Many Christians have been taught to believe that there is a tension at the heart of God between mercy and justice.

They’re told that God is loving, slow to anger, willing and able to forgive. But they’re also told that God is just, which means that God cannot allow sin to go unpunished. For many Christians, this supposed tension at the heart of God is the whole reason for the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. The Gospel is apparently how God figured out a way to both punish sin and forgiven sinners.

Never mind that Jesus never spoke about his life, death, and resurrection like this.
What he did say (or at least what he seems to imply) is that far from mercy and justice being in tension with one another, mercy is the fulfillment of justice.

It would not be inaccurate or unfair to say that the Jewish religion of Jesus’ day had become preoccupied with concerns for justice. On the one hand, they lived under the injustice of the Roman empire and they longed for the day when God would rescue them. On the other hand, God was the great lawgiver and what it meant to be a faithful, God-fearing Jew was to obey God’s laws.

And these two sides of justice worked hand-in-glove. When the people of Israel faithfully obeyed God’s laws, God would finally rescue them.

So, controlling what you can control, the religious system became preoccupied with obeying God’s laws, best represented by the sacrificial system; a very complex list of prescriptions for various types of animal sacrifices. So long as you sacrificed the prescribed animal at the prescribed time and place in the prescribed way, you were good with God and God was good with you, provided you were doing your level best to keep the rest of the commands that had been handed down in the book of Moses.

The primary job of a religious leader, so it would seem, was to make sure that people kept the commands. Rabbis called select students to follow them, accepting difficult “yokes” of strict obedience. Everyone else had Pharisees to look over their shoulders.

But Jesus reframed the whole religious point, usually by quoting one of his favorite prophets, Hosea; “I want you to show love, not offer sacrifices.”[1]

For example, in Matthew 9 Jesus called Matthew from his tax-collector’s booth and Matthew responded by throwing a lavish party at his phone, inviting all of his disreputable friends. Jesus attended as the guest of honor. When the religious leaders discovered that Jesus was socializing with sinful people they raised a stink. Jesus responded with the above quote from Hosea. Religion was not about obeying the laws (represented by getting sacrifice correct) so that those who honored the system (religious leaders) should not associate with those who failed to honor the system (Matthew and his buddies). Religion, rather, was about showing mercy to people who needed it.

Like sick people.[2]

Again, in Matthew 12 Jesus and his disciples walked through a grainfield on the Sabbath and picked some heads of grain for lunch. Some religious leaders saw them do it and accused them of violating the law that forbids common work on the Sabbath. Jesus quoted Hosea 6:6.

The law prohibiting work on the Sabbath was given so people could rest. Without the law in place, those in positions of ownership would likely exploit both land and people for profit.

The law was not given to prevent hungry people from being able to eat, which Jesus pointed out by citing several analogues from their sacred history.

According to Jesus, the point of religion was not to obey rules but to offer mercy to those who needed it. In fact, I think from Jesus’ perspective showing mercy was the fulfillment of the law’s legal requirement. To show mercy was to keep the law, regardless of what the letter of the command might say. You were a faithful, God-honoring Jew if you showed mercy to those who needed it, even if you didn’t offer the right kind of sacrifice.

Christians today still misunderstand this. I see it most prominently when they are reading the Bible. They treat the Bible like it’s a list of descriptions they are required to believe or a list of prescriptions they are required to obey (or both), rather than as a tool or resource they are supposed to employ to help them live in ways that are consistent with Jesus. The Bible is like the new sacrificial system; as long as you “believe what it says” or “do what it says” you are good with God and God is good with you, even if by believing or obeying it you’re living in ways that are entirely inconsistent with Jesus.

As I argue in my book, model every Sunday, and teach people in our formation groups, the Bible is not some magic book that fell from the sky or that we found in the woods. Nor did we receive it from a single person who wrote it in a cave after some self-proclaimed, unverifiable revelation. The Bible is the written record of a people’s experience with God in space and time, most importantly their experience with Jesus, meant to be used to help them from generation to generation remain faithful to their peculiar identity as God’s people.

In other words, we wrote the book for ourselves, to help us live the life we had already become convinced we needed to live based on our experience with God in time and space, most importantly our experience with Jesus. We don’t start with the Bible. We start with our experience with Jesus. And the Bible is not a dictator. It’s a resource that when handled properly (meaning used properly) gives life to the religious community so that the community can live out what it is convinced religious faith is all about (because that’s what Jesus told them), showing mercy to those who need it.

Religion is not a set of arbitrary commands given to a past people but meant to be woodenly applied in all times and places because those commands happen to be a book we believe is sacred. Religion is about knowing God and living consistent with that God’s revealed life. For the Christian, the life of God is revealed in the person of Jesus Christ as a life of mercy. All of God’s commands recorded in the pages of the Bible are meant to be used by the Christian community to help it honor that peculiar way of life in the world.
 
   [1] Hosea 6:6 NLT. Other English translations say, “I want you show mercy, not offer sacrifices.”
   [2] Which was, apparently, how Jesus thought about Matthew and his friends.

I’m leading a formation group right now called “Reading the Bible Like Jesus,” a workshop adaptation of my book, All the Way Down: Rebuilding Christianity from the Rubble of Evangelicalism, while also reading a book with our staff entitled Separation of Church and Hate, a humorous critique by comedian John Fugelsang of how fundamentalist evangelicals misuse the Bible and how you, the sane Christian, can respond should you ever find yourself in conversation with one.

This, of course, has me thinking a lot about the Bible (as if that were odd).

And by that, I mean the Bible as it is.

No one who was taught the Bible growing up was the taught the Bible as it is. Since the time the stories we currently have in our Old and New Testaments began circulating, people received them alongside (and often mediated through) interpretive traditions.

Take, for instance, stories like “the fall” in Genesis 3. The content of Genesis 3 does not contain the title “the fall” and nothing in the story itself directly indicates that it is communicating how humanity “fell” from a state of grace into a state of sin. But that is how some early Jewish interpreters made sense of it. They proposed that the talking snake was Satan, that Adam and Eve’s consequence for their disobedience was the “death” of mortality, previously created to live forever.

In ancient Jewish communities, those interpretations were sometimes written into the sacred texts themselves so that when they were passed along to the next generation that generation was receiving not just the story but an explanation as to what it means.
We do the same thing. Children who learn about Noah’s Ark in Sunday school aren’t just receiving the story. They are receiving an interpretation of the story (what it means) from their well-meaning Sunday school teachers. What results, however, is that they grow up believing the interpretation of the story they heard is the meaning of the story.

And that is often despite details in the story itself.

This is not to say that interpretive traditions are bad. They are unavoidable. But it is to say that part of taking the Bible seriously is understanding the difference between an interpretive stance on the Bible and what the text itself says. Genesis 3 does not say the talking snake is Satan. That is a common way the faith community has understood that character, and it may be the best way to understand it. But it is an interpretive move nonetheless and many Bible readers don’t seem to appreciate the distinction or its implications.

Because while the content of the Bible may be inspired by God, relevant for life, and ultimately harmonious (three of the four fundamental assumptions that governed all ancient Jewish interpretation), it is also cryptic (the fourth assumption that governed all ancient Jewish interpretation). So, as Christian Smith points out in his book The Bible Made Impossible, even if the Bible were a perfect book, the same can never be said for the person interpreting it.

And if you’re always receiving an interpretive tradition alongside the Bible (or worse yet receiving a Bible that has already been filtered through an interpretive tradition), you’re receiving the Bible as the person who interpreted it has taught it to you rather than the Bible as it is.

Again, that is not to sew suspicion or skepticism regarding the Bible. I happen to believe the Holy Spirit is perfectly comfortable and capable working in and through flawed human beings to communicate what God has for us. The point is to begin as a Bible reader to differentiate between what the texts themselves claim or reveal from how those texts have been handled by the faith tradition. Not for the purpose of throwing out the tradition. That would be pretty arrogant. Perhaps the tradition has very good reasons for the interpretation is has passed along with the story.

The purpose is rather so you can more deeply and thoughtfully engage the Bible as it is, not just the Bible you think you have because someone else did the work for you. You may, of course, discover that what you received as a “tradition” and simply accepted as “what the Bible means,” actually represents a more recent invention, not at all in keeping with more common and time-tested traditions.

I have this experience every time I lead my formation group: many of the people who attend our church and take my formation group are shocked to learn that what they always believed “the Bible meant” because that’s what they were told growing up or what their pastor taught them way back when, stands in direct contradiction to the better part of church history and scholarship on that particular topic.

I’ve said this many times, but historic Christianity can be thought of as a very broad river that has produced many tributaries over time. Most Christians grow up in a tributary mistaking it for the river. So, when it comes to the Bible, they believe the specific interpretive tradition they received regarding pick your topic represents the truest or best way to think about that topic, or the way all faithful Christians have always thought about it.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

The Bible you have is an interpreted Bible. That isn’t bad. There is no other way to receive it. It just means if you’re not careful you can mistake it for the Bible as it is. Thank God for the interpretive traditions we’ve received alongside and about the Bible. But one of the keys to reading the Bible well is to begin to make the distinction between the Bible as it is and these interpretive traditions, understanding where the traditions came from and why, and then trying to locate yourself within them.

Most of Fugelsang’s critiques of fundamentalist evangelicals can be traced back to them defending an interpreted version of the Bible (one that happens to reinforce their interests) rather that dealing honestly with what it says.

And in my experience, that is the source of most people’s struggles when it comes to the Bible. Interpretive traditions and good and necessary. But interpretive traditions are just that; takes on the Bible. They are not the Bible themselves and as Christians we have the freedom to enter into those interpretive discussions and ask if they best serve the faith community they propose to be for.

That’s taking the Bible seriously…as it is.
 

We’re all prone to idolatry, whether what I call Idolatry #1—the worship as God of something that is clearly not God—or what I call Idolatry#2—the worship of the right God in the wrong ways.

But why? What compels us to idol worship?

Perhaps a combination of two factors. The first is some deep acknowledgement of our finitude and therefore vulnerability. We recognize on some deep level that we are inherently dependent. We need help. We did not create ourselves and we cannot ultimately provide for ourselves. There are simply too many variables outside of our control.
I think the second factor is God’s timing. In our experience, God simply takes longer than we’d prefer.

The archetypal idolatry story in the Hebrews scriptures is the making of the golden calf. Moses ascends Mt. Sinai to receive God’s instructions while the people remain at basecamp. Moses is gone forty days and forty nights. The story doesn’t tell us how long the people expected Moses to be gone but I’m guessing a month and a half was longer than they anticipated. They get antsy. They fear Moses has been consumed by God’s holy fire.
And that is what prompts them to come to Aaron, Moses’ brother and spokesperson, and demand that he craft them an idol to be their new god, which Aaron does.

Again, they sense the need for a god to lead them, but the God who had been leading them, the god who rescued them from Egypt has gone radio silent.

When I consider the popular forms of idolatry in our lives (including my life), I see a similar pattern. When it comes to Idolatry #1, why do we put our trust in money, the government, the military, or our power? First, because we know we are inherently vulnerable and so we are always looking to something or someone to ensure our well-being. Second, these replacement “gods” are more expedient. Why wait for God to provide what I need when I can accumulate wealth for myself and have the certainty of it because I can see how much money is in my bank account? Why trust God to secure my safety and well-being when we can have tanks and bombers and long-range missiles?

These things are tangible and we can largely control their supply. No need to wait on God to give us tomorrow what we can provide for ourselves today.

When it comes to Idolatry #2, the same pattern holds. Death is our ultimate vulnerability and it’s easier and more expedient to believe in a God who vicariously sentences an innocent person (Jesus) to death to acquit guilty people (you and me) so that we can escape death than it is to believe in a God who created all people in love, redeems all people in love, and actually expects all people to embody love. The first belief structure alleges to give you everything while requiring nothing of you. It “solves” our ultimate vulnerability at the speed of an altar call.

Our compulsion to idolatry is driven by our felt need for God’s leadership combined with our unwillingness or inability to sit in any discomfort, to patiently wait for God to act on our behalf.

But faithfulness is in the waiting. A willingness to be patient, to wait, is precisely what demonstrates to God our practical trust in Him. It is precisely when Moses does not come down the mountain when you wanted or expected him to that forces the faith decision.
Will we wait on God?

There are certainly other sinful predilections that contribute to idolatry, but every act of idolatry seems to me to be a tacit acknowledgement of our implicit need for God minus the ability or willingness to wait for God to act in God’s ways, in God’s time.

As much as idolatry is about an object of worship, idolatry is also about our decision to take god-making into our own hands because we weren’t willing to wait.

To truly worship God is to not only reject substitute gods but to cease taking control of activities that function to save us. God promises to save. To worship God is to wait on God to fulfill that promise.

I’d never heard the word quindecinnial before I just looked it up. It’s the word for a 15-year anniversary.

Today marks 15 years since I began at the church. When I started, my oldest daughter was 2. This year she’s graduating from high school.

I’ve said many times I never envisioned being a pastor and while this may scare some people, after 15 years I’m still not sure what it means to be one, other than to do what I said I would do 15 years ago and that’s consistently and courageously point us to Jesus no matter the cost.

And there has been cost. The church we are today is not the church we were when I first started. While many people have joined us, many people have left us.

I never meant for any of that to happen. My first two years on the job felt I was living in someone else’s house. For the most part I just did my best to be a good roommate. But something happened in year three that changed things for me. I began preaching through the Bible, one book at a time, and I was shocked by the reaction I got to ideas and perspectives that are not only central to orthodox Christian belief (like Jesus, not the Bible, is God’s self-revelation) but are also almost universally accepted by scholars and theologians (like based on the fact that no one was there to write down what was happening when it was happening, Genesis 1-2 cannot be literal historical accounts of creation).

Many people in our church at the time reacted as if these ideas (and others) were existentially threatening. They shouldn’t have been, but they were.

And I made the decision—right, wrong, or otherwise—to begin dealing with that.

Actually, I must have anticipated this would be an issue. In the very first sermon I gave in 2011 I focused on the topic of flexibility. In words that now sound prophetic, I used Jesus’ parable of the wineskins to talk about how the people who rejected Jesus did so because they lacked spiritual flexibility. Their faith had become rigid so they could not accommodate new or challenging information, like the kind Jesus’s life and teaching was constantly throwing in their face. In the end, they just couldn’t handle it, and they got rid of him.

I made the point that following Jesus is dynamic and consequently we must always be spiritually pliable enough to learn new things from him. If faith becomes a matter of establishing and then protecting certain facts, we may end up protecting them from Jesus himself.

And from my perspective, that’s what began to happen when I started teaching through the Bible. I began to realize that people had placed their faith more in a particular way of understanding the Bible (which was incoherent and unworkable) rather than in the person of Jesus, so that when their view of the Bible was challenged their faith began to feel like it was falling apart.

I have a better appreciation now for how scary that must have felt to them and I don’t begrudge them leaving for other churches, but even after all of these years I’m not sure I could have avoided it. The fact of the matter is that to grow in your faith you have to be challenged. There’s simply no other way around it.

I suppose that challenge does not have to come from the pulpit on a Sunday morning. But if not there, where it can be accompanied by follow-up discussions and incubated in safe relationships, it will likely come through an unexpected or unwelcomed life experience where you may lack the safety nets and community to engage the questions that get raised.

Challenging people from the pulpit felt at the time like the best thing I could do for them as a pastor trying to help them live God-honoring lives. Some people embraced it. Some did not.

But somehow by God’s grace we’ve become a community where the kind of spiritual flexibility I intuited all those years ago would be critical for a healthy, growing faith family has become something of a trademark at WCC, and we’re better for it.

Jesus is our center and goal. Love is our metric. Scripture and church tradition are indispensable resources for the journey. We are not perfect, but we are perfectable. Faith is not something to build and protect. It is a path to walk, one we make in part by walking…together.

Choosing to come to WCC was one of the best decisions of my life. God willing, we have at least 15 more years together.  

The thesis of my Sunday sermon this week was “conscious contemplation of God’s love leads to conscious participation in God’s life.”

Many people make the mistake (often because they were mistaught, just like the Colossian Christians) of thinking that the spiritual journey is primarily about demonstrating their devotion to God. They have to prove their faithfulness to God with what Paul calls “pious looking self-denial” and “harsh bodily discipline.”

In short, the Christian life is primarily a life of conformity.

The point I was trying to make this Sunday is that acts of conformity are actually secondary. They are more the effect than the cause.

Our devotion to God is the effect. God’s devotion to us is the cause.

When we make the conscious contemplation of God’s love for us our primary “work,” acts of conformity to the life of Christ—our devotion to God—become easier because they become our genuine desire.

We love because God first loved us. And nowhere is this more important than when we are responding to the sin of other people.

I don’t know that I would call myself a good pastor. But to the degree that members of our congregation would say that I am, I wonder what qualities they would cite as evidence. What in their minds makes me a good pastor?

In my opinion, if I am a good pastor, it is for one reason and one reason only: I have sinned greatly and I have been loved deeply.

When you have sinned greatly you can understand the sin of others. You can empathize. You may not have done precisely what they’ve done but you can appreciate how they got there. Because you’ve found yourself in places that might seem similarly incomprehensible to others.

But you also know what it’s like to be loved in those places, for God to meet you there, to offer you mercy and a new start. And because of that, you can do the same for them. What Jesus said about the adulteress woman really is true: those who have been loved much, love much.

That does not mean I would suggest people go out and sin greatly just so they can experience the mercy of God. But of all the talents, skills, and education I’ve accrued over the years that I try to bring to bear on my role as a pastor, my single greatest asset in this work is the fact that I was once lost and God found me. That I have been loved deeply in my great sin is what informs everything about my role as a pastor, from how I offer counsel to how I disciple and plan sermons.

What applies to my work as a pastor applies equally to your role as a spouse, parent, friend, colleague, student, or community leader. In all of these roles we are constantly asked to respond to the mistakes of others. Sometimes those mistakes seem like genuine mistakes; the person didn’t mean to do what they did. But other times mistakes feel willful, intentional, even devious.

In these moments accountability is important. The point of mercy is not so people can avoid taking responsibility for their actions. Mercy is what is supposed to make it possible FOR people to take responsibility for their actions. But if you yourself have sinned greatly, including willful acts of wrongdoing that might seem incomprehensible to others, and you have been loved deeply, you can administer that accountability with compassion and understanding.

When you have been loved deeply, you can (and more likely will) love deeply in return.
It’s understandable to have the kneejerk response of incredulity, disgust, offense, or judgment in light of the behavior of others you simply can’t understand. But given time I would hope that incredulity or disgust turns to authentic concern. There are things you have done that other people would not understand because they would never do those things. But you have been loved in those things. So, when other people do things you don’t understand because you would never do those things, the hope is that you would be able to meet them with the same kind of compassionate accountability Jesus met people with. The same kind of compassionate accountability he met you with.

Again, that does not mean giving people a “pass.” But it does working to understand them, to let them know you know what it feels like to be where they are, and to often them the same hope offered to you.

Jesus calls us to be people of love. Nowhere is that more difficult or more important than when responding to other people’s sin. Consequently, nowhere is it more important to consciously contemplate the love of God in your own life.

Leviticus is one of those books where I think the average Bible reader with his uncritically held assumption that everything the Bible says is equally true and authoritative will make some mistakes that can have a negative impact on healthy faith formation.

The first mistake involves the topic of sacrifice. The opening seven chapters of Leviticus record a very detailed system for offering ritual sacrifices to God. Lots of bulls, rams, lambs, and goats. Some killed in this way. Some in that. In one case, you have to do this with the blood. In another case, you have to do that. Some sacrifices are burned on the altar. Some are burned outside the camp. And some are burned both on the altar and outside the camp.

It’s all very serious, right down to the priests’ underwear as well as what kind of incense they’re allowed to burn. Just ask Nadab and Abihu what happens if you screw it up.[1]

If Leviticus was all you had, you would have to conclude that sacrifice is central to the God-human relationship. More specifically, God-directed sacrifice. The reason God cares very much about sacrifice—so much that he spends seven chapters laying out how to do it properly—is because God is someone who expects and demands his people to offer him sacrifices.

That’s how it works.

That, however, is a mistake. And if you make that mistake it will cause you to misunderstand not only ancient sacrifice but, because the coming of Jesus is often framed using sacrificial logic,[2] the entire purpose of Jesus’ life and death.

The truth about sacrifice, and this was something the earliest prophets tried to help God’s people to see, is that God is not the one who needs or wants sacrifice.[3] We do.

According to Leviticus 17:3-7, the entire point of the God-driven sacrificial system in Leviticus was to coopt and curb Israel’s sacrificial predilections. In other words, it was built-in to the ancient mindset that sacrifice was how you related to deities. Everyone sacrificed to the gods. And things could get pretty gnarly, with people even sacrificing their own children. This was not something God wanted his people doing, but step #1 in moving them into a reality where they didn’t sacrifice anything was getting them to only sacrifice certain things in certain places. If God had not put in place the sacrificial system you read about in Leviticus 1-7, Leviticus 17:3-7 makes it clear these people would have been out sacrificing God knows what to God knows whom, including perhaps even their children to false gods like Molech.

Back when Leviticus was written, the uncritically accepted belief was that religious faith was all about people sacrificing to the gods. On the surface it looks like Leviticus may be endorsing that perspective. Far from it. Leviticus is actually working to undermine that perspective. We do not need to sacrifice to God. No one needed to sacrifice to God. According to Jesus, God is the one who sacrifices for us.

The second mistake people make when reading Leviticus concerns the various lists of moral prescriptions, especially the sexual prohibitions you’ll find in Leviticus 17-19. If you’re not familiar, take a minute and read those chapters and then ask yourself, “What must that world have been like if someone felt the need to put these specific sexual prohibitions in writing?”

It must have been a pretty wild place.

And that’s the point. Leviticus 19 makes it clear that the primary reason for these various prescriptions is to set the people of Israel apart from their neighbors. It was the neighboring nations who engaged in these practices but since God’s people were supposed to be distinct—set apart, holy—they should not.

The average Bible reader thinks that what is most important are the specific prohibitions rather than the purpose given for those specific prohibitions at that time.

The outcome is that you have well-meaning Christians today who are very careful not to engage any of the behaviors listed in Leviticus 17-19 (and condemn anyone who does) all the while doing all kinds of things that are common to their neighboring nations; perhaps things like consumption, distraction, promiscuity, and violence.

I think Jesus would call that straining out a gnat to swallow a camel.

When Jesus came along and told his followers that they must be holy because God the Father is holy—language he borrowed directly from Leviticus—he did not list a bunch of sexual prohibitions. He told his followers they must be merciful, echoing language from those same Levitical chapters that often (and conveniently) gets overlooked.

There is a reason wise Jewish teachers landed on Leviticus 19:18—love your neighbor as you love yourself—as the summation of the whole code. They could see clearly enough that it wasn’t about the specific list of dos and don’ts. It was about the principle to love and take care of people. Even most of the sexual prohibitions had to do with honoring other people.

And, therefore, the specific lists can change over time. The point is to honor God by the way you honor people. That was always the point. Christian faith is not about trusting some kind of ritual sacrifice as a way of avoiding having to honor God by the way you honor people. Christian faith is accepting that God is a God of sacrificial love and to follow this God is to become someone how is also characterized by sacrificial love.
   
   [1] Leviticus 10:1-2
   [2] John the Baptist referred to Jesus as the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world, perhaps referring to the scapegoat of Leviticus 16. Jesus chose instead to frame his death using Passover imagery, though that also deals with animal sacrifice.
   [3] See Samuel 15:22-23 for the first clear example of this 

While reading in the book of Exodus the other day I was struck by this particular law:

10 “If a man who has married a slave wife takes another wife for himself, he must not
neglect the rights of the first wife to food, clothing, and sexual intimacy. 11 If he fails in
any of these three obligations, she may leave as a free woman without making any
payment (Exodus 21:10-11 NLT).

I’m guessing you’ve never heard a sermon preached on this.

The reason this text caught my attention is that I think it perfectly captures the shallowness and inadequacy of two of the most common ways people approach the Bible.

Let’s call the first error the “conservative error.” In my book I say the conservative error is the assumption that you have to believe everything the Bible describes and obey everything it prescribes. The conservative error is to think that everything the Bible says is perfectly true and valid for all people at all times, as if you can just lift it off the page and “do what it says.”

But a text like this clearly invalidates that approach. For starters, we don’t condone men “taking” wives at all, certainly not more than one, and even more certainly not one from his group of slaves!

Now, the more thoughtful conservative reader will no doubt concede that things were different in their culture, so a text like this doesn’t apply today the way it did back then. I agree, and that’s exactly the point. That rule doesn’t stop being true just because you’re reading a different verse. Everything written in the Bible reflects assumptions, convictions, beliefs, and perspectives that were common to those people in that culture at that time. You don’t ever just lift a text off the page and “do what it says.”

Even with something as seemingly transferable as “Thouh shall not murder.” The people of Israel were instructed not to murder but apparently that only referred to their own people. They were routinely invited to murder other people groups! When reading the Bible, you always have to take into consideration (to the extent that it is knowable) the cultural context the passage reflects and then make translations into your own context that honor the “spirit” of what the original passage was trying to accomplish in the past even if the “letter” of your translation is different.

Which brings me to what I’ll call the “liberal error” when reading the Bible.

If the conservative error is to treat the Bible like the letter of its various descriptions and prescriptions should shape all human society everywhere for all time, the liberal error is to look at those same historically bound descriptions and prescriptions, name their incongruence with contemporary culture, and on that basis conclude the Bible is irrelevant, antiquated, or oppressive.

In this case, that the Bible permitted men to take multiple wives, including slaves, but only required men to provide those wives with minimums like food, clothing, and sexual intimacy could easily be viewed by the liberal reader as paternalistic, sexist, even misogynistic and the entire Bible could be invalidated on that basis.

To prove that everything the Bible says is authoritative, the conservative reader says, “The Bible says.” To prove that nothing the Bible says is authoritative, the liberal reader retorts, “Yeah, but the Bible also says.”

The liberal reader needs to do the same work as the conservative reader: consider how this text may have functioned in its original cultural context.

In classical rabbinic tradition, these principles were expanded to be applied to all Jewish women, slave or free. Food referred to all financial sustenance. Clothing included housing and even basic household items. And sexual intimacy included emotional closeness and a strict consent clause.

What on the surface may sound to the liberal reader like paternalism actually reflects a deep concern for the rights and dignity of women in marriage. In fact, if a woman believed her husband was failing in any/all of these areas, a rabbinical court existed to enforce the rules.

When you lift a text like this off the page and think you can just apply it in your own context you end up with the absurdity of conservatism or the shallowness of liberalism. But if you approach scripture the way Jesus did, with a knowledge of God’s loving character and the conviction that all biblical texts are to be used/applied in a way that helps us honor one another, even texts like this that can feel at best culturally foreign or at worst offensive have a depth and beauty that can lead people to authentically God-honoring ways of living together.

Sunday I preached a sermon on the dangers of productivity while also rolling out a new church management platform that will likely make us more…productive.

And while increased productivity was not the purpose for the new platform, the irony was not lost on me.

Nor was the fact that this was Labor Day weekend, a holiday typically devoted to resting from labor and productivity.

None of this was planned.

As I mentioned on Sunday, the primary purpose of our new church management platform, which is called Subsplash, is to improve our infrastructure so that our culture can more effectively grow and spread. We want to communicate more effectively, make it easier for people to take meaningful action, and keep better records so we can make more informed decisions.

And when I say “we” I am referring to our church leadership team. The entire church is a “we” of course, a body in which every person plays a unique and vital role. But some of those “parts” are set aside or “called” by the rest of the body for the purpose of serving the whole as leaders.

The primary role of a leader in the church is to serve the body by making decisions that direct it to Jesus and help it grow up into maturity in Christ, full of love.[1]

But doing that effectively in today’s culture is not just a matter of prayer and hope. Leaders need strategies and tools to help implement those strategies. That is what Subsplash is all about.

The platform will enable congregation members to connect with the church and faith throughout the week, whether by accessing media and blogs, registering for events, reading scripture, or communicating with serve teams, but it will also help church leaders collect and organize data so we can better shepherd people along their faith journey.

At Waterville Community Church, that is always the goal and the metric applied to every decision. Is this change going to positively impact our ability to help people grow up in their faith?

We believe the answer with Subsplash is yes.

I know that some people are cautious about adopting new technologies. I appreciate that. Please know that we did our homework. Subsplash is entirely secure and it does not collect or sell user data. If you’re feeling cautious, I understand. But part of what makes for healthy church cultures is a broad and diverse leadership team (which we have) that makes decisions thoughtfully and for the right reasons (which we believe we do) and a congregation that trusts the leaders it has entrusted to lead.

So, if you have not already, please take a few moments to; 1) Download our new App. Subsplash is an app-driven platform. Through the App you’ll be able to do everything from pre-check kids into Sunday morning kids’ church, manage your giving and see your giving history, watch or listen to media, register for events, and manage your volunteer schedule; 2) Create a user profile. You can use certain features in the App as a guest but to get the most out of the platform you need to setup a profile. Be sure to use a unique email when setting up your profile. Subsplash uses your email as your unique identifier in the system so no sharing emails with your spouse; and 3) If you are currently giving to the church online, your current recurring gift will process as usual in the month of September and will then automatically cancel at the end of the month when we officially phase out our current system. All you need to do is reestablish giving through Subsplash, which you can do through the App or on the church’s website.

As I mentioned on Sunday, the hope is to have everyone transitioned over and using the new system by Sunday, October 4th. Thank you again for your participation.
   
   
   [1] Ephesians 4:13-16

Back in 2022 I wrote a post reflecting on Malcolm Gladwell’s book Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know Abou the People We Don’t Know. You can read that post here.

Gladwell’s basic point is that we’re bad at talking to strangers. That is, encounters with people we don’t know have a tendency to go very badly. According to Gladwell’s analysis, that is because; 1) we default to truth, that is we assume other people are being honest with us. When they are, great. But when they’re not, not so great; 2) we buy into the illusion of transparency. We think a person’s body language is a clear indicator of intention or motive. When it is, we’re usually right. But when people are what Gladwell calls “mismatched,” even law enforcement professionals are terrible judges; and 3) we neglect context. We pay attention to the person but don’t account for time, place, or situation.

Surprisingly, a reason Gladwell does not cite in his book for why encounters with strangers can go terribly wrong is our existing, often unexamined prejudices.

We all assume certain things are likely to be true about certain other people based on various experiences and inputs. If every homeless person I see portrayed on television is a drunk or drug addict, I am likely to assume every homeless person I encounter in real life is as well. If I grow up hearing from authorities in my life that people of another race or religion are somehow “less than,” I will assume that to be true of all people in those categories.

We grow up believing certain things to be true of certain other people and more than that we assume we have good reason for our beliefs.

But just as we can be very wrong because we default to truth, assume we can read people based on their body language, or fail to consider context, we can be very wrong because of our preconceived assumptions about people who fall into certain categories or groups.

For example, there is a story in Genesis 20-21 involving Abraham, the patriarch of the nation of Israel, and a man named Abimelech. Abraham moved with his wife Sarah to the region of Gerar where Abimelech was king. Fearing that Abimelech would kill him to take possession of Sarah, Abraham introduced Sarah as his sister. Abimelech quickly took Sarah into his home to be his wife but before sleeping with her God appeared to him in a dream condemning him for what he did.

Abimelech was shocked. He had acted innocently. It was Abraham, the patriarch of God’s people, who had been deceptive.

When Abimelech confronted Abraham, Abraham’s excuse was, “I thought, ‘this is a godless place. They will want my wife and will kill me to get her.’”

“I thought, ‘this is a godless place.’”

Abraham just assumed that Abimelech and his people were godless and, as such, that they would take his wife by violence. But he was wrong. True, Abimelech did not know Yahweh, the God of Israel, but that did not mean Abimelech lacked a God-inspired conscience and a moral code. But that’s what Abraham assumed about him.

And because Abraham assumed Abimelech would treat him in an ungodly way, it was actually Abraham who treated Abimelech in an ungodly way. To protect himself against a presumed threat Abraham became the threat.

I understand anyone choosing to exercise caution around people they don’t know, especially when taking into account certain contexts. And there are good reasons for why our brains group people into categories. Those are shortcuts called heuristics that help us cut through the endless data input our brains receive each day so we can make decisions without melting down from exhaustion.

But those same heuristics can become biases or prejudices that contribute to us getting people wrong. And when we assume wrongly about another person, we tend to be the ones who act wrongly toward them. As I’ve said and written about many times, the beginning of love is to think the best of the other first. Let other people demonstrate to you who they are before you decide who they must be.

Christians are called to forgive. I call it “reactive grace.” It’s “reactive” in the sense that we offer grace in response or reaction to someone doing something to hurt or offend us.
But grace also has a “proactive” dimension, one we may not be as aware of or concerned about.

The proactive side to grace is less about forgiveness and more about how we choose to think about. All people. All the time.

This proactive dimension to grace is connected to and helps inform grace’s reactive dimensions.

When someone does something that results in us feeling hurt or offended, the emotions we feel are the products of our interpretive narratives. As meaning making creatures we have to assign meaning to every word and action. We often do this without even realizing we’re doing it, but we’re doing it.

And the stories we tell produce very different emotional outcomes. If I tell myself my spouse forgot to wish me a happy birthday because she doesn’t care about me, that narrative will likely produce anger, sadness, or resentment. If, on the other hand, I tell myself she didn’t wish me a happy birthday because she’s just struggling to keep her head above water right now with everything going on in life that my birthday simply didn’t make it on the “emergency” list, I might still be a little sad but that sadness might also be tempered with compassion and understanding.

Proactive grace is choosing to tell yourself the most benevolent story about another person as you can. In other words, proactive grace is the choice to give the other person the benefit of the doubt regarding their motives, intentions, etc. Choosing to see another person in the best possible light is the most basic act of love. It is where love begins.
Now, there is a shadow side proactive grace, just as there is a shadow side to reactive grace. Just as you can forgive another person’s bad behavior only to suffer that same bad behavior again and again, always giving another person the benefit of the doubt can materialize as excusing bad behavior which can lead to abusive situations.

You keep telling yourself the other person probably didn’t mean, they’re just having a bad day, if the circumstances were different they probably would not have said or done what they did. But the same behaviors keep happening and you keep suffering.

Neither type of grace—reactive or proactive—ought to result in the party extending the grace feeling like they’re being walked on or taken advantage of. If that is happening, it probably isn’t grace. It’s probably avoidance.

And in my experience, that’s usually what happens. One party does the work of proactive grace by telling themselves the best possible story regarding the other person, but they don’t then take the time to address the behavior and verify the story.

Giving someone the benefit of doubt does not mean you avoid discussing the issue. It just means you chose in the moment to give the other person the benefit of the doubt.

You still need to verify if the story you told yourself was correct. I told myself my wife forgot to wish me a happy birthday because she’s stressed and busy. Is that true? What if I found out the entire day of my birthday she was relaxing by the pool? Well, I need to amend my story.

You can appreciate the importance of this step more when you look at it from the negative. Imagine I choose not to give another person the benefit of doubt and consequently I am filled with emotions like anger and bitterness. What if I’m wrong? What if the motives or intentions I assigned to the other person’s actions are not accurate? Then what I’m feeling isn’t accurate either. It’s accurate based on the story I told but if the story I told is wrong, my feelings aren’t justifiable. I’m holding another person accountable for something they never meant to do with the malice I assumed. Love obligates me to verify the story I told myself.

That is no less true when you tell a benevolent story of another person. To prevent proactive grace from becoming a mechanism whereby one person just gets abused that person must address the behavior and seek to verify if their benevolent story is correct. If they were incorrect, if the person’s motives were malicious, and especially if that behavior continues, grace does not require a harmed person to remain in an unhealthy situation.

Grace is both reactive and proactive. We are called to forgive people when they wrong us, but we are also called to think the best of people before they wrong us and even when they do. But grace does not stop there. Grace involves the search for and commitment to truth.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what Patrick Deneen calls the “ideology of progress.”[1] Deneen is a political scientist and in his exert opinion, “progress” is the fundamental assumption or goal that drives liberalism as a political system.[2]

Progress is variously defined, of course, but it usually boils down to the promise of increased economic opportunity and/or greater charity with regard to social expression or what is sometimes called “identity.”

Our liberal pursuit of progress has no doubt done much good in the world. But it may also be making us sick.

Like the pharmaceutical ads that seem to dominate our marketing space. A new drug promises to clear up your psoriasis but may cause liver disease. Or a drug promises to lower your A1C but may cause swelling in the anus or genitals. I saw a news headline the other day that said while LED lights are saving us money, they may be depriving us of vital light wavelengths leaving us less healthy.

“Progress” comes with tradeoffs, some of which can be serious.

I was thinking about that this morning as I hopped back behind the driver seat of a bus and helped get kids off to their first day of school, some of those kids being my own. I thought about all the parents standing at bus stops and all of their hopes for the coming year. I thought about all the teachers, administrators, and coaches who are fresh off their (hopefully) reenergizing summer breaks.

What does an uncritical commitment to “progress” do to us in the learning arena? Does it distort the learning process? Does it impose goals, expectations, or assumptions that actually work against the healthiest modes of acquiring and accommodating new information and skills? If we are driven by the felt need for ever-increasing improvement (more league titles, higher test scores, more impressive college admission rates, more newsworthy achievements, better state report card, etc.), how does that impact both educators and students?

I don’t have answers for those questions, but I do observe that both teachers and students seem to start the school year with what appear to be “full tanks” but operate as if those tanks just slowly deplete over the course of the year until by the last day of school everyone is “empty.”

Is it good that it “works” this way? Does it work this way because secretly we’re all being driven by this hidden, unspoken pursuit of progress? The felt need for more?

It’s like we’re running with a pacer who just keeps getting faster. We’re just expected to keep up. The system is never expected to slow down. In a world built on progress, slowing down would be experienced as failure.

Don’t get me wrong, I want to see kids “achieve” and “succeed” and all that. I just wonder if we’re measuring the right outcomes.

If the two were mutually exclusive, would we rather have a child who gets straight A’s and scores a 34 on the ACT but is so busy and isolated she doesn’t have time for meaningful friendships or a student who gets decent grades and scores pretty well on tests but has enough spare time to feel deeply connected to people?

If the two were mutually exclusive, would we rather have teachers who focus on pushing students academically and athletically, or who focus on helping young people become the healthiest versions of themselves?

I know these things are not mutually exclusive, but I am trying to draw out the fact that if Deneen is correct and our political order is uncritically committed to the endless pursuit of progress, the next generation always having more and achieving more than the previous one, our educational systems are caught up in that. And while that leads to some good in the world, it may also contribute to why so many of us feel existentially unwell.

In his book Unconditional Love, the Jesuit John Powell makes this claim: “The crisis facing contemporary society is, ‘Is love really the pathway to personal satisfaction and happiness?’”[3] He wrote that in 1978!

How much more relevant is the question today? I know it’s not the business of public schools to measure this and I’m not suggesting they do. This post isn’t really about education at all. Kids going back to school just got me thinking about all of this. Why are we not as committed to the progress of love? If society is driven by the felt need for ever-increasing improvement, why do we not seem to care to see ourselves and others constantly growing in love, at least as much as we seem to care to see advancement in other areas of life?

Love is the one area where the pursuit of “improvement” doesn’t seem to come with a shadow side, some way in which it makes us sicker.
   
   [1] From his most recent book Regime Change: Toward a Postliberal Future (New York, NY: Sentinel Press, 2023).
   [2] When you hear the word “Liberalism,” don’t think “liberals,” as opposed to “conservatives.” Liberalism refers to the general political structure of American society, as opposed to say Marxism. Both “liberals” and “conservatives” are liberals in the sense that they all subscribe to this form of political order. Deneen argues that the fundamental assumption behind the liberal political order is the pursuit of progress, variously defined, but usually with reference to economic opportunity and social expression or what is sometimes called “identity.”
   [3] Powell, Unconditional Love (RCL Bentziger Publishing, 1978).

When it comes to feedback, I mostly hear positive things. That’s not because there isn’t negative feedback out there. I’m sure there is. It’s just that most people don’t share their feedback when it’s negative. I have never once had someone come up to me after a Sunday sermon and say, “Well, they can’t all be home runs,” not because every Sermon I give is noteworthy, but because most Christian people are nice.

To a fault.

In fact, my experience has been that if I say something that offends someone, they are more likely to just leave the church and pretend like we never knew each other than they are to tell me that what I said offended them and talk it out.

So, when I do get “negative” feedback, I consider it a real honor. It means that the person values me, or our relationship, or what we’re trying to do at the church enough to take up the issue. I’m grateful for that.

It also provides opportunity for clarification and extension, which is at least an implicit act of grace.

I bring this up because I received a little pushback from my last blog post “A call for fewer Jesus shirts,” that I’d like to address. If you didn’t read the post you can check it our here, but the basic argument is that our lives, not our tshirts, are our witness to the world and when we identify as Christians with our clothing but fail to live up to the standard of Christ with our lives (as we all do at least sometimes) we run the risk of maligning the church in the eyes of the world. Since we are all likely to do something in public that doesn’t represent the church well, perhaps better to just not wear clothing that makes the association obvious.

Some of the feedback I heard (again, very gracious but still what I would consider “pushback”) was that perhaps people don’t wear their religious swag for the purpose of bearing witness but simply as an expression of their gratitude for God’s mercy. They are not trying to project that they have it all together but that they have been rescued by a gracious God.

That’s a perfectly good reason to wear a Jesus tshirt. I hope we’re all finding ways to express our gratitude for what God has done for us. What I hope we can appreciate as Christians is that the message that we are “sinners saved by grace” communicates differently to those outside the church. To those inside the church it is a powerful, galvanizing identifier. We know that we are imperfect which is why we’re so grateful to have a merciful God. We’ll never get it totally right. Thank God we’re simply loved.

But to those outside the church, that same anthem can sound like an excuse, at times even a justification for bad behavior. They see us act badly and wonder how we can call ourselves Christians but still live like jerks. Because following Jesus is supposed to change how we live. We might fairly rebut, “If you think I’m a jerk now, you should have seen me ten years ago,” or “If this is what I’m like with Jesus, imagine what I’d be like without him,” but that’s the thing, we don’t get to make those arguments to the world. The world simply sees our bad behavior, associates us with Jesus and the church, and takes another step back.

If you’re looking for grace and understanding, you’ll find it in Jesus and, hopefully, the church. Where you won’t find it is in the world. That truth ought to influence how we publicly carry ourselves.

Which brings me to another important piece of feedback I received: that my critique came off a little “judgy.”

Anytime one person critiques the behavior of another person, as I did in my post with a woman I witnessed at Cedar Point, especially when they don’t or can’t have all of the information and they don’t very carefully qualify their statements, it comes across as casting judgment which is like a cardinal sin in our “you-do-you-and-let-me-do-me” culture.

First, there is a difference between judgment and condemnation. Judgment is simply assessing the behavior of another person; calling a right thing right or a wrong thing wrong. We do this sort of assessing all the time. We have to. I simply observed a woman hogging the shade as other people “suffered” in the sun and I called it selfish.

Because from where I was standing, it was. And I’m guessing I’m not the only person who made that observation.

To say that this woman did a selfish thing in that moment is not to say that she IS a selfish person or that she has no value as a person or no future with God. I’m sure she’s a wonderful person who acts in selfless ways all the time. In fact, I’m sure she’s far more selfless than she is selfish. I bet she loves God and I know God loves her.

It is simply to call a spade a spade and say that in this moment she chose to do something selfish.

That’s judgment, yes, but not condemnation.

And judgment is something that we are supposed to lovingly offer one another in the church, and precisely for the concern I raised in my post. As the Apostle Paul instructed the Corinthians, Christians are not to judge those outside the church. But we are to judge one another inside the church.[1]

That does not mean we can’t look at those outside the church and call a wrong thing wrong. We can. It simply means it is not our place to be the world’s moral police. But we are supposed to provide that function for one another and precisely because if we do not, we may behave badly in the world and negatively impact the church’s witness. Loving judgment is how we help one another become more Christlike.

Again, if you’re looking for grace and understanding, you’re not going to find it in the world. Yes, we are sinners saved by grace and we’re not trying to pretend we have it all together, but the fact is that we are supposed to be very intentional about how we live in the context of outsiders recognizing that they are passing a different kind of judgment on us all the time.[2] So, we offer loving judgment to one another that can help us more intentionally align our behaviors with our professed beliefs so that when the world sees us, “they have nothing bad to say about us.”[3]

I recognize that by writing about the woman I observed at Cedar Point rather than talking with her, I may have unintentionally vilified her in your minds without actually helping her live more honorably, which I just said is the purpose of insider judgment. But I felt pastorally it would be instructive and I thought it safe given that her identity is unknown.

I do not condemn her, just as I do not condemn anyone. But because she chose to wear a Jesus shirt I did assume she is a professing follower of Jesus. And that puts her behavior in a different light. Had she not been wearing that shirt I probably wouldn’t have thought much about it. I wouldn’t have just assumed she was a Christian and because I expect people outside the church to do selfish things, I may not have even registered it.

That’s the point. None of us have it all together. We are all sinners saved by grace. But as Christians we all bear the responsibility of public witness. When you leave your home and go out into the world, every word you speak and every action you take in front of non-believers communicates something to them about what following Jesus looks like. The consistent pastoral advice in the New Testament is not, “It’s ok to act badly in public because at the end of the day we’re all sinners saved by grace,” but something more like, “Think very carefully about what you do and don’t do. Be very intentional about what you do and don’t say, because how you carry yourself in public bears witness to Jesus.”

Let us continue to lovingly judge one another, encouraging each other to holiness both privately and publicly.
 
   [1] 1 Corinthians 5:12
   [2] Colossians 4:5
   [3] Titus 2:8

I went to Cedar Point last week. Growing up in Northwest, Ohio, I’ve been to Cedar Point hundreds of times. I love the place. I love almost everything about it. I could ride roller coasters all day.

But as much as I love the rides, I think the thing I love most about Cedar Point is the people watching.

I love humanity. I love all kinds of people, and with thousands of people to watch, Cedar Point is endless people watching enjoyment; tall people; short people; people who wear too much clothing; people who wear too little clothing; athletes; truckers; Bohemians; the Amish.

I love them all.

Well, almost.

There is one group of people I must admit I don’t love watching: Christian people repping their Jesus fit. And that crowd seemed abnormally large this time around.

There were the classics, of course; tshirts with Bible verses like John 3:16 ("For this is how God loved the world: He gave his one and only Son, so that everyone who believes in him will not perish but have eternal life”) and John 14:6 ("Jesus told him, ‘I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one can come to the Father except through me’”). John is a favorite among Bible tshirt wearers. I even saw one person with a shirt referencing the “mark of the beast” from Revelation.

A different John, but still.

Then there were the slogan shirts; tshirts that simply read, “Jesus is king,” or “Jesus is Lord,” or “I serve Jesus.” One woman had a tshirt on that just said, “Jesus” in large, all-capital letters right across her chest. Maybe there was no other place to put it. Or maybe she thought if someone was going to look at her chest she might as well get em thinking about Jesus.

And I suspect that is why most people at places like Cedar Point choose to wear Jesus attire. I suppose there could be a few who wear it for the same reason other people wear brands like Nike or under Armor or Lululemon; because they like the way it looks, they like the “fit.” But I suspect for most it’s a form of witness. They figure as long as they’re walking around Cedar point all day they might as well be a walking billboard for Jesus.

I don’t mean to be judgmental. I’m not knocking Jesus-wear as far as it goes. I will admit, I’ve never worn a Jesus tshirt myself. I’ve just never really been into Christian pop subculture; Christian music; Christian movies; Christian clothing. Pretty much anything where “Christian” is being employed as an adjective. But if that’s your thing, cool. You do you.

What bothers me when I see hundreds of Christians walking around wearing Jesus shirts is more of a concern that they think the shirts are the important “walking billboard” for Jesus instead of their lives. They want to be a faithful witness for Jesus, so they wear a shirt instead of living a certain way.

Not that the two are mutually exclusive. But I fear they often are.

For instance, the woman I mentioned a moment ago who was wearing the tshirt with “Jesus” in big, capital letters across her chest. We were near one another in line for a roller coaster. The wait was about 60 minutes. Not awful for Cedar Point standards, but still non-preferred. This was at a time of the day when the sun was highest in the sky. It was about 80 degrees but with no airflow it felt more like 90. People were visibly uncomfortable. Fortunately, half of the wait was under a shade canopy.

You could tell as far as everyone was concerned the line couldn’t move fast enough, not to get them to the ride but just to get them into the shade.

When the time came for the lady with the Jesus shirt to leave the shaded area and return to the sun, she chose instead to let the line move on ahead of her while she stayed put. I’m guessing a 50-75 foot gap opened up between her and the people in front of her. She waited for at least five minutes, if not longer.

I should point out that this lady had no visible signs of any health condition that would have made standing in the sun any more dangerous or uncomfortable for her than anyone else. Neither was she accompanied by young children or an elderly person. By all external appearances, she was a normal, healthy, adult woman who was simply choosing to remain in the shade as long as she could.

What she either didn’t realize or didn’t care about (neither is ok for a Christian) was that by remaining in the shade she was preventing people behind her from entering it. While she was enjoying a little more shade time, other people were being forced to suffer more of the sun.

It was selfish, and with her big, bold Jesus tshirt, also a beautiful contradiction in terms.

If you want to rep your Jesus shirt, be my guest. But as I’ve said many times, “Christian” is not an adjective. At worst it’s a noun. At best it’s a verb; a way of life or a way of being toward others. If your character is not formed enough where you can consistently live out the other-centered ethic that is supposed to be the trademark of Christianity, you may consider leaving your Jesus tshirt at home. If you’re gonna wear a Jesus shirt, you better be on your game.

That may be one of the reasons I don’t wear Jesus clothing. God forbid while out in public I should do something that doesn’t represent Jesus very well, my tshirt would give me away. That’s a bad look for the church. The woman in my story was selfish but had she not been wearing a shirt with the name of Jesus on it no one would have been able to associate her selfishness with Jesus, Christianity, or the church. Maybe no one did, but we’ll never know and that’s the point.

She chose to let a tshirt be her witness instead of her life. Who knows if that did any damage. Hopefully not. But a life well-lived never does.

I get the impulse many Christians have to want to influence those around them for Jesus. And maybe a Jesus tshirt starts a conversation with someone. I just hate to think there are Christians out there who think witnessing for Christ is something we do by what we wear instead of by how we live.

So, this is a general call for fewer Jesus shirts and more transformed lives.

What troubles me most about Bible readers is when they don’t question content they clearly should. People raised in certain types of Christian subcultures often express feeling badly when they question content in the Bible. But I tell them, “Actually, the fact that this content troubles you is a good sign. It means you have a healthy conscience. If you didn’t question it, that would be troubling.”

It is troubling when well-meaning Christians overlook places in the Bible where God is accused of murdering children, for instance, or when slaves are told to endure harsh treatment with a “well-I-guess-God-had-his-reasons-and-who-am-I-to-question-God” piety. For anyone whose image of God has been shaped by the revelation of Jesus Christ, these scenes should be at least somewhat unsettling. Instead of thumbing through them with ease, we should stop and begin asking critical questions. Why is this here? What does this mean? How is this profitable to my Christian faith?[1]

What the Apostle Peter says about slaves and wives is a good example. In 1 Peter 2:18-25 Peter commands slaves to “accept the authority of your masters…even if they are cruel.” He writes, “God is pleased with you when you do what you know is right and patiently endure false treatment.” And to be clear, by “false treatment” he appears to mean being beaten.

“God called you to do good,” he says, “even if it means suffering.”

Even this ought to be difficult for the average Bible reader but then Peter connects the logic to women in marriage. The very next section begins with the words, “In the same way, you wives must accept the authority of your husbands.” The implication, of course, is “even if they are cruel.” God is pleased with you when you do what you know is right and patiently endure false treatment, including being beaten.

If the command for slaves to patiently endure beatings at the hands of their masters isn’t unsettling, I would certainly hope the implication that wives should do the same is. That can’t really be what Peter is saying, right?

I don’t think it is. Or at least I don’t think that’s how modern Christians should use it.

First, Peter also commands husbands to “give honor” to their wives. Assuming men follow that command, no woman should ever endure “false treatment” including of course being beaten.

But then again, what are the odds that all men will follow Peter’s command at all times?

Slim.

So, what should women do when men fail?

And should we restrict “false treatment” to physical abuse? What if a woman endures chronic emotional, verbal, or psychological abuse? What if a husband is loving and kind on the surface but turns out to be living a double life? What then?

Should we take Peter’s words to mean that to be “faithful” a woman should “patiently endure” these things, no matter what?

Second, there is the issue of liberty. Slaves in the first century did not have the liberty to break free from their arrangements. They were slaves for a reason, typically to pay off a debt, and to leave was to essentially break the law. Women in contemporary western culture, on the other hand, are free to enter or leave a marriage at will.

In that context, Peter’s advice becomes more understandable. He compares the plight of the mistreated slave to that of Christ. Just as Jesus endured mistreatment without retaliating with violence, so you must. You can’t control your situation, you can’t leave, but you must not respond with violence.

That’s what he means when says to slaves they must, “patiently endure.” He means something like, “I’m so sorry this is happening to you. It isn’t right. I wish you could just leave. But since you can’t, do what Jesus did and patiently suffer the wrong. God will take care of you.” Peter is concerned with slaves who call themselves Christians engaging in acts of violence against their masters, which is precisely the opposite of how Jesus responded to mistreatment.

In that regard, his logic should hold for women in marriage. If you’re being mistreated do not respond in kind. Do not respond to violence with violence.

But that does not mean a woman should necessarily stay. She may choose to stay, but it would be wrong to compel her to stay using Peter’s words as justification, to paint staying and “patiently enduring” whatever mistreatment she is suffering as the only faithful or Christlike response.

She can also non-violently walk away because in our context she has the liberty to do so. If slaves had the freedom to walk away, I suspect Peter would have said, “If your master mistreats you, just leave.” In fact, the Apostle Paul gave that exact advice to slaves in the city of Corinth.[2]

This isn’t peripheral or tangential stuff. Christians all over the world struggle with moral decisions because of how they’ve been taught to handle the Bible. I know women who have endured considerable mistreatment at the hands of their husbands but who “patiently endured” it believing that was the most faithful response.

You may choose to patiently endure mistreatment by another person in the hopes that person will change or in the hopes that doing so will give you an opportunity to show them or share with them the love of Christ. That is your choice and if you have the strength to make it for a time, God’s blessing on your efforts. But to the degree that you are not obligated to do so, doing so may not be the best decision, for you or the other person.
   
   [1] 2 Timothy 3:16 says that ALL scripture is inspired by God and “useful.” One of the most important questions to ask when reading the Bible is, “How can I use this passage of scripture to motivate greater faithfulness to Jesus.” The Bible is not a master to follow but a tool to be used by God’s people to shape our commitment to Christ.
   [2] 1 Corinthians 7:21

I acknowledge that my speaking often has a polemical edge to it. So does my writing. In fact, I chose to publish my first book directly through Amazon because while several conventional publishers expressed interest in it, they wanted me to soften my critique of evangelicalism (I’m guessing not to alienate their customer base) and I wasn’t prepared to do that.

But I admit their suggestion did make me question my tone. Was I being too harsh? Could I be more charitable? Am I being unnecessarily divisive? Is this good for the church?
I often wonder these things. I don’t want to add to division in the church. I hate the thought that someone out there refuses to join a church because he or she perceives the church can’t love its own people.

That being said, I like to think my critiques are prophetic in the sense that I offer them as an insider (I critique evangelicalism as someone who grew up inside of it) and for the purpose of reforming whatever it is I’m critiquing. I don’t want to see evangelicalism crumble. If you’ve read my book, you know I think it will accomplish that all on its own. I want to see it reformed. I want to see the beautiful spirit of evangelicalism directed by a more informed approach to scripture and tradition.

In addition, I don’t see how the church moves forward in healthy, God-honoring ways without its members critiquing one another. The truth is that people within the church often have ideas or develop beliefs that are not in keeping with traditional Christian faith and are damaging to its healthy development. When that happens, for the sake of the church it is necessary for other Christians to call it out.

This has always been the case. I’ve been reading through Paul’s letters the last month or so and what has stood out to me more clearly than any other time I’ve read through Paul is how consistently and directly he calls out people he perceives to be damaging the church by their false teaching. Here’s a sample.


If you’re keeping score, that’s every one of Paul’s letters minus Philemon. And I’ve only included one verse from each letter. He rarely limits his critiques to one sentence. One of the biggest issues in the early church was distinguishing between what was true and right and good for people’s faith development from what was false and damaging. There were a lot of different people traveling around teaching all kinds of different things. Paul had no choice but to publicly challenge what he believed to be false and harmful. He did it for the sake of the church and its future. He wasn’t trying to be divisive. If anything, he was railing against those who were.

And he would go so far as to say in his letter to the Corinthians that this kind of infighting is necessary to ultimately prove who’s right.[1] The Corinthian church was beleaguered by quarrelling and division. Its members were siloing off based on their preference for certain speakers. “I follow Peter.” “I follow Paul.” “I follow Apollos.”

One of the main reasons Paul wrote to the church was to settle their disputes so there would be no division in the church but to do that he had to critique their position. He had to argue against them to get them to stop arguing with each other. There was just no other way to do it.

This process did not abate in the centuries that followed. The first 400-500 years of the church are marked by massive internal fights over moral and doctrinal issues. On the surface that looks “unloving,” but on a deeper level these conflicts were necessary for the love of the church and for the love of the world whom the church serves.

I love the church. I also love the world. When I critique camps within the church it is for love of both. There are so many beliefs that pass as orthodox in pop-Christian circles that are anything but. They actually distort the truth, producing a faith that is a shadow of its true self. When and where I perceive that, to the extent that I think it is profitable for the people whom God has entrusted to my care, I will continue to critique it. And I welcome the same from others. If you really love the church and the world you should be willing to always question and challenge your own ideas.

I recognize my challenge of others sometimes has a tone that some think could be softened, but when I compare it to some of the things Paul said, I’m being gracious.
     
   [1] 1 Corinthians 11:19

I returned to the office today after a two-week vacation. Beyond just getting to spend quality time with friends and family and some healthy rest from work, this time of year, and specifically the chance to get away, is also the time God usually reminds me what life and ministry are all about, as if to encourage me for another year.

Ministry is probably similar to other career fields (I don’t know for sure because this is the only career field I’ve ever known) in that people can inappropriately attach their sense of identity to it.

I AM a pastor.

Once you do that, your sense of worth comes from whatever metrics are most commonly used to evaluate that role. If you ARE a banker, your worth comes from closing more accounts or growing the bottom line. If you ARE a surgeon, your worth comes from how many patients you successfully save.

The metrics most commonly used to measure pastoral success are the number of people attending the church (this is usually the first question I get asked about our church by someone unfamiliar with us), the amount of money raised, the size of the facility, the number of people getting baptized or regularly attending small groups, or the number of new churches your church has planted.

But God spoke to me when my ministry career was still very young to get me thinking differently. When I first started working in vocational ministry I was obsessed with the metrics. How many students were coming to our program. How many were registered to attend camp. How many were accepting Jesus, and so forth. But if I’m being honest, I didn’t care about the metrics because these students’ lives were being changed. I cared about the metrics because they meant I was doing a good job. A numerically growing ministry made me look good, which made me feel good.

It was vanity.

But then I had a very painful experience when trying to build a relationship with a particular high school student and I heard God say to me, “Mike, you can’t reach everyone and you can’t save anyone.”

In other words, “Mike, this isn’t about you,” or at least it’s not about how “successful” you are at the work.

What it IS about is who I am becoming in him. It’s not about the work I do for God. It’s about the work God does in me along the way.

God graciously reminded me of that again this year. During my regular morning reading times over the last few weeks I read both of the following verses from the Apostle Paul.

Paul had a unique calling. Jesus chose him to carry the message of “the Good News about the wonderful grace of God” to those outside the Jewish faith. Pretty much all of Paul’s theology and writing captured in the New Testament is declaring, explaining, or justifying the belief that in Christ God was bringing Jew and Gentile together, finally fulfilling his ancient promise to Abraham that through his seed (Jesus) he would bless the whole world. It was an important work, one Paul selflessly gave his whole life to, including enduring much suffering.

In one sense, Paul was driven by the need to do what Jesus had called him to do. Nothing wrong with that.

But Paul was also driven by the need to become who Jesus had called him to become. His life may have been worth nothing to him unless he finished the work given to him, but the work in the work, or the work behind the work, the work that fueled the work, was the work Jesus was doing in him in the process.

Paul wasn’t just sharing words with people. He was sharing a way of life, a way of life evident in his own life. He was inviting people into a way of being that he was modeling. What people heard in his words they saw in his life. Had that not been the case, not only do I suspect he would not have been nearly as “successful” numerically, but it wouldn’t have mattered even if he had been.

As Jesus once said, “What does it profit a man if he gains the whole world but forfeits his very self.”

Paul knew that. He knew that the only real work Jesus required of him was to believe in him, to trust him, to yield to him in life. And he did. Over and over again, whether his ministry was “going well” by external appearances or not.

For the last twenty-five years God has graciously reminded me every year of the same truth. None of this is about success, vanity metrics. It is about who I am becoming in Christ, always. You can really only minister to other people out of who you have become in your own life. You can only give people what you yourself have. The only work Jesus requires of any of us is to trust him and become more of ourselves in him.

Like Paul, I will continue to do the work of proclaiming Jesus because that is what I believe God has called me to do. I honestly can’t imagine doing anything else. But if I’m going to get “credit” for anything, I want it to be for what people can see in my life. Not what I’m able to say, but how I live.

That is the work. It is the only real work worth doing. Here’s to another year.

Following his resurrection, Jesus asked a couple of his disciples, “Wasn’t it clearly predicted that the Messiah would have to suffer all these things before entering his glory?”[1] The question sounds rhetorical on the page, but it obviously wasn’t. The text then says Jesus, “took them through the writings of Moses and all the prophets, explaining from all the scriptures the things concerning himself.”[2]

If the scriptures clearly predicted what happened to him, Jesus would not have had to explain them. That he did have to explain them (and his followers would go on to do the same) suggests that while the scriptures are predictive, they are not predictive in the way we popularly understand the concept.

David wasn’t consciously predicting the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. Isaiah wasn’t consciously predicting the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. They spoke and wrote about events in their own context, but their words took on a deeper level of meaning and significance—to use Jesus’ words, a “fulfillment”—when read through the lens of his life, death, and resurrection. David’s poetic utterance about God not allowing him to rot in the grave found its fulfillment in God raising Jesus from the dead. Isaiah’s reference to a woman giving birth found it’s fulfillment in the virgin birth of Jesus. Isaiah’s suffering servant found its fulfillment in Jesus’ suffering and death.

That’s one way to understand how prophecy “works.” Like Caiaphas prophesying that Jesus would die for the nation, prophets consciously understand their words to mean one thing, but they take on a fullness or completeness in Christ, a fullness or completeness the prophets themselves could not have imagined.

In this final post of my prophecy mini-series, I want to talk about one more way to understand how the writings of Moses and all the prophets “clearly” predict the Messiah would suffer and die before entering his glory: the motif of the rejected prophet.

The scriptures “predict” Jesus’ suffering and death by narrating a recurring pattern that Jesus “fulfills.” The pattern is the rejected prophet. God’s people rejected every prophetic messenger God sent to them. In the same spirit, they would eventually reject his son.

This appears to be how Jesus understood the predictive quality of his scriptures. In other words, when he said the scriptures clearly predicted what would happen to him, the motif of the rejected prophet is likely what he had mind. When Luke’s gospel says that he “took them through the writings of Moses and all the prophets, explaining from all the scriptures the things concerning himself,” I imagine him citing prophet after prophet whom their ancestors rejected and killed and then saying to his disciples, “in the same way they killed the Son of Man.”

And he tried telling his disciples this before he died. He told a parable about a landowner who left his estate in the hands of tenant farmers. At the time of the harvest, the landowner sent a representative (think: prophet) to collect his share of the crop, only the tenant farmers refused to honor the agreement. They beat the messenger and sent him away. The landowner sent several more representatives (prophets) and the tenant farmers did the same thing. Finally, the landowner thought to send his son. “Surely they will respect my son,” he thought. But they did not. They saw killing the son as their opportunity to permanently seize control of the land. So, they killed the son just as they had killed the previous messengers.

The scriptures clearly predicted that God’s incarnate son would suffer and die at the hands of the elders, chief priests, and teachers of religious law because that’s what happened to all of God’s previous representatives. What they did to God’s messengers they were doing to God. So, what would they do if God himself came to be with them?

Jesus was even more explicit about this theme in an exchange recorded in Luke 11. 
Their ancestors killed the prophets, and they were now threatening to kill God’s one and only Son. Right on script. And consequently, Jesus says, they will be held responsible for the murder of all God’s prophets because their murder of God’s Son is the fulfillment of that motif, the fullest or completest example of their rejection of God.

I think the motif of the rejected prophet is also how Jesus’ disciples went on to “reason from the scriptures” that he was the Messiah. I’ve already mentioned this was their primary strategy, at least when trying to share the good news with Jews. In most cases the reader is simply told this is what they did but not given the actual content of the reasoning. For example, Acts 17:3 says the Apostle Paul “explained the prophecies and proved that the Messiah must suffer and rise from the dead,” but it doesn’t tell you what Paul actually said. What was his explanation? How did he prove that Jesus had to suffer and rise from the dead?

I think the answer is the motif of the rejected prophet, and one of the reasons I believe that is because of Stephen’s speech in Acts 7. Stephen is considered the first Christian martyr, but before he was stoned to death he gave a speech to his accusers. In that speech he recounts a good bit of their history as God’s people. He cites God’s covenant with Abraham, the betrayal of Joseph’s brothers, and Abraham’s descendants becoming slaves in Egypt. But his rhetorical point seems to be to get to the figure of Moses who rescued them from Egypt but whom they continually rejected. The hinge or turning point of Stephen’s speech is Moses’ prediction, “God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among your own people.”[3]

God will raise up a prophet like Moses, someone who will save you but whom you will reject.

I think Stephen’s approach in Acts 7 is representative of how Jesus’ earliest followers “reasoned from the scriptures” that Jesus was the Messiah and that it was predicted he would suffer and die before entering his glory. And I think they learned that approach from Jesus himself.

This explains to me how it is fair to say the scriptures “clearly” predicted what would happen to Jesus. But it also explains to me why some people were persuaded but others were not. If the scriptures clearly predicted what would happen to Jesus in the way we conventionally think of that term, everyone should have believed. But if they predicted what would happen to Jesus in more of a “pattern-fulfillment” sort of way, sharing it would feel more like you were trying to prove something to someone, which is how the New Testament documents describe what they were doing.

In my pastoral experience, people struggle with prophecy. Either they struggle to accept the claim that the scriptures predicted the Jesus event with crystal ball accuracy (which I believe they are right to struggle with) or they uncritically accept that the scriptures did predict the Jesus event with crystal ball accuracy but swallow a number of interpretive problems along with it.

As for me, understanding the predictive quality of “Moses and the prophets” in terms of fulfillment, either their words taking on fuller, more complete meaning in light of Jesus or as fulfilling a specific pattern—the pattern of the rejected prophet—makes far more sense.
   
   [1] Luke 24:26
   [2] Luke 24:27
   [3] Acts 7:37

In my pastoral experience, people struggle with the topic of prophecy. Either they struggle to accept that earlier biblical writers were precisely predicting future events (which I think they are right to struggle with) but then not knowing how to think about prophecy, or they uncritically accept that earlier biblical writers were precisely predicting future events not realizing the interpretive problems that causes.

To be clear, I do believe Old Testament scriptures are predictive. Jesus said they were. I just don’t believe they are “clearly” predictive as Jesus said they were, at least not in the way we tend to think of predictive. I’m not saying Jesus was wrong. I’m saying our understanding and expectation of “predictive” is wrong.

When we think about someone predicting the future we imagine that person seeing future events in precise detail, being able to tell us dates, times, locations, and specifics. We then apply that definition to Old Testament passages and conclude, “See, Isaiah was talking about Jesus when he wrote about a virgin giving birth,” or “See, Isaiah was writing about Jesus when he described the suffering servant,” or “See, David was writing about Jesus when he talked about God not letting him rot in the grave.”

I’m not saying that way of looking at certain Old Testament passages is wrong. As you’ll see by the time this mini post series is over, I believe all scripture points to Jesus even if the biblical authors themselves didn’t consciously see their writing as having that function when they wrote. Consequently, it’s a perfectly valid interpretive move to say that David was writing about Jesus, as we saw in the last post Peter did. In a sense, David was writing about Jesus even if he didn’t think of it that way.

I also think this way of interpreting certain Old Testament passages can have rhetorical, evangelistic power (if done thoughtfully). The reason the Apostles used this strategy was because, at least at first, evangelism mostly involved reasoning with other Jews, which meant reasoning “from the scriptures” they shared. It made sense for Peter to say to his fellow Jews, “Hey, consider what David wrote in the Psalms. Doesn’t it make sense that he was writing about someone else? David did die after all and remained in the grave. But Jesus didn’t.” He was essentially inviting his Jewish listeners to consider that their sacred texts had a different or deeper meaning than they previously believed.

Another great example of this is the Apostle Paul in Acts 17. In Thessalonica Paul “explained the prophecies and proved that the Messiah must suffer and rise from the dead.” The story says some of the Jews who were listening were persuaded.[1] Some.

So much for “proving.”

But Paul was inviting the Jews in Thessalonica to do the same thing Peter was inviting Jews in Jerusalem to do; consider the possibility that these prophetic texts have a different or deeper meaning than you previously believed. Could they be pointing ahead to this man named Jesus? When Paul tried the same strategy in Berea the story says the Bereans “searched the scriptures day after day” to see if he was “teaching the truth.”[2]

What did that look like? It’s not like they had a decoder ring and what they were doing was assessing if Paul’s words matched their fool-proof decoder ring sequence. They were painstakingly reviewing texts they thought they understood in light of Paul’s testimony and asking themselves if they could indeed mean what Paul was suggesting they meant.

All of this reinforces the idea that while Old Testament passages are predictive, they are not clearly predictive, at least not in the way we typically think of predictive. We need to change the way we think of predictive.

Let me offer one option before closing this post, which I’ve already kind of alluded to. Certain Old Testament passages are predictive of Jesus in the sense that they can be read with a different or deeper meaning in light of his life, death, and resurrection. In other words, the biblical authors were not consciously referring to Jesus when they wrote but their words take on a different level of meaning, a greater fullness when applied to Jesus.

Jesus himself said that he came not to abolish the law and the prophets but to fulfill them, a word that means something like “to make complete.”[3] Jesus’ life gives all of the words in the Hebrews scriptures their fullest or completest meaning.

I think this is what Jesus means when he says in John 5 that the scriptures “point to him.”[4] They don’t point to him with a one-to-one correspondence. We’ve already said they are predictive but not clearly predictive in this way. But looking back, because his life gives them their fullest or completest meaning, it is fair to say that they point to him, that they were pointing to him all along without anyone knowing it.

At least that is how prophetic speech plays out in the New Testament. For example, consider the prophecy of Caiaphas. Caiaphas was the Jewish High Priest involved in Jesus’ execution. John 11 says that he was led to prophesy that Jesus would die not only for the entire nation but to bring together all the children of God scattered around the world.[5] That makes it sound like Caiaphas understood the purpose of Jesus’ death and his participation in it was a good thing. I don’t think that’s what’s going on here. I think Caiaphas believed Jesus needed to die, that his death would save the nation from suffering a Roman crack down, but that it had nothing to do with forgiveness, atoning for sin, or reconciling the world to God.

But after Jesus’ death and resurrection, his words came to be understood in that fullness or completeness.

John 12:16 says, “His disciples didn’t understand at the time that this was a fulfillment of prophecy. But after Jesus entered into his glory, they remembered what had happened and realized that these things had been written about him.” John wrote these words in reference to a specific prophecy, but I believe they can be applied to all prophetic speech as a way of understanding how prophecy “works.”

The people speaking and writing as prophets did not consciously believe they were speaking or writing about future events or persons. They very much believed they were speaking and writing about present events and persons, which is what gave their words meaning and significance for the audiences that received them. But following Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection his followers reread these texts and began to interpret them as having larger, fuller, more complete meaning with reference to Jesus.

In that sense, they were “about” Jesus and had always been “about” Jesus even if the authors themselves did not know that. The scriptures “clearly” predict Jesus in the sense that when read in the light of his life, death, and resurrection they point to him. In this way, Jesus is the fulfillment of all prophecy.
   
   [1] Acts 17:3-4
   [2] Acts 17
   [3] Matthew 5:17
   [4] John 5:39-40
   [5] John 11:49-50

Today is the first post in a little three-part series on a topic that’s been coming up lately in my life different ways in: prophecy.

Traditionally—that is, how people in the Old Testament understood the concept—prophecy was about speaking the words of God. A prophet was someone who was perceived to have a special sensitivity to God so that he/she received words from God meant to be spoken to the people. The prophet was God’s mouthpiece.

When various Old Testament texts say that a person was filled with God’s spirit and began prophesying, the reader should not imagine he started uttering unintelligible words or predicting the future. It most likely means he began doing what we might call “street preaching.”[1] When prophets spoke to people on behalf of God it was always with intelligible words for the purpose of getting them to take action. “Repent of your sin and turn to God!”

Occasionally a prophet’s warning included a prediction of some future event. Jonah famously told the Ninevites that if they did not repent of their sin and turn to God, they would be destroyed. And that’s pretty representative of the predictive quality of prophetic speech. In other words, prophetic predictions are typically pretty vague. Prophets do not typically say things like, “On June 6 a man wearing black will ride into town on a white horse and set fire to the sixth house on the left.” Instead, they say things like, “If you don’t stop what you’re doing, God will bring judgment on you.”

The reason I bring this up is because it seems many Christians today assume that prophecy = this more exact form of future telling. Like prophets predicted specific future events. I’m guessing the primary reason for that is because some NT figures seem to interpret some OT passages in this way. For instance, in his first sermon following Jesus’ resurrection and the receiving of the Holy Spirit, Peter cites a text written by King David in the Psalms in which David says God will not leave his soul among the dead or allow his body to rot in the grave. Peter tells his audience that David was essentially predicting the future.


Peter’s take is that David was a prophet and as such could look into the future and write about what would happen. David wasn’t writing about himself. He was predicting Jesus.

And in my pastoral experience, that has become the way the average Christian thinks about prophecy. David wasn’t writing about himself. He was writing about Jesus. When Isaiah referred to the “suffering servant,” he wasn’t writing about himself or Israel, he was writing about Jesus.

To be clear, I don’t deny that is possible. It is distinctly possible that God gave prophets the special spiritual sensitivity to see or perceive future events; visions, dreams, etc. But there are some problems with that way of thinking about it.

First, no one at the time, including David, understood it that way. Had they, Peter’s explanation would not have been as revolutionary as it was. It may not even have been needed. Or if it was needed, all Peter would have needed to say was, “We all know David was looking into the future and anticipating God raising someone from the dead. We just didn’t know who that was. I’m here to tell you it is Jesus!”

In other words, the very fact that Peter has to tell people that David was looking into the future is evidence that no one understood it that way, including David. If you could travel back in time and ask David, “Who were you writing about in this poem,” he most certainly would say himself. He would tell you about all of the people who were secretly (and not so secretly) trying to kill him and then he would say, “But I know God will rescue me from this pit. God will never allow me to rot in this grave.”

There are many times in the Gospels and Acts when someone, including Jesus, asks almost rhetorically, “Did not the scriptures clearly predict?”[3] The answer, of course, is no! If the scriptures clearly predicted anything, Jesus and his followers would not have had to work so hard to help people connect the dots.

That does not mean the scriptures don’t predict anything. Jesus said they do and his earliest followers would go on to not only affirm that but, as we just saw with Peter, interpret scripture in that way for their evangelistic purposes. The scriptures do predict.

Just not clearly, not in the way the average person seems to think they do. If they did, the earliest Christians, especially when reasoning with Jews in synagogues which was their initial strategy, would not have had to “persuade” people, often with mixed results. The very fact that the earliest Christians had to “prove” Jesus was the Messiah by referencing these texts and arguing that they were predictive in nature is pretty convincing evidence that they were not clearly predictive in nature.

The other major problem with thinking about prophecy as “clearly” predictive of Jesus is that the prophets’ words would have had no import for the audience that first received them. If Isaiah’s suffering servant was always Jesus and everyone knew he was talking about someone who would come in the future, those words would have been essentially useless to people at the time. But they were not useless. The very fact that they survived means people found them very useful precisely because they understood them to have import in their own lives, not just as predictions about the future.

Christians look back on OT passages from the vantage point of Jesus’ resurrection and see in them anticipations of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection. They are right to do that. Jesus did that. His earliest followers did that. But that does not mean those passages were originally about Jesus in the sense that the original authors understood they were writing about future events or that their audience believed that’s what they were doing.

It just means that in the light of Jesus their words take on new significance.

In the next two posts I’ll offer a couple of ways of thinking about prophecy that I think are more consistent with how Jesus and his disciples understood and applied it.
 
   [1] See for example 1 Samuel 10:10
   [2] Acts 2:29-31
   [3] For example Luke 24:25-26

In my current teaching series, “Think Again,” I’m critiquing popular views of salvation in light of Easter.

Jesus rising from the dead forced his disciples to think again about what it meant to be saved. I’m arguing in this series it should compel us to do the same. Many Christians have uncritically accepted pop versions of salvation they’ve never seriously held up to the light of Easter.

The conservative evangelical view is that salvation is avoiding judgment and securing one’s place in an afterlife paradise. The liberal view seems to be bringing heaven to earth through social engagement.

These popular understandings of salvation are popular because they emphasize an important aspect of salvation. The conservative evangelical view, for instance, emphasizes our need for forgiveness while the liberal view highlights the importance of bringing God’s kingdom to earth as it is in heaven.

But neither provides a substantial enough framework. Securing forgiveness and a place in heaven is clearly not sufficient. Jesus’ favorite teaching topic was the kingdom of God and most of his teaching involved moral imperatives. We are called to follow Jesus, not just transactionally believe he lived, died, and rose from the dead so we can “get in.” But laboring to “make the world a better place” doesn’t fully capture it either. It seems no matter how hard we work we are never free of sin and its destructive consequences. And, let’s be honest, you don’t really need God to be a good person and make the world a better place. That much is just observable.

The view of salvation I advance in this series is participation in the life of God, or as the Apostle Peter once framed it, becoming “partakers in the divine nature.”[1] Or as the patristic Irenaeus is credited with saying, “He (Jesus) became what we are that we might become what he is.”

Salvation involves forgiveness, but Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection is not a forensic transaction so that a God previously unable or unwilling to forgive would be freed to do so. Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection is the very incarnation of God’s mercy. In other words, if the same God who has been forgiving human sin since the beginning of time were to take on flesh and dwell among the very people he created, his forgiveness would look like living a righteous life, humbly suffering mistreatment, and repaying that mistreatment with a continued offer of life and love. As I’ve said many times, Jesus didn’t die FOR God. Jesus died AS God. His death and resurrection IS the very expression of God’s mercy whose character is, has always been, and forever will be mercy.[2]  

But it is God’s mercy toward us that invites us into a new way of being; God’s way of being. We were created in the image of God, meant to reflect God’s merciful character in the world. That is only possible as we submit ourselves to Jesus and obey his leading. Having been loved by God through Christ we should want to love God in return and that love should express itself in our love for one another, just as Jesus commanded.

We should want to see God’s kingdom come to earth as it is in heaven and we should be willing to suffer for that purpose. Because that is what loving response looks like. That is what God looks like. God suffered to give us life. We suffer to give life to the world.

Salvation is not getting something from God. Salvation is getting God. It is the gift of getting to live in real life. Jesus said it this way, “Put your trust in the light while there is still time; then you will become children of the light.”[3]

Put your trust in the light and become children of the light. That is salvation. We put our trust in Jesus, and we become the people we were created to be.
 
I had a brief conversation with someone in our lobby yesterday after service. She was responding to a comment I made in my message about how faith understood properly casts out fear. There should be no anxiety in Christian faith. We are forgiven, called, and welcomed in Christ, not because of anything we believe or do but simply because God is merciful. She mentioned that while she no longer feels anxiety toward God, worried that if she doesn’t believe or behave properly God may leave her out, but that she still senses something she describes as fear; a fear of not becoming who God created her to be.

I told her she’s beginning to understand what salvation really is. When your deepest concern is not becoming the person God created you to be, not because you’re worried God will lock you out, but because you love God and want to experience the full and abundant life Jesus lived, died, and rose from the dead to give you, you’re just becoming Christian.

Jesus became what we are that we might become what he is. Put your trust in the light and become children of the light.

Salvation is becoming a child of the light.
   
   [1] 2 Pt 1:4
   [2] See Walter Kaiser’s book Mercy: The Essence of the Gospel and the Key to Christian Life (New York, NY: Paulist Press, 2013).
   [3] John 12:36

Last week I began working on my next book. I’m sharing a bit about it in this post mainly to hold myself accountable to keep working on it. Feel free to ask me about it if/when you see me next.

Like my first book, All the Way Down, the idea for this project came from my experience pastoring real people. In other words, I think what I’m aspiring to write will be really helpful.
More specifically, I think it will be helpful for people laboring through the process of faith reconstruction.

Our church has become something of a haven for people in this space. There are historic reasons for that, but how we got here is largely unimportant. It’s simply who we are now. As we say on our website, “When the old answers stop working, you don’t have to give up on faith.”

And we’re discovering it’s a much-needed space. There are lots of people for whom the old answers have stopped working and very few churches positioned to help them. The result is a lot of people giving up on faith, or at least organized religion.

What makes faith reconstruction so daunting and difficult is that everything connects to everything else. You can never just rethink one topic. Like water spilling over from one bilge bay to the next until eventually the boat sinks, when you begin rethinking one belief it isn’t long before you sense the need to rethink another, and then another, and then another until your entire faith system is “sunk.” That is understandably scary and for that reason many people stop engaging the process. I understand and appreciate that.

But for those willing and able to push through the anxiety, it’s still just a difficult process. If you being rethinking atonement,[1] for instance, you’ll have to rethink sin, humanity, the incarnation, and even what it means to have eternal life. That’s just a lot of connections to make.
 
 
What I’m trying to say here is that what makes faith reconstruction so difficult is that you set out to rethink one topic and soon realize you have to reconstruct an entire faith system. Everything is connected to everything else in a system that makes it all makes sense. Rethink one piece and it no longer makes sense in the old system.

This is why we have the theological discipline known as systematics. Systematics is a way of doing theology that presents all the relevant topics within a coherent framework so that everything can be understood with reference to everything else. Here’s what we believe about sin because here’s what we believe about God, or here’s what we believe about Jesus and atonement because here’s what we believe about creation, humanity, and sin. Many systematics assume these topics exist in some logical, self-evident, almost linear order but that’s typically because they tend to move through each topic from left to right as it appears in the Bible. We start with God and creation including our understanding of humanity, then discuss the problem of sin, God’s response plan, and so forth and so on. In truth, however, these topics are connected more like a web or mind map and “where to begin” is theologically subjective.
 
When people enter the world of faith reconstruction because they felt compelled to rethink one topic, they can become easily overwhelmed realizing they may need to replace their entire systematic.
 
But I’ve also found there’s hope in this. Without realizing that this is what is going on, what often compels a person to begin the process of faith reconstruction is that he’s been handed a systematic that launched from a fundamentally flawed starting point and, like someone polluting a river upstream, it’s contaminated everything downstream, which he eventually begins to notice.
 
Deal with the upstream mistake and cleaning up the downstream consequences becomes much easier.
 
That’s what I’m hoping to do with my new book.
 
I’m aspiring to write an accessible systematics for the average layperson, a replacement framework that “explains” all of the relevant theological topics in a more coherent way.
 
I’ll argue that our starting point must be Jesus. Not God or the Bible, but Jesus. In fact, I’ll argue that our starting point already is Jesus, we just don’t acknowledge it. Even when Christian theologians profess to begin their systematic with the God of Genesis, they’re interpreting that God’s words and actions through the lens of Jesus. They have no choice. They’re Christians! Their understanding of everything has been informed by the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, including their understanding of the Bible and everything written in it.[2]
 
I then imagine each chapter (which I hope will be no more than 10-12 pages so the reader can work through it in one sitting) having an “eat this not that” structure to it. There were a series of books published a while back under that name. The idea was to get healthy by focusing on micro-wins each day. At each meal, for instance, replace an unhealthy choice with a healthy one. Instead of ordering the fried chicken, get the grilled chicken instead. If you’re going to each potato chips, try the baked version. Over time, you’ll see a significant increase in your healthy and well-being.
 
I want to do something similar with theology. I’ll start each chapter with a popular take on a specific topic. Take atonement, for instance, which I’ve already mentioned. You’ve heard it said that Jesus died on the cross to pay the death penalty for your sins. Then, I’ll lay out a few reasons why that understanding is “unhealthy.” Then I’ll replace it within my Christ-centered framework with something “healthier.”
 
By the end of the book the reader will have a new web that makes sense of all the relevant topics in one location. And since the goal of the project is to make the book short, simple, and easily accessible, it can function as a resource. I’ve found that even after spending considerable time rethinking things, old ways of thinking hang around and you can find yourself asking, “Wait, I know this isn’t right. How should I be thinking about this again?” That’s when I usually get a phone call or email from someone. But if you have this book on your shelf, you can simply return to that chapter and refresh your memory.
 
It’s an ambitious project. Most systematics are thousands of pages and multi-volume. This will not be that. But condensing material and making it accessible for people who may not have formal theological training is equally if not more difficult.
 
My experience, however, tells me something like this is needed. So, I’m going to take a shot at it. Be praying for me. Ask me how it’s going. Share with me content or perspectives you believe need to be addressed. I’ll even take title suggestions.
 
Many people, both Christians and non-Christians, have been handed a bad story. I’m going to write a book that attempts to give them a better one.
 
   [1] Atonement is the doctrine that seeks to explain how Jesus’ life, death and resurrection function to reconcile us to God. In my experience, this is one of the most common inroads to faith reconstruction. The most common view in evangelical circles is what is popularly known as Penal Substitutionary Atonement, the belief that Jesus died to pay the death penalty for your sin so that you could be forgive and have access to eternal life. This doctrine sells well in a culture obsessed with violent, retributive notions of justice but it is fraught with theological problems, which many people eventually come to sense.
   [2] This is one of the primary arguments I make in my first book All the Way Down: Rebuilding Christian Faith from the Rubble of Evangelicalism.

In his book Unconditional Love, John Powell, S.J. asks, “Is loving really the way to human fulfillment? If I choose love as my personal life principle, will I find satisfaction and true gratification?”

This, he argues, is THE crisis facing contemporary society.

“Is a life of love, which involves a permanent and unconditional commitment to the happiness of another, really the way to personal satisfaction and human fulfillment?” As opposed to remaining unencumbered from all relationships so that one is free to pursue all the pleasure, power, and sensation life has to offer?

Powell obviously believes love is the way to personal satisfaction and fulfilment, and I agree, but if I were to critique Powell’s position it would only be to say that if he’s correct, the real crisis is that this is a crisis at all.

Because the answer is obvious. It stares us in the face every time we attend a funeral. In those moments, no one cares to talk about what you owned, the places you went, or even what you did to earn a living. What they DO care to talk about is the person you were, how well you loved them.

If you’re paying attention, at funerals you realize people are all that really matter in this world. A life well lived is a life well loved.

We know this, and yet we spend so much of our time chasing a dream or chasing a dollar. As far as dollars go, you’ll never have enough. And as far as dreams go, they ought to be as close as the nearest person.

People continue to buy into the lie that wealth, fame, and power are the pathways to full and abundant life. They are not. They may make life easier in some regards, but they do not ultimately satisfy.

The only thing that does satisfy is a fierce commitment to the well-being of others and a willingness to use one’s time, talent, and money to serve them.

Find a way to give your life away to others. It could be your spouse and kids. It could be to people through your employer. It could be to families in your neighborhood. Everyone wants a full and satisfying life. The lie is that you realize that life by turning inward, focusing on your self. The truth is that you find meaning, purpose, and satisfaction by turning out, focusing on the well-being of others.

We are the most informed, connected people who have ever lived on planet earth. Love should not be a crisis facing our society.

This will be my final post reflecting on Christian Smith’s book Why Religion Went Obsolete. If this is a topic that interests you, I would highly recommend you pick up a copy.
Smith’s explanation for why traditional religion has been in steady decline in America for decades is that it slipped into a state of unplanned obsolescence. People who once found it relevant or helpful no longer do and therefore younger generations are unlikely to even consider it an option.

Traditional religion has been replaced.

By what?

By whatever “works.”

We saw in my last post that people today tend to think of themselves as entirely self-contained, what Carl Trueman calls a “psychological self.” People approach life like it is a customizable self-actualization project. We are who we decide we are. We can be whatever we choose to be. In a reality like that, if people happen to come across traditional religion and it helps them achieve whatever subjective version of self they’ve chosen, great. But not only is it increasingly less likely for younger generations to encounter traditional religion, even if they did, many of the uncritically accepted “contours” of what Smith calls the “millennial zeitgeist” are simply incompatible with it.

In other words, even if someone were to try traditional religion, he would most likely conclude it will not “work” for him.

So, what is traditional religion to do?

I have a couple of thoughts here. There is overlap between the subjective quest for self-actualization and traditional Christian theology. Christian orthodoxy affirms that life is a journey. If the average person senses or feels like he’s moving toward some kind of actualized end, that’s because he is.

But where Christian orthodoxy challenges this aspect of the millennial zeitgeist is to say that the destination is not self-chosen or self-constructed. For Christians, we are created in the image of God and what the world calls actualization we call salvation, which is nothing less than participation in the life of God.

And if we’re correct, if what people operating under the millennial zeitgeist are truly after is “participating in the divine nature,” to borrow a phrase from the Apostle Peter—or as Saint Augustine famously said, “we are restless until our hearts find rest in thee (God)”—they aren’t going to arrive at that destination by pursuing cultural alternatives to traditional religion. They can participate in a self-constructed deity or spirituality, but that is not the same as participating in the inner life of God; Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
And it will never quite satisfy.

People are still interested in issues of “ultimate concern.”[1] We all feel the ache of longing for transcendence. As long as that is true, traditional religion will have its place. The church simply needs to remain alive and vibrant so that it can be here for people when, like the bleeding woman who turned to Jesus after spending all she had trying to get better elsewhere, they realize all the roads they’ve traveled in search of actualization have led to dead ends and traditional religion is the only path left not taken.

So, as it relates to the world, the church will have to do more honoring of people’s lived experiences. Not that preaching at the world has ever done any good, but it will be even less effective influencing the millennial zeitgeist. Instead, the church needs to meet people where they are, affirm their felt need to self-actualize, but offer in its shared life a more compelling and satisfying alternative.
 
Which brings me to the second focus for the church. While we need to meet people outside the church where they are, honoring their experience, we also need to carefully and thoughtfully challenge the millennial zeitgeist inside the church. If anything will draw people into traditional religion it is the people who currently occupy the pews. Our lives have to be good news.
 
But to the degree we are controlled by the same zeitgeist, we have nothing to offer the world it doesn’t already have. The church has to become a place that produces the kinds of people other people look at and think, “that’s the kind of life I want.” If the church were a business, you don’t grow it by hiding a bad product under good advertising. You grow it by having a great product. If the product is good, people will find it.
 
And the product in many churches is not good. I recently watched a documentary on Netflix called “The Twister.” It’s all about the E5 tornado that destroyed Joplin, MO in 2011. One of the interviewees in the documentary is a man named Cecil. He was a junior in high school in 2011. A major part of his story was growing up in a church in Joplin where he says his greatest fear was being left behind following the rapture.[2]
 
So shaped was he by teachings related to the rapture that he admits during the tornado he was concerned the rapture had come and that he would be left behind. I understand people wanting to speculate about end times and what it will be like when Christ returns, but to teach dogmatically about something no one understands or can perfectly anticipate, to the point where young people growing up in your spiritual care are fearful for their well-being, is ministry malpractice, and as long as this is the garbage that people are being taught in churches, traditional religion has no hope.
 
People will always hunger for God but they will be left with no choice but to try and find God outside the church.
 
Churches need to make first things first. We have to focus on what it looks like to be disciples of Jesus in our culture. We have to help people engage practices that form their characters in love. We have to teach them how to have the “mind of Christ” so they can more thoughtfully engage the world and their own experiences. So long as the church is adopting the millennial zeitgeist and pumping out people who look and act nothing like Jesus, there is no reason we should expect people to join us and we should probably hope they don’t.
 
That fewer and fewer are suggests we should spend less time trying to “reach” culture and more time getting our house in order.
   
   [1] A phrase used by psychologist James Fowler to name the focus of religion.
   [2] The rapture is a doctrine based on a collection of NT passages. The prevailing assumption is that when Christ returns he will gather to himself those who are saved (presumably being caught up with him in the air) and those who are not saved will be “left behind” to suffer upon the earth.  

Christian Smith argues that traditional religion in America is suffering from “cultural mismatch,” a discordant relationship with general culture that is pushing it into a state of unplanned obsolescence.

In other words, there was a time in western society when traditional religion and general culture fit hand-in-glove; people sensed the need for traditional religion to support their way of life.

That is no longer the case. People aren’t anti-religious as much as they simply don’t see the point anymore. People aren’t anti-typewriter. They just don’t use them anymore because in world of personal supercomputers, other than nostalgia, what’s the point?
But if general culture no longer supports traditional religion so that the latter is perceived by most to be unnecessary, what are some of the features of contemporary culture that are so hazardous to traditional religion?

Smith leverages the German word “zeitgeist” to answer this question. Zeitgeist means something like “spirit of an age.” Think, for instance, of the “roaring twenties.” Certainly not every moment during that decade was a party, but when thinkers look back on it, especially in contrast to previous and later periods, they can see that it was mostly an age characterized by a carefree, optimistic spirit.

Every period of time has a zeitgeist.

Smith refers to the present age as the “millennial zeitgeist.” The reader should not mistake that term to mean “those damn millennials,” as some Boomers and Gen Xers are fond of thinking. For starters, Smith argues that what he calls the millennial zeitgeist began developing during previous generations, it merely hit a tipping point in the decades that flanked the turn of the century when the oldest millennials would have been teenagers. As with most things, millennials merely took what they learned from their parents and grandparents to new, though logically consistent, extremes.

While Smith is wise to point out (especially for people like me whose formative years came during this period) that the mood shifted as American society moved from the 1990’s to 2000’s—the 1990’s feeling generally unbonded and optimistic while the 2000’s felt generally gloomy—the “spirit of the age” was consistent.

And many of the “countours” of the millennial zeitgeist focus on culture’s view of the individual. Here are few examples:

Each individual possesses a distinctive, essential selfhood that they need to discover, cultivate, realize, and express.[1]
                Neglecting one’s unique selfhood is irresponsible.[2]
                Distinctive selves should be expected to change over time.[3]
                Growing up means “becoming one’s own” person.[4]
 
Authentic selves are continually at risk of being denied, twisted, or repressed by both external forces of organized conformism, including parents, school, religion, workplace, peers, and media, as well as internal forces of insecurity, doubt, fear, self-judging, emotional dysfunction, and laziness.[5]
 
To discover one’s “true self,” individuals must rely on their own subjective intuitive responses to their own experiences.[6]
 
These empirical insights confirm Carl Trueman’s observations in his book The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, which I’ve written about elsewhere on this blog (you can access post 1 of that series here). Trueman argues that what has made it possible for someone to say something like, “I am really a man trapped in a women’s body” is nothing short of an evolution in our understanding of what constitutes a “self.”
 
Smith is describing that evolution. The millennial zeitgeist includes a version of selfhood that is largely incompatible with traditional religion. It assumes that every person is an individual on an entirely customizable self-actualization project. Each person gets to decide for him or herself who or what he/she wants to be. Experience, then, is the realm of factors and influences that may or may not “work” in helping the individual self-actualize in whatever subjective way they’ve chosen.
 
This means that syncretism will be normal. Syncretism means “to borrow.” For instance, it is highly common in today’s culture to see Christians more knowledgeable about and engaged in mindfulness than prayer or for atheists to be all about Buddhist meditation.
 
Whatever “works.”
 
It also means that novel tends to be more capturing than historical and traditional. The average person is far more likely to engage in mindfulness than prayer because prayer seems antiquated where mindfulness is perceived as new and fresh, perhaps even empirically “proven.”
 
And lastly it means that life is lived almost entirely in that Charles Taylor calls the “immanent frame.” Life is about here and now. When we talk about what “works” we’re almost always talking about what addresses a problem in our lived experience. Does this make my current life better?
 
This view of the self is largely incompatible with traditional religion. Traditional religion certainly believes that every person is an individual soul with inherent dignity and worth, but that’s about where the overlap ends. Yes, traditional religion would describe our lives in the present age as a journey but not toward some subjective vision of self-actualization. We do not decide who or what we are. We are made the image of God and self-actualization is participation in the life of God.
 
Which means that what “works” is not self-determined. If I get to decide for myself who or what I’m going to be then I also get to determine if something is working toward that end or not. But if who or what I am supposed to be is determined for me, a created reality that I am called to live into, what “works” in terms of helping me toward that received future will likewise be received, from sources like tradition, revelation, and others.
 
General culture imagines each individual as a self-contained automaton. Traditional religion says you are interdependent; you only become yourself through others.
 
It’s not hard to see why traditional religion feels entirely foreign to so many. Social institutions like churches tend to be viewed as inherently oppressive; places that will threaten your self-made authenticity rather than as places that will help you become who you were meant to be.
 
When you weren’t meant to be anyone, no one can help you but you.
 
Jean Twenge in her book Generations would agree with Smith’s analysis. Hyper-individualism is one of the factors she sights pushing younger generations into mental health crisis. In his position paper, “My Parting Prescription for America,” former US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy says something similar, calling younger generations to re-prioritize deep, robust networks of interdependent relationships versus rugged individualism and isolation.
 
But while this new, uncritically accepted view of the self is incompatible with traditional religion, making traditional religion seem unnecessary at the moment, perhaps what’s old will be one day be new again. Smith notes that people are not moving from traditional religion to secularity. There aren’t just two options. On the contrary, what we’re seeing is the budding of all manner of different “spiritualities.”
 
People are still interested in issues of “ultimate concern.”[7] We still feel the ache that traditional religion used to address.
 
Traditional religion can begin with the reality of that ache and make the case for why it has the healing balm. People today expect institutions like the church to have to prove themselves, to have to make their case. So, let’s make it.
     
   [1] P 298
   [2] P 299
   [3] P 299
   [4] P 301
   [5] P 300
   [6] P 302
   [7] A phrase used by psychologist James Fowler to name the focus of religion.

This is Part 4 in a blog series I’m calling “Why Religion Went Obsolete,” a synopsis of and reflection on Christian Smith’s 2025 book by the same title.

Smith argues that a multitude of macro and micro forces coalesced in the 1990’s and 2000’s to form a cultural “perfect storm” that effectively put traditional religion out of business. It isn’t that most people today are anti-religion. Quite the contrary. The dominant cultural view today is, “if religion works for you, go for it.”

It’s just that religion doesn’t seem to be working for most people.

But not because they’ve tried it and found it wanting. That is no doubt true for some. Western culture has seen a dramatic increase in the number of people who identify as “dones,” meaning “I’ve tried religion and I’m done with it.” Most young people, however, and this is becoming truer with each new generation, have no experience with religion because they’ve grown up in a post-religious culture, perhaps raised by “dones.”
If traditional religion went obsolete in the 1990’s and 2000’s, most young people today have simply never experienced it. Again, it’s not that their anti-religious. It’s simply that religion has never been a viable option for them. If you are a religious person that may be hard for you to get your mind around, which is why Smith spends an entire chapter offering his readers a number of metaphors that help those of us who take traditional religion for granted appreciate the cultural waters people are now swimming in.

For instance, traditional religion’s decline in the cultural world might be compared to “species decline” in the natural world. In the same that that species decline can typically be traced back to causes such as pathogens, parasites, diseases, invasive species, habitat loss, pollution, overharvesting, or climate change, we might trace traditional religion’s decline to analogues in the cultural world. What “invasive species” have moved into traditional religion’s “territory,” competing for resources? Are there “pollutants” in the cultural air making everyone “sick?”

Just as an avalanche is the result of snow, ice, and rock breaking off a mountain at just the time and coalescing to produce a movement with inertia and momentum capable of sweeping up everything in its path, Smith argues that the perfect combination of cultural factors “broke off” from a previously stable reality creating an avalanche that simply changed the cultural landscape.

What that means is today we have what theorists refer to as “cultural mismatch.” Cultural mismatch is a theory that seeks to explain why certain students underperform in certain environments relative to their objective intelligence. The idea is that culture plays a major factor. If my native culture is communal, “disorganized,” and loud I may struggle in an educational environment shaped by cultural values such as individualism, independence, and self-direction.

My wife, Kari, is an 8th-grade math teacher. She did her student teaching at a school where most of the students came from cultures different from her own. They planned to take a field trip to a local concert hall. To help prepare students, she told them they wear nicer clothes than they might typically wear to school. She told them to wear “church clothes.” She expected khakis and polo shirts. She was shocked when all of her students showed up to school the day of the concert wearing suits and formal dresses.

That’s cultural mismatch.

If traditional religion is the “student,” it flourished when cultural values, norms, assumptions, and expectations matched its own. That is no longer the case and traditional religion is struggling to perform. Not because it isn’t “intelligent” or “talented” but simply because it is being asked to perform in a world that operates according to different take-for-granted assumptions and speaks an entirely different language. And Smith argues that because most people are now growing up in that cultural world, a culture mismatched from the values, norms, and expectations of traditional religion, traditional seems entirely foreign to them and therefore a non-thought.

If you’re a Christian person, for instance, have you ever seriously entertained the idea of becoming Muslim or Hindu? Probably not. You may have considered an alternative form of Christianity but probably not joining a different faith altogether.

That’s what it’s like for most people growing up in western culture today. They’re not anti-Christian anymore than you’re anti-Buddhist. They simply haven’t grown up Christian, and due to cultural mismatch, they entertain the prospect of becoming Christian about as seriously as you entertain the prospect of becoming Wiccan.

Culture today is shaped by what Smith calls the “Millennial Zeitgeist,” taken-for-granted norms, values, assumptions, and expectations that are mostly at odds with traditional religion so that traditional religion simply does not “vibe.”[1]
 
In my next post of this series I’ll highlight some of what makes up this Millennial Zeitgeist before spending my last post reflecting on what traditional religion ought to do in a moment such as this, but I find this concept of cultural mismatch both helpful in explaining my experience as a traditionally religious person (and cleric) in contemporary western society, and hopeful.
 
Christianity has been adapting to different cultures, many of which have been hostile, for 2,000 years. This is our specialty. It’s what we do. It’s just that American Christians have never had to. We’re looking at the changing cultural landscape and crying “the sky is falling,” but the truth is the comfortable reality we once knew is simply changing. We may not like that, but instead of trying to get culture to return to whatever “stable” condition we thought it once had, which I suspect will only make the current avalanche move down the mountain with greater force, we have to adapt.
   
   [1] To use a word that expresses one of the components of the Millennial Zeitgeist, how truth is more felt than intellectually worked out.