It seems rather odd to some folks that I commit myself to the Christian confession: "Jesus is Lord". It seems to them a big stretch to make from intellectual commitments and curiosity to committing my life to that confession and resolving to discovering the Kingdom of God in the world. What makes me so convinced? Why be a Christian and an intellectual?
(Let's leave aside, for the moment, the intellectual problem of Enlightenment objectivity. If there were some standard of reason to which I might appeal to convince and persuade that Jesus is Lord, that standard would be more-true than the confession itself. In other words, there's no way to judge the truthfulness of that confession except from the inside. You just have to commit -- even if it means following Jesus on the margins and judging for yourself. That, I think, is even the witness of the NT itself. Not everyone who followed was part of those closest to Jesus. And not everyone that followed was convinced. But they did have to follow, even for a time, to see.
And this isn't true just of Jesus. If you want to learn anything -- how to weld or be married or play cricket, just for a few examples -- you have to trust your teacher and give it a whirl. From the inside. Cool objectivity won't teach you to lay bricks. And it won't teach you whether Jesus is Lord, either.)
That said, let me go on to lay out the two main reasons I trust that confession -- here's why I'm obedient to Jesus my king.
First, there's my Malthusian identity.
As a biologically contingent creature in a world of real or potential scarcity my existence crackles with survival anxiety (this is the "Malthusian" part). Due to this anxiety I attempt to possess, own or dominate some part of the world to secure the status, health, security and, when push comes to shove, the survival of myself and those I love. Obviously, when we are all doing this human existence becomes rivalrous, competitive, envious, selfish and violent.
This identity to possess and dominate is what Christians call "sin". I think it's Malthusian in nature because I think this drive is outside us -- it's the evolutionary demand to avoid death at all costs. Sin is death-denying in its attempts to be death-defying. (That Christians insist sin is something wrong inside each one of us stems from the fact we've never come toe-to-toe with Thomas Malthus' fundamental truths in his Essay on the Principle of Population.)
Sin is this act of making oneself and the resources needed for oneself one's own. This act can be described with another term: Domination. If I can hold onto myself as my own, as something I really possess and really control, then I am dominating myself. A sinful kind of identity surely requires aggression or appeasement; it requires defenses against others and against the threat of death as final dispossession. But fundamentally, a sinful kind of identity consists in the act of domination. I am because there is some section of reality which I own, which bears my name and I truly own it; it truly bears my name because I dominate it completely, because it is an instrument of my identity and my will.
Second, there's my baptismal identity.
Salvation is when we step out of that Malthusian trap. If we can step out of the identity of possession we can adopt a non-fearful and non-aggressive stance toward the people around us. Further, and deeper, we can adopt a non-fearful stance toward death, the real threat of dispossession, the real engine of our Malthusian anxieties.
How?
Well, consider Jesus.
In the NT accounts, nothing is more striking than the lack of interest in Jesus' own personality. His teachings and miracles, the response of the crowd and the hostility of the authorities, his dying and his resurrection -- these are not read as windows in Jesus' own experience, feelings, insights, and growth. In other words, the center of Jesus' reality is not within Jesus himself. Everything that happens to him, everything that's done by him, including his death, is displaced to another context and is thereby reinterpreted. However, this portrayal is understood to be a true reflection of Jesus' own way of existing. He himself does not live out of himself. He lives, so to speak, from beyond himself. Jesus doesn't confront his followers as a center which reveals himself. He confronts them as always revealing what is beyond him. In that sense Jesus lives what I call an "ecstatic identity". (It's a notion I developed more fully in my thesis on Wesley and John Chrysostom a long, long time ago.)
It seems peculiar in our world, because Jesus lives as if his identity comes from elsewhere. It comes from the Kingdom of God inaugurated in him (Luke 4).
Jesus never has his own being. He constantly receives it.
The same is true for myself as a Christian. Who I am is bound up with who Jesus is.
The Christian identity is found by stepping into the ecstatic identity of Jesus. To not own or possess your identity, but to receive it. To approach life as open rather than closed, as grateful and peaceful rather than paranoid and anxious. Christians call this "freedom from sin" or "resurrection".
Paul characterizes it as a life lived in Jesus (Colossians 3.1-4; Galatians 3.28). It is a baptismal identity in which we are refashioned according to the "image of God" in Jesus (Romans 6.1-12; Colossians 1.15-16). Who I am is bound up with who Jesus is. And who Jesus is, is bound up with who God is.
I no longer live by virtue of the reality which I possess, which I hold, which I master and keep at my disposal, I am free to share myself and all my possession with others. Above all, I can be honest with others. I can be open before them. I don't have to draw a line to mark the boundaries of my reality where I place a sign which says "Keep Out". I don't have to conceal my being behind a wall in order to keep it mine and to prevent others from taking it from me. Since I never have myself, I can never be dispossessed of myself. In short, in all my relations with other people I am freed from the anxiety of having always to keep possession of my own reality in order to be. All of which is Paul's point in Philippians.
What's more, this identity doesn't just reformulate how I relate to others. It reshapes how I approach death. Whether it's my own or others'.
Never really owning my life I can't "lose it" in the act of death. Rather, as Jesus did on the cross, we return the gift which was never ours in the first place. "Father, into your hands I commit my spirit." In this, Death, the final enemy, is destroyed.
All of that is why I'm a Christian.
Is it compelling in objective terms? Probably not. But if you're willing to give prayer a whirl, who knows.
Because prayer is one of those practices which defines who Jesus is as Lord and therefore who I am. Prayer places me in the receptive state, of receiving my identity rather than owning it. And I come back to prayer over and over again to keep my hands open to receive the gift of my identity and to constantly pry back my fingers when I'm clutching the gift too tightly. Because the minute I "own" who I am and all I have my soul beings to curdle and my mind slowly poisons itself.
(Let's leave aside, for the moment, the intellectual problem of Enlightenment objectivity. If there were some standard of reason to which I might appeal to convince and persuade that Jesus is Lord, that standard would be more-true than the confession itself. In other words, there's no way to judge the truthfulness of that confession except from the inside. You just have to commit -- even if it means following Jesus on the margins and judging for yourself. That, I think, is even the witness of the NT itself. Not everyone who followed was part of those closest to Jesus. And not everyone that followed was convinced. But they did have to follow, even for a time, to see.
And this isn't true just of Jesus. If you want to learn anything -- how to weld or be married or play cricket, just for a few examples -- you have to trust your teacher and give it a whirl. From the inside. Cool objectivity won't teach you to lay bricks. And it won't teach you whether Jesus is Lord, either.)
That said, let me go on to lay out the two main reasons I trust that confession -- here's why I'm obedient to Jesus my king.
First, there's my Malthusian identity.
As a biologically contingent creature in a world of real or potential scarcity my existence crackles with survival anxiety (this is the "Malthusian" part). Due to this anxiety I attempt to possess, own or dominate some part of the world to secure the status, health, security and, when push comes to shove, the survival of myself and those I love. Obviously, when we are all doing this human existence becomes rivalrous, competitive, envious, selfish and violent.
This identity to possess and dominate is what Christians call "sin". I think it's Malthusian in nature because I think this drive is outside us -- it's the evolutionary demand to avoid death at all costs. Sin is death-denying in its attempts to be death-defying. (That Christians insist sin is something wrong inside each one of us stems from the fact we've never come toe-to-toe with Thomas Malthus' fundamental truths in his Essay on the Principle of Population.)
Sin is this act of making oneself and the resources needed for oneself one's own. This act can be described with another term: Domination. If I can hold onto myself as my own, as something I really possess and really control, then I am dominating myself. A sinful kind of identity surely requires aggression or appeasement; it requires defenses against others and against the threat of death as final dispossession. But fundamentally, a sinful kind of identity consists in the act of domination. I am because there is some section of reality which I own, which bears my name and I truly own it; it truly bears my name because I dominate it completely, because it is an instrument of my identity and my will.
Second, there's my baptismal identity.
Salvation is when we step out of that Malthusian trap. If we can step out of the identity of possession we can adopt a non-fearful and non-aggressive stance toward the people around us. Further, and deeper, we can adopt a non-fearful stance toward death, the real threat of dispossession, the real engine of our Malthusian anxieties.
How?
Well, consider Jesus.
In the NT accounts, nothing is more striking than the lack of interest in Jesus' own personality. His teachings and miracles, the response of the crowd and the hostility of the authorities, his dying and his resurrection -- these are not read as windows in Jesus' own experience, feelings, insights, and growth. In other words, the center of Jesus' reality is not within Jesus himself. Everything that happens to him, everything that's done by him, including his death, is displaced to another context and is thereby reinterpreted. However, this portrayal is understood to be a true reflection of Jesus' own way of existing. He himself does not live out of himself. He lives, so to speak, from beyond himself. Jesus doesn't confront his followers as a center which reveals himself. He confronts them as always revealing what is beyond him. In that sense Jesus lives what I call an "ecstatic identity". (It's a notion I developed more fully in my thesis on Wesley and John Chrysostom a long, long time ago.)
It seems peculiar in our world, because Jesus lives as if his identity comes from elsewhere. It comes from the Kingdom of God inaugurated in him (Luke 4).
Jesus never has his own being. He constantly receives it.
The same is true for myself as a Christian. Who I am is bound up with who Jesus is.
The Christian identity is found by stepping into the ecstatic identity of Jesus. To not own or possess your identity, but to receive it. To approach life as open rather than closed, as grateful and peaceful rather than paranoid and anxious. Christians call this "freedom from sin" or "resurrection".
Paul characterizes it as a life lived in Jesus (Colossians 3.1-4; Galatians 3.28). It is a baptismal identity in which we are refashioned according to the "image of God" in Jesus (Romans 6.1-12; Colossians 1.15-16). Who I am is bound up with who Jesus is. And who Jesus is, is bound up with who God is.
I no longer live by virtue of the reality which I possess, which I hold, which I master and keep at my disposal, I am free to share myself and all my possession with others. Above all, I can be honest with others. I can be open before them. I don't have to draw a line to mark the boundaries of my reality where I place a sign which says "Keep Out". I don't have to conceal my being behind a wall in order to keep it mine and to prevent others from taking it from me. Since I never have myself, I can never be dispossessed of myself. In short, in all my relations with other people I am freed from the anxiety of having always to keep possession of my own reality in order to be. All of which is Paul's point in Philippians.
What's more, this identity doesn't just reformulate how I relate to others. It reshapes how I approach death. Whether it's my own or others'.
Never really owning my life I can't "lose it" in the act of death. Rather, as Jesus did on the cross, we return the gift which was never ours in the first place. "Father, into your hands I commit my spirit." In this, Death, the final enemy, is destroyed.
All of that is why I'm a Christian.
Is it compelling in objective terms? Probably not. But if you're willing to give prayer a whirl, who knows.
Because prayer is one of those practices which defines who Jesus is as Lord and therefore who I am. Prayer places me in the receptive state, of receiving my identity rather than owning it. And I come back to prayer over and over again to keep my hands open to receive the gift of my identity and to constantly pry back my fingers when I'm clutching the gift too tightly. Because the minute I "own" who I am and all I have my soul beings to curdle and my mind slowly poisons itself.