"The counterintuitive God" by Gregory Crofford for Sunday, 18 December 2016
Counterintuitive: different from what you would expect (Merriam-Webster's Online Dictionary). Like a clock that runs backwards, there's little doubt: God is counterintuitive.Take the incarnation, the eternal Christ clothing himself in human flesh. If the choice had been up to us, we might have chosen huge and flashy. Instead, to bear Emmanuel - "God with us" - the LORD chose someone humble and unknown.
Luke 1:28 (NIV) tells the story:
Greetings, you who are highly favored! The Lord is with you.Who was this "highly favored" person? Mary was a young Jewish girl. There was nothing noteworthy about her. She had no powerful connections, no high birth to commend her. Yet God - who has a habit of doing the unexpected - chose her to bear the Christ child.
Besides using the unknown Mary as Christotokos - the mother of Christ - another counterintuitive element of Christmas is tactics. Christ's coming to earth was hardly the Powell Doctrine. The former American Joint Chiefs of Staff believed that - as a last resort - if the military must be used, then go big. Amass huge quantities of soldiers and equipment, then overwhelm the enemy. But on Christmas, God didn't get the memo. He didn't dispatch an army of angels (though an angel choir did sing for a handful of shepherds). Instead, God parachuted an infant Jesus quietly behind enemy lines, like a single SEAL in camouflage. In a world under the destructive thumb of the devil and his sinister band of brothers (1 John 5:19, Ephesians 6:12 ), this underwhelming response seemed counterintuitive.
Besides choice of people and tactics, a final counterintuitive aspect of the incarnation is love. For a creation that had hatefully snubbed its Creator, one might expect in return well-deserved wrath, God paying back hate with greater hate. Yet to our utter amazement, this "SEAL" sent by God came armed with only one "weapon." Hate could never overcome hate; only love could do that:
For God so loved the world, that he gave his only son...
Paul in the cross discerned heaven's jujitsu, writing to the Romans: "Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good" (Romans 12:21, NIV). The cross is a counterintuitive demonstration of God's love for us sinners who despised him (Romans 5:8). While God's self-denying modus operandi makes little sense to human calculus, love is the powerful magnet that for twenty centuries has drawn people to their knees at manger, cross, and empty tomb.
Humble Mary, baby Jesus, love - These are three indications that we worship a counterintuitive God. The LORD acts differently than what you would expect. For the sake of our world, may we as Christ's followers recommit ourselves to doing likewise.
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Gregory Crofford
Sunday, December 18, 2016
Tags: Christology, incarnation, love
Categories: Christology
URL: http://wp.me/p1xcy8-1so
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Theology in Overalls
"Incarnation and holiness" by Gregory Crofford
It's a persistent theme across the centuries. Spirit is good; flesh is evil.Some of the ancient Greek philosophers taught the exaltation of the soul and the denigration of the body. Plato extolled the immortal soul while Gnosticism later picked up the theme, infecting early Christianity with the notion that salvation is achieved only when the soul is liberated from the prison house of corrupt flesh. Augustine never escaped the lure of this view, implying the dirtiness of the body by teaching that original sin is passed down through the procreative act.
The negative Greek view of human flesh is what makes the reaction to Paul's teaching in Acts 17 understandable. He met with a group of Epicurean and Stoic philosphers at Mars Hill in Athens (17:18). At first, they gave him a polite hearing as he attempted to build a bridge to them, speaking of the altar he had discovered which bore the inscription "to an unknown God" (v. 23). But then Paul lost his audience as quickly as he had gained it. What did he do wrong? He affirmed that God had raised Jesus from the dead (v. 31). Nothing bespeaks the value and goodness of the human body like God's willingness to restore one to life. The philosophers would have none of it.
But we're getting a bit ahead of the story. Long before Easter comes Christmas. While Easter is the feast of the resurrection, Christmas is the feast of the incarnation:
The Word became flesh and made his home among us. We have seen his glory, glory like that of a father's only son, full of grace and truth (John 1:14, CEB).
The eternal, Triune God who had made all that is and pronounced it "good" (Genesis 1) tabernacles among us as Emmanuel, God with us (Matthew 1:23) thereby dignifying humble flesh. If the Gnostics were correct to believe that the pure spirit of divinity could never stoop to inhabit a corrupt human body, then the incarnation becomes a non-sense. Yet we are not Gnostics and should resist their false teaching. Christian orthodoxy affirms that whatever the disobedience of Adam and Eve may have done to the human condition, God still sees in our body something already very good, something worth saving and perfecting.
Christmas as the moment when the Word became flesh is the celebration of God's good creation as symbolized by the tiny body of a baby boy. Our body was never meant to be viewed as a brake on our spiritual progress, as something that weight down our escape from this world. Far from a hindrance to our relationship with God, the body - properly viewed - becomes an instrument of praise. For every follower of Christ, our body becomes the very temple of God's Holy Spirit (1 Corinthians 6:19). Our body - what God already pronounced "supremely good" (Genesis 1:31, CEB) - we give back to the Lord so that it may be purified and set apart for sacred use (Romans 12:1-2). We worship God with our body. In so doing, our body becomes a vehicle the Lord can use for holy purposes.
The next time you are tempted to think of your body as an obstacle to fulfilling God's mission in your life, remember that the eternal Christ never spurned a body. Instead, he saw the incarnation as necessary, a human body as essential to fulfilling his divine calling. This Christmas, let us thank God for the body he has given us, and with joy give our body back to him for his sacred use.
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Image credit: Tou Logoi Logou
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Gregory Crofford
Sunday, December 11, 2016
Tags: holiness, incarnation
Categories: Christology
URL: http://wp.me/p1xcy8-1sb
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Theology in Overalls
"Africa and the re-enchantment of the West" by Gregory Crofford
Merlin the magicianVampires, wizards, witches, zombies - enchantment pervades the NetFlix movies we stream, the television programs we watch, and the books that sell by the millions. Science may be taught in our classrooms - the "Star Trek" franchise still has a following, after all - but it's the paranormal and the supernatural that are all the rage. In North America and Europe at the close of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st, we're seeing what may be termed the re-enchantment of the West.
As a missionary serving in Africa, I find this phenomenon fascinating since Africa arguably has never been de-enchanted, nearly a century of colonial rule and decades of post-colonial Western influence notwithstanding. Teaching a class of pastors in Benin some years ago, one told the story of seeing a mob with sticks chasing a stray dog. They beat it while the animal tried to escape. Finally, the bleeding dog fell to the ground under the pummeling of the crowd, then before their eyes changed into a young man, complete with bleeding wounds on his body. The pastor wanted to know: What does Christian theology have to say about that?
Recently I ordered a textbook for a theology course at the university where I teach. The book was published recently in the West, by Western scholars. Though the book has much to commend it, my Kenyan students will look in vain to find any framework by which to respond to the question the West African pastor asked me, yet Benin and Kenya are close in outlook. In January 2016, a story was reported in multiple news outlets that breathes the same enchanted worldview. Purportedly, a Kenyan man had his motorcycle stolen. To find out who had taken it, and to get it back, he went to the witchdoctor, who allegedly sent a swarm of bees. The bees split into two groups, once enveloping the missing motorcycle, the other attacking the supposed thief. As reported in one French language edition of the story, people sent for the witchdoctor, who then made the bees leave. One Kenyan official gave an alternative explanation, reporting that a queen bee had become lodged in the handlebars, which explains the swarming of the rest of the hive. It was one event but explained through two very different pairs of spectacles.
The re-enchantment of the West and the ongoing enchantment of sub-Saharan Africa raise several questions in my mind:
- What place does science education have in curriculum of both public and private schools in both the U.S. and Africa? Is its purpose de-enchantment?
- Does an acknowledgment of cause/effect in the universe as explained by science necessarily exclude supplementary explanations of other agents such as witchdoctors, or - to use the Western paradigm - witches, warlocks, or wizards?
- Must Christian theology in a postmodern world rediscover categories that appear in older systematic theologies, including the discussion of angels and demons? Are there any other voids in our teaching that encourage African Christians to seek explanations - and sometime, solutions to their everyday problems, like stolen bikes - in sub-Christian ways, by means other than addressing their needs to God in prayer?
How do we address issues around magic while avoiding sowing fear, keeping our eyes firmly on the truth that Christ has vanquished evil in all of its forms? In desiring to be relevant, is it possible that we'll end up making the devil and his minions larger and more powerful than they are? We must not inflate the power of the demonic by giving it undue attention, detracting from the surpassing greatness and power of the Triune God, a God who is never far away but present and active in our world.
These are areas that are ripe for theologizing based upon solid exegesis of biblical material. Having been trained in a Western setting, I did not have eyes to see Scripture in-light of the kind of question that the Beninese pastor asked me. After twenty years in Africa, I'm more sensitive to such questions. However, they are better dealt with by local African theologians who can marry scientific explanations (where applicable) to the more supernaturalistic worldview that they know so well and that is apparent in Scripture.
In light of the re-enchantment of the West, we are witnessing a golden opportunity for Western and African Christian theologians to put their heads together to provide biblical answers to practical questions but from a holistic worldview. Let us not be satisfied to let vacuums in our thinking persist. Answers that honor God are there if we are willing to seek them. We owe the church and our world nothing less.
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Photo credit: By Douglas Baulch (Douglas Baulch) [CC BY 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons
Gregory Crofford
Sunday, December 4, 2016
Tags: enchantment, magic, postmodernism, Western worldview
Categories: African theology, reflections
URL: http://wp.me/p1xcy8-1rU
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