John G. Stackhouse Jr.'s Blog, page 3
December 8, 2024
Advent II: What Is Biblical Peace?
Wonderful Counselor, the Mighty God, the Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace.
The great Handelian setting of Isaiah’s prophecy (9:6) in “Messiah” thunders out each Advent season from choirs around the world. These titles, attributed to a glorious ancient monarch, come to be attributed by Christians to Jesus. Sometime we’ll work through all four of them, but this week it’s time to focus on the last: Prince of Peace.
The second week of Advent in the Western Church traditionally is devoted to peace. Given a world perpetually at war, the first kind of peace any of us think about is a cessation of armed hostilities.
The second kind is merely the absence of unarmed hostilities, especially among the children this time of year. “A little peace and quiet, please!” I will mildly call out from my reading chair as the adorable little angels go about their play.
The third kind, however, hits the jackpot. Biblical peace is not merely the absence of war and not merely the absence of noise. It is the presence of flourishing. “Peace” isn’t an empty word, a pleasant void. It is a full word: of glorious fulfilment.
Shalom is the Hebrew antecedent to our word “peace,” and shalom means everything existing as it could be and should be. Each flower blooms with unspoiled beauty. Each waterfall roars with unrestrained intensity. Each animal grows to full maturity. Each person reaches her maximum potential.
Not only are individuals to flourish, moreover, but every relationship and every system and every society functions as it ought. Romances, friendships, business partnerships, political alliances—all are conducted with honour, fidelity, and genuine care for the other. Families, churches, organizations, governments, ecosystems—all hum along without friction, foolishness, fraud, or fear.
Above all—and in all—God’s Spirit courses with life and love. All is well.
That is what it means for Isaiah to prophesy about Jesus: He will be the Ruler who brings shalom to all the earth. So said the angels also to the astonished shepherds outside Bethlehem: “Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace to those on whom his favor rests” (Matthew 2:14). Shalom will come to all who are favoured by God, to all who will encounter Jesus and receive him gladly.
Jesus himself promised peace to his worried followers: “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled and do not be afraid” (John 14:27). Jesus’ peace: What a great gift!
How does Jesus’ peace actually come to us, however? Many of us, even longtime Christians, do not experience this time of year as a time of peace. The world certainly seems riven with strife, not blanketed in peace. What do we make of these promises?
Let’s say what we can in this short space.
Jesus’ peace comes first indeed to those “on whom his favour rests.” And how does Jesus’ favour land on his disciples? In the gift of the Holy Spirit.
Immediately before Jesus promises his peace, he promises the Spirit: “The Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you all things and will remind you of everything I have said to you” (John 14:26). Jesus’ peace isn’t just a promise: it’s a Person.
The Apostle Paul promises peace as well, and in similar terms: “The Lord is near. Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 4:5–7).
The peace of God comes to us not in some vague form—like a kind of mood-enhancing drug flowing into our spiritual bloodstream—but in the definite, personal form of Christ Jesus. He is the Prince of Peace. And God gives us the Holy Spirit who filled our Lord and who connects us to him now as the peacemaker in our hearts.
That is why Paul can describe this peace as “beyond all understanding”—or, as Jesus himself said, “not as the world gives.” It is the peace that comes from committing our lives, and especially our fears and needs, to Almighty God who shows us his friendly face especially in the face of Jesus.
This peace “transcends all understanding” because God transcends all understanding, “for it is God who works in you to will and to act in order to fulfill his good purpose” (Philippians 2:13). We can lean back on God: on God’s power, God’s wisdom, and God’s love.
We can have peace to the extent that we have the resources available for our challenges. If I’m going outside to play hockey with five-year-olds, I’m pretty peaceful. If I’m taking on even a local team of 14-year-olds, my anxiety increases in proportion to how much older I am than 14. (Answer: too much.)
I face a debt, and then God comes along and says, “Here’s a bank. Will that be enough?” Well, yes, Lord, it will.
I face an illness, and then God comes along and says, “How about I resurrect you into a a glorious body that will never die?” Sounds good, Lord.
I face a broken relationship, and then God comes along and says, “I have reconciled family members, friends, even whole nations, and I will one day reconcile the entire earth. I can help you with your problem.” I daresay you can, Lord.
To be sure, suppose God isn’t giving us a bank, or splendid immortality, or healed relationships—at least, not right now. Suppose furthermore that none of these gifts appear under this year’s Christmas tree. We can yet be at peace.
Why? Again, because of Jesus—God’s gift to us at the first Christmas and the prince of shalom: “He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all—how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things?” (Romans 8:32).
All things. That’s the language of shalom. Hang in there. Peace can be in your hearts now because peace is coming for the entire world. And until it does, God will take care of you so that you can fulfill your calling before he calls you finally home.
What does it mean to have shalom in your heart right now, even as the world outside is far from peaceful?
It means, as the great American theologian Jonathan Edwards put it, that your soul becomes so deep that it isn’t ruffled by passing gusts of momentary disturbance. Unflappable. Think of how Jesus was always poised—no matter what was happening around him and to him.
Shalom also means resilient. One’s soul quickly resumes its proper shape after having to flex to deal with genuine problems, even after being twisted or torn by today’s insults and injuries.
The peace of Christ means that your nervous system isn’t jacked up by today’s challenge, and especially that your mind isn’t racing over tomorrow’s worry. Instead of going from zero to ten whenever you’re upset, you feel a “4” toward a problem that is a “4.” You see things and feel things as they actually are.
It means that you experience genuine faith and hope and love, you manifest the fruit of the Spirit, you enjoy the qualities of “life in the era to come” (which is an alternate translation of the “eternal life” so commonly promised in the Gospel according to John).
The key is connection: connection with the God “from whom all blessings flow.” Whatever is going on outside, your inner world is centred on God and God’s Kingdom. It is inspired by the loving face of Jesus. And it is filled with the steadying, energizing, and strengthening presence of the Holy Spirit.
“There is no pit so deep that God's love is not deeper still.” Corrie ten Boom’s wisdom, won through enduring the Nazi oppression of her native Netherlands and then the misery of a concentration camp, rings out a peal of Biblical peace.
Why doesn’t God just send Jesus back today to sort things out? Why do we have to keep developing inner peace and make what peace we can around us when the world continues to burn and writhe and harm?
God knows that there is no point sending Jesus to the world as conquering King, as the sort of person Isaiah likely had in mind, until we’re ready to be his subjects. The Prince of Peace must be able to count on us as peacemakers and peacekeepers, and we’re a long way from that yet.
So God puts first things first: change the heart, change the life, change the society, change the world. Then the kingdom of peace can come at last—and last.
Yes, we can and should work with God to change society and change the world as much as we can before Jesus returns. We don’t have to wait for everyone to be converted before we tackle culture- and planet-wide problems, and we shouldn’t wait.
But there is no way we can lastingly succeed in any of our ventures if our hearts aren’t right. We humans will just spoil whatever new order we manage to construct.
That’s why the gospel imperative starts with each individual: repent and believe. That’s why it extends to the church next: “Let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, since as members of one body you were called to peace” (Colossians 3:15).
Let’s give our anxieties to the great God who loved us all at Christmas in the gift of Jesus. Let’s encourage the world to do so the same during this Advent season of penitence.
And then get busy as his faithful servants, assured and energized by the Holy Spirit. Then we will see what God’s favour looks like.
Shalom!
For a mini-course on Christmas—and for many other resources for the season as well, visit us here.
December 1, 2024
Advent I: What Is Biblical Hope?
Hope seems always to be the least understood of the famous trio of “faith, hope, and
love” (I Corinthians 13:13). What is hope, and what role ought hope to play in the
Christian life?
Advent, it turns out, is the perfect season in which to ask about hope.
In everyday parlance, hope is an uncertain aspiration. If we know something good is
coming our way, that’s one thing. If we merely hope it’s in our future, that’s quite
another.
Christmas presents, for instance. Most kids North America, as in many other places
around the world, are sure they are going to get something good for Christmas.
Whether they get the particular gift they hope for, however, is far less than certain.
Maybe, maybe not. That’s hope.
When the Apostle speaks of faith, hope, and love in I Corinthians 13, he focuses on love
as “the greatest” of the three. Love, however, depends on both faith and hope.
Faith in Biblical terms is an attitude of trust, and pre-eminently trust in God. It is the
basic posture of the wise human (the fool simply says there is no God). We recognize
that God is great and God is good, so it makes sense to commit ourselves to God. Faith
is that ongoing decision to depend on God, walk with God, do God’s will, and accept
whatever God sends as ultimately for the best.
Love in Biblical terms is caring for the other, seeking the other’s welfare, whether it be
loving God, loving our neighbour, or loving the rest of creation. The divine command to
love isn’t the command to summon up warm feelings of affection for strangers or even
enemies—as if we could. It is to encounter strangers or even enemies and to try to
bless them however we can.
What, then, about hope? Hope in Biblical terms is not merely optimism, not merely a
sunny disposition that somehow things will work out right. Hope in the Bible is not
looking for silver linings in otherwise horrible events, nor is it simply choosing to believe
that things will work out when they seem manifestly not to be working out.
Hope in the Bible—whether the hope modeled by Abraham or the hope modeled by
Paul—is distinctly Jewish. By that I mean it is distinctly both historial and prophetic. And
by that I mean that hope means both looking back and looking forward so that one looks
differently at the present.
The people of God in the Bible are constantly told to remember. Remember what God
has promised, yes, but also remember what God has done. Talk, after all, is cheap—at
least, without performance. But Yhwh promised to make a nation out of one man,
Abraham, and he did. Yhwh promised to rescue a nation under one man, Moses, and
he did. Yhwh promised to deliver Israel through one man, Gideon, and he did.
“I am Yhwh your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery,” begin
the Ten Commandments. Over and over again, the ancient prophets remind Israel that
God can be trusted now because of what God did then. Israel can hope in God—as the
psalmists keep telling themselves and the rest of God’s people to do—because of what
God has done in the past.
Indeed, “’I know the plans I have for you,’ declares the Lord, ‘plans to prosper you and
not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future’” (Jeremiah 29:11). We can hope
in God now also because of what God has promised to do in the future.
Advent & Christmas Spiritual Reflections (Free!)
These short biblical reflections encourage and guide us to prepare ourselves as we also prepare for the celebration of the first and second comings (“advent”) of Jesus.
A collection of Advent writings to support your spiritual journey this Christmas season. Sign up here!
The Bible is a story with a happy ending—that never ends. In the Old Testament, the
story ends with the messianic kingdom of everlasting shalom. In the New Testament,
the story ends with the messianic kingdom of everlasting shalom embracing the whole
world. The hope God promised through Jeremiah is envisioned by John in the last two
chapters in the Bible. In that glorious passage believers find a compelling vision of what
is to come, a vision that reaches back to console our fears, stiffen our resolve, and
energize our efforts.
Hope is the stem that connects the root of faith to the flower and fruit of love. Hope
directs our living, day by day, on the basis of where we have been, and what God has
done for us and in us. Note: not just in the Bible, but in each of our lives. Each Christian
should keep a written treasury of God’s work in our lives to regularly remember.
Hope also directs our living, day by day, on the basis of where we are going, and what
God will do for us and in us. We do well to cultivate a vivid and lively sense of what
living in the era to come will really be like, since, as the Bible makes clear, that life to
come will make entirely worthwhile whatever we experience now.
This hope, furthermore, is not wishful thinking. It is not merely an effort of will, not a
choice of the spiritually heroic. Biblical hope is, so to speak, merely logical. See what
God has done and said in the past, and what God has promised to do and say in the
future. Then just act—and hope—accordingly.
Yes, in faith, hope, and love there is a crucial element of will. We each choose—and
choose daily, even hourly—whether to trust God, hope in God, and love as God
commands us to love. But hope is not merely the adoption of a positive mental attitude.
It is not fundamentally our accomplishment.
Hope instead is most basically a gift: the gift of receiving from God the testimony of the
past and the prophecy of the future. Hope is a function of our relationship with God: an
entailment of all we know and experience as we walk with God when filled with the Holy
Spirit.
Hope simply makes sense. And in that sense our hope in God is more certain, more to
be counted on, than anything we currently see and touch in our world. We can rely on
God more than on anything and everything on which we normally set our hopes and
dreams: such as, say, our banks, or our governments, or even our loved ones.
Hope is expectancy.
I not only expect to get something from God on Christmas
morning, but I expect to get the best from God every morning.
Christians look back especially to the first advent of Jesus and see God giving us the greatest gift he could. We likewise look forward especially to the second advent of Jesus and see God giving us all the rest:
“He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all—how will he not also,
along with him, graciously give us all things?” (Romans 8:32).
That is the hope of Advent and of Christmas—and it is Christmas every day for the
properly hopeful Christian.
The historical context of Christmas, including Christian and pagan traditions
the profound doctrine of the Incarnation
meaningful ways to celebrate Advent and Christmas
insights into the ongoing "War over Christmas"
Why Choose "Christmas 101"?Gain a deeper understanding of the Christmas story
Clarify common misconceptions about the holiday
Learn how to observe the season more meaningfully
Save 50% off with coupon code MINICOURSE50 Sign up here!
What is Biblical Hope?
Hope seems always to be the least understood of the famous trio of “faith, hope, and
love” (I Corinthians 13:13). What is hope, and what role ought hope to play in the
Christian life?
Advent, it turns out, is the perfect season in which to ask about hope.
In everyday parlance, hope is an uncertain aspiration. If we know something good is
coming our way, that’s one thing. If we merely hope it’s in our future, that’s quite
another.
Christmas presents, for instance. Most kids North America, as in many other places
around the world, are sure they are going to get something good for Christmas.
Whether they get the particular gift they hope for, however, is far less than certain.
Maybe, maybe not. That’s hope.
When the Apostle speaks of faith, hope, and love in I Corinthians 13, he focuses on love
as “the greatest” of the three. Love, however, depends on both faith and hope.
Faith in Biblical terms is an attitude of trust, and pre-eminently trust in God. It is the
basic posture of the wise human (the fool simply says there is no God). We recognize
that God is great and God is good, so it makes sense to commit ourselves to God. Faith
is that ongoing decision to depend on God, walk with God, do God’s will, and accept
whatever God sends as ultimately for the best.
Love in Biblical terms is caring for the other, seeking the other’s welfare, whether it be
loving God, loving our neighbour, or loving the rest of creation. The divine command to
love isn’t the command to summon up warm feelings of affection for strangers or even
enemies—as if we could. It is to encounter strangers or even enemies and to try to
bless them however we can.
What, then, about hope? Hope in Biblical terms is not merely optimism, not merely a
sunny disposition that somehow things will work out right. Hope in the Bible is not
looking for silver linings in otherwise horrible events, nor is it simply choosing to believe
that things will work out when they seem manifestly not to be working out.
Hope in the Bible—whether the hope modeled by Abraham or the hope modeled by
Paul—is distinctly Jewish. By that I mean it is distinctly both historial and prophetic. And
by that I mean that hope means both looking back and looking forward so that one looks
differently at the present.
The people of God in the Bible are constantly told to remember. Remember what God
has promised, yes, but also remember what God has done. Talk, after all, is cheap—at
least, without performance. But Yhwh promised to make a nation out of one man,
Abraham, and he did. Yhwh promised to rescue a nation under one man, Moses, and
he did. Yhwh promised to deliver Israel through one man, Gideon, and he did.
“I am Yhwh your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery,” begin
the Ten Commandments. Over and over again, the ancient prophets remind Israel that
God can be trusted now because of what God did then. Israel can hope in God—as the
psalmists keep telling themselves and the rest of God’s people to do—because of what
God has done in the past.
Indeed, “’I know the plans I have for you,’ declares the Lord, ‘plans to prosper you and
not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future’” (Jeremiah 29:11). We can hope
in God now also because of what God has promised to do in the future.
Advent & Christmas Spiritual Reflections (Free!)These short biblical reflections encourage and guide us to prepare ourselves as we also prepare for the celebration of the first and second comings (“advent”) of Jesus.
A collection of Advent writings to support your spiritual journey this Christmas season. Sign up here!
The Bible is a story with a happy ending—that never ends. In the Old Testament, the
story ends with the messianic kingdom of everlasting shalom. In the New Testament,
the story ends with the messianic kingdom of everlasting shalom embracing the whole
world. The hope God promised through Jeremiah is envisioned by John in the last two
chapters in the Bible. In that glorious passage believers find a compelling vision of what
is to come, a vision that reaches back to console our fears, stiffen our resolve, and
energize our efforts.
Hope is the stem that connects the root of faith to the flower and fruit of love. Hope
directs our living, day by day, on the basis of where we have been, and what God has
done for us and in us. Note: not just in the Bible, but in each of our lives. Each Christian
should keep a written treasury of God’s work in our lives to regularly remember.
Hope also directs our living, day by day, on the basis of where we are going, and what
God will do for us and in us. We do well to cultivate a vivid and lively sense of what
living in the era to come will really be like, since, as the Bible makes clear, that life to
come will make entirely worthwhile whatever we experience now.
This hope, furthermore, is not wishful thinking. It is not merely an effort of will, not a
choice of the spiritually heroic. Biblical hope is, so to speak, merely logical. See what
God has done and said in the past, and what God has promised to do and say in the
future. Then just act—and hope—accordingly.
Yes, in faith, hope, and love there is a crucial element of will. We each choose—and
choose daily, even hourly—whether to trust God, hope in God, and love as God
commands us to love. But hope is not merely the adoption of a positive mental attitude.
It is not fundamentally our accomplishment.
Hope instead is most basically a gift: the gift of receiving from God the testimony of the
past and the prophecy of the future. Hope is a function of our relationship with God: an
entailment of all we know and experience as we walk with God when filled with the Holy
Spirit.
Hope simply makes sense. And in that sense our hope in God is more certain, more to
be counted on, than anything we currently see and touch in our world. We can rely on
God more than on anything and everything on which we normally set our hopes and
dreams: such as, say, our banks, or our governments, or even our loved ones.
Hope is expectancy. I not only expect to get something from God on Christmas
morning, but I expect to get the best from God every morning. Christians look back
especially to the first advent of Jesus and see God giving us the greatest gift he could.
We likewise look forward especially to the second advent of Jesus and see God giving
us all the rest:
“He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all—how will he not also,
along with him, graciously give us all things?” (Romans 8:32).
That is the hope of Advent and of Christmas—and it is Christmas every day for the
properly hopeful Christian.
The historical context of Christmas, including Christian and pagan traditions
the profound doctrine of the Incarnation
meaningful ways to celebrate Advent and Christmas
insights into the ongoing "War over Christmas"
Why Choose "Christmas 101"?Gain a deeper understanding of the Christmas story
Clarify common misconceptions about the holiday
Learn how to observe the season more meaningfully
Save 50% off with coupon code MINICOURSE50 Sign up here!
November 21, 2024
Trump as Weather
I normally agree with C. S. Lewis. But when I wrote my first book on ethics, I felt I had to put Reinhold Niebuhr and Dietrich Bonhoeffer against him—a chapter on each of the three of them, two against one: in Making the Best of It: Following Christ in the Real World (2008).
I liked most of what I read by Lewis on how to live in the world. But I concluded that there was a conspicuous gap in his published thought on large-scale social structures, from cities to nations. He seemed almost hobbit-like in his resolute focus on the individual and one’s band of friends.
(Indeed, while Lewis was a faithful churchgoer, he seems to have been, at best, an unenthusiastic one. To my knowledge, he never gives attention to the local church, whether in general or his own—except by way of occasional examples of enduring mild irritation at worship.)
In my reading of Lewis, I found disappointing in such a capacious mind—one at home across multiple centuries of British history and literature—what seemed to me a pitifully narrow outlook on civic affairs:
The main practical task for most of us is not to give the Big Men advice about how to end our fatal economy—we have none to give and they wouldn’t listen—but to consider how we can live within it as little hurt and degraded as possible” (“Good Work and Good Works,” The World’s Last Night, 1952).
I acknowledged Lewis’s heritage as a Protestant in Ulster, dominated by hostile political forces both Irish and English. I acknowledged his wartime experience in the profligate and pointless First World War, dominated by fatal politics and foolish generals. I could understand someone with such a background shrinking from engaging large-scale civic matters.
Still, surely someone needs to think on a city-wide scale, on a national level! We can’t all just return to the Shire, get out the pipes, and sit by the fire.
This past week, Donald Trump nominated a number of members for his Cabinet. I merely needed to see names such as “Matt Gaetz” and “Tulsi Gabbard” to confirm that Mr. Trump was making good on his promises and threats. Not being enamored of any of those three individuals, my mood turned sour.
And for what?
It occurs to me that I should be regarding the incoming American administration the way most people through most of history have regarded a change of regime: like a change of the weather.
You can dislike the weather. You can think that the weather has made some bad choices. You can devoutly wish the weather would behave otherwise.
Dwelling on the weather, however—glueing yourself to the Weather Channel and subscribing to websites and magazines that explain weather systems and detail previous weather patterns—seems excessive. Unless your job requires such knowledge—forecasting, the actual study of meteorology, chaos research—it is difficult to justify a preoccupation with weather studies parallel to the way some of us follow politics.
I recently came across a forgotten stack of back issues of The New Yorker, a magazine I read assiduously. I tore through this stack pretty quickly, however, because in just four years a good third of the articles had become irrelevant: profiles of people who used to be influential but aren't anymore. The weather had changed.
To focus on politics the way many of us do is to distract ourselves from our callings, to deplete ourselves of the precious resources of attention and emotion, and to desert our posts in the vital work of the Kingdom of God.
Yes, I should know enough about politics and current events to exercise my responsibility to vote. Yes, I should know much more if God calls me into party politics, government service, social activism, and other pursuits requiring political knowledge.
Most of us most of the time, however, need to get more knowledgeable about marriage, and child reading, and our work, and church life, and our souls. Those are the spheres to which God has called us and those are the projects in which we can and must accomplish something good.
Reinhold Niebuhr clearly was called by God to reflect on Big Social Facts. Dietrich Bonhoeffer clearly was called by God to prophesy during a political and cultural crisis. Pastors, institutional leaders, politicians, and other Christians whose jobs require political savvy need to acquire . . . political savvy.
Most of the rest of us, though, need to leave politics mostly alone as the social bloodsport it has become for far too many. Who cares what you think about Donald Trump . . . or Justin Trudeau? Who should?
We need to know enough to cope with the weather—literal or political. Having gotten today’s weather report and noticed what (little) matters to us, let’s tend to our gardens, the part of creation over which God actually has given you and me responsibility.
And now that we’ve had this pleasant chat in front of the hearth, let’s check the weather and then get back to work.
November 15, 2024
Wisdom: Acquisition or Acquaintance?
King Solomon remains a disquieting figure. The man who extended his father David’s kingdom to its maximum extent and enriched it to its maximum glory also built the first great Israelite temple—while also building a sumptuous palace for himself.
The man who asked God above all for the gift of wisdom and gained an international reputation for sagacity became the very picture of the royal fool: multiplying wives and concubines with their accompanying alien entanglements both political and spiritual.
The man who gave us so many of the Biblical Proverbs concludes his Ecclesiastical reflections despairing of all his inquiries into wisdom as he returns to the most elementary principle of his people’s religion:
Of making many books there is no end, and much study wearies the body. Now all has been heard; here is the conclusion of the matter: Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the duty of all mankind.For God will bring every deed into judgment, including every hidden thing, whether it is good or evil.
This man named for peace (“Solomon” comes from “shalom”) seems to have enjoyed worldly peace in abundance, but testifies yet to an unquiet heart. He knows better—better than anyone else alive. And yet he is still the willing captive of sin, and therefore of foolishness.
Almost three millennia later, the English pastor Thomas Traherne mused upon wisdom and found it where Solomon could not have looked: in the person of Jesus Christ.
Jesus Christ is the Wisdom of the Father. . . . We should spend our days in studying Wisdom, that we might be like unto Him: that the treasures of Heaven are the treasures of Wisdom, and that they are hid in Christ.
—A Century of Meditations
Solomon’s exhortations to gain wisdom, in both Proverbs and Ecclesiastes, speak of wisdom as a commodity. To become exceedingly wise is to do what Solomon did: “ponder and search out and set in order many proverbs” (Ecclesiastes 12:9)—that is, to compose and research and edit collections of wise sayings.
To think of wisdom this way would suit Solomon fine. He could acquire wisdom just as he acquired wealth and women. But in the light of the New Testament, we realize that gaining wisdom is not to gain a commodity, as Solomon gained so many commodities.
To acquire wisdom is to become personally and deeply acquainted with Jesus Christ—so conversant with him, in fact, that one becomes very like Christ: a Christian. To study wisdom is to study Christ: not only his words, yes, but all of his life. To become wise is to become able and willing to think like Jesus, feel like Jesus, speak like Jesus, and act like Jesus. The mind of Christ is the mind of Wisdom.
Solomon himself saw Wisdom personified, although as an admirable woman in the Proverbs. We see Wisdom incarnated, as an amazing man in the Gospels.
Identifying Jesus with Wisdom is a crucial conceptual move to make in our spiritual walk. It is an essential advance over the useful, but also dangerous, Old Testament—and, indeed, classical—conception of wisdom as a something one can seek and then get.
It is useful, yes, to think of wisdom as a precious treasure worth sacrifice to obtain. But it is dangerous to think of wisdom as both acquisition and accomplishment. That is the false premise and promise of the Garden serpent: “Do this, and you shall get that—all on your own, regardless of God.”
How splendid, that is, to be wise—and to bask in the knowledge that you are such! This is one of the fatal occupational hazards of all Christian teachers, preachers, and leaders, as it is also for parents.
“I know better” is an interestingly ambivalent little phrase that can prompt one to humble goodness or to arrogant wickedness. The key to its proper deployment is the cultivation of communion with “Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God” (I Corinthians 1:24). Christ alone, in the Holy Spirit, gives us the power and the wisdom to think, feel, speak, and act better.
King Solomon, the peaceful one, set his kingdom on the path toward violent division and eventual dissolution. Jesus Christ, the Prince of Peace, set his kingdom on the path toward loving reconciliation and eventual eternity.
Paul knew better: “I keep asking that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the glorious Father, may give you the Spirit of wisdom and revelation, so that you may know him better” (Ephesians 1:17). Paul knew Jesus.
November 7, 2024
Trump, the GOP, and Christian Politics
Once-and-future President Trump and evangelicals: Don’t get me started. (Actually, I
started in his previous term. See the links below.)
Mr. Trump’s friends and foes agree on at least one thing about him, however, which is
that much, even most, of what he says is bluster. Utterly ephemeral. “Vapour,” one
might say (in the spirit of Daniel Treier’s brilliant translation of “vanity” in Ecclesiastes
1:2–14).
As in the case of less flamboyant people—and that means almost everyone else—what
matters is not what President Trump says but what he does: whom he appoints, what
policies he pursues, what alliances he makes (or abandons), and what (ab)use he
makes of his office.
Let’s agree, then, shall we, to beware the “side quests” of checking that claim or
worrying about that threat or smarting over that insult. Windbags as such don’t deserve
attention. But American presidents do—as they act.
Despite the many checks and balances the Founding Fathers put into the American
Constitution, American presidents remain unimaginably powerful—and especially when
their party not only controls both houses of Congress, but when that party has (for the
first time in its storied history) so abjectly subjected itself to the predilections and
preferences of a particular person.
Let’s see what actually happens and respond accordingly.
Trump and the GOP: Far more informed pundits than I, on both the left and the right,
bemoan what has happened to the Republican Party. When conservatives as disparate
as Dick and Liz Cheney, Mitt Romney, David French, and David Frum all bewail its
metamorphosis (I do not say “metastasis”) under Donald Trump’s influence, I’ll leave it
to them to sort out the good from the bad in the recent Republican victories.
Those of us with a nodding acquaintance with American history, however, continue to
shake our heads at the party of Abraham Lincoln, Susan B. Anthony, Condoleeza Rice
and—my personal favourite—Bing Crosby.
Christian Politics: Okay, so I will in fact return to my particular tribe of Christians,
evangelicals, and talk more generally about Christian politics in the U.S.—and beyond.
I am a scholar, so I normally trade in solid evidence to ground my musings. I will put you
on your guard, therefore, that I haven’t yet seen poll data to support my anecdotally
based impressions.
Still, I found my Facebook feed overwhelmed during this election campaign with a
narrow range of issues that seemed to dominate the political agenda of white evangelical pastors and seminary professors. Abortion was prominent, yes, but so also were drag queens reading to children in public libraries and trans kids being induced into sex changes before puberty.
A few did moan about how much worse off they were economically, but those were
invariably middle-class folk who generally were only slightly worse off, if at all. And they
won’t be by next quarter, while the economy generally did better and unemployment
dropped significantly under the current administration. One wonders why middle-class
Christians feel free to focus on relatively minor changes in their own financial situation in
the teeth of Biblical concerns for the needy.
Still, one might gather from the brackish Facebook flood that white American
evangelicals—and a fair number of Catholics and even some Orthodox, again to cite
just my own Facebook streams—were preoccupied by questions of sexual diversity that
directly effect but a tiny, tiny minority of American citizens.
The normalization of cross-dressing in library readings? I wonder about that, also. For
one thing, it forces parents and kids into conversations too complex for most
people—adults or children. One such reading and now we have to talk about differing
views as to what constitutes healthy and unhealthy sexual diversity. About the
differences among people lumped together as the “T” in “LGBT” (transsexuals are
drastically different from cross-dressers, formerly called transvestites). About
accommodating various viewpoints in public institutions such as libraries. About these
and more thorny questions on which our society clearly has not yet arrived at
neighbourly answers.
As for trans kids, we certainly ought to accommodate everyone as best we can. Why
not? But “as best we can” means at least two things.
First, keep everyone’s interests in view. We should be eager to help any child and any
family facing issues around sex and sexuality. That means most kids and families, of
course, even as a fraction have unusual challenges and warrant unusual support.
Second, don't run ahead of the actual science, as activists on both ends of the political
spectrum keep urging the rest of us to do.
The package of issues around gender dysphoria, counseling, transitioning, and parental
permission is deeply complex—and deeply contested among the experts. Politicians,
including the politicians who run school boards and individual schools, should beware
getting ahead of themselves, of the people they serve, and of the actual evidence
supporting or not supporting the policies they prefer.
Focusing on these vivid but tiny minorities, therefore, seems a very odd focus for
political concern in an election with so much else at stake. (In the Canadian census of
2021, roughly 1/3 of one percent identified as “transgender” or “nonbinary.” According
to the Pew Research Center, the proportion of Americans identifying as neither “male”
nor “female” is 1.6%.)
Curiously, no one on my Facebook pages talked about the leading issue in Trump’s
own rhetoric: immigration. Perhaps white evangelicals don’t worry about immigration.
Maybe they like having friends and fellow church members from various parts of the
world. Maybe they rejoice in American wealth, or at least the opportunity to earn some
of that wealth, being extended to so many of the world’s needy. Maybe they all quietly
disagree with this campaign’s numerous racist remarks, jokes, and policy proposals
about immigration.
Perhaps, however, these evangelical Christians are just as worried about immigration
as the rest of the political right. They worry about jobs, they worry about wages, they
worry about ethnic enclaves, they worry about affirmative action, they worry about
strange customs, they worry about imported violence.
They worry, but they can’t think of a way to talk about their immigration concerns
without sounding racist. So they don’t. Not, at least, on Facebook.
They talk instead about sex and abortion. And they leave it to Messrs. Trump and
Vance to do the talking about immigration for them.
If I’m at least partly right in my suspicion, then such evangelicals end up profoundly
distorting the Bible’s own ethical priorities and focus.
Yes, sexuality is a genuine and significant concern in both Testaments. But most
people’s sexual morality and wellbeing is not threatened at all by library readings or
someone else’s child transitioning.
Meanwhile, the weightier matters of God’s instruction go undiscussed: “justice, mercy,
and faithfulness” (Matthew 23:23). Justice for the many deserving immigrants not yet
properly processed. Mercy for families victimized by coyotes and now threatened with
separation. Faithfulness to the Bible’s central command to love your neighbour as
yourself and particularly to care deeply and practically for the needs of fellow Christians,
which a large fraction, and probably a majority, of America’s recent and would-be
immigrants are.
I do not support a “throw the doors open” policy on immigration. We have had foolish
sentimentality—and political showboating—up here in Canada that has resulted in some
severe social and individual problems, as has been the case in many European
countries as well. What I do support is an immigration policy in keeping with Biblical
priorities, so far as is politically possible.
What I support even more centrally is the church focusing on the priorities given to us
by the Lord, not by our political party or leader and not by what we think will upset
enough other people to provoke them to vote as we prefer.
The woke mainstreaming of sexual diversity is not an insignificant matter. But as someone somewhere has said, the main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing. Christian worship, fellowship, discipleship, and mission: these must be the priorities of Christian teaching, including teaching about politics.
What political party and what political policy will best protect the freedom and integrity of the church’s worship, rather than co-opting it for the nation, the state, the party, or the president?
What are the mortal threats to loving Christian fellowship posed by belligerent engagement in political contests?
What political values conduce to following Jesus more closely and what instead pull us away into the trains of very different heroes?
And how is political engagement idolatrously substituting for the church’s central
mission to the poor, the lonely, the oppressed, and the lost?
A new Trump era dawns, therefore, in which we should pay more attention to what the
President does rather than what he merely says.
Likewise, the world is watching to see where we, too, spend our attention, money, and
time as well, whatever we say our values are.
Let’s make sure we have our theological and ethical ABCs in good order.
There’s quite a lot of the Christian alphabet to work out in the world with the help of the
Holy Spirit before we ever get to “T.”
Want to ThinkBetter about North American history, religion and politics in an hour or less?
Try one of these mini-courses for 50% off (Use coupon code: MiniCourse50 ex. 11/14/24) at ThinkBetter Media:
American and Canadian Origin Myths
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion & Christian Ethics
Listed in chronological order, starting ‘way back in 2016.
(Discerning readers will note some changes in fact and opinion over the years…)
Mr. Trump, Evangelicals, The Globe, and Crucial Distinctions
Trump, American Evangelicals, and the Establishment
Did God Choose President Trump?
Why It’s Not Just Nominal Evangelicals Supporting Donald Trump
A Global Perspective on American Evangelical Politics
Donald Trump and the Exceptions of American Evangelicalism
November 5, 2024
Sometimes You Need a Bowl of Blood
“This world is not my home/I’m just a-passin’ through.” Much of my theological career has been spent cautioning Christians that this good old song is deeply mistaken. This world, this planet Earth, is our home. We were made for it—literally made from it. And when God renews it, we will spend the age to come on it (Revelation 21–22).
Still, the song does strike an authentic New Testament theme. This world as it is presently constituted and governed is certainly not my home.
“My treasures are laid up/somewhere beyond the blue” is exactly in line with Jesus’ advice about investing our lives:
“Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moths and vermin destroy, and where thieves break in and steal. But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moths and vermin do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also” (Matthew 6:19–21).
Indeed, this question of treasure shows up several times in the New Testament in another striking contrast between the two economies.
Peter tells his flock to “live out your time as strangers here in reverent fear. For you know that it was not with perishable things such as silver or gold that you were redeemed from the empty way of life handed down to you from your ancestors, but with the precious blood of Christ” (I Peter 1:17–19).
This kind of language is so familiar to well-churched Christians that its shock value has worn off. Let’s see if we can usefully recover it.
Several people in expensive suits confer over a mahogany table in a richly furnished room. They are making a huge international financial deal, so dollars, pounds, Euros, yen, yuan, and rubles are all in play.
The conversation is intense, with the principals poring over spreadsheets and calculators while assistants scurry quietly back and forth to their laptops for further data. Then someone walks into the room carrying a large white bowl—full of blood.
Consternation breaks out immediately. (I’ll let you imagine the actual expressions of shock and dismay.) “What are you doing with that?” someone finally asks the newcomer.
It all depends, doesn’t it?
If you’re trying to broker the financing of a giant construction project in Africa, then you’re wise to conduct your conversation in terms of the world’s great currencies. A big bowl of blood in that context is wildly incongruous—even offensively absurd.
If, however, you’re trying to solve the world’s greatest problem, heal the world’s biggest wound, and pay the world’s biggest debt, then all the money in the world is just so much trash, just so many pointless ones and zeroes. In the global economy that matters most, the economy of salvation, you need blood for that: the Saviour’s blood.
Those of us who have been introduced to that Big Picture cannot any longer live as if we haven’t been. Those of us who have been bought with that price cannot any longer live as if money matters most—nor any other worldly currency: not fame, not pleasure, not security, not luxury, not power.
We are, as Peter says, strangers, people from Somewhere Else, playing a different game according to different definitions of success and failure.
Today happens to be Election Day in the United States of America. We recently had a provincial election here in New Brunswick and we’re headed for a national election in Canada soon. It’s easy to get caught up in the worldly currencies of votes and dollars and offices, talking and worrying and fuming and rejoicing as if those are all that matter.
They do matter. They affect the lives of people—and other creatures, too—who are loved by God. They affect the welfare of the planet he made for us and will one day remake for us. Those things matter, and we ought to work with God and each other to bring as much shalom to the earth as we possibly can through them.
On such a day, however, as on every day, it is good to remember the Big Picture, the Gospel Story, the economy of salvation. It is good to recall the frame of reference that puts gold and silver in their proper places, as it does also all rulers and authorities, all principalities and powers.
It is good to remember what matters most. And what it cost. And to live accordingly, not in service to what can be bought with money but to what has been bought with the precious blood of Christ: our new life, the life of the world to come, in God.
October 27, 2024
Halloween: Good, Bad, or Indifferent?
First, what’s with the orange and black? And the pumpkins?
Second, why are we celebrating pain, evil, and death—and, at the same time, comic book heroes and movie characters and celebrities?
And third, what’s the (increasingly) big deal? Should Christians join the North American trend of decking out our houses, as well as ourselves, for Hallowe’en at a scale that now approaches—or in many cases surpasses—even the gaudy excesses of Christmas? Should we avoid Halloween entirely?
I frankly haven’t paid much attention to Halloween over the years. I dressed up and enjoyed trick-or-treating when pretty young, but then mostly ignored the day until my three boys were old enough to get into it. Costumes were a big decision each year and walking frozen Winnipeg streets and chilly Vancouver hills tested their commitment.
Once they grew out of it, however, I ignored it again. Now I have four new kids to care for, however, and a year ago, not long after we were married, their mother raised the issue with me afresh, this time with a distinct Christian angle. So now I do have to think (better) about it, and maybe the following can be useful to you, too.
Halloween has a Christian name—about which more below. It seems to have originated, though, in the festival of Samhain (“SOW [as in female pig]-en”) among the Celts of ancient Britain and Ireland—and in similar festivals on the European continent.
On 31 October, Saman, lord of death, called together the wicked souls that within the past twelve months had been condemned to inhabit the bodies of animals. Thus the occasion is still referred to in Ireland as Oidhche Shamhna, “Vigil of Saman.”
During the Samhain festival, the souls of some who had died were believed to return to visit their relatives’ homes. Those who had died during the year just ending were believed to begin their journey to the otherworld—and Halloween was their last chance to wreak vengeance on enemies.
Candles in houses and bonfires on hilltops thus were lit to guide the familial souls—and masks and costumes were worn to avoid the fury of adversial spirits. The bonfires, incidentally, attracted insects, which, in turn, attracted (you guessed it) bats.
This season was a “thin” time, during which the normal boundaries between everyday life and the occult (or “hidden”) became porous. The period was therefore thought to be favourable for divination—particularly on lifecycle matters such as marriage, health, and death.
On the next day, corresponding to November 1 on contemporary calendars, the new year was believed to begin. Winter was beginning, herds were returned from pasture, and land tenures were renewed.
When the Romans conquered the Celts in the first century, they added their own festivals of Feralia, commemorating the passing of the dead, and of Pomona, the goddess of the harvest (whose symbol is the apple). Nuts joined apples to represent the winter store of fruits. So the roasting of nuts and the sport known as “apple-ducking” or “dunking for apples”—attempting to seize with the teeth an apple floating in a tub of water—became a part of Halloween fun.
Humans and other beings associated with netherworlds thus came to the fore: witches (and their familiars: cats), hobgoblins, ghosts, fairies, and demons. These beings were appeased by offerings of food and drink, or portions of the crops, left outside for them to ensure the people and livestock survived the winter.
These spiritual worries were joined by various trappings of late autumn in northern Europe: bare trees, dead leaves, corn stalks, and pumpkins. (More about pumpkins presently.) Black and orange became the theme colours of Halloween: black for the death of summer and orange for the autumn harvest season.
In the seventh century, Pope Boniface IV established All Saints’ Day on May 13, a day to commemorate and call upon all of those recognized by the Church as living exemplary lives. In the following century, perhaps in yet another churchly effort to supplant the pagan holiday with a Christian observance (as happened with Christmas and Easter), All Saints’ Day was moved to November 1. (Some sources indicate that this initiative came from Alcuin, the great Christian advisor to Charlemagne.)
The evening before All Saints’ Day was the evening (“e’en”) of All Hallows, since “to hallow” means “to revere” or “to make holy”—as saints were. Thus we get Hallowe’en. (Under the impress of American practicality, most North Americans have dropped the apostrophe, as we shall hereinafter.)
By the end of the Middle Ages, the secular and the sacred days had merged. Many Christians in mainland Europe, especially in France, believed that on Halloween the dead of the churchyards rose for one wild, hideous carnival known as the danse macabre. This dance was often depicted in church decoration as part of the exercise known as mememto mori, the exhortation to remember one’s impending death and to get one’s spiritual house in order. The danse macabre was sometimes enacted in European village pageants and court masques, with people dressing up as corpses from various strata of society—one possible origin of Halloween costume parties.
The Reformation of the sixteenth century essentially put an end to the religious holiday of All Saints Day among Protestants. Veneration of the saints, let alone actually praying to them, was set aside in favor of prayer directly to God. In Britain especially, however, Halloween continued to be celebrated as a secular holiday.
Similarly, in America Halloween was repressed by the Puritans, along with other festivities such as Christmas itself, as another occasion that had become overrun with pagan excess. Still, traditions lingered, especially among the Scots-Irish who settled much of the Midwest and upper South. And when large numbers of immigrants, especially the Irish, came to the United States in the latter half of the nineteenth century, they took their Halloween customs with them. The twentieth century saw Halloween become one of the principal U.S. holidays.
At the turn of that century, Halloween parties for both children and adults became the most common way to celebrate the day. Parties focused on games, foods of the season, and festive costumes. Christian wariness about the season continued as parents were encouraged by newspapers and community leaders to take anything smacking of the dead or devilish out of Halloween celebrations.
Vandalism began to plague some celebrations. Youths sharpened the traditional Scottish and Irish custom of playing pranks on this night of weirdness. At the same time (between 1920 and 1950), the centuries-old practice of trick-or-treating was also revived.
The roots of this practice were in “souling,” “guising,” and “mumming.” Seen also during Advent, groups of people would disguise themselves and go door-to-door to sing and joke and expect food and drink in return. The distribution of “soul cakes” was
encouraged by the church as a way to replace the ancient practice of leaving food and wine for roaming spirits.
(I cannot resist the factoid that these practices on Halloween were first recorded in North America in my birthplace, Kingston, Ontario. In 1911, a newspaper reported children going "guising" around the neighborhood. Yes, good old Kingston: Home of spiritually suspect beggary.)
As with so much of Halloween lore, however, incommensurate ideas got blurred together. It became common for impersonate evil spirits in “guising”—and to wreak vengeance on stingy households.
By the 1950s, town leaders in both the U.S. and Canada had successfully domesticated trick-or-treating and Halloween had evolved into a holiday directed mainly at the young. Due to the high numbers of young children during the Baby Boom, parties moved from town civic centers into the classroom or home, where they could be more easily accommodated, while costumed door-to-door begging increased also.
The Baby Boom in fact inspired candy companies to market small, individually wrapped candies. People began to favour them out of convenience, of course, but candy did not dominate at the exclusion of all other treats (such as coins, fruits, and nuts) until the 1970s when parents started fearing anything not wrapped commercially.
That still leaves the Jack-o’-lantern to be explained. So here goes.
Clever Jack trapped the Devil and exacted from him the promise that he would leave off taking Jack to hell at his death. When Jack died, the Devil kept his word. Heaven, alas, didn’t want Jack either.
The Devil delightedly threw a live coal straight from the fires of hell at poor Jack. It was a cold night, so Jack placed the coal in a hollowed-out turnip to stop it from going out. Since that time, Jack and his lantern (“Jack-of-the-lantern”) have been seeking a place to rest. And since pumpkins are considerably lighter and easier to hollow out than turnips, Jack and the rest of us have prudently turned to them instead.
Today, Americans spend upwards of $6 billion on Halloween, with more than half a billion on costumes for . . . their pets. Halloween makes its appearance in stores by late September, if not earlier, and in some neighbourhoods house decorations have become far more elaborate for this holiday than for any other.
A Christian Musing upon Halloween
Let’s take the several elements of Halloween in turn. Then we’ll pull back to look at Halloween as a whole.
First, the neighbourhood solicitation of treats. Frankly, it seems ridiculous to sponsor a mild orgy of cheap candy for middle-class North American kids. This is a class of human beings who face serious threats of obesity because they seem never to lack for sugary carbohydrates.
Bring piles of fun food to shelters in your town? Sure. But that tokenism would mean more if matched with serious investment in the charity and social policy required to truly eliminate the indefensible scandal of child poverty in these rich countries.
Maybe it’s time to bring back the house (and church) parties and stop enriching M&M/Mars and their ilk to no good purpose. (I’m glad kids don’t read these columns. I don’t want their hate mail.)
Second, the costumes. It seems that in our time Halloween costumes (for kids and for adults) come in one of three modes: alter egos (especially heroes or villains—or mere celebrities), jokes (whether silly characters or visual puns), or frights (villains or victims). I can’t see any problem with the first two—except when the first combines with the third.
The third seems highly problematic to me. Dressing up and thus briefly impersonating something horrible is meant by almost no one nowadays what it might have meant to our ancestors (and to Christians in other countries who celebrate festivals of the dead): the serious Christian mockery of the Devil and of Death.
Without that plausible religious motive, there is something deeply disquieting about adorning oneself with symbols of evil. If you wouldn’t dream of wearing the uniform of a Nazi SS officer, why dress up as Freddie Krueger or Frankenstein’s monster?
(And “It’s only for one night!” is hardly a justification for any other transgression, and that excuse withers instantly on the vine.)
Third, the commercialization. There are very large companies who have invested in our ramping up of Halloween into a bizarre celebration of—well, what? Christmas and Easter make sense, even to the Western secular mind, as seasons of joy and fellowship. Thanksgiving has become a time of family feasting. Patriotic holidays—kept within non-idolatrous bounds—serve a commendable purpose as well.
Halloween? What do all the expensive decorations stand for? A celebration of the macabre, the violent, the occult, and the diabolical? Seems troublingly strange to blow all that money on a tribute to the awful.
So what about Halloween in general?
I smile at my friends who seek to reclaim October 31 as “Reformation Day”—since Martin Luther nailed up his 95 Theses on that date in 1517. But everyone dressing up as his or her favourite Reformer year after year could get old pretty quickly, especially since they all seem to have dressed exactly the same way.
As for the evangelical attempt to exploit Halloween with so-called Hell Houses, it strikes me as . . . worth reconsideration. They either fail to scare anyone into conversion, in which case they invite contempt, or they actually do scare people into conversion, in which case they invite contempt.
It’s not that I oppose the straightforward declaration of the wages of sin. I stand with Jonathan Edwards and his sermon on “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” I don’t think, however, that a downscale local version of a dark Disney ride is likely to connect anyone with the saving goodness of God nor the sustaining fellowship of a local church. And those are the two key ingredients in a genuine conversion that has a hope of lasting.
I pose for you, therefore, as I pose for myself, three questions about Halloween:
What are you celebrating?
With what are you celebrating?
What are you thereby saying—to your kids and to your neighbours?
And I wonder if the following Scriptural analogy might be useful to you as you answer.
The New Testament church ruled out any participation in the temple cults of other gods—and thus ruled out anything associated with them (so the quartet of forbidden practices in Acts 15:29, the practices typical of pagan worship).
Paul then, however, makes the distinction between that worship and the later detritus of that worship: the meat offered to idols that later is simply sold in the marketplace, having served its ritual purpose. Paul recognizes that for some Christians the association will be repellent. But he also teaches against any worry about something like residual magic in such meat. He cheerfully says that he would eat it himself. It’s just meat.
Paul doesn’t say, to be sure, that the idols are okay to take home with you for fun, or that sexual immorality is now okay because it isn’t happening in a pagan temple. He is saying that what is in itself good remains good even if someone else has temporarily attached an unpleasant meaning to it. Christians can redefine things for ourselves.
That principle helps me enjoy the many Christmas symbols that have pagan origins but later Christian meanings. And that principle would let me enjoy attending a Halloween party, or putting one on for the children, so long as there is nothing smacking of Samhain’s dark lord.
In short, so long as it’s truly happy, in an authentically wholesome vein, then Happy Halloween!
Otherwise, not.
October 14, 2024
The Myth of "Many Christianities"
Frequently in modern times, as in the more distant past, someone writes a popular book to argue that orthodoxy is merely the position of the strongest party (Walter Bauer, Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity, 1934).
The volume might be as sensational as John Allegro’s The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross: A Study of the Nature and Origins of Christianity within the Fertility Cults of the Ancient Near East (1970). It might be as erudite as Elaine Pagels’s surprise bestseller The Gnostic Gospels (1979). It might be as recent as whatever book Bart Ehrman published last week.
The basic premise is the same. What has been championed as the one true expression of Christianity is merely what imperial power has declared and imposed. Starting with Constantine’s Council of Nicea (325), the state and the Big Church (East or West) have insisted on one favoured version of the faith, marginalizing and even crushing perfectly legitimate, and even superior, alternatives.
This general point serves the author’s particular purpose of offering a particular kind of religion as having just as good a claim on the title “Christian” as have the mainstream churches. It could be a mushroom cult (Allegro), gnosticism (Pagels), Jewish Cynicism (John Dominic Crossan), or political revolution (take your pick).
Historians of Christianity have introduced to a grateful and fascinated readership lots of churches unknown or long forgotten beyond the regions of their origin. One thinks of W. H. C. Frend, Peter Brown, and the indefatigable Philip Jenkins as chief among them. Egyptian, Armenian, Syrian, Persian, Ethiopian, and Indian traditions, among others—most with roots going back to apostolic times—have slowly taken their rightful place on the syllabi of church history surveys and in global fellowships of churches.
Rarely, however, do knowledgeable people invoke these traditions as evidence of significant differences in pre-Constantinian or pre-Chalcedonian Christianity. That’s because they weren’t, and aren’t, all that different from so-called orthodox churches in both East and West. They certainly aren’t different enough to justify including the likes of Allegro’s or Pagels’s religionists as also Christian.
As far back as the New Testament itself there were varieties of Christianity, most notably Jewish versus Gentile, as discussed at the Council of Jerusalem in Acts 15. Liturgies, languages, and even dietary restrictions varied. Such expressions of cultural difference would diversify increasingly as the gospel spread into new people groups. Yet fellowship based on recognition as brothers and sisters following one Lord, one faith, and one baptism was extended across cultural lines—even to the deeply practical matter of Paul taking up a collection among Gentiles for the Jerusalem church.
Also in the New Testament, however, were alternatives to Christianity being advertised and advanced as authentic. The apostles stayed busy identifying and warning about what they declared were not just different approaches to the common faith but different religions. Not Christianity at all—and sometimes the apostles put the point fiercely. Beware!
That is what the early church properly decided at Nicea, supposedly the first great and baneful instance of imperial orthodoxy. If you prefer to think of Jesus as the greatest of all God’s creations, as did the Arians, then you’re not just singing gospel songs instead of metrical psalms, not even just baptizing believers instead of babies. The whole nature of the religion changes to something else.
Jesus is no longer the divine-human One, both the revelational and the salvific link between God and humanity. He is no longer the Way, the Truth, and the Life. Jesus becomes instead someone to admire, or be grateful toward, or to emulate—like a cult guru, or a cynical sage, or a political leader.
The way back to God is no longer following Jesus and trusting in Jesus. It’s following Jesus’s example and trusting your ability to do so. This isn’t a different Christianity. This isn’t Christianity.
Heresies and schisms and cults have come and gone. Sometimes the church has dealt with them properly. In a few, regrettable instances, the church has dealt with them violently—as with the Albigensians/Cathars in the late middle ages and with various dissenting individuals and groups by the Inquisition, especially in Spain, in the early modern period.
Sometimes the lines were just too narrowly drawn, as with the Coptic Church at Chalcedon (451), or Protestants at the Council of Trent (sixteenth century), or Anabaptists in confessions both Protestant and Catholic (sixteenth through eighteenth centuries). Fellowship was needlessly circumscribed for a long while, although later repaired.
Groups seeking recognition in the universal church can therefore point to some mistakes in the past. But the burden of proof is on them not to show that orthodoxy has sometimes been too narrow but that their particular variety meets the proper test of orthodoxy: consonance with “mere Christianity,” the definable core of Christianity that unites the members and communities of the global church through the ages.
Is there such a definable core? Yes, there is.
Don’t take my word for it. Ask an informed Copt, or Protestant, or Anabaptist what makes their religion truly Christian, genuinely part of “one holy, catholic, and apostolic church.”
Again, don’t take my word for it. Pick up any reputable textbook on world religions and find the section on Christianity. Look up what the author says are the core tenets, rituals, and morals of the Christian religion. It will sound like Nicea and Chalcedon—and like the essential teachings of your favourite local church: Catholic, Orthodox, Coptic, Lutheran, or Mennonite.
—Unless it doesn’t. And then you have something else. It will be some version of moralism or mysticism or magic, or some combination of the three, masquerading as just another version of Christianity.
What it won’t be, in fact, is Christianity: the religion that worships the triune God who made and sustains the world, and saves the world through the life, death, resurrection, ascension, and second coming of Jesus Christ. It won’t be the religion that depends upon the renewing, guiding, empowering, and sanctifying work of the Holy Spirit. It won’t be the religion based on the Bible as divine revelation and on traditions that merely clarify and amplify the teaching of that holy book.
I understand impatience with, even despair over, the contemporary church. I’m no defender of the status quo, especially the North American Christianity I call my spiritual home. There is much that is stultifying, repellent, and just plain wrong about so many of our churches.
The solution to what’s wrong, however, isn’t to pick a religion you prefer and try to rebrand it as Christianity. It certainly isn’t ethical to try to pass off your alternative as “another version” of Christianity, let alone as authentic Christianity, in your church or denomination—or seminary.
If you really prefer Hinduism or Buddhism or Daoism or Islam, then own it and convert. If you really prefer the Jesus of Mormonism or the Jehovah’s Witnesses, then you know where to join up. If you’re fundamentally pursuing a political program, then say so and stop sticking other people’s religious labels on it. And if you really want a do-it-yourself religion, then choose your own adventure and good luck to you.
Just don’t call it Christianity. That religion has a definition already. Billions of people recognize it as such, whether they are Christians or not. It isn’t available for you to reshape as you please. It hasn’t been for two thousand years.
October 3, 2024
The Sermon on the Mount vs. the Nicene Creed: A Needless and Dangerous Choice
Perhaps you have come across this social media post, or something like it:
A former student of mine posted it on Facebook recently with a “WOW” underneath. I agree with the “WOW,” but that’s because I think the quote is so bad—and points to a significant danger.
In the comments that followed, a pastor in a mainline Lutheran church cheerfully boasted that in her church’s liturgy “I put in a Land Acknowledgement [of aboriginal claims] and took out the creed.”
WOW, indeed.
Here’s a quick list of observations and concerns. But I want to state a basic affirmation up front.
I’m sympathetic to Christians who don’t understand how churches apparently can be (self-)satisfied with weekly worship that includes recitation of doctrine without complementary reminders of the needs of the world and particularly God’s demand for justice. These Christians believe, and rightly, that doctrine without ethics is sterile, just as the Epistle of James declares that “faith without works is dead.”
The Bible teaches theology to foster praise and praxis. Think of the structure of most of Paul’s letters: indicative, then imperative. “Since God is X and has done Y, then you should Z.” Doctrine is about what has been, what is now, what is the point, and what ought to be. Taught properly, theology inevitably promotes doxology, koinōnia, and mission.
Faithful Christians are right, therefore, to bemoan the presence of creed without community and compassion.
Let’s see, however, what we can learn from this juxtaposition of the Sermon on the Mount and the Nicene Creed.
1. This criticism of the Nicene Creed can sound something like the following: “This doctrinal statement is comprised solely of doctrinal statements. Outrageous!” It’s a category mistake, accusing the Creed of failing to do what a creed isn’t meant to do.
The Nicene Creed is a creed—a summary of certain beliefs (from the Latin credo = “I believe”) in order to make clear certain important (and, usually, contested) teachings for the Church. No creed is meant to offer a comprehensive list of all a Christian is to be and do.
None of the great creeds are meant even to offer a comprehensive list of all a Christian is supposed to believe! The Nicene Creed says nothing, for instance, about the nature of revelation in Scripture, nor about the role of Jesus’ teaching and example in the life of faith—just to pick two of many basics of Christian affirmation.
Creeds are always composed in particular circumstances in order to respond to a particular need. They are tools for certain jobs. We do well to learn what they are good for and use them appropriately, rather than throw away a hammer because it cannot drive a screw. Use something else for something else.
2. No Christian church says, “Yep, just affirm the doctrinal statement and you’re good. We have no other expectations from you regarding, say, ethics, or worship, or piety, or fellowship. Just say you believe these statements and you’re in fine standing.”
Yes, some churches unhelpfully overstress correctness of doctrine and downplay other elements of Christian life. But no church I can think of has ever reduced Christian identity, life, and witness to getting sacred ideas right.
3. In particular, none of the church leaders who hammered out the Nicean Creed (325) and the later Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed (381)—which we call “the Nicene Creed” for short—ever said anything like “There, now. We have summarized everything a Christian needs to believe. And Christianity is all about correct doctrine. So that’s that.”
Again, the Nicene Creed arises out of a particular situation in the early church and was meant to resolve certain pressing challenges. What it was never meant to do, even in the fourth century, is to summarize all of even the most basic doctrines of the Christian religion, let alone every fundamental element of Christian life.
4. Turning now to the Sermon on the Mount, let’s note that the Sermon itself contains doctrine. You can’t get past even chapter 5 (the first of the Sermon’s three chapters in Matthew) without encountering Jesus making statements about the nature of the Christian life, the nature of the kingdom of heaven, the nature of Scripture, the nature of holiness, and the nature of Providence.
Everything Jesus says to do in the Sermon on the Mount is rooted in what Jesus says is the truth about God and the world—which is, not to put too fine a point on it, doctrine: teachings to be believed.
5. The Sermon on the Mount is not all that Jesus taught. It is not all God wants the Church to know, believe, and practice. That’s why the entire corpus of written revelation from God isn’t just . . . the Sermon on the Mount.
That Sermon isn’t even a summary of Jesus’ own earthly teachings. It isn’t a summary of Jesus’ teachings even in the Gospel that includes it.
The Sermon on the Mount does not occupy a position of literary importance in GMatthew: not the beginning, the centre, or the end. It is not repeated by any of the other Gospels, GLuke’s Sermon on the Plain being significantly different.
It is never referred to by any other writer in the New Testament. It is never used in liturgy by any Christian community, even as elements of it are: especially the Beatitudes and, of course, the Lord’s Prayer.
Beware, then, the currently popular lifting up of these few chapters of one gospel among all the books of the Bible as some sort of touchstone for everything else the Bible teaches and everything Christianity is about. The Sermon on the Mount is wonderful, but the centre of Jesus’ teaching, let alone of the whole Scripture, it just isn’t.
What, then, does Jesus want us to believe and do? A lot. That’s why the Bible is big.
6. Why is doctrine vital? Why did the early church spend so much energy formulating baptismal statements (like the Apostles’ Creed) and doctrinal symbols (such as the Nicene Creed and the Chalcedonian Definition of 451)—and then enforcing them? Why have Christian churches endorsed, taught, and incorporated into their very liturgy such statements of doctrine?
We can all be impatient at times: “Hey, I don’t know and I don’t care! Mumbling an old creed seems dumb to me, and I can’t be bothered finding out why my spiritual ancestors took it so seriously. Silly old-timers! So out it goes! I’m more into justice issues anyhow, as I’m sure Jesus was.” But a combination of ignorance and arrogance surely isn’t what’s needed here—what the Bible warns against as “zeal without knowledge” (Romans 10:2).
Jesus himself was manifestly “into” doctrine, spending a lot of his brief teaching ministry teaching about what God is like, what human beings are and need, who he was (and is), and in what the good life consists.
Jesus was also “into” ethics, of course, since the Christian life is, of all things, a way of life. But the way we choose to live and the actions we choose to engage in depend on what we think is real and important. And stating carefully what is fundamentally real and what is most important is the very essence of theology, whose churchly expression is doctrine.
7. If you dispense with the Nicene Creed and the doctrine it encapsulates, you don’t have more authentic Christianity. You have something other than Christianity.
No more triune God. No more Jesus Christ as divine incarnation. No more cross, resurrection, and ascension as the foundation of the reconciliation of humans with God. No more fellowship of the Spirit. No more hope of resurrection, judgment, and the world to come.
What you have instead is—well, whatever you want. You can keep the Trinity, if you like—at least for a while, until explaining it becomes tiresome and, frankly, just weird. In fact, come to think of it, since Jesus functions for us as Inspiring Example in our quest for justice, and the Holy Spirit can be just, you know, “Spirit” blessing us in the ways we approve of, we really don’t need trinitarian doctrine anymore.
Or you can keep the Cross, if you like—but as symbol of self-sacrifice in the cause of justice, or a symbol of God’s love for us no matter who we are and what we do, or a symbol of martyrdom that valorizes our brave suffering for righteousness. What it isn’t any longer is the event of God making atonement for the sins of God’s creatures through his own suffering and death in Jesus. As liberal theologian Delores Williams immortally put it, “I don't think we need folks hanging on crosses, and blood dripping, and weird stuff."
Christianity now becomes not a tradition to be gratefully received from the millions of our forebears across space and time who have recited the Nicene Creed as one among several signs of ecclesial solidarity. It is for you instead a mere storehouse of various religious artifacts and commodities in which you can shop for what you will use or discard as you see fit.
The danger is basic. If you discard the Church’s core doctrinal affirmations to just “follow Jesus,” then both “following” and “Jesus” become something else. Historically, this path leads to one or another customized combination of mysticism and moralism.
That is the historical trajectory of the liberal tradition in Christianity. And that’s the path that beckons today in front of so-called progressive evangelicals, with one traditional Christian distinctive after another giving way.
In our time, the initial controversies usually have arisen within sexual ethics. (Our culture is, as both Michel Foucault and C. S. Lewis observed with dismay, mad about sex.) But wait a while, and you’ll soon observe defenders of same-sex marriage jettisoning substitutionary atonement, endorsing universalism, adopting religious pluralism, and reducing religion to spirituality and good deeds.
I’m not saying there is an inexorable, slippery-slope logic at work. Some people might well pick a spot on this path and park there indefinitely. As a church historian, however, I report what I see over the last two centuries: a distinctive pattern repeated over and over. And few churches seem to be able to remain in one of these intermediate positions over subsequent generations. Eventually, it all gives way.
Consider F. D. E. Schleiermacher as a paradigm case. I pick him not only as the first great figure in this tradition (early nineteenth century) but also as one of the most evidently pious and relatively traditional.
The doctrine of the Trinity is an embarrassing contradiction, says Schleiermacher. The Bible is now to be regarded as just early Christian religious writing. (Schleiermacher thought that the Old Testament could be discarded or, at best, be appended to the New Testament as mere “Jewish background.”) Jesus is the first Christian, the great exemplar for us all to emulate. The dynamic of the Christian religion thus becomes, yes, a do-it-yourself blend of mysticism and moralism.
Let me be being candid about my fundamental worry—and I am indeed worried for these friends, as well as for many others. I worry that dropping the Creed—and, by this symbolic act, dropping a commitment to maintain the traditional teaching of the Church in favour of whatever we happen to think today—leaves your church without the motivation, guidance, and hope at the core of the historic Christian faith.
If you don’t sense that—or if you do, but it doesn’t bother you—may I respectfully suggest that perhaps your basic motivation, guidance, and hope have already shifted. You already have a different set of assumptions, a different list of doctrines, as to what has been, what is now, what is the point, and what ought to be. No wonder, then, that you can dispense with the Nicene Creed.
So should aboriginal land claims matter to the Church? They ought to, as should any pressing matter of justice.
Is Christianity only about correct belief? No serious Christian has ever said so.
Can you practice the Sermon on the Mount without regard for traditional Christian doctrine? I don’t know why you would.
In sum, whatever Robin Meyers originally meant in the context of the book cited, this quotation on its own (and the way it was received by the Facebookers who approved of it) points to the transition some folks are making today away from mainstream Christianity toward their own preferred modes of spirituality.
What it doesn’t point to is an actual problem with the Christian tradition. That tradition has managed without strain to endorse both the Sermon on the Mount and the Nicene Creed for a couple of thousand years now.
Should contemporary North American churches do a much better job of living in the light of both the Sermon and the Creed? Yes, they should. But that’s a different issue, isn’t it?
The key move to make in reacting to disappointment with the contemporary evangelical (or Catholic or Orthodox church) is not to leave the right for the left. We must instead go deep.
Don’t do less, substituting the cause du jour for the historic affirmations of the Church. Do more.
