Soul Size

I’m reading Douglas Hofstadter’s I Am a Strange Loop. Hofstadter teaches cognitive science (the science of thought – its origins and operations) at Indiana University. Strange Loop is an update and enlargement of his earlier book, Gödel, Escher, Bach. In both books Hofstadter explores the relationship between the self (what he calls “the ‘I’”) and the physiology of the brain. Simply put, his thesis is that what starts out as a purely physiological phenomenon involving brain biology and chemistry morphs into something that cannot be fully explained solely on the basis of physical matter; namely, a consciousness emerges that is, paradoxically and at one and the same time, both a product of the matter and master of it. That is, I Am a Strange Loop.

He’s a good writer. Even though he’s talking about a very complex subject that only the specialist can fully comprehend, Hofstadter grabs your attention and holds it with homey illustrations and punchy prose.

But what captured my attention in the book was Hofstadter’s distinction between “soul sizes.” He asserts that there are “big souls” and “little souls” all up the chain of life (from mosquito to man), and that value is (and should be) attached to souls relative to their size. His assertion is both provocative and problematic. For example, he argues that he has no compunction about swatting mosquitoes but, conversely, has become a vegetarian due to his “soul size calculus.” Moreover, on the same grounds ostensibly he asserts that he does not have a problem with aborting a five-month old fetus in deference to the mother because, on his consciousness calculus and criteria, the five-month old fetus does not have a fully developed “soul.” I find that strange.

That said, I do find his distinction between “big souls” and “little souls” to be intriguing. When C. S. Lewis once said that this world is the place for the growing up of souls, he was saying something of the same thing; namely, that souls (self, consciousness, “I” – call it what you will) have “work” to do, and that some souls do that work better than others and, consequently, have become (are becoming) either “big souls” or “little souls.” I think I’ve met some…of both kinds!

Reminds me of something Forrest Carter wrote in The Education of Little Tree. In the story, a little boy goes to live with his grandparents. His Grandma is a Cherokee and gives him a Cherokee name – Little Tree. She teaches him about life from her unique perspective. One day, in an impromptu lecture on “soul sizes,” she tells him that people have two minds – one for “body living” (animalistic impulses) and one for “spirit living” (the higher functions of “human”). She tells Little Tree: If you only use your body mind and think greedy or mean; if you are always cuttin’ at folks with it and figuring how to material profit off’n them…then you’ll shrink up your spirit mind to a size no bigger’n a hickor’nut. She goes on: When your body dies, your body mind dies with it; only the spirit mind lives on. And if you’ve thought all your life with only your body mind, there you’d be, stuck with a hickor’nut spirit.

Intriguing, isn’t it. I’d like to explore this more fully with you, but I’ve got to go exercise…my soul.

*The use of the image above to illustrate the article discussing the book in question qualifies as fair use under United States copyright law.

The Shack

People have been asking me what I thought of the new book by William P. Young called The Shack. They say: “You gotta read it; it’s a great book.” And so I ask them: “Okay, what’s so great about it?” What I get is theology – they like the view of God the book espouses. Of course, that means I’m in. So I read it. It’s a good read, really. Real page-turner. Young manifests a rare gift of language and imagery. Example: The central character, Mack, receives a note, presumably from God, which he then proceeds to open. Young describes this rather pedestrian task with language that is anything but – Turning his back to the breath-snatching wind, he finally coaxed the single small rectangle of unfolded paper out of its nest. Now, that’s nice.

Theologically, the book is a bit schizophrenic, perhaps intentionally so. When the tortured protagonist, Mack, is speaking, the theology espoused is a sort of new age, postmodern, existential, anti-intellectual, “roll-your-own” spirituality that gives priority to feeling over thinking, experience over tradition, immanence over transcendence, and the personal (individual) over the corporate and cosmic. One passage in the book is telling:

Try as he might, Mack could not escape the desperate possibility that the note just might be from God after all, even if the thought of God passing notes did not fit well with his theological training. In seminary he had been taught that God had completely stopped any overt communication with moderns, preferring to have them only listen to and follow sacred Scripture, properly interpreted, of course. God’s voice had been reduced to paper, and even that paper had to be moderated and deciphered by the proper authorities and intellects. It seemed that direct communication with God was something exclusively for the ancients and uncivilized, while educated Westerners’ access to God was mediated and controlled by the intelligentsia. Nobody wanted God in a box, just in a book. Especially an expensive one bound in leather with gilt edges, or was that guilt edges?

But when “God” is talking (as “Papa,” “Jesus,” or “Sarayu” – Young’s take on the Trinity) the theology expressed is more fully orbed, satisfying, and, occasionally, even profound. For example, when Mack asks Papa who’s in charge in the Trinity, Papa responds:

Humans are so lost and damaged that to you it is almost incomprehensible that people could work or live together without someone being in charge. …Creation has been taken down a very different path than we desired. In your world the value of the individual is constantly weighed against the survival of the system, whether political, economic, social, or religious – any system actually. First one person, and then a few, and finally even many are easily sacrificed for the good and ongoing existence of that system. In one form or another this lies behind every struggle for power, every prejudice, every war, and every abuse of relationship. The ‘will to power and independence’ has become so ubiquitous that it is now considered normal.

Actually, that’s not a bad interpretation of Jesus’ statement about the “will to power” in Mark 10:42-45 in which he suggests that power is pagan and cannot be redeemed; only aborted.

Of course, the theological issue at stake in The Shack is theodicy – the problem of evil; literally, the "judgment of God" as in God on trial. (See the collection of essays by C. S. Lewis titled God in the Dock.) Mack’s daughter, Missy, was kidnapped and murdered at The Shack and he returns to the scene of the crime three and a half years later to make sense of it all…and peace with God. C. S. Lewis, in The Problem of Pain, expressed the essence of the issue of theodicy when he says, “There are three statements, only two of which can be held together – God is all-powerful; God is good; Bad things happen.” The Shack resolves the “problem” (just as Rabbi Kushner does, When Bad Things Happen to Good People) with an appeal to impotence and immanence – God may be “all good,” but he is not “all powerful,” God’s power being limited by human choice and freedom. That resolution to the problem of evil works (in the sense of being satisfying) if the pain/evil we’re talking about is personal pain/evil. When what I’m dealing with is individual, personal, intimate suffering then it’s enough to have a God Who puts His arms around me and says “I know just how you feel even though there’s really not very much I can do about it.” When my pain is personal, immanence trumps transcendence. But when the pain is cosmic – when the bombs are falling, or the 767’s are flying into the World Trade Center – I want more than just empathy; I want sovereignty. I observed that churches were full on Sunday September 16, 2001, and the worshippers weren’t so much looking for a Caring God as a Sovereign God. Indeed, someone even said to me on that Sunday: “I needed to come here today to be reminded of Who’s in charge.” To be sure, it didn’t last. Never does. Life settles in and settles down and the tuff stuff, while not painless, is at least personal rather than cosmic, and therefore seems more manageable, and we think that with a little understanding we can handle it. That’s The Shack’s approach to theodicy; and that’s all right, I guess, so long as we remember that God is also the “Blazing Fire” the writer of Hebrews talks about (see Hebrews 12:18-21). Immanence and transcendence – we need both in our gods. Fortunately, with the Bible’s God, we get both.

One final comment. I find it interesting…and encouraging that The Shack is the number one best seller right now on the New York Times Best Seller’s List. It documents what some of us have long suspected; that, despite the ubiquitous secularism and just plain silliness being served up these days as a “junk food diet” for the desperate and the disconnected, there is yet a deep, abiding longing for God hardwired in every one of us. And it shows up at the strangest times…in the strangest places. That’s probably important.

Goodbye and Hello

I almost met Senator Jesse Helms. It was the fall of ’89, and I was Associate Professor of New Testament at Midwestern Seminary in Kansas City when the call came. First Baptist Church of Raleigh was looking for a new pastor, and I had been asked to preach for the search committee. My friend, mentor, and teacher, Dr. George Balentine, was pastor of the Hayes Barton Baptist Church in Raleigh, and he offered to let me supply the pulpit for him so that the search committee from First Church could hear me preach.

At 11:00, George and I entered the sanctuary for worship and took our seats on the chancel. He leaned over and whispered to me: “Don’t get nervous, but Senator Jesse Helms is here today.” I got nervous. I knew Senator Helms was a member of Hayes Barton, but I figured that with George out of the pulpit, and with the Senator’s busy schedule, there was not a prayer that he’d show. And yet, there he was. I nodded to him, and he nodded back to me. Don’t remember what I preached that day; doesn’t matter anyway. Other than that nod, I never met Senator Helms; I was spirited away immediately following the service to meet with the search committee from First Church Raleigh where I was to serve as pastor in the 90’s.

I would later learn that Senator Helms had been a member of First Baptist Raleigh during the tenure of my predecessor, Dr. John M. Lewis, during the tumultuous 60’s. He left the church over Dr. Lewis’ stand on the civil rights movement – Lewis was for it; Helms was against it. He joined Hayes Barton, but the two of them remained friends nonetheless. Senator Helms later came around to Dr. Lewis’ point of view on that issue, and who knows how many others. Senator Helms grew up in the Piedmont of North Carolina and knew, and related at close range with, many people of African-American descent. I rather suspect that his early opposition to integration grew more out of his distrust of big government (President Johnson’s “Great Society”) than it did dislike or distrust of people of color. But who knows? I don’t.

All I know is that though the Senator and I would have been on opposite sides of a number of issues I nonetheless admired his integrity (a quality all-too-lacking these days), his stubborn refusal to do “group think” no matter what group is doing the thinking, and his willingness to go-it-alone, if need be, for the principles he believed in.

And so, on the day when the State of North Carolina and the country says “goodbye” to the Senator from the Ole North State, I could not help recall the day that I almost said “hello.”

Just Detail

I’m not writing about anything biblical or theological in this blog. Nothing that complex or profound is occupying my attention these days. You see, we have Eastern bluebirds raising their second family of the summer in our backyard. I love bluebirds. They’re so…unexpected…and blue. Most of the birds that visit our backyard are appropriately attired in “earth tones” – brown, grey, yellow, rust, black. But bluebirds have the unmitigated gall to dress up in the showiest shade of blue imaginable. When I look at them, I can’t help but wonder how God came up with this one. “What were you thinking? Blue?”

And then there’s the whole “attitude thing.” Bluebirds have an attitude, anger management issues. They’re not much bigger than a sparrow, but they think they’re hawks! Cheryl and I sit on the deck in the evening and watch the show as Daddy Bluebird chases other birds and squirrels that dare venture too close to his bluebird box wherein Mrs. Bluebird is “great with child,” to employ the biblical idiom. (Okay, okay, I’ll taper off gradually.) He positively torments the squirrels which we, of course, love because they positively torment us, emptying our bird feeders, rearranging anything on the deck not to their liking, and generally making a mess of things and a nuisance of themselves. We sometimes catch ourselves cheering for him as he makes a “strafing run” at the squirrels: “There's one now! Sick ‘em! Get ‘em!” What bluebirds lack in size and camouflage they make up for in attitude and chutzpah. If I’m ever in a bird fight, I want the bluebirds on my side. Their carnivors, you know. All right, so they’re insectivors, but you get the point.

Don’t have a heavy theological question to explore in all this. I’m even going to resist the urge to talk about “natural revelation.” Don’t thank me; it’s what I do. But sometimes I’d like to ask God: “What’s up with the bluebirds? What were you thinking?”

I want to know, sometimes, what God was thinking. Not that I could understand it if I knew, but I still want to know. It’s His fault – He made me that way, with a voracious curiosity about Him and an insatiable appetite for Him. Deepak Choprah (How to Know God) once said: “I want to think God’s thoughts after Him; everything else is just detail.” Now that I understand.

Theology as Anthropology

I don’t normally comment on Baptist politics. Frankly, I’m not all that interested. I’d rather go shopping, and I think you know my policy on shopping. But a recent row among Baptists caught my attention not so much for what they were fighting about as what they weren’t. It seems that at a recent denominational gathering of Baptists, the Presbyterian pastor turned seminary professor turned pastor again, John Killinger, created a controversy during a workshop he conducted around his new book, The Changing Shape of Our Salvation.

The presenter apparently argued for an understanding of the doctrine of salvation more along the lines of “self-realization” and “self-fulfillment” rather than salvation in some eschatological sense achieved via Christ’s atoning death on the cross (orthodox Christianity). Some who heard him were uneasy with his soteriology believing his views called into question both Jesus’ divinity and the efficacy of his atoning death. But I think they’ve missed the real issue here. It is not a matter of his views of the “how” of salvation that troubles me here; it’s the “what.” To be honest, even those of us who believe in the atoning death of Jesus haven’t the faintest idea how it actually works, and anyone who says s/he does is either dishonest or delusional. All theories about how the atonement works are just that – theories, as C. S. Lewis says, “…to be left alone if they do not help us, and, even if they do help us, not to be confused with the thing itself.” That’s not what bothers me here; rather it is the fact that he apparently thinks salvation is more about us than God, more man’s achievement than God’s gift, more human development than divinely-wrought transformation. Succinctly: He understands theology as anthropology.

A little context might be helpful. Over the last 50 years or so biblical scholars and theologians have debated the whole notion of whether or not the biblical soteriology (the doctrine of salvation), which is essentially and fundamentally eschatological in character, is comprehensible and relevant to contemporary people. Marcus Borg’s, Jesus: A New Vision, is characteristic of this perspective in which he, while not denying the essentially eschatological nature of the biblical soteriology, abandons it nonetheless in favor of a perspective more palatable and popular to modern persons, namely, Jesus the charismatic change agent of the contemporary culture. Borg certainly wasn’t the first to deconstruct the eschatological herald of the Kingdom of God the New Testament portrays Jesus as being. Many biblical scholars have struggled with the whole idea of salvation understood eschatologically (“saved” means “saved from”… The Wrath, Hell, Judgment, this present evil age, etc., and not just “saved for” a la salvation as “self-actualization theories”). Their reasons for abandoning the clear New Testament teaching about the eschatological nature of salvation are two, chiefly: (1) Such views are too escapist, too other-worldly, too pie-in-the-sky-bye-and-bye, and run the risk of abdicating the Christian’s responsibility to redeem this world rather than just living for the next; (2) Modern people have no understanding of, or appreciation for, the kind of “delayed gratification” associated with salvation in the afterlife. They’re far more interested in the here and now. Moreover, the biblical images of the eschaton (end of the world) are odd and off-putting to modern ears. Hence, it’s better just to jettison them altogether in favor of a doctrine of salvation that is more personal, possible, and practical.

But the New Testament is thoroughly and irrefutably eschatological in perspective. When Jesus says “Kingdom of God” he means “another world” breaking in and breaking through, disrupting the ordinary order of things. Jesus doesn’t come so much to “fix” this world as to announce its end and the advent of a whole new world he calls “the Kingdom of God,” a world so disquieting, unsettling, disruptive, and counter-cultural that it takes a transformation so radical, so complete that it can only be described as “being born from above.” The Spirit of God conceives this transformation; it is not merely the result of trying harder and doing better; it is not just “tweaking” the human personality here and there; it is not “human development” or “self-actualization” or “self-realization;” it is self-denial, self-destruction, death and life, and life via death (see Mark 8:34-35). Indeed, I often say that I can extrapolate one’s entire theology pretty much by how one answers a single question: “Do you believe that salvation is essentially something ‘in here’ (that is, inside me) that I must bring out to the surface, or is salvation finally something ‘out there’ (utterly beyond me, outside me, external to me) that must come inside me and change me in order to save me?” The latter is New Testament soteriology; the former is humanism (I resist the adjective “secular” as redundant). That is to say, the Christian view of salvation, everywhere attested in the New Testament, is that apart from God’s intervening and transforming grace, I am helpless, hopeless, and incapable of “self-fulfillment” and “self-actualization.” Matter of fact, “self-realization” is about the last thing I want! The more I succeed, the more I fail. Indeed, there is no “me” to be actualized or realized apart from God’s dream of “me” when He “thought me up” and brought me out of nothing into the world. Any other “me” is a fraud…or a monster. Once again, Lewis put it succinctly when he said: “…fallen man is not simply an imperfect creature who needs improvement: he is a rebel who must lay down his arms.”

But this perspective of “theology as anthropology” is deep within the theological education community. I ran afoul of it some years ago in a faculty meeting. We were wrangling over a spiritual formation curriculum for seminary students when I expressed surprise at the document with which we were presented purporting to be a curriculum designed to “form our students spiritually.” But when I looked at the curriculum, it was heavy in behavioristic psychology, developmentalism, secular “leadership” material, and systems theory, and light on anything that could be remotely described as “spiritual” formation; indeed, there was precious little “God-language” in the document at all! That is to say, it was not about forming persons in Christ, cultivating their spiritual life, enhancing their relationship with God. It was pure developmentalism conceived in thoroughly secular and even a-theistic (and I mean that literally – "no-God") terms. It was anthropology disguised as theology. I said so, much to the consternation of the faculty. Finally, one of them, in a fit of frustration, protested with passion: “But human development is spiritual development!” There it is – theology as anthropology. I was disappointed but not surprised. As a statement of what is wrong with theological education, I couldn’t have said it better myself – theological education that isn't (theological, that is).

Let me make myself clear: Finally, essentially, necessarily theology is about God. Salvation is God’s work, not ours. If it isn’t, why bother? If becoming a Christian is finally no different than joining any other club, then why bother? If the mission of the Church is merely to help you "succeed" (whatever that means) in this world, why not just stay home and watch Dr. Phil or Oprah? You don't even have to tithe! If the Church is merely a sanctified Rotary Club, as Will Willimon puts it, why bother? As Will quips: “At least the Rotary Club serves lunch and has their meetings at a convenient hour!” A soteriology that is more anthropology than theology is no soteriology at all, at least not in the New Testament sense.

Let’s let Lewis have the last word:

The more we get what we now call “ourselves” out of the way and let Him take us over, the more truly ourselves we become. …He invented–as an author invents characters in a novel–all the different men (and women), that you and I were intended to be. …It is no good trying to “be myself” without Him. The more I resist Him and try to live on my own, the more I become dominated by my own heredity and upbringing and surroundings and natural desires. …I am not, in my natural state, nearly so much of a person as I like to believe: most of what I call “me” can be very easily explained. …Give up yourself, and you will find your real self. Lose your life and you will save it. Submit to death, death of your ambitions and favourite wishes every day and death of your whole body in the end: submit with every fibre of your being, and you will find eternal life. Keep back nothing. Nothing that you have not given away will ever be really yours. Nothing in you that has not died will ever be raised from the dead. Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay. But look for Christ and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in. (from Mere Christianity, “The New Men”)

The Crux of the Matter

Haven’t posted in a while. Been working on a writing assignment for Cokesbury. They’re publishing a new resource for laypersons (Sunday School teachers and small group Bible study leaders) called ABS Illustrated (for “Adult Bible Studies Illustrated”). The purpose of the four-color magazine is to provide background resources for laypersons who want to be able to interpret the Bible in its context and not just our own. My article was on ancient Ephesus, using archaeology, inscriptions, numismatics, primary literary sources, and geography to reveal to the reader something of the Ephesus Paul knew, an Ephesus that no longer exists, predicated on the principle that in order to understand Acts 19 and Paul’s Epistle to the Ephesians, one must know something of Paul’s Ephesus, otherwise there is likely to be as much mis-use as use of the Bible. I was pleased to write for the new publication, at least in part because I am convinced that nothing is more critical for the Church right now than a recovery of contextual biblical interpretation. Some of you who read my stuff know how troubled I am by what I’ve called the “ouija board approach to interpreting the Bible” (see my blog: “The Ouija Board Bible”) where the inspired author’s meaning is virtually ignored.

The importance of contextual biblical interpretation may not be immediately apparent to everyone, but its impact is unmistakable. It came home to me recently in Bethlehem. I was guiding a group of pilgrims to the Holy Land and over coffee one evening had a curious conversation with the local tour company representative. He expressed some surprise that I was guiding my group to places many Protestant pilgrims never go; namely, the Via Dolorosa and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Himself a Palestinian Christian (Roman Catholic), he expressed astonishment that I would take my group to those places. He said that typically Protestants aren’t interested in either of those places because they seem “too Catholic,” preferring instead Gordon’s Calvary and the Garden Tomb (which we also visit). I said, “I don’t think that’s quite it. I think, rather, that Protestants prefer the Garden Tomb to the Via Dolorosa and Holy Sepulchre because we prefer to think of the Risen Christ rather than the Crucified Christ, and those two places are much too graphic reminders of just how brutal the crucifixion was.”

Think about it. Protestants don’t typically wear crucifixes. We prefer an Empty Cross and an Empty Tomb. Catholics, who on the whole are far more willing to reflect on the Suffering Christ than are we Protestants, wear their crosses with Jesus still on it, a not so subtle reminder of just what our redemption required, both of God and of us. For most Protestants, on the other hand, the Cross has become tamed, civilized, sanitized. It was not.

I was a young PhD student when I read Professor Martin Hengel’s The Crucifixion. He points out, among other things, that the Latin word for cross, crux, was a four-letter word, literally and figuratively. It was not a word one said in polite company, both because only dregs of society suffered it, and because the method of execution was so gruesome and grizzly that one did not speak of it (which is what the word “obscene” literally means). He said that it was hard to bring the word crux into English with the same sense of offense that it carried in the ancient world. I don't want to shock you, s0 use your imagination. Got it? Crux was a word more spat than said.

If you’ve seen Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, you got a glimpse at Golgotha. It was violent, ugly, brutal, bloody. Ironically, Gibson was criticized by Christians, by Christians, for making it so gruesome that it carried an “R” rating. As a New Testament scholar, I applaud him for not sparing us. Christians need to see it for what it really was – an obscene, shocking, brutal murder of the Son of God. Only then are we able to comprehend the consequence of the words, “And he became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross.” Only then dare we sing, “I have decided to follow Jesus; no turning back…no turning back.”

Ancient Words, Amazing Stories

Fred Craddock said that the mind is like a hallway in an art gallery with pictures hanging on it, and under each picture is a word identifying the subject of the picture. So that if I say a word, you get a picture. “Nun,” “Southerner,” “Doctor,” “Homeless.” The problem is, we don’t all have the same pictures hanging on the walls of our minds! Hence, we use words, thinking that we’re communicating clearly because we have a clear “picture” in mind of what we’re talking about, but the other person has a different picture.

The problem is exacerbated by the fact that words, and the pictures they conjure up in our minds, are always accompanied by a story of some sort, a narrative matrix against which the picture is set, which gives the word context and meaning. Therefore, to exchange one word for another is not just to change the picture, it is to change the story within which the picture is set. That is to say, words don’t just communicate ideas; they also carry with them a common culture, ethos, values, and plot. Change the word and you’ve changed the story.

In an episode of the old television sitcom Home Improvement, Al’s mother dies and Wilson, Tim Taylor’s globe-trotting, Renaissance-man neighbor, agrees to conduct the funeral. At the funeral home, Tim is chatting with Wilson who, having donned clerical robe and stole, is looking over his notes for the service. Wilson reads through his funeral sermon notes to Tim and admits that he’s a bit rusty; that the last time he’d conducted a funeral was when he was a shaman on the island of Pago Pago. As he reads through his notes for the service, he comes to the part in the funeral where it says, “Dear brothers and sisters, we’ve come to pay our respects and to celebrate the life of (insert name), and to commend the soul of our beloved to the eternal keeping of the ________________,” and at this point Wilson says to himself, “Must remember to replace “Lizard King” with “Heavenly Father.” Audience laughs. They laughed because they instinctively knew that changing the words of the story changed the story itself. That is to say, while the narrative structure of the funeral service Wilson was about to do was identical in form to a Christian service (right down to the language of “brothers and sisters” and “commend the soul,” and “eternal keeping”), by simply changing the name for God from “Heavenly Father” to “Lizard King” a completely different story was assumed.

Some have suggested that because we now live in a biblically-illiterate and post-Christian world, the “ancient words” and their concomitant stories form a dis-connect rather than a connection with postmodern persons, and that in order to communicate the Gospel to a postmodern world, we must jettison the old, “ancient words” of faith (jargon, they call them, like "salvation" and "sin" etc.) and replace them with words more relevant, trendy, contemporary, comfortable, and comprehensible to a secular, postmodern, biblically-illiterate, post-Christian culture (words from the pop culture or business world or psychological jargon). The problem with this approach is that words come with an attendant context, values, ethos, and story. And so, to replace, for example, the biblical word “sin” with a postmodern, contemporary word that communicates effectively to a contemporary culture consumed with health and wellness concerns, one must choose a word from the therapy culture, such as “sickness,” or “pathology” or “dysfunction.” But that is not what “sin” means in our story. In the Bible, sin is not merely some unfortunate, no-fault, mindless mishap for which one is neither accountable nor responsible; it is intentional, willful disobedience to the One Who makes appropriate and legitimate claims and demands upon us. In our story, “sin” is not merely an “oops” or an “uh oh,” it’s a stubborn, intentional, recalcitrant “no!” that sets in motion irrevocable consequences and inescapable outcomes. And so, to exchange the word “sin” for “sickness” and "salvation" for "therapy" is not just to change the word; it is to change the story, or, as Paul says to the Galatians, to run the risk of proclaiming as “Gospel” something that is “no Gospel” at all!

Moreover, isn't it just a bit arrogant, provincial, and overweening to believe that words and a Story that have given life and meaning and hope to a people for over two millennia can, and should be, abandoned now just because the latest occupants of this planet find those words and that Story befuddling and bewildering? Why not just teach them what these words “mean” by teaching them what the Story that gives them meaning “says?”

It’s a little like marrying into a family and going to the family reunion of your spouse and suddenly meeting people with whom you have no history, hearing the names of people you don’t know, like Uncle George, and hearing stories in which you have not participated, and then announcing that you find that history “irrelevant” and these names “unnecessary” and those stories “off-putting” and that you forbid the family to speak of them again in your presence! Rather, you have your own history and some other names and some other stories with which you’re familiar, and that from now on, you want everybody at the reunion to talk only of them. Absurd? Of course. What you do is to listen carefully to their history and those names and these stories until you begin to learn who Uncle George is/was and what he is/was about. After a while, an amazing thing happens. “Uncle George” is no longer just a strange sounding name about which you know nothing. You begin to feel that you actually know Uncle George. And then, after a while, another, more amazing thing happens: “Uncle George” becomes your Uncle George! And finally, something even more amazing happens: In discovering your Uncle George, you discover yourself – that this is who you are; that this is your history; that this is your story!

That’s precisely what happens in the Bible. As the words of the people of God are spoken, the history heard, the stories shared, what had been strange and remote becomes familiar and one’s very own. That’s why in Deut. 26:1-11, the writer, composing centuries after Moses and the Exodus, instructs the people of God to bring their offerings to the temple and, before leaving them there, they are to remember their history; to speak ancient words and tell an amazing story:

A wandering Aramean was my father; and he went down into Egypt and sojourned there, few in number; and there he became a nation, great, mighty, and populous. And the Egyptians treated us harshly, and afflicted us, and laid upon us hard bondage. Then we cried to the LORD the God of our fathers, and the LORD heard our voice, and saw our affliction, our toil, and our oppression; and the LORD brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, with great terror, with signs and wonders; and he brought us into this place and gave us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey.

At the time Deuteronomy was written (or at least discovered and used as the basis of Josiah’s reform in 621 B.C.), not a one of those offering their “first fruits” to the temple had actually been alive during the Exodus, which had occurred 600 to 800 years earlier. But in speaking the “ancient words” and in re-telling that “amazing story,” that story became their story, and “they” became “us.”

Something to think about the next time some neophyte suggests scuttling the Story and the words we use to tell it in order to make room for something more “relevant” to the contemporary world.