The Virtue of Being Known

Theological Virtues

Sometime next fall, I hope to hold in my hands an actual copy of Walking the Theological Life, a book I wrote over the past year or so. It’s a look at the lives of a few biblical characters and way we find ways of knowing God through them. In Sarah, we see the theological virtue of laughter. Jacob teaches us something about knowing God through wrestling. Mary demonstrates a virtue of pondering, and Isaiah the virtue of being undone. In short, I’m trying to offer folks who are concerned about knowing God – theology students, pastors, and others – an approach to theological methodology that turns to virtues, rather than mechanics.

When I say virtues, I don’t have in mind a kind of flawlessly pristine uniformity of

thought or behavior. Many of the figures I’ve examined are anything but examples of moral virtue (e.g. Moses was a murderer and Sarah treated Hagar horribly). But there is something in their responses to the divine that our ancestors thought was not only worth preserving, but also encoding into the logic of our faith. In canonizing these stories, it’s almost as if they’ve said to us, “Don’t overlook this response. I know that person isn’t morally flawless, but neither are you, and you could probably learn something about how to know God from what happened there.”

In a series of posts, I want to offer brief reflections on the theological virtues I’m finding in these figures. These are little previews of the book, and if you’d be interested in joining the launch team, please let me know!

Our partners on this journey will be:

Jeremiah – On not Knowing How to Speak

Jacob – On Wrestling

Sarah – On Laughing

Moses – On Morality

Miriam – On Courage

Isaiah – On Being Undone

Mary – On Pondering

John the Baptist – On Standing at the Edge

The Woman at Jesus’s Feet – On Love

Thomas – On Doubting

Martha and Mary – On Grieving

Nicodemous – On Theology at Night and Leadership in the Dark

Jeremiah – On Not Knowing How to Speak

The beginning of Jeremiah’s prophetic epic begins, not with a call, but with a reminder: “Before I formed you in the womb, I have known you” (Jer. 1:5). It’s an odd way to begin a prophet’s story, mainly because prophets are known for how they speak – they are known for their words. But Jeremiah exhibits a different kind of virtue. He is the one who says, “I do not know how to speak…” (Jer. 1:6).

A twofold vision of theological virtue emerges: 1) Jeremiah is known before he will know and 2) He begins with a confession that he doesn’t know how to speak.

On Being Known

Theology sometimes gets a reputation for being a quest to know about God. I’ll admit that there was a nearly mystical allure to theology when I was just starting out. It looked to me like the theologians were the ones who had broken through the dross of the mundane to a glorious and hidden knowledge of God that wasn’t available to just everyone. I’d later find Plato hiding behind that myth, far more than Jesus. At any rate, theology was about gaining knowledge – about knowing.

It was also about taking that knowledge and wielding it in some way. Once I had the theological knowledge, I thought, I could do something with it, as if I had taken that knowledge in hand, placing it under my control.

That method, I think, has been used in some profoundly troubling and harmful ways. The headlines are filled these days with folks who have taken knowledge of God under their control and used it in service of their purposes. In some circles, that kind of method is even seen as a virtue.

Jeremiah, however, exhibits a kind of virtue that I’ve found to be far more helpful in theology. His virtue is being known by a living God before setting out on a quest to know.

The presence of this story in our biblical canon is a refreshing critique to the forms of theology that seek to know about God so that we can somehow employ that knowledge in constructing a kingdom of our own making. We can advance our causes, make our arguments, and generally take theology in hand as a tool or weapon. Jeremiah’s reminder to us is that we are known by God before we are called to speak. In him, we detect no bloviating sense of, “Let me tell you!” Rather, in his life we find something like, “I don’t know how to speak…but I am known by God.”

Jeremiah reminds me that long before I can know anything about God (even before I was in the womb!), I am known-by-God. That has to humble me. It slows me down to marvel at the reality that I am known before I am called to know, and especially before I am called to speak.

The opening lines of Jeremiah’s prophecy are a birthing suite for the virtuous work of knowing and being known in the task of theology. What is born out of his words is not an attempt to know for the sake of mastering but an invitation to first be known by God. As Jeremiah has it, the beauty of God is no set of hidden facts that, once unveiled through inquiry and observation, can be held in our hands as we would possess an idol of wood or bronze. We are known, rather, by a living God. Before we speak about God, before we put pen to paper or utter a single word, there is this: we are known by God. We could say it another way: before theologians set out to know God, they are known-by-God.

The beginning of the theologian’s quest to know God is in being known by God, placing all of us in a posture of epistemic humility and prayerful wonder. For the theologian, this posture even gestures to the beginning of a method. We begin by acknowledging that God knows us. We sit with that, we wonder at that, and it begins to suggest to us a way of doing our work. We are searched and known, to borrow the language of the psalmist (Ps 139:1). Our motivations, our gifts, our biases, our fears, our anxieties, hidden and unveiled, bravely acknowledged or naively undetected—all of that is taken up in the way God encounters us, knowing us. How might this shape the kind of theology we do? How might this move theology from the quest to acquire information about God for the sake of having answers and reorient it toward a kind of awareness that we are known by God first and beginning from there? What if we approached the work of theology by acknowledging the reality that the God we want to know is the one who knows us first? How might adjusting our way of knowing from first being a knower to being known shape the kind of theology we do?

Christian Faith is Seriously Funny

Somewhere along the line, we picked up the notion that it wasn’t okay to laugh in church, and it stuck. I fear theology had a lot to do with that, because far too often, theology isn’t a laughing matter. Theology, we think, is serious business, and nothing at which we should laugh. I beg to differ. Being funny should not be the enemy of being serious. The Christian faith is, I think, seriously funny.

A friend recently asked in a discussion forum what humor has to do with theology. As it just so happened, I've written a chapter on this topic for a forthcoming book on doing theology with virtue and joy, which I've drawn from in this brief reflection. Let me know if you'd like to be notified when the book releases; you can also take in a sermon I preached on the topic.

Humor is an overlooked virtue of the theological life. Bursting through the clear delineations of logic and cognition, laughter erupts as if our mind and body are conspiring against rationality itself by taking the mundane, the everyday, even (perhaps especially!) the vulgar, and conspicuously transgresses even the thinnest veneer of self-possession. Laughter overtakes us, even when we work to suppress it. If I’m honest, this may be one of my favorite things about laughter. Sometimes, the more you work against it, the more it makes a mockery of your effort. It doesn’t care that you’re at your aunt’s funeral. Your cousin’s oblivious boyfriend just walked the center aisle at the church with his shirt tail hanging out of his open fly for all to observe, and a particularly uppity funeral director who is clearly more comfortable interacting with dead people than living ones is wearing a look of horror on his face that is inexplicably and uncontrollably funny. We know we’re not supposed to laugh in a situation like that, so why is it so hard to stop ourselves?

This is precisely what I find to be so promising about laughter in doing the work of theology. It is upending, surprising, and overtakes us when we least expect it. It intrudes on the well-adjusted social norms that set the tone of our culture and the expectations for those who wish to fit in. It’s the kid who has smashed his nose and mouth onto the plate glass window of the fancy restaurant where a couple is having a romantic dinner and won’t relent until they acknowledge his sloppy impression of a blowfish. It offends the status quo and evokes a response precisely because it’s so out of the ordinary. Isn’t that something like hearing the gospel?

What if part of theology’s invitation to you was to be brought to laughter by God’s upending activity? Christians tend to find the clearest expression of God’s activity in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. What if the truth of God’s work to overcome evil in the world through Jesus was at least a little bit funny because it’s so truthfully serious? If this is the case, I can’t think of anything more absurdly truthful than the resurrection of Jesus. It isn’t normal for a man who was publicly executed to return to life. In fact, the public nature of the crucifixion is precisely what makes this so preposterous. Lots of people saw him die, but there’s no category of ‘normal’ where we see him come back to life, no matter the method of his demise. The odd feeling that overtakes me when I talk honestly about what I really believe is probably an indication of just how funny this resurrection business is. “I believe that a peasant carpenter, son of a virgin, from the wrong side of the tracks got crossways with religious authorities and the Roman government 2,000 years ago, and they killed him. After they killed him, he came back to life and talked with his friends, and ate fish, and appeared in locked rooms, and generally hung around for several weeks. I think he’s God and I worship him.” Speaking it out loud reminds me of how preposterous it is, but the truthfulness of it demands that I continue to speak it. When the absurd truth of God’s activity hits me like that, how can I say it with a straight face? Put another way, the only setup for a joke better than, “A guy walks into a bar…” may be, “A guy walked out of his tomb…” Or, as we often say during our laughter at a joke, it’s funny because it's true.

Funnier still is that the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus is how God has opted to deal with evil, sin, oppression, corruption, and the like. That’s a reality that moved Julian of Norwich to laughter. A fourteenth century theologian, she recorded a series of visions that she received in what became the first book to be written by a woman in English. In one vision, she saw the passion of Jesus as “the overcoming of the Fiend,” a reference to the devil. “Also,” she wrote, “I saw our Lord scorn [the devil’s] malice and set at naught his unmight; and he willeth that we do so. For this sight, I laughed mightily, and that made them to laugh that were about me, and their laughing was a pleasure to me.” Imagine, if you will, the work of a theologian to help others laugh mightily because of God’s overturning of evil, and to take delight in the laughter of those who join you.

Stanley Hauerwas comments on the nature of humor in the work of Christian theology, pointing out, “a story that has at its center a crucified savior does not invite jocular commentary.” He follows that comment with what has become one of my favorite theological sentences: “But there is resurrection.” Resurrection is the surprising punchline that makes the Christian life funny. It is not only a joke being played on death itself, but also on every familiar pattern in our life that tricks us into thinking that death is the ultimate end, and thus our lives are the ultimate good. Thinking of our lives as the ultimate good strikes me as profoundly humorless. It is completely serious because it has to be. If accruing a bunch of stuff, getting the dream job, or having the perfect house is the real meaning of life, it’s got to be defended at all costs. If our life is the ultimate end, it isn’t a laughing matter.

Resurrection is the truth that can make life funny. If it’s true that we can’t really laugh while we are afraid, resurrection opens the space for us to laugh in the face of the singular reality that has shaped human motivation from the beginning of time. Without resurrection, this life is all that we have, and is therefore the ultimate concern of human existence. You can laugh at a pie in the face when your belly is full. When you are starving, wasting food is no laughing matter. In the surprising event of resurrection, then, the Christian faith enjoys an abundance of life that can join with God in laughing at death. Pointing to the work of 20th century theologian Karl Barth, Hauerwas observes the humor that shines through Barth’s work, marking his preaching and teaching with a distinctive sense of playfulness and freedom. “Because Barth’s theology was so sure of the victory of Christ, he was free to enjoy the world.” The work of theology can be laughter, if we’ll allow ourselves to be surprised by the punchline.

Funny is what happens when absurdity and truth collide. Those of us who have been trained as theologians through the careful reading of texts and the writing of essays and books tend to run in a mode of analysis; we don’t often let things burst in upon us and call it theology. While there is most certainly something to be said for the careful consideration of an argument, this isn’t the way we experience humor. A joke lands, often surprisingly, and the surprise is what makes it funny. Steve Wilkins has observed, “Humor builds on punch-line surprises, disruption of the conventional, reversal of expectation…challenging boundaries, misinterpretation, redefinition of the familiar, satire, paradox, irony, and other related devices.” Perhaps this is what has made me a fan of Winston Churchill’s humor. “A joke is a very serious thing,” he once quipped. At risk of squeezing the life out of this clever little witticism, the surprise is that joke and serious rarely belong together. We are surprised by the word ‘serious’ after the word ‘joke,’ and that’s what makes it a joke!

Churchill was also the master of surprising his listeners by turning some serious philosophical or political reality into something else altogether. “A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on,” he once said. I think I smile at this because I can’t help but picture some deeply philosophical concept like ‘truth’ as a bumbling, bleary-eyed old man, reaching for his trousers while trying to rub the sleep out of his eyes. The oddness of an image like that carries a sense of surprise. I’m familiar with old men, I’m familiar with pants, and I’m familiar with notions of truth, but putting them all together in this way makes the familiar a bit strange.

What else is Christian theology than coming to terms with the familiar being made strange? As an ongoing act of speaking the gospel, theology describes how commonplace realities are being redemptively upended by God’s activity. Can we behold the surprise that erupts from God becoming flesh? Isn’t the work of theology to help us and others receive the “redefinition of the familiar” that takes place over and over again in the history of God’s people? Not only does God’s activity surprise us with turning things backwards and upside down, but the work of theology also seeks to bring these incongruous acts of redemption to our attention. Churchill might as well have taken his line from John’s Gospel. If the Word can become flesh, the truth can certainly put its pants on.

Part of theology’s delight is when it does the work of making the familiar strange enough to evoke laughter through disruption of the familiar. Some of the greatest comedians are the ones who can take common, everyday experiences and narrate them in ways that point out how odd they really are. There isn’t usually anything particularly funny about an airport or commercial air travel until a good comedian gets ahold of the experience. Once you’ve heard a comedian bring to light how ridiculous the whole thing can be, it’s hard to ever see air travel the same way again. That also happens to be the comment I hear from folks in church after a bit of sermonic theology that has illuminated some aspect of God’s activity in the world. “I’ll never look at that passage the same way again,” I’ll sometimes hear. I only wish they’d laugh a bit more when they say it.

Learning to laugh at something that is truly funny takes theological vision. For those studying theology for the sake of ministry, this point cannot be missed. Ministry can be a life of laughter when our eye is turned to the joke God is playing on the familiar patterns of power, oppression, control, and kingdom-building. If our vision of life in the church is conditioned by the same old patterns of power, we won’t see what is so funny about the lowly being lifted up and the mighty brought low. It will offend us. Our laughter may quickly mutate to mocking.

Theology in the mode of laughter is also vital for church leadership. When we are in on God’s joke, decisions can be made in a way that help others laugh joyfully as well. Theology without the joy of humor, however, can quickly devolve into a desperate attempt to survive at all costs, or a quest to take control. This is probably why the people who have never really had much control have produced some of the funniest comedians. Theology that assumes it needs to defend or control will almost always miss the joke.

When it’s nurtured with a theological vision of true humor, the church is a community of laughter because it has long been associated with incongruous intrusions of the norm. From its early days as a kind of subversive underground comedy club, its members would get together and try out new material. They’d read out loud texts that conveyed to them what they’ve eventually call the gospel, and it would call them into an eccentrically holy life. (Eventually, they’d call those texts the New Testament.) The gospel was the truthful story that helped them chuckle even as they continued to be pressed out of life in the Roman Empire. Humor is a powerful vehicle for telling the truth, especially the truth a lot of other people can’t see. That’s most likely why some of the best comedic traditions have come from people who have been historically oppressed. This isn’t to suggest that being a member of the church in the late-modern West automatically makes one oppressed, but it is to suggest that stepping into the pattern of the gospel has usually made people a bit odd in whatever society they find themselves, and the gospel then is the story that can keep them laughing.

Doing theology with an eye to humor means that we’ll need to invite others to join in on the joke. The challenge will likely arise when we have taken faith and its institutions so seriously that we’ve lost our laughter. Doing work that is faithful to God’s comedic material sometimes puts theologians in front of what comedians might call a tough room, filled with those who come with expectations, but can’t laugh at any of the jokes. Sometimes, comedians face a tough room when their material doesn’t have a truthful edge; the jokes are too vanilla. On the other side, tough rooms happen when the jokes are just too offensive to be funny. Comedians probably have something to teach theologians here, especially those of us doing pastoral theology. If our work abandons the edgy and surprising inbreaking of God’s kingdom, it’s probably not worth our laughter. At the same time, if telling the truth about God’s activity is simply too offensive for people, that’s probably a good indicator that they aren’t in on the joke, and their commitments lie elsewhere. God’s activity has always disrupted and unsettled those who just couldn’t find the humor in it, and so the work of the theologian may sometimes mean helping them to get in on the joke by letting go of the commitments that are blocking their laughter. Gifted humorists can do this well, helping us to see issues from unique and unexpected angles, helping us to experience humor where we hadn’t seen it before. The work of theology calls on us to acquire some comedic skill, resisting the urge to offer humorless, bland material that promises the safety of not offending, while also offering a way in for those who may have built up resistance to God’s jokes, offended at what holiness actually is.

That will, of course, require that we ourselves learn to laugh first. We need to be able to get God’s sense of humor. In my work as a professor, I spend a lot of time with those who are just beginning their work as theologians. There is, of course, the evanescent beauty of uncovering mysteries of the divine that are life-giving and invigorating. There are also plenty of times I’ll look into the eyes of a student who’s struggling to get the joke. It’s not that they can’t grasp the concepts, but that they’re beginning to realize that God’s activity is making them uncomfortable. God’s activity, authoritatively witnessed to us by Scripture, sometimes even cuts against the concepts of God and God’s activity that they’ve carried into the classroom. Over the months I spend with them, I’ve come to see my job as helping them to laugh by getting the joke. It’s not as much that I do this by explaining how the joke is funny, but by introducing them to a vision of the world in which God’s activity really is capable of evoking laughter. When we’ve learned to loosen up from the theological hang-ups that make God’s material offensive to us, it prepares us for laughter. It happens in subtle ways across time, in things like listening carefully to Mary’s song, inquiring into why Peter didn’t get the joke himself, and when I can see a spark of theological laughter in their work, calling attention to it, even if they may be a little resistant at first, in words that were familiar to Sarah: “Yes, you did laugh.” And that’s perfectly alright. When you get the joke, you don’t need to cover your laughter.

One Theologian's Take on General Assembly Resolutions

Six years ago, my home denomination last held its global gathering, at which we discuss and vote on several issues, ranging from small to large changes. Sometimes, we have trouble seeing what is small and what is large. For example, it was at our last gathering that we voted to change our statement on The Lord’s Supper, moving us from a Zwinglist ‘memorial’ position (Christ is not present at the table, but we ‘remember’ or ‘memorialize’ him there) to something far closer to Luther’s affirmation that Christ is really and truly present in that sacrament. It was a huge win for theological coherence in our tradition, though there wasn’t a single question asked or word of debate raised, signaling to me that the delegation wasn’t quite aware of how theologically monumental such a vote was. I’ve spoken on this several times in the years following, and the response is largely the same: “I didn’t know we did that! That’s a huge change!” Indeed, it is!

This time around, I thought I’d offer some brief reflections on the theological issues at stake in our resolutions. To be clear, this isn’t my advice on how anyone should vote, but having a clearer picture of the theological issues may help inform us. I’m also not a voting delegate (our district considers only those members of the clergy who are serving as senior pastors, so full-time professors usually aren’t considered for election) so, as the saying goes, “I don’t have a dog in the fight.” Well, except for the burning desire for a church I love to reflect the kingdom Jesus establishes more faithfully! This is just one theologian’s insights that I hope you’ll find interesting or helpful. I can’t touch on them all, and I’m sorry if I didn’t get to one of your favorites, but I’ll update this post with more as I’m able. If there’s a particular resolution you’d like me to discuss, feel free to let me know and I’ll do my best to speak to the theological issues it touches. Let’s get to it.

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This resolution offers a wide-ranging change to the Covenant of Christian Conduct, bringing it into harmony with a Wesleyan vision of the human person, a life filled with love, sin, and the holy life. Its setting of ‘behaviors’ within the motif of new creation is

the theological key to this resolution. One of the central themes of Wesleyan theology, new creation is more than an update of an outmoded world. It is, rather, the affirmation that God is active in the world, making all things new in accordance with God’s purposes for creation.

Importantly, the language expands from a fairly (and narrowly!) personal view of morality, situating moral behaviors within the larger narrative of God creation and redemption. “Scripture begins with God good work of creating, though the appearance and ever-increasingly devastating effects of sin followed.” In this sentence, our behaviors aren’t only abstractly ‘good’ and ‘bad’ things but are caught up in the theo-drama of creation, fall, and redemption. A reference to one of my favorite biblical passages follows: “If anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: the old is gone, the new is here!” (2 Cor. 5:17-19), and with it, the theological table is laid: this is about new creation! Or, perhaps, it signals that this is a statement more about God’s new creation activity in the world than it is about our willing ourselves to make moral choices under our own steam.

Vitally, the proposed changes use the word ‘response’ multiple times, a word that doesn’t appear at all in the original. What does that mean? It means that whatever behaviors it names will be understood as “commitments and choices in response to God’s transforming grace.” Those italics are mine, because I want to highlight how vital this is for the Christian life in the Wesleyan tradition. John Wesley’s lively image of the human heart being filled with love, excluding sin comes to mind, as does the entire vision of Mildred Wynkoop’s A Theology of Love. Flowing in the same stream as Wesley and Wynkoop, this language refreshingly reminds us that we don’t will ourselves to the kind of life described in this statement; it is a gift of grace. Or, to put it another way, this isn’t a list of rules that allow us to live a holy life; this is what a holy life looks like as it’s being transformed by God’s grace. This language moves the Covenant to become more descriptive than prescriptive, such that the behaviors it names flow out of a heart gracious filled with love for God and neighbor. In other words, while taking moral behaviors seriously, it theologically locates them in a way that makes the life of holiness one of joy, rather than a legalistic set of rules to be followed. To my reading, this statement is summoning us to take another step down the pathway toward theological coherence, making our central message even more joyful.

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Should someone be baptized if they are to be taken into local church membership? To my knowledge, this has never been a requirement for membership in the Church of the Nazarene’s history, though it does have a longer historical precedent. Some of the earliest documents we have (I have Hippolytus’ On the Apostolic Tradition in mind here) describe baptismal practices that call for three years of preparation, largely because for the early Christians, baptism was far more than a ‘spiritual’ sign that left the rest of our lives unaffected. Hippolytus described the jobs people would have to leave to be able to enter the waters of baptism and the allegiances that must be shattered. In essence, anything that stood in opposition to the lordship of Jesus had to be denied. Only then would someone be considered a full member of the church.

The early church took these vows incredibly seriously because being a follower of Jesus was a way unto itself; it wasn’t compatible with other commitments. It wasn’t possible to be a good Roman and a good Christian because being a good Roman involved vows to Caesar as lord, and to walk in the ways of Rome. We modern people don’t have a category for this kind of religious life, because nearly everyone reading this was born into a world where being an upstanding citizen came with the territory of being a Christian. Our earliest ancestors in the faith, however, couldn’t perceive of life like that, and so when one was baptized, it signaled a death of the old life (political, national, economic, etc.) and new birth into a completely different way of life. That way of life was membership in the body of Christ, the church.

Many of these practices live on today in various forms of Christianity. Orthodox communities, for example, still follow this ancient pattern, dividing worship into the liturgy of the Word (which anyone can attend, usually involving the reading of Scripture), and the liturgy of the faithful (where only the baptized are invited to partake of the Lord’s Supper). This might sound offensively exclusive to contemporary ears, but it’s meant to help us steward the treasures of the faith well, and to create a community in which faith isn’t treated like an extracurricular activity, but is as the core of who we are, commitments and all.

What, then, does this mean theologically for Nazarenes? On the one hand, it moves us more toward a sacramental approach to membership. That is, membership isn’t simply a ‘voluntary association’ like joining the Lions Club or a softball team. In this resolution, we are saying that there is divine activity undergirding membership in a local congregation. Ecclesiologically (having to do with the study of the church), this moves us away from volunteeristic visions of church life where we think of ourselves as making up a church because we’ve decided to join, and more toward embracing a theology where the church is a miracle of grace, because we are a body who have entered through the waters of baptism, where we were really and truly met by God and transformed by grace.

On the other hand, many ‘baptism first’ traditions are far more comfortable in practice with infant baptism than the Church of the Nazarene has tended to be. Though our Manual names infant baptism as a valid form of the sacrament, a strong majority of our congregations lean in practice toward ‘believer’s baptism’ in which the person being baptized actively confesses faith in Jesus. There is, of course, a theological question to be asked: Is baptism more about my public testimony to God’s grace, or God’s grace that has acted before I was aware of it? Put more succinctly, is it about what I’m doing, or is it about what God’s doing?

A Wesleyan view of this sees it as both, that God acts first in grace, and we humans respond to that grace. This is why I’ve long said that for congregations who practice infant baptism, we should also take very seriously the need for humans to actively respond to the grace they received in their baptism. Often, that looks like something called confirmation, but considering this resolution, I’m wondering if church membership could take on the shape of offering people the opportunity to respond to the grace at work in their baptism by joining a local body that God is gifting to the world as an expression of new creation.

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A statement on the goodness of creation is a welcome addition to the Manual, especially, since the Bible begins with its own affirmation of the goodness of creation from the first two chapters (Gen. 1, 2). I strongly suspect this resolution will be headed for referral to a study committee to work out some of the finer theological points, as is the case with most of these kinds of resolutions, so I’m not going to spend a lot of time parsing its language, but there are some important considerations.

First, the affirmation of the goodness of creation is a vital theological move and will help across the spectrum of doctrines. Additionally, it’s truer to Wesley’s own vision, as evidenced in one of his earliest sermons, “The New Creation,” which opens with an affirmation of the goodness of creation.

Many of the most challenging moral and theological questions of our time stem from whether or not we think creation is good. There are many Christians who consider Genesis 1 and 2 as an interesting and truthful backstory, but ultimately affirm that creation and humanity really is essentially described in Genesis 3. But the Wesleyan tradition (tracing a line of thought going back to early Christianity) encourages a view of creation where the effects of sin are real and eating away at the goodness of creation. In other words, creation really is good, but it’s being afflicted by a disease: sin and evil. Creation itself isn’t evil, but it is being afflicted by evil. This resolution helps us see that theological vision more clearly.

I’m also struck by the opening sentence, stating, “the Triune God created the heavens and the earth and everything in them out of nothing but love.” Historically, the Christian tradition has affirmed creatio ex nihilo, mean ‘creation out of nothing.’ It was a philosophical and theological safeguard against a vision of the universe that begins with ‘God and something else.’ That is, if we affirm that God created out of nothing – real nothing! – that we are on different theological ground from the other religious traditions of the world (particularly those in the ancient near east around the time of Judaism’s rise) that made meaning of their world by telling creation stories about gods who create out of a struggle against one another. Rome’s creation myth, for example, does a lot to tell the Roman people who they are by saying that they are the product of divine conflict between gods. Israel, by contrast, wanted to tell a different story altogether about the One God who has no rival and creates by speaking.

More recently, some theologians have suggested another approach to understanding creation, namely creatio ex amore. This is to say that the Christian doctrine of creation is better understood as God creating out of love, rather than out of nothing. The former, they argue, is a clearer reflection of the biblical narrative (what was that ‘formless void’ God spoke to if there was nothing?), and better sets us up to see God’s activity through the rest of the biblical story.

I’m risking going back on my earlier claim that I wouldn’t parse the language of this resolution too carefully, but the wording is like philosophical and theological catnip. What, exactly, would we mean by “nothing but love”? My friend, colleague, and former professor Michael Lodahl has done a lot of this work in his 2004 book, The God of Nature and of Grace: Reading the World in a Wesleyan Way, and you can look there if these questions interest you as much as they interest me.

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Dealing with the theological beauty and complexity of the Atonement is far more than I can do in a few meager paragraphs. The resolution before us, adapting our Article of Faith on the matter, touches on a host of theological issues, most of which I won’t be able to engage adequately in a blog post, but several points of particular interest jump out.

First, the theological theme of new creation finds its way into the language, locating the Atonement in the larger theological narrative of redemption than simply reducing it to the suffering of Jesus. That is, Atonement is more than Christ’s suffering.

Additionally, the language of reconciliation, absent from the current version, represents a step forward toward theological coherence for Nazarenes. ‘Atonement’ is one of the few words in theology that stems from English roots. Greek, Hebrew, and Latin are the usual sources for the language we’ve used to describe God and God’s activity, but the term ‘atonement’ is, at its etymological root, ‘at-one-ment.’ That is, it has to do with making one of something that has been separated. In this case, Christ’s work of Atonement reconciles the broken relationship between God and creation, renewing creation by connecting it to its source. The fact that reconciliation language is absent our current Article is a tad troubling on that front, and so I’m glad to see that shift in this resolution.

Finally, I’ll mention that our Article is broad enough that it doesn’t overtly endorse a particular ‘atonement theory,’ as we often refer to them in theology. The various atonement theories seek to describe what was happening, especially with Jesus on the cross and his suffering. Interestingly, the global Church (across denominations) has never agreed on one theory that sufficiently describes what was happening in Jesus’s crucifixion, so there is a wideness open to Christians on the matter. Some gravitate toward theories like penal substitution, in which the punishment for sin is taken on to Jesus, shielding us from it ourselves. Anslem’s satisfaction theory generally frames Jesus’s atoning work as restoring the justice between God and humanity that was violated by human sin. Gustaf Aulen’s Chrisus victor approach names the Atonement as Christ winning a victory over sin, death, and evil as the primary substance of Jesus’s atoning work, decentering ‘punishment’ motifs in favor of God’s direct engagement with evil.

Nazarenes aren’t overtly called to endorse any of these (or the others I haven’t named). For the sake of theological coherence, however, I usually encourage Wesleyans to consider which of these theories resonate with the God we have come to know in the person of Jesus. In other words, what kind of God is revealed to us in the whole life of Jesus? What if the crucifixion wasn’t Jesus shielding us from a God bent on retribution, but the very revelation of divine nature? Genesis 15 tells the story of God’s willingness to endure the consequences of Israel’s eventual breach of faithlessness, rather than inflict those consequences upon Israel. In entering into covenant with Abraham, God’s own presence ‘walks the gauntlet’ of splayed-open animal carcasses that the weaker of two parties usually would walk, signaling their own willingness to end up like the animals if they violate the covenant. It can shock us, then, that God is the one who walks the gauntlet, having to Abraham in a deep sleep. God is willing to endure the consequences of Israel’s potential violation of the covenant.

To my reading, this resolution – through its appeal to reconciliation, new creation, and resurrection language – helps us approach the Atonement through God’s self-sacrificial love.

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I teach an entire course on the content of this Article, both at Trevecca and our denominational seminary, so needless to say, a few observations aren’t going to cover everything issue that surfaces in this wide-ranging rewrite of what Nazarenes often refer to as a cardinal doctrine. Gladly, this resolution is accompanied by an extended and thorough phrase by phrase commentary, offering historical, biblical, and theological background on this particular proposal. Rather than repeat any of the fine work that’s been done there, I’ll simply mention that this resolution offers a vision of entire sanctification that resonates deeply with John Wesley’s own synthesis of eastern and western theological themes.

It’s too simplistic to paint the eastern and western streams of the Christian tradition as starkly distinct, though there are themes that each offer. The western metaphors are the ones we tend to be more familiar and comfortable to us: legal themes of guilt and pardon, stemming from Augustine and then being passed to us through Luther and Calvin. This is the stream of the tradition where we get terms like ‘original sin,’ which is a phrase used in the current Article, and it's the stream that usually tended to give us notions like original sin as being basic to the human being, such that we’ll never be free from it in this life.

The eastern stream, dating back to the work of Clement of Rome, Ignatius of Antioch, and Polycarp of Smyrna – and then later developed in the work of the so-called Cappadocian Fathers (Gregory of Nyssa, Basil, and Gregory of Nazianzus), tends to draw upon metaphors of healing to describe Christian salvation, and what we’d refer to now as entire sanctification. Gregory of Nyssa, more than his older brother Basil, or Gregory of Nazianzus, emphasized a kind of dynamic and constant growth in grace. Extrapolating this metaphor for our current context, we could say that the life of entire sanctification is responding to God’s grace with one’s entire self, such that there is no part of is that is not constantly growing in grace. It doesn’t mean we’ve ‘arrived’ at a kind of static place precisely because there’s limit to divine grace – it carries us deeper into the infinite.

The resolution before us reaches back into the western and eastern streams, just as Wesley did. To my reading, it gives more careful biblical and historical attention to what we’ve come to refer to as ‘entire sanctification,’ helping us to see that this doctrine isn’t something that was invented in the 19th century, but has deep historical roots. Of course, since the Church of the Nazarene’s inception, there has been a contingent that appeals to the vision of sanctification that emerged in the 19th century, often referred to as American holiness, which tends to work out of western metaphors. Whether our global body will embrace this synthetic, historically rooted resolution will be interesting.

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Another change to one of the Articles of Faith is bound to get attention, and rightly so. The Article under consideration here catches my attention on a few points.

First, this resolution sets the final coming of Christ within the larger narrative of God’s creation. I often remind students that there are two ways to end something. You can either stop it in its tracks, or you can bring it to a fitting conclusion. When we talk about the ‘end of the world,’ Weselyan theology wants to do so in terms of a good and fitting conclusion, rather than stopping it in its tracks, and this resolution goes a long way toward that theological goal.

The theme of new creation is here as well! “As the Triune God first created the heavens and the earth,” the proposed language states, “God will renew them in the new creation where He will dwell eternally with his redeemed people.” Not only is this precisely how Revelation 21 and 22 portray the fitting ‘end’ to creation, but it also renews theological emphasis on new creation, which is helpful on a number of fronts, including how we understand the goodness of creation, the purposes of human redemption, and so on.

Finally, this resolution appeals to the words of Scripture to conclude not only this particular Article, but the Articles of faith since this is the last one. “God, who in the cross triumphed over all evil powers, will complete His loving purposes for creation. There will be no more suffering, injustice or death, and God will wipe away every tear.” I’m struck by the theme of Christus Victor in this wording, which isn’t explicitly present in the resolution on Atonement, but is, to my mind, largely consistent with a Wesleyan approach to Christian theology. This language also concludes the Articles of faith by reflecting the way the Bible concludes, with an image of God dwelling with creation in a communion that is uninterrupted or uncorrupted by sin, evil, and death. It not only helps our Articles reflect Scripture’s narrative more fully, but it also allows us to proclaim the good news more consistently, precisely because this helps us be more theologically coherent from creation to new creation.