Most people have never heard of Joachim of Fiore (c. 1135-1202). Yet his voice was notable in a Christian tradition that still has echoes today. He was a mystic and monk who claimed that God intended to work in human history in three stages.

The first stage was the age of the Father, that is, the Old Testament era with its divinely ordained rules that required full obedience. Then came the age of the Son, the era between Christ’s life and the year 1260. The year 1260 was chosen by taking the number of days cited in Revelation 11:3 & 12:6 (i.e. 1260 days) to be years instead of days. Thus, that year promised the arrival of a third age of the Spirit when people would finally gain direct communion with God by the Spirit’s coming to rule in the lives of individual Christians.

Joachim died well before 1260 but his followers looked ahead for the new era to come. What did they expect it would be like? The Gospel of Christ, Joachim told them, would still be valid in the third age but it would be surpassed as the letter of the law was replaced by the spirit of the law. The Spirit’s activities would also dissolve any further need for the organized and hierarchical church. Instead the Spiritualists—called the Order of the Just—would rule the Church. That was a pretty bold claim, given that the Western church operated within a well defined hierarchy from the Pope downward. The new Order would displace all of that.

Joachim drew some attention, both positive and negative. His main themes were dismissed by the Lateran Council in 1215 but he was still treated by the Catholic church as a saintly figure, though not as a saint. Dante, author of the Divine Comedy, drew on his teachings. The year 1260 came and went without any dramatic features.

We can now ask, “So what?” Did he offer something we need for today? Not really. And I’m certainly not trying to promote him or his ideas here. In fact, I’m convinced he was way off base.

But Joachim and his followers did illustrate a problem that has lingered in Christianity as a whole. That is, the sort of discussions about the nature of the Godhead and about the deity of Christ didn’t extend to an additional discussion of the roles and nature of the Spirit. We had the Council of Nicaea in 325 and the Council of Chalcedon in 381 that offered us, respectively, touchstone debates for the first two concerns; but there was never an early and equivalent council devoted to the Spirit.

Over 250 years after Joachim we meet Martin Luther. In Luther’s day the promise of a third age of the Spirit was still alive for some, but Luther himself was at best only vaguely aware of such themes. He did, however, recognize the importance of the Spirit in the Bible and also held that the Spirit engages believers both in conversion and in ongoing faith. His first publication was, in fact, a German translation of the medieval mystical work, the Theologia Germanica which invited readers to a more immediate form of spirituality. So when Luther began to resist the hierarchy of the Roman-led Catholic church while promoting a more lively spirituality, some of the radical Spiritualists of the day saw him as a possible representative of a new order of the Spirit.

Two of these figures were the “prophets” Nicholas Storch and Markus Stubner from Zwickau who came to Wittenberg to meet Luther. Luther quickly rejected them and what they taught. Later a separate spiritual movement led by Thomas Müntzer—who was also dismissed by Luther—produced the ill-fated Peasants Revolt. Then yet another effort to promote the new and immediate leadership of the Spirit emerged in the town of Münster, an effort that was also crushed. The net result of these Spiritualist efforts was a widespread disavowal of the Spirit’s active role in Reformation theology and practice. He was not a welcome presence if his work was to overthrow the church as an ordered body; and his purpose was to give some leaders divine—and sometimes dubious—prerogatives! What the radicals did accomplish was to scare away any additional Spirit-advocates for nearly a century.

I offer this historical content as background for this question: what is the biblical role of the Spirit? Does he only work through established church authorities and activities today—as something of an undercover presence? Or have we entered into the new age of the Spirit, characterized by his unique works of leading and speaking through Spirit-anointed activists? Or is there some happy medium somewhere between the extremes?

All I can do is raise the question here. Any efforts to answer need to be book-length efforts. And in recent decades there have been some projects offered along that line. Here the most we can do is to suggest some key elements that must be part of any conversation.

First, we need to embrace God’s call for us now to live by the Spirit rather than by the “flesh”. Luther properly recognized that Christ’s coming signaled a new work of God in history. Luther looked, especially, to Galatians as central to this claim: there he found that any effort to make the Mosaic Law into a basis for spirituality is broken. Why? Because the Law looks to human performance rather than to Christ. So while it offers certain moral boundaries it must never be treated as the focus of faith. Instead Christ alone is to be the focus of faith. And the Spirit’s work is to elevate Christ in our hearts—to open the eyes of our hearts to see God as fully revealed in Christ. Luther was absolutely on target here.

Second, any efforts to elevate the status of the Spirit to a new position of functional primacy in the Trinity violates the eternal reality of the Father-Son-and-Spirit communion. In the Bible we find the Father and the Son to be uniquely devoted to each other in an eternal exchange of love and glory—a reality celebrated by Jesus in John 17:24. The Spirit never seeks to displace that unique dyadic reality, but he does eternally facilitate that bond of love by communicating the love of the Father to the Son, and vice versa. In an insight offered by Jonathan Edwards we notice that the Bible never speaks of the Spirit’s love for the Father, or of the Spirit’s love for the Son. Instead he faithfully carries the mutual love of both the Father and the Son—as the one who searches the “depths of God” (1 Corinthians 2:10)—back and forth between the Father and the Son throughout eternity.

We, once we are united to Christ, are then drawn into this exchange by the Spirit’s communicating ministry. Thus, we are reborn into God’s life by the coming of the Spirit as he “pours out God’s love in our hearts” (Romans 5:5). Such a role does not reduce the Spirit’s full deity and personal participation in the life of the Godhead, but it does explain how God’s relational being is sustained as the Spirit serves the Father, the Son, and the Bride by eternally and actively witnessing to this affective mutual devotion.

To say more about his personhood, the Spirit can be grieved and quenched when we, mere mortals, despise his ministry. And Jesus warned his audiences that to dismiss the Spirit’s communicating, witnessing, and coaching ministry is an unforgiveable sin. Even as the incarnate Son, Jesus responded to the Spirit’s leading throughout his life and ministry on earth. And in that reliance he set up a model for us to follow. So Luther was correct in his dismissal of the radical Spiritualists of his day who tried to modify God’s eternal status of relations. The Son reveals the Father to us, and the Spirit elevates the Son in our hearts—but, although deserving and receiving worship as one present in the Godhead, the Spirit never seeks to be uniquely elevated in our worship.

Finally, we need to learn how to respond to the Spirit’s leading. How does he do this? Not, as Joachim or the Spiritual radicals of Luther’s day proposed, by bringing about new directions in human conduct through the teachings of self-appointed Spirit-spokesmen.

Instead the Spirit illuminates the Word that he has stirred in the hearts of Bible writers. That is, the Spirit first worked in the hearts of the Bible writers, moving them to hear and report God’s heart to us, the readers. And now he moves in our hearts to hear what God wants us to know by completing the Heart-to-heart-to-heart progression of revelation. So we will never understand what the Bible is telling us unless we have the Spirit whispering in our hearts, “Listen to this, because God loves you!”

Then and only then do we become true Bible students and true Christians: by responding to that love with our own love for Christ. So Luther was right, once again, in his call, “sola scriptura.”

As for Joachim’s notions: never mind!

“Now,” the pastor implored us as he completed his sermon, “in light of what we’ve seen in 2 Timothy 3:16 this morning, I challenge each of you to equip yourselves for life and ministry! God commands us to be obedient and to glorify him through our obedience so I’m asking each of you to spend at least five minutes in each of the next five days reading the Bible. This is God’s clearly stated will so let’s go out and do it!”

I looked around. Lots of heads were nodding positively: this would be the week to obey God and to give him his glory. Some were looking down at the floor. One man—he looked like a cutting-edge sort of guy—glanced at his watch. The service ended with a song and the benediction.

On the way out of church a man in the congregation took a moment with the pastor.

“Pastor, I’m pretty busy but I want to take up your challenge. With life as full as it is, when should I do it? Is there an especially good time of day to read?”

“No, it’s totally up to you! Maybe while you’re having breakfast, or maybe before you go to bed. Just commit yourself to find a little spare time somewhere in the day.”

“Great,” the man responded, “I’ll do it before I go to bed at night—it might be a good way to get to sleep!”

This particular scenario is my own creation but it summarizes some of the more common sentiments I hear from believers today—from both pastors and parishioners. In this post I’d like to ask a few tough questions about how we treat Bible reading today. Why do we bother to ask anyone to sacrifice their precious time in this way?

First we need to ask, do we actually know God? If we don’t know him—even if we know lots about him—then any invitation to read “God’s word” is like asking someone to read someone else’s mail. The appropriate response to that will always be, “If I haven’t met him, why should I be interested in his issues?” So it’s important for those who don’t read the Bible to start with a polite question: “Dear God, have we ever actually met?” For those who lack any appetite for the Bible I’m sure he’ll answer, “No, we haven’t, but I’ve been waiting for the opportunity for some time now!”

The point is that our religious activities—whether we’re deeply involved in a cool and post-modern community of faith; or are members of a clunky and traditional old church—are not the real issues at stake. I think of Paul, for instance, when he was still Saul, being “zealous for God” as he chased Christians all over the landscape. All of that was so much nonsense when he was finally knocked off his chariot by God himself.

“Who are you?” Saul asked the one who spoke to him out of a brilliant light.

“Jesus, whom you’re persecuting” came the answer.

This, by the way, is an awkward point because in my experience it’s uncommon to hear church people talk about God as if he cares for them and vice versa—in contrast to Paul’s great passion for Christ after his own introduction that day on the Damascus road.

Yet the Bible assumes that all who really know God love him. Why? Because all who know him discover that he first loved us. And it’s impossible to ignore the Creator of all of heaven and earth as he regularly tells us, by his Spirit, “I love you” (Romans 5:5). Consider, for instance, Psalm 42:1, “As a deer pants for flowing streams, so pants my soul for you, O God.” The Bible is full of portrayals of people with that appetite, who love him deeply. And all of us who get that, love to spend time hanging out with God in his Word.

Some in the Bible, of course, despise God. And many—take Jacob or Paul as two instances—move from one status to the other as the Bible tells the stories of their lives. The Bible offers such transformation stories not only to invite us to that kind of story in our own lives; but also to warn us that only those captured by the love of the Father and his Son—as those who “kiss the Son” (Psalm 2)—will prosper in the coming Day of Judgment. And those on that Day who claim to have been religious—even when they’ve done “many mighty miracles” on God’s behalf—but who never really liked him much, will be told, “Depart from me, I never knew you” (in Matthew 7).

So knowing God “in person” is a crucial starting point for Bible reading and John 8:31 treats our devotion to the Word as the measure of true life in Christ. Yet there’s a second obstacle to overcome for many of us with lots of church experience. It’s our utilitarian tendency to treat the Bible as a resource for successful living. In sermons we hear of Scriptures as a place where we learn how to be more Godly; how to have stronger marriages; how to manage our wealth; how to become more missional as truly authentic people; how to build strong communities; and so on and on and on.

In other words, because of our fixation on finding “applications” in the Bible we begin to be “fix-it” Christians and the Bible serves us as a moral manual. This, however, misses seeing God himself—the Father-Son-and-Spirit-God—as the ultimate moving presence in the Bible; and as the ultimate motive for coming to the Bible.

Let me make the point by asking whether we see the Bible as God’s deepest and most tangible self-disclosure that he makes available to us: is he sharing himself and his heart through it? Or is does it offer us a set of lessons God and our pastors wants us to learn, ideas we need to assimilate, and behaviors we need to adopt? These differing emphases separate those who treasure the Bible relationally from those who don’t.

It’s true, of course, that the Bible does offer us all sorts of practical benefits. The God who gave us marriages, resources, communities, and everything else, has lots to tell us about how these benefits are part of his love for us. But they all become idols if we worship and serve the creation while missing the God who loves us and who has given us all these things in the context of his love. God is not a means to our ends, but our ultimate aim in himself.

So what should we say to a pastor who begs his congregation to spend 5 minutes a day for 5 days a week in the Bible? Or even to read 15 minutes each day in order to complete a one-year-read-through?

God alone can answer that, but God’s answer might be, “Shame on you! Is your portrayal of me so small, so disaffected, and so utilitarian that all you can ask for is a useless bit of spare time? I’m the ‘God who is love’ and I’m offering myself as the dynamic center of life for all your people—so get in touch with reality!”

So, as spiritual leaders of one sort or another, quit using the small appetites of those who may not even know God as a measure for anything spiritual. Instead let’s use the measure of a real love relationship.

Would a good pastor, for instance, offer premarital advice to a young couple like this: “Be sure to spend at least 5 minutes a day, 5 times each week talking to each other: that’s what your marriage needs to prosper!” God forbid!

Instead, with marriage as a model, here’s what we might want to tell young believers:

“God loves you. He opens his heart to you in the Bible. You’ll need to have ears to hear that love and the Spirit offers that—just ask for it and you’ll receive it. You’ll also need to give up things that block your response to him—he’ll coach you in that as you read. And you’ll want to have other partners to share with, so always look for companionship in your reading. Then be sure to pray in response to what you’ve read.”

If they ask, “How much reading?” answer with a bigger frame of reference—God’s love—in view than the frame of what others are doing.
“One good measure is to ask how much time you have for internet, movies, and television—our discretionary time. Then ask how you can use some of that discretionary time to be with God and with his people. Don’t let the soil of your heart get packed down by what the culture is throwing at you! Maybe cut your present ’screen time’ down by half and offer the other half to Bible time. Just remember, the more time you spend with God, the more you’ll enjoy him! Go for it!”

Remember, the more we know God, the more we love him, and the more we love him, the more time we want to have with him. Try it. You’ll like it!

I spent two years in a locked psychiatric unit during my days at seminary. As a part-time “psych tech” in a secular hospital my role was to support the nursing staff in patient care. The real life of most of our patients was often heart-breaking: in some measure all were broken and hurting. We did what we could through the medicines and interventions at hand and sometimes seemed to make some headway. Yet in too many cases the patients we helped and released were readmitted after just a few weeks or months.

Let me take a pair of insights from those days to reflect on the real life we find outside such a unit. The first is that our world itself is “crazy”; and, with that, that one of our common solutions to brokenness is misguided and can only lead to patient recidivism—and to the regular recycling of problems that most people experience in any setting.

Before I say more let me note that I don’t mean for this post to be a wholesale indictment of what our unit offered: on occasions the interventions we used led to substantial and lasting relief. I praise God for that. But much more is needed, namely a cure that speaks to all our deep needs and that lasts forever.

That said, I came away from my two years there with deep concerns about the problems of real life found both inside and outside the unit. Let me start with our most common intervention, and then turn to the underlying problem itself.

The common cure for dealing with patients whose conduct was out of bounds—too extreme for those around them—was to apply behavioral modification programs. That is, many of our patients had attitudes and behaviors that were labeled “dysfunctional” by the staff. We then confronted those issues with a variety of pressures to get them to change.

Typically the staff would begin the care program by defining behavioral standards: coaching a given patient in what was and what was not acceptable. The next challenge was to link the care plan to some form of leverage that had enough power to change the patient’s behaviors. If, for instance, patients were smokers the staff would withhold cigarettes until they behaved, and then parcel them out as rewards. Or if patients prized opportunities to go for a daily walk outside the hospital with staff escorts that permission was used as a lever for change. The greatest reward, of course, was the promise of eventual discharge from the unit: “behave and be released” was an implicit and sometimes explicit message being offered every day. Pavlov and Skinner, two of the great behavioralists, would have been proud of us!

So much for the common cure. What about the problems we were addressing? First let me offer two examples of the sort of issues we faced.

One woman was in the unit for her deep episodes of depression. As a psych tech I was expected to engage patients in conversations about their issues, then to write up anything significant in their chart for others on staff to read. In one conversation this woman mentioned that she didn’t trust men, her husband included. Why not? I asked. She answered that all the men she knew were driven by sexual ambitions and while she was always willing to offer herself she still felt unloved and unlovely—with the exception of just one of her male counselors who had ended his own involvement with her “for my sake”—so, she concluded, with this one exception, men are never to be trusted!

In a second case a young woman had been unable to invest herself in any meaningful relationships and was wildly impulsive in her behaviors. The male staff were asked not to have any substantial interactions with her over the course of her three-week hospitalization. This was only reversed on the day before her discharge so she could have some re-socialization time with men.

My sense of a much bigger problem that stands behind these more immediate episodes—the problem of a crazy world—was reinforced by the way these two encounters went forward, and illustrates what I found in many other cases.

After the first conversation—with the promiscuous wife—I returned to the staff office to check through the patient’s chart to see if her multiple male relations and expressed loss-of-trust issue had ever been reported. Nothing was noted. But before writing up the exchange I mentioned her comments to one of our experienced nurses.

“Do you mean to include that in her chart?” she asked.

“Well, yes.” I responded.

“I’m not sure why you would,” my colleague, went on, “since it’s not all that significant.”

Only then did it dawn on me that this married colleague was, herself, freely active in her sexual partnerships—as would slip out to others during meal breaks. And she wasn’t alone on staff in that pattern. I was, she seemed to be saying, the one who was living by a different behavioral standard. And, in her view, the patient’s problem with depression could scarcely be related in any way to her sexual activities.

In the second case I had my only conversation with the young woman. It began with a basic question.

“What’s your biggest ambition in life after you leave us tomorrow?”

“Huh?” she responded. “What do you mean?”

“Oh, just that all of us operate with a variety of goals and ambitions in life—the things that set up our priorities for how we spend our time and resources. ‘Hope’ is a label for that, and hope is what orients us in life. All of us have some sort of hope that helps us figure out what we want to do. So I’m curious about what you hope for in life.”

All this seemed like a brand new concept to her and she asked a couple of follow-up questions that I answered. What surprised me, though, is that she was getting more and more animated in the process. Finally she was clearly angry with me!

“I don’t get it!” she said, “I’ve been here for three weeks and what you’re saying is the first thing that makes any sense to me and it’s only coming after my three weeks here and just before I get out!”

In both cases, of course, I was spilling out my Christian faith in a world that didn’t share that faith. So the values I was applying were sometimes very different from the values that were guiding others on our staff. This is not unusual for many of us. In a mostly post-Christian culture we often see the “real world” in very different terms: and each side of this divide is increasingly viewing the other side as socially and morally dysfunctional, and even crazy on some counts.

With that in mind let me return to the favorite cure used on our unit: behavioral modification. For a biblical Christian it represents a crazy approach. It seeks to change people from the “outside-in” rather than from the “inside-out”. It dismisses the point that helped launch the Protestant Reformation when Luther insisted, contrary to the model of virtue ethics common in his day, that we do not become righteous by practicing righteous behaviors, but we practice righteous behaviors only after we’ve entered into the righteousness of Christ’s work in us [thesis 40 in his Disputation Against Scholastic Theology, 1517]. Real change in real (that is, eternal) life always starts with a heart change.

Our hearts, the Bible tells us, are the ultimate fount of all our behaviors: we were made by God, in his image, as lovers. We were made to be other-centered; to be holy and blameless in our devotion to God; and to engage in a life of faith, hope, and love.

The patient I spoke to who had her many men was looking for love in all the wrong ways. In that dysfunction—call it “sin”—she revealed a heart longing for what real sexual love offers: to engage in God’s plan for a devoted and singular commitment with just one partner for all of life, mutually bonded in an enduring trust and delight. To live otherwise is to enter into a world upside-down to God’s design.

The young woman—driven by the huge waves of impulsiveness—was hungry for an anchor in life: for meaning. And only through hope and a sense of meaning, with the worth and nobility that comes through a hope in Christ, would she find a basis for real stability in life. I’m afraid that all our unit offered her while she was with us—until our encounter—may have been some behavioral seasick pills.

So the question for today is this: are we presently living a true “real life”? Or are we living within sin while using short term behavioral pills to minimize the pain? The only way to guard our hearts is to give our hearts fully and freely to all that God offers us. Then and there we find an abundant life. The world needs us and our cure!

Later this week I’ll speak to a group with the task of comparing a “Trinitarian” to a “non-Trinitarian” understanding of God. It’s an important topic; and I probably should have launched the Spreading Goodness site with this question since it stands behind much of what we’ve offered here since beginning. On the other hand it’s a complex topic with a huge range of engagement so I approach it with respect and a sense that this is just an initial foray that will certainly call for corrections and further development.

That said, this comparison may or may not be familiar to many readers. For some it will create a response of, “What you’re talking about?” while for others, “Please! Not another dose of this topic!” It depends on what circles we run in. Let’s start with that as context.

Christians of all orthodox varieties affirm the doctrine of the Trinity as a crucial truth: that God exists eternally as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; but not all agree on much beyond that triadic label. Today there are, in fact, some wide variations of understanding in place even among evangelical Christians. Given those differences “Trinitarian Theology” refers to an effort by some to clarify and reform views of the Trinity that are, according to Trinitarian reformers, broken.

Broken by what measure? By measure of the creedal statements endorsed by the major 4^th century church councils—e.g. Nicaea in 325 and Constantinople in 381. That means that the label “non-Trinitarian” as used above is a misnomer because it refers to real Christians who affirm the Trinity at some level but who either aren’t alert to the issues at stake here; or who are informed, but who don’t fully engage or embrace the Nicaea-Constantinople tradition. This brief entry, then, aims to orient the former group—those who are still unaware of the conversation—rather than to convince the latter crowd.

My own awakening to the topic came during my doctoral days at King’s College London where I participated in the weekly seminars of the Institute for Theological Research led by the late Colin Gunton, a noted Trinitarian scholar. I first attended the seminars as a guest (liable to be exiled if spare seats weren’t available!) because my own research was not in systematic theology (Gunton’s department) but in church history. My subject was a 17^th century Puritan preacher, Richard Sibbes. I attended the Research seminars just to round out my exposure to theological traditions, both old and new.

It was a happy accident. Sibbes, I discovered, was an avid student of the major figures of the 4^th & 5^th centuries—the so-called Nicene and Post-Nicene fathers. He not only examined that era but he also recognized how these early Trinitarian views were later engaged and promoted by Martin Luther and John Calvin, among others, as key tenets of the Protestant Reformation.

At the same time Sibbes—moved by what he found—gently but firmly resisted a new movement in his day. That movement—now called Post-Reformation Scholasticism—sought to restore key values and axioms of medieval Aristotelian Christianity. It was a model best represented by the 13^th century scholar, Thomas Aquinas, hence “Thomism”.

The new movement found widespread traction in Sibbes’ day given that in the 16^th-17^th centuries European and British universities all relied on Aristotle’s works as the curricular core of undergraduate education. So when students moved on from their undergraduate studies to graduate studies in theology, they found that the earlier works by Aquinas had already synthesized Aristotle’s philosophy with theology—so they embraced the Thomist package. That synthesis, in turn, did much to shape what became the Westminster tradition. Ironically it was Thomas’s theology that Luther & Calvin had energetically dismissed years earlier. And that opposition was rooted in some of the key differences between the Thomistic view of the Trinity and the Nicene version.

Let me return, then, to what I found at King’s College. Many of the theology faculty and PhD students there were tracing Barthian theology. Barth, I soon discovered, had also been captured by the major figures of the 4^th & 5^th centuries—the same Nicene and Post-Nicene fathers that Sibbes loved. Barth then traced the way in which the Trinitarian views of those fathers were developed and transmitted by the Protestant Reformation through figures like Martin Luther and John Calvin. Gunton, as a Barth scholar, was aware of all this.

A purpose of Gunton’s research seminar was to allow doctoral students to present aspects of their research. So when the time came for me to offer a presentation of Sibbes’ theology—with Gunton as the host that day—he was clearly surprised. It turned out that the common ground between Sibbes and Barth was deep and wide. Barth, it turns out, was also resistant to any place for Aristotle’s influence in the Christian faith.

That surprise connection then set up my sense of partnership with current Trinitarianism, a movement that today owes much of its energy to the works of a Scottish clan, the Torrances, especially two brothers, James and Thomas (or T. F.). An American scholar, Robert Jenson (Gunton’s doctoral mentor), is another key figure here. My own postdoctoral studies have remained oriented to the Puritan era so I only have a passing exposure to what these men have written, but what I have read of them aligns well with Trinitarian figures like Sibbes and those he influenced, including Jonathan Edwards [on this connection, see Amy Plantinga Pauw, The Harmony of All].

What, then, are some of the differences between Trinitarians and non-Trinitarians? For lack of space let me list just four here. We’ll also call the latter tradition Western Theists because the movement is mainly a product of the West (over against the more overtly Nicene Eastern Church) and they do, of course, affirm the Trinity.

Where to begin? For Trinitarians any discussion of God must engage the Trinity as its starting point. Western Theists, on the other hand, locate the Trinity as a secondary feature within the larger conversation about God’s essential being. In virtually every expression of Western theology—including Aquinas, Turretin, Hodge, and Erickson—the standard approach is to take up the Trinity as a primary topic only after ten or more expositions of God’s monad-like attributes and being, as in Aquinas who touches on God’s existence, simplicity, perfection, goodness, infinity, immutability, eternity, unity, and more (26 in total) before reaching the Trinity. Whatever benefits these lists offer—and there are certainly some—they effectively restructure God’s actual self-portrayal. In the Bible there is, instead, a priority given to God’s relationality as in John 1:1, a text that consciously echoes and expands Genesis 1:1. “In the beginning” of Genesis we find a God who comes speaking in his triune reality, “Let us make man in our image” and “In the beginning [of John's gospel] was the Word and the Word was with God”.

Christology. Western theology continues to be plagued by impulses toward Unitarian defections—whether covertly or overtly. A problem with the attribute-list vision of God is that an essential-God-who-is-behind-the-shared-deity-of-Jesus is suggested. This, then, sets up the misimpression that there is a greater and truly ultimate Deity in the Father who resembles the monadic deities of Aristotle, Judaism, and Islam. This, in turn, sets up an implicit subordination of being between the Father (as the “real” source of deity) and the lesser Son (as his mere extension, with an implicit prospect that he himself was created). The student of this system then shares in Philip’s request to Jesus, “Lord, show us the Father, and it is enough for us” (John 14:8). Christ’s sharp response to him, then sets out a Trinitarian counter-vision, “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father!” It is only in the Son that we gain a clear picture of God! He is our proper starting point in coming to God. And then, through the Son’s disclosures of the Father’s love and glory, we engage our relational God in proper terms [see the great prayer of Jesus in John 17].

Pneumatology. Western theology finds it difficult to characterize the Spirit in robust and personal terms, no matter that the Nicene fathers called for just that. He, instead, tends to be an explanatory and mysterious force who accomplishes God’s desires, often as an “it” rather than “him”. Trinitarian theology, in stark contrast, centers in the divine communion of God—the Perichoresis—as a reality facilitated by the Spirit’s eternal work of mutual interpenetration. He takes all that is in the Father and shares it with the Son; and takes all that is in the Son and shares it with the Father in a mutual reciprocity so that all that is in the Father is in the Son, and all that is in the Son is in the Father; and all of this is shared by and through the Spirit who is both the Spirit of the Son and of the Father. The Spirit, then, is the one through whom we, too, are bonded in a real participatory union in the Son, and through the Son, with the Father. Thus life eternal comes to us by the Spirit’s communion.

Love. We read that “God is love” in John 4:8&16, yet in Western Theism love is, at best, treated with a certain embarrassed silence. One looks in vain for a Western based systematic theology that gives love the prominence it receives in the Bible as God’s great motivation and his greatest commandment for humanity. Why? Because the God of Western Theism is characterized mainly by his powers—as the great “unmoved mover”—which leaves no place for him to be “moved” by anything in his creation. This sets up a commitment to anthropopathic explanations of God’s love—that his love is actually a function of his will, and that he lacks any affective-or-responsive qualities. Instead we hear that God covets glory for himself while love languishes: duty always trumps desires in Western Theism. Then our human anthropology is reinterpreted in light of a disaffected divinity so that volition—finding and obeying God’s will—has primacy, and not our response of love to the God who first loved us. In a Trinitarian reading of the Bible, on the other hand, we find the Father as the great lover, the Son as his beloved, and the Spirit as the communicator of that Love. There is a divine passion that in no way threatens God’s stability or his eternal purposes: in love he chose us before the world was even created! This offers us a mystery that only eternity may resolve as there we will continue to experience Christ’s love that surpasses knowing.

There’s so much more to this! In fact the great opportunity for those of us who have been drawn to the communion of God’s love there are a host of corrections in our theology called for in light of the Trinity. Sin, for instance, is a relational violation rooted in absolute disaffection (“hatred”) that Jesus overcomes by his own loving atonement. So, too, revelation is no longer seen as merely contractual and rational but as the passionate and compelling disclosures of the Triune God’s love for us.

So I conclude by inviting readers to never quit exploring all that the Triune God offers us: “Oh, taste and see, the LORD is good!”

On Friday I read a news release by HealthDay News that cited a study of American college students over the past three decades. It found less empathy among students today than in the recent past.

“We found the biggest drop in empathy after the year 2000,” co-author Sara Konrath, a researcher at the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research, said in a news release. “College kids today are about 40 percent lower in empathy than their counterparts of 20 or 30 years ago, as measured by standard tests of this personality trait.”

The data cited indicates that today’s students are less alert to the views and needs of others who are in hard times. Konrath stated that college students today are “self-centered, narcissistic, competitive, confident and individualistic”.

The article includes Konrath’s speculation about the basis for this shift: “Compared to 30 years ago, the average American now is exposed to three times as much nonwork-related information. In terms of media content, this generation of college students grew up with video games. And a growing body of research, including work done by my colleagues at Michigan, is establishing that exposure to violent media numbs people to the pain of others.”

The report is troubling, but I’m not inclined to jump on a critical bandwagon here. As a counterpoint, I’m personally impressed with the selflessness and devotion of many of the young adults I’m around these days.

And I’m also aware that my own generation—those who entered college in the late 60’s—is famous for rebellions, extra-marital sex that multiplied with the coming of the pill and convenience-based-abortions, the huge rise of dissolved marriages, and more. So if any generation qualifies as “self-centered, narcissistic, competitive, confident and individualistic” I’m ready to raise my hand on behalf of my former classmates to say, “That’s us: guilty as charged!”

Here’s my point: the problem of compassionless self-absorption has been around for a long time. We can turn to Paul’s warning to Timothy, for instance, that sin is essentially a problem of narcissistic devotion even among so-called believers who have “the appearance of godliness” (2 Timothy 3:5). What was their problem?

But understand this, that in the last days there will come times of difficulty. For people will be lovers of self, lovers of money, proud, arrogant, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, heartless, unappeasable, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not loving good, treacherous, reckless, swollen with conceit, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God . . . (3:1-4).

That’s certainly not a list of character qualities you’re looking for in a spouse or in a neighbor!

But the Bible—in its whole—regularly points to these qualities as the outcome of Adam’s fall. We either love God or we love whatever fills the role of God for us. And in our struggle with the many competing affections that call out to us, if we turn from responding to God’s love in favor of another love we have taken on a God-like role.  In this we become de facto gods by overturning God’s original design for us (and for all humanity): that we are meant to love him with whole hearts. So that even in our “search for meaning”, in our “devotion to security”, or in our “need for fulfillment”—and in all the other possible self-preoccupations that go on ad infinitum—we are simply following Adam’s lead in being “lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God.”

But enough of all this negativity. Here’s a positive question to ask: how can we become genuinely God-like people. And with that, how do we get beyond our selfish preoccupations?

For a starter we should notice Konrath’s point about the unhelpful effects of media. And with that we should also listen to what Jesus taught his listeners in the Sermon on the Mount: “The eye is the lamp of the body. So if your eye is healthy, your whole body will be full of light, but if your eye is bad, your whole body will be full of darkness” (Matthew 6:22-23). Christ’s analogy of an eye’s physical function was linked immediately to what it is that a person treasures most in the following verses about loving only one master.

The point is that whatever we have as our soul’s gaze is what we become. If we’re given over to looking at worthless things, we grow increasingly worthless. If we find violence to be entertaining, we become affiliated with violence.

Think, then, of what Jesus did in his ministry. His teaching wasn’t done in classrooms but in the places where there were poor people, blind people, lame people, leprous people, immoral people, needy people. And he had compassion on them. Again and again in the gospels we read that “he felt compassion . . .”

As we use the imagery of vision let me return to something I’ve written before, that faith is a function of our soul’s gaze. When we look to Jesus we only do so because he’s already tapped on our hearts to catch our attention. Then in looking to him we find him gazing into our hearts with compassion: seeing our sin, our pride, our fears, our doubts while telling us, “come to me all you who are weary and burdened”. And as we come to him in faith he places his arm around our shoulders and says, “Do you see all those who are needy? Come with me while I care for them.”

Our hands then become his hands. Our hearts reveal his heart. Our joy is in giving rather than in receiving.

Today, then, do we know someone captured by video games? Offer some compassion by inviting them to places where real relationships exist. Do we know some who are living worthless lives? Have compassion on them by inviting them to join you in offering food, coats, and socks to the local street people. Do we know someone who has never met with God? Have some compassion and share your own joy in knowing Christ.

Empathy is cultivated, then, by both receiving it and then by offering it to others. It’s a heart-to-heart activity that starts with a Heart-to-heart meeting with God. Someone has to offer it to others in every place and in every generation. God meets that need by offering it freely through his Son, and by the Spirit; and we, as we feel his compassion towards us, will soon have compassion for others. Try it and see for yourself; then offer it to someone else.

Yesterday I watched a miracle take place. It was God’s work of taking two people and making them one. The wedding was one part of the event. The consummation of the marriage, in the privacy of the honeymoon suite, will have followed. Then in the communion of life that will unfold in days and years ahead—by God’s continuing grace—the miracle will carry forward. Marriage unites them in a host of ways for the length of their lives: spiritually, emotionally, physically, socially, and more.

Two preliminary remarks before I go on. First, the lead-in paragraph holds assumptions that aren’t necessarily current, even among Christians. In the 1950’s it would have been more common to have two Christians come to marriage as virgins intent on a lifelong marriage. There also would have been a vision for a progressive growth into full marital oneness centered in the nuclear family rather than today’s norm of paired pursuits of individual—and usually diverging—careers. Knowing their personal stories and commitments, this couple would want their traditional approach to marriage to be noted.

Second, as I write about marriage I recognize the irony of a perpetual bachelor taking up a topic he’s never experienced. Of course we are all observers of many marriages, and I was raised within a marriage, so there’s some measure of experience in that. But that’s not the basis for this post. My ambition here isn’t to offer readers a set of steps to better marriage. Nor to grouse about “good ole days” over against modern approaches.

Rather, here’s the question: why did God create marriage? I’ve noted this subject before in passing but let me take it up as a central focus in this entry.

The short answer is that God, the Father, determined to give his Son a suitable partner—a bride—for the rest of eternity. This purpose is supported by the many New Testament cues to our participatory union with Christ—of our being “in him” and “in Christ” and our having Christ “in us”. Let me engage the broad biblical frame for this theme.

First, the Bible begins with marriage in its very first pages: “Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh” [Genesis 2:24]. It also ends in Revelation’s last pages with the celebration of the coming wedding feast of the Lamb: “The Spirit and the Bride say, “Come . . .” [Revelation 22:17]. This is what scholars call an inclusio: a single theme with two bookends, one introducing the theme and the other offering a final repetition. The point is that everything written in between the bookends will be informed by the theme. While an inclusio is normally limited to a local text, or to a single book at most, it applies here to the whole of revelation. God’s divine purpose is to achieve a marriage and in his cumulative work of inspiration marriage is his guiding motif. It must shape both our reading of the Bible and our understanding of how we live under God’s loving rule.

But, sadly, the theme is largely overlooked by Bible teachers today—relegated to a tertiary status within applied theology: a matter for pastoral care. But this myopia is more contemporary than historical. The first Protestant reformers were captured by the theme of our marital union in Christ. And before them it also informed the Augustinian tradition of Triune love and saving initiative.

We need to begin with God’s own eternal relationality—in the Father’s love for the Son, and the Son’s reciprocated love for the Father, facilitated by the communing activity of the Spirit. God then extends his Triune communion to his newly created humanity. Thus Genesis 1 reports God’s plan by declaring that humanity is created relationally in God’s own image and likeness: “male and female he created them.”

God’s work of continuing creation stands behind the motif of marriage. God first set out the union of marriage as organic—the single material of “one flesh”—inclusive, and procreative: “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman [the feminine form of "man"], because she was taken out of Man” [Genesis 2:23]. She was the necessary completion to Adam, without which he was unable to live or to extend life as God intended. The interdependence is complete: she was made out of his being and only through her being would his being be extended. The oneness of their being was real, defined by their mutual participation in one shared life.

This unity was soon shattered, spiritually, by the Fall in Genesis 3. In the serpent’s guile Eve was convinced to pursue the option of becoming “like God” in order to gain the benefits he offered. She, in turn, convinced Adam to join her. As soon as they ate of the forbidden fruit the Spirit left them and they died—as God told Adam would be the case before Eve was formed.

By recognizing John 3 to be Christ’s commentary on Genesis 3, we find that this “death” was defined by the loss of the Spirit’s life-sustaining union with the first couple. This created the necessary solution of our being “born again” by the restoration of the Spirit’s presence and life if we are to live eternally. The spiritual bond between Adam and Eve was also broken—a reality Paul presumes in his commentary on unequal marriages in places like 1 Corinthians 7:14 and 2 Corinthians 6:14-18.

The fruit of the lost life and love of the Spirit in Adam was a new self-focus and defensive alienation, both towards God and Eve: “I was afraid, because I was naked, and I hid myself . . . . The woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me fruit of the tree, and I ate” [Genesis 3:10-12]. Fear, selfish inadequacy, and blame-casting became the fruit of death now found in all marriages.

God’s redemption, thankfully, is much a bigger plan than the simple restoration of a pre-Fall status quo. His plan from before the creation was unveiled by his disclosure that one would come—the “seed” of the woman—who would crush the serpent’s seed and end the rebellion.

But God’s plan would be a process. Adam, as a starting point, was confronted for rejecting God’s word on the basis of his wife’s serpent-stirred coaching: “Because you have listened to the voice of your wife and have eaten of the tree of which I commanded you, ‘You shall not eat of it,’ cursed is the ground because of you” [Genesis 3:15&17]. We now hate the product of the curse—with all the ills that come through it—and long for a cure.

Jesus was the solution—the “blessing”—who fulfilled the promise of the unique “seed of the woman”, birthed by the Spirit in Mary as a recapitulation of Adam’s first creation. Jesus also came to reorder the matter of marital relationship that Adam despised, by disclosing himself as God’s own “Word” and in responding to his Father’s words; and in calling forth his collective bride by his Word which, alone, can “set you free” from sin.

As we consider marriage as an arch-motif of Scriptures we can start by asking an age-old question: would Christ have become a man if Adam hadn’t sinned? The proper answer is that Adam’s sin was fully anticipated by God—though not formed by him. This response, in effect, treats the question as invalid. Sin and the incarnation are not in some sort of competition—rather sin, a human event, sets up the incarnation as God’s expression of ultimate love.

Let me unpack this. God gives humans a real freedom. But we are mistaken if we speak of this freedom as volition-based: as our “free will”. That’s the serpent’s sort of language. It treats our autonomy—our “self-rule”—as the basis of our being. His invitation for us to “be like God” starts with that notion and it presumes a self-focused version of deity: the role he covets.

Instead we must start with God who, in his Triune communion, “is love.” We are also told that we were made as dependent beings—”apart from me you can do nothing”—who are meant always to be bonded to God and to each other in love. But love is never imposed on us. Why? Because love exists as response, rooted in our affections: we love God because he first loved us. It is not a responsibility—as in a self-activated duty—although it bears an immense capacity for responsibility once it comes to life. So our freedom is that he allows us not to love him. He will never force himself on us and call it love. In human terms we speak of this as rape.

So, in and with Adam, we became lovers of self, lovers of pleasure, lovers of the creation rather than the creator, and lovers of the fallen notion of “self-rule”. God knew this would be a certain outcome when he created us as lovers whose creativity would search out and test alternative loves. God, in his wisdom, determined to allow us to taste sin.

And we love it. Sin enslaves us through the thrill of being “like God”—and that thrill rules us. Or it does until we, by the Spirit’s illumination, begin to see that the fruit of sin—a fruit we see clearly in others but not in ourselves—is formed in and through our autonomy.

God, in his mercy, draws such people—those broken in their autonomy—to himself. He takes people who repent of our freedom-to-choose, with all the abortions it produces; who repent of trying to determine for ourselves what is “good and evil” that allowed us to ignore his words; who repent of having the pretence of religious obedience even though we don’t really care for him or follow him with whole hearts. In place of autonomy we become a people who trust God and entrust our live to him. We discover a faith working through love.

What motivates God in his creation-fall-and-redemption plan? The Son. He is God’s proffered bridegroom in waiting. One who comes to us in the marital motif that makes males flinch. God uses the imagery of male-female sexuality as his radical entrée and workshop for us to “hear” the depth and breadth of our calling. Yet this is only an entryway that anticipates our eternal and non-sexual union with Christ. As his collective bride—in the place where we will be “like the angels” and no longer engaged in our prior earthly marriages—we will discover the joy of complete devotion to others.

But this is only for those who find him so lovely that we are drawn out of the black hole of our self-absorption into a love for him. The Bible alerts us to an irony: repentance comes more readily to the poor, the blind, the sick, and the broken than it does to the educated, the powerful, the wise, and the wealthy. But the opportunity is free to all. So the present era—from Genesis to Revelation—is our “coming out” event: our chance to come and “kiss the Son” as we are invited to do in Psalm 2.

Let me end by reminding us that Paul twice wrote of our true—our ultimate—marital union as “in Christ” by citing the Genesis 2:23-24 account in 2 Corinthians 6 and in Ephesians 5. In the latter text Paul stuns the reader by his reversal of the order of nature: “I am saying that [Genesis 2:24] refers to Christ and the church.”

Sadly we tend to be deaf to all this today because we so boldly defend our actual behaviors. We read our “hardness of heart” version of things back into the Bible.

How so? By not only approving but celebrating serial marriages. By our treating marriages as legal functions and contracts rather than as God’s continuing creation: “What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate” [Matthew 19:6]. God has, in fact, created unbreakable unions that are as real today as the “one flesh” reality of Adam and Eve. As theologians, we remain deaf by not hearing the language of God’s covenants as part of the inclusio of marriage. They can only be read rightly in that light—as Malachi illustrates in his juxtaposition of the divine covenant and human marriage covenants. And we too often miss the repeated motif of whoredom—the opposite of marriage—in both Testaments, with Haggai as the most dramatic and poignant example.

Thankfully God is still at work. He is calling out a bride, making us to be “holy and blameless” by his “washing with the water of the word.” His Son rejoices in us, despite the expense we are to him as those who caused him to be crucified. And who are now crucified ourselves because of our response to such love.

So yesterday I watched a miracle take place. It was made possible by God’s gift to us, his Son. And the full dimension of this miracle is being unveiled to us in just one setting, at the cross.

Years ago I read a thought-provoking article by Heiko Oberman: “Calvin’s Critique of Calvinism” [in The Dawn of the Reformation, ch. 11, see p. 265]. There he noted Lucien Richard’s The Spirituality of John Calvin that demonstrated that Calvin turned from a spirituality of devotio (spiritual devotion) to a spirituality of pietas (spiritual piety). Devotio was a spirituality of rejection—a denial of the world through personal discipline. Pietas was a spirituality of engagement with the world—grounded in Christ’s life and love. According to Oberman, Richard’s research offered “a major advance” in Calvinist studies and highlighted a divide between Calvin himself and the later Calvinism. The latter had “relapsed”—Oberman’s term—into the themes of spiritual devotion. I once presented this theme in a formal academic setting. Here I’ll discard most of the academic references (while still noting some key figures) and summarize some of what I learned.

We all live within a web of traditions. By that I mean that each of us has a complex set of beliefs and values that we’ve inherited from earlier generations and have then arranged in our own particular ways. So each person’s tradition will at the same moment be derivative and unique. Derivative in the sense that we’ve drawn our view of life—our tradition—from church, family, societal values, and academic training. And unique in the sense that the particular set of cords that form our personal tradition will differ from the collective cords that form the rope of life for anyone else.

Before I move to my main consideration let me offer an example of how a given tradition can shape us. Consider the notion of “progress”. For many people the idea of progress is a life-defining faith—a metanarrative—usually formed in alignment with Darwinian evolution. For others the tradition of progress is much more limited: merely a nod to the increasing human ability to collect, to process, and to distribute information; and with that information to be able to manipulate the physical world more effectively.

What are some of the differences?

In the former view anything new is necessarily superior to anything old since progress is implicitly good. Even human spirituality is always improving, so that today’s expressions of faith are superior to older versions.

For the latter group, progress is limited to external matters—to changes in technology. That means progress is properly linked to things like the printing press and to the more recent benefits of computing and digital processing devices. Such progress, however, doesn’t define humanity or involve moral or spiritual development. Even more than that, an overstated view of progress sets up an idolatry of change that damages our confidence in anything historical, including the viability and value of the Bible.

So each of us will see the world in separate ways, depending on where we stand in our view of progress. So a secular naturalist will dismiss the viewpoint of a Christian, and vice versa. Those who deify evolution will treat the past as largely irrelevant; while those who treat progress as merely material and external—of making cars that have better mileage and reliability; of flying faster and higher; of increased processing speeds in computers; and so on—will enjoy those benefits but will still view the past as important. Why? Because the past gives meaning to the present era in matters of life and value because God’s self disclosures through creation, revelation, and the life & ministry of Christ are historical realities. In other words, God alone defines meaning, while discussions of progress are merely descriptive and lack any sort of innate meaning.

With this reminder of what constitutes a tradition and why it make a practical difference to us, let’s now turn to the topic of this post: to two competing traditions of spirituality.

First, there is a spirituality of Devotion that featured the duties of faith that prospered in the century before the 16th century Reformation. It portrayed faith as a synthesis of Christian teachings and certain axioms of classical Greek philosophy. Thomas Aquinas, of the 13th century, was a leader here, along with some others who held somewhat varied alternatives—Duns Scotus for one. I mention these figures to help students who want some particulars. That said, let’s move on.

The other tradition of Piety featured inward transformation and was employed by the early reformers: Martin Luther, Ulrich Zwingli, and, later, Calvin. This tradition was affective—meaning that it stirs an immediate sense of God’s presence and love (as in Paul’s reference to the Spirit offering believers a sense of God as “Abba—Father”). It has been labeled by some as “mystical” but it must be distinguished from the mysticism of Pseudo-Dionysius who emphasized God’s ultimate unknowability and who promoted non-discursive encounters with God—a uniting with him as One who dwells in the ineffable “darkness” of pure being.

The Devotion tradition sought to balance the role of God and the human role in the spiritual life—wrestling to identify whose initiative is prior and critical in forming spiritual transformation. With that tension there was also a second feature: a profound reliance on dialectical process. This reflected a heritage of the classical Greek era and was expressed through the priority of human rationality as explained by Aristotle. A third feature is their shared confidence in the relative reliability of the human mind. The reliability of the human will, however, was questioned because of it can be distorted by sinful passions.

The chief feature of Piety, by contrast, was a confidence that the passions are both the cause and cure of sin. Furthermore, the will and the mind are held to have been stricken by the Fall, remaining deeply flawed even after regeneration. In their anthropology the Pious mystics held that the affections—the “heart”—ultimately guide one’s conduct. Jean Gerson (1363-1429), chancellor of the University of Paris, summarized this divide at the beginning of the fifteenth century. “Mystical theology” he wrote, “begins in the doctrine gathered from the internalized experiences lived in the hearts of devout souls, just as the other half of theology proceeds from those matters that operate extrinsically” [On Mystical Theology in Gerson: Early Works, 1:266].

Historian Steven Ozment comments on Gerson’s point: “Scholastic [i.e. the Devotio promoters] and mystical [i.e. Pietas] theologians were seen to differ, first of all, in their basic sources.” That is, “they studied the Bible, church history and read theological commentaries” while the mystics looked to “evidence of divine presence” in direct experience and in historical reports. Secondly, “scholastics relied on reason and distrusted the emotions, while mystical theologians trusted the affections—provided they had been disciplined by true doctrine—and believed that the reasons of the heart were closer to God than the speculations of the mind” [Ozment, The Age of Reform, 74].

This division was evident throughout the heritage of Christianity as in the separate trajectories of Bernard of Clairvaux and Thomas Aquinas that developed in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Here we return to Richard who comments on this conflict in the opposed definitions of key terms being used by the two approaches:

The medieval period may be regarded as a period dominated by two opposing tendencies manifested in the schools of St. Bernard and of Thomas Aquinas. Their opposition lay in the dominantly affective character and spiritual teachings of the one versus the dominantly speculative character and dogmatic teaching of the other. Thomas spoke of devotio as an act of the virtue of religion. Bernard and his followers spoke of devotio as an affective state [Richard, Spirituality, 84].

The differences were obvious to medieval believers as illustrated by Gerson’s account. Both the ‘head’ and ‘heart’ were seen to play a part in identifying orthodoxy, but in practice one or the other tended to dominate the approach of a given theologian. Gerson, in fact, specifically applauded the Franciscan theologian, Bonaventure, for attempting to find a balance.

Bonaventura inflames the affections while at the same time instructing the mind. Where so many others only confuse the mind and burden it with [scholastic] “qualifications,” “prior and posterior arguments,” “signs,” and “contingencies,” Bonaventura unites one with God in ecstatic love [cited by Ozment, 77].

By the coming of the sixteenth century there was in place in northern Europe a clear distaste for the methods and outcomes of the scholastic tradition. The activism of the Christian humanists, including Gerson, Francesco Petrarch, and Desiderius Erasmus; and the simple biblicism of English Lollards, all reflect a broad reaction to the fruit of the late medieval scholastics. The systemic speculations that were at the heart of Thomistic theology began to face increasing opposition by the time of the Reformation.

On the other hand more affective expressions of spirituality were offered in popular writings such as The Cloud of Unknowing, The Imitation of Christ, and others. Luther’s first effort in publication was his 1516 edition of the anonymous Theologia Germanica, reflecting his own early engagement with the tradition of mystical piety.

Oberman summarizes the goal of Luther’s theology:

He [Luther] can place Bernard before Augustine as the preacher of Christ but refers to Bonaventure as “the highest among the scholastic doctores [academics].” It is exactly where Bonaventure straddles the two schools and combines the theologia speculativa [speculative theology] with the theologia affectiva [affective theology] that Luther deviates from him and testifies: “he almost drove me out of my mind, because I wanted to feel the union of God with my soul, as a union of both the intellect and the will” [Dawn, 136].

Thus, the theologians of the sixteenth century were well aware of two broad traditions, one affective and the other scholastic. And Calvin, in his conversion to the faith of the Reformation, moved from his heritage in scholastic Devotion to his enduring commitment to the affective spirituality of Piety. “Calvinism”, on the other hand—as Oberman noted above—reverted to the values of scholastic Devotion after Calvin’s passing.

Why is this significant to us today? Because much of the current tradition of academic Christianity has followed the path of Calvinism back into a spirituality that the early reformers dismissed. For those of us who have, on the other hand, found the scholastic theology of duty and devotion to be empty of the Spirit’s life, we have an alternative and more biblical tradition to embrace—one that this blog site seeks to represent and promote.

So we can, indeed, “taste and see that God is good” without needing to gain the approval of those who prefer an arid faith that even Calvin dismissed. Two traditions, but only one is captured by God’s heart. His heart is what makes all the difference.

Last week I wrote of the importance of the Word. This week we take up prayer—the spontaneous complement to Bible reading. As I noted once before, the two go together. God offers his heart in the Scriptures and we share our hearts, in return, through our prayers. As in any conversation each party must have a voice.

As a starting point, however, we need to face a tough reality: for many people prayer is a useless exercise.

Jesus made the point when he scolded the religious leaders of his day who loved to wear their doctoral garb on a regular basis, to be greeted in public as important figures, and to be given prominence at public feasts—all while defrauding the local widows. One of their devices in sustaining a pretense of holiness was to offer “long prayers.” Yet, in reality, all they could look forward to from their prayers would be “greater condemnation” [Luke 20:47].

And his point was applicable to a broader audience—not just the leaders. The same motive that made hypocrites of the leaders was also at work among the people. They would all twist Scriptures to suit their own ends. So too they misused prayer: “This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me” [Matthew 15:8; Jesus is citing Isaiah 29:13]. This distance-of-heart problem is certainly what explains the sharp point Jesus made to the superficially religious but inauthentic listeners of his day [Matthew 7:21]:

Not everyone who says to me, “Lord, Lord,” will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. On that day many will say to me, “Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many might works in your name?” And then I will declare to them, “I never knew you; depart from me, you workers of lawlessness.”

So the great problem with inauthentic prayer is that it’s a one-sided effort to move God to grant favors and bestow gifts while we still retain an affective independence from him. In such cases we don’t really “like” God but hope to find ways to use him—to get him to support our ambitions. But such silly efforts at manipulation never work. It’s like a child who wants to fly by hopping in the air and flapping his arms.

We then ask, “Okay, then, how are we supposed to pray properly?”

The answer is no mystery: if we want to pray effectively we need to pray affectively. Prayer must always be heart-to-heart. Listen, for instance, to the relational context in what we’ve cited already. Jesus spoke of God as his “Father” and ours—as in his instructions for us to begin prayers with “Our Father in heaven . . .” And of a personal bond as the basis for prayer: to be those who “know” him.

This latter point is critical as Jesus disclosed in his prayer of John 17, “And this is eternal life, that they know you the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent” [v.3]. The whole point of Christ’s coming was to embrace a people for himself from out of the world that had despised God from Eden onward.

So let’s pause and think again about the same starting point we found to be crucial last week: what went wrong in Eden? There the serpent offered an alternative and competing word to God’s promise about the forbidden fruit: “In the day that you eat of it you shall surely die” versus Satan’s “You will not surely die.” With that conflict of claims there also came a conflict of ambitions and identity. The serpent promised, “your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil” [Genesis 3:5].

God, however, never meant for us to have such a free will of this sort—to try to stand alongside him as smaller versions of divinity in our own right. We are always free to choose, of course, but we are made to always make our free choices in a heart-to-heart alignment with him. In repentance we return to our newly beloved Creator as the one who made us for good works, works that we delight to discover and express as we maintain our life-of-communion with him. Our life is only meant to be lived within the sphere of his life and love, never apart from it.

What Satan offered Adam and Eve, then, was autonomy—a presumed capacity to be self-ruled; to assert a freedom to choose for themselves what is good and what is evil. It was this new basis of “life” lived apart from God that Jesus certainly had in mind when he spoke to religiously active people who were actually “workers of lawlessness” despite calling him “Lord, lord”.

The relational piece is crucial. To “know” the triune God is to share in an intimate bond of love with him—to reciprocate the love he is always initiating towards us. Throughout the Bible, in fact, the word “know” is a common euphemism for sexual intimacy—the epitome of mutual love in a marriage. To know Jesus and the Father is to be completely bonded to him. It doesn’t allow for independence any more than a branch can be fruitful by becoming independent from a vine.

For us to pray properly, then, we need to have the same devotion the Son displayed towards his Father—even in his most difficult trial: “not my will but your will be done.” And when Jesus told his closest followers to ask for whatever they wanted in his name—with the assurance that the prayers would be answered—he was speaking in the context of this relational bond. The apostles knew his heart, shared his heart, and sought to delight him in all they did: this, alone, is the basis for proper prayers, prayers that are certain to be answered.

What, then, are some practical suggestions? Let me offer a few thoughts from my own experience.

First and foremost, always keep our prayers and our Bible reading closely linked and fully aligned. I find myself always wanting to pray after I’ve been in the Bible. Each morning I spend about forty minutes in my Bible reading and then I go out for a walk—often in the wet weather of winter months—and spill my heart as a response to what I’ve just read. I also have a lot of folks I’ve committed to pray for over the years. I mention all of them each morning, asking God’s grace and care to be at work in and through them: my folks, my brothers & sister, their spouses & children; and my various friends. If I have any recent news from them, it supports more specific prayers.

I also regularly pray the prayer of Psalm 139: that God will search my heart, see and expose any false directions in it, and then lead me in his own ways. I ask him to coach me, correct me, and to show off his love through me. Life is always an adventure: what I think is secure can be tipped over in a second—so I ask him to keep me fully dependent on him, no matter what the day offers.

Much of what I do in my prayers is to say “thank you, Lord” as my most basic form of worship—see Romans 1:21. I review a host of things that support my thankfulness and I mention them aloud to him. Speaking of which: more than once as I’ve been praying out loud in my morning walk I’ve had someone I hadn’t seen coming intersect with me as I’m talking aloud. They probably think I’m either crazy or talking on my earphone. No matter, it’s a joy to have a tangible time of walking and talking with Christ.

I’ve also discovered the enjoyment of what Paul called “praying always”: I talk to Christ freely and spontaneously throughout the day. I ask him questions. I complain. I tell him what I’m worried about. I mention people to him who come to mind “from nowhere” and ask for his providential care to be at work in their lives. That all comes with my sense that he loves me and wants me to involve him in every step of life.

Finally, I expect him to answer me. Not in the sense of collecting benefits from him. In fact I rarely ask him for “things.” He’s supplied me with all I need for the basic issues of life. What I ask for most often is wisdom and applied insight—about how to deal with relationships, with life challenges, with planning ahead, and so on. Then, after I raise an issue in my walking-and-talking prayer I’ll move on with whatever I’m doing. Later, when I begin to have further thoughts—maybe after an hour or two, or even a day or two later—I give the Spirit credit for stirring me to think in new ways about the items I’ve raised with him. I regularly find the new thoughts to be aligned with my recent Bible reading: the one stirs and supports the other.

So, in summary, let’s pray boldly and often, and always with a sense that we are with One who is eternally in conversation both within himself and with all who share his heart. It’s a wonderful way to enjoy life!

Sometimes we hear reports of what others say about us. That happened a few years ago when a friend passed along what a noted ministry leader said about me: “The trouble with Ron is that he always rides the same pony.” What was the pony? “He’s fixated on Bible reading.”

My response? Wow! Please put that on my epitaph! What an honor if that’s what I’m known for, even if it dismisses lots of my other interests. In fact, all my other healthy interests are only derived from my fascination with the God who I meet each day in the Bible.

Why such a positive response? Because I’m standing with God himself in having that fixation. In his case the matter has to do with his identity: he is a God who exists in the eternal triune communion that carries with it eternal communication. God’s own being comes to us as “Word”—with the Son revealing what he hears from the Father, and the Spirit communicating the mind of Christ to our own spirits in words.

And our own creation as relational beings carries with it a divine template of communion and communication as we are made in God’s image as male and female. It takes at least two for a conversation to occur, for love to be expressed, for discoveries to be shared, and for glory to be given. All of this “back and forth” of being truly human only reflects the back and forth of the eternal, divine conversation—the shared glory that Jesus spoke of with the Father in John 17:24.

My thoughts about this were restirred as I prepared a sermon for this weekend on “Relational Bible Reading.” Let me review, in brief, some of the insights that jumped up once again for me in the process.

One was that everything in human history still pivots on the question of Genesis 3. Was God’s word true, or was the serpent’s word true? When Adam was told not to eat the forbidden fruit lest he die on that very day, he initially believed God. Yet when Eve—deceived by the serpent’s claims of potential benefits and the counterclaim “you will surely not die”—invited Adam to turn away from God’s word to embrace the serpent’s word he agreed to do it. And he died. The Spirit who was their bond of life was gone in an instant.

This, then, is certainly the context for what Jesus told Nicodemus in John 3: “you must be born again” and “that which is born of the flesh is flesh and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit.”

The Spirit-based versus merely flesh-based versions of life set up the great divide of today’s world: there are those who are dead and still believe the serpent’s claim that they are really alive; and those who are now alive, having accepted God’s assertion that they were dead and needed to be born again.

Faith comes from hearing and responding to God’s calling to new life in Christ. Which means there are certainly a number of still-dead Christians—those who still dismiss the claim that we were all once dead in our trespasses and sins until God, by his grace working in us to create faith, resurrected us into a new and eternal life.

I’m repeating myself in much of this post: these are features I keep coming back to in these weekly posts. But why? Because I find many Christians talking about God, about theology, about church growth, social transformation, outreach efforts, discipleship programs, authentic community, iconic symbols, and a host of other things. But in too many cases these same people don’t ever mention their Bible reading as a primary devotion. Nor do they promote it with the passion it deserves. All of which worries me.

Why?

Because of what Jesus said in John 5 to some avid theologians and academic students of the Old Testament: “You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it they that bear witness about me” [v.39]. Their reading was fruitless, Jesus said, because “you do not have the love of God within you.” It is only when we are born of the Spirit and have God’s love poured into our hearts by his new and lively presence that we actually listen to the Bible in any true and effective sense.

And because of what Jesus said in John 8 to some professed believers who were still ready to critique him for what he said about being set free from sin through abiding in his word. Once again it was a matter of a great divide between God and Satan: “Why do you not understand what I say? It is because you cannot bear to hear my word. You are of your father the devil, and your desire is to do your father’s desires” [v.43]. Jesus also made it clear that there is another trajectory that separates professed believers who don’t really like God’s word and those who do: “Whoever is of God hears the words of God. The reason why you do not hear them is that you are not of God” [v.47].

And because of what Jesus prayed in John 17 to the Father about his true followers.

I have manifested your name to the people whom you gave me out of the world. Yours they were, and you gave them to me, and they have kept your word. Now they know that everything that you have given me is from you. For I have given them the words that you gave me, and they have received them and have come to know in truth that I came from you; and they have believed that you sent me. [vs.6-8, my emphases]

There are another set of references to the dividing power of God’s word in the rest of this chapter: the disciples are hated by the world because of their affiliation with God’s word [v.14]; and the word is truth and truth reformed—”sanctified”—these, his disciples.

So let me offer my conclusion: anyone who really knows God will be avid about his word. And everyone who loves God will be hungry for anything and everything he says. And all of us who share this passion can join in having the insider’s knowledge that we’re in a unique fellowship with God and with each other: lovers of the Word!

For those, on the other hand, who although professing to be Christians, still can’t find time to read the Bible (but who have lots of time for entertainments and temporal ambitions); or who find it too hard to read; or who are more interested in high theology than in the humble literature of the Bible, here’s an invitation: ask God to give you his wonderful new life and give up your old life. And then take up your Bibles and start reading.

Once again, the words of Jesus: “If you abide in my word then you are truly my disciples” [John 8:31]. Amen, and let’s start riding that pony together!

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.