giving and receiving
Posted by Paul | Filed under uncategorised
Yesterday’s reading in the excellent advent collection Watch for the Light was from William Willimon. Here’s an extract:
Charles Dickens’ story of Scrooge’s transformation has probably done more to form our notions of Christmas than St. Luke’s story of the manger. Whereas Luke tells us of God’s gift to us, Dickens tells us how we can give to others. A Christmas Carol is more congenial to our favorite images of ourselves. Dickens suggests that down deep, even the worst of us can become generous, giving people.Yet I suggest we are better givers than getters, not because we are generous people but because we are proud, arrogant people. The Christmas story – the one according to Luke not Dickens – is not about how blessed it is to be givers but about how essential it is to see ourselves as receivers.We prefer to think of ourselves as givers – powerful, competent, self-sufficient, capable people whose goodness motivates us to employ some of our power, competence and gifts to benefit the less fortunate. Which is a direct contradiction of the biblical account of the first Christmas. There we are portrayed not as the givers we wish we were but as the receivers we are.…This strange story tells us how to be receivers. The first word of the church, a people born out of so odd a nativity, is that we are receivers before we are givers. Discipleship teaches us the art of seeing our lives as gifts. That’s tough, because I would rather see myself as a giver. I want power – to stand on my own, take charge, set things to rights, perhaps to help those who have nothing. I don’t like picturing myself as dependent, needy, empty-handed.…It’s tough to be on the receiving end of love, God’s or anybody else’s. It requires that we see our lives not as our possessions, but as gifts. “Nothing is more repugnant to capable, reasonable people than grace,” wrote John Wesley a long time ago.…This is often the way God loves us: with gifts we thought we didn’t need, which transform us into people we don’t necessarily want to be.
Tags: books, grace, provocations
an insigificant life
Posted by Paul | Filed under uncategorised
This quote was sent to me by a friend when we left university. It has haunted me ever since…
It is possible to evade a multitude of sorrows by the cultivation of an insignificant life. Indeed, if it be a man’s ambition to avoid the troubles of life, the recipe is perfectly simple — let him shed his ambitions in every direction, let him cut the wings of every soaring purpose, and let him assiduously cultivate a little life, with the fewest correspondences and relations.
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if you want to get through the world with the smallest trouble you must reduce yourself to the smallest compass.
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Tiny souls can dodge through life; bigger souls are blocked on every side. As soon, therefore, as a man begins to enlarge his life, his resistances are multiplied. Let a man tear out of his soul the petty selfish purpose and enthrone a world purpose, the Christ purpose, and his sufferings will be increased on every side.– J. H. Jowett
(From the sermon The School of Calvary.)
Tags: provocations
Learning to cry…
Posted by Paul | Filed under uncategorised
I recently stumbled on another interesting Francis Schaeffer-related article at Christianity Today: Learning to Cry for the Culture.
Schaeffer was the first Christian leader who taught me to weep over the world instead of judging it.
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Instead of shaking our heads at a depressing, dark, abstract work of art, the true Christian reaction should be to weep for the lost person who created it. Schaeffer was a rare Christian leader who advocated understanding and empathizing with non-Christians instead of taking issue with them.
The normal human reaction is to hate what we don’t understand. This is the stuff of prejudice and the cause of hate crimes and escalating social evil. It is much more Christ-like to identify with those we don’t understand—to discover why people do what they do, because we care about them, even if they are our ideological enemies.
Jesus asked us to love our enemies. Part of loving is learning to understand.
Tags: apologetics, church, culture, L\'Abri/Francis Schaeffer, provocations
You are the message
Posted by Paul | Filed under uncategorised
All art involves an intimate union between form and content.
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In Christianity, the content — the gospel of salvation through Christ — is mediated through the form of the church. The perennial temptation for Christians is to believe that the message can be detached from the community of believers in that message. But the content of faith is precisely that we are members of one body, that Christ is made manifest in our coming together in faith.Gregory Wolfe in Intruding upon the Timeless
Tags: church, praxis, provocations
On not losing the message
Posted by Paul | Filed under uncategorised
In a recent post, I linked to an mp3 on Marshall McLuhan and one by Gregory Wolfe. These two come together in the interview with Wolfe with Dick Staub. He discusses the tendency of Christians to ‘borrow’ forms from the wider culture and attempt to fuse them with the gospel. However, if it is true that ‘the medium is the message’ then there is a danger that the message we think we are communicating is not what is being heard.
So many Christians tend to say ‘let’s get on the bandwagon and imitate what is already going on’ rather than being transformative. And that would be to take what is the form of the day and bring about, through a real effort of mind and heart a transformation of the form into something new. Into something that isn’t just tagging along, but something that is dynamic, something that others would want to look to and imitate.
Tags: culture, provocations
on making space for people
Posted by Paul | Filed under uncategorised
There is an interesting article about L’Abri on the Christianity Today website. (I should note that it is not uncontroversial — see the response by Douglas Groothuis — but that is not directly important here. HT for both of these links to The Christian Mind blog.) It got me thinking that a key aspect of L’Abri has (as far as I understand) always been that it gives people an non-judgemental space in which to ask/wrestle with questions about Christian beliefs and doctrines.
Interestingly, this seems to be one aspect that L’Abri shares with Alpha — people are invited to come and discuss; with a key component being that they will not be preached at. (I guess that another aspect is community — reports from both frequently cite the community aspect as significant, perhaps even key. This raises interesting questions about whether profession should preceed inclusion in community, which I know have been debated elsewhere, but that is another story…)
It seems to me that, via Alpha, we are very good at taking this approach with people exploring Christianity from the outside or perhaps those who are looking at the basics, but we are less able to maintain this within the core church community. Experience suggests that we can quickly become uncomfortable when people ask hard questions and are often quick to give them the ‘right answer’ without properly listening or engaging. If we are not careful, people asking questions can feel excluded — asking the ‘wrong’ questions can make you feel like an outsider (again), as if simply by asking you have become suspect.
I might have been happy to accept this comes from a few select experiences in my life. But, the article on L’Abri suggests that part of the attraction, even for Christians, is that it remains a place where you can go and discuss with a freedom not always found elsewhere.
My concern is that people have different approaches to belief. For some, perhaps, doctrine comes easy; for others it takes more to make it ones own. We must be careful not to shape our communities so that only the first approach is accepted. We need to make space for those who take the longer route to work things out, re-question, re-examine, etc. without condemnation. We need to accept that these people are just as genuine in their following of Jesus. They are not (necessarily) trying to escape doctrines that they don’t like, nor does questioning of something mean that they don’t understand (which can sometimes be the implication). In many cases, they may simply need to go for a Jacob-like wrestling to come to terms with this aspect of belief and to work it in more deeply. It may even be the case that they are going for more depth than others need. And maybe that depth will produce benefit for the church community in the end.
I guess the key is that we must be slow to judge and quick to accept. Sometimes, when I read Paul on law & grace I wonder if we don’t use doctrine like the Law — a measure of who is in & who is out. The question then is: is it by getting your doctrine 100% pure that you were saved or was it by grace? Not that I am saying that doctrine is unimportant, just that we need to have grace for those in our communities who are wrestling. After all, Paul was insistent that true doctrine is taught, but also had the freedom to say ‘if any of you see this differently, the Holy Spirit will make it clear to you’ – not ‘if any of you see this differently pull yourselves together’.
It worth remembering that the purpose of doctrine is to take us on the right path and lead us on in our walk, not to decide if we are ‘sound’ or not. I wonder if a serious wrestling with doctrine has the potential to takes us onwards in a way that simple assent cannot always do. At least for some people.
So, I guess I’m asking that we give people space and conversation in their questioning; that we don’t jump to correction and judgement. But, also that we don’t immediately assume that the questioner is immature or ignorant. It is likely that these responses will not give the aid required.
[As an aside, I remember a friend suggesting that teaching in New Testament times was less the preach-from-the-pulpit that we envisage and more closer to mentoring/discipling. So, perhaps when we think of true doctrine being taught, we need to envisage a far more relational transference, not simply a list of truths laid out, but a working through together. A path that take into account the learners difficulties and struggles.]
Tags: apologetics, church, L\'Abri/Francis Schaeffer, provocations
A random walk over culture, art, christianity, etc. with occasional photographs...