If you would be my David
Then I’d be your Jonathan
Yeah, I’d take off all the trappings
Of the glory I got on
And I’d remove my armour
And I’d offer you my crown
If you would be a David
To my lonely Jonathan
And I would stand before you
Unclothed and unashamed
And I’d show you all my secrets
Just to hear you whispering my name
And if it meant I could no longer
Be my father’s son
Still I’d let you be my David
If I knew that I could be your Jonathan
Cause there’s a friend who sticks closer
Than any brother could
There’s a water that is thicker
Than the purest drop of blood
There’s a love that is more wonderful
Than any I have known
So hold me to your heart my Holy David
And I swear that I will be your Jonathan
O I swear that I will be your Jonathan
I swear that I will be…
And when the night is lonely
And the shadow’s running high
If I took my shot into the dark
Would you swear to never leave my side
And when my journey stumbles
And I’ve fallen on my sword
If I swore to be your Jonathan
Would you swear with all your heart to be my Lord?
Cause there’s a friend who sticks closer
Than any brother could
There’s a water that is thicker
Than the purest drop of blood
There’s a love that is more wonderful
Than any I have known
So hold me to your heart my Holy David
And I swear that I will be your Jonathan
O I swear that I will be your Jonathan
I swear that I will be…
My David, Your Jonathan
Dominion: A Book Review
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.
On New Years Resolutions and Rules of Life
I don't exactly know when this started for me, but over the years I have grown to love the first few days of the new year. I find it very rewarding to look back over everything that the previous year brought, and then look ahead to everything the coming year might.
I especially love the looking ahead.
I usually spend a good day or two in the last week of December setting goals for the coming year, writing out lists of all the books I hope to read over the next 12 months, thinking through all the creative projects I hope to tackle, dreaming up new dreams for my career, my family-life, my personal growth. ThenI take time to think through my daily and weekly habits, which of them are helping me in life, and which are holding me back, and plan out whatever course-corrections seem necessary.
To be honest, I might be a bit obsessive about it; but if I am, it's only because over the years I've seen how doing this on a annual basis has helped me experience things and accomplish things that I probably never would have if I just let life come at me from any direction it happened to.
As a pastor, of course, I'm conditioned to think through all aspects of life from a theological perspective, and when I do that with my tradition (read: ritual) of setting new years resolutions, I see a couple of theological themes that inform the process.
On the one hand, the Scriptures have some poignant cautions about seeking too much to be the master of your own destiny, of planning your life two confidently, without acknowledging God's sovereignty over it. In James 4:13, for instance, it warns against planning out a year of "buying and selling and getting gain," and exhorts us instead to say simply, "if the Lord wills it, we will live and do this or that." In other words, make your plans with a healthy does of humility, admitting that they're all contingent on the will of God. In another place it talks about how a man can make all sorts of plans in his hearts, but in the end it is the Lord who establishes his steps (Proverbs 16:9). In that sense, a New Year's resolution made too resolutely may blind us to the will of God unfolding in our lives. It may even idolatrously close us off from it.
On the other hand, the Scriptures remind us of the wisdom of making careful plans (Prov. 21:5), of taking careful inventory of the cost of the steps we will take in following the Lord (Luke 14:28), of learning well how to number our days (Psalm 90:12). In this sense, it is altogether wise, a matter of good stewardship, in fact, to regularly take spiritual stock of where your life is headed and how it's getting there, and then to make the heart-commitments necessary to move your life in a direction that honors God.
In his phenomenal book, God in My Everything, Ken Shigematsu talks about all this in terms of having a "rule of life." The terminology comes from the monastic tradition, where Christian monks would make spiritual commitments to live a certain way-- praying at regular intervals, reading scripture, fasting in healthy rhythms, and so on-- as a way of giving structure to their spiritual journey. He uses the analogy of having a trellis for a vine to grow on. The trellis is simply a structure that helps to stabilize the plant as it grows, giving it a framework to hold to as it bears fruit.
This is how I've come to think of my new years resolutions. More than simply goals that I'm resolving to accomplish in the coming year, the whole process, for me, is about revisiting my rule of life and determining which aspects of the trellis is helping the plant to flourish, which have fallen into disrepair, and which are no longer useful.
I'm sharing all of this to explain why I've started posting at terra incognita again, after almost nine-months of inactivity. When I started this blog back in 2009, some 1045 posts ago, I hadn't read God in My Everything, and I didn't really have much sense of what role blogging might play in my spiritual growth. Over the years, however, this quiet corner of the world-wide-inter-web has served as a bit of a sanctuary for me, a place to process ideas that don't really have any other outlet in my life, a place to test-run this or that theological theory before voicing it in a more public venue, a place to be creative, think out loud, and share some of the spiritual flotsam that bobs to the surface from time to time in my life as a pastor.
As life-giving as it's been, though, I almost decided to wrap it up this year. I've blogged on everything from the theology of video games to the true meaning of Halloween, and I was starting to wonder if I hadn't run out of things to say. At the same time, I have found that my schedule is far fuller these days than it has been in the past, and even when I have the time to devote to it, I haven't had much energy to blog
But then, as per my usual, I sat down at the end of 2022 and took careful stock of my "rule of life." As I did, I realized how much blogging has given me over the last 14 years. Between sharpening my writing muscles through regular use, and building me an archive of fascinating ideas I've come across, blogging has been a very rewarding practice, and I didn't quite feel ready to say good-bye to it. This might very well be my last year at terra incognita, but after careful, prayerful reflection, I decided to keep "regular blogging" on the goal list for at least one more year. I can't exactly say what "regular" will mean. My hope is that it will involve a post a week, but my experience tells me it's wise not to make any commitments as grandiose as all that. I do know that I want this year on the blog to be more spontaneous and less edited than some of my previous writing on this space has been. If hearing one pastor's unfiltered reflections on God, life, faith, love, words, and spirituality is at all of interest to you, let me invite you to join me for the journey.
If the Lord wills, I hope it will be a productive year of blogging, whatever he has in store for us in 2023.