Do you repent? Are you reconciled?

As an artist, I’ve found that seeking to have my art known works on the premise that I share a world with others and can share my imagination with them in a bonding love of beauty. In a world fractured by sin, such bonds are only possible through essential, thorough, reconciliation—even with strangers. The imagination is so powerful and all-encompassing that overlapping worlds seem to hardly exist (where they do at all). Is this a trite solipsism? No. 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.

Then what should bind us? Does Jesus only repair for us our broken relationship with the Father (which is something to think about) or does he also improve our actual lives here (i.e., something to experience?) I admit that I am tempted to suspect that this question wouldn’t arise for me if I really knew conversion of my heart and mind. Is that right? After all, everything we see and say is shaped by the power and character of our imagination, dependent upon our hearts and minds—and yes, I know that this is Kantian but it also happens to be provable. If anyone were so deeply converted as some claim to be, they wouldn’t struggle so mightily with deciding on questions like “what church must I attend?” because they’d be at peace already, and their imaginations would draw other sorts of questions—like, “how amazing is this?”

Our Western paradigmatic boundaries and touchstones for an active imagination have not treated anyone with the final answers they led us to seek; we suffer from the suspicion that, although we can change the scenery, nevertheless, all any Christians will ever actually do with God is pray to him. And that’s never enough because it’s a one-way street—or at least we experience it as such—and conversion is something purportedly done to us. What precisely is done in our conversion? All the Christian traditions can at least agree on this much: that, if we are converted, we are reconciled to God.

As a Protestant, I am a little suspicious that any other Christian tradition (especially Eastern or Roman types) would try to plant a seed of doubt about my reconciliation with God, and place on me a burden to strive toward that reconciliation. If that were so, I wouldn’t be converted because I’d have the same heart full of doubtful and relatively joyless striving to know God as is the case with any other folk religious groups flapping their arms, trying to fly.

If reconciliation and conversion happen to us, I’m sure we experience them—and I’ve felt the power of reconciliation in the deepest and most liberating way a few times in life—but I can’t be entirely certain that I’ve ever known this experience with God (except on a theoretical and intellectual level). I can read about a perfectly peaceful heart resting in the confidence of reconciliation with God, and I can be preached-to about it, but that never sinks-in in quite the same way as those other experiences did. Yes, I’ve expressed repentance and felt relief. I’ve been grateful—sometimes deeply at peace. But these experiences are never life-altering enough for a certainty that my heart was changed. To put it more simply, I have never felt that bad about wronging God and I have never been that relieved to know he forgave me. And before you do — Don’t tell me that you have. You haven’t. If you had, you wouldn’t spend as much time as everyone else wringing your hands about, well, anything at all because your heart and mind would be changed to praise God naturally rather than out of a sense of duty.

Aside from the dialectic of shame and assurance, God ought to inspire awe in the converted heart. I have experienced that good sense of awe but it has never been in a Protestant church. I don’t know whose fault that is, but awe is not what they’re selling. And although awe is the most common attraction we have to ancient traditions, it isn’t an exclusive indicator of the presence of God. I’ve also been awed, for example, by secular art, and by extraordinary virtues in some atheists.

One church option I’ve encountered really embraces the notion that to pray to God isn’t enough. That way is to talk about sacramentalism as the center of the Christian life: Never mind experience. Never mind the imagination. To which I’d say: That’s all well and good—but these have to actually matter to me in the ways I described or else Christianity is just another folk religion. I see other folk religions replete with the same sort of ritual cleansing ceremonies (minus Jesus)—so is that the only difference that makes for a true religion? Besides, what kind of example are the vast and various ethnic cultural centers they call “churches” in the East? Ritual is what they focus on and there’s not the least amount of zeal, conviction, or love of strangers outside the already-vetted and approved-for-communion cultic community among them to inspire anyone else to think of Christ. They tend to transfer all the work of Christ to middle men, too. For example, Jesus tells us to pray to our Father in heaven for forgiveness; whereas these people come along and say that he must’ve meant forgiveness through their declaring it so. Moreover, I find all of the American converts to these sorts of communities draw from a handful of contemporary professors whose careers are spent writing about the enlightenment and how it removed us from an embodied faith—an historical critique that I consider a boring, hackneyed, and uninspired critique. Can we not learn to make some room for loving beauty, truth, and goodness in people and in their inventions without the burden of fitting them all into a larger systematic incarnational theology? God speaks through his Word. Is that not enough for them?

All of the above reflections boil down to reveal two truths about Christianity that the Protestants have gotten very, very right: 1. Simul iustus et peccator - We still sin and doubt, and 2. The answer can only be from God in his word. The answer must always be to search the Word. Where else would we go? Where is our conviction? Where is our reconciliation? Where are imaginations formed to inspire Christian charity? Why haven’t we repented adequately or finally in a way that would set us apart as Christians? What we find in Scripture is the content of our convictions and the good news of our reconciliation.

Yet few Christians seem to realize the prima facie absurdity of being unsatisfied, left wanting, by the Word of God. Most offer the Word of God plus some other thing. Sometimes the schema proposed to Christians by our churches is centered on the Word as an object of reverence; sometimes the Word is read aloud by highly official officials that it might change us and conform us to Christ; sometimes the Word is affirmed as the ultimate source of perennial traditions that deliver the goods through daily offices and sacraments; sometimes it’s the Word and catechisms; sometimes the Word is the beginning of a history of patterned behaviors that we are to imitate—going to the Scriptures most essentially as proof of the origins of what we do. As far as I can tell, though, it’s never just the Word to be believed (where that’s the end of the story). Why is that? The Bible is the Word of God—not just a record of it. And if it’s the literal Word of God then how does anyone figure that it should be insufficient - formally or materially?

Finally, how do I know whether I participate in my own salvation, or whether it is entirely substitutionary? We are seen as good by others because grace moves us to respond in a Christlike way, especially when we are betrayed; and we come to know God through the stories He gives us, where He is portrayed as the Creator who is Himself betrayed. Before God, we are considered good only in Christ’s name, through His perfect substitution for our imperfect goodness. We participate by responding to God’s grace and becoming more like Him, but we do not participate in our justification before God, which would require perfect participation.

When we seek to understand history, we grasp the whole only through its individual parts, guided by a sense of unity that must be trusted. It’s not merely about life as a prolonged or eternal existence, but about the meaningful contents of a life—whether here or in the hereafter—that truly matter.

Moreover, I will never forget the Cross, just as I won’t forget my own coming rest in the Lord. I don’t need to focus solely on the abstract idea of life as a salvation from death—life is so much more than that. Add even a drop of awareness of mortality to any fixed idea of life, and it dissolves. And since God is known through the glory of His creation, focusing only on the recovery of our souls while neglecting the fruitfulness of creation risks losing our souls to darkness and death. If we saw creation as it was intended, we would love it deeply and have little time for self-absorption or for focusing only on its flaws.