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The whole first half of my life was dying—a half of life characterized by the quest for certitude and success. As Richard Rohr describes it, I was about to “fall upward” into the second half of life. But it wouldn’t be easy.
All the great biographies of the Bible involve suffering. The great souls grown in the Lord’s vineyard all know what it is to suffer. American Christianity, on the other hand, is conditioned to avoid suffering at all cost.
The pain of being misunderstood and misrepresented was part of the price for obtaining the vintage wine of substantive Christianity. No matter what others thought, I knew what was happening. I was saving my soul. I was discovering Jesus afresh. I was encountering an unvarnished Jesus, a Jesus free from the lacquer of cheap religious certitude, tawdry motivational jargon, and partisan political agenda. I was being born again...again. I was gaining new eyes. I was seeing the kingdom of God, really for the first time. I was transitioning from water to wine, from grape soda to Brunello di
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We have become consumers of packaged spiritualities. This is idolatry. We never think of using this term for it since everything we are buying or paying for is defined by the adjective “Christian.” But idolatry it is nevertheless: God packaged as a product; God depersonalized and made available as a technique or program. The Christian market in idols has never been more brisk or lucrative.[6]
Do you love your faith so little that you have never battled a single fear lest your faith should not be true? Where there are no doubts, no questions, no perplexities, there can be no growth.[7] George MacDonald wrote that in his novel The Curate’s Awakening.
We have to wrestle with doubt to arrive at real faith.
And know hope.
Real faith has room for doubt—understanding that the effort to believe is the very thing that makes doubt possible. Real faith is not afraid of doubt, but the faux faith of certitude is afraid of its own shadow.
A few weeks later I was walking through the Detroit airport on one of those moving walkways thinking about these things when I suddenly crossed a threshold in my mind. I made a decision. A daring decision. A risky decision. I had reached the point of no return—there would be no going back. I wanted to be my true self. Suddenly I said out loud, “Now with the help of God I shall become myself!” The curious glances I drew from strangers in the Detroit airport bothered me not in the least. I had made a decision. I was on the road to recovery. I was recovering my soul. Water was turning to wine.
Over time I began to see the cross in a much deeper way—not as a mere factor in an atonement theory equation, but as the moment in time and space where God reclaimed creation.
And what happens? Jesus forgives. Why? Because God is like that. In the defining moment of the cross Jesus defines what God is really like. God is love—co-suffering, all-forgiving, sin-absorbing, never-ending love. God is not like Caiaphas sacrificing a scapegoat. God is not like Pilate enacting justice by violence. God is like Jesus, absorbing and forgiving sin.
Life is not a game, life is a gift. Life is not about competition, life is about love. Life is not about winning the game, getting to the top, coming in first—that’s the old world of Cain and Pharaoh and Caesar. The world of cold-blooded competition is the world that kills Christ.
At the cross Jesus reveals that life is about learning to love, even if you have to die to do it, because you know that beyond death is the love of the Father and resurrection of the dead. This is the cross. This is Christianity.
As Americans we are given a script from birth—it is our shared and assumed formula for the pursuit of happiness. Without even being aware of it we are scripted in the belief that our superior technology, our self-help ideology, our dominant military, and our capacity to obtain consumer goods should guarantee our happiness—our ticket to Paradise. Said just so, it sounds silly, but when it is communicated in the liturgies of advertising and the propaganda of state, it becomes believable...and we do believe it.
Mystery is the word that replaces the “ism” known as fundamentalism. Fundamentalism was born as the wrongheaded reaction to the crisis of modernity. Ironically, fundamentalism is an approach to faith that accepts modernity’s now discredited claim that empiricism is the sole source of knowledge. Feeling intimidated by the Scientific Revolution, fundamentalism takes a “scientific” approach to the Bible—which is perhaps the worst of all ways to approach Scripture.
The point is never to “prove” the Bible, but to enter into the mystery through the portal of Scripture.
The Bible is not a scientific text or even an end in itself, the Bible is the Spirit-inspired sign that points us to the true Word of God—the Word made flesh, the greatest of all sacred mysteries. Any approach to the Incarnation that does not treat it as a sacred mystery is an act of desecration.
Fundamentalism is to Christianity what paint-by-numbers is to art.
Christianity is a sacred mystery. The Apostle Paul loves to speak of mystery—he uses that rich word twenty-one times in his letters. Christianity is a confession, not an explanation.
So don’t be surprised when I say, “You must be born again.” The wind blows where it wants. Just as you can hear the wind but can’t tell where it comes from or where it is going, so you can’t explain how people are born of the Spirit. (John 3:78, New Living Translation, emphasis added) Jesus says we can’t explain how people are born of the Spirit. The irony is, we’ve done just the opposite—we’ve completely explained how people are born again!
A Christianity that is sufficiently broad and eclectic liberates us from an arrogant and impoverished sectarianism.
In my youthful arrogance (the word I really want to use is stupidity) I effectively defined and limited Christianity to my kind of Christianity —a charismatic-flavored evangelicalism. As far as I was concerned, most Catholics, Orthodox, Anglicans, and mainline Protestants needed to “get saved”—which is to say, they needed to become my style of Christian.
This much I’m sure of, Orthodox mystery, Catholic beauty, Anglican liturgy, Protestant audacity, Evangelical energy, Charismatic reality—I need it all!
Perhaps this is a good definition of catholic.
This was basically how I understood salvation—riding your salvation bicycle all by yourself. But it turns out this is a terribly mistaken way of thinking about salvation. The Apostles and Church Fathers would have viewed it as bizarre. Salvation is not a private, autonomous, individual, unmediated experience—salvation is being personally gathered by Christ into his salvation community.
The individualistic view of salvation leads to the distinctly Protestant anxiety of having to convince yourself that you are saved. Protestants, with their emphasis on the individual, have no higher authority to confirm their salvation. Instead they must convince themselves they are saved on a purely subjective basis.
I am a Christian because the church says I belong to the body of Christ.
What if salvation is better understood as a kind of belonging? It’s true that salvation is personal, but it’s not individual. Salvation is communal by design.
Another way of saying it is this: Salvation is the kingdom of God.
It’s very interesting that Jesus only uses the word “salvation” on two occasions (Luke 19:9, John 4:22). What Jesus talks about almost exclusively is the kingdom of God. Paul on the other hand rarely mentions the kingdom of God, but speaks incessantly on salvation. Here’s the point—What Jesus tends to call the kingdom of God, Paul tends to call salvation, but they are talking about the same thing! To belong to the redeemed community that lives under the reign and rule of Christ (the kingdom of God) is to enter into the Lord’s salvation.
The difference between the two covenants is not law and grace. The essential difference between the old and new covenants is this—The New Covenant invites the whole world to become God’s people. In Christ the chosen people are now the human race and the holy land is the whole earth.
Instead of being defined by ethnicity, circumcision, and Torah observance, the people of God are now defined by faith, baptism, and obedience to Messiah. The opportunity to belong to the community of salvation is now open to the whole world—which was God’s intention all along!
When Jesus said "it is finished" what is it that was finished? Perhaps it was the tribalism of Judaism.
“Accepting Jesus into your heart” began to replace belonging to the body of Christ. All of this was in keeping with the modern emphasis on “me.”
An emphasis on the word “community” helped me understand that if the Jesus we follow doesn’t lead us into the community of other followers, we are following a mostly made-up Jesus, a manufactured Jesus designed to accommodate the modern cult of “me.”
Both sides are obsessed with individual rights. The Left doesn’t want the government interfering with rights pertaining to abortion, drugs, and marriage. The Right doesn’t want the government interfering with rights of gun ownership, a free market, and the utilization of the environment. With both the Left and the Right, individualism has triumphed over a vision for shared wellbeing. Neither the Left “do your own thing” nor the Right “do your own thing” is compatible with the “love your neighbor as yourself” ethic of Christ.
Marxism emphasizes collectivism. Capitalism emphasizes individualism. Christianity emphasizes community. Christianity endorses personhood—the inherent worth and dignity of every person.
A Christianity that understands itself as a salvation community can save us from the distinctly modern curse of individualism. Christianity knows that John Donne is right—No man is an island.
When I began my pastoral ministry during the rise of the Religious Right, conservative Christians were ready to “take back America for God.” Evangelicalism was about to become a voting block. The Moral Majority, the Christian Coalition, and Focus on the Family would all become nationally known organizations galvanizing evangelicals as a political force. “Christian Voter Guides” would be distributed in evangelical churches across the country. The central issue that initially energized the movement was abortion. Since the Republican Party shared the evangelical view on abortion, evangelicals
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The epiphany came when I was sitting, of all places, on a platform with Dick Cheney at a campaign rally. I suddenly realized I was nothing more than a puppet in a high-stakes game of power politics. I was being used. I was being asked to exploit the name of Jesus to endorse some politicians.
As Eugene Peterson says, “The gospel of Jesus Christ is more political than anyone imagines, but in a way that no one guesses.”[3] The politics of Jesus are set forth in the Sermon on the Mount—and neither the Republican nor the Democratic party have any intention of seriously adopting those politics!
The revolution that is intended is the revolution that occurs when we seriously begin to live under the reign and rule of Christ. The kingdom of Christ is the most revolutionary politics—perhaps the only truly revolutionary politics—the world has ever seen.
Trying to change the world by coercive force is not changing the world; it’s simply reconfiguring the structures of power. If we are going to attempt something as grand as “changing the world” at all, we do so by being that part of the world changed by Christ. That’s the revolution we can believe in!
Five words. Cross. Mystery. Eclectic. Community. Revolution. Five words given to me when I prayed, “Jesus, tell me what to say.” Five words that became signposts to lead me out of the dead-end cul-de-sac I was stuck in. Five words that when put together became a kind of alchemy for turning watered down Americanized Christianity into the robust wine of revolutionary Christianity.
Abraham is called the father of faith, though he may never have known or used the word “faith.” Faith was for Abraham what water is for a fish. Faith was the world Abraham inhabited, it was the air he breathed. For Abraham faith was not an abstract concept that could be dissected and analyzed—faith was simply his mysterious and sometimes difficult friendship with the invisible Creator called Yahweh.
“Lose your passion for dumbness.” I underlined those words. It became a kind of personal maxim. I would say, “Brian, it’s time to lose your passion for dumbness.”
Christian theology is the church’s ongoing conversation about the revelation of the Word of God who is Jesus Christ. At its best, theology is an act of worship—it is the act of loving God with all our mind.
True prayer is found, not on Self Help Avenue, but in the sacred space of Christian liturgy. The quiet place where ego agenda can die and a new humility can be born.
In a poetic sense the sound of Islam is the adhan. The sound of Hinduism is the om. The sound of Buddhism is the dungchen. The sound of Judaism is the shofar. The sound of Christianity is the church bell. The sound of the post-Christian secular West is the sad dearth of the church bell. The church in the West is no longer public or prayerful. We are now private. The only way we know how to be public is to be political.
The primary purpose of prayer is not to get God to do what we think God ought to do, but to be properly formed.
Quite often an evangelical will tell me that Jesus didn’t actually intend for us to pray the prayer he gave to us. But of course he did! The evangelical aversion to praying composed prayers—even the Lord’s Prayer!—is revealing. What it exposes is our modern arrogance. We want to be in charge of our own praying. So we protest, how dare someone try to tell me how to pray! Even if that someone is Jesus!
We pray the Psalms, not to express what we feel, but to learn to feel what they express.
Liturgy is a Bible word. It’s the Greek word leitourgeo and is usually translated as worship or minister. It means “work of the people.”
