peace can be restored. The problem is Jesus already played that role, and so many of the people who love fanning the flames of today’s scandals the most are supposedly His people.

First of all, when we read the Bible, we bring our “experience” to it whether we acknowledge this officially or not. There is no way to evade our own unique socialization that causes us to privilege certain aspects of whatever scriptures we read over others. For example, when a group of Latin American campesinos were given the parable of the talents to look at, they thought the third servant who defied the master was the hero of the story. For those of us who have never worked for cruel masters, we presume without a second thought that the master is the protagonist and the wicked servant really is wicked. I have a traditional reading of this story, but one that would make many evangelical Christians uncomfortable, because the placement of the story before Jesus’ famous sheep and goats passage makes me think the third servant who buried the talent exemplifies the kind of Christianity that is focused on eternal self-preservation under the terror of a “harsh master” God and thus seeks the safest solution to all theological questions (like a self-interpreting Biblical text in which our personal experience doesn’t factor), which is represented in the parable by the servant returning to the master exactly what he thought was required of him.

It’s only the proclivities of modernity that make personal experience a bad thing to be transcended in an interpretive process because the illusive goal of modernity is “objectivity,” granting ourselves the magical omniscience of not having a particular vantage point. To deny the place of personal experience in interpretation does not concern the sovereignty of the text, but the sovereignty of the interpreter. We want to own God’s truth exhaustively in our mystery-free Bibles so that we can be the gatekeepers of His knowledge. We’re like the students that poet Billy Collins writes about in his “Introduction to Poetry”:

I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author’s name on the shore.

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.

Now the primary aspect of this whole “experience” question for me has to do with my belief in the Holy Spirit, the pneuma in the theopneustos from 2 Timothy 3:16. I don’t believe that God only breathed into the writers of the Bible; I believe that the Spirit continues to breathe into us through our daily encounters, whether it is full-on charismatic prophetic revelation or peripheral glimpses and tastes of the kingdom. If you say that no meta-rational revelation in our life experience can be allowed to influence our reading of scripture, then what you’re really saying is that the Holy Spirit is trapped in the Bible like a genie inside a lamp. Furthermore, you’re saying that we don’t really have a personal relationship with a Christ who lives and speaks today, but only a relationship with a Holy Book through which we learn about a historical figure named Jesus.

Every Christian is a mixture of spirit and flesh. There is a side of our meta-rational experience that comes from our flesh (worldly influences, idols, etc) and does indeed corrupt our ability to perceive Biblical truth rightly. But there is also a side of our meta-rational experience that is genuinely God-breathed. When we are led to Bible verses that speak directly to pressing incidents in our lives, I don’t think that’s just a coincidence (which is what I would be forced to say if I were trying to pretend that life experience does not factor in my interpretation of the Bible). Rather, the Holy Spirit deliberately breathes revelation into our life experience to make a connection between the text of our lives and the text of God’s canon.

It’s not really possible to stand outside of ourselves enough to distinguish between interpreting our lives according to the Biblical canon and interpreting the canon according to our lives. We will always be doing a little bit of the latter even if we’re genuinely trying to do only the former. Since I believe in the unique authority of scripture, I am committed to viewing my life through its lens to the degree that I can. But I also think that God’s placement of the people and circumstances of my life (i.e. my experience) has all been according to His purpose. The reason I have come to this belief is precisely through being given scriptures by God with which to understand each chapter of my life. So it’s all mixed together; my experience is always already “corrupted” by scripture.

This brings me to another dimension of the “experience” question. Christians who read the Bible regularly develop intuitions about the character of Christ from having an intimate familiarity with the stories of His life. I can have a “sense” about a social issue based on my intuitions about the character of Christ in His encounters with the woman at the well, His disciples, the centurion with the sick servant, the prostitute who washed his feet, etc, but I might not have a specific, easily demarcated “proof-text” to back up my view, which makes others presume that my scripturally-derived intuitions are no more than “personal feelings.”

Not every text in the Bible is explicitly prescriptive; we privilege the ones that are if we’ve made the choice to read the Bible as an “owner’s manual,” which is why the stories about Jesus are usually given much less weight than the explicit pastoral instructions of Paul, particularly the household codes for husband/wife, master/slave relations (Ephesians 5:21-6:9, Colossians 3:18-25) and the vice lists (if they have to do with sexuality like 1 Cor 6:9-10 but not if they have to do with the schismatic contentiousness that is the hallmark of Protestantism like Galatians 5:19-21). Yet, if we’re going by 2 Timothy 3:16, then it’s not just explicitly prescriptive texts but “all scripture [that] is God-breathed and useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness.”

To access the teaching and training in righteousness of scriptures that are not immediately self-evidently prescriptive requires a longer-term meditative, experiential processing of the text that cultivates the heart of Christ in a Christian disciple even if all that disciple can articulate sounds like nothing more than “personal feelings.” So a fully faithful encounter with scripture involves processing both explicit, obvious “Thou shalt not’s” and as well as more holistic models of Christlike behavior that must be experienced in life in order to be understood. Those who denigrate the intuitive and only trust the fully perspicuous and deductive are like servants who refuse to take the risk of investing their master’s talents in ways that are not completely under their control.

Ultimately, I trust in a God who wants us to take risks in our quest to understand Him and delight in His beauty. He didn’t just leave us a book; He’s much more proactive than that. He is reaching out to us through His Holy Spirit in our everyday experiences (which we absolutely understand more clearly the more our minds are shaped by His canonical poetry). Christians who think God “is a harsh man who reaps where he doesn’t sow” (Matthew 25:24) and want to bury their talents in the safe dirt of the obviously prescriptive presume that God’s will is not something we’re supposed to contemplate and wrestle with; we’re just supposed to comb His scripture for the plain and obvious direct commands and stick to those.

Two of the best sentences in United Methodism’s 2008 Book of Discipline are on page 77: “The Christian witness, even when grounded in Scripture and mediated by tradition, is ineffectual unless understood and appropriated by the individual. To become our witness, it must make sense in terms of our own reason and experience.” Maybe by 2016, United Methodism will continue on its path of Calvinization to the degree that they’ll take those two sentences out and replace them with something like, “God doesn’t want you to understand; He just wants you to do what He says.” Or maybe the Holy Spirit will shatter the self-assurance of those who prefer the safe dirt of a static, historical “God-breath” to a living, dynamic, currently active one.

It’s a mysterious passage. I obviously don’t think it means that our move onward towards perfection means that we leave behind the basic teachings about Christ in the sense of rejecting them for something entirely different. But there does seem to be a sense that if we’re still spending all of our time talking about the basics, then we aren’t moving on toward perfection. I’ve often felt that the evangelical church of my roots sounds like a broken record player reiterating over and over again concepts like justification by faith and salvation illustrations that seemed profound to me as an eighth grader but don’t seem so mind-blowing when I hear them as a 35 year old. So it’s comforting to hear Hebrews affirm the sense that yearning to go deeper is not just some sort of spiritual rebelliousness but actually what we’re supposed to be doing.

So what needs to be added to the foundation of doctrinal basics in order to move on toward perfection? Hebrews 6 doesn’t answer this question directly. It next goes into talking about how “it is impossible to restore to repentance those who have once been enlightened and have tasted the heavenly gift… and then have fallen away” (vv. 4-6). That’s certainly an unpleasant thought that directly contradicts the popular “once saved always saved” understanding of popular evangelicalism today. The text doesn’t elaborate on exactly what constitutes “falling away.” There are no vice lists here like in the Pauline epistles.

Hebrews seems to suggest in more than one place that even one-time back-sliders are finished as far as salvation occurs. I hope that’s just a hyperbolic threat and not something to be taken at literal face value because if sinning once after receiving the Holy Spirit throws the whole thing out, then heaven will be a lot smaller than even the Calvinists think and I certainly won’t be there.

In any case, Hebrews offers a metaphor to explain. Some Christians are fertile ground that soaks up the rain of God’s word and becomes a blessing (v. 7). But those who have “fallen away” are like a land so filled with “thorns and thistles” that nothing else can grow (v. 8). I’ve met Christians who may not have fallen away from Christ in obvious scandalous ways like substance abuse or adultery, but their hearts are nonetheless filled with the thorns and thistles of bitter spiritual pride like the older brother of the prodigal son. It is as if their “salvation” is the very thing that damns them and keeps them from tasting God’s mercy. They constantly recite the “basic teachings of Christ,” but these teachings have availed them nothing in gaining the fruits of the Spirit from Galatians 5:22.

I don’t know what becomes of Christians whose faith in their own correctness seems to be the reason that they cannot be moved by the heart of Christ. I think of Jesus standing in the synagogue waiting to be judged by the teachers of the law for violating his Jewish Book of Discipline by healing on the Sabbath day: “He looked around at them with anger; he was grieved at their hardness of heart” (Mark 3:5).

When Hebrews talks about thorns and thistles, I don’t see the incidental sins that all of us continue to struggle with. I see rather the sin which hardens our hearts and immunizes us against God’s love. Spiritual pride is probably the most pernicious sin because it is the most subtle. Greed, gluttony, anger, lust, sloth, and envy are a lot more obvious and easier to call out, though falling into their clutches unrepentantly will harden our hearts pretty quickly. Pride is a thoroughly internal thorn. It is the thing I most hate about myself with which I am in continual warfare. I know that there are thorns and thistles constantly taking root in my heart, but I am willing to make my fingers bleed ripping them out.

I do consider it eternally dangerous when Christians have defined their faith in a way that so vindicates their pride that they say and do all the correct things without the love that melts us and makes us vulnerable and weak enough to be breathed into by God. Of course, I shouldn’t presume to know others’ motives. I just hope that God will break through the impossible clay of our hearts with His giant tiller that shreds the roots of our thorny pride so that holier fruit can grow and rips apart the thistles of the knowledge that we are so infatuated with so we can leave behind that infatuation and go on to the perfection that is pure love of God and neighbor.

Most countries in the world have experienced some kind of full-out war on their soil in the last hundred or even fifty years. In America, we have not since 1865. I worry that this has given us a false sense of security, believing that we can talk as irresponsibly and hysterically as we want to, because we won’t ever cross the line into physical violence. We believe in the total depravity of everyone else. How dare anyone suggest that we could be capable of things that only gangsters and terrorists do?

9/11 and the Boston massacre were done by foreigners. They were not only tragic, but egregiously offensive to our sense of world order because things like that don’t happen in America. We’re able to bracket the mass shootings (that aren’t “terrorism” because they’re done by white guys) as “mental health” problems that have nothing to do with our culture’s idolatry of violent weapons.

I recently had a conversation with someone who said that it was his civic duty to be armed in order to protect our democracy from tyranny. So who gets to make the call on what counts as tyranny? It’s one thing for a group of colonies to revolt for being taxed without representation. What if slightly more than half the country supports a vision for our society in which nobody lacks healthcare? Should the guns of those who consider that social vision to be tyrannical trump the votes of the slightly more than half who support it? Is that democracy?

As Christians, we are specifically called not to be the people who are fomenting violent rhetoric and dehumanizing political opponents. 1 Peter 2:13-17 is a good encapsulation of the witness we are expected to bear in our society:

Conduct yourselves honorably among the Gentiles, so that, though they malign you as evildoers, they may see your honorable deeds and glorify God on the day of His visitation. For the Lord’s sake accept the authority of every human institution, whether of the emperor as supreme, or of governors, as sent by him to punish those who do wrong and to praise those who do right. For it is God’s will that by doing right you should silence the ignorance of the foolish. As servants of God, live as free people, yet do not use your freedom as a pretext for evil. Honor everyone. Love the family of believers. Fear God. Honor the emperor.

Peter doesn’t allow Christians to play the “two kingdom” game and try to cite one set of rules (like the Bible) for how we behave among Christians and another set of rules (like the Constitution) for how we’re supposed to behave in the secular world. He makes us responsible for whether or not non-Christians glorify God. Peter doesn’t allow Christians to let ourselves off the hook by blaming the “liberal media” for how we look to the world. He puts the responsibility for “the ignorance of the foolish” on our shoulders. We are not supposed to silence the foolish with our arguments, but by doing right. It’s amazing how dismissive and contemptuous “Biblical” Christians are towards the Bible when it actually contradicts how they want to behave.

The most dishonorable thing that many American Christians are doing right now is their participation in the outrage industrial complex. They simply don’t see it as a sin to circulate exaggerations and outright lies about political opponents. When they get called out for bearing false witness, instead of responding with contrition and repentance, they just pluck out another supporting argument to see if it will stick better than the first one.

If you’re stocking up arms to defend your country against tyranny, it’s a fair question to ask when you’re going to use them. What if a talk radio host announces a campaign to stop paying taxes since the government has gone too far? Let’s say the FBI is moving in to arrest the radio host for conspiring to break federal law and he says come over to my headquarters with your guns to defend me against tyranny? Would you go?

Oh that would never happen. This is America. Hmm… Yes, this is America, and you and I are creating an America whose future is uncertain. If you do violence to the truth by spreading irresponsible exaggerations and rumors, then you will be held accountable by God if and when the seeds of violent insurrection bear fruit given a potent enough social catalyst. If we ever reach the 30+% unemployment levels of the Great Depression and enough anti-government militants are desperate because their homes are under foreclosure and no jobs are in sight, that could be a catalyst for widespread domestic terrorism.

As Christians, we are supposed to have a very sober perspective about the evil that we ourselves are capable of. Instead, we consider it pious to preach about the evils of other people, which is actually a strategy for concealing our own capacity for sin. When Jesus says that whoever hates another person is guilty of murder (Matthew 5:22), it’s because a murderer is someone whose hate is combined with the right social catalyst just like an adulterer is someone whose lust is combined with the right set of circumstances.

Fascists and terrorists are not a different species of human; they are people who have been brainwashed to believe that the victims they target are fascists and terrorists who threaten their own existence. The Jews weren’t hated for race or religion, but because of decades of unchallenged lies being told about them: that they were the “bankers” who caused World War I, the Great Depression, etc.

Then when Herschel Grynszpan, a Polish Jew, assassinated the German diplomat Ernst von Rath on November 7, 1938, the German outrage industrial complex exploded into Kristallnacht, an orgy of violence that left 91 Jews dead and 30,000 thrown into prison. Kristallnacht showed the Germans that open violence against the Jews had become socially acceptable; it completed the groundwork for the Holocaust to begin.

At what point will the widespread ideological violence of our virtual reality explode into a Kristallnacht of physical reality? Will the Muslims or the homosexuals or the “illegal aliens” be the scapegoats that Satan uses to accomplish his plan? How many Boston marathon bombings and IRS scandals will it take for a critical mass of people to decide it’s socially acceptable to start shooting? Don’t say it can’t happen in America. The best that we can do as Christians to prevent violence is to be the witnesses of peace and good will that Peter tells us to be. If you argue with that, you’re arguing with the Bible, not me.

Nicodemus opens the conversation by asking Jesus about the miraculous signs He has been performing: “No one can do these signs that you do apart from the presence of God”  (John 3:2). There’s an implied question in this statement: How do I experience the same presence of God that you experience? It’s important to read what Jesus says as a response to Nicodemus’ opening statement.

Jesus responds to Nicodemus by saying, “Very truly, I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above” (v. 3). Note that the spiritual birth Jesus describes has to do with our ability to see the kingdom of God; the word choice is significant and I will come back to it. The Greek word for the final preposition is anothen, which means most literally “from the top” or “from above.” It can have the derivative meaning of being “from the beginning,” kind of like when we say in a musical rehearsal, let’s start from the top, which is why the NIV felt justified using the phrase “born again.”

“From above” seems like a reference to heaven, since the word for heaven in Greek is ouranos, which is also the word for sky. Jesus later tells Nicodemus that he has been talking “about heavenly things” (v. 12) and a few verses later when John is questioned about Jesus’ baptism of people, he says, “No one can receive anything except what has been given from heaven” (v. 27). When I connect the dots of John 3 together, I see Jesus saying that we need to have the birth that is “given from heaven,” which seems to be synonymous with what He says in verse 6: “What is born of the flesh is flesh, and what is born of the Spirit is spirit.” In other words, we need to receive the birth that comes from beyond.

Nicodemus is the one who thinks that Jesus’ main point is that we have to start over: “How can anyone be born after having grown old? Can one enter a second time into the mother’s womb and be born?” (v. 4). For Nicodemus, it’s a question of status. Why should he as an elder in the Jewish community have to become a spiritual infant again? Why does he have to be born all over again?

Likewise, when we think in terms of being “born again,” we’re talking about status. If I call myself a “born-again Christian,” I’m saying that I’m not one of those “fake” Christians who can’t tell me the exact date and time when they were saved because they were born (only once) into the church and grew up Christian but never prayed a sinner’s prayer and had a Damascus Road conversion. The phrase “born-again” serves to separate insiders from outsiders, the real from the fake. It’s a phrase that has to do with status. We’ve taken our cue from Nicodemus. But the whole point of the conversation in John 3 is that Nicodemus doesn’t get it.

Being born “of the spirit” is so much more than just a status; it is the opening of our eyes to a deeper reality we had not seen before. That’s why Jesus says that this birth is the only way a person can “see the kingdom of God.” We can only behold the heavenly realm that is the source of Jesus’ miraculous signs (going back to Nicodemus’ original question) if we are born from beyond which is really also into the heavenly realm. It’s not about receiving a stamp that will gain us admission into heaven later; it’s about receiving the vision to see heaven now and thus becoming a conduit of heavenly wind (v. 8).