An attempt to share the faith in contemporary setting

I am writing this short article as an attempt to relate the Christian faith to the non-Christians in the contemporary setting. As such, I will be tapping on some scenes in Spiderman 3, some concepts from the book "The Story We Find Ourselves In: Further Adventures of a New Kind of Christian" by Brian D. McLaren and using a non-conventional approach to convey the Christian faith. There are two main themes below: reconciliation with God and to partake in God's big story. I am not sure what kind of impact the content below will create, so I will appreciate it if you could feedback to me. Any other form of sharing is also welcomed.

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In Spiderman 3, I am most impressed by Harry Osborn, who sacrifices his life to save Peter Parker from the fatal attack of Eddie Brock Jr. I am also touched by the need of Macko, the Sandman, to seek forgiveness from Peter Parker before he can really forgive himself for killing his uncle, Ben Parker many years ago. This reminds me of the sacrificial death of Jesus Christ on the cross two thousand years ago in order to reconcile us back to God our Creator and Redeemer. In Spiderman 3, it is in the sacrificial death of Harry Osborn that Peter Parker is fully reconciled back to his good old friend. Similarly, in the history between God and human, it is the sacrificial love of Jesus Christ that reconciles us back to God. But, what is it that we have done which require reconciliation and why would such reconciliation demands a sacrificial death of Jesus Christ? How do our individuals' life story interweave with God?

In the beginning when God created the world, everything was good. Human beings who are made in the image of God are the climax in the creation story. In the story told by the Jews to their descendants, they recount how chaos and disorder enter the world through human representatives, Adam and Eve. What Adam and Eve had done was to alienate themselves away from God, to alienate themselves from each other and from their own selves. When we alienate ourselves from our Creator, we start to disregard the boundary and limitation set by the Creator and we believe in our supreme authority to do anything that we want. Concurrently, we alienate ourselves from others and we treat them as an object instead of human being made in the pristine image of God. On top of that, we even alienate from our very selves and this becomes an inner turmoil and conflict within us. How many times do we seek our self-actualization at the expense our own conscience, at our own convenience to the extent that we know what is right and yet did not fulfil it?

If your own child or someone who you love becomes more selfish and committed dishonourable act, naturally you will feel hurt and pain. The pain and hurt are more intensive if he whom you trust so much turns against you. Whenever we refuse to accept the invitation to be reconciled back to God; whenever we inflict agony and suffering in any form onto another human being; whenever we know what is good and yet refuse to partake in it, we cause pain and hurt to God our heavenly Father. God wants to have a relationship with us, but we are too stubborn to turn to Him. We keep inflicting pains and damages to Him by going against His utmost good will for us. We alienate ourselves from Him, from one another and from our very own self; we destroy His creation by betraying ourselves, by exploiting other people and the environment. Instead of entering into a personal relationship with the rest of the creations, we objectify them and capitalize them for our own benefits. This nature is inherent in all of us!

How can we say sorry to someone whom we have caused hurt and agony? By apologizing profusely, by buying gifts and cards to appease the person’s hurt and anger or by some acts that seek to convince her that we are truly repentant and would sincerely want to be reconciled back. But how about seeking the forgiveness of God? As God is the wholly Other, or the transcendent Being who is beyond our imagination and our capacity to comprehend and the essential ground of our own being and existence, we can only seek forgiveness on His own terms and not ours! We know that we are not able to pay the penalties for the wrongs that we have perpetrated against Him and that Jesus Christ took on the penalties on Himself for all of us, on the cross two thousand years ago. It is only in Jesus Christ that the righteousness of God and the love of God are fully met. It is only on this condition laid down by God and there is no other! It is through and in Jesus Christ that God is able to forgive our trespasses and to be reconciled back to Him and to know Him as whom He has revealed Himself to be. It is similar to someone, for e.g. my wife, whom I want to know more about. I don’t want to know her through another person; I want to know her personally. But if I don’t even have a personal relationship with her in the first place, how could I know her personally? It is the same with God. If we don’t have a personal relationship with Him, how can we know Him personally? We could hear about Him through other Christians’ description of Him, we could know about Him intellectually by studying all the intellectual arguments about Him, but we won’t have a personal relationship with Him. To know Him personally, we must be reconciled back to Him through Jesus Christ and to know Him as He has revealed Himself to us through the Bible and through His creation.

All of us have a story, a story of our own lives. This universe has a story too. The universe is called out from nothing to something. The creator of this time, space universe whom we called God weave a big story for us to partake in. It is a story that is gradually unfolding. When we pass out of this time dimension, it is not the end of our existence. God retains the memory of everyone at every moment. The past is never lost, it is all remembered, all kept in God's memory. There is a point in the future when the composite of ourselves through our whole lifetime are all gathered together in God's presence, consummated, summed up, and gathered in the mind and heart of God. All the momentary members of our life story, the 'me' of a second ago, the 'me' now, the 'me' that I will be in a second – all these members will be remembered, reunited, in God's memory. The universe that God unleashed at the beginning has run free across the field of time, and it arrives at God in the future. Everything comes home, where everything good and beautiful and true belongs. (Adapted from The Story we find ourselves in).

When we are reconciled back to God; when we continue to seek our self-actualization within the web of personal relationships with God and with His creation; when we continue to partake in the big story God has for us; then, when we meet Him face to face one day, I could image Him to say:

"Well done! You have lived well! You helped the story advance toward my creative dreams. You fed the hungry, clothed the naked, welcomed in the lonely, visited the prisoners, shared your bread with the poor. Wherever you went, you contributed love and peace, generosity and truth, courage and sacrifice, self-control and justice, faithfulness and kindness. You enriched the story, enhanced its beauty and drama and nobility. You have become someone good and beautiful and true. Your unique, creative contributions will never be forgotten, and even the smallest act of kindness will be eternally celebrated, rewarded. After naming and forgiving and forgetting your many faults and failures, I see so much substance to your character, so much to cherish, so much of value, and it will now be set free, given a new beginning in my new creation. You have an eternal place in my story! You have been harvested from this creation, and now you will enter into the joy of the new creation!" (Adapted from The Story we find ourselves in).

Would you want to know more about the Christian faith? Would you like to be reconciled back to God? Would you yearn to partake in the big story God has weaved for all of us?

Which Jesus Christ do you believe in?

Many a times, I have asked myself how I should live a life that is worthy to be called 'Christ-like'. I have gotten different answers over the past few years. When I attended a seminar on 'Teaching with Styles' by Walk Thru the Bible ministry, Jesus was cast in the light of a great teacher with many teaching styles to be emulated by us. When I had an evangelistic bible study on John 5 where Jesus had an encounter with the Samaritan woman, Jesus was cast in the light of a great apologist who not only understood the woman's deep spiritual needs but handled her question well. In some churches, there are sermons that encouraged Christians to own private properties and to generate higher incomes as such were the economic background of the early supporters of Jesus' ministry.

In books like In His Steps by Charles M. Sheldon, readers are invited to ponder upon the question of what Jesus would do in a given situation and this gave rise to 'What would Jesus do?' movement. In the history of the church, Jesus had been used as a rally point for the crusaders to redeem the 'holy land' that Jesus stepped on. In the middle of 19^th century China, Hong Xiu Quan claimed that he was the second son of God, the younger brother to Jesus, on earth with a mission to found a new kingdom. This gave him the divine basis to inspire the Taiping Revolution, which crumpled eventually. A century later, the idea of Jesus the liberator of the oppressed was used heavily in the liberation theology to support the establishment of base communities in Latin America. In the last century, Albert Schweitzer popularized the quest for the historical Jesus, followed by Rudolf Bultmann in the recent century and the Jesus Seminar in the last two decades who advocated a deconstructed Jesus. In short, I realized that Jesus could be cast in whatever light we desire, so long as we have sufficient verses from the Bible to support ourselves. How are we then to imitate Jesus Christ if we are not sure which Jesus is historical and depicted in the light of who He truly is? Ludwig Feuerbach's The Essence of Christianity concludes that God is nothing else than man: he is, so to speak, the outward projection of man's inward nature¹.

What then bothers me is: Are we casting Jesus in our own image? Are we projecting Jesus from our social-economic and metaphysical background?

I have been able to take comfort in books for layman like The Jesus I never knew by Philip Yancey which emphasizes on the Jewishness of Jesus Christ, The Case for Christ by Lee Strobel which uncovers empirical evidences for the crucified and resurrected Christ. As I come in touch with more literature, it dawned upon me that history could never be written objectively. It is always written by the victors, by someone who wants the readers to believe in his cause. This explains why the history book in the secondary school of Japan is different from that of Singapore in talking about the same world war.

In John 20:31 "But these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name." The gospels have been written to convince the readers of the life, deeds and claims of Jesus Christ as perceived by the witnesses and preachers in the 1^st century. We who are living in the 21^st century cannot relive the historical events and have to accept what is written at face value. But we can validate the claims from verifiable evidences that we could gather. Just like a person who has not seen Confucius can only ascertain what Confucius has said and done from what has been recorded in the past and other forms of evidences to affirm the validity of it.
However, this approach has its metaphysical assumption. How do we believe in the resurrection, the healing of the disabled, the walking on water, the feeding of thousands based on few pieces of breads and fishes and other types of miracles as recorded in the gospels? This will depend whether we adopt as closed-ended universe or open-ended universe. In a closed-ended universe, we do not accept the existence of a transcendent God who can act in our system, whereas it is the reverse for an open-ended universe. For more argument about this issue, one would benefit by referring to C.S. Lewis' Miracles.

Graudally, I discovered that even if one is intellectually convinced in what the gospels said about Jesus, one may not come to accept Jesus Christ as her savior. This made me appreciate what Paul said in Ephesians 2:8-9 "For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith--and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God-- not by works, so that no one can boast." It is ultimately the faith from God which convinces a person of the reality of sin, of her need for Jesus Christ and for her to experience the authenticity of Jesus Christ as revealed in the Bible. It is then a myth that the Bible should be read objectively! The Bible is never meant to be read objectively, it is written that we may believe in Jesus is the Christ, and that by believing we may have life in his name (Jn 20:31) and for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that we may be thoroughly equipped for every good work (2Ti 3:16-17).

Michael Polanyi, a physical chemist and a philosopher of science, wrote in his Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post Critical Philosophy that knowing is personal. He believes that all observation of the universe is personal, and is influenced by individual biases, human error, and the limits of the observer's knowledge. No human observer can remove humanity from the observation (and to formulate theories as though this were possible leads to conclusions that are absurd because they overlook the existence and influence of humanity and the scientist's biases)². In John Calvin's Institutes of the Christian Religion, he affirmed that Scripture must be confirmed by the witness of the Spirit.
As such, I have reached the verdict that first and foremost, a person must possess faith (which is a gift from God) in order to believe in Jesus Christ as revealed in the Bible. This would then be the paradigm through which we interpret our empirical evidence to support the case for Christ and we continually affirm our faith by our experience in life and within the community (or the church and fellowship) that God has placed us in.

But if we were to accept that Jesus Christ is indeed the son of God and that we believe that it is through Him that we are reconciled back to God and have eternal life and it is in Him that we can grow fully in His image, how do we assess the validity of Jesus as being the liberator of the oppressed? Or Jesus as being the miracle worker?

We must be faithful to the testimony of the Scripture and the history of the Church in our proclamation of Jesus Christ. A faithful hermeneutics calls for the Scripture as illumined by the Holy Spirit to be the guide to lead us to an understanding of Jesus Christ. It is foolish if one was to ignore the Apostles' Creed, the Nicene Creed and the Chalcedon Creed which form the basis for us to comprehend Jesus Christ as both fully man and fully God, as one of the Trinity and in the encountering of the different heresies in the 1^st few centuries. Yet the application of the Scripture may yield different outcome in different context and in different community but all these demand that one should be trained in the exegesis of the text before one should commence teaching others about the same text.

In trying to concretize how I can imitate Jesus Christ, I would want to follow in His footsteps in identifying with the needs of others. To use Paul Tillich's term, Jesus Christ was able to participate in the existence of other beings. To further expand on this point, I shall extract from Paul Tillich's Communicating the Christian Message: A Question to Christian Ministers and Teachers.

But the Divine Being is not a being beside others. It is the power of being conquering non-being. It is eternity conquering temporality. It is grace conquering sin. It is ultimate reality conquering doubt. From the point of view of the New Being it is the ground of being, and therefore the creator of the New Being. And out of this ground we can get the courage to affirm being, even in a state of doubt, even in anxiety and despair. The New Being includes a new approach to God which is possible even to those who are under the despair of doubt and don't know the way out.

Not only is Jesus Christ the New Being, he identifies with the whole of the fallen humankind. In another extract, this time by
Huston Smith's The World's Religions:

How is the boundary of the self to be defined? Not, certainly, by the amount of physical space our bodies occupy, the amount of water we displace in the bathtub. It makes more sense to gauge our being by the size of our spirits, the range of reality with which they identify. A man who identifies with his family, finding his joys in theirs, would have that much reality; a woman who could identify with humankind would be that much, greater. By this criterion people who could identify with being as a whole would be unlimited.

By this measure, Jesus Christ has no boundary of the self and he has sacrificed Himself for the whole of humankind. This is a strong reminder for me to learn how to empathize with others and for me to learn to participate in the existence of other beings.
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludwig_Andreas_Feuerbach
2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Polanyi