Motions of Grace

Intersections of scripture and life

Tag: Christ

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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Entrenched poverty, Deuteronomy, and working on unsolvable problems

August 15, 2018 / / 0 Comments

 

Over the last two or three months, the churches in the town where I minister have seen a major uptick in calls for financial assistance. Some callers tell us that they’ve recently lost their jobs, but the majority are on disability insurance which, for whatever reason, isn’t enough to keep the lights on. On most days it feels like we’re pretty good at treating the symptoms of financial hardship (past-due rent and empty gas tanks) but powerless to get at the root cause (in this case, physical disablement).

To switch metaphors from the hospital to the battlefields of WWI, our churches are up against “entrenched” poverty, the kind that can’t be dislodged by a quick barrage of money. And in many places across the US and for all kinds of reasons, poverty has been digging in for generations. Some towns have never recovered after the local factory closed decades ago; some neighborhoods suffer the ongoing effects of the racist policies of the past. In St. Louis, where I live, sections of the northern part of the city look like they’ve been through a literal war. Whole blocks are abandoned, and once-venerable buildings collapse in on themselves, victims not of bombs but of long-term economic malaise.

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Misusing the Bible

July 4, 2018 / / 1 Comment

It is those who would make a good showing in the flesh who would force you to be circumcised, and only in order that they may not be persecuted for the cross of Christ. – Galatians 6:12

Paul’s opponents in Galatia have since become known as the “judaizers.” They apparently held that since Jesus was the Jewish messiah, gentiles had to convert to Judaism and, more specifically, undergo circumcision in order to receive the salvation offered by Jesus.

Their position doesn’t seem outlandish. At the time it was far from clear what (if any) break the followers of Jesus had made or would make from Judaism. No one in this new movement doubted for a moment that the Hebrew Bible was authoritative.The apostles Peter and John continued to pray in the temple, as faithful Jews, even after Jesus’ resurrection (Acts 3:1). And Jesus himself had declared that he had come “only for the lost sheep of the house of Israel” (Matt 15:24). The judaizers may have been wrong, then, but surely they were honestly wrong?

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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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Good Taste

September 13, 2017 / / 1 Comment

Common kingfisher (photo credit: Joefrei)

By the thirteenth of C.S. Lewis’ Screwtape Letters, the human “patient,” tempted by the junior demon Wormwood, has adopted a new set of friends. They’re socialists in a “purely fashionable” manner, their socialism stemming not from a serious critique of capitalism but rather from contempt for what most people believe, simply because most people believe it. They read books primarily to make “clever remarks” about them. They are fun, witty, attractive, and thoroughly poisonous to sincere Christian faith.

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