Last week I reviewed Joe Boyd’s new book, Between Two Kingdoms, was released today. It’s an allegorical work of fantasy aimed conveying the message of the Kingdom of God for kids and adults. I definitely recommend it. Here’s a quick interview with Joe, talking a little about his story and the premise of the book.
(This is part 8 in my series on Dallas Willard’s latest book, Knowing Christ Today. Previous Entries: Intro | Chapter 1 | Chapter 2 | Chapter 3 | Chapter 4 | Chapter 5 | Chapter 6)
Knowledge of Christ and Christian Pluralism
Jesus answered, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”
How can a Christian claim knowledge of Christ in a pluralistic society, where there is an increasingly hostile posture toward any religious claims to exclusive truth?
First, it simply cannot be avoided that knowledge inherently excludes by nature because, again, knowledge cannot avoid being about what is true – a state which, by necessity excludes all contradictions. If the car is out of gasoline, then declaring it so is true, a fact that logically excludes other statements such as “The car has gasoline” and “the car is not out of gasoline.” Such knowledge cannot be avoided in real life (in fact, we couldn’t survive without it), and any discipline that seeks to avoid the trueness of genuine knowledge relegates itself to the realm of the absurd, irrelevant, and possibly even the dangerous (untruth in medicine and rock climbing, for example, can get you killed). There is no plausibility for a pluralism that either denies truth or claims truth for every proposition.
However, Willard states there is an important sense in which a certain kind of pluralism is vitally important and it begins with the humble acknowledgment that even if we are convinced we are right we know we are not infallible. This is nothing less than the Christian ideal of loving one’s neighbor:
“This distinctively Christian imperative is precisely based on the knowledge of God, Christ, and right and wrong that we claim as Christ followers. It concerns respect for the sincere efforts of human beings to do what they believe to be good and right.”
Willard spends some time exploring the difference between what he calls “weak pluralism,” the position that all religions may hold some reflection of the truth about God, and “strong pluralism,” which insists that that there are no real differences at all between religions. He says there is no reason for a Christian to reject the former, but that no serious thinking person could hold to the latter. A cursory examination of the major religions reveals there are too many contradictions between the faiths. More often than not, strong pluralism is simply a veneer for polite agnosticism.
Is Christ Exclusive?
Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the father but by me” (John 14:6). What does this mean? Willard points out the obvious dilemma: If no person can be accepted by God without personal knowledge of the historical Jesus then billions of people are denied access to God by simply being born in the wrong place at the wrong time.
However, Willard maintains that Christ’s words about himself as the exclusive way were not a reference to himself in the historical sense, but in the cosmic sense, that is, himself as the Logos, the eternal Word of God. This, he says, is demonstrated by the fact that in that very moment, even though the disciples knew the historical Jesus of Nazareth personally, they still did not know him as Christ (John 14:7-9). In other words, it’s not the historical Jesus of Nazareth that is “the way,” rather, it is the eternal person of Christ (which, of course, certainly includes the incarnate Jesus). This Christ, says Willard, is always “the way” to the Father, even if it is without knowledge of Jesus of Nazareth:
“Where there really is a way to God, where there really is truth about God, where there is genuine life of God, Christ is there.”
What Willard is saying here, very simply, is that anyone, anywhere, at any time can have a limited measure of true knowledge about God, and even respond in faith to the saving grace of God, without ever hearing about the historical Jesus, and that whenever this happens it is always via “the way” of grace made exclusively by Christ.
Perhaps more shocking to some, Willard is careful to say this is not the gospel (no surprise to those who have read Willard’s previous works). A minimum cosmic acceptance by God (the “ticket to heaven” form of salvation) is not the good news. Indeed, Willard says it is not very good news anyway, since we’re still left here on earth to deal with the horrors and injustices of life. Rather, the gospel is that the Kingdom of God is readily available now to those who will become disciples of Christ, and that gospel does require knowledge of the historical Jesus and his teachings for it is only by following his teachings that we can be apprenticed into an eternal kind of life that partners with the Kingdom rhythms of God by the Holy Spirit and overcome to the evils of this world.
Questions:
“Hardly a pure science is closer to animal husbandry than it is to mathematics in that it involves selective breeding. The principal differences between the hubandryman and the historian is that the former breeds sheep or cows or such and the latter breeds (assumed) facts. The husbandryman uses his skills to enrich the future; the historian uses his to enrich the past. Both are usually up to their ankles in bullshit.”
Long before Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code there was Tom Robbins and a mummified Jesus on display in Another Roadside Attraction. Robbins writes in a rambling and wildly fragmented fashion, telling his fantastically conceived stories in an almost mythical style reminiscent of Jorge Luis Borges. Though Robbins lacks the imagination of Borges, he does share the Argentinian’s gift for erecting curious outposts of cultural self-awareness. Throughout Another Roadside Attraction the reader feels less like a companion of the characters (like most fiction) and more like an anthropologist, peeking into the field notes of a colleague who has discovered a bizarre and deliciously intriguing foreign culture.
That culture turns out to be our own.
Our main characters are an unlikely collection of pluralistic creatures: a magician/artist/musician, a an earthy pagan princess, the specter of Modernity bearing the name “Marx,” and a martial arts expert disguised as an assassin-monk who wandered the catacombs of the Vatican only to discover the mummified secret at the heart of the world’s most powerful religion. Though Robbins skewers Christianity in this story, it would be a mistake to read this novel as merely an attack on that faith. Robbins project is more ambitious – Jesus just proves to be the fattest sacred cow in what he considers to be history’s husbanded barn of “bullshit.” Ultimately, all of it must get shoveled out. Robbins reflects, in his disjointed prose, a postmodern prejudice toward the wild complexity of life and the futility of linear narratives. The pervasive – yet somehow funny and lighthearted – skepticism toward authoritative meta-narratives lie at the heart of Robbin’s novel; he simply doesn’t believe the power-claims of history anymore. Jesus may be the most conspicuous casualty, but he’s not the only one.
Robbins wants us to question history as well. Are magical thunderstorms, assassin-monks, and a mummified Jesus in the catacombs of the Vatican any more implausible than Manifest Destiny, Western Cultural hegemony, and the story of Jesus’ resurrection? Robbin’s would have us see that compared to Western history, Another Roadside Attraction is possibly the saner narrative, or, at least, no more the husbanded product of cross-pollinated scat than history itself. Because he writes with more art and honesty than Dan Brown, his critique – though ultimately adolescent – comes across as more damaging.
Yet Robbins has tossed out too much. He shovels out possibility of a truth with any purchase on people, and thereby tosses out the very concept of history itself. Without history there is no heritage, no sense of self via the communal connections of a shared identity. Without history there is no ethnicity, either inborn or adopted; there is no culture or conversion, only the wildly individualized consumption of personally invented identity. There are no convincing alternatives teased out in the relationships and philosophies that are always clever but never authentic, always wry and witty, but never satisfying. He seeks to “enrich” the future through the selective breeding of fictionalized historical alternatives, but ends up bankrupting our future by looting our past.
(This is part 7 in my series on Dallas Willard’s latest book, Knowing Christ Today. Previous Entries: Intro | Chapter 1 | Chapter 2 | Chapter 3 | Chapter 4 | Chapter 5)
Knowledge of Christ in the Spiritual Life
Those who really do know Christ in the Modern world do so by seeking and entering the Kingdom of God. Everything else we have discussed here is meant to lead up to that.
Hence, in Chapter 6 it is Dallas Willard’s desire, above all else, to convince us that Christ is a living person, contemporary with each of us, and available to each of us in an interactive relationship amid the daily activities of one’s life. This is what it means to know Christ: to potentially have a real and dynamic sense of personal connection and communication with Him at any and every moment.
The reason so many people don’t have this knowledge – this actual connection – with Christ is because, fundamentally, they don’t believe it is possible. The cultural climate of Modernity and it’s Enlightenment prejudices have convinced many people that true, reliable knowledge of God (much less Christ) is not really possible.
But much of Christ’s work on earth was to inaugurate the present availability of this real spiritual interaction with God and His Kingdom. This is critically important because knowledge about a thing/person is not knowledge of a thing/person. One of the very important thing Jesus does in the gospels is demonstrate that fact, and immerse (or baptize) his disciples into that God-bathed reality. This kind of first-hand interaction with Gos is our source of knowledge of God by Christ and through the Holy Spirit.
In this Chapter Willard spends some time interacting with ways in which Christ can be said to have been demonstrably “present” in Modern society. There is a nice discussion of how Christ breaks through all barriers, including those of science, religion, and culture, and some interesting engagement with modern writers who have come to independent conclusions regarding the uniqueness of Christ.
There is also some brief interaction with Willard’s understanding of the role of the classic spiritual discipline for learning to come into regular contact with Christ. If you’re familiar with Willard’s writing at all, there’s nothing new here. If you’re not, you would be well served to read The Divine Conspiracy and The Spirit of the Disciplines.
Willard also spends some time addressing what some have called the “new atheism.” This is a helpful portion of the book, mostly because Willard affirms that Christians have much to learn from the arguments of atheists. The fact that Christ breaks through as a person in the persons and structures of our society doesn’t mean that those who proclaim him are correct in their beliefs, ideas, and assumptions. Willard does not see them as a threat, mostly because these people “do not long for there to be a biblical type of God or to be a part of His life.” Hence, they are predisposed to miss God (there will be no “seeking and entering”) and there is no sincere engagement with those who practice genuine spiritual lives.
(Two asides: 1. I don’t agree with Willard on this last point. Some of the atheists I’ve encountered are atheists, in my estimation, precisely because they do long for what God supposedly stands for – such as righteousness, peace, and justice – but they cannot reliably find that God in the world around them, and 2) It occurred to me that there are many self-proclaimed Christians who, apparently, “do not long for there to be a biblical type of God” either. Indeed, a few go to great lengths to explain away that God and replace him with a God more suitable to their liking. Some, in their own way, have even embraced the term “atheist” or stated flatly that they’d prefer atheism to the God of the Bible.)
Unlike most contemporary Christian authors (conservative or liberal) Willard makes a rather interesting and unique claim: Christians must demonstrate a verifiable form of spiritual knowledge. I think this assertion is one of the boldest claims of the book, and in this chapter he states that those who genuinely come to know Christ will:
Questions
Fairy tales are more than true; not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us dragons can be beaten.
—G. K. Chesterton
And so, Joe Boyd’s fairytale, Between Two Kingdoms, begins with the words of Chesterton, promising, by proxy, an adventure of truth, danger, and perhaps even a dragon waiting to be vanquished. What follows is a delightful tale of childhood faith, broken people restored, and, yes, a dragon of sorts, set within an imaginary realm that somehow contains two very different kingdoms.
Joe Boyd has been on quite the adventure himself over the past thirteen years. During that time he helped to plant a large “church-within-a-church” in Las Vegas in 1997, then transition that into APEX, a decentralized house church network in 2000 (Joe’s story was recounted in the 2005 book Emerging Churches by Eddie Gibbs and Ryan Bolger). Boyd is now the Teaching Pastor at the Cincinnati Vineyard Christian Fellowship, and working to integrate his passions for the Kingdom in a new city.
One of those passions is creative expression (Boyd is also a professional actor), and Between Two Kingdoms is his take on a Kingdom of God fantasy, complete with a King, good and evil Princes, a magical doorway between two realms, and an atmosphere of both innocence and tragedy. Throughout the tale, we follow our reluctant hero, Tommy, as he endeavors to follow his hero the Prince of the Upper Kingdom. Together they seek to rescue wayward subjects in the Lower Kingdom. Along the way we discover a little something about what it means to to have faith, be a friend, recognize true danger, and, perhaps most importantly remember what needs remembering and forget what we need never hold on to.
There is much more in this densely packed fable. There are swords, rescue missions, perilous confrontations and mysterious creatures. And, as you might suspect, Between Two Kingdoms is, more than anything, a re-telling of the redemption story. However, Boyd manages to work in some surprises through his deceptively simple characters; surprises that may reveal more about ourselves and what we truly believe than we realize going into it. And that, of course, is what good fiction is really all about – telling the truth. Overall, Between Two Kingdoms is a delightful read, perfect for sharing with children who love fantasy, or adults who haven’t forgotten what it means to be children.
In August of 2008 we moved into our current house, a rental, here in Oceanside. It’s an old, 60′s era, ranch rambler, completely outdated and run down, and totally energy inefficient.
We love it.
It also sits on half an acre, wedged in a unique little crevice of our neighborhood. There are 5 avocado trees, three apricot trees, and lemon tree, and an orange tree, so last summer we were swimming in fruit. Jenell was inspired by the space, so she planted a very small vegetable garden outside our kitchen door – a few tomato plants, peppers plants, some herbs, and an eggplant. We enjoyed wonderful homemade salsa all summer long. (Jenell also had a pretty decent shared garden in Ohio we enjoyed for two seasons).
This year we’ve decided to get more serious.
Our hope is to develop a genuine food producing garden in our backyard, one that we can possibly share with our church and our neighbors. I’ve carved out a section of the expansive backyard about 50 feet by 15 feet and our plan is to grow greens, sweet potatoes, carrots, tomatoes, peppers, beans, onions, leeks, etc. We’ve checked out a half a dozen books from the library on backyard food production, and I’ve been on the internets (of course), but, frankly, the information is overwhelming.
So.
If you garden, what are your favorite sources? Books, websites, whatever. Send us your recommendations please…we need the help!
(This is part 6 in my series on Dallas Willard’s latest book, Knowing Christ Today. Previous Entries: Intro | Chapter 1 | Chapter 2 | Chapter 3 | Chapter 4)
The Miraculous, and Christ’s Presence in Our World
In Chapter 4 Willard laid the foundation for establishing the logical existence of a god, that is, “a vast non-physical being underlying – perhaps also interpenetrating – the reality of the physical universe.” The fact that many either don’t know this, refuse to know it, or refuse to acknowledge it has no bearing on its truth. Indeed, people frequently refuse to believe what they know to be true (gambling or smoking is a prime example).
This, as Alex right pointed out in the comments on Chapter 4, merely leaves us with Deism – which is a far cry from the Theism of Christianity. To be a Deist gets you halfway there, and puts you in company with virtually all the Founding Fathers of the United States, as well as many Christian scholars (I’m looking at you Marcus Borg) and some of the proponents of liberal Christianity today. As Willard points out, this is no secret. To say that some Christian scholars are Deists is generous; some are plainly atheists.
But it is the peculiar claim of historic, orthodox Christianity that Christ was the divine incarnation of God; that such gave witness to the frequent intervention of God into this world, and that such intervention continues to this day. In other words, the faithful witnesses of historic Judaism and Christianity have always made the claim, beyond Deism, that God is often breaking into this present world to make contact with people and change their lives.
This amounts to Willard’s second argument for the existence of God and his source of particular knowledge about God: For millenia people have been claiming to have encounters with this God, they are remarkably consistent, and they constitute a genuine body of knowledge.
There is, in this Chapter, an extensive conversation about the miraculous and a logical defense of their validity. As with his treatment of the Cosmological argument for the existence of God – and in similar logical fashion – here Willard feels he has established the logical necessity of the possibility of the miraculous. From there he goes on to apply this same logical method to the question of the resurrection of Jesus – the central claim of the historic Christian faith. Again, Willard concludes that there is no other logically plausible explanation other than that Jesus indeed was raised from the dead.
(Again, there is simply no time or space in this kind of overview to rehash Willard’s arguments. If you’re interested, you have to buy the book. Obviously, I recommend it.)
He concludes:
“The established possibility of resurrection, resting upon the openness of the physical universe to a nonphysical source of creator of it all, opens the door to consider fairly the evidence that strongly favors the resurrection of Christ as an actual event and favors his continued presence in this world. So the factuality of a major miracle in this world can be known by those who would like to know and who are willing to give adequate consideration to the available evidence. Perhaps the main responsibility for knowing it lies upon those who believe it. A reasonable next step would be openness to God’s intervention in other contexts and, especially, in the events of their own lives today. Thus they could come to know the reality of a “spiritual life” for ordinary human beings (see the next chapter).”
Question:
In Chaim Potok’s well-known novel, My Name Is Asher Lev, the main character Asher is a gifted artist and a member of the Ladover community, a small population of Hasidic Jews living in New York who follow a charismatic spiritual teacher known as the Rebbe. Potok uses this character to explore the complexities of faith and family at odds with the emerging worldviews of Modernity and postmodernity, skethcing these abstract concepts skillfully through the narrative of a family at odds with the world and with itself.
Although Asher’s art is dismissed as frivolous at best and idolatrous at worst, the irony is that it is through his art that the strongest themes of his family’s anguish bubbles to the surface. Asher’s mother has suffered a double tragedy in her life, the first with the loss of a close family member and the second at the hands of a husband – Asher’s father – who has given his life to the cause of the Rebbe, a cause that has taken his on frequent travels around the globe. As Asher grows, and as his artistic gift expands with him, he begins to discover that his painting offers the opportunity to give expression to his family’s suffering in ways that his mother’s faith never could. There are powerful touch-points in Asher’s art that speak to the story of his family, and reflect on the story of God as well.
Sadly, this exploration leads to powerful conflicts with his father, who doesn’t understand Asher’s desire to paint or deal with the difficulties of the past.
Consequently, there is a powerful divorce between Asher’s art and faith that reflect the wider divorce between these two expressions in the Modern world. Throughout most of the earlier portions of the book, especially as a child, Asher seems to be able to manage the tension between the two; perhaps because he is a child his parents condemn his gift less, and he antagonizes them less. But as he pushes his artistic gift to maturity, the two worlds become irreconcilable. Asher remains the child of this broken family – still able to visit and spend time with each of his “parents,” and in many ways (much like children of divorce) still trying to bring them together – but ultimately Asher chooses to live with his “mother,” the artistic gift within him, full time.
The author uses powerful symbols to depict this inner-divorce, depicting Asher’s artistic travels in Europe in parallel with his father’s travels in support of the Rebbe and his Ladover teachings. His father gave his life for the Rebbe and followed him all over the world in order to perpetuate his faith, and likewise, Asher follows in his father’s footsteps in an antithetical way – in pursuit of a different kind of “Rebbe” and a different kind of faith.
The novel reaches a kind of psychic climax when when Asher paints a crucifixion as a means of exploring his own mother’s torturous grief. This reprehensible, offesnive, and agonizing image becomes the most potent way for Asher to explore his mother’s pain, and perhaps the only way Asher could cause his father – a man who had largely dismissed the needs of his wife – to empathize with that pain. Asher’s use of the crucifixion becomes an instrument of empathy and self-sacrifice – Asher’s self-sacrifice from the Ladover community on his mother’s behalf.
(This is part 5 in my series on Dallas Willard’s latest book, Knowing Christ Today. Previous Entries: Intro | Chapter 1 | Chapter 2 | Chapter 3)
Because that which may be known of God is manifest in them; for God hath shewed it unto them.
For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse. (Romans 1:19-20)
Can We Know That God Exists?
Willard states that when it comes to knowing whether or not God exists we need not start from scratch. The ancient scriptures of Judaim and Chrsitianity describe a non-physical being of personality, a person of immense proportions, self-dependent, all-powerful, and loving. Furthermore, that character of love makes God-self available in covenant relationships with human persons. He then points to Christ, saying,
In a manner unique to Jesus among all among all teachers of the earth he tells us we can, right now, right where we are, rely upon the “kingdom” of this God – upon his rule, reign, or governance – and that we will then, by experience, find that “kingdom” to have the character of a loving family in its most ideal form.
This is nothing less than Jesus’ gospel, and it is nothing less than the testomony of all ancient Judeo-Christian scripture that this God is available to people, primarily through the art and practice of prayer, and that this God intervenes in peoples lives from time to time. If this is true, it has massive consequences for people’s lives. If it’s true, some will receive it as very good news, while others will find it to be very bad news indeed, and resent the very idea of a creator being interfering with their lives. The good news of Jesus is not good news to everyone.
However, not everyone believes this kind of God exists, or even that the existence of any kind of God can actually be known (a common position even among Christians). Contrary to this popular opinion, Willard says knowledge of God’s existence can readily be known. Indications of the existence of God come from two main classical streams of thought: 1) Observations about the natural world (or, the Cosmological argument), and 2) Certain kinds of experiences people have. In this chapter Willard deals exclusively with the first.
There’s no time or space here to rehash his arguments – and I would rather you buy the book anyway – but suffice it to say that the Cosmological argument has a long and robust tradition of being espoused by a great many thinkers who stand well outside the Christian tradition, and therefore must at least be dealt with seriously, even by those convinced of their error. Willard’s main points in outlining this argument are:
For Willard, like Paul, this knowledge is rather self-evident – although, admittedly, largely obscured by the convoluted musings of Modern philosophers who are largely lost in an epistemological wilderness. Still, he claims with confidence that such knowledge is sure and propels us forward, saying,
“Our argument thus far does give us a magnificent “Creator,” though not yet a personal presence in human history and in individual lives – not a perfectly good God of love. However, we say once again, do not underestimate the importance of what we’ve gained. Now the entire cognitive landscape has been changed, and with it real possibilities of knowledge of such a personal presence in the world in of a spiritual life for human beings in union with God the creator.”
Questions:
(This is part 4 in my series on Dallas Willard’s latest book, Knowing Christ Today. Previous Entries: Intro | Chapter 1 | Chapter 2)
How Moral Knowledge Disappeared
In the third chapter Willard is concerned with helping us understand how we have come to a place where religion is no longer viewed as a valid source of knowledge.
He begins by reinforcing that for centuries Christ was known primarily through his moral teachings, and that this moral teaching was reliably passed along and used for the general good of everyone – believers and non-believers alike – until very recently in Western history. Specifically, he says,
This knowledge was available to the public through the institutions of society recognized as sources of knowledge, primarily, of course, churches and schools (of all the various levels). Then, over a period of time, less than a century, the knowledge institutions of our society ceased, for various causes and reasons, to represent traditionally recognized moral values and principles as constituting a body of knowledge. They took it to be an area in which knowledge was not possible or not possible to the extent it could be taught as knowledge. This is the disappearance of moral knowledge that has actually occurred in our recent past.
Willard then lists several causes for this disappearance. They are:
1. The failure of the visible Christian church to apply the principle of Jesus to the appalling conditions of European humanity during the 1700′s and 1800′s. When the church was still the public custodian of morality, it failed to speak for Christ in the face of horrible abuses.
2. The simultaneous advancement of knowledge by the sciences that called into question many of the founding documents, events, and personalities of the Christian traditions and institutions. According to Willard, the cause here was not so much the advancement of scientific knowledge itself, for that knowledge never really succeeded in showing a non-Christian foundation for moral knowledge. Rather, the failure was on the part of Christan institutions who, under secular pressure, capitulated to the abdication of moral knowledge as actual knowledge.
3. The emergence of many different kinds of moralities through the anthropological research of non-European cultures. As the moral systems of other cultures was studied, there grew a common academic consensus that no morality was necessarily true, as such, and that Western (Christian) morality was merely another cultural form of morality.
4. The disappearance of the human self at the hands of psychological research. The concept of the unconscious emerged, rendering meaningless the idea that the human self was something that could be formed intentionally and consciously. The conviction grew that we are shaped and formed largely beyond our own control by forces inside and outside that are neither moral nor immoral.
Over and against this trajectory of relative morality and cultural opinion, Willard states that Christ’s version of morality is clearly unique and superior to anything else found in human history. To be sure, there are reflections of it in a variety of cultures and religions, but Christ stands alone in his radically teachings about love.
Particularly, the way Christ applied the rule to love neighbors, which includes strangers, aliens, and enemies. This kind of love pervades every level of life – especially the ordinary – supersedes any and all laws, and becomes the basis for a revolutionary society that successfully cultivates such neighbor love among others, beginning with the early Christians.
Questions:
"Tea. Earl Grey. Hot."
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