Canon Fodder

Below is an article written by one of my mentors, Bart Campolo. I reference this article often because it is very meaningful to me and really approximates many of my own thoughts. The first time I read it out loud, I cried. Much later (just the other night, in fact) I read it out loud again, and cried again. I guess that tells you something about what I care about. You’ll find the article in its entirety below, or you can read it among the other “barticles” here.

take my god… please

A few years ago, after being politely asked to depart early from yet another speaking engagement for giving the wrong answer to a question about the limits of God’s mercy, I decided it wasn’t fair to keep sneaking up on unsuspecting Evangelicals. Strange as it seems to me, I know all too well that to promote a God both loving enough to desire the salvation of all His children and powerful enough to accomplish it is a dangerous scandal to such folks. After all, without
the fear of their unsaved loved ones’ eternal damnation, how would they motivate one another for outreach and missionary service?

And yet, almost everywhere I go, I meet people –especially young people – who are not motivated at all by such fear. On the contrary, these people are utterly horrified by the notion of a Heavenly Father who essentially says to His
children, ‘I love you, but if for any reason you fail to accept that fact before your mortal body expires, I will kill and torture you for all eternity’. Especially if that same Heavenly Father holds in His hand all the reasons His children do
or don’t accept Him in the first place. These are the people who ask me the questions that used to lead to my early departures, and who write me letters and emails like this one:

Dear Bart-

This might be kind of weird, but I have a question for you. I did Mission Year last year and when you came to visit my team you told a story about how when first started working in the inner-city, you got to know a girl who was gang-raped as a 9-year-old and, after her Sunday School teacher told her God must have allowed it for a reason, rejected God forever. Because you believed God
was indeed in control, and because you believed that girl’s lack of faith doomed her to eternal damnation, you decided that God was a cruel bastard. You sort of said the words inside my head out loud, words I had wanted to say for a long time.

Anyway, after putting this off for almost a year, I want to know how you reconciled that. How did you make it from, “God is a cruel bastard” back to “I can trust Him”? I can’t seem to make that leap. Sometimes I begin to really trust Him, but as soon as I think about my past abuse and those I know and love who are bound for Hell…it just doesn’t add up. I want to know the God
you know- who apparently allows for horrible things in this world to happen, but remains pure and holy and trustworthy and faithful and loving.

I don’t know if any of this makes sense to you, but as I was wrestling with it again today I was reminded of you and hoped you might be of some help.

Sarah

Dear Sarah,

Thank you for writing to me. Over the past few years, I have become convinced that yours is actually the single most important question in the world. As Rabbi Harold Kushner observes, “Virtually every meaningful conversation I’ve had with
people about God has either started with that question or gotten around to it before long” While I am sure my answer will not be as eloquent as his, I will do my best.

First of all, while I certainly believe my most cherished ideas about God are supported by the Bible (what Christian says otherwise?), I must admit they did not originate there. On the contrary, most of these ideas were formed during that difficult time I described to you, when I was suddenly disillusioned by the suffering and injustice I discovered in the inner-city, and did not trust the Bible at all. At that point, for the first time, I realized that a person’s life does not depend on whether he or she believes in God, but rather on what kind of God he or she believes in. I also realized, for better or worse, that the only evidence I was could rely on was that which I saw for myself.

What I saw then, and still see now, is a world filled with dazzling goodness and horrific evil, with love and hate, with beauty and ugliness, with life and death. In the face of such clear duality, it seemed to me then, and still seems to me now, that there are but a handful of spiritual possibilities:

*There are no spiritual forces. The material universe is all. Our lives bear no larger meaning, and those who hope for more hope in vain. In this case, considering that 9-year old rape victim, I despair.

*There is only one spiritual force at work in the universe, encompassing both good and evil. This world is precisely as this force wills it to be, and everything—including the rapes of children—happens according to its plan. In this case, again, I despair.

*There are two diametrically opposing spiritual forces at work in the universe, one entirely good and loving and the other entirely evil. Satan (or whatever one chooses to call that evil force) is most powerful and therefore will utterly triumph in the end. The suffering of that poor little girl is but a foretaste of the complete suffering that is to come for us all. In this case, of course, I despair.

*There are two opposing spiritual forces at work in the universe, one entirely good and loving and the other entirely evil. God (or whatever one chooses to call that good and loving force) is most powerful, and therefore will utterly triumph in the end. The suffering of that poor little girl – Satan’s doing – will somehow be redeemed and she herself will be healed as part of the complete redemption and absolute healing that is to come for all of us. In this case—and in this case alone—I rejoice, and gladly pledge my allegiance to this good and loving God.

I cannot prove or disprove any of these possibilities, of course, based on the evidence of my experience. What I know with certainty, however, is the one that makes me want to go on living, the one I choose for my own sake, the one I deem worthy of my allegiance. I may be wrong in this matter, but I am not in doubt. If indeed faith is being sure of what we hope for, then truly I am a man of faith, for I absolutely know what I hope to be true: That God is completely good, entirely loving, and perfectly forgiving, that God is doing all that He can to overcome evil (which is evidently a long and difficult task), and that God will utterly triumph in the end, despite any and all indications to the contrary.

This is my first article of faith. I required no Bible to determine it, and—honestly—I will either interpret away or ignore altogether any Bible verse that suggests otherwise.

This first article of faith was the starting point of my journey back to Jesus, and it remains the foundation of my faith. I came to trust the Bible again, of course, but only because it so clearly bears witness to the God of love I had already chosen to believe in. I especially follow the teachings of Jesus because those teachings—and his life, death, and resurrection—seem to me the best expression of the ultimate truth of God, which we Christians call grace. Indeed, these days I trust Jesus even when I don’t understand him, because I have become so convinced that He knows what He is talking about, that He is who he is talking about, and that He alone fully grasps that which I can only hope is true.

Unfortunately for me, God may be very different than I hope, in which case I may be in big trouble come Judgment Day. Perhaps, as many believe, the truth is that God created and predestined some people for salvation and others for damnation, according to His will. Perhaps such caprice only seems unloving to us because we don’t understand. Perhaps, as many believe, everyone who dies without confessing Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior goes to Hell to suffer forever. Most important of all, perhaps God’s sovereignty is such that although He could indeed prevent little girls from being raped, He is no less just or merciful when He doesn’t, and both those children and we who love them should uncritically give Him our thanks and praise in any case.

My response is simple: I refuse to believe any of that. For me to do otherwise would be to despair.

Some might say I would be wise to swallow my misgivings about such stuff, remain orthodox, and thereby secure my place with God in eternity. But that is precisely my point: If those things are true, God can give my place in Heaven to someone else, and go ahead and send me to Hell. For better or worse, I am simply not interested in any God but a completely good, entirely loving, and perfectly forgiving One who is powerful enough to utterly triumph over evil. Such a God may not exist, but I will die seeking Him, and I will pledge my allegiance to no other possibility, because, quite frankly, anything less is not enough to give me hope, to keep me alive, to be worth the trouble of believing.

You can figure out the rest. I don’t hate God because I don’t believe God is fully in control of this world yet. Heck, God is not fully in control of me yet, even when I want Him to be, so how could I possibly believe that God is making it all happen out there in the street? I don’t hate God because I believe He is always doing the best He can, within the limits of human freedom, which even He cannot escape.

On that last point, consider for a moment the essential relationship between human freedom and love, and then consider the essential identity between love and God. If God is love, if He made us for love in His image, then He had no choice but to make us free, to leave us free, and to win us for His Kingdom as free agents (which, evidently, is a long and difficult task). So He did, and so He will.

I don’t hate God because, although I suppose He knows everything that can be known at any given point in time, I don’t suppose He knows or controls everything that is going to happen. I also don’t hate God because I really believe in Satan (and also in my own, moving-in-the-right-direction-but-still-pretty-doggoned-sinful nature). I don’t hate God because it seems to me that this world is a battleground between good and evil, not a puppet show with just one person pulling all the strings. I don’t hate God because the God I have chosen to believe in isn’t hateable, and because I refuse to believe in the kind of God that is.

Now here is the good news: I may be entirely wrong, but even in my darkest hours, my God of love hasn’t stopped speaking to me. On the contrary, I hear His voice in places I never did before, always saying the same things, one way or another: I am with you. I’m sorry about all the pain. It hurts me too, especially when my little ones suffer. I have always loved you and I always will. Do the best you can, but don’t worry. Everything will be all right in the end. Trust me.

And I do. And I hope you will too, sooner than later.

Your friend,

Bart

Of course, to believe in God the way I do is to change the rules of ministry, and especially of youth ministry. I still convince young people to accept Jesus as their personal Lord and Saviour, but not because I’m afraid God will damn them to Hell if they don’t. On the contrary, I want kids’ to follow Jesus because I genuinely believe it’s a better life. Eternity aside, I want their lives to be transformed by God’s truth right now, for their sakes and for the sake of all the hungry and broken people out there who need them to start living His disciples. After all, the sooner we all start following Jesus by feeding the poor and freeing the oppressed, the sooner God’s will will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven. But most of all, I evangelize people because I know they are my loving God’s beloved children, and I don’t want them to live a minute longer without knowing too that most wonderful fact of life.

And I stay in the inner city, in spite of all the suffering and injustice I see here every day, because I can. No longer do I blame God for what is beyond His control, or hate him for visiting so much pain on His little ones. Even in the midst of such ugliness, I can stay here because I am full of faith. I may not be sure of what I know anymore, but I am absolutely certain of what I hope for, and most of the time I manage to live in that direction.

I stay here for one more reason, of course: In places like this, nobody asks you to leave early because you can no longer find the limits of God’s mercy.

I am really impressed by Tim Keller’s performance, so much so that I’m going to have to read his book. I don’t find his arguments compelling, but I do find them thought provoking. His charisma and humility are very appealing, and his literary knowledge is impressive and informative. I’d heard his name tossed around in Emergent circles, but I’d never heard nor read anything by him until today. Definitely worth watching when you can find the time! (ht: TallSkinnyKiwi)

So I just, finally, finished Jesus for President by Shane Claiborne and Chris Haw. It was an amazing, inspiring, wonderful read- and my head and heart are still spinning a bit. It’s billed as a book “to provoke the Christian political imagination,” and provoke it does. Of course, by “politics” the authors aren’t just referring to the art or science of conducting the affairs of government- or then again, maybe they are, if by “government” one is referring to that of Christ and his kingdom. In any case, these are some of the things I’ve been thinking about in response to what I read. In the book Shane and Chris echo something that actually came up at one of our recent Emergent cohort gatherings, namely that being “born again” is less about some spiritual hoop one has to jump through in order to gain access to God’s kingdom and more about taking on a new identity- a radical re-orientation of one’s self-conception in light of one’s membership in that kingdom, a kingdom “whose gates are always open.” I’ve long talked about yearning for something more, about wanting to be part of something larger than myself, as if I’m Neo and I’m still plugged into the Matrix. I have this sense that something’s not quite right about the world, that there’s something I’m missing, and I’m driven by my question(s).

I’ve said for a while that I think following Jesus should matter- it should really impact every aspect of how I live my life, or in my view, it just isn’t “worth it.” Saying this may make me a (would-be) radical, and if so, I’m just fine with that, for I know no other way to make sense, practically, of the Jesus story. As I’ve said before, if the story is true in any way that doesn’t rob the term “true” of all meaning, then it must be true in a way that changes one’s life- and the life of the world itself- in the manner I’ve described. Andrew Perriman’s mild critique of this approach- in which he suggests that radical “Jesus discipleship” may be a necessary response to the excesses of Modern Consumer Christianity but is not an exclusive or sufficient one (he prefers a “new creation” paradigm)- notwithstanding, I see no other way for the Church to move forward and actually “be the Church.” Claiborne and Haw make this point themselves, I think, in referring to the desert monasticism of the early Church and saying that it was as much about saving the Church as it was about withdrawing from its excesses. They describe it as an “isolation ward” meant to kill a cancer, and I think this is an apt analogy that applies just as well to the phenomenon of “new monasticism” today. What I’m saying is that I don’t believe that the (“First World”/Western) Church can really be that “new creation” without taking the drastic steps that radical “Jesus discipleship” calls for. Or, to quote MLK, Jr.: “The world,” he said, “is in dire need of creative extremists. We live now in extreme times. The question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be. Will we be extremists for hate or for love?”

Rather than speaking for Shane and Chris, though, I’ll let them speak for themselves through the following section summaries of the book:

Jesus for President
Chapter/Section Summaries

Section 1
A good Creation of love and beauty takes a turn for the worse, landing it in a murderous chaos. What to do? Flood it and start fresh? Build a tower that reaches heaven? Appoint an adventurous elderly couple to lead the people out of the nations to the Promised Land? Something has to save humanity from themselves …

Section 2
The construction of a set-apart people into a living temple of blessing is going so-so. The solution: God puts skin on to show the world what love looks like. But here’s the catch: the Prince of Peace is born as a refugee in the middle of a genocide and is rescued from the trash bin of imperial executions to stand at the pinnacle of this peculiar people. A strange way to start a revolution …

Section 3
Flags on altars, images of the gods on money … Caesar is colonizing our imaginations. What has happened to the slaughtered Lamb, the Prince of Peace? There seems to be another gospel spreading across the empire, and two Kingdoms are colliding. What is a Jesus-follower to do when the empire gets baptized?

Section 4
Snapshots of political imagination … the question is not are we political, but how are we political. Not are we relevant, but are we peculiar? The answer lies in how we embody what we believe. Our greatest challenge is to maintain the distinctiveness of our faith in a world gone mad. And all of creation waits, groans, for a people who live God’s dream with fresh imagination.

The “fresh imagination” noted above is critical, I think, and this is one of the things I most love about Shane’s books and, more importantly, his example and that of others like him. I wholeheartedly concur that my ability to live as a Christ-follower under the shadow of empire is indeed limited only by my imagination, and the availability of partners with whom my family and I can join in the struggle to really “be the Church.” I only hope to find such friends here in NE Ohio- and soon…

For those of you who know me personally or who have read my posts on this blog or my previous/other ones, you may grow tired of me returning again and again to some of my favorite muses- some that I’ve never met but would love to, like Frederick Buechner, and others that I have had the privilege of knowing- like Bart Campolo. Still, when inspiration strikes- even if it’s from a reliable, trusted source- sometimes I feel compelled to share, as I am doing now. The following is from Bart’s latest newsletter, which you can get straight from the horse’s mouth here. This is what he had to say:

Dear Friends,

For as long as I can remember, I’ve ended my letters and emails with the encouragement ‘Keep the faith’. I must have picked that up from my father, since he’s the only person I know who signs off the same way. It might have been more lucrative for me to have picked up ‘It’s Friday, but Sunday’s coming!” instead, but I’ve always preferred the flexibility of the simpler phrase. Not everyone who hopes for God’s grace is a Christian, after all, and we who are, surely hope for more than that.

We hope to be happy and successful, for example, however we measure those things. We hope that our parents love us and that our marriages work out and, more than anything, that our kids will always be safe and sound. We hope for such things, at least, unless we have learned to know better. On the Monday morning after my last letter, a mother and daughter from our fellowship showed up at our side door. Terry is mentally handicapped and deeply damaged. Her daughter has her own set of issues. For months we’d been planning a summer move from their dangerous, filthy, heatless apartment building into a cute little duplex we’ve been fixing up around the corner, but all of a sudden we were too late. “Tanya got raped in the hall last night,” her mother said, and from then until now we’ve been walking on the dark side of love.

The sequence of what followed doesn’t matter, and I couldn’t remember it even if it did. The hospital, the detectives, the rape crisis center. Getting that evil building condemned, relocating the guys in our duplex, finding bedbug-free furniture for Terry and Tanya, finding helpers for the move itself. The girl’s bad behavior as our houseguest, her mother’s worse behavior as a parent. The questions, the doubts, the guilt for questioning and doubting. And then, as if piling on, the quick meltdown of a promising young man we’ve lavished with attention and opportunity for the past 7 months, and the crude suicide attempt of a troubled young woman whose phone call for help I failed to return the day before.

What does matter, I think, is the way all those things have been eating away at expectations of goodness and order I didn’t even know I had. It’s been a while since I believed everything happens for a reason, according to some grand plan, but evidently I’ve hung onto the notion that love always makes some kind of difference, even in the midst of chaos. Even that somewhat less-ambitious worldview, however, seems to be no match for just this one little neighborhood, let alone the world itself.

It isn’t the suffering here that’s getting to me, but rather my neighbors’ dull, matter-of-fact attitude about it. Tanya hasn’t been fazed much by her rape, her counselor tells me, because she always expected to be hurt that way sooner or later. After all, her mom was raped three times as a girl, receiving no follow-up care or counsel, which may explain why she can offer so little now in terms of emotional support. The meltdown guy? He walked away because we called him on a lie and it never occurred to him that we might just forgive him. The girl who tried to kill herself? She lives in Terry’s condemned building and has nowhere to go with five children under the age of 10. One missed call was all it took to convince her nobody cares enough to help.

It seems to me that these are the poorest of the poor in spirit, the ones who hope for next to nothing. To survive in a place like this, such people learn to live almost completely in the moment. They know better thatn to expect any ongoing goodness or order. They keep no faith. We have come to love them, but the longer we’re at it the more I am haunted by the fear that nothing – not even love – may be strong enough. I can celebrate the ways our intentional generosity touches some of our neighbors, but I can’t ignore the fact that both their natural hopelessness and the dysfunctions that inspire it are quite capable of breaking us. Or at least of breaking me.

If that happens, however, it won’t mean I was wrong about Grace, but only that I overreached my limits. And if it doesn’t happen, it won’t mean that love always makes a difference, even in the midst of chaos, but only that I managed to keep the faith. That’s all I’m hoping for now, for starters at least.

Your friend,

Bart