Two weeks ago I was the chapel speaker at my boys' high school. What do you say to teens about living into the way of Jesus?

I started by sharing this story that had gone around Facebook. From the Huffington Post:

A tiny bit of compassion can have a huge impact.

Two weeks ago, Ehab Taha, a 26-year-old from Canada, was riding public transit in Metro Vancouver when a large man he described on Facebook as “suffering from drug abuse and\or mental health issues” became aggressive in his train car.

The man was alarming fellow passengers “with erratic movements, cursing, shouting” until a 70-year-old woman decided to reach out and help him by extending her hand and grabbing his. The sweet gesture soothed the man. Eventually he sank to the floor of the train as tears flooded his eyes.

"It was quite incredible how much he calmed down in a split moment,” Taha told HuffPost Canada. “It was the most touching thing I've ever seen.”

Moved by “the incredible display of humanity,” Taha snapped a picture of the two holding hands and posted it to Facebook.

That picture is above. My friend John alerted me to this story. He sent it to me in a text with a simple note: "This is Jesus."

After reading the story I asked the students, "Why do stories like this go viral?"

They go viral, I argued, because we see the kingdom of God in stories like this. When we see something like this it feels so right, so good. This, we say, is what the whole world should be like.

And yet, far, far too often we take a pass on kindness. Yes, this is the way the world should be. Yes, this is the way we should be. But we don't practice kindness. Much to our and the world's determinant.

To bring that point home I read novelist George Saunders' convocation speech at Syracuse University about what, looking back, he regretted most in his life:

What do I regret?

Being poor from time to time? Not really. Working terrible jobs, like “knuckle-puller in a slaughterhouse?” (And don’t even ASK what that entails.) No. I don’t regret that. Skinny-dipping in a river in Sumatra, a little buzzed, and looking up and seeing like 300 monkeys sitting on a pipeline, pooping down into the river, the river in which I was swimming, with my mouth open, naked? And getting deathly ill afterwards, and staying sick for the next seven months? Not so much. Do I regret the occasional humiliation? Like once, playing hockey in front of a big crowd, including this girl I really liked, I somehow managed, while falling and emitting this weird whooping noise, to score on my own goalie, while also sending my stick flying into the crowd, nearly hitting that girl? No. I don’t even regret that.

But here’s something I do regret:

In seventh grade, this new kid joined our class. In the interest of confidentiality, her Convocation Speech name will be “ELLEN.” ELLEN was small, shy. She wore these blue cat’s-eye glasses that, at the time, only old ladies wore. When nervous, which was pretty much always, she had a habit of taking a strand of hair into her mouth and chewing on it.

So she came to our school and our neighborhood, and was mostly ignored, occasionally teased (“Your hair taste good?” – that sort of thing). I could see this hurt her. I still remember the way she’d look after such an insult: eyes cast down, a little gut-kicked, as if, having just been reminded of her place in things, she was trying, as much as possible, to disappear. After awhile she’d drift away, hair-strand still in her mouth. At home, I imagined, after school, her mother would say, you know: “How was your day, sweetie?” and she’d say, “Oh, fine.” And her mother would say, “Making any friends?” and she’d go, “Sure, lots.”

Sometimes I’d see her hanging around alone in her front yard, as if afraid to leave it.

And then – they moved. That was it. No tragedy, no big final hazing.

One day she was there, next day she wasn’t.

End of story.

Now, why do I regret that? Why, forty-two years later, am I still thinking about it? Relative to most of the other kids, I was actually pretty nice to her. I never said an unkind word to her. In fact, I sometimes even (mildly) defended her.

But still. It bothers me.

So here’s something I know to be true, although it’s a little corny, and I don’t quite know what to do with it:

What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness.

One of the blessings of living in West Texas is the Mexican food. Our town isn't huge, but it's filled with family-owned Mexican restaurants. So if you love Mexican food the way I do, that makes Abilene a great place to live.

Our favorite restaurant is Los Arcos. You can sort people in our town by which Mexican restaurant is their "go to" restaurant. We have friends who are Oscar's people and friends who are Mary's people or Farolito's people and so on. We're Los Arcos people. For almost twenty years Jana, the boys and I have eaten at Los Arcos. So many times I don't even open the menu. I get #14, the Los Arcos plate. Two enchiladas, a beef taco, and rice and beans. And I love the Los Arcos salsa--great flavor, on the hot side, and lots of it--always distinctively served in mason jars. 

Starting with rice and beans when they were little, Brenden and Aidan grew up to love Mexican food at Los Arcos.

All that to say, it's been a sad week at the Beck house. Los Arcos had a fire Monday night that destroyed the restaurant. News reports say that the Castro family plan to rebuild, but that will take awhile. It's sad because the Castro's had put so much into the building over the years, renovating and expanding. And we're also sad for all the wonderful service staff, the kind people who took care of us over the years.

It's a weird feeling. Soon the family and I will want to go out to get some Mexican food. But we'll sit in the car for a few minutes having no idea where to go.

And wherever we go we'll fear it will never be the same.

He had never felt that ministry--or God--was about making things happy. He'd long felt that the heart of ministry--and the heart of God--is about making things beautiful, even when they can't be happy.

--from Samuel Wells & Marcia A. Owen's Living Without Enemies

This week during my Monday night Bible study out at the prison we were in Matthew 17 and we reached the story about the exorcism Jesus performs after descending the mountain after his transfiguration:

Matthew 17.14-18
When they came to the crowd, a man approached Jesus and knelt before him. “Lord, have mercy on my son,” he said. “He has seizures and is suffering greatly. He often falls into the fire or into the water. I brought him to your disciples, but they could not heal him.”

“You unbelieving and perverse generation,” Jesus replied, “how long shall I stay with you? How long shall I put up with you? Bring the boy here to me.” Jesus rebuked the demon, and it came out of the boy, and he was healed at that moment.

We were puzzling over Jesus's initial response to the father. “You unbelieving and perverse generation how long shall I stay with you? How long shall I put up with you?"

Rather than being moved by compassion Jesus seems upset and irritated. But why? And with whom?

Though Jesus is talking with the father it doesn't seem that Jesus is irritated with him and his request to heal his son.

Maybe Jesus is irritated by his disciples who had failed to cast out the demon, perhaps because they lacked faith (see verses 19-21).

But I don't think that's it either.

What I argued out at the prison was that we should take the target of Jesus's rebuke at face value. Jesus doesn't rebuke the father or the disciples. Jesus rebukes the generation.

It seems, to me at least, that Jesus is blaming the suffering of this child on the perversity of the generation. Jesus is angry because the wickedness of a generation is causing children to suffer--physically, psychologically and spiritually.

And I think Jesus's rebuke still rings out. Children continue to suffer in our world because we are an unbelieving and perverse generation.

“When you visualized a man or a woman carefully, you could always begin to feel pity . . . that was a quality God's image carried with it . . . when you saw the lines at the corners of the eyes, the shape of the mouth, how the hair grew, it was impossible to hate. Hate was just a failure of imagination.”

― Graham Greene, from The Power and the Glory 

Growing up I'd always heard Matthew 9.38 used as a call for evangelism. "Ask the Lord of the harvest," Jesus says, "to send out workers into his harvest field." The message we took from this passage was to go out into a lost world (the harvest field) to win souls (harvest) for the Kingdom.

The other day I was reading this passage and the fuller context caught my attention.

Matthew 9.35-38
Jesus went through all the towns and villages, teaching in their synagogues, proclaiming the good news of the kingdom and healing every disease and sickness.When he saw the crowds, he had compassion on them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd. Then he said to his disciples, “The harvest is plentiful but the workers are few. Ask the Lord of the harvest, therefore, to send out workers into his harvest field.”

Notice what Jesus is feeling prior to his comment about sending workers into the harvest field:

"When he saw the crowds, he had compassion on them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd."

Jesus has compassion for the people because they are "harassed and helpless." The text doesn't say he has compassion on them because they are sinners in the hands of an angry God, destined for eternal hellfire. The crowds were lost--they were directionless, like sheep without a shepherd--but they weren't lost as the fire and brimstone evangelists tend to frame it, as standing under the judgment of a wrathful God.

All this changes the framing of how we might think about the "workers for the harvest." People are lost. But they aren't damned. They are, rather, harassed and helpless. Directionless and aimless. Looking for care. Searching for good news.

So the workers do what Jesus did. Having compassion for others we imitate the two things Jesus did.

We proclaim the good news of the Kingdom and we provide care, healing every disease and sickness.

I live a double life.

The life known to social media is this guy you're reading now. Author of a blog and books about theology. All written by a psychologist and often from an psychological angle, yes, but mainly a blog about theology.

That's one life. The other life is my job. Which has nothing much to do with theology.

I'm an experimental psychologist. Not a counseling or clinical psychologist. A degree in experimental psychology is mainly a degree in the methods of social science research. So a lot of it involves statistics.

As you can imagine, most of my faculty at ACU, who are clinical, counseling and school psychologists, wouldn't look forward to teaching a statistics class. But an experimental psychologist would. An experimental psychologist is well-suited to teach statistics and research methodology classes. That's our bread and butter.

So that's what I teach at ACU. Beyond a large psychology survey course, I mainly teach statistics at ACU. An undergraduate class and a multivariate statistics class for graduate students. I also supervise Masters theses.

Like I said, double lives. I'm a guy who writes books about the devil in the morning who lectures about multiple regression in the afternoon.

Above is a picture of the whiteboard after a lecture of mine on Tuesday. It's one of my favorite lectures. I do a magic trick for the class and then use that trick to illustrate the basic ideas of null hypothesis testing.

Lectures like these are a huge, huge part of my life, a part of my life social media never gets to see.

"Be not angry that you cannot make others as you wish them to be, since you cannot make yourself as you wish to be."

--Thomas à Kempis, from The Imitation of Christ

A few months ago I shared a post about how to begin using The Liturgy of the Hours (also called the Divine Office) for daily prayer. The Liturgy of the Hours is for Catholics what the Book of Common Prayer is for the Anglican Communion.

Anyway, I wanted to let you know that I recently purchased the Divine Office app for my iPhone and have been enjoying it very much. You should check it out (works for Android as well). It's $9.99.

In the mornings I try to pray through the Office of Readings and Morning prayer. But sometimes I just don't get up early enough to do this before I have to head off to work. The Divine Office app provides you with audio readings of all the prayers. So on days when I can't sit down and read the Office before work I turn on the audio and listen to the prayers while getting ready and driving or riding my bike to work. I also listen to evening prayer on the way home from work. I've also been using the app a lot while walking the dog.

Beyond the audio, the Divine Office app also gives you all the text for every prayer. So you can read or listen, or both. The app also includes a liturgical calender which is handy in finding dates for Holy Days and seasons. Finally, I also like the notifications function, which can be customized. This function rings a bell on your phone, like text message alert, when it's time to say one of the Offices. Even if I can't say the prayers when the bell chimes its sound throughout the day is a nice reminder to pray.

Anyway, if you're a busy, on the go kind of person, or simply struggle with the discipline of prayer, you might really like the Divine Office app. I'd recommend it.

We've reached the last post in reviewing Václav Havel's essay “The Power of the Powerless”.

In the previous post we described how when we live within the lie--when we automatically go along with the status quo--we create an illusion of universal assent which helps us to become obedient.

So how are we to resist this pressure?

Plus, how does Havel's analysis help us think about the uniquely spiritual aspects of spiritual warfare?

Let's return to the situation of the greengrocer described by Havel in the last post. When we last left the grocer he was hanging posters of patriotic paraphernalia on his walls. And by doing so the greengrocer was propping up the illusion of universal consent.

But let's say that the greengrocer starts to grow disillusioned. Starts noticing that things aren't going as well as the propaganda seems to indicate. Let's imagine that the greengrocer, finally fed up with things, stops putting up that poster in his store window:

Let us know imagine that one day something in our greengrocer snaps and he stops putting up the slogans to ingratiate himself. He stops voting in elections he knows are a farce. He begins to say what he really thinks at political meetings. And he even finds the strength in himself to express solidarity with those whom his conscience commands him to support. In this revolt the greengrocer steps out of living within the lie. He rejects the ritual and breaks the rules of the game. He discovers once more his suppressed identity and dignity. He gives his freedom a concrete significance. His revolt is an attempt to live within the truth.

This revolt, according to Havel, is the power of the powerless. This is the power of truth in the face of illusion. As Havel notes, “Living within the lie can constitute the system only if it is universal.” The religious thrall of ideology works only when there is unanimity. Thus, when a lone individual begins living within the truth the universal spell is broken, a dissent has been publicly registered. And this threatens the entire system:

The greengrocer has not committed a simple, individual offense, isolated in its own uniqueness, but something more serious. By breaking the rules of the game, he has disrupted the game as such. He has exposed it as a mere game. He has shattered the world of appearance, the fundamental pillar of the system. He has upset the power structure by tearing apart what holds it together. He has demonstrated that living a lie is living a lie. He has broken through the exulted façade of the system and exposed the real, base foundations of power. He has said the emperor is naked. And because the emperor is in fact naked, something extremely dangerous has happened: by his action, the greengrocer has addressed the world. He has shown everyone that it is possible to live within the truth.

Importantly for our conversation about spiritual warfare being more than political activism, this act of defiance and dissent isn’t a strategic political will to power. Living within the truth is the tactical action of the powerless and the weak. The act is existential, spiritual, and moral rather than political. The power is the power of truth. As Havel describes it:

[T]his confrontation does not take place on the level of real, institutionalized, quantifiable power which relies on the various instruments of power, but on a different level altogether: the level of human consciousness and conscience, the existential level…Therefore this power does not rely on soldiers of its own, but on the soldiers of the enemy as it were—that is to say, on everyone who is living within the lie and who may be struck at any moment (in theory at least) by the force of truth…This power does not participate in any direct struggle for power, rather it makes its influence felt in the obscure arena of being itself.

This is the spiritual liberation that must accompany political emancipation.

For the truth, Jesus said, will set you free.

In Václav Havel's essay “The Power of the Powerless” we begin to "live within the lie" of a power system's ideological justification when we begin “accepting appearances as reality." We live within the lie when we accept "the rules of the game” of the world we are living in.

And when we do this we “become a player in the game, thus making it possible for the game to go on, for it to exist in the first place.”

That's a critical piece of the puzzle. When we accept the game--the status quo--we make it possible for the game to go on. 

And importantly for Havel, we don’t really need to believe the lie. We just have to live within it, quietly and uncomplainingly.

Havel making this point:

They need not accept the lie. It is enough for them to have accepted their life with it and in it. For by this very fact, individuals confirm the system, fulfill the system, make the system, are the system.

When we do not dissent from the status quo we become both the victims and the instruments of oppression. In accepting the prevailing worldview and the ideology that supports current power arrangements we “create through [our] involvement a general norm and, thus, bring pressure to bear on [our] fellow citizens.” We learn “to be comfortable with [our] involvement, to identify with it as though it were something natural and inevitable…[and we] come to treat any non-involvement as an abnormality.”

In our conformity we stigmatize dissent and non-conformity. An outcome of this conformity and stigmatization of non-conformity is succinctly described by Havel:

Quite simply, each helps the other to be obedient.

In his essay Havel has us imagine the plight of a greengrocer. Early in the essay we see the greengrocer displaying a poster in his store window declaring some nationalistic banality similar to a “God Bless America” bumper sticker. As Havel notes, such a poster or bumper sticker attracts hardly any notice or commentary, precisely because it is so universally accepted as the ideological background of national life.

And therein lies the insidious nature of the prevailing ideology, the source of its power in creating social conformity.

By functioning largely in the background as the unquestioned assumption ideology creates the illusion of universal assent, which creates the unseen force-field of normative social pressure.

We've helped each other become obedient.

In my upcoming book Reviving Old Scratch I mention that the men in my Monday night Bible study out at the prison made me a homemade birthday card for my birthday last year. The card is pictured here.

What's cool about the card, and I mention this in the book, is that the edges of it have embedded foil. I asked about where the foil came from and they told me it was from the foil scavenged from yogurt cup tops. The whole thing is adhered together with glue from some old prison recipe.

Technically, the card is considered contraband, as anything the inmates physically make is considered contraband.

It's one of my most cherished possessions.

We're continuing to work through Václav Havel's famous essay “The Power of the Powerless”.

To recap, ideology is the spiritual authority that justifies current power arrangements, the metaphysical glue holding the power structure together. And one of the ways ideology performs this function is by making the status quo seem automatic and inevitable.

Things are the way they are because that's how things have always been.

But we haven't yet gotten to the really important question. What is ideology hiding from our view? If ideology is an illusion what are we being deceived about?

According to Havel, ideology obscures the relationship between the self-interested good of the power system and the common good of human beings.

That's so important let me say it again a bit differently. Ideology hides the fact that what is good for the power system isn't necessarily good for the people.

Phrased differently again, ideology makes you sacrifice your life for the system by tricking you into thinking that you are the one who is benefiting. 

The power structures pursue certain self-interested aims and ends. But these aims and ends diverge from the common good of human beings. What is good for the powers is rarely good for the people. In pursuing their own interests the power structures often ignore, subvert or undermine the good of the people.

Ideology hides this conflict, deceiving the people into believing that what is good for the powers is good for the people, that no disjoint exists between the two. Havel describing this:

Ideology, in creating a bridge of excuses between the system and the individual, spans the abyss between the aims of the system and the aims of life. It pretends that the requirements of the system derive from the requirements of life. It is a world of appearances trying to pass for reality.

Ideology convinces people, in the face of obvious injustice and exploitation, that the harm and alienation they are experiencing is good, necessary, and noble. Ideology turns systemic abuse and indifference into a source of heroic dignity.

For example, each election cycle we tell stories valorizing working men and women who work long hours and struggle to pay the bills. These suffering workers are our ideological heroes and our patron saints. And by idealizing and normalizing exploitation ideology tamps down dissent and discontent, showing how there is no fundamental antagonism between the powers and the people.

Ideology, Havel writes, is “the illusion that the system is in harmony with the human order, and the order of the universe.” And in the face of this apparent harmony—that the current power arrangements are just and good—we become docile, conforming and obedient.

In Havel’s potent assessment we begin to “live within a lie.”

The words.
These tell the story of our curse.
The mark of Cain upon our foreheads.
Hell never was our punishment.
Dust you are
to dust you shall return.
We were severed from life.

The ash.
Burnt black residual of fire,
sign of lamentation and grief
for all that we have torn in the world
and left bleeding.
Dawn of turning and advent of conversion.
Repent!
Cries a voice in the wilderness.
Make your crooked heart straight.
The kingdom of God is near.

The sign.
Etched upon our skin by the church
to contradict all that must die.
Emblem of paradox.
Intersection of life and death.
Mark of unexpected and surprising grace.

Having described ideology as the metaphysical and spiritual glue that holds power structures together, Václav Havel goes on in his essay “The Power of the Powerless” to describe how power becomes depersonalized. This is key. When power becomes depersonalized it is robbed of its human and moral element. No one is to blame. No one is in charge. The status quo seems automatic and inevitable, the only logical and conceivable outcome.

Oppression has become routine.

Havel describes two features of the depersonalized spirituality that characterizes and inhabits power structures.

First, ideology—the spirituality of the power—gives the power a sort of a unconscious, inevitable and automatic nature. People aren't making real human choices within power structures. They are, rather, behaving automatically, submitting to the norms, policies, procedures, rules, culture, tradition and expectations of the power structure. They are often, quite simply, doing their jobs.

This creates an impersonal bureaucratic inevitability. As Havel describes, there is a "blind automatism which drives the system."

This dehumanizes the power, extracts the human and moral element. In the power system "automatism is far more powerful that the will of any individual." Human conscience and autonomy become trapped and suppressed within the system:

[A]utomatism, with its enormous inertia, will triumph sooner or later, as either the individual will be ejected by the power structure like a foreign organism, or he or she will be compelled to resign his or her individuality gradually, once again blending with the automatism and becoming its servant, almost indistinguishable from those who preceded him or her and those who will follow.

This illustrates a second aspect regarding the impersonal nature of power. Beyond the impersonal, distributed and automatic execution of power, we see how the spiritual nature of power allows the power structure to persist over time as human servants come and go, live and die. As Havel notes:

If ideology is the principal guarantee of the inner consistency of power, it becomes at the same time an increasingly important guarantee of its continuity...power is passed on from person to person, from clique to clique, from generation to generation in an essentially more regular fashion...it is ritual legitimation, the ability to rely on ritual, to fulfill and use it, to allow oneself, as it were, to be borne aloft by it.

Summarizing, all this goes to reinforce why spiritual warfare is not against "flesh and blood." As Havel describes, power is anonymous, dehumanized and bridges human generations. The real battle is against "something that transcends the physical aspects of power."

In short, spiritual warfare is spiritual. The clash is not between “flesh and blood” but between rival spiritualties and rival objects of worship. The battle is not between human bodies but between truth and illusion.

At root ideology is a tool of deception aimed at “legitimizing what is above, below, and on either side.” Ideology is “a veil behind which human beings can hide their own ‘fallen existence’, their trivialization, and their adaptation to the status quo.”

Ideology is the secular religion we imbibe, the “ideological excuse” that is given so that we might reconcile ourselves to a dehumanizing and demoralizing status quo.

When we talk about spiritual warfare the classic text is Ephesians 6.12 (KJV):

For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.

This text has tended to be interpreted in one of two ways. Conservative Christians often read the phrase "we wrestle not with flesh and blood" to mean that spiritual warfare involves doing battle with demons--malevolent disembodied spirits. By contrast, progressive Christians have tended to take the reference to "the principalities and powers" to mean that the focus of spiritual warfare is to resist oppressive political and economic systems.

As a progressive Christian I've tended to go with this latter understanding of spiritual warfare. Inspired by liberation theology I tend to equate spiritual warfare with social justice. But this sort of understanding begs the obvious question. If you equate spiritual warfare with political activism then why use the word spiritual?

In answering this question many have turned to the work of Walter Wink and William Stringfellow to describe how power structures are created by and maintained by an inner or underlying spirituality. The spiritual and the political are closely connected. Spiritual liberation must accompany political liberation. This is why political movements often fail by not taking into account the spiritual aspects of the struggle. Repentance is as important as revolution.

A really insightful way to think about the relationship between the spiritual and the political is the analysis of Václav Havel in his famous essay “The Power of the Powerless”. Though written in response to the communist regime in Czechoslovakia, Havel’s analysis is timeless, so I'd like to devote a few posts walking through the essay.

To start, Havel begins by describing the relationship between reigning power structures and ideology, the reigning cultural worldview. According to Havel, ideology is the spiritual glue that justifies and animates current power structures. Ideology is the “secularized religion” that justifies current power arrangements, making them seem moral, transcendent, and beyond dispute. Havel notes:

The whole power structure…could not exist at all if there were not a certain ‘metaphysical’ order binding its components together…This metaphysical order guarantees the inner coherence of [the power structure]. It is the glue holding it together, its binding principle, the instrument of its discipline.

In short, power becomes equated with truth:

…the centre of power is identical with the centre of truth…the highest secular authority is identical with the highest spiritual authority.

This is why all social resistance and dissent is inherently spiritual and religious in nature. What is being challenged and fought against is the spirituality of the power structures. Again, Havel's analysis here converges on the theological work of Walter Wink and William Stringfellow.

The spiritual, metaphysical, and religious aspect of power arrangements—all power arrangements, from the smallest organizations to the largest nation states—explains the impersonal inertia of power structures, why our battle is against an anonymous spirituality rather than the "flesh and blood" people embedded within the power structures.

Brenden, my oldest son, is in the middle of basketball season. It's been an interesting year in the stands. Our fans have been particularly--Hmmm, how to say this?--vocal and enthusiastic this year. And not in a good way. And the most mortifying thing about this is that we are a Christian school. Christian text and mottoes fill the gym and we start the game with a word of prayer. And still, despite all this, the behavior from our fans is abysmal. Last week our Athletic Director sent an email to the parents of the school reminding them to tone it down. It's sad.

As I still in the stands, as yelling takes place all around me, my mind tends to drift to Augustine.

Our desires are good but disordered. As I watch parents I can't but affirm the goodness of loving your child and wanting the best for him or her. Nor do I fault the love of excellence and effort in the struggle to win in a competition. All these desires are good and loving these things is godly, healthy and appropriate.

But these desires--the love of a child, the desire to win--become disordered when elevated to the highest place. The love of a child becomes disordered when we begin to yell at other children and cheer their failures. The desire to win becomes disordered when we begin to despise the other team and dehumanize the referees.

So, wish us luck this evening. Brenden as a game tonight. That's where I'll be.

Sitting in the stands. Cheering Brenden and the Panthers. Thinking about Augustine.

Two weeks ago I wrote about the famous social psychology study From Jerusalem to Jericho. Conducted by John Darley and Daniel Batson the study found that hurry and time pressure reduced helping behavior among seminarians on their way to preach a sermon about the Good Samaritan.

In case you missed it, in the comments of that post Julie shared a personal story that really moved me.

I've read Julie's story now to a few different audiences at church as an example of the Little Way of hospitality, an example of how through small acts of kindness we welcome people into the warm circle of our affections.

Julie's comment and story:

I heard of this study [From Jerusalem to Jericho] many years ago (probably at ACU) and was just telling a friend about it yesterday. I was reminded of it when I headed out in a snowstorm for my MSW class on death, dying and bereavement on Monday. My neighbor, an elderly Cambodian man with schizophrenia and terminal cancer, was walking to the bank and asked if he could accompany me. I knew it would make me late for class and keep me out longer in the storm, but I also realized that it was a good thing to do. We had a lovely chat and he sweetly bowed to me as we parted. I was late for class. The next day he died of a heart attack while receiving his chemotherapy treatment. I am grateful for our walk together.

In the series of posts I just finished reflecting on John Barclay's book Paul and the Gift I used Barclay's perfections of grace to comment on different soteriological positions, mainly comparing and contrasting Calvinism and Arminianism, but also mentioning Universalism.

What I'd like to do in this post is show how Barclay's perfections of grace map onto Thomas Talbott's propositions as described in his book The Inescapable Love of God and his essays in the edited book Universal Salvation?: The Current Debate.

Long time and regular readers will have seen Talbott's propositions before, but if you're new to them Talbott has us consider the following three propositions:

1. God’s redemptive love extends to all human sinners equally in the sense that he sincerely wills or desires the redemption of each one of them.
2. Because no one can finally defeat God’s redemptive love or resist it forever, God will triumph in the end and successfully accomplish the redemption of everyone whose redemption he sincerely wills or desires.
3. Some human sinners will never be redeemed but will instead be separated from God forever.

We start by affirming that each proposition has ample biblical support. But as Talbott points out, you cannot logically endorse all three propositions. You have to accept two of the propositions and reject a third. And depending upon which propositions you either accept or reject you end up with either Calvinism, Arminianism, or Universal Reconciliation.

Following Talbott, the various soteriologies end up looking like this:

1. Calvinism: Adopts Propositions #2 and #3. God will accomplish God's plans and some people will be separated from God forever. This implies a rejection of Proposition #1, that God wills to save all humanity. (The limited scope of salvation is implicit in the doctrine of election.)
2. Arminianism: Adopts Propositions #1 and #3. God wills to save all people and some people will be separated from God forever. This implies a rejection of Proposition #2: God will fail to accomplish something God wills, to save all people. (An appeal to human freedom is usually used to explain this failure.)
3. Universal Reconciliation: Adopts Propositions #1 and #2. God wills to save all people and God will accomplish God's purposes. This implies a rejection of Proposition #3, that some people will be separated from God forever. (Opinions differ in how this happens, but often a purgatorial view of divine justice is posited.)

So how does Talbott's propositions map onto John Barclay's perfections of grace?

Recall one of the main arguments of Barclay in Paul and the Gift. All of these soteriologies believe in grace. The differences between the soteriologies are found in which perfections they include in their theology of grace.

To recap, Barclay argues that grace can be perfected--as a vision of "pure" grace--in six different ways:

1. Superabundance
Grace is "perfected" if it is lavish and extravagant.

2. Singularity
Grace is "perfected" if it flows out of a spirit of benevolence and goodness.

3. Priority
Grace is "perfected" if it is unprompted, free, spontaneous and initiated solely by choice of the giver.

4. Incongruity
Grace is "perfected" if it ignores the worth or merit of the recipient.

5. Efficacy
Grace is "perfected" if it accomplishes what it intends to do.

6. Non-Circularity
Grace is "perfected" if it escapes repayment and reciprocity, if it cannot be paid back or returned.

And in my series I made an argument for a seventh perfection:

7. Liberality
Grace is "perfected" if it is given to more rather than fewer recipients.

As should be obvious, Calvinism, Arminianism, and Universalism all believe that grace displays the perfections of superabundance, singularity, priority and incongruity. God's grace is lavish (superabundant), loving (singularity), unprompted (priority) and poured out upon sinners (incongruity). All four of these perfections are found in Calvinist, Arminian and Universalist theologies of grace and salvation.

Where the views differ, as hinted at in Talbott's propositions, is in how each theology various perfects efficacy and liberality. Summarizing:

1. The Perfections of Grace in Calvinism
In Calvinism efficacy is perfected but not liberality. Grace accomplishes what it sets out to do (perfection of efficacy), but saves only the elect (no perfection of liberality).

2. The Perfections of Grace in Arminianism
In Arminianism liberality is perfected but not efficacy. Grace is given to all of humanity (perfection of liberality) but the gift of grace fails to accomplish its goal in saving all of humanity (no perfection of efficacy).

3. The Perfections of Grace in Universalism
In Universalism both the efficacy and liberality of grace are perfected. Grace is given to all of humanity (perfection of liberality) and grace will, eventually, accomplish the goal of saving all of humanity (perfection of efficacy).

If you go back to Talbott's propositions you can see how they are teasing out how efficacy and liberality are being variously perfected (or not) by the different soteriological positions.

Grace abounds, but is perfected in different ways.

This will be our last and final post about John Barclay's book Paul and the Gift.

Again, as I said in the first post, these posts are not attempting to be a full and scholarly review of Paul and the Gift. I'm simply using these posts to collect insights from Paul and the Gift that I found interesting, helpful or important. So reader be warned, Paul and the Gift is an academic tome of modern Pauline scholarship. Personally, I got a lot out of Paul and the Gift, but I like reading Pauline scholarship. But not everyone does.

So let's wrap this series up with a final takeaway from Paul and the Gift.

Recall Barclay's argument that grace can be "perfected" in one of six different ways (and I've suggested a seventh). Recall also that many of these perfections don't come from Paul but come, rather, from the debates of church history.

Non-circularity was one of the perfections that emerged out of the Protestant break with Catholicism. Non-circularity is the perfection that for grace to be "perfect" it has to escape the cycle of reciprocity and repayment. As Protestants know, God's grace--as a perfect gift--cannot be repaid. To attempt repayment is foolish and impossible. And to even think that you could repay the gift is an act of sinful pride, the hubris of "works-based" righteousness. Grace, in the hands of Protestants, is non-circular. Repayment is impossible.

But as Barclay points out, the perfection of non-circularity is foreign to ancient notions of gift-giving. And more than foreign, nonsensical. The gift-economy of ancient patronage assumed that gifts obligated recipients to make a repayment of some sort, if not materiality then in gratitude and loyalty. And as Barclay goes on to point out, Paul's treatment of grace adopts these ancient assumptions. Grace creates covenantal obligations. Grace expects gratitude, fidelity and righteousness.

So where did the perfection of non-circularity come from?

Simplifying greatly, non-circularity emerged out of the debates between Protestantism and Catholicism regarding the role of "merit" in salvation. In the debates about sola fida and sola gratia the notion of non-circularity was perfected, pushed to its logical and rhetorical extreme through the fires of debate. We've inherited this distortion--the perfection of non-circularity--which distances us from Paul's more ancient understanding that grace creates bonds of obligation, fidelity and reciprocity.

There are many important implications about this development that I'd like to unpack in this post.

First, the quality of gift-giving is always assessed against its ideal, "perfect" manifestation. For Christians, then, our gift-giving is always going to try to mirror God's gift-giving. So if God's gifts are perfect in being non-circular, according to Protestants, then our gifts are perfect insofar as they are also non-circular. That is to say, our gifts are "perfect" if they escape repayment.

And I would argue that this notion--that our gifts are perfect in how they reflect the non-circularity of God's gifts--has been one of the most toxic and damaging ideas in all of Protestant theology and ecclesiology.

Let me be specific.

If you've spent any time at all in Protestant churches you'll have noted one of our neurotic patterns: We're happy to serve but very, very uncomfortable being served. Protestants are very servant-hearted people. We'll work ourselves to death serving people. But you cannot serve a Protestant. To be on the receiving end of service makes us very, very uncomfortable.

And the reason for this, following Barclay, is our inherited theology of grace, a view of gift-giving that perfected non-circularity. Service--and gift-gifting generally--cannot and must not ever be reciprocated. Because if it were to be reciprocated, in this theological scheme, then it is no longer a gift, no longer grace. According to the perfection of non-circularity, reciprocity contaminates the gift. Thus, we are very, very happy to serve, but that service must never be reciprocated.

You see the sad outcome here, right? In the community of faith we are happy to give but can't ever receive. We are happy to serve but can't ever be served.

Driven by the perfection of non-circularity the economy of love is sacrificed for charity.

Charity is a one-way, non-circular gift, something I give to you that you must never, ever repay. Economy, by contrast, is circular, bonds of mutual sharing and obligation, gifts given back and forth, back and forth, back and forth.

In sum, by perfecting non-circularity the Protestant theology of grace ruined our ability to form Christian community, a community rooted in covenantal bonds of mutual affection and shared obligation.

Making matters even worse, the Protestant theology of non-circular grace perfectly suited the individualism of modernity. Non-circular grace--grace as charity--is a one-sided model of love that is perfectly suited to individualism. I, the benevolent giver, give a gift to you, the recipient. Just like God.

Just like a god.

You can see the toxic effects of this notion upon Christian community. But consider also the toxic effects upon Christian service and mission in the world. Because grace must be non-circular when we go into the world we are always placing ourselves in a god-like position: Here we are, as Christ's representatives, to serve you. You cannot do nothing for us. We want no repayment.

And while that sentiment seems noble, you can see how problematic it is. Again, our imaginations about grace have been so distorted by the debates of church history that can't see how twisted our notions of grace have become.

In our twisted imaginations it seems perfectly obvious that grace expects no repayment. And yet it is also perfectly obvious that when we go into the world on mission and service trips that this one-sided model of grace creates enormous problems: Here we are to serve you, and you shall do nothing for us. In fact, you can make a good argument that the colonialist, savior-complex that infects missionary and service efforts in the church is rooted in the Protestant theology of non-circular grace.

Of course I'm not suggesting that we expect payment for the gifts we give. We can't let our notions of grace get captured by modern economies of capitalistic exchange, something far, far from the ancient imagination of gift. What is needed is a recovery of the ancient imagination that gifts connected people in bonds of mutuality.

And of particular importance here is how, in the early Christian communities, these bonds of mutuality broke with the patronage of Greco-Roman culture. Again, in the ancient gift economy gifts created obligations, often suffocating and oppressive obligations, between the rich and poor, between the powerful and the weak. So while Paul assumed that gifts flowed through bonds of mutual obligation, Paul was keen to dismantle the hierarchical nature of ancient patronage and gift-giving. This is the big battle Paul is fighting in the book of 1 Corinthians, where the hierarchy of Roman patronage was leaking into the church.

Paul combats this in a variety of ways. First, any obligations we feel in the church aren't toward each other. Our gifts to each other flow out of gratitude for God's gift in Christ. Second, the gift we give to each other is primarily the gift of love. Finally, connecting back to the last post, our love mirrors the love of God's incongruous grace by nullifying and reversing the honor culture of the world. That's the big take home message in 1 Corinthians:

1 Corinthians 12.24b-26
God has put the body together, giving greater honor to the parts that lacked it, so that there should be no division in the body, but that its parts should have equal concern for each other. If one part suffers, every part suffers with it; if one part is honored, every part rejoices with it.

In the church we practice what I've called rehabilitative honoring, giving greater honor to those who have been shamed by the world (i.e, "giving greater honor to the parts that lacked it").

And what is key here, to return to the point above, is mutuality, that the parts of the body "have equal concern for each other." In the body we are covenantally connected. If one part suffers, we all suffer.

And it's that interconnectedness, the entire motif of Paul's body metaphor, that is cut off by the non-circular Protestant theology of grace.

We could put the matter this way. When it perfected the notion of non-circularity the Protestant theology of grace lost its covenantal imagination.

Which is a point that helps connect us back to the last post.

Recall that Paul's gospel of incongruous grace nullified ("crucified") systems of honor and worth in the world so that the "walls of hostility" could be dismantled in the formation of new and revolutionary social arrangements.

Grace wasn't an abstract metaphysical theory of atonement.

Grace wasn't an internal psychological experience of guilt and gratitude to prompt an altar call.

Grace was a social revolution.

So when we talk about the covenantal obligations of grace we aren't talking about merit and works-based righteousness--pietistic moral efforts trying to be a "good person" to pay back or say Thank You to God. No, for Paul grace was a sociological phenomenon. "New creation" for Paul was the church, the new humanity called out of the world where there was neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male or female.

In short, grace for Paul was a lived, social reality. Therefore, to experience and participate in grace was to create and participate in this new social reality. Extra Ecclesiam nulla salus. There is no salvation outside the church. This was true for Paul. The reconciled new humanity of the church simply was salvation.

The incongruous grace of God--poured out upon Jew and Greek, slave and free, male and female--formed this new humanity, began this new creation. To fracture this humanity is to step out of the church and back into the world, to step out of life and back into death. This is the covenantal obligation of grace, to participate in God's grace by living reconciled in Christ as the new creation.

Thus it is impossible to say you are living in God's grace if you don't love your brothers and sisters. Ecclesiology is soteriology.

So, yes, grace has strings attached. Grace obligates us to live as the reconciled new humanity, as the new creation. There is no grace outside that social reality. No life outside in the dominion of death. As Barclay summarizes (p. 442):

The good news is first and foremost the act of God-in-Christ, but if it is not enacted in the social practice of believers, it ceases to be existentially real.

Or even more succinctly, (p. 444, his emphasis):

[C]ommunal practice is integral to the expression of the good news.

As I pointed out in my last post, according to John Barclay in his book Paul and the Gift Paul's great theme concerned the incongruity of grace, that God gave the Christ-gift to the unworthy.

And as I noted in my last post, this was a revolutionary idea. The incongruity of grace was Paul's great theological innovation.

In fact, Paul was so successful in preaching this message that he completely flipped the ancient understandings of grace and gift-giving. Nowadays we simply assume that grace--to be grace--has to be bestowed upon the unworthy. But this is the exact opposite of the ancient understanding!

But it's hard for us, thousands of years after Paul, to recover the shock of what he was saying.

But there's a deeper problem here. Although we've deeply appreciated the incongruity of grace, we fail to attend to the social and corporate implications of grace and have, instead, turned grace into a private, psychological experience.

For example, when you hear the message of incongruous grace preached from the pulpit the message tends to be about how you, as a sinner, are unworthy to have merited such a gift. The focus is upon your own personal unworthiness--your sin and guilt. In the hands of contemporary Christians the incongruity of grace is often used to shame us: You didn't deserve it, you were unworthy, but Christ died for you anyway.

We can appreciate why we've used the incongruity of grace in this way. Rhetorically and psychologically, the story about how God loved you in spite of your personal sin, guilt and unworthiness is a potent emotional tool for evangelistic efforts.

But as Barclay argues in Paul and the Gift, Paul's message about the incongruity of grace is less about psychology--stirring up feelings of guilt and gratitude in our hearts to prompt an altar call--than sociology. As we pointed out in the last post, Barclay wants us to appreciate how Paul's gospel of incongruous grace functioned in his mission to the Gentiles.

Specifically, God's incongruous grace justified Paul's mission to the Gentiles. Grace had been poured out upon the unworthy, upon the Gentiles as Gentiles. Further, Paul's message of incongruous grace was the supportive theology that allowed Jews and Gentiles to come together in table fellowship, the first, tentative social experiments on the road to becoming the church (see: Acts 11.19-26; Gal. 2.1-21).

But how, exactly, did the gospel of incongruous grace facilitate these social experiments? The answer to that is what I think is the most fascinating and important takeaway from Paul and the Gift.

According to Barclay, new and revolutionary communities were able to form as the fruit of Paul's gospel because the message of incongruous grace displaced social and cultural standards of value and worth, standards that had previously separated people. In the face of the cross all those standards of social evaluation, significance and worth had been "crucified" and thrown away. Freed by these systems of social and cultural worth, the Christian community was able to extend fellowship and love across social lines that had been taboo.

As Barclay writes (p. 394-395):

The cross shatters every ordered system of norms, however embedded in the seemingly "natural" order of "the world"... the cross of Christ breaks believers' allegiance to pre-constituted notions of the honorable, the superior, and the right...Paul parades the cross as the standard by which every norm is judged and every value relativized...

[As used by Paul in his argument in Galatians] The enormous creativity made possible by this vision of reality is immediately obvious: "For neither circumcision counts for anything, nor uncircumcision, but new creation."... Paul announces the irrelevance of taxonomic systems by which society had been divided in subtly hierarchical terms: old "antinomies" are here discounted in the wake of a new reality that has completely reordered the world..[I]n context the primary focus is the social novelty of communities that disregard former boundaries by discounting old systems of worth. The "new creation" is indifferent to traditional regulative norms and generates new patterns of social practice. 

We can clearly see the social effect of grace in Paul's famous declaration in Galatians 3.28:

There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus. 

For Paul these distinctions remain. Paul is a Jew and he is a man. But what has been "crucified" in Christ, to quote Barclay (p. 397, emphasis his), is the "evaluative freight carried by these labels, the encoded distinctions of superiority and inferiority." Thus, continuing with Barclay, "baptized believers are enabled and required to view each other without regard to these classifications of worth."

The heart of Galatians 3.28 isn't an abstract call to "justice" or "equality" but the introduction of a whole new paradigm of social evaluation and honoring. Barclay writes (p. 397):

All forms of symbolic capital not derived from "belonging to Christ" now lose their ultimacy. Baptism "into Christ" provides a radically new foundation for communities freed from hierarchical systems of distinction, not because of some generalized commitment to "equality" but because of the unconditioned gift of Christ, which undercuts all other reckoning of worth.

In all this we can appreciate the sociological impact of Paul's gospel as he attempted to plant Christians communities that violated social taboos throughout the Greco-Roman world. Jews and gentiles, slaves and masters, men and women crossing taboo social boundaries and discarding hierarchical systems of social capital. All these systems of social valuation, distinction and worth were rendered null and void, crucified with Christ in baptism, so that a new creation, tangibly incarnated in the new social reality of the Christian church, could be realized and enjoyed. As Barclay summarizes toward the end of Paul and the Gift (p. 566, emphasis his):

Paul's notion of the incongruous Christ-gift was originally part of this missionary theology, developed for and from the Gentile mission at the pioneering stage of community formation. Since God's incongruous grace dissolves former criteria of worth, it forms the basis for innovative groups of converts, by loosening their ties to pre-constituted norms and uniting them in their common faith in Christ.

Now, to return to our reflections, what Barclay is describing isn't typically how God's incongruous grace is preached in our churches. In most churches the gospel of incongruous grace is not used to "dissolve former criteria of worth" to form "innovative groups of converts." In most churches incongruous grace--gifts given to the undeserving--tends to devolve into what many call "worm theology," a phrase taken from Isaac Watts' hymn Alas! and Did My Saviour Bleed: "Would he devote that sacred head for such a worm as I?"

In most churches to appreciate incongruous grace you must appreciate your lowly, worm-like status. And Christian preachers have been extraordinarily creative in communicating this message, with Jonathan Edwards' "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" being the classic prototype of this genre.

What has been lost, according to Barclay, and this is what I think is the most potent insight of Paul and the Gift, is the practical sociological thrust of grace, the formation of communities that throw away cultural and social systems of worth to realize "new creation" in their midst through surprising, boundary-crossing communities. As Barclay writes (p. 567):

Ancestry, education, and social power are subordinated to a common "calling" that disregards previous assumptions of worth (1 Cor. 1:26-31). Novel communities are encouraged to relativize the differences in culture, welcoming one another on the unconditional terms by which each was welcomed in Christ Jesus (Rom. 14-15).