faith « Wondering Fair

Delicate Delegation

1 06 2012

It seems to me that the delegation of tasks (better known as the delegation of control) is a bit like asking a friend to cut your hair. You’re probably better off doing the job yourself, you sense things are not going to turn out perfect, but at least you can say you gave them a chance before taking back the scissors (and editing their handiwork later).

Delegation of anything can be a delicate issue. Some of us can’t handle the weight of responsibility, and so delegate in order to shirk decision-making at the earliest opportunity. Others of us simply don’t trust anyone other than ourselves to do the job well or to meet our expectations, countenancing delegation solely as a means of assigning unwanted and unimportant work to someone else.

So how does God square up as a delegator? How does someone with a world of power, and vision to match, decide who to share it with? How does God get the work done? Looking at the life of Jesus, we find some interesting lessons. Here are a few:

Firstly, God invests in people quickly. Within moments, it seems, of Jesus’ taking up public ministry, he calls alongside Simon Peter and his brother Andrew, then James and his brother John (Matt. 4). From the outset, God does not intend to do his work alone.

Secondly, God takes the flack for his people’s mistakes. Nobody concerned to save face would choose disciples like Jesus’ twelve. Time and again they misunderstand him, they misinterpret him and disobey him, with the consequence that others misunderstand and misinterpret him. So no, God would not get a gold star for his choice of employees, but he manages the ones he has with exceptional skill. Jesus is patient with his disciples, he takes his time with them, he journeys with them, he repeats and explains things for them, he invests time and prayer in them, and ultimately he stands by them. Nobody gets dropped but everybody is given freedom to leave, however painful to himself and his mission (Matt. 26:31).

Thirdly, God’s ‘whys’ are more important than his ‘whos.’ When it comes to choosing who to pass the baton to, Jesus chooses prayerfully (Luke 6) and then merely adequately. I don’t think Jesus chose disciples from among fishermen, zealots and tax collectors because they shone out as skilled learners and leaders. I think he chose them for a different reason entirely: to show that it is only by God’s own qualities, his love, grace and power shared, that anyone can fulfil God’s intentions. God’s associates are not the world’s boldest and best, but ordinary people like you and me, people who may not have it all at the outset but who can learn as they follow, developing skills and traits which mirror God’s own, with everlasting impact.

Having been a manager myself in days gone by, I appreciate that these things may not translate easily to the world of business (or hairdressing!), geared as we are to hold on to control more easily than we relinquish it. But I do wonder what life would look like if we had a go at doing things Jesus’ way. We might end up looking like Ziggy Stardust, but perhaps we wouldn’t need the scissors back.

Madi Simpson

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Tags: delegation, disciples, faith, God, Jesus, mission, vocation, work
Categories : Bar Conversations and Cheap Advice

What if I Can’t Believe?

28 05 2012

A few years ago, The Washington Post ran an interview with evangelical mega-church pastor Rick Warren where Warren was asked the following question: “How come some people ‘get’ to believe and others do not? ” Why does God “allow” some, like Rick Warren, to believe but not others? After all, many people would really like to believe—perhaps they would like the comfort provided by religion but for whatever reason just can’t bring themselves to do so. What if we just can’t believe?

In response, Warren says a few things about how the Bible promises that who seek God will find him, but he doesn’t challenge the root assumption of the question: God’s primary interest is that we set aside our rational objections and “believe in him.”

I think that most people who are honest about their belief or disbelief in God would admit that they are pulled in both directions at different points in their lives (or even at different points of the day!). There are times when God’s existence seems self-evident and there are times when it seems utterly impossible. Frederick Buechner has memorably stated that “there is doubt hard on the heels of every faith, fear hard on the heels of every hope”; I would say that the opposite is also true—that the persistence of hope hounds even the most hardened skeptic. Belief and unbelief are both plausible ways of “reading” the ambiguous world we live in.

So what do we do? Just passively accept whichever way we happen to be inclined and not give the matter another thought? Try to “force” ourselves to believe or attempt to perform the necessary exercises to convince God to gift us with this ability? Or might we perhaps use the ambiguity which makes the matter so difficult to consider a different understanding of what God might be after.

What if God’s primary interest wasn’t in getting us to “believe” certain facts about the cosmos? What if he was willing to take whatever faith we could muster and use it in the promotion of his intentions for the world? What if God has created the world in such a way that living authentically human lives involves things like trust, commitment, uncertainty, and risk; what if part of what God is after is a recognition of our dependent and creaturely status and a willingness to accept and live within the parameters (cognitive and otherwise) that this entails?

The seventeenth century mathematician/philosopher Blaise Pascal is mostly known for his famous “wager” where he tells the skeptic, in a sense, that he ought to “bet “on the existence of God because the potential gains far outweigh the potential losses of choosing incorrectly. In the same passage from Pensées that contains “the wager,” Pascal addresses a variation of the question posed to Rick Warren above: “What if I just can’t believe?” Pascal’s answer (very loosely paraphrased) goes like this: live as if it were true and see what happens. Rather than thinking yourself into belief, try living yourself into it? If loving (or even believing in) God is difficult at the moment, start with loving your neighbour.

I don’t think that the ultimate standard by which God will judge us is the degree of certainty about his existence that we manage to conjure up before we die. I cannot imagine God asking, on judgment day, “did you manage to preserve your belief in me, despite living in a world where my existence wasn’t always obvious?” I can imagine him asking: “Did you act according to what light you were given? Did you seek me with your entire being? Did you refuse to let pride and fear overcome hope in the possibility of a future of justice and peace? Did you nourish and make the most of what faith you had or complain that it wasn’t stronger?”

Whatever might be said about these questions, they at least seem to avoid the implication that human beings are little more than proposition affirmers/deniers. At the end of the day, nobody really benefits from a bunch of people “believing” in God if “belief” is understood as something like “cognitive acceptance of the existence of a supernatural being.” It’s hard to imagine how God benefits from a bunch of people nodding their heads when asked “do you believe in God?” just as it’s hard to imagine how it changes much for human beings.

But if God has intentions for the world that go beyond individual human brains and what they find rationally plausible, and if the realization of these intentions depends, in part, on what we do not just what we think, then maybe we ought to expect a deep and indissoluble connection between beliefs and behaviour. Perhaps if we busy ourselves with doing what we’re reasonably sure God wants us to do, the “belief” in him that we struggle to maintain or discover may be closer than we think.

Ryan Dueck

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Tags: hope, faith, doubt, ethics, Washington Post, fear, belief, Pascal, Rick Warren, behavior
Categories : Tough Questions

One True Religion?

16 05 2012

Q: There are lots of religions in the world. So how can a Christian presume that his religion is the only right one?

A: Short answer: A Christian shouldn’t presume that. His religion isn’t the only right one.

Slightly longer answer: If by “the only right one” a Christian is saying that everything his religion says is right and everything every other religion says is wrong, then he’s denying one of the fundamental claims of his own religion, namely, that Christianity is the fulfillment, not the negation, of the religion of Old Testament Israel. Furthermore, it’s just obvious that Christianity has a lot in common with both Judaism and Islam. And, in fact, Christianity has various teachings and practices in common with pretty much every other religion in the world: Christian missionaries have been building on those common features for centuries.

Even longer answer: First, let’s clear the ground a bit. Just because there are lots of opinions about an issue doesn’t mean that one opinion isn’t right and the others are wrong. A math teacher might receive a wide range of responses (= ”opinions”) on an exam, but she knows that only “x + 3” is the correct answer. You ask for directions in a strange town to the museum, and four locals give you four different answers, but the answers usually aren’t all equal in effectively getting you to your destination. So the mere presence of multiple opinions says nothing immediately about whether there is more than one correct answer—or even whether a correct answer is available at all.

Second, we can think of religions as maps and directions on how to best use the maps. They describe reality and tell us how best to negotiate reality. As such, religions that patently fail to describe reality accurately or to tell us how to negotiate it effectively fall out of use in favour of religions that do a better job.

We can also assume that religions that do work, at least somewhat, will make assertions about reality that overlap with assertions made on other maps. If we’re trying to walk from the western edge of Venice to the eastern, any decent map is going to include a description of the Grand Canal and of at least one of the very few bridges that cross it. So even the worst map that actually works—that anyone living in Venice will give you–will share at least some information with the best map possible.

So of course the world’s religions share various claims and practices with others. The world is what it is and living in it is done most effectively this way rather than that, so religions that approximate those realities are going to share a lot of the same claims.

Third, allowing then that more than one religion can be true in important respects doesn’t mean that all religions are equally good, nor that one religion isn’t the best of those available. If you actually had a map and a guidebook furnished by the founder, planner, builder, and ruler of the area–who also demonstrably has taken great pains to communicate with you as truthfully and helpfully as possible–then you’d be very glad to have such instructions and you would have good grounds to consider them the best available. You might even want to share them with people you care about.

That’s what Christians do when they preach the gospel. They say, “We are so thankful to have been given The Directions by The Maker. And they’re free! Come get them!”

Maybe there are better directions available elsewhere. If so, please tell us. We, like any other sensible people, want the best help we can get. But we hope you won’t be angry with us if we’re pretty enthusiastic about what we think is the best map and guidebook we’ve ever seen and we want to share it with you.

In fact, shouldn’t you be angry with us instead if we wouldn’t?

John Stackhouse, from his latest answer at Ask John.

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Tags: Christianity, evangelism, exclusivity, faith, religion, theology, world religions
Categories : Tough Questions

The Blank Menu

14 05 2012

The waiter looked confused. He shuffled the menus in his hand from left to right, then put one in the middle, then rechecked them again. “Why don’t you just give them to us,” I found myself thinking, “why all this fuss?” He opened and checked each menu again, and finally handed them to us. The quality paper and elegant font matched the fanciness of the restaurant, encrusted on a hill overlooking Rome and its domes, carved on marble floors and with a couple Ferraris adorning its entrance.

Vongole. Risotto ai funghi porcini. Gnochi alla romana. It looked like a grand meal was about to start. I read all options carefully, each seemed delicious, though I have a penchant for anything quattro formaggi. “How do the oysters sound to you?”, asked my father-in-law. “It’s on page 3.”

“Which oysters? Page 3… Oh, I see, here it says vongole, your menu is in English,.” That’s why all the fuss, I thought. The waiter had to select English menus for my in-laws, visiting us for a week, and menus in Italian for Sarah and I. Makes sense.

“But why doesn’t this menu have prices?,” asked Sarah. “I can’t choose if there are no prices.”

Her father smiled. “Choose anything you like, it’s on me. Don’t worry about the price.” Sarah and he always have discussions about prices: she wants to pay the lowest price possible, to negotiate the best bargain. Whenever she searches for some product online, like airfare, she puts cheap to start: cheap flights, cheap hostels, cheap car rental. “Look at the value,” says her father.

“My menu has prices,” I said. “Yours doesn’t?”

“No, it’s all empty. I can’t choose like this. Let me see yours.”

We switched, and her menu didn’t have any price indeed. Then we checked everybody’s menus: mine and my father-in-law’s had prices, but Sarah’s and her mom’s didn’t. That’s why the waiter was so confused; he had to match not only the language of the menus, but also those which had prices and those which didn’t.

“Oh, I see… The gentlemen pay, and the ladies choose blissfully without worrying about the price.” I had never seen this menu ethic before, though I must says it befits Italian culture well. The couple next to us were probably used to it, he in a suit and she in a long gown, even if now was lunch time. Maybe they are the ones who came in the Ferrari.

“How unjust! Let’s call the waiter and tell him that here it’s the women who pay…” Part of me found the whole think funny, the other part found it sexist and offensive. But since I could play the generous gentleman at the fancy restaurant and not pay for a dime, I’ll leave my protest for next time.

Sarah’s mom looked flattered to be treated like a lady, but Sarah and I put the priceless menu aside, and started to browse the one with the big expensive prices. Neither she nor I could choose our food if we did not know how much it cost, even if her father would treat us. How would you dare order a 180 euro lobster at someone else’s expense, even if if it was your father? Better to stay humble, and aim low, and enjoy the risotto at 28 euros, which was delicious enough. We were already ordering a plate for each of us, and feeling guilty for doing so; we usually share a plate and placate what remains of our hunger with the free portion of bread. She’s not the only one who’s cheap, I admit.

But this time it wasn’t only the bread which was free. Everything was free, thanks to her father. Actually, everything would be paid for, which means that for us everything was priceless. We could not evaluate the worth of a plate of food based on a number next to it. We are so used to it, and used to evaluate people and jobs and houses and countries by the numbers they come with. Remove the prices, and how we monetize and evaluate the whole of life, and we remain clueless.

Sarah’s father talks about value, but I savored my risotto thinking instead of another word: of grace. The worth of things is different when they don’t come at a price. For people who are used to evaluate worth with money, and to measure people for how much they make, and moments for how much they cost us, to receive things for free sometimes feel like they come at a lower value. We did not earn it, we did not conquer it with our sweat. They arrived just too easy.

But that’s what grace makes to us. It confuses and disorients; it points to a logic of life which is like a menu without prices. But it is the logic we arrived here by, granted with our lives and bodies and minds and families for free, and the logic we have to relearn if we are to grasp what life is about. For the fundamental quality of existence is that it is given. It is offered for free, and until we learn to remove prices from things and people, we reduce them to how much we think they are worth, and miss the whole splendorous generosity and fecundity of life.

René Breuel

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Tags: faith, food, grace, price, restaurant
Categories : Spirituality for the Rest of Us

“Here Lived a Great Street Sweeper…”

9 05 2012

I’ve got two questions I’m going to ask you. Here’s the first one:

“So, what do you do?”

This is one of those standard questions we get asked when we meet somebody new. Most of us answer with our job: “I’m a plumber”, etc. But why don’t we say, “I play football”, or “I drive my car”? Intuitively, the question expects that we will answer it with our occupation. Furthermore, an interesting grammatical shift happens here: “What do you do?” is answered with “I am…” So, what we do as an occupation is now how we define our very identity. Most of us, in fact, probably identify ourselves by our jobs before we do by our families (only those who work as parents all day answer “I’m a mum or dad”), or by our nation (not many answer, “I am an Australian/American/Italian, etc”).

And yet, there’s a flip side to this, seen in the answer to the next question:

“So, how’s work?”

Now, what emotion does that question evoke in you? Many of us immediately feel the urge to start complaining. The few of us who actually feel enthusiastic about the answer, often get rather nasty looks from people: everybody else hates their job, why should we be the lucky ones who don’t?

So it seems that now, our chief identity marker has to be linked with misery and frustration. This hardly seems to be a good situation!

Part of the issue is that there has been a shift over time, seen in the very word we use to describe our job: it is now occupation, but it used to be primarily a profession, and before that, it was primarily a vocation.

Vocation comes from the Latin for call (vocatio is the root for vocal, as well). Up until the Reformation, most people believed that God only called those who went into clerical or monastic jobs. But the Reformers argued that God calls people into whatever job they do. This meant that there was as much vocation in being a blacksmith as being a monk. Eventually, Catholics agreed (most notably Francis de Sales). But it was England’s Puritans who really took this on, leading to the “Protestant work ethic”. Puritans were often an employer’s best workers, because they worked not just for their boss, but for God Himself. This made work have a new dignity, and it’s precisely at this time that we really see work becoming a primary identity marker.

Secularisation tries to destroy that idea, making us feel that our jobs have nothing to do with God at all. You can see this in the shift from talking about our vocation to our profession. God didn’t call us to our work any more – we did. We professed it. At first, this was a celebration of our autonomy. We decided who we were. In the 1950s and 1960s “boom”, this seemed pretty true, since most middle-class people could choose their jobs.

But ultimately, we discovered that our job wasn’t always our choice. Our boss told us what to do. It thus became just something to occupy our time, our occupation. This has now happened to most of us, but it obviously was a reality for many from low socio-economic groups long before. Martin Luther King Jr once spoke to such a group, some African-American school kids about their job prospects, and this is what he said:

And when you discover what you will be in your life, set out to do it as if God Almighty called you at this particular moment in history to do it. If it falls your lot to be a street sweeper, sweep streets like Michelangelo painted pictures… like Shakespeare wrote poetry. Sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will have to pause and say: Here lived a great street sweeper who swept his job well.[1]

King realised that having an occupation or even a profession just isn’t enough. What we need is a calling. And the only way to have a calling, is to have Somebody Who calls. The fact that such a Caller exists was a great reality that we really need to rediscover. His calling brings a whole new dignity, purpose and focus into our job, and may well change how we answer the question, “So, how’s work?”

Matt Gray

[1] Seattle Times: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/special/mlk/king/words/blueprint.html .

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Tags: calling, faith, God, identity, Job, Martin Luther King, occupation, profession, vocation, work
Categories : Making a Difference

Making Our Mark

7 05 2012

“If our life were without end and free from pain, it would possibly not occur to anyone to ask why the world exists.” So said German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer around a century and a half ago in The World as Will and Representation, and it is a sentiment that would be echoed by many today, no doubt. The reality and inevitability of death haunts our steps as human beings, regardless of whether we claim to be religious or not. Every worldview must somehow come to terms with death.

One such attempt is seen in an article by Richard Handler that deals with the subject of death from an atheistic perspective. The article is focused on atheist author and psychiatrist Irvin Yalom who, while acknowledging the fear and despair that accompany our peculiar ability as a species to foresee our own deaths, argues that the concept of “rippling” is a way of ameliorating these fears:

Rippling refers to the fact that each us creates—often without conscious intent or knowledge—concentric circles of influence that may affect others for years, even for generations…. [Y]ou can leave behind “something from your life experience, some trait; some piece of wisdom, guidance, virtue, comfort that passes onto others, known or unknown.” The key here is human connection, which touches other lives in secret and untold ways.

There is obviously a measure of truth to this. The kinds of people we are have lasting influences on those around us. We leave a mark. The problem is, that while we might prefer that those elements of who we are that “ripple” out would be positive, life-affirming things, often the marks we leave can be rather ugly ones. Even the most morally upright among us will leave, at best, a mixed legacy. The ripples that go out from our lives have the ability to affect both for good and for ill.

Handler comes close to noticing the problem:

What about those whose lives don’t noticeably ripple into a loving community? People do die without friends, alone and miserable, in prisons and cyclones. I have known people who will be missed by absolutely nobody. What rippling effect do they have?

His answer? While acknowledging that “the idea of rippling can be abstract,” in the end the best it seems we can hope for is that we “can gain comfort in thinking that one’s atoms can ripple and dissolve into the universe… All of us ripple in ways we are not even aware of.”

Far from addressing the question, this seems to simply be a restatement of the issue. Yes, all of us do “ripple” in ways we are not even aware of. That’s the problem! Human history is the story of both tremendous good and radical evil “rippling” down throughout history, one leaving inspiring traces of what we think we are here for, the other poisoning the lives of individuals and communities indefinitely. The problem isn’t just that some individuals and communities don’t leave much of a “ripple” or don’t “ripple” well; the problem is that some “rippling” is downright toxic.

What we need is not some vague sentiment that the best of who we are will somehow trickle down and have some marginal impact on a few people for a brief flicker of cosmic time. What we need is a vision of the future and of what it means to be a human being that can transcend and is not tied to our own inconsistent, fragile, conflicted, and transient identities and moral performances.

The beginnings of one such vision is articulated by Yale theologian Miroslav Volf who, in The End of Memory, eloquently identifies both the problem with “rippling” as a response to death and the Christian alternative:

We are neither made nor unmade by what we do or by what others do to us. The heart of our identity lies not in our hands, but in God’s hands. We are most properly ourselves because God is in us and we are in God. No doubt, what we or others have inscribed onto our souls and bodies marks us and helps shape who we are. Yet it has no power to define us. God’s love for us, indeed God’s presence in us and our being “caught up beyond” ourselves and being placed “into God” most fundamentally defines us as human beings and as individuals.

The Christian hope is that what is good, and worth preserving from human history will be validated, and rendered permanent in God’s new creation. Correspondingly, that which was false and evil, that which “rippled” down through the millennia damaging and defacing God’s good world, destroying relationships, fostering fear and enmity, and barring the way for people to experience the shalom God intended for them will be judged, healed, and forgotten. It will “ripple” no longer.

Ryan Dueck

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Tags: anxiety, Arthur Schopenhauer, death, faith, God, influence, life, Miroslav Volf, New Testament, redemption, religion
Categories : Making a Difference, The Heart of Faith

Distance, Repentance and Embrace

4 05 2012

Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations details the maturation of Pip, a young man specially selected by an unknown benefactor to become a “gentleman.” It is easy to read the tale as a rags-to-riches story, with Pip moving from his apprenticeship to his brother-in-law, Joe the blacksmith, to the high-life of London, complete with expensive dinners, private clubs, and days filled with nothing but leisure. Pip’s assumes that Miss Havisham—the crazy, rich, old woman in his town—has chosen to patronize him with the plan that he marry the beautiful, distant Estella, her ward and Pip’s childhood companion. However, Pip’s expectations are dashed when he discovers that his benefactor is really a convict and that Miss Havisham’s plans for Pip or anyone else were never kind. Despite the disappointment and a number of narrative complications, in the end Pip eventually develops a life in London and far away from the blacksmith’s forge, placing him solidly among the middle or even upper-middle class.

However, there is another, more troubling narrative at work that invites a different reading. Joe, Pip’s brother-in-law, is really a surrogate father to Pip and the deep love between them is quite clear… except that Pip seems to always intended to be good to Joe, to visit Joe, to thank Joe, to tell Joe that he loves him but Pip never actually gets around to doing these things. Pip is actually quite embarrassed by Joe’s lack of formal education and poor, country manners. In this, it is a modern prodigal son story—the son just wants to get away from home and, when he is given a chance, he goes without looking back, rejecting the man who had cared for him through his childhood, who has been his friend, his confidant, and his comforter. In fact, when Pip is back in his home village, he stays in a hotel without going to visit Joe.

Granted, Dickens’ tale is toned-down version of the the parble of Prodigal Son. However, in some ways, Pip is more insidiously unkind to Joe than the traditional Prodigal Son. Rather than the son eventually returning home repentant, Pip never returns to humbly confess his arrogance to Joe. In fact, rather than Pip seeking Joe out, Joe leaves the forge for London to nurse Pip through the sickness and through his recovery—even though Pip secretly feels that he is too good for Joe and his unrefined ways.

Eventually, Pip does confess his shabby treatment of Joe and Joe says all is forgiven but the relationship is never as intimate as it once was. The narrative’s closing note of displacement reflects the particularly modern outlook of the novel, suggesting that after the relational breech of Pip’s embarrassment regarding Joe, after the high-living in London, after Pip’s shame regarding his benefactor, there is no going back. One might learn, grow, and regret the past, but we all move on and there is no restoration or renewal, only the sham of a family or the sham of a romance.

Amid our modern expectations of a great fall into knowledge, shame, regret, and ultimately personal growth, Jesus parable of the Prodigal Son offers a frightening hope. Like Pip, the original Prodigal Son’s maturation and resulting repentance lead him to return to his father. However, unlike Pip, the Prodigal is not permitted to repent in the context of a dispassionate conversation. Nor is the Prodigal allowed to move-on relationally, remembering his old father with a distanced, fond affection and a bit of lingering sadness for the irreparable breach.

The Prodigal is not permitted these emotional escapes because the Father in Jesus’ parable is very different from the good, kind Joe. The Father rushes out to his son on the road, stops the son’s confession before it really begins, hugs him close and declares cause for a celebration. The breech is repaired by the Father’s overwhelming love for the Prodigal. But the Prodigal is also exposed, his failing known by all, even though the Father chooses to forgive them.

Pip, on the other hand, is able to hide his repeated betrayals of Joe: confessing privately and receiving Joe’s forgiveness privately, Pip’s identity as a private, self-sufficient individual is left intact. Yet, unlike the Prodigal, there is still no place for Pip, no home or family to claim and to be claimed by.

The frightening thing about the Prodigal Son is that it depicts the hope of restoration and renewal that God offers each of us. There is no escape after a measured confession into a polite, albeit distant, relationship. God welcomes each of us to himself with an exuberant love that will not permit us to hide. Instead, God sees our deepest betrayals and suffocates them in an embrace.

Jessica Hughes

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Tags: Charles Dickens, embrace, faith, fiction, forgiveness, Great Expectations, Jesus, literature, novel, Prodigal Son, reconciliation, repentance
Categories : Bar Conversations and Cheap Advice

A Tale of Two Politicians, and of Redemption

30 04 2012

Injustice smells. There is a nauseating odor to it: toxic, enraging, sad. And when we see someone who cheated and betrayed, someone who let us down, it is hard to find satisfaction more pleasing to our guts than to beat him up, to make him pay for his sins.

Two politicians made me think of this last week. The first was John Edwards, an once-promising American presidential candidate, charming in his looks and in his words, but who betrayed his terminally ill wife and lied about. Caught right in the middle of his presidential campaign, Edwards faced last week his trial. But as Washington Post contributor Christ Cillizza pointed out, it was a trial more about feelings than legal procedures: “This trial — regardless of the outcome — amounts to one last chance for the public to express its disdain for a man who cheated on his terminally ill wife, lied about it, fathered a child out of wedlock, lied about it and is now left searching for some strands of redemption or, at least, forgiveness.” It is another chance to look at a man who fell, fell from really high up, and make him pay.

The second politician, Charles Colson, had an even more spectacular fall: the Watergate disgrace, maybe the most famous corruption scandal of modern politics, when Colson helped a team of then-president Richard Nixon’s reelection committee to break into and tap the offices of his political opponents. Colson and others were sent to prison for this, but then he underwent a conversion, narrated in his bestseller Born Again, and became a devout Christian. Colson then dedicated the second part of his life to start a ministry that reaches out to prisoners, and become a major evangelical leader.

The thing is: Colson died last week, and, curiously, his obituaries at major newspapers have varied in tone. Some narrated the whole of his life, and praised his conversion and the good he made after it. Others, however, were cynical, and implied that his life change was just smokescreen, that Colson remained the Watergate dirty trickster for all his life, that the redemption of such a treacherous man could not possibly be true. How could it?

Redemption is hard to believe in. It really is. Especially because it is such a personal matter: I am treacherous too, I’m the one deserving condemnation, and I can’t possibly believe that I could find redemption. An observer of the reactions to Colson’s death put it well: “When you read those who smirk and dismiss the Chuck Colson conversion, … [r]ead a subtext that belongs to all of us: the fear that the criminal conspiracy we’ve all been a part of will be exposed, and just can’t be forgiven. Read the undercurrent of those who find it hard to believe that one can be not just pardoned, but “born again… That’s indeed hard to believe.”

But what if redemption is possible? What if people like Edwards or Colson can really be forgiven and start anew? What if I can be forgiven? What if I can end this life with my head raised high, with no finger pointing at me, redeemed by the grace of Christ, and have something like the following scenario for Colson’s death be true also for me?

I have to believe that when Chuck Colson opened his eyes in the moments after death that he didn’t hear anything about break-ins or dirty tricks or guilty consciences. I have to believe Mr. Colson heard a Galilean voice saying, “I was in prison and you visited me” (Matt. 25:36). I have to believe that he stood before his Creator with a new record, a new life transcript, one that belonged not to himself but to a Judean day-laborer who is now the ruler of the cosmos… That’s good news for guilty consciences, good news for recovering hatchet men and women like us.

Indeed it is good news, almost too good to be true. But true it is, and deliciously, liberatingly, scintillatingly good too. Redemption is possible, not despite the greatness of our sins, but because of the greatness of Jesus’ grace for us.

René Breuel

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Tags: Charles Colson, faith, forgiveness, Jesus, John Edwards, justice, politics, redemption, sin, Watergate
Categories : The Heart of Faith

Power Reveals

23 04 2012

In February 1st, 1933, two days after Hitler’s election as chancellor of Germany, a young theologian gave a radio address on the theme of leadership in Berlin. Dietrich Bonhoeffer was only 26, and the address had been scheduled to go to the air for some weeks, but it couldn’t be more timely. Bonhoeffer denounced the Führer concept of leadership Hitler would come to embody, but couldn’t quite finish: his speech was cut off.

The full horrors of Hitler’s leadership were still far in the future, but Bonhoeffer’s address had a prophetic ring to it. It seemed to picture the consequences of the dominating and self-referential type of Führer leadership which loomed on the horizon, and to call people to a different vision. Hitler’s understanding of leadership, according to social historian James MacGregor Burns, was engulfed in his own suffocating sense of self. “While he claimed to seek power for the sake of the salvation of his country and for the purification of the Nordic race, this was self-deception. He identified his goal wholly with his own dominance and was willing to destroy his people for the sake of his own power.” As Hitler laid prostrated at an army hospital in the end of World War I, depressed and anguished over how he and his motherland had ended in defeat, the two fates seemed fused and confused in his mind.

The fate of vanquished Germany and his sense of defeat seemed to merge – as the hope of victory and his own power merged later – and perhaps too, as Walter Langer suggests, he was reacting to the defeat of Germany as if it were a rape of himself as well as his real and simulated mother (in Mein Kampf he was still referring to Germany as ‘she’).[1]

Bonhoeffer’s address, on the other hand, envisioned leadership differently: self-effacing, lucid, and, according to his theological frame, recognising of higher authority and above all of God’s authority. “The true Leader must always be able to disillusion… He must lead his following away from the authority of his person to the recognition of the real authority of orders and offices.” In other words, true leadership for Bonhoeffer meant a pointing away from oneself, it meant leading people to maturity and responsibility similar to how parents raise children to independence. “[H]e has to lead the individual to his own maturity… He must radically refuse to become the appeal, the idol, i.e. the ultimate authority of those whom he leads.”[2]

This was just the beginning. These two visions of leadership would clash in the coming years – the self-aggrandizing versus the self-giving, the powerful versus the powerless – and Bonhoeffer would be hanged for his opposition to the Nazi regime in 1945. Yet the crucial difference among them, if you look closely, is not how much power Hitler and Bonhoeffer got, but the central piece of each’s worldview: how they understood who God is. Bonhoeffer had quite a clear understanding of God as a transcendent, benevolent Person, and this informed his life and vision profoundly. In regards to leadership, he declares in his 1933 address, “Only when a man sees that office is a penultimate authority in the face of an ultimate, indescribable authority, in the face of the authority of God, has the real situation been reached… Alone before God, man becomes what he is, free and committed in responsibility at the same time.”

Hitler’s understanding of God, however, is difficult to precise, especially since he camouflaged his views to manipulate churches to his side, but certainly it was not the God of Bonhoeffer. It seemed to be instead an amalgam of self, the German nation and the Aryan race, fused by his hatred of betrayers and Jews, and the consequences are obvious: intoxicated by power, unchecked by any transcendent notion of goodness or responsibility, Hitler spilled over ever greater levels of his toxic self.

“Nearly all men can stand adversity,” said Abraham Lincoln, “but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power.”[3] That is so true. Power reveals who we are, and reveals even more the fundamentals of our worldview. If our God is self, or our happiness or success, power will burn in self-worship, and we will manipulate and hurt people around us. If our God is God, however, like it was for Bonhoeffer, a good dose of power may be tempting, but we have an allegiance higher than self, goodness beyond our ego, and will point people away from ourselves and toward maturity. And even if political power never comes our way, we will still live generously, and give of ourselves to others, and have the courage like Bonhoeffer to oppose and even foresee the havoc of someone who becomes his own god.

René Breuel

[1] James MacGregor Burns, Leadership (New York: Harper & Row, 1978), 108.

[2][2] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, as quoted in Eric Metaxas, Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2010), 141.

[3] http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/keywords/give.html#oEYkcEHDrvMVDjwr.99

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Tags: Abraham Lincoln, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, faith, God, Hitler, identity, idolatry, leadership, power, worship
Categories : Making a Difference

The Losers Who Keep on Winning

18 04 2012

We love winners. The only time that we sometimes start to like losers is when they start to win – then we call them underdogs. But sometimes, we like that losers are losers, because they used to be winners, and we didn’t like them when they were winners. Besides, underdogs can be dangerous. In The Hunger Games, Donald Sutherland’s President is told, “Everybody loves an underdog.” He responds, “I don’t.” He then points out that the underdog districts are underdogs for a reason. They contain valuable natural resources that the Capitol exploits. There is a fine line between an underdog winning, and a exploited group rebelling.

So, what is the Church? A winner? A loser? Are they the exploitative Capitol? Or are they the exploited underdog? Do you want them to win, or lose? The overwhelming sense in our society is that the Church has lost. It’s a loser. And that’s a good thing, because apparently the Church was once a terrible winner. It seems that wider society, generally, sees the Church as a tired, fat, old Capitol. The underdogs are rising against it, and when they win, everybody will cheer.

But who is this “underdog”? What has the Church been supposedly oppressing? Has the Church been oppressing the poor? Really? That’s news to the countless millions, if not billions of poor people that Christians have helped over the centuries, thanks to groups like the Salvation Army, or the Franciscans, to name just a few. Often the only people who stood with the poor, the quintessential underdogs, were the Christians. If the Church loses, believe me, it will not be a good thing for the poor. And who is telling society, again and again, that the Church does not stand with the underdog? Isn’t it the media, who are run by the wealthy, the influential, and the powerful? If anybody is the Capitol, surely, it’s the media, not the Church.

In reality, people have always found ways of making the Church sound like we are losing, and that it’s good that we lose. And then we’ve won.

Christianity began in the Roman Empire, and was persecuted with increasing vigour until everybody thought we’d lost. Right at that moment, we took over Rome. Then, when the Roman Empire crumbled, everybody thought we’d crumble with it. The barbarians, with their pagan gods, would win, and we’d lose. Then we took over the barbarian Franks and Britons. Then, when the barbarians gave way to the Vikings and the growth of feudalism, we took over the Vikings (now called Normans) and feudalism. And when out of the tattered remnants of the English Civil War, secularism promised the end of Christianity, within a century the Wesleyan Revivals spilled over the nation. At every point, people said we had lost.

And here is an amazing realisation. We have often been the underdogs. And then, we lose. We die. In fact, it’s actually when we die, that we usually win. G. K. Chesterton said, “Christianity has died many times and risen again; for it had a God who knew the way out of the grave.”[1] Easter is about Jesus being the Underdog, that everybody wanted to lose. Good Friday felt really good for the Pharisees, Pilate’s Roman government, the masses. They thought they had won. But Easter Sunday shows that Jesus wins. Always. And Jesus, through His Body on earth now, the Church, has been doing the same thing, over and over, ever since.

Whether you are a Christian or not, you may think that the Church today is dying. You may think our ethics is archaic, that our credibility is shot, that we are an exploitative Capitol that robs from the poor and downtrodden underdog. If you think that, I’d ask you, firstly, to check your source – Capitols from Rome, to Paris, to Mecca, to Moscow, to Hollywood have been saying that about us for centuries. Most of those who said such things are now gone. You don’t even know their names. But we are still here. I invite you to join the everwinning underdog, the Church, as they serve the everwinning Lord Jesus Christ.

Matt Gray

[1] G. K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man (New York, NY: Dodd Mead & Co., 1925), chap. 2.6.