Tag: Augustine

A church for (and against) the world

A church for (and against) the world

What should be the church’s posture toward the world?

The challenge, as with bodily posture (hunched shoulders, rounded back, neck forward), is that posture solidifies at a subconscious level, without us noticing. (Did you just sit up straighter?)

To this point, I recently reread an excellent essay by the theologian, Natalie Carnes with the following subtitle: “Reconsidering the Church-World Divide” (here). She begins by drawing attention to other articles with titles like this: “World versus Church: Who Is Winning?” (…a line that could only be more cringeworthy if read by Howard Cosell).

I won’t rehash Carnes’ full argument, but it includes a helpful reminder that Scripture contains BOTH protagonistic and antagonistic passages on the church-world relationship. Both “for” and “against.”

Church Against World

For instance,

“You adulterous people, don’t you know that friendship with the world means enmity against God?”

~James 4:4

Or even stronger,

“Do not love the world or anything in the world. If anyone loves the world, love for the Father is not in them.”

~1 John 2:15

Church For the World

On the other hand, numerous passages reveal God’s radical heart for the world, which calls us to a similar “for-ness”: loving, serving, and practicing incarnate presence.

Most famously,

“God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him.”

~John 3:16

And this,

“God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting people’s sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation.”

~2 Corinthians 5:19

The following line from 1 John is even more interesting since it comes in the same book (above) that contains, arguably, the strongest anti-world prooftext:

“He [Jesus] is the atoning sacrifice for our sins, and not only for ours but also for the sins of the whole world.”

~1 John 2:2

Pro or Contra?

So… which is it?

Should the church be for or against the world?

It has long been acknowledged that different passages can mean different things while using the same word. Hence, “world” (cosmos) is a bit like “flesh” in its varied biblical meaning. In some cases, it means God’s good-but-fallen creation, loved and reconciled by Christ’s work. In others, it refers to a willingness to embrace ideologies and behaviors that set themselves in destructive opposition to goodness, beauty, and truth. Hence, as my former professor, David Wells, once wrote: “worldliness is anything that makes sin seem normal and righteousness seem strange.”

In the end, this much seems true: A Christ-like church must be both for and against “the world.” Yet the more important point is that this dual posture cannot take any form we wish: Our antagonism must always be housed within a larger protagonism.

Carnes puts it like this:

“the ‘versus’ of the church and world is enfolded into a larger for-ness. . . . There is a kind of against-ness: God did not leave the world to its own deterioration and destruction; God placed God’s own body against the forces of sin and death. And yet how could this story be told apart from the larger protagonism . . . which begins with a God who ‘so loved the world’?”

If you get nothing else, get this:

  1. A church bent primarily on defeating the world inevitably becomes more like it.

On the other hand…

  1. A church bent only affirming the world inevitably ceases to be “for it” since we have nothing to offer that the world does not already have.

The first point explains why rigid and partisan forms of religious fundamentalism often harbor and hide some of the darkest sins (see here)–whether sexual abuse, excusing and elevating authoritarian leaders, and even forms of violence. The second point explains why many exclusively pro-world (“affirming”) churches are basically empty. Why go? Especially when there’s golf and sleep and football.

We need both points, for as Carnes notes, “the world” is not merely something “out there” but “in here” with the dividing line running not only between groups, denominations, or political parties—but through every human heart, including mine.

Thus, Paul gives this crucial reminder not to pagans but to Corinthian Christ-followers who have lost the plot: “though we live in the world, we do not wage war as the world does”-i.e., with violent, snarky, flailing, win-at-all costs power plays (2 Corinthians 10:3).

Conclusion

If this were my classroom, I’d grab a marker and try to illustrate a better model for envisioning the church-world relation: beyond strict division or simplistic overlap (see below), and toward a complex and mysterious layering that sets aside combat metaphors in favor of more agricultural ones–since Jesus used those too. Something like this:

In one sense, I am borrowing from Saint Augustine, who says it this way:

She [that is, “the pilgrim City of Christ the King”] must bear in mind that among [her] very enemies are hidden her future citizens; and when confronted with them she must not think it a fruitless task to bear with their hostility until she finds them confessing the faith. […]

In truth, these two cities are interwoven and intermixed in this era, and await separation at the last judgment.

~De Civitate Dei, 1.35

Hello friends. Please subscribe on the home page to receive these posts by email. This is especially helpful since I’ve decided (mostly) to uncouple the blog from social media. I’m grateful for you. ~JM

Love is God, but not like you think

Love is God, but not like you think

C. S. Lewis famously proclaimed,

“Love ceases to be demon only when it ceases to be a god.”

He was quoting M. Denis de Rougemont. But just two sentences later, Lewis writes the following in his own words:

“the truth that God is love may slyly come to mean for us the converse, that love is God” (The Four Loves, p. 7).

In one sense, I agree – as do scores of Christians who assert some version of the following: God is love, but love is not God.

For instance, A. W. Tozer:

Equating love with God is a major mistake which has produced much unsound religious philosophy and has brought forth a spate of vaporous poetry completely out of accord with the Holy Scriptures and altogether of another climate from that of historic Christianity.

Or (after a quick Google search), the “Fierce Marriage Podcast,” which describes an episode like this:

“God is love… but, love isn’t God!” In this episode we’ll look at the wonderful, counter-cultural, biblical idea of love.

The idea here is that we often make an idol of what we call “love”—as defined by feelings of romantic ecstasy, emotional attachment, sexual desire, or a piercing (almost painful) longing for another creature—whether it’s for a boyfriend, a child, or a Labrador Retriever.

There’s truth to this danger, especially because most of us—whether we know it or not—are more children of Romanticism (e.g., Rousseau, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Disney, Nicholas Sparks, Taylor Swift) than we are of a cold and sterile Rationalism. What’s more, the danger is not that we would love too much, but that our loves become misdirected and disordered, so that we chase endlessly after a particular feeling, and end up worshiping created things instead of the Creator. Ironically, to do so may also destroy the objects of our love (and ourselves) because created things cannot possibly bear the weight of divine expectations.

In response, Lewis, Tozer, and “Fierce Marriage” have this to say: God is love (1 John 4:8), but love is not God.

AUGUSTINE’S REBUTTAL

It may surprise us to learn, however, that the greatest theologian in church history disagreed, at least in one sense.

Saint Augustine by Philippe de Champaigne

Saint Augustine wrote this in reflecting on 1 John’s claim that “God is Love.”

“[V]ery Love is God: for openly it is written,
‘God is Love.’”
~ Augustine, Enarrationes in Psalmos, 98.4.

If his assertion seems flimsy, Augustine then returns to 1 John (and other texts) for additional proof: “whoever abides in love abides in God” (1 John 4:16). For Augustine, it’s crucial to note that Scripture is not here describing a flowery human emotion, but a divine person (more on that in a moment).

Hence, if (1) God is Love, and (2) abiding in Love is abiding in God, then it follows inescapably that (3) Love is God. On one level, the argument may be read somewhat like a math equation. You cannot say 2+2 = 4 without also affirming that 4 = 2 + 2. If Deus (God) = dilectio (love), then the converse is true. And that fact does not care about your feelings.

LOVE AND TRINITY

But… (and we must not miss this “But”) Augustine’s argument then takes a turn that makes it very different from a pop song, fused with a Nicholas Sparks novel, drizzled with a sugar-free glaze of suburban spirituality.

He begins to think about the Trinity.

His question is as follows: If God is Love, and if Love is from God, and if abiding in Love is abiding in God as God abides in us (all of which are taught in Scripture), then which person of the Trinity ought to be identified as the divine Love that simultaneously fills us even as it links us both to God and other people?

Augustine’s answer is the Holy Spirit,

“by which the begotten is loved by the One who begets him and in turn loves the begetter.”
~Augustine, De Trinitate, 6. 7.

After all, Augustine’s favorite Bible verse was Romans 5:5:

“God’s love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us.” ~Romans 5:5

WHO IS RIGHT?

So, should we side with Lewis or Augustine?

In the end, it depends entirely on whose definition of “love” you’re willing to accept, and which god you’re talking about. Augustine writes of Love’s divine origin, Lewis speaks of creaturely echoes. One is the pure spring, the other is the creaturely river that flows invariably through tainted soil. Lewis thus explains:

Every human love, at its height, has a tendency to claim for itself a divine authority. It’s voice tends to sound as if it were the will of God Himself (The Four Loves, emphasis mine, p.7)

In the end, Lewis, Tozer, and “Fierce Marriage” all defer (in differing degrees) to a fallen and culturally-defined account of the word. Hence, they speak of it as a “demon” when it assumes the place of a “god.” I get this move. And I’ve probably made it too.

But it comes at a cost, not just because it risks sounding like illogical nonsense (2+2=4 but 4 ≠ 2+2), but because it means we’ve settled(?) for a fallen definition in place of the real thing. Dare I say, for “mud pies in a slum because [we] cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea.”

Augustine defines Love in light of the Trinity, so “demonic” definitions are ruled out from the start.

Of course, that’s no defense of twisted, selfish, or sinful expressions of what we call “love” down here. (Augustine knew that better than most.) Instead, it’s an invitation to let God define the word that is itself definitive of God’s holy character, poured out by the Holy Spirit, into our hearts.

In other words: Love is God, but maybe not like you think.

Hello friends. You can subscribe to this blog via the green button on the home page to receive future posts by email. This is helpful since I’ve decided (mostly) to uncouple the blog from social media. I’m grateful for you. ~JM

Mestizo Christianity

Mestizo Christianity

A “mestizo,” writes the historian Justo González, is a person who belongs to two realities simultaneously—and by virtue of this “both-and-ness” does not feel entirely at home in either of them.

He explains:

A Mexican-American reared in Texas among people of Euro-American culture is repeatedly told that he is a Mexican—that is, that he does not really belong in Texas.

But if that Mexican-American crosses the border hoping to find there his land and his people, he is soon disappointed by being rejected, or at least criticized, as somewhat Americanized—or, as Mexicans would say, for being a pocho.

The passage comes, of all places, in a book about Augustine of Hippo, the fourth-century church father (here).

Augustine

For González, Augustine’s youthful restlessness

was due not only to his distance from God … but also to the inner struggles of a person in whom two cultures, two legacies, two world visions clashed and mingled—in short, of a mestizo.

WHAT DOES HIPPO HAVE TO DO WITH TIJUANA?

This may seem like a strange description.

Saint Augustine, after all, was a Latin-speaking citizen of the Roman Empire, steeped in neoplatonic philosophy and converted to Christianity before becoming the most influential theologian after the apostle Paul.

How is he “mestizo”?

González’s point is that despite his classical (Latin) learning, Augustine was born and raised in Africa.

Thus when he finally made it as a rhetorician in the emperor’s court, he never belonged entirely. The accent gave him away, says James K. A. Smith, like “a stubborn hayseed halo around his eloquence.” And when he returned to Africa to live as a monk, the Berbers and the Donatists could see him only as an uppity “Roman” who was too big for his britches.

I encountered these passages in Smith’s new book on Augustine (here), and they made me consider how all of us feel this restless in-between-ness in one way or another.

Take me, for example.

In many ways, I am the ultimate “insider.”

I am a white Christian male in the buckle of the Bible-belt, residing in the same town where I was born. As a theology professor, I couldn’t be more “basic” if I drank coffee from a handmade mug, wore sport coats with elbow patches, and listened to U2 past 2004 (which, I do).

Yet even I feel caught between “tribes” in certain ways: Neither fundamentalist nor Liberal; neither Republican nor Democrat; neither OU nor OSU. 😉

MESTIZO SPIRITUALITY

For González and Smith, it was precisely Augustine’s “mestizo” status—that is, his painful awareness of his restless hybridity—that helped him grasp a crucial insight. Neither Rome nor Hippo Regius was the “City of God” (civitate Dei). To be a Christian is to be a pilgrim and a foreigner, and the civitate Dei is, for now, a tent city that is closer to a refugee encampment than the hulking cathedrals made of stone.

Smith writes,

The Christian isn’t just a pilgrim but a refugee, a migrant in search of refuge. The Christian life isn’t just a pilgrimage but a journey of emigration.

This is not because our greatest hope is leave earth (though Augustine flirted with that error on occasion). Rather it is because we were made to find our rest in God, rather than in the things God made.

Much of our restlessness and disappointment is the result of trying to convince ourselves that we’re already home. The alternative is not escapism; it is a refugee spirituality—unsettled yet hopeful, tenuous but searching, eager to fine the hometown we’ve never been to. … God is the country we’re looking for.

In the face of Rome’s decadent decline (sound familiar?), González sees Augustine’s mestizo mentality as a saving grace.

he, who was both African and Roman, and therefore both and neither one nor the other [could] develop a philosophy of history, a vision of God’s action, that did not depend on Roman civilization… .

If American evangelicalism is to survive, it will have to embrace this mestizo mindset, along with Augustine’s famous line from the Confesssions—the book Smith describes as “a hitchhiker’s guide to the cosmos for wandering hearts”:

“You made us for yourself, O God, and our heart is restless till it finds its rest in thee.”

 

Want to support this blog? Here are some other things I’ve written:

Click the green “Follow” button to never miss a post.

Signup here to receive bonus content through my email Newsletter, “Serpents and Doves.”