One of the startling moments in Christ’s ministry came as he answered a tough question on divorce and remarriage. Jesus told his followers that marriage is meant to be a lifelong commitment that precludes divorce (see Matthew 19); and they then asked him about the option for divorce that Moses had provided in the Old Testament. His answer: “Because of your hardness of heart Moses allowed you to divorce your wives . . .”

In effect Jesus was saying that God’s real desires could sometimes differ from what he allows us to do. So my point in starting here is not to poke around in the thorny bush of divorce and remarriage but to ask what we should make of God’s apparent accommodation to human stubbornness—to our “hardness of heart.” The question is this: if God really does offer us some room for moral accommodation can we or should we take advantage of the space it offers us?

It’s an important question. One strong impression that comes with bold Bible reading is a sense of how far our Western and modern (and even post-modern) Christian patterns of life may differ from biblical ideals. I think, for instance, of biblical calls for holiness—including sexual and ethical purity—in a culture that winks at boundaries. Of calls to hold human life as sacred. Of calls for social and economic justice. For meaningful and constructive conversations in place of degrading entertainments and divisive gossip. For mercy and care as opposed to relational and physical violence or the quieter abuse of selfish disinterest towards others. For men to be godly leaders. For marriages to display a trajectory towards increasing oneness rather than towards negotiated detachment and emotional separation. For shepherds to lead churches selflessly and sacrificially. For lives to be lived in the world but not of the world—offering a distinction between Christ and the brokenness of our fallen culture.

The points of tension are innumerable and I suspect my little list will have hit hot buttons for some—which only illustrates the point. And as Christ indicated above, there is a biblical diagnosis for these issues: our hearts are still hard towards God. Mine included.

What, then, should be our response? Should we take advantage of God’s grace in Christ—knowing that whenever our sin increases, grace increases even more? Paul rejected that option in his writing to the Romans. Grace will always match our needs, but transformed hearts refuse to abuse that privilege.

Or should we repent and determine to shift our hearts in a new direction? The solution of working to be godly—as if we could stomp out the raging forest fire of sin with our tennis shoes—is nonsense because a hardened heart doesn’t even realize that it’s hard! It would be like telling a tone-deaf person to sing a complex melody in perfect form.

Our hearts, after all, are defined by desires. Or, to put it differently, the heart is the response-center of the soul, made by God in order to respond to him in love. Every moment of life is meant to be lived in the purview of God’s love. Yet that bond was violated by Adam; and since then all of us have embraced that violation because in Adam all of us are now birthed without the presence of the Spirit. In his dismissal of God the Spirit’s ministry to his offspring also ended. And it was the Spirit who had once poured out God’s life and love into his heart.

So we now—if we either lack the Spirit’s life or are newly born in Christ but still oriented to old desires—find ourselves responding to other invitations to love. And these invitations, if not of Christ, are all illicit and corruptive. Jesus was saying as much when he declared, “apart from me you can do nothing”. We were made to abide in him, in his love and in his word. So a heart is measured, ultimately, by its orientation to Christ and to the Father through him. If a person finds Christ unattractive he or she is simply showing off their hard hearted status: of a stone-like disposition towards the creator and lover of their soul.

I know I’m being repetitive here in my review of a Spirit-centered and heart-based spiritual anthropology; it’s a familiar refrain from earlier Spreading Goodness entries.

I need to review the point in order to shift gears and to move to a point of specific application in the question of how we can still be hard hearted while believing in Christ. And here it is: we are being hard hearted when we refuse to read the Bible relationally, daily, and boldly.This has to be said in the face of vast indifference to relational Bible reading found in the church today. God exists in eternal, triune communion and his Son has been called the eternal “Word”—God loves us and shares himself with us through his word. The battle of light and dark, of life and death, pivots on God’s word versus the Serpent’s word.

So the gravest question of life is this: whose voice are we responding to in a given moment? There is no “neutral” realm of life-conversation—Paul made that clear in Ephesians 2:1-3 where he wrote of our former life as being under the rule of Satan, God’s enemy. Paul, thank God, was at least willing to confront the issue. Today it isn’t even raised in most churches. Paul, for instance, called the Corinthians spiritual babies—utterly immature. They were still nursing on milk rather than eating spiritual meat.

Yet we Christians still tend to nibble at the Bible if we taste it at all. Christians will watch two or more hours of television in a day; or invest as many hours on the internet and then consider ten minutes in the Scriptures, if that, to be more than enough to satisfy any spiritual obligations.

Let me be blunt: that approach is hard hearted. God offers us his heart in the Scriptures yet hardened hearts could care less: God isn’t very compelling compared to _______. But think about it. To ignore the Scriptures—the most tangible self-expression God offers us today—is like telling a spouse, “ten minutes of you is all I need in a given day, thank you.” Try that and see how far your relationship goes ahead.

Jesus was making this point in John 8:31-59 as he confronted the “believers” who were not ready to listen to his word: “If you abide in my word you will know the truth and the truth will set you free.” To listen to him is to be set free from the world and its values. To listen to him is to be captured by the Father’s love that the Son reflects and reveals. To resist him is to be given over to the desires of the devil. Jesus made it clear enough in this text—along with his disclosure of his union with the Father—that it almost cost him his life before his time.

Now let’s turn to the applied solution: what can we do if we have hard hearts and have an itch to be open hearted? As one who is also hard hearted too much of the time here’s my best advice: pray the prayer of Psalm 139: 23-24 at least once a day and then start to respond to God’s nudges to read his word and to respond to what it tells us.

Search me, O God, and know my heart! Try me and know my thoughts! And see if there be any grievous way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting!

Here’s the point: the heart is so self-deceptive that only God can reset it. And he is more than prepared to step in once the invitation is offered. In fact, he will have been at work beforehand if we offer any invitation in the first place! That’s because our hearts were made by him and for him. And only his presence stirs the heart in the right—the God-oriented—way.

So while Jesus spoke to his audience about hardness of heart in the times of Moses, with a suggestion that their current questioning was still aligned with that hardness, I think we can presume that Jesus was not expecting them to stay there.  The whole point of his teaching was to move them forward into love and greater faith.  It’s a calling we need to receive as well.

The last six weeks have been eye-opening for me. At the beginning I was in Kathmandu, Nepal, and I’m now in Siem Reap, Cambodia—home of Angkor Wat and other ancient Khmer ruins. Today, a Sunday, I’m also in the Psalms in my current Bible reading; and the collision of these vastly different experiences calls for a comment.

First, Kathmandu. As Lareau, my Barnabas colleague, and I met there with local Christians for a four-day visit we drove through an area where craftsmen were busy fabricating idols—dozens and dozens could be seen as we drove through the “idol district”. Images from Buddhist, Hindu, and perhaps still other religions, were being shaped and gilded with obvious devotion. Kathmandu is a place devoted to serious worship!

Then yesterday and today, with memories of Nepal still fresh, I toured the widespread Angkor complex with some friends after we concluded our time at a conference in Battenbang. In the process of our tour we found modern devotees among the ruins of the varied divinities that were once celebrated there hundreds of years ago. Figures of often headless Buddhas—desecrated by competing Hindu devotees in times long past—already had pungent incense sticks burning as we visited in the early morning. We were offered the chance to light some ourselves by attending priests but we politely bypassed the offer. Other expressions of active worship were to be found at many points among the sites we visited: orange saffron robes covered some of the larger ancient statues that are still intact; and in some cases additional modern items surrounded them.

Finally, this morning in my Bible reading I reached Psalm 136 where the call to thank God for his goodness is stated and elaborated; and it offers a steady refrain after every stanza, “for his steadfast love endures forever.”

Here’s what struck me: we are all worshippers. Where we differ is in what we worship and why. The Psalmist was worshiping God as one whose love had captured him. The devotees in Kathmandu and Angkor Wat were also expressing forms of worship in their own manner and for their own purposes.

So my point in noticing this juxtaposition of worship events is neither to endorse some form of pluralism—the notion that everyone must do what seems best to them—or to set up a debate about the superiority of one over the others. A discussion of what is true and what is false is needed but this posting is not that venue.

So while I am a Christian, and I certainly do believe in Christ and not in the others, in taking that stance I have no inclination to be sharp or uncaring towards those who travel in different directions from my own. In fact I long for words and ways to draw them to the God I love and who loves them.

I can be positive towards those with whom I disagree deeply, in part, because I am happy to find others in the world who are bold enough to worship. And in the Western world I admire those who worship even in the face of a fierce bias against any type of worship. In our “enlightened” West an aggressive secularism despises spiritual passion with a misguided passion of its own.

Which should be a signal to us that even the most ardent secularist is still a worshiper—even if his or her worship lacks statues, or candles, or baptismal fonts, or choruses, or prayers. I think, for instance, of the great secularist idols. And by the term idol I have in mind the sort of biblical warning against “greed which is idolatry”—that is, the sorts of devotion that participants fail to recognize for what it really is: worship. The secularist, then, may have become a follower of wealth, or health, or power, or status, or even altruism—all of which are ambitions that make them into increasingly “god-like” figures in their own eyes and in certain select circles of fellow devotees. What bonds them together is their ultimate devotion to autonomy—to a self-defined independence—which is a supreme form of worship.

The reason for making such a blanket claim is my Christian certainty that we are all made by God and for God as lovers—lovers made to respond to him. In that creation-context our existence as processing beings is, then, always affective and heart-based. Not surprisingly even secular neurobiologists have sometimes described our ability to process experience as “thinking by feeling”.

The point is that we orient ourselves to the world through what we love—”desire” or “like” or “want”—most, and that love is our purest form of worship. It is what Paul pointed to in Romans 1:25 in charging the world with guilt for having “worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator”.

Let me return to my multiple exposures to worship in the past weeks. What I found in common among them is a deep devotion expressed through various outward behaviors. Money was being invested in the worship exercises; time and energy were part of the process; and efforts to refocus the soul in new, other-worldly, directions were paramount.

What struck me as dramatically different about the Christian faith was embedded in the orientation of the worship. In reading the Psalm about God’s goodness, with its refrain, “for his steadfast love endures forever”, I find a focus on God’s initiative, not ours. It offers a confidence that God already knows about our sin. For those of us who have come to him he—as other Psalms and the New Testament make clear—has already removed our sins far from us, as far as the east is from the west.

So at the meeting of Christians in Battenbang, before we came to Angkor, and at the meeting with Christians in Nepal, what characterized our unity was not an effort to please God but a celebration of God’s pleasure in us: of his love for us. And with that we find the encouragement of being freed from guilt, shame, fear, and doubt, all because of what God has already done for us in Christ.

So it is that we bring to other worshipers a sense of appreciation for their felt longings, and for their efforts to do the right thing. But where we differ is in knowing that the right thing is to focus on the right person, on Christ. There we discover a love that endures forever; a love of response rather than an unending burden of duty.

So let me end this reflection, and this trip to Cambodia, with my own response to God and an invitation to worshipers of other gods: “Oh, taste and see, Jesus is good! Come to him and find your desired peace and refuge!”

I was asked to speak about encouragement. Given the topic I guessed that at least some of the retreat participants already knew about its negative alternatives, of discouragement and its lurking big brother, depression.

The assignment turned out to be more challenging than I expected. I first considered what the option of simple volition might offer—the answer of the simple ditty from a decade or two back, “Don’t worry; be happy!” A nice sentiment, but winsomely misguided and impossible to apply. It’s like telling a person to turn on the lights during a power outage.

So I next asked myself, “And what causes emotional disruptions?” Let me stay with the analogy of electrical power. That’s like asking a lineman in charge of the power grid, “And what are the most common reasons for you to be called out?” His answers might include broken lines caused by storms; burned out fuses; short circuits; power plant problems; and more. Yet the problem is usually somewhere in the transmission network rather than in the power plant itself. Nowadays most of the developed world has reliable power generation systems, so that’s the last point of concern.

Here’s a question, then. Does the analogy of the electric power grid actually apply to our soul concerns? I’m convinced it does. As just suggested, lost electric power can be assessed in three steps: is the problem in the source; in the transmission; or in the appliance I’m using? In other words a working appliance assumes an uninterrupted connection to the power source. So our analogy presumes that encouragement and discouragement are relational, with encouragement gained from a source outside ourselves: from an emotional power source.

We must be careful, though, not to insist that restored relationships are the immediate solution to every form of discouragement. A post partum depression, for instance, can be traced to the mother’s physical state—a function of chemistry. I also know of some who experience seasonal depressions and need a good sunshine cure.

We also can be discouraged by impersonal circumstances that disrupt our lives—the loss of a job, or some sort of property loss. So let me say from the outset that what follows next must always be an invitation, not a task.

With that said, here is what I came to in preparing my talks: the deepest sorts of discouragement come from broken bonds of love. Courage for life, on the other hand, comes from being loved. To put it in terms of what I’ve written before about God’s being, we are made as transitive beings: designed for relationships in the image of God’s own Triune relationality. Call this the need to love and to be loved. Without both of these we begin to lose our courage for life.

But, on the other hand, in the love the Spirit pours out in our hearts—a love more profound than the superficial romantic and sexually construed love of our culture—we find the ultimate basis for deep encouragement. It offers us a way forward emotionally when darkness wraps its coils around us. Certainly this is what Paul had in mind when he offered some otherwise implausible instructions:

Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice. Let your reasonableness be known to everyone. The Lord is at hand; do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. (Philippians 4:4-7)

So the power supply for emotional encouragement is this love of God offered to us by God through Christ and expressed to our hearts by the Spirit.

Some readers are certain to ask, “Is it really that easy? Aren’t we back to humming ‘Don’t worry, be happy’ with this sort of advice.” The answer is, absolutely not.

What makes all the difference is the reality that the “Lord is at hand”—that is, he is immediately concerned with our welfare and alert to our needs. Our requests have someone “on the other end”—God—who is listening to us with a devotion of love for us that was expressed through the cross. It is this relational certainty that brings peace.

That’s not to say that God won’t allow us to experience hard times; or that his love requires him to maintain our personal financial, social, and physical security. What he offers, instead, is the embrace he shares with his Son who died on the cross for our sake. This love is poured out to us by the Spirit so that we begin to have emotional access to it in our activity of rejoicing. Or, to put it another way, we begin to engage God’s reality rather than our own self-absorbed view of life as soon as we begin to tell him how much we delight in him.

This is not a mind-game, either, of saying something we don’t really believe. The point is that the Lord really is at hand, expressing his love to us both through the Scriptures and through the Spirit who is present to us as we read and respond to the Scriptures.

In other words we begin to reciprocate God’s already-present-love once we begin to rejoice. We are simply living out an appropriate response to his many initiatives on our behalf. In rejoicing we find our eyes being opened to see why our rejoicing is so proper and fulfilling. We rediscover worship, and with worship the “transmission line” between our hearts and God’s heart is restored.

So as I’m here in Cambodia, speaking to a wonderful group of believers about encouragement in an emotionally difficult setting, all I’ve done is to make God and his love for us our focus. And although we are just halfway through the retreat we already have some rich measures of new courage instilled in our hearts. And it will only get better. For that we rejoice!

British Professor Colin Gunton caught my attention when he said, “I prefer not to speak of God’s attributes but of his perfections.” He pressed the point by noting that the language of attribution centers on the perceiver rather than on the one perceived. So any attributes suggest our human capacity to assign labels to God on his behalf. Gunton preferred, instead, to use the language of God’s perfections because, while denoting God’s inherent qualities, they suggest our place as responders to God rather than as initiators.

It struck me as a small but appropriate corrective to a human impulse to view and represent God in terms defined more by our interests than by the priorities and emphases of God’s own self-disclosures in the Bible. My question for this entry is whether Gunton’s proposal might be sharpened.

But first we should ask why Gunton even raised the matter. I don’t recall that he offered a reason, but the move suggested a response to an underlying impulse in theology: a human tendency to reshape what we know of God in terms of our own interests. That is, to engage God’s self disclosures as resources for selfish personal benefits.

To engage God as a source of personal benefit is not necessarily wrong, of course, if all we mean to do is ask how we should respond properly to him. But what if sin plays a role in the reshaping process? Augustine, after all, treated sin as self-love—”concupiscence”—and Luther treated it similarly, as a “curving in” on ourselves so that as sinners we perpetually seek to serve ourselves. And assuming that even theologians are fallen—although many are repentant and have grown in real faith—the Fall will still account for a human bias towards domesticating God and his word: of making God into a resource for human self-love. Aaron, for instance, claimed that his golden calf was actually just an image of Yahweh—even as the fallen impulses of the Israelite nation turned this “God” into an excuse to have an unseemly party.

If such a distortion is present even in speaking of God’s attributes, what are the results? One feature is a preference to treat all of God’s self-disclosures as intransitive qualities—whether speaking of them as attributes or as perfections. That is, to treat God as a collection of essential and divine, but non-relational, resources. Take holiness, for instance. If God is seen to be holy, what does that actually mean? If we treat him as a resource, and if we are living as sinfully autonomous (“self-loving”) perceivers, then we may be reshaping God into an infinitely large container of something called holiness.

That is, since by using an intransitive perspective of God we portray him in static terms—as a self-contained essential being—then we, as those made in God’s image, are free to see ourselves as little bits of this intransitive God who also contain some measure of holiness. So, too, we begin to see ourselves as carriers of goodness, love, faithfulness, and so on, to the degree that we draw upon these communicable attributes. God is, in this approach, our Genie and we are the beneficiaries as we rub up against him on Sundays to gather measures of God-ness for ourselves.

But by recognizing that God discloses himself as triune and relational—as the eternal Father-Son-and-Spirit God—we find a transitive and relational being rather than an intransitive monad or singularity defined by a set of essential qualities. And here even Gunton’s proposed language of perfections may fail if the identified perfections do not take on the underlying relationship in which all God’s qualities exist.

Transitivity, after all, speaks to the subject-object or one-and-other state of being that is common to our experience. A transitive verb, for instance, identifies some sort of relationship between two or more objects or actors. To say “I believe you”, for instance, is a transitive sentence. An intransitive verb, by contrast, lacks any relationship. “I am” is intransitive.

Why is this important? For at least two reasons. First, transitivity is inherent to God’s triune, relational being: to the God who spoke, “let us make man in our image”. If we are to maintain our faith in the Father-Son-and-Spirit God then we must adopt language appropriate to that bedrock reality of being.

Second, we must repent of our fixation on a “capacity”-based view both of God and of ourselves. By that I mean our fallen tendency to see personhood mainly as intransitive states of being. If I think of myself, for instance, as constituted by a set of skills, learnings, powers, and purposes, I have actually begun to see myself as a monadic and relatively autonomous self-moved entrepreneur.

Let us turn again to God’s holiness, then. Will it differ to speak of God’s holiness from within the revealed context of his eternal relational being—rather than to speak of his attributes or perfections in static essential terms?

Yes. Holiness must be seen, trinitarianly, not as some ethereal moral quality but as the moral ethos of God’s dynamic mutuality. So that all that has ever existed in God’s eternal, glorious communion has a label: love. And the quality of that love is holiness. That is, nothing unseemly or impure—something inappropriate to God’s mutual, active love—is able to exist in the context of that love.

We must also reengage all of God’s so-called attributes from within the triune insights of biblical theology. For instance, if we speak of God’s immutability, impassibility, omniscience, omnipotence, and so on, what difference does it make if we start the conversation from within the transitivity of God’s eternal triune communion? Frankly I believe we will find some misfits—especially to the degree that Christian theology has assimilated the lists of God’s qualities rooted in Aristotle’s a-relational Metaphysics, all of which are notable for being anchored in an essentially monadic “self-moved mover.”

So I applaud the late Colin Gunton for raising an important question. Our task now is to take it up, while reading our Bibles, to see where it might lead us. My confidence is that the God we begin to describe as a result will be far more attractive than the God represented in some of our current systematic theologies.