Incarnation: The Intersection of Two Universes

Gerard van Honthorst Adoration of the Shepherds, still influenced by Saint Bridget

A Twilight Musing

The word “incarnation” gets a lot of use this time of year, and like most frequently-used terms, its full meaning tends to get lost in its commonness. Literally, it means “being manifest in bodily form,” and it can refer to any disembodied entity assuming physical shape. However, when Christians say “The Incarnation,” they are of course talking about the Son of God being born and living out an earthly life as a human being. That bare fact would be astounding even if God had taken human form in the perfect world of the Garden of Eden; but His being incarnated in a world corrupted by sin betokens a cosmic intersection between changeless Divinity and the ever-changing sin-diseased heavens and earth. When the apostle John wrote the prologue to his Gospel account (John 1:1-18), he called the part of God that took human form “the Word,” which “was God” and was “with God” (v. 1) before He “became flesh and lived among us” (v. 14). Deathless Eternity was enveloped by mortal flesh, locking them in a battle from which either Eternal Life or endless Death would emerge victorious. Praise be to God, we know the outcome of that battle won by the Savior Jesus, whose incarnated flesh suffered death, but was raised in glory, the firstfruits of the victory over Death.

Both of the poems below reflect the process of the Word being encased in flesh, but then also emerging from flesh to become the Eternal Word again, having triumphed over Sin and Death. In the first poem, I have assumed a symbolic correspondence between the “swaddling clothes” in which Mary wrapped Jesus at His birth and the customary shroud in which His crucified body was buried. Although there was great rejoicing at Jesus’ birth because of the promises associated with His Advent, the lowly circumstances surrounding that birth indicated that His earthly existence would not fulfill the conventional expectations of powerful king and conquering hero. Just as His birth hid the death embedded in it, so His death was the womb of the Life embedded within it.

The second poem traces the same cycle of progress from the absolute and timeless Presence of God, to the extension of His Essence into the original creation of Earth, and finally to that Essence taking on human form, but without the corruption of sin. Through that Birth, Earth will be delivered from its corruption once again to embody the Essence of God’s original purpose for it, thereby empowering it to be the dwelling place for God’s eternal Presence.

"And the Word Became Flesh" (1985)

(John 1:1)

When Word invested in flesh,

No matter the shrouds that swathed it;

The donning of sin's poor corpse

(Indignity enough)

Was rightly wrapped in robes of death.

Yet breath of God

Broke through the shroud,

Dispersed the cloud

That darkened every birth before.

Those swaddling bands bespoke

A glory in the grave,

When flesh emerged as Word.

Take up this flesh, O Lord:

Re-form it with Your breath,

That, clothed in wordless death,

It may be Your Word restored.

Immanuel (1977)

In God's Presence

Is the essence

Of perfect earth;

In one birth

Knows all earth

The essence

Of God's Presence.

May the wonder of the Word becoming flesh be made real to each of those who rest in its redeeming power; and may each of those inhabited by the Spirit of Christ know with assurance that “this flesh . . . clothed in wordless death” is being transmuted to the “Word restored.”

Social Media, Immanuel Kant, and the Church

What on earth do these three things have to do with one another? Well, I recently found myself looking at the work of Immanuel Kant, particularly his Religion within the Bounds of Reason, and a few thoughts occurred to me to pass along. In the third section of the book, Kant extends the discussion beyond the need for individual forgiveness and moral transformation to a more communal matter: participation in a community and its role, among others, to furnish eminently teachable moments.

It’s easy to think we’ve morally arrived when we’re sealed in like a hermit away from others, but we acquire patience when we actually have to practice it among other people. We learn love when we strive to have it for people not always easy to love. This is an important reason why community is vital as a sanctification tool.

Kant recognized that victory of the good over evil, and the founding of the kingdom of God on earth, occurs only in the context of community. He thought of such a “community of ends,” or “ethical commonwealth,” as a necessarily religious institution. Why?

When we live in proximity to others, we all too easily have a corrupting influence on each other. Consistent with Christian theology, Kant thought that, despite our potential for good, we’re all also afflicted with radical evil. Believers are in the process of being extricated from our “dear self” that can so easily beset us and derail our best efforts, but we remain susceptible to its allure. Only God’s grace can ultimately liberate us from it.

As I reflected on this, it dawned on me that we live in an interesting historical moment in this regard. Until about a decade ago, social media didn’t exist like it does now, and it has thrust us all, however unwittingly, into a novel relational paradigm, a new robust community. High school reunions don’t mean what they used to; rather than being out of touch with old friends and hankering to reconnect, we get hourly updates about their goings on. Much of this is wonderful, even charming, but it has its downside, and Kant can help us see why.

“Familiarity breeds contempt” is an oft-repeated adage for good reason. The more we’re around others—virtually or otherwise—the greater the temptation to find them a bit wearisome. Patterns emerge; idiosyncrasies begin to grate; and interpersonal conflicts owing to jealousy, selfishness, and a million other causes can easily ensue. This is unfortunate, but Kant also saw such inevitable conflicts in community as potentially redemptive, for they can reveal to us new things about ourselves—our need for deeper transformation, for learning to live with others despite their (and our) moral frailties and failures, and for coming to understand what it means to treat others as ends in themselves rather than as mere means.

Kant thought such communities are forged by a willingness to come together and agree to cooperate based on moral laws. He saw these communities as a kind of church in which we have the chance to learn and grow, becoming better, not worse. The possibility for both exists.

And the context of social media ratchets it all up a notch. Here the ugly underside of the human condition is often on full display: indulgence, rabid partisanship, off-putting communication styles, sophistry, dehumanization, unchecked incivility, shoddy argumentation, disingenuousness, putting on airs, projecting impressions, self-aggrandizement, addictive tendencies, unfiltered commentary, unprovoked tendentiousness, and the list goes on.

The littered trail of not just lost Facebook connections, but ruined friendships—even among strong professing Christians—is adequate commentary that too often social media has brought out our worst, not our best.

To my fellow believers, in particular, I’d like to say this as a word of encouragement and exhortation: of course social media isn’t the (or even a) local church, but we’re all part of the Church universal, and biblical truths apply. If social media is going to serve as a redemptive presence in our lives, we have to remember something that Kant recognized clearly. The ethical commonwealth—the contexts to which we belong, even on social media—is insufficient for true religion. We have to learn to allow God to guide all the members of a group together, all the disparate parts of His body. He’s the Head of the Kingdom of Ends able to coordinate and make cohere all the different roles we’re meant to play.

The same Being or Source is at the root of the moral deliverances to which we all need to heed, especially when it’s tempting not to. From this perspective, the level of cooperation between the members of the groups thus banded together will be a function of how faithfully they follow His lead in their lives. Garden variety conflicts are still sure to arise, but they needn’t—and they mustn’t—irremediably divide; they can instead be means of grace.

Kant offered a good test for actions when it comes to religious practice that would also serve as a useful rule for engagement on social media: Asking whether the word or action conduces to virtue, in oneself and others. If it doesn’t, best to refrain from it.

The Bible would up the ante even more: Is it an expression of love? Is it a way to obey the most important command to love God with all of our heart, soul, mind, and strength, and our neighbor as ourselves? If we speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, we are a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. And though we have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge, and though we have all faith—so that we could remove mountains—and have not love, we are nothing.

In this wonderful and special time of year, a season of soaring hope and charity, and at the precipice of a new year, let’s do something countercultural: let’s allow a spirit of generosity to replace any animus and invective, exchanging harsh tones and cutting comments for words of healing and edification, renewal and mercy, reconciliation and restoration—extending to others the grace that’s been offered to us.

From all of us at MoralApologetics.com, blessed Advent, and Merry Christmas.

Image: Telephone exchange by Cristiano de Jesus. CC License. 

Jack Reacher, Superheroes, and Jesus Christ

Jack Reacher is a former military policeman. With neither permanent address nor credit card this formidable 6’5” martial arts tactician drifts in anonymity. Wherever he goes he finds helpless victims caught in powerful webs of evil. Against insurmountable odds Reacher comes to their aid.

Author of the super popular Jack Reacher novel series, Lee Child, discussed with writer Steven King at Harvard University the derivation of his character ‘Jack Reacher’. ‘Jack Reacher’, he said, is his iteration of the ageless longing for the superhero.

This Advent season we Christians reflect on the coming into the world of the promised Prince-King-Savior, Jesus Christ. Is he, like Jack Reacher, just another construct of wishful human thinking? So skeptical critics since the nineteenth century have argued. They discount Jesus Christ as just another myth in the long line of human longing for the super hero – the deified Man. Such critics have taken their cue from the philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach who said God—substitute Jesus Christ—is a human invention. He is the deified essence of Man. Jesus Christ is humankind’s highest ideals, hopes, and imaginations fictionally personified. Namely, Jesus, just like Jack Reacher, is a projection of the human imagination.

Feuerbach’s and the skeptical critics’ contention is as unsuitable as it is an inadequate explanation of Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ was enough unlike the profile of a hoped-for messiah-savior that not only his own Jewish people but the world did not recognize him. Let me point out why Feuerbach’s claim is off base and show the disparity between the human, idealized super-hero and Jesus Christ.

The imagined deified heroes embody what we are not but wish we were. They fill up our cosmic inadequacies. Fantasize with me about an archetypical super-human. What is your god or goddess’s profile? The idealized deified idol is endowed with super-human strength. Muscular, attractive, with enhanced intelligence, he or she is a champion who knows what to do in all circumstances. Endowed with an indomitable spirit, the conqueror is virile, generous, and has a streak – just a streak – of good. With death-defying acts, the divine hero surmounts improbable odds to triumph over every impossible predicament to save helpless persons. In the superhero, evil meets its match. They right wrongs, fight for justice, and defend the public from the catastrophic machinations of tyrannical, psychopathic villains. You know their names: Hercules, James Bond, X-Man, Batman, Wonder Woman, et cetera. We cannot forget Superman! In 1935, two New York City taxi-cab-drivers imagined a superman who could defeat crime and fight for truth and justice. He is faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, and able to leap tall buildings in a single bound. “Is it a bird? – Is it a plane? – No, it’s SUPERMAN!” Possessing X-ray vision, he has extraordinary, muscular strength, good looks, and, yes, he is honest and humble.

He was a model for this American male. I had my Superman suit with the big ‘S’ on my chest. I waited for that suit to arrive for two months. Mom said it was only two weeks. I went “flying around” – I mean, running around – our backyard. I could not bend steel, or outrun the dog, but I was hopeful.

Superman is made to be seen! His stupendous saving acts are performed before the eyes of the watching world. Who can miss a man flying down Wall Street in royal blue tights, a giant red ‘S’ centered on his chest, and a red cape flapping behind him? Humankind dreams of heroes who flex their muscles, and make the spectacle of their superiority resoundingly clear. At the end of the day, no one is left in doubt who wields the greatest strength, the superior intelligence, and the supreme prowess.

Contrast the hero tradition with the coming Ruler, Messiah-King, Jesus Christ. Does Jesus match their profile? He is born in an animal shelter to a craftsman family in an obscure country. The prophet Isaiah says of him, “He had no form or comeliness that we should look at him, and no beauty that we should desire him.” He did not possess the unusually attractive Grecian star-quality looks of Hercules. We’re told nothing of his looks, or the color of his skin, in fact, but plenty about his character. Moreover, contrary to Superman, his great works were performed not in the great cities like Rome or Athens but in the rural, country villages of Galilee … the Big Islands and Tight Squeezes of this world. His miracles were always awesome, but often not sensational. He was not Hercules holding up the world or Batman swooping down from a skyscraper in Gotham City’s searchlight. Though there were exceptions, He worked in understated and invisible ways to leave room for doubt … and faith. Though the results were overwhelming, one saw very little flash. When religious or secular leaders asked him for the spectacular sign of a ‘superman’, he refused to give it.

The Gospel writers make clear in Jesus’ own as well as the Gospel writers’ minds his culminating glory was the scornful cross! What human fantasy would ever conceive it? What hoped-for human imagination would envision the ideal hero-god’s climaxing achievement a humiliating public execution by his enemies on a cross? Shall the ideal superhero die like a dog an excruciating and humiliating death stretched out naked publicly in front of his enemies?

Jesus Christ is distinctly different from human fictions. Contra Feuerbach and the skeptical critics, human authors could not imagine him. His profile is not a construct of wishful, human thinking. He is not the fantasized superhero. Jesus Christ is beyond human fantasies. He is from elsewhere. ‘Of the Father’s love begotten, Ere the worlds began to be, He is Alpha and Omega, He the source, the ending, He.’

And yet none like Him so deeply satisfies our yearning for a Savior, for in allowing Himself to be broken, He offered the world its only chance to be healed.

All Hallows Eve

  By Tom Thomas

What if on ‘All Hallows Eve’ you were revisited by spirits of the ghoulish dead?  Or in the witching hour of midnight, the murderous Jezebel entered your house? Or the fierce barbarian Genghis Khan, communist revolutionary Vladimir Lenin, Jack the Ripper, or hockey-masked Jason – even one of your difficult, dead relatives – paid you a visit?  So people in the distant past believed happened on October 31st.

On October 31st, the Celts, the ancient Britons, observed the Samhain festival.  The Samhain festival marked the return of the herds from summer pasture and bringing the field harvest home.  The final night of October marked the last night of summer and the eve of the New Year ushering in darkness and dismal, winter days.  The departing summer light cast a sinister shadow on the festival.  The ancients believed departed spirits of the dead – occult ghosts, witches, and hobgoblins – haunted their earthly homes.

How could people protect themselves from these unwanted intruders?  They lit bonfires and masqueraded as fiends to disguise themselves from these returning supernatural prowlers.

The Christian church tried to redeem this pagan interest in the departed dead by redirecting people to remember the Christian saints and martyrs past.

So, October 31st has become known by its Christian name, ‘All Hallows Eve’ or ‘All Saints Eve’.  Still, ‘Halloween’ has become a tangled mix of all the influences above and other folklore.

How should Christian believers view it?  For sure, we take the satanic netherworld with utter seriousness.  The devil is an active agent on the prowl seeking to destroy.  Jesus has come to deliver us from this underworld of Satan.  The Son of God was revealed ‘to destroy the works of the devil’.

On the one hand, we stay away from the occult of scary ghosts, witches, demons, macabre horror and terror.  On the other hand, many grew up not attaching long forgotten ancient preternatural meanings to Halloween. They have seen it as an autumn night children dress up in their favorite character’s dress and ask for treats.  With the paganization of society in recent decades, emphasis on the occult and macabre seems to have returned. Let our informed consciences guide us.

Of course, the great Protestant event of October 31st , of which we are celebrating the five hundredth anniversary, was Martin Luther’s posting of his ninety five theses (more on that in another post). Also, with a wider understanding of the biblical term ‘saints’ than Roman Catholics, we Protestants can use the season to remember the witness of men and women gone on to glory who with victorious, saving faith and love have left us a lighted path.

Ash Wednesday and Existential Longing in The Moviegoer

"Golden Theater" by T. Hawk. CC License. 

Binx Bolling, the protagonist of Walker Percy’s 1961 novel The Moviegoer, has settled for an ordinary life. Foregoing his previous intent to study law or medicine or engage in scientific research, he no longer desires to do “something great.” Instead, Binx prides himself on having given up “grand ambitions” and “the old longings” and now “sell[s] stocks and bonds and mutual funds; quit[s] work at five o’clock like everyone else” and dreams of “having a girl and perhaps one day settling down.”

And so Binx partakes in the ritual of the everyday. He lives in the suburbs rather than amid the excitement of New Orleans whose “old world atmosphere” incites within him feelings he cannot control. Instead, he prefers predictability: living as a model citizen and perfect tenant, armed with the paraphernalia of modern life by which he circumscribes his identity. Binx’s longing for normalcy and stability is unsurprising given that his life has been marked by tragedy—with a brother dying from pneumonia and another from an accident, losing his father at a young age, and being wounded himself while fighting in the Korean War.

Determined to stave off yet more devastating losses, Binx fills his wallet full of “identity cards, library cards, credit cards” and stuffs his lockbox with “his birth certificate, college diploma, honorable discharge, G.I. insurance, a few stock certificates,” and the deed to land inherited from his father. Consumerism drives his life, as he purchases popular products of the day, derives guidance from advice columns, and even models his relationships on movie plots.

Yet, try as he might to reduce himself to a cog in the machine, Binx remains unalterably human, with an innate hunger for significance, meaning, and purpose. To satisfy this hunger, he adopts the ceremonies of his thoroughly secularized culture—the moviegoing of the novel’s title being the most prominent. The routines of mid-twentieth-century America give him forms by which to understand his life, and he dignifies those routines with official titles like “certification,” “repetition,” and “rotation.” An evening radio program This I Believe, he tells readers, serves as his “compline,” referring to the traditional night prayer that completes the Church’s work that day.

But Percy’s novel shows just how dissatisfying these counterfeit, superficial, secularized rituals are, how little they are able to sustain a meaningful existence. The story’s events transpire in the days leading up to Mardi Gras, with parties and floats and general raucousness planned on the periphery of Binx’s central concerns. He is approaching his thirtieth birthday, and his aunt—the principal authority figure—is pressuring him about his future plans. He has none, and worse, though ill-equipped, he has been charged with caring for his depression-riddled step-cousin Kate. All he offers, all he can offer, is desacralized sex and a relationship mimicking the interaction between a director and his actress.

Even Binx himself recognizes the insubstantial nature of such a foundation on which to build a life, on which to found a marriage: “Flesh poor flesh failed us. The burden was too great and flesh poor flesh, neither hallowed by sacrament nor despised by spirit [. . .]—flesh poor flesh now at this moment summoned all at once to be all and everything, end all and be all, the last and only hope—quails and fails.”

The spiritual malaise of Binx and Kate, which parallels the spiritual malaise of the world they inhabit, is underscored by contrast with the onset of Lent, Ash Wednesday being the culmination of the novel’s events.

The novel’s most admirable figure, Binx’s terminally ill younger brother Lonnie, is a devout Catholic, and his childlike faith combines with wisdom beyond his few years to squelch any sympathy the readers might be tempted to harbor for Binx’s self-imposed existential despair. In the midst of his debilitating illness, Lonnie’s concerns are for the state of his soul, confessing feelings of pleasure over his brother Duval’s death, and for the state of Binx’s soul, praying for him when he takes communion.

It is Lonnie whose sufferings point beyond himself to Christ; it is Lonnie who revels in the life he is offered, perhaps out of knowing its limits. And it is Lonnie of whom we think when Binx and Kate watch a parishioner enter church to receive his ceremonial ashes.

Ash Wednesday is the start of Lent, the period leading up to Easter which calls Christians to spiritual preparation for the day marking the lynchpin of our faith—the resurrection of Christ. On this day, services and ritual highlight two themes: human mortality and sinfulness. Ministers mark worshipers’ heads with ash as a sign of grief for the human condition and repentance for our own participation in the sins of mankind.

The ashes—while an external sign—function on a level not possible for Binx’s material-bound rituals. In reaching back through history to the origin of humanity itself—touching on a multiplicity of biblical stories along the way—these ashes bind us, to each other, to our creator, and to our redeemer. They tell us who we are, “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return,” and what we should do with that knowledge, “Repent, and believe in the Gospel.”

Binx’s rituals, on the other hand, fail to answer these big questions, or if they attempt to do so, the answers themselves fail. These citizenly duties—purchasing his auto tag, heeding public service announcements, contributing to the economy—merely situate him within his society. They provide a guidebook for making his way through the social maze. These rules and roles offer him little exploration of the human condition, more expansively construed.

For man is both more and less than Binx envisions him. Man is not merely the physical creature Binx reduces him to, nor is he the epitome of reality. The ritual of Ash Wednesday corrects both misconstruals, pointing to our creator God as the author of our existence, the source of our identity, the framer of our purpose, and the vehicle of our redemption.

Why Does New Year’s Day Come After Christmas?

There is no inherent reason that the celebration of New Year’s Day should be only a week after the observance of Christmas, but Westerners have accommodated quite comfortably to the opportunity to have an extended holiday.  Historically speaking, the juxtaposition of Christmas and New Year’s Day seems not to have been designed, but rather came about as a concatenation of institutional decisions.  The earliest Roman calendars set March 1 as the beginning of the year, and our names for September, October, November, and December came from the Latin numbers for seven through ten.  In 153 BC the Romans designated January 1 as the beginning of the new year because it marked the installation of the Roman Consuls to their year-long terms.  The name of January was particularly appropriate to this purpose, since it was named for the god Janus, who was pictured with two faces looking in opposite directions, forward and backward.  Jan. 1 as the beginning of the calendar year was continued by Julius Caesar in his reconstructed calendar in the first century BC and was adjusted by Pope Gregory in the late 16th century into the form we use today; but the church did not give Jan. 1 any religious significance, except that it was dedicated to the Feast of the Circumcision of Jesus.  Protestant countries, especially England, didn’t adopt the Gregorian calendar until the eighteenth century, so they were even less concerned with any religious connection between Christmas and New Year’s Day.

However, I have been thinking this year of how there is a spiritual and philosophical dimension to this juxtaposition of the Feast of the Nativity and New Year’s, in that it lends itself to a consideration of the interaction of light and time.  God’s first act of creation was with the words, “Let there be light,” and His second act was to separate darkness from the light to create Day and Night—that is, out of light came time, even before the physical markers of time, the sun and moon.  Since all of God’s creation was seen to be good, there was no association of darkness with evil until sin entered the world.  In its unsullied form, darkness provides a time of rest for mankind and a meaningful rhythm between work and renewing sleep.  As a result of sin, God’s orderly balancing of light and darkness was thrown into disarray.  Thus, when Jesus, the Light of the world appeared on the scene, He was sent to pierce the darkness and to overcome it (John 1:4-5)—one might even say, to redeem it.  The birth of Jesus came at the proper time according to God’s plan and mankind’s need (Mark 1:14-15; Gal. 4:4-5).  Through the Incarnation, God re-enacted His original initial act of creation, the insertion of light into chaos.

So in this new beginning, the sowing of the seed of regeneration, we have also an incipient redemption of time, a covenant to translate us into a timeless New Heaven and New Earth, in which there is such perfect rest that there is no night, and no need of sun and moon, for the Light of the Father and the Lamb are perpetually banishing sin-blemished night (Rev. 21:22-25).  Thus, the new beginning represented in Christmas can lead us naturally into a celebration of our New Birth as children of God through the grace of the sacrificed Lamb of God.

Our human celebration of the New Year has something of the ambivalence of the God Janus for whom January is named.  When we look both back and forward in time, we experience a mixture of regret and hope, while recognizing our limited ability to do any better in the future than we have in the past.  But that double view has been redeemed and unified by the Perfect Link between past and future, our Lord Jesus.  It is that thought I have expressed in the following poem.

For the New Year

Would to God

That one of the faces of Janus

Were altruistic; but both,

So far as I can see,

Reflect the inability of mortal me

To espouse the good for its own sake.

I hardly make the turn toward love

Before I find my comfort

Has not been left behind.

There seems but relative difference

Between the good I choose

And the evil I refuse.

Thanks be to God that He makes

Neither too much of the backward aspect

Nor too little of the hopeful prospect.

He set the model when He looked

Two directions at once,

But with a single eye.

                              --Elton D. Higgs

Image: Nativity with a Torch by the Le Nain brothers, c. 1635-40, Public Domain

The Ambiguous Branch

A Twlight Musing

Two Messianic passages in Isaiah speak of the Savior as a shoot from an apparently dead source, but they are starkly different in tone.  In Isaiah 11 we have a mighty King:

There shall come forth a shoot from the stump of Jesse, and a branch from his roots shall bear fruit. . . .  [W]ith righteousness he shall judge the poor, and decide with equity for the meek of the earth; and he shall strike the earth with the rod of his mouth, and with the breath of his lips he shall kill the wicked.

(Is. 11: 1, 4)

Here the emphasis is on the Messiah as triumphal ruler, exercising divine power to bring justice and peace on the earth.  In contrast, the other passage, Isaiah 53, presents a despised and rejected Messiah who is put to death unjustly:  He

grew up . . . like a young plant, and like a root out of dry ground; he had no form or majesty that we should look at him, and no beauty that we should desire him.  He was despised and rejected by men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief; and as one from whom men hide their faces he was despised, and we esteemed him not” (Is. 53: 2-3)

His role here is seen, not as ruler, but as one “wounded for our transgressions” (v. 5) and “oppressed” (v. 7).

I find it both startling and instructive that that there should be such contrasting uses of the same image of the Messiah as an unexpected offshoot or sprout.  Both applications of the image are, of course, true, but they depict different stages of the Messiah’s impact on the world, and they need to be seen in the proper sequence.  The presentation in Isaiah 11 focuses on the Davidic lineage of Jesus and on the ultimate rule of Christ on the New Earth when he reigns as David’s heir, exercising power over the “Peaceable Kingdom” depicted in Isaiah 11 and 65:17-25.  However, this manifestation of the Messiah was not to come merely as a renewal of the flawed political Kingdom of Israel, nor was it to be a direct outcome of the First Advent of the Christ, but as a component of His Second Coming.  Before the full fruition of Jesus as the Son of David must come the fulfillment of His mission as the Son of God, accomplished through His death as the perfect sacrificial Lamb of God.  Only in that way could the temporal throne of David be transmuted into the Eternal Kingdom.

Moreover, that is also the pattern for us as God’s children.  If we are to be glorified with Him, we must first participate in His suffering (see Rom. 8:17).  Reflecting that truth, and in the spirit of the Advent season, I present the following poem.

The Budding Stump

(Isaiah 11:1-3 and 53:1-3)

The Stump of David,

Cracked and grey with age,

Neglected, cast aside,

Now sprouts again, as God had said.

Not couched in beauty, or in power,

Comes this obscure and unexpected Branch;

Nor with glory sought by swords,

Drenching Israel's enemies in blood--

Though bloodshed nascent lies within.

O Lord of stumps,

Whose sapience informs

What men have cast aside,

And makes to grow again

What You Yourself have pruned away:

Take now the hopes of glory

Grown and nourished by our pride;

Reform them by Your promised Shoot,

That we may find the power

That lies in roots, and not in mighty trees.

Elton D. Higgs (Dec. 26, 1982)

Image: "Winter Bloom" by MelissaTG. CC License. 

Three Reasons Christmas Matters for Morality

At this time of year, Christmas images are everywhere. As we walk into the grocery store, we see Santa and his reindeer painted in the window, adorned by the phrase, “Peace on earth, good will to men.” As we drive by a neighbor’s house, we notice a brightly lit nutcracker. Close beside, a nativity. These decorations go up right after Thanksgiving, and by the first week in December, they just blend into the background. I think the lack of attention we pay to ornaments often extends to Christmas itself. We hear the sermons and sing the carols, but the reality they point to, we often overlook. The preacher says, “One of Jesus’ names is ‘Emmanuel.’ That means ‘God is with us.” We nod our heads, and we know that is a good thing. But why is it a good thing, exactly? And what is this business about “peace on earth and good will to men?” That’s a question I aim to answer at least partially by giving three reasons Christmas matters for morality.

1. Jesus’ birth reveals the metaphysical nature of human beings

Many atheists today think that human beings are merely biological machines. For example, Richard Dawkins has famously said, “We are machines built by DNA whose purpose is to make more copies of the same DNA. ... This is exactly what we are for. We are machines for propagating DNA, and the propagation of DNA is a self-sustaining process. It is every living object's sole reason for living.” A similar idea is expressed by Daniel Dennett who thinks of humans as “information processing machines” created by mindless natural forces. Now, Dawkins and Dennett are likely quick to affirm the dignity and value of human persons. But difficulty arises when we ask, “How is it that a machine could have such value?” It does not seem the bare matter could ground real value. Besides that, what follows from such a view is that humans have no genuine free will. Instead, their actions are determined by physical necessity. Not everyone agrees this precludes free will, but the views of such compatibilists strain credulity and common sense. Another problem is that on such reductive materialist views, humans as humans don’t even exist. Instead what we have is a pile of parts arranged human-wise. Humans are, when we take the view seriously, a collection of elements hanging together due to natural forces. “Human” is just the term that human-shaped piles call other human-shaped piles. With a view like this, it easy to see why ethicists like Peter Singer have argued that very young babies or the mentally disabled are justifiably euthanized.[1]

Consider the contrast presented in the Christmas story. For one, there is a certain metaphysical view of human persons at work. God became a man.  We’ve got to keep in mind that God did not just appear to become a man. He really did become a man. If this is true, then humans could not possibly be mere machines. As Jesus tells us, “God is spirit” (John 4:24). Something that is essentially and necessarily spiritual cannot become only material and retain its identity. If God, who is spirit, became a pile of parts arranged human-wise, he could no longer be called God. Therefore, there must be something more to man than his physical parts. But what kind of thing must humans be for God to become one of us? It seems that, at the least, humans need to be souls.

Why is this so? First we must realize that the Second Person of the Trinity existed as a person prior to his incarnation. This person is a person without any physical parts. If this person continues to be a person in the incarnation, his personhood cannot depend on any physical parts or else he would not be identical with himself prior to incarnation. That is to say, the material parts of Jesus as the incarnate Son of God must be only accidental properties and not essential ones. If they were essential, it would mean there was an essential difference between Jesus incarnated and Jesus prior to his incarnation. The person incarnated would not be the same person as the Second Person of the Trinity. But, Jesus, who is an essentially spiritual person, became an actual human person. Consider what this must means for humans in general. If Jesus really became a human, humans must also be essentially spiritual persons. Humans, then, must essentially be non-material substances; humans must be souls.[2]

If humans are souls, everything they do is not determined by the physical laws of the universe. Having a soul also provides the “metaphysical goods” to ground a human nature. If humans are souls, they are not piles of parts. Instead, they are a unified substance endowed by God with personhood. These powers include the power of volition so that humans are able to direct their lives toward one end or another. So when we see Jesus laying in manger, one of the things we ought to perceive is a rejection of the reductive view of human persons proposed by Dawkins and Dennett. The incarnation tells us that humans are body and soul. As such, they have the capacity to transcend the determinative laws of nature and become agents, capable of directing their own lives.

1. Jesus’ birth demonstrates the value and dignity of human beings

Jesus’ birth also demonstrates the value and dignity of human beings. It does this a couple of ways. First, as we read in John 3:16, God sent Jesus into the world because he loved the world. God loved humanity and so he made a way for us to be saved from our sins. And he did this at very great cost. God could have loved us, but only a little. In that case, he might refrain from sending his Son, but feel very bad about doing so. Suppose you have a friend who you loved only half-heartedly. Unfortunately, some malicious criminals take your friend hostage. They are the kind of criminals that will slowly torture and kill your friend just for the fun of it. And then these criminals send you a ransom note saying that, if you agree, you can take her place. Now, only loving your friend half-heartedly, you feel empathy for her, but you don’t make the trade. You would have to love your friend deeply and fully if you were to trade your life for hers. And this is what Jesus has done for us.

For humans, though, we often love what we should not. We love things that are not good. However, God, who is maximally good, has no misplaced affections. When God loves us, he does so because we are his children and made in his image. We have intrinsic value and are therefore worth loving. Notice, though, that this worthiness is not autonomous from God, as if we could make ourselves worth loving. Instead, we are only worth loving because God graciously made us in his image, investing us with the worth we possess. As Mark Linville puts it: “God values human persons because they are intrinsically valuable. Further, they have such value because God has created them after his own image as a Person with a rational and moral nature.”

The fact that Jesus came as a man is another way his birth shows the value and dignity of humans. Not only were humans worth saving, it was also worth becoming a human to do it. Consider this proposition: “Being a human is good.” How could we know whether this was true or false? A reductive atheist would have real trouble here because (1) there are no such things as human beings, only human shaped piles, and (2) there is no clear way to make sense of “good.” David Bentley Hart, with his characteristic confidence and cadence, writes, “Among the mind’s transcendental aspirations, it is the longing for moral goodness that is probably the most difficult to contain within the confines of a naturalist metaphysics.” However, as Christians we know both that humans exist and that God grounds the good. We also know that God, being maximally great, only ever does what is good. Therefore, if God became a human being, being a human being must be good. That may sound like a trivial idea, but consider the implications. If being human is good, it means that our lives have meaning. We do not need to progress to the next stage of evolution, we only need to live as humans as God intended. It also means, contra the worldview of many, that there’s nothing inherently bad about the body; salvation includes the redemption of the body, not deliverance from it. If being human is good, all humans have dignity and value.

1. Jesus’ birth means it is possible for humans to live the moral life

If we consider the possibility of living the moral life on reductive atheism, we end up with some dim prospects. One worry is that there is no objectively good moral life. This is why so many atheists talk of making one’s own meaning in life. Though the universe is cold and dark, human ought to nevertheless pull themselves up by the bootstraps and choose to live a life of meaning. I am inclined to think this is just wishful thinking. Besides this, if humans are machines and have no free will, it seems impossible to live a moral life. It seems that for a choice to be moral, it must be chosen by an agent. We don’t think our computers are immoral when they crash (despite the temptation); neither are human biological machines when they do something destructive.

Further, unless the universe just happens to cause us to live a moral life by accident, we will have to work at becoming a virtuous person. We must act as agents who are capable of making moral progress. Atheist Sam Harris agrees and makes this suggestion: “Getting behind our conscious thoughts and feelings can allow us to steer a more intelligent course through our lives (while knowing, of course, that we are ultimately being steered).”[3] But of course, to say that we can steer ourselves in any sense is to discard the idea that humans are machines. In order to steer ourselves, we must be something more than that. So reductive atheists seem to have no hope for living the moral life, whatever that might be. And the way Harris in such sanguine fashion affirms a contradiction as if doing so makes sense doesn’t eliminate the incoherence.

The birth of Jesus, on the other hand, suggests a very different outcome. To see why, we must go all the way back to the creation account in Genesis. There we see that God made man in his image and to rule and reign as his representatives on the earth (Gen. 1:27-28). Adam and Eve were, in a very real sense, responsible for realizing the kingdom of God. And God’s kingdom is what humans were made for, a place where God, humans, and creation live together in peace. It is important to understand here that peace means much more than we modern readers might normally think. We tend to think of peace as the absence of violence. But for the Jews, peace was much more robust than that. Peace, for them, was happiness and human flourishing—shalom. If we live in peace, we live according to the created order, enjoying and appreciating God and all that he has made, especially other humans.

However, humans chose to disobey God and thus sin entered the world. The effects of sin were so dramatic that humans could no longer live as God intended; the kingdom of God could not be established by these fallen humans. However, God did not leave us in this predicament. God set into motion a plan that would restore the kingdom of God to the earth and the story of the Bible is very much this story. God called Abraham and promised that through him, all the people of the earth would be blessed (Gen 12:3). Then, from the descendants of Abraham, God formed the nation of Israel. God promised Israel a King who would restore peace to the earth. God says this King will take away punishment and take great delight in his people. He will “rescue the lame” and “gather the exiles”; he will restore their fortunes (Zeph 3:15;19-20).  Zechariah records for us what God says it will be like when this King comes (8:3-12):

This is what the Lord Almighty says: “Once again men and women of ripe old age will sit in the streets of Jerusalem, each of them with cane in hand because of their age. The city streets will be filled with boys and girls playing there.”

 This is what the Lord Almighty says: “It may seem marvelous to the remnant of this people at that time, but will it seem marvelous to me?” declares the Lord Almighty.

 This is what the Lord Almighty says: “I will save my people from the countries of the east and the west. I will bring them back to live in Jerusalem; they will be my people, and I will be faithful and righteous to them as their God.”

 This is what the Lord Almighty says: “Now hear these words, ‘Let your hands be strong so that the temple may be built.’ This is also what the prophets said who were present when the foundation was laid for the house of the Lord Almighty. Before that time there were no wages for people or hire for animals. No one could go about their business safely because of their enemies, since I had turned everyone against their neighbor.  But now I will not deal with the remnant of this people as I did in the past,” declares the Lord Almighty.

“The seed will grow well, the vine will yield its fruit, the ground will produce its crops, and the heavens will drop their dew. I will give all these things as an inheritance to the remnant of this people.

The takeaway from this passage should be that this King will restore the robust, Jewish notion of peace to the world. Without this King, humans would be left without hope and the possibility of ever flourishing as humans. But, under the reign of this King, the effects of sin will be done away with and human flourishing will once again be possible.

We are also told by Micah that this king would be born in Bethlehem and from the tribe of Judah; his origin will be “from old, from ancient times” (Micah 5:2). So when Jesus, Son of God and from the family of Judah, was born in Bethlehem, we know this must be the King about whom we were told. We should understand that God has kept his promise to make the world right again. Now, while Jesus was still laying in a manger, how this would happen had not been made clear. That would come later. But we should be very happy indeed to know that God, our King, was born on Christmas some 2000 years ago because with his birth came the promise that humans can live as God intended – in peace.

[1] Singer thinks that the only thing that counts as a person is a rational, self-conscious person. Babies and the mentally disabled are therefore not persons and do not deserve the same rights as other persons. See for example his Should the Baby Live?: The Problem of Handicapped Infants (1988), Oxford University Press.

[2] This is not to say that having a body is not the ideal way for humans to exist. However, humans can apparently be separated from their bodies at least for a short while. Paul, for example, was caught up to the third heaven. Also, prior to the Second Coming, humans will apparently exist sans bodies while they await the resurrection. J. P. Moreland and Scott Rae defend this view in Body & Soul (2000) IVP Academic.

[3] Sam Harris, Free Will. Simon & Schuster.

Photo: "Nativity" by Jess Weese. CC License. 

Co-Guardians for the God-child

I like the 2007 movie “The Nativity Story,” because it presents the story of Mary and Joseph and the events leading up to the birth of Jesus with a gritty realism that easily (and usually) gets lost in the romanticized crèches and Christmas pageants that depict the Christmas narrative.  Both of the couple God chose to raise His Son had to face excruciatingly difficult circumstances and attendant decisions when Mary was “found to be with child by the Holy Spirit.”  In the two poems below, I have attempted to portray the consternation felt by each of them when an angel brought the message that they had been chosen to be parents to the Holy One of Israel, Emmanuel, the Messiah.

               The Husbandry of God

                       (Luke 1:26-35)   

How can I contain this word from the Lord?

His light has pierced my being

And sown in single seed

Both glory and shame.

Content was I

To wed in lowliness

And live in obscurity,

With purity my only dower.

Now, ravished with power,

I flout the conventions of man

To incubate God.

In lowliness how shall I bear it?

In modesty how shall I tell it?

What now shall I become?

But the fruit of God's planting

Is His to harvest.

No gleaner I, like Ruth,

But the field itself,

In whom my Lord lies hid.

--Elton D. Higgs

    1980

Joseph In Waiting

     (Matt. 1:18-26)

Familiar wood now nears its goal,

Purpose carved from formless block.

My wife sits waiting by,

Custodian of promised Son,

Full with Spirit-crafted child.  

.

How strange has been

This celibate intimacy

Since angel-visions

Translated besmirched betrothal

Into Holy co-habitation.

Others praise an act of mercy,

Taking shameful form into my house;

I know that in her Spirit-quickened womb

Lies more than chaste maid

Could ever have been.

Match made on earth

Transmuted now to Heaven’s pairing,

We dwell together with nascent God

And await the Day of Deliverance.

Elton D. Higgs

Dec. 12, 2015

Image: "Rembrandt van Rijn 195" by Workshop of Rembrandt - Web Gallery of Art:   Image  Info about artwork. Licensed under Public Domain via Commons - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Rembrandt_van_Rijn_195.jpg#/media/File:Rembrandt_van_Rijn_195.jpg

Chatting with Santa Claus

A Twilight Musing

I had a conversation with Santa Claus this morning.  It came just after my wife and I had noted, while taking our morning walk in a small mall, that the piped-in music was unrelentingly secular; and that led us to lament the season’s loss of religious meaning in our society as a whole.  We met “Santa” as he was strolling the central corridors of the mall.  He wasn’t in costume yet, but he was dressed festively in a green vest and a red cap, with other seasonal colors as decoration.  He greeted us affably, and we fell into brief conversation.  He affirmed that he was, indeed, “Santa Claus,” and he cheerfully confided to us that he considered it a great privilege to have the children on his lap and to listen to their hopes and stories.  “They warm my heart,” he informed us in the robust voice that enables him to boom out “Merry Christmas” to passers-by as he sits on his Santa throne.  We parted from him to continue our walk, but we saw him a couple of times more as we perambulated.

We noticed that he was consciously engaging people who were standing around waiting for the shops to open.  At one point we observed him grasping a man’s hand and having earnest conversation with him.  The next time we saw him, we asked if he was praying with the man, and he affirmed he was.  “I try to be of help to people if they’re willing to talk.”  It was obvious that he regarded his pre-duty time at the mall as a ministry opportunity.  “Take a look at my van out there in the parking lot.  It has a ‘Put Christ back in Christmas’ sign on it.  I try to do what I can to point people to Jesus, whatever their religious affiliation.”  We wished him God’s blessings in both his official and his unofficial activities, and in turn he blessed us on our way.

Reflecting on this experience, I accepted it as God’s answer to our lament about the secularization of Christmas in the world around, and about the general increase of hostility toward religion in the past few decades.  In the face of that discouraging situation, God is working through a portrayer of Santa Claus (a prime icon of secularization) to touch people’s lives with divine love and concern.

Keep up the good work, brother!  The mall management may be paying you to be Santa for the kids and their parents, but you are obviously working for a higher Master.  And when I walk by and see the kids on your knee and the parents looking on, I’d venture to say that they’re getting more out of the encounter than they know, for I suspect that they’re being prayed for as well as being given a listening ear and a jolly laugh.

As for me, perhaps I would do well when I walk in the mall this Christmas season to lay aside my self-righteous carping about secularization of the holiday and be on the lookout for opportunities God may open up for me to be a blessing to someone else who is there, even if it’s only to say a prayer for someone who looks sad or unhappy.  And if the piped-in music distorts the season, I can always hum some real Christmas music to myself.

An Easter Reflection

My wife’s an English professor, and she’s helped me realize I’m late to a game, or a party—or an awkward social occasion; whatever! I'm late—that of seeing the power of stories, the way they shape us, how we define ourselves by and see ourselves in relation to them. It makes sense, but as a philosopher I’ve heretofore tended to be more interested, when it comes to something like “worldview,” to think in terms of what’s true and what’s false, what we have good reason to believe and what we don’t. It’s why my philosophy stuff, as much as I love it, sometimes seems so thin and dry in comparison with the richness and thickness of her literature.

 Today is Easter, for example, and the evidential case for the resurrection is important to me. I am confident there’s a nondiscursive way of knowing, via personal experience, the truth of the resurrection, and it may be the most important knowing of all—but though that may be good for those who have it, it doesn’t much help those who don’t. Fortunately the historical case for the resurrection is amazing; my colleague Gary Habermas is one of the world’s leading experts on the topic. For those interested in wondering whether the story of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus is actually true, whether there’s evidence for it historically, I’d encourage them to read Gary’s books.

 That sort of thing is a fun intellectual exercise, and it appeals to me as a philosopher. But suppose we establish the truth of the resurrection, or at least the credentials necessary to believe in it rationally. It’s hardly the end of the story, but just the beginning. Even devils presumably believe in the historicity of the resurrection. That it’s true is extremely important, but its truth doesn’t mean we’re conducting our lives according to that truth. This is where seeing worldview as more than a set of propositions one believes to be true can come in so handy, and seeing the power of stories can help.

 We are all of us inveterate storytellers. We love a good yarn—to hear them, to tell them. And the most important stories are the ones we most closely associate with our identity. On a garden-variety note, but one that rings with significance for me, I think of a few years ago, when my mom was still alive. A brother, my mom, a sister, and I met in Kentucky—and for a few hours one afternoon we reclined in a room together and endlessly rehearsed stories that make up our family lore. They were stories we’d told and retold a thousand times, each recounting as delightful as the one before, tickling us all to no end. We didn’t need to exaggerate or stretch the details; the canon’s already fairly established; too much deviation isn’t even allowed. The same stories, yet still rife with significance. I remember that afternoon, while regaling my family members with stories, and being regaled by them, I felt what I can only describe as unbridled joy. I was with people who’d known me my whole life, and we were relishing the stories that, to a significant degree, defined our shared lives together and knit us together as family. I was home.

 The best literature shouldn't be enjoyed just once. C. S. Lewis once wrote that the sure mark of an unliterary man is that he considers "I've read it already" to be a conclusive argument against reading a work. Some stories are good for ingestion; others are worthy to be relished, savored, digested. The greatest Story most of all.

 Each Easter, I go to church, and hear the Easter story one more time. The details are the same. Nothing changes. But as my pastor said this morning, we change. Each time we hear it we’re different. We bring a new set of needs to it, but the story itself remains the same. I couldn’t help but think of Holden Caulfield’s visits to the Museum of Natural History—where the exhibits are always the same, which he found deeply comforting, but those visiting the museum, he recognized, are always different, either in big ways or small. The Easter story provides an even more significant point of constancy, an even more fundamental Archimedean point on which to stand. The narrative of self-giving love reaches its climax each Easter and offers itself to each of us, and though the story is the same, how it speaks to us is always slightly different. For it meets us where we are, at our point of need, reminding us of what doesn’t change, and offers to transform us. It offers us the chance to become part of that universal Story, to define ourselves anew in relation to it.

 That the Story is true is obviously crucial, but recognizing its truth isn’t enough. The Story challenges us to become part of it, to define ourselves by It and Him, to grab hold of what’s constant and permanent, eternal and ultimate, while bracing ourselves for needed and inevitable change in the midst of growing and of life’s vicissitudes and contingencies.

 The Story tells me who I am and what I’m called to be. It reminds me of what love looks like and that death isn’t the end. It challenges me not just to believe that it happened, but that the fact that it happened makes all the difference. It was the key plot point on which the whole narrative turned, marking love's victory and the death of death. It reminds me that as a Christian I don’t merely believe static truths, but dynamic life-transforming ones—that I’m part of a Story that’s still in the process of unfolding. And we’ve been afforded a glorious peek to see how it ends.

Image: Claude Lorrain (1604/1605–1682) [Public domain or Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Victor, not Victim

A linguistic quirk in the history of the English language has resulted in the term “Good Friday” being applied to the day on which Jesus, the Son of God, was crucified. Other languages, though, have more intuitively appropriate designations for this liturgical day, such as “Sad” or “Dark” or “Mournful” Friday. This variation of nomenclatures can serve as a catalyst for some comments on the fact that the events of Crucifixion Friday in scripture can be seen as both sad and good. Today, of course, we have the advantage of knowing what came on the Sunday after Dark Friday, when Jesus burst out of the tomb. On Friday, He appeared to be the victim, but on Sunday, He was clearly the Victor. On Friday, the darkness eclipsed the light; on Sunday, the Light overcame the darkness.

In our life experiences, the shadow of Friday is sometimes all we see and feel, but we still walk in the Light of that Resurrection Sunday, with an additional firm hope of eternal glory to come. We mourn the events of Dark Friday when Jesus was the victim of evil men, but we are buoyed by the realization that Jesus’ death was the necessary door that He had to go through to become the Victor over sin and death. He did not so much overcome His victimization as transform it by showing that victory was embedded in the very act of willing sacrifice. So His death can be seen as a sort of mine planted in the cross that the Devil stepped on unawares, bringing about his own doom and the explosive Life of the Resurrection.

This point of view is very effectively conveyed in the Old English poem, “The Dream of the Cross” (or “Dream of the Rood,” to use the Old English word for cross). In this poem, Jesus is represented as a hero coming to do battle with and overcome his foes. In the narrator’s dream, the cross of Christ speaks:

Then I saw the King of all mankind In brave mood hasting to mount upon me. . . . . Then the young Warrior, God the All-Wielder, Put off His raiment, Steadfast and strong; With lordly mood in the sight of many He mounted the Cross to redeem mankind. When the Hero clasped me I trembled in terror, But I dared not bow me nor bend to earth; I must needs stand fast. Upraised as the Rood I held the High King, the Lord of heaven. (trans. Charles W. Kennedy, 1960)

This is a lovely picture of Christus Victor as He “mounts” the cross, fully capable at any time of exercising His heavenly power to defeat His enemies. But scripture makes it clear that He had a more profound purpose than the exercise of worldly power. His design was to implement the “deeper magic” of God’s world (to use C. S. Lewis’s terminology in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe), and through the redemptive power of the Lamb of God to bring about an eternal victory, not just a temporal one. Jesus did indeed come as a conquering hero, but in the heavenly way of things, He had to endure defeat as an avenue to victory. Let us be willing to follow Him through that door of suffering and sadness to reap the victory in Jesus that lies on the other side.

Image: "Crucifixion" by Rooztography. CC License. 

To Know the Cross

by Thomas Merton

I pray that we may be found worthy to be cursed, censured, and ground down, and even put to death in the name of Jesus Christ, so long as Christ himself is not put to death in us. – Paulinus of Nola

The Christian must not only accept suffering: he must make it holy. Nothing so easily becomes unholy as suffering.

Merely accepted, suffering does nothing for our souls except, perhaps, to harden them. Endurance alone is no consecration. True asceticism is not a mere cult of fortitude. We can deny ourselves rigorously for the wrong reason and end up pleasing ourselves mightily with our self-denial.

Suffering is consecrated to God by faith—not by faith in suffering, but by faith in God. Some of us believe in the power and the value of suffering. But such a belief is an illusion. Suffering has no power and no value of its own.

It is valuable only as a test of faith. What if our faith fails the test? Is it good to suffer, then? What if we enter into suffering with a strong faith in suffering, and then discover that suffering destroys us?

To believe in suffering is pride: but to suffer, believing in God, is humility. For pride may tell us that we are strong enough to suffer, that suffering is good for us because we are good. Humility tells us that suffering is an evil which we must always expect to find in our lives because of the evil that is in ourselves. But faith also knows that the mercy of God is given to those who seek him in suffering, and that by his grace we can overcome evil with good. Suffering, then, becomes good by accident, by the good that it enables us to receive more abundantly from the mercy of God. It does not make us good by itself, but it enables us to make ourselves better than we are. Thus, what we consecrate to God in suffering is not our suffering but our selves.

Only the sufferings of Christ are valuable in the sight of God, who hates evil, and to him they are valuable chiefly as a sign. The death of Jesus on the cross has an infinite meaning and value not because it is a death, but because it is the death of the Son of God. The cross of Christ says nothing of the power of suffering or of death. It speaks only of the power of him who overcame both suffering and death by rising from the grave.

The wound that evil stamped upon the flesh of Christ are to be worshiped as holy no because they are wounds, but because they are his wounds. Nor would we worship them if he had merely died of them, without rising again. For Jesus is not merely someone who once loved us enough to die for us. His love for us is the infinite love of God, which is stronger than all evil and cannot be touched by death.

Suffering, therefore, can only be consecrated to God by one who believes that Jesus is not dead. And it is of the very essence of Christianity to face suffering and death not because they are good, not because they have meaning, but because the resurrection of Jesus has robbed them of their meaning.

To know the cross is not merely to know our own sufferings. For the cross is the sign of salvation, and no one is saved by his own sufferings. To know the cross is to know that we are saved by the sufferings of Christ; more, it is to know the love of Christ who underwent suffering and death in order to save us. It is, then, to know Christ. For to know his love is not merely to know the story of his love, but to experience in our spirit that we are loved by him, and that in his love the Father manifests his own love for us, through his Spirit poured forth into our hearts. . .

The effect of suffering upon us depends on what we love. If we love only ourselves, suffering is merely hateful. It has to be avoided at all costs. It brings out all the evil that is in us, so that the one who loves only himself will commit any sin and inflict any evil on others merely in order to avoid suffering himself.

Worse, if a person loves himself and learns that suffering is unavoidable, he may even come to take a perverse pleasure in suffering itself, showing that he loves and hates himself at the same time.

In any case, if we love ourselves, suffering inexorably brings out selfishness, and then, after making known what we are, drives us to make ourselves even worse than we are.

If we love others and suffer for them, even without a supernatural love for other people in God, suffering can give us a certain nobility and goodness. It brings out something fine in our natures, and gives glory to God who made us greater than suffering. But in the end a natural unselfishness cannot prevent suffering from destroying us along with all we love.

If we love God and love others in him, we will be glad to let suffering destroy anything in us that God is pleased to let it destroy, because we know that all it destroys is unimportant. We will prefer to let the accidental trash of life be consumed by suffering in order that his glory may come out clean in everything we do.

If we love God, suffering does not matter. Christ in us, his love, his Passion in us: that is what we care about. Pain does not cease to be pain, but we can be glad of it because it enables Christ to suffer in us and give glory to his Father by being greater, in our hearts, than suffering would ever be.

Editor's Note: This essay comes from the devotional, Bread and Wind: Readings for Lent and Easter, published by Plough Publishing House in Walden, New York, in 2003. It’s found on pages 43-4

Post-Christmas Limbo

The week between Christmas and New Year’s Day is often a bit of a let-down, a limbo that has a diminished glow of the Christmas celebrations, but is not yet the full resumption of everyday duties that will begin in earnest after New Year’s.  This is more particularly true if we have had a deep spiritual experience in revisiting the meaning of the birth of Christ, or even a rich re-connection with our families.  The aftermath is an anti-climax.  

As I thought about this, I tried to imagine what it was like for the shepherds after the first flush of the Nativity Night, when they were chosen to be the first witnesses of the Incarnation.  The days immediately afterward must have been full of the telling of what had happened to them, but I can imagine that as time went on, they needed something more than the thrill of relating those spectacular events.  It’s that maturing of realization that I wanted to depict in the following poem.

After Immersion in Glory

First flush of Glory faded now,

How shall we return to our flocks?

Having eagerly reflected the Light received,

Having believed the angel’s words

And seen the unlikely Babe

Born in a barn,

How now to fit that flash

With tedious tasks resumed

In nights as dark as ever?

The word we heard

Burst in on reality,

A pregnant pause in vacuous vigils,

Now duller made

By memory of angels’ song.

And yet a remnant of light is left,

No more in arching, starry sky,

But seeded in ourselves.

How now to deal with Word

Not merely heard and told,

But planted?

Time suspended transmutes

To time extended;

Shadowed Glory puts out shoots

From roots of all that we have seen.

The fields about are still the same,

But we are fertile soil

To grow the Glory

That will not fade.

--Elton D. Higgs

  Dec. 29, 2015

All Saints Day, Scenes from Heaven, and the Resurrection of the Dead

In the book of Revelation we find powerful images of the saints who have gone on before us. We catch a glimpse of twenty-four elders who, along with myriads of angels and other heavenly beings, fall down before the Lamb, worshiping Him in heaven because He alone is worthy to open the scroll (Revelation 5:8-14). In another place we see a portrait of the souls of our brothers and sisters who were slain because of their witness of Christ, longing for God to judge the inhabitants of the earth and to avenge their blood. They are given white robes and told to wait just a bit longer until their fellow siblings and servants join them (Revelation 6:9-11). Again, we catch another scene of a great multitude of people who have come out of the great tribulation—people from every tribe and nation—all standing before the throne of the Lamb in worship (Revelation 7:9-17).

Christians have long held differing views on the timing of when these heavenly events take place, whether in the past or in the present or in the future. Regardless of the timing, we can, nevertheless, capture deep theological truths about the afterlife and our brothers and sisters in Christ who have gone on before us. Namely, these heavenly scenes bring us hope, not only eschatologically, but in the here and now.

Death is the great neutralizer. It is the enemy that none of us escapes. It snatches up our loved ones, bringing heart-wrenching pain and suffering into our lives. Yet these heavenly scenes remind us that we are not to grieve like those who have no hope (1 Thessalonians 4:13). Biological death is not the end; it’s just the beginning.  Our hope is ultimately in the Lamb of God who was slain for the sins of the world. For the same Lamb who was slain is also the one who rose triumphantly from the grave. He has gone before us, and we too shall receive a resurrected body in His likeness. As the Apostle Paul describes it in his first letter to the people of Corinth, “the body that is sown is perishable, it is raised imperishable; it is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory; it is sown in weakness, it is raised in power; it is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body” (1 Corinthians 15:42-43, NIV). Though our bodies may die, we can be assured that that’s not the end. Our brothers and sisters are waiting in anticipation of having a resurrected body, just as we are. The Lamb has defeated death, and His victory has swallowed it up and taken away its sting (1 Corinthians 15:54-57). We who are alive (bodily), along with our brothers and sisters in heaven, await the day when the Lamb of God brings about His sovereign judgment and puts the world to rights.[su_pullquote]The Lamb has defeated death, and His victory has swallowed it up and taken away its sting.[/su_pullquote]

These portraits of the afterlife also remind us that heaven is not a place of inactivity. Because of our limitations, it’s difficult for us to keep in our purview that heaven, and the activities of the saints therein, is just as much a part of reality as our own existence. Though we can’t know the exact goings on of heaven, these scenes provide for us a hopeful glimpse.

Each year Christians from all over the Western world take November 1, or the first Sunday in November, as a time to commemorate the saints who have died. Protestants recognize saints to include all who have been baptized by the Holy Spirit into the body of Christ. This is what it means to be a part of the church universal, which includes all saints, at all times, who have been united by a common salvation in Christ.

All Saints Day is a time to celebrate the great cloud of witnesses who have gone on before us. It’s a time to reflect on and to thank God for their lives. It is also a time to await in eager anticipation when God will one day reunite His family. All who are in Christ will be raised and we will see the coming together of heaven and earth. We can rejoice that there will one day be no more death or mourning or weeping or suffering. God will dwell among us. We will be His people, and He will be our God. All things will be made new (Revelation 21:1-5). Maranatha!

Image:"John Martin - The Last Judgement - Google Art Project" by John Martin - dQEGwOc0m1PjWQ at Google Cultural Institute, zoom level maximum - Tate Images (http://www.tate-images.com/results.asp?image=T01927&wwwflag=3&imagepos=6). Licensed under Public Domain via Commons - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:John_Martin_-_The_Last_Judgement_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg#/media/File:John_Martin_-_The_Last_Judgement_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg

Cyprian, Mortality, and Future Hope

Cyprian of Carthage was a third century bishop in North Africa. He is most famous for his pastoral interactions during the Novatianist schism. His writings evidence his pastoral concerns not entering into theological reflection for the sake of doctrinal elegance, but rather focused upon the needs of those connected with his ministry. He influenced later thinkers, including Augustine, and was himself influenced by Tertullian’s writings. His most famous work is On the Unity of the Church, in which he wrote what is perhaps his most well-known statement: “He can no longer have God for his Father who has not the Church for his mother.” In his On the Mortality, Cyprian also addressed how the Christian ought to respond to suffering and the imminence of death in this life.

On the Mortality no doubt reflects Cyprian’s concern, as do many of his works, for the threat of recantation which faced many of his flock. Cyprian ministered in an age where persecution was an ever-present threat for the Christian community. Much of Cyprian’s theological reputation comes from his opposition to Novatian, who had set himself up as an anti-pope and was opposed to reinstating the “lapsed” (i.e., those who had denied their faith when faced with persecution) to good standing in the Church. Cyprian, though he advocated for re-instating the penitent, nevertheless did not encourage laxity among believers. In On the Mortality, Cyprian encouraged Christ-followers to remain faithfully obedient to God, even when faced with death. Part of Cyprian’s plea is for the believer to keep the reality of the in-breaking of the kingdom of God ever present before them. He wrote:

The kingdom of God, beloved brethren, is beginning to be at hand; the reward of life, and the rejoicing of eternal salvation, and the perpetual gladness and possession lately lost of paradise, are now coming, with the passing away of the world; already heavenly things are taking the place of earthly, and great things of small, and eternal things of things that fade away. What room is there here for anxiety and solicitude? Who, in the midst of these things, is trembling and sad, except he who is without hope and faith? For it is for him to fear death who is not willing to go to Christ. It is for him to be unwilling to go to Christ who does not believe that he is about to reign with Christ (Cyprian of Carthage, On the Mortality, II, translation by Robert Ernest Wallis).

Cyprian, assured by the words of Jesus that the kingdom of God is both here and near, maintained that confidence in the face of death is available to the Christian. This, though, does not mean—because of the “not yetness” of the kingdom—that Christians can expect a life free of suffering in the “now.” As Cyprian continues:

Thus, when the earth is barren with an unproductive harvest, famine makes no distinction; thus, when with the invasion of an enemy any city is taken, captivity at once desolates all; and when the serene clouds withhold the rain, the drought is alike to all; and when the jagged rocks rend the ship, the shipwreck is common without exception to all that sail in her; and the disease of the eyes, and the attack of fevers, and the feebleness of all the limbs is common to us with others, so long as this common flesh of ours is borne by us in the world (Cyprian of Carthage, On the Mortality, VIII).

According to Cyprian, not only should believers expect to experience the same pain and suffering as the unbeliever, they should in reality expect more, since the spiritual powers will battle all the more fiercely against them (Cyprian of Carthage, On the Mortality, IX). They are ultimately, however, assured that they will overcome death even if they must traverse through it in order to do so. Cyprian wrote:

What a grandeur of spirit it is to struggle with all the powers of an unshaken mind against so many onsets of devastation and death! (Cyprian of Carthage, On the Mortality, XIV).

In On the Mortality, Cyprian referenced Philippians 3:21 in his word of assurances. Because of the power of the risen Jesus, who has been given authority over all things, those in Christ will be transformed into the state of his glorious body. As Paul writes elsewhere (1 Thessalonians 1:12), Christ’s glory will be shared with those united with him. Ultimately the assurance of believers’ resurrection can be held firmly because Jesus himself is the firstfruit of that resurrection (1 Cor. 15:20). The greatest threat which the cosmic powers can wield against God’s people (O, Death) must ultimately be viewed as no threat at all. Death’s sting departs. Death’s failure arrives. And in the face of the suffering inevitable in this world, that truly is Good News.

The Trinity: Knowing the Loving God, an Essay for Trinity Sunday

The Adoration of the Trinity by Albrecht Dürer (1511)

Immutability is one of those technical theological words or attributes of God that some believe was contrived by theologians. Put simply, immutability means unchangeable or unalterable, and it is a classical attribute of God. This attribute, however, is not generated by theologians but directly derived from Scripture. Hebrews 6:17-18 states, “In the same way, God, wishing even more greatly to show to the heirs of promise the immutability of His intention, mediated it by an oath in order that through two immutability things — for God to lie is impossible by these immutable things — we refugees might have strong comfort in order to attain the hope which is set before us” (trans. mine, italicized words represent words implied by translation). Similarly, Malachi 3:6 records, “For I, Yahweh, do not change, and you, sons of Jacob, are not exterminated” (trans. mine from MT).

Perhaps more important is the belief that we can truly relate to God, which is the magnificent truth of the greatest commandment: “You shall love Yahweh your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might” (Deut. 6:5). When God’s unchangeableness is paired with the mutual love shared between God and humanity (John 3:16), a tension presents itself. To love is to relate, but in all relating — it seems — is some measure of change.

If we were to relate to a rock, or a tree, we would be sorely disappointed since there is no mutual relating, and why is this so? We could change our attitude towards the rock, but the rock will never adjust itself — how could it? — to relate to us. This relationship is a one-way gig; we adjust to relate to the rock, but it never adjusts itself to relate to us. Love for a rock is bound to go unrequited. Few of us, I suppose, would believe this to be a good relationship; indeed, if my father were to relate to me in such a way — always expecting me to change, but never himself changing — I suspect that I would find the relationship malformed. At the least, we might not find him personable or relatable. Thus, the theory of Aristotle that the Divine (God) is the Unmoved Mover leaves us with a rather mechanical and non-relatable God.

Both God’s immutability and His relationality are equally important and non-negotiables, so we must find a way to uphold them together. To do this, we will employ the nature of the Trinity using Maximus the Confessor as our foundational thinker while deploying John Zizioulas’ commentary on Maximus. The key to success in this endeavor will be to discuss how God can be unchangeable while also showing how God adjusts (and in this sense is changeable) so as to relate to us.

God is One in nature, Three in persons; this is the orthodox doctrine of the Trinity. When Scripture says that God does not change, the question we must ask is whether this should be taken as absolute immutability (Unmoved Mover) or qualified immutability. It also should not be missed that, if we look closely at the contexts of the Scriptures cited earlier, it is God’s intention for Israel (Malachi 3:6) or for the future of the church (Hebrews 6:17-18) and God’s complementing oath that are described as immutable, not God directly. These texts are cited frequently as metaphysical statements about God’s total being, but the contexts look less supportive of using them that way. Although this contextual fact is important, we will nevertheless assume that God is immutable (unchangeable) in some respect. For Maximus the Confessor, God is both changeable and unchangeable, which, prima facie, looks inherently contradictory. However, Maximus explains that God is unchangeable in regards to nature (what God is), but changeable with respect to the Persons (Father, Son, Spirit). John Zizioulas clarifies Maximus’ thought:

Maximus uses . . . a distinction between logos [what/nature] and tropos [how/Persons]: in every being there is a permanent and unchangeable aspect and an adjustable one. In the Incarnation, the logos physeos [nature] remains fixed [unchanging], but the tropos [Persons] adjusts being to an intention or purpose or manner of communion [changing]. In other words, the love of God bridges the gulf of otherness by affecting the changeable and adjustable aspect of being, and this applies equally to God and to the world: God bridges the gulf by adjusting his own tropos, that is, the how he is . . . . This amounts to a ‘tropic identity’, that is, to an ontology of tropos, of the ‘how’ things are. This is a matter of ontology, because the tropos of being is an inseparable aspect of being, as primary ontologically as substance or nature.[1]

This may be difficult to follow, but the point we want to draw from Zizioulas is that God must adjust or be changeable if we desire to speak meaningfully of God relating to us. If God does not adjust to have communion with us, that is, to relate to us, then all our talk of God desiring to have relationship with us is meaningless. What type of insight can we gather by returning to Hebrews 6:17-18 and Micah 3:6 with these points in view?

Hebrews 6:17-18 tells us that God gives us confidence based on two immutable (unchangeable) truths: 1) that God’s faithful intention is unchangeable, and 2) that oaths are unbreakable, especially ones taken by God. If we had to pick only one attribute that explains why this is the case, we might choose God’s goodness (or maybe veracity). It is God’s nature that is good, but it is the Persons (Father, Son, Spirit) that make this goodness communal with us. God’s nature is good, and that goodness becomes faithfulness to us by the Son’s (and Spirit’s) relating and sharing it with us. The Trinity’s communal faithfulness, that is, the love the Father, Son, and Spirit share, is adjusted outward when They create the world. The goodness/faithfulness remains the same; with whom the communion includes is extended. Namely, it is extended to us creatures; it is adjusted to embrace us. Persons are capable of adjusting themselves to embrace others; nature, like the rock example above, is not.

Micah 3:6 is discussing God’s continued faithfulness to Israel despite their failings (vv. 1-6): “I, Yahweh, do not change, and you, sons of Jacob, are not exterminated.” The implication is that God’s faithfulness to Jacob and God’s promises to him and his posterity is keeping the sons of Jacob from being exterminated. God’s nature is one of inherent goodness or faithfulness. God, through the promises made to the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, extends that faithfulness to Israel. Again, only persons are capable of adjusting themselves to have communion with others. It is the Persons, therefore, the Father, Son, and Spirit, who embrace others, and, in so doing, intimately relate to us.

A practical takeaway from this is that the more personal someone (even an animal) is or becomes, the more she or he will make room for deep, intimate relationships. God the Trinity is the Communion of the relationships mutually shared among the Father, Son, and Spirit. The Trinity makes room for relating to humans so that those who trust the Lord Jesus will have fellowship with the Father, Son, and Spirit (2 Cor. 13:14; 1 John 1:3). To be like God, then, we should make room for intimate relationships both with God and with others, but what more is this than fulfilling the two greatest commands: “ . . . love Yahweh your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind . . . [and] the second is like it, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself’” (Matt. 22:37-39). The Trinity makes room for relating to humans so that those who trust the Lord Jesus will have fellowship with the Father, Son, and Spirit (2 Cor. 13:14; 1 John 1:3). To be like God, then, we should make room for intimate relationships both with God and with others, but what more is this than fulfilling the two greatest commands: “ . . . love Yahweh your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind . . . [and] the second is like it, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself’” (Matt. 22:37-39).

It is correct to say God is immutable, but when we place this statement together with God loving and relating to us as Trinity, we need to consider this a qualified immutability. Again, the Trinity is immutable in His essentially loving nature and changeable regarding the Persons “making room” for others. Who and what God is does not change, but He does change to relate to new creatures who respond to His overtures of love and come into communion with Him.

Notes:

[1] John Zizioulas, Communion & Otherness: Further Studies in Personhood and the Church, ed. Paul McPartlan, rep. (2006; London: T & T Clark, 2009), 24 – 25; Maximus the Confessor, Ambigua 1, 5, and 67. Maximus uses the Greek phrasing of τροπος ὑπαξεως (tropos hypaxeōs: mode of existence) and πως εἰναι (pōs einai: how being exists) to explain. Grammatical brackets mine.

Image: By PJParkinson (Own work) [CC0], via Wikimedia Commons

Pentecost Sunday and the Power and Presence of God

Today is Pentecost, the ecclesiastical festival commemorating the establishment of the church itself. On this fiftieth day after Jesus’ resurrection, the Holy Spirit descended on Christ’s disciples as they prayed in one accord in the Upper Room, thereby launching their ministry, a dynamic outreach that would burst the confines of Jerusalem and Judea and would spread the Good News throughout the world.

Ten days before the events recounted in Acts 2, before the disciples of Christ had watched Jesus ascend to heaven, they had asked him when the restoration of Israel would come. He was the promised Messiah, they knew, but what did his departure portend for a restored kingdom? Instead of an answer, they heard Christ’s promise of the Spirit. So they waited. They obeyed Jesus’ command, remaining together in Jerusalem.

At this time, many pilgrims were in the city to celebrate the Feast of Weeks, the Jewish holy day recognizing God’s giving Moses the Law at Mount Sinai. This feast is known as Shavuʿoth in Hebrew and Pentecost (fiftieth day, after Passover) in Greek. As the disciples gathered together, the Holy Spirit fell upon them, setting them aflame by the transforming presence and power of God. The imagery of wind and fire of Acts 2 echoes that of Exodus 19, chronicling God’s presence on the mountain Moses ascended (as Kent Dobson notes in his commentary for the NIV First-Century Study Bible).

As God made abode with Moses and the Israelites, so too he was with these disciples, and now would take up residence within them. Far from abandoning or forsaking them, or leaving them desolate, he planned to animate and inspire them, write his law on their hearts, and fulfill his promise to pour out his Spirit (Joel 2); in fact, he planned to anoint them for a work whose breadth and profundity they could have scarcely imagined, of which the kingdom of Israel was just the beginning.

The Holy Spirit empowered these unsophisticated Galileans to preach the Gospel message with power both to Jews living in Jerusalem and to those on pilgrimage for the holy day. Despite sharing the same Jewish faith and religious tradition, the onlookers hailed from a wide range of geographical locations including Mesopotamia, Asia, and Egypt and spoke a number of different languages. They were culturally diverse as well—Parthians, Medes, Elamites, Cretans, and Arabians, and both ethnically Jewish and converts to the faith. Through the miraculous work of the Spirit, the Gospel message, relevant to all, was now heard by all, in their own native tongues.

God used the obedience of these disciples to begin reconciling the whole world to himself. The same power that raised Jesus from the dead was now at work within them, to effect nothing less than the complete restoration of his created order, a process still underway.

And that message, boldly proclaimed with divine unction, radically changed the lives of those who heard and heeded, responding to God’s gracious and glorious overture of love. Three thousand people, Acts 2 tells us, were baptized and welcomed into Christian fellowship that day, a fellowship depicted by Luke as nothing less than extraordinary.

In Glimpses of Grace Madeleine L’Engle describes the life of the early church in these terms: “[O]n that first Pentecost the Holy Spirit truly called the people together in understanding and forgiveness and utter, wondrous joy. The early Christians, then, were known by how they loved one another.” She continues by challenging the contemporary church to live in such unity: “Wouldn’t it be wonderful if people could say that of us again? Not an exclusive love, shutting out the rest of the world, but a love so powerful, so brilliant, so aflame that it lights the entire planet — nay the entire universe!”

These early Christians held property in common, submitted themselves to one another, studied scripture and learned from the apostles, praised God, lived in gratitude and generosity. And their numbers continued to increase. God used their obedience to begin reconciling the whole world to himself. The same power that raised Jesus from the dead was now at work within them, to effect nothing less than the complete restoration of his created order, a process still underway.

For Pentecost not only reminds us of Mount Sinai by way of the Feast of Weeks; it also harkens back to the Tower of Babel from Genesis 11—except, where language divided those at Babel, it united those at Pentecost. While scripture contains many instances of the devastation wrought by human sin, few stories capture the imagination as fully as that of Babel. As the population grew after the flood, people settled in Shinar, later deciding to build a city with a tower “reach[ing] to the heavens,” motivated by a two-fold purpose: to “make a name for [them]selves” and to avoid being “scattered over the face of the whole earth.” Seeing their plans, God thwarted them, confusing their languages and dispersing them throughout the world, the very thing they hoped their building project would prevent.

Although the precise sin of the people is not named in Genesis 11, historical context suggests that pride was at its root. (Dobson says that “[t]owers in the Bible usually are associated with human arrogance,” pointing to Isaiah 2:12-17 and Ezekiel 26:4-9 as examples.) Fear, too, perhaps motivated them (as Brent A. Strawn explains); they may have craved self-protection, isolation, and stability—all of which would have come, they supposed, from a city. Even so, such self-protection came at the expense of obeying God’s command to Noah (and Adam and Eve before that) to “[b]e fruitful and increase in number and fill the earth.” Rather than submit to God, the people of Babel relied on themselves, cutting themselves off from others and fulfilling their own desires, not God’s will.

Pentecost reminds us that God does not call us to live in our own strength, in the comfortable confines of our own devising. Rather, we are altogether dependent on the only true Source of our strength and victory. God’s plans for healing, hope, and restoration are far grander than our narrow terrestrial dreams forged in the finite minds of mortal men. Ours is a calling much too high for us to achieve with the resources of our own meager devices. God’s Spirit is still available to take up habitation in our hearts, to flood us with waves of liquid love, transforming us to be like Christ, empowering us to obey God’s call, with the same power that raised Jesus from the dead.

Ascension Day, St. Athanasius, and Theosis

Christians celebrate throughout the year a number of holy days, each of which emphasizes the life and work of Jesus. Of notable importance are Christmas, the commemoration of the Son’s entrance into the world whereby he takes on our humanity through the incarnation, and Easter, a celebration of Christ’s death and resurrection. In liturgical traditions from both the East and West, Christians also celebrate Ascension Day, which commemorates Jesus’s ascension to heaven.

Ascension Day is one of the earliest Christian celebrations. Tradition states that it is apostolic in origin and dates back to as early as the first century. According to Scripture, after the events of his death and resurrection, Jesus appeared to his followers over a span of forty days (Acts 1:3) and then was taken up into heaven to sit at the right hand of the Father (Mk 16:20; Lk 24:53; Acts 1:9). Christians, therefore, celebrate Ascension Day on the fortieth day after Easter Sunday.

Jesus’s ascension remains an essential teaching of the Christian church. As with the incarnation, death, and resurrection of the Son of God, the ascension is intricately connected to our salvation. Each should be taken as part of the seamless and inseparable work of Christ, as demonstrated in the writings of the early church.

In his defense of the incarnation, Athanasius (c. 297 C.E. – 373 C.E.), the Bishop of Alexandria, remarked that “it was our sorry case that caused the Word to come down” (Athanasius, On the Incarnation, 1.4). Death had dominion over us because of sin, and it was only through the incarnation of the Word that God could put an end to death and corruption. The Word, who is immortal and who is also the Father’s Son, is incapable of dying. “For this reason,” claimed Athanasius, “He assumed a body capable of death, in order that it, through belonging to the Word Who is above all, might become in dying a sufficient exchange for all, and, . . . put an end to corruption for all others as well, by the grace of the resurrection” (Athanasius, On the Incarnation, 2.9). Toward the latter part of his work on the incarnation, Athanasius says something startling: the Word “assumed humanity that we might become God” (Athanasius, On the Incarnation, 8.54). This may sound strange to our modern ears, but Athanasius’s claim would have made perfect sense among his Greek hearers. It is not that humanity becomes God in an ontological sense, as one might find in pantheism. For Athanasius and the other Greek Fathers, a clear distinction remains between God and creation. God alone is eternal, immortal, uncreated, and incorruptible. Rather, his point was that through the work of the Son of God we become a “holy race” and “partakers of the Divine Nature” (Athanasius, Letter 60, to Adalphius, 4; cf. 2 Peter 1:4). God, by his grace, shares eternal and abundant life with his creatures.

By no means was Athanasius the only church Father to emphasize this teaching that we now call “theosis” (deification). It first appeared in the work of Irenaeus, who claimed that God became incarnate through the Son in order to “win back to God that human nature (hominem) which had departed from God” (Against Heresies, 3.10.2). The doctrine of theosis places emphasis on restoration. Not only was Christ’s work for the forgiveness of sin and for our reconciliation to God; it was also for the restoration of our fallen humanity, for our healing, and to bring us into union with God. Theosis, then, refers to the full saving work of God in our lives, which ultimately culminates in our glorification and immortality.

Jesus, who is our advocate and intercessor before the Father (1 Jn 2:1), and who sympathizes with us in our suffering (Heb 2:17-18), experienced the full weight of our humanity while on earth (Heb 2:10-18; 4:15; 5:7-10). Yet, he did so without sin (1 Pet 2:22; 2 Cor 5:21; Heb 4:15; 1 Jn 3:5). He went before us and is now present with the Father. Because of the completed work of Christ we too may share in the full restoration of our humanity and in our future glorification (Rom 8:18). Not only do we experience forgiveness and a relationship with God, our bodies also will be raised in the likeness of Jesus’s resurrected body—mortality has been clothed with immortality (1 Cor 15:54). Jesus’s resurrection and ascension gives us the ultimate hope and assurance that God has defeated death. One day, those who are in Christ will bask in the indwelling and glorious presence of God in the renewed heavens and earth (Rom 18:21; Rev 21:1-3).