Have you ever mourned a falling star? From PARSE regular A.J. Swoboda, comes an honest, powerful relection on dealing with the tainted histories of spiritual heroes and personal influences. – Paul
“I was burned.”
It would be impossible to count the number of times a new member to our church community has entered our fellowship with that line. Countless, indeed. And, in most cases, the pain is still throbbing. In many conversations, I hear them talk about leaving ministries with wonderful leaders, inspiring histories, and profound impact. Of course, I’ve learned to be quick to press into that pain—there’s always an important story there. Healing, after all, was (and is) a central aspect of Jesus’ ministry. I am always careful.
How do we learn and grow after churches, pastors, spiritual authorities, or organizations have hurt or deeply disappointed us?
So, how do we learn and grow after churches, pastors, spiritual authorities, or organizations have hurt or deeply disappointed us? How do we eat the meat and spit out the bones? In search of an answer, I like pointing out three disturbing historical insights from Christian history, three far-off heroes who let us down.
Questionable heroes
First, it recently came out that one of my heroes, John Howard Yoder—perhaps the most influential voice of pacifist theology in recent Christian history—was a womanizer who had a number of questionable relationships.
Second, a summer intern at my church who attends Princeton seminary informed me that one of my other longstanding theological heroes, Karl Barth, had a nearly three-decade relationship with his secretary that was anything but “appropriate.”
Third, I long-ago discovered that my favorite theological volume, The Theological Dictionary of the New Testament—edited by Gerhard Kittel and Gerhard Friedrich—was originally commissioned by the Hitler and the Third Reich during World War II.
My favorite theological dictionary, it turns out, was paid for by the Nazis.
As Christians, we often do not know what to do when we discover the dark parts of our history.
It doesn’t sit well knowing that two of my favorite theologians and my favorite theological dictionary have such tainted histories.
As Christians, we often do not know what to do when we discover the dark parts of our history. But what these three stories have done is caused me to rethink the way that I view history—particularly how God is involved in our broken histories.
From heroes to history
What brings meaning to dark, painful histories like these? “Can one speak of ‘meaning’ in history?” famously asked Lesslie Newbigin—even a history corroded by corruption, sin, and darkness in the stories of our most adored heroes? We must acknowledge that God is not one who pre-plans or inserts evil into his good creation. Evil, wrote C.S. Lewis, is always derivative, like a vine growing on a good tree. God doesn’t author evil. But God can and does work through all kinds of evil. Yes, Newbigin argued, history does have meaning, so long, and this is important, as “it has a goal.”[1]
So what is the goal of all of history? That is a tricky question. It is all the trickier if we don’t see history as actually heading toward something. Every age of history is equally near to God, believed the German Lutheran historian Leopold von Ranke (1795-1886), and that no matter what period we may look at, God is revealed, uniquely, in each. No period of history is better, von Ranke argued, just different. Yet, this can so easily lead to the belief that we are not going anywhere—that there is a lack of consummation in history where God will never break in at a final glorious new beginning.
Newbigin was right. History has meaning because it will have a future, a goal.
The goal of all of history is a new heaven and a new earth, as the Apostle John would tell us. All of history will, one day, be eternally summed up into that age of Jesus’ lordship when he will reign in the age to come with grace and truth and love.
All of history will, one day, be eternally summed up into that age of Jesus’ lordship when he will reign in the age to come with grace and truth and love.
The Bible utilizes two images to speak about God’s relationship to history. First, Jesus is described as the Alpha and Omega, the Beginning and the End. Notice that the Bible calls Jesus the Alpha and the Omega; not the Alpha through Omega. Again, I’ve found C. S. Lewis’s description of God in history helpful: “History is like a play in which the beginning and the end are written but the middle is up to us to improvise.”[2] History is a story where the beginning and the end are clearly decided, but God works with us to be creative in between.
The second image comes from some ingenious author of a sermon known as the book of Hebrews. In Hebrews, the author writes that God is “sustaining all things by his powerful word" (Hebrews 1:3). In poetic playfulness, the author selected quite a fascinating word for “sustaining.” Quite interestingly, Paul selected the same word when he was in prison writing to his friend Timothy. At the abrupt conclusion to one of his letters, he asked his friend Timothy if he would be so kind as to “carry” his scrolls, books, and cloaks to him during the upcoming winter (2 Timothy 4:13). This would have been no small task, amounting to a thousand miles or so. Timothy agreed, soon carrying Paul’s books and cloak the one thousand miles to his friend who was stuck in prison. The word for “carry” is the same word for “sustaining.”
God carries the history of the world on his back, all of history. So there are two images: the image of a God who begins and ends the script of history, and the image of a God who is carrying all of history on his back like a bag of books. I think that God determines the Alpha and Omega, and that God is present in everything in between, as the Alpha through the Omega. Not just the beginning and end, but every other boring letter in between. God is over history creating it, and he is under history carrying it, caring for it, and sustaining it.
I sort of see history the way my son takes communion. Communion remains, for me, the most sacred event of my week. Kneeling at the altar, wife and child close beside, we dip our little square bread in the cup of grape juice. We adults are so reflective, so quiet, subdued. My little boy goes all out, dipping all of his bread, fingers, and often whole hand into the symbolic representation of Jesus’ blood. (He’s the reason there are floaties in the juice.) It’s unsanitary—but so are community and the process of salvation. Adults are too sanitary.
God is in human history the way my son drowns communion bread and his whole hand in the symbolic blood of Christ.
God is in human history the way my son drowns communion bread and his whole hand in the symbolic blood of Christ. God not only drenches every crack of human history in his grace but is so invested in history that he himself enters into it through his own son. God enters the cracks of all of history yet remains huge enough to stand tall above it. He saves it by entering it. He’s in it, below it, and above it.
Historical forgiveness
This brings me back to my womanizing heroes Yoder and Barth, as well as my favorite theological dictionaries commissioned by Hitler.
I think that Paul’s command to “forgive as you’ve forgiven” (Col. 3:13) is one that we certainly need to live today. I can forgive because I’ve been forgiven. But we never extend that same grace in a way that transcends the now. What does it mean to historically forgive?
I think it means that we learn to practice forgiveness not only toward our living neighbors but also toward those in our history books who loved Christ, but also were sinners. I believe we need to learn to live forgiveness historically, not just relationally. We can do that when we recognize God’s love of all of history—that God carries it. Don’t hear that I am saying we should just overlook the sin, the womanizing, the dirty money. Never. Confession is the only road to forgiveness. In that light, forgiveness is anything but ignoring sin. Rather, forgiveness demands the acknowledgement of sin.
Forgiveness, of course, is not the rubber-stamping of approval of one’s sin. Nay, forgiveness is the acknowledgment of such hurt and the dunking it in the grace and love of Jesus Christ that we ourselves have drown in the rivers of baptism.
Two-sided forgiveness
I wasn’t personally hurt by Yoder, or Barth, or my theological dictionaries. Many have been. But, I have to learn as a Christian that God can use the very broken histories of very broken people in a very broken world to bring about redemption and grace. God doesn’t need brokenness in order to so. Rather, he’s just so good that he can carry it all in his hands.
He dunks the whole world in his hands.
“I was burned.”
I come back to my new friends with old, painful stories. These stories—stories of hurt, of anger, of bitterness—forged by our histories and our heroes are not stories I believe Jesus wants us to just move past. Forgiveness is not side-stepping reality. Forgiveness is entering into reality with grace. As Jesus dies, he does not suggest for one moment we should forget about what has been done to him.
He asks God to forgive it.
Forgiveness is two-sided. It dunks pain in the grace of God. But it still acknowledges that it was pain.
A.J. Swoboda is a pastor, writer, and professor in Portland, Oregon. He is @mrajswoboda on Twitter.
[1] Lesslie Newbigin, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1989), 103.
[2] C. S. Lewis, God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002), 105.