The Defining Moment of Christianity

The defining moment of Christianity is the death of Jesus Christ on the cross. I choose this moment instead of the resurrection for a couple of reasons. First, to everyone who has ever claimed that God is dead, in that moment, they were proved right. Jesus, fully God, fully human, succumbed to the final moment of all our earthly existences, death.

Without the resurrection, Christianity is a sham. At best, it is a collection of moral platitudes and clichés built around the Golden Rule. The promise of Scripture was that Jesus would rise again. So, without a resurrection, we have definitive proof of the error of Holy Scripture.

But for the resurrection to occur, Jesus showed the ultimate love for us. He loved us so much that he died for us, and died horribly. Jesus, as human, would find death inevitable as someone who lived fully as human on this earth. But Jesus as God, as Deity, as the Creator, someone fully separated from the Creation, he died too.

Now death could not hold him, and Jesus knew that death could not hold him, but that promise did not prevent his anguished cry, “My God, my God, why hast though forsaken me?” It did not prevent him from sweating blood in the Garden of Gethsemane, praying that the cup of wrath be passed from him. But he was obedient, he was loving, even to the moment of his passing.

Theologies of the Cross explain the death of Jesus judicially, as atonement, morally, as the ultimate example of faith, cosmically, as the victor over the forces of Satan, but I feel a hole in those understandings.

Biblical interpretation is marvelous at logical and intuitive assemblages of God’s Word to show us the marvelous nature of our faith. And for that I am so very proud to be a Christian.

But I also know that I have been called upon to pastor people who have experienced pain and death and loss in ways I can only imagine. The Spirit gives me utterance, but I have this terrible feeling that I do not have the ‘chops’ to really speak to their situation. But the language of suffering and pain permeates Scripture, as does the language of its healing. I don’t have the ‘chops’, but my Lord Jesus does. I want to explore that, to develop the theology of the Cross to include a real exposition of the suffering of Jesus, how that suffering can truly allow us, as the followers of Jesus, to speak more completely to people who could use the healing we have experienced.

"I Am Legend"

Will Smith is immune to a disease that wiped out humanity. He is trying to find a cure-he was an army doctor before the disease, now a survivor and still working.

A couple more survivors show up. One claims to have been guided by God. Will Smith comments that God didn't do this, man did. Later, in a fit of anger, his true feelings surface, he doesn't believe God exists. But then he finds redemption.

The movie was dark (wiping out humanity movies usually are). But this was higher budget, more thoughtful, and much better acted then the fare I usually watch on Sci-Fi. And I thought they treated the theological aspect pretty well.

It made me think, how much of the population of the earth really needs to survive some human-made disaster and still exist as the children of God? Will Christ come back to the 6 or 7 or 8 billion of us, or to 1% who survive a plague, some 12 million? Or will it be even less?

We are supposed to be the stewards of the earth. Here is one image of what could happen if we do it really badly!

Nonviolence

In anticipation of Martin Luther King Day in January (I need something to keep my frustrations rising from all the Christmas hoopla), I have been reading a collection of his essential works. And one thing that absolutely fascinates me about his work comes from a museum display I saw in Lancaster County, PA.

The local School Boards were trying to impose manditory schooling on the children of the Amish. But the Amish refused. The men gathered and were arrested and held in prison for a time, embarassing the local authorities, until they finally struck a compromise, the eighth grade for men and I don't remember how little education for the women.

As a man with a couple of Masters degrees, married to a teacher, I find the level of education among the Amish relative to 'secular' standards to be too low. But I am also envious at times of how they have truly lived the Christian life as few others.

But I was amazed at the connection between a truly nonviolent Christian community embodying the nonviolent protests that were advocated and broke down the walls of segregation that shamefully divided our country.

What is the greater sin?

I spent a very refreshing couple of days back at my alma mater, Westminster Seminary. Its biblical rigor grounds me. Each year, there is a preaching conference. I have had the privilege of attending the last two, and both have bolstered me. But this one was also very tough.

Dr. Bryan Chappell of Covenant Theological Seminary delivered the message home so powerfully that God loves me, no matter what, no matter what I have done. This truth is there for all Christians, that God has chosen them, that there is no abandonment. Sometimes, when it feels like I am out there by myself, I can lose that center.

But then we had the alumni dinner. It was another powerful occasion, sharing the successes of the Seminary, catching up, looking forward. But one of the things the Seminary participated in was a mass mailing to I think it was over 57,000 congregations in California and the other states with the ballot initiative of defining marriage as between a man and a woman.

In a stroke, the tyranny of the majority was going to undo, especially in California, the public committments that two people in love had made to one another to be exclusive to one another until death did part them. And this was celebrated as a triumph in the Seminary that is so central to my grounding in God's Word.

And it makes me sad. The mercy of God is from everlasting to everlasting, but there was no mercy in that moment. I am only one voice, standing on the other side of the line in the sand they have drawn on the issue of interpreting Scripture and homosexuality. I am not sure I am worthy, or even have the words to preach to them, they are so dear to my heart.

This was a similar fight I had when I attended. It was the reason I could not pursue ordination in the Presbyterian denominations they train pastors for. The issue was the ordination of women. There was a very intense biblical interpretive construct of why that could not be. And I do not question their scholarship. But I attended and was nurtured in a mainline Presbyterian Church with a woman pastor embodying the best in ministry.

What God revealed in the practice of God's people and what God's people saw God revealing in God's word were at odds in that moment. I chose what I saw in God's people. I chose to understand and interpret Scripture from a wider perspective, using broad themes of freedom and considering the more restrictive historic circumstances in which Paul and other authors of Scripture wrote from.

I am there again. There are people, committed Christians, for whom their sexuality is not a choice. But they are marginalized as either lying or too messed up in their sexuality to know what is 'right' by good and loving people who, I believe, have taken the interpretation of Scripture in a wrong direction.

God is good, God is love, God does not marginalize or exclude those God loves. And I accept the authority of the inspired canon of Scripture. So there is a problem in the interpretation, somewhere. Are we willing to prayerfully find where we have fallen and correct our mistakes?

Tyranny of the Majority!

There are thousands of marriages at risk in California. The propositional election system is allowing a tyranny of the majority against a new sweep of committed monogamous relationships. Women and men who have committed their lives together have just had their lives put in new jeopardy. That stinks!

The amazing thing is that I am usually a great supporter of direct electoral involvement. I think the representative system has fallen under the control of party politics that has made it so hard for the average citizen to stand for office, much less influence things by direct ballot access.

But that is why we have Constitutional guarentees. That is why we have an uberlaw to protect us from the tyranny of the regular legal systsm. And in California it has fallen.

I am not even looking at a theological framework at this moment. I am simply venting my anger that those for whom homosexual marriage is not their business, namely heterosexual voters, are able to oppress in one day a significant segment of our population who were gaining equality in this nation.

It is wrong.

From "A Year of Living Biblically"

For one year, the author tried to live biblically, exploring the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, trying to live the biblical moral law of the Old Testament and the New Testament. Along the way, he spoke to many sects and leaders of both Judaism and Christianity. One of the most significant contacts he made for the purposes of our discussion was an Evangelical bible study group that met in New York City.

These were men from churches that condemn the ordination of homosexuals, that seek to block the possibility of marriage of homosexuals, who take the biblical passages on homosexuality as condemnation of those who are gay, lesbian, or transgender in our culture. And each man was a self-avowed homosexual, and evangelical, and living examples of being at odds what the evangelical wing of the Church teaches.

They've taken the biblical passages speaking against homosexuality as references to pagan sexual worship practices. This interpretation has come out of their dual experience. They have not made a 'choice' to be homosexual. It is in their created order. They do not see how Scripture can condemn them for what they have not chosen.

I am not sure how the rest of us can either.

Inerrancy and Homosexuality

I am a strong proponent of the inspiration and the inerrancy of Scripture. I am also a strong believer in the ongoing need to review and reconsider our interpretations of the inerrant Word of God.

Genesis teaches that God created man and woman in God's image. It teaches that there is a combined effect of image borne in a monogamous relationship. Genesis also teaches how sin has entered the world and creation itself is fallen under the effects of sin. I believe that tainting has struck even to the biological levels of our humanity.

I had someone describe this as the 'freakshow defense'. Simply put, there are physical specimens of humanity that defy the created order of Genesis. Biologically, they do not fall under the perfection of Eden that "man and woman God created them". Nonsexual humans, humans with the sexual organs of males and females, humans with none, have been reported in the medical literature.

So what do we do with people like this? Because the bible says 'man and woman', are we to assume these people do not seek to have a monogomous relationship-recognizing the great difficulties that presents. Or are 'man and woman' titles that refer to the pre-Fallen condition of humanity?

Then here comes the possibility that I am riding a sled down the slippery slope. If sin has confused the biological definitions of 'man and woman', what about other possibilities? What about "a woman trapped in a man's body" and vice versa? What about people who would be considered beyond reproach in every other part of their lives assumed to be liars when they say their sexual preference for the biological same sex is not a choice, but hardwired?

The easiest decision we can make is simply to ignore the catastrophic effects of sin beyond the power of personal choice and condemn those of homosexual persuasions among us that they have made a sinful choice. That is what the bible teaches, right? Maybe on a superficial read.

But the love of God, the mercy of God, the redemption of God overcomes the effects of sin, we believe that comes by grace in Jesus Christ. And there are convincing testimonies out there from Christians who do not believe their sexuality is a choice-and those who live homosexual lives are condemned for it.

I think the rest of us have committed a sin by our condemnations, without daring to err on the side of mercy, without daring to admit that we are very likely wrong.

Because the inerrant Bible teaches that we are all created in the image of God, that we are all Children of the Living God, brothers and sisters of Jesus, and that we must live by love, not judgment.