THE RE-SACRALIZATION OF THE WORLD

In 1965, in his book The Secular City, Harvey Cox summarized the prevailing prediction shared by sociologists of his time: “The age of the secular city, the epoch whose ethics is quickly spreading into every corner of the globe, is an age of ‘no religion at all’. It no longer looks to religious rules and rituals for its morality or its meanings. For some religion provides a hobby, for others a mark of national or ethnic identity, for still others an aesthetic delight. For fewer and fewer does it provide an inclusive and commanding system of personal and cosmic values and explanations” (p. 3). However, later in his book Fire from Heaven, Cox confesses his misjudgment: “Nearly three decades ago I wrote a book, The Secular City, in which I tried to work out a theology for the ‘post-religious’ age that many sociologists had confidently assured us was coming. Since then, however, religion—or at least religions—seemed to have gained a new lease on life. Today, it is secularity, not spirituality, that may be headed for extinction” (p. xv). Interestingly, the famous Peter Berger had the same “conversion of thought” concerning secularization. His edited book The Desecularization of the World (1999) is a mighty evidence of his change of mind.

In this essay, I affirm Cox’s and Berger’s analysis of the re-sacralization of the world, but my thoughts are not guided by a sociological approach, which I am not capable of doing in the first place (although I have read at least half a dozen of Berger’s books and a few others). Rather, my reflections are more theological and practical.

In this short essay, I equate “the sacred” with “the one worshipped.” Thus, sacralisation is simply the attribution of reverentiability or worshipability to something or someone. For instance, people in cultures with animistic worldviews worshipped that which they considered sacred. This could include literally anything. In the forgotten Filipino animistic worldview, for instance, ant hills were considered sacred, and thus were treated with reverential fear. The most important element that I want to point out, however, is that in animism, things and places are not sacred on their own. Sacredness is not an inherent quality, but is derived. Specifically, a thing or place is sacred only when a spirit indwells it.

Therefore, when I argue that there is a re-sacralization of the world, I am not referring to a return to the recognition of spiritual indwelling in things and places. The naturalistic mindset is still the predominant worldview today, not only in the West, but the majority of the world. I am saying that paradoxically, there is sacralisation in naturalistic cultures, but of a different sort from animism. The difference is this: Whereas animism perceives sacredness as derived from spirits that indwell the “that”, naturalism perceives sacredness as derived from other categories. These categories may include “pragmatism,” “pleasureability,” “sensuality,” etc. As such, the modern world has discovered new “spirits” with which to divinize new “relics.” It is ordained by its own bishops and presented to the world as new objects of worship. This new form of divinization or deification is a radical alternative from the animistic mindset, but is still sacralization. It is a mad ascription of venerability to things and powers, such as Money, Sex, Pleasure, Politics, etc. As far as I am concerned, this modern procedure is as illogical (contrary to reason) as the animism that it repudiates!

But this re-sacralization that ordains everything useful and pleasurable as gods is not even new. It is as old as sin itself, because it is the very essence of sin: IDOLATRY. It is the worship of man-made gods, a pseudo-divinization of this and that.

CARRY YOUR CROSS

Here is a passage from Thomas A’Kempis’ Imitation of Christ (chapter 37) that Dennis Braham quoted this morning in his sermon on discipleship. It is so profound that I could no longer add anything to it.

“If you bear the cross willingly, it will bear you and lead you to your desired goal, where pain shall be no more; but it will not be in this life. If you bear the cross unwillingly, you make it a burden, and load yourself more heavily; but you must bear it. If you cast away one cross, you will certainly find another, and perhaps heavier.”

DOES LOVE WIN?

I could no longer ignore the ongoing debates surrounding the concept of universalism in my cyber life, so I hope to join the DIALOGUE (not the damaging skirmish among people with poisonous pens/keyboards). This is admittedly an initial, pre-emptive response, waiting for fuller development until Rob Bell’s book “Love Wins” makes it to my library. My only intention, for now, is to show how “Love Wins” can lead to universalism, in the general context of the relationship between love and salvation. I offer three models of understanding how Love is supposedly to win.

Firstly, there is a non-coercive Love leading to salvation. The liberal theologian Hastings Rashdall promoted this view, calling it Moral Influence Theory. Rashdall quotes Peter Abailard’s commentary on the epistle to Romans:

“Now it seems to us that we have been justified by the blood of Christ and reconciled to God in this way: through this unique act of grace manifested to us—in that his Son has taken upon himself our nature and persevered therein in teaching us by word and example even unto death—he has more fully bound us to himself by love; with the result that our hearts should be enkindled by such a gift of divine grace, and true charity should not now shrink from enduring anything for him.”

Basically, the argument is this: By dying on the cross, the amazing depth and width of Christ’s love is manifested, “with the result that our hearts should be enkindled,” leading for us to finally say “Yes!” to God. The rhetoric is this: “Who would not be moved by such a display of selfless love?!” Of course everyone knows that this model of “non-coercive, but powerfully persuasive love” winning the hearts of everyone is highly idealistic. The painful reality is that the world seems to be rejecting this wonderful display of affection, rather than being moved to following Christ. In short, this seems to be a failed model for love to win in the end. I hope this is not the model that Bell is promoting.

The second model is more of a coersive love triumphing over everything and everyone, but it could have two forms. The first variant of “Love wins” is strictly tied to the concept of God’s sovereign power, or of God’s Omnipotence. This means that in the end, it is the Will of God to save everyone that will be realized, with or without the consent of contingent human freedom. Because God is All-Powerful, his Love will triumph over all. Hmmmm… Need I explain the fallacy of this model?

The second variant is grounded in the nature of God as Love. This means that if God’s nature is Love, then to allow hell to exist or to allow people to eternally suffer is contrary to God’s nature; hence, God will ultimately be true to his nature as Love and redeem everyone. This model is a bit more difficult to refute, and I suspect that Bell’s main arguments are grounded in this model. But the weakness of this line of thought is that it compromises the freedom of God, and impiously imprisons God using God’s own nature as the limiting cage. What it misses is that God’s Love and Freedom are tied together, that is, that God’s Freedom is his Freedom to Love. Furthermore, this model seems to postulate an eternal higher moral principle called “Love” that God has no choice but to obey. Again, this model is self-contradictory.

(There could be other foundations for universalism, such as universal election, single predestination, Christocentricism, etc., but I only sought to discuss Bell’s two words: “Love Wins”. As I hinted, the two models above are self-collapsing. But if I discuss universalism in terms of the vicarious Person and Work of Christ, my responses would be radically different.)

COSTLY GRACE AND HOLINESS

I presume that all students in Wesleyan Bible colleges and seminaries who are attending theology classes would have a fair understanding of two important holiness catchwords: cheap grace and costly grace. It was Dietrich Bonhoefer who popularized these concepts, defining cheap grace as “the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, Communion with confession, absolution without personal confession” (Cost of Discipleship, p4), in contrast to costly grace as the grace that “calls us to follow Jesus Christ…, compels a man to submit to the yoke of Christ” and which “comes as a word of forgiveness to the broken spirit and the contrite heart” (CoD, p5). For Wesleyan theologians like me, these important definitions seem to fit well with the “grand deposit” of our tradition, holiness.

Although Bonhoefer is not among our tradition’s theological forefathers, I still wonder whether Wesleyans have fallen prey to the highly moralistic and anthropocentric overtones embedded in Bonhoefer’s understanding of the Christian life. Although Bonhoefer’s intentions are noble, in that he stressed practical Christianity as opposed to the highly rationalistic Christianity espoused by most of his German colleagues, I think he completely missed the point when he understood the costliness of grace in terms of our following and sacrificial bearing of the cross as our Christian response and responsibility. A careful reader of his Cost of Discipleship could not but feel that the emphasis tends to slide toward human activity in response to the costliness of our redemption paid by Christ. I agree with Bonhoefer’s assertion that grace is costly because it demands much from us who are disciples of Jesus Christ. The problem, however, is that he tends to think of these demands in light of moral, ethical and practical terms.

So if I reject a moralistic view of the costliness of grace, what is my alternative? Following T. F. Torrance, I think grace is costly because it costs nothing from us. But it is precisely because it costs nothing that it costs everything! Self-centredness and a false sense of self-sufficiency are characteristics of our fallen human nature. We, as humans, want to take care of our lives. William Henleys’ poem Invictus perfectly encapsulates our egocentricism: “I thank whatever gods may be for my unconquerable soul… I am the master of my fate: I am the captain of my soul.” If grace is “an unmerited or undeserved favour,” then it actually asks nothing from us—but because it asks nothing from us, it also asks to commit our lives to God whole-heatedly, and to completely trust in God. Grace asks us that we abandon ourselves, and consider all our actions as “filthy rags” (Isaiah 64:6). We are accustomed to clinging to our good works and works of service as assurances that we will be graced and blessed, but the gratuity of grace asks us to think of our good works as nothing. Because grace is free, it costs us what is very dear to us: our own self-will, self-assertion and self-conceived capabilities to please God.

Grace is costly, therefore, not because it requires us to labour and work so that we might be holy. Rather, it is costly because it takes away from under our feet the very ground on which we stand, and the free will which we as human beings cherish so dearly becomes exposed as a subtle form of self-will! Because grace costs nothing and it is free, it lays an axe to the root of all our cherished possessions, achievements and amount of good work. Grace disturbs human self-centredness, for in Christ, God accomplished for us what we want to accomplish for ourselves. As such, if taken out of context, Bonhoefer’s statement that “cheap grace is the grace we bestow on ourselves” (p4) hits the bulls eye.

I am not rejecting the biblical imperative for good works in relation to holy living. I am not an antinomian, nor will I ever be. But it seems to me that our doctrine of holiness ironically suffers from the very problem of self-centredness which it addresses once the moralistic aspects are given priority, because then holiness is centred on my performance, my good works, my obedience, and my discipleship instead of a humble self-abandonment to wholly emphasize Christ’s grace, Christ’s love, Christ’s mercy and Christ’s justice. An unchecked emphasis on works on holy living may lead to self-congratulatory spiritual pride grounded in self-accomplishments. Even the call to self-introspection and consecration may lead one to be engrossed with one’s self, and is thus self-centredness. My main contention is that holiness explicated in terms of the self promotes its opposite. Holiness is selflessness, and thus to focus all the lights and camera to the self – no matter how genuinely holy the intention is – is contradictory.

Grace is costly because it requires nothing from us; and because it requires nothing, it costs us everything: the self and all its self-minted coins of good works. Expanding the Reformation cry, could we not say therefore that holiness is [totus/totus] sola gratia and sola Christus?

THEOLOGY AND WORSHIP

As the title suggests, my main interest lies in establishing the relationship between theology and worship, which may appear to be extremely ambitious, given that while worship is understood today as a church activity by all Christians, theology is primarily relegated to be an academic activity by only a selected few, or primarily by those with church responsibilities. To engage in worship is expected from all while to engage in a rigorous study of God is not. To a certain degree, church-goers are excused in expecting a level of profundity from ministers of the Word, so that ministers are by default required to engage in rigorous training and education on behalf of the people. But this popular expectation is still not a valid excuse for the majority’s detachment from rigorous personal reflection, or of many people’s suspicion about or animosity towards academic theological training.

That some, if not most people in the church consider theology to be irrelevant in the church’s life is in many ways not without valid and empirical fundament. The problem of technical theological terminologies, which theologians seem to excel in inventing, is but the tip of iceberg. If one adds the complexity of the style of writing in many theological works, the philosophical categories employed in theologizing, and the notorious intentional sophisticated articulation of writers, one would understand why Christians outside the academia are taken back, for it would appear that engaging in theology today is impossible without a working knowledge of vast fields of knowledge. It is therefore not entirely the fault of majority of Christians to think that there is a sense of elitism and exclusivism in theological studies. “Theology,” in its current shape, is simply inaccessible to majority of believers. It might seem preposterous, but theology as it is today, needs to repent.

This article is an initial apologetic attempt by a young wanna-be-theologian who wants to argue that theology is primarily an act of worship. But before proceeding to this, let it be mentioned first that in the early church, theology resulted out of worship. The relationship between the doctrine of the Trinity and the early church’s worship is an excellent illustration. The first attempts to articulate the doctrine of the Trinity probably started in the second century, but the church’s worship of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit goes way back to the early first century. The baptismal formula in Matthew 28:19 and the Eucharistic-benediction formula in 2 Corinthians 13:14 clearly indicate that an implicit awareness of the Trinity was already present in the early church’s worship. The inter-relationship between the prophesied coming of the Adonai in “the day of the Lord” (Joel 2:28-32), and the church’s prayer Maranatha (“Come, Lord Jesus”) and Epiclesis (or Invocation of the Holy Spirit in prayer) all signify that the Father, Son and Holy Spirit were all equal Subjects of worship. It is out of this implicit awareness of the Triune God in worship that necessitated the church to articulate their belief in the Three-in-One. This is what James B. Torrance refers to as the doxological approach to theology: theologizing arising out of the church’s worship.

Now, to my primary question: How is theology also an act of worship? I understand theology to be “the rigorous wrestling with the Self-revealed Truth in God.” In theology, the theologian in engaged in a rigorous wrestling with the Self-revealed Truth in God. Notice how I capitalized Truth, for theology is not primarily about wrestling with propositional statements; rather, theology is a face-to-face encounter with a Self-revealing God who continuously asserts his Lordship over the theologian. In theologizing, the theologian is not communicating with angels or interpreters, but is communicating with an eloquent God who has spoken for himself in Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit. In Jesus, the Revealer is the Revealed. The Communicator is the Communicated. The Giver is the Gift. The Truth of God is an embodied and personalized Truth: “I am the Way, the Truth and the Life,” Jesus said (John 14:6). As such, to engage in theology is a frightening Moses-like encounter, in which God requires us to take off our sandals for we are threading holy grounds. Theology is a frightening Isaiah-like encounter with God, or is a Thomas-like encounter with God in which the only appropriate response is a worshipful utterance: “My Lord and my God!” (John 20:28).

What is happening in genuine theologizing? Because the theologian is face-to-face with the Self-authenticating Truth of God, theologizing involves a continuous process of rigorous and critical introspection, in which the theologian’s presuppositions and understanding are brought to light and questioned by the truth of the Gospel, so that by virtue of the questioning and pressing truth of the Gospel, the theologian continuously submits his mind and heart to the givenness of God’s objective truth. As such, theologizing is primarily a reception-in-submission to God’s Self-revelation. Any theologizing that attempts to lord over God (instead of being lorded over by Him) by categorizing God through some cultural, philosophical framework is not genuine theologizing, but is an idolatrous self-deification. The end of theology is for the theologian to perfectly submit his mind and rationality to God, thus making God the Lord of his life. This is how theology is also worship. Theology is worship when we are transformed by the renewing of our minds (Rom 12:2).

So why should theologizing be done by all Christians? Because all Christians should come to the presence of the Truth themselves, whereby in that encounter with the Truth of God our habits of thinking, our prejudices, our questions, our misunderstandings, and our alienated minds could be brought to introspection by the Truth. Then as we repent and submit our lives, hearts and minds to God’s rebuke, correction and edification, we are also engaged in humble and whole self-prostration before the Lord our God, praying “I surrender all! I surrender all!” This is worship! Theologia is eusebeia!

IMMANUEL, "GOD WITH US"

The message of Christmas is extremely simple, and is encapsulated in the very name that was prophesied by the prophet Isaiah: Immanuel, “God with us” (Isa 7:14; Matt 1:23). The Name Immanuel has profound pedagogical implications, in that it summarizes the whole scope of theology in one simple Name. If theology is theo-logy—“the inquiry into the being, nature and work of God” simply put—with God as the primary Subject and Object, then theology cannot be summarized in a propositional sentence filled with abstract and complicated speculations, but is sufficiently articulated in this One Name: Immanuel. This Name drives home the fact that God’s Being and Nature is not abstract, or that the term “God” is not essentially ambiguous. Rather, the Name stresses that God’s Being is inherently relational, i.e. that God is a Person-in-relation or a Person-for-others. “God” can no longer be conceived as a metaphysical being, residing in isolation and aloofness in a dimension somewhere, as in the god of the philosophers, but should be seen as a relating God, a God who is dynamic and active.

Thus, Christmas is primarily about persons-in-relation. On the one hand, it is about God, the ultimate Person, becoming human and taking upon himself the very nature and limitations of finitude in order to relate with creation in the manner that creation is accustomed, i.e. physical interaction. On the other hand, it is about persons, us, humanity, whose very being and essence is personal. Our existence, because of the depersonalizing effects of sin, is completely fragmented, and its restoration depends upon the perfect human—the second Adam, as the Apostle referred to Jesus Christ. Concerning the relationship between these two persons—God as personalizing Person and humanity as personalized persons—Christmas shouts an important message: that whereas human logic dictates that “birds of the same feather flock together,” in the God-humanity relation, such is not true. God’s free and gracious self-relating presence abolishes human categories of worthiness and of moral status. Immanuel, “God with us” is not God-only-for-the-worthy, or those who, in one way or another, achieved or accomplished something that would make them qualified receivers of God’s presence. God in Christ came to the unredeemed world. To paraphrase the apostle Paul’s message: “while we were still sinners” (Rom 5:8) or “while we were God’s enemies” (Rom 5:10), He came in order to be with us and for us. Christmas, then, is a time of hope and joy, for it is the coming of God for everyone. No wonder the proclamation of the angels on Christmas day was “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace to men on whom his favour rests” (Luke 2:14).

In relation to the above, Christmas, therefore, is a miracle. It is not just one ordinary event that can just be placed alongside the many events that take place in history. It can be granted that like all other historical phenomena, the Christmas event happens within specific space and time coordinates, and as such is nothing special. We can say, on the other hand, that the characters in the event endow the Christmas event a special status. We categorize an event a “miracle” if it involves the supernatural, so that the specific involvement of the divine in the Christmas event makes the coming of the Immanuel a miracle. But Christmas is not a miracle primarily because of the divine involvement.

If a “miracle” is an occurrence of something extraordinary or extra-mundane, then the Christmas event is the best miracle involving God and humanity since creation itself. Its significance outweighs even that of the Exodus of the Hebrews from Egypt. Its significance can only be compared to the event of creation. If we interpret creation as the act of God in creating beings-other-than-himself for the sake of relationship, then Christmas is the re-creation of relationship between God and created reality. But this astonishing realization is not the miracle that I am speaking of. Could it be that the miracle lies in the meeting between the divine and the creaturely, or between Infinitude and finitude? Yes, but there is something else. Quite simply, Christmas is an event where the miracles of love, reconciliation, friendship, compassion, and forgiveness take place. It is God himself reaching out to humanity, making the compassionate and loving initiative to rescue humanity from its self-created and self-inflicted entropy. Christmas is Immanuel, God alongside us in our suffering—God as human in Christ experiencing the very experiences of fallen and suffering humanity—God condescending and emptying himself of his glory in order to be “God with us.” And God does this for us who are sinners, idolaters and enemies of God. This is the miracle—the unfathomable and logically impossible event—that God himself should become human, touching and becoming the very creature that He seeks to redeem, and experiencing human life with us while being one of us in the most literal sense.

Christmas, then, is a message of hope, comfort and love for everyone. It is the gospel, the good news, summarized in the Name Immanuel, “God with us!”

ON THE "SPIRIT" OF THE HUMAN PERSON

(1) Is the “spirit” a part of humanity among other parts? To be sure, the Bible seems to present it as such, but nothing is said as to how it is connected with the other human constituents, or how the parts interplay in a whole functioning human being. The Apostle Paul seemed to have taught a strong opposition between flesh and spirit, but of course the continuing disagreement among scholars today as to the real meaning of these ambiguous terms is itself an evidence of the difficulty of the problem.

(2) Does or can the “spirit” operate on its own without the other human parts? This is just a follow-up question to the first, but it is inevitable nevertheless. The answer to this question has many staggering implications. Just for starters, in relation to salvation, if YES, then soteriology becomes a Christianized Gnostic version of salvation, where the physical body is not relevant (thus: RC penitence for the sake of the spiritual; and escapist theology, where salvation consists in the escape of the soul/spirit from its imprisoning body). This, then, contradicts with Paul’s important teaching of the resurrection of the body, grounded upon the vicarious resurrection of Jesus Christ himself, the prototokos of creation (Col 1:18).

Thus, the theological answer is most probably “NO.” This means, then, that even though the Bible teaches dichotomy/trichotomy (depending on where you are looking), it does not teach autonomous regionalization of the parts, where one part is more important than the others, or that one part can connect with the divine while the others can’t. The relation of the parts to the whole human can be termed as “distinction-in-unity.” This is my view of the matter. When the spirit is in touch with the divine, the soul and body are as well; and vice versa.

(3) But if the parts operate interrelatedly, then why are there partitions in the first place? It seems to me that the Bible writers did not really intend to teach that there are several human parts/aspects. It is our “individualistic” and analytic mind that has highlighted the difference. 

Instead, their enumeration of parts/aspects was actually meant to teach about the importance of the whole human person. For instance, the command “love the Lord with all your heart, soul, body, mind” enumerates several aspects not in order to show that humanity has several aspects, but to show that the whole human person should be a worshipper. In fact the enumeration could be inexhaustive: it can go like “love the Lord with all your heart, mind, soul, spirit, body, strength, will, freedom, etc” to make the point that the whole human being should love the Lord. OR Paul was teaching the difference between living in the flesh and the Spirit in order to tell his hearers that some aspects of their lives still need to become worshippers (Rom 12:1-2). In short, he was not vindicating the bifurcation, but was actually advocating unity and integrity of the whole.