Love

The third and most important xian virtue is love.

When speaking of the love of God, there is something about the term "love" that is well, corny. In the midst of a hurting world that looks at suffering and corruption with such serious denunciations, God’s love can sound like a pipe-dream of rainbows and lollipops. Where is God’s merciful intervention and concern? While love sounds nice, we need real answers, not a romantic fairy-tale.

Is the love of God a romantic love? I certainly wouldn't want to suggest it isn't romantic. Contrary to the often stoic portrayals of Jesus in the church's artwork throughout the centuries, I think we ought to be comfortable with a theology that asserts God as the ultimate romantic, and author of romance itself, romantic love being part of his very nature as God.

Though we do see illustrations of God's romantic love in scripture, romantic love is not the main emphasis, and a strictly Romantic view of God's love can be very meaningless to a lot of people.

Some verses of the bible have become "theme verses": verses that sum up well the overall message of the bible. As regards God's love, John 3:16 is one of those verses. Unfortunately because of the way it is worded, it can also be prone to misunderstanding. "For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish, but have eternal life." The part of this verse that is often misunderstood is the "so". I have often heard it interpreted that "for God so loved the world" is meant to be an expression of the grandeur of God's romantic feelings of love. Something like an infatuated, glassy-eyed "I love you sooooo much!"

I suspect that the popularity of this verse has contributed to abit of the uncritical use and presentation of the love of God.

In truth, the "so" of this verse is really speaking of manner, or kind. It would be more accurately (but less simply) translated as "For in this way, God so loved the world: that he gave his only begotten son."

Of course, this does not mean the romantic and emotional element of God's love is absent from the text, but the main thrust is the exemplary manner of God's love: the laying down of the life of God for the sake of a world in need of God.

I find this is a much more instructive and helpful summary of what is most important to know about the love of God: a willingness to lay down our lives for others. This is the love that God calls us to have in our hearts.

This is much more sober, practical, credible and winsome than the portrayal of this Christian virtue as a romantic fling with the Lord.

Given how frequently the Christian faith is subjectivized and privatized beyond recognition, it's important to remember the objective quality of God's love. God's love is identifiable and in some sense, measureable. So much so, it's almost unmistakeable, for it has definite qualities to it. “Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.” (1 cor 13:4-7) Why is this so important? Because in love there is a real, objective and practical tool to evaluate whether or not you are a good person.

The horrible temptation (I would even go so far as to label it demonic) is to delude ourselves with moral excuses. Many have an abundance of religious romance, church flings and a hodge-podge of cuddly cherub-like thoughts that never amount to any action. Not all have (or have been taught how) to cultivate genuine character.

While growing in the love of God doesn't fit into a tidy 5-step formula, the cultivation of the virtue of love must at least be wrestled free from foggy, unmeasureable notions of God's love as mere romance.

Contagious Hope

Christian hope is a contagious hope. It is more than something an individual thinks will happen, but is something Christians share corporately. Our future hope of eternal life is not a vision of a private mansion to compensate for all the comforts we missed out on in this life. Our hope is the hope of fullness of fellowship with God, fullness of human community, fullness of harmony with the creation. In this sense, Christian hope must be shared, and even demands that such hope be spread around.

There is an element of Christian hope that fuels an excitement, a zeal that is sometimes louder than the message itself. It is an excitement that reminds me of the charged trial dialogue wherein Peter and John replied to the council: “...we cannot but speak of what we have seen and heard.” (Acts 4:20)

All people, regardless of their worldview or religion at some point experience the logical conclusions of their views of the future. At some point in life, all people have to come to psychological terms with the future: that is, they have to come to a liveable peace with what they believe the future entails. This may be as simple as anxiety over one’s upcoming career, or as epic as wondering what awaits us after the grave. All worldviews say something about the future, even if they choose to remain silent about the future.

(A small aside on that last comment: even if one says the future is unknowable, that belief lodges itself into the mind as true, and therefore must find practical expression. If the future is entirely unknown, this results in certain obligations. For example, when encountering those who claim to know the future: claims of future-knowledge are then claims of falsehood, and we are to react to falsehood accordingly. So even agnosticism about the future entails obligations, and a lifestyle that is consistent with genuine ignorance.)

Consider what the Christian hopes is coming: justice to the wicked, fullness of fellowship, absence of death. Who can fail to be moved by God’s promise to “wipe every tear from their eyes”? (Rev 7:17) All wrongs will be righted, life will no longer have the curse of death upon it. Moreover, jerks, manipulative people, hypocrites, power-mongers, corrupt politicians, -everyone of vile character -will be excluded. (I feel I ought to elaborate on the exclusion of the wicked from heaven, but that's a topic for another post. For this post I'm satisfied with saying that the absence of evil people is a good thing to look forward to.) This hope is revitalizing, energizing. Life does not end in death, nor are we at risk of our good work ever being destroyed, nor is the future lost in agnosticism. If God’s promises are in fact true, any alternative one previously held seems all ashes and mire.

Herein lies the contagion of Christian hope. It seeks, even insists on being spread around. I think this gets misconstrued more often than not. To be sure, at times this becomes an adversarial issue, but at the core, what we proclaim in Christ (or rather, what God has proclaimed in Christ) is fullness of joy. This is the express motive stated by John: “...and we are writing these things so that our joy may be complete.” (1 Jn 1:4)

Missing out on Christian hope is like having to work on Christmas day. Having done that numerous years in a row, it gets pretty sickening to become socially sidelined on missing out in crucial moments of turkey and wine, presents and laughter, and late night conversations by the fire while the frost grows on the windows. Missing out on Christmas is to be left out in the cold, and the spread of Christian hope seeks to include others in the joy of Christmas fellowship.

Transforming Hope

I have often heard the notion that Christian hope tends toward evil behavior. Perhaps you’ve heard that too. Allow me to share a few examples that may have a familiar ring to them: “The Christian hope in a future state of heavenly bliss keeps Christians from seeing real-world problems: rather than finding practical solutions to human suffering, they just focus on a pipe dream of kingdom come.” Or perhaps this one, whom we’ll call “the senseless Christian”: “Jesus is going to come back soon, so there’s no sense bothering about all the nonsense going on now: he will right all the wrongs when he comes back in the next few years.”

How are we to respond to these propositions? The first objector claims that there is an incipient evil within Jesus’ teachings. The second, though a believer, seems to have come to a similar conclusion regarding mercy towards a suffering world. He doesn’t think Jesus’ teachings are evil, but let’s face it: his application of Christian doctrine certainly is.

My first response is to say that the bible teaches the very opposite of these things: that the future hope of God bringing justice to the world has the opposite effect: it promotes activity, compassion, benevolence, justice, etc. We may say to the first objector that at the very least, he must present his objections to the actual teachings of Jesus, not what he supposes their outcome will to be. The bible does indeed teach there is a future state of justice to come to the world, but this future hope transforms the way we live in the present for good. “Let us hold fast our hope without wavering, for He who promised is faithful; and let us consider how to stimulate one another to love and good deeds...encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the day drawing near.” (Heb 10:23-25)

To give this objector credit, I think he is correctly perceiving an evil tendency in the human heart, but this tendency is not within Jesus’ teachings themselves. There is a tendency we have to twist reason and good sense, to twist the good and holy into something profane and sinful. I don't find it implausible that someone will take a promise of justice to come and distort it into an excuse for moral laxness.

This objector assumes a spirit of hypocrisy within the believer: that since God will one day render justice to each for their misdeeds, the believer is exempt from such judgment. I think the fallacy here is plain: by this logic, we would be reasoning as follows: “God is going to judge all the world’s misdeeds: except mine.” I think it makes much more sense to reason that if God is going to right all of the wrongs in this world, and we find we have wrongs in our soul, isn't that strong motivation to get rid of those wrongs? Or are we supposing that God’s process of righting corrupt human hearts on judgment day will be all lollipops and rainbows?

To the second person, we may justly censure his passivity and demonstrate through a simple reading of the bible that his profession is at odds with the teaching of the Lord he claims to follow. His passivity is simply storing up judgment for himself.

The second person also seems to be assuming that God only cares about 100% success in our charitable efforts, rather than a heart of love that drives charitable energies. That is, the senseless Christian imagines God will come and say: “Well, you tried to do good, but the appointed day of judgment came, which ruined all your benevolent plans, so I’m not going to really look at what you did, or what was in your heart.”

It is true that many of our charitable efforts don’t succeed, (think of giving funds to a homeless person who simply uses it to buy drugs) or they simply aren’t as efficient a use of our time and energy as they could be. We should be giving thoughtful attention to genuinely useful and productive charity. However, I think the problem with the “senseless Christian” isn’t a heart that’s concerned about more effective charity. Rather, his mind seems to be looking intently for an alibi to keep charity out of his heart, and has twisted Christian doctrine in so doing. His hope is not set on a real idea of justice, (see my last post for my comment on how our hopes need to be based in reality) but on a justification of himself no matter what’s in his heart.

I think transforming hope concludes with the exhortation to hope in the truth, and live accordingly.

The Logic of Hope

Of the three Christian virtues, faith hope and love, hope is the virtue I hear about the least in sermons and books. I certainly have no memory of ever being directly exhorted to cultivate more hope in my life. Yet in numerous places in the bible, Hope is commended as one of the elementary staples of the Christian life. (Rom 5:5; 1 Cor 13:13)

“Hope” seems to stand out from the other two virtues. Faith is easy to grasp, for it is wedded directly to our basic concepts of religion. Whoever heard of calling oneself “Christian” but having no faith in the basic articles of belief, or whoever heard of a “faith” that had no expression of personal piety? Likewise, love is a pretty intuitive concept, for it forms the basis of Christian ethics: it tells us how we ought to treat one another. So Faith is foundational by definition. Love provides the practical relevance of Christianity. Why should hope have a place among these two fundamentals?

Perhaps one of the reasons hope is seldom discussed is because of an abundance of wealth. Hope is by nature a future thing, and since we have so much comfort in the present, why bother with the comforts of the future? What if we regularly faced real poverty, with bare bread and water, or with a regular risk of death by exposure? Hope does seem to have more gravity in a context of suffering, for though the destitute are helpless now, it comforts the sufferer to know that one day justice will be made reality. Though the present may be all death and disease, the future will be life abundant, which makes the present more bearable.

Nevertheless, I would like to argue that hope needs place of prominence in our minds regardless of our standards of living. Hope remains fairly shallow if it is only seen as an answer to present financial misfortune. It’s unfortunate that hope doesn’t get more air-time, and so I hope to throw out some seeds of reflection on cultivating the virtue of hope by reflecting on a few aspects of hope.

First off, I take it as basic that our hopes must be firmly rooted in reality. We have all now and then taken our pipe-dreams seriously, or been around people with wildly unrealistic personal ambitions for honor, power, and wealth. Such hopes tend to either be corrupting by nature, or be doomed to failure from the outset. Needless to say, we would do well to avoid such false hopes. Bad hopes corrode the soul, or they fizzle out and die in a crippling burst of disappointment. Genuine hopes fuel people with an energy that is difficult to quench. Idealy, those genuine hopes reflect a concrete reality to come that is more than just a private ambition or religious preference.

What this means is that the heart and mind must have a sense of assurance, a certainty that what we hope for will come to pass. It can’t be a passive wish, or a plausible theory. It must take its seat in our hearts with a weighty certainty that fixes our eyes. The author of Hebrews compares Christian hope to “an anchor of the soul”. (Heb 6:19) Hope is so essential because of its weightiness in the Christian life. It is that bedrock, that mass of iron below the surface that keeps faith alive in the midst of the howling tempest. Without that anchor, trials and distractions can capsize and shipwreck faith.

In a very general way, “certainty” is something often associated with empirical evidence. Again I wonder if one of the reasons hope isn’t the hot topic it should be is because the logic of hope fits uncomfortably with scientific investigation. The logic of Christian hope is not subject to surveys and scientists. It’s not something we can cherish by ourselves and get ourselves up into a state of certain hope by engaging in various sorts of “proofs”. Christian hope is based on the promise of God, and no Christian hope deserves to be called such, if it isn’t rooted in an encounter with the God whose Spirit inspires confidence. Simply put, God is good, and knowledge of God’s goodness, especially his love for us shown in Christ, I think is what forms the chief core of certainty that rallies the Christian heart to have an unwavering hope in an unimaginably wonderful future that is yet unseen.

Faith

Faith is a much maligned virtue. In common usage faith is often described as some sort of flighty mental activity that is the antithesis of evidence and reason. I can’t help but feel a little insulted at this misunderstanding of faith, as if one of the primary Christian virtues Jesus calls us to is shutting our minds off. Of course, genuine faith is nothing of the sort. Faith requires mental content, and well-reasoned reflection. I’ll briefly write about these aspects of faith in turn.

For starters, faith requires content, and is far from an empty-headed activity. I’m not sure if my experience can be applied to everyone, but I find it impossible to exercise faith in something I’m ignorant or uncertain of. Faith as an act requires some knowledge of the person we’re trusting. In fact, I would say it requires a lot of knowledge. How much would you trust a stranger? Would you trust a stranger to give you good directions? Would you trust a stranger with your wallet? How about your soul? Why then would anyone expect a person to come to a meaningful faith in God apart from any knowledge about him? If you're a particularly skeptical kind of person, you likely want some sort of reasoned evidence for faith, and faith just ain't gonna happen without some basic questions answered. In my experience, any kind of faith that isn’t accompanied by a good knowledge of God’s acts and commands, as well as clearly articulated reasons why a person believes, ends up showing itself sooner or later as a fragile faith, or worse, a counterfeit one.

This idea of a good knowledge of God’s acts and commands brings us to the next characteristics of faith I’ve chosen: reasoning. Faith is something that, the moment you try to do it, forces you to reason intensely about it. It’s one thing to say: “I believe in God”, but what is that faith in God unless it’s related to other things in your life? “Faith in God” is not a coherent concept unti it has a context, for it is not as if we are bodiless souls floating about in a void with the Lord. When faith is flexed it is flexed in places and relationships. What does it mean to believe in God in the workplace? What does it mean to believe in God in relation to friends, family members, governments, other religions? Faith demands reasoning because when faith is exercised, it is brought into conflict. A faith that does not reason is a faith that cannot act, and a faith that does not act cannot be faith, for faith is by definition a verb.

To be sustained, faith needs regular education. Knowledge must constantly be on the increase. Unfortunately, it’s not uncommon for a Christian to work hard at increasing their biblical knowledge-base (and their knowledge of the world where they are doing their believing) early on in their spiritual walk, only to cease studying and reflecting for many years. Some may suddenly find themselves having a crisis of faith in their early 40's as they try to get by on the faith of their early adulthood. Or perhaps more commonly, a teenager may find their Sunday-school faith irrelevant to their growing adulthood, and may cast off their childhood faith altogether. In a sense, we are supposed to cast off our childhood faith, but that is so we may embrace a more mature understanding of God. (1 Cor 13:11) Without regular content, reflection, exercise, and age-and-situation appropriate study, a person’s faith will not and cannot amount to much.

Book Review: Agenda For Theology

It just occurred to me that some people might find the title “book review” a trifle dull. As far as I’m concerned, Newspapers the world over would double their readership if they ran book-reviews as front-page articles. Perhaps I need a snappier name for my book reviews? Perhaps “Strolling through Prose: (insert book title here)" or “Epic Awesomeness!” I mean “Book Review” and “Epic Awesomeness” are essentially synonyms, right?

At any rate, I must say I heartily recommend this slim volume. I was introduced to the work of Thomas C. Oden through his 3-volume systematic theology, which I refer to regularly in my studies. This book is an earlier work, where he spells out his beef with contemporary theological method, and proposes an alternative. The meat and potatoes of Oden’s method is summarized by Vincent of Lérins: “What was at all times and everywhere believed by everybody”. (my paraphrase) In other words, there is a stress put on ecumenical consensus in doctrine, primarily as expressed in the first seven ecumenical councils of church history.

Oden lays down a lot of smack on Modernity. He makes the observation that if you put a bracket on the last 200 years or so of Christian theology, (i.e. theology written in the Modern period) you see an astounding amount of unanimity as to what the bible teaches. Now why is this significant? I think it’s highly significant for anyone who has driven down the street and noticed the Reformed church on one side of the road, and the Nazarene church on the other side, or the Lutherans and the Baptists a block away from the Catholics. I think the common (and superficial) reaction to this experience is to assume that there is no such thing as “Christianity”: no one really represents “Christianity”, because there’s so many different versions of it! I must admit that the most infuriating position I’ve ever argued against is the notion that the bible isn’t clear enough, or the Christian tradition clear enough to be able to identify a core orthodox theology. If I may wax graceless for a moment, may I say that this idea is complete unadulterated crap rooted in a positively inexcusable commitment to religious ignorance.

What is this “vital center” of Christian orthodoxy? Oden boils it down to 3 things. 1. An Interpersonal Encounter with the Living Christ. 2. The Will of God is Revealed in the Resurrection of Jesus. 3. A life growing into Christ and out of Sin. Now I personally find this list pretty minamalistic, and if that’s the vital center, it almost leaves the impression that everything else Christians say and teach is up for grabs as “unclear”. If I hadn’t read Oden’s systematic theology I would think that he would be in the business of holding closely to the above core 3, and then slipping in whatever ideas he wants to and excusing his flagrant rejection of Christian tradition by squeaking heresy in under the rubric of “not part of the vital core”.

The relentless slam on Modernity keeps Oden a straight-shooter though, and his work displays a remarkable amount of self-restraint. Particularly edifying is Oden’s rousing exposé of the Modernist obsession with anything new, as if it was a self-evident fact that we know more than our predecessors, or that we are smarter and more ethical people than all that have preceded us. One would think our culture teaches something like that, given how much little importance is given to soaking up classic literature.

Even if one has no interest in theology, Oden’s book is well worth the read as a social commentary. Oden himself spent much of his life as a political activist, and later as an academic trying to square up the discipline of psychology with Christian theology, only to find that dialogue with other disciplines is almost entirely one-sided: theologians desperately trying to buddy up the insights of psychology, sociology, etc, whereas these disciplines pay little or no attention to theological studies departments.

Most of the books I read are for personal interest and curiosity: this one I thoughtfully recommend to almost anyone interested in contemporary ideological and political issues.

Remembering the Circuit Rider

A few nights ago I had one of the most exhilarating bike rides. The weather network had forecast less than 1 mm of rain for the evening, and so I thought little of taking my bike to work when my shift started in the sunny afternoon. “So it might drizzle abit on the way home, no biggy.” Well, when 9 o’clock rolled around, the pavement had been replaced by puddles, and heaven was busy sending reinforcements to thwart the stalwart efforts of the city’s storm drains.

Forty minutes it took me: by the time I got home, I needed to change my clothes, much in the manner one peels a banana. Any garment that wasn’t covered completely by my raincoat was drenched through. My boots, my socks, my pants, and yes, even my undies.

Yet despite having much to complain about, the whole ride was encapsulated by an odd sense of gratitude and joy. My vision obstructed by fogged and rain-spotted glasses, slugging forward through yet another puddle up to my spokes; it all reminded me of something from a church history research paper I had done in college: the Methodist circuit riders.

The circuit riders (most of them Methodists, after the model John Wesley set in England) were the travelling preachers that made up an influential portion of the clergy of North America in the 18th and 19th centuries. We sing about these hardy ministers every Christmas in the song “Walking in a Winter Wonderland”: In the meadow we can build a snowman/Then pretend that he is Parson Brown/He’ll say are you married?/We’ll say No man/But you can do the job when you’re in town. With no local clergy to perform weddings, marriages would need to wait until the lone circuit rider next swung by on his circuit of the region. When he came, he would give sermons, perform marriages, funerals, baptisms, counselling, often all in the same day!

Among my in-laws, a tale is told (I’m not sure which generation) of a circuit rider who had come by the ranch late at night and showed himself in for some shelter. (This wasn’t a rude practice back in the day btw.) In the morning, he thanked the housekeeper for the pot of soup she had left out for him. “I didn’t leave any soup out” She replied. Dear old great-grandma had left out the pot of water she had used to boil some socks on the stove, and the circuit rider had consumed it!

The circuit riders braved rain and snow, and lived on what they could carry on a horse. The average life expectancy of these men was somewhere around 28-30 years old. Most of them died of exposure.

My rainy bikeride was a 40 minute exercise in imagination: my tires sloughing through the puddle was in fact the laborious efforts of my horse getting through the river. My tires didn’t skip over unexpected stones: it was my steed stumbling while trying to find a footing in the dark. The driving passion wasn’t a desire to get home out of the rain: it was the souls that needed Christ that drove me on and kept my spirit warm while my digits went numb.

In all my life, I have never suffered from real deprivation: I’ve always had a roof over my head and enough to eat. I don’t use my bike for any particularly noble purpose like reducing my carbon emissions or some such fad. I make myself bike to work because I’m lazy and cheap: I have a heck of a time putting regular exercise into my schedule, and I’ll do almost anything to lower my fuel bills.

Nevertheless, despite my existential reality, the experience brought to mind a different reality altogether: the reality of a life of sacrificial faith. A verse comes to mind, penned to the churches in Colossae by the apostle Paul while suffering in prison: “Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I am filling up what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the church, of which I became a minister”. (Col 1:24-25) I have always found this verse puzzling. Being a good Protestant, I wholeheartedly embrace the complete sufficiency of Jesus’ vicarious death. Redemption was completed at the cross, to teach anything less is to spit at God’s gift of grace. Apparently, here Paul thinks Jesus’ sacrifice is lacking something,
and he’s wrapping up those loose ends of vicarious suffering by doing time.

I think I come a little closer to grasping what Paul meant when I ponder the ongoing suffering love of so many missionaries and ministers. Theologically speaking, I understand that Jesus’ mission as the messiah didn’t end at Calvary. The Holy Spirit continues the work begun by Jesus, and so his ministry carries on even to this day in the life of the church. The heart of God that moves the Christian life of service is none other than the suffering love of Jesus that endures imprisonment, exposure, even death, for the sake of the ones He loves. In this sense, there is a lack in Jesus’ afflictions: while the atonement was once for all, each generation is in need of experiencing this longsuffering love in the flesh, and that task falls on the shoulders of Jesus’ disciples, who “fill up what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the church.”