Category Archives: Bible

The Good Thief’s Penance


Bryan at Creedal Christian has posted this meditation from the late Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh (Bloom) that I hope to remember whenever I feel ensnared in persistent sins:


So often we ask ourselves and one another a very tormenting question: How can I deal with my sinful condition? What can I do? I cannot avoid committing sins, Christ alone is sinless. I cannot, for lack of determination, or courage, or ability truly repent when I do commit a sin, or in general, of my sinful condition. What is left to me? I am tormented, I fight like one drowning, and I see no solution.

And there is a word which was spoken once by a Russian staretz, one of the last elders of Optina. He said to a visitor of his: No one can live without sin, few know how to repent in such a way that their sins are washed as white as fleece. But there is one thing which we all can do: when we can neither avoid sin, nor repent truly, we can then bear the burden of sin, bear it patiently, bear it with pain, bear it without doing anything to avoid the pain and the agony of it, bear it as one would bear a cross, — not Christ’s cross, not the cross of true discipleship, but the cross of the thief who was crucified next to Him. Didn’t the thief say to his companion who was blaspheming the Lord: We are enduring because we have committed crimes; He endures sinlessly… And it is to him, because he had accepted the punishment, the pain, the agony, the consequences indeed of evil he had committed, of being the man he was, that Christ said, ‘Thou shalt be with Me today in Paradise…’

Read the whole post here.

Book Notes: Liberating Tradition


Kristina LaCelle-Peterson’s Liberating Tradition: Women’s Identity and Vocation in Christian Perspective offers a solid introduction to Christian feminism, and a wake-up call to the churches not to mistake culturally conditioned gender roles for gospel truth. Topics surveyed include the strong women of the Bible and their often-overlooked successors, from the female monastics to the 19th-century social reformers; feminine metaphors for God in Scripture; sex discrimination and body image; the diverse forms that marriage has taken in the Judeo-Christian tradition; and the egalitarian message of Jesus.

While at times I feel that Liberating Tradition goes in too many directions at once, this smorgasbord may be useful to conservative Christians who have not previously been exposed to basic feminist critiques of consumerism, for example. The book’s main strength is that LaCelle-Peterson backs up mainstream feminist-egalitarian arguments with detailed Biblical citations and historical evidence of women’s leadership roles in the church.

I was encouraged to see this book being sold at the recent Wheaton College theology conference, on the table of Baker Books, a leading evangelical publisher. As egalitarian perspectives become more reputable in evangelical circles, space also opens up for a more dynamic, historically aware method of reading Scripture, which hopefully can benefit other marginalized groups. It’s no longer plausible to say that we must replicate the family structures of first-century Palestine or else we’re undermining the authority of the Bible. Educated, active, Spirit-filled women, in numbers too great to ignore, are forcing the church to recognize that history and personal experience must inform our interpretive process, which means that our understanding of what the Bible says about women will change over time.

LaCelle-Peterson distinguishes herself from secular feminists and Christian complementarians, both of whom see the Bible and feminism as inherently incompatible. Instead, she argues that the Bible as a whole affirms women’s full humanity and equal participation in God’s kingdom. She does not take the liberal approach of throwing out texts that offend her politics, but rather contextualizes them and asks whether the “obvious” interpretation merely seems so because of the sexist cultural lenses through which we read.

God’s maleness, for instance, is not evident from Scripture. Compared to the other gods of the ancient Near East, who all had consorts and fertility rituals, the God of the Old Testament is strikingly non-gendered. Why do we assume that God is a literal “father” when this metaphor appears, but have no trouble perceiving the figurative language when God is compared to a stream of water, a rock, a nursing mother or a brooding hen? Since the God of the creation story transcends gender, “made in God’s image” applies equally to men and women.

After the Fall, hierarchy is introduced into the male-female relationship, with elements of oppression and unhealthy craving. Again, Christians have easily recognized that the other aspects of Adam and Eve’s new situation are a curse to be alleviated: “Are the items in Genesis 3 describing the state in which God wants us to live? For example, since God said farming would be difficult, does that mean using tractors is contradicting God?…Is it wrong for a woman to have epidural anesthesia in childbirth, since God said that women will have increased pain as they bear children?” (p.40) By contrast, we take Adam’s rule over Eve to be a moral norm, not a warning that their sin now taints all intimate relationships with the possibility of abuse of power.

In Jesus’ earthly ministry, we see God’s original plan for an egalitarian kingdom. Jesus validated Mary the sister of Martha when she assumed the posture of a male disciple, and provocatively ignored the purity taboos that would have kept him from healing, touching and speaking with women.

In a section titled “Discipleship Trumps Gender Roles”, LaCelle-Peterson adds, “It is interesting that Jesus also refuses to affirm positive traditional roles for women, even when asked to. Most significantly, unlike the tradition of some sectors of the Christian church, he does not put his own mother on a pedestal and value her simply for having borne him.” (pp.58-59) In Mark 3:33-35 (“Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother”) he takes an exclusionary status marker, one’s membership in a family, and makes it open to all who follow God. Women who fulfill traditional expectations as wives and mothers are no more privileged than their widowed, poor, or unpartnered sisters, including those with a checkered sexual history. Similarly, in Luke 11:27, Jesus proclaims that anyone, through discipleship, can be on a par with the woman who gave birth to him. “He isn’t putting Mary down, but raising the status of all the women in the crowd.” (p.59)

LaCelle-Peterson takes on the verses in the Epistles that seem to limit women’s participation, such as 1 Cor 14:33-35 (“women should be silent in the churches”). She notes that these lines occur within a discussion of how both men and women should behave decorously when they pray and prophesy, so that non-Christians will not be scandalized. It is assumed that women will be preachers and teachers (e.g. Phoebe and others in Romans 16). As many scholars now believe, 1 Cor 14 probably refers to women in the congregation who talked during the service, perhaps asking their husbands to explain the Scriptures, since women were not generally literate.

LaCelle-Peterson suggests that 1 Tim 2:11-15 (“…I permit no woman to teach or hold authority over a man…yet she will be saved through childbearing”) addresses a specific problem: female followers of Diana or other mother-goddesses who were proclaiming their superiority to men within the church. Saved “through” childbearing does not mean “by” (as in, salvation comes through being a mother) but “during”; God will bring them safely through childbearing, so they no longer need to hedge their bets by praying to Diana.

Anyone who’s cringed at the selection of pastel-tinted “Christian womanhood” books in a Lifeway bookstore, or sat through one too many John Eldredge lectures on how men naturally long to be rescuers and women to be rescued, will appreciate LaCelle-Peterson’s deconstruction of gender stereotypes that have been picked up by the evangelical marketing machine and reinforced with so-called divine authority. Consumer culture teaches young girls that their self-worth depends on being pretty, delicate, and unthreatening. Gimmicks like Revolve, the Bible packaged as a teen fashion magazine, misdirect Christian girls’ energy toward externals rather than internal spiritual maturity. It would be funny if it wasn’t so dangerous.

One of the most helpful sections of this book is its tour through the many manifestations of marriage in Biblical times and beyond. What Christian conservatives call the “traditional” family, with the man working outside the home and his wife staying home to raise the children, is an artifact of 19th-century capitalism. Before industrialization, husbands, wives and children often worked side by side on the farm or in the artisan’s workshop. Both parents were involved in teaching the children the skills they would need to carry on the business.

However, when capitalism turned men into salaried employees of a large corporation, women’s non-cash-based labor became devalued and invisible. It was a sign of upward mobility if your wife could afford to stay home. This meant that the woman became an ornament to the male ego rather than a contributor to society. That pride-based arrangement doesn’t sound like the model of mutual submission we read about in the Epistles, still less the actual patterns of discipleship in the early church. Yet today’s conservative churches have uncritically
adopted a commercialized vision of gender roles as if it were based on natural law.


To me this suggests the dangers of an ahistorical reading of the Bible. Human beings are inescapably embedded in history, both enriched and constrained by the specifics of our time, place, and material interests. When we are afraid to contextualize and move on from the social arrangements that happened to prevail in New Testament times, because we are seduced by an impossible dream of an “objective” social order that stands outside historical contingency and fallibility, we also lose perspective on our present-day social arrangements and how they unconsciously shape our hermeneutics. 

Liberating Tradition contains many more useful arguments from history and Biblical criticism than can be summarized in this review. By necessity, LaCelle-Peterson limits her focus to women’s heterosexual relationships and church leadership roles, but the logical extension of her critique of gender is unavoidable. Having admitted, in any context, that the meanings of maleness and femaleness are historically variable — and having recognized that our fallen nature easily converts difference into inequality, contrary to the radically inclusive vision of Jesus — we cannot honestly say “marriage is between one man and one woman” without admitting that most of the important words in that sentence are ambiguous, including (pace Bill Clinton) “is”. Will the female pastors and theologians in today’s conservative churches, who owe their leadership roles to feminist readings of the Bible, speak out against heterosexist idolatry, or will they pull the ladder up after them?

Rediscovering the Trinity (Part Three)


Highlights of the final day of last week’s “Rediscovering the Trinity” conference at Wheaton College (you knew there were going to be three posts in this series, didn’t you?):

Philip Butin, president of San Francisco Theological Seminary, was an engaging speaker who proposed that preaching could be a continuation of the divine speech that we find in the Bible. He cited the views of Calvin and other 16th-century Reformers that preaching didn’t just expound God’s word, it could be God’s word under certain circumstances. Since the written text of Scripture is derived from a prior oral tradition, we can’t say that God only works through written language. Proper preaching is not speech about God but speech by God, declaring what Jesus has said and done, and what He will do through the Spirit. To preach Christ means to allow the Spirit to speak through you. However, this is not automatic; the preacher has to unblock the channel for divine communication by staying true to Scripture.

Now, I find these claims for preaching to be unduly restrictive at best, dangerous at worst. Why should preaching be more likely than other verbal art forms, or non-verbal expressions of worship, to reveal the Spirit? And what does it mean when preachers disagree? The diversity of views within the Bible itself is confusing enough. Back then, we had church councils who decided which writings about Jesus counted as Scripture. Now that the church has fractured into thousands of denominations, we couldn’t even begin to agree on an authority that would determine the divine status of particular sermons. I realize that Butin wasn’t actually proposing a new canon, but in that case, what benefit is there to making these extreme claims for one human activity as opposed to all others?

Butin helpfully exegeted St. Paul’s discussion in 2 Cor 2-4 of how his own words could carry divine authority. Paul’s unique insight: because of the normative pattern of Incarnation, divine revelation is most profoundly and authentically communicated through ordinary, flawed human leaders and their words. We have this treasure in earthen vessels so that it will be clear that the power comes from God alone (2 Cor 4:6-7). God communicates through our sincere, vulnerable, broken selves. Through the transparency of not hiding our inadequacies, we remove the veil and let the gospel shine through. This is the most comforting and life-changing message I can imagine; again, though, I don’t see why preaching should be singled out.

Leanne Van Dyk of Western Theological Seminary offered a more holistic, inspiring vision of how our entire lives can be a proclamation of our incarnate faith. The church first of all proclaims the gospel by being a community that lives differently, and only secondarily by verbal evangelizing. The church is the gathering of people who worship, confess, and give witness in concrete ways to the reality of God’s kingdom that has broken into our world. The church is not mainly about generating personal spiritual experiences or dispensing true information.

The church’s mission is a subset of God’s mission, not coextensive with it. In the Bible, and the world around us, we see God using persons, cultures, institutions, and even nonhuman creatures (Balaam’s donkey) who are outside the current covenant community.

Authentic and coherent patterns of Christian life are central to the task of witnessing. Don’t discount the power of small, mundane acts of patience, deference, hospitality and unselfish love. When we make dinner, plant a garden, or spend time with friends, we are also proclaiming the gospel (or not!). Proverbs and Ecclesiastes show that God cares how we go about such daily business, because that’s how we spend most of our time. Honoring the proclamatory aspect of everyday routine can make space for sabbath rest, freeing us from the pressure to be always busy at service projects or preaching. (One of my favorite bloggers, the Internet Monk, calls this pressure “wretched urgency”.)

Van Dyk said mission is not a project or a goal so much as a way of life. No kind or honest or patient deed is wasted. It is all taken up into God’s own purposes for the restoration of shalom.

Someone asked whether we could really call these activities proclamation if Jesus is not mentioned. I didn’t get a clear sense of how Van Dyk would distinguish Christian “implicit proclamation” from other types of good works. But since she wasn’t saying that action should replace God-talk, only that it’s on a par with it, this may be yet another instance of Trinitarian “both/and” not “either/or”. 

During a wrap-up panel discussion at the close of the conference, the question was posed whether a proper Trinitarian understanding of unity would help us overcome doctrinal divisions within global Christendom? (John 17: “that they all may be one”.) John Franke and Edith Humphreys disagreed over whether unity should even be our goal. Franke, who is writing a book called Manifold Witness, said the plurality of truth is part of divine design. Part of learning to manifest unity is living peaceably with our genuine differences, trusting that God is at work in ways we can’t see. Humphreys saw differences as God’s response to original sin, His plan to teach us humility and make us aware of our incompleteness, not His ultimate design for humanity. Franke put forth an alternate view that multiple perspectives are needed to capture a multifaceted God. Butin concurred; God is unity not in spite of diversity but because of it.

Want more Wheaton? Collected papers from each year’s conference are published as anthologies by InterVarsity Press. I picked up their 2006 collection The Beauty of God: Theology and the Arts at this year’s bookfair, and the one from last year’s excellent conference on the early church fathers has just been released.

Rediscovering the Trinity (Part Two)

More highlights from last week’s Wheaton College conference on “Rediscovering the Trinity”:

Jonathan R. Wilson (Carey Theological College) and Steven M. Studebaker (McMaster Divinity College) gave presentations on the Trinity and the created world.

Wilson summarized the thought of several theologians concerning the role played by each Person of the Trinity in creating and sustaining the cosmos. The late Colin Gunton, for example, elaborated on Irenaeus’ metaphor that the Son and the Spirit are the two hands of God in the world. Gunton suggested that the Son is the unifying power of creation, reconciling all things and holding them together by his atonement, while the Spirit is the particularizing power of creation, guiding each part to reach that perfection appropriate to its nature. Through them, the Father both prevents creation from slipping back into chaos and restores its teleology.

Meanwhile, according to Wilson, theologian Robert Jenson observed that the Trinitarian doctrine of creation answers “both/and” to the question of whether God created the world for His glory or to have someone to love. In the Trinity, God’s love and God’s glory are one. The Father initiates creation, the Son makes it good, and the Spirit sets it free to be distinct from God.

So how does this apply to our life? If all we have is God the initial creator, we are bound to inflexible structures of the created order, and fall into legalism and fatalism. We try to live according to the pattern He has laid down, but there is no redemptive activity of God in the world to help us. On the other hand, if all we have is the Spirit immanent in creation, we end up deifying nature and losing our identity as humans. There is no God apart from nature to give it meaning beyond itself–no teleology.

One frequent error in Christian spirituality is a proto-Gnostic view of creation as simply a fallen realm from which we must be rescued. The good news of redemption is separated from the goodness of creation, severing Son from Father and Spirit. Because of the Spirit, when I receive a new life in Christ, it doesn’t mean that my identity is wiped out. My particular self is part of God’s originally good creation, though flawed by sin.

Studebaker spoke of “creation care” (good ecological practices) as a spiritual discipline. Why do Christians worry about the music we listen to and the clothes we wear, while being indifferent to our consumption habits and their impact on the planet? This has to change. We’re not used to caring for the environment as part of our Christian responsibility, because we think too much about the afterlife and the end times, sometimes even rejoicing over natural disasters as signs that the Second Coming is near.

But Christ doesn’t just save our “souls” for “heaven”. Romans 8 speaks of “the whole creation” groaning for redemption. If our groans arise from the Spirit, so does the cry of the nonhuman creation, seeking liberation from bondage to decay. The Spirit is the breath of life in all creation and is devoted to bringing it into loving fellowship with God. We can participate here and now in God’s life-giving love by caring for His world.

Studebaker urged us to recover a sacramental understanding of all life. Our incorrect mind-body dualism makes us abandon the realm of practical decision-making to secular influences.

An audience member asked, if the pine tree gets to take part in the new creation, why not unbelievers? One of the panelists replied that unlike humans, the tree’s bondage to sin is not of its own volition, so “creation care” spirituality doesn’t necessarily lead to inclusivism on the question of salvation for non-Christians–though in my view, it’s yet another good argument for that position. After all, if you believe in total depravity, humans after Adam and Eve don’t really have the free will not to sin, either; our sins are just as derivative as those of the pine tree.

John Franke (Biblical Theological Seminary) and Mark Husbands (Hope College) genially duked it out over “social Trinitarianism”. Traditional theology, using categories borrowed from Greek philosophy, emphasized that the three Persons were united in one “substance”. The majority of contemporary writers about the Trinity are more concerned with relationality–the mutual love among the Persons as a model for the Christian community. I’m not entirely sure why this difference has risen to the status of a debate (“less filling? tastes great!”). My guess is that the “anti-social” folks are worried that our theology is being revised to fit current political sentiments, importing too much democracy into our relationship with God. Some social Trinitarians are also feminist theologians, still a suspect category at a conference where rose-tinted books on Biblical womanhood uneasily shared shelf space with books on postmodernism and liberation theology.

Franke, a social Trinitarian, began with a caveat about the inadequacy of all descriptions of God. What we call “the Trinity” is not a precise literal picture but still a true guide to certain revealed features of the divine life. So we need an inclusive, pluralistic treatment of theological models, because this diversity best captures the multifaceted nature of God and the Bible. Thus, he was not arguing that his preferred model was the best one for all times and places.

Some modern theologians feel that the traditional focus on ontology makes God seem too static and isolated. When we say “God is Love,” we must be affirming that relationship is God’s essence, not a mere attribute He shows us. It fits with our current understanding of human selves as constituted by interpersonal relationships, not atomized individuals. Similarly each Person within God is unintelligible save in relation to the others. The social model of the Trinity counteracts modernity’s objectifying, isolating tendencies.

Husbands objected that this model misses the transcendence of God, the fact that there is more to God than His interaction with us. Moreover, human beings are really not capable of emulating the complete mutuality of the three Persons, even leaving sin out of the picture. Ontologically, we are separate individuals with our own agendas and perspectives, whereas the Father, Son and Spirit are a unified subject. We should emulate Jesus, not the inner life of the Trinity, which is beyond our comprehension.

Husbands’ critique is logical but I wonder whether he’s looking at the relational model too literally. We can base our communities on the essential values of the Trinitarian God (love, mutual submission) without having to replicate God’s structure.

Robert Lang’at, the provost of Kabarak University in Kenya, proposed that Christianity is intrinsically missionary because the dynamism within the Trinity extends to the pouring out of God’s truth and love upon the world. Words such as sending, service, sacrifice, love, self-giving, and community were Trinitarian words before they were missionary ones. Just as the Father sends Christ and the Spirit, they send us to continue God’s mission in the world.

Lang’at said it was a mistake for modern “seeker-sensitive” evangelists to play down distinctively Christian concepts like the Trinity, because this just ensures that they will be exporting their culture instead of the gospel, opening the door for Western consumerism (the prosperity gospel) or imperialism to infect developing nations. Having
lost our theological moorings, we now teach missions as a form of marketing, with our message being dictated by social-science strategies rather than Christian truth.

Individualism and totalitarianism are two sides of the same coin, he argued, like relativism and imperialism–an extreme solution to the problem of the one versus the many, which results when we lose the Trinitarian ideal of dynamic mutual coexistence. Neither Western individualism nor Asian and African polytheism are properly balanced, by contrast. The absolutizing of the individual–the dogma that I can be myself without my neighbor–is a disease of the West. The counter-reaction, which Lang’at sees often in politically unsettled African societies, is a sort of demagoguery leading to repressive mass social movements.

He warned evangelists against conceding too much to African polytheism in order to make their message accessible. Africans aren’t fazed by the idea of God having a son, because their creation myths almost always start with the gods’ giving birth to their tribe, but these myths are always tribal (our god created our people), not universal, as Jesus is supposed to be. We lose the radical message of the brotherhood/sisterhood of all people in Christ.

Keith Johnson, who trains ministers for Campus Crusade for Christ, explored whether Trinitarian thinking can help us understand Christianity’s relationship to other religions. I have to admit I had trouble following this one because Johnson was mainly critiquing several other theologians I’d never heard of. His main point, similar to Husbands, was that the Bible does not exhort us to emulate the Trinity per se but Christ. When we bypass Scripture and merely use the concept of the Trinity as fodder for elaborate metaphorical schemes about how plurality relates to unity, we have no reason to believe any of these schemes are reliable.

Rediscovering the Trinity at Wheaton (Part One)


The annual theology conference at Wheaton College in Illinois is one of the spiritual high points of my year. Wheaton is the evangelicals’ Harvard, a small school located on an idyllic and superhumanly neat campus in the Chicago suburbs. This year’s topic was “Rediscovering the Trinity: Classic Doctrine and Contemporary Ministry”.

The Trinity is wonderful because, as Calvin College professor John Witvliet noted, its dynamic reconciliation of opposites (divine/human, unity/plurality, spiritual/physical) counteracts our perpetual tendency to reify particular concepts and then dismiss all aspects of life that fall outside our favorite abstract scheme. Nietzsche wrote that in every ascetic morality, man adores one aspect of himself as god and demonizes the rest. An incarnational, Trinitarian faith is anti-ascetic, frustrating our legalistic binary oppositions and the scapegoating that occurs when we inevitably project the disfavored trait onto some social group (as in, spirit=male, flesh=female).

In becoming man in Jesus, God redeemed all of human nature; therefore, no area of life is beneath God’s concern or unable to be used for God’s purposes. The sending of the Holy Spirit shows us that God is not only “up there” but equally an ongoing presence on earth; that revelation is not only in the past but continuing to unfold through today’s preachers, teachers, writers and mystics.

Several presenters at Wheaton noted that many Christians have a de facto Unitarian or dualistic faith because the doctrine of the Trinity has not been clearly presented in their churches. We imagine God as a static entity in heaven, sealed off in a realm of divine perfection, while we fumble around blindly on earth, unable to receive reliable communications from that other reality. But this is not the God of the Bible, who, though surely ineffable, time and again condescends to pour some aspect of His being into forms that we can comprehend. Kevin Vanhoozer, in his two-part talk on Trinitarian Biblical interpretation, noted that arguments against the Bible’s divine inspiration ask “How can the finite contain the infinite?” but that this is precisely what we believe happened in Jesus. That miracle was not a one-time event but continues through the Holy Spirit, who allows the human words of the text to be a channel for divine speech.

Other highlights:

Edith Humphrey of Pittsburgh Theological Seminary discussed the hierarchy of persons in the Trinity. Although the Son and the Spirit proceed from the Father, our thinking about God should begin with the Son, because Jesus is the lens through which we see, for the first time, the true identity of the God of the Old Testament. Humphrey pointed out some of Jesus’ miracles as signs of this self-identification. For instance, Jesus’ calming of the seas harks back to Psalm 107 and Isaiah 51 where God is named as the one who creates order out of the primordial waters. The Transfiguration similarly recalls the cloud of glory in which God appeared to the Israelites in Exodus. Finally, when the resurrected Jesus breathes the Holy Spirit on his disciples, this is a new creation of humankind, replacing the breath that God breathed into Adam and Eve.

“Amazing love, how can it be/That thou, my God, shouldst die for me…” In word and song, Humphrey rhapsodized on the awesome self-limiting of God as revealed in Jesus. The God who restrains the seas now pours water into a basin to wash our feet; the one who fixed the foundations of the earth is affixed to a cross.

In what was an odd move by one of the only two female presenters, Humphrey ended with a strong critique of inclusive language in the hymns and liturgy (she’s an Anglican), saying that the new wording often obscured the hierarchy both within the Trinity and between God and His creatures. Because the question period was much shorter this year, I didn’t get to ask her whether hierarchy was inseparable from masculine language or whether instead this was just theological sloppiness by the revision committees. (Being among evangelicals makes my feminism more radical and vice versa.) Because of my own family background, I personally like imagining God as my father but I’m not going to defend it as theologically superior.

John Flett of Princeton Theological Seminary observed that Protestants have relied too much on secular social structures to give shape to our institutional life, allowing us to be co-opted by materialism and consumerist individualism. How can we recover the Catholic sense of the church as an alternative kingdom, without replicating its monarchical structure? In the Trinity we find a model of symmetrical and decentralized power. Flett and Humphrey seemed to be on opposite sides of the main divide running through this generally peaceful and collegial conference: the “social trinitarians” who emphasized egalitarian and pluralist aspects of the Trinity, and others who focused on hierarchy and unity. Among the latter group I sensed a certain donnish determination to “resist the spirit of the age”.

John Witvliet, one of the most engaging speakers, discussed ways to integrate Trinitarian ideas into our liturgy and spiritual practices. We need to communicate that the Trinity is life-giving, exciting and true — that we worship a God who embodies mutual love rather than solitary dictatorial power. Through the Son and the Spirit, we are invited to participate in the relational life of God. These fully divine agents perfect as well as receive our worship, making it a dance of grace that we join, not an achievement we must master in order to reach God on our own (contra the Pelagian heresy). Perichoresis, which means the mutual interpenetration and indwelling of the three Persons, is based on the Greek word for dance.

How do we get people to live their faith in a Trinitarian way? Witvliet said the real question is not “how do we theoretically explain the Triune God” but “how would your prayer life and identity change if you believed Jesus and the Spirit were fully divine?” As C.S. Lewis wrote in Mere Christianity (Book IV, Ch. 2), when we pray, we are praying to God the Father, prompted within by God the Spirit, aided by God the Son who prays with and for us. Arian or Enlightenment theology eliminates this mediation, putting impossible pressure on us to close the human-divine gap with our own good works.

Gordon T. Smith, president of reSource Leadership International, made the case for a greater Protestant emphasis on the sacraments (baptism and communion) as the embodiment of our Trinitarian faith. Through the Lord’s Supper we accept God’s offer of Himself through Christ, and recognize the ongoing presence of the Spirit. We can’t experience God through theory alone. In the sacraments, the life of the Trinity is formed in us.

Protestants outside the Anglican tradition historically downplayed the sacraments in response to what they saw as Catholic superstition, investing too much power in a human being to magically turn bread and wine into divinity. However, this is not how the sacraments work. It’s not a human-effectuated transformation but a decision to recognize and participate in something God is already doing. A Deist or Unitarian theology puts God completely outside the material realm, but an incarnate theology shows that divinity already pervades this world through the actions of the Spirit (contra dualism), though God the Father is larger than His creation (contra panentheism).

Kevin Vanhoozer of Trinity Evangelical Divinity School argued that most contemporary Biblical hermeneutics are de facto Deistic. “Inspiration” is simply the answer to why we read this book (God as creator of the canon), but not a way of reading differently (i.e. with the Holy Spirit’s guidance). In some sense God’s providence is the cause of all books ever written, but that doesn’t make them Scripture. What sets the Bible apart is the claim that God continues to be involved in this text in a unique way, by promising that the Spirit will use it to disclose God’s truth over time.

Vanhoozer had some quibbles with the analogy of the Bible as a second Incarnation. The complete fullness of God does not dwell in the Bible as it does in Jesus and the Spirit, because the Bible is an object and not a person. Speech extends a person’s presence but is not a person in its own right. For me, this opened up some liberating possibilities for the development of doctrine. If the dynamic Holy Spirit in some sense outranks the static text, perhaps we block the Spirit’s action when we don’t allow new information from history, science, psychology or personal experience to reinterpret words whose meaning once seemed clear. (Insert your favorite controversy here.)

In the second installment of his talk, Vanhoozer depicted the Trinitarian God as essentially communicative, both in God’s inner life and in His interaction with the world. The gospel is not mere information but the speech-act of God’s declaring us to be forgiven. The Incarnation resolves the Kantian or postmodern impasse where we’re trapped in a play of symbols and perspectives, while true uninterpreted reality is “out there” in a noumenal realm we can’t touch. Our language is reliable because God uses and upholds it; by God’s grace, there is no incompatibility between divine transcendence and human speech.

The high-priestly prayer in John 17 shows that the three Persons communicate by giving glory to one another and declaring that glory to us. The Spirit makes public this intra-Trinitarian conversation, drawing the church into God’s communion by pouring divine love into our hearts. Conversing is part of God’s identity. One could say that God is the name for this mutual loving and glorifying activity of the three Persons. The Bible is the locus for this ongoing communication with God.

What then is the place of “truth” in a Trinitarian reading of Scripture? It is neither the liberal extreme of truth as fleeting interpretive moment, putting primacy on subjective experience, nor the conservative extreme as an objective property of the text, with no need for the Holy Spirit. The Bible is like a baseball bat that needs the Holy Spirit to swing it in order to hit a home run. Or, to use another analogy, Scripture is like a musical score that must be realized by the musicians, i.e. the worshipping interpretive community. Biblical truth is a dynamic event.

Walter Brueggemann: “Infallibility” Versus Faithful Imagination

Image #55 (Fall 2007) ran an interview with the notable Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann that led off with some questions on the role of the imagination in Biblical faith. His remarks, excerpted below, could serve as my own manifesto for how I read the Bible as an artist and a Christian. (The full article is not available online, so buy the issue and read their symposium on “Why Believe in God?” with Wim Wenders, B.H. Fairchild, Doris Betts and others.)

…[W]hat we always do with the biblical text, if we want it to be pertinent or compelling or contemporary, is commit mostly unrecognized acts of imagination by which we stretch and pull and extend the implications of the text far beyond its words.

I have come to the rather simplistic notion that imagination is the capacity to image a world beyond what is obviously given. That’s the work of poets and novelists and artists–and that’s what biblical writers mostly do. I think that’s why people show up at church. They want to know whether there is any other world available than the one we can see, which we can hardly bear.
…

The intrusion of the word “infallible” [into the biblical debate] is misleading and unfortunate. The endless temptation of orthodoxy in its many forms is to receive a glimpse of gospel truth and then try to freeze it as an absolute formulation. I think the creeds of the church and the catechisms are important, until we start treating them as absolutes. Then we cover over all the generative force of the biblical testimony and make it a package that we transmit to each other and use as a club on each other.

Now, I am not finally a relativist: I don’t think that any idea is as good as any other idea. I believe that there are truthful statements, but the truthful statements have to be continually restated in order to stay truthful. I see orthodoxy as an ongoing interpretative process; we never reach an end point in it. I would not want to say that imagination contradicts orthodoxy, rather that it contradicts certain temptations of orthodoxy to freeze and absolutize. If these texts bear witness to the living God, then we cannot freeze and absolutize the good word of the living God.

On a related note, Anthony Esolen at Mere Comments has been watching a lot of Bible movies and wondering why it’s so hard to avoid dreadful sentimentality in Christian music and film:

[S]entimentality — which is but a parody of deep feeling — is deadening. Nowadays, in mass entertainment, it comes in the really noxious form of easy, “sentimental” cynicism, when a banal remark with the form of a sniggering comback is supposed to elicit the cheap thrill of superiority, an easy confirmation of despair and meaninglessness, as of rich kids slumming in the precincts of hell. Yet I think there are connections to be drawn between that kind of sentimentality and the cloying, smothering sort that characterizes bad religous art, including the bad religious music we’ve discussed here before.

How to explain? We also watched a couple of movies by a director who, I think, is a great deal less cynical than he appears to be, as he is instead a fantastic storyteller with a heart for human shame, absurdity, and, occasionally, love and heroism — Billy Wilder (we watched The Apartment and Witness for the Prosecution). There’s no sentimentality in Billy Wilder, but there sure is a lot of sentimentality in what passes for Christian pop, and that sentimentality is the kissing cousin, or maybe the drippy smooching cousin, of easy cynicism. (By the way, I want to preserve a distinction between kitsch, which retains a bit of childlike innocence to it, and the self-indulgent sentimentality of our hymn writers, who do not even bother to affect innocence.) So when Bob Hurd writes, “What are you doing tonight? I’d really like to spend some time with you,” referring to the Son of God as if he were a very nice teenage date, he’s far less honest, and far less reverent, than Wilder is when he dares to show the hollowness of a man who wears decency like a well-tailored business suit (Fred MacMurray), to be taken off when convenient. Wilder is sharp, incisive, dogged; he wants the truth. But bad religious art, like bad art generally, flees from the truth. Wilder may not see what you’d like him to see, but he strives to see, and to show you what he sees.

In my opinion, the difference between good and bad Christian art, just like the difference between good and bad biblical interpretation, generally comes down to trust. Do we trust that the world is infused with Christian truth, or is Christian truth something foreign that we have to inject into the unredeemed facts? Do we believe that by following the road of honest inquiry wherever it leads, we will ultimately find a truth congruent with the gospel (and be forgiven for our missteps along the way)? Or are we so afraid to leave the church’s well-trodden conceptual paths that other outside sources of knowledge, such as evolutionary biology, are forbidden or irrelevant?

Today in church we heard the story of the apostle Thomas (John 20:24-29). We call him “Doubting Thomas” because he famously said he would not believe in the resurrection unless he touched the risen Christ’s wounds with his own hands. This has made him a hero to many liberal Christians, who look at fundamentalist fears of science and the artistic imagination, and see some truth in the secularists’ stereotype of the courageous freethinker versus the timid believer. Interestingly, Christ does show up in response to Thomas’ demand for personal proof, so perhaps he was making a point that healthy skepticism keeps the church brave.

But Thomas also knew when to stop doubting, recognizing the risen Jesus as “My Lord and my God.” He did not remain a perpetual doubter in order to congratulate himself on his open-mindedness; he wanted to know the truth, more than to feel good about himself. Jesus then says, “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.” We’ve traditionally heard this as “more blessed”, but perhaps no dichotomy is intended. Somewhere between blind faith and bad faith is Christian imagination, which fearlessly probes the unknown, and submits to the truth it finds.

Holy Week in the Blogosphere


Yesterday was Palm Sunday, and this weekend, unbelievable as it seems to us in the Northeast who still see snow instead of crocuses on our lawns, will be Easter. Lent is my favorite season of the Christian year, a time when I can get serious about some spiritual problem or slackness of will. Since it’s only forty days (and it seemed shorter this year, somehow), I’m not daunted by the prospect of an open-ended vow, the promise to “never do that again” which undermines itself from the start by its very implausibility. It’s like Anne Lamott’s cure for writer’s block: rather than sit down to the monumental task of “writing your novel”, she suggests that you resolve every day to write as much as will fit within a one-inch picture frame.

Well, I didn’t do that, but I did more or less keep my Lenten resolution to stop talking to my novel characters instead of Jesus. What I discovered, when I no longer had my imaginary friend telling me “Girl, you look fabulous, and I love your defense of the Trinity!”, was that I still use others’ approval as a substitute for faith that God will either (a) bring to completion the good work He has begun in me, or (b) use my failures and humiliations for my spiritual growth and that of others, if I let Him.

My faith this year has been largely about “Not-That”. God is not Eros, not morality, not intellect, not the church, not my opinions, not others’ opinions. God is only authentic in the absence of all concepts about God. This is, after awhile, a dark and confusing space to inhabit. My plot problems, it seems, were really life problems, as I had fallen into radical doubt about all methods of knowing the right path.


That feeling found a companionable echo in Hugo’s latest post about his hiatus from church. I too have returned to the words of that old Negro spiritual: You’ve got to walk that lonesome valley/You’ve got to walk it by yourself/Ain’t nobody here can walk it for you/You’ve got to walk it by yourself. I keep wanting others to walk it for me, or at least with me, so that I can feel more confident that I am “right”. But only Jesus can make me right, or rather, lead me beyond rightness to God’s love. Jesus walked that valley for me, so why do I need anyone else to do it?

Kim Fabricius has posted a bracing Palm Sunday sermon about how the death of Jesus invites us to step into that emptiness, the place of not knowing and not being comforted:


So: for one Holy Week forget about the suffering of Jesus, the courage of Jesus, the wickedness of it all. Forget even about the dying of Jesus: it is not to the crucifix, or even to the deposition, that I would direct you – no! Rather look at the man – dead – gaze upon the corpse of Christ, fix your eyes on his cold and rigid body, laid out on a slab, already showing signs of decomposition. I am thinking of Hans Holbein’s painting “Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb”. The Russian author Dostoevsky saw the painting, in a museum in Basel, stopping on his way to Geneva, and forever after it haunted him like a nightmare. He describes it in his great novel The Idiot. The character Prince Myshkin says: “Why some people may lose their faith by looking at that picture!”

This sermon doesn’t have three points, it’s got three words: Lose your faith! (I warned you I would be sacrilegious.) Yes, lose your faith. Lose your faith in God. For as the French mystic Simone Weil insisted, there is a kind of atheism that is purifying, cleansing us of idols. Lose your faith in the god that the cross exposes as a no-god, a sham god. Lose your faith in the god who is but the product of your projections, fantasies, wishes, and needs, a security blanket or good-luck charm god. Lose your faith in the god who is there to hold your hand, solve your problems, rescue you from your trials and tribulations, the deus ex machina, literally the “machine god”, wheeled out onto the stage in ancient Greek drama, introduced to the plot artificially to resolve its complications and secure a happy ending. Lose your faith in the god who confers upon you a privileged status that is safe and secure. Lose your faith in the god who promises you health, wealth, fulfilment, and success, who pulls rabbits out of hats. Lose your faith in the god with whom your conscience can be at ease with itself. Lose your faith in the god who, in Dennis Potter’s words, is the bandage, not the wound. Lose your faith in the god who always answers when you pray and comes when you call. Lose your faith in the god who is never hidden, absent, dead, entombed. For the “Father who art in heaven” – this week he is to be found in hell – with his Son.

No one puts it more starkly – or more honestly and truthfully – than Bonhoeffer. We must recognize, he wrote from prison, “that we have to learn to live in the world ‘as if God were not here’. And this is just what we do recognize – before God! God himself compels us to recognize it… God would have us know that we must live as men and women who manage our lives without him. The God who is with us is the God who forsakes us… Before God and with God we live without God. God lets himself be pushed out of the world and onto the cross” – and then down from the cross and into the grave. “He is weak and powerless in the world, and that is precisely the way, the only way, in which he is with us and helps us.” God a Super-Power? That god is a demon, the Devil. If that god is your Lord, this week is a call for “regime change” (Walter Brueggemann).

So, yes, lose your faith! For as with life, so with faith: only those who lose it will find it. Or rather may find it. Faith is a risk, and discipleship demands that we learn to live with insecurity and uncertainty, setting out on a journey without a map, with companions who are as lost as we are, following a leader who is always way ahead of us, beckoning mysteriously, “Follow me!”, and then vanishing just as we arrive. God is mystery, ineffable mystery, naming a reality that we know, but the more we know, the more we are forced to un-know and rethink everything we thought we knew.
In an older post, Christopher at Betwixt and Between reflects on how Lent’s call to humility is heard differently by members of the dominant group versus those who are out of power. Traditional Christian rhetoric about “dying to self” has been addressed to those who already had a fully-formed, privileged self to lose. Without a nuanced understanding of the audience being addressed, this theology may further oppress those (such as women, children and sexual minorities) who have been forced to submerge their selfhood to the powers of this world.

Finally, Kittredge Cherry at Jesus in Love is running a Gay Holy Week series of readings and artwork that retell the Passion narrative with GLBT imagery.

Sara Miles on the Idolatry of the Family


Poet and journalist Sara Miles, whose conversion memoir Take This Bread has just been released in paperback, preached this sermon last summer at St. Gregory of Nyssa Episcopal Church (San Francisco) about an all-too-common misunderstanding of Christian “family values”. Just as in Jesus’ day, “family” is not merely a sentimental tableau; it is a circle of power that defines who possesses status and purity, and who does not.


Jesus says, I’ve come to bring fire to the earth and destroy your family. Do you think I’ve come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division. What’s burning up here isn’t just money, as it was in the Gospel last week. It isn’t just religion, as it was two weeks ago when poor Peter tried to make a shrine to the ancestors to protect him from the blazing fire of the transfiguration. What Jesus is burning up in this reading is the past, and the future of the world as we see it in human terms. He’s replacing it with the fire of the perpetual present: the fire of Christ, the fire of baptism through death. The fire of new creation. He is burning down the house….

In our cold postmodern capitalist world, family sometimes seems like the only place we’re safe. It’s home. It’s love. It’s a minivan full of blond children. But Jesus is not talking about a cozy, affective private household: he’s talking about a system of power.

In Jesus’ time, family ruled as much as the temple did….or the soldiers of the imperial army. Your very name, your identity, was determined by whose son or daughter you were. Your role in life was completely circumscribed by your position in the family. Your freedom as an individual was negligible in the family, and in the network of families that made up tribes and nations. The father ruled the mother, the mother-in-law ruled the daughter–in-law, the elder brother ruled the younger brother.

And central to the construction of family, of course, was who was outside it. Families existed—in fact, just as they do now—to define outsiders. Widows and orphans, illegitimate children—these people had no power, no authority, no place. They were not full humans, because they did not belong to a family.

Jesus is gonna burn that sucker down.

And, to the extent that we still think families are about private life, about controlling boundaries, about maintaining an inside and an outside, they are over. When we think they’re about knowing who isn’t family, who isn’t our brother or sister, they’re over. God wants to smash even our enlightened, modern families, and replace them with something new. Because family, to Jesus, is not just the family you’re born into. Not the family of history, but the whole human family Jesus is born into, the family he remakes in his own image. Family contains everyone who is a child of God. It is love without conditions. And that smashed-up family, the new creation, is what Jesus gives us to live in, once he’s burned down the house of exclusive, man-made families.

Visit Sara Miles’ website for more sermons, interviews, and an excerpt from her new book.

Jesus the Oyster-Man


Today in the Anglican cycle of prayer we commemorate the brothers John and Charles Wesley, whose revival movement within the Anglican Church gave rise to the Methodist denomination. James Kiefer at The Daily Office tells this story of one Wesleyan preacher’s creative misreading of the Bible:


[A]lthough Wesley found it natural to approach the Gospel with habits of thought formed by a classical education, he was quick to recognize the value of other approaches. The early Methodist meetings were often led by lay preachers with very limited education. On one occasion, such a preacher took as his text Luke 19:21, “Lord, I feared thee, because thou art an austere man.” Not knowing the word “austere,” he thought that the text spoke of “an oyster man.” He spoke about the work of those who retrieve oysters from the sea-bed. The diver plunges down from the surface, cut off from his natural environment, into bone-chilling water. He gropes in the dark, cutting his hands on the sharp edges of the shells. Now he has the oyster, and kicks back up to the surface, up to the warmth and light and air, clutching in his torn and bleeding hands the object of his search. So Christ descended from the glory of heaven into the squalor of earth, into sinful human society, in order to retrieve humans and bring them back up with Him to the glory of heaven, His torn and bleeding hands a sign of the value He has placed on the object of His quest. Twelve men were converted that evening. Afterwards, someone complained to Wesley about the inappropriateness of allowing preachers who were too ignorant to know the meaning of the texts they were preaching on. Wesley, simply said, “Never mind, the Lord got a dozen oysters tonight.”

God bless the human mind that brings order out of chaos, a humble imitation of God’s own creativity. Because he understood the heart of the gospel, this preacher wrestled with a text that initially appeared absurd, finding meaning, and birthing a fresh and powerful new image of salvation, where literalists would say there was only a mistake. How is Jesus like an oyster-man? (What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?) Poetry begins with the kind of deep seeing that such a conundrum provokes.

One of my favorites among Charles Wesley’s 6,000+ hymns is And Can It Be . Sing along at CyberHymnal.

Charles Wesley: “Come, O Thou Traveler Unknown”


An ongoing paradox of my spiritual life is the interplay of willpower and surrender. I am flung back most heavily upon God when I reach the limits of my moral or intellectual abilities to solve some problem. At such times I must learn to quit thrashing around and trust that God will reveal the way forward in His own good time. I have an aversion to inactivity, which always feels to me like edging close to the precipice of depression. Yet, as anyone who’s practiced meditation can testify, rest is not the same as passivity or inaction. Stillness is hard work! That’s where the willpower comes in. Not to batter my way bull-headedly through my problems on my own, but to cling with all my might to the promises of God, and refuse to be distracted by subtle doubts and speculations. “For I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified.” (1 Cor 2:2)

Richard F. Lovelace recently sent me a link to this classic hymn by Charles Wesley, a presentation of the gospel through the metaphor of Jacob wrestling with the angel, which to me expresses the perfect balance between God’s action and ours:

Come, O thou Traveler unknown,
Whom still I hold, but cannot see!
My company before is gone,
And I am left alone with Thee;
With Thee all night I mean to stay,
And wrestle till the break of day.

I need not tell Thee who I am,
My misery and sin declare;
Thyself hast called me by my name,
Look on Thy hands, and read it there;
But who, I ask Thee, who art Thou?
Tell me Thy name, and tell me now.

In vain Thou strugglest to get free,
I never will unloose my hold!
Art Thou the Man that died for me?
The secret of Thy love unfold;
Wrestling, I will not let Thee go,
Till I Thy name, Thy nature know.

Wilt Thou not yet to me reveal
Thy new, unutterable Name?
Tell me, I still beseech Thee, tell;
To know it now resolved I am;
Wrestling, I will not let Thee go,
Till I Thy Name, Thy nature know.

’Tis all in vain to hold Thy tongue
Or touch the hollow of my thigh;
Though every sinew be unstrung,
Out of my arms Thou shalt not fly;
Wrestling I will not let Thee go
Till I Thy name, Thy nature know.

What though my shrinking flesh complain,
And murmur to contend so long?
I rise superior to my pain,
When I am weak, then I am strong
And when my all of strength shall fail,
I shall with the God-man prevail.

My strength is gone, my nature dies,
I sink beneath Thy weighty hand,
Faint to revive, and fall to rise;
I fall, and yet by faith I stand;
I stand and will not let Thee go
Till I Thy Name, Thy nature know.

Yield to me now, for I am weak,
But confident in self-despair;
Speak to my heart, in blessings speak,
Be conquered by my instant prayer;
Speak, or Thou never hence shalt move,
And tell me if Thy Name is Love.

’Tis Love! ’tis Love! Thou diedst for me!
I hear Thy whisper in my heart;
The morning breaks, the shadows flee,
Pure, universal love Thou art;
To me, to all, Thy bowels move;
Thy nature and Thy Name is Love.

My prayer hath power with God; the grace
Unspeakable I now receive;
Through faith I see Thee face to face,
I see Thee face to face, and live!
In vain I have not wept and strove;
Thy nature and Thy Name is Love.

I know Thee, Savior, who Thou art.
Jesus, the feeble sinner’s friend;
Nor wilt Thou with the night depart.
But stay and love me to the end,
Thy mercies never shall remove;
Thy nature and Thy Name is Love.

The Sun of righteousness on me
Hath rose with healing in His wings,
Withered my nature’s strength; from Thee
My soul its life and succor brings;
My help is all laid up above;
Thy nature and Thy Name is Love.

Contented now upon my thigh
I halt, till life’s short journey end;
All helplessness, all weakness I
On Thee alone for strength depend;
Nor have I power from Thee to move:
Thy nature, and Thy name is Love.

Lame as I am, I take the prey,
Hell, earth, and sin, with ease o’ercome;
I leap for joy, pursue my way,
And as a bounding hart fly home,
Through all eternity to prove
Thy nature and Thy Name is Love.


Sing along at CyberHymnal!