500 Years of Martin Luther

Today many of my theologian and Christian friends are posting thoughts and quotes about Martin Luther since the Reformation officially began on this day, according to church historians, five hundred years ago when Luther posted his 95 theses to the door of the Wittenberg Castle.  Now I'm no Luther expert, but I have found some of his ideas really intriguing and I continue to wrestle with the implications of what he came to believe and teach.  

Two short quotes of Luther have proved to be a guiding light for me this year as I deal with the fallout from my divorce and the unending waves of grief I feel day after day:

1) "Be a sinner, and let your sins be strong ("sin boldly"), but let your trust in Christ be stronger, and rejoice in Christ who is the victor over sin, death, and the world."  

When I hear these words I am only able to "hear" them as a child of the Wesleyan-Holiness tradition.  Wesley, when he encountered the work of Luther, found it to be deeply disturbing and too mystical.  In fact, he found the idea so completely confusing as to arouse anger.  In 1781 Wesley described Luther's work as "shallow … muddy and confused … deeply tinctured with mysticism throughout, and hence often dangerously wrong."  How can a true Christian sin boldly, Wesley reasoned?  Doesn't such an idea lead into the darkness of anti-nomianism and anarchy?  I think Wesley never fully resolved some of these tensions in his own mind because, after all, his conversion experience took place while hearing Luther's reflections on St. Paul's Letter to the Romans.  What can possibly be more Protestant than that kind of a conversion!?!

Yet the good news behind what Luther is writing beckons to me too.  It's like a faint glimmer of hope that God is so profoundly big and good and in utter control of history that our own human free will almost seems to fade in importance.  Sure, we do bad things and we do them all the time and these harmful choices we make hurt others around us and even hurt ourselves.  Yet what if the mystics are correct when they insist that God is love and that love wins and that in some very mysterious way that we don't yet fully understand we will -- all of us, according to some! -- come to rest within the arms of a loving God who is far bigger than we can even think or imagine?  Such is the logic of grace.  It is the logic behind old hymns that I grew up singing in camp-meeting tabernacles with words like "Jesus paid it all / All to Him I owe / Sin had left a guilty stain / He washed it white as snow." In other words, salvation is a work of God and not something we ever earn.  As a dysfunctional Wesleyan, I find that very, very hard to believe for any serious length of time.  

The doubting Thomas in me cries out, "But how can God use addiction?" I've wrestled with this theologically for at least fifteen years:  can God really love an addict?  After all, I can hear Wesley saying, "a child of God does not sin."  And what is addiction if not utter slavery to sin and self? (Some would say it is a brain disorder, but I'm not completely sold on that idea yet).  So, anyway, that's why I am intrigued by Luther's doctrine of salvation by grace through faith alone, yet am not entirely sure if I can believe it.

2) The second quote from Luther that has been with me all year was posted by my friend Ken Brewer at Spring Arbor University:  “One becomes a theologian by living, by dying, and by being damned, not by understanding, reading, and speculation.”  

Of course, I find tremendous hope in this idea because it means that even a story as seemingly tragic as my own can be redeemed.  All of my life I have longed to be a theologian.  It has bordered at times on an obsessive-compulsive tendency, as the history of this blog demonstrates.  Try as I might, I have simply not been able to understand my recent divorce and my bouts with addiction.  In many moments my uncertainty has led me into profound despair of life itself and, as I have written elsewhere, throughout this year I have often asked myself the perennial human question: "To be or not to be?"  

Yet what an irony it would be if this path in life that I have taken (did I chose it or not?  I cannot decide) could be redeemed in such a way that through the suffering and damnation I am currently experiencing I might one day come to a better understanding of God.  God, after all, has always been my Ultimate Concern, even when I haven't always acted like it.  Indeed, I think this may have been the fundamental problem with my marriage:  I allowed Courtney to replace God in my life and, when she inevitably let me down as all humans must do, then I grew resentful and angry.  Even now I often feel the temptation to give in to bitterness, yet I know that to do so would be to walk a path toward destruction and death.  I hear St. Paul whispering in my ear, "Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good."  I'm not always sure what that means, but I want to do my best to follow in that Way.

Christian thinkers and mystics since Pseudo-Dionysius have pointed to a three-fold spiritual path for believers: a trail that leads from purgation through illumination to unification.  Luther's statement above echoes this ancient teaching about purgation.  We must be refined in a furnace of pain for, otherwise, some of us would simply never learn and we would be condemned to a hell of our own making for eternity.  This is a deep mystery:  even Jesus Christ had to enter into death and damnation.  Regardless of whether or not one takes it literally, the church has also always taught that Jesus Christ descended into hell itself prior to his resurrection by the Father.  

At this point in my life that idea brings me deep existential comfort.  It isn't just a "head knowledge," but a "heart reality."  When I can do nothing at all except to pray Psalm 6 or Psalm 77, even in the midst of the agony and tears I cling to this insane Christian idea that God herself/himself is present with us in the pain.  Thus we are called, as my uncle once told me, not to "go around" the pain, but to go "through" it.  I don't really pretend to understand what that means, but it seems wise.  

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God Almighty, thank you for the slightly insane, profane, racist bigot Martin Luther because if you can save a dude like that, you can probably save anyone.  That's the offensiveness of grace.  I believe, but help now my unbelief.  Amen.

Film Review: Columbus (2017)

Director Kogonada’s debut film Columbus is a love letter to art, architecture, nature, and the universal human quest for meaning.  It’s a very deliberately paced and careful film that may turn off a wider public audience – an audience that is currently engulfed, according to one of the film’s protagonists, not in a crisis of attention, but a crisis of interest.  The long (almost unsettling) shots of trees, buildings, and human faces communicates that this film is fundamentally a story of spiritual odyssey.  Cassandra (played masterfully by Haley Lu Richardson) is just a simple Hoosier girl who longs to leave town, but feels compelled to stay in Columbus, Indiana to care for her mentally ill mother.  She providentially meets Jin (John Cho), a Korean-American visiting town due to his father’s sudden illness, and the film centers around the unlikely friendship that forms around these two souls adrift and how their friendship sets both on a new trajectory. 

Jin, an ambitious yet broken out-of-towner with a deeply unhealthy relationship with his father, tends to drown his sorrows in alcohol.  He laments that he cannot appreciate architecture since his father was an expert on the subject and, in Jin’s words, “you grow up around something and it feels like nothing.”  Yet he sees within this young stranger Cassandra an almost mystical, spiritual love for the beauty and order of architecture.  Her mysticism intrigues him, all the more so since he is a wandering soul without any relationship to the spiritual realm.  For Cassie the seemingly mundane, ordinary places of her hometown – two different banks, a church, her elementary school – have taken on a sort of healing power in her life that she does not understand and cannot explain.  Speaking of a bank building, Cassandra attempts to explain to Jin the significance of where they are standing, “I’d probably seen it thousands times before, but one night I looked up and just saw it.”  (I cannot help but think of what John Wesley called the spiritual sensorium, which awakens within those who have eyes to see and ears to hear.)  Jin, always the skeptic, isn’t sure he even believes in the healing power of architecture or holy places so he chooses to ignore Cassie’s testimony.  It is a story of spiritual sight vs. spiritual blindness, yet neither is fully in the dark nor fully enlightened.  Both are on a very complicated journey.  The realism of this is very refreshing.

Throughout the film, Cassandra seems to be lost and yet she also catches glimpses of profound beauty, glimpses that gives her a sort of orientation to life when she doesn’t know her life’s purpose.  Though there is plenty to contrast between Jin and Cassie, they do share some important commonalities:  both wandering souls are given clarity and direction by the other.  Jin seems to begin to gain “sight” thanks to his serendipitous encounter with the odd Hoosier girl.  And Cassie received the answer to her question about where to go in life (isn’t the choice to leave one’s home and family one of the most difficult and universal choices we all have to make?) from this odd and unhappy sojourner.  

“You need to stop feeling bad,” Jin tells Cassandra near the end of the film.  She simply replies, “Yeah, so do you.”  Neither of them are able to extend such grace to themselves and so they give it to one another.  This is a healing, salvific moment for them both.

I loved this film since it wrestles with questions that consume my own mind these days:  Where should I go in life? How does one determine where to go?  And what does all the damn beauty around me mean?  As my friend Bill recently told me around a campfire in Wyoming, for Plato the beginning of all religion is in the pure appreciation of beauty because when it strikes you, there is no denying it.  Beauty becomes a sort of self-evident principle upon which many people choose to orient their lives.  When the architect builds, when the painter paints, when the hurting and lonely dance out their pain under a starry sky, when a child gets lost while looking at a flower, when two strangers become friends – all of these are acts of worship and surrender to beauty.  

The film ultimately challenges us all with a haunting question: Do you appreciate the beauty that is all around you or do you just let it all pass you by?  The answer to this question is, I believe, the difference between living in heaven or living in hell.

Neurobiology, Free Will, and God's Judgment

I recently heard an interview on Fresh Air with Adrian Raine, a neurobiologist, criminologist, and author of the book The Anatomy of Violence.  Raine has conducted extensive brain-mapping of murderers, serial killers, and psychopaths and has demonstrated quite conclusively that violent criminals who have acted upon angry impulses very often have an underdeveloped prefrontal cortex.  The prefrontal cortex is the segment of the brain that provides impulse control and effectively tells us "Even though you're really angry with him, don't pull out the kitchen knife and kill him."  Raine describes this part of the brain as the "guardian angel" of the human conscience.  As a result of his investigations, Raine is calling attention to the fact that some criminals commit crimes due to their very biological makeup.  And this not only applies to murder, but also to less serious offenses such as cheating on a test, stealing, lying, and so on.

Raine and the host Terry Gross talked extensively about the legal implications of this finding, but meanwhile my own brain was spinning as I considered the theological implications.  As a child of the Wesleyan tradition, I have always believed strongly in human free will and agency.  In fact, you could perhaps describe Wesleyan-Arminian theology as one massive theological project attempting to preserve the belief that we humans are free to choose between right and wrong, good and evil.

And then neuroscience comes along.

Now Adrian Raine is not saying that we never make any free choices.  But he is saying that we are less free than we have always thought we are.  Some people are biologically predisposed to violence and (consequently) others to peace.  Some find it easier to lie, cheat, and steal.  And a few (those known as psychopaths) feel no guilt whatsoever when engaging in behavior that hurts others.  It all depends on biology.

What am I to make of this theologically?  How do we incorporate such findings from the field of neurobiology into a doctrine of free will?

Perhaps this is why Christ instructs us never to judge one another.  The action of another individual might seem reprehensible to me (and it would be reprehensible if I were the one to do it), but that action might not be as freely chosen by the other individual as I would assume.  For example, it is clear from Scripture that bearing false witness is wrong.  But what if Bob has a neurological predisposition and enhanced proclivity for lying.  It would be easy for me to judge Bob for telling a lie, and I still do think that a lie is wrong.  But it might be less wrong for Bob than it would for me (assuming I do not have the same predisposition).  This means that our moral judgments on others can be quite inaccurate.  I do not know Bob's brain chemistry and therefore I cannot offer a perfectly clear judgment because any fair judgment would take his brain chemistry into account.  The question is one of moral culpability.  And our human ability to determine culpability is severely limited, if Dr. Raine is right.  (Some theologians will undoubtedly reject his theory out of hand since it doesn't fit into their theological framework, but I think that's just plain lazy and dishonest).

I don't know the answer to these questions, but I do know this:  it's a good thing God is judge and I am not.  His judgments are perfect.  I can declare with St. Paul, "How unsearchable are His judgments!"  He alone knows my brain chemistry and Bob's brain chemistry and the brain chemistry of everyone on earth... and that means that He alone can judge.

A Few Pastoral Reflections on Newtown

Like many Americans, I wept when I heard the news from yesterday.  Perhaps it’s because I have a kindergartener myself.  Perhaps it’s just the utter disbelief that it happened in an elementary school.  Whatever it was, the news of yesterday’s shooting in Connecticut hit me harder than any story since 9/11.

Now after this tragedy, as is the case after every tragedy, we are once again faced with the question, “Why?”  For those of us who believe in God, we are faced with the even more difficult question, “How could God allow this to happen?”  While I don’t really know the answer to that (and anyone who claims to is lying), I wanted to jot down a few thoughts just in case they might be helpful to someone somewhere asking these same age-old questions.

1.     This school shooting was not God’s will.  Sadly, Christians are coming out of the woodwork to explain how this could be God’s will.  I’ve heard it said, “This is God’s punishment for our nation removing prayer from schools” and other such nonsense.  Plain and simple, this did not come from God.  To think that it did is to turn God into the devil. 

2.     Yesterday’s events can be best understood as an act of human free will.  Perhaps God could have created a world in which free will did not exist, but he judged that human free will and all that comes with it – both good and bad – was preferable to a universe populated by robots.

3.     This shooting is not the end of the story.  As Christians, we must insist that evil does not have the final say.  To paraphrase St. Paul, “We mourn, but not as those who have no hope.”  We do not know what the end of the story will look like exactly, but we do believe that even the worst of evils will pale in comparison to the beauty and goodness that will envelop us.  This is not to downplay what happened and how horrific it was; it is just to insist that what happened yesterday is not the end of the Grand Story.   We believers insist on the truth of Jesus’ words:  “Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.” (Matthew 5:4)

4.     The victims did nothing wrong to deserve this.  It’s truly remarkable that some Christians today still see tragedies like this as a sort of retributive justice from an angry God.  We heard the same drivel after Katrina.  To those who make such hurtful and misguided claims, I plead, “Please read the book of Job.”  Or perhaps recall the time Jesus said: “What about those twelve people who were killed when the tower of Siloam fell on them?  Do you think that they were more guilty of wrongdoing than everyone else in Jerusalem?” (Luke 13:4).  The point:  there is no correlation between tragedies and the morality of those who suffer from them.

      5.  If we feel pain over loss, God feels it all the more.  The picture of God in Scripture is the Suffering One.  When we want to see the heart of the divine mystery, we look upon the cross.  Let’s not get this mixed up:  God is not the one inflicting pain; he is the one feeling pain next to us.  Too many Christians get this wrong and make God out to be evil rather than good.

I realize that I’m not saying anything new here.  There’s nothing very profound in what I’ve written.  Yet I feel that people need to hear this simple theology in the midst of tragedy.  As many struggle to make sense of what happened this week, we join them, recognizing that we don’t have all of the answers.  But in the meantime we cling to hope.  If we believe anything as Christians it is this:  God is good, all the time.  All the time, God is good.

Hypnotism

About 10 days ago, my wife and I were on our first cruise. We didn't attend most of the nightly shows, but one of them that we did attend featured a "comic hypnotist." Inviting 12 participants from the audience who were willing to be hypnotized, he asked them all to concentrate on his words and put eight of them under his spell, dismissing the other four to return to their seats. He then proceeded to make these eight unfortunate people perform all manner of embarrassing activities such as performing a ballet, sniffing each other's shoes, and sobbing uncontrollably. While most of the audience roared with laughter, I sat there with a sick feeling in my stomach. This was my first time to see a live hypnotism and something about it seemed unnatural.

I am convinced that hypnotism is not a gimmick. It really works. I marveled at the absurd acts these eight people performed without even cracking a smile (that is what convinced me the most). But the sheer power that the hypnotist had over these individuals frightened me. If he had told them to go jump off of the edge of the ship, I believe they would have done it.

That evening I had a theological crisis. All sorts of questions emerged from the event: How is it possible for one human to be able to control the minds of other humans? What evil could be done if this were used by the wrong person? Why would God, who in my view seems to value human free will very highly, allow this utter destruction of free will? If these people acted like this and were seemingly unaware of their actions, could we all be hypnotized by God and not know it? (I know this sounds absurd at first, but consider: does God manipulate us to any degree? Surely if a hypnotist could manipulate someone, then God could at least change our desires or our inner dispositions at his every whim?)

And more questions emerge that relate to my earlier entries entitled "Virtue in a Pill." If a hypnotist could "cure" me of my sinful impulses such as the desire for other women or outbursts of anger or even my difficulty with listening to others, then why should I not go and have it done right away? In other words, can a hypnotist do what I've been asking the Holy Spirit to do for me only quicker and more effectively? Which leads to a deeper question: Assuming that the Holy Spirit could be more effective than a hypnotist if he wanted to, then why doesn't He do it? If God has the power to instantly sanctify me and I earnestly ask Him to do it but He does not, then when I do sin am I ultimately to blame or is God? A good hypnotist is able to help people out of depressions, addictions, etc and we do not blame him for doing so; in fact, we praise such a doctor for healing his patients. But if God could act as the Great Hypnotist but does not do so even to the patient who is keenly aware of his own sickness and pleads for help, then isn't this blameworthy? Wouldn't we shame a human who acted in such a way?

The other alternative, of course, is that although God can instantly sanctify a person, He may have very good reasons for choosing not to. We can only speculate at what such reasons might be, but my best theory is this: God actually prefers for us to struggle with sin than to be instantly alleviated from it. Perhaps within this struggle is a greater good -- the long, slow, painful development of character, for example. But does this mean that God actually prefers sin over holiness in certain circumstances?

Allow me to illustrate: Al is an alcoholic. Al asks God to instantly cure him by removing from him his desire for booze. God has the power to do this. I imagine that if Al went to a doctor and asked to have his desire for booze removed and the doctor had the ability to do it, the doctor would in fact do it or he would be in some way morally blameworthy. But God does not instantly cure Al and, in fact, watches him struggle with the addiction for years even to the point that his marriage is broken and he loses his job. Al attends AA meetings and does everything within his own power to break himself free, but he continues to relapse once or twice a month. His spirit is willing, but his flesh is weak. But the question is this: if Al does go out and get hammered one weekend, who is to blame? Is it Al or is it God? It seems to me that God is more to blame than Al.

Hypnotize me, O God, and do it now. Amen.