Finding God In The Conversation

Reading the Gospels, it is hard to shake the feeling that one is listening to one side of a telephone conversation. So much of what is written is really Jesus speaking ‘at’ people, rather than ‘to’ them. Sure there are questions peppered in, but they seem more like excuses for Jesus to go off on His own tangent, more like literary devices than the words of real people.
The reason for this is simple: the Gospels are based on an oral tradition that rose up around the person of Jesus. Since what was retained was primarily what He said, and not what was said to Him, the Gospels come off too often as a series of sayings and events rather than as the life of a concrete individual. And His lessons seem more like sermons, rather than one part of a broader conversation, which they probably were.
There are a few exceptions to this tendency in the written Gospels, and one can be found in Mark 12. Here we have an example of Jesus in conversation, and while it still feels like a lot is being left out, we get a much more organic picture of Jesus’ interaction with those around Him. There is a particularly beautiful exchange with one of the teachers of the law in verses 28-34, where Jesus gives the Greatest Commandment. Jesus is impressed by the young man and you can almost feel Jesus smiling when He tells the man that he is ‘not far from the Kingdom of God’.
This image of Jesus as someone who engaged in dialogue and dialectic is of supreme import to me. For me the primary picture of Jesus is God in this everyday person, just talking to people, having conversations with them. In and through those conversations lives, and ultimately the world, were changed. It must have been an experience like no other: to just be able to sit and talk to God in human form, like He was any other person. It is in conversations with others that I personally have had the most profound encounters with Christ, and so that image of Jesus is the one that I cling to most.
This has been the very nature of the youth groups I’ve led: just sitting with a group of individuals focused on important moral, religious, and theological issues and through that conversation finding God. One person brings up some point, another comes along and criticizes it, or bolsters it, and through it all we are trying to reach out to Something Bigger than ourselves. In those moments, through these people at this time, just talking these matters through, I feel lifted up to some Higher Place, and I know that we are all reaching out to something Ultimately Real, and that it is also reaching out to us. It is not like God is one factor within the conversation. The Revelation of God takes place in and through the conversation itself, through the struggle, the self-examination, and the directing of hearts and minds toward the Divine. That is what Christianity, and revelation, is all about to me. This transcendent experience, found in and through dialogue and community, has colored my entire view of the Bible. I see scripture as a dialogue between God and man, and between man and man, and I see God’s Revelation as being within the very fabric of that dialogue.
When Jesus is called “The Word of God” I take that to indicate that we are in conversation with the Divine, and that Jesus is the center of that conversation. Whenever people of good conscience come together to try to discover who they are in their relationship with each other and with God, and use dialogue to overcome their isolation and find something deeper, higher, and better, if you look with the right eyes, you can see the very Incarnation of God. You can see Jesus Christ. I know I do.

The Double-Edged Sword of Apocalyptic Language

One of the great spiritual 'advances' I've made in my own life in recent years was to become comfortable, really comfortable, with apocalyptic imagery and to come to a real understanding of it's value. When I talk of 'apocalypticism', I'm speaking of the kinds of images one finds in Zechariah, Daniel, and especially the Book of Revelation. When people talk about these books and the imagery contained therein, they usually focus on the prophetic aspect of the writing. But it is particularly the Combat Motif that has both bothered me, and intrigued me, for some time now.

The Combat Motif is the theme of there being some evil counter-force in the universe working against God. In contemporary Christianity this is imaged as something like a fallen angel. The idea of a devil is bothersome to most mainline protestants. We emphasize a juridical model of atonement, and so success or failure to receive salvation is based on the fulfillment of some moral demand: either in action or more commonly in terms of our beliefs. We are expected to do or believe something specific and our success and failure in life, at least spiritually, is based on us living up to this expectation. We believe in free will, and we want to take responsibility for our own actions. I am also inclined towards belief in free will and I'm big on personal responsibility. I don't like the possibility of giving someone the excuse 'the devil made me do it'. Plus generally speaking modern people don't like to sound silly or childish, like we believe in the boogeyman or something.

But as I've come to respect Eastern Orthodox visions of atonement, whereby Jesus Christ breaks the power of satan through his sacrifice, a healthier respect for the Combat Motif, and for apocalyptic language in general, has developed within me. I think that while we've recognized the danger of fleeing from responsibility, forgoing apocalyptic language altogether has robbed us of part of what we need to talk in a fulfilling way about the meaningfulness of life, the reality of evil, and even the glory of salvation. I wonder if part of the reason for the success of the more evangelical faiths, over the more mainline protestant and catholic movements, is because they are able to speak much more naturally about the cosmic battle between good and evil. By placing our own internal and social moral struggles within the context of truly cosmic forces within the universe, they speak to life as it is actually experienced by us. They have a phenomenological reach, if you will, that the more common denominations seem to lack. The reality is that the Combat Motif reaches back to antiquity, and it plays an important role both explicit and implicit throughout the Bible. This issue is big in my current unpublished book BREATH OF GOD. And many churches just don't do a very good job of really wrestling with its place in our lives.

William James once said that life 'feels like a fight'. I'd tend to agree with him.
Apocalyptic language continues to be relevant because it speaks powerfully to that fact. It can distort the nature of the fight, and it is a danger that we will spend so much time fighting monsters under our bed that we will fail to fight the ones in our own hearts. But without it, I'm convinced that the full measure of life as it is lived, and the actual meaning of life in the world, can be concealed. There is a reason it is called "revelation".

The Gospel According To Earl

Both our junior and senior high youth groups are using the TV show MY NAME IS EARL to study the Bible. With its rather low-brow humor, it may not seem like the ideal choice, but in reality the show is full of moral and religious musings that make wonderful fare for a good discussion of various Biblical passages and principles. Some may also be upset that the show's central religious theme is Buddhist, rather than Christian. Earl, the show's main character, is obsessed with karma, the idea that what goes around comes around. In it he tries to balance out all the bad karma he's built up by making up for many of the mistakes he made in his rather shady past. This would not sit well with many Christians, who see karma as something antithetical to the Christian message. But, truth to be told, the Bible itself has a tradition within it that is very much like the Buddhist concept of karma.

The Deuteronomistic interpretation of history, which predominates in many of the historical books, the Book of Deuteronomy, and many of the prophets, interprets all historical events in the light of God's justice. Suffering is supposed to be the result of our own past sins or the sins of our ancestors, and success (by the Deuteronomical lights) is similarly the result of fealty to God. This insistence that suffering is the result of our own behavior, inculcated into the prophets a sense that all difficulty must be met with increased trust in God and personal virtue. Eventually, other members of the Israelite community began to criticize this worldview. The Book of Job, the Book of Ecclesiastes and prophetic books like Habbakuk, essentially are a turning to the prophets and saying 'hey God, hey prophets, the world doesn't really work that way. Good things happen to bad people and bad things happen to good people. The world is more complicated than you seem to say it is'. Much of what is written in the Bible is an affirmation of, or a protest against, a karmic view of destiny.

The issue is a difficult one because in one sense, what the prophets were saying we should DO in response to suffering was, for the most part, correct. The prophets encountered a God that was so good that next to Him all human goodness looks like, in Isaiah's words, 'but filthy rags'. The idea that the only proper human response to our encounter with God is humble worship and repentance, and the idea that suffering must be met with faith, are largely correct. But the problem is that any rudimentary examination of the world will find that most events, good and bad, are not tied to anyone's behavior. Moreover, however true it is that all people are equally distant from God in terms of morality, it is not true that all people are equally good or equally bad, any more than the fact that both 7 and 8 are equally distant from infinity means that 8 isn't greater than 7. Relative moral judgments have to be made in the world, and if God can't guide those, then He can't guide the ethics of our lives here and now.

Figuring out how to reconcile the prophets' experience of God as infinite goodness, our need to meet suffering with faith, and the fact of evil within the world, is one of the primary challenges for any person of faith. The truth is life is not as simple as it is made out to be in MY NAME IS EARL. But examining what life would be like if it were, and what that means for us as people in the here and now, is something that is very fruitful for any Christian. It is no wonder that our discussions during this study have been particularly stimulating.