the gift of work

In his book Free of Charge, Miroslav Volf speaks about the gift of work. This is what he says (p 107):

[T]he gift of work is the primary means by which God gives what we have … God gives us life, powers, and abilities, and so we earn and possess. We’ll earn and possess so we can give, as when we share our food with the hungry; we’ll give even while earning, as when we create goods and offer services with dedication, care, and wisdom; and we’ll give even by possessing, as when we open our home for others to enjoy.

When it comes to work, the past couple of months have been quite unsettled and bitsy (particularly as Natalie and I transition a little unevenly from study for me and work for her to study for her and work for me). But I think God’s been teaching me that the work that enables us to earn a living — and share and contribute and extend hospitality — is something we have to be offered, given. Not something to which we’re automatically entitled.

More, it’s not something we can just make happen for ourselves — not only because any power or ability that we might have is given us by God (cf. Deut 8.11-18), but also because reality itself in the (God-given) concrete contexts in which we find ourselves working can either facilitate our labours or obstruct them.

I guess it’s ultimately about whether or not we’re working with the grain of reality. Whether we’ve been invited — given the opportunity — to work. Here. Now. With these people, these tools, this material, etc. Or whether we’re trying (presumptuously) to lay hold of it for ourselves.

a Christian response to climate change — 2.0

I’m aware that my previous post (about providence and climate change) was a bit of a tangled mess. Let me try to tease it apart a little and lay out the direction in which I’d love to see the conversation move.

What I’m proposing to do is:

• Take another look at the question of how Christians should respond to climate change. In particular, I’d like to focus on some of the urgent, practical questions — about how to balance competing priorities, etc — that I never really got around to dealing with in my earlier reflections (such as THIS, THIS or THIS).
• Yet in turning to application I don’t want to turn my back on theology. I’ll continue to try to gather my thoughts around the topics of God’s providence — his gracious, sovereign and purposeful interaction with the world he has made — and human stewardship, taking Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness as a touchstone.

Here (in a little more detail) is how I’m proposing to tackle it:

1. ‘If you are the Son of God…’ — God’s provision and human stewardship
2. ‘Not by bread alone’ — the heart of human stewardship
3. ‘Do not put the Lord your God to the test’ — the shape of human stewardship
4. ‘Serve him only’ — the goal of human stewardship
5. ‘They will bear you up’ — the un-looked-for satisfaction of stewardship

I expect to add further sub-points as I elaborate on each of these ‘theme-statements’, fleshing out what they might mean for our responsibility to care for God’s good creation (although, of course, they have wider application — and indeed, the fact that creation care isn’t the only game in town is something with which we’ll no doubt wrestle as we move forward).

providence and climate change: redux

Climate change seems to be making a comeback from post-Copenhagen obscurity (although someone really needs to tell the sceptics to stop flogging the dead horse of the University of East Anglia ‘cover up’).

Since I wrote did some work on it last year, I’ve been doing a bunch more thinking. Back then, I kept banging on about the fact that in the face of widespread anxiety and cynicism, God’s providence means that Christians are invited to participate in his care for and rule over the world he’s perfecting through Jesus by the Spirit.

Far from writing a permission slip for a laissez faire attitude (because ‘It’s all going to burn anyway’ perhaps?), this means that a Christian response to climate change will be marked by confidence and humility.

• Confidence without humility quickly becomes an excuse for arrogant meddling — whether along the lines of greedy exploitation or hardline conservationism that seeks to wind back the clock. Creation remains God’s. He bears primary responsibility for it and we are ‘junior partners’, seeking his glory rather than our own comfort and selfish ends.
• On the flip-side, humility without confidence in the risen Lord quickly descends into panic, despair or (perversely) frantic activism. Under God, we bear genuine responsibility, which we shirk to our shame. But we do it with hope and iron-clad trust that God’s ultimate purposes will not be thwarted. Life not death will triumph.

That being said, I’m keen to push things further in terms of practice. I’ll post a plan for my reflections next week.

Before I begin, I want to indicate something about how I’m going to tackle it: My reflections will be anchored in Jesus’ confrontation with the devil in the wilderness. Why? For the one thing, it’s a climatic moment in God’s interaction with his world. More, it has stacks to say about God’s providence and what it means for us to live truly human lives, liberated from the devil’s distorting influence.

By sticking with this one passage I can keep things both theologically informed and focussed on the practical implications. That’s the hope anyway!

Stay tuned…

Why we haven’t posted much this week

I was meant to post this week because Chris is in Melbourne talking with various people from AFES (it’s been very worthwhile – your prayers have been and continue to be appreciated). But I’ve fallen short of Chris’ blogging standards… Here’s what’s been keeping me so busy in the real world:

1. I cleaned the oven. It was not very pleasant.
2. I catalogued our CDs before packing them in boxes. It was fun for the first box, less so as I finished the last one.
3. I’ve been to my first evening meeting about Mission Areas. It was slightly scary, but really quite positive.
4. I’ve been preparing for a meeting this morning on the theology of disability, for which I had prepared a discussion paper. It was actually quite a lovely meeting. I hope to share some of my reflections over the next couple of weeks.

‘are you the one who is to come?’

A friend of mine recently pointed out something fascinating about the time John the Baptist sends messengers to quiz Jesus, asking: ‘Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?’

(Don’t get distracted by the apparent scandal that John seems to be harbouring doubts. That’s not that fascination, or even scandalous — believers in both Testaments often harbour doubts. But instead of denying or obsessing over it, they take it to God.)

The truly fascinating thing here emerges once you realise that Jesus is in the middle of doing a bunch of things that evoke the stories of Elijah and Elisha — a healing connected with a Gentile soldier, a widow’s son restored to life, that sort of thing.

An 18th Century Russian Elisha

Now assuming that this isn’t about furnishing an all-purpose proof ‘that Jesus is God’ or something, John’s puzzling question begins to make sense: John is interested in what it means for Jesus to be acting like Elijah (or his historical successor, Elisha).

And within the framework of expectations John was probably working with — about Elijah’s true end-time successor, the herald who would pave the way for God’s own arrival — you can understand why he’d want to know what it means!

Everything else had seemed to point to John being the end-time herald, announcing the imminent arrival of God. And as the encounter unfolds that’s exactly how Jesus does identify John.

But only after he’s done a number on John’s expectations. Jesus doesn’t hand out an immediate reassurance along the lines of: ‘It’s OK. I am the one who is to come’. Rather, he says: ‘Look at what I’m doing. Like the Servant Isaiah spoke about (that perplexing figure who represents Israel), I’m restoring sight to the blind, mobility to the lame, humanity to lepers, hearing to the deaf, life to the dead; I’m bringing glad tidings to the poor’.

Ultimately, it is only as the Servant — not just as a human being, but as this human being, destined to suffer and by suffering redeem many — that Jesus answers to John’s expectations about the arrival of God.

Fascinating, huh?

stuff to click

1. Andrew shares some thoughts on infant baptism — coming down in its favour without once mentioning covenant! He doesn’t answer every question you may have (and the Comments open up even more). But it gets my hearty ‘Amen’.
2. Stuart takes on one of our holy cows about Christian ministry — the conventional wisdom that pastors should be ‘talent scouts’ on the look out for People Worth Watching. For me it raises some interesting questions about leadership…
3. Michael Bird responds to J. Mack Stiles’ article, “What’s Happening to InterVarsity”. It has the distinct feel of birdge-burning to it. But you’ve got to give it to him — Bird is unafraid to call it like he sees it.
4. Tim Chester insists that ‘Mission is central to the Bible and central to our identity’, tracing the universal appeal to worship God throughout Old and New Testaments. (Although, perhaps it underestimates the difference between the ‘You come to us’ approach of the OT and the ‘We go to you’ in the NT.)
5. I wonder how you feel about Seth’s claim that too much data crowds out faith. It may look like a simple faith v reason thing, but it made me think hard about whether Christian responses to the New Atheism have let the demand for ‘proof’ (of a very particular kind) distract us from our real goal.
6. And there’s a great article on the Ekklesia Project blog about love and virtue. Here’s a teaser: ‘The “return to virtue” has been helping some of us late modern folk get beyond the unattached (“Teflon”) self of an “efficient” way of life by reminding us of ways that our actions presuppose a political (communal) setting’.

help me prepare a course about Jesus

I’ve mentioned that I’m slated to run a six week course on the person and work of Jesus at La Trobe. Here’s my brief:

• Who? Christian university students attending a weekly training evening.
• How? Run six 1 hour seminars (with a mix of learning modes — small group discussion, brainstorming, etc)
• Why? To help them develop in theological maturity and be better equipped to share the good news about Jesus with others.

I’m not quite sure how I want to tackle it at this stage. I’m currently tossing up a couple of different options:

Option 1: explore a variety of different ‘angles’ and emphases

This would (presumably) involve spending some time on the expectations raised in the OT that are picked up and related to Jesus in the New Testament — and possibly exploring how they’re refracted in 1st Century Judaism. I would then plan to move through the different ‘portraits’ of Jesus painted in different New Testament writings (e.g., Paul’s letters, one the Synoptic Gospels — probably Luke — John’s Gospel, and the Book of Revelation).

Option 2: systematically examine one New Testament ’statement of belief’ about Jesus

I’m thinking either Philippians 2.5-11 or Romans 1.1-5. We’d take whichever one of these statements I settle on one clause at a time, using each one as a springboard into the broader topic. This would cover a lot of the same territory as in Option 1, but may help limit any arbitrariness in the selection of topics and overall order we follow.

The way I see it, the pros and cons of each approach look a little bit like this:

I’d love to hear what you think about the strengths (and weaknesses) of these different approaches.

a resolution

We cleaned our house from top to toe yesterday. Thank God for public holidays just before you need to move!

The real estate agent is bringing people to inspect it today. We love the landlords and want to make sure someone falls in love with the place.

Whatever the outcome, it feels great. We are resolved to work this hard in our new home in Melbourne so we can enjoy it (not just to impress other people)…

the virtue of gazing into the middle distance

And here you were thinking it was a vice!

By Henningklevjer (from Wikimedia Commons)

Apparently, far from being vicious the ‘middle distance perspective’ is used in the New Testament to render both the life of Jesus (in the Gospels) and that of ordinary Christians (in letters like Ephesians). At least, that’s what David F Ford reckons.

Check out what he says in his essay, ‘System, Story, Performance: A Proposal about the Role of Narrative in Christian Systematic Theology’ (from Why Narrative? Readings in Narrative Theology, p 195):

The middle distance is that focus which best does justice to the ordinary social world of people in interaction. It portrays them acting, talking, suffering, thinking, and involved in institutions, societies, and networks of relationships over time; in general this perspective renders … “the detail of how things are”. The perspective and the content go together. If one moves too close and allows the dominant perspective to become, for example, one person’s inner world or stream of consciousness, then the middle distance has been supplanted. Likewise, if one takes too broad an overview and subsumes the particular people, words, and actions into a generalization, a trend, or a theory, the middle distance loses its own integrity and becomes, at best, evidence or a supportive illustration.

I guess this is something like the tension many people experience in preaching — or otherwise trying to present the good news of Jesus. It’s easy to fall into the trap of either over-familiar, confessional, ‘look at me’-ism or of trotting out pithy-sounding but bland platitudes and hastily formulated generalisations about ’society’ or ‘the world’.

Perhaps it’s time to rehabilitate the virtue of gazing into the middle distance…

some thoughts on John’s presentation of Jesus

I’m mulling over the way Jesus is presented in John’s Gospel — and especially how he’s presented in relation to God. Let’s start with the following points culled from Dunn’s Christology in the Making (pp 258-265):

• Jesus’ designation as the Word and Wisdom (and Shekinah) of God in 1.1-18 adds depth to his portrayal as the Son of God and Son of Man in the rest of the book.
• Despite its very ‘Greek’-sounding cadences, John’s presentation of Jesus is not entirely unJewish, bouncing off the ways First Century Jews already spoke of God as both near and far, immanent and transcendent.
• At the same time, John constantly foregrounds the relation between Father and Son in a manner that almost suggests we’re dealing with two beings here.

Placing all these things side by side results in a variety of apparent anticipations of later orthodox confession about Jesus and his identity of being and activity with God the Father. Such is the sophistication and clarity of John’s presentation of Jesus.

All of which is more or less uncontroversial. But I keep wanting to ask: What about the elusiveness of Jesus? The lack of recognition he constantly meets, the hostility and division his arrival produces?

Sunrise over Mt Sinai

Now I suppose we probably persist in privileging John like this because it seems to tell us what the other Gospels merely show us. But I suspect we’re in danger of forgetting that John’s language only sounds explicit (and compelling and powerful) from the perspective of later orthodoxy.

What’s more, we’re in danger of underplaying the shock and difficulty — even the mind-bending paradox — of what has become so comfortable and familiar to us: speaking of Jesus as the ‘Word become flesh’, etc.

We just need to do better at reckoning with the fact that almost every time it looks like we get something approaching the high formulations of later orthodoxy Jesus sidesteps any unambiguous identification with God (which is what happens in John 5.16-30 for example).

John may pose the question with unusual directness and clarity (to our ears). But rarely are his answers as cut and dried as we might imagine.