The Beauty of Calvinism

The beauty of Calvinism is the humility it impresses on it's adherents, and the way it moves moral calculation in the right direction. For Calvinists can never make assumptions about their own salvation, and so cannot feel puffed up about being one of the chosen who are going to Heaven. Or if you are Calvinist of a stripe that believes that faith is a freely given proof of salvation, it cannot bring you to pride for you still likely hold to total depravity and to the view that your faith is neither a moral nor intellectual achievement you can lay claim to. If I KNOW I am totally depraved and additionally think my salvation was none of my own doing, then I cannot rightly be very egoistic about it can I? Or at least no more egoistic than any other person, since we are all equally screwed up.

Additionally a predestinarian cannot fall into the trap of doing good solely for everlasting reward. For our final destiny is already vouchsafed no matter what we do. Calvinists generally believe in unremovable grace. No, a Calvinist's moral focus is not heaven or hell but simply love of God. It is about doing the right thing because of that love. These virtues of Calvinism draw me in, and I find myself unable to turn away from them. My own theology has a heavy Calvinist flavor.

The Importance & Theological Significance of Sabbath

The Sabbath was a very important religious development in Hebrew religion. In it is a profound moral truth which is more and more being recognized by science and secular philosophy, and an even more profound theological truth that is often missed. 

Today will be a Sabbath for me. It will be a one post day, and I am off of work (both jobs). I will do as little work of any kind as possible. The Bible's concept of Sabbath pulls in, in one fell swoop, the entire meditative tradition found in other philosophies. We need quietness, and a time set aside for extended introspection and indeed worship. We think that only activity is productive, but indeed rest and inactivity can be very productive if the goal is shoring up the inner resources needed for the rest of life. This message, as you can tell, is the corollary to the one I gave on 2/3. Life is work and play, and work and play are good. But a life that is void of extended periods of inactivity loses the vitality that makes those activities spiritually productive. Indeed, there are several studies that show the health benefits of having a time of Sabbath.

The theological significance is that in this period of inactivity and rest we see some fundamental truth about the divine. The Old Testament tells us that the Sabbath was established by God's day of rest after the creation of the world. Almost all living things have some period of inactivity, of something like sleep or rest. And indeed many non-living complex systems seem to have natural 'rest' periods as well. Few ever really reflect on the Biblical insight that this tendency is grounded in the nature of God. For it reveals a God that is NOT completely invulnerable and self-sufficient. An in-all-ways all-powerful God has no need for rest. 

We need to rest, we need Sabbath. But we need to rest REFLECTIVELY and thus the importance of worship as a part of Sabbath. For in our resting we can find a window into the life of God. 

The Awareness of Death

Death stands next to each moment, forcing us to fully soak it up, to let it wash over us and to hold onto it with all we have, for it is passing into nothingness. And yet in that activity we discover that the depth of experience is without bounds and that life has a quality to it that is beyond the facts of it's passing away, bringing us to the conviction that the moment passes not into nothingness, but into something beyond imagining.

The Depths and the Shallows

See: Ecclesiastes 3:1-8

Life is a series not simply of ups and downs, nor of hills and valleys, but of heavens and hells, of summits beyond imagination and depths beyond words. Any philosophy or religion must account for the fullest range of human experience, and for the heavens and hells of this life. Any and every moment must be looked at as meaningful, though not every moment can be looked at as equally good.

Viktor Frankl was right when he said that if life as a whole is to have any meaning at all, then suffering too must have some meaning in it. The hard times of life cannot, and should not, be ignored or discounted. It is not enough simply to live into the good times of life and to soak them up. For the suffering that is bound to come will not simply be erased by reflecting upon good times. Very few people can so surround themselves with ease and comfort that they can simply escape from suffering and pain. And what is lost if one does achieve such a life? Might there not be some value in participating in the pain of the world?

Nor is it enough to somehow deny that suffering is, in fact, suffering. I can never get past this aspect of the Buddhist thought. It takes it for granted that personal escape from suffering is a goal to be sought seemingly at the expense of all else. But it seems to me that alleviating the suffering of others must have some place alongside the alleviation of my own. If it takes me 40 years to achieve nirvana, but in the meantime I could've helped thousands of people, wouldn't the latter minor alleviation of overall suffering outweigh the total alleviation of my own. And indeed, I may need to share in the pain of others to help them feel less. Co-suffering can be redemptive and helpful, and we do much good by truly sharing in the pain of others. And suffering cannot be erased for those who are in its depths. They must find meaning in life in the depth of their suffering, and not simply be goaded into escaping it by letting go of desire. It is like telling them that their suffering is their own fault. It is blaming the victim.

So I must find some way to find meaning in the pain of this life, in the hells (and I mean hells) I experience on a regular basis. Yet I cannot, in the final analysis, throw my hat in with those who handle the problem of evil by making it a gateway to some greater good, by justifying suffering and evil by putting it all in the hands of an all-powerful and providential God who is also good. In this way what looks evil to us is really good in disguise. This is simply to deny an experience that seems as palpable to me as any other. For suffering and evil are experienced by me as GENUINELY wrong. In this sense there is some truth in the Buddhist attempt to escape from suffering. It is a recognition that suffering is very much a spiritual assault and comes to us that way. That is the result of real evil.

The other side of the problem is my desire to alleviate suffering while still seeking the good life. The good moments of life, ephemeral as they are, come to me as a kind of call, a call to soak it all up. I don't think that we should simply avoid the wonder and beauty of life, and in fact I think we should take every good moment and push it as far as it can go, drinking it to the dregs. Buddhism is wrong: life is not only suffering. It is wonder, and enchantment, and awesome, and just simply kick butt. Christianity too often tries to take the wonder as the sole and primary lens of interpretation, all negative experience is filtered through that lens and so all is labelled 'good' even when it obviously is not. Buddhism takes the negative as primary and filters all through that lens, and so all is labelled 'bad' even when much is not. Scientism denies the depths and the shallows, and leaves us with a stultifying neutrality that speaks to the objective world, but not our subjective encounter with it. In all three cases what you have is an over-simplification of the world. Life is wonderful, and terrible, and our philosophy must account for it, and find meaning in all of it.

I take personal suffering as an opportunity to share in the suffering of God. The suffering of God is not good, in fact it is very bad. But it is God's choice to make Himself vulnerable to suffering that makes the world possible, and I think existence is inherently better than non-existence. When God identifies with the victim of every suffering, that victim's plight is eternalized. It is always remembered and never let go of. The joy and experience of the attacking entity is lost, forever, into oblivion. That person's internal existence comes to nothing. The sufferer however is eternalized, and judged right in the attack. What's more, just as a person can grow from hard times, God also grows and learns something from every experience. But this is not to say that God wills these experiences. The sufferer need not have suffered to learn what they did. They may have learned or experienced something better. To say value is pulled from a situation is not to say that a greater value wasn't possible, nor is it to say we cannot mourn the loss of that value. But we can be thankful that nothing we go through is wasted. For even if we learn nothing, God does. And so suffering becomes something from which we can gain value. We don't have to embrace it altogether, but nor do we put our heads in the sand about the suffering of others. Seeking to share in the pain of others is to find a path to God.

The good moments in life are just as important. Whenever we soak up a moment of joy and happiness, we are simply giving that joy and happiness to God. That moment may be fleeting for us, but it is eternal in God. It never dies, is never forgotten, and never loses it's sharpness. God experiences the good AS us, and so we get to love life to the fullest, without mourning the loss. It may be lost for us in this world, but in God and in the next world, it is remembered forever. Life is a heaven because every good is made eternal Somewhere Else. Life is a hell for all suffering is the crucifixion of Christ. Both are real, and both are important. Both matter for both are a part of the life of God.

There is a Trinitarian lesson in here somewhere.

One-Post Wednesday: Homily On John 16

"Divine Discovery"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZD_3QtPkTOs

Question of the Day

If you see great potential in someone for spiritual achievement (say, in mysticism), but you know that developing it will involve great danger and risk, should you encourage that in them or not?

A Long Post On Ruth

This is the introduction to my soon-to-be-published study guide on The Book of Ruth:

Ruth is one of the most beloved and recognizable books of the Bible. It is the paradigm of one of the ‘shorter books’ of scripture: a mere four chapters. The story is simple and straightforward, some would say sublime. As a piece of literature, it is just one of the best things ever produced by human hands. The characters are remarkably developed for such a short text, and one is easily pulled into the details of the story. It has the power to really ‘stick with you’ and it is one of those Biblical stories it is easy to tell to children (disregarding a few minor details). So many of us learn it early, and remember it.

The sophistication of the storytelling, and the verbiage used in the original Hebrew, betrays a relatively late period of writing. It was likely written down after the Babylonian Exile and during the time when Israel was a vassal state of Persia. But the setting for the story is much earlier, and as we will see, it is highly likely that the story itself existed in oral form long before it was written down. The reasons for this assertion will become apparent as we examine the text.

The historical setting for the written form of the book, however, betrays the fact that behind the simple storytelling there is a deep theological purpose behind the book. Israel often struggled with the question of ‘particularism’ and ‘universalism’ (this is small ‘u’ universalism, not to be confused with big ‘U’ Universalism, the idea that all people ultimately go to Heaven.) On the one hand, God repeatedly tells the Jews that He has a special relationship with them, and that the substance of His salvation centers around His covenant with THEM. Again and again the Jews are told “you will be my people, and I will be your God” (e.g. Jeremiah 32:20, Ezekiel 36:28). Moreover, there are Biblical passages that demarcate clearly the Jewish people from the other Canaanite tribes that surrounded them. The Jews were specifically warned not to intermarry with certain groups of Gentiles (see: Deuteronomy 7).

However, just as the Jews were said to be a special people, set apart from all others, and clear lines were drawn between them and other Canaanite groups, they were also called to a universal destiny, to act as priests of God for the rest of the world. They were told that they were to have a place in God’s reformation of the planet, and that God still had a special love for all human beings (Exodus 19). So while God’s concern for the Jews was particular, His plan for them was universal. Some prophets included in their vision of the Kingdom of God the reconciliation of all people under Yahweh (Isaiah 66:18-21).

In the actual history of Israel, this theological tension played out as a struggle between a tendency towards ethnocentrism and even racism, and a desire to see all people brought under Yahweh’s banner. And all the history of Israel is a wavering back and forth between these two poles: the exclusive and the universal.

Not long before Ruth was actually written down, the Israelites had just returned from exile in Babylon. Upon returning home, Nehemiah and Ezra began a long and hard struggle to rebuild the Jewish nation and rebuild the political and religious structure of the Israelite people. This included the literal rebuilding of Jerusalem and Solomon’s Temple. There were many hardships, and one of the things that the leaders feared most was a reversion back to the idolatrous practices that had led to the exile in the first place. As a part of the attempt to avoid this pitfall, the leaders ordered Israelite men to put away all foreign wives and any children they may have from such a union (see: Ezra chapters 9 & 10). This decision was disastrous for those who were ‘put away’ and Israelites who resisted were violently punished.

It is within this context that the ancient story of Ruth was written down, along with several other stories and books that date from about the same period (520-400 BC). It was probably an attempt to remind the Israelite people that God’s own application of the laws regarding intermarriage with certain other groups was never hard and fast, and that foreign inter-marriage played an important part in their history. It is an important voice crying out against what the writer sees as racism and injustice in the Ezra/Nehemiah reforms.

The setting for the story itself is very different. Written down in the Persian period, the events it tells take place at least 500 years earlier. The Bible began with the ancient beginnings of the world and mankind, and moved to the story of the patriarchs, a familial group of Sumerians who moved to Canaanite at the behest of a God who had made them their special possession. After a few hundred years, they went into Egypt first as allies of the Egyptians, but later they were made slaves. God raised up a charismatic leader, Moses, who led them out of bondage and into the desert, where they wandered for almost 40 years.

Soon they were led by Joshua back to their ancestral home, and they captured large swaths of Canaan and made it their homeland, Israel. During this period, the various tribes of Israel would be led by charismatic leaders in the style of Moses. These leaders were called judges. It is important to understand that at this time Israel was not a ‘nation’ in the traditional sense. It was rather an area captured by Joshua within which the 12 tribes of Israel lived. Those tribes were semi-autonomous, bound together by a common language and history, but acting more or less independently of one another. This is before Saul and David gathered the tribes together and formed a real political nation-state.

It is at this time that the events Ruth accounts take place. And so there are themes in the book that relate both to the period when it was written (during the foreign purge under Ezra) and when the actual setting of the book took place (the chaos that reigned during the period of the Judges, when Israel was seeking a national identity).

But this is not all. There are universal themes in the book that transcend time and place. The book is  undoubtedly written by a woman. The writer could’ve chosen to emphasize any aspect of the original oral tradition, the tragedy of Naomi’s family, the love story between Ruth and Boaz, or the heroic actions of Boaz himself. But whoever wrote the book down chose to emphasize the relationship between Ruth and Naomi. Like the racist tendency in some parts of Jewish history, the Bible also has in many places the marks of misogyny. Whoever wrote Ruth decided to turn it, at least in part, into a commentary against that tendency. No book in the Old Testament so exalts a woman as the Book of Ruth does. There really is nothing else like it in the Hebrew Scriptures.

Another important aspect of Ruth illustrated in that moment is the theme of friendship. This is the first time in the Bible that a human friendship is elevated to the same level as, say, the parent/child or spousal relationship. There are Biblical friendships before this point, to be sure, but here we see friendship as the very embodiment of Divine Love, and this is the first time that happens.

There is also this sense in Ruth that God is not a particular actor within the story but the background for the story as a whole. There is no individual point in which God comes in. There is no theophany to move the story along, no miracle that gets people out of their problems and no prophet to reveal God's will. This is a simple, human story of people just trying to be the best people they can be. But the writer sees in that human drama a Revelation of the Divine as clear as any other. And that motif is repeated in Esther, in 1 Maccabees, in Judith, in Nehemiah and elsewhere.

So all in all, Ruth tells a rich and exciting story in a relatively short space, but it also covers a vast number of important theological issues, and reveals a lot about Israel both in the time when it takes place and in the time when it was written down. All of this will come to bear as we delve into the text itself.