Christian Battleground

By James Kushiner
The Fellowship of St. James

Psalm 3 is the first of six psalms recited each day during Matins in the Orthodox Church. It may seem a bit strange to pray so early in the day: "Lord, how many are my foes! Many are rising against me; many are saying of me, 'There is no help for him in God'." Am I praying the words of a paranoid person?

No, for in the Christian frame of mind, there are at least two connections or identifications here. First, the mocking statement that "there is no help for him in God" reminds me of those mocking Jesus upon the Cross. In carrying our crosses daily, we are to identify with our Lord, the Suffering Servant.

Second, these many foes are those identified by St. Paul: "We wrestle not against flesh and blood, but principalities and spiritual powers" bent on harming us or at least distracting us from our faith in Christ. 

We all face an unseen spiritual warfare each day in the form of countless temptations and choices--sounds and images designed to entice us to think about comfort, appetite, or sex; numerous personal interchanges in which one may respond out of ego, self interest, or irritation; cares and anxieties to be fretted about. The visual attraction of (some) immodest dress.

Our witness to Christ is not often public, or necessarily even made to another human being who might perceive it. We witness to Christ before the angels and the spiritual powers every time we resist temptation--whenever we reject unseemly thoughts, or quietly say a prayer for the safety of a driver who has cut us off rather than curse him. Every act or thought in Christ bears witness to Him who is "Pantocrator"---Ruler over all: All authority in heaven and earth is His; our obedience renders His Rule present, against the present age.

Even these small efforts throughout the day make a difference, for cursing, selfishness, lustful thoughts and looks--even if kept "private"--drive out better thoughts and prayers, and render us susceptible to further descent into darkness.

Such opportunities to live, think, and act with "the mind of Christ" seem countless once you become aware of them. At the beginning of the day, I foresee that the temptations will return and multiply. But with the Psalmist, I call upon the Lord, "Arise, deliver me, O my God," while confessing, "Deliverance belongs to the Lord." Each small victory makes a difference, not only for you, but for those around you.

How Do I Learn From Experience If I Don’t Have Any?

By Matt Jenson
The Scriptorium

Earlier this summer, I got an email from John Buchanan, a current student in the Torrey Honors Institute:

Hello, Dr. Jenson.

As you may be told from time to time, you are the mentor that seemed sensible to talk to regarding the subject of this email… Probably because you are a younger male but who knows for certain. I wrote this email in the same form as I would talk to you about something in an office hours, but as there is no more time for office hours, I am hoping an email will suffice. I wrote quite a bit at first, which was probably just for my own benefit, and have condensed it to the core. I understand if you do not have time to reply, and thank you for your time and wisdom.

Am I supposed to be learning about how experiences happen before I experience them? I feel robbed of my experiences. The knowledge I am gaining from Torrey is undoubtably invaluable, but I am young and full of energy and ideas. I do not feel qualified to talk for three hours (or write a paper) about sex, or love, or being old, or being even twenty-years old (because I am not yet), or ruling, or being ruled, or dying, or so many other themes. I do not even feel qualified to talk about friendship because I have only since beginning college started actually being in completely healthy friendships.

What is the expectation of me as a young student? Am I to bring experience of truth into discussions or learn about truth from words while in a chair? How am I supposed to know what beauty is if I am trapped inside all day?

If you have any understanding of this to pass on to me (through written words, ironically) I would appreciate them.

I cannot wait for the summer.

- John Buchanan

What a great question. To learn about something, it seems we’ve got to know about it already to some extent. This was the quandary Socrates considered in the Meno. If I don’t know something, I can’t begin to search after it; if I do know it, there’s no need to. Here, John’s asking a particular form of this question with reference to the knowledge that comes from experience. We learn best through cycles of action and reflection–but what if, as John suggests, we don’t have broad or deep enough action on which to reflect? Who knows, maybe we should just postpone college till, say, age 40. Give people some basic skills, get them out living life, then invite them back in middle age to reflect on their lives so far.

Maybe, though I suspect there’s more to it. Here’s what I wrote in response:

Hi John,

Thanks for this email from back in May. It was a hectic time, and since then I’ve mostly been in email hibernation mode. Now I’m yawning, though, and slowly waking from a long email nap. I hope this is helpful in response, though I’d imagine you’ve got plenty of new thoughts on this topic by now. One thing I smelled in your email was that combination of exhaustion and exasperation that comes at the end of the semester, and particularly the end of spring semester, when the thought of being outdoors, able to touch grass and ground, to be relatively untrammeled and simply live sure sounds a lot better than yet another book, paper or test. I feel the same about that time of year.

In one sense, you’re right. You don’t know much about sex or love or being old or king. In light of that, you might think of your education as a time to gain categories for the big features of life that you have yet to meet and to glean from the hard-won experiential knowledge of others. You may not know about growing old, but you can watch Lear lose his focus and grip on reality and succumb to decades of selfishness, taking a kingdom along with him. That does a couple things: It expands your imaginative sense of aging. We experience reality through our imaginations; we paint scenes and tell stories in our minds of what our growing older, say, will look like. But our imaginations are limited to what we’ve seen and heard, to a great extent. Others’ lives–even in fictional ones–can expand our sense of what is possible, for good or ill.

Now, that’s no substitute for living, of course. Books are meant for lots of things, certainly including fun and diversion, but the greatest of these is to aid us in living well. We don’t only read Lear for fun; we don’t even read it just to learn about aging. We read it, in significant part, so that we may live, and age, well. One big mistake Torrey students make is thinking that, because they’ve got a rich conceptual grasp of reality, they have figured out life. Far from it. Once we get the conceptual tools in place–and, of course, those tools need sharpening throughout life, and often enough replacing–we have to try them out on life itself. I can’t count the number of times I have learned in my heart and gut and with my hands what my head has long known. And that’s not a knock on head knowledge. In fact, I think the head knowledge has helped me recognize truth with my heart, gut and hands; but there’s no replacing that knowledge that I know from the inside because I have lived it. There’s also no shortcut to it. So while I wouldn’t worry about your relative lack of experiential knowledge at this point, and while I still think reading all these books does you a world of good, don’t let anyone fool you by telling you that critical mastery of Lear is as good as gaining the wisdom of aging.

One more thing, though: Don’t sell yourself short. You know far more than you know. Twentyish years is a lot of years. What’s more, those are formative years, years that will stick with you even after your twenties are a blur. You may not know about [cue sweeping orchestral music] LOVE!, but you’ve had a crush on someone. You’re known a crush unrequited. You’ve probably been on a date, squirmed with awkwardness, not been able to think about anyone else, thought your life wouldn’t go on without them, etc. Sound cliche? Well, I suppose it is; but maybe it’s better to say it’s common, in the best sense of the word. We all know something of that experience. And it doesn’t take that much work to draw an analogy from, say, the crush of a 15-year-old to, well, just about any of the relationships in Pride and Prejudice. Same goes for any number of topics. It may just be that you have yet to tap your experience as you run into what seem like more regal accounts of life in our curriculum. I’d be willing to bet a lot of money that most of the authors we read would feel far more ‘common’ in person than their sometimes-vaunted language would suggest.

I’m glad you’re in Torrey, John. I hope you’re enjoying life this summer, living it to the full. See you in a few weeks.

MJ

Today's War Against the Saints

By James M. Kushiner
The Fellowship of St. James (email)

Today, August 1 in the St. James Calendar of Christian Year we note the commemoration in East and West of the Seven Maccabees: Abimus, Antoninus, Gurias, Eleazar, Eusebonas, Alimus, and Marcellus, along with their Mother Solomone and their Teacher, the Scribe Eleazar. These martyrs "lived during the time of the Syrian King Antiochus IV Epiphanes of the Seleucid dynasty (175-164 B.C.), who, having reduced the Jewish nation to slavery, sought to constrain the Children of Israel to renounce the customs and institutions handed down by their fathers and adopt the ways of the pagans. To this end, he decreed that everyone must eat pork, an unclean animal forbidden by the law (Lev. 11:7-8)"(Orthodox Synaxarion) 

  

The authorities tried to compel Eleazar to eat, forcing the pork into his mouth, which he spat out. They tried to persuade him to feign submission in order to save his life. "At our age, it is not fitting to feign, for fear that many young people, seeing that Eleazar has, at age ninety, adopted foreign ways, might do the same thing because of me and my dissimulation; and that for a brief span of life. I would thus bring on my old age defilement and dishonor; and, were I to escape the temporal punishment of men, I would not, living or dead, escape the hand of the Almighty."  

  

The seven brothers were arrested and shown the instruments of torture, to which the eldest son replied: "We are ready to die, rather than to transgress the laws of our fathers." Solomone bravely exhorted her sons: "I know not how you were formed in my womb: for I neither gave you breath, nor soul, nor life, neither did I frame the limbs of every one of you. But the Creator of the world, that formed the nativity of man, and that found out the origin of all, he will restore to you again in his mercy, both breath and life, as now you despise yourselves for the sake of his laws." (2 Macc. 7:22-23) 

  

Her seven sons were tortured and killed one by one before Solomone was killed. Gregory the Theologian said of them: "In fact, although their witness had been before the coming of Christ, these holy martyrs are in no way less than those who followed the Lord, imitating His life-giving Passion; for it is faith in Christ, who, already living in them through the hope of the resurrection, made them triumph over all that held them to the earth." 

We should be careful to note that a divine law is still in effect for Christians, even if Jewish dietary laws are not. And today much of this divine law contradicts the ascendant "new morality." Young boys (and girls) in many schools are being taught that sex is no longer just for marriage. Isn't this an ongoing program to have Christian students "renounce the customs and institutions handed down by their fathers and adopt the ways of the pagans"? Isn't this state-sponsored encouragement of apostasy? 

Resistance to this is obedience to God rather than men and will not go unrewarded, even if it ends up being punished by men. While we do not see martyrs in our land, yet, we must all stand as witnesses, martrys, come what may. So, remember the Maccabees!

Yours for Christ, Creed & Culture,

James M. Kushiner

Executive Director, The Fellowship of St. James

Psssst: Melchizedek!

By Fred Sanders
The Scriptorium

(For the sermon that this is an excerpt from, go here.)

The book of Hebrews is a work that trains us to hear the voice of God when we read Scripture. And it not only trains us to hear God’s voice, it trains us to focus especially on what God himself emphasizes, and one way God emphasizes things is by swearing solemn oaths in a few key places in Scripture.

But Hebrews also provides training in how to hear when God drops hints. The author (or speaker, since Hebrews shows so many signs of being composed for oral delivery) seems to delight in bringing out minor scenes from the Old Testament and revealing how much was actually going on there. He presents them as if to say, “did you notice this? Did you hear what God was hinting at here?”

Here comes God’s hint. Pssst: Melchizedek, get it? Eh? See what he’s up to here? 

To make sure you get the big picture with Melchizedek in Hebrews 7, here’s a little trick with verses 1-3: Leave out all the extra phrases and just take the first few words of verse one and the last few words of verse 3: “Now this Melchizedek… continues a priest forever.” That’s the key idea about Melchizedek: priest forever.

Melchizedek skips across the surface of the Bible like a stone over a lake: Three short verses in Genesis. A thousand years later, one verse in a Psalm. A thousand years later, Hebrews. As W. H. Griffith-Thomas points out, “Melchizedek is mentioned three times in Scripture: in history (Gen 14); in prophecy (Ps 110); and in doctrine (as here), this last being based on the other two.”

Look at that first occurrence, in the history of Genesis 14:18:

18. And Melchizedek king of Salem brought out bread and wine. (He was priest of God Most High.) 19. And he blessed him and said,
“Blessed be Abram by God Most High,
Possessor of heaven and earth;
20. and blessed be God Most High,
who has delivered your enemies into your hand!”
And Abram gave him a tenth of everything.

That’s it. You can do a comprehensive, exhaustive study of every mention of Melchizedek in the entire canon of Scripture by reading those three verses, one verse from the Psalms, and then Hebrews.

In verse 17, Abram’s talking to the king of Sodom; in verse 21, he goes back to talking to the king of Sodom.  Three verses, out of nowhere and back into nowhere.

But look how much Hebrews gets out of it: “And Melchizedek king of Salem.” Melchizedek means king of righteousness, king of Salem means king of peace. (salem, shalom, salaam). This one man is the king of both righteousness and peace!

And he’s a priest.  In fact, this is the first use of “priest.” The first priest in the Bible is not a levitical priest, but a priest of the most high God way back in Genesis 14: Melchizedek.

In 7:4, Hebrews cries out, “See how great this man was!” Better than Abraham.  He blessed Abraham. The first priest, Melchizedek, basically takes God’s promise to Abraham and rephrases it as a blessing on him after his victory in battle.  And the blesser is above the blessed, so Melchizedek is better than, is above, Abraham. That’s a big deal in Bible terms: Matthew’s gospel traces Jesus’ lineage back to Abraham and calls Jesus the Son of Abraham, because that’s the very source and fountain of the covenant promise. But when you get alllll the way back to Abraham, there he is… Father Abraham has not yet had many sons… and standing there beside him is Mr. Melchizedek, full grown, no relation, got his own thing going on in another town, he’s the king and he’s a priest, and he blesses Abraham.

What did these two men do when they got together? They had church. Tithes were collected, a blessing was given, and bread and wine were eaten. That’s a church service! And then, apparently, Melchizedek must have packed up the portable pews and the offering plates and gone back to Salem to keep kinging and priesting it up with his people. Who was this guy? It doesn’t say.

This is why I think of Melchizedek, especially in these 3 verses from the history part of the Bible, as a kind of hint from God. We don’t get as much of his story as we’d like. I’d love to know the further adventures of Melchizedek. But let’s look at it this way: he’s the king of some people group at Salem way back in the days of Abraham. I don’t know the Salemites. Were they descendants of Ham or of Japheth who settled there?  Were they related to the Amorites, the Hittites, the Hivites, the Etcerites? We don’t know.

Here’s the hint part: God apparently had something going on with this people group, something we aren’t told much about. They’ve got a priest, one who leads them in worship not of idols or a false god, but of the most high God, the possessor of heaven and earth. That’s cool. Too often we read the story of the Bible and think, God’s got his chosen people, and the unchosen people are just collateral damage. God just cares about the messianic line, and everybody else is in the way. Does God care about Salemites? The hint from Melchizedek is that he does: they have some knowledge of him, they have a priest. The Bible’s not mainly about that, but there are hints.

In the Chronicles of Narnia, Aslan often shows up to explain things beautifully, and the people he’s talking to always change the subject and ask about somebody else in the story. Aslan’s reply is always something like : “I am telling you your story, not hers. I tell no one any story but his own.” I want to know about the Salemites. God’s not telling that story. Here’s where it gets tough:  more than 400 years later, the people of Israel are going to return to this land and God will command them to drive out and destroy the inhabitants. Why? Does God only care about the chosen people? No, he cares about all people, he’s the possessor of heaven and earth. Look over at Genesis 15:16, God tells Abraham his descendants will come back, but for now they have to leave the promised land. Why? “the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet complete.” Apparently God is keeping an eye on multiple timetables. The Salemites are doing okay, they’ve got a priest who gets it. The Amorites? They’re going to get worse and worse, and then in will come Israel like a broom to sweep them out.  Shall not the judge of all the earth do right?

All this and more is hinted at in Melchizedek.

Hearing God: Start by Overhearing

By Fred Sanders
The Scriptorium

This is a section from a sermon I preached at my home church, Grace Evangelical Free Church in La Mirada, as we work our way through the book of Hebrews. I got to do chapter 7, on Melchizedek, and I presented it as an opportunity to learn how to heard God’s word. I think that’s one of the key concerns of Hebrews overall, and I take its teaching on Melchizedek to be an especially vivid instance of it.

I’ll turn most of the sub-points into their own blog posts in the next few days, but if you want to hear the w hole thing, the full Vimeo is embedded (audio and outline also available at our church resources website).

Hearing God’s word is a skill. It’s a skill that we can learn, with God as our teacher. God is in the business of making us good listeners, good hearers of his word. Hebrews is all about this: learning to hear God’s word. Practice makes perfect, until we become mature, (5:14) “those who have their powers of discernment trained by constant practice to distinguish good from evil.” God is an excellent speaker, and is in the business of making us good listeners.

The playwright Anton Chekhov (1860-1904) once gave this advice to authors: “If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it’s not going to be fired, it shouldn’t be hanging there.” With a good writer, there is nothing extra just hanging around, to be ignored. Well, God is the kind of careful composer who doesn’t just leave extraneous stuff strewn about in the early chapters. He said Melchizedek and he is going to fire that Melchizedek gun pretty soon. We just need to do some ear calisthenics to make sure we hear it when it goes off.

So before we get to Melchizedek, we’ll go through some ear exercises. Here are some baby steps into hearing God’s Word.

First of all, we don’t have to start by hearing what God says to us. He actually starts us out with an even easier step before that: he lets us OVERhear him. He lets us overhear him talking to somebody else about us. I think that before God even speaks to us, he speaks to his Son in our presence, so we can overhear them talking to each other.

Think about it this way: in the gospels, when Jesus begins his public ministry, a voice comes out of heaven. I assume it’s a big booming James Earl Jones style voice, and what does it say? It says “This is my beloved son in whom I am well pleased. Listen to him.” Okay, voice from the sky says listen to this guy, I’m listening to this guy.

“This is my son.” But what’s it say in Hebrews? Ch. 1:5, “You are my son.” Get the difference between “this over here is my Son,” and “you are my Son?” Hebrews lets us in on the fact that before God ever talked to us, God the Father was already talking to God the Son. 

When did the Father say this to the Son? Before when.  Where? Beyond where. God the Father and God the Son have been in conversation with each other in eternity past, in the unity of the Holy Spirit. When God starts communicating with us, he’s already been communicating with himself from before the foundation of the world. If communication is a success term, God needs a hearer, and he has always had the perfect audience: himself. The Father has always had the Son as his audience, and the Son has had the Father to hear him, forever and ever amen.  Which means you’re invited to the listening party, but if you don’t come, there’s a party going on anyway.

When God starts saying his word to us, he starts by letting us OVERhear what has been going on between the Father and the Son already. He brings us into that conversation. We learn to hear God’s word by the immersion method, the same way babies learn to speak in our households. First a lot of listening, a lot of overhearing what’s going on around them, then hearing direct speech to them, and finally responding. God is a communicating God who brings his children up the same way. 

My wife Susan had sweet grandparents who made a habit of talking to each other about their grandkids: “Isn’t Susan growing up to be a lovely young girl? Oh yes, and she has such a nice way with everything. Such a helper around the house, I just love that girl.” When people compliment you, you believe them. But when you OVERhear them say nice things about you to somebody else, you really know you’re getting the truth. Plus you get the bonus of getting to feel sneaky! “Wow, inside information.”

This is how God trains us: The Father says “you are my Son.” The son says “I will tell of your name to my brothers, in the midst of the congregation I will sing your praise.” 

The Father says “Sit at my right hand,” and the Son says “I will put my trust in him.” We should listen in to that. Overhear this divine conversation. I don’t know what the Father and Son talk to each other about in the Spirit when they are at home in the happy land of the Trinity. But by the time we overhear them, they have begun to talk to each other about us.

The Idol of Love

By John Mark Reynolds
Philosophical Fragments

Mom and Dad are great parents. It is not Mother’s Day or Father’s Day, but events of the past week have set me to thinking about parents, love, and friendship.

One virtue they had: my brother and I knew they would always love us.

So long as they had anything, we would have something.

They were open to talk, even to disagree. They dialogued about everything and let us read almost anything. 

As I got older, I made choices that were very wrong and they believed to be very wrong. My parents never stopped loving me, but they did withhold their approval. In one sense, they withdrew their friendship, because my sins were big enough that they feared more for my soul than my body.

Of course, even when I was walking down a dark road, their door was open. They refused to sit in the pig sty with me sipping coffee and pretending I was “alright,” but if I came to my senses I knew they would see me (as the Father saw the prodigal in the parable) a long way off and welcome me home joyfully.

In fact, they did welcome me home joyfully.

Saint Paul makes it clear that we can have business relationships with non-Christians. We are called to love everyone, even our enemies. At the same time, the Lord Jesus talks of damnation for those who do not enter the narrow way.

Today, because Jesus is still the second most popular historic figure in America (next to Abraham Lincoln), it has become fashionable to talk of his eating and talking with sinners. This is true and never to be forgotten, but he also never stopped calling them sinners and urging them to repent of their sin.

Like Jesus, I remember my Mom and Dad taking some pretty tough people into our house and their trying to help them. Sometimes this worked out, sometimes it did not. There was no limit to their love, but there was a limit to their toleration. If someone was not walking toward the light, they knew they could have no further fellowship with darkness. 

It is Sacred Scripture after all that tells us we cannot befriend the world system. That means that however kind we are called to be, there is a limit to the approval and support we can give.

My parents, I am confident, would never have stopped loving me, but if I had gone off the rails, they would never have given me approval. Of course, if my behavior was not sinful, if they were wrong about their judgment, then they would hurt themselves and me needlessly.

They had enough humility to agonize over whether they were wrong, but enough courage in their convictions to act on them. When they decided on righteousness, they used the standards of Scripture, the witness of the saints gone before them, and reason.

They were never so arrogant as to assume their own age had a corner on righteousness. They taught me to oppose racism and the racist laws of the 1960’s, because they were aberrant stains on Church history, contrary to Scripture (where is race there?), and contrary to their reason.

If I had become a racist and encouraged others to do the same, they would have distanced themselves from me. If I had embraced any sin and built my life around it, they would have loved me, but disapproved until death.

On politics or social choices, what is prudent in this time, they would have agreed to disagree. They would have tolerated much that less holy parents would have despised, but if I chose moral evil, they would have separated from me.

They loved me, but loved God and His righteousness more. 

My mother wept over me in prayer, but she was not so weak as to pretend agreement or give me approval by her presence in my sinful choices. They thought, and I think they were right, that the real arrogance was in me for thinking my generation had insight that had escaped the Church Universal. 

At first this annoyed me, but during my time of walking away from their values, I came to realize that if I was right and they were wrong, that their disapproval was a cost of my decisions. Parental approval would be valueless, if it came regardless of what I did. 

Dialog is good, there is nothing I will not discuss or consider, but dialog must never be an excuse to pretend that one does not have a (fairly) settled view. There comes a time when dialog with sinners (or if I am the sinner, with me), becomes unproductive. 

The Bible calls this state “hardness of heart” in one case and “folly” in another.  

The slogan “let’s keep talking,” can be an excuse (at least in me) to avoid recognizing that embracing sin creates irreconcilable differences without repentance (on somebody’s part). 

I knew they would always love me, but not that they would always support me. If the wages of sinful choices was death, they would mourn my passing. 

My parents would say, if they were allowed to look over my shoulder just now, that they know everyone, including themselves is a sinner. The problem with the Pharisees of Jesus time was not their doctrine, Jesus was a Pharisee himself by belief. The problem is that they pretended they were not sinners or escaped the harder demands of Justice by sophistry.

These Pharisees did not feed their parents, they oppressed the poor, they had impure hearts.

They were worse sinners than the people everyone knew were sinners, because they would not call their sin “sinful.” 

But notice what Jesus did and did not do: our Savior had harsh language for anyone who used sophistry to escape the demands of holiness. Thieving for God was still stealing and so he cleared the Temple. What Jesus never did was tell the woman caught in adultery, the tax collector, or the prodigal that they had made lifestyle choices or that their problem was society’s perception.

Jesus was willing to go anywhere and risk anything to call men and women to repentance.

A Christian must follow His model. No sinner can be intimate with God. The only way any of us can stand before God is by putting on Christ. 

Can a man or woman in Christ be “best friends” with an unbeliever? I cannot see how. If the most important thing in my life is Jesus, then our level of intimacy will be curtailed. I think this is why Scripture urges believers to marry only other believers.

We cannot join “Christ in us” to someone who does not know Christ.

And yet over shared interests, I see no reason good fellowship and collegial relationships cannot be had with those not in Christ. Love demands we be as intimate as we can be without giving the appearance of condoning injustice or vice.

But at times a person will so associate themselves with their vice that I do not see in good conscience how loving my neighbor, all my neighbors, could include tacit approval of their life by hearty fellowship. One way business leaders keep running sweatshops in other lands is they pay no social cost in this land. 

They get the benefit of our friendship here and the profit from exploiting labor there.

My parents taught me to love all my children. I can think of no deeper love. I would, I hope, die for my children, but because I love them I will never live for them. 

Recently an episode of Psych featured a “moving in together” party for the main characters. Everyone was there celebrating this increase in “love.” I realized with sorrow that if my own children had such a party, I would not be able to go. It would not be that they were my enemies or that I would have ceased to love them. If such a child made any move to repent, then I would rush to help them.

That was a sorrowful thought.

It is not, of course, the severity of the sin that merits such a painful response: a crucifying of parental love in the name of holiness. I am confident that every heart, my heart, contains worse sins than living together before marriage, fornication. 

The difference is embracing sin, promoting it, calling it no sin.

Love cannot see the beloved embrace destruction and death of the soul and join the party.

I suppose, like Jesus, I could go to the sick and call them to be well or to the sinners and winsomely call them to repentance. But if I were not invited as a physician of souls, as Jesus was, or as a rabbi, then going seems merely rude.

Jesus never went to a celebration of sin and called it “not sin.” He never took a sinner and told them that their sin was not sin, but a result of oppression or “othering.” 

Jesus called every sinner to repentance: especially religious types such as I am.

And some sinners, Romans, Zealots, Pharisees, and Sadducees, hated him for it. Other sinners left their sinful activity and he accepted them just as they were to make them something different. 

So when I read friends say that nothing I could do or believe would separate us, I think this is no longer friendship, but idolatry.

I must hate every relationship, parent, child, country, in light of the love of God and God demands perfect holiness. My way forward is not to feel better about myself, but worse. I am a sinner needing salvation. My path to joy is not to embrace my desires, but to crucify them.

In practical life, this means having as deep a relationship as I can with anyone, but not with any action. And of course (Psalm 139:21), if a man or woman rejects God, then (as Jesus said) I must hate that rejection. There is an unpardonable sin: the sin of becoming unable to ask for pardon.

Oddly, no matter how this is said, whatever is tried, “speaking the truth in love” seems no longer possible to many. “I love you, but I think you are in error, damnable error.” may be true, but I am not sure we have any ability to hear it. We think “judge not” means never judging, so we judge God’s judgments on us as evil.

When our friend says, “Hurrah for my sin!” then silence smacks of cowardice or idolatry. Love and truth can’t be separated, so out of our grievous pain for their error, don’t we have to say something? 

For a long time, I was tempted by this dodge: “I will give my view once and let people know when I change my mind.” This may be socially more polite, and certainly would be better for my career, but too often is cowardice.

When the topic is sin, then I must speak, as kindly as possible, with offers for acceptance for any sinner who repents, but I dare not be silent or risk empowering injustice and evil with silence.

Silence about sin equals death for the beloved. 

I have known people, God knows I have surely been such a person, who use speaking the truth as an excuse not to love. They are the parent who punishes saying: “this punishment hurts you more than me” in a mockable way. They do not mind the punishment at all.

That is a grievous sin. 

But isn’t there as great a sin in refusing to acknowledge (at least for a moment) that best judgment says a fellow believer has embraced wickedness? Paul, John, Jesus, and all the prophets do not say to keep every relationship going. The Biblical doctrine of separation from the world has been abused enough, that many of us refuse all but a hypothetical case.

Can’t a person even excommunicate himself? Or is our love so cloying that we will not respect a person has chosen a different god, even if he or she uses the same name?

If it is possible,when? 

Christians must allow humans the liberty to choose a new God and a new Christ. My God and my Christ command holiness, justice, and righteousness. As Paul points out, the deeds of righteousness are pretty plain as are (from his perspective) evil deeds. If someone decides that parts of Christianity are good enough that they keep them, but deny ethical ideas universally held by the Church, then they are in a new “Christian” faith.

This new faith may be better, but it is not the old. If history is any guide, it is likely worse and will fade in time. 

On sexual ethics the Church has spoken with a unified voice. Jesus does not give us a detailed sexual ethic, but in every case the Savior “ups the demands” of the Pharisees, He does not lower them.

The Pharisees placated their own desire to sin by allowing divorce. Jesus said: “in the beginning it was not so.”

The Pharisees ignored their lusts as long as they “did not do it” or at least get caught. Jesus said lust in our hearts was (for us) sex sin. 

The great saints of the Church, Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant, often get individual ethical decisions wrong, but they are unified on this: sex is not sinful in itself, but most of our sexual desires need radical purification.

On sex, just like any other desire, we cannot trust ourselves. 

Perhaps the great hypocrisy of the American Church in the last twenty years has been ignoring some vices and “not asking” while focusing on vices done by smaller groups of people. We knew that a couple was “living in sin,” but we rushed to celebrate their Christian marriage without first calling them to repentance. There should have been no party without repentance, but because their vice was close enough to our own and all “ended well” we ignored it.

We ignore divorce: God hates divorce. 

Perhaps I have been too eager to justify the sin of my friend when he divorces, because he is my friend. Until he repents of his wrong, shouldn’t we be at least a bit estranged? Will not repentance come with fruit (like paying child support)?

We are so eager to say that God does not hate the divorcee that we forget that God does hate the divorcee if the divorcee loves his sin. (I certainly know divorce happens to some people without their consent.)

I know that I have sometimes said: “But I am the last traditional Christian, my friend trusts or can befriend! It gives me a chance to soften his or her heart.”

This is true and someone might be called to do it, but only if they never allow themselves to appear to condone or celebrate sin. This is so hard that I am not sure any but a great saint could manage it while being perfectly loving. 

In my own experience, either my values ended up being compromised or I gave others the appearance of evil. This most often comes when I agree as much as possible with a person, but am silent about the disagreement. 

“Loving the sinner and hating the sin” is no longer good enough for the American majority. Christians must love the sinner who loves their sin and join in any celebration of their sin. This may be something, but is not the love described in Scriptures. 

Of course, the “loving the sinner and hating the sin” formulation was always too vague. Jesus hated sinners as sinners, but he saw sinfulness was not all there was to any of us. We were created in the image of God and though sinners, could become something else if we allowed God to change us. 

Mom and Dad loved me, but hated the sin and the sinner. They believed there was more to me than my status as sinner.  Jesus came for sinners, but so they could stop being sinners. He loves us as we are only so we can become something new. 

God’s acceptance of us, any of us, into Paradise is contingent on our changing.

I come to God just as I am, He accepts me not as I am, but as Christ will make me. The sinner in me will be purged as if by fire . . . I am must kill my old self or I cannot be raised with Christ.

Priests or pastors may have different jobs to do, but for the rest of us, we must respect other people’s decisions enough to recognize that if we worship the true Christ, they have come to worship a false one. 

Humility in part means refusing to set up our own standards for fellowship and becoming nicer than God. There will be no sinners, after all, in heaven. If we don’t hate our sin, we go to Hell. 

Everyone in God’s Heaven, if you follow the Christian God, will be a sinner who has rejected, whoever imperfectly their sin, and found a new life in Christ. Few will die sinless, but nobody who loves sin and continues in it knows God (I John). 

My parents demonstrate this much better than I, but I am learning. They too were not always holy in their loving, they would compromise in the name of love, or be tempted by hate, but they did better every year. If there is always the temptation to temper relationships over too little, perhaps the greater temptation is to never disagree at all.

Disagree agreeably if you can, but not at all costs. 

Mom and Dad knew this: love for any human, object, or group is limited by the greater love for a Holy God.

Pick the wrong God and great horror will result, but that is true of any of us, even if we believe in no god but humankind or community.

“Love God and do whatever you wish,” but make sure that you love the God who is Love and Holy.

Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty: not so holy am I. Even when I have tried to live by this standard, I have failed. I have been unkind over too little and kind when separation was needed. My “boundaries” have been my own and not a Holy God’s. 

Lord Jesus Christ, son of God, have mercy on me a sinner.

“You Are Opening the Doors to Every Demon” (Barth circa 1935)

By Fred Sanders
The Scriptorium

Around 1935, Karl Barth developed a style of speaking and writing that cut through a lot of atmospheric confusion and obfuscation. He found this new tone of voice for two reasons:  first, it was 1935, and the crisis in Germany was becoming impossible for the world to keep ignoring. As a (Swiss) professor teaching in Germany until 1933, Barth had been sounding the alarm for some time. But by 1935 things got seriously Nazi, and the state church of Germany, nominally a Protestant organization, identified itself with the pro-Hitler “German Christian” movement and began taking action against dissident pastors.

But second, Barth found his new tone of voice because he heard the word of God straight from the Bible. Years before, he had set himself on the course of listening to Scripture with real attention, and he had made a lot of noise starting with his epochal Romans commentary. But as he approached age fifty, Barth had spent several years listening and teaching what he heard in Scripture, and it started to sound forth more strongly.

The two factors (content and context, manner and mystery) converged and made this a golden period for Barth’s style. These eventful years are also a bit of a dead spot between publishing of Church Dogmatics volumes: I/1 came out in 1932, and I/2 didn’t appear until 1939. But the stream of short writings and speeches from this time period includes some of my favorite of Barth’s works. When asked where a new reader should start in Barth, I emphasize that the real barthy Barth is in the Church Dogmatics, and readers should get there as soon as possible. But to warm up for those jumbo volumes, I recommend two works from this interim period. First is Credo, a daring little commentary on the Apostles’ Creed (a good sub-title would have been “Dogmatics According to the Apostles’ Creed”). Its dedication page is stark: “1935! To the Ministers Hans Asmussen, Hermann Hesse, Karl Immer, Martin Niemoller, Heinrich Vogel. In memory of all who stood, stand, and will stand.” Credo may be my favorite Barth book.

The second book from this period is God in Action, a lovely short work consisting of three lectures given in Paris in April 1934 and two given in Switzerland later that same year. “The Christian As a Witness” distill’s Barth’s view of church and theology about as well as anything I’ve ever seen (and doesn’t yet draw all the bibliological conclusions that he will draw, unfortunately in my view,  in I/2).

Both books have appendices with transcripts of question-and-answer sessions! The appendix to God in Action is remarkable in every way, as it captures the kind of questions pressed by audience members after Barth has just made the strongest statements.  An Englishman says Barth is right about much of what he says, but ought to give more credit to creatures, to humans as subjects rather than merely objects, to the fact that we are called “not only servants but also friends of God.”

Barth pushes back harder. “If we are to face each other squarely, you must not meet me with such a ‘Yes, but…’; you must answer with a complete and unequivocal No!” After scolding the questioner for praising the speech and then slipping in a little “yes, but,” Barth launches into a direct contradiction of the questioner’s point:

You spoke of Christ. Let me emphasize only one fact. Christ believed He could not bring real and genuine help to man except by dying for him. What does it mean? What shall we infer concerning man? Concerning ourselves? In the face of this fact, in the face of the cross and resurrection of Christ, what shall we assert of man except that man, as man and without Christ, is lost. And to be lost does not mean to have gone astray a little, it means to be wholly lost…. I believe we need to learn anew what the Holy Scriptures say and mean by substitution of Jesus Christ and satisfaction. “I love, yet not I, Christ liveth in me!” In His face, it is impossible even so much as to mention cooperation. Certainly, we are neither stones nor beasts. We are human beings, even very nice people. But Christ was not able to help us in any other way than by dying for us. There is no other help for us than this.

Before taking the next question, Barth informs the un-named Englishman where the question went astray: “I invite you, not to form your estimate of man arbitrarily but to be guided by what the Holy Scriptures say of him. If you will do this for a while, we shall understand each other better…. What is needed above all today is a clear and unequivocal stand: Yes or No! The Church will die if we continue in our mere opinions.”

It was a brave audience that kept asking questions of this thundering orator.  But ask they did: a man from China spoke movingly of the realization of the kingdom of God on earth; a man from India pleas for more attention to the human response to divine Action; a Russian professor tells of the church’s suffering, and urges Barth to admit that “witnessing” involves actions as much as words. The editor of the volume summarizes the next several questions thus: “A series of questions are asked which run in the direction of the objections previously voiced: Barth’s address confines  the concept of witness to too narrow a limit; it needs to be supplemented and integrated in respect to life.”

You can practically hear Barth sigh. “I feel like a man who is making a vain attempt to swim against a torrent. It is quite evident that this conference is against me.” He summons his energy for one final response, a general answer to all the objections, or rather to the “one objection common to you all.” He begins by assuring them that he, too, is a modern man who has seen a little bit of life and has experienced a few things. He tells a little bit of his own biography, of how he pastored for a decade, faced the task of preaching the gospel, and encountered secularism. And what he saw in the church in Switzerland and Germany in those years was not a church that stuck to the message of Scripture (remember that in Barth’s view, “at bottom, the Church is in the world only with a book in its hands”). Instead, he heard on all sides a different message. He saw a church that

stood for the doctrine: men and the world must be helped by love, by what Christians possess, by what they are, and by what they have to say and carry into the world of men from out of their gospel treasuries. And they proceeded to fit their actions to their ideas with evangelization and works of charity, with social activity, and, in our own day, with the remarkable fusion of Christianity and nationalism. All along the line, it was a Church which was no longer Church, and did not care to remain any longer the Church of God. It was, and meant to be, the Church of the pious man, the Church of the good man, the Church of the moral man, but, at any rate, the Church of man.

Barth gestures around at the history of recent centuries, using categories like pietism and rationalism to explain what happened to the confession of Christian faith in his country. And then he closes with an ominous warning. I quote it at length here because it seems so obviously appropriate to our own day. And the only reason I wrote this blog post was to put this quotation into circulation anyway:

And now let me tell you something from our immediate present day. My dear friends from England and America, I am from Germany. There we have reached the end of the road at whose beginning you are standing. If you begin to take the pious man serious, if you do not care to be one-sided, you will reach the same end before which the official German Church stands today. For what we have experienced in Germany during these latter days –this remarkable apostasy of the Church to nationalism, and I am sure that every one of you is horrified and says in his heart: I thank thee God that I am not a German Christian! I assure you that it will be the end of your road, too. It has its beginning with “Christian life” and ends in paganism. For, if you once admit, “Not only God but I also,” and if your heart is with the latter –and friends, that’s where you have it! –there is no stopping it. Let me assure you that there are many sincere and very lovely people among the German Christians. But it did not save them falling a prey to this error.

Let me warn you now. If you make a start with “God and…” you are opening the doors to every demon. And the charge which I raise against you I lay before you in the words of Anselm: Tu non considerasti, quandi ponderis sit peccatum! You failed to consider the weight of sin! And this is the sin: that man takes himself so very seriously.

You are not yet forced to think on these things. Perhaps it is still  possible in your Churches to carry on discussions about them. The enemy has not yet made his appearance, at least,  not as he has invaded Germany –as the man who has risen to claim his rights, recklessly and brutally. What will you do if a similar fate befall you? Will you face the enemy with the weapons you are now carrying in your hands? Let me assure you in advance that you will never stand before him. In Germany we have learned by experience that the one thing that offered a chance to face the real enemy and refuse his claim was the simple message: God is the only Helper! It was the simple Either-Or which was refused a while ago. Learn in time what may here be learned. You are still soldiers in the barracks. Real firing has not yet begun for you. Some day you may be called to the front line. Perhaps there you will remember our discussion. You may then gain a better understanding of what you do not seem to be able to grasp today. One-sidedness will  be your only chance.