I love my family, and I miss them when I am not with them. When I imagine a life completely lacking the demanding structure being a wife and mother of four, I get the heebie jeebies.
AND ALSO, I frequently just want them to LEAVE ME ALONE. Preferably for a week or so, where I don’t have to hound them to clean up their messes, figure out how to bilocate, or moderate their tragedies and fights.
I’m betting nobody who read those two paragraphs batted an eye at these two statements, both of which are both 100% true…and which stand 100% in contradiction to each other.
But I lay them out there, trite and non-sensational as they are, because I wanted an easy way to make a point.
There are truths that contradict each other, and yet they are both, well, true.
You know by now that I write songs for Catholic worship. In the past few years, I’ve been challenged by clergy to consider the language of “kingdom building.” The danger is Pelagianism, which as I understand it is the idea that we are the movers and shakers, rather than God. To speak of kingdom building is to suggest that we are capable of bringing God’s kingdom, when in fact God is the one who does the work. The kingdom will never be fully revealed on Earth, because the Kingdom is Heaven.
This makes perfect sense to me…
And yet.
The thing I can’t reconcile in that is that if the Kingdom is never going to happen on earth, and in fact, CAN’T happen on earth, then why would anything of earth matter at all? Why should justice be a question? And that question cuts both ways. If Heaven is all that matters, why advocate for left-leaning causes from race to environmental stewardship—AND ALSO, why advocate for right-leaning causes such as abolition of abortion? If none of it matters, none of it matters!
Clearly, it DOES matter, despite the danger of Pelagianism in claiming so.
I promised I would share more from my reading of the N.T. Wright biography of Paul. Today is that day, because something Wright stressed again and again in his book was the importance of the temporal world to both Jesus and Paul.
What we think is THE central question of Christianity is: “How do I get to Heaven?” But this, Wright argues, is something Christianity took on in Medieval times. This was not what they were thinking about in the time of Jesus or the first century after the Resurrection.
Wright’s position is that we should read Paul as exactly what he was: a Jew. Despite Paul’s mission to the Gentiles, everything about his approach to Jesus was grounded in and grew out of Judaism. (Bear with me; there’s a reason this is important.)
Everywhere he went, Paul went first to the synagogues. Wright points out that every time Paul’s sermons are laid out, they follow the same pattern—he traces the Jewish history, bending toward the coming of the Messiah—who they expected to be an earthly force who would make a Heavenly kingdom present in real time, here on Earth.
That’s an important point: Judaism expected the coming together of Heaven and Earth, as in God coming to THIS earth to make things right. Wright stresses that everything in Paul’s background and writings displays Jewish belief of the time—namely, that for the Messiah to come, people of faith had to act on the real world and make it more closely align with God’s will. That was what would bring about the conditions for the coming of the Messiah.
So, what does this mean for us? The facile answer is that the Jewish people just stopped short. But Wright would argue otherwise. Paul’s preaching, Wright says, got him in trouble because he was suggesting that Jesus did exactly what the Jews had been expecting. It just looked different than they thought it would. They expected a political kingdom and Jesus brought a spiritual one, but he did bring the Kingdom of Heaven TO EARTH. Jesus was the beginning of Heaven and earth touching, but it’s NOT “just” about some Heaven we access at the end of time. It’s about the physical world, here and now.
And Paul didn’t stop being preoccupied with the idea that our actions had to work toward a world better aligned with God’s will, because to him, that was what would facilitate the second coming.
So, two truths that seem to be contradictory. God, not us, is the work behind the kingdom, a kingdom which we will never achieve on earth. AND we have a responsibility to try anyway.
I’m curious to hear how others grapple with this contradiction.
Its like that old Catholic/Protestant argument--can you lose your salvation, or is it once saved always saved? Protestants with the OSAS belief point out (rightly) that none of us can ever do enough to earn salvation--it is a gift from God. We point out that if your faith isn't manifested in your life, it doesn't really exist, and that unless you are saying that at some point Christians lose their free will, it doesn't make sense to say that we can't choose to leave God and live a life antithetical to His will, and we accept that having that choice may mean we make it--and suffer the consequences.
There is a stream of thought that looks at Christianity as a series of rules--many of which for most of us revolve around carnal issues as most people don't have major problems avoiding murdering their neighbors or stealing from them--don't do this or you will go to Hell (and if it is something you struggle with and I don't it is a lot easier to put it in the mortal sin category) . There is another stream that looks at what you do do--the "be nice" folks or social justice warriors who point out that Jesus told us to take care of people, and not just people who were just like us. Both streams have some truth, and yet both are incomplete.