Welcome back to the Fourth Wave podcast. Today, we are beginning a new series which will end up taking us to the end of year. Series may seem like a circuitous route to the issue of non violence, but I I don't really see it as such. I want to explore the issue of incarnation. So let me explain how I think that this fits into the heart of our podcast.

If you've listened to all of our episodes, then you'll know that the concept of incarnation has come up with some frequency. And a lot of times it's represented in Philippians two, which is all about kenosis and incarnation, both Christ's incarnation and his call for us to likewise be incarnate. I think that it's time that we spend a season on the idea of incarnation because it's one of the building blocks, in my opinion, of a non violent life. It's gonna be one of those things, kind of like consequentialism, where it comes up so much that it might not be directly related to it but it's its root. I was actually just listening to Bruggemann today, I just started a book.

I'd heard his name dropped a bunch of times and so I was like, Okay, well I'll read a book by him. I forget what the title of the book is, but he was talking a lot about the Christian life and the importance of community, and he was getting at a lot of root things and he talked about one of the biggest problems for Christianity is greed. Like we believe that there's this scarcity of resources, we don't truly trust God with our lives, particularly with money but with with other things as well because we believe that there's this scarcity, we don't truly trust in God's provision. And so he talks about how hope provides you with a lifestyle that trusts in God and you can be generous, but the opposite of hope is despair. And likewise, the opposite of generosity is greed.

So really, if you're gonna talk about greed, you would first, at least according to Bruggemann, probably wanna talk about despair and hope and those sorts of things. And I think that incarnation is going to be very similar here. It's going be one of those things that you'd say, Well, I don't want to talk about incarnation, just want evidence that non violence is good or works or biblical or historical or whatnot. But the incarnation is going to be one of those really vital building blocks to understanding and accepting a non violent life. Before we get into the episode proper, want to preface the series with a few things.

First, as I talk about incarnation, I'm going to be discussing a lot of concepts in of the way I think things ought to be, the way we ought to be living out our lives. And I don't at all intend to imply in any of these episodes that I'm actually doing this well. Rather than this series being something which I've mastered and I'm discussing from an area of expertise, this is the beginning of a journey for me which I'm trying to work through. I don't know how long I'm gonna be able to say that because the non violent journey, well I'm like five years in now, I still feel like I'm just starting in terms of a lot of this stuff because there's so many implications on, you know, how you help the poor and how you relinquish your wealth and resources and it's it's just so all encompassing and and overwhelming and I I feel like I've only made baby steps so far. But nevertheless, God, I I hope and think that He is working in me and this fleshing out these ideas is kind of trying to help me figure out how to move forward in those steps, maybe get to walking and running soon.

So consider this season a first attempt at my fleshing out of the concept of incarnation, an unpolished dialogue with myself. That being said, it is a dialogue which, like I said, has been going on in my heart and mind for over a decade, not the non violent aspect but this idea of incarnation and poverty, just all of the things together. So I'm hopeful that it will be beneficial for you to jump into the middle of that conversation with me because I have put a lot of thought into it. Second, I'm hopeful this series will resolve an issue I recognized at the end of season two, which is that a lot of what I talk about might come across as moralism. And since much of what we discuss has to do with particular actions like don't kill your enemies.

Some see what I'm advocating as just a list of rules. And I understand how you might think that when I talk so much about how we ought to act, Though oftentimes I think this is an all too convenient ungracious dismissal by those who don't want to genuinely engage the content. But to give detractors the benefit of the doubt, and surely there's probably at least one or two genuine detractors out there who are trying to grasp this, I do get how you might be wary of all of our discussion on actions. While I believe in objective morality, that morality must flow out of a relationship with a personal agent. We don't have a list of rules to follow, but rather we follow our creator God.

Our goal isn't adherence to a list, but adherence to the character of God. There's a good quote which I think sums this up from the author of Bonhoeffer the Assassin, one of the authors, Mark Nation, in a paper that he wrote entitled A Blanket License to Commit Evil Acts. I think the quote sums things up pretty well. It says, quote, just as in chapter one where Bonhoeffer says that we must give up our ideas of good and evil, so in chapter two, Christ, Reality and Good, he says we must give up our notions of being good or doing something good. What is truly important is not that I become good or that the condition of the world be improved by my efforts, but that the reality of God show itself everywhere to be the ultimate reality.

Where God is known by faith to be the ultimate reality, the source of my ethical concern will be that God be known as the good even at the risk that I and the world are revealed as not good, but as bad through and through. As Bonhoeffer unfolds this claim, it becomes apparent that what he wants his readers to see is that the reality in light of which we live our lives as Christians is the reality of the God known in Jesus Christ. He goes on to say that the source of a Christian ethic is not the reality of one's own self, not the reality of the world, nor is it the reality of norms and values, it is the reality of God, end quote. There have been many times where I haven't made this clear or where I haven't pushed this to the forefront. I believe it, but it's not something that I've done a really good job of saying over and over again.

I don't advocate enemy love because it's on the list of what God does or does not want me to do and I just wanna check off that moral component. I advocate loving enemies not killing them because that's what Jesus is like and I love Jesus. That's one reason why I feel this season is important though it doesn't relate directly to non violence. Non violence is a position which comes out of who God and Jesus are and this season is about who Jesus is and how He interacts with the world. I think this season will retroactively give a foundation to this whole podcast Since the importance of this season is in my view pretty significant, I wish I was more read up on the topic, honestly.

I'm sure there are books out there about the incarnation as as I'm going to approach it, but I I really haven't seen any at this point. Much of what I've seen is, you know, talking about like theological interpretations of of the hypostatic union and how the incarnation happened, not about what all incarnation entails. I'm sure they exist out there, I just haven't seen them. I've started to get into some of the more mystical writers in Catholicism and Orthodoxy, and I've gotten glimpses of some incarnational types of things from from those like Francis of Assisi, but I, like I said, I I have yet to find stuff on the incarnation as I'm talking about it. Nevertheless, I think it's important for me at this juncture to take a first stab at the topic apart from, you know, my ignorance on the history of it because it's so foundational to what this podcast is about.

As I come across material and have future further thoughts, I'll add to the seasons over the years, and hopefully bolster and modify where needed. Alright, those are the caveats that I I wanted to lay out there. So let's get into the series. For this episode, I simply want to set up the series by telling the story of a portion of my life. Now, I debated whether or not to do this since both seasons one and two start off somewhat similarly, though I'm going to to give you some quite a few different angles here.

But I I just think it's important for those maybe who didn't hear those seasons as well as because I am coming from some significantly different angles that I'll just throw it out there. So I think it's an important start. So here we go, little bit of my story. I grew up attending a Christian school from second grade onward. My life was saturated with Christianity.

As like I was at church two, maybe three times a week, missions conferences, all that stuff, church camps, church school, everything, everybody was Christian. As I got into middle and high school, I began to play sports against other Christian schools. It was always interesting because you could you had slightly different demographics in Christian schools based on where the schools were located, as well as what the philosophy of those particular schools was were. The more urban schools tended to be the ones that self identified as missional and didn't require professions of faith from at least one parent, whereas the more rural schools viewed themselves as kind of like the the citadel model, I'll call it. An oasis of faith amidst secular public schools whose job it was to protect, preserve, and to pass on the faith to students.

So from a relatively early age, I was seeing this conflicting strategy amongst Christians. We're either kind of like a citadel of defense or, I don't know, like a commando force making incursions. And I think you see these concepts even play out in the larger world. Christendom at times viewed its job as conquering in the name of Christ, being kind of this commando force that goes out. Now in this vein, we get the Crusades.

In the modern United States, while there may be some parts of Christendom's conquering ideology present, dispensationalism and the world's imminent demise and Christianity's Christendom's kind of deterioration often makes us take more of a Christians in The United States take more of a citadel approach. The world is fading away and we need to hang on to and preserve our Christian nation as long as possible. In hopes that Jesus will return before we have to face persecution and hardship like most of the rest of Christianity throughout the world now and throughout all of history. Obviously, there's some hyperbole in there as this is a spectrum with Christians landing all across it. Nevertheless, each view tends to lead towards different pitfalls.

I grew up under the more dispensationalist brand of Christianity. So we were more of the Citadel type as opposed to the commando force. My school and and church were pretty defensive. We loved Matthew five's Sultanate passage and we viewed ourselves as this remote city on a hill that people could escape to, escape from the world to to to our city. When we received someone out of the world, we'd quick lift the gate and let them come in and close it back up.

We were a light from the last bastion of hope out of the world, not this bastion of hope for the world to the world. And our saltiness was the only thing preventing the meat from rotting, we thought. We were preservers or conservationists, hence we were conservatives. Helped the world to last long enough to get the elect in through the gates. At the same time, I could look back at Christian history and realize that our position offered us a better option than going out into the world and forcing people to convert through the sword.

Aggressive Christianity, this the commando Christianity, didn't seem like a great alternative to me. For as unfulfilling as it was to be pumping water out of a sinking ship, which is what our role as a church was growing up, it was better than the alternative of going out and killing people metaphorically or literally. Fast forward to my adult years, I was beginning to move into ministries and lower level church leadership and my heart was suffering. As an individual, I felt like I was largely throwing my tithes and offerings at problems. I wasn't doing anything meaningful or tangible in my life to do good in the world.

And as a deacon, the systems that I was following or proposing were impersonal systems that didn't really dig in with those who were in need. While the church I attended as an adult wasn't dispensational in their theology, functionally it worked out the same. We may not have believed that the world was a sinking ship, but rather that many of the people in the world were on lifeboats which were sinking. We were safe and if they wanted to be safe, then they should join us and start believing the right things like us and start living the right way like us. If they did, they probably wouldn't have the problems that they had.

You can hear more of those stories in episode, one of seasons one and two and I'll put a link to some of my written stories in the show notes. But the point is that my life, was essentially built around making incursions into the world. I wasn't really in the world or of it, but instead I was hopping into it for a moment when I'd help an individual do the diaconate, but that was about it. I'd hop right back into my citadel. My life just didn't feel like I was living up to what a supposedly radical Jesus would have advocated.

As I wrestled with that, I was changed by a number of things. Can hear about some of those in in the episodes I've already referenced, particularly the the season on consequentialism. But another thing that helped me was gaining a different understanding of two different passages in the Bible. One of those passages is where Jesus talks about how He's going to build the church on a rock and the gates of hell won't prevail against it, against the church. As this passage was always read to me, the church was on the defensive while the gates of hell stormed the church.

Michael Heiser put this into perspective for me when he expounded on the geographical and linguistic context of this verse and pointed out that gates are not offensive weapons, right? The gates of hell wouldn't withstand the assault of the church. It wasn't the other way around. The church is on the offensive which in retrospect seems like it should have been obvious, right? The gates will not withstand the church.

Unfortunately, some of the translations make it difficult to understand what what is so clear. And honestly, that that fits so much better with the grain of the New Testament. That's the story of the Great Commission and the whole New Testament. We are on the offensive. We are going out to the nations.

Jesus is making making the nations His footstool. However, Christians had thought this in the past before and I didn't really like that because this is the logic out of which the Crusade sprung, that that we Christians are to go out and conquer for Christ. But, we see clearly here that that we are to assault the gates of hell, not the gates of other nations. Paul gives us a similar logic when he tells us that we don't war against flesh or blood, or when he talks about how we are soldiers of Christ and soldiers don't concern themselves with affairs not common to their soldiery. Jesus also gives us rationale for fighting spiritual battles when He declares that His people don't fight because His kingdom is not from this world.

It's a different kingdom. It does battle differently. The church is to be at war and to be aggressive but not in the way that the medieval church was at war and subsequently ruined Christian testimony for the next millennium. The other passage which helped to change my views were the salt and light passages I've already referenced from Matthew five. As I began to study these passages more, I realized that these aren't preservation passages in as much as they are passages of betterment.

When you read about the light, the light's not a beacon on some far away hill that people run to, you know, like some citadel. Now the light is depicted as penetrating into the darkness to take the revelation of God out from it. We illuminate the path of the world to make the world a better place. The same thing was true with the salt passage. Sure, salt might be a preservative, sure.

But that's not what's in view with the word usage in Matthew five. The passage talks about its taste, its appeal, its flavor. We're not preserving a world that's just hanging on by a thread until Jesus comes to destroy it all. We're making the world a better, more enjoyable place that sees and tastes that God is good. Whereas the author of the letter to Diognita says, Christians are the soul of the world.

These two concepts, these two passages really helped me to change my world. I wasn't to be on the defensive, I was to be on the attack for God. I also wasn't just trying to ram my religion down the throat of others. My religion, my relationship with God should flavor my encounters with others and draw them. I can tell you that my work with the poor was not flavored well at all, both due to the rigid processes we had in place as well as my attitude and discomfort in working with them.

It was just not a pretty sight and it just left me lost not knowing where to go from here. So that's where I want to leave the first episode at this discomfort, this discontinuity that I had in my life. At that point in my life, I recognized that there were some major problems and many forms of Christianity, my own included, And it was sapping meaning for my life and the radical nature of what it should mean to be a Christian. But where should I go from there? We'll talk about that in the about the next step in our next episode.

That's all for now, so peace. Because I'm a pacifist, when I say it, I mean it.