Spirituality Column #459
September 1, 2015
Current in Carmel-Westfield-Noblesville-Fishers-Zionsville-Geist

By Bob Walters

“… you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” – The resurrected Jesus, to His disciples, Acts 1:8

I read recently of something called the “Benedict Option” – modern-day Christians emulating ancient Benedictine monks who disengaged from the world to pursue deep, spiritual, free-of-worldly-temptation contemplation, prayer and solitude.

Just go up into the hills – alone – and think about Jesus.

Sometimes that sounds really nice.

St. Benedict was a sixth-century Roman Christian for whom “Benedictine” monks are named and largely considered the founder of European monasticism.  St. Antony had a similar role founding monasticism in Egypt – “the Desert Fathers” – in the third century.  Ever since, there have been monks living ascetic lives of Christian prayer and contemplation detached from political issues and societal fashions.

Many ordained societies – Jesuits, Franciscans, friars, nuns, etc. – stand foursquare amid the chaos of an unbelieving world and advocate diligently and publicly for Jesus, the Church, the Gospels and right-minded devotion to the Holy Spirit.  I’m an Evangelical, not a Catholic, and hence no expert on monks, etc.  But note: “In the world but not of the world” doesn’t necessarily mean “go away.”

Writer Rod Dreher recently coined the phrase “Benedict Option” and has gained some renown encouraging Christians to stage a “strategic retreat” from culture.  When the U.S. Supreme Court announced its Obergefell decision in June finding a Constitutional right to gay marriage, the “Benedict Option” received a shell-burst of comment and support by conservative Christians and cultural critics.  The court decision signaled, to many, that “changing the world” in a good way may no longer be possible.

Dreher doesn’t suggest “heading for the hills” so much as he is urging Christians to partially disconnect from both society and the political process.  Christian ethics and American culture seem to have arrived at an all-time divide, the thinking goes, so Christians should retreat, living moral lives in like-minded communities.

Dreher’s critics note that the Benedict Option would remove Christians from the cultural conversation just when their input is most critical.  It harkens back 100 years or so when fundamentalist Christians gave up trying to combat Darwinism in secular colleges and modernist theology in mainstream Protestant churches.

Fundamentalists formed their own denominations and schools, disengaged from American public life, and it really wasn’t until Billy Graham started his Crusades – the big ones – in the late 1960s, 70s and beyond – that Gospel truth gained popular ascendance over the passive cultural acquiescence of modern-minded churches.

Yes, culture looks bleak, but Jesus calls us to be witnesses, not quitters.

And when it comes to affirming the truth of Christ, there really is no option.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) notes, Jesus IS truth.

Spirituality Column #458
August 25, 2015
Current in Carmel-Westfield-Noblesville-Fishers-Zionsville-Geist

By Bob Walters

Discovering the spirit in one’s own heart is no guarantee that one is responding to the right and true Spirit of God.

It’s a great weakness of how modern Christianity markets itself: mimicking secular culture’s insistence that our true self, our true humanity, our true love, our true peace, our right, wrong and eternal destiny all constitute our vital identity, all resulting from how we “feel” about the sum of our own life experiences.

“Listen for the voice of the spirit in your heart. That’s the way to spiritual life.”

Uh, no.

The elephant that is not in the room, the huge piece of truth, love and humanity catastrophically missing from the thin identity of “just me” and the unedited “voice of my heart,” is the external, ultimate and final authority of scripture and the eternal, unwavering truth of God.  This omission, this broadband failure to understand the Almighty as the beginning, purpose, and end of all things, is why joyful Christians who espouse the truth of Jesus Christ encounter the worldly hostility of prioritized personal opinion and sacrosanct situational morality.

For example, “Who are you to say that Jesus is real?  That’s not what my heart says.”  The irony, of course, is that the world reflexively sides with the assumption of divine vacancy.  The tragedy, of course, is a Christian stumbling to find words of truth.

Churches – most of them, anyway – say “Jesus is real.”  And Christians say, “Jesus is real.”  Yet there are the quasi-Christian, qualifying “but-heads” who say some version of: “Jesus is real, but … he just wants me to be happy, to be free (meaning “do what I want”), be prosperous, etc.”

And there are the flip-side, angry Jesus believers.  They’d say, “This hard thing happened so now I’m mad at Jesus,” or “I’m waiting for Jesus to answer this prayer to show me he is real,” or some version of “I like Jesus but I can’t stand Christians.”

So there is our world today, where politics, academia, culture, entertainment and media have steamrolled God’s truth by prioritizing personal preference and sanctifying indiscriminate feelings of the heart. “My experience defines my truth.”  Satan loves it.

Don’t get me wrong … you will never experience Jesus without your heart, your head and probably your hands, for the Christian’s soul, mind and industry are inseparable and constant witness to faith in the external truth, righteousness, good, glory and authority of God.

It’s really too big a job for one lone human heart, no matter how experienced.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) says read the Bible, seek council of Godly men and women, pray … and THEN listen to your heart.
PS: The Holy Spirit is the only one that counts.

Spirituality Column #457
August 18, 2015
Current in Carmel-Westfield-Noblesville-Fishers-Zionsville-Geist

By Bob Walters

“They are not of the world, even as I am not of it.” John 17:16

“Do not conform to the pattern of this world …” Romans 12:2

What is it that is different about Christians?

Considering the world today, and looking at Christianity today, too often the most apparent answer is, “Not much, really.”

Scant hours before His crucifixion, Jesus prays in the Garden (John 17) for the disciples whose job it will be to continue what He has started – the restoration of mankind back into right relationship with God.  It was a relationship originally broken in another garden, the Garden of Eden, and then tumultuously tendered, restated, rejected and re-ordered throughout history by both Jews and Gentiles.

The Holy Spirit, after Jesus, carries the heavy burden of changing hearts, but relating the raw material – the story – of the history-changing Good News of the Messiah was the job of the disciples.  Jesus is praying that they would be sanctified by truth and protected from a hateful and distrusting world.

Paul is the New Testament’s chief expositor of who Jesus was, what Christianity means, why the Messiah was sent, and to some degree, how Christians are supposed to act.  Paul lays out the Christian message at great length in his letter to the Romans, provides a more succinct version in 1 Corinthians 15, and pens a brief, beautiful hymn describing Jesus, the Gospel, his own mission as Apostle and the fruit-bearing work of Christians everywhere in Colossians 1:12-21.

In all this, we learn what Christians are charged with doing.  But the question is, what do Christians actually do?  What does this “in the world but not of the world” business actually look like?

The best answer I’ve found is “The Letter of Mathetes to Diognetus,” an early piece of apologetics describing Christians.  Of mysterious authorship and uncertain destination but utterly authoritative in its message, the letter appeared in the second century, possibly dating from the late first century when John was writing Revelation and collecting the works that would become the New Testament.

The writer (“mathetes” means “a disciple” and is not a name) describes how the Christian is foreign to the world as the soul is foreign to the body, loves those who hate him, lives in eternal faith in a perishable world, and flourishes in persecution.

"Diognetus,” whoever he was, was quite obviously a gentile outsider, possibly a scholar, curious about what Christians believed and why they acted as they did.  See an excerpt from the letter HERE or read the entire letter with commentary HERE.

It’s a timeless lesson any of us will find enriching – and convicting – today.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) thanks Dr. Paul Blowers for the “Diognetus” tip.

Spirituality Column #456
August 11, 2015
Current in Carmel-Westfield-Noblesville-Fishers-Zionsville-Geist

By Bob Walters


It’s been quite a summer.  Here we sit, observing …

- a society-muddling U.S. Supreme Court decision on marriage,

- an aging, gender-obfuscating ex-athlete who is a hero for “being my true self,”

- one recently dead, ridiculously over-publicized African lion that I really wish were not dead but perspective tells me pales against the thousands of dead, willfully aborted human babies every day,

- silly but ominously sincere, complicit, ongoing media-stirred hysteria over the science-ordained and politically grandstanded “greatest threat to mankind,” climate change, which I’m convinced nobody honestly understands,

- and a potentially lethal international “treaty” wherein our own U.S. government is the central enabler of green-lighting the awful, likely possession of the worst kind of weapon by the worst kind of enemy – an enemy that doesn’t want our territory or resources, one that simply wants us and our allies dead because their scripture says so.

Welcome to an August 2015 snapshot of this world we are “in but not of,” a world apparently weighing anchor not just on morality and Godly realities but simple common sense.  Nobody should need a Bible to see that these events are dangerous, maybe even devastating, to a pretty good thing we’ve built as the United States of America these last couple of centuries.

And yes, Mr. President, “we built that.”  All kinds of American people built it, with the help of God the Father Almighty who centuries ago sent His son Jesus to redirect mankind’s fallen trajectory into one of hope and sent the Holy Spirit to teach us divine joy, peace, work and love.

As for America, I think God wanted to let all humanity see what could happen when man’s creative freedom was unleashed from tyrannical powers both political and ecclesial.  Freed from kings and bishops, America flourished and the Gospel spread across a new nation.

I bring all this up not because I have a solution to the turmoil. I don’t.

But one exists: Jesus Christ has “got this.”

We as Christians must return to basics: love God, love others, help the poor, feed the hungry and let our lives witness to the love of Jesus Christ, not the judgment of human fear and frailty.

I look at our Savior on the Cross.  He came into the world for no other purpose than God’s glory, which is the same as God’s love.

Be in that, and of that.  And pray joyously.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) notes that John 17:16 and Romans 12:2 closely approximate “in the world but not of the world.” More on that next week.

Spirituality Column #455
August 4, 2015
Current in Carmel-Westfield-Noblesville-Fishers-Zionsville-Geist

This is Progress?
By Bob Walters

Anglican theologian N.T. Wright’s latest book “Simply Good News” brilliantly re-asks the age-old-question, “Who’s in charge here, anyway?”

Wright comments forthrightly and biblically on why the appearance of Jesus Christ in history is an event, is actual “Good News,” and is the God-directed truth of how things are, where they are going, and how they are going to be.  Wright poses these propositions against the fallen-world’s centuries-long proclivity to re-state and re-form Christian doctrines to match constantly changing social and political environments.

The world in general, Wright notes, prefers its encounter with Jesus to encompass merely “take-it-or-leave-it” advice, borne of convenience and comfort as historically pronounced and preferred by man.  Harkening back to the old, limiting dodge which confines Jesus to being a “good moral teacher,” Wright plainly points out the puniness of that line of thinking.

Jesus – His life, death and resurrection – is so much bigger than that.

Just out this summer, “Simply Good News” is a quickly paced 171-page read that spares us the complexities of sodden theological epistemologies and endless philosophical proofs that normally weigh down this type of exposition into the deep and typically opaque academic mire of advanced religious studies.  Obviously in a book this size, thankfully, there is no room for that.

Wright, a British professor, prodigious author and former Anglican bishop, is noted for his plain-speak explanations of the deepest theological matters.  He is a man of Christian faith who does not cloak truth in the hollow charade of “religious studies,” where Christian faith is neither required nor particularly welcomed in academia’s re-tooled modernity of God.  God has become this quaint, quasi-real thing.  Jesus is this dangerously unbelievable thing.  Christianity is a superstition best observed but not embraced.

The modernist “truth” preferred in today’s broadest social, cultural, political and academic contexts is the developmental primacy of man’s philosophy, science, technology and sociology.  That, Wright points out, is where modern man errantly believes “progress” occurs.  That, Wright points out, is humanity’s biggest problem of the last three centuries.

As we contemplate the lightning-fast development of Western culture or consider the fundamental development of America as an outstanding example of faith-based politics (and I believe it is), Wright offers a view I’ve never considered: an eye-opening commentary on how 18^th century philosophers and 19^th century technology “progressed” into the 20^th century’s world wars, communism, Nazism, and many other human catastrophes.

Wright’s point is that God is in charge and that humanity – at its own peril – misdirectedly endeavors to be in charge.  Jesus, in truth, is news we can use.

Understanding that is progress.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) recommends the book which includes an intriguing final chapter on the Lord’s Prayer which, Wright notes, is often prayed backwards.