Is God Kind or Stern? Reflections from the Heidelberg, Week 1

This week, we began a class on The Heidelberg Catechism that I’m calling ‘The Basics’.  In the class, I explained that the baby who learns the basics of walking will continue to use those basics as an adult for any number of tasks, whether walking across the street to give a neighbor a gift, or running into a burning fire to save someone.  In a similar way, Christians really must learn the ways of the Apostles’ Creed, the Lord’s Prayer, and the Ten Commandments so that they will think, feel, and live the Christian faith in all seasons.  Whether one’s faith is ‘on fire’, reaching out like flames into the world – this person, that person, connections, coincidences that AREN’T coincidences – or if one’s faith is dry – undernourished on account of anxieties, fears, or sins – these ways of thinking, feeling, and living provide us ancient and authoritative steps back into the story of God and his people.  We all need to be habitually re-oriented to this story.

One of my favorite questions from that first class was about a strange word I’d used to describe the Heidelberg Catechism: ‘kind.’  I was asked to talk about how the Heidelberg Catechism was ‘kind’ when Calvinism as a whole has a reputation of being ‘stern.’  What came to mind was that Calvinism – the tradition inspired by pastor/theologian/reformer John Calvin – conveys such a strong God that those who champion this God have little patience for any of the odd quirks of humanity.  I am a subscriber to Ken Myers’ Mars Hill Audio podcast and he recently interviewed James Bratt, the author of a biography of Abraham Kuyper, a Calvinist theologian, professor, journalist, and statesman from the Netherlands who lived in the 19th century.  In describing some of the influences of Kuyper’s young life, Bratt talked about a Calvinism which described a God of such strong sovereignty that there really wasn’t much emphasis on the way we know God through Christ.  Intriguingly, Bratt described the risks of adhering to a faith in a remote distant, stern Creator without much emphasis on Christ in that it gave way to the equally remote, distant, but kind, benevolent god of Unitarian Unversalism.  Both miss out on Christ.  Instead, the Heidelberg Catechism invites us into its lessons about God, people, and world by asking “What is your only comfort in life and in death?”  Its answer drives us primarily and exclusively to Christ: “That I am not my own, but belong – body and soul, in life and in death – to my faithful Savior, Jesus Christ…”  In Christ, God comes to give us comfort.  Properly understood, this is Calvin’s vision as well.  God is strong, sovereign, and holy.  But through Christ, we see that his judgment has been poured out at the cross.  Through Jesus’ sacrifice, we have been received anew into God’s house to know him and to gaze upon his beauty, and to live for him in our lives by the power of the Holy Spirit and not by our own strength.  God's kindness in Christ shows us the true face of God without losing the serious business of God's holiness by allowing it to degenerate into a sort of humorless, stern frigidity.

Lost in the Woods

Humorist Patrick McManus ruminates about the various best ways to get lost in the woods.  He thinks the absolute best way is to go as a group, including invoking the power of magic:

“Undoubtedly, the surest way to get lost is to venture into the woods as a member of a group.  Sooner or later one of the boys, on a pretext of offering up a riddle, says, “Hey guys, I bet none of you can tell me which direction the car is in.  Heh heh.”  (The “heh heh” is tacked on to imply that he knows the right direction, but truth is he couldn’t tell it from a kidney stone.)  Everyone now points firmly and with great authority in a different direction.  In every such case, the most forceful personality in the group gets his way.  The effectiveness of this method arises out of the fact that the most forceful personality usually turns out to rank on intelligence scales somewhere between sage hens and bowling balls.  He is also an accomplished magician.  With a wave of his arm and the magic words “the car’s just over that next rise” he can make the whole bunch of you vanish for three days.” (A Fine and Pleasant Misery 16)

Christ-less Discipleship

N.T. Wright describes the history of the Jesus Seminar in the beginning of Jesus and the Victory of God.  The Jesus Seminar was a group of biblical scholars in the late 20^th century whose collaboration consisted of claims to say for sure whether various parts of the four gospels were authentic or not – in other words, whether Jesus really spoke them, or if they were merely attributed to him by later redactors.

Robert Funk, the chairman of the Seminar, called his fellow scholars to, in Wright’s words, “fearless discipleship.”  Funk: “We are about to embark on a momentous enterprise…the course we shall follow may prove hazardous.  We may well provoke hostility.  But we will set out, in spite of the dangers, because we are professionals and because the issue of Jesus is there to be faced.” (Wright 32)  Wright notes that Funk’s call to his colleagues to take up the task is “strangely reminiscent of Mark 8:34, which in the Seminar’s voting came out heavily black, i.e. inauthentic.”  In other words, Funk invokes sacrifice-fueled integrity for the sake of a project that includes debunking Jesus’ sacrifice-fueled integrity.

I had to look up Mark 8:34.  Here is how it reads: “Then (Jesus) called the crowd to him along with his disciples and said: “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.”

People as a matter of course should be careful about their calls to mission with regard to debunking Jesus.  If they aren’t careful, they could be seeking to destroy the very fabric of mission that inspires them in the first place!

Christ and Marriage

A few delightful passages from an old book by Thomas Torrance, James Torrance, and David Torrance, all Scottish theologians, all brothers.

First, that a husband and wife become one person in marriage:

“The Gospel proclaims that God has not abandoned man and woman in their most intimate relationship.  In Christ God goes with a Christian man and woman.  He is present in Christian marriage continually creating and building it to his glory and to man’s and woman’s mutual comfort and happiness.  By his Holy Spirit he brings us again and again to the cross in humility, repentance and renewal.  For the cross is the place where we are made by the Holy Spirit to die to ourselves and to rise ever again as a new person, one new person, man and wife, in Christ Jesus.  This is something which must and does happen again and again.  Having committed ourselves, our love and our marriage to the Lord, the Lord presides over our marriage, he assumes the responsibility for deepening our love and building our marriage, seeking to perfect it through the years.  In Christian marriage, God is always present in all his creative redeeming power and love.” (A Passion for Christ, 95)

Torrance here reminds us of the enduring truth of Genesis 2 – that a man and woman become one flesh in marriage.  The Christian single person is free.  That man or woman does not have to marry to be whole.  Christ is the spouse for every Christian person, as Laura Smit’s book Loves Me, Loves Me Not reminded me recently.  The Christian who marries has a new identity – husband and wife – in Christ Jesus.  Paul speaks of marriage as mysteriously tied to Christ’s relationship to his church.  In this way, our marriages remind us of our salvation.  In both, we are told “this is a great unity.  There are two, and yet it is not so complex as that you are separate.  You are one.”  This is the case for husbands with their wives in Christ.  This is the case for the church with Christ.

Torrance goes on to talk about God’s self-giving to be married to us:

“In his covenant with us in Christ, God gave himself to us, and goes on giving himself to us, in all his wholeness and entirety.  This is the incredible wonder and mystery of the Incarnation – something happened to God!  God has given himself and goes on giving himself in entirety to us in Christ.” (95)

One of the sure-fire ways God uses to move me from my drudgery and dullness is to show me what it means that Christ gave up his wealth and authority with his Father over the heavens and earth to become poor, to become a tiny baby in the arms of his mother Mary.  Torrance reminds me that this change that God took on is also an illustration of marriage.  “A man will leave his mother and father to be united to his wife.”

This ennobles the challenge of marriage.  Give of yourself in your marriage.  God gives of himself in his marriage.  This is the way of the cosmos.  All love is work.  Labors of love are still love.

John 7 - Keeping God's Words

A group Bible study looked together at John 7:1-24.  This passage caught me:

"Jesus answered, "My teaching is not my own.  It comes from the one who sent me.  Anyone who chooses to do the will of God will find out whether my teaching comes from God or whether I speak on my own.  Whoever speaks on their own does so to gain personal glory, but he who seeks the glory of the one who sent him is a man of truth; there is nothing false about him.  Has not Moses given you the law?  Yet not one of you keeps the law.  Why are you trying to kill me?" (John 7:16-19)

Through most of the discussion, I remained puzzled about Jesus' transition from the Father's teaching to Moses and the law.  But in both cases, we are dealing with the question of 'keeping.'  Jesus receives teaching from the Father.  He keeps it.  The Jews receive the law from Moses.  They don't keep it.  Keeping a teaching or a law isn't storing something away in an attic.  My wife and I recently threw away a number of things from our attic that we realized we weren't going to use.  Two years from now, we'd be asking ourselves yet again, "Why are we keeping this?"  Keeping the law would have more to do with what Psalm 119 is talking about:

"How can a young person stay on the path of purity?  By living according to your word.  I seek you with all my heart; do not let me stray from your commands.  I have hidden your word in my heart that I might not sin against you.  Praise be to you, Lord; teach me your decrees.  With my lips I recount all the laws that come from your mouth.  I rejoice in following your statutes as one rejoices in great riches.  I meditate on your precepts and consider your ways.  I delight in your decrees; I will not neglect your word." (Psalm 119:9-16)

Think of the verbs: words are lived, hidden, recounted, rejoiced in, meditated upon, and delighted in.  This is how Jesus treats his Father's words.  Failure to do so is failure to keep.

If you are flooded in words, take some time and let most of them go and dwell with the words of the Bible alone.  The words of the Bible are the words of life.  These are the creative words from Genesis with which God speaks everything into being.  If you can't slow down or put aside other words to tend to those of the Bible, I leave you with the words of someone from this same Bible study: "I have experienced the power of the Lord, and it has almost always involved me going out of my comfort zone."  I circled the words 'comfort zone'.  We all have them.  Areas of thought, feeling, and life that we hesitate to exit.  As we prayed, quite a few of us said things like this, "God, make me more confident to be uncomfortable."  I hope it is your prayer too.  Wanting to keep God's words is the first step to actually keeping them.  And we can ask God to do this for us.  

The best news of all is that those in Christ have his Spirit so that we love to do the Father's will in the same way that Jesus does.  The common thread is the life lived by the Holy Spirit.  The old life which refused to obey God has been put to death, and the new life in the Spirit loves God's words.  In this new life, we live the words, hide them in our hearts, recount them, rejoice in them, meditate upon them, and delight in them.  This is what Jesus does.  This is what we do.

Children

Stratford Caldecott maintains that there is something infinite about childhood.  He explains:

"The pure gaze of innocence is one that does not secretly look for what can be got out of something or someone.  It sees things as they are in their own right.  The energy behind the gaze is not diverted by a variety of other passions.  When a baby wants something, it wants that thing completely, as anyone who has witnessed a tantrum must see.  Thus the child lives each moment more intensely than those who have grown old in sin.  His eyes are clearer, his ears keener, his energy stronger.  He lives in a universe that seems to go on forever, for he has not had the experience of many winters and summers, and of the flickering parade of birthdays through the years.  He has no yardstick against which to measure his life.  This intensity of experience is partly a function of the way memory and imagination work.  It is the memory of time that makes us old; remembering eternity makes us young again." (Caldecott, Beauty of the Word)

Everytime you see a thing or a person as a gift in itself, you are becoming young again and looking on the world as a child.  And everytime you see God as a gift in himself, you are becoming a child of God again - "Whoever does not receive the kingdom of God like a child shall not enter it" (Mark 10:15)

Jesus' Victory

Jesus’ victory alone – is it enough?  To even ask the question is to acknowledge that life feels like defeat at times.  If we were fulfilled and had all we desired, why would we search for any other victory than what we already have in him?  

 

It seems to me that the biblical faith stakes everything on a victory that comes in the midst of what looks like defeat.  We gain our life by losing it.  To the one who toils at this ground, the one who strives to obey without too much regard for more worldly measures of success, a victory comes that is not one’s own, but which belongs to Christ.  This person has a chance to share in Christ’s victory and to be satisfied. 

 

Jesus’ victory is not staked upon his rhetorical skill or upon his gifts for healing.  His victory is established by his comprehensive life and the positive force of his obedience and of his love.  The obedient life lived toward God looks so passive and dependent from the world’s perspective, but it is the most forceful, wise, positive decision to be made with one’s life – for to give one’s life to God is to gain it back again, even if it is lost. 

 

And Christ’s death is not for himself alone.  By the grace of God, it is vicarious, whereby the benefits of his life and of his death and of his new life are shared generously.  His status as God’s Beloved Son is unique by nature, but whatever else we could want or need by way of adoption is provided to us by grace.  Only that Jesus Christ be received as Jesus Christ, all else will suffice for us, far beyond what we could know or expect. 

 

This is the good news for our secular, post-modern era and its unique challenges: that although we consider everything outside our own emotions and our own heads with suspicion with regard to forming our personal identity, Jesus gives the gift of finding ourselves, the gift of a true identity and the gift of a solid basis for reality outside of ourselves. For even the darkest night, Jesus’ gifts are enough light to fill the sky. 

 

For the most downtrodden of us, the most self-pitying of us, his gift is the sort that comforts and satisfies, not least because this comfort is rooted in our own pain and sin-sick sorrow.  We were right to feel as we did.  It was all true.  But through this weakness comes strength.  Strength over and against the allegiance-claiming world and also for the sake of this same world, which God loves.  We are not orphans or beholden to any other lord.  Christ’s love frees us from all tyranny – even the tyranny of our own selves – and deputizes us for love and service in his name, as his ambassadors. 

 

And though all burdens are equally manageable to him in his glory, that is not so for us. Some hours weigh heavily.  Some days crush us. The early morning burden may take one hour to give him.  The late afternoon burden may take one minute.  With Christ, we should expect comfort.  And we should wrestle until we get it.  We should dig through the mess of our lives in prayer until we find the cross of Jesus Christ. Where else would we find victory?  What other victory is there?  His pain is solidarity.  But for all the work to get there, it is worth it.  Only when we find him at his cross do we find the reminder that we never skip straight to hope or to resurrection in our lives.  Only when we find him at his cross are we immediately flooded with transcendent and prevailing hope of a great victory.  This hope is one step away, but the only one who can say this, and the only who can make such a step is the one who finds Christ at his cross.  That is the great overview of the world, the lookout on the universe.  We can only overcome the world because, at a point in time, Christ overcame the world.