I Believe in Saints

Christianity asserts a number of preposterous things.

We can begin with our foundational belief: that a dead man, after being murdered in a particularly brutal manner, rose again from the dead and then spent forty days forming the community that now bears his name. After that, he floated up into the sky.

That is difficult to believe. For starters, “where is heaven?” The Gospel writers claim Jesus ascended there, but a contemporary person is left wondering what that even means. We live on a globe surrounded by space in all directions. Obviously, the ‘heaven’ to which Jesus ascended cannot possibly refer to a real space-time location like Cleveland or Calcutta.

So yes, these are preposterous things. They challenge our credulity. And yet, I believe them. I am an educated person so I speculate how these beliefs can be credibly accepted or explained. However, they do not seriously challenge my faith.

The greatest challenge I have about our faith is the question of personal transformation. I wonder if Christians ever become “new creatures.” The New Testament claims our conversion leads to transformation. That word points to a change as radical as when caterpillars turn into butterflies or tadpoles into frogs.

But does this occur? Are Christians really that different than non-Christians?

We can avoid the question by claiming that although our transformation has not yet occurred, it will, “in another time and another place.” The New Testament does indeed teach that our greatest transformation occurs after death and ‘glorification.'  Nonetheless, it also teaches that we are being made new now, in this life. The Apostle Paul even says we become like ‘living Bibles.’

Traditionally, Christians used the word ‘saint’ to describe this New Testament belief in personal transformation.  Modern Evangelicals – at least ones I know -- find that word distasteful, even when referring to the apostles. They like it even less when we use it to talk about folks like Francis of Assisi or Augustine of Hippo.

“Aren’t we all saints,” they ask?

Yes.

No.

The New Testament teaches that we cannot save ourselves, that we are saved by Christ, though his graciousness and mercy. Jesus transforms us because we trust in Him. Therefore, he declares us ‘saints.’ He accepts us as holy – ‘just-as-if ‘— although we are not and invites believers to view themselves in that light.

That explanation does not solve my question though.

The New Testament leads us expect that the effects of this ‘just-as-if’ declaration becomes gradually visible now, in this world, in this life.  As a believer walks into the new life God has given him through grace, his ‘old man’ dies away and his ‘new man’ walks in the newness of life.

But does this happen?

After a lifetime of Christian service and practice, serving as a missionary and a pastor in multiple situations and in multiple places, I can only say, “it seems to happen sometimes.”

Personal transformation is the exception and not the norm. Indeed, I don’t even see much concern for personal transformation among church leaders, or believers in general for that matter.

Furthermore, personal transformation on the magnitude of what scripture describes ought to have a huge effect on those communities in which Christians predominate. Such communities ought to flourish – or so it seems to me – in all areas of human life and thought, in ways that manifest, or at least hint at the coming kingdom when “the glory of the Lord will fill the earth.”

One should at least expect that church congregations, which are groups of transformed individuals, would manifest a sense of the peace and community Christian faith claims occurs when people follow Christ. One would think that a church would be the one place we might see personal spiritual flourishing that gradually infects the arts, sciences, personal health, joy, and delight -- every part of those who live in these communities.

Please understand; I am not expecting heaven on earth. I am not expecting that we will ever become in this life what can only occur in the next. I am only asking whether any hint of those coming things ought to occur today and that if they do not, what sorts of proof do we have that they ever will?  Shouldn’t we expect non-believers to judge for themselves the quality of life  -- personal and communal – that Christian faith produces?

In The Mountain of Silence, author Kyriacos Markides writes, “the spiritual struggle … aims at healing our existence, our personhood, and sealing our communion with the Divine, which is our real destination and the justification of our being in the world. As long as this goal is not reached, we will continue to function in an imperfect, pathological way, experiencing one injustice after another. The social world we collectively create will naturally reflect this pathology that lies within ourselves. “

My reading of the New Testament calls me to reject the popular Christian notion that we can only expect to be forgiven but never transformed. That idea implies that I can just pick up my “get out of hell free card” without worrying about the dysfunctions of heart, mind and body – the illnesses of soul – that create war, crime, disease and poverty. I can sing happy songs about Jesus without asking why I am not rising out of the gunk of life.

I find this avoidance of the central questions of life increasingly unbearable. It is church business at the expense of spiritual life.

If Christians are not changed, Christianity is not true. If it is not true, it should not be preached. It is unethical to make a living from something that doesn’t work. Disneyland makes a good living promoting mythology but they acknowledge that their business is entertainment. If that is our business, we should say so. If we claim we are presenting reality, then we must demonstrate proof.

I claim that Saints are the only real proof that Jesus rose from the dead, or that the Holy Scriptures contain anything that contemporary people should find compelling. If we have no saints to present, then we have very little to say.

It is because I believe a person can become a saint -- not merely declared a saint but become a saint -- that I continue to walk the Christian life. Believing that, I study the scriptures and try to apply their lessons to life. I enter worship expecting to experience the transcendence and awe that leads a person to step out of those natural circumstances of family, economy and intellect where God finds Him and on into the patterns of thought and life that forms him into a “new man in Christ.”

Sainthood is not mere escapist otherworldliness though. God made this world, this material world, for us – for us to know, enjoy and use. The material world is our appointed realm and the primary place of our spiritual stewardship.

That’s why I study those disciplines of human life to which I have been attracted. I read science journals because I believe God created the world and that He delights when we discover its secrets. I read novels because I believe in the arts, through which human beings express echoes of divine creation.

Saint Irenaeus said, “the glory of God is a person fully alive.” If the foundation of Christianity is the resurrection of Christ, then it follows that the definition of a saint is a person fully alive.

Culture wars, political fights, church spats, feuds, religious control of others, backbiting, gossiping – all these things are evidence for the opposing view – that Christianity offers nothing compelling or even real for the broken systems and the broken people of the world.

Saints, people who have been made fully alive, is what manifests the reality of Jesus to the nations of the world.

That, or nothing.

Dad's Most Important Lesson

Dad is interesting. The son of an older father, whose grandfather was the son of an older father, his family tree appears to be missing a couple of generations. Although it seems incredible, Dad’s great grandfather was born in 1807.

As a result, my father’s family had very old roots.  It’s values and its stories came from the earliest times of American society. So he was born with an ancient soul.

He lived on a small strip of inhabitable land beneath the shelter of the Alleghenies, in a tiny village called Chesapeake. It is built on the banks of the Kanawha just barely beyond sight of the much higher elevations where his family lived a generation before. He swam perhaps before he could walk but at least soon thereafter.  He farmed when his hands were able hold a hoe. He learned to read the forest floor and knew what animals had been there and when. He learned which berries, roots and leaves people could eat.

Like his father, dad became a contemporary Daniel Boone, as much at home in the woods as in town.

To me, Dad will always smell of sassafras. Although he became a polished, urbane minister, my favorite image of him will always be of him returning from the mountains with game, or from the river with fish.  And, every year, he brought paw-paws and sassafras in from the woods.

I didn’t learn those lessons. They already seemed a part of our family’s distant past, when those old folks buried up on the mountain had been alive, back in the days before Lincoln. Dad connected me to that past and loved telling me about it. It just seemed so quaint and remote to a kid growing up ducking under desks to protect himself from Russian bombs.

We moved into Charleston when I was young. Nearly every week we visited Chesapeake and Marmet. It wasn't far. However, those few miles took us into a different world.  There were Syrians, Greeks, Jews and Chinese in the city; even a few Presbyterians!  In those days, people tended to live in their own ethnically defined community, so school was the place where you met those other kinds of people. 

Dad thrived there, in Charleston. Although he never stopped wanting to farm and hunt, he knew he had to adapt to a rapidly changing world. So he started a business to support himself as he pastored our small church. When  the church kept growing, he sold his business.  Perhaps it was time for a stable, predictable life.

No chance.

When I was in my teens, Dad decided to move to South America.

People move around a lot now. They didn’t then. It would have been a shock had he said we were moving to Maryland or Pennsylvania. But Ecuador? That might as well been the dark side of the moon! Moving there would involve learning a new language and eating God knows what. But I suppose for Southern West Virginians, if you are going to move out of the state, you will have to learn a new language anyway – it might as well be Spanish!

That’s how, in the spring of 1969, my mom and dad took three children out of the Appalachians Mountains and moved them to the Andes.

My dad started learning our new language right away. He began preaching in it as soon as he knew enough words to get his point across. He made business acquaintances. He met government officials. He started schools. He helped clinics get established in Indian villages.  He organized communities of new Christian believers. He worked tirelessly to help younger people rise out of poverty and ignorance. He purposefully and openly ignored all forms of class distinction, which he despised and taught us to despise.

Twenty years later, now in his fifties, Dad returned to the United States. He and my mother had no home. They had spent their savings building churches and schools.  They had to figure out how to fit back into a country that had changed more radically than they had imagined.

Dad began by starting a church in West Virginia.

Then, he began planning churches among immigrants. He believed Anglo-Saxon Christians were not noticing the many opportunities for the gospel among the nation’s newest peoples. So he went to work to make a difference.

As they build countless congregations, my dad and mom lived modestly. They stayed out of debt. They invested what they could. They rejected the growing madness that minsters of the gospel should display conspicuous wealth.

So, when dad retired, well into his seventies, their modest home was nearly paid for. As he has repeatedly told me, “I don’t think I will be a burden on you kids. I think I have things pretty well planned out to take care of us.”

And that has proven to be true.

Dad is eighty-one now. His hearing is challenged. He has had a serious bout with glaucoma.

Nonetheless, every morning after prayer he cleans up, dresses up, and goes to work. Sometimes he is busy writing articles or books. Sometimes he is repairing something in the house before it breaks. Sometimes he is taking a trip to speak or meet with someone who needs encouragement.

But here is the takeaway. My dad tried to teach me all sorts of lessons I couldn’t seem to learn. I may have been stubborn. Maybe I was wired differently. For whatever reason, I have not learned nearly as much as I could have. So, in a dozen different ways, Dad is a much better man than I am.

However there is one thing I have learned from Dad. It may be life’s most important lesson: never stop growing.

In many families, the children are gradually forced to parent their parents.

That hasn’t happened in our family. It is not likely to happen. My dad is still a step ahead, still growing, still thinking things anew. He still tries to figure out why young people think differently than he. He wants to know what he can learn from them as well as teach them. He tries to understand new technology and then uses it. He likes a challenge. And he really doesn’t like it when people discourage others.

Not long ago, some people were grumbling about our president. Some of them got pretty passionate. Dad remained silent. After a while he said, “This new president is terribly young and he has such a heavy burden. Maybe we should just pray for him.”

Well. What does one say after that?

It has been hard on Dad to accept his hearing loss. It was really a difficult day when someone told him he should learn sign language. But after a few weeks he told me, “Well, I figure its just another language to learn. I’ve done that before. I can do it again. Besides, do you know deaf people have their own culture? God probably wants me to care for people in that culture. If that’s what He wants, I’ll need to learn that language. We just do what we can.”

Those are the components of Dad’s greatest lesson to me: Keep moving. Keep growing. Don’t get trapped in a particular era or a particular stage of life. Grieve things that are passing and then adapt to the way things have changed.

When I think of an example of a life well lived, I think of Dad, a mountain man who became a citizen of the world.

I am proud of all his accomplishments. But to me, he will always smell of sassafras, fresh from the forest; a gift from a man with roots who learned the importance of both stability and adaptability for living a wise, meaningful and holy life.

Religion Sucks!

As everybody knows, religion is a very bad, bad thing. It is the worse form of tradition, which is also bad.

All tradition is an impediment to individual expression. It hinders science. It causes religious people to do stupid things. It makes people wear uncomfortable clothes. It promotes elitism. It causes cancer.

Religion sucks! Tradition sucks! 

But you knew that already.

Movies, songs and sermons repeat the mantra incessantly. You might say the only respectable tradition left is the universal hatred of tradition, especially religious tradition.

Secular people claim that Christians are addicted to tradition. Actually though, Christians usually hate religion as much as anyone else.  

Now, there are some really good reasons to be suspicious of tradition, especially religious tradition. Jesus said we should be careful not to substitute tradition for truth. Thomas Khun warned that even scientists sometimes resist scientific advances because they become so loyal to accustomed ways of looking at things. So yes, yes, yes – we should feel free to question tradition, including religious tradition.

But there is another side to this. What separates human beings from animals is our ability to transmit to children the structures of thought and behavior we received from our parents. Civilization is the result. So is the Christian Church. All communities of every kind, rely on tradition to link individual members one to another across time and space. That's what forms and sustains communities -- all communities. 

Toilet training, for example, is a tradition that has, so far, escaped popular contemporary ridicule as yet another thoughtless habit lacking scientific, reasonable, biblical, or politically correct reason to sustain. The protocols for biological human excretion are fairly detailed. Although continually adapted to one’s personal and societal requirements, the basic rubrics for the ritual remain basically unchanged since ancient times. Softy wipes were undoubtedly an improvement over maple leaves and corn shucks but that adaptation did not significantly alter the ancient routine. And, it may be argued, this tradition has helped individuals maintain healthy connections to their community. 

The daily practice of dental hygiene too, although recently electrified for some of us, has also remained basically unchanged for the last hundred years or so. Although it has been said that halitosis is better than no breath at all, those who claimed that never lived in jungle villages.

And I could go on.

Human beings have been able to transmit vast amounts of knowledge from generation to generation in ways that has gradually built up civilization. The central apparatus for accomplishing this feat has been those ritualized processes through which we offer and receive countless mental and behavioral structures to make community life possible. That's what tradition is. 

We employ the mechanisms of tradition in every discipline. When we don’t, we experience tragic loss.

In 1920, Srinivasa Ramanujan died. He was perhaps the most brilliant mathematician who ever lived. Unfortunately, he made no significant contribution to mathematics.

Why?

Because he was poor. He lived most of his life outside the sort of social environment in which his gifts might have been recognized. Had he been born to a different class, he could have learned about ancient and modern math. He succeeded nonetheless  in rediscovering, on his own, many theories and disciplines that had taken the rest of civilization centuries to develop. So his intellectual gifts were impressive. They were also, through no fault of his own, unfruitful.

Ramanjan reminds me of a lot of contemporary Christians. They are devout, sincere and intelligent. However, they feel obligated to recreate the beliefs and practices of their faith at a time they desperately need the old creeds, canon and catechism. Because they have no access to these historical structures of thought, they lack important resources for the work of defending their faith -- even to themselves. 

I have thought about this as I have read Reza Aslan’s book Zealot. Several Christian friends had been reading it and feeling threatened by things it said, so I wanted to read it too.

I have discovered that Zealot is a well written description of Jesus and the New Testament. However, it offers a radically different perspective than traditional Christian views of Christ, the Bible and the Church. 

I won’t take Aslan’s book to task here. That is not the purpose of this blog. Besides, others have done a good job doing that.

What I want to say about Aslan's work is that reactions to his book exposes the weak, undefended underbelly of contemporary Evangelicalism. 

While we have been ridiculing our own traditions, undermining our historic structures of theology and piety, rushing to embrace every advance in the project of turning Christianity into a rock concert led by entertainers and governed by business executives; we raised two generations to assume that theology and biblical knowledge are utterly irrelevant to the development of authentic faith. 

As a result, Aslan’s book sounds true, solid and factual in comparison to either the vacuous self-help platitudes flowing from our nice preachers or the nationalistic tirades erupting from our mean ones. Aslan is just one more voice attacking tradition, piety, and orthodoxy. So he makes more sense to many of our young believers than their pastors.

But here’s the issue. None of us would know Jack squat about Jesus Christ were it not for one slightly overlooked thing: religious tradition.

Yes, that nasty, unmentionable feature of civilization and spiritual life has been the thing most responsible for transmitting knowledge about Jesus from his first followers to us. Furthermore, the traditional religious infrastructure we have been mocking, rejecting, attacking and lampooning were the very conduits through which knowledge about Jesus finally arrived at our enlightened, authentic, nontraditional, iconoclastic, restored New Testament congregations that now loudly profess to believe in ‘relationships but not religion.’ 

So, I am saying that nasty word out loud: religion. And yes, I do include things like the celebration of Christmas and Easter and all other yearly events that delighted centuries of children and created opportunities for them to learn the content and practice of Christian faith. Religion is structure. It may indeed hinder one's person spiritual growth. Nonetheless, it is also an indispensable part of forming that faith. Becoming an adult occasionally requires one to carefully move beyond tradition but he must do it with the full knowledge of what he is doing and why. It is never a flippant thing to decide one has become wiser than the accumulated wisdom of his forebears. 

Furthermore, I must say, the Bible is a part of our religious tradition. It too is a religious, cultural product. It was formed over many centuries as good people collected ancient documents, and then copied and endorsed them as a collection, long after the apostles were dead. The Bible’s contents were not published as a single book for many, many centuries after that. Then came centuries of translation, printing, and distribution. It took a long time and a lot of work to develop our Bible.

So how can a preacher keep a straight face as he waves his Bible denouncing tradition? Does he not realize that he could not even read that Bible had it not been translated by scholars whom he does not respect? How can he use a Bible to denounce the very traditions that delivered that Bible to him? And why should we respect him and his views when he disrespects the views of everyone who came before him? That is the madness of this continual attack on tradition and orthodoxy.

And yet, year after year, often in the name of relevance, we keep dismantling every significant part of our Christian heritage.

Hymns have become boring not only because of their antiquated musical format but also because we didn’t teach people the meaning of their lyrics.

Communion became irrelevant because we were passing around little plastic shot glasses covered with globs of processed reconstituted foodstuff.

How can hymns remain relevant if we believe nothing significant really happened in the world until we entered it? 

How can communion remain significant when we spend so much time ridiculing tradition?

Does it really matter that Jesus asked us to observe communion if we just don’t see the reason for it?

Nonetheless, we believe our grandchildren will somehow grow up to be Christians.

So I do want to talk about Aslan’s book, I really do. It deserves a response. But I hardly know how to respond. I fear we have already accepted the idea that contemporary thought should not derive from anything in the past. We have already said that we do not owe the past any explanation. So I think we have been well prepared, by our own preachers, for this book.

I think many of us already agree with Aslan, at least in principle; that one’s view of Jesus is not beholding to anything we have learned about Him from those who knew his disciples or from those who knew those who knew his disciples and those who knew them. We understand more than all those who have claimed to follow Christ throughout history, bless their hearts! We have already decided that history doesn't have much to say to us and that religion and tradition suck. 

But do religion and tradition really suck?

In the end, I think the hatred of tradition is what sucks. The arrogant, temporal provincialism of our times gradually sucks the meaning out of everything until finally nothing is left but the brilliance of our own contemporary opinions, formed godlike, out of nothing, and sustained through the sheer power of our own self-creating and self-sustaining word.