One Another

The single most telling indicator of a person’s moral character has nothing to do with the data they believe about God or how they worship God, and everything to do with how they treat others.  Of course, it’s easy to be judgmental and harsh if you believe that God is judgmental and harsh; at least there’s some cognitive consistency there.  I can never understand, however, how a person can claim to worship a loving and forgiving God and yet be so critical and callous toward others.  God’s nature is to forgive and teach, not condemn and punish.

Terms of Forgiveness

In all the reading that I have been doing on the issue of forgiveness, I have found that there is a lot of confusion and confounding of terms.  For instance, though forgiveness and reconciliation are related, they are not the same thing.  Forgiveness is primarily an attitude of the heart, and as such it can and often is done unilaterally.  If someone has hurt or offended you, you can forgive that person even if you are stranded on a desert island with no means of communicating with anyone.  Furthermore, you can forgive that person even if that person has neither repented of the hurtful behavior or in any way acknowledges that they have done anything wrong.  Admittedly, forgiveness is easier when a person apologizes and repents, but neither is necessary for forgiveness to occur.  Forgiveness is necessary for reconciliation to occur, but it is not the same thing.  Reconciliation requires all parties to be involved, and it is hard work.  True reconciliation requires that all parties deal with the behaviors and attitudes that caused a relationship rift, and that is a hard thing to do.  A certain level of relationship is possible by ignoring the situation, acting like it never occurred, looking past it, etc., but a relationship on those terms is never quite the same as before.  Trust erodes, and the even is never really forgotten.  At some point, when something similar occurs again, the old feelings and repressed attitudes come up.  With true reconciliation, the event is admitted, the hurts are confessed, sorrow is expressed, and repentance occurs.  The relationship is never the same, but in a good way.  Growth occurs in the individuals involved, and a new level of understanding and trust is established.  A better relationship result.  This kind of reconciliation does not always occur, but forgiveness can occur in all situations. 

Another confounding of terms that I have seen is when forgiveness is confused with absolution.  Absolution is a freeing from blame or guilt, a release from the consequences, obligations, or penalties of a wrong inflicted.  But forgiving a person for an action does not necessarily mean that that person bears no responsibility for reparations to the injured person.  If I loan you my car and you run a red light while texting a friend and get in an accident, I’ll forgive you, but I’ll also expect you to fix my car.  Now, there may be a situation in which I may also absolve you of the consequences.  Maybe I know that you have you have limited financial resources and that fixing my car will mean that you can’t provide for your family, and so I’ll choose to cover the repairs myself.  In this instance both forgiveness and absolution occur together, but they aren’t the same thing.  And here’s an important point—if in absolving you of the consequences of the accident and paying for the repairs myself I allow myself to become bitter toward you; in other words, I give you absolution but not forgiveness, I hurt myself and damage the relationship.

I remember a cover of Time magazine many years ago that illustrate the difference between forgiveness  and absolution.  The picture is of Pope John Paul II visiting Mehmet Ali Agca in prison.  Two years prior Ali Agca had shot the pope in an assassination attempt, and now the pope was sitting in a private room with Agca, knee-to-knee and face-to-face, holding his hand—and telling him that he was forgiven.  But when the visit was over, the pope went back to the Vatican, and Ali Agca remained in prison.  John Paul II had the power to forgive, but absolution was not his to give.

The headline of that January 9, 1984  cover of Time magazine asked, “Why Forgive?”  Well, for the next twenty years the pope not only befriended Ali Agca but also his entire family as well.  Ali Agca served out his prison sentence; that provided his absolution.  And when he was released from prison in 2006, he held a copy of that Time magazine, and he called the pope his friend.  Forgiveness had occurred, which helped bring about reconciliation—true friendship.  There was a cost to all of it—a cost for forgiveness, a cost for reconciliation, and a cost for absolution, but it resulted in an entire family touched with the good news of the Gospel—and a wonderful witness for all the world to see.

Spring

I don’t care what the calendar or the thermometer says: when pitchers and catchers report to Spring Training, it’s Spring.  Go O’s!

Speaking of Spring, whenever the temperatures warm up and the grass starts growing again, but the trees haven’t yet sprouted leaves, I think about Jesus proclaiming that the Kingdom of God is at hand.  On those early Spring days, it’s clear that Spring has arrived, but not fully.  There are signs of its arrival, but the vestiges of winter are still visible: the trees are still bare and the flowers haven’t yet bloomed.  That’s what Jesus meant: the Kingdom of God had arrived, but there are vestiges of the present age.  The days of the present evil age are numbered, and the fullness of the Kingdom is assured, but for a time there is some of both.  So we get to decide: do I still want to live in Winter, or am I ready to live the rebirth of Spring?  And one more thing: every moment you spend worrying about whether you are going to be with God in the afterlife is one less moment you get to enjoy being with God in this life.  Jesus didn’t say the Kingdom of God starts after you die, he said it is at hand.  Live your life with God in this life, and he’ll take care of you in the next life.  Too many Christians treat living for God as less important than making sure they’ve taken care of the afterlife part, but Jesus taught the opposite—it’s living for God now that leads to eternal life; or, more accurately, living for God now IS eternal life.  It begins now, and death can’t stop it; and if it doesn’t begin now, death won’t start it.

Who's Irrational?

It’s hard to imagine a Christian Fundamentalist and an atheist agreeing on much with regard to religion, but here’s one that they have always believed and taught—higher education will cause you to lose your faith.  Throughout much of the last century, education was viewed suspiciously by many people in the pew.  “Simple faith” was saving faith, and nothing good could come of young people going off to the university and learning all these new ideas like evolution and Freud.  As I was finishing college and getting ready to go to seminary I was warned to be careful lest I would lose my faith.   I wasn’t the only seminarian so warned.  Similarly, most atheists seem to believe that religion and faith in God is a bunch of superstition, fairy tales, wish-fulfillment, and other lame attempts to explain the mysteries of the universe.  Once one rationally examines the scientific evidence, belief in God becomes unnecessary—and irrational.  A recent study showed that it just ain’t so.  A survey of about 5,000 post-graduate students showed that 85% believed in God or a higher power, while 82% of all Americans share that belief.  And these “educational elites” are actually more likely to join a church than the typical American, 63% to 54%.  While atheists would tend to call these Fundamentalists “irrational”, it would seem that the fear or hope that education leads to faithlessness is just, well, irrational. 

There's some historical amnesia going on here as well.  The roots of much Enlightenment thought--individualism, rationalism, scholasticism--can be found in Western Christianity.  The Christian church in Europe provided the seedbed for the rational worldview that characterizes the West.  There's a reason that the Enlightenment took hold in places where Christianity flourished and not, for instance, in China or South America.  To link Christianity to religions of superstition is to ignore history and the influence of the church in the West.

Of course, there are some, myself included, who now openly question the rational optimism of the church and the Enlightenment i.e. that we can reason our way to everything, including God.  I think reason has a role, but it also has its limits.  God is Mystery, and we'll never think our way to a complete understanding of who and what he is.  The created can never comprehend the Creator.

But that makes sense, doesn't it?  

It's irrational to place complete faith in rationalism.

Oh, I do love irony.

Wolves and Lambs in Egypt

One of the under-reported dimensions of the revolution in Egypt was the way that Muslim’s and Christians worked together to bring democratic change through non-violent means.  This video was posted on YouTube a couple of weeks ago showing Muslims protecting Egyptian Christians (known as Coptic Christians) and their churches, and Christians protecting Muslim protesters from supporters of the Mubarak regime.   

Regardless of one’s views of the politics of this event, it is significant in that it was a non-violent revolt in which Muslims and Christians stood side-by-side, and it worked.  There are a couple of places in the Old Testament that use the metaphor of predatory animals like wolves, lions, and leopards living peaceably in God’s Kingdom with prey animals like lambs and calves (Isaiah 11:6 and 65:25), and it makes me wonder if this isn’t the very thing the biblical writers had in mind.  Maybe here in the United States we can realize that Christians and Muslims don’t have to be enemies—and maybe not even rivals.

Busy

“The idea of cultivation and exercise, so dear to the saints of old, has now no place in our total religious picture.  It is too slow, too common.  We now demand glamour and fast flowing dramatic action.  A generation of Christians reared among push buttons and automatic machines is impatient of slower and less direct methods of reaching their goals.  We have been trying to apply machine-age methods to our relations with God.  We read our chapter, have our short devotions and rush away, hoping to make up for our deep inward bankruptcy by attending another gospel meeting or listening to another thrilling story told by a religious adventurer lately returned from afar.

“The tragic results of this spirit are all about us.  Shallow lives, hollow religious philosophies, the preponderance of the element of fun in gospel meetings, the glorification of men, trust in religious externalities, quasi-religious fellowships, salesmanship methods, the mistaking of dynamic personality for the power of the Spirit: these and such as these are the symptoms of an evil disease, a deep and serious malady of the soul.”

--A.W. Tozer, The Pursuit of God

          If not from the somewhat dated language—the “gospel meeting” has gone the way of Billy Sunday and Billy Graham—it would be natural to assume that Tozer is describing the state of modern Christianity and contemporary Christians.  Well, he is, but not intentionally so.  Tozer began writing The Pursuit of God on a train trip from Chicago to Texas in the late 1940’s.  He wrote through the night, and by the time he arrived in Texas the rough draft was done.  Before the Internet, which allows you to find an answer to just about any question in a matter of minutes if not seconds; before microwave ovens which allow you to go from freezer to a hot-cooked meal in less than five-minutes; before Netflix and On-Demand in which you can decide to watch a movie, decide which movie to watch, and be watching in just a few minutes; before all the “time-saving” devices which have conspired to speed life up and actually leave us with more to do in less time, Tozer lamented that people had grown too busy and impatient to endure the slow development of the spiritual life.  The resulting impoverishment to our souls not only depleted our spirits but also distorted our religion and corrupted our churches.

        And it hasn’t gotten any better.  I’m not one to assert that things have gotten worse across the board—that our culture is less moral, less caring, less spiritual, less, well, everything than in the good ol’ days.  There was a lot of immorality in the good ol’ days, a lot of callousness, and a lot of materialism in the good ol’ days.  More, less, I honestly don’t know, and I don’t know that anyone is in position to make that judgment.  So maybe it has always been true that people have been too impatient and too busy to adequately nurture their souls, and Tozer’s words from 60 years ago are evidence of that.  Two thousand years ago Jesus warned people not to allow the cares of the world to crowd out the things that feed the soul, so this is nothing new.  It’s not just an issue for the modern human in a consumerist culture; it’s a human issue, period.

           But yet…I can’t get away from the feeling that this problem which has always been there hasn’t somehow metastasized in a critical area in our hearts and souls and moved from a chronic condition to an acute condition.  Our attentions have deficits, and if we try something and don’t see results pretty quickly, we give up.  We conclude that this is just the way it is, or that spiritual nurture is for those really dedicated fanatics, or that we’re just not wired that way.

            But if it’s the way it is, it’s not the way God intends it to be, nor is it the way it has to be.  And it is for the really dedicated, but that isn’t supposed to be an elite group any more than people dedicated to living is supposed to be an elite group.  And we’re not wired that way, we are wired for spiritual living because we are spiritual as well as physical beings—but the wiring has gotten messed up over the course of a few thousand years.  And there is no quick fix for a problem that has been developing for thousands of years.

          Eugene Peterson describes discipleship as a long obedience in the same direction, and surely he’s on to something.  

          I just sometimes wonder if I’m too busy to listen.

Grace Conditions

Is God’s grace ever conditional?  Is there a little box at the bottom of the salvation agreement that you must check, saying that you agree to abide by the terms and conditions?

If this sounds like a silly question—and it should—it is unfortunately a question that needs to be asked and answered, for in some Christian groups grace really does seem to have conditions attached to it.  Classic five-point Calvinism, for instance, speaks of Unconditional Election and Irresistible Grace i.e. that God chooses (elects) who is going to be saved and who isn’t, and he chooses according to his own reasons—or even whims—and there is nothing anyone can do about it.  God either chooses you, or he doesn’t.  And because God chooses and there’s nothing you can do about it, his grace is irresistible.  If you are chosen, you will be saved, even if you don’t want to be.  (To be fair, a Calvinist would say that if you are chosen, you will want to be saved, but the fact remains that whether you want to be or not is irrelevant.  All that matters is whether God wants you to be saved.)

So election and predestination are unconditional, but grace isn’t.  Its condition is whether or not you happen to fall into the “elect” category.

But I have no real beef with Calvinists.  I don’t agree with them, but I understand their position.  I have a lot of friends who are Calvinists, and there is much upon which we agree, and we work together in those areas.

More harmful are those who want to divide Christians into two groups, nominal Christians, and Real Christians—and who feel they can tell the difference.  Depending on what is important to the individuals and the groups with which they associate, a Real Christian is determined by their position on certain doctrines, or certain political positions, or their views on evolution vs. creation, the nature of Scripture, or matters of church polity, even the style of worship music preferred.

It’s something that is easy to fall into.  We all know people who appear to be going through the motions of following Jesus, but to all appearances are Christian in name only—hence the term nominal.  And the more you dig into Scripture and matters theological, the more you tend to see some things as more central to what it means to be a follower of Jesus than others.  And when other Christians seem to “major on the minors,” it’s easy to fall into the trap of feeling somewhat superior.  You know, they’re going through the motions while you are focusing on the stuff that really matters.  Or even worse, that they are taking Christianity down a wrong or destructive path while you are trying to follow the true path of Christianity.

And that’s a very dangerous path to take, because even if you are right about the majors and minors—or maybe especially if you are right about the majors and minors, this is the path of self-righteousness.

In other words, you can be right about important things and still have a log in your eye (Matthew 7:1-5).  And if you have a log in your eye, it doesn’t really matter how right you are.

The fact is that God’s grace isn’t conditional.  It just is.  It is who God is, and how God operates.  His grace is unconditional, unlimited, amazing, overwhelming, comprehensive, incomprehensible—and absolutely necessary, for no one can be saved without it.  In fact, Paul said that if grace isn’t unconditional—if there is something you have to do to get it, it isn’t grace at all.  But if it is by grace, it is no longer on the basis of works, otherwise grace would no longer be grace (Romans 11:6).

Our challenge is to resist the tendency to receive grace unconditionally but give it conditionally.  This goes not only for when someone sins against us or someone we love, but also for when someone simply disagrees with our cherished positions.  To disagree is not to sin, and to feel or act otherwise is the ultimate log-in-the-eye position.

We who receive grace unconditionally must also give grace unconditionally, and that is hard, maybe the hardest thing in the world to do.  But whoever said following Jesus was easy?

Ironically, those who have the most difficulty giving unconditional grace to others often have difficulty giving it to themselves.  If being wrong about some theological or ecclesial matter is sin and grounds for disqualification from being a Real Christian, then you can’t afford to admit that you may be wrong.  And you have to argue for your position even when it’s clear your position is untenable.

At any given time, all of us are right about some things and wrong about others.  We shouldn’t get puffed up about the areas in which we are right nor down on ourselves where we are wrong. 

Ultimately what’s important is not being right, but being in right relationship with a God of Amazing Grace.