:: in.a.mirror.dimly ::

One of my fondest memories of seminary is lunch time. The first generation Korean students gathered at a table and opened their Tupper wares to share with one another. I was even invited to pick up some chop sticks in join them at times.

Meanwhile, the occasional middle-aged pastor who had forgotten to bring a lunch would survey the vending machines with dread, knowing that the cheeseburger in a plastic bag would be his best option. He delayed that decision as long as possible.

Once a month we had a guest speaker come for a pizza lunch. Just about the entire seminary turned out for these events, filling the cafeteria and giving us all a chance to see each other and to catch up. These lunches gave us something that is essential when a bunch of people from a variety of backgrounds and relationships gather together to talk about God: relationships.

Do We Speak Truth in Relationships?

I love the way that ideas and conversations can spread on the internet, but the most significant drawback is the relational void that can occur in some online “conversations.” That isn’t to say that relationships can’t happen—they do. I’m just saying that we can now enter into conversations where we know nothing of the people participating in them.

Consequently, we don’t understand where someone is coming from and we’re not all that invested in seeking the best for that person. We just see a pile of text that challenges something important to us. There’s no prospect of seeing that pile of text at the next community lunch.

The Difference That Relationships Make

I’m certainly all for sharing my ideas online and hearing out those who disagree with me. However, I’ve observed some interesting dynamics. For example, though I’m a committed Arminian, many of my closest friends since childhood remain Calvinists. Although my childhood church is complementarian in their views toward women, and I have changed to egalitarian, I would pay close attention to the opinions of my pastors should they even contact me with a concern about my writing.

It actually can be quite easy to be friends with people we know who believe differently from us. Of course we all have experienced exceptions to this.

Who Should We Listen To?

As a general rule, I put the most stock in the opinions of the people who know me the best. Starting with my wife and some family members, I also pay close attention to friends, pastors, and colleagues. It is both unhealthy and impossible to acknowledge every opinion online as a kind of authority for our lives, and yet, it’s often tempting to do just that—even if we think we need to challenge these voices.

Who Should We Ignore

The tricky part about blogging is that I need to remain open to conversations with folks from a variety of perspectives, but I also can’t let a challenge from someone who doesn’t know me rattle my cage. I can’t lose sleep over the stuff coming from denominational leaders, celebrity pastors, and groups that would condemn someone like me.

They’re free to believe as they wish and I recognize their place in the church, but their critiques are also irrelevant to me. They have nothing invested in my own spiritual growth or the growth of my community, and therefore the best thing I can do is to seek accountability among those who desire to see myself and my community grow. While I seek guidance from perspectives outside of those who agree with me, a relational investment is critical.

Recognizing the Benefits of Authority

Having set some boundaries around the opinions I care most about, I want to make it clear that within the confines of relationships and becoming personally invested in one another, I also highly value the place of authority. We all need pastors and friends who care enough about us to challenge us to change. Tomorrow I’ll write about the freedom that comes from loving, relational authority.

Have you ever become frustrated by the Bible? Sometimes the commands of Paul set me on edge.

He writes to the Ephesians, “be renewed in the attitude your minds.” Fine, I’m all for that. My mind is feeling a bit stale these days. How exactly should I go about that?

It’s tempting to read these verses and to think it’s all up to me. However, the bigger picture of holiness presented by Paul and throughout the Bible actually takes quite a bit of pressure off us.

The power to become like Jesus comes from his indwelling Spirit. However, are we really off the hook completely? I mean, we dare not insert our own works into the equation?

This is where Protestants can especially struggle since we’re so “salvation by works-averse.” The power is 100% from God, but we can neglect it. I’m not in any way capable of powering my chop saw, but I need to plug it in to the power source and keep it there if I want to cut anything.

The word that Jesus used to describe this process was “abiding.” The abiding is our work. It’s what we have to do if we want to become holy and renewed in our minds. A branch can’t grow any fruit on its own, but it needs to remain connected to the vine in order to grow grapes. The nutrients come up through the vine as the branch stays connected.

Our abiding work tends to put us at odds with our fast-paced culture that values multi-tasking and increased efficiency. Dare I suggest that our culture doesn’t really know what it is to “abide.” It seems lazy or wasteful. The heroes know how to squeeze every last ounce of productivity out of their time, money, and even other people. Those who know how to abide are an anomaly.

The examples of abiding in scripture are sometimes quite extreme to our eyes:

• Moses spending 40 days on the mountain.
• Joshua remaining in the tabernacle long after Moses had left.
• Samuel sleeping in the tent of the Lord.
• Anna fasting and praying night and day for her entire life.
• John the Baptist spending his adult years in the seclusion of the wilderness.
• Paul wandering in the wilderness by himself before beginning his ministry.
• Jesus praying for an entire evening.

Why would all of these founders of our faith spend so much time in solitude, away from productive ministry and work? What is the value of this time?

The connection is this:

• Without 40 days on the mountain, Moses fails to lead the people to the Jordan River.
• Without those evenings in the tabernacle, Josh falters when he leads the people into the Promised Land.
• Without those nights in the tent of the Lord, Samuel can’t hear God speak to him.
• Without fasting and prayer, Anna misses the Messiah and the message God gave to her.
• Without wandering in the wilderness, John and Paul can’t hear the message God wants them to share.
• Jesus modeled this for us. It’s striking to think that even God incarnate set aside time to hear the voice of God. It’s like a Trinitarian brain teaser.

Do I honestly believe I can imitate Jesus effectively by praying less than he did?

If I’m ever frustrated by my lack of progress with holiness, one of the first places to begin is the work of abiding. I can’t explain what happens when God gets ahold of us or how he “makes” us holy or renews our minds. We have models who have gone before us who suggest that this is the only way to be changed.

I crave spiritual breakthroughs. Sometimes they arrive unannounced and pounce on me like a rabbit on a carrot. Other times I wait and beg God for them like a rabbit standing up on its hind legs in the kitchen while I make a fruit salad.

Either way, rabbits like their treats, and I crave spiritual food.

Thankfully God gives us what we desire, even if it’s sometimes in a form we don’t expect or at a time that doesn’t fit our schedules.

While the taste of God’s goodness is still in my mouth, the attack comes.

I prefer to think of Satan as more of a pest, a bug that annoys me with temptation and negative thoughts. However, his ambitions go far beyond that of a bug—he wants to destroy us.

This means that every time I have a spiritual breakthrough and experience the joy of God, the freedom of God, or the knowledge of God, I can expect serious temptation, discouragement, and even disruptions to my life. Exhaustion, conflict, and stress can press in, taking away the joy of God’s provision.

Seeking first God’s Kingdom is a life and death struggle. Thankfully God wants us to succeed. I have found him accessible and caring for me when discouragement hits after a breakthrough. After all, God wants us to grow into maturity.

Even if I fell into sin immediately after a breakthrough, I have found God more than willing to accept my repentance and to pick up where we left off. Unlike a person who may want to justify himself by judging us or proving us wrong, God’s love compels us to keep moving forward after we’ve stumbled, when we’re discouraged, or when we’re attacked.

He has overcome the world, and he’ll continue to overcome it today.

For more posts on faith: The Art of Attraction: The Joy of Asking

There are times when I don’t like who I become: fearful, angry, and defensive. Defensiveness usually tips me off that something isn’t right.

Sometimes I’ve been wronged, and I feel defensive. At the moment when I feel defensive, I have to decide how to respond. That’s when I have to choose between working toward redemption or retaliation.

Other times I haven’t been wronged personally, but I fear the impact of what someone else believes, teaches, or practices. Whether or not my fears or evaluations are correct, the moment I feel defensive, I begin to think of ways to protect what I believe and value from a perceived threat—typically another person or movement.

The moment I become defensive about beliefs, practices, or values, I’m no longer in a position where I can love another person, seeing him/her from God’s perspective. I’m rooted in my perspective, and I become convinced that the existence of another perspective could upend everything I hold dear.

Usually defensiveness is rooted in misperceptions and overreactions. However, even if my defensiveness is warranted, I need to decide whether I’m going to reach out in redemptive ways or strike in order to protect myself.

When my Christian faith was all about finding the right answers and holding onto the truth rather than holding onto a person, I was defensive all of the time. Everyone who differed from me was a threat who called into question the beliefs that my faith was built upon.

When my Christian faith and salvation rested on having the right answers and holding onto the truth, defensiveness made sense.

Allegiance to truth or a particular perspective demands defensiveness in order to preserve it from criticism.

It’s no secret that Christianity stands and falls on one foundation: Jesus Christ. We can all agree on that, but if our foundation is found in a person and in his revelation through the Spirit, scripture, and Christian community, where does that leave us with truth?

That is where Christians tend to differ.

From where I sit, I’ve learned to see truth, or what we believe, as something important, but not something I’m supposed to necessarily defend. No matter what someone teaches, Jesus is still Lord. He defines the truth, he alone knows all of the truth, and there’s nothing that I can do to enhance that.

I see my role as that of a messenger who needs to pass along a message, not a warrior who has to protect something. Even when I meet a Christian who is missing a key part of the Christian faith, I’m a messenger who should affirm what is right and gently correct what is wrong with the ultimate goal of helping others know and experience Jesus as fully as possible.

If someone is committed to Jesus and holds to beliefs that I consider wrong, I gain nothing and they gain nothing when I become defensive. I may be able to encourage that person to see things differently, but if I feel the need to defend the truth or attack someone, the larger problem is my insecurity, my desire to control, and the possibility that I’m resting more on having the right answers instead of the right savior.

I left for seminary an hour early on my first day of classes. I wanted to make sure I had time to grab a cup of sweet coffee from the cafeteria, casually browse through books in the student lounge, and then sit in class well before it began.

For me, seminary was the place to get all of the answers. I’d grown up in a fundamentalist church  learning all kinds of stuff about the end times, heaven and hell, and a host of other interpretive issues related to the Bible, particularly: how literal should we take the Bible? And especially, why do we interpret some parts of the Bible literally, while we others are not?

My pastor, at a church that wasn’t fundamentalist, had warned me that seminary would not give me all of the answers. It was sound advice that took years to sink in. As of that morning, I was beginning my quest to find the truth.

Cruising down the northeast extension of the PA Turnpike, I was fifteen minutes away from the seminary when traffic stopped.

We turned off our engines and waited.

Somewhere ahead of us, a truck had turned over, spilling oil, chemicals, acid, or something else horrible onto the road. I can’t quite remember. We eventually turned around, drove back down the highway, and took a series of detours on unfamiliar roads.

I made it to class where, in a rather surreal scene, our professor was leading everyone in a song. They were singing the Hebrew alphabet  to the tune of Yankee Doodle. On a side note, my girlfriend’s (as in the girlfriend who is now my wife) brother had taken Hebrew in college and knew the same song, so the next time we got together, we sang our mastery of Hebrew for her.

Sometimes the pursuit of truth leads us to traffic jams, unfamiliar places, and unexpected destinations. I never would have guessed I’d spend two-three hours sitting in traffic, winding through back roads, and then singing the Hebrew alphabet after arriving an hour or two late for class.

There are a lot of things about Christianity that surprised me over the years as I filled myself up with truth at seminary.

While I recommend seminary, especially my own seminary, seminary and truth have something in common: they have their limits. And when we say something has limits or can only do so much, that isn’t the same as saying they are bad or deficient in some way.

Limited truth is not the same as relativism.

Rather, we need to correct misperceptions and try to see their true value for what it is.

In my own case, I thought that having a handle on the truth, knowing how to interpret the Bible, and being able to spot fundamentalist errors would make me a deeply spiritual person who is close to God. Truth can set us free since it can lead us to God, but truth is not enough by itself.

In many ways, my seminary helped me figure this out. There’s more to Christianity than finding the right answer. There’s more to following Jesus than preserving what he taught.

By the time I left seminary, I had a lot of answers, but I didn’t have a lot of God. I’d given myself to my books and papers, but something was missing. My pastor had tried to warn me. My professor in a Christian spirituality class had tried to warn me. But I wanted answers, and I worked hard to find them.

I soon learned that truth couldn’t do what I expected.

If Jesus really wanted us to get his teachings 100% correct, he would have left us a document in his own words. Instead he trusted his followers to sort it out for us—entrusting his truth to a community. Just giving us the truth wasn’t enough. In fact, he gave us a whole lot more than the truth.

This week I want to look at the limits of truth, the ways we mishandle truth, and a full picture of the Christian life with truth in its proper place.

Tomorrow’s Post: The Problem with Defending the Truth

This little survival guide series aims to offer some ways to help you flourish as a disciple of Jesus, and part of thriving as a Christian is learning what you need and what’s the dead weight you can toss overboard. Let’s face it, we can spend  a lot of time worrying about the nonessentials.

I study theology, so I’m all over that one.

One of the things Christians get worked up over are these things called absolutes or absolute truth. Last week I heard a speaker extol absolutes as essential for the survival of Christianity. Are they really?

Part of the problem is we don’t have a clear notion of what they are, and there are all kinds of imperfect explanations out there that cloud the issue.

Then we spend our time at conferences learning about how Christianity is going to disappear from the face of the earth because the young people in your youth group don’t believe in absolutes. We all know that fire and brimstone from heaven will follow that, which sort of makes all this talk about “global warming” a bit of a moot point.

God’s like, I’ll show you godless liberals some global warming!

So, let’s begin by asking what this absolute business is all about and then talk about whether we need them. Hint: we don’t, but we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

What are Absolutes?

Part of the absolute discussion revolves around how we frame our questions and definitions. For the sake of brevity, I’ll ask two related questions:

Is there is a universal, scientifically verifiable perspective on the world?

Can human beings have a universal, scientifically verifiable perspective on the world?

Both of these questions get to the heart of what absolutes are all about. The trick is that Christians have to insert some caveats into such philosophical questions that sort of take us out of the realm of religion.

You see, absolutes and the idea of a universal perspective are the product of the modern/Enlightenment movement of philosophy when the scientific method was applied to all aspects of life, including religious belief. While Christianity and core doctrines such as the resurrection are based on solid evidence and reliable witnesses, we unfortunately cannot say, reproduce the resurrection in order to verify it in an absolute, universal sense.

However, this way of defining truth collapsed upon itself in the late 20th Century. With the rise of globalization and an awareness of multiple perspectives on the world, many realized that level of certainty is a bit tough for humans to reach. In fact, as Christians, we can chalk that quest for certainty up to human pride and claim that only God has such a universal perspective.

Is there certain, absolute truth out there? To a certain degree, yes, but only God knows it in that sense. That’s not our place.

Do We Need Absolutes?

Some may say that I’m killing Christianity, but the truth is that our faith rests in part upon, well faith. There is a measure of mystery and uncertainty as we rely upon both truth and the experience of God. Keep in mind that God gave the Israelites both laws to keep and a tabernacle where they could meet him.

Christianity does not boil down to beliefs, law, or words on a page.

And speaking of Israel, let’s remember that Christianity began in an Eastern context in which Enlightenment principles of knowledge would have seemed over the top. Movements such as postmodernism and relativism have reacted strongly to the unrealistic expectations that absolutes have placed on truth and knowledge.

Christians can say that truth has its limits, but it’s also not a truth-free-for-all. God has revealed to us what is right and what is wrong, and he has incarnated the truth in the person of Jesus. We continue to experience truth through the work of the Holy Spirit.

Far from being stranded on the rapids of relativity, Christians have scripture and the Spirit as their paddles. We may not know as much as we’d hoped, but then again, Christianity has survived and even thrived in contexts other than the Enlightenment. Absolutes do not guarantee the survival of the Christian faith.

In fact, in order for Christianity to continue to thrive, we need to make sure we aren’t letting either the old context or the new context to determine our beliefs and practices. The modern and postmodern have been both friends and foes to disciples. Our faith can survive in both, but it’s up to us make sure we don’t anchor ourselves in either of them.

I’ve been asking myself a few questions lately that I’d like to play with here, spurred on in part by Harvey Cox’s book The Future of Faith (which I don’t necessarily agree with as a whole, but I find a great read):

What did Jesus leave us?

Why did he leave those things and not others?

How far dare his followers expand and innovate upon them in order to remain faithful?

The list could be longer, but in a sense he left three key things: a group of followers, a meal for them to celebrate, and the Holy Spirit. While he certainly taught a great deal, he never wrote down his sermons, trusting his followers to pass them along under the guidance of the Holy Spirit. He didn’t leave us with a creedal statement, but rather a ritual meal along the lines of a reimagined Passover celebration.

So that leaves me wondering what we should infer based on these things.

If I may dare to speculate, I wonder if Jesus was telling us that it’s far more important to focus on him, on one another, and on the Spirit rather than any kind of written account or a creed, even if those things have a place. In fact, Jesus may have been passing along a way of living more than a set of beliefs. How can we make Jesus’ priorities our own without descending into a holy mess?

Let’s remember that God knows how to give commands, to write lists, and to dictate scripture. However, Jesus focused on creating a community that was shaped by a meal centering on him and the leading of the Holy Spirit.

I wonder if Jesus knew we’d turn scripture into an idol if he wrote anything down directly? I wonder if he knew we’d become so enamored with truth and scripture that we would miss the more important parts of his message: imitating his way of life, focusing on his death and resurrection, and living in accord with his Spirit.

It doesn’t seem to have been a mistake that Christianity was first called “The Way” or that Christian literally means “little Christ.” Jesus left us with a way to live, not a set of creeds that define us as believers.

On one occasion John the Baptist asked Jesus if he truly was the Messiah. In reply, Jesus listed his actions, not his beliefs. He defined himself and his beliefs according to how he acted.

However, us Christians today have swung heavily toward defining ourselves by what we believe. Churches list their beliefs on their web sites and candidates for ministry write doctrinal statements because that’s how we establish our credentials. 

Imagine if we added action statements to our doctrinal statements: we heal the sick, we feed the hungry, we visit the prisoners, we cloth those in need, we gather to worship Jesus, we celebrate his death and resurrection, we follow the lead of his Spirit. That sounds curiously similar to Matthew 25. Underneath these actions there are beliefs, and in fact I would argue that these beliefs are even more valuable and relevant because they prompt us into action.

In fact, it may be that our beliefs are irrelevant unless they are overshadowed by their actions. Maybe the only way to save, preserve, and truly honor our beliefs is by spending a significant amount of time on action, putting them into practice. The people who love truth are the ones who act on it.

That kind of speculation makes my head spin.

I love scripture, and I believe in truth, but I wonder if Jesus would really care about the many things we argue over in relation to the truth. Keep in mind that I devoted a significant amount of time to writing a theology book, so I’m pretty sure I’m not flirting with relativism here. I’m seeking balance here, but in order to arrive there I need to critique the side of certainty that can stumble into conceptual idolatry, while hoping to avoid falling to the other extreme of listless relativism.

Another installment of my fictional series Sarcastic Saturday:

Earth–In a surprising development for Christians devoted to social justice and loving one another, the Kingdom of God appeared because enough Christians have taken a bold stand for the truth. Michael the Archangel appeared in the heavens and proclaimed the victory of truth over error and relativism.

People who love truth everywhere are rejoicing that they were right. “We knew that if we exposed enough error and took a bold enough stand for truth, sound doctrine, and watered down Christianity emphasizing service that God’s Kingdom would show up,” said one self-proclaimed truth activist. “I’m not surprised that we were right,” he added.

“Here I thought my worship was meaningless because of the injustices Christians have been ignoring,” shared one pastor who works among the homeless. “As it turns out, the only thing God has cared about all along is if we get our doctrines correct.” 

Christian social justice ministries have since shuttered their operations, opting to commit to further study in order to sort out their doctrines in light of the Messiah’s second coming.

“What a shocker,” shared one member of Christians for Social Action. “The next thing they’ll say is that sarcasm can be redemptive.”