What Is Truth?

Posted on April 6, 2012 by

On this Good Friday, I want to share a short excerpt from a meditation I gave at one of our Passion Week services this week.  I was retelling the story of Pilate’s interrogation of Jesus.  Back and forth Pilate and Jesus go.  Though it’s clear that Pilate is more concerned with order, he also seems to be frustrated with what is truth in the midst of this very difficult day.  In fact, when Jesus challenges Pilate that part of the core of the mission God had given him was teaching truth, Pilate is finished.  His final question: “What is truth?  That opens up some interesting possibilities for us.  My thoughts below are not original to me; they are a combination of insights I found in several books and sermons from others.

Here’s the key.  John is a master of language and symbolism.  Though John uses some of the simplest Greek in the New Testament, he also uses some of the most vivid imagery, and we see themes running through the whole book.  When a word is repeated, it matters.

When Pilate asks, “What is truth?”, John wants his readers to remember what Jesus said in John 14:6-7.  This is a big philosophical question that the Greek shad been attempting to answer for a long time, and then that debate was inherited by Rome’s best minds.  Jesus had the answer; Jesus was the answer.

Jesus has already answered it in a way that no one expected.  (John 14:6-7 NIV) Jesus answered, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. (7) If you really know me, you will know my Father as well. From now on, you do know him and have seen him.”

Did you hear what Jesus said?  “I am the way, the truth, and the life.”  When Pilate asks the question, “What is truth?”, we are supposed to remember that Jesus has already answered the question.  He is truth.  When we want to know truth, we look to Jesus.  We like our doctrine.  It is designed to answer the questions.  It is supposed to be a scientific method which should yield truth in the end, but Jesus has already told us what truth really is: it is him.

Truth, for Christians, is not some doctrine out there that needs to written.  It’s not something that we can write and then be done.  It’s not a sentence that we can paint on the wall.  Truth is Jesus.  When God chose to reveal to us the deepest truth of the universe, it came in the form of Jesus.

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The Beatitudes

Posted on April 2, 2012 by

Our staff recently finished reading N.T. Wright’s book Simply Jesus together.  Several of the staff members would argue that there was little that could be called simple in either the book or our discussions about it; however, I don’t think that was exactly Wright’s point with the title.  One of the more insightful passages comes near the end of the book.  In this section, Wright lays out his understanding of the Beatitudes, which shed an entirely new light on this familiar passage which begins the Sermon on the Mount:

This is the point at which a great deal of Jesus’s own kingdom agenda comes into its own.  His great Sermon on the Mount opens with the Beatitudes, which are normally read either as a special form of “ Christian ethic” (“This is how you are to behave, if you want to be really special people”) or as the rules you must keep in order to “go to heaven when you die.”  This latter view has been reinforced by the standard misreading of the first Beatitude.  “Blessings on the poor in spirit! The kingdom of heaven is yours” (Matt. 5:3) doesn’t mean, “You will go to heaven when you die.”  It means you will be one of those through whom God’s kingdom, heaven’s rule, begins to appear on earth as in heaven.  The Beatitudes are the agenda for kingdom people.   They are not simply about how to behave, so that God will do something nice to you.  They are about the way in which Jesus wants to rule the world.  He wants to do it through this sort of people—people, actually, just like himself (read the Beatitudes again and see).  The Sermon on the Mount is a call to Jesus’s followers to take up their vocation as light to the world, as salt to the earth—in other words, as people through whom Jesus’s kingdom vision is to become reality.  This is how to be the people through whom the victory of Jesus over the powers of sin and death is to be implemented in the wider world.

The work of the kingdom, in fact, is summed up pretty well in those Beatitudes.  When God wants to change the world, he doesn’t send in the tanks.  He  sends in the meek, the mourners, those who are hungry and thirsty for God’s justice, the peacemakers, and so on.  Just as God’s whole style, his chosen way of operating, reflects his generous love, sharing his rule with his human creatures, so the way in which those humans then have to behave if they are to be agents of Jesus’s lordship reflects in its turn the same sense of vulnerable, gentle, but powerful self-giving love.  It is because of this that the world has been changed by  William Wilberforce, campaigning tirelessly to abolish slavery; by Desmond Tutu, working and praying not just to end apartheid, but to  end it in such a way as to produce a reconciled, forgiving South Africa; by Cicely Saunders, starting a hospice for terminally ill patients ignored by the medical profession and launching a movement that has, within a generation, spread right around the globe (Wright, Simply Jesus, 218-219).

This is huge for me.  I have understood the beatitudes as a reversal of the culture’s values, but Wright takes that to a whole new understanding.  As always, Wright is pointing to the work of God in the continually emerging kingdom of God, and he argues that the beatitudes identify the kinds of people that God uses to bring about his reign on earth.  I love the lines at the beginning of the second paragraph above.  When God chooses to make change, he does not uses tanks and guns; instead, he uses the people that are described in the beatitudes.  I’ll never read this passage in the same way.

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Rachel Held Evans Video

Posted on March 30, 2012 by

My Year of Biblical Womanhood: Why I Camped Out in the Backyard During My Period from Fuller Theological Seminary on Vimeo.

I have been reading Rachel Held Evans’ blog for a few months.  She is both insightful and entertaining as you will see if you watch the video above.  Her year of biblical womanhood is interesting, but it forces us to address an important question: exactly how do we apply Scripture to our lives?  What parts are we called to live out and what parts do we let go?  Before anyone reacts too quickly, think of the fact that few of the women in our church have their heads covered during worship.  Her book, which due out later this year, promises to deal with these questions in further detail.

She references Christian Smith’s book The Bible Made Impossible, which I found to be challenging, frustrating, and insightful.  He forces similar questions, and as we move forward, I think these are some of the questions that we will need to examine carefully if we intend to reach the generations which are emerging now.

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Rush Limbaugh

Posted on March 7, 2012 by

I have gotten to the point that I really can’t listen to many radio talk shows any more. All of the vitriol and anger that the hosts spew ends up making me angry, and I think it contributes little to the intelligent discourse of ideas.  With that in mind, I wasn’t exactly shocked to hear about Rush’s comments from last week.  In fact, what surprises me more is that we don’t have this kind of reaction more often.  Rachel Held Evans gives a thoughtful response in a time when it is easy to blindly defend Rush or pile on:

“What does it say about the college co-ed Susan Fluke [sic], who goes before a congressional committee and says that she must be paid to have sex. What does that make her? It makes her a slut, right? It makes her a prostitute…So, if we’re gonna sit here, and if we’re gonna have a part in this, then we want something in return, Ms. Fluke: And that would be the videos of all this sex posted online so we can see what we are getting for our money.”
– Rush Limbaugh 

To me, this is whole situation is a no-brainer:  What Rush Limbaugh said was wrong.  No woman, under any circumstances should be spoken of in those terms.  Limbaugh’s ugly rant against law student and activist Sandra Fluke was misogynistic, vitriolic, and far beyond any definition of civil discourse. It should be categorically condemned, and sponsors are right to pull their advertisements in response. Yes, two liberal commentators have used similar language in the past, but as David Frum wisely points out, the indecencies of others in the past do not excuse those of Limbaugh in the present, nor should they prevent us from speaking out about the situation at hand.

It’s hard to believe that any Christian would support a man who leveled such a crass and hateful rant against someone created in the image of God, but over the weekend, I encountered several who did just that…and passionately. Most were part of my own evangelical community.   This baffled and frustrated me, as it did many of you who, via Facebook and Twitter, told me that you’ve encountered similar reactions among your family and friends. 

How can anyone who identifies as a follower of Jesus not only listen to, but support, this kind of disgusting language?  How can good people—the kind who show up at my door with a casserole the minute they find out I’m sick—openly cheer these kinds of remarks? 

 I can’t know for sure what goes on in people’s minds when they align themselves with the likes of Rush Limbaugh, but I suspect this reaction has something to do with three common blind spots among evangelicals: (more)

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Essential Books – Part 5

Posted on March 2, 2012 by

In any studious Christian’s library, even if it is small, should contain at least one work on church history.  As one of my professors frequently said, we suffer from spiritual amnesia when we refuse to acknowledge that we have a story and a history.  In our own lives, we can hardly know who we are if we don’t know our story.  So much of who we are is tied into our history.  The same is true in our spiritual lives.  Though we may take Scripture as our guide, we study it through the lens of our experience and our history.  To properly understand ourselves and our place in church life, we need to know some history.

One of the most accessible works on church history is Mark Noll‘s Turning Points.  To lay out the basic shape of the history of Christianity, Noll identifies thirteen events which served to change the course of the church.  Each of the events was a crossroads at which the church made an important theological or ecclesiological decision.  Sometimes church structure or practice was at stake; at other times, the identity of Jesus was the primary issue.  While any church historian would probably be prepared to argue with Noll over whether these are the thirteen most important turning points, Noll makes a good case for each.  But the Noll’s genius is not defending his choices.  Rather, the real contribution is explaining to the popular reader the background, primary issues and players, and consequences of each event.  This allows the reader inside these key moments and helps the reader make the connection between past and present.

Noll is an engaging storyteller and keeps his reader involved in the story from beginning to end.  Turning Points is not an exhaustive church history and does not claim to be; it is a clever overview.  For a more exhaustive work, Justo Gonzalez’ The Story of Christianity, Volume 1 and Volume 2 are an excellent choice.

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Cancelled it

Posted on February 29, 2012 by

I saw this video on Scot McKnight’s blog.  I think this sentiment is fairly common.  It’s tough when a minister prepares content that seems great and no one cares, but I think many of us would agree that this is much less about ministers and their feelings than it is about our culture.  I think people are less and less inclined to be interested in a “class.”  As she says, people are more interested in service.  The question for those of us who are concerned about spiritual formation is how we can help people grow in their relationship with God through service.

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Lent

Posted on February 28, 2012 by

During this season of Lent, LeAnn and I are reading Lent for Everyone: Mark, Year B by N.T. Wright.  Wright has arranged readings, primarily from Mark but also from other lectionary readings, along with his devotional thoughts for the season.  Since this is N.T. Wright, they aren’t exactly light reading, but they are challenging.  As always, Wright forces me to rethink suppositions and see the ministry of Jesus in a new light, which I find helpful.  Lent is a great opportunity to reflect and consider what needs to change, and in view of Wright’s approach, to consider what parts of life we need to allow Jesus to take over…again.

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