Dominion: A Book Review

Two summers ago I went through what I have come to think of as a minor crisis of faith. It was nothing too earthshattering, but I was between ministries, with a bit more time on my hands than usual, and I happened to read a bunch of books in a row that each pointed out some of the unsightly stains on the garment of Church history. The first was a book called Walking the Bridgeless Canyon, which explored, among other things, the church’s response to LGBTQ people, a sobering story marked predominantly by misunderstanding, mistreatment, prejudice and pain. Then I read a book called Jesus and John Wayne, which examined the patriarchy, misogyny, militarism, and hunger for power endemic in American Evangelicalism. After that I read a book called, Yours, Mine, Ours, about the way European Christians used the Doctrine of Discover to justify exploiting and oppressing North America’s Indigenous People, convincing themselves that they were, in fact, doing God’s work by stealing land and violating treaties to “Christianize” the continent.

It was all pretty grim reading, and its cumulative effect was to leave me wrestling with a profoundly unsettled “What If?” What if, I wondered, in standing with the church, I was actually standing on the wrong side of history? Not that I hadn’t known before that there were some horrid moments in the annals of the Church’s story, but somehow, seeing them laid out so systematically, one after the other after the other, confronted me with the dark side of my tradition in a way I hadn’t really seen it before.

I am still wrestling with some of these issues, a year and a half later. Some I have come to terms with, and others have challenged me to find a different way of being Christian than the way that up till now had always come naturally to me. In another post, perhaps, there would be time to unpack the entire journey and explain how the Spirit led me through it.

For today, I’m sharing this only to give some background for a book I read over the holidays this year, and to explain, maybe, why I found it so fascinating. Like the books mentioned above, Tom Holland’s Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World, is also a survey of the Church’s story. It traces the formation of Christendom, from the crucifixion of Jesus up to the present moment. Holland is not, as far as I can tell, a follower of Jesus Christ. He is, however, an erudite historian committed to objectivity, and while his version of the church’s story does not shy away from discussing any of the debacles I just mentioned, neither is it content to paint a simple two-dimensional portrait of Christianity as a power-hungry religion intent solely on oppressing, exploiting, and manipulating others for its own private ends.

If anything, Holland’s survey of church history leads him to the conclusion that the vast majority of the values and assumptions held dearest by the liberal, secular society of the West, actually trace back directly and inexorably to the Christian movement. The idea that there could be such a thing as a secular society, distinct and separate from “the religious,” is only one such assumption. The notion that there was such a thing as “religion,” and that it was a particular sphere of human thought and activity, distinguishable from one’s political, national, and ethnic identity is another. So is the modern assumption when it comes to sexual morality, that it’s not okay for one person to treat another person as a “thing” there solely for their sexual gratification. Likewise the belief that the powerless ought to be given special consideration in our society, or the idea that there is such a thing as “universal human rights” that give worth and dignity to all people. The list is pretty long, actually, of the ways Christianity has shaped our civilization, inculcating us with our most deeply held values, values that continue to exert an immense influence over us, long after society as a whole has forgotten the Christian root they sprang from.

Towards the end of this whirlwind tour of Church history, it occurred to me that if I find the Church’s exploitation of Canada’s indigenous people repugnant (and I do)—or if I am appalled at the way the Gospel has been used to mistreat women (which I am)—if the moral failings of the Church really do grate against my values, I mean, it’s primarily because my values have been so profoundly shaped by the last 2000 years of the Church’s influence on our world, that I take them for granted.

In one place Tom puts it like this: when we, as modern secular people, criticize the church for things like misogyny or exploitation, we seldom realize how deeply Christian the values are that we use to make that critique, how rarely those values have formed in civilizations that were not shaped fundamentally by Christianity, and how bizarre those values would seem to an ancient, who lived in a world before the Christian message began to exert its influence.

If the debacles of Christian history trouble us, he says, it’s primarily because we are more influenced by the Christian message than any of us realize.

I’ll let you read the book to see how convincingly he makes this case, by surveying the history of the Persian Empire, ancient Greece, the rise and fall of Rome, the Protestant Reformation, and any number of other historical epochs. For my part, though, Dominion has given me a much-needed counter-point to the hard tale of oppression and corruption I’d been wrestling with for the last year. It’s reminded me that the story of Christ’s Bride can’t be told in simply two dimensions, painted in black and white and framed as an either or. The Kingdom of God, for all its being a field planted with wheat and weeds together, still it remains a good and holy yeast, kneaded into the dough until it leavens the whole bunch. Dominion gives one a glimpse of just how thoroughly the leaven has caused the dough to rise.

The Story of Christianity, a book review

I was raised in a conservative evangelical church tradition, one that emphasized the Sola Scripture legacy of the Protestant Reformation and was highly suspicious of anything that had even a whiff of Catholicism about it. Liturgy, sacrament, even stained-glass windows were all viewed with skepticism. On the books, our church was consistent with historic Christianity in its teaching about the Trinity, the hypostatic union, and other such theological non-negotiables, but the emphasis was not on any of these monumental truths about who God is and how he’s revealed himself to us. It was on, rather, asking Jesus into your heart to get yourself saved, and then reading your Bible and praying every day so you’ll grow, grow, grow. I don’t remember anyone saying this in so many words, but looking back, it’s clear to me that the spiritual leaders of my church community were not at all sure if Catholic or Orthodox believers were worshipping the true Jesus, and even if they were, everyone was sure that their particular expression of faith was “lifeless ritual” and “works-righteousness” and not a genuine form of Christianity.

The very strong impression I took from the church of my childhood was that Christianity began sometime towards the end of the 19th Century or the start of the 20th, and that it really only got off the ground in the 40s, with the preaching of Billy Graham. If pressed, I’m sure everyone would agree that you could trace the origins of the faith back to the early 16th Century and the protestations of Martin Luther. Whether there were any real Christians before him, however, was anyone’s guess, because everything prior to October 31, 1517 was shrouded in a godless mist of Catholic hocus pocus.

I can remember stumbling across things like the Prayer of St. Francis, or the Breastplate of St Patrick, and being absolutely stunned by the beauty of them, but not sure what to do with the “Saints” to whom they were attributed. Were there really Christians back as far as that, and were they really capable of such stunning spiritual depth and profound expressions of having Jesus-in-your-heart devotion?

Since those early days of my spiritual formation, I’ve had many opportunities both formal and informal to experience church traditions that are happily thriving in meadows outside the evangelical fold. I’ve had the privilege of studying church history both broadly and deeply, and I’ve encountered Christians from across Christendom, both living and historical. I’ve come to see the many blinders I had developed, growing up in a church tradition that tacitly implied that there was a 1500-year gap during which no real Christians existed, between the penning of the last book of the Bible (ca. 90 AD), and the start of the Protestant Reformation (ca. 1517).

These blinders, I’ve since learned, had blinded me not only to Church history, but to a very rich, deep vision of who God is and how he has been at work among his people throughout the ages. Not only that, it left me with a great deal of spiritual xenophobia and a prideful assumption that my particular church tradition had a self-righteous monopoly on God’s Truth.

As God has removed these blinders, I’ve come to see how varied and fecund the vineyard of his church really is, what it means to confess belief in the one, holy, apostolic, catholic Church, and how big a family tree I belong to in Christ. I’ve also come to discover how spiritually unhealthy it is to ignore or deny the truth that as Christians, we are part of a 2000-year-long story that God has been telling about his plan to bind people together in community around a shared love for the Lord Jesus Christ.

I was reminded of all this last year when I had the pleasure of reading Justo Gonzalez’s monumental book, The Story of Christianity, Vol 1: The Early Church to the Dawn of the Reformation. The book details the intricate and convoluted story of the development of Christianity, from its origins as a fringe movement within 1st Century Judaism, to its world-spanning presence as a global religion by the end of the 15th Century. Along the way he introduces his readers to the many remarkable theologians, fathers and mothers of the faith, saints, sinners, popes, and reformers whom God used to direct the formation of his Church. It made for riveting reading, not least of all because Gonzalez is so adept at drawing out the human motivations at play in the world changing events of the Church’s history.

It may not be that you ever had the kind of blinders about the Church and its history that I described above. It may be that they were removed long ago. It may be that you’re still not sure you want them removed. Whatever the case, I think every follower of Jesus should at some point or another take a tour of the epic saga that is Church history. It will help you better understand this Jesus you’re following, by seeing how people throughout the millennia have followed him too.

If you’re looking for a guidebook for such a tour, one that is both thorough and academic while still being accessible for a relative beginner, Gonzalez’s The Story of Christianity is about as good a starting place as any I've come across.

Going to the Gym with God (Part 9): On Being a Temple

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The other day I was watching some random sit-com on Netflix, and one of the characters made some passing comment about their body being a temple. I think it was in relation to eating junk-food, the reference in question. Someone offered them a bag of chips or some such thing, and they declined, explaining that they weren’t willing to “desecrate this temple” by eating junk.

As a pastor my theological radar started pinging like made when I heard the reference. The character in the show had only meant it as a throw-away line, but of course, there is a profound theological truth underlying the sentiment—and apparently it’s a popular enough sentiment to have made it into the script of a Netflix sitcom—that our bodies are “temples.”

For the secular person, I expect, the idea of the body being a “temple” points to the belief that we are actually spiritual creatures; and inasmuch as the human body “houses” the human spirit—and to the degree that the human spirit is in fact “sacred”—in that sense, and to that degree—our bodies are “temples” for the human spirit.

But I’m not a secular person, of course. As a Christian, when I heard this passing reference to the idea that the body is a “temple,” my mind went immediately to the place this idea originated from, the writings of St. Paul, in his First Letter to the Corinthians, Chapter 6, verse 19: “Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have from God, and that you are not your own?”

In the New Testament, it’s not the fact that the body houses a “sacred human spirit,” that makes it a temple, but the fact that, for the Christian, their flash-and-blood bodies are indwelt by God’s own Holy Spirit, and in that sense, and only that sense, it’s fitting to discuss it as a “temple” of God.

This idea is often mentioned in church circles—that the Christian body is a temple of God’s Spirit—and it’s often used as a basis for ethical reflection. Inasmuch as the body is God’s temple, any immoral actions or unethical activities that you might do in your body, or with your body, or as your body, have the inevitable consequence of desecrating the temple.

Paul himself makes this argument in the passage in question. He uses the fact that the Christian body is God’s temple, primarily, as a basis for arguing against sexual immorality—fornication, adultery, prostitution, and so on. The underlying logic of the passage is that sexually immoral practices like these are “misuses of the body” that result in the body itself being joined with the “sexually immoral”; and to the extent that this is true, they constitute a spiritual “desecration of God’s temple” (the body itself) and are therefore especially egregious for Christians to participate in.

Because we are temples of the Holy Spirit, in other words, we ought not to defile the temple by using our bodies in sexually immoral ways.

It’s natural to extrapolate other ethical implications from this passage (though it’s equally easy to slip into all kinds of non-sequitur arguments, too). Since smoking, for instance, is deleterious to the body’s health, it constitutes a “defilement of the temple,” too; so too does drinking, over-eating, or what have you.

At a certain point, I think it’s possible to take this logic in a direction Paul never intended. His main point in 1 Corinthians 6:19 is about immoral practices specifically, and how using our bodies to do things contrary to God’s will is an offense against the Holy Spirit who indwells the Christian body. Whether smoking, or drinking, or indulging in that bag of chips makes one a “temple-desecrator” in Paul’s mind is a bit of an open question.

It’s even possible to take this logic in a direction entirely contrary to Paul’s point. It is possible to get so hung up on the notion that the body is a temple and therefore it must be kept in pristine condition, that we actually start to worship it, itself, instead of worshiping the Holy Spirit, whose indwelling presence is the only thing that makes it a temple in the first place. It’s like going to church and instead of worshipping God, spending all your time adoring the building…

On top of all that, I think a completely honest handling of the "temple of God" talk in 1 Corinthians has to acknowledge that this reference to individual believers being temples of the Holy Spirit is the odd man out in Paul's writing.  Predominantly, he prefers to talk about the entire community of faith being "the temple of God" together. We are only temples individually if and as we are connected to a Spirit-filled community of Faith, which is corporately the temple of God. Fundamentally, the teaching that the individually believer is a "temple of God" personally, I think, is meant to speak to their place and involvement in the community. You ought not do anything that desecrate your "temple" personally, because you are part of a community of faith that corporately has to function together as God's holy temple, and how can you be part of that if your own "temple" is filthy?

So I don’t want to take the Christian belief that the body is a temple any further than the text allows, but in principle, I wonder if there is something to this idea that can help us in our effort to outline a “theology of exercise.” It’s not that because the body is a temple for the Holy Spirit, we better keep it in shape for fear of desecrating it (as though my lack of cardio-vascular fitness was somehow an “abomination that causes desolation); if that’s what you hear when I say that the Christian teaching about the indwelling presence of the Holy Spirit is a building block for a robust theology of exercise, then I’m not communicating well here at all.

But what if we took it in a different direction than that? What if we let this profound truth really touch our imagination: that the Holy Spirit of the Creator God truly did deign to make these finite, fragile, somewhat measly human vessels of blood and bone his home—that he really did dwell with in. How profound an affirmation of our bodies—as weak and given to breaking down as they are—would we hear if we heard that let that truth hit us with perfect clarity: your body—yes that fearfully-made assemblage of bone and skin and flesh and blood and cells and tissue—as strange as it may sound to hear and incredible to believe—yours and my bodies are actually dwelling places for the Spirit of God.

With what joy would you take your next run? With what delight would you sweat it out over your next afternoon at the gym? With what pleasure might you plunge into the pool the next time you’re there? With what grace might you take that next long stroll through the park? What if you really believed it, I mean: that the Holy Spirit of the Living God himself was with you, within you, as you did these wholesome things, and that he was actually delighting to be with you, as you put this, his temple, to such good use?

Where is Thy Sting?

If you’re a regular reader of terra incongita, you’ll know that over the last few months on this blog, we’ve been spending some time exploring the nature of the church. The theological way of describing what we’ve been up to is to say “we’ve been doing some ecclesiology,” and man have we covered some wide-ranging ground. This is a popular-level pastor’s blog, of course, not a theology textbook, so I’ve taken some liberty to think well outside the box as we’ve explored the theological nature of this strange organism called “the church.” We’ve imagined the church as a comet, the church as a game of Calvinball, the church as an angel, and the church as a comedy sketch. Before we close the book on this series, however, there is one more angle I’d like to come at it from, because there is an important function that church once had in culture that we are increasingly neglecting, to the point, I worry, of being in dereliction of duty.

The church is also, or at least, was meant to be, a memento mori. Memento Mori is Latin for “reminder of death,” and in medieval times, the memento mori was an object, maybe a skull or an urn, or more likely a painting of a skull or an urn, kept in a prominent place, that reminded the owner, whenever he saw it, that he was in fact, mortal and that he would, in fact, die.

The idea behind the memento mori, is that there can be something profoundly cathartic in remembering one’s mortality and, more importantly, it can inspire us to live our lives well, today, knowing that we may not have the chance to do so tomorrow.

I sound morbid. I know.

But that’s part of the problem I’m trying to put my finger on. Our culture generally is a death-denying culture. We want our meat not to bear too close a resemblance to the dead animal it is. We want our cemeteries to look like city parks, and be euphemistically stylized as “memorial gardens.” We want funerals called “celebrations of life,” lest anyone be forced to dwell too literally on the plain fact of death. And, by and large, the church has capitulated to the death-denying pressures of the world around us. We’ve cleaned up our hymns, we’ve moved the cemeteries off our grounds, we’ve out-sourced the funerals to “funeral homes” and we’ve found all sorts of spiritual-sounding ways of talking around the subject.

It wasn’t always this way, of course. Time was you walked past the graves of the dearly departed on your way into church. Time was confessing “the communion of saints” with the creed included a very solid belief that one day we would join them. Time was hymns were replete with references, sometimes quite taunting references, to death. Time was the church was quite clear on its duty to help folks experience a “glorious death” (and we understood that for death to be, in fact, glorious, it must first be remembered, and confronted as a plain fact of life.)

I sound like an old fuddy duddy. I know.

But it’s only because I think there is something neurotic, or at least potentially neurotic, in our culture’s squeamishness about death, and I wonder if the spiritual ennui, the consumeristic vacuity, the manic hunt for the next thrill that seems so wide-spread in our culture isn’t somehow connected to our inability to come to terms with our own mortality.

If I’m on to something here, perhaps, as we continue thinking outside the box about the church, perhaps one of the ways to address the spiritual ennui, the consumeristic vacuity of contemporary North American culture is by regaining the church’s role as a memento mori.

I’m thinking John Keating here, not Eeyore, but I’m also thinking about the fact that only the man who is ready to die can truly live, and that the gospel, rightly understood, doesn’t deny the fact of death but wrestles with it, wrestles it to the ground, and brings it into submissive service to the Lord who conquered it in the cross.

Put differently, it is impossible to taunt death with the ringing victory cry of the Christian—death where is thy sting?—without also, at the same time, looking it dead in the eye and acknowledging that it's there.

Angels Among Us

In the opening chapters of the Book of Revelation, the Risen Jesus dictates a series of prophetic letters to St. John the Divine, addressed to the Seven Churches of Asia Minor: the Church at Ephesus, the Church at Smyrna, the Church at Pergamum, at Thyatira, at Sardis, at Philadelphia and Laodicea. For those even vaguely familiar with the Book of Revelation, this will probably ring some bells. These seven churches are in various stages of success and failure, hopefulness and helplessness, victory and defeat, and Jesus sends them each a letter, warmly commending them for their spiritual victories, tenderly comforting them in their trials, and sternly warning them when it’s needed.

I think about these seven letters to the churches in Revelation a fair bit in my work as a pastor; they come to mind, actually, on a pretty regular basis. It’s not, however, because of the specific content of any individual letter. To be sure, they are among some of the most poetic and compelling passages in the whole New Testament, and I fully trust that the same Jesus who promised the Pergamonian Church a taste of the hidden manna should they overcome, promises to reward the FreeWay’s overcoming in like manner.

But that’s not what draws me to these letters.

It’s this curious observation that I made a few years back and I can’t “unnotice” now that I’ve noticed it: Jesus addresses each letter, not to the “pastor” of the church, or the “over-seer,” or the “elders board” or even the individual congregation. Instead, in each letter he address “the angel of the church.” “To the angel of the church at Ephesus” he says, “write ....”

“To the angel of the church at Smyrna... to the angel of the church in Pergamum ...” and so on.

This is supposed to be a blog post about church ministry, specifically, not angelology, so I won’t delve too deeply here, but it strikes me as all kinds of interesting that, when addressing the trials and triumphs, the struggles and successes, the warp-and-woof of each church’s spiritual life together, Jesus does not address individuals, specific leaders, or even corporate congregations. He addresses the angel of the church.

If you’ve read the work of Walter Wink before, or William Stringfellow, or Hendrikus Berkof, who each write eloquently and insightfully about the “inner” or “invisible” realities that exist in all human efforts to order our life together—from political power structures, to economic system to, even, church institutions—you may see where I’m going with this. There is—the Bible is quite convinced of it—a spiritual life or a spiritual entity (words are difficult here) that becomes evident whenever we structure human life-together.  It emerges from the power structures we erect, and at the same time transcends them. The Bible calls these things Powers and Principalities, Thrones and Dominions, Authorities and Rule. In Colossians we’re told that Christ defeated the Powers and Principalities through the cross (2:15); and in Ephesians were told that Christ is enthroned above them all (1:20); and later in Ephesians we're told that our battle as Christians, is not against flesh and blood but against them (6:15).

The Bible regularly depicts these “Powers and Principalities” in personified ways, as angels and/or demons, variously at work in the world. In saying that, I don’t mean to imply that I take the Bible’s talk of angels and demons as “mere” metaphor, as though there was nothing “real” behind Daniel’s demonic “Prince of Persia” (Dan 10:13) than “simply” the power structures of the Persian Empire. What I am saying is that, as far as the Bible is concerned, the two are intimately connected. The demonic “Prince of Persia,” and the concrete realities of the Persian Empire—the spiritual beings in the heavenly realms and the human power structures that exist on earth—are opposite sides of the same coin. The later are concrete expressions of the former; and the former draw their meaning directly from the later.

I promised I wouldn’t delve too deeply, so let me resurface with this. Put simply: nation states—as human efforts to order our life together—nation states all have an “angel” that exists invisibly, but powerfully, and exerts an invisible but powerful influence over the people who “belong” to that nation state. So do multi-national corporations. And economic systems. And institutions of higher learning. And, as far as the Book of Revelation is concerned, it would seem, so do churches.

There was, in a very real sense, an “angel of the church at Ephesus”—a spiritual entity, a spiritual reality—a spirit—that exists because the church at Ephesus exists, and though it transcends the Ephesian church and exists separately from it, its life is intricately bound up with their life. And so, when Jesus wishes to address the life of that church, even though he has very real, flesh and blood human beings in mind while he’s doing it, he doesn’t address individual leaders or church members. He addresses “the angel of the church at Ephesus.”

There’s an angel of the church at Laodicea, too; and at Sardis, and, if I am reading the Bible right on this one, an angel of the church called FreeWay, at Oshawa.

Every church has its angel.

Anyone who’s ever walked into a church and just sort of knew without being able to put a finger on it, that the “spirit” of this church was dead, or bitter, or vibrant, or reverent—anyone who’s ever been in a church that just couldn’t seem to break through a spirit of failure, or pride, or what have you, no matter how many times they changed the pastor, no matter who moved on or who moved in—anyone who’s ever been in a church where the spirit of the place was full of life and love and joy and before they knew it they were radiating life and love and joy, too—will get what I’m trying to say here.  There is a spirit to every church—every church has, for lack of an even more biblical way of putting it—its angel.

This is why I think about the letters to the churches in Revelation regularly in my work at the FreeWay, because in my more imaginative moments, I wonder: what is the FreeWay’s angel like? Don't worry.  I’m not going new age here, or theologically flaky or dropping off the deep end. I don’t waste much energy on this; but every once in a while, in good Book of Revelation fashion, I wonder.

What does the Angel of the Church called FreeWay look like? (I imagine him as shorter and spunkier alongside the more staid, noble and somber angels of the Heavenly host. His armour of light is held together with duct tape, his wings affixed with chewing gum, and where all the rest of the assembled angels have swords, he has a slingshot protruding from his back pocket...)

More important than what he looks like, though—and this is a question I do spend a fair bit of pastoral energy on—what would Jesus say to the angel of my church, were he to address it the way he addresses the angels of the churches of Asia Minor?

On Playing Calvinball in Church

Richard Beck is a Christian Psychologist who teaches at Abilene Christian University in Texas. His blog, Experimental Theology is one of my favorite stars in the blogosphere, and I seldom come away from it without having a few thoughts, or more, provoked. Some of his ideas—like the one about the connections between Christian Hospitality and the Circle of Kindness, for instance—or the one on the theological meaning of monsters—have even found their way into a sermon or two of my own (always, of course, with due reference).

One of his posts, in particular, has stuck with me for years now, and I’ve gone back to it more than once as I’ve thought through various aspects of church life and ministry. Back in 2008, he did a theological analysis of The Complete Works of Calvin and Hobbes (yes, Calvin and Hobbes. This is the sort of off the wall musings that has so endeared me to his work). The whole series is worth reading (click here), but the one that especially resonated with me was the post in which he draws some theological connections between the Church and Calvinball.

It may be that you’re not a Calvin and Hobbes aficionado, so this may take a bit of back story. “Calvinball” is a game Calvin invents after one too many little-league humiliations.

As a self-avowed artist growing up with two brothers who were far more athletic than me, I have always identified with Calvin’s experience of alienation, discomfort and outright rejection whenever he tries to enter the world of organized sports. Which is why, perhaps, Calvinball has always struck a funny bone of mine.

Calvinball is Calvin’s alternative to organized sports, because, as Hobbes likes to point out, no game is less organized than Calvinball. It has only two rules. Rule #1: It may never be played the same way twice; and Rule #2: You make up all the other rules as you go.

Here’s some footage of a game underway:

The connection between Calvinball and Church life may not be immediately clear, but Richard Beck suggests that, as an alternative to the world of organized sports, Calvinball is perhaps as good a metaphor as any for the Church, as an alternative community to the communities of the World.

“You start to see some really profound things when you compare the world of Calvinball to the world of organized sports,” He argues. “Organized Sport is...a competitive world where rules govern the engagement; a world that creates winners at the expense of losers, and encourages scapegoating (since someone has to be to blame). By contrast, Calvinball is... a relational world... where trust structures the engagement; ... it’s a win-win, joy-filled game ... that enhances community.”

In Beck’s analysis, “Calvinball is based on trust and friendship. Enemies can’t play Calvinball; you’d just have too much control over the other person. With winners and losers and adversarial dynamics in play it comes as no surprise that people are scapegoated in organized games. But the world of Calvinball fosters community. There are no losers, and thus no scapegoats, among friends.”

Well, anyone who’s a Leafs fan probably wishes that were true in organized sport, too. But this is the point where I’m stopped dead in my theological tracks, because Beck goes on to say: “I think we see in Calvinball an analogy for what was observed in the early Christian Church... The Greek term that I’m thinking of is the word koinonia...”

Koinonia may be as unfamiliar to you as Calvinball, so I should explain. It means “fellowship” literally, but the way it gets used in the New Testament, it means far more than simply “hanging out with good friends”. The standard “go-to” definition is found in Acts 2:42, where it’s describing the community of the very first church and it says,

They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer. Everyone was filled with awe at the many wonders and signs performed by the apostles. All the believers were together and had everything in common. They sold property and possessions to give to anyone who had need. 46 Every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts. They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts, praising God and enjoying the favor of all the people. And the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved.

The sharing and celebration and mutual support and positive regard that you see at work there, that’s koinonia. It’s a kind of trust-based, joy-filled togetherness that’s maybe better illustrated by a good game of Calvinball, than it is by anything else. At least, if Richard Beck’s on to something, it is. “It might be a stretch to connect Calvinball with Acts 2:42,” he says, “but let’s go with it... Calvinball and the church represent a kind of ‘coming out’ of a world of competition and adversarialness. Both represent a place where a new kind of game is played... a game built on koinonia rather than competition... a game centred on trust and community and joy.”

I have seen a lot of churches over the years, and a lot of different approaches to doing church. Some churches I’ve seen have been more like a business venture, others more like an ingrown (and sadly dysfunctional) family. Some have been like a circle of wagons, defended from the outside world, and others like a dispenser of religious goods and services.

But I’ll be honest, the kinds of church experiences that I remember most vividly and most positively, the ones where I look back and say, yeah, the Holy Spirit was certainly doing some very remarkable things there, are the ones that had the kind of trust and joy and creativity and grace that tickles the funny bone and sparkles compellingly whenever Calvin and Hobbes get going on a rollicking round of Calvinball.

It may be that this--the degree to which we bring a Calvinballesque spirit to the game--or, if that sounds too trivial, than let me speak more concretely about the degree to which our life together exhibits the characteristics of genuine koinonia--it may be that this measure of success, more than butts in pews or bucks in offering plates or whatever other measure we may be tempted to use--this is the truest indication of what God is really doing in our midst.

At least, as far as Acts 2:42-47 is concerned, if we have koinonia, by God's grace, everything else will follow.

Ecclesia Ludens, the Church at Play

There’s an obscure, somewhat bizarre episode in the Book of Acts that crosses my mind every once in a while when I’m deep in the thick of ministry at the FreeWay. It’s the story of Paul and the Seven Sons of Sceva.

In case this one wasn’t included in your Sunday School flannel graphs, let me give you the background. During the course of his missionary journeys, Paul arrives in Ephesus, where there is a septet of Jewish brothers going around performing exorcisms for hire. These seven “sons of Sceva” get a load of the miracles Paul’s performing in Jesus’ name, so they decide to give it a try. “In the name of Jesus whom Paul preaches,” they intone over their next demonized client, “I abjure you to come out!” And the result looks something like a cross between WWF and Monty Python:

The evil spirit answered them, “Jesus I know, and I know about Paul, but who are you?” Then the man who had the evil spirit jumped on them and ... gave them such a beating that they ran out of the house naked and bleeding.  Acts 19:16

Now: when I say that this episode crosses my mind sometimes during ministry, I should clarify. It has nothing to do with the beating these guys get for trying to capitalize on Jesus’ name; and it’s not because anyone has ever run out of any of my services bleeding. It’s not even because it involves a failed attempt at casting out an evil spirit.

It’s only because it’s—well—if you can get past some of the cultural baggage here—evil spirits, random acts of cudgelling, seven dudes fleeing a house “naked and bleeding,” and what not—if you can let those things simply exist as they might have in their original, first century context—it is a funny story.

At least it was meant to be so, I think. Seven bumbling exorcists who don’t know Jesus from Adam get a royal whooping from the evil spirit they’re trying to exorcise because they misused the name of Jesus, with the ironic effect that the evil spirit, who surely has no vested interest in upholding Jesus' name, ends up pointing out just how precious and sacred and powerful it truly is. Okay: it’s not Corner Gas material, maybe; no sides got split in my telling of the tale, I’m sure, but still, the more I think about it, the more I think Luke, the author of Acts, wants this little episode to crack a pious but genuine smile on the faces of his readers.

Not that I’d recommend the majority of his work, but the guy who runs the Brick Testament website maybe got this one right, presenting it in the medium of a Lego diorama. It sort of does sound like what you’d get if a 10-year-old boy were to come up with a Bible story. Lots of action, a few good fisticuffs, and a eyebrow-arching guffaw at the end: “And he gave them such a licking they fled the house naked and bleeding!”

And this why I think about it every once and a while at the FreeWay, because it suggests to me that, for all its seriousness and eternal import—and make no mistake, ministry is serious and of eternal import—but even in the midst of all that, there is something to ministry that was meant very much to be, for lack of a better word, fun.

This isn’t an exegetical hill I’m ready to die on yet, but I wonder if a passage like Acts 19:13-16, the one about the seven beaten sons of Sceva, was written especially for church leaders who've let church life wring out of them the ability let themselves go with a good-natured, whole-hearted laugh. Or for church communities so burdened with the weight of glory that life together is no longer life-giving. Or for Christians who don’t really think, actually, that the Christian life has space in it for a healthy sense of humour.

It’s not just in Acts 19:13-16, either, that we see Luke throw a sideways glance at his audience with a wry grin that sort of says, “There is, in fact, some very holy fun, going on here, for anyone who wants to get in on the action.” In Acts 12, for instance, you get the one about Peter, escaped from prison, who goes to the house where they’re praying earnestly for his release, and the servant girl is so flummoxed to see him there that she forgets to let him in and no one will believe her that he’s at the door. In Acts 20 you get the one about poor old Eutychus, who fell asleep in the window because Paul’s sermon was so long-winded (the original long-sermon joke...) Acts is peppered, actually, with funny scenes once you start to look for them.

I should clarify. In calling these things “fun” or “funny,” I don’t mean to trivialize the things of God, or to suggest we should handle them flippantly or foolishly. C. S. Lewis has a great letter in The Screwtape Letters where he unpacks humour theologically, and suggests that there is a very important place for “the Joke Proper,” as a channel and expression of Christian Joy, that there is such a thing as a godly joke, and that laughter is not only spiritual healthy, but has all kinds of potential to be redemptive and worshipful if we’ll let it be so.

That’s the kind of funny I’m trying to get at here. And that’s the kind of fun, I think, that church ministry should include: the “funny” that is willing to watch the greatest made the least and the last made the first, and bubble up with laughter because it’s happening—the “funny” that is humble enough to laugh even at itself— the “funny” that views all things, our trials and our accomplishments, in the clarifying light of eternity, where most of the things you take so seriously will turn out not to be nearly so serious as you take them to be.

We laugh a fair bit at the FreeWay. Jokes get told at board meetings all the time. No small amount of play happens during the Sunday morning set up. Our worship team banters with one another between every other song during Thursday evening practice. And when I hear it, or see it, or join in it—the fun, that is—sometimes I think: I bet Luke would get the joke here; and other times I think: I bet Jesus is laughing with us, on this one.

That’s me with my guard down. The straight-laced theologian in me wants to put it like this: in addition to our understanding of the church as Ecclesia Apostlica (the Apostolic Church), and Ecclesia Semper Reformanda (the church always reforming), we must come to understand her, too, as Ecclesia Ludens.  The church at play.

Christ's Comet: an analogy for the local church

As a pastor, I have often found the image of a comet to be a helpful framework for thinking through and reflecting on the various levels of participation in church life that one sees among the people connected to any given local church, from Christmas-and-Easter Christians, on the one hand, to fully devoted day-in-and-day-out disciples on the other.

In case you've never seen one before, let me explain.  A comet is a beautiful moving object in the night sky with three basic parts: the nucleus, the coma and the tail. The "coma" is a glowing cloud around the nucleus, that the nucleus creates as it moves through space, and the "tail" is the luminescent stream of gases that the nucleus leaves behind it on its journey. What's important to note, for our purposes, is that it's the movement of the comet’s nucleus which creates the coma and the tail, and makes it shine so brightly.

Here’s a diagram:

Let me point out the parallels here, for starters.  The local church is like this in that ideally it, too, is moving—that is, it is on mission for Jesus and going from point A to point B, spiritually speaking, in the process.  A stationary or stagnant church, obviously, doesn’t ‘shine’ any more than a stationary comet would.   And, like a comet, it is made up of a solid core nucleus, namely, serious disciples who are genuinely committed to living out their faith in the context of day-in-and-day-out community. Without that nucleus, you've got no comet.

But here's where it gets interesting.  Because around that nucleus of disciples there's going to be a glowing “coma”—that is to say, a bunch of folks who are Christian and committed to Jesus (so they’re glowing) but they aren’t “all in” in terms of their commitment to this local congregation (i.e. they’re not part of the nucleus). They are attracted to the ministry and life of the community, they participate in it on a more superficial level. They are, more or less, moving with the congregation, but they haven’t yet made a deep commitment.

Then there are folks who are in “the tail”—that is, they are Christmas-and-Easter types, maybe, or perhaps they are they are the spouse of a member of the church.  It could be that they were once involved but in various ways have dropped off. They may not even be Christians, but they still have a residual “glow,” because they were or are in contact with the nucleus. However, they’re not really “moving with” the nucleus (or if they are, they’re moving much more slowly).  Every church community, whether they realize it or not, has a "tail" like this.

Like I say, as a pastor, I find this a helpful image for thinking about church life.  Ideally, my work as a pastor helps people in the tail move up into the coma, and people in the coma move up into the nucleus. When people in the nucleus break off into the coma, I do what I can to keep them from dropping into the tail.  I sometimes find it helpful, even, in pastoral work, to ask myself "where in the comet" is this person, and then shape my pastoral response accordingly.

So it's a useful visual, to be sure.

But, here’s the reason I find the comet analogy especially helpful: because for the comet to be a comet (and for it to shine brightly in the night sky) it actually needs the coma and the tail along with the nucleus.

Every local church needs all three.

Of course, you can’t have a tail and a coma without a nucleus, anymore than you can have a church without a core of serious, committed disciples who are moving in the direction of Jesus. However, that nucleus won’t “glow” unless it has a coma and a tail—just like the church won’t “glow” if it doesn’t have an aura of seekers, neighbours, Christians who are not quite “there” yet, etc.—people who are participating in the community at various levels of commitment, but they haven’t made a covenant or membership commitment to this local church.

Sometimes church leaders can be tempted to despair over the "commitment level" of people in their community (and to be sure, the ideal movement is always "up into the nucleus" through deeper commitment and fuller devotion to Jesus), but the thing to understand is that a church without any loosely-committed adherents is like a comet without a coma or a tail.  And just to beat the analogy to death: the movement of the nucleus actually creates a coma/tail; it's inevitable, even, dare I say, desirable.  In the same way, the mission of the church’s core will create a coma and a tail of people who are more-or-less moving with the church but not quite “all in.”

It's inevitable.  Even desirable.  Because a church that doesn’t have this happening, is probably not moving that much on mission, and probably isn't, actually, shining too brightly for Jesus.

Little Country Church, a song

Almost 20 years ago now, my wife Dani and I woke up one Sunday morning in January, looked at each other and said, "Maybe we should try going to church today..."  It was the last day of Christmas holidays, and the next day I would be going back to my job as an English teacher at the local High School; I had been drifting, spiritually, for a lot of years, and feeling especially overwhelmed by work.  We were expecting our first child, and, like Dani put it, "When this little life starts asking serious questions, we need to have good answers."  

Anyways, it was maybe a convalescence of a lot factors, not to mention the mysterious and inexorable Hand of Providence, leading us, unawares, by our young and uncertain hands, but for whatever the reason, we felt that morning that church just might make the difference we needed in our lives. Twenty years and counting, later, I can honestly say it did, it has; not just the church, of course, but the God we met there.  It was a little country church in a small town in north-eastern Alberta called "Two Hills Fellowship Chapel" (the two hills in questions was the name of the town) and even today when I hear the expression "salt of the earth," my mind goes inevitably to the folks we met there, who loved us and introduced us to Jesus and discipled us in his Ways.  

This is a song I wrote the summer we moved away from Two Hills, back in 2004, when we finally answered God's call on our lives to go into full time ministry.  The country and western style is a bit of a stylistic departure for me, but I felt it was apropos to the subject matter.  I'm sharing it today as the fifth song on my most recent recording project, "accidentals," but also, and more importantly, as a big, thankful shout-out to all the brothers and sisters in Christ at Two Hills Fellowship Chapel.  God used you all powerfully in my life and I am deeply grateful.





There’s a little church in a little town in a place where two hills meet
And though it’s been a while now, it’s in my memory
The wall were framed for fellowship, they rest upon the rock
The foundation of salvation found in God’s Holy Book
And every Sunday morning rings the bell they raised by hand
From the steeply built with care and love as a beacon in the land

I thank God for that little church, where the preacher preached the word
Where the people worked hand in hand , serving their Lord
Where the Old Time Religion still set the captives free
If it wasn’t for that little church, God knows where I’d be

And the preacher in that little church is resolved to know one thing
That’s Jesus Christ the crucified and resurrected King
And he studies to present himself, approved and unashamed
A workman with the word of truth, proclaiming Jesus’ name
For every Sunday morning when that Holy Book is read
Broken hearts were bound up and hungry hearts were fed

I thank God for that little church, where the preacher preached the word
Where the people worked hand in hand , serving their Lord
Where the Old Time Religion still set the captives free
If it wasn’t for that little church, God knows where I’d be

On a snowy day in January, I first walked through those doors
Not knowing one day I’d walk out, changed forever more
For the living stones that built that church were the world’s salt and light
And they showed me how to find my place in the body of Christ
For every Sunday morning my heart softened bit by bit
Until the living water came and saturated it

I thank God for that little church, where the preacher preached the word
Where the people worked hand in hand , serving their Lord
Where the Old Time Religion still set the captives free
If it wasn’t for that little church, God knows where I’d be

And like a lighthouse on a rock, it glimmers in the night
While the tide of darkness rises with the waning light
And like a haven for the broken, wearied from the fight
Where spirits trade their weakness for the power of Jesus’ might

I thank God for that little church, where the preacher preached the word
Where the people worked hand in hand , serving their Lord
Where the Old Time Religion still set the captives free
If it wasn’t for that little church, God knows where I’d be

Musical Mondays (VI)

A musical reflection on Ephesians 5:25ff, about the brokenness of the Church (Universal) and Christ's self-giving love for Her despite (and because of) the brokenness.

The Colors of Martyrdom

There's an old sermon from 7th Century Ireland called the Cambrai Homily.  It lays out an elaborate theology of Christian Martyrdom using Matthew 16:24 as a starting point ("Then Jesus said to his disciples, 'Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me').  The Cambrai Homily famously categorizes martyrdom according to three colours:  red, white and green (though the actual hue of the third color is disputed; in Irish it's glas). 

"Red martyrs" are perhaps the most obvious.  They faced violent persecution, torture or death for the sake of Christ.  Red martyrs bled for Jesus. 

Such martyrdoms, of course, were both common and precious in the earliest days of the church (witness the horrors described so vividly in the Book of Revelation), but as Christianity became increasingly mainstream in the Roman Empire, bona fide martyrdoms got less and less easy to obtain.  On at least one occasion, a group of Christians actually turned themselves in to the Roman authorities, asking to be executed for Christ's sake (and creating no small amount of bewilderment for the Roman governor, who, if not sympathetic towards Christians, was at least indifferent, and certainly not hostile). 

So the church needed new ways for the faithful to express their death-defying commitment to Christ.  This they found in the concept of a "white martyrdom."  A white martyr did not shed literal blood for Jesus, but expressed his or her witness through some life-long vow of asceticism or other--a bloodless "death to the world" that might include things like: vows of chastity, monastic oaths, mendicancy, or becoming a hermit.  These are "white deaths" in lieu of the red.

Now this was old news by the 7th Century, but what the Cambrai Homily adds is the third color: a "green" (glas) martyrdom.  Green Martyrdom was about self-mortification and denying desire.  Fasting was a predominant form of "green martyrdom."  So were penitential acts like praying in the frigid Atlantic or spending the night immersed in water (this seems to be a common one).  A Green Martyr died to the immediate needs of the flesh, in order to turn the heart to God instead.

I've been thinking about the Cambrai's color scheme for martyrdom ever since I preached this sermon on the Martyrdom of Stephen, back in August.   You see:  I live in a world where desire is often seen as the driving mechanism of life: consumer desire drives our economy, emotional desire drives our entertainment industry, and, according one author at least, sexual desire drives the Internet (see Patchen Barss's book, The Erotic Engine). 

The point is: in a world where life is so closely associated with fulfilled desire, self-denial really does have the odor of death about it.  So I'm wondering today how radical a witness for Jesus we might have if we updated the tradition of the Green Martyr. 

What if we consciously saw denying those desires that no one in our culture thinks you can live without, as a stand-in for the honor of dying for Christ?

P.S. (Love Wins)

One of the things that makes pastoral ministry pastoral, I'm learning, is giving theological ideas "legs" for people.  Which explains why, re-reading yesterday's post, I could easily imagine somebody wondering the big "So what?" as they waded through my rather abstract ramblings about the crisis of evangelical ecclesiology and the controversy over Rob Bell's Love Wins.  So what...does it look like, to address the crisis in evangelical ecclesiology, after all?

This is a bigger question than a 500-word blog post could tackle, to be sure, but for starters, and as hint as to where I'd want to go with it, I'd suggest you check out my friend Jon Coutt's thorough and insightful work with Rob Bell's book over at this side of Sunday.  What is particularly exceptional about his series is that Jon hasn't asked, with the likes of John Piper and Kevin De Young and the rest, "Is Rob Bell a heretic?" (and then bid him a cursive and uncharitable "farewell" (or "welcome to the club!" as the case may be).)  Instead, Jon has framed his whole analysis around this question:  "Could someone convinced by [this] book sign my denomination's statement of faith?" (Jon is a pastor with the Christian and Missionary Alliance). 

The difference here is subtle, but profound: not "is Bell 'heretical' or 'orthodox'?" but "How does the position of my ecclesiological tradition inform and/or contrast to Bell's position."  Rather than assuming the authority to pontificate ex cathedral about a Christian brother's alleged heresy, Jon's question is humble enough to admit that theological work must have an ecclesiological context, and that this context inevitably shapes and even limits (in healthy ways) our theological positions.  It doesn't address the ecclesiological crisis in evangelicalism, perhaps, but it at least acknowledges it and refuses to say more than his context permits him to.  Jon has read Beyond Foundationalism, too (and he reads this blog once in a while, too, so I welcome his corrective input if I've mis-represented him here).

If more evangelical leaders evidenced this kind of humility, perhaps we really would start moving in constructive ways towards a positive evangelical ecclesiology.  Because what's interesting to me is that, six posts into the series, Jon hasn't even discussed Rob Bell's book yet.  The way he's framed his question has forced him back to his own tradition, to explore it more deeply and question it more probingly, seeking to understand its biblical basis, its historical roots, its import and application (and he has made there some illuminating discoveries), so that he can answer his research question honestly.  And it's only in that kind of probing, I think, the self-probing of our own traditions first, that we gain the necessary humility to speak the truth to one another in love.

What No One Yet has Said About the Triumph of Love

In case you've been living in the evangelical world's version of a sensory deprivation tank in Siberia and somehow missed it, let me catch you up to speed. Recently, the popular and/or controversial pastor of a mega-church in Michigan published a book about Heaven and Hell that made big waves in the sea of all-things-evangelical. Actually, it was the pre-game show that really made the wave: a 3 minute advert for his book, which he posted on the Internet, in which he hinted that he would be giving some non-traditional answers to some hard questions about the doctrine of hell, about which some self-appointed watch dogs over at a blog called "The Gospel Coalition" cried universalist! and heretic!, and after which Harper Collins bumped the book's release date up by two weeks.

Here's the video:

Just how big a wave did it make? To compare: if you google Jesus of Nazareth, Pope Benedict's most recent publication, you'll garner around 668,000 hits. A google of this pastor's Love Wins will earn you 606,000 hits. So the literary crest he's carving, it would seem, is at least as big as the Pope's. Heck: even CBC News, that pillar of secular liberalism, caught wind of it and figured it was worth a mention, though their story reads like a third-grader's account of the theory of relativity, for all the sensitivity to the real issues it shows (read the article here).

Bloggers better than I have taken more pains than I to review, dissect, respond and otherwise put their theological surfboard to the wave. I'd suggest you start here; then read this nuanced deconstruction of some of the theological terms being used in the debate; and then read this 10-part series by Steve Holmes, lecturer at St. Mary's College, St. Andrews Scotland. He offers, by all accounts, the most thorough and theologically erudite analysis of the book you'll find on the web.

Of course, after Don Miller published this scintillating review, it seemed like there was simply nothing left to say.

But there is something I haven't yet heard anyone say, and it stands out glaringly to me, so I'll offer it here.

The crisis over this book, such as it is, is not really a crisis about the doctrines of Heaven and Hell at all. It is more a crisis, I think, of ecclesiology. The problem that the guys who have come out swinging really have with this Michiagan pastor is not that he may hold untraditional views on the afterlife. By most accounts, he isn't saying anything that hasn't been said before; and to be sure, pastors who have called themselves Christian have said far more radical things than him, with impunity as far as the likes of the Gospel Coalition are concerned.

Their real problem is that "he's one of us" (so to speak), or at least in lots of other ways he sure sounds like it. He talks evangelical Jesus talk like "one of us." He's published by reputable evangelical publishers like "one of us." He calls himself evangelical, like "one of us." He upholds the Lordship of Jesus in old fashioned ways, like "one of us." If he were just a "flaky" "liberal" pastor, they could dismiss him and be done with it. And it's no coincidence that many conservatives with the hardest cores have tried to stick the anathema of "liberalism" on him in disingenuous ways, because if he were simply a "liberal" they would have just cause to turn down his application to the club without even considering it.

But he's evangelical. And because Evangelicalism is such a loosely defined tribe, a tribe where inclusion is based on whether or or not your "version" of the Gospel is like mine, or you "feel" like me when you talk about the Bible, or you "sound" like me when you pray, or sing, or wax theological, a tribe where membership is more often based on our self-identification as evangelical and, for all our talk about Sola Scriptura, authority is more often based on worldly measures of popularity (who has the biggest church, the best-selling book, the most popular broadcast, the most endorsements from other self-appointed leaders of the movement)... because evangelicalism has no Magisterium other than blog stats and book sales... because we suffer this crisis of ecclesiology, self-appointed Gospel Coalitions and self-described Christian Hedonists feel it is necessary to guard the ford, ready to execute any brother who can't pronounce Shibboleth. (And as an aside, this is why the uproar over Rick Warren's invitation to the Desiring God Conference last year was so significant-- it illustrates the same crisis in ecclesiology-- an "evangelical leader" had invited someone we weren't quite sure about to the party).

Let me try saying it this way: "Heretic" and "Orthodox" are as much ecclesiological designations as they are theological. To be orthodox is to be in keeping with the received teaching of the Church-- and to be a heretic is to be contrary to the received teaching of the Church. But the crisis is that there is no Church, as such, in Evangelicalism. There are only churches. There is no legitimate, single "body" which uniformly "receives" teaching; there are only bodies-- Zondervan and the EFC and the good folks at Christianity Today and the Gospel Coalition and the Billy Graham Association and Big Idea (until Hollywood bought them) and Vineyard (well, we'll sing their songs but we're not so sure about their methods) and so on.

In an ecclesiologically fragmented universe like this, anyone who doesn't agree with me is a heretic and anyone who does is orthodox, and it's not just my right, it's my duty to personally defend my "truth" against your "error"; and since we'll never get to sit together at the next Ecumenical Synod, the easiest way to do so is to lash out (in ways that are by turns pompous, stingy, dismissive and silly).

I haven't read Love Wins, and probably won't; I have read Stan Grenz's Beyond Foundationalism, which is perhaps a more helpful book anyways, in that it helps us to understand the interplay between the community, theology, Scripture, tradition, Church and truth that's at work here. But thinking about all this, and looking for something to say about it that 606,000 posts haven't yet touched on, I want to ask: what if, instead of 606,000 passionate posts about the controversy over Love Wins, we devoted that much web-space to equally passionate discussions about the crisis in Evangelical ecclesiology that the Love Wins controversy has simply brought to light?

Perhaps then the energy spent on self-righteously denouncing a "suspected heretic" (who, as far as I can tell, is no heretic at all) might be spent instead on making Ephesians 4:1-6 our reality as evangelicals.