Jesus: the smile of God

[This is a copy of my column in the last edition of VOX.]

One of the best (and also challenging) things about Church is that it throws all sorts of people together who would otherwise probably never interact with each other. For example, it’s rare, I think, in our culture for deep friendships to be formed across generations. But, despite being ancient (in my 50s), it is a delight to have good friends who are a generation younger. Two such couples had their first baby last year. It’s been a joy to see their joy. And, since I have just finished a draft of a book on love, it got me thinking about the love of parents for their children.

Now I know that, sadly, this is not always the case, but there is nothing fiercer or more tender than parental love. The mother and father envelop their baby in love; they would do anything for the well-being of that little bundle of life. They bombard their baby with smiles (and various clucking and cooing noises along with weird facial expressions). Eventually this tiny new person smiles back.

That first smile is a transcendent moment and is what these musings are about.

In reading about love I came across these comments by a Swiss theologian, Hans Urs von Balthasar.[1] He writes that

‘After a mother [I’d add father as well!] has smiled at her child for many days and weeks, she finally receives her child’s response. She has awakened love in the heart of her child’.

The baby is loved into loving.

And von Balthasar then draws parallels between parental love and God’s love.

God interprets himself to man as love in the same way: he radiates love, which kindles the light of love in the heart of man, and it is precisely this light that allows man to perceive this, the absolute Love: “For it is God who said, ‘Let light shine out of the darkness,’ who has [shone] in our heart to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ” (2 Cor. 4:6). In this face, the primal foundation of being smiles at us as a mother and as a father. Insofar as we are his creatures, the sea of love lies dormant within us as the image of God (imago). But just as no child can be awakened to love without being loved, so too no human heart can come to an understanding of God without the free gift of his grace – in the image of his Son.

This is a beautiful and moving picture.

It is also profoundly biblical. John writes that ‘love is from God’ because ‘God is love’ (1 John 4:7-8). ‘We love because he first loved us” (4:19). That love takes flesh-and-blood form in the self-giving love of Jesus: ‘This is how God showed his love among us: he sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him’ (4:9). And it is in our response of love that we come to a knowledge of who God is: ‘Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God’ (4:7).

Think about that for a moment: John tells us that we love in order to know. That’s a radical thought in a culture which thinks that knowledge equals information and facts and ‘know-how’ and has nothing to do with love.

Another theologian, James K. A. Smith, puts it this way,

The smile of the cherishing mother [again, what about dads?!] that evokes the smile of the infant is a microcosm of a cosmic truth: that God’s gracious initiative in the incarnation – “he first loved us” – is the provoking smile of a Creator who meets us in the flesh, granting even the grace that allows us to love him in return.

Jesus as the smile of God.

Now that’s an image to mull over the next time you hold a happy baby in your arms.

[1] All the following quotes are drawn from J. K. A. Smith, You Are What You Love (Brazos Press, 2016) pp. 111-12.

Good Friday: what does it mean to follow a crucified Messiah?

A reflection on Mark 10:32-45 this Good Friday

Monasterboice High Cross

As the disciples follow Jesus towards Jerusalem, he takes them aside once more to prepare them for what is ahead. The language and imagery is brutal.

“We are going up to Jerusalem,” he said, “and the Son of Man will be delivered over to the chief priests and the teachers of the law. They will condemn him to death and will hand him over to the Gentiles, who will mock him and spit on him, flog him and kill him. Three days later he will rise.”

Condemned by Jewish authorities. Handed over to ruthless pagans. Public shame, humiliation and undeserved violent death. This is what lies ahead.

Yes, these images are followed with a promise of resurrection from the dead, but the flow of the story suggests that pretty well none of this entire sequence was understood by the disciples. This is illustrated by James’ and John’s request “Let one of us sit at your right and the other at your left in your glory.”

I have considerable sympathy for James and John! What Jesus predicts is inconceivable. If he is the anointed Messiah of God, shame, death and humiliation cannot be his fate. Rather, it should be glory and exaltation – hence the brothers’ request.

The other disciples’ indignation is not at James and John’s utter misunderstanding of Jesus’ imminent fate, but at their grab at glory for themselves. Like James and John, they have little idea what Jesus’ promise that “You will drink the cup I drink and be baptised with the baptism I am baptised with“ would mean in practice.

So Jesus seeks to clarify, again, what it means to follow the Son of Man. He calls them together and says

“You know that those who are regarded as rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their high officials exercise authority over them. Not so with you. Instead, whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first must be slave of all. For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.”

Discipleship within the kingdom of God means following Jesus. On the surface that sounds simple, but he leads his followers to take on a new and strange identity:

– Slave (doulos): become a slave of others rather than seeking a position of power, status or respect

– Servant (diakonos): become a servant of others, rather than be served by others.

This an uncompromising call to a difficult and demanding way of life. Jesus, as is his style as a terrible salesman, offers no possible evasions for his followers. There are no soft options. The norm for discipleship is the cross. Death is what it means to be a disciple – regardless of who we are.

The pattern for this other-focused service is Jesus’ willingness to give up his very life for others. A ransom liberates captives. His is a self-giving death so that many are set free. It is life lived for others, not the self.

Following Jesus is absolutely not the path by which to achieve glory, honour, respect and status. So if we hope to achieve those things in Christian life and ministry, like James and John we have completely missed what following Jesus is all about.

Among the Gentiles in the ancient world (the Roman Empire is probably in view here) the world worked according to strict hierarchies of status, prestige, position, wealth and political patronage. Those in power lorded it over their inferiors. This simply is the way reality was constructed. No other world could be imagined,

Until now.

Jesus’ death on a cross opens up a new way to imagine the world we live in. It calls Christians to belong to a different reality, a different kingdom, to follow a king like no other. A king who freely and courageously gives his life for others; who surrenders power without resorting to violence; who refuses to defend himself or his own rights before his enemies.

Good Friday is a day to reflect on the wonder and beauty of this king. And then to reflect on our lives.

How we are living them and who we are living them for?

If we are honest and realistic (or, to put it another way, if you are anything like me!) we will be reminded that we continually fail to live self-giving lives of service to others. We don’t want to be servants and slaves. At the very least it is inconvenient; at the very most it means suffering and death. Most of the time it is somewhere inbetween – a daily calling to an other-focused way of life.

And then, in our weakness, failure and sin, to come to the foot of that cross and to give our lives afresh to our crucified Lord.

Always remembering in hope his words, “Three days later he will rise.”

Comments, as ever, welcome

Some things Jesus was terrible at

Incipit to Luke, Book of Kells

I’m doing some reading and writing on Luke 6 and particularly Jesus’ ‘Sermon on the Plain’ (6:17-49). A couple of excerpts from Luke:

Looking at his disciples, he said: ‘Blessed are you who are poor,
for yours is the kingdom of God.
Blessed are you who hunger now,
for you will be satisfied.
Blessed are you who weep now,
for you will laugh.
Blessed are you when people hate you,
when they exclude you and insult you
and reject your name as evil,
because of the Son of Man. (6:20-22)

And

‘But to you who are listening I say: love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who ill-treat you. If someone slaps you on one cheek, turn to them the other also. If someone takes your coat, do not withhold your shirt from them. Give to everyone who asks you, and if anyone takes what belongs to you, do not demand it back. Do to others as you would have them do to you. ‘If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners love those who love them. And if you do good to those who are good to you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners do that. And if you lend to those from whom you expect repayment, what credit is that to you? Even sinners lend to sinners, expecting to be repaid in full. But love your enemies, do good to them, and lend to them without expecting to get anything back. Then your reward will be great, and you will be children of the Most High, because he is kind to the ungrateful and wicked. Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.  (6:27-36)

What might you call the theology behind Jesus’ call to discipleship in the Sermon on the Plain?

An anti-success theology?

You are going to be poor, hungry, weeping and hated. This in contrast to being rich, comfortable, well-fed and well-respected (vv. 24-26). This is just slightly incompatible with the capitalist pursuit of wealth and happiness in the here and now.

A guarantee of suffering theology?

Enemies may, and probably will, do their very worst to you. Be ready for it.

A very-delayed gratification theology?

Blessings are promised now but are guaranteed only in the next life. ‘Rejoice in that day and leap for joy, because great is your reward in heaven.‘ (vs. 23) In the meantime in your suffering continue to have faith and trust in a future day of justice for you ain’t going to see it in this life.

A blessing of opposition theology?

To be persecuted for the name of the Son of Man is a privilege not a disaster. Don’t complain, embrace it.

A willingness to be hated and taken-advantage theology?

Love enemies in a way the boggles the mind of them and anyone else watching. It is going to be personally extremely costly – emotionally and financially.

A self-sacrifical costly love theology?

There is zero self-interest in this life to Jesus’ calls to love enemies. Love for the sake of it. Love because God is like that. Love as God loves whatever the cost.

Jesus the terrible salesman

Jesus is simply a terrible salesman.

Nothing about material comfort, security, the right to happiness, social standing. Not a  word about how much we are loved by God. Not a mention of unconditional grace.

But instead a whole bunch of well-on-nigh impossible exhortations that are guaranteed to seriously inconvenience disciples’ lives.

Surely this sermon needs to be sent back to the marketing department for a serious re-write.

I wonder what the re-draft would look like?

Comments, as ever, welcome.

Contested Love (5) the deadliest opponent of love?

Getting back, eventually, to Simon May’s fascinating book Love: A History.

We are in chapter 7 on ‘Why Christian Love is not Unconditional’

We don’t tend to link thinking about money with thinking about love. They are very distinct things are they not? What has one to do with the other? We assume that wealth, and the things that go with it, are benign, if not actively good. It does not have much to say, one way or the other, about our loves lives does it?

May writes as a philosopher looking in to Christian theology and ethics from the outside. While I don’t agree with some rather sweeping generalisations, he nails the Bible’s warnings about the spiritual danger of wealth and its connection to pride.

Pride destroys our capacity for love. Thus it is the deadliest sin of all.

Jesus’ greatest enemies, he says, are money, pride and hypocrisy. They feed into vanity, greed, selfishness, a lack of concern for others, and a vain morality that pretends to be for the good of others but is about making ourselves feel good.

Love, in contrast, is a determined focus on the good of the other.

“Jesus’ tremendous focus on money and the vices of pride – hypocrisy and self-righteousness – returns us to a central theme of this book: the precondition for love … is submission to the real presence of the other; submission to her individual lawfulness and what she calls on us to do …

And this is why money and the pride and self-sufficiency it fosters, are Jesus’ main target in his prophetic denunciations within the Gospels

… pride and the some of the conditions of wealth-accumulation can be huge impediments. Pride is about self-protection, self-sufficiency, barricading oneself against one’s neighbour, absorption in, or the business of self-esteem, a myopic dedication to one’s own prestige and power that darkness the mind to the reality of others – all attitudes that exclude submission; while the pursuit of wealth necessarily places the impersonal demand of utility at the centre of our relations with those caught up in this ambition – a far cry from the attentiveness that is at the heart of love …

This theme is so overwhelmingly pervasive in Jesus, that May asks this question.

What might your answer to it be ?

Why then has Jesus’ message been so perverted? Why has Christianised civilisation been so concerned with sex, and so much less inhibited by Jesus’ preaching against pride, possessions and power? Whether we are talking about the historical Church, the ‘civilising mission’ of Victorian Britain, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (the atheistic embodiment of the deeply religious Russian nation) and its unspeakable vanity of bringing revolution to the whole world, the ‘manifest  destiny’ with which American ‘Anglo-Protestantism’ dignifies itself, or the Christian fundamentalism that gives it such strident voice today – in all these cases intense sexual prudery is combined with ruthless pursuit of power and property, flaunted with the very pride, the very self-congratulatory lording it over others, to which Jesus’ whole life and death are a standing reproach …

He concludes with this stinger.

it is remarkable how often people who seek to civilise the world by force, often in the name of Christianity and with a sense of being guided by God, themselves profess a hierarchy of values so completely at variance with those of Jesus.”

pp. 105-6.

Do you agree – is pride the greatest opponent of love? What else makes the flourishing of love all but impossible?

Contested Love (3) love as the supreme virtue

I’m skipping on in Simon May’s Love: A History to an important chapter on the evolution of love within Christianity.

A question: what is Christian love? How would you define it? What is distinctive about Christian love as compared say to love in our wider culture today?

I had quite a few quibbles with May in the this chapter. Not surprising I guess, he is venturing into detailed areas of Christian theology and painting with a broad brush. There are half-truths and generalisations, but the overall thesis is intriguing.

He argues that two major shifts in the history of love happen that are intimately linked to how love comes to be understood within Christianity.

1. Love is elevated to become the supreme virtue. There is no better thing than to love and be loved. The idea of love as eternal and supreme is everywhere in the West.

2. Love as divine: in love we are united to the divine. And this experience of divinity is radically democratic – open to all ordinary people.

He traces this development, beginning with Jesus. (and this is one place that it is ‘Yes, but’)

Jesus is not linked to the two developments above. He is firmly located within OT categories of love as command and obedience. May says Jesus speaks little of love – I think this is overplayed with significant elements of love within the life and teaching of Jesus passed by.

May pits Jesus against John (love as divine) and Paul (love as supreme). Again, I am not convinced that there is such a wedge between Jesus, John and Paul when it comes to love.

[And there are links here back to our discussion of the New / Old Perspective on Paul – with love in the apostle’s teaching seen in some frameworks as part of Christianity’s love / grace / freedom set over against the law / legalism / slavery of Judaism.]

May argues that the claims made for love by Paul are uniquely extravagant in the history of love – love fulfils the law. [But I would argue that love is deeply rooted within the law – Deuteronomy 6]. May sees a radical disjuncture of OT to NT (Paul) in terms of love. A sort of Old / New Perspective on Love.

“one thing that is obviously happening is the creation of a new morality – based on so great an intensification of Old Testament morality that a genuine revolution in values has occurred.” 87.

What do you think? Is love within Paul a ‘new morality’ and ‘revolution’ compared to love in the OT?

Moving on, it is Augustine, May argues, where love becomes the greatest virtue and from which all actions and morality flow.  But what happens is how love not only answers questions of flourishing and ethics, but deeper questions of existence and meaning.

“love is to be the lodestar of our lives and, if blessed with the capacity to exercise it, we can aspire to imitate God. It was only a matter of time before the outrageous conclusion was drawn that through love we, ordinary men and women, can ourselves become divine.” 87

A bit of a villain in the historical exaltation and divinisation of love is Martin Luther who he quotes as saying “we are gods through love.” He acknowledges that Luther is well aware of potential heresy here – again I think this is overplayed.

But things get really interesting in how May perceptively links Christianity’s elevation of love as the supreme virtue WITH a deep awareness of the need for humility within Christian spirituality.

To fill in what I think he means here: if we are commanded to imitate the love of God, such love is only possible because of grace, the gift of forgiveness, the Spirit and God’s enabling.  Love is always first from God.

If Augustine is the theologian of love, he is also the theologian of grace: we are not self-sufficient. “The Grace of God makes a willing man out of an unwilling one.” 90

We find our fulfilment in God (Augustine’s restless heart).  May sees Augustine as very Platonic – the ladder of ascent to the divine. It is by grace that humans can ascend to caritas (divine love, selfless love, eternal love) rather than cupiditas – lower love, without reference to God.

It is this unique combination within Christianity of an ascent to divine love combined with a deep emphasis on humility, that is so powerful and enduring. Such love is hard – it requires obedience and persistence and discipline.

The implication I think is that he means love only comes slowly, it needs character, it is a virtue that is the fruit of moral integrity and dependence on God.

“This view of love expresses the reality that exaltation and abasement are related to each other in a profound dialectic – a dialectic incomparably revealed in the incarnation and crucifixion of Christ. ‘Wanting to be gods’ is inseparable from wanting to go the way of the Cross. The crucifixion of the incarnate God is not a gruesome paradox, as Nietzsche was to characterise it, but rather speaks a deep truth: if you want to be ‘Gods and Saviours of the world’ you have to be (and not merely appear) humble.   (92)

How convincing do you find this?

What are the essential requirements for love to flourish?

 

Barth, Schweitzer and the weirdness of Christianity

At particular times in the history of the church, ‘disturbers’ have emerged, protesting against the cultural captivity of the church. They have rightly seen that authentic Christianity should never be domesticated and made ‘safe’.

Maybe you can think of some ‘disturbers’. A couple that come to mind are:

Albert Schweitzer’s apocalyptic Jesus brushed aside the anaemic Jesus that had resulted from 19th century liberal theology’s quest for the ‘historical Jesus’. Schweitzer was magnificently right in his rejection of the un-Jewish and un-troubling Christ of the First Quest. His portrait of Jesus of the Gospels was far closer to the truth – even if Schweitzer finally drew the wrong conclusions about Jesus as a failed apocalyptic revolutionary.

The 20th century Jesus Seminar was in many ways a replay of the First Quest – a de-historized Jesus, shorn of miracles and the eschatological urgency of the kingdom of God. One of N T Wright’s many achievements has been his compelling rejection of the methodology and conclusions of the Jesus Seminar in his Jesus and the Victory of God. What shines through Wright’s work on Jesus is how he brings the Gospels, and their main subject, to vibrant disturbing life.

Another ‘disturber’ was the Swiss pipe-smoker Karl Barth. His protest was against a culturally captive form of Christianity, unable even to identify the threat Hitler posed.  His great ‘NO’ to any form of natural theology denied that God could be reached ‘from the bottom up’. Barth’s genius was to insist on absolute otherness of God; God could only be revealed from the ‘top down’ by the triune God himself.

Thus, God, for Barth is both the Revealer and the Revelation. It is God alone who can choose to reveal himself, and he does so in Jesus Christ. It is God’s Spirit alone who can effect God’s revelation in Christ. It is a mixture of hubris, pride and naivety that leads people to believe that they can put God in a nice neat box. Barth blew up the box.

Schweitzer and Barth, in very different ways, saw clearly that when we downplay the ‘weirdness’ or ‘Otherness’ of Christianity, God and the gospel become quickly domesticated, diluted, insipid; unable to stand against evil; to give prophetic witness; to form radical and counter-cultural communities of faith; to speak of an alternative kingdom of God that has broken into this world.

It’s no coincidence that both Barth and Schweitzer spent much time considering Jesus. The Jesus of the Gospels just isn’t dull, predictable, undemanding, easily accommodated into our lives and having little to say about the broken world in which we live.

Once we lose touch with the weirdness of Christian faith, it is inevitable that we end up with a form of Christianity that is virtually indistinguishable from the wider culture.

So what are some signs that we have lost touch with the strange Otherness of Christianity?

Here are some suggestions in no particular order – feel welcome to add your own:

1. When the content of much Christianity tends to be primarily therapeutic.

God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life. The church is a community where you will be loved and accepted unconditionally. The gospel will give your life new significance and meaning. God will help you navigate through the storms of life. The pastor is there to remind and encourage you that you are loved.

This is Christianity lite – a form of spiritual consumerism that promises all and demands little. God is there for you because you are worth it.

No place here for the NT’s embrace of suffering, injustice and persecution as ‘light and momentary troubles’.

No place here for the notion that being a Christian means death: death to the self; death to sin; death to an old order of existence.

2. When faith is assumed.

This is perhaps the most damaging legacy of Christendom. Everybody is ‘in’; everybody has been baptised; Christianity is natural, universal, and all-embracing. The focus of preaching and teaching is on equipping and exhorting and encouraging members to be more committed to helping the church maintain its structures and existence. Mission is marginalised and almost irrelevant.

Little place in an assumed faith for the deep mystery of the atonement: that somehow in one man’s death and shed blood, something happened of universal spiritual significance that forgiveness and freedom from sin needs to be appropriated through repentance and faith.

3. When Jesus is marginalised.

You know – things like his apparently crazy teaching on non-violence. His teaching on money and possessions. His utterly uncompromising demands of his followers. His passion for justice. His words of coming judgment. His unrelenting eschatological focus on the kingdom of God and his urgent summons to enter now.

And, to top all of this, is the NT’s exalted Christological claim that this local Rabbi was God in the flesh. A completely unexpected development; foolish nonsense to Greeks, revolting heresy to Jews, unbelievable religious jargon to contemporary atheists, a threatening universal truth claim to modern pluralists.

This is why I love this picture of Jesus by Oliver Crisp – it brilliantly captures the otherness of Jesus who resists all easy categorisation.

4. When the Spirit is paid only lip-service.

Pentecostals and charismatics rightly protest against a sort of virtually ‘binitarian’ Christianity, where the vital, central and life-giving role of the Spirit is replaced with a form of rationalism. Where there is little expectation of the empowering presence of God himself to change lives, heal, and work visibly in the church and the world.

5. When ‘God is on our side’.

I mean by this a form of religious nationalism where Christianity is co-opted to bless and sanctify our politics; our identity; our nation. ‘God bless America’. God on the side of the British Empire. God on the side of Catholic Ireland’s fight for freedom against that Empire. God on the side of [Protestant] Ulster not to be subsumed within Catholic Ireland.

God sure does switch sides a lot doesn’t he?

Once God is safely for us, then our enemies are unrighteous. Since error and heresy have no right, all sorts of horror follows. For examples, read some Irish history.

6. When we buy into the sacred / secular divide.

A nice image here is of an orange and a peach. A Christian view of life is not orange – nicely segmented into distinct categories, with spiritual being one sitting alongside work, family, leisure etc. Rather life is like a peach – one whole fruit where everything is spiritual with Jesus as the centre stone.

The sacred / secular divide attempts to neuter the universal Lordship of Christ over all of life. It reduces Christianity to some sort of Kantian subjective experience. Truth becomes individualised and privatized. The gospel is reduced and personalised. The church has little to say to the world.

7. When we lose touch with the eschatological heartbeat of the Bible.

The OT and NT look forward to a new creation; a remaking of all things within a different order of existence where death is banished. No hospitals, doctors, medicines or morgues there. A future where evil and sin will have no place and justice will be done for ever.

But this is not just away in the future sometime – the future is already here in the present. The ‘proof’ is the presence of the promised Spirit, a foretaste of God’s rule to come. The resurrection of Jesus is the forerunner of the resurrection to come for all who belong to him.

Now that just doesn’t sound ‘normal’ and rational and scientific does it? Such a vision invites scorn and ridicule (as well as joy and hope). Well, let the scorn and ridicule come for Christianity is nothing without eschatology. Whenever the church loses focus on future hope it becomes fat, lazy, complacent and inward looking.

 

So, any attempt to make Christianity acceptable and reasonable to modern culture by removing the ‘unbelievable’ bits is doomed to failure. Even with the best of intentions, what remains will bear little resemblance to historic orthodox Christian faith.

I’ve nothing against good apologetics (defending the historic reliability of the Bible, the historicity of the resurrection etc) but increasingly I see a Christian’s primary task as simply announcing and telling and discussing the good news as it stands – without apology, or qualification or embarrassment. (And without aggression, arrogance or coercion either).

The irony is that it’s when we take it upon ourselves to change the story and try to make it more popular and relevant, that we do the greatest damage.

In other words, let the weirdness and Otherness of the Christian gospel stand on its own two feet. This is the apostolic story that we have been given – let’s keep to the script and trust in God to do the rest.

Living gently in a violent world where cartoonists get shot

The graphic images of gunmen executing a helpless French policeman on a Paris street should shock. In conversation the other day, someone called this act ‘inhuman’ in its brutal callousness. Brutal and callous, yes; inhuman? No.

All too human in fact. I’m only stating the obvious (good at that) to point out that 2000 people were killed in violence in Nigeria last week. The nice, good, freedom-loving liberal West has killed thousands of people in Iraq and Afghanistan in the last 10 years: it’s alleged that the CIA tortured at least 14,000 Iraqi prisoners in the (terrifying for victims) ‘War on Terror’ along the way. Violent conflicts continue to rage at a fairly consistent level across the world, with particularly bloody examples in Syria and Iraq.

And you don’t need to know much Irish history to be aware of the long legacy of the glorification of the gun on both sides of Irish politics.

I well remember sitting in a lecture class in Belfast as a student and hearing gunshots just outside the classroom window as the IRA ruthlessly executed Edgar Graham, a law lecturer and Unionist politician. It isn’t extremist Islamic violence that is somehow unique in its willingness to deal in death.

And then of course there is all the ‘common’ violence of domestic abuse and violent crime etc that don’t count in ‘war’ statistics. Or the innumerable ‘unknown’ stories of unimaginable violence that go on out of sight and mind: one a friend learnt first-hand of over Christmas was of Albino children in East Africa being hunted and killed out of the belief that drinking their blood or eating their body parts would bring wealth and prosperity, or having sex with an Albino girl would cure AIDS.

I could go on (and on and on) but the point is this: violence is embedded in the fabric of this fallen world; it’s endemic to human nature (mostly men of course but that’s another topic). It is primarily violence, especially against women, that hinders development in many parts of the world. And neither is violence limited to ‘backward’ cultures; indeed it seems that our capacity for violence climbs in line with our ability to develop technology to kill each other.

Today, it is primarily the democratic, liberal and free Western governments which make billions out of selling sophisticated weaponry globally. The top 100 companies worldwide sold $400 billion worth of arms in 2013. Two-thirds of those companies are in the USA or Europe. The USA makes over half of global arms sales, followed by the UK and France and even peace-loving Germany not far behind.

The causes of violence are complex: tribalism, ethnic conflict, hot nationalisms, religious extremism, political expediency; competition for scarce resources; ruthless greed, over-population – whatever reason you can identify, it is obvious that humans do not lack motives, means and the willingness to kill each other.

It has been ever thus (Gen. 4:8) and this is why the question of a Christian response to the reality of violence and war is a question posed to every generation of Christians in every culture globally.

And since Christians believe that the Bible is the Word of God, what the Bible teaches about peace and non-violence becomes pretty important.

Here’s my contention – and feel welcome to join a discussion: the New Testament witness is overwhelming and unambiguous in its commitment to non-violence. And that witness flows from the life and teaching of Jesus Christ. Any theory that justifies Christians engaging in violence inevitably therefore takes some form of theological or philosophical or pragmatic argument ‘beyond the New Testament’.

But what about Paul? Does he really have as strong and consistent committment to non-violence as Jesus? Doesn’t he live a more pragmatic grey-zone when it comes to (justified) violence?

Not according to Jeremy Gabrielson in his book Paul’s Non-Violent Gospel: the theological politics of peace in Paul’s life and letters. The longest chapter in the book is ‘Trajectories of Violence and Peace in Galatians’.

I suspect that, along with Romans, Galatians has been one of the most influential letters ever written in human history. Its huge themes of gospel, grace, justification by faith, law and life in the Spirit have impacted untold millions. What’s fresh here is Gabrielson goes beyond those usual Galatian themes, to argue how the letter also speaks of Paul’s deep and pervasive commitment to non-violence.

The ‘pre-Christian’ Paul is a violent persecutor (1:13) who tried to ‘destroy’ the fledgling messianic movement of Jesus-followers (1:23) – out of his zealousness for the law. While Paul does not go into details and we have to rely on Luke for an account of Paul’s role in the killing of Stephen, such zealousness linked to violence is seen in the writings of Philo.

Paul’s experience of the risen Christ, not only causes deep and profound ‘shifts’ in his understanding of the law, faith, righteousness and even his ‘theology proper’ of God himself, but also in his understanding of what sort of life pleases God.

Gone is the notion of ‘righteous violence’ – killing in the name of God. Rather he can rejoice that he has been ‘crucified with Christ’ and his former self no longer lives (2:19-20). However precisely understood (and there are debates over how much these verses are autobiographical), he rejoices in the humiliating and debasing horror of crucifixion. He is now a ‘slave’ (1:10) of Christ. As Gabrielson puts it,

“The violent Paul died when Christ was apocalypsed in him; now Christ-in-Paul shapes Paul’s life in the flesh in a cruciform existence. Violence remains a part of Paul’s life, but it is now violence inflicted on and received by the Apostle rather than performed by him.” (95)

He includes a significant quote from Michael Gorman’s excellent book, Inhabiting the Cruciform God (158-9)

“Seldom …. is his turn from violence qua violence (as opposed to his turn from persecuting the early church to promoting the faith) seen as a constitutive part of his conversion and life, or as paradigmatic for, and therefore constitutive of, Christian conversion and therefore new life generally. If the conversion of Paul, grounded in the resurrection of Christ, is paradigmatic, it is paradigmatic in multiple ways, not least of which is his conversion from violence to non-violence.”

In other words, the violent Paul ‘died’ upon encountering and then following the crucified and risen Messiah. The ‘new’ Paul was a man of peace. Now, IF this radical shift from violence to peace is paradigmatic for all believers, a life of non-violence is not just a personal ethical ‘choice’ for a Christian; it is an intrinsic part of belonging to the new age of the Spirit. Gabrielson puts it this way:

“The trajectory of violence for Jesus’ disciple is ruptured, and once they have been co-crucified, their transformed, newly enlivened bodies take on a power over violence which exercises its power-over-violence only because Violence cannot understand how it is defeated by weakness. The sway of the cosmos, the old-age modus operandi, led to Paul’s violence, but Paul’s new modus operandi, his new trajectory involves living into the new creation which has as its gravitational center the cross of Christ.” (99-100)

Gabrielson unpacks Galatian’s rich understanding of the Christian life – a life marked by the fruit of the Spirit in the overlap of the ages. I really like what he says here. It covers similar territory to a chapter I worked on last year on Paul and the Christian life, but with a focus on implications for Christian non-violence.

New life in the Spirit will embrace and overcome suffering. It will be a life of love and giving; bearing burdens and enacting forgiveness. It leads to the paradox of Christian freedom, where freedom takes the form of voluntary ‘slavery’ of love and obedience to the Risen Lord.

As I’ve argued elsewhere, the Spirit- flesh contrast in Galatians is talking of a cosmic reality, where the future is already here in the present and Christians to embody that new reality through life in the Spirit which overcomes the old life in the flesh. This new life leads to a new political order of ‘doing good’ to all, especially the household of God ( 6:9).

Yet, being peaceful, does not mean that violence will not come your way. This is why Paul warns his communities that the violent world would probably do its violent worst – they should expect suffering and trouble.  But their response was to repay evil with good; to embody a politics of peace in the face of a politics of violence.

For this was the way of their Lord.

Luke 7:18-35 John’s question to Jesus

A couple of weeks ago I was kindly invited to preach at Dunlaoghaire Evangelical Church within a series on Luke’s Gospel.

Jonny Somerville videoed the scene of the crime. That’s one ‘L’ in ‘Mitchel’ Jonny 😉

Comments welcome I guess.

The greatest story

Last week a university student union invited me to give a talk on how Jesus, the OT and the NT fit together.

I used this outline:

1. What is the Bible about? 

An all-encompassing story – from Creation, Fall, Israel, Jesus, Spirit & Church – to our place in the story and looking forward to the END of the story (new creation)

2. What is the NT?

Here’s a suggested definition

a theological reflection on the significance of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus in light of Israel’s story as told in her scriptures.

Every NT writer is doing this in one way or another. Examples from Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Acts, Paul in Romans .. etc etc

3. Who is Jesus?

The promised Messiah in whom God fulfils his promises to Israel and accomplishes his plans for the redemption of the world.  He is the one around whom the whole story revolves. To understand the OT as Christian scripture, you start with Jesus and re-read the reconfigured story. The NT does this in hundreds of ways -the diagram is a quick sketch of some examples. Most significantly, Jesus is the embodiment of YHWH himself come to his people to redeem his world.

4. What difference does this make?

Someone (rightly) said I didn’t earth this practically enough. So here’s another go:

Being a Christian is much more (but not less than) believing truth – it is faith in a person; being ‘in Christ’ who is the resurrected and living Lord.

This gives believers:

A new identity – the old ‘I’ is gone, the new creation has come.

A new purpose – ‘my’ story finds meaning within God’s story in Christ

A new community – my story is lived with others who are in Christ

A new hope – the story is not over yet.

Such profound identity change costs everything – it is a complete re-orientation of the self, of life, of values to live by, of meaning and of purpose. It is, in other words, a radical decision to join one’s life to one true story; the greatest story of all.

Comments, as ever, welcome.

Israel through a Christological lens (3)

So, does the church ‘replace’ Israel?

The charge of ‘replacement theology’ is a heavily loaded one. It is frequently equated with anti-Semitism, It is seen as denying God’s covenant(s) with Israel (especially regarding Israel’s ‘divine gift’ of the land which is assumed to be permanent) and therefore being sub-biblical at best. It is seen as arrogant (Christians better than Jews) and so on.

Sometimes ‘replacement’ theology is equated with ‘supersessionism’. The tricky bit here is that these terms need definition. Rikk Watts has a very good article on ‘Israel and Salvation’ in The Oxford Dictionary of Evangelical Theology. In it he describes Gabriel Fackre’s systematisation of at least 5 forms of supersessionism and 8 forms of anti-supersessionist theology. I’m not going to go into all them here – save to say that it’s misleading to throw terms like ‘replacement’ around without defining what it is you are talking about.

I don’t believe in ‘replacement’ theology. I do believe in ‘fulfilment’ theology. Here’s why:

The church does not ‘replace’ Israel as if ‘that story is a dead-end and now here’s a new one’. The entire NT is incomprehensible without the story of Israel. Jesus completes or fulfils that story – he is the one about whom the whole story revolves. As sketched  in the last post, themes of exodus, Messiah, Torah, land, temple, Spirit, people of God – all find deep continuity and fulfilment in the ‘Christ event’.

It is those who are ‘in Christ’ who are children of Abraham. Believers in Jesus are adopted as God’s children through the Spirit of God (Galatians; Romans). This is a reconstituted Israel – made up of anyone who abides in Jesus (to use John’s language this time). It is crystal clear that it is not sufficient to belong to Israel or to be Torah-obedient. it was not enough for Paul – it is the New covenant which surpasses the Old for it brings life (2 Cor. 3:7-17). The vital thing here is to ‘turn to the Lord’.

The language for the NT people of God is significant. The church (ekklesia) is in continuity with the qahal – the community of Israel. The outpouring of the Spirit to the Gentiles is seen as a fulfilment of the promise to Abraham and to Jacob that all nations would be blessed. Paul explicitly calls the church ‘the Israel of God’ in Gal. 6:16.  There is no longer any significant spiritual distinction between Jew and Gentile (Rom 10:2; Gal 3:28, whole of Ephesians) – they retain their identity and culture within the one body, but the spiritual significance of being Jewish is radically relativised. No where is this more clear than in Paul’s radical statement that

“Neither circumcision nor uncircumcision means anything; what counts is the new creation.” (Gal 6:15).

This theme of fulfilment is seen in how OT covenants find their completion in Jesus (the Christological lens). Exodus; Abrahamic; Davidic covenants are all fulfilled in Jesus. He enacts a new exodus; those in him are children of Abraham; he is the anointed king. And when it comes to Passover, the gospel testimony is startling: Jesus enacts a new Passover, offering his own body and blood to bring forgiveness in and through his death (and victorious resurrection).

And these theme of fulfilment is seen in relation to the land itself – just as it has been for Temple and Torah and people of God. The eschatological vision of the New Jerusalem is of a cosmic place of reconciliation where believers from all tribes and tongues and nations enter in. Just as the physical Temple is decentered and fulfilled in Jesus himself (and indeed Jesus announces impending judgement on the temple), so the land is ‘decentered’. No longer are God’s people tied to the land, but are formed from all nations through the life-giving Spirit, as the gospel of Jesus Christ is preached and bears fruit all over the world (Col 1:6).

What does all this mean today?

i. There is ONE covenant and ONE new humanity in Christ, made up of Jews and Gentiles, equal recipients of grace, first to the Jews, then to the Gentiles (who are graciously grafted into that one story).

ii. Torah is fulfilled through faith in Christ and a life in the Spirit. This is not replacement – but God acting to bring forgiveness and new life and holiness to the world beyond Israel as he had always promised to do.

iii. God has not abandoned Israel (Rom 11:2-6). Theirs is the original story; theirs is the Messiah. Paul longs that they would recognise him as such (Rom 11:13) – and that many will come to saving faith in the future (Rom 11:26-7). The paradox is that God has used Israel’s rejection of her Messiah  to bring the gospel to the nations.

iv. ‘Israel’ is redefined in the NT through the life, teaching and saving work of Jesus the Messiah. There is one unfolding story of God’s redemptive action in history. What has changed is that Gentiles are now welcomed in to that story and do not have to become Jews to be part of it. If the identity of the people of God in the OT was Torah and circumcision (and,  very importantly, faith in and love for God), now the identity of the people of God is faith in Christ, love of God, a life of holiness empowered by the Spirit, baptism into Christ, and the new covenant meal of the Lord’s Supper.

v. The idea that the modern secular nation-state of Israel is in some way a literal fulfillment of God’s promises to OT Israel is a fatally flawed hermeneutic that sits in flat contradiction to the consistent witness of the New Testament. For that reason alone it should be seriously questioned.

vi. Saying this is not anti-Semitic, or anti-Israel or pro-Palestinian or pro-Islamic! To claim that it is is just a form of spiritual bullying. There are other political and pragmatic and moral arguments that can be better made for the right of Israel to exist in peace. Just don’t distort the Bible to bolster those modern political positions when it does not. It’s bad theology on all sorts of levels.

Comments, as ever, welcome