Losing Faith

Real Live Preacher's recent blog entry could not have come at a better time for me. It deals with losing faith and finding it again, "St. John of the Cross said that there are paths we travel as children in the faith, but real faith doesn't come until you reach the end of the path and find nothing." Well, I think I'm almost at the end of the path.

Most people assume that clergy and Biblical scholars have a depth of faith that borders on naivete. I think for many of us faith exists despite what we have learned not because of it. When you discover truth, you have to act upon it. Either you dismiss it wholesale as blasphemy, or it wrestle with it until you are able to incorporate it into your worldview. I've found that the people in the pew have a far deeper, innocent, and simple faith. I've always respected the simple faith of the people I preach to, even envied it. I've always tried to challenge people's thinking but never in an attempt to make them lose faith. My focus has always been on the end product of our faith. Does it impact our daily choices for the better? If so, our faith has worth. Tragically, I've known many pious people who were judgemental, racist, sexist, homophobic, and power hungry who used their faith to justify and embolden their views. I've come to learn that faith is not the sum of what you believe based on experience and fact. It is a choice you make.

Faith and Mystery

I've been reading Ideas and Opinions by Albert Einstein, which has fascinated me. The pursuit of the meaning of our existence seemed absurd to him. He thought the most beautiful experience we can have as human beings is the mysterious. If we lose our capacity to wonder, he said we are as good as dead. It was the experience of mystery that fostered religion, and only in that sense did he consider himself religious.

I cannot conceive of a God who rewards and punishes his creatures, or has a will of the kind that we experience in ourselves. Neither can I nor would I want to conceive of an individual that survives his physical death; let feeble souls, from fear or absurd egoism, cherish such thoughts. I am satisfied with the mystery of the eternity of life and with the awareness and a glimpse of the marvelous structure of the existing world, together with the devoted striving to comprehend a portion, be it ever so tiny, of the Reason that manifests itself in nature.

He talked about three motivations or stages of religion. First, there is a religion of fear. Gods are fashioned, served, and appeased to aleve our fears of hunger, sickness, death, etc., which also establishes a priestly caste to serve as mediators between the people and the gods they fear. Secondly, there is the God of Providence based upon a social or moral conception of God who protects, rewards, punishes, comforts, loves, and keeps the dead. He says that the scriptures illustrate the development of a religion of fear into moral religion.

Though rare he says there is another level of religious experience which he calls a "cosmic religious feeling" prompted in part by the futility of human desires and the wonder at the natural order revealed in nature and the world of thought. This feeling distinguishes the religious geniuses of all ages, which are often regarded as heretics. It "knows no dogma and no God conceived in man's image; so that there can be no church whose central teachings are based on it." He believed it is "the most important function of art and science to awaken this feeling and keep it alive in those who are receptive to it."

I feel like I'm in a rut of sorts, somewhere between a moral religion and a cosmic religious feeling. It depends on which day you ask me. Regardless of where we find ourselves, I hope that we never lose our capacity to wonder. I don't believe it's our calling as human beings to explain the Mystery but to embrace it.

Costly Grace

These are my reflections on the first chapter of The Cost of Discipleship, "Costly Grace."

Bonhoeffer's argument for "costly grace" over "cheap grace" at first seems to contradict his attack upon the religious trappings of the church which overburden people and make genuine decisions for Christ difficult. He describes cheap grace as "the grace we bestow upon ourselves... it is the justification of sin without justification of the sinner... preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance... grace without discipleship... grace without the cross."

"By making this grace available on the cheapest and easiest terms" the Church may have Christianized a nation but at the expense of true discipleship. "We gave away the word and sacraments wholesale, we baptized, confirmed, and absolved a whole nation unasked and without condition." The call to follow Jesus fell silent.

The danger of cheap grace is that "the account has been paid in advance; and, because it has been paid, everything can be had for nothing." What I have come to understand is that he argues against religious prerequisites to receiving grace. That it is indeed the free gift of God that cannot be earned, bought, or bestowed by man, but he is also passionately attacking "grace as a license to sin," that recipients of grace cannot rest content living just like the world. While the grace of God is free, it is a costly gift, and the receipt of such a gift makes us stewards of His grace. As those who have been forgiven so great a debt, we are under a holy obligation to follow after Christ, which we do at the cost of our very lives. In the end he says that the message of cheap grace has ruined more Christians than any commandment of works.

Martin Luther's departure from the monastery was "the worst blow the world had suffered since the days of early Christianity. The renunciation he made when he became a monk was child's play compared with that which he had to make when he returned to the world." Until that time the Christian life was believed only possible to the spiritual elite, but now Luther demonstrated that "the only way to follow Jesus was by living in the world." He says that Luther learned that "grace had cost him his very life, and must continue to cost him the same price day by day." The Reformation launched a revolution of believers who had been called to follow Christ in their everyday lives. Grace could no longer be separated from discipleship, as though it were optional. The most urgent problem in Bonhoeffer's day as well as ours is "How can we live the Christian life in the modern world?"

Reading Update

The Cost of Discipleship is proving to be one of the toughest books I've read. I'm having to read each chapter four times just to process them. This is not the book you read in bed after midnight. It will give you a migraine. I don't know if it's because it was written in the 30's or because it was translated from German, but it's just tough to read at times. Generally, by the second time I read a chapter I understand what he is saying. The third time I read just to argue with him and myself about what he is saying. Finally, it starts to come together for me about the fourth walk through. The real reason I find the book so hard is that it challenges most everything I think I know about following Christ. If it were any other author, I'd dismiss parts of it and keep reading, but this is Dietrich Bonhoeffer. While he is not infallible, his words are weighty enough that they demand to be wrestled with and worked out in my life.

I just got Dallas Willard's book The Diving Conspiracy. I'm excited to start reading it after hearing what a friend of mine said about it, plus seeing it quoted so many times in blogs and books. I think it will be my bedtime reader. Bonhoeffer will be reserved for those moments when I'm alert and my brain cells are firing in synch. After hearing quite a few Einstein quotes and theories in a movie recently, I decided to get his book, Ideas and Opinions, which appears to cover a broad range of topics beyond science.

I watched Kingdom of Heaven with Orlando Bloom last night. It was an awesome movie about the fall of Jerusalem to the Muslims between the Second and Third Crusades. The movie helped to put the Middle East conflict in historical perspective and has great discussion starters about tolerance and diversity. I'm a history nut, but I thought it was an awesome movie. I stayed up till almost 2:00 a.m. reading 10 chapters of Church History covering the rise of Christendom in Europe, the medieval Church, and the crusades.

The library called this morning to say that my book(s) were ready to be picked up. I think there's at least three. I like to multi-task my reading to keep it interesting. Life's too short to be ignorant.

Sin Cargo

I received my first ever credit card offer in español today. I suppose they thought I wasn't responding to the previous 100 offers because I couldn't read English. The first thing that caught my attention on the envelope was the bold phrase "Sin Cargo." Having just finished a blog entry on the unnecessary weight of religious baggage that we carry around, my mind first thought of the theological weight of such a phrase before I realized it wasn't English.

To my further amazement and sheer delight I found out, one Google search later, that the translation of the phrase is "without charge." Imagine that! Consider the weight of all the junk you carry around with you unnecessarily. No charge! The debt is already paid. So, why don't we just drop it already?

The Cost of Discipleship

After reading about Dietrich Bonhoeffer for a long time I finally decided to read The Cost of Discipleship for myself. I noticed that several emerging churches and the Northumbria Community cite his book as inspiration. I thought for my own benefit I would share some of my reflections.

The birth pains of change in the Church are worth the cost if the end result is "a richer understanding of the Scriptures" and "a more determined quest for Him who is the sole object of it all." Bonhoeffer talks about the difficulty people have in making a "genuine decision for Christ" because the Message is "overlaid with so much human ballast - burdensome rules and regulations, false hopes and consolations... so overburdened with ideas and expressions which are hopelessly out of touch with the mental climate in which they live." His words are so relevant that it is hard to believe that this book was written in 1937.

Bonhoeffer might as well be addressing modern-day fundamentalists when he describes the "Church's concern to erect a spiritual tyranny over men, by dictating to them what must be believed and performed in order to be saved, and by presuming to enforce that belief and behaviour with the sanctions of temporal and eternal punishment." He challenges us to cast off these man-made burdens and to receive the yoke of Christ which is easy.

I for one have often found myself struggling to live for Christ. Frankly, it's not easy. It's tough, but Bonhoeffer says one of the reasons we have found it so difficult is because of the weight of all the religious garbage that we have inherited, albeit unknowingly, "Only the man who follows the command of Jesus single-mindedly, and unrestingly lets his yoke rest upon him, finds his burden easy, and under its gentle pressure receives the power to persevere in the right way. The command of Jesus is hard, unutterably hard, for those who try to resist it. But for those who willingly submit, the yoke is easy, and the burden is light." I think we still are trying to earn His love, rather than submit and receive it freely, so we resist Him and choose misery over joy. Bonhoeffer pleads with us, "may we be enabled to say 'No' to sin and 'Yes' to the sinner." Perhaps that sinner is ourself.

Is It Really a Bad Thing?

There are many different voices in the emerging conversation, which I particularly believe is a good thing. The diversity of opinion within this movement makes it very difficult to define and label by its opponents. Often the only criticism that gets any traction is that the emergent is free-for-all theology. Consider the following quote:

"The great confusion that exists in the divergent positions of the Emergent Church results from their challenging the final authority of the Scriptures. When you no longer have a final authority, then everyone's ideas become as valid as the next person's, and it cannot help but end in total confusion and contradictions." Calvary Chapel's statement on the Emergent taken from Mark Driscoll's blog on theresurgence.com

If the byproduct of this conversation is that "everyone's ideas become as valid as the next person's," isn't that a good thing? I disagree that the end result is "total confusion and contradiction." You only have total confusion and contradiction when a participant in the conversation believes his particular position is infallible and absolute. If you can engage in a conversation with respect for the viewpoints of others, humility, and an openness to the possibility that you may be wrong, amazing things can take place. We used to call that fellowship.

It occurred to me that when our forefathers in the faith sat down in these early church councils to hammer out the foundation stones of our theology, they didn't begin with consensus. While the end product of those councils was a unified statement of belief, that certainly did not mean that each person completely abandoned their own opinion but rather compromised and collaborated so that the finished product would represent the totality of the community.

I paused this morning to be thankful that I was born in a country and a particular time in history when it is not illegal to think for yourself and question everything, no matter how threatening that may be to the status quo.