AS FAR AS I CAN SEE

If you point out to a monkey how delicious a hamburger is, it will ignore you. Same with Christianity.

What is a belief?

This could be considered as a question of philosophy – of ontology or linguistic analysis – or a question of psychology or etymology, or in other ways as well.  We’re only going to consider it within the realm of the pragmatic question of how we are living in relationship to Christ. 

With that said, it’s obvious that such a belief does not consist in words floating around somewhere, in one’s brain, for example, or one’s ‘spirit’, or anywhere else.  Nor is it a potential or disposition for vocalization under certain circumstances.  Christian belief isn’t simply something said, whether aloud or to oneself.  A human monster could say the appropriate words while doing monstrous things, could even ‘think’ them sincerely.  Even the devils believe, as James puts it.

Salvific belief, meaning the attitude towards the sovereignty of Christ that advances one on the road of salvation, is a dynamic attitude, one connected with behavior and preoccupation, but it’s also one that admits of degrees.  Degrees of what?  Degrees of strength.  But strength doesn’t have meaning in a contextual vacuum.   Having strong muscles describes the muscles in the context of weight resistance.  Just so, having strong salvific belief describes something in a context.  What is the context?  It’s the context of the other dynamic motivations of the individual, the other attitudes connected to behavior and preoccupation, the desires, the hungers, the fears, even the other beliefs.  Even the other loves.

Your salvific belief in Jesus as your Lord refers to your dynamic attitude towards His sovereignty over your life: the beauty that attracts your eyes, the food that appeals to your hunger, the problems and narratives that engage your curiosity, and the resultant uses to which you put your time and energy. At least for most of us, it’s an attitude at least occasionally in conflict with other dynamic attitudes, and it’s in the context of such conflicts that its strength becomes apparent. 

We might usefully compare it to gravity, to the gravitational pull of your being towards another’s.  At a great distance from that source, its pull is weak, and easily overcome by other attractions.  But with each movement you make closer to the source, the stronger becomes its pull, and the influence of the others correspondingly weaker. 

This is the Christian road of salvation, one voluntary step after another taken towards its gravitational source.  An observer might say ‘Your faith is growing stronger’, but experientially, it’s the weakening of all other influences. 

And the things of the world will grow strangely dim.

The words of Jesus are always spoken to an individual.  We’re told that they are not written on stone, but on the human heart.  But remember, there is no such thing as an abstract or general heart; hearts have their only reality in living women and men.  Obedience to the word of Jesus presupposes hearing the words of Jesus spoken uniquely to oneself. 

But the words of Jesus are very softly spoken, and obedience to them presupposes attentiveness on our part.  That attentiveness is fundamental to everything else: it is a pearl of great price.  It must be sheltered from the world, and cherished.

It’s not difficult to shelter yourself from many of the world’s hindrances to your attention: by turning off the phone or television, by seeking solitude, and so on.  But there is one such hindrance that is more powerful than the others, because, although not itself real, it has been incorporated into our relationship with reality – has taken possession of us, to use the Bible’s own figure.

I’m referring to the clock, or, more accurately, to the spirit of the clock.

Learning to follow Christ is not a matter of making oneself obedient to a certain set of rules. One of the great earmarks of those following Christ is wonderment on their part as to their own motivations.  They are being shaken free from a primitive, worldly, model of understanding.  They are being shaken free from the world altogether.

This is another implication of the reality that faith is a response, not an attitude or decision.  It’s a response of one’s being at a level deeper than thought or self-awareness.  Everyone is a Christian long before he or she takes a vow or pledges an allegiance.  Those activities are fruits and flowers; what they emerge from is faith. 

That’s why we should never applaud ourselves for having ‘come to Christ.’  Jesus said, You didn’t choose me, I chose you. 

The Hebrew Scriptures at the foundation of our faith often speak of God as a king.  But the king is a very poor model for thinking about God.  Unlike the Old Testament writers, Jesus never uses it.  The closest he comes is in teaching about the kingdom of God or of heaven, but the phrase has the meaning of moral authority rather than a physical place or political arrangement, and Jesus is always instead teaching about the nature of that authority, and always contrasting it with our normal understanding.

The models Jesus uses instead to guide our reflection about the nature of God are the father and the shepherd.  The quality those models share is the obligation of self-sacrifice, and that is the opposite of what defines a king (or a dictator, or an emperor, or a president).  The quality that defines a king is that others are obligated to him for self-sacrifice.

When we kneel in prayer, we are not kneeling in deference to power.  We kneel in deference to weakness.  This is the fundamental mystery of Christianity (and what Nietzsche, who fully understood Christianity, railed against): it worships weakness.  We submit our will, not to a more powerful will, but to a will that abjures power altogether, and asks us to do the same.  Asks, not orders.  When we kneel in prayer, we are not signaling our acceptance of an order or ranking, but our acceptance of an invitation to serve, rather than be served.

Jesus kneeling to wash the disciples’ feet is the perfect incarnation of prayer.

Christian thinkers often speak of God’s relationship to the unfolding of history – whether human or universal – on the model of an author’s relationship to a finished novel.  Themes and morals have been thought out in advance, a plot concocted, characters introduced and developed to play their parts in the unfolding drama.  Seasons and locations and climate have all been arranged to suit the author’s purpose of bringing the plot to its satisfying conclusion. 

In fact, I don’t think it’s unfair to say that this or some variation of this has been the prevailing background paradigm for Christian theology from the very beginning. We find it even in New Testament scripture, clearly rooted in the same Jewish model.  It’s what justifies the thought of predictive prophesy in both testaments.  It’s what we have in the back of our minds when we speak blithely of God’s omniscience extending over time, of seeing the end from the beginning, of knitting, not just the child’s being, but the child’s entire life together in the mother’s womb.

The problem, of course, is that it makes human freedom and hence human responsibility problematic.  The best theology can muster is to call it a ‘mystery’, and sweep it under a rug.

Well then, suppose we modify the model.  God is no longer the author of a finished novel, but now the playwright who allows the actors the right to improvise.  They may speak their own lines, fashion their own characters, invent their own plot devices.  We have salvaged human freedom!

But the playwright has still provided the actors with the denouement and the conclusion.  The playwright requires of the actors that, whatever they do, they must still serve the author’s final end.  They are still tools of the playwright’s intention, just tools of a more elaborate design.  The freedom it offers is illusory, like that of a caged bird to fly from one perch to another.

Well then, we go to the extreme.  Someone gathers people together, then sits back with no further involvement to observe their behavior, opens the cage door to let the bird fly away.

But this is not God.  This is a voyeur.  A birdwatcher.

The problem is the model itself.

God is not like an author at all.  God does not see the end because God has not determined the end.  Jesus Himself told us what the best model is: that of a loving parent.  Parents do not see or know their child’s “end” (whatever that might even mean).  Loving parents can be shocked, disappointed, even appalled, without yet ceasing to love.  Parents are always there to help, and always willing to forgive.

Begin with that, in thinking about God, and feel sympathy for all those who good men and women who have squandered their mental energy thinking about God as an author.

THE WIDOW’S MITE

The spiritual truth of the sacrificial system is this: What God is receiving is neither payment nor bribe – He already owns the goat.  What He is receiving that He didn’t have before is the sacrifice of the goat.  It’s the hallowing of the goat through its sacrifice that’s added to God’s treasury.

There is one possession – one treasure – of which no one has more than anyone else: the hours of the day.  They are the true manna, our daily provision. 

When we spend our time – our daily provision – in prayer, we’re not adding the time to God’s treasury.  What we’re adding to God’s treasury – to God’s glory – is the hallowing of the time, something God, alone, could not produce.

That may, in fact, be the purpose of creation.

One suspects Jesus was aware of the time the widow spent in prayer.

A person doesn’t normally enjoy breathing.  Normally, breathing is neither a reward nor does a person find it rewarding.  People can certainly use these words to describe breathing, but they falsify rather than reveal reality.  Reward,  enjoyment and similar expressions all suggest that there is an activity of some sort, and then, separate from that activity, a response or reaction to it, an appreciation of it.  They lead us to think of something like breathing on the model of what happens when you inhale a cigarette or take a sip of wine, and your action is followed by a release of chemicals in your brain that manifests in a certain sort of somatic sensation that our physical body welcomes.

But that’s what happens when you smoke a cigarette, not when you breathe, and that’s why it’s misleading to use such language when talking about respiration.

Breathing is simply part of the normal operation of the body.  Cut off the oxygen supply, and of course the body experiences distress, but the return of oxygen is not enjoyment – it’s relief and a return to normalcy.

Similarly children do not enjoy play, not do they like it, and for exactly the same reasons.  Playing is the normal state of the child, part of the normal operation of the child.  Unless they have been incapacitated in some way, all children play, just as all people breathe.

The aim of the Christian disciple is to become as naturally harmonious with God’s will as our bodies are with breathing and children are with play.  The goal is not to enjoy that harmony, or to like it, and certainly not to find it rewarding or to be rewarded by it.  Those are simply the wrong categories of thought to use it thinking about our relationship with God (though they certainly are commonly used, perhaps more commonly than any others.)

In the most elevated conception, Yahweh is a god of justice, of mercy, and of condescension.  These are the qualities of the ideal ruler; a conception of the best that the best of human beings can imagine, the deepest that the deepest of human beings can fathom.  It is a noble, virtuous, compelling conception, forever worthy of respect.  It is the conception of Isaiah and Jeremiah and Ezekiel and John the Baptist. 

But it is not the Truth, as revealed by Jesus.

John’s gospel records Jesus’ new commandment to his followers, that they love one another as he has loved them.  And why?  John’s first epistle tells us: because God is love.  To be like God is to be like love.

But Jesus, the wellspring of this staggering thought, didn’t offer it in English or Greek.  It would have been in a Hebraic tongue, and the word he would have used has the root meaning of to give.  The quality being described is a giving nature. 

To give someone something is to remove it from one’s own benefit or use or being and bestow it on someone else. 

So when John tells us that God in this degree loved the world that he gave his son to it, he’s describing the depth of God’s giving nature, and he’s saying that it is bottomless, even to the limit of God’s own self, even to death.  Jesus Himself said the same thing: Greater love than this does not exist, than to give one’s own life.  That is the limit of love, to have nothing left of oneself.

Jesus provides us with the full revelation of God on the Cross, because God is love.

As we grow old, we have a tendency to focus on the mistakes we made when we were younger, the wrong choices, the lack of caution that resulted in catastrophe, the temptations to which we offered no resistance, and so on.  There is certainly place in maturity for such reflections, and for the regret that makes them poignant, sometimes even sorrowful.

But it’s very important, as we grow in knowledge and discernment (Philippians 1: 9), that we do not lose hold of our affection and respect for the innocence that occasioned most of those mistakes, even though the thing itself, the innocence, may be lost to us, recoverable now only through an act of grace.  Where that innocence lacked in wisdom, it overflowed in courage and buoyancy and passionate hope, and these are precious and fragile attributes of spirit, qualities to love and pray for.  

When Jesus, from the Cross, handed over His mother to the care of His beloved disciple, he was handing over what had been precious in the old dispensation – its courage, its buoyancy, its passionate hope – to the guardianship of  the new, His church.  As members of His church, we must never lose our affection for the old, whatever errors those qualities may have occasioned.

And this is the lesson for each one of us, as well, as we grow old in knowledge and discernment.