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

The seed of the serpent can be recognised by one primary motive: it convinces the individual that his or her primary calling is to become somebody.

“Self Made Man,” Bobbie Carlyle, bobbiecarlylesculpture.com

This creation of an imagined being is the essence of idolatry. Those who are under the power of Satan is characterised by a supreme trait: the pursuit of becoming, what we usually refer to when we speak of self-actualisation or self-authentication.

This should not be difficult to understand. Once we assume the position of creator, we are instinctively driven to create a self.

We were never called to do this. To be created by God is to be called towards the acceptance of an identity, not an effort to construe it. This dream of becoming is a demonic deception and prohibits us from being. To be a son* does not happen as a result of the effort of the will, having been taught the characteristics of a son, striving to live up to the identity of a son, or any such thing. It is a reality that can only be attained to through a process of birth that is initiated by another.

This is where we go wrong. Our lack of a sense of self forces us to compensate by creating an ideal self in our imagination. This we do by borrowing from those who seem to have succeeded in their construction of a self. Our neighbour seems more concrete than ourselves, more actualised, more authenticated, and so we imitate our neighbour in the hope of becoming the self that we perceive the neighbour to be. This is where the prohibited motivation to desire the possessions, indeed the very life of the neighbour, arises.

The creation of a self is not a responsibility given to a son. The son’s responsibility is to obey the father, and to do so according to the sovereign timing of the father. The son should not try and improve on the father’s wishes and resist the father’s will by trying to construe a will that seems better for him. Neither should the son resist the will of the father because the father’s will seems too hard, too difficult or too unattainable. The son’s responsibility is to trust the father’s wisdom and initiative, and to yield to it on an ongoing basis. The son is not called to suppose or imagine what the ideal son looks like, and then separate himself from the father’s instruction in order to be free to pursue the goal of ideal sonship. The moment he does so he is acting contrary to his very identity as a son.

The deception in the garden took place because the serpent convinced the first son and the first daughter of God to pursue an identity independent from that of the one birthed from their father. The serpent succeeded in providing an image that was different to the one that God the Father had in mind. Surely Adam and Eve thought that the attainment of the image-ideal would be of such a nature that it would be acceptable even to God. In this sense the desire for self-authentication was so strong, and the anticipation thereof so clear, that it proved a greater reality than the prospect of death.

The greatest hindrance to effective Christian living is the demonic idea of creating a self. Unwittingly, multitudes of professed believers have borrowed this pagan ideal from those who do not know God as a father. We have adopted their idolatrous practices. We have followed in their footsteps. This we have done, not in a carnal sense but a religious one.

We have assumed, mistakenly, that conversion means to no longer pursue the creation of a carnal self but rather the creation of a spiritual self.

And so, we have juxtaposed carnality and spirituality at the wrong side of the equation. What we should have done is to draw a contrast, not between carnality and spirituality as the goal of our self-authentication, but rather between the acts of creating a self and accepting a self as it was originally created.

How does this work in practice?

The Christian begins his life confronted with the image of the ideal Christian. This image is proclaimed in books, from pulpits, by his spiritual peers and virtually everywhere that one goes in the Christian world. Unwittingly, the Christian is drawn into that place of comparison that happens when you view the ideal proclaimed by Christendom in the light of your own progress or lack thereof. The contrast between the ideal and the present self is undeniable, and the emotions evoked as a result of the inevitable comparison is compensated for by a virtuous and solemn dedication to commit oneself to whatever process is necessary to become like the image.

This is where Satan is more like an angel of light than anywhere else. Because the projected image of spirituality is so glorious and radiant in its appearance, and so unlike anything that comes from the realm of darkness, the Christian does not think for one moment that he/she is in fact beholding the image of Satan himself.

What we learn from this is that the devil’s primary objective in the life of an individual is not to dissuade that individual from pursuing a Christian ideal, as we are often taught to think. Rather, it is to convince the Christian that he or she is responsible for the crafting and sculpting of their own Christian identity.

Satan has little interest in what you create. His only interest is to turn you into a creator.

The fallacy that God has called us to change springs from this demonic deception. Nowhere in Scripture are we called to try and change ourselves, as though this is the great aim and goal of Christianity. What Scripture teaches is that we should live by faith in the work of God that no man can emulate. This is clearly depicted in the example of Abraham who understood that he did not have the ability to create life as a result of his body being as good as dead. Abraham had to look away from himself and to God. He had to trust God. He had to understand that God could call those things that are not as though they were. And, very importantly, he had to understand that he himself could do none of that.

This is what faith is all about. It is to look away from the self and to look towards God, the Creator. The object of faith is God himself, not some or other object created by the imagination, invisible to the naked eye, waiting for us to call it into existence in the way that God called the earth into existence. The error of modern-day faith is that it turns us into co-creators with God, instead of children believing on the finished, completed and perfect work of the Father.

Where does that leave the Christian, then? If I am not allowed to entertain an image of an idealised Christian self, then what am I left with?

The answer is simple: the glorious image of Jesus Christ, the perfect son of the Father who has accomplished everything necessary for sonship.

I am to behold Christ, not an imagined self created by my own desires.

The book of Hebrews depicts the Christian walk as a wilderness pilgrimage with the eyes focused on Jesus Christ, and reveals this as the substance of faith. Herein we are joined by all the faith heroes of the past. These men and women were looking for a better country, that is, a heavenly one. Their vision was in Christ and a future, heavenly inheritance. Their vision was never on some or other improved version of the self, not even a godly self.

The Bible makes it clear that we are given provision only for the day during our wilderness wanderings. This excludes any focus on a long-term project of self-improvement, no matter how sanctimonious such a project may be. Our calling is one of obedience for the day, nothing more.

The moment we envisage more than a mere day, we shall intuitively become aware of the fact that our provisions are not sufficient for our intended journey.

This explains the prevalence of spiritual anxiety amongst God’s children in our age. Inundated with sermons on self-improvement and adaptation to some or other Christian ideal, we are constantly reminded that our rations are insufficient for our pilgrimage.

*It goes without saying that the term sonship includes sons and daughters, and is used because it appears so in Scripture.

This morning I meditated on the magnificent words of Isaiah 66:2:

But this is the one to whom I will look: he who is humble and contrite in spirit and trembles at my word.

I was taken back to thoughts that I penned down eight years ago on this blog…

What do you think of when you hear the word “disciple”?

If you are like most people the word will conjure up an ideal standard of Christian commitment. There are normal Christians, and then there are… disciples.

The conventional wisdom goes something like this: A disciple is one who has distinguished him or herself as wholly dedicated to the Lord. To become a disciple is the goal of Christianity, and discipleship is the means to get people there. We need to make disciples, not just converts. Once a person has attained to the status of a disciple he or she has fulfilled the intention of the great commission. A disciple is distinguished from a mere believer as the finished house is distinguished from its blueprint.

Does some of this sound familiar? Are you more or less in agreement with these statements? If so, you may have missed one of the central and most vital messages of the New Testament. By giving some special status to the term “disciple” you may very well have robbed yourself of the very thing that is intended by the word.

In the first place, the word has absolutely nothing to do with attaining to some spiritual level. Whilst it may have overtones of commitment and discipline (many people erroneously believe that the word disciple is a derivative of the word “discipline”), these have more to do with the actual meaning we have assigned to the word than the word itself.

The word disciple is a classic example of the confusion that arises when a Biblical word is not translated but transliterated, that is, the transcription of a word in one language into corresponding letters of another language without regard to the original meaning.

Disciple is a transliteration of the Latin “discipulus” which carries the same meaning as the Greek New Testament’s “Mathetes”, namely a “learner”, “student,” “pupil,” “apprentice,” or “adherent”. Of course none of these meanings are retained in the English word disciple.

Let us consider the implication of this for a moment. Don’t you think there is something slightly weird about a commandment to “go and make learners of all nations”? This would imply that people in a pre-evangelised state are not learners, and that the intention behind the so-called “Great Commission” is to turn them into ones.

But wait, it gets weirder. This would also imply that to become a disciple is not to live up to some level of commitment, but to be reduced to the level of one who needs guidance. It is to let go of preconceived notions and to open oneself up for receiving new information. To become a disciple is not to reach the end of the road, but to be placed at the beginning of it. It is not a destination, but a point of departure. It is not an accomplishment, but an emptying.

The Call to Learn

None of this should be surprising. The New Testament overflows with verses speaking about the necessity of learning:

• Repentance (metanoia in Greek, from meta and nous) means a “changing of the mind”.
• The transformation that follows repentance takes place through a “renewing of the mind” (Rom.12: 2).
• Spiritual warfare, according to Paul, has to do with breaking down strongholds, and such strongholds are defined as “arguments and opinions raised against the knowledge of God”. Paul further defines spiritual warfare as “taking thoughts captive to obey Christ” (2 Cor. 10:4-5).
• In the same passage mentioned above, Satan is depicted as the one who leads people’s thoughts astray from a sincere and pure devotion to Christ (11:2) and who “blinds the minds of unbelievers” (2 Cor. 4:4).
• The New Testament depicts unbelievers as having been given up to a “debased mind” (Rom.1: 28), as walking “in the futility of their minds” and as being “darkened in their understanding” (Eph. 4:18).

This explains why Christianity is a lifelong process of learning. The subject matter, of course, is nothing but Christ himself, in whom “are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge”, providing the rich resource for reaching the “riches of full assurance and understanding and the knowledge of God’s mystery” (Col. 2:2-3). We are “taught in him, as the truth is in Jesus” (Eph. 4:21). In fact, he IS the truth, John says (John 14:6), explaining his earlier statement that “grace and truth came through Jesus Christ” (John 1:17).

The incarnation of the Word is the objective dynamic in this equation. The process of “learning” is the subjective dynamic. The one cannot exist without the other.

And so Jesus says “learn from me” (Matt. 11:29), and Paul says “you have not so learned Christ” (Eph. 4:20). Jesus Christ is our curriculum, and he has preserved the revelation of Himself in the Scriptures outside of us, his Spirit within us and his Body around us. And so we have no excuse not to “learn him”.

If you were given the knowledge above and then the assignment to formulate a “great commission” for the church (without any preconceived ideas) you may very well have written it exactly as it appears in Matthew’s gospel. Clearly the first step on the narrow road leading to life is to become a “learner”. This is no accomplishment or badge of distinction, but rather a painful and humbling “letting go” of personal convictions, opinions, paradigms and the like.

It is to embrace the poverty of spirit prescribed in the first line of the Sermon on the Mount. It is to aspire to the education of Christ, and to say with him “My teaching is not mine, but his who sent me” (John 17:16). It is to stop being Martha and to become Mary. It is to sit at the feet of Jesus and receive from him.

If you have not first become a learner you cannot progress any further on the path of liberation from your own dearly held convictions that have put your thought life into bondage, that determine your emotions and ultimately dictate your actions.