• Once in Royal David’s City

    by  • December 7, 2011 • 1 Comment

    two verses from Cecil Alexander’s Once in Royal David’s City (1848), as sung by Sufjan Stevens (2002):

    He came down to earth from Heaven,
    Who is God and Lord of all,
    And His shelter was a stable,
    And His cradle was a stall;
    With the poor, oppressed, and lowly,
    Lived on earth our Savior holy.

    And our eyes at last shall see Him,
    Through His own redeeming love,
    For that Child so dear and gentle
    Is our Lord in Heav’n above,
    And He leads His children on
    To the place where He is gone.

    The King came. But the King didn’t come to kings, other rulers, smaller lords or governors. The King didn’t make his entrance in the halls of power, didn’t visit the wealthy or the religious or the righteous. This King entered the world as a stranger and an outcast whose parents were forced to travel across country so caesar could have a better idea how big his empire was and how best to tax it. Then this King was born in a barn because his parents couldn’t even find a hotel room.

    And that’s the drama of the incarnation. The King of kings and Lord of lords doesn’t enter our world in the company of the well-to-do. Indeed if he had that might have reinforced their pretension. Worldly kings and lords don’t tend to appreciate other kings and lords, except perhaps as peers. But this King is peerless, and is famously underwhelmed by the lifestyles of the rich and famous (with apologies to Robin Leach). And so, in a scandal to our values, in an offensive disruption of the things we prize most, this King appears as a “dear and gentle” child.

    I don’t want to overstate my point – this kid who was born in the company of cattle to a relatively poor couple was also supposed to descend from the line of king David. But David himself came from humble beginnings – short, young, shepherd chosen above all his older brothers. David, however, gradually moved away from those beginnings and eventually took on the role of the classical king that he was chosen to counteract (cf. the Bathsheba incident and the census). But this new King, God’s true and ultimate King, represents a totally new vision, a vision he never corrupted nor ever will corrupt (in spite of how regularly his later followers would corrupt it).

    The scandal of this King’s birth, the scandal that “With the poor, oppressed and lowly, / Lived on earth our Savior holy,” is eventually carried forward and brought to a climax when this King, this Prince of Peace, is publicly executed by lesser (false) kings in order promote a lesser (false) peace.

    May we remember this season that we are not our own king, and that the kings we revere are at best pale imitators of the True King. And may we live in the light of the scandal that this effectively homeless child is the “Lord in Heav’n above”, and that this is, in the words of the angel in Luke 2, “good news of great joy that will be for all the people.”

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    a few Wesleyan hurdles: inner/outer, ‘heart’

    by  • December 2, 2011 • 0 Comments

    Writing about Wesley is hard. He uses a lot of expressions that I find archaic, and the ways he deals with some concepts rubs me the wrong way. Two related examples. First, his usage of ‘heart’ is difficult for me because I’m worried about how it might be participating in the popular dichotomy between “head” and “heart” – between emotion and cognition – that I find troubling because of the ways that it ignores desire’s essential involvement in how and why and what we think (and all of that’s involvement in how and why and what we do).

    Second, Wesley employs concepts of “outward religion” and “inward religion”, a dichotomy that is easy enough to understand but arguably more troublesome than the aforementioned. My fear here is that the inward will become the realm of Christianity and the outward, ‘more serious’ stuff will become the responsibility of some other more ‘practical’ power, be it politics, pocketbook, personal preference, etc. We can tuck God safely away in a little ‘inward’ box and justify some pretty un-Christlike things. See pretty much anything written by JH Yoder or Michael Gorman if you’re not sure what I mean. The gospel isn’t ‘fire insurance’ it’s a whole new life – a new creation – here and now. And that’s radical, disruptive stuff.

    But my concerns are pretty contemporary, and Wesley is not a 21st century man, he is a 18th century man. And so I think he largely predates these misconceptions, at least in their modern form. In fact, I think these misconceptions actually came out of the mixture of Wesley’s language, along with parallel language coming from other quarters, and later (and a few concurrent) philosophical developments and fashions.

    This claim is bolstered by the fact that much of his energies are spent holding inward and outward religion together, employing the distinction to undercut the distance between the two. For Wesley, inward religion necessarily breeds outward religions, and outward religion fosters and deepens inward religion. The two are of a piece, and can’t be separated without doing violence to both.

    Furthermore, for Wesley the ‘heart’ isn’t too separate a thing either. The Oxford Fellow just means to point out that our human desires are exactly where God wants to go to work on us. God wants to transform and reform us where we love. Moreover, Wesley is also no adherent of Deb from Napoleon Dynamite‘s “follow your heart” philosophy (yeah, I just went there).

    I noticed these ‘hurdles’ (and other similar concerns) over the summer as well, but the more I read Wesley the more I am convinced that Wesley is merely a victim of a changing conversation, and that he is not guilty of these modern philosophical and theological crimes.

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    painful steps so slow…

    by  • November 30, 2011 • 0 Comments

    from Sara Groves’ adaptation of It Came Upon a Midnight Clear (2008):

    You beneath life’s crushing load,
    Whose forms are bending low,
    Who toil along the climbing way
    With painful steps so slow;

    Look now, for glad and golden hours
    Come swiftly on the wing;
    Oh, rest beside the weary road
    And hear the angels, and hear them sing:

    “Peace on the earth, goodwill to men
    From heaven’s all gracious King!”
    The world in solemn stillness lay
    To hear the angels, to hear them sing.

    Life is not all sunshine and rainbows. It’s sorrow, striving, struggling, suffering (and, undoubtedly, other words that start in ‘S’). In Romans 8 the apostle Paul seems to think that the world itself is taken up into this struggle: he says that creation is groaning – like from childbirth! – in anticipation of what one day will be but has not yet come to be.

    And, in spite of whatever alternative messages we may conjure, this is where we live as well. This groaning awareness of what is not, of what God has left unfinished. This is the first part of what Advent is about, waiting in (sometimes painful) anticipation of what is not yet.

    But – and this is a big ‘but’ – Advent is never celebrated without knowing that Christmas is right around the corner. Though we still live in an unfinished world, we live in a world that is being finished, a world that God has inhabited in a human person. And in a sense he’s done so simply to say, “Peace on the earth, goodwill to men / From heaven’s all gracious King!”

    The world that is still being finished is here in the humility – or humiliation? – of a baby reduced to being born in a filthy barn, really, finally, fully finished. May the scandal of this good news haunt our waiting in the coming weeks; indeed may it haunt our every thought until Christ is born anew in our lives and in our world. And may the materialistic pretensions of this season be undercut by the material reality of what we’re celebrating – the Savior of the world being born surrounded by dead grass and animal feces.

    Animal feces? I’m pretty sure there’s an apt metaphor for much of what we do around Christmastime somewhere in there…

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    God has an Israel

    by  • November 17, 2011 • 0 Comments

    Digging through old drafts of blog posts the other day I found the following post, last edited April 2, 2010. It seems like a relatively complete thought, and I have no idea why I didn’t post it then. So I’m posting it now. 

    In my reading from the Church Dogmatics this morning, ol’ Karl was talking the Old Testament, and some of the things he was saying reminded me of a quote that I thought I had read earlier in §14. But I was wrong. Here’s the quote, from von Balthasar:

    All ancient peoples have their gods. The God of Israel, however, is distinguished from all other gods by the fact that he brings into being a people to worship him by his own free sovereign act of choosing – whether we look at the first manifestation of this choice of a people – when God called Abraham – or at his choosing his people when he led them out of Egypt at the hand of Moses (who himself had first to be called of God), thus making something like a nation out of a miserable collection of uncultured and demoralized slaves; before all this, in each case there is a free act of the divine initiative that can neither be foreseen, demanded, nor deduced. (Engagement With God, pp. 13)

    I quite enjoyed the point that von Balthasar makes here. Israel is not a people who have a god named YHWH. Rather, YHWH is the God who has a people, Israel.

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    ‘Student’ vs. ‘Youth’ Ministry

    by  • November 16, 2011 • 2 Comments

    Leonardo

    Leonardo says, "I'm not a student, but I am a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle."

    I recently asked a friend and colleague if she knew where the term “student ministry” came from, and why so many people use it. She wasn’t really sure, but she did point me to this blog post guest authored by Christian Smith that served to confirm my apprehension about that way of speaking of our ministry with teens.

    I was still in high school the first time I ever heard someone use the term “student ministry,” and even then it caught me off guard. It seemed really weird to me that a church would label me as a student, because I did not think of myself in those terms. These days I am actually working in youth ministry, and I’ve only grown more convinced that it’s a weird way of talking about ministry to teens. Here are a few of the reasons why I never say I work in ‘student ministry’:

    First of all, the church should be careful when it defines people in terms of their occupation. What we ‘do’ is an important part of who we are, but privileging any one role tends to be reductionistic, especially when that privileged role is chosen poorly. This is particularly true with young people, who are so often engaged in a number of activities outside the classroom that they count more central to their identities. I’m not sure that I know a single teen that would self identify first as a student. As far as they’re concerned they are softball players, guitarists, gamers, band members, and (I hope!) Christians before they are students. If they don’t identify themselves primarily as students, why do so many churches?

    Second, it’s a bad idea for teens to be thought of as students in the church, because the term ‘student’ reinforces some unfortunate but common misconceptions about discipleship. The term ‘student’ lends itself to an excessively cognitive understanding of what teens are, and therefore to an excessively mental, intellectual view of discipleship. Teens are thought of primarily as neutral idea-receptacles that need to be filled with the right kind of information. This is problematic insofar as Jesus doesn’t call us just to think the gospel, he calls us to live it. Christianity is less about what you know, and more about who and how and why and where you love. Worship is a very different genre from what goes on in the classrooms our teens frequent. And thank God for that.

    Third, the term ‘student’ overestimates the difference between teenagers and the rest of the church. On the one hand, ‘student’ risks suggesting that the rest of us have nothing else to learn, nowhere else to grow. And on the other hand, the term overestimates the tentative nature of teen faith. We need to invite teens to be the church today along with us, and they can’t do that as just ‘students’. And if the rest of us are going to be the church together with them, then we too need to get in touch with the fact that we are still students, or better, disciples of the master too.

    Fourth, the term is exclusive. The church has a responsibility to minister the gospel to all teens, regardless of whether they are students, home-schooled, dropouts or early graduates. This one seems like a no-brainer to me.

    I don’t mean to suggest that the term ‘youth’ ministry is perfect and unproblematic. Only that it is far less problematic, makes much more sense, and doesn’t carry so many risky misconceptions. Separating a group by its age can be problematic, especially since I think we should be striving to be one church, worshipping God together, across generational lines. If for Paul it was important to point out that in Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek, man nor woman, slave nor free, in our age we might just as well add that in Christ the differences between young and old are reconfigured as well. So ‘youth’ ministry might overestimate the difference between youth and the rest of the church as well. But if such a ministry is put together to make sure young people have a place in our community (‘in’ being the operative word, not apart, alongside or near), then maybe the difficulties of the term can be minimized. Regardless, I still think this is a smaller barrier to overcome than those with ‘student’ listed above, so I’ll stick with ‘youth’ unless someone can persuade me otherwise.

    On that note, I’d be really curious to hear if anyone knows why the term ‘student ministry’ is so popular? What are its benefits? Or what’s the critique of ‘youth ministry’; why is that term so bad?

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    1. “Salvation by Faith”

    by  • November 15, 2011 • 0 Comments

    John Wesley“All the blessings which God hath bestowed upon man are of his mere grace, bounty, or favor…” Everything we have is from God’s grace, and grace alone. Our existence, the image of God, the fact that we’re alive right now, and even our good works are all only by God’s grace.

    This is a helpful reminder for today, when we live in a theological climate in which people sometimes use creation, the image of God, our present experiences and our good deeds as ways to hide from God’s grace. Contrariwise, John Wesley firmly believes that all of these things hold together only by grace, only by God’s gift. I take that to mean that such things as these can’t be thought of independently of the action of a grace-ing God. The good that we have we have only by grace, though we really do have it.

    For instance, our good works aren’t really good, but are tainted by our sinfulness. And if they are genuinely good, credit is due to God, not to us.

    So what of salvation? It has to be only by grace. But anyone who knows even a little about John Wesley knows that his understanding of salvation takes up our agency as well, engages and invites our action, if only by God’s own primary primal action. God alone by grace does the saving, but God also graciously calls out our involvement. This place where God’s action meets our action is called faith (or faithfulness). In other words (Wesley’s words from “Sermon 1: Salvation by Faith”): “Grace is the source, faith the condition, of salvation.”

    This faith is a faith in Christ, especially in his cross and resurrection, and this faith goes much deeper than mental assent, but is a “disposition of the heart” (which, it should be noted, is itself also much deeper than a mere emotional assent). Salvation by Faith doesn’t discourage holiness and good works, but requires them; Salvation by Faith doesn’t lend itself to pride but necessarily excludes it; Salvation by Faith doesn’t encourage sin but rules it out; Salvation by Faith isn’t an uncomfortable doctrine – it’s the only comfortable one.

    Wesley’s underlying assumptions about total depravity on the one hand and God’s grace and mercy on the other shine through in a big way throughout this sermon. There’s a real gift there. Sometimes people today try to understand grace while forgetting that to be human in God’s world is to be in an overwhelmingly humble position. This leads to a cheap understanding of grace. Then others make the opposite mistake. In an effort to take sin seriously, grace becomes a mere footnote. Wesley talking about these topics in this sermons seems more like a feedback loop. In saying something serious about sin, Wesley can’t help but talk about grace. And grace necessarily reminds Wesley of human sin.

    And then faith and salvation: because they are what happens when God’s grace meets up with sinful humanity.

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    Wesley on Several Occasions

    by  • November 7, 2011 • 0 Comments

    I really enjoyed auditing a class on Methodist theology this past summer (“We have a theology?” I joked more than once). But I still don’t feel as conversant as I’d like to be in John Wesley’s thought. On top of that, the Barth project is on hiatus, and my leisure reading could use some focus and structure. Not to mention a change of pace, and Wesley is certainly that compared to Barth.

    So, I have a new goal: read all of John Wesley’s Sermons on Several Occasions. Side goal: write the occasional blog post on the experience. Here goes.

    Sermons on Several Occasions consists of 141 of them. Sermons, I mean. The title is very descriptive of the content. So I’ll leap right into the Preface to the first series (sermons 1-53). Here John Wesley introduces the sermons to follow and their general overarching theme: the way of salvation. I’ve picked out a few features of this preface that seem to be of note.

    First, his sermons are sermons, designed for the preaching of the gospel to the people (ad populum); they are not designed as systematic treatises, nor are they written for theologians. They are written to be “plain truth for plain people.” If he’s a theologian he’s clearly doing what Barth called “irregular theology,” but his priorities are such that it may be unfair to label him as a theologian at all. He’s much more of a pastor, albeit a pastor who understands that discipleship is a deep responsibility, and so worth the critical care and precision of articulation we tend to call theology. But even with that Word-care and precise articulation, he makes it clear that he’s trying as hard as he can to be unpretentious.

    Second, John Wesley is an evangelical. (If the previous sentence offends you, try it again with the prefix “proto-” in front of the ‘e’ word. If that didn’t help, I’m afraid that’s all I can do for you.) He says things like, “I want to know one thing, — the way to heaven; how to land safe on that happy shore. God himself has condescended to teach the way: For this very end he came from heaven. He hath written it down in a book.” Wesley cares a lot about salvation and how it ‘works.’ For him it works only because of Jesus, and he aspires to be a homo units libri — a man of one book (the Bible, of course). The salvation way of Jesus, disclosed in the Bible, is distinguished from all other ways, is before all other ways.

    Of course Wesley is not a contemporary North American evangelical. But while he never handed out a single “Have you heard of the Four Spiritual Laws?” booklet, he is heavily preoccupied with salvation. And while he gets somewhat heavy handed with “heart” language, he very much thinks that Christianity can’t really separate the ‘interior’ from the ‘exterior.’ And while calling him an inerrantist would be anachronistic at best, he does lean heavily on the Scriptures and treats them as primary and authoritative. While it would be irresponsible to read Wesley and hear in him the words of our fundamentalist neighbors, it would be just as irresponsible to read Wesley and not hear some room for rapprochement with them. God has acted to save the world, and Wesley is trying to take that very seriously.

    Third, Wesley knew there were other people who knew more than him, and even offered them advice on how they might change his mind (plain proof of Scripture + kind patience). And then he went so far as to say that truth is not the primary determinative category for Christian discipleship — love is: “For, how far is love, even with many wrong opinions, to be preferred before truth itself without love!” But if Wesley isn’t a contemporary North American evangelical, neither is he saying that it doesn’t matter what we believe or think as long as our ‘heart’ is in the right place. I read him here as being in the same line as James Smith’s argument in Desiring the Kingdom: people are not primarily thinking things, but desiring — loving — animals. It’s not that our minds don’t matter, it’s just that they aren’t in charge. Wesley is concerned with the love of God for us, and our love back to God. Because that’s where the action is.

    “The God of love forbid we should ever make the trial!  May he prepare us for the knowledge of all truth, by filling our hearts with his love, and with all joy and peace in believing!”

    Next up: Sermon 1, “Salvation by Faith.”

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    I want the Goods

    by  • March 14, 2011 • 0 Comments

    At the very beginning of Book II of Plato’s Republic, Glaucon, one of Socrates interlocutors, lists three different types of goods:

    1. Some things are good purely for their own sake, and not because of anything in particular that comes from them. Joy and ‘harmless pleasures’ are the two examples Glaucon cites.

    2. Other things are good both for their own sake and for the sake of things that come from it. Knowing, seeing, and being healthy are Glaucon’s examples here.

    3. The third kind of good are things that aren’t particularly good in and of themselves, but are nonetheless desirable because of good results that they produce. Examples include exercising, medical treatment, medicine itself, and making money. (357b-c)

    This three part typology (which Socrates responds to quite agreeably, if you were wondering) is fascinating to me, because I think our culture has no comparably nuanced language for the good. For us, what is good is just what is desirable. We participate in other activities, we call them “necessary evils”, but we do so because they give us things that we do desire. But at bottom we’re always only driven by desire. And my hunch is that our desires are more arbitrary and disorganized than we think they are. They have to be in order for capitalism to work.

    Plato surely had his own problems (and ends up taking the Republic in a surprisingly totalitarian-esque direction), but nonetheless I think Glaucon’s three different kinds of good are helpful, if for nothing else than to help develop for us the vocabulary of the good beyond the language of “I want…” or “I feel like…” For these exercise their own more clandestine form of totalitarianism, deeply and violently sinister, but in ways that kill quietly, with a smile and a helping of the finest delicacy.

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    Suffering is overcome by suffering

    by  • March 7, 2011 • 0 Comments

    Bonhoeffer on Matt 26:39ff:

    Jesus prays to the Father that the cup pass from him, and the Father hears the son’s prayer. The cup of suffering will pass from Jesus, but only by his drinking it. When Jesus kneels in Gethsemane the second time, he knows that the cup will pass by his accepting the suffering. Only by bearing the suffering will he overcome and conquer it. His cross is the triumph over suffering.

    Suffering is distance from God. That is why someone who is in communion with God cannot suffer. Jesus affirmed this Old Testament testimony. That is why he takes the suffering of the whole world onto himself and overcomes it. He bears the whole distance from God. Drinking the cup is what makes it pass from him. In order to overcome the suffering of the world Jesus must drink it to the dregs. Indeed, suffering remains distance from God, but in community with the suffering of Jesus Christ, suffering is overcome by suffering. Communion with God is granted precisely in suffering.

    Suffering must be borne in order for it to pass. Either the world must bear it and be crused by it, or it falls on Christ and is overcome in him. That is how Christ suffers as vicarious representative for the world. Only his suffering brings salvation. But the church-community itself knows now that the world’s suffering seeks a bearer. So in following Christ, this suffering falls upon it, and it bears the suffering while being borne by Christ. The community of Jesus Christ vicariously represents the world before God by following Christ under the cross.

    [...] Bearing constitutes being a Christian. Just as Christ maintains his communion with the Father by bearing according to the Father’s will, so the disciples’ bearing constitutes their community with Christ [...] Jesus called all who are laden with various sufferings and burdens to throw off their yokes and to take his yoke upon themselves. His yoke is easy, and his burden is light. His yoke and his burden is the cross. Bearing the cross does not bring misery and despair. Rather, it provides refreshment and peace for our souls; it is our greatest joy.

    (Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Discipleship, pp. 83-84)

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