To Love Truth Requires Courage and Humility

It's not a stretch to say that the apostle John loved the truth (as opposed to simply knowing truth). He wrote this in his third letter, "I have no greater joy than to hear that my children are walking in the truth."

There's a vast difference between being a "lover of Truth" and being one who simply knows true information or true doctrines. I believe that one thing that shows that John was a lover of truth is that he loved and closely followed Jesus who is Truth personified. More than simply giving data and facts about the Man, John shares from a deep personal knowing of Him.

The following are some characteristics that I see of one who loves the Truth (as opposed to merely having correct information or beliefs):

• The active seeking of the person of Jesus who is Truth personified; i.e., not settling for gaining correct facts or beliefs about Him but seeking His Spirit for a knowing/understanding of the person of Jesus...who He is, what He's like, what He desires, and how He feels and thinks about His creation in general, and about me in particular.
• A holy dissatisfaction with what I presently know of Him and His ways; i.e., never content with what I have learned in the past. Although thankful for what I have learned, I should be ever pressing into His Spirit for further understanding and experiencing of this God-Man Who is unlike any other in the universe in His love and kindness and embracing of all.
• A willingness to "unlearn" what I have known as truth; i.e., there are things that I have learned along the way that must be unlearned as I mature in God; this is a natural part of maturing in any walk of life, but it is painful for fearful humans because we find identity and security in believing that everything that we believe is correct. It disorients us to discover that something we used to be so sure of isn't quite aligned with the full truth as it is in Jesus.
• A sincere walking in the Truth; i.e., loving Truth enough to follow Him in loving obedience.

Gaining correct information is fairly easy; loving Truth is risky and requires courage and humility.

Framing God's Story: Disinterested Love, the Way of Escape

In the previous three posts (here, here, here) I have shared an alternative way of viewing God's story of His creation and love of humanity. Today I will conclude this series with thoughts concerning how we escape from this awful slavery to the fear of death (self-preservation).

Born mortal, we are all slaves to fear...particularly fear of death in its many forms. The satan uses this deep fear against us; it pushes and pulls us into sinful living because of our panic at losing our life (be that our actual physical life or losing that which gives us a sense of significance and permanence in this age).

In becoming fully human like us, Jesus faced this fear of death. At every turn He succeeded in living free from its dominion by never yielding to the temptation to save His own life at the expense of another; in other words, through self-giving love. His death on the cross was the culmination of a life lived in love, choosing the life of "the other" over His own life when faced with that choice. By so doing, He broke the stronghold that the fear of death held over humanity.

We who are in Christ are empowered by His presence in us to overcome bondage to fear of death in the same way. Theologian John Romanides says: "The salvation of man is dependent upon how much, under the guidance of God, he is capable of exercising himself in the cultivation of a genuine, unselfish, and unconstrained love for God and his fellow man...Just as God, above all, is free of every need and self-interest, the spiritual man who has the Spirit struggles and becomes perfected in the love according to Christ, love that is delivered of all need and self-interest."

And so it is in our struggle to love purely and without self-interest as Jesus loved that we are little by little perfected in love and therein delivered from fear. Fear is cast out by love, and as fear and death loses its hold over us, sinful practices drop off. This is the process of salvation that we struggle to walk out together daily with the Spirit and with one another. (Scripture at times calls this 'dying to the false self' with its self interest and self preservation.)

May the Spirit of Jesus help us understand our dilemma and enter actively into the struggle to learn to love disinterestedly and thereby experience increasing freedom from the tyranny of fear and of its fruit, sinful living.

Framing God's Story: Fear of Death Enslaves Humanity

Continuing on the theme of reframing the story of God and His creation with the frame of the fear of death as humanity's fundamental predicament rather than of sin, I'll share some ways in which we humans are "held in slavery by their fear of death" (Heb. 2:14,15), according to Richard Beck. (For previous posts, go here and here.)

One way we manifest our bondage to the fear of death is in our denial of death which we do by attempting to remove signs of it in our everyday life. Arthur McGill says of the American lifestyle: "All traces of weakness, debility, ugliness and helplessness must be kept away from every part of a person's life..." Beck adds that "we are happy to help others but are loathe in this culture of death to ask for help...Beyond maintaining personal appearances, the culture of death avoidance demands that reminders of death, disability, age, failure, and weakness be removed from public view...In contemporary American culture our slavery to the fear of death produces superficial consumerism, a fetish for managing appearances, inauthentic relationships, triumphalistic religion, and the eclipse of personal and societal empathy."

Another manifestation of our enslavement to fear is our participation in cultural hero systems. All cultures have their hero system which defines success for those living in it. We all want to "make our mark" by creating or being part of something that is 'lasting.' "For example, my life is deemed meaningful because my children outlive me, or I wrote a book, or I helped the company have its best quarter of the year. Child, book, and company are all forms of 'immortality', ways to continue living into the future in an effort to 'defeat' death."

For the hero system to give a sense of permanence and security in the face of death, it must be experienced as absolute, eternal, transcendent and ultimate. When someone comes along who has different values, everything that has contributed towards my sense of significance and security in the face of death is threatened. This gives rise to demonizing (marginalizing and dehumanizing) the "other", the outsider.

Finally, Beck shows how our fear of death pressures us to attach ourselves in idolatrous relationships with institutions (including  Christian institutions). Beck quotes William Stringfellow who says that the contemporary equivalent to the biblical language of "powers, virtues, thrones, authorities, dominions, demons, princes, strongholds, lords, angels, gods, elements, spirit..." are realities such as "all institutions, all ideologies, all images, all movements, all causes, all corporations, all bureaucracies, all traditions, all methods and routines, all conglomerates, all races, all nations, all idols..." These entities exert a moral force in our lives in the form of demanding our service and allegiance and loyalty, and we willingly yield to this, finding ourselves in rivalry with those inside our organization and in competition with other institutions who may be a threat to our success.

Stringfellow explains why the temptation to yield to this moral force is so great: "Make work your monument, make it the reason for your life, and you will survive your death in some way...Work is the common means by which (people) seek and hope to justify their existence while they are alive and to sustain their existence, in a fashion, after they die."

The irony of giving our allegiance to these powers (be they institutions, nations, movements, etc) is that they too are mortal, and self-preservation is at the heart of their existence, meaning that to surrender ourselves to them is a form of worship of something mortal rather than worship of the eternal God. All of this can happen in the name of God as can clearly be seen in the religious and political systems of Jesus' day (and ours).

Next week I will conclude this series about framing God's story differently by sharing how the slavery to fear of death is broken in our everyday walk in God.

Framing God's Story: More About Human Weakness, Less About Human Wickedness

Continuing the theme of last week's post (The Picture Frame Makes a Difference), I want to share more about how some others in Christianity frame the human predicament differently than we western Christians generally frame it.

In his book, The Slavery of Death, Richard Beck says: "Where Western Christianity has tended to interpret 'sarx' as a depraved and congenital 'sin nature,' the Orthodox see 'sarx' as 'mortality' - our corruptibility and perishability in the face of death. And it's this vulnerability, Paul explains, that makes us susceptible to sin. The idea here is that we are less 'wicked' than we are 'weak.' As 'sarx' - mortal animals - we are playthings of the devil, who uses the fear of death to push and pull our survival instincts (our fleshly, sarx-driven passions) to keep us as 'slaves to sin.'...Sin here is seen as a symptom of death, the underlying disease.

"...our vulnerability to death makes us fearful, paranoid, and suspicious creatures and...these fears promote a host of moral and social ills...Because we are mortal and driven by self-preservation, our survival instincts make us tragically vulnerable to death anxiety - the desire to preserve our own existence above all else and at all costs."

According to Hebrews 2, Satan uses this fear of death to hold us captive to resorting to our own devices for survival rather than trusting God, and this sin of independence in turn brings separation from God, and so the tragic cycle goes on. In this particular framing of the story, salvation is from death and corruptibility and its cycle, whereas in the western framing of the story, salvation is from divine wrath.

Framing humans in God's story as weak rather than as wicked presents a different view of God and of humans; as I suggested in last week's post (here), it can significantly change our attitude towards others (and towards ourselves) and empower us to see all humans with compassion rather than with judgment.