The Fellowship of Runners

20 02 2012

When Rolling Stones magazine interviewed U2 singer Bono, and asked which kind of music turns him on, Bono answered in a surprising and self-revealing way. “The music that really turns me on is either running toward God or away from God. Both recognize the pivot, that God is at the center of the jaunt.”[1]

Music that runs toward or away from God. I would imagine Bono would choose songs by their rhythm, by their catchy chorus, by their ability to move a stadium with its melody. Maybe he would be attracted to romantic lyrics, peppered with sensuality and longing, or maybe to music that resounds in people’s hearts and influences a generation. Yet Bono goes for our existential core: our gut reaction before ultimate reality, our instinctive surrender to God’s presence or haunted flight from his face.

I, for one, am more of a surrender type of guy, but I’m fascinated by the fellowship of runners. You know, by that anguished avoidance of God, stubborn and defiant, which tries to outrun infinity and outsmart omniscience. I admire this kind of persistence – it feels almost like a little dwarf’s rebellion – and, if I may confess some sadistic impulses, I enjoy seeing people avoid the inevitable and fight until the last breadth against God. It is entertaining. It is like children kicking and struggling against a spoonful of chocolate, only to enjoy it the minute it enters their mouth. I’m not quite sure why I enjoy this final struggle, maybe because I see it s the final tantrum of sin before the flood of grace, but when I see someone running away from God, I smile, and try to stay around long enough to see God catching up.

Can I share some scenes of my sadistic voyeurism? Let’s start with red meat, you know, a good sinner of old, a mighty oak falling down. Augustine narrates in his Confessions how he tried to run from God, and revels in the foolishness of it: “I would only hide thee from myself, not myself from thee.”[2] Augustine’s is a fascinating journey, elaborated by a great soul-physician in the Confessions, until he comes to the decisive moment: “Thou didst call and cry aloud, and didst force open by deafness. Thou didst gleam and shine, and didst chase away my blindness. Thou didst breathe fragrant odors and I drew in my breath; and now I pant for thee. I tasted, and now I hunger and thirst. Thou didst touch me, and I burned for thy peace.”[3]

Good stuff, eh? I like C. S. Lewis’ final struggles too, and the silent resistance he tried to muster to the last, even against a palpable sense of God’s presence. Lewis narrates in his autobiography:

“You must picture me alone in that room in Magdalen, night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him who I so earnestly desired not to meet. That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps the most defected and reluctant convert in all England.”[4]

But let me acknowledge it too. Maybe I enjoy seeing these moments in others not much for the agony’s sake – though that is fun, I admit – but maybe, if I may face my own resistance, because I enjoy the moments when God finally wins me over, and overflows my opposition, and reluctantly I let myself kneel and pray. I like seeing it in others because I see that this reluctance is not only my own, and even a stubborn like myself is within the reach of grace. I see David trying to make his bed in the depths, and feel I’m not down there by myself – there’s God, and there’s David hiding too, who tells me to shush and go hide somewhere else. If these dwarves dared to resist God, my own short arms and legs don’t seem to so foolish either. I can rest, and open myself, and let God arrive, and thank him for seeking such a small-minded fool as I.

René Breuel

[2]     Augustine, The Confessions of St. Augustine, ed. and trans. Albert Cook Outler (Mineola, New York: Dover, 2002), X.II.2.

[3]     Ibid., X.XXVII.38.

[4] C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy: The Shape of my Early Life (Orlando: Harcourt, 1955), 228-229.


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Madonna, World Peace, and Religious Pluralism

15 02 2012

World Peace was center stage during Madonna’s halftime performance at this year’s Super Bowl. For our Wondering Fair readers uninterested in American culture or sports, I will spare you the details of the well-choreographed and highly entertaining spectacle. This essay focuses less on the glitz and glamour of the Super Bowl than on the possibility of world peace in an age of religious pluralism. 2011 as we know was a year rife with protests, so is world peace in the way Madonna envisions possible? Can we all learn to “coexist,” as the trendy bumper stickers encourage us to do? Madonna’s halftime performance seems to suggest that we can achieve global shalom, but it’s hard to imagine such a world when our current economic, political, and religious differences are so severe.

On the religious front, one proposal to help establish world peace is to adopt a position called religious pluralism. Promulgated by academic theologians like Wilfred Cantwell Smith and John Hick, religious pluralism is the idea that all religions are essentially equal paths up the same divine mountain. Each simply recognizes Truth in a different way, though all roads lead to God. In Hick’s own words, “pluralism is the view that the great world faiths embody different perceptions and conceptions of, and correspondingly different responses to, the Real or the Ultimate from within the major variant cultural ways of being human….”[1] Here, in his desire to remain religiously neutral, Hick substitutes the word “Real” for God, a term which has a clear Abrahamic bias. The benefits of religious pluralism, it is thought, are that people may stop trying to convert or coerce others into their way of thinking and thereby live together in harmony.

Despite good intentions, there are several problems with religious pluralism. First, it is methodologically flawed. In an attempt to find what is common to all faiths, the pluralist is forced to ignore seriously important elements of each religion. The things that make religions unique—such as the Trinity for Christians or the prophecy of Muhammad for Muslims—are routinely trivialized and viewed as unnecessary additions. To suggest that Christians or Muslims willingly give up their core doctrines in favor of a far more ambiguous pluralist picture of the divine seems ill-conceived.

Second, pluralism is morally problematic. If the Real does not reveal Itself to people in history, then the religious practices of faithful Hindus, Jews, Christians, and Muslims are based on misunderstandings. Since the Real hides Itself from everyone (except for Hick and other pluralists!) and remains fundamentally mysterious to us, we are in the dark morally and cannot live in a way that pleases the Real. This deep agnosticism which runs through religious pluralism makes it especially difficult to discern right from wrong.

Third, pluralism is logically impossible. As many scholars have pointed out, the idea that all religions are true in their own way flies in the face of common sense.[2] All religions make exclusive truth-claims and prioritize their understanding of reality over against others. Religious pluralism, with its nuanced and sophisticated understanding of the Real, is no different. Ironically, the desire to create a universal religion for everyone only leads to the denial of all other truth-claims made by religious believers. How can Hinduism, with its claim to 330 million gods, be just as true as Theravada Buddhism, which has zero gods, or Judaism, which has only one?

Finally, from a Christian perspective, religious pluralism fails to acknowledge Jesus as Lord. To be sure, this is unproblematic for persons of other faiths, but for Christians who want to be true to their historic beliefs, Jesus must be seen not merely as one manifestation of an unknown higher deity we call the Real. Rather, Jesus made known his identity in history by walking among people and saying things like, “I am the way, the truth, and the life” and “I and the Father are one.”[3] His exclusive truth-claims, as we know, not only caused consternation and led to his crucifixion, but they were and continue to be fundamental to the Christian story. Despite its lack of Super Bowl glitz and glamour, it is this story, I would argue, that promises to end all protests and ultimately usher in real world peace.

Paul McClure

[1] John Hick, “Religious Pluralism.” Reprinted in Philosophy of Religion: Selected Readings. Ed by Michael Peterson, William Hasker, et al. (New York: Oxford UP, 2001), 565.

[2] For more resources, see Harold Netland’s Encountering Religious Pluralism, Stephen Prothero’s God Is Not One, Vinoth Ramachandra’s Faiths in Conflict, John Stackhouse’s No Other Gods Before Me, and Ravi Zacharias’ Jesus Among Other Gods.

[3] Italics added. John 14:6, 10:30 (NIV)

*Thanks also to Professor Ivan Satyavrata for his helpful lecture on religious pluralism.


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Is Doubt the Enemy of Faith?

25 01 2012

Doubt gets a bad rap. We live in a world where we are not supposed to doubt, it is unhealthy—bad. Doubts, though, are like confrontations, which also have a bad rap. However, it is in confrontations that change can happen. Sometimes my wife needs to confront me, and at that point there is a back and forth until eventually one of us realizes our error (or often we both do) and we change. Today—we are so afraid of confrontations—we don’t have them. In a Facebook generation we just unfriend, ignore or avoid—but then we are depriving ourselves and others of possibly growing.

Doubts are the same way. We often are afraid of them—or we don’t deal with them—but then we never grow. In fact they may actually help. How do I know? Look at the famous, but often misunderstood biblical story of Doubting Thomas often used to illustrate how it is wrong to doubt. It can be found at the end of the Book of John.

What does Jesus do when he approaches Thomas here? Two things: First, he calls him out for doubting clear evidence—the other apostles eyewitness accounts. Most people highlight this aspect of the story. However, the second thing Jesus does is actually gives into the demands of Thomas! Thomas demands to see Jesus, his pierced hands and side, and then Jesus—after rebuking Thomas, actually gives him exactly what he demands. Why would he do that?

Jesus is trying to keep Thomas, as well as the listener from falling into one of two camps prevalent in ancient and modern culture. The first camp can be called the blind faith camp.  This group of people thinks doubts are the enemy of faith. That blind faith camp never questions their faith, never ask hard questions, and never seeks answers for when doubts rise up. They say that the definition of faith, is you don’t know, so stop trying to ask questions and just believe. There is almost a fear if that if you do ask questions then you will lose your faith.

The second camp out there is what I call the persistent cynicism camp.  These are individuals who try to poke holes in everything and mock all truth statements, and undermine all claims of purpose. I know these people exist because I was one of them. Whose to say what is true? What is true for you is true for you, but what is true for me is true for me. In some respects these people are committed to the belief that there is no belief—there is nothing else out there.

Through his actions, Jesus wants to avoid both extremes. Notice he rebukes Thomas not for doubting in general—but for doubting clear evidence from his friends. In other words, he was in the
persistent cynicism camp. He was not seeking or trying to find answers, he made a blanket statement and he was not going to budge. However, on the other hand—Jesus actually gives into his demands, and validates and even answers Thomas’ demands. So it seems, from a fresh reading of the passage, doubts are not necessarily the enemy of faith, only if they stay in a persistent state of cynicism.

In fact, they may actually boost a faith/trust paradigm. How does Thomas respond after Jesus shows him the evidence? All the gospels have Jesus trying to show others who he really is, but the one person who confesses Jesus’ full nature is Thomas!  No other human being had a higher view of Jesus than Thomas. In verse 28 he says, “My Lord and My God.” This is a personal expression of intimate relationship that is accomplished through processing doubts. So use them, search them, and build off them.

Michael Keller


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Man Seeks (Straightforward) God

23 01 2012

Over the last decade or so, the conversation about God and religion in the public square has been dominated by the extremes.  Whether angry atheists convinced that religion “poisons everything” or defensive and dogmatic believers who condemn atheists in equally strong language, the impression often given is that there are two groups of fundamentally different people out there who can do little besides shout at each other across the huge and unbridgeable chasm between them.

But the picture sketched above does not tell the whole story.  In between these extremes exist more moderate atheists and believers, as well as a growing demographic of people referred to as the “nones”—a name derived from checking the “None” box on surveys asking for one’s religious preference.  Simply put, Nones aren’t sure about God and religion.  They’re not, by in large, atheists (93% claim to believe in God or a higher power), nor are they adherents of any particular religious tradition.  They’re searching, seeking, inquiring.  They’re open to God, but not in traditional forms and expressions.

Former NPR correspondent Eric Weiner speaks for the Nones in his new book Man Seeks God: My Flirtations with the Divine.  In a recent article, Weiner expresses his exasperation with the “true believers” and the “angry atheists” that have dominated (North) American religious discourse over the last decade or so.  Like many of us, Weiner sees the world as just a bit more grey than the black and whites offered by these two groups, and is open to a much wider range of questions and answers than they are.

According to Weiner, Nones

don’t get hung up on whether a religion is “true” or not, and instead subscribe to William James’s maxim that “truth is what works.” If a certain spiritual practice makes us better people—more loving, less angry—then it is necessarily good, and by extension “true.”

Nones are, apparently, characterized by an extremely pragmatic approach to issues of God and religion.  The fundamental question, according to Weiner, is not, “What is the good, the true, and the beautiful?” but “what works for me?”  Of course, there are numerous unstated assumptions about the nature of the good and beautiful embedded in Weiner’s assertion that if a spiritual practice makes us better people it is “true,” but this is, nonetheless, an undeniably human-centred approach to questions of God and religion.

A little later, Weiner makes this even clearer:

We need a Steve Jobs of religion. Someone (or ones) who can invent not a new religion but, rather, a new way of being religious. Like Mr. Jobs’s creations, this new way would be straightforward and unencumbered and absolutely intuitive. Most important, it would be highly interactive. I imagine a religious space that celebrates doubt, encourages experimentation and allows one to utter the word God without embarrassment. A religious operating system for the Nones among us. And for all of us.

“Straightforward,” “unencumbered,” and “absolutely intuitive.”  These are interesting adjectives to place alongside of the quest of faith, to be sure.  Historically, the pursuit of God has been one of great joy, self-discovery, and peace, to be sure, but also one of self-denial, struggle, and even periods of great doubt and suffering, as countless people of faith down through the ages would attest.  A prominent image of the path to God is one of ascent—an image evoking the long and arduous process of climbing a mountain.  There is exertion and pain and struggle on the path to the top.  Indeed, Jesus himself said that “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me” (Luke 9:23).  Evidently, faith isn’t supposed to always be easy.

We have just made our way through the Christmas season.  If the Christian story is to be believed, the light of the world entered the human predicament in a most unusual, unexpected, uncomfortable, and possibly even embarrassing manner.  Jesus’ arrival on the human scene did not nicely align itself with what human beings thought ought to be the case, with how they thought divinity ought to look, with the way in which they imagined a rescue operation ought to be undertaken. It still doesn’t, for many of us.  We have all quite likely imagined other, more “straightforward” ways for God to save than the way represented by the birth and career of Jesus.

But perhaps the truth isn’t always comfortable or unencumbered or straightforward or intuitive. Perhaps, in addition to our capacity to interrogate reality, the truth asks questions of us.  Perhaps it is we who must conform to what is real and true and good and beautiful, rather than adapting and adjusting these concepts and behaviours to fit our preferences.  Indeed, if truth really is something that exists outside and independent of human minds and hearts, then perhaps the first question to ask—for Nones and for all the rest of us—is not, “what works?” or “what seems to make the most sense to me?” or “what do I prefer?” but “what is true and how do I align myself with it?”

The Christian conviction is that the struggle of faith—with all of the wrestling and sorting through our embarrassment and confusion and discomfort as we align ourselves with what is true—is worth it.  And that the view from the summit of the mountain is spectacular.

Ryan Dueck


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The Christian Conspiracy

16 01 2012

In the mood for a conspiracy theory? The menu is vast: Obama’s birth certificate, Putin’s election, the landing on the moon, Area 51,  Michael Jackson’s mysterious death. But I have a biggie: the rise of Christianity. The growth of the world’s largest faith seems obvious now, with the benefit of hindsight and churches dotting every other corner (almost literally, here in Rome at least.) But if you look closer, the historic rise of the Christian faith seems more enigmatic than Swiss bank accounts: how could such a faith grow after the death of its leader? How do you explain Christian success after Christ’s failure?

If you look at it realistically, Jesus was a very unattractive messiah to believe in. He was a peasant who lived in an obscure corner of the Roman Empire. He offered eternal life but died tragically, executed like the worst criminals, like someone on an electric chair today. So why didn’t Christianity die with the death of its leader? What relaunched the Christian movement and drove its growth? What moved people to believe in Jesus after he was crucified?

The Christian response is that Jesus came back to life, showed himself to people, and so faith in him was reignited: “on the third day he rose from the dead.” Oh right! Here comes the fairy tale!

Yet, can you think of any other explanation? How do you account for this massive relaunch of faith after Jesus’ violent and public death? Let’s look at the theories have been put forth to explain belief in Jesus after his death:

1. Wrong tomb: some people explain that the disciples went to the wrong tomb and, not finding the body of Jesus, concluded he was risen. Clean and simple explanation, eh? But if that was the case, the authorities should just show the right tomb with Jesus’ corpse, and the mistake would be cleared out.

2. Jesus didn’t really die: others say that Jesus did not really die, and after regaining strength, he exited the tomb and people thought he was risen. But that could be the case say, if Jesus had been poisoned in a hidden room and not many people had inspected his body. Jesus’ death was visible and public, however, and people for and against his message buried him. Besides, when a solder struck his side, blood and water came out: the separation of coagulated blood is a medical evidence of death.

3. Disciple’s conspiracy: others say that the disciples wanted to promote faith in Jesus so much that they secretly stole the body, and started preaching that he was risen. But the problem here is that the disciples gave their lives for this conviction, and were tortured and killed for preaching that Jesus was God and was alive. Trick-or-treat every now and then is fun, but nobody would have suffered so much and so long for a lie. They were absolutely convinced that Jesus was indeed risen.

4. Collective hallucination: a last theory suggests that the disciples were so psychologically shocked with Jesus’ death that they had hallucinations and thought they had encountered Jesus after he died. However, Jesus appeared to hundreds of people, sometimes to a few individuals, once to more than 500 people, and appeared to people in numerous occasions and repeated times. It is highly unlike that all of them had the same hallucination at once, and that all agreed on the details. Moreover, Jesus appeared after he died also to people who opposed him, like Paul on the road to Damascus, and who did not expect to meet him at all.

The best explanation for the change of mind in the disciples was that Jesus was truly raised from the dead. Can you think of any other explanation? No other theory but a historic resurrection explains adequately the rebirth of Christianity after Jesus’ death.

René Breuel


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Rules… or Ruler…

11 01 2012

Rules. Rules. Rules.

One of the most common complaints about Christianity is that it is merely a pile of rules. These rules are sometimes ones about what you should do (ie, “read your Bible”), but more often are about what you shouldn’t do (“do not have sex… well, maybe a little after you get married… but don’t enjoy it…”). This criticism – which emerges out of many people’s experience – upsets us because these rules seem to be primarily there to exert power over people, and to steal away some of their fun.

Now, I could rail against this in a whole host of ways. Or I could also suggest that many of the rules that Christians live by are there to protect people from the un-fun consequences of a false kind of fun. And that would be true, at least for some of them. But I think there’s a better answer:

Christians don’t follow rules. They follow the One Who Rules.

Of course, I recognise that there are some – if not many – people claiming to be Christian, who most certainly do seem to follow rules. One option from that, then, is that those people are not really Christians. And, sometimes, I suggest they are not. But, sometimes (and I’d like to think most of the time) Christians are actually keeping the rules, not following them. That might seem like semantics, but it makes all the difference.

Following is a walking metaphor. It is about letting something determine where you go, letting it rule and direct you. That “something” that you’re following can be a person, or perhaps a goal. If you’re following a person – perhaps a king, or a master, or a teacher – they tell you (or show you) where you need to be going in order to follow them, and out of that emerge your “rules”. You then have two potential pitfalls: you could potentially forget about following the person, and just follow the rules in-and-of-themselves; or you could ignore the rules, as an expression of not being committed to following the person any more. But in either of these options, whether you follow the rules or you stop following them, the result is the same: you stop following the person.

Christians believe that Jesus is the King, the Master, the Teacher – and I might suggest they believe that for good reasons. And Jesus said, “Follow Me”, quite a lot. When asked what following Him would look like, Jesus boiled it down to two directions: “Love God. Love other people.” He also showed what following Him would look like, by loving God passionately, and loving people sacrificially. And then He said again, “Follow Me.” The specific examples that He either taught (ie, “don’t lie”) or did (ie, healing somebody), emerge out of loving God, and loving other people.

Jesus also emphatically criticised any people who claimed to be following God, but who were only interested in following the rules. That’s because most of the time, they were so busy following the rules that they had forgotten Who they were really meant to be following. They had forgotten Who so badly, that when He walked right up to them, and said, “Follow Me”, they didn’t even recognise Him.

Practically, what difference does this make today? Well, a good example is from World War II Germany. Those who just kept the rules and forgot Who they were following, said, “Jesus said not to lie, so when the Nazis ask us where the Jews are hiding, we have to tell them the truth.” The real followers said, “Jesus said following Him was about loving God and loving other people. So when a bunch of guys want to kill some people, we’ll lie to keep those people alive. Because letting them be killed is not loving them.” Most of the time, lying would not have been loving to God or others, and so they had kept that rule. But when it wasn’t loving to God or others, they saw the higher priority, which was following Jesus.

So Jesus isn’t asking you to follow a system, a belief, a mantra, or a set of rules. He’s saying the same thing He’s always said:

“Follow Me.”

Are you?

Matt Gray


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Categories : Making a Difference

Liberating Freedom

9 01 2012

Hey, gotta’ solution: why choose? To anyone surveying our current cultural scene, and its splintered breadth of options political, artistic, religious and social, an easy attitude rises from the pack: why choose a worldview to commit to – and all those hurdles called dedication and loyalty and sacrifice – when we can choose nothing, and live free of care? In societies as complex and fragmented as ours, it is a lot of work to survey every point of view out there. Why bother then? Why should I commit to a faith that will reduce my personal freedom, by telling me to live a certain way, and reduce my intellectual autonomy, by telling me to believe certain things?

Freedom from constraints. Sounds like a simple concept, right? Avoid serious commitments, and soar like an eagle, detached from the frenzied discussion below. This commitment-phobia is something many young folks today are committed to (!), according to leading sociologists. In a major survey of young adults today, for example, Notre Dame sociologist Christian Smith describes this as one of the major tenets of young lifestyles:

Numerous dimensions of the  culture of emerging adulthood – uncertainty about purpose, delaying settling down, the individual as authority, amorphous relationships, strategic management of risk, the tentativeness of cohabitation, aversion to moral judgments, reluctance to commit to social and political involvements and investments – reflect and reinforce their interest in maintaining as many live and promising options as is feasible. [i]

Yet, if I may beg to differ, I don’t think this kind of absolute freedom exists, or can ever exist. It is a myth. Every lifestyle will bind us and every conviction will restrain us, no exception. If one chooses to live his sexuality openly, for example, and change sexual partners as often as he pleases, he will enjoy the freedom to choose a new girl when the current one is not as appealing. But this very act will also constrain his freedom: this person will close itself to the pleasures of being committed to someone, and all the trust, serenity and shared memories of a lifelong relationship. In a similar way, someone may want to maximize her intellectual autonomy and believe that all truth is relative. But then her freedom will be restricted, because she won’t be able to believe in an infinite number of specific truths – be it evolution, Jesus’ resurrection, or karma – and won’t believe in something with all her heart.

Any choice, personal or intellectual, binds us. And not to choose binds us too, without giving us any real benefit. Absolute freedom is a myth; it does not exist. We will never be free from everything. The fish cannot swim outside of the water, or he dies. But inside the ocean, obeying the parameters he was created for, he is free to swim everywhere.

But what if we framed personal freedom differently? What if the question were, instead, not freedom from something, but freedom for something? What can truly capture my heart? What can I live for? What is the true life I can commit to? What is the most compelling worldview I can believe in?

And here comes the twist. Paradoxically, if we find the best choice, and believe the real truth, and really commit to it, we will find the freedom for which we were created. “You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free,” said Jesus.[ii] We will be free for life. Truth will bind us and therefore free us evermore. We will be free to be the persons we were created to be.

What do you live for then?

René Breuel

[i]     Christian Smith with Patricia Snell, Souls in Transition: The Religious & Spiritual Lives of Emerging Adults (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 80.

[ii]    John 8:32


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How Much Redemption?

7 12 2011

Let me start with a confession: I’m an unapologetic cat-lover. For several years two Norwegian forest cats (Sam and Luna) were part of our family. We deeply enjoyed their company, but this enjoyment always existed under something of a shadow: both had genetic heart conditions that led eventually to their premature death.

In the time since then, living without feline companionship, I’ve found myself reflecting on their “personhood,” if I may use this term. There are plenty of (in)famous accounts of animals that are reductive; among these Descartes suggested that they couldn’t feel pain. In contrast, I found that Sam and Luna each had unique personalities:  one cat was a morning “person,” the other wasn’t. They could be cheerful or cranky. They enjoyed play and humor and when we lost Luna, Sam visibly grieved her absence for his remaining months. Far from the machines that Descartes imagined animals to be, these two displayed an astonishing range of uniqueness.

I was recently reminded of a sermon by John Wesley when he reflects on the place of animals in the kingdom to come:

The whole brute creation will then, undoubtedly, be restored, not only to the vigour, strength, and swiftness which they had at their creation, but to a far higher degree of each than they ever enjoyed. They will be restored, not only to that measure of understanding which they had in paradise, but to a degree of it as much higher than that, as the understanding of an elephant is beyond that of a worm. And whatever affections they had in the garden of God, will be restored with vast increase; being exalted and refined in a manner which we ourselves are not now able to comprehend.[1]

Wesley isn’t alone in his conviction that God’s redemptive activity includes not only humans, but also a broad range of what he first created – George MacDonald and C.S. Lewis suggest similar things – and his sermon doesn’t arise out of mere sentimentality. John Wesley was, as Thomas Jay Oord puts it, “a theologian deeply interested in science,” who “kept abreast of the scientific developments of his day by reading the works of leading scientists and philosophers.” [2] Having beheld the intricate interrelation of all the various creatures in God’s creation, a new creation that consisted only of humans seemed unnecessary and nonsensical to Wesley; it would not account both the witness of the created order and that of Christian scripture. As Denis Edwards observes, there are a number of passages in the bible which include non-human creatures in the final state, including Revelation 5:13-14, which contains “a remarkable vision of all the creatures of Earth united in a great song of praise of the lamb, the symbol of the crucified and risen Christ.” [3]

I realise that my suggestion here opens up a huge variety of challenging questions. What about people who are allergic to cats, and who imagine heaven without them? Where would God possibly fit all the insects that have come and gone since the creation of the earth? Yet I think that the kingdom to come is better regarded as an object of hope and wonder than one which we can anticipate in too-concrete ways. I for one, look with hope not only to meet my grandpa again, but also to an expansive vision of the new creation, filled with lions, lambs and bugs alike.

Jeremy Kidwell

[1]  John Wesley, reflecting on Romans 8:19-22 and Isaiah 11:6 in his sermon, “The General Deliverence” – read the rest here: http://new.gbgm-umc.org/umhistory/wesley/sermons/60/)

[2] Thomas Jay Oord, Divine Grace and Emerging Creation, p. ix.

[3] Denis Edwards, Creaturely Theology, 81. Other instances include 1 Cor. 8:6, Rom 8:18-25, Col 1:15-20, Eph 1:9-23, Heb 1:2-3, 2 Peter 3:13, John 1:1-4, and Rev 21:1-22:13.


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Black Friday Blues

2 12 2011

Black Friday—the traditional American shopping day that occurs the day after American Thanksgiving or the final Friday in November—has long been a tradition in the United States. For those who don’t know about it, it is the day that many retailers “go into the black” for the year, finally making a profit. Of course, because of the extensive sales (often beginning at 4am), many people have traditionally used this shopping day to begin purchasing gifts for Christmas. The final Friday in November has also, traditionally, marked the beginning of the Christmas season in North America. With the thanksgiving turkey eaten and all hints of Pilgrims, Native Americans, and other potentially disturbing history lessons happily buried beneath an evening of American football and a stomach ache from over-eating, the day-after-Thanksgiving used to greet those venturing into public with garlands, wreaths, bows, lights and Christmas carols buzzing in the air.

Not this year….

This year, the aforementioned Christmas accouterments began appearing sometime closer to November 15th or even November 1st. No one really seemed bothered by this remarkably early appearance of Christmas. However, some people were outraged when stores in America decided to start “Black Friday” sales on Thursday, adulterating a traditional public holiday both by making people work and by tainting the holiday with consumer practices (not that Thanksgiving wasn’t already well-consumerized, but the opening of retail stores on the holiday meant that the marketplace was more obviously and unavoidably infiltrating the day).

I, on the other hand, am deeply bothered by the early appearance of Christmas, not just this year but every year. Historically—as in before the Victorian invention of the modern celebration of Christmas—Christmas didn’t begin until the night of December 24th. At that time, the faithful marked the birth of Jesus and continued celebrating for 12 days. The celebration was, from what historians tell us, frequently marked by gift giving, lots and lots of drinking, eating, and general merry making. But I’m getting ahead of myself…

The period before Christmas is Advent, a much ignored season of the year in modern culture. Sure we have advent wreaths but there is no real sense of “advent,” from the Latin “adventus” or coming. Coming: as in not here yet…not arrived…expected…hoped for…looked for….

Some Christians—who initiated the celebration of Christmas in the first place—do try to keep the celebration of Advent alive. In Christian practice, Advent is kept alive through fasting, prayer, and a focus on the future, on things yet to come (not Christmas carols, lights, bows, wreaths, or garlands: these are the signs and symbols of celebration not expectation). What is it that Christians look for, long for, pray for, hope for during advent? Christians look for, hope for, expect the coming of Jesus. Advent is a time of remembering God’s promise to restore the world he created and of looking for the fulfillment of that promise. Christians believe that Jesus is that very creator-God come to dwell among humanity for a time, beginning that work of restoration and renewal. Yet that work isn’t finished yet. During Advent, as Christians re-live the historical hope for renewal, they also continue to hope for the completion of God’s work of restoration in a world still broken and still in need of healing.

So, what’s wrong with decking the halls early? Why is it worse than shopping on Thanksgiving? For the simple reason that in celebrating Christmas before the holiday comes, Christmas day and the celebration of Jesus’ birth becomes the end of the story, the main event that we then pack-up. By celebrating in advance, we lose the practice of hoping and of praying, we lose the holy expectation that sees our broken world and longs for it to be made whole.  In celebrating Christmas as the beginning of a new season—the Christmas season—Christians acknowledge that the process of God’s restoration begins with the coming of God in the person of Jesus but that restoration is not completed in a day. It is ongoing, continuing, even in this Advent season. So, I say, let’s not deck the halls with boughs of holy because it is not the season to be jolly… not yet. Right now, it is the season to be subdued by the darkness that engulfs our world and to long for God to come dwell among his people once again.

Jessica Hughes


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Categories : Spirituality for the Rest of Us

A Beautiful Life

28 11 2011

What if I’m wrong?

Whatever space we happen to inhabit on the worldview continuum, this is a question that is bound to occur to all of us.  As human beings we simply do not and cannot know as much as we would like prior to deciding upon ultimate matters.  And I suspect that the “what if this is all a colossal mistake?” question occasionally occurs to even the most settled of minds.

At the end of Miroslav Volf’s Free of Charge there is a brief chapter entitled “Postlude: A Conversation with a Skeptic.”  After coming to agreement that the life of Jesus was good, beautiful, and worthy of emulation, Volf records the following hypothetical exchange around what would he do if he found out that the whole notion of a generous God who gives and forgives and who expects us to do the same, was nothing but an enormous lie:

Skeptic: “What if your dark thoughts at night—and my sober observations!—are true? What if you are waking up to a dream?”

Volf: “Well what?”

Skeptic: “You’d be wrong.”

Volf: “And I would have lived the right kind of life, the life you called beautiful.”

Skeptic: And have lived a false beautiful life! Wouldn’t that matter to you? Can a false life ever be good?”

Can a false life ever be beautiful? Can it be good?  And what, if anything, does our answer to this question have to say about the worldviews we adopt?

Some would suggest that our worldviews are simply the result of the culture we happen to have been raised in.  We are all socialized into and inhabit a particular “plausibility structure”—a taken-for-granted way of thinking about and living in the world which privileges certain kinds of answers to certain kinds of questions. At its most extreme, this view sets forth a kind of sociological determinism where our cognitive and behavioural options are completely determined by our social environment. Is it even possible to just accept a different way of looking at and living in the world given what we know about the nature of belief formation and the myriad sociological and psychological factors that contribute to the process?

Obviously it is.  People do, after all, change their minds about matters of faith.  But when they do, it seems that more often than not it is the quality of someone’s life that proves most compelling, as opposed to the comprehensiveness of their facts or the logical rigour of their argumentation. People respond to well-lived lives—to “beautiful” examples of forgiveness, grace, compassion, kindness, patience, and joy. The beauty and goodness of human lives can and do lead people to the conclusion that the foundation upon which such lives are based just might be true.

What is the connection between truth and beauty? However we answer this question, I think that the fact that we seem to be hard-wired to expect, even demand that the two be linked is suggestive. Is it possible that a genuinely good and beautiful life would have no connection to what is ultimately true about the world? If so, what would we be claiming about the nature of the world? About human beings? About God?

Sociologist Peter Berger has said that “to have faith is to bet on the ultimate validity of joy.” I think that it is also to bet on a deep and permanent connection between truth and beauty—between our deepest aspirations and intuitions and the way the world “really is” and will one day be.


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Categories : Bar Conversations and Cheap Advice

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