We take it for granted—but we shouldn’t—that Jesus came into the world as a baby. As far as I can tell, all of His other interactions with mortals, before and after His earthly ministry, were in mature form—either as a spirit before He was born, or in His resurrected body after His death. While on earth, His public ministry occurred when He was grown, as did His suffering, death, and Resurrection on our behalf.

I suppose there are many reasons. For one, Jesus was never above the law—He came to earth through birth the way we all do and now understands what it’s like. But perhaps another is this: Jesus’s physical development, from boy to man, both enabled His spiritual progression and symbolized the progression our spirits, too, are capable of. That should give us hope!

The starting point of infancy is perhaps not pointless at all. Progression is the eternal plan—physical and spiritual. In every way, the life of Jesus was an example for us—even in showing that minute, day-to-day development, which may sometimes seem slow, insignificant, or even undiscernable, is actually eternally significant.

We know so little of Jesus the boy and Jesus the teenager. Aside from the events of His birth and His temple-teaching experience, His youth is typically summarized by this verse in Luke: “Jesus increased in wisdom and stature, and in favour with God and man.” 

Although little is said of this time of His life, He must have experienced the joys of play, the challenges of being little, and the difficult transition from oblivious childhood innocence to chosen innocence. The physical reality of growing up and developing accountability is a sacred thing to which Jesus Christ can relate.

Perhaps it was through His physical development that His great spiritual development could occur. While Jesus was developing from boy to man, He was also developing spiritual intelligence and glory. Even He, the Lamb without blemish, “received not of the [Father’s] fulness [of glory] at the first, but received grace for grace, until he received a fulness.” Doctrine and Covenants 93 anchors this progression in embodiment: “spirit and element,” when they are inseparably connected, receive a “fulness of joy.”

How can it be that even Christ “received grace for grace”? I am not sure we fully know. But we do know that the full stature of our spiritual maturity is more than to merely be innocent. It is to grow in our capacity to live by light and truth—so much so that truth and its light are found in us, increasing our oneness with the Godhead. It is one thing to be welcomed back into God’s arms; it’s another to be remade in His likeness. But both involve teaching the body to act at the behest of the spirit. Jesus was justified on His own by never transgressing the Father’s law. In John 10, Christ models humble submission to the Father—saying it was the Father who sanctified Him and gave Him His glory.

There is something very comforting in knowing that even Jesus “received grace for grace” as He lived in His mortal body. For one, it suggests the probable disposition of the Father toward His children. If even the Father’s Only Begotten Son progressed toward His glory, surely the Father takes a long view, and not an immediate one, of our spiritual progress. Like parents who patiently help their babies develop new abilities without condemning them for their previous inabilities, the Father helps us develop new capacities that expand our agency and therefore our potential to be like Him.

The knowledge of “grace for grace” also gives us great comfort in how we relate to Jesus. He knows what it is like to spiritually strive in a physical body for more holiness from the Father. He knows what it is like to develop accountability and then to face the challenge of temptation it brings. He knows what it is to be helpless and vulnerable, to experience the innocent feelings of childhood and then to face the difficult mortal struggles and realities we confront as we mature. 

We can take comfort in knowing that “grace for grace” is real for us. Lest we believe it was only for Jesus, He explicitly tells us otherwise: “For if you keep my commandments you shall receive of his fulness, and be glorified in me as I am in the Father; therefore, I say unto you, you shall receive grace for grace.” 

The baby Jesus embodies our hope to become. Baby Jesus’s physical existence prefigured the physical Resurrection He would bring. And it is the union of our physical and spiritual bodies, reborn through resurrection, through which we will receive the fulness of joy. 

So as we contemplate His miraculous birth, let us remember the miracle that, in the first place, He was born at all. In His choosing to enter mortality as a baby, we find the hope that we all may grow grace for grace to become like Him.

The post How Baby Jesus Makes Hope Tangible appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

I’ve often had to deal with sorrow and disappointments at Christmastime. They’re usually a reaction to all the materialism, the rush to buy things, the assumption that gift-giving is all-important, that getting further in debt and ending up disappointed should be the norm. January then ushers in the realities that follow such values each new year. I know the drill because I stand as a witness against it every year. 

On the other hand, focusing on Christ heavily during Christmas can be more meaningful than any Black Friday or Cyber Monday. For four decades, my wife Kaye and I have enjoyed making it a sacred season, a time to reflect on the Savior’s miraculous birth, an occasion to gather in our humble home with our rather large family of 40 or so, when counting married kids and grandkids. It’s always on Christmas Eve. We also commemorate the births of others preceding December 25, including the Prophet Joseph’s birthday on Dec. 23, Kit Carson’s on Dec. 22 (a frontier hero of my youth), and my own on Christmas Eve, Dec. 24. Although our tribe has lived and worked in 20 U.S. states, as well as over a dozen nations, we try to gather annually and sit around the old fireplace, singing Christmas music, re-enacting the magical story of Jesus’ birth, eating homemade meals, sleeping in the basement or on the living room carpet, and more. Family togetherness has always been a priority, when possible.

Yet, some of the most meaningful Christmas seasons for me have been when I’ve left the comforts of home to serve “the least of these” among impoverished villagers in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Because I was a Marriott School professor at BYU, carrying out a humanitarian trip for 10-15 days between semesters was an ideal time to escape campus and grading, sometimes with other family members joining to serve. 

Below are several experiences during the Christmas season in which I felt especially close to Jesus while actually trying to focus on His teachings.

A few years earlier, in another experience in Africa, I had one of the more sacred experiences of my life when I took my wife Kaye to Mali, West Africa, to volunteer during the last two weeks of December, leaving our kids and friends back in Utah. If I can paint the scene, it had all the elements of the 2000-year-old birth of Christ, including walking dusty rural paths, braying donkeys, lowing cattle, and children dressed in mere rags as clothing. I’ll never forget a young mother holding her new scrawny baby, nursing to keep it alive. 

It really did feel like we were transported back to the days of Jesus’ birth hundreds of years earlier. But we were in sub-Sahara Africa, the people were Muslim and the gifts were of smiles and papaya rather than gold, myrrh, and frankincense.

 We weren’t there to have Christmas parties but to evaluate the needs of poor villagers in southern Mali and explore whether we could potentially design and establish a microcredit program for economic development in which I could generate funding and train students of mine from Harvard and BYU to implement a new program. The ultimate goal was family self-reliance.

It really did feel like we were transported back to the days of Jesus’ birth hundreds of years earlier. [/perfectpullquote]Leading up to the trip, Kaye and I mobilized support from our Latter-day Saint neighbors and friends. The ward cultural hall was turned into a Third World “factory” in which Provo mothers and girls, including our daughter, sewed soft, cloth, Black dolls that we could distribute to Malian girls. The young men contributed soccer balls and marbles. Adults donated toys, soaps, clothes, and towels. One of our neighbor families donated all their Christmas gifts, deciding it was better to “give rather than receive.”

 At the time, Mali was ranked as the second poorest nation on the planet as people suffered from decades of drought, civil war, abject poverty, and hunger. The average Malian adult died at 46, perhaps not unlike Jesus’ time. And some forty percent of children born in those villages died before age 5. So it was a place of desperate poverty and a struggle to survive.

For ten days in Mali, we labored alongside villagers making adobe bricks to build two village schools, the first two in that entire region of 30-plus communities. There were no paved roads, no electricity, no supermarkets, or tech businesses. People mostly lived on millet, the type of birdseed we give the sparrows in our trees. Life was hand-to-mouth each day. Yet we found among these Muslim friends the love within families just like in Provo, Utah.

A few days after arriving, we distributed the soaps and other family gifts. We handed out flattened soccer balls with bicycle pumps so boys could blow them up and begin playing the most important thing in their lives, soccer with a ball. Instead of street soccer in the dusty desert of sub-Saharan Africa where they usually just kicked a big bunch of knotted rags as a substitute for a real ball, they now had actual soccer balls.

We distributed the sweet, simply crafted, soft Black African dolls made by our ward mutual girls to several dozen Malian girls. We both still vividly remember “Maine,” a young mother whose newborn had died, holding the doll we gave her 9-year-old daughter, cradling it softly while humming a lullaby as she remembered her lost baby. Later we saw other mothers singing to the dolls, rocking them as they remembered the deaths of their own babies a year or two before. When the sweltering heat subsided at night, the drummers showed up and Kaye danced with the women in several villages after they wrapped and tied one of their babies on her back. She wore a native boo-boo like the other African mothers. 

That sacred experience was special for us. We learned from the people. We grew to appreciate having quiet, modest holiday experiences. Ever since, we’ve sought to avoid the rush, the shopping malls, the expensive gifts. In contrast to U.S. Christmas spending, which in 2021 will average $998 per person, Mali was and is different. People there lived humble lives as they experienced joblessness and poverty. At that time, 25 years ago, many had but one meal a day. The average Malian family’s annual income was about $300, compared to the average American family of about $24,000 back then. 

A few days after Christmas, as we hugged our friends and climbed into an old jeep to head up the road to the airport and return home, we reflected on what life must have been like for Mary and Joseph as they took similar difficult trails from their homes to Bethlehem. In Luke, we learn they were finally able to rest in a dirty, noisy, animal stable on the very night that the angels sang “Glory to God.” That same night, humble peasants followed the exultant heavenly messengers. During our humanitarian expedition, we felt an inkling of ancient Palestine. Yet our experience was with shepherds and goat herders of modern Mali making their way home to their mud huts to spend another evening listening to the cries of hungry children. 

I’m grateful for each Christmas season to reflect and remember Jesus’ magical birth, His life of teaching and serving others. Ultimately, the greatest miracle wasn’t His humble beginning. Rather, it is his great atonement for all mankind, including me. The experiences above, and many more, help me seek to follow his example and to value humility and life’s simplicities more than ever. 

Note: We encourage you to consider making your own family donation this Christmas to alleviate the suffering of brothers and sisters in acute need. We asked Dr. Woodworth to recommend charities he trusts in the work they do and as good stewards of donated funds. In addition to supporting the humanitarian work of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints around the world, here are his other recommendations: 

• Academy for Creating Enterprise (https://www.the-academy.org/)—helping to alleviate suffering in many countries
•  Ouelessebougou Alliance (https://www.lifteachother.org/)—supporting families in one of the world’s poorest nations, Mali, West Africa
•  Mentors International (www.mentorsinternational.org)—helping the poor in the Philippines, Nicaragua, and elsewhere
•  CHOICE (Center for Humanitarian Outreach and Intercultural Exchange)  (www.choice.humanitarian.org)—supporting the poor in Nepal, Ecuador, etc.
• HELP International (www.help-international.org)—supporting people in 10 countries, many extremely poor such as Cambodia, Peru, etc.

The post Trying to Christmas Like Jesus appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

While the seasonal media frenzy around the identity of Jesus can correctly be attributed to a desire for increased readership and viewership, there is a deeper struggle underway within Christianity itself, wherein lay people are grappling with questions concerning the identity and character of Jesus of Nazareth.  The name of Jesus is invoked to support and also to oppose any number of political and social stances, from gay marriage to border walls to tax policy. At the same time, questions of Biblical historicity that for more than a century were almost exclusively the domain of specialists are now being argued in books and online videos that make skeptical and critical scholarly perspectives accessible to the average Sunday School participant.  Largely thanks to the popular work of critical scholars like Bart Ehrman, Christians operating with assumptions of Biblical inerrancy are finding themselves overwhelmed with questions surrounding the authorship of the gospels, divergences in gospel narratives, and thorny issues such as why the earliest manuscripts of Mark (long regarded by scholars as the earliest of the gospels produced) do not include a resurrection narrative.

The average churchgoer is not likely to bring the appropriate intellectual toolset to respond to the questions raised by the fields of textual and historical criticism, and on a more basic cognitive level, many Christians operate with the devastatingly erroneous assumption that factual historical narratives they hold to be sacred and true, should be immune to rational counterargument.  When they encounter just such a rational counterargument, the result is often predictable. Unaware of the biases and ideological commitments of critical scholars, Christians reading critical scholarship often find their faith coming apart at the seams, particularly if their faith is based primarily in the convictions of other people and is lacking any personal experiential dimension.

Latter-day Saints have been affected in recent years by all of these trends, which are only part —but certainly the most consequential part—of a larger crisis of loss of faith in our community.  Our crisis of deconstructed belief in the resurrected Christ is made possible by the same epistemic and methodological processes that deconstruct belief in the prophetic calling of Joseph Smith and his successors in the institutional church.  Evangelicals and other groups who used to swim in schadenfreude upon seeing Latter-day Saint convictions melt away in the acid of critical attacks, are now horrified to find their own systems, grounded in untenable notions of Biblical inerrancy and “self-validating” authority-based epistemologies, coming apart as many of their own adherents test their Christian convictions in the same critical intellectual solvent.

Liberal Christianity has provided a respite for many who are struggling to retain their faith in the face of critical arguments.  Liberal theologians impose naturalistic explanations upon miraculous events documented in the gospels, and thereby relieve their readers from the psychic burden of believing in phenomena that seem to not be empirically verifiable or historically plausible.  That psychic burden is further assuaged by focus on the social aspects of the gospel that Jesus and His followers taught and attempted to implement in the early Christian community. Even while the decision to live in the spirit of Jesus’ concern for the marginalized is transformational to the soul, it has become the substance of countless purely horizontal, non-believing professions of Christian devotion.

Similar to the question of what it means to be Christian,  “What is Christianity?” has been examined in countless iterations.  It is no secret that reconstructing the life and thought of Jesus of Nazareth is an enterprise typically characterized by self-serving analysis and competing selective interpretations of the available historical data.  Christian satire site The Babylon Bee humorously captures the problem in an article with the headline “Jesus Was A Socialist Deconstructionist Feminist, Claims Socialist Deconstructionist Feminist Scholar.” The article quotes a fictional academic who asserts: “When I strip away the things that obviously could not have been said by the Jesus of history, the Christ figure is practically an avatar of my own mind.”

More seriously, John Dominic Crossan addresses the problematic variety of findings arising from historical Jesus studies in a frank and forthright introduction to his book The Historical Jesus: “That stunning diversity is an academic embarrassment. It is impossible to avoid the suspicion that historical Jesus research is a very safe place to do theology and call it history, to do autobiography and call it biography” (p.xxviii).  Crossan’s assessment is a favor to his readers, some of whom may lack context that would enable them to situate his own scholarship in the academic chaos that is historical Jesus research. In his book The Writings of the New Testament, believing scholar Luke Timothy Johnson further explains the problem:

A pile of pieces does not by itself yield a satisfying picture of Jesus.  It is necessary to fit these pieces into an alternative framework than the one provided by the Gospels.  At this point, the subjective character of the entire enterprise becomes evident: the framework chosen often reveals as much about the investigator as it does about Jesus.  When scholars, all using the same methods and studying the same materials, derive such a variety of “historical” Jesuses—a revolutionary zealot, a cynic radical, an agrarian reformer, a gay magician, a charismatic cult reformer, a peasant, a guru of oceanic bliss — then one may well wonder whether anything more than a sophisticated and elaborate form of projection has taken place (p.555).

The magnitude of this problem is ably portrayed in Charlotte Allen’s sweeping survey The Human Christ, where the problem of ideologically-motivated framing of the Jesus story is presented as a centuries-long quagmire, spanning from Marcion’s efforts to de-Judaize Jesus to the intellectual trends of the enlightenment, to the 18th Century rise of German schools of critical scholarship, and finally to the contemporary work of Crossan, Marcus Borg, and others.

Written in 1998, Allen’s survey predates the rise of University of North Carolina scholar Bart Ehrman.  A formerly believing Evangelical Christian, Ehrman lost his faith after contemplating the problem of evil.  Pairing his newfound skepticism with training in textual criticism, Ehrman has employed challenging questions around inconsistencies in New Testament manuscripts, along with ambiguities in the historical record, to create compelling counter-narratives to traditional Christian faith.  His success in undermining faith has been so widespread that a team of Evangelical New Testament scholars has formed The Ehrman Project, a series of YouTube videos designed to counter his influence.  Scholar Ben Witherington has undertaken lengthy page-by-page treatments of Ehrman’s books in order to expose Ehrman’s faulty logic and scholarly overreach.

In Witherington’s critique of Ehrman’s book Jesus, Interrupted, he begins with a discussion of Ehrman’s qualifications:

Bart Ehrman, so far as I can see, and I would be glad to be proved wrong about this fact, has never done the necessary laboring in the scholarly vineyard to be in a position to write a book like Jesus, Interrupted from a position of long study and knowledge of New Testament Studies. He has never written a scholarly monograph on NT theology or exegesis. He has never written a scholarly commentary on any New Testament book whatsoever!

Lest Ehrman accuse Witherington of poisoning the well, Ehrman might remember his own assessment of Reza Azlan’s qualifications to write the book Zealot:

A number of readers have pointed out to me that it’s not fair to say he does not have credentials in the field, because he has a PhD in sociology of religion. Yes, he does.  And that would provide him with credentials to write a book on the sociology of religion. But his historical Jesus book is not a sociological analysis. It’s a historical study based on an examination of the New Testament Gospels. The credentials for that kind of study have nothing to do with sociology of religion.

In contrast with these scholarly debates over qualifications, Witherington’s book-length survey of historical Jesus scholarship, The Jesus Quest, engages with a broad sample of studies and explores the methodology of the Jesus Seminar, whose participants famously engage in a voting process and utilize a set of criteria (often arbitrarily, depending on the scholar) to determine which of the sayings of Jesus in the gospels can be considered authentic.  Witherington’s book joins Charlotte Allen’s Human Christ, N.T. Wright’s Who Was Jesus? and Craig Evans’ Fabricating Jesus in the crowded field of surveys of historical Jesus studies, and the proliferation of YouTube presentations by Ehrman and others indicates that this apologetic genre has room to flourish in online media formats.

Observers of the field of historical Jesus studies know that there will never be enough books and presentations to counter every critical argument; the proliferation of books and media is fueled by powerful incentives in terms of both financial compensation and validation of the worldviews of the consumers of these materials. It’s precisely for this reason that I would argue more attention to worldview and bias is essential to rendering inert the tendency of this information to overwhelm. To that end, Ehrman’s openness about his loss of belief in God over the problem of evil is an important confession of a priori bias against the historicity of the miracle-filled narratives of the gospels. Ehrman’s bias sees its opposite in that of NT Wright, who often describes a childhood experience of God’s love as a formative moment that would serve as an epistemic lens for his adult scholarly career. Wright’s Christian Origins series helpfully provides several chapter-length discussions of the impact of worldview and epistemology in New Testament studies. Scholars like Witherington and Evans are very open about their belief in the divine authority that infuses scripture, and as might be expected of creedal Christian scholars, their studies reflect a bias toward traditional Trinitarian interpretations of the New Testament text.

Among liberal scholars, acknowledgements of bias sometimes take the form of a personal story, as in the aforementioned case of Bart Ehrman and his loss of belief in God. In other situations, it takes the form of metaphysical pronouncements like Rudolph Bultmann’s naked assertion that “It is impossible to use electric light and the wireless and to avail ourselves of modern medical and surgical discoveries, and at the same time to believe in the New Testament world of spirits and miracles.”

Additionally, modern liberal scholarship often reflects a bias toward the fallacy of composition: if any segment of scriptural text is of questionable provenance, then all scriptural texts can be considered to be of questionable provenance; if any narrative in scripture can be considered allegorical, then allegory is an appropriate genre category for all of scripture; and so forth.

In recent years, another form of liberal bias was displayed in Richard Rohr’s bestselling panentheistic treatment of Christ, The Universal Christ.  Rohr’s expression of the good news of the gospel of Jesus Christ takes the form of a series of questions to the reader:

What if Christ is a name for the transcendent within every “thing” in the universe? What if Christ is a name for the immense spaciousness of all true Love? 

What if Christ refers to an infinite horizon that pulls us from within and pulls us forward too? 

What if Christ is another name for everything—in its fullness? (p.5)

Rohr does not always share other liberal theologians’ bias for naturalism; his worldview is panentheism in the form of a Christ essence that is somehow in everything.  In one sense, Latter-day Saints may resonate with this representation of a “cosmic Christ” as it echoes the discussion of the Light of Christ found in D&C 88. But Rohr’s cosmic Christ is then portrayed as a being with views that rarely if ever diverge from American progressive political orthodoxy and its vision of social justice. Christ in the person of Jesus of Nazareth is portrayed as operating in opposition to Second Temple Judaism (rather than as a devout adherent to His faith), and also described as having the spirit of a woman in a man’s body, answering progressive longings for an intersectional incarnation. Ultimately, despite the many productive discussions of Christian teachings that are contained in The Universal Christ, the book’s portrait of a cosmic Christ resembles nothing so much as a cosmic Richard Rohr.  A sad moment in the book is Rohr’s admission that “For the last ten years I have had little spiritual ‘feeling,’ neither consolation nor desolation.”  As a strong admirer of Rohr’s other work, I wish he had resisted the impulse to write on the very most consequential of theological subjects during a period of inability to sense God’s influence in his life.

What should be the Latter-day Saint response to a field that is so beset with intellectual entropy and ideological self-affirmation?  Despite the myriad problems in the field of historical Jesus studies, it would be a mistake to dismiss all of the work of these scholars.  James and Judith McConkie’s 2018 study Whom Say Ye That I Am is an excellent example of how believing Latter-day Saints can synthesize the work of historical Jesus scholars and render a historically-informed portrait of Jesus that is both faithful and challenging.  But to prepare for broader engagement with this field of scholarship and for the less intellectually-intensive popular debates over Jesus taking place in our media outlets, our first priority should be to get our own house in order, and that begins with an honest examination of the quality of our theology as understood among rank and file members of the Church of Jesus Christ. Terryl and Fiona Givens are making strides in improving our theological assumptions in The Christ Who Heals and other related works, but the seeds of quality theology cannot sprout and bear fruit in toxic or fallow intellectual soil. The healthy soil of our unique Christian message should be formed of mature teaching and practice of grace and charity, along with an epistemology that values personal experience and credible witness testimony over the agnostic philosophical commitments that govern academic discourse.

In that vein, we do not need to share in the dissonance of commentators (often white males of privilege) who profess to value the voices of women and yet reject the witness testimony of Anna the Prophetess, the woman who anointed Jesus at Bethany, Mary at the tomb, or in the current dispensation, Emmeline B. Wells in the temple, over the fact that their witness testimony does not conform to modern standards of historiography or universal empirical verifiability.  We can celebrate and fully accept the testimonies of those women, placing them comfortably in the long chain of corroborating witnesses of the resurrected Christ that span from antiquity to the present. From an epistemic standpoint, we can affirm Bruce R. McConkie’s statement that “God stands revealed or He remains forever unknown,” and reiterate Jesus’ declaration that this revelation is most possible among simple people (Luke 10:21-22).  More recently, President Russell M. Nelson’s recent encouragement to “Ask your Heavenly Father if we truly are the Lord’s Apostles and prophets” is the most compelling of epistemic positions in the contest of opinions regarding the identity of Jesus of Nazareth.  Opinions that emerge from debates among the unconverted in popular media and the chaotic field of historical Jesus studies will never approach the epistemic value of restoration witness testimony.

Our criticism of the excesses of liberal scholarship furthermore need not be answered with excesses that are rooted in the conservative temperament so prevalent in, for example, U.S. Evangelical churches.  We can perhaps set aside our well-intended instinct to harmonize the gospels and instead explore the unique priorities and voices of the authors. We can acknowledge that Jesus in mortality was speaking from a first-century Jewish worldview, to first-century Judean audiences. If ideologues misuse New Testament messages of social justice in the service of a naturalistic worldview, we can resist the temptation to overcorrect; we can fully and honestly explore Jesus’ prayer that “Thy Kingdom come; Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven” and advocate for public policy ideas that will enable society to conform to God’s vision for humanity in the present. Our firm declaration in The Living Christ that Jesus was the Jehovah of the Old Testament also provides us with a much greater impetus to explore the social justice messages of the Hebrew prophets, and to interpret their messages with the additional exegetical resources of our open canon.

Finally, we are in a better position to prevent contamination of our spiritual soil with the intellectual poisons that have killed our political discourse: If liberal commentators err in claiming that Jesus’ lack of public pronouncements on gender dysphoria or abortion constitute His concession-by-silence to modern progressive views on those issues, then we do not need to conclude by way of the same logical fallacy that Jesus’ silence on pollution of natural resources or His silence on family separation at the U.S. Southern border somehow hint at His indifference to these moral and policy failures. Being more attentive to the influence of our partisan political loyalties in our treatment of the  message of restored Christianity can enable us to stand in contrast with both contemporary Evangelical Christianity and its progressive opponents, both of whom seem presently unable to distinguish between God and Caesar. 

When political progressives are rightfully disgusted with propaganda paintings depicting a close relationship between Jesus Christ and right-wing political figures, the answer is to speak with conviction of Jesus Christ as Jehovah communicating to Isaiah “thus saith the high and lofty One that inhabiteth eternity, whose name is Holy; I dwell in the high and holy place, with him also that is of a contrite and humble spirit, to revive the spirit of the humble, and to revive the heart of the contrite ones.” As progressives challenge the moral and policy incongruities that they perceive among religious conservatives, they would do well to be mindful of severe rhetorical limitations intrinsic in a liberal mental portrait of Jesus of Nazareth as one of many ancient speakers of truth to power—especially when compared to the persuasive power available to those conceptualizing Jesus as the resurrected Christ and the God of Israel.

The post Creating Jesus in Our Image appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

As the final essay in this series (earlier essays are here, here, here, and here), I would like to briefly identify what I take to be a false conclusion—one that has been widely accepted and is, thus, tenaciously held. This false conclusion is, in fact, both premise and conclusion—and, therefore, doubly dangerous. It is a hidden secular stumbling block that far too often is a source of confusion and struggle for those trying to make sense of their faith, their relationship with God, and the teachings of scripture and religious leaders. The name of this secular stumbling block is “Hedonism.” Simply put, hedonism is the notion that the pursuit of pleasure (however it is defined in particular cases) is the principle aim and driving force of life. A hedonist is, thus, someone who strives to maximize personal pleasure and benefit while simultaneously seeking to minimize personal pain, discomfort, or costs. 

While the word “hedonism” tends to conjure up images of wild excess and indulgence, that is only one possible manifestation of the idea. There are, in fact, many versions of hedonism at work in the world. Some are quite unapologetically selfish and self-aggrandizing, to be sure, but there are other forms that are less obviously selfish and more civil in their approach, seeking to secure personal benefit through cooperation and mutual cost-sharing. I dare say that most people, religious or otherwise, tend to be repulsed by the former and more comfortable with the latter—more approving of the lifestyle philosophy of Bill Gates or Ayn Rand, for example, than that of Hugh Hefner or Miley Cyrus.

It is, nonetheless, difficult to overstate the pervasive influence that the concept of hedonism exerts in our modern world, and on the way we so often understand ourselves, our motives, the actions of others, and even the nature of gospel of Jesus Christ. It really requires very little convincing to see that hedonism is a dominant feature of contemporary social, economic, political, and interpersonal life these days—and, indeed, has been such a feature for a very long time. Indeed, you really only need to scan the daily headlines of your local newspaper to find a litany of accounts of people acting in (or defending acting in) self-interested, and even aggressively hedonistic, ways in the realms of business, politics, education, law, sex, marriage and family, and almost every other area of daily social life.

For many people, it just is the case that to be human is to be “an egoistic, rational, utility-maximizer.” That is to say, for most people it just is a given of life that most of us, most of the time—if not all of us, all of the time—are really just “in it for ourselves,” doing what we can to get ahead in a “dog-eat-dog” world where the only real strategy for success is “looking out for number one!” Even some Christian thinkers suggest that such a view is biblical in nature and is to be embraced with God’s blessing. 

Whether expressed in the overtly crass, materialistic terms of an “if it feels good, do it” ethic, in the biblical language of the fallen selfishness of the “natural man,” or in the calculative jargon of secular rationalism and individual autonomy (e.g., to get what you want out of life requires careful planning and strategic, long-term thinking), the basic assumption about the priority of the Self is always the same (even though the prescriptions for addressing the issue may differ greatly). That is, the Self is, it is said, of all things truly human, the most fundamental, and its interests relentless, inescapable, and undeniable.

Given the pervasive reach of the assumption of hedonism, the only real question that is thought to confront us is how we will go about maximizing our individual pleasures, personal happiness, and economic or social benefits in the course of our daily lives. Indeed, it is the investigation of this very question that tends to occupy the time and intense efforts of Ivory Tower social scientists and philosophers, Wall Street investors and Madison Avenue advertisers, and a vast host of government bureaucrats devoted to hammering out the myriad details of public policy. Very few, in fact, ever bother to question the basic proposition of hedonism, taking it instead as a basic axiom of human life, a law of nature, red in tooth and claw, whose possibilities for excess and destruction can only be mediated by education in the fine art of disciplined self-control, or the careful cultivation of higher, more refined tastes in choosing the objects of one’s pleasure-seeking aims.

What is sometimes missed in all of this, however, is the profound role that the secular premise of universal hedonism tends to play in shaping and guiding our religious lives and understandings. For example, it is commonly said that the primary reason why anyone might opt to divert from an enticing path to pleasure and personal benefit by choosing instead to obey heavenly commandments and follow strict scriptural teachings is really just a matter of the forward-looking calculation of self-interest. In other words, obedience to covenant obligation is often seen, not so much as sacrificing pleasure for pain, as the best route toward securing for ourselves (over the long-haul) particular blessings and rewards we desire by paying the divinely dictated costs of discipleship. Ordinary conversations, for example, about such things as chastity, tithes and offerings, fasting, and various health or dietary restrictions often center on the specific goods (i.e., blessings) that are to be gained by one’s adherence to such commandments—i.e., longer life, financial windfalls, avoidance of unwanted diseases or pregnancies, unique spiritual clarity, and other such desires. Granted or so the argument goes, obedience and self-denial are inconvenient, even painful and frustrating, but the joys of the heavenly payoff will, in the long-term, be more than sufficient to offset any pains endured in the short-term of self-denial.

When seen in such a way—that is, through the unrecognized secular assumption of hedonism—it becomes easy to envisage our religious life as essentially a matter of spiritual bookkeeping where we maintain entries under two basic columns: Costs and Benefits. Sinful or forbidden conduct is then entered in the “Costs” column, while obedient actions are entered into the “Benefits” column, presumably for each column to be added up at various times—and, finally, before the final judgment bar of God—and compared in order to determine whether one has truly done what is necessary to earn the benefit being sought. 

Spirituality and religious life is, on this model, essentially an economic matter of equitable giving and taking, governed by the complex interplay of universal hedonism and implacable contract law. We come to believe that so long as we simply pay sufficiently into our heavenly bank accounts by means of various acts of obedience—while not incurring too much debt by disobedience—then we are entitled to promised and desired blessings from God. A loving Heavenly Father, in this view, is somewhat akin to Santa Claus: a kindly old fellow keeping precise and detailed lists of the Naughty and the Nice, a man who pops up occasionally to reward those who have done whatever is needed to make the one list and to punish (with the spiritual equivalent of a lump of coal) those who have earned a spot on that other list.

When we think of our relationship to God in this hedonistic way—as we are so subtly and continuously encouraged to by our larger culture and its secular liturgies—commandments and heavenly guidance are reduced to being merely the instruments by which we can obtain for ourselves from God certain experiences, goods, or benefits (whether spiritual or temporal) that we happen to personally desire (for whatever reasons). The possibility that one might wish to obey God and follow prophetic counsel simply because doing so is good in itself and serves no other end or purpose, reflecting only love, gratitude, and self-forgetting, is a possibility seldom explicitly entertained or explored fully in its own right. Rather, we too often simply take it for granted that personal desire for benefit always comes first as motivation, self-interest endlessly framing the meaning of any particular acts of obedience and providing the only reasonable justification for inconveniencing oneself in the service of either God or one’s neighbor.

The ultimate consequence of this sort of thinking, although seldom noted, is that we come to see our relationship with God in terms of individual means and individual ends. That is, God becomes someone who we seek out in order to get things from Him that we want, things we want for our reasons and our purposes. The nature of such a relationship is, as I noted above, at its root an economic or contractual one, rather than a familial or covenantal one. It is a relationship whose primary concern is the equitable exchange of desired goods and services by separate parties with separate—though perhaps converging—interests. In other words, our relationship with God is fundamentally instrumental in nature. That is, it is not an end in itself, but rather only an instrument (a means) by which we seek to achieve what are decisively individual ends—regardless of whether those ends are understood as obtaining particular desired blessings (and the rewarding gratification that comes with them) or merely avoiding certain undesired punishments (and the frustration and pain they bring).

While it is easy to see how such a view of the nature of our relationship with God is too superficial, too manipulative, and too self-focused to make adequate sense of the more meaningful and fully covenantal relationship God seeks to have with us, there is a more pernicious danger lurking here that needs to be recognized and brought out into the open. Having unwittingly absorbed the assumption of universal hedonism, and the ethic that comes along with it, through the operations of a multitude of secular liturgies bent toward shaping our self-understanding, certain beliefs about and expectations of God come to be firmly solidified in our minds. A basic conception of God as just the chief provider or withholder of blessings and punishments quickly takes hold, becoming the lens through which we interpret our relationship with Him and understand both His character and our own.

Once our covenant relationship with God is framed in the terms of contractual exchanges, grievances can begin to mount when the blessings we desire, and have come to expect as the result of our diligent obedience to specific commandments, do not show up. In the midst of suffering, setbacks, and trials, we may begin to find ourselves wondering why God is not keeping His end of the bargain with us. Why, we might begin to ask, are we not getting from God what we have clearly earned by our dutiful observance of the commandments He has given? Why is He not keeping the promises He has made? Why have I been consistently offering my tithes to the Church if God isn’t going to resolve my financial difficulties? Why have I been faithfully attending worship services, praying and fasting, if He isn’t going to heal my child of her debilitating illness? Why am I working so hard to be good if God is going to go ahead and let bad things happen to me? When operating from hedonistic premises, especially when they are not recognized as assumptions in the first place (much less secular ones), it is all but impossible to offer a satisfactory answer to such questions, answers in which God is not seen as being untrustworthy, arbitrary, or malicious and false. A serious crisis of faith is the usual (and very predictable) result.

Fortunately, there are other premises from which we might understand the nature of divine commandments, prophetic counsel, and the possibilities of genuine relationship with God. It is possible to “think differently” as we strive to make sense of our faith and our experience of suffering and tragedy. Indeed, I would argue, the Christian worldview might well demand it of us. As Wilkens and Sanford point out in their excellent book Hidden Worldviews: Eight Cultural Stories That Shape Our Lives, secular and theistic “convictions differ radically” and “what exists (and does not exist) in my universe, the means by which it is known most accurately, my place in this universe, and a host of other questions will have answers that are molded by my convictions. If I change my convictions, my world, at least as I experience it, changes with them.” 

Our assumptions about the nature of ourselves and the world, be they genuinely theistic (Christian) or purely secular, “radiate outward to shape our ethics (what we believe we should or should not do) and values (what we take to be priorities).” Ensuring that we have actually thought through the premises that undergird the lives we live, the goals and aspirations we have, and the kind of God we can experience requires vigilant examination of the incongruities that exist between what are, clearly, rival perspectives on who we are, who God is, and what possibilities for a meaningful, authentic relationship might exist.

One possible avenue available for exploration and comparison is one in which the fundamental reality of moral agency is merged with the equally fundamental reality of the “pure love of Christ,” or what has long been known in the Christian tradition as agapé. In contrast to the secular assumption of hedonism being intrinsic to human nature, and thus the foundational context for all human relationships, we might consider the possibility that as moral agents we are capable of forgoing instrumental reasoning and self-interested action by acting unreservedly out of love for another in self-transcending desire for their welfare, with no thought given for our own. Of course, as moral agents we can certainly give ourselves over to self-regard, taking up the invitation to seek after personal benefit, or yielding to the desire for manipulation and control (of others) in order to gain what we seek for ourselves. However, as moral agents, we can also yield instead to the “enticings of the Holy Spirit” as we are called to the possibilities of selfless love and humble gratitude.

In this perspective, moral agency is our nature in a way that hedonism is not. While it is certainly the case that we can act out of a desire for gratification, out of self-interest and self-regard, even more basic to our divine nature is that we are the sorts of beings who can act, rather than just be acted upon (by the unrelenting force of hedonism, for example). Thus, we can yield to the possibilities of being more loving, more truthful, humbler, and focused on the needs of others—and not in any way that requires that we combat or control a fundamentally selfish nature. Rather, yielding to divine invitation to forget ourselves by being-for and loving others as ends in themselves, and doing so in self-transcending gratitude for a Savior who is the very truth that sets us free and makes all things possible, is the clearest and fullest expression of just exactly who it is we are as sons and daughters of God, made in His very image and likeness.

In giving ourselves over to the subtle whisperings of the Spirit—the quiet and persistent promptings of divine invitation—we can begin to understand that obedience to the commandments of a loving Heavenly Father and the compassionate and wise counsel of religious leaders is not some instrumental means by which we secure for ourselves the satisfaction of our individual desires. Instead, we come to know that divine commandments and prophetic counsel are in fact themselves heavenly blessings, and genuine obedience is at its root an act of loving gratitude for the blessing of commandments. 

Imagine what a world devoid of heavenly guidance and structured command might look like. It takes only a moment’s reflection on such things to see the chaos and confusion that would ensue. Indeed, it really only takes a moment’s observation of the moral turmoil and mayhem in the world around us—or, even, in the world within us—to understand the consequences of living outside of Divine law and command. The unrelenting intensity of the moral anguish of it all begins to beggar the imagination. But, once seriously considered, it also becomes quite clear just how it is that commandments are in and of themselves blessings—the very blessings God always promised. 

Considered anew, from a perspective free from the reductive hedonism of secular liturgies, obedience can be seen to constitute the recognition of one’s dependence on and adoration of a compassionate, caring God who seeks always—and in all ways—to comfort and bless and ennoble His children. Divine commandments as blessings are the very embodiment of God’s wish to guide His children to fuller, safer, and more meaningful lives—specifically, lives more like His own.

Seen in this light, then, concern for the calculus of personal cost and benefit that has been subtly inscribed on our hearts through the formative processes of secular liturgies loses its persuasive power over our religious imagination and spiritual understanding. Of course, trials and suffering and painful setbacks will come—it would be foolish to assume otherwise—but it becomes possible to see that these things happen not because God has failed to keep His end of the “obedience bargain” with us. Rather, tragedy comes because that is the nature of life in a world such as this, a world jam-packed with other moral agents working out their relationships with one another and with God—sometimes doing it well and bringing much joy, but at other times doing it poorly and bringing much misery in their wake. 

Reasoning from the premises of moral agency and charity, rather than inescapable hedonism, one’s perspective on justice also changes dramatically as we begin to see that it is only mercy that can make sense of a world of injustice. Only in light of unearned mercy can unearned injustice be made, if only in some small measure, intelligible. In Christ’s merciful love for each of us in the midst of the supreme injustice of His suffering for and because of us, in Gethsemane and again on the Cross, we find an alternative image of humanity and human possibility—an image in stark contrast to the secular assumptions of the hedonic basis of human nature. As the poet and author, Arthur Henry King noted, “Christ in his incarnation as man shows the possibilities of the human.” 

In Christ, we discover that commandments are gifts freely and lovingly given, not instruments to be used in the furtherance of individual aims and ends. And, though injustice will come into every life and pain will follow, we are never alone, even in the deepest anguish of our own personal Gethsemanes. “Lord, I resented your silence,” Father Rodrigues confesses in Shusaku Endo’s novel Silence. “I was not silent,” God responds, “I suffered beside you.” In Christ, the demands for fair exchange are swallowed up in the promise of mercy, compassion, communion, and a peace that speaks directly, soul to soul. The test set before us in this life is, thus, not whether we will maximize our blessings by calculating obedience to divine laws and commandments, or whether we will earn our place in heaven by compiling a spotless record of dutiful compliance. Rather, the great test set before us is to learn what it means to be moral agents, beings who can not only truly love but who must allow themselves to be loved. In so doing, we are able to give ourselves on the altar in sacrificial similitude of the infinite and eternal sacrifice of the Son of God. 

No negotiation is needed here, and no contract is necessary—only yielding submission to the loving will of God is required, submission as an act of pure love and humble gratitude unburdened by the quest for personal benefit or calculations of the relative costs and benefits of discipleship. This does not, however, mean that we need not enter into sacred covenants or be vigilant in keeping them. Rather, it only points to the fact that, unlike contracts (which are entered into by equal parties pursuing individual ends), covenants are sealed on altars as sacrificial acts of one’s will to a loving God—a God who makes demands and expects much of us.

In the end, then, the questions and doubts that generate so many crises of faith for so many of us must be met by more sustained and careful reflection on the premises from which such questions and doubts spring. In setting aside the all-too-often hidden secular assumption of universal hedonism, we are at last able to consider a genuinely alternative view of what it means to be a human being, to love others, and to honor God. This is an alternative view in which moral agency is taken to be the foundational fact of human nature and existence, and one in which the economic concerns of the Self can be dispensed with as deeper, more intimate engagement with a truly relational God can begin to take place. However, in order for such reflection to do more than just recapitulate the tired assumptions and categories of secular thought, we must be willing to open ourselves up to this alternate starting point and the very different ways of understanding ourselves, others, and God which this perspective entails. Perhaps (as I have noted before), in so doing, we may at last come to see what the real, most fundamental difference is between secular starting points and sacred ones. Perhaps, if we are sufficiently open to instruction, we will come to see that the living Christ is our one true foundational premise.

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I find myself in good company with a divine relationship paradigm, aided and abetted by writers like Pascal, who wrote in Pensées that those who try to disprove the Bible through reason are only proving what God calls himself in scripture: the hidden God, who will only reveal Himself to those who sincerely seek him. C.S. Lewis pointed out that when you believe in a personal God, “You are no longer faced with an argument which demands your assent, but with a person who demands your confidence.” And Anne Lamott’s trajectory from disbelief to belief began when she started to feel Jesus “watching me with patience and love,” a sensation she compared to “feeling that a little cat was following me, wanting me to reach down and pick it up, wanting me to open the door and let it in.” 

Their encounters with a person-God who earns trust not by granting every wish like a genie, or by answering every question like a celestial professor, mirror my own spiritual journey. While I find much that makes sense, even profoundly so, in the doctrines of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and have had questions answered over the years, not every question is answered nor every mystery solved. I doubt it is for anyone. I believe because living the religion brings into my mundane, exciting, happy, sorrowful, and otherwise routine life a Presence that occasionally interrupts it—sometimes gently like the cat, every once in a while miraculously. 

You would think that theologians from our faith tradition, with its doctrine of God as an embodied, relational being, would have already written more books like the recently released and paradigm-shifting Who is Truth: Reframing Our Questions for a Richer Faith (with “Who” replacing a crossed-out “What”) by Jeffrey L. Thayne and Edwin E. Gantt, but maybe I missed them. BYU-affiliated psychologists Thayne and Gantt explore, in philosophical terminology accessible to lay readers like me, the “person-truth” at the heart of the Bible’s Hebrew worldview: that of a dynamic, relational God who speaks to us personally. By contrast, ideas based on Greek and Enlightenment thought permeate our culture and emphasize “idea-truth,” which is abstract, impersonal, never-changing, and can be arrived at empirically. 

The authors are in no way opposed to, and indeed are scholars trained in, rigorous scholarship modeled on enlightenment ideas of systematic observation and rational analysis. The salient point of their book is that conflating religion with a set of ideas requiring empirical proof leads to many of the “intellectual and spiritual labyrinths of our day,” labyrinths better navigated by a faith born of encounters with the Divine. Like others who have described the nuances of spiritual IQ, they distinguish between proving a scientific hypothesis and discovering spiritual truth. Along the way, they explore the ramifications of a person-truth view on everything from contradictory statements by faith leaders to coping with the vicissitudes of life that make us feel out of control. 

The first part of the book points out philosophical differences between idea-truth, in which “religion becomes a set of doctrines” and person-truth, faith in the dynamic God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, who leads His also-dynamic children through different time periods that entail changing directives. While the idea-truth of science requires its precepts to be unchanging and consistent, like the Pythagorean Theorem, the person-truth of religion exists in shifting scriptural narratives chronicling “God’s saving, rescuing, and uplifting activities.” 

While idea-truth balks at inconsistency in scripture and sermons by religious leaders, person-truth views these inconsistencies differently. Gantt and Thayne point out that Church leaders “with various backgrounds and perspectives” give “dozens of sermons a year in a variety of contexts over their decades of Church service.” Obviously, they conclude, such a large volume of words from so many people will include internal contradictions, as does scripture. But according to a person-view of truth, the purpose, or forest, of both sermon and scripture is consistent, despite discrepancies among the trees: both “invite us into a covenant relationship with God” rather than “generate a perfect consensus of abstract belief.” 

Fixating on idea-truth over person-truth not only leads us to unrealistic expectations of a perfect consensus, but also creates problems in other areas when we don’t understand the differences. While idea-truth requires its experts to undergo peer review and contribute to scientific consensus, person-truth allows God to choose humble prophets who often buck consensus. While idea-truth demands conformity to correct ideas only (Einstein’s infidelity, for example, never affected his scientific theories), person-truth requires living the right way and makes moral demands on us to arrive at spiritual truth. 

Just as important, a person-truth approach involves fidelity. “Will ye also go away?” Jesus asks the Twelve when many of his disciples abandon him because of the Bread of Life sermon. The God of person-truth asks us to trustingly remain with Him through periods of cognitive dissonance and trials, while an idea-truth worldview lets us justifiably discard ideas we find unscientific or unhelpful. Yet loyalty to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, Thayne and Gantt insist, stems not from blind faith, but from a confidence born of experience, much like a close marital relationship is based on trust derived from an accumulation of interactions in which the beloved has come through again and again.

Thayne and Gantt’s purpose, they point out, is not to “add fuel to the tiresome conflict between science and religion,” but to arrive at epistemic humility, meaning “that we treat naturalism as a pragmatically useful assumption, rather than as absolute truth.” In other words, yes, in the lab or classroom, reach for the peer-reviewed expert consensus, but don’t expect that same approach to lead you to the Divine. Similarly, keeping political ideology confined to politics helps further distinguish a set of ideas from a religious paradigm; otherwise, Grantt and Thayne point out, we risk pitting “our ideological worldview (whether is be liberalism, libertarianism, conservatism, or any other belief system)” against the teachings of God’s servants. Doing so, they write, leads us “to ‘ideolotry,’ which is what happens when we elevate an abstract system of belief (or ideology) to the level of absolute truth.” 

The authors’ themes about the limitations of arriving at religious truth via ideology, reason, or accumulated information, and their caveat of a behavioral component in accessing the Divine, remind me of another useful book, How to Think by literature professor Alan Jacobs. Among Jacobs’ helpful prescriptions for thinking well is his emphasis on the emotional and relational components of arriving at truth. If you want to develop your thinking, Jacobs suggests, develop your character as well as your feelings. Apparently John Stuart Mill, raised to become a rational genius, underwent a mental breakdown in young adulthood that found its cure in reading Wordsworth, the poet of feeling and transcendence. 

An observation in Jacobs’ book from G.K. Chesterton on the limits of reason merits a lengthy quote:

“If you argue with a madman, it is extremely probable that you will get the worst of it; for in many ways his mind moves all the quicker for not being delayed by the things that go with good judgement. His is not hampered by a sense of humour or by charity, or by the dumb certainties of experience. He is the more logical for losing certain sane affections. Indeed, the common phrase for insanity is in this respect a misleading one. The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.”

Chesterton, Jacobs, Thayne, and Gantt seem to agree that there are other ways of knowing—experiential ways beyond reason alone. William James and his Varieties of Religious Experience would concur, as do other learned types, even of the scientific ilk. Clinical psychologist and Columbia professor Lisa Miller, in her book The Spiritual Child, attributes her mother’s vocal prayers and her father’s quiet sharing of spiritual moments to developing her own spiritual IQ. She finds scientifically plausible the notion that human beings are wired for transcendence and possess inborn spirituality that must be used—or lost—and recommends spiritual and transcendent practices to develop a relationship with the divine. 

Because sin, according to Thayne and Gantt, represents a sickness in our relationship with a personal God, “almost anything could be a sin and alienate us from God and small and neutral things can bring us to him.” Interestingly, the concept of person-truth, they argue, also entails the concept of person-falsehood—an embodiment of evil who represents not just an innocuous set of false ideas or beliefs, but a being actively seeking to lead us from a benevolent one. While the idea-view of truth appropriately recommends rational counterarguments to combat false concepts, the person-view of truth assumes that, when dealing with the devil, “rational arguments may be insufficient. Divine rescue is often needed.” 

Speaking of the devil, I’ll conclude with one of the most compelling chapters in Who Is Truth: “Person-truth does not give us control.” In it, Gantt and Thayne offer sage counsel to neurotics like me who fall prey to Screwtape’s advice to his junior devil: Keep the human patient obsessed with uncertainty and “contradictory pictures of the future” that arouse suspense and anxiety. Dwelling on the future and the unknown, the senior devil assures, barricades a human’s mind against God, who “wants men to be concerned with what they do; our business is to keep them thinking about what will happen to them.” 

Idea-truth indeed gives us a sense of control. Aided by empiricism, the “technological ideal” of modern science allows us to predict what will happen in the future and, when scientifically possible, even exert control to change conditions. Furthermore, the moral quality of our lives and “our dishonesty and pride, or our lack of compassion towards those who suffer,” write Thayne and Gantt, “are all unrelated to our ability to accurately report observations or make logical inferences.” However, person-truth not only involves moral conduct, but requires us to relinquish control. No wonder, the authors write, that we succumb to the temptation to “apply the technological ideal of idea-truth to the gospel [in which] gospel living becomes a formula that we follow to guarantee a prosperous life, a happy marriage, faithful children, or any number of other blessings.” 

Yet “turning to Christ involves surrendering control over our lives,” they point out, and illustrate this aspect of person-truth by weaving through several perceptive C.S. Lewis stories. In Perelandra, one of the protagonists must spend her nights on islands that float with the currents and is tempted by a demonic being to move to the security of fixed land, which she resists. Only after being guided by divine beings to fixed land does she realize that to have left the floating islands earlier would have meant “to reject the wave—to draw my hands out of God’s and say to Him, not thus, but thus.” 

Just as the Beavers tell the Pevensie children in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe that Aslan, the Christ-lion, is not “safe,” Gantt and Thayne explain that neither is God “safe”: “He is not an abstract idol that we can mold in our own image, or render in our minds along wholly rational, expected, and familiar grooves.” Again, they pull in C.S. Lewis for the power punch: “My idea of God is not a divine idea. It has to be shattered time after time. He shatters it Himself. He is the great iconoclast. Could we not say that this shattering is one of the marks of his presence?”

This great iconoclast, the Who of my faith, shows up enough, even after I’ve doubted, to let me know I can handle floating islands, gospel questions, even the great unknown, as long as I feel the marks of His presence. Walking with Christ is a powerful thing, Christian writer Timothy Keller points out, illustrating this concept with the concluding chapter of A Tale of Two Cities. When protagonist Sydney Carton willingly takes the place of condemned prisoner Charles Darnay, a young seamstress, also on death row, discovers Carton’s identity and marvels at his substitutionary sacrifice. Deeply moved, she asks him to hold her hand for strength on the way to the guillotine. 

While the What of gospel doctrine is important, and indeed fills the bulk of our sermons and Sunday School lessons, it ultimately can’t walk with us—or save us. Looking to the Who reframes our gospel questions, as the book’s title suggests, and not only leads to a richer faith, but helps us move through even the valley of the shadow of death knowing we’re not alone. 

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