unknowable.

Reflections on Faith.

[blakebaggott-deactivated2017041]

[stillseekingthetruth]

An Anguished Faith

Faith is anguish, even as it is hope.

Our faith is what empowers us to hope for more while looking at the world and boldly declaring, "all is not as it should be." Our faith is what leads us to realize that the cards that we have been dealt with in this life are not the cards we were meant for.

Our faith is what reminds us that not all that happens is good. That there is no good in the death of a young child, or the sickened wasting of a parent. There is no greater design in tragedy except the reminder that there is evil still at play, and that the final triumph of good is yet to come.

How can we dare to say all is well? All was not well when Eve picked the fruit. All was not well when the Israelites were cast into slavery. All was not well when Christ was crucified. But all will be well. The waves of redemption slowly make their way into Creation, and all will be well.

[stillseekingthetruth]

Mystery and Faith

It's easy to get caught up in the need for certainty in this day and age. We need to know what we are doing, how we are doing it, and why we are doing it before we can take the first step. Every action, every decision needs to be tied into a great 20-year plan, or else we feel like we are hopelessly drifting without direction.

This kind of mentality can quickly sink into our approach of faith and spirituality. We need to know everything about God, what he's doing, how he's doing, and why. We want to go to church and come away more certain about who God is and what He is doing.

What we don't like is being exposed to the fact that God is, at his core, a mystery essentially incomprehensible to humankind. We are incapable of comprehending infinity, and yet we insist on having a fully self-consistent theology and understanding of God. When we are confronted with seeming contradictions in the Bible or between our belief and experience, we have the impulse to rationalize.

But God cannot be rationalized. God is not merely a more perfect human being. God is wholly and fully holy -- set apart. He cannot be comprehended, not can he be explained. In the Book of Job, Job cries out to God in frustration for his suffering despite his righteousness. God does not give him an explanation. God simply states that his ways are too mighty to be understood by a mere man.

As Christians, we are shown the way to draw near to God. But drawing near to God does not mean demystifying him. It means more fully submitting ourselves to the great unknown. It means surrendering all of our preconceptions and understanding about what God is and submitting to fearful glory that destroys nations yet forgives sinners, that allows the faithful to suffer as the wicked prosper, all to say "your will be done, not mine."

[stillseekingthetruth]

Among Evangelical churches, women are permitted to and even encouraged to serve. Many do, often as ushers, program coordinators, and teachers. But as one looks higher up into the Church hierarchy, the faces become increasingly more masculine, eventually becoming pre-dominantly male, as only men are permitted to serve on the governing deacon and elder boards of many churches.

Read more on my writing repository, The Post-Evangelical.

[stillseekingthetruth]

I am unfufilled and disatisfied.

When being a Christian didn't bring me the fulfillment and satisfaction I wanted, I quit. I believed in a God who would make me feel satisfied with life, not bitterly disappointed by its circumstances and outcomes. But being an atheist didn't really make me feel much better. And then I found that becoming a Christian again didn't provide the much vaunted "fufilling relationship with Jesus" that I had been promised time and time again. But when I shared this with other Christians, they looked at me funny, as if my faith was defective. Surely I hadn't learned to trust him well enough. Or so I believed, until I dug deeper into what my faith was built on.

I, like many others, had been sold a lie, a distorted repackaging of the Gospel which proclaimed that God's ultimate mission was to provide me with an absolutely fulfilling relationship which would transform my life. When these promises fell short, I felt betrayed. Coming back to my faith, it was impossible to prevent these feelings from coloring my perceptions of God -- as an all-powerful but untrustworthy figure who didn't always make good on his promises.

Read the rest on my writing repository, The Post-Evangelist.

[stillseekingthetruth]

Focus on seeking the presence of God. Without this, nothing else can follow. If God is not, then the rest of Christianity is of no value. But if God is, then all things are possible.

We can skip this so quickly in our prayers, immediately jumping to listing our desires and wishes, without even stopping to simply be in the presence of God.

[stillseekingthetruth]

Is God?

The question is not, “Is God Good?”

The premise of judging such a potential reality of God as being good or evil is in itself a contradiction, for if a Primal Originator exists on some level of existence above this one, surely it cannot be judged by philosophical constructs of good and evil. Indeed, the question “Is God Good?” is in itself a denial of God, for it presupposes that God is not really God at all and that human thought is capable of comprehending the Divine well enough to pass such judgment. If this was true, God would be no God but merely, as Karl Barth put it, “humanity writ large,” not the infinite Divinity from which all else flows, our comprehension included.

The question is, “Is God?”

[lucid222reveries]

Love is patient and kind (1 Cor. 13:4); enslaving and torturing people is neither. Love is never rude (1 Cor. 13:5); burning people alive is. Love does not insist on its own way and is not irritable or resentful when others disagree (1 Cor. 13:5); compelling people to agree with you by using force is the direct antithesis. Love doesn’t rejoice in wrongdoing (1 Cor. 13:6), even if (especially if) those rejoicing credit God, who supposedly gave them the power to do it. Love bears all things while believing the best in others and hoping the best for others (1 Cor. 13:7); imprisoning, enslaving, and killing others in the name of your religious views is not bearing their burdens, believing the best about them, or hoping the best for them. It’s that simple. Given how obvious this is, one wonders how it was so often missed and why it is yet so often missed today. One wonders why no one in church history has ever been considered a heretic for being unloving. People were anathematized and often tortured and killed for disagreeing on matters of doctrine or on the authority of the church. But no one on record has ever been so much as rebuked for not loving as Christ loved. Yet if love is to be placed above all other considerations (Col. 3:14; 1 Peter 4:8), if nothing has any value apart from love (1 Cor. 13:1-3), and if the only thing that matters is faith working in love (Gal. 5:6), how is it that possessing Christlike love has never been considered the central test of orthodoxy? How is it that those who tortured and burned heretics were not themselves considered heretics for doing so? Was this not heresy of the worst sort? How is it that those who perpetrated such things were not only not deemed heretics but often were (and yet are) held up as “heroes of the faith”?

Greg Boyd, The Myth of a Christian Nation (via antonyofva)

[stillseekingthetruth]

Evangelism is not something we do, but who we are. If we are proclaiming the glory of God to the world, we are necessarily evangelizing.

[stillseekingthetruth]

Reflections on Lent II

When we fail to keep up with our fasting in Lent, it's so tempting, so easy to give up. If I haven't been successful, why should I bother continuing now that I've failed? Actually, this attitude isn't just a Lent attitude. It's a human attitude about life in general. But that's a falsehood. In grace we are told that yes, we will not be perfect. But by accepting grace we're also told that there is grace to start again. It cuts both ways -- it is not held against us, the falling and failing, but we no longer have an excuse to not start again.

Lent isn't just about the perfect execution of a 6 week fast. Lent is really an intentional practice that mirrors the entire journey of faith, the daily struggle of living under grace -- of being freed from a human standard so that we may rise to a divine one. Of knowing that even when we mess up, it's not the end, but a beginning. It's not a comfortable truth, because when we've failed, it's so much easier to wallow in that, to simply embrace failing and give up on success. But Christ told us that even the most dirty, fallen, and messed up of all of us can stand up and start over again.

[stillseekingthetruth]

Christ Does Not Satisfy

Christ was not meant fulfill us.

I once was at a revival event, complete with altar call and frenzied prayers for revival. At one point, the leader went as far as to say, "I sense that someone in this room has a torn left meniscus. I just want you to know that if you pray with all your heart, God will hear that prayer and answer that prayer and heal you!" Given that this was a room of 200 people, many of whom were sports fans drawn by some football player's endorsement, I figure he probably wasn't too far off the mark.

The overarching theme of the night was, "God will fufill your desires!" That sex, drugs, money, posessions, these all would leave you wanting, but that God will fufill that inner desire. A theme reflected in their claims that those who trusted God would even recieve fufillment of their immediate desires for healing.

God satisfies your desire. God satisfies you.

It sounds really nice, but it completely misses the point of the Gospel.

Christ does not satisfy us. How long has it been since Christ came? 2000 years, give or take a few. Does life feel satisfying? Christian or Atheist, life is not satisfying, God or no God. There are bills to be paid. Work is monotonous. Relationships, no matter how much we try to pull God into them, are still broken. We are still broken.

Then we go to our friends who are not Christians and promise them that Christ does satisfy and that with Jesus, our needs are fufilled more than any worldly things do! And no one mentions that in reality, something is still lacking. In Christ, we are just as broken as we were before, no matter how much we pray for redemption. No matter how much we have experienced redemption. It's still there. We are still hurting just as much as we were before. We are still broken.

The traditional Church answer we're told is that this is because Christ is yet to come to complete his work. And maybe that's followed with an exhortation to meditate stronger on the Word, or to pray harder. Or maybe we're told it's because God has chosen not to completely heal us. But what an unfulfilling answer this is! Do I have to try harder to overcome my doubt? Or has God passed me over when it comes to my struggle?

As long as we focus on ourselves, this tension will always gnaw at and tear at our hearts. As long as we think that we shouldn't be feeling incomplete, we will never see what Christ has done.

The focus is not on us. The Christian faith is not about the fulfillment of our desires. Jesus did not come to fufill our desires. He came to destroy them, to free us from our broken human wants so that God's desires might be fulfilled instead.

In the Old Testament, the Jewish people were commanded by God to make sacrifices in atonement for sin. In essence, these sacrifices were the giving up of things of worldly value to God -- grain, livestock, money. And in the act of sacrifice, worldly things were irrevocably given over to the Lord. In the Bible, the NIV translation notes that the term "destroyed" is frequently used in a way that "refers to the irrevocable giving over of things or persons to the Lord, often by totally destroying them" (found in Deuteronomy 20:17, only one of many examples of this word).

In the Crucifixion, Jesus, the substitute for humanity, was destroyed on the cross. And through him, not only destroyed are our sins but also the root behind them: our desires.

We do not inherently desire good. What we desire, even when we desire "good" is evil -- sin, in the sense that our desires are not Godly desires regardless of how good they may seem. In the very beginning of the story of humanity, it is written that "The Lord saw that the wickedness of huamnkind was great in the earth and that every inclination of the thoughts of their hearts was only evil continually," (Genesis 6:5). And in Romans 3:10-11, Paul cites Old Testament texts proclaiming that, "there is no one who is righteous, not even one; There is no one who has understanding, there is no one who seeks God." It isn't a sense of absolute "evil" that these texts rail aginst. Rather, it is this inherent brokenness in ourselves, our inherent depravity that prevents us from turning to serving God rather than ourselves that Christ came to overcome.

Christ did not say he came to fufill our desires. To say so twists the gospel into a false religion about a wish-granting deity who furthers our hedonistic desires. Christ came to destroy our desires. Rather, in him, these desires and their inherent sinfulness have been handed over to the Lord irrevocably. We are no longer our own. In 1 Cornithians 6:19-20, the Apostle Paul exhorts believers to not be ruled by their own sexual desires. He draws from Roman cultural practices: that a slave whose freedom was bought with temple money was now owned by the God of that temple, and that likewise, Christians were no longer mastered by themselves, but by God. And as such, we are no longer ruled by our desires. We are ruled by the desires of God.

In Christ, we have been freed from the self-serving order of this world, of ourselves. We are no longer ruled by our desires and their sinful and self-centered nature, but ruled by the love of God that destroys our realities of self-serving desire, freeing us to be ruled not by our desires but by his desires instead. Christ is not about us. He is about him. And that is good news.

Further Reading: The Falsehood of the Christ-Commodity

[stillseekingthetruth]

Church and Christ

Just as Christ is not a commodity which fulfills our lives, neither is Church a commodity (or the giver of a commodity) that can fulfill our lives. Church is not a place where we learn life-giving values that can grant us fulfillment and satisfaction.

Indeed, even to say Church is a community where we learn of Christ's story of what he has done and how to apply it in our lives fails to fully capture its divine intent. This too reduces Church to a product of its functions. Rather, Church is where we situate ourselves into that story, transforming it from a mythology that informs our lives into the story that is our lives.

In going to Church, we do not simply learn of Christ's story and allow it to wash into our lives. Rather, in Church, we seek a direct encounter with Christ through his hands and feet in this world, his people. By entering into this divine community, we no longer see Christianity as a set of principles or narratives which inform our lives, or a mythology. Rather, Christ becomes our life.

All other things, teaching, communion, service, flow out of a life that is integrated into the on-going story of Christ in our world today. Unless this merging of stories happens first, all things are merely religious rituals that have no power.

[stillseekingthetruth]

The Falsehood of the Christ-Commodity

To market Christ as someone who acts by fulfilling us does not do him justice. Rather, it creates a false Christ-commodity which simply competes with all the products the world offers to fulfill us. If Christ merely claimed to fulfill our desires, he makes the same claim as the false idols promising a better life, a better reputation, a better experience.

Christ told us that all who would follow him must deny themselves first first1. Self-denial entails the denial of what is king in our lives: the agony at our core that drives us to sinful self-gratification of the desires of the flesh. It is this agony of unfulfillment which drives us to pursue false idols. It is this agony which drives us to replace Christ with the false Christ-commodity which claims to divinely fulfill the emptiness inside. It is this agony at our core that Christ calls us to deny and truly find freedom.

In the Cross, the call to freedom was made real. In his death, we were freed from the fallen order of self-fulfillment of the sinful self and were offered instead the desires of God through his Holy Spirit, offering us an alternative: pursuing God instead of ourselves. The Apostle Paul boldly proclaimed to the Church in Rome that by the Spirit we may put to death the sinful natures of the body and find life instead2.

References: 1 Matthew 16:24 2 Romans 8:13

[stillseekingthetruth]

Reflections on Lent I

Fasting is different from a diet or a self-improvement regime. Fasting aims not to improve ourselves but to set our eyes more perfectly upon Christ. In lacking, we can be reminded that someone promised us more than the idols we turn to for self-fulfillment. The agony of lacking reminds us of the greater agony that Christ went through on the Cross when sin was poured upon him for our sakes.

And by facing the agony of want and lack, we open ourselves up to fully experience the freedom from the sinful desires of our hearts, inclined towards self-gratification, away from God-glorification. We stop telling ourselves, "I must be fulfilled," and instead learn to say "Christ is better than this."

It requires faith to say that Jesus is better than self-fulfillment. It requires faith to give up what is here and what is now for what is not seen, heard, or felt. It requires faith to enter into the freedom we can have in Jesus.

Lent is a time to cultivate that trust and faith and to pursue Jesus through the agony of desire.

[stillseekingthetruth]

Consider The Following

14.5% of all Americans, including 16.2 million children, lack ready access to food1.

15% of all Americans live in poverty, with the rate significantly higher among African Americans and Hispanic Americans2.

70,792 youth were incarcerated in 2010, the the majority of these youth being African American and Hispanic American3. In California alone, 56.5% of youth released in 2004 were back in jail by 20104

104,630 U.S. children were waiting adoption in 20115. Of these, 49,758 found families. 54,872 did not6.

If you wanted to serve, you don't have to look far. You don't need to go overseas or across the border. You just need to open the door. The radical love of Christ is for all people of all origins and locations, for it is the only thing that saves in termination.

Does it matter if we serve after we are saved? In a word? Yes. Salvation was not given to us because we wanted it or even because we needed it, but because God's love is to his own glory. We must respond in kind, to perpetuate his goodness and love to glory. We were redeemed to be sent out to redeem. Christianity is not so much about feeling good as it about doing good.

In closing, a man by the name of Toyohiko Kagawa once said:

"I read in a book that a man called Christ went about doing good. It is very disconcerting tome that I am so easily satisfied with just going about."

Let us seek out the good that has not yet been done and do it in the name of Christ.

1U.S. Hunger -- Bread For The World 2Income, Poverty and Health Insurance in the United States: 2011, pg. 14 3Census of Juveniles in Residential Placement, National Crosstabs for 2010 by Race 4California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation 2010 Juvenile Justice Outcome Evaluation Report, pg. 5 5Children's Bureau, Child Welfare Outcomes Report Data: Children Waiting for Adoption Overview 6Children's Bureau, Child Welfare Outcomes Report Data: Children Adopted Overview

[stillseekingthetruth]

If a street conversation can instill spiritual change, how much more can bringing someone to witness this day-to-day narrative of God redeeming his creation in community transform a life? If a tract or a conversation cannot melt the heart of the embittered ex-Christian who has left church, what about experiencing the love of Christ in community that contradicts his or her past knowledge?

Excerpt from a talk I'm giving for my fellowship

[byebyebaggott-deactivated201305]

The matter is quite simple. The Bible is very easy to understand. But we Christians are a bunch of scheming swindlers. We pretend to be unable to understand it because we know very well that the minute we understand, we are obliged to act accordingly. Take any words in the New Testament and forget everything except pledging yourself to act accordingly. My God, you will say, if I do that my whole life will be ruined. How would I ever get on in the world? Herein lies the real place of Christian scholarship. Christian scholarship is the Church’s prodigious invention to defend itself against the Bible, to ensure that we can continue to be good Christians without the Bible coming too close. Oh, priceless scholarship, what would we do without you? Dreadful it is to fall into the hands of the living God. Yes it is even dreadful to be alone with the New Testament.

Søren Kierkegaard (via jspark3000)