ACE Journal (Spring 2019)

FAITH AND THE ACADEMY

CHRISTIAN COMMUNITY in an Age of Individualism

SOLA SCHOLASTICA?... OR ECCLESIAL ENGAGEMENT

Benjamin K. Forrest

THE COMMUNION OF SAINTS: COMMUNITY AND SANCTIFIED MEMORY IN NOVEL AND FILM

Stephen Bell

GROWING TOGETHER IN SPIRITUAL MATURITY

Thomas E. Bergler

AN INTERVIEW WITH ROSARIA BUTTERFIELD LIFE TOGETHER IN THE ACADEMY

Mark Allen

Engaging the Culture with Grace and Truth

SPRING 2019

Mark Allen, Executive Editor

Benjamin K. Forrest, Managing Editor

Jack Carson, Associate Editor

Maria Kometer, Assistant to the Managing Editor

Joshua Rice, Creative Director

Emilee Ellsworth, Marketing Director

Michael Strobel, Marketing Manager

Seth Bingham, Project Coordinator

Annie Shelmerdine, Graphic Designer

Allison Shannon, Promotional Writer

A. Chadwick Thornhill

Steve Lowe Mary Lowe

John S. Knox

Daria Borislavova White Maria Kometer

FAITH AND THE ACADEMY: ENGAGING THE CULTURE WITH GRACE AND TRUTH i

8 Life Together in the Academy

Mark Allen, Executive Director, Center for Apologetics & Cultural Engagement, Liberty University

12 Christian Community in an Age of Authenticity

A. Chadwick Thornhill, Chair of Theological Studies, Rawlings School of Divinity, Liberty University

16 Growing Together in Spiritual Maturity

Thomas E. Bergler, Professor of Ministry and Missions, Huntington University

19 Sola Scholastica?... Or Ecclesial Engagement

Benjamin K. Forrest, Professor of Christian Education, Associate Dean, College of Arts & Sciences, Liberty University

22 Christian Community, the Gospel, and a House Key: An Interview with Rosaria Butterfield

Benjamin K. Forrest, Professor of Christian Education, Associate Dean, College of Arts & Sciences, Liberty University

26 Christian Community in an Age of Radical Individualism

John S. Knox, Associate Professor of Sociology, School of Behavioral Sciences, Liberty University

29 Individual and Community in Spiritual Growth

Steve Lowe, Chair of LUO Graduate Theological Studies, Rawlings School of Divinity, Liberty University

Mary Lowe, Associate Dean, Rawlings School of Divinity, Liberty University

32 The Communion of Saints: Community and Sanctified Memory in Novel and Film

Stephen Bell, Associate Professor of English, College of Arts & Sciences, Liberty University

36 By Our Love: Proclaiming the Gospel through Christian Community

Eunice Chung, MDiv '14, ThM '15 Alumni, Liberty University

38 Redeeming Community From Outside the West

Daria Borislavova White, Core Faculty Member, School of Behavioral Sciences, Liberty University

Maria Kometer, Graduate Student Assistant, Center for Apologetics & Cultural Engagement, Liberty University

41 Research Collaboration: A Unique Opportunity for Christian Community and Professional Development

Lisa Sosin, Director, Ph.D. in Counselor Education & Supervision Program, Professor, School of Behavioral Sciences, Liberty University

Michael Trexler, Ph.D. Counselor Education & Supervision Program Student, School of Behavioral Sciences, Director of Student Counseling Services, Liberty University

John J. S. Harrichand, Graduate, Ph.D. Counselor Education & Supervision Program, School of Behavioral Sciences, Liberty University; Assistant Professor State University of New York

Timothy A. Sosin, Graduate, M.A. Clinical Mental Health Counseling, School of Behavioral Sciences, Resident Student Counseling Services, Liberty University

INTERDISCIPLINARY ESSAYS

44 Business for Kingdom Good?: Interdisciplinary Engagement from Business and Biblical Studies

Kevin L. Rawls, LUO Associate Dean and Assistant Professor, School of Visual & Performing Arts, Liberty University

R. N. Small, Assistant Professor of Biblical Studies, Rawlings School of Divinity, Liberty University

46 Lament and the Language of Poetry: Interdisciplinary Engagement from Literature and Old Testament Studies

Gary E. Yates, Professor of Biblical Studies/Old Testament, Rawlings School of Divinity, Liberty University

Andrew S. Walker, Assistant Professor of English, College of Arts & Sciences, Liberty University

49 Nursing and Refusal of Treatment: Interdisciplinary Engagement from Nursing and Philosophy

Shanna Akers, Dean, Associate Professor, School of Nursing, Liberty University

Mark Foreman, Professor of Philosophy & Religion, College of Arts & Sciences, Liberty University

BOOK REVIEWS

52 The God Who Gives

Alex Gantt, Student Fellow, Center for Apologetics & Cultural Engagement, Liberty University

53 Life Together

Allison Kasch, Student Fellow, Center for Apologetics & Cultural Engagement, Liberty University

Training Champions for Christ since 1971

Mark Allen Executive Director, Center for Apologetics & Cultural Engagement, Liberty University

LIFE TOGETHER IN THE ACADEMY

The question before us in this issue is, “How do we advance Christian community in an age of individualism?” As we think together toward answers to this question, let me suggest that the Christian University, as a place to experience deep, rich, and lasting Christian community, needs to consider the following tensions.

First, the Christian university is not a church. Ben Forrest addresses this issue pointedly in his article, “Sola Scholastica?... Or Ecclesial Engagement.” I will not make the same point here. Suffice it to say, for the Christian, the local church is the primary place to experience the depth of Christian community as believers gather to hear the Word of God preached, baptize, take the Lord’s Supper together, and live under discipline and pastoral care.1 The university is more like a living “conference” of Christians, a place where students, professors, and staff gather from various local church traditions to appreciate and experience fully “the richness of the one gospel.”2

Second, Christianity is beautifully global and contextual. Neither Western Christianity nor any other regional or cultural expression of Christian community alone defines the essence of Christian community. In last semester’s issue of Faith and the Academy, we discussed global Christianity. We saw that Christianity extends to almost every region of the world, but no single location can claim it exclusively as its own possession. No one nation, state, or town defines Christianity or limits it. Christianity is racially diverse and culturally variegate as well as beautifully and breathtakingly enriched by its many expressions throughout the entire world. Christianity contextualizes malleably within the various cultures in which it makes its home; yet, somehow Christian community transcends its host culture having its own supra, independent existence, beyond any one local expression. I will never forget experiencing such Christian community as I worshipped in a European Chinese local church in Antwerp, Belgium, where Cantonese, Mandarin, French, German, Flemish, and

English speakers gathered to sing praises with one united voice — one voice, but many languages.

Third, and connected to points one and two, Christian community is big and small. The largeness and history of Christianity encourages us because we realize that we are a part of something substantial. Yet, while the Christian community is vast, it resists its own bigness. At its very heart the faith of Jesus Christ is relational and communal. For us, its most meaningful existence is its local embodiment. As the body of Christ, it is designed to be seen, to be felt, and to be touched—not just in some general ethereal or intellectual sense, but in the reality of eye to eye, hand to hand, and heart to heart contact. Biblical Christianity does not imagine faith as something we do in isolation, lost in its vastness, but as something we experience in connection to those who are right here with us.

Finally, Christianity is communal and individual. Certainly, The Apostles Creed, our oldest known creed outside of the Bible, begins “I believe,” but it is meant to be recited in community with others, and the creed’s very structure is Trinitarian, or communal. Christianity calls the individual out of isolation and into community while avoiding violation of healthy individuation. Recall from the New Testament’s teaching on spiritual gifts that the church is one body with many members. Individuation exists within community; differentiated selves live together in one love. Undergirded and framed by its Trinitarian theology, Christianity embraces the individual within a community. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in Life Together, perceptively captures this first by warning, “Let him who cannot be alone beware of community,” and then by asserting the reverse, “Let him who is not in community beware of being alone.”3 Christianity at its best allows the true individual to participate in authentic community.

Given these four tensions, let me offer three modest suggestions for Christian community in the Christian university: hospitality, friendship, and convocation.

The first suggestion involves a disposition we all must intentionally cultivate: hospitality. Hospitality is not just opening up our home to people for fellowship, but opening up our heart to others. It is creating space inside of ourselves to learn from and hear from the other. It means to slow down and suspend judgment for the moments of our encounters to receive the depth and wonders of who they are. Others in the Christian university bring gifts to us from faraway places. They have vast cultural, personal, and perceptual blessings to share with us. To each person there is more to encounter than what meets the eye; they can enrich our lives and teach us so much. We must resist the urge to reduce them to a simplistic perception that we can manage. In his book, Reaching Out: The Three Movements of the Spiritual Life, Henri Nouwen identifies the second movement as “Reaching Out to Our Fellow Human Beings.” The first chapter in this section is titled, “The Second Movement: From Hostility to Hospitality.” In this chapter, after a brief survey of the biblical theology of hospitality, Nouwen asserts, “The biblical stories help us realize not just that hospitality is an important virtue, but even more that in the context of hospitality guest and host can reveal their most precious gifts and bring new life to each other.”4 In a Christian university, students, staff, administration and faculty come bearing spiritual gifts to share with others, if we will create a space in our hearts to receive these blessings from each other.

The second suggestion involves the unique opportunities we have in the Christian university for friendship. Friends are companions who share a common interest in hiking, entrepreneurship, football, health, or whatever, but who have discovered together that they are on a mutual inward quest for something more. In The Four Loves, C. S. Lewis defines friendship:

The Friends will still be doing something together, but something more inward, less widely shared and less easily defined; still hunters, but of some immaterial quarry; still collaborating, but in some work the world does not, or not yet, take account of; still traveling companions, but on a different kind of journey. Hence we picture lovers face to face but Friends side by side; their eyes look ahead.5

The Christian university provides a fertile context to make friends. As believers come from all over to pursue their interests and passions, they discover others with similar interest who are on a journey to somewhere that they cannot completely define, but they sense that they are on their way to somewhere. I had this experience when I met Josh Chatraw at Liberty

University. We came together with a common interest to write a book on apologetics, and along the way, we became friends. As we say in the introduction, “We came together for this book because we have a mutual concern for the church’s witness and a shared vision for teaching Christians to engage the world, but it has also served as a touchstone to go on mission as friends.”6 The Christian university with its many academic fields and extracurricular activities, possibly like no other place on earth, provides the opportunity to experience the deep community of friendship.

The third suggestion is convocation. By this, I mean the opportunities we have in a university for large portions of our faculty, administration, students, or staff have to come together in bigger gatherings or projects. We have the opportunity to hear from and learn from others, sometimes as we sit together listening to a guest lecturer or hearing various departments in the university report on what is happening in their world. We get out of our silos to allow the discoveries, perspectives, and actions of others to enrich us. In these gatherings, we share our common life with each other.

Those are just three modest suggestions for entering into Christian community within an academic setting.

This entire issue is filled with helpful reflections on life together in an age of individualism. We hope that these insights impact your understanding of community and that they ultimately benefit your walk with Christ.

1 Jonathan Leeman, “A Congregational Approach to Catholicity: Independence and Interdependence,” in Baptist Foundations” Church Government for an Anti-Institutional Age, eds. Mark Dever and Jonathan Leeman (Nashville, TN: B&H Academic, 2015), 367 – 380.

2 See how Kevin Vanhoozer develops the idea of Christian “conference” in Biblical Authority after Babel: Retrieving the Solas in the Spirit of Mere Protestant Christianity (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2016), 224.

3 Deitrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together (New York: Harper & Row, 1954), 77.

4 Henri J.M. Nouwen, Reaching Out: The Three Movements of the Spiritual Life (New York: Doubleday, 1986), 67.

5 C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves (San Diego: Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1988), 66.

6 Joshua D. Chatraw and Mark D. Allen, Apologetics at the Cross: An Introduction for Christian Witness (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2018), 13.

Fourth Annual Every Square Inch Conference

Co-sponsored by Liberty University Student Activities

FEB. 28-MARCH 1

“There

A. Chadwick Thornhill Chair of Theological Studies, Rawlings School of Divinity, Liberty University

Christian Community in an Age of Authenticity

What does Christian community look like in an age of authenticity? One of the challenges with cultural engagement is even seeing the culture in which we are immersed. In the West, we have a sense of autonomy about our thoughts, purpose, and direction. We are, at least by perception, masters of our own destiny, charting our course through life. With such a perception, we no doubt have a sense in which our decision-making abilities are unencumbered by any outside forces. Such a view is surely naïve.

Charles Taylor has proved an influential guide in understanding how we arrived at our current cultural moment, as well as understanding the major force of our cultural beliefs and baggage.1 According to Taylor, the late-modern self is closed off (“buffered”) from external elements which create dissonance with how it seeks its authenticity.2 Late-moderns have adopted an “immanent frame,” meaning our busy, distracted, and enlightened selves rarely find ourselves open to the transcendent, thus, ultimately to God.3 This framework does not just influence the atheist, the skeptic, or the “secular” person, but rather influences us all. We thus locate religious experience, as Andrew Root emphasizes, primarily in our personal beliefs (“faith”) and in our institutional participation (“Church”), pulling our perception away from the reality that all life is God’s domain, not just our private beliefs and church attendance.4

How might we understand our divided and contentious cultural moment so that we might analyze its influences and point more helpfully and forcefully to the place of Christian community in this context?5 And how does the Christian academy and the Christian church develop meaningful Christian community that transcends political, ethnic, and economic barriers? Part of our answer begins with how we define identity. This is surely a complicated question which must take into consideration personal experiences, communal identification, ethnicity, gender, class, career, etc. For Christian community to thrive, however, identity

formation must be viewed within a Christological, Trinitarian, and Ecclesial perspective.

Christological

How do we define the human self? Traditionally, theologians have begun with an anthropology rooted in Adam, sin, and the Fall. Without denying the importance of these theological realities, Paul opens us to a slightly different starting point. Christians widely affirm that humans are made in the image of God (cf. Gen 1:27), but rarely agree on what exactly that entails. In Colossians 1:15, we find the assertion that “The Son is the image of the invisible God, firstborn over all creation.” Similarly, in Romans 8:29, Paul declares that God has predestined his people “to be conformed to the image of the Son.” For Paul, Jesus is the image of God. Jesus is the telos of humanity. Jesus is true humanity.6 We find authentic human identity only in identification with and participation in Christ, meaning we identify with Jesus’ work on our behalf (life, death, resurrection, ascension), take part in the reality of his death, burial, and resurrection (which baptism signifies), and participate with Him in his work of reconciling all creation to God through our living by the Spirit of God. We are (and are being) transformed into the image of Christ.

Trinitarian

Further, as we reflect on the nature of what it means to be transformed to the image of Christ, we find that for Jesus, this profoundly involved communion with God. Examples abound throughout his ministry, but we see a glimpse of this in the second half of John’s Gospel. Jesus knows and is known by the Father (John 10:15), is one with the Father (10:30), and glorifies and is glorified by the Father (17:1-5). Located between these affirmations of Jesus’ union with God is the affirmation/command for Jesus’ disciples to abide in him as he abides with them (15:1-17) through love. We find in the Trinity the only true grounding of love

and relation. Love is eternal because God is love, and God is love because God exists in a divine, eternal fellowship of love between the Father, the Son, and the Spirit. God’s love is not dependent upon an external object, but rather rooted in God’s very own nature as Triune. To put it bluntly, if God in his nature is lovingly communal, that surely means His people need more than personal piety to be transformed into the image of the Son. They need communion with God, but they also need communion with the people of God. As Snodgrass affirms, “The process of “becoming myself” takes place in community.”7

Ecclesial

How do these theological realities aid us in the formation of our identity and the formation of vulnerable Christian community? As previously noted, according to Root, our culture has led us to see “faith” primarily in terms of our personal beliefs and our institutional participation (church attendance). The New Testament, however, never portrays spiritual transformation occurring as a result of right beliefs (see James 2:19) or institutional participation. These things are foundational, no doubt. According to the New Testament, it is Spirit-filled identification with and participation in Christ which brings about individual and communal transformation (cf. Eph 2:21-22). Faith cannot be reduced to intellectual assent, nor to institutional identity. Faith in the New Testament is a vibrant relational reality of trust in, and obedience to Jesus as God’s Anointed King.8 The “buffered” self of late-modernism seeks to control its identity and thus resists outside influences which might disturb its construction. What we find in the New Testament is a self whose construction demands openness to disruption, both from God through the working of His Spirit and through His people.

To “faith” in Jesus then (if I may verbalize the noun), means to commit oneself to him, and subsequently be drawn into the family of God, the body of Christ, the Church. “Faithing” in Jesus is the litmus test for Christian identity. One of the reasons we find Christian community difficult is we have erected walls of separation—communal boundaries—quite similar to the earliest Christians, which are not themselves demands of the Gospel. In the work of Christ, says Snodgrass, “boundaries of exclusion are obliterated, and all are granted access to God and to the family of God, and all are bound together in Christ into a new unity.”9 As Snodgrass also recognizes, however, this does not mean the life of a Christian is an unbounded one, an existence which plays into the hand of the late-modern quest for authenticity, but rather that the only boundary that matters is union with Christ

(being “in Christ” as Paul terms it10) and allegiance to King Jesus. A Christian identity reconfigured around Christology, Trinity, and Church sees Jesus Christ as our paradigmatic definition of humanity, recognizes participation in relationship with a lovingly communal God and God’s people as essential, and declares commitment to the people of God, in spite of the discomforts and agitations which may come, as a definitive reality.

We must begin to envision, teach, and live the authentic self as the “Christian” self, meaning not Christian social identity, but Christological identity in which we see our telos as being conformed to the image of the Son, Jesus Christ, the true humanity. With this Christological reorientation comes the process of adopting of the mind of Christ, which Paul describes (see Phil 2:1-11) as kenotic (a self-emptying, otherserving lifestyle which seeks not one’s own interests but the interests of the other) and cruciform (a willingness to sacrifice of one’s self for the good of another). To find ourselves in the midst of meaningful Christian community, we must throw off the comforts of selfmade authenticity and embrace the interdependent love which is grounded in the very being of the Triune God. God doesn’t just give us salvation, God gives us Himself. To encounter God in Christ is to be reconciled to God, reconciled to His people, and act as an agent of reconciliation for the world.

1 See Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007).

2 Ibid., 559ff.

3 Ibid.

4 Andrew Root, Faith Formation in a Secular Age: Responding to the Church’s Obsession with Youthfulness (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2017), 9293.

5 See “Political Polarization in the American Public,” Pew Research Center, June 12, 2014. http://www.people-press.org/2014/06/12/politicalpolarization-in-the-american-public/; Aaron Williams and Armand Emamdjomeh, “America is More Diverse than Ever—but Still Segregated,” The Washington Post, May 10, 2018. https://www.washingtonpost.com/ graphics/2018/national/segregation-us-cities/?noredirect=on&utm_ term=.db26474ed913.

6 See Marc Cortez, ReSourcing Theological Anthropology: A Constructive Account of Humanity in the Light of Christ (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2017).

7 Klyne Snodgrass, Who God Says You Are: A Christian Understanding of Identity (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2018), 91. See also Joseph H. Hellerman, When the Church Was a Family: Recapturing Jesus’ Vision for Authentic Christian Community (Nashville: B&H Academic, 2009).

8 See Matthew Bates, Salvation by Allegiance Alone: Rethinking Faith, Works, and the Gospel of Jesus the King (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2017).

9 Snodgrass, Who God Says You Are, 187-88.

10 See Constantine R. Campbell, Paul and Union with Christ: An Exegetical and Theological Study (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2012).

CENTER for APOLOGETICS & CULTURAL ENGAGEMENT

LUAPOLOGETICS.COM

Check Out Our Recent Senior Fellows’ Publications

On Reading Well: Finding the Good Life through Great Books*

Karen Swallow Prior Brazos, 2018

Counseling Techniques: A Comprehensive Resource for Christian Counselors

Article Contribution by: Linda S. Mintle

Zondervan, 2018

The Morals of the Story: Good News about a Good God*

David Baggett

Marybeth Baggett

IVP, 2018

A Legacy of Preaching: Apostles To The Revivalists

Vol. 1

Benjamin K. Forrest

Kevin L. King

Bill Curtis

Dwayne Milioni

Zondervan, 2018

GROWING TOGETHER IN SPIRITUAL MATURITY

The Rise of the Nones. You Lost Me. Church Refugees. A Churchless Faith. Churchless.1 Over the past decade, the stack of books with titles like these kept growing, alerting concerned Christians to the fact that more and more Americans do not regard church involvement as an important part of their lives. Meanwhile, multiple studies confirm that many who still attend church regard their faith as an individualized journey, and perceive church as valuable only if it helps in that selfdirected process.2 For many, one justification for such individualization is that when sharing life with others in the church, we often get hurt. Even some who have not personally experienced these church hurts assume that they will be safer if they keep their distance. While there are many reasons for a believer to love the church, one of those reasons which cuts directly to the heart of the individualistic spirituality favored by so many today, is that, simply stated, the Bible teaches that we need the church in order to grow to spiritual maturity.

In the book of Ephesians, we learn from Paul that the glorious, cosmic plan of God produces communities of believers who grow together into maturity in Christ. Paul begins one section of his letter with this exhortation: “I therefore, a prisoner of the Lord, beg you to lead a life worthy of the calling to which you have been called” (Eph 4:1). According to Paul, this worthy life is a life of spiritual maturity that can only be experienced by believers who are connected to the body of Christ:

The gifts he gave were that some would be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, some pastors and teachers, to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, until all of us come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to maturity, to the measure of the full stature of Christ. We must no longer be children,

From Here to Maturity is an accessible guide for helping both individuals and whole faith communities to grow spiritually. Bergler claims that spiritual maturity — defined as "basic competence in the Christian life" — is both desirable and attainable, and he effectively presents a biblical theology of spiritual maturity.

Bergler, Thomas E. From Here to Maturity: Overcoming the Juvenilization of American Christianity. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2014. $20.

Thomas E. Bergler Professor of Ministry and Missions, Huntington University

tossed to and fro and blown about by every wind of doctrine, by people’s trickery, by their craftiness in deceitful scheming. But speaking the truth in love, we must grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and knit together by every ligament with which it is equipped, as each part is working properly, promotes the body’s growth in building itself up in love (Eph 4:11-16 NRSV).

Paul is signaling that the link between spiritual maturity and the church is central, not incidental, to God’s plan. He demonstrates this in a couple ways. First, Paul introduces the theme of maturity by connecting it to his opening description of God’s eternal plan of salvation in chapters 1-3, by reminding them of the “one Lord, one faith, one baptism” (Eph 4:4-5) that unites them, and by connecting spiritual maturity to Christ’s ascension. This connects Christian maturity and growth to the drama of salvation and to the ultimate purposes of God in Christ. Christians who are disconnected from the maturity-forming community of the Church are not being faithful to all God’s purposes for sending Christ.

Second, we see in this passage that growth toward spiritual maturity is the job of every Christian, and we need each other’s help to grow. Only when each person in the church is doing his or her part can the body can experience growth and maturation to the fullest. Paul even implies that not only individuals, but the church as community can reflect the mature image of Christ to the world as we learn to love one another. Thus, according to Paul, the church is not an optional service that I can dispense with if I find other ways to grow on my own.

Third, in Ephesians 4, Paul exhorts his readers to put off the unloving behaviors that divide the church (lying, unresolved conflict, evil talk, bitterness, slander) and to put on their loving opposites (honesty, speech that builds up, kindness, forgiveness). Paul’s list of things to put off and put on alerts us to the fact that some Christians in our churches will do hurtful things. Paul is writing to a church filled with imperfect people after all. This list, coming just after the passage about maturity, suggests that mature believers are further along in replacing relationship destroying behaviors with relationship enhancing ones. Paul’s teaching in 1 Corinthians 1-3 confirms this point; there he calls the Corinthian believers spiritual babies precisely because

they were dividing into factions and looking down upon each other.

These relationship damaging sins and the way they contrast with spiritual maturity is significant. Today’s individualistic Christians are tempted to leave the church when “it” hurts them. But according to Paul, when we sin against our brothers or sisters or they sin against us, it is an opportunity for all involved to grow toward maturity (in confession or forgiveness) and to begin to look more like Jesus (through mercy and grace). The person who walks away from the Church because of the tensions between brothers and sisters robs both the offender and the offended of the opportunity to grow in Christ-likeness.

Devoting ourselves to helping each other grow in maturity—and using conflicts as opportunities for spiritual growth—are not habits that come naturally, even to redeemed human beings. That’s why Paul had to teach these concepts to the churches under his care. But “teach” for Paul meant more than just sermons and letters. Paul said that we need to be “speaking the truth in love” with each other (Eph 4:15). A literal translation might be “truthing in love”—not only verbally communicating truth, but also “’maintaining,’ ‘living,’ and ‘doing’ the truth.”4 The life we live together in the body of Christ, indeed the very quality and texture of our relationships themselves, provides an indispensable means of becoming truly redeemed humans.

We can see in Paul’s own life what this might look like. Paul compared himself to a mother giving birth to (Gal 4:19) and tenderly caring for (1 Thess 2:7) his spiritual children. He also compared himself to a father “urging and encouraging and pleading that you lead a life worthy of God” (1 Thess 2:11). Paul claimed to be sharing both the Gospel and his very self with them because they had become “very dear” to him (1 Thess 2:8). Walking alongside others as they move towards Christlikeness can be difficult. To Paul it sometimes felt like labor pains (Gal 4:19). Perhaps one reason why some Christians are not spiritually mature is that neither they nor their fellow church members are willing to love each other the way Paul loved the believers in his care.

Like Paul, we must expend personal effort and maintain genuine affection as we help our fellow church members be formed into people who love their brothers and sisters well. A person is formed in something when they

FAITH AND THE ACADEMY: ENGAGING THE CULTURE WITH GRACE AND TRUTH

can actually do it. If you attend years of swimming lessons but never learn to swim, you have not been “formed” as a swimmer. If you attend years of church but never get any better at actually loving your fellow Christians, then you have not been formed into a mature disciple.

When people suffer at the hands of Christians, they will often grow angry with God and distance themselves from Him and His church. Christians who are not yet spiritually mature may be especially prone towards this reaction. In order to help them learn from these experiences rather than be hardened by them, a mature Christian should seek opportunities to pray for and support these brothers and sisters as they navigate the Christian journey (Phil 2:1-11; Eph 4:2-3). But whether the opportunities are pleasant or painful, as spiritual children remain connected to a spiritual family, they will face situations that call for love. When they respond to these situations with love and sacrifice, they are further formed into mature disciples who can do what love demands. If we want to be like Jesus, we cannot dispense with the church. Individualism and spiritual maturity push in opposite directions, and we must choose to stay enrolled in Jesus’ school of love called the church.

1 James Emery White, The Rise of the Nones: Understanding and Reaching the Religiously Unaffiliated (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2014); David Kinnaman and Aly Hawkins, You Lost Me: Why Young Christians Are Leaving Church and Rethinking Faith (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2011); Josh Packard and Ashleigh Hope, Church Refugees: Sociologists Reveal Why People Are DONE with Church But Not Their Faith (Loveland, CO: Group Publishing, 2015); Alan Jamieson, A Churchless Faith: Faith Journeys Beyond the Churches (London: SPCK, 2002); George Barna and David Kinnaman, Churchless: Understanding Today’s Unchurched and How to Connect with Them (Carol Stream, IL: Tyndale, 2014). Sociologist Jean Twenge provides data that suggests that this religious disaffiliation is getting worse with each succeeding generational cohort. See Jean M. Twenge, iGen (New York: Atria Books, 2017).

2 For documentation of this attitude see Thomas E. Bergler, From Here to Maturity: Overcoming the Juvenilization of American Christianity (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2014), chapter 1 which draws on multiple sociological studies of contemporary American spirituality.

3 Ben Witherington III, The Letters to Philemon, the Colossians and the Ephesians (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2007), 283-293.

4 John R. W. Stott, The Message of Ephesians (Downer’s Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1979), 172.

Benjamin K. Forrest Professor of Christian Education, Associate Dean, College of Arts & Sciences, Liberty University

SOLA SCHOLASTICA?... OR ECCLESIAL ENGAGEMENT

The five solas of the Reformation have given evangelical Christians a rich heritage and a theological compass helping us keep our trajectory pointed towards true north. Foundational throughout the Protestant Reformation was the emphasis that we are saved by Grace Alone (sola gratia), through Faith Alone (sola fide), which is made available by Christ Alone (sola Christus). These truths are revealed through Scripture Alone (sola scriptura) and with the goal of God’s Glory Alone (soli deo Gloria). Further, these truths serve as touchstones for practical and professional theologians – truths we must remember and rehearse. What is not present in this list is—Sola Scholastica—the School Alone. Nowhere in the Reformation did our forbearers recommend or suggest that the school replace the church as the primary means of Christian community or missiological endeavors. Surely, the school should be a “handmaid” to the church, a supporter of the church, and a means of preparation for professionals in a wide variety of contexts, but, never is there a suggestion for the university to become an abstract form of a “new bride of Christ,” – if ever such a thing could be envisioned.

There is a common temptation I see within the confines of Christian education. Christian schools and universities can unintentionally engender a practical (if unbeknownst) ecclesiology where Christian community is the school and revolves around the school. This practice seems to cultivate an unhealthy disposition. The post-university years, among the young adults we disciple, are often filled with ecclesial apathy where graduates wander from church to church looking for a replication of the communal existence previously found in teams, clubs, campus ministries, dorm life, or classroom-centered theological conversations. If this is the case, if students leaving our halls fail to recognize the importance of the church, then surely we have failed in one of our most important tasks—to ready students for a life lived in

service to the bride of Christ, among the fellowship of believers, and regardless of their vocational calling.

Context of Critique

Perhaps, this critique is too laden with my own personal experiences; for, I am a product of Christian education. From kindergarten to my doctorate (save that wayward year in second grade), I have attended Christian schools—from Oregon to Virginia. I love Christian education, and I passionately advocate for biblical training. However, I recognize now that these years developed in me a poor practical ecclesiology. My youth group was my school, my small group was my basketball team, and my favorite diet of preaching came from weekly treks to the chapel. In spite of (or perhaps because of) my Christian education, my view of the church, throughout much of my life, was less than what scripture called it to be, and I fear this experience may be more common than educators might hope.

Scripture often refers to the church as the Bride of Christ. While educational institutions can (and should!) come alongside the church, supporting its mission, they cannot and should not replace the bride with something altogether different from what was instituted by Christ, and from what he gave himself up for (cf. Eph. 5:25). It took being called to ministry and beginning seminary for me to recognize that my own ecclesiological understandings fell short of the scriptural ideal. Even then, it was not an automatic restructuring. I loved the church because Christ loved the church, but I loved the school because I grew in the school, was edified by the school, was challenged by my teachers, and found my primary Christian community therein.

As I reflect on these experiences, I see how the Lord’s provision guided me through ecclesiological

immaturity and to a wonderful church, which has shown me what the church can and should be. After my wife and I were married, we committed to a local church. We knew it was right and we wanted to be faithful to the Lord in our newly married lives. But we became that young couple that was last in – first out. Our Christian community was not found in the church, and since only a small part of what we saw as our spiritual growth came from the church, our investment was not yet whole-hearted. This church, however, was soon to become our tutor in and for a maturing ecclesiology.

Maturity and Commitment

Maturity was one of Paul’s express goals in his writing to the churches he planted throughout the Roman world. When Paul wrote to the church at Colossae, he said, “Him we proclaim, warning everyone and teaching everyone with all wisdom, that we may present everyone mature in Christ” (Col 1:28, ESV). Elsewhere Paul said that God gave apostles, prophets, evangelists, shepherds, and teachers “to equip his people for works of service, so that the body of Christ may be built up until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature…”

(Eph 12-13a, NIV). As Christian professors, maturity should be one of our express goals in the teaching and training of young champions who are equipped and ready to engage their faith and their field with a Godgiven vision. Yet, I fear that our training has so focused on classroom instruction, that we have forgotten the importance of cultivating a love for the church. This narrow focus has propagated an apathy among students who have such a buffet of church options

that they never quite find the right one during their four-plus years. Instead of finding a place where “called out individuals” spend time together reading, praying, singing, and pursuing Christ’s mission – students are tempted to “date” the church – never quite ready to commit to “the one.” And yet, commitment is a vital part of the maturation process in moving from childhood to adulthood. C.S. Lewis recognized this temptation toward apathy and, in writing in the voice of the demonic Screwtape, said,

My dear Wormwood,

You mentioned casually in your last letter that the patient has continued to attend one church, and only one, since he as converted, and that he is not wholly pleased with it. May I ask what you are about? Why have I no report on the causes of his fidelity to the parish church? Do you realize that unless it is due to indifference it is a very bad thing? Surely you know that if a man can’t be cured of churchgoing, the next best thing is to send him all over the neighbourhood looking for the church that “suits” him until he becomes a taster or connoisseur of churches.1

Dating, tasting, or becoming a connoisseur of churches – all of these descriptors connote something antithetical to our goal of Training Champions for Christ. Instead of cultivating ecclesiastical-connoisseurs, we must set our trajectory on forming students who have been discipled unto maturity and have the capacity to commit. We want to create graduates who faithfully serve within their family unit their entire lives. We should also desire to cultivate students who faithfully commit to the bride of Christ. However, by the very nature of the wonderful blessings that fill our immediate context,

the buffet-temptation is real. Options abound, and it is very likely that among the hundreds of churches in our region, there is almost always a “better one out there.” This potential is moot. Nowhere in scripture are mature believers encouraged to go and find the perfect church. The church is not, nor can it be, perfect; the church is filled with men and women who have hearts like mine, sinful and prone toward selfishness. In spite of this reality, it is the bride of Christ whom he loved enough to live for and die for.

This then is part of our job as Christian academics. We train students academically and vocationally as well as ecclesiologically. We train them to take their spiritual gifts and vocational preparation into the church to serve it faithfully. This requires that they understand the purpose of the church, have models for church engagement, and recognize the need for living within a body of local believers. Ecclesial faithfulness and commitment should be one of the highest priorities and byproducts of our educational endeavors as Christian professors.

Toward Ecclesial Engagement

What does this look like? It starts with faculty members who love the church and model this love for their students. It also starts as a conversation with first-year students who are new to campus. Some of these students, who come from all over the world, hail from similarly churched areas. Others may have never known what a buffet of churches looks like. In these conversations, our challenge should encourage students in two ways. First, challenge them to embrace all that the university holds for their edification and

discipleship. But second, challenge them to quickly commit to a local body of believers. With the vast array of congregational traditions available to them – charge students to quickly evaluate the options and then to whole-heartedly commit and to serve faithfully. Such conversations come with an exhortation to avoid “dating the church,” always looking out for what might be better or more attractive in the semesters to come. This same conversation needs to happen with second, third, and fourth year students as well.

However, in these later years, this conversation also takes on the metacognitive aspect of preparing young champions for life after college. This means they will need guidance regarding how to leave Liberty well and move out into the world faithfully. Some contexts into which they might move may have similar benefit and options, but other contexts might feel like cold deserts when compared to the Christian university that strives to be a greenhouse for faith. As students move away from college, their new geographic locale may resemble very little when compared to the spirituallyenriching setting of the university. However, if they have learned how to faithfully engage their church while here on campus, they will be able to move into these new worlds with the competence to find and serve the Bride of Christ – their new Christian community. Students need the church – because they are called out – and they are called to go. And this world is not a greenhouse for faith, but the church is!

1 C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, annotated edition (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 2013), 93.

Rosaria Butterfield Ph.D., Ohio State University

Benjamin K. Forrest Professor of Christian Education, Associate Dean, College of Arts & Sciences, Liberty University

CHRISTIAN COMMUNITY, THE GOSPEL, AND A HOUSE KEY: AN INTERVIEW WITH ROSARIA BUTTERFIELD

Rosaria Butterfield is an author, speaker, pastor’s wife, homeschool mom, and former professor of English and women’s studies at Syracuse University. She is author of “The Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert” and “Openness Unhindered.”

Forrest: In your most recent book, The Gospel Comes with a House Key, you discuss radically ordinary Christian hospitality. I appreciate your juxtaposition of the terms radical and ordinary. Can you explain why Christian hospitality is both ordinary and radical?

Butterfield: Hospitality is the daily art and craft of transparent and communal Christian living, with regular and predictable times of table fellowship and prayer. It is how the gospel travels in mundane moments, bringing the awakening words of life to strangers, neighbors, and family. It is the lens through which we behold the divine appointments that make up God’s daily providence. But it is also radical, in two different ways: 1) Daily hospitality sanctifies the giver by exposing the root of selfishness and pride and revealing the hardness of heart that says, “My house, my castle, my time, my boundaries, my stuff, my, my, my”; and 2) It gets to the root of God’s heart, reminding us that our lives are not our own, but rather, are gospel bridges for fellow image bearers, some of whom we like and others we really can’t stand without God’s help.

Forrest: You root your theology of hospitality in the Imago Dei and say that the image of God in humanity is the epicenter of the worldview divide. Can you explain how you see this as the epicenter and then explain why this central reality then forms your understanding (and practice) of hospitality?

What did God use to draw a radical, committed unbeliever to himself? Did God take her to an evangelistic rally? Or, since she had her doctorate in literature, did he use something in print? No, God used an invitation to dinner in a modest home, from a humble couple who lived out the gospel daily, simply, and authentically.

With this story of her conversion as a backdrop, Rosaria Butterfield invites us into her home to show us how God can use this same “radical, ordinary hospitality” to bring the gospel to our lost friends and neighbors. Such hospitality sees our homes as not our own, but as God’s tools for the furtherance of his kingdom as we welcome those who look, think, believe, and act differently from us into our everyday, sometimes messy lives— helping them see what true Christian faith really looks like.

Butterfield, Rosaria. The Gospel Comes with a House Key Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2018. $19.99.

Butterfield: If we start with biblical anthropology —who we are, ontologically and authentically—this introduces human dignity for all. The counterpoint is also relevant to consider here: if we start with any other anthropology, most notably the ontology-driven identity politics that fuels the LGBTQ movement and has seduced some evangelical Christians as well, we deny human dignity for all. We are all created in God’s image, with a soul that will last forever and a body that will either inhere to the New Jerusalem upon Jesus’s return to this world as its judge or suffer interminably and eternally in hell. Genesis 1:27 records that biblical sexuality is at the center of gospel life—not some kind of thematic sideshow—and being born male or female comes with responsibilities, blessings, and constraints. Starting with biblical anthropology instills a deep regard—an awestruck longing—for Christ. Why? Because union with Christ is what makes us whole and authentic, and because truly, no one can live up to these standards without Christ’s sanctifying power in our lives. Tragically, we live in a world that values people instrumentally—for their function or purpose, and not inherently for their reflection of a holy God. Biblical hospitality that starts with Imago Dei knows that God’s people are everywhere.

Forrest: This issue of Faith and the Academy is themed on “Christian Community in an Age of Individualism.” Hospitality is certainly important for Christian community, and it combats our tendency toward narcissistic individualism. How can hospitality be a redemptive tool in a world that craves relationships without understanding their symptoms or the underlying causes of their pains?

Butterfield: Biblical hospitality reaches out into the world to seek out strangers, but it always finds its epicenter in the community of the local church. It recognizes that people are dying of crushing loneliness, and that the gospel cares for the body as well as the soul. But because people are suffering under the weight of sin, and because addiction and abuse characterizes more people than we would like to admit, we craft our hospitality homes in recognition of this. In our home, certain nights of the week are designated for open and regular meals and Bible study and prayer. We do this because we know inviting people on a certain date, while convenient for the host, might be an impossible quandary for the guest. Perhaps the person you are inviting does not know if she will be sober or safe on that day and is too embarrassed to try to explain this all to you. But if you invite people every

week—same day, same time—on one of those nights, your neighbor with a secret will be able to come. Also, hospitality does not translate the gospel by osmosis. At our house, after dinner, the children pass the dinner plates to the kitchen sink, and Kent and I distribute mugs of coffee, Bibles, and Psalters. Our wide-ranging conversations take on focus when the word of God is sung and read. We pause. We open our Bibles. Some people are reading the word of God for the first time. Is this awkward? Sometimes. But we do this anyway. We open our Bibles not to stop the conversation, but to bring Jesus into it. And then we close the night in prayer.

Forrest: In quoting Bonhoeffer, you recognize sin causes mankind to withdraw from community which exacerbates temptation. “The more isolated a person is, the more extractive will be the power of sin over him, and the more deeply he becomes involved in it, the more disastrous is his isolation” (Life Together, 112). How do Christians create something that can become an inoculation against this reclusiveness, which leads to sin? What is necessary for a community to walk the Christian life together in a way that encourages each to pursue holiness?

Butterfield: Waking up to my sexual sin brought deep fears of crushing loneliness—and backsliding and isolation always go together. When Kent and I got married, we committed our home to being an open and welcome place to singles in the church on any night of the week, and this daily living as family of God with singles in our church has provided our children with aunts and uncles in the faith, enriching all of our lives in ways we could never have anticipated. Sometimes what Christians call “boundaries” are just selfish excuses to withhold love from single Christians. Being a Christian comes with an entitlement to belong to one another. Having an open home to brothers and sisters in Christ, without a lot of micromanaging and planning, creates a culture of belonging, knowing, and being known. This positive and warm sense of connection can itself be a powerful barrier to sin, especially sexual sins which thrive in dark isolation.

Forrest: In chapter 3, you give suggestions on how to converse well with unsaved neighbors. You asked a simple question I found profound, but could also be abused. The question you asked is, “Do I have the grace to say this little?” Good-meaning Christians often fall on both sides of the continuum in conversation. Some say so little, they never say anything of salvific

substance, while others say so much they never engage in listening or hearing. What is your advice about this art of conversation for Christians intent on being good neighbors?

Butterfield: I’m an old marathon runner, and marathon runners are in things for the long haul. In building relationships with neighbors, I don’t think of conversations as sneaky raids of biblical truth into the crevices of their dark hearts. I think of my unsaved neighbors as fellow image bearers with whom I have the benefit of doing life together. And I really don’t “love” my saved neighbors more—I just get to love them longer. For me, all of this begins with my morning Bible reading and designated time of prayer. It is crucial for Christians to know that in order to be biblically fluent, we must be deep in the Word and long in prayer. I leave my Bible open in my kitchen, right next to the coffee pot. As things come up throughout the day, issues with my children, my neighbors, and my own sinful heart, I open the word and I read. When neighbors ask me for help or advice, I want to give enough of the Bible that they ask for more. In general, I try to make sure my words are not stronger than my relationships.

Forrest: One of the things I believe dissuades contemporary Christians from radically ordinary hospitality is the fear of knowing how to walk the line between approval and acceptance. Many find it easier to avoid this balancing act, but I am sure there is a better and more obedient way forward. Would you mind sharing with readers how you have learned to walk this road between these two tensions?

Butterfield: Christians proclaim Christ in word and deed in particular cultural moments. While the culture does not change the gospel, it does tell us what our neighbors believe to be true. We live in a world that has bought into the idea of “intersectionality”—a belief that who you truly are is measured by how many victim statuses you can claim—with human dignity now only accruing through an intolerance of disagreement of any kind. This means we need to have strong enough relationships that we can offer a gentle challenge to our friends who have collapsed acceptance with approval. A few years ago, an old, dear friend came out to me as lesbian. On the phone, she said, “We can’t be friends anymore, Rosie, because you don’t approve of me anymore.” I had to share with her the reality that I never approved of her—and she never approved of me. Over the ten years of our friendship, we disagreed about key issues—politics, religion, and food rules, but we always loved each other and showed

up for each other in a crisis. When I told her I never approved of her and I was sorry she thought I ever approved of her, she laughed out loud and thanked me for my usual candor. Then she told me she did not approve of me, either. To this day, we are friends.

Forrest: Our goal in this publication is to equip faculty to engage culture and train students to do the same. Thus, the primary audience is professors, but our secondary audience is students. Could you speak directly to these two audiences with advice on how each constituent might practice hospitality (and community building) in their unique contexts?

Butterfield: To the students: College students need to connect with local churches, even taking membership if you can do that. It does not matter that you will “only” be at this church for a few years; these few years might be the most spiritually tumultuous of your whole life! College students experience serious moral crises and concerns, and it is vital and valuable to be part of a church that can help you navigate this. So disarming as this might sound, you practice hospitality by sharing both your resources and your needs. Your spiritual health and growth are blessings to the local church and to the world. To the faculty: introduce students to your church body, and bridge for them the college and the church. If you can do this over regular Lord’s Day evening suppers or fireside chats with snacks, this is all the better.

Forrest: Are there any parting pieces of advice you would like to pass along to our readers as we are challenged to live well in Christian community in a way that shows and shares Christ?

Butterfield: We are a Word-centered, Spirit-filled, God-honoring, Christ-indwelling people. Be deep in the means of God’s grace so you have something to share with others. Make repentance of your own sin a bigger burden than your neighbor’s sin. Practice hospitality in the strength and the power of God. If hospitality is done in your own strength, it will become self-serving and self-defeating. If hospitality is done in God’s strength, it can be the gospel bridge that transforms lives.

John S. Knox Associate Professor of Sociology, School of Behavioral Sciences, Liberty University

CHRISTIAN COMMUNITY IN AN AGE OF RADICAL INDIVIDUALISM

Being a member of any Christian community is no easy task in the postmodern world. Forty years ago, parishioners welcomed an institutional approach to the faith. Congregants were more likely to submit to the theological charges and challenges of their pastors, whom they considered experts in the faith and trusted servants of God. In 2018, the American church milieu (for all denominations, statistically) has changed dramatically.

Many sociological studies of religion (including my own 2009 doctorial research) testify that a paradigm shift has occurred in Western society, with ultimate sacred authority no longer resting in the hands or hearts of the clergy, but in individual parishioners’ egos and self-determination—a transformation which I have termed, Sacro-Egoism 1 Although this SacroEgoism (a.k.a., radical individualism) has manifested itself in numerous ways across the American religious landscape, it can be most easily perceived in the attitudes and expectations of the postmodern congregants, themselves.

First, a significant number of Christians today consider their own personal religious interpretations and understanding to be their highest authority. Second, many attenders (and especially those within the Millennial demographic group) hold anti-institutional and ambivalent attitudes toward church authorities.

Third, despite this disdain for ecclesiological control, sociological surveys indicate that most people care deeply about their spiritual beliefs—so much so that they refuse to allow anyone else to choose for them.

Fourth, while this hyper-individualization of faith may enhance their personal commitment to Jesus, it can also idiosyncratically transform the way that Jesus is understood and followed. Finally, postmodern Sacro-Egoists may not like institutions, but they are not necessarily anti-Bible. They care about the biblical message; yet they demand that its final interpretation be

left up to them, regardless of any personal theological training (or a lack, therein).

Not surprisingly, this paradigm shift toward the inner self has caused significant issues within the church body. Pastors often find themselves in the middle of conflict and controversy, seeing their theological aphorisms dramatically clash with the egos of others in their flock. A survey of pastors across America confirms this polemical reality.

For instance, Father Bill, a Catholic priest from the Pacific Northwest attests,

An example of [Sacro-Egoism] happened once when a parishioner approached me after Mass telling me that he was going to vote the opposite of what I had been preaching about; yet, I never spoke about what or who to vote for, and instead had been preaching about Jesus’ care for the poor and the sanctity of life. For this person, neither the teaching of the Gospel nor the Church was of any consequence since he perceived it to contrast his political affiliation. So, out of spite, he was going to vote against what he perceived as being told what to do.

Pastor Aaron Yaeger, a Lutheran minister from Virginia states,

Radical religious individualism is pervasive. It impacts all areas and facets of life ... each person wants to be able to decide for himself what he believes ... So, you run into those who think that no church has the whole truth and each man must decide for himself what is true.

Father Wesley, an Anglican priest from Virginia asserts,

Anglicans have a very high view of the Church and the Sacraments that can, when effectively employed, be a countermeasure to some of the influences of the postmodern culture of radical religious individualism...

In our own parish, there is an impulse among some individuals towards a kind of identity politics that has infiltrated the modern political spectrum ... The debates about homosexuality and women's roles reflect the issues at the heart of postmodernity.

Pastor Andy, a Reformed-Baptist pastor from New York, states,

The authority of the community of the church is undermined by individualism, despite people saying that they believe in the authority of Scripture! I often hear (directly or indirectly), “What’s good for the church is not necessarily good or applicable for me.”

In times such as these, learning how to foster good church community can be difficult to discern. Still, church leaders must not allow narcissism or defense mechanisms (from either pastor or parishioner) to dictate church life. As John Chrysostom wrote so long ago, “Shallow emotions lead to apathy and complaining; so, they make us indifferent toward other people and toward the events which shape their lives ... To be a Christian means to extend one’s heart both downward and outward.”2 Ultimately, pastors are to lead in both word and deed. Any action taken or attitude expressed must have the promotion of God’s Kingdom as its number-one priority. Personal benefits are secondary to the greater goal of spreading the Gospel or administering service to those in need (including spirited radical individualists).

Romans 16:17 states, “I appeal to you, brothers, to watch out for those who cause divisions and create obstacles contrary to the doctrine that you have been

taught; avoid them” (ESV). In The Letter of Ignatius to Polycarp, Ignatius of Antioch commends,

Out of love, be patient with everyone, as indeed you are. Devote yourself to continual prayer. Ask for increasing insight. Be ever on the watch by keeping your spirit alert. Take a personal interest in those you talk to, just as God does. ‘Bear the diseases’ of everyone like an athlete in perfect form. The greater the toil, the greater the gain.

This unity cannot be accomplished in an environment of radical individualism, which demands affirmation of all personal beliefs at the sacrifice of others.

Sadly, in America today, many church communities struggle, full of factionalism grown from the divisionary effects of radical individualism. It is in these dangerous situations that pastoral skills, callings, and voices for God are muffled and gagged, thwarting needed service for God’s people. The Apostle Paul warned Timothy that such self-centered religious environments— “having a form of godliness but denying its power”— were unacceptable in God’s kingdom.

By permitting such a toxic environment to prevail, by staying silent or shallowly preaching, a pastor can become just air-and-shadow instead of the heart-andsoul for God’s people. What can churches do to combat the disharmony and spiritual sickness that comes from a thousand voices demanding to be equally heard and affirmed? Three ideas to consider come to mind.

First, Sacro-Egoism in the assembly is nothing new. In fact, the Bible is replete with examples of the personal rebellion of God’s people, Sacro-Egoistically

rejecting God’s commands for personal gain and under their own personal authority (see Genesis, Judges, Jeremiah, Amos, etc.). The Prophet Samuel attests to this in Judges, writing, “In those days, Israel had no king; everyone did as they saw fit” (Judges 21:25, NIV). Contrary to what some progressive pastors may purport, radical religious individualism is never approved of by God in the Bible, and has historically led to personal and public destruction when embraced by His followers. God’s people thrive in relationship and community, not in isolationism and self-idolatry.

Second, throughout history, God has given humanity free-will (also called “agency” in Sociology). Genesis 3:22 records, “And the Lord God commanded the man, ‘You are free to eat from any tree in the garden, but you must not eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat from it, you will certainly die’” (NIV). Thousands of years later, Hebrew leader Joshua reasoned, “But if serving the Lord seems undesirable to you, then choose for yourself this day whom you will serve, ether the gods your ancestors served beyond the Euphrates, or the gods of the Amorites, in whose land you are living” (Joshua 24:15, NIV). Even into the first century, A.D., the Apostle Paul reminded the church in Galatia, “You, brothers and sisters, were called to be free. But do not use your freedom to indulge the flesh; rather, serve one another humbly in love” (Galatians 5:13, NIV).

Finally, clergy must strive to be models of Jesus Christ’s love for God and neighbor. Many Sacroegoists have trust issues; the more pastors can reflect

God’s goodness and grace, the farther people move into the community. One needs to look no further to substantiate this notion than the loving model of Jesus Christ in the Gospels. He obeyed God for the sake of the community of God, He loved sinners for the sake of the community of God, and He endured the cross—sacrificing his personhood for the sake of His Father’s Kingdom and His Father’s children.

Unquestionably, postmodernity is a socially-perilous time, and radical individualism is a ubiquitous force to reckon with in Christian communities. Yet, despite the individualistic toxicity, there is Good News. Pastors can help their congregations understand that all people have the ability—especially through the guidance of the Holy Spirit—to make Godly-choices, that true personal power is seen in restraint, not in excess, and that the treasures of God are priceless compared to any benefits of the will.

Marvelously, the Bible promises that with God’s help, we can transcend ourselves (and potentially any controversial, Sacro-egoistical setting) to focus on the greatest goal: building up God’s Kingdom and community on earth.

1 John S. Knox, Sacro-Egoism: The Rise of Religious Individualism in the West (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2016), 13-16.

2 Robert Van de Weyer, ed., On Living Simply: The Golden Voice of John Chrysostom (Liguouri, MA: Liguori/Triumph, 1996), ch 79.

Steve Lowe Chair of LUO Graduate Theological Studies, Rawlings School of Divinity, Liberty University

Mary Lowe Associate Dean, Rawlings School of Divinity, Liberty University

INDIVIDUAL AND COMMUNITY IN SPIRITUAL GROWTH

In our various places of ministry over the years, we have had formal and informal relationships with international students from around the globe. Through these encounters, we detected a distinct difference between our non-Western students and their American counterparts who represent a cultural perspective that prizes the autonomous individual above the group. This cultural focus on the individual adversely influences theological reflection community in the church.1

We see an example in our traditional interpretation of Ephesians 6:10-17, the so-called “Armor of God” passage. Most interpret the passage through an individualistic lens that runs contrary to the evidence in the text itself.2 We have been taught that each individual Christian puts on his/her own armor and goes into spiritual battle alone with the Enemy, while ignoring the plural pronouns, plural form of verbs, and the plurality of enemies mentioned in 6:12. We complicate this misinterpretation when we ignore the flow of Paul’s theological reasoning which places the individual Christian3 within the community.4 Paul’s emphasis on the community contextualizes the individual-in-community and rightly establishes a balanced perspective between the two often missing in our culture, churches, and Christian institutions.

An Ecological Perspective on Spiritual Formation

Many Western Christians allow a cultural conception of the individual to color their thinking about spiritual formation. The problem is that such a view fails to give a rightful place to the role of the Christian community in faith formation. We have developed a biblical model of spiritual formation that accommodates both the individual and the group processes of growth built around the concept of ecology. God designed individual elements in nature to grow in relation to other components, reflecting a deep interconnectedness. Social scientists believe that humans function best when there is healthy interconnection with others in

social ecologies. A social ecology is a whole-person system in which various influences promote mutual growth and development of interconnected persons. The scriptures suggest that the processes of growth in natural and social ecologies operate in the spiritual ecology of the church and kingdom.

When we engage in behaviors that reflect disconnected individualism, we rob ourselves and others of opportunities to reflect God’s design for optimum growth. Disconnection from others truncates whole person transformation because of the power of sociospiritual impact. Further, the less we are connected to others, the greater the chance of social, spiritual, intellectual, emotional, and moral stagnation. The key to understanding spiritual growth is to understand our connection to Christ and our connections to one another in the Body of Christ.

Old and New Testament writers draw upon ecological images to illustrate spiritual growth.5 The most prominent illustration of this hermeneutical pattern appears in the nature parables of Jesus. One parable scholar observes that the parables operate “on the assumption that what is valid in one sphere is valid also in the other.”6 The kind of growth referenced in the parables and other similar texts is always ecological growth.7 For example, Jesus directed his disciples to “Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow.”8 Lilies do not grow alone disconnected from other environmental conditions but in field ecologies. As Callenbach reminds us, “Strictly speaking, there are no truly individual organisms. Nothing alive exists in isolation from its ecological context ...”9

The Ecology of the Body of Christ

Scientific descriptions of the human body borrow the language of ecosystem to reflect the interdependent nature of the different bodily systems and functions.10 Paul stressed such “mutual interdependence” in both the human body and the body of Christ through the use of ecological language that would suggest the

interdependence of the individual-in-community, as seen in Eph. 4:16.11 In this text, Paul expressed our spiritual connections to other members of the body through the use of two syn-compounds.12 He stressed the interactions that transpire between these spiritual connections through a medical term for contagious contact (“every joint supplies”).13 In the spiritual ecology of the body of Christ, Christians spread spiritual nutrients in a mutualistic manner through the exchange of spiritual gifts and other forms of interaction.14 When these spiritual connections and interactions fractured, as in the church at Corinth by divisions, schisms, and factions, Paul admonished them to reconcile with one another to avoid the spiritual immaturity such disruption produces.15

We desire connectedness. As Grenz writes, “The transgression of our first parents led to the unmistakable disruption of community. Their act brought alienation or estrangement where once there had been only fellowship.”16 The fragmented community of Babel reflects the sin of setting self above God rather than self in relation to God and others. In The Church of Facebook, Rice refers to the need to return to place, not in the sense of location but to a place of belonging and connectedness.17 Connection is part of our creational DNA and reflects what God desired to have with us from the very beginning. When we table with one another in the church or share a meal in the midst of our everyday lives, we leave behind, even for just a moment, the isolating individualism that threatens our very existence as people of God. When we serve one another and allow ourselves to be served, we return to its rightful place, a biblical understanding of self in relation to others rather than the socio-cultural message of self over others. When we do this, we restore God’s ecological design for persons within community rather than isolated from community.

1 C. Norman Kraus, The Authentic Witness (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1979). In part Kraus writes, “The impact of modern rational individualism has been so overpowering in Protestantism . . . Individualism, as the public assumption or mind-set in America, has pervasively influenced biblical interpretation of the last one hundred fifty years” (p. 77).

2 See Tom Yoder Neufeld, Put on the Armor of God: The Divine Warrior from Isaiah to Ephesians (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1997) and Martin Kitchen, Ephesians (London: Routledge, 1994).

3 3:16; 4:7, 16, 25; 5:33.

4 1:22-23; 2:12, 14, 15, 16, 19, 21, 22; 3:6, 10, 21; 4:4, 12, 13, 16; 5:5, 23, 25, 27, 29, 30, 32.

5 Psalm 1:3; Hosea 14:5-7; Isaiah 27:2-3; John 15:1-11; Matthew 6:28; Mark 4:8; 1Corinthians 9:11; Galatians 6:7.

6 A. M. Hunter, Interpreting the Parables (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1960), 8.

7 See Howard A. Snyder, Liberating the Church: The Ecology of Church and Kingdom (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1983) and Dwight J. Friesen, Thy Kingdom Connected (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2009).

8 Matt 6:28, ESV.

9 Ernest Callenbach, Ecology: A Pocket Guide (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 83.

10 Daniel J. Schneck, “What is This Thing Called Me? The Stationary, Buffered, Isothermal Living Engine,” American Laboratory 38, no. 10 (2006): 4-10 and Jennifer Ackerman, “The Ultimate Social Network,” Scientific American, June 2012, 36-43.

11 James D. G. Dunn, The Theology of Paul the Apostle (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1998), 555.

12 “Fitted together” and “held together.”

13 Harold W. Hoehner, Ephesians: An Exegetical Commentary (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2002), 573.

14 Eph 4:7-11.

15 1 Cor 1:10; 3:1-4.

16 Stanley J. Grenz, Theology for the People of God (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994), 188.

17 Jesse Rice, The Church of Facebook: How the Hyper-Connected are Redefining Community (Colorado Springs: David C. Cook, 2009).

Stephen Bell Associate Professor of English, College of Arts & Sciences, Liberty University

THE COMMUNION OF SAINTS: COMMUNITY AND SANCTIFIED MEMORY IN NOVEL AND FILM

Our modern culture finds itself trapped between a kind of perpetual forgetfulness and a longing for the rich historical storehouses of the past. On the one hand, the 24-hour cable news cycle and social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Snapchat feed our appetites for the latest bits of gossip, political intrigue, and personal vanity—slowly eliminating time for deep reflection and sustained attention. Think about the last picture you posted on Instagram or status update you offered on Facebook. What was the typical length of time during which others were consistently liking or commenting on your post? One to two days? Three to four at the most? Or consider the most recent outrage du jour on social media. Many critics have noted that time itself seems to have accelerated in recent years, making an event which took place only a week ago seem as if it occurred years in the past. Evanescence is the order of the day. Alan Jacobs directly connects these phenomena with the emergence of smartphones in 2008. As he states, on your smartphones you can get (a) a stream of prompts for visceral wrath and fear and then (b) games and distractions that accomplish the suddenly-necessary self-soothing. Between the wrath and fear and the subsequent soothing, who can remember what happened last week, much less ten years ago?1 To paraphrase Isaiah, the latest controversy withers, our memory of it fades; surely the present moment is nothing more than grass. Or as novelist Salman Rushdie puts it succinctly and memorably, "We are a nation of forgetters.”2

On the other hand, popular culture paradoxically reveals a deep, abiding desire for the past and a persistent recognition that we must exist in loving community to help one another remember events and ourselves accurately. Two of the most popular films from the past year were the Pixar animated film Coco and the Mr. Rogers documentary, Won’t You Be My Neighbor? Coco tells the story of a young boy named Miguel who is magically transported to the world of his departed ancestors on the Mexican Day of the

Dead. The beautiful, central premise of the film is that the dead are permitted to travel across a bridge of marigold flowers once a year to reconnect with their living relatives, as long as those who are living have memorialized their loved ones properly with gifts of food and photographs on ofrendas (a kind of family shrine or altar). Those who no longer have family members to remember them endure the pitiable fate of a second death in the other world as they vanish from all recorded memory. Miguel's sacrificial efforts to ensure that a long-dead family member is not forgotten by his living relatives present remembering well as a corporate venture, made perfect through a commitment to love one's living and dead family members fully and intentionally.

A longing for a gentler, more neighborly time also seems to have created the perfect conditions for the new Mr. Rogers documentary to be embraced by our society—one that has become fissured by anger, disagreement, and seemingly unbridgeable political divides. As David Brooks remarks in a review of the film, "The power is in Rogers's radical kindness at a time when public kindness is scarce...Moral elevation gains strength when it is scarce.”3 We all instinctively want to return, if only in our memories, to Mr. Roger's vision of America, in which empathy, kindness, and compassion for our neighbors motivate our actions. As Wendell Berry notes in his poem, Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front, "most of us today are afraid to know [our] neighbors and to die.”4 Social media, of course, exacerbates this problem, creating online information silos that encourage like-minded individuals to band together, while insisting that the opinions and viewpoints of those who don't think the same be attacked, mocked, and marginalized. The anonymity of the "comments" section encourages even Christians to commit this sin of "un-neighborliness" in our zeal to be right and to “own” those who think differently.

One of the more powerful novels to counteract these trends—and to illustrate the redemptive power of both memory and loving community—is William Kennedy's Pulitzer prize-winning 1983 novel, Ironweed, a careful reading of which could prove a healing alternative to our broken, amnesia-ridden world. Ironweed tells the story of Francis Phelan, a 58-year old bum from Albany who turns violent when drunk, but who had formerly been a talented baseball player for the Washington Senators before the Great Depression. Kennedy shows how Francis's default urge has always been one of flight, from family, responsibility, and himself. When he was 21, he killed a scab during a trolley strike. Years later, he killed a fellow vagrant who sought to cut off his feet one evening to steal his shoes. And perhaps most tragically, he fled his family after dropping and accidentally killing his two-week old son while changing his diaper. Kennedy's epigraph is taken from Dante's Purgatorio—To course oer better waters now hoists sail the little bark of my wit, leaving behind her a sea so cruel—which suggests that Francis, like Dante, is on a spiritual quest; the sea so cruel represents the inferno, or hell, of Francis’s violent past, lingering traces of which continue to haunt the man through a recurrence of painful memories. Yet the events of the story also seem to set Francis in a kind of purgatory; just as Dante is given the divine promise of erasure and cleansing of sins as he ascends Mount Purgatory, so too does Francis find a measure of comfort and potential redemption the more he is encouraged by both the living and the dead to confront his past instead of avoiding it. As he sadly expresses at his young son's graveside towards the beginning of the novel, “You suppose now that I can remember this stuff out in the open, I can finally start to forget it?”5

Part of the beauty of Kennedy’s approach is the way in which he insists that we need one another to achieve wholeness and grace; as such, it perfectly captures the vital importance of neighborly love. When Francis forgets who he is or begins to indulge in the worst excesses of his nature, he's always drawn back to himself by his fellow vagrants, Helen or Rudy, or later by the family that he had abandoned, and to which he is provisionally reconciled by the end of the novel.

Caroline J. Simon, in her reading of the novel, claims that "Neighbor love...involves seeing someone as having a destiny even when there is little overt evidence that this is so.”6 One of the most lamentable fates for any individual is to feel cut off from the redemptive workings of community, and Francis frequently fears that his many past sins will lead to his total isolation, even as his own actions actively seek to separate him

from others. At the beginning of the novel, we read that he remembered the tears he cried when he stood alongside the open grave of his father and he realized then that one of these days there would be nobody alive to remember that "he cried that morning...It's okay with me if I don't have no headstone...just so's I don't die alone.”7 Yet towards the end of the novel, his long-suffering wife Annie reveals that there's a place for Francis in the family plot despite the way he had treated them, and that he will always be memorialized as part of the family.

But Francis is not only being lovingly urged to remember himself and his place in the community by the living, but also by the shades of those who have died, some at Francis’s own hands. When Francis is working as a gravedigger and day laborer in the local cemetery at the beginning of the novel, family members and neighbors who have passed away are presented matter-of-factly as characters in conversation with Francis, and the author, Kennedy, is intentionally ambiguous about their existence. Are they merely conjured back to life through Francis's memories of them, or do they still live on another plane? Whatever the case, Francis's encounters with this great cloud of witnesses serve to remind him of important truths that he'd suppressed about his own past and to point him towards redemption. Like the souls in Dante's Purgatorio who distinguish themselves from the selfinvolved residents of hell by making Mt. Purgatory shake with joyful shouts of praise when a sinner is freed, these faces from Francis’s past resolve to let bygones be bygones in their desire for Francis to be healed. In one beautifully redemptive scene, they even construct a set of baseball bleachers in his family's backyard to cheer on his reconciliation with his family.

It’s no accident that Kennedy sets the action of the novel on Halloween and the day after, All Saint's Day. As one character reflects, It’s a holy day. You have to go to church. It's the day we remember the martyrs who died for the faith and nobody knows their names. "Oh yeah,” Francis said, “I remember them fellas”8 (emphasis mine). Alan Jacobs, in his Original Sin: A Cultural History, cites the work of historian Peter Brown, who traces the origin of the veneration of the saints to the late Roman world of early Christianity. Since most commoners had no ability to right the wrongs they were forced to endure, they often appealed to local patricians with more power and influence to help them receive justice or escape injury. This practice was then translated into their conceptualization of the spiritual realm, and feast days were established for individual

saints who could similarly intercede for these Christians before God in ways that the commoners feared they themselves were powerless to do:

We all instinctively want to return, if only in our memories, to Mr. Roger's vision of America, in which empathy, kindness, and compassion for our neighbors motivate our actions.9

The confused individualism of the modern world lacks the resources to provide a fulfilling life, and these works of culture demonstrate ways that the deep human desire for community and belonging can break through the modern cultural conscious. If we as Christians believe that works of art have the capacity to baptize our imaginations and draw us closer to God, we should receive these cultural gifts with gratitude and understand the ways that they draw us out of ourselves, reminding us to slow down and love others more intentionally and fully.

1 Alan Jacobs, “The Ministry of Amnesia,Snakes and Ladders,” (July 5, 2018), accessed July 25, 2018, https://blog.ayjay.org/the-ministry-ofamnesia/.

2 Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children (NY: Penguin Books, 1991), 36.

3 David Brooks, “Fred Rogers and the Loveliness of the Little Good,” The New York Times (July 5, 2018). http:/www.nytimes.com/2018/07/05/ opinion/mister-fred-rogers-wont-you-be-my-neighbor.html.

4 Wendell Berry, Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front, The Country of Marriage (NY: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973).

5 William Kennedy, Ironweed (NY: Penguin Books, 1984), 19.

6 Caroline J. Simon, The Disciplined Heart: Love, Destiny & Imagination (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1997), 74.

7 Kennedy, Ironweed, 16.

8 Ibid, 165.

9 Alan Jacobs, Original Sin: A Cultural History (NY: Harper One, 2008), 72.

Eunice Chung M.Div '14 and Th.M. '15, Liberty University

BY OUR LOVE: PROCLAIMING THE GOSPEL THROUGH CHRISTIAN COMMUNITY

On January 17, 2018, British Prime Minister Theresa May appointed a Minister for Loneliness for the United Kingdom. She stated, “For far too many people, loneliness is the sad reality of modern life… people who have no one to talk to or share their thoughts and experiences with.”1 Across the Atlantic, in an American nationwide survey by Cigna, 54% of the participants identified as always or sometimes being lonely. Studies reveal that loneliness has far deeper consequences than an absence of socializing with friends; it affects physical health, is worse than smoking 15 cigarettes a day, increases the risk of heart disease and stroke, causes slower recovery from breast cancer,2 and can even result in premature mortality.3 Loneliness is growing in the West, and is prevalent among the young and old. In the West, our individualistic society is paradoxically seeking community, a sense of belonging, a desire to feel wanted.

This issue is not merely social; it is spiritual. After the fall, fellowship with God was broken, and in its place, distrust, betrayal, pride, strife—sin—flourished. Sin affects every aspect of human development and interaction. It divides and isolates. Loneliness is merely another indicator of the blight of sin, another reminder that our battle is not against flesh and blood, but against spiritual powers.

The church is called to engage our lonely society; the Great Commission is intensely, intimately communal. Gospel-focused living demands a sharing of one’s life, time, and resources with those who are around. Counter to the pervasive individualistic attitude of the West, Christian discipleship pervades others’ lives, moving them toward deeper sanctification and greater Christlikeness, not toward Western societal norms or personal ambition. In Life Together, Dietrich Bonhoeffer states, “Human love constructs its own image of the other person, of what he is and what he should become. It takes the life of the other person into its own hands. Spiritual love recognizes the true

image of the other person which he has received from Jesus Christ; the image that Jesus Christ himself embodied and would stamp upon all men.”4 Discipling necessitates drawing individuals into Christian community. By inviting others into this sphere, the church is not simply meeting a societal need; it is obeying the command of God to disciple others.

Christian fellowship is essential to the outworking of the Gospel. Jesus states in John 13, “A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another. By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” Christian community is not simply a band-aid covering an emotional need in society; it is perhaps one of the most powerful evangelistic and discipleship tools the church possesses. By this, the love Christ followers have for one another, the world will know the Son. Through believers’ love for their spiritual brothers and sisters, the world will know to whom we belong: Jesus Christ. Christian community exposes Christ to our culture, a world that is lonely, desperately aching for somewhere to belong, be known, and be loved. Christian fellowship is neither a private social club nor a hideaway from the woes of the world: it is gift from God to the saints, through which the world can glimpse his goodness, love, and beauty.

Jesus echoes this concept again in his high priestly prayer in John 17. With death imminent, Jesus prays over not only those in his present company, but for all future believers:

“I do not ask for [the disciples] only, but also for those who will believe in me through their word, that they may all be one, just as you, Father, are in me, and I in you, that they also may be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me. The glory that you have given me I have given to them, that they may be

one even as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become perfectly one, so that the world may know that you sent me and loved them even as you loved me” (ESV).

This unity, reflective of divine love, is the confirmation to the world that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God. Jesus states this reality twice to emphasize its importance, both in verses 21 and 23. In fact, the second time Jesus repeats the phrase, he extends his explanation that this unity is not only evidence that Jesus is from the Father, but it is also proof of the Father’s sacrificial love.

This sacrificial love, or “Deep Magic,” to borrow C.S. Lewis’s term in The Chronicles of Narnia, reverses the sting of death and invokes a new covenant between God and believer. Furthermore, God chooses to work through imperfect followers to transmit this message to others. God utilizes Christian love and unity to reflect this love to the world. He calls us to embody “Deep Magic” through our relationships with believers and with those who have yet to believe. This sacrificial love, demonstrated first by Jesus, can be emulated in the church, and through it, the world can witness and experience “Deep Magic” for themselves.

At times, the Church reflects the disunity of the world more than the unity of Christ. Church disputes, an insistence on being seen as “right” on social media, and refusals to forgive others divert our attention away from our primary mission. We must refocus and remember our calling. The Church is uniquely positioned to face our modern loneliness epidemic.

Through the Father’s grace and mercy, we who were dead in our trespasses, are made alive together with Christ the Son! The Holy Spirit resides in the saints, working on our behalf for His glory. He renews our hearts, reorients our loves, and unifies his church to be released into the world.

Christian community is both the means and goal; the Church reaches seekers through its community, so that they too can become the community. Out of a response to our Savior’s love, we, saints who possess innumerable spiritual blessings and are fully equipped for every good work, must fulfill our duty—to faithfully display the love of Christ both to the saints and to the lost. We must lean into the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Our society is longing for belonging that only the Gospel can truly provide, for it is by this that the world will know who he is, by our love for one another.

1 Press Release “PM Commits to Government-Wide Drive to Tackle Loneliness,” Gov.UK, January 17, 2018 accessed August 8, 2018, https:// www.gov.uk/government/news/pm-commits-to-government-wide-driveto-tackle-loneliness.

2 Ritu Chatterjee, “Americans Are a Lonely Lot, And Young People Bear the Heaviest Burden,” National Public Radio, May 1, 2018, accessed August 3, 2018, https://www.npr.org/sections/healthshots/2018/05/01/606588504/americans-are-a-lonely-lot-and-youngpeople-bear-the-heaviest-burden.

3 Julianne Holt-Lunstad, Timothy B. Smith, and J. Bradley Layton, “Social Relationships and Mortality Risk: A Meta-analytic Review,” PLOS Medicine 7, no. 7 (2010), accessed August 3, 2018, https://doi. org/10.1371/journal.pmed.1000316.

4 Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together (New York: Harper & Row, 1954), 37.

Daria Borislavova White Core Faculty Member, School of Behavioral Sciences, Liberty University with Maria Kometer

Graduate Student Assistant, Center for Apologetics & Cultural Engagement, Liberty University

REDEEMING COMMUNITY FROM OUTSIDE THE WEST

It is no secret that people are suffering from a severe lack of community. In this age of technology, we have so many unintentional, hurried, and mindless chats over our smart devices. Many have turned these conversations into their primary mode of communication with the world around them. In addition, Western society has adopted an individualistic framework that prizes the desires of the individual over the needs of the community—and this framework is beginning to spread across the globe. With the rise of individualism and the decline of the communal society, healthy communities can be few and far between. Christians have been called to value the needs of others, to become a community, and to care for one another; however, in a society so saturated in isolation and independence, it can be difficult for the church to envision this concept. I propose here that by looking outside of the mindset of Western individualism, Christians may better understand where the church has lost community and reclaim the “togetherness” found in the Bible.

I was born and raised in a small town surrounded by mountains in communist Bulgaria. I played outside until late evening, undisturbed by news of crime and the safety concerns of my parents. Our town contained only 10,000 people, all of whom had lived there for generations. In a community like this, there exists both pros and cons. My parents’ home is just as it was during my childhood – always open with people coming in and out each day. A boy comes to help my mom with her garden and cut the wood for winter. The pharmacist across the street comes to personally deliver medications, and cousins several times removed bring news and come for advice. On the other hand, however, black-and-white thinking and judgmentalism are a part of such a close-knit community, with unwavering opinions and something to say about everyone else’s lives. With this being said, our community has lived together in unity and will continue to do so. I have been married to an American

for 20 years, but my sense of self is forever anchored with my people.

The first church lived in a traditional society that, while similar to the culture of my own childhood with its pros and cons, is a kind that most of us raised in the West could not understand. Christianity, however, was not itself bound to this culture, but left the tight language and traditional bounds of these places to create a global body of believers where there was no longer “Jew nor Greek,…slave nor free,...male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” (Galatians 3:28, ESV) While this global nature is one of the most profound elements of the Christian faith, I propose to you that many cultures in the West have neglected to allow the global Christian faith to become intimately local and pervade their own culture, resulting in a lack of deep, communal relationships.

The Christian community was central to Jesus’ vision for His church. When He prayed for the disciples, He asked that “they may be one” (John 17:21) the way He was one with the Father. His glory, the beauty of His presence, was given to the disciples through that unity. Jesus called it “complete unity” (John 17:23), and the way the world will know Him. The Christian community exploded into reality on the day of Pentecost, claiming the first 3,000 converts who would become “one in heart and mind” (Acts 4:32), share prayer, food, and possessions, and go on to reach the world with the Good News and the power of the Spirit.

What I need to clarify, however, is that this is not simply a case of “the good ol’ days” nostalgia, painting a picture of the big, bad West. In Western culture, to be certain, traditional societies have been permeated by a postmodern, individualistic worldview (centering around the individual’s needs and desires), and even the church has been impacted by such an atmosphere. Until recently, much of the world held

a more traditional view, maintaining that individual needs and desires ought to be adjusted to the needs of others.1 Interestingly enough, however, while this shift from tight knit communities is usually characterized as the “sin” of Western culture, the spread of globalization has changed many traditional societies, with places even like Japan becoming less traditional.2

“So what?”, you may ask. Why does this spread of individualism matter? Well, over the years, we have discovered that the value framework to which we ascribe—traditional or individualistic—impacts us even more deeply than the simple, conscious choices we make. Tsai claimed that ideal affect, or the emotion we would like to feel most often, depends on our cultural norms.3 The more one values an emotion, the more focused one becomes on experiencing and paying attention to its presence. Tsai discovered that exuberant joy and excitement are preferred in a culture like that of the United States, while low positive emotions like calmness and serenity are preferred in Asian cultures. How, you may ask, do we know what people prefer? We look at their favorite stories. Parents in America read “Where the Wild Things Are” and value excitement and stimulation, while Taiwanese parents tend to value calmer and quieter stories.4 Ideal affect is also varied between religions. Currently, American Christians strive for high arousal positive states, while Buddhist teaching is associated with low arousal positive states.5 With this information in mind, we can understand that the framework that a society chooses will affect almost every aspect of their lives—and thus we see why, in a society valuing individual excitement over communal serenity, healthy community can be hard to come by.

A recent study I conducted that included a total of 20 in-depth interviews analyzed through line-by-line coding illuminated this global spread of individualism beyond the West in the rising generation as well as deeply held values. The study included individuals in the USA, Bulgaria, Greece, and Turkey. While there were certainly value differences between each country of origin, each culture contained a marked difference between the individuals I interviewed and their children. All study participants, regardless of their country of origin, agreed that culture was dramatically shifting with the next generation, and the interviews revealed that the “electronic childhood” had ushered in a break-down of communication, a lack of respect for adults and the wider world, an attitude of entitlement, sexual objectification, and a loss of innocence. What I found most powerful, however, was the hope I soon discovered. Regardless of the spread of individualism,

all subjects, both Western and Eastern, claimed community as the most important element of their life. Without fail, family—parents, grandparents, extended family, and children—were at the forefront of importance, followed by friendships, community, and a sense of belonging with the wider world. It becomes clear that, regardless of the framework our culture has chosen, somewhere deep inside of us we all deeply value community.

In light of this study, then, we see that while an individualistic society has made it difficult for us to express and create connection, all people still deeply value and crave it. It is here that the church must step in. In a world of people desperately craving community, the church can provide an answer. “But how?”, you might ask. Again, we must take a step outside of a strictly individualistic mentality and borrow from a more communal culture. Historically, the African American church seems to have grasped the wisdom of this big vision. For many in this community, the church was family. They recognized this vision for the church: “In a world that sometimes wasn’t giving you this message, at church you got the message that you are beautiful, smart and you mattered. Church was an extension of family for me.”

We have had small tastes of this unity—flickers of light when we are with beloved people. I have personally felt the importance of this unity when struck by crisis. My small group of women at church surrounded me to pray, cry, bring food, and comfort. They chose to love me as they loved themselves, and they surrounded me with friendship and love. It is this community

that the church must foster, and it can no longer be relegated only to times of terrible crisis. Perhaps, if the church could understand that they are daily battling forces that are too great for one man alone, we could understand the urgency of developing healthy community. Perhaps we must first recognize our struggles with dividing politics, sinful family legacies, and the current existential angst for the struggles that they are. We will, in many cases, have to adopt the sacrifices made by my childhood community in Bulgaria in order to put the needs of others above our own convenience. We must step outside of the “me first” mentality in which our culture is spiraling, and realize that without community, we will never see the fullness of Christianity as it was intended—not just a slightly inaccessible and global concept, but a family in which we find fulfillment and unconditional love in the hands of our Father.

1 Jeanne L. Tsai, Brian Knutson, and Helene H. Fung, “Cultural Variation in Affect Valuation,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 90, no. 2 (2006).

2 Takeshi Hamamura, “Are Cultures Becoming Individualistic? A CrossTemporal Comparison of Individualism-Collectivism in the United States and Japan,” Personality and Social Psychology Review 16, no. 1 (2012).

3 Jeanne L. Tsai, “Ideal Affect: Cultural Causes and Behavioral Consequences.” Perspectives on Psychological Science 2, no. 3 (2007): 242–259”

4 Jeanne L. Tsai, Koopmann-Holm, B., Ochs, C., & Miyazaki, M. “The Religious Shaping of Emotion: Implications of Affect Valuation Theory”, in Handbook of the Psychology of Religion and Spirituality, 2nd edition, eds. R. Paloutzian & C. Park (New York, NY: Guilford, 2013), 274-291.

5 Jeanne L. Tsai, Felicity F. Miao, and Emma Seppala, “Good Feelings in Christianity and Buddhism: Religious Differences in Ideal Affect,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 33, no. 3 (2007).

Lisa S. Sosin

Director Ph.D. in Counselor Education & Supervision Program, Professor, School of Behavioral Sciences, Liberty University

Michael Trexler

Ph.D. Counselor Education & Supervision Program Student, School of Behavioral Sciences, Director, Student Counseling Services, Liberty University

John J. S. Harrichand

Graduate, Ph.D. Counselor Education & Supervision Program, School of Behavioral Sciences, Assistant Professor, State University of New York

Timothy A. Sosin

Graduate, M.A. Clinical Mental Health Counseling, School of Behavioral Sciences, Resident Student Counseling Services, Liberty University

RESEARCH COLLABORATION: A UNIQUE OPPORTUNITY FOR CHRISTIAN COMMUNITY AND PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT

The Ph.D. in Counselor Education & Supervision (CES) Program at Liberty University develops professional counselors, supervisors, counselor educators, research-scholars, and servant-leaders who are empowered by God’s grace and truth to serve a hurting world. In the counseling context, grace can be viewed as providing a compassionate, collaborative relationship, while truth is seen as the competent delivery of best-practice based services grounded in a biblical worldview. As a profession that advocates for the marginalized, traumatized, and suffering, counselor education is done best when walking alongside those being trained. This creates a unique nexus which cultivates both Christian community and professional development.

One disorder counselors treat that causes isolation and disconnection from community is anxiety. Over thirty million adults in America suffer with an anxiety disorder,1 many of whom are college aged individuals. Recent studies reveal that anxiety is an epidemic on college and university campuses,2 weakening students’ attendance, grades, career trajectories, relationships, and mental and physical health.3 In this article, we briefly describe our experience as co-researchers working on a team to address this problem with anxious Liberty University students.

For this study, we administered the Creative Group Counseling for Anxiety (CGCA) intervention to a group of students suffering with moderate to severe anxiety. CGCA has its roots in The Creative Exposure Intervention (CEI), a PTSD treatment that I (the first

author) developed to address the needs of adolescents suffering with severe anxiety due to bullying.4 In CGCA, CEI was expanded to a six session group counseling format that specifically targets the needs of anxious college students. CGCA is derived from empirically supported and creative treatments for anxiety.5 One primary benefit of CGCA is that, as a group treatment, it provides the experience of community, peer support, normalization, and authentic connection—all of which in and of themselves aid in decreasing anxiety.6

In addition to helping anxious students, the research team also modeled for aspiring counselor-educators outcomes desirable for their own futures as counselors and mentors. To accomplish this, we collaboratively:

(1) ran a CGCA group; (2) developed and conducted research measuring CGCA’s effectiveness; (3) analyzed the data; (4) critically assessed and synthesized research findings; (5) determined the implications of results for the field of counseling; (6) developed an American Counseling Association (ACA) professional conference presentation to teach other professionals CGCA and to disseminate the results of our study; and

(7) developed and submitted a manuscript to an ACA peer reviewed journal.

Reflections and Testimonials

Our shared research journey positively impacted each of us. In reflecting on the lessons learned at this nexus between Christian community and professional development the co-researchers offer the following reflections and applications.

Community in Research Collaboration

Research mentorship provided a foundation for engaging in meaningful research and ministering to anxious students while adding to the broader literature. It was exciting to find that the CGCA experience was effective for these students! Similar to Bonhoeffer’s Life Together, the research process reminded me of the importance of community in research collaboration, both for our research team members, and the participants comprising our study.7 In this spirit of collaboration, I hope to continue impacting our world for the better through group research initiatives, learning from and mentoring others.

Importance of Collaboration in Research

Analyzing the data consensually was a remarkable experience. As we shared our observations and insights from the data, a synergy formed that enabled us to see, together, what we could not recognize alone. This was one of the most meaningful and memorable experiences of our shared journey. As Christians, working together as a team and with the members of the CGCA group, I was reminded of the biblical principle of believers walking together in unity (Ps. 133:1) and keeping in step with the Spirit (Eph. 4:3). Because each research team member brought a unique lens to the research findings, we developed a robust and nuanced understanding of what we explored; a depth to the conclusions and implications that is clearly the result of working together as a research team, as opposed to individual researchers.

Collaborative Research as a Picture of Interdependence

The four of us brought a diverse range of gifts to this project. Each team member internalized the DNA of the work, contributed to the wholeness of the CGCA project, and carried out responsibilities according to his or her giftings. This dynamic made a world of sense in light of God’s design for the Body of Christ. It was an honor to work with such an experienced team! I learned the importance of research collaboration, which profoundly mirrored our goal of walking side by side our anxious clientele. As I serve as president of Virginia’s Association for Spiritual, Ethical, and Religious Values in Counseling, I now have the opportunity to implement a collaborative research initiative with our research team. Thanks to the CGCA project, I will champion unity in research and celebrate the diverse gifts of my team members. I also look forward

to applying what I learned into my clinical practice, teaching, and division leadership.

Reflections and Conclusions

Research reveals the significant impact of faculty mentoring on student confidence in research ability and production.8 As a result of our shared endeavor, anxious students met their counseling goals and many exciting opportunities for professional development and community connection emerged for all of us on the research team. The advancement of professional fields depends on training students to both develop effective ways to address societal concerns and to conduct and disseminate rigorous research that tests effectiveness. Shared research efforts such as these provide a rich and meaningful way to teach these vital skills in the context of Christian community.

Through the manifestations of each of these skills, a symbiotic relationship between believers is formed, wherein all work together to advance the Kingdom of God.

1 “Understanding the Facts of Anxiety Disorders and Depression is the First Step,” Anxiety and Depression Association of America, https://adaa. org/understanding-anxiety.

2 “Center for Collegiate Mental Health (CCMH) 2016 Annual Report. Publication No. STA 17-74,” Center for Collegiate Mental Health (2017), https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED572853.pdf.

3 Thomas Baez, “Evidence-Based Practice for Anxiety Disorder in College Mental Health,” Journal of College Student Psychotherapy 20, no. 1 (2005).

4 Lisa S. Sosin and Amanda J. Rockinson-Szapskiw, “Creative Exposure Intervention as Part of Clinical Treatment for Adolescents Exposed to Bullying and Experiencing Posttraumatic Stress Disorder Symptoms,” Journal of Creativity in Mental Health 11, no. 3-4 (2016): 391-408.

5 See David H. Barlow, Todd J. Farchione, Christopher P. Fairholme, Kristen K. Ellard, Christina L. Boisseau, Laura B. Allen, and Jill T. Ehrenreich-May, Unified Protocal for Transdiagnostic Treatment of Emotional Disorders: Therapist Guide (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2011); Laury Rappaport, Focusing-Oriented Art Therapy: Accessing the Body’s Wisdom and Creative Intelligence (Philadelphia, PA: Jessica Kingsely Publishers, 2009); Daniel J. Siegel, The Mindful Counselor: A Clinician’s Guide to Mindsight and Neural Integration (New York: NY, Norton & Company, 2010).

6 Diana Koszycki, Jennifer Thake, Celine Mavounza, Jean-Philippe E. Daoust, Monica Taljaard, and Jacques Bradwejn, “Preliminary Investigation of a Mindfulness-Based Intervention for Social Anxiety Disorder That Integrates Compassion Meditation and Mindful Exposure,” Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine 22, no. 5 (2016): 363374.

7 Deitrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together: The Classic Exploration of Christian Community (New York, NY: Harper and Row, 1954).

8 Laura L. Paglis, Stephen G. Green, and Talya N. Bauer, “Does Adviser Mentoring Add Value? A Longitudinal Study of Mentoring and Doctoral Student Outcomes,” Research in Higher Education 47, no. 4 (2006): 451476.

Send Us Your Top STUDENTS

Students from all academic disciplines can participate. Applications for Fall 2019 are available at LUApologetics.com.

Business

For Kingdom Good?:

Interdisciplinary Engagement from Business and Biblical Studies

Kevin L. Rawls, LUO Associate Dean and Assistant Professor, School of Visual & Performing Arts, Liberty University

R. N. Small, Assistant Professor of Biblical Studies, Rawlings School of Divinity, Liberty University

The goals of business and the Kingdom of God can appear mutually exclusive, in that businesses seem to exist only for the sake of material profits, and the Kingdom of God is focused on both the immaterial and eternal. Can we serve both God and money? Can Wall Street and Church Street really intersect in a meaningful way? These questions are posed without obvious answers because of a deeper presupposition.

The secular and the sacred appear to be separated into two spheres. The realms of work and worship seem to have limited engagement with one another, but we are nonetheless confronted with the reality Kuyper reminded us of: “there is not a square inch” of our human experience that is beyond the sovereignty of Christ.1 Can there be real and meaningful integration in these two worlds or will the integration merely be artificial and contrived? An entrepreneur can say a prayer before a business meeting, and representatives of a house of worship can attend a business roundtable, but is this the extent of integration?

The distinction between the secular and the sacred apparently developed in a robust form in the middle ages.2 During that time, there arose a group of individuals who, in an effort to concentrate all of their attention upon God, left society and established suitable homes in a sequestered monastic life. Thus, in their mind, the essence of devotion to God required an abandonment of society rather than an engagement

of it. The Protestant Reformation made many seismic changes to the religious landscape, but one major change was in this area of engagement, specifically regarding vocation.

Martin Luther, the Protestant Reformer and a former monk himself, set out to change this secular/sacred distinction. Luther said, “Therefore I advise no one to enter any religious order or the priesthood, indeed, I advise everyone against it - unless he is forearmed with this knowledge and understands that the works of monks and priests, however holy and arduous they may be, do not differ at all in the sight of God from the works of the rustic laborer in the field or the woman going about her household tasks, but that all works are measured before God by faith alone.”3 This fresh perspective on vocation allowed all Christians to approach their station in life as a platform to serve God. In this doctrine of vocation, the believer is an agent of God’s, working out His grace and favor in the world by using their gifts and talents to serve and bless others.4

This fresh understanding of vocation, as posited by Martin Luther, may be closer to Moses and the apostle Paul than the false secular/sacred distinction. Humanity’s ability to work creatively seems intrinsic to being in the image of God (Gen 1:26-28). The Christian should view work as done before God and not before men (Col 3:22-4:1; Eph 6:5-9). In the letter to the Thessalonians, the apostle Paul stated that the

ability to work and support oneself is a way to love one another and be a positive witness to non-believers (1 Thes 4:9-12). If we agree with the premise that entrepreneurial activity and business can be conducted for kingdom good, what are some principles for the way forward?

First, business entrepreneurs must see their work as a means of ruling wisely over God’s creation as image bearers (Gen 1:26-28). Humanity was placed in the garden to steward the creation in a manner that would allow it to flourish and bear good fruit. There must be no sense of exploiting God’s earth, animals or fellow humans in pursuit of capital. Rather than the role of a tyrannical owner seeking to use and waste what he is given, the role of steward was given to mankind to assist in bringing order and dominion to creation.

This leads into the second principle, which is that love for others must be the controlling ethic in any entrepreneur’s enterprise (1 Thes 4:91-12). One can, within their vocation, sin against another by performing actions that bring harm to others or contribute to the growth of sin in a society. In light of this principle, Christians may need to pass up on new market opportunities, refusing to meet a demand for a product that will ultimately harm its users. The Christian entrepreneur must allow love and the best interest of others to fuel their business models. They must face the reality that ethical business dealings may lessen personal profits. While this may not be true of every situation, the Christian must be prepared.

Third, profit in business entrepreneurship should not be viewed as inherently bad nor inherently good. The profits are a function of value added to the consumer and the owner of the business. However, profits should not be the only measurement of business success and health. Rather, profits should be viewed as a means of gauging a sustainable societal good. The impact of the business on the stakeholders, those outside of the direct production and consumption of goods or services, must be taken into account as well. Indeed, there are a growing number of business models created to intentionally impact stakeholders in a positive way. These “social enterprises” measure the social impact alongside the profits as a way to guide the mission and health of the business.5

Fourth, a sense of calling is important for the Christian entering this vocation (Jer 1:5). Rather than thinking that they must simply choose any job, a Christian should seek to discover their God-ordained vocation. An entrepreneur should not see this path as merely a path to financial success and prosperity, but also as a part of our well-being as individuals.6 The Christian

in business should enter the field out of both an identification of God-given talents and a sense of calling. When we are able to effectively bring our gifts and talents to meet the needs of others, we are able to see how God has called us to be a part of His provision and grace in the world. We do this ultimately through the Lord, who brings forth the resources necessary to continue to do that work and to effectively continue to sustain the calling and vocation He has provided for us. We, as believers not limited to a temporal focus, should be uniquely able to see the foolishness of chasing only profits. The Christian should remain aware of the lure of materialism and greed that can so quickly can ensnare (Matt 19:24). As the Christian is working to the glory of God, they must be willing to bear his/her cross in vocation. Seeking a higher calling and working for a higher goal will remove profits as the ultimate litmus test.

Christian entrepreneurs ought not to think that their financial contribution to church is the only way to advance Kingdom good. Such a mentality reflects the secular/sacred distinction, is inconsistent with the doctrine of vocation, and is likely a result of viewing Kingdom work through the lens of a tax code that creates a non-profit/for-profit distinction. The Christian entrepreneur understands that fair pay to employees, ethical business contracts, accurate bookkeeping, and appropriate investing are forms of ministry as well as ways to advance the Kingdom. Alternately, the Christian entrepreneur also understands the importance of the church and seeks to use their talents and skills to minister within it.

The Christian’s conscience before God and their love expressed to others will create business dealings that ultimately glorify God. And it is with this perspective that we can confidently state that yes, business can be for Kingdom good.

1 Roger Henderson, “Kuyper’s Inch,” Pro Rege 36, no. 3 (2008): 12-14, https://digitalcollections.dordt.edu/pro_rege/vol36/iss3/2.

2 Gert Melville, The World of Medieval Monasticism, trans. James Mixson (Collegeville, MN: Cistercian Publications, 2016).

3 Martin Luther, The Babylonian Captivity of the Church 1520: The Annotated Luther Study Edition, eds. Erik H. Hermann and Paul W. Robinson (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2016).

4 Gene E. Vieth Jr., God at Work: Your Christian Vocation in All of Life (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2002).

5 J. Gregory Dees, “The Meaning of Social Entrepeneurship,” in Case Studies in Social Entrepeneurship, eds. Jost Hamschmidt and Michael Pirson (NY: Routledge, 2017).

6 Bryan J. Dik and Ryan D. Duffy, “Calling and Vocation at Work: Definitions and Prospects for Research and Practice,” The Counseling Psychology 37, no. 3 (2007): 424-450, https://doi. org/10.1177/0011000008316430.

Lament and the Language of Poetry: Interdisciplinary Engagement from Literature and Old Testament Studies

Gary E. Yates, Professor of Biblical Studies/Old Testament, Rawlings School of Divinity, Liberty University

Andrew S. Walker, Assistant Professor of English, College of Arts & Sciences, Liberty University

In the contemporary imagination, poetry is predominantly the romantic kind—short, emotional, lyrical, and expressive. Yet the long history of poetry, from its practice in the Old Testament to its various contemporary forms, demonstrates that poetry remains a literary mode as various as any other. Its expressions from antiquity to the current day range from the epithalamium (a poem celebrating marriage) to the elegy (the lament of death). Common to these diverse forms and eras, the language of poetry offers a distinct kind of expression quite separate from that of much contemporary theology.

John Keats, the famous Romantic poet, captures one of these differences in tracing out, as he saw it, one of the marks of the great poet. In a letter, Keats described what he calls “negative capability,” which is the poet’s capability of “being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”1 For Keats, this capacity was essential to the poet and describes well at least one of poetry’s possible modes.

It is also one of the ways poetry is uniquely capable of helping the Christian to endure the present age, particularly during periods of lament.

In her book, The Cloister Walk, the poet Kathleen Norris quotes a Benedictine monk as saying, “God behaves in the psalms in ways he is not allowed to behave in systematic theology.”2 As Logan Jones explains, the fact that the psalms are poetry means that “they seek not so much as to explain but as to offer the reality of life lived in all its messiness, both the pain and praise.”3 Further, the psalmists give expression to the wide range of emotions involved with “life lived in relationship to and in covenant with God, especially in the midst of loss.”4

Lament

In the Old Testament laments, the poets give full expression to their distress in regard to self, their enemies, and even to God. Craig Broyles finds some

form of accusatory language toward God in more than sixty different verses in the Psalms (cf. Pss 6:4; 10:1; 22:1-2; 44:10-15; 77:8-10); 88:6-9, 15-19), because God himself is often viewed as the source of distress.5 The tone of these laments is often shocking in the expressions of bitterness and anger toward God, and these prayers frequently direct the probing questions of “Why?” and “How long?” toward God. Poetry provides the medium for expressing these negative emotions toward God by offering conflicting images of God that reflect the disconnect between the poets’ beliefs about God and God’s apparent neglect or failure to act in accordance with his character and promises. Israel would celebrate that the Lord did not “forget” his people or his covenant promises to them (cf. Deut 4:31; Isa 44:21; 49:15), but the psalmist in the midst of distress would ask the Lord, “Will you forget me forever?” (Ps 13:1, CSB).

In Psalm 23, the Lord is the caring shepherd who provides for, guides, and protects his flock. In Psalm 44, however, the people feel quite differently as a result of their defeat in battle at a time when they had not turned away from the Lord in disobedience. Because God has refused to go out with them in battle, they feel as if God is a neglectful shepherd who has handed them over to be eaten like sheep and scattered among the nations (Ps 44:11). Israel’s theological confession was that the Lord as its “Protector” would never “slumber or sleep” (Ps 121:4, CSB). The idea of a sleeping deity was something more associated with a pagan god like Baal who was unable to respond to the prayers of his worshippers (1 Kgs 18:27), but in the grief over this defeat, the people could cry out, “Wake up, Lord! Why are you sleeping? Get up! Don’t reject us forever!” (Ps 44:23, CSB).

This language is not a statement of "ontologocal reality" about God but rather the people's very real perception of God's apparent neglect and inactivity.

The prophet Jeremiah depicted Israel’s idolatry as an abandonment of the Lord as “the fountain of living water” and a turning instead to worthless gods that were nothing more than “cracked cisterns” that could never hold water (Jer 2:13, CSB). Nevertheless, Jeremiah when suffering intense persecution and feeling abandoned by God could charge that the Lord was “a mirage” and “water that is not reliable,” nothing more than a dried up wadi that was unable to refresh and sustain him (Jer 15:18, CSB). Even in the expression of such raw emotion, the poets are not abandoning their theological convictions

or their faith in God. Rather they are expressing bewilderment, grief, and anger as to why their experience with God in the midst of life’s difficulties does not appear to be in accord with their established beliefs about God or in line with his covenant promises and commitments. This language is not a statement of “ontological reality” about God but rather the people’s very real perception of God’s apparent neglect and inactivity.6 This feature of the laments is liberating for us as worshippers because it enables us to see the boldness and honesty with which we can approach and engage with God in prayer. At the same time, this type of deep reflection would include meditation on the person and character of God that produced trusting confidence in God’s goodness and ability to fulfill his covenant promises (cf. Ps 22:1-2 and 22:25-31).7

After struggling with God’s apparent neglect, Jeremiah would come to confess, “Praise the Lord for he rescues the life of the needy from evil people” (Jer 20:13, CSB). The transformation of lament into praise was not instantaneous and only emerged after the prophet was able to give voice to his negative emotions toward God. The language of poetry was the vehicle for expressing those emotions that ultimately led to praise and deeper trust in God’s goodness and faithfulness. These laments also offered motivation for the Lord to respond to the prayers of his people.

The Language of Poetry

What is recognized here as characteristic of the Psalms and their practice of lament is ultimately a poetic capacity that is communal. In many ways, however, such communal lament is counter-cultural in a society fixated on comfort and pleasure, even within the church itself. Given that a third of the Psalter is lament, the liturgy of Christian worship ought to more fully reflect expressions of sorrow, cries against injustice, and heartfelt confession of sin. Ministers who teach those in grief and crisis how to lament promote a kind of spiritual authenticity that can bring intimacy with God. In our attentiveness to the method of lament we find in the Psalms and the language of poetry in general, the church might thus be better equipped to mourn together.

Christians can often feel the need to respond to tragedy by too quickly providing theological and philosophical answers, but in making use of the language of poetry, we might have a witness that better models how to worship in the midst of suffering and pain (Ps 62:8). Poetry, even as it is commonly practiced today,

maintains much of this quality of uncertainty, paucity, or merely a holding on to a possibility that would otherwise be foreclosed. In one of Emily Dickinson’s little poems, this quality is not only exemplified but composes the content of the poem. In its entirety, it reads:

Tell all the truth but tell it slant — Success in Circuit lies

Too bright for our infirm Delight

The Truth’s superb surprise

As Lightning to the Children eased With explanation kind

The Truth must dazzle gradually Or every man be blind —

To assume the language of poetry is to court such an oblique strategy of communication. It is to tell the truth but tell it slant. It is to walk the circumference of our conviction and check the border of our doubt. As the Psalms demonstrate and contemporary poetry attests, the language of poetry—and especially in the way it nurtures our negative capability—might help us to lament both as inheritors of the mysterious gospel and as humans living with loss in a fallen world.

1 John Keats, Selected Letters (London: Penguin Books, 2014), 142.

2 Kathleen Norris, The Cloister Walk (New York: Riverhead Books, 1996), 91; quoted in Logan C. Jones, “The Psalms of Lament and the Transformation of Sorrow,” Journal of Pastoral Care and Counseling 61 (2007): 47.

3 Jones, “The Psalms of Lament,” 47.

4 Ibid.

5 Craig C. Broyles, The Conflict of Faith and Experience in the Psalms: A Form-Critical and Theological Study, JSOTSup, 52 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1987), 55-59.

6 Joshua C. Waltman, “Psalms of Lament and God’s Silence: Features of Petitions Not Yet Answered,” Evangelical Quarterly 89 (2018): 210.

7 See further Daniel J. Estes, “The Transformation of Pain Into Praise in the Individual Lament Psalms,” in The Psalms: Language for All Seasons of the Soul, ed. A. J. Schmutzer and D. M Howard, Jr. (Chicago: Moody, 2013), 151-64.

Nursing and Refusal of Treatment: Interdisciplinary Engagement from Nursing and Philosophy

Shanna Akers, Dean, Associate Professor, School of Nursing, Liberty University

Mark Foreman, Professor of Philosophy & Religion, College of Arts and Sciences, Liberty University

Case Study

Frank is a 37-year-old divorced father of two teenage children who was involved in a car accident a week ago, resulting in him becoming a quadriplegic. He is in a hospital bed attached to a ventilator which is necessary to sustain his life. He is conscious and aware of his condition and able to communicate with those around him. Frank lived an active lifestyle. His greatest love was painting, something he knows he will never be able to do again. Realizing that his artistic life is now over, he decides he does not want to spend the rest of his days living in this condition. He has requested that the ventilator be removed, and he be allowed to die.

Ethical Considerations

Cases like Frank’s are tragic and never easy to resolve. We are torn by two competing moral impulses. One is to maintain Frank’s life and help him to adjust to the challenges of living as a quadriplegic. While he cannot live the life he knew, we believe he can still have a meaningful life. This is called beneficence, a concern for Frank’s welfare. The other impulse recognizes that Frank is a full-grown adult and, as such, we should respect his autonomous choice. His choice is one that many of us can identify with as we imagine the burden of a bed-ridden life. So we experience a conflict between beneficence and respect for autonomy. How should we consider Frank’s request? We would like to suggest two considerations in approaching this case.

First, it is important to note that Frank is not requesting any action that hastens his death. Bioethicists often draw a distinction between active euthanasia and passive euthanasia. Active euthanasia occurs when the intention is to cause death and the action itself is the direct cause of death. An example is a case in which an overdose of morphine is given to a patient that suppresses the patient’s respiration, causing death. In passive euthanasia the intention is not to cause death

(though it may be foreseen) but to relieve the patient of burdensome treatment. The patient’s death is not the direct effect of the action but is due to the debilitation or disease he succumbs to. While the first is directly causing and hastening death, the second is allowing death to come, if it comes at all, due to the natural process of the disease or debilitation. This distinction is reflected in the laws of our country where active euthanasia is illegal while passive is legal and often seen as appropriate.

Frank’s case falls under passive euthanasia. While he wants to die, the action of removing him from the ventilator is not the direct cause of death, the debilitation that he has is the direct cause of death. If the physician were to remove the respirator and Frank were able to breath on his own, we would not deem the action a failure despite Frank’s desire did not come to pass. It is also important to note that respecting a person’s choice does not mean agreeing with it. As Christians, we recognize the even God has created free will and does not force man to make a decision in favor of good over evil.

Second, what Frank is actually requesting is a refusal of treatment. One of the guiding precepts of modern medicine is that of informed consent. Informed consent means one cannot treat a patient or perform research on a patient without that patient’s consent. This presupposes that the patient is adequately informed of the basic elements of the treatment: diagnosis, proposed treatment plan, reasonable alternatives, prognosis, any risk or harm/benefit assessments and financial cost. Informed consent is our primary means by which we protect patient autonomy. The corollary on informed consent implies that the patient is free to refuse treatment. Hence, most ethicists agree that refusal of treatments should be generally honored.

Is the right to refuse treatment unlimited and irrefutable? Most bioethicists answer in the affirmative. To refuse treatment is a highly paternalistic action

and is normally not justifiable. However, some argue if the known intention of a person’s refusal is to cause significant harm to himself, one is justified in infringing on his autonomy in the name of beneficence. Christian ethicist Gilbert Meilaender is one who takes such a position. He suggests two questions need to be addressed in cases like Frank’s: (1) Is the treatment useful or useless, and (2) Is the treatment excessively burdensome? He suggests if the treatment is useless and excessively burdensome then one is justified in honoring a request to cease. However, if the intended aim is to cause significant harm or death to oneself then one might be justified in refusing to honor the request.1

Nursing Considerations

This is the intersection of nursing and ethics. Whether requests for active euthanasia or requests for passive euthanasia, up to 50% of Oregon nurses have been asked to participate in euthanasia since the legalization of physician-assisted suicide.2 Physician Assisted Suicide and/or Death with Dignity is legalized practice in six states and the District of Columbia. As more states consider this policy, nurses must be prepared to face such questions from patients suffering from a variety of disabilities and disorders, both physically and mentally.

The American Nurses Association (ANA) Code of Ethics for Nurses Provision 1.1 requires a Respect for Human Dignity, acknowledging the “inherent dignity, worth, unique attributes, and human rights of all individuals.”3 The Right to Self-Determination in Provision 1.4 recognizes that individuals have the right to accept, refuse, or terminate treatment. As with Frank, competent adult patients have a right to terminate medical treatment, such as the use of a ventilator or feeding apparatus.

Nurses experience personal and professional conflict in response to euthanasia. Nurses’ personal beliefs and values may conflict with those of the patient/ family, or the patient and family members may differ in values. The nurse should address conflicts with the interest of the patient taking priority.4 When conflicts arise which are not resolved through communication, nurses have an obligation to consult the healthcare organization’s ethics committee. In the case of Frank, several elements may create conflict, such as the care of his teenage children or for Frank himself. The intervention of the ethics committee could support both healthcare providers and Frank and his family.

Nurses are called to care with the Art of Compassion. Conscientious objection to actions that would bring about a patient’s early death is appropriate; however, the nurse has the responsibility, privilege, and calling to care for patients at their time of death. And this includes care of the patient who decides to terminate medical care resulting in death.

Understanding of the Code, Ethical standards, and a Biblical Worldview, Christian nurses are better prepared to care for patients who are actively dying or those who seek to terminate medical care. Nurses must be prepared mentally, emotionally, and ethically to care for patients who are dying, and nurses should prepare to conscientiously object to actions that are ethically and morally objectionable.

Resolution

We would suggest we must begin with examining Frank’s state of mind. One cannot give informed consent if it is determined the he is not of sound mind. Therefore, a psychological evaluation is appropriate to determine if Frank is suffering from severe depression or anxiety. If he is, then one may be justified in refusing his request.

If it is determined that Frank is thinking clearly, then it would be appropriate to have a conversation with him in an attempt to persuade him to reconsider his position. It has only been a week since the accident, and there are still options available. Christian artist, Joni Eareckson Tada, was involved in a similar accident with similar results and achieved a very meaningful life as an artist, author, and singer. As Christians, we affirm that human life has value regardless of impairments and we seek to honor God and live that life to its fullest.

However, Franks may not gain that perspective. It is his choice and we need to respect that choice even if we disagree. Therefore, if enough time has passed and Frank has not changed his mind, then one should honor his request and remove the respirator.

1 Gilbert C. Meilaender, Bioethics: A Primer for Christians, 3rd ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co, 2013), 69-75.

2 Lois L. Miller, Theresa A. Harvath, Linda Ganzini, Elizabeth R. Goy, Molly A. Delorit, and Ann Jackson, “Attitudes and Experiences of Oregon Hospice Nurses and Social Workers Regarding Assisted Suicide,” Palliative Medicine 18, no. 8 (2004): 685-91, http://dx.doi. org/10.1191/0269216304pm961oa.

3 American Nurses Association, Code of Ethics for Nurses, with Interpretive Statements (Silver Spring, MD: Nursebooks.org, 2015), 1.

4 Ibid., Provision 2.2.

Book Reviews

Alex Gantt Student Fellow, Center for Apologetics & Cultural Engagement, Liberty University

Focused on the theme of God as a giver in countless regards, Kelly M. Kapic portrays the gospel as not only a gift purposed to reconcile mankind to God, but as a conduit to abundant life in Christ. Recognizing the momentous role of the Trinity, the author provides ample background for an in depth understanding of God as a giver through exploration of the creation and fall of mankind, along with the illusion of self-ownership. Kapic suggests mankind is more influenced by people and things than may be realized, exhorting readers to surrender futile attempts for ownership to the One who truly owns the world and everything in it, thereby accepting the God-given role of manager. Kapic further expounds upon his view of the false guise of complete individual freedom through relaying the deep, lasting effects of sin, recounting consequential relational and creational bondage. After this consideration of the creation and fall of mankind, Kapic shifts focus to redemption—the gift of Christ and his promised return. The weight of God’s sacrifice in gifting us His Son is heavily emphasized, along with, again, the biblically evidenced idea of humankind’s belonging to God. This latter concept is juxtaposed with the widelyheld value of individual freedom. The irony of finding freedom in Christ, yet being “slaves to righteousness” (Rom. 6:18) is noted and supported through the author’s appeal to the necessity of “going all in” with God (111).

From the author’s establishment of God as a giving Being even prior to the creation of man (through the Trinity), Kapic balances the justice and wrath of God with His gracious giving. Yes—sin is addressed and the reader is reminded of the depravity which exists apart from God, but a both realistic and hopeful tone is maintained throughout the entirety of the book. The encouragement for Christians to live hospitable, giving, self-sacrificial lives is bolstered by the profound detail with which the author illuminates the role of the Trinity in the story of humanity and of the individual.

This book can overall be described as insightful. As evidenced by the provision of clear explanations given for what are otherwise slightly convoluted ideas, the author, perhaps most markedly, provides practicality for the reader. Notions such as the Trinity, faith, and generosity are explained in such a way that the reader is shown the goodness, graciousness, and merciful nature of God. Readers are also inspired to live in light of the hospitality of Christ; the quality of giving is shown to be inherent in the Trinity. Arranged in the order of creation, fall, redemption, and kingdom, the progression of the role of the Trinity easily and comprehensibly coincides with descriptions of practical application.

The God Who Gives is a thought-provoking reminder of God’s ownership, his giving nature seen throughout time, and the lifestyle we are to live in light of these considerations.

The God Who Gives calls readers to discover that the whole Christian story is founded upon the Triune God’s self-giving and our belonging to God. Fully embracing this truth changes how we view God, ourselves, and the world. Living in God's gifts, we are freed to give ourselves and truly experience life.

Kapic, Kelly M. The God Who Gives: How the Trinity Shapes the Christian Story. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2018. $17

Allison Kasch Student Fellow, Center for Apologetics & Cultural Engagement, Liberty University

Life Together by Dietrich Bonhoeffer offers a challenging yet practical perspective on Christian community. Through reflecting on one of his own seminaries, Bonhoeffer follows a day in the life of the Christian and presents five key aspects of what should be included: community, the day together, the day alone, service, and confession and the Lord’s Supper. Bonhoeffer addresses the nature of Christian community and how Christians are to live for one another, not merely with one another.

Regarding community, Bonhoeffers reminds Christians that living among other believers is a gift, not a right. This valuable community is a foretaste of the eternal kingdom and can be a great source of joy and strength when viewed through the proper lens. Christian communities are easily destroyed when believers value their vision for community more than the community itself. Bonhoeffer calls Christians to enter into community with a heart of thankfulness, instead of one with a set of demands. God places Christians into a specific community of believers, and by neglecting to be thankful, growth within the community is hindered.

The day together focuses on the community joining with one another in praise, thanksgiving, reading Scripture, and prayer. Bonhoeffer centers on the importance of spending time in the morning together—for the start of the day should not be concerned with the day’s burdens but should be fixed on God. Following the day together, Bonhoeffer demonstrates how this time is unfruitful unless the believer also practices the “day alone”. Spending time in silence—prayer, meditation, and intercession—allows Christians to encounter the Word. Bonhoeffer stresses how prioritizing the “day alone” is not a form of legalism but of discipline and faithfulness.

Bonhoeffer subsequently addresses service and offers a refreshing take on what serving others should look like in the life of the Christian. Since God has met believers in their lowest moments, Christians, too, should meet others in their times of need. Later, Bonhoeffer asserts that confession of sins to other believers is a picture of God’s grace; this practice is the preparation for the celebration of the Lord’s Supper and should be a time filled with joy, encouragement, and prayer.

Throughout Life Together, Bonhoeffer’s tone is one of a call to action for believers. He offers practical ways for Christians to come together and create gospel-centered community. Bonhoeffer’s reasons for the various aspects of Christian life together are consistently rooted in Scripture, and he reflects on the continual need for Christ in one’s life. In a humble manner, Bonhoeffer urges believers to be united with one another and with Christ.

In Life Together, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, renowned Christian minister, professor, and author of The Cost of Discipleship recounts his unique fellowship in an underground seminary during the Nazi years in Germany. Giving practical advice on how life together in Christ can be sustained in families and groups, Life Together is bread for all who are hungry for the real life of Christian fellowship.

Bonhoeffer, Deitrich. Life Together: The Classic Exploration of Christian Community. New York, NY: Harper & Row, 1954. $15

NOW AVAILABLE:

TGC Book of the Year for Evangelism and Apologetics, 2018

“Joshua Chatraw and Mark D. Allen have produced the most comprehensive, accessible, and up-to-date manual on Christian apologetics that I know of. Despite how full its treatment of the subject, it is eminently readable. The authors present all the various approaches to apologetics respectfully, proposing their own pathway that incorporates a large range of insights from many disciplines and thinkers. ... Highly recommended.”

TIM KELLER Pastor Emeritus The Redeemer Presbyterian Churches of New York City

BY DR. JOSHUA D. CHATRAW Director of New City Fellows, Raleigh, NC

DR. MARK D. ALLEN Executive Director, Center for Apologetics & Cultural Engagement, Liberty University

“One of the best books about apologetics I have read.”

ALISTER E. MCGRATH Professor of Science and Religion Director of Ian Ramsey Centre for Science and Religion, Oxford University

Center for Apologetics & Cultural Engagement Editorial BOard

Shawn Akers

Mark Allen

Joseph Brewer

Gabriel B. Etzel

Keith Faulkner

Mark Foreman

Benjamin K. Forrest

Chris Gnanakan

Edward Hindson

Gary Isaacs

Linda Mintle

Karen Swallow Prior

Gary Sibcy

Samuel C. Smith

“I do not ask for these only, but also for those who will believe in me through their word, that they may all be one, just as you, Father, are in me, and I in you, that they also may be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me.”

John 17:20-21

Coming FALL 2019

Vol. 4, no. 1

Faith and the Academy: Engaging Culture with Grace and Truth

“Reimagining the Disciplines in a Secular Age”