Category Archives: Christianity

It was horrible.  The shooting of those children at the Sandy Hook School in Newtown, Connecticut, was horrible.  In many ways, that is the most important thing, almost the only thing, to say about Sandy Hook.  We’ve seen the newscasts and read the articles, all of which only add to the anguish and anger we feel.  With an event as malignant as this, little that is truly constructive can be added to the ongoing conversation, certainly nothing that will bring back those children and those adults.

Still, we as human beings are unique among creatures in our wish to reflect upon and explore tragedy.  Wrestling with what’s unfathomable helps us to come to grips with what has been lost.  For whatever they might be worth, here are a couple of thoughts related to this recent massacre.

Simply and chiefly, we grieve with those that grieve.  Not that I’m alone in this regard, but as a pastor, I’ve sat with scores of people just after they’ve experienced great loss.  The older I get, the less I say in those situations.  It’s better just to sit there, be with them, and weep with them.  (The biblical book of Job gives us an object lesson in “right truth, wrong time.”)  If anything, in tragic situations I affirm to fellow sufferers how bad things are; we can free each other to recognize that terribly hard things really are terribly hard.

And we grieve together, not alone.  For all of the miles that separate us from Connecticut, on December 14 we gathered friends and loved ones around us more closely, whether in person or via talking, email, text, or facebook.  I believe that in grieving together we discover our better selves.  On a larger scale, although the sense of unity and commonality was all too brief, the aftermath of 9/11 over ten years ago recalled to us that we can and should transcend our differences and disagreements.  (The good folks at Westboro Baptist Church have missed this truth is a crucial way; they’ll be surprised that they themselves will receive the God they’re asking for.)  So, I don’t consider tweets and posts on 12/14 about holding your kids a little tighter and telling your friends you love them as digital ephemera akin to something like the e-emoting about Michael Jackson’s death.  Sandy Hook was heavy stuff, and it reminds us that we’re all in this together.  We may die alone, but we shouldn’t stare into that abyss apart.

At the same time, we’re also alone on the earth in asking the why and how questions.  Ants don’t shake a fist toward the sky when a neighboring colony gets stomped on, but when we lose our own, we do.  For Newtown, we wonder, Why do we allow so many guns in our culture?  Was the school lax in its security?  How could Adam Lanza have done it, and could we have stopped him?  On one level, though, I think these how’s and why’s may be a little misguided, even though I can understand their necessity.  To use a trivial analogy that I don’t in any way intend to trivialize Sandy Hook, three years ago I made the mistake of impersonating an athlete in a city basketball league, and I blew out my knee.  After the successful installation of my spiffy new ACL—thank you, Mr. Cadaver!—the surgeon gave me some “before” photos from the inside of my damaged joint.  I could clearly see one on one side of the inner knee cavity the severed end of my ligament, and miles away on the opposite knee shore was the other stump of my ex-ACL, with nary a gristly thread between.  Those pictures showed me exactly why and how my knee became so badly injured, but what they didn’t do was take away the pain or lessen the grueling months of recovery.  In the same way, if we scour Lanza’s life for clues, identify exactly how the school could have been made safer, or finger the gun control law that was too wide, we would at best gain information (and much of it valuable) but not real understanding or comprehension.  Everything would still hurt just as much.

It might be better to view these how’s and why’s as what they may truly be: as laments.  We don’t need to know the why, but the why.  How could our world be this way?  What kind of an existence is this, where shootings can occur and first graders one minute are smiling, and then are not?  This is unavoidably theological territory.

I’m a Christian Protestant pastor, so let me offer some Christian reflections at this point.  By doing so, however, I don’t want to imply that these are the only positions a thoughtful person can hold, or that those that don’t agree with me are worthless or dumb.  I have plenty of friends that would take different views of these things, and I honor those opinions as well as seek dialogue.  Nevertheless, here goes one Springsteen fan’s take on some hopefully pertinent issues.

We could very easily say, as many do, that something like Sandy Hook proves that there can’t be any God, classic “problem of evil” stuff.  I can of course see why one would believe this, and I feel it often myself, even as a pastor.  But what makes me a theist is that I believe our laments tell us something profound about who we are.  When tragedy strikes us, either individually or collectively, doesn’t our anger register as focused and not diffuse?  Don’t we direct our anguish to a higher being?  I recognize that this reasoning isn’t strictly “logical”—although I’d submit that none of us are strictly logical beings anyway—but in an ironic way, that we want to blame God when bad things happen may actually be a confirmation that we naturally intuit a God to be there in the first place.

More than that, our outrage at Sandy Hook affirms that our broken world is worth lamenting.  To me, our laments beg the question, “Why do we lament?  What story forms the substructure of our tears?”  The biblical narrative suggests that we lament because we, as made in the image of a good creator, inhabit a good world marred by evil.  In that same connection, I suspect that modernism (not to mention its post-y successors) in its ongoing quest to find “deeper” causes and roots to our personhood (psychological, developmental, economic, social, genetic, etc.), for all of the genuine fruits of its inquiries, has also done us a disservice in its assertion that we are no more than the sum of our biological parts.  Our laments, we might say, are merely the tips of imbedded icebergs of larger, impersonal forces.  For example, I might learn that my deep desire not to go gently into that good night is merely genetic programming to further the survival of my species; but it doesn’t feel that way.  That’s not what my mind and spirit are telling me.  Author Marilynne Robinson has recently written, “Even as our capacity to describe the fabric of reality and the dimensions of it has undergone an astonishing deepening and expansion, we have turned away from the ancient intuition that we are a part of it all.”  We are part of it all, which whispers to us that there must be an author to all of it.

As I go into the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures, it is striking that so many laments are included within the sacred texts.  This tells me that a) God’s story at the very least accounts for the occurrence of horrible things, yet b) we’re nevertheless encouraged to complain to God about them.  I find each of these propositions more comforting and more likely to be true than either of their contraries.  Furthermore, one can’t be real without the other.

It’s not unusual for me to field questions from people asking what the Christian “answer” to suffering, injustice, evil, and natural disaster is.  I don’t think there is one, per se, but I actually find that reality satisfying.  Do we really need the answer, after all?  In fact, I’d hold any “answers” to a tragedy like Sandy Hook suspect.  Surely it is an inhumane (and likewise unbiblical) prescription that we should just suck it up in the face of horrible things because that’s just the way of the world.  Stoic-types, both ancient and modern, believe this, but they aren’t much fun at parties.  Similarly, can it really be the case that evil is just an illusion?  To say that the Connecticut shooting is merely a material reality to be transcended by the more mature belittles human dignity and loss.

Interestingly, the Bible doesn’t offer a divine answer to human suffering, but it does narrate a divine action in response to it.  I’m not sure that the typical formulation of the problem of evil deeply wrestles with the Christian story.  It isn’t only that God is good and powerful; the church’s Scriptures also contend that God himself has entered into his own story and suffered on our behalf.  There are of course many that would reject this narrative, but I’d hope that we all could recognize that if God has personally entered into our bitter world in order to experience it and ultimately make it better, we’re not dealing simply with a bare, God-up-there kind of theism.  We may think that this story is true or untrue, but wouldn’t we agree that it’s unique and possibly intriguing?

Years after the Holocaust, a German writer named Guenter Rutenborn wrote a play that sought to plumb the horrors of what Hitler had done.  In it, God is put on trial.  How could such evil and injustice be allowed to occur upon the earth?  By the end of the drama, God is found guilty of crimes against humanity, and his sentence is death.  God would have to live the in the world as a Jew, to know what it is to lose a son, to suffer in great agony, and to die.  The essence of that play rescues for me my belief in God, because I believe this is precisely what God has done.  I would be an atheist if it weren’t for this part of the Christian story.  The cross satisfies our need for justice, shows that the divine being himself is angered by the things that we are angered by, and suffered himself to birth a world of forgiveness, joy, life and peace that has only just begun.

I have a first grade son, and he is the most sensitive of all of my children.  Emily and I knew that within our family, he would be the most shaken and terrified by the news of Newtown.  We weren’t wrong in our assessment.  That children the same age as he were killed made his fear even more visceral.  Over that weekend in December, he asked me, “Dad, is it safe for me to go to school on Monday?”  I paused, took a breath, said a silent prayer, and replied, “My son, we love you, your teachers love you, your police officers love you, this borough loves you, and God loves you.  You are surrounded by love.  I’m sure that you’ll be safe on Monday.”  My boy: “But do you know for sure for sure?”  I: “I’m sorry, but I don’t know for sure, for sure.”  He: “Then why do we trust in God at all?”  As I kissed goodnight my child whom I love beyond any measure or rationality, I told him, “Because Jesus shows us that even though the world isn’t safe today, one day it will be.”

Tim Chester, A Meal With Jesus: Discovering Grace, Community, & Mission around the Table
Somewhere in a parallel universe, there exist shelves and shelves of theological books that are well written.  Unfortunately in this regard, we live on earth, where good theology is often poorly expressed (and sketchy theology reads like buttah).  Throw in the Z-axis of quality missional reflection, and you’re seeking the holy grail hat trick of Christian literature.  But hey, anything’s possible.

Enter Tim Chester, from the parallel universe of England.  On a steel horse he rides across the pond to give us A Meal With Jesus: Discovering Grace, Community, & Mission around the Table, and he serves up said hat trick.  Chester has apparently written many books for IVP and others in Great Britain, but I only became aware of him last year with his You Can Change, which is a wonderful work that details the dynamics of gospel growth in our lives.  For all of You Can Change’s strengths, however, I agreed with a perceptive critic that thought the style of the book rather pedestrian and decried, “Unfortunately, Chester writes more like a butler than a buccaneer.”  I wouldn’t have put it in such a stroppy way—horses for courses, and all that—but it seems that Chester has taken that criticism to heart with A Meal With Jesus, and what we have is a remarkable short volume that blends deep biblical theological reflection with a bracing call to mission, all produced in a manner that is neither overcooked nor underwritten.  Bob’s your uncle!
I loved A Meal With Jesus so much, in fact, that I’ve invited all of us at Providence to buy a copy, read it, and open their homes to others this summer for the purpose of joy and mission.

Chester builds his book around the gospel of Luke and notes how frequently there Jesus is at a meal.  “How did Jesus come?” Chester asks, “He came eating and drinking.”  I never quite thought of it that way, even though I spent years preaching through Luke, but Chester is sussing out something important: “Jesus spent his time eating and drinking—a lot of his time. He was a party animal. His mission strategy was a long meal, stretching into the evening. He did evangelism and discipleship round a table with some grilled fish, a loaf of bread, and a pitcher of wine.” This might not feel like a stonking revelation in itself, but the implications that Chester builds from this premise are striking.  For example, argues Chester, Jesus’ meals are a strategic way to throw a spanner in the works of the religious establishment and engage in kingdom mission:
Jesus is called “a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners.” This is why eating and drinking were so important in the mission of Jesus: they were a sign of his friendship with tax collectors and sinners. His “excess” of food and “excess” of grace are linked. In the ministry of Jesus, meals were enacted grace, community, and mission. So the meals of Jesus represent something bigger. They represent a new world, a new kingdom, a new outlook. But they give that new reality substance. Jesus’s meals are not just symbols; they’re also application. They’re not just pictures; they’re the real thing in miniature. Food is stuff. It’s not ideas. It’s not theories. It’s, well, it’s food, and you put it in your mouth, taste it, and eat it. And meals are more than food. They’re social occasions. They represent friendship, community, and welcome. I don’t want to reduce church and mission to meals, but I do want to argue that meals should be an integral and significant part of our shared life. They represent the meaning of mission, but they more than represent it: they embody and enact our mission.
I believe this is true.  Sharing a meal is a great equalizer—just like grace itself—which is precisely why the Pharisees couldn’t stand Jesus.  Have you ever been in the house of a friend (or an erstwhile stranger) for dinner and not wanted the meal to end?  Isn’t there something intuitively correct in Chester’s assertion that “around the table we offer fellowship and celebrate life”?  When Christians practice such simple hospitality with a true sense of joy and inclusion, “Our meals offer a divine moment, an opportunity for people to be seduced by grace into a better life, a truer life, and a more human existence.”

If Christians want to engage in mission, then, better perhaps than entering an evangelism program or attending a conference on the subject is simply opening their homes and dinner tables to others.  According to Chester,
Jesus didn’t run projects, establish ministries, create programs, or put on events. He ate meals. If you routinely share meals and you have a passion for Jesus, then you’ll be doing mission. It’s not that meals save people. People are saved through the gospel message. But meals will create natural opportunities to share that message in a context that resonates powerfully with what you’re saying.
I wish that I had encountered this message years ago—and yes, ironically enough, this message really just derives from the Bible, which I’ve read before—and have done a better job of doing mission in this way and of communicating this vision to others.

Alas, here is also the problem: all of this theologizing is brill, and suddenly Chester makes mission sound so much easier than the hair shirting alternatives, but why don’t I share meals with others more than I do?  Because I’m often a Pharisee.  It was those in the religious upper class that lorded their status over others and only practiced hospitality to buttress their own status and reciprocal gain.  Jesus, however, gives the toodle pip to that way of thinking and says instead, “When you give a dinner or a banquet, do not invite your friends or your brother or your relatives or rich neighbors, lest they also invite you in return and you be repaid.  But when you give a feast, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind, and you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you.”  This teaching is hard for anyone to practice, but when it happens, it’s beautiful.  Then I turn back around to gaze in upon my own cold heart, and Chester warns me, “It’s easy to love people in some abstract sense and preach the virtues of love. But we’re called to love the real individuals sitting around the table.”  Or again, “Our meals express our doctrine of justification. It’s possible to articulate an orthodox theology of justification by faith, but communicate through your meals a doctrine of justification by works.”  This is profound.  My meals really do express my “vision for life,” and whom I invite and how I practice them says more about me than I want to admit.

Nevertheless,  A Meal With Jesus holds out hope to me on two levels.  First, getting on the Chester bandwagon is as easy as giving someone a quick call or email to come over for dinner.  It’s not rocket science.  In addition, Chester continually draws the reader back to the grace of Christ, grace that forgives, grace that renews, grace that says, “Try again.”  That’s what I want to do, and I believe that the ethic of A Meal With Jesus could transform Providence and its mission in some permanent ways.  And best of all, as we press ahead with sharing hospitality, we are orienting ourselves to abiding, future joy.  Chester one more time:
What are the Christian community’s meals for? They achieve many things. They express so much of God’s grace. They provide a glimpse of what it’s like to live under God’s reign. They express and reinforce the community that Christ has created through the cross. They’re a foretaste of the new creation. They’re a great context in which to invite unbelievers so they encounter the reality of God among us. But they’re not “for” any of these things. It’s a trick question. Everything else—creation, redemption, mission—is “for” this: that we might eat together in the presence of God. God created the world so we might eat with him. The food we consume, the table around which we sit, and the companions gathered with us have as their end our communion with one another and with God. The Israelites were redeemed to eat with God on the mountain, and we’re redeemed for the great messianic banquet that we anticipate when we eat together as a Christian community. We proclaim Christ in mission so that others might hear the invitation to join the feast. Creation, redemption, and mission all exist so that this meal can take place.
Well said.

Alan Jacobs, Original Sin: A Cultural History
I’ve read a few books on sin, but Alan Jacobs’ Original Sin: A Cultural History is unique in a particular regard: it’s funny.  John Calvin on the subject of sin, for example, is many wonderful things, but he’s devoid of any ha-ha’s.

Thank goodness, then, for Jacobs, professor of English at Wheaton College, who’s enlivened a rather moribund genre.  He himself admits, however, that he’s starting from a deficit, as he attempts to make a plausible case for such a hoary doctrine to the contemporary skeptic, but I think he succeeds in his task as much as anyone ever could.  (Realistically, there’s only so much one can do in order to make the doctrine of original sin attractive, but Jacobs very nearly emerges from Original Sin with the silk purse.)

I’m all about cold and relentless logic here at “Words of Angehr,” so let’s break down the title into its constituent parts.  So there’s the Original Sin part.  This is a traditional Christian teaching which holds that when Adam and Eve fell, the power of sin and the curse of sin was transmitted to their posterity (i.e., to all of us).  As a result, humans are not born inherently good nor as a tabula rasa, but instead as sinners predisposed to selfishness and evil plus already under judgment.

Obviously, original sin would be something of a drag to bring up at cocktail parties.  Nevertheless, Jacobs argues persuasively that we need a concept of original sin in order to make proper sense out of our world and of ourselves.  His driving query, for you Latinists out there in blogoland, is, “Unde hoc malum?”  (“Where did this evil come from?”) I think that’s a great question, and one that I would place before any religious skeptic.  Is it just an unfortunate coincidence that people do terrible things, or that our tabulae probably remain rasae for just such a little while before selfishness fills us up?  Alternatively, is “evil” simply a function of our biological programming so that we then aren’t able to call anything evil or wrong at all?  After the bloodiest century in the history of the world, is optimism about humanity the order of the day for 2011?  Calling Dr. Pangloss!  Unde hoc malum?

Original sin might not go down any easier than Ovaltine, but that doesn’t mean it fails to get the job done.  Those that would dismiss original sin may be setting themselves up for a fall.

But the title, Original Sin, continues into sub-, as all current titles inexorably must.  What we have in this book by Jacobs is a Cultural History.  In other words, Original Sin isn’t a systematic theological treatment of its subject, nor historical theology.  Instead the author details major proponents of original sin (Augustine, Edwards, Whitefield) and its detractors (Pelagius, Wesley) but even more interestingly traces echoes of the doctrine through cultural artifacts (literature, music, politics) so that he might construct a compelling plausibility matrix for a belief that few of us would prima facie wish to accept.  Unde hoc malum?  Answer: original sin.

Truthfully, it’s the “cultural history” part of the equation that drew me to this book.  I’m not an expert on the subject, but I feel like seminary and study have already imparted to me a good-enough understanding of the basics of original sin.  What I haven’t given nearly as much thought to is how original sin has surfaced consistently throughout cultures around the world and across the centuries.  Original sin is always there!  In service of that thesis, the breadth of Jacobs’ reading is breathtaking.  We have here Shakespeare (of course) but also Marlowe, C. S. Lewis but also Whittaker Chambers, George Whitefield plus the Duchess of Buckingham, Reinhold Niebuhr with Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, Scholastic Protestantism with Kabbalah Judaism, Solzhenitsyn and Rebecca West, Mike Mignola’s  Hellboy comics-cum-film and (say it ain’t so) Nicholas Cage’s Ghost Rider movie, and so on.  Alan Jacobs probably reads a lot.

The downside of this type of history, in my opinion, is that it can tend to be so impressionistic that the thesis becomes irrefutable by default.  On the other hand, the mind behind “Words of Angehr” really isn’t that logical after all, so I prefer “cultural” history anyway.  The method (and to a lesser extent) style of Original Sin reminds me of the writings of music critic Greil Marcus, who can be eclectic to a fault, sometimes dead wrong, but never less than fascinating.  With Jacobs and Marcus, occasionally a reader may think that correlations between their sources only cohere in the mind of the author, yet I’m enough of a postmodern to wonder, Isn’t all history like that anyway?  If you like history as a timeline, Original Sin: A Cultural History probably isn’t for you.  But if, conversely, you’re an interesting person with a curious and energetic mind, you’ll love it.

And did I mention the stuff about funny?  This book about sin is funny—funny in ways that are rather profound, funny also as in humorous, and sometimes both.  After a lengthy discussion of the clash between Augustine (who fervently believed in original sin) and Pelagius (who thought he was good enough, smart enough, and gosh-darnit people liked him), Jacobs comments, “Pelagianism is a creed for heroes, but Augustine’s emphasis on original sin and the consequent absolute dependence of every one of us on the grace of God gives hope to the waverer, the backslider, the slacker, putz, the schlemiel.”  Life is funnier in yiddish.  And let’s face it, we’re all schlemiels.