Please Pray!

Unfortunately, as is completely obvious I have not had time for another post for months! My preaching and my teaching schedule have just made it impossible to post.

That being said, my schedule, hopefully, will get even busier. I've applied to do a research PhD at St. John's University. If my abstract is accepted, I'll be doing a research PhD there.

Please pray that it is!

Jason

When You Arrive...

Not an especially theological theme today—although there is plenty to be theological about. Still not quite done with Stricken by God? yet, but I finished Brita Miko’s chapter the other day and read it again. Even though her’s is a narrative approach and dramatic, I was moved by the way she wrestles with the call for us to forgive as Christ does. I think, for me, it speaks in this way: when I move to a theological position, part of the struggle is understanding and accepting the practical ramifications of the position. And the non-violent love and forgiveness of God is packed with practical application.

I guess tonight I feel a little more devotional and personal. Miko’s chapter realized in me my own struggle with forgiveness. Basically her point is if the point of the cross is forgiveness, then Christ’s call to pick up our crosses means he is truly showing us how to live (forgiving as we’re crucified) as Christians. In her essay she wrestles with God’s offering forgiveness to a serial killer in her town.

I’ve been preaching (I have to admit, some of my best work) through Matthew and focusing on the profound counter-cultural, counter-political, even counter-ethical impact of Jesus’ life. My point has been that Jesus life and teaching is a critique of the world’s ways of doing things and EVERYTHING he does challenges EVERYTHING we already think. Inherent in that is a call to love, forgive, and refrain from judgment as Christ did and does. On a daily basis, I’m getting there. But I’m realizing just how much I’ve struggled with the events of my recent past.

Let me put it this way…the other day my closest friend called and asked how I was doing. I told him our church is doing well, we’re growing, we’ve improved financially (drastically), and we’re moving into a bigger location. They’re open to my preaching and I’m free to explore the Bible the way I read it. I don’t know where I’d find this kind of freedom in the pulpit anywhere in the area we moved from. I couldn’t ask for a better situation.

Furthermore, I told him I’m doing some adjunct teaching and it looks like it’s only going to open into more. I’m doing Old Testament Survey and have developed the course into an online course, so I’ll be doing the hybrid AND online Old Testament Survey course. This November I’ll do Old Testament Survey AND Life of Christ (I’m excited about that one) and I’ve worked with the guy writing the curriculum to develop a postmodern approach to it. I’ve even developed a pretty decent beginning to a friendship with him. Next spring I’ll be doing Understanding the Bible, and later Biblical Theology. As an adjunct in a new program, I couldn’t ask for a better situation.

On top of it, I explained that I’m doing some writing. I’m even publishing an article in Christian Standard November 2. I love writing, but until now I hadn’t met anyone who was very enthusiastic about my writing. It’s an opportunity to explore that option, something I’ve always wanted to do. I couldn’t ask for a better situation.

As our conversation went on I finally said, “Paul, I don’t know. I seem to be at the beginning, having opportunities I always wanted. I think I might be happy.” He laughed and said it sounded like I was waiting for it to fall apart. It was then that I realized that he is right. I am waiting for everything to fall apart. I’m not saying everything is perfect all the time, but I’m beginning to realize some dreams and I’m truly enjoying using all my gifts to do kingdom work. So I had to ask myself, “Why AM I also so scared?” Why is it that I keep putting pressure on myself not to make any mistake? The truth is, when I do make mistakes, I find myself panicking, expecting people to lose respect for me and pull their support—expecting them to question me at every turn and to oppose me publicly. And yet, the people around me continue to show me patience and support. I’m just still unsure how to handle it.

I think I know why. My last work experience was a negative one. I dealt with being judged, being denied forgiveness, and being constantly questioned as far as my maturity, dignity, and faith. As a result, I’m constantly waiting for failure and struggling with self-doubt where I am now.

Here’s the problem. Even though I’m now realizing the three biggest dreams I’ve had, I still struggle to be Christlike about the men who passed judgment on me and who caused me and my family so much pain. I still struggle with hoping that they fail and that they run into the kind of barriers to their success that they threw up in front of me.

However, when Jesus was on the cross he looked down at the people who were torturing him to death and made this statement, “Father, forgive them, because they don’t know what they are doing.” Now that I understand that the cross is not about God’s anger, but about mine, I realize that he is talking also about me. He is offering forgiveness to me. He is offering it to everyone. And his call to those who would follow him is to pick up a cross and do likewise. That means that my call is to forgive even those men who crucified me.

Why is that a problem? They aren’t crucifying me now. They don’t even think about me now. And, truthfully, God’s taken that screwed-up mess and made it 1000x better than it would have been if I’d had what I wanted there! (The only drawback is that we deeply miss some of the relationships we had in that place.) I’m doing everything I wanted to do (I’m not saying I’ve reached the end, but that I’m on the way to being who I really want to be). My family’s ENTIRE situation is better now. My crucifixion is over. Why is it that I still haven’t repeated Jesus’ words of forgiveness for my torturers? Why do I still relive it? Why do I still sometimes hope for their failure?

So, here goes. I forgive them. I recognize in them what God sees—limitless worth. Are they perfect? No. Does God love them even so? Absolutely. Does he want me to? Um,………….. well……………..yes. I don’t trust them and don’t want a close relationship. But I love them and forgive them (forgiveness and reconciliation are just not the same thing--until you get to Miroslov's chapter, and one of his comments that stood out to me is that complete forgiveness isn't really possible until justice is at least recognized). At any rate, I hope they succeed in Christ.

But I’ve been here already. Many times. And here’s my real struggle. I have every reason to believe I will be again. Because the truth is that forgiveness is possible, forgetting isn’t. And I can’t forget. I can’t wipe it away. And there are moments when it still hurts. Floods of emotion return especially when I have victories. That’s the most bitter part of it. When I should be really happy because of a success, I find myself saying, “See, you were wrong about me. What did you know? I CAN do it. I’m NOT who you said I was.” And what should be great moments become bitter moments.

I think I’ve concluded that, even though I’m moving in this non-violent direction, I’m still a violent person at heart. But what Miko proved to me is summed up in this quote in which she wrestles with God’s forgiveness of someone who would destroy someone else over and against her own desire to enact revenge upon the destroyer. I’m changing it in brackets to reflect my own struggle.

“I need you [she’s speaking to God] to be like me. We cannot be gracious to the one who annihilates the vulnerable. We cannot be gracious to these destroyers. Do you understand me, God? Do you know what you do? What is inside [them], is inside me. I could kill. I could kill even God, because of my beliefs.

“I do not want to have only these two choices.

“Your forgiveness would mean I either satiate my need for justice by killing you, or I forgive [them] with you and die myself. Your forgiveness leaves me with only two options. I become like [them] or I become like you. This is not what I want. I want a third option to be that we damn [them—or rather that they fail the way they set me up to fail]. You and I survive and [they fail]. (pg. 246, Brita Miko’s chapter in Stricken by God?).”

Of course, I can’t hope for their failure. That’s not forgiveness. Isn’t that what Jesus meant when he told his followers to deny themselves, pick up their crosses, and follow him? Doesn’t following him to the cross mean following him ON the cross? Doesn’t it mean that I MUST, somehow, move past these feelings that return all the time to me, and find a way to love them even though they STILL don’t recognize how they hurt me and my family? I think it does. But, honestly, I don’t even know if it’s possible. Somehow I’ve got to respond to them with the part of me that they didn’t damage, the part that God is using even now. And I’ve got to heal from all of that.

I feel like I’m finally arriving now. It’s like I’m finally becoming what I might actually be best at. And I’ve wondered for years what it would be like to have the options just open up and things start happening. I never dreamed it would be so bittersweet. And what makes it that is not what is good and noble and true, but the damage done to me from the past. Jesus, however, when he rose from the dead didn’t walk around with a chip on his shoulder towards the people who crucified him (me). He simply forgave them. He showed me how to get past it. I know I need to. I think I want to. I just don’t know if I can.

My prayer, Jesus, is just please help me be more like you.

Stricken by God?

I have to admit that I have different reactions when I open up a new book and start to interact with it. For instance, I’ve been using a book for my Old Testament class at ACC by Ronald Youngblood. When I first opened it and read the chapter titles, the book told me what to expect—and as I plodded through it, it did not surprise me. It’s the same old classic Calvinistic approach to sovereignty and election—and it makes the classic mistake in Old Testament studies of assuming you can understand it in its own context apart from a Christocentric emphasis. Even my students have commented that it has very little to do with my class.

The book I’m reading right now, Stricken by God? Nonviolent Identification and the Victory of Christ, is providing exactly the opposite experience. The book is deconstructing the classical Anselmian view of the atonement (propitiation), also known as the Penal Substitution view. That view states that God, in response to sin, is full of wrath. This wrath is the kind that can only be satisfied through violent retributive justice towards those who have incurred it. Thus, God is violently angry at sinners—but has mercifully offered the solution to that situation in the suffering of his son. In that event, God fully unleashed his wrath upon Jesus—Jesus stood in the way and “took our punishment” on himself. Few verses provide more impetus for this view than the suffering servant passage of Isaiah 53:4.

I’ve had the book on my currently reading list for several weeks, but have only just now had time to really open it. And I was looking forward to it. But having only competed one chapter, not only am I looking forward to it—I believe it may be a life-changing type of read for me (similar to what happened when I began reading the open theists). And the list of authors (including N.T. Wright, Richard Rohr, C.F.D. Moule, and Miroslav Volf) intensifies the anticipation of the great things to come (not to mention the blurbs from René Girard, Stanley Hauerwas, Brian McLaren, and my favorite, Gregory A. Boyd). It is doubtful I could find a book with as many exciting theologians.

Brad Jersak—editing with Michael Hardin, opens up with a chapter explaining the title of the book beautifully. He defines the theological stakes, “In the midst of our wondering, we run into a relatively recent dogmatization of penal substitution as the evangelical atonement creed. No longer content to call it a theory, many preach it as the required content of belief in order to be ‘saved.(18-19)’” And songs like “How Deep the Father’s Love for Us” and “In Christ Alone” ("and on the cross as Jesus died, the wrath of God was satisfied") emphasize how deeply this doctrine has been ingrained in our theology. But should it be?

Jersak establishes these three themes in the book as a challenge to penal substitution: 1) God’s nonviolence in Christ at the cross—this is especially relevant when one considers how much nonviolence is a part of Jesus’ teaching, 2) Christ’s identification with humanity in incarnation and suffering, 3) the victory of Christ over Satan, sin, and death (19).

To me, the most exciting of those themes is identification, as this has been a theme of my own theology and teaching for some time. Later in the chapter, Jersak discusses the notion of God “turning his face away” from Jesus on the cross as he cried “eloi, eloi, lama sabacthani.” For some time, I’ve been teaching that Jesus is not responding to God’s absence from him but is identifying with the human condition as it is expressed in Psalm 22. Jesus is fully experiencing death, suffering, and the violence of our sinful world. Jersak defines that thought on page 37-38.

Most exciting, however, is his treatment of the suffering servant passage. On page 29 he begins to deconstruct the traditional juridical understanding of sin and punishment. He charges that sin is NOT something that God cannot see or look at—this would remove God’s knowledge of MOST of history! Hence, the cross is not a case of God’s punishment, but of his healing of our sin (31). God is not acting his violence out on his son instead of us—he is suffering in an experience of our situation in order to defeat it and heal it. He is identifying with us this way:

• “At the Cross, Christ identifies and unites with all humanity in his incarnation and identifies with every victim (crying, ‘My God, my God’ with all who have experienced abandonment) and perpetrator (‘he numbered himself with the transgressors’).
  
• “We begin appropriately by identifying with those who crucified him. We put him there. Isaiah 53—we thought he was smitten by God, but it was our sins that put him there.
  
• “We repent by choosing to identify instead with Christ in his commitment to actively resist the powers, but in his way (nonviolently and with forgiveness). Not the substitution of him dying instead of us or experiencing God’s active punishment for us, but rather, dying with him (Romans 6) so that we might also live with him… (32)”

In the cross, rather than the violent retribution of God , we see the response of humanity to the message of God’s love. As Irenaeus said, God “does not use violent means to obtain what he desires…(34).” It is people who are violent. And the Bible is very clear that it is not God who is crucifying Jesus, it is humanity!

As I said, I am excited for what this book has in store. Jersak’s deconstruction of the classical interpretation of Isaiah 53:3-5 (36) is a simple yet brilliant reason why I think this book is going to be life-changing! Highly recommended!

The Cost of Discipleship

Not a very theological theme today. But here’s what you get after a week of vacation.

Leaving vacation at the beach last Saturday was, as usual, inevitable yet excruciating. For me, the bottom line had as much to do with returning to work and reality as anything else. The rhythm of the waves, salt air, and near constant breeze of the Atlantic was invigorating. I didn’t want to return.

For me and my family, though, the real problem was leaving family. We stayed at Myrtle Beach with my in-laws, my kids' grandparents, aunts, and uncles. We hadn’t seen most of them for over a year—and one of them for over two years! Spending the week with them was wonderful, though not without all those little family hiccups that we’re all familiar with. And I’m willing to admit that the family hiccups are one of the things that make the experience so great.

Yet the time came, once again, to leave. As the week wore on we could feel it coming. By Friday, even the fun activities we did were tinged with sadness. We made statements like, “well, it’s our last trip to the beach,” and, “let’s hit the hot-tub one more time before we leave.” And by Saturday, we sort of waited for the inevitable moment when we’d drive away in different directions, not knowing when we’d be together again.

Myself…I’m used to it. I grew up a preacher’s kid, so I know what it is to say goodbye to family. In fact, I was always surprised to meet people who’d lived near their grandparents their whole lives. As a child, I learned little tricks for how to survive those sad goodbyes. You make jokes, tell yourself you’ll see them again, and talk about how much fun you had. Then you cry silently on the way home.

My kids, however, are still rookies at it. And between the two, my son is the most expressive. I watched this time as we tore them away from grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins. My son’s face reflected a sort of depressed acceptance. He tried hard to control his sadness and, eventually, simply lost. He cried with each goodbye hug and nodded at whatever words people tried to comfort him with. My daughter, a few years younger and less comfortable expressing her sadness in public, resolutely held her ground—refusing to cry. She smiled, told silly jokes, hugged everyone , and avoided eye contact. I had to say, between the two I probably behave more like Grace. But Christian expressed my feelings.

When we got in the car and started to drive away, Christian could barely contain himself. He was crying hard. We looked back at Gracie and she had finally given in . Her face was contorted and sad and she was genuinely sobbing. Finally, Christian’s grief turned to anger. He slammed his fists down and he screamed, “I’m sick of living away from my family! I hate it!” We’ve moved them now twice, ripping them from family and friends in our desire to minister.

I didn’t want him to feel that way. But what could I say? Was he wrong to feel that way, if only for a moment? And, did I feel any differently? I didn’t. In fact, Christian and Grace were expressing what we were all feeling. It was the natural pain that comes with being ripped away from people you love. It shreds you inside and tears your heart to pieces. And it begs the question: why? Why walk away from family and friends to pursue a job, a few of the descriptions of which might read:

Little to no job security
Low pay
Unlimited hours
Travel required?

Now, I love my job and I love the church I serve. I am glad to be here and many of my dreams are coming true! But I have to admit that, sometimes, it seems like it would be easier to just quit and go home. It would be financially easier to just get a secure job doing something I’m not crazy about but that paid well. Why do it? Why agree to break our hearts over and over? Why pursue this crazy lifestyle?

I guess, the bottom line is, Jesus promised we’d suffer as Christians. And he promised that doing ministry would hurt. It calls for sacrifice. It calls for pain. It calls for risk. It’s the cost of following. Jesus said that whoever does not hate his father and mother for his sake was not worthy of his kingdom. I don’t hate them. But I’m willing to lose them if he wants me to. And in Philippians 3:8 Paul said that he considered all of the things he gave up when he came to Christ to be skybalon, which literally means crap. He considered everything he lost to be nothing—it’s all sewage—compared to knowing Jesus. And, I believe Paul was right. Even though it hurts to leave, it’s really no sacrifice at all. Jesus is worth it. He deserves it. He deserves a whole lot more than that. So, I guess bring it on. I’m ready to give more.

Jesus for President

Just a note to the faithful few who still check up on this blog. As you can see, I've been a bit too preoccupied with other things to do much blogging. In fact, I'm not getting a whole lot done very quickly any more. My reading is at a slow crawl right now. I've found that the preaching/teaching thing is pretty time-consuming.

I'm reading a book I picked up at BN last week, Jesus for President. It's not especially heavy reading (not compared to some of the other stuff I'm reading). It's also put together in a format that is postmodern and visually interesting. Dare I call it "emegent?" The book is a critique of contemporary American Christian idolatry. Here are a few quotes. To find the book, look in my currently reading list and click the link.

"So can you pick up what we're putting down, smell what we are stepping in? Jesus would make for a bad president. It's hard to imagine Jesus wearing a 'God bless Rome' T-shirt and promoting his campaign with stickers and buttons and a hundred-million-dollar campaign. And he would be considerably uncomfortable as commander in chief of the largest military in the world. Nevertheless, he was political. All of his titles granted him political authority. Calling hm Messiah or Lord is like acclaiming him--unlikely as it is--as president. He was the president who did not want to be a president. His politics aspired to something different from state power (86)."

"Author and professor Walter Wink does brilliant work exploring Jesus' creativity in his teaching in the Sermon on the Mount, especially in the familiar 'turn the other cheek' verses (Matt. 5:38-42). Wink points out that Jesus was not suggesting that we let people sadistically step all over us. Jesus taught enemy love with imagination. He gave three real examples of how to interact with our adversaries. In each instance, Jesus points us toward disarming others. Jesus teaches us to refuse to oppos evil on its own terms. He invites us to transcend both passivity and violence a third way (92)."

At any rate, it's been an interesting side read so far.

Jason

Sorry No New Posts

If you're one of the few who checks back on the Abyss every now and then, you've probably noticed I haven't posted anything for a while. I've been really busy with a part-time teaching gig I picked up on top of my ministry. Also, I'm going to be teaching this Summer as an adjunct at Atlanta Christian College, so I'm going to remain busy.

But I have a few thoughts about things I've read recently and I'll probably post something soon!

Thanks!

Jason

Deconstructing an Anti-modern

One of the most important classes I took in my Master's degree dealt with modernity and postmodernity as meta-mindsets. The instructor, my advisor, demonstrated a brilliant understanding of postmodernism's root in modern rationalism.

As I went through that class, he presented a V-shaped chart to explain the progress. Across the top were five "mindsets." First was the naive premodern, second the premodern (or willful premodern), third the modern, fourth the anti-modern, and fifth, the postmodern. Moving down from the top left of the chart, a line shows the progression of philosophical thought through these columns as those who began as naive premoderns came to embrace the enlightenment experiment and modernity as a philosophy. However, as modern philosophies (such as logical positivism) took their toll, postmodernism was the end result. The line moves to the bottom of the page, past the point of despair to complete postmodernism. This line downward remains under the label of the modern mindset.

From there, he posits that many people reconstruct a metaphysic and move from the position of postmodernism under the modern mindset to a postmodern mindset which no longer holds to that complete subjectivity. The postmodern mindset still recognizes the questions and issues of modernity, but no longer trusts modernity to solve the problems it claims to solve. The class was brilliant!


However, I think one of the most interesting concepts I encountered in the class was the mindset of the "antimodern." To my instructor, the antimodern was the Christian who, because he had dealt with the questions posited by modernity, could no longer be a premodern. But in many ways, the anti-modern should be seen as someone who embraces the mindest of modernity in order to break down its foundation. The study of apologetics is an anti-modern endeavor, it attempts to call into question modern philosophy on its own basis and prove Christianity according to modern standards.


When I first went to Bible college, apologetics was one of my most passionate interests. Without really knowing what it meant, I had embraced the mindset of the anti-modern. My goal was to provide rational and empirical evidence which would be undeniable and would compell reasonable people to believe. I really intended to construct a modern argument proving why the gospel message was absolutely compelling and impossible to deny. As anyone who has read my blog can see, I abandoned that endeavor some time between my junior year of college and my first year of graduate school. At some point I acknowledged that it isn't possible to work in the realm of "knowledge." That being said, I really consider my change in this area to be growth.


One of the apologists who I have listened to and appreciated for years is Ravi Zacharias. In fact, for a few years I had pipe-dreams of doing something similar to what he does, as much of his work is an anti-modern critique of postmodernism as a philosophy. There is no question that he understands postmodernism and sees its faults. However, I no longer feel that the apologetic approach is the way to get at postmodernism. Here is why: the whole notion of apologetics, to me, is an attempt to prove that scripture measures up to modern thought when, in truth, modern thought ought to be measured against scripture. The anti-modern mindset really is rooted in modern rationalism more so than in scripture, in that it takes seriously enough the claims of modernity to force scripture to measure up to it.

A two-part message on Ravi's podcast, which was actually delivered several years ago, was called Cultural Relativism and the Emasculation of Truth . In it, Ravi began unpacking the issue of truth in our time. He delivered three reasons why the world has been led into falsehood in our time. The most wonderful was the first: that reason has replaced revelation. He, correctly, traces the beginning of the enlightenment experiment to Kant, who set in motion the wheels of modernity in his claim that all that can be known is phenomena. Of course, Kant still believed in the noumena. But as modernity went on, those who followed gradually removed the supernatural from the discussion altogether. At the end of the 19th century, it was Nietzsche who came out and blatantly said that it was now up to mankind to deliver an ethic apart from any supernatural influence. God was dead, we had killed him. Now it was time for the superman to come forward and create a new world.

Ravi, also, correctly pinpointed the real issue in that point. It is that Kant really isn't the forerunner of that line of thinking. In fact, it goes all the way back to Genesis 3. The fundamental mistake was to look inward for a sense of right and wrong rather than to trust what God had said was true. This is why the serpent asks, "Did God really say you would die if you ate from this tree?"

Ravi's first point in this lecture was, I think, brilliant. The goal is to move to scripture, to begin with scripture as a starting point in theology. From there, it is possible to build a system which is, really, self-authenticating. In this way, I thought Ravi was consistent with a most post-modern of all theological movements, Radical Orthodoxy.

However, his second point disappointed me because it displayed a massive anti-modern influence. The first problem was that reason had replaced revelation. The second was that truth has been subverted by agnosticism. Here is why I find this interesting. In a sense, Ravi's first point is an attempt to abandon Kantian thinking and begin with scripture as a foundation rather than rationalism. It doesn't really try to address Kant as much as to leave him behind. To my mind, however, the second point is really an abandonment of the first point.

His goal in the second is to prove that we CAN have knowledge. Of course, the Kantian definition is that knowledge is "justified, true belief." In this definition, especially in metaphysics, knowledge is really impossible. This is why agnosticism has become so popular. In this, I don't think Ravi is far off. The Kantian idea about knowledge has caused problems. But, is the solution to insist on our ability to "know?"

Scripture, of course, uses the word "knowledge" a lot, even in reference to our knowing God. However, I think the line is blurry between the relational and rational notions of knowledge in scripture. Is the Bible referring to our ability to know God or know of him? The first is relational, the second rational. To my mind, the Bible concentrates on the first, the relational knowledge. The second, the rational, I think is exemplified in the cry one man made to Jesus, "I believe...help my unbelief!" It really isn't possible, in a modern sense, to come to knowledge about God. This is what faith is: belief even in the admission that "I don't know with certainty."

What I thought was strange about Ravi's second point was how often he equivocated rational knowledge with belief. His point was that when we rule out rational knowing, we have ruled out the ability to believe in anything. But I think he's wrong! Postmoderns, those moving from modernity (especially from postmodernism), are re-embracing faith but still affected by modern ideas about knowledge. In other words, just because I claim it isn't possible to KNOW something, doesn't mean I can't BELIEVE it! In fact, I think faith is only possible in the absence of knowledge!

Oh, anyway...I'm not sure that came across. I guess my point is that I can see that the anti-modern may never really click with postmodern culture. While Ravi, in his genius, will continue to be a favorite of mine, I have to admit I don't think he and I would ever be on the same page. Interestingly, where I now live is about 40 minutes from his headquarters! If ever the opportunity came to meet him, I now have it. But, interestingly, I feel further now from his thinking than I ever did.

Later.