Beliefs and Actions

Over at this outstanding blog, a really interesting discussion is shaping up.  The issue is Orthodoxy versus orthopraxis.

Orthodoxy means “right beliefs”.  For example, somebody might believe that the orthodox position is that Jesus is connected to God in some unique way.

Orthopraxis means “right actions” or “right practice”.  It’s the actions undertaken by a person.  For example, somebody might believe that to follow Christ means that we should be giving food to those who are hungry.

There are several unsurprising things about this distinction.  These unsurprising things include:

#1) People debate about which is more important.

#2) This debate often comes down with old school traditionalists on one side and the post-modern emergent side on the other.

#3) It’s not really as complicated a debate as all these Latin (Or are they Greek?) terms make it appear.

It seems to me that this is just a dressed up version of the question “What’s more important to Jesus: that we have the right attitude about things or that we do the right things?”  All the Catholic Vs. Protestant “Works vs faith” debates are really about this issue.

I know that often people say that our hearts are much more important than whatever things it is we do.   I know that they’ve got lots to back this position up.  But there’s two things that are worth considering before we jump to this conclusion.

The first is that we have a very different understanding of what it is to know something than Jesus contemporaries did.  The modern era has made an idol of a certain type of understanding.  The staggering successes of science have lead to us treating rational, logic based, intellectualized knowledge as the king.  When scripture speaks about knowing or believing a thing, it’s not the same sort of knowledge that we think of when we think about, for example, knowing that 7 X 7 = 49.

The second is this quote from the Book of James. 

“12Speak and act as those who are going to be judged by the law that gives freedom, 13because judgment without mercy will be shown to anyone who has not been merciful. Mercy triumphs over judgment!

Faith and Deeds

 14What good is it, my brothers, if a man claims to have faith but has no deeds? Can such faith save him? 15Suppose a brother or sister is without clothes and daily food. 16If one of you says to him, “Go, I wish you well; keep warm and well fed,” but does nothing about his physical needs, what good is it? 17In the same way, faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead.

 18But someone will say, “You have faith; I have deeds.”
      Show me your faith without deeds, and I will show you my faith by what I do.

 19You believe that there is one God. Good! Even the demons believe that—and shudder.

 20You foolish man, do you want evidence that faith without deeds is useless^[d]? 21Was not our ancestor Abraham considered righteous for what he did when he offered his son Isaac on the altar? 22You see that his faith and his actions were working together, and his faith was made complete by what he did.”

It seems to me that almost any time the emergents are on one side and the traditionalists are on the other, it’s wise to assume that the truth is probably somewhere between them.  There’s some debates where both sides are equally right.

But there are some cases that you can’t have one side without the other.  There are some times that one side taken to far becomes an extreme that is wrong.  One of my favorite things about Jesus is when he steps outside of an either/or and looks at the big picture.  James seems to be following this tradition.

There are some things that we could have orthodox beliefs about which would change our actions.  If it turns out that the “right belief” about the nature of the atom is that it’s composed of quarks, this might be interesting.  But really, whether it’s quarks or strings or whatever, this isn’t going to change the ways I live my life.

I submit that orthodox beliefs about the nature of Jesus aren’t this kind of beliefs, though.  They aren’t abstract.  We couldn’t possibly hold orthodox beliefs without engaging in orthopraxy.  On the other hand, it seems clear to me that we won’t be able to identify the right practices if we don’t have the right beliefs in the first place.

I love the way that James expresses this.  I wonder if he had a sarcastic smirk on his face as he challenged someone to show them their faith without deeds.  Because it’s pretty much impossible to do this.  We can’t show anybody our faith except by their deeds. 

And I love how he uses the story of Isaac.  Even thousands of years ago, it was a temptation to sit around and intellectualize these things.  (Probably, if they’d had the technology, the people that James was talking to would have had blogs that read distressingly like my blog.)  It seems to me the whole point is this: stating beliefs is easy.  Acting on them, that’s where we’ll seperate the adults from the children. 

The City of Babel

It’s funny how we get these pictures in our head.  We have these images that we think are in the bible.  But the thing is, they are not.

Most of us know that it’s just a common assumption that there were three wise men because they brought three gifts.  However, the number of  is never stated.  It could have been two.  It could have been twenty.

Because we’re used to seeing pictures of the animals entering Noah’s arc in pairs, we assume it was a pair of each animal.  In fact, though, it was seven each of the clean species of animal that went on.

This morning I was reading about the “Tower” of Babel.  I notice a number of things that I never had before.  Things that contradict what I always thought I new about it.

For example, I always thought that everybody spoke the same language before the tower of Babel.  But if you check out the chapter before, when they go through all the lineages of Noah’s sons, they note that some of them developed their own languages.  It seems like God causes the tower-builders to lose the common language they all shared.  But there were already other languages around.

There is some more though.  The passage about the Tower of Babel is below. 

They said to each other, “Come, let’s make bricks and bake them thoroughly.” They used brick instead of stone, and tar for mortar. 4 Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves and not be scattered over the face of the whole earth.”

 5 But the LORD came down to see the city and the tower that the men were building. 6 The LORD said, “If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. 7 Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.”

 8 So the LORD scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city. 9 That is why it was called Babel ^[c] —because there the LORD confused the language of the whole world. From there the LORD scattered them over the face of the whole earth.

We always talk about the Tower of Babel as if it was one structure in the middle of a cow field that was going up.   But the plan was to build an entire city according to verse 4.  They mention that the tower will be a part of it.  Clearly it’s part of the problem.  They think the tower will allow them to reach the heavens.  I can see the various problems with this.

But they have other stated goals.  They want to make a name for themselves.  They want to avoid being scattered over the Earth.  We never find out what part of the plan is the most offensive to God. 

It does seem reasonable to think about the tower though.  Becuase here’s another thing that never occured to me: What do they mean by “not be scattered over the face of the earth.”  Is this a general statement about all the random things that can happen?  Or is this a specific reference to the flood?

Did they recall, through stories, the flood?  It gives one explanation for why you’d want to build a tower of stones.  Maybe the hope was that they could make it higher than the flood waters would ever go.  Maybe by using those “new fangled bricks” the assumption was that the foundation wouldn’t be washed away.

I know that God said he’d never flood the world again.  Maybe that’s the whole point.  Maybe part of why God scatters them for their failure to trust his promise to never flood the world. 

There is relevance in all this in my every day life.  When I am in the middle of something great with other people, the natural assumption is that Satan is responsible for the disruption.  But one of God’s earliest actions in the entire bible is to get in the middle of something which is on some levels great.  And to disrupt it utterly.   Clearly the issue isn’t so much what they were doing (building a city) as why they were doing it (to make a name for themselves, to avoid being scattered.)  Even the idea of reaching heaven isn’t a bad one.  But the way in which they wanted to do it was bad.

Interestingly, God didn’t say “Yeah, that’s a good plan.  Why don’t you see if that little brick tower of yours makes it up to heaven.”  God new it would never be high enough.  Today we know that.  He confounded a community because their hearts and intent was wrong.  That’s an interesting thing.

My own children and my high school students so often remember the punishment, but not the crime.  Sometimes, my youngest will come out of time out and say “Why did I get that time out?”  It’s human nature to try to minimize the effect of the consequences of our actions, rather than trying to avoid the consequences themselves.

If my assumption about the flood is correct, if the tower was a way to make it through the next flood, we see how far back this goes.  The mind set wasn’t: “Let’s make sure humanity never again gets so corrupt that God wishes he never made us in the first place.” It wasn’t “Let’s celebrate the fact that God’ll never use a flood again.”  It was “How can we create an insurance policy for when the flood returns.”

I wonder what my life would be like if I spent more energy taking the right lesson away from my struggles.

The Great Pleasure Machine

I’ve been pondering how we’re wired to search out the truth.  Even when that truth is irrelevant to our every day existence, even when it is painful we search out the truth.

At the same time, paradoxically, we thrive on denial.  There are things we don’t admit to ourselves.  But denial isn’t the whole story.

Consider the first Matrix movie.   The characters in the movie are faced with a choice: live in the bleary, harsh, dangerous world that actually exists.  Or they can participate in a tremendous illusion, living in the safe comfort of a virtual existence that is much easier and more comfortable.

Or a thought experiment.  Suppose somebody designed a perfect pleasure machine.  While attached to this machine you can do nothing but experience unimaginable pleasure.  Would you want to spend the rest of your life attached to this thing?

Or something a little closer to home: If your spouse had an affair, would you rather live in blissful ignorance?   If your cherished grandfather was dealing crystal meth, would you rather not know?

We cheer for the characters in the matrix who operate in the real world, rather than the imaginary one.  Most of would not want to spend the rest of our waking days attached to The Great Pleasure Machine (though personally, I wouldn’t mind a few minutes.)  We would want to know about our spouse.  Or are grandfather.

I’m not saying we wouldn’t be a bit ambivalent, even tempted by not-knowing.  But overall, we want to know.

To me, the things that’s interesting, is that in some of the cases, you can’t provide a logical account as to why we want to know.  If our spouse was going to bring home a sexually transmitted disease from the affair, it’d be logical to want to know.  But suppose both your spouse and the partner are monogomous, and disease free.  I think we still want to know.

No matter what stipulations we put on these scenarios to guarentee that our ignorance won’t negatively impact us, something in us yearns for the truth.  We’d even rather be hurt by the truth than live in ignorance.

People who don’t believe that their isn’t an absolute and fundamental truth, people who suggest that we were “created” by random circumstances, I think they owe an explanation here.  It’s hard to imagine why all this would be the case if we weren’t wired this way by a truthful creator who wants us to seek him out.

 

 

The Dove

1

Then he sent out a dove to see if the water had receded from the surface of the ground.  But the dove could find no place to set its feet because there was water over all the surface of the earth; so it returned to Noah in the ark. He reached out his hand and took the dove and brought it back to himself in the ark.  He waited seven more days and again sent out the dove from the ark.   When the dove returned to him in the evening, there in its beak was a freshly plucked olive leaf! Then Noah knew that the water had receded from the earth.   He waited seven more days and sent the dove out again, but this time it did not return to him.

2

As soon as Jesus was baptized, he went up out of the water. At that moment heaven was opened, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and lighting on him. 17And a voice from heaven said, “This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased.”

3

It was not like the others of its kind

That is why Noah chose it, of all the animals to check.

(Or perhaps it was like those others

and it was simply the fastest in the cage,

leaping to the mans hand…

perhaps it was only in that Greater Later

that the thing found itself born again.)

 

Out and back

out and back

out, out, out…

But never back, that third time.

Never landing below

the ground had let the dove down before.

up and up

up and up

up… and then…

home.

 

Time passed, a timeless time past.

The bird made new

or perhaps it’s true nature revealed.

 

It descends

to lead us from our otherwise death

it

descends

to crown

The King.

Fighting persecution

Jesus makes all sorts of promises about how difficult it will be to follow him.

It’s easy to look at these people who will oppose us and demonize them.  That’s probably part of our fallen nature: to look at those who stand in our way and ignore their humanity.

There is this whole cast of figures that I’d always looked at in this light.  People from the Ancient Romans, to anti-Christian governments, to people in my life who take issue with my Christianity.

It’s easy to demonize this crowd.  To think that it is somehow a moral failure on their part to stand in the way of Jesus’ mission.

I had this realization this morning: the only moral failure is mine for not presenting who Jesus is.  They might be making mistakes, these other people.  They might be deluded or confused or wrong.  But it’s not a moral issue.  It’s a reality issue.

The fundamental question isn’t: what’s right or wrong?

The fundamental question is: who is Jesus?

Because what counts as right or wrong is determined by who Jesus is.  The way the second question is answered will impact the first.

If somebody has answered that second question in a different way than I have, then they will oppose what I want to do.  This is only natural.  It’s not a measure of their immorality. 

If somebody wanted to spread Buddhism to the world, I would oppose them.  Becuase I disagree with them about the question of who the Buddha was.  Can I expect to be treated any differently?

Furthermore, even among Christians, to whatever extent God is moving in my heart alone, I should expect to have to fight that battle alone.  I might create an overall reputation of trustworthiness or untrustworthiness.  I can hope that my reputation will precede me.  But if I say to someone “I believe that this is what God wants me to do because when I listen very carefully that’s what he seems to be saying” I should only expect them to believe this as far as they trust me and as far as what I’m saying is consistent with what they already know about God.

It seems like God might use us to broaden our own or somebody else’s ideas about who he is or what he is about.  The prophets and (later) Jesus did this over and over again: they never contradicted what God had unvieled before.  But they did cause God’s prior self-revelations to get revisited and re-envisioned.

(Did you ever notice how we want to have our cake and eat it too, with in Chrsitian circles… Out of one side of our mouth we make claims like ‘There are 897 prophecies in the Old Testament that Jesus fufilled’ and out of the other side of our mouth we say ‘Jesus was so different than everyone expected that even the experts in the law didn’t recognize him.’?)

Seeing things this way doesn’t make things easier.  It seems to me that the traditional view, the view I’d always clung to, was that people who would stand in the way of what I’m trying to do in Christ, people who stand in the way of who I’m trying to be in Christ, these people were on the opposite side.  They are my opponents.  I should deal with them as if there is a war and they are the foot soliders of the other side.

OF course there is a war.  But we’re told in scripture the enemy is powers and principalities.  Those who persecute us– even with violence– they are, in fact, doing something which (from their vantage point) is quite reasonable.

The Year of Living Biblically

I just finished “The Year of Living Biblically” by A. J. Jacobs.  It’s outstanding stuff.  Not only is it an entertaining read, but it’s got really profound implications for those of who are Christians.  A few of these implications are theological, but mostly this should be required reading in terms of evangelism.

The writer is fairly up front about his agenda.  He begins wanting to expose the idea that nobody can follow all of the bible literally.  To prove this point he takes one year of his life and spends this year attempts to follow the bible.  While doing this, he visits all sorts of communities who are attempting to follow the bible literally as well.

He does the mandatory trip to visit the Amish.  And he hangs out with a variety of Ultra Orthodox Jews.  He visits snake handlers.  He journeys to Israel.  And spends some time among the surviving Samiritans.  (Did you know that there were surviving Samaritians?  I didn’t.)

There is some interesting facts in the middle of all this.  But more than this his treatment is incredibly even handed and fair.  He meditates on both the beauty of the snake handlers’ faith and the wierdness of what they do.  He spends some time at Pat Robertson’s church and he chats with Tony Compola. 

Despite the idea that he starts with an agenda he’s incredibly fair and even handed.  He’s as nuanced in his discussions as these sorts of books could possibly be.  He treats the left and the right with parity.  And he mantains an openness.

There are places where modern life seems to force him to be silly.  He stones somebody with tiny pebbles.  But even this turns into an opportunity for insightful reflection.

The relevance to evangelism is in his transformation.  Over the course of his “biblical year” he does not commit himself to either Judaism or Christianity.    But he begins a journey.  He develops a healthy respect for ideas he probably once would have considered wacky. (Perhaps he still considers them wacky: but now he respectfully finds them wacky)  And he finds that he loves to pray.

I know that it’s true of my own journey that when I was placed in a worshipful environment (the church) I got what was going on in a way that I never would have if you’d just described it to me.  When I began to pray, mostly out of desperation, it worked.  It didn’t make sense that it worked.  I probably never would have gotten to a place that logically it made sense to pray. 

I have heard it said (maybe in some cheesy kids movie) that sometimes you have to believe in order to see.

My own experiences and this book bare out this idea.

I think what all this means is that we need to work hard at helping people have the experience of our faith that speaks to us.  Perhaps we need to tone back our talking about our faith and starting turning up the doing.  This is scarier in some ways: deep down we all know that there is something wierd about worship services, the ways we pray, etc.  We expose ourselves when we step past the stage of just talking about our faith.  But of course, we have to do it.

Even if none of these motivations resonant with you, pick up the book.  It’s a good entertaining read.  It’s also got lots of interesting exploration of stuff I had no idea was in the bible.

This post was submitted to Randy Elrod’s Watercooler Wednesdays.

Binding

I’ve recently come across the idea of binding in three different biblical contexts.  They shed some interesting light on each other.

Abraham had to bind his son before killing him.  (Those of us who know the story know that he didn’t kill him.  But he did bind him in preperation.)

Some Orthodox Jewish people bind themselves, following ”Old Testament” instructions to do so.

Many people use prayers to bind Satan or demons.

It’s interesting, that we atleast translate all these words as the same: binding.  In each case we are preparing for sacrifice.  In the first case, it’s normally a sacrifice of an animal.  And the sacrifice is the killing of that animal.

In the second case, I suppose we are sacrificing oru agendas, desires, will. 

In the third case, the binding of demons seems to be an agnolwedgement that under our own power we really don’t do much of anything.  I’ve always been a bit troubled by the idea that I simply say Jesus name, and it’s like a Harry Potten incantation: suddenly I have power over the root of evil itself.

(I imagine I’m going to stir up all sorts of irritation with that last sentence.  I’d ask readers to really hear me out.  I’m not saying that Jesus’ name carries no power.  I’m saying it’s easy to look at this as if the power is in the sounds themselves.)

But if we view binding as the preperation we realize that Jesus himself will do the sacrificing, the dealing with the demon, whatever dealing that is.

 

Old Age in Genesis

Genesis reports that the first several generations of humans lived for many centuries.    I’ve heard people before notice that each generation lives a few years shorter than the generation before.  The idea is that Adam was nearly genetically perfect and each generation after got further and further and further from his genetic near-perfection.

The thing that strikes me as a little odd about this idea is that it seems to suggest that the fall gets progressively worse over time.  I have no particular reason to think that we ought to be able to recover from the fall on our own: there’s no good reason to think things ought to get better.  But it’s a little strange to ponder the idea that things are slowly getting worse. 

It would seem like Adam and Eve– who after all made that fateful decision– ought to experience the effects at least as much as the rest of us.

I suppose somebody could argue that in the Garden they had some sort of advantages that lead to them later in life living longer than everybody else.  The problem with this idea is that every single generation lives shorter than the life before.  It’s not like there’s a sudden drop off.  It’s this gradual shortening of life spans, across dozens of generations.

It’s almost like the fall set loose some sort of symbolic toxin or radiation or cancer.  It’s progressing, getting worse with each generation.  On a literal and practical level, perhaps the shortening life spans are a result of increasing human foolishness, greed, and selfishness.  Each generation honored its elders less and took increasingly poor care of them.  Or each generation was marred by increasing violence making it increasingly likely that people would die at increasingly young ages.  Or each generation simply made less healthy decisions.

These don’t seem all that likely either, though, because the bible does not report these specific things (not taking care of the elderly or increasing violence) and because the drop off is so steady.

An interesting thing is that all these guys are (by our standards) incredibly old when they have our first children.  Like nearly a century old in most cases.  Presumably they aged slower as adults or simply stopped aging at some point  (Otherwise, can you imagine what it would be like to be 200?)  I wonder if they aged slower into adult hood.  If they lived five times as long as us, did it take five times as long to reach adolesence?  Would they emerge from puberty at age 90?

I feel so not up to the task of parenting sometimes.  How awesome would it be if I was able to have five times as much life experience under my belt before I became a dad?!?  This is again, assuming that I don’t get the other less-fun symptoms of being that age.  And sometimes I mourn for all those ages that are behind me.  It’d be awesome to get to spend more time in some of those ages.  (Allthough, junior high was the deepest pit of hell.  I wouldn’t want to extend that by a factor of 5)

I make no secret of the fact that I’m ambivalent on the question of whether or not these stories literally happened.  But I do notice that there is something interesting on a more symbolic level.  (This does not contradict a literal reading, it might complement it.)

One of the ways I make sense of the bible’s talk about sons inheriting the sins of the father is by adressing the fact that we see this all the time anyway.  It seems unfair, but it’s undeniable that if I make a lousy decision in many cases my kids will pay the price for it, too.  I break a law and go to jail, they end up growing up with out a dad.  I become addicted to drugs they have to deal with all the stupid things I did under the influence.  I get a divorce and they grow up with all the challenges a divorce brings.

The question I never considered before this morning was this: who pays more, the father or the son?

Perhaps the idea that is illustrated in these shrinking life spans is that sometimes the sons will pay a much higher price than the father.  Maybe it’s more difficult to grow up without a dad than it is to go to jail.  Maybe some sin has a snow ball effect, and we start just a little ball of the stuff rolling down hill.  It’s a knee-high ball for our kids.  Our grand kids cope with a snow ball the size of a house.  Our great grand kids face a full blown avalanche.

1 Corinthians 13 (Revised)

1 Corinthians 13

The very depths of me hum

with the greatness of this realization:

 

This realization that though I might speak great truth

truths which unlock the secrets of this world

truths which unlock the secrets of the next world

I might speak ecstatic wisdom.

 

but words

without love

are only noise.

 

And I might appear to be a prophet:

holy man healer medicine man mystic.

There might be a depth to me

deeper even than the deepest wisdom

Healings, trances and supernatural abilities.

but actions,

abilities,

without love

are irrelevant.

 

If I am self-sacrificing:

if I give every piece of me

to build up every piece of you

if I give until I am a sad shell…

if I wait until I am almost nothing

if I throw the sad remnants of what I once had

of what I once was

into the very flames of sacrifice…

if I sacrifice even my love

if I give even my love

until I have none left

then I have truly given too much.

 

Where patience manifests itself

love is underneath.

 

Where true kindness emerges on the outside

love hovers beneath.

 

Where envy has been transcended

love has conquered.

 

Where boasting has been ended

love has begun.

 

Where pride falls

love rises up.

 

Where cruelties fade away

love comes into focus.

 

Where selfishness is defeated

love victors.

 

Where rule books and score books are thrown away

love springs up.

 

Love does not flourish among evil,

love abides in truth.

Love preserves the eternal

Love trusts even when it is hard

Love believes in the best of us

Love maintains the best of us.

Love is perfect.

 

It is not like our words, any words

whether those words refer to this world or the next.

 

Some day

we will run out of words

 

Some day

our tounges will no longer wag.

 

Love is perfect.

It is deeper than understanding.

understanding resides within us.

and begins as a passenger with us.

but transforms us, maybe

into the passenger for a while.

 

The best we can ever hope for this life is to speak partial truths.

The best we can ever hope for this life is to know half the truth.

But we can participate,

right here,

and right now

in something which is full and complete.

 

Someday we will be greater than we are.

Someday we will see that we are not so different now

than the child we once were.

 

We know that when we were toddlers

we could not speak complete sentences

or understand the fullness of adult thought.

 

Someday we will look at who we are now

and where we are now.

and we will see that we are still toddling around

still so uncomplete.

We put our childishness away before,

we will put away this new childishness again.

 

In that new place

in that new time

we will step into the fullness

of what we were meant to be.

The best of us

is what will be left of us.

We will be faith

hope

and love.

But the greatest of these

the greatest of what we will be

is love.

The accordian

I am no great lover of the accordian.

 

If you forced me to sum up my feelings about the thing

into just one word

I’d probably settle

on “dorky”

 

I was therefore surprised

to find that the thing

is actually quite a symbol

of Life Itself.

 

Have you ever noticed

how isolated elements of life can feel so familiar

when taken one by one?

Yet somehow

thrown together, taken as a whole.

They just feel so strange.

 

I am not surprised by the existence of war

or my daughter’s sweet kisses.

I am not surprised by the smell of patchoulli

or the flavour of success…

Until I think about the fact

that they all inhabit the world together.

 

And the humble accordion.

A Frankenstien’s monster of a thing.

A keyboard torn from a piano and turned on its side.

thrown onto a bellows of a  blacksmith.

and some buttons thrown on the other side for good measure

wielded by the sort-of kid

they put a “kick-me” sign on the back of

in movies set in the 1950’s.

Who would concoct such a thing?

 

The notes themselves

if you just listened to one or two

these would be in explicable

except for the clear assertion that they are not music.

 

If you chose a moment, two moments

out of my life.

They, too, would be inexplicable

except for the fact that they are not music.

 

When you string those notes together, though

well sometimes

sometimes it is still not music.

But other times?

other times, it is.

 

There are times that the accordion is stretched out so wide

that I think it is has expanded to fill up the size of the world.

And there are times at that is compressed so small

I wonder if it would fit in the back pocket

of somebody’s lederhosen.