Justice of God

In my previous post, I referred to a monumental theological paradigm shift that I had undergone some years ago. I also mentioned that I had never felt the unction to speak about it on this blog.

The main reason is that I have been working through the massive implications of it all.

Added to this, as one gets older, your desire to throw the cat amongst the pigeons diminishes. You lose the taste for the dramatic and sensational. Your appreciation for the greater gifts of God escalates—relationships, nature, prayer, contemplation, simplicity, solitude, books that focus on what God has done rather than what we should do, and so on.

The point is that I have little appetite for controversy and certainly no desire to stir it up. Schopenhauer is often credited with saying, “All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.” I do not mind ridicule. But violent opposition demands clarification—and clarification often hardens resistance, spiralling into verbal conflict that accomplishes nothing and ruins the hearers.

I read the other day that Keanu Reeves says he’s reached a stage in his life where he’s avoiding arguments, so “even if you say 1+1=5, you’re absolutely correct. Enjoy!”

“Yay,” I said, “I’m going to do exactly that.”

“No, you’re not,” a little voice whispered within.

I sighed and thanked the Lord. An aversion to theological quarrels does not mean compromising the truth; it means “speaking the truth in love”.

That’s the word I’ve been thinking about.

Love.

The more I thought about it, the more there was to think about. My shift turned out to be more of a continental drift than a hopscotch jump. Ultimately, it took me to a place where I could no longer use the exegetical and hermeneutical tools that I had been handed at seminary for unlocking the mysteries of God and his universe. The theological form I had inherited was inadequate for capturing or conveying what I was beginning to see.

During this period, two words began to play on my mind.

Parable.

Community.

The Power of Parable

I was reminded of Neil Postman’s analogy, in Amusing Ourselves to Death, of two Native Americans communicating via smoke signals, but finding it impossible to discuss deep philosophy this way. The form excludes the content, Postman said.

Postman was a disciple of Marshall McLuhan, the legendary Canadian philosopher who coined the adage, the medium is the message. According to McLuhan, the form of a medium of communication (television, technology, newspaper, pulpit) embeds itself in the content it carries and creates a structural influence that shapes perception more than the content itself.

Why is this relevant? Because it illustrates the futility of thinking and speaking about love outside the relational dynamic that is love. To do so is not to propagate love; it is to obscure it. Cognition alone is a poor wavelength for transmitting the language of love.

Parable makes it possible to circumvent those limitations. It makes dead words alive by subjecting them to stories of living people. Parable is incarnational. It can do more than speak about love; it can show it. And so, instead of writing about love, I wrote a story of a man who found love, a novel titled The Sinai Code.

In Community, for Community

But I did something else: I figured that if love must be embodied to be spoken truthfully, then it must also be explored and shared that way.

In community, for community.

And so, I reached out and shared my findings with a brother in the Lord, Wayne Jacobsen, whose writings had been resonating with my understanding of God’s love for a long time. Wayne is best known for his book He Loves Me!

This was his response:

One day, I received a fascinating email from South Africa. I had no idea who Tobie van der Westhuizen was or why he wanted to share with me a discovery he had been exploring for eight years. He wanted to know if his conclusions resonated with me. Did they ever! But it did take us some time to get there. His initial statement made me wonder if he was yet another kooky amateur theologian with some half-baked theological novelty. Tobie’s initial email cut right to the chase: “The word righteousness is not in the Bible.”

That email led to a friendship and, eventually, to our writing a book together, Just Love. These words, taken from the Dedication, say it all:

Whoever reads this book will soon realize it could not have been written by either of us alone. It is the shared witness of two lives that followed Christ on different continents for nearly a century between them. It reminds us that true community reaches beyond the limits of one mind or one lifetime. In these pages, two worlds merge—the world of reflection and the world of lived experience—and that meeting is no accident. Words are meant to become flesh.

If you are wondering about my kooky statement, “The word righteousness is not in the Bible”, you’ll have to buy the book 🙂 It will be available on Amazon.com within a few days. The official publication date is March 3.

A New Direction

The implications of the basic idea set forth in Just Love are far-reaching and call for further exploration and much reflection. For the past sixteen years, I have written on this blog about the Christian life and the organic nature of God’s church. I still intend to do so, but the focus will be different. In future, I will be exploring these and other issues in light of the discoveries that have changed my life beyond anything I could have imagined a decade ago—discoveries documented in Just Love.

As you may have noticed, the name of the blog has changed from naturalchurch to Justice of God. Stick around, and you will soon find out why.

Just love,

Tobie