Dogmatics in Outline, Ch. 5 – God in the Highest

As we get into the declarations of the Creed, Barth picks up the pace. It’s almost as if he got excited while giving these lectures, and that excitement comes through in the printed version. I really like his proposition for this chapter/lecture:

God is He who according to Holy Scripture exists, lives, acts, makes Himself known to us in the work of His free love, resolved on and consummated in Jesus Christ; He, God alone. 

The heart of what I think Barth is trying to say through this whole chapter is that the God we worship, the God we know and love is the God which is revealed in Jesus Christ and through Holy Scripture. He is not our discovery. We didn’t evolve into this conception of God. We did not uncover him. He revealed himself to us, and this is the only reason we know him or anything about him.

This chapter reminds me of a conversation I watched with Orthodox priest and professor, Fr. John Behr. In this conversation, Fr. Behr says, “More often than not we think about ‘What is God?’ And we normally think of him in superhuman projections.” Yet, this is not the way, as Christians, we should approach God. Our question, for Fr. Behr, is not ‘What is God?’ but, ‘Who is God?’ He says this question is “absolutely central” for the Christian, and this question is answered “simply by the person of Christ.” This revelation of God in Jesus Christ is getting a little ahead of our path through the Creed with Barth, but I think it is pertinent because the person interviewing Fr. Behr questions him with, “By starting with the question, ‘Who is God?’ rather than ‘What is God?’ are you not presupposing the existence of God already and taking us down a path that some people may not be willing to begin to walk?” Fr. Behr’s answer is brilliant and inspiring. He says, “You can’t presuppose the existence of God without specifying which God it is that you presuppose exists. Well, this is the One I confess to be God.”

This is where I think Barth is driving to through this chapter. He is using the proclamation of the angels when they announce the birth of the Messiah to the shepherds, “Glory to God in the highest,” (Lk. 2:14) as a way to speak about the first article of the Creed, “I believe in God the Father Almighty. God is Almighty. He is the highest. He is beyond categories. Quoting Aquinas, he says, “Deus non est in genera,” God is not in a class. God is not one of a species. He is not a member of a group. He, as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit exists above, higher than, all else. As Fr. Behr reminds us, God is not the sum of all good superhuman projections. He is higher than that.

As humans, we can only conceive of things and persons in categories. We do this naturally and without thinking about it. If God is the Highest, if he is above categories, how are humans supposed to conceive of him? How are we supposed to find him? Simply put, we cannot. Barth, following Kierkegaard, says, “Note well: In the whole Bible of the Old and New Testaments not the slightest attempt is ever made to prove God.” (37) This is crucial to understanding God as he is confessed in the Christian Creed. If God could be proven, he would be like the other gods who have been discovered in human history, he would be one in a genera, in a class. But he is never in these categories, he is unsearchable, his ways are inscrutable (Rom. 11:33). He can only be revealed, and only it is only he who can reveal himself.

This is precisely what Christianity is, the self-revelation of God to human beings. Therefore, “the highness of God consists in His thus descending” (39). Or, as Fr. Behr puts it, Jesus “shows us what it is to be God in the way that he dies.” For Origen, the whole event of kenosis, of God the Son pouring himself out into human flesh that takes will embrace death on a cross, is the revelation of God.

So, the Creed’s proclamations about God, beginning with “I believe in God the Father, Almighty,” is not something we discovered, it is what we confess because it is what has been revealed to us by himself. 

This puts us in a place of humility. This reminds us that we cannot “get to” God, he must come to us. And he has. He has come to us and revealed himself to us in Jesus Christ and through Scripture. The very fact of us being able to confess this God is the “proof” that this God is alive and wants to be known by human beings.

Dogmatics in Outline, Ch. 3 – Faith as Knowledge

Christianity and Reason have always had a terse relationship. We have not known quite what to do with Reason. On the one hand, we have the beloved Apostle calling the Son of God “Logos” in the beginning of his gospel and the likes of Origen and Clement, both of Alexandria apparently leaning heavily on the philosophical ideas of their time. While on the other hand, there is Paul exhorting the Colossians to, “see to it that no one takes you captive by philosophy and empty deceit” (2:8), and Tertullian asking, “What does Jerusalem have to do with Athens?” For a while it would seem that the Church’s relationship with Reason would settle down in Aquinas’ work and even, at some level, that of the Reformers. But the 20th Century rolled in to the sound of shouts of hallelujah and speaking in tongues, a movement that would often come to embrace an anti-intellectual mode of being, a movement that at this moment is the fastest growing Christian community in the world.

Barth begins this chapter by reminding us that it was the devil, Mephisto, who said, “Despise only reason and science, man’s supremest power of all.” Christianity cannot be anti-rational for the very fact that we have as our Lord and God the Logos-become-flesh, Jesus Christ. There are many ideas and meanings behind the statement, “In the beginning was the Logos, and the Logos was with God, and God was the Logos” (John 1:1), but they are not less than or other than the basic idea of logos as reason.

This is important because, in order to be meaningful to the world, Christianity must be intelligible. This is not the same as saying that Christianity has to “make sense” at every point. Miracles, even in the ancient world, never “made sense,” even if they were more believable at the time. The very idea of God, uncreated and eternally here, does not make sense (why is there a God instead of nothing at all?) But these do not make Christianity irrational or anti-rational.

Faith is knowledge, then, because faith is itself a kind of knowing. In the first chapter, Barth calls dogmatics a science, because dogmatics (theology) is the study of God and the church. It is knowledge. In order to be knowledge, what dogmatics discusses and proclaims must be knowable. God must be knowable. But this is where science as we normally think of it and faith diverge. The knowledge we acquire by scientific endeavors comes about by our own effort. We come with the question, we develop the means by which to discover the answer to our questions. We interpret the results. This is a powerful truth about humanity, and it is not to be rejected or villainized. But the knowledge of God cannot be “got” by human effort, it can only be a gift from God himself.

Barth says, “Church proclamation is language, and language not of an accidental, arbitrary, chaotic and incomprehensible kind, but language which comes forward with the claim to be true and to uphold itself as the truth against the lie. Do not let us be forced from the clarity of this position. in the Word which the Church has to proclaim the truth is involved, not in a provisional, secondary sense, but in the primary sense of the Word itself–the Logos is involved, and is demonstrated and revealed in the human reason…”

Faith is knowledge precisely because their is a Subject to be known. There are things about the divine Subject, God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit that can be known, which ought to be known by his people. And there things about the Church who is called and formed by God and the cosmos created by God that can and ought to be known. The Church’s proclamation, the Creed (the Apostle’s for Barth’s book, but I would also add and be more inclined toward the Nicene Creed) is the utterance of the Church’s knowledge of God, and that knowledge is true. True in a deeper sense than the way 1+2=3 is true.

Barth touches on the question of whether revelation is a valid way of knowing in a tangential way. This is something he takes for granted. So much so that he is able to say that “Christian faith is concerned with an illumination of the reason,” without qualifying the statement. There is something about the brashness, the audacity of a statement like this which I appreciate.

For Barth, the reason we can have faith as knowledge is because God has made himself known. God wants to be known. God wants to be experienced. This runs counter to how many people, even many Christians think about God. People tend to think that God wants to remain hidden, that faith is blind, and that any real faith in God must be held regardless of our experience. In the documentary Ja und Nein, Barth talks about revelation and says that, if one only ears that hear, “we could hear him constantly” because he is not dead, but is alive and speaks today. If we had eyes to see, we could see God in “the beauty of spring.” This revelation happens outside the Bible, but it does not replace the Bible, for Scripture is the sure testimony of God revealed in Jesus Christ, in whom “God spoke for himself unambiguously.”

This is the crux of the matter for Barth’s theology as a whole, and I think of Christianity as a whole. Jesus Christ is the Word of God spoken to humanity as a revelation of himself. Everything hinges on and turns on Jesus Christ. Jesus is the Word of God before church proclamation (preaching/teaching) is the Word. Jesus is the Word of God before even the Bible is the Word. The Word written and the Word proclaimed are derivative of the truth, the reality, that the Son of God is the Word of God in himself. “There is no genuine rust, no really tenable, victorious trust in God’s Word which is not founded on His truth (Jesus); and on the other hand no knowledge, no theology, no confessing and no Scripture truth which does not at once possess the stamp of this living truth. The one (knowledge/theology/confession/Scripture) must always be measured and tested and confirmed by the other (Logos/Jesus).”

I’ve grown tired of the phrase, “Christianity is not a religion, it’s a relationship,” because I feel like it has become trite. Yet, the statement is true for Barth. Christianity is not nor cannot be another religion with ambiguous deities and moral codes. Christianity is knowing God by meeting him through faith in Jesus Christ, who is his Word incarnate. If our Christianity is anything other or less than this, than it is not Christianity, it is merely another religion.

The Word of God (Logos/Jesus) is the reason underlying, undergirding, underneath, within, behind, animating all things because it was through Jesus that God created all things. Therefore, when a person believes in Jesus, when a person trusts in Jesus and knows him, that person also finds the ground of their own being and finds the meaning of their own existence. Barth says when we know God through his Son, when we trust God through his Son, there exists within us the “inmost familiarity with the ground and goal of all that happens, of all things.” The peace that passes all understanding, then, comes from the fact that our beginning and ending, our foundation and telos, are in God. We are participating in the very ground of being, and when we are in this relationship with God, we know our telos, our goal and end, our perfection is to be with him where he is and to see his glory. It is to finally know as we are known.

La Résistance

The election is days away. With each day, my heart grows heavier. Most of my readers and friends have some clue about the ideas I have concerning the Church and the political process. Namely, I feel the Church should pull out of the process, and be something distinct from government entirely. I really need to dedicate a blog to that subject alone, but this can’t be that post. In fact, in this post, I won’t ask anyone to forego voting this cycle. Ultimately, people need to follow their conscience concerning the roles of Church and state, and I can’t impede on that. So, if you feel like voting Clinton, or Trump, or some other third party, please do so with your conscience under the discipleship of Jesus.

Now, to be on with the real subject, political resistance.

Whether or not a person feels they should vote, the problem every Christian needs to acknowledge is the current relationship between the Church and politics is sick, at best. This is not specific to one party. The GOP and Evangelicals have a history together, and this is what most people think of when they talk about an unhealthy relationship between Church and state. But I’m thinking of both (all) parties, especially since more and more young adult Christians are finding their beliefs and convictions line up closely with the Democratic Party. If things continue this way, in a very near future, the way people feel about Evangelicals and the GOP will be the way they feel about Millennial Christians and the Democratic Party.

This shift from Conservatism to “Liberalism” has been fueled by two, probably legitimate, desires in young Christian Americans. The first is a longing for an authentic Christianity that more closely resembles that taught by Jesus in the Gospels, and the example of the early Church. The second is a desire to no longer be bound by lifeless religiosity, conventions that know how to only say “No!” without real connection with the Spirit of Jesus.(This negative Christianity, that can only say “No!” instead of “Yes!” has been the cause of so much Church fall out and the Christian inability to function as normal human beings who can talk about and enjoy things like alcohol and sex, among other things.) An offshoot of the second reason is the desire to be culturally relevant to an America that was not only hostile to the typical expression of Christianity, but unmoved by it.

Each flavor has its particular danger. The Conservative side is in danger of holding legalistic standards over others and over unbelievers (all the while letting themselves getting away with the same sins, and crushed by shame) apart from the experience of communion with Jesus. The Liberal side is in danger of allowing serious compromise into their lives, choosing sinful lifestyles in the name of being culturally relevant and not being religious. This, too, happens apart from communion with Jesus.

Communion is the hinge one which this all swings. The reason, a reason, the Church is at war with itself, at least in the political arena, is because we are choosing sides and participating in this system apart from communion. If we are not first and foremost disciples of Jesus Christ, it will be impossible for us to participate in this country as Christians. Republicans and Democrats, yes, but not as Christians, not as witnesses, and therefore, always at the mercy of the current of culture, unable to change the direction it heads. Significantly, both sides want to help change the direction of culture, influencing it in a Gospel way. I ask the question, if there is no actual communion with Jesus, how can we influence the culture with the love of God?

I believe it is time to resist the system at every angle, time for the Church to no longer let its voice be manipulated by the vicious and disgusting politics that happen in this country. If we are honest with ourselves, neither party, no party, speaks with the authority of Jesus Christ because no party is concerned with Jesus and the Gospel. Again, this isn’t a direct call to quit voting or work in the political system, but it is imperative that we change the way we approach the political system specifically, and culture generally. This is where the Sermon on the Mount comes in.

This message which Jesus gave to his disciples in the Gospel of Matthew, is the guiding principle for the Christian. The beauty of it is, since Jesus moves the commandments from outward actions to internal ways of being, we are given no choice but to wait for the word of God, the voice of the Spirit, in every moment of crucial decision. There are no correct answers, no laws for us to follow, only a voice to hear and obey. That is why the Sermon is resistance against the system, against the culture, and why it will be the way to engage with and transform both. Anyone who knows me, or is familiar with Dietrich Bonhoeffer, will know immediately that his teachings are highly influential in my train of thought, right above the Desert Fathers of the third and fourth centuries. Let’s allow him to say something about the Sermon:

“I think I am right in saying that I would only achieve true inner clarity and honesty by really starting to take the Sermon on the Mount seriously. Here alone lies the force that can blow all this hocus-pocus sky-high–like fireworks, leaving only a few burnt-out shells behind. The restoration of the church must surely depend on a new kind of monasticism, which has nothing in common with the old but a life of uncompromising discipleship, following Christ according to the Sermon on the Mount. I believe the time has come to gather people together and do this.”

Bonhoeffer thought the Sermon was “the deciding word on this whole affair.” Are you concerned about social justice? Are you offended by the beggar on the street corner? The Sermon speaks, “Give to the one who begs from you, and do not refuse the one who would borrow from you. (5:42)” Are you poor? Are you rich? Jesus says, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, (5:3)” and, “Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth…for where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. (6:19, 21)” Are you concerned about the moral direction of our country? Do you try to stay away from legalism? Jesus warns, “You shall not commit adultery, but I say to you that everyone who looks with lustful intent has already committed adultery in their heart. If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out… (5:27-29)” We could all use Jesus’ warnings about anger, “Everyone who is angry with his brother will be liable to judgment… (5:22)” Next time you want to have an outburst of anger toward a Trump supporter, or a Clinton supporter, or any of their followers, remember that one. How can we forget the (in)famous, “Do not resist the one who is evil. But if anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also, (5:39)” and, “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father who is in heaven. (5:44, 45)”?

My point is, it’s not just Conservatives or just Liberals who need to start taking the Sermon on the Mount seriously. It’s every Christian. It’s you and I. The Sermon speaks to every disciple, and if anyone would be a disciple of Jesus Christ, they must take the Sermon seriously, or risk discovering they never were a disciple to begin with (see 7:21-23).

This is the way of resistance. In the end, a person can vote for whomever they want, but what truly matters is whether or not they are being Salt and Light. For “if salt has lost its taste, how shall its saltiness be restored?“

In the end, Christians of both political persuasions must give up hope in the political system, at least as a means of establishing a good society, whatever that means to each person. Even more importantly,

we have to stop fighting one another over political parties.

We are one Church, and we are called to be witnesses of Jesus Christ in our country by how we act, not by what we say is right, not by legislation, not by what we say isn’t wrong, not by political persuasion, and certainly not by accusing our brothers and sisters to those outside the Church. “Let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven.“

We must be the Church before anything else. We must be disciples of Jesus before we are Democrats or Republicans or Moderates. Our allegiances and guiding principles must belong to Scripture and the voice of God above all else. It is the Church’s job to stand over against the government, whatever form it takes, and declare the word of God, and shelter all who flee to her for refuge from the governments. It is our duty to be a preserving agent (salt) in the world, while the state is called to “bear the sword.” (See Romans 12)

There is so much to say. I have so much to say and have thought, wrestled, and prayed about this particular subject for a few years now. The Sermon on the Mount is where I am landing. I have had some radical(?) ideas in the last couple years about proper Christian response, not simply to this election, but to the political system in general, and I feel this Sermon is the sun around which all other ideas have to orbit. So if this is a call, and I hope you read it that way, it is not to vote for anyone person in particular, or to not vote (which is what I am choosing), but to commit to taking the Sermon on the Mount seriously, to commit to becoming a disciple of Jesus Christ, encouraging our brothers and sisters in the Church in the areas we find easy, and allowing ourselves to be challenged and changed by Jesus’ words in the Sermon, and by those who find those parts easier. We are in this together, whether we like it or not.

Last election cycle, I said that the next would leave Christians in a particularly difficult situation. The details of it worked out a little differently than I thought, but the overall effect is the same. Christians have as options people who care nothing for the Gospel or human dignity. Whichever way a Christian might vote, they are doing so by necessarily making significant compromises to the Gospel and to Jesus. Maybe it’s always been this way, but it seems out in the light this time around. At this point, we can only be blind to that fact by conscious decision. I believed then, and I believe now, that this is God’s way of breaking the unhealthy relationship the Church has with the State, forcing us to realize we have to go about engaging with culture in a different way, and giving us little option but to either continue in compromise until our voice is completely obliterated, or become the Church.

Devotional Doubt

I’m reading My Bright Abyss by Christian Wiman. It might be the most beautiful non-fiction book I’ve read. It’s challenging me in ways I’ve never been challenged before, the way I think about God and the world. I like it. It makes me uncomfortable sometimes, and I’m having to take them into prayer.

I started reading the book shortly after I posted My Darkness, and it seems to fit my mood perfectly. All that being said, I’m going to quote a couple paragraphs from it here. I’ve never done this before, and I don’t know if it’s legal. So, Christian, if you somehow come across this, first of all, thank you for writing, and secondly, all credit goes to you.

You know the value of your doubt by the quality of the disquiet that it produces in you. Is it a furious, centrifugal sort of anxiety that feeds on itself and never seems to move you in any one direction? Is it an ironclad compulsion to refute, to find in even the most transfiguring experiences, your own or others’, some rational or “psychological” explanation? Is it an almost religious commitment to doubt itself, an assuredness that absolute doubt is the highest form of faith? There is something static and self-enthralled about all these attitudes. Honest doubt, what I would call devotional doubt, is marked, it seems to me, by three qualities: humility, which makes one’s attitude impossible to celebrate; insufficiency, which makes it impossible to rest; and mystery, which continues to tug you upward–or at least outward–even in your lowest moments. Such doubt is painful–more painful, in fact, than any of the other forms–but its pain is active rather than passive, purifying rather than stultifying. Far beneath it, no matter how severe its drought, how thoroughly  your skepticism seems to have salted the ground of your soul, faith, durable faith, is steadily taking root.

---

The Gospels vary quite a bit in their accounts of Jesus’ resurrection and the ensuing encounters he had with people, but they are quite consistent about one thing: many of his followers doubted him, sometimes even when he was staring them in the face. This ought to be heartening  for those of us who seek belief. If the disciples of Christ could doubt not only firsthand accounts of his resurrection but the very fact of his face in front of them, then clearly, doubt has little to do with distance from events. It is in some way the seed of Christianity itself, planted in the very heart of him (My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?) who is at once God and our best selves, and it must be torn terribly, wondrously open in order to flower into living faith.

But how does this happen? Here, too, the Gospel stories are helpful, Just as some of Jesus’ first-century followers could not credit the presence of the risen Christ, so our own blindness, habit, and fear form a kind of constant fog that keeps us from seeing, and thereby believing in, the forms that grace takes in our everyday lives. We may think that it would be a great deal easier to believe if the world erupted around us, if some savior came down and offered as evidence the bloody scars in his side, but what the Gospels suggest is that this is not only wishful thinking but willful blindness, for in fact the world is erupting around us, Christ is very often offering us the scars in his side. What we call doubt is often simply dullness of mind and spirit, not the absence of faith at all, but faith latent in the lives we are not quite living, God dormant in the world to which we are not quite giving our best selves.

There it is. These are the reasons I love this book.

Lord, if we are going to have doubt, when we inevitably have doubt, let it be devotional doubt, and not self-sufficient pride.

Amen.

My Darkness

During the winter of 2007, through the spring of 2008, I walked into darkness.

I’ve probably thought about that time every day since then. It at least feels like it. It has never left me.

In the winter of 1987, I was severely burned over a large portion of my body. I spent about six months at Denver Children’s Mercy Hospital, fighting for life in the beginning, and recovering for the rest of that time. I was released on April 4th, my birthday, which was also Easter Sunday. Seems fitting. Almost thirty years later, I still wear the scars from that moment on my arms and back. When I was in high school, my dad learned of a procedure that could remove my scars, significantly, if not entirely. He asked if I wanted to go through the procedure. Without hesitation, I told him no. He was taken back by my reaction. He couldn’t understand why I wouldn’t want to remove the scars.

I still feel the same way today I felt then. These are not just scars, these are my scars. They are as much part of me as my brown eyes, or my temperament. What happened to me that day shaped me, left its mark, literally, and is a necessary part of my being. To remove these scars, my scars, would be to deny and attempt to hide who I am. Though there are painful memories living in my scars, they are me.

Sometimes, while I am driving alone after a long day, or long week, or long month, I think about that winter, when God disappeared. It didn’t happen suddenly. Gradually, he faded from sight, vanishing behind the descending darkness. I remember the night I realized he was gone. I was in the living room of my parents house, watching an advertisement for a conference in Kansas City, and the cold reality of my lostness hit me full force. I quietly shut my laptop, went downstairs into my room, and begged God to come back. With tears making their way down my cheeks, I understood I was alone.

Without God, the only one I could look at was myself, and I didn’t see much. I had been very self-confident until then. There wasn’t much I didn’t know, or that I couldn’t learn. I thought that, until I could no longer see.

Existential atheism.

I thought I believed in God. I wanted to believe in God. I wanted Jesus to be what and who he said he was, but there was no evidence of that for me. Maybe he was, but without coming face to face with that reality, he may as well have been rotting in a grave somewhere. That was the Jesus I knew then, a dead, long forgotten Jesus who meant nothing to me. Yet, in meaning nothing, he meant everything. His existence still overshadowed mine.

God was gone, and in his absence, he was present with me.

He was the void I was falling into, without knowing it. We live most our lives in fantasy, trying to convince ourselves of things we don’t truly believe.

Had I ever believed in God?

I never thought about it. I never gave myself the chance to doubt, and in so doing, I never gave myself the chance to believe. There were times in the two years that followed high school when moments of unbelief would explode in my head, but I never confronted them. I simply told myself this was untrue, that God did exist, and I only needed to keep believing. But darkness grew like moss in my being, until one day, I could no longer deny it. Darkness became my reality, and it pushed out all the fantasies I called faith.

I hated it then.
I am thankful for it now.

Obviously, I came out believing in Jesus. I’ve written about it before, so I won’t take the time here.

My heart wears scars from that time. Scars which are sensitive to certain temperatures and touches. Scars I can see whenever I look into my own eyes. Scars I hope never disappear. They remind me that I have lived and I am alive. They remind me that I am nothing, and in my nothingness, the reality of God can be a light in darkness, and my nothingness becomes Being in him.

There is a sadness in my heart that never goes away. Its roots are anchored in my atheism, in my dead God. But the leaves grow up into the brightness that is the Living God. There, where they bear fruit, is joy and peace.

My scars remind me what I have is faith in Jesus, and not a fantasy of God.

Queen in Gold

Corn in a Twilight Sky by KDB

 

I was thinking about the statements the Bible says about the Church, and some of the things I’ve heard said over the years about the Church becoming this powerful, holy force (see Ephesians 4:11-16). I was also thinking about the condition she is in now.
Divided
Angry
Confused
Compromised
Hurt
Hungry
Broken
Defensive

I didn’t know how to reconcile what I could see in the Church now with what I read in the Scriptures. And I certainly could not see how we are supposed to come into this glorious reality I was reading about, so I asked the Holy Spirit how it would happen, expressing my disbelief in it ever happening.

Suddenly, I saw a great, grassy field stretching as far as the eye could see in every direction. If you’ve ever been to Wyoming, and watched the breeze move through the grass like waves, you’ll know what I’m talking about. In the distance, I could see a single plant, standing above the grass.

I was rushed toward it, and saw it was a corn stalk. Just one. There were no cornfields here. Only the plains and the single stalk of corn. It grew high and straight. I could see the age in the sections toward the bottom. The older sections browned and peeled back to allow the newer sections to grown. What wasn’t browning and drying up at the bottom was a dark green.

A single ear of corn grew at the top.
The husk around the corn was light brown and dry. The leaves were starting to turn back at the top. The husk peeled back slowly, and revealed, not an ear of corn, but a woman of solid gold. She shone with a bright light and wore a crown.

This is a picture of the Church, Ecclesia, the Queen of Heaven.

I feel that God was showing me the growth pattern of the Church, because She is, after all, a single, living organism. There has never been a time in history when the expression of the Church was wrong, even if some practices or beliefs were. The Church has been exactly what it needed to be in order to fulfill the purpose God had for it at that time. Yet, a time would come when it grew old, and new growth had to come out from within. The old skin would peel back to allow the new growth. But the old was still alive, still part of the Church, and still necessary for the new growth to survive. In some ways, it protected the new growth.

This is all leading up to the fruit, the Queen of Gold, the Church in all her glory. All the growth. All the hard times, the sick times, the bad weather, the droughts, the explosions of growth, the hardening of the outer layers, is leading up to that moment when suddenly She will be revealed to be what God always intended. She will be full of the glory of God. She will be beautiful and pure.

She has to finish growing. Fruit should not be eaten until it’s ripe. As long as we’re here, fighting this out, figuring out how to worship and serve and love Jesus Christ, we’re still growing. We need to be kind to one another. We are all One plant.

And one day,
we will all
be revealed to be the One bride of Jesus Christ.

What Does God Know?

And they heard sound of YHWH walking in the Garden in the cool of the day, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of YHWH among the trees of the Garden. But YHWH called to the man and said to him,

“Where are you?”

Genesis 3:8-10

The first question found in the Bible comes from the mouth of God, the Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth. He spoke, and by his word existence was woven into being. But here he is, walking in a Garden, perplexed.

“Where are you?”

I’ve often heard it said, “You know if God is asking you a question, he’s not asking for his sake, he’s asking for your sake.” While I can appreciate that sentiment, I have a hard time believing that, especially in Genesis 3. That response is like the deus ex machina, the easy solution to a hard problem to which a writer couldn’t find a way out. I think these responses are born from fear, because we can’t have a God who is unpredictable. It’s easier to keep our minds contained around a God who knows every single detail. And a God we can comprehend is a God we can control, even if we wouldn’t admit it. It’s this fear that, I believe, led to doctrines like the Perpetual Virginity of Mary. We were so afraid of the possibility of Jesus having some sort of imperfection, that we had to invent in illogical, or at least unnecessary, doctrine about Mary.

When YHWH asked the question, “Where are you?” I think he meant it.

Adam and Eve and God shared a union that echoed Triunion. When Adam ate the forbidden fruit, that union was broken. Something within the fellowship of God and humanity was ruptured, and Adam was lost to himself, and to God.

Maybe he knew exactly which tree to find Adam and Eve cowering behind, but that’s not really important, is it? What does it matter if God knew, physically, where Adam was? In the moment they ate from the Tree, God experienced loss. Adam and Eve disappeared from his line of vision, and he went looking for him.

Adam, and through him, humanity, had run away from home, and God grew…nervous? Scared? Anxious?

The Fall was rebellion, but it was more than that. It was losing our way. Adam wandered away from Life, from Union, and into death and fear and loneliness.

And God felt it.

He knew that Adam and Eve were now in danger. Yes, they had done something wrong. Yes, they had disobeyed God. But these were children. They were learning about life and existence along the way just like we do. And God is a Father. He’s a good Father. And good father’s don’t unleash their full rage on their children when they make mistakes. Adam/Humanity would have to bear the consequences of that decision, but I don’t think God was marching through the Garden saying, “Adam! When I find you, so help me!”

I think God was scared for the children he loved so dearly because they were now lost in an existence that was bent on their destruction. And when they fell out of his line of vision, his heart dropped, and he did what any loving Father would do, he dropped everything and went searching for them.

My Pointless Twenties

Tonight I will start my first day of school, “real” school I suppose. When I am finished some years from now I will have a degree of some sort. Most likely in Theology or Literature or both. Over the last few years I have had a number of friends go to college, many of them are returning to finish degrees. I am starting from the ground up. Katrina and I are both starting today. She is sitting in her first class, math I believe, at this moment. As we told people we were going to college everyone was excited for us. Unfortunately the excitement was not the loudest word. The sharpest words sounded something like, “It’s about time!”

As I approach my thirties I have more and more friends from IHOP going to school and starting careers. The mantra of the exodus is one of contempt and disappointment. “Why did I wait so long?” “Why did I waste so many years of my life here?” Mind you, most of my friends are younger than I and arrived at IHOP later than I did.

I moved to Kansas City to be a part of the International House of Prayer when I was 21. It was an exciting time for me and for the ministry. There had been a sudden surge in numbers and it seemed God was doing something special. We were called, as 18 to 25 year olds, to “waste your lives on Jesus.” The messages were inspiring, we were stirred and pledged our twenties to serve Jesus in the place of prayer and worship. We fasted, I tried fasting, we sang, we prayed, we evangelized. Anything we could do for the glory of God, that the Lamb might receive the reward of his suffering, we did. Eight years went by, more for a handful, less for most, and we realized something. We had wasted our lives. We at least wasted our twenties.

Who knew there would be so much regret at the end of that time?

Someone brought to Katrina’s and my attention that Kansas City has a high percentage of successful thirty-somethings. They started working hard in their early twenties and now have high paying careers and businesses. While they were busy starting businesses and families we were sitting in an ugly room doing nothing.

As I thought about this something dawned on me. They told us from the very beginning we were wasting our lives. None of this was hidden from us. They told us we were laying aside our twenties and careers and comforts to pursue something bigger and eternal while the world would continue to build its fame and fortunes and comforts. We were called explicitly to a life of simplicity. Why should we be offended when we find ourselves at thirty exactly where our leaders said we would be? It’s been said that we were taken advantage of, that we were to impressionable in our post-graduate stage to know what we were getting into. There may be a measure of truth to that. Maybe if I had known I would be trying to go back to school and start a career from the very bottom at age twenty-nine I would have chosen to start college then.

Yet, there is so much of who I am now that I would not be if I had not “wasted” my years at IHOP. There is so much I have learned about God and about myself and about the world while at IHOP that I love and would not change. I learned the value of prayer, the preeminence of the Scripture, I was shown that God is truly is love and that he wants to show me that, to let me feel it. Among the most important things I gained, as if these things can be quantified, was the high value for the Sermon on the Mount. While so many people my age are running from the commands of God, the words of Jesus in the Sermon remind me again and again that this is the only sure way of building a sturdy life. He reminds me when I feel lazy that the way of destruction is broad and easy and many travel there.

I have spent countless hours in prayer and worship. My time in the presence of the Lord has formed me like nothing else. I know, because I know myself, that if I were not involved in this ministry I would not have spent anywhere near this much time with God, either in a corporate or private setting. How can I regret spending so much time, sometimes hours a day, worshiping Jesus and praying for the world? The only way this can be a waste is if I believe Jesus doesn’t exist or doesn’t answer prayer. (I can’t help but wonder if that is the real reason for the offense in people’s hearts and not the fact that they are approaching thirty and they have no career.)

Don’t mistake this for a life free of disappointment. My God has there been disappointment. Things haven’t gone according to plan. I thought things would happen, great things and small things, that have not happened. In my first year I was expecting a great revival to sweep Kansas City. I was expecting some sort of persecution to happen in the United States. Neither of these happened. Then again in 2009 it looked like something huge was going to happen. Thing is, something did happen, but we were so busy looking into the future we couldn’t appreciate what God was doing then. That is not God’s fault or IHOP’s fault. It’s not as if the leadership was not disappointed that things didn’t escalate from there either. We helpless, hapless twenty year olds are not alone in this.

Welcome to life.

There was a year of my life, 2007-2008, where I was pretty sure Jesus was not real. It was the most depressing time of my life. Nothing made sense. I didn’t make sense. But it was the perseverance I was taught at IHOP that lead me through the time of wilderness, a term used so often here, that kept me pushing through to the other side. When I came out I was loving Jesus more, leaning on my Beloved, as it is said, and not offended at his leadership. Whereas I have seen far too many leave the faith because of disappointment.

There are so many worse ways to waste your life.

All in all, I am grateful for my time at IHOP. It’s certainly not over, just different. I have no regrets spending my twenties here. There is nothing in me that wishes I could go back and try another path. I feel so much more prepared for school now than I did at eighteen. I am certain that I would be a different person if I did not waste my life here, and not for the better. Of course this life isn’t for everyone. Jesus has different places for people to spend their twenties and sometimes that is in school so they can have careers when they’re thirty. But that wasn’t the path he had for me. I would encourage you, if you are one of those who wasted their twenties here, to think about this differently, especially if you feel disappointed in your decision. I moved here because I heard the voice of the Lord, whatever that means. It was a nudge, a desire, a leading.

I am glad I followed that leading.

The Promise Maker

 

Promises.

 All make them. All receive them. But many are the broken promises that lay shattered around us. From the smallest and simplest promise to do someone a favor to the deepest and greatest promise to stay true to love. Each carries the weight of trust. A promise fulfilled is foundation of trust built. A promise broken can be the unraveling of an entire life. We all know too intimately the pain of broken promises from the smallest to the greatest and some of us are indeed unraveled because of the broken word. The pain has driven some to wish that no one would promise, that the promiser would do instead of say. Those of us who have broken promises are often resigned to nodding our heads in consent, or saying simply, “I will.”

 Above all promise-makers and promise-breakers, promise-recipients and promise-dodgers, sits the Lord of Creation, Giver of the greatest promises. Standing above all, we look through the broken promises at him and wonder, “Can I trust him?” We have heard the sayings, “He is the perfect Father. He is like the most caring Mother. He is the most abandoned Lover. He is the best of Friends.”The very words meant to give us comfort often are the very words that make us most uneasy. These nouns describe the ones who have broken promises, the sources of our pain and distrust.

 Do you trust God?

 Can you trust him?

 Will you trust him?

 If he is like father or mother or lover or friend than no, he cannot and should not be trusted. What if, though, he was not simply like a father but is a father, not like a mother but is a mother, lover, and friend? Is it possible the pain from these promise breakers is so acute because we sense deeply that things ought not be this way? Does the disappointment awaken a mythic nostalgia in us for a time when yes was yes and no, no?

When we look into the eternal past we see him sitting there, crowned. Before there is anything or anyone else in the world he is there dwelling in Triadic unity. He is true. He is true to himself. There is no deceit. There is no broken promise. There is no darkness in him at all.

She’s Just a 2-Bit Hooker

We have been traveling through the book of Hosea in my small group. The first three chapters are a familiar story for many people. It starts out simple enough, and like most of the Prophets. It names the prophet as well as his father and tells the names of the kings under whom he prophesied. Then, like the other prophets, he says, “When the LORD…spoke…” but here, it takes a surprising turn.

Instead of giving Hosea an oracle, he gives him a shocking command, “Go, take yourself a wife of whoredom, and have children of whoredom…” Never before had a prophet, or any man of God, been given such startling direction. The reason? “For the land commits great whoredom by forsaking the LORD.” And, “Go again, love a woman who is loved by another man and is an adulteress, even as the LORD loves the children of Israel…”

Through the years, in hearing this book talked about, the sympathy always goes to Hosea. “I can’t believe God would do that to Hosea.” Many ancient teachers refused to believe this was a real story, relegating it to a parable that Hosea told, because it was inconceivable that a holy God would command thus. But through my first day of teaching Hosea i found myself not grieving for Hosea, but for Gomer, the wife turned whore.

I began asking myself, “Who was Gomer?” and i realized that God wasn’t merely telling a story through her, not merely exploiting her as so many had. He was rescuing her.

The story goes that Gomer was not a prostitute when Hosea married her, but would become such afterward. What is it that makes young women give their bodies away to men who care nothing for them? Why do so many women give themselves to abusers when they can have someone who will love them? It usually has something to do with abuse, often sexual. Ancient Israeli culture was hyper-sexualized and women were valued for their physical beauty and sexual prowess. Sound familiar. Temple prostitution was to Israel what pornography is to America. Fame, beauty, self-esteem, and money could all be had by selling yourself in sex-rites. But trauma is always what leads a woman down this road.

Enter Yahweh, the great redeemer. He has been watching. He was been waiting for the right moment. Hosea is ready. He brings Gomer to Hosea’s eye and says to Hosea, “This is the one whom my soul delights in. Go get her. Rescue her. She’s in pain. She’s been abused. She needs a redeemer. Love her like I love her.”

Hosea does. First, he marries her, taking her out of her shame filled life and family and bringing her into his own destiny as a holy one of God, as a saint. She turns, she falls. She sells herself, not believing she is worthy to be the wife of a holy prophet. She is abducted and sold into sex-slavery. She was using sex to fill her painful void, now it turned on her and enslaved her.

Yahweh comes to Hosea, “Go again, give your love to Gomer. I love her and I will redeem her.” Hosea goes to her pimp and asks to buy her back. To the pimp, she is worth next to nothing. To Hosea and to Yahweh, she is worth everything. Hosea buys her back and tells her, “You must live as mine and give yourself to no one else. I, also, will belong only to you.”

The book makes no more mention of her betrayal. It seems that Gomer stayed faithful for the rest of her days. God finished his work. He saw something in Gomer that no one else, likely not even Hosea, could. Under the filth, then under the pain, he saw beauty. Under the whore he saw the beauty of purity and holiness. Instead of stoning her, as the Law commanded, Yahweh, the Giver of the Law, redeemed her, saved her, from her pain and dirt.

May our eyes see like he sees.