Jesus Christ the Scandal of God

I'm in the midst of another good book that I'd like to share with you.

It is so easy to think of myself as this important person that does important things. As we go to White Swan, I frequently have to check myself. We tend to get many kind people saying very nice things about us and what we are doing. We are very thankful for this. But it doesn't help me to be humble. It doesn't help me to give glory to God for what He is doing in and through me. It is so easy for me to turn something into a me thing instead of a God thing.

I've been reading The Ragamuffin Gospel, by Brennan Manning and it has some really good things to say. Some of it I've questioned theologically, but there are some really helpful insights that Manning has regarding the grace of God that covers all our sin.

"According to Hosea, God is willing to maintain a relationship even when His spouse [Israel or the Church or me] has become a coarse and vulgar prostitute. This same conviction is carried into the New Testament. The adulterous woman is brought before Jesus. The god of religious leaders, who never got over Hosea's contribution, is expected to judge her. She has been unfaithful and the divine posture embodied in leadership would stone her. The God of the Pharisees is interested in the contract, in justice first and foremost. Let us kill the woman for the contract. The person is expendable. 

"But in the man, Jesus, we see the human face of God, one in keeping with Old Testament revelation. He is interested in the woman. His love moves beyond justice and proves more salvific than spelling out the ground rules all over again.

"Unjust? To our way of thinking, yes. Thank God! I am wonderfully content with a God who doesn't deal with me as my sins deserve. On the last day when Jesus calls me by name, 'Come, Brennan, blessed of my Father,' it will not be because Abba is just, but because His name is mercy." Pgs 103-104

I would add that God's justice is satisfied because Christ took the punishment for our sins. So He is both just and the justifier.  He is both just and merciful.

"For those who feel their lives are a grave disappointment to God, it requires enormous trust and reckless, raging confidence to accept that the love of Christ knows no shadow of alteration or change. When Jesus said, 'Come to me, all you who labor and are heavy burdened,' He assumed we would grow weary, discouraged, and disheartened along the way. These words are a touching testimony to the genuine humanness of Jesus. He had no romantic notion of the cost of discipleship. He knew that following Him was as unsentimental as duty, as demanding as love. He knew that physical pain, the loss of loved ones, failure, loneliness, rejection, abandonment, and betrayal would sap our spirits; that the day would come when faith would no longer offer any drive, reassurance, or comfort; that prayer would lack any sense of reality or progress; that we would echo the cry of Teresa of Avila; 'Lord, if this is the way you treat your friends, no wonder you have so few!'" Pg 115

Isn't this just like God? He always flips everything on its head. Or more correctly, we've flipped everything over and He puts it right again. We are so focused on duty, on doing right. Jesus is focused on relationship, "Come to me . . ."

"Will we ever understand the gospel of grace, the furious love of God, the world of grace in which we live? Jesus Christ is the scandal of God. When the Baptizer is imprisoned by Herod, he sends a couple of his followers to ask Jesus, 'Are you the One who is to come into the world or should we wait for another?' Jesus says, 'Go back and tell John what you have seen and heard: the blind see, the deaf hear, the lame walk, the poor have the gospel preached to them, the messianic era has erupted into history, and the love of my Father is revealed. Blessed is he who is not scandalized in me.' 

We should be astonished at the goodness of God, stunned that He should bother to call us by name, our mouths wide open at His love, bewildered that at this very moment we are standing on holy ground." Pg 104

We make Jesus into our own image. A peaceful, conservative, baby Jesus. (We even think we know what Jesus looks like, thanks to borderline, or maybe not borderline, but actually blasphemous books like Heaven is for Real.) But He turned to the peaceful and conservative of the day and called them a "brood of vipers." If Jesus doesn't scandalize, then we aren't seeing the real Jesus.

The Banality of Evil

[Editors Note: This post has nothing to with Sacred Road and could be controversial. The fact that it could be controversial, however, is a statement in itself.]

Adolf Eichmann

This summer I read the book by Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. This book describes the trial of the German Nazi leader that occurred in Israel in 1961. Eichmann was accused of committing crimes against the Jewish people, crimes against humanity and war crimes during the whole period of the Nazi regime but especially during the War. Eichmann was instrumental in the deportation of Jews from various countries in Europe and then eventually in the transporting of Jews to the extermination camps.

What I'd like to do is quote several passages from this book with the purpose of showing how people like Eichmann could be instrumental in accomplishing the Holocaust and the entire German nation could support (or at least stand by and allow) the Holocaust to happen. And then draw an analogy to how the United States is passively and some actively allowing the holocaust of abortion to happen right under our noses.

In trying to justify his actions, Eichmann tried to point to the Kantian definition of duty. He defined this as "'I meant by my remark about Kant that the principle of my will must always be such that it can become the principle of general laws' (which is not the case with theft or murder, for instance, because the thief or the murderer cannot conceivably wish to live under a legal system that would give others the right to rob or murder him). . . . In this 'period of crimes legalized by the state,' as he himself now called it, he had not simply dismissed the Kantian formula as no longer applicable, he had distorted it to read: Act as if the principle of your actions were the same as that of the legislator or of the law of the land--or, in Hans Frank's formulation of 'the categorical imperative in the Third Reich,' which Eichmann might have known: 'Act in such a way that the Fuhrer, if he knew your action, would approve it. . . . It is true that Eichmann's unconscious distortion [of Kant's principle] agrees with what he himself called the version of Kant 'for the household use of the little man.' In this household use, all that is left of Kant's spirit is the demand that a man do more than obey the law, that he go beyond the mere call of obedience and identify his own will with the principle behind the law--the source from which the law sprang. In Kant's philosophy, that source was practical reason; in Eichmann's household us of him, it was the will of the Fuhrer. Much of the horribly painstaking thoroughness in the execution of the Final Solution . . . can be traced to the odd notion, indeed very common in Germany, that to be law-abiding means not merely to obey the laws but to act as though one were the legislator of the laws that one obeys. Hence the conviction that nothing less than going beyond the call of duty will do." pgs, 136-137

"Confronted with documentary proof of [Eichmann's] extraordinary loyalty to Hitler and the Fuhrer's order, Eichmann tried a number of times to explain that during the Third Reigh 'the Fuhrer's words had the force of law', which meant, among other things, that if the order came directly from Hitler it did not have to be in writing. . . . Within this 'legal' framework, every order contrary in letter or spirit to a word spoken by Hitler was, by definition, unlawful. Eichmann's position, therefore, showed a most unpleasant resemblance to that of the often-cited soldier who, acting in a normal legal framework, refuses to carry out orders that run counter to his ordinary experience of lawfulness and hence can be recognized by him as criminal. p. 148

"Eichmann . . . at least dimly realized that it was not an order but a law which had turned them all into criminals. The distinction between an order and the Fuhrer's word was that the latter's validity was not limited in time and space, which is the outstanding characteristic of the former.  This is also the true reason why the Fuhrer's order for the Final Solution was followed by a huge shower of regulations and directives, all drafter by expert lawyers and legal advisers, not by mere administrators; this order, in contrast to ordinary orders, was treated as a law.  Needless to add, the resulting legal paraphernalia, far from being a mere symptom of German pedantry or thoroughness, served most effectively to give the whole business its outward appearance of legality.

"And just as the law in civilized countries assumes that the voice of conscience tells everybody "Thou shalt not kill,' even though men's natural desires and inclinations may at time be murderous, so the law of Hitler's land demanded that the voice of conscience tell everybody: 'Thou shalt kill,' although the organizers of the massacres knew full well that murder is against the normal desires and inclinations of most people. Evil in the Third Reich had lost the quality by which most people recognize it--the quality of temptation. Many Germans and many Nazis, probably an overwhelming majority of them, must have been tempted not to murder, not to rob, not to let their neighbors go off to their doom (for that the Jews were transported to their doom they knew, of course, even though many of them may not have known the gruesome details), and not to become accomplices in all these crimes by benefiting from them. But, God knows, they had learned how to resist temptation." pgs, 149-150.

I agree that comparing the US with Nazi Germany is controversial and not accurate.  However, it struck me as I was reading this book that we have so thoroughly cloaked abortion in politics and court cases and precedent that it seems to insulate us from the horror of what it actually is, the murder of our offspring. We have cloaked the discussion in conversations about choice and a choice it is, to murder our offspring.

The Nazi's were able to cloak their actions by changing the law to sanction the massacre of Jews, Gypsys and others that were defenseless and without advocates.  How different is this from the United States cloaking its actions (and Christians not doing much about it) under Roe v. Wade to sanction the murder of the defenseless unborn?

The Cost of Discipleship

What does it mean to follow Christ? How much of what we believe is affected by our culture? What lenses do we read Scripture through and how do those lenses impact how we understand Scripture? And then how does that understanding influence how we apply Scripture to our lives?

I've been thinking about these types questions lately. One of my concerns is how difficult it is to see blind spots in my understanding of Scripture. In my own life I've noticed how difficult it is to recognize when I am looking at things through a middle class American lense rather than a Christian lense. We live impacted and influenced by our surroundings and often can't see how those surroundings alter the way we think (or don't think) about things.

A book written a few years ago by David Platt, attempts to address some of these questions.  The book is titled, Radical: Taking Back Your Faith from the American Dream. There are a few quotes I'd like to share.

"Somewhere along the way we had missed what is radical about our faith and replaced it with what is comfortable. We were settling for a Christianity that revolves around catering to ourselves when the central message of Christianity is actually about abandoning ourselves." Pg. 7

"Yet the kind of abandonment Jesus asked of the rich young man is at the core of Jesus' invitation throughout the Gospels. Even his simple call in Matthew 4 to his disciples--'Follow me'--contained radical implications for their lives. Jesus was calling them to abandon their comforts, all that was familiar to them and natural for them." Pg. 11

Christ and the Rich Young Ruler

What do we do with the verse after verse in Scripture that tells us to give of ourselves, give up our lives, give up our belongings, give up our family? Many of these verses speak directly against what the American dream is telling us. Frankly, many are speaking against what today's American church is telling us.

• Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal, but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven . . . . For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. Matthew 6:19-20a, 21
• Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me, and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. And whoever does not take his cross and follow me is not worthy of me. Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it. Matthew 10: 37-39
• Then Jesus told his disciples, "If anyone would come after me, let them deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it. For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul? Or what shall a man give in return for his soul? Matthew 16:24-26
• At the end of Christ's interaction with the Rich Young Ruler Christ says, "And everyone who has left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or children or lands, for my name's sake, will receive a hundredfold and will inherit eternal life. But many who are first will be last, and the last first." Matthew 19:29-30
• Fear not, little flock, for it is your Father's good pleasure to give you the kingdom. Sell your possessions, and give to the needy. Provide yourselves with moneybags that do not grow old, with a treasure in the heavens that does not fail, where no thief approaches and no moth destroys. For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also. Luke 12:32-34
• Now great crowds accompanied him, and he turned and said to them, "If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple. Whoever does not bear his own cross and come after me cannot be my disciple. . . . So therefore, any one of you who does not renounce all that he has cannot be my disciple." Luke 14:25-27, 33
• Whoever loves his life loses it, and whoever hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life. If anyone serves me, he must follow me: and where I am, there will my servant be also. If anyone serves me, the Father will honor him. John 12:25-26
• And all who believed were together and had all things in common. And they were selling their possessions and belongings and distributing the proceeds to all, as any had need. Acts 2:44-45

It is really hard to know what to do with these verses.  It is easy to read them in a spiritual way and say that what we are to give up are simply moral vices. And we know that is true.

But its too easy to stop there.

An Eternal Perspective

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I recently finished the book, The Christian Mind, by Harry Blamires. One area I would like to probe a bit more is this idea that Mr. Blamires brings up the supernatural orientation that Christians should have in their thinking.

He writes, "a prime mark of the Christian mind is that it cultivates the eternal perspective. That is to say, it looks beyond this life to another one. It is supernaturally orientated, and brings to bear upon earthly considerations the fact of Heaven and the fact of Hell. . . . The Christian mind sees human life and human history held in the hands of God. It sees the whole universe sustained by his power and his love. It sees the natural order as dependent upon the supernatural order, time as contained within eternity. It sees this life as an inconclusive experience, preparing us for another; this world as a temporary place of refuge, not our true and final home."  Pg. 67

Too often we think and act like eternity is not real. We think like all we have is the here and now.

If we think like the non-believer, the concerns over our retirement account, type of car we have or where we live take on an importance well beyond what they should. The pleasures of this life and today's circumstances take precedence over the love of God and our neighbor.

Our life right now is full of all kinds of things that take our minds off what is important eternally. Selling our house, packing and getting organized, transitioning out of my firm, trying to find a home on the Reservation. It is easy to get caught up in the uncertainty; to be anxious and try to take things in our hands. Even to begin to doubt when things don't go as smooth as we would hope.

It is also easy to get caught in all the things that we have to do and not focus life here and now. Emily going to Homecoming, our Pastor's wife that had a miscarriage and showing them love and care, taking advantage of opportunities to share the Gospel as we tell people what we are doing, speaking the truth to friends that are having marriage troubles. Life is going on around us and it is so easy to lose sight of what is important and what the Lord has before us - specifically - to do for His glory.

But then we go to church on a day like today and hear the following passages of Scripture read. A true dose of reality that helps focus perspective on life.

Preparation of Confession:  For you, O Lord, are good and forgiving, abounding in mercy to all who call upon you.  Psalm 86:5

Assurance of Pardon:  We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life. Romans 6:4

The Law of Christ:  But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light. Once you were not a people, but now you are God's people; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy.  II Peter 2:9-10

The Christian is losing his mind

[Editor's note:  While this post has some bearing on Sacred Road it is not directly related.]

I recently read again a great book by Harry Blamires, The Christian Mind: How should a Christian think? (ISBN: 1-56955-044-1) Several years ago Pastor Irwin at Covenant Presbyterian Church had the Elders and Deacons read this book.  My current Pastor Nease recently reminded me about it and so I thought I would read it again.  It is a great book and I recommend that everyone read it.

His basic premise is that the modern Christian has forgotten how to think Christianly. He argues that secularism has infiltrated the way we think about society, politics, and everything else so that now we don't even realize that we think about things with the mindset of the the secular world rather than based on Biblical truths and premises.

You might wonder about this statement.  But he wrote this book in 1963 and I believe his points are even more relevant today.

Mr. Blamires does a great job of reminding the reader that as a Christian we should have an eternal perspective about almost every decision that we make.  This eternal perspective is based on the objective truth that has been revealed to us in Scripture.  Too often we enter into discussions forgetting the fact that we actually have a firmer foundation to engage others.

Here are a few quotes to whet your appetite:

"An important contributory factor to the loss of mental morale by the Church has been a misguided conception of Christian charity.  It has been assumed that the charitable man suppresses his views in the same way that he subordinates personal interest. . . . [Christians] have come to imagine that just as the unselfish man restrains himself from snatching another piece of cake, so too he restrains himself from putting forward his point of view. And just as it is bad form to boast about your private possessions or loudly recapitulate your personal achievements, so too it is bad form to announce what your convictions are. By analogy with that charity of the spirit which never asks or claims but always gives and gives again, we have manufactured a false "charity" of the mind, which never takes a stand, but continually yields ground. . . . A man's religious convictions and understanding of the truth are not private possessions in the sense that his suit and the contents of his note-case are private possessions. . . . Your beliefs, as a Christian, are not yours in the sense that you have rights over them, either to tamper with them or to throw them away. . . . One of the crucial tasks in reconstituting the Christian mind will be to re-establish the status of objective truth as distinct from personal opinions, to rehabilitate knowledge and wisdom in contradistinction from predilection and whim." Pgs. 39-40

"The Christian mind looks at the propaganda of modern secularism and is astonished to learn that under man's management the world is supposed to be on the whole in a tolerable shape.  The normal course through life is pictured as a progress through an increasing number of acquisitions and comforts. You get a house, then you get a fridge, then you get a telly, then you get a car; and all the time you are peacefully maturing, with a pretty young wife at your side, from youth to early middle age.  For in the world of advertisements no man ever grows older than thirty-five and no woman grows older than twenty-seven. It is a cosy picture of life, full of color and ease. There is always plenty to eat and drink. The furniture never gets old or drab. The wallpaper never peels off the walls. The sun shines. The gardens appear to weed themselves. There is no pain, except for a fleeting hint of indigestion which can be magically whisked away by the right pills. . . . The Christian mind is shocked, bewildered, and, as it seems, rendered impotent to communicate meaningfully with a secular mind so cut off from its dearest and most illuminating presuppositions.  Therefore the Christian mind instinctively withdraws, turns its attention to other matters--say, the individual spiritual life, or the problem of Church disunity."  Pg. 74

"To believe that men will be called to account for each wrong committed and each good committed is itself enough to give an urgency to human deliberations and decisions which the secular mind cannot sense. . . . When one weighs the full momentousness of this particular distinction between the Christian mind and the secular mind, one is awestruck. . . . On the one hand is the assumption that all is over when you die; that after sixty or seventy years, sheltered and cushioned by the Welfare State, you can sign off for good; that eating, sleeping, growing, learning, breeding, and the rest, constitute the total sum of things; that in worldly prosperity and well-being lies the source of all meaning and value. On the other hand is the almost crushing awareness of a spiritual war tearing at the heart of the universe, pushing its ruthless way into the lives of men--stabbing at you now, now, now, in the impulses and choices of every waking moment; the belief that the thoughts and actions of every hour are molding a soul which is on its way to eternity; that we are choosing every moment of our lives in obedience or disobedience to the God who created and sustains all that is; that we are always responsible, always at war, always involved in what is spiritual and deathless; that we are committing ourselves with every breath to salvation or damnation." Pgs. 75-76

If you find the ideas raised here interesting, I would recommend reading this book.  He speaks to many interesting topics such as the Christian mind's: 1) supernatural orientation; 2) awareness of evil; 3) conception of truth; 4) acceptance of authority; 5) concern for the person; 6) sacramental cast.