“God is very dangerous apart from Jesus. He’s angry apart from Jesus.”

Whenever I hear people contrast God with Jesus, it makes me wonder who in the world they think Jesus is. Those of us who affirm the Nicene Creed understand Him to be fully God, and of one essence with the Father.

This then makes me wonder, of someone who thinks like Piper, just who does he believe crossed the veil in order to effect the salvation of man? Jesus, the nice guy? Jesus the superman? Jesus, the perfect Lamb?

We’re getting warmer, but we’re not fully there until we confess that this Jesus is also fully God, and of one accord with the Father. Thus it is God — the Just and the Justifier, as St. Paul tells us in his letter to the Romans — who effects man’s salvation from sin and death. Is there judgment for those who reject this gift? Absolutely. But to speak of Jesus coming down to spare us from an angry God, as if they are separate in mercy and will, or as if the chief enemy of man is God, is simply false.

As an added treat, notice how Piper, towards the end, suggests that he’s hewing to tradition when he appends “in the name of Jesus” to his prayers. Those who attend to Church history before the 16th century might suggest a better tradition, which is to pray in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

For the love of Christ is a post from: Sand in the Gears

. . . Then Peter said to them, ‘Repent and let every one of you be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins; and you shall receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. For the promise is to you and to your children, and to all who are afar off, as many as the Lord our God will call.’”

Pentecost is a post from: Sand in the Gears

In a nutshell, Christian sentimentalism arises from a premature grasp for Easter morning, a refusal to follow the three days of Easter as three days in an irreversible sequence of victory over evil.”

(Jeremy S. Begbie, “Beauty, Sentimentality and the Arts,” in The Beauty of God)

On Christian sentimentality is a post from: Sand in the Gears

“Daddy,” she said. “God says don’t worry about tomorrow.” Then she burst into tears. We hadn’t taught her that verse, she picked it up from a song or a story or who knows precisely where.

And this is the thing about theology — the knowing of God: there are a great many people who can direct you to the Gospel verse where Christ says this. But it doesn’t occur to many of us, upon learning that we have only months to live, to think about anything but that dread tomorrow. One can know the truth, but to cling to it, when despair intrudes, requires faith. Yet maybe Caroline didn’t fully understand the import of those words. Maybe, if questioned about her faith, she would have been unable to give satisfactory answers.

This is the thing about what men have done to theology — we have made knowing the unfathomable, immeasurable, ineffable God a matter of the human intellect. For centuries the Church brought even the young, baptized children of believers into the holy mystery of the Eucharist — the thanksgiving wherein we come to the table set with the bread Christ said is His body, the wine He called His blood.

But the holy things, in much of Christendom, have been stripped away. Science-minded rationalists tried to parse out how, exactly, the bread and wine become flesh and blood. Their rebellious progeny transmogrified the elements into ineffectual symbols. Communion, once central to Christian worship, became secondary to lectures. The priestly robes were cast aside in favor of professorial garb, which gave way to business dress.

We diminished the Eucharist, but added the work of intellectualizing. Small children were thus forbidden what had once been theirs. Paul’s admonition to unruly Corinthians who gorged and inebriated themselves during Communion meals came to be the proof-text for theologians bent on barring the table. “Let a man examine himself,” Paul told the drunkards. Somehow this came to mean that only those capable of rational discourse about the content of Christian dogma should be allowed to receive the Body and Blood.

Taking a covenantal approach, my church has since its inception allowed fathers to determine, after consulting the elders, when their children may receive Communion. Wife and I took our two youngest to them, five year-old Isaac and two year-old Isaiah, and passionately argued that they be allowed to the Table.

And I got the words wrong. I couldn’t adequately express what this great mystery means. Had I tread more carefully, and been better-versed in Reformed, covenantal theology, perhaps the elders wouldn’t have reconsidered our church’s practice. But I didn’t say the right things. I sowed disagreement, and they realized they were out of accord with the Presbyterian Book of Church Order, and now the little ones in our church have been excommunicated. Our church has come fully into the fold of the denomination to which it has pledged allegiance.

I am grieved for the men who have done this. I don’t doubt their motives. They believe they are protecting children. They believe in a god who curses little ones for coming to the table without knowledge of good and evil. How can I blame them for wanting to protect my children from such a thing?

Here is another thing about theology — we all hew to tradition. The self-deception of the modern Protestant is that he does not, that all his beliefs are derived from the Bible, that this is the meaning of the Protestant battle cry: sola scriptura. No one comes to Scripture a tabula rasa, however. Our understanding of the Trinity, for example, is based on tradition, though it seems plain as day to us when we read our Bibles. The various baptismal practices of denominations follow various traditions, as do practices of communion and preaching and hymnography and liturgy. The most slavish devotee of tradition, in fact, is he who imagines he has none, for he can neither see how he might be wrong, nor trace his error back to its progenitor.

What has been done, then, is that the traditions of the one holy, catholic, apostolic Church, practiced for over a millennium, have been rejected in favor of rationalist European traditions. And the thing is this: our zeal does not excuse our transgressions. Aaron’s sons were zealous. But they sought God on their terms, as have too many of us over the centuries. Aaron loved his sons, and perhaps his sons even intended orthodoxy — right worship — but they departed from it.

And they were devoured. I love the men in our church who have done this thing. And I have no delusions that fire will pour down from heaven and consume them. But they have played with strange fire, God help them. They meant well, but, intending to place themselves between children and a vengeful god, they have placed themselves between our children and Christ.

Many of my friends are fond of believing that all their beliefs are based solely on Scriptures. So tell me then, what of Christ’s command: “Let the little children come to Me, and do not hinder them”? Did He mean only then, to the man-Christ could they come? And if He meant that they are always welcome, did He then mean that He would not be in the Eucharist, that He would watch from afar as we nibble the bread, gulp the juice? And if the latter, then why did He say: “This is My body;” and, “This is My blood”?

Immediately the Reformer must consult his traditions, his logic. What did Calvin say? How did he differ with Luther? What does the panoply of modern Reformers have to say, from their readings of earlier Reformers? Our allegiance to Calvinism is so great that for its sake we must finally rebut Calvin himself, who admitted that communion of small children was the practice of the early Church.

Beginning with the belief that we are merely good citizen Christians consulting our Bibles with the aid of the Holy Spirit, in other words, we rapidly rush to our saints and catechisms. And now we have a problem, dear friends, because the Reformers find themselves squarely in opposition to a millennium of Church practice. It is Tradition versus tradition, and each claims that his is the Bible rightly known.

If only, I heard a God-seeking man complain, God had been clearer on this matter.

Brothers, sisters, He has been clear. He gave us the Church, which gave us the Bible we hold in our hands. He gave us His Apostles, who gave us their students, who gave us the Traditions of the Church. He guided the minds and hearts of the Church fathers as they battled heresies in the early centuries — battles which gave us our understanding (which too many of us now believe we can divine on our own, with our Church-given Bible) of the Trinity, the essence of Christ, the necessity of Baptism. The very fact that, in the year 2010, this so exceedingly complicated should tell us that we have gone astray.

He has been clear, and the apostle our denomination quotes most frequently — St. Paul — admonishes us as well: “Hold to the traditions you were taught by us, either by our spoken word, or by our letter.”

Isaac, Isaiah, I am sorry. Because of my intellectual inadequacy, yours is now held up to keep you from Christ’s Table, at least until the time when you can muster the right words to convince the right handful of men that you have enough rational faith. Of all the ways I have failed you thus far, this grieves me greatest. I am sorry as well for the other children who will now be turned away. I am sorry as well, brothers, if my conviction has forced you down a path to strange fire.

As for Wife and me, how can we come to a banquet when our children are turned away? How can we believe that we were, on that dreadful day we learned our child would die, worthy of Communion by virtue of our knowledge, whereas Caroline, faithful though incapable of intellectualizing, was not?

Let the little children come to Me, and do not hinder them. For whom do we think this was written?

On the excommunication of a child is a post from: Sand in the Gears

Inevitably the answers are dissatisfying, because even the most dedicated materialist-atheist understands in his gut that it’s not social injustice or lover’s frustration or chemical imbalances that drive a man to carve up children, but a desperate soul-sickness. To a world that denies the God-sparked soul, however, man must remain inscrutable, and so therefore must the world be to man, and God to man, and man to himself. This is the great alienation, not man from his labor, or man from Nature, or man from his mother.

But newspapers can’t speak this way, nor can professors or philosophers, and increasingly neither can preachers, which presents to us a future in which we all know something is desperately wrong, but where we no longer have words to name it.

The missing third is a post from: Sand in the Gears

It’s a particular tragedy of post-modern civilization that an inability to distinguish between dogs and humans is the purview of psychopaths and philosophers. This man, of course, didn’t think his wife a dog, but his worldview doesn’t allow him to see that her life, though mired in pain and unhappiness, might have a purpose beyond its utility to her, and to him.

Those who haven’t experienced chronic, debilitating pain or incapacitation should be wary of trivializing the suffering of others. As with most inviting sins, self-murder is far easier to resist when one is not tempted to do it. The non-Christian, further, does not comprehend this as sin. His incomprehension is tragic, because man at enmity with God is man at enmity with himself. His purposes are utilitarian, his world and vision are blighted, and death is his end.

It’s hard enough for a Christian to endure great physical pain, even when his understanding is rich enough to see suffering itself as both a witness and a sign, as Alexander Schmemann writes in For the Life of the World, of coming victory, of Christ’s trampling down of death by death. It must be harder still, if not offensive, to hear a healthy person painlessly whisper that this pain is for a greater good.

Pain and suffering simply are; they are part of a broken world, and so the question for man is how he will confront them when they come to him. If Christ Himself trembled in the Garden of Gethsemane, how then can we blame the non-Christian, contorted with multiple sclerosis, when he asks for what seems a dignified release?

We cannot blame him. And though we are obligated to declare the growing industry of facilitated murder in Switzerland a wicked enterprise, we should be mindful that it is the natural, rational action of people alienated from Christ. Which means the response cannot be simply to oppose suicide and the various forms of murder dabbled in at the fringes of the medical profession. We must oppose these things, because as Christians we are called to oppose evil. But the root cause is man’s alienation from Christ, and the only solution is his reunion with Christ, which means that for every Christian effort to change a law, there should be a hundred Christian efforts to change hearts.

On the facilitation of murder is a post from: Sand in the Gears

And, being practical-minded, they invested their ponds and cave walls and stories with it, because until the invention of modern Christian theology, every God-minded person understood that if He is anything He is incarnational, and the knowing of Him is more than a rationalist exercise in parsing out the numbers of angels on pin-heads, or the amount of human suffering and damnation necessary to optimize His self-glorification. Even the pagans understood, in other words, that the approach to God is bound up in blood and mystery. Having no Church (and therefore no Bible) to guide them, they scratched and clawed and invented their way toward some kind of holiness, but always, Chesterton suggests, with tongues in cheeks. We know the Creator of all things doesn’t really live in the wind-whistling cavern, but we know there is more to this world than wind and rock.

I wonder, then, if the persistence of silliness like the Family Wicca guidebook, in an age and country where most of us can stave off death and discomfort until the very end, and where distractions are plentiful, might be rooted in some holy impulse. It’s silliness, of course, because it takes a term (paganus) that long ago connoted ignorant hill people mired in local superstitions, converts it to a proper noun, and constructs around it a notion of universality, as if the druids and witches and tree-stump worshippers of old were all really touching the same life force, a quasi-conscious wisdom welling up from the loving bosom of Gaia. But who needs to sacrifice chicken gizzards at midnight to the tree-stump demi-god when we have TiVo and a life expectancy of 78 years? Where sin and judgment do not exist, what person in his right mind goes traipsing about under a full moon, slapping at mosquitoes and trying not to lose his amulets and crystals in the underbrush?

The answer, I suspect, is rooted in something good gone terribly awry, which is all sin, which is all mankind. Crafted in the image of God, we all of us know, even if only for a few seconds on waking in the darkest part of night, that there is more to creation, to the universe, to us, than matter and velocity and time. We know, as we feel the pounding of our own hearts, that there is a great mystery afoot, and that somehow we are bound up with it, that it courses through our veins as it courses through history.

Blood and mystery. Too many churches have dispensed with both, relegating the sacrament of Communion to infrequent play-acting with symbols, and confusing worship with lectures, prayer with chatter, theology with books. Maybe, in other words, grown adults in full possession of their faculties succumb to prancing about fields at midnight because they know — as we all know — that this great mystery afoot in the world was meant for us, yet — and here is the great tragedy — the last place one will find it is church.

And so here is the real mind-bender: who has strayed farther from God, the crystal-rubbing, spell-chanting Gaia-worshipper, or the prayerless, passionless, careless Christian, for whom church is a building that bears a cross, an hour’s imposition a week, a candle at Christmas and a corsage at Easter, a bit of insurance against the coming grave?

Blood and mystery is a post from: Sand in the Gears

For those who think the club is small is a post from: Sand in the Gears

A far better exposition on what happened at Golgotha, and what followed at the tomb, can be found in St. Athanasius:

“He, the Mighty One, the Artificer of all, Himself prepared this body in the virgin as a temple for Himself, and took it for His very own, as the instrument through which He was known and in which He dwelt. Thus, taking a body like our own, because all our bodies were liable to the corruption of death, He surrendered His body to death instead of all, and offered it to the Father. This He did out of sheer love for us, so that in His death all might die, and the law of death thereby be abolished because, having fulfilled in His body that for which it was appointed, it was thereafter voided of its power for men. This He did that He might turn again to incorruption men who had turned back to corruption, and make them alive through death by the appropriation of His body and by .the grace of His resurrection. Thus He would make death to disappear from them as utterly as straw from fire.” (From On the Incarnation, emphasis added)

He is Risen!

The risen King is love is a post from: Sand in the Gears

Nor has He turned away His face from me; And when I cried out to Him, He heard me.

Which reminds us that Christ on the cross, while fully man and therefore fully empathetic with the alienation of man from God, was — and ever will be — fully God, and thus incapable of alienation from the Father. It was not only, in other words, a perfect man dying on the cross for the salvation of mankind, but God Himself on that cross, stretched from torn human limbs not for self-amusement nor to satisfy some heavenly bloodlust, but out of love — deep, abiding love, love yet so alien to man that we insist on making it secondary to medieval notions of penal justice — or worse still, abstract it altogether into God’s love for Himself.

How deep the Father’s love for us indeed, that it will be bound neither by the actions nor the theologies of men. Justice was indeed served on the cross, but man, on that day, was liberated not from an angry God, but from sin and death. And this is why we eagerly await the celebration of His resurrection, and more eagerly still the life to come.

Deeper than we know is a post from: Sand in the Gears