God will teach you in your life

Seeing goodness in a fallen world does not redeem the world and neither does it redeem us. The main thing for a Christian isn’t finding signposts that by analogy evidence God’s marred handiwork; the main thing for a Christian is redemption unto a new and everlasting life. The difference Christ makes in our lives is that we live as people with something to be ultimately hopeful about. That hope is delivered to us; we don’t sniff it out under every rock ourselves.

There’s real danger in taking the wrong view of wisdom. If our conversations about sanctification, about becoming wise, or about our relationship to God are dominated by appeals to goodness, truth, and beauty, then that will enforce a habit of treating God as The Great Explanation for what we experience in life’s instances of goodness, truth, and beauty. And although we should be cautious not to create false dichotomies, nevertheless, Christian knowledge and experience of God aren’t defined by his utility as an explanation for what we love. We won’t ever have a thorough and convincing explanation for what we’ve experienced of God which would, in any case, become a subjective abstraction to debate endlessly as we’re prone to do. So, in the end, this will remain something we can know but which we can’t explain; neither however is there one reason for my belief in justice or love.

It’s also an easily-forgotten fact that we believe or disbelieve a thing before we know its truth or falsehood. There is no entirely neutral view of anything at all. So should I ask what we Christians believe and why, I shouldn’t be surprised if I can only pull together a list of beliefs that may appear disconnected from one another at a glance. But these are not disparate facts; they hang-together in a natural way but also in a way we might identify as systematic (just as we’d see patterns in lots of other places in nature). The work of our collective and individual imaginations can appear similarly chaotic: as an artist, for instance, to have my art known works only on the premise that I share a world with others and can share my imagination with them in a bond of love of beauty. Yet the imagination is so powerful and all-encompassing that overlapping worlds hardly exist if at all. The truth is that there is only one shared world but we don’t see it that way except in glimpses when reality forces itself on us (in problem-solving, etc.)

We believe as God teaches us. There’s no sense in thinking we can sort of don a necklace of all the beliefs of a given confession, for example, strung together and complete. It’s simply not true.

Have I created a false dichotomy, though? Is it one or the other? Is the Christian life one of being increasingly conformed to Christ in how we love or is it more a matter of our increasing knowledge of what points to God as the Source of our loves?

This is where we can begin to treat the phenomenological aspect of being a Christian. Knowledge about something apart from acting in an experience of it isn’t even part of the way to what God intends for us in our interactions with the world! Jesus Christ was present among his apostles in order for them to experience Him—not just so that his followers would be able to mentally go through a checklist of what the Messiah fulfilled that was prophesied in Scripture. The God of Scripture spoke to people in its accounts through their experiences of him and I don’t think that has ceased. I have made more than one major life decision on the grounds that it would be wiser and more Christlike if, in order to make this decision, I should set-aside even the most alluring visions or dreams that took shape in my mind’s eye to beckon me toward one glorious path, and choose instead the path that was grounded and marked-out by good fortune for my loved ones for whom I was responsible.

Isn’t this a Christian way? And if so, doesn’t that mean I’ve learned something of God by it? Is the Bible enough? Enough for what? The proof text to say that it is enough to stand alone in our faith lives as the source of all understanding is the verse about it being good for teaching, etc. But that doesn’t mean other things aren’t also good. Martin Luther once wrote: “Without trials ... a person can know neither Scripture nor faith, nor can he fear and love God. If he has never suffered, he cannot understand what hope is.”

So is it Scripture plus trials?

I can see someone scrambling to object that well, of course we have to live our lives, too! And that’s precisely what I’m saying. God will teach us in our lives and we will see it happening.

To answer the question I posed earlier, yes it would be a false dichotomy if I were to draw a division between what God teaches in Scripture of himself and what we learn of him by his work in our hearts and minds through life experience. But this leaves the content of this knowledge as yet untreated. What do we learn as Christians? I believe we learn what can’t be learned by pagan means—and especially to be hopeful. It’s not, in other words, a matter of seeing notes of God in everything good, true, and beautiful. As I’ve written elsewhere, being a Christian is more properly and essentially a matter of being hopeful that we are saved out of the world; being Christian is not a question of being more érudite and appreciative tourists in the world.

We experience sacraments; we do see them point to our Creator (and thereby know more of God by his handiwork) and they also conform us to Christ, making us holy. We can’t simply say the word “baptism” and expect that to answer all questions about what it is to be baptized. Insofar as we seek an explanation for the sacrament of baptism we will fail in some regard or other. All explanations for life experiences are speculative and speculative things invite doubt. With regard to the intellectual aspect of being a Christian, therefore, any and all explanations will never be sufficient for certain knowledge beyond reasonable doubt.

Returning to the intellectual content of being a Christian for a moment, all of these explanations for experiences are framed by Christian apologists as proofs — even for God’s existence. Christians try to explain the Creator of all things visible and invisible who is necessarily beyond what could be described—using concepts created for knowing things in the world. Putting our apologetics hats on, we want to prove that God is there to others; most painfully, sometimes we feel that we need to prove it to ourselves. Does this give the lie to Christian belief in Kant’s noumena as a figment of our rationalization of the absurd? Does this expose intellectual attempts at deciphering what is beyond what we can grasp with our minds as being nothing more than an artful strategy to cope with cognitive dissonance?

We can answer this from another angle of approach that will eventually lead us into the subject of the other, phenomenological aspect of being a Christian.

It is an undeniable, absolute, certainty that despite the incomprehensibility of God nevertheless there are indeed doctrines which those Christians who are intellectually capable of the task will necessarily believe. Nobody can take in the whole universe at a glance but we can know for certain that it goes beyond what we’ve understood. That is to say that the inability or incapacity to think doesn’t indicate that christification bypasses the intellect—not, at least, any more than being a human being doesn’t involve having arms and legs simply because some people are born without them.

Furthermore, setting aside the struggle to know more than we can possibly know, I reject the idea that we need to prove anyone’s existence at all—specifically because it is impossible to do so in any case at all; God’s existence is no exception. I am sometimes haunted by the anxiety of sin stricken uncertainty of relationship to God. A work of Christian theology, when it’s truly Christian, is the expressive content or product of such struggling. Confidence that I’m doing theology is necessary to doing it, but having confidence is never proof of a relationship with God.

There are lots of beliefs we can’t defend to the uttermost. I could, for instance, present a clever explanation for why love “doesn’t exist” but is a mythic or poetical description of ultimately meaningless material and biological functions; I could explain that most (if not all) people construct these castles in the sky, so to speak, as fortresses to protect their emotionally-laden commitment to the reality of ethereal, misty, love. But my assertion would beg the very question of what epistemic criteria we are to apply to knowing whether a thing is real or a merely ephemeral, abstract, figment of the imagination (which itself in turn would be the product of chemical processes). Finally, with regard to Christianity, we even have assumptions that go entirely unquestioned. For example, just because God is perfect, and God says we should love him wholeheartedly—why do we take that to mean “perfectly”? And why do we have to be perfect in order to qualify for being in the presence of the perfect God? Etc.

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As for Scripture’s explanatory value: Do I believe as I do because I’ve learned from Scripture? Yes, there’s that. But I also sense that I’m not the only one who lives with a deep suspicion that if we believe the Bible we may learn a great deal from its pages—but it won’t be enough to prove to ourselves or to God himself that we actually know him. If I’m honest, sometimes it even feels like if I don’t mention God often enough in conversations he might think I forgot him—or that indeed I might forget him. Moreover, we look around us and see Christians everywhere disagreeing with one another on what the Bible says. The New Testament epistles are letters written by actual people to other actual people—not thoroughgoing theological essays designed for system-building. Every single church, group, or denomination is at war with every other one based on ultimately subjective abstractions that reduce these texts to blueprints to follow to the letter in constructing theological systems ; not even Lutherans are an exception to this rule (despite our self-assessment as being above that intellectualist fray).

What if the Word of God draws them and us just as well? How does the truth and effect of Scripture draw people to live in Christ? It’s commonly taken as granted that when we read the Bible it will communicate to us what other religious works do but through stories and such but this is wrong. Moreover, it’s not uncommon to hear representatives of various reformational churches cite the earliest church sources as definitive evidence that they, and not the Catholics, are most like the first church. Perhaps. But is that going to work on someone who knows he is in Christ and in fellowship with other Christians in a Catholic church? If he’s clever he might restore that it isn’t mimic Christ’s Church but to be it. The Christian, in other words, isn’t meant to search the Bible for who he is supposed to be; he’s supposed to see in it his own history.

Everything anyone wrote in the Bible is fed into dead letter systems. Some theologian will pose a question and someone will respond that “the better question is such and such,” rather than answering. Sometimes, they’ll infer the motive behind the question and identify it as characteristic of a group of which they’re critical. By so doing, they’ve translated someone’s words into their own which are already sorted with answers readymade. Is this not what we do with Scripture too? We translate someone’s authenticity into our dead letter systems. Scripture is thus treated as a completely exhaustive proof of some key doctrine or other in each particular church or denomination. There are identifiable themes this way for each denomination: the Reformed will find a way to talk about God’s sovereignty with every single thought or experience of God recorded in Scripture; the Anabaptist will redirect everything to the kingdom and our part to play in it; the Roman Catholic will shoehorn its own ecclesial authority into every line; the Eastern Orthodox will change the subject to something entirely unrelated but highly spiritualized and vaguely reminiscent of ancient legend and folk religion; the Lutheran will be dutiful to advertise the Word and Sacraments (or otherwise find something nasty to say about the Reformed who all but ignore them). I could keep going.

One final note on this subject. If what we experience is somehow being drawn over and over again to the nagging thought that there is something deeply true about — at the very least — Christianity writ large, then why do we go first to the scholars who don’t testify to having been made aware of being similarly transformed in love of at least Christianity (if not of Christ?) Why do we measure the truth of our transformation according to the merits of the case as presented by the untransformed scholars instead? Their critically, academically, detached, skepticism about scientific historicity is an expression of not being like those of us who are transformed.

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Faith is the word for what God does when he delivers us expectations for happiness in the midst of our trials that aren’t squelched when we are wracked with anxiety, deathly ill, or lonely. Saying such a thing invites knee-jerk reactions—especially in wariness about existentialist influences—but when Lutherans, for example, point to receiving the Word and Sacrament when asked about the essentials of our lives of faith in Christ, it would be impossible for them to deny that these are in fact “experiences”. Regardless of how we subjectively interpret the experience, baptism and the Supper nonetheless happen to us.

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I have often wondered why hedonistic people don’t seem interested in theology and I thought it was because they consider it to be nonsense about how to please God by thinking and doing the right things according to dusty old traditional books by superstitious weak-minded people. But it’s actually because they don’t want to know what’s going on in the world, so they suppress it.

All people strive for peace and oneness with either God—or with the natural world. Do all people have an innate but mere capacity to know God or an explicit knowledge of God which we suppress? Thomas says the former, and I tend to agree on this point. I’m increasingly leery of anyone telling me that God loves me but not to try to love him back “because you can’t”. Whom are they denying by saying this?

Faith and philosophy as explanations create doubt, but nobody doubts that God exists if they’ve had a profoundly life-changing experience with Him. Now, even avowed atheists experience all the deepest things that we cannot confirm by natural explanations—things like love, or forgiveness, and so on. There are non-Christians who practice the same habits and train the same virtues. What then is the difference between Stoic self-denial or asceticism and Christian self-denial or asceticism?

To many of us Christians, bad habits are evidence of not being born of God. It’s a troubling and yet altogether commonplace teaching across every Christian group I’ve encountered, studied under, or worshipped with, that though a non-Christian may seem good and loving, that it must be that actually he isn’t. Does this even deserve a rebuttal? Something else that I’ll hear from many different types of Reformation-minded Christians is that, though infants might seem innocent, that truly they are wicked sinners. In response both assertions I’d want to ask, “but what do you actually believe?” The cognitive dissonance they create for themselves this way is at the very least unfruitful.

With regard to the case of the good atheist I think the more accurate thing to say is that, for the atheist, the experiences they have of these deeper things don’t cohere; they’re the scattered particular instances of each deeper thing: a little forgiveness from her, some hatred for him, and so forth. For the atheist, the deeper things don’t cohere to describe a whole life (and remember I define philosophy as a search for an emergent whole). The atheist might say “I have love,” and “I have forgiveness, just like you.” But Christian repentance—to take one example of a deeper thing—describes a whole life ; repentance is constant for us Christians and without any gaps between persons or events eliciting it. Moreover, repentance has a specific meaning to Christians (so long as we’re using that term to describe what God does in us). It means contrition and faith—which combination can only apply to one object or person. If it’s constant, then to whom are we always contrite?

Spiritual illness is rampant. Maybe it’s always been this way—it’s hard to tell. One thing is increasingly certain, however, and that is this: some of us try to cure ourselves by avoidance or curating every interaction with people, whereas others of us notice that we seem less spiritually-sick when we are fully available and engaged in others’ needful, spiritually-sick lives. Is it wisdom to imagine ourselves sullied by others’ words and deeds? Or is the second way the wiser, more Christian way of thinking?

I could be wrong (no, really), but I’m beginning to think that most post-Reformational thinking takes the former view, whereas some but certainly not all (nor perhaps even most) Eastern—or pre-Reformational, for that matter—thinking is more aligned with the latter way.

Earlier I said that, to many Christians, bad habits are evidence of one’s not being saved. I’m beginning to make-out a pattern connecting this to other Protestant thinking wherein the essential truth about the human condition is one of historical fact and future fact: Adam fell, and Christians will rise in Christ.

But as I said before that: spiritual illness abounds.

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The essential thing in Christianity worshipping Christ by definition. If someone replies, “Ah, but how?” then I’d be concerned for the same reason as if someone were to ask how he’s supposed to love his own wife. If we are being told what we must do in order to love, we are producing it rather than witnessing it flow from us. I’m at my most ecstatic and joyful place as a witness to beauty outside of myself. Either faith is what the Spirit conceives in us as we receive Christ and his Word of forgiveness at church (the divine service), or the Spirit of Christ in us is who receives salvation and forgiveness wherever we are. Once someone accepts that faith is a gift and not something he creates for himself by believing very hard, only then will he be able to accept that he has it without endlessly probing into the very possibility of such a thing as faith or God. Christ also creates our faith for us. I readily agree that we need to be shown whom to worship. But how to worship should be intrinsic to who we are. In other words, if we’re worshipping the resurrected Lord then we’ll realize that everything left in our lives is at best an aid to that end—including the church. Note the difference: the church is an aid to that end, not identical to it. We are not equipped to be judges of church history. We are in history, yes, but to think there’s something spiritually fruitful about studying the church is to have your eyes on the wrong prize.

At the same time, however, not all Christian churches are helping with the spiritual illness problem. Many of them are only talking about the past and the future.

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A brief note on atonement theories—i.e., talk about the past :

What’s actually important is eternal life in love (to include forgiveness). What’s not important: punishing people, making sure people know who’s boss, understanding things we don’t have to worry about, and answering questions nobody else posed to us (to name a few). Talk about atonement theories and even sin itself can sometimes be a privilege when someone’s struggling to merely survive. But none of that makes such reflective abstractions about theories any less real.

The truth is that some days I just don’t understand penal substitutionary atonement, for example. I might be told I’m presumptuous to say that actually it’s love that ultimately satisfies anyone’s wrath, not punishment. But that’s something I know from experience—and isn’t it the Christian experience? We go from hatefully wrathful to godly in and through a love not only patterned after the one truly divine triune loving relationship, but as sinners actually adopted into that relationship. Something I sometimes can’t understand is how, though our capacity and intentions to forgive truly freely (is it real forgiveness if we’re only satisfied by imagining that our enemies will suffer in hell?) are commensurate with our godliness—yet God himself needed to “satisfy His wrath” in order to forgive.

Here’s a very helpful summary that touches on what I’ve just discovered is a place where Thomas and I apparently agree: “Thomas’s distinction between pœna simpliciter and pœna satisfactoria (as a kind of pœna secundum quid), according to which punishment is the infliction of pain against the will of the sinner whereas satisfaction is the penitent’s voluntary undertaking of a good work which is penal in itself, leads to two important conclusions about the respective natures of satisfaction and punishment. First, although satisfaction must be accomplished by means of penal works, the element of pain is merely the quasi matter of the act, whereas its formal part is the gift offered in compensation, while the charity which informs the act is the principle from which it receives its power of satisfying. The magnitude of pain required for satisfaction thus decreases in proportion to the increase of charity, for the compensatory gift offered out of a greater love makes the offering itself more pleasing and acceptable to the one offended and thus serves to restore broken friendship and reconcile friends. Secondly, insofar as two persons are united in charity, one can satisfy for the sins of the other, whereas one cannot be punished (simply speaking) for the sins of another. Eleonore Stump’s arguments are therefore directed against the Reformation doctrine of penal substitution precisely to the extent that Christ appears therein to endure mankind’s punishment in the full and proper sense (that is, pœna simpliciter), whereas they present no difficulty for Thomas’s doctrine of pœna satisfactoria.”

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Relatedly, what I find to be one particularly poor reason to be Protestant is that one supposes that he avoids the trappings of inauthenticity in prayer or worship by the vainly repetitive liturgical rites, and so forth, which they see in Roman Catholicism or Eastern Orthdoxy. The sad fact is that Protestants really aren’t any more authentic in their worship than anyone else. If you don’t see Evangelical Protestants reciting prayers with learned (i.e., traditional) vocabulary and in learned cadences, then I doubt you’ve paid much attention to how similar such people sound to one another when they’re just being genuine in prayer.

The good news is that Christ intercedes for us. And one good reason to be Protestant is in the recognition that it is not only tolerable but in fact good that there are different streams from the same source in Christ. This way we don’t have to despair at every appearance of a fracture in history (unlike traditions whose adherents are held hostage by their own patchy histories). Some traditions, denominations, or churches, take inspiration from their little heroes of the faith in church history; but these streams are no more disparate in their ultimate source of faith—Christ—than we are as individuals when we draw from our experiences in life and turn them into useful means by which God may bless the world.