February 25, 2006

Treasure in Earthen Vessles?

I was a Lutheran Pastor for nearly twenty years. I have several years of advanced theological training. I feel competent in making a critique of what often passes as the Christian faith. I do not pretend to speak for any denomination. My thoughts are mine alone.

Personal Salvation?
I am disturbed by the idea that the event of the Christ was simply to effect personal salvation. It would be ignorant to dismiss the centrality of the incarnation in Christian theology; indeed, St. Paul speaks eloquently of God’s value of the individual as the object of grace. While much of the NT speaks about the establishment of a covenant viz a vie the sacraments as a participatory metaphor that symbolizes the salvific intention of God, it is not the end of the intention of this divine metaphor: salvation is the beginning, not the end, of the eschatological reality.

What is the eschatological imperative? It is to be Christ for the world. I am not speaking the double-talk of the new age self-justification. To my mind, this is spiritual masturbation: so much self-pleasure with no love or intention of sharing community. To be Christ for the world is to lose one’s self for the sake of the world. This is what the myth of the incarnation of the logos bespeaks: God comes into the world to be broken by the sin – becoming the curse – that even the deepest fractures of the human heart may be healed by the brokenness of the Christ. As Christ is raised, so to shall humanity be raised in the likeness of the Christ. It is significant that the risen Christ still bears the prints of the nails: the wounds did not heal; they remain as Christ returns to bear the brokenness of humanity to the perfection that is God. This act perfects God and gives birth to hope where once there was despair. Why, then, do we speak of personal salvation? Look at the myths of the fall. Our individual parents were cast out of the garden, out of a place of harmony and peace. Individuals must be welcomed back to the garden if they are to live lives that are not bound up in their lust for their own welfare.

Lust for Self-Preservation
Gandhi was a rather pointed critic of the Christian religion: Oh, I don't reject your Christ. I love your Christ. It's just that so many of you Christians are so unlike your Christ." I do not believe that Gandhi is the ultimate arbitrator of the truth of Christianity. I do believe that it is a fair critique of the practice of the faith in Western Culture. The Christian religion is not a doctrinal system as much a covenant between God and humanity, a promise made between the lover and the beloved.

The crux of the faith is to be free from the need to be saved. If I am free from myself, I am free to be love for others, especially for the unloved.

This is the key article of the doctrine of the incarnation: God transcends God’s self to be for humanity. In this way, the individual is freed from self-preservation to be for the other. Sadly, this has not been the case for most of the history of the Christian faith. Much of the faith becomes an article of self-justification and thus a sullen caricature of itself.

God is Love
I have, for years, been haunted by a small – only five short chapters worth – epistle in the NT, First John. In this short letter the author, an anonymous writer influenced by St. John’s mysticism, writing about 90-120 C.E., writes the words: beloved, let us love one another… for God is love. The proof of faith is not intellectual ascent. The proof of faith is love for one another. And this love is not limited to those that share our faith, it is not a love that excludes, but seeks to love all as sons and daughters of the same parent. So this say? It tells me that there is none that can be outside of the love of a God that has become broken for the sake of love. That is a profound realization, one that changes the self with the beautiful and terrible knowledge of God.

The difficulty with truth is that once you have encountered it you are changed. You can no longer claim ignorance and are now held hostage by its demand to change.

I believe this is why most Christians have degraded the depth of their creed and have settled for a lesser eschatology; another word for this is original sin. We have made God over in our own image; we have made God into a source for my eternal life without considering the depth of love that drove the eternal to embrace the now. Consider that most Christian evangelism says nothing of a duty in love to care for the needs of all flesh. If God is love, and we are the disciples of the Christ, how, then, can we stand apart from this demand to love all? This terrible truth means death, not eternal life.

Justification by Grace through Faith
God justifies, that is God puts us right. We are free from the need to be for ourselves. Faith, then, is the act of living as if we are free. It is the strong word of God that says no to all that would imprison us, including wealth and self-satisfaction. That I would have criticized the so-called theologians of liberation for their confusion of ethics and eschatology. Now I am not so certain that this is a valid critique. I do not believe that we are the force that brings the Kingdom of God to the earth. I believe that we act as if God reigns and that God’s reign is defined by love. Dostoyevsky put it well when he wrote: “hell is the inability to love.” Augustine, as well, when he said, “Thou beholdst the Trinity when thou beholdest love: for the lover, the beloved, and the love are three.”

This is why I am not a Christian. I love the Christian myth, but feel that this is beyond me. I believe, help my unbelief. I think that too much dilution has taken place. We have lost ourselves in a sea of things and self-satisfaction, on both the materialistic and metaphysical levels. Perhaps Gandhi was right: there are precious few Christians. Prayer has to be transformed into action. Creed has to find articulation in life. Poetry has to become the muse that inspires life, like YHWH playing with the dust, forming it into a body and inbreathing life and then declaring love for the dirt that had infinitely greater potential than dirt could imagine. It became the dwelling place of the logos. Perhaps it is a treasure in an earthen vessel?