Theology for the Masses

Note: This is my first crack at this and it is rough and incomplete.  Also, I whipped this up at 1am after a long, long day.  So be gentle.  I am limited to 1000-1200 words of commentary.  I’m taking some chances with gender and scripture, so think of those areas as an exploration rather than… something else.

Section I – Preamble

We hold the below to be our best understanding of the reality of God, God’s relation to creation, actions within history, and our relation to both the rest of creation and to God. We draw upon the following for our formulations: the Spirit of God speaking through the Scriptures, the wisdom of our fore-parents, the best thinkers of our day, and our communal experience. We recognize that this statement is contextual and need not be universal and may even be wrong. If so, we welcome and humbly scrutinize any criticism as we pursue God and God’s will. This statement of faith will consist of statements which are commented upon in the footnotes.

Section II – The Nature and Relation of God.

We believe in one God who is love[1] and therefore internally and externally communal.[2]

And that this God transcends gender but relates in culturally engendered ways.[3] This God relates to itself and others

1. through the person of the Father, Almighty, judge, and maker of heaven and earth,
2. and through the Logos, [4] the only begotten Son, fully incarnated in Jesus of Nazareth,[5]
3. and through the Paraclete,[6] the Holy Mother,[7] which dwells within the members of Christ’s body and guides them through the Bible.[8]

Section III – Creation

We believe in the material and spiritual creation of all that is by God.[9]

And that there is a plan, purpose, and order to creation and that this plan, purpose, and order were disrupted by sin, rendering the whole of creation alienated from God, introducing chaos, decay, and death.[10]

Section IV – Humanity

We believe that humanity was created by God and imbued with the image of God and charged by God to care for creation in God’s stead.[11]

And that we sinned and continue to sin against God, creation, and one another, marring Shalom and separating ourselves from God, creation, one another, and from spiritual life.

And that humanity was created not to live alone, but as flourishing members of a community.[12]

And that those who accept the grace of God are crafted into the Body of Christ, made citizens of the Kingdom of God, and receive spiritual life anew.[13]

Section V – Scripture

We believe that Scripture consists of the Protestant canon.[14]

And we consider it to be human compositions[15] which were co-opted by God and breathed through by God so that it is “useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness.” (2Ti 3:16 NRS)[16]

And that it is the sole record of God’s revelation in literary form. [17] This message will always need to be translated by the help of the Paraclete into each culture it encounters.[18] In that way, it is subjective.[19] It is objective in that it describes the world as God wills it to be.[20]

Section VI – Redemption

In line with sections III and IV, we loudly proclaim a cosmic no! to the present state of ourselves and the universe. Accordingly, we believe that Jesus’ work on the cross is the means through which he will redeem all of creation.[21] This is happening in part now, but will only be finished at the Parousia. We look to the past for the pristine state, to the original Shalom as that which will be restored.[22] Yet, we also look forward to when heaven and earth will be created anew and heaven will descend upon earth.[23]

And that his begun with the victory of the Resurrection, continues through the present time, and will only be completed at the Parousia. Empowered by the Paraclete, we are agents of the reclamation of both sinful creatures and sin-smashed creation, as image bearers, until Christ finishes the work at the end of this age.

[1] “Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love.” (1Jo 4:8 NRS)

[2] As love, God must have an object and subject of his loving and since it is dependent upon nothing, there must be plurality within the Godhead. (Grenz and Franke 2001, 195)

[3] God has no sex, save for the humanity of Jesus. God does relate to us in ways that are culturally gendered. He contains both genders, “for male and female he created them, (Gen 1:27 NET)” and so we speak of God as genderful, rather than genderless. God the Father relates to us as in traditionally constructed masculine ways. He creates us, protects us, rebukes us, and loves us. God the Son is sexually male, but genderly neutral. He carries both masculine and feminine attributes as commonly seen in cultures. He is Lord, but also Wonderful Counselor. It is noteworthy that Jesus was sometimes depicted with feminine features in Antique and Late Antique art precisely because of his traditionally feminine traits. (Jensen 2000, 124-128) The Paraclete relates to us as a mother, less as Lord, ruler, and protector, but more as a comforter, and intimate guide. See note 7 for my drawing from Christian traditions on this matter. Furthermore, to emphasize the relational aspect of the trinity, I will use he and she to refer to actions as persons and it to describe unified actions. This is more to underscore the relational nature of the members of the Trinity than anything else.

[4] “In [the] beginning was the Logos and the Logos was beside the God and God was the Logos.” Εν ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ λόγος, καὶ ὁ λόγος ἦν πρὸς τὸν θεόν, καὶ θεὸς ἦν ὁ λόγος. (Joh 1:1 NA27)

[5] "And the Word became flesh, and did tabernacle among us…” (Joh 1:14a YLT)

[6] Just as we take Logos from the Greek in John 1:1, we take Paraclete from it as well later on in John. We are reminded most often of John 14, which is as near as you can get to a Trinitarian statement: “And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate, who will never leave you.” (Joh 14:16 NLT)

[7] I follow both Origen of Alexandria and early Syriac Christians which sometimes described or approvingly quoted works which described the Paraclete as the Divine Mother. (Rogers 2009, 119)

[8] (Grenz and Franke 2001, 64-68)

[9] In [the] beginning God created heaven and earth. “in principio creavit Deus caelum et terram” (Gen 1:1 VUO)

[10] Where there was Shalom, there is now decay, death, violence. The climax of Genesis’ opening creation poem ends with God creating rest on the 7^th day. This rest can be seen as all of history bundled up in this day (see Hebrews 4 for the Future Rest) or as the completion and establishment of harmony in creation and with God, the pristine state which sin marred in the next few chapters of Genesis, the return to which history aspires. (Wirzba 2006, chap. 1-2)

[11] “God created humankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them, male and female he created them.” (Gen 1:27 NET) As image bearers, we rule and cultivate creation in God’s place. (Grenz and Franke 2001, 199) See Gen 1:28 and 2:15 for a scriptural basis.

[12] We were not created as individuals plucked from the void and twisting in the wind. (Grenz and Franke 2001, 203). Instead, we are social animals, who construct, find meaning, and live in community. By community, I refer to Toennies’ idea of Gemeinshaft instead of Gesellshaft. Gemeinshaft refers to “relationships encompassing human beings as full personalities rather than single aspects or roles of human beings,” to which Gesellshaft refers. (Grenz and Franke 2001, 211) This is a by-product of living within God’s design, not an end in and of itself.

[13] Called out of the rebelling masses of humanity are those who respond to the call of God to accept the gift of grace which is offered by Jesus and made possible through his work on the cross, which is the apex of history. Those that respond to the seed of faith are grafted into the body of Christ which is his bride. This body extends temporally from the past, through the present, and into the future, and geographically throughout the whole world. For the seed metaphor, see Luke 8:11-15; for the basis of grace and the cross, see John 3:16 and Col 2:14.

[14] We have no scriptural basis, no manuscript basis, and no scientific basis for this claim. It rests solely upon our faith in the Spirit guiding our historical spiritual community. It was not delivered to us on plates of gold; it came into being through much struggle, trepidation, and time. We listen to other Christian works such as the Catholic Apocrypha, popular Christian devotional and academic works, and even ancient Christian non-canonical texts (such as the Acts of Mar Andrew and Mar Matthias) for human and divine wisdom, but hold the Canon over and above all these as the only set of works co-opted by God as his instrument of communication.

[15] We rebel against the notion that God is the initial crafter of these texts.

[16] We cling onto usefulness and deny the practice of using it as the fourth member of the trinity, as God incarnate.

[17] As such, we elevate it above all other texts and base our construction of the world upon our readings of it. Insofar as worlds are constructed by the language and categories as socio-cultural worlds, the Paraclete creates the Christian world through the melding of the revealed biblical stage and the present and local cultural stage.(Grenz and Franke 2001, 75)

[18]Additionally, it was produced within a specific geo/cultural-historical context and must be translated into each successive and adjacent context by aid of the Paraclete. The Paraclete enhances our ability to read the Bible and understand its overarching narrative and to craft and translate it into our interpretive frameworks. (Grenz and Franke 2001, 81)

[19] Though subjectivity in this sense is not of the same sort that plagues Christian apologists in their nightmares and writings; it is truth in context.

[20] (Grenz and Franke 2001, 272)

[21] “[A]nd through him God reconciled everything to himself. He made peace with everything in heaven and on earth by means of Christ’s blood on the cross.” (Col 1:20 NLT)

[22] See Hebrews 4, especially Hebrews 4:9: ‘So then, a Sabbath rest still remains for the people of God;” (Heb 4:9 NRS)

[23] Consider “Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the old heaven and the old earth had disappeared. And the sea was also gone. And I saw the holy city, the New Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven like a bride beautifully dressed for her husband.” (Rev 21:1-2 NLT) This will fulfill Jesus’ prayer to God that “May your will be done on earth, as it is in heaven. (Mat 6:10 NLT)

Sin never becomes a quality or even a substance. Sin is and remains an act.

— Emil Brunner

Similarly, Love is only mediated through actions, never sentiment nor well-wishes.  The coming and sacrifice of Christ is the greatest act of Love shown to this world since the Maker made it with His making.

If we wish to love, if we wish not to sin – action must be the language we in which we speak and silence; the Word of the Lord must be our grammar.

While Meredith, JR, Amanda and I were visiting Cassie and Tom in Wilmore, KY, we had the chance to sit around and talk some theology.  We touched on quite a few topics, such as pacifism and the pros/cons of postmodernism.  One of the topics we tossed around was the nature of God’s glory.  It started with a quote Tom read me from Free of Charge: giving and forgiving in a culture stripped of grace:

Some theologians claim that all God’s desires culminate in a single desire: to assert and maintain God’s own glory.  On its own, the idea of a glory-seeking God seems to say that God, far from being only a giver, is the ultimate receiver.  As the great twentieth-century theologian Karl Barth disapprovingly put it, such a God would “in holy self-seeking… preoccupied with Himself.” In creating and redeeming, such a God would give, but only in order to get glory; the whole creation would be a means to an end.  In Luther’s terms, here we would have a God demonstrating human rather than divine love.

Boom, shocka-locka.  This encapsulated my thoughts and intuitions on the matter.  Then Tom read me the next paragraph:

But we don’t have to give up on the idea that God seeks God’s own glory.  We just need to say that God’s glory, which is God’s very being, is God’s love, the creative love that wants to confer good upon the beloved.  Now the problem of a self-seeking God has disappeared, and the divinity of God’s love is vindicated.  In seeking God’s own glory, God merely insists on being toward human beings the God who gives.  This is exactly how Luther thought about God.  So should we.

Galactus, after being freed from Annihilus by the Silver Surfer

Boom, Sho—-wait.  Is Volf trying to have it both ways?  Meredith, Tom, and I wrestled with this quotation for quite a while.  First off, what in the world is glory?  Glory seems to be intimately tied to honor – exchangeable, as a matter of fact.  Honor is a fundamentally a status ballast – receiving honor lifts your status up and losing honor lowers it – at least in antiquity and any other cultural setting that I am aware.  When I give my wife honor, I am elevating her status in my and my community’s eyes.  It is the same when we honor Christ (or give Him glory).

Given this, seeking one’s own honor is fundamentally a selfish act.  The being in question is attempting to gain status for herself in a given society.  Now, for God to assert and maintain God’s own glory, He must fundamentally be acting selfishly (see Barth and Luther as quoted in the quotation).  However, a selfish God seems contrary to God’s character, which is the motivation for Volf’s first quoted paragraph.  However, Volf immediately switches gears and says that if God’s very being is love, the whole problem goes away.  He says “[i]n seeking God’s own glory, God merely insists on being toward human beings the God who gives.” What Volf does not do is tell the reader how this is accomplished.

After talking through this with Tom for a half hour, we came to the following conclusion.  There are two types of glory; glory that seeks its own gain and glory that seeks the flourishing of others.  The first one, which we are most familiar with, is a flawed human since of honor and glory.  The second, which is foreign to the historical record and counter-intuitive, is divine glory – the evaluation of status, not because of majesty or might (fear based glory), but based on love that seeks the flourishing of others and not of itself.  I don’t give God the glory because He is a mighty being who could squash me like a bug (although He most certainly can), but I give God the glory because of what he hath done for me and for Meredith, and for my good friend Scott.  Here, God is not really seeking his own glory (at least in the human sense) but receives it because he is not doing so. 

In God’s eyes, real glory and honor is seeking the good of others for their own sakes, not one’s own.

Thoughts? (Tom – I am recounting this several weeks after we talked about this – what would you change or add?)  I would love to hear from my reformed and my Church of Christ friends.  It is hard to phrase with the succinctly with the correct nuance.

Father,

we are children who have been given much. You have blessed us with an abundance of all things: food to fill our stomachs, every kind of entertainment to distract and occupy our minds, and every opportunity to adorn our bodies with things

stuff

the trappings of our culture that we think make us beautiful.

Father,

you teach us that the day will come when we are stripped bare of everything we hold dear, everything that we tell ourselves defines who we are, all the things we tell ourselves make us beautiful. And on that day, all you will see are those things that truly define who we are, those things that truly matter because they are the things that matter to you. And you will determine if, in fact, we are truly beautiful.

Father,

may you find on that day children who care really and truly for our brothers and sisters, your beloved creatures crafted so lovingly in your own image. May you find that we were never guilty of stealing from them those things they need to express that image fully.

Teach us to strip ourselves of the finer things of our culture that we may clothe ourselves with the finer things of your kingdom culture. Give us eyes that see the beauty that your eye beholds, that we may learn how to become beautiful in your eyes.

In the book of Job, written sometime between the early sixth and late fifth century BCE, God describes Job as a blameless and upright man who fears God and turns away from evil.  What is such a man like?  If we were to be blameless and God fearing, what sort of things ought we do?

I don’t know about you, but growing up I often imagined good ole Job as a quiet, monkly figure who amassed wealth and other manifestations of favor from God through smart and godly business practices.  I imagined his actions as self-contained.  He surely was righteous because he did no wrong, a passive righteousness, a lack of sin.  Similarly, I conceived personal righteousness in the same terms – if I don’t actively sin, I am being righteous.  Always righteousness was framed in terms of protecting it from sin.

Job considers righteousness as something completely different. Job, in verse 14 of chapter 29, poetically links righteousness and justice, saying:

I put on righteousness and it clothed me;

     my justice was like a robe and a turban.

While it makes perfect sense in retrospect, it something that I never really considered before. Just as robes and turbans clothe a person, justice the the action of the righteous.  Lets look around this verse and see how Job was righteous.

• delivered the poor who cried and orphan who had no helper
• blessed the wretched
• caused the widow to sing for joy
• eyes to the blind
• feet to the lame
• father to the needy
• championed the cause of the stranger
• broke the fangs of the unrighteous (those acting unjustly, apparently)
• made the unrighteous drop their prey (those who were people oppressed) from their teeth

How different this is from what I used to imagine?  Job is not cloistered, separated from society, being a “perfect” individual.  Here he is actively engaged with those around him, helping those in need and opposing those who oppress.  He is righteous because he takes an active stance against sin in the world.  Thus, if we are to be righteous, we must conceive righteousness in the same terms – it is not enough to not actively sin, we must act for divine justice on earth.  It is not our righteousness that needs protecting from sin – it should be sin (or injustice in the world) than need fear our righteousness!

Addendum:  As Hank rightfully pointed out, I am not talking about how we obtain righteousness, instead I am talking about how we show our righteousness.  We are declared righteous by God through no deed nor merit on our part – but, we need to be righteous instead of trying to protect our righteousness.

Jake Malloy was another person who prayed at the Parkade Baptist Church “Battle for America” Concert of Prayer.  He prayed a prayer of repentance, one that was modeled after the fruits of the spirit.  Here is a taste:

I apologize that the commandment of love You set above all others we have treated so lightly, Forgive us, please, for not loving You with all our hearts because our earthly treasures consume us. Forgive us for not loving with all our souls because we corrupt them and treat our and others’ souls as if they were not eternal. Forgive us our unloving minds that spend little time studying who You are. We repent of using our strength to serve ourselves rather than serving others with the strength You provide. Forgive us, Father, for creating a structure where Christians are expected to be consumers rather than productive servants.

I encourage you to read and pray the rest here.

Faith lived out.

H/T: Scott Parsons.

So I found this quote by Alvin Plantinga taken from his magnum opus “Warranted Christian Belief.” To give a little context to the quote, Plantinga had been talking about his Calvin/Aquinas model for the necessity of the “internal instigation of the Holy Spirit” due to the noetic effects of sins. For fundamentalists like Plantinga (and myself) it offers some humor and insight.

“But isn’t this just endorsing a wholly outmoded and discredited fundamentalism, that condition than which, according to many academics, none lesser can be conceived? I fully realize that the dreaded f-word will be trotted out to stigmatize any model of this kind. Before responding, however, we must first look into the use of this term ‘fundamentalist’. On the most common contemporary academic use of the term, it is a term of abuse or disapprobation, rather like ’son of a bitch’, more exactly ’sonovabitch’, or perhaps still more exactly (at least according to those authorities who look to the Old West as normative on matters of pronunciation) ’sumbitch.’ When the term is used in this way, no definition, no definition of it is ordinarily given. (If you called someone a sumbitch, would you fell obligated first to define the term?) Still, there is a bit more to the meaning of ‘fundamentalist’ (in this widely current use); it isn’t simply a term of abuse. In addition to its emotive force, it does have some cognitive content, and ordinarily denotes relatively conservative theological views. That makes it more like ’stupid sumbitch’ (or maybe ‘fascist sumbitch’?) than ’sumbitch’ simpliciter. It isn’t exactly like that term either, however, because its cognitive content can expand and contract on demand; its content seems to depend on who is using it. In the mouths of certain liberal theologians, for example, it tends to denote any who accept traditional Christianity, including Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, and Barth; in the mouths of devout secularists like Richard Dawkins or Daniel Dennett, it tends to denote anyone who believes there is such a person as God. The explanation that the term has a certain indexical element: its cognitive content is given by the phrase ‘considerably to the right, theologically speaking, of me and my enlightened friends.’ The full meaning of the term, therefore (in this use), can be given by something like ’stupid sumbitch whose theological opinions are considerably to the right of mine’” (Warranted Christian Belief, pp. 244-245).

from the hands and heart of a white, anglo-saxon protestant male:

Today is the day many in our nation have set aside to remember and honor Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and his dream of racial equality. I often wonder how seriously we take this any more. After all, I’ve heard over the past several years countless Americans of European descent choose to speak of “reverse-racism”, bemoan Affirmative Action as outdated and unfair and of course rage against the swelling tide of illegal immigrants. This is nothing new in our country. In the immigration swells of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, “white people” were just as racist. The difference was that ‘we’ were discriminating against Italian and Irish immigrants. In fact, the rhetoric used to describe those immigrants was strikingly similar to that used of blacks and now of the current tide of immigrants. Now, however, most every American considers Irish and Italian peoples to be nothing more than another flavor of ‘white’, and even black persons are welcomed by the white majority so long as they conform to white culture. [1]

No, America’s racism grows out of the same old problem – we are afraid of that which is unlike us. We have not become less racist; rather, we’ve managed to incorporate more of those formerly Other races into ourselves. We demand that you look like us (as much as possible), speak like us (English only, please), believe like us (liberal, Judeo-Christian) [2] and act like us (2.5 kids, nuclear family, share our values, etc.). So long as you conform to We, you may stay here, and you may thrive here. But if you do not, if you choose not to conform and instead to celebrate your distinctiveness, then you are a threat to We. You take Our jobs and You threaten to undermine Our values and Our way of life. So long as You demand that you be allowed to remain You, You will have no place among We. We will drive you out, and We will build walls to keep You out, where You belong.

And this is why Dr. King’s dream is still so far from reality. We are not yet a country where a person is judged by “the quality of his character”. We are still judged by the color of our skin, by the type of clothing we wear, by the words we speak (and the accent with which we speak them), by the god we worship (and the theologies to which we hold), and by the nation to which we pledge allegiance.

Of course most of you know that I hold no special love in my heart for America. What breaks my heart about our continuing racism this is that the Church is one of the biggest advocates of continuing racism in this country. Sunday morning continues to be ‘the most segregated hour of the week’. Many do not even see this as a problem; a leader at my church has said repeatedly when I bring up the idea of working for a more integrated congregation, “They’re more comfortable in their own churches.” Nearly every Evangelical with whom I speak about immigration thinks that a person should be required to learn English to even cross the border. And at the Crystal Cathedral’s ReThink conference this weekend, prominent Evangelical leader Chuck Colson made this statement: “Islam is a tragically regressive religion, because it has proven itself incapable of producing a great civilization.” Now, I’m going to blog about this more extensively later, but these attitudes pervade God’s Church. And we are not meant to be so.

We are to welcome the alien, the stranger among us, because we were once aliens in Egypt. We are to welcome the Other into ourselves just as they are, for so has God opened Godself to us even while we were yet sinners. We are to offer love because we first were loved. I have a dream that one day God will teach God’s people what it means to be God’s children. Or maybe I should dream instead that one day we will have eyes to see the object lessons God’s placed all around us, and ears to hear the cries of the stranger in our lands, ears that will remember our own cries, and note how similar They are to We. Not because we speak the same language or worship the same way or look the same or believe the same. But because we are all children of the same God, and we all have equal need of the same redemption.

May God give us eyes of faith to see the reality of what it means to be human today. And may God give us ears to hear the cries of God’s children who are still in bondage. And may God teach us how to love the Other as perfectly and redemptively as God has.

“It’s a long way from the shadows in my cave up to Your reality, to watch the sunlight taking over. Take me over.”

– Switchfoot, “Home”

1. Consider sitcoms such as the Cosbys, Family Matters and Fresh Prince of Bel Aire, in which the family structure, economic status and weekly problems mirrored that of white suburban America much moreso than they reflected (primarily urban) black culture] [↩]
2. Not, of course, political liberalism, but true philosophic liberalism, which sees religion primarily as a private, individual concern rather than as a corporate reality/worldview. [↩]

Check out The Fuerst Shall Be Last.  This guy has some fantastic insights on Trinitarian theology.

It’s an excellent starting point for some discussion.  And, I think, a cogent argument for the supremacy of Love over sovereignty as God’s defining attribute.

“[Your dream to become great] is the dream of every living creature, the desire that is the very root of life itself. To grow until every space is a part of you. It’s the desire for greatness. There are two ways of fulfilling this, however. One way is to kill anything that is not yourself, to swallow it up until and destroy it until there is nothing left to oppose you. But that way is evil. You say to all the universe, “Only I will be great, and to make room for me, all the rest of you must give up even what you already have to make room for me.” – Ender Wiggin, Speaker for the Dead by Orson Scott Card

“⁷Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. ⁸ Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love. ⁹ God’s love was revealed among us in this way: God sent his only Son into the world so that we might live through him. ¹⁰ In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins. ¹¹ Beloved, since God loved us so much, we also ought to love one another. … ¹⁹ We love because he first loved us.” – John the Elder (1 John 4)

What does it mean to say that God is Love? For much of our history, Christian theology has spoken of God’s central attribute as existence or glory or something of the like. But John is claiming something all-together different. John tells us that “God is love”, and another writing from that same community defines Love as Sacrifice: “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends” (John 15:13). But what then does it mean to say that God is Sacrifice? To sacrifice is to give up that which we value. Giving up that which is not dear to us is hardly sacrifice; rather, to sacrifice is in a very real way to give of ourselves, to give that which comprises our identity. So imagine a God who is defined not by self-glorification or –gratification, but by self-emptying, self-sacrifice. Imagine a God existing in three persons who are engaged in an eternal dance of joyful, selfless giving. This sort of God finds glory not in self-aggrandizement, but rather in selfless giving. The greater the sacrifice, the greater the glory. It is this sort of God who, out of the overflow of joy and sacrifice, the overflow of Love, creates a world filled with being who, like himself, have a will that they can willfully sacrifice (for one cannot be selfless if one has no Self to give).

But here, of course, is the steep cost of Love. Beings created in the Imago Dei, the Image of God, can choose to sacrifice, or they can choose not to sacrifice. We can choose to give of ourselves or we can choose to preserve our Selves, to fight and to battle until we have created a space in which only We exist. This is the essence of Sin: that we would choose to preserve I at the expense of the Other, rather than to give I in service, in sacrifice to the Other. This tendency to think first of ourselves, to work for self-preservation, has been at work in us since the beginning, and we are nothing if not creatures of habit.

This Self, this Sin has infected us all since the beginning. We Self-full beings see the beauty of creation through the lens of Self; we tend to ask only “how can this serve my needs?” Rather than work with God to cultivate his Garden, we have chosen instead to do as we please, and in doing so, we serve to unmake that which God called good (Genesis 6). In choosing not to serve God even as God gives himself to us, we have become captives in our own minds, unable to see or care for anything beyond that which is good for I. We have lost what it means to abandon our Selves, to live for something other than I, and so have been cut off from God, unable to enter into his Garden of giving, of true Life anymore.

Thanks be to God that he did not leave us in this sorry state! Rather, he gave once more of himself, emptying himself of his divine nature and taking the form of a slave. He came to We who could tolerate no Other and he refused to be one with us. Rather, he offered us a different way to live, a way that did not demand the preservation of the Self, but rather offers the Self in acts of Love, of Sacrifice. We could not tolerate his Otherness, his difference, and yet still he gave himself to Us, and let us have our way with him. We did what any Self does when it feels threatened. We lashed out and destroyed that which threatens. He knew this, and yet he still gave. He gave and gave, until it killed him.

And only then was the power of Love revealed. For we were made to see that in the end, all of our attempts to preserve I will only end in destruction, for we were not created to take. We were created to give, in imitation of the Self who gave himSelf for us.

“A careless leper too comfortable in his own world to notice the older wounds have new infections with new intentions.
Darkness settled in behind me, tapped me on the shoulder singing shivers to my spine from the corners of my mind,
“I’ve been wanting to remind you of everything you’ve left behind and wouldn’t you, shouldn’t you remember me?
Should you forget, I haven’t yet.”

She’s there when I’m alone and she always seems to know the stories that’ll take me back to where my comforts sleep.
A caress with velvet paws that hide her sharpened claws along the walls that time has built high searching for the blemishes.
And i know she’s breathing murder, that it is folly to endure her. But there is sweetness in her whisper,
“When you’ve had enough, I’ll be waiting. Wouldn’t you, shouldn’t you remember me?
Should you forget, I haven’t yet.’”– Stavesacre, “The Two Heavens”

As I was studying me some Attic Greek tonight I was reminded of Hank’s retranslation of John 3:16. Hank did an excellent 5-part series on this verse and went through the translation process step-by-step. I would recommend reading reading through each of the five parts (one two three four five) to get a feel for the translation process.

His translation reads as follows:

“Thus in this manner God loved the world that he gave his one and only Son so that everyone that is believing in him will never perish but have life forever.”

I especially like two of his changes/emphases. First, Hank rightly translates the “so” in the phrase “For God so loved the world…” as “in this manner.” It describes how the love of God was shown to the world. God showed his love through a selfless sacrificial act.

The second aspect that I appreciated was Hank’s emphasis on the middle voice of ἀπόληται, or to perish. The emphasis on the middle voice demonstrates that the perishing was a result of our own actions. Restated, we perish ourselves. It demonstrates that although we have shot our selves in the foot, God action of love for us is his providing a way into eternal life despite our shooting of our own foot.

The only thing I would really change about his translation is restoring the subjunctive forms of “will never perish” and “have” in the last two clauses. The verbs are in the subjunctive form, which describe possible worlds, not actualized ones. Those that believe, by their believing enter into this possible world where they do not perish and instead have eternal life. This world is make possible by God’s giving of his son, Jesus.

My changes would read as follows:

“Thus in this manner God loved the world that he gave his one and only Son so that everyone that is believing in him might never perish but might have life forever.”