On one level, Christian faith is such a simple thing. But is it, really?
A woman used to visit our small church to sing and to teach a Sunday School class. For this, she used three sheets of construction paper – one black, one red, one white. From these she cut, for each child, three little squares to convey the Christian message. Black represented our sinful human nature; red stood for the sacrificial blood shed by Jesus on the cross; white was the redeemed transformed life for those who had faith.
The Christian salvation message could scarcely be conveyed more simply.
But maybe this simplicity is misleading. Let me introduce another story pointing in an opposite direction. A couple of years ago I gave a talk for graduating theological students in which I set out the “mixed-up-ness” of Christianity. Later one of the graduands made open mock of the mixed up speaker. I guess he preferred the kindergarten simplicities by construction paper theology.
The Christian tradition, however, gives us a whole package of interpretations that address the confusions, ambiguities and contradictions that life throws up at us.
1) Are we humans good people?
Answer quickly: Yes or no?
Well, actually the answer is not so simple. On the one hand, we possess an original righteousness symbolized by creation in the image of God. On the other, we suffer from original sin symbolized by the prideful fall of Adam and Eve in the garden.
We are both good and bad.
You probably always knew that.
But recognize that this is not typically sequential. The identical action can be simultaneously loving and exploitative. The word I often use for this is “dialectical.” The term mixed-up-ness may be more to the point.
2) Is the historical process (political, economic, creative) tending towards a good end or is it so corrupt as to eventuate in tragedy?
The problem of history is perhaps the leading theological problem of our time because it runs into everything else, from nuclear war to global warming.
What is the nature and destiny of the temporal flow of events in which we have to struggle?
The Christian answer: It’s mixed up.
One way the Bible looks upon this is to say that the powers of the present age (marked by historical evil and tragedy) are mingled with the powers of the age to come (with their assurance of divine triumph).
Accordingly, we have to be on guard against superficial utopianism on the one hand, and capitulating to cynicism on the other.
3) Is the natural creation a beautiful and beneficent place of golden wheat fields undulating in the breeze and peaceful paddles into the sunset? Or is nature the crucible for raging forest fires and treacherous tsunamis that strike without warning?
I resonate to Mary Oliver’s ebullient celebration of connection with the grass. She wants to learn “how to fall down into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass.”
I have a sharp and cherished memory of a night time race, bare foot and hand in hand with a friend through the dew-soaked grassy cover over the reservoir behind McGill University.
Yes, grass is great.
But I have a contrary experience of grass. In India, moving cautiously and fearfully in the darkness through the grassy field separating our sleeping hut from the meditation hall hoping the grass was holding no frightened cobra.
Or, on the Isle of Elba, thrashing uphill through thigh-high grass to reach our bungalow, mindful of our hosts warning, “attentione le vipere.”
Grass was not our friend.
The point is that nature does not allow gooey, sentimental self-deception of how things are mixed-up in reality. A sunset paddle on a placid Algonquin lake coexists with the roaring and devastating tsunami.
Creation is good, but it’s fallen. As Paul says in Romans, “we know that the whole creation has been groaning and in travail together” awaiting its redemption (8:22).
The Christian teaching recognizes the mixed-up-ness of the world and our lives.
That’s the point.
That’s what makes it radically honest, morally mature, and profoundly insightful.