Wizards Wanted

In today’s reading in the One Year Bible, we encounter God’s severe instructions about “wizardry.” We are not to respect nor heed the words of a wizard, or anyone who claims to channel a familiar spirit. Such people are to be cast out of the community.

A hundred years ago, many of the great minds of Europe and America were caught up in the antics of spiritualists. They enjoyed parties where mediums raised tables and introduced the participants to automatic handwriting. Departed loved ones spoke through these mediums with convincing displays of protoplasm and blinking lights.

Most of it was fraud, some of it was not.

The scriptures make it clear that this is a boundary that a believer must not cross. Either God invites a person into the spiritual world or one must not go.

All through history, people have been trying to be “spiritual.” God doesn’t want us to be “spiritual.” He wants us to be mortals. Trying to be “spiritual” doesn’t usually turn out well. People trying too hard to become “spiritual” become either unhinged or demonic.

The Bible teaches that true spirituality works the other way: spiritual things become material.

The Word becomes flesh.

Man does not ascend up into heaven, as we learn from the story of the tower of Babel; God descends into the earth, as we learn in St. John 1:1-16.

When we try to conjure a “word” from God, we usually get into trouble. God sends a word to us – in a book.

God is as interested as we are in healing the ancient divisions between time and eternity, Heaven and Earth; and spirit and matter. However, we can’t repair the bridge from this side. Every time we try, we mess up. So God says, “Stop trying to be wizards. No soothsaying. No reading tea leaves, broken buzzard bones or frog entrails. Stop gazing into crystal balls, preparing horoscopes or puking up protoplasm in the form of dead uncles.

In other words, "Stop trying to get to me. I am coming to you. I know the way and how to get there. Just wait for me."

Christians believe that God did that when he “became incarnate.” What that word means is that God not only “took on” flesh, as a man might put on a coat, but that He truly became a man.

We call this belief the doctrine of the incarnation, a word which means “en-flesh-ment.”

Many of the other great world religions view our belief in the incarnation as disrespectful of God; perhaps even blasphemous. Muslims and Jews particularly find this doctrine repulsive. Although, as Karen Armstrong points out in her History of God, Jews and Muslims have had to propose different solutions to the same theological problem we face: how does God, being wholly spiritual, interact with a material world? (Both Jews and Muslims have come to see their sacred scripture as the solution to that problem.)

Most religions don’t believe that God does interact with matter. Some of them teach that we must learn how to shed our material existence. Others adopt some form of shamanism, where specially gifted “spiritual” people go into trance and run messages back and forth between our world and the other one.

Christians however, believe that the incarnation is an example of supreme intimacy between God and His people. We believe that God made Himself vulnerable to us, because He wanted to have a relationship with us. Therefore, for Christians, the incarnation is an overwhelming demonstration of God’s love. It tells us that God wanted so much for us to know Him that He laid aside His dignity and power to become one of us.

Listen to Robert Barron’s wonderful phrase that I used in an earlier blog:

“In His great leap out of Himself, God discloses, super-abundantly and overwhelmingly who He is.”

Martin Luther, the great Protestant reformer once said, “I have no God whether in heaven or in earth, and I know of none, outside the flesh that lies in the bosom of the Virgin Mary. For elsewhere God is utterly incomprehensible but comprehensible only in the flesh of Christ alone.” (Quoted by Donald G. Boesch, in Essentials of Evangelical Theology, Volume 1, p 127, Harper & Row, 1978)

The doctrine of the incarnation addresses the question: “who exactly is Jesus?” It is not a simple answer, though. Other than our doctrine of the godhead, the incarnation may be the most difficult Christian teaching to express and understand. Christians believe that Jesus is fully God; fully Man; and fully God and fully Man at the same time.

Jesus was a great religious teacher, much like other great religious teachers in many ways. However, unlike the others, Jesus became a bridge for us to God; a bridge made from his own flesh. After his death, Christ resurrected and ascended into heaven. This means that there is now a man (resurrected and glorified) sitting on Heaven’s throne. This Man, the risen Christ, intercedes for us and saves us.

Therefore, to Christians, the material body of Jesus is as important to us as His Spirit. We do not believe that he discarded his body even after the incarnation, as though it were “a thing” of no further use.

As the Nicene Creed puts it, “for us and our salvation He came down from Heaven and became a Man.

The incarnation continues.

God is no longer just a Spirit; He has flesh like us.

That fact has changed the universe.

We don’t need a good wizard. A shaman would be a poor substitute for what we already have.

We have God.

God with us.

God in us.

God for us.

Happy Birthday!

To all the world’s Methodists, Wesleyans, Pentecostals and Charismatics – take note: today is your birthday!

On today’s date, in 1784, John Wesley chartered the Methodist Church, setting into motion the form of Protestant Christianity that would gradually evolve into a very substantial portion of the word’s churches.

Our faith has been shifting and evolving in that way since the very beginning.

That’s why in today’s Bible reading (One Year Bible), the Old Testament and New Testament passages seem to be yelling at each other.

The Leviticus passage (Chapter 15) talks about how people become “unclean.” A man becomes unclean who has an orgasm – you have to destroy any clay pot he happens to touch, for example. A woman becomes unclean in her menstrual cycle. They both have to bathe, offer pigeons; do all sorts of things to become clean.

In the New Testament passage, Jesus says in essence, 'forget all of that. You don’t have to do the ritual hand washing. You guys keep focusing on all that stuff, but you forget about developing godly character. '

Out of such apparent contradictions between the two covenants, defining their relationship to one another, and applying such ancient instructions to modern life, come all the denominations and divisions of Christendom. Gather three Christians together, open up the Bible, and you will get five opinions, two systematic theologies and at least one new revelation that has been previously hidden from all humanity since the foundations of the earth.

What do we do with all of this?

Well, for one thing, we can laugh!

We all know that Jesus saved us and that He gives us new life as we follow Him.

We also know that we each interpret how that works in very different ways.

And, more often than not, we fuss about it.

However, at the core of our faith we find not only unity; but also diversity that remains committed to community.

This is true even within God Himself.

Although the doctrines of the godhead were developed slowly, the central ideas were already present in the Old Testament.

Consider Proverbs, chapter 8. Listen as Wisdom speaks.

22“ The Lord possessed me at the beginning of His way,

Before His works of old have been established from everlasting,

From the beginning, before there was ever an earth …

27 When He prepared the heavens, I was there,

When He drew a circle on the face of the deep,

When He marked out the foundations of the earth,

30 Then I was beside Him as a master craftsman;

And I was daily His delight,

Rejoicing always before Him,

31 Rejoicing in His inhabited world,

And my delight was with the sons of men.

(Proverbs 8:22-31, New King James Version)


The way that Proverbs uses the concept of “Wisdom” is very close to how the Greeks used the concept of “logos.” The opening words of St. John’s gospel takes advantage of this similarity to create a bridge between Greek and Hebrew thought. That’s how John introduces Christ to the non-Hebrew world.

Christ was with and was God, he says.

St Augustine (November 13, 354 – August 28, 430) was one of Christianity’s most influential thinkers. In his Confessions (which every Christian should read), St. Augustine says that that as a pagan philosopher he had often read about the Logos. Therefore, he didn’t find St. John’s words as out of the ordinary at first. Then, he says, “I read these startling words: “The Word (Logos) became flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:14).

For Christians, these opening words of St. John’s gospel are some of the most precious words of the New Testament. However, that same passage has provoked much of the intense discussion that divided early Christians and which still can provoke a lot of passionate disagreement.

Why is that?

Presenting Christ as the “Logos,” or even as the “Wisdom” of God, forced Jewish Christians to stretch their understanding about God.

If Christ had indeed existed “in the beginning,” if he truly was with and yet was God, then they had to find some new way of comprehending their faith.

By using the word “Logos,” St. John set the stage for Christians to understand and worship Christ, not only as the Son of David or as the Jewish Messiah, but, as in the words of the Nicene Creed, the “eternally begotten Son of God.”

Christians through the ages have meditated on the opening of John’s gospel, trying to comprehend what he was really saying about Christ.

Robert Barron, in his book Thomas Aquinas: Spiritual Master (Crossroads publishers, New York, 1996) says that in Christ, God “leaped out of Himself.” (p.49)

Wow! That’s it!

The Nicene Creed calls Jesus “very God of very God.” The Nicene statement is much more formal and precise than Barron, but “leaping out of Himself” – what a phrase!

God leaping out of Himself means He keeps surprising us.

Once we learned how to keep our bodies clean and to respect and manage our sexuality, he told us to stop obsessing about ritual hand washing. Once we settled down to a few centuries of tradition and protocol, he sent Martin Luther. Once we thought through the implications about justification by faith, he sent Wesley to remind us that faith ought to be changing our lives.

Anglicanism leapt out of Catholicism. Methodism leapt out of Anglicanism. Pentecostalism leapt out of Methodism. Charismatics leapt and leapt and leapt. We have no idea what will happen when they stop leaping.

It's kind of a madness, I guess, all this leaping.

Like the madness of a kindergarten or a high school dance.

Not nearly as nice and orderly as an old folks home.

On the other hand, there not much procreation in an old folks home.

So happy birthday to father John Wesley and all his unruly kids.

Keep leaping.

Is The World Really Flat?

On this date in 1632, Galileo published a paper that would shake the foundations of the Western World: The Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems.

The paper asserted that the earth moves around the sun. The earth was not, after all, the center of the universe.

It would be difficult for us to imagine how terrifying this discovery was for Christendom. Of course, most people, burdened by everyday life, didn’t even hear about the discovery. It would take centuries for the news to seriously affect the faith of most believers.

We have long since adjusted to Galileo and routinely read passages that speak of the sun moving or not moving metaphorically. Even conservative fundamentalists do not argue with Galileo now.

In the early twentieth century, two other discoveries slowly became challenges to our traditional view of the universe. Again, most believers still give these discoveries little thought. However, as their implications move from the intellectual community into our everyday awareness, Christians must make adjustments. They must decide: what stories and phrases in scripture are absolute and literal; what are metaphorical ways of expressing spiritual truths?

The theories of relativity and the discoveries of Quantum Mechanics are even more disturbing than Galileo. They call into doubt our ability to accurately grasp the nature of reality.

The early Christians faced similar difficulties as they took their Hebrew views into the Greco-Roman world.

In my last blog, I wrote about how the Apostle John explained both the Hebrew view of creation and the incarnation of Christ to his Greek-speaking audience. He used one very important Greek word: Logos.

The word “logos” was familiar to educated people in the first century.

Though we usually translate “logos” as “word,” we could also translate it as “reason,” “blueprint,” or, depending on the context, a number of other words and phrases.

By the time of Christ, the Greek philosophers had so refined and expanded the meaning of the word that it had come to mean something like “the organizing principle of the cosmos.”

In our earlier discussion about Plato’s view of form and substance, I mentioned how John used Plato’s idea of logos as the form of forms, the blueprint of all blueprints.

By the 1st century, Greek intellectuals were describing the logos as the link between matter and spirit.

After all, the Greeks wondered, “how could – indeed, how would – God, a spiritual being without flesh or material substance of any kind, create a material world? Then, once He had created it, how or why would he interact with it?

We might rephrase their ancient question using a modern metaphor: what sort of interface connects matter and spirit? What allows them to interact?

Plato and others taught that the “logos” was the connection between matter and spirit. Logos allowed form and substance to interact.

In other words, the Greeks believed that the organizing principle that gave the universe its meaning and form was itself divine. Logos was the womb of all material substance.

That is important because John is not the only writer in the New Testament to make use of this concept.

The Writer of the Hebrews, for one, uses this same vocabulary. Whenever we encounter in the New Testament words like “true,” “shadow,” “real”, “form” or “substance,” we are viewing the universe through the lenses of platonic thought (the teachings of Plato’s followers).

We should not over emphasize the platonic elements in the New Testament however. The New Testament writers made use of Greek philosophical language but they rarely gave the terms they borrowed, the same meanings as pagan philosophers. John was only using a Greek word that he thought would communicate the gospel. He knew that his Greek audience would not understand Hebrew concepts as he had learned them from his ancestors.

We don’t question the Apostle John’s faithfulness to the Word of God. However, he was taking a big risk and one that opened up centuries of conflict within the church.

Galileo was a believer and it troubled him to upset the faith of his friends.

He was also a scientist. He had seen what he had seen. He could only determine that the accustomed way of reading scripture was inadequate for the present.

It’s something to think about today, over one hundred years after Einstein and Max Planck.

Last year, my daughter wrote a blog about Galileo that you might find interesting. In it, she talks about the gift and fear of knowledge such as Galileo wielded.

http://beatriceblount.blogspot.com/2009/07/nostradamus-ii-limitations-of-shared.html