Thinking Beautifully

This summer, I’ve been working with a colleague of mine at Calvin University and a student fellow to develop a new website focused on beauty as a lens for Christian scholarship. It’s a project we’ve been interested in for a long time, and we’re grateful that it’s finally getting off the ground. Being part of a team is inspiring me to return to blogging, but probably not here most of the time. You’ll find me more often at http://thinkingbeautifully.org/. If I have things to say unrelated to beauty, I’ll still post them here, but given my current writing projects that’s not going to happen often! Hope you’ll drop by the new site for a visit.

Is Lament a New Testament Practice? I Think Not

2 Corinthians 1
Reading this chapter today helped to crystalize my growing discomfort with the language of lament as I hear it being deployed in many Christian circles. Job laments. Job suffers and sees no reason or purpose in his suffering, so he laments. The Psalms often lament, crying out to God and accusing Him of abandonment. This is the sort of lament that seems to be affirmed in many conversations that I hear today: we bring our sense of God’s unfairness and inexplicable abandonment of us into our times of worship because it’s right and appropriate for us to feel those things. I just don’t think that makes sense from a New Testament vantage point. Of course, if I feel those things, I need to express them to God, and then He will correct me and tell me how I am mistaken. But what I hear is people advocating lament, making a point of having a place in the worship service for this sort of complaining against God, as if that’s a necessary and good part of worship.
Paul does not lament in this way. He knows all about suffering, and he talks about his suffering openly, but he also understands that suffering must come to him because he follows a suffering Savior. There’s nothing inexplicable, surprising, or unfair about it. “Just as the sufferings of Christ are abundant for us, so also our consolation is abundant through Christ” (1:5). Unlike Job, Paul experiences consolation alongside suffering, as suffering’s natural companion. Paul even names God the Father as “the God of all consolation, who consoles us in all our affliction” (1:3-4). The suffering unites us to Christ, and therefore it brings consolation along with it, because union with Christ is consoling.
Paul recounts a time when he and those with him believed that they were going to die as a result of persecution. He says, “We were so utterly, unbearably crushed that we despaired of life itself. Indeed, we felt that we had received the sentence of death so that we would rely not on ourselves but on God who raises the dead” (1:8-9). They “despaired” of life, i.e., they believed they were going to die. But they not despair about God’s care for them. In fact, in the midst of this desperate situation, they saw a purpose to their suffering: that they would be forced to rely on God rather than on themselves. And even in the midst of this desperate situation, they retained a confident hope in the resurrection. There’s no indication at all that Paul ever came to God in a posture of accusation or entitlement or complaint.
The conclusion of this chapter is an affirmation that in Jesus “it is always ‘Yes.’ For in Him every one of God’s promises is a ‘Yes’” (1:19-20). Even while recounting his sufferings, Paul is hearing God’s yes to him. This yes allows Paul to reply with a similar yes, to offer “the ‘Amen,’ to the glory of God” (1:20). As I read this, Paul is not just saying yes to God being glorious, but rather Paul is saying yes to all that God does or allows, including all Paul’s own suffering, offering that suffering to God’s glory. (I think this is very similar to Jonathan Edwards’ idea of ‘consent,’ but that’s for another time.)
Later in 2 Corinthians, Paul talks about “a thorn” that was “given” him “in the flesh, a messenger of Satan to torment me, to keep me from being too elated” (12:7). The context is that he has been speaking about having been caught up into heaven. Even here, I would not characterize Paul’s attitude as lament. He sees that the source of this thorn is not God but Satan, understanding that he is caught up in a spiritual war. He has a great advantage over Job in this, since he knows what is going on in the world in a way that Job could not. Paul also understands that God is sovereign over his suffering, that Satan could not torment him if God did not allow it, so he feels free to petition God repeatedly for healing, even while acknowledging that the suffering has a purpose: to keep him from being “too elated.” And, of course, he receives a very clear response from God about why the suffering continues: “my grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness” (12:9). Paul offers that comfort to us as something that applies more widely, not just to his specific situation and not just to him. We should hear this verse as applying to our sufferings as well. Paul’s response to God’s refusal of healing and to God’s affirmation of the perfecting nature of weakness is not lament. Rather, he affirms, “So I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may dwell in me. Therefore, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities for the sake of Christ; for whenever I am weak, then I am strong” (12:9-10).

Bonaventure on How Scripture Lights Up the World

“It is certain that as long as man stood up, he had the knowledge of created things and through their significance, was carried up to God, to praise, worship, and love Him. This is what creatures are for, and this is how they are led back to God. But when man had fallen, since he had lost knowledge, there was no longer any one to lead creatures back to God. Hence this book, the world, became as dead and deleted. And it was necessary that there be another book through which this one would be lighted up, so that it could receive the symbols of things. Such a book is Scripture which establishes the likenesses, the properties, and the symbolism of things written down in the book of the world. And so, Scripture has the power to restore the whole world toward the knowledge, praise, and love of God.”

Collations on the Six Days, XIII.12

The Prayer I Need Right Now

Into your hands, O merciful Savior,

we commend your servant, Mary.

Acknowledge, we humbly pray,

a sheep of your own fold,

a lamb of your own flock,

a sinner of your own redeeming.

Receive her into the arms of your mercy,

into the blessed rest of everlasting peace,

and into the glorious company of the saints in light.

This is the prayer I’ve been praying since my sister Mary died unexpectedly earlier this month.  Of course the pastor read it at the graveside, and yet I keep praying it myself, over and over.  In times of loss, when no words come, what a gift it is for the church to give us time-tested words that are exactly what we need to be saying.

The Limits of Narrative

My first job out of seminary was as the Director of Youth and Christian Education at First Presbyterian Church of Buffalo, New York.  Most of the students in my youth group came from non-Christian or nominally Christian homes.  They had started coming to the church as children because the programs offered were something to do in the neighborhood, and so most of them had been through Sunday School and knew a lot of Bible stories.  But most of them had absolutely no idea what those stories meant.  They could tell me the story of Jesus dying on the cross and coming back to life three days later, but they couldn’t tell me what that story had to do with their own lives.

I had been at the church for less than a month when I announced to my sister (who had moved to Buffalo with me): “These kids need the catechism!”  During my time in seminary, I had been quite disdainful of the Reformed confessions.  I thought that my own upbringing had included too much confessional drill and not enough Bible immersion.  I assured one of my professors that I would never need to use the skill of catechetical preaching that I was being taught, since I would always preach from the Bible.  And of course I was quite enamored of narrative theology.

Less than one month into my first church job I realized that I had been grossly mistaken.  Stories provide meaning only when they are attached to some scaffolding that offers structure.  My confessional tradition had been doing that for me, even when I was disdainful of it.  When I encountered students who had no such scaffolding at all, I saw the limits of narrative.

All of which is prompted by the fact that my Christianity and Culture class has just begun reading Community of Character by Hauerwas, and I keep finding myself saying “Yes, but…”  It’s a good book; I did choose it for this class, after all.  But it needs some qualification.

 

Conference on the Ascension – Call for Papers

I’m part of the planning team for a multi-denominational conference on Reformed understandings of the ascension sponsored by The Fellowship of Presbyterians.  My job is to be the coordinator of paper submissions.  So here’s the CFP.

“The Ascension of Christ: Christ has Gone Up; The Church has been Sent Out”

April 25-27, 2016

Venue: First Presbyterian Church, San Diego

The doctrine of Christ’s ascension has always been important in the Reformed tradition.  One clear statement of the Reformed perspective is found in the Heidelberg Catechism, which notes that Christ’s ascension benefits us in three ways: “First, he is our advocate in heaven in the presence of his Father. Second, we have our own flesh in heaven as a sure pledge that Christ our head will also take us, his members, up to himself.  Third, he sends his Spirit to us on earth as a corresponding pledge.  By the Spirit’s power we seek not earthly things but the things above, where Christ is, sitting at God’s right hand” (Q/A 49).  The Catechism also points out that the ascension has implications for our understanding of the two natures of Christ, saying “Christ’s divinity is surely beyond the bounds of the humanity that has been taken on, but at the same time his divinity is in and remains personally united to his humanity” (Q/A 48).  Similarly, the Westminster Larger Catechism notes that Christ Jesus “in our nature, and as our head, triumphing over enemies, visibly went up into the highest heavens, there to receive gifts for men, to raise up our affections thither, and to prepare a place for us, where he himself is…” (Q/A 53).  Other Reformed confessions could be cited with similar claims about the central importance of the ascension of Christ.  We hope in this conference to gather theologians and pastors from a variety of Presbyterian and Reformed denominations to explore this shared emphasis. Confirmed plenary speakers are Michael Horton (Westminster Seminary West) and Laura Smit (Calvin College), with more to be announced soon.

For this conference, we are interested in constructive theological papers that work within this Reformed tradition to explore the implications of Christ’s ascension for the Church’s mission in the world today.  Starting from within the Reformed confessional tradition, we wish to consider what difference the ascension of Jesus makes for our on-going work of evangelism, discipleship, and worship.  Please send submissions via email to Professor Laura Smit (lsmit@calvin.edu) by December 1.  Submissions must include your name and preferred title, institutional affiliation (whether school or church), denominational affiliation, an abstract of no more than 200 words, and a statement regarding any audio-visual needs.  Papers should be short enough to be presented within 20 minutes.  Notification of acceptance will be given by February 1.    

Learning to See the Sky

This summer I took a trip around the northern shore of Lake Superior with the goal of being somewhere dark and clear where I could get a good look at the sky.  I had a dim hope of being able to see the northern lights; that didn’t happen.  Another trip is clearly needed.  But I did see some beautiful stars.

While I was in Thunder Bay, I paid a visit to the Astronomy Centre at Fort William Historical Park one evening.  I was the only person who showed up, and I got a lot of personal attention, including a tutorial on how to take pictures of the sky with my camera.

But the coolest thing was that the docent took my iPhone, put it up to the telescope eyepiece, and took pictures of the moon for me.  They’re so beautiful!

As I moved on around the lake, I tried to take pictures on my own from my campsites.  Although this was the view from my campsite at Lake Superior Provincial Park, by nightfall it was all clouded over.  So not so much success.

Nothing daunted, after I’d been home for a week I went back north to the Dark Sky Park near Mackinaw City to watch the Perseid meteor shower with my friend Kate.  I didn’t see very many meteors, even though my attention did not wander from the sky.  Most of the time I would hear the people around me go “ooooh” and realize that I had again been looking in the wrong area.  (I feel like Donna Noble – let the Whovians understand.)  Although I got no pictures of meteors, I did get some nice pictures of the sky.  They are too large to add to this post, so you’ll just have to take my word for it.  Many dots of light, some clouds, glimpses of the Milky Way.

Part of my motivation for this new interest in the sky is the fact that C. S. Lewis loved looking at the stars and often wrote in his letters about what he was observing through his home telescope in the evenings.  And part of my motivation is a growing awareness of how different my experience of the night is from the medieval thinkers I most love to study.  But I think that most of my sudden need to look at the sky comes from the fact that I’ve just had a very urban year.  Now I want to be somewhere that’s away from the city lights, somewhere that’s dark at night.

So maybe now I should start paying attention when the observatory on my campus a few feet away from my house has open viewing evenings….

Faith, not Sight

I spoke in chapel at Regents Park College on Friday, June 12, having been assigned the gospel and epistle lessons for the following Sunday. Here’s my best memory of what I said.

Mark 4 begins with a very familiar parable: “A sower went out to sow….” Most of us probably know this parable, and more than that we know with some certainty what it means. That’s because this parable, unlike most, is one that Jesus himself explains. In verses 10-20, he offers to his disciples a detailed explanation of what each element of the parable stands for. More than that, he promises that he will always tell them what his parables mean, even if he leaves the crowds baffled by the mystery.

So when we then move on to a series of four brief, enigmatic parables, we expect that we will again receive an explanation. These are parables about what is hidden becoming visible, what is earned becoming great beyond deserving, what is potential becoming actual, and what is small becoming great. Our reading today includes the last two of those four: the parable of a farmer sowing seed and reaping a crop many months later, and the parable of the tiny mustard seed growing into a large and fruitful plant. What is the power that produces these transformations?

Even on the literal level of the stories themselves, this is by no means obvious.

We may be tempted to think that the mystery of these parables is simply a result of the primitive ignorance of the first hearers, but this would be to over-estimate our own understanding. Even the most accomplished plant biologist cannot give an exhaustive explanation of the power that leads a seed to become a plant. And if we think for a moment, we know that this mystery remains in many subjects, not just botany, even for 21^st century people full of arrogance about our scientific knowledge. Indeed, every academic in the room knows that our academic work is rooted precisely in this mystery, in our awareness of wonder about some area of life that may seem obvious and clear until we think about it deeply, but that – upon reflection – reveals itself to be anything but obvious. Aristotle says that philosophy begins in wonder, but so does every study. No matter how much we investigate and explore, we ultimately run up against the unknown, the confusing, the mysterious, the wonderful. And often our wonder is produced precisely by the sorts of transformations announced in these parables – the movement from invisibility to visibility, from darkness to light, from predictable to unexpected, from clearly caused to prodigally generous, from potentiality to actuality, from barrenness to fruitfulness, from smallness to greatness.

Which is why I say that even on a literal level, the power that Jesus is discussing is by no means obvious. And if that power is not obvious, how much less obvious is the Power to which the parables are pointing. For what great transformations are these small transformations analogies? And how mysterious must be the Power that could produce such transformations, so far beyond our every-day experience? Granted that we expect the Power to be divine in some way; there is still much here that remains unclear and that we would be grateful to have elucidated.

And so we wait for the explanation that we have been promised. Surely Jesus will make this all clear. But no. Although verses 33 and 34 at the end of our passage set us up to expect such an explanation from Jesus, no explanation is forthcoming.

Perhaps this is because this Power is beyond reason, beyond didactic explanation, perhaps beyond articulation. At the beginning of the Summa, Aquinas explains that in order to understand the Christian life we need a knowledge that is beyond reason, because the end toward which we are being drawn is God Himself, Who is beyond reason. He argues that we need a knowledge that is revealed to us, a knowledge that reason could never attain. And in his Centuries, Thomas Traherne argues that just as a magnet invisibly and mysteriously draws metal toward itself, so God mysteriously draws us. He says that we need parables and other indirect language to explore these “invisible ways of conveyance” by which God communicates His love to us. Perhaps in this case the parable cannot be reduced to a reasonable explanation.

And so Mark declines to provide such an explanation of these four parables. But he does not leave us hanging. He offers an explanation not via discourse but via events. The four parables are followed in the book of Mark by four works of power.

First, Jesus goes out onto the sea with his disciples, and when a great storm arises they find themselves in a watery chaos that reminds us of the watery chaos at the beginning of Genesis. The world is dissolving, and they expect to die. In the face of this chaos, Jesus reveals himself as the one with power even over the winds and the waves, the one with power to bring order out of chaos. He is the Creator, calling into existence a new creation, and the disciples are going through the waters of a baptismal death into a new life. This newness is seen in the subsequent three stories. A man who has been captured by demons, who has lost his humanity, who cannot even speak, is restored to his right mind and becomes a disciple of Jesus. A woman who is in a perpetual state of uncleanness and infertility is healed and restored to wholeness. And a dead child is brought back to life. The fullness of humanity is restored in these three stories. As our epistle lesson tells us, when anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation.

Now I suppose that Jesus could have simply told the disciples this. He could have said: “These four parables about the mystery of natural transformation point to the far more wonderful transformation that comes when I as your Creator, your Lord, and your God take you into union with myself, set you free from the powers of sin and death, and give you a new birth into a living hope.” What would that possibly have meant to his disciples, here at the beginning of his ministry? How could they possibly have understood this? And so he shows them. He enacts the truth that they so desperately need to know.   Aquinas says that our great need is revelation, and in these acts of power Jesus reveals himself beyond anything our reason could figure out for itself. Traherne says that our great need is love, and in these acts of power Jesus reveals himself as the One who cares deeply that we are perishing and who loves us enough to make us new.

How do we enter into this new life? Paul says that we walk by faith, and not by sight. We move beyond empirical investigation, beyond reasonable deduction, beyond what we can figure out on our own, to surrender not to some abstract power but to Jesus himself. Jesus, who is the great revelation of the love of God, has come to make us new. He is the One who moves us from hiddenness to glory, from works to grace, from barrenness to fertility, from death to life.

Over and over, we choose to walk by sight, and when we do we also choose death and barrenness. We must close our eyes to reason, and hear a parable instead. We must cease to be committed to an idea or an ideology and be committed to the person of Jesus instead.