Tactical Faith

Equipping Christians in Alabama

Discipleship

A Manual for Christian Dissidents

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Filed Under: Christianity and Politics, Culture, Interviews, Podcast Tagged With: , ,

An interview with Rod Dreher

In this interview we discuss with Rod Dreher his new book Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents.

How are we to navigate the terrain of a constantly shifting culture that is increasingly Post-Christian in it’s outlook. As more and more people look to authorities to find solace, where do we fit into this framework as Christians who are called to live in the world, but not be of this world.

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Perceptions of the Kingdom: Spiritual Disciplines

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Filed Under: Philosophy, Spiritual Disciplines, Theology, Worldview Tagged With: ,

If discipleship, at the core, is really a matter of “having the mind of Christ”, then how do we actually change the way we perceive the world to see the world as the Triune God does?

The work of Dallas Willard has been a great source of understanding for me in this. Willard draws from Aristotelian ideas of virtue formation to help us do this. For Aristotle, one of the key means to become a virtuous person is to do the things that virtuous people do. As Christians, if we want to see the world as the Triune God does, then we should try to do the things that Jesus did.

Someone might object that I claimed in the previous post that it is not about our actions, so how can the key be found in our actions? We do not do the things Jesus did in order to master the specific actions, but as part of how we come to understand who Jesus is and how He sees the world. A great musician does not simply reproduce the performance of another, yet, she will study the great performances of the piece carefully. This study is in order to try to see what the other musicians saw when they performed the piece. She may even try to incorporate some of their techniques into her performance, but ultimately, the musician is at her greatest when she interprets the piece for herself and performs with her own understanding in mind. Similarly, some young athletes may try to imitate their favorite athlete, performing the idiosyncrasies of the athlete in order to be like that specific athlete who is great at his sport. Yet, while those idiosyncrasies may help the seasoned athlete, due to his body type, muscle structure, or some other reason, they may prove to be detrimental to the young athlete who is not the same person as the older athlete. Yet, there is something valuable in studying great athletes because you can learn about the kinds of things they see when they are on the field.

However, it is not enough to just look at the actions that the exemplars do in order to become great, but you need to train yourself to be like them. When put in the pressure situations, we rarely are able to make a decision to act contrary to the way we’ve trained ourselves to do things. The work we’ve done before that moment shapes what happens in that moment. This is why musicians practice scales. It is rare to actually play a scale in a performance, yet nearly every musician practices scales. Practicing the scales helps one be able to move between notes with little conscious effort, allowing one to focus on the actual performance of the music as opposed to correctly producing each note. Similarly, basketball players do lay up drills in warm ups, not because they expect to get easy, open lay ups in the game, but because if a lay up is a part of their basic muscle memory, they can then focus on making the adjustments necessary to make a shot like that in the game as opposed to doing the actions necessary to a lay up.

So what are the lay ups or scales in the Christian life? This is the heart of the spiritual disciplines as described by Willard. He breaks down the disciplines into disciplines of abstinence and disciplines of engagement.[1] Practicing things like silence, solitude, fasting, secrecy, frugality, and others helps to train us so that in the moments in our spiritual life, we are able to better recognize our dependency on God and make our bodies servant to our spiritual desires and needs as opposed to being enslaved to our bodily needs. Solitude is not about training yourself to be away from other people for the sake of being away from other people. Rather, solitude helps you to learn to free yourself from the external distractions by removing them and then start to address the internal distractions one would never recognize in the midst of the external ones. So it is with other disciplines of abstinence. These disciplines are not saying that the things from which we abstain are bad, but are showing us that when the desires for them are not properly ordered, they can take away from our experience of the fullness of life promised in Christ. By not allowing them mastery over us, we can use them in fruitful ways to further the Kingdom.

The disciplines of engagement are things like prayer, study, worship, fellowship, submission, confession, and others are things that disciplines that require our engagement. These are good things that are unnatural to us and so we have to take the time to practice these things. They will often feel unnatural when we start doing them. Additionally, these are disciplines that develop, such that you may think you’ve mastered one aspect, only to discover that there are deeper depths that you can enter at each level. However, it is important to remember that the goal is not to master these practices for the sake of the practices, but that these practices lead us to experience the world as Christ and to develop the mind of Christ within ourselves.

The problem with many approaches to spiritual disciplines is that people do the disciplines for the sake of doing the discipline, believing that the actions themselves are the goal. Rather, these actions are like the scales for a musician or the lay ups for the basketball player. They help develop the spiritual muscles necessary for us to act in the pressure filled moments, so that we can attend to what is actually going on before us rather than be preoccupied with trying to think about WWJD. If we have the mind of Christ, that question is not a matter of trying to imagine Jesus as someone dramatically other from us, who experiences and lives in the world in a way almost incomprehensible to us, but it becomes a matter of seeing the value before us and acting in a way that upholds or enhances that value. The spiritual disciplines are an important way that we can help develop those perceptions.

Yet, the spiritual disciplines often feel like something that is more work that we have to fit into lives that are already too full. They feel like an overwhelming task to accomplish when we aren’t even finishing everything we need to do each day, feeling like we’re falling further and further behind. In the next post, I’ll address this and discuss the role of the disciplines in the life of rest we are promised in Christ.

[1] This discussion of different disciplines draws from Willard’s chapter ——- in The Spirit of the Disciplines.

Perceptions of the Kingdom

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Filed Under: Ethics, Guest Post, Philosophy, Worldview Tagged With: , , ,

Aristotle says in Nicomachean Ethics that every action is done aiming at a good. Before you start listing all the bad actions that people (especially you) do as clear counterexamples to this claim, consider your own thought process when you do something you would say you know to be bad. When you go back to the buffet for the third or fourth time, you may know that you’re going to be miserable and regret doing it, yet you go because in that moment, the partaking of that additional food is appealing and seems to be good. You aim at the good of enjoying food, but your understanding of enjoying food fails to consider the moderation necessary for actual enjoyment that is not fleeting. We can even look at more extreme examples like premeditated murder. When someone decides to kill another person, the murderer may recognize that the victim’s friends and family would be deeply hurt and, if caught, the rest of his life will be spent in prison. Yet, the murderer so strongly holds the belief that the world will be better for him if the victim is not alive in it, that the murderer acts, despite the negatives that could result. For Aristotle, being a good person is not about doing the right action, but about seeing what is good correctly, for an accurate perception of the good will result in right action. Because we all do what we perceive in that moment as good, the way we perceive the good is of the utmost importance. Additionally, the longer we incorrectly hold a perception of something as good, the more difficult to change it, as we fight back against the solidification of our perceptions of value that tend to happen over time.

However, the examples above point to the reality that we don’t properly perceive the good all the time, and that the idea of the good that some have is so misshapen that what is actually good may be repulsive to them. With Christians, Dallas Willard made the case in multiple places that discipleship is too often treated as an optional good for those who are really committed. The mindset is that actually living out the principles of the Sermon on the Mount are only for those “super-Christians”, clergy, or even no one, showing us how far we are from God. However, what Jesus lays out in the Sermon on the Mount is the way of the kingdom, both now and in the New Creation. If these things look unappealing to us now, what reason do we have to think that they will suddenly become appealing upon our death? Jesus tells us that eternal life is not primarily a matter of what happens when you die, but about knowing the Triune God (John 17:3). So if what is now unappealing or lacks value becomes appealing and valuable in an instant upon death, it is worth pondering if it is really you that exists in the New Creation.

If eternal life is something that can be experienced already, then we should be living in that life of relationship with the Triune God in the here and now. Then, as I talked about in a previous post, when you’re in relationship and genuinely pursuing that relationship, the way you see the world is changed, and what you value changes as well. Eternal life is then about learning to see and value reality through relationship with the Sustainer of reality.

While there are seismic shifts that can happen in the way we understand the world, these shifts are incredibly destabilizing and often leave us feeling uncertain of more than just that issue, including who we really are. If we are treating discipleship as an optional part of Christianity, or a secondary emphasis to evangelism, I think we’ve misunderstood what Christianity is about. I am not at all bold enough to make any claims about the salvation of those who hold such a view, whether just in theory or in practice, but it seems that at the very least, the process of transformation into Christlikeness has to happen, and if it fails to at least start in this life, we only further solidify the parts of our life that are contrary to that process, making it a lengthier and more difficult process in the life to come.

The Christlike perspective is necessary in the New Creation, for without it, we may live in the Kingdom, but without an understanding and appreciation necessary for the flourishing we are all called to in the New Creation. So if we must gain this perspective, but it is presently a perspective foreign and unappealing to us, if clothed with that perspective in an instant, would we know how to function? This is not simply being given glasses to make things clear that were once blurry, but learning that what we thought was up is down,  what we thought was power is weakness, what we thought was ugly was beautiful. If we are able to immediately accept and thrive with that instantaneous change, what is the connection between these new people and the people we were before this change? It seems like all that we valued and even the way that we remembered our lives would shift so dramatically, that while it may be the same resurrected body, it may be the same embodied soul, but is that the person we knew ourselves to be before we died? [1]

However, if we are working to bring our perceptions in line with Christ, to see the world as He does, then, like Paul says in 1 Corinthians 13, what we now see as a reflection in a mirror, we will then see face to face in the New Creation; what we know in part now we will know fully in the New Creation. It is as though we will gain glasses to see perfectly the things we strained to see here and now. Glasses only do good for people who are trying to see reality, but are struggling. Glasses don’t cure blindness, nor do they cure those who lack a commitment to truly experience reality, preferring to perceive things in ways that serve them most.

Working to gain that Christlike perspective of the world cannot be done on our own, but requires Jesus, for at the very least, we need Him as a check on us as to whether our perceptions are actually becoming more like His or not. We too have work in this, as no one can make us see things differently than we want to see them. An oversimplified analogy would be that of the magic eye pictures that were so popular in the 90s. What looks like a weird, formless pattern on first glance, becomes an interesting 3D picture upon looking at it in the right way. However, if you don’t look at it in the right way, you’ll continue to only see the pattern and not the picture that is within the pattern. You can train yourself to make it easier to see the picture, but it is a different way of looking at the picture than you typically look at the world. In Christ, the reality of the Kingdom requires you to train yourself to see in a way that is foreign to this world, but failing to do so, means that you fail to see the depth of what is going on in the Kingdom, not just in the New Creation, but even in the here and now.

Again, I am not saying that those who call themselves Christians but fail to strive toward a Christlike in the present will not be in the New Creation, for the Triune God does not want anyone to perish, but all to be saved (2 Peter 3:9). However, the work necessary to change our perception can and should begin now, because I believe the Triune God wants all of us there, not just our embodied souls, and there won’t be an instant in which our perceptions are completely and dramatically changed to appreciate the reality and beauty of the Kingdom.

How do we do this? I’ll lay some groundwork for this in the next post.

[1] The explanation of why an immediate, dramatic change in values might undermine our identity is discussed at greater length in a future podcast to be linked once recorded.