Conspiracies Exposed (Part IV): We have Seen the Enemy

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One of my favorite B-Grade horror flicks staring former WWF wrestlers is that 1988 cult classic They Live. In They Live, Rowdy Roddy Piper stars as a butt-kicking Everyman who stumbles across a secret cabal of mysterious aliens, who have infiltrated society disguised as normal citizens, and are controlling the population through mind control, subliminal messages, and mass media. This movie was doing The Matrix before The Matrix was cool.

Truth be told, however, I’ve never even seen the whole film; there is just one scene etched indelibly on my imagination. Because early on in the story, our hero Mr. Piper discovers a resistance group holed up in a church (no coincidence, that), and there he acquires a set of mysterious sunglasses that, when he dons them, allows him to decode the messages that the aliens have plastered across the billboards, magazine covers and television screens of his world.

So, for instance, he might look at a billboard advertising the latest computer software, and it seems normal enough, but when he looks at it through his sunglasses, it turns into a black-and-white sign reading, simply, OBEY. He might look at the photograph of a pretty fashion model on the cover of a magazine in the convenience store, but when he sees it through his sunglasses, it’s a black and white page simply printed with the word REPRODUCE.

You really have to see it to believe it…

I have no idea if the makers of They Live consulted any biblical scholars when producing this film (I kind of think they didn’t) but the reason I find this obscure sci-fi fantasy flick so fascinating is because it’s actually a pretty good analogy for one of the hardest, but also most intriguing books of the Bible. I’m talking here about the Book of Revelation.

We’ve been spending a fair bit of time over the last month at terra incognita unpacking conspiracy theories (as an epistemological phenomenon, not particular conspiracy theories), and up until now we have avoided getting too deep into the Book of Revelation. But I would be remiss, as a Christian pastor talking about conspiracy theories, if I didn’t at least give Revelation a nod in this discussion. This is because, on the one hand, conspiracy theories of the Christian variety tend to be intricately, almost inextricably tied up with the Bible’s apocalyptic writings. I have seen any number of Christian conspiracy theorists, for instance, offering to explain how such-and-such a political leader is really the Beast of Revelation, or how UPC Codes, G5 towers, debit cards, or vaccinations are really a fulfillment of the prophecy about the number of the Beast, or how this or that development in geo-politics is really the machinations of some secret society pushing us towards Armageddon.

The problem with using the Book of Revelation to shore up your conspiracy theory like this, is that the conspiracy theorist who does so is kind of right, but not quite, and not at all in the way they think.

This brings us to the other hand. Because the Bible’s apocalyptic writings actually do help us to discern, and understand, and respond to the “stuff of conspiracy theories”—the machinations of political powers, the manipulations of corrupt economic systems, the dehumanization of omnipotent technology—all of it. The problem is that most conspiracy theories that draw on the Book of Revelation to speculate about the existence of an Illuminati (let’s say) or whether [fill in name of political leader here] is really the Beast, are working with a fundamental misunderstanding of how biblical apocalyptic actually works. Consequently they tend to misread the news, and do violence to the biblical text, both at the same time.

So as a primer in how biblical apocalyptic works, might I refer you to Rowdy Roddy Piper’s “decoder glasses” in They Live. Because what we see here is that the conspiracy, such as it is, is hiding in plain sight. All it takes is something (a set of sunglasses…. a highly symbolic biblical text…) to decode it for us. The adverts and the social media feeds and the economic systems that you take for granted—and this is the key, you accept them as normal because they are normal in your society—that’s where the real conspiracy lies. If only you could see them through the right lens.

A full exegesis of the Book of Revelation is impossible to do in a 1000-word blog post, but suffice it here to say that all of the dark imagery—the idolatrous beasts and the multi-headed dragons, the scarlet Jezebeels and the 666s written on people’s foreheads—all these trace back to specific aspects of everyday life in the Roman Empire: Caesar, and the worship of Caesar, the Imperial Genius and the exploitative economic systems that gave it life, the military conquest and dominance, the pagan idolatry. All of these things were the kind of stuff that your average citizen in ancient Rome would have simply assumed was the way the world turned, systems of government and politics and economics as normal to them as 1st of July celebrations and regular garbage pickup is to us. What the Book of Revelation is doing is peeling back the façade of these things to show—not another human conspiracy—but instead the spiritual reality that lies within these everyday things.

That “Caesar” whom you worship so willingly on your way to temple (Revelation seems to be saying) has a spiritual dynamic to his office, a spiritual entity indwelling his office, even, and whatever else it is, that spiritual entity is best imagined as a demonic beast hell-bent on devouring the world. It’s like putting on a pair of sunglasses and realizing the billboard really says OBEY. Suddenly you see for the very first time that thing that was always there.

I’m wording this very carefully. Because Revelation is not saying (I don’t think) that Caesar himself was the Beast. If it were saying that then you’d have every license in the world to use Revelation to concoct no end of modern-day conspiracy theories. But Revelation is saying something more subtle and more important than that.

There is a bestial power at work within all our acts of “Caesar making”—every human effort at empire building—and this "spiritual power” is the real problem. This is why the early Christians could denounce Emperor worship, in one breath, something they did every time they confessed that Jesus is Lord, but in the very next breath they could enjoin their followers to honor the Emperor (1 Peter 2:17). Because they understood that the mere human being named “Nero” wasn’t the real enemy; the real enemy was the bestial “power” that indwelt Nero’s authority and office as Caesar, the “powers and principalities” which every Christian knows are the real adversaries (Eph 6:12).

That last reference to Ephesians 6 is especially helpful here. In this verse Paul makes it crystal clear that for a Christian, no human being, be they Caesar or otherwise, is our enemy, and it is a failure of Christian courage to make it out as though they were. “Our struggle is not against flesh and blood,” he says, “but against the (spiritual) rulers, the (spiritual) authorities, the spiritual powers of this dark world.” Paul is doing here in shorthand, I think, what the Book of Revelation is doing at length; or rather, Revelation is an extended, poetical exposition of this basic principle. Human beings are not the enemy. The enemy is the fallen spiritual entities that indwell all human power structures, be they political, economic, technological or otherwise.

This is why I say that plugging your pet conspiracy theory into the Book of Revelation to give it juice does violence to the text. Because most every conspiracy theory I’ve ever heard starts with the premise that there are some mysterious unknown human beings in power, secretly trying to manipulate us, and because they are in league with the devil, these human beings must be the enemy. Even if there were real conspirators behind this or that modern day problem, which for all I know there may be, Revelation would ask us not to see them as the enemy themselves, but as victims of the enemy, tragic casualties of the real war. When we fail to realize this, and use the Book of Revelation instead as a way of gaining power over other people (even if they are the unseen people behind my theoretical conspiracy), we may actually fall into the Beast’s trap, playing by his rules and grabbing for his power, even as we are trying to expose him.

As an alternative, we can let the Book of Revelation be a set of They Live sunglasses that allow us to see the spiritual dynamic at work behind, beneath, and within every human power structure, and especially within those power structures we take for granted as normal.  In saying this, I realize that the analogy breaks down almost immediately, because in They Live, the aliens were disguised as human beings, making people the enemy again-- but hey, that's what you get when you turn to former WWF wrestlers for your theological analogies.

So maybe we should just stick with the Book of Revelation itself. If we did, it would remind us that even the conspirators (such as they may be) aren’t the enemy. The real enemy is a spiritual one, hiding out in plain sight, and because this enemy truly is spiritual, it can only be “fought” in those ways that Jesus himself taught us to fight: with prayer, with truth, with cruciform humility, and with self-giving love.

On Racial Equality and the Human Family

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There’s a spot in the Book of Acts where the Apostle Paul is speaking before the philosophers of ancient Athens, sharing the Gospel on the slopes of the Acropolis, and he says this almost throw away line about the origin of the species. “The Lord God,” he says, “gives life and breath and everything else to every human on the face of the earth” (paraphrase). Because (direct quote), “From one man he made all the nations (pan ethnos anthropōn—lit. “every ‘ethnicity’ of men”), that they should inhabit the whole earth.”

In Paul’s mind, all human beings, regardless their racial distinctions, share the same common ancestor, and the whole human race is the single creation of the same one God, descended together from one mother and father. Bear in mind, too, that Paul is speaking as a Jew before Gentiles when he says this, and as such he has all kinds of reasons to make all kinds of claims to racial distinctiveness. Instead of doing that, however, he appeals to his common humanity with his Greek audience.

No doubt he is thinking primarily of the Book of Genesis here, which traces everyone back to the same single set of parents. Notably, though, he does not quote the Hebrew Bible to convince his Greek interlocutors of this truth, rather he quotes their own pagan poets. “Didn’t the Stoic Philosopher Aratus say it, back in 300 BC, that we are all God's offspring?” he asks, with a bit of rhetorical flare.

Yes Aratus did say that; but this is more than just rhetoric for Paul. This touches on a truth that is absolutely essential to his understanding of the Gospel, a truth that, he believes, God has written on the hearts of every ethnic group on the planet, whether they have the sacred scriptures to remind them of it or not: that we are all members of the same human family.

In pointing all this out, Paul is simply expressing the natural corollary of the Hebrew creation story itself. One of the main points that Genesis 1 and 2 is making when it says that God created Adam and Eve in the beginning, is that every people group on the planet must therefore be descended from the same mom and dad. This is one of the reasons the Book of Genesis is so obsessed with genealogies, incidentally. We tend to gloss over them, but echoing in every mention of who begat whom in the genealogies of Genesis is the conviction that each of us are therefore blood brothers and sisters with everyone else. In this light, the convoluted table of nations in Genesis 10 could very well be one of the most beautiful anti-racist texts ever penned, because whatever else it does it underscores this truth: that no one’s not related.

When I was in Seminary I did a project where I traced out a complete map of the family tree of Adam and Eve, including every character, every marriage, every birth that gets mentioned in the book of Genesis. The results were pretty fascinating, reminding me not only that human beings really did make good on Genesis 1:28’s directive to multiply and fill the earth, but that in doing so we formed a beautifully inter-connected web of humanity, one that ties us all together with each other.

While I believe this with all my heart, we have to be very careful how we handle this truth, because it can actually point us two different directions, one of them very helpful, the other decidedly not so.

On the one hand—the not-so-helpful-hand—we can look at the family tree in Genesis and say, essentially, well there you go: there’s no point making a big deal about race, racial distinctions, racial injustices, because after all, we’re all part of the same single humanity. People are saying this very thing, I think, when they say stuff like “All lives matter,” or “There’s only one race: the human race.” Even if these statements are fundamentally true, they are, I would argue, misadventures in missing the point. The fact that we are all part of the same human race and therefore all equal in God’s eyes doesn’t mean that we can’t speak specifically about particular ethnic groups that make up the human family, if by doing so we can redress past wrongs or current injustices.

Because there’s this other hand—the more helpful other hand—where we allow the family tree in Genesis to teach us how to feel the pain of another human being who is suffering racial injustice, as though it were our own pain. Because it is; or it should be. If it’s true, for instance, that the Native American child who was torn from his family and forced to attend a racist residential school was literally my brother, then I should feel as outraged and traumatized by what happened to him as I would be if it had happened to my biological father or my very own son.

I’m saying this in part because  this morning for the first time I saw a photograph of Derek Chauvin, kneeling on the neck of George Floyd during the arrest that resulted in his murder. Words fail me. It was disgusting, brutal, heart-wrenching, infuriating, but none of those words actually capture what I felt. Because as I looked at it, that strange family tree from the book of Genesis, the one I’d drawn back in seminary, came up in my mind’s eye, and it was as if God was saying: if that was your son, or grandson, or father, or brother lying there in that photo, how would you respond in this moment?

Because in theological terms, it was.

My grief, of course, will never match the grief of those who were George Floyd’s immediate family and closest friends, and it would trivialize their pain, I think, to somehow suggest it even comes close. But anyone who can look at that photograph and not feel the grief, the anger, the heartbreak, and the ache for justice that they would feel, if it was their own flesh and blood under that knee, has not learned the first lesson of the Book of Genesis, or, indeed, of the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Phantosmia (A Scent of Smoke), a song

About three years ago I started having this strange experience where I would randomly begin to smell smoke, when there was no real smoke to be smelled. The first time it happened it was so strong that I figured something in my office building must actually be burning, so I started wandering the halls trying to pin-point where it was coming from, sniffing the air so deeply that I almost hyperventilated. Three years, multiple doctors appointments, two specialist referrals, one EEG and one MRI test later, I was told that this was a common phenomenon, a condition related to migraine auras, and completely harmless. Apparently there's even a name for it: it's called phantosmia. 

I've actually come to welcome my phantosmia episodes when they happen (usually one will come along every couple of months or so). The smoke scent itself is not unpleasant, something like a campfire smell, and they often trigger vague feelings of nostalgia. Early on in my journey with phantosmia, though, I was thinking about the ways in which this experience of looking intently for a smell that isn't there could be a metaphor for life. A few songwriting sessions later and I'd come up with this.



I’m being haunted
By a scent of smoke
I’m just being taunted
Cause when I look around
Nothing’s burning

Oh, how I hunted
For a scent of smoke
I had what I wanted
But when I woke I found
Empty yearning

Like a bird in a fist
That flutters away
Before it can be glimpsed
Like a dream that escaped
Before the dreamer awoke
My heart has been shaped
By a scent of smoke

Still I’m undaunted
I can take a joke
And yet I’m haunted
Cause when I look around
Nothing’s burning

Like a bird in a fist
That flutters away
Before it can be glimpsed
Like a dream that escaped
Before the dreamer awoke
My heart has been shaped
By a scent of smoke

On Racial Equality and Glorification

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As a pastor I often hear people refer to the folks they can’t wait to see again in heaven. Sometimes this is simply a vague reference to a loved one who has passed away—looking forward to being greeted by a friendly face when they too pass over to the other side—other times it is a very clear idea that their loved ones are looking down on them from heaven, waiting eagerly for their arrival.

In what I’m about to say, I hope it’s clear that there’s nothing wrong with this. I am looking forward to seeing all kinds of friends and family on that day, too.

It’s just this: I can never remember a single time in all my years as a pastor when someone has said, I can’t wait until we get to heaven and I’ll get to sit down with people from all kinds of races and cultures that I’ve never known, and finally be reconciled with black people, and white people, and brown people, and Native American people, and Russian people,  and Chinese people, without any of the racial barriers that currently divide us.  Or even less theologically: I can’t wait till heaven, when there won’t be racism any more.

I’m speaking somewhat hyperbolically. Certainly, I’ve known missionaries who have faithfully traveled to the ends of the earth and back to tell people of every nation, tribe and tongue about Jesus, and that’s got to be an expression, in some way, of this desire for racial reconciliation. (Although it’s not this by default. Lots of terrible acts of racism have been perpetrated in the name of “missionary zeal,” too.)

But either way, my point still stands. We are, on the whole, far more interested in being reunited with our own “kind” of people in Heaven, than we are in being reconciled to “other kinds” of people.

And if I’m on to something here, let me say that this is, I think, a profound failure of the Christian imagination. Because the Scriptures say far, far more about the racial reconciliation that will happen in the New Heaven and the New Earth, than it ever does about our personal family reunions.

At least: I can’t remember a single saying of Jesus where he speaks about my Grandma or Grandpa waiting in heaven to hug me with open arms.  I can’t remember any parable he told where my dearly-departed best friend will welcome me in with a holy high five. Though again, I’m not saying this won’t happen, or that there’s anything wrong with wanting it. I’m just saying that that did not seem to be Jesus’s primary vision of what we should expect come that day.

Instead, I remember a him saying that “many will come from the east and the west to take their places at the feast with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in the kingdom of Heaven” (Matthew 8:11; and he said this to Jewish people, in response to the faith of a Gentile person). And I remember a parable about a great banquet where many who were called would not come, so the Holy Host brought them in from the roads and the country lanes to fill the house with others (Luke 14:15ff). And I remember St. John the Divine’s vision of heaven itself, where people from every nation, tribe and tongue were gathered together to worship the Lamb (Rev. 7:9-10).

In other words, if the Heaven of the Bible can be thought of in any way as a big family reunion, it is not my personal family that will be reunited, but the whole family of all humanity—a glorious reconciliation of the races, where all are brought together in Christ as “one new humanity” (Eph 2:14-15).

This unity, though, does not nullify the ethnic differences that make each one distinct, rather it celebrates and sanctifies them all as God’s gift to his people. After all: didn’t God declare all the creatures in the sheet to be clean, in Peter's vision (Acts 10:15)?  And didn’t he forbid Peter from calling any of them impure, whom God himself had sanctified? And didn’t he show Peter that this vision was really about racial reconciliation in the Gospel, by following it up with visitors asking about the Gospel, who were from a racial group that Peter’s people had been taught to despise?

The answer to all these questions is yes.  Because the heart of heaven beats passionately for racial reconciliation—the leaves of the Tree that grows in Heaven, remember, are for the healing of every ethnic group (Rev 22:2)—and the Holy Spirit wants us to labor with him towards that day.

I’m saying all of this because over the last few days, while protests for racial justice rage around the globe, I have been trying to think through racism from a soteriological perspective. Soteriology is the high-falutin’ word for “the Bible’s teaching about salvation, how we are saved and what it means for us.”  It started just with a realization that as a white Christian I have this deep-seeded desire to justify myself when it comes to racial inequalities, rather than seeking to be justified by faith in Christ. After writing about Justification by Faith, I realized you couldn’t stop there, and had to talk about Sanctification, too. After writing that piece, I figured I ought to go all the way with it, and reflect on Glorification as the final jewel in the crown.

Glorification is the theological term we use, sometimes, to talk about the hope of glory that God extends to us in the Gospel. We are not saved for this life only. If that were the case, Paul says, we are to be pitied above all people. Instead, our salvation is a promise of life to come in the New Heavens and New Earth, when Jesus himself comes in glory to judge the living and the dead.

When people talk about meeting their loved ones in Heaven, they are reflecting, whether they realize it or not, on the doctrine of glorification.

The truth is, however, that if we want to be biblical in our doctrine of glorification, we have to wrestle with the fact that one of the things that will make our glory so glorious is just that, on that day, we will finally and fully be reconciled with people from every nation, tribe, and tongue on the planet; and there won’t be a racist among us.

We have to be careful when using the doctrine of glorification to talk about racial justice, however. It can very easily slip into “pie-in-the-sky-when-you-die” kind of thinking. What does it matter (we might say) if you are oppressed now? When you get to heaven you’ll get your reward, so just suck it up and suffer through….

That abuse of the doctrine of glorification has been used, actually, to justify racism in the past, to keep the oppressed oppressed and the oppressors oppressing; and if it sounds like I’m saying that then I have failed in this post.

Because there is a different way of applying the doctrine of glorification.  In this different way, a Christian looks deeply into the Scriptures to see what Heaven is really like. What is God’s vision for the sinless relationship with him, in harmony with others, and at peace with the world, that he wants us to enjoy in eternity? What is he moving this crazy thing called the History of Planet Earth towards? What will life in the New Creation be like?

You grasp hold of that vision.  And then you set to work—in your limited capacity and with the Holy Spirit working through you the whole way—you set to work—by prayer and petition with praise and thanksgiving—you set to work trying to “live into” that glory now. You live into it, (so to speak) so that when it finally dawns in All its Glory, you’ll be ready for it, because you’ll have been practicing for it all along.

When we apply the doctrine of glorification in this way, we discover not only the motive, but also the means by which to resist racism. Because you will not be a racist in Heaven. No evil thing is allowed into the Heavenly Jerusalem (Rev 21:27), so any racist sin that’s still lurking in my heart come that day will have to be laid aside—covered by the blood of the cross for good—before I ever pass through those gates.

How much better if we allowed the glory of the Lord to get to work on us here, and now, instead? How much better if we asked him to heal that sin now, instead, so that when we do at last make it to Glory, we will be good and ready to take our place in that heavenly choir which is (according to St. John the Divine, it is) made up of singers from every nation, tribe, tongue and culture, people, ethnicity, and race under heaven.

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On Racial Equality and Sanctification

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I am part of a holiness movement. Both denominations that I serve, the Church of the Nazarene and the Free Methodist Church in Canada are descended from the Wesleyan Holiness tradition. I am saying this in part as a follow up on the post I made yesterday about justification by faith. In that post I was trying to say that the right response for us, when we become aware of the ways in which we are complicit with racial injustice, is not to try to justify ourselves, but to throw ourselves instead on the mercy of God in repentance, and seek in Christ’s death for our sins our only justification.

This is theologically true. One of the challenges, however, is that so often Justification gets separated from Sanctification in our understanding of the Gospel, so that the “right standing with God” that Jesus offers us does not ever result in a concrete change in how we love our neighbours as ourselves. 

This was, I think, one of the reasons the Holiness Movement began the way it did, to challenge the idea that a disembodied “faith” could save us, without ever needing to see it “play out” in concrete action in the world. This, too, has been one of the failings of the modern evangelical movement, I think, which has communicated that the Gospel is about getting people into heaven by having them “ask Jesus into our hearts,” without ever asking Jesus to change the way their hearts are beating. 

Essentially the Holiness Movement said no to this idea that the Gospel was simply “eternal fire insurance” for heaven, preaching instead that the necessary evidence of our faith in the Gospel was the way in which “Gospel fruit” showed up in our lives.

I’m bringing this up, in part, because many of the stories I have been hearing over the last few days have reminded me of how culpable the white evangelical church really is when it comes to racial injustice, either by actively acting racist, or at the very least by not actively resisting racism.

How could this be? When the Gospel so clearly indicates (at least on my reading it’s crystal clear) that racial equality is God’s vision for his Kingdom?

I would argue that one of the explanations is that white Christians have been content to be “Justified by Faith” without wanting to be “Sanctified by the Holy Spirit.” If we were truly, entirely sanctified we would loathe racial prejudice as the affront to the Creator that it is, and we would long for racial justice the way the Creator himself must long for it. And until we are entirely sanctified, I do not think we can expect to see real, lasting change when it comes to this issue.

So I’m saying this partly to bring Justification and Sanctification back together in this discussion: we can never talk about how we are justified by the grace of God, without wanting to be sanctified by the Spirit of God.

But I’m also saying it to address another impulse that I am noticing in myself, as a white middle-aged male, besides the impulse to self-justification. That is the impulse to “virtue-signal.” It’s one of the reasons I did not respond immediately on social media when news about the protests against racial injustice started to hit my Facebook feed last week. It seemed to me that to jump in with a “like” and a “share” that really cost me nothing would only come across as an empty signal of a phoney virtue I didn’t think I deserved. Of course, the irony is that not saying anything could also be a kind of virtue-signalling, too. If it’s concerned primarily with how my silence will “look to others” it simply becomes a way of saying, “Look at how sensitive I am… I get the issue well enough to hold my tongue….”

Lord have mercy.

Because what I am discovering as I process all this is that just like there is a desire to self-justify when it comes to the evil or racism, there is also a desire to self-sanctify, that is to find a solution to the problem of racism that does not require the supernatural transformation that only the Holy Spirit can effect.

Please don’t get me wrong. I believe that social action, speaking out, taking risks, political protest, personal sacrifice, engaging in dialogue, resisting evil, that all these things have a place. They are essential if we are ever to see justice roll down like a mighty stream. Racism is real, a deeply rooted sin that needs to be addressed as such. But the problem of racism is not that we are racist, per se, it’s that we are unsanctified, and if we were entirely sanctified we would find within us the spiritual resources necessary to address and resist the problem of racism.

I believe that the call which is sounding across the country right now, as cities burn and people protest, is not just a call for us to confront the evil of racism. I believe it is that, but that there is another call, echoing within it, the way deep calls out to deep. It is the call of Jesus to all his followers, and especially his white followers in positions of privilege, to be sanctified today by the Holy Spirit. This is what he always offers us when we repent of any sin: not just a divine forgiveness, but a divine change that empowers us to be different.

Without that divine change in my heart,  I honestly fear that my best efforts to fight racism on my own may amount to little more than an empty signal of a phoney virtue I’m not sure I really have.

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On Racial Equality and Justification by Faith

The other day I received some constructive criticism about my ministry, pointing out a blind spot I had when it came to promoting (or in this case, failing to promote) racial diversity in our community. It was a relatively minor critique, all things considered, but given the racial tensions in the political atmosphere these days, it stuck with me.

I write this, of course, as a middle-aged white male living in one of the most prosperous countries in history, placing me among one of the most privileged demographics on the planet. Acknowledging that, I say what I’m about to say very cautiously, and offer it with an open hand. Through all last week, as news about the protests in the States began popping up on my social media feed, and it became clear to me that a real political groundswell was emerging, I chose not to comment on it in any of the social media channels available to me. This was not because I was trying to bury my head in the sand and ignore an issue that is as close to the Lord’s heart as racial equality is, but simply because, as a middle-aged white male, I believed I was the last one who had any right to speak. Rather than pipe up with my own ignorant point of view—what do I know about systemic racism, who has never had any doors closed to me because of the colour of my skin?—I did my best to listen to the points of view of others. In this I was trying to follow the advice of one of my spiritual heroes, Francis of Assisi, who sought more to understand than to be understood.

But here’s what I found, by seeking to understand: I have within me an impulse towards self-justification that is grievous to the Holy Spirit.

I say this because when I received the constructive criticism I mentioned a minute ago, I noticed that my instinct was to think of all the reasons why the critique could not be true—to “justify myself” in my own eyes. I wouldn’t say my response was defensive, necessarily, but the first thing that came to mind was everything I had done to promote racial equality in my sphere of influence. I won’t list them here, because the sum total of them is pitifully small, truth be told. The point is just that, my gut reaction was to pull out my “spiritual ledger” and start reviewing all the times and all the ways I had proved myself to be “a swell guy” when it comes to this issue. I’m not sure I would have named this impulse as “self-justification” before this week, but as I mulled it all over, I came to see that this is exactly what it was.

I believe this grieves the Holy Spirit for two reasons. First, and foremost, because if I am a Christian, then the gospel I have believed tells me that I cannot justify myself; and it’s because I can’t that God has already justified me in Christ. Regardless my just deserts, he has declared me righteous in the death of his Son. Bear with me, if you see the problems that appear when we try to apply the doctrine of Justification to the issue of racism, because I see them too, and I will get to them in a minute. But theologically, I think that the only way forward for someone in my position—someone, I mean, who has lived his whole life benefiting from systemic inequality (whether he realized it or not)—is to admit that there is no human justification for it, and to turn, a repentant sinner needing grace, to the justification that God offers us in the death of his son, our Lord Jesus Christ.

We aren’t used to thinking about the doctrine of Justification as something that can, and should, impact human relationships. We have been conditioned to think about it solely as a theological abstraction, a truth that puts us in right relationship with God and paves our way to heaven, yes, but a truth that shapes the very structure of our interactions with others? That’s a different ball of wax, isn’t it?

And yet, as I process the impulse towards self-justification I mentioned above—the way my heart grasps so quickly for all the reasons that I couldn’t be as bad as it looks—I am coming to see how important it is for Christians to allow the justification of Christ to transform the way we experience and respond to the issue of racism in North America.

In The Cost of Discipleship, German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer argues that Jesus is not only the mediator between us and God, but he is also, for that very reason, “the mediator between us and all other [human beings].” The same idea emerges in Bonhoeffer’s Life Together, where he suggests that “within the spiritual community there is never, in any way, whatsoever, an ‘immediate’ relationship to one another”; and “Because Christ stands between me and another, I must not long for unmediated community with that person.” One of the ways we “long for unmediated relationship” with others, I think, is by thinking up all the reasons we are “justified” to be in relationship with them, instead of acknowledging ourselves as culpable sinners in need of the grace God offers. (Surely a divinely reconciled relationship with others is not least among his graces towards us?)

I believe with all my heart this is true. The problem, of course, is that if it’s applied in the wrong way, it can amount to saying simply, “Yes, maybe I benefited from racial inequality as a white person, but Jesus says I’m okay, so it doesn’t matter to God, and certainly shouldn’t matter to you.” If it sounds like I’m saying that then I’m not communicating well here at all.

Because there is a different way of applying the Doctrine of Justification to every-day human relationships. It involves honestly facing the ways I’ve knowingly or unknowingly participated in sinful power structures and saying simply: I can’t justify that. There is no human justification. And then, because the Gospel proclaims that even that sin is nailed to the cross, I discover in God the grace genuinely to repent. This is not cheap grace (to quote Bonhoeffer one last time), but neither is it an empty, virtue-signalling repentance. Because if I am justified in Christ, then I must surrender my own self-determination to Christ, and allow him to mediate my every interaction with others. Only there will I learn truly what it means to do justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with Him.

This brings me in the end to the second reason self-justification grieves the Holy Spirit. It is because so long as we are determined to justify ourselves, we will stay blind to our blind spots. After all, if I saw what was really happening in all the places I’m not looking, it might leave me feeling uncomfortably culpable. Better not to look there, right? Worse than keeping us blind, though, self-justification is all kinds of likely to make us defensive, arrogant, even cruel, ignoring the honest protest of others, and so missing opportunities to grow in Christ-likeness. Because to hear those protests the way Christ would, we would have to acknowledge all the ways we have been unjust, and are therefore unjustified. Rather than do that, it’s easier to bluster, minimize, equivocate, evade and dismiss.

May the Lord have mercy.

And thanks be to God that he has had mercy, and offers it to us all today in Jesus Christ. May we find in him the humility and the strength to work together, as we labor towards that day—the day the Holy Spirit himself is labouring towards—when all of God’s people, gathered from every nation, tribe and tongue stand together before the Lord, justified freely, together, by his grace.

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Eating, Praying, Loving (Part III): Thank You Brother Fish

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Many years ago my dad and I took our kids on a fishing trip to a local fish farm near London. They were just old enough at the time to find fishing fascinating, but still young enough that the delicate work of worming the hook and unhooking the catch fell to me.

My son actually landed the big one that day, a nice, plump rainbow trout just waiting to be caught. When he brought it in, it was so feisty that I had some difficulty keeping it still to unhook it, and accidentally left some ugly bruises on its otherwise beautiful rainbow flanks. Later, when we brought in our catch, the staff at the fish farm cleaned it for us, for our cookout that afternoon.

I have clear memories of watching my Dad clean the fish on fishing trips in the Rockies when I was a kid, so I watched nostalgically as the skilled workman turned our beautiful rainbow trout into a feast fit for a fish fry.

If you’ve never seen a fish cleaned before, I should say that it’s not an especially pretty job, but it’s not all that gruesome, either. I’ve certainly never been squeamish about it. But while we watched, I thought about the bruises I’d left on the side of the trout while bringing it in, and I thought about its sleek body flexing and fighting in my hands as I did, just moments earlier. It might have been because I was standing there with my young son, and was feeling especially, paternally, philosophical, but whatever the case, it struck me in that moment unlike it had ever done before, that this thing that we would be eating later in the day was a living creature, just the same as I was. And from there it was only a hop, skip, and a jump to this reminder—something we all know but forget so easily—that food not only gives life, it also takes it.

I think this truth—that the food we eat comes from living creatures—is one we need especially to remember in this modern era of industrialized food production, where the foods we consume are produced somewhere out of sight and out of mind, and seldom bear any resemblance to the animals they once were. Time was you raised the goose before you cooked it—it actually lived with you—and you personally participated in the act of slaughter that brought it to your table. Chicken nuggets, of course, look like no part of any chicken I’ve ever seen; and it’s easy to eat a dozen of them without ever thinking about the fact that what you're eating once scratched the dirt with a forked foot, fussing and clucking with the very breath of life.

Any biblical spirituality of food, however, can’t go very far without facing this truth squarely, that food is death and life together, and that what we eat, we eat at the cost of another living creature. You see this idea all over the place in Torah. First, we notice that the original Adam and Eve were actually created to be vegetarian, that eating meat, though it is clearly sanctioned by the Creator, was not the Creator’s original idea. Humans only became carnivores, according to the biblical record, as a result of the Fall, and after they had emerged from the ark on the other side of the flood (Gen 9:3). Similarly, we see the repeated prohibition against eating blood, because as far as the Bible is concerned, the life of the creature is in the blood (Lev 17:14). To eat blood would do violence to the sanctity of life itself. The same logic seems to underscore many of the food laws we find in Torah—the prohibition against cooking a goat in its mother’s milk for instance (Ex 23:19), or the restriction against eating a mother bird and its own eggs together (Deut 22:6). There are probably other reasons for these commandments, too, but one of their cumulative effects is that they require us to respect the “aliveness” of the things we eat.

However important it is for us to feed ourselves, the Bible seems to be saying, don’t do it without acknowledging how sacred the life is that you are taking to do so; after all, that life too is a gift of the Creator, and he has compassion on all things he has made.

Christian theology usually emphasizes the human being’s distinctness among all the creatures in the creation, and for good reason. We alone are made in the Image of God, and in this, God set us apart from all the other works of his hands. It is possible, however, to emphasize this truth in a way that overshadows a second, equally important truth: that we share a sacred kinship with the rest of his creatures.

This is not a philosophical statement; it’s an exegetical one. Genesis 2:7 describes the creation of the Adam in this way: that God “breathed the breath of life into his nostrils,” and so the man became a “living creature.” That’s my translation. Older Bibles translate that last part as “living soul,” but that’s misleading. The term in Hebrew is nep̄eš ḥay-yāh—“living being”—and it is the exact same term that Genesis 1:24 uses to describe all the “living creatures” that God created on sixth day of creation. In the same way, the term for God’s “breath of life” that brings the human being to life in Gen 2:7 (niš-maṯ ḥay-yîm) is the same term that Genesis 7:22 uses to describe all the living creatures that are destroyed in the flood. Inasmuch as the breath that animates us is the same breath of the same Creator that animates them, we have a kinship – what theologian Charles Sherlock calls a “sixth day solidarity”—with all God’s creatures great and small.

If our eating is to be fully biblical, then, it must acknowledge this kinship in some way. This does not necessarily mean we should start eating vegetarian—though I have eaten vegetarian at various seasons in my life, and found it to be an extremely satisfying diet. It does not mean, either, that we should all go back to organic farming—though recently I went to visit a friend who raises chickens and came home with a dozen farm-fresh eggs that were not only more tasty, but also more meaningful to me, since I had actually met the chicken they came from. These things actually may be part of someone’s response to the Biblical witness.

But even without an over-haul of our entire diets and the food system that supports them, there are ways we can be more biblical when it comes to this aspect of life. Here’s a simple idea for starters. The 12th Century mendicant monk, Francis of Assissi, is famous for his deeply spiritual love for literally “all creatures of our God and King.” That hymn, in fact, is based on his second most famous prayer, The Canticle of the Creatures, in which he praises the Lord by singing the praises of the sun—“Sir Brother Sun,” he calls it—his sister the water—his brother the fire. In short, he praises the Lord, by celebrating his kinship with the rest of the Lord's creation.

What if, in our eating, we took a page from St. Francis’s prayer-book? What if the next time we sat down at table and said grace, we actually thanked the Lord for our brother the cow, our sister the chicken, our cousin the rainbow trout, and indeed, thanked them, our creaturely kin, for giving their lives to feed ours? If we did, we might take one step closer to understanding the true meaning of Psalm 104:28-30, when it reminds us that the same ruach of God that throbs in our lungs throbs in theirs also, and like us, when God takes it from them, they too die and return to dust, just as surely as we will do.

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Salome Danced, a song

Every once in a while a songwriter hears a song in his head and is able to bring it to life exactly as he heard it. Other times he has no idea what he was trying to say, even after the song is fully realized. Those two things aren't mutually exclusive, necessarily, and this song, "Salome Danced" was a bit of both. It's sort of a musical midrash on the story of Salome in the gospels. I'd had the piano riff floating around for a while, and thought it sounded vaguely Persian. When I started the lyrics, I wanted to write something that captured both the sensuality of the story but also the terrible pathos. What I got is certainly what I heard, but even so, I'm not entirely sure what it means. 




Salome’s eyes danced glittering like the stars at midnight
Salome’s eyes danced ebony behind the veil
Brimming like a chalice of gold full wine dark red
Salome danced (she danced) and St. John lost his head

Salome’s hands danced fragrant and dripping with myrrh
Salome’s hands danced fluttering behind the veil
Soaring like a bird of paradise with wings outspread
Salome danced (she danced) and St John lost his head

For a fleeting glimpse behind the seven veils
St John lost his head
For a lingering touch of those gilded nails
St John lost his head
Just to lift her to his lips like the holy grail
Yeah St John lost his head

Salome’s feet danced jangling with bells of silver
Salome’s feet danced luminous on barefoot souls
Gliding like a vapor of incense with a graceful tread
Salome danced (she danced) and St John lost his head

For a fleeting glimpse behind the seven veils
St John lost his head
For a lingering touch of those gilded nails
St John lost his head
Just to lift her to his lips like the holy grail
Yeah St John lost his head

And O I see her hiding in the shadows
Somewhere in the darkness a little girl cries
While mamma was waiting
And the party guests were watching
And Herod was laughing
Ah something inside her died

For a fleeting glimpse behind the seven veils
St John lost his head
For a lingering touch of those gilded nails
St John lost his head
Just to lift her to his lips like the holy grail
Yeah St John lost his head
Like the tragic ending of a sordid tale
Yeah St. John lost his head

Conspiracies Exposed (Part III): The Secret about Conspiracy Theories

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I know a man who is an avid consumer of conspiracy theories. He keeps abreast of them all, from the most rabid rants of Alex Jones to the most erudite speculations about the proliferation of G5 technology. He is especially consumed with conspiracy theories of the biblical variety, and emails me periodically wondering where we are on the “timeline of biblical prophecy,” if I think some recent event or other in global politics might actually be the work of the Anti-Christ, or if this or that political leader may in fact be the Beast of Revelation. Often his emails are accompanied by videos from websites with titles like “bannedvideo.com,” which connect the dots between the Bible and world events more freely than a toddler with a crayon in an activity book.

If it sounds like I’m making fun, I am really not. I’ve shared in previous posts how harmful I think conspiracy theorizing (as distinguished from “conspiracy hypothesizing”) can be, how complex the issues are, and how high the stakes. As a pastor, I care about this man a great deal and have often wished we could have real dialogue about some of these ideas. The challenge, of course, is that conspiracy theories tend to be all-or-nothing ways of thinking, making real dialogue about them fraught with tension. If the evil-doers really have infiltrated the highest levels of the government and the furthest reaches of the news media, then anyone who offers any evidence to the contrary is either their dupe, their flunkey, or their instrument. The framework has animosity built into it.

Early on in my relationship with this man, I was really struggling to figure out how to respond to all this pastorally, so I reached out to one of my theological mentors for advice. We talked it all over, and before I knew it, we were theologically theorizing about conspiracy theories themselves. At one point, my mentor said something that completely recast what a conspiracy theory is, for me, and why we find them so compelling.

“A conspiracy theory,” he said, “has the same spiritual allure as the occult, and may actually be the opposite side of that coin.”

I asked him to explain. The person with a conspiracy theory believes they have acquired “hidden knowledge” about spiritual realities that are invisible to the average person, he said, that they have seen through reality, so to speak, and have accessed a deeper, darker reality on the other side. This is the same kind of thing that “occult knowledge” offers, the ability to “see through” the everyday and access an invisible reality lurking on the other side. And for both, the allure is the same: we want to access “hidden knowledge” because we believe it will give us power. In the case of occult knowledge, the offer of power is clear. Dr. Faustus summoned Mephistopheles because the devil offered to give him what he wanted. In the case of a conspiracy theory the offer of power is less obvious, but just as alluring. It promises us that if we just “trust the theory” we’ll have power over our enemies (because they won’t be able to take us in), the power to escape their manipulations.

I’m still trying to decide if this theory about conspiracy theories has something to it or not. The unconvinced would point out that, even if they share “hidden knowledge” in common, conspiracy theories and occult practices have opposite impulses. The one wants to align with evil, while the other wants to resist it.

Fair enough; but if there’s any connection at all, it would explain why so many conspiracy theories seem to offer such detailed, elaborate, even intimate knowledge about “what the devil’s up to.” It would also explain, possibly, why so many of the conversations I’ve had with bona fide conspiracy theorists, have had such an undercurrent of fear, anger, xenophobia, and often even glimmers of hatred to them. If you can know a tree by its fruit, the fruit of a full-on conspiracy theory does not seem to be peace, hope, joy or love; at least not in my experience it doesn’t.

Maybe “occult” is going too far though. There was a heresy that the early church rejected, way back in the early days of the faith, called Gnosticism. The term comes from the Greek word for knowledge, because the Gnostics believed that what would save you, in the end, was knowledge, especially hidden knowledge about spiritual things, knowledge the initiate had and the uninitiated didn’t. Gnosticism probably had a finger or two in the “occult pie” itself, but it was not an occult system per se; at least, it didn’t have to be. The Gnostics weren’t looking for magical power necessarily, they were after hidden knowledge, because they believed that salvation lay in knowing "the secret."

In their case, the "secret" involved ascending through an elaborate system of spiritual planes inhabited by all sorts of spiritual beings, but the key is that the world as it was—the world you could see and touch and love with the creator’s love—was to be rejected in favor of a “higher,” “better,” “more-real” world that was invisible, and immaterial, and attained only through secret knowledge.

I wonder if the worst of modern day conspiracy theories are really a form of Gnosticism, an offer of salvation—literal salvation from the machinations of the mysterious Beast of Revelation—not by trusting solely in the saving work of Jesus Christ, but by trusting in our own ability to figure out what lies “behind the veil.” Even if they’re not exactly a gnostic in nature, I’m wary of conspiracy theories for the same reason the early church was wary of Gnosticism: because they don’t teach us how to love the creation with the Creator’s love. Instead they teach us to suspect it, to distrust it, to reject it, in favor of something “more real” we think we can see going on behind the scenes.

The unconvinced would push back here, probably.

What could be more loving than to help people see “the truth?”

Possibly so; as a preacher, I’ve certainly committed my life to that end. But in the case of a conspiracy theory, I would suggest that because it’s always after some “hidden cause” for evil that must be lurking somewhere where no one can see it, it can distract us from addressing the very real, very obvious evil that we face in the “real world” every day: the pain of the exploited, the suffering of the oppressed, the need of the poor, the turmoil of the lost. These are things the Gospel wants to address literally, and it’s possible to become so consumed trying to work out the Number of the Beast, that we miss the million opportunities we face every day to come alongside the victims of the Beast with the grace, the love, and the healing power of the God.

After all, as Christians we possess the greatest secret of all—the Mystery of Divine Love as revealed in the Gospel—and this is, as the Apostle Paul reminds us in Colossains 1:26, an open secret, one that God has made fully public in the death and resurrection of his Son. According to Revelation 12:11, only this public declaration of the love of God in Christ has the power to overcome the Beast, and however much he may conspire, it alone will triumph, in the end.

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Of Games and God (Part III): The Quest for Transcendent Immersion

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One of my favorite video games as a kid was that 1980s cult classic, Dragon’s Lair. If you somehow missed the 80s, all you need to know is that Dragon’s Lair was a fantasy adventure game, where the player guided a valiant knight named Dirk the Daring on a quest to rescue the fair Princess Daphne from the clutches of an evil dragon named Singe. This was in the days when home consoles were still in their infancy, so Dragon’s Lair was one of those quarter-munching arcade attractions of a by-gone era. It played largely like an elaborate choose-your-own-adventure game, where every level presented you with a series of puzzles or booby-traps, and you had to decide if you would, for instance, turn left or drink the potion, draw your sword or dodge right. There was some careful timing and some sharp reflexes required, for sure, but most of it was trial and error.

What set Dragon’s Lair apart from its contemporaries, however, were the graphics. In the days when most other games were still mucking about with pixelated space invaders or monochrome pac-men, Dragon’s Lair had found a way to harness cutting-edge laserdisc technology to present action scenes on-par with those of an animated Disney feature, the likes of which had never been seen in a video-game format before. As a result, Dragon’s Lair allowed the player to immerse himself in the adventure more fully and more magically than any other game in the arcade. While you didn’t exactly become Dirk the Daring (the advent of the true action adventure RPG was still a few years away), still, Dragon’s Lair invited you into a compellingly-realized, intricately-textured world, where your actions progressed a living, breathing story, and your imagination—because it had to work less-hard to fill in the visual gaps—was free to soar.

Held up against the standard of today’s most popular video game adventures, of course, Dragon’s Lair looks somewhat naif. It’s almost a bit too-cute-for-words, next to the sprawling kingdom of Hyrule in Breath of the Wild, say, or the cinematic (and rather grown-up) cut-scenes of The Witcher 3. A purist would probably argue that it doesn’t even qualify as a true RPG. At the time, however, Dragon’s Lair sparkled as an alluring hint of what a video game could be: not just a fun digital pass-time, but an immersive journey into an alternate world.

“Immersion” is, in fact, the technical the term gamers use to describe all this. The degree to which a video game recreates an experience so vividly that you can allow yourself to believe it’s really happening to you, is its level of “immersion.” Gamers sometimes evaluate games based on how “immersive” it is, and often the more elaborate role playing games will allow independent programmers to develop modifications to the original code (called “Mods”) that increase a game’s “immersion” even more. The immersive nature of video-gaming, I think, is one of the aspects that sets it apart from other human activities. In reading, for instance, you are invited to immerse yourself in a story, but the world of the story—its sights, sounds, movements and sensations—must be supplied entirely by the imagination. Cinema is much more sensory, of course, but the worlds created through film are no-where near so interactive. Only video games bring the human imagination to life so fully, in a genuine, interactive, multi-sensory experience.

“Immersion” is an important concept, not just in gaming, but in thinking about gaming theologically, too. If it’s true that one of the appeals of gaming is the way it allows you to escape the world-as-it-is and immerse yourself in an alternate world, so completely and so compellingly that it imaginatively transfigures the real world as you do, then in this gaming intersects with one of the main themes (and appeals) of theology, too. Like video games, theology also acknowledges and affirms the human desire to experience a world unlike the world as it is, to be taken out, above, or beyond every-day human experience, and immerse ourselves in something transcendent. C. S. Lewis famously put it like this: “If I find in myself desires which nothing in this world can satisfy, the only logical explanation is that I was made for another world.” Interestingly, as a way of illustrating that truth, Lewis invented the magical world of Narnia, a place that imaginatively satisfied a child’s desire for transcendent immersion, by poetically offering them an alternate world to explore. In doing so, of course, he also provided us with one of the 20th Centuries great symbols for the Christian life: becoming a King or Queen of Narnia in the everyday world of modern England.

Great care is needed here. The transcendence that theology offers is not some computer-engineered projection of human desires, sustained by our own ingenuity, any more than it is an imaginary kingdom for children, dreamed up by a creative storyteller. The transcendence that theology offers is, in fact, the world-as-it-is, transfigured by the holy and heavenly presence of the very Spirit of God Himself; and remarkably, as we immerse ourselves in that presence, we find ourselves not taken out of the world but sent into it, to love it and embrace it and supernaturally redeem it with his grace and truth. The immersion that theology offers, you might say, immerses us more fully than we could ever imagine in the ordinary stuff of earth, by immersing us completely in the extra-ordinary stuff of heaven.

So in this theology and video-games are plying different trades. But as an analogy for how theology does its work—and, perhaps, as evidence that this work speaks more intimately to the human heart than we might otherwise have expected—we can look to the immersive worlds of today’s best video games. In them we discover that the human spirit is in fact longing for an experience of the transcendent, that we are wired for something that nothing in this world can satisfy. And by them we are reminded that to satisfy this longing is not just our deepest need, but also a source of sheer delight.

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