Army of Priests

(From Emerging Grace)

“There are two freedoms – the false, where a man is free to do what he likes; the true, where he is free to do what he ought.” - Charles Kingsley

There is a common idea in Christianity that God respects our freedom so much that He is willing to allow our mistakes to lead us to eternal torture in hell. According to this view we consciously choose to say no to God and God responds by leaving us to our own devices. After we die He judges us and sends us to hell for the choices He allowed us to make. The consequences are our fault and are just. God is not required to intervene on our behalf whilst maintaining the moral high ground. Freedom from sin is understood as forgiveness from sin and it’s consequence of hell (i.e. freedom from sin = a ticket into heaven). Much of this is true but it misses the point.

The Nature of Sin

No one in their right mind chooses to sin. When we sin we should think of ourselves as being mentally disabled. If we truly know the consequences and exact details of what we are doing we would never choose to do it. If we knew truth we would always choose God. Always. Sin relies on deception to strike and thus eliminates free will in order to cause you to stumble (i.e. you have to lose your freedom before you sin; it is not something you lose after you sin when you are subject to the consequences you can no longer avoid).

Take Adam and Eve. When they ate the apple they were choosing to “become like God”. They were presented with a choice for something that looked really good. Instead they got misery. Who in their right mind would eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil if they fully knew (and believed) the consequences? Adam and Eve got something different to what they choose – their freedom was overruled. Imagine if you walked to a bakery and ordered a sausage roll but always got a meat pie. You would not really be choosing. Freedom only exists when we get what we choose. Adam and Eve did not get what they choose. They did not have freedom (although they are still guilty for their lack of belief and self-centred thinking).

Sin always works this way. It works by polluting our vision, confusing the data, and making a bad choice look like a good one. When you sin you almost always justify it in your mind thinking it would satisfy you in some way – but in fact you have been fooled by a lie! The results are never as good as righteousness and the only reason you ever “chose” it is because you were deceived into thinking it was the better choice. You did not get what you choose. Between a choice of A and B you chose B but got C. You never asked for C, you wanted B (because it genuinely looked better than A), but C was forced upon you against your free will.

Sin is not a wrong choice between good and bad. Rather it is a choice between good and bad masquerading as “better”. Sin itself is a symptom of the evil in this world. Evil can be understood as a disease transmitted by sin (like flu is transmitted by its symptom of sneezing). We are born into this world filled with this disease, someone inevitably wrongs us, and this sin against us tarnishes what was supposed to be a perfect creation. In our ruined state we place ourselves before God, becoming or “catching” evil ourselves, and soon begin to spread it to others with our selfish sins against them. The end result is a world full of ruined people who, because they are ruined, strike out against one another ruining each other even further.

This is hardly what you would call freedom, and a God who sat back and allowed it all to happen whilst this trap forced us into hell (which we didn’t want) would not be respecting our free will. Sin is hardly what you would call a “choice” although our ability to choose is what allows it. If God truly respects our free will he would be compelled to intervene in this cycle, not dispassionately sit back and allow it to continue.

Justice

It’s a sad thing to see a Christian who stuffs up and then cowers as they expect God to begin punishing them for their mistake. Such a view is based on a western understanding of Justice. Justice as executed in our court systems is punishment for doing something wrong. It is directly opposed to mercy which holds back punishment. Thus God is perceived as a being whose senses of Justice and Mercy contradict each other. The end result is a God who appears to have unconditional wrath (everyone is sent to hell) except where mitigated by his conditional love (based on our faith).

Biblical justice is closer to what we would call reconciliation (Isaiah 1:17, 30:18, Jeremiah 21:12, Zechariah 7:9, Matthew 12:18-21, Luke 4:18-19). It is correcting a wrong not via punishment but through the healing power of grace. It is about undoing the damage done by evil in this world. Violence cannot do this. It only inflicts more damage where damage has already been done. Two wrongs never make a right. Redemptive violence is a myth.

Now there are places in the bible where God displays his wrath and punishes people. This however is a preventative measure, not a redemptive one. When a child breaks something and his parents punish him it is not so that what he has broken can be repaired, rather it is so that he does not do it again. God’s wrath works the same way. It is the desperate attempt of a father to teach his children not to run onto the road during peak hour. It is conditional and it is disciplinary (not redemptive). After a child has been hit by a car and is in a coma there is little point in punishing him for it, the time for healing has come.

In the case of humanity that healing comes through love, and not just any love, but the unconditional, infinite love only found in a relationship with God. It is through this love that our ruined state can be repaired, and the symptoms of it will begin to desist. This is why relationship must be made central to Christian theology: God does not need to forgive us of our sins so that we can have a relationship with Him; rather it is through our relationship with Him that we are cleansed of our sins. Jesus did not need people to be clean to eat with them. The idea that we are cleansed of our sins and can thus get into heaven at salvation and then after this, we can begin to have a relationship with Christ makes the relationship optional (we can get into heaven before we have the relationship). If we understand the cleansing of our sins as something that happens through that relationship it becomes vital for salvation.

Salvation

Viewing salvation as a mere key to heaven however greatly minimises it. He we are trapped in a cage: broken, ruined, diseased humans. God, whose love stirs in him a longing for justice, longs for our freedom, our repairing, our healing, and our curing. He cannot sit back and let sin ensnare and drag his creation into hell. So He sent His own son to die for us. Did he need Jesus to die in order to declare us righteous? Did he need a scapegoat to satisfy his wrath or some law he was bound by? No, but we needed Him to die. We needed to know that we were loved enough for Him to die. We needed to know that we were beautiful under all our scars. We needed to know that in our discussing state someone cared so much to go through so much pain. And so as Jesus was struck by a blow designed to put His message of love out of action what really happened is that God turned this own blow against the devil, amplifying this message of love a hundred fold, and defeating evil once and for all (or put differently: whilst on earth Jesus teaches a message of love, the devil tries to stop it, but by Jesus’ death He pays our ‘ransom’ and makes the greatest statement of love of all).

That message – that we are loved – changes us. It begins the healing process. It acts as a cure. But Jesus work is not done yet. In his resurrection we find hope. We find hope that a dead man (like we are) can find life. We have hope that a man wrapped in our chains of sin can find freedom. That a man locked in hell can escape – just as we are trapped in hell even whilst alive. We know we no longer need to try to escape these chains on our own because someone is coming to us with the key. That key is grace, and that grace is experienced the only way it can be – in our relationship with Him.

The gospel is not the story of God giving us a choice to avoid punishment in hell whilst He sits back and hopes we make it. The gospel is the story of God coming to us whilst we are bound in chains we cannot escape and tearing them from us before it is too late. It is the story of God giving us freedom, not expecting us to act with a “free will” that we do not have. As God woos us we fall in love with Him. As we fall in love with Him we begin to place Him first – the criteria upon which we base judgements begin to change. As that criterion becomes love filled we begin to sin less (because sin no longer looks like a good choice). As we sin less we contribute less to the mess this world is in and instead begin to get to work helping God to save it.

That is freedom – not choosing something that we want to do based on criteria ruined by our selfishness, but choosing what we ought to do based upon love found in Christ. Freedom is a good thing, not something that causes us to sin, but something that causes us to be righteous. Something found in relationship. The result of redemption. The purpose of salvation.

(Disclaimer: I am aware that the thoughts in this post are not complete and need some refining. It is a base upon which to think about a relational theology and not the final product. I encourage you to build upon this base just as I have built upon the base built at The Rebel God and by authors such as Donald Miller and even John Eldredge. As my fellow blogger says, “Theology is something that should be done in community.”)

“The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it’s indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it’s indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it’s indifference.” – Elie Wiesel

1.  We admitted we were powerless over apathy—that our lives had become unmanageable.
2.  Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
3.  Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God.
4.  Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
5.  Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
6.  Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.
7.  Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.
8.  Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.
9.  Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
10.  Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.
11. Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God, praying only for knowledge of His Will for us and the power to carry that out.
12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to other victims of apathy, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

“We believe a person will gain access to heaven because he is knowledgeable about theology, because he can win at a game of religious trivia. And we may believe a person will find heaven because she is very spiritual and lights incense and candles and takes bubble baths and reads books that speak of centring her inner self; and some of us believe a person is a Christian because he believes five ideas that Jesus communicated here and there in Scripture, though never completely at one time and in one place; and some people believe they are Christians because they do good things and associate themselves with some kind of Christian morality; and some people believe they are Christians because they are Americans. If any of these models are true, people who read the bible before we systematically broke it down, and, for that matter, people who believed in Jesus before the printing press or before the birth of Western Civilization, are at an extreme disadvantage. It makes you wonder if we have fashioned a gospel around our culture and technology and social economy rather than around the person of Jesus Christ.” (Donald Murrow in Searching for God knows what)

I love that quote. It’s controversial and it is offensive and it forces you to think. A lot of people have a lot of weird ideas of what a “Christian” is. Several hundred “bible believing” organisations believe you aren’t even saved unless you are one of their members. Some people believe you have to do some sacraments or get baptised or pray a special prayer. That last one never sat well. One moment you’re heading to hell then you just say a little prayer and viola you’re going to heaven all expenses paid. I never prayed that prayer. I just kind of grew into Christianity.

We often say that “Christianity is a relationship not a religion” but our theologies and methodologies do not reflect that. For all intents and purposes Christianity, as practised today, is a religion – a set of spiritual things and ideas that a group of people does/believes.

Things that do not make you Christian

I am weary of using the word “Christian” because it describes a group of religions and as such is a corrupted label. But bear with me.

• Knowledge does not make you Christian. James 2:19 says it best: “You believe that there is one God. Good! Even the demons believe that—and shudder.” Let’s face it; there are quite a few atheists and quite a few demons who know the facts of the Christian faith much better than we do. The demons even know it is true and believe it better than we do. It is a real shame that most of evangelism these days is based around trying to convert someone to their way of thinking when Christianity involves so much more than thought. Knowledge is a starting point. The free grace/easy believism position taught by most evangelicals makes no sense to me.
• Works do not make you Christian. Going to church does not make you Christian any more than going to the zoo makes me a monkey. Atheists are very good at reading their bibles and Muslims can picket abortion clinics just as well as we can. Casting out demons won’t get you to heaven (Mathew 7:21-23).
• Saying some prayer does not make you a Christian.
• Getting baptised does not make you a Christian.
• Voting for some politician does not make you Christian.
• Belonging to some organisation does not make you Christian.
• Going to a Billy Graham crusade does not make you Christian.
• Calling yourself Christian does not make you Christian.

You might agree with me on all those points, but think for a second on how much of Christianity fits into them. I’ve almost covered the whole religion! Most of Christianity as practised is nice people surviving in the world as they rush from one program to the next which are in turn designed to ensure they do not waver from a set of special ideas. Sunday Morning: Church, Sunday Night: Church, Monday Night: Prayer Meeting, Tuesday Night: Worship Practise, Wednesday Night: Bible Study, Thursday Night: Leadership Meeting, Friday Night: Youth, Saturday: Men’s or Woman’s group.

It’s one giant exercise in missing the point.

The Point

Every now and then I hear a pastor giving a sermon designed to make the congregation perhaps think about having a “relationship with God”. It boggles the mind. But it is fully expected. Relationship with God is an idea that is tacked on to our religion rather than being the focus of it. Once you have accepted the correct doctrines, said the little prayer, joined a church, and developed habits of reading your bible and petitioning God for stuff you can begin to consider having this relationship thing.

There has been a growing move in recent years to reshape our theology and methodology around relationship. Most people who do understand it’s important don’t really have a systematic theology for understanding it. Derek Flood wrote an article that first got me thinking about what a relational theology might look like. A theology based not on legal ideas but a person and his emotional, ferocious story. It would take some time to outline my ideas but here are some thoughts to ponder:

• What if the entire point of your existence was a love relationship with Christ?
• What if sin is not so much disobedience as it is adultery?
• What if everything God has done has been designed to restore our relationship?
• What if a Christian is simply someone who has a love relationship with Jesus Christ?
• What does a “Love Relationship” mean? How does it change you? Can you truly love God without being transformed? What does it look like?
• What if Church was meant to be a big organism with a larger scale love relationship with God?
• What if faith is more about rebuilding trust with the God you abandoned than knowing stuff?
• What if the bible is meant to be more of a letter rather than just a field manual?
• What comes first: loving God or faith or works?

Wouldn’t a Christianity that took these questions seriously look different? You can’t love God without knowing him. You can’t love God without expressing that through works.

Evangelism

Once we start thinking in terms of relationship with God being the thing that makes you Christian our methodology has to change. Evangelism in particular will need to change. How do we evangelise so that we are introducing people to God rather than just convincing them of some ideas? Obviously they do need to know some stuff or they can’t have that relationship at all. They need to know what God was like but then that is just teaching them about God. What they really need is to experience God. That builds relationship. So how do we evangelise as to help people fall in love? A lot of people have, but only many years after they were first “converted”. The fact is most “converts” never build that relationship. That means that our methods are very inefficient.

What are your thoughts?

(From Emerging Grace)

“..In order for any two people – much less any two strangers – to really click, they’ve got to share something in common significantly more profound than working in the same place, or living in the same neighbourhood, or even being held captive together on the same alien spaceship.” – (John Shore in “I’m Ok, You’re Not”)

I went to the pub last night for a mates 21^st birthday. My conservative parents weren’t too happy about it but figured it would be ok since I had to drive anyway. The night was quite enjoyable. Fortunately, my friends were happy drunks rather than angry ones. As the evening rolled on however, I realised that a fair few Christians would disprove of my being there.

I’m not talking about being legalistic; I’m talking about being protected. In an effort to protect ourselves from the evil world we isolate ourselves into little Christian ghettos. By being at that party I was engaging in the world. I was putting myself within the range of peer pressure. I could have even sinned…

As Christians we often have a lot of trouble with associating with people “out there” – in the world. I know many Christians who socialize almost solely with other Christians. It is an easy temptation to fall into. Sure, we may work with non-Christians or see them at the checkout or on TV but we rarely invest ourselves into them (unless we are trying to evangelise them). Rather we form Christian sub-cultures so that we can stay protected whilst scratching our heads about why people aren’t flocking to us.

I have a flier in my hands for a Christian travel agency that gives the advice “let’s keep it within the Spiritual Body of Jesus Christ”. I want to puke. Why would we want to keep it within the body of Christ when there are plenty of good secular agencies providing the same or better service? Why would we want to use a Christian real estate rather than a secular one? Why would we want to put our movies on Godtube instead of youtube, myspace, facebook, virb, google video, or photobucket where everyone can see them? Is the secular world not “worthy” of us?

Matt Whitlock in Frequently Asked Questions suggests that we need more Christian bar tenders. Why? Because when a marriage is failing or someone’s had a bad day at work or can’t pay their bills where do they go? They go to the bar and talk to the bar tender. Of course, in the evangelical world jobs like bar tending are cursed. Evil happens in bars! Indeed it does, and that’s why we are needed there.

The Church is very defensive. We are more concerned with keeping things the same than we are in changing them. In my mind the church should be the primary motivator of change in the world. We repeatedly recommend that Christians not associate with people who sin incase it is contagious and we will catch their disease. Every time evil encroaches on an area we run from it. Instead we should be aggressively seeking out the evil in this world. Where evil is Christians should be so that we may fight it.

I strongly believe that Christians are meant to change this world. However, in order to change it you need to engage it. By “engage” I don’t mean hide in our church buildings and throw tacks at people who walk by. I mean enjoy the movies that non-Christians enjoy, frequent the places non-Christians frequent, do the things non-Christians do. Even befriend non-Christians just because you want to; not just to evangelise them.

The best example of contextual living I have heard of was set by Craig Gross who founded xxxchurch, a ministry to porn stars. Craig Gross goes to porn shows in order to be where he is needed. In one blog post he tells the story of how he had lunch with Ron Jeremy at hooters and then followed him to a party. It was not what you would call a “safe Christian place”. In the end though, after everyone had left, only Craig was there.

I knew eventually all the craziness would only last a few hours, it would eventually come to an end. It is all temporary, the fame, the sex, the girls, the life and eventually it all will go away not just for Ron but for everyone. Then what?

Ron looked at me and said, “Pull up a seat.”

… By 2:30 am the club was empty. I stayed. Why? because when all these things fade away what is left is only Faith, Hope, and Love. I gave back my all access pass and headed back to hotel, but realized we are on the same team. I don’t need the lanyard anymore to see that. The differences about porn we will leave to the debate, but in life, Ron Jeremy can not be an opponent. He must be a friend, and friends share friends and invite each other into their world. We’re more alike than different, we both have struggles, challenges, etc, but when it comes down to it, the only difference between Ron and I is that I have a relationship with Jesus that Ron doesn’t have that yet. But we’ll keep sharing dinner, sharing our friendship, and sharing our lives, and maybe one of these days we’ll have that in common too.

Craig is one of those guys who gets it. He understands that we are in this world not to run from evil but to fight it, to engage it. Where are meant to “be there”. Jesus also made a habit of seeking out the dark, evil places. He always found the sinners in an area and ate and laughed and loved with them. He met them where they were, not expecting them to reach a certain standard of holiness before they could talk. He didn’t need Christian spaces or cultures to hide in. He lived in the culture of the time because that was where the people were – where his mission was.

I have a fair few non-Christian friends. Do I want them to become Christians? Absolutely. Is that desire the prime motivator of my friendship? No. Will I keep being friends even if they never accept God? Yes. My friendship and love is not contingent on their accepting God. If it was, it would not be true friendship. I accept them as they are, even as I desire them to grow.

It’s not all this simple though. By attempting to engage and change the world we will soon see the world try to engage and change us. We are on the earth to battle and should expect evil to fight back. The more we engage the world the more we increase our chances of being compromised by it. But the more we distance ourselves from it the more we compromise with fear and passivity. This is where the balance of being “in this world but not of it” comes in. We belong to neither the evil world nor the Christian subculture.

We are made to be “salt and light” but salt is useless if not applied to something and light is pathetic if it is hidden. We could hate consumerism with such vigour that we go and live a simple life in the country and then influence no one. Is this what Christians are meant to be? We could be so pure that we flee from every sign of sexuality and therefore never spread that purity to the people who need it most.

But here is a question: is purity seen more in a protected conclave or a sex craved campus where a Christian holds firm to God despite constant temptation? Isn’t it the way we contrast with evil that makes us truly good? That’s what this world needs: contrast. If we hide in Churches amongst Christian friends doing Christian activities we are only white on white, if we mix in pubs amongst non-Christians’ sinning we are white on black – and appear all the more white for it.

That’s contextual living – being there. Being where the world is its blackest. Being where the pain is. Being where the people are. Being where the devil is. Being where Christians don’t dare to go.

“The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.” – John 1:14

“Incarnational Living” roughly corresponds to a catch all phrase in emerging circles for “active Christ likeness”. It describes an aggressive attempt to live a life that exemplifies Jesus in the community. In short, incarnational “livers” take the question “What Would Jesus Do?” seriously.

The incarnational liver sees parallels between Jesus life and their own. Jesus, who is not of this world, took a humble form as to actively show love and pursue justice (culminating in his death). So the incarnational liver sees themselves as not of this world but rather as a humble vessel of Christ in this world; on a mission to show love and make justice. In other words, the incarnational liver is a “little modern day Jesus”.

The incarnational liver is active. They passionately search out opportunities to express love and bring justice. They do not wait for an opportunity to find them. They consider their life a mission. It is a mission to show the modern world Christ – to introduce them to Him through the example of their own lives as to initiate an experience with their creator by proxy. They not only tell people about God, they show them him. They show His love by giving it, sacrificially if necessary and without hesitation. They show His justice by fighting unrighteousness. By being known they give people a “taste of God”.

The incarnational liver is a Radical Christian. They are “God in the neighbourhood”. They influence the world around them. People are not the same after knowing them. They are an “incarnation of God” through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. That’s a lot of responsibility. To seek out the most despised people in society and find the best way to love them. To make fellowship with the outcasts. To stand up against corrupt and discriminating social structures. To give until it hurts and then give more.

I want to be that type of Christian. I want to be a bearer of Christ’s image. I want to find where it hurts the most and be there. I want to show people Jesus by being like him. When people ask “What was Jesus like?” I want to respond, “Let me show you.” He lived a revolutionary life – a counter cultural life. He did small things with great love and in the process gave them what no great action could – himself.

I want to live like that.