Year: 2015

Copyright  by Shea Oakley

All rights reserved

Self-Condemnation is no remedy for self-centeredness. In fact self-condemnation is, by definition, self-centered. Some Christians have made the mistake of thinking that by mercilessly condemning themselves they are somehow cooperating with God’s plan for enabling them to die to self. This is a fallacy. Brennan Manning once said that what believers truly need is “self-acceptance without self-concern”. By this he implies that it is only when we accept ourselves in Christ as sons and daughters of God, rather than hate ourselves as sinful failures we think He rejects, that we are ready to forget ourselves and live more fully for God and for others. Condemning ourselves rather than our sins only perpetuates self-obsession and spiritual immaturity.

It is very easy for Christians to mistake unhealthy self-recrimination for healthy repentance. Perhaps the biggest reason this happens is in our tendency to see the God of the Bible as an angry father whose primary mission is to convince us how evil we are. While it is true that the unvarnished condemnation of human evil is a component of God’s plan to bring us back to Himself it is only the initial component. It is true that we cannot realize our need for a Savior until we first realize that we are sinful from birth and justfully separated from our Creator by that sinfulness. Without the dawning of that knowledge we will continue to walk blithely on towards Hell thinking that we are “good persons”. It is absolutely essential to our redemption that we do come to know how black our unredeemed hearts really are.

But that conviction of sin is only for when we remain on the other side of salvation. Once we have been convicted of our wickedness, cried out to Jesus Christ to forgive us and become new in Him we are no longer required to focus primarily on our own evil. Instead we now can and must focus on the One who redeemed us and on what He has turned us into: beloved children of God who have been made righteous in the sight of the Father through the shed blood of His Son. While we still have a sinful part of us that must be progressively put to death we are no longer defined by that dying nature but instead by “Christ in us, the hope of glory”.

We dare not turn the initial awareness of evil that brought us to Christ into an ongoing hatred of all that we are. That was never the purpose of the initial revelation of our fallenness. Its only purpose was to open our eyes to the absolute need for salvation in Christ. After that salvation is secured through sincere faith the only one who wants moral self-awareness to morph into crippling self-condemnation is the Enemy of our souls. He knows that a Christian who is busy hating himself is a Christian who cannot grow in love for God and others. If Satan cannot prevent our salvation his next ploy is to make our lives miserable and unproductive. If he can convince us that we should not accept our acceptance by our loving and saving Lord then has achieved this secondary goal.

Once Jesus Christ has saved us our blessed new purpose is to enjoy and serve Him forever while learning to love others as ourselves. Self-condemnation has no place in the life of God’s “new creatures”.

Copyright by Shea Oakley
All rights reserved

Relationship is at the core of the Christian life. This should not be surprising as the God we worship is a Trinity, living eternally in relationship within the Godhead. As creatures made in God’s image we are utterly relational beings and apart from life-giving bonds with God and with each other we die, both emotionally and spiritually.

Today even the most basic human connections are unraveling at an alarming pace. In the West we have created the most alienated culture in human history. Radical individualism has sold us on the idea that we can somehow go it alone, or at least live more for ourselves than for others, with no ill effects on our souls. Augmenting this spirit is the kind of de-centralized living made possible by modern mobility. Suburban sprawl, for instance, give the illusion that every person or family is an island onto itself. This is personified in the sometimes fortress-like detached housing we favor in the suburbs. In some “communities” it seems like the only things missing are moats.

Divorce is rampant. Children are growing up with a sense of dislocation and loneliness that sometimes leads to violence (witness the schoolyard shootings that have afflicted America during the past several years). Casual, loveless sex is trumpeted in every form of media and drug and alcohol abuse remain intractable problems in this society.

Affluence adds to the problem as it makes possible the illusion of personal independence. Pre-industrial era life required community out of practical economic necessity. In poor, agricultural cultures co-operation and interdependence were required just to insure that everyone was fed. An aloof life-style was only attainable by very rich individuals, and they were few and far between. Not so today. Ours is the wealthiest society in human history and consumers have easy access to physically life-sustaining products, the acquisition of which is provided for by the labor of someone else, somewhere else. This is unknown in any previous period and it breeds an isolationism that most of us are not even consciously aware of.

To say that the church has been co-opted by the spirit of this age is, unfortunately, an understatement. At one time the church was the center of interdependent community in both urban and rural areas (though the former became less true as the cities grew into the massive megalopolis’s we have come to know today). The idea that an hour and a half Sunday service is the extent of Christian commitment was completely alien to the church during most of its history. Believers lived out their lives corporately and the physical house of worship in a town or village was only a symbol of a communal existence that existed outside its doors. This contrasts with the present day when our churches are often just a place to spend a short time worshipping with people we do not endeavor to further know once the service ends and we go our separate ways.

Meanwhile adultery, divorce, depression, suicide and a number of other human ills that are rampant in the culture at large are becoming ominously more frequent in Evangelical Christianity. We increasingly resemble the world around us and our lack of community is a very basic reason for why it’s happening.

It may well be that the “New Reformation” many Christian thinkers believe must come to the confessing church in the 21st Century will be centered on a very deliberate and counter-cultural rejection of the atomizing tendencies of contemporary culture. Intentional communities are becoming emblematic of the so-called “Ancient-Future Church” as those who sincerely desire to follow Jesus in the West seek to recapture the deep community that was modeled by the earliest Christians. Such experiments in more communal living might strike terror into the hearts of many of us who over-value our independence, but they may well be the only road back to truly life-sustaining relationships in a world that tends to tear apart the human ties that God designed to bind.

Make no mistake about it; Western culture is dying from the disease of Radical Personal Autonomy. Tragically the signs seem to indicate that the church in this part of the world may be dying with it. We who call ourselves a communion of believers must fundamentally re-discover what it means to live not just for God, but also for one another before that happens.

Copyright by Shea Oakley
All rights reserved

“The truth is that we want the semblance of community without the risk or the cost. We want to be surrounded by friendly acquaintances, but we don’t want to be entangled, whether in a job, a marriage, or a church.” -Andy Crouch

There is much talk about the need for community in the Church today. In fact the very term “community” has become a buzzword in Evangelical circles. This issue is a legitimate one, for the Church has given in too much to the radical individualism that marks the surrounding culture. The question, though, is not whether we know we need to have more community. The question is, as Crouch bluntly puts it, whether we truly want it. Do we truly want to be invested where we work, faithful in our marriages and committed to one church? Too often the answer, whether admitted or not, is no.

The problem is that you cannot have community without real interdependence and the idea of such interdependence frightens modern Westerners. Why? Because we have bought into the lie that complete personal autonomy is not only desirable, but must be defended at any cost. This is the altar at which western culture worships, and as long as it does Christians embedded in that culture will have a hard time trading such autonomy for genuine community. You cannot have 100% of both simultaneously. It just does not work that way. Community has a price and that price is some of our vaunted individualism.

No one should be surprised that many people rank the word “I’ over “we”, particularly when those people are not believers. What is harder to understand is how Christians who claim to know and live by the Bible can miss the imperative it communicates for Christians to greatly love one another, just as Jesus loves us. Such love is impossible without being deeply invested in each other’s lives. The communion of the saints is an integral part of authentic Christianity. If we are not to a large degree striving to live for each other then we cannot rightly claim to be living for the Lord. All we really need to do to recognize this is to ponder the reality of the Trinity. God exists in permanent, perfect and infinite relationship within Himself. His children need to model their bonds with one another after what exists within the Godhead. Father, Son and Holy Spirit do not keep themselves at a distance from each other, and neither should we.

Of course human bonds will never achieve such perfection on this side of the Eschaton. Even the most committed believers will always have a degree of difficulty surrendering their personal “rights” for the sake of community. Anyone who thinks otherwise does not grasp the relational limitations inherent in our present fallen nature. However, this is not a valid excuse for some of the superficial relationships we see masquerading as the communion of the saints in the Western Church today. Something is very wrong when so many Christians come together for an hour and a half on Sunday mornings and then go their separate ways for the rest of the week.

So the question is how do we fight the alienation from each other that is symptomatic of the worst aspects of Modern and Post-Modern culture? It must begin as so many other things begin in the Christian life, with impassioned prayer. We need to ask for God to show us the blessings of deeper community so that we might develop a thirst for it. We need to petition Him to show us the emptiness and eventual despair that is the lot of those who knowingly or unknowingly worship radical individualism and total personal autonomy. Finally we need to ask our Lord to help us to repent of these two idolatries, not only on behalf of each of us but also for the Body of Christ as a whole. Once we sincerely do this the Lord will reveal to us the practical steps we must take to be more deeply connected to one another. Then progressively, as our holy desire for this unity grows, the Spirit will bind us one-to-another. When (and, unfortunately, if) this begins to happen the “blessed community” will become more of a reality in our churches. The result will be our common good and the glorification of the Name of our God.

Copyright  by Shea Oakley

All rights reserved

Rational discourse on the historical proof for the Resurrection and other supernatural events in the life of Christ is of limited value in effecting most conversions. More often what changes lives is a visceral experience of the love of God through his Son. If you ask most Christians why they became children of God they will tell you that the reality of Jesus’ love for them became experientially authentic at a certain moment in their lives. In other words they had a personal encounter with him that forever changed everything.

When Saul was knocked off his horse on the road to Damascus it was not a rational defense of the historicity of the gospel accounts that laid him low both literally and spiritually. The actual presence of the glorified Son of God did that. While it may be true that you must know certain empirical facts about Jesus in order to fully believe in him this proclamation leaves us shaking our heads over accounts of biblically illiterate people on foreign mission fields that recognized Christ for who he was because they had had a encounter with him before missionaries ever cracked open the Bible in front of them. When the missionaries did teach what the scripture says about Jesus these pagans recognized the identity of the One who came to them, sometimes years before his Western representatives did.

Today many Evangelicals are fixated on the rise of Post-Modernism in the first world. They see it as an entirely evil philosophy that denies all objective truth. The anti-Post-Modernist among us will often say that rational, scientific proofs of the absolute truth of the Bible are being abandoned wholesale by a bunch of relativistic philosophers bent on de-legitimizing Christianity. While there is certainly some truth in this charge it is a mistake to assume that the people proffering it are themselves coming from a truly biblical position. In my experience the standard bearers of the war against Post-modernism are sometimes just as captive to Enlightenment-inspired Modernism as their opponents are to contemporary Post-Modernism.

The cardinal assumption of the Modernists was that everything that was truly knowable was accessible by empirical scientific inquiry. The cognitive aspects of human knowledge were virtually deified by the Enlightenment. The mystical and experiential was dismissed as just so much superstition. Whether they are consciously aware of it or not, present day apologists for a purely rational approach to the mysteries of Christianity are offspring of the Enlightenment, a period that caused a huge rejection of supernatural theism by millions of people in the West. This is, to say the least, ironic.

The Hebraic view of God, and thus perhaps the most biblical (as ancient Hebrews, under divine guidance, wrote the Bible) recognizes the inscrutable nature of God and his work in the universe. The Hebraic view is much more interested in experiencing a personal, relational knowledge of God himself than in trying to dissect divine history in the name of systematic theology. We might do well to recognize that some of the Post-Modern stress on experience is closer to the zeitgeist of those who authored the Bible after they had very personal, very powerful encounters with the Lord of the Universe.

The reason this matters is because human beings in the “Post- Industrial”, computerized world of the 21^st Century are yearning for something besides scientific evidence to fill Pascal’s “God-shaped hole”. More accurately they are yearning for Someone. We need to introduce them to the God of immediate experience, not just of historical fact, if we hope to lead them away from the “-isms”, whatever they may be, that distract from coming to a saving knowledge of Jesus Christ. We who presume to evangelize must allow God to touch hearts through our witness for it is our hearts that most desperately need to be captured and transformed by our Savior. In this transformation those hearts often lead. Our brains follow later.

Copyright by Shea Oakley

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Some say that human beings need to take part in some heroic and genuinely dangerous quest to give their lives any true meaning in the end. Today the unconscious longing for such a mission is probably most obviously manifested in our popular entertainment, often in motion pictures like the Lord of the Rings Trilogy, the eight films of the Star Wars series, or the three movies derived from the Chronicles of Narnia. In all these films a group of flawed protagonist’s band together on a quest to see ultimate good win out over ultimate evil. As we watch these Hollywood epics we often feel caught up in a sort of primal calling to involve ourselves in some similar but real journey. We feel the obligation to sacrifice our private interests for some greater communal good, and we actually desire it. We desire to play a significant part in a profound moral adventure.

It is, I submit, no co-incidence that two of the originators of the films mentioned, J.R.R.Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, were Catholic and Protestant Christians respectively. As for the creator of Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader, George Lucas has admitted that his own personal spiritual journey was the driving force behind his making of the Star Wars pictures. You see, epic quests require the presence of moral conflict and moral conflict requires something larger than Post-Modern Existential meaninglessness. If there is no such thing as right and wrong, then there is nothing to capture the human heart’s longings for ultimate meaning, and nothing to spur us on to pursue the risks involved in “saving the world.” This is true whether we are talking about the world of Middle Earth, Narnia, the Republic of Coruscant or, more importantly, the world outside the theater door.

The Kingdom of Self which dominates Western Civilization today kills the noblest impulses of a race made in the image of God, a race that is the crown of His creation and one that is also, according to the Judeo-Christian narrative, being fought over in a universal battle between real good and real evil. So much of what passes for culture today deadens our sense of being caught up in a battle worth fighting, a battle that “quest movies” point to through the cinematic use of compelling allegories. These celluloid flights of imagination wrest our hearts from slumber and inspire us to desire to sacrifice for a greater good than our own interests, if only for the 120 minutes we sit in the theater.

So, yes, we need films like these to help open our eyes to the fact that in “real life” we are serving either good or evil, life or death, God or the Devil. But beyond that we also must become willing to embrace our own very real and personal role in the actual ongoing cosmic battle, a non-cinematic conflict in which the price of cowardice and self-centeredness is our very souls.

by Shea Oakley
All rights reserved

Contemporary Christians are fond of saying they “do not have a religion, but a relationship”. By this they primarily mean that real Christianity is not about human beings reaching up to God through ritual and effort, but rather about God reaching down to human beings in a relational way through his incarnation in Jesus Christ. There is, however a secondary meaning implicit in the statement. 21st Century Christians know that recent generations of Westerners have become somewhat anti-historical. Those born in the post-World War II era have been shaped by a society that has consciously or unconsciously thrown off hundreds of years of acculturated tradition in all areas of life. We are a people shaped by technological and cultural change unprecedented in human history. We are also greatly influenced by the “Throw-Away Culture” enabled by our similarly unprecedented mass affluence.

The result is a civilization addicted to the new and novel. This has tended to be accompanied by a rejection of things that come across as too tied to the perceived formality of the generations that existed prior to the present age. To them one of the most un-novel and formalized institutions of the older generations in question is the institutional Christian church.

When compared to other Christian faith traditions Evangelicals, by nature, tend to be innovators. Our spiritual ancestors, after all, include the Reformers of Western Europe and, in the case of U.S. Evangelicals, the founders of the numerous breakaway churches and religious movements that characterized the American nation’s early history. For this reason we, perhaps more than the members of any other present-day strand of world Christianity, tend to be sympathetic to the idea of “progressive innovation”, at least in regard to forms of worship.

Because of this sympathy Evangelicals today are in the forefront of the effort to make the church “relevant” to secular people who we feel cannot relate to the musical, liturgical and architectural modalities of other church traditions that pre-date the Modern and Post-Modern eras. Vast numbers of Evangelical churches have embraced everything from rock music to casual dress to cutting-edge technology in theatrically-inspired buildings in an attempt to come across as hip, contemporary and, perhaps most of all, comfortably “21st Century”. Millennia-old ritual is often out, MacDonald’s in the lobbies of Mega-Churches is in.

This brings us back to the expression I opened this piece with. “Relationship” is a far more contemporary sounding word than “religion” and that is one of the reasons contemporary Evangelicals like the “not a religion, but a relationship” catchphrase so much. To some degree we like it in just the same way we like our “non-churchy” churches. It is a statement about the evangelical impulse to meet people where they are in an attempt to bring them into our faith, in short to be culturally relevant.

So if you happen to be invited to one of our worship services and find yourself in what seems like a high-tech rock concert rather than St. Patrick’s Cathedral, with people dressed in T-shirts and jeans rather than suits, you will at least have some idea what the specific socio-cultural influences were that made it that way.

But I must confess my personal prayer is that the God we endeavor to introduce you to there will leave a far more lasting impression on your heart than the technology, music and casual dress does, because when it comes to matters of the Spirit the message still matters infinitely more than the medium.

Copyright by Shea Oakley
All rights reserved

If you know anything about Evangelical Christians you probably know that we are big on the Bible. In fact here in America we have even been called “Bible-Thumpers” as in “thumping” people over the head with the book in question. More sophisticated critics sometimes refer to us as “Biblicists” in the same way they refer to radical Muslims as “Islamists”, to differentiate between what they consider normally religious people and fanatics. Evangelicals, they say, are obsessed with Scripture and thus “Biblicists”; unlike other people who might wear a cross around their neck and attend a building with a cross on it from time to time, but thankfully don’t try to convert anyone. Many Secularists call such cross-wearers “Christians” and tolerate them because they aren’t very offensive to anyone.

(I do not mind being referred to as a Biblicist personally, if what you mean by that is that I take its truth claims seriously On the other hand if you are using the term pejoratively towards me; well, since my faith tells me to turn the other cheek I’ll try to do that.)

The fact is that the Bible, particularly the New Testament, is the only place people who sincerely want to be followers of Jesus Christ can find his story, his words and the words of those he appointed to introduce the faith to the world nearly two-thousand years ago. It is also the only place they can read the words, spoken through the prophets of the Old Testament, of the Being who Jesus himself referred to as his Father. The Bible and Christianity are thus really inseparable. Christian denominations that have disregarded scripture in an attempt to be more “progressive” and “culturally relevant” have, in a sense, cut off the very limb they once stood on. Perhaps this is why such denominations have, of late, been losing their adherents at an alarming rate. A watered-down, Bible-less, Christianity is somewhat of an oxymoron and just isn’t that compelling in the long run. Biblical Christianity is booming in many parts of the world. Maybe it is because people want the real thing or nothing at all.

Of course many Secularists think the Bible is a bad influence on people, what with its exclusivist claims and its tendency to call a spade a spade when it comes to human nature. Those who either do not believe in the existence of God or who would prefer to think of God as an amorphous sort of being who would never ask anything of the human race do not like this book. They find it offensive.

The bottom line is that it is offensive. It tells of a good God who has been betrayed by a race He created in perfect love and who decided to the use the free will He also gave them in love to spit in his face. It goes on to say that this loving God is also a holy God who cannot forever abide this unjustified rebellion and will someday rightfully judge every human being who ever walked the Earth.

So the Bible is offensive, at least to a race of self-centered rebels who do not want to admit their creator’s absolute claim over their lives. In fact many people would just assume the book and those who believe in it go away. The problem is that neither is going to happen anytime soon because the God of the Bible illuminates the way back to him in that Bible, through his Son, and some of us have caught on to the fact that this is a very good thing (in fact the greatest thing that has ever happened to us.)

Of course rather than hate us, and the book we so firmly hold to, it might behoove some of you who are reading these words to ask yourselves if maybe we aren’t onto something. At the very least you might want to pick up a copy of it and get a better idea of why we hold it in such high esteem and, who knows, you might even meet its ultimate Author in the process.