1994

2024

Core Texts

shaping our philosophy of ministry

The House

A Philosophy of Ministry

Every organization has a particular way of accomplishing their purpose - a certain wisdom they apply toward their end.

Call it a philosophy.

The philosophy of ministry at The House has been shaped by some core texts we have been reading throughout our history.

The selections below have shaped our philosophy of ministry. Reading these will effectively take the reader through the elementary school of thought permeating our work. Additional works can be found at the end of the book.

Life of the Beloved by Henri Nouwen

Our posture toward others

The Weight of Glory by CS Lewis

How we think with others about God

The Great Omission by Dallas Willard

How we make disciples of Jesus

The Bible for the Postmodern World by NT Wright

How we read the Bible

Life Together by Dietrich Bonhoeffer

How we live together in community

Life of the Beloved

Henri Nouwen

How this has shaped our philosophy of ministry

The first truth about each person we meet is that they are beloved. Therefore it is our business, as beloved people meeting with beloved people, to begin every relationship in a posture of wonder and curiosity about the glory of God and the dignity of this person.

EVER SINCE YOU ASKED ME to write for you and your friends about the spiritual life, I have been wondering if there might be one word I would most want you to remember when you finished reading all I wish to say. Over the past year, that special word has gradually emerged from the depths of my own heart. It is the word “Beloved,” and I am convinced that it has been given to me for the sake of you and your friends. Being a Christian, I first learned this word from the story of the baptism of Jesus of Nazareth. “No sooner had Jesus come up out of the water than he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit, like a dove, descending on him. And a voice came from heaven: ‘You are my Son, the Beloved; my favor rests on you’” (Matt. 3:16–17; Mark 1:10–11; Luke 3:21–22). For many years I had read these words and even reflected upon them in sermons and lectures, but it is only since our talks in New York that they have taken on a meaning far beyond the boundaries of my own tradition. Our many conversations led me to the inner conviction that the words “You are my Beloved” revealed the most intimate truth about all human beings, whether they belong to any particular tradition or not.

Fred, all I want to say to you is “You are the Beloved,” and all I hope is that you can hear these words as spoken to you with all the tenderness and force that love can hold. My only desire is to make these words reverberate in every corner of your being—“You are the Beloved.”

The greatest gift my friendship can give to you is the gift of your Belovedness. I can give that gift only insofar as I have claimed it for myself. Isn’t that what friendship is all about: giving to each other the gift of our Belovedness?

Yes, there is that voice, the voice that speaks from above and from within and that whispers softly or declares loudly: “You are my Beloved, on you my favor rests.” It certainly is not easy to hear that voice in a world filled with voices that shout: You are no good, you are ugly; you are worthless; you are despicable, you are nobody—unless you can demonstrate the opposite.”

Isn’t that what friendship is all

about: giving to each other the gift

of our Belovedness?

These negative voices are so loud and so persistent that it is easy to believe them. That’s the great trap. It is the trap of self-rejection. Over the years, I have come to realize that the greatest trap in our life is not success, popularity, or power, but self-rejection. Success, popularity, and power can, indeed, present a great temptation, but their seductive quality often comes from the way they are part of the much larger temptation to self-rejection. When we have come to believe in the voices that call us worthless and unlovable, then success, popularity, and power are easily perceived as attractive solutions. The real trap, however, is self-rejection. I am constantly surprised at how quickly I give in to this temptation. As soon as someone accuses me or criticizes me, as soon as I am rejected, left alone, or abandoned, I find myself thinking: “Well, that proves once again that I am a nobody.” Instead of taking a critical look at the circumstances or trying to understand my own and others’ limitations, I tend to blame myself—not just for what I did, but for who I am. My dark side says: “I am no good. . . . I deserve to be pushed aside, forgotten, rejected, and abandoned.”

Maybe you think that you are more tempted by arrogance than by self-rejection. But isn’t arrogance, in fact, the other side of self-rejection? Isn’t arrogance putting yourself on a pedestal to avoid being seen as you see yourself? Isn’t arrogance, in the final analysis, just another way of dealing with the feelings of worthlessness? Both self-rejection and arrogance pull us out of the common reality of existence and make a gentle community of people extremely difficult, if not impossible, to attain. I know too well that beneath my arrogance there lies much self-doubt, just as there is a great amount of pride hidden in my self-rejection. Whether I am inflated or deflated, I lose touch with my truth and distort my vision of reality.

I hope you can somehow identify in yourself the temptation to self-rejection, whether it manifests itself in arrogance or in low self-esteem. Not seldom, self-rejection is simply seen as the neurotic expression of an insecure person. But neurosis is often the psychic manifestation of a much deeper human darkness: the darkness of not feeling truly welcome in human existence. Self-rejection is the greatest enemy of the spiritual life because it contradicts the sacred voice that calls us the “Beloved.” Being the Beloved expresses the core truth of our existence.

I am putting this so directly and so simply because, though the experience of being the Beloved has never been completely absent from my life, I never claimed it as my core truth. I kept running around it in large or small circles, always looking for someone or something able to convince me of my Belovedness. It was as if I kept refusing to hear the voice that speaks from the very depth of my being and says: “You are my Beloved, on you my favor rests.” That voice has always been there, but it seems that I was much more eager to listen to other, louder voices saying: “Prove that you are worth something; do something relevant, spectacular, or powerful, and then you will earn the love you so desire.” Meanwhile, the soft, gentle voice that speaks in the silence and solitude of my heart remained unheard or, at least, unconvincing.

That soft, gentle voice that calls me the Beloved has come to me in countless ways. My parents, friends, teachers, students, and the many strangers who crossed my path have all sounded that voice in different tones. I have been cared for by many people with much tenderness and gentleness. I have been taught and instructed with much patience and perseverance. I have been encouraged to keep going when I was ready to give up and was stimulated to try again when I failed. I have been rewarded and praised for success . . . but, somehow, all of these signs of love were not sufficient to convince me that I was the Beloved. Beneath all my seemingly strong self-confidence there remained the question: “If all those who shower me with so much attention could see me and know me in my innermost self, would they still love me?” That agonizing question, rooted in my inner shadow, kept persecuting me and made me run away from the very place where that quiet voice calling me the Beloved could be heard.

Aren’t you, like me, hoping that

some person, thing, or event will

come along to give you that final

feeling of inner well-being you

desire?

I think you understand what I am talking about. Aren’t you, like me, hoping that some person, thing, or event will come along to give you that final feeling of inner well-being you desire? Don’t you often hope: “May this book, idea, course, trip, job, country, or relationship fulfill my deepest desire.” But as long as you are waiting for that mysterious moment you will go on running helter-skelter, always anxious and restless, always lustful and angry, never fully satisfied. You know that this is the compulsiveness that keeps us going and busy, but at the same time makes us wonder whether we are getting anywhere in the long run. This is the way to spiritual exhaustion and burn-out. This is the way to spiritual death.

Well, you and I don’t have to kill ourselves. We are the Beloved. We are intimately loved long before our parents, teachers, spouses, children, and friends loved or wounded us. That’s the truth of our lives. That’s the truth I want you to claim for yourself. That’s the truth spoken by the voice that says, “You are my Beloved.”

Listening to that voice with great inner attentiveness, I hear at my center words that say: “I have called you by name, from the very beginning. You are mine and I am yours. You are my Beloved, on you my favor rests. I have molded you in the depths of the earth and knitted you together in your mother’s womb. I have carved you in the palms of my hands and hidden you in the shadow of my embrace. I look at you with infinite tenderness and care for you with a care more intimate than that of a mother for her child. I have counted every hair on your head and guided you at every step. Wherever you go, I go with you, and wherever you rest, I keep watch. I will give you food that will satisfy all your hunger and drink that will quench all your thirst. I will not hide my face from you. You know me as your own as I know you as my own. You belong to me. I am your father, your mother, your brother, your sister, your lover, and your spouse . . . yes, even your child . . . wherever you are I will be. Nothing will ever separate us. We are one.”

Every time you listen with great attentiveness to the voice that calls you the Beloved, you will discover within yourself a desire to hear that voice longer and more deeply. It is like discovering a well in the desert. Once you have touched wet ground, you want to dig deeper.

I have been doing a lot of digging lately and I know that I am just beginning to see a little stream bubbling up through the dry sand. I have to keep digging because that little stream comes from a huge reservoir beneath the desert of my life. The word “digging” might not be the best word, since it suggests hard and painful work that finally leads me to the place where I can quench my thirst. Perhaps all we need to do is remove the dry sand that covers the well. There may be quite a pile of dry sand in our lives, but the One who so desires to quench our thirst will help us to remove it. All we really need is a great desire to find the water and drink from it.

You have lived fewer years than I. You may still want to look around a little more and a little longer so as to become convinced that the spiritual life is worth all your energy. But I do feel a certain impatience toward you because I don’t want you to waste too much of your time! I have fewer years ahead of me than behind me. For you, I hope the opposite is true. Therefore, I want to assure you already, now, that you do not have to get caught in searches that lead only to entanglement. Neither do you have to become the victim of a manipulative world or get trapped in any kind of addiction. You can choose to reach out now to true inner freedom and find it ever more fully.

So, if you are interested in starting on the journey of the Beloved, I have a lot more to say to you, because the journey of the spiritual life calls not only for determination, but also for a certain knowledge of the terrain to be crossed. I don’t want you to have to wander about in the desert for forty years as did our spiritual forebears. I don’t even want you to dwell there as long as I did. You are very dear to me, a friend whom I truly love. Although it remains true that everyone has to learn for himself or herself, I still believe that we can prevent those we love from making the same mistakes we did. In the terrain of the spiritual life, we need guides. In the pages that I now want to write for you, I would like to be your guide. I hope you are still interested in walking along.

The Weight of Glory

CS Lewis

How this has shaped our philosophy of ministry

God accommodates himself to us in order that we may know him. If there is no common ground, there is no place to begin a relationship. This is true in our relationship with God and others. Therefore, we look for shared affection, desire, understanding, or experience as the place to begin our knowing God and one another.

If you asked twenty good men today what they thought the highest of the virtues, nineteen of them would reply, Unselfishness. But if you had asked almost any of the great Christians of old, he would have replied, Love. You see what has happened? A negative term has been substituted for a positive, and this is of more than philological importance. The negative idea of Unselfishness carries with it the suggestion not primarily of securing good things for others, but of going without them ourselves, as if our abstinence and not their happiness was the important point. I do not think this is the Christian virtue of Love. The New Testament has lots to say about self-denial, but not about self-denial as an end in itself. We are told to deny ourselves and to take up our crosses in order that we may follow Christ; and nearly every description of what we shall ultimately find if we do so contains an appeal to desire. If there lurks in most modern minds the notion that to desire our own good and earnestly to hope for the enjoyment of it is a bad thing, I submit that this notion has crept in from Kant and the Stoics and is no part of the Christian faith. Indeed, if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.

We must not be troubled by unbelievers when they say that this promise of reward makes the Christian life a mercenary affair. There are different kinds of rewards. There is the reward which has no natural connection with the things you do to earn it and is quite foreign to the desires that ought to accompany those things. Money is not the natural reward of love; that is why we call a man mercenary if he marries a woman for the sake of her money. But marriage is the proper reward for a real lover, and he is not mercenary for desiring it. A general who fights well in order to get a peerage is mercenary; a general who fights for victory is not, victory being the proper reward of battle as marriage is the proper reward of love. The proper rewards are not simply tacked on to the activity for which they are given, but are the activity itself in consummation. There is also a third case, which is more complicated. An enjoyment of Greek poetry is certainly a proper, and not a mercenary, reward for learning Greek; but only those who have reached the stage of enjoying Greek poetry can tell from their own experience that this is so.

The schoolboy beginning Greek grammar cannot look forward to his adult enjoyment of Sophocles as a lover looks forward to marriage or a general to victory. He has to begin by working for marks, or to escape punishment, or to please his parents, or, at best, in the hope of a future good which he cannot at present imagine or desire. His position, therefore, bears a certain resemblance to that of the mercenary; the reward he is going to get will, in actual fact, be a natural or proper reward, but he will not know that till he has got it. Of course, he gets it gradually; enjoyment creeps in upon the mere drudgery, and nobody could point to a day or an hour when the one ceased and the other began. But it is just insofar as he approaches the reward that he becomes able to desire it for its own sake; indeed, the power of so desiring it is itself a preliminary reward.

The Christian, in relation to heaven, is in much the same position as this schoolboy. Those who have attained everlasting life in the vision of God doubtless know very well that it is no mere bribe, but the very consummation of their earthly discipleship; but we who have not yet attained it cannot know this in the same way, and cannot even begin to know it at all except by continuing to obey and finding the first reward of our obedience in our increasing power to desire the ultimate reward. Just in proportion as the desire grows, our fear lest it should be a mercenary desire will die away and finally be recognised as an absurdity. But probably this will not, for most of us, happen in a day; poetry replaces grammar, gospel replaces law, longing transforms obedience, as gradually as the tide lifts a grounded ship.

But there is one other important similarity between the schoolboy and ourselves. If he is an imaginative boy, he will, quite probably, be revelling in the English poets and romancers suitable to his age some time before he begins to suspect that Greek grammar is going to lead him to more and more enjoyments of this same sort. He may even be neglecting his Greek to read Shelley and Swinburne in secret. In other words, the desire which Greek is really going to gratify already exists in him and is attached to objects which seem to him quite unconnected with Xenophon and the verbs in μι. Now, if we are made for heaven, the desire for our proper place will be already in us, but not yet attached to the true object, and will even appear as the rival of that object. And this, I think, is just what we find.

No doubt there is one point in which my analogy of the schoolboy breaks down. The English poetry which he reads when he ought to be doing Greek exercises may be just as good as the Greek poetry to which the exercises are leading him, so that in fixing on Milton instead of journeying on to Aeschylus his desire is not embracing a false object. But our case is very different. If a transtemporal, transfinite good is our real destiny, then any other good on which our desire fixes must be in some degree fallacious, must bear at best only a symbolical relation to what will truly satisfy.

In speaking of this desire for our own far-off country, which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you—the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence; the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both. We cannot tell it because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience. We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly suggesting it, and we betray ourselves like lovers at the mention of a name. Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that had settled the matter. Wordsworth’s expedient was to identify it with certain moments in his own past. But all this is a cheat. If Wordsworth had gone back to those moments in the past, he would not have found the thing itself, but only the reminder of it; what he remembered would turn out to be itself a remembering. The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself, they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited. Do you think I am trying to weave a spell? Perhaps I am; but remember your fairy tales. Spells are used for breaking enchantments as well as for inducing them. And you and I have need of the strongest spell that can be found to wake us from the evil enchantment of worldliness which has been laid upon us for nearly a hundred years.

Almost our whole education has been directed to silencing this shy, persistent, inner voice; almost all our modern philosophies have been devised to convince us that the good of man is to be found on this earth. And yet it is a remarkable thing that such philosophies of Progress or Creative Evolution themselves bear reluctant witness to the truth that our real goal is elsewhere. When they want to convince you that earth is your home, notice how they set about it. They begin by trying to persuade you that earth can be made into heaven, thus giving a sop to your sense of exile in earth as it is. Next, they tell you that this fortunate event is still a good way off in the future, thus giving a sop to your knowledge that the fatherland is not here and now. Finally, lest your longing for the transtemporal should awake and spoil the whole affair, they use any rhetoric that comes to hand to keep out of your mind the recollection that even if all the happiness they promised could come to man on earth, yet still each generation would lose it by death, including the last generation of all, and the whole story would be nothing, not even a story, for ever and ever. Hence all the nonsense that Mr. Shaw puts into the final speech of Lilith, and Bergson’s remark that the élan vital is capable of surmounting all obstacles, perhaps even death—as if we could believe that any social or biological development on this planet will delay the senility of the sun or reverse the second law of thermodynamics.

Do what they will, then, we remain conscious of a desire which no natural happiness will satisfy. But is there any reason to suppose that reality offers any satisfaction to it? “Nor does the being hungry prove that we have bread.” But I think it may be urged that this misses the point. A man’s physical hunger does not prove that man will get any bread; he may die of starvation on a raft in the Atlantic. But surely a man’s hunger does prove that he comes of a race which repairs its body by eating and inhabits a world where eatable substances exist. In the same way, though I do not believe (I wish I did) that my desire for Paradise proves that I shall enjoy it, I think it a pretty good indication that such a thing exists and that some men will. A man may love a woman and not win her; but it would be very odd if the phenomenon called “falling in love” occurred in a sexless world.

Here, then, is the desire, still wandering and uncertain of its object and still largely unable to see that object in the direction where it really lies. Our sacred books give us some account of the object. It is, of course, a symbolical account. Heaven is, by definition, outside our experience, but all intelligible descriptions must be of things within our experience.

The scriptural picture of heaven is therefore just as symbolical as the picture which our desire, unaided, invents for itself; heaven is not really full of jewellery any more than it is really the beauty of Nature, or a fine piece of music. The difference is that the scriptural imagery has authority. It comes to us from writers who were closer to God than we, and it has stood the test of Christian experience down the centuries. The natural appeal of this authoritative imagery is to me, at first, very small. At first sight it chills, rather than awakes, my desire. And that is just what I ought to expect. If Christianity could tell me no more of the far-off land than my own temperament led me to surmise already, then Christianity would be no higher than myself. If it has more to give me, I expect it to be less immediately attractive than “my own stuff.” Sophocles at first seems dull and cold to the boy who has only reached Shelley. If our religion is something objective, then we must never avert our eyes from those elements in it which seem puzzling or repellent; for it will be precisely the puzzling or the repellent which conceals what we do not yet know and need to know.

The promises of Scripture may very roughly be reduced to five heads. It is promised (1) that we shall be with Christ; (2) that we shall be like Him; (3) with an enormous wealth of imagery, that we shall have “glory”; (4) that we shall, in some sense, be fed or feasted or entertained; and (5) that we shall have some sort of official position in the universe—ruling cities, judging angels, being pillars of God’s temple. The first question I ask about these promises is “Why any one of them except the first?” Can anything be added to the conception of being with Christ? For it must be true, as an old writer says, that he who has God and everything else has no more than he who has God only. I think the answer turns again on the nature of symbols. For though it may escape our notice at first glance, yet it is true that any conception of being with Christ which most of us can now form will be not very much less symbolical than the other promises; for it will smuggle in ideas of proximity in space and loving conversation as we now understand conversation, and it will probably concentrate on the humanity of Christ to the exclusion of His deity. And, in fact, we find that those Christians who attend solely to this first promise always do fill it up with very earthly imagery indeed—in fact, with hymeneal or erotic imagery. I am not for a moment condemning such imagery. I heartily wish I could enter into it more deeply than I do, and pray that I yet shall. But my point is that this also is only a symbol, like the reality in some respects, but unlike it in others, and therefore needs correction from the different symbols in the other promises.

The variation of the promises does not mean that anything other than God will be our ultimate bliss; but because God is more than a Person, and lest we should imagine the joy of His presence too exclusively in terms of our present poor experience of personal love, with all its narrowness and strain and monotony, a dozen changing images, correcting and relieving each other, are supplied.

I turn next to the idea of glory. There is no getting away from the fact that this idea is very prominent in the New Testament and in early Christian writings. Salvation is constantly associated with palms, crowns, white robes, thrones, and splendour like the sun and stars. All this makes no immediate appeal to me at all, and in that respect I fancy I am a typical modern. Glory suggests two ideas to me, of which one seems wicked and the other ridiculous. Either glory means to me fame, or it means luminosity. As for the first, since to be famous means to be better known than other people, the desire for fame appears to me as a competitive passion and therefore of hell rather than heaven. As for the second, who wishes to become a kind of living electric light bulb?

When I began to look into this matter I was shocked to find such different Christians as Milton, Johnson, and Thomas Aquinas taking heavenly glory quite frankly in the sense of fame or good report. But not fame conferred by our fellow creatures—fame with God, approval or (I might say) “appreciation” by God. And then, when I had thought it over, I saw that this view was scriptural; nothing can eliminate from the parable the divine accolade, “Well done, thou good and faithful servant.” With that, a good deal of what I had been thinking all my life fell down like a house of cards. I suddenly remembered that no one can enter heaven except as a child; and nothing is so obvious in a child—not in a conceited child, but in a good child—as its great and undisguised pleasure in being praised. Not only in a child, either, but even in a dog or a horse. Apparently what I had mistaken for humility had, all these years, prevented me from understanding what is in fact the humblest, the most childlike, the most creaturely of pleasures—nay, the specific pleasure of the inferior: the pleasure of a beast before men, a child before its father, a pupil before his teacher, a creature before its Creator. I am not forgetting how horribly this most innocent desire is parodied in our human ambitions, or how very quickly, in my own experience, the lawful pleasure of praise from those whom it was my duty to please turns into the deadly poison of self-admiration.

But I thought I could detect a moment—a very, very short moment—before this happened, during which the satisfaction of having pleased those whom I rightly loved and rightly feared was pure. And that is enough to raise our thoughts to what may happen when the redeemed soul, beyond all hope and nearly beyond belief, learns at last that she has pleased Him whom she was created to please. There will be no room for vanity then. She will be free from the miserable illusion that it is her doing. With no taint of what we should now call self-approval she will most innocently rejoice in the thing that God has made her to be, and the moment which heals her old inferiority complex forever will also drown her pride deeper than Prospero’s book. Perfect humility dispenses with modesty. If God is satisfied with the work, the work may be satisfied with itself; “it is not for her to bandy compliments with her Sovereign.” I can imagine someone saying that he dislikes my idea of heaven as a place where we are patted on the back. But proud misunderstanding is behind that dislike. In the end that Face which is the delight or the terror of the universe must be turned upon each of us either with one expression or with the other, either conferring glory inexpressible or inflicting shame that can never be cured or disguised. I read in a periodical the other day that the fundamental thing is how we think of God. By God Himself, it is not! How God thinks of us is not only more important, but infinitely more important. Indeed, how we think of Him is of no importance except insofar as it is related to how He thinks of us. It is written that we shall “stand before” Him, shall appear, shall be inspected. The promise of glory is the promise, almost incredible and only possible by the work of Christ, that some of us, that any of us who really chooses, shall actually survive that examination, shall find approval, shall please God. To please God … to be a real ingredient in the divine happiness … to be loved by God, not merely pitied, but delighted in as an artist delights in his work or a father in a son—it seems impossible, a weight or burden of glory which our thoughts can hardly sustain. But so it is.

And now notice what is happening. If I had rejected the authoritative and scriptural image of glory and stuck obstinately to the vague desire which was, at the outset, my only pointer to heaven, I could have seen no connection at all between that desire and the Christian promise. But now, having followed up what seemed puzzling and repellent in the sacred books, I find, to my great surprise, looking back, that the connection is perfectly clear. Glory, as Christianity teaches me to hope for it, turns out to satisfy my original desire and indeed to reveal an element in that desire which I had not noticed.

By ceasing for a moment to consider my own wants I have begun to learn better what I really wanted. When I attempted, a few minutes ago, to describe our spiritual longings, I was omitting one of their most curious characteristics. We usually notice it just as the moment of vision dies away, as the music ends, or as the landscape loses the celestial light. What we feel then has been well described by Keats as “the journey homeward to habitual self.” You know what I mean. For a few minutes we have had the illusion of belonging to that world. Now we wake to find that it is no such thing. We have been mere spectators. Beauty has smiled, but not to welcome us; her face was turned in our direction, but not to see us. We have not been accepted, welcomed, or taken into the dance. We may go when we please, we may stay if we can: “Nobody marks us.” A scientist may reply that since most of the things we call beautiful are inanimate, it is not very surprising that they take no notice of us. That, of course, is true. It is not the physical objects that I am speaking of, but that indescribable something of which they become for a moment the messengers. And part of the bitterness which mixes with the sweetness of that message is due to the fact that it so seldom seems to be a message intended for us, but rather something we have overheard. By bitterness I mean pain, not resentment. We should hardly dare to ask that any notice be taken of ourselves. But we pine. The sense that in this universe we are treated as strangers, the longing to be acknowledged, to meet with some response, to bridge some chasm that yawns between us and reality, is part of our inconsolable secret. And surely, from this point of view, the promise of glory, in the sense described, becomes highly relevant to our deep desire. For glory means good report with God, acceptance by God, response, acknowledgement, and welcome into the heart of things. The door on which we have been knocking all our lives will open at last.

Perhaps it seems rather crude to describe glory as the fact of being “noticed” by God. But this is almost the language of the New Testament. St. Paul promises to those who love God not, as we should expect, that they will know Him, but that they will be known by Him (1 Cor. 8:3). It is a strange promise. Does not God know all things at all times? But it is dreadfully reechoed in another passage of the New Testament. There we are warned that it may happen to anyone of us to appear at last before the face of God and hear only the appalling words, “I never knew you. Depart from Me.” In some sense, as dark to the intellect as it is unendurable to the feelings, we can be both banished from the presence of Him who is present everywhere and erased from the knowledge of Him who knows all.

We can be left utterly and absolutely outside—repelled, exiled, estranged, finally and unspeakably ignored. On the other hand, we can be called in, welcomed, received, acknowledged. We walk every day on the razor edge between these two incredible possibilities. Apparently, then, our lifelong nostalgia, our longing to be reunited with something in the universe from which we now feel cut off, to be on the inside of some door which we have always seen from the outside, is no mere neurotic fancy, but the truest index of our real situation. And to be at last summoned inside would be both glory and honour beyond all our merits and also the healing of that old ache.

And this brings me to the other sense of glory—glory as brightness, splendour, luminosity. We are to shine as the sun, we are to be given the Morning Star. I think I begin to see what it means. In one way, of course, God has given us the Morning Star already: you can go and enjoy the gift on many fine mornings if you get up early enough. What more, you may ask, do we want? Ah, but we want so much more—something the books on aesthetics take little notice of. But the poets and the mythologies know all about it. We do not want merely to see beauty, though, God knows, even that is bounty enough. We want something else which can hardly be put into words—to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it. That is why we have peopled air and earth and water with gods and goddesses and nymphs and elves—that, though we cannot, yet these projections can enjoy in themselves that beauty, grace, and power of which Nature is the image. That is why the poets tell us such lovely falsehoods. They talk as if the west wind could really sweep into a human soul; but it can’t. They tell us that “beauty born of murmuring sound” will pass into a human face; but it won’t. Or not yet. For if we take the imagery of Scripture seriously, if we believe that God will one day give us the Morning Star and cause us to put on the splendour of the sun, then we may surmise that both the ancient myths and the modern poetry, so false as history, may be very near the truth as prophecy. At present we are on the outside of the world, the wrong side of the door. We discern the freshness and purity of morning, but they do not make us fresh and pure. We cannot mingle with the splendours we see. But all the leaves of the New Testament are rustling with the rumour that it will not always be so. Some day, God willing, we shall get in. When human souls have become as perfect in voluntary obedience as the inanimate creation is in its lifeless obedience, then they will put on its glory, or rather that greater glory of which Nature is only the first sketch.

For you must not think that I am putting forward any heathen fancy of being absorbed into Nature. Nature is mortal; we shall outlive her. When all the suns and nebulae have passed away, each one of you will still be alive. Nature is only the image, the symbol; but it is the symbol Scripture invites me to use. We are summoned to pass in through Nature, beyond her, into that splendour which she fitfully reflects.

And in there, in beyond Nature, we shall eat of the tree of life. At present, if we are reborn in Christ, the spirit in us lives directly on God; but the mind and, still more, the body receives life from Him at a thousand removes—through our ancestors, through our food, through the elements. The faint, far-off results of those energies which God’s creative rapture implanted in matter when He made the worlds are what we now call physical pleasures; and even thus filtered, they are too much for our present management. What would it be to taste at the fountainhead that stream of which even these lower reaches prove so intoxicating? Yet that, I believe, is what lies before us. The whole man is to drink joy from the fountain of joy. As St. Augustine said, the rapture of the saved soul will “flow over” into the glorified body. In the light of our present specialised and depraved appetites, we cannot imagine this torrens voluptatis, and I warn everyone most seriously not to try. But it must be mentioned, to drive out thoughts even more misleading—thoughts that what is saved is a mere ghost, or that the risen body lives in numb insensibility. The body was made for the Lord, and these dismal fancies are wide of the mark.

Meanwhile the cross comes before the crown and tomorrow is a Monday morning. A cleft has opened in the pitiless walls of the world, and we are invited to follow our great Captain inside. The following Him is, of course, the essential point. That being so, it may be asked what practical use there is in the speculations which I have been indulging. I can think of at least one such use. It may be possible for each to think too much of his own potential glory hereafter; it is hardly possible for him to think too often or too deeply about that of his neighbour. The load, or weight, or burden of my neighbour’s glory should be laid on my back, a load so heavy that only humility can carry it, and the backs of the proud will be broken.

It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you can talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilisations—these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit—immortal horrors or everlasting splendours. This does not mean that we are to be perpetually solemn. We must play. But our merriment must be of that kind (and it is, in fact, the merriest kind) which exists between people who have, from the outset, taken each other seriously—no flippancy, no superiority, no presumption. And our charity must be a real and costly love, with deep feeling for the sins in spite of which we love the sinner—no mere tolerance, or indulgence which parodies love as flippancy parodies merriment. Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbour is the holiest object presented to your senses. If he is your Christian neighbour, he is holy in almost the same way, for in him also Christ vere latitat—the glorifier and the glorified, Glory Himself, is truly hidden.

The Great Omission

Dallas Willard

How this has shaped our philosophy of ministry

Discipleship to Jesus Christ is the intended response to hearing the Gospel of His Kingdom. His people are to become more and more like Him as they follow Him. This Spirit-led work is accomplished as Christians fix their attention on Jesus, intend to become like Him, obey Him, and resist whatever is working against His Kingdom.

Joy to the world, the Lord is come, let Earth receive her King! Let every heart, prepare him room, and heaven and nature sing!” So sings the grand old Christmas carol, with the implication that now, with the coming of Jesus into our world and our lives, things are going to be really different. And that theme is sustained through the ages up to the present. No knowledgeable person can think anything else. Transformation into goodness is what the “Good News” is all about…isn’t it?

But there is a great deal of disappointment expressed today about the character and the effects of Christian people, about Christian institutions, and—at least by implication—about the Christian faith and understanding of reality. Most of the disappointment comes from Christians themselves, who find that what they profess “just isn’t working”—not for themselves nor, so far as they can see, for those around them. What they have found, at least, does not “exceed all expectations,” as the standard evaluation form says. “Disappointment” books form a subcategory of Christian publishing. Self-flagellation has not disappeared from the Christian repertoire.

But the disappointment also comes from those who merely stand apart from “visible” Christianity (perhaps they have no real knowledge of the situation, or have just “had enough”), as well as from those who openly oppose it. These people often beat Christians with their own stick, criticizing them in terms that Jesus himself provides. There is an obvious Great Disparity between, on the one hand, the hope for life expressed in Jesus—found real in the Bible and in many shining examples from among his followers—and, on the other hand, the actual day-to-day behavior, inner life, and social presence of most of those who now profess adherence to him.

The question must arise: Why the Great Disparity? Is it caused by something built into the very nature of Jesus and what he taught and brought to humankind? Or is it the result of inessential factors that attach themselves to Christian institutions and people as they journey through time? Are we in a period when both rank-and-file Christians and most of their leaders have, for some reason, missed the main point?

If your neighbor is having trouble with his automobile, you might think he just got a lemon. And you might be right.

But if you found that he was supplementing his gasoline with a quart of water now and then, you would not blame the car or its maker for it not running, or for running in fits and starts. You would say that the car was not built to work under the conditions imposed by the owner. And you would certainly advise him to put only the appropriate kind of fuel in the tank. After some restorative work, perhaps the car would then run fine.

We must approach current disappointments about the walk with Christ in a similar way. It too is not meant to run on just anything you may give it. If it doesn’t work at all, or only in fits and starts, that is because we do not give ourselves to it in a way that allows our lives to be taken over by it. Perhaps we have never been told what to do. We are misinformed about “our part” in eternal living. Or we have just learned the “faith and practice” of some group we have fallen in with, not that of Jesus himself. Or maybe we have heard something that is right-on with Jesus himself, but misunderstood it (a dilemma that tends to produce good Pharisees or “legalists,” which is a really hard life.) Or perhaps we thought the “Way” we have heard of seemed too costly and we have tried to economize (supplying a quart of moralistic or religious “water” now and then).

Now we know that the “car” of Christianity can run, and run gloriously, in every kind of external circumstance. We have seen it—or at least, anyone who wishes to can see it—merely by looking, past the caricatures and partial presentations, at Jesus himself and at the many manifestations of him in events and personalities throughout history and in our world today. He is, simply, the brightest spot in the human scene. There is no real competition. Even anti-Christians judge and condemn Christians in terms of Jesus and what he said. He is not really hidden. But for all his manifest presence in our world, he must be sought. That is part of his plan, and for our benefit. If we do seek him, he will certainly find us, and then we, ever more deeply, find him. That is the blessed existence of the disciple of Jesus who continuously “grows in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ” (2 Peter 3:18).

But just there is the problem. Who, among Christians today, is a disciple of Jesus, in any substantive sense of the word “disciple”? A disciple is a learner, a student, an apprentice—a practitioner, even if only a beginner. The New Testament literature, which must be allowed to define our terms if we are ever to get our bearings in the Way with Christ, makes this clear. In that context, disciples of Jesus are people who do not just profess certain views as their own but apply their growing understanding of life in the Kingdom of the Heavens to every aspect of their life on earth.

In contrast, the governing assumption today, among professing Christians, is that we can be “Christians” forever and never become disciples. Not even in heaven, it seems, for who would need it there? That is the accepted teaching now. Check it out wherever you are. And this (with its various consequences) is the Great Omission from the “Great Commission” in which the Great Disparity is firmly rooted. As long as the Great Omission is permitted or sustained, the Great Disparity will flourish—in individual lives as well as in Christian groups and movements. Conversely, if we cut the root in the Great Omission, the Great Disparity will wither, as it has repeatedly done in times past. No need to fight it. Just stop feeding it.

Jesus told us explicitly what to do. We have a manual, just like the car owner. He told us, as disciples, to make disciples. Not converts to Christianity, nor to some particular “faith and practice.” He did not tell us to arrange for people to “get in” or “make the cut” after they die, nor to eliminate the various brutal forms of injustice, nor to produce and maintain “successful” churches. These are all good things, and he had something to say about all of them. They will certainly happen if—but only if—we are (his constant apprentices) and do (make constant apprentices) what he told us to be and do. If we just do this, it will little matter what else we do or do not do.

Once we who are disciples have assisted others with becoming disciples (of Jesus, not of us), we can gather them, in ordinary life situations, under the supernatural Trinitarian Presence, forming a new kind of social unit never before seen on earth. These disciples are his “called-out” ones, his ecclesia. Their “walk” is already “in heaven” (Philippians 3:20), because heaven is in action where they are (Ephesians 2:6). Now it is these people who can be taught “to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you.” In becoming his students or apprentices, they have agreed to be taught, and the resources are available, so they can methodically go about doing it. This reliably yields the life that proves to “exceed all expectations.”

Jesus put it this way to his little group of immediate followers: “I have been given say over all things in heaven and in the earth. As you go, therefore, make disciples of all kinds of people, submerge them in Trinitarian Presence, and show them how to do everything I have commanded. And now look: I am with you every minute until the job is done” (Matthew 28:18–20). We see in world history the results of a small number of his disciples simply doing what he said, with no “Omission.”

People in Western churches, and especially in North America, usually assume without thinking that the Great Commission of Jesus is something to be carried out in other countries. This is caused in part by the use of “nations” to translate, when a better translation might be our contemporary “ethnic groups,” or just “people of every kind.” But this leads in practice to not treating “our kind of people” as the ones to be led into discipleship to Jesus. Some actually think that “we” don’t need it, because we are basically right to begin with. But in fact the primary mission field for the Great Commission today is made up of the churches in Europe and North America. That is where the Great Disparity is most visible, and from where it threatens to spread to the rest of the world. Our responsibility is to implement the Great Commission right where we are, not just to raise efforts to do it elsewhere. And if we don’t, it won’t even be implemented “over there.”

It is a tragic error to think that Jesus was telling us, as he left, to start churches, as that is understood today. From time to time starting a church may be appropriate. But his aim for us is much greater than that. He wants us to establish “beachheads” or bases of operation for the Kingdom of God wherever we are. In this way God’s promise to Abraham—that in him and in his seed all peoples of the earth would be blessed (Genesis 12:3)—is carried forward toward its realization. The outward effect of this life in Christ is perpetual moral revolution, until the purpose of humanity on earth is completed.

This vision of the meaning of world history is explained in detail in the general introduction to the Renovaré Spiritual Formation Bible (2005). As disciples of Jesus, we today are a part of God’s world project. But realization of that project, it must never be forgotten, is the effect, not the life itself. The mission naturally flows from the life. It is not an afterthought, or something we might overlook or omit as we live the life. The eternal life, from which many profound and glorious effects flow, is interactive relationship with God and with his special Son, Jesus, within the abiding ambience of the Holy Spirit. Eternal life is the Kingdom Walk, where, in seamless unity, we “Do justice, love kindness, and walk carefully with our God” (Micah 6:8). We learn to walk this way through apprenticeship to Jesus. His school is always in session.

We need to emphasize that the Great Omission from the Great Commission is not obedience to Christ, but discipleship, apprenticeship, to him. Through discipleship, obedience will take care of itself, and we will also escape the snares of judgmentalism and legalism, whether directed toward ourselves or toward others.

Now, some might be shocked to hear that what the “church”—the disciples gathered—really needs is not more people, more money, better buildings or programs, more education, or more prestige. Christ’s gathered people, the church, has always been at its best when it had little or none of these. All it needs to fulfill Christ’s purposes on earth is the quality of life he makes real in the life of his disciples. Given that quality, the church will prosper from everything that comes its way as it makes clear and available on earth the “life that is life indeed.” There will always be many battles to fight, but the brooding presence of the Great Disparity, and the illusion that it is all that Christ has to offer humanity, will not be one of them.

So the greatest issue facing the world today, with all its heartbreaking needs, is whether those who, by profession or culture, are identified as “Christians” will become disciples—students, apprentices, practitioners—of Jesus Christ, steadily learning from him how to live the life of the Kingdom of the Heavens into every corner of human existence. Will they break out of the churches to be his Church—to be, without human force or violence, his mighty force for good on earth, drawing the churches after them toward the eternal purposes of God? And, on its own scale, there is no greater issue facing the individual human being, Christian or not.

Can anything be said to help us make the transitions into and within discipleship to Jesus Christ? The pages that follow contain several previously published articles and addresses on discipleship, spiritual disciplines, and spiritual growth and formation. They are now almost impossible for the ordinary person to find, but some have thought that there is a real need for them to be available. Some of the selections have been revised in minor ways, but they are all presented here substantially as they were originally published or given. There is some small degree of repetition, since they are “occasional” pieces, and some variations of style. Some are explicitly addressed to ministers, but the principles in them apply to everyone. I hope this will not prove to be a distraction. I have attached a final “Parting Word” in which I try to emphasize the simplicity of the “next steps” that can orient individuals and groups for action.

What Jesus expects us to do is not complicated or obscure. In some cases, it will require that we change what we have been doing. But the Great Commission—his plan for spiritual formation, “church growth,” and world service—is pretty obvious. Let’s just do it. He will provide all the teaching and support we need. Remember, “when all else fails, follow the instructions.”

Personal Soul Care for Ministers and Others

Keep your heart with all vigilance,

For from it flow the springs of life.

—Proverbs 4:23

THE CALL OF GOD to minister the gospel is both a high honor and a noble challenge. It carries with it unique opportunities as well as special burdens and dangers for members of the clergy as well as their families. These burdens can be fruitfully borne and the dangers triumphantly overcome. But that will not happen unless the minister’s “inner person” (2 Corin thi ans 4:16) is constantly renewed by accessing the riches of God and His Kingdom in the inner person.

The Soul and the Great Commandment

“Soul” will be understood here in its common usage as referring to the hidden or spiritual side of the person. It thus includes an individual’s thoughts and feelings, along with heart, or will, with its intents and choices. It also includes an individual’s bodily life and social relations, which, in their inner meaning and nature, are just as hidden as the thoughts and feelings. This inclusive understanding of “soul,” though close to what the word means on the street, is not ultimately satisfactory for analytical purposes. But it will work well enough for our needs here.

The secret to a strong, healthy, and fruitful ministerial life lies in how we work with God in all of these hidden dimensions of the self. Together they make up the life of the real person. They are the inescapable sources of our outward life, and they almost totally determine what effects, for good or ill, our activities as ministers will have. Natural gifts, external circumstances, and special opportunities are of little significance. The good tree, Jesus said, “bears good fruit” (Matthew 7:17). If we tend to the tree, the fruit will take care of itself.

The inner dimensions of life are what are referred to in the Great Commandment: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself” (Luke 10:27). This commandment does not tell us what we must do so much as what we must cultivate in the care of our souls. This is true for all believers and is certainly true for ministers of the gospel.1 Our high calling and sacrificial service can find adequate support only in a personality totally saturated with God’s kind of love, agape (see 1 Corinthians 13).

But we must be very clear that the great biblical passages on love—those already cited and others, including 1 John 4—do not tell us to act as if we loved God with our whole beings, and our neighbors as ourselves. Such an attempt, without the love of God indwelling us, would be an impossible burden. We would become angry and hopeless—as, in fact, happens to many ministers and their families, trying to be “nice.”

Character and the “Fruit of the Spirit”

The “sudden” failures that appear in the lives of some ministers and others are never really sudden but are the surfacing of long-standing deficiencies in the “hidden person of the heart” (1 Peter 3:4). Divine love permeating every part of our lives is, in contrast, a resource adequate to every condition of life and death, as 1 Corin thi ans 13 assures us. This love is, in the words of Jesus, “a spring of water gushing up to eternal life” (John 4:14). And from those possessed of divine love there truly flow “rivers of living water” to a thirsty world (John 7:38).

The people to whom we minister and speak will not recall 99 percent of what we say to them. But they will never forget the kind of persons we are. This is certainly true of influential ministers in my own past. The quality of our souls will indelibly touch others for good or for ill. So we must never forget that the most important thing happening at any moment, in the midst of all our ministerial duties, is the kind of persons we are becoming.

God is greatly concerned with the quality of character we are building. The future He has planned for us will be built on the strength of character we forge by His grace. Intelligent, loving devotion to Christ will grow in importance through eternity and will never become obsolete.

It is God’s intention that our lives should be a seamless manifestation of the fruit of the Spirit: “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control” (Galatians 5:22–23). He has made abundant provision for His indwelling our lives in the here and now. Appropriate attention to the care of our souls through His empowerment will yield this rich spiritual fruit and deliver us from the sad list of “deeds of the flesh” (Galatians 5:19–21). We can be channels of the grace of the risen Christ, and through our ministerial activities—speaking, praying, healing, administering—He can minister to others. But we must attend to the means of His grace in practical and specific ways to experience His life into and through our lives.

Practicing the Presence of God

The first and most basic thing we can and must do is to keep God before our minds. David knew this secret and wrote, “I keep the Lord always before me; because He is at my right hand, I shall not be moved. Therefore my heart is glad, and my soul rejoices; my body also rests secure” (Psalm 16:8–9).

This is the fundamental secret of caring for our souls. Our part in thus practicing the presence of God is to direct and redirect our minds constantly to Him. In the early time of our practicing, we may well be challenged by our burdensome habits of dwelling on things less than God. But these are habits—not the law of gravity—and can be broken. A new, grace-filled habit will replace the former ones as we take intentional steps toward keeping God before us. Soon our minds will return to God as the needle of a compass constantly returns to the north, no matter how the compass is moved. If God is the great longing of our souls, He will become the polestar of our inward beings.2

Jesus Christ is, of course, the Door, the Light, and the Way. We are privileged to walk in this profound reality, not just preach it. We first receive God into our minds by receiving Jesus. We open our consciousness to him and direct our attention toward him. This and nothing else is our “business as usual.” The way forward then lies in intentionally keeping the scenes and words of the New Testament gospels before our minds, carefully reading and rereading them day by day. We memorize them. We revive them in word and imagination as we arise in the morning, move through the events of the day, and lie down at night. By this means we walk with Him moment by moment—the One who promised to be “with us always.”

As a beginning step in this practicing process, we can choose to practice constantly returning our minds to God in Christ on a given day. Just decide to do it, and then do the best you can without harassing yourself. In the evening, then, we can review how we did, and think of ways to do it better the next day. As we continue this practice, gently but persistently, we soon will find that the person of Jesus and his beautiful words are automatically occupying our minds, instead of the clutter and noise of the world—even the church-world.

Our concentration on Jesus will be strengthened by memorization of great passages (not just verses) from scripture. Passages such as Matthew 5–7, John 14–17, 1 Corinthians 13, and Colossians 3 are terrific soul-growing selections. This practice of memorizing the scriptures is more important than a daily quiet time, for as we fill our minds with these great passages and have them available for our meditation, quiet time takes over the entirety of our lives. “Those of steadfast mind you keep in peace—in peace because they trust in you” (Isaiah 26:3).

God’s word to Joshua, as he undertook the great task before him, was, “This book of the law shall not depart out of your mouth; you shall meditate on it day and night, so that you may be careful to act in accordance with all that is written in it. For then you shall make your way prosperous, and then you shall be successful” (Joshua 1:8). Psalm 1 demonstrates that this became a part of the recognized practice of spiritual living among the Israelites. Meditation on Him and His Word must become an integral part of our lives too.

But how does the law get in your mouth? By memorization, of course. The law becomes an essential part of how we think about everything else as we dwell on it. Then the things that come before us during the day come in the presence of God’s illuminating Word. Light dwells within us and enables us to see the things of life in the right way. “In your light we see light” (Psalm 36:9). This is the true education for ministry, and for life.

Love and Worship

As the Living Word and the written Word occupy our minds we naturally—and supernaturally—come to love God more and more because we see, clearly and constantly, how lovely He is. The glorious being of God is not just a truth we had better believe. It is an inexhaustible wonder and a delight.

The wise old Puritan Thomas Watson wrote,

The first fruit of love is the musing of the mind upon God. He who is in love, his thoughts are ever upon the object. He who loves God is ravished and transported with the contemplation of God.’ “When I awake, I am still with thee” (Psalm 139:18). The thoughts are as travelers in the mind. David’s thoughts kept heaven-road. “I am still with Thee.” God is the treasure, and where the treasure is, there is the heart. By this we may test our love to God. What are our thoughts most upon? Can we say we are ravished with delight when we think on God? Have our thoughts got wings? Are they fled aloft? Do we contemplate Christ and glory?…A sinner crowds God out of his thoughts. He never thinks of God, unless with horror, as the prisoner thinks of the judge.

In this way we enter a life, not just times, of worship. The hymn of heaven will be a constant presence in our inner lives: “To the one seated on the throne and to the Lamb be blessing and honor and glory and might forever and ever” (Revelation 5:13).

Worship will become the constant undertone of our lives. It is the single most powerful force in completing and sustaining restoration of our whole beings to God. Nothing can inform, guide, and sustain pervasive and radiant goodness in a person other than the true vision of God and the worship that spontaneously arises from it. Then the power of the indwelling Christ flows from us to others.

Remember, however, that we are not trying to worship. Worship is not another job we have to do. It is one aspect of the gift of “living water” that springs “up to eternal life” (John 7:38; 4:14). Our part is to turn our minds toward God and to attend to His graceful actions in our souls. This is the primary “care of the soul” we must exercise. Then love and worship, worship and love, flow in our lives as we walk constantly with God. By stepping with Him—in the flow of His grace—we live with spontaneity, love our neighbors, and minister the word and power of the gospel.

Opening to the Fullness of Joy

Personal soul care also requires attending to our feelings. Emotions are a real component of life and of our lives in Christ. Some ministers, and many, many people, allow their emotions to defeat them.

We do well to note, however, that love is the foundation of the spiritual life and joy is a key component in the Christ life. Joy is not pleasure, a mere sensation, but a pervasive and constant sense of well-being. Hope in the goodness of God is joy’s indispensable support.

In a moment of worship and praise, Paul spontaneously expressed a benediction on the Christians in Rome: “May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit” (Romans 15:13). This verse addresses the profound needs of the emotional side of the Christian’s life.

The great central terms of life in Christ are “faith,” “hope,” “love,” and “peace.” These are not just feelings; in substance, they are not feelings. They are conditions involving every part of an individual’s life, including the body and the social context. They serve to equip us for the engagements of life. They do, however, have feelings that accompany them, and these positive feelings abundantly characterize those living in the presence of God. These feelings displace the bitter and angry feelings that characterize life “in the flesh”—life in human energies only. They even transform the sickening emotional tones that permeate and largely govern the world around us—even, many times, the church-world itself.

Jesus taught us to abide in God’s love, “so that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be complete” (John 15: 10–11). Our joy is complete when there is no room for more. Abiding in God’s love provides the unshakable source of joy, which is in turn the source of peace. All is based in the reality of God’s grace and goodness. Faith, hope, love, joy, and peace—the “magnificent five”—are inseparable from one another and reciprocally support each other. Try to imagine any one without the others!

Solitude and Silence

Among the practices that can help us attend to soul care at a basic level are solitude and silence. We practice these by finding ways to be alone and away from talk and noise. We rest, we observe, we “smell the roses”—dare we say it?—we do nothing. This discipline can be used of God as a means of grace. In it we may even find another reminder of grace—that we are saved, justified by His redeeming power, not by our strivings and achievements.

In drawing aside for lengthy periods of time, we seek to rid ourselves of the corrosion of soul that accrues from constant interaction with others and the world around us. In this place of quiet communion, we discover again that we do have souls, that we indeed have inner beings to be nurtured. Then we begin to experience again the presence of God in the inner sanctuary, speaking to and interacting with us. We understand anew that God will not compete for our attention. We must arrange time for our communion with Him as we draw aside in solitude and silence.

The Psalmist said, “Cease striving and know that I am God” (Psalm 46:10). And immediately following this, the writer affirms the success of God’s mission on earth: “‘I am exalted among the nations, I am exalted in the earth.’ The Lord of hosts is with us; the God of Jacob is our refuge” (Psalm 46:10–11).

Other translations of this verse read, “Be still, and know that I am God” (New International Version) and “Step out of the traffic! Take a long, loving look at me” (The Message Bible). God’s provision for us and for His work through us is adequate. We do not have to “make it happen.” We must stop shouldering the burdens of “outcomes.” These are safely in His hands.

Someone has insightfully said, “The greatest threat to devotion to Christ is service for Christ.”

What a paradox! This is so easily a challenge for many ministers. Allowing service for Christ to steal our devotion to him is a radical failure in personal soul care. But it is one from which the practice of communing with Christ in times of solitude and silence can deliver us.

Time Is Made, Not Found

A response to giving attention to personal soul care often is “I don’t have time for extensive solitude and silence. I have too much to do.” The truth is that we don’t have time not to practice solitude and silence. No time is more profitably spent than that used to heighten the quality of an intimate walk with God. If we think otherwise, we have been badly educated. The real question is, will we take time to do what is necessary for an abundant life and an abundant ministry, or will we try to get by without it?

So a couple of words of counsel are appropriate for our attending to the inner life. First, God never gives anyone too much to do. We do that to ourselves or allow others to do it to us. We may be showing our lack of confidence in God’s power and goodness, though possibly our models and our education have failed us. Second, the exercise of God’s power in ministry never, by itself, amends character, and it rarely makes up for our own foolishness. God’s power can be actively and wisely sought and received by us only as we seek to grow by grace into Christ-likeness. Power with Christ-like character is God’s unbeatable combination of triumphant life in the Kingdom of God on earth and forever.

Power without Christ’s character gives us our modern-day Sampsons and Sauls.

Knowing Christ through times spent away in solitude and silence will let our “joy be complete” (John 16:24). It will bring over us a pervasive sense of well-being, no matter what is happening around us. Hurry and the loneliness of leadership will be eliminated. We can allow the peace of God to sink deeply into our lives and extend through our relationships to others (see Matthew 10:12–13).

A young Christian who had been guided into the effective practice of solitude and silence had this to say:

The more I practice this discipline, the more I appreciate the strength of silence. The less I become skeptical and judgmental, the more I learn to accept the things I didn’t like about others, and the more I accept them as uniquely created in the image of God. The less I talk, the fuller are words spoken at an appropriate time. The more I value others, the more I serve them in small ways, and the more I enjoy and celebrate my life. The more I celebrate, the more I realize that God has been giving me wonderful things in my life, and the less I worry about my future. I will accept and enjoy what God is continuously giving to me. I think I am beginning to really enjoy God.

Experiencing God through the practice of connecting with Him via this discipline brings rich rewards.

Planning for Fullness of Life

Our discussion so far has been more illustrative than expository. Solitude and silence are absolutely basic in our responsibility to soul care. But they also open before us the whole area of disciplines for the spiritual life. It is vital for us to keep before us that there are tried and true ways we can pursue abundant life in Christ. These ways are often referred to as “spiritual disciplines.”5 We can and must incorporate these into our lives as completely reliable ways of personal soul care. There is no substitute for this.

A person could make a long list of such disciplines, drawing on the history of Christ’s people. The list would certainly include fasting, which when rightly practiced has incredible power for the transformation of character and for ministry. On this list would also be such practices as frugality, service, celebration, prayer (as a discipline), journaling, fellowship, accountability relationships, submission, confession, and many others.

There is no such thing as a complete list of the disciplines. Any activity that is in our power and enables us to achieve by grace what we cannot achieve by direct effort is a discipline of the spiritual life.

As we seek to know Christ by incorporating appropriate disciplines into our lives, we must keep in mind that they are not ways of earning merit. They also are not paths of suffering or self-torment. They are not heroic. They are not righteousness. But they are indispensable wisdom.

Once we learn that grace is not opposed to effort (action)—though it is opposed to earning (attitude)—the way is open for us to “work out” all that is involved in our salvation, not only “with fear and trembling” but also with the calm assurance that it is God who is at work in us to accomplish all of His goodwill (see Philippians 2:12–13).

When we have settled into a life of sensible disciplines with our ever-present Teacher, then Peter’s admonition (2 Peter 1:5–7) to add virtue to our faith, knowledge or understanding to our virtue, self-control to our knowledge, patience to our self-control, godliness to our patience, brotherly kindness to our godliness, and divine love (agape) to our brotherly kindness will prove to be a sensible plan for life. God will use this course of action to help others through our ministries as well.

“For if you do this,” Peter continues (verse 10), “you will never stumble.” In our walk with God in Christ there will be provided to us, from “his riches in glory” (Philippians 4:19), sweetness and strength of character, profundity of insight and understanding, and abundance of power to manifest the glory of God in life and in ministry—no matter the circumstances! And “entry into the eternal kingdom of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ will be richly provided for you” (2 Peter 1:11)—long before you die.

The Bible for the Postmodern World

NT Wright

How this has shaped our philosophy of ministry

The Scriptures, which are authoritative, inspired, and ‘breathed by God’ through His people, tell a cosmic redemption story of which we all are a part. In light of that, we aim to see each text in the Bible in connection with the overarching story of God’s redemption in and through the people of Israel, namely in the Israelite Jesus, the Christ and the Son of God.

1. Introduction: The Bible and the Modern World

I had better begin by defining my terms. Most of us are dimly aware that, as someone said recently, 'reality isn't what it used to be'. We are in the middle of enormous cultural changes within Western society, which leave many observers bewildered and many participants bemused. All the signs are that things are going to get more confusing, not less, and that the onset of the Millennium, which at one level had nothing to do with postmodernity and all that, made people on the one hand eager for and on the other hand fearful of great changes in the way we look at the world. The so-called 'Millennium bug', the nasty cold that all our computers were supposed to catch on January 1st 2000, is, at the level of contemporary mythology, a wonderfully symptomatic disease of postmodernity: explorations into cyberspace that forgot a ruthlessly modernist piece of equipment, so that when the new age dawned they, as with Cinderella on the stroke of midnight, may well have turned into pumpkins.

But, in case some feel left behind by all this jargon, what do we mean by 'modernity' and 'postmodernity', anyway? A quick thumbnail sketch is all we have time for. By the 'modern' world I mean, broadly, the western world from the eighteenth century to the present. The European Enlightenment at the intellectual level, and the Industrial Revolution at the social level, produced enormous changes both in how society worked, literally and metaphorically, and in how people thought. The large-scale shift from agrarian economies to factory economies had, of course, profound social consequences, of which some parts of New Zealand at least are, I am sure, very much aware. Those who learnt to think for themselves in the Enlightenment without fear of tradition, and then in the Industrial Revolution, those who learnt to make things for themselves rather than having to grow them, acquired a new confidence: they could take on the world.

Thus there grew up the modernist trinity: first, the confident individual who says, 'I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul.' Secondly, there was certainty about the world and about our objective knowledge of it. We can look at the world and know things, and that is objective knowledge. (Someone said facts, like telescopes and wigs for gentlemen, were an 18th century invention.) Thirdly, and perhaps above all, there grew up a new mythology of progress; the belief that the world was actually going somewhere, was progressing, and was about to reach its goal. Reality was then conveniently divided up into facts and values; facts were objective, values were subjective.

Or, in another of the great Enlightenment ways of carving up the world, there were the truths of reason 'out there' which the mind might be able to grasp, and the truths of the empirical world, the things that you could actually do business with. There was an ugly ditch, said the German philosopher Lessing, between the two of them. Split level reality, is what the modernist trinity purchased at considerable cost, and we have been paying that cost ever since.

The negative corollaries of all this are quite clear: the European world said we are no longer bound to traditional religions or ethics. We live in the real world, people said, and religion and ethics are a matter of private opinion. Part of the avowed aim of modernity was to get away from endless European wars of religion, by showing that religions were simply about what people did with their solitude, and that it was therefore absurd to fight one another about such beliefs. We have learnt to think for ourselves, and can use this ability to show up barbarity and superstition, to free ourselves from the tyranny of tradition.

It is this heady combination, I think, that people regularly refer to when they talk about 'living in the modern world.' Its positive achievements are obvious: modern medicine, communications, and hundreds of other social improvements. With a few exceptions, such as the Amish community in Pennsylvania, we all live off the modernist achievement. Its darker side is not always so well known, but they include of course the French Revolution (however much the aristocracy had asked for it, a movement of liberty, equality and brotherhood that kills thousands of people, including many of its own, to make the point is self-defeating, and hardly a good advertisement for its own principles).

Likewise, the myth of progress and enlightenment (which was there in Keats) created the context not only for Charles Darwin, but for that which followed in his wake, namely that Social Darwinism that made talk of eugenics, of racial purity, of selective breeding, and ultimately of final solutions, possible and acceptable, even apparently desirable, not only in Germany but also in Britain and elsewhere. And those whom the Enlightenment enabled to think of themselves as masters of their fate and captains of their souls were of course standing on the enslaved shoulders of millions of workers for whom the main effect of swapping agricultural serfdom for industrial wage-slavery was the loss of fresh air.

And, to pursue the political point, as Western society has levelled out in the last two hundred years, it has increasingly achieved this freedom at the expense of the rest of the world. The brave new reality of modernity, symbolised by the architecture, music, art and politics of the 1950s and 1960s, has looked increasingly hollow. This is the context for the rise of postmodernity.

Before looking at that phenomenon, though, let us think for a moment of what happened to the Bible within modernity. It was seen, of course, as part of the tradition that had to be overthrown. In a world where objective facts were what counted, the Bible was weighed in the modernist balance and found wanting. Since Progress, not Creation, was what counted, evolution must be right and special creation must be wrong. Genesis was therefore out of line. Since science studied the unalterable laws of nature, miracles were out of the question, and half the biblical account stood accused of fairy-tale fantasy.

When the so-called Jesus Seminar in California debated the resurrection of Jesus, and then went public with a press conference to announce that they had concluded that the resurrection didn't happen, as part of their evidence they brought in a young woman who worked in a mortuary in Los Angeles. She testified before the press that she worked all the time with dead bodies; and they always stayed dead! (This was supposed to be some kind of scientific revelation.) That is precisely part of the point of the Resurrection of Jesus-everyone else always stays dead when they die and Jesus didn't. (The incident illustrates that the Jesus Seminar is a relentlessly modernist movement, though not all its members are modernist.)

Since according to Reimarus 200 years ago, Jesus was actually a Galilean revolutionary (or whatever), the idea of his being 'the son of man', let alone the Son of God, let alone dying and rising for the sins of the world, must be the pious invention of the later church, on its way to the Constantinian enslavement of the world in religious superstition. (Notice the way in which the Enlightenment borrows at certain points the rhetoric of the Reformation, while firmly rejecting its spiritual certainties).

As for biblical ethics, within modernity they are quite simply out of date; an odd idea, one might suppose, to apply to an ethic, but there it is. Within this modernist context, the Bible is reduced in its public role to being read in the liturgy more as a piece of verbal wallpaper than anything dynamic, and in its private role to being read in order to inspire holy thoughts in individuals, which it might do, some would hope, irrespective of its truth-claims. So strong has been the rhetoric of the modernist worldview that any attempt, and there have of course been many, to show that these negative judgements were ill-founded-in my own field, for instance, I think of half the writers in the so-called 'Quest for the Historical Jesus'-has regularly been dismissed as attempting to recreate a bygone age. The tide of modernity is coming in, and anyone who questions it is a fundamentalist Canute.

2. The Transition to Postmodernity

But, as we all know, the modernist movement has been having an increasingly hard time of it in the last decade or two. Marx, Nietzsche and Freud, the masters of suspicion nurtured within the bosom of modernity, propounding their theories as 'scientific' and hence respectable within that frame of reference, have shaken to the core the modernist vision of reality and all that went with it. Again, the briefest of accounts must suffice here.

The context for the cultural change has again been a change in the methods and assumptions of the way we live. The recent British Telecom advertisement, which urged 'Why Not Change The Way We Work', was, like most good advertisements, telling people to do something they were already beginning to do or to want to do. The rhetoric says, instead of commuting boringly and expensively and pollutingly to offices in the middle of the city, why not stay at home in your comfortable home in the suburbs and do your entire work by phone and fax and modem?

The microchip has replaced the factory, the secretary, and a lot of other things and people as well; communities that depended on eighteenth-century ways of doing things have been reduced either to mass unemployment or to the status of theme parks. In the UK we have places where the inhabitants are now paid to dress up as miners, steelworkers or whatever and do to amuse the tourists what their forebears did to produce materials. (Your Christchurch trams are doing a miniature version of the same thing in a smaller way.) This phenomenon is certainly a major feature of the British landscape. Instead of producing and making things, entertainment is the order of the day.

This industrial and sociological change dovetails neatly into the changed vision of reality that is so characteristic of postmodernity. Instead of objective facts-hard-edged things, like lumps of coal or steel girders-we have impressions, attitudes and feelings, floating around in the cyberspace which all of us visit but few of us could describe accurately. At a conference in Dallas a couple of years ago I heard a speaker say enthusiastically, 'Today, attitudes are more important than facts-and we can document that!' A wonderful statement, trembling on the brink between modernity and postmodernity. We have learnt, in the title of a recent book, that 'Truth is stranger than it used to be'; that all truth-claims are made by somebody or some group, and that all persons and groups have agendas, which ingenious critics can smoke out with the help of street-level wisdom that goes back ultimately to Marx, Nietzsche or Freud.

This is, of course, what preoccupies western journalists, not only when they have a President on the run but all down the scale. I find myself thinking when I was reading an article in the London Times that actually most of our journalists, most of the time, at least in the UK only ever tell one story. The details change, but the story is the same; namely, that all the people who think they are somebody have all actually got feet of clay. They are not interested in positive stories.

Only in today's climate could the news that reforms at Westminster Abbey have quadrupled the size of the regular worshipping congregation, producing a nice problem about where to put the regular Christmas tree, be reported by The Times, on its front page, as a snub offered by the Dean to Her Majesty, the regular donor of the tree in question. Facts are not important; spin is everything. Reality is therefore no longer divided, as by modernity, into facts and values, or truths of reason and truths of science. Reality is whatever you make of it. You make it up as you go along.

If reality is thus being merrily deconstructed, the same is even more true for stories. One of the best- known aspects of postmodernity is the so-called 'death of the metanarrative', the critique applied to the great stories by which our lives have been ruled. (Metanarratives are the big stories, or the big pictures- the big story of modernity is the myth of progress.) Again, you can see this clearly at the political level. The post-war generation lived by the myth that world politics consisted of the Cold War, between the East and the West, and that once that got sorted out everything would be all right. When America basically won by default, Francis Fukuyama wrote a piece called 'The End of History?,' suggesting that there was now nothing much more to happen.

But we still had, and have, the Middle East. We still have Northern Ireland. We still have the Balkans, Rwanda, the Sudan, and many other places that no longer make it into the newspapers (the selectivity of the media is another major feature of postmodernity) but that form running sores in our post-Cold-War world. That big story was a lie. There is still all those little stories bubbling along, and we haven't a clue what to do about them. Precisely because postmodernity says my story matters, your story matters, everybody's story matters; so the Kosovo Albanians say this is our story, this is who we are, and the Serbs say, oh well, tough, this is our story, this is who we are. And crunch. The same is true in Northern Ireland and elsewhere. That is the political edge of postmodernity. And the modernist myth we lived in was just a cover up so that now that that has gone, our politicians haven't a clue what to do. One of the reasons is that very few of them have done either philosophy or religious studies at university. They thought that wasn't practical enough.

I had a wonderful moment in Oxford when a bright undergraduate, reading theology, who spent his penultimate long vacation in Zambia working with local churches and came back thrilled with what the churches were achieving, and with the task of theology as enabling the church to be the church in the two thirds world. He was determined to go back and get into development work as a theologian. At the end of the next term, the provost of the college where I was teaching, who had in his earlier life been an economic adviser to Harold Wilson's government, asked this young man, 'What do you want to do?' And when he said, 'I'm going to be a development worker in the third world,.' the provost asked, 'Why aren't you reading economics?' This lad shot back, 'Because theology is so much more relevant.' He was right. The economist hasn't got any answers.

The same is true, of course, with progress and enlightenment themselves: everybody's liberation turns out to be someone else's slavery, everybody's economic boom turns out to be at someone else's expense. So all our great stories, says postmodernity, our controlling narratives, are broken down into little stories: my story, your story, which may be 'authentic' in themselves ; this really is how we feel things, how we see things ; but which will almost certainly not impinge on one another. (This is fine, of course, if we live in cyberspace, where we can create our own virtual realities, accessed from our suburban sitting rooms, but it makes no sense at all where there are real lines drawn on real pieces of ground and human beings get shot if they cross them, or happen to be born the wrong side.)

This break-up of large narratives into little ones, philosophically, again goes back to Nietzsche, who offered collections of aphorisms as the appropriate way of describing the world. We can see the effect of this in some contemporary novels, which like 'The French Lieutenant's Woman,' offer a choice of endings according to the reader's mood, or which, like Julian Barnes' History of the World in Ten and a Half Chapters, offer no connected narrative at all, but only a succession of images, with, as he implies, the story like a raft adrift on an inhospitable ocean. It is interesting that in contemporary biblical studies some, not least those who have drunk deeply at the postmodern well, have preferred the hypothetical document 'Q' and the proto-gnostic document known as The Gospel of Thomas to the canonical gospels: precisely because they provide, after all, collections of detached sayings, instead of an over-arching story. The same thing is seen culturally in the sudden rise in the UK of the radio programme Classic FM, which offers snippets of music, only seldom indulging the older taste for complete symphonies, concerti, and operas.

And the bottom line of postmodernity is the deconstruction of the individual. No longer are we the masters of our fate, the captains of our soul. We are each a mass of floating signifiers, impulses and impressions, changing all the time, reconstructing ourselves as we go along according to the stimuli we receive, the spin that comes our way. The 'meaning' of a book, a poem, a work of art is not something inherent in the thing itself, but shifts according to the readers. Who is to say there is any objective meaning? If metanarratives are to be killed off, so are authors, whose intentions remain opaque behind the text-and is there even a text, anyway?

Equally, you can see what happens if you transpose the same confusion into other spheres, such as politics, marriage and sexuality, or education. This is the postmodern dilemma: reality ain't what it used to be, the great stories have let us down, we aren't feeling ourselves any more. We are left with a pick-and- mix culture, an if-it-feels-good-do-it culture, a whatever-turns-you-on culture: the hippiedom of the 1960s grown up, all dressed up for the millennium but with nowhere to go. At the personal level, the culture is symbolized by the portable personal stereo, creating for its wearer a private and constantly shifting world of sound; or more darkly the pornography industry, now providing safe telephone or cyberspace sex for those who find that real relationships with real human beings are too complex or messy. At the corporate level, in the UK we have the Greenwich Dome-a giant impressive space which nobody knows what to do with-it is, perhaps despite its inventors' intentions, a near-perfect symbol of this confused, shifting, ambitious yet rootless culture.

3. The Bible In the Postmodern World

What happens to the Bible within this culture I have so briefly described? I content myself with some notes on the way in which the postmodern climate has affected readings of the Bible; these, in good postmodern fashion, are random rather than systematic, but there is no time for the latter anyway.

Deconstructing the 'big story'

The first obvious thing is that the modernist critique of the Bible seems to be heightened. All great stories are suspect, so the Bible is not only politically incorrect because it told the wrong story (as the Enlightenment thought) but because it tells a story at all. Of course, not all the biblical books are in narrative form, but the majority are, and the present framing of the canon of scripture, and for that matter the various framings which the Jewish canon underwent, all emphasize an overarching narrative from a beginning to an end, with various subplots in between, which transcends, though includes, the messages of the individual books.

The Jewish canon, without the New Testament, means we are left with either Genesis to Malachi, (or in the way that it is organised in the Hebrew Bible, Genesis to 2 Chronicles) and it is a story in search of an ending. It ends with a sort of 'Yes, and what next?' The Christian canon as we have it is that same story, with the four gospels saying, in their very different ways, this is the climax of the story, and then the Epistles and the Apocalypse, saying 'Now this is what we do with it.' With the end of Revelation providing this wonderful image of the heavenly city coming down from heaven to earth, we don't end by going back to Eden, instead there is the climax of the story, with the human project, God's project, finished successfully. That's the big story.

And even when there are some books that don't have a big story, Proverbs, for instance, which after Ecclesiastes would perhaps be the most appealing book for a postmodernist, is held in its canonical context within a narrative framework of creation, exodus, promised land, monarchy, exile and restoration. The later books which draw on Proverbs, such as the Wisdom of Solomon, make explicit this narrative setting for detached wisdom, insisting that 'wisdom' is found and known supremely within the ongoing life and story of Israel.

But within postmodernity such narrative settings are suspect. There are other stories, we are told, and these ones may be oppressive. For example, the liberation theology of the 60's made such a big deal out of the exodus. That was the paradigm we were told for all liberations. Now in postmodernity people are realising that if you simply tell the exodus story what are you going to say to the Egyptians at one end and the Canaanites at the other? We are reminded, for instance, that the Jewish way of telling the story of the Middle East is now deeply damaging to the Palestinian communities who comprise most of the native Christians in that part of the world. And so on.

Deconstructing Biblical reality

The biblical view of reality is also, of course, under attack. Paul, we are told, saw things his way; but we should also bend over backwards to see things through the eyes of his opponents, who after all thought of themselves as Christians too, and may have had a point which Paul's rhetoric ' the literature of the conqueror, after all, is what survives' has masked from our sight. Graham Shaw's book, 'The Cost of Authority,' a polemic against Paul's supposed manipulation of his readers, is a classic postmodern protest against taking things at their face value. Shaw said, taking 2 Corinthians in particular, that Paul is not actually arguing passionately from the cross to a particular style of life, but cynically manipulating his readers and hearers with rhetoric which sounds very impressive, but is in fact, just another power trip. That is a classic postmodern deconstruction of a passage of the Bible.

The Biblical view of the whole of reality, in which Jewish-style creational monotheism is by and large taken for granted, is also under attack; some have argued that this rather one-dimensional and puritanical Deuteronomic viewpoint was imposed heavy-handedly upon various other viewpoints, scrunching the little stories of the cheerful and interesting semi-polytheists in Israel under the jackboot of a uniform, and subsequently canonized, monotheism. (The imagery is not chosen at random; memories, and imaginations, of the tyrannies of the first half of the twentieth century provide fertile soil for the protests of the second half. Postmodernism looks back to Hitler and Stalin and says, 'Modernism; that's what it always does.')

Deconstructing the Biblical view of the person

The biblical view of the person, likewise, will not do for the relentless postmodernist. Who are you as a human being? The Jew replies and the Christian replies: 'I am made in the image of God.' The postmodernist asks, 'What could it mean to be made in the image of a god when all god-stories are power- games?' Only that this, too, is a power-game, an example of speciesism in which humans project a glorified version of themselves on to a hypothetical cosmic reality and use this to legitimate their oppression and rape of the rest of their world. Thus postmodern liberation theology, standing shakily on one part of the biblical narrative (the exodus tradition), critiques other parts of the bible for their latent oppressive tendencies.

The hermeneutic which emerges from this kind of reading is itself very much characteristic of postmodernity's pick-and-mix, smorgasbord culture. You read the bits that resonate for you, you give them the spin that suits you, and you use them to subvert the bits you don't like. (When you hear someone preaching like that, that message carries no authority whatever. Allusions to the Bible within that framework are themselves in danger of being just power trips. If you can pick and mix, then all you are saying is, I agree with the Bible wherever it agrees with me.)

This is, in effect, the old 'canon within the canon', but with Marx, Nietzsche and Freud calling the tunes instead of Luther's doctrine of justification by faith. Of course, no serious postmodernist would give any shelf-space to any doctrine of authority; if doctrines are themselves suspect, how much more something so dehumanizing, so tyrannical, as a doctrine of authority, not least the authority of a sacred text? Read this way, the Bible becomes one cultural artefact among many, to be drawn upon when useful and dumped when not. One might in the last analysis read Iris Murdoch, Seamus Heaney, or Francois Lyotard. And many do.

4. The Bible For the PostModern World

But supposing we are not satisfied by having our use of the Bible conditioned by the present cultural climate? Supposing we are not convinced by the postmodern claims themselves, and not happy with the truncation of a lively and evidently fruitful Christian tradition according to the Procrustean bed of postmodern theory?

There are several good reasons why we might either argue this point, or, in postmodern style, simply feel it. For a start, there are the inner contradictions within postmodernism itself at the level of theory. To say 'all truth is relative' only works if the statement, that all truth is relative, is itself exempt from its own generalization. (All truths are relative, except the statement that all truths are relative!) It has been pointed out often enough that we are an extremely moralistic society, even though the issues we are moralistic about are quite different from before. The person who loses their temper if someone criticizes their alternative sexual lifestyle will be equally angry with the farmer in the UK who hunts foxes to protect his chickens. Even postmodernity's attack on all grand universal ideas becomes itself a grand universal idea; its polemic against all metanarratives becomes itself a new metanarrative, a new Jack the Giant- killer, in which the bold young underdog hero (postmodernism) slays boring old Giant Modernism. For all it deplores big stories, great metanarratives, postmodernity has one itself. The death of the metanarrative is itself a metanarrative. Because belief in postmodernity is itself, eschatological. It is about a history that is going somewhere and when it gets somewhere then it finds cataclysm. It is a secular version of the old Götterdämmerung epic, the 'Twilight of the Gods' as in Wagner's opera; this too is a story.

So, too, there are the interesting contradictions which appear within the postmodern agenda. The jazz musician Charlie Mingus declares that 'In my music, I'm trying to play the truth of what I am. The reason it's difficult is because I'm changing all the time.' Observe that fascinating contradiction between two of the great postmodern agendas: the need to tell my story, rather than anyone else's, allied confusingly to the constantly deconstructing self. You can't imagine that troubling Bach, Mozart or even, dare I say, Louis Armstrong. The serious postmodernist would say, of course, that that's precisely where we are at, and that anyone who wants consistency is asking for the moon. But are we bound to accept this verdict? Does the Bible, read for all it's worth and for all we're worth, have anything to say by way of reply? Yes it does.

In the Christian canonical Bible as we now have it we find, without much difficulty, a single over-arching narrative. It is the story which runs from creation to new creation, from Eden to the New Jerusalem. Though this is the backdrop and ultimate context, however, the great bulk of the story focuses quite narrowly on the fortunes of a single family in the Middle East, who are described as the chosen people through whom the creator God will act to rescue the whole world from its plight.

The choice of the particular family does not imply that the creator has lost interest in other human beings, or in the cosmos at large; on the contrary, it is because he wishes to address them with his active and rescuing purposes that he has chosen this one family in the first place. But the Jewish story thus highlighted contains a puzzle at its heart. The chosen people are in themselves in need of rescue. (It is like Russian dolls. Inside the creation story is the Jewish story, and inside that is the Jesus story.) Even if we were to rearrange the Old Testament Canon - adopting, for instance, the normal Jewish order in which the Prophets precede the Writings, so that the Canon ends not with Malachi but with 2 Chronicles - we would still find ourselves reading a story in search of an ending, a story in which the people chosen to bring the creator's healing to the world are themselves in need of rescue and restoration.

The early Christian writings we call the New Testament declare with one voice that the overarching story reached its climax in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, whom the early Christians believed was the promised Messiah of Israel. In Jesus the chosen people had found their rescue and restoration, though their self-appointed guardians and spokespersons had not seen it that way. And now the point. Israel's Messiah was always supposed to be the Lord of the whole world, so the idea that Jesus is the Lord of the world is not a funny early Christian idea wedged on to Jesus, and not really fitting; it grows right out of first century Jewish messianism itself. His followers then saw themselves as royal heralds, claiming the whole world for its new King.

Although it is often (rightly) said that the early Christians saw themselves as living in the last days, it is even more important to stress that they saw themselves as living in the first days, the beginning of the new creation that dawned when Jesus emerged from the tomb on Easter morning. They saw themselves, in other words, as living within a story in which the decisive event had already occurred and now needed to be implemented; even if we were to ignore Acts for the moment, that is the implicit narrative which informs and undergirds all the epistles. The four canonical gospels, in their very different ways, are all only comprehensible if we understand them to be telling how the story of God and Israel reached its climax in Jesus, and telling this story moreover from the perspective of those now charged with putting this into effect in and for all the world.

Even if we were to rearrange the New Testament Canon, this implicit story-line would still emerge at every point. It is only in the detached, aphoristic sayings- collections such as Thomas, or the hypothetically reconstructed 'Q', that the narrative perspective is lost, and Jesus is seen simply as a teacher of a strange and subversive wisdom, perhaps even of a religious gnosis, in which the whole story of Israel and the creation is lost sight of in favour of a private religious experience or an individual protest against the ills of society.

Once we grasp this point, we can see easily enough that the interface between the Bible and our own contemporary culture still bears a good deal of family likeness to the interface between early Christianity and its surrounding milieu. When we construe the Bible, in its own terms, as the true metanarrative, the strange history of the creator and the cosmos, the covenant God and the covenant people, the God who becomes human and dies for the sins of the world, the God who breathes his own breath into his followers and equips them to implement his victory in the world-when we read the Bible like this, we discover that this great metanarrative challenges and subverts several other worldviews. (God forgive us, within modernity, when often we as Christians thought that the way to use the Bible to address the world was to abstract large chunky doctrines from the Bible and hurl them at the heads of people who believed large chunky modernist doctrines. You have to deconstruct the Bible in order to do that. Much better to let the Bible be what it is, which is a story, and stories are far more subversive and damaging to other alternative worldviews than large chunky doctrines ever were, which are basically shorthand versions of stories.)

Challenges of the Biblical metanarrative

Let me very quickly sketch out five ways in which this is so, laying foundations thereby for some of the points I want to make in my final section. Here as elsewhere, I am of course cutting several much longer stories very short indeed.

To begin with, the biblical metanarrative challenges paganism, and our neo-pagan world. From creation to recreation, from the call of Abraham to the New Jerusalem which comes down from heaven to earth, what the Bible offers presents itself as the truth of which paganism is the parody. Paganism sees the glory of creation, and worships creation instead of the creator. The grown-up version of this is of course pantheism, whether Stoicism in the ancient world or the varieties of New Age belief in the contemporary world. The mirror-image of this is dualism, the belief that creation is the work of a lesser god or indeed an anti-god.

One of the remarkable things about the Bible is the way in which, from Genesis to Revelation, these options are systematically refused and undermined. There is one God, the creator; creation is good, but it is not God; the reality of evil in the world is not to be explained in terms either of an evil creation or an evil god, but is seen as an intrusion into the good creation, which is dealt with through the story of the chosen family. This biblical challenge to paganism, and indeed to dualism, is of course huge and basic; I presuppose it in all that follows.

Second, the biblical metanarrative challenges and subverts the worldview of philosophical Idealism, in which historical events are mere contingent trivia, and reality is to be found in a set of abstractions, whether timeless truths or absolute values. Any attempt to see the biblical stories as simply illustrations of such timeless truths or absolute values is confronted by the biblical text itself, in which the opposite is the case: the love of God, the justice of God, the forgiveness of God, and so forth are invoked not to draw attention away from the historical sphere but to give it meaning and depth. (The love of God, for example, is not just an abstract idea; it happened on the cross. The forgiveness of God is not just a nice theory; it what happened when Jesus was hanging there with nails in his hands and feet.) When Israel invokes the justice of her God, what she wants is to be liberated from her oppressive enemies. When the early Christians spoke of the love of God, they were referring to something that had happened in recent history, which had changed the way the real world-not just their real world, but the real world-actually was. If they weren't referring to this, they were, quite literally, talking nonsense.

This means, third, that the biblical metanarrative also challenges and subverts the non-storied aphoristic world both of the Gospel of Thomas and of contemporary postmodernity. (That is very relevant to contemporary debates about Jesus, not least with those who are most anxious in our own day to deconstruct what they see as the oppressive narrative and theology of the canonical gospels. They end up with a Jesus who functioned like a wandering Cynic, or perhaps a gnostic, whose whole raison-d'être was simply to utter striking, paradoxical and challenging aphorisms, challenging the existing socio-cultural order but offering simply a do-it-yourself way of constructing either one's relation to the outer world or one's inner religious world.)

This is, of course, the reflection (on the screen of historiography) of the postmodern emphasis on deconstructing all metanarratives, and on the individual doing his or her own thing. In neither case does this reconstructed Jesus belong within a story; in neither case does he announce the Kingdom of God as a new fact bursting in upon the public world. Ironically, the attempt to deconstruct Jesus leaves one with a sort of secularized version of the private world of the dualistic pietist, in which Jesus and the Bible only tell me about myself, not at all about public reality.

The biblical metanarrative challenges all such attempts at deconstruction. It insists that there is a public world; it acknowledges that there are all sorts of problems in this public world, including the problem of knowledge itself; but, instead of allowing the problems to dictate the terms, ending with deconstruction, it insists that the problems have been addressed and defeated by the Creator himself. (This is not, please note, a Christian version of the modernist rejection of postmodernity. That is an ever-present temptation

for some types of Christianity, and is I believe to be resisted.) The biblical metanarrative invites us to go through the postmodern critique of modernity, Christian modernity included, and out the other side into a new grasping of reality, a post-post-modernity.

Fourth, the biblical metanarrative challenged, from the very beginning, all pagan political power- structures. (This is in a sense one application of my first point.) This, indeed, is implicit in the very meaning of the word 'gospel,' both in its Old Testament context, where Isaiah spoke of the good news that YHWH had overthrown the idols of Babylon and thus had broken Babylon's grip on Israel, and in its Greco-Roman context, where 'gospel' referred to the good news of the birth or accession of an emperor. The New Testament, firmly rooted in the Jewish world of Isaiah, addressed the Greco-Roman context with the news that Jesus of Nazareth was the new, true emperor of the world, whose accession to supreme power was the good, liberating, healing news for which the whole creation had been waiting. This was either a statement of public truth or it was a statement of public falsehood; the one thing it could never be was a statement of a private truth, of 'how I feel', a belief which involved the speaker's religious interiority but nothing else.

This is actually inherent in the Jewish context from which the essential theme derives. When Jesus spoke of the Kingdom of God he must have meant, in the Jewish world of his day, a reality which would challenge decisively the kingship of the existing authorities; that is (of course) part of the explanation, both historical and theological, of the crucifixion. When Paul spoke of the Lordship of Jesus, he was using for Jesus language which explicitly and obviously evoked the Lordship of Caesar. There cannot be two Lords of the world.

From a Jewish point of view, the biblical metanarrative challenges all pagan power, deconstructing it in terms of its underlying idolatry and dehumanization; in its place it offers the kingdom of God as promise and hope. From the Christian point of view, the fuller biblical metanarrative makes the same challenge, but now with the sharp edge that on the cross the one true God has in Christ, as Paul said in Colossians, defeated all principalities and powers, and led them in his triumphal procession, as a bedraggled, beaten bunch of has-beens. In their place is one who says, in a way that postmodernity would never even dream of, 'all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.' (Do you see the point of who it is who is saying that? If you or I said that, in postmodernity it would be another power trip. But when it is the crucified Jesus who is saying it, we know that it was not a power trip. It was about love.)

Fifth, the biblical metanarrative-in which the story of God and the world develops, takes shape, and points to or reaches a climax-challenges all rival eschatologies. This is so whether the biblical metanarrative in question is Jewish or Christian. Consider, for instance, the various political eschatologies which are advanced from time to time: the belief, held by some in Augustus' court, that with the establishment of the Roman Empire a new Golden Age had begun; or the way in which the story of the development of democracy is told as though the establishment of one-man-one-vote, and then one-person-one-vote, or even dare I say it, proportional representation, would usher in the new Golden Age. Part of the reason for the deep cynicism of Tacitus, Juvenal and others at the end of the first century, and for the deep cynicism of many commentators at the end of the twentieth, was and is that the Golden Age has let us down. We pressed all the buttons and the toy didn't work. That's the point about Diana's death. People said Diana was a modern princess; but she wasn't, she was a postmodern princess. She had lived in the 'great dream;' she had found her Prince Charming, she had everything going for her, and the dream let her down. That's why in Western culture she was an icon of where we are in postmodernity.

Consider, also, the great eschatological claim represented both by the word 'Renaissance' and by the word 'Enlightenment.' Whoever invented the idea of the Middle Ages was, in retrospect, one of the most powerful people in Western history. Whoever invented the idea that humankind had 'come of age' in the eighteenth century was equally powerful, if not more so. (People didn't sit there during the Middle Ages saying, 'It's a bit boring in the Middle Ages, I wonder when they are going to end.' It was a later invention by someone telling a three stage story, and guess where he was; in the New Age, wasn't he?) The Enlightenment did exactly the same thing. (Before the Enlightenment people didn't sit around saying, 'It is rather dark, isn't it?') The Enlightenment was not merely a return to a previous cultural golden age: now, all history was to be seen as leading up to the great climax of technological advance, historical and theological scepticism, political revolution and so forth, which were then to be implemented to dispel the long night of pre-enlightenment superstition and slavery. And these are rival eschatologies to Christianity, because Christianity tells a story about the world reaching its climax in Jesus of Nazareth. That is hard to believe as we realise that the world isn't actually a better place. Paul said that the world had reached its climax in Jesus Christ-he was in prison much of the time so that he knew the world was not a better place! But he said God has already in Christ defeated the powers, and we are now working towards the implementation of that. That is too difficult for many, so they tell alternative eschatological stories. If the Biblical story is told truly, it will subvert the alternative stories. But to tell it truly, you have to be living it.

Again, when eschatology comes and goes and things don't after all get better, you have the contemporary equivalent of that great twentieth-century myth about the first century, the so-called 'delay of the Parousia.'. Before the eschatological climax is reached, you are hoping that it will happen soon; if you believe that it has already happened, hope consists in the belief that the climax, the great victory, the great enlightenment, will soon be fully implemented. When everything is done to implement it and still things haven't got better-as has happened, more or less, in the Western world of the twentieth century-what you get is a failure of hope; which is, more or less, where our culture is right now. Nobody in America really thought that by impeaching Clinton, or not impeaching him, things were actually going to get significantly better. Not many people in Britain, I think, supposed that under New Labour we would do much more than rearrange the deck-chairs on a rudderless vessel in heavy seas. We have, as I said, the world of Götterdämmerung: the gods have let us down, and all we can now do is to play.

The biblical eschatology challenges all such rival eschatologies, with the strange news that world history actually reached its climax in the first century, in the Middle East, with the death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, the Jewish Messiah, the Lord of the world. This is of course found by many today to be quite incredible, but this has always been because of the presence of rival and powerful counter- eschatologies. Now that these have collapsed or are collapsing, it is up to those who read the Bible and take it seriously to set about living by its eschatological message and so forming the community that cannot be deconstructed, because it is a community of love. This leads me to the final, and climactic, things I want to say today.

A Biblical Challenge to Postmodernity

Let me take the three elements of postmodernity and suggest what a reading of the Bible might have to say at each point.

a. A Biblical metanarrative of love. I have already stressed that the Bible as a whole, as well as in most of its parts, presents us with a large, overarching narrative. Postmodernity is bound to object: metanarratives are controlling, dominating, and we all know the ways in which this story too has been used politically, socially and personally to bolster this or that power-trip. But the Biblical metanarrative itself resists being abused in this fashion, because it is the story of love. The Biblical metanarrative offers itself as the one story which cannot be deconstructed, to which the criticisms of Marx, Nietzsche and Freud are not relevant. (Look at Jesus on the cross-was he doing that for money? Was he doing that for power? Was he doing it for sex? It was an act of love.) The story speaks from first to last of a God who did not need to create, but who did so out of overflowing and generous love. It speaks of a God who did not need to redeem and recreate, but did so as the greatest possible act of self-giving love.

The problem is, of course, that our telling of this story has been, and our living of the story as Christians, not least as modernist Western Christians, has often been, God help us, a power-play of our own. (Those of us who live and work within an established church feel that problem even more acutely, believe me.) But the Biblical metanarrative itself is not a controlling narrative: it is a self-giving narrative. Those who read it and are formed by it have to become a self-giving community in order for it to make sense. It is not a power-play; it is a love-ploy. The fact that postmodernity cannot recognise love, but insists on deconstructing it, is its Achilles heel.

Somehow if we are to address contemporary culture with the message of the Bible we must get used to combining two things which are normally at opposite poles-humility and truthtelling. For us, humility intellectually has come to mean 'I would want to argue x, y or z'; in other words, I wouldn't go so far as actually to assert this, because that might offend you. And truthtelling has come to mean arrogance: there are two ways of looking at things-the right way, and your way. Somehow we have to tell the truth but to tell it as the liberating story, the healing story, the true story. And of course, as you might expect me to say, the best way we can do this is by telling, again and again, in story and symbol and acted drama, the biblical story, focussed on the story of Jesus himself, the true story of the Word made Flesh. (That is why the great symbol at the heart of Christianity is the symbol of the eucharist; it is the symbol of that story.)

b. Biblical promises for the deconstructed self. If we are telling and living the true story we will discover, within it, that it contains promises for deconstructed selves. We Christians shouldn't actually be afraid of deconstruction; it points in its own way to the truth that Jews and Christians and many others regularly acknowledge, that all our righteousness is as filthy rags. Of course if we are arrogant modernist lonely individuals (captains of our fate, and masters of our soul) we need to die with Christ, and if deconstruction is a rather 'through-a-glass-darkly'way of pointing us to that, so be it. But what postmodernism never notices is that after death comes resurrection: the truth of baptism is precisely the truth of new life the other side of death. Here we need, I believe, to develop as an essential part of the engagement between the Bible and contemporary culture a better and richer theology of worship, the worship of the true and living God, whereby we are renewed in the image and likeness of God; renewed, coming up the other side after deconstruction. Those who tell this true story are invited to be not, lonely and Enlightenment individuals, there are many parts of the church still, which are run by and encourage Christian versions of the lonely Enlightenment individual. it's a dangerous way to go. No, resurrected selves in community is what we are called to be.

c. A Biblical way of knowing. And thirdly, in this life, we can and must think in terms of reconstituted reality and genuine knowing. Yes, we must take on board the full postmodern critique of those arrogant Enlightenment epistemologies (ie theories of knowledge) in which a supposed objectivism was actually a cloak for political and social power and control. (Look how the empires of the 18th and 19th century made a way on the back of technology etc. We know what the world is, so we are just going to take it over and use it for our ends.)

But when all is said and done it is part of the true human task, given in Genesis and reaffirmed in Christ, that we should know God, and one another and the world, not with a spurious hard objectivity as if we were flies on the wall, but with a genuinely human knowledge. Paul speaks of being 'renewed in knowledge after the image of the creator.'

However, instead of the normal contemporary accounts of knowing, which underlie so much current discourse, I believe we have to work towards a better one. In modernity, normal current accounts of knowing privilege the would-be objective scientific knowing: test-tube epistemology, if you like. Every step away from this is seen as a step into obscurity, fuzziness, and subjectivism, reaching its peak in metaphysics. Instead, I believe that a biblical account of 'knowing' should follow philosophers such as Bernard Lonergan, a great Catholic philosopher of the last generation, and take love as the basic mode of knowing, with the love of God as the highest and fullest sort of knowing that there is, and working, so to speak, down from there.

The thing about love is, of course, that when I love I affirm and celebrate the differentness of the beloved; not to do so is of course not love at all, but lust. But, at the same time, when I love I am not a detached observer, the fly-on-the-wall of objectivist epistemology. I am passionately and compassionately involved with the life and being of that-whether a thing, a person, or God himself-which I am loving. Do you see what this does? In other words, though I am fully involved in the process of knowing, this does not mean that there is nothing which is being known; or, to put it the other way, though I am really talking about a reality outside my own mental state, this does not mean I am a detached observer. I believe we can and must give an account of human knowing for the post-postmodern world which will amount to what we might call an epistemology of love.

Living out the story

I hope you notice what I have just done. I have tried to give an account of narrative, selfhood and knowing which embodies and reflects the biblical metanarrative itself. I have suggested, in other words, that it is our task not just to tell but to live out the story; that the model of God's self-giving love in creation, covenant, judgment, mercy, incarnation, atonement, resurrection, wind and fire, and ultimately recreation must be the basis for our self-understanding, our life, and our vocation.

And when we do this, we discover, I believe, that the reality of which we are dimly aware, but which our ontologies, pre-modern, modern and postmodern find slipping through their fingers, is best described in the biblical language of heaven and earth, created, sustained, redeemed and to be renewed by the living God known in Jesus and in the Spirit.

The Bible does not tell us to ignore postmodernity and carry on as though modernity were still what mattered. Far from it. The Bible tells a story which will lead us through postmodernity's necessary critique of modernity and on, through, out the other side. And all this leads me to what I most passionately want to say today.

I believe we have an enormous opportunity, here and now, for serious and joyful Christian mission to the post-postmodern world. There are those who seem to yearn for the days when things were nice and simple, when a supposed biblical gospel could be preached to people who were, in effect, unsuccessful Pelagians, trying to pull themselves up by their moral bootstraps. But we can't go back to the 1950s. (Someone said of the church that it is now finally and gloriously ready for the 1950s! God help us-we have got to be ready for 2020 and 2040, and teaching our young people how to enage with those issues, and not to preach to the world we grew up in.) Nor, however, can or should we succumb to postmodernity itself, though it may well be that for some people and groups a time of penitence, in which modernist nonsense can be purged and rethinking can begin, might be a good idea.

We live, as I have said, at a time of cultural crisis. At the moment I don't hear anyone pointing a way forward out of the postmodern morass; some people are still trying to put up the shutters and live in a pre-modern world, many are clinging to modernism for all they can, and many are deciding that living off the pickings of the garbage-heap of postmodernity is the best they can do. It isn't simply that the Bible, and the Christian gospel, offers us a religious option which can outdo other religious options, can fill more effectively the slot labelled 'religion' on the cultural and social smorgasbord. It is, rather, that the Bible and the Christian gospel which it offers us point the way to something which should have meant a celebration of the Millennium with the Christian meaning it ought to have had.

They point us, and indeed urge us, to be at the leading edge of the whole culture, articulating in story and music and art and philosophy and education and poetry and politics and theology and even, heaven help us, biblical studies, a worldview which will mount the historically rooted Christian challenge to both modernity and postmodernity, leading the way into the post-postmodern world with joy and humour and gentleness and good judgment and true wisdom.

I believe we face the question: if not now, then when? And if we are grasped by this vision, we may also hear the question: if not us, then who? And if the Bible is not the key book for us to have at our elbow as we go to this task, then what is?

I end with a parable. Last autumn my wife and I went to Paris for a conference, and in a spare moment visited the Louvre for the first time. There, a disappointment awaited us. The Mona Lisa, which every good tourist goes to goggle at, is now not only as enigmatic as she has always been. One has always been faced with the question, what that smile means, and whether we are really only reading our own meanings into it. (A classic epistemological problem.) But now, following a violent attack, she has been placed behind thick protective glass, so that all attempts to look into those famous eyes are befogged by glimpses of other eyes, one's own and dozens of others, reflected back from the protective casing. Ah, says Postmodernity: that's what all of life is like. All that you think you see is really a reflection of something in your own mind. But is it? With the Bible as my evidence, I believe that there is such a thing as a love, a knowing, a hermeneutic of trust rather than suspicion, which is what we most surely need in the twenty- first century:

Let me leave you with some lines I wrote the next day after the visit to the Louvre;

A Paris newcomer, I'd never been

Followed by those dark eyes, bewitched by that Half-smile. Meaning, like beauty, teases, dancing In the soft spaces between portrait, artist,

And the beholder's eye. But now, twice shy,

She hides behind a veil of wood and glass;

And we who peer and pry into her world

See cameras, schoolchildren, other eyes,

Other disturbing smiles. So, now, we view

The world, each other, God, through prison glass: Suspicion, fear, mistrust-projections of

Our own anxieties. Is all our knowing

Only reflection? Let me trust, and see,

And let love's eyes pursue, and set me free.

Life Together

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

How this has shaped our philosophy of ministry

The Christian life is intended to be lived in community. Furthermore, our corporate Christian witness is just as important as the witness of an individual.

“How very good and pleasant it is when kindred live together in unity!” (Ps. 133:1) In what follows we will take a look at several directions and principles that the Holy Scriptures give us for life together [gemeinsame Leben] under the Word.

The Christian cannot simply take for granted the privilege of living among other Christians. Jesus Christ lived in the midst of his enemies. In the end all his disciples abandoned him. On the cross he was all alone, surrounded by criminals and the jeering crowds. He had come for the express purpose of bringing peace to the enemies of God. So Christians, too, belong not in the seclusion of a cloistered life but in the midst of enemies. There they find their mission, their work. “To rule is to be in the midst of your enemies. And whoever will not suffer this does not want to be part of the rule of Christ; such a person wants to be among friends and sit among the roses and lilies, not with the bad people but the religious people. O you blasphemers and betrayers of Christ! If Christ had done what you are doing, who would ever have been saved?” (Luther).

“Though I scattered them among the nations, yet in far countries they shall remember me” (Zech. 10:9). According to God’s will, the Christian church is a scattered people, scattered like seed “to all the kingdoms of the earth” (Deut. 28:25). That is the curse and its promise. God’s people must live in distant lands among the unbelievers, but they will be the seed of the kingdom of God in all the world.

“I will … gather them in. For I have redeemed them, … and they shall … return” (Zech. 10:8–9). When will that happen? It has happened in Jesus Christ, who died “to gather into one the dispersed children of God” (John 11:52), and ultimately it will take place visibly at the end of time when the angels of God will gather God’s elect from the four winds, from one end of heaven to the other (Matt. 24:31). Until then, God’s people remain scattered, held together in Jesus Christ alone, having become one because they remember him in the distant lands, spread out among the unbelievers.

Thus in the period between the death of Christ and the day of judgment, when Christians are allowed to live here in visible community with other Christians, we have merely a gracious anticipation of the end time. It is by God’s grace that a congregation is permitted to gather visibly around God’s word and sacrament in this world. Not all Christians partake of this grace. The imprisoned, the sick, the lonely who live in the diaspora, the proclaimers of the gospel in heathen lands stand alone. They know that visible community is grace. They pray with the psalmist: “I went with the throng, and led them in procession to the house of God, with glad shouts and songs of thanksgiving, a multitude keeping festival” (Ps. 42:5). But they remain alone in distant lands, a scattered seed according to God’s will. Yet what is denied them as a visible experience they grasp more ardently in faith. Hence “in the Spirit on the Lord’s Day” (Rev. 1:10) the exiled disciple of the Lord, John the author of the Apocalypse, celebrates the worship of heaven with its congregations in the loneliness of the Island of Patmos. He sees the seven lampstands that are the congregations, the seven stars that are the angels of the congregations, and in the midst and above it all, the Son of Man, Jesus Christ, in his great glory as the risen one. He strengthens and comforts John by his word. That is the heavenly community in which the exile participates on the day of his Lord’s resurrection.

The physical presence of other Christians is a source of incomparable joy and strength to the believer. With great yearning the imprisoned apostle Paul calls his “beloved son in the faith,” Timothy, to come to him in prison in the last days of his life. He wants to see him again and have him near. Paul has not forgotten the tears Timothy shed during their final parting (2 Tim. 1:4). Thinking of the congregation in Thessalonica, Paul prays “night and day … most earnestly that we may see you face to face” (1 Thess. 3:10). The aged John knows his joy in his own people will only be complete when he can come to them and speak to them face to face instead of using paper and ink (2 John 12). The believer need not feel any shame when yearning for the physical presence of other Christians, as if one were still living too much in the flesh. A human being is created as a body; the Son of God appeared on earth in the body for our sake and was raised in the body. In the sacrament the believer receives the Lord Christ in the body, and the resurrection of the dead will bring about the perfected community of God’s spiritual-physical creatures. Therefore, the believer praises the Creator, the Reconciler and the Redeemer, God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, for the bodily presence of the other Christian.

The prisoner, the sick person, the Christian living in the diaspora recognizes in the nearness of a fellow Christian a physical sign of the gracious presence of the triune God. In their loneliness, both the visitor and the one visited recognize in each other the Christ who is present in the body. They receive and meet each other as one meets the Lord, in reverence, humility, and joy. They receive each other’s blessings as the blessing of the Lord Jesus Christ. But if there is so much happiness and joy even in a single encounter of one Christian with another, what inexhaustible riches must invariably open up for those who by God’s will are privileged to live in daily community life with other Christians! Of course, what is an inexpressible blessing from God for the lonely individual is easily disregarded and trampled under foot by those who receive the gift every day. It is easily forgotten that the community of Christians is a gift of grace from the kingdom of God, a gift that can be taken from us any day—that the time still separating us from the most profound loneliness may be brief indeed. Therefore, let those who until now have had the privilege of living a Christian life together with other Christians praise God’s grace from the bottom of their hearts. Let them thank God on their knees and realize: it is grace, nothing but grace, that we are still permitted to live in the community of Christians today.

The measure with which God gives the gift of visible community is varied. Christians who live dispersed from one another are comforted by a brief visit of another Christian, a prayer together, and another Christian’s blessing. Indeed, they are strengthened by letters written by the hands of other Christians. Paul’s greetings in his letters written in his own hand were no doubt tokens of such community. Others are given the gift on Sundays of the community of the worship service. Still others have the privilege of living a Christian life in the community of their families. Before their ordination young seminarians receive the gift of a common life with their brothers for a certain length of time. Among serious Christians in congregations today there is a growing desire to meet together with other Christians during the midday break from work for life together under the Word. Life together is again being understood by Christians today as the grace that it is, as the extraordinary aspect, the “roses and lilies” of the Christian life (Luther).

Christian community means community through Jesus Christ and in Jesus Christ. There is no Christian community that is more than this, and none that is less than this. Whether it be a brief, single encounter or the daily community of many years, Christian community is solely this. We belong to one another only through and in Jesus Christ.

What does that mean? It means, first, that a Christian needs others for the sake of Jesus Christ. It means, second, that a Christian comes to others only through Jesus Christ. It means, third, that from eternity we have been chosen in Jesus Christ, accepted in time, and united for eternity.

First, Christians are persons who no longer seek their salvation, their deliverance, their justification in themselves, but in Jesus Christ alone. They know that God’s Word in Jesus Christ pronounces them guilty, even when they feel nothing of their own guilt, and that God’s Word in Jesus Christ pronounces them free and righteous, even when they feel nothing of their own righteousness. Christians no longer live by their own resources, by accusing themselves and justifying themselves, but by God’s accusation and God’s justification. They live entirely by God’s Word pronounced on them, in faithful submission to God’s judgment, whether it declares them guilty or righteous. The death and life of Christians are not situated in a self-contained isolation. Rather, Christians encounter both death and life only in the Word that comes to them from the outside, in God’s Word to them. The Reformers expressed it by calling our righteousness an “alien righteousness” [“fremde Gerechtigkeit”], a righteousness that comes from outside of us (extra nos). They meant by this expression that Christians are dependent on the Word of God spoken to them. They are directed outward to the Word coming to them. Christians live entirely by the truth of God’s Word in Jesus Christ. If they are asked “where is your salvation, your blessedness, your righteousness?,” they can never point to themselves. Instead, they point to the Word of God in Jesus Christ that grants them salvation, blessedness, and righteousness. They watch for this Word wherever they can. Because they daily hunger and thirst for righteousness, they long for the redeeming Word again and again. It can only come from the outside. In themselves they are destitute and dead. Help must come from the outside; and it has come and comes daily and anew in the Word of Jesus Christ, bringing us redemption, righteousness, innocence, and blessedness. But God put this Word into the mouth of human beings so that it may be passed on to others. When people are deeply affected by the Word, they tell it to other people. God has willed that we should seek and find God’s living Word in the testimony of other Christians, in the mouths of human beings. Therefore, Christians need other Christians who speak God’s Word to them. They need them again and again when they become uncertain and disheartened because, living by their own resources, they cannot help themselves without cheating themselves out of the truth.

They need other Christians as bearers and proclaimers of the divine word of salvation. They need them solely for the sake of Jesus Christ. The Christ in one’s own heart is weaker than the Christ in the word of another Christian. The heart in one’s heart is uncertain; the Word is sure. At the same time, this also clarifies that the goal of all Christian community is to encounter one another as bringers of the message of salvation. As such, God allows Christians to come together and grants them community. Their community is based only on Jesus Christ and this “alien righteousness.” Therefore, we may now say that the community of Christians springs solely from the biblical and reformation message of the justification of human beings through grace alone. The longing of Christians for one another is based solely on this message.

Second, a Christian comes to others only through Jesus Christ. Among human beings there is strife. “He is our peace” (Eph. 2:14), says Paul of Jesus Christ. In him, broken and divided humanity has become one. Without Christ there is discord between God and humanity and between one human being and another. Christ has become the mediator who has made peace with God and peace among human beings. Without Christ we would not know God; we could neither call on God nor come to God. Moreover, without Christ we would not know other Christians around us; nor could we approach them. The way to them is blocked by one’s own ego [das eigene Ich]. Christ opened up the way to God and to one another. Now Christians can live with each other in peace; they can love and serve one another; they can become one. But they can continue to do so only through Jesus Christ. Only in Jesus Christ are we one; only through him are we bound together. He remains the one and only mediator throughout eternity.

Third, when God’s Son took on flesh, he truly and bodily, out of pure grace, took on our being, our nature, ourselves. This was the eternal decree of the triune God. Now we are in him. Wherever he is, he bears our flesh, he bears us. And, where he is, there we are too—in the incarnation, on the cross, and in his resurrection. We belong to him because we are in him. That is why the Scriptures call us the body of Christ. But if we have been elected and accepted with the whole church in Jesus Christ before we could know it or want it, then we also belong to Christ in eternity with one another. We who live here in community with Christ will one day be with Christ in eternal community. Those who look at other Christians should know that they will be eternally united with them in Jesus Christ. Christian community means community through and in Jesus Christ. Everything the Scriptures provide in the way of directions and rules for Christians’ life together rests on this presupposition.

Now concerning love of the brothers and sisters, you do not need to have anyone write to you, for you yourselves have been taught by God to love one another.… But we urge you, beloved, to do so more and more” (1 Thess. 4:9f.). It is God’s own undertaking to teach such love. All that human beings can add is to remember this divine instruction and the exhortation to excel in it more and more. When God had mercy on us, when God revealed Jesus Christ to us as our brother, when God won our hearts by God’s own love, our instruction in Christian love began at the same time. When God was merciful to us, we learned to be merciful with one another. When we received forgiveness instead of judgment, we too were made ready to forgive each other. What God did to us, we then owed to others. The more we received, the more we were able to give; and the more meager our love for one another, the less we were living by God’s mercy and love. Thus God taught us to encounter one another as God has encountered us in Christ. “Welcome one another, therefore, just as Christ has welcomed you, for the glory of God” (Rom. 15:7).

In this way the one whom God has placed in common life with other Christians learns what it means to have brothers and sisters. “Brothers and sisters … in the Lord,” Paul calls his congregation (Phil. 1:14). One is a brother or sister to another only through Jesus Christ. I am a brother or sister to another person through what Jesus Christ has done for me and to me; others have become brothers and sisters to me through what Jesus Christ has done for them and to them. The fact that we are brothers and sisters only through Jesus Christ is of immeasurable significance. Therefore, the other who comes face to face with me earnestly and devoutly seeking community is not the brother or sister with whom I am to relate in the community. My brother or sister is instead that other person who has been redeemed by Christ, absolved from sin, and called to faith and eternal life. What persons are in themselves as Christians, in their inwardness and piety, cannot constitute the basis of our community, which is determined by what those persons are in terms of Christ. Our community consists solely in what Christ has done to both of us. That not only is true at the beginning, as if in the course of time something else were to be added to our community, but also remains so for all the future and into all eternity. I have community with others and will continue to have it only through Jesus Christ. The more genuine and the deeper our community becomes, the more everything else between us will recede, and the more clearly and purely will Jesus Christ and his work become the one and only thing that is alive between us. We have one another only through Christ, but through Christ we really do have one another. We have one another completely and for all eternity.

This dismisses at the outset every unhappy desire for something more. Those who want more than what Christ has established between us do not want Christian community. They are looking for some extraordinary experiences of community that were denied them elsewhere. Such people are bringing confused and tainted desires into the Christian community. Precisely at this point Christian community is most often threatened from the very outset by the greatest danger, the danger of internal poisoning, the danger of confusing Christian community with some wishful image of pious community, the danger of blending the devout heart’s natural desire for community with the spiritual reality of Christian community. It is essential for Christian community that two things become clear right from the beginning. First, Christian community is not an ideal, but a divine reality; second, Christian community is a spiritual [pneumatisch] and not an emotional [psychisch] reality.

On innumerable occasions a whole Christian community has been shattered because it has lived on the basis of a wishful image. Certainly serious Christians who are put in a community for the first time will often bring with them a very definite image of what Christian communal life [Zusammenleben] should be, and they will be anxious to realize it. But God’s grace quickly frustrates all such dreams. A great disillusionment with others, with Christians in general, and, if we are fortunate, with ourselves, is bound to overwhelm us as surely as God desires to lead us to an understanding of genuine Christian community. By sheer grace God will not permit us to live in a dream world even for a few weeks and to abandon ourselves to those blissful experiences and exalted moods that sweep over us like a wave of rapture. For God is not a God of emotionalism, but the God of truth. Only that community which enters into the experience of this great disillusionment with all its unpleasant and evil appearances begins to be what it should be in God’s sight, begins to grasp in faith the promise that is given to it. The sooner this moment of disillusionment comes over the individual and the community, the better for both. However, a community that cannot bear and cannot survive such disillusionment, clinging instead to its idealized image, when that should be done away with, loses at the same time the promise of a durable Christian community. Sooner or later it is bound to collapse. Every human idealized image that is brought into the Christian community is a hindrance to genuine community and must be broken up so that genuine community can survive. Those who love their dream of a Christian community more than the Christian community itself become destroyers of that Christian community even though their personal intentions may be ever so honest, earnest, and sacrificial.

God hates this wishful dreaming because it makes the dreamer proud and pretentious. Those who dream of this idealized community demand that it be fulfilled by God, by others, and by themselves. They enter the community of Christians with their demands, set up their own law, and judge one another and even God accordingly. They stand adamant, a living reproach to all others in the circle of the community. They act as if they have to create the Christian community, as if their visionary ideal binds the people together. Whatever does not go their way, they call a failure. When their idealized image is shattered, they see the community breaking into pieces. So they first become accusers of other Christians in the community, then accusers of God, and finally the desperate accusers of themselves. Because God already has laid the only foundation of our community, because God has united us in one body with other Christians in Jesus Christ long before we entered into common life with them, we enter into that life together with other Christians, not as those who make demands, but as those who thankfully receive. We thank God for what God has done for us. We thank God for giving us other Christians who live by God’s call, forgiveness, and promise. We do not complain about what God does not give us; rather we are thankful for what God does give us daily. And is not what has been given us enough: other believers who will go on living with us through sin and need under the blessing of God’s grace? Is the gift of God any less immeasurably great than this on any given day, even on the most difficult and distressing days of a Christian community? Even when sin and misunderstanding burden the common life, is not the one who sins still a person with whom I too stand under the word of Christ? Will not another Christian’s sin be an occasion for me ever anew to give thanks that both of us may live in the forgiving love of God in Jesus Christ? Therefore, will not the very moment of great disillusionment with my brother or sister be incomparably wholesome for me because it so thoroughly teaches me that both of us can never live by our own words and deeds, but only by that one Word and deed that really binds us together, the forgiveness of sins in Jesus Christ? The bright day of Christian community dawns wherever the early morning mists of dreamy visions are lifting.

Thankfulness works in the Christian community as it usually does in the Christian life. Only those who give thanks for little things receive the great things as well. We prevent God from giving us the great spiritual gifts prepared for us because we do not give thanks for daily gifts. We think that we should not be satisfied with the small measure of spiritual knowledge, experience, and love that has been given to us, and that we must be constantly seeking the great gifts.

Then we complain that we lack the deep certainty, the strong faith, and the rich experiences that God has given to other Christians, and we consider these complaints to be pious. We pray for the big things and forget to give thanks for the small (and yet really not so small!) gifts we receive daily. How can God entrust great things to those who will not gratefully receive the little things from God’s hand? If we do not give thanks daily for the Christian community in which we have been placed, even when there are no great experiences, no noticeable riches, but much weakness, difficulty, and little faith—and if, on the contrary, we only keep complaining to God that everything is so miserable and so insignificant and does not at all live up to our expectations—then we hinder God from letting our community grow according to the measure and riches that are there for us all in Jesus Christ. That also applies in a special way to the complaints often heard from pastors and zealous parishioners about their congregations. Pastors should not complain about their congregation, certainly never to other people, but also not to God. Congregations have not been entrusted to them in order that they should become accusers of their congregations before God and their fellow human beings. When pastors lose faith in a Christian community in which they have been placed and begin to make accusations against it, they had better examine themselves first to see whether the underlying problem is not their own idealized image, which should be shattered by God. And if they find that to be true, let them thank God for leading them into this predicament. But if they find that it is not true, let them nevertheless guard against ever becoming an accuser of those whom God has gathered together. Instead, let them accuse themselves of their unbelief, let them ask for an understanding of their own failure and their particular sin, and pray that they may not wrong other Christians. Let such pastors, recognizing their own guilt, make intercession for those charged to their care. Let them do what they have been instructed to do and thank God.

Like the Christian’s sanctification, Christian community is a gift of God to which we have no claim. Only God knows the real condition of either our community or our sanctification. What may appear weak and insignificant to us may be great and glorious to God. Just as Christians should not be constantly feeling the pulse of their spiritual life, so too the Christian community has not been given to us by God for us to be continually taking its temperature. The more thankfully we daily receive what is given to us, the more assuredly and consistently will community increase and grow from day to day as God pleases.

Christian community is not an ideal we have to realize, but rather a reality created by God in Christ in which we may participate. The more clearly we learn to recognize that the ground and strength and promise of all our community is in Jesus Christ alone, the more calmly we will learn to think about our community and pray and hope for it.

Because Christian community is founded solely on Jesus Christ, it is a spiritual [pneumatisch] and not a emotional [psychisch] reality. In this respect it differs absolutely from all other communities. The Scriptures call pneumatic or “spiritual” [geistlich] what is created only by the Holy Spirit, who puts Jesus Christ into our hearts as lord and savior. The scriptures call “emotional” what comes from the natural urges, strengths, and abilities of the human soul.

The basis of all pneumatic, or spiritual, reality is the clear, manifest Word of God in Jesus Christ. At the foundation of all emotional, reality are the dark, impenetrable urges and desires of the human soul. The basis of spiritual community is truth; the basis of emotional community is desire. The essence of spiritual community is light. For “God is light and in [God] there is no darkness at all” (1 John 1:5); and “if we walk in the light as he himself is in the light, we have fellowship with one another” (1 John 1:7). The essence of emotional community is darkness, “for it is from within, from the human heart, that evil intentions come” (Mark 7:21). It is the deep night that spreads over the sources of all human activity, over even all noble and devout impulses. Spiritual community is the community of those who are called by Christ; emotional community is the community of pious [fromm] souls. The bright love of Christian service, agape, lives in the spiritual community; the dark love of pious-impious urges, eros, burns in the emotional community. In the former, there is ordered, Christian service; in the latter, disordered desire for pleasure. In the former, there is humble submission of Christians one to another; in the latter, humble yet haughty subjection of other Christians to one’s own desires. In the spiritual community the Word of God alone rules; in the emotional community the individual who is equipped with exceptional powers, experience, and magical, suggestive abilities rules along with the Word. In the one, God’s Word alone is binding; in the other, besides the Word, human beings bind others to themselves. In the one, all power, honor, and rule are surrendered to the Holy Spirit; in the other, power and personal spheres of influence are sought and cultivated. So far as these are devout people, they certainly seek this power with the intention of serving the highest and the best.

But in reality they end up dethroning the Holy Spirit and banishing it to the realm of unreal remoteness; only what is emotional remains real here. Thus, in the spiritual community the Spirit rules; in the emotional community, psychological techniques and methods. In the former, unsophisticated, nonpsychological, unmethodical, helping love is offered to one another; in the latter, psychological analysis and design. In the former, service to one another is simple and humble; in the latter, it is to strangers treated in a searching, calculating fashion.

Perhaps the contrast between spiritual and emotional reality can be made most clear in the following observation. Within the spiritual community there is never, in any way whatsoever, an “immediate” relationship of one to another. However, in the emotional community there exists a profound, elemental emotional desire for community, for immediate contact with other human souls, just as in the flesh there is a yearning for immediate union with other flesh. This desire of the human soul seeks the complete intimate fusion of I and You, whether this occurs in the union of love or—what from this emotional perspective is after all the same thing—in forcing the other into one’s own sphere of power and influence. Here is where emotional, strong persons enjoy life to the full, securing for themselves the admiration, the love, or the fear of the weak. Here human bonds, suggestive influences, and dependencies are everything. Moreover, everything that is originally and solely characteristic of the community mediated through Christ reappears in the nonmediated community of souls in a distorted form.

There is, likewise, such a thing as “emotional” conversion. It has all the appearances of genuine conversion and occurs wherever the superior power of one person is consciously or unconsciously misused to shake to the roots and draw into its spell an individual or a whole community. Here one soul has had an immediate effect on another. The result is that the weak individual has been overcome by the strong; the resistance of the weaker individual has broken down under the influence of the other person. One has been overpowered by something, but not won over. This becomes apparent the moment a commitment is demanded, a commitment that must be made independently of the person to whom one is bound or possibly in opposition to this person. Here is where those emotional converts fail. They thus show that their conversion was brought about not by the Holy Spirit, but by a human being. It is, therefore, not enduring.

There is, likewise, a “merely emotional” love of neighbor. Such love is capable of making the most unheard-of sacrifices. Often it far surpasses the genuine love of Christ in fervent devotion and visible results. It speaks the Christian language with overwhelming and stirring eloquence.

But it is what the apostle Paul is speaking of when he says: “If I give all I possess to the poor, and surrender my body to the flames” (1 Cor. 13:3)—in other words, if I combine the utmost deeds of love with the utmost of devotion—“but do not have love (that is, the love of Christ), I would be nothing” (1 Cor. 13:2). Emotional love loves the other for the sake of itself; spiritual love loves the other for the sake of Christ. That is why emotional love seeks direct contact with other persons. It loves them, not as free persons, but as those whom it binds to itself. It wants to do everything it can to win and conquer; it puts pressure on the other person. It desires to be irresistible, to dominate. Emotional love does not think much of truth. It makes the truth relative, since nothing, not even the truth, must come between it and the person loved. Emotional love desires other persons, their company. It wants them to return its love, but it does not serve them. On the contrary, it continues to desire even when it seems to be serving.

Two factors, which are really one and the same thing, reveal the difference between spiritual and emotional love. Emotional love cannot tolerate the dissolution of a community that has become false, even for the sake of genuine community. And such emotional love cannot love an enemy, that is to say, one who seriously and stubbornly resists it. Both spring from the same source: emotional love is by its very nature desire, desire for emotional community. As long as it can possibly satisfy this desire, it will not give it up, even for the sake of truth, even for the sake of genuine love for others. But emotional love is at an end when it can no longer expect its desire to be fulfilled, namely, in the face of an enemy. There it turns into hatred, contempt, and slander.

Spiritual love, however, begins right at this point. This is why emotional love turns into personal hatred when it encounters genuine spiritual love that does not desire but serves. Emotional love makes itself an end in itself. It turns itself into an achievement, an idol it worships, to which it must subject everything. It cares for, cultivates, and loves itself and nothing else in the world. Spiritual love, however, comes from Jesus Christ; it serves him alone. It knows that it has no direct access to other persons. Christ stands between me and others. I do not know in advance what love of others means on the basis of the general idea of love that grows out of my emotional desires. All this may instead be hatred and the worst kind of selfishness in the eyes of Christ. Only Christ in his Word tells me what love is. Contrary to all my own opinions and convictions, Jesus Christ will tell me what love for my brothers and sisters really looks like.

Therefore, spiritual love is bound to the word of Jesus Christ alone. Where Christ tells me to maintain community for the sake of love, I desire to maintain it. Where the truth of Christ orders me to dissolve a community for the sake of love, I will dissolve it, despite all the protests of my emotional love. Because spiritual love does not desire but rather serves, it loves an enemy as a brother or sister. It originates neither in the brother or sister nor in the enemy, but in Christ and his word. Emotional love can never comprehend spiritual love, for spiritual love is from above. It is something completely strange, new, and incomprehensible to all earthly love.

Because Christ stands between me and an other, I must not long for unmediated community with that person. As only Christ was able to speak to me in such a way that I was helped, so others too can only be helped by Christ alone. However, this means that I must release others from all my attempts to control, coerce, and dominate them with my love. In their freedom from me, other persons want to be loved for who they are, as those for whom Christ became a human being, died, and rose again, as those for whom Christ won the forgiveness of sins and prepared eternal life. Because Christ has long since acted decisively for other Christians, before I could begin to act, I must allow them the freedom to be Christ’s. They should encounter me only as the persons that they already are for Christ. This is the meaning of the claim that we can encounter others only through the mediation of Christ. Emotional love constructs its own image of other persons, about what they are and what they should become. It takes the life of the other person into its own hands. Spiritual love recognizes the true image of the other person as seen from the perspective of Jesus Christ. It is the image Jesus Christ has formed and wants to form in all people.

Therefore, spiritual love will prove successful insofar as it commends the other to Christ in all that it says and does. It will not seek to agitate another by exerting all too personal, direct influence or by crudely interfering in one’s life. It will not take pleasure in pious, emotional fervor and excitement. Rather, it will encounter the other with the clear word of God and be prepared to leave the other alone with this word for a long time. It will be willing to release others again so that Christ may deal with them. It will respect the boundary of the other, which is placed between us by Christ, and it will find full community with the other in the Christ who alone binds us together.

This spiritual love will thus speak to Christ about the other Christian more than to the other Christian about Christ. It knows that the most direct way to others is always through prayer to Christ and that love of the other is completely tied to the truth found in Christ. It is out of this love that John the disciple speaks: “I have no greater joy than this, to hear that my children are walking in the truth” (3 John 4).

Emotional love lives by uncontrolled and uncontrollable dark desires; spiritual love lives in the clear light of service ordered by the truth. Emotional love results in human enslavement, bondage, rigidity; spiritual love creates the freedom of Christians under the Word. Emotional love breeds artificial hothouse flowers; spiritual love creates the fruits that grow healthily under God’s open sky, according to God’s good pleasure in the rain and storm and sunshine.

The existence of any Christian communal life essentially depends on whether or not it succeeds at the right time in promoting the ability to distinguish between a human ideal and God’s reality, between spiritual and emotional community. The life and death of a Christian community is decided by its ability to reach sober clarity on these points as soon as possible. In other words, a life together under the Word will stay healthy only when it does not form itself into a movement, an order, a society, a collegium pietatis, but instead understands itself as being part of the one, holy, universal, Christian church, sharing through its deeds and suffering in the hardships and struggles and promise of the whole church. Every principle of selection, and every division connected with it that is not necessitated quite objectively by common work, local conditions, or family connections is of the greatest danger to a Christian community. Self-centeredness always insinuates itself in any process of intellectual or spiritual selectivity, destroying the spiritual power of the community and robbing the community of its effectiveness for the church, thus driving it into sectarianism. The exclusion of the weak and insignificant, the seemingly useless people, from everyday Christian life in community [Lebensgemeinschaft] may actually mean the exclusion of Christ; for in the poor sister or brother, Christ is knocking at the door. We must, therefore, be very careful on this point.

The undiscerning observer may think that this mixture of ideal and real, emotional and spiritual, would be most obvious where there are a number of layers in the structure of a community, as in marriage, the family, friendship—where the emotional element as such already assumes a central importance in the community’s coming into being at all, and where the spiritual is only something added to humanity’s physical-emotional [leiblich-seelischen] nature.

According to this view, it is only in these multifaceted communities that there is a danger of confusing and mixing the two spheres, whereas such a danger could hardly arise in a community of a purely spiritual nature. Such ideas, however, are a grand delusion. On the basis of all our experience—and as can be easily seen from the very nature of things—the truth is just the opposite. A marriage, a family, a friendship knows exactly the limitations of its community-building power. Such relationships know very well, if they are sound, where the emotional element ends and the spiritual begins. They are aware of the difference between physical-emotional and spiritual community. On the other hand, whenever a community of a purely spiritual nature comes together, the danger is uncannily near that everything pertaining to emotion will be brought into and intermixed with this community. Purely spiritual life in community [Lebensgemeinschaft] is not only dangerous but also not normal. Whenever physical-familial community, the community formed among those engaged in serious work, or everyday life with all its demands on working people is not introduced into the spiritual community, extraordinary vigilance and clear thinking are called for. That is why it is precisely on short retreats that, as experience has shown, emotion spreads most easily. Nothing is easier than to stimulate the euphoria of community in a few days of life together [gemeinsame Leben]; and nothing is more fatal to the healthy, sober, everyday life in community of Christians.

There is probably no Christian to whom God has not given the uplifting and blissful experience of genuine Christian community at least once in her or his life. But in this world such experiences remain nothing but a gracious extra beyond the daily bread of Christian community life. We have no claim to such experiences, and we do not live with other Christians for the sake of gaining such experiences. It is not the experience of Christian community, but firm and certain faith within Christian community that holds us together. We hold fast in faith to God’s greatest gift, that God has acted for us all and wants to act for us all. This makes us joyful and happy, but it also makes us ready to forgo all such experiences if at times God does not grant them. We are bound together by faith, not by experience.

“How very good and pleasant it is when kindred live together in unity.” This is the Scripture’s praise of life together under the Word. But now we can correctly interpret the words “in unity” and say “when kindred live together through Christ.” For Jesus Christ alone is our unity. “He is our peace.” We have access to one another, joy in one another, community with one another through Christ alone.

Other Influential Works

In an effort to keep this collection manageable, we limited the texts to ones which were reasonably short, have been foundational to us for decades, and whose authors have finished their race.

Here at the end, we leave you with some additional works and authors which continue to shape how we make disciples of

Jesus Christ.

Influential Books

Mere Christianity CS Lewis

Liturgy of the Ordinary Tish Harrison Warren

Matthew: A Commentary F. Dale Bruner

Practicing the Way John Mark Comer

Letters From a Skeptic Greg Boyd

Divine Conspiracy Dallas Willard

Reading While Black Esau Macauley

Atlas of the Heart Brené Brown

The Master Plan of Evangelism Robert Coleman

Long Obedience in the Same Direction E. Peterson

Creative Ministry Henri Nouwen

The Sparrow Mary Doria Russell

Surprised by Hope NT Wright

Concise Theology JI Packer

Influential Podcasts

The Bible Project Tim Mackie & Jon Collins

Unbelievable Justin Brierly & Ruth Jackson

Bēma Marty Solomon & Brent Billings

This Cultural Moment John Mark Comer & Mark Sayers