It is so easy to say; But what does it mean?

It seems that so many Christian communities proclaim in the same attitude as their other proclamations of belief—without the statement being truly reflective of something happening within *and without*. Just like many people proclaim a belief in Jesus as Lord without it having any material change in their life, so the same with forgiveness.

We say I forgive you, not to describe an event within our life, rather all too often it is used as a means of subversive control and power. All too often we are too quick to assert our forgiveness when we have no desire to change ourselves.

True forgiveness never leaves the forgiver unchanged. To truly forgive requires taking the burden from the forgivee, something much more difficult and long term than a simple ‘ernest’ statement. What all to often happens, in the statement of forgiveness, is a desire by someone to gain or retain control over another. This is a veiled attempt to turn the tables of power. The forgiver attempts to assert their power over the forgivee by ‘offering’ their forgiveness. This ‘offering’ allows the forgiver to be perceived as humble, all the while forcing a position of weakness upon the forgivee by creating a situation where they much receive their ‘gift’ of forgiveness. This allows the forgiver, whose place is one of ‘giving’, to keep control over the transaction.

I recently came across the quote Mahatma Gandhi, “forgiveness is the attribute of the strong”. This quote coupled with the context of Katharine Sarah Moody‘s recent posts on Nietzsche‘s understanding of master/slave morality, I can’t help but think that all too often forgiveness is manipulated into a slave morality will to power, a desire to control through manipulation of meek humbleness.

I also think this idea can go the other way. All to often we falsely humble ourselves by asking for forgiveness, apologizing for our mistakes—not because we really seek change, but rather because we desire to get out of the immediate problem. After the problem is resolved, we revert to our old ways. This is classically seen in the cases of domestic abuse.

It’s easy to say things which satisfy another’s ego while never intending to actually act upon those words. I wonder what a way forward would be towards reclaiming the truly revolutionary aspect of forgiveness—a conception so powerful, no wonder forgiveness would be circumvented.

[When] asked if he wanted to do market research, [Jobs] said, “No, because customers don’t know what they want until we’ve shown them.”

I’ve said this same thing in regards to the structure and style church worship services. If people haven’t been shown or taught a different way, how can they be expected to desire anything more than what they’ve seen?

It is the responsibility of the leadership not to simply give the people what they want, but to further propel them into something which creates new experiences, which draw the people into a new seeing and a new way of living.

I’m reminded of Peter Rollins’ thoughts on our dreams and aspirations: we shouldn’t be trying to fulfill our dreams but rather to dream new dreams.

“Every once in a while, I find myself in the presence of purity—purity of spirit & love—and I always cry. It always reaches in & grabs me.”

Steve Jobs

“Architects, painters, and sculptors must recognize anew the composite character of a building as an entity. …Art is not a ‘profession.’ There is no essential difference between the artist and the craftsman. The artist is an exalted craftsman. … Together let us conceive and create the new building of the future, which will embrace architecture and sculpture and painting in one unity and which will rise one day toward heaven from the hands of a million workers like the crystal symbol of a new faith.”

The desire came to make a book which would chronicle that Lenten exploration. The initial idea was to make a book of photos, photos as prayers, which followed the form of the daily office. I loved the idea—but was stuck on how to actually execute such a project. How could the photos correlate with Lent or with the readings of the daily office? I felt the project needed something, something to ground the photos, to give them context—without the kitsch of Thomas Kincaid.

At the same time, I wanted to participate in a great project which Peter Rollins began. The idea is to take the time of Lent which is normally used to give things up, to clear away that which has hindered our connection to God and our fellow wo/man and to instead give up god for Lent. He cleverly called this Atheism for Lent. The idea is to use the great critiques of the modern prophets; Marx, Nietzsche, & Freud to burn away the idols which have crept into our psyche, those distortions of God which have kept us from embracing the world as it is.

In Peter Rollins’ book Insurrection he talks about how the institution of church, its structure and practices, does much to insulate us from the trauma of the cross by comforting us with these false images of God and reality. Rollins wishes for churches to include within their liturgies the reality of our doubts and laments.

My project for Lent is to combine these two thoughts of atheism and creativity for Lent.

For inspiration and reflection during this period I will read the writings of the Trappist monk Thomas Merton and also the writings of philosophers and atheists Karl Marx and Friedrich Nietzsche. These will be the interpretative a/theism lens through which I will read the liturgy of the daily office, found in The Book of Common Prayer.

My proposal is to make a prayer book, which includes as commentary my journey of rewriting the liturgy to reflect the prayers of one who doubts and laments. I will include photos of those 40 days which chronicle my eye of lament. It will also include the daily reflections on the words, phrases, & prayers which I will include, omit, or rewrite. After the period of time is completed, I will collect these resources together into a collected work, with the original and rewritten liturgy along with my reflective commentary.

“It is only the infinite mercy and love of God that has prevented us from tearing ourselves to pieces and destroying His entire creation long ago. People seem to think that it is in some way a proof that no merciful God exists, if we have so many wars. On the contrary, consider how in spite of centuries of sin and greed and lust and cruelty and hatred and avarice and oppression and injustice, spawned and bred by the free wills of men, the human race can still recover, each time, and can still produce men and women who overcome evil with good, hatred with love, greed with charity, lust and cruelty with sanctity. How could all this be possible without the merciful love of God, pouring out His grace upon us?

These are the selected photographs taken from a walk down the backside of the historic downtown area—just a short walk from home.

There are plenty of thorough reviews all over the web. I see no point in repeating what others have done better than I could. I just want to include one thought. This repeated in my mind throughout, while reading the book:

This is the most important book published for the general Christian audience since N.T. Wright’s Surprised By Hope (2008). What N.T. Wright did for eschatology, I think Scot McKnight does in this book for soteriology.

He takes personal salvation and removes it as the central element of the gospel. This is similar to how Tom Wright moves our hope from a personal trip to heaven to a reconciliation of all things in his said book. Both authors open up the New Testament story into something that is deeper, richer & more encompassing than simply a personal faith in a personal salvation.

And if you can’t imagine what the gospel might ever be if it’s not personal salvation then you need to read this book…immediately.

A Jew did not become a Christian by coming to see God as a righteous judge and a gracious forgiving protector. The Jew believed that already, being a Jew. What it took for him or her, to become a Christian was not some new idea about his or her sinfulness or God’s righteousness, but one about Jesus…
The heresy Paul was struggling against was not that the Jewish Christians continued to be committed to keeping the law; Paul was quite tolerant of those who held to such a conviction. He taught respect for the dietary scruples. He went out of his way to share their ritual faithfulness when in Jerusalem. Nor was it their thinking that by keeping the law they would be saved, for Jewish Christians did not believe that. The basic hersey he exposed was the failure of those Jewish Christians to recognize that since the Messiah had come the covenant of God had been broken open to include the Gentiles. In sum: the fundamental issue was that of the social form of the church. Was it going to be a new and inexplicable kind of community of both Jews and Gentiles, or was it going to be a confederation of a Jewish Christian sect and a Gentile one? Or would all the Gentiles have first to become Jews according to the conditions of premessianic proselytism.

In sum: Yoder is saying Paul is saying salvation is open to everybody, and the old system of us & them is done. This isn’t against the law per se except in as much as the law was used to exclude people.

In John Howard Yoder’s The Politics of Jesus I was lead to a possible glimpse of an endless eschatology. Let me quote the pertinent passage:

In correlation with our sense of impossibility we tend to think of “apocalyptic” promises as pointing “off the map” of human experience, off the scale of time, in that they announce an end to history. But the past deliverances of Israel had been recounted as having taken place within their own history and on their own Palestinian soil. The whole body of hermeneutic prejudices linked with the concept of the “interim ethic,” as if what Jesus was predicting was an end to time and space, gets us off the track right at this point. Jesus’ proclamation of the kingdom was unacceptable to most of his listeners not because they thought it could not happen but because they feared it might, and that it would bring down judgment on them.

…

The mighty acts of God in Israel’s history had been neither the end of history, nor off the scale of human events. We have every reason to assume that the inauguration of the jubilee was understood by Jesus’ hearers with the same concreteness as the Exodus story or the deliverance of Jehoshaphat had for them. (p.85-86, the end of the chapter “God Will Fight For Us” from The Politics of Jesus)

Previously in this chapter, Yoder describes the experiences of Israel in the Old Testament where they find their saving grace in the acts of God. The point he was making was how people would have heard Jesus’ message in the Palestine of the first century. The point being that the teachings of Jesus were not an unattainable perfection which showed people’s need for his saving power or a vision for a world to come which had no connection to his contemporaries. Rather what Jesus was saying, according to Yoder, would have been interpreted within a worldview where God’s redemption happens within history—because God had already done it before, the Old Testament being our remembrance of that.

What if we took this understanding of Jesus’ hearers not just simply as a hermeneutic but as our eschatology. What if we took the end out of our eschatology. What if Christianity was about continuing the story of God’s involvement in the world…a world without end.