Formulate Your Own Set of Christian Values

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The values that I seek to foster on a daily basis reflect my understanding of God’s redemptive purposes on earth. I believe that as a “follower of Jesus,” I should seek to “partner with God” toward the realization of these purposes, which, in a manner that I cannot begin to comprehend, will be “fully realized” sometime in the future. In the meantime, I am called to daily actions that present intimations of that future complete accomplishment (as taught by Jesus in the Parable of the Mustard Seed, as recorded in Matthew 13: 31-32).

I was raised in a pietistic Lutheran tradition that essentially embraced only one Christian value; that human beings enter into a “positive personal relationship with God” by means of some type of “conversion” experience. It was not until I was in my late 30s that I questioned the adequacy of this narrow view of God’s redemptive purposes.

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Can I Always Give Jesus the Last Word?

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My last Musing (“Seeing Through Partisan Politics or the Eyes of Jesus”) raised some important questions that were left unanswered; questions that beg for more in-depth analysis. What follows is a coherent set of four essays that provide this “deeper” analysis

The first essay by Harold Heie poses and reflects on the overarching question posed as the title for thisMusing, at the end of which Harold confesses that, being neither a biblical scholar nor theologian, he doesn’t know the answer. The second essay by Ben Lappenga, a biblical scholar, is Ben’s response to Harold’s essay. The third essay, by Cambria Kaltwasser, a theologian, is her response to both Harold’s essay and Ben’s essay. The fourth essay, by Harold, is the final conclusion he arrives at from his consideration of the first three essays: There is an enormous need for educating Christian laity regarding biblical interpretation.

Ben Lappenga currently serves as a Visiting Associate Professor of Religion at Hope College (MI) and Cambria Kaltwasser currently serves as Associate Professor of Biblical and Theological Studies at Northwestern College (IA).

Jesus clearly taught that he came to earth to fulfill the Old Testament law and the prophets: “I have come not to abolish them, but to fulfill them” (Matthew 5:17).

It appears to me that there are two differing strands of thought in the Old Testament as to the nature of this “fulfillment,” one of which is consistent with my understanding of Christian values, with the other strand, in my estimation, being extremely destructive of Christian values.

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Seeing Through Partisan Politics or The Eyes of Jesus

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For my new Musings into the near future, I will often  follow a pattern of posting two back-to-back Musings that are inter-related. The first Musing will be directed primarily to users of social media; it will be relatively brief, using “popular language” that can easily and quickly digested. The follow-up Musing will be geared to readers who are seeking a more extended conversation, more “academic’ in tone and content, concerning challenging questions that are unanswered in the first Musing

Our beliefs about any contemporary contentious issue are deeply informed by the lens through which we understand the nature of that issue.

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The Power of Love Taught and Lived Out by Jesus

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Jesus was not spared the temptation to become all-powerful. 

Tim Alberta starts his thought-provoking book The Kingdom, The Power, and the Glory, by quoting the following words recorded in Luke 4:5-8 (KJ21):

And the devil, taking Him up into a high mountain, showed unto Him all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time.

And the devil said unto Him, “All this power will I give Thee, and the glory of them: for this has been delivered unto me, and to whomsoever I will, I give it. If thou therefore wilt worship me, all shall be thine.”

And Jesus answered and said unto him, ‘Get thee behind me, Satan! For it is written: “Thou shall worship the Lord thy God, and Him only shalt thou serve.’”

These words should not be interpreted as Jesus ruling out the exercise of power. He only rejected the type of power that Satan offered to him. At the end of this Musing, you will read about the type of “power” that Jesus taught and lived out. But it will take us a while to get there. I start by reflecting on the type of “power” that is rampant in our tribalistic culture. 

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The Quest for Power

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In our increasingly polarized and tribalistic culture, the desire to exert power over others is rampant. I point my readers to two examples.

In the political realm, it appears that many politicians will do most anything to get elected to legislative office, or re-elected once in office. Why is that? It is my belief that this desire is very often motivated by an inordinate quest for power, a desire to exercise dominion over others; which presents a sharp contrast to the ideal of serving the best interests on those who elected you to a legislative office (which is my reason for supporting the concept of “term-limits”; an idea that begs for elaboration, which is not possible in this brief Musing).

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There is Hope for Evangelicals Returning to the Church

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In the past 25 years, 40 million persons in America (15% of the USA population) who self-identify as “Evangelicals” have left the institutional church. Why is that? And is there a way to “bring them back?” In in their excellent book The Great Dechurching, Jim Davis and Michael Graham, with Ryan P Burge, wrestle with these challenging questions.

In this relatively brief Musing, I cannot adequately address the plethora of helpful insights, backed-up by much data, that is presented in this very informative book. Therefore, what follows will focus primarily  on my understanding of the authors’ reflections on “Belief,” “Belonging” and “Behavior.”

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A Broad View of God’s Redemptive Purposes and your Role (and Mine) in Accomplishing those Purposes

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In the pietistic Lutheran sub-culture into which I was born and raised, we were led to believe in a very narrow view of God’s Redemptive purposes: God only wishes to redeem individual persons.

In 1972 I began to seriously question that narrow view of redemption during a sabbatical leave while teaching mathematics at The King’s College (NY), when I read the Bible from cover to cover searching for clues as to God’s intentions for Creation. I have been refining the results of that quest ever since.

While still embracing the importance of “individual redemption,” I now believe that God has a much broader set of purposes for the world, as follows:

  • Positive Relationships of human beings with God
  • Truth about all aspects of our world
  • Loving relationships among all humans
  • Justice for all humans, especially for the poor and marginalized
  • Physical and emotional well-being for all humans
  • Peace among humans experiencing conflict
  • Harmony among humans and other living beings
  • Flourishing of the natural environment
  • Flourishing of all expressions of beauty in human creations

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My Search for Truth

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My desire to understand the truth about all aspects of our world is insatiable. After 40 years of serving as a teacher and academic administrator at four Christian liberal arts colleges, I formulated a description of higher education at its best in just three words: “Conversations Seeking Truth.”

But the goal of uncovering the truth about any given contentious issue has fallen on hard times because of a strong tendency to gravitate toward one of two unacceptable extremes: relativism and tribalism.

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Imitating Jesus

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I recently had the delightful experience of reading a book that beautifully captured a number of my deeply held beliefs about the nature of my commitment to the Christian faith. Especially gratifying was the fact that the author, Gerald L. Sittser, and I served together as members of the administration at Northwestern College in Iowa in the 1980s and became good friends (so, he will always be “Jerry”).

In his splendid book Resilient Faith, Jerry makes it abundantly clear that the calling of each Christian is to “imitate” Jesus, who “changed everything” (p. 106). Consider his various descriptors:

  •  Jesus is the “center of reality” (p. 174)
  •  Jesus was at the “heart of the Christian way of life” (p. 174).
  • “All holiness” derived from Jesus (p. 124).
  • The early Christians had a “new identity in Christ” (p. 105)
  • “Conversion to Christ implied conformity to Christ” (p. 177)

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A Redemptive Approach to Human Sexuality Disagreements within Christian Churches

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Numerous Christian churches, and their denominations, are being torn apart by an inability to orchestrate respectful conversations among members who strongly disagree regarding human sexuality issues. This is especially true for the issue of same-sex marriage, where the major disagreement is between those who hold to a “traditional” view of marriage (God intends for marriage to be reserved for a man and a woman) and a “non-traditional” view (God will bless a same-sex marriage where the partners make a covenant commitment to love each other for a lifetime).

I will now point my readers to a splendid example of how one church, Covenant Christian Reformed Church (CCRC) in Sioux Center, Iowa, under the leadership of their Senior Pastor, Joel Kok, has modeled a redemptive path in the midst of this current vitriol. My hope and prayer is that this story will inspire many other Christian churches, and their denominations, to replicate the redemptive approach exemplified at CCRC.

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