To wrap up the Humanity series, which began with discussions on The Original Commission of God and then on The Global People of God, we are going to end on a more directly practical note. Taking what we have realized about humanity so far, we are going to discuss one major way that we live out our humanity, and it is something that actually isn’t thought about too much.

How we use our possessions.

Catholic New Testament scholar Luke Timothy Johnson, whose insights in his book Sharing Possessions: What Faith Demands form a large part of this discussion points out: This is “one of the knottiest questions imaginable: the connection between being a Christian and the way we own and use things.”

And what makes this issue so important is that “The things we own and use … lie close to the bone of our individual and collective sense of identity.” The very fact that we have possessions reveals a lot about what it means to be human.

It’s not just a matter of our possessions being mere externalities in relation to us, and that what we do with them doesn’t have much to do with our own hearts and the condition of our souls – no, they have a lot to do with who we are, and what we are.

In a deep discussion of the relationship between being and having, Johnson makes a good point. That to be alive today is to own something, no matter how poor you are – “the claim to ‘have’ and therefore to ‘be’ extends beyond our bodies and our material possessions to every possible sort of ‘ownership,’ of ideas, plans, time, space, ideals, friends, partners, spouses, virtues.” It’s not just about material things.

The Bible is absolutely saturated with texts that deal with possessions. However, scholars are in agreement that a coherent system of what a Christian should do with possessions simply can’t be drawn from the Bible. For example, we have commandments for total renunciation of possessions alongside commandments of almsgiving and hospitality.

But, the more I’ve thought about this, the more I see it as utterly appropriate that Scripture is ambiguous on this issue. It points beyond itself to the larger issues – this discussion is about stuff, but this isn’t just about stuff.

So I’ve had to fight the tendency to try to take into account all of the biblical evidence. What I would rather focus on are some of the larger issues connected to the whole idea of possessions, like the ones just mentioned, presupposing the vast importance the Bible attaches to possessions.

What the Bible everywhere supposes is attitudes and convictions and beliefs and emotions are expressed through the body, what Johnson helpfully calls “body language.”

And it’s hard to think about what it means to live as a human without thinking of how we use the things that we own. “The way we use, own, acquire, and disperse material things symbolizes and expresses our attitudes and responses to our selves, the world around us, other people, and most of all, God.”

Possessions are so important because they both represent and effect our response to reality. They are a crucial part of our body language. What do you think of as real, and important? Look at your body language, what you do with your possessions. You will use your possessions to respond to what your heart holds in a prominent place. “For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.” You can flip this around. “Where your heart is, there your treasure will be also.

As Christian monotheists, who believe in the one God who is the only thing that can be properly worshiped, we continually face a conflict. “The conflict for monotheism is between faith in the one God and idolatry.”

The question always before us is are we going to respond in any given situation in such a way that says God is what is most real to us–or anything else?

Johnson: “Idolatry, in simple terms, is the choice of treating as ultimate and absolute that which is neither absolute nor ultimate. We treat something as ultimate by the worship we pay it — meaning here, of course, neither the worship of lips nor of license but of service. Worship is service.” “You’ve gotta serve somebody.”

Key point: Johnson says that in his judgment, “Scripture regards the body language of possessions as the most direct and important expression of faith and idolatry.”

What is wrong with humanity is that it has turned away from God and served other things. The paradigmatic Jewish and Gentile sins are idolatry. The world has chosen to worship other things, images, rather than the God of Israel who has no image. Except for us, those created in his image and meant to bear his image.

C.J.H. Wright: “Idols distort the image of God in us. Since idolatry diminishes the glory of God, and since humans are made in the image of God, it follows that idolatry is also detrimental to the very essence of our humanity.”

To turn from the imageless God to serve that which can be seen and may offer more immediate satisfaction, those things that are ours, is to fall from being properly human. Not just properly Christian, not as if you’ve just had a religious failing–but falling short of the ideal human.

“The things of the world are the raw material for the fashioning of my idol,” Johnson says. Just as Israel took their gold to make their golden calf, you have possessions, and most of them must be used at some point. Will they be used to fashion an idol? Or will they be used in such a way that their ultimate owner would approve of?

Because here’s the thing. Psalm 24:1 says the earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof. And there’s no doubt that we are his. We are then faced with a paradox about possessions that should keep us grounded in the proper place expressed by Johnson: “If the earth is ‘his,’ and we are ‘his,’ there is not, in the final analysis, a sense in which we truly possess anything.”

We are really stewards, caretakers, there is nothing we have total ownership of.

What if we always asked ourselves when we make decisions with our stuff, “What if I can’t do this with someone else’s money?” “Should I really do this with someone else’s time?”

Though Scripture doesn’t offer clear cut guidelines for how to do so, it is absolutely clear that possessions are properly dealt with, which means God is properly served and humanity does what it is meant to do, is when possessions are shared.

Why? Because it’s about sharing as the humanity that we are intended to be. By  the original commission of God, we are called to serve him by doing the things that we are meant to do, working, serving, protecting, creating, and all in community. One big point about all of this is that by serving others you are serving God.

And the question of how exactly you live this out shows how necessarily ambiguous it is. Of how much time you should spend in service to others and how much time you need for yourself. How much money you should keep and give away. How much of your daily energy should be spent for the sake of those around you instead of yourself.

Your situation is different from others. There are cultural differences, social differences. Scripture has done us a service in avoiding mapping out for us exactly what we should do with possessions.Because what we are supposed to do is live in an “imaginative obedience,” that is, actually putting in the work of being in conversation with God, our own hearts, with our neighbors, to see how we can best serve God and neighbor and world through our actions with what we have and who we are.

And at the end of the day, we are to be pleased with what we have, as Hebrews 13:5 makes explicit. I’m not sure faith can stand when someone can truly question God’s provision.

As we saw in the first week, Jesus best fulfills the Original Commission of God. Jesus is the ultimate ruler, ultimate priest, ultimate creator, ultimate HUMAN. He is the ultimate sharer.

Jesus is so important because he was exactly what Israel needed, and because he is exactly what humanity needs. Humanity needs God to share himself with us. It is the only way we have life, it’s the only way we have our being, the only way we can have any sort of meaning or enjoyment or happiness or joy.

Jesus’ death on the cross is the ultimate paradigm of what it means to share. Just as God had instated a sacrificial system by which his people would give to him, Jesus ends up being the ultimate sacrifice, the ultimate gift. By sharing his very life, God through Jesus accomplishes the ultimate sharing act.

Philippians 2 “Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others. Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death—even death on a cross.”

Paul paraphrases the same idea elsewhere: 2 Cor 8:9 “For you know the generous act of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, so that by his poverty you might become rich.”

A series on humanity must therefore end on a note of worship.

2 Cor 9:7 – “Each of you must give as you have made up your mind, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver.” Paul is talking about one giving to another, but for a long time I’ve loved to apply this to the idea of worship. The only thing that we can truly give God that he cannot take from us, is worship. God loves a cheerful giver, that is, a genuine giver.

It’s why the God who instated a policy of sacrifices for his people  says in Jeremiah (6:20) your sacrifices aren’t pleasing to me; In Isaiah (1:11) I’m not delighted by sacrifices, In Malachi (1:10) you might as well shut the temple doors for all I care, because for this God, as 1 Samuel (15:22) and Hosea (6:6) attest, desires steadfast love, not sacrifice.

How you use possessions, all of those things entrusted to your care, and are at your disposal, is so central to being human. Bearers of the image of God, a community of rulers and priests. It is central to your living, your loving, your serving, and ultimately, your worshiping.

Modified from a talk given at Christ United Methodist Church on 7/25/12 entitled “Humanity: Sharing and the Worship of God.” Listen to it here. Find the handout under “Transcript.” 

Ross Douthat wrote in his recent New York Times article “Can Liberal Christianity Be Saved?”:

“The most [numerically] successful Christian bodies have often been politically conservative but theologically shallow, preaching a gospel of health and wealth rather than the full New Testament message.”

This can be seen in the fact that the largest church in America is pastored by Joel Osteen, the supreme icon of this shallow gospel of health and wealth. And some of the largest churches in other parts of the world preach the same kind of message.

Christianity may be especially splintered nowadays, but the word “Christianity” retains a solid meaning. It can still be used to properly denote a variety of traditions falling under its larger category. It refers to Catholics, and Greek Orthodox, and Southern Baptists.

But, there comes a point where what is believed is so divergent from the traditional, ancient, universal Christian message that it is, for all practical purposes, no longer the Christian message. How do we measure this exactly? Well it’s more of an art than a science. But the good news of the Lordship of Jesus Christ being diminished to the hope of health and wealth is surely not anything like the Christianity of the past two millennia which is reflected in the New Testament. If anything, it is indeed heresy–i.e., something other than what is the original good news of Christ. This original gospel is about the kingship of Jesus, the defeat of sin and evil, and the eternal worship and enjoyment of God in righteousness and justice. The prosperity gospel has made it about you and your satisfaction with your stuff.

In his book Sharing Possessions: What Faith Demands, the Roman Catholic New Testament scholar Luke Timothy Johnson concludes one his chapters with this paragraph:

It can be stated unequivocally that Luke-Acts–the scriptural witness that speaks most emphatically about the human use of possessions as a response of faith–bears no trace of the contemporary heresy called the prosperity gospel. However much televangelists and others trumpet the “scriptural” character of their claim that faith brings with it material prosperity, their selectivity with regard to the Bible is far more severe than that practiced by Christians who have followed one of the classic options for sharing. They choose to follow a handful of Old Testament texts in the Deuteronomic tradition, and ignore completely the unanimous witness of the New Testament, which portrays discipleship not in terms of worldly success, but in terms of radical obedience and service–service that involves the sharing of possessions rather than the accumulation of them. There is simply no gospel character to the claims of the prosperity gospel, no element of genuine Christian discipleship.

My task will always be on this blog to write about the “full New Testament message” to which Douthat refers. May I also live in it and hope in it.

“For whatever be the knowledge which we are able to obtain of God, either by perception or reflection, we must of necessity believe that He is by many degrees far better than what we perceive him to be.” Origen, De Principiis 1.5

Jesus died on the cross for our sin.

—

The cross was a very common form of execution used by the Roman Empire.

It was especially employed to put anyone suspected of revolt against the Empire to a torturous death on display for all to see.

It was not only a way to punish and kill the alleged offenders; it was a way to force others to think twice before they do anything that could be seen as rebellious. Lest they suffer the same fate.

Jesus was executed by the Romans by being hung on a cross on a high place outside the walls of Jerusalem.

He was seen by the Roman Empire as a threat.

In the first part of the Humanity series, the early chapters of Genesis showed us what humanity was originally created for in the first place. Aside from what we are to do as Christians, what is our role as humans?

We were created to worship and serve God by being his rulers on earth. And not just rulers, but priestly rulers. Rulers that mediate the presence and reign of God to the whole creation. And along with it goes our task as sub-creators. God did not create a completely finished world in Genesis. He left room for human creativity and work to bring about the end-times garden-city of Revelation, where God’s presence is all in all, as Paul would put it.

Therefore, understanding who we are as Christians is vastly incomplete apart from a knowledge and awareness of the global church. The global church is that part of humanity which is on the course and is in the process of becoming the people that God has always longed to make for himself.

So this lesson is a rough introduction to your brothers and sisters in Christ around the world, our fellow rulers, priests, sub-creators. Those people that we join in the vision of Revelation 7 of the worshiping crowd that no one could number. They were from every nation, tribe, people, and language.

I want to frame and focus our question this way: How do we best understand 1 Cor 12:12-27 in light of today’s church?

The context is about the use of spiritual gifts, but what Paul says here applies to the idea of church unity at large. But as much as it is about unity, is just as much about the need for diversity. Both diversity and unity are crucial to the church the way God has designed it.

This passage is about the well-being of the community, not just the individual. What binds Christians together, reflecting the community that humanity was created to share, is the concern they are to have for one another as each of the parts of the body plays its equally important role.

The thing is, however, that Paul wrote this when the church didn’t yet span many, many cultures and languages and nations. 2000 years later, the people of God, the church, has grown and expanded across the entire globe. How do we best understand and apply this passage in today’s time?

This question is especially important for those of us in this part of the world. Because Christianity is so common in the West, we have been accustomed to thinking of the wider church as just the American church, or perhaps the European and North American church.

And it’s often said that such a church is not doing so well. That numbers are dwindling and its influence is weakening. In one way, this is true to some extent. In the 20^th century (it’s probably even worse now) people were leaving the Western church at a rate of 4,300 a day. But in Africa 22-24,000 were coming to Christ daily. China as a country that claims 16,500 new believers everyday, the largest growing church in any one country.

The church is doing very, very well. Christianity is still the largest and will continue to be the largest religion in the world.

However, Philip Jenkins notes the huge shift that has taken place and must be taken into account. This is one of the most important things that today’s Christians need to know:

Christianity is now rooted in the Third World and the religion’s future lies in the global South.

It is in those places that Christianity has historically not been very widespread that it is growing at a rapid pace.

By 2025 Latin America and Africa will be in competition for most Christian continent. By 2050 only about 1/5 of the world’s three billion Christians will be non-Hispanic whites. Philip Jenkins: “Soon the phrase ‘a white Christian’ may sound like a curious oxymoron.”

Soong-Chan Rah, a Korean missiologist sums it up this way: “In the year 1900, Europe and North America comprised 82% of the world’s Christian population. In 2005, Europe and North America comprised 39% of the world’s Christian population with African, Asian, and Latin American Christians making up 60 % of the world’s Christian population. By 2050, African, Asian, and Latin American Christians will constitute 71% of the world’s Christian population.”

Rah continues:”Fifty years ago, if you were asked to describe a typical Christian in the world, you could confidently assert that person to be an upper middle class, white male, living in an affluent and comfortable Midwest suburb. If you were to ask the same question today, that answer would more likely be a young Nigerian mother on the outskirts of Lagos, a university student in Seoul, South Korea, or a teenage boy in Mexico City.”

Thus with greater clarity and sharper vividness we see the vision of Revelation 7 of the great crowd that no one could number. People worshiping Christ as the Lamb of God that are from every nation, tribe, people, and language.

Speaking of language, not only is the church in the process of spreading to more and more nations, tribes, and peoples, but also over 2,000 languages are used to worship Christ in the world today. That’s more than any other religion. Jenkins adds, “Spanish has since 1980 been the leading language of church membership in the world, and Chinese, Hindi, and Swahili will soon play a much greater role. In our lifetimes, the centuries-long North Atlantic captivity of the church is drawing to an end.”

Far too much in the church we have an “us, them” mentality that is foreign and even poisonous to the biblical portrait the body of Christ. We have it with the Methodist church down the road, with the other denomination, and especially with the churches of other countries. We hear about China adding 16,500 everyday, and what do we think? “That’s them.” No, that’s US!

And the thing is, increasingly nowadays we don’t have to go far out in the world there to see the phenomenon of global Christianity. In this country it’s increasingly becoming a reality right here in our neighborhoods.

Although it is often perceived this way, in actuality the Western church isn’t shrinking! Frankly, it’s only the predominantly white churches that are shrinking. In other words, it isn’t only in the world that the church is becoming multiethnic; in America itself we are soon looking at a nonwhite, multiethnic majority. It is the ethnic churches that are the fastest growing in America.

Christianity Today recently reported that 85% of Yale’s Campus for Crusade for Christ is Asian. On the other hand, the Buddhist meditation meetings on the same campus were almost completely white.

So what it means to think of the body of Christ today, not only globally but here in this country alone, is to think of a wide variety of cultures, races, classes, etc. And this variety is only getting wider, and further from Western and North American culture. It’s necessary to differentiate the Gospel and who we are as God’s people apart from who we are in our races, nationalities, and so on. We will thereby see God for who he is and what he is all about in more fullness.

And so, back to our Bible question. What does it mean to read 1 Cor 12 today in light of all this?

As Paul says, “God has placed each of the parts in the body just like he wanted.” Diversity is a good, necessary diversity, but it is all within the one body of Christ. Paul says here that the eye can’t say to the hand, “I don’t need you,” or the head can’t say to the feet “I don’t need you.” I’ve heard a Kenyan pastor apply this passage in this way: “The American church can’t say to the Chinese church I don’t need you. The church of Brazil can’t say to the church of Uganda I don’t need you.”

There ways that are obvious to us Westerns about the ways the Third World church needs us, with all of our resources. And that’s true. But, How do WE need THEM?

The Western church faces many troubles today that can be aided with such power by the Third World majority Christians. They have an extreme devotion to their Christian life. They have plenty that can and is helping us through struggles. Timothy Tennent has said that “Global Christianity is the greatest force for renewal in the northern hemisphere.”

Part of our problem is that there is too much of a sending mentality and not enough of a receiving mentality in the way we think about being global Christians. It’s not just about missions. It’s world Christianity.

In 1 Corinthians 12:25-26 Paul says God has arranged things this way so that there might be mutual concern among everyone. If a part suffers, the whole suffers. If a part rejoices, the whole rejoices. Paul uses here the same word for having concern or caring for in other places to say don’t have it for yourself. Here he says, have it for everyone else.

It is in this way that we see Jesus and grow in our knowledge of him. “You all are the body of Christ and parts of each other” (1 Cor 12:27).

Andrew Walls said “Christian diversity is the necessary product of the Incarnation.” God became human in order that humanity would become the humanity it was supposed to be, and we are seeing as a result how widely varied are the people that bear the image of God. To see what God looks like, we see Jesus. And the primary way we see Jesus is by looking at the faces of the true humanity that is being shaped to look more and more like him.

“You all are the body of Christ and parts of each other.”

Modified from a talk given at Christ United Methodist Church on 6/27/12 entitled “Humanity: The Global People of God.” Listen to it here. Find the handout under “Transcript.”

On several occasions I’ve come into contact with some remarks by some Christians to depreciate humanity in order to uphold the sovereignty of God. And I have a good deal of trouble with them.

One is that human powers of reason are warped and therefore untrustworthy. Or, even worse, that God is somehow “above” reason or logic. I frequently encounter this as a response to a theological proposal that is based not on explicit Scriptural evidence. For example, If I say “I think this is true because I reason that …” some would respond that human reasoning is incapable of making valid conclusions about the nature of God. As if only that which is explicitly revealed about God in the Bible is all that can be known or believed about God.

This just strikes me as an attempt to defend the sovereignty of God. Which I’m sure always has a completely admirable motive behind it. BUT, there is one major problem.

And it turns out to be a self-defeating problem. Here it is: God’s sovereignty needs no defense. Why? Because it is no way challenged. It definitely isn’t by human reasoning abilities. As if the trustworthiness of human reasoning abilities in regards to the divine would thereby diminish God in some way.

Don’t get me wrong — God will never be completely understood nor will he be limited in any fashion. But there’s a difference in saying there’s a limit to the quantity of our understanding of God instead of saying there’s a limit to the quality of our understanding of God.

Besides all that, I don’t see much reason to conclude that human reasoning powers about God are warped. Sin being fully and properly accounted for, I still don’t see how our rebelliousness as sinners means that every one of our human capacities are completely and utterly inept. Paul, the author of Hebrews, etc., all felt free to reason about the nature of God. And they do it confidently.

The other way some people depreciate humanity in order to uphold God’s sovereignty has to do with the teachings of Calvinism in regards to salvation.

God must determine that certain people will come to know him because, some say, the opposite position requires free will on the part of humans. And human free will and divine free will cannot co-exist.

Now, though I don’t currently believe this is the case, God may actually determine that certain people will know him simply by his own choice. But it won’t be because he has to step in because human free will somehow challenges his sovereignty.

To clarify, when we say human free will, we should denote a derivative free will, a will that is secondary to that of God, but a will that is free nonetheless. Free will on the part of humans is one of the Bible’s biggest presuppositions. It is everywhere assumed, and so nowhere explicitly stated. I don’t think those that deny human free will have really thought their position through. If it is true, it makes for a completely unlivable and meaningless existence because all of our actions are predetermined.

In the end, both positions skewer themselves, and for this reason: in these efforts to defend the sovereignty of God, they imply that the sovereignty of God is of such lowly nature that it could be challenged at all. Some of the smartest people I know have made these arguments, but I remain baffled. I don’t see, and I don’t think I will ever see, how human reason and human free will in any way challenge the sovereignty and power of the God who brought us into being in the first place.

At least one source attests that Tim Keller calls Paige Brown the best Bible teacher in America. I do know Paige attended the church Tim pastors in New York for a while, so this wouldn’t surprise me. While there are teachers whose works I have read that have proven to be a more formative influence on me, the group of sermons I have heard from Paige have certainly been the most valuable that I’ve ever encountered.

And you’ve probably never heard of her. I have a feeling she prefers it that way. Not to say that those Christian leaders who make a name for themselves were simply out to make a name for themselves, but there is no question in the case of Paige that she’s just about speaking the truth. Though I wish she has, she has not written a book–which is often the first step toward making yourself known in the world of Christian teaching. She just did campus ministry for several years at Vanderbilt and Virginia, has a degree from Covenant Seminary, and basically is just a stay-at-home mom with her three kids and occasionally speaks at conferences.

And so, without knowing anything about her, and having heard nothing about her before, a couple years ago I went to the Christian Life Conference at Second Presbyterian in Memphis that featured her as a speaker for that year’s theme, “A Heart for God.”

Making her way through the Saul and David story of 1-2 Samuel, Paige shows how vital the condition of the heart is in light of the God who claims our lives as his. And she does it with a keen literary sensibility, wit, and honesty, and all in an appropriately worshipful and humble stance.

I have listened to these sermons many, many times and they always lead me to look at my own heart with discerning and critical gaze and yearn to have the heart of God.

Click on the names of these resources to check them out. The Christian Life Conference sermons are available on the website of Second Presbyterian.

• “The Desperate Heart“
• “The Rejective Heart“
• “The Reflective Heart“
• “The Responsive Heart” A video of this message is available here.

Here’s a great article on singleness that she wrote before she was married entitled “Singled Out for Good”

Here’s a couple of talks she gave for The Gospel Coalition:

• “When Despair Invades Gospel Work: Learning from Elijah“
• “Kingdom Matters“

And a video of a plenary session speech she gave for a Gospel Coalition women’s conference entitled “In the Temple: The Glorious and Forgiving God.”

And a video of session she gave for the Gospel Coalition’s women’s conference entitled “Fearing God in a Fallen World.”

Here’s a conversation with Jenny Salt about women’s studies in the church.

That’s all I’ve been able to find from her. If you discover anything else, let me know.

And I can’t find an email address anywhere for her, so if she somehow sees this, thank you Paige.

One of the main insights I’ve had while reading N.D. Wilson’s one-of-a-kind book, Notes from the Tilt-a-Whirl: Wide-Eyed Wonder in God’s Spoken World, is that I didn’t know that we could write this way.

Not to say that even if I felt like I was “allowed” to write such a book then I would have, but the greatest value of this book so far has been the way Nathan David has put some of my own thoughts into words so simple, beautiful, powerful, and witty that I could never come up with them. He puts into expression some of my deepest thoughts and feelings. It makes for a very satisfying piece of art.

So, use the following paragraph to get to know him a little bit. His question in this book is what the world is, and what it’s for.

Just to be clear, I live on a near perfect sphere hurtling through space at around 67,000 miles per hour. Mach 86 to pilots. Of course, this sphere of mine is also spinning while it hurtles, so tack on an extra 1,000 miles per hour at the fat parts. And it’s all tucked into this giant hurricane of stars. Yes, it can be freaky. Once a month or so, my wife will find me lying in the lawn, burrowing white knuckles into the grass, trying not to fly away. But most of the time I manage to keep my balance despite the speed, and I don’t have to hold on with anything more than my toes.

It was six or seven times that I kept coming back to this paragraph and laughed every time before I went much farther with the book. It’s only on page two.

Now that you’ve been introduced to him, I’d like you to read how he articulates that all of us have faith. It’s not a question of religious affiliation or rejection of anything having to do with God; everyone lives in faith.

On pp. 22-23, he provides three options that have been put forward to explain just where it all came from. And all of them have been called Sophia at some point in human history. “Wisdom.” N.D. says, let them walk the runway. “Which is the most beautiful and has the best birthing hips? Which could have mothered such a world as ours?”

Sophia 1: Matter is actually infinite. Where the regress stops, there is some physical element that is made from nothing else and … has always had existence.

This is the atheistic evolutionary story. The universe consists only of time and chance acting on matter. At some point, the ancient matter blew up, and now here we are.

Sophia 2: Something immaterial is infinite, has always had existence, and at some point created the material world.

Ooh, I like her. Every little thing she does is magic.

Sophia 3: Blend. There is some material in the world that has always had existence, and there is something immaterial that has always had existence.

This is actually the creation story of most theistic and polytheistic religions. A god grabs hold of fluxing chaos, or their offspring, or their own thigh, or something with prior existence and reshapes it into the world around us. Norse, Greek, Aztec, and even Muslim creations begin this way.

Of course, any number of flavors and stories fit into these categories, particularly the last one. People and peoples have watched the stars and made their choice, shaping themselves and their cultures in doing so. The choice is not a question of logic, though we may make it logically. We cannot boost logic to the level of a transcendent arbiter here. It cannot whisper the answer in our ear. Any knowledge at this level, at this fundamental question of origins and ultimate metaphysics, must come through something else.

Welcome to the world of faith.

What were Christians created for?

Trick question. God didn’t create Christians; he created humanity.

We humans, who happen to also be Christians, are very good at focusing our attention on and engaging in God’s mission with the Great Commission of Matthew 28. To make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of God.

We don’t do so well, however, with focusing on the Original Commission. What we were meant to do as humans, not just Christians? Have you ever thought about this? It’s all there in Genesis 1-2.

When God created humans, he created them to be in community as image-of-God bearing priests, rulers, and sub-creators. Or put another way, priestly rulers who contribute to the perfection of creation through showing the world who God is. Because, though we often don’t think this way, there is only one perfect world in the Bible and it is not the one in Genesis. It is the one in Revelation. The garden-city-temple of Revelation is what the garden of Eden in Genesis was meant to become in the power of God working through his image-bearers.

And it’s not the power of God working in us only to gain converts. And it’s not the power of God working in us only to feed the poor. It’s the power of God working in us in everything that we do as humans meant to work, create, and ultimately rule on earth.

So why do we bother with everything that we don’t typically think of as being the Christian activities? Why do we engage in the arts? Why do we share in an awesome view of the ocean? Why do we build, organize, imagine, toil?

Because this is the Lord’s work. Not just preaching and doing marriage ceremonies.

And we engage in this work and creativity of God not because we are earning our salvation in Jesus; of course not. And not because we are merely showing how grateful we are for our salvation in Jesus, although that may certainly be part of it.

We do this, because this is what we were created for. Therefore, we are less human without it. We become properly and completely human when we are mediating the presence of God and instituting his reign in the world.

So it’s a matter of what is central. So many theological issues in the church could be resolved today if we understood that salvation is not central. If our personal salvation is made central, we struggle to know what to do with the rest of the world. But if our role in the world is made central, then salvation has its proper place as the means by which we get there. Salvation is a restoration to the humans we were meant to be, not an end in itself.

Humankind wasn’t created for salvation, but for God’s kingdom. You were not created to be saved. You were created to reign.

In order to biblical Christians, and humans, what if we kept Genesis 1-2 alongside Matthew 28 in our thinking and in our practice?

Modified from a talk given at Christ United Methodist Church on 5/30/12 entitled “Humanity: The Original Commission of God.” Listen to it here. Find the handout under “Transcript.”

Thanks to Asbury Seminary student Liz McClellan for the picture of her freshly painted fire hydrant on the streets of Wilmore, KY. I’ll leave you to figure out why I included it here.

I’ve learned something recently. Do your job and you get paid. Volunteer at your job and you stand a good chance of getting dessert.

We’re getting a Cokesbury bookstore on the Christ Church campus, and instead of paying professionals (people who knew what they were doing) to take up the old brick walkway outside the building where the new store will be housed, the church asked its staff (people who had no idea what they were doing) to get the job done. And so we did, and they thanked us with some Mexican ice cream at this good little place in town.

Piled into the bus on the way there, we passed a church whose marquee read: “The Bible is not antique. It is not modern. It is eternal.”

Later on, when I mentioned this to my friend who is well-read on the Muslim religion, said “That’s Islam.”

He was right. This is no disrespect to Islam, but they hold a view of the Quran that is different from the way Christians think of the Bible. For Christians, to hold such a view of the Bible would be an improper level of devotion to the biblical text itself.

This is seen in the way people mischaracterize Christians as “people of the book.” Though I appreciate the point that it makes, because we do look to the Bible for God’s story, doctrine, stories, etc., Christianity appropriately conceived is adhered to not by people of the book but people of the Person.

Christians are those who are committed to Christ, whether they’ve never encountered a Bible or met Jesus through their reading of a Bible.

Come to think of it, Christianity came before the Bible, and in the new heavens and new earth I’m not sure it’s very important to think of what role the Bible will play.

In this stage of history, it certainly plays an important role. But its role is limited.

The Bible IS antique, and it DOES speak to modern times, but it is not eternal.