Clarion: Journal of Spirituality and Justice

"Come with me." - by Brian Zahnd

The knowledge of God’s mystery is Christ.
–The Apostle Paul

Our hearts are restless until they find their rest in Thee.
–Saint Augustine

I dreamed I saw St. Augustine, alive as you or me.
–Bob Dylan

A bit of autobiography, because we are our stories
And we are known in the telling of our stories…

It was a Sunday afternoon in June and I was sitting on my porch reading a very old book. The book was The Confessions of Saint Augustine and I was reading it primarily because I was somewhat embarrassed that I never had. I knew Saint Augustine was a towering figure whose influence on the church and Christian thought cannot be overemphasized, so I eventually decided I ought to read his spiritual autobiography. Some have called Confessions the first real autobiography in history and if not the first it is certainly one of the most influential. Written 1,600 years ago, the entire book is a prayer—that is, it is addressed to God in the form of a three hundred page prayer of thanksgiving as Augustine reviews his life from his days as a profligate sinner to his life-altering encounter with Jesus Christ. As I sat with old Saint Augustine on my porch that Sunday afternoon, I had no inkling that the story of a fourth century church father would become a pivotal point in my own spiritual pilgrimage. But because it’s a great story and also because it pertains to what I want to tell you, let me share with you how Augustine became a Christian.

Easter Reflections by John Van Vloten

Song of Solomon 2

“¹¹ See! The winter is past; the rains are over and gone. 

¹² Flowers appear on the earth; the season of singing has come, the cooing of doves is heard in our land. 

 ¹³ The fig tree forms its early fruit; the blossoming vines spread their fragrance. 

Arise, come, my darling; my beautiful one, come with me.”

There’s just something about Spring, isn’t there? I walk around and marvel at how God changes everything in a few short weeks. I find myself walking around the garden and the forest to see what’s happening and when I see buds opening and green shoots pushing forth I go a little 'crazy.' But not as crazy as Galanthophiles. These odd creatures (and you may be one yourself) live for seeing the first snowdrop of the season. You can picture a car load of elderly women and men driving around Sussex in a little Mr. Bean car peering out of the windows and yelling “I say, there’s one!” and screeching the tires so that they can all surround the little white bloom and rejoice. I totally get this.

The Children of Cain - by Brian Zahnd

This post consists of an excerpt from chapter nine of All Quiet On The Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque.

Remarque was a German veteran of World War I. (He later became an American citizen.) Remarque published All Quiet On The Western Front in 1929. It sold two and half million copies in the first eighteen months. Some have describe it as the most honest account of war ever written. German soldiers would simply say of Remarque’s book, “So ist es gewsen!” (That’s the way it was!)

And if you ask me what this post has to do with Holy Week, I will simply answer, much!

Read it thoughtfully.

I have entitled this excerpt as…

The Children of Cain Have a Conversation Concerning the Legacy Bequeathed Them.

The Heretical Commentary: Essay 1 -- Alfred Sergel IV

The Heretical Commentary: Essay 1

"Why do you live like you're going to die, Alfred?"

Heresy comes to mind when I think about the insanity of actually making this internal inquiry public.

I'm either losing my mind or actually beginning to get it back "...for this was not revealed to" me "by flesh and blood, but by" the everlasting "Father in heaven."

It's interesting...

We exhaust ourselves trying to mend the veil that tore when He died.
Are we mending the veil so we can hide behind it like Adam and Eve hid behind the bush?

We toil....and in this vain effort...we tire ourselves in mind, body and spirit...and we tire those around us.

Too tired to love...both God and neighbor.

The 'found' get lost.

We make His words good advice rather than good news. And the yoke just gets heavier and heavier.

The Sabbath becomes a day, rather than the Way.

Are we walking out of the Garden....again?

It's right in front of you Adam.
It's right in front of you Eve.

The Spirit whispers and the snakes yell....but don't be distracted...not now.

Seek first the firstborn of the dead...
See your life in His life and find life, abundantly....

Ever. Lasting.

So...?

"Why do you live like you're going to die?"

Heart to Heart on the Heart of Darkness by Archbishop Lazar Puhalo

Give 'em hell Harry -- by Brian Zahnd

Artwork "Way to Hades" by Sanjay Sonwani

Thinking.

Preface: I tend to see a lot our evangelical ills as connected with the seduction of empire. (Or as I call it in public these days, “superpower.” Because people who reject the notion that the United States is an empire, will proudly claim the moniker of “superpower.” So, empire, superpower, it doesn’t matter to me, both fall under the same prophetic critique.) Anyway, I realize I tend to pull a lot of diverse things into my critique of evangelicalism’s unholy allegiance to the compromised values of a superpower, so I could be off base here. But I don’t think I am.

Hell. Hell as an afterlife torture chamber generated by a wrathful God who is personally offended at the transgressions of sinners. (As opposed to sin-generated contemporary Gehennas and whatever afterlife self-imposed exiles and adverse reactions to the love of God there may be [which have the potential to be “forever” and are for ever…until they are not.]) That Hell—the punitive Hell of Jonathan Edward’s angry God (where the wrath of God is understood, not as an anthropomorphism for the consequences of sin in a universe created with a default mode of goodness, but as the literal fury of an offended deity)—that Hell serves a useful purpose in the psyche of those committed to the necessary violence of an empire…I mean, superpower.

In my reading of Cain and Abel, the city Cain built, Abraham’s quest for a different kind of city, especially in Jesus’ cryptic comments about lies and murder in John 8, and finally the city of God unveiled in the Apocalypse, allegiance to violence lies at the heart of much of what God in Christ is saving the world from.

But the good folk living in a superpower have a hard time hearing this. Because even if they only know it subconsciously, there is an intuition that our (all important!) lifestyle is maintained by violence. It’s simply the way the world is, if it is arranged around an axis of power enforced by violence. This is the world of Cain’s city and Pilate’s truth—the world of violence, collective murder, and the lies we tell ourselves about it.

So if the God of the Bible is ultimately a raging violent deity hurling his enemies into a burning hell, we have a powerful warrant for the necessity of utilizing violence for achieving our own good ends.

For example: If those godless Japs are headed to an eternal hell anyway, what’s the big deal if Harry Truman orders Hiroshima and Nagasaki turned into temporal hells? (Ironic factoid: Truman’s nickname was “Give ‘em hell Harry”) And if today we need to give some Muslims a taste of burning hell from an Apache helicopter, it’s nothing compared to what God is going to give them later on! So praise the Lord and pass the ammunition! (Or is it praise the ammunition and pass the Lord?)

Yes, I think an “infernalist” view of hell (thank you for that term, Brad) is intimately connected to our still largely unchallenged allegiance to violence, a problem which is especially exaggerated in a superpower culture. I have anecdotal evidence of this. On several occasions when I have challenged our allegiance to violence by appealing to the Sermon on the Mount, I have been “trumped” by hell. People do connect the dots. And then look for an escape. They look for an someone to save them from the “impossible” demands of Jesus. Sometimes they go backward into the Old Testament and use Joshua to save them from Jesus (“Well, in the Old Testament God commanded war.”) Sometimes they leap forward into a literalist interpretation of Revelation and use Edward’s angry and violent God to save them from Jesus. (“God is not opposed to violence, look what he does in Revelation!”)

What I’m saying is that violence and our acceptance or rejection of it has a lot to do with how we form our eschatology, atonement theory, and ideas of eternal judgment.

And empire has a hell of a lot to do with our desire to find a way for violence to be baptized in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. One of the ways we do this is to imagine that God himself is eternally addicted to violence.

But I don’t believe it.

God is like Jesus.

God has always been like Jesus.

There has never been a time when God was not like Jesus.

We have not always known this.

But now we do.

 

The Sacredness of Questioning Everything (excerpt) -- by David Dark

From David Dark, The Sacredness of Questioning Everything (Zondervan, 2011).

... A forthright honesty about how little we know is a luxury many of us feel we can't afford if right belief is our salvation, if we are saved because of the intensity with which we know we're saved.

The business of having to feel a particular way or to feel a sense of absolute confidence in God  or to pretend to know that God is there all the time is one of the things I've actually been saved--and am being saved--from...

....For love of God, as the expression goes, or, perhaps better, for love of humanity, I want to exorcise the "fear god" who keeps us afraid of our senses, wary of imagination, frightened of looking too hard at ourselves, and too fearful to think things through.  This god who ISN'T love, made in our worst image, would keep us doubled up inside, putting on a brave face of fake confidence.  This dysfunctional deity often interacts within our own semiconscious dysfunction and can render "religious types" into some of the saddest and most fearful, hateful, and damaging people in the world.

I want to announce the good news that God, the God in whom I believe, never calls anyone to playact or pretend or silence their concerns about what's true.  I want to break through mind-forged manacles that render us incapable of seeing truthfully for fear we might let in the wrong information...

I encourage the use of whatever strong language might be employed in tearing down these idols, these false conceptions of who God might be.  Damn this demonic Uncle Ben business.  Damn it all to hell.  May we bear it no more.  Be explicit in bearing witness against such hellishness. Or pray, if need be, as Meister Eckhart paradoxically prayed, "God, rid me of God."

"God, rid me of God."  Does that strike us as scandalous?  Eckhart's prayer is scandalous to us only to the extent that we still believe that our conceptions of God--and not the grace of God--are what will save and deliver. As if our intellectual consent to certain truths is what will redeem, as if our faith in our own faith is the price of admission to eternal bliss.  This madness degrades both the biblical witness and the possibility of sane thinking. Leaning on our own understanding of God in this way is idolatry, an inappropriate and unfaithful dependence on our pictures, concepts, and broken ideas that can't hold life-giving water.  Nothing we claim to know or have hold of or pretend to believe as children or as adults places us on the winning side of God's affections.  Maybe we're only called on to be honest. Maybe a vision of a God whose love transcends the limitations of our visions enables such honesty.

Local gang shooting and intercessory peacemaking -- Chris Hoke

Part 1

I just got a call that--while I was at a meeting with Presbyterian pastors about a "Gang Initiative" helping involve churches in these very neighborhoods--there was a shooting. Some rival Norteños came through the Cannondale Lane projects where we are spending more time, saw some former Sureño boys hanging out, and opened fire on them.

I don't think anyone was hit. But there has been a year long break from shootings, and this could ignite a series of retaliations. I am on my way to be present with the guys. I don't know what I'll say or do.

Please pray for God's presence and peace on Cannondale Lane in Mount Vernon, WA today. Bless the boys who were shot at (as well as the shooters) that they can process the fear and anger and not turn to the weapons I hear they are already gathering as I write this.

Remodeling Hell? -- Brad Jersak

THROUGH ME THE WAY INTO THE SUFFERING CITY, THROUGH ME THE WAY TO THE ETERNAL PAIN, THROUGH ME THE WAY THAT RUNS AMONG THE LOST. JUSTICE URGED ON MY HIGH ARTIFICER; MY MAKER WAS DIVINE AUTHORITY, THE HIGHEST WISDOM, AND THE PRIMAL LOVE. BEFORE ME NOTHING BUT ETERNAL THINGS WERE MADE, AND I ENDURE ETERNALLY. ABANDON EVERY HOPE, YE WHO ENTER HERE. (Dante's Inferno)

If Dante were to revisit the Inferno today, he would find his visions of hell deeply embedded in our Western psyche, culture, and religion. Images of fire and brimstone, dungeons and torture, demons and judgment continue to ignite imaginations and controversy. In our era of CGI everything Dante described in poetry can be recreated on the big screen for those who want to face their deepest fears in a climate-controlled environment where the smell of buttered pop-corn masks the stench of sulfur. Modernized upgrades of medieval artwork imbue movies like Jacob’s Ladder (1990) and What Dreams May Come (1998); comic books like Hellblazer and Hellboy; and video games like Inferno. One can even take the Dante’s Inferno Test online, where visitors are exhorted, “Test your impurity, find out which level of Dante’s hell you will be spending eternity in.” And for a personal taste of hell, why not marinate some chicken wings in Dan-T’s White Hot Inferno sauce? I’m sure even Dante would be confused: Is hell a place, a state or a brand?

Western civilization does not hold a monopoly on the dreams and nightmares of the afterlife. Taoist and Buddhist mythology contain their own layered maze of terrifying torture chambers (Diyu), and the Hindu Naraka features the usual fire, boiling oil and other instruments of abuse for karmic atonement between incarnations. And Dante’s hell barely holds a torch to the hellish punishments described in the Koran: 

Garments of fire have been prepared for the unbelievers. Scalding water shall be poured upon their heads, melting their skins and that which is in their bellies. They shall be lashed with rods of iron. Whenever, in their anguish, they try to escape from Hell, back they shall be dragged, and will be told: “Taste the torment of the Conflagration!” (22:19–23)

Global belief in some form of divine judgment remains as unquenchable as its flames, the New Atheists notwithstanding. For their part, writers like Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins give voice to those whose atheism is rooted less in unbelief than in hatred of a religion-projected god whose mind reflects humanity’s need to best one eternal excruciation with another. They and Bill Maher mock such notions as patently religulous and write off faith as laughable were it not for its dangerous capacity to incite fear and violence.

Do they have a point? I can only offer my own experience in response. As a sensitive little boy raised in the evangelical church, I was a horrified but Bible-convinced infernalist. I accepted in good faith the word of camp counselors who described the fate of the lost as we stoked orange coals during late night marshmallow roasts. Seeing as I had prayed the “sinner’s prayer,” they assured me I had no need to worry. But worry I did.

What about the unchurched cousins I loved so dearly? God loved them, but if they didn’t love him back, he would skewer them on an everlasting rotisserie—just like the stick I used for roasting my marshmallows. My great commis- sion was to “snatch others from the fire and save them” (Jude 23). And if I failed, I feared their blood would be on my hands (Ezekiel 33:6).

Just as awful as being that traumatized eight-year-old camper was the fact that I was being groomed to become the next zealous counselor. My first convert responded quickly to the choice between eternal life and everlasting flames. I remember being troubled by his expression — not the wide-eyed fear I expected, just incredulity and a rushed prayer before the dinner bell rang. I sensed that he was un- convinced of the gravity of the decision, especially when I discovered that he had “fallen away” within days of returning home.

Highly visual, I became overwhelmed by mental images of bubbling skin and the attendant shrieks of the masses with whom I went to school, stood in line with at McDonalds, and prayed for every night before bed. Unlike Hitchens and Dawkins, I knew and loved (and feared) a living God too much to junk my entire worldview just because the idea of eternal, conscious torment in hell clashed with what I conceived to be his loving character.

I tried to swallow the discrepancies in denial or wallpaper over the holes like a writer trying to hide glitches in a bad plot. But eventually, the necessary rational and emotional disconnect got caught in my throat. There it would remain until I could discover an alternative view that was just as faithful to the Bible — not that I even dared to hope one existed. If only I had realized that the Christian theologians were already on the case — had been for centuries.

Renovating Hell: Theological Options for Divine Judgment

Sheltered in my tiny corner of Christendom, like many evangelicals I was unaware of the heated discussion around damming up the river of fire through various alternative perspectives on hell that did not transform God into a wrathful tyrant-judge who consigns the unrepentant to Dante-esque tortures for eternity. As it turns out, the view of hell with which I grew up — infernalism — is only one of several options handed down to us through our forefathers in the faith. We will survey each of them briefly here.

To download the entire article and Brad's interview, click here.

To listen to Brad's podcast interview with Greg Albricht, click here.

To order Brad's book Her Gates Will Never Be Shut: Hell, Hope and the New Jerusalem, click here.

 

 

Of Hitler and Lilies -- by Brian Zahnd

“Consider the lilies.”
—Jesus

Leonard Woolf (1880-1969), the English writer, political theorist and husband of Virginia Woolf, wrote a book entitled Downhill All The Way. Published in 1966, it is an autobiographical account of the years leading up to World War II. Leonard Woolf closes Downhill All The Way with these words:

I will end with a little scene that took place in the last months of peace. They were the most terrible months of my life, for helplessly and hopelessly one watched the inevitable approach of war. One of the most horrible things at that time was to listen on the wireless to the speeches of Hitler—the savage and insane ravings of a vindictive underdog who suddenly saw himself to be all powerful. We were at Rodmell during the late summer of 1939 and I used to listen to those ranting, raving speeches. One afternoon I was planting in the orchard under an apple-tree iris reticulata, those lovely violet flowers, which like the daffodils come before the swallow dares and take the winds of March with beauty. Suddenly I heard Virginia’s voice calling to me from the sitting room window: “Hitler is making a speech.” I shouted back, “I shan’t come. I’m planting iris and they will be flowering long after he is dead.” Last March, twenty-one years after Hitler committed suicide in the bunker, a few of those violet flowers still flowered under the apple-tree in the orchard.

Consider the lilies.
Fear no evil.
Fret not because of evil men.
Trust in the Lord with all your heart.
This too shall pass.
Amen.

BZ

Bust of Leonard Woolf in the orchard at Rodmell.

The irises beneath the apple-tree.

(The painting is Irises by Vincent Van Gogh.)

 

What if -- by Ron Roper

What if God was only giving the Devil enough rope to hang himself on that dark April day when he hung up God’s Son to torment and shame?  I may be wrong, but what if the only wrath shown against Jesus at the cross was the wrath of Satan, who was about to get his head crushed by heavy fallout from his own diabolical deeds of terrorism—the prelude to God’s turning the ancient world upside-down?

What if the heinousness of human sin was sufficiently portrayed at the cross in the savagery of the malevolent who trumped up defamatory charges and brutally whipped, hit, mocked and pierced the Just and Holy One of God, without any alleged downpour of divine wrath on him (as if he were bearing God’s punishment for sins instead of suffering from their actual sins, which fatally took him down)?