Upstream

Shane welcomes theologian and Fellowship of Ailbe Principal, T. M. Moore, to unpack the rich, Biblical truth found in some of our most beloved seasonal hymns.  

Shane and the Davenant Institute’s Dale Stenberg share what Jesus’ Incarnation means to them, and demystify some 50-cent theological terms.  

My wife is one of those people who has a subscription to Amazon Prime every four months, when the company tries to tempt her back with another one-month trial. It turns out there’s a good bit of Christian fare on the service, and we occasionally resort to digital sedation for the kids. 

Last night’s feature was a cartoon adaptation of the gospels I’d never seen. It looked anime-influenced, and the voice-acting was a tad over-the-top, but it struck me as scripturally sound. While serving up dinner, I caught the scene out of John in which the Sanhedrin plots against Jesus. Cartoon Caiaphas, looking somewhat less impish than he does in most depictions, raises his hand for silence and utters those unwittingly prophetic words: “It is better for you that one man die for the people than that the whole nation perish.” 

Here’s what came over me like a thunderclap (which I know I’m risking by writing this): The high priest’s reasoning seemed solid and his intentions noble. Maybe it was the sympathetic visual portrayal of the character—the lack of that familiar hunch and legalistic sneer, more like a pre-fall Saruman than like an emperor Palpatine—that made me rethink his motives. Or maybe it was the influence of good historians in my life this year. Whatever the cause, I could see where Caiaphas was coming from. The crown (or in this case, the ephod) rests heavy, and one can imagine the pressure on a man tasked with mediating between an unruly people and an unforgiving empire.

Then there are the theological excuses the Sanhedrin might have fielded: Jesus wasn’t the first itinerant yokel to proclaim Himself Messiah. They were a dime-a-dozen in first-century Judea, and there was a long and venerable tradition of responding to them with deadly force. Recall as well that Yahweh had spent the better part of a millennium pounding into Hebrew skulls that He was the only true God and that no one should make pictures of Him or claim equality with Him. Israelite kings who forgot this quickly found their nation under new management. 

Now imagine that a Man waltzes into Jerusalem who claims to be both the image of the invisible God and equal with Him. Imagine that this Man’s parentage is sketchy and his popularity starting to draw attention from the Italians. And imagine that this Character has just ransacked the Temple market and assaulted several dove-merchants of sterling reputation, ignoring along the way the careful theological reasoning and Sinaitic penumbra you invoked to justify this lobby of lucre. And then imagine, on top of it all, that this Nazarene nuisance unleashes a string of invectives and insults against you and your esteemed colleagues. 

What would you have done?

Caiaphas was, of course, wrong—as tragically and damnably wrong as any human being has ever been. My point is that the cosmic regicide he committed didn’t require anything beyond the ordinary endowment of human fear, blindness, and pride. This cartoon was right not to depict him as a ravening goblin because he wasn’t one. He was a man—a very reasonable and logical man by earthly standards. And he—along with Judas Iscariot and Pontius Pilate—reasoned and logicked himself into murdering God.

Ed Stetzer used to quip on “BreakPoint This Week” that Christians should be comfortable professing things that don’t seem reasonable. “After all,” he would say, “we believe God became a Man, died and rose from the grave, and is returning someday riding a white horse, with a sword coming out of His mouth.” Quibbles about apocalyptic imagery aside, Ed’s point is well-taken. We Christians worship a homeless wonderworker who got Himself killed by winning arguments with canon lawyers. He was born, according to embarrassing records that somehow survived, in a feeding trough. Respectability isn’t in our DNA. If at the heights of medieval scholasticism, ensconced among basilicas, stained glass, and Aristotelian distinctions men who claimed the name of Jesus ever fancied themselves refined, the joke was on them. They were fools—at least by the world’s standards.

Perhaps this is what that itinerant yokel meant when He told His followers, “Whoever wants to be first among you must be your slave,” and when He prayed, “I praise you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and learned, and revealed them to little children.” Perhaps if the One whose very nature defines reason, logic, and wisdom resorts to such inversions, we are worse off than we thought. Perhaps there was no room for God in the halls of learning or temples of established piety. Perhaps a stable was His only alternative to judging us immediately. 

I’ve benefitted a lot this year from reading and listening to British popular historian Tom Holland. He’s not a believer (yet). But he grasps the paradox at the heart of Christianity. In an interview with Anglican minister and spoken-word poet Glen Scrivener, Holland urges Christians to let our freak flag fly:

“If you’re a Christian, you think that the entire fabric of the cosmos was ruptured by this strange singularity—someone who is a God and a man sets everything on its head. And to say it’s ‘supernatural’ is to downplay it. This is a massive singularity at the heart of things. And if you don’t believe that, it seems to me you’re not really a confessional Christian.”

In my Upstream discussion this week with Dr. Ken Boa, he used the word “anamnesis.” He explained that this term refers to the regular remembrance of God’s mighty acts, especially through Jesus Christ, in the Lord’s Supper and in liturgical seasons like Advent. Part of the purpose of remembering these acts annually is calling to mind and placing before our eyes the strangeness of God’s work. It’s so easy to see creches with their hay, and farm animals, and Mary and Joseph and the shepherds and probably the Magi looking on serenely and forget what a bizarre scene it is. Who in their right mind, unless they had heard from God or been catechized by Christianity, would look at that child in a feeding trough and think, “This is the King of all creation”? 

As my children absorb the story of Jesus—either through manger scenes or Amazon Prime trials or through our Scripture reading, I hope they also catch this whiff of otherworldly truth so many skeptics and Sanhedrin have missed. I hope they detect in the gospel’s foolishness a Divine conspiracy to humble the proud and dethrone the mighty. And I pray my heart can grow young enough this and every Christmas to join them beside the manger to learn again what true wisdom looks like. 

Shane visits with Dr. Ken Boa to explore the reason and structure of liturgies in the life of Christians. They explore how traditions and rhythms in the faith draw Christians to a deeper understanding and appreciation of Christ, spiritual maturity, and the reason for the seasons.

The lead-up to Christmas was the first time I ever experienced “sehnsucht”—the inconsolable longing not satisfied by anything in this world. I remember the music (especially the minor key stuff), the lights on the tree, the cooling weather (a welcome reprieve in Florida) and the smell of mom’s candles combining to charge the air in our home with expectation. Like good Baptists, we didn’t consciously celebrate Advent, but by Dickens, we kept it in our hearts.

Even at that young age, I understood that what I longed for—what I hoped for—wasn’t in the music, the decorations, the food, or even the plastic dinosaurs wrapped beneath the tree. The object of my desire was in the manger, pictured by a ceramic stand-in whose visitation triggered awe, sadness, and an electrifying sense that a Grand Miracle had taken place.

Years later I learned that for the medieval Church, Advent and Christmas weren’t that big of a deal. Lent and Easter dominated the liturgical calendar, marking the Lord’s triumph over sin and death and mirroring the emphasis of the New Testament. Even so, the rise in prominence of Christ’s birth in worship and imagination seem right to me.

The Resurrection only makes sense in light of the Incarnation. In many ways, the miracle of Christ’s return from the grave is the fulfillment of a promise made by His Incarnation. Having joined Himself inseparably with creation, God the Son could no sooner surrender this world to decay than He could suffer decay, Himself. The Resurrection had to happen, precisely because the Incarnation could not be reversed.

In his appropriately titled “Miracles,” C. S. Lewis calls God donning humanity in Mary’s womb “the Grand Miracle,” and “the central event in the history of the Earth—the very thing that the whole story has been about.” When you understand his atonement theology, remarks like this make sense. Lewis drew heavily on the fourth-century theologian Athanasius, even writing a preface to the Church Father’s masterpiece, “On the Incarnation.” Athanasian themes loom large in “The Perfect Penitent,” the section of “Mere Christianity” in which Lewis unpacks the meaning of Christ’s Incarnation and Passion.

According to Lewis, human beings had gotten ourselves in a pickle with God. And as the responsible party, it fell to human beings to set things right. We would have to pay our debt, which meant repenting perfectly, dying to self, and returning to God. But there was a problem: “…the same badness which makes us need [repentance], makes us unable to do it.” The very sin that places us in God’s debt makes us incapable of paying that debt. We would need God’s help in order to “surrender, to suffer, to submit, to die.” But God, in His own nature, never does such things! Indeed, if the classical theists are correct, God cannot move at all from potency to act. He cannot change. It turns out that “the one road for which we now need God’s leadership most of all is a road God, in His own nature, has never walked.”

“But,” Lewis adds (I imagine after a pregnant pause in the original radio address) “…supposing God became a man.” Such a Person—possessed of the inexhaustible power and holiness of Divinity but clothed in the flesh, blood, and rational animal nature of man—could suffer, submit, change, and die, and do all of these perfectly. As man He could discharge man’s debt by living the life God required and dying the death justice demanded. But as God, He could elevate human nature to something hitherto unimagined: “For He was made man that we might be made God,” writes Athanasius, “and He

manifested Himself by a body that we might receive the idea of the unseen Father; and He endured the insolence of men that we might inherit immortality.”

From this we get a sense of what Lewis means by calling the Incarnation “the Grand Miracle”—the very fulcrum of history. In becoming a man, the Word bridged not only the abyss between holiness and sin but the infinity between Creator and creature. In Jesus, God permanently joined Himself with creation, becoming a creature Himself, united forever with our race as a Kinsman Redeemer, which is Old-Testament-speak for our rich big Brother.

We also get a sense of why the hope and desire of Advent are mingled with sadness. Between the manger and the empty tomb is a horrible cross. We rightly mourn for our Brother as He volunteers his newly-birthed flesh to be torn on our behalf. Yet volunteer it He must. This was, after all, His central reason for becoming human—that by inhabiting a body subject to death, He could exhaust the power of death and destroy the grave from the inside.

In Hebrews 2:14-17, the Incarnation is the miracle that prepares God to stand in our place and die in our stead. His human body and soul give Him the legal and natural right to serve as our substitute: “Since therefore the children share in flesh and blood, he himself likewise partook of the same things, that through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil, and deliver all those who through fear of death were subject to lifelong slavery. Therefore he had to be made like his brothers in every respect, so that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in the service of God, to make propitiation for the sins of the people.”

Athanasius strengthens the substitutionary element, here, writing: “…thus taking from our bodies one of like nature, because all were under the penalty of corruption of death, He gave it over to death in the stead of all, and offered it to the Father,” in order that “all being held to have died in Him, the law involving the ruin of men might be undone,” and “He might turn them again toward incorruption, and quicken them from death by the appropriation of His body and by the grace of the Resurrection, banishing death from them like straw from the fire.”

In the Incarnation, all our hopes and fears meet, as the carol has it. The solemn joy that sparked longing in my young imagination is a fitting reaction to history’s central event. Far from diminishing Easter, our anticipation of the Grand Miracle of God becoming human during Advent deepens our understanding of Jesus’ identity and sharpens our longing both for His Resurrection and ours. This fast and the feast to follow give us confidence that Christ’s triumph over sin and death will be our triumph, because it reminds us every year that we hope and believe in a God who is not only for us, but also with us.

Shane discusses Christmas and Advent with historian Glenn Sunshine. The two draw a historic line between Christmas and Advent, sharing the theological and historical roots of both markings on the church calendar. They explore the faith-formation that occurs in practicing the rhythms and disciplines that traditionally accompany the season of Advent.

At this point, the “What Would Jesus Do?” slogan seems more at home in a history museum than on a bracelet. This relic of 1990s evangelicalism caught on about the time I was finishing elementary school, and I dutifully joined in the trend and wore the letters in several colors, often to AWANA, until they all fell apart or were lost.  

For many who went on to become interested in theology, the WWJD saying became the butt of jokes along with that Christian t-shirt that parodied the Abercrombie and Fitch logo with an allusion to the feeding of the five thousand that said, “A Breadcrumb and Fish,” (go ahead and groan). For me and many others, WWJD became a typical example of Christian bookstore theology. Our much more informed response was that Jesus did stuff we as Christians can’t. He performed miracles, forgave sins, authoritatively interpreted the Scriptures, and died to save the world. Instead of asking “What Would Jesus Do?” we newly-minted theologians explained, Christians should ask, “what did Jesus command us to do?”  

Looking back, I’m not so sure that was the right response, and not just because “WDJCUTD” would be harder to remember or fit on a bracelet, and not because obeying Jesus’ commands is at all a bad idea. I actually think our criticism of WWJD was misguided on a more fundamental level. Insisting that Jesus isn’t our ultimate example because we can’t do all the things He did confuses His character with His calling, and more importantly, confuses His humanity with His Divinity.  

Jesus’ life was not a screenplay we must follow. That was never what anyone who wore a WWJD bracelet meant by it. They weren’t claiming we must all, as one friend memorably put it, “strive toward a life of singleness, marrying no woman, raising no children, traveling the countryside hanging out with twelve buddies, and getting into trouble with the law.” Charitably, evangelicals in the nineties were saying that we should ask how Jesus would behave if He were in our circumstances, taking into account what we know of His character and commands. And this sort of imitation of Christ as a Person is explicitly taught in Scripture. John 13:13-17, 1 Corinthians 11:1, Ephesians 5:1-2, 1 John 2:6, and 1 Peter 2:21 are just a few examples. The very name “Christian” implies an identification with Christ that goes beyond mere belief or allegiance, reaching to our very persons and characters. We are to be, as I’ve heard it put, “little Christs.” 

Second, it’s true that we can’t be God, but no one has ever suggested we can. We are, however, absolutely called to be human in the way God Incarnate was. There’s a big difference. In his “The Wonderful Works of God,” Dutch theologian Herman Bavinck gives an especially helpful reminder of how central Jesus’ humanity was to His mission, and how essential it is to our salvation that we partake of this humanity. In his chapter on Christ’s humiliation, Bavinck points out that Jesus’ three offices of Prophet, Priest, and King are human offices to which we, too, in our appropriate way, are called. He is, as is so often the case, worth quoting fully, here:  

“In the unfolding of the image of God, in the harmonious development of all his gifts and power, in his exercise of the three offices of prophet, priest, and king lay the purpose and destiny of man. But man violated this high calling. And that is why Christ came to earth: to again exhibit the true image of man and to bring his destiny to perfect fulfillment. The doctrine of the three offices lays a firm connection between nature and grace, creation and redemption, Adam and Christ. The first Adam is type, herald, and prophecy of the last Adam, and the Last is the counterpart and fulfillment of the first.” (page 316)  

If we fail to recognize that Christ was and is the ideal human—not just God with us, but the fulfillment of all that our first father and our whole race were meant to be—we get a Docetic savior. This superhuman phantasm may be instrumental to our salvation, but he is irrelevant to our sanctification. We may claim he spares us from the wrath of God, but he remains wholly alien, offering us no help in repairing our sinful race or reviving this broken creation.   

The reason we are right to ask, “What Would Jesus Do?” is that Jesus came not merely to serve as a sacrifice for sin or to issue moral commands, but to personally embody and restore the image of God in man. This is also why the Incarnation matters so much, and why I greatly enjoyed my conversation this week on Upstream with theology professor and podcaster Thomas Price. As we explored the deep meaning of Advent, Dr. Price emphasized that Christ’s role as the Last Adam means He has given us a new way of being human. It makes sense to model our lives after Christ’s because in the truest possible sense, Christ lived our kind of life, and He openly invites us to imitate His obedience.  

To anyone who objects that Christ was God, and that it must have therefore been easy for Him, Dr. Price points to the Scriptures, which assure us Jesus was truly man, “made fully like us, fully human in every way, in order that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest”—one who “was tempted in every way we are, yet without sin.” And to those who object that Jesus had the power to do the impossible, the Scriptures reply that “the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead is living in you…” Which means that imitating Christ is not only possible, but for those who share in His Spirit, inevitable.  

It turns out that younger me wasn’t as good a theologian as I imagined, and the Christian bookstores weren’t always wrong. “What Would Jesus Do?” is a question that should always be at the front of our minds—even if we no longer wear it on our wrists.

Shane Morris visits with Dr. Thomas Price about Athanasius' On The Incarnation. The pair discuss the significance of Jesus being man and how Advent is an important time for the Christian, and not only to celebrate the birth of Christ. Sign-up for more resources at www.breakpoint.org/advent.

Shane welcomes writer and editor Samuel James to help us understand how social media is transforming into a kind of alternate reality, and how disembodied, digital existence—especially when it involves sex, war, and meaningless work—is uniquely destructive to men.

Why do little kids love stories so much? What is it in them that wants a story before bedtime? Why do they listen so intently and question you about every detail? Why is it that whenever you overhear two or three little children on the playground, they’re almost undoubtedly in character as warriors, or princesses, or police officers, or cowboys, or magical beings? Why do they so naturally, with no help from adults, step into the roles of characters in their own spontaneous stories?

Well, it turns out all that play and storytelling has a serious purpose, and may even be essential to transforming an infant’s mind into the mind of adult. Tracy Gleason, professor of psychology at Wellesley College, summarizes the substantial research on the relationship between make-believe and “a child’s developing creativity, understanding of others and social competence with peers.”

“Imaginary play,” she writes, “could encourage social development because children are simultaneously behaving as themselves and as someone else. This gives them a chance to explore the world from different perspectives, and is a feat that requires thinking about two ways of being at once, something that children may have difficulty doing in other circumstances.”

Imaginary play exercises one of the mental muscles that likely sets us apart from animals: so-called “theory of mind,” or our ability to project our self-awareness onto others and imagine what life must be like from their perspective. The idea that others are not merely furniture in our sensory environment but have an inner life much like our own is a deceptively large cognitive leap. After all, we’ve never occupied anyone else’s mind, and never will. We have only our own experience to go off. Yet without making this leap, human beings could never have true relationships with each other. When children assume the role of a character from a movie or book or even one they’ve invented, they are establishing the rudiments of culture and society, and even preparing their hearts to receive and obey the Golden Rule.

Story-based play emerges from theory of mind. It is what happens when children realize there are other characters besides themselves that share in the experiences and limitations of their world. It’s also why, if you listen closely beside the playground, you will hear them pausing their games incessantly to argue about those rules.

“No, your superpower is fire, mine is water.” “We’re both orphans, but we aren’t sisters.” “Velociraptor is faster than T. rex!” “The princess escaped—the bad guys didn’t find her.”

As Gleason puts it, “…some research suggests that children engaging in social pretend play spend almost as much time negotiating the terms and context of the play as they do enacting it.”

I’ve even heard my children—particularly my most detail-oriented son—giving voices to military action figures and anthropomorphized Hot Wheel cars, who hotly negotiate the terms of their imaginary worlds.

Yet while stories are correlated with and probably essential for their growth and education, children aren’t the only ones who love a good tale. Adults since the dawn of recorded history have told their own stories about the origins, meaning, and ultimate destiny of our world. Most of all, they’ve told stories about their place in the world, and what it means to be a hero, rather than a villain. We think of the

Enūma Eliš, the Epic of Gilgamesh, the exhaustive visual tales of Egyptian gods and their mischief, the Iliad and the Odyssey, Beowulf, and of course, the Bible.

For Christians, the fact that the Bible contains the true plot of human history is no impediment to its also being a marvelous story. The opposite, in fact. As C. S. Lewis puts it, “…the story of Christ is simply a true myth: a myth working on us the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference that it really happened…” If it’s true that stories are an essential part of how human beings learn, grow, and become virtuous, then it shouldn’t surprise us that when God set out to reveal Himself to fallen man, He did so not with a bullet-pointed list of doctrinal propositions, but with a story—one complete with danger, intrigue, murder, romance, long quests, courage, and self-sacrifice.

I suspect it’s very possible we would have no hope of learning the most important moral and spiritual lessons in life without stories, both factual and imaginary. I think of one of my favorite movies, “It’s A Wonderful Life.” Toward the middle of the film, the discouragement of George Bailey, particularly for a man who can imagine feeling his disappointment with life, is crushing. He really does seem to have gotten the short end of the stick, to have been discarded by the world despite all his sacrifice for others. You sympathize with his desire to give up. If at that moment the film stopped and rolled a bulleted list of reasons why George Bailey is actually a blessed and rich man, why his future is bright, and why he should thank God for his wonderful life, audiences would scoff and walk away disappointed. And rightly so—even if all the bullet points were true.

But that’s not what we get. We get the second half of the film, in which George Bailey enters a make-believe world where he was never born. He is granted the wish of Job, and for one terrible night, lives in a story where he was never a character. He is appalled and grieved by the results, and realizes through the medium of story how richly God has worked through his life to bless others, to hold greed in check, and to bring irreplaceable joy into the world. By the end of this brief runtime, we have undergone an emotional and spiritual transformation of our own. The power of one man’s story has taught us something no amount of didactic instruction could.

This gets to the heart of what I discussed this week on Upstream with the CiRCE Institute’s Heidi White. Stories belong at the heart of education, no matter how old we are, because they are how humans put flesh on the bones of fact. They are the medium and language of meaning—truth made incarnate. And if the goal of education is to form virtuous men and women, then the quality of the education we give our children depends largely on the types of stories we tell them.

I hope you’ll listen to my conversation with Heidi, and I hope it inspires you to honor the imaginations of the children in your life—not only because it’s how they learn and grow, but because no matter how old we get, you and I will never outgrow the classroom (or the playground) of storytelling.