Who in the World is Us?
An Ego Check
As I noted last Sunday, when Dr. Cherith Nordling visited Journey Church, she shared a quote from Athanasius, a deacon in the early Christian church of Alexandria, who wrote: “For the son of God became like us so that we could become like him.”
And — which surely bears repeating — she proposed that Christ lived as he did because he declined to be influenced by the narratives of the world; because he chose instead to live in contact with God's spirit. Likewise, she observed, for us to live in connection with God's spirit, we need to decline to be guided by the world’s dominant narratives. They are the quests for fame, power, riches, sensual pleasures, and ego gratification
Today I mean to lobby against the world's temptation to defend and gratify our egos even while thereby demeaning others.
I must have encountered dozens of times the complaint by nonbelievers that goes something like "Those Christians think they are better than us." Well, I've been around a long time and have known all sorts of people, and if the word "better" regards qualities such as nice, kind, generous, or forgiving, my assessment is that most Christians are no better or worse than most anybody.
Recently I heard a talk by Kristin Du Mez, a history professor at Calvin College, who told of a movement that emerged during the 1960s. Feeling threatened by liberal media dominance, conservative church leaders, setting out to build a separate culture within the larger culture, began to develop and promote resources so people wouldn't need to depend upon mainstream news or entertainment. Out of this effort grew Christian tv networks, bookstores, and book publishers. For any who might distrust Ms. Du Mez, I will certify that the truth of her commentary on this issue is common knowledge amongst Christian writers.
A digression: a related story involves the overthrow of the hippies first by the “real” world and then by the church. I will address this tragedy before long.*
Returning from my digression: The evangelical — largely Baptist — counter-culture was pretty well established when Pam and I began to teach at Christian Heritage College.
Not long after we landed there, people from an accrediting agency made clear they weren't happy with David Jeremiah acting as the college president and also the head of Shadow Mountain Church, which shared a campus with the college. So, Dr. Jeremiah stepped aside and the college hired a new president. At a convocation ceremony, we gathered to welcome the new president. The honored speaker was Tim LeHaye, co-author of the Left Behind series of Christian novels about the Rapture and its results. Spoiler alert: the good guys get shuttled to a blessed eternity and the other folks are stuck on earth and in big trouble.
Mr. LeHaye's speech pointedly advised the college's students to consider themselves set apart from the world and to beware fraternizing with the worldly, meaning everybody but us. In the context of CHC, "us" meant Biblical literalists who maintained that the universe was created 5000 years ago, that Jonah spent a few days inside a big fish, and that God and Satan agreed upon a friendly competition to test Job's response to a hideously brutal series of trials.
I have no beef with literalists. If that's what they choose to believe, swell. But I'm wary of folks who also feel certain that those who prefer to look on parts of the Bible as stories meant to offer lessons, like fables and parables do, are riding with athiests on the express to a fiery eternity. Which was a common opinion around our campus and at the adjoining seminary.
When Mr. LeHaye concluded his talk, Pam and I hustled to our office to shed our academic robes. We shut the door behind us and exclaimed in unison, "That guy is scary."
I won't bother to compare the behavior Mr. LeHaye advocated for us to the way Jesus lived. I'll only note my opinion that some of the less discerning students left that ceremony with their egos boosted, feeling sure they were better and more dearly loved by their creator than the worldly or less literally inclined. Which of course grants them license to avoid contact with, ignore the needs of, or cancel people.
Although I am not, never have been, and probably never will be a Catholic, one of my favorite Christians is Father Dean McFalls, whom I met when he was a seminarian with Mother Teresa's Missionaries of Charity. Among other fun issues, we talked about who might get invited to heaven and who escorted to hell. Brother (now Father) Dean assured me the Catholic Church never claimed to know for sure whether any certain person, even the likes of Adolf Hitler, would get dumped into hell.
The Missionaries of Charity take a vow of poverty, chastity, obedience, and wholehearted and free service to the poorest of the poor. Their vow is pretty much the world's narrative turned upside down. Though I doubt I'll ever take it, I surely admire those who do. They don't even accept credit for helping people but insist they are only helping Christ in his distressing disguise. And what kind of louse wouldn't help Christ if they recognized him?
To me, the most endearing trait of the Missionaries of Charity is their humility. Humility can sometimes prevent us from seeking to gratify our egos.
Aside from taking such a vow, another, less rigorous path toward humility is through reading good stories. Here's a glimpse of how reading fiction can help us overturn the world's narrative, a good article from Plough.
And since Perelandra College is all about good books including fiction, in case you'd care to help us out, an easy and most appreciated way is by opting for a paid subscription to our rather peculiar online church.
By the way, because a day without music is usually a bust, here's a song I heard at Journey Church (during the setup between services). Somebody besides me must suspect a blessed eternity isn't just for literalist evangelicals. While listening, please take note of the lines, "My feet is my only carriage, so I've got to push on through, but while I'm gone, everything's gonna be alright." Then savor the heavenly guitar solo that follows.
* For a preview of my future diatribe about hippies v the world, listen to Jackson Browne’s “Before the Deluge” and Don McLean’s “American Pie”.