Full Contact Christianity

A little while ago, someone asked me for some thoughts on forgiveness.  The result seemed worth sharing.

There’s nothing wrong with revenge.  God has so made the world that revenge is a necessary and important part of the moral universe.  But GOD takes revenge, and we don’t.  Forgiveness is letting go of vengeance and giving it over to God. (Rom. 12)

A common explanation of forgiveness is “not bringing it up again.”  Having forgiven a person, I should not go back and club him with his sin against me — thus far, no problem.  But the ability to bring it up again without re-experiencing the hurt is an important test of healing.  In relationships, people talk about the past, and having a big “don’t touch this topic” area in the past is a sign that healing is not complete.

Sometimes healing is not complete because God simply hasn’t yet brought it about.  But sometimes healing is not complete because the sin is not forgiven, and the wound is still festering.

The Triune God is all about relationships.  Human relationships are meant to be a portrait of intra-trinitarian relationships.  A broken relationship is an offense to God because it breaks His law.  But deeper than that, it is an offense to God because it is a lie about Him; it paints a false picture of the intra-trinitarian relationships.

When people break relationships, God responds in grace and wrath.  Both.  God calls His people to be His image in this as well.

A broken relationship creates a cycle of alienation and bitterness.  Restoring relationships is about breaking the cycle of alienation and bitterness.

Forgiveness helps break the cycle by not feeding it.  This is an image of God’s grace. If you are not alienated and bitter, that’s a big step in the right direction.

Another part of breaking the cycle can be hedging against a repeated offense.  A young woman may forgive the guy who date-raped her, but that doesn’t mean she has to go on another date with him.  There is a difference between seeking revenge and refusing to put yourself in an exposed position again.   There are long-term consequences to sin; this is part of imaging God’s wrath.

The relationship cannot really be mended without genuine repentance on the offender’s part.  Sometimes there’s nothing to do but wait for it.

Another part of imaging God’s wrath is imprecatory prayer and involving the appropriate church, familial, or civil authorities.  While these things certainly can be motivated by revenge, they are all compatible with forgiveness.

God’s wrath and its this-worldly images and agents are means for inducing repentance.  Imprecatory prayer is prayer for rough grace, that the offender might repent and the relationship might be restored–or at least that God will graciously prevent him from repeating the offense.

In a word, yes.

But as is often the case, there are some qualifications.  The below is an edit of a letter I wrote to a friend a while back.  In the course of his pastoral ministry, he had been asked this very question, and responded that bankruptcy is theft, because you’re taking money, promising to pay it back, and then not doing it.  Simple, right?

Not so fast…

We have to look at the general equity of the Torah on this point.  There are conflicting  biblical demands.

On one hand, paying what you promised to pay is Bible 101.  Treat others as you want to be treated, love your neighbor, let your “yes” be “yes,” and so on.  This much is obvious, and really doesn’t require much more discussion.

On the other hand…

Bankruptcy was possible under Torah.  A man (and his family) could be sold into slavery to pay his debts.  However, they were only slaves 7 years, and then they were not only released, but sent out with provisions to make a fresh start.  There was no prohibition against predatory lending per se in the Torah, but if you lend the guy 20 years’ wages, and he defaults, you only get him for 7 years — so you’re going to lose a lot of money.  And don’t forget that all debts are canceled every sabbath year, so that also limits the term of the loan.

Hence the conflicting demands.  Under Torah, the debtor is responsible to love his neighbor and honor his word, i.e., to pay his debt.  On the other hand, the creditor is also responsible to love his neighbor, and that means not lending a man more than is good for him, thereby subjecting the man to decades of debt slavery (in one form or another).  If he tries, he will run up against one of two limitations: the length of term for a debt (sabbath year) or how much wealth he can extract from a man’s slave labor for seven years (either directly, by taking the man as a slave, or indirectly, by selling him as a slave).

So as far as the present-day debtor is concerned, I grant your basic point — a man ought to pay the debts that he agreed to pay.  However, God knew that this was not always going to happen, and made provision for it when He set up a civil government.  So should we — In Israel, some lenders would be wicked or stupid enough to lend to people they shouldn’t, and some borrowers would be greedy or stupid enough to fall for it.  Human nature hasn’t changed, and we need the same sort of protections that Israel had, in one form or another.  One could argue about whether our bankruptcy system is a good reflection of the one in the Torah, but one can’t just say that no such system should exist.  The protection is meant to be invoked; that’s why it’s there.

Secondly, speaking to the debtor is only telling half the story.  If you’re going to preach to debtors about their need to pay up, you should also preach to the creditors about ethical lending.  The credit industry in this country deliberately incites people to get themselves into trouble so that they will be subjected to decades of debt slavery.  Those debts payable are counted as assets to the creditor, and all he has to do to increase his assets is lend more money to people who can’t afford it (until, as we recently saw, the whole thing crashes).  It’s a wicked system.  I don’t mean to make the debtor look shiny here; he’s not.  Nobody’s putting a gun to his head and making him take out a loan.  But his sins and the predatory creditor’s sins make a nasty combination, and if you’re going to sort the thing out biblically, you have to speak to both sides.

Untangling this in a specific counseling situation is a mess.  You probably don’t have the option of speaking to the creditor much; you’ll be dealing with the question of whether the debtor should default (chapter 7), reorganize for long-term repayment (chapter 13), or just soldier on with whatever changes he can make on his own (e.g., take a Dave Ramsay or Financial Peace University course, credit counseling, etc.)  The thing you must remember here is that bankruptcy law is on the books as a reflection of God’s law; it is right that such a thing exist.  There will, therefore, be a time when such a protection should be invoked.  It is the role of the church leaders to determine if this is such a time.

If it is not, the debtor should be subject to church discipline if he defaults on his debts, and remain under discipline until he repents and takes steps to repay them.  On the other hand, if it is such a time, then not only should the debtor not be subject to discipline; he ought to invoke bankruptcy protection with the blessing of the elders.  Bankruptcy is a harsh mercy and it would be better not to need it, but sometimes that ship has already sailed.

Novels are often good for astute cultural commentary.  But it’s not often this quotable:

The end of the twentieth century and the dawn of the new millennium had seen something of a renaissance in the public awareness of the paranormal.  Psychics, haunts, vampires — you name it.  People still didn’t take them seriously, but all the things Science had promised us hadn’t come to pass.  Disease was still a problem.  Starvation was still a problem.  Violence and crime and war were still problems.  In spite of the advance of technology, things just hadn’t changed the way everyone had hoped and thought they would.

Science, the largest religion of the twentieth century, had become somewhat tarnished by images of exploding space shuttles, crack babies, and a generation of complacent Americans who had allowed the television to raise their children.  People were looking for something — I think they just didn’t know what…[T]hey were once again starting to open their eyes to the world of magic and the arcane that had been with them all the while…

This from Jim Butcher’s fictional wizard Harry Dresden, the hero of Storm Front, the first book in the series The Dresden Files (quote from page 3).  He’s right.  If you’re not prepared to deal with this, people, you need to bone up.  And don’t think you can just dismiss it all as a bunch of chicanery.  There’s chicanery present, certainly, but you can’t just respond like an Enlightenment science-worshipper here, for two reasons.

First, nobody will listen to you.

Second, you’ll be wrong.  There are gods many and lords many — always have been.  You can’t do battle with principalities and powers in the heavenly places by denying that they exist, or that they’re relevant to human life.

As Christians, we don’t fear the powers; for us there is one Lord, and only one, and He made the heavens and the earth.  But when someone else speaks about the powers, we don’t respond with a snort like they’re crazy, either.  The Bible teaches us better than that.

As I was chatting with someone about my last post, he wanted to know what I was reading that was causing so much trouble.  I thought about a couple of different ways of answering the question, but I think the best strategy here is just to talk about what I’ve been reading and listening to recently.  So here it is:

I read my Bible daily.  I happen to use the New King James version, because that’s what I’ve been using since I was in fourth grade, and I haven’t found a good enough reason to switch to anything else.  Devotionally, I’ve found myself returning to the Eastern Church’s Jordanville prayer book (editing out prayer to saints, the Virgin Mary, and so on), but when I went up to St. Mary’s Glacier, I took my Book of Common Prayer for the Coverdale Psalter it contains.  Yes, I like NKJV psalms too, but my BCP fits in a sandwich bag and is a lot lighter to carry up the mountain.

I attend Englewood Bible Church, in Englewood, Colorado, which I suppose I could best categorize as evangelical fundamentalist.  There I weekly hear the preaching of Pastor Bob Hayes, who is presently taking us through Hebrews.  In the Monday morning staff meetings, he’s taking us through a study of 1 Thessalonians.

I just finished a course from The Teaching Company on C. S. Lewis, spanning his life and works in a breathless 12 sessions.  My next one from them will be a second trip through Brooks Landon’s Building Great Sentences.  In between, I’m listening to James Jordan’s Bucer Institute lectures on the Ten Commandments and George Thompson’s second set of lectures on the Middle Ages.  (Depending on my mood, there’s a Doug Wilson sermon thrown in here and there; I get one every week thanks to the largess of Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho, for which I am very grateful.)

I do most of my listening in the car, and in between lectures and sermons, I salt in music and spoken-word performances.  Current listening is Kim Taylor, Kelly Minter, Sligo Rags, Sons of Korah, Gretchen Wilson,  a bit of Toby Keith, and a few songs by Over the Rhine; also poets Jack McCarthy and Frankie Drayfus.

I’ve been reading Orthodox Psychotherapy by Archimandrite Hierotheos Vlachos for nearly a year, off and on.  Tough sledding.  I read until I can’t understand any more, then I stop and rest awhile.  In a continuing effort to understand it, I’m reading The Illness and Cure of the Soul in the Orthodox Tradition by the same author, which turns out to be shorter and more general, but also a lot easier to follow.  It’s clearing up some of the questions I had.  In the same tradition, I am involved in a reading/discussion group that is going through The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church by Vladimir Lossky a chapter at a time, and then meeting on Skype to discuss it.  We’ve suspended the group temporarily due to upheavals in two of our lives, but we’re hoping to begin again shortly.  I find Lossky to be a starry-eyed idealist when it comes to his own tradition, and he indulges in generalizations that would make the boys at Credenda/Agenda blush (I read them, too), but I find that after my initial outrage subsides, I benefit quite a bit from grappling with his root concerns.

I found a copy of  Dorothy Sayers’ The Mind of the Maker just yesterday, and began reading.  Thus far, it is a breathtaking reflection on the relationship between God as artist and what human artists do.  Denser and more linear than N. D. Wilson’s Notes from the Tilt-a-Whirl (which I keep by my bedside, and to which I keep returning), but similarly life-giving.  Speaking of the folks up at Canon, I would be reading my way through a copy of The Forgotten Heavens right now, but it’s out of stock.  Hope they fix that sometime soon.

After a couple of abortive attempts at reading it, I’ve returned to Beyond Prediction, by Drane, Clifford and Johnson.  It’s a study of the Tarot, in which the authors argue that there’s a Christian message in the symbolism of the Tarot.  These guys aren’t just sitting around theorizing; they actually use their approach to evangelize New Age types and lead them to the Scriptures.  (Picture walking up to someone who’s messing about with Tarot cards, and asking, Philip-like, “Do you understand what you are reading?”)  Now, with all respect, I strongly suspect that the authors are a little nuts.  But if you believe that Christianity is the fulfillment of paganism (or, as I’d prefer to put it, paganism is a parody of Christianity) — and I do — then you can’t ignore the few people who are doing work in that direction.

Since I continue to take a shot at fiction writing every November (and because I just enjoy it), I read a bit of fiction most nights before I go to sleep.  A week or so ago, I finished Frank Herbert’s Soul Catcher, which is a fairly direct inversion of Christianity — a fictional picture of what the quasi-judicial slaughter of an innocent might mean in a pagan milieu.  Yesterday, I finished Storm Front, the first of Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files novels.  I’ve read a couple of the later ones, but hadn’t gone back to catch up on what happened earlier in the series.  Next up is Stranger in Paradise by Robert Parker.  (Why not Christian fiction?  I do, occasionally, when I get a recommendation I trust.  Mostly, I refuse, because reading Christian fiction is like doing your grocery shopping in the Safeway dumpster.  You can find some good stuff, but what you have to go through to get it….)

I don’t much read magazines, but I have the current issue of Grace in Focus sitting on my desk.  I skimmed it last night, and by the time you read this, I’ll have read it over again.  I also have an Imprimis from Hillsdale College around here somewhere that I need to read, and I’m hunting for someplace locally that carries Journal of the Asian Martial Arts. I buy about every other issue, depending on whether it has enough articles that interest me, but I haven’t found a local vendor yet.

My birthday was late in June, and my dad gave me Branding Faith: Why Some Churches and Nonprofits Impact Culture and Others Don’t by Phil Cooke.  I’m about halfway through it.  He’s got a lot of good to say, but to be honest I can only stand so much discussion of branding at once.  Another very generous friend recently gave me Calvin’s Ecclesiastical Advice, a collection of 46 of Calvin’s letters on such subjects as the Lord’s Supper, church discipline, marriage, and judicial issues.  It lends itself to reading in spurts, which I am doing.  Speaking of letters, I am also engaged in a long-term project to read through the letters of Flannery O’Connor (or at least the ones in the Library of America edition of her collected works.  After her, the letters of C. S. Lewis, which will take a very long while.

Also in spurts, I’m working my way through Comic Poems, an Everyman’s Library Pocket Poets anthology edited by Peter Washington.  The poets are as diverse as Dorothy Parker, Martial, and anonymous composers of timeless limericks.

I have had Cassiodorus’ Institutions of Divine and Secular Learning on my Amazon wish list for over a year, but it was rather pricey, so I hadn’t gotten it.  A month or so ago, a used copy came available for about $5 and I bought it.  I am now most of the way through Book 1, and really looking forward to Book 2.

On a recent trip to Colorado Springs, I bumped into The Unlikely Disciple: A Sinner’s Semester at America’s Holiest University by Kevin Roose.  I got my hands on a copy, and stalled out halfway through it.  The description of student evangelism at Daytona Beach’s Bike Week/Spring Break was just too painful to read all at once.  I put it aside for a few days, came back.  It took me several days to get through it, a piece at a time.  I am now past that part, and the sailing is a bit smoother.  I expect to write more about this book once I’ve finished it.  Also whilst down in the Springs, a friend lent me his copy of Gerard Lohfink’s Jesus and Community.  Looks like dense reading.  I skimmed over it last week, and will read it in earnest shortly.

I am also working my way through Michael Bull’s Totus Christus, which is taking much, much longer than I expected.  It’s a big, dense book, and I’m having trouble sorting through what I think of it.

I don’t follow blogs much, other than Michele’s, but I browse widely: Stephen Wedgeworth, Michael Bull, Jeremy Myers, Peter Leithart, Doug and Evan Wilson, among other Christians.  Also, two of my favorite fiction authors, Steven Barnes and Steve Perry, both of whom write solid, readable stories, and both of whom practice the same martial art that I do, albeit on a different branch of the family tree, and both of whom blog about writing, martial art, and a variety of other issues.

So that’s a couple of Roman Catholics, a couple of Free Grace types, three Anglicans (if you count Thomas Cranmer), some Eastern Christians, a bunch of Reformed guys, a handful of difficult-to-categorize Protestant mutts, and some pagans to round the whole thing out — and this is about normal for my reading load.  Do I value them all equally?  No, of course not.  Do I recommend that you go out and read/listen to them all?  Again, no.   Can a discerning Christian profit from any/all of these?  Sure.

Everybody doesn’t have to read widely, and most people don’t.  But those of us who write, need to read.  Those of us who wind up being professional theologians (in some sense) need to read.  There’s just not much benefit to reading stuff you already agree with entirely; opening up the windows to let some air in is not just recommended, it’s required.

In God’s providence, I have shifted jobs, locations, and churches, and my days of regular preaching and participation in formal liturgy have come to a definite pause.  I wasn’t at it very long — less than a full year — but it seems an appropriate time to stop and ask what I learned.

At the end of last December, when I’d only been doing it for four weeks, I wrote the following:

I’ve been at this for mere weeks now, and I’m sure there are all sorts of things about preaching in a formal liturgy that I still don’t know.  But I have found a series of interesting things as we’ve made the transition.

Obedience is a lot of hard work.  Not exactly news, but there it is.

Preaching a sermon that fits in with a more formal liturgy takes conscious preparation.  It sounds obvious when I say it like this, but if you’ve done both, you know what I’m talking about.  There’s a very real sense of changing gears here.

The sermon has to be a bit shorter to accommodate everything else we’re doing.  Courtesy of the way I was trained to do exegesis, I started learning how to condense in my second year of seminary (2000), and I’ve been working at it ever since.  I can condense the same content into a shorter time span.  All it takes is time in the study…

Crafting a liturgy also takes time.  Lots of time.  The first week, I spent all of my sermon prep time, Monday through Thursday, on the liturgy.  Come Friday, I’m pulling out my sermon notes that I normally would have picked up again on Monday.   Better scheduling needed here, but I expect to have to work twice as hard until we get the liturgy up and running.

The [liturgical] framework enhances the preaching.  A lot.  I can’t put my fingers on the differences yet, but I can feel them.  There is something about doing it this way that makes a huge difference.  More on this when I have something intelligent to say about what the differences are.

I’ve had six months since then, and while there are still many, many things I don’t know, I do have a few more things to say.

The liturgy makes counseling easier. The training in confessing our sins and receiving assurance of pardon sets the stage for church-wide application of James 5:16.  Believers are priests, and this is a priestly function.  But evangelicals don’t know how to do it.  The liturgy gives them a model; they are trained every week.

The counseling causes the liturgy to take hold. After I counsel a congregant through some sin issue, assist them in confessing the sin to the Lord and assure them of His pardon, and (of course) help them to begin growing beyond it, I have the privilege of watching their eyes light up when we get to the assurance of pardon in the service.  Their certainty that He has forgiven even that sin is palpable.

Doing formal liturgy well requires a spiritually mature, musically talented worship leader as well as a capable pastor. We were missing that, and I could feel the lack.  Good liturgy takes teamwork; it’s not the kind of thing that one man should do solo.  I learned this a little too late to do anything about it, and I’m grateful that God blessed our obedience in spite of me missing this (in retrospect) pretty obvious point.  I was blessed with a willing body of congregants who were committed to being obedient to the Scriptures in our liturgy.  We could never have done what we did without their willing help and participation, and I’m eternally grateful to them, each and all, for their suggestions, support, participation and commitment.

God blesses obedience. Our execution was often fumbling and inept.  How could it be otherwise?  We’d never done anything like this before.  But God was kind to us, and we saw results beyond all proportion to our skill.  Put another way, skill is no substitute for obedience.  We’ve all been to services where there was vastly more skill in evidence, and yet we were left empty.  Taking heed to God’s commands makes a real difference in weekly edification.