Jason Micheli's Blog, page 95

Abstinence: 99.999999% Effective

 

Matthew 1.18-25

     Many Christmases ago, after singing “O Come All Ye Faithful” and “Silent Night” service after service after service and after having a distracted parent spill hot wax on my hand, service after service after service, on Christmas morning Ali and I took our boys into New York City to see the tree in Rockefeller Center,to gaze into the windows on 34th Street, and to run after the boys as they ran wide-eyed through FAO Schwarz. 

     We were nearly into the city, at the entrance to the Lincoln Tunnel, on the Jersey side, when outside my window I spotted a large billboard depicting the manger and the magi making their way by the star over Bethlehem. 

     Only on this billboard were the words “Myth “and “Reason,” spelled out in all caps: “You KNOW it’s a MYTH. This season celebrate REASON.”

          My son, Gabriel, saw it, or saw me staring at it. He pointed at it through the window and asked me what it said. “It says atheists are irritating, unimaginative killjoys,” I said. Gabriel nodded his head and said, “That’s what I thought.”

 

     I later learned (thanks to Google and NPR) the billboard was paid by the American Atheists Association, whose president, David Silverman said, “Many people do not actually believe in God but go through the motions of religious practice,” Silverman said in an interview, “Plus, every year, atheists get blamed for having a war on Christmas, even if we don’t do anything so this year, we decided to show Christians what a war on Christmas looks like.”

Paul Myers at Science Blog applauded the American Atheists Association “bold billboard,” saying “… he hoped it would “sting Christians and stir up a little resentment among them by reminding Christians that not everyone can follow the same path to God as them. Not everyone can come to a belief in something like the Christmas story. Belief doesn’t come easy for some people.” 

Leave it to a dues-paying atheist to believe it’s somehow news that it’s difficult for folks to believe the Christmas story. 

Only someone who never goes to church would suppose that card-carrying members of the Christian faith don’t still struggle with that faith. 

I’ve been preaching Advents and Christmases for almost twenty years now, and every year more than a few pew sitters ask me about the truth of the virgin birth. 

     Sometimes, it’s a life-long question for a doubting pilgrim. 

Sometimes, it’s a point of argument for a hardened skeptic. 

Sometimes, it’s an intellectual hurdle for a student just home from college armed with just enough philosophy to inoculate them against the real thing.

     Sometimes, it’s a question from someone at a holiday cocktail party, someone I’ve never met, someone who finds out, despite my subterfuge, that I’m not an architect after all, that I’m a pastor, and then is determined to be a pain-in-my-you-know-what to ask me (like I’m as dumb as a potted plant or a member of congress), “Do you really believe in the virgin birth?”

    

 

“Do Christians really expect right-thinking people to believe in something as preposterous as Jesus being born of a virgin?” David Silverman asked a reporter. 

It seemed not to occur to the president of the American Atheists Association that the angel’s news would have been every bit as unbelievable and preposterous for Mary. 

And Joseph. 

In Matthew’s Gospel, Joseph is the first person to learn that Isaiah’s 800 year old promise would finally come to pass in a much less tidy and much more complicated way than Isaiah ever let on. 

Joseph is the first person to hear the news. He’s the first person to realize that his fiancé would never be able to prove how it happened exactly. 

He’s the first person to know that it had nothing whatsoever to do with him. 

And he’s the first person to struggle with believing that abstinence only works 99.99999% of the time.

 

Matthew reports in his nativity narrative that upon hearing the news of Mary’s pregnancy, “Joseph resolved to dismiss Mary quietly…” Matthew leaves it to us to imagine just how long it took Joseph to come to that decision.

But, it’s not like Joseph’s happy about it.

The word in the next verse, where Matthew writes, “But just when Joseph had considered to do this, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream.”   The word “consider” in the Greek comes from the root word thymos. 

It can mean “to ponder” as in “to consider” or it can mean “to become angry.” It’s the same word Matthew uses in the next chapter to describe King Herod’s rage as Herod orders the slaughter of innocents.

Joseph’s initial response to the annunciation is anger. 

Why is he angry?

Because prior to the angel appearing to him, Joseph only had Mary’s testimony. 

Joseph only had Mary’s word, and Joseph did not believe her. Joseph did not believe in the virgin birth. Joseph did not believe the word was made flesh in Mary. 

Therefore, Joseph knew what the word required Joseph to do with Mary. 

 

Matthew says that Joseph was a “righteous man.”

In Hebrew the term is tsadiq. 

And it’s not just an adjective for someone. 

By calling Joseph a righteous man, Matthew’s not simply saying that Joseph was a good man or a moral man or even a God-fearing man.

Tsadiq in Matthew’s day was a formal label. An official title. Tsadiq was a term that applied to those rare people who studied and learned and practiced the Torah scrupulously, applying it to every nook and cranny of life. 

When Matthew tells you that Joseph was a tsadiq, he’s telling you that Joseph knew what the Law required he do with Mary. 

Dismissing her quietly was no more an option for a righteous man under the Law than healing on the sabbath. 

You see, in Mary and Joseph’s day, betrothal was a binding, legal contract. 

Only the wedding ceremony itself remained.

Mary and Joseph weren’t simply engaged.

For all intents and purposes, they were husband and wife.

For that reason, according to the Law, unfaithfulness during the engagement period was considered adultery. According to the Mishna— which is Jewish commentary on the Law— infidelity during betrothal was thought to be a graver sin than infidelity during marriage.

 

According to the Book of Deuteronomy, Joseph must take Mary to the door of her father’s house and accuse her publicly of adultery. If Mary doesn’t deny the charge, then the priests and elders of Nazareth will stone her to death.

That’s what the Law commands.

Of course, if Mary does protest, if she denies that she’s sinned, if she’s foolish enough to tell people something as ridiculous as her child being conceived by the Holy Spirit, then Joseph, as a tsadiq, certainly knows what course of action the Torah requires.

According to the Book of Numbers, Joseph is commanded to take Mary before a priest, who will compel Mary to stand before the Lord. The priest will pour holy water into a clay jar. Then the priest will sweep up the dirt from the synagogue floor and pour it into the jar of water. Then the priest will write and read out the accusation against her. 

Finally, the priest will take the accusation and the ink in which it was written and mix them into the water and command Mary to drink it.

The bitter waters.

If it makes her sick, she’s guilty, and she’ll be stoned to death.

If somehow it does not make her ill, then she’s innocent.

Her life will be spared though, in Mary’s case, her life still will be ruined, because she’s pregnant and Joseph’s not the father. 

She will be considered an outcast on par with lepers and tax collectors and shepherds. 

And as a tsadiq, someone who lives the Law inside and out, Joseph certainly knows her sin will become his sin. 

He’ll be an outcast too, righteous no more. 

That’s why Joseph’s angry— whether he shows Mary grace or he hammers her with the Law, either way he’ll suffer. He’ll either lose his wife or he’ll lose his life. 

But it’s a choice— notice— determined by his disbelief. 

 

     The Church has never quite known what to make of Joseph, treating him like an extra in a story starring his wife and her child. 

It’s Mary whose song we hear at Advent. It’s Luke’s Gospel, not Matthew’s, that’s the most popular this time of year. 

It’s the annunciation to Mary that artists have always chosen to paint. 

Prior to the angel of God appearing to him, Joseph distrusts her.

  Joseph is a red-letter righteous man, but before God’s messenger brings him the news, Joseph doubts the Christmas Gospel. 

That is, it takes a revelation of God— a revelation from God— for Joseph to have faith in the news of Mary’s pregnancy ex nihilo. This is why we shouldn’t get too hung up over that clause in the creed about the virgin birth. 

Every little mustard seed of faith is a virgin birth. 

God creates Jesus ex nihilo, but God also creates your trust in Jesus ex nihilo. 

Joseph is the model for how God works faith in us. Joseph’s asleep. Joseph’s completely passive. 

And from nothing, God implants faith in Joseph’s heart through his ear; such that, when Joseph wakes up he does the very opposite of what he had previously determined to do. 

Only then can Joseph profess, “I believe in Jesus Christ his only Son our Lord, who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary.”

 

The Small Catechism (a catechism for children) explains the work of God the Holy Spirit this way: 

“I believe that I cannot by my own reason or strength believe in Jesus Christ, my Lord, or come to Him; but the Holy Spirit has called me by the Gospel.”

Faith, the Bible says again and again, is a gift. 

It’s not an attribute innate to you. 

It’s not an accomplishment won by you. 

It’s not an answer you arrive at through investigation. 

It’s a gift— extra nos— that comes from outside of you.

 

Faith comes by hearing a promise, the Bible says. 

The Gospel is the promise by which Christ plants faith in you. 

Promises like this is my body broken for you, this day in the city of David a savior is born for you, apromise like the one we sing in the carol, “Child for us sinners, poor and in the manger.” 

The promise called Gospel is the device by which Christ delivers faith into the empty womb of your heart. 

This is what David Silverman at the American Atheists Association gets so wrong. Unbelief in the Gospel is our natural predisposition. 

Apart from the gracious work of the Living God upon us, all of us believers in the Gospel teeter on the verge of unbelief. 

It’s not that Christian faith is easy. 

It’s that it’s harder than even atheists imagine. 

To believe that the baby in the ark of Mary’s womb is the Maker of Heaven and Earth, to believe that Jesus has wrapped himself in our flesh and through his body and blood has done everything necessary to save you and make you holy, to believe that he will come again, bearing your every sin in his body, to make you his own beloved— that sort of faith is no easier for us than it was for Joseph. 

That sort of faith— it takes an act of God. 

It’s not that Christians are on a path up to God that others with their reason and doubts cannot abide. 

There is no path to God for any of us— that’s the point of this season. 

God, Zechariah reminded us this morning and the Christmas carols remind us year after year, must come down to us. 

And that’s why, contrary to the American Atheists Association’s stated desire, all of us, preachers, you and me, cannot be silent. 

Because the Word that took flesh in Mary’s womb, comes down to us in the manger of ordinary words and, apart from the auditory assault of God in his promise called the Gospel, we’d all be atheists. 

      

    

     I didn’t see it until we were leaving the city, on our way home. On the other side of the Lincoln Tunnel was another billboard, another nativity image, put there by some evangelical group. 

     This one said: “It’s true.”

     Gabriel saw that one, too, and said, “Look, it’s the same picture.”

     And I said, “No, that one’s different.” 

     “What’s the difference between them?” he asked. 

     “A miracle,” I said. 

      

When it comes to that miracle—

Maybe you’re still clutching an IOU from God. Maybe it feels like porch pirates stole it right underneath your nose, because the gift for you still hasn’t arrived. Maybe Christmas is a time when you think everyone else here has it all together and you’re the only one with more questions than clarity. 

So remember, Joseph is the model. 

And neither Joseph’s faith nor his doubt changes anything from God’s side. 

Joseph’s belief in the incarnation does not activate anything in God that wasn’t already true just as Joseph’s disbelief did not negate what God was already up to in the world for him. 

The Holy Spirit had already overshadowed Mary, whether Joseph believed it or not. God had already taken flesh in Mary’s womb. 

Even if Joseph doubted it, God had already determined to become Jesus and in Christ’s body and blood to die for Joseph’s sins and be raised up from the dead for his justification. 

It’s all already true. 

The only thing Joseph’s faith in it changes is Joseph— his life.

By believing in it, Joseph gets to share his life up close with Christ. 

May God wind his way to your heart through your ear. 

Hear the good news. 

The great good news of the Gospel is that God has already decided to do something about our lives— whether we let him into our lives or not— whether we do anything about it or not, whether we believe it or not. 

He has sent his Son to live for us the faithful life we cannot live, to die for us the sacrifice we cannot offer, and toraise us up with him forever. 

That’s good news!

Believing it is what makes all the difference in our lives. 

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The Christmas Creed in a Nutshell

Over at www.crackersandgrapejuice.com, we’re doing an Advent Devotional Series. Check it out!

Here’s the latest offering:

“I am not interested in what I believe. I am not even sure what I believe. I am much more interested in what the church believes.”

― Stanley Hauerwas, Hannah’s Child: A Theologian’s Memoir

Stanley Hauerwas often insists on pointing out that the reason doctrine— that is, speaking Christian— is critical to Christians in a way that distinguishes Christianity from other religions is, simply, because Christians believe God is a person. Mary’s Maker is contained in her womb. The incarnation is a mystery not in the sense that it is unknowable; it’s a mystery that has been revealed. It’s important, therefore, for Christians to work with our words and make this mystery intelligible for to get Jesus wrong is to get God wrong. More importantly, we work with the Church’s words, because if Jesus is not who the Church has confessed him to be then, as St. Paul points out in 1 Corinthians, we are of all people most to be pitied, for not only are we still in our sins, we have committed (idolatry) the gravest of them.

With that in mind, as we round our way into the Fourth Sunday of Advent, preparing to hear Isaiah’s promise whispered into Joseph’s ear, I thought it would behoove us both to rest and wrestle with exactly what Christians claim is contained in Jesus’ other name, Emmanuel: God-with-us.

1. The Father who dispatches Gabriel is God.

2. The Son in Mary’s womb is God.

3. The Holy Spirit who alighted on the prophet Isaiah is God.

4. The Father who empties himself of power and might is not the Son.

5. The Son is not the Holy Spirit but is the fruit of the Spirit overshadowing Mary.

6. The Holy Spirit who rests on the Son in the Jordan is not the Father but is sent by the Father.

7. There is only one God.

Your head hurt yet?

Christmas, in other words, is the wonderful discovery that we couldn’t possibly have made up the God whose name is Trinity.

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Episode #239 — Amy Laura Hall: A Woman at War with War

It’s in Advent when we look with the prophets to the abolition of war and the return of the Prince of Peace. So what better time to talk again with Dr. Amy Laura Hall of Duke University?

I’m thrilled to have made friends with Amy Laura Hall. Not only is she back on the podcast to talk about Stanley Hauerwas’ influence on her work and theology, she’ll be our special guest in June at our annual live podcast at Annual Conference in Roanoke, Va.

If you’re getting this by email, you can find the podcast here: https://www.spreaker.com/user/cracker...

Amy Laura Hall was named a Henry Luce III Fellow in Theology for 2004-2005 and has received funding from the Lilly Foundation, the Josiah Trent Memorial Foundation, the American Theological Library Association, the Child in Religion and Ethics Project, the Pew Foundation and the Project on Lived Theology.

At Duke University, Professor Hall has served on the steering committee of the Genome Ethics, Law, and Policy Center and as a faculty member for the FOCUS program of the Institute on Genome Sciences and Policy. She has served on the Duke Medical Center’s Institutional Review Board and as an ethics consultant to the V.A. Center in Durham. She served as a faculty adviser with the Duke Center for Civic Engagement (under Leela Prasad), on the Academic Council, and as a faculty advisor for the NCCU-Duke Program in African, African American & Diaspora Studies. She currently teaches with and serves on the faculty advisory board for Graduate Liberal Studies and serves as a core faculty member of the Focus Program in Global Health.

Professor Hall was the 2017 Scholar in Residence at Foundry United Methodist Church in Washington D.C., served on the Bioethics Task Force of the United Methodist Church, and has spoken to academic and ecclesial groups across the U.S. and Europe. An ordained elder in the United Methodist Church, Hall is a member of the Rio Texas Annual Conference. She has served both urban and suburban parishes. Her service with the community includes an initiative called Labor Sabbath, an effort with the AFL-CIO of North Carolina to encourage congregations of faith to talk about the usefulness of labor unions, and, from August 2013 to June 2017, a monthly column for the Durham Herald-Sun. Professor Hall organized a conference against torture in 2011, entitled “Toward a Moral Consensus Against Torture,” and a “Conference Against the Use of Drones in Warfare” October 20-21, 2017. In collaboration with the North Carolina Council of Churches and the United Methodist Church, she organized a workshop with legal scholar Richard Rothstein held October, 2018.

Amy Laura Hall is the author of four books: Kierkegaard and the Treachery of Love, Conceiving Parenthood: The Protestant Spirit of Biotechnological Reproduction, Writing Home with Love: Politics for Neighbors and Naysayers, and Laughing at the Devil: Seeing the World with Julian of Norwich. She has written numerous scholarly articles in theological and biomedical ethics. Recent articles include “The Single Individual in Ordinary Time: Theological Engagements in Sociobiology,” which was a keynote lecture given with Kara Slade at the Society for the Study of Christian Ethics in 2012, and “Torture and American Television,” which appeared in the April 2013 issue of Muslim World, a volume that Hall guest-edited with Daniel Arnold. Her essay “Love in Everything: A Brief Primer to Julian of Norwich” appeared in volume 32 of The Princeton Seminary Bulletin. Word and World published her essay on heroism in the Winter 2016 edition, and her essay “His Eye Is on the Sparrow: Collectivism and Human Significance” appeared in a volume entitled Why People Matter with Baker Publishing. Her forthcoming essays include a new piece on Kierkegaard and love for The T&T Clark Companion to the Theology of Kierkegaard, to be published by Bloomsbury T&T Clark.

Laughing at the Devil was the focus of her 2018 Simpson Lecture at Simpson College in Iowa and has been chosen for the 2019 Virginia Festival of the Book. She continues work on a longer research project on masculinity and gender anxiety in mainstream, white evangelicalism.

Don’t forget to go to www.crackersandgrapejuice.com to become a patron of the podcast!

 

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New Book! Crazy Talk: The Stories Jesus Told (about himself)

The podcast posse at Crackers and Grape Juice has a new book out. To all of you who kvetch that we need to pay our producer, Tommie Marshell, this is your chance to support the show. Plus, it’s actually pretty good. We got a professional editor to edit it this time. Don’t take our word for it. This is what author, Sarah Condon, has to say about it:

“The Church has done more damage to the power of the parables than any other category of scripture. We have moralized them and purposed them for our own agendas. We have hoisted them onto children and told them to “be good.” We have called ourselves Good Samaritans and Eldest Brothers like a Biblically uneducated clown parade. They were never intended for any of that nonsense. The Parables are intended to be void of morality and only consumed with the agenda of Jesus, who came only to save us. Buy this book. Jason, Teer, and the other yahoos will remind you just how bizarre, compelling, and truly unfair the parables really are. Thank God.”

You can order the book here: https://www.amazon.com/Crazy-Talk-Sto...

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Episode 238 : Dr. Thomas Lecaque— The Apocalyptic Myth that Helps Explain Evangelical Support for Trump

Thomas Lecaque teaches Religious History at Grand View University in Iowa. He recently authored an article in the Washington Post that caught our attention, entitled “The Apocalyptic Myth that Explains Evangelical Support for Trump.”

You can find the article here: https://www.washingtonpost.com/outloo...

I had a blast talking with him, and I hope you enjoy listening along with us.

Don’t forget— go to www.crackersandgrapejuice.com.

Get your Stanely Hauerwas “Jesus is Lord and Everything Else is Bullshit” t-shirt. Click on support the show and become a patron of the podcast for peanuts. Like our Facebook Page and share something. Find us in iTunes and leave us a rating and review.

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What Mayor Pete Augurs for the Way Forward in the UMC

I often joke that the Church, the UMC in particular, would be healthier if church people, pastors especially, actually read Paul’s Letters. We’re not speaking Christian when we draw lines according to some righteousness equation, for Paul tells us unequivocally in Romans that NO ONE IS RIGHTEOUS.  

We’ve muddled the Gospel into G-law-spel when we presume to have achieved a righteousness of our own through our “holy-living” (ie, the happy accident of having been born straight) or right-believing (ie, “all means all”).

Speaking of divides—

Last winter at the UMC’s Special Sex Conference (I mean, General Conference) in the aftermath of the decisive vote I watched from up above in the press box, as a rainbow-clad group of pastors and lay delegates gathered through the scrum to the center of the conference floor. They fell on their knees and wept. Only an arm’s distance away from them, another group of pastors and lay people sang and danced and clapped their hands in celebration. If you want to talk about what’s incompatible with Christianity, it’s that image I saw from high up top in the press box.

But even prior to the vote, it had become unmistakable to me and my podcast posse how at a global gathering like General Conference, where real-time translations were happening across scores of languages, the problem for which the UMC was— and still remains— at an impasse is that United Methodists, no matter their geographic origin, largely speak in two different and divergent languages. 

Or rather, the problem in the United Methodist Church’s fight about sexuality, which in my darker humors makes me dubious about any Way Forward that doesn’t resemble Marriage Story, is that we’re not ultimately fighting about sexuality. The problem in the United Methodist Church is that sexuality is the issue over which we’re discovering the irreconciliable fact that the United Methodist Church is a Church of two different religions which, if we’re honest, don’t really recognize one another as kindred creeds. 

What’s incompatible in United Methodism isn’t gay Christians. We’re a liberal denomination that’s been in decline since it’s inception in the ‘60’s. We’d kill for a horde of gay Christians to overrun our congregations. 

What’s incompatible in United Methodism isn’t gay Christians; it’s the two religions presently practiced within it. 

It was clear at General Conference:

One side spoke in terms of fidelity to Biblical tradition and another in terms of imitating Jesus’ examplar hospitality and embrace of the outcast. Not only did neither side attempt to persuade the other side— lip service aside— neither side really recognized the other side as professing and practicing their own faith. 

Friend of the podcast, David French, recently made this very point by way of Pete Buttigeg for the Dispatch:

“If Pete Buttigieg, an Episcopalian, receives the Democratic nomination for president, it’s a virtual certainty that the only churchgoing candidate—and the only candidate who speaks fluently and easily about the role of faith in his life and in his politics—will lose the churchgoing Christian vote (and lose the white Evangelical vote by a staggering margin) to a thrice-married man who bragged about grabbing women by the genitals, appeared in Playboy videos, and paid hush money to cover up an affair with a porn star.

There will be easy answers for this divide. Progressive Christians will blame partisan hypocrisy (Evangelicals object to Mayor Pete’s gay marriage but overlook Trump’s serial sexual sins? What?) Conservative Christians will simply point to Buttigieg’s position on abortion and religious liberty—and to Trump’s judges. Often the explanation is as basic as stating the truism that Republicans vote for Republicans and Democrats vote for Democrats, regardless of underlying theology.

While Mayor Pete talks about faith—he doesn’t truly connect with millions of American Christians.
When Buttigieg speaks, Evangelicals don’t hear “one of us” and then choose to reject one of their own to support Donald Trump. 
Instead, they see a man of a related, but different, faith, where the differences are so profound that we often don’t speak the same spiritual language.”

In an interview with Rolling Stone, French notes, Mayor Pete explained how he understands salvation, “My faith teaches me that salvation has to do with how I make myself useful to those who have been excluded, marginalized, and cast aside and oppressed in society.”

Says French,

“Buttigieg isn’t a theologian, but he’s a smart and effective communicator of his beliefs, but when Evangelicals read his words, they’ll hear that internal “record scratch” that makes them say, “Wait. What did he say?”

What becomes quite evident at a global gathering of the United Methodist Church, which may not be so obvious in a local congregation, particularly on the coasts, is that the UMC is the ecclessial home to both mainline liberals and conservative evangelicals. Functionally, the latter have more in common with nondenominational evangelicals and Roman Catholics than they do with theological liberals in their own denomination. 

French goes on:

“In fact, Evangelical Protestants now connect far more with Catholics than they do Mainline Protestants like Mayor Pete. In some crucial ways (such as the high view of scripture), Evangelicals connect more with Orthodox and Conservative Jews than they do with Mainline Protestants. 

The more Mayor Pete speaks, the more he highlights those differences and the more he distances himself culturally and theologically from the Christians in Trump’s base.

For example, the Evangelical mind is incredulous at the notion that any scriptural command—even a command as harsh as imposing stoning as a punishment for sexual sin—was “always wrong,” and the Evangelical mind is incredulous at the notion of salvation so inexplicably tied to human compassion.

That does not mean that Evangelicals are in favor of stoning and against compassion. The Christian church is not bound by Levitical law, and Christ himself stopped the stoning of a woman caught in adultery. Moreover, Christians are called to engage in acts of sacrificial love for their fellow man, but we don’t ever find scriptural commands to be “wrong,” nor do we find “salvation” in compassion.

It’s not that Mainline Christians view the Bible as just another book, it’s that they view it to greater or lesser degrees—to be incompatible with the notion of a God who personifies love.

In the Mainline formulation, Christ is less an instrument of salvation and more a vehicle for inspiration. The Mainline vision of salvation is alien to the Evangelical mind. 

Most Evangelical Protestants understand salvation not through works of compassion but rather through faith alone, by the grace of God alone, working through the atoning sacrifice of Christ alone.”

Presently, there are a handful of plans to reconcile the our differences in the United Methodist Church and a great deal of hope being invested in them. I’ve long thought it’s naive to think the UMC would navigate this debate more nimbly than the denominations which went before us over the brink, but David French throws cold water even on my optimism, reminding us that, even if we can resolve the LGBTQ issue, a more fundamental divide remains:

“If mainstream media figures believe that Mayor Pete speaks the same Christian language as Trump’s Evangelical base, they need to think again. He’s a sincere proponent of a faith that is very different from theirs.”
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The Promise that Gives You Christ

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For our services on the second Sunday of Advent, I offered three reflections in tandem with musical offerings by our choirs. Isaiah 11 and John 1 were the scripture texts.

It’s Better to Receive than to Give

“Get dressed in something nice,” my mother said through my bedroom door, “We’re going to church.” I was a teenager, somewhere between my learner’s permit and my license to freedom, and somewhere, I’m sure, a needle scratched clear off a record. Save for a Holy Roman shotgun wedding, where even elementary-aged me could sense the bride and groom were about to make a terrible decision, I’d never gone to church before. 

It was Christmas Eve, and, as a  teenager, I had a few expensive (and awesome!) gifts on my wish list. None of them was what I ended up receiving. 

From the discreet remove of the balcony, I learned “Silent Night” had more than one verse and I discovered that the magi were conspicuously missing from the gospel lesson the woman in the guady holiday sweater read for us. I’d seen the bumperstickers, of course. I knew Jesus was the reason for the season, but that Christmas Eve it wasn’t at all clear to me what was the reason to keep on fussing in the here and now about somehow locked away two thousand years in the past. 

Not until the pastor held up a loaf of bread, broke it, and gave thanks to God and then, pouring wine into a silver cup, he taught us a word that not even this A+ English student knew: incarnation. Lifting the cup of wine and showing it to us like Vanna White revealing a hidden vowel, he explained what lay not so self-evident in the familiar story of Mary, Joseph, and the heavenly host. God takes flesh in Jesus Christ, I heard for the first time. Our flesh, the preacher proclaimed. God became what we are, the preacher preached so that we can become like God.

Here’s the thing—

As an adolescent, I had suffered acne so severe the dermatologist prescribed me medication I later learned had been used initially to treat Hanson’s Disease; that is, leprosy. What I was, I believed, was unlovely and therefore unloveable.   

To hear that God would put on my blemished skin, that Love itself would take on my unlovliness, become what I was, take my body as God’s own body— well, that first worship service on Christmas Eve was like a wardrobe into Narnia. I’d been given a gift I didn’t realize I needed and wanted until I had received it. 

What was that gift?

Let me ask a better question. 

And it’s an important question because, let’s be honest, most of us would feel far more guilty if we neglected our Christmas shopping than if we neglected to go to church on Christmas. 

So here’s my question: 

Why should we go to church on Christmas? 

(For that matter, why should we go to church at all?)

What can you receive at church on Christmas that you can receive nowhere else?

What can you get at church no one else can give you?

The answer, of course, is Jesus Christ. 

Only at church, only where the Word is preached and the sacraments are rightly celebrated, can you receive Jesus Christ himself. 

And everything that belongs to him. 

I shouldn’t have said “of course” because, of course, preachers like me mess it up all the time. We make it seem like what Church has to offer the world is politics or behavior modification, purpose or principles for daily living when, in fact, the gift we have to offer the world is Jesus Christ himself and everything (his righteousness, his sonship, his faithfulness, his resurrection, his Father’s eternal love) that belongs to him. 

At the heart of so much Christianity is a strange and self-negating sort of absence. We gather on the sabbath only to hear about what happens elsewhere. In both overt and unintended ways, many churches signal that revelation happens everywhere but here, at the font, at the altar, on a preacher’s imperfect lips and in your sin-harded hearing. 

God’s out there, on the move, and it’s our job to find him and join him, preachers like me exhort. God happened in Jesus Christ, we say— and note the past tense, whose teaching and example we can imitate in our own personal lives and for our social causes. Just think about how many sermons you’ve heard over the years that implied the real stuff of Christianity happens not on Sunday morning but Monday through Friday, on the frontlines of the “real world.”

But those sorts of reductions of Christianity misunderstand what kind of word— fundamentally— is the Gospel. The Gospel is not a timeless set of ideas we can apply to our politics or personal lives. The Gospel is not a school of philosophy or, even, a way of life. The Gospel is not a means to make us or our children more moral. 

The Gospel is a promise. 

The Gospel is a particular kind of promise, in fact. 

The Gospel is the promise by which Christ gives himself to us. 

The Gospel works like a wedding vow, Martin Luther said. The Gospel is a promise by which the Bridegroom gives himself and everything that belongs to him to his beloved. What makes Christ present in creatures of bread and wine is the same promise of the Gospel proclaimed from the pulpit— the same promise we sing in our Christmas carols. The reason this is the season of comfort and joy is because the promise itself gives us Christ himself. Of all the times of the year, Christmas is the season when Christians should be insisting that it’s better to receive than to give. 

What all our other versions of Christianity obscure is how what’s present to us in the promise of the Gospel, even if we are nothing but unimpressive, ordinary Christians, is greater than all the possible experiences in the world. Nothing less than Christ himself, Luther wrote, is what all believers receive by faith alone. By faith in the promise we are united with Christ. Through the promise of the Gospel— whether the promise is proclaimed from a pulpit or sung by a choir or placed in your mouth on bread and wine—  Christ lives in you and you in him. Through that promise, Paul writes, the Maker of Heaven and Earth dwells in your heart. God is not far away in heaven nor is God off at work in the world busier with someboday other than you. God is in his Word and the Word that takes flesh in the virgin’s womb still takes up residence among us. 

The Gospel is the promise by which Christ gives himself to us. 

This is why the Bible teaches that salvation comes by hearing because Jesus Christ is salvation and he comes to us the same way he came to Israel, by the announcement of a promise. 

What I received that first Christmas Eve, in my ears and on my lips, it wasn’t an idea. 

It was God himself. 

That’s why the church is necessary.

We only have one gift to give, as the Church, but it’s a gift that can be infinitely distributed. And because only Christ is without beginning or end, he’s the only gift you can receive that will keep on giving. 

Pretending to Wait

Have you ever noticed how Advent is a season when Christians play at waiting. We pretend to be waiting. We light purple candles and we sing songs like “Come, O Come Emmanuel” to recapitulate Israel’s exilic longing as our own. We pretend to be waiting for the arrival of what we believe has already come. . 

After all, what distinguishes Christians from Jews is the fact we believe that for which Israel waited has already arrived. The day promised by the prophet Isaiah, John’s Gospel makes clear, has come. The Kingdom of God prophesied by the John the Baptist has come in the one John identified as the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world— the Kingdom and the King are one and the same. 

Advent is the time when we pretend to be waiting because we believe the promise has already been fulfilled. By the baptism of Christ’s death and resurrection, we Gentiles have been grafted into the People of God. The Powers of Sin, Death, and the Devil have been defeated by Christ’s cross; there is therefore now no condemnation. Likewise, the Great High Priest has sat down forever from his work because the judge became the judged, offering a perfect once-for-all sacrifice. And having ascended to the Father, the lamb slain from the foundation of the world sits on the throne as the world’s true King and from thence he shall come again to the quick and the dead. 

If the long-expected messiah has already arrived in the ark of Mary’s womb, if Emmanuel has already ransomed us from captivity to the Babylon of Sin and Death, then to what end do we break out the purple paraments every Advent and rehearse a yearning that’s already been fulfilled in the flesh? 

Stanley Hauerwas, the geezer theologian who irritated some of you two weeks ago, writes in his latest book, Minding the Web: 

“Israel learned to wait by God’s gift of the Law that made her a people who had to learn to live out of control. To be sure, she was often less than faithful to what her Lord had given her, but through the ups and downs of her history, she learned what it means to wait on the Lord.”

The Law, in other words, was a gift through which Israel learned to wait on the Lord; so that, through such waiting, Israel could learn faithfulness. But the gift we’ve been given in Jesus Christ is not the Law but the Gospel. As John puts it in the closet thing to a nativity story his gospel has got, “The Law was given through Moses, but Grace and Truth have come in Jesus Christ.” 

If the Gospel of Grace, the glad tiding of the Law’s fulfillment for you, is the gift we’ve been given, then how might waiting— resting— with this gift glean from us a deeper faithfulness? What’s the wisdom in pretending to wait for a promise that has already come— a promise that is no further away than Sunday’s bread and wine? 

Robert Farrar Capon was an Episcopal priest and food writer for the NY Times who died a few years ago. Capon opens his least known book, The Foolishness of Preaching, with a screenplay of sorts. Capon uses a set-up you’d expect on Bay Watch first to script a typical presentation of the so-called gospel. A woman is drowning in the seaside. The lifeguard/hero/Christ-figure swims out through the rough waves, fights the undertow, then drags the woman to shore, and depleted of all energy, still manages to give her mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. She was as good as dead, until … the lifeguard named Jesus saves her. 

That’s one version gospel, which is really no gospel at all, Capon says, crumpling up the script and tossing it in the rubbish bin. 

For take two, the lifeguard rushes down off his chair, swims out to the drowning woman,  grabs her, and never lets her out of his grip. And then the lifeguard goes down with the drowning woman. Down to the ocean’s floor. Then, as Capon’s screenplay notes, the camera pans across the startled and disturbed onlookers and then freezes, focusing on a spare note left behind by the lifeguard. 

The lifeguard’s note reads, “She’s safe in my death.” 

Capon goes on to apply to preachers and hearers of the Gospel:

“Our preachers tell us the wrong story entirely. They can’t bring themselves to come within a country mile of the horrendous truth that we are not saved by our efforts to lead a good life. Instead, they mouth the canned recipes for successful living they think their congregations want to hear. It makes no difference what kind of success they urge on us: ‘spiritual’ or ‘religious’ success is as irrelevant to the Gospel as is success in health, money, or love. Nothing counts but the cross of the Christ child. But for even a sadder thing, on the rare occasions when they do get around to proclaiming the outrageousness of salvation by death of the divine Lifeguard, they can do it for no more than fifteen minutes. In the last five minutes of the sermon they meekly take back with the right hand of plausibility everything they so boldly set forth with the left hand of paradox.”

We’re all born lawyers. With the Law hardwired onto our hearts, as Paul says, we all want to be told what to do and then try our damndest to do it. We’re all born lawyers. We have to be taught the Gospel. 

Better put, we need to learn to trust the message that we are justified before God not based on what we do for God but based on what has been done for us by the God-Man. The Gospel of grace comes so unnaturally to us that first it had to come to us in a virgin’s womb— that’s not natural.

That’s why we pretend every Advent, playing at an expectation that’s already been met and acting as though we’re waiting on a promise that hasn’t already come. Advent is an annual reminder to us, who insist on otherwise, that salvation not about a path that we make for ourselves to God but about God coming to us. We spend every year hearing again Isaiah and John the Baptist speak of God’s highway in the desert so that we, who are hellbent on adding another outband, glorybound lane to that highway, will finally learn to trust the happy news of God’s one-way love. 

I’ve Got the Joy, Joy, Joy, Joy Outside My Heart

When I was counselor at a United Methodist summer camp, we sometimes had to sing with the kids that song “I’ve got the joy, joy, joy, joy down in my heart.” 

You know the song?

I hate that song. 

Especially this time of year. 

It’s always been hard for me to feel at peace during Advent. It’s never been easy for me to feel joy down in my heart at Christmas. And it took me a while to understand how that’s okay. It took me a while to understand that it’s okay I don’t feel very joyfol or at peace during this season because it took me a while to understand the Gospel. 

It starts with a particular Christmas Eve when I was boy during my parents’ on-again, off-again marriage. 

My mother was working the night shift at the hospital, and my grandpa was there to keep an eye on my little sister and me. We had finished up the dishes when my father came home from whatever bar had closed early for the holiday. He was quite drunk. It wasn’t the first time he’d come home drunk, but he’d never come home drunk on Christmas. The next Christmas he didn’t come home at all. I remember my mom driving me around town to help her look for his car. He was parked in front of someone else’s home, a woman. I still remember the colored lights on whoever’s porch reflecting on my mom’s windshield.

After my parents finally split up for good, my mom struggled knowing that we weren’t having the sort of Christmas she thought we ought to have, the Christmas she thought other families gave their children. The oughts always accuse, and this ought stressed her out. Disappointed her. Frustrated her. And every year it would come to a head while we decorated the Christmas tree. Every year, trimming the tree invariably ended with me shouting unfair accusations and shedding tears and my mom throwing the treetop angel on to the floor and yelling “To hell with it all!” One Christmas, I recall, she pushed the artificial tree down on its side just as the jack-in-box from the stop- motion Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer said, “We’re all misfits.”

Call it post-yule stress disorder. Feelings of peace and joy have always been hard for me at Christmas. And, as a pastor, I know I’m hardly alone. Christians at Christmas are often made to feel guily if they’re not filled with joy down in their hearts. 

For Christians to think they ought to feel a certain feeling simply because they’re Christian, not only is that impossible— and impossibly cruel to put on others who suffer grief and depression— it betrays a fundamental misunderstanding about what kind of word is the Gospel. 

The Gospel is the promise that gives you Christ and everything that belongs to him. 

And that’s enough!

Martin Luther said that the Gospel of God’s condescension to us to be with us and for us in Jesus Christ sets us free to name things as they are. You can let everything in your life be what it is, and you can let your feelings be what they are. You’re free not to pretend because the point of the promise called Gospel is not that you’re supposed to feel a certain way, joyful and at peace all time. The point of the Gospel promise is that something glad and joyous has happened, outside of you, and, regardless of how we feel and what’s going on in our lives, we Christians agree it’s worth celebrating. 

The Gospel may not be a joyful word in you this season but it’s still a joyful word in and of itself no matter how you’re feeling or what cross you’re bearing because it’s a word that gives you Christ himself. You have him in his promise regardless of your feelings. The Gospel may not always give you a peaceful, easy feeling, but the Gospel does give you the Prince of Peace, as real and present with you by means of his promise as he was in Mary’s womb. 

And what would you rather have when the you-know-what hits the fan? 

A feeling? 

Or God? 

No matter how you feel inside, you can always cling to this promise outside of you.

Our message this season isn’t “You should feel glad and joy-filled and at peace (and something’s the matter with you if you’re not).” 

Our message this season isn’t about you at all. 

It’s “Hear the good news, for you is born this day in the City of David…a savior, the Prince of Peace, who will free his people from their sins…” 

The Gospel may not be a joyful word in you this Christmas, but it’s still a joyful word because it’s true.

And regardless of what’s true about you this season, you’ve got the joy, joy, joy, joy outside of you in the Gospel. You’ve got the joy, joy, joy, joy outside of you in this promise that Christ will love you, no matter what. And because the empty grave proves that Christ keeps his promises, you can rest assured— you can be at peace— that, in the end, with you, “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.”

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Episode #237: Dr. Matthew Sutton ~ DT isn’t the OG: Explaining the Bond Between Trump and White Evangelicals

Turns out, DT isn’t the OG.

Harding and Trump have much in common. They are among the most allegedly corrupt presidents in U.S. history. Their Cabinet teams have been racked by scandal. Like Harding, Trump’s personal morals are the antithesis of what religious Christians profess to demand.

But, like Harding, Trump maintains the support of the faithful because of his policies and the attention he lavishes on Christian voters and their faith leaders. Both presidents sought religion-based immigration bans. They criticize international organizations, avoid broad alliances and insist on America first, last and only.

And they use the Bible to justify their policy proposals. Trump, like Harding, praises the devout, advocates policies consistent with evangelical readings of the Bible and seeks to use his office to advance evangelicals’ theological agenda.

Donald Trump isn’t the first President with whom Christians went all in, using their mutual fear of the other to justify and excuse all manner of corrupt behavior. Before there was The Donald, there was Warren G.

Dr. Sutton recently wrote an article in the Washington Post that got our attention for this episode.

You can find it here:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outloo...

Matthew is the Edward R. Meyer distinguished professor of history at Washington State University. The author of award-winning books, including American Apocalypse, and the recent book, Double Crossed: The Missionaries Who Spied for the United States During the Second World War, he lives in Pullman, Washington.

Don’t forget— go to www.crackersandgrapejuice.com.

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Christian Century Review — That All Shall Be Saved by David Bentley Hart

Here’s my review in the latest issue of the Christian Century. I confess that it was both a treat and a terror to review a book by the likes of DBH.

You can find the article here:

https://www.christiancentury.org/revi...

Some years ago, I co-officiated at a burial in Arlington National Cemetery along with a megachurch pastor who was famous for his pithy radio spots aired in the Washington, D.C. area. A fundamentalist member of the immediate family had insisted on the participation of a pastor “from a Bible-believing church.” When parts for the brief liturgy were doled out, this pastor told me, “I’ll just say a few words.”

The deceased man had died too early and far too slowly of cancer. After I prayed and read from the First Letter of Peter about the promise of an imperishable inheritance, my co-officiant stepped to the head of the casket and, after acknowledging the deceased man’s bravery and accomplishments, informed us that he had nonetheless “failed his most important mission.” 

“He’s lost forever to us— and to God— because he never accepted Jesus Christ as his personal Lord and savior,” the pastor said. Then he invited all of us gathered by the grave to “treat this tragedy as God’s way of giving you an opportunity.” 

I wondered whether the horror on the widow’s face was directed at him or at the God of whom he spoke. Only later did it occur to me that nothing this pastor had said to us about God and eternity had been biblical. It had sounded Christianish, sure, but none of it came from the Bible he’d waved in the air. By contrast, the ancient liturgy I’d celebrated was really nothing more than a pastiche of promises straight out of scripture, beginning with the very last of Christ’s words of grace: “I died and behold I am alive forever more, and I hold the keys of hell and death.”

In his little book The Doors of the Sea, David Bentley Hart recalls reading an article in the New York Times shortly after the tsunami in South Asia in 2005. The article highlighted a Sri Lankan father, who, in spite of his frantic efforts, which included swimming in the roiling sea with his wife and mother-in-law on his back, was unable to prevent his wife or any of his four children from being swept to their deaths. The father recounted the names of his four children and then, overcome with grief, sobbed to the reporter that “My wife and children must have thought, ‘Father is here . . . he will save us’ but I couldn’t do it.”

Hart wonders: If you had the chance to speak to this father in the moment of his deepest grief, what should you say? Hart argues that only a moral cretin would have approached that father with abstract theological explanation: “Sir, your children’s deaths are a part of God’s eternal but mysterious counsels” or “Your children’s deaths, tragic as they may seem, in the larger sense serve God’s complex design for creation” or “It’s all part of God’s plan.” Most of us, Hart says, would have the good sense and empathy not to talk like that to the father. Hart then takes his point to the next level: “And this should tell us something. For if we think it shamefully foolish and cruel to say such things in the moment when another’s sorrow is most real and irresistibly painful, then we ought never to say them.” 

His point is as prophetic as it is pastoral. If we mustn’t say such things to a father in grief, we ought never to say them about God. Indeed, if we are able to utter such things about God, it’s a sure sign that scripture has been conscripted into the service of a dogmatic tradition and, thus, religion has corrupted our conscience. 

Beating at the heart of That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation is this same righteous indignation. As readers of his previous work will anticipate, the book displays the diverse range of Hart’s intellectual gifts. It is at once a theological argument, an exegetical examination, a patristic study, a metaphysical inquiry, and an astringent and often playful polemic against the alleged doctrine of eternal hell. But behind the turns of logic and philosophical jargon, That All Shall Be Saved is primarily a work of a stirred and unyielding conscience. 

Hart insists that the transcendent God of absolute Love and infinite Goodness would not bring into existence a world in which one or more human beings might be condemned to everlasting misery and suffering. If this key claim is true, then it surely follows that “the God in whom the majority of Christians throughout history have professed belief appears to be evil (at least judging by the dreadful things they say about him).” 

The elegance and erudition of Hart’s sometimes overwrought prose can prove misleading. Whereas Flannery O’Connor employed bizarre characters and grotesque plot turns to shock her readers awake, Hart deploys syllogisms and writings of the church fathers to the same end. Readers who would place Hart nearer to Plato than, say, Amos have not grasped the pathos behind the writing. As much as the prophets, Hart thunders against the corrosive effects of Christianities rendered cruel through their incoherence. In doing so, he alerts readers to a simple but often forgotten truth: if the behavior or character of the deity you describe would elicit moral revulsion when attributed to any other creature, then the god in question is but a creature. It is not the Creator. 

His theological arguments and scriptural exegesis aside, it really is that simple for Hart— just as it was, he argues, for more of the ancient Christians than their posterity has permitted us to remember. The Father is not less merciful than the Son enjoins his disciples to be, nor does the Spirit sow fruit in us that is absent in or incongruent with the Father’s own attributes. God is good, as we teach our children. And we can teach our children that God is good because our conception of the good is analogous to the God who is Goodness itself and who has been disclosed to us in the self-giving of Christ. As Gregory of Nyssa taught, “the Word and he from whom he is do not differ in their nature.” 

Because the fullness of God dwelt in the Word made flesh, our words—words like good, love, and justice—are not empty. And if they are empty and correspond to nothing ultimately true, then Hart is right to conclude that there is no meaningful distinction between perfect faith and perfect nihilism. When our theological language has been so emptied of true corollaries in God, and when terms like justice and eternal punishment are paired together, “the boundaries of the rational have been violated.”

The brevity of That All Shall Be Saved is itself a feature of Hart’s argument for universal reconciliation. For Hart, the argument against infernalist and annihilationist understandings of hell and for the salvation of all is straightforward. It’s a simple matter because the gospel is really quite uncomplicated. 

For the evangelists, the epistle writers, and the earliest of the church fathers—who, unlike Augustine, could read the original language of the New Testament texts—the unambiguous story of salvation is that of “a relentless tale of rescue, conducted by a God who requires no tribute to win his forgiveness or love.” The good news proclaimed by the earliest church fathers was a story not of God rescuing us from himself but of God delivering us from death, the consequence of a broken creation. The gospel for the first Christians, who were best positioned by time, place, and language to understand it, was the “epic of God descending into the depths of human estrangement to release his creatures from bondage to death, penetrating even into the heart of hades to set captives free, recall his prodigal children, and restore a broken creation.”

At the beginning, Hart frames That All Shall Be Saved as a postscript to his recent translation of the New Testament (The New Testament: A Translation, 2017). Understanding the connection between the two is necessary for understanding his book, for Hart believes that once the accretions of interpretative bias are peeled away from the biblical texts, the all-ness of God’s saving will and work is obvious. Hart is unequivocal in his argument and unsparing in his polemic because he insists that belief in eternal hell relies upon assumptions which are foreign impositions—born of bad translations of the biblical texts—upon the original glad tidings of the church. 

Hart’s rhetoric is unbending because belief in the infinite torment of a finite soul, or even the permanent loss of that soul through annihilation, is only possible once you’ve confused the kerygma which inaugurated the church. None of the earliest expositors of the faith, Hart points out, incorporated into the gospel “the discordant claim that innocent blood had to be spilled to assuage God’s indignation.” Instead the God who is the creator of all is determined to be the savior of all. Death, not sin, is his enemy, and the aim of his incursion in Christ is not the appeasement of his wrath but the healing of all that he had formerly declared very good. 

But what about the verses about “the gnashing of teeth” and about the sheep being separated from the goats? Hart anticipates the question, playfully noting that “if Paul really believed that the alternative to life in Christ is eternal torment, it seems fairly careless of him to have omitted any mention of the fact,” and that Jesus “in the gospels simply makes no obvious claim about a place or state of endless suffering.” These rejoinders come between Hart’s painstaking excursus, verse by verse, through the Greek of the texts in question. Along the way, Hart notes how the term “hell” itself is not present in any of the scriptural texts; it’s an Anglo-Saxon word that translators attach to the specific, geographic, time-bound places used in the texts. In those few texts, Hart also notes, it’s always deployed in passages that are narrative, pictorial, and hyperbolic and thus meant to be received as metaphor. In contrast, whenever the New Testament speaks of the universality of God’s salvation in Christ (47 times by Hart’s count) it does so in bald theological assertions (as in 1 Corinthians 15:22: “For just as in Adam all die, so also in the Anointed all will be given life”) which can be taken in no other way but literally. 

Hart’s stroll through the relevant texts comes in the second of the four meditations which comprise That All Shall Be Saved. In the first meditation, “Who Is God? The Moral Meaning of Creatio Ex Nihilo,” Hart argues that the doctrine of creation is not merely an explanation of origins but is an eschatological claim, every bit as concerned with our whither as our whence. Precisely because that whence is sheer gift, the whither—if God is indeed Good—can only lead to one end, himself. Belief in an eternal hell relies upon a literal, which is to say static, reading of Genesis. To preach fire and brimstone one must first conjugate the Triune God’s deliberation (“Let us make humankind in our image . . .”) into the past tense. Creation from nothing, as church fathers like Gregory of Nyssa saw clearly, does not refer to God’s primordial act but to an eschatological one which witnesses to God’s ultimate—as in teleological—relation to creation.

Creation from nothing isn’t so much a statement about what God did or what God does but a statement about who God is. To say that God creates ex nihilo is to assert that God did not need creation. God, who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, is already and eternally sufficient unto himself, a perfect community of fullness and love, without deficit or need and with no potentiality. Creation from nothing confesses our belief that the world is not nature but creation; that is, it is sheer gift because the Giver is without any lack. Creation is not necessary to God. It is not the terrain on which God needs to realize any part of an incomplete identity. Precisely because God did not need to create, because creation is sheer gift, God “needs” for creation to reveal his goodness. Morally speaking, God is now bound to creation’s end because its beginning was not bound to him. In other words, for creation to be gift and the Giver to be good, then God “must” bring to fruition his purpose in creation. 

“In the end of all things is their beginning,” Hart argues, “and only from the perspective of the end can one know what they are, why they have been made, and who the God is who has called them forth.” What Christians mean by the imago dei is not immediate, Hart claims, borrowing from Gregory. Creation is, in fact, inseparable from what we call sanctification. God’s “Let us…” does not refer to the events of day six of creation, but names the plot of the entire salvation story. As Gregory saw it, we can only truly say that God “created” when all of creation finally has reached its consummation in the union of all things with the First Good. Belief in an eternal hell, in which some portion or multitude of humanity is forever lost, forsaken, or annihilated, contradicts belief in creation from nothing, for if God’s promised aim is that in the fullness of time all of humanity will bear his image, the promise can never be consummated without all of humanity included in it.

“What Is Judgment? A Reflection on Biblical Eschatology” is Hart’s second mediation, in which he recovers the hell he believes the first Christians and church fathers anticipated, a fire of God’s judgment that is neither retributive nor eternal but is, as Malachi prophesies, a refining fire. Purgation is not damnation. A finite creature could never justly merit an infinite punishment. The gospel is that God in his love and justice is “dragging all of sinful creation unto himself,” and this means that prior to the consummation of all things every sinful soul will come before “the healing assault of unyielding divine love upon obdurate souls, one that will save even those who in this life prove unworthy of heaven by burning away every last vestige of their wicked deeds.” 

Hart turns to Gregory of Nyssa’s conception of the imago dei in his third section, “What Is a Person? A Reflection on the Divine Image.” Quite simply, we are not persons in isolation. The person I am is literally inconceivable apart from the people in my life. We are who we’ve loved. From this incontrovertible axiom follows an equally incontestable assertion: hell for some would be hell for all. If who I am is constituted by the memories given to me by those I’ve loved, then what would it mean for me to be in heaven when they are in hell? Heaven would be a torment to me. Or if memory of them was blotted out from me to spare me the pain of knowing of their suffering, then the part of me they constituted would likewise be erased. To believe in an eternal hell for some is to believe that the host of heaven have been, in decisive ways, hollowed out, made shadows of their former selves, as C. S. Lewis famously sketched the souls in hell. Such a hell would require that the heavenly host be eternally lobotomized. 

Finally, in “What Is Freedom? A Reflection on the Rational Will,” Hart directs his ire against the most popular and admittedly compassionate defense of eternal hell. Many fire and brimstone apologists appeal to human freedom and God’s respect for its dignity. God does not consign creatures to hell, the thinking goes, God merely consents to hell. God accepts the risk, inherent in any loving relationship, that some creatures will reject his love and choose hell over him.

Despite the tempered, rational appearance of this approach, to Hart’s mind it is perhaps the worst argument of all in favor of an eternal hell. Rather than esteeming our creaturely freedom or God’s respect for it, the argument sacralizes the very condition from which we’re redeemed by Christ: bondage to sin and death. The fatal deficiency in the free will defense of the fire and brimstone folks, Hart argues, is that it employs an understanding of freedom that is incoherent to a properly tuned Christian ear. 

The breadth of the Christian tradition would not recognize such a construal of the word freedom. For the church fathers, indeed for St. Paul, our ability to choose something other than the Good that is God is not a sign of freedom but of a lack of freedom. It’s a symptom of our bondage to sin, not our liberty from it. 

For Christians, freedom is not the absence of any constraint upon our will, and it is not the ability to choose whatever you will; it is to choose well. We are most free when our will more nearly corresponds to God’s will. And just in case readers can’t connect this point to the issue of perdition, Hart continues: “It makes no more sense to say that God allows creatures to damn themselves out of his love for them or his respect for their freedom than to say a father might reasonably allow his deranged child to thrust her face into a fire out of a tender regard for her moral autonomy.”

If it’s true that we can choose hell rather than God, and forever so, then for those who do, Christ is not their redeemer. And if Christ is not their redeeemer, then he was not. And if he was not for them, then he was not for any of us, and the god who purportedly took flesh for the redemption of all captives is a liar and maybe a monster. In either case, he’s neither good nor the Good.

During that burial at Arlington National Cemetery, to my shame I kept my mouth shut as the megachurch pastor speculated about the eternal torments that were now the deceased man’s just reaping. I maintained a respectful silence. I was cowed by the prejudice that his was an acceptable, coherent rendition of Christianity’s happy tidings. Though I suspect most do not actually believe in it (or else we too would be on street corners with bullhorns, trying to save souls), eternal hell remains the default doctrine among Christians, who believe that the Bible and the theology which emerges from it require them to believe it.

 Having done something like 500 funerals, I know that most people’s moral intuition tells them that, in the fullness of time, even the elder brother will join the father’s feast for the prodigal. Most of the time this moral intuition gets expressed in sentimentality. Just yesterday I was told, “Mom now has her wings with glitter all over them, soaring around with Dad.” We resort to kitsch to express what our gut tells us to be true because the church too often has been reticent to assert what scripture and tradition give them permission to profess.

Though at the beginning of the book Hart declares that he has no expectations of convincing readers, his is an argument that, frankly, I find irrefutable. But it will be sufficient to the church’s work and witness in the world if readers merely find Hart’s arguments plausible, and theologically and scripturally sound. If Hart can clear this meager bar, I’m confident that That All Shall Be Saved will send readers scurrying back not only to the Bible but to the ancient church fathers in the hopes of meeting Christians who unabashedly believed what they quietly confess. In the end, Hart’s book is a work of practical theology, equipping Christians to trust in the God of Love in whom most— if only furtively— already believe. 

Jason Micheli is pastor at Annandale United Methodist Church in Annandale, Virginia. He is the author of Cancer is Funny: Keeping Faith in Stage-Serious Chemo and Living in Sin: Making Marriage Work between I Do and Death.

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Episode #236– Scott Shay: In Good Faith: Questioning Religion and Atheism

In many ways, Advent is a season that pivots not only between two aeons, the old and the new, but between testatments, old and new, and faiths, that of Christianity and Judaism. After all, Advent is largely the time when Christians anticipate the second coming by rehearsing the anticipating of the first coming found in Israel’s prophets. Therefore, this might be the perfect time to release our conversation with Jewish author and financier, Scott Shay.

The son of Holocaust survivors, Scott A. Shay has had a successful business career spanning Wall Street, private equity, venture capital, and banking. He co-founded Signature Bank of New York and has served as its Chairman since its formation. He has been a provocative commentator on many financial issues, including among others, how the banking system should best function to help society, the implications of a cashless world, and tax reform. Scott called for the re-imposition of Glass-Steagall and breaking up the big banks at a TEDx talk at the NY Stock Exchange in 2012. Throughout his life, he has been a student of religion and how religion ought to apply to the world outside of the synagogue, church, or mosque. In addition to authoring articles relating to the Jewish community, Scott authored the best-selling Getting Our Groove Back: How to Energize American Jewry (Second Edition, D evora 2008).

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