But that’s just the side of me that wants to put things in categories talking. That’s the ancient Greek in me that want to get out.

The reality is different. Or, at least, I hope it’s different. The reality is this:

You don’t get to have one without the other. Grace, works; justification, sanctification; salvation, service. However you want to say it.

It’s one coin with two sides. You have both, or you have neither. You don’t get to work your way into the Kingdom. But you don’t get to walk into the Kingdom saying you’re washed clean with a bunch of debauchery strapped to your body.

This is why Christianity preaches not only the death of Jesus for you, but also the death of you for Jesus. This is why we preach not only Christ taking up the cross, but also us taking up the cross. We preach not only Jesus’ resurrection and his glorified body, but our resurrection and our New Man as well.

We focus on the “once” of baptism, and the “always” of new life.

You don’t get to have one without the other.

Which is a good thing, really.

Both, or neither originally appeared on We Should See Other Blogs on 2011-04-07.

Substitutionary atonement is great; it’s a core doctrine, one of the great threads of Christian thought. But it’s not enough, is it? It doesn’t seem to go far enough.

I think that’s because it only speaks to what Jesus did in a legal sense. I think that it speaks to balances and weights and accounts, and that’s fine, but it’s only a part of the puzzle.

That’s part of the problem with Christianity as we know and practice it today. We get a lot of things right, but we don’t follow through. It can’t be just that Jesus died and we believe and have his righteousness transferred to us and then we can go to heaven.

I think there’s more to it than that. Doesn’t Jesus’ death speak to present reality as well as future? Doesn’t it speak to how we live now, how connected we are to God now, as opposed to us living in that middle time between the cross and eternal bliss.

Scripture speaks of Christ not only dying to redeem souls — it doesn’t speak in the language of “souls” at all, does it? — but also of redeeming everything. People are part of that equation, and a big part, but Adam’s and our sin doesn’t just affect our souls. It affects everything.

When Adam fell, everything changed. We live in a broken world, a world that is winding down and falling apart. It’s a world where the best works of humanity decay and fall apart, something that strikes most of us as completely backwards.

Jesus death is the start of fixing all that. On the cross he fixed the divide between perfect God and imperfect humanity, but also between perfect reality and imperfect reality.

Between heaven and earth, if you will.

In other words, I think it’s entirely appropriate to think of Jesus’ death in terms of saving people, but also of saving the world, of seeing his Kingdom come, not just in our hearts but in our reality, in our physical world.

So the question becomes… what are we doing? Are we working with God to fix this reality? Are our acts of love helping to bring in the kingdom? Are we in line with God’s plan?

It’s not enough to stand around waiting to get lifted into the sky in some absurd escapist rapture. Anyone can do that. We need to celebrate Jesus’ death in remembering what he did for us, in celebrating his agony, but also continuing to remember what that means going forward.

Good Friday Thoughts originally appeared on We Should See Other Blogs on 2009-04-10.

I can get on board with unions. They’re necessary to balance the interests of workers against the interests of corporations. I get that. Yet when it comes to transit workers, some of the most overpaid and impolite unionised individuals in existence barring perhaps automotive workers, I’m not on their side. Especially when the TTC members reject an offer that would make them the highest paid transit workers in the country, even in the face of their union recommending they take the deal. Especially when they give an hour or less notice that they’ve decided to strike, stranding tens of thousands of people who count on the TTC to operate. They could not possibly have engendered less public support for their actions. Almost everyone I’ve talked to about the strike is enraged at the TTC. Couldn’t the union have simply started a work-to-rule campaign wherein they stopped accepting fares? That would have put pressure on the city without garnering for themselves the further, aggravated dislike of an entire city.

• Shark fin soup.

I watched Sharkworld last night. The film is amazing, but the events portrayed in the film are a travesty. An unmitigated, utterly barbaric raping of the oceans. Frankly, anyone who eats shark fin soup should have his arms and legs chopped off and be left to starve on the side of a road somewhere. If flaunting your wealth involves damaging the life-support system of the entire earth, perhaps you should be made to feel the cost of that. I hope future generations look back on the Chinese and Taiwanese as a sort of barbarian race of ecological terrorists whose actions severely diminished the richness of the world’s oceans. Not that I have much of a high horse to speak from; Canada’s seal hunts and government subsidised fisheries are just as ruthless and unconcerned with long-term impact. Personally, I stopped eating fish — any fish, at all — about six months back, after reading A Short History of Nearly Everything. And it’s sad to see that a bunch of nutcases at Greenpeace are doing God’s work (in their own strange, rabid way) while the vast majority of Christians don’t bother to tend to the world’s largest garden: the seas.

• Evangelicals in bed with the Republican party

Certainly after Mr Bush’s disastrous dual terms in office, some of the Republicans in the States must be second-guessing their religious affiliation with their party. That it took a bunch of crooks to do that is a great tragedy. That some will never question that affiliation is a greater tragedy still. Still, with the mythology of the Pilgrims and Religious Freedom and Democracy and Fighting The Evil British and God Is On Our Side still going strong, it’s not really that strange. It’s just… sad. America is no more on God’s side than Charlemagne or Constantine (whose in hoc signo vinces should still ring as an affront to the very ethic of Jesus, and one of the greatest lies the devil has managed to perpetuate over the ages). You mix your religion with your politics and you find that they make very bad bedfellows. Your religion must of course inform your political views, but politics must not ever inform your religion. Politics is about the exercise earthly power; Jesus is about the exercise of heavenly power. These things are very, very different. They are oil and water. You should not mix them up, or soon you find people painting Jesus on the side of their nuclear warheads.

• Cliches in sermons.

If you are attempting to preach an authentic sermon, something that resonates in the hearts and minds of your listeners, don’t use cliches. Don’t use marketspeak. You’re not a motivational speaker. You’re not an entertainer. You must approach scripture and let it inform your method of preaching. People do not need handy bullet points that rhyme and have a particularly pleasing cadence. Bullet points do not impart truth, at least not any sort of useful truth. As anyone trying to implement and idea will tell you, it’s not simply enough to have a great idea: you need a great implementation. That is to say that while a turn of phrase might be handy to encapsulate the thrust of your message, the nuances are where the magic lies. Or, you might say, the difference between Mac OS X and Windows. There’s a reason Jesus used parables and not a lot of handy tracts. You can mine a parable for ages, you can look at it from different directions and see things you didn’t see before, you can over-analyse it, you can approach it with too much gravitas, you can do all kinds of things. A bullet point is boring. A bullet point that rhymes and sticks in your head is annoying and boring.

I have to expand on this. Jesus told stories that had a particular richness to them. They weren’t simple anecdotes with simple points. They were designed so you have to look at them just the right way — often in hindsight — to get the point. And often you’ll quite dislike the point because it hits you dead-centre.

These days preachers tend to tell stories both brief and humorous that make a particular broad point that lines up with their sermons. These stories are blunt instruments. They’re not really narrative: they’re cleverly disguised bullet points. There’s no meat. There’s no content. They’re like a dancing monkey with colourful clothes: it might be briefly entertaining, but you certainly wouldn’t want to marry the monkey. It’s just a monkey. Take off all the clothes and strip away the dancing routine and it’s just a monkey. And you’ll find that monkeys are rather boring, after all.

I’d like to be told the truth. Not a particularly one-dimensional version of the truth that can fit in three points and thirty minutes. If telling the truth means you need to go into overtime and tell stories and confuse me and dig deeper than I’m prepared to go, DO IT. God knows I’m never going to do that myself, willingly.

Four things that make me rather cross. originally appeared on We Should See Other Blogs on 2008-04-27.

It’s not that hard, is it? The names roll off my tongues one after another. If you’ve been exposed to the world outside your own borders at all, you’ll recognise them. They have existed, and they exist right now, these places.

There’s so much evil in the world. So much injustice. So much stricken poverty and horrible injustice. There’s so much evil that standing before it makes me feel powerless, unable to help. I’m just one man. What can I do?

It’s always been here: the scale of our atrocities as a species increases, but it’s the same thing that’s been happening since the first humans sinned. It is not right that some go hungry, but some have always gone hungry. It is not right that some die in genocides, but some have always died like that. It is not right that brutal dictatorships flourish while the church is poised at the brink of the abyss, but this awful balance has always just been kept.

So going forward, what now? What is my posture towards these things to be? How do I, as a Christian, effect change in this world?

I don’t have a very good answer for that, I’m afraid. I don’t have a grand revelation. I haven’t had an epiphany or seen a blinding light. All I know is that I am convinced that what I do matters, not simply in the sense that people are important and I should care about getting their souls into heaven, but in the sense that the physical world is important, that taking care of it is important, and that justice here and now is something God speaks of over and over in the scriptures.

All I can say is, keep plugging. The church has done an amazing amount of work in the world. It has done some evil, some grandly evil things it should never have done, but the unspoken kindness and grace and justice it has visited on mankind is a testament to its greatness, its transforming power. The church is a beautiful thing with a great opportunity to do work today, here, now, on this physical planet. We have the keys to the kingdom in our hands, so to speak.

We work in the hope that at the end of this earth, this earth will become something new, but yet not new. That when we rise to life again after the brief sleep of death we will rise to a world without injustice, as God judges and begins to set things aright.

I know judgement is not a particularly comfortable thing, and our culture is decidedly MPD about it, but it must be done. Evil must be identified and pronounced against and rooted out. Jesus will do that when his kingdom comes in fullness, yes, but I am his agent here and now, part of his kingdom or revolution that exists now in bits and pieces. Should I not do the same?

Should we not all do the same? Should we not identify evil, judge against it, and proceed to root it out wherever we can?

Going forward; what now? originally appeared on We Should See Other Blogs on 2008-04-16.

In the last few years I’ve harboured a suspicion that most popular Christian thought about the kingdom of heaven is simply missing the point. The seminal moment for me was reading Brian McLaren’s The Secret Message of Jesus, which tried very hard to weld together the ideas that God’s kingdom is about saving souls, yes, but also about making the world a better place. Now, if McLaren got there by saying “I am not a Platonist, I am post-modern, I am trying to re-envision the true meaning of the church”, and if N. T. Wright got there by saying “I am not a Platonist, I am orthodox, I am trying to re-discover the true meaning of the church”, there’s something to be said about looking differently at the physical world and what comes after it and what that means for today. And where McLaren offers a compelling vision, N. T. Wright provides a brilliant theological underpinning for the whole idea.

Take for instance the miracles of Jesus. We often — and I’m as guilty of this as anyone — suppose that Jesus’ miracles are signs that point to his authority as the Messiah. Then we stop there. Of course they are that, but they are also more. They’re woven into God’s story, the story that we often skim over while calling the kingdom of heaven something else entirely. Jesus’ miracles are directly related to his saying that the kingdom of heaven was there right then, and look what happens when the kingdom of heaven enters the world: spiritual healing, yes, but also physical healing. The language of scripture is absolutely, starkly clear on this: your sins are forgiven, your body is made whole, you are saved. As N. T. Wright points out, our ingrained division between spiritual salvation and physical salvation didn’t really occur to the early church, and they weren’t really bothered by both being part of the same ball of wax.

The point is, when the kingdom of heaven is here, healing happens. This is both spiritual and physical healing because when Jesus rose from the dead he didn’t simply redefine death as something that happens to release you from your earthly body so that you can spend eternity as a disembodied soul in paradise. He conquered death. His resurrection is a sure promise that death itself will one day die, but also that in death dying we will reclaim the sort of physicality we were meant to have.

I believe this is part of God’s story, a story that has so many times bewildered Israel, and I’m firmly convinced will bewilder the church as well: we have signposts pointing into a bright mist, but we don’t know exactly how things will turn out. God’s story seems to be a tale of flowering, of outgrowth. Every time we think we’ve got the whole thing down pat, God grows something amazing and new and unforeseen and barely hinted at out of our familiar surroundings. Take the children of Israel. We know in retrospect that they are the seed from which the entire world will be fed, but for them the ultimate question was “How is God going to save Israel?” God comes along and says, “I’m not going to. I’m going to cause an outgrowth from you that will save the world, and in that, you will also be saved.”

It’s the same for us. We ask, “How is God going to save our immortal souls and bring us to heaven?” God comes along and says, “I’m not going to. I’m going to grow from you the kingdom of heaven on earth that will eventually transform the world, and in that, you will be transformed.”

Which of course means that what we do now, in this world, has significance. What we do here is not all doomed to be cast away, to be burned, and to be no more after we die or after Christ returns to earth. No, the opposite is in fact true: what we do here matters because what we do here effects who we are are what we will do eternally. It makes me quite happy to think that one day, when I receive a glorified body and am living in the earth made new with the New Jerusalem’s grand appearance, I am going to be writing poetry there too. My hope is that I will be much better at it then than I am now. My confidence is that I’ll still enjoy it then as much as I do now.

But this whole train of thought also underpins the whole idea of the Missional Church. The idea that we must be God’s hands and feet in our community derives from the fact that when we help people by giving them food and clothes and credit counselling and HIV/AIDS relief, and when I steward God’s creation by recycling and attempting to be sustainable and spewing less carbon into the air, I am fulfilling part of God’s mission on earth, that I am really being a member of the kingdom of heaven.

It’s bothered me for a long time that the vanguard of evangelicalism seems to be simply co-opting their secular liberal counterparts’ fashionable concern for this world without knowing why exactly they’re doing it. (Not to mention those who don’t like it because it smells a bit like those dirty Christian liberals who’ve converted Jesus into a mascot for world change.) But here are the underpinnings. This is the engine that drives the whole thing. If one day we are going to rise physically and inhabit this physical world, when heaven and earth are made new and the New Jerusalem (a picture of the fullness of the kingdom of heaven, and heaven itself, natch) meets up with earth, our labours now matter. It makes sense of Paul urging people to labour in Christ, and makes sense out of our post-modern urgency to do something, anything, about the state of the word our liberal secularist forefathers left us in.

It’s all there. The great flowering of the church is when we are resurrected and glorified and then go about doing exactly what we’re supposed to do exactly the way we’re supposed to do it. That’s the bright fog: all I can say is that it will be sometime in the future, and that it will absolutely blow my and your mind.

In the meantime, we have our mandate. We are the kingdom of heaven, right here and right now, and we are called to bring healing into a very, very broken world. And not just one kind of healing, but a holistic healing that not only prepares the soul for glory, but the body as well.

Surprised by Surprised by Hope originally appeared on We Should See Other Blogs on 2008-04-12.

It’s C.S. Lewis saying that Aslan is not safe, but he is good.

We love safety so much, don’t we? And there’s nothing wrong with that. I, for instance, feel incredibly safe with Laura’s love. I don’t feel like she’s going to blow up any minute and abandon me. I know what that’s like, and trust me, you don’t want a relationship (God forbid a marriage) that resembles more a landmine than a safe harbour.

You can find in God that incredible safety as well: no matter what you are going through in your life, if you’ve bought into his grace, if you’ve been granted that faith, you are above all safe. As Mrs Elliot used to say, Underneath are the everlasting arms. From our seemingly impossible disasters to actually impossible disasters, there is hope that will not leave you ashamed for having hoped. Or assurance. You may lose your lover, you may lose your health, you may lose your house, but you will not be ashamed of finding refuge in God. He is a strong tower. You are above all, safe.

But there’s safety and then there’s safety. God isn’t bound by your desire to be financially secure. When Joel mentioned how so much preaching is geared towards a better life now, I wanted to stand up and cheer. (Not to mention that Mr Osteen reminds me of a smarmy used car salesman and I would very much like to punch him in the face, with all Christian love.) Or maybe God does care that you have a better life now, but we’ve simply got the frame right and the picture all wrong. Maybe your better life now isn’t about being financially triumphant or well-loved. Maybe your better life now is about crossing a wilderness and getting to a promised land. The trip isn’t necessarily going to be cushioned. Maybe it will be. You don’t really get to know that.

Laura and I have been very tight for money since we’ve been married. We have one income and some debt from her schooling and from my life as a bachelor. One of the things we’ve been really convicted about, ever since Joel talked about giving, is separating a portion of my income and giving it to God. We do this in several ways, but primarily it’s giving to the church. We don’t have a lot to give, and common sense says that what we do give should be instead squirrelled away for a rainy economy. Yet it seems better to me to live outside of that small comfort and safety zone by obeying God with our giving than using it for ourselves. I’m not going to spin a sob story here: we live very well on what we’ve got, but there are a lot of things we have to forgo whilst living this way.

This is a small thing. There’s a couple from Imago Dei who essentially walked away from a comfortable life to work in the Himalayas with an unreached people group. Joel moved to Mississauga and started a great church. Paul was whipped and beaten and shipwrecked ultimately killed. These are not small things, and they are not safe things.

But they are good things, and things that will ultimately be blessed. Because in following God, sometime you end up dying on a cross. Look at what Jesus did: was his life at all safe? Yet here we are, millennia later, still looking at his legacy and seeing it change the world.

Unsafe originally appeared on We Should See Other Blogs on 2008-04-09.

* * *

Normally, I’m okay with James MacDonald. He’s generally a decent preacher, and I’ve had opportunity to be blessed by a number of the things he’s said. On Saturday I caught a snippet of a sermon he did on post-modernism, a snippet that I’m going to go on to criticise mercilessly. I’m not even going to pretend that I don’t like criticising, just to be nice, because I generally do analyse things in my head. This is no exception.

I’m well acquainted with the art of making a straw-man and then tearing it down: it’s a useful skill in certain circumstances. For instance, showing people what a straw-man is. Making a straw-man out of post-modernism, saying it’s all about relativism and denying truth claims, etc, is disingenuous at best, and outright dishonest at worst. The only way someone could come to such a conclusion is if he had never, ever actually joined the conversation and instead sat in the bleachers and listened to the hecklers.

Any post-modern worth his salt will admit that right now post-modernism is a tag applied to a whole bunch of junk, all of which is unified by the undeniable supposition that modernism is no longer good enough to meet today’s challenges. In short, modernism is broke. When modernism first burst onto the scene — or I should say evolved out of the Middle Age’s chaotic ruins — I’m sure the first generation considering themselves modern had no idea what that even meant. It took hundreds of years for the philosophy to coalesce. It took a long time to look down and see where the world had planted its feet. And even modernity as a definition fails to capture every facet of modern thought: after all this time we’re not quite sure where we stand.

I’m sure the first generation to question the King’s divine right to rule raised a few eyebrows. The first generations to question rationalisation, alienation, commodification, decontextualization, individualism, chaos, and industrialism should raise a few eyebrows too.

But the post-modernism as a philosophy, as a way of life, is in its infancy. Mocking its shortcomings or even its perceived shortcomings is like making fun of a budding artist’s paintings. It’s not in good taste, and it smacks of pure meanness.

Besides, no post-modernist will say that 2 + 2 does not equal 4. But if you can’t see the difference between that and saying that truth claims are contextual, that narrative matters, and that not everything can be measured and sorted into a list, then you’re the one who deserves a good mocking. It’s not hard to make straw-men for modern American churches — pastored by a Canadian or not — especially when they cater to a rich middle-class audience by tickling their ears while explaining why they’re better than those dirty post-moderns. Thank you, Lord, that I am not like them, that I believe in truth claims! (See what I did there?)

That said, I don’t consider myself post-modern. I don’t think it’d be a good idea, as it seems to be every good Evangelical’s whipping boy lately. I have, however, read books by Brian McLaren and Donald Miller, and see a lot of good in them. Though I fear I’ve said too much…

* * *

Today’s message reminded me that there’s quite a difference between hearing the stories of Jesus and hearing lists of attributes of Jesus. Maybe it’s just me, but I can list facts all day and no one will give a toss (facts are by their very nature boring; even documentary film-makers understand this). Novels and poetry and stories and songs aren’t simply entertainment, they’re also communicative mechanisms.

Once, when was a lot younger than I am today, I started volunteering at a soup kitchen. My motives weren’t that great, I suppose, as it gave me an excuse to not attend one service of a church I had begun to dislike quite a lot. But I still did it, and I think that counts for something. Most of the people that came there were pretty much the dregs of society. I was trying to think of them as noble and loved and the sort of people that Jesus would have had a meal with or maybe healed of something, but I had hard time seeing them as anything but very smelly and dirty. I honestly didn’t like myself for feeling this way, but I just couldn’t get past it. To me they were just people who needed a bath.

Then this one guy — he looked about fifty years old — sat down at this badly tuned piano, pulled out a sheaf of dog-eared music, and played. And man, could he play. I presume to play keys a bit here and there, but nothing, nothing like this man. Later the staff told me he was a hardcore alcoholic, that he had destroyed his life with booze, and I’m sure this was very true. Yet it seemed to me that amidst all that brokenness there was this indestructible beauty that simply couldn’t be kept in.

I don’t how he did it, but this man helped me as much as I helped him. I gave him a meal, true, but he gave me the ability to see past the surface into the inherent nobility that is contained in each person’s soul, whether that person is a redneck or is homeless or is a soccer mom or is an annoying television preacher with bad hair.

Sometimes I tell this story to people to show them that there is beauty even in ashes, that there is joy in an alcoholic’s music, something like that. I suppose I could simply tell them that, or maybe make a slide with some bullet points, but it isn’t the same, is it?

* * *

Laura and I just got back from celebrating our six month anniversary. It’s flown by! In that time, we’ve had no major problems or even any major fights. My mum thinks this is because we’re essentially still honeymooning. I like to think it’s God’s grace. See, I’m much more spiritual than my mum, though of course I’m not. She’s got me beat by a good kilometre or two.

We stayed at a local hotel, since local hotels cost a fair bit less than non-local hotels, and feasted on Elliot House food. Both were excellent. We even had a whirlpool bathtub. I made it too hot to get into when I first drew the bath. I’m stupid like that, but you can see how my wife is long-suffering.

It’s still odd to say “my wife”. My wife. Yep, still odd.

Sunday’s Assorted Grab-Bag of Thoughts originally appeared on We Should See Other Blogs on 2008-02-10.

Guys don’t want their women to be crazy about getting married or any of that hoopla. Most of the guys I know can just barely tolerate the commotion or the expense. Guys want their women to be crazy about them. I want my wife to be crazy about me.

Sometimes I think God must feel like a dude surrounded by a bunch of chicks who really want to get married. Sure, they want the best groom available, but pretty much anything will do. He must wonder why we call it so many different names like fulfilment and making the most of life and being all that you can be.

From what I read in scripture, God doesn’t want people to be crazy about being fulfilled. He wants people to be crazy about him. He wants the church to be crazy about him, for his wife to be crazy about her husband. And, if I’m honest with myself, my emotions are pretty much everywhere else, and I don’t think I’m along on this one.

Elsewhere in thought. originally appeared on We Should See Other Blogs on 2008-02-05.

Yet, I want to push past pure doctrine. It’s good. It’s right. The statements it makes are, as far as I can tell with God’s help, an accurate reflection of reality. All of this is true, and pure doctrine is still not enough.

Pure water is good, but if you don’t drink the water, you still die of thirst.

Maybe what I want isn’t to push past pure doctrine. Maybe what I’m trying to say is that I want to stop choosing doctrine or practice. Maybe I’m trying to make myself less binary, less like a pendulum. This is the way I’ve thought for a long time, you see: the churches that have the good doctrine generally keep it to themselves as if to let it outside of the church family will make it fall apart, and the churches that have the great practice generally seem to think salvation is about hugs and roses and making everybody feel great about themselves.

If you recoil at this dichotomy, I don’t blame you. I don’t like thinking like that, and I’m probably not right about it.

But I’ve been to too many churches where they put a verse — sometimes even a whole chapter — about sharing the gospel and feeding the hungry and taking care of orphans and the vulnerable, but have no real corporate way to put the words into practice other than shunting some money into a basket every Sunday.

And I’ve been to too many churches that seem to be active in the community and concerned about social justice, but just can’t seem to get it that Jesus’ death and resurrection are the only reason that justice means anything in the end.

These aren’t really helpful categories, though. It’s not like every church has to choose along an axis which percentage of orthodoxy vs orthopraxy, and every prospective member has to choose which percentage they’re content with. Life isn’t like that, and hardly any churches are the gross caricatures I’ve drawn.

I want both. It’s not a difficult formula. The central message of scripture transcends both, bringing both in line. The central message of scripture is that God deserves glory and honour and praise and adoration. He does this by both saving people’s souls, and redeeming the world. He chooses to do so by means of the very people he has saved, and God help me, that decision seems a little daft some days.

Beyond pure doctrine. originally appeared on We Should See Other Blogs on 2008-01-31.

We’ve come far from that point. In Canada, I’m pretty sure we never even were at that point. Now, separation of church and state means more that both government and religion should not inform eachother as much as is possible. This is what we call the secular state.

Christians of all stripes can view this a bunch of ways, I think. There are some that think that a secular state is an impossibility, and that trying to create one is a mistake. Others view the secular state as a sort of unfortunate necessity, a goal that can’t really be reached, but must be, under the circumstances.

I think both are fair positions to take. They both take a different kind of nation with different kinds of goals, sure. Yet they’re both reasonable.

I’m in the second camp, mostly. I say mostly because those categories are a reduction, a sort of boiling down of a whole range of though. I’m not expecting anyone reading this to fall exactly into either category. Life isn’t that binary. I’m mostly in the second on the list. Mostly.

Here’s what I think. The Christian faith has a bunch of goals, right? There’s an overarching purpose to it all, that God glorified himself, as he should. Yet there are smaller goals as well. Jesus restoring his creation to himself. His followers living like him and practicing true religion. Christians loving their neighbors, whoever that may be. Praise. Loving God. The pursuit of holiness. These are some of the goals of the Christian faith.

Nations-states, however, have a radically different agenda. Their overarching purpose, though it may unwittingly glorify God, is self-preservation. Like any other organisation, a nation-state takes on the agenda of its constituents, and exists simply to exist. There are smaller goals beneath that, like expressing ethnic identity, gathering around a shared value, or simply protecting a bunch of land. At the end of the day, though, nations are about self-preservation, whether offensively or defensively or both.

These goals clash. Christians simply don’t spread the faith through violence and force. Nations preserve themselves through force: it’s not a perfect world.

When these two entities co-mingle, the resulting monster is hard to put down. The state intrudes into the faith and suddenly there is tyranny and persecution. The faith intrudes into the state and suddenly there is fanatical nationalism and oppression.

Christians can be politicians, and politicians can be Christians, no problem. But the domain of the state is not conducive to the practice of true religion: you do not wage a “Christian” war, and you should not crouch a war in religious terminology. While the state must use force, the Christian absolutely must not.

On the other hand, though the government must not be a respecter of religions, religions are not bound by such strictures. Religions are about opposing truth claims. Christianity makes truth claims that say, among other things, that all the other religions of the world are counterfeits. And while governments must not make these sorts of claims, Christianity must be free to do so, whether it irks the tolerant soul of every civil servant labouring towards an equal commons.

This is essentially what I believe on this matter. Freedom of religion is essential, a secular state is essential, and the separation of the two is the guiding essential that keep both from collapsing into and ruining eachother.

The Separation of Church and State originally appeared on We Should See Other Blogs on 2008-01-28.

Attribution and License for the above photo.

Bullet points for a Monday morning. originally appeared on We Should See Other Blogs on 2007-12-03.

Maybe this is why when I expect messiah to be a military leader, he comes and conquers things I didn’t expect, using methods I hadn’t foreseen. Or when I assume Jesus will validate my holiness, he exposes me as an illusionist, as a fraud. Or when I show him my methodology, he tells me that true religion is taking care of widows, feeding orphans, that sort of thing.

Jesus is almost maddeningly different from the world I live in. Sometimes he makes me crazy, because even at the best of times, I’m a Pharisee whitewashing my own grave. He asks my why I call him master, even though I don’t do what he says. He tells me that I am blessed if I hear his words and obey them.

He wants me to become like a child. Or a servant. Or a sacrifice. Naturally, I don’t really want to be any of those things.

There’s so much of the old me to toss in the trash. I am supposed to don humility and slough off pride. I have the Holy Ghost working in me, powering me.

I’ve been a Christian for ten or so years now. Why, then, does this all still feel so strange?

Why does this feel so strange? originally appeared on We Should See Other Blogs on 2007-11-08.

I won’t be long here, but it made me think of the song, “The Heart of Worship”, which — love it or hate it — says something profound about the way I do anything, really. It begs ask, “What have I made worship into?” On one hand, this entertainment, a worship of preference, some sort of spectacle; or on the other, a rigid system, a theological construct, a bunch of made-up rules? Either way I can draw near to God with my lips and be ever so far away from him in my heart.

Or the way I treat God. Sometimes I feel like I put God into little containers and just open the containers of God Time whenever it seems appropriate. On Sunday I open a big one, and on week nights and before meals I open little ones, and sometimes during the I get out a medium sized one. But God is bigger than that, right? This is what Brother Lawrence means when he talks about the practice of the presence of God, I think, that God is everywhere and in every moment, and even though there are certain times that focus in on him, the rest of them belong to him as well. God gets all of my time. Yet throughout the day, I forget about him, abandon him, and kick him in the face. As the song goes, prone to wander, prone to leave the God I love.

How often am I exactly like the people in the Old Testament? The entire collection of books is like a macrocosm of my life. Obedience is better than sacrifice. I draw near to God with my lips, but am far from him in my heart.

I have a head stuffed full of theology. Yet there’s an essential disconnect there: theology doesn’t necessarily lead to a good life. It’s just knowledge, and knowledge gives you a big head. There needs to be something that connect the two, theology and practice.

I think that thing is relationship. How do I draw close to God in my heart? By having a relationship with him, a real thing that happens, not some pseudo-relationship that involves a lot of hand-waving and good-sounding words. But I’m so far from God: how do I draw so close? There needs to be something that connects us.

I think that thing is Jesus.

Jesus is what makes the heart and head and perfect God and imperfect man connect. He connects what I say to what I mean. He is bigger than my containers.

What connects my head and my heart? originally appeared on We Should See Other Blogs on 2007-11-05.

I don’t know how Peter responded — it isn’t in the Book — but I can say I’d be mighty unhappy. A little hurt. Wounded pride, that sort of thing.

Pride aside, it goes to show what happens when you’ve got your own ideas about what the Messiah’s supposed to be. What happens is your ideas get out of the way.

Peter was, I imagine, pretty caught up in the messianic vision of the day: A conquering king come to kill Romans and wrest the holy land away from the pagan empire. It’s actually a pretty cool idea, come to think of it. On an earthly scale it weighs a lot.

Of course, that’s not what the Messiah was, or what he had come to do.

Doesn’t that raise a question for me and you, though? What funny ideas do we have about Jesus that are getting in the way of what he’s really supposed to be doing?

I know some people who look at Jesus like a national hero. Others who look at Jesus as a focal point for a precise doctrinal framework. Others who see him as a good man, a teacher of morality. Others yet who say the right words but in reality see Jesus only when things go wrong, if even then.

Lots of people have lots of funny ideas about Jesus. What about you? What about me?

Who is he really, and what did he really come to do?

Are you getting in the way?

Are you getting in the way? originally appeared on We Should See Other Blogs on 2007-10-30.

Nicodemus isn’t stupid. As a Pharisee, he’s probably been exposed to this sort of teaching his entire life, where the teacher doesn’t answer the question with a answer, because the teacher isn’t interested in simply imparting information. The teacher wants to know if the student is actually interested in what he has to say, wants to know if the student is engaged with what he saying.

And what does Nicodemus do? He replies to Jesus with a question of his own, one that I think is a rehtorical question. How can a grown man be born again? But again, he’s not stupid: history would suggest that Nicodemus is a man well known for his wisdom. He’s actually employing Christ’s own methods, asking a question that seems simple enough on the surface while on a deeper level engages Jesus’ trope on its own terms.

This is why the conversation seems to jump around so much. Jesus and Nicodemus both understand that they’re among the most educated people in Israel at that time. Jesus is a rabbi, Nicodemus is a Pharisee. They jump from concept to concept without explaining any of it, really. Yet Nicodemus seems to understand, and from all reports, seems to have believed.

I think we do a disservice to Nicodemus and Jesus’ conversation by reading it as if Jesus is instructing Nicodemus, the toddling idiot, in all these blinding truths. Perhaps a better reading would be that two theological giants of the day are having a conversation, and one of them is suggesting a view the other has either not considered or considered unlikely.

Was Nicodumus some sort of bumbling idiot? originally appeared on We Should See Other Blogs on 2007-06-17.

Ironically, this post is just another post with more talk; I guess you can call these words cheap, too. But if they are, at least they’re self-aware, which is maybe the most important thing when it comes to talking about stuff.

That said, I’m sick of simply hearing people bitch and moan about stuff. Maybe talk is good in that it helps form opinions and solidify positions, but something has to come after that.

Oddly enough, the things we talk about tend to be those things we can’t really do anything about; I’m convinced that a good barometer of what people can’t change is found in what they go on about. At least, I’m like that. I talk about Jesus and love and faith way too often because I really don’t have enough Jesus or enough love or enough faith.

But I don’t talk about poverty in the former Soviet Bloc countries. I’m already doing something about that. It’s not some sense of false modesty. I’m simply doing my bit to help out by giving money and time, so I don’t feel the need to talk about it much. I think personally we could do more, corporately, to help the poor, the orphans, the widows of the world, but most people I meet are pretty good about that. I know a lot of generous people, who if they’re not donating money are donating time, and vice versa.

Tangentially, what is complaining really going to do? Anyone can complain. Anyone can point out flaws. Anyone can say, “Our church communities are doing $foo when they should be doing $bar!” Anyone can say, “I’m sick of this place, and I want to be in a different place.” Anyone can say, “This API implementation is simply proliferation.”

Armchair critics are a dime a dozen. Implementers – the doers, the makers – they’re rare, and beautiful. I love Derek Webb and Sufjan Stevens for that very reason: instead of merely saying that Christian music is, on the whole, a load of bollocks, they’ve gone and created music that not only mentions God topically, but reflects him in the quality of their work.

I’d like to be like that. I try to, when I create.

Last thing. How often do complainers mention God? I mean, not just mention him as this concept that exists alongside their particular beef, but mention him relationally (or to step back from the vogue, covenantally)? Maybe that’s the litmus test right there. Be doers, not complainers. But not pulling yourself up by your own laces. Instead do what you do through and with God. In relationship.

So there. That’s something I’m not good at. But I’m going to stop talking about it now, because I think I’m tipping my hand.

Self: how about you stop whining for a while (even if your whining is elaborate and faux-spiritual) and actually, you know, do something? originally appeared on We Should See Other Blogs on 2007-03-28.

Having read several books that place the focus of Jesus’ message on redemption not only of souls, but also of creation, I found a review of one of these books that called the author’s formulation of scripture’s message as a “sad substitute for the gospel”.

But is it?

It keeps prompting the question in me that if Jesus came to save souls, great: but what comes after that? What does that look like?

Or, why does salvation have to be this either/or thing between a liberal social gospel (which, I agree, standing alone doesn’t make much sense at all) and the liberation of souls from the devil’s grasp?

Why does it always seem to come down to that?

Scripture says that Jesus came to reconcile all things to himself. All things. Not just human souls, but his creation as well, unless I’m reading that verse completely wrong. Putting it another way, the creator of the world, the Word, comes back in the flesh to re-create things and make them good again, the way they were before the fall.

But what does that look like? I admit, if you’re looking for the end of the world in a decade, if you’re thinking that Jesus is going to–excuse the hyperbole–come down from on high in his spaceship and beam up all the saved people, if you’re expecting everything to just end, if you’re expecting that heaven is the final destination, yeah that makes sense. It makes sense in an individualist sort of framework, where you have a personal relationship with Jesus, who has come to save your soul, so you can eventually end up in heaven, where you will be happy and you and you and you and on and on and on.

If scripture talks that way, I must have missed it, and I’ve been doing my fair share of reading lately. I’ve poked these ideas with a sharp stick, and they bleed true, I think.

For instance, the kingdom has come. It has. Jesus said the end of the world would be in his generation, and the children of Israel saw it come, but they also saw the replacement for their small corner of the earth. They saw the children of Jesus strewn across Asia, and then across the world.

Yet the kingdom hasn’t come, not really, not the full thing, has it? Jesus isn’t reigning on earth yet. Things aren’t good here. We don’t have our new heaven and new earth. We still have entropy, and microevolution, and death, and suffering, and war.

So what do we do in the meantime? Is the kingdom this sort of inward-focused blessing machine for the people behind the walls, or is it maybe a blessing to all nations? Do we have a responsibility just to ourselves, or to the whole world?

Does this include helping the poor? Yes. Does this include saving the environment? I think so. Does this involve saving souls? Absolutely.

See, I can’t separate the two things in my head. Saved people do good things. It’s true. Sometimes they do bad things–I do bad things, for crying out loud, all the time–but in general Christians, real Christians, are a blessing to those around them. If you’re saved, doesn’t that mean the default position is feeding hungry people? If you’ve been redeemed, doesn’t that lead to a life of compassion?

Maybe the whole point is not just getting to some place where we all have a personal transformation and that’s it. Maybe the point is God’s glory, Jesus’ glory. And maybe, just maybe, he’s more glorified when we seek to redeem not only the souls of people, but everything, or anything at all.

Perhaps we haven’t been missing the point as much as just not getting to the end of the stick. originally appeared on We Should See Other Blogs on 2007-02-22.

I imagine it’s much like finding your perfect mate and not falling in love with him or her. Your friends might tell you that you two were made for eachother, and on some level you might see that this piece of your puzzle matches his, or this aspect of your personality is complimentary to hers, but on another level (if you don’t feel that way) your instincts tell you that knowing all that isn’t exactly the same as wanting to spend the rest of your life together.

Of course, some people don’t experience relationships like that. Some of you will inhabit love like part of an equation, and that’s fine. We all have different ways of experiencing reality.

Faith is the same, I think. Faith isn’t an exercise you perform or an equation that you balance or really anything like that. It seems to me that faith is like making a friend, in a way. You read scripture, you find Jesus and meet him, and you decide something; either you decide that you’d like to spend the rest of your life getting to know him, or you don’t.

Some things follow after that, says holy scripture. Your life is changed. You act differently. You experience reality in a new way. Or to put it more tangibly, you love God, and you love your neighbor, neither of which are terribly difficult concepts to wrap your head around.

Maybe that’s the problem with the whole faith thing. It’s just too simple. I sometimes think, “If a ten year old can do this, doesn’t that make it simplistic and unrealistic?” I’m a fan of not demonising complexity. I usually say, “Complexity is not a vice.” Yet, some things are simple, gut-level things while at the same time becoming mind-bendingly difficult to wrap your head around when you think about them. Maybe it’s because the heart is better at grasping some things and the head better at others: I don’t know.

I like systematic theology and thought experiments and balancing equations. I really do. They are all useful in their own way, in their own sphere. But you don’t have to balance an equation (2 + 2 = 4) to understand reality, any more than you have to understand five areas of doctrine to have reality refreshed for you. Or to put another way, the theology of meeting Jesus is simply a matter of reading a book and deciding whether or not to follow the guy you read about from cover to cover.

Or to put it yet another way, understanding that Jesus is alive, that he’s still around, and that he’ll take you if you want it. Think of all the people Jesus said, “Your sins are forgiven!” to who were like, “Wait, what?” You don’t even have to go that far, I don’t think. You can find out all those things afterwards. Jesus comes first, always. You don’t really have to know you’re forgiven, that you’re changed, that you’re new. It happens, and you can figure out the wherefores and whatnots later.

It makes me wonder about how I’m going to teach my children about Jesus. I’ve thought about it for a few days now; if I ever pump out (or, hopefully, if my wife ever pumps out) some of the little ones, I think I’d like to tell them early on that Jesus is essentially like me. He’s like dad, except he doesn’t suck at being a dad. Having a dad is — I’ve found out — one of those gut-level things and sometimes a very painful kicked-in-the-gut-level thing.

My kids don’t have to understand my salary and worldview to get that I’m their dad. Yeah, they’re going to grow up and want to know about how to compile a program from source and how to change the oil in the car and what exactly why I don’t want them listening to pop music, but before all that, I’m their dad. If they can understand that, they can understand enough about Jesus and God and all that stuff to relate to him in a way that makes sense.

Sure, I’d like to raise a brood of little Calvinists, but to be honest that follows after raising a brood of little Christians who don’t start learning ass-backwards. I don’t know much, but I know that.

I’d like to go back and tell my friend what I’m saying now, that becoming a Christian is sort of like getting married or having a dad, and not much at all like playing chess or deciding between quantum mechanics and string theory. I’d like to tell him that Jesus changes your life, and all you need to do is read the book and meet the man and meet the God.

What does it look like? originally appeared on We Should See Other Blogs on 2007-02-16.