Taking Up a Different Space

Taking Up Space is moving to Taking Up Space. If you link to it, please link to it.

Watching Grass Grow

A couple of pastors were working on a computer presentation recently and found themselves spending (wasting) a bit of time staring at the little hourglass cursor while the computer was caught in some eternal loop of logic. One of the pastor's said, "When we get to heaven, I don't think we'll spend any time staring at hourglasses."
"That's true," the other replied, "unless maybe we'll understand the physics involved well enough to make the experience meaningful."
Perhaps the things around us are not as trivial as we think. Maybe what makes certain things seem like a "waste" of time is really a problem of perspective or knowledge. The revelation of Creation is deep and multileveled, and we humans don't see the hand of the Creator in it simply because we lack the faith to look. We breathe God's air as though it belongs to us, and this trivializes all the miracles involved.

Spiritual Growth

Have you ever thought about what it means to grow spiritually? I’ve become convinced that the way many of my Christian friends think of growth is really more like shrinkage or confinement. Our purpose often seems to be increasing specificity. In the process, we make decisions that confine us. For example, we decide whether we believe in infant baptism, or in the rapture. Or we commit to Calvinism over Arminianism. Or we develop a conviction about the appropriateness of any number of gray issues like drinking, dancing, dating, daily Bible reading, etc. There are whole groups of Christians who still think that long hair (or an earring) on a man or short hair (or make-up or pants) on a woman are bad—perhaps even sinful. To be sure, those groups are a bit extreme, but as I look around, I see that even if we don’t go that far, we think of Spiritual growth as the development of and compliance with an increasingly particular set of doctrinal and behavioral standards.

My problem with this is not that it’s wrong to have a well thought out theology or a commitment to behavioral holiness. It is, however, mistaken to think of those as the sole parameters of the spiritual life. When we do, we end up drawing the parameters tighter and tighter. Using the word “growth” to describe this is something of a misnomer.

The solution to this “problem” is to remember—and prioritize—the personal and relational aspect of spiritual growth. In other words, I view my growth as greater and greater personal interaction or depth of fellowship with God or with other people or with creation. Let me illustrate. When I learned to drive a car, I seriously expanded my capacity to interact personally with the world around me. I began to take up more space in the world—I grew. In a very similar way, if I get to know you well, I can begin to understand and interact with the world from your perspective to some degree. You—or your thoughts and feelings—become like a car I can drive around and get a bigger view of things. By knowing you, my horizons are expanded.

Jesus defined eternal life as knowing God (John 17:3). “Knowing” in this case is personal and interactive, not just cognitive and propositional. If I keep this in mind, I will see spiritual growth as being more and more widely traveled in the personality of God. Then I can put my refined theology and careful obedience in their proper place. They are like cars I can drive around to be more engaged with God. Jesus said as much when he said, “He who has my commandments and keeps them; he is the one who loves me; and he who loves Me will be loved by my Father, and I will love him and will disclose Myself to him.”

Divine Comedy

All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts

—from Shakespeare’s As You Like It

I thought of these lines recently in Church. The parson of the day was expounding upon that outrageous promise God makes to his chosen people that everything is working together for their ultimate benefit. The Play, I thought, that drama presented on the stage of creation, is a comedy—a story in which the hero (God’s chosen ones) comes out especially well in the end, and all the tragic situations of the plot (including his own missteps and character flaws) turn out to have contributed to his success.

It strikes me that this is something that makes (or should make) Christians very odd. Since we have read the script and know the outcome, how do we keep ourselves from laughing 24 hours a day like Paul did: “Where, O death, is your sting!?” It may be that we are not laughing because we spend too much time reading the negative reviews. The Modern reviewer ignores the script and calls the play a tragedy, or if he is Postie enough, he sees it only as a War Story played out in the Theater of the Absurd. To such critics, we comedians look like the greatest of fools, but I say the Risen One, our firstborn, the Author and Finisher, justifies my giddiness.

And now, the comedic words of William Cowper:

God moves in a mysterious way
His wonders to perform;
He plants His footsteps in the sea,
and rides upon the storm.

Deep in unfathomable mines
of never-failing skill,
He treasures up His bright designs,
and works His sovereign will.

Ye fearful saints, fresh courage take,
the clouds ye so much dread,
are big with mercy, and shall break
In blessings on your head.

Judge not the Lord by feeble sense,
but trust Him for His grace;
Behind a frowning providence,
He hides a smiling face.

His purposes will ripen fast,
unfolding every hour;
The bud may have a bitter taste,
but sweet will be the flower.

Blind unbelief is sure to err,
and scan his work in vain;
God is His own interpreter,
and He will make it plain

A Good Saturday Morning

I spent this morning with two of life’s great pleasures, a great cup of coffee and a really good book. The coffee was Kenyan Kiaguthu Peaberry roasted to the City+ level. Mmmm. The only way to get really good coffee is to roast it yourself, which I’ve been doing for a couple years now. I had roasted some of this Kenyan bean before, but I think I overcooked it. This batch was much better.

The book is called Proper Confidence: Faith, Doubt & Certainty in Christian Discipleship by Lesslie Newbigin. If you know me, you’ve heard me talk about Michael Polanyi, the 20^th century scientist and philosopher whose work was the subject of my thesis. Newbigin’s book is a great quick reference for the application of Polanyi’s thought to the Christian life, and I highly recommend it. It’s only 105 pages and is written in a very accessible style. I read the whole thing this morning.

If you’re curious about how Christian thought fits (or doesn’t fit, as Newbigin shows) into classical, modern, or post-modern ideas about knowledge, you should read this book. If you’re one of those young evangelicals that is disenchanted with the hyper-rationalistic hyper-individualistic concepts of Christianity, you should read this book. If you want to figure out whether truth is objective or subjective, you should read this book. If you want to know what is really wrong with fundamentalism or with liberalism (and you won’t find it in what they say about each other), you should read this book.

Here’s a quote to give you the flavor: “The human person is not a mind attached to a body but a single psychosomatic being. The implication of this, of course, is that the gospel does not become public truth for a society by being propogated as a theory or as a worldview and certainly not as a religion. It can become public truth only insofar as it is embodied in a society (the church) which is both “abiding in” Christ and engaged in the life of the world.”

A few weeks back, my friend Jon (who also introduced me to home roasted coffee) wrote an interesting piece for his blog about a recent trend among young evangelicals in which many are departing to more liturgical versions of Church, especially various Eastern forms (by the way, I think the Emergent Church is sort of a wimpy American-consumer version of the same trend). It’s all a sort of pre-modern postmodernism. If we all read Polanyi (or Newbigin’s short version of Polanyi), this trend would evaporate.

By the way, I FINISHED my thesis last week, and after a very helpful proofread from my English professor friend Bob, it has now been shipped to the seminary! I wish I had read Newbigin’s book at the beginning of the process. It is chock full of pithy Polanyian language.

Postmodern Christianity?

If you're looking for a single resource that discusses various Christian responses to postmodern thought, this is the book you should read. It's one of those "six views" collections with articles from two scholars who reject postmodernism as hazardous to faith, three who embrace postmodern thinking and seek to "revision" Christianity in postmodern terms, and one who adopts what he calls a posture of "dispute."

This last approach, the one I find most appealing, comes from Kevin Vanhoozer, and his essay alone is worth the price of the book. While many (perhaps most) evangelicals are not taking postmodernism seriously enough and some are taking it way too seriously, Vanhoozer is at just the right level of not taking it seriously. Here's a sample:

Why do I prefer a disputational rather than a conversational model of dialogue? Dispute better captures the seriousness of the encounter; something important is at stake in this discussion. Dispute also suggests that I am contending for my position, not simply sharing it. Better: I am contending for the faith that was once for all entrusted to the saints (Jude 3). Finally, "disputation" has the merit of being a venerable genre of theology, dating from the medieval period. Part of my purpose in the present essay, however, is to revise the notion of disputation so that the focus is on a whole person witness to concrete Christian wisdom rather than a wholly intellectual demonstration of an abstract truth. On this latter point—the necessity of going beyond analysis—I do not dispute with postmodernity but say "amen." To dispute with postmodernity is also to engage it. Christian thinkers cannot go around postmodernity; we have to go through it.

You seminary students should go to the library and make yourself a copy of this article entitled, "Pilgrim's Digress: Christian Thinking on and about the Post/Modern Way." There's a lot of wisdom here for Christians who want to outgrow the individualistic, rationalistic, anti-ecclesial faith of 20th century evangelicalism without becoming stupid.