Reading through Galatians in my devotions, I simply am struck with its power and beauty, its revolutionary character. Something new always hits me with it, and this time around (I cannot count how many times I have meditated through Galatians) – this time around something new struck me. I will attempt to bring this out by meditating through Galatians and James.

I call this an “Anabaptist” reading, as it loosely conforms to an Anabaptist soteriology, which historically has seen obedient action to be apart of faith, grace, and salvation. As the cherished axiom states, there is no “faith without following.” It is also, loosely “New Perspective” in its understanding of Paul, but I will show that this perspective is in agreement with Anabaptist principles of interpretation of the law where any conviction is evaluated by  (1) a Christocentric concern, (2) the leading of the Spirit, even beyond the literal teachings of Scripture, and (3) interpretation in the law of love.

In Chapter 2:11-12 it reads, “But when Cephas came to Antioch, I opposed him to his face, because he stood self-condemned; for until certain people came from James, he used to eat with the Gentiles. But after they came, he drew back and kept himself separate for fear of the circumcision faction.” Here it seems that Paul connects the “circumcision fraction” with those sent from James.

Now within Paul’s writings, in particular Rom. 4:12 and Col. 4:11, the circumcision party is also simply those “circumcised” or the “Jews,” which suggest that the group was must larger than just James. Knowing what Paul accuses this group of also and what we know of James, James is innocent of the hypocrisy Paul accuses some of the Judaizers of. It was a wide spread mentality of Jewish Christians, who wanted to hold on to their Judaism, even it if meant imposing aspects of it on Christians.

So, we can see that the Jewish-Christians, an understandably conservative fraction within the church, saw what Paul was doing as promoting moral laxity. While they did not use the word, it is not far-fetched to characterize Paul as a “liberal” within this movement: emphasizing his immediate religious experience over sacred writings, seeking to revise cherish beliefs, etc. I use this word vivaciously because Paul was not a liberal in the modern sense of being concerned about foundational principles of individual reason and rights. Perhaps “radical” is a better word. Whatever the case, James, a conservative, was not pleased. Many commentators attempt to lighten his words in his epistle to make it sound like his arguments are not directed at Paul’s theology and his followers, however, the polemic reads fairly plainly in James 2:14-26:

What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if you say you have faith but do not have works? Can faith save you? If a brother or sister is naked and lacks daily food,  and one of you says to them, “Go in peace; keep warm and eat your fill,” and yet you do not supply their bodily needs, what is the good of that? So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead. But someone will say, “You have faith and I have works.” Show me your faith apart from your works, and I by my works will show you my faith. You believe that God is one; you do well. Even the demons believe—and shudder. Do you want to be shown, you senseless person, that faith apart from works is barren? Was not our ancestor Abraham justified by works when he offered his son Isaac on the altar? You see that faith was active along with his works, and faith was brought to completion by the works. Thus the scripture was fulfilled that says, “Abraham believed God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness,” and he was called the friend of God. You see that a person is justified by works and not by faith alone. Likewise, was not Rahab the prostitute also justified by works when she welcomed the messengers and sent them out by another road? For just as the body without the spirit is dead, so faith without works is also dead.

Notice a few things that suggest is directed to Paul’s followers. James and Galatians are early documents written around the same time. James and Paul use the same vocabulary of “faith and works,” “justified by faith,” “justified by works,” etc.  James cites Abraham’s example, same as Paul (cf. Gal. 3; Rom. 4), as if in a proof texting battle. Now, most conservative commentators refuse to recognize that this is a disagreement between Paul and James (or each others’ followers – some of the accusations Paul and James lob at their opponents don’t match them, but perhaps radicalizations of their positions) mostly because they assume the early church somehow must have had perfect doctrinal agreement, which is a really idealistic and a rather silly assumption. The New Testament documents controversy after controversy that the early church leaders faced, within and from without. They were human after all. The more evident interpretation is that between Paul referencing James as part of the circumcision group, the confrontation at the Council of Jerusalem, and James’ polemical tone in his epistle, we are witnessing in the record of the New Testament canon a doctrinal feud between a form of Jewish-Christian conservatism and Paul’s radicalism. Paul, obviously, eventually won out.

Nevertheless, James seems to think that justification by faith removes all moral obligation, which is why he attacks it so hard. However, as we will see, Paul does not have anything against doing what is right or obeying loving commands as part of trusting Christ. The two misunderstood each other perhaps.

So, let’s draw near to the text of Galatians to understand what Paul is doing. Paul comes to the realization that removing circumcision is the way to go. It is interesting how he comes upon this. It is a matter that displays his charismatic experience. In Gal. 1:12 he reports that his gospel message, which includes the abrogation of circumcision, was from a “revelation of Jesus Christ.” This is not just his original vision on the road to Damascus, as he continues to report that “after 14 years…I went up in response to a revelation” (2:1). This was intensely personal, since no one else had this revelation, not Peter, James, Titus, or Barnabas. No one else. Paul, led by a private experience, was compelled to cease the practice of circumcision in his mission to Gentiles. Titus, even more interestingly, does not receive a revelation, but simply does not feel “compelled” as if it was simply not a burden to his conscience. This is why I, with tongue-in-cheek, refer to Paul as a liberal: he appeals to religious experience and reports Titus’ appeal to personal conscience.

Refusal to obey the laws of circumcision is no small step. Gen. 17:13 writes, “So shall my covenant be in your flesh an everlasting covenant.” It was a prerequisite for the Hebrews to participate in the Passover (Ex. 12:44). In fact, the eschatological promises of Isaiah 52:1 prophesy a day when the “uncircumcised” will never enter Zion. In the New Testament, Jesus was circumcised even, and he never explicitly denounced the practice. So, we cannot under-appreciate just how radical a move Paul is making here.  He is virtually doing the equivalent of a Catholic ripping out the Apostle’s Creed from the liturgy, or for a Baptist to remove personal Bible reading (or, perhaps, the holy ordinance of the pot-luck). Paul is calling into question the heart of the religion he was raised with.

Some would say that Paul abrogated circumcision because it was apart of the “ceremonial law,” which has been a standard Christian interpretation from very early on. There are several problems with this:

(1) There is no distinction in the NT that divides the OT law this way. Grouping all the  abrogated commands together as “ceremonial” was the interpretation of post-biblical thought. Doing so, however, does not work well when we realize that Jesus abrogated ethical commands also, such as divorce laws and retaliation laws (Matt. 5-7).

(2) There is no distinction in the OT that divides the OT this way either. The laws of Deuteronomy, as any contemporary commentary will point out, flow from the Ten Commandments. Thus, all specific commands do not fall into a schema of “ceremonial, governmental, and moral” but rather all the commands are read as specific applications of the Ten: all are understood to be moral. The ceremonial was ethical in the Jewish mindset. In fact, as any Jewish commentary would point out, to disobey circumcision, because it identified God’s people as a sign of the everlasting covenant, was an ethical, not ceremonial offense. It would be the same as a Christian today refusing to be apart of a church or refusing to pray. Similarly, to disobey the Sabbath was apart of the Ten Commandments, and thus, deeply ethical (something that Jesus transgressed by healing and picking wheat on). Consumption of pork was an ethical guideline, not just for health reasons as in the popular estimate, since it seemed to be associated with deviant pagan ritual (cf. Isa. 65:4; 66:17 – although the exact details of these rituals are unknown).

(3) We should even note that Paul has no problem with circumcision being practiced among Jewish Christians as Peter taught (Gal. 2:1-10). Paul was comfortable with multiple practices as long as both “remember the poor” (Gal. 2:10). In fact, in Acts 16:1-5, Paul insists that Timothy, whose mother was Jewish, ought to get circumcised in order for it not to hamper his missionary efforts with Jewish people. Paul does not have anything against circumcision, it is really the way in which it was held by some. It was the manner or “mode” in which it was held, we might say.

(4) Paul retained other ceremonial aspects of the law such as baptism and communion, both obviously given new importance by Christ, but nevertheless, both are based on aspects that could be understood as ceremonial. Baptism, especially, is based on the ritual washing laws of Leviticus, which if Paul was out to remove all ceremonial aspects, the idea that dipping in water for the forgiveness of sins one would think would be  among the first to go. Thus, Paul is not objecting to circumcision based on its ceremonial character. That is simply inaccurate.

So, why did Paul remove circumcision from the retirements of new Gentile believers? Here our inherited Reformed theology offers us sloppy answers. It is not that it is wrong (Luther and Calvin resolutely insisted on God’s grace, to which we all inevitably say a big “Amen” to). But it used categories in a way that could be more precise. Paul is not saying that salvation does not require any effort on human parts or that obedience is part of understanding one’s salvation. Paul is quite explicit in the later end of Galatians that the Law does apply to all believers as it is interpreted through love (Gal. 5:14). There is the “law of Christ” that must be obeyed (Gal. 6:2). The law is still in effect, but it has  been reinterpreted, such that actions that are against this love, namely the vices of 5:19, mean those who do them will “not inherit the kingdom of heaven” (5:21). Here Martin Luther’s interpretation of justification by faith is utterly unhelpful, as disobedience, even if one believes in Christ, is seen to have severe salvific consequences.

Now, losing the inheritance of the kingdom of heaven does not necessarily mean one is not going to heaven, but it does put it in doubt and it does mean that one has shut a form of grace out of one’s life in the present. Grace does in fact depend on, at least in part, what a person freely does. For instance, merely trusting in Christ while one chooses to continue in a drug addiction does cause one to lose grace in the present. A drug addict may end up in heaven by trusting God’s free grace, but that person is not “inheriting the kingdom of heaven” in the present if the addiction drives them to harm themselves and others, swallowing them up in shame and self-deception. A part of “inheriting the kingdom of heaven” is removing that addiction so that the person can have a better life. Thus, in Paul’s understanding, obedience is important still. Obedience is new life (similar to the Anabaptist emphasis). It just begs the question of what kind of obedience.

Paul is not against doing something as part of grace, he is against a particular perversion of “works.” As we see in Galatians, it is not that he had a problem with ceremonial aspects. He is not against the idea that obedience is apart of grace. As we saw, the ceremonial-moral interpretation of the OT law is a false dichotomy. So what is his reason for abolishing circumcision then?

(1) He is against any action that sees one’s salvation as self-initiated (such as how the Judaizers were appropriating circumcision), which  downplayed the surprising, unmerited gift of Christ. Obedience is apart of grace, but obedience does not make God have grace on us. Repentance is only possible because of the opportunity God gives in the first place. Obedience is what God and people do together, not just the person by his or her own autonomous strength. Paul does not have anything against obedience, he has something against self-righteous attitude in obeying, the “holier-than-thou” complex. It is the mode of action that he is disturbed at.

(2) Since the event of the Spirit was a spontaneous event, that did not happen through taking on full observance to the law and circumcision in particular (Gal. 3:3-4), the idea that doing so after the fact was putting trust in the wrong place. He was against circumcision being used as a barrier, preventing Gentiles from coming to Christ, especially since the gift of the Spirit was happening while Gentiles were uncircumcised.

(3) For Paul (and this is prevalent in inter-testimental literature also), circumcision became associated with the ethnic identity of Jews, that which separated them from Gentiles, and Paul concluded that this was something that should not be imposed on the non-Jewish converts. It seems that Judaizers made this a cause for arrogance and superiority over Gentiles, in the same way men could claim religious superiority over women or free people over slaves (thus Paul’s axiom in Gal. 3:28). Paul saw the confidence in circumcision as ideological, causing racial inequality, regardless of the fact that it was “biblical,” and therefore sought to revise it. Since Christ became a curse (Gal. 3:13), God’s presence was found in that which was excluded from the law, no marker between those with the law (Jews) and those outside (Gentiles) could be left up, except those that functioned to bring people close to Christ and those that were loving.

(4) Within the context of Gal. 5, Paul seems to suggest that circumcision was abrogated because it was unloving, or at least ineffective in the Galatian context.”For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision counts for anything; the only thing that counts is faith working through love” (Gal. 5:6), or “the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. Against such things there is no law” (Gal. 5:22). This insinuates, if the Galatians are evaluating their moral obligations they had inherited from the Hebrew Scriptures with such criteria, circumcision will fall short and therefore be non-applicable. This makes sense of why some commands remain while others do not. One can only imagine that the expectation that a new convert had to cut some of their genitals off to be in the church would be perceived by that believers as excessive and unloving!  Meanwhile, ceremonial acts like baptism, Sabbath practice, communion, etc. were not seen as unloving and unproductive for Gentile believers, and therefore still applied.

Trusting circumcision downplayed confidence in Christ’s work; it did not accurately describe the experience of the Gentile Christians, who were given the Spirit (the true mark of whether they were included in Abraham’s blessing) apart form being circumcised; and moreover, the expectation of circumcision was simply unloving. We see here that the removal of circumcision was a radical revision that Paul initiated by a Christocentric interpretation of his Scriptures, a Spirit-led approach, in the law of love, that made him feel justified with forsaking thousands of years of teaching, removing the sign of the everlasting covenant, even to the point of battling it out with his fellow Apostles, who disagreed with him. Eventually, of course, Paul won out, and the Jewish-Christian conservative fraction dwindled.

If this is the way the early Christians interpreted their Scriptures, we should in some way do the same today. The question then becomes how do we apply these interpretive criteria to the Scriptures and the ethical dilemma’s of our day?

So, abolishing circumcision had quite a lot to do with racial reconciliation and equality. It had a lot to do with listening to the Spirit speaking, and prophetically evaluating one’s beliefs. While it had specific theological elements that only Jews and Christians share, its application demands that anywhere a group claims to be closer to God because of something they have, can be seen as ideologically. Whites are not closer to God than Blacks. The rich are not more favored by God than the poor. Straight people are not more loved by God than gays and lesbians, and where there are barriers in the church to reinforce that kind of spiritual inequality, we should follow Paul to tear these barriers down.

My Mother’s Passing

After my wife and I got married, my mother and I were not getting along well. My brother was getting married (he had been married once before). When I met my brother’s fiancée, I could tell that she had a drug background that she was lying about. My brother, working in the US and needing a VISA (an objectionable underlying motive for marriage) rushed into marrying her. I formally opposed my brother’s second marriage because I did not think he was making the right choice. For that, my mother told me that she did not actually approve of my wife, and told me that I was not a productive member of the family.

However, we then heard that my mother’s cancer had taken a turn for the worse in the fall of 2009, (it had reappeared in her liver and she was quickly succumbing to it). My wife and I came home often to help her. I worked at doctoral courses during the week and my wife and I cared for her on the weekends with my sister. As I stayed with her before her passing in hospital, I reflected on the broken relationship we had. Thankfully, in the time in hospital leading to her passing, we were able to reconcile, and she reaffirmed her faith in Christ, passing in peace. I remember the words well when the former pastor of Hope Community Church came for a visit. He read Psalm 23 to her and gently asked, “Susan, you know that the Lord is your Shepherd, don’t you?” To which she smiled, nodded faintly, and a serene look came over her despite the pain she was in. She died at Christmas time in 2009. We had to have the funeral the day before Christmas Eve. I remember that year the whole family, my brother, sister, my wife, and myself all sat around a Christmas tree without any gifts.

Her passing caused deep pain in the lives of my older brother, younger sister and I. We found out that my mother, before her cancer returned, had gotten involved with dangerous people. It seemed that before her cancer was really bad, she was the mistress of one of the mafia in town, something that she only vaguely alluded to before. When her cancer was taking a turn for the worst, she borrowed several hundred thousand dollars from him in order to do a radical medical treatment in Europe. The medical treatment did not work. However, the mobster, concerned now only with recovering the money he gave, came to us expecting us to pay our mother’s debt.

I spoke with this man several times. My impression of him was that he was a terribly wretched man. So obsessed with making money that he no longer enjoyed life. He had multiple homes, but lived in his office, a collection of sports cars, but drove his company truck, a beautiful wife and kids that hated him – all from his unstoppable obsession with making more money. I remember going to meet with this man’s representative to stand up to him and tell him that I was not going to pay him anything. My wife gave me the strength to do this, and, to the man’s surprise, she gave him a good piece of her mind. After I told him that I was not going to give him any money, we were worried that he would come after us. However, in an interesting act of divine providence, he became embroiled in a police investigation.

Christmas has been a difficult time every year. For several years after my mom’s passing, I would re-experience that day in the hospital. I remember her choking on her liquid filled lungs, such that I remember almost fainting at the sound of coffee percolating at Christmas the next year. However, over time it has gotten easier, mostly because I have my children to celebrate Christmas with. These good memories have helped heal the painful ones.

Now, my brother found within a few months after my mother’s passing (which itself was only a few months after his wedding) that his wife was a drug addict, who ran off with quite a lot of his and his company’s money. She got caught with a DUI with possession of controlled substances, and went to prison. However, she also stole a doctor’s certified prescription notepad before running off. I got a call around that time from my brother. Apparently a DEA SWAT team raided his house in the middle of the night, looking for this notepad, rushing into his house while he was in his underpants. My brother admitted that he wished he listened to me. In our conversations in the months following, I talked him through getting his life back into God’s purpose, which also meant going back to church. He eventually listened, and he has been going ever since.

Working, School, and Marriage

My wife and I bought our first home in Bradford and had our first son, Rowan, in 2011. I was working full-time as a doctoral student, half-time as a student pastor at Bradford Baptist, a TA several hours a week for some courses at Wycliffe College, and the following year, I took on a 10 hour per week job of coordinating a soup kitchen. My wife, who then went on mat-leave, used her year off to upgrade her teaching degree from a B.C.S.E. to a B.Ed. Those were extremely tiring times. Money was short and my wife and I got on each others nerves. We both realized we had to rely on each other to get through it all.

I loved doctoral course work. I decided, since I had already spent five years at an evangelical Baptist institution, that I would take courses people as different from me as possible. I studied liberal theology at the United Church college (reading Schleiermacher). I studied Catholic theology with Jesuits (reading Hans Urs von Balthasar), postmodernism with postmodernists, Barth with Barthians, etc. I took deconstructionism, psycho-analysis, critical theory, and philosophical hermeneutics. I studied theologians like Pannenberg and Barth more closely. In my spare time, I read several books by Jurgen Moltman. I studied philosophers such as Aquinas, Kant, Hegel, Ricoeur,  Adorno, Derrida, and Foucault. I took a lot of my courses at the Institute for Christian Studies, and loved their philosophical rigor and Christian radicalism.

Working at the Gathering Spot soup kitchen was one of my favorite places to work. As I often tell people, it is amazing how having meal with schizophrenic individuals once a week kept me sane. It kept me sane because I realized the insanity of our consumeristic, “normal” lives. I was often taught that those in poverty are lazy free-loaders, and of course there are those, but I found that the homeless are homeless well before they find themselves without a roof over their head. Most of the people that came to the Gathering Spot were abused, abandoned, often disabled. They were people that needed hope just as much as they needed a meal, just to get by. Some of the best nights of my life was coming back to Bradford on the bus after singing Karaoke with a 63 year-old man with the intellectual age of a 13 year old that thought was “the next Celine Dion”; or, talking with people who told me, because I was a pastor, how much they hated the church, but after months of listening to them and encouraging them, they would then come to me wanting prayer or an encouraging word from Scripture.

Of course, working at the Gathering Spot made for some of the saddest rides home on the bus also. One cold night in January a man came in after the food was all gone, freezing. Embarrassed we gave him scraps we scrounged up. I sat with him before he left and he said that he was going to try to get into one of the shelters. I prayed him through trusting in Christ for salvation, which he accepted and left. I went home that night feeling terrible, because I wanted to go with him personally, but I was not able to. The next day, I found out that 30 homeless throughout Toronto were found frozen to death.

I was also ministering at Bradford Baptist Church, a Fellowship Baptist Church, while I was fundraising to eventually launch a church plant in a nearby town. I loved working at Bradford Baptist. However, the plan for church planting with the Fellowship came to an end as I met with the association leader at the time, who was a self-described fundamentalist. I spoke about the need for church planting, and he turned the conversation to doctrine. He knew that I supported women in ministry, and he thought that was unbiblical. I told him that I used to hold his view, but after thinking and reading about it, and asking myself, “Could I be wrong?” I now see support of women in ministry to make better sense of the sweep of the Scriptures. He responded, “I don’t need to ask myself whether I could be wrong, I have the Holy Spirit.” This of course implied that my years of studies had quenched the Spirit in me. So, I pleaded with him that Christians needed to work together despite their differences and further the Gospel, rooting ourselves in God’s character, like the love of the Trinity, rather than on secondary things like gender roles. He replied – and this is what he said verbatim – “Gender roles is more important to the Gospel than the Trinity. And, Spencer, if you ever speak opening about this, I will cut your funding.” Now, he meant all this quite politely. He, like any other fundamentalist is a product of a way of thinking, one that sees church unity only possible by unquestioned conformity and exact uniformity of doctrine. I get that way of thinking about unity, but I just don’t think the early church was that uniform (James Dunn’s Unity and Diversity in the New Testament changed my paradigm on that). Unity for me is now seeing Christ in those different from me, working to understand and encourage people in the different places they are at in the journey of faith. When I got home, I told my wife that I was going to start looking to minister with a different Baptist denomination. That led me to start pastoring in the CBOQ. I think the grass has been greener.

Before taking the position of pastor at the First Baptist Church of Sudbury I proposed my dissertation on the narrative theology and baptist vision of James Wm. McClendon, jr., a progressive Baptist, who passed away in 2000. The dissertation pushed me to investigate my Baptist roots more, coming to appreciate Anabaptism, New Lighters, Black Baptists, and the Social Gospel, although not uncritically. The Anabaptist insistence on Christocentric, communal interpretation I found to resolve many interpretive problems I wrestled with. The lens of non-violence, while some might write off as naive, I consider so essential to God’s enactment of the Kingdom of Heaven through the (Non-Violent) Cross, our witness in a world exploding with violence and hate. The Baptist “New Lighters” like John Smyth (the first Baptist) or Henry Alline (the first Baptist in Canada), believed that Scripture speaks anew in every age of the church. I feel the Spirit is speaking afresh today. While I had previously condemned liberals, I found in the writings of Walter Rauschenbusch, E. Y. Mullins, Walter Connor, Martin Luther King, etc. voices that passionately cared about Scripture and living a Christ-like life, but had been labelled and dismissed without warrant because they saw Scripture saying something different from the main stream. I found myself just as appreciative of Charles Spurgeon and Oswald Chambers as I was of John Clifford and William Newton Clarke. I became convinced that this was the way forward, to seek appreciation of all streams of Baptist life, even if they do not want to affirm each other or even affirm me. I love and appreciate too many brothers and sisters on either side of the spectrum to demean their faith. Although it really hurts every time a conservative person tells me that they don’t think I am an authentic Christ-follower just because I don’t believe in doctrine x, y, or z. Such is the plight of the moderate, neither liberal nor conservative, attempting to use the best from both.

Conclusion (For Now)

I think of my faith much like a mosaic. My life has been a series of events very different from others. It involves a lot of brokenness, a lot of stuff that was never “supposed to happen.” Things have gotten fragmented. However, there is something beautiful in what God has done in my life and those around me. The broken fragments come together, fragment by fragment, for those that see more than just pieces, and it shows a picture of redemption and reconciliation, promise and providence: a picture of a faithful God. This picture is of a God that encountered me in my despair as a teenager, failure and doubt through my years in high school and college, was with me in times of pain and discouragement, and now, has equipped me to be picture of grace to those around me.

In College

I went to Heritage Bible College and Seminary. There certain professors pushed me in my faith. Dr. David Barker’s hermeneutics course challenged me to take a precise look at the Scriptures in context. “Interpretation is about perspiration. Inspiration is about application not illumination,” he reminded us. Up until that point, I always assumed that the right answer in the Bible just magically popped into our heads after prayer (illumination). Dr. Barker taught that if you care about the Bible, you better be willing to put the time in to study it (perspiration).

Dr. Paul Wilson pushed me to be more academically thorough. I remember doing a history essay by correspondence course using only the books in the church’s library I was interning at. It was on how the early church grew, and in hindsight, I definitely got less historical and more preachy than I should have. I was convinced I got an A, and I confidently strolled into his office to receive my paper back at the beginning of the fall term. “So how did I do?” I asked Dr. Wilson. “Spencer, I’ll be honest. Your paper was just not very good.” He proceeded to take a few books off his shelf, saying, “You should have interacted with this book, and this book would have shown that what you said here is complete unfactual.” I think I came pretty close to crying when he told me my paper did not “even resemble a history paper.” In hindsight, that was just tough love.

The pinnacle achievement for my undergrad was receiving an A in Dr. Wilson’s Ancient Near Eastern and Greco-Roman History major paper. Mind you, that was only after taking the course once already.

I remember taking a course on contemporary issues in theology with a professor named Mark Boughan. The course text looked at doctrinal debates in Evangelicalism, and we had to think about both sides, weighing the options. This went against my fundamentalist insistence that there was only one answer, the clear one, and everyone who thought otherwise were liberals.  I remember I did my essay for that class on the inerrancy of Scripture, a essay that left me with more questions than answers. But, that is what good education sometimes does.

While I was in college, I helped pastor a small house church as I lived with that pastor and his family. I remember one night after Alpha Course, I was angry at one person because they believed in infant baptism (how dare he!). I turned to my pastor saying, “We need to stop that person from thinking that way! It’s unbiblical!”

My pastor turned to me in the car, “How do you know you aren’t the one who is wrong?”

I responded, “I can’t be wrong. I have the Holy Spirit!”

He smiled and echoed my words back to me, “You are saying you cannot be wrong?”

“That’s right,” I said again, “I cannot be wrong. I have the Holy Spirit.”

This went on for a while, and he kept repeating my words to me till the thought struck me, “Wow, I sound really arrogant. I’m human. I’m a sinner. Of course, I could be wrong!” The day I learned to ask myself “Could I be wrong?” was the day my fundamentalist theology began to rapidly unravel.

The Contemporary Theology course also studied postmodernism and the emergent church, terms I did not understand, but liked to condemn. I found myself hating one proponent of the emergent church named Brian McLaren. It struck me, however, one night that I really had not read anything by him. I had just been taught to hate what he was about. So, I thought, at any rate, if I was going to critique him, I should at least listen to him in the way he would want me to listen. That way, I would critique him accurately. Now, the choice to listen to others different form you is a dangerous choice. I found myself agreeing with many things he had to say.

My most formative influence in seminary was William Webb, whose book on redemptive-movement in many ways saved the Bible for me in the coming months and years. His notion was that the  Bible, far from being a flat culture-free book, had a dynamism, moving from culture to culture. This movement was the Spirit slowly reforming our ways slowly towards the ideals of the kingdom of heaven. He showed us that there are passages of the Bible that are quite culturally regressive, but through the prophetic push of Scripture into today, we can leave those behind and work towards the kingdom of God.  I originally through Webb was a liberal, since he beleived women could be pastors. So, I made sure to grill him with questions in class. To my surprise, he gentle worked through each question with more patience than I would have had for a kid like me. In the end, he satisfied my questions, and I changed positions to egalitarianism. Webb in many ways, showed many of us a hermeneutic we already intuitively presupposed. We no longer believe in slavery, polygamy, holy war, and overt patriarchy. We all read Scripture in a way them extrapolates it based on what we know today. This made a profound impact on me, as it reshaped how Scripture’s authority worked. It was now dynamic, no longer static, pushing me to be progressive rather than regresssive.

Much of my theological exploration came at the gentle guidance of Stan Fowler, a man who I am convinced our Baptist denomination would have torn itself apart years ago if not for his constant peacemaking. Of course, many saw him as fence sitting, but I came to appreciate his attempts at promoting moderation.

Under him I wrote a master’s thesis on the postmodern theological method of Stanley J. Grenz. I originally began the thesis looking at the doctrine of Scripture, but turned to issues of methodology. Also, I originally was writing against Grenz, thinking that since he was “postmodern” he was therefore “liberal.” However I slowly found myself agreeing with him against his critics. I found that the very people calling him a liberal, were actually deeply unaware of how they had filtered the Bible with their own modernism. So, I changed my thesis to a defense of his theological proposals.

The Dark Summer

My most significant personal trial occurred in the final year of Bible College, which I call “the dark summer.” My father, who was remarried and just retired, complained at Christmas time in 2006 of stomachaches. Doctors diagnosed it as inoperable, pancreatic cancer. In four months he lost over a hundred pounds, shriveling up into something you would see in holocaust pictures.

Yet, my Dad had a very strong faith. He knew that he was going to die, and told me, “Spencer, I know I am not getting out of this one.” He told me how proud he was of me, and encouraged me to continue pursuing my ministry calling. As he said that, he took off his wedding ring and his favorite Swiss Army watch and gave it to me with my step-mom’s wedding band for my future wife.

He kept telling me that the last thing he wanted to do was see me graduate, so in April, they drove him to Forward Baptist Church, and brought him in on a wheel care for the graduation ceremony. He passed away two weeks later in hospice, just over four months after being diagnosed.

He showed me a wonderful example of perseverance in suffering. One time, his meds wore off, and he clenched his fists so that his fingers dug into his palms. Bent over in the tremendous pain, he prayed, “Thank-you, God, even for this. Thank-you for every opportunity you give me to show my love for you!” While his passing was painful, his example helped me in many ways through what happened as the summer continued.

At the same time, that summer, I went to the mall. I saw my other close friend, who was a part-time supervisor there and also an associate pastor in the area. He asked if I was up for coming to his car, while he was on smoke break. I agreed. When he got there, he confessed to me that his marriage had come to a brutal end. I asked, “Why?” and he responded: “Spencer, I’m gay.” This came as a complete surprise to me. He apparently married his wife trying to suppress or change his orientation, but the result was the opposite. When he told his senior pastor, the pastor threw him under the bus, firing him, saying, “Obviously you just need more faith!”

The ensuing scandal led him, my friend, to become suicidal. He had become convinced that he was predestined not to actually have salvation because, as he thought (similar to my own earlier perfectionism), “With enough faith I can do anything, but if I am still sinning, I must not have enough faith. And if I do not have faith, God must not want me to be saved.” He concluded that he might be one of those people that think they are Christians, but in fact, they will say, “Lord, Lord,” and Jesus will say that he never knew them. So, he concluded that if he did not have God in his life, life was no longer worth living. He attempted suicide and failed, and as he told me his story, he showed me his scared, sliced hands. I was moved with tears, recalled my own experience of God meeting me. I assured him that if he was willing to take his own life in the idea that life without God is not worth living, then truly, God must be smiling at his sincerity, as he did with my own. I assured him that it was the poor in spirit that are those that God blesses. I encouraged him to look at the forsaken Christ at the cross as an answer to whether he was chosen for salvation. Christ, the rejected one, was closer to him now more than ever. He left town for several years after this, but years later we reconnected. He informed me that my words helped him come back to faith and prevented him from committing suicide again.

[Some who know this story which I have told in person will know that I am leaving out another significant event here on this online version]

My father dying and my fiend coming-out about his sexuality and attempting suicide, both happened in one summer. That summer I got a job working night shifts, which left me hours at night thinking about my faith. I recall sitting in my room one night feeling that all rational grounding for my faith was left void, all practical examples of faith in my life had failed, left the church, or, even worse, had passed away due to horrific god-forsaken illness. It was in that moment of despair, I sensed a great void of meaning confront my life: Could all this be worthless? Is life an abyss of vacuous truth? Then something happened in a similar way to when I was younger; something else manifested itself to me. I remember sensing the truth of Christ beyond all the failures of human thought and religion, a hope that prevailed over all despair, come upon me again. It simply assured me that while I can get my faith terribly wrong, Christ is still there. My “truth” could fail, but Christ will not. The result was that I committed myself to rethinking my faith with that hope and reassurance.

That summer I must have read through about 30 books. I thought to myself that if Christ is true even if my beliefs have failed, then I must give Christianity the benefit of the doubt and investigate other traditions to see what they can offer. I was drawn to theologians like Karl Barth, who taught me that the Scripture still continue to speak, beyond doubts of historicity. I was drawn to Wolfhart Pannenberg, who pointed out that  truth is only final in the eschaton (and so, until that time, all truth claims cannot be dogmatic and must be tentative, fallible, and revisable). He gave me the framework to examine my convictions in hope. William J. Abraham taught me that when I turn the Bible into a book of foundational rational certainty rather than a canon to nurture one’s walk with Christ, it collapses. Alister McGrath taught me the congruence between faith and science. Alvin Plantinga’s Reformed epistemology allowed me to think about God as a person (which oddly I think I was in many ways not doing before that). Plantinga wrote that if God was a person, belief in God is as basic as believing that other people exist. I was drawn to the Open Theism of Clark Pinnock, who impressed on me a relational understanding of God. My studies became excited by a deep personal drive, not merely for a good grade, but to explore afresh faith.

Losing my father was difficult. One day, working on my homework late one night, I stopped. I had an epiphany moment that the only person I worried about making proud of was gone, and so the only person that would see these grades was me. “Why do I bother trying so hard?” I asked myself. I thought to myself that I could, possibly, just do what I could to get by. Without a father figure, like many young men, the only person you have to worry about is the person you see in the mirror, and it is scary what you could be comfortable with if you refused to hold yourself to a higher standard. So, I remember praying that night to live my life by my heavenly Father’s standard.

Through that difficult time, I depended heavily on my girlfriend, Meagan, who I would marry several years later in 2009, and now we have two wonderful children, Rowan and Emerson (and a third boy on the way). Meagan and I are partners in life, and I know that because we have weathered some pretty heavy storms. So, after Meagan and I got married, we moved so that I could begin studies at Wycliffe College at the University of Toronto.

Faith is rarely acquired all at once, but instead in small fragments. Faith, as I have found, cannot probably be formed with a person shields themselves from the pain of this world. It is that brokenness – that fragmentation – that God uses to form a faith he can use.

Upbringing

I was born in Hamilton, Ontario. Thankfully, I was raised in a Christian home for the early years of my life. My father, a truck driver for Dofasco, was the son of a Baptist pastor, as my grandfather was a Dutch Baptist immigrant, who became a pastor in the Hamilton area. I remember saying the sinner’s prayer when I very little one night with my father. I recall doing so because I was jealous of how my brother did so the night before – and I wanted what my older brother had! I was fairly well grounded in the Scriptures at a young age as I was given the opportunity to attend a Christian private school till grade six and attended youth group and bible camp until going away to college.

I remember one odd miracle growing up. When I was in kindergarten, my hand was covered in warts. My mother had a similar problem. Oddly, she and I both had warts going up our arms. My mom took us to doctors trying different things to prevent it. However, stubborn as they are, nothing worked. However, one morning, as I came up for breakfast, my mom looked at me and said, “Spencer look at your arm.” I did and was surprised to find no warts. They were all gone. My mom showed me her arm, again not a single wart. Astonished, she said, “We prayed about this last night in Bible study. I went to bed with warts, and woke up with them gone.” I don’t presume to base me faith on an event like this (it has always seemed like an odd miracle, but there are many like it in the Bible), however it did at the time lead me to see at an early age the spiritual all around me.

The Sense of Eternity

One odd yet formative experience in my story was when I was seven. My great aunt passed away, whom I really did not know well, but I inherited an ornate marquetry chest from, built by my great-great uncle. At the time it was the most beautiful and costly thing I owned. Now, one night the notion of eternity struck me. I do not remember why, but the notion came to my young mind. It was more than the mere notion – more tangible. It was like a sense of eternity. It occurred to me that one day even something as beautiful as this chest could be nothing more than dust and vapor. It kept bothering me and in fact it frightened me. I told my father about it, whom I can only imagine was a bit puzzled; assured me that as we follow Jesus, every detail of our lives, no matter how small, has eternal value. Since then, the question of what I was going to do with my life that would have eternal value was always with me.

Difficult Teen Years

Sadly childhood bliss and naivety left as my parents divorced, rather messily, when I was in grade seven. After the divorce my father did not come around much. I later found out it was because my mother was unfaithful to him and he was hurt and frustrated. She told him they were separating in order to get back together and reconcile, but in fact, this was a pretense so that she could pursue another relationship while the divorce eventually went through. He confessed later that he became depressed, but we were able to reconcile through my high school and college years.

Through this, my early teen years were often quite alone as I was often teased or simply did not fit in at school. Since we switched schools after my parents’ divorce from a Christian private school, I was teased as the sheltered kid in public elementary school. I recall being very quiet. In hindsight I think I was unable to process the pain of what was happening to my parents. I was also 5’ 11’’ by grade seven, which meant I was very good at sports, and that made some of the tough kids really hate me. So, a tall, lanky, passive, introverted, nerdy kid made an obvious target for bullying. I remember receiving a petition signed from my classmates that they all hated me and wanted me to die. I remember the guys putting the girls up to asking me out, then reneging and mocking me. Many days I would go home, close the door to my room and cry, wanting it all to end. I don’t recall ever thinking to myself to take my life, but I did want my life to end. I did not believe in fighting people, and I remember having the idea that God had more for my life. I loved going to our church’s youth group at Stoney Creek Alliance Church, where pastor Cal Stafford was my youth pastor. He had a way of encouraging people without even knowing what they were going through.

My family chose to send my brother, sister and I to the Catholic high school, Cardinal Newman, rather than the public high school, which most of the kids from my school went. My parents did not know about the bullying, but it was a nice fresh start for me. I was able to develop a close circle of friends, several I have to this day. Having been bullied and teased, I concluded I never wanted to be like that. I would practice the principle that it is preferable to befriend people different from myself. I considered it worthwhile to sit with people that did not have anyone to sit with at lunch.

Oddly enough, in Grade 11, my high school Catholic religion teacher, Ms. Tessier, a former nun, encouraged me to read my Bible more. This was funny: she picked up that since I had gone to Sunday school, I had a lot of Bible knowledge that no one else had. She asked me, “Do you read the Bible?” I replied, “No, but I basically know what its all about.” She smirked (as I do now, having completed a decade of theological studies) and encouraged me to read it every night.

So, that night, I sat on my bed, wondering what part of the Bible to read. I cracked it open to Romans, probably because I thought the Roman Empire was neat. I remember being amazed at how the pages spoke to me that night. I took a highlighter, and highlighted all the passages that spoke to me. However by the end, I basically highlighted 90% of the book, which kind of defeated the purpose.

That year, upon my religion teacher’s encouragement, I practiced Lent, giving up television and video games, all while deciding to read Rick Warren’s Purpose Driven Life. It was during this time that I felt called into the ministry. The next year, I formed a small Bible study with Ms. Tessier’s help. Ms. Tessier had aspirations of me becoming a catholic and going on to be a priest, but I declined. I decided to go to Heritage College, the denominational school of the Baptist church I was attending at the time with my father.

Seeing the Light of God’s Smile

In high school I developed a strong perfectionism in my Christian walk. I figured that if you have faith, you must obviously be able to get rid of every sin in your life – you just need enough faith. Of course, I could not, and this bothered me. I was overwhelmed with self-hatred for all my flaws. I began to beat myself up about not having enough faith. I wondered whether I was even saved. If I did not have enough faith – something I thought you simply have by God’s gift or you don’t – and I was saved through faith, could I not have enough faith to be saved? One night I was so overcome that I sat on my bed angry. At that point I had a kind of vision. I saw myself trapped in a small cell, but the door flung open, leading up a staircase into light. A blue light, wrapped in a kind of cloud, descended and came around me. I sensed from the soft light that this was God’s smile on my life, meeting me in my poverty of spirit and was pleased with my sincerity. The light dissolved before my eyes and I found myself across the room lying on the floor. I sat up in awe of what just happened. I felt assured in a new way that God loves all sinful people. God wants sincere and authentic attempts to follow him, not perfection.

My Mother

Now, in grade nine my mother quickly remarried a man that I could only sense at the time had something off about him. I recall telling my mother that I opposed their marriage, and she did not listen. The man, named Dave, ended up being abusive. He threatened to beat her and my sister, and would constantly remind my mom that “You’re just a stupid woman.” He had a very bigoted faith where he believed women were inferior.

When I was in grade 11, my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer, and her husband proceeded to drain the family bank accounts, because he was expecting my mother to die and did not want to “waste” money on any extra care. My mother’s cancer went into remission, and they separated in a messy divorce, fighting for years over the business that they co-owned.

I recall in college, coming home and getting in the heated argument where my mother told Dave that she wanted a divorce and he needed to go. I broke up the fight before it escalated, and took my step-father aside, restraining my own anger, and persuaded him he needed to leave. He accepted. At the time, theologically, I know I did not believe in divorce, always hoping for resolution, but I also felt there was simply no other productive option.

They still couldn’t get a divorce because they owned a business together, and Dave made the work atmosphere so unproductive that it was affecting both of their livelihoods. So, at one point members of my family met to discuss what do about it. One of them, I believe it was my mother’s boyfriend at the time, put it on the table that he, proverbially, “knew a guy” that could have Dave “taken care of” for 10 000 dollars. It was also stated by another that a divorce could cost 50 000 dollars: “What is the point of wasting money on a person that doesn’t deserve to live?” I chimed in: “Because we are all made in the image of God, regardless of whether we think a person deserves to live or not!” Ashamed my mother’s boyfriend backed down and thanked me after for preventing him from doing something he might have regretted.

Police got involved in several occasions over the next few months over petty fighting about their business. My mother, however, was a very intelligent woman, and eventually figured out a legal technicality that succeeded in shutting him out of their business. My grandfather, who was ill, owned the building their business was operating in. However, he signed landlord authority over to me, and, one day while my mother and Dave were at her lawyer (which was about 45 minutes away), I changed the locks and posted eviction notices, saying that Dave was no longer allowed on the premise. When Dave figured out what my mom was doing, that he had been lured away, he rushed back to try to take anything from the property of value, not realizing I had changed the locks. I sat in the dark office waiting and heard him come, rip off the sign, try his key, furiously bang and curse, and left. I breathed a sign of relief, but then heard a drill on the lock. I called the police, and they arrived just as he wedged the door open, surprised to find me inside. He turned to run, and the cops caught him, went through all the legalities, and told him to leave. After that, my mom came into the office smiling – a moment I have never been more proud of her – and turned to me and said, “Not bad for a stupid woman, eh?”

At the time, we attended a church plant in Stoney Creek, New Hope Community Church, which was very supportive to our family. I was hired there to work over a summer, and the pastor there, Don Craw, was one of my first mentors in ministry. However, my mother left the church, seeing organized religion as too repressive and judgmental to her (a conclusion I always thought was unwarranted given how supportive the church had been). Also it seemed as though her fight with cancer had caused her mental health to decline. After the separation, my mother became extremely erratic. She became very promiscuous, and dated several men at one time to get money out of them. One of her boyfriends got her associated with New Age groups like the Unity Church. At one point after visiting a fortuneteller, she was convinced that her and her current lover were lost lovers from a previous life and that my older brother was their forbidden love child. Her actions caused a lot of disappointment from the rest of the family, as well as a rift between her and myself. As a young man, it was incredibly difficult to see the woman that first brought me to church end up abandoning it for irrational and morally content-less spirituality. During this time my siblings also left the church. So, I was left with the challenge of re-bringing the Gospel to my own home.

Kim Davis has been getting a lot of air time. Back when her original incarceration occurred, I thought the whole thing was fairly inconsequential. To be honest, Davis gives me the same vibe as people who have bumper stickers that depict a Jesus fish eating a Darwin fish or say “Are you following Jesus this close?” It is not that they aren’t well intentioned people. It is just that I would never hold them up as poster children of Christian witness. Well, tell that to the internet.

Now, tell that to the Pope, who recently met with her, prayed with her, and congratulated her for her courage and her stand for religious freedom. To be honest, the Pope is a classy guy. So, I’m just surprised he dignified this situation with a response like that. Good on him. But is what Kim Davis did really an appropriate way to stand for religious liberty?

So, I will briefly weigh in on the issues around Kim Davis. I admit, I am probably writing about this for the same reason I watch The Bachelor. There is virtually no substance to the story, but I am a big sucker for hoopla, but anyway, here it goes.

So, should a conservative Christian clerk issue same-sex marriage licenses? And while we are at it: Could a conservative Christian bake a cake for a same-sex wedding? Oh for the sake of historical-consciences,  media amnesia be damned: Should the conservative Christian CEO promote gay employees (I’m referring to the  Chic-Fil-A debacle)?

Notice that I am saying “conservative Christian.” I say this because I know just as many passionate liberal Christ followers that have a different interpretation and notion of biblical authority from my own. We all need to make our peace with the diversity the Spirit has chosen for Christ’s body. But if you are a liberal, I am asking you to step into the mind of the conservative. Attempt to understand it as you would want conservatives to understand you (I’ll say more about empathy later). From the perspective that homosexuality is against God’s design and that same-sex marriage is not a biblical practice, I would hope that any liberal understands that there are well-intended, open-minded conservative Christians without a drop of homophobia in them. Conservative Christians are just trying to be faithful to what God is showing them.

So, assume this with me, whether you agree with it or not. Now I ask myself, if I was Kim Davis, what would I do? Please don’t make any bracelets. It is purely hypothetical. It means what would I do in her employed position, so I am not saying literally her – although I will admit to staring at myself in the mirror and wondering: what would it be like to have Kim Davis’ hair?…Anyhow, I digress. What would I do?

I would frankly resign or ask to be laid off. That I think would be the appropriate response if I was in a line of work I did not morally agree with. You cannot be a pacifist and a soldier and just refuse to fire your gun. You cannot be a doctor and work at Planned Parenthood and expect to be paid but never do an abortion. You cannot be a Jehovah’s Witness and be a nurse at a blood donor clinic, refusing to take anyone’s blood. If you do not morally agree with the line of work, don’t do it, much less expect to be paid for doing less work than others.

If you feel obliged not to bake a cake for a gay couple, then you have chosen not to get any money from them. That’s fair. That’s religious liberty and its consequences. We all have the right to act as our conscience dictates. Unless you are Maria Antoinette, withholding cake is not oppressive. However, let’s remember that Kim Davis did not get imprisoned for having an opinion. This is not about religious liberty or free speech in many ways. She got in trouble with the law because she refused to do the legal duty she was hired for. If you don’t believe in the power of the State as something legitimate yet separate from the church, then do what the Mennonites did. Don’t be selective. Demanding the same pay for less work is turning religious rights and freedoms into religious privileges. Again, if you don’t agree with the line of work, the better witness is to resign.

But whether it is issuing a marriage license, baking a cake, or promoting a employee, I fear there is a persistent hypocrisy on the part of these Christians. Licenses were undoubtedly issued, cakes were unwittingly baked, and promotions blindly awarded for heterosexual adulterers of far worse sorts. Where was the integrity of conscience there? Theses events show that conservatives don’t just let us all be sinners equally, but unevenly see LGTBQ individuals as the worse form of sinner. Many conservatives Christians I know don’t just see homosexuality as sin like it is a sin to smoke or work on Sundays. Gay people disgust them. They are a political threat. They are the scapegoat of the church’s dwindling power. It is so much so that far more than all the other sin and injustices out there (including and especially injustices done by the faithful), these Christians see that their professions, in their minds, must be made into soapboxes of condemnation. Hypocrites full of condemnation…Jesus had a few choice words for people like that.

But back the truck up. I have gotten a head of myself. Allow me to compose myself again…

There is an overlooked question here. We have missed something. It is this: can I support without morally affirming? That is the question. It is the distinction that was never made. Kim Davis thought that issuing same-sex licenses means she is 100% agreeing theologically with same-sex marriage. Is that really the case?

By that same logic countless gay youth have been pushed out onto the streets because their conservative parents, in their mind, have been lead to believe that if they materially support their openly gay child they are actually affirming something their convictions condemn. Of course, they continue to delude themselves when they think that if they abandon them, a gay child will obviously then see the love of Jesus. Somehow they think these things logically follow.

Same with the person that refuses to bake a cake or a business that refuse promotions.

The next question is the shocker: Does the Bible actually offer a pattern where support is possible without affirmation? Like many debates in evangelicalism, authentic biblical zeal is dangerously mixed with biblical illiteracy, concocting a cocktail of well-intended bigotry. As the Baptist theologian James McClendon used to say, the problem with fundamentalism is that it is not fundamental enough.

Let us look at the example of men serving unethical governments.

(1) Joseph served the self-proclaimed god, Pharaoh, enabling Egypt to become even more of an idolatrous superpower.

(2) David served the pagan king Achish, providing military support for an enemy to Israel.

(3) Daniel served the oppressor of his people, Nebuchadnezzar (who also claimed deity for himself). It is not that he lacked conviction. When told not to pray, he still did. When his friends were told to bow down to a statue, they did not.

Let’s move on to Jesus…

(4) Jesus performed a miracles for a centurion’s household, healing his servant boy (moreover, some suggest the boy may have been his pederast). He could have told the centurion, “Well that is what you get for occupying land that is not yours. Go home!” He could have inquired into whether there was a pederast relationship between him and the boy. Whether that is the most obvious interpretation or not, the point is Jesus did not ask. He served.

(5) Jesus miraculously made more wine even when people were getting well sauced at a wedding. While the point of that sign is not promotion of drinking (it was the arrival of the “new wine” of the new covenant), Jesus nevertheless made a great bartender.

In each of these examples, the person could have been seen as complicit in helping someone do something sinful: helping the political enemy of the people of God, not to mention enabling idolatry, or worse, even using drunkenness as a grand stand for a kingdom sign. Yet for various purposes, they did so. Joseph and Daniel out of virtue; David out of necessity; Jesus out of compassion and prophesy, etc. All these examples are, of course, dissimilar from the present one in various ways, but I think the point remains:

Christians should have the freedom not to support what they think is sinful. However they are called to serve sinners and service need not be seen as affirmation. Serving others is an act of good witness.

The public sphere is not the church. The fight for political rights are not the same as Christian witness. They overlap some, but they are not the same. Christians would be wise to remember that.

The public sphere is a place where not all agree, and it is the job of the government to regulate relationships to promote common good and common well-being.

Would a Christian want an atheist business to refuse promotions under the notion that they can’t promote someone they thing is deluded? How would a church feel if a company refused to sell them communion cups? Or an atheist government clerk refusing to send charitable status paperwork or ordination papers out of their defiled conscience?

In a world exploding with differences, Christians can have a faithful political witness by merely promoting empathy, honesty, and fairness: something that will work fair better at creating a bottom line of common good and decency than any Constantinian strategy will ever do.

I am going to preach to you now. God’s Word addresses us today afresh as it has for thousands of years:

“The only thing that counts is faith expressing itself through love…You, my brothers and sisters, were called to be free. But do not use your freedom to indulge the flesh; rather, serve one another humbly in love. For the entire law is fulfilled in keeping this one command: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ If you bite and devour each other, watch out or you will be destroyed by each other.“ (Galatians 5:6, 13-15).

Charleston, South Carolina. June 17th. 9:05 p.m. Twelve congregants gather for prayer and the reading of God’s Word at Emanuel Methodist Episcopal Church. A 21 year old, white, sandy-blond haired man walks in, sits down, and begins to speak with Rev. Clementa Pinckney. They begin to argue, and he stands up pulling out a .45 cal. pistol, aiming it at 87 year-old Susie Jackson. Jackson’s nephew, 26-year-old Tywanza Sanders, tries to calm him down. The man replies, “I have to do it. You rape our women and you’re taking over our country. And you have to go.” Sanders moves in front to protect his aunt, heroically acting as a human shield. He is shot first and drops to the ground. “Y’all want something to pray about? I’ll give you something to pray about,” the gunman cries, shouting racial slurs. He proceeds to pump dozens of rounds into people there. He has to reload five times to continue the premeditated carnage.

The suspect is Dylan Roof, a deranged racist hell-bent on starting a new civil war. This is evil of the most chaotic and unnecessary sort.

Why did God allow this senseless killing? Why did he not intervene?

Why did he not show up to protect his children as a white bigot gunned them down in a house of prayer?

This question was posed to me by a friend, but we ask this question not just for these people but for all who came before them, the greatest victims of history: the martyrs.

While the world cries out for vengeance, we, the spiritual family of the victims, must lament this loss in a different way. We know that the way of Christ necessitates the most costly sacrifice. This makes our laments as bitter as it is beautiful. Every Christian when they are pulled up from the waters of baptism should know that they have committed themselves to a non-violent witness in the face of the powers and principalities of hate and violence in this world. We cannot give into the same hate the fueled this massacre, and we are oddly moved towards thanks for the martyrs are have shown us so great a witness.

We have a resolve to refuse a heart of vengeance that is predicated on the sobering realization that to long for the punishment of sin, egregious sin, against others is to condemn the sin we excuse in ourselves. However, to answer the question, “Why did God allow this?” I just don’t think the question gets answered with this reminder.

A classical apologist would appeal to how we have free will or that suffering is pedagogical. However, I am of the opinion that human freedom is neither this absolute to the divine prerogative nor this desire for our own.

I am of also of the opinion that tragedies and the question of “why?”  do not get answered in Scripture with reason as we commonly understand it. Reason and logic are parts of the good order of creation. Rationalizing evil is to assign it some of the goodness of reason. However, evil must be understood as an absurdity. It has no reason. It ought not to have a reason. An inexplicable tragedy should probably be left as such: unexplained.

We can say that Christ is with those that suffered. We can say God’s faithful are always prepared to take up their own non-violent crosses as Satan bares his teeth. We know that the way of the cross will prevail, and we pray that the martyrs’ lives will work a witness to effect the redemption of those lost in the darkness of hate similar to that of the perpetrator. We know that there will be a day of judgment and restoration as God loves even the perpetrator. We know this because he loved us while we were his enemy. This disarms our hate, pushing us towards the compassion needed to perhaps bring a bit of that much longed for restoration here in our midst today. However, not all suffering is remedial. An omniscient God does not need to test his subjects for he already knows the answer. God does not require suffering, evil, and tragedy to accomplish his will. All things can be used by divine providence to bring about good, and we sincerely hope that good comes out of this evil, despite this evil. However, if God caused the felix culpa, our original fall or this one, in order to enact our redemption, no matter how spectacular, God is immeasurably wasteful.

To ask “why did God not intervene?” (we circle around this vexing question) is not to occasion a place for atheism either. Atheism is too easy. If God does not exist, the brutality of this life is inconsolably permanent. The only response, no matter how undesirable, will ultimately be a paralysis of acceptance. All condemnation of it is rendered as vacuous as any hope beyond it. If God is dead, the stench of the problem of evil still lingers.

But Scripture never sees moments like this, moments where God seems absent, to be a basis for intellectual disbelief. It is a cause for faithful lament. The words of Scripture offer vocabulary to name the groanings of our saddened souls. It compels and allows us to ask similar questions to what reverberates constantly through the Psalms: “How long O Lord?” or as Christ’s cry on the cross, echoing Psalm 22: “Why have you forsaken me?” Interestingly enough, not even Christ, not even his prayer, was answered during his life. An inexplicable tragedy remained as such: unexplained. Only sin required the solution that meant Christ willingly died for us.

God responded three days later with the resurrection, and we wait on that promise. The Christian philosopher Gabriel Marcel once said that the problem of evil and tragedy is not an intellectual problem to be solved so much as a mystery to be lived. How is it lived? The only way, the only respond to our original question might be to say that we pray, we mourn, we resolve live differently. We commit to solidarity, to compassion, to lament, to justice, to reconciliation, and to hope. May we not be paralyzed with apathy or hate or despair.

We live awaiting the restoration of all things. We live trusting the promise of the resurrection. We live waiting on the crucified God as the Apostle of the persecuted churches of Revelation cried out, “Come Lord Jesus Come!”

We dare not dishonor the victims by speaking easy answers or blaspheme our God by ascribing to him the authorship of evil or condemn ourselves to a broken and brutal reality that is beyond hope of repair.  And so, we do not give an answer, we cup our hands to our mouths in the face of divine mystery and tragedy as Job did. And after this we give a response.

We live this response in the lament-filled space of compassion and prayer.

How long O Lord? How long?

Just then a lawyer stood up to test Jesus. “Teacher,” he said, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?” He said to him, “What is written in the law? What do you read there?” He answered, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself.” And he said to him, “You have given the right answer; do this, and you will live.” But wanting to justify himself, he asked Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?” Jesus replied, “A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell into the hands of robbers, who stripped him, beat him, and went away, leaving him half dead. Now by chance a priest was going down that road; and when he saw him, he passed by on the other side.  So likewise a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. But a Samaritan while traveling came near him; and when he saw him, he was moved with pity. He went to him and bandaged his wounds, having poured oil and wine on them. Then he put him on his own animal, brought him to an inn, and took care of him. The next day he took out two denarii, gave them to the innkeeper, and said, ‘Take care of him; and when I come back, I will repay you whatever more you spend.’ Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?” He said, “The one who showed him mercy.” Jesus said to him, “Go and do likewise.”  (Luke 10:25-37)

First to understand this beautiful passage, we must recognize it is a parable. We ascertain this as a hermeneutic judgment upon the text. Indulge me for a second. Understanding the passage on the Good Samaritan literally would not be to fret about whether historically there really was a man who got beaten up, left for dead, passed by a Levite and Priest, and then finally, a man from Samaria rescued him.  Jesus responds to the lawyers’ question, “Who is my neighbor?” with this story. It references real places and it seems plausible. He never says whether it is a parable. Why would we doubt it to be anything but history? Many so-called literalists worry about texts of Scripture like whether the origin stories of Genesis, the story of Jonah, or the drama of Job are historical and if they are not they are worthless. They would feel obliged to see it necessarily this way because they must read it “literally.” But literal reading of Scripture merely means to read the passage they way it – the letters on the page – intend to be read. To read any passage of the Bible literally might mean reading it as poetry, parable, metaphor, or some complex mixture of the above.

This parable reminds us of these often forgotten hermeneutic considerations. We all intuitively recognize that Jesus is not reporting a historical account and if this story did not historically happen, its truth would be no worse off for it. The parable does this without having any historical reality behind its statements. The story is doing something quite beautiful by displaying a set of figures, patterns of action, mentalities and convictions that transcend times and culture. Jesus is here dismantling the arrogance of the lawyer, who “was seeking to justify himself.” The lawyer wanted a way of excusing himself of his obligation to his neighbors, whom he did not want to care for. We all do this in our broken world of sweatshops, oil sands, racial killings, ISIS and drone strikes. We look for ways to say to those who we do not want to feel obliged to  that “You are not my responsibility. You do not deserve my compassion. I don’t have to care about what you think.”

Thus, the lawyer asks “who is my neighbor?” implying that he wants criteria that will absolve him of his responsibility to certain neighbors (like his enemies) and Jesus answers with a story about a generic man from Jerusalem who got robbed (a situation that the lawyer easily could himself in). Because he was near death (which would make him ritually unclean according to strict reading of the Law), a Levite and a priest pass him by. Yet a man, a Samaritan, who by his ethnicity would be an enemy, had compassion. This implicitly forces the lawyer to ask of himself, “If I was in dire need, who would I want to be a neighbor to me?” Jesus forces him by the figures in the parable to say that he would want all people, including his enemies, to be a help him.

Jesus continues and says “Who do you think was a neighbor to the man who fell into trouble?” The man is again rhetorically compelled to recognize that a neighborliness is not an object to be identified – “Who is really is my neighbor?” – but a mentality to embody, a posture of compassion towards anyone we cross paths with in this messy world: “A neighbor was the one who showed him mercy.”

Jesus responds, “Go and do likewise,” which implores the actions of the Samaritan figure to the (non-Samaritan) lawyer, inducing him to think of himself not as the man going from Jerusalem but now as the man going about showing mercy.

Because this is a parable, it transcends its cultural time frame. Because it is the inspired word of God, we know that it does happen in places of need in this world. It is a figure alive before us that we are to live and embody. This parable is real. It is happening now, calling a different world, a different kingdom into our midst. This kingdom transcends the opposed identities that are further the wounds of this world –  rich/poor, male/female, black/white, citizen/immigrant, gay/straight, Christian/Muslim, Western/Eastern, cop/criminal, so on and so forth. This figure obliges God’s chosen ones to be agents of reconciliation and empathy.

This story could be about Muslims lining up to protect Christian churches in Egypt.

It could be about a bigoted cake maker in Indiana who was financially supported by a gay person.

Those stories actually happened.

May we all come to terms with how we can all act like the lawyer.

But may we live the Good Samaritan in compassion and grace.

May we go and do likewise.