Tag: church history

Questioning Authority

~ Vincent

This entry is part of a series called “The Gospel in a Postmodern World.” Learn more about the series here.
Preached on November 13, 2022
Scriptures: Psalm 119:161-168, Judges 17:1-13

Comedy of Errors at an Elegant Downtown Restaurant
The chair is really a table making fun of itself. 
The coat tree has just learned to tip waiters.
A shoe is served a plate of black caviar.
“My dear and most esteemed sir,” says a potted palm to a mirror, “it is absolutely useless to excite yourself.”

I remember my English teacher reading this poem by Charles Simic to the class back when I was a junior in highschool.  When he was done, he asked us what it meant.  One student said that maybe Simic was trying to talk about how objects take on their own personalities over time.  Not a bad guess, but the teacher just nodded his head and kept waiting for more answers, so we kept going.  Another raised their hand and suggested that the author was talking about how we treat objects better than we treat people.  Again, solid guess.  But still, the teacher just kept waiting with that stoic look on his face.  A few other people took a stab, but nothing seemed to satisfy him.  Finally, an uncomfortable silence settled over the room.  He said, “I noticed all of you were trying to tell me what the author meant.  What if he didn’t have anything in mind when he wrote this?  What if this is just a random thing he wrote down?  What if YOU’RE the one who has to decide for yourself what it means?”

He was introducing us to that classic dilemma within literature: where does the authority to declare the meaning of a piece lie?  Is it with the author, is it in the work, or is it with the audience?  If the author is the person who has the right to tell us what their piece really means, the best way to learn more about it is to read a biography about them.  The more we can learn about them, the more we can figure out what it was they were trying to get at.  But if you think the work itself has authority, you may not want to waste your time with a biography.  The author might have created something that they didn’t even fully understand!  Spending more time with the work itself will reveal things that they might not have dreamed of.  Pablo Picasso was famously in favor of this way of looking at things.  He would paint something and then critics would say, “Ah were you trying to get at this?” and he’d respond, “You know, when I painted it I didn’t think I was, but now that you pointed out it’s very clearly there.  You’re right.”   And then, of course, the meaning might rest with the audience.  Who cares what the creator wanted to say?  What do you experience when you’re engaging with the work?  How does it make you feel?  How does it help you to see things in a new way?  That’s what it’s all about.

Where does meaning lie?  Where is the authority: the author, the work, or the audience?  This question broadly correlates to three different eras that we’ve been talking about (premodern, modern, and post-modern).  In real life, we have those same three possible sources of authority available to us today.  We’ve got an author (God), we’ve got a work (creation), and we’ve got an audience (ourselves).  Where does authority lie?  Each era answered the question differently.

In the pre-modern world, especially from the Middle Ages until around 1700, it was broadly assumed not only that there was definitely an author of all of creation, but that author had the authority over everything.  If you look at the way their society was structured, it was deeply, deeply religious.  Political theory was steeped in faith.  The economy was highly religious.  Even their everyday language was constantly pointing to God.  Something as tiny as a basic greeting had a religious dimension to it.  Instead of “hello,” you might get something like, “God be with ye,” or “God save you.”  And why?  Because they assumed if you really want to understand things, you look to God.  God knows the meaning of everything.  Look to Him and you’ll know what’s going on.  You can see that attitude reflected so clearly in their writings.  I’m going to stick with poetry to explore the thought processes in each era because, you know, pick a motif and go with it.  John Dunn’s poem, Death, Be Not Proud, is a great example of thought in the Middle Ages:

Death, be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;
For those whom thou think’st thou dost overthrow
Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me…

It goes on from there in that same general spirit.  What’s he drawing trying to draw attention to?  God.  We see this thing called death, and it might look scary, but it isn’t as bad as we think.  If you have faith in the author of creation, in God, you have to recognize that death isn’t anything to fear.  Look up to God and you’ll know how everything works out in the end. God makes sense of the world, even in the face of death.

Now let’s move forward to the Modern Era.  In the 17th through the 20th centuries, people started to think differently.  They said, if there is an author out there (and who can say whether there is or not), he doesn’t seem to do much.  Let’s not worry about authors.  Let’s worry about the work: creation.  Clearly creation has certain laws, regardless of where they come from.  If we understand those laws, we will understand existence.  So people set about uncovering those natural processes that governed creation.  

Some people think of this as a great scientific revolution.  A time of light, as opposed to the darkness that came before it.  I mean, the movement was called, “the Enlightenment,” so that’s certainly what they were trying to invoke, but I would push back on that.  Yes, there were some great advances in technology during this timeframe, that much is undeniable, but was it really as totally unprecedented as some make it out to be?  I don’t think so.  Science was advanced in startling ways in a lot of timeframes.  If it weren’t for the accomplishments of Medieval scientists that came before them, people like Alcuin of York, Roger Bacon, William of Ockham, Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus, and others, much less the thinkers of antiquity and before them.  No, the heart of the movement wasn’t nearly as scientific as it sometimes presented itself to be.  No, the biggest difference was that philosophical change in perspective: the world is its own authority.  We just have to understand it’s laws if we want to live well. To see that in action in a very unscientific way, let’s take a look at Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself:

I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.

My tongue, every atom of my blood, form’d from this soil, this air,
Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their parents the same,
I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin,
Hoping to cease not till death.

What’s Whitman excited about?  Nature!  This air!  This soil!  This blood!  Natural things are good.  There’s an earthiness that makes all of creation worth paying attention to.  It has value in and of itself.  Don’t look up!  Look out.  Look to creation.  It will tell you all of the meaning that needs to be known.

And then, of course, we have the Postmodern Era which we have discussed at length throughout this series.  That’s where you end up with poetry about shoes getting fed caviar.  What’s the point?  It’s up to you.  What does the work bring up in you?  What journey do you undertake internally when you encounter creation?  That’s what matters.

As you go through each era, you can see how people think about meaning and order.  The pre-modern mind saw a sacred order.  God at the top, everything goes around him.  The modern mind saw a natural order.  Keep the order in mind and you’ll figure things out as you go.  In the postmodern world, you make your own order, because there’s no natural logic to the things out here.  The world is what you make of it.

I know some of you may not be big fans of poetry, so thank you for suffering through those examples with me.  You can see these philosophical elements in any artistic medium, though.  I just chose poetry because I liked it and it’s short enough to get to quickly, but you can choose anything you like.  Think about literature.  Dante’s Divine Comedy is a perfect example of a pre-modern story.  A man goes through Hell, Purgatory, and then Heaven, detailing things along the way.  We’re literally observing the divine order at work.  You move into the Modern Era and you have Walden.  It’s just a guy living in the natural world.  The whole point is showing the beauty of living well within that natural order.  And then take something from today, for example, A Song of Ice and Fire a.k.a. Game of Thrones.  It may not be exactly a literary classic but it’s a story that got a lot of people’s attention.  Who’s the good guy in Game of Thrones?  No one.  There’s no divine order.  There’s barely any order at all.  Everyone is trying to seize power for themselves because where does power lie here? You.  You decide what the world is and you try to make what you can of it. 

You start in the medieval section and you will see art everywhere depicting divine beauty: Jesus, saints, and angels.  Then you move forward a little and what do you see?  Landscapes.  People want to capture the beauty of the natural world.  And the further on you move, the more you see the landscapes start to vary.  Artists like Monet and Van Gogh start to paint landscapes from perspectives that earlier artists would never have imagined.  And then, of course, you get to contemporary art and things just fall apart.  I saw one exhibit that was just a fence leaning against the wall.  If they didn’t have a plaque with the artist’s name next to it, I’d have assumed they were just doing construction!  I even googled it and found that exact fence on sale at Home Depot for $219.  You too can have an art installation in your home for the low, low cost of $219.

As we move through these different philosophies in each era, from seeing the authority in an author, to seeing authority in the work, to seeing it in ourselves, you would think it would be like a process of taking off shackles.  Theoretically, we should be the freest people of all time.  We should feel lighter than air!  We should be freer than ever since we’re only answerable to ourselves!  But if that’s the case, why is our Postmodern Era so typified by existential dread?  Why do so many people wake up in the morning and ask themselves, “What’s the point?  What am I even doing here?  What’s the point of any of this?”  It turns out, when we’re the only ones with authority and we invent our own meaning, it’s really easy to remember that it’s all nonsense.  We made it all up!  It’s pointless.  If we get frustrated or bored by what’s going on, the sheer arbitrariness of it all is right there, staring us in the face.  Is it any wonder that people can’t be bothered to enjoy a meaning that they know they’ve made up?  Why bother reading a book or a speech or short story when all of it is nothing more than an opportunity for me to expound upon myself.  Things feel pointless because in many ways, they are.  When the world is bound by the smallness of our own horizon, it seems so tiny.  We have nothing to live for!  We have nothing to die for!  It’s all tremendously shallow.  

This is not the first time that these sorts of ideas have taken hold.  There’s this temptation to assume that whenever something happens, it’s happening for the first time ever.  That’s rarely the case.  Here, we can see in the Scriptures a period not so very different from the one we inhabit; a period where people see no legitimate authority outside of themselves.  Let’s read through Judges chapter 17 carefully.

Now a man named Micah from the hill country of Ephraim said to his mother, “The eleven hundred shekels of silver that were taken from you and about which I heard you utter a curse—I have that silver with me; I took it.”

Then his mother said, “The Lord bless you, my son!”

Right from the beginning, this story should strike you as odd.  What a strange opening!  A man steals his mother’s fortune.  It’s 1,100 shekels of silver.  We don’t need to do any kind of ancient conversion rate to figure out that this is a lot.  Near the end of this story, someone is promised ten silver shekels of silver annually for a job and he takes it without complaint.  If ten shekels a year is a decent wage for one year, this is massive!  He’s set for life!  But he stole it from his mother, who curses whoever took the silver, so he brings it back.  And what’s her reaction?  To bless him.

Why?  Returning the money you stole because you’re worried about a curse is better than keeping it, of course, but it’s not exactly an example of sterling behavior.  Maybe it’s worth lifting the theoretical curse over, sure, but giving a blessing?  Why?  He hasn’t done anything good!  He barely managed to avoid the obvious evil that he was headed towards!  He hasn’t earned anything!  Even though he’s a sketchy guy, he gets a blessing.  I’m sure only good will come of this.

When he returned the eleven hundred shekels of silver to his mother, she said, “I solemnly consecrate my silver to the Lord for my son to make an image overlaid with silver. I will give it back to you.”

So after he returned the silver to his mother, she took two hundred shekels of silver and gave them to a silversmith, who used them to make the idol. And it was put in Micah’s house.

There has been some debate among commentators about what exactly was intended by the word “idol” in this particular story.  Is this idol intended to represent a being other than God, or is this idol a visual representation of the god of Israel?  I tend to assume the latter.  She essentially says, “Thank the Lord! I’ll have this idol made,” so to me that tips the scales towards an idol designed in service of God, rather than Baal or someone like that.  But here’s the thing, it doesn’t actually matter in the end. Either you’re making an idol for some other God, in which case you are guilty of breaking God’s law because you made you’re worshiping some other God, which is wrong, or you’re breaking the law by making an idol, which is against God’s law regardless of the intent you had when you made it.  

God explicitly forbids idols multiple times throughout the Scriptures.  It’s in the Ten Commandments!  Don’t make idols!  Why?  Because even if the idol is intended to serve God, idolatry fundamentally reverses the divine order.  God created us.  We are in his image.  When we turn around and create idols, in some sense we’re turning around and creating God.  We’re designing him in our image.  God is not subject to the smallness of our understanding.

The pattern of disordered behavior continues.  At first, a blessing went to a thief.  Now an idol goes to God because someone wants to thank him.

Now this man Micah had a shrine, and he made an ephod and some household gods and installed one of his sons as his priest. 

Even if I was right earlier and that first idol was intended to serve God, Micah has decided that one god wasn’t enough.  He’s filling out a little pantheon for himself, giving his main god some little friends.  Then he designs his own priestly garb and finds a priest to hire.  He’s got his own little religion going on!  And then we see the through line for the whole book of Judges:

In those days Israel had no king; everyone did as they saw fit.

This line appears throughout Judges, and it’s one of the last lines of the entire book: in those days, Israel had no king; everyone did as they saw fit.  It’s not necessarily a reference to a physical King.  Not long after Judges ends, Israel does get someone to be king and God warns them that they don’t need a king over Israel.  He warns them that he should be their king and that any king other than him is going to make all kinds of mistakes.  But they tell God, “That’s a little abstract for us.  We’re not really into the whole ‘king we can’t see’ thing. We’d rather just get a physical king just like every other nation.  Thanks!”  So they get a king, and he’s pretty rotten.  The point here is not just that there’s no physical king; it’s that there’s no authority.  There’s no god that anyone really acknowledges.  They are their own authority.  They do what they want.

A young Levite from Bethlehem in Judah, who had been living within the clan of Judah, left that town in search of some other place to stay. On his way he came to Micah’s house in the hill country of Ephraim.

We’re introduced to this Levite, a priestly figure, out traveling around.  He’s looking for somewhere to stay.  We don’t know why, but we know he has responsibilities back home.  For whatever reason, he’s out and about and he meets Micah…

Micah asked him, “Where are you from?”

“I’m a Levite from Bethlehem in Judah,” he said, “and I’m looking for a place to stay.”

Then Micah said to him, “Live with me and be my father and priest, and I’ll give you ten shekels of silver a year, your clothes and your food.” So the Levite agreed to live with him, and the young man became like one of his sons to him.

Micah hires this Levite away from his responsibilities in Bethlehem. And notice that at the end, it says that this Levite became like a son to him. In Roman Catholic churches today, people refer to priests as “Father,” partially to show reverence to a religious authority, but here this Levite is just the opposite! He’s “like a son.”  This priest isn’t someone he’s going to submit to.  He’s hired a false authority for show, but he retains authority over this Levite. 

Then Micah installed the Levite, and the young man became his priest and lived in his house. And Micah said, “Now I know that the Lord will be good to me, since this Levite has become my priest.”

What an absurd statement we get to end this story.  This man has done nothing but break the God’s law since the story began.  He stole money from his own mother, he made an idol, he invented new gods, he started his own religion, and then he hired a corrupt priest to serve as the head of this new religion.  And he sits back and thinks, “Yeah, God must be pretty happy right now.”  Why?  He’s never done anything that God wanted.  He’s only done what he wanted.  He imagined what he thought a good divine order might look like, he usurped traditional elements and ritual to make it look like it had some dignity to it, and now he’s bought in to what he himself invented.  He’s not interested in worshiping God!  He’s only interested in legitimizing his own self-worship.

All too often, that is the way Christians approach church today.  Is there an interest in God?  In church?  In his divine order?  No.  But there is an interest in legitimizing self-worship with traditional elements and ritual.  We come to church with our lives just the way we like them and tell God, “I’m happy with the way I’ve arranged things.  I just need you to sign off on it.  Please tell me it’s ok to break your law.  You want me to be happy, right?  So approve of what I’ve done!  Tell me you’re happy.  Tell me you’re happy!  Tell me you’re happy!”

The whole thing reminds me of a theory by the famous mystic Evelyn Underhill.  She once explained the goal of life by telling people to map their lives out on paper.  Write the central element of your life in the middle, and then everything that serves that center all around the page.  For most people, their name goes in the middle of the page, and most events in their lives are intended to serve them.  God ends up in a corner of the page, propping up their ego.  In this model, the assumption people carry is that God exists to serve them.  People assume that if everything serves them, they will be happy.  Ironically, it makes them miserable.  We long for something greater than ourselves to serve.  As long as we’re using all of the elements in our lives to serve ourselves, we’re eternally frustrated by just how shallow everything seems.  If we want to make a better map, we start with God in the center and design everything in our lives around him. How are we serving him?  How is our life a part of something greater than ourselves?  Serving God brings joy!

I think she’s right. I think she’s absolutely right.  In a world where there’s a sense that we ourselves are the ultimate authority and there’s no meaning outside of ourselves, we Christians have the meaning of life at our fingertips!  But there’s a temptation to slink back and say, “Maybe they’re right.  Maybe I am the authority.  Maybe all of these religious trappings are intended to serve me.  God is here to endorse my order.  He’ll like what I do.  He’ll sign off on it.”

But if we do that, we are denying the world something it desperately needs.  People are waking up every morning asking, “What’s the point?”  People desperately crave to know that there’s a point to all of existence.  For crying out loud, they’re reading poetry about feeding caviar to shoes and they’re staring at gates!  We can do better than that!  People are seeking legitimate beauty!  Legitimate truth!  Legitimate authority!

We have to accept God’s authority to understand any of that.  We have to seek to serve Him, rather than ourselves.  There is an authority outside ourselves.  There is an author, and he carries incredible authority over creation, revealed to us most completely in his word.  The great missionary, Leslie Newbiggin once said, “If we cannot speak with confidence about biblical authority, what ground have we for challenging the reigning plausibility structure.” In other words, we can’t present a genuine Gospel to the world if we can’t trust that God’s authority, as put forth in his word, is actually legitimate.  No, we need to look to Scripture and see how the God that we claim to serve is communicating with us!  Talking to us!  Telling us what the point is!

Of course, sometimes, it’s hard.  Sometimes, the things God asks of us in Scripture are incredibly difficult.  Some of his ways don’t seem to serve our wants at all.  The world might look on and say, “What are you doing?  Why don’t you just live an easy life?”  Nobody remembers people who live easy lives.  Nobody writes stories about people that did nice, easy, normal things.  Nobody writes a book about someone who went and got coffee one day.  People read stories about heroes that slay dragons and save kingdoms.  People crave stories about people who overcome the odds for something greater than themselves.  That’s something we have the opportunity to do: to serve something greater than ourselves. 

For the past three sessions (not counting our Reformation Day detour), we’ve talked about Postmodernism.  We’ve talked about the ways that the church is, in many aspects, on the back foot.  We’ve talked about truth; in the postmodern world claiming to know objective truth is seen as arrogant.  How do we communicate in a way that seems humble without giving up on truth?  We’ve talked about sin; in a world where the assumption is society is the sole corrupting force, how do we acknowledge the sin that rests in the human heart?  Both truth and sin are complicated to discuss honestly with people outside the Church.  It violates popular thought in ways that are often seen as offensive.  But when it comes to authority, I think we may have something intriguing on our hands.  It’s something that doesn’t violate the orthodoxy of secularism in a way that’s obviously offensive, but is still outside of the norm enough to make people hesitate and ask, “What?”

If we started to live into God’s authority, REALLY started to live into it, we would probably be perceived as pretty weird people.  We’d be those Christians; the ones who take it a little too seriously.  Too often, we try to distance themselves from those Christians.  We try to seem religious, but not too religious.  We try to be approachable and cool.  That’s proven pretty ineffective.  Looking at attendance rates in larger denominations, the more a church ignores the uncomfortable bits in Scripture to seem cool, the more their attendance rates plummet.  The more a church presents a Biblical counterculture to the world, the more likely they are to grow.  I don’t mean to oversimplify things by suggesting that attendance proves that something is right.  Obviously popularity is a poor substitute for truth.  But I do mean to suggest that people outside the church are seeking more than just an institution willing to rubber stamp the dominant cultural order.  They’re actually more interested in a weird place that they don’t fully understand than they are a safe place where that affirms their own authority.  Weird isn’t all bad.

When you’re weird, you show that you’re willing to break from a status quo that’s proving itself ineffective.  You also become the kind of group that earns a second glance from people.  Have you ever stopped to look twice at something normal?  No!  Of course not!  You see a million normal things every day.  Why on Earth would you stop to look at one more normal thing any longer than you have to?  But something weird?  You may well stop and look for a minute!  This thing, foreign though it may seem, is different.  It’s got something to say.  That’s a huge advantage to the Church, if we’re willing to take it.

Some churches do, and it proves surprisingly effective.  I remember one Pentecostal girl in seminary that spoke very well on this.  When I met her, I asked her about tongues because that’s what you do when you’re talking to someone who’s Pentecostal!  You talk about tongues!  It’s a rule somewhere I think.  We chatted about it a bit before I said, “You know, it must be really hard to evangelize because that’s really out of the norm.  I mean I think it’s weird and I’m a Christian!  I already agree with you on like a huge chunk of things that non-Christian people don’t, and I think your understanding is, forgive my saying it, strange.  It must be infinitely more challenging to talk to non-Christians about your faith, since this is a significant part of it.”

She responded, “Are you kidding me?  It’s so much easier for me to evangelize.  People want to talk to me.  They come up and say, ‘You’re Pentecostal, right?’ and I say, ‘Yeah.’  And they say, ‘But you obviously don’t believe in that tongues stuff, right?’ and I say, ‘I don’t just believe in it; I’ve seen it.  Come and see!’”

I may not agree with the way Pentecostals understand tongues, but wow, that’s a good sell.  I almost went to church with her there and then.  “Come and see!” 

In a world that isn’t used to accepting authority outside of themselves, there’s a shallowness that many feel.  Increasingly, people crave something bigger than their own thoughts and whims, and we have something they’re looking for.  Something weird.  Something that should be forcing us to live in a way that’s totally different from the people around us.  If we’re honestly accepting the authority of God as presented in the Scriptures, people should have to look twice!  If we’re living the way that we’re supposed to, there should be conversations a lot like the ones she experienced.

“You’re a Christian, right?”

“Yeah.”

“But you don’t believe in any of that weird stuff do you?”

“Yeah.”

“Wait, so you actually think there’s a God that you can talk to and outdated laws he wants you to keep and an objective point to all of this?”

“I don’t just believe it; I know it.  Come and see.”

The Authentic Self

~ Vincent

This entry is part of a series called “The Gospel in a Postmodern World.” Learn more about the series here.
Preached on November 6, 2022
Scriptures: Psalm 51, Romans 3:9-20

This is sermon three in our series on the Gospel in a postmodern world.  In our first week, we talked a little about the current state of things in the West.  Statistically, Christians are more likely to lose their faith than in any prior generation and conversions are rarer than ever before.  Rather than assume that it’s just a product of every church being incompetent or suggesting that the Gospel needs a hip new revision for a new era, I went in a different direction.  I suggested that the current Western cultural movement, Postmodernism, is one that is especially challenging for Christianity to flourish in.  The doctrinal orthodoxy of pop-culture is not kind to our faith.  We can’t just keep doing the same old same old.  We have to accept that we are missionaries in this new world, and the first step for any missionary is to evaluate the culture.  Know it.  Know the advantages and the disadvantages.  Know the challenges and the easy moves.  Know what people expect.  Then you can go from there.

In week two, we talked about truth.  The postmodern world is typified as a post-truth world.  There is no popular framework for real, objective truth.  There’s only subjective truth.  What’s true for me is not what’s true for you.  Truth is little more than an opinion that’s accepted by all present.  This will not do.  Christianity, from its inception, claimed to be genuinely true, not partially true or a truth in a competing market of reasonable truth claims.   Christians have to be people concerned with OBJECTIVE truth, calling people back to a genuine reality that was created by God.

And then we had a slight departure from the series in Reformation Day.  Which was fun!  I love doing a little history.  We talked about Martin Luther and the origins of Protestantism.  We learned about sola Scriptura and sola fide.  And near the end of the sermon, I mentioned that works righteousness was making a comeback.  People today, if they assume a god exists, don’t see themselves as someone who needs salvation from the God in question.  All in all, they don’t tend to see themselves as something that needs saving.  Which makes sharing the gospel in a traditional way a challenge.  “Hey, did you know God will forgive all your sins in Jesus Christ?”  “What sins?”  “The ones you’ve done your whole life long!”  “That’s pretty presumptuous of you.  I haven’t really done any sins that matter.  Actually, I’m one of the good ones.  Shame on you for being so judgy.”

And some of you may feel as though that’s an untrue statement.  You might think, “Hey, most people would agree to their sinfulness on some level, Vincent.  You’re just being judgy.”  So let me clarify my observation here: how many people that you meet genuinely consider the core of their humanity to be tainted by original sin?  How many people genuinely think that they’re only capable of good by God’s grace, without which they are only able to sin?  Not a lot.  The average assumption about human nature isn’t that it’s hopelessly flawed.  It’s that it’s actually shockingly good.  Let’s think about a pop culture example that states this theory pretty clearly.

How many of you saw The Greatest Showman?  It came out about 5 years ago.  It was actually up for a few awards, if I remember correctly.  It’s this musical about the circus.  In that movie, there’s a group of people that belong to the circus’s freak show.  They’ve had hard lives.  They’ve been made fun of.  They’ve been ostracized.  But now?  Now that they’re in a community together, they’ve gained the confidence to be themselves… and they sing this power ballad: This is Me.

I am not a stranger to the dark
Hide away, they say
‘Cause we don’t want your broken parts
I’ve learned to be ashamed of all my scars
Run away, they say
No one’ll love you as you are
But I won’t let them break me down to dust
I know that there’s a place for us
For we are glorious
When the sharpest words wanna cut me down
I’m gonna send a flood, gonna drown ’em out
I am brave, I am bruised
I am who I’m meant to be, this is me
Look out ’cause here I come
And I’m marching on to the beat I drum
I’m not scared to be seen
I make no apologies, this is me.

What is the assumption about our singers?  That deep down, they’re incredibly beautiful.  They’re different in a way that scares the world, and so the world has tried to keep them down.   So they have to band together and resist the pull of society!  They have to learn to be authentically themselves in a hostile world. 

 The problem isn’t with me!  The problem is OUT THERE in society!

Now, obviously in that example, it’s hard not to agree.  Being mean to a bearded lady because they look different is unambiguously cruel.  But that ballad spoke to people from every walk of life.  It won the Golden Globe award for the Best Original Song, it was nominated for an academy award and a Tony, and it had millions of replays on every music streaming service you can think of.  And why?  Because it’s easy to relate.  It’s easy to feel like someone who is uniquely beautiful that’s being held back by society.  That’s part of the philosophical lens of the postmodern world.  Sin isn’t something in me.  I’m pretty amazing once you get to know me.  SOCIETY is the sinful thing.  If you tell me Im sinful, that’s not gonna resonate.  It’s mean.  I’m pretty good.  If you tell me society is sinful… oh, man.  AGREED.  Society IS dreadful.  We need to get rid of that thing so that I can start being my authentic self!

The orthodox Christian view is very different than the modern Western view.  And just to drive that point home, I want to look at two philosophers.  One a very orthodox Christian theologian.  One a philosopher of the Enlightenment.  Both men wrote a book named Confessions.  Both of those books detail a story in which they  stole produce.  But the takeaway for each man is totally different depending on how they think about sin and what needs redemption.

Our orthodox Christian is Augustine of Hippo.  In his Confessions (written sometime in the fourth century) when he was a teenager, he was hanging out with his friends one night… and they saw this tree of pears on someone else’s property.  And what did they do?  They stole the pears!  They snuck into the yard, filled a basket with the pears, and made off with them.  Why?  Not to eat them.  As a matter of fact, they had better pears at home.  They just threw the basket of pears to some pigs and laughed about the whole thing.  No, they stole them because it wasn’t allowed.  They wanted to break the rules.  They wanted to steal.  They wanted to destroy something beautiful!  He writes:

“It was foul, and I loved it. I loved my own undoing. I loved my error–not that for which I erred but the error itself. A depraved soul, falling away from security in thee to destruction in itself, seeking nothing from the shameful deed but shame itself.” 

-Augustine, Confessions

For Augustine, why did he destroy the pears?  Because something is wrong INSIDE.  There’s something deadly wrong.  That’s why we need salvation… because from our birth, something inside is veering us away from life towards death.  That’s sin.  That’s the problem.  Original sin was something humans were born with.  Because of humanity’s fall when Adam and Eve ate that fruit that God told them not to, humanity’s nature itself was changed.  We went from law-abiding creatures to law-breaking creatures.   So every one of us, regardless of what we’ve done specifically, is tainted by original sin.

Now, let’s move to Rousseau.  Rousseau was a philosopher in the Enlightenment and he ALSO wrote a book called Confessions.  Make no mistake, if you’re a nerd, you don’t accidentally write a book called Confessions without knowing what you’re doing.  He’s deliberately drawing his audience’s attention to Augustine.  And he ALSO includes a story about produce theft with friends!  But notice how he tweaked things.  He’s working for this guy whose mother has a little garden growing nearby.  And this boss asks him to regularly go steal a little bit of asparagus from that garden, sell the asparagus, and give him the proceeds.  He’s really uncomfortable that he would be asked to do this by an authority, but he wants to please the boss, so he does it.  And after a few times, he starts to become bitter.  He asks himself a question: “Why am I taking on all the risk with none of the reward?”  So he starts skimming a little off the top.  But that’s not really enough to make it worth the punishment that he would endure if he were caught stealing, so he starts stealing other little things that he finds around the house.  Apples.  Trinkets.  Anything that he can get his hands on.  He’s been put in an unjust situation!  In his mind, additional theft at least gives him what he’s owed for his boss’s unfair demands.  Notice what slowly twisted him.  Was it his inner desires?  No!  The real culprit was society!  He writes:

A continual repetition of ill treatment rendered me callous; it seemed a kind of composition for my crimes, which authorized me to continue them, and, instead of looking back at the punishment, I looked forward to revenge. Being beat like a slave, I judged I had a right to all the vices of one.

-Jean-Jaques Rousseau, Confessions

Rousseau doesn’t believe in original sin like Augustine does.  He believes in what I’ll call “the beauty of authenticity.”  He thinks people are fundamentally good.  The thing that causes trouble is society.  Society warps people.  It makes them want to be other than what they are.  They start to try to be better than.  Bigger than.  Smarter than.  They want to be the boss!  And for them to be better than, others have to be lesser than.  People, fundamentally good, are warped by the society around them.  People have to learn to let go of society’s corrupting grasp and be the beautiful creatures they always were.

Pears and asparagus.  Both stolen.  Both thefts encouraged by friends.  But the locus of conversion is very different.  Do we need to convert individual people?  Or do we need to convert society?

And some of you, I’m sure, are saying, “Vincent, slow down.  Aren’t they both right?  Isn’t it true that society needs changing and people need changing?”  Sure.  But what we’re trying to identify is the root problem.  If it’s society, I can set out to create bulwarks against unrealistic expectations and oppressive forces to recover the goodness that each person secretly holds in their hearts.  It’s not going to be easy, but it’s doable.  If the problem is that original sin has corrupted human hearts… well that’s a bigger challenge that we can tackle.  That’s when we need to get someone much bigger involved.

The seeds that Rousseau planted during the Enlightenment took root.  And they grew.  And today we see their expression in movies like The Greatest Showman.  People are wired to critique the world around them.  Ask anyone!  Ask, “What cultural forces are preventing you from being yourself?”  You’ll get a laundry list of answers.  Easy.  Ask someone, “What sins are preventing you from being yourself?”  and you’ll get a less warm answer.  Similarly, it’s really hard to talk to someone about a God that forgives their sins when people aren’t really concerned about their own sins.  It’s much easier to talk about a God that wants to change the world around me.  

And I include myself in that.  Remember, as we critique culture, we’re a part of it.  We don’t get to say, “This is what other people do!”  No, this is what WE do too.  It’s really hard to talk about personal sin, it’s easy to talk about societal sin.  That isn’t a natural human instinct to push the blame onto someone else.  It’s a cultural shift.  The early Methodists were required to be in small groups.  You couldn’t be a Methodist without being in a small group.  It didn’t work that way.  And during your small group, you had confession time.  With everyone there.  And you named every sin that you were wrestling with.  And everyone there prayed for God to help you with those sins.  Can you imagine doing that today?  No way!  That sounds insane!  Give me a justice group or something.  Let me go solve the problem OUT THERE!  But the problem in here?  Psht.  Get that outta here.  It’s good enough.

So let’s think about this shift.  Can Christianity let go of its commitment to original sin and shift to focus primarily on societal sin?  No.  No we can’t.  That’s not to say we can’t acknowledge that there’s sin out there.  It’s not to say that we can’t work to try to help those affected by it.  But we can’t say, “people are fundamentally good and we just need to work on some really good laws until we get it just right and THEN everything will be good.”  We can’t.  The problem is deeper than that.  According to the Bible, we could come up with the most perfect society in the world, all the best laws, totally remove all oppressive forces, totally remove all need to feel better than or worse than… and we’d still manage to mess it up.

Turn in your Bible to Romans 3 verse 9:

What shall we conclude then? Do we have any advantage? Not at all! For we have already made the charge that Jews and Gentiles alike are all under the power of sin. As it is written:
“There is no one righteous, not even one;
    there is no one who understands;
    there is no one who seeks God.
All have turned away,
    they have together become worthless;
there is no one who does good,
    not even one.”
“Their throats are open graves;
    their tongues practice deceit.”
“The poison of vipers is on their lips.”
“Their mouths are full of cursing and bitterness.”
“Their feet are swift to shed blood;
ruin and misery mark their ways,
and the way of peace they do not know.”
“There is no fear of God before their eyes.”


Now we know that whatever the law says, it says to those who are under the law, so that every mouth may be silenced and the whole world held accountable to God. Therefore no one will be declared righteous in God’s sight by the works of the law; rather, through the law we become conscious of our sin.

Most of what we have in this section is just Paul quoting other parts of the Bible.  He’s quoting several different psalms and Isaiah.  Why?  To talk about our sin.  And is this because Paul hates people?  Not at all.  He thinks that people have a problem that’s deeper than societal pressures.  He thinks our hearts are fundamentally infected.  And if you have an infection in your heart, do you worry about polishing up your social interactions?  Do you say, “Man, I just try harder and the infection will just go away!”  No.  You don’t solve an infection with willpower. You call a doctor.  Paul is trying to tell us that there’s this infection in our hearts.  And he knows the doctor: Jesus.

What shall we conclude then? Do we have any advantage? Not at all! For we have already made the charge that Jews and Gentiles alike are all under the power of sin

What’s going on here?  Paul is addressing whether or not Jews have an advantage over Gentiles in regard to sin.  After all, they had the law, right?  Surely someone who knows the law will be in less trouble than someone who doesn’t have the law!  They’ve got everything right there!  You might think about this as though it’s about church people today.  Don’t we have an advantage against sinning?  We’ve got the Bible!  We’ve got church tradition!  But what does Paul say?  NO!  You’re not any better off!  You’re a sinner.  You’ve got the same infection that they’ve got.  You need a doctor just as bad.  Sin isn’t just a problem that requires some better laws.  It’s deeper than that.  You need something bigger.  

And now Paul gives us that big list of Scripture quotes:

“There is no one righteous, not even one;
    there is no one who understands;
    there is no one who seeks God.
All have turned away,
    they have together become worthless;
there is no one who does good,
    not even one.”
“Their throats are open graves;
    their tongues practice deceit.”
“The poison of vipers is on their lips.”
“Their mouths are full of cursing and bitterness.”
“Their feet are swift to shed blood;
ruin and misery mark their ways,
and the way of peace they do not know.”
“There is no fear of God before their eyes.”

Look at what he’s doing here.  He’s naming all of humanity first off.  Little babies.  Old folks.  Everyone.  Nobody is righteous.  Not one.  All have turned away.  And now he goes all throughout the human body to show just how lost we are.  Our throats.  Our tongues.  Our mouths.  Our feet.  From head to toe: infected by sin.

And every so often, there’s someone who gets tripped up by that word “fear.”  Fear of God means respect in this context.  Don’t get tripped up.  It’s reverence in the face of his awesome majesty.  It’s the sobering recognition that he’s in charge of every aspect of everything ever.  It’s that feeling of proper smallness in the face of infinite bigness.  It’s not fear that he’ll hurt you.  That’s not what Paul is trying to say.  He’s saying, nobody has a right relationship with God.  Not one of us.  

Now we know that whatever the law says, it says to those who are under the law, so that every mouth may be silenced and the whole world held accountable to God. Therefore no one will be declared righteous in God’s sight by the works of the law; rather, through the law we become conscious of our sin.

The problem should be clear at this point.  It’s not JUST what’s outside.  Sure that’s wrong.  But more than that, there’s a problem inside.  Let’s read on to see the solution.

But now apart from the law the righteousness of God has been made known, to which the Law and the Prophets testify. This righteousness is given through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe.There is no difference between Jew and Gentile, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and all are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus.

There’s the solution.  Faith in Christ is the only thing that can cure us.  Our works aren’t enough.  Just like with Martin Luther last week, you can try and try and try and no amount of effort will ever be enough to solve the problem.  Every person on earth is redeemed not by works, but by faith. A commentator named Handley Moule writes: “The harlot, the liar, the murderer, are short of it; but so are you. Perhaps they stand at the bottom of a mine, and you on the crest of an Alp; but you are as little able to touch the stars as they.” Everyone falls short, but everyone can be justified freely by His grace. The doctrine of original sin matters because you can’t cure a disease that you don’t know about.  If we say we’re all good inside and it’s just a matter of outer troubles, we’re addressing the wrong problem.

But what do we do if maintaining sinfulness is a part of the core Christian thing?  How do we evangelize to people who don’t see themselves as sinful?  If you don’t need to be saved, how can I introduce a savior? I spoke with a campus minister from the university recently, and he actually brought this up.  He mentioned that evangelizing to people by talking about their sinfulness and need for a savior might have worked 50 or 60 years ago, but today, it’s just a non-starter.  People don’t recognize their personal sin or need for a savior.  But something that has proven to be especially effective is evangelism about relationship.  We live in a timeframe where people are more isolated than ever.  In Robert Putnam’s landmark study, Bowling Alone, one of the metrics he used to check societal isolation was the size of groups that people went bowling in.  Now, people go bowling by themselves more than ever.  Bowling leagues are much smaller than they were in the past.  And that’s just the metric he chose as his central conversation piece for the book.  Social clubs are dying in droves, petitions are less common than ever, people know their neighbors less, people meet their friends more rarely.  Community is at an all time low.  People are lonely.  This campus minister recognized that and used it to evangelize.  He talked to people about how God wants to be in relationship with them, despite all the ways they’ve been pushing him away.  THAT worked.  THAT was effective at opening a conversation about God.

People may not feel guilty, but they feel alone.  They know that something is wrong in this world and they’re desperately trying to fix it.  Do they need to know about sin?  Yes.  Absolutely.  But leading with that isn’t going to make sense.  It’s going to feel like an attack and people will defend against an attack.  Guilt versus innocence may not make sense, but loneliness and closeness do.  It’s not a perfect substitute.  After all, if I’ve hurt God, can’t I do something to make it better?  There’s that gap where it’s not completely addressing the sin problem.  But, you know, it’s not works-centric and it’s still accurate.  Sin is a doctrine that will probably take some time for people to understand in our era.  That’s ok.  Not everything will make sense all at once.  Sometimes, you just need to get a foot in the door and see where things go.  When I was first Christian, I barely had anything that looked like a genuine Christian faith.  The only doctrines I thought seemed good were Heaven and a good God.  The rest just seemed crazy!  But the deeper doctrines need more time to teach.  I was hooked by the lure of eternity and and God pulled me in from there.

As we evangelize today, it’s important to recognize that people won’t see themselves as sinful.  This is a hard doctrine.  And unlike objective truth, a debate won’t gain us any ground.  But we can pivot.  We can acknowledge that we are far from God.  Our relationship is weak.  Only through Christ’s sacrifice can we approach God afresh.  And when people start to encounter God, they’ll recognize that it’s not enough to just say hi.  Something more is necessary.  Something that transforms what they are into what they were always supposed to be.  And it’s a good reminder for us too.  When we don’t feel particularly sinful.  When we’re convinced that we’re just a good person trapped in crummy circumstances that someone else really ought to clean up… well that’s when we need to recognize that our relationship with God is weak.  If we’re blaming the world as though he doesn’t know what’s going on in it, we need to spend some time with him.  Only then will we start to see the transformation that we need.

Amen.

Reformation Day

~ Vincent

This entry is part of a series called “The Gospel in a Postmodern World.” Learn more about the series here.
Preached at The Plains United Methodist Church on October 30, 2022
Scriptures: 2 Peter 1:10-21, Romans 1:8-17

Happy Reformation Day, everyone!

I’ve noticed a lot of Methodist churches don’t regularly celebrate Reformation Day, which is a shame.  It’s a great opportunity to look back at our own history; to see where we’re from and what some of our core DNA is.  We need to give it the attention it deserves.  At one of my past appointments, I spoke about Martin Luther during the sermon, and afterwards a woman came up to me and said, “Wow, Martin sounds great!  I haven’t met him yet.  Does he go to the other service?”  Who can’t blame her for what she doesn’t know?  It’s on us pastors for not teaching it enough.

For those curious, Martin Luther did not go to the other service. Martin Luther lived in the 16th century.  He was the founder of Protestantism.  Without him there would be no Methodists!  There would be no Anglicans from which Methodists could come!  Not only would there be no Protestants, but what we know today as the Roman Catholic Church would look different as well.  Martin Luther is a big deal so I think it’s worth a little time to tell his story and remember about one of the great Protestant heroes.  

I want you to imagine that the year is 1521. You are in an imperial court in the city of Worms, a city that’s in what we know today as Germany, but was known back then as a part of the Holy Roman Empire.  This room is full of some of the most powerful people in the world.  Among them is Charles V, the singular man who is the archduke of Austria, the Prince of Spain, the lord of the Netherlands, the duke of Burgundy, and the emperor of the Holy Roman Empire.  He is a big deal.  There’s also a papal envoy dressed in some of the finest clothes imaginable.  In front of that envoy, a monk stands next to a pile of books.

The envoy speaks: “Martin Luther, this court has reconvened.  Yesterday we asked you two questions.  The first: ‘Are you the author of these books in front of you?’  You answered yes.  Our second question: “Do you renounce the ideas contained therein and recant your heresy?’  You asked to be granted a 24-hour recess.  This was granted, but we are back today, Mr Luther, and we need an answer.  Do you renounce the ideas contained within these books and recant your heresy?”

You wouldn’t have expected things to turn out like this given where this story starts.  It starts in a little kingdom called Saxony.   Saxony was not the kind of place where life-altering things tended to happen.  It was in Northern Germany.  Northern Germany wasn’t well developed.  It was really rural.  Southern Germany had a lot of stuff.  Northern Italy had a lot of stuff.  Northern Germany?  Not so much.  There were no ruins of an old Empire to build on.  There were no great trade routes.  Most of their top items to sell were natural resources; grain, fish and minerals.  Saxony wasn’t the kind of place where big things happened. 

None of that was helped by the politics of Saxony only a few generations back.  When King William II of Saxony died, his two sons split the kingdom and each inherited half of it.  The elder brother got to choose how the lands were split, and the younger brother got to choose which area he wanted to inherit.  And so the elder split the lands: one of the two parcels was a long, twisty portion of land that was mostly rural, and the other was a little clump of land that had all of the major cities in it.  The choice fell to the younger brother: did he want to rule the urban center of the lands, or the larger rural area?  He took the urban area, leaving the elder brother, a man by the name of Ernest, the jaggedy rural strip.

Since Ernest was the elder and got second pick of the lands, he got something extra: the title “Elector of the Holy Roman Empire.”   I don’t want to get too far into the weeds describing the political system of 16th century Germanic kingdoms, but here’s a really basic understanding: imagine if the United States had a weak federal government and strong state governments.  In this model, the president would still exist, but he would appear on the global stage to represent the collective interest of the states.  Individual states would have a lot of autonomy.  The president wouldn’t really have much say over them.  That’s basically what the Holy Roman Empire was.  There were a bunch of really small kingdoms, some so small that they were just singular cities, all bound together in mutual interest and represented by an emperor that they got to elect.  Not everyone got to vote for the emperor though.  Only a very small group called “the electors” got to vote.  Ernest may have inherited the rural lands, but he was an elector, and that made him, strangely, an important man with a somewhat unimportant kingdom.

That’s the legacy of 16th century Saxony.  Not exactly the center of the world.  But when Ernest passed away, his son, Frederick the Wise, was looking to change all that.  Frederick was bound and determined to make little Saxony the kind of place where things happened.  The capital of Saxony, Wittenberg, only had 2,000 people in it and 400 buildings, but it was the biggest city there was in Saxony, so that’s where he started.  He created two plans to make Wittenberg a destination for people all over the world.

The first was to create the biggest collection of relics the world had ever seen.  Relics were basically Christian artifacts.  The presiding theory of the day was if you looked at a relic God would bless you.  It was a very mechanistic process.  Look at the thing?  Get the blessing.  Frederick started collecting relics and managed to get his hands on over eighteen thousand of them.  He even managed to collect a vial of milk from the Virgin Mary and a twig from the burning bush.  Now, you can decide if you think those relics were legitimate or not, but people at the time thought they were VERY legitimate.  Pilgrims started flocking to Saxony to see all of his relics laid out in Wittenberg’s chapel.  They wanted to soak up all of God’s grace that they could!

Frederick’s other plan was to build a university in Wittenberg.  He’d build a massive, top-notch university and people would come from all over the place to attend!  Maybe, some of them would even stick around and become citizens of Saxony.  So he started hiring professors.  He even bought one of those newfangled printing presses!  Printing presses were a bit of a curiosity at this point.  Books weren’t all that common.  They weren’t even written in language that the average person understood.  They were only in Latin, the language of scholars.  Frederick wasn’t sure how exactly this printing press was going to help him, but new things were exciting and his university would have nothing less but the very latest in technology.

Even with Frederick’s ambitious plans in full swing, the average person would not have expected much from little Saxony.  Nor would people have looked at the hero of the Reformation, Martin Luther, and expected great things from him.  Martin was from a middle-class family.  His dad owned a mining business and managed the business side of things, which was both expensive and risky.  He had to take out loans to buy the mining rights to a piece of land and he never knew when there might be a cave-in or flooded tunnel that would impact his ability to pay off the loan properly.  He spent most of his life in debt as he took out and paid off different loans, but all things considered, he was pretty good at what he did.  The mining business did well enough, so he sent his son, Martin, off to college in a place called Erfurt, a big city in the area, in the hopes that he would become a lawyer.  If he was a lawyer, Martin would be able to help the family business a lot.

That was not to be.  Martin went to college, and one day, while he was coming back to campus from a little trip, there was a storm.  We’re not just talking about a little rain. We’re talking about howling winds crashing thunder!  Lightning struck right next to him!  He was sure he was going to die.  He prayed to God, “Let me live through this and I will do whatever you want. I will give my whole life to you,” and the storm subsided.  So, true to his word, he gave his life to God and became a monk.  His father was not particularly enthusiastic at first, but he warmed up to it over time. He saw his son’s sincerity and wanted what was best for him.  So, Martin started living in his local Augustinian monastery there in Erfurt.  He found a mentor that he really admired.  Things were going well!  Unfortunately, his mentor moved away.  There was this little university that was just getting started up in Saxony’s capital, Wittenberg, and it was hiring up all of the professors that it could.  Since Martin’s mentor was both a monk and a professor, he took a job and transferred over to a monastery in Wittenberg.  Unfortunately, Martin didn’t have a lot of friends around the Erfurt monastery after his mentor left.  The other monks weren’t on the same page as him.  They decided to transfer him to their branch in Wittenberg so that he would be near his old friend and out of their way.  When you’re a monk, you don’t really get a say in the matter.  They’re not asking if you’d like to be transferred; they’re telling you that you’re getting transferred.

You might think that Martin would be overjoyed to be back with his friend.  He was not.  He was really frustrated.  Wittenberg was full of nothing!  All of Saxony was full of nothing!  That was the kind of place where barbarians settled!  Nonetheless, as he settled in, things turned out pretty well for him.  He became a pastor and worked at the local church.  His mentor helped him get on-staff at the university where he taught as the professor of biblical theology.  Everything was slowly turning out ok.

Now we have the right person (Martin) in the right place (Wittenberg) for the Reformation to kick off, but there’s one critical element we haven’t discussed: the powder keg.  The event that blew up and kicked everything off.  At the time, the Catholic Church was selling something called indulgences.   An indulgence was basically a little certificate from the pope that said all of your sins were forgiven.  They were also transferable.  You could buy one and apply the forgiveness to someone else.  A lot of people would buy them for their dead relatives.  The popular assumption of the day was that your dead relatives were probably in purgatory.  Heaven was only for the super holy Christians, Hell was for non-Christians, and purgatory was for Christians that were too sinful to make it into Heaven.  God would purify them over the course of a few thousand years until they had been fully cleansed of their sins.  That process of purification was said to be pretty unpleasant, so you wanted to help your dear sweet relatives get out of there in any way you could.  Buying the pope’s indulgences was the best way to get grandma to Heaven.

I’m sure many of you find that thought process unthinkable, but there’s a long series of ideas that were accepted over time before selling indulgences started to make sense.  I won’t go through all of it, but it starts with ideas like, “Well, if you go to a holy site, isn’t it reasonable to think that God would bless you?”  Sure, ok, that makes sense.  God probably blesses pilgrims that go to holy sites.  “Well, what if Christians do something to help others?  Like defending them from persecutors by going on crusade?  Will God bless them for doing that?”  Ok, sure, intellectual baggage of the crusades aside, maybe it’s reasonable that God would bless people that set out to help others in unfortunate circumstances.  “Well now, what if you donate a large amount of money so that someone else can do those things?  Wouldn’t that also deserve a blessing?  Because you’re the reason someone else can do it.”  Right there, you’ve already got the fundamental framework for indulgences.  You’re just a hop, skip, and a jump away from writing certificates. 

Martin hated the church’s sale of indulgences.  They were getting ready to sell them in Saxony for the third time in five years.  Saxony wasn’t wealthy!  Why did they keep selling them there?  And all the money from the indulgences was going to fund repairs of Saint Peter’s Basilica, a really fancy church in Italy.  Why did the pope need the money of peasants to fund a church for the wealthy?  And Martin saw the negative effects that indulgence sals had on people, both rich and poor.  Poor people that had to scrimp and save so they could buy a certificate for grandma to go to Heaven.  The rich, on the other hand, didn’t worry as much about living a Christian life when indulgences were around.  They could do whatever they wanted as long as they made sure to grab a certificate for themselves when they were done.  The whole thing had gotten completely out of hand.

As this was happening, Martin had a rapid spurt of spiritual growth.  He was someone who seemed to have it all: he was a professor, he was a monk, and he knew his Bible forward and back!  But he had a dark secret: he hated God.  Martin hated God because he thought that he would never be good enough for him.  The popular theory to explain how law and grace functioned in the Christian’s life was via something called “imbued grace.”  They thought that God gave you enough of his grace to go out and keep the law pretty well.  If you made mistakes, well, then God would be angry.  If you asked for forgiveness, he might punish you a little less severely, but you would still be punished to some degree.  And after it was done, you were expected to go and live a perfect life again.  Martin believed it, just like everyone else, and so he tried very hard to live a life without sin.  He realized that when he really thought about what he had done on a given day, there was always sin to be uncovered.  There was always a moment when he was jealous or when he was short with someone, and so God was always angry and waiting for him to do better.  His best wasn’t good enough.

But everything changed when he was teaching a class on Romans.  Romans is like that.  Some of the most famous Christians of all time converted while reading Romans. Saint Augustine, one of the most famous Christians of the 4th Century, converted while reading Romans.  Martin Luther converted while reading Romans.  John Wesley converted while reading Romans.  The book of Romans is powerful.   Let’s look at one of the passages that was on the top of his mind.  This is Romans 1:8-17:

First, I thank my God through Jesus Christ for all of you,because your faith is being reported all over the world.

This is a letter from Paul to Roman Christians and you can see that he’s impressed with them.  He’s impressed that they have such incredible faith in a place like Rome.  Christians in Rome endured a lot of persecution.  Torture and even death, depending on who was in charge at the time.  It would have been incredibly dangerous.  You would need an impenetrable faith!  But this is the kind of church where people had impenetrable faith.  They didn’t stumble; they endured.

God, whom I serve in my spirit in preaching the gospel of his Son, is my witness how constantly I remember you in my prayers at all times; and I pray that now at last by God’s will the way may be opened for me to come to you.

In other words, he wants to visit them.

I long to see you so that I may impart to you some spiritual gift to make you strong— that is, that you and I may be mutually encouraged by each other’s faith. 

I love the humility here.  One of the great apostles says, “I want to give you a gift and the gift… is that you and I get to sit down and build each other up.” Faith is not just a one-way street!  It’s something that takes people coming together.  People that are mature and very wise and people that are brand new!  We all stand to learn and be built up by one another.

I do not want you to be unaware, brothers and sisters, that I planned many times to come to you (but have been prevented from doing so until now) in order that I might have a harvest among you, just as I have had among the other Gentiles. I am obligated both to Greeks and non-Greeks, both to the wise and the foolish. That is why I am so eager to preach the gospel also to you who are in Rome. For I am not ashamed of the gospel, 

The gospel would have seemed pretty ridiculous by a lot of the popular philosophies of the day.  The average Roman would think that the gospel was nonsense! “Your God’s so great? Well, why’d he get crucified then?  A powerful god doesn’t end up dying on a cross.  I can find a god more worthy of my worship than that.”  The average Jewish person would have been equally disinterested: “Your god is supposedly great, but he hasn’t delivered us from the Romans.  I don’t see any grand miracles that he’s done.  He rose from the dead and apparently did nothing worthy of note for me.”

But Paul is not ashamed of the gospel, regardless of what others think! He goes on to say why:

because it is the power of God 

How often do you think about the gospel in that way?  How often do you understand it not just as a collection of words, but as something powerful?  As words that crackle with energy?   The gospel is the power of God!  It’s not just something for us to mull over in our spare time.  It’s the kind of force that changes hearts and minds.

For in the gospel the righteousness of God is revealed—a righteousness that is by faith from first to last, just as it is written: “The righteous will live by faith.”

This whole time, Martin had been trying to be good enough.  And here we see one of the major themes that comes up again and again throughout Romans: you’ll never be good enough to earn salvation.  On our own, we are not capable of perfectly keeping God’s law.  God grants us salvation not because of our works, but through faith in Christ.  When we reach out and trust in him, that makes all the difference.  Our salvation isn’t through legalism.  It’s through love! God looks down and sees not a guilty person, but someone who has been cleansed!  Who is innocent!  Who is pure!  Someone covered by the perfection of Christ.

We are saved by faith, not works.  Does that mean we should go on sinning?  By no means!  Paul specifically says that later in this same letter to the Romans.  But if our salvation isn’t based on legalism, we should be able to act however we want, right?  No!  Paul says that a true Christian should be transformed through their encounter with God.  We shouldn’t want to sin anymore.  We should be totally different creatures, empowered by God to seek what is right instead of what is wrong. And besides that, our motivations for doing what’s right should change.  We don’t keep the law out of fear of God’s punishment.  We do it out of fear of hurting our relationship with him.  We want to make him happy.  We should naturally want to honor and cherish the one we love.  Our relationship with God may not be based on maintaining a code of conduct, but we should still want to honor the God who saved us with everything we do.

And here, inspired by the words of Scripture, we see Martin articulate one of his big ideas: sola fide.  We are saved by faith in Christ alone, not by our works.  Not our abilities.  Not because we’re good enough, but because we have faith in Jesus.  We reach out to him and accept the sacrifice he made on our behalf.  Martin’s big idea didn’t come from the intellectual trends of the day, but through scripture alone.  There’s another one of his big ideas: sola Scriptura.  That’s Latin for “by Scripture alone.”  Scripture is the only authority that we can rely on to ensure that we’re practicing real Christianity and not just something that we made up.

Now we’ve got the who, the where, and the what.  Everything is in place.  Martin Luther started preaching what he had learned in Romans.  And the indulgence sellers came into Saxony and started preaching their doctrines.  This is a selection from the sermon of a man named Johann Tetzel.  He was selling indulgences in Wittenberg, and this is what he preached:

You should know that all who confess and in penance put alms into the coffer according to the council of the confessor, will obtain complete remission of all of their sins…  Why are you standing there?  Run for the salvation of your souls!…  Don’t you hear the voices of your wailing dead parents and others who say, “Have mercy on me, have mercy on me, because we are in severe punishment and pain.  From this you could redeem us with small alms and yet you do not want to do so.”  Open your ears as the father says to the Son and the mother to the daughter, “We created you, fed you, cared for you, and left you our temporal goods.  Why then are you so cruel and harsh that you do not want to save us, though it only takes a little?”  (20-21, A Sermon, Johann Tetzel, as found in The Protestant Reformation, Hillerbrand)

THAT was the last straw.  THAT was what made Martin Luther write his ninety-five theses.  Ninety-five reasons why indulgences were bad! Ninety-five reasons that the pope was wrong! Ninety-five ways the church was failing!  And he didn’t just keep this debate in academic halls. He started writing books.  These were books written in a language that regular people could actually read.  He wrote for the average person because he thought they deserved to know what was going on.  He also made sure that people had access to the Bible in their own language so they didn’t have to take his word for it.  They could go to the Word of God and look for themselves!  He looked to Scripture alone (sola Scriptura) to find the truth, and now everyone else could do the same.  Because even if he was eloquent, his words weren’t worth anything.  God’s word was worth something.  It was and still is the final authority on all things.

Some people get a little confused about Luther’s relationship with tradition They think he brought this new, unheard of understanding to the Scriptures and represented a radical break in Christianity from its past.  That is not the case.  Yes, he trusted Scripture alone as the ultimate authority, but that doesn’t mean he was ignorant of tradition or uninterested in the Christians that went before him.  Read some of his writings sometime!  You won’t make it far without finding a citation from one of the great thinkers from the first 1500 years of the faith.  The man was a professor that sold books.  His goal wasn’t to prevent people from reading and learning from those who went before him!  His goal was to reconnect with early Christianity and recover the faith from people who had slowly twisted it over the years.  Sola Scriptura doesn’t mean separating yourself from the collected body of Scriptural knowledge and just believing whatever you want to believe about the Bible.  It means learning as much about it as you can about God’s word, educating yourself on what it’s saying to you, and taking it as the authority above any earthly thinker, regardless of how popular they might be.

Well, after he posted his ninety-five theses, things got difficult.  It turns out posting ninety-five reasons why the pope is wrong doesn’t exactly put you in his good graces, and in those days, the pope was shockingly powerful.  Pope Leo X wrote a papal decree called Exsurge Domine, which is Latin for “Arise, O Lord.”  It basically said: “Martin Luther, turn from your heresy or burn for your heresy.  The choice is yours.”  And that brings us back to where we started: an imperial court where a monk is being questioned.  He was asked, “Do you recant your heresy?”  Here is how he responded:

“Unless I am convinced by the testimony of the holy Scriptures or someone can reasonably prove to me that I have erred (for I neither believe in the pope nor the councils alone since it has been established that they often erred and contradicted themselves) I am bound by the Scriptures which I have cited at length and my conscience has been taken captive by the word of God. I am neither able nor willing to recant. Here I stand. I can do no other.”

From there, things got really crazy.  He was whisked back to Saxony, where he went into hiding.  Remember how Frederick the Wise was deeply invested in making Saxony a place where things happen?  Turns out that no matter how devoutly Catholic he was, he wasn’t willing to give over someone who attracted as much attention and sold as many books as Martin Luther.  Martin’s big ideas kept spreading, and more and more people started hearing the things that he was saying.  That is how Protestantism started.

Why do I think this story is worth our consideration?  It’s not like anybody is going around selling indulgences today, right?  After all, why would they?  The average person isn’t convinced they’re particularly sinful.  They may not perceive themselves to be perfect, but they don’t think they’re a bad person, and that ought to be good enough for God.  Works righteousness has made a significant comeback in the modern era; the bar for salvation-worthy works is just a lot lower than it was in Luther’s day.

People simply don’t understand the seriousness of sin anymore!  In an environment like this, we need to remember our solas: sola fide and sola Scriptura.  From whence comes our salvation?  Not from ourselves!  Contrary to popular belief, we’re not particularly good.  We’re saved because God is particularly good.  He’s the only one with the power to save us.  The best thing we can do is to trust our lives in his hands.  To have complete and total faith in him, rather than ourselves.  Sola fide.  And how do we know that this is the case?  Not because we’ve kept up with the philosophical trends of the day particularly well or because we’ve read the articles that have harvested the most clicks.  No.  Our authority is not the shifting sands of public opinion.  It’s Scripture alone. Sola Scriptura.  We look to the word of God and that is our rock and our anchor.

Aside from the solas, Luther’s boldness is so incredible.  He stands for what’s true, even knowing that he might be killed for it.  That’s the level of boldness that the church desperately needs to reclaim today.  Only a few generations ago, it was socially advantageous to participate in a church.  It didn’t matter if someone believed any of it; they were happy just to be participating in a normative institution of American culture and reaping the benefits that came along with it.  You can find records where businessmen with almost no interest in religion move to a new town and immediately join the local church.  Why?  So that they can promote their business and be seen talking to the right sort of people.  People gave up their Sunday mornings to get something tangible.  Churches that participated in that cultural quid pro quo are in a hard place today.  Why?  Because things don’t work that way anymore.  Nobody stands to gain new clients or a good reputation because they go to a local church.  At best, the church is neutral on both of those axes, and at worst, it may actually cost them a good reputation to be a regular participant in an orthodox church.  The next generation of Christians will not be enticed into Christianity because they stand to gain anything in the secular world.  To the contrary, they will have to pay something.

Martin Luther was willing to pay any price when it came to keeping the word of God.  I pray that each of us would be willing to do the same should it fall to us.

Amen.

Christian Whimsy

~ Vincent

This is a brief departure from my current series. I’ve been chipping away at the fundamentalist/modernist debates, but this came up and it was too fun not to write about.

I don’t know that Christianity is usually associated with whimsy.  Sure, you have your happy-clappy Christians that play guitar while they sing who are a good deal more relaxed than their high church counterparts, but even they’re pretty serious in the grand scheme of things.  They seriously implore people to love their neighbor.  They seriously talk about the need to emulate Jesus.  Though they may be chipper and informal, they’re still not exactly playful on average.  Whimsy seems not to come naturally when your centerpiece is a crucified God.  That’s the thing I love about the Christian apologist G.K. Chesterton. He taps into a level of whimsy that is so rare within Christian communities. 

For example, in his book Orthodoxy, he recalls an incident in which he was working in a publishing house and his boss had just turned someone’s manuscript down.  This boss muttered, “He’ll be ok.  He believes in himself.”  Chesterton promptly argued that point with him:

Shall I tell you where the men are who believe most in themselves? For I can tell you. I know of men who believe in themselves more colossally than Napoleon or Caesar. I know where flames the fixed star of certainty and success. I can guide you to the thrones of the Super-men. The men who really believe in themselves are all in lunatic asylums.

(Ch. 2, Orthodoxy, Chesterton)

Sure enough, when we’re logical about it, when recognize that believing in ourselves doesn’t actually make us any more likely to succeed than anyone else.  Every would-be pro-athlete and aspiring instagram influencer believes in themselves.  Some delusionally so!  We’ve all known someone who has no ability to sing and yet insists that they will be the next great pop-star.  We’ve all known someone who wrote “the next great American novel” without being able to handle simple sentence structure.  But telling them that they won’t hit it big won’t change their plans one iota.  Why?  Precisely because they believe so strongly in themselves.

Our individualist society says that if you believe in yourself, you’ll get somewhere, but Chesterton takes that secular dogma and flips it on its head.  Logically, we are the least trustworthy people when it comes to evaluating our own ability.  We’re incredibly biased, either for or against ourselves.  We need to believe in something more secure than our own ego.

He does the same flip with our faculty of reason.  We assume that if you use your reason, you’ll figure things out sooner or later.  But how flawed is that assumption?  Some of the most rational people in the world are the least reasonable:

If a man says (for instance) that men have a conspiracy against him, you cannot dispute it except by saying that all the men deny that they are conspirators; which is exactly what conspirators would do. His explanation covers the facts as much as yours. Or if a man says that he is the rightful King of England, it is no complete answer to say that the existing authorities call him mad; for if he were King of England that might be the wisest thing for the existing authorities to do. Or if a man says that he is Jesus Christ, it is no answer to tell him that the world denies his divinity; for the world denied Christ’s.

Ch. 2, Orthodoxy, Chesterton

Again, the tables are turned!  We assume that a keen sense of rationality can make sense of the world, but none of the people in this scenario are illogical!  They all make perfect sense!  And yet, we know they’ve reached the wrong conclusions.

The world we’ve constructed in our minds is far too narrow.  We assume that we need to set out with our brain and our ego to conquer a largely stagnant world.  But in the process, we miss all of the delightful joy that surrounds us.  For example, we fail to celebrate the greenness of a leaf.  We all assume that leaves ought to be green because they’re always green.  But what if that leaf were polka-dotted?  Or puce?  Or teal?  Why not?  Things could have been any way imaginable!  And yet, the leaf is green.  What a delight!  What a pure, unpredictable delight to see the greenness of a leaf and know that it could have been any other way, but it is green.  It’s only our own self-centeredness that stops us from seeing the joy in that leaf!  We assume that things are the way they are because “logically” that’s what they have to be.  Or we assume that the green leaves are just backdrops for our grand story that we’re responsible for making.  But these leaves are more than that!  Once we start to delight in the crazy random joy of green leaves, we can start to wonder, why are they like that?  Is it all just mechanistic detail to be relegated to the background?  Or is there a joyful logic to it?  Is there a god that happens to delight in green leaves?

The world we live in is so dreary.  There’s so rarely anything greater than ourselves.  We are expected to go out in all of our power and make something out of both ourselves and this mixed-up world.   But Chesterton tells us to stop.  There’s so much more at work in this world than what our little minds can perceive.  Rather than drawing the limits at our own horizons, he invites us to rediscover a world infinitely larger than our own perception.  A world in which a green leaf is a miracle and in which we are a tiny speck in the plans of an infinite God.

Chesterton’s works are all in the public domain, so if you’re intrigued, check out a free copy of his work on Amazon or google.  And if you don’t have the time for a new read right now, reawaken your sense of whimsy.  Don’t believe the narrow constraints that modern philosophy places on the world.  The good news of Christianity isn’t all somber.  A creative, world-creating God is real, and he’s in charge of every little thing you see.  That truth makes mundane existence more of a fairy tale than you might expect.

One Point Per Parable: Julicher is Overrated

~ Vincent

I knew a pastor that used to preach that every parable had precisely one meaning. They never explained why that was the case. Of course, making declarations like that from the pulpit isn’t uncommon. Pastors have a terrible habit of just kind of declaring that their school of thought is self-evident and there’s no other possibilities out there. Or worse yet, they use the dreaded, credibility-grabbing phraise “scholars say…” Which scholars? Why do they say that? What are my other options? Don’t get me wrong, I get the instinct. Sermons aren’t intended to be a comprehensive history of religious thought. At the same time, I do wonder how often we cause problems by not fully explaining why we’re preaching what we are. In any case, I just assumed the “one point per parable” idea was a weird quirk of that pastor and ignored it. Until now. Lo and behold, I found the history of the idea. And it turns out the guy behind the theory was pretty influential! But not quite as influential as many claim.

Adolf Julicher was the guy who started telling people that there was “one point per parable.” He’s a 19th century German professor. I stumbled across the name while I was reading Kenneth Bailey’s Jesus through Middle Eastern Eyes (which is a phenomenal resource for anyone looking to learn about Middle Eastern culture and Christ, by the way). He cited Julicher’s work as the fundamental turn away from the allegorical approach which dominated thought in the medieval era. This would be a pretty major accomplishment. Allegorical interpretations are often pretty weird to modern eyes. For example, Bailey points to Augustine interpreting the parable of the Friend at Midnight (Luke 11:5-13). In that particular parable, Jesus tells everyone to imagine trying to knock on their neighbor’s door to borrow three loaves of bread at midnight. What would your neighbor say? Probably nothing nice. But if you keep pestering them, eventually they’ll get out of bed and give you some bread. He follows up with some of his classic thoughts on prayer: “Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find,” (Lk 11:9). Augustine reads this story and says that the person waking up in the story is actually intended to represent anyone who is seeking meaning in life. They’re up at midnight because they’re so world-weary and desperately seeking something more. The friend is Scripture, which we should always go to in times of need. And the bread? That’s the life-giving knowledge of the trinity. Needless to say, it’s a bit of a stretch. (If you want to know more about the best and the worst of the allegorical approach, see my posts on the best of it and the worst of it)

Adolf Julicher is presented as the anti-allegorist. He says Jesus told parables not to obscure the meaning of things, but to make them clear. Jesus wasn’t some kind of weirdo mystic; he was just a relatable storyteller trying to get simple points across. Consequently, there are no hidden meanings in parables. They have one meaning, and it should be obvious.

I’m sure some of you are thinking, “Hold up! But Jesus was specifically asked why he kept speaking in parables and he said:”

Because the knowledge of the secrets of the kingdom of heaven has been given to you, but not to them. Whoever has will be given more, and they will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what they have will be taken from them. This is why I speak to them in parables:

“Though seeing, they do not see;
though hearing, they do not hear or understand.”

Matt 13:11-13

Fair point. That passage definitely favors the allegorists more than Julicher. But that’s where Julicher’s modernist background comes across the strongest. The modernists were a group that thought the core of religion had been corrupted by centuries of mythology and tradition, and it had to be recovered by stripping away the weird parts of religious doctrine to get back to the pure ideas of Jesus. Julicher is right in those footsteps. He says that the apostles were all wrong about the parables. They quoted them out of context. They mythologized them way more than Jesus intended. They didn’t understandJesus at all. Rather than take him at face value and accept him as a sweet, simple rabbi that could help them grow, they mythologized him and made it incredibly complicated for the modern person to see the true simplicity that Jesus was getting at. What Julicher sees in Scripture is a sort of fanciful take on the true idea that was planted by the original Jesus:

The authenticity of the Gospel parables is not absolute. They did not emerge from the mouth of Jesus as we now read them. They are translated, displaced, and internally transformed. . . . Without careful examination, one can nowhere identify the voice of Jesus with voices of the Gospel authors.

Jülicher 1963: I.11. as cited at
https://parablesreception.blogspot.com/2015/08/adolf-julicher-1857-1938.html

As you can tell, Julicher’s comes with a lot of baggage. If we’re seriously claiming to rely on his work as a cornerstone of our own thought, we’ve got this whole, “Don’t trust the Bible, it’s full of misunderstandings,” overtone above everything else. We are forced to fumble through the mistakes of the authors when we pick up our Bibles, rather than to be informed about anything we didn’t come in with. We end up on this quest for a historical Jesus, which is ironically different from the story of Jesus that came down to us through history. Because that guy does miracles and was the son of God, and that’s just silly.

Is this really the cornerstone of modern parable interpretation? It seems like a lot of people out there think so. Not only did Bailey directly contrast him with the allegorical approach, citing him as the cure for the past’s goofiness, but a lot of professors in seminaries out there seem to hold up Julicher as the start of contemporary parable scholarship. And I think they’re wrong. If you’re a theological modernist, Julicher is absolutely core to that tradition, but there are a lot of Protestants out there who certainly aren’t intellectual descendants of Julicher and somehow avoid the highly allegorized approach. To know why, we need to look between these two eras to find a school of thought that was infinitely more influential and far less controversial.

What happened between the Middle Ages and the modern era? The Reformation! You know, that big period where people specifically started avoiding allegorical readings and focusing on what Jesus meant in his context when he said things. It was that era in which John Calvin and Martin Luther dominated. To be fair to Julicher, he seems to have suggested that these men were on the right track before their followers delved back into allegory, but I don’t think he’s right. To the contrary, I think that the fundamentals of the Protestant Reformation set out a path that’s normative for most Protestant preachers to this day. Let’s use Calvin as an example. Just glance through Calvin’s commentaries on any parable. He’s consistently logical (by modern Protestant standards). He pays attention to the cultural context and the implications of the words in Greek. He often gains several meanings from a parable, but they’re ideas that all seem theologically connected to the circumstances at hand and the major themes Jesus is speaking to. Calvin does all this without devolving into the fullness of allegorical wackiness. When he looks at the warning from Jesus that parables are deliberately unintelligible to some people, he doesn’t read that at a license to go wild speculating about the hidden meaning, nor does he dismiss it as a piece of obscurantism from some befuddled disciples. He goes in a different direction:

 These words were intended partly to show that all were not endued with true understanding to comprehend what he said, and partly to arouse his disciples to consider attentively that doctrine which is not readily and easily understood by all. Indeed, he makes a distinction among the hearers, by pronouncing some to have ears, and others to be deaf. If it is next inquired, how it comes to pass that the former have ears, Scripture testifies in other passages, that it is the Lord who pierces the ears, and that no man obtains or accomplishes this by his own industry.

Calvin’s Commentary on Matthew, ch. 13 v. 9

The challenge in understanding the parable is that no person is capable of understanding any part of God’s truth on their own. Only through God’s grace are we capable of understanding any of it. Anyone listening to the parables without the grace of God hears little more than nonsense. And just to make sure Arminians out there aren’t outraged by the choice of Calvin as normative, I gave Wesley a quick check and he says almost the same thing with the caveat that all people could listen to that grace, but some won’t because they’re so stuck in their worldly ways. Either way, the assumption that the parables are generally capable of being explored through logic and knowledge of Jesus’ cultural context and are ultimately legitimized through faith made possible by grace is pretty normative for most of the sermons on parables I’ve ever heard. And that methodology was around way before Julicher.

I hate to contribute to creating these big categorizations in history. It’s always unpleasant dividing thinkers between different eras. Whenever we categorize things, we inevitably simplify them to a degree that rarely does justice to the subject matter. Nevertheless, I was delighted to find Julicher and solve the mystery of where that pastor got the “one point per parable” theory, but I do think it’s necessary to keep a wider scope when considering his legacy. He’s not the first one to advocate intensely for less allegorized approaches to the parables, nor is he the most popular. He’s got his place in his tradition, for sure. But it’s not quite as massive as the average article seems to claim.

Apologies for the indirect citations for Julicher. Most of his key stuff remains in German, so it’s tough to get at. If you want to know more, check out this site, which has links to some great secondary sources in English and even one in German: https://virtualreligion.net/primer/julicher.html.

The Flight of Gregory Nazianzen and the Challenge of New Beginnings

~ Vincent

It’s been ages since I last posted. Life has been crazy. I’ve gone from being the associate pastor at Bexley UMC to the pastor at The Plains UMC. I moved about an hour and a half south for the new position and, right now, all of my life is in boxes. Needless to say, I’ve not had a lot of spare time for reading.

Once I got a moment to myself, naturally, I wanted to find a saint who had been through the same sort of challenges and read up about how they handled their big transition. I landed on one of my favorites: Gregory of Nazianzus. This is the fourth post I’ve written about him. Previously, I’ve written about his poetry, his take on theosis, and his refreshing melancholy in the face of the modern obsession with happiness, but this is the first time I’ve ventured out of the poetry of his retirement years.

In his younger days (32), Gregory was chosen for ordination a priest. His dad (also named Gregory) was the local bishop in Nazianzus and he found his son’s help invaluable in his ministry. His son managed to help him navigate the political and doctrinal challenges of the Arian Creed of 359 (Gregory Senior signed on as a supporter of a heretical creed and made a bunch of enemies until his son convinced him to apologize and withdraw his support), and besides that, he was incredibly capable as a theologian and pastoral care provider. Unfortunately, Gregory Jr. had no interest in actually being a priest. He wanted to be a monk! His ordination moved forward anyway, which was kind of a thing at the time. Ancient theologians are always getting priest-ed without wanting it. It’s humility trope—the most suitable person to put in power was supposed to be the guy who is too humble to want it. It’s usually reasonable to assume it’s being exaggerated for the sake of a good story. In Gregory’s case, it’s safe to assume he REALLY didn’t want to be ordained. He ran away for a few months, leaving his church really peeved at him, and after he finally did return, he called his ordination a “noble tyranny” in his first sermon (Or. 1, par. 1). If he was just trying to come off as humble, he went a little too hard.

In any case, Gregory was someone who knew what it was like to have his life uprooted for the Church and learned to thrive in the midst of it. How did he do it? I picked through his first two orations. The first is the sermon he gave when he returned to Nazianzus on Easter after a few months of hiding. The second is something he wrote to explain himself when people weren’t so thrilled with him after he returned (nobody came to church for a while in protest—church politics never change). I found a few gems in each.

The first one was certainly the lesser of the two. He doesn’t dwell much on his flight and spends most of the time talking about Easter. Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad he didn’t make the Easter sermon all about him. That’s a great move. At the same time, I’m here for that juicy personal drama. The fact that it’s not here limited my interest. Nevertheless, I liked his biggest reference to his flight:

A Mystery anointed me; I withdrew a little while at a Mystery, as much as was needful to examine myself; now I come in with a Mystery, bringing with me the Day as a good defender of my cowardice and weakness; that He Who to-day rose again from the dead may renew me also by His Spirit; and, clothing me with the new Man, may give me to His New Creation, to those who are begotten after God, as a good modeller and teacher for Christ, willingly both dying with Him and rising again with Him.

Or. 1, par. 2

How eloquent! I appreciate his willingness to name his flaws. To call yourself a weak coward is pretty intense! But he didn’t shy away. It wasn’t that the task was too great; it’s that his courage failed him and he needed to step away and reevaluate himself. God’s grace is enough to cover it.

There are also several references to mysteries. As I read it, the first mystery appears to be his ordination. He withdrew because of the weight of the sacrament bestowed on him. Now, he returns proclaiming a second mystery, which is the mystery of the resurrection of Jesus and the new life bestowed on us all. By this promise, even one who was a coward can be born into the new man that God desires.

The second oration was a little juicier. This one wasn’t a sermon and was explicitly intended as an explanation of his absence, so I got pages upon pages of him giving personal details about his challenge in facing a big transition. This is what I came here for. It starts out:

I have been defeated, and own my defeat. I subjected myself to the Lord, and prayed unto Him.

Or. 2 par 1

What a bombastic opening. He immediately reasserts the best of what he said in his sermon for those who didn’t attend worship that day. Why was I gone? Because I was at war with God. I have laid down my weapons and been defeated. I am subjecting myself to him. I’m no longer running. I’m digging in.

In the ensuing paragraphs, he discusses his respect for God’s sacred order, his meager qualifications, and his emotions through it all. The big crescendo of his argument builds as he points to the duty of a priest:

[T]he scope of our art is to provide the soul with wings, to rescue it from the world and give it to God, and to watch over that which is in His image, if it abides, to take it by the hand, if it is in danger, or restore it, if ruined, to make Christ to dwell in the heart by the Spirit: and, in short, to deify, and bestow heavenly bliss upon, one who belongs to the heavenly host.

Or. 1, par. 22

He goes all out after this, going on for paragraphs about how this is, “the wish of the prophets and the law…why God was united to the flesh by means of the soul…why the new [covenant] was substituted for the old…” etc. (or 2, par 23-25). This is, in his eyes, the summation of it all. The whole of the job of a priest is to assist God in healing the core essence of a person. In light of this incredible duty, how could anyone be surprised that he balked for a moment? And yet, he ultimately accepts his new priestly responsibilities, saying, “I fell down and humbled myself under the mighty hand of God… now I am commissioned to exalt Him in the congregation of the people and praise Him in the seat of the elders,” (or 2, par. 115). What once seemed like a terrifying possibility is now a duty. The weight of the task may be heavy, and the responsibility unexpected, but he now recognizes that it has fallen to him to glorify God in this way. God put him in this place. Who is he to argue? And who is any detractor to deny him this place that God gave to him?

I don’t know that a lot of modern people can relate deeply to being stolen away from the monastery and ordained against their will, but Gregory still lays out a lot of great principles that are worth embodying. First, he’s honest! He owns his initial shortcoming and doesn’t try to cover it up. The whole thing could have been a total disaster, but he acknowledges his mistakes (something especially difficult when you’re under immense pressure) and ends up making the whole thing a moment that reflects the weightiness of God’s calling and the heights of God’s mercy. More importantly, he learns to trust God all the more after being called to something new. Big transitions are hard. It’s easy to get nervous, upset, frustrated, weirded-out, etc. But God isn’t just randomly switching things up. He’s placed us exactly where we are for the sake of our own holiness and the deification of those around us. Sometimes we might get negative. It’s certainly not ideal, but even some of the greats had their moments of despair. We need to bounce back and recognize the importance of the duties he’s given us. The heights of what God calls us to are greater than anything we could possibly imagine for ourselves.

I hope I can keep the spirit of post-flight Gregory as I adjust to my new setting down here in The Plains. I know God put me here for a reason, and I hope I can do work that brings him glory.

An Odd Mix of Joy and Sorrow: Christ Jesus Lay in Death’s Strong Bands

~ Vincent

A few weeks back, I wrapped up a class about hymns at the church.  We looked back at how music was used in worship throughout the ages and looked at some particularly famous hymns along the way.  If you’re interested in that kind of thing, we used the book Then Sings My Soul: Book 3 by Thomas Nelson, which is not only approachable and concise, but does a nice job of blending history and music. 

There’s one hymn that really stuck with me from that class: “Christ Jesus Lay in Death’s Strong Bands” by Martin Luther (sheet music and full copy of the lyrics here).  I have no idea how common this hymn is among Lutherans.  For all I know, they sing it every week.  Goodness knows Methodists know more than their fair share of Charles Wesley hymns.  However common it might be in other traditions, it was totally foreign to me, which means I could appreciate just how weird (and wonderful) it was. Here’s a great rendition by Concordia Publishing House:

First off, it’s an Easter song in A minor.  Who writes an Easter song in a minor key?  Easter is a celebration!  It’s glorious!  I don’t expect sad music!  But here’s Death’s Strong Bands, full of melancholy, proudly announcing Easter.  It’s a mix of joy and sorrow that I didn’t expect on Easter.

The lyrics have that same tension.  Just look at verse 1:

Christ Jesus lay in death’s strong bands
for our offenses given;
but now at God’s right hand he stands
and brings us life from heaven.
Therefore let us joyful be
and sing to God right thankfully
loud songs of alleluia! Alleluia!

The first two lines are intensely melancholy, so much so that I’m surprised by the heavenly triumph that follows! And before you say, “Hold on, Vincent!  What if Martin Luther was only saying something like ‘Christ died for us,’ in the first verse?  That could certainly be considered joyful,” hear me out.  The whole hymn vacillates between triumph and sorrow:

  • Verse two is about how all of humanity was enslaved to sin and death (mournful)

  • Verse three is about Jesus destroying death and taking its crown (triumphal)

  •  

    Verse four is about the “strange and dreadful strife” when good and evil fought and good won (triumphal, but with mournful undertones)

  • Verse five compares Jesus to the paschal lamb that died so his blood could save others (could be played either way; suffering love is a complex theme)

  •  

    Verse six and seven switch into high celebration, explicitly saying that it’s Easter and we should remember it with food, drink, and celebrations (highly triumphal)

When I talked to the class about this particular hymn, it turned out to be a lot less popular than I expected.  The most popular complaint was that it was just too gloomy to sing on Easter and too perky to sing on Good Friday. Maybe it could fit in on a Palm/Passion service? But even then you’d have to cut out the verse that explicitly says it’s Easter. It came off like a hymn with some problems that would need solved before it saw it’s day in Sunday worship.

Apparently the people who compiled the United Methodist Hymnal felt the same way.  They cut verses two, three, and five, removing the themes of death, sin, and atonement (the stuff we usually associate with Good Friday). What’s left is significantly more triumphal. Given that verse six and seven are the only two “very triumphal” verses, the percent of the hymn dedicated purely to celebration rockets up from 28% pre-edit to 50% post-edit. This is a common edit of the hymn shared by most mainline denominations and a few evangelical ones.

I can’t help but feel we’re losing something with edits like this. The tension between joy and sorrow and the battle between good and evil are what made the song interesting to begin with! If we ditch that, what are we left with? A weird, subpar Easter hymn that’s arbitrarily in a minor key. Gross. But I get what they were trying to do! They wanted to tip the balance between joy and sorrow in favor of joy! They wanted to resolve the tension and make it a little more Eastery! But resolving that tension made it boring and odd.

If were going to give it some tweaks to help it find a place in worship, a better solution (in my mind) is showcased by efforts like the band Koine. Rather than remove the tension between the celebratory stuff and the mournful stuff, they leaned into that tension. They removed verses 6 and 7 (the explicit references to Easter) and basically turned it into a Good Friday hymn:

Now that’s worth singing!  The minor key makes sense.  I get it.  The sweetness of salvation and the bitterness of Christ’s death are properly intermingled.  It feels a lot more loyal to Luther’s original intent as well. I can’t fathom someone asking him if they could ditch the stuff about Christ’s death and sin and him saying, “Oh, for sure!  Now that I think about it, it was a little gloomy.”  Not a chance.

I do have to admit that the original draft is definitely an odd hymn and a tough sell for Easter.  I almost wonder if you could split the verses and make two versions: the Good Friday edit would have verses 1 through 5, and the Easter Sunday edit would have verses 1, 6 and 7.  If you sang those different versions on their appropriate days during Holy Week, it might give a sense of continuing work that works really well. But maybe I’m working too hard to make an odd hymn work.  Or maybe I’m not properly appreciating what Martin did in the first place! Either way, this hymn’s mix of joy and sorrow hit me just right. I’ll keep pondering this hymn for weeks to come.

Easter Sermons, Augustine of Canterbury, and the Procession to the King of Kent

~ Vincent

I preached my first Easter sermon this past Sunday, which was delightful. I hadn’t had the privilege of preaching on a holiday before (at least, not one of the big ones). Now that it’s over, I’m reflecting on the occasion. There are so many guests at churches on Easter. A lot of them have pretty minimal relationships with the Church. What do we show them to impress the importance of God on their hearts? How do we evangelize on big occasions like Easter?

Luckily for me, I stumbled across this reading from Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of England while auditing one of Matthew Hoskin’s classes at Davenant Institute (his blog is here and is brilliant, by the way).

Augustine of Canterbury (who is not the same person as Augustine of Hippo) was sent by Pope Gregory the Great to share the Gospel with the people in Kent (modern England). They set up a meeting with the king in the hopes of getting permission to evangelize throughout his territory. I can only imagine a meeting like that would be infinitely more stressful than giving an Easter sermon to a visitor-heavy crowd today. He needed translators! He needed to adhere to local sensibilities and codes of respect! If things went wrong, the King might not only decide to kick them out; he might decide to kill these obnoxious missionaries that were meddling where they ought not meddle. So what did he bring? What did he show the king of Kent to impress upon him the seriousness of this Christian faith?

They came… bearing a silver cross for their banner, and the image of our Lord and Savior painted on a board; and chanting litanies, they offered up their prayers to the Lord for the eternal salvation both of themselves and of those to whom and for whom they had come. When they had sat down, in obedience to the king’s commands, [they] preached to him, and his attendants there present the Word of life.

The Venerable Bede, Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of England, Ch. XXV

Can you imagine the spectacle of that procession? An envoy from Rome arrives complete with silver cross and marching chanters and all the (figurative) bells and whistles. It’d have been a breathtaking sight! More than that, Augustine is unapologetically offering up things that are otherworldly. He isn’t offering trade deals. There’s no promise of improved relationships with other kingdoms. He isn’t even explaining how fun the children’s ministry will be for the kingdom’s kids! All of the pageantry and splendor serve to create this little window into a world beyond our own. And it works! The king gives his approval for their activity in his realm.

I’m well aware that some of that procession is normative for the time and culture. I’m also sure that the average Easter visitor won’t have the same response to a crowd of monks chanting for their salvation that King Ethelbert did. As I continue to unpack my first Easter at the helm, I have to keep asking, how do we create a window into Heaven? How can we evangelize like Augustine of Canterbury and present the truth in a way that makes people stop and marvel?

What Did Jesus Write in the Dirt in John 8:1-11? Big Name Theologians Weigh In

~ Vincent

While poking around some different articles on the treatment of women in Leviticus, I stumbled across some wacky interpretations of what Jesus wrote in the sand in John 8:1-11. Let me refresh your memory on that passage (with a verse from chapter 7 to make sure we don’t start in the middle of a sentence):

7 53 Then they all went home,

8 1 but Jesus went to the Mount of Olives.

2 At dawn he appeared again in the temple courts, where all the people gathered around him, and he sat down to teach them. 3 The teachers of the law and the Pharisees brought in a woman caught in adultery. They made her stand before the group 4 and said to Jesus, “Teacher, this woman was caught in the act of adultery. 5 In the Law Moses commanded us to stone such women. Now what do you say?” 6 They were using this question as a trap, in order to have a basis for accusing him.

But Jesus bent down and started to write on the ground with his finger. 7 When they kept on questioning him, he straightened up and said to them, “Let any one of you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.” 8 Again he stooped down and wrote on the ground.

9 At this, those who heard began to go away one at a time, the older ones first, until only Jesus was left, with the woman still standing there. 10 Jesus straightened up and asked her, “Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?”

11 “No one, sir,” she said.

“Then neither do I condemn you,” Jesus declared. “Go now and leave your life of sin.”

What did Jesus write? It’s important enough that it’s referenced twice at crucial story moments, but apparently not important enough to tell us anything about it. I’ve heard people say he was writing a passage from Leviticus 20 indicating that BOTH people were supposed to be stoned, revealing that they would be breaking the law if they stoned her because they failed to produce both parties. Others have said that he was writing the names of every accuser along with the sins that they had recently committed. I’ve even heard that he drew a line in the sand for people to cross if they felt they were worthy. There are a lot of takes out there, but most of them aren’t really founded on much apart from one person’s random guesswork. What have the major theologians of the Christian tradition said about the writing in the sand?

Naturally, I started with Augustine (because you can never go too far wrong with Augustine). Luckily for me, he preached a series of sermons about the book of John and his take was customarily good. He suggested the trap the Pharisees laid was in making Jesus choose between gentleness and justice. If Jesus approved of the women’s death, he’d be the guy that condemned peasant women and his popularity would suffer. If he didn’t approve of her death, he was speaking against God’s justice and was officially a transgressor of the law! Jesus navigates the dilemma with his typical craftiness by taking neither option. But what about the finger writing?

You have heard, O Jews, you have heard, O Pharisees, you have heard, O teachers of the law, the guardian of the law, but have not yet understood Him as the Lawgiver. What else does He signify to you when He writes with His finger on the ground? For the law was written with the finger of God; but written on stone because of the hard-hearted. The Lord now wrote on the ground, because He was seeking fruit. You have heard then, Let the law be fulfilled, let the adulteress be stoned. But is it by punishing her that the law is to be fulfilled by those that ought to be punished? Let each of you consider himself, let him enter into himself, ascend the judgment-seat of his own mind, place himself at the bar of his own conscience, oblige himself to confess… Each looking carefully into himself, finds himself a sinner. Yes, indeed. Hence, either let this woman go, or together with her receive ye the penalty of the law… [H]aving struck them through with that dart of justice, [Jesus] deigned not to heed their fall, but, turning away His look from them, “again He wrote with His finger on the ground.” 

Augustine, Sermon on John Chapter VII. 40–53; VIII. 1–11

Brilliant! Rather than focus on non-existent content, he’s looking at the symbolism of the act itself. Why would Jesus write on the ground? Because God wrote the law on stone the first time, and now he’s writing on the ground. This is the same dust that people were created from. Were they fertile enough to bear fruit after all these years? Or were their hearts still hard as the rocks that the commandments were once written on? He even returns to his idea of gentleness by indicating that Jesus didn’t stare them down after the incident, shaming them for their sin. He just keeps writing. Really nice work here.

Other patristic authors are less worthy of sharing. John Chrysostom has a sermon series on John that deliberately skips over this particular story and a lot of ancient theologians (especially in the East) follow suit, leading some to believe that they had copies of John that didn’t contain these verses. In Against the Pelagians, Book 2, Jerome suggests Jesus was writing out the names of the accusers to to fulfill Jeremiah 17:13 “Those who turn away from you will be written in the dust,” (a passage which seems to have been intended to be more poetic than literal). By and large, Augustine’s logic seems to have been attractive. Thomas Aquinas carries it forward to the Middle Ages in his mega-commentary Catena Aurea and includes support from Venerable Bede and Alcuin of York to back him up.

In the Reformation, John Calvin comes out swinging against Augustine and approaches the story without interest in allegory:

By this attitude he intended to show that he despised them. Those who conjecture that he wrote this or the other thing, in my opinion, do not understand his meaning. Nor do I approve of the ingenuity of Augustine, who thinks that in this manner the distinction between the Law and the Gospel is pointed out, because Christ did not write on tables of stone, (Exodus 31:18,) but on man, who is dust and earth. For Christ rather intended, by doing nothing, to show how unworthy they were of being heard; just as if any person, while another was speaking to him, were to draw lines on the wall, or to turn his back, or to show, by any other sign, that he was not attending to what was said. Thus in the present day, when Satan attempts, by various methods, to draw us aside from the right way of teaching, we ought disdainfully to pass by many things which he holds out to us.

John Calvin, Calvin’s Commentary on John 13:1-11

Gone is the speculative symbolism! Instead, we have a Jesus that’s just not listening. Pharisees are coming around, asking questions that they already know the answer to, and Jesus just starts doodling in the sand. That’s how little he cares what they have to say. When he says “Let he who is without sin throw the first stone,” Calvin reads that as a deliberate reference to their own sinfulness. They know they aren’t being sincere. They’re scheming, conniving, wretched men trying to kill someone to prove their own point. It’s not that the law isn’t legitimate; it’s that they aren’t being legitimate, and they know it. Again, Calvin is sticking to the Scripture pretty thoroughly and avoiding wild speculation about the writing. Well done.

The Reformation seems to be a bit of a hinge in historical interpretation. After the Reformation, commentaries that I can find seem to take a more practical approach to the matter. The symbolic dimension is swallowed up by the practical. Some lean more heavily on WHY he wrote (to avoid meddling in politics, to calm people down, etc.) while others focus on WHAT he wrote (names, sins, passages of the law, etc.). John Wesley is one of the better big-name interpreters to marry the practical and the symbolic, but his notes are still ruthlessly pragmatic:

God wrote once in the Old Testament; Christ once in the New: perhaps the words which he afterward spoke, when they continued asking him. By this silent action, he,

1. fixed their wandering, hurrying thoughts, in order to awaken their consciences: and,
2. signified that he was not then come to condemn but to save the world.

John Wesley, Wesley’s Explanatory Notes on the New Testament, John 8:1-11

Obviously there are oodles of others well worth reading, but these were the ones that I thought were worthy of lifting up. They’re all respected enough for their words to carry weight, and each seems to represent the general stream of mainstream interpretation within their era.

Ultimately, I’m really pleased with what I found. I expected to find some really wacky stuff, but a shocking majority of commentators avoided wild speculation about the specifics of the writing and interpreted in light of the information that they had, rather than what they didn’t have. Frankly, that was my bias from the outset. If the Bible doesn’t say what Jesus wrote, it couldn’t have been all that important to the story (sorry Jerome). But really, it was phenomenal to see all the directions people went with it. I have a soft spot for that symbolic dimension. It emphasized the weight of each action within the passage in a way that was far beyond the mundane. So what did he write? Beats me. As much as I like Augustine, I’ll side with Calvin for the sheer delightful possibility of Jesus rolling his eyes and playing tic tac toe against himself in the dirt while they were trying to talk to him.

Christian Resentment and the Good News of Martyrdom

~ Vincent

I’ve been reading a fair few cultural critiques lately (C.S. Lewis, Philip Rieff, Charles Taylor, Andrew Root, and Rod Dreher). Each of these authors is trying to articulate what makes faith in the modern world challenging and the cultural forces that make conversion so unlikely for the average Westerner. And honestly? It’s been kind of a bummer. To be clear, I think there’s immense value for Christians in each of these writers. To share the gospel effectively, we have to understand the people around us. What do they long for? What do they expect? What do they think is reasonable? What parts of the faith will they find to be a challenge? Given the massive cultural shift over the past 50 years, churches need to realize that the mission field has changed and they have to adapt to be effective ministers of the gospel. At the same time, reading these books repeatedly can breed a sense of desperation. It’s clear the Church no longer has the privileged status it once had.

Certain eras just had a tremendous energy around faith. For example, if you’ve ever read the diaries of old Methodist preachers from the earliest days of America, you know that their experiences are totally incomprehensible for a modern Christian. “I preached the gospel in a field today. Five-hundred were converted through the grace of God. Huzzah!” Seriously? How on Earth did you pull that off? To be fair, the diary entries tend to end in mass conversions or the preacher having tomatoes hucked at them, but still! There’s that sense that things are MOVING! Today, there’s not that same movement. Cultural critiques can help us put our finger on some of the factors that have made things harder, but they can’t make them go away. A truth that once seemed so obvious that people might convert on the spot is now so challenging for people to accept that there are active, identifiable cultural barriers preventing people from hearing that good news. It can all start to feel a little hopeless. When you put all those thinkers together, you end up with one massive decline narrative about Christianity in the West.

It’s not just reading philosophy that can lead you to feel hopeless. A lot of churches have pretty strong decline narratives themselves. Mind you, not all. There are some big churches that are doing very well for themselves! But converts to those churches are often drawn from smaller churches, rather than from the ranks of non-Christians. The shrunken churches that are left behind end up with a distinct decline narrative. “There used to be so many more people here.” “Those are the classrooms we don’t use anymore.” “What gets young people to go to church? Why aren’t they coming?” Again, some of this is good. Congregations need to look at the tough realities of their situation! But a lot of it feels hopeless. Looking at the bad is only helpful insofar as it can direct us to the good.

So where’s the hope for Christians in a post-Christian era? How can we stay excited when it feels like things are going downhill?

It can help to remember that the challenges we face aren’t anything near the persecutions that other believers have experienced. There are countries where you can get killed for being Christian. There are places where evangelizing is illegal. What we’re facing? It’s nothing compared to that. And so many of them didn’t face their harsh realities with hopelessness. They were joyful to suffer for the one they loved.

The Martyrdom of Polycarp is a beautiful second-century story of someone was joyful in the face of wild adversity. The culture that second-century Roman Christians were living in was openly hostile. If you couldn’t tell from the title, they killed Christians. In this particular account, they’re going to kill Polycarp (a Christian bishop) if he doesn’t deny his faith make a sacrifice to the emperor (spoiler: he doesn’t). Here’s a community that has EVERY REASON to be frustrated by the philosophy of their day and is facing challenges to ministry that we can’t even fathom— but they don’t express any hopelessness in the story. Just look at this excerpt:

All the martyrdoms, then, were blessed and noble which took place according to the will of God. For it becomes us who profess greater piety than others, to ascribe the authority over all things to God. And truly, who can fail to admire their nobleness of mind, and their patience, with that love towards their Lord which they displayed?— who, when they were so torn with scourges, that the frame of their bodies, even to the very inward veins and arteries, was laid open, still patiently endured, while even those that stood by pitied and bewailed them. But they reached such a pitch of magnanimity, that not one of them let a sigh or a groan escape them; thus proving to us all that those holy martyrs of Christ, at the very time when they suffered such torments, were absent from the body, or rather, that the Lord then stood by them, and communed with them.

Martyrdom of Polycarp, Ch. 2

They saw their bishop get stabbed to death by the authorities, and they’re praising God! Because God is in control. Even if circumstances are horrendous, they trust him. If he wants them to endure, they’ll do it with a smile. There’s not even a hint of fear. All of this is coming to pass because of God, and it will all turn out right because of God.

I’ll skip the bulk of the middle, but feel free to read it over at New Advent here if you’re curious.

After the story of Polycarp’s death, the final chapter ends with this:

We wish you, brethren, all happiness, while you walk according to the doctrine of the Gospel of Jesus Christ; with whom be glory to God the Father and the Holy Spirit, for the salvation of His holy elect, after whose example the blessed Polycarp suffered, following in whose steps may we too be found in the kingdom of Jesus Christ!

Martyrdom of Polycarp, Ch. 22

They wish their readers happiness. Not worldly happiness, but the kind of happiness that Polycarp had. The kind of happiness is the kind Paul felt when he wrote, “Christ will be exalted in my body, whether by life or by death. For to me, to live is Christ and to die is gain,” (Phil 1:20-21). Real happiness isn’t rooted in culture or circumstance; it’s rooted in God.

The world is different. Converting to Christianity isn’t the obvious choice. Going to church isn’t as common. We won’t likely won’t enjoy the cultural clout and full buildings that we used to, but the happiness that we’re aiming for was never in full buildings or philosophical ease. It’s in loving Jesus and trusting him no matter what.