This series has focused on two sorts of mysteries, the mystery of God's own being and the mystery of God's relation to the world. Both of these concern the contrast between Uncreated Being and created being.

But another location where mystery shows up concerns God's will. Most of these questions concern why God does or does not act in the world. God's will is inscrutable. This is particularly dismaying in relation to pain and suffering, questions of theodicy. Why does God allow horrific things to happen? Why is God not answering our prayers?

At these moments, Christians often appeal to mystery. Texts like Isaiah 55 are regularly invoked:

For my thoughts are not your thoughts,
neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord.
For as the heavens are higher than the earth,
so are my ways higher than your ways
and my thoughts than your thoughts.

In my first post, when I described my allergic reactions to mystery, this particular appeal was the most galling. Appealing to mystery in the face of suffering struck me as calloused, an easy dismissal, a failure to fully face or recognize the pain. In the face of horrors the statement "It's a mystery!" struck me as not very helpful and smacked of indifference. 

Plus, the questions here are hard and the challenges to faith significant. To avoid this difficult reckoning many resort, a bit too quickly, to mystery. Such an appeal can look like an existential defense mechanism, a way to cling to a comforting illusion.

Here's what was happening inside of me, for many years, during my allergic season in regards to mystery. I was so afraid that my faith was a defense mechanism that I refused to be consoled or comforted in the face of pain and suffering. As strange as this may sound, I wanted my faith to hurt. I wanted God to be a problem, a thorn in my side and a stone in my shoe. This pain, I believed, was evidence that God was not consoling me. My guiding Bible verse was Job 13.15, "Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him." God was causing me to suffer. God was killing me. And I took that as evidence that my faith wasn't a fearful grasping at a comforting fairy tale. 

I went on to use this faith configuration to judge others. I had rejected mystery to squarely face the pain of life. Others appealed to mystery in the face of suffering and seemed contented. And I judged that contentment, suspecting it of timidity and superficiality. As a Winter Christian I stood in judgment of the Summer Christians. 

Over the last twenty years, though, a thaw occurred. In current parlance, deconstruction gave way to reconstruction. The icy winter Christian years gave way to a warming. No longer Arctic I'm more autumnal, with some intimations of spring. Having banged my head on the problem of evil for decades, I eventually realized that, well, it's a mystery. This isn't a nut that can be cracked. At the same time, my fear that my faith was a defense mechanism faded. As I describe in The Shape of Joy, spirituality sits at the heart of human flourishing--gratitude, joy, meaning in life, mattering, love, reverence, moral beauty, wonder, awe, and hope. None of that seems to be due to a furtive neurotic delusion. 

Given all this, my posture toward mystery has turned toward the pastoral. I continue to think that a too quick appeal to mystery in the face of grief and loss can be blithe and dismissive, deployed to provide a bandaid or to escape our own discomfort. We can use mystery to obfuscate and avoid. So, while I've come to recognize the place of mystery in the life of faith, even in the midst of suffering, I believe we should be careful and discerning in how to verbalize this truth aloud. For example, if a suffering person asks about why God is allowing some pain to happen I think it's better to say "I don't know" than "God's ways are higher than our ways." "I don't know" steps into mystery while bringing us into solidarity with the one who is suffering. We stand, together, perplexed and unknowing. A mystery is experienced but not offered to explain.

One way to think about mystery in Christian thought is to ask what the opposite of mystery might be. As I hear people talk, the opposite of mystery, as I mentioned in the last post, is a reductionistic and mechanistic explanation for "how" or "why" things "work." Basically, the opposite of mystery is something akin to a scientific explanation, some sort of causal account of the world. 

Consider, for example, quantum mechanics. As Richard Feynman once said, “I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.” The reason for this is that quantum mechanics doesn't present us with a causal mechanism. And lacking that clear causal account, we find quantum mechanics mysterious. We know quantum mechanics "works," from a predictive aspect, but we don't know "how" it works. This lack of a causal account is what made Einstein so suspicious of quantum mechanics ("God doesn't play dice with the universe") as being the final account of the cosmos.

My point here is simply to note that, when we lack a causal account, even scientists resort to "mystery." The opposite of mystery, therefore, seems to be giving a causal account. To explain something is to expose the mechanism. As Feynman said in another quote, "What I cannot create I do not understand."

This is why I discussed the "causal joint" in the prior post. If the opposite of mystery is a mechanism then the "casual joint" between God and the world will be ever shrouded in mystery. No causal, mechanistic account can be given for the God/world relation. 

A more whimsical way to describe all this comes from the paperback edition of Hunting Magic Eels. In one of the new chapters I used Brandon Sanderson's contrast between hard and soft magical systems in fantasy novels. I did a recent series about this as well. A hard magical system in fantasy fiction, according to Sanderson, is when the mechanism of the magic is clear and transparent. We know how the magic "works." In a soft magical system, by contrast, we know that magic exists, it enchants the fantasy world, but we don't know how the magic works. The mechanism is hidden. As I argue in the paperback edition of Hunting Magic Eels, Christianity is a soft magical world. As the old hymn puts it, God moves in mysterious ways. We know that God is at work in the world, but God's actions are not at our disposal. The "why's" and the "how's" are not transparent to us. The world is inherently and persistently mysterious.

Anglican theologian Austin Farrer coined the phrase "the causal joint" in his book Faith and Speculation and I think it gets to the heart of what I described at the end of the last post. Christian mystery regularly shows up at "the causal joint."

The boundary that was vigilantly policed by Jewish monotheism was between Uncreated Being and created being. To worship created being was idolatrous. Only Uncreated Being, the One who created the universe ex nihilo ("from nothing"), was worthy of devotion and worship. During Second Temple Judaism this contrast between Uncreated and created being encountered Greek philosophical thought which eventually led to the Christian apophatic tradition. While created being is accessible to human observation and exploration, Uncreated Being is an impenetrable mystery. What Uncreated Being "is" in itself is beyond human comprehension.

What, then, happens when Uncreated Being and created being make contact? What is the "casual joint" between God and the world? What does this point of connection and influence look like? How does the Infinite and the finite interact? 

As I mentioned at the end of the last post, because one side of the relation is shrouded in apophatic mystery the "casual joint" between God and the world cannot be specified, described, or imagined. At the causal joint we must make an appeal to mystery. This is not done to avoid hard questions or stop the conversation. It concerns, rather, the grammar of God. Due to the asymmetry of being we find at the causal joint no "explanation" can be given for God's relation to and influence upon the world. And the casual joint shows up in a lot of conversations, from miracles, to providence, to prayer. We ask a lot of "how" questions, and "how" questions concern the causal joint. 

Basically, mystery evaporates whenever we have a reductive or mechanistic account, if we can specify a causal chain. So we ask questions like "How does prayer work?" or "How do miracles work?" with the expectation that there's some mechanism behind the scenes that we can investigate and uncover. But since things like prayer and miracles show up at the causal joint--the interface between created being and Uncreated being--a mechanism cannot be specified due to the apophatic mystery on one side of the equation. This renders all of God's actions in and on the world inherently mysterious. 

At the causal joint, mystery is simply unavoidable.

I have used the word "apophatic" from time to time on this blog/newsletter. But readers come and readers go, and "apophatic" isn't a word a lot of people know. So, we should start by getting everyone on the same page. Any conversation about mystery needs to begin with the apophatic tradition in Christian thought.

To start, theologians make a contrast between cataphatic and apophatic theology. Cataphatic theology, also called "positive theology," concerns what can be properly said, claimed, or asserted about God. Basically, cataphatic theology concerns our "God talk," verbal statements that express our ideas and beliefs about God. Cataphatic theology contains creeds, beliefs, doctrines, dogmas, and Biblical teachings. A lot of cataphatic theology involves policing all these words and ideas, drawing boundaries between the licit and illicit, between orthodoxy and heresy. Most of our spiritual lives are spent swimming in cataphatic waters--from books to podcasts to sermons to blogs/newsletters--we share, talk, and debate about ideas and beliefs about God and the life of faith. Some of us gravitate toward abstract, theological cataphatic expressions, others like to keep things literal and Biblical. Either way, we're expressing beliefs about God. 

The apophatic tradition, by contrast, is called "negative theology." Apophatic theology is the Via Negativa, the "way of negation." 

There are a couple of different ways to think about this. First, in contrast to positive theology, what we can properly say about God, negative theology concerns what cannot be said about God. Apophatic theology marks the point where words and mental representations about God falter and fail. A different way of thinking about negative theology is approaching God through a series of negations. Through negations--God is not this, God is not that--we chip away at the mystery of God. Thomas Aquinas deploys this strategy in the Summa Theologica. Critically, for Thomas, this "chipping away" doesn't reveal God at the end of the process in any clear, positive way. As Thomas said, we can know God's existence but not God's essence. That is to say, from a cataphatic perspective, we can assert that God exists. We know this by observing God's effects upon the world. These are Thomas' famous five "proofs" for the existence of God. That said, while we can assert, positively, that God exists (if you find Thomas' proofs convincing), we do not know what God "is." God's essence is beyond human conception. To peer into God's very being is to look into an impenetrable darkness. Following Thomas, we can use negations to narrow in on God, sort of like approaching the event horizon of a black hole. Our knowledge is a boundary encircling a mystery rather than the grasping of something definite. 

The critical point here is how apophatic theology chastens our verbal claims and mental representations of God. There is a literalness in speaking about God that must be mortified. True, our words can help us climb toward God, our thoughts can seek him, but at some point we reach the top of the cataphatic ladder. Words and ideas can only take us so far. At the top cataphatic ladder is a step into the mystical and contemplative. Silence is emphasized over verbalization. Thomas Aquinas reached the top of his cataphatic ladder in a mystical experience, late in his life, during the celebration of the Eucharist. He stopped writing the Summa because after his vision all his words seemed to him as straw.

While all the church fathers and early theologians recognized the apophatic aspect of the theological task, along with the mystical approach toward God, Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite (c. late 5th to early 6th century) and Maximus the Confessor (c. 580 – 662) are considered seminal figures in the apophatic tradition. After Aquinas, Meister Eckhart (c. 1260 – c. 1328) and Nicholas of Cusa (1401 – 1464) are also a major figures, along with the author of the mystical treatise The Cloud of Unknowing (14th century). But again, pretty much every significant Christian theologian, early and late, has recognized the apophatic aspect of theological reflection. The role apophaticism plays in emphasis and centrality varies considerably across theologians and through the tradition as a whole, but it's always there.

The point of this post, beyond introducing readers to apophatic theology so I can freely use the word "apophatic" going forward, is simply to state that, due to God being God, mystery is baked deeply into the pie. Any speech or reflection about God is inherently haunted by mystery. All God talk is mysterious, has an apophatic aspect. To be sure, apophaticism isn't what I was describing in my last post, the way "mystery" can get used to short-circuit a theological conversation or wave away a hard question. But as I'll argue in the posts to come, mystery must be regularly invoked at the God/creation point of contact. Necessarily so, because, as we've seen in this post, there is a persisting apophatic aspect to one side of this relationship.

"Annunciation"

Behold the liminality,
the threshold, the doorstep.
The shimmering translucent membrane--
the thinnest of thin spaces.
Gateway to heaven
as innocuous as Jacob's pillow.
The pivot, the fulcrum of eternity.

Heaven and earth are hushed.

An angel awaits her answer.

"They gave the corpses of your servants to the birds of the sky for food"

Not the most cheery line to select, but Psalm 79 is another of those psalms dealing with the destruction of Jerusalem and Israel's exile:

God, the nations have invaded your inheritance,
desecrated your holy temple,
and turned Jerusalem into ruins.
They gave the corpses of your servants
to the birds of the sky for food,
the flesh of your faithful ones
to the beasts of the earth.
They poured out their blood
like water all around Jerusalem,
and there was no one to bury them.

Given the devastation, the psalmist cries out for God to act:

How long, Lord? Will you be angry forever?
Will your jealousy keep burning like fire?
Pour out your wrath on the nations
that don’t acknowledge you,
on the kingdoms that don’t call on your name,
for they have devoured Jacob
and devastated his homeland.
Do not hold past iniquities against us;
let your compassion come to us quickly,
for we have become very weak.

God of our salvation, help us,
for the glory of your name.
Rescue us and atone for our sins,
for your name’s sake.

I'm struck by a few different things.

First, the reference to atonement in Verse 9: "Rescue us and atone for our sins." The root of the word translated as "atonement" in the Old Testament is kaphar, which literally means "to cover." Atonement is "covering over" sin. What's interesting in Psalm 79 is how that atonement and covering has shifted from the human side of the equation over to God's. In jarring contrast to a pagan imagination, we cannot make atonement. Only God can. The covering of our sins is a Divine prerogative. This reversal sets up the strange gospel claim that God makes a sacrifice for us, rather than the other way around. "While we were still sinners, Christ died for us," declared Paul. Following Psalm 79, it would have to be that way. If atonement is going to be made for sinners, it has to come from God. 

The other thing I'm pondering are those dead bodies: "They gave the corpses of your servants to the birds of the sky for food." 

I'm writing a book right now, tentatively titled The Book of Love. The book goes from Genesis through Revelation showing how to read the Bible as a book of love. I've just finished a first draft of the chapter on Revelation. And guess what? There's a lot of dead bodies in Revelation! Concern for the Christian martyrs is a huge theme in Revelation, perhaps its most pressing concern. My point in making this connection is simply to revisit my pessimistic view of history. If Revelation is any indication, I don't think the plea of Psalm 79 will be answered within history. At least not any history the Bible envisions. Revelation speaks of a time of "tribulation," and I think that is what history is, the tribulation.

Which is a pretty gloomy thing to recognize and contemplate. But that's the whole point of Advent. Looking forward to the Second Coming. 

In my poem on Sunday I wrestled with the relationship between realism and hope. Can hope be realistic? I've been pondering that question. In one sense, no, hope cannot be realistic. To have a "realistic" expectation of a happy outcome might instill confidence and optimism, and that is a type of "hope," but radical hope looks beyond the "bars of the possible." And yet, if hope becomes "unrealistic" it can become wishful thinking. So, when the dead bodies pile up, is it realistic to be hopeful? Does what is seen delimit what we may dream? Or does hope come from beyond, from what is unseen? 

As I said in Sunday's poem, the border of what you think is real encircles what you may hope.

I've been thinking about mystery.

My thinking was set into motion by a brief conversation I had with my friend and ACU colleague Paul Morris. Paul is a physicist and a philosopher and he hosts "Philosophy Roundtables" at ACU where our faculty can gather around conversations where theology, philosophy, and science intersect. When I ran into Paul at our campus Starbucks he mentioned he was thinking about a Roundtable on the topic of mystery. I've been think about mystery ever since.

Theologically speaking, what do we mean by "mystery"? And when is it appropriate or not to make an appeal to mystery in theological conversations?  

I've been pondering these questions because my opinion about mystery has changed over the years. For much of my adulthood, from college into my 40s, I was in a pretty skeptical, disenchanted place. I've described these years as my "Christian agnostic" phase. Still practicing Christianity and committed to my local church, but a bit unsure about if any of it was true. My general stance during this time was basically "even if it's not true, following Jesus is a beautiful way to live." 

During these years I had a strong allergic reaction to any appeal to mystery. My feeling at the time was that "mystery" was a theological "get out of jail free card" whenever the questions got too hard and difficult. "Mystery" felt like cheating. "Mystery" was a conversation stopper. If you ever faced a theological question you couldn't answer you could wave it away with an appeal to "mystery."

My opinions, though, have changed. I've become more comfortable with mystery. No more allergies. This has largely been due to my exposure to the apophatic theological tradition which traffics pretty heavily in mystery. And while it is true that mystery shows up when our intellects hit a wall, I think there's a pretty clear, particular, and consistent appeal to mystery that seems, to me at least, legitimate.

So, this is a series about mystery, about what it is and where it shows up.

The Shape of Joy has three parts. Part 1 is entitled "Curved Inward." In this part I describe how our identities have become increasingly self-referential and how this undermines our mental health. Part 2 is entitled "Turning Away" and in this section I describe how the first step toward joy is a step back from yourself. We disengage from our neurotic, self-referential loop. 

One of the lines of research I discuss in Part 2 concerns the surprising science of humility. I say "surprising" because I don't think many people would have picked humility as being among the most robust predictors of mental health and well-being. For a lot of people, perhaps especially those raised in religiously conservative spaces, humility involves denigrating yourself, actively mortifying your ego and self-image to combat pride. But as psychologists have studied humility they have observed something quite different.

What, then, is humility? In The Shape of Joy I share two influential descriptions. The first comes from the psychologist June Tangney. According to Tangney, humble people possess the following qualities:

• An accurate assessment of yourself
• An ability to acknowledge your mistakes and limitations
• An openness to other viewpoints and ideas
• An ability to keep your accomplishments in perspective
• A low self-focus
• An appreciation of the value of all things, including other people

A second influential list, overlapping some with Tangney’s but also different in some points, comes from the researchers Joseph Chancellor and Sonja Lyubomirsky. Humble people possess or are characterized by the following:

• A secure, self-accepting identity
• A view of yourself free from distortion
• An openness to new information, being teachable
• Being other-focused rather than self-focused
• Possessing egalitarian beliefs, that is, seeing others as having the same intrinsic value/importance as oneself; lacking feelings of superiority

You'll notice that neither list has "thinking less of yourself" as a feature of humility. What these lists do describe is someone who is secure and grounded, and how from that groundedness flow social and psychological capacities. In short, as I describe in The Shape of Joy, humility isn't thinking less of yourself but a capacity to turn away from yourself and toward others.

This is a follow-up to my post a few weeks ago entitled "The Politicization of Enchantment." In that post I used Paul Kingsnorth's comments about Jordan Peterson to offer a warning about what I called the "Nietzschean Christianity" being promoted on the Christian right. To understand today's post you'll want to have read that prior post.

I want to make two clarifying observations about my earlier reflections. 

First, what are my opinions about Jordan Peterson? Readers who just randomly dip into my posts won't be aware that my opinions of Peterson are complex. On the one hand, I've repeatedly expressed admiration for how Peterson gets young people, especially young men, to take the Bible and Christianity seriously. I've found Peterson's reflections on the Bible to be quite interesting and fascinating. I have also appreciated the way Peterson pushes back on prominent atheists. Jordan Peterson is, perhaps, the best apologist of faith we have. So, I admire many things about Jordan Peterson and think the church has much to learn from him.

And yet, I've also been quite critical of Peterson. My major criticism concerns the "Nietzschean Christianity" he is promoting. A second, but related, criticism, as described in my most recent post, is how this vision of Christianity is being put to use on the political right. 

Which brings me to my second clarifying observation. 

I've described Peterson's Christianity as "Nietzschean Christianity." Which might strike fans of Peterson as strange given how Peterson's project is quite explicitly working against our modern "crisis of meaning" which has resulted from a Nietzschean rejection of Christianity in the West. So, if Peterson is explicitly anti-Nietzsche where to I get the notion that he's actually promoting Nietzsche?

The answer goes to Petersons' Darwinian-Jungian approach to Scripture. As everyone knows, Peterson isn't a Christian. He's very pro-Christian and might be on the verge of conversion, put when push comes to shove in his debates with atheists, Peterson doesn't cross the line into full confessional belief. And it's precisely at this point where Peterson stumbles and succumbs to a Nietzschean vision of Christianity.

Here's why.

Lurking behind Peterson's Jungian hermeneutic is a Darwinian view of human evolution and progress. Things like the "hero archetype," which functions as hermeneutical Rosetta Stone for Peterson, are "true" for Peterson because the hero archetype encodes vital information and behavioral strategies that have helped humanity survive and evolve across time. And it's this Darwinian connection that dooms Peterson to a Nietzschean Christianity, for the criteria of "true" for Peterson is always some version of survival and evolutionary success. Which means that Biblical truth, in the hands of Peterson, is always going to tip toward a will to power as the will to power is how Mother Nature sorts the weak from the strong. Simply put, pull back the layers of Peterson's hermeneutic and what you get is survival of the fittest. Truth = Survival. Truth = Fitness. Truth = Evolutionary Success. In short, a Nietzschean Christianity, a Christianity that privileges agonistic struggle, "slaying the dragon," and a will to power. And is it any wonder, when this is made plain, why Peterson's version of Christianity appeals to the political right? Let's quote Paul Kingsnorth again:

For Peterson, Christianity is a Joseph Campbell-style hero journey, one especially designed for young men. In his short film “Message to the Christian Churches” Peterson lays out his civilizational call and challenges the faith to keep up…Peterson goes on to lay out his case for the defense of civilization, which he defines as a society based on the "encouraging, adventurous masculine spirit." The Christian Church, it turns out, exists to encourage this spirit. It is, he states, there to remind people, young men included, and perhaps even first and foremost, that they have a woman to find, a garden to walk in, a family to nurture, an ark to build, a land to conquer, a ladder to heaven to build, and the utter terrible catastrophe of life to face stalwartly in truth, devoted to love, and without fear. Do you see anything missing in this list of what the church ought to be doing? It’s Christ. It's Jesus. He gets not one mention, not in the entire film. Neither does God the Father. Neither does the Holy Spirit. Instead, Peterson's civilizational church is to be a self-help club for young men. It's to be a cultural institution fighting back against the Woke and the bloody Gaia worshippers and the feminists and the life-sapping cultural Marxists. It sees life as a catastrophe, and the correct response to that catastrophe as masculine conquest. What Jordan Peterson wants, in other words, is a church that looks like Jordan Peterson.

I don't know if Jordan Peterson wants a church that looks like Jordan Peterson. But what I do know is that Peterson's Jungian hermeneutic is doomed to produce this sort of Nietzschean Christianity because a Darwinian vision of survival is regulating how Peterson reads the Bible. And until Peterson embraces Christianity, his vision of the faith is always going to drift toward the Darwinian and Nietzschean. For the simple reason that survival, rather than Christ, is regulating his hermeneutical vision and choices. 

This is why metaphysics matters and why Peterson playing coy with Christian metaphysics is shooting his project in the foot. Let me make this plain. 

The kenotic, self-offering love we witness in Jesus Christ only makes sense if you have a metaphysics of hope. More simply: Agape demands resurrection. Sacrifice requires eschatology. If I give my life away in love I have to trust that my sacrifice isn't futile or wasted. For example, think of Maximilian Kolbe's sacrifice in Auschwitz. Peterson likes to describe the hero as going off and making a great sacrifice to return with treasure for the community. But what if the hero never returns? What if, like Maximilian Kolbe, the hero is just dead? What then? A metaphysics of hope and resurrection declares that Kolbe's sacrifice is still heroic, even if it only echos in eternity. As do all acts of sacrificial love. 

The point is that until Peterson adopts a metaphysics of resurrection, that the tomb of Jesus is literally and historically empty, his hermeneutics will never be fully able to describe the self-sacrificing nature of Christ that Kingsnorth so eloquently describes in his lecture. Peterson can't get there because he's not willing to cross over the metaphysical bridge to embrace eschatological hope. And without that hope, Peterson's descriptions of "the hero" will, of necessity, tend toward survival and a will to power. For that is the only vision of the heroic possible in a world governed by Darwinian struggle.

Again, metaphysics matters. Peterson cannot articulate a truly Christ-like vision of the heroic because he lacks a metaphysics of hope and resurrection. Nietzsche was right, it's either Christ or the Anti-Christ. And right now, Peterson's Christianity is on the wrong side of that equation. 

"The Bright Field" by the Welsh poet R.S. Thomas is one of my favorite poems: 

I have seen the sun break through
to illuminate a small field
for a while, and gone my way
and forgotten it. But that was the pearl
of great price, the one field that had
treasure in it. I realize now
that I must give all that I have
to possess it. Life is not hurrying

on to a receding future, nor hankering after
an imagined past. It is the turning
aside like Moses to the miracle
of the lit bush, to a brightness
that seemed as transitory as your youth
once, but is the eternity that awaits you.

 ///

The reason the poem resonates with me is because it captures the thesis of Hunting Magic Eels, that modern disenchantment is due to pervasive attention blindness. Re-enchantment, therefore, is a practice of attention. 

Every day we pass by sacred moments. Each of these moments is the pearl of great price. Our days are filled with fields of hidden treasure. And yet, we hurry past, lost within ourselves. Trapped in nostalgia or regret about yesterday. Fretful or planning for tomorrow. We're never present to the moment and, therefore, miss the sacred encounter.  

To see God we must turn aside, like Moses, to the miracle of the lit bush. These are the "strange sights" I describe in Hunting Magic Eels, those moments in everyday life where eternity awaits us. 

Futility paces cynically
behind the bars of the possible.
The border of the real
encircles what you may hope.
The seen delimiting your dreams.

Prophecies and promises swirl in challenge
to shriveled, shrunken ontologies.

We start, anew, the seasonal test
to view a farther horizon.

"tell a future generation"

Psalm 78 is among those psalms that retell the story of Israel. Psalm 78 is framed as intergenerational communication, the older generation sharing the story with the younger:

My people, hear my instruction;
listen to the words from my mouth.
I will declare wise sayings;
I will speak mysteries from the past—
things we have heard and known
and that our ancestors have passed down to us.
We will not hide them from their children,
but will tell a future generation
the praiseworthy acts of the Lord.

In his book Nonverts: The Making of Ex-Christian America, Stephen Bullivant dives into data on the "Nones," those who check "None" when asked on census surveys to identify their "religion" or "religious preference." Roughly one out of four Americans are "Nones."

This category, the religiously unaffiliated, has been steadily increasing in the United States, accelerating with every generation. According to Bullivant's data, 11%-16% of the Silent (1928-1945) and Boomer (1946-1964) generations identified as None. Among the Millennial (1981-1996) and Gen Z (1997-2000) generations, the Nones have increased to 35% and 29% respectively.

But who are the Nonverts?

A "Nonvert" is Bullivant's label for a person who was raised in a religious tradition but who now identifies as a None. That is to say, a Nonvert is a person who has left the faith. Instead of converting to a religion, you are deconverting and disaffiliating to become a "None." Nonverts are those who are leaving the church.

In short, within the None group there are two subgroups, who Bullivant calls "Cradle Nones" and "Nonverts." Cradle Nones are Nones who were raised without a religion and have remained religiously unaffiliated. Nonverts, by contrast, were raised in a religion and have left that faith to identify as having no religion. According to Bullivant's data, of the total None group, 27% are Cradle Nones and 73% are Nonverts. And again, these trends are increasing with each subsequent generation. 

When compared to data on religious conversions, the picture becomes very alarming. As Bullivant describes, for every Cradle None who converts churches lose five Nonverts. Last year, I called this the "evangelism gap": For every one convert we lose five Nonverts.

The take home point in all this is that churches are not holding their younger cohorts. Churches are losing their children. 

Which brings me back to Psalm 78. We tend to think that evangelism is taking the gospel to the lost, to those outside the church. But the reality is that the majority of the Nones have grown up in churches. Evangelism, therefore, needs to pivot to focus on the home and the pew. Churches have become mission fields. Which means that evangelism is increasingly intergenerational. Telling a future generation the praiseworthy acts of the Lord.

I was recently struck again by the description of the demon-possessed man filled with "Legion" after his exorcism. As you'll recall, after Jesus heals the man the townspeople come and find him quite changed:

People rushed out to see what had happened. A crowd soon gathered around Jesus, and they saw the man who had been possessed by the legion of demons. He was sitting there fully clothed and perfectly sane. (Mark 5.14-15)

The man was restored to sanity. 

When we think of salvation we tend to thing of it in moral terms, bad versus good. But there is also a mental aspect to grace, even a mental health aspect. Insanity versus sanity. As the recovery community describes it in Step 2 of the 12 Steps:

We came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.

A Power that can restore us to sanity. Deliverance as sanity. Rescue as sanity. Emancipation as sanity. Salvation as sanity. 

Our spiritual state without God is mental confusion. Our predicament isn't just about our wayward desires and cravings, it's also about how we think, our thoughts about ourselves, others, and life.  A restoration of sanity. Here's how Frank Sheed describes a bit of this in his book Theology and Sanity.

[I]f we see things in existence and do not in the same act see that they are held in existence by God, then equally we are living in a fantastic world, not the real world. Seeing God everywhere and all things upheld by Him is not a matter of sanctity, but of plain sanity, because God is everywhere and all things are upheld by Him. What we do about it may be sanctity; but merely seeing it is sanity. To overlook God's presence is not simply to be irreligious; it is a kind of insanity, like overlooking anything else that is actually there...

God is not only a fact of religion: He is a fact. Not to see Him is to be wrong about everything, which includes being wrong about one's self...

...We live, indeed, in a vast context of things that are, events that have happened, a goal to which all is moving. That we should mentally see this context is a part of mental health. Just knowing that all things are upheld by God is a first step in knowing what we are, so a clear view of the shape of reality is a first step toward knowing where we are. To know where we are and what we are--that would seem to be the very minimum required by our dignity as human beings.

Having discussed the parables of Matthew 13 I want to end this series with the question about their ongoing and contemporary relevance. 

In the second part of this series I applied the parables of the Sower and the Wheat and the Tares to make a comment about the ambiguous moral profile of the church--wheat and tares growing side by side--along with the relative smallness, numerically speaking, of the kingdom. I also made comments throughout this series about how the parables of Matthew 13, given their pessimistic outlook, wouldn't fit in with church growth books and programs. The parables of Matthew 13 describe the kingdom of God as a "secret" which only a few respond to. Given this "secretness," it is hard to see how anything described as "mega" would fit Jesus' description of the kingdom. That is, unless, in light of the Parable of the Net, the kingdom of God drags in a lot of worthless fish. 

And yet, I've also highlighted in this series how Jesus' audience functioned as the interpretation of his parables. The parables were describing what was in front of Jesus and what he faced by way of reception. His teachings pulled in big crowds and those crowds were a mixed lot, like the Parable of the Wheat and Tares and the Net. Jesus was the Sower sowing the seed, and much of that seed fell on unfruitful soil. 

Which raises a question. Is it appropriate to apply Matthew 13 to the modern church? The parables aptly describe Jesus' reception, but what about ours? As I've repeatedly pointed out in this series, the parables of Matthew 13 sound a pessimistic note. Does that pessimism apply to today's church?

Opinions, I expect, will vary here. By my take is, yes, the parables of Matthew 13 describe the kingdom of God in our modern contexts. More and more, I've come to think that following Jesus is "the narrow way," something very precise and very specific. The kingdom of God, therefore, is both easily and generally missed. Much of modern Christianity just doesn't walk the narrow, precise, and very specific path of the kingdom. You either hit the bullseye with Jesus, and it's a small target, or you miss it completely. Given this, the label "Christian," like the Parable of the Net, pulls in a lot of worthless fish. Like the Parable of the Wheat and Tares, the field of Christianity is filled with weeds. And while such an assessment throws some cold water on church planting--"Hey, your new church is going to pull in all sorts of folks, some good, some not so good, and some bad."--and looks upon "mega" expressions of Christianity with a lot of skepticism, I find the vision of Matthew 13 refreshingly accurate and realistic. 

The kingdom of God is a secret, Jesus says. It's like a hidden treasure. It's easily overlooked, like a mustard seed. And it fails to thrive in many hearts, among people who listen but do not hear, who see but do not perceive. But among those with good hearts, those who hear and understand the word, the kingdom grows abundantly. These hearts discover the hidden treasure, find the priceless pearl, and sell all they have to obtain it. 

Those who have ears, let them hear.