I had a thought the other day.  If God’s judgment leaves someone out of the Kingdom of Heaven, which can be rationally described as hell, then I’m going to hell.

Did I get your attention?

Here’s why I’m going to hell.  The broad assumption in evangelical Christianity is that in order to enter the Kingdom of Heaven, one must speak a specific belief of Jesus.  This was called the sinner’s prayer when I was growing up.

So let’s say that is true.  It is then arguable that most of the Eastern world, Australia, Asia, and much of the Arab and Jewish world would be excluded. The primary assumption in that model is that grace is only true once it is accepted.  It becomes true in the cosmos, when we accept it.  As Rob Bell asked, “Will billions and billions of people burn forever in hell?”

I’ve said that prayer. I learned to recite it daily in college because I constantly wondered if I had said it right.  When someone speaks this prayer, they are considered in…mostly. ;-P  So I’m assuming that I’m in.  In fact, as Paul would often suggest, I must be in.  I’ve committed my entire life, my entire way of being to following this Jesus guy.  I gave up my career in business to pursue ministry.  I spent most of my life savings so I could spend time developing community based discipleship programs. I wrote a book on the Gospel.  None of that get me in heaven. It simply is.

But if I’ve learned anything from following Jesus, if I’ve learned anything from the Gospel, it is that it is relentless in its pursuit of the lost.  Jesus spoke parable after parable of the lost sheep, coin, and son. If there are people on the outside of the gates of heaven, then I’m rallying the troops inside to go find them.  I’m going to hell to remind them of who they are: children of the living God who are called very good.

Love doesn’t end.  The mission isn’t over if someone is on the outside of the gates.  There is still someone who doesn’t know the message.  Call me a dreamer, but I just can’t see Jesus going all the way to the cross and then saying, “Yep, they just didn’t get it while they were alive.  Let’s leave ‘em to rot and burn.”

Care to come with me?

I have a love/hate relationship with personality tests.

Yesterday I asked the question on Twitter: What would Jesus get on the Myers-Briggs test? I got a lot of responses but they all came out very similar.  Rachel Held Evans summed it up very simply with, “Whatever I got, right? ” She was obviously being humorous, but the problem is that everyone else said the same thing.

The question came out of a late night pub conversation with some friends, and when I asked it out loud, it immediately drew a loud response of laughter.  And in some ways it seemed like the laughter was directed back at us, as if we were all ironically in on the joke. It was like we all knew that Jesus couldn’t be limited by a narrow definition, so why were we trying to do the same for ourselves?

I believe in the power of technology.  But for every invention is an equal and opposite intention.  Technology can be used to captivate as much as it illuminates.  What if the personality test, which has given us a means in which to understand our current personality, has also given us permission to say, “This is just who I am, damn it.  Deal with it.” And by declaring, “This is who I am” we become captivated by a narrow definition of what it means to be human.

I have friends on both sides of the spectrum, introvert and extrovert. And after taking the test, they all say the same thing.  “Oh now I get it.  This is who I am.”  It gives language to what they see every day in their lives.  But I also see it captivate them by giving them permission never to grow.  They get stuck in a definition provided by another human being and then live there…permanently.

I get that completely.  When I first took the test fifteen years ago, I was an INTJ. INTJ’s are described as:

INTJ: Have original minds and great drive for implementing their ideas and achieving their goals. Quickly see patterns in external events and develop long-range explanatory perspectives. When committed, organize a job and carry it through. Skeptical and independent, have high standards of competence and performance – for themselves and others.

And I was an asshole.  But in learning that I was committed, organized and could carry it through, was skeptical and independent, I was empowered to be an asshole.  It destroyed most of my relationships.

And then I began listening very seriously to the command to love from Jesus.  The problem is that love doesn’t it neatly into a single category.  It calls us to introversion and extroversion, sensing and intuition, thinking and feeling, and Judging and Perceiving.  It calls me, in other words, to become a whole human being.

And then something funny happened.  As I began to practice love, my personality changed.  I became an ENFP.  Three out of the four categories changed. ENFP’s are described as:

ENFP: Warmly enthusiastic and imaginative. See life as full of possibilities. Make connections between events and information very quickly, and confidently proceed based on the patterns they see. Want a lot of affirmation from others, and readily give appreciation and support. Spontaneous and flexible, often rely on their ability to improvise and their verbal fluency.

It’s a very accurate representation of my current personality, but it’s also not the whole of who I am.  As I made the jump from introvert to extrovert, I had to relearn what it meant to spend time alone again.  As I abandoned my need to judge everything, I had to relearn the value of judgment through love.  In other words, there was value in both/and.

By limiting ourselves to a narrow framework of INTJ, ESFJ, or ENFP , we’re missing out on the larger possibility of what it means to be fully human as revealed by Jesus.

What do you think?

To understand this post you might need to review the previous two posts here and here.

I said: And with that I began to realize why people have so many theological disagreements. Our faith is in our interpretation of Scripture, as opposed to Jesus. As much as I love Scripture it’s Jesus once removed.

I find it interesting that Ken left out of his post what comes just after that statement.

“It is all we have, but it must always be interpreted. And once removed, it presents differences of opinion on what it says. And I’m not suggesting it has no value. It has immense value.”

Ken Silva responded with:

“Sounds very pious, “As much as I love Scripture it’s Jesus once removed”; however, it’s actually a subtle attack on Scripture pitting it against Jesus as if what we read in the Bible is somehow in conflict with what Jesus taught. What you need to know is this odd idea that somehow the Bible is lesser than Jesus is not new; and what it’s designed to do is open the door for such as these to circumvent God’s authority in favor of the autonomy of their own subjective experiences. That one can somehow have Jesus as opposed to obeying His inspired Word in Holy Scripture is impossible. Lord willing, I’ll cover this in more depth; but for now just consider what Jesus says below:

So Jesus said to the Jews who had believed in him, “If you abide in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” (John 8:31-32)”

What do you think? Is what I said pitting Jesus against the Bible?

Be Perfect from The Work Of The People on Vimeo.

Perfection is about seeing people the way God does. Boooyah!

One of the things I really love about Jesus is that he focused so much on engaging what my friend Kathy would call, “little pockets of love.”  He engaged people’s faith but arguably spent more time simply loving on people in their space of brokenness.

Matthew 18:3 – And he said: “Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.”

In other words, what Jesus was up to had to be so simple that a child could do it.  And yesterday I had this thought that about our systems of church and theological education.  The pinnacle of the current theological education is the MDiv.  Most churches require it if you are going to be a pastor.  Most of Christianity is about creating a narrow system of belief, but for Jesus the idea was about engaging the practice of love.

Mark 12:30-31 – Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’There is no commandment greater than these.”

And then it hit me that something is skewed when a child can’t get an MDiv but a child can practice love.  And then my friend Colin shot back to me on Facebook that an adult can get an MDiv and practice love, which made me wonder if we’re making it harder than it really needs to be.

What do you think?

I was thinking about the word “Christian” when I came across this quote:

All words, then, belonging to the inner world of the mind, are of the imagination, are originally poetic words. The better, however, any such word is fitted for the needs of humanity, the sooner it loses its poetic aspect by commonness of use. It ceases to be heard as a symbol, and appears only as a sign. Thus thousands of words which were originally poetic words owing their existence to the imagination, lose their vitality, and harden into mummies of prose. – George MacDonald, The Imagination: Its Function and its Culture

What if the word Christian became poetry again? Or the word became flesh.  Either way its still poetry.

Why is there such a tension with grace?

This past week Jay Bakker, son of Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, was profiled in The New Yorker.  The article surprised me in some respects because it was a profile on an emergent perspective.  It’s a fair feature piece on a guy who has been to hell and back, and then chose to go live in the midst of suffering for the sake of the Gospel.  I’ve met Jay and he is truly as genuine as they come.

But on the third page of the article the author draws out the tension some have with Jay’s approach.  It states:

None of this thinking has endeared Bakker to the conservative-Christian behemoth. “I think a movement founded on rebellion is going to collapse under the weight of its own moralism,” says the Evangelical writer Ted Kluck, who accuses Revolution of substituting the arrogance of the traditional church with its own. To others, Bakker is not moral enough: He is engaging in “cafeteria Christianity,” picking only the parts of the faith that suit him. By focusing on grace, he is absolving sinners. He’s been threatened physically at speaking engagements and been told he’s leading people to hell. But Bakker speaks like a true believer. “Another type of reformation is happening,” he says. “And when a reformation is happening, the reformers aren’t recognized as reformers. They’re seen as heretics.”

The central tension is that Jay is focusing too much on grace. And when the author draws out the tension by saying, “he is absolving sinners,” I couldn’t help but think of this verse.

5 When Jesus saw their faith, he said to the paralyzed man, “Son, your sins are forgiven.”

6 Now some teachers of the law were sitting there, thinking to themselves, 7 “Why does this fellow talk like that? He’s blaspheming! Who can forgive sins but God alone?”

8 Immediately Jesus knew in his spirit that this was what they were thinking in their hearts, and he said to them, “Why are you thinking these things? 9 Which is easier: to say to this paralyzed man, ‘Your sins are forgiven,’ or to say, ‘Get up, take your mat and walk’? 10 But I want you to know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins.” So he said to the man, 11 “I tell you, get up, take your mat and go home.” 12 He got up, took his mat and walked out in full view of them all. This amazed everyone and they praised God, saying, “We have never seen anything like this!” (Mark 2:5-12)

The Gospel begins with this radical notion of grace and forgiveness.  Isn’t one of the central responsibilities of the priesthood to dispense grace? And if Jesus gets to dispense forgiveness in the name of the Father, then I get to.  Jay Bakker gets to.  We all get to.  That is the truth.

What is our understanding of obedience in the kingdom of God?  What are we being obedient too?

In a previous post I talked about Following Jesus Is About Healing.  And one of the pushbacks or responses I got was the idea that following Jesus is about obedience.  And I get that.  I actually don’t disagree with that statement.  Following Jesus requires obedience.  But to what?

In the narrative of scripture we have unique problem.  For the first 2,500 years of the human story (characterized by the first 9 chapters of Genesis) there are only two commands given.  The first is the Command in the Garden.

Genesis 2:17 – “…but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat of it you will surely die.”

The second occurs roughly 1,200 to 1,600 years later and is given to Noah after the flood.

Genesis 9:4-6 – “But you must not eat meat that has its lifeblood still in it. And for your lifeblood I will surely demand an accounting. I will demand an accounting from every animal. And from each man, too, I will demand an accounting for the life of his fellow man.

“Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed; for in the image of God has God made man.”

That’s it.  The first is impossible to even replicate in its strict sense.  We can’t eat of that specific tree.  The second we can but likely won’t.

The next 1,400 years is characterized by the giving of the Ten Commandments.  God gives Israel a unique version of the human idea of the law.  As much as we like to think its original, the Ten Commandments are not.  Hammurabi invented a code almost 500 years earlier. And I’m not doubting the validity or uniqueness of the Ten Commandments.  I only want to state that they are not original.

The problem is the period of the law only lasts until the cross.  One of the central ideas that the followers of Jesus had to wrestle with is what it means to operate from a basis of freedom.  This idea of transcending the law is sometimes called believer’s freedom.

Romans 7:6 – But now, by dying to what once bound us, we have been released from the law so that we serve in the new way of the Spirit, and not in the old way of the written code.

1 Corinthians 10:23 – “Everything is permissible”—but not everything is beneficial. “Everything is permissible”—but not everything is constructive.”

Paul seems to give us a different idea in his letter to the Romans.

Romans 8:2 – because through Christ Jesus the law of the Spirit of life set me free from the law of sin and death.

Two kids of law. Hmmmm. So if our obedience is not to the law, what is it then?  What is the law of the Spirit of life?

Alan Hirsch: Overview of the DNA of Movements [VERGE video] from Verge Network on Vimeo.

What is your understanding of the phrase, “Jesus is Lord.”  What does it mean to you and perhaps consider what it means to your community?

What is the principle purpose of following Jesus?

One of the tensions I have come to reflect deeply on is what could be argued as the mission of the church.  When we follow in the footsteps of Jesus, what are we learning, doing, seeing, feeling, and getting to?  What is the central purpose of the mission of God?

I have several friends who have and would continue arguing for the idea that the central purpose of the church is to glorify God. This thought hit me when I read my friend Jeff’s post when he quoted Why We Love the Church: In Praise of Institutions and Organized Religion, by Kevin DeYoung and Ted Kluck.

“What we need are a fewer revolutionaries and a few more plodding visionaries. That’s my dream for the church – God’s redeemed people holding tenaciously to a vision of godly obedience and God’s glory, and pursuing that godliness and glory with relentless, often unnoticed, plodding consistency (p222).”

Many of my more conservative friends argue that the central purpose of the church is to glorify God.  So our energies, actions, and organizations all revolve around the acts that glorify God.  It produces services that focus intently on the act of worship.

The problem is that when Jesus announces his ministry to the people, glory is not high up on his list. For Jesus, his primary purpose seemed to be about healing.

The scroll of the prophet Isaiah was handed to him. Unrolling it, he found the place where it is written:
“The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to release the oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” Luke 4:17-19 (New International Version)

Jesus’ primary concern in ministry is the present healing of the human person.  He desires restoration in the form of story, or good news.  And this news produces release from captivity and oppression, restoration of sight, and an awareness of favor.  And this idea is deeply consistent with the rest of the story.  When John the Baptist asks if Jesus is “the one”, Jesus doesn’t give him the answer.  Instead he points to the evidence of healing.

John’s disciples told him about all these things. Calling two of them, he sent them to the Lord to ask, “Are you the one who was to come, or should we expect someone else?”

When the men came to Jesus, they said, “John the Baptist sent us to you to ask, ‘Are you the one who was to come, or should we expect someone else?’ “

At that very time Jesus cured many who had diseases, sicknesses and evil spirits, and gave sight to many who were blind. So he replied to the messengers, “Go back and report to John what you have seen and heard: The blind receive sight, the lame walk, those who have leprosy are cured, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the good news is preached to the poor. ²³Blessed is the man who does not fall away on account of me.” Luke 7:18-23 (New International Version)

Jesus informs John’s understanding of what is real by looking for the evidence of healing.

And I’m not arguing against bringing glory to God, or the act of worship.  I’m suggesting that when we focus on the intended goals as opposed to the process that creates them, we fail to reproduce the story that informs them.  What if Jesus clearly understood that the act of healing leads to glory?  Speaking deeply into the oppression, pain and suffering of an individual and restoring the person to wholeness produced a story of worship that was unlike anything we could manufacture.

We get a real glimpse of this in the Gospel of John.  Jesus heals a man born blind.  And the man is brought before the Pharisees for questioning.  He’s been healed yet he has no understanding of why.  All that he knows is that he has.

A second time they summoned the man who had been blind. “Give glory to God,” they said. “We know this man is a sinner.”

He replied, “Whether he is a sinner or not, I don’t know. One thing I do know. I was blind but now I see!”

²⁶Then they asked him, “What did he do to you? How did he open your eyes?”

²⁷He answered, “I have told you already and you did not listen. Why do you want to hear it again? Do you want to become his disciples, too?” John 9:24-27 (New International Version)

The man has a story of healing that informs his understanding of the world.  He can’t avoid it because it is experientially true.  His desire to follow is informed by his healing.  He naturally assumes a desire to follow Jesus because he has a story of how powerful Jesus actually is.  In some ways it seems like we get the cart before the horse.  They want the glory of God, but they completely miss it is actually being produced right in front of them.

What would happen to the church if we focused on healing instead of glory? Healing requires us to step into the pain and suffering of the world around us.  It requires that we get dirty by that which is oppressing the world.  Healing requires that we deal with our own suffering as well, and that’s hard.

But I wouldn’t want it any other way.