Gospel Made Visible

"Christian proclamation might make the gospel audible, but Christians living together in local congregations make the gospel visible (see John 13:34-35). The church is the gospel made visible." -- Mark Dever in his book entitled The Church.

Election quote by Mark Driscoll

"That is election. Where the father in love, pursues foolish, obstinant and disobedient children who have chosen death, and he decrees that more important than their will is his love." -- Mark Driscoll

Pressuring Congress to pass laws --> Civil Religion

I'm on chapter four of Resident Aliens, which hits upon the topic of Christian ethics and therefore also upon the relationship of the church and the government. Hauerwas and Willimon hit the nail on the head when ti comes to Christians trying to legislate morality. It shows a misunderstanding of the nature and purpose of the church as well as a gross misunderstanding of the relationship between church and state. What follows are several quotes from the fourth chapter. (*sheepish grin* OK, so not just several but lots.)

"The way most of us have been conditioned to think about an issue like abortion is to wonder what laws, governmental coercions, and resources would be necessary to support a 'Christian' position on this issue. The first ethical work, from this point of view, is for Christians to devise a position on abortion and then to ask the government to support that position."

"The habit of Constantinian thinking is difficult to break. It leads Christians to judge their ethical positions, not on the basis of what is faithful to our peculiar tradition, but rather on the basis of how much Christian ethics Caesar can be induced to swallow without choking. The tendency therefore is to water down Christian ethics, filtering them through basically secular criteria like 'right to life' or 'freedom of choice,' pushing them on the whole world as universally applicable common sense, and calling them Christian."

"Here is an invitation to a way that strikes hard against what the world already knows, what the world defines as good behavior, what makes sense to everybody. The Sermon [on the Mount], by its announcement and its demands, makes necessary the formation of a colony, not because disciples are those who have a need to be different, but because the Sermon, if believed and lived, makes us different, shows us the world to be alien, an odd place where what makes sense to everybody else is revealed to be opposed to what God is doing among us. Jesus was not crucified for saying or doing what made sense to everyone." 

"Merging one's personal aspirations within the aspirations of the nation, falling into step behind the flag, has long been a popular means of overcoming doubts about the substance of one's own life." 

"Christian community, life in the colony, is not primarily about togetherness. It is about the way of Jesus Christ with those whom he calls to himself. It is about disciplining our wants and needs in congruence with a true story, which gives us the resources to lead truthful lives. In living out the story together, togetherness happens, but only as a by-product of the main project of trying to be faithful to Jesus."

"Yet most modern ethics begin from the Enlightenment presupposition of the isolated, heroic self, the allegedly rational individual who stands alone and decides and chooses. The goal of this ethic is to detach the individual from his or her tradition, parents, stories, community, and history, and thereby allow him or her to stand alone, to decide, to choose, and to act alone.  It is an ethic of great value in our type of society because the corporation needs workers who are suitably detached from communities other than their place of work, people who are willing to move at the beck and call of the corporation."

"The question is, What sort of community would be required to support an ethic of nonviolence, marital fidelity, forgiveness, and hope such as the one sketched by Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount?"

"Whenever Christians think that we can support our ethic by simply pressuring Congress to pass laws or to spend tax money, we fail to do justice to the radically communal quality of Christian ethics. In fact, much of what passes for Christian social concern today, of the left or of the right, is the social concern of a church that seems to have despaired of being the church. Unable through our preaching, baptism, and witness to form a visible community of faith, we content ourselves with ersatz Christian ethical activity--lobbying congress to support progressive strategies, asking the culture at large to be a little less racist, a little less promiscuous, a little less violent. Falwall's Moral Majority is little different from any mainline Protestant church that opposes him. Both groups imply that one can practice Christian ethics without being in the Christian community. Both begin with the Constantian assumption that there is no way for the gospel to be present in our world without asking the world to support our convictions through its own social and political institutionalization. The result is the gospel transformed into civil religion." 

"The Sermon on the Mount cares nothing for the European Enlightenment's infatuation with the individual self as the most significant ethical unit. For Christians, the church is the most significant ethical unit."

"We ask ourselves what sort of church we would need to be to enable an ordinary person like her [a pregnant teenager] to be the sort of disciple Jesus calls her to be. More important, her presence in our community offers the church the wonderful opportunity to be the church.... ...we are graciously given the eyes to see her as a gift of God sent to help ordinary people like us to discover the church as the Body of Christ."

"Our ethics do involve individual transformation, not as a subjective, inner, personal experience, but rather as the work of a transformed people who have adopted us, supported us, disciplined us, and enabled us to be transformed. The most interesting, creative, political solutions we Christians have to offer our troubled society are not new laws, advice to Congress, or increased funding for social programs--although we may find ourselves supporting such national efforts. The most creative social strategy we have to offer is the church. Here we show the world a manner of life the world can never achieve through social coercion or governmental action. We serve the world by showing it something that it is not, namely, a place where God is forming a family out of strangers.

"The Christian faith recognizes that we are violent, fearful, frightened creatures who cannot reason our will our way out of our mortality. So the gospel begins, not with the assertion that we are violent, fearful, frightened creatures, but with the pledge that, if we offer ourselves to a truthful story and the community formed by listening to and enacting that story in the church, we will be transformed into people more significant than we could ever have been on our own.

"As Barth says, '[The Church] exists... to set up in the world a new sign which is radically dissimilar to [the world's] own manner and which contradicts it in a way which is full of promise' (Church Dogmatics, 4.3.2)" [Brackets in this quote are from the authors.]

"Ethically speaking, it should interest us that, in beginning the Sermon on the Mount with the Beatitudes, Jesus does not ask disciplines [sic] to do anything. The Beatitudes are in the indicative, not the imperative, mood. First we are told what God has done before anything is suggested about what we are to do." [emphasis theirs]

The Sermon on the Mount "is morality pushed to the limits, not so much in the immediate service of morality, but rather to help us see something so new, so against what we have always heard said, that we cannot rely on our older images of what is and what is not."

"We are forever getting confused into thinking that scripture is mainly about what we are supposed to do rather than a picture of who God is." [emphasis theirs]

Turning the other cheek "is not a stratagem for getting what we want but the only manner of life available, now that, in Jesus, we have seen what God wants. We seek reconciliation with the neighbor, not because we will feel so much better afterward, but because reconciliation is what God is doing in the world in the Christ."

"Therefore, Christians begin our ethics, not with anxious, self-serving questions of what we ought to do as individuals to make history come out right, because, in Christ, God has already made history come out right. The Sermon is the inauguration manifesto of how the world looks now that God in Christ has taken matters in hand. And essential to the way that God has taken matters in hand is an invitation to all people to become citizens of a new Kingdom, a messianic community where the world God is creating takes visible, practical form."

Whew! I still have a few pages of the chapter to go, but I thought these quotes were all so meaty that I wanted to share them here. 

The South is Christ-haunted

"I think it is safe to say that while the South is hardly Christ-centered, it is most certainly Christ-haunted." -- Flannery O'Connor, in her article The Catholic Novelist in the Protestant South

(Just saw this quote in a Tom Cannon post and thought it was so well said that it needed to be reposted.)

Part of God's Story - a series of quotes from the book, Resident Aliens

"Too often, we depict salvation as that which provides us with a meaningful existence when we achieve a new self-understanding. here, with our emphasis on the narrative nature of Christian life, we are saying that salvation is baptism into a community that has so truthful a story that we forget ourselves and our anxieties long enough to become part of that story, a story God has told in Scripture and continues to tell in Israel and the church."

"It is our baptismal responsibility to tell this story to our young, to live it before them, to take time to be parents in a world that (though intent on blowing itself to bits) is God's creation (a fact we would not know without this story. We have children as a witness that the future is not left up to us and that life, even in a threatening world, is worth living -- and not because 'Children are the hope of the future,' but because God is the hope of the future." (emphasis theirs)

"The church must be created new, in each generation, not through procreation but through baptism."

"People of God do not let the world determine how they respond to tomorrow."

"To launch out on a journey is to move toward some goal. Of course, in the journey of faith, we have no clear idea of what our end will be except that it shall be, in some form, true and complete friendship with God. For now, our daily experiences of testing and confirmation of that friendship sustain us. Perhaps this explains why Jesus' ethic was so thoroughly eschatological -- an ethic bound up with this proclamation of the end of history. Ethics is a function of the telos, the end. It makes all the difference in the world how one regards the end of the world, "end" not so much in the sense of its final breath, but "end" in the sense of the purpose, the goal, the result."

"Travelers, in the midst of the vicissitudes of the journey, learn to trust one another when the going is rough."

[The apostle] "Peter stands out as a true individual, or better, a true character, not because he had become 'free' or 'his own person,' but because he had become attached to the Messiah and messianic community, which enabled him to lay hold of his life, to make so much more of his life than if he had been left to his own devices."

-- Resident Aliens (Hauerwas and Willimon), chapter three.

Faith - part of a much bigger story

"Faith begins, not in discovery, but in remembrance." - Willimon and Hauerwas in Resident Aliens.

And so, from nothing, our universe begins.

I'm currently reading (and listening to on CD -- I go back and forth) Bill Bryson's book, A Short History of Nearly Everything. I love his description of the beginning of the universe. Not only did it strike me that he holds to the idea of ex nihilo, but he also captures so well the grandeur and beauty of "Let there be light...."

It is natural but wrong to visualize the singularity as a kind of pregnant dot hanging in a dark, boundless void. But there is no space, no darkness. The singularity has no "around" around it. There is no space for it to occupy, no place for it to be. We can't even ask how long it has been there -- whether it has just lately popped into being, like a good idea, or whether it has been there forever, quietly awaiting the right moment. Time doesn't exist. There is no past for it to emerge from. 

And so, from nothing, our universe begins.

In a single blinding pulse, a moment of glory much too swift and expansive for any form of words, the singularity assumes heavenly dimensions, space beyond conception. In the first lively second (a second that many cosmologists will devote careers to shaving into ever-finer wafers) is produced gravity and the other forces that govern physics. In less than a minute the universe is a million billion miles across and growing fast. There is a lot of heat now, ten billion degrees of it, enough to begin the nuclear reactions that create the lighter elements -- principally hydrogen and helium, with a dash (about one atom in a hundred million) of lithium. In three minutes, 98 percent of all the matter there is or will ever be has been produced.  We have a universe. It is a place of the most wondrous and gratifying possibility, and beautiful, too. And it was all done in about the time it takes to make a sandwich. 

The basic doctrine of the Bible

The following is an excerpt from John Alexander's book, Stop Going to Church and Become the Church:

"A few years ago I was teaching at the Church of the Sojourners on love. I said that although Jesus taught that loving God is the first commandment, the New Testament in fact talks more about loving each other. Someone suggested I was injecting modern, secular humanism into the Bible.

"I denied it, but I promised to study the question. So the next week I used my handy Online Bible computer program to call up all the uses of the various Greek words related to love. Then for the next month I neurotically classified each verse. Was it a commend to love God or a command to love fellow human beings? My research took many, many hours, but I learned I was right--hands down.

"I also learned that I had missed the point. And had been missing it for fifty years.

"The point isn't that I'm supposed to love God. Nor is it that I'm supposed to love others. The point is that God loves me. That's the basic doctrine of the New Testament. And of the Old Testament.

"Which is a whole different story than I was telling. A much better one. A story of grace."

Moving towards being a family

"If Scripture is authoritative in our lives and not just a rabbit's foot we carry around, we must be moving more and more towards being a family, towards relatively small groups who know each other deeply enough and broadly enough to speak the truth in love. Otherwise the gifts of the spirit will be much less powerful than they're meant to be. Then we'll all be spiritual midgets, and the world won't have a way of seeing the light set on a hill." -- John Alexander

Taking the Name of the Lord in Vain

"The irony for these legalists (of which I’ve labeled myself a recovering one), is that to live contrary to Christ’s teachings, indeed to live contrary to the empowered life of God’s Spirit, is to violate God’s Law in the third commandment:  “Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain.” How is that?  Briefly, to take God’s name in vain is not merely to misuse the name in crude speech.  The Scripture teaches that the application of that commandment is broader than that (see the explanation given in the Westminster Larger Catechism). To wear Christ’s name, yet to deny him by living legalistically, hypocritically or by rejecting his clear teachings, is to take his name in vain." -- Pastor Don

War of Words: Getting to the Heart of Your Communication Struggles

Rating:
Category:	Books
Genre:	Religion & Spirituality
Author:	Paul David Tripp

This past summer, the gals in our church decided to read and discuss a book together. We chose War of Words, by Paul David Tripp. The book is divided into 3 main sections, so we met three times throughout the summer break to discuss a section each time. I’ve already written about my thoughts on the first part of the book, which bothered me both because of how he supported his point, but also because of how he overstated his position. However, I thought the rest of his book was not only better written (although he continued to persist in aiming in one direction while continually pointing to another), but he also had a lot of really good things to say. (In other words, it's a good thing I was reading this book in a group because if I was reading it on my own, I probably would have chucked it a few chapters in. But having to meet with other folks to discuss the rest of the book kept me plugging on through.)

Let me first address my biggest pet peeve with this book before I get on to acknowledging several of the excellent things he said. The book is titled the War of Words because the goal is to teach Christians, in particular, how to speak in a way that reflects the loving, forgiving, gracious character of God. So obviously, Tripp's focus was on what people say to one another. But he repeatedly said things such as:

"...it is important to recognize that the war of words is actually the fruit of a greater, more fundamental war. This is the war of wars; it is what life is about." (p. 37)

"Like all wars, this war is for control. It is a war for our hearts." (p. 39)

"...a life of godly communication is rooted in a personal recognition of the sovereignty of God." (p. 69)

"The war of words is, at bottom, a war for sovereignty." - page 69

In other words, the heart of the matter isn't our words at all, but the heart (or attitude) that our words spring up out of. I feel like Tripp is pointing me in one direction ("focus on the conversation" - "the words are the issue") and then he keeps redirecting me toward the "heart of the matter" which is our attitudes and beliefs. I suppose an analogy would be if a doctor wrote a book on the "War of the Cough" and then repeatedly said throughout the book that the cough wasn't the essential core of the problem but the cold that caused it. If that's the case, then why not focus on the cold throughout the book and address the cough as needed within that discussion? Why title the book and spend the entire first section of the book focusing on the symptom only to undermine both of those by focusing on the underlying heart of the matter for the entire rest of the book? Why not get the focus straight from the get-go and deal with the symptoms throughout as well... as symptoms, not as the central, but not primary, problem? I found this continued bifurcation of focus to be distracting as I read.

And yet, I think Tripp has some excellent things to say as well. I do agree that the root of relational problems often has far more to do with our attitudes, our need to be right, and the sense that we are in control of our lives than what words we use or how we couch them. In disagreements we often approach the other person as the enemy, rather than seeing the disunity or anger as the enemy and both our self and our supposed opponent as the victims. Christians in particular are keen to use the Bible as a weapon against our own spiritual family rather than applying it as a balm to heal the wounds that divide.

Right relationships come about when we also have a right understanding of ourselves. If we think that we know more, know better, and act better than those around us, it's quite likely that we'll have a fair bit of disunity (within our family, our workplace, our congregation, etc.). But if we are willing to take an honest look at ourselves, acknowledge our own faults, accept the help others are willing to give to change our attitudes or our behaviors, then we can grow, and change, and heal. It boils down to recognizing that we are not divine. We are not God. We don't know it all. And even when we're right about an issue, lording that rightness over another does more harm than good. It's not just our knowledge or beliefs that must be accurate, but our attitudes as well. If we cannot speak the truth in love, then we'd best just shut up until we can.

Tripp says that "our words should bring God the glory he deserves. And second, our words should bring redemptive good into the lives of the people God has placed around us." In other words, we should love the Lord our God with all our heart and love our neighbor as our self. As Christians, we should be ambassadors for God who help to bring about God's redemptive purposes, rather than ambassadors who act as agents of wrath - wrath that wells up our of our own selfishness. God is not a tool in our lives that we can wield to get our own way. In fact, entirely the opposite is true. Jesus said, "By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another." We're not known to be Jesus' disciples because we're right, or our opinions are shown to be better, or we act more godly than other people. We're known to be disciples because we are people who, even in difficult relationships -- like with our enemies -- operate with an attitude of love.

So in the end I think I'd recommend this book. But if you're going to skim at any point, I'd suggest skimming the first three chapters. This book challenges some of the standards attitudes and opinions within the church (at least the church in America) and in that regard I think it makes a good book for discussion. The evangelical American church is rather known for being arrogant, self-righteous, and unforgiving. As Tripp says, "It is never okay to communicate in ways that contradict [God's] message, methods, and character." (Which sounds very much like what Os Guiness said as well.) And yet Christians frequently do exactly that. Until we get to the heart of the matter, I think Christians will continue to be arrogant and bitter ambassadors for a God who is neither.

---

Quotes from the book

"Winning the war of words means living with eyes open, aware not only of our own struggle, but of other pilgrims struggling on the journey with us."

"Paul says, 'Brothers, if someone is caught in a sin, you who are spiritual should restore him gently....' Let's be sure we understand these words. Notice first that Paul does not say, 'If you catch someone in a sin...' He is not talking about sneaking up on someone to catch him in the act! Rather, he is talking about how we as sinners get 'caught' -- that is, entrapped and ensnared in sin."

"Self-indulgent, sin-indulgent talk contradicts our identity as the children of grace."

"Gentleness doesn't mean compromising the truth. Rather, it means keeping the truth from being compromised by harshness and insensitivity."

"When we are wronged, the thing of highest importance is not that we feel satisfied or avenged, but that we respond according to God's plan and for his glory."

"We seem to forget that, really, there is only one enemy -- and it is not the person being confronted! The purpose of confrontation is not to stand against the person, but to stand alongside him, pointing out the things God wants him to see, confess, and forsake."

"The lack of forgiveness causes us to fight God rather than submit to him and causes us to stand against rather than with one another."

"Truth is the casualty when I love myself more than I love you."

Unity

"Most of us are in unity with no one but ourselves." -- John Alexander

How being a church is like playing baseball

More quotes from John Alexander's book:

"Church is a full-time occupation, not the weekly attendance of a performance. Church isn't the sort of thing you can go to. You can be the church, you can become the church, you can even do church, but you can't go to church. ... One way of saying it is that church is the sort of thing that you become part of. You're the church whenever you're with other Christians in such a way that you depend on each other, love each other, serve each other, and speak the truth to each other in love for the sake of Jesus." 

"Our task is to find ways to become the church together. I suggest that becoming the church is rather like becoming a baseball team. Players have to practice together enough to learn each others strengths and weaknesses. Then they can use each others strengths and play around each others weaknesses.  They sort out who can pitch, who can field, who can bat, who can coach. In the process, they learn to rely on each other, team sprit 'arises,' and somewhere along the way, rather mysteriously, they cease being just a collection of individuals and a group identity appears. They become a team. They become the Cubs." (lol! Sounds like John is channeling Bob Appleby here, except that I suspect he was already doing the sports metaphors before he met Bob. Those two were like two peas in a pod.)

He then goes on to explain that he's not talking about just making Sunday morning services more participatory. He says, " Services are important, but church is mostly crying with your brother in Christ when he learns that his son is disabled. Or helping your sister paint her house while talking together about the way, the truth, and the life."

John makes three points about what he calls "reinventing church":

1) Church is something you do or become or be, not something you go to.

2) It's crucial to identify people's strengths and weaknesses within the body and then each person should play their position -- do what they're good at. 

3) "God intends us to be part of team, part of a body." 

4) "In neither baseball nor church is a building crucial.

To sum up, "In both [baseball and being a church], it's more of a process than an event. In both, it's a matter of spirit. In both, the way it happens is rather mysterious. In both, coaching is crucial. In both, not recognizing your need for others is disastrous. In both, there's a place for observing, but it's for people not on the team, for nonChristians, for outsiders."

Convenience

"What is truly convenient? And who is it convenient for? And let’s remember that for all our conveniences there is someone or some place on the other end that may not find it convenient at all." -- Tracy Bianchi, from an article entitled Convenience and its Consequences

The beginning of wisdom

A friend of mine just retweeted this:

RT @JohnPiper The beginning of wisdom is that I have absolutely no say in how God should run the world, and I am peaceful with that.

It seemed to fit in with our previous discussion in which I used a gardener and ant analogy, so I thought I'd share it here.

God's noblest work

I'm reading a book called Revelations: Diaries of Women which includes excerpts from a wide variety of women including the wife of Tolstoy, the wife of Dostoevsky, Anne Frank, George Eliot and Virginia Woolf. Many of the women that I have read so far appear to adore some man or other (often husbands, but Dorothy Wordsworth adored her brother, William.) It was getting to a point that I honestly started to wonder if men were different or better or some such back in the day. (Or perhaps the women led more pathetic lives?)

But then I got to a quote by Louisa May Alcott, the author of Little Women.  When she was 10 years old she wrote the following in her diary:

Father asked us what was God's noblest work.  Anna said men, but I said babies. Men are often bad; babies never are.

I had to laugh at that.

So what would you say is God's noblest work?  (Atheists can play along by deferring to the God part for the moment and focusing on the noblest work bit.) I'm tempted to pick something mushy like "love" or "community." But I think the theme of the quote involves tangible objects. Chocolate jumps to mind, but that might be a bit of a silly answer.

I suppose a question like this calls to mind another question, "What does it mean to be noble?"

I guess I'm going to go with "People" as my answer for now. We're such complex creatures that I think that makes us pretty impressive. But noble?  See, I'm not sure if we fit that part. I'll have to keep thinking on this.