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Doubt signals not God's death but the need for our own--to die to the theology we hold to with clenched fists. Our first creeping feelings of doubt are like the distant toll of a graveyard chapel, alerting us that the dying process is coming our way.
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Peter Enns |
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Paul doesn't call followers of Jesus "Christians." He calls them "in Christ." That isn't the easiest thing to understand, let alone explain, but it suggests an intimacy with Jesus that defies words. That intimacy also includes--somehow--suffering."
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Peter Enns |
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Physical death is the final letting go that we all experience with loved ones and that we will ourselves experience one day. Dying now the way Jesus says to means letting go already of every comfort, familiarity, joy, and sorrow--and of the false sense of control those things give us. Letting go of these things is a dying process. Jesus sounds more like a mystic than an intellectual lining up correct thinking.
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Peter Enns |
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We have to die, and the choice is ours. If we don't, we are still holding on to something. And if we are holding on, we aren't really following. Just sort of following. Standing around. [Oh God, what did I sign up for? This Christianity thing is hard. Deep breath . . .] The apostle Paul chimes in, too: I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me. (Galatians 2:19-20)
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Peter Enns |
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92948a8
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The life of Christian faith is more than agreeing with a set of beliefs about Christ, morality, or how to read the Bible. It means being so intimately connected to Christ that his crucifixion is ours, his death is our death, and his life is our life--which is hardly something we can grasp with our minds. It has to be experienced. It is an experience.
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Peter Enns |
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7512393
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We're so crucified, in fact, that we read elsewhere, "You have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God" (Colossians 3:3). Our lives are hidden--strong language, like we're not even in the picture. And being hidden with Christ and being "in" God sounds downright mystical enough to unsettle--as it should--anyone who thinks that the Christian's first duty is to make sure to think the right thoughts."
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Peter Enns |
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3b784cb
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And all this talk of dying and being crucified and hidden doesn't describe a one-time moment of conversion when we "become Christians," as if that's final. If things were only that easy--a one-time transaction of "accepting Jesus" and then it's over. Dying describes a mode of existence we agree to once we enter the holy space of being a follower of Jesus--surrendering control, dying, all the time."
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Peter Enns |
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123de9e
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Dying is the normal mode of Christian existence, a pattern of life, what followers of Jesus are to do not just once but every day, every moment. It is certainly not a problem to be fixed so we can return to "normal," as we were. The choice is always and ever before us: whether we will hold on right here and now to what is dear, to what we know, to the familiar and safe, to twist and bend all of our experiences of God into our own shape, to ..
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Peter Enns |
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That's what Paul is after. Dying leads to real living--"Christ who lives in me," a life so deeply connected to the divine that we no longer live, but our lives are "hidden with Christ in God." Dying "with" Jesus leads to new life now, what Paul calls a movement "from death to life" (Romans 6:1-14). This is good news, the best news. When we "die," God doesn't leave us dead. God brings us back to life--"raising us from the dead," as Paul puts..
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Peter Enns |
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578b2a7
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Being "saved" by God is an ongoing process of growth and transformation, of dying and rising, of being "conformed to the image of his [God's] Son," as Paul puts it (Romans 8:29). Following Jesus means experiencing the taste of resurrection and ascension now--whether doing laundry, paying bills, or leading nations."
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Peter Enns |
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Getting there is all about dying, and each cycle of dying and rising we come to in our lives brings us, I believe, to greater insight into our deep selves, where Christ lives "in us" and our lives are "hidden" in God."
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Peter Enns |
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3b8cb66
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Doubt is divine tough love. God means to have all of us, not just the surface, going-to-church, volunteering part. Not just the part people see, but the parts so buried no one sees them. Not even us.
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Peter Enns |
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0a80bdd
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I need Sunday morning centered on what is transrational, the fundamental Christian mysteries of incarnation and resurrection, the very heartbeat of Christian faith. Not irrational or unworthy of discussion and debate, but that which, when the intellectual dust has cleared, is ultimately beyond what our minds can grasp. I need a God bigger than my arguments.
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Peter Enns |
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3cab962
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I like a prayer book and liturgy to guide me in my faith rather than falling back into my comfort zone of controlling reality with my learned and carefully chosen words, and without leaving it up to me to come up with what to say here and now when I just may not feel like it.
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Peter Enns |
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I need a place to let go and fall back from my familiar patterns and trust God to catch me.
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Peter Enns |
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One of the great comforts of Israel's epic is that it contains raw expressions of fierce doubt and lack of trust in God embraced by the ancient Israelites as part of their faith. I am thankful to God for this Bible rather than a sanitized one where spiritual struggles of the darkest kind are brushed aside as a problem to be fixed rather than accepted as part of the journey of faith.
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Peter Enns |
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Christians today have more in common with the Israelites wandering through a lonely and threatening desert or exiled to a hostile land than with Paul and most other New Testament writers. The Old Testament doesn't speak in the booming voice of imminent triumph. It speaks of generation after generation of the faithful and not so faithful, of successes and failures, of God's presence and God's absence.
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Peter Enns |
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So let me say it in a way that the ancient Israelites couldn't: when we are in despair or fear and God is as far away from us as the most distant star in the universe, we are at that moment "with" Christ more than we know--and perhaps more than we ever have been--because when we suffer, we share in and complete Christ's sufferings. And we don't have to understand that to know we should like it."
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Peter Enns |
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Rather than focusing on the badges that define our tribal identity (our church, denomination, subdenomination, doctrinal convictions, side of the aisle, whatever), a trust-centered faith will see the world with humble, open, and vulnerable eyes--and ourselves as members and participants rather than masters and conquerors. We will see our unfathomable cosmos and the people in our cosmic neighborhood as God's creation, not as objects for our ..
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Peter Enns |
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Rather than being quick to settle on final answers to puzzling questions, a trust-centered faith will find time to formulate wise questions that respect the mystery of God and call upon God for the courage to sit in those questions for as long as necessary before seeking a way forward.
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Peter Enns |
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Rather than counting on the acquisition of knowledge to support and defend the faith, a trust-centered faith values and honors the wise--those who through experience and mature spiritual habits have earned the right to lead and are given a central role in nurturing faith in others.
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Peter Enns |
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40b6e2f
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Rather than defining faithfulness as absolute conformity to authority and tribal identity, a trust-centered faith will value in others the search for true human authenticity that may take them away from the familiar borders of their faith, while trusting God to be part of that process in ourselves and others, even those closest to us. The choice of how we want to live is entirely ours.
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Peter Enns |
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Trusting God even when we can't or don't want to because nothing makes sense--especially then--is freedom, freedom from the pressure of needing to be certain when certainty has left us. Choosing to trust the Creator then and there isn't irrational, but a humble admission that our rational faculties are limited for grasping the eternal and infinite. To call such trust irrational has already put on a pedestal the rationalistic pattern of fait..
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Peter Enns |
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It is so easy to slip into "right thinking" mode--that we have arrived at full faith. We know what church God goes to, what Bible translation God prefers, how God votes, what movies God watches, and what books God reads. We know the kinds of people God approves of. God has winners and loser, and we are the winners, the true insiders. God likes all the things we like. We speak for God and think nothing of it. All Christians I've ever met who..
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Peter Enns |
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Of course, we all know that dying, rising again, Christ in me, hidden in God, seated in heaven are metaphors--the use of common language to grasp the uncommon, a reality too deep and thick for conventional vocabulary. Following Jesus is an inside-out transformation so thorough that dying and coming back to life is the only adequate way to put it.
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Peter Enns |
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Doubt signals that this process of dying and rising is underway. Though God feels far away, at that moment God may be closer than we realize--especially if "know what you believe" is how we're used to thinking of our faith."
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Peter Enns |
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Doubt is sacred. Doubt is God's instrument, will arrive in God's time, and will come from unexpected places--places out of your control. And when it does, resist the fight-or-flight impulse. Pass through it--patiently, honestly, and courageously for however long it takes. True transformation takes time.
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Peter Enns |
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We can't get our minds around God. I don't think the Christian faith is fundamentally rational, by which I mean it cannot be captured fully by our rational faculties--and in fact, more often than not, confounds them. A God who can be comfortably captured in our minds, with little else for us to find out apart from an occasional adjustment, is no God at all. Expecting faith in God to be rational is often more the problem than the solution.
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Peter Enns |
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In other words, I believe that faith in the Creator is necessarily transrational (not antirational) and mystical. I try to remember that as I work through intellectual challenges--and I mean work through, not avoid.
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Peter Enns |
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Christianity is a setup for letting go of certainty. The two pillars of the Christian faith express the mystery of faith: incarnation and resurrection. Of course, there's more to the Christian faith, but two elements make Christianity what it is, and both dodge our powers of thought and speech.
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Peter Enns |
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Rather than simply protecting the past, our faith communities have a sacred responsibility to protect the future by actively and intentionally creating a culture of trust in God, in order to deliver to our children and children's children a viable faith-- *a faith that remains open to the ever-moving Spirit and new possibilities, rather than chaining the Spirit to our past *a faith that welcomes opportunities to think critically and reflect..
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Peter Enns |
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N. T. Wright's Justification: God's Plan and Paul's Vision or What Paul Really Said.
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Peter Enns |
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Thomas Merton's Thoughts in Solitude.
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Peter Enns |
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The reputation Christianity has in the public arena has varied causes, to be sure, including our post-Christian culture, which has little use for religions of any sort. But ultimately some blame must fall squarely on the shoulders of Christian subcultures that are armed with an unwavering sense of certainty in what God wants here and now, which is not up for debate and must be imposed (to the glory of God).
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Peter Enns |
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All this is to say that a faith in a living God that is preoccupied with certainty is sin, for it compromises the gospel--personally, locally, and globally. But it need not remain so. As Jesus said to the adulterous woman, "Go your way, and from now on do not sin again" (John 8:11)."
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Peter Enns |
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Faith like this does not come easily for many of us, and often it can only emerge at the tail end of difficult and trying experiences. For it is in those moments that we come to realize how little we actually know, that we have traded God for our own tired images of God, and that the frenzied pursuit of and clinging to correct thinking will sooner or later leave us empty and exhausted. But if we venture further, we will then begin to see th..
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Peter Enns |
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In the entertaining story in 1 Kings 18: 20-40, the prophet Elijah* teases and mocks the priests of the Canaanite god Baal when their god does not show up for a divine duel with Yahweh. At one point Elijah even suggests that perhaps Baal needed to use the restroom, which is to say he isn't a god at all. I'm not kidding. He has wandered away in verse 27 is a euphemism for going potty.
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Peter Enns |
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a0cea8a
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These ancient writers had an adequate understanding of God for them in their time, but not for all time--and if we take that to heart, we will actually be in a better position to respect these ancient voices and see what they have to say rather than whitewashing the details and making up "explanations" to ease our stress."
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Peter Enns |
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Biblical writers living in different times and places who wrote for different reasons and under different circumstances have modeled for us the centrality of wisdom for the life of faith. To rethink the past in light of the present moment, as the ancient writers did, is--again--not an act of faithlessness, but the very thing faith demands. To do what is necessary to bring the past to meet the present is the highest sign of respect. A wooden..
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Peter Enns |
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Think of the resurrection as God unexpectedly going off script and bringing into the present time a bit of the future.
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Peter Enns |
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These two laws in particular were central to Jewish identity in Paul's day. They had become social badges of honor to distinguish Jews from Gentiles, something concrete to hang on to amid the persistent religious chaos introduced by centuries of Greek and Roman ways. That's why I wear my Yankees jersey in Phillies country. I do it, at great risk to myself, to let the world--the world, mind you--know that I am different. I belong to another ..
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Peter Enns |
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The period of the monarchy is not only the meat of the Old Testament narrative of Israel. It's also the period when Israel's grand narrative was written.
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Peter Enns |
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One more ball to juggle, but let's sum up the first two: (1) Israel's dismal story of the monarchy is the meat of the Old Testament, and the origins stories are an introduction to that main story. (2) Israel's origins stories, like the stories of the monarchy, were written during the period of the monarchy and the exile when the Israelites were ready to write it. Now, the third ball to keep in the air: (3) Israel's stories of kings and exil..
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Peter Enns |
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With all due respect to Israel's primo king, David and I are not on the same page here. I'm more with the seventeenth-century philosopher Blaise Pascal, who lived when modern science was coming into its own, and who had public nervous breakdowns in his Pensees such as: "The eternal silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me."
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Peter Enns |