Much of my Christian journey over the last decade has been a growing understanding of how following Jesus shapes how we join God’s work in the world today. It’s not just that we are being formed to be like Jesus, but that we act with the intent of seeing God’s kingdom come through our continuation of Jesus’ ministry.
No one has helped me understand this more than NT Wright — though I should acknowledge Dallas Willard as a close second. As I’ve read Wright’s work, a gap became apparent to me — if Christians do good works in the world, bringing about God’s intended plan for creation, could that not just be some kind of religious humanism? We make progress, and the problems of the world go away.
It is this gap that NT Wright addresses in Evil and the Justice of God. Not a sexy title, to be sure. But Wright, as usual for his popular level writings, takes a challenging subject, and makes it both accessible and hopeful.
Of course, it is quite an idealistic dream to hope that humanity will continue to improve to perfect harmony. Though not so idealistic that we haven’t seen that scenario played out at the hands of future fictional heroes like Captain James Tiberiau Kirk in _Star Trek_. But as write addresses, even such a dream does not eradicate the problem of evil:
If the world gradually gets better and better until it turns into a utopia — though we should in any case be appropriately cynical about such a possibility– that would still not solve the problem of all the evil that has happened up to that point.
So Wright does not dismiss the need for God in setting things right. But he does show how it is important for followers of Jesus to engage with God in this grand task:
I now want to suggest that part of the Christian task in the present is to anticipate this eschatology, to borrow from God’s future in order to change the way things are in the present, to enjoy the taste of our eventual deliverance from evil by learning how to loose the bonds of evil in the present.
Wright takes a complex problem that has been discussed through human history and wraps up a helpful overview in five chapters. But, as usual, where he shines, is in helping me engage a large concept with how I should live.
Two themes stood on in my reading as proper responses to engaging the tension between good and evil in the physical reality we engage everyday. Here are a few of his words around these themes:
Art
How can the Christian imagination be reeducated so that we can become conscious of living between the victory achieved by Jesus and the ultimate renewal of all things? At this point, we must speak about art. One aspect of being made in God’s image is that we ourselves are creators, or at least procreators.
Genuine art is thus itself a response to the beauty of creation, which itself is a pointer to the beauty of God.
Forgiveness
The New Testament promises a world in which forgiveness will be offered not only by God but also by all God’s people.
I selected this book for review from the publisher. The edition I received also included a companion DVD entitled Evil. I watched the DVD after reading the book. It was a helpful summary, though I think it could stand well on it’s own. I did find the DVD a little overdramatic at times, to the extent that it diminished the message at times.
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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received this book free from the publisher. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.”
Today, we broke a bottle of champagne over Creation Project and declared it launched. (The server seems to be doing okay, though perhaps a bit sticky.) The site features two blogs and links to other writings from my friend and fellow Austinite Jonathan Dodson.
The homepage is a modified magazine format, featuring the latest post, as well as links to Jonathan’s two blogs (imported from wordpress.com), and a featured category to his most recent writings on other sites. One one of his previous blogs, Jonathan used artwork from Ben Hansen Design which served as inspiration for the new site. Special thanks to Ben for making those graphics available.
I’m not sure how it was that I was able to live over three and a half decades without being aware of Flannery O’Connor. What I’ve learned and read of her in the last few years has me wanting to make sure others are aware of her.
(If you watch Lost, you might be familiar with O’Connor from the book cover to the right. Bonus points if you can name when it appeared on the show.)
The paragraphs below were published in an article 53 years ago called The Church and the Fiction Writer. The whole article deserves to be read, but these closing thoughts are significant not only for how Christians create art, but how they engage with it as well. When I read them, I know that she was either way before her time, or that some of us have taken a long time to catch up:
If we intend to encourage Catholic fiction writers, we must convince those coming along that the Church does not restrict their freedom to be artists but ensures it (the restrictions of art are another matter). To convince them of this requires, perhaps more than anything else, a body of Catholic readers who are equipped to recognize something in fiction besides passages that they consider obscene.
It is popular to suppose that anyone who can read the telephone book can read a short story or a novel, and it is more than usual to find the attitude among Catholics that since we possess the truth in the Church, we can use this truth directly as an instrument of judgment on any discipline at any time without regard for the nature of that discipline itself. Catholic readers are constantly being offended and scandalized by novels they don’t have the fundamental equipment to read in the first place, and often these are works that are permeated with a Christian spirit.
The title on my business card reads Local Theologian. Carrying that title means that I try to be an ongoing student of both theology and the local cultures of Austin. Theology comes in all forms, but one of my personal commitments is to continue reading books written at an academic level. Academic books can be thick, and they often aren’t high on the readability scale. I only read a section or two a day, meaning I only work my way through a handful every year.
All of this means I try to be choosy, while also reading theology from a variety of backgrounds. As I looked through the Intervarsity Press catalog last fall, I took notice of The Indelible Image, by Ben Witherington. Witherington teaches at Asbury Theological Seminary and comes from a conservative Evangelical perspective. I hadn’t read any of his books, but from the handful of writings I’d read on his blog, I knew him to be a true scholar in that he was fair and engaging with other perspectives than his own.
What drew my interest to The Indelible Image was the subtitle: The Theological and Ethical World of the New Testament. While this book is only volume one, with a second volumne on the way, Witherington goes to great length to show that the theological concerns of the New Testament writers were not only a proper understanding of God, but a shaping of behavior as well. Withering puts it this way in the intro:
To sum it up succintly: God wants his moral and spiritual character (and behavior) replicated in his people. As God is holy, just, righteous, loving, compassionate, merciful, and so on, so also he expects his people to be.
A book like this is not going to be for everyone. You have to be interested or motivated to work your way through it. Admittedly, sometimes it was discipline and intention to finish that pushed me onward. Witherington is readable, but as you’d expect in an academic work, he’s also very thorough. Very.
But in the end, it was a helpful book for me. If theology is to shape behavior, which I think it must, then this will be more evident at a local level than at any other. I’m left to consider asking…how can the understanding of a transcendant God shape the way our church community lives in our neighborhoods?
If 800+ plus pages can be neatly tidied up into a few sentences, than Witherington does it here:
Salvation then involves both belief and behavior, both cognitive content and character. As God is loving, holy, just and good, so he intends to renovate for himself a people who are holy, just and good. Ethics is the working out of the saving activity which God’s Spirit has been working in and into us, to will and to do.
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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received this book free from the publisher. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.”
