Field Notes From a Religion-Less Christian

January 10, 2022

Bled Out by the Psalms

For some time now I have thought that if I kept up the patterned discipline of reading the Psalms daily, 150 each month, that at some point they would break into my consciousness and rather than I remembering them, I using them, things would turn and they would remember me and they would use me. 

Today, with Psalm 51, I had a lot of that. That one is deep confession, of course. Nothing new there. But it was in the practice of making those words actually my words, not a recognition of the significance of confession as I read the words, but in actually confessing as I read the words, where the switch came on and the change happened. 

What I have been finding is that it’s very important to speak the words in the first person in real time – not observe them as being first person address, but actually try the words on and see how they fit. Too tight? Too loose? Just right? How do I look in the mirror? Is that me or somebody else? Do this with the readings that are first person and then too do the same with second person, with statements about God, evil, life, trust.

It’s a lot, this number of Psalms each day in order to complete 150 each month. Who has time for this? Well, really? Yesterday I spent 2 hours watching a movie. Who has time for that? We see, then, it’s not the time it takes, but the heart it takes. By that I mean the exposure of your actual and authentic self. It’s not the intuitive way to heal, this being cut open and bleeding that happens when you let the Psalms in. But just like the dynamic of salvation that is faith alone, where there is no life until a death occurs, there is no life in the psalms until you are bled out, until you are dead. You can’t stop mid-way in your exposure and get out the gauze and ointment and work to wrap the wound up to protect yourself from dying. But oh, who wants to do this kind of daily death? Who sets out daily to do that? Why would I intentionally give myself an hour in the day to do that?

I’m reminded of Jacob wrestling the stranger through the night and insisting on holding on until the stranger would bless him (where is that in Genesis?….I don’t have a Bible handy to look!).  To read the psalms you have to realize you are not appropriating spiritual wisdom that you can apply as a salve for your wounds or suggest to your friends over brunch or editorialize in the newspaper. Rather, you are in a wrestling match with God, and God will pin you down and you will be defeated. Well, more than that. You will die. If you cannot do that, if you cannot be utterly destroyed and be left with nothing but a waiting for somebody to come along and find you and give you a second chance, another life (call it hope in the resurrection), don’t waste your time with the Psalms. Watch that movie instead. I’m afraid that movie will not bless you, and only instead entertain you. Not that there isn’t something to be said for that (I’ll keep watching movies). But if you want to be blessed….torn open and killed and brought back to life with more vigor than you can imagine,  read the Psalms. Pray the Psalms. Use the Psalms. Or, rather, let them use you.

                                                                 A Recent Day in our Kitchen

Field Notes From a Religion-Less Christian

Thursday, January 20, 2022

How to Stop Using the Bible (and let it start using you)

“What is worse, speculation refers to something said elsewhere in another time and place to which one is ordered to submit” (Luther’s Outlaw God, Vol. 1:  Hiddenness, Evil and Predestination, Steven Paulson, 2018, p. 100)

When we read the quotes of others, their wisdom on life, we engage them as something we are to take and do something with, something we are to use to gain agency or position up against what is possible (possibility is the modality, not necessity). The things that are said are something for us to “understand,” stand under, as in submit to as authoritative for us to accept (or reject) and use (or not use) to move us forward in our quest for completion of the law (law = whatever demand(s) is held over us, whether self-imposed or otherwise). What’s important for us in life is to get things right. This assumes that there is such a thing as “the correct, “the right,” a law, the law, that should be if not more accurately said, must be, fulfilled, completed. 

We normally read and use Scripture in this fashion. It is a compilation of accounts and stories that we are to use in order to get things right. What matters to us is getting things right (again, this is what it means to live by and with the infrastructure of the law). 

All of this pertains to what Luther was explaining to Erasmus in the Bondage of the Will (1525). Erasmus insisted that Scripture was obscure and needed to be understood (and one could only go so far in that understanding until things “were above us” and not for us to know). Luther insisted that Scripture was as plain as day and simply needed to be heard. The difference was in the seeing how God lives, operates in relationship to creation. For Erasmus, God lives in the modality of possibility within space and time. There is this understanding of life with God, relation to God, that is expressed in the modalities, the ways of communicating/relating from life in relationship to time: possibility, contingency and necessity. Erasmus saw the true nature of the relationship to be possibility because God would not have given the law, the commands, without the expectation that they be enacted, obeyed, completed. Luther saw that true nature as “necessity,” but bridled under that philosophical term because what he was describing of God’s foreknowledge and determination was a “necessity” that did not act within a legal superstructure. It was a necessity that was outside of the Law altogether. Life was (is) not about getting it right, and finding ways to do that with some combination of strengths, agencies, from persons (what is our responsibility) and God (what is God’s responsibility). For Luther, necessity operated out of the Promise of God to and for us because that is who and what God is. God is unmerited mercy. God has laws to give (with a  2-fold purpose: civil order and pressing us toward the mercy) but God is not the Law. 

Thus, the stories of the Scripture are not to be used by us to figure out how to get life right. They are the story of God and how God’s mercy will not be denied. Not about how we are to work to get things right but about how God works to get things right: that “rightness” being where there is no meritorious relationship, there is no “righteousness” save for the righteousness of God (Luther in the Hiedelberg Disputation: “We are not loved because we are lovely. We are lovely because we are loved”). The gospel, good news, is not then about how God fixes us so we can now get things right (or has made us right by Godself in relation to the Law), but that there is no law that requires in the first place that we get things right. Christ, God enfleshed so as to make no mistake about it, is the end of the law. 

Christ fulfills the law (Jesus: “I have come not to abolish, but to fulfill the law”) by demolishing its use as a tool for relationship to God [when Jesus says he isn’t going to “abolish” what he means is that the law’s purpose of civil order and spiritual pressure bringing us to confession of our total reliance on God still stand, still are viable [the Lutheran tribe of Christianity’s Book of Concord’s (1580), and still the working confessional documents today) so-called “civil use” and “theological use]. What Jesus is doing in “fulfilling’ the law is demolishing its “third use, “ the way of using the law to make good with God. Of course, Jesus had no familiarity or use for the later developed theologies about the law that I am talking about here. He did not think (I’m pretty sure of it!) “hey, I’m going to demolish the third use of the law. Watch me.” No, it was simply that the legal standard of the Torah that he and his religious contemporaries knew so well was not about a standard for a standing with God. His arguments, for example, about how we are not to worry about life, look at how the flowers in the field and the birds of the air have no cares….why would you worry?, are all about seeing the relationship to God as a given, a gift. 

The Bible, the Scripture, then is not then a book for us to use to understand God, but rather is a book God uses to understand us. 

We don’t figure out obscurities in the narrative. The narrative is as plain as day. We may not be comfortable with it, but there it is (e.g. Exodus 4 where God is the assassin, Job, where God sets Satan loose on Job, 1 Samuel 2 where God kills, passim, and even this one: Romans 1 where homosexuality is called a sin. Now on that one, the homosexual one, there is a lot to say, but I’ll just say this: I think Paul’s words on that in Romans 1 are just wrong, in that they are culture bound and lack the knowledge of science. I am not a Biblicist, I am a Jesus follower and I think Paul got following Jesus wrong on the homosexuality question. That being said, the text itself is as plain as day. Paul says homosexuality is a sin. I’m not going to say he didn’t say that. I’m going to say he is wrong based on my take on the science of today and the unconditional hospitality of Jesus).

God who creates also redeems and also sustains, all.  And this God will not be denied, not even by our denial.

The Bible is a strange book for us not because it has ancient incantations that are culturally anachronistic  but because it speaks a language where God does all things in relationship to us and we do nothing in relationship to God. This language is just not natural for us. In fact, and here’s the sin of it all, in it all, we object to it because we no longer are the operative player. We are benched by God in the game of salvation.

But, miracle of miracles, even our objection is overruled because it cannot be otherwise. It is of necessity. Since God is God and God is Mercy, there simply will be nothing than complete and utter mercy, in all space and time. End of story. Beginning of life!

 (pictured here: five stories, looking down, the grand staircase at Orlando's Dr. Phillips Performing Arts Center, January 15, 2022, at the Center's Open House featuring the newly opened Steinmetz Hall)

Field Notes From a Religion-Less Christian

November 24, 2021

Assassination and Anfechtung

“Yet as with all of the stories of the hidden God outside the law, the text remains there as a gouty foot that laughs at our doctoring” (Luther’s Outlaw God, Vol. 1: Hiddenness, Evil and Predestination. Steven Paulson, 2018)

The text is Exodus 4:24: “On the way, at a place where they spent the night, the Lord met him and tried to kill him”

What if the whole definition, reality, thing about God is not morality at all. Not even social justice. What if the mission of God is the Promise of God delivered, not just the justice of humanity experienced. Then, “Katy, bar the door!” Look out! God will not be denied! In order to ensure that the Promise be delivered God will even become an Assassin. God will work to kill the Preacher in order to force the Preacher to deliver on the mission. It, God, forces the Preacher to rely on and know only the Promise, and nothing more, not even an easy or difficult path to delivering the Promise. Martin Luther called this full court press “Anfechtung.” Not simply an experience of human reason or feeling that questions whether God exists or delivers, but an action of God that presses the issue, moves us forward to the only thing that can and will save us: God Godself.

Field Notes from a Religion-Less Christian

January 1, 2022

How Does the Cross Work?

There is the understanding of the saving work of God actually working because of a compassion for us who have been disobedient. The Anselmian Atonement Theory embraces this. What is assumed here is that sin is a breaking of a covenant law.  Sin is a disobedience. Salvation, or rectifying, is a forgiveness that is and can only be instituted by sacrifice on our behalf. And so faith becomes the appreciation for this intervention on our behalf. And preaching becomes this grand admonishment to an ever deeper appreciation for the selfless act of God in and through Jesus on our behalf. 

How wonderful it is that God is so self-less for us!

Of course, this is a smoke-screen to hide the truth, which is, again, of course, that we killed Jesus and would do it again in a heartbeat. 

When we make God the Lawgiver, or the Law itself, we have a metaphysical infrastructure that supports our position as Agent on our own destiny. If and when we repair the breach, even employing God to do the dirty work for us, all is well. God works for us. We are the Owner, the Employer and God works for us. 

If, though, we own nothing, God is set loose. God is rogue. God is the Outlaw. 

This state of affairs, this nakedness and empty-handedness, is simply too painful for us to tolerate. We must respond, lash out, with creating theologies that support our philosophy of self-development and self-enlightenment. 

The biblical narrative is all too easily hijacked to support a theology about the cross which keeps us alive within the law’s superstructure wherein we have a say in the matter of our destiny. If we cannot repair the damage ourselves we can at least participate and change things, make things whole, by believing somebody else has fixed it. 

Contrast this to a theology where the cross alone is our theology (Crux sola est nostra theologia, a phrase Martin Luther employed). When this happens we don’t have God-thinking (theology) about the cross, we only have the starkness and darkness that is the cross itself. The killing of God is our doing and all we are capable of doing and all we actually want to do. We kill God because God does not do our bidding of redeeming the righteous and condemning the wicked. God does not play by our rules and only, instead, gives mercy to the deserving and undeserving alike. 

What dies on the cross is the law, this "metaphysical superstructure." God as the law dies. God dies.  Christ is the end of the law (Romans 10:4). Yes, Jesus dies, but he is the one of mercy who only gives mercy and this one, this mercy one, dies, which means to say retributive justice which would have lashed out and taken no prisoners, that one dies.  Mercy prevails. It is all that is left. The last word is the word of forgiveness. Everything else is literally dead. Mercy does not win because it is better (“oh, how lovely is God’s love!” we like to say because such admiration displays our enlightenment: “we get it! Before we did not see it. Now we do!”) Mercy wins because it is the only thing left standing. 

The cross shuts us up, destroys all recriminations and retributions. Mercy does not win as if there ever was a competition. It rather envelopes and encompasses and embraces all that ever existed and exists. 

And so, I don’t find myself enamored with an appreciation attitude toward God, a spirituality of gratitude. Rather, I am laid bare and find in that darkness only the light of God. In my world’s construction of retribution and payback and earning a place, I find only mercy. And that is simply too good not to be true. I don’t applaud this mercy, as if I am some spectator admiring benevolence. I am more like a sputtering breathless one laying prone on the ground at the water’s edge after drinking desperately, gulping gaspingly the fresh water provided me at the oasis in my desert.