Love of Neighbor as Hermeneutical Key

Therefore, all such things as you wish men might do to you, so do to them as well; for this is the Law and the prophets.
 -Matthew 7:12 (DB Hart, emphasis mine)

I don't mean to be a stickler.... but here's where a guy, per divine ordinance, gets stoned for picking up sticks on the sabbath:

Then the Lord said to Moses, "The man must surely be put to death; all the congregation shall stone him with stones outside the camp."  So, as the Lord commanded Moses, all the congregation brought him outside the camp and stoned him with stones and he died."
 -Numbers 15:35-36 (NKJV)

Here’s where Paul affirms the love of neighbor hermeneutic:
For the whole Law is summed up in a single utterance to wit: "You shall love your neighbor as yourself."
 -Galatians 5:14 (DB Hart)

Here's a blessing being pronounced upon infanticide:

How blessed will be the one who grabs your babies and smashes them against the rock!
-Psalm 137:9 (NET)

Back and forth we go.  So my question is.....really?  Do unto others is the Law and the prophets?  Am I reading the same Law and prophets?

I mean, I could understand if he said, "While the ultimate goal of the Law and prophets is to form a moral world in which people are loving others as themselves (as instituted through sacrificial and ceremonial laws, etc) much of the Law and prophets prescribe what happens in the event that you don't."  Or more crudely, "the Law and prophets are about loving your neighbor as yourself.  And if you don't, we will kill you."

That is much differenn that saying that "do unto others" is the Law and the prophets.  Doing unto others as they would do unto you unless they do something wrong or are in some way unworthy would be a pretty big asterisk.

I realize that there are ways to spin all of this, to salvage Jesus's words in the historical-critical sense (not an allegorical sense) of the text and make them perfectly compatible with the Golden Rule.  I happen to think that this is where things have the potential to get really, really dangerous.  The rationalizations.  The twisting of language to sound pious.

"To tolerate sin is not loving at all."

"God is loving, but He is also holy."

"We don't get to choose what 'good' is."

"Sin is very serious."

These include some truth.  They just don't resolve the issue at hand.  It's difficult to equivocate around doing unto others as you would have them do unto you.  Stoning a person is not doing unto others as you would have them do unto you.  Not in any meaningful sense.  Any moral imperative is lost in pure equivocation.

So I don't see these resolving the issue at hand for several reasons, not the least of which is the immediately prior verses in the Gospel of Matthew:

Or is it not the case that no man among you, if his son should ask for a loaf of bread, would give him a stone?  Or, if he should also ask for a fish, would give him a serpent?  If you, therefore, who are wicked, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in the heavens give good things to those who ask him.
 -Matthew 7:9-11 (DB Hart)

Jesus doesn't present some inaccessible understanding of "doing unto others as you wish them to do unto you."  It is as plain as a man giving a gift to his son.  At least for Jesus, a so-called "total depravity" has not snuffed out the ability to recognize a "good gift."  He appeals precisely to this recognition.

So I'm back to my original questions:

Really?  This is the Law and the prophets?

My tone is not to be misinterpreted here.  It's not one of cynicism (well, not only cynicism!) but of wonder.

What is Jesus's hermeneutic?  How does he interpret?  How can 'I' as individual and 'we' as a collective learn this hermeneutic in a deep and formative way?

Two main points then:

One, whatever theories exist as to the nature of the Biblical texts, they need to be fully informed by this vision of Law and prophet as love your neighbor as yourself.  And not in a twisted and inaccessible way, but in a way that does justice to the simple kindness of a parent giving a gift to child.

And two, I don't think it's possible to understand Jesus without wrestling with his hermeneutic.  To Jesus, each iota and serif is only truly 'fulfilled' when viewed through the lens of the law of love.  Any other 'fulfillment' is to miss the point.

Do not think that I came to destroy the Law and the prophets; I came not to destroy but to fulfill.  For, amen, I tell you, until heaven and earth shall pass away, not a single iota or single serif must vanish from the Law, until all things come to pass.
 -Matthew 5:17 (DB Hart)


When all things come to pass, when humanity is roused from sleep and caught up in the life of God, this fulfillment will be manifest precisely as love of neighbor, and love without mixture.

Love does not work evil against the neighbor; hence love is the full totality of the Law.  This moreover, knowing the time: Now is the hour for you to be roused from sleep, for our salvation is nearer now than when we came to faith."
 -Romans 13:10-11 (DB Hart)

May this 'fulfilling' invade the present.

Heaven and Hell in Christian Thought - Thomas Talbott (5): Restricting the Scope of God's Love

The Inconsistent Triad

These posts relate to the article "Heaven and Hell in Christian Thought" by Dr. Thomas Talbott as published in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.  

This essay strikes an excellent balance between being concise and being thorough in laying out the arguments and viewpoints of various Christian schools of eschatological thought without resorting to caricatures.  His project is careful to present each of these viewpoints at their strongest, for only then can productive dialogue occur.


Return to Part 1
Back to Part 4

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Let's now look at how Talbott addresses the Augustinian notion of God's "restricted love".

The Augustinian reasons as follows:

God's saving grace is irresistible in the end, and yet everlasting torment in hell will nonetheless be the terrible fate of some; therefore, God does not love all created persons equally and his (electing) love is thus limited in its scope.

In the end, it's fairly simple.  Grace is "irresistible" (proposition 2), yet everlasting separation is true (proposition 3).  Therefore, it must be the case that God does not love all people equally in the sense that God wills their salvation.

If a person is not saved it is because God doesn't want them to be saved.  His electing love, being irresistible, cannot and must not extend to them.  Period.

For some people this salvation equation is sheer theological fact.  "Mysterious" as to the reasons for God's "free" choice to save some and not others, but not mysterious in it's sheer necessity.  On the other hand, for those who either (1) come from a tradition that doesn't hold to the Augustinian version of "irresistible" grace or (2)come from a tradition that does view salvation through the lens of the Augustinian version of "irresistible" grace but didn't realize the necessity of this limited scope of God's salvific will, this is a scandalous assertion.  Shocking.  For some, heretical.

The assertion naturally leads to some important theological questions like:

What??  

God doesn't want all people to be "saved"?  

How and where do we see such an idea defended philosophically?  Biblically?  Theologically?

What about those parts of scripture that would seem to indicate that God does indeed want all to be "saved"?

1 Timothy 2:4 is one example of an isolated verse commonly used to affirm God's desire to save all people without exception:

who desires everyone to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth. (NRSV)

For a person who needs to restrict the scope of God's (electing) love and sees this verse as holding some sort of authority, this verse is a problem.  What can be done?  But here is how Augustine explains it :

"the word concerning concerning God, 'who will have all men to be saved,' does not mean that there is no one whose salvation he doth not will...but by 'all men' we are to understand the whole of mankind, in every single group into which it can be divided...For from which of these groups doth not God will that some men from every nation should be saved through his only-begotten Son our Lord."  (Enchiridion) 

So for Augustine, "all" must merely mean "all kinds" or "some" individuals from "every group".  This is the necessary exegetical move.  God simply cannot be said to will the salvation of all people (as defined in proposition 1) and maintain any Augustinian theological coherence as defined by the acceptance of propositions 2 & 3.  So any Bible verse that seems to say otherwise ("all" as meaning literally "all people") cannot really be doing so.  It must be shoved off to the side or dismantled.

The logic of it is not difficult to see.  Simple.

Now some proponents of the Augustinian view of "limited election"argue, quite simply, that God does not love the non-elect at all.  Others, like the contemporary philosopher Paul Helm don't argue that God doesn't "love" all people or that "love" is not of God's very essence.  Instead, Helm seems to dismantle the connection between God's love and God's salvific will.  Helm argues that God's loving nature or God's loving actions towards human beings do not necessitate that God's redemptive love extends equally to all people.  The argument goes, just as there are differences within the created order (male/female, etc), there can be differentiations with respect to God's redemptive purposes.  Essentially, God being love in God's essence and being loving towards God's creation does not mean that this love is necessarily and finally redemptive in nature.

Helm does not here seek to throw out the language of "love" but rather to rework it's semantic content to fit into an Augustinian framework by:

1. creating a special category of "love" called "redemptive love" and arguing that the former does not necessarily entail the latter
2. viewing divine love on a sort of sliding scale, the minimum level of which may be called "love" but doesn't include the will to save

Jeff Jordan takes a similar approach.  He argues that God's love need not be maximally extended for it to be love.  He finds the idea of "equal love" to be an impossibility because love is not defined by uniformity.  In other words, divine love need not be salvific in it's aims for it to be divine "love".

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A lot of foundational things to work through here.  Personally, I'd prefer to see the language of "love" thrown out all together than see it's semantic content be reduced to a rubble of Augustinian equivocation.  Preference aside, the implications of going down this path are, I think, stunning and disastrous.

For me, the questions that arise out of this section are:

1. When does "all" mean "all"?
2. What is the connection between who God is and what God does?
3. We may very well be dealing with definitions of "love" that are are semantically different.  So what do we mean by the word "love"?  
4. Does God being "loving" entail that God wills the ultimate good of the object(s) of his love?  Or can "love" will something less (and far worse) that the ultimate good of the beloved and still be called "love"?
5. What are the protological (in-the-beginning) implications of a limited love?

continued

"Pure Religion" is Messy

“Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this, To visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world.”  James 1:27 KJV

So what does it mean to be “unspotted from the world”?

On the one hand, we read that pure religion is to visit the fatherless and widows.  That seems rather straight forward.  It means to look after the most vulnerable.  It is not an instruction to “care” from a great distance and with the best of intentions.  It is not an invitation to join a cause.  It is to visit the fatherless and widows.  And not to visit them in their neatness and tidiness.  It isn’t to behold their purity and loveliness.  It isn’t so that they can do something for me.  It is to visit them in their affliction.

Pure religion is to enter into the messiness.

I don’t believe that the 2^nd part (the part about staying “unspotted”) is contrary to the 1^st part (visiting the most vulnerable).  They are one and the same thing.  So I can’t read this and think that keeping myself unspotted from the world is the same thing as keeping my distance from that which is messy.  The unspotted are those who visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction.  This is the pure religion of the Kingdom of God that is not of this “world”.  Or to flip things around, the “spotted” are those who don’t visit the afflicted.

The righteous Pharisee keeps himself “unspotted from the world” according to the ways of the world:

Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector.  The Pharisee stood and prayed about himself like this: ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other people: extortionists, unrighteous people, adulterers – or even like this tax collector.  I fast twice a week: I give a tenth of everything I get.  (Luke 18: 10-12 NET)

This is holiness-as-separateness. 

The Pharisee is spotted.

But Jesus is God with us.  His holiness is not like that.  His is a holiness that draws him into the mess, not away from it.  Jesus is the pure religion that is unspotted from the world.

The holiness of “the world” is the type of holiness that draws one away from the mess and the pain.  The holiness of Jesus, the holiness that characterizes “true religion”, draws him into the mess and the pain.  His holiness is not diminished.  Rather, in his self-giving love, it is made manifest.  It is enhanced.

True, we are not Jesus.  So this is not to minimize the complexity of life or our own fragility.  This is not a naive or arrogant self-righteousness that sees itself as the pure gift to all that is less.  In the waiting-for-all-to-be-set-right, that end that we long for but do not know, to follow Jesus is to follow him into the fray.  It is to get a little messy.  Or at least a recognition ultimate well-being is not tied to the avoidance of messiness.  Not only because this law of love that is the holiness of Jesus that is the holiness of God beckons us, but because of the metaphysical truth that “no man is an island”.  Fates are intertwined.  

Because I’m not separate from some abstract messiness that is “out there”.  Not really.

Our destiny, mine and yours, is the eternal Kingdom of God.  In the faith of this Kingdom lies a "pure religion" that is not of this world.

Free-will, Freedom, Universalism, and the Allure of Love (John A.T. Robinson)

It is probable that the mental picture usually conjured up of the relation between divine omnipotence and human freedom is that of two irresistible forces each pulling in opposite directions. If, per impos­sibile, one were to gain a painful inch here or there, it could only be at the expense of the other’s loss: submission to the power of God must involve the abandonment of the freedom of man. But have we any rea­son to think that this is at all an accurate picture of what happens when will meets will in the personal relationship of love? Surely, it is grossly misleading.

We all know times, when a man or woman really shows his or her love for us, whether it be in some costly manifestation of forgiveness or self-sacrifice or in some small act of kindness or consideration, that we feel constrained to respond—we cannot help ourselves, everything within us tells us that we must. Our defenses are down, the power of love captures the very citadel of our will, and we answer with the spon­taneous surrender of our whole being. Yet, at the same time, we know perfectly well that at such moments we can, if we choose, remain un­moved; there is no physical compulsion to commit ourselves. Everyone may point to instances in which he has been constrained to thankful re­sponse by the overmastering power of love. And yet, under this strange compulsion, has anyone ever felt his freedom infringed or his personal­ity violated? Is it not precisely at these moments that he becomes con­scious, perhaps only for a fleeting space of time, of being himself in a way he never knew before, of attaining a fullness and integration of life which is inextricably bound up with the decision drawn from him by the other’s love? Moreover, this is true however strong be the con­straint laid upon him; or, rather, it is truer the stronger it is. Under the constraint of the love of God in Christ this sense of self-fulfillment is at its maximum. The testimony of generations is that here, as nowhere else, service is perfect freedom. When faced by an overpowering act of love, we realize how absurd it is to say that the freedom and integrity of our moral personality are safeguarded only if we set our teeth and determine not to allow ourselves to be won to its service. If, then, we do not lose, but rather find, our freedom in yielding to the constraining power of love, is there anything to be gained for the cause of liberty by demanding that when it is under the control of self-will it shall in the end be stronger than when it is under the control of love? May we not imagine a love so strong that ultimately no one will be able to restrain himself from free and grateful surrender? If the miracle of the forcing of pride’s intransigence—which is no forcing but a gentle leading—can be achieved in one case (St. Paul would say, in my case), who are we to say that God cannot repeat it in all? One by one, may not each come to the point at which he finds himself constrained to confess in the words of Charles Wesley:

I yield, I yield,

I can hold out no more;

I sink by dying love compelled

To own thee conqueror!

In The End, God…, by John A.T. Robinson, p 105-106

Reflecting on ‘The Love That Matters’ by Charles Featherstone (5) Aching to be Loved

This is the 5th in a series of posts reflecting on The Love That Matters by Charles Featherstone.  1st post here.

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In case you hadn’t noticed, the subtitle to ‘The Love That Matters’ is “Meeting Jesus in the Midst of Terror and Death”.  As the “meeting Jesus” part has not happened yet in the narrative flow of the book (at least not consciously) I’d like to focus on the 2^nd half of that sentence – the “in the midst of terror and death” part - prior to getting to the “aching to be loved” part that is the title of this post.

Though the specific forms and manifestations vary, the experiences of “terror and death” are prevalent throughout the early parts of the book.  For example, Charles writes:

What was I looking for?  What did I want?  Some kind of justification for the urge to do violence, some way to legitimize my rage at the world I lived in.  That’s what I wanted.  I had a nihilistic urge seeking a pretense, some sort of idea, some mess of words to cover the naked desire to simply burn everything down. (p 79)

This is just one example.  Earlier posts in this series have touched upon this rawness and pain, a pain that leads to “nihilistic urge”.

But then, just a handful of pages later and seemingly out of nowhere, Charles writes:

Love can be an abstraction or an ideal only for those fortunate enough to take its presence in the world – its fleshiness, its goodness, its generosity – for granted.  To ache to be loved, as Jennifer and I both did when we were young, is to ache to know God. (p 86)

Because love is a relationship, and it’s meaningless to claim to love someone if there’s no chance she will understand or experience the doing as love. (p 87)

Where did this come from?  The contrast between these sorts of thoughts and those from just 7 pages earlier provide something of a glimpse into the nature of the battle to find a place in the world "in the midst of terror and death".  There is a tension, an uncertainty.  And as sometimes happens in life, Charles thoughts on love are a surprise, an interruption into a story as it’s being told.

I wonder, was Charles only able to write these words in hindsight?  Can a person only recognize such things about love in their past having subsequently found something of that love that they’re aching for?  And having seen it, they can go back and see their trajectory towards it?  Or does one recognize such things in the moment, in between the moments of nihilism?

I don’t know.  Maybe it doesn’t matter.  Either way, I really liked what Charles wrote here. 

Love cannot be reduced to an abstraction.  Nor can it’s “success or failure”, given this definition of love as fleshy concreteness and as meaningless apart from relational fulfillment, be reduced to the mere offer of love.  Because it’s meaningless to claim to love someone if there’s no chance of that person understanding or experiencing that love as love.

Love must be experienced as love in order to be complete as love.  It takes form through both giving and receiving. 

This is an existential statement.  And it’s an eschatological statement.  It need not become abstract to be either of these.  It need not become generalized or lose its sense of particularity if we take this definition of divine love and widen it, drawing out it’s implications. 

Love is not concerned with its success in terms of minimum requirements, in terms of being “offered” and then shrugging it’s shoulders contentedly if “rejected” in “free-will” by one person or by every single person who ever lived (there is no distinction).  No.  You can argue that God’s love ends I suppose.  You can try that, and some do.  But don’t argue for the fulfillment of love apart from the beloved’s experience of it as such.  This love is not kitschy or sentimental.  But it is relentless, entering into a world of terror and death.

"The only victory love can enjoy is the day when its offer of love is answered by the return of love.  The only possible final triumph is a universe loved by and in love with God."

-William Barclay

continued

Reflecting on 'The Love That Matters' by Charles Featherstone (2) Alone

Being the father of a young daughter, there's a lot about Charles' childhood years that stuck with me:

“I did tell my parents once, not long after it started.  It was at dinner, we were sitting around the table, and I remember my father’s response; “People are going to tease you.  You just need to learn to deal with it.”  Not helpful.  My mother’s advice was even worse; she told me I needed to understand that the people who teased me probably had hard lives at home.  Why that was supposed to explain their teasing me I wasn’t sure.  But I quickly determined that my parents could not be trusted.  I may have mentioned the problems a time or two, but I never really talked to them about this again.  In fact, no adult could be trusted.  No one in a position of power and authority could be trusted.  Because they didn’t want to know.  Or because if they knew, they didn’t care.  And they certainly weren’t going to do anything to help.  I was alone.  I was on my own.  This much was clear.”   -p32

“There were a lot of mornings when I would wake up wondering, “Why?  Why do I bother going through all this?  What if this is all there is?  What’s the point of going on?”  Because at the age of ten, I was afraid, truly afraid, that this life of loneliness and fear, and having to deal with abuse on all sides – from kids and adults alike, at home and at school – was all there was ever going to be.  So what was the point of going on?  If this was all life was going to hand me, there was no point.  No point at all.   -p35

“I was simply not wanted by the world in which I lived, by the people who lived in and ran that world.”   -p38

"They sometimes spoke nice words, words of caring and concern - "I Am Lovable and Capable!" - but they never meant it.  Ever.    -p38

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My wife, daughter and I were at a birthday party for a 7 year old boy a short while ago, the son of some close friends of ours.  Lots of boys and girls, some still in diapers, running around yelling, screaming and farting.  It was loud and it smelled pretty bad just about everywhere.  It seemed like there were about 50 kids, but in reality there were more like 15. 

Like a lot of 7 year old boys, the birthday boy is into Star Wars.  He’s not just into Star Wars toys books.  He’s into Star Wars in a way that he wants to be IN Star wars.  He doesn’t just want toys, he wants the whole costume.  So we got him a Darth Vader costume – jumpsuit, cape, helmet – the whole deal.  He took a quick break from opening his presents, went in his room to put on the costume, and came back out and finished opening his presents.

Putting on the costume, a little boy simply HAS to play the part of a servant of the Dark Side.  The commanding walk and intimidating presence, the trademark breathing.  The power.  Naturally, sides are going to be chosen and leading to some sort of fun conflict.  In this case, Darth Vader was putting kids in "jail".  Jail was a bedroom with the lights out.

Being one of the smaller (and more persuadable) toddlers, my daughter was thrown into "jail".  Put into a dark room, closed door, no lights.  By Darth Vader.  For the fun of the party.

So she is in the room crying desperately.  My wife and I thought we heard crying, but there were lots of kids running around and everyone seemed to be having a good time.  With all of the noise at the party, we just didn't think much of it.  Crying came and went.  We certainly didn't think the cries belonged to our daughter.

We don't know how long she was in there.  Though it probably felt like an eternity to her, it wasn't more than a few minutes.  Other people heard her crying as they walked by the door of the "jail".  They opened the door and she came running out.  These folks brought her to us, and we picked her up and comforted her in her tears.  You know the type - the hard tears where the person gasps for breath.

She calmed down fairly quickly.  The birthday boy's dad chastised him for what he did, he apologized, my daughter and Darth Vader made their peace, and things mostly went back to the way that they were.  But my daughter still talks about this.  She hasn't forgotten.

Pretty anti-climactic.  So why do I bring this up?  

I don't mean to compare a bit of out-of-control birthday party fun in a healthy environment with friends to Charles' hellish experiences growing up.  They're decidedly not the same thing.  But I just wonder, what would it have done to my daughter if she had been in that room for 15 minutes?  30 minutes?  But what if she'd been locked in the dark and nobody cared?  In the midst of having a good time, what if nobody had really wanted to hear or respond to her cries?  Her parents, the ones tasked with safety (and not just her physical safety) being either aloof or indifferent?  Principled to the point of looking the other way?  And the same with everybody else....a sort of survival of the fittest social environment?

Would she start to lose faith in people?  Could it have been the sort of moment in which a bit of innocence is lost, the moment where a child realizes that the world is not an entirely safe place?  That she might just be on her own?  That her pain was a sort of inconvenience to the ethos of the party?  No doubt moments of loneliness and pain come to all kids, but what do parents do when they come?  She was able to find comfort, but what if there wasn't any to be found?

What if, in her trauma, we had just calmly explained that "this is the way birthday parties are"?

Now remove the particularities, and imaginatively transpose these metaphors to the constant existence of a 10 year old boy.

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As the father of a 3.5 year old, the sort of constant fear that characterized Charles' elementary school years breaks my heart.

I recognize that I can’t protect my daughter from everything.  Up to a point, I can’t protect her from struggling because difficult situations may emerge from the best of environments and intentions.  My wife and I have made conscious decisions to let her interactions with other kids play out, up to a point.  We want her to learn to have a humble self-confidence, to stick up for herself, to learn to work through difficult situations with other kids.  

When kids are mean (nearly always unintentionally at her young age), we often tell her that we want her to be nice even to the people that are mean to her.  A "treat people as you want to be treated" Golden Rule sort of thing.  I think it's a good thing to strive for, this proactive growing of the internal capacity for love and good will towards others.

But I think about what Charles needed as a child.  First and foremost, he didn't need practical relationship advice, solid and time tested principles, reality checks on the way things are, lessons in empathy, etc.  He simply needed to matter to someone.  To be known and heard.

As a parent, I really need to remember that.  I'd like to think that I always will.  Hearing Charles' story, however, I cringe at my capacity to offer false comfort.  Things are fairly easy now from an interpersonal standpoint because usually her little issues with other kids are accidents.  She's 3.5 years old.  She has an innocence about her, a pure and joyous way of seeing the world.  I can tell her that sometimes kids just play rough or mean, or that she should try to remember that other kids sometimes have things going on that make them act out a little bit.  It is easy to do this because she is so young.  It is easy because the kids she hangs around are generally good kids.  But it will not always be so easy.

My role as a dad cannot be reduced to abstract "ideals", words of wisdom that float above the fray of actual existence.  The pain or loneliness experienced in the life of an actual flesh and blood person cannot be reduced or dismissed as an occasion to tout principles or learning opportunities.  For a child - for my daughter - to be loved is to know that she matters, in her joys and successes but particularly in her pain, her perceived insufficiency, her failures, loneliness, rejection and heartache.  There's no substitute for that, no program or "life-lesson" that can render unnecessary or fundamental that innate need of value and worth.

You know what?  I don't think we ever really outgrow that need.

continued

Lent 2017, Day 1 - What is Lent again?

Well that was quick.  I didn’t even get through one day.  What the hell is Lent about again?

A few days ago, I read a post over at Internet Monk – Another Look: Lent is not about getting better.

The 1^st 2 sentences:

"Lent is not about getting better.Lent is about preparing to die."

Boom.

The post proceeds to question the narrative of Lent as primarily a 40 day exercise in spiritual recommitment.

"Dubbed “adventures,” “training,” “journeys,” “discipline” or “formation,” the focus was more on getting better, stronger, more mature, more capable.  Casting off death so as to become more alive.  Stripping off the sin that so easily besets us and running a good race to the finish.

I don’t know."

Me neither.  I really don’t.  These dubbings are fine as far as things go, but Lent has to be about something other than 40 days of trying extra hard, right?  What possible purpose could a mark of ashes serve in that narrative?  None as far as I can tell – any connection is superficial.  No, effort and intentionality are not the enemy.  But our trying, our plans, our good intentions, our self-improvement projects – none of it alters the fact that the bodies through which we perceive existence are going to die. 

Ash to ash.  Dust to dust. 

And if Lent is about that instead, well, then maybe our attempts at devotion (noble as they may be) are out of step with Lent’s meaning.  Maybe they’re even counterproductive when it comes to the particularity of Lent because Lent is about something else.  I know that a well-intentioned giving-something-up-for-Lent has a liturgical history, but can it actually get in the way of that “something else”?

Enter the Walter Bruggemann Lent devotional that I’m reading this year – A Way Other Than Our Own.

Right away, a different vision and Lenten purpose is presented:

“But this is a God to whom a turn must be made, a God of demand, a God of demand ready to be a God of grace…not just hard demand, not just easy grace, but grace and demand, the way all serious relationships work.” 

“The imperative is around four verbs, “seek, call, forsake, return,” good Lenten verbs.” 

“Lent is a time to consider again our easy, conventional compromises and see again about discipline, obedience, and glad identity.”

Sigh.  I can't help but hold these two hermeneutics in tension.

In past years, I might’ve brushed off the Internet Monk approach as morbid and pointless in favor of Brueggemann’s approach.  This time around it’s pretty much the opposite. 

Are these two approaches at odds with one another? 

What the hell is Lent about? 

Is this not knowing part of it?

I can’t say why, but as I pondered this a post from a few years back by the always perceptive Richard Beck came to mind – Love is the Allocation of Our Dying.  The post had nothing to do with Lent.  Not directly anyways.  It was posted in mid-September.

“Life is a finite resource always slipping away.  Every minute that passes is a passing of life, a movement toward death.  Every moment we are being expended and used up.”

“Because to love other people in small but tangible ways over a lifetime is a way of dying.”

Maybe this is how these two seemingly contradictory viewpoints can be held together, even if only loosely.  It seems misguided to suggest that Lent is intended as a season where we simply sit around and think about death (although such sober meditation is far from unnecessary).  No, there is the matter of being.  Of existence.  What shall we do?

After the hope of advent and the vision of epiphany (and maybe Lent isn’t supposed to make sense except that it proceeds from these?) we resolve to love as the allocation of our dying.  It is the form that our dying takes, and the form that reveals just how much we don't want to die.  This is hard.  Sometimes it is pleasant and sometimes it is not.  We will fail.  We will both lack the imagination to envision what such an allocation looks like and will fail to do what we can imagine.  Even our successes are usually riddled with the anxiety of death or ego.  

Our own successes cannot save the world.  Or ourselves.  

We face this.  We allow ourselves to dwell in that for a moment.

I don’t know.  Just thinking out loud.

Divine Love As Giving (Miroslav Wolf)

So, what do we Christians mean by love? First, let’s consider what we don’t mean. Plato’s Symposium is likely the most influential text about love in the whole of Western literature. In it, Socrates argues that to love is to desire something one does not have and considers to be good. Apply this definition of love to God, as some Muslim theologians do, and you immediately see the difficulty. God lacks nothing that is good, and God has no needs. So God cannot desire anything God doesn’t have. Therefore God cannot love— in Socrates’s sense of the word. Now, Christians agree with Muslims who think this way. All responsible Christian theologians insist that God doesn’t love in this “needy” kind of way; such love wouldn’t be worthy of God. 

Does it follow, however, that God doesn’t love at all? We use the word “love” in another sense— not just to designate desire for what we lack, but commitment to give of what we have and of who we are. This is the main sense in which the Christian tradition speaks of God’s love. “For God so loved . . . that he gave,” reads the famous verse about God’s love quoted earlier. When God loves, God doesn’t long to get something, but undertakes to impart something. God gives when God creates; God gives when God delivers; God gives when God forgives; God gives when God grants eternal life. God gives, and in giving God loves. All of God’s works are done out of generosity, none out of acquisitiveness.

--Mirsoslav Wolf (Allah: A Christian Response, p. 154)

The Resurrection (IOCC Newsletter)

I've been thinking a lot lately about the various ways that theologians speak of what "salvation" even is.  The differences between legal/forensic and ontological views of salvation are huge. Terms like "forgiveness" and "faith" are frequently described in fundamentally different ways. I found the view below to be a beautiful illustration of the “ontology” of salvation and the inherent participatory nature of it.

The following is just a quick blurb from the Spring 2016 International Orthodox Christian Charities (IOCC) Newsletter.  It's so rich that I thought it worth posting here.

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In the image of the crucified Christ who “takes away the sin of the world” (John 1:29), the Church also receives the tragic and sinful experiences and failures of man, for it is the Body of the Crucified Lord.  In order to save the world, the Church must pass through the reality of death.  As St. Paul says, death takes place within us (the Apostles), so that life can begin inside you (i.e., the Corinthians and members of the Church) (cf. 2 Cor 4:6-12).  This is what the real saints do.  Without this identification with the tragic destiny of the world, there is no salvation of the world.

The great truth that modern ignominious treatments of death ignore is that fear of death is conquered by taking upon oneself the death of others, so they might live.  To live truly means to die and then to live.  Fearless with regard to death are those who die daily by sacrificing for others.  If the spiritual fathers do not die, everlasting life cannot be born in their beloved ones (for example, spiritual children).  The Lord said, “unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit” (John 12:24).  It is out of the Eucharistic perspective that St. John the Theologian proclaims: “He who does not love abides in death” (1 John 3:14).  Sanctity cannot exist outside of the “other” because the other serves as the “terminal” or “reference” of holiness.  This ontology of love leading to communion justifies the centrality of the Resurrection in the economy of salvation.

Bishop Maxim
Serbian Orthodox Church in North and South America
Diocese of Western America

The Love of God And The Law of Gravity?

Science Mike just put out a special episode of his Ask Science Mike podcast specifically about the recently confirmed existence of gravity waves. 

Listen to it here.

Being that this may be the closest thing to “Gravity Waves for Dummies” that I'm going to find, it's a bit disheartening that the majority of it is still well beyond my comprehension.  But maybe that's as it should be.  

Beyond any confusion and wonder at the weird, freaky, science-fictionish nature of our cosmos, there's one particular string of thoughts from Science Mike that stuck with me in terms of theological parallel:

"Gravity is very weak when compared to other forces in physics.  Now I know that sounds strange.  Here on Earth where you feel the intense pull of gravity every time you climb a flight of stairs, for example.  You clim enough stairs and you become very aware of Earth's gravity well.  But just think about how small a magnet is needed to pull a nail off a table.  And when you do that, that magnet is attracting that nail, is pulling that nail more powerfully than an entire planets gravity.  Gravity is weak compared to other forces in physics, and because of that, gravity waves are very, very small."

But at the same time, we have this:

"Why doesn't the moon crash into the earth?  Because the moon is traveling fast enough to be in free fall that's equal to the curvature of spacetime.  So the moon is constantly falling around the earth.  And the earth is constantly falling around the sun.  And the sun is constantly falling around the center of the Milky Way galaxy."

On the one hand gravity is weak.  While the laws of physics say that a nail will be inexorably pulled towards the mass of the earth, all it takes is a tiny, tiny magnet to pull it away.  The gravitational force of an entire planet submits to this tiny magnet.

On the other hand, gravity is the force that keeps planets and stars of unfathomable size from crashing into one another.  It allows the cosmos to dance.  And, scientifically speaking, the cosmos are indeed always dancing - spinning, twirling, falling.

Weak, yet unimaginably strong.  Dynamic, not static. It's "perfection" creating ceaseless relational movement.  In what seems to us as infinite nothingness and outer darkness, gravity is working to pull things together, to put each created object dance it it's rightful place.  Constant.  Invisible.  Light, dark, warm, cold - doesn't matter.  Nothing is beyond it's reach.  Though we drift, we drift within it.  Inescapable.  

As Radiohead sings "Gravity always wins".

Gravity is a symbol of the weakness of God, the weakness that is yet stronger than the strength of men.  It causes the cosmos to dance.  Love.  The gentle yet providential love of God that pervades the cosmos, down to the tiniest subatomic substance.

Do I dare believe this?  Or is this poetic nonsense?  A delusional assignment of meaning to a cold universe of arbitrary power or chance?

Who is this God, this God who speaks through the consent yet inevitability and inescapability of gravity?

I won't take the metaphor too far.  Gravity, after all, also causes the heaviness of cement walls that crash upon children in Haitian earthquakes.  Rather than lift them, it pulls floundering refugee mothers clinging desperately to capsized boats down to the depths.

Such is the nature of our existence.

Freedom for the fulfillment of love (Gerald May)

If we were left in the realm of self-determination, our freedom would remain directionless. It might be freedom from attachment, but it would not be freedom for anything. It would be doomed to wander from one self-generated intention to the next. It is only by moving from self-determination to divinely inspired participation that freedom finds its direction toward the fulfillment of love. 

And it is the realization of our essential union with God and creation that enables and empowers the practical living of love in the real situations of life. There is no missionary zeal here, no knee-jerk attempts to be helpful, no programmed acts of religious nicety, no knowledge of what to do for one’s neighbor. Here actions and feelings flow from a bottomless source within us, and our intellect can do nothing but stand by and marvel.  


From The Dark Night of the Soul by Gerald May - Ch. 7