A martyr's death

A sad story came out of my home state of Arkansas on Christmas eve. Philip Wise, a major in the Salvation Army, was shot and killed in the act of delivering donations to a local Salvation Army donation center. The two assailants were attempting to rob Wise of the Christmas donations he had collected when they fatally shot him. His wife and children were present at the center and waiting for him to arrive when the murder occurred.

The story was reported by Today's THV Channel 11, a local television station in Little Rock (and was later picked up by CNN). The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette quoted Major Harvey Johnson, the commander of the Salvation Army in central Arkansas, as saying, "We serve places that aren't often safe. We do our best to do the things that would protect ourselves. But we go to the places to bring the light to dark places, to offer hope to those who might be hopeless."

Fred Hokes, who works at same Watershed Human and Community Development Agency where Wise worked, added, "When workers who help the poor go into rough neighborhoods, many times the only thing they can do is hope their kindness will deter violence."

"You just depend on the grace of God, that's all you can do. You're always vulnerable. There's never a guarantee. You just do the best you can."

Wise's death is deeply wrong, and it is devastating for those he leaves behind. My own prayers will be lifted up for the widow, children, and congregation that he leaves behind. But his death is not tragic, in the strict sense of that term. It conforms to the finest logic of Christian martyrdom, which offers a witness more powerful than 1000 sermons preached from a pulpit.

The calling that Philip Wise pursued with his life was a calling to spread the good news of Jesus Christ in a place where good news was hard to come by. And the manner of his death will echo unto eternity - where I believe he is even now in the presence of God, rejoicing with angels and archangels.

There are really two senses of martyrdom. The first - a more narrow definition - relates to a person losing his life in the act of Christian witness, because of that Christian witness. Killing a Christian because he is a Christian fits this strict sense of martyrdom.

The wider understanding of martyrdom is that suffered by those who are killed while in the act of Christian service or ministry - perhaps not because they are Christian, but nevertheless because of the implications of what their Christian service entails. That is probably the way to think about the death of Archbishop Oscar Romero. I think it's also the way to think about Philip Wise's death. His Christian faith was not the reason he was killed, but the ministry to which it compelled him nevertheless led to his death.

In my own understanding, that makes him a martyr of Christ.

Hail the Son of Righteousness!

God's act of salvation in delivering the Hebrews out of their bondage to Pharaoh is Scripture's greatest prefiguration of the coming of Jesus Christ into the world.

When delivering the call to Moses on Mt. Horeb, God tells him, "I have surely seen the affliction of my people who are in Egypt and have heard their cry because of their taskmasters. I know their sufferings, and I have come down to deliver them out of the hand of the Egyptians and to bring them up out of that land to a good and broad land, a land flowing with milk and honey" (Exodus 3:7-8a; ESV).

That good and broad land was Canaan, of course. But the land given to God's people was also a sign of an even greater promise to come. For the oppression of Pharaoh reflects the greater oppression of sin, brokenness, and alienation that afflicts all of creation - and particularly those creatures made in God's own image. And the compassion with which God heard his people's cries in Egypt was not exhausted in the exodus.

The word of the Lord -

     "Long ago, at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed the heir of all things, through whom also he created the world. He is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature, and he upholds the universe by the word of his power."

 - Hebrews 1:1-3a (ESV)

That Son has come, even Jesus Christ the Lord! And the redemption he is bringing is a redemption for all of creation. As it is written in Isaiah the prophet --

"For you shall go out in joy
and be led forth in peace;
the mountains and the hills before you
shall break forth in singing, 
and all the trees of the field
shall clap their hands. 
Instead of the thorn shall come up the cypress;
instead of the brier shall come up the myrtle;
and it shall make a name for the LORD,
an everlasting sign that shall not be cut off"

                                (Isaiah 55:12-13; ESV)

So come, everyone who thirsts. Come to these waters.

For with them you will find the spring of the water of life.

Incarnation implications

"The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world. He was in the world, and the world was made through him, yet the world did not know him. He came to his own, and his own people did not receive him.  

"But to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God, who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God. And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth." - Gospel of John 1:9-14 (ESV)

Modernity's skepticism often means that kids in church are taught that the Bible doesn't really mean a lot of the things it claims: Jesus didn't really walk on water; that's just a literary device! Blind and lame people weren't really healed; they were just re-incorporated into the community! And Jesus wasn't really raised from the dead; it was just the disciples' continuing experience of his spiritual presence!

I got quite a bit of this growing up, and I see quite a bit of it in mainline Protestant churches today. Let me make a couple of observations, the first one short and the second a bit longer (and with help from the bishop of Alexandria).

First, a Church or tradition that makes statements like those above has already lost its faith in God. Its people have already chosen another god to worship; they're just taking a little while to get Jesus out of the center of the picture.

Second, this kind of easy dismissal of Christianity's confessions often - no, usually - betrays a thoroughgoing adherence to a form of radical historical criticism that sets out first principles and then judges the witness of Scripture by them. In the year 2010, we know X to be true about the "natural world," so anything that appears to violate X must be false!

This approach results in an inevitable agnosticism (if not outright atheism). And it also shows a poor understanding of the theological ground of our faith. Here's why:

The Christian faith is rooted in the truth of the Incarnation. That is, God - the wholly transcendent Creator of the universe - deigned to take on flesh in order to redeem his people from the brokenness and alienation that had become their lot. The One who stands outside of space and time entered in, so that the creation might be fully renewed according to his gracious design.

If you believe that - if you believe that God has become incarnate in the person of Jesus Christ - then you believe that the seemingly immutable "laws of nature" are not so immutable at all. If a God who is wholly spirit and without bounds can come to inhabit the flesh of a man, then anything is possible. All of a sudden, a virgin birth, a ministry marked by proleptic miracles, and a bodily resurrection don't seem out of character for God's Messiah at all.

"In the world you will have tribulation," Jesus tells us. "But take heart; I have overcome the world" (John 16:33b; ESV).

 In his great treatise, On the Incarnation of the Word, Athanasius puts it this way:

"For as, when the likeness painted on a panel has been effaced by stains from without, he whose likeness it is must needs come once more to enable the portrait to be renewed on the same wood: for, for the sake of his picture, even the mere wood on which it is painted is not thrown away, but the outline is renewed upon it; in the same way also the most holy Son of the Father, being the Image of the Father, came to our region to renew man once made in His likeness, and find him, as one lost, by the remission of sins; as He says Himself in the Gospels: 'I came to find and to save the lost.'"

 He has come. And he is coming.

Happy Medieval Christmas

Would things be more awesome if we lived in medieval times?

Undoubtedly.

Can we do anything about that?

Unfortunately, no.

Well, almost no. The picture you see above is not some 800-year old stone path in the garden of a medieval castle. It's in my backyard. I decided my wife and I didn't have enough medieval influence in our lives, so I built a vaguely medieval stone path around our garden this past year.

It's pretty medieval even in the summer. But with a light coating of snow and my fancy "accent stones" sticking up at odd angles, it's downright Dark Ages! Every time I go back there I almost expect Madmartigan to come storming out of my garage on his way to take the One Ring back to Castle Grayskull. 'Course it's never long till Emily makes me put my knight stuff away so I can come inside and eat supper.

Anyway, I've been wanting to share a picture of the path around my garden for awhile. Just remember - we weren't all lucky enough to be born in 13th century England, but that's why they invented websites like this one. (It shows you how to build a catapult. No joke.)

So happy medieval Christmas. And if you're asking yourself if Christmas was more awesome during medieval times, the answer is probably yes. But Christmas is still pretty awesome as it is.

Wednesday Miscellanies

A couple of weeks of end-of-semester grading, capped off by a quick trip to Houston to attend a conference, has kept me away from the blogosphere for awhile.

I've been jotting down lots of blog-worthy items over the past few days, though. Here are a few of them:

- I spent this past weekend at The Woodlands United Methodist Church near Houston. I was there for the annual AFTE Christmas Conference for John Wesley Fellows, which is a gathering of evangelical Wesleyan scholars and graduate students who are committed to the renewal of the Wesleyan tradition in the UMC. We were the guests of the  Rev. Ed Robb III, who is the chairman of the board at AFTE and senior pastor at the Woodlands UMC. My participation in the John Wesley Fellowship program has been one of the most rewarding of my graduate student career, and I was reminded of just why that is the case when Dr. Robb recounted the story of how AFTE came into being. At our gathering on Friday evening, Dec. 11th, he described AFTE's dual focus as, "A deep concern for spiritual renewal in the United Methodist Church, and a conviction that such renewal results from solid theology." I couldn't agree more.

- President Obama's acceptance speech for the Noble Peace Prize in Oslo, Norway, has gotten a lot of attention. David Brooks of the New York Times believes it cements a foreign policy approach emblematic of Niebuhrian Christian realism. The Washington Post's Kathleen Parker calls Obama's speech his "most presidential," and describes it as "a triumphant expression of American values and character." My question: Assuming there is a point where Christian discipleship and American values diverge, what is that point?

- The United Methodist Council of Bishops has issued a pastoral letter entitled, "God's Renewed Creation: A Call to Hope and Action." Here's a link from my own bishop's website where you can download the letter. Its subjects include pandemic poverty & disease, environmental degradation, and the proliferation of weapons & violence. I haven't read the letter yet but look forward to doing so over the Christmas holiday.

- A thought on doctrine in the UMC: It's not that the Church simply has disagreements on doctrine. It's much more dysfunctional than that. The real problem is that we don't even know how to have a conversation about the place of doctrine in the life of the Church.

- Yesterday I was diagnosed with ulnar neuropathy. It's highly uncomfortable. And it's apparently gonna take some physical therapy. Ulnar neuropathy is a common ailment of serious bicycle riders. Of course, I haven't been on a bicycle in years. It's also a common ailment of serious laptop users. My doctor said she calls it "graduate student syndrome." Blech.

Is God with us?

"They will call him Immanuel, which means, God with us."

The doctrine of the Incarnation is central to the Christian faith. It states that God has come into the world in the person of Jesus Christ. Jesus is the one who did not regard equality with God as something to be grasped, but instead emptied himself and took the form of a servant - being born in our likeness and suffering for us on the cross (Philippians 2:5-11). Through his life, death, and resurrection, he has opened the way to our reconciliation to God's own self and our restoration in God's own image.

The season of Advent is the time when we remember and re-tell the story of the Incarnation. It's a story that can border on sentimentality if we're not careful, so I sometimes think it's helpful to think of both Philippians 2 and John 1 when we're reading from the birth narratives of Matthew and Luke. The One who was born to Mary is none other than the eternal Word of God, who was there at the very beginning and through whom all things were made.

But wait - there's more.

Intimately connected with the Incarnation of God in Jesus Christ is the gift of the Holy Spirit. Before he ascended into heaven, Jesus promised us that he wouldn't leave us alone. Indeed, he poured out the Holy Spirit onto the Church so that we could be taught, counseled, encouraged, and transformed.

An emphasis on the persona and work of the Holy Spirit is one aspect of Wesleyan theology. As Wesleyans, we understand the Spirit to be essential to the affirmation that - yes! - God is still with us.

John Wesley writes in his Letter to a Roman Catholic, "I believe the infinite and eternal Spirit of God, equal with the Father and the Son, to be not only perfectly holy in himself, but the immediate cause of all holiness in us: enlightening our understandings, rectifying our wills and affections, renewing our natures, uniting our persons to Christ, assuring us of the adoption of sons, leading us in our actions, purifying and sanctifying our souls and bodies to a full and eternal enjoyment of God."

That's a strong statement of the importance of the Holy Spirit in the Christian life. And Wesley echoes it elsewhere, particularly in relation to the work of the Spirit in salvation. For instance, look at this comment by Wesley in his sermon, "The Great Privilege of Those that are Born of God," where he speaks about what he calls, "the life of God in the soul of a believer."

Wesley writes, "It ... implies the continual inspiration of God's Holy Spirit: God's breathing into the soul, and the soul's breathing back what it first receives from God; a continual action of God upon the soul, and re-action of the soul upon God; an unceasing presence of God, the loving, pardoning God, manifested to the heart, and perceived by faith; and an unceasing return of love, praise, and prayer, offering up all the thoughts of our hearts, all the words of our tongues, all the works of our hands, all our body, soul, and spirit, to be an holy sacrifice, acceptable unto God in Christ Jesus."

Our election is, it turns out, conditional. It is conditional upon the action of the Holy Spirit upon us, and upon our willingness to be swept up in that wonderful work of grace upon our souls. Wesley's statement captures that aspect of salvation beautifully. What he's describing, in essence, is what it means to be perfected by grace.

Considering the presence of the Holy Spirit with us here & now, in my mind, adds something significant to how I think about Advent.

Listen to Mark Driscoll

You should listen to Mark Driscoll, if you don't already.

Here's three reasons why:

First, he probably takes the Bible more seriously than you do.

Second, he's willing to engage the culture in a way few pastors and theologians are.

Third, he represents the way Calvinism gets preached and taught in the church when it is embraced wholeheartedly. And Wesleyans need to hear it to understand it.

If you're asking yourself, "Who is Mark Driscoll and why should I care," then let me explain.

Driscoll is the pastor of Mars Hill Church in Seattle who stands at the forefront of an evangelical resurgence in Reformed theology. Driscoll is a "5-point Calvinist" (a term he embraces) and is causing shockwaves throughout the evangelical world with his unabashed Calvinist preaching, teaching, and writing.

For the purpose of context, you've got to realize that evangelicals (and here I do not mean Wesleyan evangelicals) have long held a theology that is basically a Calvinist and Arminian mishmash. If you don't know what I mean by that, just think for a minute about the incoherence these two statements: "Choose Jesus as your personal Lord and Savior" and "Once saved, always saved." Driscoll, on the other hand, comes across like someone plucked out of 17th century New England and set down in 21st century Seattle. He's a Puritan, only a Puritan who wears retro t-shirts and sports a constant five o'clock shadow.

Driscoll has become enough of a phenomenon that the New York Times ran a feature story on him in the NY Times Magazine back in January. The story was - not surprisingly - both snarky and condescending. But the very fact that it was written speaks volumes about the impact he's having on American culture and religion.

I started listening to podcasts of Driscoll's sermons a few months ago after hearing someone remark about his boundary-pushing preaching style. Since then, I've probably listened to a dozen or more of his sermons (which typically run longer than an hour apiece). Here are my thoughts:

First, Driscoll reads the Bible with an intensity that few Protestants - from liberal to evangelical - are willing to do. He has a sense of the authority of Scripture that is right on. Taking the Bible as seriously as he does is deeply needed in the United Methodist Church. And in that sense, he's more Wesleyan than me or just about any Methodist preacher I know. (For the pastors out there, note the way Driscoll engages in what is often called "pre-critical exegesis." He doesn't always do it consistently, but he does have a sense of the way that historical criticism has overreached and made claims that are no more grounded, and sometimes much less so, than the church's traditional claims about Scripture.)

Second, Driscoll looks out at the wider culture around him and recognizes how out-of-step it is with the way of discipleship presented in the New Testament. Again, for context you've got realize that Protestant liberalism is in its death throes. Its tendency is either to devolve into a muddy spirituality that cannot cope with historic and catholic Christian affirmations or to see Christian discipleship as civic participation in a liberal democratic society with a little Jesus thrown in. Either way, it will (and in some cases has) eventually morph into something that isn't recognizably Christian anymore.

Driscoll sees the thinness of mainline Christianity's presentation of the Christian life, and here's what makes his critique so important: he knows that liberal Christians are liberals, but he also understands that most evangelical Christians are liberals, too. (If you don't know what I mean by that, then just note the two distinct ways I'm using "liberal" in this post.) Theologically, Driscoll's kind of where New England Puritanism was in the 1740s and 50s. Liberalism in American culture had its birth there, as those who embraced Enlightenment rationalism began to move steadily away from the "city on a hill" vision of their forebears. Driscoll sees that and throws his lot in with the federal theology of Calvinist orthodoxy. It makes for a vision of the Christian life with a great deal of internal consistency.

Don't get me wrong: I don't agree with a lot of what Driscoll offers in place of the surrounding cultural alternative. But the fact that he's unwilling to allow the politically correct climate of American society to silence him is impressive. And we can learn something from it.

The problem with Driscoll is that his theology's all wrong. His doctrine of God, his soteriology, his ecclesiology: they're out of step with the gospel given to us by Jesus Christ. And - this is important - he advances his Calvinism by invoking a caricatured version of Arminianism. This comes up from time to time in his preaching, as it did in a sermon on the gospel of Luke that I listened to while raking leaves yesterday. That NY Times Magazine article represented Arminian soteriology (though not by name) with an absurd statement that, interestingly enough, could have come from Driscoll himself: "Since the early 19th century, most evangelicals have preferred a theology that stresses the believer's free decision to accept God's grace. To be born again is a choice God wants you to make; if you so choose, Jesus will be your personal friend." In the sermon I heard yesterday, Driscoll mocks the Arminian understanding of humans' role in accepting God's grace while conveniently leaving out such matters as the universal atonement and prevenient grace.

If you are a Methodist, all this has some implications. First, stop worrying about the mind numbingly mundane "church programming" approach to to Christian discipleship and start getting serious about salvation. Read the Bible (everyday) and pick up a collection of Wesley's sermons (here's a good one). Realize that the culture has infected the church to a degree that we need an exorcism. But realize, also, that Driscoll's Calvinism isn't the answer. The horrible decree of double predestination makes God into a monster. But just the same, God is also not the sentimentalized warm fuzzy "presence" that we've allowed him to become.

It's high time that Wesleyans got serious about the gospel God raised us up to preach. We've been playing at dolls far too long.