Category: Holy Spirit

Discerning God’s presence

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Jesus said, “You have now seen him; in fact, he is the one speaking with you.”  – John 9:37

This blog is about discerning God’s presence. He is here in everyday life, revealing himself to people. Even those who might not recognize it. God is making all things new, and everything in our daily routine – even its mundanity and sameness – is divinely preparatory to experiencing the truly real.  

I’m intent on knowing Jesus Christ as the destination of my inner longing. It began with a crisis of confidence in the terse doctrinal system drilled into my adolescent brain; namely that the world mostly contains people for whom there is no redemptive possibility. It preached that the only true belief was that an unalterable divine decree precluded the majority of humanity to have any opportunity whatsoever of living eternally with Him. Since Adam and Eve, men and women remain accursed and utterly without God, because pervasive sin makes people so filthy that they are repulsive to God.  We humans, have been stripped of our divine likeness. Irrespective of Christ’s mission to “preach deliverance to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind”, some, so they said, are unsaveable.  Hence, there is no point in bothering to share God’s reconciling love in Jesus Christ with the already-damned. God, according to the founding father of this particular movement, “determined with himself whatever he wished to happen with regard to every man. All are not created on equal terms”.  

Nothing could be more cruelly bereft of God’s mercy and love. Like many Christians, we sought good grades on the Great Commission. But we flunked the commandment to love people in a way that makes them feel loved. It is reminiscent of the Pharisee who prayer-boasted: “God, thank you that I am not like other people”.  Recalling those days, if they were not numbered among “the Remnant” (just us select few), they were unworthy of compassion, God’s or ours.  That is historical Christianity gone wrong. Such dehumanization isn’t the Jesus who ignored artificial religious boundaries that forbade contact with lepers and detested non-Jews. And he healed the untouchables, like a Roman centurion’s servant, or a Gentile woman’s daughter. Still more serious, he “unlawfully” healed on the strictly-observed Sabbath day of rest. Even the dogs were to be fed from leftovers from his table. A God bereft of compassion is not worthy of my worship. He formed man from the dust of the ground, not from a pile of shit.

The late Rachel Held Evans mused, “I would hate to think that God creates disposable people”.  She believed in God’s promise to love each and every human being that has ever or will ever live, instead of what’s termed “limited atonement”. As Ms. Evans called it, unbelieving people who have real lives and real names were seen merely as “pond scum” in God’s eyes.  God only loves the precious few who win the Divine Lottery. Others – before they ever commit a single sin – are not afforded even a chance to be saved and are divinely auto-deleted. As one Calvinist professor explained, “Everything God does to or for the reprobate in this life is deliberately designed to prepare him or her for eternal damnation”.  It reminds me of a quote, perversely twisting the message of Jesus. It was uttered by a distinguished dean of theology about those who are not Christians just like him:

The other peoples of the world – Muslims, Buddhists, and those of other faiths, as well as those Christians not born again – do not concern Him.

And yet those people – over your backyard fence and all over the world – are searching for love. They’re rooting around for ultimate meaning. They are literally dying to see God as friend and lover. You know many like that, feeling devoid of any divine experience.

There are those who have learned to sing “hymns to an unknown God”; seekers who may never feel the spiritual need to get up on Sunday and attend a church. Some are church exiters, saying “I’M DONE” with oxygen-starved theology – especially with polarizing politics commingled with the Gospel. Others are nursing wounds after having been pushed under a busload of sanctimony. These may have given up not only on the institutional church, but also are resentful towards God, and will never again bow the knee. And that doesn’t even begin to cover the self-directed spiritual seekers, who have never knocked on a church door as the only hope for a lost world. God loves them, as well.

At the end of the day, Jesus did not come to construct systems competing for First Prize in the most correct theology. God will always know more than we do. Neither did he come not to organize a mega business/church that offers the best life – but only on our terms. Religion tends towards becoming sediments layered to reach God instead of a divinely-initiated encounter, exposing our hearts and souls to the mystery of being touched by him. Action-oriented “doings” primarily about what we do for Jesus, not about what He has done for us. This is Christless Christianity, as Michael Horton explains in his book of the same name, “our practices reveal that we are focused on ourselves and our activity more than on God and his saving work among us”. 

Good. I got that all out of my system. This blog, on the other hand, reflects my desire that all mankind let go of self and be enveloped by Christ’s grace, discovering the means by which we meet God.  I mean to say God really doesn’t hate you like others say. I’m grateful to have escaped the black hole of a retributive God to find a fresh vision of divine love. I invite all God-curious men and women into the true universe filled with the freely giving of the divine Self, which we call grace. Not only does God act in love, he awaits our love in return. Our proper response is the mystical experience known as faith, a heavenly wisdom superimposed over empirical knowledge, and extending well beyond. “Leave your country, your family, and your father’s house, for the new land that I will show you”, God told Abram and Sarah, saying “I will surely bless you”.  We all find ourselves needy and find it difficult to be truly at home with ourselves and at peace in the universe. God invites us to go beyond our own comfort zone and undertake a life pilgrimage to something infinitely better. God will move you quietly forward in grace as the time is right. It’s okay if you’re not yet ready to take that step in your emerging journey towards faith. Jesus said he didn’t come for the healthy, but for those who need a doctor.  The Physician is ready to see you now, but He also has a capacious Waiting Room.

The Old has Become New

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– 2 Corinthians 5:17

I began this blog 6 years ago, with the byline, “Welcome to a new evangelical blog”.

Well, things change, and so do people—and how they view reality. Truth stays the same; our viewpoints change. To keep it brief, this is no longer an evangelical blog. I have moved away from evangelicalism but not from Jesus. It feels more accurate to say evangelicalism has moved away from Jesus. This isn’t about being against evangelicalism; I’m just done and have moved on.

If you’re interested in exploring the remains of evangelical Christianity, I recommend Diana Butler Bass’ great book, Christianity After Religion.[1] She explains how things fell apart but also shows that Christianity has faced worse challenges in its 2,000-year history and is still here, thanks to the Holy Spirit.

“Sir, we would see Jesus” (John 12:21). That’s the guiding principle for this new direction. Many people believe in some kind of god and want to connect with the divine. But God is a spirit, and it takes a spiritual focus to see Him. Psalm 10 speaks about God being hidden: “Why do you hide yourself in times of trouble?” (v. 1) The Psalmist answers: “In his pride the wicked man does not seek him; in all his thoughts there is no room for God” (v.4). It’s our issue, not His.

God is present. He is not hiding; He is welcoming. While we might not make space for God, His Kingdom has room for everyone who has ever lived. There’s a lot to explore here, and it’s all very exciting. We’ll be developing these ideas moving forward, and I hope you’ll join me on this journey to God!

TGBTG

Stuart Thompson,

Twelfth Week After Pentecost

[1] Diana Butler Bass. Christianity After Religion: The End of Church and the Birth of a New Spiritual Awakening. (New York: HarperOne, 2012)

Return of the Christian Super Hawks

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Another war, another letter from Christian war hawk Richard Land. You may recall his 2002 open letter to President Bush stating his “Bible-believing”  scholarly imprimatur – grounded in scriptural authority. Sanctioning unilateral war against Iraq “fell well within the time-honored criteria of just-war theory.” The letter, co-signed by a bevy of right-wing, neo-fundamentalist leaders, granted the Bush government a theological dispensation to inflict divine punishment. “The question is not if God is on our side, but if we are on God’s side,” Richard Land was quoted as saying about the Iraq invasion. “Then, with a wink of the eye, Land added, ‘But I think God is on our side in this one.’”[i] Gott Mit Uns!

But as firstly envisioned within Catholic public theology, Just War was the last resort. Not a shallow checklist before launch; not a divine set of minimums to bless waging it. Evangelical misuse of  Just War theory conceals its double-speak behind lofty philosophical presuppositions.  Influential pastor Jack Hibbs speaks for many evangelicals when he declares it is unchristian to demand that Israel’s response to the attacks from Hamas be “proportional.”  To our shame, we really don’t mean what we say.

Any war becomes entangled in a moral morass once the tit-for-tat shooting starts. By then, its too late to play by Marquess of Queensberry rules. Especially concerning the inevitably targeted civilians and noncombatant casualties.  Even from those whose motives are spiritually clean, where going to war could not possibly have been anything else but pure. As any military commander can tell you, even the best of plans go out the window when combat begins. Truth, as we are often reminded, is the first casualty. Some 500 people died in the October 17th aerial attack that hit al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza City. Each side blames the other. Whether by mistake (like the Mukaradeeb wedding massacre), or deliberately (like My Lai) innocent people are just as dead, whether Just War – or just a war. 

Theologian Walter Wink had this to say: “ Declaring a war ‘just’ is simply a ruse to rid ourselves of guilt… If we have killed, it is a sin, and only God can forgive us, not a propaganda apparatus that declares our dirty wars “just.” In fomenting war and political objectives, Christians have lost our orientation by doing the will of the demonic enemy within ourselves.”  As Walt Kelly’s Pogo says, “We have met the enemy, and he is us”.  

But we are seeking answers to the wrong question. We need to ask how to achieve the shalom of Just Peace, rather than tidying up messes caused by all our presumptive “just” wars. Even King David was barred by God from building the Temple because he “shed so much blood on the earth before Me”. (1 Chronicles 22:8). Despite doing what he thought was the Lord’s will, he was far from sinless in the process. We, proud and rebellious people that we are, often find ourselves in the same need for confession and forgiveness.

Sin. None of us are immune from its deceitful and predictable end in death. Not individuals, not nations – Jesus said there would be wars and rumors of war. But he also blessed the peacemakers. They will be called children of God. (Matthew 5:9). And yet, the naysayers dismiss Just Peace as “simply inappropriate to the realm of political life…  At the risk of oversimplification, their argument is that the condition of perfect peace and justice denoted by the term shalom can be brought about today and through human action”.  

Bible nay-sayers are war-mongers who search for scriptural “nails” on which to hang a war, contradicting what the Bible intends. Christians are those who promote God’s peace.. To become peacemakers, we must begin with ourselves. We are commissioned to teach the nations “to obey everything I have commanded you”. We are to pray “Thy will be done”, not ours. We are commissioned to inject the empires of politics with the new order of shalom inaugurated by the One of Peace.  The power of the Holy Spirit (Acts 1:8) enables us to live out Jesus’ teachings on love and compassion, and achieve what otherwise seems humanly impossible.  

What can poor little me do???? Many individual small ways add up as we live out His mission of love .During my weekly grocery shop this week, my clerk was a displaced Ukrainian.  The woman behind me in line wore a hijab. I made it a point to say I was praying heart-broken prayers for each. Peace, said Mother Theresa, begins with a smile..That’s a start. Shalom begins with you and I:

Let there be peace on earth

And let it begin with me

Let There Be Peace on Earth

The peace that was meant to be

… With God as our Father

Brothers all are we

Let me walk with my brother

In perfect harmony.

… Let peace begin with me

Let this be the moment now.

The (Not-So) Inerrant Bible

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The antediluvian world intrigues me. For what the Bible says about it, but more for what it omits. The Bible is the word of God. I get that. Meanwhile, the universe God created is given short shrift in the beginnings of Genesis. We read where He created the heavens and the earth. He had a lot of creating to do, of which much is left unsaid.  Frankly, I’d like to know what was going on in the 400 billion Milky Way stars, with 1-to-10 trillion orbiting planets. Not to mention the 2 trillion galaxies within our observable Universe. We are only beginning to understand things out there. Planet earth is but a grain of sand on endless miles of beach. Taking the Bible purely as an astronomy text makes for a very frustrating read. Apart from but a few brush strokes on a broad canvas, the Bible is silent. Let’s just say, there’s little help for cosmologists there.

Literalists don’t look at that as a weak point. Theirs is the conversation-ending “God said it. I believe it. That settles it.” The fact that there’s a lot that God didn’t say doesn’t deter literalists from presuming to know he meant. In The Lost World of Scripture, John Walton and Brent Sandy observe there’s a considerable “lostness” in how the Bible came into being. This is the literalist’s dilemma throughout the pre-flood account of Genesis. Christianity is great at reading between the lines; the most malleable religion of all. The materiality of the Biblical ante-diluvian world is as ineffable as Heaven, given that an epoch terminated by a cataclysmic worldwide flood defies outside scrutiny. Even God to have delivered all of that pre-history into Moses’ hands is not specifically stated in the Bible. Nor is it a sure thing that Moses even wrote the Pentateuch – which somehow doesn’t explain how he could write the account of his own death.

“What is man, that thou art mindful of him? And the son of man, that thou visitest him?, asks the Psalmist. The Bible soon segues into what was revealed to human beings, using anthropomorphic language. God walked in the garden of Eden. (Gen. 3). “There’s no definitive proof, but the passage’s implication seems clear to me”, writes evangelical defender Randy Alcorn. Implication, surmise, presupposition, conjecture. Literalists twist themselves into logical pretzels reading into the Bible what isn’t there, or simply talk godly twaddle like Sunday School teachers to their 3rd grades. “Evangelicalism is not fundamentally an intellectual organism”, Peter Enns writes, “but an apologetic one”. This explains why evangelicals cannot be silent even where the Bible is silent.

Indeed, evangelicalism has been afraid of intellectual honesty since the Scopes trial, which exposed the empty-headed, predetermined conclusions of their doctrinal beliefs. Like Ken Ham, where his concrete boat, The Good Ship Eisegesis, teaches there were dinosaurs on Noah’s Ark. There is much to unlearn at his Kentucky religious theme park, where a little embellishment of the Biblical text might be necessary here and there to properly defend it. Temptation lurks in an apologetic that goes beyond the sacred page, seeking to control the text rather than submitting to it. God’s history is wild thing, which we profanize by domesticating it.

It’s easy to have these apologists drag you down into their “never contradicts itself” weeds, but the broad contours of literalism have been pretty well covered by Scopes. Suffice to it to say, that since then plenary inspiration has been a fundamentalist axe to grind against “liberal” Christians who see the Bible trustworthy so far as it is necessary for our salvation, and that it is to be received through the Holy Spirit as the true rule and guide for faith and practice. Funny that two pillars of fundamentalism – Machen and Warfield – rejected literalism in favor of “theistic evolution.” It wasn’t until the first Cultural War first salvos fired by Harold Lindsell, and later sanctified (or embalmed) by the Chicago Statement, that it became a doctrinal hill to die on.

Gallup published a poll this week showing a declining proportion of the overall American population — now 20% — believes the Bible is literally true, word for word. (This is down from 49% in 2011). Half of evangelicals polled did not believe every word should be taken literally. Most evangelicals look to the Bible for answers – not questions. If evangelicals were the least bit self-aware, they might appreciate that NO ONE wants to adopt an anti-intellectual, anti-science and anti-educational faith that is so absurdly and proudly detached from reality. Personally, I can’t accept a faith – much less a supernatural faith – where I have to check my brain at the church door. And I find it distressing that, despite overweening confidence in knowing what the Bible clearly teaches, fewer and fewer evangelicals are able to articulate the essentials of faith in even an elementary way.

I recite the Nicene Creed each Sunday, believing God “spoke through the prophets.” I believe in the nearness of a personal God, under whose providence we have the Bible as the written history of salvation under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. And that the Scriptures are sufficient in fulfilling their purpose and function. Just as God had intervened in time and space, He was making himself known by history in story and story in history – a narrative unity inextricably linked to form what might be called true myth. That is to say, the Bible is to be read more as the history of revelation, than the revelation of history. It is sacred history, which Walter Bruggemann observes “stands some distance from what modern people might call history”. In that regard, “history” in the Old Testament is backgrounded to the metanarrative of love relationship between living God and broken creation. The subject matter of the Bible is God as He deals with His creation. Its attention is on Divine doing; the history of the hidden God gradually lifting the curtain on himself for the redemption of a fallen world.

The Bible is the word of God. Once again, I get that. I completely believe in it; except in the ways I don’t.

Pissing Into The Wind

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Train up a child in the way he should go:
Advert featuring Proverbs 22, used by the Uvalde massacre gun manufacturer

“The time to stop the next shooting is right now”. This past week, I’ve noticed a prophet in the biblical tradition speaking out against American gun idolatry. Beto O’Rourke confronted Texas Gov. Greg Abbott at his press conference after Uvalde. . “Somebody needs to stand up for the children of this state or they will continue to be killed,” he said. Amidst jeering and shouts for O’Rourke to shut up, Dan Patrick – Texas Lt. Governor, Southern Baptist, outspoken Christian, and politician with an  “A+” rating from the NRA–  stood up to tell O’Rourke, “You’re out of line and an embarrassment.”  Super-Christian and gun-lover Ted Cruz shamed Beto’s behavior as crass, embarrassing; “it was disgusting”, accusing him of a political stunt. O’Rourke was not dissuaded: “Somebody needs to stand up for the children of this state or they will continue to be killed just like they were killed in Uvalde yesterday.”

It is the prophet’s duty to proclaim a message from God. It doesn’t always involve fore-telling; but forth-telling. The present is the kairotic moment of the prophet’s message. It is this day, and also for this today, that we are to listen, not to hang on predictions concerning tomorrow. There is an immediacy; an urgency in the prophetic word to respond by retracing our steps towards the Jesus waiting for us in the Gospels. Today, we need more people who speak honestly about our own blind spots – prophets to tweak the conscience of evangelicals and recapture the prophetic mission of the church. “The task of the prophetic imagination,” writes Walter Brueggemann, “is to cut through the royal numbness, to penetrate the self-deception so that the God of endings is confessed as Lord.” [i] That’s exactly the prophet’s calling! It’s not a choice; it’s a divine obligation.

“Then they put their hands over their ears and began shouting.” Unlike St. Stephen in Acts 7, Beto wasn’t stoned, but he was escorted out with the mayor screaming he was “a sick son of a bitch”. Likewise, a quick review of biblical prophets discloses that their prophetic utterances did little more than piss off those mired in persistent disobedience. “Was there ever a prophet your ancestors did not persecute? They even killed those who predicted the coming of the Righteous One. And now you have betrayed and murdered him—you who have received the law that was given through angels but have not obeyed it.” (Acts 7:52-3)  Jesus suffered and died on the cross, having exposed the moral hypocrisy of the religious elite – the Pharisees – who appeared on the outside “to people as righteous but on the inside are full of hypocrisy and wickedness.” (Matt. 23-28).

A quick glimpse through Google for “white evangelical prophets” returns the glaringly obvious. Most of this soothsaying issues forth from the religious flotsam sitting at Donald Trump’s feet. False witnesses aside, I’ve known a few prophetic voices among evangelicals – most of which were scorned, vilified or cast out of the camp. Jim Wallis. Beth Moore. Shane Claiborne. Tony Campolo. And many others who spoke against guns through the centripetal urgings of the Holy Spirit. Divine Truth was entrusted to human truth-bearers. Like the late Sen. Mark Hatfield, who used his National Prayer Breakfast speech to condemn President Nixon for prolonging the Vietnam War. (And managing to piss off Nixon’s golf buddy, Billy Graham in the process). These modern day evangelical prophets gave voice because God spoke first. The words they spoke were of Someone Else. Confrontation was not something they set out to do, but something they had to do.

I place Beto O’Rourke squarely in that prophetic tradition. Beto spoke truth to power; to those who would rather cradle their AR-15 babies than elementary school children. “Stay cool. Run out the clock.. But don’t worry: this moment will be over soon”, was the advice Republican advisors were giving the wake of Uvalde mass shooting. Now here’s a fresh thought: let’s reduce mass shootings by getting more guns! In other words, do nothing in the shadow of death; then do more of the same. Like the Pharisees, evangelical moral perfectionists persist in their sanctimonious refusal to listen – or act in the slightest against gun idolatry. They are too busy Making America Great Again to bother about making childhood childhood again. And the waiting list of children to be blood-sacrificed on the evangelical altar to Moloch grows each day. Nothing stands in the way of AR-15 bullets– except those moved of the Spirit to speak truth to power. Pray that God raises up more prophets to expose the moral depravity of the religious elite! Bold prophets – who aren’t afraid to “spit” into the wind and proclaim “the time to stop the next shooting is right now”!.

[i] Walter Brueggemann, The Prophetic Imagination, Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2001, p. 45.

Evangelicals and the Holy Weirdo

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Show me your ways, Lord, teach me your paths.  Guide me in your truth and teach me, for you are God my Savior, and my hope is in you all day long. Psalm 25.

I heard a comedian once refer to the Holy Spirit as a “weirdo”. At least in practice, many evangelicals might agree with him.

As a version 1.0 evangelical growing in faith in the 1970’s, my life was immersed in that generation of cessasionists. That is, all supernatural gifts ceased with the Apostles, the theology being that once the Scriptures were committed to velum, God saw no need for extra-Biblical prophecy, healing, ecstatic utterance and the like to continue. The indwelling of the Spirit was not, it was taught, an event subsequent to, but part of the conversion experience.

As a junior camp counselor during Christian Service Brigade, I befriended two of my team members who I saw as “on fire” for God. One evening after our communal campfire, they went off by themselves to pray. They later came back from the forest, reporting they saw the vision of a bright light which they interpreted as the working of the Holy Spirit. Their bunks were cleared the next morning.

One of my uncles married a woman who became deeply immersed in her pentecostal church. He reluctantly got involved as well. And so I asked him how he was getting along, speaking in tongues. His enigmatic reply was, “it helps if I have a few beers in me.” And I remember being invited by friends to their charismatic church. As if on cue, members of the congregation began a conga-line around the perimeter of the sanctuary.. It seemed less spontaneous than contrived performance. So un-Presbyterian. Those personal glimpses permeate my evangelicalism, reinforcing the impression that full outpouring, the experiential reality – means, like some weird uncle – the indwelling of the Holy Spirit à la Benny Hinn is normative.

It’s not. Neither are the so-called evangelical luminaries that go on about their MAGA direct line with God, yet have no connection through the Holy Server. Declarations about what they demand God make happen in America seems to me more like they are trying to lead the Holy Spirit, instead of the other way around. I’m sure many of these self-identified “evangelicals” never personally experienced Jesus in the first place.

It’s this background of negative experiences that had convicted me that the Holy Spirit – the Paraclete – is more a ghostly helper alongside, than the divine spirit that dwells inside the Believer. Nice to have, but not clue in how It works. After all, we have the Bible – the fourth member of the Trinity to guide us. Jesus already spoke to us through that book; what more do we need?. Frankly speaking, we evangelicals – imbued with the scholastic tradition as we are – trust in the Lord with all our hearts but and lean on our own understanding; We often act as if we disbelieve in the Spirit of Jesus.  Or, he is like a topical ointment we apply instead of the heart surgeon we need him to be.

Scripture tells us the Holy Spirit isn’t a side-kick or add-on, he permeates the very soul of every believer. The Spirit divides soul and spirit, both joints and marrow, and discerns the thoughts and intents of the heart. I know the Holy Spirit resides within me. I never intend to quash him, but many times I know I have. And I feel deep inside there is something missing in my innermost evangelical spirituality. I recoil from the words of James Packer, when he says “supernatural living through supernatural empowering is at the very heart of New Testament Christianity, so that those who, while professing faith, do not experience and show forth this empowering are suspect by New Testament standards.” Those are fearful words, especially for those like me prone to lead with a leash so the Holy Spirit doesn’t go out of bounds, and get beyond our control. I agree with one of my spiritual mentors, Roger Olson. “Yes, most Christians are afraid of the Holy Spirit whether they would admit it or not… People tend to be afraid of what might happen if they open the door to the Holy Spirit. They read the story of the coming of the Holy Spirit upon and in the disciples on the Day of Pentecost and think ‘Well, that was a one-time event and we certainly don’t want that happening in our church!'”

We evangelicals substitute reading verses wrenched out of context for the benefit of our neat little systems to give us the strength we lack through lack of reliance on the Spirit. (Solus Spiritus Sanctus was never laid down as a pillar of Reformation faith). We lean solely on the Scriptures to teach us how to truly trust God.. Deep down, many of us don’t trust the Spirit’s vocation to do that. Fear causes us to recoil from a Christian life filled with joy and power, manifesting the fruit and gifts of the Spirit. Dwight Moody had the courage to say “the world has yet to see what God will do with a man fully consecrated to him”. Could it be that we are afraid that the Holy Spirit would lead us into the sorts of places we’d rather not go? Letting loose of control is scary. Maybe the Spirit is not the weirdo; we neurotic, apprehensive Christians are.

What do you think?