Archives For Theology, Reluctantly

Whole Faith Makes Creation Care Natural

Nathan Aaberg —  November 30, 2016 — Leave a comment

Many of my posts over the last two years have been asserting that God’s Creation is an essential element in the ethical and theological considerations of a whole Christian faith.

I am now convinced that a primary reason that mainstream Christianity doesn’t naturally integrate thoughtful, perpetual concern for Creation into what a Christan life means is that the typical presentation of what Christianity is about is in itself incomplete. And it is this incompleteness that is behind so much of the blindness of professing Christians to not only the natural world but also to injustice and evil.

What you hear at most Christiain churches — that Christ’s death is an atoning sacrifice for our sins — is indeed a core element of the faith. To modern ears, it sounds odd and perhaps even clunkily superstitious. But I believe there is deep truth in it.

Yet there is more.

You see, you encounter much more when you read the 66 books of the Bible with an open mind. And you encounter much more when you spend time with devoted Christians and when you encounter God through prayer or spiritual experience.

But when Christians extract sacrificial atonement as the sole good news from the Bible, so much is  lost.

What you get is epitomized by the sign I saw while driving home today from Missouri. It read, “When you die, are you going to heaven or hell?”

Christianity in this boiled-down version becomes a question of one’s status before the courts of God in regards to one’s eternal destination after one has lived life on this earth. It becomes solely a matter of one’s spiritual-legal standing. It ignores the actions and words and meaning of Jesus’ life before he was crucified and after his resurrection.

In Renovation of the Heart, a book I’m now reading for the second time, Dallas Willards writes of the larger meaning of the Bible, “This present life is to be caught up now in the eternal life of God”

In other words, we can live, truly live, by allowing God to reshape our hearts and minds and souls by accepting Jesus. Salvation is about having the life God offers us and having it now.

This is the abundant life Jesus offered.

Here are more words from Dallas Willard, also from Renovation of the Heart, that resonate with me:

“Our soul is like an inner stream of water, which gives strength, direction, and harmony to every other element of our life. When that soul is as it should be, we are constantly refreshed and exuberant in all we do, because our soul itself is then profusely rooted in the vastness of God and his kingdom, including nature; and all within us is enlivened and directed by that stream. Therefore we are in harmony with God, reality, and the rest of human nature and nature at large.”

Church life should consciously be about promoting that profuse rooting of our souls in God. How different Christians’ relationship with Creation would be if that was the norm. That is the kind of church I’d like to be part of. That is the kind of church I’d like to help build.

 

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In the Kingdom Flow

Nathan Aaberg —  July 31, 2016 — Leave a comment

It’s a simple but counterintuitive finding.

As Cal Newport tells it in Deep Work, when University of Chicago colleagues Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Reed Larson invented a psychological testing technique called the experience sampling method, they were eager to find out what kinds of activities truly gave people joy and fulfillment.

The experience sampling method involved giving test subjects a pager and then randomly paging the subjects during a day. When they were paged, the subjects were to immediately record what they were doing and what their feelings were. This method, as opposed to relying on test subjects to keep a diary on their own throughout a day, was found to be far more effective in prompting people to accurately document the connection between different kinds of activities and their state of mind.

Here is what Csikzentmihalyi wrote of their fundamental finding:

“The best moments usually occur when a person’s mind or body is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.”

This prompted him to write the book Flow about that particular state of being. Flow I

Our instincts, of course, are to seek happiness and contentment in relaxation, fun, and doing as little as possible. There is, of course, nothing wrong with relaxing. We need downtime. Even the occasional binge watching of a TV series. Yet, being fully engaged in something – physical training, carrying out a challenging work project, figuring out a complex jigsaw puzzle – that pushes us and stretches us is actually an essential ingredient of a full life.

This, interestingly enough, is what the whole Christian life offers.

When, with God’s help, we commit ourselves to living out God’s love and purposes in all phases of our lives and the life of the world, we are immersed in something both challenging and worthwhile. This will translate into new consciousness of our choices and our habits every day of our life. It may mean taking on projects and challenges at a larger scale. These projects or challenges may well be way beyond what we believe we can handle with the skills and experience we’ve developed on our own.

This is what I believe the Jesus was talking about when he talked about the kingdom of God and the kingdom of heaven. He modeled it for us. Committing ourselves to it, paradoxically, can give us our best moments in life. Not necessarily easy. Or relaxing. But it can make us fully alive to who we should be.

This is what I would call the “kingdom flow.”

A great example is Bob Muzikowski. As he describes it, he was saved and made sober on the same day. When he subsequently moved to Chicago from New York to get away from reminders of his former drinking life, he started a little league on the city’s troubled Near West Side that attracted, to his amazement, 300 youth the very first time he put out notices about it.

His dive into a larger purpose did not end there. His professional life continued in the financial world until he began to talk deeply with Bob Buford and then joined the Halftime Institute when Buford launched it. In this process, Muzikowski found that he continued to be drawn to the needs of the communities he had experienced through the Near West Little League he had helped establish. So he gave up his comfortable financial career to convert an abandoned Catholic elementary school on the Near West side into the Chicago Hope Academy, a college and life preparatory high school with a strong Christian faith element. Muzikowski purposefully developed it to be more affordable for poor and minority youth than typical private high schools. He also recruits the best teachers he can find from around the country.

This has not been easy work.

“If I hadn’t had a Halftime journey, my life would have been easier and less stressful today,” Muzikowski says, “but it would definitely be a lot more shallow.”

Not everyone may feel the calling to do something that meaningful on that scale. But in every life I am convinced there are needs and purposes that God is offering us to be engaged with and choices to make every day. Responding will move us beyond our own interests and needs while tapping the talents and skills we have and even those we don’t know we have.

When we move from faith in God and what God offers to us through Jesus to a deep commitment to living with God’s purposes firmly in mind every moment, we go from getting to the starting line to actually running the race of which the Apostle Paul speaks in 1 Corinthians 9:23-25.

This is an essential point of what I mean by the phrase “whole faith.” When Jesus said he was the way, the truth, and the life, he was not pointing only to life after death. He was, as I understand it, pointing to a true life that begins when we synch our lives with God’s purposes. That true life begins in the here and now, and that God-filled life will never end. After death, it will be even more glorious and complete. This is the new and abundant life that Jesus promised. Being in this kingdom flow give us the sense of flow and challenging, immersive purpose that Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi described.

Our churches should help us understand this and develp the kingdom flow in our lives.

I know I need that help at times. The brokeness of the world, incuding the dysfunction of how we treat God’s earth, is at times overwhelming. When I don’t hear churches calling us to bring God’s kingdom into this world to the best degree possible, I am dismayed. I even find myself questioning my faith.

But when I come across Christians like Bob Muzikowski, my spirits rebounds, and my faith grows. I am encouraged, too, that there are growing numbers of Christians in the kingdom flow who are working in their own ways to change how we treat God’s earth in the process of growing food from it. Like Bob Muzikowski, they have taken on missions that are challenging and require of them tremendous sacrifice. Gabe Brown, Joel Salatin, and Ray Archuleta are just some of them.

The testimonies of their lives and the impacts of their lives say a great deal about what the whole Gospel offers to you and the world and about its truth beyond its words.

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As Water Reflects the Face

Nathan Aaberg —  July 9, 2016 — Leave a comment

Have you found yourself coming to walk in the same paths as your parents without consciously choosing to do so?

My father has long treasured the book of Proverbs and has quoted his favorite verses as long as I can remember. As I recently made my way through Proverbs as part of my morning meditation and prayer routine, I found rich wisdom in it. It’s becoming one of my favorite books of the Bible.

The twenty-seventh chapter’s nineteenth verse has begun to put down particularly deep roots in me:

“As water reflects the face, so one’s life reflects the heart.”

What kind of heart are our lives reflecting?

The Bible refers to the heart a great deal. The word “heart” is referred to in the Bible, depending on the translation, easily over 500 times, according to Christian Bible Reference.

There are also many definitions of the heart as it is used in the Bible. I would suggest that it is a combination of one’s character, will, and emotions. It is the center of who we are.

Read the Bible carefully and you’ll see that the nature of people’s hearts is at the center of many stories.

When David reacts in anger to Nathan’s story of the rich man who has stolen and then cooked a poor family’s beloved lamb, it is David’s heart that is on display. When the story leads David to then confess his own sin of adultery with Bathsheba, it is David’s heart that has been moved. And the fact that his heart would respond to the crushing realization of what he had done in the context of God’s moral framework is one of the reasons we sympathize with David. Our hearts resonate with his heart.

As you read the Gospels, I believe you’ll find that Jesus is sympathetic or antagonistic to people depending on the orientation of their hearts.

People who are humble and who recognize their own failings or whose hearts are full of adoration for God receive his kind attention.  On the other hand, Jesus jolted people who had allowed their hearts to become cold and selfish. People who had become bound up in preserving institutional power or in pursuing purity without being balanced by mercy find themselves exposed to Jesus’ anger and criticism.

Jesus models for us the hearts we should have – full of love but also tenacious and passionately committed to God’s will and kingdom and intentions for this world.

In his book Renovation of the Heart: Putting on the Character of Christ, Dallas Willard wrote a profound statement about Jesus:

“The revolution of Jesus is in the first place and continuously a revolution of the human heart or spirit. It did not and does not proceed by means of the formation of social institutions and laws, the outer forms of our existence, intending that these would then impose a good order of life upon people who come under their power. Rather, his is a revolution of character, which proceeds by changing people from the inside through ongoing personal relationship to God in Christ and to one another. It is one that changes their ideas, beliefs, feelings, and habits of choice, as well as their bodily tendencies and social relations. It penetrates to the deepest layers of their soul.”

Much of my life I have heard little of this from churches I have attended as there is a focuse on holding true to correct doctrines on grace, sin, the Trinity, and other topics. But there is little or no attention given to encouraging members to honestly and carefully examine the state of their hearts and to helping them deliberately open their hearts to transformation by God.

I am 100% convinced that a whole Christian faith must also be rooted in what Dallas Willard calls the revolution of the heart. A whole faith church would be intentional about this in its worship, instruction, and culture.

If Jesus is renovating, remaking, and revolutionizing our hearts, then our lives could not help but reflect that. And not just the lives we live in public, but all the spheres of our lives. At home. With our families. With our friends. On business trips. In our politics. On the Internet.

And, without doubt, in our relationship with the life of God’s earth.

How could it be otherwise?

How can one be loving, compassionate, patient, and possessing of self-control and yet deliberately and unnecessarily maim the land, water, and living things around us? How can one be fiercely, self-sacrificingly loyal to God’s desire for how all of life should be in this world and go along with systems and culture that methodically destroy what God has given us to carefully shepherd?

More than in any other area of our lives, we have put blinders on our hearts when it comes to our relationship with non-human life around us.

Our human tendency, of course, is to resort to rationalization when there is an aspect of our life in which we do not live by the values to which we say we are committed with our hearts and minds. This is easier to do when the mainstream culture and even the mainstream church culture around us accept and even promote those rationalizations.

But God wants our whole life, our whole heart.

And when you open yourself to God’s love and God’s spirit, your heart will begin to be remade and your life cannot help but show it.

Every corner of your life.

What kind of heart is your life reflecting?

What kind of heart is the corner of God’s living earth that you are impacting with your life reflecting?

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Why do you waste your time with that?

Nathan Aaberg —  June 14, 2016 — Leave a comment

Earlier this year, I had the opportunity to speak at length on the phone with a Christian I had met at a gathering of conservationists and other community members in central Illinois. He and his wife are active members of their church. They also happen to care deeply for God’s earth.

This wasn’t always the case.

The turning point came in 2005 when he had back surgery while living in Ohio and couldn’t walk for some time. When he began to recover, he made it a goal to walk all 16 Metro parks in Columbus. The experience renewed his love of nature. Later, when he retired and returned with his wife to Illinois, he completed a Master Naturalist program. This, in turn, led him to get further involved with conservation through a local non-profit organization that preserves and restores natural areas. As part of their desire to live as simply as they could, they bought a seven-acre property, built a passive solar home, and have been restoring the land to native natural habitat.

Yet, he has found that not everyone at their church sees the connection between the Christian faith and the his and wife’s attentiveness to Creation.

He vividly remembers being asked by a fellow church member, “Why do you waste your time with that?”

In Our Father’s World: Mobilizing the Church to Care for Creation, Edward Brown recounts a similar experience. He was having a conversation over coffee with a friend he deeply respected who had been the principal of a missionary school that both Brown and his wife had attended early in their lives. When Brown describes the mission organization he had founded (Care of Creation) and his personal commitment to environmental missions, he could tell this friend was distressed by all that he was saying. Here’s how Brown recounts his friends’ words to him: “He finally put down his cup of coffee, looked me in the eye and said, “Ed, what in the world does this have to with the Great Commission?””Our Fathers World #3484 IVP FINALOur Fathers World #3484 IVP Version

If you’re Christian and you’ve expressed a concern for God’s earth, you’ve probably faced something like this moment yourself. So how do you answer those questions?

The following excerpt from Our Father’s World, published by InterVarsity Press, will be helpful for you to read. You’ll see that Brown places a commitment to preserving God’s earth within the context of a whole Christian life.

He also pushes back. He highlights the negative consequences that unfold when Christian missions don’t present a complete faith that includes a commitment to shepherding God’s living world.

Here is the excerpt:

If you’ve stayed with me this long, you have a pretty good idea of why I believe caring for God’s creation has everything to do with that final command that Jesus gave his disciples: “Go and make disciples of all nations” (Matthew 28:19). I’ve made a case for full, creation-restoring redemption. But my friend’s question is a serious one. He has seen the primary message of the gospel of Jesus Christ diluted by various kinds of “social gospel,” and he believes he has some reasons to be nervous. Is this just one effort to make a timeless gospel relevant, focusing on human needs but cutting out the essential heart of redemption and forgiveness of sins through Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross? The history of Christian ministry is littered with the carcasses of organizations that attempted to adapt to the needs of the moment and in the process lost the spiritual power that made them unique.

So how is caring for creation different? The first part of the answer requires a review of the foundation laid in the first part of this book. Christian missions is the effort of the whole church to extend Christ’s ministry of reconciliation (see 2 Corinthians 5:11-21) to all nations and all peoples, making disciples and “teaching them to observe” all of Jesus’ teachings and commandments (Matthew 28:20), in effect teaching them to live in ways that will reverse the curse of sin throughout all of God’s creation.

We’ve seen that this process involves a restoration of each of the relationships broken at the time of Adam and Eve’s sin: our relationship with God is restored in salvation; our relationship with ourselves in sanctification; our relationship with each other in koinonia, the restored community of the church; and our relationship with nonhuman creation in learning to live in harmony with it again, a process reflected in the ancient Hebrew word shalom….. If, then, the purpose of Christian missions or ministry is the accomplishment of this kind of full redemption, including creation care is not a distraction from the main goal. It is the goal.

Countries like Kenya have experienced more than one hundred years of missionary presence, but their current state shows no improvement. Depending on what you want to measure, Kenya is possibly a great deal worse off than before the gospel arrived. Is there a correlation between this and the truncated view of the Christian missions we’ve promoted for the last century? If the biblical goal is shalom, but we thought we were finished when we delivered a simple message of salvation, it’s no wonder things haven’t worked out quite as well as we might have expected. Bad theology – or at least incomplete theology – will always give bad results.

Jesus warned his disciples of the dangers of casting out a demon and leaving the “house” swept, cleaned but unguarded. That demon returns with seven others more powerful than itself (see Luke 11:24-25). We have driven out the demons of paganism with a lightweight gospel of personal salvation. Today the churches in these countries are reaping the harvest. If we’re honest, the results of this are evident not just in the daughter churches of missionary-receiving countries, but also in many of the mother churches that sent missionaries out in the first place. Bringing creation care and missions together will restore the theological integrity of the missionary enterprise.

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“God has to save them from our sin”

Nathan Aaberg —  April 14, 2016 — Leave a comment

Who is the “them” in this sermon excerpt?  An unfortunate group of people?  A community in some Third World country?  No.  The pastor in this case is referring to the trees, waterfalls, oceans, and other living things around us.

That and other provocative insights can be found in this sermon by Reverend Timothy Keller, the founding pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Manhattan. I urge you to listen to it with an open heart and mind.

In the sermon, Reverend Keller unpacks the larger meaning of Genesis 9:1-17 in ways you have probably not heard before. There has been a tendency I’ve long noticed for Christians to highlight only the covenant between humanity and God in this chapter and to neglect the significance of the fact that the covenant is also with all of life. But Reverend Keller asserts that it is actually outlining three great relationships we must pursue — with Creation, with fellow humans, and with God.

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Reverend Timothy Keller

Here is one other sequence of Keller’s words in the sermon:

“The Bible says Creation is speaking to you — the stars, the waterfall, the animals, the trees.  They have a voice.They’re telling you about the glory of God. And its your job as stewards of Creation, as stewards of nature to make sure they keep speaking, to not let their voice go out.  It’s your job to help them be themselves…. It’s your job to join the choir.”

We are in a world full of life and energy, in other words, and that life has been part of the God’s story and has its own unique value to God. What’s more, we are not complete if we are not attentive and in positive relationship with that life.

I continue, by the way, to be impressed by Keller’s preaching and writing.

One of the more insightful books I’ve read about the Christian books was his Walking with God through Pain and Suffering which I studied during a particularly difficult period of my life. He consistently reveals ways of understanding God and life in ways that are rooted in the Bible and yet have a nuance and spirit to them that are uniquely rich and robust.

P.S. I want to give special thanks to Ray Archuleta for recommending that this sermon to me.  I attended a full-day session on soil health farming presented by Ray Archuleta and Gabe Brown at the 2016 MOSES Organic Farming Conference in February. Two things struck me about Ray during that day of instruction: his unflagging passion (seasoned with wit and powerful stories) for building the life of soil as the central focus of good farming and his recommendation of the book The Bible and Ecology: Rediscovering the Community of Creation by Richard Bauckham. I recently reached out to him, and we had a wonderful conversation over the phone about his Christian faith. 

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