Author: dopderbeck

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Biblical Studies Scripture

God's Concern for the Marginalized in the Old Testament: Part 2

Once again I’m going to make an effort to start writing / blogging regularly.  This post is from a paper I wrote for an Old Testament class at Wycliffe College.  The prompt was as follows:  Discuss God’s concern for the outsider (the poor, the widow, the orphan, the marginalized, etc.) in Genesis–2 Kings.

Here is Part 2:  The Marginalized and the Outsider in the Law

The law texts in Leviticus and Deuteronomy provide a rich but also ambiguous source regarding the marginalized and outsider. The foundation of the Torah are the Ten Commandments and the shema. (See Deut. 5:1 – 6:25).  The shema commands Israel to “Love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength.” (Deut. 6:5 (NIV)).  The shema is repeated by Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount, but with the emendation that followers of Jesus must also “love your neighbor as yourself.” (Matthew 22: 37-40; Luke 10:27 (NIV)). This emendation seems to be taken from Leviticus 19:18: “Do not seek revenge or bear a grudge against one of your people, but love your neighbor as yourself.”  (NIV).  The ambiguity here is that Deuteronomy 7 includes a herem warfare text that seems to exclude certain “outsiders” from the category of Israel’s “neighbors”:

When the LORD your God brings you into the land you are entering to possess and drives out before you many nations —the Hittites, Girgashites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites, seven nations larger and stronger than you— and when the LORD your God has delivered them over to you and you have defeated them, then you must destroy them totally. Make no treaty with them, and show them no mercy….

(Deut. 7:1-2 (NIV)).  Leviticus 19:18, both in its own context and in relation to the text from Deuteronomy, seems to limit reciprocal “love” to relations among “your people,” that is, among Israelites.
There are a variety of approaches to these and other herem texts in the Hebrew Scriptures. None of them are entirely satisfactory.  Within the context of the Deuteronomic and Levitical law texts, however, it is worth noting that the narrative frame represents Israel as the “marginalized” or “outsider” people among the nations. Like the proto-historical narratives, the Law and  the conquest narratives depict God graciously making space for His people amidst the violence, idolatry and sin of the nations, leading ultimately to the redemption of all the nations from idolatry and violence.

The more “famous” examples of concern for the marginalized and outsider in the Torah are the Jubilee, debt, tithe, and gleanings laws. (See Leviticus 25:8-55). The Jubilee law set aside one year out of every fifty years, during which a variety of legal obligations would be reset. For example, the law provided for bonded labor in the event an Israelite became impoverished. If an Israelite became the bonded servant of another Israelite, the term of bondage could last only until the Jubilee year. (See Leviticus 25:39-42).  If an Israelite became the bonded servant of an “alien or temporary resident” – that is, a non-Israelite living in the land – the bondage could be redeemed for a price based on the number of years until the next Jubilee times the rate to cover his work with a hired laborer, and in any event the term of bondage would terminate automatically in the Jubilee year. (See Leviticus 25:47-55).  The Jubilee law, however, did not exempt non-Israelites from perpetual slavery. (See Leviticus 25:44-46).

The seven-year debt laws provided that loans made to Israelites must be canceled in an amnesty year as part of a seven-year cycle. (Deuteronomy 15:1-3).  The debt law in Deuteronomy specified that “there should be no poor among you” and that Israelites should lend freely to other Israelites in need even if the cancellation year is near. (Deuteronomy 15:4-11).  Once again, however, the debt laws did not apply to non-Israelite debtors. (Deuteronomy 15:3).  A seven-year period also applied to bonded labor, although this was a rolling period that allowed at least six years of service.  (Deuteronomy 15:12-18). This rule seems to conflict with the Jubilee law in Leviticus, since according to Deuteronomy a Hebrew bond servant must be set free after six years of service, while the Jubilee year would arrive only once every fifty years. (Deuteronomy 15:12-18).  If these laws were intended to work together, it may be that the Jubilee release would apply to bonded servants who pledged to remain in service notwithstanding the seventh-year release. (See Deuteronomy 15:16-17).

The tithe laws in Deuteronomy required an annual tithe of one-tenth of each person’s produce. (Deuteronomy 26:1-15).  This law included a three-year cycle according to which, in every third year, the tithe would be given “to the Levite, the alien, the fatherless and the widow so that they may eat in your towns and be satisfied.”  (Deuteronomy 26:12).  The gleanings law stated that the edges of the field should be left unharvested and that this portion together with the gleanings (parts of the harvest that had fallen to the ground) should be left “for the poor and the alien.” (Leviticus 23:22).

These provisions illustrate the Torah’s concern that all of God’s people have a share in the land.  Contrary to some modern attitudes about poverty, there is no suggestion in these laws that individual poverty is the result of moral fault.  In fact, Deuteronomy 15:11 states that “[t]here will always be poor people in the land,” which reflect an understanding that bad things can happen to anyone and that the community is responsible to care for those who are experiencing hard times.  Moreover, the tithe and gleanings laws recognize the often precarious status of “aliens,” that is, of non-Israelites, and include them in the welfare system.  At the same time, the bonded labor laws provided redemption only to Israelites, and the Law also required herem warfare against what we might today call the “native peoples” of the land.  The Law’s provision for the “marginalized” and “outsiders” therefore reflects a framework that is deeply conditioned by the historical and theological contexts of these texts as witnesses to God’s dealings with Israel.

 

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Biblical Studies Scripture

God's Concern for the Marginalized in the Old Testament

Once again I’m going to make an effort to start writing / blogging regularly.  This post is from a paper I wrote for an Old Testament class at Wycliffe College.  The prompt was as follows:  Discuss God’s concern for the outsider (the poor, the widow, the orphan, the marginalized, etc.) in Genesis–2 Kings.

Here is  Part 1:

The Marginalized or Outsider in Genesis

Section A:  The Protohistory (Gen. 1-11)

The theme of the “marginalized” or “outsider” does not at first blush seem evident in the “protohistory” of Gen. 1-11.  After the depiction Gen. 1-2 of God’s creation of the universe, the Earth, and humanity, these chapters tell the story of humanity’s persistent, violent rebellion against God.   This theme is summarized in Gen. 6:5:  “[t]he Lord saw how great man’s wickedness on the earth had become, and that every inclination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil all the time.”  (NIV). But these chapters also tell the story of God’s persistent grace and faithfulness towards the creation and particularly towards sinful humanity.  In Gen. 3:21, after Adam and Eve are removed from the Garden, God provides them a covering of skin.  In Gen. 4:15, God marks the murderer Cain to protect Cain from vengeance in the land “east of Eden.”  In Gen. 6-9, God remembers Noah and, even after the terror of the Flood, renews His covenant with humanity.  In Genesis 11:8, God scatters the nations, perhaps in part to protect humanity from its own attempt to overreach human limitations.

In a sense, then, Gen. 1-11 demonstrated the furthest depths of God’s concern for the “marginalized” or “outsider.”  These chapters show that we as human beings are “outsiders” from the fellowship of God because of our own willful sin and violence.  We have “marginalized” ourselves by trading our status as the crown of God’s creation for the allure of knowledge and power that properly belong only to the God who made us.  We deserve exposure, but God provides covering skins; we deserve destruction, but God provides an ark; we deserve to be shattered and toppled but God scatters us into nations in which we can build functioning human societies.

Part B.  The Patriarchal Narratives

In the Patriarchal narratives (Gen. 11:27 –  50:26), some of the more poignant examples of God’s concern for the marginalized and outsider are in His provision for “secondary” characters within the narratives.  By convention we call these the “patriarchal” narratives, but they are also significantly “matriarchal” stories.

We feel sympathy for Abram that he is old and childless, particularly if we understand the extent to which his culture practiced primogeniture and connected an abundance of children with male success and status.  (Gen. 15:2.)  But Abram’s culture tended to “blame” the wife for infertility, and provided alternatives such as multiple marriages and concubinage with household servants.  Indeed, although Abram believed God would keep his promise to provide Abram with heirs (Gen. 15:6) – a moment celebrated in the New Testament as a paradigmatic act of justifying faith (Romans 4:3) – it seems that Abram did not trust God to provide an heir through his wife, Sarai, and so accepted the invitation to sleep with Sarai’s maid, Hagar.  (Gen. 16:1-4.)  This marginalized Sarai, who would become the barren, disfavored and shamed wife, except that God also remembered and honored her.  (Gen. 17:15.)  When God changed Abram and Sarai’s names to “Abraham” and “Sarah,” He showed His concern both for Sarah as a marginalized woman and for all of humanity, male and female.  As Eve was called the “mother of all the living” (Gen. 3:20), Sarah was named “the mother of nations.”  (Gen. 17:16.)  The woman who was barren was made the new Eve, and the womb that was empty became the ark that would carry the seed of “kings of peoples” who would be scattered throughout the earth to build a new peaceable kingdom.  (Gen. 17:16.)

There are other instances in the “patriarchal” narratives in which God particularly remembered marginalized women:  the provision for Hagar and her son Ishmael (Gen. 21:17); the opening of Leah’s womb when Leah “was not loved” (Gen. 29:31, 30:17); the provision of children to Rachel, despite her scheming (Gen. 30:22); the rescue (though violent!) of Dinah (Gen. 34:1-37); and the provision of offspring (though through nasty deceit!) for Tamar when Onan would not fulfill his duty to his brother’s widow (Gen. 38:1-30).  Although some of these examples are “messy,” they illustrate that, even in a cultural setting dominated by powerful men, in narratives that emphasize the faith and failings of the Patriarchs Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph, God remembers and honors women as well.

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City Scripture

The City on the Hill

Every time you read slowly through a familiar part of scripture you notice something new.  Today I noticed something about the “city on a hill” metaphor used by Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5:14).

This metaphor is famous in American history because of John Winthrop’s sermon aboard the Arabella in 1630 and later by John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan.  In politics and sermons, the city on the hill usually represents an elect, special group of people, who in virtue of their virtues, can lead the way forward for the rest of humanity.  The city on the hill is on the hill because it is socially and morally above the masses of those without virtue.

But in Matthew’s Gospel the flow of events does not suggest this kind of elitism.  In Matthew 4, the writer details Jesus’ temptation by Satan, including Satan’s final offer of the kingdoms and glory of the world from a perch on a high mountain.  (Matt. 4:8-11).  After his temptation, Jesus begins to proclaim the coming of the Kingdom.  (Matt. 4:17).  As he proclaims the Kingdom, Jesus calls individuals to follow him, including Peter, Andrew, James, and John.  (Matt. 4:18-22).  We should notice that the call of these disciples is from among ordinary people who had already heard Jesus’ proclamation of the Kingdom.

As Jesus continues to preach and minister in the synagogues, he touches and heals the common people — the λαῷ (“laity”), and “crowds” begin to follow him.  (Matt. 4:24-25).  Seeing the crowds, Jesus retreats to “the mountain” with his “disciples.”  (Matt. 5:1).  There is a lovely parallel here with the “mountain” from which Satan showed Jesus the kingdoms and glory of the world during the temptation narrative in the previous chapter.  From this mountain, Jesus is showing his disciples the wealth and glory of the Kingdom of God:  the crowds of ordinary people who need love, healing and care. 

I think that these crowds are the people Jesus refers to in the beatitudes:  the poor in spirit, the mourners, the meek, the hungry and thirsty for righteousness, the merciful, the peacemakers, the persecuted.  (Matthew 5:1-10).  Jesus tells his disciples that these crowds already have within them people who are “blessed,” and instructs his disciples to be “salt” and “light” in and to the crowds.  (Matthew 5:13-16).  This is why, and how, the righteousness of Jesus disciples must “surpass that of the scribes and Pharisees,” and it is also how they will “enter the kingdom of heaven”:  by living among ordinary people who do not even realize they are already blessed.  (Matthew 5:17-20).

Categories
Thought

Love or/and Glory?

In the Christian History class I’m teaching, we recently covered portions of Athanasius, On the Incarnation.  I love this text because it provides an “eastern” take on human nature, the fall, and the incarnation.  Athanasius presents human fallenness as a sort of conundrum for God.  If God created humanity out of love, and provided humanity with the grace of His law of love, what could God do when humanity turned away from love and embraced the dissolution of death?  Athanasius’ answer is that the incarnation, crucifixion and resurrection of Christ were a necessary response flowing from God’s character and purposes for creation.

I call this an “eastern” approach because it emphasizes God’s being as prior to God’s will.  Of course, Athanasius wasn’t arguing against Divine freedom.  Athanasisus was not suggesting that God was compelled to redeem fallen humanity by some power or force that is higher than Godself.  But God’s will to redeem us, for Athanasisus, is so intimately connected to God’s character that Athanasisus could present our fall as a Divine dilemma and could speak of the “impossibility” of God not redeeming humanity:

As, then, the creatures whom He had created reasonable, like the Word, were in fact perishing, and such works were on the road to ruin, what then was God, being Good, to do? Was He to let corruption and death have their way with them? In that case, what was the use of having made them in the beginning? Surely it would have been better never to have been created at all than, having been created, to be neglected and perish; and, besides that, such indifference to the ruin of His own work before His very eyes would argue not goodness in God but limitation, and that far more than if He had never created men at all. It was impossible, therefore, that God should leave man to be carried off by corruption, because it would be unfitting and unworthy of Himself.

Athanasius’ approach is subtly different from “western” approaches that prioritize God’s freedom.  The “western” approach emphasizes, correctly, that God was not compelled to create, nor was He compelled to redeem.  God’s “reasons” for creating and redeeming are finally inscrutable to us and are grounded in God’s glory.  Creation shows God’s glory, redemption shows God’s glory — and reprobation shows God’s glory as well.   For thinkers such as Augustine and Calvin, the fact that many or most human beings rebel against God and are finally not redeemed glorifies God by demonstrating God’s holiness and justice.  The “why” question — why would God need to demonstrate His glory in a way that results in the damnation of most of the creatures created in His image — is often set aside in these “theologies of glory” as impertinent.  The “reason” is that God, precisely because He is God, is utterly free to do as He wills.

Anyone who knows my theological leanings will know that I find full-blown “theologies of glory” repugnant.  A God who is pure will is a God who cannot really be “loved” or “trusted.”  That is not the God of scripture or of Christian faith.  (It is not even, I think, really the God of Augustine or Calvin, even if they can be read to trend in that direction).  That is the pantheon of Canaan, the Ba’als and Molechs who consume and must be worshiped because they consume.

A very perceptive student pointed out during our classroom discussion of Athanasius, however, that Athanasius also offers a theology of glory.  Notice that Athanasius says it would have been “unfitting” and “unworthy” of Godself for God to allow His created image to ruin itself.  For Athanasius, the glory of God is His love, and the love of God is His glory.  In the terms of contemporary philosophical theology, for Athanasius, God’s being is ontologically prior to God’s “will,” such that there is finally no separation between God’s love, justice, power, and will.  God saves because He is God.  If we are reprobate, it is only because we reprobate ourselves.

This, of course, still leaves us with some enormous questions.  If God knew we would turn away from created grace and towards decay, and if God knew that some, perhaps most, would persist in the way of decay, why would he have created us at all?  The Augustinian dual response of inscrutability and glory must here return:  we can’t really know because we are not God, but we can say that in any case God’s glory is demonstrated in the end.  Yet, with Athanasius, we can say this in a way that understand God’s “glory” as coextensive with His “love.”  Whoever is reprobated, if anyone is finally reprobated, if even many or most are finally reprobated, it is not in any way because God determines even one human person’s reprobation.  Impossible as it is to fathom, it is all, finally, love.

Categories
Church

Christian History: Class 2

Here is a recording of the first part of my lecture for last week’s Christian History class at Alliance Seminary.  We cover some key figures and events leading up to the Council of Nicea.  I open the class with a recording of the Oxyrynchus Hymn and also attempt a chanted prayer from The Divine Hours.  The Powerpoint slides are available here.

Categories
Cosmos Spirit Thought

What Difference Does God Make?

My friend Ryan Bell, as part of his “Year Without God” project, recently wrote about the question “What Difference Does God Make?”  His answer was that God makes no difference to his daily life.

There may have been some confusion in how Ryan framed the question.  If there is a God, then God makes all the difference in the universe, because there would be no universe without God.  This is simply a function of the definitions of what theologians mean by the terms “God” and “universe” (or, more accurately, “creation”).  If there is no God, then of course “God” makes no difference at all, and indeed the question of what “difference God makes” is nonsensical, a non-question.  In other words, the question “what difference does God make” begs the question whether there is a God.

I think what Ryan meant is “what difference does believing in God make?”  Even this is a question fraught with definitional problems.  For example, what does “difference” mean?  Given that most human beings through most of history have had some sort of belief in God or the gods, and given that even evolutionary sociobiologists seek to explain such belief  with the language of adaptation, it seems beyond dispute that belief in God / the gods makes a substantial “difference.”  Certainly folks like Richard Dawkins like to argue that belief in God makes a pernicious difference by increasing divisions and violence among humans.

Here I think Ryan meant what positive difference does believing in God make?  This seems evident in his focus on “hope.”  At least some people report that their belief in God gives them “hope.”  Ryan feels he can experience hope without belief in God.  In fact, Ryan feels that at least some of the sorts of beliefs about God he received from his church experience were less hope-filled than how he feels “without” God.

I can’t blame him for that conclusion.  The vision of the “Left Behind” theology so popular in American church culture is hopeless and nihilistic.  The spirituality of pop materialism is far more attractive:  we are on this Earth for a blip in evolutionary time, but we have the capacity to feel and experience life at least for a moment, and so we can find that moment let go of worries about the future.  Don’t think so much; feel, and let go.  That is the message of almost every contemporary pop song, romantic comedy, family-oriented animated film, home furnishing commercial, and so-on.   It is a compelling message, because entails substantial truth, even though it is incomplete (see, e.g., the Book of Ecclesiastes).

IMG SRC = http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Moche_decapitator.jpg
The Decapitator

But this raises another set of questions:  Who said belief in God is supposed to make an emotionally positive difference to the believer?  Why should a value judgment like positive matter to us?  And what, exactly, do we mean by “belief” in God?  There have been cultures in which belief in the gods produced fear rather than hope.  I can’t imagine that the Moche people, for example, thought of the Decapitator primarily in terms of the category of “hope.”

At this point I think Ryan’s Christian background is already in play.  Christians take “belief” in God to mean “trust.”  Christians want to “trust” God because we believe He is perfectly good and loves us absolutely, demonstrated in the fact that He created us, gave us life, and gave Himself for us on the cross.  We expect that this kind of “belief” will, at least over the long haul, at least in the hard fissures of life, and at least at the end, make all the difference to how we feel and how we live.

Even given these Christian presuppositions, why don’t most non-Christians feel hopeless most of the time?  I think there are at least two  Christian theological notions at play:  the doctrines of creation and grace.

Christians believe every human being is created in God’s image.  We differ among ourselves to varying degrees about the extent to which sin affects our ability to function properly as God’s image-bearers without a specific connection to Christ, but we generally agree that simply being human is a precious gift that entails some basic blessings. Christians further agree that all human beings who enjoy the basic goods of life are given at least some measure of grace.  In fact, this common humanity and common grace is a cornerstone of Jesus’ ethical teaching:

You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’  But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you,  that you may be children of your Father in heaven.  He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.  (Matt. 5:43-45.)

It is no surprise that, on any given day, both people who trust in God and people who do not trust in God (and people who struggle to trust in God) wake up, eat breakfast, get dressed, go to work, engage in relationships, and participate in the general goods of life.  This is part of the theology of creation as well as the theology of grace.  The more penetrating question, then, might be whether we can recognize grace and respond in some way to it.

 

 

 

 

Categories
Spirit

The Gift of Church

I didn’t feel like going to church this past Sunday.  It was hard getting the family out the door.  I was tired.  I wasn’t in the mood for mauve carpets, praise music and a long sermon after the splendor of the Eucharist at St. Thomas Church last week.    But a beautiful thing happened.

There’s a young man who comes to our church with his family and who has a significant disability.  It’s the kind of disability that twists the body, distorts the countenance, and makes ordinary communication impossible.   This young man seems to like me.  Maybe it’s because I do some work with disabled people and this sort of thing doesn’t phase me.  Maybe it’s because I can communicate with him a little better because of my son’s disability.  Maybe he knows I need a friend.

After the service, he was sitting by himself and I went over to say hi.  Through a bit of improvised sign language, he told me he had a toothache and was going to the dentist.  He seemed delighted that I understood, and as is his way, gave me a big bear hug.  Then he signed “I love you,” and I signed “I love you too.”

THERE was the Church:  a delight in understanding another person, a delight in being understood, a generous outpouring of heartfelt fellowship, and a sign of love that closes every distance.

Categories
Spirit

A Year Without God

Former Seventh Day Adventist Pastor Ryan Bell has been begun a “Year Without God” project in which he is trying to live as an atheist for a year.  It’s caused a bit of a media stir.

Ryan is a really good guy.  I met him a couple of years ago at the Duke Divinity Reconciliation Summer Institute.  We hit it off and hung out in the hotel lobby in the evenings having beers.  I understand, a bit, the trauma Ryan must feel at being tossed out by his home church as his views became more progressive.  I understand, a bit, the difficulty of breaking out of fundamentalism without losing faith.  But I’ve never had any desire to be “without God.”  What I’ve always wanted, more than anything, is to know I’m “with” God.

It’s not that I have purer desires or stronger faith than other people who “leave” God.  I think it’s more a matter of perspective.  If I say I’m done with God, I’m already acknowledging that God exists, I’m already claiming to know precisely what God is like, and I’m already presuming my prerogative to terminate any previous correspondence I’ve had with God.  If the whole exercise is supposed to represent a new intellectual honesty, it would fail from the start.  In my effort to live “without God,” I’d be stuck with Him at every turn.    It would in fact become an exercise in denial.

I think all I can do is acknowledge the truth of my desire.

I desire God. I desire to know God, and to be known and loved by God, and to know I’m known and loved by God.  The cognitive dissonance I feel between what I sense God is like and what I find in some theologies and practices is the stirring of knowledge, not the drag of doubt.

I desire to be like God.  I desire to know what only God knows.  I desire to change what only God can change.  I desire to escape history and contingency the way only God stands outside history and contingency.  The cognitive dissonance I feel at my human limitations is the stirring of the will to control the knowledge of good and evil, not the wind of faith.

Categories
Thought

Writing Again

It is time to start the discipline of writing again. If you have subscribed to my blog in the past, please note that I have transferred the blog to a new domain because Facebook had been blocking my links. I invite you to sign up for email updates from this site.

Categories
Scripture Spirit

The Lord's Prayer

These are some reflections on Willimon and Hauerwas’ book Lord Teach Us.

It was a delight for me to read the Introduction and first two chapters of “Lord, Teach Us.” The faith presented in this book is refreshingly different from the faith I received when I was younger.

It’s somehow embedded in my spiritual consciousness that the “Christian life” is primarily an exercise in avoiding dangers. My posture, unconsciously, has been one of defensiveness and fear. “We” need to be on constant vigil against moral laxity, heresy, “liberalism,” “secular humanism,” and other threats. If there were something like the “Homeland Security Threat Meter” for spiritual things, in that setting it would constantly have been on “Red.” It’s no accident that the Christian school attached to my former church has a crusading “Defender” as its mascot. The “Defenders” man the battlements and ever scan the horizon for attacking enemies.

Hauerwas and Willimon present instead a faith that recognizes its own weaknesses. As they note at the start of the Introduction, “[b]ecause of the nature of the Christian faith, all of us, no matter how long we have been around Jesus, are always learning anew how to ask the right questions. No one of us ever becomes so faithful, so bold in our discipleship, that we become experts in being Christian.” They are able to make such a statement because they conceive of the faith “not primarily as a set of doctrines, a volunteer organization, or a list of appropriate behaviors.” It is rather “a journey of a people.” To be Christian, they say, “is to have been drafted to be part of an adventure, a journey called God’s kingdom. Being part of this adventure frees us from the terrors that would enslave our lives if were not part of the journey.”

It’s hard to express how much loss I feel resulting from the many years I spent unconsciously or consciously thinking of my Christian faith as something that brings slavery to terror. My Christian commitment was in some important ways born of fear – the fear of Hell. As a young teenager, fire and brimstone preaching motivated me to think, do and say the right things. We lived under the cloud of the Great Tribulation, the scourge of Antichrist followed by eternal flames, from which only proper faith in Christ could rescue us. The vast majority of the human race was on a fast train to Hell, and only a small remnant of us who got things just right would escape.

Thankfully, there were other influences on my faith besides those fire and brimstone prophecy preachers. There were youth leaders, college professors, family members and friends who really did catch the “adventure” of Christian faith. And there was a kernel of truth in the pulpit thumping – Jesus himself, after all, was the source of the imagery of sheep and goats, good soil and rocky soil, Abraham’s bosom and Gehenna.

Yet, even now, it’s hard for me to fully assimilate the truth that the Christian faith is fundamentally “a prayer that [we] must learn to pray” rather than “a set of beliefs.” I’m baffled sometimes when I meet former Roman Catholics who have gotten “saved” and joined evangelical churches. Their testimonies uniformly concern freedom and security: they traded what they perceived as a rigid system of doctrines, good works, guilt and penances, for the blessed assurance of simple faith in God’s grace. I suppose they just haven’t realized that in many of our evangelical churches, particularly for those of us who have grown up in the church, the system of doctrines, works, guilt and penances is just as rigid as it is in any version of cultural Catholicism – and perhaps it’s more insidious because it’s under the surface. Scratch the skin of many conservative evangelicals and you’ll find the same iron blood as that which flows through the most traditional of Catholics.

So, when I read Haurewas and Willimon’s meditation on God as “Our Father,” it banishes some of those old demons and encourages the whisperings of better angels:

“It is comforting to know that even though you don’t always feel like a Christian, though you do not always act like a Christian, much less believe like a Christian, your relationship as a friend of God is not based on what you have felt, done, or believed. Rather, you are a friend with God because of God’s choice of you in Jesus through the church.”

Indeed! Yet – “through the church” . . . . This is our fundamental weakness as “independent” evangelical churches. How do my Catholic friends who embrace and live their Catholic identities know they are accepted by God? Why don’t they suffer from the same guilt and fears as those ex-Catholics I know who left that faith for evangelicalism (or, more likely, for no faith at all)?

I think it’s because they’ve learned to receive the blessing of the Church. They’ve learned to recognize that their friendship with God is far bigger than their own personal strengths and weaknesses. Sure, they realize the need for a vibrantly personal faith, but it’s a faith that’s far more than “personal,” and that therefore is far stronger than their personal weaknesses. And here, they can more readily grasp the significance of Hauerwas and Willimon’s thoughts on the fact that “Our Father” is “in Heaven”:

“You may not be good with words. Don’t worry. George Herbert, St. Francis, and Teresa of Avila pray with you. You may not have your head straight on Christian doctrine. Go ahead and pray with confidence. Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther, and Georgia Harkness pray with you. You may find it difficult to make time to pray. Pray as often as you can. Your prayer joins those already in progress by Dietrcih Bonhoeffer and Dorothy Day.”

We may demur for any number of reasons to the authority of Popes and Cardinals or Metropolitans. Maybe those reasons are good ones rooted in the Reformation, or maybe at this point they’re still born of the fear of change, or maybe there’s some of both at work. Regardless, it’s vital that our “personal relationship with Christ” be far more than “personal.”