Space Enough, and Time

How odd, writing about strength on a rainy Friday night at the end of a short but intense work week.  But that’s the way the essay-for-reflection falls.  And so the question of strength from Kevin Vanhoozer’s “The Drama of Discipleship.”

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For Vanhoozer, strength of “heart, soul, and mind” comes “by constantly practicing the presence (and activity) of Christ in the power of the Spirit.”  And things like vocation, formation, and culture are all connected to it.  “Everyday life affords plenty of opportunities to practice the way of Jesus Christ.”  And Scripture helps inform that.  I like how Vanhoozer brings back the triad of inform/form/transform throughout the piece.  He does it again when talking about the command to love God with all our strength, particularly as he completes the square with conforming:

The Latin conformare means “to make of the same form.”  This is precisely the vocation of the church: to make disciples, people who have the same “form” as Jesus Christ: that is, the form of a servant, the form of a son– not to mention the form of prophets, priests and kings, the offices that make up the holy nation.  In the final analysis, God is not shaping individuals only, but a people.

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What role, then, does Scripture play in the realm of strength?  Of the many things Scripture does, Vanhoozer adds that “Scripture’s role in the economy of revelation and redemption is that of finishing school.  It is the Spirit’s curriculum for imparting habits of right thinking and desiring, for cultivating the mind of Christ in his disciples.”  It is Scripture, then, that “communicates an extraordinary culture: a set of belief, values and practices that correspond to the new created order ‘in Christ.'”

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The section on strength feels a little slight when compared to the previous sections of the Great Commandment.  Perhaps strength is almost a picture of the other three (heart, soul, and mind) played out over a longer period of time.  And so strength is not just the lifting of a car to free someone trapped underneath.  It is the long haul, the spiritual stamina, that continues on past today.

One of the interesting things about Kevin Vanhoozer’s “The Drama of Discipleship” essay in his Pictures at a Theological Exhibition collection is in how well it spirals.  In this case, spiraling is a good thing: it’s a pedagogical method where you revisit key concepts at different points.  And so when he moves through the Great Commandment from heart to soul, Vanhoozer revisits concepts like vocation, formation, and culture in good, necessary ways.

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Having established that “loving God with all your heart” means “sharing the passions of Jesus,” Vanhoozer moves to “loving God with all our souls.”  Instead of spending time writing a mini-treatise on the nature of the soul, he jumps right in with the idea of cultivating the virtues.  These he calls “the habits of Jesus’ heart.”  Virtue talk can be tricky, of course, as many evangelicals might view such things as somehow masking a works-centered salvation.  Beyond that, virtue language goes all the way back to Aristotle and ancient Greek culture, which can be off-putting to some.  “A spiritual virtue,” Vanhoozer asserts, “is a habit of communicative activity that is conducive to right relatedness to other persons, especially God.”  Jesus, of course, exemplifies this.  Which brings to mind Chesterton’s comment on Jesus and the virtues from Orthodoxy:

The modern world is not evil; in some ways the modern world is far too good. It is full of wild and wasted virtues. When a religious scheme is shattered…, it is not merely the vices that are let loose. The vices are, indeed, let loose, and they wander and do damage. But the virtues are let loose also; and the virtues wander more wildly, and the virtues do more terrible damage. The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone.

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And so we are thrown back on knowing and becoming more like Jesus, which means we are thrown back on Scripture.  It is here, Vanhoozer asserts, that we learn “judgment” as a kind of practical decision-making skill.  “God gives us his Word and Spirit not simply to inform but to form and transform, to cultivate not only new thoughts but also habits of thought, a way of thinking in accordance with the gospel.”  And this adoption of virtuous habits ends up being a key part of the Christian vocation: “everything we say and do discloses the state of our soul.”  Vanhoozer concludes his section on cultivating virtue: “Christian character formation is a matter of becoming what one already is in Christ.”

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I’ve been doing more virtue talk these last few years (in various and sundry forms).  With underclassmen, we talk through the “Do Hard Things” ideas of the Harris brothers. With our school we talk about the “sensibilities” of humility, curiosity, love, and commitment.  With the seniors, we talk about the cardinal and theological virtues.  Something that I find odd is that virtue talk is relatively rare for them (at least from their perspective).  They understand hard work and getting-what-you-deserve.  And that’s mostly true for adults, too.  Which makes the question of creating a virtue-friendly culture paramount.  It’s something to lead with, not utilize as clean-up at the end.  But that’s a difficult skill and outlook to master, particularly under the “tyranny of the urgent” that so many of us face.

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We’ve started class the last two weeks with selections from the book of Proverbs, which is concerned with wisdom.  Wisdom, the fruit of a virtuous life, is a positive thing, something to be sought out and embraced.  It is good for you.  It brings health to the body and strength to the bones.  But even the quest for wisdom is diminished in our culture today.  We’d rather touch the hot stove and pay the price of experience than learn from someone or something beyond us.  What would it take, I wonder, to create a culture that thrives on a healthy cultivation if spiritually-grounded virtues?  How would it play out over the course of a year . . . or the course of a twelve-year education?  Scholars and theologians agree: the cultivation of any virtue takes years.  At what point, if any, is it too early to start?

(image from amazon.com)

One thing the last 18 months of life and work have shown me is my need for wisdom.  Wisdom that is both deeper and wider than general life advice (though it would probably get there eventually).  But wisdom, it turns out, can be hard to find, particularly in a culture, religious and not, co-opted by programatic busyness and instrumentalization.  You have to do a lot of sifting to find wisdom, particularly in digital realms like Twitter, which has been come the instantaneous replacement for the reading of books for many of us.  Even still: wisdom.

Thankfully, I’ve been able to find a few sources of wisdom that weave the personal and professional together for me.  One such source is the work of Kevin Vanhoozer, if for no other reason that he has helped add some nuance and reinforcement to some thinking that N. T. Wright helped spur in me around my seventh year of teaching.  Like Wright, Vanhoozer has been a reliable guide whose writings, dense as they can be, have helped me navigate some potentially rough waters.

Something else the last 18 months of life and work have shown me is the need for individuals and for communities to do some deep presuppositional work on what they believe, why they believe it, and how those beliefs play out in a broader culture.  Too often, perhaps particularly in Baptist settings, we have lived off of the capital of our predecessors.  And now, to quote A. W. Tozer, we think we can produce a fruit similar to theirs without digging roots similar to theirs.  Wisdom, I think, is able to articular actions based on ancient truth in a contemporary setting in a way that points us beyond ourselves.  Too often we jettison the ancient for the contemporary (or vice versa) and end up with nothing much in general.  And so the need for some presuppositional “deep work” would be good for us, or at least for me.

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In the opening section of his reflection on the New Testament renderings of the Great Commission (which can be purchased here), Kevin Vanhoozer asserts that “Christian witness involves both speaking the truth in love and loving the truth we speak.”  I hear the “speaking the truth in love” on occasion, often referring to the hard things we think we need to say to one another and not just the Gospel truth that keeps us from being “tossed back and forth by the waves, and blown here and there by every wind of teaching and by the cunning and craftiness of people in their deceitful scheming” (Ephesians 4:14).  Truth, of course, is a funny thing.  Turns out that you can believe it and it not mean all that much to you.  Looking to the letter from James, where “even the demons believe,” Vanhoozer asserts that “the difference between a demon and a disciple, then, depends on God’s Word taking root in human hearts and bearing fruit in the work of love.”  Not just work, mind you: the work of love.

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As he lays the groundwork for his consideration of the Great Commandment, Vanhoozer puts at least three concepts into play: vocation, formation, and culture.  These are three concepts that have been key to my understanding of the last year-and-a-half (as it pertains to work, the last year as it pertains to being pastor-less at church).  Vocation, Vanhoozer asserts, is something deeper than simple career (the thing that most of us make our primary mode of identity).  “Our most radical identity,” Vanhoozer asserts, “the seat of our personhood, is rather a function of how we habitually respond to the call of God.”  (And if you’re going to talk habits, you’re eventually going to have to think through the work of James K. A. Smith, but more on that later in the week).  All of us, of course, respond to God each day, either by ignoring or embracing His breaking into our lives through the mundane and the mysterious.

Formation, then, is “that part of the process whereby our spirits– our habitual way of responding to the call of God and others on our lives– are formed into a particular identity.”  Vanhoozer is talking about our formation as spiritual beings and not simply as beings of flesh, blood, and brains.  He even tries to rehabilitate that trickiest of all concepts, spirituality, which he calls “a matter of the heart, a dispositional way of being.”  Our dispositions and hearts (our spirits) are always shaped by things beyond us.

And what lies beyond us is our culture.  “Indeed,” Vanhoozer concludes, “a culture is nothing less than a strategy for cultivating a particular shape of life, a means of spiritual formation.”  Culture, then, is a presuppositional plank on which much of our day-to-day lives are built.  Which means you have to attend to culture.  There was a time, at least it felt like there was a time, where we considered culture well (what we built, why we built it, how we built it).  We’ve been in the deconstruction and criticism part of cultural discussions for some time now (just spend two minutes on Twitter and you’ll feel the futility we have fed into).  And if we haven’t been doing that kind of demolition work, there’s a good chance that we haven’t been doing a good job of genuine maintenance and stewardship of the best of the culture that we’ve inherited, particularly as it applies to the care of soul and spirit (we’d like to think we’ve got the “body” part down).

It is into this mixture of things that Vanhoozer begins his look at the Great Commandment as a way of understanding and growth.  And it is this mixture of things that all of us live, move, and have our beings.  Because they can be “the air we breathe,” it might seem difficult to talk about them.  At the same time, some of us think about these things all of the time, particularly as we experience a real deficiency in our communal approach to them.

Tomorrow: The Desires of the Heart.

(image from readytalk.com)