Baxter's Ongoing Thoughts

A Word from John McLeod Campbell

2011-12-05T21:42:00.001-06:00

My friend John MacMurray emailed these quotes from John Mcleod Campbell's The Nature of the Atonement.

"If the atonement is rightly conceived of as a development of the incarnation, the relation of the atonement to the incarnation is indissoluble; and in a clear apprehension of the incarnation must be felt to be so. Further, if the eternal life given to us in Christ is that divine life in humanity in which Christ made atonement for our sins, then the connection between the atonement and our participation in the life of Christ is not arbitrary, but natural: and thus the incarnation, the atonement, and man's participation in the divine nature, offer to our faith one purpose of divine love, reaching its fulfillment by a path which is determined by what God is and what he wills that man should be.

"Yet I cannot forget that there are earnest and deep thinking minds in whose case the faith of the incarnation and their acceptance of it as the fundamental grace of God to man to the light of which all that concerns God's relation to man is to be taken, has issued, not in the recognition of the atonement as a development of the incarnation, but on the contrary, regard the atonement as in the light of the incarnation alike uncalled for and inconceivable."

"So soon as the incarnation... is accepted as itself the light to which the subject of the atonement must be taken, we are prepared to find that all conceptions of the atonement, which accord not with the love of the Father of spirits to mend his offspring manifested in the incarnation, will be rejected."

And We Wonder Why We Are Nuts

2011-10-07T12:16:00.001-05:00

Here are two quotes from Jonathan Edwards, that go a long way toward explaining our craziness.

“The bow ofGod’s wrath is bent, and the arrow made ready on the string, and justice bendsthe arrow at your heart, and strains the bow, and it is nothing but the merepleasure of God, and that of an angry God, without any promise or obligation atall, that keeps the arrow one moment from being made drunk with your blood.”— Jonathan Edwards, “Sinnersin the Hands of an Angry God”, in TheWorks of Jonathan Edwards (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust), vol. 2, p. 9.

“The apostletells us that ‘God is love’; and therefore, seeing he is an infinite being, itfollows that he is an infinite fountain of love. Seeing he is an all-sufficientbeing, it follows that he is a full and overflowing, and inexhaustible fountainof love. And in that he is an unchangeable and eternal being, he is anunchangeable and eternal fountain of love.”—Jonathan Edwards, Charity and Its Fruits (Edinburgh: TheBanner of Truth Trust, reprinted 1982), p. 327.

Placing these quotes together allows us to peer inside the tortured human psyche, writhing in the pain of two worlds, two Gods, two visions. Edwards puts Picasso into words.

'Thank you Lord Jesus Christ for coming into our traumatic darkness to show us the truth. As believable as it is to us in our terrible confusion, you have made it plain that there is no angry archer behind your back, only your Father who loves us out of his love for you and the Holy Spirit. He will never be satisfied until we are delivered from the trauma of the false god and free to give ourselves to the blessed Trinity and life in Papa's house.'

"If you have seen me, you have seen the Father." (John 14:9)

A Ken Blue Gem

2011-09-09T15:22:00.002-05:00

My friend Ken Blue and I were having a fantastic conversation about election and how Jesus was chosen first and we in him before the foundation of the world. He summed up the conversation with one of his great lines.

"Predestination means that you were eternally found in Jesus before you were ever lost in Adam."

I See Trees of Green...

2011-08-14T11:24:00.004-05:00

My friend Debbie Sawzak of Toronto sent me this gem she had written. I asked her permission to share it on my blog.

On my way into Brampton for the "Insurgency" the other night, I was listening to instrumental music that seemed to make the world around me into a movie. So I decided to have a good look at what was passing by, and enjoy it as something of which I was a little moving part. The thought struck me—perhaps as a result of having listened to Gunton on creation, having read Capon on the theme of what we are here for, and edited a chapter of Baxter’s book in which he goes on about the great dance and God’s delight in it—how intensely the triune God loves the world, not as an abstract entity but as a concrete, living ensemble of particular people and things. When you love someone, whether a spouse, child, or dear friend of long standing, you love them moving, sitting still, asleep, doing stuff; you love the way their hand looks holding a pen, the way they pedal a bicycle, the way they look up from a book when they hear something outside. There are instants when you just watch them and they don’t know it, and part of the sheer pleasure you have in doing so is linked to their unconsciousness of you in that moment. And I thought, as my eyes and ears took in everything around me, that it is probably the same for God: that he loves this elderly Asian lady, not just in general, but loves her specifically as she bobs up and down pulling that little bungee-corded cart of groceries behind her across the crosswalk, loves those two young twenty-something guys and the way they sit on that bench waiting for the bus, one leaning back with his legs sprawled in front of him and the other bent over with his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands. He loves how that girl strides along with her backpack on her back, her thumbs hooked in the straps. He takes a particular secret delight in enjoying them while they are paying no special attention to him, the way we do with those we love when they are absorbed in something.

And not only people, either: he loves how that tree sways and is moved differently but seamlessly by the swaying from the tip down to the lowest branch, how the four legs of that dog running along the sidewalk are so nimble and coordinated, how that bird alights flawlessly on the knife-edge of the top of that sign and manages to keep its perch there while a heavy truck whooshes by, how the clouds change shape and colour ever so slightly as the air moves them high above us. And not only things he’s made, either, but things we’ve made out of the things he’s made: he loves the way those words look as they scroll across that digital sign, the arrangement of bricks outlining and accenting the windows of that building, the distinctive ringing made by the bell on that boy’s bike as his thumb presses the lever and the little hammer strikes the metal numerous times a second, the way the red, green, and yellow lights control the traffic so that two lanes of cars start moving at once and turn left in a single smooth arc. He thinks, “Man, this is cool. I’m so glad this is here!” Of course, he also sees a whole lot of shabby and horrible and wrecked things that cause him sorrow, more sorrow and grief than we can possibly imagine. But this grief is also just as much part and proof of his loving, and he doesn’t give up.

I thought about how this material world is home for us, precious and familiar, and how it has become home for God too, precious and familiar, because he has been actively present in it all along, has even been here in the Son in the same flesh as ours by which we experience all these things.

All these thoughts drew praise from my heart.

Debbie

The Meaning of the Trinity

2011-07-28T20:28:00.003-05:00

Here is a quote from Professor Thomas F. Torrance on the meaning of the Trinity. Every word and phrase merits careful reflection.

The Trinity “means that God is not some remote, unknowable Deity, a prisoner in his aloofness or shut up in his solitariness, but on the contrary, the God who will not be without us whom he has created for fellowship with himself, the God who is free to go outside of himself, to share in the life of his creatures and enable them to share in his own eternal Life and Love. It means that God is not limited by our feeble capacities or incapacities, but that in his grace and outgoing love he freely and joyously condescends to enter into fellowship with us, to communicate himself to us, and to be received and be known by us. Moreover, the doctrine of the Holy Trinity means that God does not surrender his transcendence in condescending to be one with us in Jesus Christ, but it does mean that the more we are allowed to know God in himself in this way the more wonderful we know him to be, a God who infinitely exceeds all our thoughts and words about him, but who in spite of that reveals himself tenderly and intimately to us through his Son and his Spirit.” —Thomas F. Torrance

Something Beautiful

2011-06-18T11:06:00.027-05:00

Yesterday I saw something beautiful. Perhaps the emphasis in the
sentence should be on the words 'I saw,' for surely the beauty is as
present and ubiquitous as sunshine. Down a dusty road on the edge of a
cornfield in the middle of nowhere Mississippi, my friend Larry and I
were installing a pool for a retired nurese and her four children—four adopted
children. There were three black boys and one little white girl, and
they were more excited on this blistering June day than on Christmas
morning itself. All four children came from drug-destroyed homes. Born
into unspeakable abuse and trauma and pain; they were being saved by a
woman who simply said, 'it just breaks my heart.'

The kids grinned from ear to ear all day long as they played and
watched. They were remarkably well behaved. One of the boys had the
most beautiful smile I think I have ever seen. He wanted me to pull his
front tooth. The little girl thought the pool was coming from the sky.

'It just breaks my heart.' Who cannot see the origin of such a
life-giving burden? The retired nurse probably has no idea whose burden
she bears and loves, but I will take here over a hundred church
committees trying to create another kingdom for an absent god. The
other-centered, self-sacrificing, redeeming, hope-creating and saving
love of the blessed Trinity is not absent, but present everywhere, here
and now in the midst of the great darkness and its tragedies. Like a
vast, burning bush this world is alive with the glory of the blessed
Trinity.

Bless you retired nurse for giving your heart and life to participate.
You and your children are beautiful. May the kingdom of the blessed
Trinity and all its life flourish by your cornfield.

Next week I get to hear a disucssion on church growth.

"If you think of ten thousand things that are good and worth having,
what is it that makes them good or worth having, but the God in
them?" —George MacDonald

Easter

2011-04-24T07:51:00.001-05:00

As the Father’s eternal Son, and the anointed One, and as the Creator in and through and by and for whom all things were created and are sustained, Jesus already had a relationship with all creation and the whole human race prior to his incarnation. In his death at our hands Jesus established his relationship with us in the catacombs of our twisted pathology and sin. Humbly submitting himself to be rejected and cursed by us Jesus pitched his tent inside our blackest hell, and he was not alone. He brought his Father and the Holy Spirit with him. How could the love of the Father, Son and Spirit be defeated by evil? How could our sin and treachery overcome the mutual faithfulness of the Father, Son and Spirit? How could death destroy the eternal life of the blessed Trinity? On resurrection day the life and love and fellowship of the Father, Son and Spirit triumphed. Jesus rose in his Father’s love, anointed in the Holy Spirit, and he was not alone. He had us, and all creation in his arms.

Hope in Jesus and in his relationship with his Father, and in his relationship with the Holy Spirit, and in his relationship with all creation. Believe.

Happy Easter

A Good Friday Prayer

2011-04-22T11:43:00.002-05:00

Bless you Jesus Christ, Father’s eternal Son, One anointed in the Holy
Spirit, Creator and Sustainer and Redeemer of all things. In
unspeakable humility you crossed all worlds to become one with us, and
submitted yourself this day to be judged and beaten, mocked and
despised, cursed and crucified by the human race, embracing the
hostility of sinners against you, that you could reach us at our
unspeakable worst, thereby bringing all that you are with your Father
in the Holy Spirit together with all that we are in our terrible
darkness and pain. We betrayed and rejected you and you formed them
into the way of our adoption. We despised and cursed you and you formed
them into the temple of the Holy Spirit. Dying in the arms of our scorn
you brought your life into our death, your relationship with your
Father into our miserable destitution, your anointing in the Holy
Spirit into our despair, transforming Adam’s fall into the bosom of
your Father and the world of the Holy Spirit. Bless you Jesus, all
honor and praise and glory to your unspeakable love.
Blessings to all,
Good Friday 2011
Baxter

MacDonald

2011-03-28T15:44:00.001-05:00

"Therefore all that is not beautiful in the beloved, all that comes
between and is not of love's kind, must be destroyed." —George
MacDonald

The Gospel

2011-03-11T12:44:00.001-06:00

The gospel is not the news that we can receive an absent Jesus into our lives. The gospel is the shocking news that Jesus has received us into his.

Baxter’s Upcoming Speaking Schedule

2011-02-26T09:19:00.000-06:00

Baxter’s Upcoming Speaking Schedule

5 March 2011, Phoenix, Arizona
All Day Seminar
Contact: Alice Scott-Ferguson
Phone 480-538-7939

14 May 2011, Grand Junction, Colorado
All Day Seminar
Contact: Dave Eddy
Phone 970-210-5560

21 May 2011, Kansas City, Kansas (with Paul Young)
All Day Seminar
Contact: Brad Hill
Phone 913-530-2373

The Kingdom

2010-07-20T16:55:00.002-05:00

One of my flat-bellied friends phoned me the other day and said that he had finally figured out why I don’t talk much about the kingdom of God. I was intrigued as I think of myself as speaking about the kingdom frequently. In the course of the conversation, I realized that I don’t actually use the words ‘the kingdom of God’ that often. That doesn’t mean, however, that the kingdom is not important to me, or that I am not addressing it in my books and lectures.

Any reader of Matthew, Mark and Luke knows that the kingdom of God is a central subject. The kingdom of God, or the kingdom of the heavens, is mentioned 55 times in Matthew, 20 in Mark, 44 in Luke. But in John it is addressed only 5 times. Does this mean that John is not interested in the kingdom? No, of course not. In the place of the kingdom language John prefers the language of ‘life,’ which he uses 43 times. In Matthew, Mark and Luke, the good news is that the kingdom of God has come. In John, the gospel is that real life has come. Either the kingdom and real life are two different things or they are speaking of the same reality. As an interesting side note, Jesus speaks of salvation only twice, once when speaking with Zaccheus, and once with the woman at the well.

Much has been made of the differences between the Synoptic Gospels and their kingdom emphasis, and John and his emphasis on eternal life, but the obvious point of connection between them all is the person of Jesus. For me, all of the great New Testament ideas—new covenant, kingdom, eternal life, salvation, atonement, adoption, justification, regeneration, baptism of the Spirit, redemption, heaven, etc.—have their true content and meaning in Jesus himself.

The new covenant is the new relationship established in Jesus’ own experience between the blessed Trinity and broken, sinful humanity. In Jesus the Father, Son and Spirit have reached us in our traumatic darkness, and established a real relationship with us at our very worst. Our contribution was to crucify the Father’s Son. Dying in the arms of our bitter and cruel rejection, Jesus embraced us in our treachery—and he brought his Father and the Holy Spirit with him. This is the new covenant, the new relationship established in the death, resurrection and ascension of Jesus, the incarnate Son. Jesus is the new relationship. He is the one in whom the blessed Trinity and broken humanity meet and are together.

To my mind, to speak of the kingdom of God is to speak of the same reality from another angle, or with a different emphasis. The kingdom of God is not about some kind of abstract rule of God, whereby he imposes his authority upon his creation from a distance by law, or even by grace. The kingdom is about the sheer life and joy, the peace and goodness, the shocking love and abounding fellowship and creativity of the Father, Son and Spirit setting up shop on earth in Jesus, and through the Spirit’s witness and work, the kingdom is about this very life in Jesus coming to full and abiding and personal expression in us, and in our lives, and in our relationships with one another, and in our relationship with the whole creation, until the earth and the cosmos become a vast burning bush alive with the trinitarian life of God. (T. F. Torrance would be proud of that sentence!)

Real problems arise when we separate the great New Testament themes from Jesus himself. They then become abstract, non-relational and impersonal concepts, devoid of the life and relationship of the blessed Trinity. They become commodities or things that we can possess or manipulate or control apart from Jesus himself. Salvation becomes a legal exchange rather than an ongoing relationship of shared life in our darkness. The further these ideas are removed from Jesus himself, the more they are separated from each other as well. We end up with a vision of the kingdom of God, of salvation, of eternal life, and of adoption, which have little in common. But when we think of these great themes from a center in Jesus himself and his own life and relationship with his Father and the Holy Spirit, they become unique expressions of Jesus and of his relationship with the human race and creation.

Jesus teaches us that eternal life is not possession of an infinite battery pack, but knowing his Father through him. “And this is eternal life, that they may know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent” (John 17:3). “And we know that the Son of God has come, and has given us understanding, in order that we might know Him who is true, and we are in Him who is true, in His Son Jesus Christ. This is the true God and eternal life (1John 5:20). Eternal life speaks first and foremost to the quality of our existence, not to its duration. It is abounding or super-abounding life, as Jesus said (John 10:10), which is so ‘alive’ it cannot be extinguished, but endures forever. And this life is not something altogether different from that of the Triune God. It is the trinitarian life itself, shared with us relationally in and through Jesus. Eternal life is the thriving, flourishing, rich and unencumbered life that comes to expression in us as we know the Father himself with his Son in the Spirit, not in isolation, but together with others. This life is not self-centered, but other-centered. Fueled by freedom to love and to be loved in fellowship, which comes from knowing Jesus’ Father, this life overflows in goodness and joy, and in freedom to give ourselves for the benefit of others. Such life could not possibly be contained, but overflows into our relationship with all creation.

Salvation involves both a retrospective and prospective dimension, as John McLeod Campbell said. Retrospectively, salvation focusses on the removal or overcoming of sin and its consequences. Prospectively, it focusses on renewal and the giving of life. Dying a humiliating death in the embrace of a thousand disgusted faces, Jesus submitted himself to our sin and iniquity thereby becoming “the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world” (John 1:29). He takes away our sin by bearing and suffering it personally, by enduring our scorn and bitter rejection, by dying in our hatred. And he was not alone. In submitting himself to suffer such injustice and brutal murder at our hands, Jesus not only made himself the scapegoat for our ills, but he was making our alien humanity the dwelling of the Holy Spirit. He was ushering into our great darkness his own relationship with his Father (life) and his own anointing with Holy Spirit (baptism). He is both the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world, and “the one who baptizes in the Holy Spirit” (John 1:33). In him we are both justified and adopted, our sin is overcome and we are included in the eternal life of the blessed Trinity.

In this way the trinitarian life set up shop, so to speak, on earth, in our death and hell, the new relationship was established with broken sinners, real ‘knowing’ of the Father was opened in our darkness, and the Holy Spirit “accustomed Himself” to dwell in our flesh, to borrow a great phrase from Irenaeus, . Such is the kingdom of God—and eternal life, salvation, justification, adoption, the new covenant, heaven. They are all about Jesus himself and what became of the blessed Trinity, and to us, and to creation in him.

Thank you, Holy Spirit. We will have more light, please.

The Story Behind the Story

2010-06-18T06:57:00.002-05:00

Let me thank you for your emails and phone calls. Many of you have expressed your concern for me since I have not posted a blog in a while. The tornado did not hit my part of Mississippi, but just north of us was a disaster. I drove through that area two weeks ago. The damage was shocking and incredibly widespread. Hundreds and hundreds of huge trees were snapped in half like match sticks and flung on houses and cars. My heart broke as I thought of all the shattered dreams. And now it looks like the oil spill in the gulf will grow into the greatest disaster of all. I grew up not far from the coast, and I grieve daily as I watch the slow death of a part of the world that I dearly love. The implications of this spill are unimaginable. We need a miracle, cascading miracles.

On another level, since January Perichoresis has been financially strapped. Times are tough for us all. I think we will make it through this month, but after that it does not look good at all. So I have disappeared into my study and been working around the clock to finish my book on The Shack, and to finish my novel. I am two-thirds done with both. If you can help financially, please do so. You can send a tax-deductible gift to Perichoresis • P. O. Box 98157 • Jackson, MS 29298.

Here is an excerpt from one of the first chapters.

Never intended for publication, The Shack was written by William P. Young (known to his friends as Paul) as a story for his children. He had two aims: first, to give a gift that would express his love for his kids, and second, “to help them understand what had been going on in his inside world,” as his friend Willie put it. Paul’s goal was to get the story to Office Depot before Christmas to make fifteen copies for his children, his wife, and a few others. But even while working three jobs, there wasn’t enough money. Eventually copies were made, and the story circulated through his family and friends. He was encouraged to have it published as a proper book, but found that it was rejected by every publisher that was contacted, as being ‘too out of the box’ or ‘having too much Jesus.’ For Paul, its actual publication as a real book, now one of the best selling books in history, is lagniappe, as the Cajuns say—a little something extra. His dream was fulfilled when the first copies were made and his children had a story that would explain something of their father’s journey into the real world.

I heard Paul say that he reached the point in his life when he cried out, “Papa, I am never again going to ask you to bless something that I do, but if you have something that you are blessing that I could share in, I would love that. And I don’t care if it’s cleaning toilets or holding the door open or shinning shoes.” And Papa replied, “Paul, I’ll tell you what, how about I bless this little story you are writing for your kids. You give it to yours, and I will give it to mine.” The rest, as they say, is history.

But is it? There is far more going on in an average person’s life than anyone would dare to dream. And that is certainly true of Paul Young. The Shack is not a novel written by an academic who finally learned to communicate with regular people. There is a story behind the story, several in fact, but I will stick to Willie’s statement. ‘‘To help them understand what had been going on in his inside world.” (p. 12) The inside world, the world of the invisibles, of pain and turmoil, of shame, broken hearts and broken dreams, is the world that drives us all, and especially the larger-than-life tale in The Shack. The story behind the story is the gut-wrenching hell that Paul Young suffered in his own life. I have seen a picture of Paul when he was six years old. He looked like an old man—weary, miserable and spent, and terribly sad. His eyes screamed despair. The picture made me cry. But that is the beginning of this story we have all come to love, at least most of us.

By the time Paul was six years old, he had been emotionally abandoned, physically and verbally beaten and sexually abused—repeatedly. To say the least, he was crippled inside from his early days in life. No child—no person—can withstand such trauma. It creates a lethal roux of shame, fear, insecurity, anxiety, and guilt. These invisibles coalesce into a damning, debilitating, and unshakeable whisper: “I am not alright. I am not good, not worthy, not important, not loveable,” which haunts every single moment of life. How does a child, or anyone, cope with an inner world of such anguish? No one can.

As a fish was not made to live on the moon, we were never designed to live in shame. But what do you do? Where do you go? Most of us bury it all in a garbage can in the backroom of our souls, and move on. Or try to. But what we bury rules us. What we don’t know that we don’t know will destroy us. ‘I am not’ becomes ‘I will be,’ and we dream a dream of becoming. ‘If I can just get married and have children.’ ‘If I can just get that job or promotion, that money, that car, that house, that power, that position, that new relationship.’ And off we go. But such ‘things’ are incompetent to address spiritual pain. They never work, though we will defend them ‘til they kill us. So we medicate, go on autopilot, check out, or we stay busy, we get involved in a great cause, manage other people’s inner worlds, live through our children, or just stay drunk in one musical way or another. It’s too much.

Paul Young turned to religion, partly because it was the environment he grew up in and therefore readily available, and partly because it presented a possible way to perform his way into becoming valuable. He was born in Alberta, Canada, but before his second birthday found himself on the mission field in the highlands of Netherlands New Guinea (West Papua). Around six, as was required by the particular mission board, he was shipped off to boarding school. Before the age of ten, the family unexpectedly returned to Canada and by the time he graduated from high school, Paul had attended thirteen different schools. His dad had made the change from missionary to pastor.

These facts don’t tell you about the pain of trying to adjust to different cultures, of life losses that were almost too staggering to bear, of walking down railroad tracks at night in the middle of winter screaming into the windstorm, of living with an underlying volume of shame so deep and loud that it constantly threatened any sense of sanity, of dreams not only destroyed but obliterated by personal failure, of hope so tenuous that only the trigger seemed to offer a solution.

Religion was the only world Paul knew, the cards he was dealt. So he played them. He believed in the ‘religious’ version of Christianity. He had too. With ‘I am not good’ whispering in every breeze, he set out to prove that he was good. He graduated at the top of his class in college, became a shining star, a people-pleasing, religious performer on his way to the top. But every moment involved the exhausting task of hypervigilance, constantly scanning each group, each discussion, each meeting and moment to manage people’s impression of himself. For how could Paul, or any of us, let folks know of the dying inside. With one hand on the lid of his garbage can, he smiled, taught the Bible, became ‘the nice guy,’ the counselor, while keeping everyone at a safe distance. But he found no relief from the raging turmoil in his inner world. He cried out to God for healing, re-dedicating himself and his life a hundred times, until his re-dedicator finally burned out. His life became a form of hiding, while desperately searching for relief and help anywhere he could find it. But there is no healing in religion. Healing happens when you meet Jesus in your shack, a place Paul tried hard to deny even existed.

He performed himself into ministry, into business, into marriage, into fatherhood, trying to exhaustion to become an authentic human being while hiding the underlying shame and personal failures. A single phone call rocked his world forever. Two words in fact. ‘I know.’ Kim, Paul’s wife, had found out about the affair he was having with one of her friends. That is one way that shame works its poison in our lives. There are millions of others, of course, but one is that we turn to another person, a “magical other” who will be our all, our life, our salvation. I suspect Paul found out what Shakespeare meant when he said, ‘hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.’ But that’s not the whole truth. ‘Heaven has no ally like a woman who knows how to love.’ The book’s dedication reads, ‘to Kim, my Beloved, thank you for saving my life.’ While Mackenzie’s weekend at the shack represents eleven years of Paul’s actual life—eleven years of pain and emotional torture, depression and mere flashes of hope—it was Kim’s heroic love wrapped in fury that held it all together. From a human perspective, without Kim and her heart Paul Young would probably be dead, or tucked away in some cold asylum, or an empty man still performing. There would have been no story to tell, at least not one about meeting the blessed Trinity in the garbage can.

On the other side of hell, as real freedom and life began to dawn, it was Kim’s insistence that Paul write something for the children to explain his journey and new-found liberation. She didn’t mean a book, and neither did Paul, but most folks are thrilled that it all turned out this way. On more than one occasion, I have heard him speak of Kim and their children with tears streaming down his face. The book was born in the crucible of life, of trauma and abuse, of empty religion, misery and betrayal, of mercy, love and reconciliation. Luther said somewhere that God makes theologians by sending them to hell. In hell, of course, no one is interested in theology. What we learn in the emptiness of grief, in the pain, the trauma of suffering is that we are not interested in pseudo-promises, intellectual masturbation, or “Skippy, the wonder Christ,’ as my friend Ken Blue puts it. What we learn in hell is that we want out. We learn desperation for life, for healing, for real salvation, for a Savior who saves here and now, who reconciles, who heals our brokenness, and delivers us from our shame. We need something that works.

This is the story behind the story. The Shack could have easily been titled ‘From Hell to Heaven,’ or ‘From Overwhelming Shame to Being Loved into Life,’ or ‘How Jesus Healed a Screwed Up Man,’ or even ‘With Gods Like Ours No Wonder We Are So Sad and Broken.’ For the story is about hell and heaven, trauma, shame and finding love, the real Jesus accepting a broken man, and it is about the Father, Son and Spirit finding us in the far country of our terrible and powerless mythology—to share their life with us. For the truth behind the universe is that God is Father, Son and Spirit, and the one unflinching purpose of the blessed Trinity is that we would come to taste and feel, know and experience the very Trinitarian life itself.

What Paul and Kim have lived through and what they have discovered in the love of Papa, Jesus and Sarayu is the joy unspeakable, full of glory that Peter talked about, and the abounding life that Jesus promised. They cannot go back to the same old, do more, try harder religion with its properly attested Bible verses. Like C. S. Lewis, in the midst of misery they were surprised by joy.

Some have taken offense at the theology of The Shack. Paul’s response is not one of theological argument or biblical proof-texting, though he is very adept at both. His response is his own life and relationships. He would say, ‘I have a tee shirt from hell, several of them, in fact. Religion doesn’t work anywhere, and especially there, but the Father, Son and Spirit came to find me in my hell. They accepted me, loved me, embraced me, and are healing me with their love.’ And, I think Paul would ask a simple question, ‘How’s your theology working for you?’ And knowing Paul, he would follow that with, ‘how does your wife or husband or friends think your theology is working for you?’ So, while The Shack is a story for his children, it is a bit more complicated than that. This story is matter of life or death. Paul Young is serious. He wants his own children to see the disastrous incompetence of religion to heal our broken souls, and he wants them to know the astonishing liberation of Papa’s embrace.

The Father, Son and Spirit, whom he calls Papa, Jesus and Sarayu, are not myths like Santa Claus, the white, blue-eyed Jesus, and the tooth fairy. They are real. They meet us in our pain, in our anger, bitterness and resentment, in our shame and guilt and powerlessness, in our miserable, broken relationships—and in our deadly religion—and there they love us into life and freedom. Hence, the second dedication, ‘…all us stumblers who believe Love rules, stand up and let it shine.’

God in Our Image

2010-04-18T11:18:00.003-05:00

Sometimes I begin a seminar by having the group close their eyes and answer the question, ‘Have you ever heard the whisper, I am not?’ Without my even asking, hands go up. Sometimes people raise both hands. There is always a gasp or two, and nervous laughter. Then I ask, ‘I am not what...? Instinctively people answer the question with one word. As they answer I write it down on the board. Here is a list from a recent conference.

I am not... welcome, not perfect, not good enough, not loved, not lovable, not understood, not deserving, not the one, not satisfied, not acceptable, not special, not certain, not appreciated, not there yet, not important, not smart enough, not worthy, not fast enough, not safe, not liked, not included, not anything, not fulfilled, not respected, not valuable, not it, not happy, not free, not forgiven, not able, not tall enough, not pretty enough, not strong, not healed, not supported, not saved, not wanted, not special, not adequate.

Whether we are conscious of it or not, we all carry the burden of this whisper, and it is a burden, a ‘yoke grievous to be borne’ to borrow a great phrase my Professor, J. B. Torrance. It debilitates and poisons our lives. It can be scary to look honestly at our own ‘I am nots,’ or the family of them that have taken root in our souls. Two things will happen for sure. First, you will be shocked at how much of your time, energy and life have been dedicated to managing this burdensome yoke, and how it has shaped your perception of yourself and others, and your relationships or lack of them. But, as Paul Fitzgerald of Heartconnexion ministries says, ‘what is not acknowledge cannot be healed.’ And if is not healed, it is influencing.

Second, you will be liberated. When we look at ourselves and face our ‘I am nots’ a wonderful thing happens. We experience the sheer acceptance of the Father, Son and Spirit. It’s almost funny. For we all know that the Lord knows us inside and out anyway, but we have a way of not thinking about his awareness of us, and our lives. But an honest look at ourselves makes us vulnerable to Papa’s love. That is as beautiful as it is ironic. Our ‘I am nots’ make us fear exposure and thus judgment. This is the trick of the father of lies. But what actually happens when we get honest is that we have nowhere to go. And when you have nowhere to go you become keenly aware of where you are—known, loved, accepted and delighted in by Jesus, his Father and the Holy Spirit. You may even hear another whisper, this one laced with divine delight and humor, “Well, duh! And... You didn’t think we knew that?” We have been loved and accepted our whole lives, but not in our minds. And that is the problem.

John Calvin said that our minds are a perpetual factory of idols. The beautiful news of our inclusion in Jesus’ relationship with his Father and in his relationship with the Holy Spirit is too good to believe. How could I be so loved, so embraced, so accepted? It can’t be.

At somewhere around this point in the seminar I have the group close their eyes again and ask another question. ‘What is God like?’ Answers come quickly and usually with considerable passion. Here is a list of the answers.

Holy, Judgmental, Indifferent, Powerful, Mean, Removed, Love, Distant, Legalistic, Uncaring, Impersonal, in Two Minds, Unsafe, Unapproachable, Angry, Gracious, Loving, Harsh, Abusive

With a list like this you would think I was speaking in a prison, but I wasn’t. This list, or one very similar to it has cropped up time and again in my travels around the world. It appears to be universal. Never once has the word Trinity been said, or the word relational—except, of course, by people who had been through the seminar before.

Here is another question. ‘Do you notice a similarity between the two lists?’ At this moment in the seminar there is dead silence, usually followed by something akin to a corporate gasp, and then head shaking and laughter. The way we think of God is the fruit of our ‘I am nots.’ It is called projection. While the Bible tells us that God created us in his own image, the truth is we have created god in ours. We hear the whisper, ‘I am not...’ believe it, project its pain into heaven and create a corresponding god, who then confirms our ‘I am not...’ Without even knowing it we tar the face of Jesus’ Papa with the brush of own wrongly perceived ‘notness.’ It is a hermeneutical nightmare, which ruins life, poisons freedom, and destroys relationships. With a god like this how could anyone face their ‘I am nots,’ or even acknowledge that anything is wrong?

The whole quagmire is rooted in a lie, and knowing the truth is its undoing. Jesus shares his own ‘I Am’ with us. He always has and always will. And he does so in the deep places. It is Jesus’ own I Am—I am the beloved Son of the Father, I am anointed with the Holy Spirit, I am wanted, welcomed, loved, known, cared for, safe, a thrill to my Father’s heart, I am acceptable, important, worthy, good, and full of joy—that he puts within our hearts. And the Holy Spirit works to help us hear it and to take baby steps of faith that it is true, steps against our own judgment or mindset. As we do, we begin to know that we are known, accepted, loved and delighted in, and we have freedom to look honestly at ourselves. We begin to see Jesus’ Papa with Jesus’ eyes. Then comes more freedom to be honest. In time our ‘I am nots’ are erased by Jesus’ great ‘I ams.’ And Jesus’ own life and peace and joy and freedom with his Father and the Holy Spirit begin to express themselves in us, in the way we see ourselves and others, in our relationships, work and play. It is, as Paul Young says, ‘an incremental process.’ And it produces life. Such is the kingdom of the Triune God. Thank you, Holy Spirit. We will have more please.

Good Friday

2010-04-02T12:35:00.002-05:00

I just read an essay on Jesus “absorbing the wrath of God” on the cross. It almost made me throw up. With such ease and passion and not a little patronizing the writer split Jesus’ Father into two different persons, and then ripped the Father-Son relationship apart, apparently without even knowing it, or caring. What madness. I suppose the Holy Spirit just stood there dazed wondering whose side he was supposed to join. There is something sinister about the need to have the Father vent his rage upon his own Son. And even more so when one then tries to call such an act “glorious grace.” But punishment is not forgiveness, and murder is not grace, and Jesus did not suffer the wrath of his Father, and the Holy Spirit was not torn between two lovers.

“Behold, we are going up to Jerusalem; and the Son of Man will be delivered to the chief priests and scribes, and they will condemn Him to death, and will hand Him over to the Gentiles to mock and scourge and crucify Him, and on the third day He will be raised up.” (MT 20:18-19)

It was the human race—not the Father—who condemned his Son. We cursed him. We poured our scorn, our wrath, our rage upon Jesus. We murdered him. And Jesus deliberately submitted himself to us and to our bizarre wrongheadedness. He bore our wrath. He suffered our enmity and died in the arms of our scorn. And he was not alone. His Father and the Holy Spirit were with him. And that is just the point. In the murder of Jesus the life of the Father, Son and Spirit found its way into our greatest sin—and overcame it. The cross is not about Jesus being forsaken by his Father; it is about the Father’s Son incarnate and the One anointed in the Holy Spirit submitting himself to the darkness of the human race, and thereby establishing a relationship with us as gross sinners. In the genius of the blessed Trinity our rejection and murder of Jesus were turned into the ultimate act of acceptance and embrace. In the murder of Jesus the blessed Trinity was “absorbing the wrath of the human race,” thereby forming oneness with us in our sin, and including us in Jesus’ relationship with his Father in the Holy Spirit. That is glorious grace, and forgiveness, and atonement, and real reconciliation, and love, and holiness, and right relationship, and mercy, and judgment.

Thank you Father, Son and Spirit for loving us beyond our wildest dreams.

The Blessed Roux

2010-03-04T18:06:00.002-06:00

The astonishing beauty and joy and goodness of the relationship of the Father, Son and Spirit is the blessed roux destined to permeate the dish of the whole cosmos.

Freedom to Be

2010-02-10T09:44:00.001-06:00

My friend Paul Fitzgerald of Grace Connexion Ministries showed me a poster that he uses in one of his lectures. It was a tombstone with a place for a name. Underneath that was the simple epitaph “I survived.” When I first saw it I laughed, but then it has haunted me ever since. I will be posting some thoughts soon on the origin of our “I am nots.” I am not loveable. I am not good enough. I am not worthy, not special, not wanted. We all have them, and they debilitate us, poisoning our freedom to live life. We go into survival mode. One of my most damaging is “I am not there yet.” It is a simple statement, but it drives me, and I suspect it drives nations, corporations and denominations as well. The particular problem that “I am not there yet” creates is the inability to enjoy the moment, and that means people and Papa’s creation. That is a consequence of the enormous drive to contribute, to do more, to create. Folks who are afflicted with this particular problem get an awful lot done. They are typically over-achievers. And we typically miss out on our daughter’s smile, the simple joy of being in the room with friends, or the exquisite colors of a bird. Even when we take a break, we can’t take a break.

Last week I got a call from a older man who had been ‘asked to leave’ the church where he served as a pastor. He was devastated. He had no idea what he would do. ‘Ministry’ was his life. After I listened for a while to his hurt and to his fear, I told him, “Jesus loves you an awful lot.” He asked, “what do you mean?” “He loves you so much as to deliver you from the machine, so that you can be free to live. If you are a pastor, no one can keep you from caring about people. You don’t need to be in a institution to do that. All you need is people. So now you are free to get to know people. And you can do that anywhere, beginning with your own family.”

“I am not there yet” usually means that we buy into someone’s definition of where ‘there’ is, and some notion of how to get there, and we lose ourselves in the diligent process of being faithful. So much so that we don’t even know who we really are. Our very identity, our sense of who we are becomes confused with our role in ‘getting there.’ My pastor friend got delivered from being in ‘ministry.’ Or perhaps I should say he got delivered from someone’s or some group’s definition of ‘ministry.’ It was a surgical cut that hurts like hell, but it was designed with love for liberation.

Where is ‘there”? All our “I am nots” have their origin in the whisper of the father of lies. They certainly are confirmed by life experiences, by childhood wounds, by financial loss, betrayal, tragedy, and disappointments. There is evidence for the whisper, or so it would seem. But given the evidence, what will it take to get there? What will it take to feel worthy? What will it take to feel important, or wanted, or special or loved? These are the better questions. Who told us what ‘special’ is and why did we believe them? Who defined ‘there’ for me, and why does their opinion matter so much? What is the origin of ‘important’ or ‘worthy’? What constitutes being ‘wanted’ or ‘loved?’ Who or what has defined these quite fundamental ideas for us?

Toward the end of The Shack there is conversation between Mack and Jesus that is very relevant here.

‘Jesus?’ he whispered, as his voice choked. ‘I feel so lost.’

A hand reached out and squeezed his, and didn’t let go. ‘I know, Mack. But it’s not true. I am with you and I’m not lost. I’m sorry it feels that way, but hear me clearly. You are not lost.’” 114

I think Jesus’ own “I Am” is the answer to all of our “I am nots.”

I Am there, and you are in me. So you are there too.
I Am worthy, and you are in me. So you are worthy too.
I Am loved, and you are in me. So you are loved too.
I Am important, and you are in me. So you are important too.
I Am wanted, and you are in me. So you are wanted too.

Blessed are the ones who have the freedom to be, for they shall see glory everywhere.

I just noticed a male cardinal sitting on a limb in my backyard. Blood red feathers against the backdrop of the brown hues of leafless trees. I wonder what that means?

Two Gods

2010-01-22T17:35:00.002-06:00

Since Christmas I have been working around the clock on a book on The Shack. For the next stretch I will be posting some of the material I am working on. By now, The Shack has probably become the best selling book in history, apart from the Bible, or at least it is close to it. Well over 11 million copies have been sold in about 30 languages. At least ten more translations are in the works. The wild, global popularity of The Shack in itself tells me that there is serious spiritual hunger in people’s hearts. I hope and pray it is a sign of the passing of the Augustinian captivity of the Church. Perhaps I am too critical of Augustine, but he is the Father of Western Christianity, and that version has handed down the deadly quagmire of deism, legalism and rationalism—the unholy trinity of the Latin West.

A quick search of the internet reveals that The Shack has liberated untold numbers of people, and, not surprisingly, stirred up the proverbial hornet’s nest. Some folks are not pleased at all, slinging the ‘h’ word around like they are the appointed guardians of orthodoxy. Whatever people are trying to say is wrong with the book when they call it heretical, I think Athanasius would be quite pleased with The Shack, not to mention the Father, Son and Spirit. I would go the other way and say that insofar as one thinks the theology of The Shack is heretical, that is the distance they themselves have fallen from the early Church’s vision. If the doctrine of God set forward in The Shack appears problematic, then have a read of Athanasius’ On the Incarnation of the Word of God. The faulty assumption in much of the criticism of The Shack is that ‘modern’ evangelicalism is indeed the definition of orthodox Christianity. That is a dangerous assumption.

The issue is the goodness of God. Apparently some folks don’t think that Jesus’ Father is in fact as good as the ‘Papa’ of The Shack. Are we really worried that someone might get into heaven who is not supposed to be there? Are we actually concerned that a broken man or woman or child might illegitimately believe in the sheer goodness of God and find healing and hope, only to be bitterly disappointed when they finally meet Jesus’ Father?

Perhaps behind the criticisms of The Shack is the sting of another question that is way more personal, and scary, and in some ways more profound. It is simple and straightforward. ‘Could I be this wrong?’ ‘Could we be this wrong? Paul Young is the apostle of the broken heart, holding out to hurting people a vision of the Triune God that actually brings healing to the soul, but as such he is also necessarily the apostle of Western crisis. Somewhere inside, I suspect, we all know that he is right, that Jesus’ Father is this good, that we are this loved and accepted, that the Holy Spirit in person has embraced us all in Jesus, but my, my does this ever fly in the face of many of our cherished notions.

The mythology of the fallen mind found its most sublime expression in Greek philosophy, which through Augustine and others then warped Western theology at large. That is not to say, of course, that all is wrong, for the Holy Spirit is blessedly at work in us all. There have been many protest, and many breakthroughs, not least in the great Reformation, and in the work of Karl Barth and others, but the god of the philosophers still reigns in the West. And that is the problem. The Western mind is riddled with two entirely different gods. The one being the Father, Son and Spirit, and the other what the Greeks called the ‘Unmade’ or ‘Unoriginate,’ whose ambiguous nature has steadily been filled with legalistic indifference, distance and sterility. Such a god leaves humanity hesitant, fearful, insecure. The Shack brings the problem to the surface. The love, indeed the tenderness, the sheer approachability and humanity of the Triune God portrayed in The Shack touches the raw nerves of our despairing hearts, and it does so with unimaginable hope. If God is like Papa, Jesus and Sarayu, then my life can be different. I can live loved in peace and hope. But how can this hope become real to us, truly liberating and healing, when the god of the philosophers fills our heads? We are torn between the news of being loved, cared for and accepted, which is given to us in the witness of the Holy Spirit, and the alien concepts that rule our minds from Greece, which tell us that God is not so kind and cannot be trusted. The god of the philosophers with all its theological tentacles must be slain. But that is scary business. For some of those tentacles might be favored notions upon which careers and indeed entire denominations have been built. So, while The Shack is a great story of one man’s healing, it is also a prophetic Word crashing the lifeless party of Western deism, legalism and rationalism. Thank you, Holy Spirit, we will have more please. Kill the beast.

A final word from Athanasius. “The pagans, who are altogether strangers to the Son, were the authors of the word, ‘unmade;’ whereas our Lord Himself commonly spoke of God as His Father, and has taught us in like manner to use and apply the same…. Nowhere in Holy Scripture does the Son call the Father the ‘unmade.’ And when he teaches us to pray, He does not say, ‘When you pray, say, O God unmade,’ but rather, ‘When you pray, say, Our Father, which are in heaven.” (Against the Arians, I.34)

He Became

2009-12-25T01:43:00.002-06:00

"Our beloved Lord Jesus Christ became what we are to bring us to be what he is in himself" (Irenaeus, not an exact quote, but very close). Merry Christmas to all.

Grace

2009-12-18T23:05:00.002-06:00

If you haven’t read the comments from the ‘dead fly’ post you are missing something exceptional, especially bdfwinn’s poem, and 2lb2’s off the charts oration—what a stunner. 2lb2, you need to visit more often. Your comments are welcome here.

Now back to the incarnation. I have written of the incarnation as the Lord’s acceptance of us as fallen creatures, and in terms of His determined identification with us in our fallenness. The Father, Son and Spirit are not in denial about the disaster of the fall, nor do they react with neutrality or indifference, and certainly not with rage. The dream of our adoption stands, but now this dream includes dealing with our profound darkness. The one thing that the Father, Son and Spirit counted on from us—the single divine expectation—is that we would reject Jesus and put Him to death. It is here that we see the incarnation as grace.

I have heard grace defined as ‘God’s unmerited favor’ and as ‘God’s Riches At Christ’s Expense.’ There is something to be said for both ideas, notwithstanding the latter’s assumed and dreadful split between the Father and the Son. The love of the Father, Son and Spirit is certainly unmerited, and it is costly, but more must be said about the pain of grace. To be gracious is to hurt, for it is not merely to wink at a problem, but to enter into it and bear it personally, to endure it, in love and mercy and patience. The incarnation involved and continues to involve Jesus’ entrance into our fallen world and broken lives, and it involves his personal suffering from our blindness. Grace is the freedom to bear another’s scorn, for their salvation.

Many years ago I read Rudyard Kipling’s great poem, “If,” and was struck by one particular line. “If you can keep your head, when all about you are losing theirs, and blaming it on you, you will be a man.” It is the blaming part that reveals the deep heart of grace. Keeping your wits about you, maintaining your balance and orientation can be difficult, but how much more so when everyone else is flying off the handle, so to speak, or losing the plot, as the Ozzies say, and in their fear and pain making you the scapegoat for their trauma? ‘That is what you call ironic,’ as the one-eyed pirate said. And the grace of the blessed Trinity involves terrible irony. Either the Father, Son and Spirit were caught by surprise when we humiliated and murdered Jesus, or they saw it coming, and deliberately incorporated it as the way of incarnation and reconciliation.

We killed the solution. The blessed Trinity expected it, and used our rejection of Jesus as the means to establish a real relationship with us as we are in our brokenness. Such is grace. But as shocking and beautiful as this is, more must be said. For the death of Jesus was not an act of detached, clinical justice. We murdered him, and the act was full of contempt, and disdain, bitterness, mocking, and hatred. The Father’s Son himself was patronized by his own creatures as a blaspheming, demon-possessed, cursed of God liar who mislead the people and deserved to be spit upon and crucified. Jesus deliberately and willfully submitted himself to suffer our patronizing contempt, even to the point of death by public humiliation. The whole world sneered. Part of his grace toward us was the fact that he did not vaporize the human race, and part was his astonishing heart of submission to our profoundly bizarre and cruel judgment. But there was no other way for the dream off the Father, Son and Spirit to be fulfilled. Grace is the freedom to bear the scorn of another’s enlightenment, and Jesus did it, thereby proving himself a Kipling man, gracious, and truly divine.

‘No room in the in,’ was the first hint of the human enmity on Jesus’ horizon. He never batted an eye, and “instead of the joy set before Him, He endured the cross, despising the shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God (Hebrews 12:2). Think about this: in Jesus himself, in his own person and experience, the world of our darkness, contempt and disdain met the world of his relationship with his Father and the Holy Spirit. Jesus is the place where these two worlds met and are united. By bearing our bitter, patronizing cruelty, Jesus has united his life with the worst of ours. That is acceptance, and identification, real forgiveness and reconciliation, and that is grace. And it is real. And we are included in Jesus’ relationship with his Father and the Holy Spirit, because, as Athanasius said, he is a gracious and merciful Lord who loves the human race.

“What love, what care, what fearless joy
has found us in the night
that we may know as he has known
the everlasting light”

May the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of his Papa, and the free flowing fellowship of the Holy Spirit overwhelm us all, this season in particular.

The Dead Fly

2009-12-11T12:52:00.002-06:00

A new post is in the works on the incarnation and grace, but I could not help but relay what just happened. As I was writing I paused to reflect on a point when I noticed a dead fly in the window seal. If a picture paints a thousand words, a dead fly in the window seal speaks volumes. Vintage Holy Spirit.

Here are a few of the thoughts that filled my mind as I stared at the dead fly.

• He left it all on his field of dreams.
• Effort exhausts without truth.
• A false savior will kill you every time.
• We can’t invent freedom.
• It’s not up to us to make it.
• Things are not always what they seem.
• It’s okay to stop and rest.
• Listen
• Universalism?

I made a little banner with a post-it note and a tooth pick. On the banner I wrote “I did it my way.” Then I took some small rocks and hoisted the banner above the fly in honor of his Herculean effort.

Post your own comments and I will place them in the main text after a few days.

Thank you Lord Jesus that you found a way to meet us in our darkness.

Expectation

2009-12-03T13:13:00.001-06:00

The incarnation is about the Lord’s acceptance of us as we are as fallen creatures, and about the stunning move to so identify with us as to see things the way we do. A third lesson on the incarnation has to with divine expectation. Read the Prologue of John with the following questions in mind. What does God expect from us in the incarnation? What is He counting on us to do to make the incarnation a success? Most of us, I suspect, would say that the Lord is expecting us, or counting on us to believe. But think of this statement: “He came to His own, and those who were His own did not receive Him (John 1:10).

If the Lord was counting on us to believe in order for the incarnation to happen, then bitter divine disappointment lay on the horizon. For our response was to crucify the Father’s Son.

Let me share a lesson from the deer stand, a book I have been reading, and a story from a friend, all of which may help us understand that the only expectation that the blessed Trinity had of the human race is that we would murder the Father’s Son.

Sitting on my deer stand, reading James Hollis’ The Middle Passage, I heard the fabled snap of a stick. It sounded like it came from straight in front of me, maybe at 11:30, if you imagine 12:00 being directly in front of me. I began to stare at every tree, branch and twig. The more I stared, the more I was convinced that I could see a deer, a buck, large and in charge. It took me a full minute to grab my gun and get it pointed in the right direction. As I looked through the scope I could not see the buck at all. So I moved my eyes away from the scope and scanned the area. Nothing. But as I stared I began to see the buck again. Shouldering my rifle, I looked through my scope but there was no buck. This back and forth went on for over ten minutes before I finally accepted, as all deer hunters know, that in the woods our minds can play tricks on us.

On the way home I phoned my friend Ken Courtney and he relayed a lesson that he had learned many years ago in his training in the National Guard. His team was being taught how to spot things in the woods in the dead of night. Never, he said, stare at the object. When you hear or see something, look at it, then turn away and focus on something else, then come back and look again, then look away. When you stare or focus on something for very long your mind’s eye will create something that is not there.

I was amazed at the apparent coincidence of Ken’s lesson and my experience with ‘seeing’ the buck, with what I was reading in The Middle Passage. One of Hollis’ main points is what he calls “the Magical Other.” It seems that in our dating days we so stare or focus upon our new found beloved that we create an image of them that is not actually there. Our minds (or hearts, or brokenness) play a trick on us. We create the Magical Other who will be our life, our security, our completion, our salvation, our wholeness, and they do the same with us. Unearthly expectations run high, hope abounds, and all is well in never never land.

It is disappointing enough when the buck turns out to be a figment of our own imaginations, but it is an altogether different matter when cracks appear in our Magical Other. It is inevitable. Think about it, two broken people make gods and goddesses out of each other. How long can that last? At some point the incongruence between the real person and the image we have plastered over their faces—an image conceived in the dungeons of our own brokenness—becomes very apparent. Given the intensity of our investment in our Magical Other, and given how deep and dear the dream is to us, its shattering is catastrophic. A new world of bitter disappointment and venomous blame, of frustration and anger, of withdrawal and manipulation, among other things, burst into being. The relationship dies. Couples split up, and each one goes out and does the same thing all over again, plastering his or her dreams of life onto the face of a new, true love. ‘This one is different, special. I just know it.’

Was it ever a real relationship to begin with? And has it really died? After I realized that there was no buck, I had the opportunity to go back to real hunting. When the dream of the Magical Other is shattered, the simple truth is that we then have an opportunity to get to know the real person, and to accept them as they are, to identify with them, and have real relationship, and who knows, maybe even find the companionship and communion we have longed for all along.

It is a glorious truth that the blessed Trinity is not into projection. There is no dungeon of brokenness in the basement of the Trinitarian life of God out of which dreams for us are born. The dream of the Father, Son, and Spirit for our adoption, for our inclusion in their shared life, love and fellowship carries no expectations for our contribution. We are not the Magical Other of the Trinity, upon whom the Father, Son and Spirit project their hope of one day becoming whole.

In shocking grace and humility, the one expectation of the Triune God, the one thing that the Father, Son and Spirit counted on from us in order to make the incarnation a reality is that we would pour our scorn, our anger, our wrath, our judgment onto Jesus, humiliating him publicly by cruel crucifixion. And Jesus deliberately and wonderfully endured it all. In bearing our scorn, and submitting himself to our bitter anger, Jesus met us where we are in the dungeon of our brokenness. He accepted us. He identified with us, and through having no expectations from us other than that we would reject him, he has established a personal relationship with us at our very worst. Now, Jesus lives in our dungeons, and he brought his Papa and the Holy Spirit with him. In the very place where our disastrous dream of the Magical Other (and its poisonous demands) is born now dwells the life and fellowship and love of the blessed Trinity.

Discovering Jesus in the dungeons of our brokenness means that we do not have to dream of a Magical Other or plaster our dream upon their face and demand that they live up to our unearthly expectations. And it means that we do not have to impose our agendas upon the lives of our friends, or of creation. Discovering Jesus in the dungeon means we are free to live in and out of the real dream of the Father, Son and Spirit, for now our adoption is no dream at all, but the simple truth. We are included in their shared life. The Father, Son and Spirit have pitched their tent inside our dungeon. Such a discovery is the beginning of faith and repentance (a radical change in the way we see), and it is the beginning of the freedom to accept others and to be accepted, to know and to be known, to love and to be loved, to delight and being delighted in.

Lord Jesus forgive us for what we have done to you and to one another in our pain. Holy Spirit help us meet Jesus in our dungeons.

References
James Hollis, The Middle Passage: From Misery to Meaning in Middle Life
James Hollis, The Eden Project: In Search of the Magical Other.

From Dirk Vanderleest

2009-12-01T12:01:00.001-06:00

Dear Friends of Perichoresis,

Now that we finally figured out how to send emails through our web site, let me introduce myself. My name is Dirk Vanderleest. I am the CEO of the Jackson Municipal Airport Authority. I have been a part of the ministry of Perichoresis since its beginning back in the early 90’s, and now serve as the Chairman of its Board. It is one of the highlights of my life to be involved in such a ministry.

Yesterday I Googled “Baxter Kruger” and discovered over 6 million results. I was shocked and thrilled. Then I checked the numbers on Baxter’s blog. To date his blog has been accessed over 44,000 times from over 70 countries. Again, I was shocked and thrilled, and then perplexed. As a businessmen I could not help but wonder, how can a ministry with this kind of impact be financially strapped every month? As you know, Baxter is a theologian for the masses and a great communicator of the real gospel, but he is not good about communicating how our ministry survives, or about asking for money to support it.

Here are the business facts. Book and lecture sales make up about one tenth of our annual budget of one hundred and fifteen thousand dollars. The rest comes from private donation, people like you and me, who have been blessed by this ministry and want to see it touch the whole world. There is some contribution from churches, but not much. As one of our Board members put it, ‘there are a lot of folks feeding from our trough and not even leaving a tip.’ I think the problem is that many people who of have been blessed by our ministry simply don’t know that their help is sorely needed. So I am asking you to help support this ministry. A contribution of $20.00 or more a month would go along way. If you can do more we would be thrilled. I realize that we are all struggling these days, but I also realize that Perichoresis has helped millions of people around the world. A small contribution from a large number of people will help stabilize the financial part of our ministry, and it would help us expand our outreach so that many more folks can find real healing and hope.

• You can contribute by making a tax-deductible check payable to Perichoresis and by sending it to:
Perichoresis
P. O. Box 98157
Jackson, MS 39298

• You can contribute anywhere in the world through our web site (perichoresis.org). If, like me, that word is to hard too remember, visit and it will guide you to our main web site. Once there look for the word “Donate” between “Free Resources” and “Subscription,” just under the black Perichoresis banner at the top of the page. Click on “Donate.”

• In Canada send tax-deductible check payable Incarnation Ministries to:
Incarnation Ministries
P. O. Box 11168
2620-1055 West Georgia Street
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Thank you for your help and contribution.

Sincerely,

Dirk Vanderleest

Identification

2009-11-22T11:13:00.002-06:00

The last blog was focused on the incarnation as an act of divine acceptance of the human race as we are in our profound confusion. Without approving of what happened in Adam, and without being in denial about it, the Lord, in His everlasting commitment to share His abounding life with us, became what we are. Before creation the Father, Son and Spirit dreamed of our adoption. Unto this end the universe and humanity were called into being, and the Lord entered into real relationship with Adam and Eve. Believing the lie of the evil one opened the door for darkness and alienation to enter Adam’s world, ruining all possibility of relationship between Adam and the Lord.

The first response of the Lord was simple acceptance (without approval) of what had happened. Then came His clothing of his terrified creatures. And recall that I said the clothing of Adam and Eve was never about God and some divine need to be appeased. The clothing was about the afflicted and terrorized conscience of Adam and Eve. For there can be no real relationship, and thus no real sharing of life, when fear and hiding dominate Adam’s fallen mind. For John, the incarnation involves the Lord’s acceptance of the fallen world, and it involves a stunning move toward real identification. “The Word became flesh, and dwelt among us.” That is to say, the Father’s son not only became human, but so entered into our fallen world as to establish relationship with us as fallen creatures. He entered into Adam’s fallen mind, identifying with the way Adam, and the human race at large, see things.

The sharing of life is the point, which necessitates real relationship, which in turn necessitates that we must find a way into God’s life, or the Lord must find a way to into ours. Acceptance is the first step. Identification is the next. We are capable of neither. So the Lord is his abounding grace, as Irenaeus said nearly 19 centuries ago, became what we are (Irenaeus was a disciple of Polycarp who was a disciple of John, the disciple of Jesus).

Identification, like acceptance, does not mean approval. It means that one person so desires to share life with another (which is the trinitarian way of being) that she or he is willing to enter into the other person’s way of thinking, seeing and believing (without necessarily approving of them at all), even into the other’s way of seeing themselves. For John, that “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us” means that the Father’s Son has identified with us in our profound darkness, especially with our grotesque confusion about his Father. There are few words more terrible than “He came unto His own and His own received Him not.” Yet that is exactly what the Father’s Son did. He entered not only into our world, but into our darkness and dastardly broken way of seeing, believing and thinking, and there he was terribly rejected, exactly as He knew He would be. Think about it. This is not naïve divine denial. Jesus and His Father and the Holy Spirit knew what we would do—reject Jesus—and Jesus embraced our rejection, deliberately and astonishingly allowing Himself to be cursed and damned by His own creation. And—and the existence of the universe hangs on this and—in allowing Himself to be cursed by His own creation, He met us in our sickness, and He brought His Father and the Holy Spirit with Him.

So then, the Father, Son and Spirit (and their shared life, love and fellowship) have not only accepted us in our terrible sin, but have so made their way into our craziness that their shared life now dwells in our brazen, wrongheaded rejection. Jesus’ way of seeing and believing and thinking has set up shop inside our darkness. His own relationship with His Father, and His own relationship with the Holy Spirit have—through His enduring of our bitter scorn—pitched their tent inside our hell. Acceptance. Identification. Determined love. Real relationship. The Word became flesh and dwelt among us.

Acceptance

2009-11-06T17:49:00.001-06:00

The incarnation means that the Father’s one and only Son became a human being, bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh. He who is face to face with the Father became what we are. Such staggering humility is a theme in itself, and we will come back to the Lord’s humility, but for the moment, the focus is upon the hidden acceptance involved in the coming of the Father’s Son.

In the Genesis narrative (and excuse me if I refer to something other than John and Ephesians) Adam and Eve’s fall left them hiding from the presence of the Lord. Terrorized and overwhelmed with guilt, they were not about to come out and face the Lord. And the Lord, in beautiful and astonishing grace, met them where they were in their new found darkness. He clothed them. Most of us in the West, subject as we are to the trauma of legalism, would assume that the Lord clothed them so that He could look at them, given that He is so holy as to not be able to look upon sinners. Such a notion is the product, in my opinion, of the fallen mind. The act of clothing Adam and Eve is not about the Lord and His supposed need to be appeased, but about Adam and Eve and their afflicted conscience. They have believed the lie, and doubted the very heart of the Lord. In believing that the Lord is not really for them they have adopted a profoundly alien paradigm. How could they possibly react to the presence of the Lord, given what they now believe about Him. The Lord, however, has set His heart upon Adam and Eve, and in them upon the race at large, to do us good beyond our wildest dreams. But now that Adam has bought the lie such relationship is beyond possibility.

I submit that the clothing of Adam and Eve had no Godward direction at all. It had nothing to do with the fallen notion that we must pacify and angry God, or that God needs to be pacified. The clothing of Adam and Eve was an act of concession on the Lord’s part, accommodating Adam’s fallen imagination, in order to establish a real relationship with Adam and Eve in their fallenness. In His astonishing love, and in determination to fulfill His dreams for our adoption, the Lord stoops to meet Adam and Eve where there are, to relate to them as fallen creatures. He accepts the situation. He accepts the fall as reality for Adam and Eve. He does not approve of their debacle, but neither is He in denial about what has happened. Adam and Eve have bought the lie. Their basic cast of mind is now terribly skewed. They believe terrible things about the Lord. They are hiding. The Lord meets them in their darkness and clothes them so that their conscience can be somewhat quieted, and perhaps a new relationship can begin.

The incarnation is the same love and determination writ large. The Lord comes in person. He comes to us. He enters into our world of darkness. He comes to His own. He not only becomes a human being; He becomes flesh. That is to say, He enters into the bushes with Adam and Eve, stepping into their terribly wrongheaded frame of reference and way of thinking. Why? To meet us where we are. To establish a real relationship with us as we are in our brokenness.

The incarnation is an act of divine acceptance of the human race as we are in our profound confusion. Without approving of what has happened, and without being in denial about it, the Lord, in His relentless love and determination to live in relationship with us and to share His abounding life with us, becomes what we are.

There is a lesson here about the power of acceptance. To accept someone is not necessarily to approve of what they are about, or even of what has happened. To accept them is to say that we recognize that what has happened is real, and that we intend to meet them where they actually are. The incarnation is the determination of the love of the Father, Son and Spirit to establish a real relationship with us as we are in our darkness. It is a costly move, as John announces in his prologue. ‘He came unto his own and His own received Him not.’ This rejection on our part will lead to the terrible shout, ‘Crucify, Crucify Him!’ And this shout, which is more than mere words, is where the incarnation finds its ultimate fulfillment. As we, as the Jews, as the Gentiles, the Romans, and the race at large nail the Lord to the cross of Calvary in utter rejection, He submits Himself to our brazen wrongheaded judgment, thereby meeting us at our utter worst, thereby establishing a real relationship with us as we are in our fallen, broken, judgmental craziness. And He brought His Father and the Holy Spirit with Him.

Acceptance leads to real relationship, and real relationship leads to real relationship.

May the Holy Spirit give us more light.

Notes on John's Prologue 1

2009-10-30T17:12:00.002-05:00

Over the next few months I will be sharing some of my thoughts on John’s famous prologue (1:1-18). Much like Paul’s opening statement in Ephesians, which runs from vs. 3 to vs. 14, John’s prologue is packed. Each and every word and phrase are chosen deliberately. I suspect John wrote his prologue last, as a shorter version of his gospel at large. For the gospel is the prologue expanded.

John begins and ends with a revolution in human thought about the very being of God.

In the beginning the Word was, and the Word was (face to face) with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning (face to face) with God (1:1-2).

No human has ever seen God. The one and only Son of God, who dwells in the bosom of the Father, he has made Him known (1:18).

As a good Jewish man, John believes that God created the heavens and the earth, and all things. And while John affirms the opening verse in the Hebrew bible, (In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth) he wants to fill out our concept of God by adding relationship. So John starts before creation itself, and places the Word, or the Son, there before the beginning with God.

John has met Jesus, and in meeting him, in knowing him, he has concluded that Jesus belongs to the divine side of things. Jesus is everything that God is, the one and only Son, who dwells in the Father’s bosom from all eternity. And he became human.

John’s thought is a revolution in human thought about the being of God, a revolution which took over three hundreds to reach formulation in the doctrine of the Trinity. But for John, the implications are staggering, and form the heart of his message. The one who is face to face with the Father from before the beginning, the one who dwells in his bosom, and knows the Father inside out, this one has become a human being (1:14) to be with us. The Father’s Son himself has come. He has become human, what we are, and the Father’s Son has become one of us so that he could share with us all that he is and has with his Father in the anointing of the Holy Spirit. That is the staggering sequence. Divine relationship. Incarnation. Sharing of divine life. And nothing less.

Before the beginning, the Son was face to face with his Father, dwelling in his bosom. He became one of us, to dwell among us, so that we could receive of his own fulness and life. Herein lies the heart of John’s message, and he writes so that we can come to see who Jesus is and who we are in him, and what stunning life has been given to the human race in him.

Put your big boy britches on and deal with it. This is what has happened. The Father’s Son himself has come. And he has established a real relationship with us in our darkness, so that we could share in, taste and feel, and experience, all that he is and has in his life with his Father.

Everything in John’s gospel is calculated to help us, who live in the great darkness, to come to ‘know’ Jesus for ourselves, so that believing in him, we may begin to experience his own life, rather than our own. So John’s gospel is both the announcement of the coming of the Father’s Son in person, and the news that summons us to believe in him, rather than in ourselves, so that we can know what he knows—the Father, and experience life in his embrace.

On Evil

2009-10-09T14:38:00.001-05:00

Dualism says that good and evil are equal powers, with Jesus and Satan squared off for the prize of humanity. But in the Christian tradition, Satan is a creature whose opposite is not Jesus at all, but the archangel Michael. Jesus is the Creator, Satan a creature, apparently an angel, now fallen. In his incarnate life, death, resurrection and ascension, Jesus has overcome evil, disarming the rulers and principalities and authorities in the heavenly places. Jesus’ lordship, however, is not yet completely manifested. He instructs us to pray for his Father’s will to be done on earth, as it is in heaven, and for us to pray to be delivered from the evil one. Moreover, we are constantly called to participate in Jesus’ life and lordship.

The sticky bit lies here, between the completeness of Jesus’ victory in himself, and yet the continued presence and work of Satan and his cronies on earth. The presence and influence of evil, of course, seem to argue that Jesus’ victory is not real. It may be, however, a little more complicated than that. For me, Jesus’ victory is absolute, a non-negotiable. But his victory, and this I think is critical, includes us, and us not as robots, but as real persons. Jesus has included us in his own life with his Father, and in his own anointing in the Holy Spirit, and in his own relationship with all creation. For the most part, I have always focussed on the sheer, stunning beauty of such an act. We are included in the Trinitarian life of God. But the other side is equally beautiful and stunnning. The Father, Son and Spirit have included us in their life. They take us seriously. As Barth so wonderfully put it, “God does not want to be God without us.” And the fact that we are included in the Trinitarian life means that the Father, Son and Spirit are not doing end runs around us. As shocking as it may seem, the Triune God does not operate as if we are not included in the Trinitarian life.

It is here, I suspect, and who knows, that the evil one finds a temporary toe-hold in Jesus’ world. These days, especially in physics, we have come to understand that the human mind is not simply a detached observer of the world around it. What we ‘observe’ actually impacts the thing or things we are observing. The human mind is powerful. But not in itself. That is the mistake the self-help, and the faith folks make. Jesus is the One in and through and by and for whom all things were created, and are sustained. He is the One connected to all things. The cosmos is wired, so to speak, to respond to his thoughts and observations. Having been given a real place in Jesus’ life means, among other things, that we have been given a real place in His connection with everything in the cosmos. While we do not have any power in ourselves (because we do not have any real connections with things in ourselves), our inclusion in Jesus means that we have the plivelege of participating in his powerful connections. What we think, or believe, or observe matters, because of who we are in Jesus.

I suspect, and again, who can really say, that this is what the evil one knows about us that we don’t. He has found a way, for the moment, to hijack, to borrow a great word from Ken Blue, the goodwill and life and power of Jesus through us. Satan exploits and misuses us, and our place in Jesus. It is not that Satan has found a way to reprogram our hard drives, for that would be to violate our wills. He has found a way to deceive us so that we unwittingly, yet willingly, bring his poison into our ‘observations’ of ourselves, others, and life.

If we were not connected to Jesus, then our ‘observations’ would not impact a single particle, even in our own minds, no matter how we strained get our faith right. But we are, and they do. Diabolos exploits Jesus’ relationship with us and our relationship with Jesus through his lie. That is all that he has. Even his own existence comes from Jesus himself. His time is limited because he has been defeated by the Lord Jesus, and because the Holy Spirit himself has been sent to us to teach us the truth. As we come to know the truth, the truth of who we are in Jesus, and as we learn by experience that Satan’s lie is a yoke, grievous to be born, (Thank you, J. B. Torrance) and we cry out to be delivered from his deception, he will have no place in the life of humanity. Toto will have pulled back the curtain of Satan’s confusion, and we will be shocked at the mere creature who has deceived the nations. Then the Lord of all creation will speak to him.

Meantime, we cry out to the Holy Spirit for light, for understanding, for the freedom and life that is ours in Christ to be manifested in our ‘observations.’

“These things I have spoken to you, that in me you might have peace. In the world you have tribulation, but be of good cheer; I have overcome the cosmos (John 16:33).

The Image of God

2009-09-08T08:42:00.002-05:00

Sorry for the long delay in posting another blog. I have been working around the clock on a new book. One part of the book deals with ‘the image of God,’ which has a long and storied history of debate and discussion. For the most part in the West we have thought of the image of God in terms of the human mind, or our capacity for self-reflection and intellectual or rational thought. To be created in the image of God means that we are ‘rational’ creatures. Karl Barth, as he was want to do, opened a new world when he proposed that the image of God had more to do with being created male and female. Irenaeus, in the early Church, set forward a distinction between ‘the image’ and ‘the likeness’ of God, such that we were created in ‘the image of God,’ but were to grow into ‘the likeness of God.’ This distinction gives a real place for relationship and human personhood. The Greek Orthodox tradition has followed Irenaeus with considerable fruitfulness.

It would seem obvious that whatever it is that we believe about God will shape what we think about being created in God’s image. And here it gets interesting. Note this classic definition of God from the Westminster Larger Catechism.

Q. 7. What is God?
A. God is a Spirit, in and of himself infinite in being, glory, blessedness, and perfection, all-sufficient, eternal, unchangeable, incomprehensible, everywhere present, almighty, knowing all things, most wise, most holy, most just, most merciful and gracious, long-suffering, and abundant in goodness and truth.

While one could find biblical support for each of these ideas about God, this definition is shockingly abstract and non-relational. There is no mention of the love of God, or of the relationship of the Father, Son and Spirit, or of their communion together. It is, as T. F. Torrance says, ‘not essentially or distinctively Christian’ (The Mediation of Christ, p. 101). What would being created in the image of this non-relational deity look like?

In my study of John’s gospel, it has gradually dawned on me that whatever else ‘the image of God’ may mean, it surely involves being wired, as it were, relationally. If we start with the faceless, nameless omni-being, who watches us from the infinite distance of a largely judgmental heart, then our basic ideas of the imago dei will naturally follow suit. But, if with John, and the early Church, we start with the relationship of the Father, Son and Spirit, then to be created in the image of God means, at the very least, that we are designed to be relational, open, not closed or self-contained.

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” The Greek preposition translated ‘with’ in John’s opening statement, ‘and the Word was with God,’ means far more than ‘with’ as we would use it today. We could say that we sat 'with' Heather on the train, but that only means that we were there, in the same place, side by side, with Heather. ‘With’ in John 1:1 means ‘turned towards, open to, face to face.’ So we are immediately thrown into the world of intimacy, fellowship, sharing, and communion. John ends his famous prologue by bringing us back to this foundational point, but this time with an even more intimate image when he speaks of the Son as being ‘in the bosom of the Father’ (v.18)

So John, in a deliberate play on the opening words of the Bible, “In the beginning, God created…” fills in the notion of ‘God’ with intimate, face to face fellowship. This sets our thoughts on a relational trajectory from the beginning. For John, the very being of God involves love, sharing and fellowship. To be created in the image of this God is thus to be designed for personal interaction, intimacy, and communion. We were never made to be isolated, self-contained, vacuum sealed like a coffee can.

The implications of this foundational notion are incalculable. But let me make a few quick points. First, at the deepest level of our being we are open, not closed. Created in the image of the Trinity means that we were designed to receive the life of the Triune God, and to share this life with others. Second, being wired for relationship, we can never ‘find ourselves’ in isolation from others. Neither the Father, nor the Son, nor the Holy Spirit exist alone. As fellowship lies at the heart of the being of God, so life and meaning for us comes in relationship. But, so does the greatest pain. Since we are made for relationship, there is nothing quite as traumatic as a broken one. There is profound pain in being alone, isolated, cut off from others, whether by our own mistakes, or by the vicissitudes of life. To feel rejected hurts like hell because it is a violation of our very being.

Like it or not, we live between the ‘rock’ of being wired for relationship and never finding fulfillment without them, and the ‘hard place’ of giving ourselves to be known and possibly being rejected. I would hazard a guess that most of us compromise by presenting what we think will be an ‘acceptable’ version of ourselves, thereby securing something of the life that comes in relationship, without running the risk of being known and thus opening ourselves to possibly experiencing the hell of personal rejection.

The fellowship of the blessed Trinity is not based upon their achieving good marks against an external standard, which stands above the Father, Son and Spirit, keeping constant vigil on their behavior. The communion of the Triune God is rooted in the freedom to love. For us to move from being created in ‘the image’ into ‘the likeness’ of the Triune God, (or to become what we are, and thus experience life) involves our accepting that we are broken people. In being honest with our own brokenness, we are opening ourselves to hear (within the dark world the lie) the truth that we are known and loved as we are. We always have been, and always will be. This is the world of the Triune God of love. Knowing that we are loved and accepted as we are opens us to know and to be known, to love and to be loved, to care and to be cared for—intimacy, fellowship, communion, which leads to life and fulfillment.

Holy Spirit, help us to receive forgiveness, and take baby steps into the freedom of being known.

You Are the Child the Father Always Wanted Part 6

2009-08-12T00:52:00.004-05:00

You Are the Child the Father Always Wanted Part 5

2009-08-12T00:51:00.002-05:00

You Are the Child the Father Always Wanted Part 4

2009-08-12T00:50:00.002-05:00

You Are the Child the Father Always Wanted Part 3

2009-08-12T00:49:00.002-05:00

You Are the Child the Father Always Wanted Part 2

2009-08-12T00:48:00.003-05:00

First Perichoresis podcast series on iTunes

2009-08-11T23:12:00.016-05:00

One of my flat-bellied friends with YWAM has been after me to put some of our stuff on iTunes. So I told him to take one of my favorite series and go for it. So the six lectures from the series "You Are the Child the Father Always Wanted" are now available here and on iTunes. Share them with your friends.

You know you can visit our web site www.perichoresis.org for more audio downloads, books, prayers, and more. Also, since 'perichoresis' is too hard to spell for some folks, we have a new link site, thegreatdance.org.

Do your thing Holy Spirit.

Baxter

Escape the Ordinary

2009-07-25T16:29:00.004-05:00

The separation of Jesus from his creation, and the human race from Jesus is disastrous. This dualism leaves us assuming that our human existence is merely human, with, at best, a random, whimsical influence of the Holy Spirit. And if our fatherhood and motherhood, our work and play, laughter, music and romance are all bereft of the Holy Spirit, we are forced to look beyond our humanity for the Spirit and for real spirituality. But the Son of God became a human being, and in his ascension he did not discard his humanity as an old and useless robe. The incarnation and the continuing existence of the Son incarnate means that the Trinitarian life is now thoroughly human. Jesus spent most of his time not preaching, but working as a carpenter. Was his carpentry outside of his relationship with his Father and the Holy Spirit? To be sure, Jesus was anointed with the Spirit for his messianic work at the river Jordan, but that could never mean that the Holy Spirit or his Father were absent before that event. Jesus is the one who knows the Father and he is the one anointed in the Holy Spirit. The incantation means that he lived out his relationship with his Father and his relationship with the Holy Spirit as a human being, and he continues to do so now and for all eternity. The sphere of the Holy Spirit’s work is Jesus Christ, and the relationships that he has established (or reestablished) in his incarnate existence. To put this the other way around, Jesus has included the human race, and all creation in his own relationship with his Father and in his own anointing in the Holy Spirit. It is in our humanity that the Holy Spirit is bearing his fruit.

A while back there was a billboard not far from my home. It was an advertisement for a local Church. It read, “Escape the Ordinary.” There it was, Plato, Greek dualism, non-incarnational spirituality (in Jesus’ name) plastered for all to see. Jesus has been thoroughly disassociated from our ordinary humanity, the Holy Spirit is at work in some invisible, non-human sphere, so come to our Church to experience non-human spirituality. Why would we want to escape the ordinary when Jesus has embraced it and brought his Father and the Holy Spirit with him? My heart hurts for the carpenters in that Church, and for the mothers and fathers, the teachers, cooks and nurses, the ‘ordinary’ workers who give themselves everyday to help make our world function. They have been duped into believing that they must come to Church (and who knows what else) to experience the Holy Spirit, when they should have been lead by the Church to see the blessed Trinity at the florist, or the gas station, or in the music, the laughter, the love and joy and service all around them.

When we don’t see it, we invent it. When the human race is ripped out of the embrace of the Triune God (in our fallen, Greek-infested imaginations), we are forced to invent a non-human spirituality, and then forced to convince people that what we have invented is indeed the real dingo. And then forced to believe that it is so, or that our boredom with this dance in the darkness is the fruit of our lack of commitment. Our humanity, our relationships, our loves, joys and burdens, our work, our play are all minimized, devalued and made to be second rate.

A pastor once came to me in tears because the Holy Spirit had ‘fallen’ on a Church across town, and left her and her congregation behind. She could not understand. They had fasted and prayed for months, yet the Holy Spirit fell on another congregation.

“Do you love your husband and children? I asked.

“Of course.”

“Do you serve them, care for them? Wouldn’t you give your life for them?”

“Of course, I would,” she said with considerable intensity, and a quizzical look as if to ask ‘what has this got to do with the Holy Spirit?’

“Well,” I asked, “are you telling me that your love and care and service for your family, and your willingness to lay down your life for them, if necessary, all originate in you? Did you create that love? Are you that good? Or could it be that the love you know and experience for your family and for others is actually the super-natural, extraordinary love of the Father, Son and Spirit already at work within you?

Jesus said, “I am the light of the cosmos. The one who follows me shall never, ever walk in the darkness, but shall have the light of life” (John 8:12). To follow Jesus means, at the very least, that we raise our hands and say, ‘Jesus, I do not want to see things the way that I see them any more. I want to see your Father, and the Holy Spirit, myself and others and all creation with your eyes, the way you see them.’ As the light of Jesus shines into our darkness, we will not be yearning to escape the ordinary, we will be stunned and full of wonder at the ordinary presence of the blessed Trinity in our humanity. Heaven is not a bodiless state in an invisible place. Heaven is the life of the Father, Son and Spirit coming to full and abiding expression in our human existence, and the earth and the cosmos are filled with the life and love and fellowship of the blessed Trinity. Meantime we grieve over the self-centeredness, over the lust and greed, the social and racial, environmental and political and religious injustices that run wild around us, wreaking such havoc in our lives. And we fast and pray for the Holy Spirit to reveal the truth to us in our darkness. We pray for people to be given eyes to see and that the way things are in Jesus Christ would indeed emerge more and more in our human existence.

Thank you, Holy Spirit. Without you our lives would be a miserable mess of dark sadness. We are grateful for your presence and for the fruit you produce in our lives. Help us to see Jesus and his life in others, in work and play and music, in relationships, laughter and ordinary life. We are grieved that our world is so lost in the dark imagination of the fallen mind. We feel helpless to make any difference. Shine the light of Jesus.

Farming and the Holy Spirit

2009-07-03T17:04:00.002-05:00

Ten or so years ago I was traveling through the Midwest to speak at a conference. A young man had picked me up at the airport and we were driving through farmland country. I liked him immediately, and we jump straight into conversation. As we drove through the flatlands everywhere we looked there were farms, tractors and men plowing. I asked the young man what he was planning to do when he gradated from college. He quickly replied, ‘I am going to seminary.’ ‘So you want to be a pastor?’ ‘Yes,’ he replied. So I asked if he had ever thought about how the Holy Spirit related to all those farmers plowing their fields. ‘No, not really,’ he said, ‘I have never thought about that.’ ‘Well,’ I said, ‘it would be a good idea for your think on that, as almost all of your parishioners will be farmers, or from farming families. These men spend 60 plus hours a week farming, and their families are right with them. So if you don’t know how the Holy Spirit relates to what they do, you are essentially saying that most of their lives fall outside the realm of the Trinitarian life of God. As their pastor, what exactly are you going to urge them to do to be spiritual?’

After a moment of awkward silence, I asked him if he prayed before he ate supper in the evening. ‘Of course,’ he said, ‘I always thank the Lord for the food we are about to receive.’ ‘Why?’ I asked. ‘Why thank the Lord?’ It was one of the first times that the utter craziness of the sacred-secular dichotomy was so clear to me. The young man looked at me like I had grown a third eye. ‘How is it that you thank the Lord for the food that these farmers and their families grew with such great care, and yet you do not know how the Lord relates to their lives as farmers? And what exactly is the good news that you will be proclaiming to these farmers and their families?’

One of the great disasters of Western deism here stares us in the face. These farmers and their wives and children give their lives, day after day, month after month, year after year, to grow food to feed thousands of people. And I would hazard a guess that for the most part they love what they do. On Sundays they do their religious duty and go to Church, or at least they used to. I wonder if they have ever heard a single sermon on the way their lives and farming are a participation in Jesus’ anointing in the Holy Spirit, one of the ways they are a part of the kingdom of the Triune God. And if not, what then have they heard?

What do we say to the man who drives the bread truck six days a week, or the teacher who gives her heart for children with little recognition of her real value and less money? What do we say to the fishermen, the firemen, the oil workers and architects, the nurses and mechanics, the sanitation engineers, social workers and business men and women, to the fathers and mothers, grandfathers and grandmothers about what they do with the vast majority of their time on this planet? ‘Sorry, what you do is nice, but second class, just on the edge of the Holy Spirit, but still outside?’ I have seen preachers do the lip quiver asking for money to support people who are in ‘full time’ Christian ministry, as if the farmer and his family, the nurse, the grandmother are not.

I think this is one of the great issues of our day. If the ‘modern’ Christian message is incapable of affirming people in their humanity, in their work and play and relationships, then we don’t have anything much to say to them, other than ‘do your duty now so you can go to heaven when you die’? Why should they come to Church? Why would they be interested in anything we have to say. The modern message is irrelevant to their lives here and now.

But what if we told people who they are? What if we told them that they were included in Jesus, and in his relationship with his Father, and in his anointing in the Holy Spirit? What if we told the bread truck driver that his work was inspired by the Holy Spirit himself? What if we treated him as if it were true? What if we told the teacher that her burden for her students did not originate in her at all, but in the love of the Father, Son and Spirit, and that her participation in their love was as beautiful as it was critical? What if we told the farmer and his family that the Lord has no intention of being the Lord without them (to borrow from Karl Barth) and that their farming was the fruit of the Holy Spirit? What if we began to relate to people and to what they do with the honor and respect that belongs to Jesus himself and the Holy Spirit?

The Spirit's Presence

2009-06-29T09:27:00.002-05:00

Last night my wife Beth and I had a fantastic meal at a local restaurant called Que Sera Sera (Whatever Will Be Will Be—and no, I did not miss the irony). I had redfish, one of my favorites, topped with an assortment of peppers and crabmeat, and an unearthly seafood cream sauce. Beth had fried green tomatoes with crabmeat—a Southern delicacy. It was awesome. As we bowed to thank the Lord for such a meal a series of thoughts raced through my mind, and then two very distinct memories of similar moments of insight (forthcoming in another blog).

The first thought regarded all the time and effort that went into making the dish. Being a fisherman, I thought of all the folks involved in catching that redfish, which to my knowledge is not commercially available, so someone had to sacrifice for Jesus and go red fishing, and someone had to make lures, fishing line, reels, anchors and a boat and motor. Then they had to get the fish from the Gulf to Jackson and to Que Sera in a hurry. Then I thought of the hours and hours that had been spent by many people perfecting the sauce, and of the cooks, the waiters, the English brewers of New Castle Brown Ale, and even of the architect who designed the building, the men who built it, the painters, the decorators, and of the beautiful fans that kept the outdoor area fairly cool. And right behind my chair was a wonderfully conceived flower garden, full of color and obviously loved and nurtured. Our waitress told us she was new, but she worked hard to make our evening as wonderful as she could—and she did.

As we break through the veil of Western Deism and think of the Holy Spirit’s presence and work in the light of the relationship Jesus has established with the human race, and indeed with the cosmos, we are ready for a simple question of enormous significance.

Why do we thank the Lord for the food?

Don’t get me wrong. Of course we thank the Lord for food and beauty, for life and relationships, for breath, for our wives and husbands and families, but is it not the case that when we thank the Lord for a meal, we are in fact speaking volumes about the presence and activity of the Holy Spirit, as well as the ‘ordinary’ people who are involved in the meal?

When we thank the Lord for our meal we are instinctively or intuitively operating out of a reality that scarcely makes the front page of our rational theological discussions. In our prayers are we not acknowledging the participation (perhaps unwitting) of each and every person in the Lord’s lavish gifts to us? Our heart theology is way better than our head theology. As my friend Ken Blue says, “Thank God, most people live better than their theology.”

I will probably never meet the men or women who got up at 5:00 am to go red fishing, (if you read this, I am ready to participate) or the people who designed and built the reels, line, boat and motor they used, or the truck to haul the fish to Jackson, or the designer and manufacturer of those cool fans. And I will never meet the chef whose great great grandmother created that awesome seafood cream sauce in her kitchen on the bayous of Louisiana, and handed down its secrets to be tweaked through the generations. But before I was conscious of what I was doing, I was thanking the Lord for this beautiful moment and this great food—praising Him for His gift given to us through the time and effort and heart, and perhaps blood, sweat and tears of hundreds of people.

We all do the same thing every day. Yet, theologically we cannot, or perhaps will not, see it. We have so separated Jesus Christ from His creation that we swim in the fruit of the Holy Spirit’s presence and blessing, oblivious to everything but ourselves and perhaps a few friends. Our shrunken, distant Jesus forces us to live with the assumption that there is no Holy Spirit in the ‘ordinary’ moments of our human existence. While our hearts betray our blindness when we thank the Lord ‘for the meal we are about to receive,’ we are left to look over and beyond our humanity to find the Holy Spirit and a spirituality in another world—usually one of our own devising. All of which means that we look over and beyond people, devaluing their existence and participation, as we chase the ‘supernatural.’ This is the revulsion people feel when we in the Church act as if we are ‘in’ and others are ‘out,’ and as if we are onto ‘the real thing’ whilst others a ‘just people.’

In Jesus Christ, the Holy Spirit is present, not absent, and He is present with all of the life and beauty, creativity and music, burdens and joys and loves of the blessed Trinity, whether anyone sees it and believes or not. My yearning is that we would be able to see each moment in the light of Jesus, to perceive and enjoy the Holy Spirit’s presence, and participate in His fruitfulness with complete awareness. And what will happen when we do? If the Holy Spirit is able to do so much everyday around this planet through a human race that is as blind as bats, what will happen when we begin to see? What will happen when instead of imposing our own ideas and agendas, our pride and prejudice upon the Holy Spirit’s presence and work, we actually stop and pray, asking the Holy Spirit to enlighten us so that we can participate as those who understand what is going on in and through and around us? What will happen when instead of unwitting opposition to the Holy Spirit, we give ourselves whole heartedly to participate in His life-giving, fruit-producing presence?

We either see ourselves and others as merely human, with an occasional dash of ‘supernatural’ inspiration, or we see ourselves and others as those included in Jesus Christ and in His anointing in the Holy Spirit. The former will produce pride and incessant striving, followed by more pride, then boredom and burnout, and the divisive minimization of our human existence as we chase the spirituality of the non-human god. The latter will produce dignity and hope, and a regard for one another beyond race, religion, and all prejudice. For we will see ourselves and others as brothers and sisters (blind as we may be) equally included in the Trinitarian life of God. We will look for the Trinitarian life emerging in and through the ‘humanity’ of others, and we will cherish, celebrate and do what we can to encourage its emergence. Seeing ourselves and others included in Jesus’ anointing will give us the freedom to embrace our fishing and cooking, our mothering and fathering, our relationships, our burdens and joys, our ideas and designs as not our own at all, but as our participation in the presence of the Holy Spirit in person.

Holy Spirit, we are blind lot. Thank you for your patience with us and for the wonderful way you share the life of Jesus and his Father with us. Thank you for your utter determination to bring about the full emergence of the Trinitarian life in and through us, until the whole cosmos is alive with the Great Dance of the Triune God. We pray for and give you permission to reveal Jesus Christ in his glory, and our place in him.

Dualisms and the Holy Spirit

2009-06-19T11:11:00.002-05:00

It is not always what you don’t know that hurts you. More often than not the real problem lies in what we don’t know that we don’t know. In speaking of what we don’t know that we don’t know we are moving into the realm of presuppositions, assumptions and paradigms—those invisible ideas and hidden categories that shape what we see and don’t see. This is the fundamental issue in all areas of human knowledge, and nowhere more so than when we attempt to think about the Holy Spirit.

It is critical that we reflect on how we are to go about understanding the Holy Spirit. Do we simply amass all the verses in the bible that speak of the Spirit, distill them into one or two or more general categories and call this the biblical doctrine of the Spirit? While we neglect what the scripture says to our peril, this approach could quickly fall prey to the problem of what we don’t know that we don’t know and how that shapes what we see and don’t see in the scripture.

For theologians such as Irenaeus and Athanasius in the early Church, and Karl Barth and T. F. and J.B. Torrance in our own time, the way forward is to stick closely to Jesus and to the light shinning in his very identity. Part of what these theologians mean by following the light of Jesus is that the very existence of the Father’s Son incarnate speaks volumes about God, humanity and the divine-human relationship, and not least about the Holy Spirit. The identity of Jesus Christ gives us a fundamental, a starting point, and an inner logic and framework for our thought. It also exposes deadly assumptions built into the Western mind, and these assumptions (which happen to be dualisms) dramatically affect the way we read the scripture and go about theological thinking.

To speak of Jesus Christ biblically is to speak of the Father’s Son incarnate, and of the One anointed in the Holy Spirit, and of the Creator—in and through and by and for whom all things were created and as sustained. Jesus has serious connections, to say the least. And unless we are going to posit that Jesus divorced himself from his Father, unanointed himself of the Spirit, and split away from being the Creator—in and through and by and for whom all things were created and are sustained—then his very existence proclaims to us that the Father, and the Holy Spirit, and creation are not separated but bound together in very real relationship. Indeed, Jesus is himself the relationship. Jesus’ identity, his very existence in relationship with his Father, the Holy Spirit and all creation is the light of life, the secret, the key to God, to creation, to history and human existence within it.

“ I am the light of the cosmos. The one who follows Me shall never, ever walk in the darkness, but shall have the light of life” (John 8:12).

This vision of the identity of Jesus as the One who lives in relationship with his Father, and the Holy Spirit, and all creation exposes several dark spots in our Western mindset. First, our presentation of the gospel typically begins with the announcement of our separation from the Father. We sinned. We are separated from God. But the very existence of Jesus, as the Father’s undivorced Son incarnate, and as the One who did not undo his relationship with humanity when he became human, proclaims to us that all forms of separation from his Father, whether mythological, theological or personal, have been overcome by Jesus himself. The gospel is not the news that we can be reunited with a separated god. The gospel is the news that the Father’s Son himself has come, the Creator, and he has overcome whatever separation from God we have created, and he did so in his own being and existence. We don’t make Jesus part of our lives. He has made us part of his.

Second, while a split or dualism between the supposed ‘sacred’ and the ‘secular’ dimensions of human existence is built into the fabric of the Western mind, and of Western religion, Jesus’ existence exposes such a notion as nonsense. He is the Creator, the One in and through and by and for whom all things were created and are sustained. This Creator became a human being, and in doing so he joined the Father, the Holy Spirit and all creation in relationship.

“All things came into being by Him, and apart from Him nothing came into being that has come into being” (John 1:3).

What part of creation has come into being behind the back of Jesus? And what part of creation manages to continue to be without him? What part of creation is not included in his relationship with his Father and the Holy Spirit? The ultimate dualistic disaster is ripping the Father, Son and Spirit apart, such that we could possibly encounter one without the other. Given the beautiful and utter oneness of the Trinity, the fact that the Son is the Creator and sustainer of all things means that he has a relationship with all creation, and in him so do the Father and the Holy Spirit. What part of our human experience is therefore ‘secular,’ without Jesus, devoid of the life of the Father, Son and Spirit? Motherhood? Work? Play? Romance? Gardening, golf, teaching, doctoring, governing, loving our neighbors?

Third, to go back to Irenaeus and his insight that the Father and the Holy Spirit were ‘accustoming’ themselves to dwell in the fallen human race through the life of Jesus—and over against our own ideas and assumptions—we are to proceed on the assumption that the Holy Spirit is present and at work in the relationships that Jesus himself has established with the fallen human race and with all creation. For in Jesus, the Father and the Holy Spirit found their way, so to speak, into real relationship with us in our fallen worlds.

What we don’t know that we don’t know is that we come to the scripture and to the discussion of the Holy Spirit and his relationship with us with a mindset riddled with dualisms, which keeps us from even suspecting that the Holy Spirit may be present, at work and producing his fruit everywhere. I once heard a young man say, ‘our job is to get the Holy Spirit into people.’ To begin with, only the Father’s Son and the anointed One could ever accomplish something as staggering as uniting us with the Holy Spirit. If you take Jesus Christ out of the equation of creation, the cosmos instantly vanishes. Not a single molecule survives a second without Jesus. And if the Holy Spirit decided that he would evacuate human existence, the cosmos would become utterly fruitless, void of life. It seems to me that we are giving ourselves far too much credit, assuming that ‘ordinary’ things like laughter, fellowship, caring, working, giving ourselves for others, being parents, making music, creating things are simply 'human' and have no Jesus or any Holy Spirit in them. Our dualisms have blinded us, and we don’t even know it.

When we finally meet Jesus face to face, I don’t think we will ask his forgiveness for giving him too much credit, and for overestimating his place in the whole scheme of things. I think we will be stunned silent by the sheer centrality of his very existence to the whole cosmos and to every moment of our entire lives. And I think we will be overwhelmed when we see the fingerprints of the Holy Spirit everywhere.

Where we are in our understanding and in our believing in the Holy Spirit is another matter, and is never to be confused with the Holy Spirit's presence, work and fruit-producing.

Holy Spirit give us Jesus’ eyes. Help us to see you in our lives and living, in our work and play, in the extraordinary ordinariness of life.

Irenaeus' Vision of the Incarnation

2009-06-05T23:31:00.001-05:00

Reading the early Church Fathers always jerks me out of our Western deistic legalism back into the relational world of sharing in Jesus’ relationship with his Father and in his anointing in the Holy Spirit. Mark it well sisters and brothers, Jesus became human to share with us nothing less than himself and all that he is and has with his Father and the Holy Spirit. Only the blessed Trinity could dream of such a gift. And only the Father’s Son incarnate, anointed with the Holy Spirit himself without measure could make such a dream a living reality. Here are a few classic quotes from the great Irenaeus, disciple of Polycarp, disciple of St. John.

“…the Son of God being made the Son of man, that through Him we may receive the adoption—humanity sustaining, and receiving, and embracing the Son of God” (Against the Heresies, III.16.3).

“For [God] promised, that in the last times He would pour Him [the Spirit] upon [His] servants and handmaids, that they might prophesy; wherefore He did also descend upon the Son of God, made the Son of man, becoming accustomed in fellowship with Him to dwell in the human race, to rest with human beings, and to dwell in the workmanship of God, working the will of the Father in them, and renewing them from their old habits into the newness of Christ” (Against the Heresies, III.17.1).

“Therefore, as I have already said, He caused man (human nature) to cleave to and to become one with God. For unless man had overcome the enemy of man, the enemy would not have been legitimately vanquished. And again: unless it had been God who had freely given salvation, we could never have possessed it securely. And unless man had been joined to God, he could never have become a partaker of incorruptibility. For it was incumbent upon the Mediator between God and men, by His relationship to both, to bring both into friendship and concord, and present man to God, while He revealed God to man. For, in what way, could we be partakers of the adoption of sons, unless we had received from Him through the Son that fellowship, which refers to Himself, unless His Word, having been made flesh, had entered into communion with us? Wherefore also He passed through every stage of life, restoring to all communion with God” (Against the Heresies, III.18.7).

“For it was for this end that the Word of God was made man, and He who was the Son of God became the Son of man, that man, having been taken into the Word, and receiving the adoption, might become the son of God” (Against the Heresies, III.19.1).

“…the Word of God, who dwelt in man, and became the Son of man, that He might accustom man to receive God, and God to dwell in man, according to the good pleasure of the Father” (Against the Heresies, III.20.2).

“And for this reason it was that He graciously poured Himself out, that He might gather us into the bosom of the Father” (Against the Heresies, IV.2.1).

“Now this is His Word, our Lord Jesus Christ, who in the last times was made a man among men, that He might join the end to the beginning, that is, man to God. Wherefore, the prophets, receiving the prophetic gift from the same Word, announced His advent according to the flesh, by which the blending and communion of God and man took place according to the good pleasure of the Father, the Word of God foretelling from the beginning that God should be seen by men, and hold converse with them upon the earth, should confer with them, and should be present with His own creation, saving it, and becoming capable of being perceived by it, and freeing us from the hands of all that hate us, that is, from every spirit of wickedness; and causing us to serve Him in holiness and righteousness all our days, in order that man, having embraced the Spirit of God, might pass into the glory of the Father” (Against the Heresies, IV.20.4)

“He might easily have come to us in His immortal glory, but in that case we could never have endured the greatness of the glory; and therefore it was that He, who was the perfect bread of the Father, offered Himself to us as milk, [because we were infants]. He did this when He appeared as a man, that we, being nourished, as it were, from the breast of His flesh, and having, by such a course of milk-nourishment, become accustomed to eat and drink the Word of God, may be able also to contain in ourselves the Bread of immortality, which is the Spirit of the Father” (Against the Heresies, IV.38.1).

“It was for this reason that the Son of God, although He was perfect, passed through the stage of infancy in common with the rest of mankind, partaking of it thus not for His own benefit, but for that of the infantile stage of man’s existence, in order that man might be able to receive Him” (Against the Heresies, IV.38.1).

“…our blessed Lord Jesus Christ, who did, through His transcendent love, become what we are, that He might bring us to be even what He is Himself” (Against the Heresies, V. Preface).

“But we do now receive a certain portion of His Spirit, tending towards perfection, and preparing us for incorruption, being little by little accustomed to receive and bear God…” (Against the Heresies, V.7.1).

In these quotes several themes emerge with passionate clarity. First, the goal of the incarnation is not to appease an angry god, but to reach us with the very life that the Father’s Son experiences with his Father and the Holy Spirit. Adoption—being included, fellowship, the sharing of life, union, not legalities and accounting—is the point. Second, in the incarnation there is a two-way movement of ‘accustoming.’ In Jesus, due to his unbroken relationship with his Father and the Holy Spirit, the Father and the Holy Spirit are accustoming themselves to dwell with and in us, and in his life and death, Jesus is accustoming human nature to receive and share in nothing less than the life of the blessed Trinity. There is in Jesus a stunning stooping on the part of the Triune God, and an equally stunning transformation or conversion of our humanity to bear the life and glory of the Trinity. Jesus is and will forever be the mediator, the One in whom the life of the Trinity and the life of humanity are together in real fellowship and union. At the heart of the incarnate life, death, resurrection and ascension of Jesus lies this two-way movement of togetherness, which forever calls us to give ourselves to participate in Jesus. Third, and this is not a new point, but one that surely needs to be emphasized; it is the Father himself and the Holy Spirit himself who come to dwell in us in Jesus.

Over the next few weeks I will be writing about the Holy Spirit’s relationship with us and with all humanity. St. Irenaeus, with his vision of the Holy Spirit accustoming himself to dwell with and in us through Jesus’ incarnate experience is surely the proper foundation for any discussion of the Spirit’s work in our lives. Meantime, let go of the distant, unapproachable, disapproving Judge and ponder the early Church’s vision that the purpose of the incarnation was bring us to share in, to taste and feel and experience the very life of the Father, Son and Spirit. While it may not appear to us in our dark times that these things could possibly be so, the fact that they are warrants us to pine, and to expect, and to pray for more. For we have been given a place in the relationship that Jesus has with his Father and the Holy Spirit.

This Man Receives Sinners

2009-05-22T13:22:00.001-05:00

One of the most beautiful truths about Jesus is the way he received people and the way people felt comfortable with him. In Luke 15:1-2, we see this played out in a rather dramatic way. First, the outcasts, the failures, especially the religious failures, were coming to Jesus, and not only listening to Him, but actually straining to hear what he had to say. Something about Jesus made them feel at home not condemned, accepted and welcomed not scrutinized. Jesus treated broken people like old friends. They wanted to know more. Second, the Pharisees seized Jesus’ love as their longed-for proof that Jesus could not possibly be from God. “This man receives sinners, and eats with them” (Luke 15:2). You can almost hear the Pharisees’ gnarling, sardonic whispers, ‘Ha! Some man of God you are.’

The assumption of the Pharisees and of their whole religion is that God could not receive sinners, and certainly never eat with them. For eating with someone is an act of intimacy, fellowship and solidarity. Thus Jesus could not possibly be connected to God in any way. The Pharisees of every generation cannot cope with Jesus’ oneness with the Father. “He who has seen Me has seen the Father” (John 14:9). “I and the Father are one” (John 10:30). For such a oneness and unity simply means that what Jesus does, the Father does, and what the Father does, Jesus does. “Truly, truly I say to you, the Son can do nothing of Himself, unless it is something He sees the Father doing; for whatever the Father does, these things the Son does in like manner. For the Father loves the Son and shows Him all things that He Himself is doing…” (John 5:19-20).

So the act of Jesus, summed up by the Pharisees’ accusation, “This man receives sinners, and eats with them,” is either the living expression of the Father’s heart and being, (the ultimate truth about God and humanity, and thus the gospel) or it is a glitch in the otherwise ongoing oneness between the Father and Son, a sort of momentary act of independence, dissimilarity and disunity on Jesus’ part, and thus an act that cannot be trusted as a reliable expression of the Father’s heart at all.

It seems to me that while confessing the oneness of Jesus and his Father, almost all of Western Christianity operates with the Pharisee’s assumption that God could not possibly receive sinners and eat with them. Hence we cannot see that the presence of Jesus is in fact just that, the act of God in person receiving sinners and eating with them. Jesus is the Father’s Son standing in the far country of human brokenness and religious pride. He is the living embodiment of the Father searching the cosmos for us, finding us and receiving us into his life.

Just like his Father, this man receives sinners and shares life with them. Indeed this man’s very existence as the Father’s Son incarnate is the living embodiment of the Father receiving sinners, pharisees, and the lost children of Adam to himself. In Jesus we are received and embraced by the Father forever.

We either live with the assumption that this embrace cannot be so, and thus doom ourselves to the emptiness of religion, the pride of the Pharisees, or the sadness of the failures, or we believe Jesus and learn to live embraced by his Father.

Come, Holy Spirit, Spirit of truth and adoption.

His Presence

2009-05-15T05:56:00.002-05:00

I woke up in the middle of the night with this sequence of thoughts running through my mind. We are wrong about God, dead wrong. We create religions out of our dead wrong views of God. We impose the religions that come from our dead wrong views of God upon God, ourselves, others and creation, seriously damaging our inner and outer worlds, poisoning marriage, family and relationships, work and play. We are deeply committed to our wrong views of God, their religions and damage. We slander, vilify and even murder those who disagree with us and our dead wrong views of God, and the religions we have created to go with them, or point out their damage.

Jesus came to show us the truth about God. We killed him. He knew we were going to kill him. He deliberately allowed us to abuse and crucify him. In submitting to our abuse and murder Jesus entered into our darkness, bringing his knowledge of the Father inside our wrong views of God, and bringing his own sonship inside the religions that we have created, and bringing the life he shares with his Father inside the damage our wrongheaded vision has produced for ourselves and others and the cosmos.

Jesus is never going away. His presence is salvation from ourselves and the hell we create, and it is inclusion in his world and freedom to live in it with him. Life is the time and space and freedom given to us to learn the difference between the worlds we create and Jesus’ life with his Father.

“Experience is a brutal teacher,” says C. S. Lewis in the movie, The Shadowlands, ‘but we learn. By God, we learn.”

On Atonement

2009-04-29T16:15:00.002-05:00

Last week someone asked me for a brief statement of my view of atonement. “Sure,” I said, “How about one word—Jesus.” Of course, I was being slightly cheeky, but in the end I was also dead serious. Jesus is atonement. While I knew the man wanted a little more, just not a whole tome, I expanded a little. For me, atonement is not so much a thing that Jesus did as it is Jesus himself. For Jesus Christ is the Father’s eternal Son incarnate, and the One anointed in the Holy Spirit, and the One in and through and by and for whom all things were created and are sustained. Through his incarnate life, death, resurrection and ascension he has brought his Father, the Holy Spirit and all creation together in real relationship. This real relationship is atonement, and it is inseparable from Jesus. So for me atonement, adoption, the baptism of the Holy Spirit, reconciliation, the kingdom, eternal life, new covenant and salvation are all of a piece. They are all different ways of describing who Jesus is and what has happened to the Triune God, the human race and all creation in his very incarnate existence.

Adoption speaks to the fact that we have been included in Jesus’ own relationship with his Father. The baptism of the Spirit speaks to the way he has included us in his own anointing in the Holy Spirit. Salvation speaks to the fact that in his life, death and resurrection our sin was overcome and we were placed in a new relationship (covenant) with the Father. Eternal life speaks to our inclusion in Jesus’ own knowledge and communion and fellowship with his Father. And the kingdom of God speaks to the fact that Jesus has included us in his relationship with his Father, and in his relationship with the Holy Spirit, and in his relationship with the whole human race, and in his relationship with all creation. When we pray for ‘the kingdom to come’ we are asking for Jesus’ own life in this four-fold relationship to come to personal and abiding, corporate and international, environmental and cosmic expression in and through us.

The ideas of atonement and reconciliation speak to the way Jesus, in his own experience as the incarnate Son, through life and relationship, through death at our hands and resurrection in the power of the Spirit, brought everything in the cosmos together. Whatever else we say about the nature and means of atonement, it must never be separated from Jesus himself, and must never lose sight of the stunning fact that right now and forever the incarnate, crucified and resurrected Son of the Father sits at his right hand—as a human being. Our great hope is the fact that he has us with him and the Holy Spirit is determined that the breathtaking at-oneness established in Jesus would come to real and personal expression in us, and in our relationship with Jesus’ Father, with one another and with all creation.

In Jesus Christ a new cosmic order of real togetherness has been established forever. We all included, and we all stand called to a radical change of mind, called to rethink everything we thought we knew about God, about ourselves and others, about our planet, our future and life itself. Because of Jesus and of what he has made of the cosmos, we are all called to give ourselves to participate in his world. We are called to let his Father love us. We are called to walk in his Spirit. We are called to love one another with his love for each person. And we are called to participate in his relationship with all creation. And we are promised abounding life in the process. We are free, in a manner of speaking, to live in our own worlds, and free to try to impose them upon Jesus and his world, but such will only produce ever increasing pain. For it is a violation of atonement, of the way things really are in Jesus, of the togetherness that he has established between the Triune God, the human race, and all creation in himself. And such violation necessarily hurts like hell.

In an age when the idea of truth seems anachronistic, the togetherness and at-onement that Jesus Christ made real in himself is and remains the truth—reality—God’s reality, our reality, cosmic reality, reality that sets us free for life in his world.

Resurrection

2009-04-12T12:48:00.001-05:00

The great Irenaeus said that our ‘beloved Lord Jesus Christ became what we are that he might bring us to be what he is in himself.’ Athanasius said much the same, ‘the Son of God became son of man to make us sons of God.’ For both of these early Church theologians the incarnation was a staggering fact, which shouted to the world that the Father, Son and Spirit wanted real relationship with us, fellowship, communion, shared life. As Karl Barth said, God has no intention of being God without us. The gift given to us is Jesus himself, and all that he is and has with his Father and the Holy Spirit—adoption. As astonishing as it is, the eternal purpose of the Triune God was to give the human race a real place and share in the very Trinitarian life itself.

But how do you reach the human race in its terrible blindness and wrongheaded resistance and rebellion? How do you include people who want nothing of you, and indeed want you dead? And what good is the incarnation if Jesus does not penetrate Adam’s fall? Such would not be a real incarnation, and neither Jesus nor his life would actually reach us in our brokenness.

In the shocking love of the Triune God, the Father, Son and Holy Spirit deliberately embraced us in our sin and darkness, willfully submitting themselves to our bizarre anger and judgment. The incarnation proclaims that the Triune God is passionate about sharing the Trinitarian life itself with us, and nothing less. The submission of Jesus, and in him the Father and the Holy Spirit, to our brutality, rejection and murder shouts a determined, astonishing love larger than the cosmos. And the resurrection declares that he did it, that in Jesus, and in his suffering from our hands the Trinitarian life itself has set up shop inside death and darkness and evil forever. Dying in the arms of our scorn, the Father’s Son made contact with Adam, recreating relationship with him and all his wayward sons and daughters from inside the fall—resurrection.

Father, Son and Holy Spirit forgive us for the way we have twisted your amazing, determined love, and tried to force your passion and character into our blind legalities. Father, forgive us for what we have thought of you. Jesus, forgive us for the way we have denied your oneness with your Father. And Holy Spirit forgive us for minimizing your constant witness to the truth.

Thank you Jesus that though we rejected you, you did not reject us, but embraced us in our foul blindness, bowing to our rage that you might reach the real us—and bring your Father and the Holy Spirit with you. Hallelujah. Blessed be the Holy Trinity.

Good Friday

2009-04-10T18:17:00.002-05:00

“Behold, we are going up to Jerusalem; and the Son of Man will be delivered up to the chief priests and scribes, and they will condemn Him to death, and will deliver Him up to the Gentiles to mock and scourge and crucify Him, and on the third day He will be raised up” (Matthew 20-18-19).

Many years ago I studied the four gospels very carefully with one question in mind. Why did Jesus die? What do the gospel writers actually say about the reason for his dying? Being from a conservative background, I had always been taught that Jesus died as a sacrifice for our sins, and that on the cross he suffered the wrath of God in our place. Although most of the Western world has been taught a variation on this theme, it is utter nonsense, if not blasphemy against the sheer oneness and love of the Father, Son and Spirit. The clear teaching of the gospels is that it was the human race, not the Father, who cursed Jesus. It was the Jews and the Gentiles, not the Holy Spirit, who abandoned him. We rejected Jesus. We condemned him. We poured our wrath upon him and made him a scapegoat. The astonishing fact is that instead of retaliating, which he could have easily done, Jesus deliberately submitted himself to our profoundly broken judgment. He, the Father’s Son and the anointed One, willfully bowed to suffer our disdain and contempt. We ridiculed him, mocked him and murdered him.

Either our bitter rejection and condemnation of Jesus caught the Father, Son and Spirit by surprise, or it was part of the reconciling plan all along. Jesus did not come to balance a legal ledger, but to reconcile us. He came to establish a real relationship with the human race in all of its sin and terrible brokenness. And how did Jesus establish a real relationship with us in our sin? First, he became one of us, a human being, bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh. Second, he accepted and bore our darkened, abominable condemnation. Jesus did not die to suffer from his Father. Jesus died to meet us at our absolute worst, and dying in the arms of our scorn he did just that. Jesus bore our sin, not figuratively, but literally. We despised him, as Isaiah prophesied. We hated him and crucified him. As he accepted our derision and hatred, as he suffered our sin personally, as we beat him, spit upon him, cursed him and crucified him, he was meeting sinners in their dark, gnarled and twisted world—and he brought his Father and the Holy Spirit with him. This is real reconciliation.

Hallelujah. What astonishing and determined love.

Identity and Experience

2009-04-02T20:38:00.002-05:00

In the plethora of responses to my last blog I could not help but notice that one of you cited a few verses, but did not explicitly counter the Christological affirmations. In citing these verses are you suggesting that Jesus is not the Father’s eternal Son incarnate, and not the only one anointed in the Holy Spirit without measure, and not the Creator in and through and by and for whom all things were created and are constantly sustained, and not the reconciler of his creation? Do these verses disprove the central affirmations of the Christian faith? As far as I am concerned these affirmations were non-negotiable for the early Church, and functioned as the heart of the apostolic and patristic hermeneutic, or mind. The Christian community was and is called to take ‘every thought captive to the obedience of Christ’ (See 2Corintians 10:5) and to “see to it that no one takes us captive through philosophy and empty deception, according to the tradition of men, according to the elementary principles of the world, rather than according to Christ. For in Him all the fulness of Deity dwells in bodily form, and in Him you have been made full…” (Colossians 2:8ff).

The first order of business in taking these commands seriously is to answer the question, who is Jesus Christ? The second is to rethink everything we thought we knew about God, about creation, about ourselves and history, the past, present and future in the light of Jesus. He is the truth. The ministry of Perichoresis is committed to these two callings, faltering as we may be.

Or, in citing these verses are you wrestling with the biblical witness? Are you asking, given who Jesus is—the Father’s Son, the anointed One, and the Creator, sustainer and reconciler of all things, and as such the One who has included the human race in his own life—what are ‘we’ to make of verses which, as they are translated in certain translations, seem to contradict the fundamental affirmations? This, I take, to be what you were asking, and rightly so. It is a biblical issue. Any self-respecting bible scholar has to wrestle with how the meaning of a specific verse fits into the larger meaning or ‘scope,’ as Athanasius called it, of holy scripture. First, we ask the Holy Spirit to give us the eyes and perspective of Jesus himself. Second, we need to go back to the early Church fathers, for I suspect they have already answered all of these issues, as the Arians in particular were not shy about highlighting ‘problematic’ verses. Third, it is always a good idea to study the original languages, and then read several different translations.

For example, 1Corinthians 2:14 in the NASB reads, “But a natural man does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him, and he cannot understand them because they are spiritually appraised.” This happens to be a verse that I use all the time. Your quoted translation says, “the man without the Spirit.” This is a great example of how the translator’s own theology figures into the translation, and an affirmation of the need to read different translations. Another example is Ephesians 4:17ff. “This is say therefore and affirm together with the Lord, that you walk no longer just as the Gentiles also walk, in the futility of their mind, being darkened in their understanding, excluded from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, because of the hardness of their heart.” I think this is a great translation, with the exception of the word ‘excluded,’ which should be ‘alienated.’ Paul is saying, because of the futility of their minds and because of their darkened understanding, they are alienated from the life of God, which is shared with them in Jesus. Bringing their confusion into Jesus’ relationship with them poisons their participation in the life of God. So don’t be like the pagans, give up your own vision, and let Jesus teach you about his Father, receive His love and live.

Luke 11:13, “If you then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven "give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!" The context here is about the goodness of the Father, and thus the admonition to ask and seek and knock, and not just once, but as an ongoing relationship rooted in Jesus’ Father’s goodwill toward us. If we, being evil, know how to give good gifts to our children, how much more does my Father (the fountain of all goodness,) know how to give the Holy Spirit himself, to those who ask Him? Apparently, in citing this verse, you are troubled by the word ‘ask,’ as if to assume that unless we ask Jesus’ Father we will not have the Holy Spirit. Yet without Jesus sharing himself and particularly his parrhesia (freedom, courage, boldness, assurance) with us, and without the Holy Spirit bearing witness in our innermost beings that we are children of the Father in Jesus, we would never come out of the bushes and asks the Father for anything. This is about relationship. Pentecost is first. In and through Jesus, the Father has poured out the Holy Spirit upon all flesh. As my friend Ken Blue says, our response to the Holy Spirit is to say, ‘thank you Holy Spirit, we will have more please.’ This is also our ongoing response to the Father and all his gifts in Jesus, and to Jesus and all that he is sharing with us. How thrilled the Father is when we takes sides with Jesus and the Spirit against our own darkened notions, and thus dare to say ‘thank you’ and ask for more.

Romans 8. The argument in the first part of Romans 8 parallels Galatians 3 and revolves around the question as to which way are we going to live, according to the flesh (kata sarka), or according to the Spirit (kata pneuma). The way of the flesh leads to death and misery. The way of the Spirit leads to life and peace. Paul is assuming that the Spirit is at work through Jesus in the Romans, and in us. The question is not who has the Spirit of Christ or who doesn’t, but which way are we going to live. Eugene Peterson, in The Message, has a take that is worth pursuing. “But if God himself has taken up residence in your life, you can hardly be thinking more of yourself than of him. Anyone, of course, who has not welcomed this invisible but clearly present God, the Spirit of Christ, won’t know what we are talking about. But for you who welcome him, in whom he dwells—even though you still experience all the limitations of sin—you yourself experience life on God’s terms.”

Likewise Peterson’s translation of Jude 17-19 is worth careful reflection. “But remember, dear friends, that the apostles of our Master, Jesus Christ, told us this would happen: ‘In the last days there will be people who don’t take these things seriously anymore. They’ll treat them like a joke, and make a religion of their own whims and lusts.’ These are the ones who split churches, thinking only of themselves. There’s nothing to them, no sign of the Spirit!”

Acts 2:38 Peter replied, "Repent and be baptised, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins. And you will "receive the gift of the Holy Spirit." When Jesus was baptized in the Spirit at the river Jordan did that mean that he did not have the Spirit prior to that moment? The coming of the Holy Spirit to Jesus at Jordan was not a movement from absence to presence, but from presence to another kind of presence. It is relational, not spatial. I think we are safe to begin here and see where this leads in wrestling with this verse.

Here are a few other thoughts about the Holy Spirit. First, it strikes me that we need to think about the Holy Spirit’s relationship in and with us relationally. He accustomed himself to dwell in us through Jesus, and that means through Jesus’ suffering from our bizarre blindness. So the Spirit knows how to relate to us, the real us, the broken us, but being so profoundly blind we cannot cope with the sheer weight of his goodness and beauty. So he walks with us relationally, giving us space to make fools of ourselves, all the while addressing us in ways that reach us, and thus calling us to relate to Him as a person, and to give ourselves to participate in Jesus’ life—step by step, moment by moment. Second, most of what I hear or read about the Holy Spirit is all but completely devoid of real relation to Jesus himself. It is as if Jesus died and did his part, and then went back to heaven. Then, on the basis of Jesus’ death, the Holy Spirit comes to do his. But apparently they don’t talk much, so the Holy Spirit has his own thing happening with us, instead of taking of the things of Jesus and relating them to us. There seems to be a remarkable devaluing of the fact that Jesus is the anointed one. He and he alone is anointed with the Holy Spirit, and without measure. Because we seem to have missed this, many seem to crave an anointing in the Spirit independent of Jesus’ relationship with them, and seem to be craving something from the Spirit altogether different from Jesus’ own life. As if it would ever cross the Holy Spirit’s mind to operate independently of Jesus or to give us a gift other than Jesus himself. The gift given is Jesus—and all is and has in his relationship with his Father and the Holy Spirit. When you see this Jesus and see yourself included, you don’t stop at a second or third blessing. Be bold. Live with expectation. Ask for more.

For serious study of the Bible, I recommend the New American Standard Bible, the Jerusalem Bible, the King James, the New English Bible, The Message, and J. B. Phillips’ translation.

One person said, “He will not have an answer for those verses as most Perichoresis messages are taken from passages in the books of John, Ephesians, Colossians and a handful of other books. It seems the whole perichoresis message is built on a select few passages and many other 'difficult' passages are just never mentioned or ignored.”

You speak as an authority on my references, but what you said I take as a high compliment. John, Ephesians and Colossians are reliable references. But you forgot Galatians, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Hebrews and 1John and Romans, and Irenaeus, Athanasius, Hilary and the Cappadocian fathers, Calvin, Luther, Thomas Erskine, John MacLeod Campbell, George MacDonald, Karl Barth, C. S. Lewis, J. B. Torrance and T. F. Torrance. If these brothers have an issue with me then I should be hanged. Either way, it is always wise, as Proffessor James Torrance used to say, to read widely.

Another response, “However, the question I hear behind the original post regarding "the Holy Spirit is in the little girl" was NOT addressed.

Here is the question I hear: What about those who do NOT take "small steps of faith"? What is the eternal destiny (and present state) of those who reject the light?

Please do not use all caps. And it would be better, in my opinion, if you would have said, however it did not ‘appear to me’ that the original question was addressed. I have addressed this question ad nausem, including in my blogs, so part of me wants to say read the blogs and the books and then we will talk. The other part of me never tires at answering one more time.

If one understands the distinction between ontology and soteriology a great many quibbles go away.

I have said repeatedly and in all of my lectures that the whole human race is included in Jesus Christ—and in his relationship with his Father, and in his anointing in the Spirit, and in his relationship with each person, and in his relationship with all creation. Jesus accomplished this inclusion in the power of the Holy Spirit in his incarnate life, death, resurrection and ascension as the fulfillment of his Father’s dreams for the human race. This is our ontology. It is our identity. It is who we are. It is what Jesus calls truth or reality. Our ontology or identity is distinct from our experience, because our experience is shaped by what we believe in our darkness (see Ephesians 4:17ff). We do not know the truth. We are in the great darkness. “I have come as light into the world, that everyone who believes in Me man not remain in darkness (John 12:46). So we bring into Jesus’ relationship with us, into his sharing life with us, profoundly broken notions of God, of Jesus, of his work, of others and of ourselves, and of the Holy Spirit and the future. Like trying to drive backwards in Los Angeles, these broken notions create brokenness in our relationships, in our attitudes, in our outlook, forming pain and chaos in our ‘experience.’ Such that we are a long way from ‘experiencing’ the abounding life that Jesus shares with us all. We are not being true to ourselves. It is our bizarre, wrongheaded beliefs, and our acting out of those bizarre notions that keep us of from ‘experiencing’ Jesus’ anointing in the Holy Spirit, which is constantly shared with us. So in terms of our identity (our ontology) we belong to the Father, Son and Spirit. Jesus has made this a reality forever. In terms of our experience, we live out the Trinitarian life shared with us, through our own beliefs, which are rooted in the darkness, and thus are profoundly at odds with reality. There is truth, reality, ontology. Then there is what we believe, and thus impose upon the truth, experiencing the consequences of such violation.

When Jesus says, “you shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free,” (John 8:31-32) he is saying first that there is something real whether we believe it or not—the truth—the real world that he and his Father and the Holy Spirit have established. And second, that by our not knowing (in the biblical sense) the truth, we are in bondage.

The Father, Son and Spirit have embraced us forever in Jesus. They walk with us relationally, not spatially, always treating us as persons, never as distant objects. Jesus has included us in his own life. The Holy Spirit works to give us eyes to see the real world in Christ. As we see ourselves love and embraced, as we take baby steps in saying our ‘Amen, to the glory of the Father,’ more relational room is opened in our darkness for the light to operate, and for us things get richer, deeper, more beautiful. John 14:20.

If one is really interested in my thoughts on these matters read my book, Across All Worlds: Jesus Inside Our Darkness.

As to what happens to people when they die, my answer is that they meet Jesus (see previous blog on judgment), and in meeting Jesus they will see themselves in his light. What they do with the revelation of Jesus Christ and of themselves in him, I cannot say, and neither can anyone else. Hopefully they will all say hallelujah. But it is entirely possible, as I have said repeatedly, that they may continue in their darkness and obstinate wrong belief, thus continuing to suffer the miserable brokenness of believing in themselves and their own marred vision, and continuing to suffer the non-peace and terrible self-centered sadness and anxiety that arise from not knowing (biblically speaking) Jesus so as to be set free from themselves and the darkness.

So, ontologically we are all in Christ and Christ is sharing himself and all he is and has with us, including and especially the Holy Spirit. Because of Jesus Christ our ontology never changes. Our identity is as strong and stable as his own relationship with his Father and the Holy Spirit. Thus we have something to believe in that is solid, not dependent upon what we make true, or create by our faith. It is this reality, this ontological truth in Jesus Christ that the Holy Spirit reveals in us, thereby creating the crisis of faith. Soteriologically (or experientially) we are all caught between our ontology and our blindness.

It strikes me that because many ‘modern’ evangelicals cannot see this distinction between our identity and our experience, they come across sounding like existentialists, whose faith and decision, actually create ultimate meaning in the universe.

Who is Jesus Christ? This is the question. I have put my answer on the table and tried to think clearly in his light about every jot and tittle of theology. Granted I am blind, and thus inevitably bring my own darkness into this life-long process. The premise, however, that Jesus is the light of the cosmos and thus we are to bring every thought captive to him, seeing to it that no one takes us captive…. stands. It is painful when the revelation of Jesus exposes cherished notions that are not faithful to him. He calls us to repentance, to a radical recasting and renewing of our fallen minds that we may live.

When we finally meet Jesus face to face we will not say to him, ‘Jesus, I overestimated your place and prominence in the whole scheme of things. I gave you too much credit.’ As we see him we will know how embarrassingly blind and obstinate we have been. We will understand that our greatest sin has been our insisting that Jesus repent and believe in us. That is what sin is at its heart, it is declaring ourselves to be right and Jesus to be wrong, wrong about his Father, wrong about himself, wrong about the Holy Spirit, wrong about life and history, and it is the unrelenting determination to impose upon Jesus and his world our own vision, and insisting that he join us in our darkness. And guess what? He did.

From 'With" into "In"

2009-03-20T03:10:00.002-05:00

One of the responses to our discussion of Papa’s touch goes as follows:

Hi Baxter,
I was wondering what do you base your statement ~"the Holy Spirit is in the little girl"? The little girl who has never heard of Jesus and this can be applied to adults who have do not believe/worship Jesus. Would it not be more accurate to state that the Holy Spirit (the Spirit of Jesus)is WITH the girl but not yet indwelling her? As I understand it, the Holy Spirit indwells believers and unites us to Christ. And the Holy Spirit is with everyone else drawing us all to Jesus. (This comes from Dr. Gary Deddo, your classmate)
We are connected to Jesus now in the same way we WERE connected to Adam. So that is why Jesus says that "whatever you do to the least of these, you do to me." I'd appreciate your comments. Thanks.

To my mind there are several critical issues here that need to be addressed, although who is competent to speak about such things. The first concerns the basis for saying that the Holy Spirit is ‘in’ not merely ‘with’ the abused little girl who allegedly has never heard of Jesus? Presumably there is an invisible line somewhere that the Holy Spirit cannot cross without our faith. The second has to do with the question, does the Holy Spirit unite us ‘to’ Christ? The third concerns the statement that ‘we are connected to Jesus now in the same way we were connected to Adam’?

The fundamental issue here is the identity of Jesus Christ, for his very identity is the light of the world, and as such speaks volumes about the Father and the Spirit and their relationship with us, among thousands of other things. While we cannot possibly begin to cover all that needs to be said here, I will give you what seems to me to be the three foundational realities about Jesus. First, Jesus is the Father’s one and only and eternal Son, who for us and for our salvation ‘came down from heaven, and was incarnate by the Holy Spirit of the virgin Mary, and was made man,’ as the Creed says. Second, Jesus is the only one who is anointed with the Holy Spirit as an abiding reality and without measure. Third, Jesus Christ is the Creator and sustainer of all things. As the apostles testify, he is the One in and through and by and for whom all things were created and are constantly upheld (John 1:1-3, Colossians 1:16ff; Hebrews 1:1-3, and see earlier blog). Contrary to what many of us have heard all our lives, we do not make Jesus part of our world; he has made us a part of his.

In the deistic West, however, if we ever think of Christ as the Creator (and I wonder how many of you have actually heard a sermon on Christ as the Creator) we think of Jesus as the ‘source’ of our existence, but not as the one who ‘constantly sustains’ us. It is as though Jesus created us and gave us something akin to a life-battery, then he stepped back leaving us to live like an Eveready Energizer Bunny. Creation, in this framework, is like a soap bubble blown into the wind by a child. We could say that the child created the soap bubble, but once the bubble detaches from the wand there is no ongoing relationship with the wand or the child. It is this disconnect, which seems to be etched into the Western mind, that is the problem. In such a scenario Jesus creates us, gives us the life-battery, and then steps back, and he could theoretically die and we would all keep on going and going until our life-battery runs out of power. What happens to Jesus after creation and the giving of the life-battery is of no necessary consequence to us or to creation. Such a notion is a far cry from the New Testament which contends that Jesus is not only the source of our existence by way of a past gift (the life-battery), but he is the ongoing source and sustainer of our continued existence, so much so that if he withdrew himself from us, the human race and indeed the cosmos would vanish in an instant.

Note carefully these words from John Calvin’s Commentary on the Gospel of John, as he comments on John 1:4 and the phrase, “in him was life.”

So far, he has taught us that all things were created by the Word of God. He now likewise attributes to Him the preservation of what had been created; as if he were saying that in the creation of the world His power did not simply suddenly appear only to pass away, but that it is visible in the permanence of the stable and settled order of nature–just as Heb. 1.3 says that He upholds all things by the Word or command of His power. Moreover, this life can either be referred at large to inanimate creatures, which do live in their own way though they lack feeling, or expounded only of the animate. It matters little which you choose, for the simple meaning is that the Word of God was not only the fount of life to all creation, so that those which had not yet existed began to be, but that His life-giving power makes them remain in their state. For did not His continued inspiration quicken the world, whatsoever flourishes would without doubt immediately decay or be reduced to nothing. In short, what Paul ascribes to God, that in Him we have our being and move and live (Acts 17.28), John declares to be accomplished by the blessing of the Word. It is God, therefore, who gives us life; but He does so by the eternal Word. (John Calvin, The Gospel According to John, translated by T. H. L. Parker, (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company), 1988, pp. 10-11).

Following the apostles, Calvin is at pains to point out that the creation and the continued existence of all things are completely dependent upon the Son of God. What then are we to make of the fact that it was this Son who became human? What happened to his relationship with his Father and the Spirit? Did he break ties with his Father and the Holy Spirit when he became a human being? Did he dissolve his relationship with the human race and all creation in his incarnation? Of course not.

This is a point of capital importance. For already in the very identity of Jesus Christ—the Father’s eternal Son, the One anointed in the Holy Spirit, and the Creator, in and through and by and for whom all things were created and are sustained—we are speaking of One in whom the Father, the Holy Spirit, the human race, and all creation are not only connected, but are together in relationship. For St. Athanasius, the deepest problem of the fall of Adam was the way it threatened this relationship, not the relationship between Jesus and his Father and the Holy Spirit, but the relationship between Jesus, the human race and all creation. As Athanasius said, creation was on the road to ruin and was lapsing back into non-being.

Into this perilous situation the Father’s Son became incarnate through the Holy Spirit and the virgin Mary to do the very thing that was impossible for us—reestablish relationship. Through his incarnate life, death, resurrection and ascension Jesus lived out his own sonship as a human being inside the fallen world of Adam, therein reestablishing real relationship with fallen humanity. As he lived out his own sonship, and as he reestablished relationship with fallen humanity, he was at the same time including us in his own relationship with his Father and the Holy Spirit.

Astonishingly, Jesus intentionally used, as T. F. Torrance says, our sin against him as the way to establish deeper relationship with us. It was not the Father or the Holy Spirit who rejected, cursed and abandoned Jesus; it was the human race. We condemned and damned him. As we cursed Jesus and damned him, and as he deliberately accepted our condemnation and bore our scorn, he was entering into the deepest possible relationship with us in our sin and odious brokenness. In suffering from us, in bearing our bitter rejection, in dying in the arms of our judgment and condemnation, Jesus met us at our absolute worst.

Such a relationship, it seems to me, stretches any notion of ‘with’ into ‘in.’ Even on a purely human level it is difficult to imagine a person being ‘with’ another person and not being ‘in’ them in some sense. It is even more unimaginable when we are speaking of the One in and through and by and for whom all things were created and are sustained becoming a human being and being ‘with’ us to the degree that he became what we are, and deliberately, astonishingly and graciously bore our scorn and rejection.

What is left outside of this relationship? Did Jesus leave something of himself behind? Is there something of us, some particle of sin, some dimension of our brokenness that was withheld as we crucified him? The cross, or better yet, Jesus on the cross, accepting and bearing our bizarre judgment and its bitterness is nothing short of Jesus making contact with and overcoming the original sin, thus reestablishing or recreating his relationship with us and his rightful place as the One in and through and by and for whom all things were created and are sustained. Put another way, as Jesus allowed the human race to place our sin upon him, to reject and curse him, he was translating ‘with’ into ‘in.’

Now, it must be emphasized that as Jesus became what we are, and as he lived out his own sonship and anointing inside our fallen world, and as he deliberately accepted being condemned and damned by us, he was bringing into relationship everything that he is as the Father’s Son, and the anointed One, with everything that we are in our fallen brokenness. In Jesus Christ, the incarnate, crucified, resurrected and ascended Son of the Father and the anointed One, the very life of the Trinity has set up shop ‘in’ the very core of our fallen human existence. Adoption is not a theory. It is the real world—even if we cannot see it or believe it, yet. For when Jesus accepted us as we are and bore our bitter judgment, he was not alone—he brought his Father and the Holy Spirit with him. As St. Irenaeus said, in Jesus’ life and death the Holy Spirit “accustomed” himself “to dwell in the human race” (Irenaeus, Against the Heresies, in The Ante-Nicene Fathers, volume 1 (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Erdmann’s Publishing Company, reprinted 1987), III.17, 1, see also III.20.3).

Jesus is thus the One in whom his Father, the Holy Spirit, the fallen human race and all creation are not only related, but rightly related, and rightly related in the most profound way imaginable. “In that day you shall know that I am in My Father, and you in Me, and I in you” (John 14:20)

Is the abused little girl, who has theoretically never heard of Jesus, included in Jesus? Of course. Is she included in Jesus’ relationship with his Father? Of course. Is she included in Jesus’ anointing in the Holy Spirit? Of course. What is the basis for saying that the Holy Spirit is ‘in’ not merely ‘with’ the abused little girl? Jesus Christ. For he has included her (and all of us), and Jesus never travels alone. So unless we are prepared to posit some kind of breach between Jesus and his Father and the Holy Spirit, or that some level of our humanity and its fallenness was absent as we damned Jesus, then he has included the fallen world in his relationship with his Father, and in his relationship with the Holy Spirit. 'With' simply does not have the depth to describe such a relationship.

Now, is it accurate to speak of the Holy Spirit as uniting us to Christ? My answer is ‘Yes,’ as long as we understand that this union happened in Jesus’ life and death. The Holy Spirit united us with Christ, or better, united Christ with us, or better yet, worked in and through Jesus to reestablish his union with us in Jesus’ own existence. To be sure, the union was the fruit of the Spirit, but it happened in Jesus, not at some subsequent stage in us and in our history, and certainly not by our faith. Where a given person is in his or her understanding Christ’s union with us is another matter, but our blindness or enlightenment has nothing to do with the fact of Christ’s relationship and union with us in the Spirit.

The baptism of the Holy Spirit is not an external event, for in Jesus, the Spirit has made his way into the living room of our blind souls. It is in the very center of our created and fallen being that the Holy Spirit witnesses to our innermost beings and begins to free us to live in the inconceivable world of our adoption in Christ. For while it is impossible for us to push the weeds of our fallen minds to the side, and thus to believe in anything other than what we perceive through our blindness, Jesus has penetrated our darkness and brought the Spirit of truth with him. The Holy Spirit is not a spectator, watching from the outside, giving abstract and external instructions that he hopes that we will apply to our lives. He meets us in the corridors of our fallen souls, bearing witness to the ‘unbelievable’ world of Jesus and his Father. He works within us to help us see through our own blindness to know who God is in Christ and who we are in him, and in this way to help us take baby steps against our own judgment and alienation.

Inside, at the core of our being, the Holy Spirit bears witness with our spirits (See Romans 8:16.) that it is true, that we are sons and daughters of the Father himself in Jesus, crying the exclusive words of Jesus, “Abba! Father!” within us. “And because you are sons, God has sent forth the Spirit of His Son into our hearts, crying, ‘Abba! Father!’” (Galatians 4:4.).

On the basis of Jesus Christ, and in the truth of what he has done for and with and to the human race in his own incarnate life, death, resurrection and ascension, we proclaim to every person that they have been adopted, included in Jesus’ relationship with his Father and in his relationship with the Holy Spirit. And in Jesus’ name we call them to walk in the light of Jesus, promising joy and peace in believing, and warning of continued misery in unbelief. We pray to the Holy Spirit, who in Jesus, has accustomed himself to dwell in the fallen human race, to reveal Jesus ‘in’ every person so that they may know the truth and be set free by it.

The Holy Spirit united Jesus with us and us with Jesus in Jesus’ life, death, resurrection and ascension. And in Jesus’ life the Spirit accustomed himself to dwell in us. Both, I take to be living realities established in the grace of the Triune God prior to our faith and repentance. Within us the Spirit works to bring us to hear Jesus Christ, the living Word of God, to see and encounter Jesus himself within our own brokenness, so that we can begin to discern good from evil, light from darkness, life from death, and heaven from hell. In such encounters we are summoned and freed to take baby steps of faith in Jesus and his world, and to turn from our own darkness. Such baby steps give more room for the Spirit’s life and power to operate within us. It frees us to relate to and to participate in Jesus’ anointing in the Holy Spirit. It is all an ongoing relational reality, which began in Jesus’ incarnation and continues throughout our lives, and one would assume throughout eternity.

As to whether “we are connected to Jesus now in the same way we were connected to Adam” let me say that Jesus is the Father’s eternal son, not a creature like Adam, and Jesus is the one in and through and by and for whom all things were created, and are sustained and reconciled. According to Paul, Adam was a mere type, a foreshadowing of the One to come (see Romans 5:14). As a creature, not the creator and sustainer of all things, Adam’s connection with the human race, whatever it was, falls under the heading of this foreshadowing, and points ahead of itself to the real connection in Jesus Christ. So, no we are not connected to Jesus in the same way we were connected to Adam. Adam’s connection hinted at the real union coming in the incarnate and crucified Creator-Son and anointed One.

Please give Gary Deddo my regards. He is one of the most brilliant theologians I have had the priveledge of knowing.

For more on these issues see my essays, “Bearing Our Scorn: Jesus and the Way of Trinitarian Love” and “The Truth of All Truths” and “The Light of the Cosmos,” available at perichoresis.org, and T. F. Torrance’s books, The Mediation of Christ, and The Trinitarian Faith, and J. B. Torrance’s great book, Worship, Community and the Triune God of Grace.

It All Goes Back in the Box

2009-03-11T00:59:00.002-05:00

My friend Gary Arinder told me about a sermon that he heard some years ago. The main character in the sermon was a young boy who would visit his grandparents every summer during his teenage years. Late at night he and his grandmother would play monopoly, which she would inevitably win. Over the years he dreamed of finally beating his grandmother at their favorite game. At length, I think it was the summer before his Senior year, he won. He, of course, was gloating as they put the pieces back in the box, having achieved the cherished victory after so many years of games. As they put the game away, the grandmother turned to her grandson and said, “Monopoly is like life, in the end it all goes back in the box.”

When Gary told me the story, my mind raced with thoughts and questions. Chief among them was, ‘what do we take with us, if anything, as we move from this life to the next?’ What is really important? Our answer is dictated to us by what we believe about God. I have heard sermons, even recently, when the preacher proclaimed that the chief concern of God was his own glory. Plato would be proud. If God is concerned with his own glory then what we take with us—what counts—are those moments when we glorified God, whatever that may mean. But if we, with the early Church, throw Plato and his in-turned, self-centered God out of our minds and focus upon Jesus, and thus his Father and the Holy Spirit, then we are at once in the world of relationships.

The doctrine of the Trinity means, among other things, that God is not self-centered at all, but profoundly and beautifully other-centered. The Father is not preoccupied with his own glory, but loves his Son and the Spirit. And the Son is not bound in narcissism. He loves his Father with all of his heart, soul, mind and strength, as every page of the Gospels shout. And the Holy Spirit is not burdened with the revelation of his own significance. He glories in shining his light upon the Father and Son and their relationship.

My friend Bruce Wauchope of Adelaide, Australia likes to say that 'the currency of heaven is relationships.' The value system of the blessed Trinity is markedly different than ours. In our world money, position, power and prestige matter. But—even as we are learning again in the United States—these are mere illusions which are no more real than the Jolly Green giant. What difference does it make if you are the richest person in the world? For a while you are ‘somebody,’ maybe even ‘the’ somebody, but then you die and your money, and the opinion of your peers goes back in the box. At that moment you find yourself in another world, a world where money and its prestige and power are not valued at all. Your investments prove foolish. You have nothing with which to commend yourself. What really matters? When the game is over and it all goes back in the box, what is left? What do we take with us?

It is beautiful how the blessed Trinity has designed life and history. Everything goes back in the box. We are free to dream our dreams, free to invent our own value systems, free to define and then crown ourselves with glory, but then we all die and face the real world and the real value system. And what do we meet on the other side? What is valuable in heaven? What is the only thing the blessed Trinity favors?

Clive Staples Lewis, in his breathtaking sermon, ‘The Weight of Glory,’ talks about how we all crave fame. What we all want, according to Lewis, is to be famous. But here is his wrinkle, it is not fame with others, not fame with our peers for which we so dearly yearn. It is fame with God. We want to be famous with God. While part of us would never dare to dream of such a thing, another part could never deny that a hint of the Father’s smile is worth more than a thousand dreams fulfilled? So what makes the Father smile? What makes us famous with the blessed Trinity? Preaching? Missionary passion? Money? Power? Prestige?

Could anything thrill the heart of the blessed Trinity more than seeing their own other-centerd care and love and giving expressing themselves in us? Today I was on the receiving end of such fame. An old woman brought me a glass of ice water. It was hot. I was thirsty.

In fifty years she will have moved on and so will have I, and all that we had, made, possessed and valued will have vanished, as well as all the things possessed and done by the grandmother and her grandson. It all goes back in the box—all that is, except relationships. How Trinitarian.

Papa's Touch Revisited

2009-02-24T13:58:00.002-06:00

Thanks to all of you for your responses to my last blog, including my dad and son, and his friend C. N. I had no idea that it would stir up so much reflection. Mark’s comments, of course, were particularly pointed and raise a series of rather huge questions.

Papa has revealed his heart and will for the entire human race, and indeed the cosmos, in Jesus. Immanuel is not a theory, but a divine-human fact. Jesus Christ has embraced us all in his incarnate life, death, resurrection and ascension, lifted us up and established a real relationship with us in our darkness, sin and brokenness. In establishing a real relationship with us he has included us in his own relationship with his Father and his own relationship with the Holy Spirit—adoption. So in Jesus we see not a second plan or a half-time adjustment, or just another idea of God, but the one, eternal will and plan of Papa. Before creation Papa set his heart upon us all and determined that we would be brought into real and abiding relationship with Him through Jesus, His only son, so that we could experience life in His embrace.

The gospel is not the news that we can receive an absent Jesus into our lives, but the stunning news that Jesus has received us into his. We do not make Jesus Christ part of our worlds. He is the creator. He has given us a place in his cosmos. And even as we rejected our place in the great rebellion, he refused our rejection, came in person to bear our scorn, and reestablished real relationship with us, thus giving the fallen world a place in his relationship with his Father and the Holy Spirit. It is here that I am sometimes labeled a universalist because I will not budge on the fact that the Father’s Son has included us all, thus fulfilling his Father’s dream and will for us. What Jesus has made real in his own person through life, death, resurrection and ascension is the real world, the rest is what we bring to his table in our darkness.

I will deal again at another time with the problem of universalism (see The Great Dance and Across All Worlds, and just about everything I have ever written or spoken). Suffice it to say here that the universal inclusion of the human race in Jesus and in his relationship with Papa and the Holy Spirit is both great news and exposing news. It declares to the world who God is and why the Lord created this universe and humanity within it. And it declares to us who we are and why we are here and what is going on in our lives. The news of what Jesus has made of his creation in himself is fantastic news, full of hope for us all, but it is also news which exposes our utter blindness and brokenness. So it is in the light of Jesus Christ and of what he has made of us that we get a glimpse of where this is all heading and of what we should be experiencing in our lives. And it is in this light that we, at last, can see that there is a real and serious problem. Our salvation in Jesus Christ reveals we are all profoundly blind and destructive. We just don’t get it, don’t see it, don’t believe it to be true at all, and our unbelief has traumatic consequences.

Given that Papa has embraced us all in Jesus—and I do not mean the ‘good’ us, I mean the broken, blind, sinful us, for that is what happened when we rejected and cursed Jesus and he bore it without retaliation—we should see Papa’s touch everyday, all day long. And we should see personal, relational and international healing and wholeness emerging. For we are all included in the life and wholeness and beauty of the blessed Trinity. So when Mark asks his great question, ‘does God give moments like this to starving orphans in third world countries?’ my answer is, of course, all day long, every day. For Papa has embraced us in Jesus in real and personal relationship, and He does not live as if it is not true. It is not a question of whether or not Papa is present in all tenderness and care and love, for in the light of Jesus we have solid ground for knowing that He is so forever. It is a question of what we see and do not see, and of what we do to ourselves, to others and to creation in our blindness.

Let me put this another way. When we meet Jesus and see him as he is, I don’t think we will say, ‘Jesus, forgive me, for I overestimated your place and significance in the world. I gave you too much credit.’ And I don’t think we will ask Papa, ‘where were you?’ or accuse the Holy Spirit of dereliction of duty. For when we meet Jesus and see who he is and thus who we are and what is happening in this world, we will see both his presence in our lives and that we have been terribly and profoundly blind. Moreover, we will see that we have imposed our blindness upon Jesus’ world and people with devastating, if not traumatic consequences (check out our own marriages!). Then we will see how the Father, Son and Spirit embraced us in our sin, and even used us and our brokenness to break through not only our own blindness, but that of other’s as well. The Holy Spirit is a redeeming genius. In the light of Jesus we will see how and when and where the love and life, the care and burden of the Triune God was at work within us and in our lives.

Here is a great example. When Mark spoke of his ‘lying awake at night staring at the ceiling, thinking about those I know who are profoundly struggling, let alone all those around the world who need a meal or a safe place to sleep,’ I could not hear those words as Mark’s at all. Those are the words of Jesus himself—present, not absent. This is Jesus’ burden being shared with Mark and with us. For Jesus has included us in his life. Immanuel is not a theory. It is not a doctrine waiting for us to apply to our lives. Immanuel is the real world, Jesus Christ is present with us in our terrible blindness. As Jesus shares himself with us, we feel his joy and his burden, and we have moments when Papa’s presence breaks through our blindness.

We should see more of Papa’s presence and care everywhere, and we should be burdened when we don’t. For the Jesus within us knows his Father and His presence, shares Papa’s heart with us in our blindness, and shares our pain when his presence is violated in our lives.

When Mark cited Frederick Buechner’s description of compassion as "the sometimes fatal capacity for feeling what it's like to live in somebody else's skin. It is the knowledge that there can never really be any peace and joy for me until there is peace and joy finally for you too," I could only here Jesus again speaking to us all. For he is the only one who has suffered the fatal capacity of feeling what it is like to live in somebody else’s skin. And he did so because he committed himself to us before the foundation of the world, and he will not rest until we too feel his peace and joy, and until the cosmos is expressing his own relationship with Papa and the Holy Spirit.

“Does that little girl who's never heard the name of Jesus, cowering in a corner dreading another night of abuse, does she get to feel Papa's touch?” What we know about this little girl is that she is included, that Jesus (who has suffered the fatal capacity of feeling what it is like to live in somebody else’s skin) is with and in her sharing her terror whether she has heard of his name or not, that the Holy Spirit is bearing witness with her spirit that she is included and loved, that in Jesus Papa is present, and that she is living in a terrifying hell, which is the real world she experiences and wars against the witness of the Holy Spirit. And I would hazard a guess that she is getting a load of religious crap as well. She is in desperate need of embodied love and truth, for the Holy Spirit to reveal Jesus Christ not merely to her, but in her (as happened to Saul of Tarsus, Galatians 1:16). There is no hope for this little girl (or for Saul of Tarsus, or any of us) if Jesus Christ is not already in her, meeting her in her trauma and sharing himself and all that he is and has with her. And Jesus is not absent.

This little girl, I suspect, is a picture of the human race suffering abuse from all forms of darkness. Jesus has established a real relationship with us in our traumatic existence, and his presence in our hell is our hope. Having suffered from our hands the worst abuse imaginable, he is able to share himself with us in our pain. His presence commands us and frees us to see Papa everywhere, and to cry out for the Holy Spirit to give us eyes to see. And his freeing presence in our darkness burdens us for those who don’t see. We live in the joy and burden of Jesus himself, sharing his burden for the starving orphans around the world, and for fat materialists, and for those who tar Papa’s face with the brush of their own angst and create a religion to go with it, for those who have been abused and abuse, for those who hurt and feel ashamed of themselves, and for those who live as if they are the answer.

Paul’s prayer is universally relevant, “that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you the Spirit of wisdom and of revelation in the knowledge of Jesus. I pray that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened, so that you may know what is the hope of His calling, what are the riches of the glory of His inheritance in the saints, and what is the surpassing greatness of his power toward us who believe” Ephesians 1:17-19).

And the declaration of Jesus, “I am the light of the cosmos; the one who follows Me shall never walk in the darkness, but shall have the light of life” (John 8:12).

May the Holy Spirit reveal Jesus in us, and give us the courage to take baby steps against the way we see things. And may he continue to apply his redemptive genius to our lives and use us to help others know the truth.

Papa's Touch

2009-02-11T23:22:00.002-06:00

On a recent trip I found myself in the Singapore airport with nine hours until my next flight. While the Singapore airport is surely one of the most beautiful in the world, nine hours is a long time, especially in the middle of the night, and I had already traveled from Jackson, Mississippi to Dallas to Los Angeles to Japan. Needless to say, I was exhausted, seriously so. In fact, for about an hour I thought I was going to faint. A hint of panic swept into my soul as well as a good dose of doubt as to my sanity.

The first order of business was to find a place to exchange money and buy something to eat and drink. But everything was closed. So I walked and walked and walked. At length I stumbled onto an American Express currency exchange, got some Singapore money and set out to find food. I ate some fantastic shrimp soup and drank at least one quart of water. To my surprise the food and water did not help much. Still feeling faint I figured I needed to find the most comfortable chair possible, thinking I would probably pass out—an unknown vagrant half way around the world from home.

Out of the corner of my eye I caught a glimpse of what looked like an American football game on a huge flat screen TV in what turned out to be a Boston style pub, complete with Red Sox and Celtic memorabilia. Thinking I was delusional, I walked over to take a closer look. To my utter amazement, not only was it an American football game, but a replay of the Cotton Bowl. It was my team, the Ole Miss Rebels playing Texas Tech in one of the great bowl venues in our country. For those of you who do not know, I graduated from the University of Mississippi (known as Ole Miss), and we rarely have a great football team. But this year we did, and we ended up playing Texas Tech which was ranked 7th in country. According to polls, 91 percent of Americans thought Texas Tech would beat us without mercy. And they should have. It was a David and Goliath thing. But on New Years day the game was on, and we not only won, we dominated. It was one of our greatest games ever.

So there I was in Singapore, exhausted, teetering on the edge of fainting, and certainly scared, and there in an Irish pub was my team the Ole Miss Rebels on the big screen. It was an ESPN replay of the great game. What are the odds of such a moment? Who knows? Who cares? I did.

Of the thousands of folks passing through the Singapore airport on any given day, it is hard to imagine anyone who would be touched by an Ole Miss football game. But on that night, so far from home, Papa spoke to me loud and clear. Perhaps I should say, Papa spoke to me in the most personal and tender way.

There is something here about how personally Papa relates to us. The most important moments of faith are always intensely personal. I stood there and laughed as tears rolled down my cheeks, thinking to myself, ‘It is true. Papa is real. We are—I am—known and loved and cared for. Everything is going to be fine.’

I think this is a good way for us to pray for our friends and family. We ask Papa to speak to them in ways that may or may not be relevant to others at all, but are profoundly personal and tender to them.—and thus very meaningful. Isn’t that what Paul was praying for in Ephesians 1:15ff?

It is the Holy Spirit’s work to give us Jesus’ eyes to see Papa’s tender care, especially when we feel exhausted and alone.

Happy New Year

2009-01-01T01:02:00.001-06:00

"In the world you have tribulation, but take courage, I have overcome the cosmos"

—Jesus

The Incarnation

2008-12-24T11:56:00.001-06:00

Reading through some of my favorite sections of Irenaeus and Athanasius it struck me again how full of wonder they were over the incarnation. They did not think of the incarnation as a means to another end. The gift is Jesus himself. The Father’s Son became a human being, one of us. The simple point of such an amazing move is that he wanted to be with us, and to share life with us. Immanuel, of course, means just that. Although technically Immanuel means ‘God with us,’ the God who came to be with us is a God of relationship. The Son did not come alone. He became human as the Father’s Son and as the One who dwells in the Holy Spirit. So he brought his relationship with his Father and his relationship with the Holy Spirit into his incarnate relationship with us, and indeed all creation.

Being so preoccupied with legalities has largely blinded us in the West to such an astounding gift. We have separated the gift from the person. The cross has become more important than Jesus. The incarnation has become a means to another end. But it is not the cross or the death of Jesus that is central to the gospel. The heart of Christianity is Jesus himself. To be sure, it is Jesus as crucified, resurrected and ascended. But these aspects of Jesus life are just that, aspects of his life and existence and being, and they are aspects of his incarnate relationship with us.

It may be helpful to note that the incarnation is not to be confused with the birth of Jesus, as if it were only one part of his life. The incarnation is all inclusive, involving his birth, life, death, resurrection and ascension. To be with us, to include us in his own life and relationships, sin had to be addressed and overcome. The death of Jesus figures into the larger event of his incarnate relationship with us, of his bringing heaven and earth together in relationship. Given the fall and sin, how could there be a real incarnation without the death and resurrection of the Father’s Son? For how could Jesus have a real relationship with us without meeting us as we are as fallen creatures? And how could this Son and this anointed One meet us as we are as fallen creatures without overcoming our sin?

And given that Jesus is the Father’s Son and the one anointed in Holy Spirit, how could there be a real incarnation without the ascension as its fulfillment? For how could this Son and this anointed One become what we are without including us in his world and life and relationships? And how could he include us in his world and life and relationships without the ascension, without lifting us up into the arms of his Father and the embrace of the Holy Spirit? The ascension is the finishing, as it were, of the process of establishing real relationship with us, wherein the Trinitarian life of God opens itself up and fully accepts, embraces and includes all that we are in our human existence.

Stretching from the Father’s dream of our adoption to the virgin birth into Jesus’ life, death and resurrection, the incarnation finds its ongoing fulfillment in the ascension. In the ascended Son heaven and earth, all things divine and human are together in real relationship forever. This is the meaning of the incarnation. The gift of the Triune God to the human race is Jesus himself, and in him real and everlasting relationship with the Father and the Holy Spirit. Immanuel. Salvation. Reconciliation. Adoption.

As the great Irenaeus put it, ‘our beloved Lord Jesus Christ became what we are that He might bring us to be what he is in Himself.’ And Athanasius, ‘the Son of God became Son of man to make us sons of God.’ And John, ‘the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld his glory, glory as of the one and only from the Father, full of grace and reality…of His fulness we have all received grace upon grace.’ And Paul, ‘For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though He was rich, yet for your sake He became poor, that you through His poverty might become rich.’

And Jesus, “In that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in Me, and I in you.’

Merry Christmas

The Shack in Australia

2008-12-08T02:47:00.002-06:00

The cat is out of the bag—and it is a big cat. I just got home from a two week tour of Australia with Paul Young, author, as most of you know, of the international best selling book, The Shack. It was my great joy and privilege to introduce him to brothers and sisters and seekers in Adelaide, Melbourne, Brisbane and Sydney. It felt like we were watching Luther nail his ninety-five theses on the door of Wittenberg, except the door here is the whole world. To date well over four million copies of The Shack have been sold, and it is now being translated into 40 languages. The wild popularity of Paul’s book shouts to us that people across the world are seriously thirsting for something beyond the Western god. Hallelujah.

As Paul says, ‘the shack’ is a metaphor of the wounded soul, the inner world where we bury our hurts, traumas, and the terrible pain of our personal tragedies. In contrast to religion—which is our endless attempts to try to heal ourselves—the book is about encountering Jesus, his Father, and the Holy Spirit in our shame and darkness and fear, and finding real healing. One of my favorite scenes in the book involves the Holy Spirit and Mackenzie digging together in a garden, which is both a wild mess and beautiful at the same time. Mack comments,“ I feel strangely at home and comfortable here.” Then comes some rather stunning words from the Spirit—and this is the heart of the uprising.

And well you should, Mackenzie, because this garden is your soul. This mess is you! Together, you and I, we have been working with a purpose in your heart. And it is wild and beautiful and perfectly in process. To you it seems like a mess, but to me, I see a perfect pattern emerging and growing and alive—a living fractal (p. 138).

Note carefully that the Holy Spirit is inside Mack’s brokenness. When is the last time you heard a sermon on the freedom of the Holy Spirit to meet you and to love you in your shame? And then Papa (God, the Father) comes walking down a path in the garden with a sack lunch. Herein lies the glorious crisis The Shack creates across the world. Is God this good? Is God this accepting, this comfortable with us in our brokenness? It is a question of the character of God. Could it be that Jesus’ Father is free to love us as we are, free to accept us in our disasters and pain? Could it be that Papa has embraced us—the real us— forever?

As I listened to Paul tell the story of his own great sadness, which is the story behind the story, and as I watched the tears flow, it struck me that in desperation for real solutions to his own pain he discovered the trinitarian God of the early Church. The healing vision of love that fires The Shack, contrary to some reports, is not new, but ancient. And, blessedly for us, Paul has found a way—in the genius of the Holy Spirit—to pierce the veil of our legal darkness, and help us see the truth all over again. The Shack is a fundamental book. In ways almost inexpressible, it shares the beauty and goodness of God with us, and in doing so it quickens our hearts with hope. But it also exposes our ingrained beliefs, leaving us with a way too personal question, which God? Is it the unapproachable and unaccepting god of Greece, or Jesus’ Papa cooking breakfast for us in our shame? It is that simple, and that huge. Which God?

C. S. Lewis said that as he read George MacDonald’s, Phantastes his imagination was baptized. He went on to say that it took 18 years or so for his baptized imagination to reach his head. I suspect that such a baptism is what happens to most people who read The Shack. The Holy Spirit bears witness with our spirits that it is true, that Papa is this good, and that we are truly loved and embraced forever. This divine witness gives us permission—surely fleeting at first, but nevertheless real—to question the largely philosophical, legal god we have inherited. And even though we have a plethora of underlined bible verses to prove the truth of this god, the baptism of our imaginations—the witness of the Spirit—haunts us with the notion that we may well have misread the book.

For my money, we have been intellectually trapped by a vision of God that owes as much, if not more, to Greece and Rome than it does to Jesus. Thus, without knowing it, we have had to live in fear, ashamed of ourselves and our brokenness. We have had no real choice but to pretend that our religion actually works, while our souls remain riddled with fear and pain. The questions posed by Paul Young are this, ‘Is God ashamed of us? Is he aloof, watching us from the infinite distance of a disapproving heart? Is law more important to God than real relationship with us? Are we left to ourselves to find healing? Is heaven a place we go to avoid hell?’ His answer and mine is a simple, yet resounding, ‘No!’

The good news is that Jesus has moved in and set up house inside our darkness, and he brought his Father and the Holy Spirit with him. Christianity is about getting over our vision of god and letting Jesus teach us about his Father. In the midst of our shame the blessed Trinity has come to dwell, to love us, and to heal us from the inside out. Heaven is not so much a place as it is the sheer free-flowing life that emerges in us when we meet Jesus’ Papa inside our shacks. Can you believe in this God? Why not? Who told you about God?

In the belly of the Western, deistic and legalistic beast, the baptism of our imaginations is happening again. The fleeting hints of permission are being rumored in the dark places of our souls. We dare to hope. With the hints come freedom to question our inherited vision of god, to risk believing in Jesus’ Papa and his goodness. For Lewis it took 18 years for the Spirit’s witness to convert his mind. No one knows how long it will take for us, but the baptism is very real and it is not going away. The vision of The Shack stuns us with Papa’s love. Could it be?

Of course.

Permission granted. It is okay to believe in the overflowing goodness of the blessed Trinity.

When we meet the Father, Son and Spirit face to face I would lay odds that our response will not be, ‘forgive me, I overestimated your goodness.’

For more on Jesus inside our darkness, see my book Across All Worlds, and my free essay, “Bearing Our Scorn: Jesus and the Way of Trinitarian Love.” Both are available at our web site www.perichoresis.org.

The Faith of Christ

2008-11-13T20:38:00.002-06:00

Way back in the 50’s a debate started regarding the translation of certain key passages in Paul that had to do with justification by faith. The question was whether or not we should translate these passages as referring to Christ’s faith or to ours. Of course, most post-reformation translations take these passages as obvious references to our faith in Christ. In the Greek language, however, the construction could be translated either as a subjective genitive (Christ’s faith) or as an objective genitive (our faith in Christ). Interestingly, the King James translates them as referring to Christ’s own faith. Over the decades the debate grew intense and scholars from around the world joined in. In fifty or so years a decided shift has taken place. At first the burden of proof was on those who thought the passages should be translated as referring to Christ's faith, and not to our faith in Christ. These days it is the other way around.

Here are the key passages. I will quote first from the New American Standard Bible.

ROM 3:22 “even the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all those who believe, for there is no distinction.”

ROM 3:26 “for the demonstration, I say, of His righteousness at the present time, that He might be just and the justifier of the one who as faith in Jesus.”

GAL 2:16 “nevertheless knowing that a man is no justified by the works of the Law but through faith in Christ Jesus, even we have believed in Christ Jesus, that we may be justified by faith in Christ, and not by the works of the Law; since by the works of the Law shall no flesh be justified.”

GAL 2:20 “I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me, and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me, and delivered Himself up for me.”

GAL 3:22 “But the Scripture has shut up all me under sin, that the promise by faith in Jesus Christ might be given to those who believe.”

EPH 3:12 “in whom we have boldness and confident access through faith in Him.”

PHIL 3:9 “and may be found in Him, not having a righteousness of my own derived from the Law, but that which is through faith in Christ, the righteousness which comes from God on the basis of faith.”

As you can see, far from being peripheral, these passages are at the center of Paul’s thought. The issue at hand challenges both the Roman Catholic and Reformation doctrines of justification at a fundamental level.

I first discovered the debate when I was in seminary working on an exegetical paper on EPH 4:11-13. Verse 13 reads, “until we all attain to the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to a mature man, to the measure of the stature which belongs to the fulness of Christ.” In my paper, I argued that ‘of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God’ were to be interpreted as referring to Christ’s own faith and knowledge, as surely as ‘the fulness of Christ’ refers to his own fulness and not ours. Looking back I can see how this issue opened the door for me to understand the theology of J. B. and T. F. Torrance, with their powerful and beautiful emphasis on the vicarious humanity of Christ. Over the years I continued to follow the debate, which reached its peak in the 90’s, but is still brewing. Strangely, the theological significance of this transition is yet to be appreciated.

Three factors convince me that Paul is not talking about our faith in Christ, but Christ’s very own faith, such that we are justified by the faith and faithfulness of Jesus himself.

(1) It seems clear enough, as even the NASB translation reads, that Paul (in EPH 4:13) is speaking about our participation in Jesus’ own faith, knowledge and fulness. In his earlier prayer (EPH 3:14-19) Paul prays that we would come to comprehend and to know the love of Christ, that we “may be filled up to all the fulness of God.” In Colossians Paul says, “For in Him [Christ] all the fulness of Deity dwells in bodily form, and in Him you have been made full” (2:9-10). Clearly the fulness belongs to Jesus, and is then shared with us. Jesus himself tells us that he came to give us not simply peace, but his own peace (JN 14:27), and his own joy (15:11). And, of course, in his famous prayer it is abundantly clear that Jesus envisages the very love and glory of the Father and Son themselves dwelling in us personally (17:22-26). In Matthew, Jesus claims not only that all things have been handed over to him, but also that he alone knows the Father, and anyone to whom the Son wills to reveal Him (11:27). The heart of the gospel is the fact that Jesus alone knows the Father, and he alone is filled with the fulness of God, and that he has come to share himself and all that he is and has (fulness, knowledge, peace, joy, glory, love, and faith, among other things) with us. Sharing in Jesus' own life and relationship with his Father and the Spirit is the point.

(2) The genitive construction in ROM 3:26 (ek pisteos Jesou) is exactly the same in ROM 4:16 where Paul is talking about Abraham’s faith (ek pisteos Abraam). The NASB does not translate the Abraham passage as 'our faith in Abraham,' but as “those who are of the faith of Abraham.” If the NASB were consistent, ROM 3:26 would read, “for the demonstration, I say, of His righteousness at the present time, that He might be just and the justifier of the one who is of the faith of Jesus.

(3) In Galatians 2:16 we have a perfect illustration of what is called a chiasm. The verse reads,

“nevertheless knowing that a man is not justified by the works of the Law, but through faith in Christ Jesus, even we have believed in Christ Jesus, that we may be justified by faith in Christ, not by the works of the Law…”

A chiasm or chiastic structure fills the Psalter. It is very Hebraic. It is named after the Greek letter ‘Chi’ which looks like an X in English. If you take away the right part of the X you are left with an arrow pointing to the right. In terms of a chiastic argument, the first point in the argument starts with the top left of the X, or arrow. The next point, which is the heart of the argument is the tip. The last point is a repeat of the first point and starts at the beginning of the bottom of the left side of the X. If this is all too confusing to you, let me put Paul’s argument in chiastic sequence.

knowing that a man is not justified by the works of the Law
-----but through faith in Christ Jesus
----------even we have believed in Christ Jesus,
-----that we may be justified by faith in Christ
not by the works of the Law.

Three times in this verse, Paul, allegedly, speaks of faith in Christ, which is rather redundant and superfluous, unless a chiasm is being employed, and he has in mind not our faith in Christ, but Christ’s faith or faithfulness. The verse works perfectly only when we understand that Paul is thinking about the faith of Christ. It would then read,

knowing that a man is not justified by the works of the Law
-----but through the faith of Christ Jesus,
----------even we have believed in Christ Jesus
-----that we may be justified by the faith of Christ
not by the works of the Law.

The first and the last clauses speak of not being justified by the works of the law. The second and next to the last speak of being justified by the faith of Christ himself. The middle clause speaks of our trusting in Jesus’ faith and faithfulness. The point of Christian faith is not in the efficacy or power of our own faith, but believing in the faith and faithfulness of Jesus himself, who stands in our place. We believe in Jesus and in his faith. This is the center, the tip of the arrow, of Paul’s chiastic argument. Jesus has taken his place on our side of the covenant relationship with God. And in our place he has offered the perfect response of faith and faithfulness, wherein we are justified. We take our stand, according to Paul, upon his vicarious offering to the Father, upon his faith and faithfulness, that we may be justified not by our own works or faith, but by Jesus.’ We choose to be justified by Jesus’ faith and faithfulness, not our own.

The fruit of taking our stand on Jesus’ faith is peace, the cessation of striving to find a way to justify ourselves through anything that we may do, whether our own faith or works or religious activity of any sort. We cling to, hope in, and pin all our hopes on Jesus, and upon who he is and what he has done as our vicarious representative.

Failure here is simply to doom ourselves to live with ourselves and our faith and religious performance. To not believe in Jesus—and in his faith and faithfulness—is to sentence ourselves to believe in ourselves and in our own efforts, and it is to suffer living with the failed assurance of such a way of believing. So for Paul, we rest in Jesus himself, not in ourselves, and in resting in him, in believing in him, his own glory, knowledge, peace, joy, love and faith begin to have room to come to personal expression in us.

If we translate the key passages as references to Jesus’ faith in our place, it would look something like the following.

ROM 3:22 “even the righteousness of God which comes through the faith/faithfulness of Jesus Christ for all those who believe, for there is no distinction.”

ROM 3:26 “for the demonstration, I say, of His righteousness at the present time, that He might be just and the justifier of the one who is of the faith of Jesus.”

GAL 2:16 “nevertheless knowing that a man is no justified by the works of the Law but through faith of Christ Jesus, even we have believed in Christ Jesus, that we may be justified by the faith of Christ, and not by the works of the Law; since by the works of the Law shall no flesh be justified.”

GAL 2:20 “I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me, and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith/faithfulness of the Son of God, who loved me, and delivered Himself up for me.”

GAL 3:22 “But the Scripture has shut up all me under sin, that the promise by the faith of Jesus Christ might be given to those who believe.”

EPH 3:12 “in whom we have boldness and confident access through His faith/faithfulness.”

PHIL 3:9 “and may be found in Him, not having a righteousness of my own derived from the Law, but that which is through the faith of Christ, the righteousness which comes from God on the basis of faith.”

At every point and at all points in between Jesus and his life and faithfulness is the point

Remember, every translation is a translation of the original text through the lens of a particular theology. The Reformers made a great step forward, away from works based salvation. It is time for us to stand on their shoulders and take the next step in their journey into a faith of Christ salvation, which, I suspect was what they were saying all along.

The Wrinkle in Time

2008-11-04T08:17:00.002-06:00

The Bible is the story of God’s relationship with his creation. And like most great stories there is a wrinkle in it that no one saw coming. Something unprecedented, indeed unthinkable happened. And once it happened the story itself changed forever. Well, that is not exactly true, because the story itself did not change—we did. And in particular our understanding of what the story is about, of who God is, of why God made the world and history suddenly found themselves confronted with God’s wrinkle. Catching the entire world by surprise, God came in person to be with us. As John said, “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:14).

Why? The most obvious—but almost unbelievable—answer is that God wanted to be with us and wanted us to be with him. From the beginning of Genesis all the way through the story of the Jews it is clear that the Lord wants relationship with his creation. But relationship of what kind? Early on we have God giving commandments to Adam and Eve, and then later the law was given through Moses to the people of Israel. So it would not be unreasonable to think that the relationship God wants with us is more or less legal. The older Calvinists structured their entire theology around the idea that God relates to us on the basis of law. But the shocking fact at the heart of Christianity is that God—without ceasing to be God—became human. We either think that such an event was in order to fulfill the law or we see it is a revelation of the kind of relationship the Lord wants to have with us—personal, so personal that everything even hinted at in the law is not only fulfilled but taken into new worlds of intimacy.

Paul, in Ephesians, says that God “chose us in Him to be holy and blameless before Him. In love He predestined us to adoption as sons” (1:4-5). At first glance, such language sounds awfully distant and legal, given that most of us innately hear ‘holy’ and ‘blameless’ and ‘adoption’ as legal words within a deistic worldview. But consider the other phrase in sentence, ‘before Him.’ The NIV translates ‘before Him’ as ‘in His sight,’ giving the impression that what Paul has in mind is that we are to be objects in God’s sight, as my computer or a candle are objects in my sight. But I think this is far too non-relational and pale and insipid for what Paul has in mind. Note Markus Barth’s comments on the meaning of ‘before Him.’

‘BEFORE HIM’ denotes the immediate presence of God to man and the closest proximity of man to God. The image suggests the position and relationship enjoyed by the cream of society at a royal court, by children to their father, by a bride to a bridegroom…” (Ephesians: The Anchor Bible, p.80).

Here we have a staggering statement. Barth sees Paul as suggesting that what the Lord is after in creation is relationship, real relationship with us, relationship of the most personal and profound and intimate and hospitable order. Not legal standing, but fellowship, communion, indeed union with us and we with God—shared life.

What are we to make of this? On the one hand, we have a rather stunning vision of God coming to be with us in person and to share nothing less than His own life with us in the closest, most beautiful way. On the other, we have an implicit question. Is this sharing of life a mere happy coincidence? Are we simply lucky that Adam fell? Whereas he got the law, we get God himself? Is God’s personal coming an afterthought, plan ‘B,’ some kind of divine half-time adjustment, as it were, consequent upon Adam’s disobedience? Or is God’s personal coming plan ‘A,’ the one and only eternal and original plan of God before the ages? Was adoption the eternal point? While these are simple and straightforward questions, their implications are monumental. How we answer them determines the way we read the book. Does Jesus fit into Adam’s world, or does Adam fit into Jesus’ world?

For my money, the incarnation is in no way an afterthought The incarnation—and the shared life that comes to us in the incarnate Son—is the original plan before the first particle of creation was called into being. Paul reread the story I the light of God’s wrinkle, and so should we. The law, the covenant, the whole history of the Jews, and indeed, creation itself serves the larger purpose of the incarnation and the sharing of the trinitarian life with us. To borrow from T. F. Torrance, what we have in creation and in Israel’s history is the preparation of ‘the womb of the incarnation.’ Creation is thus the first step in an inconceivable divine dream in which the human race will move from non-being to dirt to the right hand of God the Father. Adam, Abraham, Israel are created and called by the Lord to be the divine-human relationship in and through which the Father’s Son himself will cross all worlds and become human, uniting in himself the human race and the very trinitarian life of God.

This gives us a three-part vision of human history. First, there is the preparation for the coming of the Father’s Son, the creation of the womb of the incarnation. Second, there is his coming and the fulfillment of his Father’s dreams for us in his own life, death, resurrection and ascension. Third, there is the coming of the God the Holy Spirit in and through Jesus. As Irenaeus said, in Jesus the Holy Spirit himself has accustomed himself to dwell with the human race and accustomed the human race do dwell in him. So we have the time of preparation, the time of fulfillment, and the time of the Spirit. Implicit throughout these times is the profound blindness of the human race. So one aspect of the time of the Holy Spirit is our education, which includes accepting and relating to us in our terrible darkness and gently giving us eyes to see God’s wrinkle in time, so that we can live in the anointing of the Holy Spirit.

Today I am most grateful that the Holy Spirit is passionate about our coming to know the truth, for it seems we are passionate about avoiding it. But blessedly, the Holy Spirit will not go away.

For more on this vision see my paper “On the Road to Becoming Flesh: Israel as the Womb of the Incarnation in the Theology of T. F. Torrance.” This essay is available on our web site as a free download.

The Kingdom of the Triune God

2008-10-19T12:42:00.002-05:00

Jesus has included the human race in his relationship with his Father, and in his relationship with the Holy Spirit, and in his relationship with every human being, and in his relationship with the whole cosmos. As Vanessa Kersting says in one of her songs, “You are the center of it all.” Jesus is the alpha and the omega, the one in and through and by and for whom all things were created, and are sustained, and are reconciled. I believe this is the early Church’s vision of Jesus Christ. I take it as our non-negotiable, our fundamental hermeneutic from which we are to rethink everything we thought we knew, from our vision to God to social justice, from our notions of God’s eternal purpose to our economics, from our concerns for human dignity to our freedom to play. The kingdom of the Triune God is, in my view, the life of Jesus himself (in its four-fold relation) coming to personal, relational, social, international, global, environmental, economic, political, spiritual, musical, playful and cosmic expression in us, in our world, and throughout the cosmos.

Viewing human history and our times in the light of Christ tells us that there is more happening on this planet and in our lives than we ever dared to dream. Jesus (and his four-fold life) is present, not absent. And Jesus is present everywhere. Moreover, the Holy Spirit is at work in every arena seeking to facilitate the emergence of Jesus’ life. If we have eyes to see we can see Jesus’ life emerging everywhere. But we can also see that something is terribly wrong.

In a nutshell, a dastardly and profound confusion has set up shop inside our minds. Biblically speaking, the human race is in the dark—blind as bats—and each of us brings the darkness, and our own particular blindness to the table of Jesus Christ. So much of life on our planet, from our marriages to our global politics, from our day to day work to our attempts to find glory, seems to be the incessant attempt to impose our wills, our blindness, our notions upon Jesus himself, upon others and his world. To me sin is the attempt to wrest Jesus into believing in us and in our notions. It is unbelief in Jesus and belief in ourselves. Sin is the belief that Jesus is dead wrong about God, about humanity and history, about how to live, and about the cosmos, and the insistence that he turn from his beliefs, repent and believe in us.

Jesus is present, not absent. He is sharing with us all his own four-fold life. The Holy Spirit is working to give us eyes to see and ears to hear, so that the kingdom of the Triune God continues to emerge. And humanity, as a race, as individuals, as governments and religions—while breathing Christological air and living in Christ’s life—is dead set on imposing its bizarre notions upon Jesus and his world.

History is the time and space given to us to dream our dreams, to think up our theories, to invent our own worlds, and to attempt to wrest Jesus and the cosmos into our vision. All the while, Jesus is sharing himself and his life with us, and we are haunted and inspired, thrilled and made malcontent by his presence in our darkness.

We know we are made for glory, but we still believe in ourselves and our endarkened dreams. We are, as Chaucer said, like the drunk man, who knows his has a house, but cannot find his way home.

Meanwhile there is more than a little of Jesus’ life everywhere you look and listen. Come, Spirit of truth.

Spin Master

2008-10-08T00:49:00.002-05:00

Our Presidential election has become hype and sound bites with no reference to a larger reality as to why or why not we should act in any particular way. Most of the media has proven untrustworthy, embarrassing itself with its patronizing prejudice. Our post-modern, relativistic world has nothing real to stand on, and the ‘jesus’ of the modern church is so incredibly small he offers no answers to the ‘isms’ that are destroying us, to say nothing of international relations or of the great issues we face with the environment of our beloved planet.

So where does that leave us? The real battle in the United States today is the battle over spin. Who can become the Spin Master? Who is best at dazzling urgency? Who can touch the raw nerves of fear? Who has the best commercials, or personality, or style—today? Who can twist the filtered news unto their own agenda? What a sad tale. But what do we expect when our culture believes there is no ‘reality,’ and the church’s ‘jesus’ is little more than a tribal deity? I suspect most of us are so overwhelmed with the incessant crap, or so bored with the latest side-show, we just tune out and try to make the most of our lives. Who knows what to believe anyway? For my part, I would despair were it not for the Jesus of the early Church.

Here is my political platform: Jesus has included the human race in his relationship with his Father, and in his anointing in the Holy Spirit, and in his relationship with each and every human being, and in his relationship with the whole cosmos. The human race—including the Church—stands called to walk accordingly.

The basis for our concerns for social justice, for the health of the environment, for the end of poverty in all its forms (including the ultimate poverty of not knowing Jesus’ Father), for the end of racism, sexism, and all prejudice is Jesus himself—and the fact that he is sharing his heart with all of us. In him, the Father, the Holy Spirit, the human race, and the whole cosmos have been brought together in real relationship forever. His presence is therefore both a promise and a warning. Since he is the one in whom all created things have their being and life and meaning, any personal, racial, sexual, international, global, or environmental violation of the good and righteous relationships he has established in his own being is doomed to hurt like hell and to produce chaotic misery. And since he is the one in whom all creation has a blessed place—including each and every human being—to walk with him, to place our own ideas and agendas at his feet for light is to participate in his rightly-related world of wholeness.

Come, Holy Spirit. Give us eyes to see and ears to hear.

The Embrace

2008-09-13T00:53:00.002-05:00

You never know which moments, words or events will be important to people. A man buys flowers for his wife, for which she is thankful, but she remembers the smile on his face, and the fact that his shoes were untied. A child on a vacation to the Grand Canyon remembers the laughter of the family at 3 am on the way back. History is even more unpredictable. What moments, what events, what words matter in the long run? Who can know? Only time will tell. While our beloved media tries with all of its cunning to make certain moments weighty, there is something real that is larger than all of us, and somehow we know it when we hear or see it, and when we don’t.

While I would not claim to be a prophet, I would hazard a guess as to one of the great moments in our time—at least for the Western world. I have heard recordings of President Roosevelt’s address after Pearl Harbor, and President Kennedy’s famous speech as well. And I have listened to Martin Luther King’s freedom address, and watched in serious respect when Barak Obama spoke in the aftermath of Rev. Wright’s publicized diatribes, and recently I watched Sarah Palin’s amazing speech at the Republican convention, yet for my money the most important moment in the West in the last one hundred years was when a fictitious broken-hearted, angry, and cynical white man named Mackenzie met God face to face. And God—appearing as large black woman— ran to embrace him, lifting him in an eternal hug (See William P. Young’s, The Shack). That moment spoke and speaks volumes, and it speaks to places in our souls that we would rather pretend do not even exists. It is way to scary to let ourselves believe that God could be so good. So we settle. We just don’t have a theology to go with our heart’s knowledge.

Mackenzie’s daughter had been kidnapped and brutally murdered, and he had grieved his heart out. Blaming himself—and God—he lost life. Then he got a note from God to meet at the shack where his daughter had been killed. At length, and with not a little hesitation, he set out for the shack. With doubts whirling, he opened the door. The shack was a bleak as his absent god. The years of hurt proved their point. Mack left convinced that his absent, judgmental god was real. But something happened on his way back to his truck. To his shock, life blossomed. Amazed, he walked back to the shack and stood on the porch. Not knowing what to do…

Mack decided to bang loudly and see what happened, but just as he raised his fist to do so, the door flew open, and he was looking directly into the face of a large beaming African-American woman.

Instinctively he jumped back, but he was too slow. With speed that belied her size, she crossed the distance between them and engulfed him in her arms, lifting him clear off his feet and spinning him around like a child. And all the while she was shouting his name—“Mackenzie Allen Phillips”—with the ardor of someone seeing a long-lost and deeply-loved relative. She finally put him back on earth, and with her hands on his shoulders, pushed him back as if to get a good look at him.

“Mack, look at you!” she fairly exploded. “Here you are, and so grown up. I have really been looking forward to seeing you face to face. It is so wonderful to have you here with us. My, my, my how I do love you!” And with that she wrapped herself around him again (William P. Young, The Shack, pp. 82-83).

“My, my, my how I do love you!” Who doesn’t want God to be this way? Who doesn’t want to be so loved and embraced, so cared for and cherished? Yet who dares risk hoping in such in such a God, and in such love? So we settle, believing in the god of our broken imaginations, the faceless, nameless, judgmental, omni-being watching us from a distance. For the one thing we all know for sure is that we are unworthy.

Yet, nevertheless, somehow we know that the God Mackenzie met is the utter truth.

The one who bore our bitter scorn—suffering our abuse to meet us and to embrace us as we are—is the revelation of the Father confronting the god’s of our broken imaginations. Jesus says, “He who has seen Me has seen the Father” (John 14:9).

“And with that she wrapped herself around him again.”

It is okay to believe in Jesus' Papa.

The Wonderful Exchange

2008-09-02T16:46:00.002-05:00

“For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though He was rich, yet for your sake He became poor, that you through His poverty might become rich” (2Corinthians 8:9).

This short verse from the apostle Paul takes us out a merely forensic or legal view of Jesus’ coming and gives us a much richer and far more profound vision. Here, as throughout the early Church, the coming of Jesus is not merely about the taking away of our sin, but about the staggering life that he brings to us, the very life that he himself enjoys with the Father and the Holy Spirit.

Cleansing is certainly critical, but the taking away of our sin is unto a greater purpose, the sharing of his life. Jesus is, as the Baptist said, “the lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.” And he is also the one “who baptizes in the Holy Spirit.” The saving work of Jesus, in the New Testament’s vision, always involves both dimensions. As John McLeod Campbell argued, there is both a retrospective and a prospective dimension to salvation in Christ. There is the removal, the cleansing, the taking away of sin, and there is the giving or sharing of life.

But when the fullness of the time came, God sent forth His Son, born of a woman, born under the Law, in order that He might redeem those who were under the Law, that we might receive the adoption as sons”(Galatians 4:4).

In the West we have been so thoroughly preoccupied with the retrospective dimension of Christ’s work (redeeming us from the law, taking away our sin, justification) that we have almost forgotten the prospective dimension (baptism in the Spirit, adoption, union, the sharing of life). Hence there are thousands of books on justification and only a handful on adoption, even though our adoption stands as the driving reason, indeed as the eternal reason, for Jesus’ coming (See Ephesians 1:5).

My point is not to denigrate the work of our Lord in taking away our sin—such a work is fundamental—but to bring us back to the early Church’s vision that Jesus both takes away our sin and shares himself and his own life with us. The great early Church father, St. Irenaeus, put it this way, “our Lord Jesus Christ, who did, through His transcendent love, become what we are, that He might bring us to be even what He is Himself” (Against Heresies, V, preface).

Note John Calvin here as well:

This is the wonderful exchange (mirifica commutatio) which, out of his measureless benevolence, he has made with us; that, becoming Son of man with us, he has made us sons of God with him; that, by his descent to earth, he has prepared an ascent to heaven for us; that, by taking on our mortality, he has conferred his immortality upon us; that, accepting our weakness, he has strengthened us by his power; that, receiving our poverty unto himself, he has transferred his wealth to us; that, taking the weight of our iniquity upon himself (which oppressed us), he has clothed us with his righteousness (Institutes, IV.17.2).

And James B. Torrance:

The prime purpose of the incarnation, in the love of God, is to lift us up into a life of communion, of participation in the very triune life of God (Worship, Community, and the Triune God of Grace, p. 21).

In Paul and Irenaeus from the early Church, Calvin and Torrance from more modern times, we see that salvation in Christ is about a wonderful exchange involving not merely legal standing, but life itself. For Paul, the One who was rich before all worlds became poor in order to take away our poverty and give us his own wealth. For Irenaeus, the Son of God became what we are to bring us to be what he is in himself. For Calvin, the Son of God became one with us to make us sons and daughters with himself, and to share with us his own immortality, strength, wealth and righteousness. For Torrance, the Father's Son became incarnate to give us a share in the very triune life of God.

For all four, not to mention the apostle John, Karl Barth and many others, the incarnation was not a mere prerequisite for a spotless sacrifice on the cross, but the way of union between all that God is as Father, Son and Spirit, and all that we are in broken human existence. Without the cross and Christ’s death on it there could be no such union, and talk of the incarnation would be a farce, but the death of Christ serves the larger purpose of the wonderful exchange of Christ taking all that is ours and giving us a real share in all that is his.

In a variation on Paul’s great statement, “For you know the stunning grace of the Father’s Son that though he was rich in the shared life of the blessed Trinity, yet for our sake he became poor, suffering our wrath to meet us, and now through his suffering we who were so poor have been included in Jesus’ own rich relationship with his Father and Spirit.”

As Professor Torrance insisted, the Christian life is about participation, about our personal participation or sharing in the very life of Jesus himself, and thus in his life and relationship with his Father, and in his relationship with the Holy Spirit, and indeed in his relationship with all creation.

May the Holy Spirit quicken us with hope that such a vision could be true, and may the Spirit of adoption give us the faith that yearns to know and experience Christ’s life within us, until the life of the blessed Trinity—shared with us all in Jesus—comes to full and abiding and personal expression in all the earth.

Jesus, Inclusivism and Dogmatism

2008-08-25T00:50:00.002-05:00

For four or so lonely centuries there had been no prophetic word from the Lord to his chosen people Then, out of the desert of silence, a wild man stepped into Israel’s history. His message was as shocking as his appearance. Calling for a radical change of vision, John the Baptist proclaimed not only that the kingdom of God was at hand, but that he had been sent to prepare the way for the Lord himself.

The religious leaders of the Jews could not fathom what was happening, so they sent delegates to ask John who he was and why he had come. John’s response was simple and clear. I am not the Christ. I am not Elijah. And I am not the expected prophet. I am a witness, a voice crying in the wilderness, “Make straight the way of the Lord” (See John 1:19ff).

“Why then are you baptizing, if you are not the Christ, nor Elijah, nor the Prophet?”
“I baptize in water, but among you stands One whom you do not know. It is He who comes after me, the thong of whose sandal I am not worthy to untie.” “After me comes a Man who has a higher rank than I, for He existed before me… I have beheld the Spirit descending as a dove out of heaven, and He remained upon Him.” He is “the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.” He is “the one who baptizes in the Holy Spirit.” “I have seen and have borne witness that this is the Son of God” (see John 1:25-2-34).

For John the Gospel writer, the incarnation of the Father’s Son himself was the most staggering event in all of history. He sees John the Baptist as the last of the great prophets, the final herald sent by the Lord to shake the world from its slumbers. Great as the Baptist was, the gospel writer sees him as a chosen witness to something far greater. “There came a man, sent from God, whose name was John. He came for a witness that he might bear witness of the light, that all might believe through him. He was not the light, but came that he might bear witness of the light (John 1:6-8). The fact that the Baptist was a mere witness is the writer’s way of letting us know that something extraordinary is happening in the coming of Jesus.

Note John the Baptist’s witness to Jesus.

• He is the Lord himself (v. 23).
• He is present, not absent, and you do not know him (v. 26).
• I am unworthy to untie his sandal (v. 27).
• He is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world (v. 29).
• He is a Man who has a higher rank that me, for he existed before me (v. 30).
• He is the One upon who the Holy Spirit himself descends and remains (vv.32-33).
• He is the one who baptizes in the Holy Spirit (v. 32).
• He is the Son of God (v. 34).

In an age of political correctness, inclusivism. and relativism many can scarcely relate to the Baptist, and certainly not to the gospel writer who is using him to wake us up to the utterly unique reality that Jesus brings into being. After all, how could one person be the Lord himself, the Lamb of God, the anointed One, the One who baptizes in the Holy Spirit, and the Son of God. So we quietly pat John the Baptist on the head and tuck him away as a fiery, but misguided simpleton. The problem is that the witness of John the Baptist is the foundation of the New Testament and the heart of the early Church. There simply would be no New Testament, no early Church, no Christianity, and no life without Jesus Christ and the utterly unique life that he brings to the human race.

These days, and indeed throughout the history of the Church, there is serious temptation to fudge on the uniqueness of Jesus. Who isn’t tired of religious bickering, dogmatism, and the ubiquitous ‘us-them’? But does the uniqueness of Jesus necessarily promote exclusivity, intoleration and dogmatism. Historically speaking, belief in the uniqueness of Jesus has lead to all manner of arrogance, division, mistreatment, and even to bloody wars. So it would seem that if we believe that Jesus is the Father’s Son, the Lord, the anointed One, and the Savior, then we are drawing a line in the sand which necessarily creates and promotes a ‘we are in, they are out,’ black and white mentality, within which a dogmatic, intolerant spirit thrives. While I am all for toleration and inclusiveness, I don’t think we have to throw out the truth of Jesus Christ to have them.

The witness of the two John’s to the utter uniqueness of Jesus Christ is not the basis of exclusiveness, but the foundation of real inclusivity and tolerance, patience and love—and dogmatism. As the unique and only Father’s Son, as the One in and through and by and for whom all things were created and are sustained, as the One anointed with the Holy Spirit himself without measure, Jesus is the One who has established a real and abiding relationship between his Father, the Holy Spirit and the whole human race. He has included us in his unique relationship with his Father. He has included us in his unique anointing in the Holy Spirit. He has included us in his unique relationship with all creation. The vision of the apostles is that Jesus’ own relationships—in which we have all been included—would come to personal and abiding expression in us and in our relationships.

Strange as it may sound, those on the right and those on the left, within the Christian community, are actually kindred spirits at a fundamental level. Both operate with the assumption that Jesus has not included the human race in his own life. On the right, this assumption takes the form of a hard and fast line between those who are in and those who are out. On the left, this assumption takes the form of promoting inclusivisim without, and even against, Jesus.

What is the basis of being inclusive, or of being exclusive? From my perspective, the two Johns are shouting to us across the centuries that the Father’s Son, the One in and through and by and for whom all things were created and are sustained, the One anointed in the Holy Spirit has come, and he has included us in his own life. So in Jesus we have a reason for being both inclusive and dogmatic. He has included the whole human race in his life. If we must be dogmatic, then let us be dogmatic about the inclusive humanity of Christ. If we must be inclusive, then let us see Jesus as the real basis for our inclusive spirit. The truth is, the very identity of Jesus commands us to both dogmatism and inclusivism. So let us stand with the truth of Jesus that he has embraced the whole human race and given us all a place in his own life, and live accordingly.

Stop and think. Jesus is the Father’s only Son. He is the one anointed in the Holy Spirit. He is the one in and through and by and for whom all things were created and are constantly sustained. He is the lamb of God who has put all things right. And he has given us all a place in his world, and indeed in his own life and relationships. The Church is called to be the place within this world of confusion where this reality is taken with the utmost seriousness. It is the uniqueness of Jesus that gives (or should give) the Christian community the freedom to embrace, to relate, to tolerate, and to love, knowing that Jesus has embraced us all, and that the Holy Spirit (sent through Jesus ) is steadily at work doing what none of us can do—give people eyes to see and ears to hear Jesus himself.

It is hard not to be haunted by the Baptist's words: "Among you stands one whom you do not know." When we finally meet Jesus I suspect that none of us wiil say, "I overestimated you and your place in the whole scheme of things."

Lord Jesus, beloved and faithful Son of the Father, have mercy on us in our darkness. Holy Spirit give us the Baptist’s eyes.

Keys to Marriage?

2008-08-11T01:41:00.002-05:00

Last week I was having a conversation with a young couple and they asked me what I thought were the keys to a good marriage. My immediate response was that I did not know since I have only been married for 26 years. We had a good laugh, and then they said, “seriously, what are the really important things that make a good marriage.” I asked leave to ramble for a moment before I gave them a more direct answer. Then I told them about my friend Ken Blue’s statement. “There is nothing better than a good marriage, and there is nothing worse than a bad one.” This is the dice we are all wired to roll. Somewhere inside (the new covenant written on our hearts) we all know that we are made for life and that life, real life, comes in relationships. So we fall ‘in love’ and get married and all is well. Then we wake up (probably gradually) with a pain that is more brutal than an August day in a Louisiana swamp. Then we find 101 ways to avoid our pain. When our coping mechanisms quit working we face the crisis of our lives.

My parent’s generation did the English ‘stiff upper lip’ thing and just ground it out. There were probably as many miserable marriages then as there are now, but ‘divorce’ was a brand that few were willing to accept. My generation throws in the towel way too quickly, in my opinion, reloads and remarries the same problem all over again, postponing the crisis for a few years of ‘love.’ These days ‘divorce’ is almost a status symbol. But splitting up is not like trading cars. There are ties and connections—body, soul, emotional and many other connections—that get ripped apart, and that hurts like hell, even if the bonds have been dying for years.

But, I told my young couple, there is something about a covenant, about an unconditional commitment, that creates the space and freedom for the proverbial ‘shit’ to hit the fan. Our wounds, as my friend Bruce Wauchope says, come through relationships, and so does our healing. But if we break up and move on, we may be being counter-productive, post-poning our own healing. Don’t get me wrong, the Holy Spirit is a redeeming genius. He takes whatever relational mess we give him and works endlessly to bring healing and life. I love that about the Holy Spirit. So in the genius of the Holy Spirit splitting up is a real opportunity for grace and healing—and so is staying together. The disaster we bring on ourselves in either case is the steadfast refusal to look at ourselves. We can stay together because it is the right thing to do and continue to blame everyone in the universe for our pain, and never find the healing we crave. And we can get divorced and continue to blame everyone in the universe for our pain, and never find the healing we crave. The critical thing, as I told my young friends, is that whether we stay together or split up, each person must be willing to face the mirror and have his or her fundamental way of thinking shattered and recreated in the light of life. And if that is the only way forward—and it is since we are fallen and all blind as bats—then why not hang on and go through it together?

In my experience such a commitment takes two, and it takes the real hope that there is one who knows love and loving who dwells within us all. So, theoretically speaking, the first key to a good marriage, if there is such a thing, is willingness to look at yourself, and willingness to have the Holy Spirit (He is the Spirit who loves us and is passionate about us coming to experience real life) reveal your own issues to you and lead you into healing. Forget blame. Accept that you are in the dark and need help. Realize that if you don’t find healing for yourself there will never be happiness in your marriage. Ask the Holy Spirit to bring revelation and healing to you. This is the way of life.

There is always hope, because Jesus is in all of us, and it is his love that drew us together, and thus submission to his Spirit allows his love to flourish in us. But, blind as we all are, this is a lesson that takes a long time to learn.

Now, within this personal willingness to submit to the Holy Spirit, there is a willingness, to enter into your partner’s way of seeing, and especially into his or her way of seeing you. I am not saying that you have to agree with what you see when you see with their eyes, but real relationship means that you enter into their way of thinking. This requires openness to communication. Communicate, quit blaming and listen. Intimacy is all about feeling what your partner feels, seeing what they see, even if what they feel or see is not necessarily ‘right.’

This is the heart of the gospel of the not-angry-but-Trinitarian God. The Father sent his Son into our darkness to experience our life—and our god—with us. While never agreeing with us or our way of seeing his Father at all, Jesus submitted to our darkness and suffered from our bizarre judgment. There and then, the Triune God met us as we are and established a real relationship with us in our darkness. Now the light of Jesus—his knowledge of his Father’s heart—is within us, and not a person on the planet can escape the crisis of vision that Jesus’ presence creates. When we enter into our partner’s way of seeing—and into their way of seeing us—the same crisis emerges. It is a crisis of communication and healing and intimacy, or a crisis of self-defense and rebellion.

As a freebee, I will throw in two words from my Dad. The first is what he passed onto us as the eleventh commandment, “Thou shalt not take thyself too seriously.” Enough said. The second is related, but more crude, so hang in there. When I was a teenager he would sometimes ask me if I had a case of ‘seeitus’ (pronounced c-eye-tus). He steadfastly refused to define what seeitus meant. True to his word, he finally told me what it meant when I turned 40. “‘Seeitus,’ he said, “is the attitude that develops when your optic nerve gets crossed with you sphincter muscle and gives you a shitty outlook on life.”

So, what are the keys to a good marriage.
(1) Know you have issues and ask the Holy Spirit to bring healing to you.
(2) Quit blaming others.
(3) Thank Jesus for sharing his experience of love and loving with you.
(4) Communicate your feelings.
(5) Don’t take yourself too seriously.
(6) Listen to and enter into your partner’s way of seeing, especially into their way of seeing you.
(7) Remember the 11th commandment too often.
(8) Pray for a cure for ‘seeitus.’
(9) Laugh.

There is surely way more to be said, but it is late and I am only 49.

Self-Referential Incoherence

2008-07-22T23:11:00.002-05:00

I wish I could take credit for the phrase, ‘self-referential incoherence,’ but I cannot. I believe it was born in the mind of Professor Alvin Plantiga. Way back in the late 80’s, when I was in Aberdeen, Scotland, studying with Professor J. B. Torrance, Plantiga came to give the prestigious Gifford Lectures. After one of his lectures, several of us gathered for a beer and a follow up discussion with the famous philosopher. It was then, I believe, that he shared that great phrase with us. It stuck with me ever since. Over the years I have expanded it slightly into, ‘the latent deism of the Latin West and its ongoing problem with self-referential incoherence,’ as a larger statement about how lost we become when God is only watching us ‘from a distance.’ But I digress.

I think Plantiga meant to give us a thought to put in our back pockets for the days when the naysayers out do themselves during Q & A. Nonetheless, ‘self-referential incoherence’ is a profound insight into the problem of ‘the fall.’ For the most part we have been taught to think of sin as primarily a moral problem. I think sin is fundamentally a reference problem, followed, of course, by all manner of other rippling relational, social and moral issues. In the fall, Adam’s reference point moved from God to himself. He became self-referential, and thus developed a perception of himself, God and the world from a center in himself and his terrible fear. From that point the human race was trapped in its own way of seeing. If it does not ‘make sense to us’ it cannot be true. Our way of perceiving a person or a situation is the way it is. And that is the problem fraught with utter impossibility. Even the Lord’s presence and self-revelation, and indeed his way of thinking and saving, has to pass through Adam—and our—way of thinking, and thus the Lord himself and all his ways are subject to our judgment. He must make sense to us, or He is not correct, and thus dismissed. So we invent a god in the image of our own self-reference—which, of course, from the Lord’s perspective is utterly incoherent—and judge God’s presence and action by it.

So how could the Lord possibly reach us, and establish a real relationship with us in our self-referential incoherence? Everything the Lord does will be perceived, or misperceived, through our grids of judgment. Whatever he ‘says’ will be ‘heard’ through our ears. Who among us would ever suspect that our way of thinking or hearing could possibly be faulty? And even if we stumbled onto the idea that our judgment could be wrong-headed, what could we possibly do to escape our self-referentialism?

How does the Lord reach us? How do we escape our own way of seeing? How could we possibly perceive beyond our own perception and know the Lord as he is? How could we have real relationship with each other when between us stands our own judgment?

Confidence

2008-07-19T09:01:00.001-05:00

In the two centuries between 1600 and 1800, the Church across Europe, America and indeed across the Western world suffered two direct and brutal blows, which shattered its confidence and left it in a crisis of irrelevance. The movement known as ‘The Enlightenment’ (also known as ‘The Age of Reason’) decimated the rational foundation of Christian faith and set forward an alternative vision of God, of the universe and of human existence and life within it. This new vision captured the imagination of the masses and led them as a pied piper into a brave new world that did not need the Christian gospel and certainly not the Church. The Church has yet to recover.

Such a secular movement did not develop in a vacuum; it was over one thousand years in the making, and as strange as it might sound has part of its root system in the Church itself and particularly in the great St. Augustine (354-430). The secular Enlightenment is, in my view, Augustine's stepchild, born of his unholy marriage between Greek philosophy and the definitive revelation of God in Jesus Christ..

In their combination of a sophisticated philosophy with religious aspiration, the pagan Neoplatonists had only one serious rival—Christianity, and, anti-Christian though they were, it was the incorporation of their ideas into Christian theology that ensured their permanent influence on European culture (John Gregory, The Neoplatonists, preface, viii).

The principal figure in the transmission of Neoplatonist thought into Christian theology is St. Augustine (John Gregory, The Neoplatonists, p.177)

It was a long time in coming, but the unconverted reasoning that Augustine allowed into the holy of holies of Christian thought finally came of age in the Enlightenment and broke free from the shackles of Christian authority altogether. Like a child who grew up to abuse his parents, pagan reasoning rose with such considerable force that the Christian vision of God and the cosmos was overthrown and a pagan vision of God and a radically secular world-view took its place.

There and then, the Western Church lost is position, its standing and prestige in the culture around it. We have yet to recover. Since that moment in history, the Western Church has been in survival mode, fighting tooth and nail to get back on its feet and find a place, a legitimate hearing in the larger secular culture. The last 200 years of Western Church history represents a long and frantic attempt to find an acceptable basis for Christian faith, and to establish the relevance of Christianity for human life, in a society that believes it is of little value. At the same time, the Church retreated into itself and its private Sunday spirituality, in a desperate attempt to protect its own turf, hoping that the storm would blow over and go away.

Today as the unwitting heirs of the Enlightenment's revolution, and as the sons and daughters of a saddened and beleaguered Christianity we are spiritually depressed, and light years away from the New Testament's vision of Jesus Christ as the true light of the entire cosmos and of the early Church’s magnificent vision of the Triune God. And we are a long way from the sheer passion and the unbridled confidence and the dreams that such vision stirs within the human soul. And we are a long way from moving out in that passion and confidence to explore the universe, to rethink human existence and relationships, to develop political, economic and scientific, medical, psychological and legal theories in the light of the fact that Jesus Christ, the Father’s eternal Son is the One in and through and by and for whom all things were created and are constantly sustained.

We have lost the fearless, confident boldness, the parrhesia, of the apostolic mind. We have lost, what my friend David Upshaw calls, “the apostolic swagger.” The apostles believed that they had seen the mystery behind all things—past, present and future. They believed that they had come to the heart of the universe itself, to the very secret of creation and of human history. In such knowledge, they set out to inform the whole world, and indeed the principalities and powers throughout the cosmos. They gave their lives in the service of the revelation of Jesus Christ because they knew that the cosmos was bound up in Him, and thus that coming to believe in Him inevitably meant the release of the kingdom of the Triune God throughout the earth and the cosmos.

Jesus performed miracles not merely to prove that he was God, but as the expression of the fact that as the Father’s Son, in and through and by whom all things were created and are sustained, the cosmos was already wired for him, already set up to respond to his every thought and bidding. What would happen, then, if the human race came to know Jesus, and believed in him, and brought its fallen and confused mind to his feet for conversion? What would happen if people threw their hearts and souls and minds into participating in Jesus’ world, and in His life with his Father, and in His anointing with the Spirit? Would it mean disaster for the creation? Would it mean great darkness and chaos? Would it mean evil? It would mean the personal, the corporate, the global, the cosmological manifestation of the kingdom of the Triune God. It would mean that the fullness of the Trinitarian life of God would flower in our humanity and express its goodness across the earth, releasing the great dance of life shared by the Father, Son and Spirit throughout the cosmos. For it is our darkness and terrible confusion that stifles the emergence of the present kingdom.

This is what the apostles knew intuitively in their encounter with Christ. This was the Jesus they encountered and worshipped and served with their lives. This was the Jesus Christ who blew their minds, thrilled their hearts and filled them with hope—and stunning confidence. But compared to the great apostles, compared to the martyrs and the fathers such as St. Irenaeus and St. Athanasius, the modern Western Church has retreated to playing shuffle board in a nursing home—when we have been given the secret of the universe, and the keys of the kingdom of the Triune God. It is time for us see again what the apostles saw, to encounter the real Jesus Christ, the Father’s Son, the anointed One, the Lord and light of the cosmos.

Come, Holy Spirit.

Ordinary?

2008-07-14T23:36:00.002-05:00

I was riding home a couple of nights ago when I noticed a bumper sticker. It read, ‘if you bought it, it was trucked.’ The next day I actually met a trucker as we stopped to get some ice and water. I got into a conversation with him about the bumper sticker. He said, ‘man, you don’t have anything in your house, including anything that went into building your house or out-fittin’ it, that was not delivered by one of us.’ His comment reminded me of a conversation I had had a few years ago in Toronto with a trucker. His job was to drive his truck from Toronto to Miami twice a week to pick up flowers and bring them back to Toronto. As I listened to his story it struck me how many people, and families, were blessed by his unknown work. Think about the weddings, the special occasions, the not-so, yet, quite critical moments in peoples’ lives that are directly influenced by the fact that this dear man gets up at 3:00am and heads south, by himself, to pick up fresh flowers for people he will never see or know.

Many years ago, I wrote a small booklet called, The Secret. In many ways I think it is my best work (The Secret is a free download on our web site). The point of the book was to help us realize how much of what we assume is our ‘ordinary’ lives is actually part of our participation in the Trinitarian life of God. That such a line of thought sounds somewhat strange to us is shocking proof of how profoundly lost we are in our religious darkness. God incarnate spent more time making chairs and tables than he did preaching, or doing miracles. Think about it. What did Jesus, the Father’s eternal Son incarnate, do for the vast majority of his earthly life? I don’t mean to say that we should give up on the miraculous, or, at least, what we might think is miraculous. I am all for miracles. My point is that there are stunning miracles happening in all of our lives everyday, but we can’t see them because of our religious prejudices.

While I utterly deplore the lack of expectation in our Western churches, it bothers me more that we cannot see how Jesus is involved in our ordinary lives. Let me put it this way: Don’t thank God for your daughter’s wedding if you cannot say ‘thank you’ to the trucker, or the cake designer, or the dress designer, or the gardener, or the architect, or the one who toils making sure the salad is perfect, as the ones who participated in the Lord's personal blessing. While the Father, Son and Spirit do not need any of us, the fact is they refuse, as Karl Barth has insisted, to be God, or to bless us, without the participation of others.

We all know—somewhere deep inside—that everyday we are blessed by people who do their jobs, by people who care, by people who grow or cut or dress the chickens, by people who meet, bless, care and teach our children, by people who make sure the traffic signals work, by people who work with shovels or atoms or gaze the stars to make things easier for all of us. But do we have a theology—or a Christology—that even hints at telling us who these people are who bless us so, or leads us to honor them for their participation?

Just remember: When you bow your head to thank God for the food you are about to receive, or to thank Him for your car, or your house, or the air-conditioning, or the health of your baby, make sure you thank him for the regular folks who He uses to bless you through. We don’t need to spend millions figuring out what is wrong with the Church or why it is dying. We need to see Jesus as he is—present, not absent—blessing his creation through ordinary people. And when the Church finally gets it, and starts refusing to recognize people according to ‘the flesh,’ and thus starts treating the truckers, farmers and workers, the gardeners, teachers and mechanics of the world as people who are participating in the Trinitarian blessing of creation, I suspect we will not have a problem with boredom or with an audience.

Jesus and Installing Pools

2008-07-08T23:12:00.002-05:00

I Got back from a remarkable trip to New Zealand only to discover that our beloved Perichoresis' ministry is in the hole financially. We have struggled since we began in 1994, but we have always managed to make payroll. This month was different. For the first time in all these years we did not make it. So let me make an appeal. If our ministry has been a blessing to you, please consider helping us financially, so we can be a blessing to many more. Contrary to what you might think, Perichoresis is a very small ministry. Our outreach is global, and that is both stunning and beautiful to me, but the ministry of Perichoresis is almost exclusively privately funded, and the work boils down to me and my wife Beth. Until recently, thanks to a dear friend, we have operated out of our house. We now have our own offices. Scotty Rogers works one day a week helping us with administration. Scotty is a very gifted minister and therapist, with a passion for youth, and my prayer it to bring him on full time.

Ask the Holy Spirit to guide your heart. You can contribute online through our webs site. Just go to ‘donate’ on any of the pull-down menus. Or you can send a tax deductible check to us. Perichoresis • P. O. Box 98157 • Jackson, MS 39298. Every dollar counts.

Meanwhile, I have been working with a friend who just started an outdoor pool installation business. The 14-16 hour days in the Mississippi heat and humidity has been a challenge to me at 49, to be sure, but it has been a great experience. Installing pools is a dramatic contrast to teaching. The fruit is immediate and obvious. And I love that. And Pharisees don't hang out in the Mississippi heat! We hit the ground running around 7:00am, cut the sod and start carving the ground. By the end of the day another family is thrilled. The smiles on the kid’s faces alone makes it all worthwhile. (Yeah, I can hear it now, ‘Baxter, the pool guy’).

Most of the pools we have installed have been in rural Mississippi—not that there is any part of Mississippi is that not rural—and that has taken me back to my roots. One of the great strengths of Perichoresis is its ability to put complex theology in creatively simple ways. For my part this has its origin in growing up in a small town in the deep South. I reckon that the return to hard work in the farm lands of Mississippi is intended as a blessing from the Lord. I am grateful. It is exhausting, but good.

Everyday I think of Jesus asking the servants to get water to fill the ‘empty’ Jewish purification pots. It was surely hot, and the wedding party needed wine, not water, but the servants got the water and Jesus turned it into wine. The servants, doing something as apparently mundane as getting water, got to participate in the creative blessing of the Lord himself. Dignity. Meaning. Purpose. Our fleshly systems of evaluation are the fruit of sheer blindness. Participating in Jesus’ presence and blessing, whether it is through farming, putting in pools, helping a friend, or, I suppose, even preaching, is life.

The lesson for us all is this: There is far more going on in our lives than we ever dared to dream. We belong to the Father, Son and Spirit. We always have and always will. And the presence, not absence, of Jesus, calls us to throw our hearts and souls and minds and strength—and sweat—into participating in what he is doing. What we need is wisdom. So, Holy Spirit, please give us real eyes to see the presence and work of Jesus. Deliver us from our blindness and our sacred-secular dualism so we can see Jesus in the midst of our ‘ordinary’ lives.

Evangelical Repentance

2008-07-01T09:39:00.001-05:00

Is forgiveness prior to repentance? This was one of the critical questions Professor James B. Torrance of Scotland (my professor in theology) used to raise to his students. It was, of course, a question calculated to stop us in our tracks and to force us to reflect upon some of our assumptions about the heart of God the Father and the reconciling work Christ. I am not sure that I ever heard anyone answer ‘yes,’ at least not before they heard Professor Torrance lecture on the subject. Torrance’s abiding point was that God’s forgiveness is unconditional and is to be proclaimed as such to the world.

Two of Torrance’s main influences on this point were John Calvin and Thomas Erskine (see his book, The Unconditional Freeness of the Gospel, in the ‘essays’ section on our web site). Calvin himself says that “a man cannot apply himself seriously to repentance without knowing himself to belong to God. But no one is truly persuaded that he belongs to God unless he has first recognized God’s grace” (Institutes, III.2). Yet how is one to recognize God’s grace if it is not proclaimed to him or her as a fact rather than a conditional promise?

Recently I had a conversation with a young man who was somewhat disturbed by my simple declaration that “God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself” (2COR 5:19) and by the fact that I turned to the folks gathered at our meeting and declared that all without exception had been forgiven and embraced by the Father himself. In the conversation afterwards, I asked the young man, ‘what is the gospel?’ ‘what do you tell people to believe?’ ‘what is the good news?’ He answered, ‘I tell people to believe in Jesus.’ I then asked, ‘believe in what about Jesus?’ His response was telling, ‘I tell people that if they repent and believe in Jesus, they will be forgiven.’ ‘So,’ I said, ‘the object of our faith is not Jesus and our salvation in him, but the possibility that we can be forgiven, if we repent and believe in Jesus. So we are summoned to believe in a Jesus who may be our savior if we repent and believe in him correctly, and in doing so (which we can’t) we actually make him the savior?’

Either we believe in the fact of our forgiveness in Jesus, and thus have something real to believe in, or we believe in the possibility of our forgiveness, and thus believe in whatever it is (our faith, repentance or goodness) that makes the possibility a reality.

The gospel is not the news of what can be if we make it so; it is the news of what is, of what God has established in Christ. ‘God was in Christ reconciling the cosmos to himself.’ Torrance, Calvin and Erskine were right, forgiveness is prior to repentance, and indeed, prior to faith. For without the fact that ‘God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself’ there is nothing real to believe. And without the proclamation of this truth as truth we give people nothing to believe in except themselves and the existential power of their own faith and self-energized repentance.

Are we really afraid that there is someone out there who is not supposed to hear that they are forgiven, embraced and included, and thus may get into heaven without God’s permission?

God and Greens

2008-06-22T23:05:00.002-05:00

I am working on an essay on great lines from Paul Young’s book, The Shack. Given that there are so many, it will probably turn into a book. At the moment my favorite line is one that has to be among the most remarkable statements in theological history. It is spoken by Papa (God, the Father) to Mackenzie, a brokenhearted man who finds himself in a weekend conversation with the Trinity. They are eating breakfast with Jesus and Sarayu (the Holy Spirit). It is a breakfast of champions, to be sure, and the food is out of this world, so to speak. Mackenzie is enjoying some greens, when Papa returns to the table from the kitchen. Papa glances at Mackenzie and somewhat shouts,

“Whoa….. Take it easy on those greens, young man. Those things can give you the trots if you ain’t careful” (The Shack, p. 121).

This is a statement that not only speaks volumes, but also gets behind the ‘watchful dragons,’ as Lewis would say, of our religious defenses. Or as Larry the Cable Guy would say, ‘I don’t care who you are, that’s funny.’ And it is funny. Even the tightest brother among us would find himself smiling, at least to himself. But it is also serious in the way it instantly speaks to something very real within us, a hope, a longing that God could be so real and we could be so known and accepted as we are. I wonder what went through Mack’s mind when he heard God the Father warn him about overdoing the greens and getting the trots? Could God really be this real, this human, this aware of and comfortable with our humanity? While every Bible reader should know that God made us and is comfortable with our humanness, somehow our theology has betrayed us through the years and left us feeling that much of our humanity is unworthy if not shameful. When is the last time you heard a series of sermons on sex, or even wanted to?

Papa’s comment about getting the trots confronts us with the wonderful fact that God does know us, and like us and indeed enjoys us as we are. Such a thought is simply too hard for many of us to accept. It seems way too good to be true. And here is the rub. The lack of our acceptance of our Father’s acceptance, and of His enjoyment of us as we are leaves us in the boring and dreadful world of having to invent a ‘spiritual’ or ‘righteous’ or ‘acceptable’ self to offer to God. So we miss out on the joy of being known, accepted and enjoyed. What kind of Christian life does that leave us living, and who would want to hang with us in our falsely invented ‘spiritual’ and ‘righteous’ and ‘acceptable’ lives?

As to the sin part, well, “the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us (John 1:14).” To be sure, Papa hates our sin for what it does to us and others, but He does not wait for us to clean ourselves up before He meets us. In Jesus, Papa has not only embraced our humanity; He has embraced us in our fallen humanity. Embraced in His love, He bids us to let go of our invented ‘spiritual’ and ‘righteous’ selves, and to accept His embrace of us as humans—and as broken humans. As we accept His acceptance, we experience His liberating love in all parts of our humanity. Then we know life in the freedom of the Father’s love.

By the way, later on in the day the Holy Spirit gave Mack another plant to eat to counter act the effect of the greens.

New Zealand

2008-06-12T09:31:00.001-05:00

I am just back from a fantastic trip to New Zealand. Jay Lucas, the director of YWAM (Youth with a Mission) in New Zealand, and his wife Erin, invited me down to teach at their national leadership gathering. We met at the YWAM base called Oakridge two or so hours north of Auckland, near Maungataroto. We had a long weekend of fellowship and focus on the gospel of the Triune God, complete with great music, skeet shooting, and slow roasted lamb (and I was told that the Ozzies were the b-b-q specialists in the Southern Hemisphere! Thanks Ross and the gang, it was awesome).

The focus of the conference was on the question, ‘who is Jesus?’ and I had two and half days to unpack his relationship with his Father, the Holy Spirit, and the human race, and the meaning of his life, death, resurrection and ascension, and what happened to the human race in him. For you cannot speak of Jesus Christ without speaking of his life with his Father and of his anointing in the Holy Spirit, or of the fact that he is the one in and through and by and for whom all things were created and are sustained. And thus you cannot speak of this Jesus’ incarnate life, death, resurrection and ascension without speaking of the new covenant relationship he has established in himself between the trinitarian life of God and the human race, and indeed with the whole cosmos. (By the way, when is the last time you heard a sermon or a lecture on Christ as the Creator? Why is such a central point of the New Testament proclamation so absent in contemporary preaching?) There were many questions and long discussions about the atonement, why Jesus died, the source of his suffering, faith and repentance, evangelism, heaven and hell, which thrilled me, for it meant that the stunning implications of Jesus’ very existence were being seen all over again.

From there we headed back to Auckland and to the hospitality center of New Zealand—Dale and David Garratt’s home—for an evening with new and old friends, several fantastic musicians, and Tom Hallas. It was one of those nights that I call ‘an event.’ There were great stories, lots of laughter, songs, long discussions and plenty of gratitude. Thanks Dale and David and Mindy. That was a large time.

After that I met with Mark Strom, the Principal of New Zealand Bible College, spoke at their Chapel service and spent the afternoon discussing theology with several faculty members. It was a very encouraging day. The gospel of the Triune God is well on its way to be recovered around the world. Thank you, Holy Spirit, we will have more please.

Then there was green lipped mussels, Belgian beer and more discussions, followed by rest and then a legendary fishing trip to the Great Barrier island. We flew out at 7:00am and hit the ground running, except for brief introductions and some crayfish (lobster) at the Orama Christian Center. Jay led Jamie R. S. Thomas (and Englishman who works with 24/7 prayer) and me on a two hour bush-wack across the island to Sandy Bay. The scenery was so breathtaking I felt like I was on the set of The Lord of the Rings. The beauty notwithstanding, I kept my eyes peeled, half expecting an Orc to jump out any moment, and I was quite relieved to know that there are no poisonous snakes or spiders or plants in New Zealand. We finally made our way down the ‘hill’ to Sandy Bay, and yes we caught fish, in fact, within 40 seconds I caught a huge snapper (pronounced, snappah), and yes I have witnesses and pictures. We fished until the tide threatened to take us away, and then made our way back up the hill through the bush and back across the island. We were greeted by the Orama staff and a wonderful meal, after which we had a beautiful discussion about Jesus and who we are in him. It was a great day, and I was very encouraged by the generous and informed hearts of the folks at Orama. Thank you. I will be back.

The next day we fished in a boat, while Jamie gave us a lesson on how to catch fish in the ocean with a hand net (it must be an English thing). We raced back to the airport and got back to Auckland in time to cook fish at the Lucas’ with friends. The next day I shopped for gifts for my family and saw some of the sights with Jay, Erin and their son Ezra. That evening I had the great privilege of speaking with a group of musicians, artists and writers. Saturday I got to see more of Auckland and talk all day and into the evening about everything theological with my new friend Adrian. Sunday, I got to speak at a great church called ‘the edge’ in Auckland, and even had Q & A afterwards. That evening I was invited back to the Garratt’s for another round of lavish hospitality, fellowship and communion. Most of Monday was spent with the Lucas’ before what turned out to be a long trip home.

While the popularity of Paul Young’s great book, The Shack, gives me hope for the West, my trips to Australia I have led me to believe that the awakening we so desperately need will come to us from the Southern Hemisphere. My trip to New Zealand greatly confirmed my hope. The Holy Spirit is up to his under-the-radar tricks in Aotearoa. May he shine the light of Jesus Christ on the world from the beautiful lands under the southern cross.

A Dead Man Speaks

2008-05-26T23:50:00.002-05:00

Wouldn’t you like to talk with someone who died, and then was brought back to life after 4 days? I know I would. Of course, these days we hear of such things fairly often, and who knows what to believe? But to me, it is striking that John does not interview Lazarus after his 4 days in the grave and his astonishing resurrection. So many of our questions could have been answered, and fairly quickly, if John would have recorded for us the conversation Lazarus surely had with Mary and Martha. John is strangely quiet here. How could a man such as John miss such an opportunity? But his silence, I suspect, is intentional, very intentional. Think about it. Jesus calls a dead man back to life. John’s silence, with respect to the dead man’s experience, speaks volumes. Personally I don’t think it ever crossed John’s mind to interview Lazarus. Why? Because the One who is himself the resurrection and the life is standing right in front of him!

What happens when we die? What do we encounter? Where do we wake up, and in what condition? I think John’s answer is that we meet Jesus—who is our life. And meeting Jesus as our life is both the gospel and exposing judgment at the same time.

I suspect at least 3 things happen when we meet Jesus in death and resurrection. (1) We come to know (not simply to believe, but to know) that we do not have the power of existence. We discover in death—in an irrefutable way—that Jesus Christ is the living one, and that we are not. This is not the conclusion of our intellect after a convincing philosophical debate. It is the fruit of losing every semblance of power, of coming to an absolute end of ourselves, and then meeting the One who holds our very being in the palm of his hands, so to speak.

(2) Meeting Jesus—as the source of our life—reveals to us that our entire existence, from conception to our death has been a participation in his life. Our loves, our sacrifices, our ideas and burdens, our joys and sorrows, our beauty and courage, our laughter and creativity have all had their origin, not in us, but in Jesus and his relationship with his Father and the Holy Spirit. For there is only one circle of love in this universe, the circle of life shared by the Father, Son and Spirit. In meeting Jesus we come to know as we are known. We see ourselves as we truly are, people who are not, and never have been, separated from God, people who are eternally loved by the Father, Son and Spirit, and have been made joint-heirs with Jesus himself, adopted, included in the Trinitarian life in Christ. We see our lives as the long process whereby the Trinitarian life, shared with us in Jesus, has been emerging, through the Spirit, in us, and in our relationships with one another and the whole creation.

(3) Such a revelation is the most thrilling news in the world, but it is also withering. For to meet Jesus as our life, to see the Father’s love for us, to know that we are included in Jesus’ own anointing in the Holy Spirit shows us our real life, and it inevitably reveals that we have been a long way from living it. Only in the light of Jesus Christ—and of who we truly are in him—do we understand how far we have fallen short of living in the glory of the Triune God. The mess we have made of ourselves and our lives reveals, not that we do not belong to the Father, Son and Spirit, but that we have been participating in a terrible and terrifying darkness. We have followed, not the Spirit of truth and of adoption, but the spirit of error and separation. We have lived in and out of profound confusion. We have been terribly wrong. The great darkness, and our believing its lies, created pain, and while the Holy Spirit was a work within us leading us to believe in Jesus and to participate in the Trinitarian life, we were at work believing in ourselves and in our home-made pain remedies. Seeing ourselves included in Jesus and in his life, reveals that we have been proud, self-centered pricks, whose lives have been more a form of hiding and self-justification, sadness and pain management, than open-souled fellowship and simple joy. In meeting Jesus, as the real truth of our life, we come face to face with how we have hurt ourselves, and others, and creation in the great darkness, with how we have ignored the Holy Spirit himself and preferred our own judgment, and with the brutal, yet liberating, fact that we do not have a clue about life and living it.

Jesus said, and says: “I am the light of the cosmos, the one who follows me, shall never, ever walk in the darkness, but shall have the light of life” (John 8:12).

Judgment

2008-05-08T23:30:00.002-05:00

In John chapter 5, Jesus is in the thick of things with the Jewish leadership. He has just healed a man who had been sick for 38 years, which the Jewish leaders completely overlooked, because Jesus healed the man on the Sabbath, thus breaking one of their rules. As they attacked Jesus for ‘breaking the Sabbath,’ he defended his healing by appealing to the fact that he was only participating in what his Father was doing (v. 17). At this the leadership’s attack on Jesus moves from ‘persecution’ to an intense desire to ‘kill’ him, "because he not only was breaking the Sabbath, but also was calling God his own Father, making himself equal with God” (v. 18). And so begins an argument, at the heart of which is an unstated question from Jesus, ‘who is really making themselves out to be equal to God here?’ In Jesus’ mind, he is only doing what he sees his Father doing, and thus living his life in submission to the Father. The Pharisees, however, have not heard the voice of the Father (v. 37), do not have His word abiding in them (v. 38), are unwilling to come to Jesus to have life (v. 40), do not have the love of God in themselves (v. 42), receive glory from one another and do not seek the glory that is from the one, true God (v. 44), and do not even believe in Moses, the one in whom they have placed their hope (v. 46). It is a classic Jesus flip. He turns the accusation of the Jews back upon themselves, with withering, and hopefully, liberating exposure of the fact that they have no interest whatever in submitting to God. So who is making themselves out to be God?

In the midst of this storm there is a fascinating sequence on judgment. First, Jesus lays down a shocker—one that many people today cannot believe he actually said. “For not even the Father judges any one, but He has given all judgment to the Son” (v. 22). Relinquishing His own right to judgment, the Father has given all judgment to Jesus. I think this is related to v. 27: “And He gave him authority to execute judgment, because he is the Son of Man.” It is as if the Father is saying, ‘look, Jesus, you are in the trenches here. I trust you completely. Whatever you say goes, in heaven and on earth.’ So much for hierarchy. The implicit point to the Jewish leadership is clear. ‘Be careful, boys, I don’t think you know who you are dealing with here, but you will.’

There is a play in Jesus’ words on two of the Greek words which we translate judge or judgment. One word is krino, which means to separate, discern, consider, or evaluate or to decide. The other is krisis, from which we derive the English word crisis. Jesus is saying, the Father judges (krino) no one, but has given all judgment (krisis) into the hands of His Son. Jesus has the authority to execute crisis, because he is personally present, and his personal presence means crisis (nowhere to hide exposure) for all in darkness, including religious darkness.

“Do not marvel at this, for an hour is coming in which all who are in the tombs shall hear his (Jesus’) voice, and shall come forth; those who did the good, to a resurrection of life, those who did the bad, to a resurrection of judgment (krisis)” vv. 28-29. Jesus, of course, is not saying that salvation comes by works. He is saying, to the Jewish leadership, ‘the day is coming when the ones who gave themselves to participate in life will get what they wanted—life, the Father himself. And the ones who opposed life and participated in darkness (did not seek the glory of the one, true God) will rise to a rude awakening, a crisis, for they will rise and meet Me—again. I, the Father’s Son, the way, the truth and the life, the savior and salvation itself, will be standing on the other side of the end of all God-playing, religious nonsense.’ Jesus is the judgment.

It is “appointed for men to die once, and after this comes krisis” (Hebrews 9:27).

A Note on the Gospel

2008-05-07T19:02:00.001-05:00

From all eternity, God lives as Father, Son and Spirit in a rich and glorious and abounding fellowship. There is no emptiness in this circle, no depression or fear or angst. The Trinitarian life is a life of unchained communion and intimacy, fired by passionate, other-centered, self-giving love and mutual delight. Such love, giving rise to such togetherness and fellowship, is the womb of the universe and of human existence within it.

The gospel begins here with this God and with this divine life, and its unbounded fellowship and joy. Before time dawned and space was called to be, before the heavens were stretched out and filled with a sea of stars, before the earth was summoned and filled with people and life and endless beauty, before there was anything, there was the Father, Son and Spirit and the great dance of Trinitarian life. The stunning truth is that this Triune God, in amazing and lavish love, determined to open the circle and share the Trinitarian life with others. This is the one, eternal and abiding reason for the creation of the world and of human life. There is no other God, no other will of God, no second plan, no hidden agenda for human beings. From the beginning, God is Father, Son and Spirit, and from the beginning, this God has determined not to live without us (as Karl Barth said).

Before the blueprints for creation were drawn up, the Father, Son and Spirit set their abounding love upon us and determined that we would be adopted, that we would be given a place inside their circle of life, and made participants in the very fellowship and joy and glory of the Triune God. There and then, before creation, it was decided that the Son would cross every chasm between God and humanity and establish a real and abiding relationship—union. He was predestined to be the mediator, the one in and through whom the very life of the Triune God would enter human existence and human existence would be lifted up to share in the Trinitarian life.

The gospel is the good news that this stunning plan of the Triune God has now become eternal fact in Jesus Christ. In his incarnate life, death, resurrection and ascension, he laid hold of the human race, took us down in his death, recreated us in his resurrection, and lifted us up into the embrace of the Father in his ascension. The Holy Spirit was then poured out upon the world, with the singular mission of revealing Jesus Christ (and who we are in him) to humanity in its darkness. The Holy Spirit comes to lead us to know the truth, so that the reality of our adoption in Christ can come to full and abiding and personal expression in us, and in our relationships with one another, and in our relationship with all creation.

Come, Holy Spirit

Dwelling in the Father's love

2008-05-03T10:38:00.002-05:00

Brandon and Dwell, I have finally had time to sit down and read your discussion. I am thrilled for both of you. Brandon, your 3-D illustration is a gem, as is your point about the chair, and I love your heart. Dwell, you are obviously a careful and sensitive thinker, and know your way around the larger gospel discussion. So my hat is off to both of you. It seems to me that what you are wrestling with is the reality of relationship, not simply a position, or a title, or a fact, but a relationship. I hope all without exception come to know Abba and experience his love in Jesus to the uttermost. Like George MacDonald and Thomas Erskine, two of my heroes, it makes no sense to think that the Father’s love will not win every heart. Unlike those two giants, I cannot make a doctrine out of our hope. To be a universalist (doctrinally speaking) would be, for me, to deny the reality of our distinction within Christ’s relationship with us, and that would be to deny the authenticity of our personhood, which is one of my beefs with the Calvinists.

In the last 2 chapters of my book, The Great Dance, I do the best that I can to sort through Christ’s union with us and our real distinction. Come to think of it, towards the end of most of what I write I come around to this issue, except in Across All Worlds—the whole book is about Christ relating to us in our darkness.

Dwell, you said, “But with the official Perichoresis message it seems to me that although it is better on the surface - ie We are all justified, and sit at the right hand of the Father in Jesus etc.....The bottom line is that WE still have the burden of deciding our destiny.”

The statement, “the burden of deciding our destiny” strikes me as odd in the context of the stunning news that we have been included in Jesus’ own relationship with his Father and the Holy Spirit. I cannot imagine hearing my wife say “I love you” and hearing that as a burden. “I love you” is a declaration that I am a real person and I am in a relationship where I am called to love and to be loved. It is an invitation to love and relationship. The gospel declares to us that we are included in the love of the Father, Son and Spirit, and as such calls us be loved, to let the Father love us, as my friend Bruce Wauchope so beautifully puts it. What is burdensome about letting the Father love us? Jesus declares the Father’s love to us and summons us to believe in his Father’s love. The object of faith is the fact of the Father’s love and acceptance, which means that we are real persons to the Father, that we are in a relationship with him, and are called to respond.

In the story of the prodigal and his brother, the Father’s love for both boys was endless, and because of his endless love, they were both called to respond.

Several points need to be isolated here. (1) The Father loves us. What we do or do not do cannot change, validate or nullify his love. We are loved—forever. (2) If we doubt, and we all do, we are to look to Jesus whose very existence reveals the Father’s endless love to us. The object of faith, and the ground of assurance, is the reality of the Father’s love and acceptance in Jesus—the fact that we are included. (3) The Father’s love calls us to let him love us. To deny the need to respond to the Father is to reduce us to non-persons and to pretend that this is not a relationship.

The gospel is the stunning declaration that we are included in the relationship that Jesus has with his Father and the Holy Spirit, and as such it is a declaration that rocks our illusions and doubts, and summons us to let the Father love us, as Bruce says, or to learn to live loved, as Paul Young says. Or perhaps we should say that the gospel summons us to dwell in the Father’s love.

Bless you all

For more of my thoughts on the way of trinitarian love, see my essay, “Bearing our Scorn: Jesus and the Way of Trinitarian Love.”

Why I Left Calvinism

2008-04-30T00:21:00.002-05:00

Having grown up in the Southern Presbyterian tradition, I was taught the five points of Calvinism from my mother’s womb. I memorized the children’s catechism early on and very nearly finished memorizing the famed Shorter Catechism itself—but one can only take so much. After my college days, I worked for a while within the ‘truly reformed’ community as a campus minister’s assistant, studying everything I could get my hands on related to the glorious ‘doctrines of grace.’ And yes, to my shame I taught Calvinism as the truth of the gospel. Although rigorously logical and thoroughly biblical, in a curious sort of way, somewhere inside I always knew that fundamental errors loomed at the core of the Calvinist system.

Before I set forward my main points as to why I left Calvinism, I want to make two important comments. First, to this day, I love John Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion and his various biblical commentaries. Apart from his doctrine of reprobation (see Institutes III. XXI), which he got from Augustine, I find the Institutes to be beautifully written, even devotional, and certainly far more moving than the type of theology handed down by his descendents, which reads more like religious insurance manuals than its does a song of someone who loves God. Calvin is cut from a different piece of cloth than the Calvinists. And, by the way, although the doctrine of “limited atonement” logically follows Calvin’s doctrine of double predestination, he never taught it. Second, I believe that the larger Christian community owes a serious debt to Calvinism. Almost single-handedly it has maintained an interest in the stunning, gospel-filled doctrine of election. Granted, that what it gives with the one hand (election is true), it takes away with the other (it is only true for some), but what could be more stunning than the truth that we were known and loved and indeed embraced by the Father, Son and Spirit from all eternity. My beef with the Calvinists here is not with the fact of our election, but with the way they limit it, and thus limit its preaching as the unconditional truth for all. Be that as it may, I am grateful to my own tradition for keeping the heart of the gospel before us, even in its limited form. What the Calvinists think is true for only a few, should be proclaimed to every person on the planet: “The Father himself set his love upon you before the foundation of the world and predestined you to be adopted into the very trinitarian life of God. And his own beloved Son, Jesus Christ, has come and accomplished his Father’s dreams for you and the human race.”

Sorting through the issues of the Calvinists’ system is like untangling a box full of loose coat hangers, so I will keep my focus, for now, on the three main reasons that I left Calvinism.

(1) The first concerns the origin of the idea of reprobation. In Calvinism there are two groups of people, those “elected” to salvation and those “passed by” or “deliberately damned” or “reprobated” before the foundation of the world. My question is, where did such a notion originate? Is reprobation the Father’s idea, or the Son’s, or perhaps it is the Holy Spirit’s?

Many years ago I read Athanasius’ treatise Against the Arians, and his statement that there was never a time when the Father was alone, existing without his Son, and was just God and not Father. Athanasius’ point was that the relationship of the Father, Son and Spirit is not a form that the single God assumed for a moment in time. This relationship is the eternal and deepest truth about God. God is Father, Son and Spirit—always has been and always will be—and therefore every thought of God, every idea, every dream, and every plan of this God is relational, flowing out of the relationship of the Father, Son and Spirit.

Athanasius, thankfully, rocked my Calvinistic world. He made me see that whatever we say about God (or about God’s will) has to be grounded in the relationship of the Father, Son and Spirit, for there is nothing deeper about the being of God than this relationship. The ideas that God would elect some to salvation and pass others by, or outright reject them, must be, theologically speaking, grounded in this relationship. It is obvious how election to adoption would flow out of the Father-Son relationship, for the Father loves the Son and shares all things with him in the Spirit. So it is not out of character or odd that the blessed Trinity would think of including others in the trinitarian life. But why would this God think of excluding? What about the life that the Triune God lives would ever lead to the deliberate damning of people? Does such an idea flow out of the way the Father and Son relate? Is there are part or side of the Father that is disinterested in his Son, neutral, even eager to dismiss, look over, and, indeed, to reject him? And is it this dark side of the Father’s relationship with his Son that thus gives natural rise to the rejection of large parts of humanity?

Or perhaps there is a second Son, banished from the Father’s love and presence from all eternity, and thus in the Father’s rejection of the second Son originates the idea of the Father rejecting part of his creation? If you cannot ground God’s decision to pass by or to reject parts of his own creation in the relationship of the Father, Son and Spirit itself—in God’s very being—what is its ground? Is there something deeper about God than the love and fellowship of the Father, Son and Spirit? Is there a god behind the back of the Trinity who ultimately calls the shots? While I have actually had Calvinists contend that the New Testament never teaches that fellowship is at the core of God’s being, for me it was a scriptural, historical and theological no-brainer. So for me, the doctrine of double predestination (of electing some and damning others) is patently non-Christian, because it cannot be grounded in the blessed life and way of relating of the Father, Son and Spirit. And if you cannot say that there is a part of the Father that eternally rejects his beloved Son (and who would dare think of such a thing), then there is no theological basis—in the being of God—for positing why God would think of passing by or rejecting large parts of his creation, or even conceive of such sadness. For me, the reprobating part of the Calvinists’ doctrine of double-predestination both denies that the Trinity is the ultimate and eternal truth about God, and supposes that there is something deeper about God than the fellowship of the Father, Son and Spirit that ultimately calls the shots for creation.

(2) The second reason I left Calvinism is the doctrine of limited atonement. The Calvinists prefer the phrases “definite atonement” or “particular redemption” to the phrase “limited atonement” because they are trying, rightly so, to maintain that the death of Jesus actually accomplished something. I am with them here. But in their system, “accomplishing something” leads to the idea that Jesus never intended to and never did die for the whole human race. He came to die for and to save only the elect (and here I can only say, tongue in cheek, “of course”). Their system of God’s election of some and reprobation of others logically carries them away into such a grotesque notion that Jesus gave himself only for a limited number of people. They honestly don’t think that there is anything wrong with such an idea. In the end, the doctrine that Jesus died only for some and not for the whole human race is a theological denial of the deity of Jesus Christ, and that, to me, was and is as scary as denying that the relationship of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit is the deepest truth about God’s being.

The apostles are crystal clear that it was in and through and by and for Jesus that all things came into being and are sustained. Let me cite a few verses.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being by Him, and apart from Him nothing came into being that has come into being (John 1:1-3).

For by Him all things were created, both in the heavens and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things have been created by Him and for Him. And He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together (Colossians 1:16-17).

And He is the radiance of His glory and the exact representation of His nature, and upholds all things by the word of His power (Hebrews 1:3).

John and Paul and the author of Hebrews are emphatic that Jesus is the Creator and that not one thing that was created came into being in any way other than through Jesus Christ. And note that this point is not relegated to obscure footnotes in the latter chapters of their writings. This is the first point. As a side note, when is the last time you heard a sermon on the fact that Jesus is the Creator, the one in and through and by and for whom all things were created? Why isn’t such an obvious apostolic emphasis prominent in our preaching today?

My point here is to say that in the apostolic mind there is a definite and clear connection between Jesus Christ and all creation. Unless we are prepared to posit that the Father created and sustains creation’s existence behind the back of his Son, then, with the apostles, we affirm that everything came into being through the Father’s Son, and we affirm that everything continues to live and move and have its being through him (see Acts 17:28 and I Corinthians 8:6-7). Everything, including every human being, derives existence through Christ and breathes’ Christological air. Let me quote Calvin himself here and his comments on John’s phrase, “in Him was life” (John 1:4).

So far, he has taught us that all things were created by the Word of God. He now likewise attributes to Him the preservation of what had been created; as if he were saying that in the creation of the world His power did not simply suddenly appear only to pass away, but that it is visible in the permanence of the stable and settled order of nature–just as Heb. 1.3 says that He upholds all things by the Word or command of His power. Moreover, this life can either be referred at large to inanimate creatures, which do live in their own way though they lack feeling, or expounded only of the animate. It matters little which you choose, for the simple meaning is that the Word of God was not only the fount of life to all creation, so that those which had not yet existed began to be, but that His life-giving power makes them remain in their state. For did not His continued inspiration quicken the world, whatsoever flourishes would without doubt immediately decay or be reduced to nothing. In short, what Paul ascribes to God, that in Him we have our being and move and live (Acts 17.28), John declares to be accomplished by the blessing of the Word. It is God, therefore, who gives us life; but He does so by the eternal Word. (John Calvin, The Gospel According to John, translated by T. H. L. Parker, (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company), 1988, pp. 10-11.0).

Following the apostles, Calvin is at pains to point out that the creation and the continued existence of all things are completely dependent upon the Son of God. The critical question here, for me, was what happened to the connection that the Father’s Son has with all things when he became a human being? Does the incarnation mean that he ceases to be the one in and through and by and for whom all things were created and are sustained? Did he break ties with his creation? Of course not. The incarnation is the coming of the One who is already the source and sustenance of all things. He brings his prior relationship with the cosmos and every human being within it with him as he becomes human.

While the Son incarnate is certainly a real man, an individual person, he is much more. His humanity is, as J. B. Torrance insisted, “vicarious humanity.” What becomes of him is not small-print, back-page news, which may or may not be relevant to us. He is the one in whom all things came into being and are continually upheld, thus what becomes of him has immediate implications for the whole creation. This fact should lead us to see with Paul that when Christ died, we died. When he rose, we rose. When he ascended, we were lifted up in him to the Father’s arms (see Ephesians 2:4-6; 2Corinthians 5:14ff). But this is a subject for another day (see my books, The Great Dance, and Jesus and the Undoing of Adam, and the lecture series, “The Big Picture: From the Trinity to Our Adoption in Christ”). For now, the point is that it was Jesus’ relationship with the entire cosmos and with the whole human race that called a halt to any notion of limited atonement that I had running though my brain. The life, death, resurrection and ascension of the incarnate Son/Creator was as wide and deep and large as creation itself. To deny this was simply to deny that Jesus was the incarnate Son of God and the Creator in and through and by and for whom all things were created and are sustained.

I remember standing on Canal street in New Orleans arguing with a Calvinist about this very point. He did not like my questioning the doctrine of limited atonement. We were both attending an American Academy of Religion conference and happened to bump into one another on our way to get something to eat. He started firing questions at me. There were hundreds, if not thousands, of people on Canal street at that moment, and I asked him, “where did these people come from?” He answered, “God made them.” I asked, “which God?” He tried to look perplexed, but he knew where I was going. So I asked again, “which God?” And he said, “you know, the Christian God.” Notice that he did not say, “the Father, Son and Spirit,” for that would mean that all of these people had come into being through Jesus, and thus that Jesus already had a relationship with them. So I just stared at him waiting for more. So he qualified his remarks, by adding, “God created them through common grace.” “You are hiding,” I said, which he did not like at all. “Hiding from what?” he retorted. “Behind the smoke screen of God’s common grace, you are hiding the plain biblical fact that all of these people came into being and continue to live through Jesus Christ.” He acted like he could not understand what I meant. For the deity of Christ, the fact that Jesus is the one in and through and by and for whom all things were created and are sustained is the end of the doctrine of limited atonement, and he knew it. The fact that Jesus is God means that the entire cosmos, and the whole human race within it, are implicated in his incarnate existence, and in what becomes of him. If he dies, we die. If he rises, we rise. If he ascends to the Father, we ascend to the Father. And that is what happened.

(3) My third reason for leaving Calvinism is more pastoral, and has to do with the way Calvinism gave me nothing objectively real to proclaim as divine fact, and thus leaves us with no basis for real assurance. For me, the very heart of Christian living is parrhesia—assurance, confidence, freedom, security—which is rooted in the Father’s eternal and unyielding love, which Jesus himself reveals to us in the Spirit. But how could I hope that Jesus would reveal the Father’s love to a person, in the power of the Spirit, when I could not declare to them that it was absolutely true. Let me cite Calvin again.

Now we shall possess a right definition of faith if we call it a firm and certain knowledge of God’s benevolence toward us, founded upon the truth of the freely given promise in Christ, both revealed to our minds and sealed upon our hearts through the Holy Spirit (Institutes, III.2.7).

For Calvin, the very center of Christian faith is the certain knowledge that God is for us. Without knowing that we belong to the Father himself, and without experiencing the unearthly assurance that baptizes our souls as we do, our souls are left simmering in the poisonous roux of fear. And here we should note Louis Berkhof’s lament: “There are comparatively few Christians to-day, who really glory in the assurance of salvation. The note of heavenly joy seems to have died away out of the life of God’s people” (Louis Berkhof, The Assurance of Faith, p. 16). Berkhof was a Calvinist theologian of the last century. So we have Calvin defining faith as a firm and certain knowledge of God’s benevolence toward us, and Berkhof lamenting the fact that few Christians experience real assurance. Wonder why?

Is there is way to experience real assurance of the Father’s love and of our salvation in Christ when are told that before the foundation of the world God elected some to be saved in grace and others to be damned for the glorification of divine justice? Calvin himself recognized the problem and pointed us in the right direction, only to fall at the last hurdle. Calvin directs us to Christ as the mirror of our election (Institutes III.xxiv.5), so if we struggle with whether or not we are one of the chosen, we are to look to Christ. But, and this is the problem, the mirror of Christ reflects two groups of people, the one’s loved by Jesus’ Father, and the others who are eternally not loved and doomed by the same Father.

This is a serious problem. The human soul is fragile. It is designed by God to live out of the baptism of unearthly assurance that comes from a firm and certain knowledge of the Father’s love. But how can we know that the Father loves us when he may have rejected us before the foundation of the world? Calvinism give us nothing objective to say to the world, no unconditional word of God to proclaim openly to everyone—except that we are all sinners. What is the gospel to be proclaimed according to Calvinism? For me, the gospel is the good news of Jesus Christ and of what became of the cosmos and of the human race in him. When he died, we died. When he rose, we rose. When he ascended, we ascended into the Father’s embrace, and there accepted forever as his adopted children. Our adoption in Christ is objectively true for everyone, a divine fact, established in Jesus Christ’s own existence forever, whether anyone believes it or not. To believe the truth, to believe that you are so loved and accepted is to experience the unearthly assurance of the Father’s love, and thus to begin the journey of learning how to live life in the security and freedom of his passionate embrace.

A Calvinist could only hear what I am saying and conclude that I am teaching universalism. While I am not a universalist, I am saying that before the foundation of the world, the Father, Son and Spirit set their love upon us all, determining to give us a place in the very trinitarian life itself. And, I am saying that Jesus has fulfilled the Father’s dreams of our adoption. In his incarnate life, death, resurrection and ascension he cleansed us of sin, recreated us in his resurrection, and lifted us all into the Father’s arms in his ascension. The Holy Spirit himself was poured out on all flesh to bring us to know the truth so that we could be set free from the great darkness and its terrible, life-canceling fear.

The fact that we are all included in Christ—and in him adopted children of the Father—and the fact that the Holy Spirit has been sent to lead us to know the truth does not mean universalism; it means that we have something real to preach, namely that we all have a beautiful life to live, and that we are all called to live it, called to believe in Jesus and his Father, called to let go of our hellish anxiety and to receive the Father’s love and live. The ones who believe in the witness of the Spirit to our adoption by the Father in his Son, experience the baptism of unearthly assurance (the firm and certain knowledge that the Father himself loves us). Those who don’t believe the Spirit’s witness do not experience the baptism, and continue to live in the doom of the darkness and its anxious hell. Let me put this another way. The human race has been justified by the Father, Son and Spirit. Those who believe that God has justified them, experience the freedom of their justification—rest, peace, hope, assurance. Those who don’t believe that God has justified them, continue to experience a life of striving and self-justification, anxiety and insecurity—religious death.

It is critical, to my mind, not to confuse the divine fact with our experience. People can be loved, adopted and justified, and yet not experience the Father’s love, or the freedom of his adoption, or the peace of his justification because they do not believe these realities to be true. What they believe does not have the power to change the facts, but our faith or lack of it does affect our experience of the facts. To believe that the Father loves you does not make it true, (for it is true whether you believe it or not), but believing the Father’s love to be true means his love becomes a real experience for you.

Now may the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit (Romans 15:13).

Giving us no objective gospel or absolute truth to proclaim to the human race, no absolute fact of the Father’s love and the finished work of Christ to shout to the world, Calvinism gives us nothing to say to humanity, and gives the human race nothing real to believe, no concrete, objective basis for faith, and thus no possibility for unearthly assurance. What do the Calvinists call people to believe, and to believe in? “Jesus” would seem the obvious answer, but how can you really believe in Jesus when you have no basis for believing that he even died for you at all? Are we supposed to believe that we may be loved by the Father, and that we may be included in Jesus? What basis, what ground is given by Calvinism to anyone to believe that they are loved by God? How is one to know for sure? In the Calvinists’ system, we cannot even look to Jesus himself, for their Jesus embodies and reveals the Father’s divided heart. In the end, and at all points in between, Calvinism leaves us with maybe as the object of our faith, and with no option but to look to ourselves to find proof that the maybe is actually true and we are of the chosen. Being left to ourselves to move from maybe to firm and certain knowledge of the Father’s love is simply not a recipe for Christian faith and assurance, not to speak of peace and rest.

So, for me the Calvinists’ doctrines of double predestination and limited atonement form a tag team that not only gut-punches our already anxious souls, but fuels our profound anxiety, because it gives us no objective truth to proclaim or to believe. Without objective truth, we can never have unearthly assurance, and we are doomed to live with an assurance that is of our own making. Calvinism leaves us either in denial of our waywardness, for to acknowledge it would be to face “proof” that we are not of the elect, or it leaves us inventing a religious form that we can follow to prove that we are—and self-righteously proud that we are doing so. No thank you.

Is the gospel a theory or a declaration? Is the gospel the news that the Father may have embraced you in Jesus, or is it the news that the Father has embraced you in Jesus forever? Thank God, the gospel is a declaration of a divine fact—you are embraced, included in the trinitarian life of God. And this divine fact carries with it both a promise and a warning. Its promise is this: if you believe that you are included, you will experience the Father’s love. The warning is this: if you do not believe that you are included, you will continue to experience striving, insecurity and fear. In which world do you want to live, the world of the Father’s embrace, or the world of maybe?

The best treatment of the problem of assurance from a Calvinist’s perspective is Louis Berkhof’s, The Assurance of Faith. (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1939). He sees the issue and has some helpful things to say, but in the end he leaves us with ourselves and the hope that the Holy Spirit can take the vague, even deceptive message that “God loves sinners” (for the Calvinist’s God loves some sinners) and use it to give an individual firm and certain knowledge that the Father loves them in particular. Thomas Erskine’s, The Unconditional Freeness of the Gospel, written in the land of Calvinism, is the book to read if you want to understand the gospel and to experience real assurance (available on our web site).

The best book on Calvin’s theology is Victor A. Shepherd’s, The Nature and Function of Faith in the Theology of John Calvin, (Macon, Georgia: Mercer University Press, 1983).

A White Piece of Paper

2008-04-24T01:14:00.001-05:00

Many years ago, when Beth and I were first married (we celebrate our 26th anniversary next month) we got into, shall we say, a debate about the color of our apartment walls. I argued that they were obviously white, while she smiled and contended that they were off–white. So to prove my point, I grabbed a piece of typing paper and confidently slapped it to the wall. Needless to say, the presence of the white paper instantly revealed that the walls were anything but white.

I heard a man preaching on the radio last week, and he was holding forth about sin and the need for salvation. He went on and on about us being sinners, and about breaking the law and falling short of the glory of God. I could not help but wonder how sinners could possibly have a clue about the glory of God, let alone what is meant by falling short of it. Then I remembered the white typing paper. Only as we see our salvation in Christ do we begin to know what it means that we are sinners. Only as we see ourselves wrapped up in the Father’s love in Christ can we begin to know what it means to fall short of His glory. Forgiveness reveals guilt. Salvation reveals how far we are from living in its joy. John Calvin was right when he said, ‘no man can apply himself seriously unto repentance until he knows that he belongs to God.’

We have the order wrong. You don’t preach law so that folks will know they are bad and then seek forgiveness; you preach forgiveness so they will know they are missing out on a fantastic life, and thus seek to know how to live it. For what could be better than to know that the Father himself has forgiven us and embraced us forever? Yet what could be more exposing than the whiteness of the Father’s love and acceptance as they reveal the darkness of how far we are from living in His embrace? To see yourself loved forever and safe in the Father’s arms reveals that we have a glorious life to live, and that we are like church mice living in fear in the dark (religious dark?). For the Father’s embrace shows us what real life is all about, and at the same it time shows us that we are a long way from living in its joy. The whiteness of the Father’s love reveals our lives as a sad and pitiful mess, and it summons us to turn from such sadness, receive the Father’s love and live. Receiving the Father’s love is life (John 17:3).

Holy Spirit, you have the run of our dark house. Reveal the Father’s love in Jesus. Expose our bondage for what it is that we may run to Abba for healing.

The World Wide Church of God

2008-04-23T00:10:00.002-05:00

I spent the afternoon and well into the night watching videos on the World Wide Church of God web site (wcg.org). Ray Anderson, John (I-am-so-excited-I-could-burst) McKenna, Paul Young and many others are all on a roll about the way the Father, Son and Spirit have embraced us all and share their trinitarian life with us. It is beautiful. Mike Feazell and Tony Murphy are doing the greatest of all services to the church and the world. Check it out. If you are not inspired, check your pulse.

The site is full of interviews and discussions on the frontiers of the Spirit’s ministry to us today in our great darkness. For more on the story of the transformation of the World Wide Church read Joe Tkach’s, Transformed by Truth and Mike Feazell’s, The Liberation of the Worldwide Church of God. These brothers have been crucified for the truth, and now they are experiencing the joy of resurrection. May the Holy Spirit continue to use you all to give us all eyes to see—well done mates, keep it up. And get Malcolm Smith interviewed.

The Shack Revisited

2008-04-22T13:40:00.002-05:00

Richmond Grace Church in Richmond, Virginia was the place to be last weekend. I was thrilled just to be in the room. It was a regional conference of the World Wide Church of God, although everyone was welcome, and it was beautiful and fun and full of life. In the basement of a Masonic Temple, where Richmond Grace meets every Sunday, people of all colors and from all walks of life gathered for a festival of friendship, truth, music and dance in the embrace of the blessed Trinity.

Two things amaze me about the World Wide Church of God, and this gathering proved them once again. First, this Church has opened its soul to the Father, Son and Spirit. I have never seen such hunger and openness in the United States. Second, this Church is integrated. Here we were in Richmond, Virginia of all places, and the room was full of different races, gathered in the name of the One who ends all racism, and every other “ism.” Don’t get me wrong, this was not one of those meetings where the white folks are willing to let the colored folks in or vice versa. This was the body of Christ, and it was beautiful. No shame. No division. No separation. Light, life and love—smiles everywhere. So before the conference even began the Holy Spirit was on a roll. For me, pastor Bill Winn and his wife Davina embody the joy of it all. Bill is a theologian in an evangelist’s body, with no 'off switch,' and Davina is the beautiful calm that creates a welcome space. And Tim Brassell (another local pastor) and his wife Donna are a tag team of beaming grace and truth, and not a little fire. You not only felt welcome, you felt wanted—at home. Add to all of this the stunning music of Vanessa Kersting, from Adelaide, Australia, and the room is fully pumped (the Aussies are ubiquitous).

William P. (Paul) Young was introduced and began to share his story—and what a story it is. Here is a man who has been through hell sideways, several times, and he is not bashful about sharing the dark and sad parts. He is a man baptized with the unearthly assurance of Papa’s love, and you don’t get such a baptism without facing yourself. When I met Paul in the airport on Wednesday afternoon, I knew he was my brother from another mother. He is not a tall man, but his heart is as big as Western Australia. He is Papa with a Donald Sutherland grin. He sounds a little like Kevin Costner and sometimes like Tom Hanks, but mostly he is a little boy with twinkling eyes that say, “you have no idea how good Papa is, but you are about too.” I suspect he goes to sleep grinning.

Underneath The Shack, which by now must be around #1 on the best seller list in the USA, or should be, is a tale of abuse and pain, religion and pretense, striving, hurt and betrayal—and an ocean of grace. From 10 in the morning until 5 in the afternoon on Friday, April, 18th we sat spellbound by a brutally honest and utterly free man as he shared his life of trauma and of the Father’s unending love. If you were awake, you were moved. There were deep tears and cleansing laughter as old wounds were touched and healed, and we began to believe that the gospel is true, that Papa is good, that Jesus has saved us, and that Sarayu is free to meet us anywhere. Paul is a living example of two of his favorite statements. “Freedom is an incremental process. “Its all about timing, just not ours, but Papa’s.”

What spoke most deeply to me is the way Paul personifies the Father’s love and acceptance of us as we really are. In one of my teaching sessions the next day, I quoted Papa from The Shack. “Take it easy on those greens, young man. Those things can give you the trots if you ain’t careful” (p. 121). I have read a lot of theology, but that statement has to be one of the finest theological statements ever written. The Lord is not ashamed of, or put off by, or embarrassed by our humanity. He loves us as we are. He meets us where we are. And as we let Him love us through Jesus, all our broken parts begin to be bathed with Papa’s love, and in Sarayu’s time and soul-gardening grace we become like Papa.

Vanessa’s song, “For All the Times” (I predict it will be a #1 song) flows right out of Papa’s love.

For All the Times
©Vanessa Kersting, 2007

for all the times you don’t get told
hear Me say I love you
for all the times you don’t feel beautiful
hear Me say you’re beautiful
o so wonderful

(chorus) this is not who you are
this is who you are
you’re Mine you’re Mine

for all the times you feel alone
hear me say I love you

for all the times you were told
that no one would care
feel My heart beat for you
for all the times you don’t feel good enough
hear Me say you’re worth more
than you know

for all the times it gets too much
feel My arms hold you

It fell to me to follow Paul and Vanessa, and also a wonderful local dance team, but it was the easiest thing I have ever done. I was home, and I was with brothers and sisters, and they were hungry, and it was as beautiful as it was fun. In the words of Ken Blue, “Thank you, Holy Spirit, we will have more please.”

And at the very end on Sunday afternoon, Jeff McSwain (another one of J. B. Torrance’s spiritual children) dropped in for a visit. I couldn’t help but grin like Paul.

And yes, it was recorded, and will be available in audio and video soon.

www.richmondgrace.com
www.windrumors.com
www.vanessakersting.com
www.perichoresis.org
www.dancingGod.org

The Father's Undivided Heart

2008-04-15T09:22:00.002-05:00

The ideas that God, the Father needed to be appeased in order to accept us, and that Jesus became human in order to suffer the wrath of his Father on the cross so that we could be accepted, always struck me as terribly wrong. But, growing up in the deep South in the USA, such notions were all one ever heard, and heard repeatedly, and still do. In this atonement theory, the Father is in two minds about us, or, at the very least, there are two sides of the Father, the one being the righteous, just and holy side, the other being the graceful, merciful and loving side. The one thing we knew for sure about God was that he could not simply forgive us and accept us as his fallen creatures. The truth, we were told is that He could not even look upon us vile sinners. His holiness and justice and righteousness demanded satisfaction before forgiveness could become a reality. And so on the cross Jesus bowed as the Father’s holiness, justice and righteousness formed into wrath against our sin and was poured out upon him instead of us.

Of course, it is far more complicated than this, or so we were told, but the more I tried to sort through the complications, the more troubled I became. Apart from the fact that in this theory there is no forgiveness at all, only justice, as my friend David Upshaw says, we are left with a divided Father, and a Son who is remarkably different in character and freedom from the Father he reveals. After all, while Father is too pure to look upon sin, his Son is free to become flesh, embrace sinners, eat with them and even become sin for us (2COR 5:21). So, if Jesus’ becoming flesh, embracing sinners and becoming sin is not a revelation of the Father, how did we develop our notions of the Father? What happened to, “he who has seen me, has seen the Father” (John 14:9), or “I and the Father are one” (John 10:30), or “He is the radiance of His glory and the exact representation of His nature” (Hebrews 1:3)?

All of this is to say that on a cold March afternoon in 1980 I found St. Athanasius’ beautiful little book, On the Incarnation of the Word of God, and as I read a single sentence rocked my inherited, legalistic, quasi-trinitarian world. “As, then, the creatures whom He had created…were on the road to ruin, what then was God, being Good to do?” (§ 6) What struck me, and still thrills me every time I read this sentence, is Athanasius’ assumption about the Father’s heart. There is no indifference here, no ambiguity or division in the Father. He loves His creation with an single heart, and is passionate about its blessing. The holiness, justice and righteousness, and the love, grace and mercy of the Father are not opposed to each other, but form an undivided heart, determined to bless us at all costs. Thus, it is unthinkable, Athanasius says, for God to turn his back upon His creation, and to allow us to be destroyed, because it would be “unfitting and unworthy of Himself” (§6).

So the coming of Jesus flows out of the Father’s undivided heart, and the lengths to which Jesus goes—willfully bowing to suffer, not the Father’s, but the human race’s rejection and curse, as we poured our wrath out upon him—reveals the Father’s uncomplicated, single-minded love for us. On the cross, the holiness, righteousness, and justice of God are not at odds with the mercy, grace and goodness of God, but form into one self-sacrificing love, which is prepared to, and actually does, suffer dis-honor and grotesque shame in order to reach us and bless us beyond our wildest dreams. The death of Jesus is not about appeasing an angry God. It is about the Triune God doing the impossible—reaching the human race in its terrible darkness and corruption, where the undivided heart of the Father is unimaginable.

“He who has seen me, has seen the Father.”

For more on my views of reconciliation, see Jesus and the Undoing of Adam, and Across All Worlds, and “Bearing our Scorn: Jesus and the Way of Trinitarian Love,” all available on our web site.

Jesus and the Church

2008-04-10T09:44:00.001-05:00

To speak the name of Jesus Christ, biblically and in the tradition of the early church is to say Trinity, and it is to say humanity, and it is to say cosmos, and it is to say that the Triune God, the human race and the cosmos are not separated, but bound together in relationship, in union, in covenant forever.

For according to the apostles, Jesus Christ is the Father’s Son. He is the One anointed in the Holy Spirit. He is the One in and through and by and for whom all things were created and are sustained. The critical question is: Did Jesus break relations with his Father when he became human? Did he give up his anointing in the Spirit? Did he set aside his connections with the human race and the universe when he became incarnate? The answer is a resounding “No!” We cannot speak of Jesus Christ, therefore, without speaking of his relationship with his Father, and of his anointing in the Spirit, and of his relationship with the human race, and of his relationship with the universe. And we cannot speak of the life, death, resurrection and ascension of Jesus Christ without speaking of what happened to us and to the cosmos in him. When he died, we died. When he rose, we rose. When he ascended, we were exalted in him. To speak of Jesus Christ is to say that in him, the Father himself, the Holy Spirit, the human race, and the cosmos are related, together, united. He is the union.

The gospel is not news of an absent Jesus who waits for us to receive him into our lives. The gospel is the staggering news that Jesus has received us into his life. Jesus has received us into his relationship with his Father, into his anointing with the Spirit, into his relationship with the human race, and into his relationship with the cosmos.

In the light of who Jesus Christ is; in the light of the fact that he has received us into his relationship with his Father, and into his anointing in the Spirit, and into his relationship with humanity, and the cosmos, we can see who we truly are, why we are here, what our time, our history, our lives are about, personally and corporately and historically. In the light of Jesus Christ we can see what the Triune God has planned and willed for humanity. For the existence of Jesus Christ is not plan “B,” quickly worked up after the failure of plan “A” in Adam. Jesus Christ is plan “A.” He is the alpha and the omega, the first, the eternal Word of God.

In the light of Jesus Christ and what he has made of us in his life, death, resurrection and ascension, we can see something of the alien darkness that is blinding the human race, something of how far we are falling short personally and corporately and globally of who we are in Jesus Christ, something of the terrible bondage that is holding us down. It is the calling of the Christian Church to take Jesus Christ seriously, to believe in Him. The Church is summoned to be the people within the world in darkness where Jesus is allowed to have his way with the mind and heart and will of humanity. It is our calling to have our minds, our world-views, our fundamental vision reconstructed in the light of Jesus Christ, to think through the personal, relational, global, historical, political, economic, environmental, religious, scientific and cosmic implications of the very identity of Jesus Christ. We are called to be the people in whom the stunning news of our adoption in Christ–of our inclusion in Jesus four-fold relationship–is understood, believed, enjoyed and freely shared with the world.

Jesus Christ himself is the truth that can set us free from the bondage of darkness. The Church is called to bear witness to Jesus Christ, the truth of all truths, the light of the cosmos, the One in whom the Triune God, the human race and the universe are personally and rightly related.

A Man Heard Music

2008-04-09T06:59:00.001-05:00

One of the great social events in our part of the world is a crawfish boil. Last weekend I cooked over 200 pounds of crawfish for a friend’s annual gathering. The afternoon, and then the evening, was alive with laughter, relationships, community and life. We had a large time. One of my favorite moments happened when The Delta Mountain Boys (a local Blue Grass band) started playing. While their fiddle player was absent, their music was still fantastic. But then, out of nowhere an older man appeared with a fiddle in his hand, and joined right in. I assumed that he was a friend of the band and that someone had called him. At a break I introduced myself and discovered that he did not know anyone at the party. He said, “I hope you don’t mind, but I was sitting on my back porch listening to this great music and decided I had to find the party and join in. So I grabbed my fiddle and drove around the neighborhood until I saw the cars.” After the initial surprise, I assured him that he was more than welcome and hoped he had as much fun as the rest of us.

A man heard music and set out to find the party.

On the Holy Spirit

2008-04-01T11:53:00.002-05:00

In his incarnate life, death, resurrection and ascension, the Father’s Son himself has embraced the human race and given us a place in his own relationship with his Father. And Jesus has included us in his own anointing in the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit comes to us to free us to live our true lives as joint-heirs with Jesus and adopted children of the Father.

Most discussions of the Holy Spirit’s coming and ministry tend to divorce the work of the Spirit in our lives from Jesus himself, and from Jesus’ ongoing relationship with us in our brokenness. At best, it seems, the Holy Spirit has been understood as coming to us on the basis of what Jesus did for us. It is as if Jesus came and did his thing, then that chapter is closed, and the Holy Spirit comes and does his, and there is not much of a connection between the two. It seems to me, however, that the empowering ministry of the Holy Spirit is profoundly interrelated with Jesus, and with Jesus’ ongoing relationship with us as sinners. The Holy Spirit comes to us not only on the basis of what Jesus has done for us, but in and through Jesus himself and his own ongoing relationship with us in our terrible darkness.

The Holy Spirit empowers us to live by meeting and accepting and embracing us—in and through Jesus—as we are in our brokenness and shame, and terrible and terrifying blindness, and there in our brokenness and blindness and shame, the Holy Spirit empowers us by revealing Jesus, not simply to us, but in us. For Jesus is already within us with his Father.

As the Holy Spirit reveals Jesus in us, we begin to get glimpses of who we really are and of how deeply and personally we are loved and accepted by the Father himself. These moments of revelation, in the trauma of our darkness, challenge our entrenched beliefs about ourselves and about God. We are summoned to takes sides with Jesus against our own mythology, summoned to believe in Jesus and his Father, and in ourselves as loved and accepted and embraced.

Believing in Jesus is accepting our acceptance; it is receiving the Father’s love, and thus Jesus’ own parrhesia—freedom, assurance, confidence, boldness and life—is free to take baby steps within us. Our anointing in the Holy Spirit in Jesus begins to flourish in our own experience and life.

The Holy Spirit is a redeeming genius, most competent to meet us where we are in our darkness, and without overwhelming us to lead us to begin to use Jesus’ right mind, and to risk leaving our own darkness and its strange comfort, embracing the new world of the Father and his incarnate Son.

For more on Jesus inside our darkness, see my book Across All Worlds.