Tag Archives: Philip Yancey

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Modern Times Call for Ancient Virtues

When I look back at my journal from 2001, I find this entry:

“(1) I will not hurry through the day so as to leave no spaces to hear from God. (2) I will not measure the day only by how much I accomplish. (3) I will not attempt to live the Christian life or minister for Jesus Christ in the power of the flesh or for my own praise.”

In the next few years, my life would be in ruins, and these goals would be the last thing on my radar. Now, after another ten years, I’m back to where I started, and I confess I still wrestle with these same three faults (“hurry sickness”, a “to do list” approach to life, and a desire to be noticed and admired.) I don’t even know if I’ve made any real progress.

But when I have found help, and I’m finding it again recently, it’s been in some ancient approaches that were unfamiliar to me most of my Christian life and during many of my years in ministry. It’s a counter intuitive approach where what was seen as bad (disappointing, distracting, painful, and shameful) can now be embraced as good (useful, revelatory, transformative, and redemptive). What previously was to be avoided with a vengeance, was now to be embraced. Henri Nouwen has famously dubbed this necessarily painful approach “downward mobility.” The theologian Jurgen Moltmann’s comments relate:

“… what are virtues for the mystic are torment and sickness for the modern man or woman: estrangement, loneliness, silence, solitude, inner emptiness, deprivation, poverty, not-knowing, and so forth …. What the monks sought for in order to find God, modern men and women fly from as if it were the devil.” (Experiences of God)

We do fly from these things. If they don’t terrify us (and mostly they do), they certainly make us uncomfortable. Moderns value being loved and included. We like to be confident of own adequacy and understanding, and most of us long for the respect of others and for a life of prosperity, or at least comfort. We love to surround ourselves with our music, and keep ourselves busy. Why would we want it otherwise?

The truth is that what is comfortable, easy, familiar and may seem to us what God clearly wants for us (health, happiness, satisfaction, knowledge), often instead prove to be distractions, detours or dead ends. If we’re lucky, we may finally become so desperate that we’re willing to try any approach – even if it’s one that turns our familiar approach on its head.

At the heart of this is what I recently started thinking of as “transformational moments.” When the Psalmist tells us to “quiet our souls“, when Henry Nouwen tells us that loneliness can be transformed into productive solitude, when Dallas Willard tells us to “ruthlessly eliminate hurry” if we want to grow, when Eugene Peterson tells us we must carve out a time for God if we are to “interrupt our preoccupation with ourselves”, when Nouwen (again) refers to the effect of the noise around us as “psychic numbing”, when C. S. Lewis says that “every single act and feeling, every experience, whether pleasant or unpleasant, must be referred to God”, when Philip Yancey recommends a kind of prayer as that which will help us overcome our “obsession with ourselves”, when Peter Scazzero continually teaches on the necessity of the “Daily Office” – they’re all talking about different parts of the same thing.

I think Jesus was also speaking of it when he told Mary, the sister of Lazarus, that she “had chosen the better part” – a notably surprising analysis.

So, here’s the thing. I’m writing this for me. I’m mapping out where I’m going in the months ahead – not so much with the blog as with my life. I’m mapping out what I want to think about – what I want to practice – what I believe really works. (In the past I’ve tried what is more commonly recommended, and that wasn’t enough.)

Let me end with a short illustration. Suppose I have a big fight with another family member, and I’m overwhelmed with anger. The traditional advice is to forgive before the sun goes down, to be slow to anger (next time), to imitate the Apostle Paul, or Jesus, and perhaps to ask some trusted friends to pray for me and hold me accountable. This is all well and good as far as it goes, but I don’t think it goes far enough, or starts at the right place.

Instead, the ancient virtues would dictate that I carve out some times to sit before God in silence, where I would ask him to show me what is likely the deeper cause of my anger. I might then decide to find some of the “angry” psalms to pray (There are many.), and to schedule several times a day to recalibrate my heart (centering myself at mid-day, for instance, on the God whom I may have forgotten since I did the same upon rising). I might also make a plan to end the day with an “examen” – reviewing the events of the day, and especially how anger played a part in it. I might “refer to God” my anger problem, deliberately trust him to change me from within, and seek to know what way my angry moments might be “transformational” or “redemptive” for me. I might end by confessing that I might be an overly angry person for a long time yet, that I know he can use me in the meantime, and that I understand that he will probably not simply remove my anger from me with a wave of his divine hand – and that his yet unfilled purpose in me is fulfilled in that. (As I think about these two approaches, I’m inclined to see the first one as comprising the “ends”, and this one as the “means” to those ends.)

Something like that. I don’t know. I’m embarrassingly new at this, but I’ve done each of these things enough to consider this a productive approach. I bet that some of you will relate, and perhaps have further suggestions. Perhaps others of you will think that I’ve become a new age mystic or even a heretic. I’m willing to hear from you as well.

In the meantime, I know I can’t go wrong with this example of the Psalmist, which I’ll be following. He says, “I have stilled and quieted my soul; like a weaned child with its mother, like a weaned child is my soul within me.” (Psalm 131:2) I think just this in itself, a very ancient practice indeed, will not fail to be transformational.

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“Go Ahead. Shake Your Fist At God”

“For they shake their fists at God, defying the Almighty.”   Eliphaz in Job 15:25

By the end of the book that bears his name, Job has repented, apologized to God, and quieted himself before God. It’s instructive to ask “Why?” Why the big switch from his questions and criticisms of God that fill up most of the rest of the book? Here’s why: (1) Not because God answers his question, “Why me?” He doesn’t.  (2) Not because God explains to him why the righteous suffer. He doesn’t.  (3) And not because God reveals himself in awesome majesty and power, which he does (Job 38-40), because Job knew this already as some of his monologues make plain. The reason that Job repents is (4) that God appears to him – He sees God “with his own eyes”, and that was enough.

I would have expected a different ending. I would have expected God to let Job know about the contest with Satan, and about why he was suffering (pretty much the same thing). I would have expected Job to be rebuked for his disrespectful, seemingly arrogant, bitter attitude towards God, and that his misguided friends would be more or less let off the hook. (They were just saying what everybody then believed – including Job, until recently that is.)

Instead, God vindicates Job and condemns his friends – in each case for what they “said about him.” This is important.

God has no problem with Job except that he has spoken beyond his knowledge. He rewards Job. The fist in the air that must have accompanied so much of what Job had to say was no problem. The fist in the air was a good thing. In fact, God condemnation of Job’s friends is really because they didn’t raise their fists with Job. Job himself warns them that they will be judged, and that’s exactly what happens. (I know you may be beginning to fume, but please stay with me.)

Let’s examine then, what both Job and his friends had to say about God (explicitly and implicitly):  Job’s friends agreed that (1) God rewards the just, (2) that he punishes the unjust, (3) that since Job is suffering at God’s hand, he is obviously unjust, and (4) that therefore everything made sense. There was no reason for protest. No reason for a fist in the air.

As for Job, he agreed on the first two points, but when it came to the charges against him, (3) Job insisted he was innocent and still being punished by God. He also said (4) that this made no sense, and that it was indeed reason for protest – and thus the fist in the air.

The theology of Job’s friends was untempered by compassion or empathy towards Job, nor did they seemingly even entertain the possibility that Job could be speaking the truth (even though they knew the kind of life he had always lived). Their worldview wouldn’t let them go there. They had no self-doubt, no sense of their own limitations, and that is how their speaking about God was not right. They looked at what seemed an obviously horrific travesty of justice, attributed it to God, and were content to leave it at that. No questions. No problem. No protest.

Like his friends, Job attributed all his problems to God. Unlike his friends though, he wasn’t content to just accept that the God of justice would torture a righteous man for no reason. (Job was completely unaware of the cosmic test that was transpiring.) Job wouldn’t be quiet or let it go. Nor would he agree to a world where God arbitrarily torments those whose hope is in him. Job had no explanation for his experience, but he repudiates the explanation that his friend’s worldview and theology implies – about God!

In a way, this brings us full circle to the beginning of the book. Satan says to God “Anyone can believe and hope in you when he has sufficient evidence to lean on.” God replies, “Then take away his evidence.” And he does! And in the end, Job passes the test! He loses his hope (at times), he rails against God, he accuses God of being a bad God, he reaches the point where nothing makes sense any more, and where he desperately wants to die. Even so, he refuses to believe in an ultimate way, that God is not the righteous ruler of the world.

When intuition and instinct lead us to struggle with something that God does or says, we’re not just to fold our arms smugly and say to ourselves or others, “If God did it/said it, it can’t be wrong.” No. That’s just the opposite of the message of Job. That’s just what Job’s friends did. What we must do is refuse to explain away the apparent injustice and cry out for answers. That’s what Job did. What Job did is a better thing. In the story, it’s the only acceptable thing. And why? Because instead of assuming that we always have the answer, it assumes we don’t. And instead of diminishing God’s glory and righteousness (as is implicit in the argument of Job’s friends), it insists upon it – even though at the moment it makes no sense.

Who had more faith, Job or his friends? You know the answer to that. And that’s what we’re called to – faith based on evidence (and Job’s faith was based on evidence – evidence left over from “the good old days”, but not forgotten), but also faith that persists when there is no contemporary evidence, no evidence that makes sense any more.

So, remember Job the next time your world is turned upside down and inside out. The next time it seems that God is your enemy for no good reason. The next time you cry out to him in desperation and receive only silence in reply. The next time a natural disaster wipes out a nearby community, or a murderous rampage takes out a whole classroom of children. Those of you who trust and hope in God, remember Job, and don’t be afraid to raise your fist.* You’ll be in good company.

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*I realize that nowhere in the text does it say that Job actually raised his fist in the air in protest, but Job certainly protests, and it’s not in an academic, emotionally detached manner. He calls down curses, he speaks rashly, he says that God is “beating him” and “grounding him down“, – even his friends could see that his suffering was “too great for words.” I believe that in a theatrical performance, anyone who played Job would be raising his fist in anger. How could it be otherwise? The words of Eliphaz express his idea of what “wicked people” do – “they shake their fists at God.” It’s clear that in his speech, he is talking about Job and to Job (cf. Yancey, The Bible Jesus Read, p. 57), but indirectly, as is common in the monologues of the three friends.