Toward an Orthodoxy of LIFE

John Wesley, as quoted by AW Tozer in the Preface to his marvellous book 'The Pursuit of God", asserts that:

Orthodoxy, or right opinion, is, at best, a very slender part of religion. Though right tempers cannot subsist without right opinions,yet right opinions may subsist without right tempers. There may be a right opinion of God without either love or one right temper toward Him. Satan is proof of this.'

If what Wesley says is true, then the church (at an institutinal level at any rate) has managed to get somewhat unbalanced over the years in terms of its mission and its raison d'etre.  If orthodoxy ought to be a 'slender' part of Christian life and faith, then it seems to me that we have somehow turned it into a most un-slender part indeed.  If Christianity were a delicious and deep-filled pie (and why not?)  then that which Wesley suggests should be a mere sliver, we have somehow expanded into a bloody great wedge.  In some cases, we have mistaken the slice for the the whole blessed pasty itself. My question, is, brothers and sisters: in our hunger for right belief, are our eyes bigger than our tummies?

Personally, I find the endless debates and anxieties about orthodoxy (my own debates and anxiteties very much included) increasingly hard to swallow.  In trying to live as a Christian, and help others to do the same, I get really down at times when I look at the history and denominational 'map' of the church.  This is not to say that I have figured it all out and can offer a perfect, off-the-shelf, one-size-fits-all model of Christain life and fellowship which I'm ready to wheel successfully out where other, lesser mortals have failed.  (yeah, and I've also fugured out what kind of church JESUS would go to.  Clue: he wouldn't go to yours).   But in seriousness, the question I would ask, humbly, is this:  has all the breath and ink and pixels we as Christians have ejaculated into the world over questions of orthodoxy actually been that successful in bringing people closer to the transforming power and love of God?  

Another thing I'm puzzled about is this:  were (are) all the endless church splits, and sub-splits really about defending orthodoxy anyway?  Or were they just about an inability to love one another with the kind of love Christ loved us?  Were they about the pursuit of right doctrine?  Or were they just an acquiesence to kind of world-weary pessimism about the ability of human beings to just GET ALONG WITH ONE ANOTHER?  I don't know.  Perhaps a mixture of noble ideals and dirty selfishness - that's what life can feel like at times - praise God that he is able to lift us out of the mire of ourselves!

Orthodoxy - believing the right stuff - I think exists to provide the solid stage upon which the vibrant and exciting theatre of faith is played out.  Remove the stage altogether, and you have a hard time putting on a play.  But if the wooden boards of the stage itself, knots and repairs and woodworm holes and all,  become the primary meaning and focus of the acting experience, then it is a dull play indeed.  In fact it's just a bunch of people staring at the floor.  And what of the theatre-goers - those non-Christians who peer at us as we play out our part in God's story.  Will they see people nit-picking over the wording of creeds and arguing over the finer points of dogma, or will they see people living life, and living it in all its fullness?


I worry that when, as Christians, we are too concerned with believing the right things that we either then put our feet up in self-satisfaction once we think we've figured it all out, or else insist that others toe the line, which we insist is THE line, the one and only line, and and more right than anyone else's.  Both seem like blind, Pharasaical alleys to me.  I think we need to be more concerned with having the right relationships with the right people at the right times to right the wrongs of this world - and the world unseen.  This is what I mean I think by an 'orthodoxy of life'.  It's not (just) our belief that is right, but our lives which are right.  You're not a disciple of Christ because you believe the apostles' (or some other) creed.  Even the Devil believes the right stuff about God, as Wesley reminds us (and isn't that just DEVASTATING?  Even scarier, is that the Devil may even have a fuller understanding of theology than any human who has ever lived.  How else would he be able to lie so effectively?)  No, you are a disciple of Christ because you know him and love him and pick up your cross every day and follow him.  Belief is something you do with your brain.  Faith is something you do with your soul.


What was Jesus' attitude to orthodoxy?  I think it was ambiguous (or was it? haha)   He upheld the Law of Moses and followed its signposts to holiness, and yet he downright broke the Law when, in the circumstances of REAL HUMAN LIFE, it contravened the higher, more essential Law of holy love for God and man.  And I think Jesus remained ambiguous about orthodoxy in order to teach us to lift our eyes to that higher Law - the one which Paul said was written on our hearts -  which isn't really a Law at all of course, it's a Person, a mystical encounter, a hyper-reality of love.  How can this be all about right belief?  Right belief may lead us to the water (and do so crucially) but it is not the water itself, and on its own, it certainly doesn't have the power to make us drink.   The Kingdom is surely a LIVED-OUT thing, not a codeified, abstract, mechanised, systemic thing.  It's a living, breathing, messy, paradoxical, glorious, long-suffering thrill-ride of a thing.  It's all our best dreams and all our worst nightmares all at once, half-told by our grateful sobs and wholly, and silently understood by the ever-patient ear, and the ever-loving arms of the Father of Eternity.


Tozer uses Wesley's assertion as a springboard for a call toward a more geniune thirst for the life-changing presence of God (at least that's what I think his book's about - I was dazzled by it and I need to re-read it).  Francis Thompson's poem, The Hound Of Heaven (subject of a future blog, because it's blowing my mind at the moment!) portrays the same relationship, but with God as pursuer.  Both I think, resonate with a generation which is just plain WEARY with doctrinal squabbling and is hungry and thirsty for true righteousness.


Is there a revival of mysticism happening right now?  I hope so.  I need one.  My own faith seems to insubstantial, so sickly, so fickle.  Oh, Lord, drive me, drive me, into your terrible and life-giving presence!









 
 

The Bible and the Person in the Darkness

I've been thinking a lot over the last few months about what I really believe about the Bible.  I've encountered very conservative, all-or-nothing, literalist interpretations, all head-in-the-sand stubbornness and exhausting argumentativeness.  Then there's the ultra-rational, 'it's-not-scientific-therefore-it-has-no-value-and-is-probably-dangerously-primitive' point of view which seems to me sad,  reductionist and banal.

NT Wright, CS Lewis and Tim Keller seem to be my preferred ploughers of more nuanced, humane and imaginitive furrows through the fretful field of Biblical bias.  I'm warming to Brian McLaren too at the moment, as I read his 'Naked Spirituality'.

Something he says (in a footnote) about Moses and the burning bush got me thinking.  It was to do with literal interpretation of events.  He basically states his position that it doesn't matter in what way the story is 'true', because whatever way you slice it, it marks a great watershed in our experience of the awesomeness, and yet the closeness of God.  And that got me thinking - I think as evangelicals we expect people who are not Christians to believe things which are, let's be honest, pretty preposterous.  And I think we have absolutely no right to expect this.  (obviously, people can believe all kinds of preposterous things without the influence of Christians, but that's beside the point).

So what comes to my mind at the moment is this: we cannot expect people to believe in the supernatural events the Bible records if they haven't sumbitted themselves to the Person of Jesus.  Without a direct experience of the living God, we are imprisoned by unbelief.  You can argue all you want with an atheist about the existence of angels, or burning bushes, or virgin births, but I just don't think that atheist will accept your reasoning without a direct and personal revelation from God. 

But when that person turns the handle to the gentle, persistent knock of Jesus on the door of their lives, suddenly anything becomes possible.  It isn't that brains and reason suddenly walk out as Jesus walks in.  That suggests to me an unnecessary dualism.  Rather it has something to do with the re-ordering (the re-creating actually) of our inner being which happens when we encounter Christ.  When the myth of self-centredness (the myth that 'the world revolves round me') - when this myth is debunked by our awakening to the conquering, self-sacrificing presence of a God who really does love and care for us - when this happens, and only when this happens, we can enter into the deeper mythology of the infinite-and-yet-incarnate spiritual reality which God inhabits, and into which he invites us to plunge.

I struggled to believe in the supernatural stories in the Bible before I had a supernatural encounter with God.  Now... what do I think?  I am more inclined to believe they are true.  What do I mean by 'true'?  Were they empirically true all along, or does their 'truth' need to be unlocked by my belief?  A rational voice says to me: 'believe that stuff, and you'll believe anything'.  In the words of Mulder from X-Files though, I WANT to believe.  More than that, I'm compelled to believe by what has happened to me.  I didn't break into my own life and change it.  No.  I cried out to the darkness and (who knew!) there was something there.  Not a watertight, abstract, all-figured-out, intellectual answer, like the one we so often hold out and with which we try to win minds to Christ.  But rather... something like a moment, a meeting.  A decisive moment, although it wasn't clear whether it was me making the decisive move, or the something there in the darkness that met me.  The only way it makes sense to me is that it wasn't a someTHING - a system, a rule, a product - it was a someONE: a Spirit, a Father, a Friend.  Systems and arguments and evidence can't forgive someone.  Only a Person can do that.

All of this I guess is a long way of trying to say: why should anyone believe in the Biblically supernatural if they don't believe in the personally supernatural?  Once the Person has been embraced, the rest starts to fall into place, starts to have truth, meaning, power.  Questioning the validity of the Bible's historical accounts, pithy explainings, poetical questionings, and prophetic reverberations somehow seems of secondary importance next their place within the power and the presence and the transformative yearning urging loving closeness of the Person, that is, Christ.  Why care for the Bible unless it show me Christ?  Why study the Bible unless it enlargen Christ?  Why argue about the Bible, unless it argue for Christ?  Why draw conclusions about the Bible unless it conclude for Christ? 

The irony of being an evangelical, is that in order to have a high view of the Bible, one must lower his view of the Bible, for the Bible itself bends the knee to the Person.  A merry dance indeed, it leads us!  But it leads us, ultimately, back to the Person.  All the angels and demons and burning bushes and talking donkeys and Virgin Mothers and wise men and prophets and the whole unlikely and preposterous cast of thousands and millions and billions who have lived and breathed and hoped and despaired and triumphed and failed and hoped again and faded and finally, or not finally, given up the ghost only to grasp the great white hope of heaven itself with the weak and broken and slippery butter fingers of humanity - all, in the end of the ends, which might just be a beginning, all bend the knee to the Person.  And so do I. 

That's where the Bible really gets going for me.  If you are skeptical about the Bible (and why shoudn't you be?) then open your eyes to the possibility of the Person about whom it is written.  And ask, seek, knock, DARE to cry out to the darkness!

The Smell of Fatherhood

I'm in an unreal place and time.  Our son Aidan was born just a little over a week ago.  There are a million things I could say about this miraculous thing that has happened to me, but I thought I'd write about something that took me by surprise just the other day.

We'd been through the Hoping (Hannah's heart and mine aligned with a new wonder) the Waiting (a tough and totally necessary lesson from God about not-having-to-be-in-control-of-everything-all-the-time), the Happening (wonderful, terrifying, bewildering, fascinating, transforming) and the first stages of the Adjusting (something like giving in to a very persuasive person who doesn't have to do any actual persuading).

Then the other day, something akin to normality returned when I left my new wee family for a few hours to take the bus into Edinburgh.  A humdrum journey on a humdrum bus with a humdrum driver and lots of other humdrummers lost in their thoughts and counting the humdrum minutes til their destination.   I was feeling groggy and attempting to slip into a commuter-coma, when something unexpected crept up on me - a sensation I imagine like the Flaming Lips' tried to express in their 'softest bullet ever shot'.  The sensation was this:  I could smell him.

Perhaps its because I devote so many of my energies to thinking, talking, listening and watching that I always seem to underestimate to power of smell.  As such I'm constantly being ambushed by my olfactory sense.  A smell can awaken emotion, nostalgia, longing, just as much as music can - perhaps even more.  Certainly there's something somehow more visceral, less rarified about the effect a smell can have.  I guess we tend to associate smell with negative feelings - the warning sign of gone-off milk.  The sad tang of disinfectant in old folk's homes.  Farts.

But the smell of which I suddenly became aware while slouching along on the 38 bus yesterday wasn't like any other smell I've encountered - consciously or unconsciously.  Of course I've smelled babies before.  It's a curious musty, high, sweet odour which all babies have.  I think this (allied with visual cuteness) is another of nature's ways of ensuring we fall, head over heels in love with them.  But this smell - this particular variety of the millions of subtle variations of baby-scent reverberating around the nostril hairs of fathers throughout the world - THIS smell was unmistakably the smell of my son.  It was as if, though he is only a few days old in the eyes of Man, it was as if his very presence was lingering, soul-like just above my skin.

The Old Testament repeatedly calls for sacrifices which produce a pleasing aroma to the LORD.  I suspect this is both symbolic and literal.  As the smell of roasting meat rises mouth-wateringly to the holy nostrils of the angelic realm, so the aroma of - that is the result of - righteousness rises from our acts of obedience and love to the nostrils of our heavenly Father.  Catholic and Eastern churches seem to understand something of this in their multi-sensory worship, even if their use of incense might seem churchy and affected.  I still remember it from my childhood - the soft clack of the incense burner as the priest swung it back and forth on its long metal chain, wafting exotic vapours over an expectant congregation.  Is God pleased with this pungency in worship?  Perhaps, yes.  Perhaps only when our love for our fellow man is equally fragrant.

All of this of course was far from my mind when I was gently jolted out of my mindlessness and surprised by the scent of my son.  I simply breathed deeply the smell of fatherhood.  From today, everything is new.