THE TRUTH WE SEE

Today marks the 150th anniversary of the death of the Danish Christian thinker Søren Kierkegaard. Few other writers have captured my heart or my mind more than this one. For the ten years that I have been reading, writing and thinking about “the melancholy Dane” he has consistently reminded me that authentic Christianity is not merely a matter of assent to a certain set of propositions or a matter of merely being a decent fellow but is instead a life of deep passion and a life of radical obedience. To be sure, I have often preferred doctrinal acquiescence and shallow moralisms, but Kierkegaard has kept me from ever feeling okay about that.

Kierkegaard saw himself as a sort of missionary whose task it was “to reintroduce Christianity to Christendom.” He lived in a country that touted itself as being a Christian nation, but Kierkegaard was convinced that in a nation where everyone thought themselves to be Christian, true Christianity did not exist. He writes: “We have what one might call a complete inventory of church buildings, bells, organs, pews, altars, pulpits, offering plates, and so on. But when Christianity does not exist, this inventory, so far from being an advantage, is a peril, because it is so very likely to give rise to the false impression that we must have Christianity, too…. Christ requires followers and defines precisely what he means by this. They are to be salt, willing to be sacrificed. But to be salt and to be sacrificed is not something that the thousands naturally go for, still less millions, or (still less!) countries, kingdoms, states, and (absolutely not!) the whole world. On the other hand, if it is a question of size, mediocrity, and lots of talk, then the possibility of the thing begins; then bring on the thousands, increase them to the millions – no, go forth and make the world Christian.

“The New Testament alone, not numbers, settles what Christianity is, leaving it to eternity to pass judgment on us. It is simply impossible to define faith on the basis of what people in general like best and prefer to call Christianity. As soon as we do this, Christianity is automatically done away with. There are, in the end, only two ways open to us: to honestly and honorably make admission of how far we are from the Christianity of the New Testament, or to perform skillful tricks to conceal the true situation, tricks to conjure up a forgery whereby Christianity is the prevailing religion in the land” (Provocations: The Spiritual Writings of Kierkegaard, 178-180).

It seems to me that these words have not lost there sting, even 150 years later and on an altogether different continent. We, as evangelicals in America today, have much to learn from this nineteenth century Danish Lutheran. And on a much more personal level (as SK would insist we consider his words), I recognize that I still have much to learn about my own pursuit of Christ. Above my desk hangs the following quote that provides me much needed perspective on my work as a scholar and a disciple:

“The matter is quite simple. The Bible is very easy to understand. But we Christians are a bunch of scheming swindlers. We pretend to be unable to understand it because we know very well that the minute we understand we are obliged to act accordingly. Take any words in the New Testament and forget everything except pledging yourself to act accordingly. My God, you will say, if I did that my whole life would be ruined. How would I ever get on in the world?

“Herein lies the real place of Christian scholarship. Christian scholarship is the Church’s prodigious invention to defend itself against the Bible, to ensure that we can continue to be good Christians without the Bible coming too close. Oh, priceless scholarship, what would we do without you?” (Provocations: The Spiritual Writings of Kierkegaard, 201-202)

If you know much about Kierkegaard’s biography, you’ll know that it isn’t much of a stretch to say that Jesus ruined his life. And he wouldn’t have had it any other way. May we all learn a bit more what it means to find our lives by loosing them for the sake of our Master.

I have learned a lesson in persistence in prayer from my three and a half year old. Nearly every night at bedtime for the past 10+ months since the tsunami, my son Will has either prayed or asked me to pray for “the people affected by the tsunami” (a phrase he got from me, but it has become his own). Since the time of Hurricane Katrina he’s expanded his prayer to include “the people affected by the tsunami and the hurricane.” If I’m winding down my part of the prayer and haven’t said it yet, he interrupts me to insist that I pray for them. I have to confess that I probably wouldn’t have thought much at all about the people affected by the tsunami in several months had it not been for Will’s insistence that we not neglect to lift them before the Lord.

As we were praying the other night he was feeling a little extra verbose, so he added to his normal prayer saying “And God, we pray that one day you will stop all these tsunamis and hurricanes.” Wow. It was a simple prayer from a child who really didn’t know what he was asking, but it struck me deeply, reminding me that the world we live in, the world in which I’m trying to raise my kids is “not the way its supposed to be” but that one day it will be. It reminded me that I have a certain obligation to teach my children both about our hope that things will one day be made right, and also to teach them to recognize that that day has not yet come. Things aren’t the way they’re supposed to be, and that obliges us to pray, and hope, and work.

In his book Educating for Life, Yale philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorff writes about Christian education, suggesting that part of teaching children to think and live Christianly in this world is to teach them to “lament the absence of shalom wherever we find it absent.” He writes: “Christian education must exhibit and teach for lament. The cry “This should not be,” so far from being smothered, as all too often it is, must be allowed, even encouraged. Why is that? For one thing, the struggle for the healing of broken and distorted relationships can be genuine only if it emerges from a heartfelt lament. But second, to teach our [children] to love the earth, to love God, to love culture, to love each other, to love oneself, is, as all of us know who have loved, to court the possibility, indeed, the certainty, of grief and sorrow” (Educating for Life: Reflections on Christian Teaching and Learning, 263).

As a father, it is a challenge to know how to appropriately teach a three and a half year old child how to lament, but in forcing me everyday to remember the thousands of people on the other side of the world whose lives are still in shambles, my three an a half year old has taught me how.

Yes, Lord. Will you one day stop all these tsunamis and hurricanes? Will you make all that is wrong with our world and all that is wrong with me right?

Developing an overly critical disposition is, I suppose, an occupational hazard for one who spends his days studying theology. The line between critical and overly critical is a thin one, and one I’m certain I cross more often than I even realize (as I often also do with respect to the line between critical and insufficiently critical). But what I really fear is failing to include myself in my own criticisms, that is, being overly critical of others while being overly generous with myself. Jesus’ famous line about the log in you own eye and the speck in your neighbor’s makes it clear that precisely the opposite is supposed to be the case.

In this vein, I was struck today when reading the words of the seventeenth century French devotional writer François Fénelon. The book Meditations and Devotions is a collection of Fénelon’s prayers and homilies. Reflecting on 1 John 2:15, where we are told, “Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world” Fénelon writes:

“How wise these words are. The world is that heedless and corrupted multitude that Christ accuses in the Gospel. Everyone criticizes the world and yet each of us carries it in his heart, for the world is made up of those people who love themselves and who love others without relation to God. We are the world, for we love ourselves and seek in others what comes from God alone. Let us admit that we do not have the spirit of Christ. How shameful to say we renounce the world and yet to keep its values. Desire for power, love of prestige, self-indulgence, pursuit of pleasure, cowardice in Christian practices, neglect of the truths of the Gospel – here is the world. It lives in us; and we want to live in it, else why are we so desirous that it love us and so fearful lest it forget us?” (Meditations and Devotions, 18)

Wow. Need I say more?

My good friend Chris McGregor has a link on his blog to an article from Tom Brokaw about contemporary evangelicalism (taken, if I’m not mistaken from a recent NBC special). In the article Brokaw interviews Ted Haggard, president of the National Association of Evangelicals and pastor of a megachurch in suburban Colorado Springs. In the interview there is an interesting exchange between the two men:

Brokaw: Most of the churches that I know of, and certainly the ones I attended, at some point, you out loud acknowledge that you were a sinner or that you came face-to-face to guilt that you may feel.
Haggard: Right.
Brokaw: I didn’t see any of that here.
Haggard: Well, we do talk about sin. But, see, the issue is Jesus took care of our sin. And Jesus removes guilt from our life. So the emphasis in our church isn’t how to get your sins removed because that’s pretty easy to do. Jesus did that on the cross. The emphasis in our church is how to fulfill the destiny that God’s called you to.
Brokaw: You’re making it easier for them.
Haggard: Making it easier for them just like Jesus did, just like Moses did.

I know very little about Ted Haggard and am hesitant to be too critical of an isolated comment, but he said something here that captures much of my concern with contemporary, consumer-driven evangelicalism. It’s hard for me to read the New Testament or the history of the Church and see how Jesus made things “easy” for his would-be followers. Don’t get me wrong. I like “easy.” I’ve lived much of my life with “easy.” And obviously “easy” sells well in the suburbs. But deep down inside I’m afraid “easy.”

I was doing some research for my dissertation this morning, reading one of my favorite theologians, P. T. Forsyth. I came across a great passage written by this British theologian in 1912 about the Gnostics of the early centuries of the church, a passage referring to an ancient heresy that I fear has an all too familiar ring to it:

“They impressed people by a magnetism, a facility, and a confidence which the apostles, much humbled and scarcely saved, did not command. They offered a liberty very different from that wherewith Christ made apostles free. To their ardours, at their height, everything was lawful; and therefore sin was mostly a fiction. It could certainly be made too much of. They lowered and practically erased the fence between the Church and the age, and adjusted the Cross with so much ingenuity to the culture and comfort of the hour that it also was erased from their gospel.... And there were many who fell in with the ways of pagan society, only bringing to them a certain religious aspiration and refinement which even paganism could not command. Throughout it all the death of Christ was pushed into the corner, like an embarrassing episode of which the less said the better.... It tended to banish repentance from its experience, as spiritual culture always does when it claims to outgrow evangelical faith. The fear of God dropped to a crude and inferior stage of religion. The idea of discipline vanished from church life; and an extravagant idea of personal liberty, imported from the natural democracy, took the first place, vacated by the obedience of faith” (Faith, Freedom, and the Future, 23-24).

Jesus did say “my yoke is easy and my burden is light” but he also said “anyone who would come after me must take up his cross and follow me.” The former is much more easily marketable than the latter, but if you really want Jesus, you don’t get one without the other.