Motions of Grace

Intersections of scripture and life

Category: Current Events

Ideologies, “those people” and grace

March 18, 2019 / / 0 Comments

Christchurch, New Zealand | Getty Images

There is no one explanation, and perhaps no real explanation, for why someone would walk into a public space and gun down dozens of people he’s never seen before.  In some cases, like the terrorist attack in Christchurch, we can appeal to “ideology” in an attempt to make sense of what has happened. Put very simply, an ideology is a set of beliefs about the way the world should be (i.e., a set of ideals) coupled, almost always, by an account of why the world is not that way. And such an account usually involves “those people.”

“Those people” ensure that the world remains a middling-to-bad place because of their own ideologies, behavior, or even their very existence. “Those people” oppress the proletariat; they undermine family values; they maintain the heteronormative patriarchy; they’ve come here to take our jobs.

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Running with scissors

January 26, 2019 / / 0 Comments

Last year I served as volunteer chaplain at a hospital in Saint Louis. One afternoon, in the course of my rounds, I visited a black patient with an extra-large King James Version Bible situated prominently on his tray. I asked him about it, and he immediately asked me what I thought about salvation. Giving the standard grace-through-faith-in-Christ answer, I quickly found myself on the receiving end of an increasingly aggressive declarations that Jesus was, in fact, a black man. At first I voiced disagreement, but then I realized discussion was useless and instead asked the patient why this belief was so important to him. He ignored my question and continued to explain that the apostles were black, as was Moses, as were the people of Israel (it seems that modern Jews are impostors).

As he continued pontificating on the all-black cast of biblical characters with growing vehemence, I felt my heart beating fast and my blood pressure rising. Eventually I interrupted him and repeated my question: “Why does this make such a difference to you?”

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Embracing truth

June 14, 2018 / / 0 Comments

“I am … the truth” (John 14:6)

Our president, as everyone knows, generously applies the term “FAKE NEWS” to stories and even entire news outlets. In a tweet last month, he helpfully defined “fake news” to mean not “reporting that is factually incorrect,” but rather “reporting that is negative” towards his presidency.

I actually appreciate this. Everyone tends to discount or disregard unfavorable truths, but not very many people have the candor to admit that this is in fact what they’re doing. The president understands that the categories “I don’t like this” and “This is false” are distinct but difficult to keep distinct. Our minds constantly transmute the former into the latter.

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On faith and North Korean nukes

December 2, 2017 / / 0 Comments

The American mainland is apparently now within range of North Korean missiles, bringing the prospect of nuclear attack to my generation for the first time (the Berlin Wall fell nineteen days before I was born).

It’s safe to say at this point that we are involved in another cold war, although this time it’s with a country smaller than Missouri and lacking the capability the old Soviet Union had of annihilating the US over the course of a lunch break. But the Soviet Union, for all its atrocities, was run by calculating men who proved unwilling to subject the world to nuclear war. By contrast, it’s distressingly unclear whether the leaders of North Korea are, in fact, sane.

The threat posed by North Korean nukes can be greatly exaggerated, but it is real. It’s also a good opportunity for American Christians to reflect on how to live in the face of potential horrors. The obvious answer is that we must live by faith, and this is certainly true, but we need to be careful about what we mean, exactly, by the word “faith.”

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