Monthly Archives: February 2017

"The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of the Father, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all." 2 Corinthians 13:14

When it first came out in 2007, I read William P. (Paul) Young's The Shack. Not surprisingly, this popular Christian book generated a great deal of discussion, and some of it vitriolic. Because the movie is coming out this week, I'm seeing quite a bit of discussion about the story, again some of it rather vitriolic. I want to address some of the major objections I hear and perhaps shed a little light on what I think the book is and what it is not.

The most often heard objection to The Shack concerns its depiction of the Trinity. The story portrays the main character, Mack, visiting a shack that was the site of a horrible crime. He there meets God, in three persons, literally.

The Father, appears to him as a large, African-American woman who goes by the name Papa. The Son is Jesus as you might expect to see a typical first-century Jewish man, though clothed in contemporary work clothes. The Holy Spirit, is a woman, that goes by the name Sarayu, a Hindu word that means wind or breath. The book consists of conversations Mack has with all three at once or individually.

Now, the quickest way to be labeled a heretic is to try and describe the nature of the Trinity. God's oneness combined with His separateness is so slippery that theologians created the word trinity to describe God's nature. Efforts at being specific are fraught with theological pitfalls, and someone is always ready to help you fall into a pit.

One of the most energetic critics of the book claimed that Williams was promoting modalism, a theological term, which like most theological terms, makes us professional theologians sound like we know a lot more than you. This teaching dates to the late second century, and states that God is one (so far so good), and that He appears in three different roles (and there is the problem). Modalism on the human level is that I am a husband, father, and friend, but obviously I cannot be all three separately at once. The error of the teaching is that in the Bible, God is all three at one time, separate and co-equal. The Trinity is one substance but three distinct persons or personalities. Modalism emphasizes the unity at the expense of the tri.

Far from promoting modalism, the book actually depicts very creatively a basic truth about God. God is three persons. This criticism can only come either from someone who has not read the book or who simply does not know what modalism is.

A second broad criticism is that the book is scripturally incorrect. Just about anything reduced to writing can be scripturally incorrect in that it conflicts with some part of Scripture, or someone's interpretation of Scripture. As I've written elsewhere and often, it's a mistake to think of the Bible as offering a unified and systematic theology. For the most part, the Bible is a story. Very seldom do we find anything in the Bible close to what we find in theology books. That's not to belittle or dismiss theology books, but it does suggest some limits to our attempts to systematize the Bible and then judge any other ideas against our systems.

I write this as a rather traditional Christian, and one that has a doctorate in Greek New Testament. I did not devote years of study to the New Testament text to then decide it doesn't speak with authority to my life. I believe the Bible, and you're not going to "out-believe" me when it comes to the Bible. So if what I've written so far gets your hackles up, just calm your hackles down.

One of the things I chiefly believe about the Bible is that it has broad and rich language and imagery. The nuances are many and deep. This variety doesn't diminish its fundamental unity about a good and loving God. The Bible provides a lot of stories in The Story as a way for people to find their story in it, and align more closely their story with God's desire for them. Having said all of this, I think Young presents a good story that drew on some very important New Testament teachings in a very creative, interesting, and thought-provoking way.

Space does not allow a survey of all the places where I thought he got it right, but I do want to mention his main thesis. One of the most puzzling and challenging scriptural truths is that God loves each of us deeply. Grace is amazing. Frankly, words fail when I try to elucidate "God is love" or even "God so loved the world." What Williams has done is give us a story that depicts that love. I found it charming.

As for some other teachings, Williams was extraordinarily orthodox in his affirmation of Jesus as the agent of creation, the Spirit as active and personal, the impossibility of a literal separation of Father and Son on the cross, the fact that all roads do not lead to God, and the necessity of our forgiving one another.

Paul Williams was not really attempting to describe specifically what the Trinity is. The Shack is not a documentary, nor is it a theology book. The book is a story, an illustration, an analogy, and any of these descriptions when pressed very literally will tend to break down at some point. Of course The Shack has weaknesses, but I simply don't find any weaknesses so objectionable that I would tell someone to stay away from it. Grace is best understood inductively. That is why Jesus told stories like the Prodigal Son, and, if you recall, that story was highly criticized by some very religious folks.

So relax and read the book and go see the movie if you want to. You may or may not like it. But you certainly will not be endangering your soul. You just may feel closer to God. Bottom line, I just don't think God gets offended by some of the things we get offended by.

By the way, I'm not a movie reviewer, and I have not seen the movie. However, I have seen the trailer, and based on that I give the movie 3 ½ halos (out of 4).

Grace,

Dr. Terry Ellis

February 26, 2017

"And whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him." Colossians 3:17

"Whatever you do" and "do everything" clearly covers a lot of ground. As a practical matter though, what did Paul have in mind here? Was he serious? For the average Christian, whoever that may be, what is the "whatever and everything" of life?

In religious matters, surely one of the most common mistakes is to limit "whatever and everything" to the realm of "highly spiritual events" in which everything that happens every day must be by the hand of Almighty God. I once heard a minister say quite seriously that God told him that morning what kind of cereal to eat.

In an effort to duplicate that kind of devotion some Christians try to see God's hand in finding a good parking place, for example. We might want "whatever and everything" to be suffused with deep spiritual meaning and messages. A professor once told that a minister he knew spoke as if he could not walk down the hall of his church without having six highly significant spiritual encounters. That sounds laudable, but when I heard that I thought "I usually hear about a clogged toilet when I walk down the hall of my church." My life seems so ordinary by comparison.

We want "whatever and everything" to be awesome (the most overused word in the contemporary Christian vocabulary) and miraculous, and in our rush to apprehend the awesome and miraculous we may even be guilty of trying to manufacture them. Thus, I want my sermon to be a tour de force, my column to be insightful and inspiring, my devotional to be so deep as to cause all heaven to pause in wonder. Why? Because "whatever and everything" is a call to supernatural excellence!

This approach to living the Christian life fits perfectly the post-modern mindset. Post-modernism as a cultural description is slippery, but it appears to me to be a mood. People today want feelings and emotions. Form and substance are secondary to experience. Thus, a post-modern believer may want "whatever and everything" to be highly charged. The effect this shift has had on churches and Christians is profound and beyond the scope of a single GraceWave, but suffice it to say that in spite of all the recent (last 30 years or so) efforts to "make the church relevant" we have fewer Christians and arguably a dumbed-down discipleship that results from wanting "whatever and everything" to be awesome.

Try to live the Christian life this way and at some point you will soon feel defeated and frustrated. Rather than "whatever and everything" being numinous and divine, you probably will find Monday morning to be rather ordinary. Too many Christians are then beset by a despair of inadequacy.

Further complicating the problem is the highly lauded testimonies of the spiritual giants of today who seem to have everything going their way. They attribute their pleasant circumstances to God's blessing (which is good) and strongly hint that God's blessings are the result of their energetic and successful faith (which is highly dangerous). I say "dangerous" because the moment we make that claim we shift from grace to works, essentially claiming that what we have is the result of what we have done.

This works-oriented thinking is doomed from its very inception, for it leaves us incapable of dealing with suffering or hardship. I have spoken to many Christians who, in the face of struggle, feel vaguely responsible even when the challenge is clearly beyond their control. Remember when it was discovered that Mother Teresa suffered from depression? Many Christians responded with denial or shock or both. The idea was that this genuine saint of the church should have been immune to such common handicaps. Saints are never immune. They become saints not through a life of uninterrupted bliss, but through persevering in the difficult times and rejoicing in the manifold expressions of God's presence and grace.

We simply cannot live every day on the Mount of Transfiguration. Thankfully, we do have times of exquisite closeness to God, and can live in the afterglow of them. God has a habit of showing us great things, and then asking us to faithfully guard the memory of those events without expecting a daily duplication. Thus Israel remembered God's deliverance from Egypt while they walked in the wilderness for forty years. They waited 700 years for a messianic prophecy to be fulfilled. The goal was to live each day with simple faith.

And that is what we can do. Frankly, I don't think we have any ordinary days. If we have a solid theology of grace combined with a hopeful understanding of Providence, then is there truly an ordinary moment? I tend to think we are closer to returning to the Garden than we suspect. A little basic awareness, and we begin to see the evidence of heaven everywhere. That truly is awesome whether I'm completely healthy or wealthy (though honestly I would welcome both!).

While weeding his garden one day, St. Francis was asked, "what would you do today if you knew the Lord was returning tomorrow?" Francis replied, "I would finish weeding my garden." He apparently saw glory in the ordinary but did not rely on a feeling or emotion to validate his genuinely spiritual outlook on life.

That is the kind of day-to-day faith we need, one that is both left-brained AND right-brained. We do "whatever and everything" faithfully and gratefully, without complaint or a nagging suspicion that our "whatever and everything" is insufficiently spiritual. We live each moment under God's careful watch and His tender care, not under heaven's merciless evaluation. In every task we have God as our companion, and we do each task well. In this way, we will live the ordinary life extraordinarily well.

The truth is, we spend a great deal of our time living, what the world would call, ordinary lives, but believing that as God powerfully demonstrated His faithfulness in the past, He will quietly demonstrate His faithfulness today, tomorrow, and every day. So go to work. Take care of your family. Enjoy your recreation, your meals, your sleep. And give thanks to God in the ordinary "whatever and everything."

Grace,

Dr. Terry Ellis

February 19, 2017

"Therefore let us leave behind the elementary doctrine of Christ and go on to maturity." Hebrews 6:1

Spiritually, when I was nine-years old I walked the aisle of my church and made Jesus mine. I became a Christian.

Physically, when I was nine-years-old I was probably a little over 4 feet tall, and weighed about 50 pounds.

Tomorrow I will turn 59, half a century of living after being that little kid.

Physically, I am 5' 10" and weigh 145.

Spiritually, I am ?

Measuring spirituality is very hazardous. We usually reduce it to memorizing a catechism or Bible verses. We count church services attended, or use other religious metrics. I think all of these are important. Religion, in spite of the bad press, gets lots of things right. It provides a structure, instruction, and tradition, all of which can translate into a spiritually more mature person.

Of course, that's not necessarily the case, for I can go to church, earn degrees, and engage in lots of other religious activity and still be mean as a snake. In Jesus' parable, the hyper-religious Pharisee was not justified, but the contrite publican was. Both were in the same place, doing the same thing, but they had vastly different hearts, and that made all the difference.

So religious activity can certainly help, but it's also a highly uncertain indicator of real spirituality.

Let's go back to my nine-year-old self. There was not a time in my young memory when I didn't know about God, Jesus, the stories of Easter and Christmas. I grew up with them. My parents were Christians, church-going Baptists. I was in church the second Sunday of my life, and have been there pretty much every Sunday since then. I certainly didn't have a highly developed theology as a nine-year-old, but I gave all of myself as I understood myself to God as I understood Him.

I'm very glad to have that firm starting point in my life, but how sad it would be if I today still lived with the limited understanding I had 50 years ago. It would be just as sad, and ludicrous, if I were still a little over 4 feet tall and weighed 50 pounds.

However we measure it, let's agree that spiritual growth is necessary. This expectation is clear throughout the scripture.

The author of Hebrews in the passage for this GraceWaves wrote of leaving behind elementary doctrines. He went on to suggest repentance, faith, resurrection, and judgment as some of these. Obviously, all of these doctrines have a place in our faith, but the writer indicates that there is so much more to learn. We can check off all the doctrines and still have a long way to go.

The expectation of growing insight shows up in an interesting way in the gospel of John. There the disciples would witness one of Jesus' signs (as John calls the miracles), and John would add "and they believed in Him." The disciples had been faithfully following and believing in Jesus prior to the miracle, but John realized that each sign took them deeper into Jesus, as it were. Their belief became a deeper belief. I very much like that idea.

The language of salvation in the New Testament is also quite interesting. Syntactically, we were saved, are being saved, and will be saved. Yes, there is a point in time when I became a Christian. I was saved. But it is equally true that today I am being saved, that is, the saving presence of God in my life continues. Finally, in the future I will be saved as God completes this work in me. I'm saved. Again. Growth is implied and expected.

Finally, the New Testament provides us with two very clear examples of spiritual growth. We see John and Peter with all their flaws when they walked with Jesus. We also see them through their writings 30-50 years later. They clearly were not of the same temperament. They grew.

But what exactly is this spiritual growth? Grace has to be the key, for it is the most puzzling doctrine of our theology. To paraphrase Tillich, we begin by accepting the fact that God accepts us even when we are unacceptable. I still sometimes struggle to accept that! The lure of binary thinking leads me to judge myself and others when grace tells me to accept. Accepting and applying grace is clearly one of the main struggles I face, and so must be one of the main ways I grow.

Let's approach it this way. Grace is like a vision for the world. In my graceless vision I tend to look at all things and all people in terms of their value or cost to me. How much trouble is that person going to cause me? Will this financial decision ease my future? When the center of my universe becomes me, I invest myself in endless judgments about what makes me comfortable.

Grace, however, enables me to accept, to appreciate, and even to enjoy all things in their particular expression. That's easy when something is pleasant, but it also works when I'm challenged. When the genuinely irritable event or person does come into my life, I can observe it without attaching myself to it. Observed in grace, the irritable event or person either passes along, or, and this is the true wonder, becomes part of the grace-transformation. They don't negatively affect me, and in fact may respond to God's grace through me as a flower turns to the sun.

Whatever spiritual growth looks like we should all agree that we cannot continue to feel God's closeness today based solely on the experience we had at the beginning. Reading a different author, attending a retreat, learning to meditate, etc. are all ways that we can challenge ourselves to gain new insights into an infinite God.

What I had as a nine-year-old was both completely sufficient and totally infantile. I made the first step in a journey that takes an eternity. Let's all keep walking.

Grace,

Dr. Terry Ellis

February 12, 2017