CommonChristianity: priorities

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Spirituality Column #717
August 11, 2020

Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

One Life to Live

By Bob Walters

“My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.” – Jesus, John 15:13-14

“Give me liberty or give me death!” – Patrick Henry, 1775, Second Virginia Convention

“It is simply false that life is the highest good.” – Rusty Reno, 2020, editor, First Things

So much human, medical, media, and governmental energy in this pandemic is devoted to considering and containing the awful possibility of death. Perhaps it’s time we seriously considered the more eternal priorities of life and put them in perspective.

We are all, together, facing this Covid mystery with varying degrees of rebellion and acquiescence, distrust and compassion, fear and anger, in many cases hardship, in most cases suspicion. I can’t imagine anyone believing everything they hear.

We argue about masks; we wonder who’s telling the truth about reliable treatment. What’s up with all levels of schools and all levels of sports? Church and state collide over distancing guidelines. How do I save my life? How do I save yours? How much “information” is political agenda tied to public health panic? Who is rigging the mixed-message statistics? What constitutes prudent precaution vs. culture-killing proclamation? Our politicians claim they will do anything to save just one life.

And this while most abortion clinics are open, essential, and killing the unborn.

I include that line mainly for irony, but it speaks loudly to priorities and principles.

Our central point here is in whether as a society facing this disruptive and still in many ways medically mysterious coronavirus, we are asking ourselves the right questions and demanding of ourselves – in toto, all of us – the right sacrifice.

As a nation, in March, we were agreeable and quick to pull the plugs on production, commerce, companionship, religion, and education – anything to save just one life. But it was a gigantic exercise of fear; not courage, sacrifice, and honor. Jesus went to the horrible cross for our salvation; Patrick Henry urged his countrymen to war for their freedom, and Rusty Reno gasped at politicians urging Americans to cower before the false altar of anything to save just one life. Shut it all down if it saves one life.

No, Reno accurately points out. Life itself is not the most important thing. “What of love, honor, beauty, justice, truth – faith?” he queried. I’d add freedom and aspiration.

Reno, a New Yorker writing in March for the upcoming May issue of First Things, specifically was criticizing Governor Andrew Cuomo’s defense of a devastating state shutdown “if it saves just one life.” Reno, whose reflection I believe applies everywhere, noted Solzhenitsyn’s observation that the two principles of the Gulag and communism are “survival at any price” and “only material results matter.” It’s wrongheaded morality.

“If we begin with wrong principles,” Reno suggests, “we make a mess of things. It is simply false that life is the highest good.” That is this moment’s forgotten truth

In our fallenness, diseases always have and always will haunt humanity, but in Christ we are commissioned for love and hope in eternity, freedom and responsibility in this life, and to face hardships courageously. Anyone selling despair is selling us short.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) isn’t fearful of the virus; he is angry at the politics.

643 - Mean to Me

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Spirituality Column #643

March 12, 2019

Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

Mean to Me

By Bob Walters

“Apostolic succession” is one of those ancient church phrases that tends to make independent Bible Christians head for the ecclesial exits, their eyes rolling.

On the seminary glossary test, “apostolic succession” describes the specific Roman Catholic doctrine of the Pope’s unbroken “succession” or “transmission” of the received authority of Christ in the line of the Apostle Peter – Jesus to Peter to the ongoing history of the Church and through all its Popes up to today. Most Protestants don’t buy into it, the same way most independent Bible types don’t buy into church authority superseding that of the Bible.

But there is something about the phrase itself, “apostolic succession,” that I like and it is this: any Christian (or really anybody) – with a little effort – can track back in time along a direct line of history anchored in the era when Jesus walked the earth: when He taught and ministered, was crucified and resurrected, and lifted to Glory. I’m not saying that studying the timeline makes one an apostle, but it should give one great peace that the evidence, thought, scholarship, and ministry of Christ has a continuous (and continuing) two-thousand year track record of durability, uniqueness, and truth.

That history has been protected and transmitted not just by the Roman Catholic Church but by the various Eastern and Orthodox churches originating in the Middle East. Whether or not one agrees with specific points of doctrine or church organization, or perhaps would criticize this or that corruption in this or that church over history, all Christians are beholden to the faith and tenacity of those who carried the light of the Word of Christ through the Dark Ages and into modernity.

My friend and mentor George Bebawi pointed out in a recent conversation that perhaps the greatest mistake of the modern church and modern Christians is neglecting the rich, rich historical roots of the faith. Christianity didn’t begin with Luther or Calvin, with the Anglicans or Puritans, or Jonathan Edwards, or the Wesley brothers, or the exploding Gospel revival of 1800s America, or with C.S. Lewis or Billy Graham.

Lewis often made the point that it was more important to actually read the ancient commentators (Athanasius, Augustine, others) than to simply “read about them.” And while Lee Strobel or Josh McDowell may be far easier to ingest intellectually (and for sure, they are), it is a great lesson to look at their research and how it underscores the back-to-the-beginning train of Christian faith and worship. Many, many smart folks have been thinking about, writing about, and preaching about Christ for a long time. I take great solace in knowing that we do not have to re-invent Jesus every generation.

In my view the very worst modern-day theological aberration of knowing Christ and understanding the Bible is embodied in the make-it-up-as-you-go-along, self-focused question: “What does this mean to me?”

Our question should be, “What does this mean to God?”

It is not a mean thing to put the focus where it belongs.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) knows Christ points to the future, but we can learn much from our shared Christian past.

717 - One Life to Live

643 - Mean to Me

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