Full Contact Christianity

Once upon a time, a fast-paced American moved to a little village to learn what it meant to really know people, and be known by them. He had no idea of the journey he was beginning. As one of the villagers put it…

The film is 40 minutes long, and you should watch it.

When you’ve been in the ministry as long as I have, you find that there are certain questions that come up over and over. This post is about one of them. I’ve heard it in all kinds of different forms.

• Can you be a Christian and commit suicide?
• Can you be a Christian and homosexual?
• Can you be a Christian and an alcoholic?
• Can you be a Christian and commit murder?
• Can you be a Christian and a witch?
• Can you be a Christian and believe ____[fill in the blank]___?
• Can you be a Christian and not believe __[some basic Christian truth]__?

Of course with any of these issues there’s a lot to talk about, and the pastoral situation in which the question comes up is often very delicate, and calls for a nuanced approach that has little to do with answering the question as asked. Very often the stupidest thing I could possibly do is just answer the question, and the best possible answer is to drop whatever I’m doing, focus my whole attention on the person who asked, and say, “What makes you ask?”

All that to say that there’s a whole pastoral angle to addressing such questions that is an entirely different discussion from where I’m going today. Today, I want to talk about what all these kinds of questions have in common.

One of the things such questions have in common is a presumption that there’s a line you can cross somewhere that makes you not-a-Christian. Let’s talk about what that might look like.

Based on the evidence in the New Testament, it’s possible to be a Christian and deny Jesus (cf. Peter). It’s possible to be a Christian and commit murder (as some of the addressees of the epistle of James had done). It’s possible to be a Christian and an adulterer (as had some of the Corinthians). It’s possible to be a Christian and so abuse the poor at the Lord’s Table that God actually kills you over it (the Corinthians). It’s possible to be a Christian and a deny the resurrection (Corinthians again — they were a mess!) And so on. In none of these cases does the writer say that they have somehow crossed over and are no longer Christians. In fact, in each of these cases, the writer rebukes them as Christians and calls them to repent and return to faithful practice.

Is it possible to be a Christian and _______?  Yes. Whatever you’re filling the blank with is either sin or it’s not. If not, what’s the problem? If it’s sin, then Jesus died for it, precisely so that such things cannot define you out of the family. God is a better Father than that, and He has already prepared for every sin and mistake you could ever make.

Is it possible to be a faithful Christian and ________? That’s a different question, and a lot of the time, when we’re asking the question, we already know the answer is no.

I had an opportunity recently to be the guest on Eden to the City of God for a discussion of the creation of man. We could have talked for hours, but had to cut it off after one. Check it out!

I have recently run back across an older post by Doug Wilson that is simultaneously one of the more sensible things I’ve seen on the cessationism issue, and in another way, pretty silly.

“I don’t want a deep chasm between natural and supernatural. They are both part of the universe that God made, and they are woven together. So the fact that something is “spiritual” doesn’t make it inspired. Inspiration, of the kind described above, has ceased. But we still have spirits and souls and bodies, and the way they all are connected (within each man and between all men) is not something that we should allow materialistic atheists to define for us. The revelatory gifts have ceased. That does not mean that it is impossible for a man to be fey.”

Let’s grant all that for a second. If a man is fey, he ought to be fey subject to the Scriptures, in the service of Jesus Christ, for the glory of God’s kingdom and the benefit of the Body. He ought — not to put too fine a point on it — to behave generally in the way described in 1 Corinthians 12-14, the same way anyone should use any ability. That is, he should use his gifts lovingly for the edification and growth of the Body.

And what might such fey-ness look like? Well, it might look like…

• knowing things about people or situations that the person “shouldn’t” know
• preternaturally deep understanding, knowing what to do when the person shouldn’t have that kind of insight
• an unusual degree of trust in God for improbable things to come to pass…but they usually seem to
• an ability to make people feel better by touching or spending time with them, a pattern of people getting well with unusual speed around him/her
• an accrual of other inexplicable happenings around him/her
• a spooky ability to call out the secret desires and longings of a person’s heart

In other words, it might look like something you could describe as a word of knowledge, word of wisdom, gift of faith, healing, or prophecy…hmmm.

So when Grandma always seems to know when one of the grandkids gets hurt, even though she lives 900 miles away, what are we to call that? When a lady in the church is able to deliver on-target encouragement consistently to people whose life circumstances she could not possibly know, what are we to call that? When a man is able to identify the internal makeup calling of people he’s just met, turn them to living in the kingdom of God, and leaves in his wake a trail of transformed lives, what are we to do?

I submit we should kick the failed cessationist theological project to the curb and admit that the Spirit is doing, right in front of us, things which correspond to the words the Spirit used to describe such doings in the first-century church. Which is to say, we can either use the vocabulary God gave us, or we’ll have to make something up. Like “fey.”

As a sometime lifeguard with a few saves to my credit, I know that I can go into the water and pull a drowning person out. I’ve done it. I also know that it’s harder than people think. A drowning man will literally try to climb my body to get another breath. If I let him, I drown. And then he drowns anyway. 

I know I’m better off throwing him a rope or a float or one end of my shirt or *anything* he can grab onto than I am trying to grab him — it’s safer for both of us. But if I haven’t got anything handy, I’ll go in and get him anyway, risk be damned — I’m not going to sit on shore and watch the guy drown when I can do something about it. I can handle one guy trying to climb me. I’ll have to fight him to save him, but I’ll win, and we’ll both come out of the water alive.

I know I can’t go in and get three people at once. I can’t manage that many panicky people at the same time. They’ll climb me, and we’ll all die — or some other lifeguard will have to work that much harder to save them and me, too. Hard as it is to not just dive into the water, we’re all better off if I take the time to grab a float or a rope or branch. The goal is not just to “do something,” the goal is to actually help — effect, not display. When I spend precious seconds rummaging for a rope, one of them might go under for the last time. That’s awful.  But saving two is better than playing hero for a few seconds and drowning all four of us.

I believe in helping the stranger, the foreigner, the refugee. How many can we absorb into our country before our country — like theirs — becomes a place to flee from instead of a place to flee to? The answer cannot be zero, but as the experience of Europe is presently  demonstrating, the number will not be infinite, either. If we want real results and not just the warm feeling that we’re “doing something,” then we will have to accept two hard realities: 

1. There’s an upper limit to how many people we can help at a time.
2. There are ways of helping that will work, although they’re harder, and other ways that will fail, even though they will feel good and look heroic at first. We need to learn to tell the difference.

Greetings, all. The following is a shameless self-promotion. You have been warned.

My Th.M. thesis, Dead Man’s Faith: Spiritual Death, Faith, and Regeneration in Ephesians 2:1-10 is now available in print at a pretty reasonable price. You can find it on Amazon here. 

Fair warning; it is, literally, a master’s thesis. This means that it was not actually intended for human consumption; it was written to satisfy the arcane folkways of the academic guild. But there is a new foreword that will help you navigate to the parts that are relevant to you.

I am releasing it in this form because I’ve sat on it for 10 years, and I don’t know that I’ll ever get round to a rewrite that would bring it up to date and make it more accessible. At the moment, I have at least a half dozen projects that are more beneficial to the Kingdom of God, and so I’m devoting my effort to those instead. (By the way, you can find that stuff at Headwaters Christian Resources. If you were intrigued/infuriated by The Benedict Option, look for a new book in a few weeks. Fair warning: like all our stuff, this one will leave the high-concept theological debates for later, and put you to work.)

Ahem. Anyway, if you really want to understand either Ephesians 2:1-10 as a text, or BAR outlining as an exegetical tool, this is the best resource going at the moment (he said, modestly). And with respect to the latter, it may be the best resource available in print for some time to come — I don’t know when we’ll get round to producing an actual manual.  It’s on the radar, but all the people who could actually do it are tied up with other things, and likely to remain that way for some time. If you’re not friends with one of us already, this is the resource for you. 

So The Shack recently became a movie, and came back onto my radar. Back in the day, Albert Mohler, the president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, wrote a critique of the book that recently made the rounds again in response to the movie, and which you can read here. I might have passed over all this, but he subtitled his review “The Missing Art of Evangelical Discernment.” I’ve been working on a theology of discernment, and this is a good chance to discuss it a little. 

I’m going to be kind of rough on Mohler, so lest I fall into the trap of just criticizing things other people write, I’d like to ante up a review of The Shack that I largely agree with. I think you’ll find it worthwhile. Now as to Mohler….

Mohler’s crankiness is why evangelicals can’t have nice things. We wonder why we can’t get another C. S. Lewis? This is why. Anybody as smart as another Lewis can see the Mohler Treatment coming, and is steering well clear of us.

As Mohler said, The Shack is not only a novel, it’s a sustained theological argument. Insofar as it is teaching doctrine — and it certainly is — “It’s fiction!” doesn’t magically render it immune to critique. Young’s doctrine could stand a good, stiff critique, and it’s a shame Mohler fails to deliver. On one hand, he picks at fictional devices in a way that would damn the parables of Jesus Himself. (A friend pointed out to me that the parable of the prodigal son features a permissive, non-judgmental father who — horrors! — represents God, and a lascivious wrench of a son who achieves reconciliation with the father without recourse to Jesus.) On the other hand, Mohler is flat wrong when it comes to, say, the reconciliation of creation to God. Mohler points an accusing finger at The Shack, and all I can think is, “But the Bible actually says that.” (Col. 1:20 comes to mind.)

Then there’s the matter of that subtitle. Here’s the problem: Mohler’s “discernment” isn’t. Mohler’s article is not discernment the way a moldy kitchen sponge is not a grapefruit. It’s not that he’s discerning poorly; he has not yet begun the actual task of discernment. He is criticizing, certainly, but that’s not the same thing.

Biblical discernment, the way Jesus actually said to do it, evaluates the fruit. Good fruit, good tree. Bad fruit, bad tree. But Mohler isn’t looking for fruit; he’s testing for doctrinal “purity” from the heights of his ivory armchair. Mohler cites not one person who actually came away from The Shack with a warped view of God. Not one counseling session where he’s had to clean up The Shack‘s mess. Not one actual, real-world, bad result. He’s like a restaurant critic who reads the chef’s recipes and then writes the reviews without ever tasting the food. Might be good, might be bad — but would you take his word for it?

Meanwhile, down here in the trenches, I know actual, real people whose view of God was dramatically reformed by reading The Shack. People who had seen God as a scowling meanie eager to punish, or an impersonal force, came to know God as a Person — Three, actually — who really loves them. Faced with this reality that God actually accomplished in the real world — am I emphasizing my point enough here? — I can either be cranky because I think Young should have done better, or I can give thanks. I choose to give thanks. It’s good fruit.

Perfect fruit? Of course not. But good nonetheless. 

Not good enough to suit you? Write something better. But don’t let Mohler read it….