“Let your manner of life be worthy of the gospel of Christ… standing firm in the spirit, with one mind striving side by side for the faith.” (Philippians 1:27)
Paul’s earnest instruction to the Philippians was that their “manner of life” (conduct) be worthy of the Gospel of Jesus. The Greek word translated “manner” means, among other things, “recognized as fitting”.[1]
Paul is talking about what we see in people, the outside appearances. In essence, Paul is saying let your conduct and the way people perceive you match the fruit of the Spirit that is working within you.
The fruit of the Spirit is “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control….”[2]
Jesus warned about false prophets, adding that we would know them by their fruits.[3] In contrast, Jesus said the world would know us by our love[4], which is the greatest of the fruits of the Spirit.[5]
In this context, how do we, as Christians, respond to the things that Donald Trump says and does? Why do we defend him? Why have we tied our destiny to him? What does the fruit look like that hangs from his tree?
I came to the conclusion in college that a person cannot reason his way to knowledge of God. I don’t remember all of the details that led me to this conclusion, but the conclusion was solidified for me in a lecture given by a professor on Western Civilization featuring Thomas Aquinas.
This lecture was given every year by this professor and eagerly anticipated by students at my college, which is why I attended it. As I remember the premise of the lecture, my memory of it being simplified now so many years later, science and reason can and does lead one to God. I determined then, and I believe now, that this is not true.
Not that science, reason and faith are incompatible. It’s just that science and human reason are not adequate for the task. Just as God must, necessarily, be Other than the material universe, we who are limited to the senses that are part and parcel of the material universe are limited in our ability to “see” and know anything beyond it.
The material universe consists of and is limited to the space/time continuum. By definition, God (if He exists) is Other than the space/time continuum. He is “outside” of space time. He is timeless and immaterial. Our science and our minds exist in space time and are limited to it and by it as a first principal.
In my way of thinking, a God who exists outside of this material world (our immediate environment) would have to reveal Himself to creatures such as ourselves. We could not “ascend” to Him.
Yet this is not to say that we can’t know anything of God. If such a God were to reveal Himself to us, we could know Him, but would we recognize the significance of that revelation? Jesus claimed to be a direct revelation from God. John, the apostle, said, “He came into the very world he created, but the world didn’t recognize him.” (John 1:10)
Is Jesus who he claimed to be?
I was influenced in reaching the conclusion I came to in college about the value of science and reason in this endeavor, no doubt, by Immanuel Kant and Soren Kierkegaard. They came to the opposite position of Aquinas. They essentially say it is impossible for a finite being such as ourselves to reason or discover our way to God. There will always be a gap in our knowledge that we will never be able to close by the reason and evidence that is available to us.
This made more sense to me. There will always be a gap between a finite being and an infinite being.
I recently returned from a trip to Budapest Hungary. Traveling to foreign lands and meeting foreign people expands our horizons and opens us up to new perspectives, and sometimes helps us to understand ourselves better.
I didn’t know much of Hungary before we left, not nearly as much as I know now. We had the intimate advantage of a guided tour by our own daughter who is living there now. She regaled us with some of the rich history that is proudly displayed throughout the sprawling city.
Budapest is a City full of strong, stately buildings and monuments to its past, good and bad. We have our own monuments to the past that are no less stately, though many centuries more recent, but viewing the unfamiliar Hungarian monuments got me thinking.
Why do we do this? Why do we erect such proud monuments to our past?
My Christmas thoughts a year ago were focused on the women in the genealogy that Matthew included in the beginning of his Gospel. Tamar, Rahab and Ruth are all women whose stories foreshadow the ultimate redemption saga of God entered into our story as human being to redeem the world. The grand story of global redemption is what we celebrate at Christmastime, and these women are each instrumental in that global redemption story.
A total of five women are listed in the patriarchal lineage included at the beginning of Matthew’s Gospel. The oddity of including women in a patriarchal lineage bears some investigation. Indeed, we find the redemptive theme when we look into it, and, that theme continues with the next woman on the list, but with a twist.
The twist begins with the fact that the next woman isn’t even named. The genealogy in Matthew reads like this:
Boaz the father of Obed, whose mother was Ruth, Obed the father of Jesse, and Jesse the father of King David. David was the father of Solomon, whose mother had been Uriah’s wife[i]
Another oddity signals that something is different here. The stories of Tamar and Ruth were stories of kinsman-redeemers, women who sought the shelter and protection of the relatives of their deceased husbands, and, thereby, gave birth to sons who would carry on the line that would eventually lead to Jesus, the Christ (Messiah). The stories of the first three women, including Rahab, are also stories of trust in God that are met by God in His faithfulness.
The story of “Uriah’s wife” is another example of God’s faithfulness, but the human side of the story is one of unfaithfulness. Bathsheba is the mother who had been Uriah’s wife. She isn’t named, perhaps, for the scandalous reason that King David murdered her husband and took advantage of her.
A very close friend of mine was expressing concern about the state of the world recently. He expressed concern about Donald Trump the Korean dictator, like a bully provokes a mass murderer. I was not prepared for such an existential discussion, and I did not respond very well.
I recognize, though, the the concerns are real. I was haunted by the specter of nuclear war as a child growing up in the 60’s and 70’s. I even bought a poster of a mushroom cloud to hang on my wall, not because I wanted the world to end in a ball of fire, but because it was a reality I couldn’t ignore.
But we do learn to ignore realities like that. I no longer have a poster of a mushroom cloud, and the threat of nuclear war no longer looms in my psyche like it did in my teenage years. Though it is no less likely to happen. (Maybe even more likely now!)
Maybe we lose our angst over these things because they are hard to live with them. We learn to push them back into the recesses of our consciousness. We displace the angst with busyness, entertainment and other distractions.
The fact is that life is short and tenuous. Whether we live to be a hundred or 80 or only 8, life will end. This is a harsh, but true, reality, though I’m afraid it isn’t very helpful “advice” for someone who is laboring under the burden of the weight of the world. I wish I had said something different (or, at least, more).
I firmly believe this world is not all there is. We thirst, and water exists to quench our thirst. We hunger, and food exists to sate our hunger. It makes sense that, if we yearn for something transcendent, something transcendental exists to satisfy our existential longing.
We all seem to “know” this, but the world is so full of a thousand superficial answers to the ultimate existential question that we hardly have any idea what to believe. We might be tempted to seize on the first or closest one or easiest answer, like responding to that Publishers Clearing House Sweepstakes mailer declaring you might be the winner. For some people, hope springs eternal.
Others are tempted to abandon any hope of an existential answer. The resign ourselves to the material world, trying to squeeze whatever temporal pleasure and benefits while they can out of this myopic existence.
Is there proof of something transcendent? How can we know? These are serious and heartfelt questions.
Navigating by Faith 