Spirit of the Disciplines Update

A quote:
If one day I assure my Christian friends that I intent to “quit sinning” and arrive at a stage where I can perfectly follow Jesus Christ, they will most likely be scandalized and threatened?or at least very puzzled. “Who do you think you are?” they would probably say. Or they might think, “What is he really up to?”

But if, on the other hand, I state that I do not intend to stop sinning or that I do not plan to ever follow my Lord in actuality, they will be equally upset….My Christian fellowship circle will allow me not to follow him and even not to plan to follow him, but they will not permit me to say it. p12-13.

He points out the tension we live in between wanting to obey Jesus radically, and being seemingly totally unable to do it with any consistent sucess. So he turns to the role of the human body in the spiritual life. Jesus had a body, we have a body, and we cannot hope to change our spiritual existence apart from changing our bodily existence. It’s unrealistic to think that we can be different spiritually without being different physically, because the two dimensions of human existence are not at all separate, but closely interrelated.

Anti-Funk Initiative

I’ve decided that it will take discipline, not relying on external circumstances, to get out of the current funk and into the kind of life I could and should be living. Willard’s book (see below) is very helpful so far.

Adding comments, courtesy of SquawkBox.tv. I saw Rudy Carrasco’s and thought it was too good a feature not to have. He uses Haloscan, but they’re not taking new members. SquawkBox.tv is, and there features seem to be pretty comparable. Try it if you ever have anything to say in response to something I post.

Recovering the meaning of radical congruency

I remembered today as I read Willard’s book (see below) that radical congruency once had a significant meaning for me?that of following Jesus to a radical extent, becoming like him in life and death to self. I would like to recover that mission for this site, for my life, and for my role as a leader.

Current Book: The Spirit of the Disciplines, by Dallas Willard

I read The Divine Conspiracy a few months ago, and thought it was one of the best books on the Christian life I’ve ever seen. So Amy got me Willard’s earlier book, The Spirit of the Disciplines, for my birthday. I’m just now starting to read it, and it’s as promising as Conspiracy (pardon the abbreviation). A quote to get me started:

Our mistake is to think that following Jesus consists in loving our enemies, going the “second mile,” turning the other cheek, suffering patiently and hopefully?while living the rest of our lives just as everyone around us does. This is like the aspiring young baseball players [who imitate what great players do during games, but not the discipline and practice that make them great]. (p5)

And earlier:
The words of Jesus quoted above from Matthew 11:29-30 ["Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light."] present an alternative to the desolation of life lived apart from God. Yet, in all honesty, most Christians probably find both Jesus’ statement and its reiteration by the author of 1 John (5:3) to be more an expression of hope or even a mere wish than a statement about the substance of their lives….His teachings are treated as a mere ideal, one that we may better ourselves by aiming for but know we are bound to fall glaringly short of. (p2)

Funk

I guess I’ve been in a bit of a funk this week. Work is tough, because I’m exploring new ground with my classes (getting out of the textbook and into the fire, as it were). Some of them are going well; others are tough, and it’s taking a toll on me. Hopefully, this will be short-term thing, unlike my last-semester funk, which lasted until January.

Finished Ancient-Future Faith

I finished Robert Webber’s great book last night. It ended with a tremendous appendix on authority, tracing the church’s view of spiritual authority (in scripture, the church, the pope, etc) through the various paradigms of history, as he does with every topic he treats in the book. He does a job that is nothing short of fantastic of showing how the authority of the “rule of faith” has been central to all Christian traditions. He shows how the creeds put into contemporary (for the time) language what the church has always believed.

He makes the point that the Christological statements of the creeds are worded amazingly carefully, to avoid defining Jesus in either-or categories, but rather as fully human and fully divine. This is remarkable, he says, because it was written in a language and culture that preferred dichotomies, polar black-and-white distinctions. Counter-culturally, the creeds refused to pin Jesus down as either only human or only divine (as some of the early heresies did).

This section of the book is a must-read. I’ve said a few negative things about Webber’s sections on worship, which I found to be inadequately supported, but his ending in this appendix is superb. Highly recommended: Ancient-Future Faith: Rethinking evangelicalism for a postmodern world, by Robert Webber.

Good Wives & Good Husbands
John Homer just sent me the Good Wife’s Guide from a 1955 magazine. It’s funny to us now, because it’s so “women were made to serve men” in its assumptions. But it made me think, too, about what Paul talks about in Ephesians 5:
EPH 5:25 Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her [26] to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word, [27] and to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless. [28] In this same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself.

I don’t think it would be outrageous for a person to treat their spouse this way. It certainly shouldn’t be expected or demanded. But it would be nice if we treated each other that way. I think we’d come close to what Christ asks of us, that we treat others as we would treat Christ if He Himself were in the living room (see Matt 25:31-46).

[Thanks, John. You're a great friend. I didn't know I should expect so much until your email ].