Coercion?

Perhaps not all readers of "The Twelve" will be aware of it but in some circles within the Christian Reformed Church these past ten days there's been some serious dust-ups surrounding "The Form of Subscription." The Form is the document CRCNA pastors, elders, deacons, and also Calvin College and Seminary professors sign to indicate their ascent to the version of the Reformed faith that gets taught in the Confessions: The Heidelberg Catechism, The Belgic Confession, and the Canons of Dort.   The most immediate conversations were sparked by an editorial in the Banner by editor Bob DeMoor to which former "The Twelve" blogger Jamie Smith fired off a very impassioned response.   Since then the Facebook page for Christian Reformed pastors has been lit up with multiple posts--usually very long posts (including my own, I confess!)--as pastors from all over North America have shared thoughts.   Curiously, although this by no means counts as scientific evidence, my own observation on this conversation has confirmed Smith's contention that it's mostly Baby Boomers with a 1960's hangover who chafe under the allegedly constricting nature of signing on to 400-year old Confessions whereas the younger set of Gen-X and Millennials are far more willing (even happy) to embrace a confessional position.  Indeed, just about every former student who graduated from my seminary since 2005 and with whom I am friends on Facebook has embraced Smith's position over against DeMoor's editorial.

Interesting.    But as I have been caught up in these conversations, I've been struck by the number of people who tend to refer to signing the Form and having these guiding Confessions as being mostly all about a distasteful matter of coercive force.   The Confessions whack people to stay in line and whack them over the head even harder if they stray over any one of the hundreds of lines the Confessions draw on a variety of biblical-theological themes.  

Well and of course, there is a regulative function to the Confessions.  For the sake of biblical clarity and faithful proclamations of the Gospel, the Confessions put up guardrails to keep our biblical-theological vehicles on the main road.  But I've not generally regarded the guardrail quality of the Confessions as coercive so much as helpful, as clarifying.  At least I know what the issues are and how our neck of the Reformed woods want to articulate them.   And if I take a different view over a substantial matter in those Confessions, there are ways to address that.   It may not be easy, may not happen often, but the avenues of challenge exist (even as within the boundaries of the Confessions there is, IMHO, lots and lots of room for fruitful questioning and prodding of the issues that would not require a person to get booted from the church).

Yet there are many who chafe of late, who complain long and loud that these Confessions are just flat out coercive.   But let me float an observation--a kind of theory--that came to me the other day in the midst of typing up some Facebook reply or another: It struck me that the people who find the Confessions coercive are the same people (generally) who so clearly dislike what's in the Confession in the first place.   It's rather like marriage: what kind of a spouse regards his or her nuptial vows to be restrictive, to clip the wings of one's freedom?   Well, it's not typically the spouse who remains committed to and deeply in love with his wife or her husband.  No, the one who wants more freedom, more of an open marriage, is the one who's not so sure anymore, who's maybe got some past dalliances to deal with in the first place (it's rumored that John Edwards asked Elizabeth for an open marriage at one point.   This has been denied by Edwards but given what he had going on on the side . . .).

The Confessions are not perfect and they are most assuredly nowhere near being on a par with God's Word.  They don't always say things the way I'd prefer.   Here and there they make claims that are really difficult to deal with (but not a few of those claims are things the Bible here and there says, too, in passages that are also perplexing).   But as in a good marriage, when you love the Confessions as I do and as many whom I know do, then although you know the marriage is not perfect, although there are things your spouse does and has done for years that still drive you clean up a wall, although you even argue now and then (and even occasionally let the sun set on your anger), in the context of the larger loving relationship and the commitment you have to each other, those things are not deal breakers.   Even in moments of genuine vexation with your spouse, you don't regard your marriage vow as coercive on you, as foreclosing all kinds of options for other activities that you really want to exercise.

This is by no means a perfect analogy (and no doubt some may point this out to me in oh so many ways) but I'd liken it to also my commitment to the Bible as God's holy and inspired Word.  I love Scripture.   I have no desire to depart from its teachings.   But the Book of Joshua bothers me.   I don't like Ananias and Sapphira getting zapped dead.  The Book of Revelation seems to have caused as much loopiness in church history as solid reflection and helpful guidance.    Like certain habits that may drive a spouse to distraction or certain viewpoints held by your spouse that you've never fully embraced yourself, these things nettle but in love they don't derail your nuptial commitment nor make you feel coercively stuck on account of that promise you made some sunny June afternoon way back when.  So also my love for and commitment to the Bible means I deal with some of this other stuff and I do it in love.

As good old I Corinthians 13 reminds us, love puts up with a lot but when it's genuine, such love and the commitment it brings forth in love never feel coercive, restrictive, punitive.

Or that's what I'm thinking at the moment after a busy week of slogging through all this Confessional stuff with my colleagues. . .    To be continued.

The Wicked

A year ago I was sitting at my kitchen table face to face with a stack of 40-some sermons, each based on one of the Psalms.   In many of those sermons students struggled to write grace-filled, Gospel-saturated sermons on passages of Hebrew poetry that had no qualms about deriding "the wicked" in colorful terms, even here and there going deep into the land of impreccation in which various body parts of the wicked were depicted as being smashed, crushed, and obliterated.   Meanwhile as I read those Psalms and the sermons the students had written on them, the radio was going on and on about the death of Osama bin Laden.   NPR reported on throngs of people whooping it up in Times Square, in front of the White House, and in a variety of other locations.  And I confess that in my own heart, my first reaction on hearing the news was also a kind of "Yes!"

But I struggled then and since as to how a Christian should react to the form of "justice" that took out the world's most notorious terrorist.  My students in their sermons demonstrated that they knew that those who serve a Savior who told us to love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us cannot and should not make too easy recourse to the impreccatory Psalms so as to indulge our vengeful appetites vis-a-vis those who make our lives unpleasant.  Yes, as Walter Brueggemann points out, those kinds of Psalms are part and parcel of the larger honesty that the Book of Psalms displays.   For people of faith, all forms of speech are allowable even (or perhaps it is especially) before the face of Almighty God.   And there is something to that.    There is something liberating about seeing the rawness of lament in the Psalms, reminding us that God is big enough to "take it" when we are upset.   Lament is not a sign of weak faith but strong, plucky faith.

And curses on our enemies, maledictory prose, likewise shows that when we feel such-and-such a way about someone in our lives--especially those who oppose the ways of God and of God's people--then this, too, can be brought to speech with God.  We don't have to pretend those emotions are not a part of us.  God understands.

But it also seems that part of what happens in those impreccations is that the psalmists lay these things in God's (better and wiser) hands.   We give up our actions of vengeance by giving them over to the God who can be trusted to do the right thing.   If that is true in even the Old Testament/Hebrew world of the Psalms, how much more true is it now that we serve and follow a crucified Savior who let all the impreccations of history fall onto himself so as at long last to snap that grim cycle of retribution.   In Romans 12 Paul also reminds us that although Christians along with everyone else may still have feelings of revenge rising up in their souls, they are to leave that at the foot of the cross.   It is not our place to indulge such feelings.    (A predecesor of mine at a church I served for a dozen years claimed that in worship, it is wholly inappropriate for followers of the Prince of Peace ever to sing musical settings of the impreccatory Psalms--such words about smashing the wicked are not appropriate on the lips of those called to love and forgive everyone, starting with enemies and the otherwise unloveable.   He had a point.)

As I read Psalm sermons and heard the news a year ago, I concluded that it is fully possible that the violent end of a violent man represented the coming of justice, that it was possible this was even ultimately a providential action of God--or one that God permitted--to right some wrongs.  But I could not be sure of that.   And I was very sure that for those of us who know what this violent world cost Christ Jesus the Lord, it just was not fitting to whoop it up and wave a flag to celebrate the death of even someone as grim as Osama bin Laden.   His death is just part of the larger series calamatis that required the death of God's only Son and so counts as one more example of the nightmare of evil from which we will one day finally awaken only when the dream of the kingdom of God becomes all in all.

These are not easy issues to deal with in this crazy world.    But we were not promised easy issues.   We were promised that the Holy Spirit would lead us into all truth as time went on, and we do well to keep step with that Spirit of truth and wisdom.

The Paradox and Peril of Power

First, sorry for the overly alliterative title.  But for this post, those words really are the apt ones to invoke!  Like many people, I have been eagerly awaiting the next volume in biographer Robert Caro's series "The Years of Lyndon Johnson."   Caro is flat out one of the best biographers I have ever read--his work rivals the majesty of William Manchester on Churchill and is at least as good as Donald McCullough's great work on Truman.

But as a New York Times Magazine profile on Caro pointed out this week, as much as Caro's volumes on LBJ (three so far with #4 coming out May 1) are about the man, they are also a study in the uses of power.   Whatever else you want to say about Lyndon Baines Johnson, the man was a master at using power to get things done.   Sometimes his ability to wield power was perilous and used in nefarious ways, as when his campaign stole the 1948 Senate race in Texas (an election without which, Caro contends, LBJ might never have become vice-president or president) and as when on any number of other occasions LBJ's mastery of arm-twisting was likewise used for selfish gain (and sometimes at the cost of humiliating an opponent).

Yet LBJ was also a man of great compassion.   His early years of teaching exceedingly poor children in a remote and impoverished part of Texas always stayed with him, giving the otherwise crusty Texan a soft spot in his heart for the disadvantaged.   Often in his life LBJ's compassion took a backseat to his ruthless use of power.   But in 1957--for perhaps the first significant time in his life--Johnson managed to get his power and his compassion running in the same direction.   As Caro details it in Volume 3, Master of the Senate, in 1956 Johnson narrowly missed being nominated for president at the Democratic National Convention when he was written off as a "regional candidate."  And since the "region" in question was the South--with all its associations with Jim Crow laws and racism and slavery--Johnson became determined never to be so written off again.   So in 1957 he used his compassion for the underprivileged and his world-class ability powerfully to manipulate his fellow Senators to ram through the first piece of Civil Rights legislation in almost 80 years.    Here was a paradoxical incident where the same power that could corrupt and humiliate was put to good use.   And it would not be the last time LBJ would so use power--as Caro will detail in the forthcoming volume, as President, Johnson did something similar to get his Great Society rolling with astonishing speed following the assassination of President Kennedy.

As Robert Caro knows and as readers of his books know, power is fascinating.  It seems that very little gets done in this world without it.  I have been to Washington D.C. only twice in my life and actually stayed in the city only once about 2 years ago.   Since I was traveling alone, I spent time in lounges and restaurants just observing what was going on around me, eavesdropping semi-shamelessly (but also quite easily given the volume of most nearby power conversations).   The presence of power was palpable.   Conversation after conversation trafficked in topics related to who had power, who didn't, and how to tap into the next most powerful person in the room.

Again, fascinating.

Yet here we are in the Season after Easter, celebrating in our various ways the Gospel fact that the world changed--was saved--not through a top-down exercise in power but through a bottom-up exercise in humility and sacrifice.    Also in the Roman Empire, the power all flowed in one direction, and it steamrolled right overtop of Jesus.  As Neal Plantinga has reminded us in some of his luminous sermons, public crucifixions in the Roman Empire were among other things public reminders to the populace of who had the power and of what happened to those who opposed that power.   Every cross that rose up from a hilltop like Golgotha was like a giant Roman exclamation mark that screamed out "Any Questions!!!?"

Of course, ever since, the Church has grappled with figuring out how to get things done in a world where power is generally the way to accomplish much.   It's easy to see the power hierarchy in something like The Vatican--how often haven't we read about the "power struggles" that take place at the highest echelons of the Papal Curia?--but it's no less present in more Reformed polities (we just do our power struggles without miters and robes for the most part).   And certainly the politicization of most everything in recent years has affected also the Church, in which not a few have concluded that the way to get things done is by lobbying, by intimidation, by punishment.

Power is seductive.   It also undeniably gets things done.   LBJ knew that power could help the disadvantaged.   But he also came to learn that power has a way to come back and destroy the one who wields it, as his own despairing exit from the national stage in 1969 went on to show.   But for the Church, is it also possible that we forfeit our ability to witness to the true Gospel when we opt for power-solutions to the things we want to do?   I don't have any answers as to how, whether, or to what extent the Church can tap into power to accompish a greater good.   But in the Season of Eastertide, it's as good a time as any to wonder about such things and maybe to ask God to show us a still greater way.

Punish No More

Since this post will appear early in Holy Week 2012, my thoughts have turned toward questions of the meaning of Jesus' sacrifice.   In a seminary class the other day in a discussion on how to preach the Minor Prophets (what with all that judgment and all) I repeated something my colleague John Cooper has said in a seminar we've led together in the past.   Cooper points out that because of Jesus and the biblical fact--well attested in many passages--that God laid all our iniquity on him and that Jesus has indeed borne the punishment of us all, it is now theologically incorrect--and pastorally injurious--to think that when bad things happen in our Christian lives, this is the result of God's punishing us for this or that sin.   God no longer punishes us for our sins.  All of that fell upon our Lord and on the cross (and perhaps Jesus suffered for our sins across the whole course of his life, too, as a couple other Bible passages indicate).   By the way: please note that Cooper makes this claim about those who now dwell "in Christ."   Whether non-believers still suffer a punishment for sins is an important, but discrete, question in all this.

I think Cooper is correct.   Believers in Christ who have had their sins washed away in baptism and who now live "in Christ" don't keep getting whacked for past sins nor for new sins that still crop up in our lives.  

But when I mentioned this in class the other day, I got some curious push-back from a few students.   One in particular brought our attention to I Corinthians 11 where Paul seems to say that the wrong way in which the Lord's Supper was being celebrated in Corinth is what accounts for some of the Corinthians' having fallen ill and even having died.   "That sure sounds like a punishment from God to me" this student asserted.   He made an interesting point.   My rejoinder to him was that if that passage seems out of sync with the lion's share of New Testament witness to God's having laid the iniquity and punishment of us all upon Jesus, then it is that verse in I Corinthians 11 that needs to be interpreted in the light of the majority of the biblical text and not the other way around.

It still seems to me to be corect that God does not punish us for this or that sin or for this or that cluster of sins in our lives.  And as a pastor I know that most every time I have heard someone say to me that he or she suffered some tragedy in his or her life and that this constituted a direct punishment of God for some long-ago indiscretion, I know I am on solid pastoral ground to counsel them to think otherwise.  The Bible itself--and our Lord Jesus himself--makes it clear that we're almost always on shaky ground when we try to connect a given bad circumstance with some sin that is, therefore, being punished.  "Lord, who sinned . . . that such-and-such a tragic situation obtains?"    Jesus' answer was generally "Nobody sinned.  It's not about that."

Still . . . it may be that God allows certain consequences to flow from our own actions.  If we are reckless with our health, God is under no obligation I know of to head off the natural fallout from too much smoking or drug abuse or lack of exercise.   If we abuse our marriage vows and the marriage falls apart as a result, that's less punishment and more natural fallout of bad choices.   We may still suffer the consequences of our actions without having to construe that as punishment.   And it may also be true--as some key texts like Romans 8 make clear--that God can work inside the bad and sad and even outright tragic circumstances of our lives to generate some greater good (like a more steadfast faith or a sturdier Christian character just generally) but even that can be (and should be) fruitfully distinguished from a direct punishment for sin in some quid pro quo, tit for tat, scheme.

Well and good.   But it's still curious to me when I encounter Christians--and I am not alleging this about my student from the other day, by the way--who seem to want to hold out for God's whacking Christian people for bad behavior.   Sometimes this comes up when we are face to face with an enemy, even a sister or brother in the Church, who wounded us and whom we'd like to see God slap around a bit in retaliation (and punishment) for the sin that hurt us so badly.   Even some preachers seem to relish the idea of being able to warn the congregation that if they don't shape up, straighten up, and fly right, God will punish them.   "So be good . . . or else!"  Indeed, I've had some conversations with preachers who wonder what oomph is left to preaching if we cannot threaten even believers in Christ with a punishment of God in case they don't heed the preacher's words.   If it's all Grace and all the bad stuff got (and gets) laid on Jesus' shoulders, do we still have anything terribly persuasive left with which to lure and goad and push people toward better living?   The Gospel is great but a rolled-up newspaper held over one's head can really get one's attention!

I cannot go into all the specifics of these last points in this post (though suffice it to say that yes, even as the Apostle Paul quite consistently discovered, there are plenty of good ways to motivate Christian believers to live out their baptismal identity short of threatening them with some hellish punishments as though Jesus had never already died for all their sins to begin with).  

But in this Holy Week 2012 and as we turn our eyes to that cross once again, we need to revel in the fact that Jesus really did pay it all, bore it all, suffered it all for us.   Whatever reason we may have to want to hold on to some prospect of ongoing punishments delivered from the hand of God to his own children will never be sufficient reason to do an end-run on the cross and all that Jesus did there.

"Love so amazing, so divine, demands my heart, my soul, my all."

Breaking One's Spirit

For various reasons across the last year or two, I have been involved in some faith-and-science conversations.  One topic that has come up often of late centers on the "image of God" in humanity--there are lots of questions (as there have always been) as to just what the divine image is but in more recent times and in conversation with science there have also been questions as to when and how this image appeared in humanity.  Is it an emergent property, something that clicks into place when a certain level of brain complexity is present?   Is it something that will be detectable in fossils or through a historical reconstruction of the development of the human genome?   Is it a pure gift of God that has no necessary connection to our physical being and will never, per se, be discoverable by any branch of science?   These are all intriguing and important questions.  (Just for the record: I still believe this is sheerly a divine gift and that--as the Reformed Confessions consistently affirm--it is also a gift of enormous importance and is the reason why humanity's willfully falling into sin is as monstrous an event as theology has traditionally claimed it to be.)

Whatever the image of God is, I do believe it is the one trait we human beings possess that sets us apart from all other creatures of which we know.   It may be difficult fully to grasp this divine presence in us but sometimes I think we sense its truth best when we see what human beings simply cannot abide.   This may be a somewhat backwards way to argue for God's presence within us via his image--even in people who have not had that image restored through Christ Jesus, the express Image of God par excellence according to the New Testament--but it often strikes me as counting as a kind of indication of the image nonetheless.

Just this past weekend two articles in the Sunday Review section of the New York Times brought this home to me.   One was another fine piece by Nicholas Kristof on human sex traffic here in the United States.   Kristof profiles a now 24-year-old woman called "Alissa" and tells of her many years--beginning when she was just 16--of being virtually enslaved as a prostitute.  You can read the details for yourself if you wish but the photo of Alissa that accompanies the article is what really told the tale.   Although she escaped her former life on the streets and is now a university student, one look into Alissa's eyes reveals a sadness and a deadness of spirit that no twenty-something should evince. 

There's something in the human spirit that goes beyond high-level brain functions that just knows we were created to be more than sex slaves, that senses in ways very nearly ineffable that we've been endowed with a nobility beyond this.

A second article in that same section was about what happens to soldiers from Iraq and Afghanistan who have been close to multiple concussive forces from improvised explosive devices.   Yes, there are some physical things that can happen when the brain is sloshed around inside the skull through the concussion caused by an explosion.   But there is something even more sinister and dire that happens to the very thinking and functioning of those who have seen great violence: they start to lose their ability to connect with the world.  Some have failed to recognize spouses or children once they return home from the war.   It's as though the human spirit--above and beyond whatever may be going on physically inside the cranium--just knows we were not meant to keep repeating the sin of Cain over and over by killing our sisters and brothers in the human race.   People in such circumstances seem to forget who they are.

Maybe that's because who they are--who they were created to be by our great Creator God--has been obliterated by a world that forces them to go against all that in the horrors that just are war and violence in this world. 

I know, I know: none of this is decisive in proving that we bear the image of a grand Creator.   The New Atheists and company could and would find ways to explain all of this from a sheerly physiological viewpoint.   That's fine.  I've never been interested in proving the faith in any event.    But for me as a person of faith, this all speaks volumes as to who we are and who we were meant to be.

In Lent we're reminded that Jesus entered the heart of violence and death as the only way to restore to us the fullness of the image that had been so bleared, smeared, and sullied by sin.   Getting right into the middle of all that evil was God's way to get us out of all that.  In that there is finally hope.   And in this violent, tawdry world, it's a hope whose jagged realism is exactly what we imagebearers need.