MAKING AN IMPACT: Church

For a summary of what I’m hoping to accomplish in this blog series (in the third week of every month of 2018), I recommend reviewing my explanation here.

One of our values at Impact Campus Ministries is church.

It might seem like a silly value, but let me explain why we put it on the list.

Too many times, para-church organizations get started because of some need that the local church isn’t meeting — oftentimes because it would not be practical, wise, and good stewardship of their time and resources. There are many ministries like this and almost any missions organization you can think of will fit into this category. While some of these efforts are less para-church than others (e.g., sending missionaries to international settings is less about filling an unmet need and more about sending missionaries to do the work in other corners of the world), a bulk of these organizations will be like this. Homeless shelters, food pantries, and benevolence ministries will be like this. Pregnancy crisis centers and free medical clinics will be like this. Campus ministry organizations often make the list.

Because of this natural gap, there is often an animosity that grows, whether intentional or unintentional. Oftentimes these organizations are started because of a frustration that the local church isn’t meeting an obvious need. That chip on the shoulder is an unhealthy attitude that festers in the church world. In places like campus ministry, it can become easy to critique the local church, throw stones at their methods, and start our own thing to replace the broken piece. In return, churches become increasingly frustrated with organizations critiquing without helping, wanting to take without giving back, and always draining the resources of a church community that struggles to give generously.

And so, ICM wants to be sure we state up front that we value the local church.

We do not think we are here to critique or fix the state of the church. We are not the answer to all the world’s problems. We are simply here to help. And we want to start by coming alongside what God is already doing in His local church.

We will not try to replace the local church. We will not talk negatively about the local church. And while not all of our teams will have intentional partnerships on the level that some teams do (like our team on the Palouse), we will seek to partner with the local church whenever that partnership will be effective and efficient.

We want to do our job in a way that encourages all of our brothers and sisters to run the race well. And we want to do our job in a way that makes the church want to return the favor.

If we truly believed in the work of MILIEU (that we spoke of before) then we have to be active partners with the local church. You may remember Eric Wright sharing his stories of having students exposed to different ideas. We want to remind ourselves that if we are Impacting the U because we believe it will Impact the World, then we have to keep our students surrounded by healthy diversity and a wide demographic of people. This kind of exposure will enhance their personal development, make them better professionals, and increase their ability to lead others later in life. How could we truly pursue this and not value a connection with the local church?

And yet, it is easy to miss. And so we have to remind ourselves by putting it on our list of values.

Top 12 of CiHD: #2

For a summary of what I’m hoping to accomplish in this blog series (the first week of every month of 2018), I recommend reviewing my explanation here.

We’re down to the last two posts in the Top 12 Blog Posts at Covered in His Dust series. Today, we’ll look at the second-most-viewed post in the history of my blog. Just what is the second-most-viewed post, you ask? Well, it’s an old post on the book of Obadiah. You can read the original post here.

Wait… what? Obadiah? You’ve got to be kidding.

I’m not kidding, but more on that in a moment.

In this series, as we look at each post, I want to ask three questions: why, what, and what else? Why do I think these posts got so many views; why were others drawn to them? What do I hope people found when they got here; what do I hope they heard? Finally, what else have I learned about this; what else would I say about these ideas?

WHY THIS POST?

I have absolutely no idea.

I couldn’t even begin to offer a respectable guess on why this was my second-most-read post. I can’t find any keywords that jump off the page. I can’t think of any topical connections. While the ancient city of Petra may have some draw to it, I’m not sure it would justify that kind of viewership.

What about the old Christian rock band? Yeah, I don’t think so, either (although you're welcome for that link).

Moving along…

WHAT DO I HOPE THEY FOUND?

I hope the reader found a helpful dialogue about a book that we spend very little time in. Writing about these prophets is fun because a person could count the number of sermons or lessons they’ve heard on Obadiah on one hand (if there were any to count at all). So to bring an unexcavated portion of the Text out and shine a flashlight on it is a great discipline to be a part of. I hope that experience was beneficial for my readers.

I also hope this conversation on a seldom-talked-about book of the Bible provided a new look at a conversation that we do have often — that is, how we treat other human beings, no matter who they are. These conversations or behavioral soundbites can become like white noise in our world of spiritual development. We hear the “be nice to others” lesson so much that it loses its potency. A book like Obadiah has the potential to jar us to attention because of the unusual setting where the conversation takes place. The context is like its own inductive teaching.

WHAT ELSE WOULD I SAY?

I think I would be tempted to wax eloquent on how this post is even more applicable now than it was when I first wrote it. The original was posted on June 4, 2014, in a much different world than we live in today. In the last four years, a few things have changed politically, ecclesiologically, and digitally — and mostly not for the better. We now seem to demonstrate even less ability to show the minimal amount decency and respect to others. Quite simply, we need to figure out how to disagree and still have a dialogue. We need to figure out to the find the humanity in our brother/sister and not demonize their perspective or their history. We need to figure out how to learn from each other and seek understanding like buried treasure.

And that means this book has a deeply serious message for us: God expects a certain amount of human decency from all people — how much more the people of God! It is not OK for human beings to treat other human beings in need with disdain or negligence. I have always felt like the words that fell from Cain’s lips in Genesis — “Am I my brother’s keeper?” — are the words that sit unspoken by the people of Edom in Obadiah. And God’s response is telling: “Yes, you are your brother’s keeper.” We all have to look out for our brothers, our half-brothers, our distant cousins, and even our enemies.

It doesn’t matter if the person you are talking to wears a MAGA hat or voted for Hillary. It doesn’t matter if they are pre-millennial, post-tribulation, Muslim, or Baptist. They are people; they are divine image bearers with thoughts and values that lead to convictions, just like you. There is a shared humanity being lost and I have great faith that our children are going to teach us how to reclaim it. My prayer is that their instruction will come in time, before the condemnation of Obadiah passes for too many of us Edomites.

CHURCH HISTORY: AD 1550 thru AD 1650

NB: For readers who missed it, I suggest going back to review my setup to this section on church history to know about my disclaimers. For the graphics used in this post, the timelines are not to scale, and the dates represented are not intended to be exact. They are meant to be visual aids for understanding the larger conversation.

When I first studied Church history, the Reformation was taught as this unbelievable time of change. For obvious reasons, this period of history was seen as the hinge point for the modern era. It was one of the major peaks in the history of Christendom.

I know it feels like I was setting up a “but” statement, but I actually agree with these statements and I’ve come to see those statements from even a bigger and wider angle than what I believe was being taught to me. Originally, this period of Church history was taught to me in light of the progression of Protestant, Christian development.

But this development did not happen in a vacuum. In fact, this period of Christendom was accompanied by an unbelievably tumultuous time of cultural change that immediately followed it. Without the Reformation, I don’t believe Christianity would have survived the 200 years after it — a statement that has very little to do with what most of us would call theology or Church ecclesiology.

Even as I say that, I wonder if we can separate the two worlds (Church history and non-Church history). It is incredibly difficult to imagine a “pre-French Revolution” world (coming next in our discussion) in which there was no separation in thought between church and state, between faith and science, between poetry and pragmatism. So I suppose one might even be able to make the case (as in the Hannam book I mentioned earlier) that the Reformation actually led to and/or catalyzed what we refer to as the Age of Enlightenment.

The late sixteenth century brought us two people who had a large impact. John Knox is known as the man who founded the Presbyterian Church, which happened to be the flavor of Reformation in Scotland, seemingly overthrowing the presence of Catholicism and Anglicanism there. While those from a Presbyterian background would probably appreciate a much larger treatment of Knox’s contributions, it could be simplified into the style of government the Presbyterian Church is named after. Unlike other movements in the Protestant era, Knox brought an approach to church polity and governance known as the “presbytery” — a group of representatives who would lead the church as a governing body, rather than a hierarchy of papacy, priesthood, or the like.

In reference to the preceding paragraph, it’s hard to quantify the affect this would have on the thinking that would eventually lead to a political style of governance based on a democratic republic. While many of these ideas are based on Roman systems of governance, the impact of John Knox on the application of representative leadership is undeniable.

Another name in the mix during the Age of Enlightenment is Nicolaus Copernicus. Copernicus had this crazy idea that our universe was not revolving around the earth; he proposed the idea of a universe revolving around the sun. Using his expertise in science and mathematics, Copernicus was just trying to be honest with his findings.

While most of us read this portion of history with a smirk, we often fail to realize the impact this had on the world of theology. In this period of history, the Church’s theology rested on a geocentric understanding of the universe. Using the idea that the earth is the center of the universe, the theology of the “heavens” was such that differing levels of the heavens — and ultimately God’s dwelling place — could be found at further levels of these concentric circles of universal existence. While most of us would see this as a simple scientific adjustment and part of the learning process — the Church in this day did not. The prominent belief was that the proposal of Copernicus (and what we call heliocentrism) was threatening the very existence of God. His teaching was deemed by many to be heretical and an attack on the teachings of the Church.

As a side note, I hope my readers are realizing the relevance of this conversation to our own century of Church history. It’s a world where new scientific understandings threaten our understanding of theology and the Bible. Instead of jumping to hasty conclusions, we may want to take a lesson from this chapter of history. If we don’t, the next few centuries may not look back on our day with much kindness, but might see us as incredibly foolish, just as we do the sixteenth century.

But I digress. We will cross that bridge in due time.

While it’s probably not a shocker to most of my readers, science will not backtrack and affirm the status quo of the Church; quite the opposite, in fact. Galileo is one scientific giant who would champion the cause of Copernicus and, through the use of telescopes and other mathematics, prove (in many ways) the validity of the heliocentric universe. While this incredibly uncomfortable growth in the Church took more than a century, it happened nonetheless.

The Church accepted (albeit quietly) that their thinking was flawed, made adjustments to their theology (albeit not gracefully), and moved on.

Blaise Pascal is a Christian philosopher who helped make some radical advances in science and mathematics. In a lot of ways, Pascal would set the stage for what we understand as Newtonian physics. Through the work of men like this, the Church was able to move — even if it was an awkward movement — through the Age of Enlightenment. This growth curve would not end any time soon, and the hard work of Christian evolution through this era is only the beginning. In many ways, we are still in the awkward growth phase of this era. To this day, we continue to have a hard time appreciating the world of faith and science; often seen as enemies, we have never truly recovered from the adversarial tone struck during the Age of Enlightenment.

And so we continue to study this growth in an effort to appreciate our own place in the story.

CHURCH HISTORY: AD 1300 thru AD 1550

NB: For readers who missed it, I suggest going back to review my setup to this section on church history to know about my disclaimers. For the graphics used in this post, the timelines are not to scale, and the dates represented are not intended to be exact. They are meant to be visual aids for understanding the larger conversation.

So Christendom emerges from the period of the Crusades in horrible shape: completely beaten up, completely broken. Having spent everything they had on war and conquest, they now turn their sights toward rebuilding. In order to do this, they need to find a way to get resources.

Well, in a world that is largely illiterate, where the educated are priests and leadership, studying the Text that is written in an archaic, foreign language is difficult. It becomes simple to manipulate the truth that the masses depend on you to communicate. With a little shaping here and a little gloss there, the narrative of God quickly becomes something that can enslave people in a system of fear, guilt, and control. At its best, you had priests and Church leadership who were maintaining a commitment to sound doctrine, modeling a self-sacrificial life, and instilling a message of hope into people who needed the gospel so badly.

At its worst, we saw the rise of the Age of Indulgences. While the entire conversation is incredibly complex and usually oversimplified (as even I am about to do for the sake of brevity), the general understanding of the problem is relatively accurate. As parishioners came for their typical interaction with the sacraments, the Church leveraged this need to help control the general populace.

To understand this conversation, one needs a basic understanding of sacraments. To the orthodox faith of the Middle Ages, people believed you would interact with the many different practices of the Church in order to experience the grace, mercy, and forgiveness of God. You might remember the liturgy and order we spoke of when we talked about the contribution of Gregory the Great. The Church had identified seven sacraments to serve as corporate practices for experiencing the dispensation of grace. For these early thinkers, there is nothing magical about the sacrament itself, other than its service as a conduit to receive the grace of God into your life. Things like baptism, the Eucharist, confession, marriage — these all allow the grace of God to flow into your life.

You can imagine, as people come to engage these sacraments and anticipate the reception of God’s grace in their lives, it is a short leap for the Church to start manipulating this system for their ends. At some of its worst moments, the Church was even offering forgiveness at a monetary price. Come to confession and absolve your sins by going through the appropriate motions — and offering the appropriate gift.

In short, we are seeing a rabid abuse of Church leadership and priesthood.

Not all the educated were prepared to turn a blind eye to these abuses. The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries are littered with names of those who stood up against this corruption and fought to reveal the gospel as it ought to be seen. Two popular names in the world of scholasticism are Wycliffe and Hus.

John Wycliffe — Wycliffe was known for consistently attacking the imperial privilege of the Church at large. He hated the separation between the clergy and the laypeople and thought the gap should be dissolved. While he railed against the pomp of the high Church system, he also argued that the Text should not be held captive in an ancient language. He wanted the Scriptures to be accessible for all and thought they should be translated into the common vernacular for people to understand in services. In a lot of ways, Wycliffe paved the way for the Reformation.

John Hus — Sometimes referred to as the true father of the Reformation, it’s hard to see Hus apart from the work of Wycliffe. Hus led an informal resistance to the papacy and was eventually executed for leading what history knows as the Bohemian Revolt. There were two successful regional Crusades against the reigning papacy. While his methods may be subject, his thinking deeply shaped the thought process in western Europe and definitely laid the groundwork for what we know as the Protestant Reformation.

Part of the issue in this period of Catholic history was the geopolitical context. With a new sense of what I call “medieval nationalism,” the power structures in the world were shifting entirely. No longer was the world ruled by one giant papacy; as Christendom tried to figure out how to hold onto their outdated systems of governance, the world changed around them. People were seeing their allegiance aligned more with the powers of the state and country than they were with a foreign church. People associated with being French or German as a more immediate identification than they did with being “Catholic.”

This made it easier and easier to reject foreign papacy and rule. The papacy of Avignon actually shifted the seat of power away from Rome and into France for a period of seven popes, leading to what would later be called the “Western Schism” — when the Western Church was spilt between western and eastern Europe.

The Church continued to suffer from divisions and schisms.

In light of the many abuses of religious power, the Protestant Reformation was simply waiting for good leaders. How “good” these leaders were is left to historical debate. I will leave my personal opinions out of it; so much material has been written about the Reformation and I encourage you to do your own study. Needless to say, people like Martin Luther, Ulrich Zwingli, and John Calvin led reformations away from the Catholic Church in their respective lands, each with their own nuances to their understanding of theology.

At this point, we begin to split over the smallest of nuances. No longer held together by a common hierarchy or papal leadership, we were free to disagree over the smallest details, often fueled by our nationalistic identifications. However, each national identity will get a denominational affiliation: Germans would be Lutheran, the French might be Calvinistic Reformers, and the Swiss would follow Zwingli.

Their many opinions splintered the faith of Christendom, and we don’t have time for that full conversation. However, as far as the good this movement did, it is hard to overstate. The invention of the printing press allowed the widespread distribution of the Text in the language of the common person. The Reformation changed the face of education and cinched up the gap between the educated and the uneducated, especially in reference to theology — both orthodoxy and orthopraxy.

And while this might seem like an unbelievable amount of change for the world to endure, the change is only beginning.

CHURCH HISTORY: AD 1000 thru AD 1300

NB: For readers who missed it, I suggest going back to review my setup to this section on church history to know about my disclaimers. For the graphics used in this post, the timelines are not to scale, and the dates represented are not intended to be exact. They are meant to be visual aids for understanding the larger conversation.

We left our last discussion with the world of Christendom having been rocked to its core. With the departure of the Eastern Church, the danger is that it would raise a whole new sense of papal rejection. If folks can just tell the pope no, then what does that mean?

Well, as the saying goes, nothing brings a people together like a common enemy.

To be fair, I’m not going to wade into the spicy conversation surrounding the Crusades and present myself as a historian or expert. I know talking about this period of history can be incredibly charged emotionally — as it should be. I know some historical reconstructionists have attempted to put a “positive spin” on the Crusades and what the intentions were behind them. I will be attempting no such explanation. For me, this chapter of Christian history is dark and marked with all sorts of problems, which most of us have simply kept out of sight and out of mind.

I remember the chapter in Blue Like Jazz by Donald Miller where he spoke about his experience at the reverse confessional. He talked about how they set up a confessional booth at Reed College and — instead of receiving confessions from others — they offered confessions on behalf of their faith, both current and historic. I have not stopped hearing the kickback from readers or thinkers who say, “But why would I/they apologize for something that happened centuries ago?” This question shows our blatant disconnection from our faith and where it comes from. This disconnection stops us from being able to think critically about how we could ever get to that place. And a dark history disowned by the descendants of it will be bound to repeat itself. Some would say we are on the verge of such an era right now.

But I won’t try to present myself as an expert — only as a learner, a student of history, and a fellow thinker.

It’s my belief that in our desperate need to unify Christendom, we seized an opportunity that arose at just the right time. Shortly after the East-West Schism, the Islamic movement was making its way to capture Palestine. While there is no way I am going to give you a history of the Islamic faith here, it would be helpful to know that as Mohammed was doing the work of canonizing his teaching and creation of the Qur’an was underway, there were three dominant worldviews at play within Islam. There was what we might have called a progressive movement — which wanted to live peaceably with everyone. There was a moderate movement that saw itself as the correct faith, and others as largely apostate, but did not seek to convert them by force. There was also a radical branch of the faith bent on violent overthrow of the pagan idolaters.

If this sounds familiar, that’s because it is. We studied Judaism of the second temple period and its different sects. We have seen the same movements grow and disappear within Christian history, as well. (I cannot move on without recommending Battle for God by Karen Armstrong, a wonderful look at the history of the three faiths and the rise of radical fundamentalism in each.)

I find this helpful because most people choose which groups they want to represent their own faith story. While Christians would (typically) never define themselves by the fringe, radical edges of fundamentalism, we consistently do the opposite to the “other” in the conversation. I would say the movement of Islam toward capturing Palestine did not represent the Islamic faith as a whole (not even close). It did have a lot of traction at this point in history, though, and it did provide a perfect opportunity for the Church in the west to find a common enemy and use it as a scapegoat to bring unity to a struggling kingdom.

This is my unauthoritative (and probably oversimplified) opinion on this point of history. I am no expert in the Crusades, so I will not try to explain my way through it. Let’s just say that these few centuries were an absolute mess, and the mess seemed to galvanize an unfortunate unity in Christendom.

But before we move on to the next chapter of history, it would be worth pointing out that not everyone is out fighting in the Crusades.

They never are. We let the poor, the uneducated, and the commoners do that work for us.

Simultaneously, as the Crusades are being fought, we witness the rise of “scholasticism” and an ever-widening gap between those who have and those who have not. This is a gap we are well acquainted with today; we often talk about the gap between the wealthiest 1% and the rest of the world. In the Middle Ages, this gap was driven more by education and academic privilege. While the middle and bottom classes were fighting in the Crusades, the cream of the crop was being taught and educated at a level we simply hadn’t seen before. With the rise of science and the accomplishments it brought, a university system that we still understand and rely on today began to take shape. Apprentices were taught not only how to read and write (which was an incredible advantage, by the way!), but they were also instructed in the blossoming fields of mathematics, science, theology, and the arts — most of which was driven by the Greek philosophers of the Hellenistic era.

One of the most revered names in Church history is often that of Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas, without a doubt, changed the face of Christian history by bringing into a logical order the many fields of education. Aquinas showed how the world of mathematics and science could blend with the world of philosophy and theology, and the western world would never be the same. The way we understand our education system today is largely shaped by the perspective brought to us through the work of Thomas Aquinas. Many would call him the father of logic and reason.

I’ll resist my desire to be critical until we conclude our study of history, but I’m hoping my western-minded readers will notice that somewhere around a millennia before this, we lost some things that were absolutely crucial to the health of the Church. While I realize we are all still enamored with the pillars of Hellenism today, I hope we learned enough to critically examine just how lost we are 1,000 years after the Judaic movement of Jesus. But I digress.

Or do I? We shall see.

CHURCH HISTORY: AD 300 thru AD 500

NB: For readers who missed it, I suggest going back to review my setup to this section on church history to know about my disclaimers. For the graphics used in this post, the timelines are not to scale, and the dates represented are not intended to be exact. They are meant to be visual aids for understanding the larger conversation.

The tension between this growing movement and the empire of Rome continued until just after AD 300. Persecutions would intensify and subside at different points along this curve, usually in response to political necessity and upheaval. The early Christian movement happened to be the second fastest growing religion in the Roman empire for two centuries. The fastest growing religious movement was that of Mithra (a Roman offshoot of what is typically called “Zoroastrianism”). Emperors were sometimes known to claim to be Mithra incarnate, and the last emperor who made such a claim was Chlorus, the father of Constantine. His birthday happened to be December 25, and the Constantinian Dynasty (started by Chlorus) enacted an imperial Advent celebrating his birth — but I digress.

Most people familiar with this period of history will know that Chlorus’s son Constantine changed the course of Christian history. While the story is generally understood, the details are quite muddy depending on exactly who is telling the story and what their ultimate goal is. Constantine found himself battling over a strategic bridge; should this bridge be captured, many said the fall of Rome would be imminent. As history tells the story, Constantine seemed to be backed up against enormous odds. According to his testimony, as Constantine considered the possibilities of retreat, surrender, or certain death, he had a vision where the Christian God showed him a shield with the Greek letters “chi” (Χ) and “rho” (Ρ) on it. He understood the meaning of these inscriptions to be, “In Christ you will conquer.”

The stories differ (one record is from Lactantius and the other is from Eusebius), but it seems that Constantine was “converted” that day, before the battle. He put this new chi rho symbol on the soldiers’ shields and they went on to victory. Constantine would credit this great Roman victory to the Christian God who delivered him from certain death.

Historians are all over the map on the truth of Constantine’s testimony. Many think the story is completely legitimate. Some say Constantine was a political genius and knew the writing was on the wall as Christianity continued to take a toll on the crumbling Roman empire, with now more than 80% of the empire being Christian. According to this theory (which happens to be my own opinion), Constantine took an opportunity to seize the momentum of popular opinion and attempted to synchronize the paganism of his father’s Mithra worship and the growing Christian momentum. Others claim there is some truth in the middle, that Constantine had some experience, maybe even misinterpreting the vision, and then later struggled to figure out what this change in worldview meant politically for an already divided Roman empire.

Nevertheless, this moment in Roman history changes the course of the Church forever — and as I see it, certainly not for the better. Many folks will flippantly state that Constantine made Christianity the state religion; this is simply not true. Constantine made it legal in the Roman empire to be a Christian. There were no more penalties and persecutions for Christians. It wasn’t until much later in the century that Theodosius would enact new legislation to give incentives to those who claimed the Christian faith (practically making Christianity the “imperial religion”).

This newfound freedom meant Christians didn’t have to run for their lives anymore. Great, right? Maybe. The problem was that ever since the breakup of Jews and Gentiles, the Christians had fallen prey to that pesky Gnostic Crisis. While they struggled to stay alive, these larger theological issues stayed on the back burner. But now that folks were free to return to lives of “normalcy,” these issues took center stage. The different effects of Gnosticism drove the Christians in this almost-completely-Gentile movement to argue about the nature of Jesus. Was he man? Was he God? Was he somehow both? As they struggled to find answers to questions the Bible wasn’t asking, they needed to make a decision on what we would later call “orthodoxy” before the movement completely splintered.

This led to almost two centuries of councils — church meetings where the movement sought to make decisions on how to move forward. While this medium had worked before (think Jerusalem Council), I think it was set up for a rougher road now that the movement was divorced from the Jewish backbone of truth and Text. While there were seven major councils in all, there are four that seem to stand out historically. I will attempt to close this era of history by simplifying (and oversimplifying) them and their major decisions here.

COUNCIL OF NICAEA (AD 325): The divinity of Christ. Ordered by Constantine himself, this council convened to deal with the teaching of Arianism (among other topics). Arianism is the belief that Christ is separate from God the Father. Out of this council, they drafted the Nicene Creed, which declares Christ is of one substance with the Father.

COUNCIL OF CONSTANTINOPLE (AD 381): The humanity of Christ. Ordered by Theodosius I (mentioned above), this council convened mostly to deal with the teaching of Apollinarism, the belief that Christ was not truly human. They eventually expanded the Nicene Creed, making adjustments that expounded on their previous ideas. They added Apollinarism to their small, but growing, list of heresies.

COUNCIL OF EPHESUS (AD 431): The singularity of Christ’s personhood. Theodosius II called this council to deal with the teaching of Nestorius, who taught (although history is divided on whether or not it was him) that Christ was actually two distinct ‘persons,’ existing as God in one and man in the other. The council declared that Christ was in fact one person at all times; they also declared no one was allowed to publish any teachings rivaling that of the orthodoxy declared in these councils. Furthermore, they discussed the teaching of Pelagianism, which rejected the idea of original sin and complete human depravity (taught in Augustinian theology). The Church sided with Augustine and rejected Pelagianism.

COUNCIL OF CHALCEDON (AD 451): The fullness of divinity AND humanity in Christ. Convoked by Marcian, this council dealt with the teaching of Eutychian heresy, declaring that Christ, while being one person, was not completely God and completely man simultaneously. Known as the “Hypostatic Union,” the council’s declaration spoke to the fact that Christ was both 100% God and 100% man simultaneously.

If all of this sounds just a bit ridiculous, as if we’ve lost the plot of the story, I would say yes and no. These theological issues are actually very significant. However, it does seem as though we’ve lost the plot of God’s great narrative entirely. This might not have been necessary if — again — we hadn’t lost touch with our Text and the methodology of relationship with God (as we’d understood it for 1000 years prior through Judaism), and if we hadn’t let Gnostic ideas invade our faith. This is the beginning of a downhill slide I’m not sure we’ve ever recovered from. (But I have hope!)

It’s not long after this when Rome falls. This was not a surprise; the original strength of the empire had disappeared even before Constantine. The Romans were in constant flux and political instability. Eventually the Roman empire loses the vastness of its reach and becomes what history knows as the Byzantine Empire.

1 CORINTHIANS: Broken Body (part three)

If this is the context of the first letter to the Corinthians — if they are struggling with selfish division on one hand and rampant cultural compromise on the other — how will they move forward? Paul suggests the way to conquer the perils of their situation is love.

Surprised? I hope not. We shouldn’t be.

In 1 Corinthians 12–14, Paul moves into an interesting argument. He begins dealing with the unique giftedness of the the Corinthian church — namely, the miraculous gifts God has bestowed on them. Note that this is not written to address rightness and wrongness, or to give my personal opinions about the miraculous gifts. Clearly something unique is taking place in Corinth that isn’t taking place in Philippi or Colossae or Rome. God gets to do whatever God wants, so I’m the last person in the world who’s going to have the audacity to claim such gifts aren’t in use in the church today (albeit in conjunction with some pretty helpful instructions about how to use them properly).

But what does become relevant to our discussion here is that even the spiritual gifts have become an issue of contention and division for the people of God in Corinth. Their desire for selfish identity and glorification seems to know no bounds. They are using their own giftedness to promote their place within the Body of Christ. And couched in the middle of this three-chapter discussion is what we’ve often called “The Love Chapter.”

What many people have often noticed is that 1 Corinthians 12–14 (and maybe beyond) is a chiasm. While I have seen the chiasm identified and described in different ways, it appears Paul has intentionally placed this conversation about love in the center of a larger conversation about unity. Paul seems to be convinced that the way for them to deal with their divisions and find a place of orderly worship is to lay down their own desires and offer themselves to others in love.

This has actually been a thread for Paul throughout the letter. Look at Paul’s argument from chapter 6:

“I have the right to do anything,” you say—but not everything is beneficial. “I have the right to do anything”—but I will not be mastered by anything. You say, “Food for the stomach and the stomach for food, and God will destroy them both.” The body, however, is not meant for sexual immorality but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body. By his power God raised the Lord from the dead, and he will raise us also. Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ himself?

Or this very similar argument four chapters later:

“I have the right to do anything,” you say—but not everything is beneficial. “I have the right to do anything”—but not everything is constructive. No one should seek their own good, but the good of others.

No one should seek their own good, but the good of others. Apparently, Paul thinks that considering others before ourselves is the way to rid our faith community and our worship from the struggles of selfishness and idolatry. Paul says it isn’t enough to make sure that “it’s OK” to do something or to be something. It’s more important to consider the impact on others. Not is my behavior permissible, but is my behavior beneficial for others. Not is my behavior allowed, but is my behavior constructive for the larger community of faith.

Love God. Love others.

When you love others, God says you are loving Him.

I’ll close with some thoughts about the Eucharist — the Lord’s Supper. It seems that in the quest to find what is considered sacred by the Corinthians, even the Lord’s Supper didn’t escape their selfishness and division. Consider this from chapter 11:

In the following directives I have no praise for you, for your meetings do more harm than good. In the first place, I hear that when you come together as a church, there are divisions among you, and to some extent I believe it. No doubt there have to be differences among you to show which of you have God’s approval. So then, when you come together, it is not the Lord’s Supper you eat, for when you are eating, some of you go ahead with your own private suppers. As a result, one person remains hungry and another gets drunk. Don’t you have homes to eat and drink in? Or do you despise the church of God by humiliating those who have nothing? What shall I say to you? Shall I praise you? Certainly not in this matter!

For I received from the Lord what I also passed on to you: The Lord Jesus, on the night he was betrayed, took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, “This is my body, which is for you; do this in remembrance of me.” In the same way, after supper he took the cup, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood; do this, whenever you drink it, in remembrance of me.” For whenever you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.

The Eucharist resembled a guild feast before it did the broken body of Christ.

A broken body, indeed. This body of believers is broken beyond recognition. Yet Paul will invite them to a table that can remind them of the solidarity they share will all those bothers and sisters who worship alongside them. At the table, we are reminded of the fact that no matter who we are, we come — needy, beaten, battled — to the table of God. We find a reminder of the last night Jesus spent with his disciples and the way he served them selflessly. We are reminded of the thing that brings us together and makes us members of the same family.

We have wrestled in the previous two conversations about how much our day and culture shares in common with that of Corinth.

There is encouragement in the fact that now — 2,000 years later — we are still celebrating the same Eucharist and partaking in the same reminder of all that brings us together. I pray those regular moments will remind us of love incarnate; that we would remember the life and ministry of Jesus and how he loved; that we would be able to examine our own broken body (the Church!) and be invited to a table of grace and solidarity with our fellow brothers and sisters.

A broken body, repaired by the broken body of Christ.