Faith

Thinking about Homosexuality in an Unchanging Gospel – An Epistemological Argument

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Last night, I attended a potluck dinner and worship service hosted by the Reconciling United Methodists of the Texas Annual Conference (RUMTX) and attended by our new Bishop, Reverend Scott  Jones. The event represents the optimistic opening of a dialogue between proponents of full inclusion and our bishop, who—I’m given to believe—takes a decidedly conservative stance in regards to the United Methodist doctrine regarding sexual orientation. This includes continuing to bring disciplinary action against those pastors who violate the current Book of Discipline by performing gay marriages.

My experience last night has led me to share the following thoughts regarding full inclusion in the United Methodist Church, or within Christianity at large.

In his remarks during the worship service, Bishop Jones stated (I’m paraphrasing) “that the Gospel doesn’t change, but times do.” You could just as easily change out the word “Gospel” for “Jesus,” “the Scriptures,” “God,” or many other words to the same or similar effect, and it’s quite possible a different word was used by the Bishop and I’m misremembering. Regardless, though, the use of any of these words seems to intimate the same idea—a common one proffered by conservatives on the issue of homosexuality’s “compatibility” with Christianity.

The problem is that the statement of the unchanging nature of the divine doesn’t actually tell us anything. If the point is that the meaning and truth of Christianity and all that that entails does not change, that tells us nothing. It does not prove that traditional interpretations of the Gospel and the person of Jesus Christ are the correct ones, does not in and of itself explain the often-ambiguous meanings of the Scriptural texts, and does not even assert that we have the ability to properly interpret holy words.

As I’ve mentioned, my master’s degree is in English, focusing on medieval and Renaissance literature. My undergraduate degree is in History, again focusing on those periods. In my graduate work, I received training in the literary school of thought called “New Historicism.” The New Historicist’s approach uses a few key philosophical assumptions that are apropos to this conversation. First, New Historicism asserts that we cannot separate ourselves fully from the culture and ideologies of our own time when we interpret a literary or historical text (the Bible is of course both) and that—while we should absolutely be looking at the historical context in which something is written—we cannot fully access the context of the author or the work. This is partially because of our temporal and experiential remove from the author and partially because it is at best difficult for us to definitively discover how and where the author and work fit into the historical context with particularity. The author and her work may be fully or partially “bought-in” to the ideological context of her time, but we cannot determine this with great certitude—particularly since every text may rely on unspoken assumptions not explicit in its words.

What does this mean for us and Scripture? If you follow these assumptions, we can’t fully understand the historical context in which the Scripture is written. For all of our knowledge of Israelite and Greco-Roman culture and language, we have lost the paradigm of the people who lived through the Gospel times through the slow crush of time. We must therefore make guesses about certain meanings of the text, however educated those guesses may be.

At the same time, we cannot divorce ourselves from our own cultural and experiential biases and expectations—we cannot elucidate objectively. This makes a diversity of opinions not just desirable but necessary in our interpretative attempts.

All of this goes to say that we cannot with great confidence state definitively the Gospel message when it comes to highly complex issues such as homosexuality—we get in our own way. We have to do the best we can in interpretation, and I believe that we probably can come close to the truth of things (though logic may only get us so far). At the same time, however, we ought to be very careful about having extreme confidence in the theological positions we take when were are outside of the core doctrinal Christian beliefs (those about which we can be most secure, I think, are those found within the various creeds).

What we’re left with here is a statement without any logical assertion. Instead, it seems to me, the only value is a rhetorical one. This rhetoric taps into the idea that Christianity is under attack by mainstream secular culture—that broader cultural acceptance of homosexuality is undermining “pure” Christian doctrine. It is the same idea that causes some of us to insist that there’s a “war on Christmas,” that a secular world is actively seeking to marginalize (an uncritical and unquestioning view of) Christian truth.

Let’s for the sake of argument accept the possibility of humankind attaining knowledge of absolute divine truth. Even with this acceptance, we must admit the extreme difficulty of doing so. With that admission, we must at least entertain the possibility that Christian interpretation of the Gospel message is a process that moves closer (and occasionally farther) from the truth we seek as we discover new methods of inquiry and experience new cultural paradigms.

This development over time is something we see play out in the story of the Old Testament (and the New, but I’ll focus on the Old for these purposes). Abram is called out by what he believes is one god among many for a special covenant. The early relationship between God and the Israelites is not one of monotheism—it is one of monolatry (devotion to one god without denial of the existence of other gods). How many times do we hear the Hebrews say “Who [i.e. which other god] is like our God?”

The Ten Commandments are monolatrous and not monotheistic—“You shall have no other gods before me.” Compare with the monotheistic Shahada of Islam—“There is no god but God. Muhammad is His Prophet.” The Hebrews undergo a process of better understanding God, starting with the identification of God from the collection of supposed divine beings to a realization of God as the supreme and only divine being.

If ancient Hebrew theology progresses from a more limited to a more accurate understanding of the nature and person of God, why should we suppose that Christian theology was perfect thousands of years ago and that we could not come to a better understanding of the Living God through time and debate?

In the New Testament, we see the apostles understanding of Jesus’ message improve over time—with Jesus often lamenting the things they fail to understand. Are we any different?

If we return to the question of homosexuality in Christianity, here’s where the above points take us:

(1) Traditional interpretations (i.e. those that consider homosexuality to be sinful or “incompatible” with Christianity) should not be categorically prioritized but should—as the Wesleyan Quadrilateral would have us do—be reviewed by considering tradition alongside the Scriptures themselves, logic and reason and human experience (both personal and cultural).

(2) If honest epistemology precludes us from being absolutely sure about our theological position on homosexuality, we must make our best guess.

That best guess requires the weighing of competing theological precepts. These competing precepts are definitions of what it means to “love thy neighbor.” From the conservative position, the argument goes: “It is not loving to allow your neighbor to continue in sin.” The progressive response (to which, admitting my own bias, I subscribe): “Mercy triumphs over judgment.” For me, loving my neighbor does not mean judging them for what I might believe to be sin—I’m no better myself, and sin is, in my mind, far too complex in non-egregious contexts to be categorically defined.

In my own personal understanding of Jesus, I cannot conceive that a loving relationship between two people is right or wrong based on sex or gender. I think to categorize things along such uncompromising lines is too akin to pharisaical legalism for my comfort.

I have said in other posts that I believe that the question of homosexuality in Christianity is really a cover for an underlying argument about epistemology and the methodology, nature and bounds of interpretation of Scripture. I hope that this post adds some clarity to that assertion that I have made, regardless of where you stand on the issue or how you approach Christian epistemology and interpretation.

Like it or not, the real argument over homosexuality in Christianity is over. Today’s youth (at least for the most part) cannot fathom condemnation based on gender and sexuality issues. You might call that cultural indoctrination if you like, but I’d say it’s an example of C.S. Lewis’s natural law. Regardless, the fact of the matter is that, if youth see Christianity as homophobic, they will never open up to the opportunity to actually know Jesus. To me, that’s what’s at stake by continuing to make an issue out of homosexuality in Christianity—the longer that we even prevaricate on anything less than full exclusion, the more we push people away from Jesus.

During his speech last night, Bishop Jones said that “the main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.” Meaning, of course, Jesus. If my epistemology means that I have to take a guess about which theological position is best, you can bet that I’m going to choose the position that may bring more people to Christ every single time. Is that a compromise? Maybe, but it’s one I’m more than willing to accept.

 

Freedom

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(This post was not intended as an ode to the recently-lost-from-us George Michael, but if your mind wanders in that direction given the title, meh.)

On the first of this year–what I had expected to be a sleepy Sunday poorly attended by our congregation (I myself had difficulty in summoning the will to attend, so I cast no aspersions)—our church held a Weslayan Covenant service. Many came to re-commit themselves to following after Christ in discipleship and humility—a pretty good way to start the year, I think.

The covenant service is a Methodist tradition in which members of congregation solemnly affirm (or reaffirm) their commitment to walk with Christ…and beg forgiveness for their past failures to do live up to the covenant. The service carries with it—as one might expect—a strong undercurrent of humility, obedience and service to the Lord no matter the cost. On first hearing the liturgy, one as selfish and concerned with his own will as myself might be tempted to focus on the humbling of oneself and the turning over to God of control. Difficult as it may be for one like me, such an offering is good and righteous, for the Lord’s yoke is light.

Instead of that focus, though, my thoughts ran in a very direction. I thought about what freedom of will really means. We think about freedom of will as the ability to choose—and it is that, but we must have a more specific definition, I think. To be free is to choose because the thing chosen is what the chooser really wants (or perhaps wants to want). The alternative is to be driven to a choice because of what other people will think, or the consequences to self that might follow; that is a choice that is not free.

In a previous post I talked about moving toward a more positive morality, arguing that it would be more in line with Christ’s teachings. To put that in the perspective of free will in this discussion, consider the difference between the law-abiding citizen who chooses to be lawful out of fear of punishment and the citizen who follows the law because he believes that the law correctly describes actions that should morally be required or forbidden. The end result may look similar, but only one of these individuals has freely entered into his determination to abide by the law.

Rather than a sacrifice of the will, I realized that entering into a covenant to be a servant to God regardless of one’s own desires is not simply a single act of will, but a continuous commitment to exercise one’s will in a non-intuitive and unselfish way. The strongest will is tempered with discipline—that will acts only of its own accord and not because of factors external to it.

When we talk about freedom in Christ, this, I think, is one of the things we mean but often lose in the mental construct of our servanthood. Rather than being led around by our sin like some harnessed animal, we choose our own path. We become unfettered so that we may make of ourselves what we wish to be. If we follow Christ’s call to us, we shall one day become that perfect version of ourselves God created us to be. The slave to sin is unfree, but the willing servant of Christ is. Paradoxical perhaps, but as Chesterton likes to tell us, there are many things in Christianity that are.

Freedom and subordination to the will of God is one of those things that Chesterton would put in the category of those “furious opposites” when he states that, “Christianity got over the difficulty of combining furious opposites, by keeping them both, and keeping them furious.” As we like to say in Methodist theology: it’s not an “either/or”, it’s a “both/and.”

But using the freedom of will—especially as it is given to us in Christ—is no easy task, and I do not mean to imply any antinomian doctrine. Christ’s blood has redeemed and continuously redeems us, but it does not relieve us from responsibility. One of my best friends once told me that “we are as free as we are willing to accept the consequences of our actions.” That wisdom has stuck with me for years because in that wisdom is the freedom that Christ offers. When we are willing to suffer for what is right—to bear the consequences of being righteous, how could we not be free? What could stop us, for the Lord is truly with us when we choose what is right without counting the cost.

We often misuse our will. More often this is because we allow ourselves to be controlled by circumstances that impose themselves upon our will—emotions run amok, our view of societal expectations, our fears. That is not to say that such things are necessarily bad and to be avoided. Our emotions are good things when we feel them but do not allow them to control us; they give us clues as to what we think, what our motivations are and who we are and want to become.

Likewise, some societal norms are beneficial—they are shortcuts to morality. I used to look distastefully at rules of etiquette, seeing them only as a methodology by which a group may insulate itself from outsiders. K has showed me, however, that certain rules of etiquette—usually what we call rules of hospitality—are actually designed to help outsiders feel comfortable and to ease the tensions of dealing with the unfamiliar. This form of kindness becomes reflexive, and that is why we appreciate other people who are well-mannered. Are their times when the situation calls for bending or breaking even beneficial norms? Yes, but then I’m rarely one to claim to have any sort of knowledge that gives me confidence enough to make a statement of the absolute.

Fear, also, is an ever-present reality, though many of our fears spring from our own creation and/or are not based in reality. Nevertheless, they become part of our psychology and they drive us—sometimes consciously, sometimes not. The daily fears of the average American may be smaller in magnitude than those living in less fortunate places—“will I keep my job?” versus “will I get to eat today?”—but they are also insidious and subtle.

These are only a few of the things we let lead us around and control our will (I feel I need not expand on the role of sin and selfishness on this front). I use them simply as examples of ways we are unfree even in the belief that we are free.

All of this is to say that we Christians ought to seriously think about the meaning of freedom in our theology. To some, submission to Christ appears to be an onerous and limiting undertaking, though this could not be farther from the truth.

We need to stop using shorthand without explanation. I commonly hear phrases like “submission to Christ,” “freedom in Christ,” or “servant-hearted.” These make great catchphrases, but from a semiotic view, I’m not sure what exactly they’re supposed to signify without interposing my own definitions. This, I think, is representative of the fact that we lack a developed theology of freedom and the will outside of its role in salvation. The result is that popular imagination imposes a quite dour and depressing view of human agency in Christianity, a view that I’d describe as “we were given free will to give it up to God.”

As I hope I’ve made somewhat clear above, I don’t think that that’s accurate. I think we need a theology of the will that uplifts and celebrates the existence of human individuality and willfulness while both cautioning against wanton and destructive uses of the will and demonstrating that following Christ is simultaneously an act of willful submission and an experience of greater freedom of the will. Let us be furious in our maintenance of both sides of this paradoxical relationship.

 

Wherein My Dog Teaches Me About Judging Others

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My Welsh Corgi, Berwyn, has separation anxiety. He whines when I put my shoes on, barks ferociously at the door when I’m leaving, and pouts when either me or K isn’t around.

We adopted our little Bear (as we often call him) when we’d been married about five years. That was the time we’d originally said we’d start having children, but Kate had recently been diagnosed with the illness that eventually pushed us toward adoption and I was still in the middle of law school.

When we got him, it was clear he’d been neglected (I’m very thankful that his owner realized this and gave him to us). He lived outside, away from his owner family, and the brief experience I had with the family’s kids led me to believe that they really didn’t understand how to interact with a dog. He was a worm-eaten, flea-bitten little mongrel, so for the first several months we had him, we had to put him through heartworm treatment, neutering and flea treatment. It also took him a while to get used to living in the house but going potty outside—especially because our duplex at the time had this brown shag carpet that was very confusing to an animal used to doing his business in the Waco dirt.

He settled in nicely and quickly became an inseparable part of our family.

To let you know how attached to my dog I am, I once (purely out of thoughtless reaction) jumped into the road full-body in front of a fast-moving car because Berwyn had wondered into the street in front of it. No one was hurt and that was the last time that Berwyn got to hang out with us in the front yard without being on a leash, but it was nevertheless an eye-opener for me.

So, since Berwyn’s separation anxiety appears to be getting worse—this may be a result of the children being in the house for several months and then never coming back—it pulls on my heartstrings every time I go to leave. More than once, I’ve seriously considered not leaving at all after hearing his plaintive cries.

As a quick aside, my proposed solution was to talk to K about getting a second dog. I figured the companionship (even though there aren’t many dogs Berwyn actually likes, though he’s great with people) would do him some good. Most experts say that a second dog is usually not helpful for separation anxiety—and can even make it worse if the two dogs neurotically feed off of each other’s panic. Since Berywn’s our little emperor of pets and seems to like it that way, I’ve gone back to the drawing board.

Before getting the sound advice of experts, though, I spent some time looking at local dogs for adoption. The stories of these animals broke my heart repeatedly and I had to pull myself away almost forcibly.

The whole experience has made me think about my relationships with people and with animals. I’m much more patient with animals—and, if you ask K (and I’ll admit she’s right), I’m an absolute sucker when it comes to the Bear. People, though, I have much less tolerance for.

I started to wonder why, to wonder why a picture of a homeless dog on the internet tugs at my emotions deeper than a homeless man standing right in front of me.

The hard truth is sin. Not the homeless man’s, but my own. It’s easier for me to see people as more responsible, more culpable for their sin. That’s reasonable in one sense, as I know that Berwyn, as clever as he often is, really doesn’t understand what sin is—he just knows it’s funny to poop on the floor in the living room to protest something we’ve done that he doesn’t like. But on the other hand, the way I feel about dogs and the way I feel about people shows me just how flawed I am, how mired in the sinfulness of judging others and treating them accordingly.

Focusing on the culpability of others allows us to distance ourselves from them, to justify our decisions to ignore them, castigate them or actively not help them. This is how we rationalize holding others as our enemies or as those we have no obligation to support.

Thank God that divine vision is not so narrow! That, as best as I can understand it, God sees us like I see my dog—even as God acknowledges that we have done wrong his love for us never falters. The closest I come is when I walk into the living room, see Berwyn’s anger-poop and laugh. Yes, I’m the one who will clean it up (this time, K’s up next), but what reason is there to be upset about it?

To be clear, these thoughts are limited to an analysis of the way I think about others, not about sin in general. I do not mean to say that sin should simply be ignored—despite our salvation and the forgiveness that God graciously gives to us, we ought to each be convicted to renounce our sin and become more like our perfect Father in heaven.

But as we relate to one another, this analogy stands well. We are told not to judge one another, but to be compassionate and helpful to our fellow man. I knew this, but I didn’t understand it until my dog taught me why. If I can leave behind my judgments of other people, I can see them as God’s children and be pulled by my heartstrings to help and to serve them. If I fail in this, I see myself as superior to others, and the first shall be last.

The Beautiful Truth about Evangelism

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When I was in college at Texas A&M, once a semester a certain Tom Short would visit campus. Mr. Short travels from university campus to campus, attempting to evangelize.

A close friend and I would skip class to watch –and argue with–him. You see, he offended me. Not because he’s an evangelist, but because he spread a message too filled with fear, shame and condemnation to represent the Gospel. Once, after standing amongst the gathered crowd and going back and forth with Mr. Short for several minutes about what I perceived to be problems with his idea of God, a fellow student approached me and handed me a flyer for an atheist and agnostic student club. When I told the guy that I was a Christian, but that I didn’t believe that the visiting evangelist was doing a good job of representing what Christianity is about, he looked at me, confused. That’s what this kind of evangelism accomplishes for Christ–it turns people away by giving them an inaccurate image of our God and our faith.

A bit older and wiser, I realize now that my public protest about evangelism in the style of Mr. Short was more about self-expression and formation of personal identity than any real attempt to prevent the preacher from accomplishing his goals. There never was any need for me to speak against him, as his entire production was–as I’ll argue below–doomed by divine design. That seems a very harsh thing to say, and it is, so I hope you’ll bear with some explanation.

I don’t know whether Short’s preaching (or polemic, as was most often the case) ever caused anyone to say that he confessed Jesus Christ as his savior, but I doubt the authenticity of any such declaration (while admitting that only God knows such things). I’m not sure that fire and brimstone, accusatory evangelism has ever made a follower of Christ. Someone who confesses to be a Christian, probably, but not someone who has fallen in love with our Creator.

There’s something anemic about a theology that pressures people to make choices only to avoid hell. It reeks of predation on man’s cowardice, a use fear to coerce an admission of belief. The whole scheme is anologous to torture–give me what I want or suffer the consequences. Like torture (according to recent studies), the practice at best goads people to say anything to avoid suffering–in this case, eternally, we are told. Even secular values would condemn the person who confesses a certain belief (or who abandons a previously-confessed ideology) just to avoid punishment. So why does anyone think that threats are a viable way to share the Gospel truth?

This post isn’t about man, though. It’s about God. It’s about a God so gracious that such condemnatory evangelical practices are doomed to failure. You see, a relationship with God through Jesus Christ can only be entered into voluntarily–no amount of threat or shaming can cause a person to make a choice in his heart. Again, coercion might make someone say they’ve voluntarily chosen something, but it won’t change a person’s true desires.

Here we find a poetic justice. If God is love, and God’s ultimate desire for us is to have a deep and meaningful relationship with God, then it should follow that God wants nothing to do with coercion in the establishment of the relationship. That a person may only willingly enter into that relationship demonstrates a humility on God’s part in God’s willingness to preserve our free will in the hope of a genuine relationship, one that we may never choose to pursue.

The scriptures tell us that a person comes to believe in Jesus Christ’s divinity only through the action of the Holy Spirit and not through the actions of humans. Thank God for that! I don’t want to delve too deeply into pneumatology in this post, but I’d like to summarily comment that it seems to me that the Holy Spirit makes a way for us (call it preveneient grace if you like; we Methodists do) to choose to enter into a relationship with God based on our love for God’s character and creation.

Likewise, scholars of religion and mystical experience often describe a profound spiritual experience as one that changes one’s life but is by its very nature ineffable to others. That no one can “prove” God to us safeguards the opportunity to seek God out for ourselves, makes room for belief. After all, faith is a choice to believe in things that we cannot rationally prove or disprove.

So what does that mean for true evangelism, a sharing of the Gospel that is (I think) more in line with God’s intent for us? All we can do is try to reveal the person of Jesus Christ to others: through our own actions, through our words, through our sharing of the Gospel. It is not for us to make believers–God has ensured that a believer can only make himself. To be clear, this post is not a condemnation of evangelism–far from it–but only a stand against evangelism based in anything but love for fellow man and a desire to share the great joy of knowing Christ.

This reality reminds us of God’s deep love for us.God intends a personal relationship with each of us–a relationship so unique to each of us that we can’t even even reasonably communicate it to one another. We can only bask in the awesomeness of it side by side.

Here’s the beautiful truth about evangelism: the God of love has created the universe so that only by love may God be approached by the believer. This is not a comment about sin or salvation, not a theodicy or an aspersion against the unbeliever, only a realization of the beauty of a God who will not let us be successful is using ways other than God’s to bring people into faith.

So, the next time you hear a preacher full of fire asking you where you’ll go if you die today, don’t get angry, but remember the beauty of a God who has by the very nature of existence decreed that such an ungodly approach to the Gospel will never succeed.

The Word of God for the People of God, Part II

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For the previous post in this series, click here.

The Constitution of the United States of America is often referred to as a “living document.” We use this term because, by some miracle of foresight, careful drafting or the simple adaptability of the generic, the Constitution remains responsive to changing societal conditions. The same document has governed this nation from a time of agrarian society where industrial power was provided by the sweat of draft animals to the digital age.

When Supreme Court justices interpret the Constitution, they often speak in terms of “discovering” new doctrines of law rather than creating or adopting them (the doing of which might be a violation of the Constitution). While we’ve amended the document on many occasions, the principles of the core of the Constitution remain the foundation of American government and jurisprudence. It seems that the Constitutional well never runs dry when faced with new and difficult questions—questions that would never have been considered by the nation’s founders.

If the Constitution is a living document, the Bible is even more so. Given its length and breadth, there’s a lot of material to draw from, but even the same passage read repeatedly on different occasions will reveal different things to the same reader. This layering of meaning in the text of the Bible is one of its most defining features, I think.

Partially, this is a matter of the rich metaphors used by the Biblical authors and by the style of the writing itself. However, I believe that the multiplicity of meanings in and the always-something-new attribute of the Bible runs deeper than the skill of its writers—this is where I would say that the Bible is God-breathed, that it has a mystical way to speak to us afresh and to address our own situation no matter what that situation may be.

The Bible is more alive than the Constitution. The Constitution is alive because we return to its principles as we expand the law to deal with new social, legal and technological issues. In that sense, the Constitution is also dead—without the necromantic power of the person reading and interpreting the document, it is simply words on a page. Interpretation is uncertain, perhaps dangerous even, and best combined with a healthy bit of skepticism and careful evaluation.

The Bible, though, is alive in a different way. The true power of the Bible is that, in reading it, studying it, and living with it, one might have an encounter with the Living God, a personal encounter that transcends words on a page in meaning and power to change a person and a life. That was my experience.

For all of my intellectual theologizing, I did not understand Christianity (to the extent that I do at all) until I personally encountered Christ while reading the Bible—and that occurred only a few years ago. For all my talk of mysticism, that was only one of a very small handful of experiences in which I can say I had a direct encounter with the divine in my life. And yet, it changed me in ways that can never be undone, and neither would I want them to be.

Without the intervention of the divine upon the reader, the Bible does not possess the full power that it might. It would be a collection of wisdom, of valuable words, of a truth not fully containable within words, but it would be dead. The Bible is alive because our God is alive.

As Barth might put it, the Word of God (Christ) often comes to us through the medium of the word of God (the Bible), but the two are not the same and do not always coincide. Priority must be given to the Christ.

That is a difficult thing. How do we discern what an encounter with the divine really means? How do we interpret the messages we believe we’ve received from God, particularly when God has such a mastery of the subtle? We can argue fairly about the meaning of a passage of scripture; it becomes much harder to argue with someone about the Truth with which they feel they’ve been convicted.

If that feels dangerous, it’s because it is. For a historical example of the worst potential from those who claim to hear the voice of God but who act in ways clearly against God’s desires, go listen to Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History Series called “Prophets of Doom.” (While you’re there, stay a while with Mr. Carlin; his podcasts are terrific).

On the other hand, much has been done with the Bible itself that is counter to God’s desires, without a need for God’s involvement at all. See Gary Oldman’s character, Carnegie, in The Book of Eli for a (fictional) example of that.

While we must deal with the problem of interpretation of the divine message, that problem exists whether received in text or direct experience of the divine. The existence of such problems really does not change the way we prioritize the person of Jesus Christ and the scriptures.

As I’ve argued in other posts, the human mind is limited in its ability to understand the divine. Nevertheless, Christianity is a religion (despite its many fractious denominations) deeply focused on orthodoxy, that is, proper belief. But perhaps we ought to focus more (as Christianity also attempts to do) on the substance of the relationship with the divine, which is transformational even without being understood.

To that end, perhaps we ought to talk about the Bible as a kind of entheogen.

New Mysticism

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When I tell people that I’m an amateur theologian, they often ask what kind of theology I write about. That’s a tough question. In the past, I’ve responded by saying “existential Christian theology” or loftily explaining that I’d like to describe Christian theology in a way that makes it understandable, relevant and attractive to the millennial generation, on the verge of which I sit myself. To what extent that’s a reconsideration of current theologies or just a new marketing scheme, I don’t know. Neither does that matter so much, as the only really-persuasive, heart-changing thing about Christianity is the person of Jesus Christ.

All of that aside, as I’ve developed and organized my theological precepts in writing for this blog, I’ve come to realize the importance of mysticism in my own understanding (however limited it may be) of the divine. Were I to undertake the arduous task of writing a systematic theology, I think now that I might title the school of thought “New Mysticism.”

Dictionary.com (in the second entry) defines mysticism as “a doctrine of an immediate spiritual intuition of truths believed to transcend ordinary understanding, or of a direct, intimate union of the soul with God through contemplation or ecstasy.”

We live in a postmodern age, skeptical of any answers this world could provide us. On the one hand, we see extremists telling us that there is no possible argument about the truth, that it is painted in harsh tones of black and weight, never mixing, never graded. On the other there are those who tell us that there is no such thing as Truth, that everything is a matter of perspective, or society or culture, that everything is relative.

Every day, science continues to astound us with the complexity, strangeness and splendor of the natural universe, all the while failing to answer life’s most important questions. Neuroscience shows us the many ways in which the brain might be tricked into misperceiving; we must become skeptical of our own ability to know and understand the universe around us. But there are more things in heaven and earth, dear Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

The myth of progress has failed us; we have more ways to entertain ourselves, more things to do with our time, ways to communicate and travel faster than ever before, and yet the worst of our problems remain to plague us. We are disconnected and disaffected; disparity in power, wealth and opportunity yawns wide between societies and individuals; we still exploit one another, play games of “us” and “them,” fear and hate one another.

The myth of a bygone Golden Age is a bad joke. Those who tell us we can “make America great again” want to do so by reliving the darkest parts of our history—oppression, suppression and regression. Human nature has always been what it is; our past reflects this.

Should we not look toward what we might make of ourselves rather than what has been? Should we rely on revolutions in science and technology that might cover over the darker parts of our selves rather than healing one another’s souls and becoming something better?

Why do we look to the world for our answers? Nothing satisfies. We have been gifted the power to craft and create purpose and meaning and we have ignored it. Look at the wonder of the stories we craft—and then look upon the fallenness of the world we have wrought.

When logic fails us in answering the great existential questions, what are we to do? We look elsewhere. We look to hope. We look to faith. We look to love. None of these is logical, yet they answer more meaningful questions than all of our intellectual works.

We look beyond the world we see, to the invisible we sense only by other means, means at once inexplicable and undeniable. We look to the God who moves beyond all things, reaching for us if only we will let ourselves be grasped, whispering to us if only we will open our ears to hear.

In the relationship God seeks with us, there only is to be found Truth, there only is the source of all meaning worth making, there only are the answers we cannot find through our own faculties, great though they may be. The answers are found in relationship, not in understanding.

I know no other word for that than mysticism. I have never experienced the unio mystica, never spoken in tongues, never had an ecstatic experience of the divine. I do not mean that we should attempt to seek God through asceticism, nor do I mean to advocate for any particular “mystical experience.”

I seek a mystical way of living, one that follows the example of Christ by placing importance on the things that cannot be seen and grasped but that are more powerful than anything we find in this world—relationships, meaning, love. It is my belief that, to do that, we must free ourselves from the notion that we have the ability to understand, much less control, all things, we must be open to receiving the transcendent touch of a God who graciously condescends to be present with us. Most of all, we must live in light of the change that such experience brings to us—and we must endeavor to share that change with a world desperately in need of it.

That I think, is a mysticism of its own kind, a mystical view of existence that does not sharply differentiate between the mundane and the spiritual, but holds them together in tension. In this way, I think that it is fair to call it “new,” though I may be falling prey to the myth of progress myself.

The Word of God for the People of God, Part I

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It is a phrase we Methodists hear every Sunday after the scripture lesson: “The word of God for the people of God.” This phrasing is not used just by Protestants; its origin is probably in the Institutio Generalis Missalis Romani, the Catholic Church’s liturgical document governing the celebration of mass, where the reader of scripture ends by saying, “Verbum Domini,” and the congregants respond, “Deo gratias.”[1]

The phrase troubles me somewhat, not in and of itself, but in the implications it seems to intimate, particularly for American evangelicals predisposed to literalist and infallibilist positions regarding the Bible.

The Bible itself makes no claim to be “the word of God.” In fact, the Gospel of John opens by identifying Jesus Christ as the Word. Now, Paul does tell us that all scripture is God-breathed and useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness. 2 Timothy 3:16. I do not mean to call that statement a falsehood (I don’t think it is one), but let’s pull at the strings a little.

The apostle Paul was likely most active from 30 A.D. to 50 A.D., with his death likely sometime around 67 A.D. Scholars do not have a hard understanding of the time of writing and sequence of the Gospels, but they do have enough circumstantial evidence to build strong theories about the same. The Gospel of Mark was probably the first of the canonical Gospels to be written, appearing sometime between 65 A.D. and 70 A.D.[2]

Looking at those dates, we see that Paul had no access to the canonical Gospels during the time he wrote his epistles (which, since he was writing them, were also not part of any recognizable canon). The oral traditions upon which the written Gospels were probably based were undoubtedly in circulation, being preached by Paul himself, others whose names we have in the Book of Acts and certainly many unnamed missionaries as well, but when Paul wrote the words of 2 Timothy, there were no New Testament scriptures to be included in that statement. Really, what Paul is getting at here is that the Jewish scriptures—the Torah, the chronicles and the stories of the prophets—remain relevant to the Christian and should not be abandoned because of the Incarnation.

Let’s also think about the meaning of “useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness.” Human cultures have always (at least as long as they’ve recorded their thoughts) used both positive and negative examples to model behavior for others. We tell stories of heroes persevering and triumphing over adversity to demonstrate those qualities we think best in a human being. Conversely, we tell stories about people meeting unfortunate ends to warn away listeners from behavior we have deemed harmful or anti-social.

Several genres are strongly based in using negative examples to persuade the audience to avoid or adhere to certain behaviors. The Greek tragedies, based as they are upon the hubris of their victim-protagonists, provide one sample. As a more modern (and specific) example, consider Friday the 13th, where teenagers at Camp Crystal Lake are murdered, typically after some carnal encounter with their fellows. The obvious moral: premarital sex will get you killed; don’t do it.

You can find plenty of additional positive and negative examples for instructing in behavior in your favorite literary medium. Without putting too fine a point on it, I mean to say that not all examples useful for instruction are ones we’re meant to follow. Paul isn’t saying, “do exactly what the scriptures say without question;” he’s saying, “when properly considered, all scripture has something worth learning.” I think that we can all agree with that, but it is not an argument for a literal interpretation as it is often used.

The New Testament did not become an official canon until centuries after Christ. Marcion of Sinope (declared a heretic for his dualistic belief that the God of the New Testament could not be the same as the God of the Old Testament—ironically based on a somewhat literal reading of texts that failed to make any attempt at reconciliation or synthesis) gave us the first list of “authoritative” (according to him) scriptures around 140 A.D. More lists, closer to the eventual official canon, existed by the beginning of the 3rd century and became relatively close in selection by the middle of the century. Still, the first appearance of the exact list that would become the canonized New Testament (and described as canonized) did not appear until a letter of Athanasius of Alexandria in 367 A.D.

In contrast, the first ecumenical council, the First Council of Nicaea, occurred in 325 A.D. Prior to that many smaller councils had occurred as early as 50 A.D. (the “Council of Jerusalem” described in Acts; the next known council was the Council of Rome in 155 A.D.) to 314 A.D. Each of these councils answered doctrinal and theological questions, though the pre-ecumenical councils were not dispositive as they led to different regions ascribing to different theologies, something the Council of Nicaea sought to rectify.

The First Council of Nicaea brought us the Nicene Creed (though it was amended in 381 at the First Council of Constantinople into the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed). These creeds, perhaps with minor differences in translation or stylistic variances, are still used in worship today. Admittedly, certain of the doctrines codified in these creeds—particularly Trinitarian doctrine and homoousios—came from disciplined close readings of available scriptural documents, but it is nevertheless important to note that the doctrines were adopted before the official canon, and that it is thus likely (based on human nature) that the official canon selected those books that supported already-adopted doctrine over those that provided arguments against such doctrines.

Did God have a hand in these debates, councils and thinkers who gave us both the doctrine and the canonized New Testament? I have no doubt. Did God fully ordain and control the development of doctrine and the canon? God could have, but that doesn’t match my own experience of how God moves in the world. Of course, I’ve been wrong before…

The point of all of this information is not to discredit the value of scripture in the Christian walk, nor to attempt to answer the ultimate questions of interpretation or theological position of the Bible. Nor do I suggest that we should stop using the “word of God for the people of God” phraseology in our liturgy. God does speak to us through scriptures, although this phenomenon I think is more complex than the reading of the words themselves. It should also be noted that the lack of capitalization of the word “word” in the liturgical phrase “word of God” is purposeful; careful Methodist theology is not trying to conflate the Bible with Jesus Christ. This, however, gets lost somewhat in the hearing of the liturgy.

My goal in this post has been to provide some complicating factors based on history and logic surrounding the creation of scripture to nuance our understanding of the meaning of the words “the word of God” when referencing the Bible as compared to “the Word of God” when speaking of Christ.

This discussion cannot end here, because it does not fully answer questions about the Word of God and the use of scriptures. While I will continue to examine this topic, I’m going to hopefully avoid some pedantry and redundancy by referring you to my early post, “Ambiguity in Scripture, Part IV” for a discussion of the Barthian approach to the Word of God as Jesus Christ, a point I’ll pick up on in the post that follows.

For the next post in this series, click here.

[1] An interesting footnote to this historical point, particularly in the context of this post, is that “Verbum Domini” used to be rendered in English as “This is the Word of the Lord” from 1969 until 1991, when the translation became “The word of the Lord.”

[2] It is possible that the theorized Q source predates Mark and was already in some circulation at the time the Mark was written, but this remains debatable.

A Wedding Homily

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I recently had the great honor of being asked by my sister to perform her wedding ceremony. I’m not an ordained clergyperson, but that’s the sort of request that one just does not deny, and I remain so moved to have been asked.

At about the time this post goes live, the ceremony will be underway and, depending upon the timing, you might be reading this just about the same time that I’m saying these words to the gathered witnesses. Regardless of when you read them, here are the words I will speak, am speaking or have spoken for her homily:

“A few minutes ago, you heard a reading from 1 Corinthians 13. It’s a verse that’s often selected for weddings, being about love and all, but it’s worth considering what’s going on in the whole passage.

The passage begins with ‘If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give all I possess to the poor and give over my body to hardship that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.’

The scriptures here tell us that love must be the foundation of meaningful action; all action not based in love is ultimately fruitless and forgettable. Your successes do not matter; your failures do not matter; but your love, your love matters. Why?

Because the purpose and foundation of existence itself is relationship with God, with one another, and Creation. So important is this to our Creator that 1 John 4:7 and 8 tell us that ‘Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God…God is love.’

Jesus often uses the metaphor of marriage to describe the relationship between the church—as the body of believers—and the divine. The marriage relationship, the facing of life together where two people put their partner’s needs before their own, that’s the closest human relationship that exists to the relationship that God seeks with each of us.

The passage in Corinthians ends, ‘And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.’ Faith, hope and love are so closely bound together as to be almost inseparable. Hope is the joy and peace stretching into the boundless future that comes from faith in the absolute love of another for us. This is the message of the gospel, but it’s also the foundation of marriage. A successful marriage must be founded upon those three: faith, hope and love.

That’s much easier said than done. Marriage is not always easy; it’s the careful fusion that makes two one but also retains and respects the individuality of both members. Here’s the paradox: you two love one another because of who you individually are, but your marriage is a promise to so bind yourselves together that you, for many purposes, are one. Sometimes, there will be a struggle between your own individuality and the needs or best interests of the marriage. That’s where you’ll need faith, hope, and love.

When I talked about the three above, I hope that I made it clear that love is the most important of the three—both faith and hope rely upon love to work. Fortunately, this same passage in Corinthians gives us something of a crib sheet if we’re wondering what that word “love” means.

You see, we use the word ‘love’ to mean a number of different things: I love my sister and I love my wife and I love chocolate, but none of those loves is the same as the others. This isn’t confined to the English language—the original Greek of the New Testament has, according to C.S. Lewis’s reading, four different types of love—conveniently, Greek actually uses different words for those different types of love.

Lewis tells us about storge, the love between people that comes from empathy and familiarity, the kind of love between parents and children. Then there’s philia, the brotherly love that people who share common values or interests. There’s eros, the romantic love of desire. Most important, there’s agape, the kind of self-sacrificial love that God demonstrates for us in the person of Jesus Christ.

In a marriage, you will have storge, you will have philia, and you will have eros. Those things are the rightful and righteous fruits of a marriage to be enjoyed, but they are not sufficient to keep a marriage solid. Only agape can do that.

Fortunately, 1 Corinthians gives us a map of agape. That was the description of love you heard earlier in this service. I won’t repeat it now—you’ve heard it many times before—but I do want to point something out. The things that define love in those passages, they are not feelings, they are not descriptions of conditions, and they don’t just occur. Those things that define love in the passage—patience, kindness, not boasting, humility, truthfulness, perseverance—those things are choices.

And that’s what your marriage vows are really about, about the promise between the two of you to continually choose agape, to choose to love one another and to protect and build your relationship, and not just when it’s easy. Especially when it’s not easy.

But remember that you are not alone. The people here before you have given their word that they will be there to help you when choosing love is difficult. And sometimes it will be.

It is my prayer for you that, through the continuous choice to love one another with that divine and unconditional love you will promise to one another in just a moment, the joy and peace that comes from hope, faith and love will be yours always, based in this moment you are about to share and the words you are about to say.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.”

The Name of God as an Answer to Existential Questions

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In Exodus 3:14, God tells Moses God’s name. In translation, this is usually written out as “I AM” or “I AM THAT I AM” or “I AM WHO I AM.” A while back, I started to think about the meaning of that and found myself amazed.

God’s name is not meant to be merely impressive title, nor is it simply something that sounds good. It is certainly not simply a logical theorem—such would not need to be spoken, because it is undeniable that a being is its being.

When God tells us that God’s name is “I AM,” God is giving us truth, giving us answers to questions we may not even have thought to ask (but, probably, at some time, have crossed our minds, however briefly).

Here are two things (certainly not an exhaustive list) that God’s name tells us:

The Impassibility of God

If we read God’s name as “I AM WHO I AM,” we are given a theological argument about God’s identity. The statement declares, or at least very strongly implies, God’s self-sufficiency and sovereignty. More important, it implies God’s impassibility. The theological term “impassibility” means that God’s person cannot be involuntarily changed by any event, force or influence outside of God’s self. In other words, God is perfectly according to God’s will and no other force in existence could make God be anything other than what God intends to be.

There is a caveat, though. Some theologians want to use God’s impassibility to argue that God does not have feelings in any sense that a human could understand, or that God could never be moved by something outside God’s self. I have tried to word the paragraph above to carefully avoid such an assertion. Yes, God cannot be moved by anything outside God’s self against God’s will, but to say that God could not allow God’s self to be moved by God’s own will to be vulnerable to an outside influence would logically negate the very idea of impassibility, because a force outside of God, some more law of existence that stands above God even, would be dictating God’s “impassibility,” and such an attribute must come from ontology to be logically consistent.

Rethink some of the things that God has done with and for humanity in light of this. When Abraham pleads with God for Sodom and Gomorrah, God must be making a choice to be persuadable in the first place. Whether this story should be read as historical fact or allegory does not matter—the point is that God willingly condescends to be in a responsive relationship with humanity. God is not distant and uncaring; God is personal and deeply involved in the experience of human existence. Think also of God choosing to suffer in the person of Jesus. An impassible God need never suffer—emotionally or physically—and yet the justice of our God is so great that God shows us that God will not allow any misfortune to befall us that God will not willingly suffer alongside us.

The Origin and Existence of God and Creation

“I AM.” The original Hebrew likely did not contain a period at the end of the statement, but it reads best, I think as “I AM [full stop].”

Have you ever thought to yourself, “If God created everything, where did God come from?” Or, perhaps, if you are not inclined to faith, “What happened before the universe started? What was before before?”

It is a question unanswerable in any meaningful way by the human mind. Two major mathematical solutions have been presented. In the first, something just is without reference to any timescale—at certain dimensions of scale time becomes irrelevant and it possible that, in some quantum physics calculations for example, the same result is generated regardless of the directionality of time (past to future versus future to past). The second major mathematical solution is an infinity of universes—one universe is generated by some event in a preceding universe and this stretches backward and forward in time infinitely. To a certain extent the two answers are really the same: existence just is.

Can we really do anything meaningful with either of those interpretations? No. The human mind is incapable of grasping the infinite in any truly tangible way and the attempt to do so is often met with nothing short of existential terror.

Before humans had any concept of quantum mechanics or advanced mathematics dealing with infinite solution sets, God gave us the answer to the primordial question. It only took God two words to explain in the entirety: “I AM.” God is, uncreated, eternal, without first cause. While we humans can say those sorts of words and understand in principle their meaning, we are, perhaps forever, incapable of actually understanding what they mean in their fullness. We cannot grok them.

We get a similar answer from God at the end of the Book of Job (perhaps my favorite in the Old Testament)—we are incapable of understanding all of existence, and this forces us to choose to either have faith in the creator God or not.

The End of Violence, Part IV: An Argument

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For the previous post in this series, click here.

As promised, I’m going to humbly offer here my own views as to the appropriate relationship between the Christian and violence. The best way to begin, I think, is to start with a few statements based upon the previous posts in this series (or from scripture not discussed) and which all readers could (I hope) agree upon. Following these statements are some questions raised by the previous analysis that represent issues that must be resolved.

First: When it has a chance of success, a non-violent approach is morally superior to a violent approach.

Second: Jesus never explicitly commands his followers not to do violence.

Third: Jesus wants us to love even our enemies.

Q: If some violence is acceptable, when and how much?

 Q: Does loving our enemies (or our friends, for that matter) necessarily mean punishing those who commit injustice?

Q: How do we resolve the tension that results when we are called to love both those who would do harm and those they target as victims?

The three statements and three questions give us a good foundation to build upon before we delve into the gray area. Here’s how we begin:

Precept 1: The Christian should, to the extent possible, avoid using violence.

Violence solves problems, yes, but it typically creates more problems than it solves. Thus, Matthew 26:52, “They who take the sword will perish by the sword.”

As a student of Renaissance history, I often think of the Wars of the Roses or the vendettas fought amongst the Italian nobility during the Quattrocento. One act of violence creates a need to “get justice” or “get even” or “punish wrongdoers.” We are left with a century of bloody conflicts, each subsequent engagement arising out of those fought before it. I’m not sure that any other century is different.

Machiavelli, writing about that time, offers the pragmatic advice in The Prince that, when one moves against one’s enemies, one ought to destroy every remnant, every vestige of the enemy and his friends and relations so that none is left to seek reprisal. In the struggle for power, as was the status quo in Machiavelli’s Italy, this is sound advice. But it also reflects the extremity to which violence must be used to prevent further violence.

We ought to realize that violence, even if used for just purposes, is a result of the fallenness of humanity. Were everyone to love his neighbor as himself, there would be no need for violence. Thus, while an individual act of violence may not be a particular sin, the use of violence is always the participation in the corporate sin of humanity. Because of this, it must be used only as a last resort and should be employed only with a since of sorrow that a better outcome could not be achieved.

Precept 2: Violence should only be used to prevent or stop violent injustice against a person, not after the fact. The need for violence must be immediate.

If there’s time to think of alternative solutions, there’s time to seek a non-violent resolution to a problem. On the other hand, if immediate action is required, however, the time for seeking de-escalation of the conflict has been lost. This precept helps us to comply with Precept 1.

Let’s also think of the collateral consequences here. One of the questions posed above was how we can balance loving victims and wrongdoers. When immediate action is not necessary, we can attempt to work on loving solutions for both parties. Yes, this may be punishment for a wrongdoer, but I leave that an open question for another series of posts. When immediate action is necessary to preserve life and limb, it seems just to intervene against the wrongdoer to protect the innocent. Not our first choice given the requirement to love even our enemies, but the choice to do something non-violent has been taken from us when immediate responsive violence becomes necessary.

This also means that we do not use violence to punish wrongdoers when there is no immediate threat. Violent punishment has largely been shown to be ineffective at deterring future offense (look at 18th Century England, where the death penalty was handed out like it was about to be outlawed). More important, punishment is more about the punisher and not the punishee. When we seek violent retribution for wrongs done to us or others, we are willingly participating in the fallenness that perpetuates violence in the world. “Vengeance is mine…sayeth the Lord” (Deuteronomy 32:35, Romans 12:19). Violence inflicted as punishment cannot restore to wholeness the party injured by a crime. Because only God is truly just, we ought to leave the meting out of retributive punishment to God. I’m not saying we should never punish wrongdoers; however, violently punishing them is nothing but retribution.

This also means that violence should not be employed to protect property—only people. I’d like to avoid (for now) debates about Jesus’ views on personal property and ownership. Without going into that, I think that we can agree that Jesus’ teachings and life made clear that he valued human life over any property rights he believes in (whatever those may be).

In Texas, where I live, the law explicitly allows justified use of force for the protection of property in specific circumstances. But the law and morality should not be confused—they are separate entities with separate goals and concerns, only sometimes aligned.

Precept 3: Only the necessary amount of violence ought to be used.

To the extent that we can avoid doing more harm than necessary, we should. This is an aspect of loving our enemies. Deadly force ought not to be used if less-than-deadly force could reasonably suffice. The amount of violence we use ought to be scaled to the injustice or violence we seek to prevent. This, perhaps, is what we should take away from Jesus’ statement about turning the other cheek—violence is not the answer to offense, even if violent, that does not really threaten life or limb.

I need to hedge and be absolutely clear that, while a solid precept from a philosophical/theological standpoint, strict adherence to this precept is extremely difficult in practice. When we apply force—especially deadly force—against another person, we have little surety in the ultimate results of the force. There’s plenty of second-guessing to be done in the aftermath of a violent engagement (Would fewer shots fired have been sufficient? Could I have done something differently to stop the attacker and injure him less?), but split-second decisions must be made in a fight and survival is on the line, so the objectively best choices may not be made in the moment.

I recently heard someone say, “if the bad guy is worth shooting once, he’s worth shooting five times.” This is tactically correct—while the human body is a frail thing and a single wound from a firearm may kill a person in a relatively short amount of time, the body is also highly resistant over the short term and a single shot from a weapon the likes of which a civilian would be wielding is unlikely to immediately physically stop the attacker (though it might psychologically). Since the goal of morally-applied violence is to stop the attacker as soon as possible, a high amount of force quickly applied may be necessary, making it less likely that the attacker will survive.

As another complicating factor, applying a lesser degree of force is often accompanied by a greater degree of risk of injury to ourselves. Having studied techniques of unarmed combat, I know (technically) how to defend and disarm someone with a knife. But the same training has made clear that, when fighting a person with a knife, you will get cut, and even expert fighters (which I do not claim to be) can be killed in a knife-fight because of bad luck. If knives come out and I have reasonable tactical distance from the threat, I’d rather be behind a gun. I’m not a big guy by any means, and there are plenty of people in this world with whom I’d prefer not to go toe-to-toe unless forced and, if I’ve decided that violence is morally justified, I’m going to fight to win. A disparity in force with my opponent means the stakes of the violence may be raised higher than I would have voluntarily raised them and I must respond in kind.

Where we can, though, we ought to mitigate the results of our violence to the extent possible. After the threat is over, we ought to provide all the medical attention we can to the injured parties—including and perhaps especially any wounded attacker(s). Again, this is a matter of loving our neighbors.

Precept 4: A Christian who is prepared to do violence must make efforts in the world to prevent the necessity of violence.

If, as I do, you stand willing to do violence to other human beings to protect the innocent, you must recognize some responsibility for participation in culture and human nature that permits violence. Recognizing that, you ought to make efforts to proactively prevent the causes of violence where possible.

By this, I mean actively trying to make the world a better place. Of course, the Christian is called to this anyhow; we are called to show mercy and love justice, so we ought to (non-violently) pursue justice for the oppressed where we can, and we ought to focus on giving wrongdoers the chance to atone and reintegrate into society rather than focusing on punishing them.

This means showing kindness and respect to others—especially those with who you disagree, helping the poor to escape poverty, helping to improve unjust systems and institutions, and showing the love of Christ to our neighbors.

The person willing to do violence ought not to be quick of temper and ought to be ready to forgive offenses—otherwise our readiness to do violence turns to definitely destructive and sinful ends. We ought to hope that we never have to do violence to another person, even if we devote time, talent and money to preparing for the possibility. We must recognize that the proper response to violence is not always more violence.

If we are prepared to do violence, we Christians must be more prepared to refrain from doing violence.

Conclusion

I’d like to summarize my argument thus: We ought to view violence itself as an evil, but one that may be occasionally be used to prevent greater evil. While Christ does not explicitly command us not to do violence, it is clear that love ought to prevail wherever it can. Violence should be employed only reluctantly and with sorrow for the alternative resolutions that have been lost, even if they have been lost through the will of someone other than ourselves. Most of all, we ought to do everything that we can to prevent violence, both in our immediate situation and in the world at large.

I think I probably have one more post on this topic to do, to clean up a few loose ends and address a few things that I realize I’ve left out (what about the Ten Commandments!). More to come.