When at 14, I first heard the claim that Jesus was the son of God (somehow my previous church had missed this teaching), I remember that I was most offended by the specificity of the claim, not by anything else.
I reasoned, “There are five major world religions. What are the odds that I just happened to be born into the right one?”
Continue reading “Jesus had an eye color.”
What makes the gospel offensive is sometimes not its message but its specificity. We aren’t bothered by generalities about spirituality, but we bristle at specifics about our own lives. Continue reading “Don’t get specific with me.”
God has a will and work for us to do, and it doesn’t really matter how we get treated by others along the way. But he doesn’t intend for his purpose to be replaced by someone turning us into a doormat. If I’m going to be a martyr, I want it to be because God commanded it. I have been known to turn the other cheek very belligerently: “I’m laying down my life for you because of what Jesus did for me, buster. This doesn’t mean you’ve won over him or over me.” But that’s not exactly the right attitude! Also, we can replace God’s compassion with human sympathy: “You know, if you really cared about your neighbors, you wouldn’t sleep until they had all been converted”… or until you were hospitalized with exhaustion.
I’m thinking that the most important thing is to know where to take guilt. “Oh, I’m much worse than you think, worse than you accuse me of being. But I’m not depending on my own righteousness for my self-worth, and I’m not depending on my own strength to change. Is there anything else you’ve noticed about me that I should be aware of?” But it’s also important to discern when I need to repent and when the other person is mistaken.
My first child, a son, has been born. God is to be praised.
It is impossible to see how good work might be accomplished by people who think that our life in this world either signifies nothing or has only a negative significance…. If it is true that we are living souls and morally free, then all of us are artists. All of us makers, within mortal terms and limits, of our lives, of one another’s lives, of things we need and use.
— Wendell Berry, Christianity and The Survival of Creation
When I say something, my goal should be to communicate. I should try to understand how my message will be received by the person I’m communicating with. The fact that they may not understand it should affect how I communicate my message. The fact that they do not receive it might affect how I communicate my message. But the fact that they may not like it should not affect my message itself. Continue reading “The case against politeness”
To work without pleasure or affection, to make a product that is not both useful and beautiful, is to dishonor God, nature, the thing that is made, and whomever it is made for. This is blasphemy: to make shoddy work of the work of God.
— Wendell Berry, Christianity and The Survival of Creation
Another unstated but commonly believed heresy could be called spiritual neutrality. This doctrine says that the devil hates believers but rarely attacks them. Continue reading “Spiritual neutrality”
Christians are encouraged from childhood to think of the church building as “God’s house,” and most of them could think of their houses or farms or shops or factories as holy places only with great effort and embarrassment. It is understandably difficult for modern Americans to think of their dwellings and workplaces as holy, because most of these are, in fact, places of desecration, deeply involved in the ruin of Creation.
— Wendell Berry, Christianity and The Survival of Creation