Kingdoms and Bitterness

Ben Witherington discusses what he sees as the Christian response to bitterness over at his eponymous blog. He notes the distressing tone of cynicism and bitterness in the lives of young people today, feelings Ben did not witness in his own generation, even though both generations have endured similar reasons for becoming bitter.

Ben says the key to resolving this bitterness is to forgive the individuals who have wronged us.

Unfortunately, he’s missing the real reason why this younger generation is bitter.

If I were bitter because my neighbor shot my dog, poisoned my well, and plundered my fields, I would be angry at a flesh-and-blood person. I can see him. I can have a relationship with him. I can forgive him.

But if I were bitter because the government shot my dog, poisoned my well, and plundered my fields, there’s no individual flesh-and-blood cause for my anger. I can’t see the government system. I can’t have a relationship with a system. How do I forgive a nebulous entity that is neither him nor her—and may even include me?

The forgiveness fix Witherington advocates works fine for dealing with interrelational bitterness. But the bitterness he sees in today’s young people doesn’t have its roots in a teacher that unjustly slapped wrists or a love interest who done wrong. The bitterness in today’s youth comes from being mugged by systems and seeing no way to respond.

Consider a well-known system currently on display in the theaters. Slavery epitomizes a system that grinds up people and mangles everything it leaves in its wake. We get a good feel for this in the movie Amazing Grace. Did the Africans subjected to that monstrous system become bitter? Who could they forgive? It wasn’t individuals that enslaved them, but a system.

While forgiveness is always called for when dealing with any wrong, even those perpetuated by a system (in as much as it is possible, especially toward the most guilty individuals within the system), the proper Christian response is to bring the Kingdom of God against the system, against the kingdom of darkness (or even murky grayness) it represents. Too many of us fail to see that systems that break people’s spirits get their power from demonic sources, and we Christians must wrestle against them.

This is exactly what William Wilburforce did. He brought the entirety of his faith in Christ against that unholy kingdom/system of slavery and vanquished it. He understood that systems must be assaulted in ways that individuals can’t be.

As Christians, we forgive individuals, but we pull down ungodly systems.

Our society today runs entirely on systems in a way that it did not just forty years ago. Even our churches have become systemized. Some paleoconservatives have deemed this shift “The Managerial Society,” and it’s a form of socialism like the kind we Americans used to routinely mock in the old Soviet Union. Nearly every encounter we have in daily life within the US today has a system lurking behind it. Those systems explain why we have no great men in government now, only systems. Great men and women stand up against political injustice, but systems toe the system line, even if it’s bad for the whole the system operates within.

Young people today are bitter and cynical because they’ve grown up within these systems and they can’t see any way to transcend them.

Sadly, the one group designed to beat the system, the Church, can’t seem to get off its duff and do what Christ charged it with: tear down strongholds. Take a wrecking ball to it! The glaring error I see within the Church, even in those churches that understand strongholds, is the failure to acknowledge that they go far beyond individuals. We may talk about strongholds in a person’s life, but do we ever talk about strongholds in the entire culture? Not very often!

How does the Church go about performing this duty?

Ford will close the transmission plant near where I live. Thousands of longtime autoworkers will see their only hope for work in this region go up in smoke. I suspect a lot of folks will be bitter. They’ve put in years, and now what? What does a 52-year old autoworker do when he’s one of two thousand let go in a town of about ten thousand? Who does he forgive for his bitterness? Is there a face he can envision when he attempts to bestow forgiveness?

Too many Christians would ask him to do just that. But that’s not the Christian response. The Christian response looks deeper and broader. On a macro level, it asks questions about the way our economic system works and what it does to create these bitter people. Then it finds solutions to ending the cycle that churns up workers and later buries them. On a micro level, it stands beside the autoworker in its midst and makes it our singleminded obsession to help him find good work, keep his home, and take care of his most basic needs, be they material, physical, or spiritual.

That’s bringing the Kingdom into a system, opposing the cycle that breeds bitter people. And we’re simply not doing that. We’re asking people not to be bitter, but we stand on the sidelines and let the system grind ’em to pieces.

When the Roman system tossed aside the sick, Christians fought the system and took care of them. Later, the Roman system fell, in large part, because the Kingdom of God toppled it. Throughout history, Christians have been at the root of bringing down unholy systems and kingdoms–and not just because they forgave, but because they understood that the light shines in the darkness and the darkness cannot overcome it.

It is easy to tell bitter people to forgive. It is far harder to roll up our sleeves (all the while remembering our Kingdom cannot be vanquished) and fight systems that breed bitter, broken people. That first answer consists of words, the second of blood, sweat, and the strong right arm of our triumphant God.

Business and…

If you read the About Cerulean Sanctum tab at the top of the blog, you’ll eventually discover that I work from our home outside Cincinnati, Ohio, as a freelance business copywriter and copyeditor. The Web’s been devoid of that reality for quite some time.

I’ve struggled for about eighteen months attempting to get my biz site online. I wanted portal management software to create the site, Ethereal Pen Productions but I either got massive nuclear overkill or anemic, prissy code with an attitude. I committed to Joomla!, but its templating system favored graphic designers and code noodlers. With it perpetually in flux between two or three incompatible versions, I finally threw in the towel. In what must be considered massive irony and good fortune, version 2.1.x of WordPress included far better handling of static pages than previous versions (a former showstopper for me), so I took the plunge. The wraps came off the site yesterday. It still needs some tweaking, especially graphics-wise, but I like the lean look.

So, Ethereal Pen Productions finally lives on the Web. You’re invited to critique.

Better yet, if you need anything written, let me know. My kid needs braces.

And…

I’m still recovering from the blowback from Monday’s post, Dissing Discernment. I think all the principle players in the comments have made up. I know now not to juggle five things at once while replying to comments, so even this old diehard learned a few things from the whole conversation.

I didn’t know I was posting anything so controversial, but the whole topic’s a lightning rod. I suspect that’s one reason so few books on the topic exist. Tim Challies should sell a million copies when his discernment tome comes out. Or people will burn piles of it in the town square. You never know. (Maybe just in Canada. They’ve been testy ever since Gretzky fled.)

Whatever the case, blogging will be light in days ahead due to tax prep and deadlines on several writing assignments.

And…

If you’ve got a blog, check your bandwidth. I found a huge spike in my outgo this February. Lucky for me, I’m nowhere maxed out on my five domains. Still, Cerulean Sanctum drowned in bandwidth warning messages toward the end of last month, forcing me to re-apportion things.

So I did a little snooping and found something throttling my site: Yahoo! Slurp.

When I sent a message to Yahoo! asking about the sevenfold increase in the number of daily hits from them compared to the previous month, they told me they’d been experimenting with a plethora of new page-sucking bots and had been hitting some sites hard.

Well, no thank you very much! Fortunately for me, I’ve got some leeway. Nonetheless, their little experiment doubled my bandwidth outgo! (That’s not easy to do, either.) I can imagine that some sites that pay by the byte will receive a nasty little bill from Mr. Host courtesy of the crew from Sunnyvale. I guess the Yahooligans thought they could pick on me because I used to live there, but fled. (Heck, Gretzky got out of California, too!)

A heads up to all of you.

Be blessed…and be wary!

Dissing Discernment

Fork ahead Three weeks ago in church, one of our elders quoted T.D. Jakes.

My head nearly exploded.

You see, T.D. Jakes is a cult leader. He’s not a Christian—at least by the standards of orthodoxy. As a leader in a Oneness Pentecostal church group, he denies the classical understanding of the Trinity. (See update below.) Yet Jakes shows up on numerous “approved” lists of Evangelicals that circulate on the Web and in print media. Just the other day, our YMCA (an organization championed by historic Christian evangelist Dwight Moody) held a book sale to raise money. One table included Christian materials. I suspect a quarter of the books had Jakes’s doughy, smiling face on the cover.

A few days later in one of our small groups, someone mentioned a book by another Oneness Pentecostal without understanding the theology. He’d never heard of them or their beliefs.

In my younger days, cults crawled out of the woodwork. Mo Berg, Victor Paul Weirwille, Herbert Armstrong—we knew these guys and knew to stay far away from their pernicious brands of deviancy. I used to spend hours reading up on Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Mormons just so I could show them the truth.

Now you’ve got Mormon books showing up in Christian bookstores and Mitt Romney giving the commencement address at Pat Robertson’s Regent University.

Times were that the marks of a cult stood out like a sore thumb. Three doctrinal denials will usually reveal a cult:

Denial of the Trinity
Denial of the efficacy of Christ’s blood to cleanse from all sins
Denial of the sufficiency of faith in Christ alone for salvation

Apply those three to any religious organization or leader and they’ll snare cultists with an efficiency close to 100 percent.

In most cases, you don’t have to go any further than looking for a group’s flawed view on the Trinity to unmask it as a cult. Nothing marks the uniqueness of orthodox Christianity than the belief that God exists in three full, unique persons in one essence. We believe the unity of the Godhead in essence, the Godhead’s diversity in persons. And we’ve believed that fundamental understanding of the nature of God since the founding of the Church by Christ Himself.

How fundamental? As I see it, every doctrine we hold dear in the Church must begin with the nature of God Himself. If we fumble that, everything that proceeds from it takes on a warped perspective. For instance, the very love of God cannot be properly understood from a Oneness perspective, for the love the members of the Trinity possess for each other expresses itself in God’s love for us and our love for each other. Our concept of what love means can only be fully understood if we acknowledge that God is Trinitarian in nature.

In fact, I can’t see how anyone can possible read the Bible and not see the Trinity on every page. Consider even Deuteronomy 6:4—Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one—the word “one” there is not the word for a single person (yahid), but a unified personna (ehad). We see the same word ehad in reference to husband and wife being one (ehad) flesh. How appropriate that the ecstatic love the Triune God experiences within His persons reflects in the joining of husband and wife, while also mirroring the unification of Christ and the Church in the imagery of Bridegroom and Bride. I’m also one who believes that Man is a tripartite being (body, soul, spirit) in the same way that God is triune, further reflecting the idea that we are made in the image of God.

Just inches away on my library shelf sits James White’s The Forgotten Trinity. Check it out. For more on the error of Oneness (historically known in several minor variants as Sebellianism, Patripassionism, or Modalism), check out Theopedia.

I spoke with the elder Sunday morning about his reference. He wasn’t familiar with Oneness Pentecostals, their beliefs, or the fact that T.D. Jakes is a non-Trinitarian. He expressed surprise about Jakes and he staunchly defended Trinitarianism. While I wasn’t happy about the Jakes quote, I absolutely understood the elder made the comment without knowing the truth about Jakes.

This brings us to the meat of this post.

So why do we diss discernment? The elder made a telling statement as we talked, “There are so many variants of Pentecostalism, it’s hard to know exactly what each believes.” That’s a legitimate comment on Pentecostalism—and Christianity in general. So much fracturing and splintering over a couple millennia have left us all a bit strung out. When the Lord speaks to the seven Churches in Asia in Revelation, it’s hard to miss the different flavors of practice and belief already evident.

I’ve made the Church my study, but I still can’t tell you what the Ukrainian Orthodox believe differently from the Russian Orthodox. Or Regular Baptists from Bible Baptists. I could give you generalities, but generalities won’t cut it when trying to discern truth from error.

The sheer mass of Christian (and pseudo-Christian) thought multiplied over thousands of belief statements is daunting. No wonder so many Christians appear baffled. Still, we can’t excuse our lack of diligence.

In the charismatic and pentecostal ranks, you tend to see a lot of cult of personality issues. Folks get sidetracked by big name preachers and ministries. Prophets, apostles, deacons, elders, pastors—stick a title on someone (usually self-affixed by the Christian celebrity in question) and you’ll find people who immediately succumb to slavish devotion. Obviously, the chance for delusion runs high. Sadly, once a leader proves to have feet of clay, the defrauded simply move onto another hero. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Folks outside charismatic and pentecostal circles will, of course, laugh and mock any follower of Benny Hinn or Jack Van Impe, but those mockers aren’t immune to deception. My experience shows that rather than falling prey to dynamic individuals, the noncharismatics/Pentecostals fall for an even more insidious lie: power structures and systems. They get sucked into thinking governments, organizations (Christian or not), and even church hierarchies are the means by which the world revolves. The faithful tack a veneer of godliness over the top of power structures, but the core’s still ungodly. These folks end up perpetrating great injustices against the poor, disenfranchised, powerless, and even each other, as a result.

Don’t laugh at someone else, because I can promise that all of us have drunk (or are still drinking) from some soul-corroding teat. Even the best of us get off-track or stumble in little ways. Let’s all be humble here.

I talk about discernment quite a bit on Cerulean Sanctum. On the whole, I think it’s the greatest lack in the Church today. I think five reasons drive this:

We’re too busy – Busy people nod their heads and unthinkingly accept whatever comes their way. That’s a recipe for disaster. While the sheer number of lies out there overwhelms the average person, God still holds us accountable for truth.
We’re too apathetic – “Does discernment matter? Why should I care?” Paul warns that many have shipwrecked their faith by lack of discernment. Rank pragmatism within many Christian hearts pushes discernment into the background because its raison d’être doesn’t immediately leap out. We don’t understand that God’s people perish for lack of knowledge and that this knowledge is beneficial for own its sake—because God said we need to know it.
We think we’ve arrived – We’re saved now, so what? But eternal security isn’t license for spiritual sloth. Too many Christians think they’re in, but then fail to work out their salvation with fear and trembling. That fear and trembling includes godly discernment.
We’re naïvely optimistic – Jesus didn’t tempt God by taking a leap off the top of the Temple. The same Enemy that tempted the Lord tempts us. He’s a master at deceiving us into thinking we’re immune from the mess our neighbors made of their lives. It never dawns on us that we could go down in flames, too. So when the Enemy tells us to jump off, we do. That’s pride, and it’s from the pit of hell.
We’re not drilled on discernment – People quote 1 John 1:4 (Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, for many false prophets have gone out into the world), but it’s always for some other person in some other church at some other time. Our church leaders should have that 1 John 1:4 filter up at all times and show us how to keep it up as well.

As for me, I side with Jesus here:

Now when he was in Jerusalem at the Passover Feast, many believed in his name when they saw the signs that he was doing. But Jesus on his part did not entrust himself to them, because he knew all people and needed no one to bear witness about man, for he himself knew what was in man.
—John 2:23-25

In this day and age, it’s foolish for any Christian to go blindly out into the world. Jesus had His filter on at all times. He knew the evil that lurked in the hearts of men, so He did not trust them.

That’s wisdom for us, folks. Begin at skepticism. Never assume someone is telling you the truth, no matter how trusted that teacher/leader/pastor/friend might be. Let God alone be true and every man a liar (Romans 3:4). The Scriptures are our source. The Holy Spirit is our interpreter. Run everything you hear past those two. Any human is capable of error, even this writer. Don’t take everything I say as gospel truth. Prove it against the Word of God. Correct me if I need it. I expect nothing less.

Thanks to all who contributed. I’ll unpack some of your comments from Friday’s post tomorrow.

(Update: I made an error in currently assigning Jakes to the United Pentecostal Church. He was once affiliated with that Oneness church, was ordained a bishop in another Oneness denomination, and currently is a high-ranking leader within another Oneness church group. I regret the error.)