How Jesus makes us true

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Acts of the Apostles, Christianity, Christianity and politics, faith, Gospel, Jesus, jesus witnesses, Jesus' death, Karl Barth, Sam Wells, violence, witness

Karl Barth

Karl Barth spoke on several occasions about Christians’ need to read newspapers in light of the New Testament. Just so. But most Christians require guidance in order to do that in the way Barth means. Most of the world does not take the Gospel for granted—some simply people reject the Gospel’s account of reality by default; some actively oppose it. Christians often respond with fear, worry, and defensiveness, which suggest we believe disagreement or opposition actually threaten the truth of the Gospel. Absurd. If the Gospel is true, no human power make it false; if it is false, no human power can make it true. These realizations raise a salient question: How should those who take for granted the truth of the Gospel face encounters with those who reject or oppose it? Together, the Gospels and the book of Acts answer this question clearly:

In words and common life, tell the story of Jesus as good news without trying to enforce it, and see what happens.

Antonio Ciseri, Ecce Homo

Most everyone who has heard of Jesus knows how his life ended. Far fewer people link his death to his repeated confrontations with the Pharisees, scribes, lawyers, and other authorities, and finally Herod and Pilate. Many Christians immediately spiritualize the significance of Jesus’ death, crafting elaborate doctrines of atonement. In attending to the spiritual, we see Jesus’ death as inevitable by divine ordination, and miss the political significance of deliberate choices Jesus made to live with integrity among powers that deemed him a threat, even as he knew they would likely kill him. Jesus knew, as Sam Wells has said, “what happens when the utter goodness of God is utterly vulnerable in the presence of the shortsightedness and cruelty of human beings.” Even in that light, these authorities could have reacted differently to Jesus; they could have accepted him, but they did not. In the Gospels, Jesus’ death does fulfill Scripture and God’s plan, but he also dies because he threatens the power of those who wield the sword and prioritize their own luxury over others’ basic needs. Once we see that Jesus’ death means more than atonement, and we remember that to be a Christian is, principally, to follow Jesus, we must face—with much less surprise—Jesus’ unpalatably constant insistence that his disciples will suffer as he did.

Jesus takes for granted that those who follow in his way will be hated, excluded, insulted, and their names “cast out as evil” (Luke 6:22). Jesus’ followers will face opposition, persecution, and suffering exactly because Jesus does: “The Son of Man must suffer many things, and be killed by the elders and the chief priests and scribes, and on the third day be raised. … If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me” (9:22-23). Again, when Jesus reproves the lawyers for building the tombs of the prophets, he prophesies that they will go on persecuting the prophets and apostles whom God will continue to send (11:49). So Jesus foretells the violent opposition the apostles he commissions (Acts 1:8) will encounter. Especially since he sends those apostles first to Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those sent to it (Luke 13:34), they can expect to fare no better than Jesus. Lest any doubts remain, Jesus tells them explicitly: “they will seize and persecute you, betraying you to synagogues and prisons; you will be brought before kings and governors for the sake of my name” (Luke 21:12-13). At this point, Jesus himself will shortly stand trial before Herod the king (Luke 23:7-11) and Pilate the governor (23:1-6; 13-25). As with Jesus, so with the disciples. Jesus knows exactly the conflicts his followers will face.

Resistance to the way of Jesus—even if not universal or unmitigated—is a fact of Christian life. In Acts the apostles quickly discover how accurately Jesus predicted the opposition and conflict they would face because they speak, teach, and heal a crippled man in Jesus’ name. Jesus in John’s Gospel puts the matter starkly: “The servant is not greater than the master; if they persecuted me, they will also persecute you” (John 15:16). There is no reason to suppose Jesus’ followers today should fare differently.

In this light, modern Western Christians need to rethink the subject of persecution. We tend to think we should be able to follow Jesus without suffering for it. We’re obviously not reading the Gospel if we think that. Second, we wrongly count as persecution a prohibition against officially organized prayer in public schools or other public institutions,  sanctions against public display of the ten commandments in a context that would present them as normative, or—a particularly relevant example given the approaching season—businesses forbidding their employees to wish customers a “Merry Christmas.” And some of us worry that President Obama is a Muslim and will, therefore, depose Christians from our privileged cultural status. I recently ran across an article about a woman in Germany who interrupted an interfaith Muslim-Christian worship service and “denounced a Muslim call to prayer by reciting Martin Luther, proclaiming, ‘Jesus Christ alone is Lord over Germany!'” One commenter was outraged that a “Muslim Call to Prayer” should occur in a Christian church and asked, rhetorically, whether American Christians would “stand up for Jesus” when—not if—this sort of thing begins happening in America.

Such mild opposition hardly counts as persecution. Of course some people do not believe what Christians believe. It has always been so. More importantly, neither Jesus nor the apostles ever exhibit the smallest fear that others’ unbelief in Israel’s God poses a threat to their own life of faith. Others’ beliefs have no bearing on the truth of the Gospel, the being of Israel’s God, the reality of Jesus’ resurrection, or his identity as Lord of all. The apostles insist upon preaching in Jesus’ name because it is good news—not because they aim to secure their own survival or power, or the truthfulness of the message. They assume it is true! If it were not, they would have a much bigger problem. They do not argue against others in order to prove to themselves what they claim to believe, or to make it true by saying it loudest and longest. They do not believe the truth of what they speak depends in any way on them, and they live accordingly. The apostles’ example says that Christians should never accost others with talk of Jesus out of fear—fear that our faith isn’t strong enough, that the story might not be true, or that Christianity will lose the place of socio-political power it has held in the West since the 4th century. Christians’ social power has nothing to do with making the Gospel true. For the apostles, not having to make it true means they can show what it looks like when lived, as can Christians today. Indeed, the apostles seem to recognize something that modern American Christians seem to get backwards, namely, that the direst threats to the credibility of Christian life are not people who reject our beliefs or think them false. Rather, Christianity’s credibility suffers most from those who claim “Christian principles” or “Christian faith” but whose lives look little or nothing like Jesus’ life.

The story of Ananias and Sapphira in Acts 5 shows just how seriously lapses in obedience to Jesus threaten the early church’s life and witness. Acts presents Ananias and Sapphira in contrast to those in the community who sell a piece of property and bring all the proceeds to the apostles for distribution within the community. This couple sells a field and donates just a portion of the proceeds, but they do so in such a way that implies they give as generous and costly a gift as those who are giving the entire proceeds of a sale. In this community, such an act undermines both trust and economic stability—if the rich in the community deceptively withhold property for themselves, they will create mistrust, reinforce the economic disparity that the Gospel heals, and so undermine the community’s witness to Jesus. The immediacy and severity of Ananias and Sapphira’s punishment indicates how great a threat their action posed to the community’s life and its proclamation of good news. When the apostles confront Ananias and Sapphira with their deception, they fall down dead—the Holy Spirit removing them from the community like cancer from a body. Ananias and Sapphira lack the integrity to live the story they claim to believe. Such behavior does not threaten the truth of the story, but it puts an axe at the root of community life and undermines the proclamation of good news. How Christians live and present the story of Jesus has everything to do with whether others can receive the story as good news. Christian proclamation of Jesus’ story should always serve its being received as good news.

Jesus’ first apostles mostly told their story because they were found doing something (or something was happening to them) that required explanation: tongues of fire and new language at Pentecost (Acts 2) and a crippled man walking again (Acts 3-4). Sometimes they told the story in response to a direct request—an Ethiopian eunuch asking for guidance reading Scripture (Acts 8), or a summons from a centurion (Acts 10). The apostles generated, in Sam Wells’s words, “a context that demands an explanation, a living mystery that invites scrutiny.” The apostles’ preaching about Jesus gathered a community whose common life elicited wonder and joy from those who saw it. That is how the church should proclaim Jesus—with words and deeds commensurate to one another. If the church is “a context that demands an explanation,” then “the explanation is Jesus,” and it’s the church’s job to show how Jesus explains the life we’re living:

Sam Wells

We should seek to embody in our church life such hopefulness, such faithfulness, such patience, such endurance, such forgiveness, such truthfulness that could only be possible if Jesus has saved us. We must ensure that salvation in Christ is never just a theory. It’s a reality. It has to be seen in context. And it could just be that that context, at the moment, doesn’t just mean the Jews. It means us.

Being that context does not mean we should not use words to tell Jesus’ story. We should tell the story as truthfully as we can, but our best telling will be with those who invite us to speak. Berating others with the Gospel does not only waste the time of all involved; it actually undermines the truth of the story we hope to communicate. Part of being a good witness of Jesus involves learning when to speak, when to remain silent, when to wait for an invitation to speak, and when to make an offer uninvited. But we need never ensure the truth of the story we tell. If we relinquish that vain task, we can instead begin spending our energy on displaying ever more beautifully, creatively, and compellingly, how Jesus’ story is true in our common life—indeed, how Jesus saves us.

On theological education

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Acts of the Apostles, doctoral study, duke divinity school, faith, good work, graduate school, imagination, pedagogy, religion, seattle pacific university, stories, teaching, theological education, theology, university life

Goodson Chapel, Duke Divinity School

I recently had occasion to consider how the last twelve years of my own theological education have formed my perspective on what theological education should be, and why I want to participate in the theological education of others. Foremost, I view the world theologically. As the psalmist declares, this world and everything in it belong to God (Psalm 24:1). God is not an object in the universe, but the Creator and Lord of everything that exists; God is the measure of all things. If God is the measure of all things, and theology encompasses all thought, speech and reasoning about God, then a person’s theology will govern her thought, speech, and reasoning about all else. Theology is inextricable from an entire way of life. Theology matters “all the way down.” So viewing the world theologically involves measuring my life on God’s terms. Human beings cannot reflect God’s life in the abstract; doing so requires a particular story. Christians stake their lives on the reality of God’s story as told in Scripture and summarized in the Apostles’ and Nicene creeds. Theological educators should invite students to know the God of that story and explore this world as God’s world. Christian theological education should unite the conviction that God is the measure of all things with the distinct content of God’s story that Christians confess, and should use all the resources of the academy that serve the living knowledge of this story.

School of Theology, Seattle Pacific University

All my post-secondary schooling has taken place in institutions committed to this perspective on theological education, which has shaped my work profoundly. After graduating from Seattle Pacific University’s School of Theology, I came to Duke Divinity School—first for the M.Div. and now the Th.D.—because I sought academically rigorous study integrated with Christian confession and, ultimately, a doctorate oriented toward ecclesial life. I named my major area “Christian Scripture,” because these words together identify the community whose presuppositions and story frame all my work. I have focused on discerning what habits and skills make faithful ecclesial reading of Scripture possible and developing them. I have learned to use whatever academic tools prove helpful for understanding the Bible as Christian Scripture—that is, as witness to God’s self-revelation, and indispensable and authoritative for ecclesial life.

Duke Divinity School, Gray Building

I exercise this training every time I sit down to work on my dissertation, which engages the portrait of “witness” in the book of Acts as a whole, to the end of illuminating a Christian ethic of reading Scripture. Acts portrays a community endeavoring to live out the conviction that the God revealed in Jesus is the measure of all things. This community must articulate its identity not only for itself but also to an entire range of others, who run the gamut from eagerly receptive to violently hostile. Acts is peculiarly concerned with matters Christians must consider whenever we try to make ourselves intelligible to those who do not share our epistemic assumptions or our deepest convictions. The book of Acts, and especially its idiom of witness, offers resources for thinking through how Christians can rightly make claims to knowledge of God. “Witness” in Acts holds together precisely what theological education should: the conviction that God is the measure of all things with the particular story of Israel’s God revealed definitively in Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection.

My reasons for writing this dissertation correspond to three main challenges I see facing 21^st Century theological educators:

1)    Remaining committed to God as the measure of all things even as we work in American higher education, which requires that we neither reject entirely the prevailing epistemic paradigm nor measure all our claims to knowledge on its terms,

2)    Reshaping study habits formed by easy access to information, which inhibit the careful attention that learning to know God requires, and

3)    Maintaining the close connection between thought and life that the truthfulness of our convictions demands.

My thinking about these challenges continues to evolve, but here I offer how I am currently considering the way forward.

1) Because Christian theology begins from the presupposition that God is the measure of all things, working within American higher education presents a peculiar challenge. Modern people, whether in the academy or otherwise, are unaccustomed to considering God the measure of all things. Rather, modern people accord epistemic preeminence to science and history—disciplines that trade in encyclopedic knowledge and assume the reliability of human sensory experience. On one level, trusting historical and scientific judgments makes good sense. Christians, too, rely upon these disciplines and their epistemic underpinnings in our daily lives, but we cannot accord them epistemic preeminence without undermining our faith. Indeed, excellent scholarship requires that we use whatever tools its disciplines make available, but our commitment to reading the world on God’s terms obliges us to consider more and different possible realities than these tools alone can make available. All Christians, but especially those who work and teach in the theological disciplines, must develop the intellectual agility to use the tools of modern scholarship while not adopting its epistemology and, instead, maintaining the conviction that God is the measure of all things.

Such agility involves recognizing our single identity as one and the same person whether writing, teaching in the classroom, or participating in worship. The scholar and the Christian do not come apart. The practical form of such agility will vary according to discipline and the scholarly tools most appropriate to the kind of theological claims one makes. Modern theological study of the Bible, for example, can and should make use of historical-critical tools in order help bridge the gap between the Bible’s original context and our own. But biblical scholars should always keep the ultimate object of study in view, and not limit the Bible’s subject matter to historical possibilities.

From the very beginning of my theological training, my mentors have modeled such reading and have encouraged me to hone my skills in this art. As a result, I have not only learned by doing; I have had to think deeply about how such reading works and is possible. I am convinced that the flourishing of the Christian church requires that we continually return to Scripture, so I consider learning the art of faithful reading vital.

2) Theological study requires habits significantly at odds with the methods of information retrieval that both serve and plague our society. Most future college students  have never lived without nearly ubiquitous Internet access. A bottomless store of information ready at our fingertips can distort our understanding of what constitutes knowledge, inhibit our ability to judge the quality of information, and hinder us in developing practices of seeking suited to our object. Theological study’s object is God, and knowing God is not quick, easy, or available via Google. Christian Scripture rewards and requires slow, carefully attentive reading. As always, how we know shapes what it is possible to know. Theological educators will have to recall students to slow, careful, methodical observation, and to long and thoughtful mulling. We must resist thinking of knowledge as a commodity—a thing available as a product in the classroom. A theological view on the world requires the constant reminder that knowledge of the deepest reality available to us comes only as a gift from God’s side of the Creator/creature distinction, and can only truly be known through living its truth in communion with others.

3) Living this truth in community is the final and most constant challenge for theological educators. I have already partly addressed this concern in noting that Christians must maintain the integrity of their identity. There can be no real distinction between the scholar and the Christian—no division between “work” and “life.” But living the truth of our convictions demands even more. Theological education exists not for its own sake, but for the flourishing of the church, which likewise exists not for itself, but in ministry to God’s world. Perhaps more than some others, the theologically educated are in danger of calling Jesus, “Lord, Lord,” and not doing what he commands, not following him as his disciples. The good of viewing the world theologically consists, finally, in becoming more like God. Such is the aim of my own life, and the way of life I hope to commend to my students.

Grain and Wine: Painting Psalm 4

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art exhibit, faith, food, painting, Psalms

I’ve spend a good deal of time this Lent meditating on Psalm 4, which I still have memorized from when we used to pray it as part of the Iredell House Night Prayer liturgy. (Iredell House is a post in itself, which may shortly be forthcoming, so no more on that just yet.)  The version of Psalm 4 I have memorized, I have just discovered, is not an especially sound rendering of the Hebrew, but Psalms are difficult to translate because of their poetry. I do find the translation is poetic, so that’s in its favor. Here’s how we prayed it on Monday nights at Iredell House:

Answer when I call faithful God
You cleared away my trouble.
Be good to me, listen to my prayer.

How long proud fools, will you insult my honor,
loving lies and chasing shadows?
Look! God astounds believers.
The Lord listens when I call.

Tremble, but do not despair.
Attend to your heart,
Be calm through the night,
Worship with integrity, trust in the Lord.

Cynics ask, “Who will bless us? Even God has turned away.”              You give my heart more joy than all their grain and wine.                      I sleep secure at night
You keep me in your care.

Christians have always prayed the Psalms, which makes them a good place to go when you don’t know where to begin with prayer. The psalms are full of words that countless numbers of God’s people have addressed to the Lord throughout thousands of years. So it’s good to have them in one’s head, and I’ve found that nothing gets text in my head like reading it out loud regularly. That is, of course, how this psalm got into my head.

Lately the prayer liturgy from Iredell House has generally been going through my mind, but this psalm particularly rose to my consciousness when I thought about the theme for this year’s annual Juried Arts Exhibit at Duke Divinity School. The theme derives from the title of Norman Wirzba‘s book, Food and Faith: A Theology of Eating. Putting the theme of the arts exhibit together with meditating on Psalm 4 did eventually conjure an image in my mind that I’ve now painted.

I particularly like this one, if I do say so myself. It occurred to me, when I first began thinking about Psalm 4 in connection with the “Food and Faith” theme, that there’s actually only one line in the whole Psalm that mentions something one could depict visually. So whatever I painted would have to include “grain and wine.” In addition, apart from the fact that I’ve always prayed the psalm at night, it has the sense that the speaker is saying these words in the evening. The psalmist is alone with God, sending these words out to no one else. The speaker acknowledges simultaneously that the gifts of grain and wine bring delight, but that God is delight itself.

In the painting I’ve created, a woman sits on a low stone bench on a terrace under a tall arbor of grapes, framed by two sheaves of wheat. She has a carafe and a goblet of wine on her right and a bowl with some bread in it on her left, but they do not hold her attention. She looks out, instead, across a valley full of vineyards to distant mountains and the silvery moon that hangs low in the sky. Grain and wine are good, but they are not God.

I suppose a real artist would let the painting speak for itself, but I do want to share one last thing about it that makes it more meaningful to me: it’s actually painted on an old cupboard door that I salvaged when we tore out an unused kitchen at Iredell House and renovated it into a guest room. Sort of brings it all together.

The Juried Arts Exhibit will be up on the “0” level of the Divinity School this week through May. Those of you in the Durham area might want to come take a look at it.