I’m told that the best way to have a useful conversation with those who hold different convictions is to step into their shoes—to view the world as they do. So it’s time for me to try on a Stoic view of faith. Here are some insights I’ve taken from the exercise.

But first I need to explain to new readers what I’m talking about—what is Stoicism?

In a nutshell it’s a philosophy from the classical Greek era formulated by Zeno. He portrayed God as the ultimate Mind whose presence diffuses to all humanity as a fine, intangible substance. The ambition of the Stoic was to achieve tranquility through an informed self-rule. In various forms it carried on into the Roman era and was promoted by Seneca. It remained a popular option during the New Testament era as reflected in Paul’s meeting with some Stoics in Athens (Acts 17:18). In early church history it was embraced by Evagrius Ponticus who, in turn, passed it along to later generations of Christians.

One of the most significant of these was the semi-Pelagian, John Cassian, who in turn was followed by Benedict of Nursia and, later, by the Benedictine Pope, Gregory the Great. Through Gregory and the Benedictine Order many of its assumptions became an embedded presence in the medieval church. So while Stoicism—as a formal school of philosophy—disappeared long ago, its portrayal of the soul’s operations was and still is widely held by Christians.

What features of Stoicism remain active today? The key premise is that the soul is self-ruled so that all choices are products of a person’s private, inward conversation. The conversation relies on the activities of three motivational centers in the soul: the mind, the will, and the affections. Each of these faculties offers a unique dimension: the mind processes information; the will processes options and takes action; and the affections process various appetites and desires.

The result is a continuing and sometimes competitive conversation among the three faculties. The mind and the will are held to be primary because they represent the stable features of the soul—the faculties aligned with God’s own being. The affections, on the other hand, are viewed as disruptive and unstable—and not found in God’s being. Thus they need to be ruled by the informed mind and the disciplined will. In classic Greek terms the goal of the Stoic practitioner was to achieve a stable life—what they labeled “apatheia“. To follow the affections is to be ruled by the ungodly aspect of life.

As Luther helped launch the Protestant Reformation, all this was sub-biblical nonsense and was central to his reforming efforts—something he argued with exceptional force in his Bondage of the Will in opposing the implicit Stoicism of Erasmus. Luther held, instead, that according to the Bible there is only one motivational center of the soul: the heart. The heart, in turn, is meant to be affectively attuned to and aligned with God’s heart: in a love of ongoing response to God’s love as freely offered by the Father, revealed by Christ, and poured out into the hearts of believers by the Spirit. The mind and the will, in this view, are merely instruments of the heart, without any motivational power of their own.

Readers are welcome to pursue matters of Stoicism on their own with Evagrius deserving special notice. It’s time, now, to ask why this approach has such enduring force even if it’s not promoted in the Bible. What are some of its advantages?

Advantage 1: It establishes human responsibility before God. By celebrating the duopoly of the mind and the will the Stoic worldview portrays us as suitable conversation partners with God. In Stoicism the problem of sin resides in the realm of the affections. This is where human appetites, passions, and desires override clear thinking and self-control—qualities that God, as a pure Spirit, does not share with a material world.

Thus we are called to overcome sin by employing education to separate right from wrong; and to then to apply personal disciplines so that we always choose the right behaviors God expects. Our feelings are abandoned, treated as the irresponsible features of our being and meant only for private use. In this arrangement we are given a basis for achieving true moral freedom. In effect we become like God, knowing how to determine and fulfill matters of good and evil on our own initiative.

Advantage 2: It reduces the disruptive role of love in our day-to-day life. In the Stoic vision of life we are to approach God in strictly rational and volitional terms. God, who lacks any of passions or desires associated with affections, is seen to deal with us in strictly objective terms. This, in turn, sets up Christian relations with God as contractual and judicial functions: He gives us the requirements he expects us to follow and we then apply our minds and wills in achieving those demands.

These contracts present certain benefits—to the degree we meet and fulfill them—and penalties when we fail. The key task of this approach, then, is to determine the boundaries of God’s will—i.e. the lines where we need to stop short or else face the threat of judgment.

To love God on the basis of an affective devotion, on the other hand, is vastly more involved—as is love in any human relationship. The Stoic version of faith replaces an affective version of love with a rational and volitional version. The biblical term, heart, is in turn redefined by Stoics to represent our collective mind and will—as a disaffected center for choices to be made. So we are not expected to “like” God (i.e. in affective terms) since he doesn’t actually like us. Instead faith is all about our obedience. This is manageable for the good Stoic and it allows us to keep our actual affections hidden—used in strictly private and personal ways. The great benefit, then, is a disaffected God and a disaffected faith that allows our actual desires to go unexposed and our outward moral efforts to be rewarded.

Advantage 3: It gives the uniquely intelligent Christian the burden of leadership. Since God is seen as the ultimate Mind, all intellectuals who are Christian contract-keepers (i.e. those who affirm the key doctrines of Christianity) and who are exceptionally bright, deserve to be treated as priests. They alone can determine which of God’s many demands need to be taken more seriously and those which can be treated as optional or as culturally obsolete. They set up wonderful systems of theology that collate and refine the awkward documents that the Bible represents. In place of wandering narratives, unfocused and subjective poetry, and the “occasional literature” of New Testament letters that make up the Bible we are now given pristine books of Systematic Theology that largely displace the Bible in our newly rational faith. The great benefit, then, is that the intellectuals are our true guides in faith and we, the less brilliant, only need to listen to them in order to make proper decisions.

There are many other benefits, I’m sure, but these are useful starters. What we might notice is that each of the three listed advantages share this common benefit: they make God’s calling a bit easier to deal with. The alternative call, to love him with a truly affective devotion—a love of heart, mind, soul, and strength—is much too complex and involved for many of us. It intrudes on our freedom to do what we really want to do.

But somehow I prefer the latter alternative because that’s how he first loved us: with the same expansive and expensive passion that he and the Son have shared for all of eternity, and that the Spirit now offers all of us who are captivated by Christ’s beauty. For all the non-Stoics among us, let’s enjoy his love with all the delight it invites.

Let me ask a question: do we think and learn by collecting and affirming every idea we’ve ever heard, so that all we’ve heard grows into a single collection of “truth”? Or do we try to sort out the things that are true from the things that aren’t true? If for instance, someone tells us, “Buy this food supplement and you’ll become strong and fit without ever having to exercise!” And someone else tells us, “You’ll never be strong and fit unless you exercise!” Can the two claims fit together as parts of a whole? Or is one right and the other wrong?

That sort of “right or wrong” polarity sets up the question for this week’s entry: how is Jesus seen “in faith”? Do we determine to believe certain things about Jesus so that we get our doctrinal foundations well established? Or do we come to Jesus as one who tells us about himself, and then discover that in our meeting him he changes the way we view him and ourselves? In other words, is faith a responsibility to be performed, or a response that we experience? Is the focus of faith on our conduct, or on Christ’s initiative?

Last week I wrote about the division that emerged among the English Puritans when federal theology was imported from Heidelberg by William Perkins—with a few others—and many Puritans soon embraced it. But there were some who resisted it because it portrayed faith as a human activity that God rewards with salvation.

Here’s some context for that resistance. The 4^th-5^th century church leader, Augustine of Hippo, may have done more than any other figure in the Latin-speaking world to portray God as a Triune One who exists in his communion of love. As Augustine read Scriptures and tracked the conversations of the great church councils just before his days, he saw that God’s relational being explains his creation and his conduct. He was appalled by the British moralist, Pelagius, whose theology was formed in the context of duties and contracts: God expects right behaviors and rewards those who make right choices with salvation.

Puritans embraced Luther’s Augustinian insights. Richard Sibbes (1577-1635), as his own career matured, became a leader in this movement. Sibbes called sin “a base slavery” in which our creation design, to love God, is usurped by a love for lesser things. The solution?

“He that cleaveth to the Lord is one spirit,” as the apostle saith [1 Corinthians 6:17]. . . . Indeed, our affections transform us anew. As it is with the fire, it transforms cold and gross bodies to be all fiery; so God and heavenly things work upon our hearts, they transform us to be like themselves [Works, 5.230].

Sibbes was, at times, very clear in citing Augustine—he knew many other Puritans would not agree with him so he anchored his most important points in a rock-like authority. So, like the ancient bishop, Sibbes set out the “chief end” of humans in God’s triune love—the basis for creation. And it is only by entering God’s eternal communion that anyone finds their true end:

As Saint Augustine saith, “Thou hast made us for thee, and our hearts rest not till we come to thee;” as the rivers never rest till they discharge themselves into the ocean. And being not his own end, it is his wisdom and understanding to look principally to that which is his last and best and main end, which is God, and union and communion with God in Christ, who is God in our nature, God-man, the best of all, and therefore it is fit he should be the last [Works, 5:300].

Sibbes, in citing Augustine, addressed God’s purpose in creating humanity. The search for our “hearts rest” is satisfied by union and communion with God in Christ who is our “last and best and main end”. In other words, an affective union with Christ is the basis for an effective spirituality.

Here the question of choice comes into play. Is this union a product of human initiative or a response to God’s initiative? Only the latter answer—a response—fits the full-orbed portrayal of Scripture. Believers are invited to “see” Christ in biblical promises, which is the ground for the formation of a love relationship [Works, 7:423].

We must be wholly moulded anew. . . . “Flesh and blood, as it is, cannot enter into heaven,” 1 Cor 15:50; that is, the nature of man, as it is corrupted; we must have new judgments of things, and new desires, and new esteem, new affections, new joys, new delights, new conversation, new company [Works, 7:257].

At the very beginning of the process of transformation, the question must be raised of how one who is steeped in sin and disaffection toward God can be brought to have “new affections”. Any decisions therefore belong to the person but must be accounted for by God’s grace.

Christ is the focus of spiritual vision, displacing the viewers self-awareness: “By looking to the glory of God in Christ we see Christ as our husband, and that breeds a disposition in us to have the affections of a spouse. We see Christ as our head, and that breeds a disposition in us to be members like him” [Works, 4:271].

So, according to Sibbes, the cause of change is always in the one perceived rather than in the will of the perceiver. This comes, in turn, through a new capacity to see: “God created a new eye in the soul, a new sight which they had not by nature; for even as the natural eye cannot see things that are invisible, so the natural man cannot see the things of God, which are seen not by a natural, but by a supernatural eye” [Works, 7:424].

We agree with Sibbes. Spiritual sight—given the challenges of transformation—calls for the Spirit’s work in overcoming Satan’s distortion of God’s character. One of the primary issues of pastoral ministry, Sibbes believed, is to face “the wicked, poisonful disposition that the devil stirs up” against Christ and his elect [Works, 3:488].

Thus, as lost trust through rebellious unbelief caused Adam and Eve to fall, so a restored vision of Christ’s trustworthiness discloses a person’s conversion and initial sanctification:

They trusted not in God, they began to stagger at the promises, to stagger at the word of God. Satan robbed them of the word. He observes, and continues the same art still, to take the word from us, and to cause us to stagger and doubt whether it be true or no. . . . So Adam fell. Now we must be restored by the contrary to that we fell. We fell by unbelief and distrust, by calling God’s truth in question; we must learn to stand again by the contrary grace, by faith [Works, 3:519].

With the supernaturally restored “eye of faith”, the gradual process of restoration begins through the soul’s encounter with the truth about God as he really is.

The affective (heart-based) must be set against the Stoic (mind-and-will-based) view of the soul. The matter is crucial. If readers affirm the response-based Trinitarian theology, on the one hand, yet still insist that the real task of knowing and engaging God is something we can also accomplish by our willpower, the resulting spirituality will be confused and blind—like driving into a dense fog! The two approaches are incompatible.

As an added note, the marketing industry uses the heart-based understanding of how the soul operates as their basis for doing business: marketing shapes behaviors, not through precise reasoning and firm choosing, but by capturing emotions and stirring responses. Some major figures in modern and even in contemporary philosophy have begun to unpack a response-based approach to life. One of America’s greatest thinkers, Jonathan Edwards, simply cannot be understood apart from a heart-based, affective anthropology. And even some significant research in current neurobiology has shown that we do all our “thinking by feeling.”

As we have said here before, we were made to be lovers because God himself is a lover. We were made as relational beings because God himself is relational. And we were made as responders because God is our great pursuer and he made us as suitable partners for an eternal life of shared love, joy, life, and good works in companionship with God: not because we have to but because we want to. And we want to because we find God—as Father, Son, and Spirit—to be more attractive than any other alternative in life.

This entry is more technical, more historical, and longer than usual: be warned and be patient, please. I also think it’s important. As my elementary teacher used to say, “Put on your thinking caps!”

After recently stepping away from my years as a theology educator I’m starting to see some academic blind spots we tend to miss from close up. One of these is critical: we don’t get God’s motives right. It’s a problem of the Christian educational community at large. We tend to speak of God as if he is mainly defined by using and defending his power—as if his omnipotence is what drives him. And, biblically, that’s just not right.

I say this even though I know scholars who promote other motives, especially a divine ambition for glory. In some settings his love is also exalted; and sometimes his holiness; and maybe one or two other qualities. But after some time to ponder I’ve concluded that it’s really his power that academics see as God’s main motor.

I should say right away that I don’t doubt God’s omnipotence: all power ultimately resides in him; and all his purposes are being played out in the creation. The Scriptures affirm this. And he would be less than God almighty if it were not the case.

What I deny is that his power tells us anything about his motives. Proclamations of his power only tell us that as God he has no true competitors and that he has every capacity he needs to maintain that status. He is wholly secure.

Here’s why the question of motive matters. If power is what moves God, then he is an unapologetically and appallingly disaffected divinity. Appalling to us relational beings in that it suggests that the creation is actually relationally barren, only set up to display divine might. We would be the participants and the audience for a grand performance of power. God would be a grand utilitarian ruler; with us as his objects to be ruled.

I call this a blind spot because no one sees this summary as applicable to their own theology even when they teach it in some fashion. And in teaching it we are kept from coming to grips with the true God and with his real motives.

Let me offer the English Puritan, William Perkins (1558-1602), as both a source and an example of the problem. In his day he presented a power-concerned God to England, and his portrayal continues to influence theology until today. Yet he is never viewed as promoting a disaffected God. He was, in fact, famous for his piety and spoke often about God’s love—rather ironically, given what he actually believed and taught his students.

Perkins’ key work, the Golden Chaine, was first published in Latin as the Armilla Auria in 1590. It introduced young theology students at Cambridge University and elsewhere to the structure and import of “federal theology” as formulated in Heidelberg, Germany, in the mid-1500’s. This federalism was a mitigated contractual model of salvation—I’ll say more about it below. The scheme drew directly from a version of how salvation works that was first synthesized by Thomas Aquinas in the 13^th century.

That may sound innocent enough, but what Thomas offered in his day was what made Luther furious in 1517: it violated the Scriptural portrayal of God, faith, and salvation. Thomas had drawn heavily from axioms he found in Aristotle’s self-concerned, and unmoved-mover version of God. Yet even with this dubious heritage Perkins’ book sold like hotcakes!

Opposition to his view was very firm and sustained by some—including my doctoral subject, the irenic Richard Sibbes—and a group of ministers known as the “dissenting brethren” at the Westminster Assembly in the 1640s, who followed his lead. But the new federal model soon became an assertive and self-proclaimed orthodoxy that most Puritans accepted. All who rejected the contractual nature of the system were castigated as “antinomians” even as they accurately cited Luther again and again in their own favor.

What was Luther’s view? He complained that Thomas made God’s grace into a something: an infused disposition or habit that God gives only to the elect. This habitus gratiae equips them with a supernatural disposition to begin making righteous decisions. Thomas and the later federalists thus saw faith as a human “act of the will”. The mitigation is that God himself makes it happen. How? By the magic of the habitus—or “enabling grace”—that ensures an act of faith. By this newly embedded grace the elect then conceive the adequate act of faith God requires of them, and he then rewards them with salvation. To Luther this was just a bunch of human-centered nonsense. In fact he, Zwingli, and Calvin all dismissed grace portrayed as habitus.

They all held, instead, that grace is relational—the activity of someone—namely God’s love in Christ disclosed by the Spirit. This captures some, but not all, in personal, Heart-to-heart meetings. The apostle Paul’s conversion displayed all of this. Thus for Luther faith is our response to God himself. A new entrustment overcomes a prior willful distrust and the believer becomes united to God by faith. In all of this the heart still has freedom to move, but where it once always moved away from God, once God’s beauty is revealed in Christ, he effectively draws people to himself. Most people, however, remain disaffected and hostile to God, and are finally given over to their stubborn desires despite God’s love for them and his free offer of eternal life.

The Golden Chaine was an effort to stamp out Luther’s version of salvation. In his foreword Perkins said just that: he was offering a supralapsarian version of God’s plan-for-the-ages in place of the “Lutheran” infralapsarian version. If we translate this jargon, what Perkins rejected was Luther’s conviction that the human heart is free either to respond or not to respond to God. Perkins, by contrast, treated the human will as the place where habitus operates and where faith is birthed with this divine assistance.

For Luther, however, the heart has real freedom—but not the will. As Luther had explained in The Bondage of the Will all of humanity is ruled by sin unless and until God’s love captures the heart. The will is simply an instrument of the heart—enslaved by the heart’s desires, either for good or for ill.

Why did Perkins want to dismiss Luther’s version of faith? Because, he believed, it violated God’s rule over the universe—his omnipotence. According to Perkins all that ever occurs—even sin—is under God’s absolute control. And God has just one goal in mind, a goal Perkins posted at the very bottom of a full-page fold-out diagram he included in the Golden Chaine: “Gods Glorie”.

Perkins’ diagram—as inspired by an earlier and less overt diagram by Theodore Beza—set out two tracks in God’s program for creation: a single divine decree of predestination that was subdivided into two subsequent decrees of “Election” and “Reprobation.” And after those decrees God then created the heavens and the earth. The order here explains the title of Perkins’ position—”supra” means God determines all things before the “lapse” or fall of Adam—so that it is only by God’s inexplicable determinations that some go to heaven and others go to hell. The people involved are simply objects to be ruled.

Luther, on the other hand, had insisted that God created Adam even though he knew that Adam’s sin would soon follow. And, given the certainty of the coming fall (hence the term infra or subsequent to the lapse) God created humans and declared that some would be drawn out of death—a death of humanity’s own choosing—by his wonderful mercy. These elect ones would be drawn to God not on the basis of their own goodness, but by his mercy—a mercy most often embraced by the weak, the poor, and the despised. All people, however, are invited to come. Only when the arrogant persist in denying the offer of God’s grace are they finally given over to their sinful disaffection. God knew, of course, beforehand, those he would draw in and those he would finally give over, but he is never the author of their sin.

The differences between Luther and Perkins were not chronological differences over how God works in time, but represented two competing versions of God’s character and his operations as he determined the course of the creation.

For Luther God is understood to love and to be loveable, and allows the human heart a freedom either to love or not to love him, with faith expressing a trust birthed by God’s wonderful benevolence. This version of faith was also embraced by John Calvin.

Perkins, on the other hand, held that God’s sovereign rule is ultimate, even if God implicitly creates sin and sinners: “God created all things for himself, and the wicked man for the evill day. Prov. 16:4. Hath not the potter power over the clay to make of the same lumpe one vessel to honour, and another to dishonour. Rom. 9.21.” [at the head of Perkins' diagram, emphasis added]

Perkins was so deeply committed to his portrayal of God’s omnipotence and absolute rule that he made two other determinations about God that allowed him to be consistent. First, he located God’s love as a function of his will in the Golden Chaine. This, in effect, allowed him to maintain a Stoic version of divine conduct: that God’s mind and will are absolute; and no divine affections are involved.

But what is love like when it is defined by divine will? Does it involve any affection or compassion? Perkins answered this in the Golden Chaine [Works, 1.25]: God’s underlying essence is “void and free from all passion”.

So, too, in Perkins’ Treatise of God’s Free Grace and Man’s Free Will, “I answer [whether God has any human-like affectionate love] that affections of the creature are not properly incident unto God, because they make many changes, and God is without change. And therefore all affections, and the love that is in man and beast is ascribed to God by figure [of speech]” [1.723]. In the jargon of high theology this is called an anthropopathism. His axiom about the dangerous instability of the affections could be found in the glossary of Aristotle’s Metaphysics (s.v. affectus) but not in the Bible.

In other words, it was a question about how God is to be viewed that was at stake. Luther would, for instance, pin much significance on the human ability to reject God, even if he also knew that no one would ever choose God because of their sin. He looked to texts that affirmed God’s ambition to save and human heart-based culpability: “But the Pharisees and the lawyers rejected the purpose of God for themselves . . .” [Luke 7:30, emphasis added].

Let me return now to the blind spot commentary we began with. It was not that I hadn’t seen the differences between Luther and Perkins after my doctoral days. The blind spot was in my failure to see how much the theme of God’s omnipotence still shapes much of our current theological training. The academy, by a wide margin, prefers Perkins’ version of God over Luther’s version. Luther certainly had the Bible and the Augustinian tradition on his side, but the power politics of faith seem to be in the majority.

Or, to be more to the point: the scholastic programs love to portray a God who rules us but doesn’t actually like us. The biblical alternative is a God who loves us with a love that has real passion but who never forces us to love him in return. The choice is one of coercive power versus the power of love. Luther got God right. I pray we all will too.

I was in trouble with my high school English teacher. It was in my sophomore year—not long before I met Christ at summer camp—that she called me aside.

“Where did this writing come from? You’ve plagiarized this project, haven’t you!”

I was stunned. The project was a simple composition that I had taken very seriously, and now I had an upset teacher glaring at me.

“It’s my own work,” I stuttered. “You told us to write it on our own and that’s what I did.”

The assignment was to describe, in one page, what was most important to us in life. I had written my honest response and it was wholly my own work.

“No one your age ever writes that Time is My Greatest Treasure. This is the voice of an older adult,” she said, “so you need to be honest with me: where did this content come from?”

I stood my ground with her and the small crisis soon passed, but I came away feeling like an oddball. Even if my teacher thought I was too new to life to have this insight, it seemed obvious to me that time is to be treasured.

And now, as an older adult, I still feel that way. So if you have a moment to spare, let’s think about the importance of time.

My high school project made this point: time expresses the context—the milieu—for every element of life. So that among all the possibilities before us only a few activities actually find a place in our lives. The secret to success in life, then, is to give our time to the most significant priorities.

It was actually a practical observation. Even a high school sophomore thinks about who does—and who doesn’t—get to share his or her time. Students might not take much time to think about the actual process of prioritizing time, but that’s how they all operate.

I knew, for instance, that my high school devotion to sports—football, wrestling, and track—were time consuming and took away time from my studies. I knew, too, that there were any number of students to talk with, eat with, play with, but that I would only spend time with some of them—and that only a few would become good friends. Time is the stuff of priorities so that our lack of endless time forces us to make hard choices.

More recently and on separate occasions I’ve had two friends who read Spreading Goodness entries tell me that they only drop by the site from time to time because my posts are too long. It’s honest feedback and much appreciated. And by treasuring time myself I was able to translate what each was really saying: “Given my priorities, your posts take too much time to get through—I have other stronger interests.”

At some level we all know how this sort of thing works. It isn’t necessarily a statement about whether someone likes us or not. Mainly it’s a simple critique of the content and quality of a given post. If a topic grabs us, the question of time evaporates. If the writing itself is clear and clean enough so that’s not the issue, the reader is actually offering a glimpse of his or her priorities. Any reading, or any selection of other activities, is measured by whether that activity deserves our treasured time.

This, by the way, is also the key insight of Affective Theology. We are all made in God’s triune image as lovers, and our time—that is, what we do with our time—displays what we love most. Time, as the fabric of our lives, shows off what we treasure: our “values”, or our “priorities”, or our “interests”, or “what is really important”—or, biblically, “the desires of our heart”. Whatever we give our time to, especially our discretionary time, is what first makes, and then expresses, who we are.

We may be blind to this connection, of course. I recall, for instance, a high school student in a youth group I once led. He volunteered to do a Bible read-through, but his reading progress turned out to be very slow. His reading partner, an avid college student, asked about it.

“I’m just too busy with everything,” he answered. “I don’t have the time to do all this reading, but I’ll keep trying.”

A few days later, during their Sunday read-through meeting, the same student commented to his reading partner that he had to get home right away.

“What’s happening?”

“I need to get to the TV schedule for the week that comes in the Sunday newspaper so I can schedule my week.”

It turned out that the student was committed to watching certain television programs each week and was ready to add some new slots if anything in the schedule caught his attention. His reading partner asked him about how many hours his viewings involved.

“Oh, I average 22 hours a week,” he gushed.

I should add that he never completed his Bible read-through.

I had another conversation last week. A friend commented, rhetorically, “God takes a lot of time, doesn’t he.”

He wasn’t complaining, but was commenting on how his own growth as a Christian always came when he took good stretches of his discretionary time to read the Bible, to pray, and to be quiet while reflecting on God’s ways and words. He saw a clear linkage between his sense of spiritual well-being and the time he devoted to Christ.

It soon dawned on me that all these conversations were linked to the point of my old high school project. What’s more, my conversion—an event that came after my sophomore year—echoed that project. My faith came alive once I gave God the full treasure of my time, without holding back.

Here’s how it happened. Through a number of circumstances that I’ve explained elsewhere I sat on a Montana hillside waiting for God to speak to me—actually, for him to introduce himself to me. The event took about two hours on a beautiful summer afternoon. It was time I might have been spending with some very attractive Christian friends. But I wasn’t sure that I was a Christian myself. Thus my waiting after I had asked, aloud, “God, are you really there?”

I then met God, in Christ, by two stages. First I simply sat there, stubbornly waiting with this thought: “God, I need to hear from you. If you choose to speak, I’m here listening.” Then, after about an hour of absolute silence, a distinct thought came to mind: try reading your Bible, dummy.

That brought me to my second stage: of taking time in the Bible, starting with an hour of reading from Matthew’s gospel. It was there that he indirectly touched on my insight from the English course and gave me its spiritual application: time is a treasure, and it’s the great treasure God requires of us. He wants all of it—in order to become our time-Lord. Specifically, in Matthew 6:33, he called on me to seek first his kingdom and his righteousness.

I responded: “It’s all yours.” Then, once I gave him my time, he began to give me his values through even more time in the Word—including my present enjoyment of Bible-reading—which offers the basis for investing that time most effectively.

Time, then, is our front porch for entering into a timeless eternity. We have the opportunity now to reorder our priorities in light of God’s grace and in view of our long-term future. It makes all the difference, both for today and for the ages to come!

Thanks, then, for sharing your time—it was an honor to enjoy this treasure together.

Allen Bloom wrote The Closing of the American Mind in the 1980’s as a criticism of the growing relativism in the modern academy and in society at large. That relativism has two axioms: first that everyone should be free to hold their own opinion without having others criticize them; and, second, that every viewpoint is equally legitimate.

In effect Bloom was criticizing a new absolute that no claims of truth can be absolute. Setting aside the confused circularity of the claim that relativism is an absolute value, Bloom’s main complaint was that relativism precludes learning. If every member in a classroom has the right to claim special privilege for their personal point of view then no one is ever ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ in what they believe. The teacher, then, is left to offer a forum for students to express their thoughts to each other: they explore possibilities and teachers facilitate the process.

Bloom’s complaint, viewed after some passing of time, was at the same time overstated and astute. That is, despite his concerns some departments of the academy are still anchored in non-relative certainties: the tangible fields of botany, engineering, meteorology, and aeronautics, to name a few. The students are either correct or incorrect in presenting their research—outcomes are measured by stable empirical evidence.

Other fields of learning, however, are indeed susceptible to encroaching relativism. Social studies, for instance—including religious studies and ethics—are often held to be free from any absolute standards. Professors in this milieu are expected to stir new and broader thinking so that individuals have enough colors in their personal palette of life to paint their own unique pictures. The metaphor of the visual arts is particularly apt in such cases because the freedom once reserved to artists is now a freedom granted to historians, theologians, psychologists, and to any others who reflect on the human condition.

As Bloom—a professor at the University of Chicago—shows us, not all academics embrace this relativism but it is a growing presence. I recall, for instance, attending a history conference for University of London doctoral students in the early 90’s. The liveliest event was an animated debate between an historian who viewed his work as a creative art in which he was free to promote his own values. His opponent, by contrast, held that while interpretive variations will always exist in historical studies it is incumbent on the ‘good’ historian to offer an accurate—’true’—portrayal of events. In an earlier era the former view would never have been welcomed in serious company.

So, too, the extension of relativism into many Christian communities is now a fact of life. It plays a role, for instance, in the emerging church movement where personal authenticity and sincerity are often valued more than a concern for biblical or creedal truth. A personal point of view, strongly held, is admired as long as the person who holds it knows not to promote it as an exclusive view that others must embrace. Each participant is seen to have a role in producing a unique community of worship that displays God best through unconstricted multiplicity. Freedom is an ultimate value.

Now let me shift gears a bit. Bloom’s complaint and the flavor of my review to this point can be aligned with the so-called neo-conservatism of today—aligned with those axiomatically committed to the past as superior to the claimed progress offered by modernity and post-modernity. My concern, however, is in a different place: that the great tensions of life need to be framed not as issues of old versus new—of absolutes versus relativism—but as a competition between a relational view of life and a devotion to individualism.

Let me press the point indirectly with a bit of personal narrative. For a time I was an elder at Imago Dei Community in Portland, Oregon—notable to some as the spiritual home of Don Miller who wrote Blue Like Jazz; and the pastor, Rick McKinley, also an author and a conversation partner with leaders of the emergent church movement. While his contact with the latter group may cause some to dismiss Rick I find him to be a breath of fresh air. He is happily devoted to the Bible even as the church he leads promotes the importance of authentic community and artistic, spiritual creativity.

In practice I found that the Imago Dei Community represents a healthy reformation—even if I’ve had qualms at points. Imago differs from more traditional churches: from the behavioral spirituality found in some settings, for instance; or the existentially active but content-modest worship found in other places. Instead Imago Dei expresses a robust relational commitment to Christ. Sundays at Imago offer a spiritual lens that magnifies the biblical Christ without hesitation or apology. The view is often striking, sometimes convicting, and, at the least, regularly encouraging.

Let me say more. At its heart each Imago service invites members to meet with God in every moment of the morning. Not to renew church traditions one more time, but to hear something fresh as offered out of God’s heart through the Word. This takes place as the speaker honors what the Bible offers, not to create experiences for the sake of experience, but to experience God’s love by the Spirit’s presence in the Word, worship, and in sharing at the Lord’s table. It is a time when the events of the week at the office and at home can be reviewed within the divine context of faith and community. Ultimate self-concern—the motor of individualism—loses meaning in the presence of real faith.

With such a relational worship as context, let me return to Bloom on the one hand, and the relativists on the other. The question at stake in their debate must be relocated to a relational context. Per Bloom’s concerns, are there some set of absolute truths that undergird every aspect of education which, by extension, can enlarge the personal capacities of the learner? Or is authentic personal creativity—the stuff of post-modernity—a better measure of education?

Our answer is that if there is no divine-relational context in either case then both are ultimately empty—unable to transcend the coming Day of the Lord by finding a place in eternal communion with a triune God and his saints in the new heavens and the new earth.

The biblical answer, in fact, is that any claims of scientific or social truth are only as absolute as the Creator makes them to be. In Jesus we find the one by whom and for whom all things are created. All patterns, rules, principles, realities, and principles of the creation are located in the one who tells us “I am . . . the Truth”. This is the ever-creative, ever-loving Son who delights the Father with his ongoing good works and offers them to the Father in a relational offering. We, in turn, exist in the fabric of God’s triune relationship and not the other way round! And here it is, I’m sure, that Christ delights to tease us with the mysteries of his unending creativity that stand behind the relativity of quantum physics and the older stability of Newtonian descriptions of the empirical universe.

In this context—of God’s triune eternal, mutual glory of shared love—we find true Creativity as a living companion. The creation is not our final ‘absolute’. Instead we find absolute love, accompanied by an appropriate jealous wrath, in meeting God through the Son and by the Spirit. We were made by him and for him; apart from him we are in hell.

Adam and Eve chose the latter course by turning away from their relationship with God—seeking to be “like God” as independent beings. They loved their own pretensions to morality and meaning. Yet to seek any form of life away from God is like a shadow seeking to exist as its own being. The autonomous shadow-person is only and always a nothing—a moving Lie—of darkness forever linked to, while despising, what is real.

In all of sin, then, there is a desire to create a unique and transcendent reality but this ambition turns out to be nothing more than a Nietzschean act of volition—and ultimately an empty existence. True exercises of human creation are all rooted in faith as worship. Anything else only exists as passing shadows. Even the insistence by Bloom and his kin that truth can be discovered through academic disagreements and debates leads us to a dead end if that learning is separate from worship. Any version of education that is not done as an act of worship only expresses the closing of the human heart—the pathway to nothingness.

Listen, then, to Jesus as he speaks from within his communion of the Godhead on our behalf: “Father, sanctify them in the truth: your word is truth.” It is only in God that we find our way to truth and meaning in a broken world. Let us go there, then, and worship him in every moment of life. There we are truly open-minded and freely creative.

Let me return here to a guiding theme of the Spreading Goodness site: the role of the heart in directing all our conduct.  I revisit it in part because it invites ongoing reflection and also because for many Christians the primacy of the heart in the soul seems at the same time obvious and improbable: it bears a regular retelling.

I know the challenge involved in seeing the point because when each year as a seminary professor I introduced the place of the heart it was only slowly engaged even among the most able and devoted students.  That even though many of the same students regularly use the rubric of the heart to express their personal faith and could see the extensive biblical content that sets it out for us.  My strategy was to find a number of voices, both in the Bible and among Christian writers, to unpack the point.

Thomas Chalmers is one of these.  Chalmers, a 19^th century pastor in Scotland, knew that many in his parish were captured by a “love of the world.”  But how is it possible, he asked in a sermon, to stop loving the world?  Is it the function of the will?  He answered, no!  That view, he said, “is altogether incompetent and ineffectual.”  Instead, the way to overcome sin is “to exchange an old affection for a new one.”

His sermon title, “The Expulsive Power of a New Affection”, expressed his key to an authentic spirituality [Select Works of Thomas Chalmers, 4:271-390].  Sin lives in the heart and sin can only be cured by a new heart with transformed affections.

Chalmers held—along with Augustine, Martin Luther, John Calvin, Richard Sibbes, Jonathan Edwards and others—to an affective spirituality in which biblical faith is heart-based: a response to God’s love that changes our deepest orientation of life from being self-centered to Christ-centered.

At some level most Christians will say, “I’m in favor of God’s love and so is every other believer I know.  What’s new here?”

What is unique is not the affirmation of God’s love but the assertion that God’s love is the sole basis for launching faith.  Faith as a response to God’s love is not one option in coming to him; it is the only way anyone comes to him: faith works through love (Galatians 5:6).

Faith, in other words, is not birthed out of human will or by an intellectual assent to certain truth claims, but as a fruit of the Spirit’s love poured out into our hearts.  The will and the mind are only instruments of the heart, never its directors, so that once a love for God is present in us our thinking is reoriented and our choices are redirected.  It is in this affective primacy that spirituality takes a very different pathway to other spiritualities.

What are the alternatives?  A commonly held spirituality—the rational-volitional model—relies on one’s own ability to believe in God in an informed choice of the free will.  Another is the self-emptying call of mysticism—based on an ascent into God’s being through steps of purgation and illumination in the pursuit of an ineffable sense of union.  The former treats Christianity as the pursuit of proper knowledge; the latter pursues pure experience.  Let me set aside any reflections on the mystical option for now—it calls for a separate essay—and follow Chalmers’ focus here.

What Chalmers opposed as “incompetent and ineffectual” are the claims that faith is a rational-volitional event that can bring about self-transformation.  The basis for this approach is certainly rooted in our commonsense perception of thinking and choosing as a self-moved, uninfluenced, process.  A more sophisticated expression of this view is offered in ancient Greek (and later Roman) Stoicism.

In the Christian adaptation of Stoicism the human “act” of believing is the instrument God gives us for entering into faith—making it, ironically, a faith in the human act of believing.  Commonsense or not, the problems with this notion are obvious.  Some of the 17^th century affective Puritans, for instance, disparaged this as “will worship” because the human initiative is treated as the motivational basis for faith and, by extension, for salvation.  Our capacity to choose, then, is made to be even greater than God’s work in us.  Among the many counterclaims of the Bible we find Jesus and John responding: “apart from me you can do nothing” and “we love [God] because he first loved us” [John 15:5; 1 John 4:19].

The actual basis for faith is our newfound affection for Christ birthed by the Spirit’s illumination of the Son that “expels” our former love of self and autonomy.  It is God’s attractiveness that captures hearts and then transforms behaviors.  And before we are captured by that attractiveness we were entranced by other forms of worship.  Even the notion of a free will is nothing more than an axiomatic commitment to human autonomy.  We were made, in fact, to be lovers of God. To insist instead on Stoic autonomy is to embrace, unaware, a form of self-love.

What’s the difference in practice?  Stoic faith gives primacy to human responsibility; affective faith centers on God’s goodness and beauty that draws our gaze of faith to himself.  One is a human activity—despite claims of God’s assisting work—while the other is as one-sided as being born is to a baby.  Only the Spirit’s illumination, by opening the eyes of our hearts, brings about the change.  Yet the response is fully ours.  One creates a faith of unending duties; the other a faith expressing our new desires.

How common is this polarity?  And how much reluctance is there among Christians in facing it?

Think of what many worshippers experience.  On a given Sunday the church service begins with worship songs that express and invite a response to God’s gracious love.  Then the sermon shifts the worshippers’ emotional and cognitive gears into reverse by offering lessons on finding and obeying God’s will.  The first movement features desires; the second elevates duties.  One treats the desires as wholesome; the next treats desires as detractors that need to be overruled by the listener’s willpower.

You might have noticed this pattern but pardoned it by assuming the two movements are partners—two sides of a whole.  But think for a moment.  Are not the two movements actually opposed?  They travel in different directions with opposite destinations; and they use different motives and foci.  One draws all the attention to God’s greatness; the other to the soul’s inadequacies.  One treats God’s efforts as active and effective; the other treats human efforts as central.  One is positive and winsome; the other is negative and discouraging.

This oscillation of messages leaves many heartfelt worshippers discouraged, if not dizzy, as they find themselves spinning in spiritual pirouettes.  It also helps account for a widespread defection from traditional church ministries by those who hunger for a more coherent and compelling sense of God’s presence.

Chalmers’ sermon, then, offers us a captivating vision: God’s love is what changes us.  As our affection for God grows—as he is revealed in Christ through the Word and affirmed to our hearts by the Spirit—our old and enslaving affections begin to be expelled.  This is a spirituality that grows with a rational and volitional progression, yet it is the heart that moves both the mind and the will to change.  Apart from God we bring nothing to this transformation.  This is the good news of God’s love in Christ.  May we all respond accordingly.

Glory in the Bible is a many splendored term. It speaks of God’s tangible brilliance; of his timeless praise and honor; of our future hope as those who know and love the Son; and much, much more. Most of all glory explains our purpose in life.

Glory invited a pause for reflection today after I walked the beach of Chennai, India, this morning and enjoyed a striking sunrise that expressed God’s creative glory. Yet on the way back to our hotel compound I walked past a number of sacred cows and some statues of Hindu divinities, reminding me that glory—as a function of attribution in worship—is all too often misplaced and misapplied. The Bible offers lessons galore on the subject.

In one of these—see Exodus 32-34—a golden calf displaced God’s proper place of worship. Just days earlier Israel had seen God’s glory as a staggering sound and fire display on Mount Sinai: they were terrified by the experience! The event was part of their ordination as God’s human representatives among the nations. Soon after, as Moses returned to the mountain for more instructions on what this honor involved, his brother Aaron and the people planned a party and a golden calf (recalling their experience of the gods of Egypt) was fabricated in order to be God’s physical stand-in for the occasion. Yet this was exactly what God had forbidden a few days before in one of his ten commands! In his jealous fury he spoke to Moses about abandoning the people. He, after all, as a holy God, would consume his unholy people with his fiery glory whenever they sinned: God and his people were morally incompatible!

Moses then asked God to show him his glory. What was he asking for? He needed to find some quality, some space, in God’s character that would allow an unholy people to have continuing contact with God even when they sinned:

Moses said, “Please how me your glory.” And [Yahweh] said, “I will make all my goodness pass before you and will proclaim my before you my name ‘The LORD.’ And I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, and I will show mercy on whom I will show mercy.” [33:18-19]

It is striking that glory and goodness were so fully affiliated by God in his answer to Moses. In this moment of mercy and grace he underscored for Moses that his glory is birthed out of his goodness; yet that goodness is not shaped by human expectations. He went on to reveal that in his goodness he was prepared to offer forgiveness for sin even though certain consequences for that sin would remain active in the heritage of the sinner.

The LORD passed before [Moses] and proclaimed, “The LORD, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, but who will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children and the children’s children, to the third and fourth generations.” [34:6-7]

It was on that basis—of God’s steadfast love as context for his forgiving sin—that Moses immediately asked God to forgive Israel and to continue to live among them in his soon-to-be-built tabernacle.

O Lord, please let the Lord go in in the midst of us, for it is a stiff-necked people, and pardon our iniquity and our sin and take us for your inheritance. [v.9]

Now let us turn to the New Testament where the importance of God’s goodness and glory is also central. One of the three apostle’s who were invited by Jesus to see him in his proper glory—on the mount where he was transfigured and showed himself off as divine with all the brilliant light of the Old Testament ’shekinah’—Peter would later speak of the moment: “For when [Jesus] received honor and glory from God the Father, and the voice was borne to him by the Majestic Glory, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased.” [2 Peter 1:17]

Another of the trio of apostles who saw Jesus in his mountaintop glory was John. His gospel makes a special point of tracing glory, beginning with, “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.” [1:14]

John’s exposition of glory is one of the major threads of his gospel. He elevates features that I can only introduce here but that invite further reflection by all of us.

First he sets out glory as something we receive from others: a transitive reality. That is, it always takes at least two—a subject and an object—for glory to be present: one to glorify and another to be glorified. In other words, John treats glory as a relational reality rather than as a non-relational capacity that one owns or accumulates.

In John 5, for instance, Jesus presented himself as equal to God by calling God his Father. Many religious leaders were startled by the claim and opposed him accordingly. Jesus offered support for his own standing but he also made it clear that the underlying obstacle to believing his claim was located in one of two competing loves: “For the Father loves the Son . . .” on the one hand (v.20), and later, “But I know that you do not have the love of God within you” (v.42), on the other. A living love for God opens the heart to believe.

And what was it that these critics of Jesus loved instead of God? Jesus exposed their hearts by comparing two competing sources of glory: “I do not receive glory from people” (v.41), Jesus said. And, by contrast, “How can you believe when you receive glory from one another and do not seek the glory that comes from the only God?” (v.44).

Later in his gospel John pressed Christ’s point home by exposing those who knew that the evidence for Christ’s status was compelling yet without responding to him.

[Many] of the authorities believed in him, but for fear of the Pharisees they did not confess it, so that they would not be put out of the synagogue, for they loved the glory that comes from man more than the glory that comes from God. [12:42-43]

This mutuality of glory has its eternal basis in the Godhead. Jesus, for instance, was the loving glorifier of his Father in John 12:23-28. This episode begins with a group of Greeks who want to see Jesus but he deferred the meeting until after the time that he is glorified by his death on the cross. At the cross, he promised, he would “draw all men to myself” (12:32)—including Greeks.

How so? By dying in a way that would lead to multiplying returns. He used the analogy of a seed being planted in order to bear many more kernels than what it gave up of itself. This selflessness of multiplication was his Father’s plan for salvation. The Son was prepared to die in order to achieve it. Listen to how Jesus processed this terrible yet wonderful strategy with his disciples.

“Now is my soul troubled. And what shall I say? ‘Father, save me from this hour’? But for this purpose I have come to this hour. Father, glorify you name.” Then a voice came from heaven: “I have glorified it, and I will glorify it again.” [12:27-28]

We must not miss the point here that the Father was also experiencing the pain of the crucifixion by giving up his beloved Son to ignominious death. It was this selflessness that is his glory—the display of his steadfast love as earlier expressed in John 3:16, “For God so loved the world that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.”

In his final priestly prayer of John 17 Jesus reiterated that God’s love accounts for this plan. Here it is that God’s addresses with eternal finality (“once and for all”) the problem raised in Exodus: how can a holy God dwell among an unholy people?

He solves it by giving the unholiness of his people to his Son—for which the Son then must die—while giving his collective sons and daughters—the Church—his Son’s holiness. In this vicarious exchange (applied by our participation in Christ’s life through faith) God’s love finally wins out over sin. This whole arrangement is to the glory of God: purposed by the Father and accomplished by the Son!

Listen, then, to the Son’s summary prayer.

“Father, the hour has come: glorify your Son that the Son may glorify you, since you have given him authority over all flesh, to give eternal life to all whom you have given him. And this is eternal life, that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent. I glorified you on earth having accomplished the work that you gave me to do. And now, Father, glorify me in your own presence with the glory I had with you before the world existed.” [vs.1-5]

Glory, we thus discover, is more than the honor that goes with selflessness; it is also the environment of God’s communion: his mutual, selfless, shared devotion of Father-to-Son and of Son-to-Father—all of which is sustained by the communicating work of the Spirit (see 1 Corinthians 2).

So it is that Jesus is willing to die in order that we—his beloved bride—can join him in heaven—all of which is birthed in love: “Father, I desire that they also, whom you have given me, may be with me where I am to see my glory that you have given me because you loved me before the foundation of the world” (v.24).

Glory, then, explains our purpose in life: to enjoy God’s mutual glory as we are drawn into the love that forms and sustains that glory. Our moral incompatibility ends as we, with the Father, adore the Son (and the Father who gave him to us and for us) above all else.

This is what we were made for!

Helmut Thielicke (1908-86), a German pastor and educator who remained faithful even under Hitler’s regime in WWII, wrote that the real competition in theology is not between modernists (or “liberals”) and conservatives but consists in a more basic—and unnoticed—conflict between Cartesians and non-Cartesians. As I’ll share below, I agree with him, but first let me unpack in very basic terms what he meant; then I’ll offer a corollary to his axiom.

Cartesianism, a label for the approach to God and knowing inaugurated by René Descartes (1596-1650), has been treated by many academics as the point where the Enlightenment was launched and where our current versions of secular modernity took root.

Descartes was a Roman Catholic yet his religious views were complex, shaped in part by his appreciation for mathematics and for the insights of the Copernican revolution. Additionally he had some acquaintances who were weary of the religious battles of the day and had turned to radical skepticism as a way to dismiss religion. Descartes, in response, applied his mathematical skills to matters of faith. His goal was to achieve certainty in the face of doubts. How? By showing how the rational certainty of solving a geometry or algebra problem can also be applied to a Christian problem—the need for certainty in matters of faith—in the face of challenges brought by the skeptics.

The unusual step he took was to adopt a weapon used against faith—skepticism—in order to defend faith. In this scheme he needed an insurmountable axiom or doubt-proof starting point to begin building a faith that has full certainty. By having a point beyond doubt—indubitable truth—he was confident that all other truth could be constructed around such a certainty. Doubt would be the instrument for finding such a starting point. Another way to say this is that he decided to doubt everything in order to discover what was left after his doubting.

So he sat down by his fireplace and began doubting. In time it dawned on him that his doubting could be treated as an axiomatic certainty. Thinking (the exercise of the mind in doubting) certifies existence. So that became his starting point: “I think, therefore I am” (or, in Latin, cogito ergo sum). Then he moved on to another step—in a logical pathway from an effect (his act of thinking) to a cause (something that must account for his act of thinking) and he concluded that this necessary cause is God. But what is this God like? Additional stages of reasoning achieved a portrayal of God very close to the Roman Catholic portrayal of God.

What happened with this little exercise? It was revolutionary in that it relocated the question of “how-we-know-what-we-know” (epistemology) away from the Christian tradition that God is the ultimate reference point of knowing—as in “In the beginning was the Word”—to a human starting point. And it also relocated the notion of being—God’s being and our own—away from God’s personal self-disclosure. The basis for knowing who God is and who we are is no longer his word but our rationality so that the new starting point became the act of human rationality. In philosophical terms, reason had trumped revelation and epistemology had leapfrogged ontology. In more practical terms humanity moved ahead of deity in the process of explaining reality. Rational certainty also became a new ambition in religion in place of relational encounter with God.

With this is an all too brief introduction let me return to Thielicke’s axiom. What he noted is a pattern: that Christian academic institutions, in particular, tend to depart from a living faith as soon as reason begins to trump revelation in a given setting. This movement from a pre-Cartesian confidence in God’s existence (and in his capacity to communicate effectively) to a Cartesian confidence in the human ability to determine God’s nature through intellect and logic, has often reshaped Christianity to something more satisfying to human reason—with human reason still subject to the Fall of Adam. Simply put, the Cartesian shift relocates the Scriptures to a place “below” reason instead of “above” reason.

To a non-Cartesian Bible reader it seems that all hell (to note the underlying spiritual impulse) is set loose in the shift: it features a new devotion to accommodating faith to current trends that are to be found among intellectuals yet not found in the Bible. The non-Cartesian, however, prefers the Bible to the ever-changing “certainties” of a given era.

On the other hand a bright young college student who has never heard of Descartes but who knows that a brilliantly logical professor is teaching things that the Bible clearly resists or denies—even when that teacher is a professing Christian—faces a dilemma. Who is right? Given the social and academic leverage the professor has, after a semester or two the student will often be a convert. How so? By coming to share the professor’s Cartesianism that seeks rational and logical certainty in place of a Word-based confidence. When viewed collectively the trajectory away from biblical Christianity will follow the direction of travel seen among any number of once-Christian institutions: Cartesianism becomes increasingly indifferent to Christ and even overtly hostile to any notice of the biblical God. The change is never intended at the start, but the outcome is inevitable.

Thielicke’s insights are useful but fail to solve the problem—he only sheds some light on why so many Christian academic centers move away from faith as they gain greater intellectual standing. He knew that any given non-Cartesian—Thielicke is a recent example, with a host of precursors such as Augustine, Luther, Calvin and others—can be as intellectually able, or more so, than a given Cartesian scholar. So his point was not to condemn learning but to show where it goes astray spiritually.

This is a crucial point: the problem is not in having and using one’s intelligence! The fundamentalists who rejected formal education made that mistake: by failing to distinguish Cartesian from non-Cartesian learning they linked a conspicuous erosion of faith among students to any form of higher education. Yet the real difference is not in learning but in the starting point of learning: do we begin by presuming the primacy of God or of man?  Do we start with “In the beginning God” or “In the beginning cogito“?

So now my corollary: the matter actually begins in the heart. Only when sin is resolved by the coming of Christ’s Spirit who pours out his love in the hearts of new believers will a non-Cartesian trajectory be formed. What Thielicke merely describes must be interpreted by an affective corollary, that the heart always follows its greatest desire. The love of self is the ultimate desire for a non-believer. Only when God captures the heart by revealing the loveliness of the Son through the wooing work of the Spirit will the intellect begin to think properly: as God made us to think. Only when God is the heart’s highest desire will honesty prevail in academic settings. Only when Christ is exalted will a proper bias be in play—the bias of the creation in showing off the brilliance of the creator.

Some readers may be skeptical of my skepticism towards Descartes’ axiomatic use of doubt. What can be done to overcome such doubts? Jesus offered an answer to some of the Bible scholars of his own day who were, it seems, proto-Cartesians. In John 5 Jesus was challenged for claiming his equality with the Father. Jesus answered with all the rational logic and evidence one could hope for—citing the witnesses of God, of Moses, and of the Scriptures in his favor—yet his bottom line issue is found in verse 42: “But I know that you do not have the love of God within you.” They rejected his logic because, without a love for God, they were blind to the Truth. They loved, instead, the glory of mutual approval—a human and Cartesian focus.

So the cure to Cartesianism is a discovery of God’s love, a love freely offered in Christ and unfolded throughout the Bible. Don’t go to school, read a book, or watch a movie without it!

I’m writing this in Boise, a city where I was touched by God’s grace many years ago. In 1976 I had been invited by a church there to launch a ministry to young adults. Now, decades later, I’ve spent the weekend visiting friends from that era—Nick, Howie, Way and Beth. Each has gone on to satisfying, if varied, careers with at least one feature in common: all of us have lived the good life!

But what is the good life? Is it linked to material comforts, to social standing, or to personal pleasures?

By those measures all five of us have missed the mark. None of us have big portfolios. None of us have any status except in very small circles. And our set of personal pleasures—using the ordinary sense of the phrase—are modest. We are, in fact, all ordinary folks living in modest circumstances. Nick picked up a 12 foot used sailboat for $250 so he may be the most extravagant one among us. Both Way and Howie are pastors in small churches. Nick works as a Christian education specialist with a mission agency. Beth supports her husband, a house church pastor, and teaches in a grade school. And I’m a pastoral care consultant with a small mission support agency. Not the good life by most measures, but it is a life all of us treat as a gift from God.

One biblical theme offers a basis for our own version of the good life. It came into focus for me as we held our first young adult group retreat in McCall about a month after I arrived in Boise—in February of 1976. It was a time for me to invite the 20 or so participants to a focus. The topic I selected was new to me. I called it “The Truth versus the Lie” and used John 8 as a focal point. Steady readers of this site will recognize that text as a favorite of mine as I take it up again and again. Why? Because it offers a distinctive basis for measuring whether a life is good…or something other than good.

Let me say more about it with a bit of technical commentary (bear with me, please!). In earlier years, during my college course in biblical Greek, I noticed that the underlying text of John 8:44 uses the singular form, “the lie” and the related particle “it”, but our English translations all globalize the usage so that it reads (as in the ESV here): “When he [the devil] lies [literally: "speaks the lie"] he speaks out of his own character, for his is a liar and the father of lies” [literally: "it"]. The same switch from the singular “lie” in the original language into a globalized form is also found elsewhere in the New Testament.

Let me give a literal reading of two such texts. One is Romans 1:25, “because they exchange the truth about God for the lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the creator…” Another is 2 Thessalonians 2:10-11, “and with all wicked deception for those who are perishing, because they refused to love the truth and so to be saved. Therefore God sends them a strong delusion, so that they may believe the lie.”

So in my winter talks at the McCall retreat center I proposed that even if the globalized version of “the lie”—translated as “what is false”—has merit for the translators, there is a biblical basis for identifying one original lie: the persistent ambition of Satan to attain independence from God by taking up a god-like status. Think, for instance, of the temptation of Jesus in the wilderness when Satan asked Jesus—the Son of God—to worship him! And it was this ambition that was the lynchpin of Adam’s fall: “you can be like God” by becoming a new and self-appointed moral agent: “knowing good and evil.”

The reality—or “the truth”—however, is that there is only One God, namely the Father-Son-and-Spirit God, and he alone is worthy of all worship; and he alone establishes the distinctions of good and evil. Not Satan; and not us.

So what is the truly good life? A Christ-based life: united to Goodness himself. A life lived with and by the truth that God alone is God. We are not gods and we should know not to compete with him. He alone is the source of life, truth and goodness. Apart from him we can do nothing. The measure is his own eternal life which owns us. And—now sharing in the life of faith—we find him to be the source of our love, joy, peace, patience, and more.

As we visited this weekend we all talked about some of the challenges we have faced or are facing at present. Beth’s husband has an aggressive brain cancer, discovered just a few weeks ago, and no health insurance. Yet as we spoke he told me that much to his surprise he experienced a distinct sense of joy at the same time he and Beth were processing the news. Joy? The good life? Yes.

Way has a church made up mainly of recovering alcoholics, drug addicts, and recently incarcerated people who are now believers—some making it and others still struggling. Yet we talked of the pleasure we share in God’s care for us.

I found that we all still have one thing in common. We know that God likes us. That is, that he loves us with a genuinely affective care! We know this to be true not only as a promise offered in Scriptures; but as a truth we have all shared for the past three decades. I’m not sure if any of the others recall the McCall retreat in the winter of 1976—probably not!—but the truth that God alone is God, and that the Lie is not to be embraced, is a reality shared by each of us even today.

Let me end on a more practical note. How does the good life of “living in the Truth” compare to “living in the Lie”? Let me leave that to you, the reader, to sort out in conversation with the Scriptures and with the greatest of all Guides to understanding the Word—Christ’s Spirit. But I can suggest a few possibilities to prime the pump.

Instead of seeking greater standing and status, live as if others are more important than you are. Instead of defining yourself by your skills and your knowledge, embrace the role of a servant who freely shares personal resources as gifts to build up others. Instead of seeking your own pleasures, delight yourself in pleasing others. Before judging others for their sinful behaviors, invite God to increase your compassion and love for them.

So, living the good life is all about being captivated by the one who, alone, is good: God himself. It’s a joy that will never end!

Sometime near the year 220 the church father Tertullian asked a provocative question: “What indeed has Athens to do with Jerusalem? What concord is there between the Academy and the Church? What between heretics and Christians?” 

That question touches a tension I felt in my career as a college and graduate school educator. I found myself asking a narrower form of his question: “What does Greek ethical theory have to do with Christian spirituality?” I also discovered Martin Luther to be a companion in asking that question.  His answer, as I paraphrase his sentiments here, was blunt: the relation is one of darkness to light; of unfaith to faith; of death to life. And I’m convinced Luther was biblically aligned and correct. 

An important caveat needs to be offered before we go on. This challenge does not dismiss careful thought in favor of nonsensical faith. Tertullian was a trained lawyer, philosophically engaged and well read. Luther, too, was an academic who knew his philosophy—as an educator his earliest duty was to teach Aristotelian philosophy. They were never anti-intellectuals. Rather they used their minds to challenge basic assumptions and values of the secular philosophers. They recognized that the human mind is not the problem. Instead the problem is in spiritually blinded hearts that underlie and direct the minds of unbelievers. 

The pagan philosophers assumed that human reason is able to discover and apply moral truth with the result of human righteousness and virtue.  Aristotle, for instance, wrote in his Nicomachean Ethics that, “men become builders by building houses, harpists by playing the harp. So, too, we become righteous people by practicing righteousness…” Christians, on the other hand look elsewhere in establishing righteousness.  Jesus, alone, is the living Truth and his word is truth that sets us free from enslaving sin. So that righteousness is found only through new life in Christ: “You must be born again.”

Luther identified this polarity when he posted 97 theses entitled the Disputation Against Scholastic Theology—a list of points he offered for debate nearly two months before his much more famous collection of 95 Theses. In the Disputation the source of real righteousness was stated in two adjoining theses: “40. We do not become righteous by doing righteous deeds but, having been made righteous, we do righteous deeds. This in opposition to the philosophers. 41. Virtually the entire Ethics of Aristotle is the worst enemy of grace. This in opposition to the scholastics.” [Lull, Martin Luther's Basic Theological Writings, p.16]. 

At this point let me be a bit autobiographical. For a number of years in my early career as a Bible College instructor I taught an overview course called “Doctrine and Ethics.” I prepared for the role by reading a load of books on ethics written by evangelical Christian scholars. I also adopted the text used by other faculty at our college who taught the same course. Along with that I read some secular works on Ethics. Yet after my second or third year with the course it dawned on me that I was spending more time in class debating the text I had assigned my students than agreeing with it. Finally I asked the really basic question: “Why this?!” 

The dissonance I felt was stirred by my Bible reading. What I read there was at odds with much of what I was covering in my Ethics course. So I finally asked, “What indeed has classical Greek ethics to do with the Bible?” In teaching the course I became convinced that what the Bible calls sanctification must be seen as the real basis for Christian morality; and not the more behaviorally-focused content in our Christian Ethics texts. In many respects the latter merely mimic the values and paradigms of Aristotle and others while ignoring Scriptural themes. It was with this cognitive discomfort that I traveled to London for three years of study and, in part, it was this question I wanted to answer through my research: just how did we get here? 

In London I discovered Martin Luther. A friend and fellow-student, Paul Blackham, alerted me to the Lutheran writings after I shared with him the split I saw among 17^th-18^th century English puritans over these issues. It was a “eureka” moment: Luther had gotten there ahead of me! I was pedestrian and Luther brilliant yet both of us reached the same conclusions by reading our Bibles! 

Enough of my personal story. The real question we need to consider is the “so what?” What difference is there between the two views and how does it make a difference in the real world of day-to-day life? 

It changes our moral focus. We turn away from self to Christ.  Rather than looking to our own moral progress in accord with the ethicists we now gaze at God as revealed in his Son, Jesus. We cease to put faith in our own moral capacities; instead we place our faith in Christ alone. The motivation of duty is replaced by desire.  We follow Jesus because he loves us and captures our hearts. This because we are “born again” and born “from above” as the Spirit of God pours God’s love into our hearts. We change morally as the character of Christ is formed in us by the Spirit’s work, from the inside-out, as Luther insisted. It is never achieved from the outside-in—by building virtues and adopting moral disciplines—as Aristotle taught. Instead we listen to Jesus and what he told the rich ruler: no one is good but God alone. So God is our sole moral resource and we live with goodness only through union with Christ—not through “keeping all the commandments from my youth” as the rich ruler presumed. 

When I returned from London I moved from teaching at the undergrad college to the graduate school. What, among other courses, was I asked to teach? Doctrine and Ethics once again! But this time was different. My course had a new focus: the ethics of faith in Christ. As Paul put it in Romans 14, “Whatever is not of faith is sin.” What, then, is the object of faith? Paul answered that succinctly in Romans 10:17—”So faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ.” Christ and his word is the focus of faith, and the source of our moral transformation. 

I continued teaching the course without tossing away the Christian works that draw deeply from non-Christian reflections, but now with a purpose to show the differences of focus between those works and what the Bible offers. And with that I increasingly praised God for his Son whose love for us captures us, and whose truth sets us free from our former slavery to sin. Looking to Jesus as the author and finisher of faith is, after all, the real basis for moral transformation.