Category: Spirituality

I guess I’m working on a little series about “How Life is Like Golf” — see entries one and two for earlier thoughts. So here is today’s entry: “keep your eye on the ball.”

I’m still learning golf. One of my biggest problems is consistency. I’ve gotten pretty good at hitting off the tee, and my iron shots are getting better, but I seldom hit two or three good shots in a row. This was the case on the front nine when I played yesterday. I’d hit a good drive, giving myself a chance to be on the green in two, only to dribble my second shot a short distance or skull it into the trees. By the back nine, I realized what I was doing wrong: I was taking my eye off the ball.

In a good golf swing, your head has some lateral motion, but your eyes need to stay on the ball through the point of contact. If you rotate your head back or forward, you take yourself out of a strong hitting position, and often fail to make solid contact. If you keep your eyes on the ball, you’re more likely to shift your weight properly and hit a strong shot. And, indeed, later in the round, as I focused on this thought, my swings improved, until I finally achieved a straight, long drive, followed by a high, straight 6-iron onto the green (cutting a dogleg, I should add!), and two putts for a par.

There’s a similar principle at work in just about any sport. In fact, you could call “keep your eye on the ball” one of the Cardinal Rules of Sport.

And, the principle carries over into our spiritual lives. I’ve been reminded of this over the past week or so as I’ve been spending more time reading my Bible. I’d gotten busy, and had been neglecting to set time aside for Bible study and prayer. I took my eye off the ball, and the quality of my life began to suffer — my speech wasn’t as controlled as it should have been, my temper was more likely to erupt, my concern for myself was increasing while my concern for others was waning.

There are many good things for us to become involved in, and each of us have gifts to exercise. We’re all capable, through the Holy Spirit, of hitting a brilliant Tiger Woods-like “spiritual golf shot” once in a while. But we all need always to focus first on the basics of following Jesus. We need to come before him regularly in prayer and to regularly and purposefully study his word. We need to keep our eyes on the ball.

I was reading in Titus this morning, and came to this statement in Chapter 2: “You must teach what is accord with sound doctrine.” If you’ve followed some of the things I’ve posted here, you’ll see that I’m at a place in my spiritual life where I feel the need to de-emphasize the details of doctrine and focus more on the Christian “faith story” as it is lived out in the Church. I hope you’ll also see that I don’t disparage the importance of doctrine; it’s more a matter of emphasis. It’s interesting, though, to see how Titus 2 both reinforces and challenges some of my recent thoughts about doctrine.

I suppose I should have known of the St. Patrick’s Breastplate prayer before my Irish sojourn, but it’s one of many things about which I’ve become educated since then. It’s a beautiful prayer for guidance, protection and wisdom. I particularly like this section:

Christ with me, Christ before me, Christ behind me,
Christ in me, Christ beneath me, Christ above me,
Christ on my right, Christ on my left,
Christ when I lie down, Christ when I sit down, Christ
when I arise,
Christ in the heart of every man who thinks of me,
Christ in the mouth of everyone who speaks of me,
Christ in every eye that sees me,
Christ in every ear that hears me.

Amen.

I’ve just begun reading Leslie Newbigin’s The Gospel in a Pluralist Society and, so far, it’s reminding me why I love Newbigin. Newbigin’s concern is to explain how we can proclaim the Gospel as normative in a world that denies the concept of normativity for anything but “science,” without falling into the trap of sublimating the Gospel to the demands of rationalism. Here is some of the flow of the argument from the first chapter:

We must affirm the gospel as truth, universal truth, truth for all peoples and for all times. . . . The Christian believer is using the same faculty of reason as his unbelieving neighbor and he is using it in dealing with the same realities, which are those with which every human being has to deal. But he is seeing them in a new light, in a new perspective. . . . [I]t is essential to the integrity of our witness to this new reality that we recognize that to be its witnesses does not mean to be the possessors of all truth. The dogma, the thing given for our acceptance in faith, is not a set of timeless propositions; it is a story. Moreover, it is a story which is not yet finished, a story in which we are still awaiting the end when all becomes clear.

This is so central to much of where my thinking is right now, as reflected even in the theme I chose for this blog. We’ve tried making the Gospel primarily about the propositions we’ve extracted from the story, and we so often insist that the propositional nature of truth is essential to defending “absolutes.” But this just isn’t so; it doesn’t reflect the Biblical witness or the witness of the Spirit speaking in and through the church in history. Propositions are valuable, but the story’s the thing.

This week I attended a conference of intellectual property law scholars. I presented my current paper on peer-to-peer file sharing litigation, and heard presentations of many other interesting papers (see my SSRN page if you’re curious about my paper). It was the sort of thing I enjoy about academia. Yet, I was vaguely disturbed during the entire conference, until I had a conversation that brought my discomfort to a boil.

This week I’m with my family on vacation at Camp of the Woods in New York State. Our speaker is Haddon Robinson and his son Torrey. This morning, Torrey gave a great first person narrative on James 2:2. He mentioned three areas of pride that keep us from effective service: Pride of Place (wealth or status), Pride of Race (racism), and Pride of Grace. The latter point was particularly compelling for me: those who have been blessed with some good Christian training sometimes think they have been accepted by God because of their superior doctrine or knowledge. But this isn’t so — it is all a work of God’s grace alone. Excellent stuff.

Now, back to mini-golf and the lake.

Reading First Timothy again this morning, I was struck by 1 Tim. 4:9-10:

This is a trustworthy saying that deserves full acceptance (and for this we labor and strive), that we have put our hope in the living God, who is the Savior of all men, and especially of those who believe.”

The first thing that struck me was the source of our hope: the living God! How often do I try to keep God distant and abstract? But He is the living God; in His love, justice, holiness, power and goodness pervades all of history and the inhabits the story of every life.

The second thing I noticed were the implications of this passage for our theories of the atonement. What does it mean for the livng God to be “the Savior of all men”? Some brief research suggests three major interpretations: (1) universalism — everyone will be saved; (2) salvation is available to all who believe; or (3) in this part of the passage, “Savior” is used to refer to general grace — all men benefit from God’s general protection and care. The second and third views seem to divide along Arminian (view 2) and Calvinist (view 3) lines.

Without having done a truly careful study, I’d tentatively suggest a fourth view. I don’t think universalism is consistent with the whole of scripture, but I also think the second and third views require too many hermeneutical gynmastics. It seems to me that a better view is that this passage reflects a Christus Victor model of the atonement. The living God is the Savior of all men in that He conclusively defeated the world, the flesh and the Devil on the cross. He is the Savior “especially of those who believe” in that those who believe participate fully in the eschatological blessings of that victory. This isn’t to spurn a substitutionary view of the atonement, but simply to suggest that a Christus Victor model may also be present alongside the subsitutionary model.

And this hermeneutical excursion brings us back full circle: our hope is in the living God, who already is victorious over sin, whose reign and promised blessings are sure, and with whom all who believe will have joyful, perfect fellowship when His Kingdom comes.

I’m nearing the last days of my trip to Belgium and Ireland. It’s been a fabulous trip in so many ways. I’ve had the privilege of teaching a bright, energetic group of students who are great people to hang out with as well as to teach. I’ve seen the pretty cities of Belgium, with their Medieval centers and cosmopolitan flair, taken train detours through the Flemish countryside, and enjoyed some wonderful Belgian restaurants, Trappist beers, and chocolates. During a lovely visit from my lovely wife, I imbibed Dublin, with its curious mix of the old, new, fresh and gritty, walked the paths of 9th Century monks at Glendalough, breathed the green air of the Wicklow mountains, stuck my head out over the edge of an ancient Celtic fort on the Aran Islands, and heard traditional jigs and slides played on the accordian, tin whistle and ulliean pipes among the locals at Taffee’s pub in Galway. I fly fished in the old “lough” style on a lake with twenty mile an hour winds and three-foot waves. I toured the Burren, driving through sandstone-strewn mountains pocked with emerald meadows, standing alone in a Celtic ring fort and listening to the cattle bellow outside, much as the fort’s inhabitant’s must have done fifteen hundred years ago. I played some amazing golf courses carved from Irish stone and turf, drove through country lanes while shifting with my left hand, rooted for Cork in the hurling matches, and made new friends among faculty colleagues from the U.S., Ireland, and Belgium. I’m so glad I took this trip. And yet, I can’t wait to get home.

Late this afternoon, while munching a local goat-meat burger and sipping through the creamy head of a pint of Guiness in a pub sitting in an empty valley in the Burren, my eye was drawn to the line of an old stone wall extending from the valley over the peak of the hillside and into the misty distance. That fence somehow struck me as a metaphor for Ireland, history and life. It appeared at rest, yet worn from years of battles with wind and rain. Probably it had seen harder times — the potato famines, Ireland’s struggle for Independence — and now it enjoyed some peace during this period of prosperity. At the hilltop, it disappeared into what seemed, from my vantage point, to be an impossibly distant future.

So here I am, like that stone wall, in something of a restful valley for a few more days. But at the same time I long to get up over the hillside. I’ve missed my children so much during this month I’ve been away that I could cry just thinking about them. I can’t wait to scoop them up in my arms, kiss their cheeks, smell their hair, be their dad again. I can’t wait to sit on the deck with my wife during the langorous New Jersey summer nights. Here in Ireland, I have arrived at a place where I belong for a time, but I have yet to arrive home.

And this in turn is a metaphor for the spiritual life. Here and now there are things to experience and enjoy, work to do, crosses to carry, places to belong. But “home” is yet to come. The touch of His hand, the warmth of His breath, the joy of His embrace await another day. I’m there, but not there yet.

On this Memorial Day, I got up early to walk the dog and get some work done before the parade. It was eerily quiet outside. The whole town seemed to be sleeping in. There was no traffic and no one out under the bright blue sky. The town was at peace.

There was something appropriate and yet something ironic about the peace of this morning. It seemed appropriate because today we celebrate the sacrifices of the many men and women who fought to earn this peace. And yet it seemed ironic because war rages this morning throughout the world. I’m grateful to those who fought to earn the peace I enjoy today. But I long for the true shalom of God’s Kingdom, in which all our swords are beaten into ploughshares and there is no need for wars any longer.