Our common worldview in the West has regressed most dreadfully over the past several generations. We think we are living in a progressive society—if only we could see how far we have backslid; if only we could understand that the popularity of the moment weighs little compared to the wisdom of the ages; if only we woke up to the fact that “chronological snobbery” has blinded us to the truth that we are not inherently wiser than those who went before. In truth, they had the advantage over us, for we have burned our bridges and willfully forgotten the foundations of wisdom passed down to us—previous generations at least had roots to help them grow, whereas we, in our epiphytic short-sightedness, detach ourselves from our host-tree as if we will do anything but fall.
Paganism, polytheism, and monotheism (of most sorts, at least) are better than post-modern, secular, “God-in-the-Dock” agnosticism—an agnosticism that falls short of atheism only because the question isn’t really of much interest anymore. Myth is better than scientific theory—for “myth” appeals to what is true, while theory invokes only what is deemed probable. The Way of Christ is no aberrant deviation from the tradition of the ancients—Jews to whom it was shamefully mundane, Greeks to whom it was foolishness, and all the rest who at the very least understood the Creator held more sway than mere creatures. No, as Lewis and others have rightly pointed out, Christianity is not 100% different from the varied spiritual endeavors of non-Christians; others got it “broadly right,” in many cases, and one can find the vast majority of Truth in other paths…but (and this is the critical point) Jesus fulfilled it all, presented perfect Truth, shone a pure light amongst the fitful campfires of the primitive seekers. We modern Christians often forget that the many of the ancients were “very religious in all respects,” worshipping in ignorance what Paul offered through Christ, and—though they groped around for the Light as if blind—God was not far from them (Acts 17:22-27).
Christ is the Way, the Truth, and the Life, and none come to the Father except through Him. But that does not mean all other ways are equally distant from the truth; all errors are not equally dangerous, for although all, if uncorrected, condemn, some are corrected much more easily. Those men at Athens who already worshipped the Unknown God had a shorter distance to go to Christ than the worshippers of Aphrodite in Corinth; Nicodemus apparently had a shorter distance than Pilate, the Jews generally had a shorter distance than the Greeks, someone born into a Christian culture today has a shorter distance than someone born in an Islamic nation. But, as noted above, Pagans and others who believe in a God or many gods have a shorter distance to travel to Christ than someone who discounts entirely the supernatural and spiritual realms.
Modern Western society stands at a dreadful distance from the Way of Christ. Mainstream elements have, I believe, veered drastically away from a healthy worldview since at least the poorly-named Enlightenment. It was around then that the shift Lewis notes in “God in the Dock” became so popular. Man lost sight of the fact that the Creator was his judge and instead tried to place Him in the Dock—the seat of the defendant. That is something that we fail to address enough today.
Western Christians live in a postmodern world—a world that has “lost its story”—and we are woefully unprepared to understand His Story…in truth, the story of us all, in one form or another. Relativism is not just a foolish, flawed worldview—it is a tragic mistake, a dangerous path, an anti-rational disease that sickens a whole society. When there are no absolutes, tolerance usurps the place of Love, resignation reigns over resolution, deception overshadows truth, shallowness dries up meaning, and political correctness takes over the common good. We do not know the true stories that lay upon us all, we fail to see the meaning in the madness…instead, we embrace the madness and call its chaos freedom. As Christians, though, we’ve been given a lens that allows us to see, although often we still choose not to look in the right direction. Too many Christians see their identity as existing alongside the multifarious identities of the fallen world and ignore the critical divide between truth and error. Part of this is, I think, that we are not burdened with God’s heart for the lost: we fall woefully short of the standard “leave the 99 to find the 1 who is lost.” I know that’s part of the problem because it is something I see in myself.
But also there is, I believe, not enough confidence in the Truth. Not enough understanding of the Story. We don’t shine our certainty confidently into an uncertain world—a world that deeply craves meaning and attachment to the story for which they were crafted. We treat other religions or other worldviews as if they are equal to our own—as if “our Story” was merely something told by human mouths. Some small part of this is perhaps a fear of coming across as arrogant…but I think that a poorer excuse than most would have it. Surely, we don’t want our attitudes to ever turn somebody away from the truth, but how eager and insistent should someone be who possesses a cure of absolute importance? Confidence in the Way of Christ is not arrogance. Granted, it is not through our confidence, our knowledge, our humility, or our attitude that people will come to Christ, but only through the Spirit of God; but still our competence, our confidence, comes from God and should not be watered down by the confusion of our neighbors. For we do not speak the truth to them for our sakes, but for their sake and God’s glory. They need this Story, and they need the meaning we have been shown.
Those who believe any story tend to find it easier to learn the real Story; those who believe in truth at all can better be shown the Truth than the post-modern relativists who squeeze their eyes shut lest they face an uncomfortable reality. Relativism would suggest that whatever truth we know is little more than an opinion. We must not fall for that lie, for truth does not have its origin in man and is not malleable to his will. There is no such thing as too much confidence in the truth of the Gospel, no such thing as being too certain about that which remains, for now, unseen. Rather than disparaging the “primitive” mythologies of the savage and the ancient, we should acknowledge that they, at least, grasp half-blind for truths our contemporaries feign to forget. There is a danger in being too “modern;” there is an even greater danger in falling under the label “post-modern,” for in doing so one trades the hope of firm footing for the shifting ground of a mire.
Sunday, August 23, 2009
Monday, August 3, 2009
A Lesson Both New and Old
Having grown up in a more Christian than average environment—socially, religiously, and intellectually—I find that often I know things before I really learn them. Perhaps this is not really a result of the Christian context of my life, but what I mean is that I’ll often encounter an idea, whether in book, Bible, conversation, or sermon, and know it to be true. And yet the truth of it, though met with assent, is not paired with understanding—not even of the necessarily-limited sort that my mind allows.
Maybe this is simply because spiritual truths take a while to settle into the mental language I’m more familiar with, or else due to the difference between learning by observation and learning by experience; I don’t know. There are countless examples of this, however, of lessons known and then seen later at a deeper, more personal level. One in particular has settled deeper into my understanding as of late.
C. S. Lewis makes the point (as have many others) that God demonstrates a certain humility in accepting our obedience to Him. Most, if not all, human egos would be too offended to actually crave the sort of offering we give to God: Lewis notes that we tend to accept God only when we have learned that absolutely nothing else is capable of pleasing or saving. We come to God, more often than not, as a last resort. We turn to Him after we’ve turned to all manner of other things…what human lover (one, it must be remembered, who is completely secure, satisfied, and self-sufficient) would accept a woman after she had turned to every other lover she could find, only to finally surrender, somewhat despondently perhaps, back to the One Who deserves her attention? God views the creatures He alone formed, who not only betrayed Him so momentously once, but who again and again look for other gods, other loves, and who usually turn back to Him only when they realize themselves at the end of their ropes…and He views them with love, as if they chose Him in a respectable way.
Of course, this…oversight…of the insufficiency of our love and faith is only made possible by the all-Sufficiency of the Son of God’s Crucifixion. Still, though, Christ’s mission was initiated by God and for God, so I don’t think it changes at all (or rather, it merely increases) the marvelous quality of God accepting our feeble and frantic surrender to His love with what, in a human lover, would be seemingly imprudent and over-extreme humility. We would tell such a man “you deserve better; don’t lower your standards so far.” Thank God He found a way to keep both His standards and us.
I’ve skipped ahead. I encountered this truth many years ago and knew it as true. But my well-developed ideas about it (inchoate, certainly, compared to Lewis’ own thoughts) come mainly from a recent encounter with two familiar passages of Scripture…for the first time, I think, I saw these two passages as connecting to this idea of the unassuming nature of God’s acceptance of us. (Note that such words as “humility” and “unassuming,” when talking about this side of salvation, are used only because I can find no better. I think they are not correct, in a strict manner; God’s nature demonstrates Glory first and foremost, and using “humble” to describe God’s victorious and heroic claiming of us is a woefully incomplete adjective. But I’m focusing on the idea that He accepts a sort of love we mortals have a hard time understanding or accepting—although, through Christ, we are expected to extend it.)
The two passages I’m talking about are the Parable of the Prodigal Son and Hosea 2. The first is more familiar to most people, almost certainly, and there is nothing new I could say about such a frequently encountered passage—of course, nihil novum sub sole; “saying something new” is, if even possible, not a virtue when talking about the Bible. But it’s really the comparison between the two passages that struck me.
The “prodigal” son deeply insulted his father, left, squandered his wealth and his life on empty, depraved living; when he reached rock-bottom, he came to his senses and said: “How many of my father's hired men have food to spare, and here I am starving to death! I will set out and go back to my father and say to him: Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you.” He wanted to be taken back, if only as the lowest of his father’s servants. So he returned…and “while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion for him; he ran to his son, threw his arms around him and kissed him.” His father was not willing that his son be his servant; he would unconditionally take him back as his son once more. There are, of course, several lessons there.
But the similarity to Hosea 2 is what struck me recently. Hosea, after marrying a prostitute as directed by God and giving her all she could want, experienced the continual betrayal and shame of an unfaithful spouse; this, of course, illustrates God’s relationship with His People. In the second chapter (after a few verses that may serve as a reminder of God’s justice), God shows, I think, the Heart behind the punishments/trails/difficulties His creatures face. God demonstrates that His end-goal is always the redemption of those lost, the forgiveness and reconciliation with those who willfully abuse His Love and Holiness. Right after saying He will punish His unfaithful spouse, in short because she forgot Him and turned to other lovers, He states unequivocally that He won’t leave it at that. He also, as I stated above, at least hints that those punishments are sent in order to turn her away from dependence on other lovers…He wants her to reach rock-bottom (as did the prodigal son) so that she will turn to Him, the “one who gave her the grain, the new wine and oil, who lavished on her the silver and gold,” her One True Hope (v.8). This is what He says in v.14ff:
“Therefore I am now going to allure her; I will lead her into the desert and speak tenderly to her. There I will give her back her vineyards…There she will sing as in the days of her youth, as in the day she came up out of Egypt. "In that day," declares the LORD, "you will call Me ‘my husband’; you will no longer call Me ‘my master.’”
The prodigal son’s father refused to consider his son a servant; the Lord refuses to let His bride see Him as master. God as Lover and God as Father, these identities never supersede God as King, but they go hand in hand…and we far too often ignore these expressions of God’s holy love. But really what strikes me is that difficult-to-describe quality of God’s love for us…what seems like humility at first glance, a crazily unassuming ability to accept a response from us that is one iota short of being forced, but what is, I think, ultimately an expression of the supreme self-confidence and independence of God. He does not love us out of any inherent need; unlike us, His love (though ever for His Glory) is something extended purely, not from a grasping need for wholeness—for He is always Whole—but out of the overflow of His Love for Himself. We unavoidably needy, dependent (we were made that way) and, of course, fallen creatures find it difficult to love when there is no benefit to us, no semblance of worthiness in the object of our love, no real indication from our beloved that they would choose us on their own. God, both as Father and as Husband/Lover/LORD, forgets our sins when we are no longer lost, and His joy overflows into blessings for us, in spite of the fact that He must rescue us from the depraved state of our own rebellion against Him, in spite of the fact we tend to frantically seek an escape when He closes in with His Love, in spite of the fact of what it cost Him.
Incidentally, I think this is where one of the problematic issues of Catholicism comes in; God is not a God of purgatory, Who saves from Hell yet nevertheless punishes after death for sins. He allures us back, He rushes down the road and celebrates our return. Maybe the idea of purgatory was fashioned out of a desire to show that sin is indeed grave, and to dissuade Christians from the idea of cheap grace—that, once saved, our sins are of no real account, for they are already paid for. But the idea of purgatory is in reality an affront to the true costliness of Grace: it is in fact because of the ultimate price our Salvation cost God that our sins are no longer counted against us, tossed as far away as the East is from the West, and we know that it is for freedom we have been set free. Purgatory seeks to make us pay part of the price of sin; nevertheless, Jesus’ Sacrifice was sufficient to pay the entirety of the price.
But that’s a tangent. And I have wandered far afield. It simply astounds me, the perfection of God’s Love. We love because He first loved us, and yet still we can’t quite follow His example; for while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. While we were sinners…prodigal sons, faithless prostitutes, persecutors of God’s people…God showed that, contrary to our expectations and upbringing, He still craved relationship with us. And not the relationship of master and servant, but a relationship founded on Love; and a craving not born out of need, but out of overflowing sufficiency. Our human expectations are that, if God takes us back, it is with conditions…but I think these two passages, one from the OT and one from the NT, show that God’s love overwhelms, that instead of hoops we need to jump through we need just turn to Him, no matter how much we have avoided Him in the past—and He’s actively involved in restoring that relationship all the while. And it should always be remembered—it is only through Christ that this is possible.
Maybe this is simply because spiritual truths take a while to settle into the mental language I’m more familiar with, or else due to the difference between learning by observation and learning by experience; I don’t know. There are countless examples of this, however, of lessons known and then seen later at a deeper, more personal level. One in particular has settled deeper into my understanding as of late.
C. S. Lewis makes the point (as have many others) that God demonstrates a certain humility in accepting our obedience to Him. Most, if not all, human egos would be too offended to actually crave the sort of offering we give to God: Lewis notes that we tend to accept God only when we have learned that absolutely nothing else is capable of pleasing or saving. We come to God, more often than not, as a last resort. We turn to Him after we’ve turned to all manner of other things…what human lover (one, it must be remembered, who is completely secure, satisfied, and self-sufficient) would accept a woman after she had turned to every other lover she could find, only to finally surrender, somewhat despondently perhaps, back to the One Who deserves her attention? God views the creatures He alone formed, who not only betrayed Him so momentously once, but who again and again look for other gods, other loves, and who usually turn back to Him only when they realize themselves at the end of their ropes…and He views them with love, as if they chose Him in a respectable way.
Of course, this…oversight…of the insufficiency of our love and faith is only made possible by the all-Sufficiency of the Son of God’s Crucifixion. Still, though, Christ’s mission was initiated by God and for God, so I don’t think it changes at all (or rather, it merely increases) the marvelous quality of God accepting our feeble and frantic surrender to His love with what, in a human lover, would be seemingly imprudent and over-extreme humility. We would tell such a man “you deserve better; don’t lower your standards so far.” Thank God He found a way to keep both His standards and us.
I’ve skipped ahead. I encountered this truth many years ago and knew it as true. But my well-developed ideas about it (inchoate, certainly, compared to Lewis’ own thoughts) come mainly from a recent encounter with two familiar passages of Scripture…for the first time, I think, I saw these two passages as connecting to this idea of the unassuming nature of God’s acceptance of us. (Note that such words as “humility” and “unassuming,” when talking about this side of salvation, are used only because I can find no better. I think they are not correct, in a strict manner; God’s nature demonstrates Glory first and foremost, and using “humble” to describe God’s victorious and heroic claiming of us is a woefully incomplete adjective. But I’m focusing on the idea that He accepts a sort of love we mortals have a hard time understanding or accepting—although, through Christ, we are expected to extend it.)
The two passages I’m talking about are the Parable of the Prodigal Son and Hosea 2. The first is more familiar to most people, almost certainly, and there is nothing new I could say about such a frequently encountered passage—of course, nihil novum sub sole; “saying something new” is, if even possible, not a virtue when talking about the Bible. But it’s really the comparison between the two passages that struck me.
The “prodigal” son deeply insulted his father, left, squandered his wealth and his life on empty, depraved living; when he reached rock-bottom, he came to his senses and said: “How many of my father's hired men have food to spare, and here I am starving to death! I will set out and go back to my father and say to him: Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you.” He wanted to be taken back, if only as the lowest of his father’s servants. So he returned…and “while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion for him; he ran to his son, threw his arms around him and kissed him.” His father was not willing that his son be his servant; he would unconditionally take him back as his son once more. There are, of course, several lessons there.
But the similarity to Hosea 2 is what struck me recently. Hosea, after marrying a prostitute as directed by God and giving her all she could want, experienced the continual betrayal and shame of an unfaithful spouse; this, of course, illustrates God’s relationship with His People. In the second chapter (after a few verses that may serve as a reminder of God’s justice), God shows, I think, the Heart behind the punishments/trails/difficulties His creatures face. God demonstrates that His end-goal is always the redemption of those lost, the forgiveness and reconciliation with those who willfully abuse His Love and Holiness. Right after saying He will punish His unfaithful spouse, in short because she forgot Him and turned to other lovers, He states unequivocally that He won’t leave it at that. He also, as I stated above, at least hints that those punishments are sent in order to turn her away from dependence on other lovers…He wants her to reach rock-bottom (as did the prodigal son) so that she will turn to Him, the “one who gave her the grain, the new wine and oil, who lavished on her the silver and gold,” her One True Hope (v.8). This is what He says in v.14ff:
“Therefore I am now going to allure her; I will lead her into the desert and speak tenderly to her. There I will give her back her vineyards…There she will sing as in the days of her youth, as in the day she came up out of Egypt. "In that day," declares the LORD, "you will call Me ‘my husband’; you will no longer call Me ‘my master.’”
The prodigal son’s father refused to consider his son a servant; the Lord refuses to let His bride see Him as master. God as Lover and God as Father, these identities never supersede God as King, but they go hand in hand…and we far too often ignore these expressions of God’s holy love. But really what strikes me is that difficult-to-describe quality of God’s love for us…what seems like humility at first glance, a crazily unassuming ability to accept a response from us that is one iota short of being forced, but what is, I think, ultimately an expression of the supreme self-confidence and independence of God. He does not love us out of any inherent need; unlike us, His love (though ever for His Glory) is something extended purely, not from a grasping need for wholeness—for He is always Whole—but out of the overflow of His Love for Himself. We unavoidably needy, dependent (we were made that way) and, of course, fallen creatures find it difficult to love when there is no benefit to us, no semblance of worthiness in the object of our love, no real indication from our beloved that they would choose us on their own. God, both as Father and as Husband/Lover/LORD, forgets our sins when we are no longer lost, and His joy overflows into blessings for us, in spite of the fact that He must rescue us from the depraved state of our own rebellion against Him, in spite of the fact we tend to frantically seek an escape when He closes in with His Love, in spite of the fact of what it cost Him.
Incidentally, I think this is where one of the problematic issues of Catholicism comes in; God is not a God of purgatory, Who saves from Hell yet nevertheless punishes after death for sins. He allures us back, He rushes down the road and celebrates our return. Maybe the idea of purgatory was fashioned out of a desire to show that sin is indeed grave, and to dissuade Christians from the idea of cheap grace—that, once saved, our sins are of no real account, for they are already paid for. But the idea of purgatory is in reality an affront to the true costliness of Grace: it is in fact because of the ultimate price our Salvation cost God that our sins are no longer counted against us, tossed as far away as the East is from the West, and we know that it is for freedom we have been set free. Purgatory seeks to make us pay part of the price of sin; nevertheless, Jesus’ Sacrifice was sufficient to pay the entirety of the price.
But that’s a tangent. And I have wandered far afield. It simply astounds me, the perfection of God’s Love. We love because He first loved us, and yet still we can’t quite follow His example; for while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. While we were sinners…prodigal sons, faithless prostitutes, persecutors of God’s people…God showed that, contrary to our expectations and upbringing, He still craved relationship with us. And not the relationship of master and servant, but a relationship founded on Love; and a craving not born out of need, but out of overflowing sufficiency. Our human expectations are that, if God takes us back, it is with conditions…but I think these two passages, one from the OT and one from the NT, show that God’s love overwhelms, that instead of hoops we need to jump through we need just turn to Him, no matter how much we have avoided Him in the past—and He’s actively involved in restoring that relationship all the while. And it should always be remembered—it is only through Christ that this is possible.
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