Some Standard Wisdom for the Proactive Church Lady

Having highlighted the seedier side of Stone-Campbell views on the prospects and methods for evangelizing the newly freed slaves, let us turn now to a more egalitarian note. This comes from the Querists' Drawer where Errett and his editorial staff answered questions on belief and practice sent in by readers. Here Errett comes to the defense of some women fed up with their unmotivated fellow congregants.

“We met today for social worship and the elder no being present, the deacon and the brethren would not lead in worship; the sisters went ahead and had singing, prayer and Bible reading. Did we do right? Would it have been right for a sister to have led in the breaking bread?”

In our judgment, you did just right. And if you had added the Lord ’s supper to observances, we should still say you did right. If a company of sisters in a neighborhood in which no brethren lived were to assemble for reading and prayer, what would there be to hinder their observance of the Lord’s supper? And if brethren are present and refuse to lead in the worship, no one can charge that the women usurp authority over them, if they go forward in the performance of duties from which the men shrink. Certainly, such men should never complain because the women outstrip them in zeal and faithfulness.

Dorothy Day, the Child

Unsurprisingly, Dorothy Day began life as a child. Equally unsurprisingly, when she looked back on her childhood she found both profound truths and glimpses of her future self. This is perhaps a great act of anachronism--one which would be by no means unique to her--in which we project back onto a past of infinite possibilities the notion of fate which comes from hindsight and the wisdom which comes from distance. Even if that is true, even if to the smallest degree, it does not thereby negate the value of this self-reflection, this turning to the past to explain the present and to extract from its eventualities eternal truths. After all, Christ pointed often to children for just such a reason, either to validate this human instinct or because he knew that through it we might more easily grasp that which he taught us. It was to those like "little children" that truth had been revealed, not the wise, whom Jesus must rebuke and remind that out of the mouths of babes came true praise. To the those who would become children, the kingdom of heaven belongs. So when Day looks back on her childhood in search of kernels of truth, she may indulge a human impulse but she also practices a Christian virtue.

What she finds is both the seeds of simple faith and the onset of our most basic sins:

We did not search for God when we were children. We took Him for granted. We were at some time taught to say our evening prayers, “Now I lay me,” and “Bless my father and mother.” This done, we prayed no more unless a thunderstorm made us hide our heads under the covers and propitiate the Deity by promising to be good.

Very early we had a sense of right and wrong, good and evil. My conscience was very active. There were ethical concepts and religious concepts. To steal cucumbers from Miss Lynch’s garden on Cropsey Avenue was wrong. It was also wrong to take money from my mother, without her knowledge, for a soda. What a sense of property rights we had as children! Mine and yours! It begins in us as infants. “This is mine.” When we are very young just taking makes it mine. Possession is nine points of the law. As infants squabbling in the nursery we were strong in that possessive sense. In the nursery might made right. We had not reached the age of reason. But at the age of four I knew it was wrong to steal.

She also remember with what innocence and clarity she first learned about poverty and became disillusioned with the way it is approached in supposedly Christian society. Her words are both a testament to the obviousness of our shortcomings and to the wisdom and impressionability of our youth:

Children look at things very directly and simply. I did not see anyone taking off his coat and giving it to the poor. I didn’t see anyone having a banquet and calling in the lame, the halt and the blind. And those who were doing it, like the Salvation Army, did not appeal to me. I wanted, though I did not know it then, a synthesis. I wanted life and I wanted the abundant life. I wanted it for others too. I did not want just the few, the missionary-minded people like the Salvation Army, to be kind to the poor, as the poor. I wanted everyone to be kind. I wanted every home to be open to the lame, the halt and the blind, the way it had been after the San Francisco earthquake. Only then did people really live, really love their brothers. In such love was the abundant life and I did not have the slightest idea how to find it.

An Unreconstructed Prayer

I came across this little prayer in Charles Reagan Wilson's Baptized in Blood and kept coming back to it.

Lord we acknowledge Thee as the all-wise author of every good and perfect gift. We recognize Thy presence and wisdom in the healing shower. We acknowledge Thou had a divine plan when Thou made the rattle-snake, as well as the song bird, and this was without help from Charles Darwin. But we believe Thou will admit the grave mistake in giving the decision to the wrong side in eighteen hundred and sixty-five.

J. William Jones' thoroughly Confederate prayer is an easy object for scornful derision or amused mockery, but I imagine at the time it seemed a powerful expression of the mind not only of the speaker but of the audience. If it was met with any reaction at all, I suspect it was hearty assent from the North Carolina audience.

Meanwhile, are we any more careful in the way we address ourselves to God. With the level-heads of calmer thinkers or the benefit of the perspective of history, how will people evaluate the all too often modern prayer that God will ensure that our soldiers be the ones to kill their soldiers and not the other way around. Do we suppose God receives those prayers any better than the informed criticisms of Jones? They certainly are no less self-interested or self-involved, no less tribalist than the Lost Cause musings of the rebel veteran.

Quantifying Christianity?

Are you really a Christian? I mean, really. You may answer yes, but Changing the Face of Christianity reserves the right to disagree. They have constructed this very scientific quiz to determine just who makes the grade and who doesn't. (Though, rest assured, "This index is not intended to pass judgment on you. Instead, use it as a gauge of how well you reflect Jesus Christ both internally and externally.") There are four categories of classification: far from Christ, worldly Christian, good Christian, and spiritually mature. I am ashamed to admit--so deeply, deeply ashamed--that, upon completing rigorous ten question assessment, I just barely made the cut for "good Christians."

Now normally I am a wise enough person not to put much stock in the results of online quizzes. (I lost all faith after Quibblo told me I was a Ron when I am clearly a Hermione...a very manly Hermione.) Unfortunately, however, this quiz seems to actually be making news--or at least popping up regularly in my news feed from a variety of sources--with its claim that one out of every three professed Christians in America actually falls into "worldly Christian" or below category. According to Changing the Face of Christianity founder R. Brad White, people in this group have admitted through his test that "they rarely live the teachings of Jesus Christ."

Of course, the biggest problem with this project is the nonsensical idea that one can quantify Christianity on a multiple choice quiz. Perhaps in an age when there were fixed, catholic formulas for orthodoxy (and such an age exists only in the ignorant imaginations of nostalgic minds) that sort of cut-and-dry ten question litmus test might fly, but who is and isn't a Christian becomes much more difficult in the real world. What we have today, and have always had, is more of an ethical sampler platter where we can all identify Christian positions and non-Christian positions, but for the most part we can also all recognize that there is a tremendous field of uncertainty where confident categories cannot be widely agreed upon.

Consider this example, the first question on the quiz:

1. When someone recklessly cuts you off in traffic, do you:

• Say or "gesture" angrily at the other driver
• Not get angry, but think about what COULD have happened to you and your passengers
• Thank God you weren't hurt, and pray for the safety of other drivers
• Control your tongue/temper, but think angry thoughts

I'll go ahead and admit that as often as not what I actually do is the fourth option. What I strive for, given the options presented, is the second answer. I think it is probable, though they do not offer an answer sheet for those who have completed the test, that the "correct" answer is to thank God and pray for the safety of other drivers. Perhaps someone would like to explain to me how someone's spiritual maturity can be called into question because they do not pray for the safety of drivers whenever they get cut off. If we want to talk about living the teachings of Jesus, what he taught us to do is to go into a closet and pray privately. He lived a marvelous example of that in that most (arguably all) of the Gospel references to Jesus praying involve him going off alone to do it somewhere in private. Now if someone, say perhaps me, were to believe that prayer is a more serious matter demanding more gravitas than a few rote words muttered from behind the wheel or that being innocent as doves and shrewd as vipers allows someone to refuse anger and still be cognizant of the dangers presented by reckless driving, such a person might grade the quiz differently, declaring that those who pray every time they're cut off are good but not great Christians. Of course, I would never make a test.

It is possible, of course, that I have improperly inferred the intent of the test creators. Maybe option two really is the "right" one and option three is one of the stereotypes they are trying to combat. Even if that's the case though, the point still stands, because for everyone one who thinks that two is a better answer than three, there are those who think that true Christianity consists in constant, altruistic prayer. And therein lies the main problem with trying to quantify a population's Christianity.

There are of course other problems. The second question highlights it, asking how often you read your Bible but giving no indication of the portion of Jesus' teachings in which he commands Bible reading. After all, how could he, the Gospels not having yet been written during his earthly lifetime? I haven't read my Bible today. I don't think I read it yesterday or the day before. I'd like to believe that doesn't negatively reflect the strength of my faith or on my conformity to Christian ethics. That isn't to say that Bible reading is worthless. It isn't. It isn't to say I'm entirely satisfied with the amount of time I spend refreshing my memory about the teachings of Christ. I'm not. It is to say that cracking the spine of your Bible is not a magical means to faith nor is it a measure of faith. If I don't read it "Throughout the day, only missing occasionally," it isn't because I'm not living the teachings of Christ. In fact, I wonder how someone who spends so much time reading the Gospel has any time to live it at all.

There are innumerable problems with the quiz presented, but one more merits mention. The good people at Changing the Face of Christianity ask test takers how much time they spend worrying, with the implication being that worry (according to Matthew 7) is something Christians are commanded not to do. That's true, of course. The perfect Christian (perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect Christian) does not worry. Yet, the presence of worry does not necessarily indicate spiritual immaturity, in less you take that in an absolute and therefore meaningless sense. Think of the heroes of faith, the biblical characters that I hope R. Brad White wouldn't think of calling anything but spiritually mature, who have worried about the mundane things of life, doubted providence, and argued with God. One might even say that there is worry--or, if you prefer, anxiety--present in the garden when Jesus is praying (off alone, at a distance from his disciples *wink wink*). Later, the testers ask how often you do things privately of which you might be ashamed. Paul, who thinks himself mature enough to comment on the spiritual maturity of others, admits struggles against the baser instincts of his own flesh. Our inclination to hagiographical excess to one side, it is perhaps time we all admitted out loud that, recorded or not, it is safe to assume that our biblical heroes all sinned, even after they were redeemed in Christ.

Here we come back to an essential problem, one perhaps even more foundational than our own ethical uncertainty and tendency toward qualified pluralism. The very attempt to classify Christians in this way fundamentally misunderstands the sanctification process. Our lives are not about achieving a state of spiritual maturity. Spiritual maturity is the carrot dangled in front of us which we pursue but never achieve because perfection is an infinite virtue and not attainable concretely by finite beings. The people at Changing the Face of Christianity have some admirable goals. "Their mission is to reverse Christian intolerance, hypocrisy, homophobia, judgmentalism, and other negative Christian stereotypes, by helping Christians to be more like Jesus Christ." That's great and should be incorporated into the mission statement of every local church. Still, even if the questions were more exhaustive or more carefully chosen or if they could actually find an answer which all Christians could agree was right, it still would be a failed endeavor because the categories that matter on continuum of spiritual maturity are not qualifiers which range from worst to best. The real issue of consequence is progress versus stagnation. I feel more spiritual kinship with the angry, foul-mouthed, bigot who fights and fails to change his acknowledged flaws than the elder's wife who donates all her time to charity but confuses contentedness in her righteousness with contentedness in the saving graces of God.

But maybe that's why I failed the test.

J. W. McGarvey: On Prayer

The following is part of an ongoing commentary on J. W. McGarvey's Sermons Delivered in Louisville Kentucky. For an introduction to and table of contents for the series, see Happy Birthday, J. W.
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“No assurance is more solemnly given than that God is a prayer-hearing God, answering the prayers of His people.” It is tragic that such a statement should find so little unified assent in the Christian community. McGarvey says of his own day that “there is no subject of revelation on which there is more skepticism than on that of prayer,” and that skepticism continues to pervade the present discourse. McGarvey even goes so far as to recount the “scientific” experiment of physicist John Tyndall, who proposed setting up two hospital wards, one of which was being prayed for by Christians and one of which wasn’t, in an effort to prove the ineffectiveness of prayer. Similar experiments continue to be proposed and carried out today, and prayer is still a major battleground within Christianity and between Christians and the world.

Yet McGarvey correctly notes that prayer is one of the core features of the biblical narrative. More than baptism or the Eucharist or sacrifice or almsgiving, prayer saturates Scripture. Before Israel was a nation, the patriarchs prayed. Moses prayed before God covenanted with His people. The judges prayed long before the kings prayed; the prophets prayed and the psalmists prayed. Daniel prayed, even when it got him thrown in with the lions, and, from the belly of the fish, Jonah prayed. Jesus prayed, and he taught his disciples how to pray. How can Christians but pray, and do so fervently and with the certainly that God hears them?

As had been the case with so many subjects before, McGarvey does not pretend to understand how prayer worked or what, precisely it accomplished. Like providence, he thinks it both mysterious and mundane, and he tells the story of Elijah and the great drought to illustrate this. The first analogy he has recourse to, however, is a martial one. Understandably, as one who lived and worked in the Upper South throughout the Civil War, McGarvey (as well as his audience) knew the impact even a poorly aimed canon could have:

A man fires a rifle, taking aim, very careful, deliberate aim, and misses the mark; does that bullet accomplish nothing? Is there no force in it? In a great battle, the immense cannonading which begins the fight does little execution; most of it is vain so far as striking the mark is concerned; most of it is vain so far as killing the enemy is concerned; would you say, then, that there is no power in it? Would you say it avails nothing? Every one of those cannon balls does something. If it does nothing but split open the air, and plough up the earth, it does something. It is a tremendous force. So, if the Bible teaches the truth, every prayer that goes out of a good man's heart, goes somewhere and hits something. It is a power in this world. It has force and power, even if it misses the mark at which it is aimed; and no man is wise enough to track it and see what it does. The bullet goes out of sight through the woods. Sometimes it strikes an animal out of sight and kills it, sometimes, a man. A prayer goes out of the heart of a good man into the world; you don't know what it accomplishes; you can not follow its flight and see what is its effect; but you can believe that it avails much. When He to whom prayer is offered tells you that it is heard and that it avails much, can't you believe that? His eye can trace it when ours can not. So this matter of the force of prayer is, in the main, like everything else; sometimes, like the artillery fired in a great battle, or like a rifle shot, it strikes the mark and there is visible proof of its efficacy; and at other times it misses the mark, but strikes something else.

Here he strikes a note which has recurred throughout his sermons and which clearly functioned as a defining theological paradigm for McGarvey: the trustworthiness of God. Time has, unfortunately, not permitted us to examine all the sermons McGarvey published in his Sermons Delivered in Louisville (God just didn’t put enough Tuesdays and Thursdays in March to cover twenty-four sermons), but it will be profitable in this final entry to look at the way this overriding impulse in McGarvey’s thought has shaped the way he looks at so many features of the Christian walk.

The theme came out most clearly perhaps in McGarvey’s discussion of redemption, which is ultimately why that entry focused on it. McGarvey’s central theme contradicts prevailing misconceptions about the Stone-Campbell Movement (at least historically) that it was essentially a movement founded on an assurance that human reason could lead to salvation. To whatever extent that may be true, even comparatively, cannot undermine that for McGarvey the ultimate assurance for redemption did not rest with human effort, but divine agency, not in the bounds of human knowledge, but in spite of human ignorance. This is echoed as McGarvey outlines his vision of providence. While he rejects the popular notions of his day of a heavy-handed, irresistible providence micromanaging the world, McGarvey does trust in a God who is actively, responsively working in the world to achieve his ends cooperatively with humanity. The duty of humanity is not to set its own course or to devise its own salvation, but merely to seek out and recognize the will of God and try to submit to it.

McGarvey is more than happy to admit that this will is not comprehensible and insists that its incomprehensibility is no reason to question it. Undermining, again, common stereotypes about the Stone-Campbell Movement, McGarvey says of baptism that, if we follow Paul, we cannot give too strong a voice to the countless questions that arise from our imaginations: is baptism really necessary, why is it necessary, how are sins removed in baptism? It is enough that Jesus commissioned his disciples to baptize. From there—whatever our debates may yield—our salvation is a matter of trust in God. Scripture, McGarvey reminds us from the outset, is surprisingly unreceptive to the kinds of questions we want to put to it. That is because it records the messages and purposes of God for His people and of the people for their God.

We must trust in the God who has kept His promises countless times and for countless generations that He will keep His eternal promises to us. We trust that He has not deceived us about the magnitude of sin or about our need to repent of it. We trust that He has shown us the way He has ordained to lead us out of sin and into life, even if we don’t understand that way. We trust God, foolishly and uncynically, because with childlike eyes we have perceived a God who is trustworthy. It is on this note that McGarvey ends his sermon on prayer and we end our series on his sermons:

If God was a God who did not hear our prayers, or care anything about our prayers, He might as well be made of ice. He is a living God; a God who has friends, and loves His friends; and this is the reason that He will do something for them when they cry to Him. Don't think of God as mere abstraction, or as a being who keeps Himself beyond the sky; but think of Him as one who lives with you, who is round about you, who lays His hand under your head when you lie down to rest. So in praying, pray with the confidence of little children. One of the bitterest cries I ever heard of, came from one of the great historians of England, when he said, "I would give all I am and all I ever hope to be, for one hour of my childhood's faith, when I looked up at the sky and called it heaven." He had lost the simple faith of his early days, and could not get it back again. We are to believe that God is with us, that His eyes are upon us, and that He hears the prayers of His saints. Pray in the morning; pray at the noontide; pray when you lie down to sleep…Pray often; pray earnestly; and in order that your prayer may amount to anything, be righteous men and women. Walk humbly before God, and truly with the people, and your prayers will be heard.

The Wisdom of the Pilgrim

The following are some interesting quotes I collected quite a while ago while reading The Candid Narrations of a Pilgrim to His Spiritual Father. The story, more commonly known in English as The Way of the Pilgrim, is of a 19th century Russian mendicant practitioner of hesychasm. In addition to being a wonderful tale and an edifying spiritual text, the narrative offers an enticing look into the Russian tradition of hesychasm and the idiosyncrasies of Slavic monasticism with its emphasis on starets. I imagine, were I to take it up again, I would find many more inspirational quotes. Below are simply the notes I had from some years ago:

By the grace of God I am a Christian, by my deeds a great sinner, and by calling a homeless rover of the lowest status in life.

And one of the most lamentable things is the vanity of elementary knowledge which drives people to measure the Divine by a human yardstick.

...from now on call on the name of Jesus without counting. Submit yourself to the will of God in humility, looking to Him for assistance. I firmly believe that He will not abandon you but direct your steps.

And now, I am wandering about repeating incessantly the Prayer of Jesus. To me it has greater value than anything else on earth. Occasionally I walk seventy versts or so and do not feel it at all. I am conscious of only one thing, my prayer. When biter cold pierces me, I say it more eagerly and warm up in no time. When I am hungry I begin to call on the Name of Jesus more often and forget about food. When I am ill and rheumatic pains set in my back and legs, I concentrate on the prayer and no longer notice the discomfort. When people to me wrong, my wrath and indignation are quickly forgotten as soon as I remember the sweetness of the prayer of Jesus. In a way I have become a half-witted person; I have no anxiety and no interest in the vanities of the world, for which I care no longer.

And when I prayed in my heart bearing all this in mind, everything about me appeared to be pleasing and lovely. It was as though the trees, the grass, the birds, the earth, the air and the light were saying they existed for the sake of man, in testimony and proof of the love of God for mankind. It was as if they were saying that everything prayed and praised God.

A soldier's response to a monk who suggested reading the Gospels as a cure for alcoholism:

I listened to him and Said: 'How can your Gospels help me when my own efforts and medical treatment have failed to stop me from drinking?" I spoke in that way because I never read the Gospels. 'Don't say that,' answered the monk. 'I am sure it will help you.' And he brought me this very book the following day. As I glanced at it and tried to read a little, I said to the monk: 'No, I won't take it. I can't understand it and I am not familiar with Church Slavonic.' The monk, however, insisted that there is grace-giving power in the words of the Gospels, for they relate what our Lord himself said. 'It is unimportant if you do not understand; just go on reading,' he urged me. 'A saint said once upon a time: you may not understand the Word of God, but the devils do, and tremble.'

On Christ and Jain

Jain has always fascinated me, no doubt in large part because of the peculiar intensity with which its practitioners pursue its principles. Islam, for example, has won my admiration for the popular level of its devotion. While in Christianity, we must constantly hear sermons about the value of daily prayer, the Muslim knows instinctively to pray no less than five times a day. Jain takes this kind of meticulous devotion to another level, with serious practitioners being so committed to total non-violence that they wear masks to keep from inhaling tiny organisms and sweep the ground in front of them wherever they go in order to brush aside unsuspecting insects. Even the Jain laity take strict vows of vegetarianism as part of a broader programme of non-violence. It is precisely this mixture of definite belief and assiduous application that has made Jain one of the smallest and yet one of the most influential world religions, relative to its size.

It is this fascination with Jain which recently led me to undertake studies in a reader of world religions and to listen to a series of lectures on Eastern religions by Stephen Prothero (who, unfortunately, elected to skip Jain altogether). Over the coming weeks, I would like to share some of the insights into Jain that these very cursory studies have brought, particularly those musings which may help challenge and deepen Christian faith and which might enlighten the curious outsider looking at Jain.

Re-Reading Revelation: Seals and Trumpets (Chs. 6-8)

With the beginning of chapter six it becomes significantly easier, and more tempting, to slip into quarrels about hermeneutics and misadventures into decoding symbols. While there are certainly eschatological questions to be answered in the chapters to come and there are serious disputes which require resolution, there are perhaps less contentious truths--though they are not, for this, less important or deliberate on the part of John--which can be embraced. What John offers the readers in the opening of the seven seals and the blowing of the first four trumpets is undoubtedly cryptic. It is even probable that his audience would have found the text equally cryptic, though they may have been less baffled by what was a more typical phenomenon at the time. What is apparent, however, are several central themes which run throughout.

The first of these is the way that John alternates deliberately between destruction and salvation, between judgment and mercy. For four seals, one terror after another is released upon the world. God's agents unleash war, death, conquest, and famine in rapid succession until one quarter of the earth's population is destroyed. Then the narrative jerks violently away to the martyrs of God beneath the altar, and the divine agents are depicted clothing the suffering servants of God and telling them to be at rest. Immediately, the sixth seal is broken and even greator horrors are unleased on the earth, leaving its inhabitants to cry out to the mountains, "Fall on us and hide us from the face of him who is seated on the throne, and from the wrath of the Lamb." After spending most of a chapter on the wholesale destruction of the earth, the scene breaks away for a full chapter of the angels proclaiming salvation on the servants of God. "...he who sits on the throne will shelter them with his presence. They shall hunger no more, neither thirst anymore; the sun shall not strike them, nor any scorching heat. For the Lamb in the midst of the throne will be their shepherd, and he will guide them to springs of living water, and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes." The imagery is as tender as the former was alarming.

The juxtaposition is not merely a matter of demonstrating that God is both loving and stern. John also goes to great lengths to clearly contrast the responses of the children of God with those who are hopelessly set against Him. The saved, from every tribe, nation, and tongue, cry out together, "Salvation belongs to our God who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb!" This is almost certainly intended by John to be ironic, considering that mere verses ago the objects of God's wrath sought salvation from the mountains. While the saints offer their prayers to God, the lost pray senselessly to the mountains for salvation. They should have known that God is God over all creation, even the mountains.

Which is the second theme running through the text. The catalogue of destruction which is offered up in the opening of the seven seals and the blowing of the first four trumpets is not some litany of divine sadism and must certainly be more than a mere ennumeration of destructive methodology. Instead, Revelation 6-8 is a creation text supremely concerned with reminding God's creatures in astonishing fashion that He is creator and Master of His creation. God created the myriad and magnificent flora of the earth; with the first trumpet He permits their destruction. God created the oceans and the life which teems in them; with the second trumpet He permits their destruction. God created the fresh water rivers which sustain all life on earth; with the third trumpet He permits their destruction. God made all the lights of the heavens; with the fourth trumpet He permits their destruction. Over the course of the divine drama, God rolls up His heavens, displaces His mountains, casts down His stars, opens up His depths, unleashes His wind, and shakes the very foundations of His earth until all creation is reminded that He is in fact Almighty. Even death, that most pernicious of Christian enemies, is not above God. He is its master and will allow its persistence in accordance with His will, be it through war or through famine. In a trivial sense, the whole passage boils down to the great, familiar Bill Cosby adage, "I brough you into this world; I can take you out of it." Except God can say it to the whole of creation.

Finally, the reader is reminded throughout this text that God is not only a God who judges, who forgives, who creates, and who can uncreate but He is also a God who listens. This would have been uniquely important to the Christians of John's audience who were suffering great trials. One can only imagine the countless prayers for deliverance which were offered up and which, by all appearances, were never answered. It would be a long time before Christ's church ever found longterm safety, and in many places it still languishes in waiting. That we suffer, John reminds us, is not because our God is apathetic. When the saints beneath the altar cry out to God, their pleas are not ignored. They do not get the retribution they are begging for, but it is not because God does not sympathize with them. His plans just supercede our impatience. Later, the prayers--presumably the similar prayers to those before--of God's people are offered up with a censer before the throne. In response, that censer is filled with fire from the altar and cast onto the earth with "peals of thunder, rumblings, flashes of lightning, and an earthquake." The prayers of the saints were not ignored nor were they wrong simply because they did not result in immediate action. They were heard and answered in power, an expectation that we can share provided that our prayers align themselves with the will of God.

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For a full list of "Re-reading Revelation" posts, see Re-reading Revelation: Statement of Purpose.

How Ben Witherington Renewed My Faith in Disagreeing with Ben Witherington

By way of disclaimer, let me just say that I consider Ben Witherington to be a highly intelligent man who just happens to be afflicted with the unfortunate human shortcoming of being constantly and belligerently wrong. (It is, of course, an affliction with which I could never have an sympathy.) Being directed recently (and reluctantly) to something he had written in commemoration of the World Trade Center attacks, I stumbled upon this rather unnerving paragraph:

Were it not for the U.S. government and the EPA the beautiful state of Kentucky would be one huge pollution cloud of coal dust and other pollutants. Shame on the current Kentucky candidate whose ad, I kid you not, runs ‘man of faith, he will fight the EPA to save our coal jobs and fight Obamacare’. What a platform! What do the latter two have to do with being a Christian??? Nothing! Indeed, creation care and care for the health of the elderly and the poor are part of the Gospel sir! Get with the program or stop posturing as a man of Christian faith.

This was by no means the only objectionable content in the article but it did strike me as a stand out and one that bolstered my strong opposition to Christian politics. While I absolutely agree with the general outrage of "man of faith" being part of a political slogan, I think it is even more appalling that Witherington objects not to the very fact of Christian political activism but merely of the route which is being taken here. In one fell swoop, Witherington calls into question the very quality of this current candidate's faith merely because he has had the audacity not to endorse the current administration's policy's regarding "creation care" and charity.

Witherington seems to have made the fatal, incomprehensible error of collapsing Christ's call to care for the sick into Obama's attempt to actualize that call (if you want to naively impute such pure motives to the president). Witherington has merged the Christian responsibility to creation with the particular policies of the EPA. Suddenly to care for the sick is to support the president's health care plan and to preserve creation is to endorse the EPA. Any dissent from this new Christian political maxim calls into question not merely right judgment but the very character of the dissenter as a Christian. Heaven forbid (literally perhaps, if Witherington is followed) that anyone might suggest that charity and environmentalism are personal and ecclesiastical imperatives rather than political ones. (After all, the government has always been better about doing good in the world than the church.)

Once again, we have a clear picture of the confusion and schism which political involvement injects into the Christian community. Perhaps it is time to realize that someone can oppose a "charitable" political policy and yet be themselves charitable. (Would Witherington like to compare his personal charitable giving to that of the candidate from Kentucky? Perhaps the former would still be vindicated, but it would certainly be a better gauge.) What more, someone might even have an appropriately Christian view of the morality of homosexuality and yet not oppose the legalization of gay marriage. A Christian may support a restrained view of humanity's privileges in creation and still not support the policies of the EPA. Still another might believe that prayer is inappropriate in public schools and still raise righteous, prayerful children. What disturbs me more than two Christians who differ politically is the Christian who thinks that disagreements over means in politics reveals spiritual flaws.

In other words, Dr. Witherington, mutual forbearance is part of the Gospel, sir! Get with the program.

Pray for the Lord's Church in Egypt

For a number of reasons, it is atypical for me to issue a call to prayer. In this instance, however, the turmoil in Egypt has been gnawing at my conscience. Not for political reasons, obviously. I cannot imagine caring less whether or not the Egyptian people have a truly representative democracy. (Frankly, I don’t think there is anything inherently superior about representative democracy, and I would go so far as to say it is deeply flawed in ways that certain authoritarian forms of government are not…but that is a thought for a different time.) I am concerned about the church in Egypt getting caught in the crosshairs.

Though, from my perspective at least, it ought to be obvious to everyone, a lot of people do not seem to realize that Egypt has a substantial and diverse Christian population. There are well over ten million Christians in Egypt, accounting for somewhere in the neighborhood of 15% of the total population. While primarily the Coptic Church, there are significant groups of Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant Christians. To put it in more accessible (and perhaps more offensive) terms, you are twice as likely to find a Christian in Egypt as you are to find a Jew in New York. Yet, in spite of being such a sizable minority, the church in Egypt has long been the target for persecution. When I say "long," I of course am talking in terms of centuries not years. This past year saw a number of noteworthy events culminating in the New Years Day bombing of a church that left 21 dead and approximately 100 injured. (The US Senate was kind enough to approve a "symbolic measure" (read "metaphorical fingerwagging" or "hypothetical disapproval" which all amounts to "impotent posturing") in which they officially frowned upon the bombing.) Christians reacted to the attack inappropriately (read "violently") on the grounds that the government ought to be protecting them.

Maybe it should have, but if it wasn't doing enough to protect Christians before then it certainly won't do anything now that the powers that be in Egypt can hardly protect themselves. I haven't heard anything about it yet-- though with the crackdowns in communication I wonder whether or not we will ever have a full picture of what is going on across Egypt right now--but I fear that the "temporary" absence of law and order will only increase the danger to Christians in Egypt. I hope that such violence never occurs, but more strongly even than that I hope that when the Church is persecuted in Egypt that its members keep the faith and their behavior testifies to the Christian message of love in the face of overwhelming hate.

A Confession of Faith Against a Confession of Faith Against Ecumenism

It has perhaps been foolish to try to understand the Orthodox spirit merely by reading Lossky, Meyendorff, and others of their ilk. One could no more correctly grasp the spirit of 18th century congregationalists by studying Jonathan Edwards. Certainly the theologians to whom I gravitate represent a position within the Orthodox Church, even a vocal and prominent position, but they are no means representative of the Orthodox Church universal. There is an equally vocal dissenting group (perhaps even a dissenting majority) that espouse ideas quite opposed to the more temperate positions of many of the Orthodox authors I read. I have encountered these voices more and more, the more I detach myself from the lofty literature appearing in periodicals and collecting dust on the library shelves.

Specifically, I came across a particularly disturbing document recently which seems to have substantial support. A Confession of Faith Against Ecumenism is a vitriolic denouncement of the Orthodox participation in ecumenical dialogues, meetings, and activities. I do not intend to restate the entire document here. Instead, I will give five points which I found especially unsettling, and leave others to be unsettled by the rest should they so choose:

• Straying dangerously close to Donatism, the authors suggest that all the sacraments of the Catholics and Protestants are utterly devoid of grace on the basis of their errors. Curiously, they are willing to accept unity on the grounds of baptism, provided the baptism is a triple-immersion performed by a legitimate priest (which exist only in the Orthodox Church): "One enters the church, however, and becomes Her member, not just with any baptism, but only with the 'one baptism,' that uniformly performed baptism, officiated by Priests who have received the Priesthood of the Church."
  


• So certain are these Orthodox of their own correctness and of the depravity into which the rest of us have sunk, that they refuse to pray with other "Christians," even in private: "As longa s the heterodox continue to remain in their errors, we avoid communion with them, especially in common prayer...not only common officiating and common prayer in the temple of God, but even ordinary prayers in private quarters." I have been blessed in my encounters with the Orthodox never to be confronted with this attitude, but I cannot imagine my response if an Orthodox person refused to pray with me because of the insufficiency of my single-immersion baptism.
  


• The document is surprisingly alarmist, all of it coated with a thick layer of fear-mongering. For example, it is suggested that if we make the audacious suggestion that there are Christians outside the Orthodox Church then we might as well call Buddhists Christians: "This inter-Christian syncretism has no expanded into an inter-religious syncretism, which equates all the religions with the unique knowledge of and reverence for God and a Christ-like way of life--all revealed from on high by Christ."
  
  
• The authors seem to describe to the kind of cold, formal conservatism that so many of the authors I read have vocally rejected: "We maintain, irremovably and without alteration, everything that the Synods and the Fathers have instituted. We accept everything that they accept and condemn everything that they condemn; and we avoid communication with those who innovate in matters of the Faith. We neither add, nor remove, nor alter any teaching." Contrast this attitude--that the Orthodox have held fast without addition or alteration to the historical statements of the Church--to the sentiments of Archimandrite Lazarus Moore: "The true traditionalist is not a person who lives in the past, but one who is open and alert to the voice and activity of the Spirit today…[Tradition] is not the sum of past experience, but a living experience of God’s action today." Equally unnerving is the self-deluded senseof nostalgia that accompanies the formal conservatism. If only we could go back to better times, earlier times..."Up until the beginning of the 20th century, the Church has steadfastly and immutably maintained a dismissive and condemnatory stance towards all heresies..." Sure it has.
  
  
• Perhaps most disturbing of all is how convinced the authors (and signers) of this document are that whatever they say and however they say it may be wrapped in a banner of "tough love." Love, apparently, gives the Orthodox carte blanche to be as hateful as they like, to--in their own words--wage war on the rest of us: "The Church's strict stance toward the heterodox springs from true love and sincere concern for their salvation, and out of Her pastoral care that the faithful be not carried away by heresy...There is such a thing as a good war and a bad peace."

Some, certainly, will not object to some of those points. In particular, I have in mind the readiness of the Churches of Christ to condemn as invalid all baptisms which do not take place by immersion or baptisms of children. (Ironically, members of the Churches of Christ might be pleased to see the Roman Catholic Church blamed in the Confession of Faith for the introduction of instruments into worship.) Of course, there are undoubtedly also things to which others will object that I do not. Which is fine. Just so long as we all find something objectionable in this mess.

Texts on Thanksgiving: Peter of Damascus

Here is a text from Peter of Damascus, A Treasury of Divine Knowledge:

The purpose of what we say in our prayers is as follows. The thanksgiving is in recognition of our incapacity to offer thanksgiving as we should at this present moment, of our negligence in doing so at other times, and of the fact that the present moment is a gift of God's grace.

The prayers offered by the monks in Peter's day always began with a thanksgiving. This thanksgiving, according to Peter, was not so much a genuine fulfillment of humanity's duty to be grateful to God. In fact, it functioned first and foremost as a reminder that people cannot be truly thankful as they should. Whether it be sin or merely ignorance that prevents people from truly recognizing all that God does for His children, the gratitude offered God is never sufficient. It overlooks things that God has done and continues to do. Even if humanity were able to recognize every grace conferred to humanity, people could still not thank God adequately since every moment it would be necessary to thank God merely for the gift of being itself.

Peter recognizes that beneath every thanksgiving offered to God should be implicit remorse and recognition that it is never enough. Do we deceive ourselves into believing our gratitude is sufficient?

A Prayer for Loyalty to God

A prayer from James A. Harding, quoted in Kingdom Come: Embracing the Spiritual Legacy of David Lipscomb and James Harding:

O my father, deliver me from the domination of money. My heart is deceitful above all things and desperately sick, only though canst know the depth of it. Without realizing that it was so, I was on my way to become a professional. And now, Father, forgive thy penitent servant, and guide his wayward feet unto thy paths. Make me wholly free from the fear of men. May I by thy grace love thee, even thee alone and supremely, and because I love thee may I love thy truth, and the souls of men. Enable me to lay all my burdens and concerns as to this world's affairs upon the God who will in no wise fail nor in any wise forsake them that rest their trust on him; and then go forth to do all thy will, even thine, unto the end.

Immutability: You're Doing it Wrong

I recently read a pair of articles for work that concerned prayer and the immutability of God. Each undertook to answer the question: “If God is immutable, in what sense does he answer our prayers?” Reed Lessing (“Pastor, Does God Really Respond to My Prayers?”) opposes the doctrines of classical theism to open theism on the question of God’s immutability and inclines in favor of open theism. In his opinion, a dynamic God, a God who can be changed by our prayers, is greater than the static God of classical theism. Without abandoning completely classical conceptions of God, Lessing (citing Bruce Ware) proposes that we posit a relational mutability in God which will allow Him to be responsive to our prayers. “Constancy is, therefore, a better description for God as opposed to unbending immutability,” in his opinion.

William D. Barrick (“The Openness of God: Does Prayer Change God?”) takes the opposite approach, concluding that prayer actually changes the petitioner, not God. Anything which God appears to have done in response to human petition is merely something that He had predetermined to do all along. God’s supremacy positively forbids any suggestion that He might be mutable and thus susceptible to persuasion by our prayers. Barrick concludes, “Indeed, if man is capable of changing the mind of God, then it might be argued that man knows more about governing this world than God.”

So which author is correct? Neither. They are both wrong and not simply in the conclusions they draw (since both opinions appear to be solidly rooted in the biblical evidence that each marshaled to his defense). More importantly, they haven’t even asked the right question, so it should be expected that they cannot come to a conclusive answer. In those much beloved (at least by me) words of Hans van Campenhausen: “It is the wrong question to ask, and therefore, as one might expect, has no right answer.”

These men, and countless others before them, have artificially integrated the question of whether or not God answers prayers with the theological concept of immutability. In fact, God’s immutability can be accepted or (if one is so inclined) rejected completely apart from what one decides about God’s response to our prayers. In fact, I am of the opinion that God is both immutable and receptive to our prayers, a position which both men would undoubtedly consider self-refuting. But why?

God is immutable in that He does not change, and, defined that way, it is understandable that people should then extrapolate that God is immutable in that He does not change what He has predetermined to do. Unfortunately that confuses a change in what God will do with a change in who God is. God does not grow, does not learn, is never added to, or subtracted from, and in this sense He is unchanging. The immutability of God found critical use in the fourth century trinitarian controversies as a defense against the Arian belief that there was when the Son was not. If there was a time when there was no Son, then there was a time when God was not Father. He was lacking in that key attribute of his nature. Since God can never be said to have been lacking in anything, the Son must always have been with the Father.

Regardless of whether or not you accept that logic for the Son’s co-eternality, it assumes an understanding of immutability that is ultimately concerned with protecting God from any accusation of deficiency, or capability of acquiring deficiency. If God is said to grow, then there was a time when God was not yet fully formed. If God is said to learn, there was a time when God was in some respect ignorant. If God is said to be added to or subtracted from, then there was a time when God was deficient. Suggestions such as these were intolerable to early Christians (and to me for that matter), and thus immutability becomes an inviolable part of God’s character.

It would be an abuse of the above doctrine, it should be fairly obvious, to suggest that to give to humanity when He is asked is to somehow violate the immutability of God and require that He is changing. Just the opposite, the changes which are often seen in Scripture as a result of human petition are an affirmation of what we believe to be the consistent nature of God. In Amos 7, for example, each time God promises calamity for His people and relents of that decision at Amos’ pleading, those changes (and they are real changes in God’s activity) are not changes in who God is. They reveal who God is, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love. No less, when He refuses to relent, that shows forth His just character in no way betraying His former “repentance.” That God is responsive to the human condition is an essential aspect of God’s character, one that thankfully cannot change. It is indispensable to the personal character of God (and we do believe that God is God-in-three-persons).

For my part, I see the position of “classical” theism (gross as that misnomer is) that rejects God’s receptiveness to human petition as a perverse form of deism. Instead of the world being a watch that the Watchmaker has set in motion and left to run, God is Himself a watch that He has set and allowed to run, totally unreceptive, totally unresponsive. God becomes no better than an impersonal object which we futilely hope will respond to our needs, like insane people trying to have a conversation with a rock.

The solution is not, however, to throw immutability out with the bathwater. The question of immutability simply has nothing to do with whether or not God answers our prayers. Tying the two together does little more than betray the manifest stupidity of the modern theologian, or at least the historical ignorance. As a concluding analogy – and certainly a flawed one, as all analogies drawn between God and the imagers of God are – let me pose this question: if I am driving home with my wife, and she asks me if we can stop at the grocery story instead of going straight home, do I cease to be me by changing our course? I submit that who I am includes receptivity to my wife’s needs, not just as an accident of my human mutability but as an essential expression of my character. Only when I am no longer in any way receptive to the desires of my wife have I truly and irrevocably changed.