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Yet salvation always involves our response. If the slaves in Egypt had not responded to the message that God was liberating them, they would be there still. If the exiles in Babylon had not set foot on their journey of return, they would be there still. If blind Bartimaeus had not called out, “Son of David, have compassion on me,” he would still be blind. Without our response, little or nothing will change in our lives or in the life of the world. Salvation is the work of God, and yet we must respond.
A few years ago in a lecture, Archbishop Desmond Tutu quoted St. Augustine: “God without us will not, as we without God cannot.”
In the Christian imagination, the word “repentance” belongs to the same vocabulary as “sin” and “salvation.” We need to repent of our sins in order to be saved. Rightly understood, this is correct. But repentance too has been trivialized.
But the biblical meaning of “repent” is not primarily contrition, but resolve. In the Hebrew Bible, to repent means primarily to return to God. Its metaphorical home is the exile. To repent means to return from exile, to reconnect with God, to walk the way in the wilderness that leads from Babylon to God.
And repentance in the New Testament has an additional nuance of meaning. The Greek roots of the word combine to mean “go beyond the mind that you have.” Go beyond the mind that you have been given and have acquired. Go beyond the mind shaped by culture to the mind that you have “in Christ.”
I am intrigued by the research that has been done on near-death experiences. Of people who have been near death, about 40 percent report a common pattern: a sense of journeying through a tunnel, a burst of light, a sense of being in the presence of a loving reality, quite often accompanied by a sense of being out of one’s body.
But if our consciousness and perception can even momentarily be separate from our bodies, then the modern intrinsic linkage between brain and consciousness is called into question, and we have no idea what is possible beyond death.
Some Christians have believed that we’re all simply dead until the second coming of Jesus, the resurrection of all the dead, and judgment.
But around the year 1000, belief began to shift to judgment at the moment of death. Which is it? Moreover, the majority of Christians throughout history have believed in at least three possible postdeath states: heaven, hell, and purgatory.
And though we associate reincarnation primarily with Asian religions, some Christians throughout history and to the present day believe in reincarnation.
Beyond this, does heaven involve the survival of personal self-awareness? If so, is that desirable or undesirable?
The different visions cancel each other out, even as they also join in a symphony affirming a “moreness.” And the sense of a “More” is the ground of our hope, and even more of our trust. We live in God. We move in God. We have our being in God. And when we die, we do not die into nothingness; we die into God.
“We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies. For in hope we are saved.”26
Then comes the end, when Christ hands over the kingdom to God the Father, after Christ has destroyed every ruler and every authority and power. For Christ must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. The last enemy to be destroyed is death. . . . So that God may be all in all.27
“For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then, I will know fully, even as I have been fully known.”28 We are known by God already. In that lies our hope, for God’s knowing is forever. Salvation is about life with God, life in the presence of God, now and forever.
What does it mean to love God? In her important recent book The Silent Cry, with the provocative subtitle Mysticism and Resistance, Dorothee Soelle comments that we Christians have generally been pretty good at proclaiming God’s love for us, but that we have been less good at emphasizing the importance of our love for God.1
In a word, it means “practice.” Loving God means paying attention to God and to what God loves. The way we do this is through “practice.”
Modern Western Christianity, especially Protestantism, has not made practice central. This is very different from other religions. Judaism, especially orthodox Judaism, is primarily about practice, about following the “way of Torah.” At the center of being Buddhist is the “eightfold path,” all of it practice. So also for Muslims: of the five “pillars” of Islam, four are about practice, one of which is praying five times a day.
A second reason is that within much of modern Western Christianity, faith came to be understood as “belief” and was thus not about “doing.” But if we take seriously that faith is not primarily about belief, but about “beloving God,” then faith and practice are not opposites. Rather, practice is how we “belove” God.3
The notion that God is a reality who can be known (and not simply believed in) has become quite foreign in the modern world and in much of modern theology.
In skeptical form, it leads to a vision of Christianity as primarily “ethics.” In most generic form, the Christian way of life becomes “being good,” “being nice,” “loving people.” In strong form, it can become a passion for justice.
Practice is paying attention to God. Most concisely and broadly, this is its central purpose.
Paying attention to our relationship with God matters because we as selves are ultimately relational. It is not that we first become selves and then have relationships. Rather, we are constituted by our relationships; they shape and form us.
The formation of Christian identity will thus also always involve a transformation of identity—from an identity given by the “world” to an identity in God, in Christ.
Even secular people often have a strong sense of not being “enough.” It is the result of the internalization of standards of identity and worth flowing from the world in which we live.
Practice is about the formation of Christian character. Character—the kind of person we have been shaped to be—is the foundation of ethics.
The process of Christian identity and character formation leads from a limited identity to a larger identity, from a limited self to a larger self. The self with which we begin is the result of what has been given and done to us, the wounded self, the false self, the small self of culture. Our character is shaped by entering into a larger identity and larger self through life “in Christ.” Practice is the way this happens. The Spirit of God works through practice.
Christian formation leads to an identity in God as disclosed in the Bible and Jesus, and not in culture. Even more compactly, one’s identity will increasingly be “in Christ” and not in the self or the world.
Being part of a church: In my judgment, the single most important practice is to be part of a congregation that nourishes you even as it stretches you.
First, it is important that children not be taught in such a way that they will later need to unlearn many things.
I do so for several reasons, if “reason” is the right word here.7Petitionary and intercessory prayer feel natural; they seem like a natural form of caring. Not to do them would seem like an absence of love. As author Anne Lamott remarks, the two most common prayers are “Help me, help me, help me” and “Thank you, thank you, thank you.”8
Both claim to know the “mechanism” at work in the relation between prayer and healing. I myself have no clue what the explanatory mechanism is, and I am content not to.10
But regardless of their efficacy, petition and intercession serve the central purpose of prayer: intimacy with God.
Of course, one might say, “But God knows about my day already,” but this misses the point—namely, to state the obvious, being intimate is part of having an intimate relationship.
Meditation: Meditation involves reflecting on an image or phrase, sitting with it, holding it, remaining with it.
Another classic example of meditation is lectio divina. It can be done in either group settings or individually. It involves meditating on a biblical text until a word or a phrase emerges, and then staying with it for as long as one does the exercise and perhaps beyond it.
Contemplation: Contemplation is the prayer and practice of internal silence.
The Christian resource of contemplative prayer is being rediscovered in our time. One of the most common forms is called “centering prayer,” associated especially with the contemporary Benedictine monk Thomas Keating.
To paraphrase Roman Catholic bishop Dom Helder Camara from Brazil: “When I gave food to the poor, they called me a saint; when I asked why there were so many poor, they called me a communist.”
Justice is not about Caesar increasing his charitable giving or Pilate increasing his tithe. Justice is about social transformation. Taking the political vision of the Bible seriously means the practice of social transformation.
But we are all called to be political in the broad sense of being aware of the impact of systems on people’s lives and of God’s passion for those who are disadvantaged and victimized by systems.
This is not something to feel guilty about, as if we’ve been bad again and need forgiveness. Rather, it’s something to do something about.
A central claim in this concluding chapter is that we understand Christianity most clearly when we see it in the context of religious pluralism.
The religious landscape in the United States is rapidly changing. We have historically been Christian, Jewish, and secular, with the first far outnumbering the second and third. But in the last thirty-five years, we have become the most religiously diverse nation in the world.
The key event that sparked this growth was the Immigration Act of 1965, which opened up immigration to people from nations outside of Europe.
This is very different from the world of my childhood. Almost fifty years ago, a book on religious diversity in the United States carried the title Protestant, Catholic, Jew.3
The absolutist understanding of religion affirms that one’s own religion is the absolute and only truth.
The reductionist view reduces religion to a human invention. It sees all religions as human constructions, as human projections.
Much of the conflict about religion in the Christian West in the modern period has been between absolutist and reductionist views of religion.
Both absolutism and reductionism are the products of modernity. And to many modern people, they seem like the only two options.
