Thursday, November 22, 2012

Love the sin hate the sinner?

In my context growing up (and quite possibly in yours as well) we were taught that to be a loving Christian meant three things: love everybody as if they were your neighbor, recognize that everybody is a sinner, and hate the sin that they commit.  We were taught that when we do this, we are acting like God, who loves us while hating our sin.

There is something about this that has deeply bothered me, but I've never really been able to helpfully articulate why it is that it bothers me as much as it does.  I want to talk, first a bit about what seemed to have been at risk, and then see what other ways there are of articulating it that safeguard what needs to be safeguarded while hopefully opening us up to a more holistic approach.

When I was taught, "everybody is a sinner" what seemed to have been at stake were two things: the need to put human language around the fact that sin happens (well, lots and lots of sin happens), and almost to create a reason for redemption.  If we are perfect, why send the savior?  But that doesn't make an awful lot of sense really, because then the coming of Christ into the world to die and rise again is very nearly predicated off of the fact that I can mess up.  One only needs remember the example of a father who knows that his presence with his children will help them become full adults.  They may be naughty children in addition to being only half formed -- but it is a bit absurd to imagine that their nautyness is the only reason their father would be their father.  At the very least, if that were the only reason, he'd be a jolly awful father.

As far as putting language around the fact that a terrible lot of sin happens, and even that a large amount of sin is done by those I know, and even by me, I don't think it is necessary,  either from Scripture or experience to say that we are therefore sinners.  As far as Scripture goes, God said after creating both man and woman, "behold, it is good."  How can something that God created as good become bad through it's own actions?  Very often in the textual witness in Scripture we see humans sinning and God coming in and rescuing those who repent and punishing those who don't.  We language that says "all have fallen short of the glory of God" (which, I mean, is somewhat obvious really -- we aren't God!) but I don't for a minute think that means we are sinners.  We sin all the time, terribly, and beyond our ability to control really.  We are also sinned against all the time, in very very terrible ways.  But are we therefore evil?

In a sense I think it is a bit too simplistic to say we are sinners, to say that we are evil.  It sort of short circuits the whole redemptive drama.  If we are totally depraved, then our destruction is justified, and our redemption is easy.  By contrast, if we are still complex, if we are good, who do evil, then our recovery becomes a bit harder.  For we have to deal not only with our sin and weakness, but with our guilt and shame about that sin and weakness as well.

And for me anyway, this is where the rub is.  We were taught to "hate the sin" -- and we were taught that God also hates sin, so we are being like God when we love sinners and hate sin.  One question that was never asked though (at least in my context -- it may have been asked in your context) was, "what does it do to a person to teach them to hate part of what they do?"

When we are taught to hate at least a part of what we do, we are essentially splitting our own selves into that which is "ok" and that which is "terrible."  We suppress as much as possible that about us which we hate, and focus as much as possible on that which think is "ok".  But wait a minute here.  hold the phone.  press the pause button.

What else is sin if not this very splitting?  Sin is that which splits; divides, takes what is whole and good and makes it separate and divided.  Sin divides humanity from God, from nature.  Sin isolates one human from another human.  But sin also separates us from ourselves.  I don't see how this doctrine, "love the sinner, hate the sin" doesn't in fact encourage and actually end up aiding this splitting tendency of sin in a way that ends up  enacting the splitting of the self.

Very often it seems that the path to wholeness and healing of the soul is only through accepting all the fragmented parts that comprise us.  This path of acceptance is a path of open humility, because it forces us really to accept that we are just like everyone around us.  This acceptance isn't a reluctant sort of grinding the teeth while admitting our weaknesses.  Rather, it is a fully robust and open eyed statement, "I sin."  It is not a, "I sin, and I hate my sin."

I think that once we have come to a place where we can accept ourselves completely as we are, then and only then can we begin to heal.  God never heals only a part of us.  Rather, He insists upon healing all of us.  Very often we can spend many long years coming to terms with all of the parts of our soul we have been hiding from our own view.  Instead of further burying these parts, and cultivating hatred towards them, shall we not accept that we ourselves are not completely us without them?  Only then, at that point, can we be healed.  If the leper hated his disease to the point of denying its very existence, would he ever have cried out to Jesus to be healed?  Or, would he have been healed, but been like the nine lepers who went on their way and didn't respond by coming back and giving thanks?

In conclusion to this much to long blog post, I think the thing we were taught, "love the sinner but hate the sin" is not only merely inaccurate, but capable of cultivating attitudes in the heart that making healing difficult.  It fails to take into account that in us which is still good even though we do regularly sin, therefore misplacing the emphasis of Christ's redemption off of renewal and on to sin removal.  It also teaches us to necessarily hate the weak parts of us that continue to make us sin.  When we learn to hate ourselves, we buy into the damage of sin by furthering the isolation that it naturally already causes.  We learn to face God (if at all) with tremendous shame and guilt, instead of humility and hope.

Tuesday, November 20, 2012

The Encounter with God

The encounter with God is perhaps one of the greatest and most beautiful of all paradoxes.  It is an experience utterly outside of our control.  It is an experience that restores our hearts from isolation.  It is an experience that turns our many words about God into hymns of awe to God.

These three: the control we have over things in our life, the loneliness of our hearts and the transition from word to song (which is also a transition from description to love, from assessment to praise, and from doubt to worship) also contain for us guidelines that assure that we are in fact experiencing an encounter with God, and not something of our own making.  I take it as self evident that God created us in such a way as to make the path to him recognizable in our own construction as humans.  We shall consider them in order.

As we make the transition from child to adult, our own self begins to wonderfully emerge.  We learn to recognize our voice in addition the cacophony of voices in the cosmos, and to learn to love, and to fear, to recognize hope, and to live in uncertainty.  We approach whatever it is we view the divine to be with all the needs and expectations born from the creation and exercise of our voice in the world.  Carried on by this our unique expectation, we often refer to prayer as the fulfillment of precisely our own expectation.  Consciously or unconsciously, we discover a certain need to control the outcome of our religious experiences so that our needs are meet, our fears are relieved, our anxiety sated  and our hopes strengthened.  

But the encounter with God is something totally different.  For in God we find our true selves.  We find ourselves as He intends us to be.  We find not our voice, so much as the purpose for which our voice exists. We find also that all the fears we had built up around what makes this world a livable place and what makes it a non-livable place become stripped away.  This stripping away of our fears feels like a stripping away of our identities, of our very voices -- for we are so used to hearing this fear in our voice that we don't know any other way to talk.  Yet it is a gift.  In the encounter with God we find that our own voices are given to us, and we find why we are given voices in the first place.

The encounter with God is an experience that restores our hearts from isolation. We may imagine ourselves with Mary at the tomb as she saw the Gardner call her by name and hear our own name spoken as well from His lips.  We neither expected this nor created this.  Like her, we may be grieving the death of all we had looked to in life for hope.  Even the death of everything that we thought God Himself is (or, was, to us).  We think it proper to hold in our hearts this particular grief of being unable to find God (or, more precisely, of having been able to find Him but now knowing that He is finally unable to be found by us.)  We weep that we are truly and utterly alone.  We weep the sweet fellowship we had, and compare it to the bitter stillness of having no ability to pierce the veil that now separates our souls from their creator.  Our voice is a lonely voice in the world, and that is precisely our fault.

If we, we who cannot create, would forgive one who had wronged us, how much more shall the mere mention of our name by the Risen One who is love Incarnate restore us?  How much more shall He sheer us of our grief?  How much more shall He burst the walls of our isolation from Him with love?  How much more shall He, by proclaiming our name, proclaim His Name as Lord -- Lord even of us as we run from Him?  How much more shall He remove the shame of our running, and, as He did with Jonah, cause in us the ice of our isolation to melt in the fire of His embrace?

The Encounter with God turns our words about God into songs (or hymns) to God.  Precisely as those who have been broken into, as those who now no longer either seek to control or to run, we worship.  Our words about God no longer take the form of those who describe God as beyond themselves and then stop.  We don't use dead words to describe a distant and therefore transcendent God.  Rather, we revel with delight (as a bride and groom rejoice in each other's embrace on their wedding night) because the distance turns out not to be spacial but causal.  He is not distant in the sense that Seattle and Boston are, but distant in the sense that fire and the heat it produces, or a lamp and the light it produces.  

To be encountered by God is to find ourselves who once had been dead to be enkindled.  His love burns in us, causing our voice to lose the fear that was unique to itself, causing our hearts to be filled with hope that we did not create, causing our isolation to disappear as something barely even able to be recalled.  The Encounter with God is the receiving of a life that is both uniquely ours (indeed, we were created for it) and also the very participation in the life of God.  

We can rest assured that we ourselves did not create this encounter, precisely because we couldn't have.  We may, to be sure, succeed in creating a certain degree of forgiveness, of love, of peace, of reconciliation with our neighbor, and if we are truly great people, even with our enemy.  But who can create life?  Who can erase his or her own fears in such a way as to say of their darkness (as the Psalmist said of God) that, "even your darkness is light?"  Who can, once he or she has become isolated in their own self, redeem themselves by their own will?  Who can succeed in living into the fullness of a life that they cannot imagine?  Who among us can uplift them-self into a life utterly beyond their own imagination but, nonetheless, for which they were created all along?

Friday, November 16, 2012

A Short Reflection on the Language of Theology, People, and Scripture

Talking about God is kind of a strange thing.  I sense that it is something we all want to do -- even something we all really rather must do.  It is something that, until we do it, we don't know ourselves.  To talk about God is to describe not only our upper limit (that which we most definitely are not) but also that without which we will never be at peace.  We were created with such a desire to be at peace and in union with God, that to not talk about him at all is a kind of terrible travesty against our very beings.

Each of us therefore has something that must be said about God.  This word we have is one with the fact that we are alive.  This word that we have is also already a word that is given in response to the Word of God that has already gone out into the world.  Christ, the Word of the Father, speaks the Word of God in our hearts.  Our response is beautiful, unique, and full of a life that is more than we are.

We have all of creation that we can see and touch and hear.  Yet we realize that God is not creation.  We have our people in our lives that we love, yet we realize that God is more than the people in our lives that we love.  All of us are, I think, searching for words to describe this Word of the Father that calls us to Himself.  When we find our word, our response, our talking of the Father, we will have also found ourselves.  We will feel complete and whole because we have described and loved as much as is possible for us the God who calls us out of ourselves into Himself where we are at peace.

We have been given Scripture as a cannon of texts that all describe God in very different ways.  We can know that words about the Word of the Father are closest to being really descriptive of God when they conform to the words in Scripture.  In fact, we must use these words and live inside of them.

But how do we do that?  For just as it is obvious that God does is not creation, and that God is not the people we love, God is also not Scripture.  Scripture describes God using human emotions, and as being good, powerful, creator, and as one and three.  Yet, this only increases our wonder.  For just as God is more than creation, more than other people, more than ourselves, so God must be more than human emotions.  God must be more than good, more than powerful, more than creator, more than one and more than three.  Indeed, he is above all, but must be more than what we mean when we apply the words "above all" to anything we know.

Yet, God must be close, personal, able to be found because He has indeed found us and placed within us the desire to speak our word in response to His Word.  But, this closeness is closer than anything else that we typically use the word closeness for.  How do we live inside the words of Scripture and allow them to draw us up into God?

This aspect that we recognize of God, in which God is more than every word that can be used to describe God is helpful.  For it does not lead (as some wrongly suppose) into a nothingness.  We do not say, "well, since God is obviously good and more than good, and powerful and more than powerful, and loving and more than loving, my words of good, powerful, and loving are actually without meaning when applied to God."

When we attach this "more than" aspect of God to God's infinity, it certainly leads us to conclude that we can't really actually describe God at all.  The temptation is to say that we are finite, he is infinite, therefore, he is "more than" everything we can use to describe Him.  But this is unhelpful.  We would run the risk of just making God an infinite version of us, not some actually different from us.

Another way of viewing the "more than" language about God is to attach to it the meaning of "source."  God is more than good because God is the source of good.  God is more than love because God is the source of love.  God is more than creation because God is the source of creation.  God is more than people because God is the source of people.

Just as a fire is different from the heat it produces, just as a tree is different then the shade it produces, just as  a flashlight is different from the sight it enables, so God is different then creation.  God is more than creation because God is the source of all that is.

So what?  Why does it matter to me that God is the source of all that is?  Well, it means that when I try to respond to His Word, and talk about God within the words in Scripture I now have a way of so responding.
Rather than being led into speechlessness by the utter beyond-ness of God, I can be led into praise by the utter source-ness of God.  Since all that is is from God, I can and should praise Him as the source of all, even myself.

Wednesday, November 14, 2012

Mystery, Polemic, and Truth

I want to take a bit of time to think about how these three things relate with each other.  In one of my classes somewhere, it was said by someone, "the closer something is to being true, the less it needs to be argued for."  The assumption here seems to be that when we actually descend to the level of polemic, of arguing for or against a particular something, we are only arguing for a part of that which is true.  To turn that assumption around, and look at it from another angle, we can sort of view things on a spectrum.  One one side of the spectrum are many many many words, and not a lot of truth.  On the other side of the spectrum, one has few words, or complete silence and a good deal of truth.  The thought is that as one observes the movement from many words to few words, one also observes a corresponding movement in the amount of truth that is being referred to by those words.

What does that mean though, and how does it apply to reconciliation?  Well, to answer that question, let's briefly explore the words Mystery and Truth.

Hans urs von Balthasar describes Truth as a relationship between the thing or person doing the knowing, and  thing or person being known.  He says that when such a relationship exists, there are two markers that make it's existence obvious.  One of the markers is an increase in knowledge.  The other marker is an increase in mystery.  If both of these markers are there, than the relationship is said to be a "true" relationship, "truth" is said to be "taking place" inside of that relationship, the knowledge about the person or thing that is gained is "true".

These two things -- knowledge and mystery -- increase together.  Yet, they are opposite.  How can this be?  How does it even begin to make sense to say that if I am beginning to know something in a way that is true, then I also begin to precisely not know that very object?  I think it is because the way we approach anything -- a person, a subject, an idea, a different culture -- is done in such a way that we use much more than our minds.

My mind (and yours) has the ability to link similar things with similar things and separate non similar things from non similar things.  That is what our minds do... they combine and separate.  And, in as much as we do this about a thing, our knowledge of it increases.  We know more what is it similar to, and we know more what it is dissimilar to.

But that is not all, is it?  The more we do this knowing about a thing, the more we realize that there is always an aspect about it that is already beyond any similarities between the thing and our context that we can determine.  We also realize that there is also always an aspect about it that is already beyond any dissimilarities between the thing and our context.  We find that the things which we know are partially knowable, and partially beyond our ability to know them.  Thus mystery and knowledge increase together.

Who would argue against this?  Who would say that the subject they know most about is not also the subject that is most mysterious to them?  Who would say that the one they love and know the best of all is not also the most full of mystery?  Who would say that the one thing in life about which they can rightfully be considered an expert, is not also the one thing in life that continues to contain the most mystery for them?

And so when both of these increase together, knowledge and mystery, we say that that increase is truth.  Truth has taken place, it has happened.   If knowledge increases with no mystery, whatever is known is not known in a true way.  Similarly, if mystery increases and no knowledge accompanies it, then the mystery has not been known in a true way.

To sum up, we can now start to see a distance emerge between arguing for something and describing the knowledge and mystery of a thing.  Polemic may actually be beneficial, but it is not able to accomplish (on its own) the very thing it claims to be able to achieve.

All of what we have just said is very true of things within this world.  It describes in limited fashion how it is (to my mind anyway) that we come to know things in a way that is true.  How much more when we attempt to approach divine revelation?