Recently we had someone over and as the night came to a close Angel warmly offered, “Let’s do this again soon!” I wilted as I processed just how many things were on our calendar in the coming month. Just like Angel did, I wanted to be with them again and soon, but her invitation made me flinch.
My wife Angel and I are very different people. Angel brings light and life everywhere. People are drawn to her, and she is drawn to people. One of the many things I love about Angel is how she gets caught up in a moment with people. In that space, it’s not unusual that she shares hopes with those we are with of spending more time together. And she means it: there is no doubt of her genuineness.
“I don’t compare myself with anybody, but nobody is better.” Michael Jordan
“They say the sky’s the limit, but I think my potential is beyond it.” Jay-Z
“I won’t be happy until I’m as famous as God” Madonna
“I won’t be a rock star. I will be a legend.” Freddie Mercury
“We’re more popular than Jesus now.” John Lennon
We tend to expect that greatest among us are also some of the most arrogant. And why wouldn’t they be? For many who make it to the top of their field, we can see how that arrogance can be a driving force for their greatness.
God became flesh.
Let that sink in. Christianity asserts that God—sovereign, immutable, omnipotent, other—the eternal God who has no beginning and end—became a human being.
Because many of us have had exposure to Christianity from our early years, it is easy to miss how massive the theological implications of the incarnation are. The incarnation lays the groundwork for a God who chooses to participate in his creation. The incarnation denies the existence of an abstract and distant God, unmuddied by his handiwork.
“God did not, as the Bible says, create man in his own image; on the contrary, man created God in his own image.” Ludwig Feuerbach dropped this theological bombshell three years before Friedrich Nietzsche’s birth. Feuerbach, a name forgotten by most, but who influenced Nietzsche, wrote these words in his book, The Essence of Christianity (1841). He argued that human beings project their own attributes and desires onto an imagined deity, creating God in their own image. This for Feuerbach, is the essence of Christianity (and indeed all religions), the deification of our human ideals. “What man wishes to be, he makes his God… God is the outward projection of a man’s inward nature.”
We Westerners avoid death.
When was the last time you walked through a cemetery? When was the last funeral you went to? Our churches no longer have cemeteries, those who are older head to retirement communities and then to head to long-term care or assisted care facilities. The number of funerals held in churches has diminished. Death has become professionalized, antisepticised, and remote.
“Christ has risen!” “He has risen indeed!”
Millions of Christians around the globe greeted one another with those triumphal words on Easter Sunday. And yet, many of us who declared that marvelous truth two days ago, functionally disbelieve in the resurrection.
Do you ever despair of the grip of sin on your life? Does it feel as though you will never shake that addiction or stronghold?
I heartily endorse NT Wright's thesis: a robust doctrine of the bodily resurrection of Christ necessarily impacts our lives. Wright spends much of his book firing shots across the bows of both the fundamentalists and the liberals.
Wright attacks the fundamentalists' belief in a non-corporeal resurrection, grounded in an implicit dualism. It's an important attack. This idea that the real part of us is our immortal souls which will, alone, live on in heaven, is not just non-scriptural, it's anti-scriptural. Furthermore, as NT Wright points out, it has several deleterious effects: it undermines any urgency for the church to do her work here and now; it can create apathy to change unjust social institutions; and it can lead toward a truncated understanding of how we are to respect and appreciate the bodily existence God has granted us.
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