Character matters, but intimacy with God matters more. It is better to know God as sovereign and gracious amidst one’s brokenness than to have a strong ethical character that might tempt one to neglect God all together. In this instance the person of good character will have exalted his character to the point that he cannot see God at the root of his good character. Moreover, such a person will not be able to readily discern his own defects of character, as being distant from God would impair his ability to see how good Goodness actually is.

At the root of genuinely good character is humility, which quite simply is the ability of the soul to see clearly. Knowing this is critical, because in apparent contradiction to what I said above, the ability to worship God is intimately wedded to the goodness of one’s character, but such a character, without humility is like the whitewash on the tomb of dead men’s bones. A person who has been endowed by God with a strong will, the ability to discipline oneself, and deny oneself for the sake of a higher cause, and yet who does not acknowledge God at the root of his strong character is blind. Instead, such a one is likely to view himself as the product of his own doing, and will assert himself as a standard against which he will inevitably judge others. The irony of this is that such a good person could never be good in the fullest sense of the word, for good is defined by the qualities we see in God, and God is compassionate, and redeeming.   Such a person could never function as an agent of redemption, for redemption requires healing at the roots, and such a person is cut off from the root.

So, perhaps the crux of the matter is that a proud person with good character is at risk of having his good character undermined by his pride. His pride, being essentially a distorted vision of himself, others, and God, functions to bar himself from reality. Such a person is living on borrowed time, because he relates to his good character as something which  at root is his own, and in his failure to acknowledge God he will cut himself off from the source of his own goodness, and be left with the only thing that is his own: pride. In saying this, I am reminded of Lewis’s words, “of all bad men, religious bad men are the worst.”

The essence of humanity is an eschatological reality called forth in Jesus Christ.

Related to this idea I came across a passage from C.S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity where he talks about the new man, the man that God creates through what Lewis calls “the divine infection,” which, to put it simply, is Christ sharing his very life with us. And so, here is the passage:

The more we get what we now call ‘ourselves’ out of the way and let Him take us over, the more truly ourselves we become. There is so much of Him that millions and millions of ‘little Christs’, all different, will still be too few to express Him fully. He made them all. He invented—as an author invents characters in a novel—all the different men that you and I were intended to be. In that sense our real selves are all waiting for us in Him. It is no good trying to ‘be myself’ without Him. The more I resist Him and try to live on my own, the more I become dominated by my own heredity and upbringing and surroundings and natural desires. In fact, what I so proudly call ‘Myself’ becomes merely the meeting place for trains of events which I never started and which I cannot stop. What I call ‘My wishes’ become merely the desires thrown up by my physical organism or pumped into me by other men’s thoughts or even suggested to me by devils. Eggs and alcohol and a good night’s sleep will be the real origins of what I flatter myself by regarding as my own highly personal and discriminating decision to make love to the girl opposite to me in the railway carriage. Propaganda will be the real origin of what I regard as my own personal political ideas. I am not, in my natural state, nearly so much of a person as I like to believe: most of what I call ‘me’ can be very easily explained. It is when I turn to Christ, when I give myself up to His Personality, that I first begin to have a real personality of my own.

To get right to the heart of why I find the above ideas so provocative is that if our essential selves are embedded in a relationship with Christ and is yet to be manifest than ultimately none of us has the final say regarding what is most true about ourselves. We cannot turn to ourselves, our experiences and desires, to determine what is true regarding genuine humanity and within that larger umbrella, what is true about our individual selves, for such a truth would be firmly beyond us.

Before there was anything there was the Pouring and the Pouring poured in a new way, a way that brought forth all creation. And nothing that was or is has come into being but that the Father poured himself out by speaking the Son through the Spirit. And in the Son and through the Spirit the Father has willed that all creation should return to find its completion in Him.

When the time was right the Father willed that the Son through the power of the Spirit should fully pour himself into creation and live among us who turned away. Being among us he fully became one of us by taking our turning upon himself, so that within our turning away he may turn us back to God. And now, any who trust in him will find that where we have turned away he has turned us back, so that we may pour ourselves into the fullness of God, as he has poured himself out as an offering for us. And this is salvation: to trust him by fully pouring ourselves out for Him who fully pours himself out for us.

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Blessed Father, May the dislocation come to pass that I may lean hard upon the staff you have given me.

Aren’t you all entitled to your half-assed musings on the Divine. You’ve thought about eternity for twenty five minutes and think you’ve come to some interesting conclusions. Well let me tell you, I stand with 2,000 years of darkness, and bafflement, and hunger behind me. My kind have harvested the souls of a million peasants, and I couldn’t give a ha’penny jizz for your Internet assembled philosophy.

I’ve recently discovered Mitchell & Webb, and I have a colleague to thank and blame for that. Whether this discovery will bode well for either her or I on judgment day is yet to be seen, but nonetheless, I find these guys absolutely hilarious. This post, however, is not a Mitchell and Webb endorsement. Although, if I was to endorse them, I would do so with qualification, knowing that out of the ten of you who read my blog, seven, or maybe just six, might be a little disturbed by my endorsement, as these guys are a bit bawdy at times.  My only justification for this is that Chaucer, another Englishman, was quite bawdy himself, and he is an iconic figure within Western society. And no, I am not sure how evoking Chaucer justifies this, but honestly, I am equally not sure if justification is needed.

Anyways, as I said, this post is not a Mitchell and Webb endorsement, but rather my confession that I am something of a theological elitist. Why do I make this confession? Because, when I first heard the above quote in a skit, I thought to myself, “You know, I don’t completely disagree with this guy’s sentiments.” This “guy” was a priest who was talking to a couple who were making a friendly visit to check out the local church, and this priest’s response to their visit was far less than welcoming, and nowhere near embodied the love to which Christ calls his disciples. However, I totally get his response to people’s “half-assed musings on the Divine” in that when I talk to people about God, I often pick up an undercurrent that views all people’s opinions as equal, because, well, it’s about God, and so, what else is there to say but our opinions, because, apparently God is an empty concept that is begging to be funded however we want. I disagree with this current.

Just in case my elitism is still in question, I have another quote to share that receives my full endorsement. This quote is from Stanley Hauerwas, whose provocative words I have previously featured on my blog, and the quote is…

Theology is a minor practice in the total life of the church, but in times as strange as ours even theologians must try, through our awkward art, to change lives by forming the imagination by faithful speech. Thus, I tell my students that I do not want them to learn to “make up their minds,” since most of them do not have minds worth making up until I have trained them. Rather, by the time I have finished with them, I want them to think just like me.

What am I attracted to in these quotes? I am not sure except to say that I am having some kind of visceral reaction against the confluence of anti-authoritarian free thought, bourgeois individualism, and pluralistic ideology. It’s not that I want to embrace dogmatism, or absolutism, or any ism for that matter, but it bugs me that people seem to think that the ability to talk intelligently and knowingly about the divine requires nothing more than the ability to draw upon the same resources and methods one might utilize when talking about what shows are cool on TV. The truth is, if there is a God, and that God is transcendent, as the monotheistic traditions conceive him, then we are not just talking about some entity in the world,  but rather an entity upon which everything in the world depends for its very existence. And so, if the world is complex and not easy to get our heads around, how much more is that which exceeds the world.

Of course, having said all this, I am compelled to acknowledge that Jesus said that unless one coverts and becomes as a little child, one will not see the Kingdom of Heaven. Along with this, I oppose the academic monopolizing of theological discourse, as theology is the discourse that most properly emerges from the Church’s proclamation and worship of the God who has revealed himself in Jesus Christ. This revealing means that God has drawn so very near, and often this nearness is discovered precisely by those who are not wise according to worldly standards. So, maybe my confession needs to lead to repentance. Be that as it may, I will close by asserting that “half-assed musings on the Divine” should not be equated with the child-likeness that Jesus affirmed. So there!

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Kevin,

I have been attending a fellowship group at Saint James, primarily comprised of young adults, and last week we watched The Mission, which was followed this week by a lesson I provided to process the film. In relation to your question about penance, I asked a couple of questions about the character Rodrigo, who, in case you haven’t seen the film, was a slave trader. The questions I asked were:  ”Do you think it was necessary for Rodrigo to do penance to find forgiveness?” and “Why were the Guarani (the natives he used to capture and sell into slavery) instrumental in bringing Rodrigo’s penance to an end and in helping him find forgiveness?” The general consensus in response to these questions was that though God’s forgiveness is freely given, often penance is necessary in order for us to come to the place where we can take hold of what He is freely offering us. Penance puts us in touch with the gravity of sin and the profundity of our brokenness, and thereby brings us to the end of ourselves. In this way we are enabled to take a hold of God’s forgiveness in the only way that it can be appropriated, as that which is utterly free and completely unmerited.

Having offered this understanding of penance, and affirming it as my own, I realize that some potential problems need to be addressed regarding the application and practice of penance. The primary problem is that penance can easily become legalistic, and could be ironically used to prevent us from seeing the very thing it was designed to allow us to see. We could use our practice of penance to keep us from seeing the depths of our brokenness, and thereby the necessity that God’s forgiveness be unmerited. We could practice penance in such a way that we focus on the doing of penance, and through this generate a sense that we are atoning for our wrongdoing, or that we are overcoming our brokenness. If this is what happens when we practice penance, it is doing the very opposite of what God and the Church intends.

In some ways, my understanding of penance is akin to the Law/Gospel dichotomy that is present in Protestant notions of preaching, which is to say that Gospel proclamations should include some declaration of the Law so that people will despair of themselves and be led to Jesus. In this manner, penance is a kind of proclamation in gesture form. Again, through undertaking the discipline of penance we come to see our brokenness more fully, and become more fully able to throw ourselves upon the sheer mercy of God.

So, in light of this, penance needs to be a Spirit led reality, because the Spirit’s primary ministry is to lead us into all truth, and since Jesus is the embodiment of all grace and truth, the primary ministry of the Spirit is to more fully bring us into the reality of Jesus. The implication of this is that penance needs to be a discipline of the Church overseen by those who are wise in the ways of human depravity and who have deeply tasted the profound, glorious, and surprising grace of God.

In the movie, Father Gabriel was such an overseer for Rodrigo, and regarding his oversight I am reminded of an exchange he had with another brother of the Jesuit Order about Rodrigo. The exchange was as follows:

Father Fielding: Father, he’s done this penance long enough, and well, the other brothers think the same.

Father Gabriel: But he doesn’t think so, John. Until he does, neither do I.

As it turned out, Rodrigo’s penance came to an end when he encountered the Guarani. His penance was to carry a net full of weapons that characterized the depths of his broken existence over a great distance to the mission of the Guarani. Upon encountering them, one of the Guarani approached him with a knife in hand, and intent unclear. After a brief pause the Guarani cut the net from Rodrigo, and as the wares of his destructive life fell into the flowing waters of the river, Rodrigo was sacramentally freed from the weight of his sin. He cried deeply. He cried as Father Gabriel embraced him, and he cried even more as the Guarani encircled him, a clear sign that they had come to understand the Gospel of forgiveness by welcoming their former persecutor into their community. As I see it, the Guarani were instrumental in bringing Rodrigo’s penance to an end because they moved him beyond his existential experience of guilt, and into the realm of relationships and righteousness, where those who had every right to condemn him instead offered him unmerited forgiveness. For Rodrigo the Guarani were the face of God.

So, all this to say that penance can be a great thing when rightly administered.

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From a Christian perspective, who we essentially are is not something that is directly discoverable through reason or emotion, for our essential self is bound in the redemptive activity of God in Christ. Our essence is embedded in our relationship with God, wherein his energies works through Christ to constitute us into the image he had of us in Christ from the foundations of the world. This means that our essence does not directly lie within us waiting to be discovered by whatever means. Instead we paradoxically discover ourselves by going outside of ourselves: outside of our emotions, our desires, and our limited understanding, and into the person of Jesus, who is the fount of all that is genuine about any of us.

The thing that is tricky in the above framework is that our desires can be both an indicator of what God, through his Spirit, is working in our hearts, and it can be an expression of the brokenness that continues to blight our existence. For this reason, though our desires should not be stoically denied, as Buddhist counsel might offer, neither should they be consulted as the final arbiter of what is most true about us, or what is ultimately going to bring us fulfillment. Instead, discernment is needed regarding the significance of our desires, which is precisely what the world cannot see. From the world’s perspective the idea that our genuine self and self fulfillment is somehow beyond us, and particularly beyond our scope of understanding, is just plain absurd.

All this said, if God was like the Chairman of the Adjustment Bureau, and his plan was as rigid and static as the movie indicated, then I would probably be rebelling as well. But, the fact is that the God revealed in Jesus Christ is a dynamic and responsive God, who made us to be dynamic and responsive beings. This God does not have a strict blueprint for our lives, but he certainly has endowed each one of us with skills, desires, and purpose that can only find their fullest satisfaction and expression in and through him.