The Gift of Loneliness

I recently finished reading a book that I won from my pastor Cor's blog, The Wounded Healer by Henri Nouwen. It's a short but incredibly sweet and practical book about how the wounds we bear can help us minister to others in a confused, lost age. His writing style is both deeply insightful and emotionally engaging, a huge inspiration to me (I think he might also be an INFJ). This passage toward the end stuck out to me (emphasis added):

The Christian way of life does not take away our loneliness; it protects and cherishes it as a precious gift. Sometimes it seems as if we do everything possible to avoid the painful confrontation with our basic human loneliness, and allow ourselves to be trapped by false gods promising immediate satisfaction and quick relief. But perhaps the painful awareness of loneliness is an invitation to transcend our limitations and look beyond the boundaries of our existence. The awareness of loneliness might be a gift we must protect and guard, because our loneliness reveals to us an inner emptiness that can be destructive when misunderstood, but filled with promise for him who can tolerate its sweet pain. When we are impatient, when we want to give up our loneliness and try to overcome the separation and incompleteness we feel, too soon, we easily relate to our human world with devastating expectations. We ignore what we already know with a deep-seated, intuitive knowledge—that no love or friendship, no intimate embrace or tender kiss, no community, commune or collective, no man or woman, will ever be able to satisfy our desire to be released from our lonely condition. This truth is so disconcerting and painful that we are more prone to play games with our fantasies than to face the truth of our existence. Thus we keep hoping that one day we will find the man who really understands our experiences, the woman who will bring peace to our restless life, the job where we can fulfill our potentials, the book which will explain everything, and the place where we can feel at home. Such false hope leads us to make exhausting demands and prepares us for bitterness and dangerous hostility when we start discovering that nobody, and nothing, can live up to our absolutistic expectations.
Many marriages are ruined because neither partner was able to fulfill the often hidden hope that the other would take his or her loneliness away. And many celibates live with the naive dream that in the intimacy of marriage their loneliness will be taken away.
When the minister lives with these false expectations and illusions he prevents himself from claiming his own loneliness as a source of human understanding, and is unable to offer any real service to the many who do not understand their own suffering.

I recently came to the realization that, as enjoyable as my relationship with my girlfriend is (so, did I mention I'm seeing someone?), and as thankful for it as I am, it can't completely satisfy me, make me fully completely loved, accepted and valued, end the deep-seated feeling of loneliness, and all that fun stuff Nouwen describes. I "saw the bottom" of what it could provide. And the amazing part of my Christian learning in life is that not only was I not surprised by this realization, I was expecting it. As Nouwen says, this realization comes after marriage or years of cohabitation for some and ruins the relationship because both people were hoping that the other would, essentially, be God to them, which is too great a burden for anyone to bear. My pastor Steve often says that his wife Carol is "a great wife, but a terrible god".

But Nouwen paints a more nuanced picture than simply saying that God can cure the loneliness that no one else can. God doesn't just take our loneliness away; He turns it into a blessing and a gift for ministering to others. By understanding our own inner loneliness we can begin to understand the loneliness of others and love them through it. That is, largely, the theme of Nouwen's book.

The difference between law and grace

The following was written in response to the question, "What is the difference between being 'under law' and 'under grace'?"

The intrabiblical tension between law and grace is one that I've struggled with a lot in the past. The Law (i.e. the old covenant) is presented in totally different ways in the Old and New Testaments. In the OT, the law is given as a blessing, a set of rules to live by. The Israelites are promised that if they obey, they will live by their obedience (Lev 18:5) and it will be their righteousness (Deut 6:25). They are also told that the commandments of the law are not too difficult or too far off, but are "in your mouth and in your heart, so that you can do it." (Deut 30:14) Numerous Psalms, especially 119, treasure the Law as a gift and a blessing to be celebrated. Everything seems peachy, until the New Testament.

In the New Testament we learn that no one is declared righteous before God by observing the Law, only made conscious of sin. (Romans 3:20) Instead of a gift, the Law is now seen as a jailer that imprisoned the Jews under it, or at best a stopgap measure to hold us over until Christ came (Gal 3:23-24). The Law is revealed to have been weak and useless, making nothing perfect (Heb 7:18-19), its rituals incapable of taking away sins (Heb 10:4) as advertised (Lev 16:30). In Romans 10:5 Paul uses Moses' earlier promise that that the person who does the commandments will live by them to contrast with the "proper" kind of righteousness, the kind that is by faith.

This would all be well and good, except that God also gave the Law, which makes the gospel seem like a God-given solution to a God-given problem. It completely undermines the spirit in which the Law was given, making it into a burden rather than a blessing. It makes God's "chosen people" seem singularly unfortunate because they happened to live in a time before salvation by faith was revealed and instead got stuck with God's second-rate blessing, the Law, which doesn't save anyone. What is the point of the Law revealing their sin problem as in Romans 3:20 if they didn't live to see the solution? Commentators are quick to point out that this discrepancy is not because of a deficiency in the Law but because of our sinful inability to keep it, but was God unaware of this when He gave it, or taken by surprise? Placing moral burdens on people without helping them to carry them is what the Pharisees did, for which Jesus condemned them. (Matthew 23:4 What is going on here? How could God give the Israelites such a bad covenant deal and pass it off as a huge blessing—the covenant Christ has to deliver us from?

These are very tough questions and I definitely wouldn't say I have figured out all the answers. But I think one mistaken assumption in the questions is that the New Testament authors are making a "bad vs. good" contrast between Law and grace. I think a more fitting description of the two would be "good vs. much, much better". The key to seeing the Law as good, as I believe Paul and the author of Hebrews really did, is to stop seeing it as codified legalism—that is, as a covenant system designed to produce Pharisees. The Pharisees, including Paul (Phil 3:6), obeyed the Law perfectly—if all there was to the Law was doing what it says, they would have been "good" with God. But clearly they weren't.

The point has never been simply to do the right things, says the right words, and perform the right rituals to get into heaven, and God never told us to do so. This kind of legalism was just as much a perversion of God's Word before Christ as it is today. But there is another problem with legalism which is not synonymous with the Law, as it is just as easy to do with grace. This is treating the attainment of salvation from God as our be-all and end-all goal. Eternal life is not a "spiritual object" that God can wrap up with a bow and hand to us in exchange for good works, faith, or anything. Life is found not from Christ, but in Christ Himself (John 14:6). Eternal life is not something we receive from God, but simply knowing the true God (John 17:3). If we treat faith as something we "do" to receive a salvation that is not coterminous with knowing Christ, we may as well be legalists.

With all of this in mind, I can finally answer the question, what is the difference between being under law and under grace? It is not that we were stuck in a system of legalism and are now freed to receive our righteousness by grace through faith. This may be true of some Christians' experience, but God never commanded anyone to live this way so He could later get more glory by freeing them. What changes from Law to grace is not whether we know God or not, but how we know God. Through the Law God did provide a means of knowing and communing with Him, albeit a difficult, ritualized, and highly regimented one. The Law was also very communal in its role a the prototypical mediator between God and man; there was one tabernacle/temple for the nation where God was said to live, and where people would go to seek Him, and His commands were given on Mount Sinai for all the people.

But by grace we now know God more clearly in the person of Jesus Christ. So the book of Hebrews begins, "Long ago, at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets,but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed the heir of all things, through whom also he created the world." Whereas the Law was previously the mediator between God and man, we now have Christ (1 Tim 2:5). Through His death and resurrection we are able to know Him in ways of which the regulations of the Law were merely types and shadows (Heb 10:1). Though those under the Law could and sometimes did have a real relationship with God, by comparison with us they were prisoners. Now we ourselves are temples for God's spirit (1 Cor 3:16) and His word is written on our hearts instead of on tablets of stone (2 Cor 3:3). The precepts of the Law are fulfilled (or completed) through the grace shown to us by Jesus, who is the end of the Law (that is, the fulfillment of all it set out to do) for righteousness to everyone who believes (Rom 10:4).

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Addendum: I can't help but wonder if the term "Law" underwent a semantic shift similar to what has happened to the term "religion" today. Whereas initially it referred to the old system of instructions by which Israel would worship and experience its God, by Paul's time it seemed to have become more synonymous with the onerous legalistic burdens laid by the "teachers of the Law", and it is this usage that Paul adopts in his writing about how grace releases us from the Law. Similar to how, today, people say that "Jesus came to abolish religion" which would have sounded absurd to a first-century Christian.

The Glory of God, or packing a mountain in a suitcase

The glory of God—three simple words, so often used in theology (starting with Paul) to refer to the ultimate purpose of God, our lives, history—virtually everything. But much can be hidden behind them, and I sometimes wonder if by using them so much we've forgotten what they really mean.

It's as if a breathtaking mountain landscape could somehow be packed into a suitcase, carried off, bought and sold, changing hands dozens of times, its presence duly recorded in arrival logs and transaction ledgers, spoken of as one might refer to the next shipment of wood, a drop in the ocean of human endeavours for the day, all while its handlers remained ignorant of its awesome contents. I say unpack the suitcase, and let the grandeur speak and be seen for itself rather than being spoken of.

Transactional Christianity

The following was written as part of my Spiritual Formation class at the University of Northwestern.

"Do not be idolaters as some of them were; as it is written, “The people sat down to eat and drink and rose up to play.”" (1 Corinthians 10:7, ESV)

This verse refers back to Exodus 32:6. The context of this reference that the Lord has just finished giving Moses the tablets of the testimony on Mt. Sinai in chapter 31, and the Israelites, losing patience with Moses and with the Lord, have asked Aaron to make them new gods. Exodus 31:1-6 is worth quoting at length:

When the people saw that Moses delayed to come down from the mountain, the people gathered themselves together to Aaron and said to him, “Up, make us gods who shall go before us. As for this Moses, the man who brought us up out of the land of Egypt, we do not know what has become of him.” So Aaron said to them, “Take off the rings of gold that are in the ears of your wives, your sons, and your daughters, and bring them to me.” So all the people took off the rings of gold that were in their ears and brought them to Aaron. And he received the gold from their hand and fashioned it with a graving tool and made a golden calf. And they said, “These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt!” When Aaron saw this, he built an altar before it. And Aaron made a proclamation and said, “Tomorrow shall be a feast to the LORD.” And they rose up early the next day and offered burnt offerings and brought peace offerings. And the people sat down to eat and drink and rose up to play.

The people were growing impatient with Moses and with God: "When the people saw that Moses delayed to come down from the mountain..." As throughout the whole section of chapters 13-19 that Paul was referring to before, they still don't seem to trust the Lord even after all He has done for them. So they decide to make some new gods that they can follow and trust (the prophets delighted in pointing out the absurdity of trusting in gods you made yourself). I noticed for the first time the incongruity: Aaron makes a single golden calf and then the people say, "These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt!" As if they simply weren't comfortable banking entirely on a single god. And then it gets stranger: after making these idols, Aaron says that "Tomorrow shall be a feast to the Lord", and they bring offerings (to the true God or the golden calf, it's not clear). Finally, in the verse Paul refers to, the people just party and do whatever they want.

There is more going on here than merely exchanging worship of the true God for a false one. The Israelites still seem to keep honoring God, at least in lip service. In the polytheistic, paganistic culture from which Judaism arose, the existence of multiple gods was not controversial. Families or tribes would have a favorite god that they paid the most respects to, but they would also recognize and honor other gods, because hey, a little more blessing couldn't hurt. This kind of polytheistic worship—not rejecting the true God outright but demoting Him to merely your favorite god to worship or even a peripheral god that you superficially honored to avoid getting whacked—was a huge problem for Israel through the time of the kings. The most controversial thing about Judaism was that its God demanded exclusive worship and devotion—not to simply be added to your own personal pantheon of deities.

Thinking about it, I see Moses and the Israelites displaying two totally different attitudes both under the guide of "worship". Moses was a servant of God. He did what God told him to do, went where God told him to go—basically laid his entire life in God's hand, like so many other imperfect heroes of the Bible (and Jesus). The Israelites, on the other hand, seem more interested in how God will serve them. They expect to be practically pampered through the exodus, complaining against Him when things aren't up to their expectations, and then God seems to be taking too long, not holding up His end of the deal, they turn to another god who can better cater to their whims (while still hedging their bets with God).

This sounds uncomfortably like me. This kind of exploitative attitude, serving God as a way to get things from Him, used to characterize my faith. And it is a pervasive temptation. When we are merely giving God things like our time, our money, our service, our blog posts, and merely getting from Him things like a better life, a new community, a set of rules to live and judge others by, or even salvation (as a "get-out-of-hell-free card"), our relationship with God looks more like a business partnership. He has His interests, we have ours, and by working together we can satisfy those interests while still remaining essentially our own. But the truth of the gospel is that "You are not your own, for you were bought with a price." (1 Corinthians 6:19-20, ESV). We don't merely give God things and receive things from Him; in love we give Him our selves and receive the greatest prize of all, God Himself.

The Anti-Pharisee

My pastor Cor preached a sermon yesterday about how Jesus gets to be lord over your inner life--your mind and heart, thoughts and passions. He stressed the importance of not "sucking in your spiritual gut", that is, not outwardly pretending to be more righteous than you really are on the inside, and instead letting Jesus transform you from the inside out. This is the difference between authentic Christianity and superficial Christian-esque religion, and it is vital that we take heed of it. One of the texts he preached from was part of Jesus' tirade against the externally-focused Jewish scribes and Pharisees in Matthew 23:25-26:

Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you clean the outside of the cup and the plate¹, but inside they are full of greed and self-indulgence. You blind Pharisee! First clean the inside of the cup and the plate, that the outside may also be clean.

While I thought it was a good sermon, it didn't hit me through the heart like a great sermon does. After some reflection, I realized that this is because I tend to make the opposite error of the Pharisees: I clean the inside and neglect the outside. I'm so focused on seeking internal transformation (often by inspiration) that I don't do the hard work of actually reshaping habits and living differently. The result is that while on the inside I may be coming to resemble Christ, on the outside (which is all anyone else sees) I look little like Him in many ways.

There's a misconception in Christianity that makes this opposite mistake easy to miss, saying that the inside, the heart is all that matters. Jesus transforms you on the inside, and the outside changes to match. But I don't think it's quite that simple. He didn't say, "Clean the inside and the outside will also be clean", but "Clean the inside...that the outside may also be clean." Internal transformation is vital and preeminent for the Christian, but it is no excuse to be lazy about changing the patterns of how we actually live--it is an opportunity to do so.

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¹ Random aside: I had an instructive example for a "wrong message" to take from this woe. If you try to be practical and preach a sermon based on this text asking whether you are a cup or a plate, and enumerating bullet-pointed differences between cups and plates, you are probably, as Jesus had just said, "straining out a gnat and swallowing a camel". The point is the difference between cleaning the inside and the outside, not between Jesus' metaphorical cup and plate.

The Fulfillment of the Law

Let me offer a Law-centric presentation of the Gospel--the Good News of God--that is something like the version I grew up to believe:

Through the Mosaic Law, God makes clear His unyielding standard of perfect righteousness. Because we're all fallen, none of us can meet this standard (Romans 3:23); we disobey the precepts of God's written code and commit treason against an infinitely good God, so therefore our crime and deserved punishment are infinite. The purpose of the law is to scream to us, "Sinner, sinner!" and heighten our guilt at our disobedience (Romans 5:20) so that we would be driven to receive Christ who saves us from our sinful inability to obey the law and the condemnation it brings. When we accept Christ as our Lord and Savior, Christ takes our sin and condemnation upon Himself (Romans 8:3) and in return we receive His perfect righteousness from a life of full obedience to the Law, so that the righteous requirement of the Law might be fully, impossibly fulfilled in us sinners (Romans 8:4). Our sin then no longer separates us from God and we are able to enjoy full fellowship with Him.

This narrative is (I believe) something very much like the version of the Gospel that is presented in many evangelical Christian circles all over the country and world. So before I start to criticize parts of it, let me make clear why I'm doing so. I'm not merely trying to be a smart aleck by painting my Christian brothers and sisters as fools. I'm not trying to make myself some kind of guru who has all the answers about the Gospel; that would be Jesus, not me. What I am trying to do here is to recognize the need for a constant, divine restlessness in our faith and how we express it.

Between our established "orthodox" doctrine, statements of faith, and monolithic works of theology, there is a great temptation for us to think we have some spiritual truth "figured out", especially when that truth is supposed to be as foundational as the message of how you get Saved, the Gospel. That is, we know "enough" of it to stop questioning it and proclaim and teach it as the Truth that every Christian needs to believe. We stop being restless about our doctrine and instead rest in it, content to leave it where it is, as if any of our finite words could fully capture the gloriously boundless revelation God has given us in His word. So with the Gospel presentation. We have taken a flawed definition of the Gospel, possibly like the one I gave above, and treated it as the Real Thing, thereby blinding ourselves to the hangups it might cause with people. If God's goal for His people really is perfection, then we always need to keep growing.

With that said, you may well be wondering: that's the Gospel; it's great! What could this lunatic possibly find wrong with it? I'd like to get at an assumption it makes by asking a question:

Does the Law primarily exist to produce perfect obedience to a certain set of commands, or to produce a certain kind of people? Or, more colloquially, does the Law primarily consist of do's and don'ts, or is it a blueprint for how God's redeemed people should be and live?

You may be thinking I'm making a false dichotomy; love for God has always been the greatest commandment (Deuteronomy 6:5. Matthew 22:37), and we love God by keeping His commandments (1 John 5:3). So there is no tension between obeying His commands and becoming the kind of people He wants us to be, is there? No, there isn't supposed to be--but that doesn't meant such tension can't exist. Sinful man will make a way! Even if our concern for obeying God is meant to be equivalent to our love for God, that doesn't stop anyone from elevating one over the other

I don't have any kind of reasoned, logical, Biblical argument to "prove" why the Law, as commonly referenced by the New Testament authors, is better thought of in terms of is mission to produce a "people of God" characterized by shalom, God's desire of peace, justice, and flourishing for His creation. Instead, I will simply try to show how it "just makes sense" by pointing out questions that the Law-as-commanded-action narrative raises but does not itself answer (at least to my satisfaction).

Jesus did not obey the letter of the Law. I'm honestly amazed people don't make a bigger deal of this fact. For example, in Matthew 12:1-8, Jesus' disciples, while walking through a grainfield on the Sabbath, pick and eat some of the heads of grain. The Pharisees (who I picture as deploying "minders" to observe Jesus 24/7 for unlawful behavior) point out that Jesus' disciples are breaking the Law--not by stealing grain, but by doing work ("harvesting" grain) on the Sabbath. And they're right! Jesus responds not to explain how their interpretation is wrong and they are really keeping the Sabbath as you might expect, but by giving other examples of legitimate breaks from the ceremonial laws. If the whole point of righteousness is to obey the Law, then this makes no sense and Jesus is just making excuses. The Pharisees knew the Law backwards and forwards; Jesus does not question their knowledge of the Law but appeals to a higher priority than obedience to the letter: "I tell you, something greater than the temple is here."

Jesus and the apostles redefine or even change the ethical demands of the Law. For example, in Acts 10, Peter has a dream in which God presents him with a variety of animals (some of them "unclean" according to the Law) and tells him to "kill and eat". Let me make this unmistakably clear: God is telling Peter, a Jew, to disobey a commandment He previously gave the Jews (in Leviticus 11). His justification for this is not some exception or loophole that allows Peter to eat without breaking the commandment; God merely says, "What the Lord has made clean, do not call common." And yet Jesus said, ""Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. For truly I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the Law until all is accomplished." (Matthew 5:17-18) If by "the Law" you mean (as the Pharisees did) the specific ethical imperatives given to the Jews that must be obeyed at all costs, this promise of Jesus is repeatedly shown to be false by passages like this. But if the ultimate purpose of the Law is not to get people to act and live in certain, divinely dictated ways but to transform them, then it's easy to see how Jesus fulfilled the Law instead of doing away with it.

Or consider the contrast between the seventh commandment, "You shall not commit adultery", and Jesus's teaching on adultery in Matthew 5:27-30. Using the commandment as a springboard, Jesus explains that it doesn't just mean the physical act of adultery--lusting after a woman is committing adultery with her in your heart. Wait, wait, wait! What kind of careful, historical-grammatical reading of Exodus 20 did Jesus use to draw that conclusion? Where was it in the original text? Well, Jesus is God, so He has the authority to add to previously given commands. But even so, wouldn't it at least have been nice to know for the Israelites and not given as a "Surprise!" thousands of years later? But again, if the point of the Law is not simply rote obedience but the creation of a people of shalom, then Jesus' teaching on adultery makes perfect sense. It doesn't even constitute a change to the commandment, only a clarification. I don't think there is supposed to be any distinction between the state of our heart and our acts of obedience to God. The Pharisees had made this distinction and become masters of it, so Jesus tried to remove it by showing the two to be synonymous.

The end goal: what does fulfilling the Law mean? In the narrative I gave at the start of this post, Jesus' fulfillment of the Law basically amounts to checking all the boxes it lays out because we couldn't be obedient enough to check them ourselves. This impossibly blank list of checkboxes is supposed to be the "legal demand" of the Law (Colossians 2:14): you need to check all the boxes by obeying each rule to be righteous, or Jesus needs to do it for you with His life of perfect righteousness substituted for your own. The problem with checking boxes is that it doesn't change you. If your goal is simply to "do" the requirements of the Law, understood as rules to be obeyed, you might be able to do it, but you'll be the same person as you were before but with a full checklist. Actually, you'll be a worse person--you'll be a Pharisee.

Let's stop this double-mindedness whereby we view the Law as this impossible heavy set of moral burdens that Jesus took on Himself because we couldn't carry them, as if something instituted by God could be reduced to an obstacle to salvation to be overcome. (Also, paradoxically, by God) What if the "righteous requirement" of the Law is understood to be not a requirement to do certain things, but to become a certain kind of person--a person remade in the image of Christ? What if the intent of the Law was always to produce and govern a society made up of this kind of people, and this purpose can finally, exclusively be fulfilled via Christ's life, death, and resurrection transforming us? The proof of this, for me, is not that I simply see that it is true but that by this understanding I can see more clearly the beauty and purpose of the Gospel of God.

On reading Kierkegaard: Information vs. Transformation

I've been reading Kierkegaard's Works of Love for the last few weeks. It's a slow read, but only because it is incredibly dense in the best possible way--a great book to bring on a backpacking expedition and read before sunrise by a mountain lake (speaking from experience). The blurb on the back says it is "the kind of book that will change your life", and so far I agree. Kierkegaard's meditations on the Biblical teaching about love and the distinctness of Christian love are equal parts beautiful, enlightening, and convicting. Dozens of quotes I've underlined could spark their own subsequent posts. Maybe they will.

What most impresses me about Kierkegaard is how he is able to take a short Bible passage--like Jesus' command to love your neighbor--and expound on it for dozens of pages, examining it from every angle and laying out its manifold meanings in a way that prevents any possibility of escape. It's a vivid proof-by-demonstration of how the word of God is "living and active" (Hebrews 4:12), its meaning and applicability never confined to a few terse words on a page.

I think I'm unhealthily obsessed on this blog with thinking things that no one has thought before, or saying things that no one has ever said before. I take X common question or Y discussion in the Christian blogosphere and try to take a step or two back from everyone else, trying to nail that one crucial insight that no one thought of so the conversation will be transformed and everyone will fall silent and think I'm brilliant (or something like that). I'm never content to just "pick a side" on virtually anything, not without at least tweaking it first. At best this response-oriented approach is interesting and eye-opening; at worst, it is smug, denigrating, and utterly lacking in Christian love.

But Kierkegaard has been a poignant reminder that we really need is not new information at all, but inward transformation through the 2000-year-old message of Christianity. The words of the Bible don't help us if we keep them confined to neat theological systems out of a need for control via certainty and complete understanding; they must take root in us and grow into fruit we bear in our lives (Galatians 5:22-23). Kierkegaard's meditations are like watching this growing process in action as he takes the simple words of Jesus and Paul pertaining to love and powerfully demonstrates how they are to pervade every corner of our lives. Excessively focusing on Christian truths merely as information can lead us to forget that they are supposed to be arrows that pierce our very souls. When that happens, I'm thankful for authors like Kierkegaard to remind me of the truth.