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.

It is my pleasure to introduce Gretchen George as a guest contributor.  A friend told me of Gretchen’s story almost two years ago.  Through that indirect contact Gretchen very graciously sent me a summary of her Bible reading experience.  Here is her story.  May it encourage you as much as it encouraged me.

Those of you who have followed the posts on this website for any length of time know that Ron regularly challenges readers to read the Bible “boldly and relationally.”  Over the years, Ron has directly and indirectly challenged many people to begin reading the Bible in this way.  I am one of those people.  So when Ron asked if I would share a bit about my experience in reading through the Bible cover to cover, I was thrilled for the opportunity!

About 10 years ago, I went through a painful divorce.  I suddenly found myself a single parent of two children, then 4 and 5 years old.  As I was searching through the Scriptures for hope and encouragement, I was profoundly impacted by the words of Deuteronomy 6:5-9:

Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength.  These commandments that I give you today are to be upon your hearts.  Impress them on your children.  Talk about them when you sit at home and when walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up.  Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads.  Write them on the door frames of your houses and on your gates.

Although I have been a Christian since I was a small child, read the Bible regularly, attended Bible studies, etc., I was confronted with the fact that I didn’t know the Bible nearly well enough to teach my children the way these verses describe.  I began to pray that the Lord would show me how I could begin to know the Scriptures—and Him—in that intimate kind of way.  About six months later, I got a call from a former coworker, telling me about the Bible read-through, and inviting me to join her and her daughter in reading through the Bible.  I knew instantly that this was the Lord’s answer to my prayers.  I was excited!  We have been reading through the Bible together twice a year ever since.

The impact that this kind of Bible reading has had on my life has been profound.  For one, I have a greater understanding of God’s personal love for me and my children, and His active involvement in our lives.   For example, early on in the healing process, I told a friend that I felt like I was standing in quicksand.  Shortly thereafter, I opened my Bible and saw these words from Psalm 40:2, “He lifted me out of the slimy pit, out of the mud and mire; He set my feet on a rock and gave me a firm place to stand.”

Another time I was telling God that I felt vulnerable and unprotected.  He responded with Psalm 91:4, “He will cover you with his feathers, and under his wings you will find refuge; his faithfulness will be your shield and rampart.” Time after time I have opened God’s Word and been enveloped in my Heavenly Father’s loving arms.  It’s a marvelous experience!

I have barely begun to touch the edge of who God is—-His glory, power, holiness, and wisdom—and it compels me to know Him more.  Take the time to read through the last few chapters of Job.  The God Job encounters—my God—is awesome!  Reading the Bible in large portions at a time gives you a picture of how this awesome God has worked through the generations and carried out His plan for salvation in a way that you don’t see when you pick out chapters and verses here and there.

Reading through the Bible has helped me to understand the sinfulness of my own heart.  It has deepened my love for Christ and given me such thankfulness for my salvation.  Because I became a Christian at such a young age, I don’t think I grasped the depth my sinfulness.   Luke 7:47 says. “But he who has been forgiven little loves little.“ It is our understanding of the deceitfulness and wickedness inside of us that causes us to love our Savior so much.  Our deep love for our Lord results in a desire to please Him and to want to avoid anything that doesn’t bring glory to Him.  And, when confronted with the temptation to sin, we can fight back with the Sword of the Spirit.  Even Jesus did that!

Each time Satan tempted Him in the desert, He responded with God’s Word!

Seeing the holiness of God and my own sinfulness in a fresh way played a vital role in my being able to forgive my former husband for the incredible grief he caused me and my children by his choices.  Early on following the divorce, I received what may be the best advice I have ever gotten in my life.  The person said to me, “Gretchen, whenever the pain hits, whenever the anger comes, get down on your knees and ask God to give you a heart of forgiveness, and keep doing it until the sting is gone.”

As I did that, the Lord was so faithful and gracious to meet me right where I was.  The pinnacle of those experiences occurred one day as I was crying out to God and telling Him that I wanted to forgive, but I didn’t know how.  I then opened my Bible and saw the words of Psalm 130:4, “If you, Lord, kept a record of sin, O Lord, who could stand? But with you there is forgiveness; therefore you are feared.” It suddenly dawned on me that the grief I felt over my former husband’s offenses was but a small taste of the grief that my Lord feels over my sin.  How could I not forgive?!   It was the turning point for me in healing.  Oh, the blessing of God’s Word!

The Bible tells us to seek wisdom, to cry out for it, to search for it as for a treasure.  The thread of God’s wisdom is woven throughout the pages of Scripture.  It’s there for the taking, and yet we so often ignore it.   Having more of the Bible in my heart has helped me to access this wisdom more readily in my daily life.

My children, now ages 14 and 15, are able to take in and accept my decisions and discipline more easily than many of their peers because they know that the Bible is the foundation of my parenting.  As a nurse on a cancer surgery unit and the leader of a single parents’ ministry, I regularly encounter people who are hurting, discouraged, and frightened.  To be able to share God’s wisdom and love as expressed in Scripture is such a blessing.  Ten years ago, I would have stood by and wished I could help but would have had little to offer.

Over these past 10 years of reading the Bible in this way, I have developed a love for it, and for the Lord, that I never had in all my years as a Christian previously.  I recall reading in I Chronicles and being bogged down with what seemed to be an endless list of unpronounceable names.  Then the Holy Spirit reminded me, “I know you by name, just as I know these people by name.”  Those lists of names no longer seemed tedious!

I so enjoy books of the Bible that I’m sure I hadn’t opened previously in years.  When was the last time you read Zephaniah?   Look at the message of love you’re missing in Zephaniah 3:17, “The Lord your God is with you, he is mighty to save.  He will take great delight in you, he will quiet you with his love, he will rejoice over you with singing.”  God is waiting to pour out His love to you on every page of the book He has written!

There is much more I could say, but this has already gotten longer than intended.   The bottom line, though, is this:  You have a God who loves you so much.  He desires a deep, intimate love relationship with you.  His love is etched into His Word.  I urge to open it up and begin reading as you never have before.

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!

This entry was completed on January 1, 2010.

This morning I got word that my uncle has advanced lung cancer. It was tough news to receive on the morning of New Year’s day. Very tough. My mother’s youngest brother.

My connections with Uncle Earl over the years have been too thin, yet I’ve always admired him and cared for him. He’s a gifted, sensitive, and self-effacing man whose wry humor always keeps things in balance. What I heard this morning is that the disease has advanced so far that no chemotherapy or aggressive radiation treatments will be used. I’m not beyond having hope, but so far we haven’t heard anything from the medical community that offers human hope.

The news gives a certain perspective to life. It reminds me once again that life is “a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes” (James 4:14). When I was much younger and doing my first Bible read-through this verse in James caught my attention. I’ve now had nearly 45 years of reminders since noticing it: of having national and international figures die as part of the daily news; of losing relatives, friends, and acquaintances. I still miss my father who has been gone for over 20 years. Life is brief and uncertain: a mist.

Even in reflecting on the pain that goes with such losses this entry is not meant to be a lament. There are different ways to view death. Two weeks ago I attended the funeral of a man who touched my life years before at a key moment. Willard Aldrich was then president of the college where I held a short-term staff position. He invited me to shape my anticipated seminary studies with a view to become a college educator. I took his advice. When he died he was 100 years old and his memorial service was a celebration of how his life had touched many, many others.

When my uncle passes from this life—whether sooner or later—he, too, will have touched many lives. Sometimes in very small ways—my enjoyment today of listening to the banjo was birthed in Earl’s lively plucking and strumming—and his two daughters, my lovely cousins Blythe and Lynne, have become significant contributors to two major Seattle-area companies, Starbucks and Boeing. Gifts beget gifts.

So it is that today a double reflection has emerged: of having a new year ahead of us, with all its potential opportunities; and the reminder from Willard, and the news about Earl, that life is only a mist. One reflection is about the near term of today, tomorrow, and this coming year. The other is about the longer term reality of life and death.

Let me start with the longer term future. One of my deepest certainties of faith is that death is not an end but a beginning. As I shared in my last entry, “On Christmas Day”, one of the great motif’s of the Bible is that God the Father determined in the beginning to create a bride for his Son. And all of us who “kiss the Son”—I’m thinking here of Psalm 2—will have the joy of being included in the event foreshadowed in Psalm 45: of the Son being given his bride. This picture of the Son’s marriage with his collective bride—all of us who know and love him—culminates at the end of the book of Revelation with the wedding feast of the Lamb.

The point of this “big” view—extending beyond our present existence—is that this life only raises a curtain on something much, much greater than whatever it is that this life offers. And the Bible regularly reminds readers that this world, despite its moments of joy and promise, has been broken by our deeply rooted alienation from the Creator. It gives us enough promise to make us long for a better place and time, but it never gets us there. Heaven is not a current address for any of us.

And yet we are called citizens of heaven as soon as we embrace the Son who grants us his Father’s eternal life. Our response to him loosens our embrace of other ambitions—all the promises of the pseudo-heavens this world offers us. As the old folk chorus puts it, “This world in not my home, I’m just a passing through . . .” Life is a mist.

The second reflection is shaped by this bigger picture. Today is the first day of the new year. No one knows exactly how the year will unfold but most of us are optimistic about it: we hope to enjoy family and friendships, to make plans for work, studies, travels, and so on. By tradition a new year offers new opportunities: something of a blank slate to begin writing anew. We need that, don’t we! It’s the mercy of a fresh start.

What we must not miss, though, is that in most cases the bigger picture will show a single trajectory of travel from year to year. Our basic ambitions don’t change just because we take down an old annual calendar and put up a new one. Instead our lives are ruled by our greatest desires—or by our “will” as it’s often labeled in our Western Stoicism. Yet it’s actually our hearts that define our directions in life. So even having the clean slate of a new year offers no real mercy unless our hearts are well-directed for the new year. And only a new heart offers promise of a better direction in the new year.

So let me return now to the letter written by James, and the “mist” discussion I noted above. That text comes soon after an earlier discussion of two types of wisdom: one from “above” and a wisdom that is “not” from above! Listen, then, to James:

Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and make a profit”—yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes. Instead you ought to say, “If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that.” (James 4:13-15)

That little addition, “if the Lord wills”, is all that differs between making plans one way or in another way. One is an exercise of human independence from God; the other is an exercise of engaging God’s providence: the certainty that he loves us and is ready to work in all our circumstances for his ultimate and very good purposes. Everything in this life is meant to get us ready for that coming wedding feast.

Embracing the wisdom that comes from above or, on the other hand, a wisdom from the world, will define each of our new years. God wants us to look ahead and when we do, to be among those who see Christ waiting for us.

So, even with whatever jolting news we may find awaiting us in this year, let me wish all of you a “happy New Year” in the embrace of the Son! Only there will we find the peace God wants us to enjoy.

And—with all of what I’ve just written as context—please, pray with me for my Uncle Earl and his family. I love them and still hope for his recovery.