Knowing Jesus

"But be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves. Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to visit orphans and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained from the world. 

(James 1:22, 27 ESV)

"Truth visits those who love her, who surrender to her, and this love cannot be without virtue."

(A.-G. Sertillanges)

Our church is working through a book in our midweek small groups that attempts to make clear what "missional discipleship" is. One aspect hit me particularly hard; in fact, it's one that I've encountered before, and it hit me like a ton of bricks then too. That is the notion that knowing is intimately and inextricably linked to doing. Or, to be more radical still, that knowing is doing. That, in terms of discipleship, a passion for truth has to be a passion for holiness. These two are one and the same. Ideally anyway.

To be less abstract, let's flesh out what knowing and doing mean for our purposes. Knowing is thinking, reading, learning, meditating, perceiving and appropriating by the mind. Doing is acting, enacting, working, seeing something to fruition—with hands, feet, bodies.

Each of us is probably disposed to one or the other: "'You have faith and I have works,'" as James jests (2:18). We're all either thinkers or doers. Maybe some of us can juggle both. But even then we often fail to recognize that these two modes ought to be the same mode. It's not enough to just think, or just act, and it's not enough either just to do a little of both.

We know that faith without (good) works is dead (Jas. 2:17). Works "complete" our faith by giving evidence of a heart and mind renewed by the faithful work of Christ in us (2:22). Just knowing the Bible will not get us anywhere, at least not into the Kingdom.

We also know that works without faith are empty and meaningless and do not please God. James implies this, and Paul says so with great enthusiasm (Gal. 3), but Jesus gives us a parable (Luke 18:9-14) that speaks of the fate of those who stake their salvation on being "good people."

“Two men went up into the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee, standing by himself, prayed thus: ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other men, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week; I give tithes of all that I get.’ But the tax collector, standing far off, would not even lift up his eyes to heaven, but beat his breast, saying, ‘God, be merciful to me, a sinner!’ I tell you, this man went down to his house justified, rather than the other. For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, but the one who humbles himself will be exalted.”

The Pharisee, who represents good works without faith, without the Gospel, not only displeases God, but goes away from the temple unjustified. We should squirm and wriggle with fear at that statement. It's a simple phrase, but in it is contained an eternal consequence—and for the Pharisee it's a devastating consequence indeed. What Jesus is saying is that the Pharisee leaves and is not counted righteous—in short, he must endure the wrath of God because while he may in fact be a "good guy," he has staked his eternity on being merely moral. He does not act out of a grasp of truth, but out of spite, aloofness, to be thought elite and "holy." This does not impress God. He needs, in Jesus' words, to be "humbled." Oh how that should make us tremble!

What to do? James's solution, as cited above, is to be "doers of the Word." Not to the exclusion of being "knowers of the Word," of course. But in doing we go beyond knowing and yet, in the same way, fulfill the knowing. If I know that saving someone who can't swim from drowning in a lake is the right thing to do, but I regularly walk past beggars on the street without even the slightest desire to show them mercy with a gift of spare change (or more), then I probably do not really know anything about self-sacrificial morality. That seems to me to be James's, and ultimately Jesus', message. If you know me, then you will follow me, Jesus seems to say to us; and if you follow me, then you will become like me. Knowing means doing, acting.

So here's the challenge. Consider whether you really act out and act upon what you know of the Gospel. The degree to which you live it out is approximate to how well you know it. 

How well do you really know Jesus?

Transcending Walden; or, Why "Carpe Diem" Will Either Redeem or Destroy You (Part I)

It shouldn't surprise us that New England is the intellectual "bread-basket" of North America. The skies are pierced by the gothic spires and ivory bell-towers of America's most ancient universities. Small, leaf-strewn liberal-arts colleges dot the rolling green hills and fill the air with punchy alma maters.

Besides, New England has been home to many greats whose lives and thoughts have come to define our national identity and, to some extent perhaps, modern Western civilization as a whole. One thinks immediately of Emerson and Thoreau, of course, the juggernaut Transcendentalist divines of Concord. (That we do think of these men first is, I think, no accident. But more on that academic conspiracy some other time.)

From Thoreau we gain some particularly gripping, enduring attitudes. His year-long, nature-worshipping foray into the wilds captured in Walden, now a fairly standard text in courses on nineteenth-century American literature, is arguably the source of our modern notion of Carpe diem! (a phrase borrowed by the  classics-obsessed nineteenth century from Horace). "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately," explained Thoreau. 

I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion. For most men, it appears to me, are in a strange uncertainty about it, whether it is of the devil or of God, and have somewhat hastily concluded that it is the chief end of man here to "glorify God and enjoy him forever."

It is clear, both here and elsewhere in his account of his year of self-exile (that was, quite unlike he imagined or intended, punctuated often by visits from friends and devotees), that Thoreau was trying to get to the bottom of a timeless set of questions: What is life? What is the good life? What is life for? Whom is life for?

One might "hastily conclude" that Thoreau was not particularly enamored of the Christian answers to these questions. And one would be absolutely right. But I think there is more to his frustration than his indignant rebellion against the New England Congregational culture that surrounded him. I would bet that Thoreau did not see anyone really "enjoying" life as he thought they ought to. The particulars of such an approach to life need not be explored. The general lack of joy, which he seems to attribute to Christian attitudes, he takes as a challenge, a challenge to seek out how best to savor and relish living. If God is not the solution to lifelong and daily delight, Thoreau seems to say, then there must be another way. That is certainly the pragmatic method.

Immersed as I am in all things thesis,* I can't help but draw a parallel to another, though much less noticeable, presence in the long, tortuous history of New England intellectualism--Jonathan Edwards. I say that he is less prominent because, in the popular imagination at least, he is. The average high-school history teacher would probably not add Edwards to a list of important New England thinkers. And maybe that is not the best or most precise category in which to place him. (In some ways, my thesis seeks to answer that.) Yet in any case we tend to forget that long before Thoreau there was another New England divine who wanted to know how best to live.

"Resolved, to live with all my might, while I do live." That is the sixth entry on Edwards's list of resolutions, penned more than a hundred years before Thoreau ever laid a brick on the shore of Walden Pond. Edwards, as early in his life as his teenage years, was profoundly passionate about "sucking the marrow out of life." 

There are sixty-nine other resolutions, in fact, all of which center on one great theme--satisfaction. The difference between Edwards and, say, Thoreau, as it is between the Christian and the humanist (for the lack of a better word), is that Edwards's satisfaction is found in God where Thoreau's is in everything else. This does not mean Edwards does not enjoy simple pleasures--lemonade in the summer, a brisk walk in the fall, time with a book by the fire on a December evening. No, in this regard Edwards, or the Christian generally, is not unique. He is human as Thoreau is human.

The difference is that Thoreau's humanness, or earthliness, suffices for him. He is satisfied in his existence. To savor life is to pursue joy in existence for it's own sake. Thoreau "numbers his days" in much the same way as Edwards does. Yet not for the same reasons or with the same aims. Edwards wants "a heart of wisdom" and looks forward to the day when he will die and enter heaven. Thoreau wants to live a life without regret and fears the day when he will die and turn to dust. The earthly humanist (or Transcendentalist in this case) acts out of the urgency born of the terror of decease. The faithful Christian acts out of the urgency born of the individual purpose and vocation the Lord has granted him to pursue while he "dwells below."

And so it matters why we seize the day.

It matters, after all, why we get up in the morning. Even dogs sleep and wake. What makes us any different if we get out of bed because we're simply no longer tired? See, both the Puritans and the Transcendentalists desired transcendence. Both yearned for a way of life that went beyond the physical to the metaphysical, to the spiritual, but without verging on total reliance upon upon subjective perception. Both were searching for a middle way to live triumphantly and with fulfillment but without lapsing into sensualism or, worse yet, emotionalism. Thoreau and Edwards lived for something beyond themselves, something objective: Thoreau for a Being largely of his own concoction, and Edwards for the God of the Bible.

Indeed it matters for whom we seize the day.

Transcendentalism--which Edgar Allen Poe hilariously called "Frogpondianism" after Boston's fantastical but really very shallow duck pond--is dead. Its vague notions of a mystical, Vedic "Divine Being," though they've metamorphosed, nevertheless persist in (post)modern American spirituality. Ideas stick. And they have histories. New England is the way it is today because of the way it was yesterday. Edwards's sort of Puritanism never had a foothold in much of New England after all. Thoreau's mish-mash mysticism, on the other hand, took hold of the New Englander's imagination with far greater adhesion. Historians can only explain why this is the case to a point, after which we have to admit a degree of impenetrable mystery in the workings of this Divine Being who orders the world.

It matters to you who that Being is. Because who He is has a direct effect on who you are. And who I am. And where and how we can seize the day.

(For good tips on seizing the day for Christ, see Don't Waste Your Life by John Piper. Read it here for free.)


*And please realize that "thesising," as we call it, means my brain is mush and that I'm blogging hastily. So if there are holes here, in logic or in facts, forgive me--and then leave me a comment to let me know that something's fallen through the cracks. Danke.