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Egypt’s Redemption—and Ours

Bonnie Kristian — Mon, 09 Dec 2024 11:00:00 +0000

The Christmas story is not a story of peace and quiet but a tale of tumult and danger.

It is the story of the Son sent of the Father into a harsh world, of a difficult journey from Nazareth to Bethlehem, of the magi travelling far from the East. It is a story of angelic visits; mass migration; murder; deceit; and finally, Joseph, Mary, and Jesus fleeing for Egypt to save their lives. It is a story that barely lets us catch our breath.

And it is within this peril that we find God working a surprising reversal that will be for the salvation of those “who were far away” as much as “those who were near” (Eph. 2:17)—the salvation of one of Israel’s oldest enemies alongside the holy family. God moves to Egypt to “say to those called ‘Not my people,’ ‘You are my people.’” And just as he promised, they come to respond, “You are my God” (Hos. 2:23; Rom. 9:23–25).

The story of Joseph, Mary, and Jesus running from the tyranny of King Herod appears in no one’s Nativity play. We leave it out of the front-lawn creche. It is found only in Matthew’s telling of Jesus’ birth (2:13–23), where it concludes an account of great violence: After learning of the impending birth of a new king in Bethlehem, Herod the Great flies into a fit of rage, ordering all the male infants in the area to be murdered (2:16–18). Wailing mothers add their voices to the songs of the angels, and the young family, having been warned by an angel of this impending disaster, flees south. They remain in Egypt until after Herod dies (2:13–15, 19–20).

This is a curious story, for consider where Jesus and his family go: They escape the massacre by returning not to their hometown but to Egypt, where Israel’s national history began. It was in Egypt that the people of God were told the name of God (Ex. 3:14), that Moses came to them, that events began which culminated in God’s giving of the Law.

Egypt was not, in the Old Testament, a place of respite, even if its leeks and onions were delightful and its food delicious (Num. 11:5). And yet, the one who fulfilled the Law leaves the land of promise and is carried into Egypt. It is a surprising turn of events that the land which oppressed Israel now becomes a haven for Israel’s Messiah.

To be sure, Egypt was the place of refuge for Jacob’s family before it was the place of their enslavement. And it was often Egypt with whom early Israel traded and made alliances (1 Kings 3:1). But Egypt in the Old Testament was also symbolic of the empires of the world. It was a people destined for destruction, the nation that attacked Israel in the days of Rehoboam (2 Chron. 12:2). Both Isaiah (20:3–4) and Ezekiel (29:12) warn against trusting Egypt.

The holy family’s flight to Egypt inaugurated a change in Egypt’s relationship to God and his people. In the first few centuries after Christ, Egypt became one of the most important centers of early Christianity.

Legend has it that Saint Mark came to Alexandria, Egypt, as early as AD 41, inaugurating the church there. In the decades that followed, Alexandria was the center of debate over Christ’s divinity, a conversation that led to the first great churchwide council in Nicaea in AD 325. Egypt was also the epicenter of early Christian desert monasticism. The early diocese of Egypt helped support Christianity across North Africa, and it was the home of Athanasius, Origen, Anthony, and Cyril—titans of early Christianity. Today, Egypt remains home to one of the oldest Christian traditions, the Coptic church.

The moment when the holy family flees as refugees into Egypt turns a page in God’s story. No longer is Egypt only the land where Israel was enslaved and false gods trounced. It is now the land that has sheltered the infant Christ, honored as the first among the Gentiles to welcome the Messiah.

This part of the Christmas story gives us a new perspective on how God works: across millennia, not minutes or days or even years. For the arc of history is long and bends toward the redemption not only of Israel but also of Egypt and of all who call upon the name of the Lord (Rom. 10:13). God is not slow in keeping his promises as some count slowness (2 Pet. 3:9). In Christmas, we see the promises of history coming to pass, including the promise that Israel would be a blessing to all the nations (Gen. 12:4).

That the villain of the Old Testament would become a hero in the New Testament is emblematic of the Christian hope. We hope for just this kind of surprise, that stories moving in one direction might yet have a different, better ending. We hope without ceasing that God’s great patience will provide time for the Holy Spirit to bring forth the church in all places. We hope that broken relationships will not always be broken, that by God’s mercy our political despair might contain the seeds of renewal. We hope for Esau to reconcile with Jacob, for the Prodigal Son to return home, for the cedars of Lebanon and the Temple Mount to be at peace again.

Christian hope does not mean setting aside good judgment or being dishonest about the past but trusting that our enemies too will enjoy being part of God’s good story. It does not mean setting aside reckoning of wrongs or forgetting the Exodus. It means telling a fuller and better story in which Egypt is also the cradle of Christian monasticism, hermeneutics, and preaching. It means telling the full truth of our enemies: that they too are beloved of God, that God has plans for them of which we do not know, that he is moving among them in ways which we cannot always see in full.

As we approach Christmas, let this kind of biblical hope work itself into our imagination. Let us remember that Egypt rescues the Lord, that Assyria repents at Jonah’s preaching, that the Gentiles lay down their idols and come to the church. There will be many opportunities in the New Year to tell a partial truth about our enemies. But the good news we see in Matthew 2 is that the ones who enslaved Israel have become the first among the Gentiles to welcome the incarnate Son.

Myles Werntz is author of From Isolation to Community: A Renewed Vision for Christian Life Together. He writes at Christian Ethics in the Wild and teaches at Abilene Christian University.

The post Egypt’s Redemption—and Ours appeared first on Christianity Today.

Particular Wrongs Need Particular Remedies

CMS Admin — Wed, 01 May 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Christian theology consistently holds together truths that seem to want to fall apart: Jesus is fully God and fully human. People are sinners and created in the image of God. The church is local and universal.

And yet, despite what we affirm, in practice, Christians are often unable to walk and chew gum at the same time. Instead of holding two truths in tension, we tend to slide to one side or the other, distorting it in the process. We treat Jesus either as an invulnerable, transcendent being or as a mere prophet. We speak as if humans are either so degraded we are capable of nothing but sin or mostly fine with a few rough edges. We think of the church as if it were only our own sect or we minimize the local congregation.

Evangelical theologians have done great work in Christology, anthropology, and ecclesiology, respectively, to retrieve those three truthful tensions. But there is a fourth tension yet to be retrieved: All sins ruin us, and yet not all sins ruin us equally.

To start, let us be clear: Sin—however small—is a serious thing. And sin is only atoned for by the work of God in Jesus Christ. But saying that Christ is the only one who atones for all sin is different from saying that all sins do the same kind of work on us.

All sins break the sinner and create havoc around us. And yet the Scriptures consistently depict the sins we do as different, not only in effect on one another but before God. Within the Law, for example, different social remedies are given for different sins, and so are different sacrifices (Lev. 4; Ex. 21). Not everything requires a bull or a goat. Sometimes a dove will do. In the Prophets and Proverbs, God distinguishes—and even prioritizes—certain sins above others, and accounts for differences of intentional versus unintentional (Prov. 6:16–19; Ezek. 45:20).

Jesus names grieving the Holy Spirit in a category all its own (Matt. 12:31) and says some sins put us close to the fires of hell (Matt. 5:22). Paul likewise says that sins committed against our own bodies do particular kinds of damage that other sins do not do (1 Cor. 6:17–19).

Failing to hold these two truths about sin together has led us to moral confusion. For instance, there is a great deal of energy currently devoted to the matter of sexism in American churches. We should not hide the fact that the sin of sexism has done real damage within the church, but how we name that damage makes a great deal of difference.

As the accounting for these wrongs has begun, many discussions have bundled very different sins, lumping together anything from sexually abusive ministers to interpersonal biases. Every sin causes damage and requires repair, but common sense alone tells us these sins are meaningfully different. Raping a woman is not the same as having sexist assumptions about coworkers.

I don’t think that anyone would make the mistake of equating these sins. But once they’re grouped under a single label—sin—confusion sets in, because theologically, evangelicals treat this great range of actions as united in effect: Sin separates us from God, full stop. As we have already seen, this is true; but, in isolation, it misses much of the story. The payoff comes in our ethics. If our theology doesn’t let us distinguish between different sins with different kinds and scales of damage, we will have a hard time coming to appropriately different responses.

How did we get to this place? Part of the difficulty is overreading portions of Scripture—to confess with Romans 3:23, for example, that all have fallen short of God’s glory is not to say that all of the ways we fall short are the same. Saying that “there is no one righteous, not even one” (Rom. 3:10) is different from saying that all unrighteousness is alike in gravity or effect.

This ethos—that all sins are equal in nature—traces itself not to the New Testament but to the Reformation and later eras. Consider John Calvin, who argues, against an older tradition, that all sins—great or small—are damning ones. Or Jonathan Edwards’s contention that all sins by finite creatures are infinite offenses against an infinite God.

While treatments such as these have the effect of helping us to take all sins seriously, they also have the unintended effect of leveling all sins, such that it becomes difficult to say why accidental harm is different from intentional harm or why degrees of harm matter. When we simply frame all sins as damning sins, we ignore how Scripture recognizes that different sins break our relationship with God in different ways and, thus, require different temporal remedies. Christ’s atonement is the singular way that humanity is brought back into relationship with God, but restoring particular people to health requires different forms of repair.

Consider the example here of two disciples, Peter and James. Both disciples, we are told, are present with Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, and both flee (Matt. 26:56). But Peter’s flight from the Romans includes an active kind of denial (Matt. 26:69–75). Accordingly, Peter’s three-fold denial is met by Jesus’ three-fold question of whether Peter loved Jesus (John 21:15–17). A deeper and different kind of wound required a different kind of repair.

The older tradition of reflection on this question, seen in the work of theologians including Thomas Aquinas, differs from Calvin and Edwards in at least three important ways. First, it turns on the distinction between sins Christians commit intentionally and those we commit unintentionally. All sins are deviations from God’s will, but the ones we do deliberately are not the same as those we do in ignorance (Luke 12:47–48).

Second, while everyone is inclined toward sin, we are not all inclined to sin in the same way. Some struggle habitually with lust and others with pride. Though both sins lead us to destruction, we would be wrong to say they destroy our lives in the same way. The difference here is not their effect on others but on the nature of the sins themselves, the former being the desire for bodily pleasure and the latter the exaltation of the self above others and God. Lust may very well deform our minds and our desires, debasing us as creatures, but to nurse pride is ultimately to upend the moral universe, placing oneself above God.

And third, different sins require different remedies. To turn back to an earlier example, exposing sexual assault is different from exposing sexist thoughts. Both involve power, objectification, and sex. But they are also different: One is a violent act of will; the other is a mental or cultural habit. One requires legal intervention; the other requires interpersonal amends and discipleship.

Those differences are not only at the human level. God distinguishes between different sins too, and the way forward requires recognizing those differences. That means being able to say that some sins damage us more than others—the sins we deliberately commit are different from those done in ignorance or foolishness. It means understanding that all sin does damage, but different sins do different damage to sinner and victim alike. This recognition would make it easier to see what different responses to sin are needed.

Recovering this tension—that all sins ruin us, and yet not all sins ruin us equally—does not mean veering into the opposite error of self-serving sin ranking, of saying, Thank God, we are not like that tax collector (Luke 18:9–14). On the contrary, it means understanding that God knows each of us by name, knows our particular sins, and knows the particular virtues we need to recover from those sins.

This is the part of sanctification that comes after repentance: The lustful need chastity, the prideful humility, the violent peace, the uncharitable love. Scripture exhorts us to seek all these fruits of the Spirit’s work, which are perfected in the person of Jesus and given as God’s good gifts for particular sinners with particular wounds.

That all are broken by sin is without question. But the future for evangelicals must involve more nuance in our diagnoses, more recognition of the nature of each sin and its damage, and more attention to the slow path of virtue. For absent a remedy that attends to our brokenness in particular ways, we will continue to be like the house swept clean in Jesus’ parable in Matthew 12:43–45: There will be no new inhabitants of virtue to keep manifold demons at bay.

Myles Werntz is the author of From Isolation to Community: A Renewed Vision of Christian Life Together. He writes at Christian Ethics in the Wild and teaches at Abilene Christian University.

The post Particular Wrongs Need Particular Remedies appeared first on Christianity Today.

‘Bonhoeffer’ Bears Little Resemblance to Reality

Kate Lucky — Wed, 20 Nov 2024 11:00:00 +0000

Fifteen years ago, scholar Stephen Haynes mapped out the many interpretations of the life of 20th-century German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Bonhoeffer was a conservative who sought to restore Germany—or perhaps he was a progressive who wanted to move past stale dogmatism. Bonhoeffer was a closet Anabaptist, concerned with questions of the church first and society second. Or maybe he was the model of a theologian who cared primarily for social action here and now.

Figures as complex as Bonhoeffer are notoriously difficult to interpret well. Bonhoeffer left behind numerous monographs, sermons, correspondence, and theological writing, and since his death, there have been as many volumes of personal remembrances by friends and colleagues. All of this creates a complex and at times elusive figure, difficult to categorize within contemporary ideological movements. If we aren’t careful, situating Bonhoeffer in our own moment can be an exercise in wish fulfillment.

This is the trap into which the new film Bonhoeffer: Pastor. Spy. Assassin. falls. In the latest offering from Angel Studios, the story of Dietrich Bonhoeffer is an empty container into which our own desires—in this case, desires for a faith that serves political ends—are poured.

In one sense, Bonhoeffer is straightforward biography and is to be commended for introducing us to influences on his life that are frequently underplayed in the popular imagination: his family, his friends in the United States, his contacts in church bodies across Europe.

We watch as Bonhoeffer is educated in the finest German universities and becomes deeply concerned with the political direction of the country. He teaches at a freestanding seminary in Finkenwalde amid the rise of Nazi influence on the German church. After the seminary closes, he joins the Abwehr, a German military intelligence agency. Viewers meet his brother-in-law, also involved in the Abwehr, who took part in a Hitler assassination plot. We see Bonhoeffer arrested and dying in the Flossenbürg concentration camp days before the prisoners there were liberated by the Allies.

These facts are uncontroversial. But Bonhoeffer is more speculative than circumspect. Atop the familiar scaffolding of the theologian’s life, the film constructs the story of a man who, from childhood, seems destined to leave behind prayer for conspiracy, Bible teaching for political espionage, and theology for activism.

Rather than depicting a man of deep theological convictions and subtle intellect, Bonhoeffer tells the story of a man for whom moral convictions are a flexible and useful tool, a man whose actions are determined not by concerns for the church’s witness but by perceived historical necessity.

It is the story of a Bonhoeffer willing to do anything—including disavow the teachings of Jesus as he understood them—to assassinate Adolf Hitler.

Let us acknowledge that any biopic takes liberties with its subject. Screenwriters fill in gaps with imagined conversations and encounters not only to make a good film but also to demonstrate the individual’s character.

In this respect, Bonhoeffer is a typical film of its genre—even if the liberties it takes are a bit fanciful. For example, Bonhoeffer as a young man spent a year in New York at Union Theological Seminary, where he became acquainted with American racism and worshiped at the historic Abyssinian Baptist Church.

The film stretches these facts, depicting Bonhoeffer as leading his own jazz combo at a Harlem nightclub, being beaten in a confrontation with a racist hotel owner, and becoming an impassioned advocate for the rights of African Americans. These embellishments, entertaining as they may be, are designed less to fill up airtime than to depict Bonhoeffer as a crusader developing an appetite for justice.

Theologian Bonhoeffer is further eclipsed by political agent Bonhoeffer as the movie unfolds. As the Nazis rise to power, he says things like “I can’t pretend that praying and teaching is enough,” and “My dirty hands are all I have left to offer.” His well-known underground seminary at Finkenwalde is treated not as a place to faithfully train ordinands in the Confessing Church but as a launching pad for a political counterattack on the Nazis. Toward the end of his life, he gives a sermon in which his famous “When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die” quote is interspersed with footage of a conspirator planting a bomb.

In one howler of a scene, Bonhoeffer disavows his pacifist teaching in Discipleship, insisting “I was right … before Hitler.” His friend and student Eberhard Bethge immediately challenges his teacher, asking whether Hitler was the first evil leader since Scripture was written. Bonhoeffer replies ominously: “No. But he’s the first one I can stop.”

If this scene included fireworks and a montage of Dietrich doing calisthenics to prepare for the weeks ahead, it could not have been more perfectly written for a spy thriller.

At the heart of Bonhoeffer is the overconfident depiction of the theologian as a would-be assassin. We know that Bonhoeffer was initially arrested not for an assassination plot (as the film depicts) but for his involvement in Operation 7, a scheme to smuggle Jews into neighboring Switzerland. We know that his primary intrigue through the Abwehr was passing information about the Nazis to his ecumenical church contacts in England and elsewhere—not, as the film depicts, trying to convince the English to supply a bomb to kill a dictator.

And finally, while Bonhoeffer undoubtedly knew of plans (which included family members) to assassinate Hitler, evidence surrounding his direct involvement remains murky and contested.

Among historians, the theologian’s relationship to an assassination attempt is a hotly debated question—less a matter of Bonhoeffer’s own words than informed conjecture about what he knew of his brother-in-law’s activities. But for the Bonhoeffer movie, there’s no debate: Dietrich Bonhoeffer not only knew of a plot to kill Hitler but also was intimately involved, his earlier convictions about how to understand Christ’s teachings rendered irrelevant by the rise of the Nazis.

Bonhoeffer’s real-life words complicate this narrative. “To confess and testify to the truth as it is in Jesus, and at the same time to love the enemies of that truth, his enemies and ours, and to love them with the infinite love of Jesus Christ, is indeed a narrow way,” he wrote in Discipleship. Years later, awaiting his execution, he doubled down: “Today I can see the dangers of that book [Discipleship], though I still stand by what I wrote.”

It is likely that Bonhoeffer knew of a plot to kill Hitler. But based on his writings, it also seems that his own forms of Christian resistance—spreading information to international contacts, assisting with sending Jews to Switzerland—were consistent with his long-standing convictions.

Undermining the Nazis with paperwork and diplomacy is far less cinematic than explosives, and the makers of Bonhoeffer may have changed their main character’s worldview for mere dramatic effect. But the ideological thrust of the film feels too on the nose to be justified by drama alone. What kind of connection is the film making by suggesting that Bonhoeffer changed his mind about the “narrow way”?

Perhaps it’s suggesting that the audience should also lay down their political naiveté and take up arms. Perhaps it’s suggesting that the way of Jesus is too soft for the hard realities of modern conflict and should be replaced by a more “realistic” approach. Ironically, this is the very approach the Nazis themselves take—replacing crosses with swastikas and Bibles with copies of Mein Kampf, turning to a stronger version of church when the old ways, governed by Scripture and sacrament, no longer fit the bill.

Early reactions to the film, particularly by the Bonhoeffer family, have identified a distorted legacy. The source of some of these distortions seems easy to identify. Bonhoeffer: Pastor. Spy. Assassin. plays off the title of conservative pundit Eric Metaxas’ 2011 Bonhoeffer biography. (Metaxas’ website references the movie in the context of plans for a forthcoming Bonhoeffer streaming series, and he’s promoted it on X.)

The similarity between this rendering of Bonhoeffer’s life and Metaxas’ own trajectory is telling. Though Angel Studios has downplayed any connection between Metaxas and this project, consider the similarities (beyond the film’s subtitle). Both movie Bonhoeffer and Metaxas begin as religious thinkers, become primarily concerned with political life, and ultimately dally with the use of force in service to their ideals.

Early on in the film, Bonhoeffer’s Harlem friend says that sometimes a punch is necessary; in 2020, Eric Metaxas made news when he punched a DC protester. The parallel is too spot-on to be mere coincidence. In his most recent book, Metaxas continues to marshal Bonhoeffer’s work toward his project of politics as the ultimate end of theology. His inflammatory rhetoric consistently equates the American left with the Nazis.

The portrait offered in Bonhoeffer does not square with the man who—even in the midst of the Confessing Church’s collapse—would speak of baptism as God’s way of creating a new kingdom, who desired “the resistance tasks of the church [to] terminate in word and discipleship.” In Bonhoeffer, we see an imprisoned Dietrich returning to preaching about Christ’s sacrifice and taking Communion only after his own attempts to save Germany’s soul through an assassination plot have failed.

Perhaps judgment of the film’s message should come from Bonhoeffer himself. From Ethics:

Radicalism always springs from a conscious or unconscious hatred of what is established. Christian radicalism, no matter whether it consists in withdrawing from the world or in improving the world, arises from hatred of creation. … On both sides it is a refusal of faith in the creation. But devils are to be cast out through Beelzebub.

Put differently, one cannot drive out evil with evil. Any attempt to bend the world through evil means is to refuse to believe that God is ultimately God, even in the age of Hitler.

The ultimate failure of Bonhoeffer is not just that it gets the history wrong. It also misunderstands how Bonhoeffer’s life was already an extraordinary example of Christian courage.

Especially in the aftermath of two assassination attempts on a former president, we do not need an argument for theologically motivated government overthrow; we do not need further justification for political violence. What we needed was a film about a man concerned with how God might be calling the church to be steadfast amid the great temptation to mold our faith to our politics.

Myles Werntz is author of From Isolation to Community: A Renewed Vision for Christian Life Together. He writes at Christian Ethics in the Wild and teaches at Abilene Christian University.

The post ‘Bonhoeffer’ Bears Little Resemblance to Reality appeared first on Christianity Today.

You Don’t Need a Rule of Life

Bonnie Kristian — Thu, 10 Oct 2024 10:00:00 +0000

Contemporary culture is brimming with exhortations to discipline. From Jordan Peterson’s runaway bestseller 12 Rules for Life to Ryan Holiday’s The Daily Stoic to James Clear’s Atomic Habits, we have no shortage of guidance for embracing a life of order. And that guidance isn’t all bad; wisdom from many corners can deepen our understanding of how to live well. Psychologists, Stoics, and even motivational speakers have contributions to make.

Some are even noticeably resonant with Scripture. Peterson’s rule “Set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world” echoes Jesus’ admonition to “take the plank out of your own eye” before issuing judgment (Matt. 7:3–5). And Clear’s suggestion that we reduce exposure to bad habits before building good ones fits well with Psalm 1:1. For popular fare, we could do worse than commending self-control in a culture entranced by the illusion of endless possibility.

The Christian take on this genre is more explicitly scripturally attuned and increasingly described, with a nod to the monastics, as a “rule of life.” These books offer practical instruction for Christians seeking to bring their finances, prayers, and daily habits into one cohesive vision, and some try to recover classical disciplines rooted in the Decalogue or in historic catechisms. But they can evince too little distinction from their secular counterparts and, relatedly, too little use for the church.

Of course, it makes a difference that Christian books cite Scripture instead of Cicero, advise habits of prayer instead of silence, and teach self-discipline in service to the mission of God instead of success in business. But whether secular or sacred, contemporary rule-of-life material tends to function at the level of technique (tactics to make our lives more streamlined) rather than discipleship (which frequently doesn’t move in such a straightforward fashion). These are programs by which we may pull the fragments of our lives into a coherent whole, and we are generally expected to do so alone, or at least alone with Jesus.

Some Christian rule-of-life authors recognize this, to an extent. Consider, for example, John Mark Comer’s enormously popular Practicing the Way. “The current micro-resurgence of Rule of Life in the Western church is a joy to my heart,” Comer writes. “Unfortunately, it’s mostly being run through the grid of Western-style individualism, with individual people writing their Rule of Life.”

Comer is correct as far as he goes. But if one goes looking for an antidote to that individualism, “community” and “church” appear very briefly, discussed explicitly in just over 4 pages out of over 200. Comer offers resources for churches beyond the book, which makes it all the more surprising that even here, church community is more an appendix than a core element of these rules.

Comparing modern rules of life to their ancient counterparts is instructive. In some ways, the concerns about loss of discipline and meaning are very similar across the centuries. Monks of the fifth century complained about not being able to focus for long periods of time, just as we do today. Christians of the ancient world bemoaned being tired, distracted, envious, and divided in their lives.

But after that common starting place, these books’ guidance for a coherent, Christ-centered life differs dramatically from modern recommendations. Reading The Rule of Saint Benedict, we should be struck by a very curious thing: The first five chapters almost never discuss things you should do.

Instead, the prologue begins with a vision of the Christian life as one that is traveled in the company of others. The book’s intention is to establish “a school for the Lord’s service,” and it is not remote learning. The opening chapter, which catalogues different kinds of monks, allows that select monks who “have come through the test of living in a monastery for a long time” are able to go out into the world alone after benefitting from “the help and guidance of many.” But most of the instruction is for monks living together, gathered under a rule with their leader, the abbot.

The rule put forward by Augustinian monks has a similar orientation. It too begins with an admonition that assumes participation in a larger body of believers: “The chief motivation for your sharing life together is to live harmoniously in the house and to have one heart and one soul seeking God.” Before beginning to speak about the values or habits of monasticism, this rule spends the whole first chapter describing how monks prepare for the common life.

The pattern holds beyond monastics, too. Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Life Together gives ample discussion to habits of prayer, eating, and personal disciplines. But the first thing he discusses is the necessity of pursuing discipline in common. The Christian, he writes, is “the man who no longer seeks his salvation, his deliverance, his justification in himself,” but recognizes that “God has put this Word into the mouth of men in order that it may be communicated to other men.”

To put a fine point on it, modern rules of life too often omit what Bonhoeffer and the ancients took for granted: that the ordered life cannot be lived alone. This omission may not be surprising in secular books of our isolated age. But we should not see it in Christian rules. Contemporary Christians should take for granted that our spiritual lives are knit together and indeed are impossible under ordinary circumstances without a gathered community: the church.

When the Gospels speak of Jesus’ mission, they speak of a rabbi who gathers a community of disciples. And the apostle Paul’s preserved writings, with few exceptions, are letters to whole communities. His instructions to seek the mind of Christ (1 Cor. 2:16) and pursue lives of humility (Phil. 2:1–3) were not first given to individual Christians. They concerned virtues to be pursued together. Indeed, Paul’s caution against being “yoked together with unbelievers” (2 Cor. 6:14) assumes a common—and communal—way of life for all believers, joined together as the people of God (2 Cor. 6:16).

Why do contemporary Christian rules of life no longer begin with this vision of the church? I suspect it’s because we can no longer count on the church life presupposed by Christians in older eras—and this loss is precisely why individualistic rules are proliferating. We still long for discipline and order, and if we don’t find it in a local congregation, we turn to these books and their individual programs instead.

That’s understandable, but we can do better than accommodating ourselves to the situation at hand. Singlehandedly pulling together the fragments of our lives may be possible, but the ancients wisely never thought it sustainable. “When God created man, in order to commend more highly the good of society, he said: ‘It is not good for man to be alone: let us make him a helper like unto himself,’” reflected Aelred of Rievaulx, the 12th century author of Spiritual Friendship. “How beautiful it is that the second human being was taken from the side of the first.”

Here Aelred points us to the weakness of making do by ourselves: To be a human is to be drawn from the body of another, and to be a Christian is to belong utterly to another. Whatever rule we adopt, whatever order we seek, we must not do it alone.

That doesn’t mean there’s no place for personal disciplines in the Christian life. Benedict’s Rule recognizes that the spiritual life is not a one-size-fits-all vision. There’s ample room to apply the rule according to particular needs. Not all the monks need the same attention or struggle with the same vices, and the abbot tailors the rule for each. But the worshiping community still worships together, and its members do not first follow individual rules that pull them away from life together as the church.

So none of this means that there’s no place for individual rules. A common life provides the space for nuance, for tailoring. Benedict noted that some monks would need more sleep or more food than others; Augustine’s rule made provisions for monks who needed different work to do; Bonhoeffer speculated on what life together might look like for families with young children or work schedules that make gathering difficult. But while you can improvise from a common premise, it’s difficult to build a common life if everyone already arrives with their own rule firmly in place.

To reclaim this older vision, we must begin by unlearning deep habits of solo reading, praying, and planning for isolation. We must calibrate our sermons less to individual application and more to common aims. We must foster spiritual practices that require our assembly together instead of assume our absence.

This is not as daunting a task as it may sound, for, by God’s grace, we already have what we need to pursue it: the Scriptures, ample historical witnesses, and a clear hunger for disciplines and communion with others. What remains now is to count the cost, and then to begin.

Myles Werntz is author of From Isolation to Community: A Renewed Vision for Christian Life Together. He writes at Christian Ethics in the Wild and teaches at Abilene Christian University.

The post You Don’t Need a Rule of Life appeared first on Christianity Today.

Truth from Power

CMS Admin — Tue, 30 Jan 2024 09:00:00 +0000

Imagine yourself at any church service you wish. Imagine the music, the preaching, the reading of Scripture. Hear the voices of others next to you in welcome or in questions or in laughter. Feel yourself bumping against strangers and friends. Observe the movements of others in this scene as they jostle, listen, squirm. Listen to the message proclaimed; watch the administration of the bread and the cup.

Reckoning with Power: Why the Church Fails When It’s on the Wrong Side of Power

David E. Fitch (Author)

Baker Pub Group/Baker Books

224 pages

$12.74

Now, some questions: Where was power in this picture? How did it work? What was power doing? From where was power coming? Did you even see power in this picture before now?

Asking about how power functions in unseen ways only highlights how, for many, power goes unnoticed until there has been an egregious breach of trust. And in recent years, there have been innumerable breaches in church contexts, both infamous and obscure, and frequently centered on the abuse of persons: the manipulative sermon, the self-serving or even predatory pastoral figure, the overreach of the pulpit into politics.

This is the context—of pastoral failures, political alliances, and confusion about what power means for the church—in which David E. Fitch offers his newest book, Reckoning with Power: Why the Church Fails When It’s on the Wrong Side of Power.

From the onset, Fitch has in view the various high-profile cases in which the wrong kind of power has been found operating within the church. His examples include Christian nationalism, moral failures, sexual abuse, and other forms of damage. In summing up the current situation, Fitch proposes that there are “really two kinds of power at work in the world”:

There is worldly power, which is exerted over persons, and there is godly power, which works relationally with and among persons. Worldly power is coercive. […] Worldly power is enforced. It is prone to abuse. God’s power, on the other hand, is never coercive. God works by the Holy Spirit, persuades, never overrides a person’s agency, convicts, works in relationship.

On the worldly side are variations of what Fitch calls “power over.” Tyrannies, organizations, and even justice-coded movements to redistribute power all operate on this same basic model, he argues, and they most clearly reveal their underlying congruity in displays of violence and other coercion.

This antagonistic understanding of power pervades how Christians think about our lives, both within and beyond the church, and we are tempted to similarly use “power over” because of its sheer effectiveness. This is dangerous for Christians, Fitch argues. “It is true that worldly ‘power over’ can still be employed for good purposes, if limited purposes, with the right management and accountability,” he writes. “But it is fraught with danger, and it limits what God can do.”

Fitch surveys the Scriptures to back this assertion, but it is difficult to read the Bible without seeing the pervasive fingerprints of “power over,” including among God’s people following God’s commands. The Scriptures are rife with stories of conquest and kings, of violence and misdeeds by authorities. Here, Fitch contends that the Bible points Christians toward the example of Jesus, who modeled submission to God and the redemptive way of the Spirit. He therefore explains most (if not all) the biblical stories of “power over” as “leaders attributing the acts of worldly power to God”— biblical figures’ sinfully blurring divine commands with worldly notions of how to wield the authority God has given them.

This history of mixing “power over” with the power of God continues throughout church history, Fitch writes, as church leaders from the 2nd century to the 21st have combined “power over” and God’s “power under.” Even those who handled the combination comparatively well, like the Reformer Martin Luther’s depiction of “power over” as God’s way of preserving order within society, mixed the two in practice to sometimes terrible effect.

More recently, declamations of Christian nationalism provide a vividly negative object lesson in how this mixing leads Christians astray. Even the well-intentioned pursuit of social justice, Fitch says, may perpetuate the very “inequities, abuses, and exclusions” it seeks to undo if activists take a “power over” approach.

So, what does the alternative of “power under” look like? How does “power under” function in practice? As history and Scripture show us, Fitch writes, it is dangerously easy to miss a shift—perhaps even accidental or well-intentioned—from exercise of “power under” to “power over,” whether in ourselves or in our institutions. There is no how-to manual for discerning the two powers, though we may see “red flags that indicate worldly power is already at work.”

And there are green flags of “power under” too—practices such as mutual submission, receiving the plurality of gifts that are present in the body of Christ, and inclusion of those affected by decisions in leadership processes. For Fitch, a consistent emphasis on listening, trusting in the illuminating power of the Spirit, and all persons submitting to each other in pursuit of God’s voice are key to embodying the “power under” of Jesus.

Fitch’s concern over how churches have prioritized organizational self-preservation at the expense of love and justice—or have used mechanisms of state and social power to enact changes favorable to Christians—is well-founded. And his call for Christians to develop difficult habits of listening, mutual submission, and conversation is sorely needed.

And so, in what follows, I want to affirm his practical suggestions while asking some more difficult questions about the sustainability of the framework undergirding Reckoning with Power as a whole, which I argue does not ultimately offer a compelling way forward.

In naming the pervasiveness of “power over,” not only throughout the Scriptures but in church history and in contemporary church practice, Fitch has rightly identified the dual nature of sin: It tells the truth, but only in part.

In Eden, the Serpent was right that the man and woman would have their eyes opened, would be like gods, would know good from evil. Worldly power likewise tells a partial truth: It can effect change—accomplish a great deal—perhaps even for objectively good causes. The question that Fitch wants us to reckon with is what else comes bundled with that promise of change, like how the Fall came bundled with the Serpent’s promise of knowledge.

To be sure, grasping “power over” has brought devils upon devils into a cleaned-out house (Luke 11:24–26). But it is unclear that “power over” and “power under” are—or can be—as far apart as Fitch claims. I have drawn attention to Fitch’s comments about the utility of “power over” for this reason, for they highlight how these two forms of power are frequently companions. The direction of “power over” often works in concert with the persuasion of “power under.”

And perhaps that closeness isn’t purely the failure of the flesh. Perhaps, sometimes, it is because Christians have a (borrowed and chastened) capacity to name sin and heresy and to offer an account of what can and cannot be part of the people of God. It is unclear to me, for example, how a church purged of all “power over” might preach something as difficult as the Sermon on the Mount, the Decalogue, or the Prophets. How can faithful church leaders “judge those inside” the church (1 Cor. 5:12) without some measure of “power over” the people in their spiritual care?

For the power of Christ is not only to serve but to bind (Matt. 18:18)—not only to forgive but, as Fitch himself notes, to tell the truth (2 Cor. 6:4–7). It is not clear, in other words, that creatures such as us can be free of the blurring Fitch wants us to abjure (even setting aside the fact that Christians are always sinners undergoing repair).

Put differently, it is not clear that the church can do without some form of “power over,” though we should aim to reliably wield it not as a sword but as a healing scalpel. Jesus’ own ministry offers not a few instances of service coupled with commands, of “power over”—a commanding of not only demons but of authorities and disciples. Jesus seems to couple the two types of power, albeit in limited ways.

This is not to say that the practices Fitch offers are futile, only that there is no safe means through which we can fully separate these types of power. The corruptions of power may appear in any number of ways. We cannot draw a tidy line between “power over” and “power under,” naming the former as worldly and evil and the latter as godly and good, and call the matter settled. “Power over” may be used in a Christlike manner to reprimand sin, and “power under” is not immune to corruption and may even become a whitewashed tomb (Matt. 6:5–8; 23:23, 27).

Indeed, as author Lauren Winner has observed, the very practices of God’s repair among us can themselves be subject to “characteristic damage.” The fractures of a fallen world persist even within gifts of grace. Acts of mutual submission may ultimately be strategic, for example, as people practice “power under” while secretly biding their time. And there are few words more laden with the expectation of ending disagreement and conversation than the “power under” tactic of “consensus.”

In the wake of so many publicized abuses of power, it is right to be concerned how we use power as Christians, to encourage accountability, to continue to talk about how it forms and malforms us, and to care for the wounded. Fitch writes with the passion of one who has seen damage and power up close, and his eagerness to call the church away from its temptations is to be commended.

But what we need is not a purer model of power but the ongoing bonds of forgiveness. We must assume that we will in fact harm one another, at least in unintended ways. We must not assume that we can somehow put off “power over” altogether.

I say this not because I wish to embrace a kind of Christian realism; on that, Fitch and I are in firm agreement. It is simply that the kind of power Fitch wants to reject cannot be fully put away, though we must certainly reject certain versions of it: Christians must always heed the warning of Samuel and not wish to have power like the other nations (1 Sam. 8:10–22). I say this not because Christians lust for control but because “power over,” in its best form, is the kind of authority Christ gives to his church. It is power over sin, death, and the devil (Luke 10:19; 2 Cor. 10:4), and to refuse to take it up with fear and trembling is a power failure of a different kind.

Myles Werntz is the author, most recently, of From Isolation to Community: A Renewed Vision for Christian Life Together and co-author with David Cramer of A Field Guide to Christian Nonviolence. He writes regularly at Christian Ethics in the Wild.

The post Truth from Power appeared first on Christianity Today.

Time Is Not a Political Promise

Bonnie Kristian — Mon, 21 Oct 2024 10:00:00 +0000

American voters are divided over many issues this election cycle, but we’re united in a deeper expectation for our political parties: They promise—and we want them to promise—the control of time itself.

This promise takes different forms for different politics. Some candidates pledge to bring a better future. Others say they’ll return us to a better past. The direction of the promise matters less than the fact of it. Once we have decided that time can be thus managed, it’s just a matter of picking which time we prefer.

The two leading contenders this year have particularly obvious, dueling notions of time. The Harris campaign’s catchphrase, “We’re Not Going Back,” rejects the past, while the Trump campaign’s promise to “Make America Great Again” lurches in reverse. Despite their policy divides, both campaigns trade on dissatisfaction with the world as it is, and both look to some other time as the solution.

As a political strategy, it’s effective. Discontent with the present, Americans ask when, if ever, life was better than this—and both candidates have a ready answer. Former president Donald Trump’s reply is a particular rendering of the past, one that omits historical wrongs and insists old greatness can be recaptured. Vice president Kamala Harris peers into the mists of the future. She may not be able to offer certainty about what the future holds, but whatever its challenges, she assures, it’ll be better than what’s behind us.

This sense that the best kind of politics comes from some time other than now has become so common in American elections that we scarcely notice it. In 2012, it was in Barack Obama’s “Forward” and the Mitt Romney–linked “Restore Our Future” (the latter of which manages to look in both directions at once). The parties’ chronological orientations were reversed in 2004, with John Kerry’s “Let America Be America Again” and George W. Bush’s “A Safer World and a More Hopeful America.” Whether we visit the 1996 election, with Bill Clinton’s “Building a Bridge to the 21st Century,” or “We Are Turning the Corner” in Herbert Hoover’s ill-fated 1932 campaign, time—and how we conceive of it—is always on the ballot.

Across these varied campaigns, we should notice two common commitments. First is the assumption that the present is worse than some other time. Whether that time is decades beyond anyone’s remembering or in a future yet to be named, that time is not now. Imagine a candidate saying, You know what? This is pretty good. Let’s not change anything and just stay here. You can go ahead and declare that candidacy dead.

Second, these promises assume time moves in a straightforward manner. Life is either getting better or worse. We are in either a climb of progress or a slick decline. Republicans and Democrats alike presume that time can be reliably managed. What worked once will work again, or what is working now will only keep working better in the days to come. If we simply pick the best time and work to reach or return to it, we’ll have the lives we want.

But in the sober days of nonelection years, I think we really do know better. We know that time does not work this way. Time is full of ambiguity and reversals. It never lives up to its promises. Sometimes, a new thing appears, something no one saw coming.

For readers of Scripture, it should be a truism that time is not straightforward, that what is past cannot be repeated, that the future is out of our hands. That recognition is basic to what it means to be the people of God. This does not mean quietly suffering injustice. It does mean that, for Christians, living well within time requires getting comfortable with the fact that no time—past and future just as much as the unsatisfying present—will fulfill our hopes.

Consider a moment from Numbers 11 which encapsulates this dynamic. As the people of God traveled through the desert, they became discontented with their journey. They longed for the past—and the leeks and onions—in Egypt, forgetting that Egypt was also the place of their enslavement (v. 5).

The manna of the present lay amply before them, and God’s guidance was close at hand, but the people longed for quail. They wanted food that belonged not to the desert present but to the coastline they had not yet reached (v. 31). And God provided the quail, a food from the “future,” but it wasn’t a gift. It was a judgment on the people’s discontentment with the provisions of the present (vv. 31–34).

We can read this passage as a judgment against grumbling, but it strikes me that it’s better read as an exhortation to refuse wishful thinking about the past or future.

The past may well have had goodness—the food probably was better in Egypt!—but it also had suffering we’ve forgotten or been unwilling to acknowledge. Likewise, to “Make America Great Again” by somehow returning to the past would mean recovering the morals of a lost world and also its prejudices and injustices.

And the future may well have its glory—Israel was not wrong to look forward to leaving the desert!—but the future will also have its unfulfilled promises, its limits and fresh failures we have not yet anticipated. Hurrying to an unknown future may not bring the relief and liberation suggested in “We’re Not Going Back.”

Perhaps a Christian view of time should look less like yearning for leeks and onions or milk and honey, giving ourselves to whomever promises to transport us to the desired past or future. Perhaps it should look more like recognizing the goodness of the manna God continually gives.

In that spirit, let me offer three proverbs for resisting the false allure of political promises to control the direction of our times.

Time is filled with ambiguity. Christians believe God will accomplish a good end for the world. But that does not mean the future will unfold as we want or expect. For even when Christ came in “the fullness of time” (Gal. 4:4, ESV), the coming of the Lord occurred alongside the death of the innocents (Matt. 2:16–18) and the continued rule of Rome. When the words of deliverance came to Isaiah (14:28), it did not mean Assyria had disappeared. None of this means God is absent, only that no time will be all we’ve hoped until “the old order of things has passed away” (Rev. 21:4).

Time is an occasion to learn to trust God’s provision. Our best times offer signs that we can trust God to provide in full. The bread in the desert, given in time, anticipates the Bread of Life, given to sustain us eternally. Moments of justice appear in our politics, and the setting right of wrongs is to be celebrated. These are exceptions which will one day, in God’s kingdom, be the rule. Celebrate them for what they are, and do not despise them for being incomplete.

Time is full of surprise and reversal. When Israel was being led through the desert, water appeared from rocks, manna from the sky, and quail from far-off lands. Walls were overtaken by horns, and spies were rescued by women on rooftops. God provided for Israel’s common life out of nothing, defying predictions of demise.

But good times are interrupted, too. God is with us, but time is complex and, for us, unpredictable. Israel’s return from exile in Babylon was followed by conquest by a Greek empire, then another brief reprieve, then conquest by the Roman empire.

God is always working within time, and he is not surprised by its twists or even its hairpin turns. We often are. We can’t foresee when a terrorist attack, depression, or global conflict will set aside the best political aspirations. Historical trends are one thing, but history is another, and only a fool will say that time runs in one direction.

In this light, Christians in America (or anywhere politicians promise to deliver the past or future) should be patient in the face of time’s ambiguity. These proverbs invite us to be temperate in our celebrations, to avoid mistaking temporary goods for permanent ones, to celebrate blessings while planning for leaner times. They invite us to learn to trust in the God who provides for his people again and again—the God who is with us in all times, even now.

Myles Werntz is author of From Isolation to Community: A Renewed Vision for Christian Life Together. He writes at Christian Ethics in the Wild and teaches at Abilene Christian University.

The post Time Is Not a Political Promise appeared first on Christianity Today.

Homeschooling for the Common Good

CMS Admin — Mon, 12 Aug 2024 04:40:00 +0000

I am an educator. I believe in the good of education for everyone and that public schools should be amply funded and resourced. I believe in contributing to the common good even when it doesn’t directly benefit me. And in the summer of 2020, my wife and I found ourselves in what I’d once have called a most improbable situation: We became homeschool parents.

Let me explain.

One of the attractive parts about moving to Abilene, Texas, five years prior was the well-loved public school system. We bought our house near one of the many excellent elementary schools and expected an ordinary educational path for our two children. We’ve long known public school teachers, happily paid taxes for schools our children didn’t attend, and looked back fondly on our own days of bus rides, locker conversations, and school cafeterias.

Then COVID-19 came. Suddenly, we realized our our oldest would be going to kindergarten masked, unable to see his teacher’s face, distanced from other children—or else staring at a screen for hours a day in virtual kindergarten. Guidance from the school board was minimal, and the deadline to register our child for COVID kindergarten ticked ever closer.

We couldn’t do it—but we realized we could handle homeschooling, at least for a while. Both my wife and I could do some of our work remotely, and we could convert part of our living room into a classroom. It would be hard, but we could make it work.

“One year,” we said. “We can do one year.”

Let me say, now, that making this decision was not a brave one. It was simply the only one we felt was available to us. Had COVID not forced our hand, I’m not sure we’d ever have gone the direction we did. That first year required an upheaval in our lives, and not only because of COVID. We never thought we’d be teaching someone how to read and do basic math without help.

But gradually, we quit making jokes about homeschoolers and dropped our unease over being the only homeschool family we knew. We began to embrace the freedom to take long weekends for camping. We found we enjoyed introducing our kids to literature, music, history, and philosophy. We found a rhythm of work and instruction that meshed with our family’s goals. When the most intense COVID era eased, we began to connect with other homeschool families. We enrolled our children in a three-day-a-week co-op run by licensed educators. We even attended a homeschool convention.

Many times, I’ve wondered who we are becoming. But one year turned into two, and, four years later, I can’t see us turning back.

Still, the one lingering question for me is that of the common good. Here in Texas, property taxes are used, in part, to fund the schools, but each school’s enrollment also affects its funding. The lower enrollment drops, the less funding a school gets. By choosing to not enroll our children in the public school around the corner, in other words, we’ve taken money out of that school’s coffers—more money than my school supply donations will ever replace.

By homeschooling, then, maybe I’ve taken away from the common good. But money is not the only measure, and not all of what public schools offer as common is necessarily good.

As an educator, I think standardized testing is a bad way to organize instruction. As a parent, I have concerns with how much time my kids are away from home, how many hours rote homework takes from play and individual interests.

One need not be a Christian to share these concerns. But as a theologian and ethicist, I have other questions too: Is participating in common rites like voting and public education the only or best way for a Christian to contribute to the good of society? And is it possible that in saying no to the concrete, flawed version of a public good, we may say yes to the common good it aims to serve?

In the first century, Justin Martyr offered this account of Christian participation in the common good:

And more than all other men are we your helpers and allies in promoting peace, seeing that we hold this view, that it is alike impossible for the wicked, the covetous, the conspirator, and for the virtuous, to escape the notice of God, and that each man goes to everlasting punishment or salvation according to the value of his actions.

Justin is one in a long line of Christians taking this approach, a line that runs through Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, the Reformation, and into the present. To support the peace of the city is not, Justin argued, the same as using the means of the city: By pursuing the common good in a uniquely Christian way, he said, Christians bear witness to what cities are meant to be.

Today, we can hold with the apostle Paul that it’s good to live at peace with all people as far as we are able (Rom. 12:18), and with Jeremiah that we should seek the welfare of the city (29:7). But that doesn’t require us to pursue these ends only through the means provided by the state. It doesn’t mean people of good will can’t disagree about the form of the common good while agreeing on its value.

At its best, homeschooling orders education around the common life of the family first and, from there, the life of the world. For Christians, it brings education, vocation, family, and spiritual formation into an integrated whole.

Homeschooling certainly can be—and often is—done in a spirit of resentment, as its detractors tend to charge. But it can also be an opportunity for Christians to help children pursue a vision of wisdom, citizenship, and goodness differently.

What if homeschooling offered an alternate vision of education that might even have resonance in the public school system?

What if homeschooling illuminates what Christians should desire for all families: time to educate, freedom to make choices about what is good for our children, and civic resources that help our citizens grow in charity and goodness?

What if, as my family has found, it is possible to homeschool for the common good?

Myles Werntz is author of From Isolation to Community: A Renewed Vision of Christian Life Together. He writes at Christian Ethics in the Wild and teaches at Abilene Christian University.

The post Homeschooling for the Common Good appeared first on Christianity Today.

This Is the Violent World in Which Christ Commands Peace

CMS Admin — Mon, 16 Oct 2023 09:00:00 +0000

Violence, we are told, followed so closely the origin of human evil as to be almost indistinguishable. For soon after Adam’s sin, violence appears—first in the skin taken from animals (Gen. 3:21), then in the murder of a brother (4:8), and finally over the whole of the earth (6:11). Violence follows humanity through the Flood and into the world beyond it, taking root in generational fights of the tribes of Isaac versus Ishmael and Jacob versus Esau. Nations that bear so much in common, divided by that very common history: This is the story of Scripture and of our own world.

It is into this violent world, not some easier one, that Christ gave his disciples the instruction to turn the other cheek, to pray for their persecutors, and to give to those that ask without expecting things to be returned (Matt. 5:38–48). These teachings have been contentious wisdom ever since, especially when we are confronted with horrors like the terrorist attacks by Hamas in Israel this month. Following Jesus here feels so impossible. Who could live that way in a world like this?

But that is what Jesus commanded, and it is this violent world for which he died and in which he was resurrected. It is into this violent world that the Holy Spirit was sent, and fruits of that Spirit are peace, humility, gentleness, and goodness (Gal. 5:22–23). Perhaps we think such gifts and teachings are unfit for a violent world, but Jesus thought otherwise.

Perhaps such an approach to great violence—to turn the other cheek and to seek the good of one’s enemy—seems nonsensical. And indeed, many in church history rendered exactly that verdict on Christian pacifism.

Perhaps, as one objection goes, these teachings describe a world beyond history. Perhaps these are commands we can heed only in the age to come. But this does not square with a Jesus who loved his own enemies, which includes all of us (Rom. 5:10).

Or perhaps, another objection goes, responding with limited force is justified when facing great evil, and Jesus meant his command only for interpersonal relations. But this, too, falls apart when compared with Christ’s own example. When Peter attempted to defend Jesus in Gethsemane, Jesus healed his enemy, sheathed Peter’s sword, and went away to die (John 18:10; Luke 22:51).

The prospect of a limited use of violence may seem eminently reasonable. But as it follows sin, violence will not be so easily contained and made rational. Violence is deceptive, even—or especially—when it is well-intended retaliation for rank evils like terrorism. It produces, by its nature, more wreckage than we expect.

What the teachings of Christ offer is a refusal to justify the non-sense of violence. It is a refusal to call violence “understandable” or “reasonable.” It is a refusal to minimize sin or follow its logic, whether by rationalizing terrorism or justifying violence in return.

Explaining how violence happens in a sinful world is no consolation to Rachel weeping for her children. For how do you explain hundreds dead at a music festival? How do you explain rockets hitting ordinary homes? How do you explain the bombs that answered those murders, hitting civilian apartment buildings and killing children in their beds? What kind of reason could stand up here?

To be clear, violence is not uniform: Terrorism is not the same as retribution, and killing civilians is not the same thing as killing terrorists. But we are in risky territory when we try to establish grades of respectability within violence, as if some of it might approximate how God created us to live. The moral calculus of violence must give way to a harder and more beautiful teaching: that all people are created in God’s own image, and the loss of any person is a victory of death, the last enemy Christ came to destroy (1 Cor. 15:26).

Christian pacifism is not about trying to make sense of the world’s violence, then, but about bearing witness to the God who stands with the victims of that violence and calls his disciples to do the same. It is less about promising to “fix” violence and more about becoming the kind of people who treat violence as God did on the cross: an evil to be overcome with love and mercy (Rom. 12:21).

In the Crucifixion, God does not respond to human violence with more bloodshed. He offers the ones who killed him a place at the table (Acts 2:36–38). If violence is a symptom of a world sick with sin, it cannot also be sin’s cure.

Does that mean a Christian pacifist is passive in the face of great violence? Hardly. We could point to pacifists serving as medics in combat zones, as translators and negotiators, as chaplains, and as relief workers. We could even point to pacifists who have lived in the Middle East as peacemakers and educators.

This approach—bearing witness to God’s own peace amid decades-long conflict—may seem far away from what is needed. But Christ, quite literally, offers just this form of peace.

Remember that we who are Gentiles were once “separate from Christ, excluded from citizenship in Israel and foreigners to the covenants of the promise, without hope and without God in the world. But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far away have been brought near by the blood of Christ,” as Paul wrote to the Ephesians. God himself has suffered violence to make “one new humanity out of the two, thus making peace, and in one body” reconciling us to God and one another (Eph. 2:11–22). If we want to call this frail and unrealistic, we must say the same of Christ.

So let us pray for the church in Nazareth, Bethlehem, Jerusalem, and Gaza to join hands in proclaiming that the Christ who has been raised from the dead will bring not only a cessation of violence but also the administration of justice—and in that justice, true peace. Let us pray that those who are in the midst of this violence will continue to proclaim that Christ has come to unite Jews and Gentiles into one body. And let us pray that we would all name violence for what it is: sin.

Myles Werntz is the coauthor of A Field Guide to Christian Nonviolence. He writes at Christian Ethics in the Wild and teaches at Abilene Christian University.

The post This Is the Violent World in Which Christ Commands Peace appeared first on Christianity Today.

Scarcity’s Strange Gifts

CMS Admin — Wed, 26 Jun 2024 05:00:00 +0000

There are many reasons to expect that the Western church, at least, is heading into a long season of scarcity. Much of the European church is already there, and here in the States, we aren’t so far behind: Attendance is down, though there is reason to suspect this trend line may have plateaued. Giving to church ministries was up in recent years, but the group giving the most is aging quickly, and it’s not yet clear that younger cohorts will fill the gap. Ministers, reporting more anxiety and less support, find themselves with fewer relationships and resources to support their work.

This abundance of scarcity will have a long-term impact on the character, health, and ministry of many congregations. Its effects are already familiar to smaller and more rural churches, but this is increasingly a reality shared by large and urban congregations too.

That may seem like a grim vision, but scarcity of time, energy, and resources can be a mixed blessing. For, while long periods of abundance are to be appreciated, they can be deceiving: We anticipate that the good times will not end, and when they inevitably do, it shakes our very foundations. Churchgoing rates in America, for example, have been discussed for years now as a sign of crisis. But these numbers are arguably nothing special in global and historical contexts. The downturn feels like a catastrophe only in light of 80 years of historically high membership.

So, what if we organized our church lives around an expectation of scarcity instead of an assumption of plenty? Behavioral science researchers Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir have examined how scarcity affects the way we make decisions. Summarized in their 2013 book Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much, their research provides helpful insights for congregations.

Mullainathan and Shafir discovered that study participants who were asked to deal with scarcity (like a shortage of time) could better prioritize their most important tasks. Scarcity produced not only negative results (like increased anxiety) but also positive ones (like increased focus and attention).

We’ve all experienced something like this. If you’re working on a tight deadline, you can tune out phone calls, socializing, and even meals to give increased attention to the problem at hand. You might reach what researchers call a “flow state,” in which your mind and work simply click along, with hours feeling like minutes. For most of us, this isn’t a normal working condition. It’s the result of scarcity.

Mullainathan and Shafir also found that people who’d gone through particular kinds of scarcity in the past were more likely to be attentive to those going through similar situations in the present. Those who had lost loved ones could read it in the faces of others in grief; those who had experienced economic downturns were more attuned to others in economic crisis. Traveling the valley of the shadow of death left participants more likely to know not only what others were going through but also how to help them navigate that valley themselves.

No one wants to suffer scarcity, but this research suggests that scarcity brings benefits that can’t be acquired any other way. You don’t need scarcity to be efficient and empathetic, of course. But the prioritization scarcity forces and the practical attention and specific care it teaches are unique.

For readers of Scripture, such a finding shouldn’t be surprising. It’s reminiscent of how Moses, having spent years in the wilderness, could help lead the children of Abraham through the desert. It explains God’s chastisement of Jonah who, after being rescued from death, was unhappy that Nineveh was spared God’s judgment. It gives depth to Paul’s letter to Philemon, in which the apostle sympathizes with the plight of Onesimus after having lost his own freedom.

Or consider the Beatitudes. Those who are poor—suffering material scarcity—are given the gifts that only God can give, able to welcome a new way of life in the midst of precarity (Luke 6:20). Those who have had their hearts purified are able to see God (Matt. 5:8), and those who suffer loss and persecution can receive God’s kingdom (Matt. 5:10–12). But herein lies the difficulty: To cultivate that kind of attentiveness, that kind of wisdom, you have to go through that kind of scarcity first.

This invites us to look at our situation again—at the scarcity vexing churches in the United States.

A few congregations may be able to avoid this scarcity altogether, to raise funds and endowments to the point that no financial downturn will affect them. For most churches (and Christian nonprofits and faith-based universities), however, this won’t be an option. Yet given the blessings of scarcity, perhaps that’s for the best. Perhaps the right response is not to build bigger barns but to learn to be reliant on and rich toward God (Luke 12:16–34).

Other churches may simply ignore the connection between unearned suffering, God’s provision, and virtue, emphasizing instead that God’s presence can mean an abundance of resources. This is the bread and butter of the prosperity gospel, and it places the fault of having few resources squarely on the shoulders of those without. But Jesus did not draw such a tight connection between faithfulness and abundance; on the contrary, he taught that God “causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous” (Matt. 5:45).

Still other churches may respond to scarcity by closing down. In some cases, this path is the only option; for others, chronically having too little exhausts goodwill. Calls to resilience become a burden of shame, and when the doors finally close, it feels like relief.

Scripture does not shame those who grow tired (Matt. 11:28–30), nor are Christians called to seek out scarcity and other suffering or endure abuse. But before we choose one of these responses—and especially before the prospect of disbanding a congregation begins to appeal—let us remember that though scarcity will come for us in one form or another, it may not only bring hardship. It can also bring unexpected gifts—gifts that can come to us in few other ways.

The full barns will not last. In many cases, they are already emptying. And in all of this, God will be present. This is a story that Scripture tells repeatedly. It is the story of manna appearing in the desert (Ex. 16), water pouring from rocks (Ex. 17), provisions being supplied by ravens and widows’ jars (1 Kings 17:2–16), poor Christians providing for each other’s needs (Acts 2:44–46). Consider that lean times can offer something greater for congregations than sheer survival.

To the first possibility—of simply outlasting lean times—Scripture counsels us to embrace risky generosity, to give to those who ask, and to remember that God is the one through whom provision comes (Luke 12:32–34). Generosity amid scarcity teaches us be grateful, to give despite difficulty, and to trust in God’s provision in all circumstances. To pull back from generosity is to miss an opportunity to grow in gratitude and learn that abundance is not our right.

To the second possibility—of ignoring scarcity entirely—Scripture counsels us against assuming that lean times signal God’s absence and calls us instead to be faithful with what has been given (Matt. 25:14–30). Learning to mourn what we have lost without despairing for the future is critical to being a people of hope (Jer. 29:11). Likewise, learning to make do with what we have received fosters in us virtues of creativity, thrift, and prudence, knowing what we can do without.

To the third possibility—of simply stopping—Scripture gives a word of comfort: We are not alone in times of scarce resources (Ps. 40:16–17), and the way forward may be to join hands and institutions with believers around us. As Paul instructs the Corinthian church (2 Cor. 9:1–5), the task for a church in scarce circumstances is to remember that we are bound together by Christ. That may mean merging congregations or, following the church in Acts 2, selling our buildings to better share our resources, efforts, and space for the sake of the gospel.

Scarcity of resources is a relatively new situation to the American church, which for decades has enjoyed high attendance, abundant giving, and the luxury of ample volunteer hours. Yet scarcity too has its gifts to offer—strange, hard invitations to an unforeseen future, but ones that could be abundant in virtue and love.

Myles Werntz is the author of From Isolation to Community: A Renewed Vision of Christian Life Together. He writes at Christian Ethics in the Wild and teaches at Abilene Christian University.

The post Scarcity’s Strange Gifts appeared first on Christianity Today.

Church Is Life Together or Not at All

CMS Admin — Thu, 14 Sep 2023 13:00:00 +0000

Dechurching is upon America, and everything from religious abuse to apathy to digital media have been named as culprits. This conversation has created many hypotheses, and as many implausible solutions. But most of the analyses of evangelical dechurching miss the deeper problem: an anemic church theology taught and modeled to churchgoers. The call to dechurching may, in fact, be coming from inside the building.

Daniel Williams wrote recently for CT that many evangelical luminaries were rarely consistent churchgoers themselves, and this was accompanied by a weak ecclesiology. Williams says the problem of dechurching today is not due simply to the poor precedent set by evangelical leaders. The problem is also the bedrock evangelical assumption that the Christian life is ultimately an individual adventure, fundamentally between God and the soul.

Within evangelical circles, whether intentionally or not, church has frequently been treated as an optional facet of the Christian life, primarily as a means to helping each of us live out a personal faith. Church is something that exists to assist one’s individual growth or spiritual experience. But this understanding misses the point, which is that church, as the body of Christ, is intrinsic to the life of faith.

Trying to address the crisis of dechurching by appealing to the practical benefits of the church to the individual is thus to try to revive the very problems which led us here to begin with. Appealing to individual experience is not the way forward. Sin is, from the beginning, a work of division and separation, a turning of a people into scattered individuals, and God’s cure cannot take the form of the disease.

As Gerhard Lohfink has put it, God will have a people, not just a collection of individuals. To be a people is to exist collectively through our prayer, our piety, and our purpose, inseparable from one another. When Scripture commands us to gather, it is because this is how God has called us and who God has called us to be: a new people among the peoples of the world, a holy temple into which individual stones have been joined together (Heb. 10:25; Eph. 2:21).

So, what are churches to do to regain their identity as a people? How do we, in the words of Williams, redeem an evangelical ecclesiology?

Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Life Together was written in another time of church crisis, when Bonhoeffer was helping to establish a new seminary for the fledgling Confessing Church. The Confessing Church had been established as an alternative to the German National Church, which had altered its confession to include a new clause offering allegiance to the Führer.

In linking itself fully to Adolf Hitler, the National Church attempted to establish itself as a true “church of the people”—certainly a strategy for long-term survival, but at a heretical cost. Though Bonhoeffer’s context is different, challenges to the church’s cultural survival today force us to ask the same question: What is “the church” that we are trying to save?

The church, Bonhoeffer writes, is centered not on individual experience or on the ability of a strong leader to cast a compelling vision. These may sustain churches, but only for a time. Instead, the church in all its practices is meant to be a community—a people who encounters Christ through and with one another, and not merely a group of individuals who live alongside one another.

This community is to be centered on Christ, who is present in its midst. Christ has called each person beyond themselves to be a part of this corporate body. It is Christ alone by which the church survives and succeeds, and Christ alone who calls forth a body centered on being God’s people in the world.

If we come to Bonhoeffer hoping that, by making our churches into communities, they will become successful, we miss his point: that community is what makes it a church at all.

For Bonhoeffer, an individual Christian life is impossible. Because the Spirit has drawn together a body, we encounter Christ through the words we speak to one another, through the Communion we eat together, and through the Scriptures we read and live out alongside each other. The practices which he commends in Life Together are not so much about making the church successful as they are about making the church a community.

But the work of becoming a people does not mean adopting a new program. It means turning our attention once again to the familiar practices of the Christian life—congregational singing, the reading of Scripture, eating together—only with a profounder end in mind: to become a community. In this way, although Life Together is thoroughly practical, it is also deeply theological.

When we read Scripture together, for example, he advises selecting longer passages that remind us of God’s ongoing work among his people, a work which the church of today is grafted into. Such passages focus on the centuries-old story we share with Christians throughout history, as opposed to focusing on a person’s individual context. In particular, he commends the Psalms, the prayerbook of Israel, which direct our attention to the church’s ongoing connection with Israel and to our calling to be a people.

Likewise, when we sing corporately, he commends singing in unison to center our attention not on our individual experiences, but on the reality that God has made us into one people. And when we pray together, Bonhoeffer asks us to pray for those things that concern our common life first, not for those things which belong solely to the individual.

When we scatter throughout the week, there is ample time for Christ to speak to our individual concerns and our personal lives through the Scriptures. But even these times, Bonhoeffer says, are for the edification of the larger body, that we might bring back to the church those things which Christ has given us while we were apart from one another.

A similar ethos applies to how we read Scripture, share meals, and think about missions. If the aim of church practice is that we might be drawn together as a people, then not only does what we do matter, but how we do it.

As Bonhoeffer reminds us, “Christian brotherhood is not an idea which we must realize; it is rather a reality created by God in Christ in which we may participate.” Practices of prayer, singing, and service are not magic pills, but invitations of God into a deeper reality that Christ has made possible.

We invite all the believers among us—not just the excellent readers—to be readers of Scripture. We eat in such a way and in such a time that all can gather. We do missions not to enable people to become religiously affiliated individuals, but to become members of a community where gifts will be called out and where we might receive the words of Christ from others.

In commenting on the reciprocal nature of prayer, Bonhoeffer says what makes it possible for an individual to pray for the group is “the intercession of all the others for him and for his prayer.” He asks, “How could one person pray the prayer of the fellowship without being steadied and upheld in prayer by the fellowship itself?”

Whatever spiritual life the individual has depends first on the community that God in Christ is creating. The church here is not an afterthought: It is the presumption. God is creating a people whose life together in Christ makes possible all our individual journeys into the world.

The Spirit draws us from all places and goes with us into all the world—whether we are gathered or not. But this going out is for the sake of being brought back in. We are meant to be a people whose lives are knit together, not a people who simply make do on our own.

If dechurching is to be addressed, the response cannot be more of the same that led us here. For the church offers us something that cannot be categorized in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs: The church gives us Jesus and makes us part of Christ’s body. And it is in this body that we become Christian, in which we experience the presence of Christ and are changed.

Just as the disciples learned together to hear the voice of Jesus, so also do we. We must not merely revise our faulty evangelical ecclesiology, seeing the church as an additional aid to the needs of a life of faith. Instead, we must abandon such thinking altogether. And if this faulty vision of church is what dechurching leaves behind, then all the better.

Myles Werntz is the author of From Isolation to Community: A Renewed Vision of Christian Life Together. He writes at Christian Ethics in the Wild and teaches at Abilene Christian University.

The post Church Is Life Together or Not at All appeared first on Christianity Today.