I am no expert on N. T. Wright’s theology, but I know enough to reject those charges of his critics that he is weak on “the substitutionary atonement.” Here is the clincher for me, from one of his meditations in The Crown and the Fire: “Jesus, the innocent one, was drawing on to himself the holy wrath of God against human sin in general, so that human sinners like you and me can find, as we look at the cross, that the load of sin and guilt we have been carrying is taken away from us.”
To be sure, Wright has also been calling us to think more expansively about the atoning work of Christ. But he has never advocated doing away with substitution as an essential feature of Christ’s redemptive mission.
The more expansive context is nicely captured by Scot McKnight’s helpful golf clubs image. We need several clubs to play a good game of golf, McKnight observes, and the putter is one of many. But the putter is typically necessary to get the ball in the hole.
One of my colleagues responded to that image in a way that I found helpful. He pointed out that sometimes a golfer does make a hole-in-one, without the aid of a putter. And he observed that some folks in Young Life have reported that there are teenagers who have been brought to Christ by a strong emphasis on the Christus Victor theme. Kids into “Goth, “ vampires, witchcraft and the like often respond most positively to the idea that the powers of evil have been conquered by Christ’s encounter on the Cross with “the principalities and powers.”
A point well taken. But still, holes-in-one are not common occurrences. Normally, the use of the putter is necessary. It’s just one of the clubs, to be sure. But an important one.
Here’s my worry about contemporary talk, especially among some younger evangelicals, about atonement theory. They rightly say that the atonement is more than substitution. But they often proceed then as if it were less than substitution.
I was at a conference a while back where a younger preacher said rather forcefully that he seldom mentions the substitutionary work of Christ anymore in his sermons. Instead, he talks about how Christ encountered “the Powers” of consumerism, militarism, racism, super-patriotism and the like. I left that conference troubled in my soul. I was driving a rental car to another city, and I turned on the radio which, as it happened, was tuned to “Christian radio.” I was about to search for NPR when I decided to stay tuned to the recording of a man who was telling his story to a group of fellow business folks. I’m glad I listened.
The man told about a time when he was increasingly successful in his business dealings, while increasingly dissolute in his personal lifestyle: drinking heavily, unfaithful to his wife, distant from his children, his marriage headed toward divorce. His wife and daughters were active in church life, but he never attended.
One Saturday evening, after he had downed several martinis, his 10-year-old daughter came to him and pleaded with him to come to church the next morning—she was part of a singing group that would have a role in the service. He reluctantly agreed—something he greatly regretted the next morning when he awoke hung over. But to church he went.
In his testimony he then described what he heard for the first time in his life in the sermon that morning: that he was a guilty sinner who needed salvation, and that Jesus had taken his sin and guilt upon himself on the Cross of Calvary. Weeping, the man said, he pleaded with God to take away his burden of shame, and from that point on his life took a new direction.
I’m glad the preacher had a putter in his theological golf bag that morning. The other clubs are, to be sure, important. But this is the one that made all the difference on that occasion. I hear a lot of creative stuff these days about Christ’s non-violent suffering, his incarnational love—again, all good and proper. But I find myself also listening for the theme that assures me that the whole story of atonement is being told: that I can say as a guilty sinner that “my sin, not in part, but the whole//is nailed to the Cross and I bear it no more.”
I resented Billy Berger (I’m changing his name here) for four decades. Sometimes, in the earliest years, the resentment felt like it approached outright despising. At the root of it, though, was envy.
Like me, Billy Berger was a preacher’s kid. In fact, our fathers served as pastors of the same congregation—with Billy’s dad serving first. Billy was the same age as I, which meant that all the neighborhood kids, and just about everyone in my seventh and eighth grade classes at the local public school, knew Billy.
And they praised him a lot. So much so, that sometimes it really hurt. Betty Boyd (also not her real name) was a case in point. She liked to sketch plans for houses, and I had a bit of a crush on her. So she deeply wounded me when one day she proudly showed me a drawing and said: “This is the house that Billy Berger and I will live in when we are married.”
And then there was the time that Billy came back to town with his parents for a visit. It was summer, and we were on vacation when they visited. When I returned home, there was much talk about how wonderful it was to have seen Billy again. One young man whom I considered a good friend even told me that all the kids liked Billy Berger better than me. I cried myself to sleep that night.
Several years ago, I preached at a church in the Midwest. After the service I stood greeting parishioners at the door, and I saw one man, about my age, hanging back, waiting for the chance to speak with me when the others had passed.
When the time came, he thanked me for my sermon, and then went on, haltingly. “You have no reason to know who I am, but I’ve known about you for a long time. My name is Billy Berger, and my dad served at (——) Church before your dad. We knew all of the same kids in school.” I started to tell him that I did indeed know who he was, but he waved me off. “I have to confess something to you,” he said. “I have resented you for a long time. Once we went back to visit, and all my old friends told me how wonderful you were. Someone even said that Betty Boyd had a crush on you.” And then, some tears. “I’m glad I came to church today. It seems dumb to say it, but I feel like a burden has been lifted.”
The tears came to me too, and I told him that I too needed some burden-lifting. It was not a long conversation, but an important one. We hugged and he went on his way.
I’m not sure exactly what the spiritual lesson was in all of that. But that there was one, I have no doubt.
Phyllis and I have been talking lately about what we sometimes hear as a reason why people do not attend church. It’s not that they have no interest in spiritual matters, they say. It’s just that they get their spiritual inspiration by “spending time in nature.” Walking in the woods, listening to birds sing, watching a sunset, reflecting along a shoreline—these are for them the ways they get in touch with the divine.
We don’t find these testimonies to be without merit. In fact, it has some attraction for us. A local nature reserve near our home offers Sunday morning Audubon-sponsored bird-watching walks, and we would like to go. Furthermore, given the many church service times we have to choose from at our home congregation, we could do so without simply skipping church. And for us, the bird-watching walk would also be a way of connecting with God in nature.
I recently came across an Emily Dickinson poem that stimulated my thoughts on this subject:
Some keep the Sabbath going to church;
I keep it staying at home,
With a bobolink for a chorister,
And an orchard for a dome.
Some keep the Sabbath in surplice;
I just wear my wings,
And instead of tolling the bell for church,
Our little sexton sings.
God preaches,—a noted clergyman,—
And the sermon is never long;
So instead of getting to heaven at last,
I ’m going all along!
What is theologically and spiritually off-base in this poem is that the poet is treating her times listening to birds sing under the orchard’s “dome” as a legitimate substitute for church worship. Having said that, though, I still like the poem, especially if we take it as showing how time in nature can serve as an important spiritual supplement to corporate worship.
Here we can draw some encouragement from the Reformation era confessions. The Westminster Confession points us in the right direction when it tells us that “the light of nature, and the works of creation and providence… manifest the goodness, wisdom, and power of God.” Unfortunately, it quickly blunts the positive point it is making there when it immediately stipulates that all of this serves mainly “to leave men inexcusable”— since the things that are revealed in nature aren’t “sufficient to give that knowledge of God, and of his will, which is necessary unto salvation.”
The Belgic Confession is more helpful. While it also eventually gets around to the “without excuse” rider, it takes a little more time than the Westminster to get there. “[T]he creation, preservation and government of the universe,” it tells us, “is before our eyes as a most elegant book, wherein all creatures, great and small, are as so many characters leading us to contemplate the invisible things of God, namely His power and divinity.”
Emily Dickinson can be seen as a gifted reader of the “elegant book” that God has provided for folks who spend time in orchards listening to the birds sing. We would all do well to give careful attention to what that “book” is intended to teach us. But we do need the other Book—where the Lord tells us all of those things that are “necessary unto salvation”—including how best to honor, as his redeemed people, the “all creatures, great and small” that are also loved by the One who has saved us.
Phyllis made a good suggestion about how to integrate what goes on in both church services and nature walks. Someone should write a collection of biblically based devotionals, she said, for people who claim to get more out of spending time in orchards than they do in corporate worship. Such devotionals might even bring them back to church, as necessary supplement to their nature walks. A great assignment for someone who is skilled at carefully reading both “books”! Or maybe it has been done?
The Muslim scholar and I were sitting at dinner together, and he was telling me about his involvement in a Muslim project devoted to interfaith dialogue. “How about the faith and culture questions?” I asked. “The attempt in places like France to regulate how Muslim women dress in public—is that a big topic for you and your colleagues?”
“Ah, the burqa,” he said. “It’s too bad that is such a big issue. Especially since for many of us it ought not to be an issue at all. The Qur’an, you know, says nothing about that kind of thing. There is nothing in our Islamic tradition that requires women to cover themselves in that way!”
Part of me was pleased with his attitude. Like many Muslim intellectuals with whom I have talked, he is eager to encourage the Islamic community to find its proper place in larger pluralistic democracies. That kind of project is extremely important. And to the degree that the burqa is an expression of resistance to the call to live together with mutual respect, it is something that we should want to disappear.
But there is another part of me that resists the idea that we should be abandoning those forms of dress that are expressions of religious conviction that stand over against the dominant culture. A few days after my conversation with the Muslim scholar I was in an airport, sitting at the gate area, waiting for my plane. A young nun, wearing the habit of her community, was sitting nearby. A teenage girl passing by the nun stumbled and dropped some things she was carrying. The nun quickly stepped forward and helped her retrieve her belongings. I saw their eyes meet for a brief moment as the girl thanked the nun for helping. The nun smiled and wished her safe travels.
The teenager was wearing a tee-shirt bearing the Satanic symbol of a rock band, and had several tattoos and piercings. It was an interesting brief encounter. Two modes of dress that spoke very different messages.
I was glad that the young nun was wearing her habit. I felt the same way about two Mennonite women, wearing head coverings and long skirts, who passed by a few moments later.
In those brief moments in the airport, I resolved to live with some ambivalence about the burqa.
BP, as we all know, is in big trouble as the oil continues to spill into the Gulf waters. But recently the company drew additional criticism when its board chair said that his company recognized the woes that this crisis was inflicting on the “small people.”
The angry response to his comment temporarily caught me up short. A week before reading about the controversy, I had sent off to the publisher my final draft of a short book manuscript on Abraham Kuyper’s theology of culture. At one point in my manuscript I mentioned the fact that the Dutch statesman-theologian was well known in his day for his affection for de kleine luyden—“the little people.” I had not felt the need, when I reported this in my study of Kuyper, to apologize on his behalf. Which makes me wonder whether there is a difference between Kuyper’s attitude and that of the BP leadership.
I think there is a difference. The “small people” comment by the BP leader came across as condescending. For Kuyper, on the other hand, the term “little” was an expression of affection, of deep concern. He worried much about political and economic systems in which the voices of “ordinary” people are not heard. Those who often appear to be “low” in the eyes of the powerful are “high” in God’s estimation.
To be sure, the line between affection and mere condescension can be a thin one. But it must be respected. In Isaiah’s prophecy, for example, two of the images of leadership employed are shepherd and father. The good shepherd “gently leads those who are with young.” And a godly king is a “nursing father.” While each of those can be taken in the wrong direction, properly understood they point to the need for leadership to be sustained by a genuine empathy for those the leader has been called to serve.
Sometimes people who regularly profess a concern for the poor do so in a condescending spirit. This comes through when “the oppressed” becomes an abstraction, or when a commitment to “the marginalized” is so heavily freighted with ideology that real people themselves get marginalized.
I once spoke to an ecumenical gathering where I held up John Perkins’ “Voice of Calvary” ministries in Mississippi as an admirable program for serving those in need. I described how Perkins had set up a health clinic and had organized food cooperatives for the poor. At a reception afterward, a person from a denominational agency berated me for advocating a “band-aid” approach for dealing with poverty. “These little measures do no good,” she said. “We need a revolution that redistributes wealth!” But what about actual suffering people in Mississippi? I asked—surely the “band-aids” of medicine for the sick and food for hungry children can be a significant blessing. She smirked: “You do them no good by offering them false hope!”
A year later at a gathering of the same group, also at a wine-and-cheese reception, I heard her once again holding forth about the futility of band-aids. I offered up a silent prayer for what John Perkins had been doing for real human beings in the meantime.
Some of my warmest memories from childhood are of an adult lovingly applying a band-aid to a cut or a scrape. The line between affection and mere condescension can be a thin one, but most of us have experienced a real difference between the two. And my clear sense is that the BP chairman and Abraham Kuyper were on different sides of the thin line.
There have been reports in a couple of different places about a 30-year study of the capacity of empathy in college students. Among other things, the researchers tested the ability to “read” another person’s facial expressions. Comparing the data between 1979 and 2009, the report concludes that there has been a 40 percent decline among folks in their late teens in the ability to empathize with others.
In the 1995 film “Clueless,” there was a scene where two high school girls walking side by side in a school hallway were talking to each other on their cell phones. I thought it was a funny caricature of teen culture at the time, but that kind of thing has become commonplace. Young people are communicating more than ever, but they are relying less these days on face-to-face encounters; instead they are texting, twittering, emailing, cell phoning, facebooking—sometimes while sitting in the same room with the folks with whom they are communicating.
A sermon that I have often held up as an example of a really bad use of Scripture was based on a Gospel phrase about Jesus: “and he looked at her.” The whole sermon was about the importance of making eye contact. I’m still not ready to endorse the hermeneutic that the preacher employed. But maybe we need to find some more legitimate ways of issuing biblically based appeals for more face-to-face communication!
Shortly after the Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity early in the fourth century A.D., he issued the Edict of Milan (in 313), not only legalizing Christianity, but actually making it the official religion of the Roman Empire. This resulted in such a close relationship between church and state—the “Christendom” arrangement—that infant baptism was for all practical purposes the entry-point into citizenship. Thus, often these days when some religion is seen as being too closely linked to political power, the specter of “Constantinianism” is quickly raised.
The criticisms of the Constantinian arrangement are legitimate. When the church allies itself too closely with political power it loses the freedom to be the kind of church that God wants it to be. The late Lesslie Newbigin, who served for many years during the twentieth century as a missionary in India, made this case very effectively. When Newbigin returned to the British Isles after his retirement, he was shocked by the major cultural changes that had taken place there, as well as on the European continent and in North America. When he had begun his career he had seen himself as being sent out from a Christian culture—where Christianity was “the established religion”— to a mission field. But now he realized that his own homeland had become a mission field. Christians in the West, Newbigin observed, could no longer take a dominant Christian influence for granted. We are now, he said, “post-Christendom.” But that is not a thing to be regretted, he quickly added. The church should always see itself as “missional.” The Christendom arrangement lured the church into a sense of “owning” the culture that kept it from full faithfulness to the gospel.
All of that is good and important. The problem, though, is that sometimes the folks who make much of the dangers of Constantinianism and Christendom are placing too strict limits on how Christians can relate to public life. This was made clear to me in a conversation with someone who thought that my own views were dangerously close to Constantinianism. I pushed the person to explain why he interpreted my perspective in that manner. His response came in the form of two questions: Do I think that Christians can work effectively for Christian goals “within the American political system”? And do I believe that Christians can not only endorse the use of violence in law enforcement and military campaigns, but actually themselves serve as police and members of the military?
I responded to both questions in the affirmative, but also with the necessary qualifications. I believe that there are limits to the kinds of political compromises that a Christian can agree to. And I also believe that police action and military campaigns must be conducted within the kind of moral framework associated with “just war doctrine.” The person’s response was an “Aha! So you admit it. You really are a Constantinian!”
Actually, I do think Constantine had something right. And here I take an important clue from Lesslie Newbigin. As critical as he was of the Constantinian/Christendom arrangement, he insisted (in his Foolishness to the Greeks, 100-101) that we must be careful in our assessment of the errors of that arrangement. “Much has been written,” he observed, “about the harm done to the cause of the gospel when Constantine accepted baptism, and it is not difficult to expatiate on this theme.” There can be no question, Newbigin said, that the church has regularly fallen “into the temptation of worldly power.” But he goes on: Should we conclude from this that the proper alternative was for the church simply to “have … washed its hands of responsibility for the political order?” Do we really think, Newbigin asks, that the cause of the gospel would have been better served “if the church had refused all political responsibility, if there had never been a ‘Christian’ Europe?” The fact is, he notes, that the Constantinian project had its origins in a creative response to a significant cultural challenge. There was in Constantine’s day, he says, a spiritual crisis in the larger culture, and people “turned to the church as the one society that could hold a disintegrating world together.” And for all the mistakes that were made along the way, it was nonetheless a good thing that the church actively took up this challenge.
That is insightful. There is nothing wrong with working within the present political structures to serve the cause of righteousness in the world. But we must always do so with an awareness of the Constantinian danger of forming an unhealthy—and unfaithful!—alliance between the church and political power.
I’m a year behind in watching Lost. I’m in the middle of last season’s DVDs in my time each morning on the exercise bike. So I did not watch the grand finale. But I’ve heard a lot of talk about it around the Fuller campus. And much of it is theological: purgatory, salvation, good and evil, crucifixes and church sanctuaries. All of that is fine. I’ll probably have theological thoughts of my own when I catch up with everyone else.Lost lends itself nicely to that kind of theological discussion—maybe even a little too nicely. But right now I’m more caught up in thinking about the series finale I did watch after faithfully viewing every episode for eight seasons: “24.”The Jack Bauer saga was a great run. And there were at least some hints at theological themes at the end. The really evil guy, former president Logan, was trying to convince President Taylor, herself involved in a terrible cover-up, that the only hope the two had of not having their evil deeds exposed was to do away with Jack Bauer. Hearing this speech, I pushed the pause button on the recording and got off my exercise bike to write down the relevant phrases. If Bauer lives, said Logan, he will not give up in his fight against the folks responsible for the cover-up: “He will rise up out of the deepest hole in the ground” to make things right.President Taylor eventually saw the error of her ways and public repented. What brought her to her moment of truth was a recorded message from Jack, in which he expressed the deep conviction that a truly “lasting peace” can come only with “trust” and “honesty.”
Not bad for a character widely criticized for having an end-justifies-the-means approach to fighting evil. Of course, Jack did not die in the end, so we don’t have to look for him to “rise up” again from some deep place in the earth. And that’s a good thing. For one thing, it means that we may yet see Jack and Chloe again, this time in a full-length film. More importantly, it would have been yet another wasted death. There was really no chance of a real “rising up” if Jack had died. It’s already been done—and with a genuine guarantee of an ultimate “lasting peace.”
In a recent column published in the magazine The New Republic, Leon Wieseltier criticized President Obama for the kind of language the president uses when he discusses Islam. Wieseltier makes no secret of his own commitment to a secularist outlook when he refers to “Obama’s creepy habit of addressing Muslims in religious terms.” What Mr. Obama’s rhetoric fails to recognize, says Wieseltier, is that the main conflict relating to Islam these days is not one between the Muslim religion and the rest of society. Rather it is the battle within Islam, between those who focus exclusively on religious categories and those who are working toward the “secularization” of Muslim life. And Wieseltier is not subtle in telling us which segment of contemporary Islam he finds “creepy.”
My guess is that Mr. Wieseltier would also find me and many of my fellow evangelicals to be creepy. Like Muslims of deep conviction, we oppose much that is associated with the idea of “secularization” in the mind of someone like Leon Wieseltier. It is important to say right off, though, that there are key elements of the process of secularization that we ought to affirm. Where things go wrong is when secular-ization, however, becomes secular-ism, especially in the attempt to consign religion to a purely “private” realm, one where religious beliefs and values have no legitimate place in dealing with public matters. Thus, the legitimate advocacy of “the separation of church and state” is transformed into the misguided insistence on the separation of religion and public life. And here is where many of us as evangelicals want to join our Muslim friends in protesting that kind of confusion.
Ian Buruma recognizes this commonality in his recent book, Taming the Gods: Religion and Democracy on Three Continents. In discussing the hostility that many in Europe worry about in experiencing the growth of Muslim communities in their midst, he sees that opposition as having much to do with the way in which the Muslim presence is seen as a significant force for resisting the secularization of life in the West. And then he makes special mention of evangelicalism: the evangelical movement in North America, he says, has much in common on this score with Muslims in Europe.
Like our Muslim counterparts, our religious beliefs are for each of our communities matters of deep conviction. And each of our communities worries much about the ways in which many of the dominant patterns of the larger culture—especially the larger culture of the West—pose a serious threat to the maintenance of these deep convictions.
The huge challenge that we evangelicals face these days in this regard, then, is how do we live out our faith in a pluralistic society in which we acknowledge the rights of our fellow citizens—people whose values, beliefs and lifestyles we often strongly disagree with—to acknowledge nonetheless their rights to enjoy the same freedoms that we claim for ourselves? And this is a topic about which Muslims and evangelicals have much to discuss together.
Someone recently talked about what are seen these days as the failures of the kind of liberation theology that got much attention in the 1970s and ’80s. I agreed with many of the criticisms. But I balked a bit at the suggestion that the Latin American liberation theologians simply superimposed a “political ideology” on Christianity. That certainly was true in some cases. But there were noteworthy exceptions, particularly in what is widely acknowledged to be the classic text of that movement, A Theology of Liberation, by Gustavo Gutierrez.
I often quote Gutierrez as a wise voice on the importance of a contemplative spiritual life. In his book he made it clear that he was aware of the dangers of absolutizing our own favorite political causes, and thereby being highly selective in drawing on those resources of Christianity that are useful in promoting our own pre-established goals. As a corrective to this tendency, he argued that the Christian life must be “filled with a living sense of gratuitousness. Communion with the Lord and with all men is more than anything else a gift.” Furthermore, he contended, prayer, as the means by which we engage in our communion with God, “is an experience of gratuitousness.” Properly understood, prayer is entering into God’s presence with no agenda, with no list of causes that we insist on promoting. Prayer, he says, is a “‘leisure’ action”; it is a “‘wasted’ time, [that] reminds us that the Lord is beyond the categories of useful and useless. God is not of this world.” In our prayerful communion with God we look forward to goals that God has set, ones that can only be fully realized when the Reign of God arrives at the end-time: “Every prophetic proclamation of total liberation is accompanied by an invitation to participate in eschatological joy: ‘I will take delight in Jerusalem and rejoice in my people” (Isa. 65:19). And then this: “[O]ur joy is paschal, guaranteed by the Spirit.” (Gustavo Gutierrez, A Theology of Liberation: History, Politics and Salvation, Orbis Books, 1973, 206-207)
That’s hard to improve upon as a wonderful call to the self-critical life of prayer!
