(considering) 8:28

When I was all ready to comment on the Way of the Master v. Rational Response Squad debate, somebody beat me to the punch. The above link will take you there.

That said, I would like to accent that “science” is not itself a neutral term, especially as the claims of modern science are themselves based on a series of worldviews and one major fallacy (the fallacy being highly useful in science, but not so useful in day to day life). The worldview is that the universe is pretty much as we perceive it to be. Of course, 15 minutes reading a Kant primer, or a work of most epistemologists shows this to be a radically simplistic statement (the truth is that we can only talk about the the universe as we experience it, whether that has any relation to reality or not cannot be objectively tested, and even that is debated).

The fallacy is that if something cannot be proven to be true (or at least fit with the evidence that we can prove as true), one must assume it not to be. Of course, this would wreak havoc on modern society as people sought to test every contractual transaction (how do you KNOW that the bank is holding your money for you and will give it back when you ask? How do you KNOW that your wife or husband will remain faithful? How do you KNOW that there was a real moon landing or that the twin towers fell because of a terrorist attack?). So something that is eminently useful (solid skepticism) in science becomes a great deal more problematic in general life. Indeed, as anyone who has seen “the Matrix” (or read Rene Descartes) can tell you, there are possible reasons to disbelieve the “real” world.

God comes through tacit knowledge, that which you know because you know, and provides a basis for other knowledge. We can seek understanding and respect of one another, but conviction of a differing point of view comes through a different channel (whether of Atheism or Christian Theism). There must be an epiphany, or as I would say, revelation.

Next time, after this excursis into the realms of unbelief, I will talk about a Christian heirarchy of love (yes, there is one).

Hey everybody,

Well, you guys all get to hear me rant again. Noting some of the replies I’ve gotten on my last entry, I’m thankful to note that some are still reading me, even as I fail in the discipline of writing. Thank you all for your long suffering.

Anyway, tonight I attended the convocation/awards night for the small seminary I attend. I was surprised to learn that I’m the top student academically in year 2 (yay). Which really did surprise me, though I’m glad that God granted me a good year, and seems to have aided my understanding some.

The keynote address was given by the Rev. Dr. Herbert O’Driscoll. For those of you who don’t know who that is, he’s a modern Anglican minister and hymn writer. In many ways, what he had to say was good. I’d say much of it was very good, including a point where he used an astute reading of scripture to better understand Jesus’ wilderness experience.

Things went a little downhill for me in other parts of what he said. My biggest difficulty sprang from one of his points near the beginning. He told those gathered of his two loves. The first love was his wife of many years. The second, I thought was going to be the Lord Jesus Christ (which would have been an apt parallel). As a result, when he said “the Church” I was a little confused.

To get what I’m referring to, think a little on what the Church is. It is called “the body of Christ” and it is made up of all believers. That means that when you say “I love the Church” it can mean either that you love the body of Christ, or that you love well, yourself (if you think yourself a believer). To be a proper parallel (apples and apples so to speak) he should have started by saying that his two loves were his 35 year marriage and the Church. Of course, he might find himself sleeping on the couch tonight, as his wife would be a little ticked that the marriage was more important than she was.

One does not become a good husband or wife by loving and building up “the marriage”, they become a good spouse by loving and building up THEIR SPOUSE. Similarly, one does not become a good Christian by building up your Christianity, but by focusing on and loving CHRIST.

I think a great many of the Church’s problems would be avoided by simply understanding that distinction. My friend’s caricature of a fundamentalist hypocrite Christian makes the point well. If Uriel (who commented on my last post) loved Jesus more than she loved being right, or being a Christ follower, or having a Jpod, or damning people to eternal hellfire, she’d be a lot less hypocritical. After all, all those other things would simply no longer be the point. The point would be Jesus.

Similarly, the other mistake the speaker seems to have made would have been avoided.

In referring to the High Priestly prayer of Jesus (as recorded in John’s Gospel, Chapter 17), he noted that Jesus prayed that his followers would all be one. He took this to mean that Christians should not dismember the body of Christ by separating. From an exegetical perspective, I believe he forgot the context. Jesus was praying to God, not giving a command to his disciples. The reason is simple. Unity does not come from the work of believers, but is a gift of God. Jesus was asking the only person who could grant unity for unity.

As we Christians seek to follow, serve, and be like Jesus (because we love Him above all else), we become unified as a gift of God (see my earlier post on community). Unity is not an institutional thing, it’s a Jesus thing.

This leads me to a very very controversial statement. I do not believe that the body of Christ is separated. Schism DOES NOT EXIST.

I think there are many separate expressions of Christ, but among each of them there are those who are in Christ, and thus are my sisters and brothers in Christ. They love Jesus, they are kin. They differ on loads of stuff, from baptism, to eucharistic doctrine, to whether they have rock music on their ipods, but they are in the Church.

Now this does not mean that all people who claim to be Christian are, far from it. The problem is that I cannot make blanket statements about who is of the Church and who is not. I can only say that some people are in sin and some are not. If you embrace sin (for which Jesus suffered and died), you obviously have something in your life to deal with, as hurting people and loving them don’t fit together very well.

Similarly, if I separate from an institution because the institution is keeping me from loving Jesus, I do not thereby separate from the Church. The question is whether I love Jesus or not. Indeed, if I stay in the institution, and ignore Jesus, I have committed schism anyway.

Before I conclude, I need to add another proviso. If you leave all bodies of believers, I would say that you also have an action at odds with claiming to love Jesus. Fellow believers reflect Christ to you, and really are the body of Christ. So if you don’t love other believers, you do not love the body of Christ. It also should be noted that in any relationship, if you are unwilling to love the friends of the person you love, your relationship is headed for trouble.

So the conclusion: The Church is made up of those who love Jesus. Institutions are largely irrelevant to the question of whether you love Jesus. Institutions (when good) are there to help you love Jesus, but they are not Jesus. Thus we cannot dismember the body of Christ, we can only possibly be included or excluded from him, through love of Him or the lack thereof. In either case, you don’t split the Church at all by not loving Jesus, you simply cease to be part of it (regardless of how often you fill a pew, or fail to).

So the upshot is that Christianity is a question of where your heart is. If you love Jesus, you are Christian, if you do not love Jesus, you are an unbeliever. All the trappings are irrelevant to that question.

It’s a lot like faith and works when you come to think of it. After all, faith is what saves you from hell, not works. Works are simply an indicator of faith (though not always an accurate one). Similarly, it is love of Jesus that makes you Christian. If you love Jesus, you enjoy spending time with others who love Jesus, and help you to love Jesus more, but that only indicates a love of Jesus (not always accurately).

Anyway, I’ve rambled long enough, and honestly am beginning to repeat myself. So I’ll end here.

In Christ,
– Steve

So, I was talking to a friend of mine about belief structures, and stuff. She was supporting the Atheist position, and I was pointing out my distaste for atheism, borne mostly of my disdain for the many athiests I know. Generally speaking, people don’t get too enamoured of you when you call them stupid, deluded, and irrational. Especially when you seem unable to explain why besides labelling all religious inferences “fallacies”, but I digress.

Of course, I should probably realize that not all atheists are jerks, it just seems that the few willing to talk to me about faith are.

That said, I was reading “Blue Like Jazz recently (a good book generally). In it the author tells of an incident where he and some fellow Christians took the time to apologize for the way in which Christians misrepresent Jesus to those around them. He also pointed out how the word Christian seems a little misused of late, since people tend to associate strange things like killing people and making fun of others with “Christian”. The author says he now uses the “follower of Christ” moniker rather than the much maligned “Christian”.

So I wonder if I’m not guilty of doing to atheists what some of them do to Christians. Just because the majority of atheists I talk to seem to be judgmental arrogant bigots doesn’t mean all of them are (or even that the ones I talk to are), or that atheism is a faith held only by the most arrogant of people. As a follower of Christ, one to whom forgiveness was given when I most definitely did not deserve it, I think it behooves me to give others the benefit of the doubt. It seems that may be what Christ meant when he commanded me to “love [my] enemy and do good to those who persecute [me]”.

I didn’t do the crusades, but some people see my faith that way, and not all atheists think the religious are inherently stupid.

In the end, don’t consign people to approbation because some people who agree with them are jerks. If I want people to give a good hearing to Jesus, I need to have the humility and honesty to face the blindness in myself.

“But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus, his Son, purifies us from all sin. ” I John 1:7

Normally, I’m a little averse to quoting a single passage of scripture and then reflecting on it. In many cases, it can lead to some pretty awful violence against the meaning of a passage. In this case, though, I think I’m justified.

In the middle of John’s diatribe on the need for people to live in keeping with the call of Jesus Christ on their lives, he puts in a very (seemingly) odd sentence; the one noted above.

I think both the sentence, and its placement in I John are important. The central message of the passage is that we follow Jesus in all we do. We cannot claim to be in unity with Jesus, and then walk in darkness, but at the same time, we cannot pretend we have no sin. Instead, we are called to confess and repent of our sins, and as a result get cleansed from all unrighteousness.

In all of that, John makes the statement that if we walk in the light, as He is in the light, we have fellowship with one another.

From what I’ve been learning in my classes, this is counter-intuitive. Many people would claim that the main thing we need to do is to be intentional in the Church about “building community”. That we are called as a people to build accepting places where people feel free and accepted and loved. In that context, they claim, we can build the kingdom of God.

While I am sympathetic to the idea, I honestly think that such is a fools errand, and I think the scripture leads me to that conclusion (we’ll see more of this at some later point when I finally deal with the non-egalitarian nature of love, as it’s reflected in Christ’s quote of the Shema Israel). Most clearly, this is taught from the above text.

My contention: Community is not built, it just happens.

Now, this does NOT mean that there isn’t work involved in the proper functioning of a healthy community, but that the point of that work is not the community itself, the community is a side effect to the seeking of the primary goal. This is why I disagree wo vehemently with people who talk about “The Kingdom of God” as the ultimate goal. It’s not. The goal is the glory of the King, and as we seek that glory for the king, we become part of the kingdom.

As it says above, as we walk in the light, the effect is that we have fellowship one with another. It does not say we have fellowship one with another so that we may walk in the light. Thus the work in building a Christian community lies not in how well we build a community, but in how well we build Christians. It is how we manage to edify one another, and build each other up in following God and avoiding the “deceitfulness of sin” (see Hebrews 3:12-13), that makes us community, as we become closer in our seeking after Jesus.

This isn’t surprising. Think about a good dating relationship. We don’t maintain a good relationship by focussing on the relationship itself, but by focussing on the people we love, and their good. My (as of yet non-existant) girlfriend shouldn’t particularly impressed if I talk about how valuable our relationship is unless it’s valuable because I find HER valuable. The point isn’t the relationship, the relationship is an effect of the point.

This is in stark contrast to the old adage that one can be “so heavenly minded that they are no earthly good”. Indeed, at least as far as community is concerned, we are earthly good in precise relation to how “heavenly” (Godward) minded we are. It is only as we are Godly minded that we develop Christian community properly, and as we fail in community, it is because we have somehow been hardened by the deceitfulness of sin to not walk in the light. God promises as we walk in the light we have fellowship with one another. So if we have no fellowship with one another, some of us are simply not following Christ.

This brings me to my title. The question is not whether or not we meet a boundary, but whether or not we swear fealty to a king. Lamin Sanneh in a short book (of which I cannot remember the title) points out just this point. We are Christian insofar as we are aimed at Christ. Not in how many points of doctrine we agree on. Indeed, someone can be aimed at God, though very far away from Him, and be more Christian than someone who adheres to many of the doctrines, but whose heart is aimed away from God.

This does not mean that doctrine is unimportant. On the contrary, it is vital. This is how we tell if we’re aimed at God, as it is God’s revelation in Scripture that shows us what it is we are aimed for. Namely God, and specifically the God we see incarnated in Jesus Christ. Yet the question is not whether we hold to the doctrines, but whether we hold to the God that those doctrines describe. We love the doctrine because we love the God they describe.

So then the question of where our hearts are is inestimably important both for eternity, and for our lives here. It is MOST important for eternal reasons, as it is God that is of ultimate importance, but if we do not see God as ultimately important, we will find even our temporal goal of community is unattainable. This is why we seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness (note: not just the Kingdom of God). All the other goals come from that one, not vice versa.

This is why, in the more mundane facets of reality, Churches must be made up of primarily believers. Why marriages must be between believers, why the closest friendships should be between believers. In each case, the lack of believers means that the Churches, the marriages, and the friendships are doomed to failure. It’s why if we love our friends, we MUST tell them about Jesus and pray that they come to faith (as its only through belief that our friendship has any chance of lasting). It’s why Churches must have both preaching for conversion and church discipline, as in order for the church to survive, people in it must see and savour Jesus above all else. It’s why we should seek to marry believers (if we marry), as it is only through Jesus that a marriage can thrive properly, as it is through Christ that we have fellowship one with another.

Indeed, as with all things, our relationships as Christians are dependant on our relationship with Jesus