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Bearing the Image of God

The Spiritual Act of Naming: Truth Telling in Writing (Writing As a Spiritual Discipline Series)

sapling photoHeather Walker Peterson continues our new series, Writing As a Spiritual Discipline. See the first piece in the series here, and see other work by Heather here. 


Telling the truth is a task entrusted to Adam as he names the animals; it is a responsibility of redeemed humankind which has been told the truth about itself in Jesus. Oliver O’Donovan

My desire to write comes from an experience of reading. I read a transforming word. As I am transformed, I wish to influence transformation in a confusing and unjust world. Ethicist Oliver O’Donovan writes in Resurrection and Moral Order that Christ’s coming restored us to Adam’s place as a namer of reality: a truth teller. This calling as writers is an act of creativity, love, and dependency.

Creativity

Truth telling, O’Donovan tells me, is creative because I participate in God’s created order. I am given the authority to name, to interpret the state of affairs that surround me. As a truth teller, I find that situations are not simplistic. I am not scared of the nuanced or even ambiguous because in O’Donovan’s words, God’s law “is as complex and pluriform as the created order itself, which it reflects.” Within myself, I also recognize creativity. I feel inward hands as I write, reaching out, picking up one object, setting it down, until they grasp, with a moment of relief, the object that makes a convincing metaphor for my audience.

Love

Love, according to O’Donovan, is my response to the creative freedom that God gives me to name reality. Without love in my words, I am “a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal” (1 Cor. 13:1). O’Donovan’s description of love includes delight—in my slight paraphrase: we love others for who they are and that they exist. I think of Anne Lamott’s compassionate images of annoying people in her book Traveling Mercies, like the fundamentalist on the plane whom she had a laugh with after a turbulent ride.

Dependency

But in my desire for the world to be a better place, I am tempted to control with my words. Or in my weakness, I flat out miss something I should have taken into consideration. As a writer, I am limited by time and context, some years later, revising what I said before or wishing I could.

This is where Christ’s departure from his disciples is our gift—the Holy Spirit. I am challenged to take a posture of listening. I listen to his Holy Spirit through Scripture and through the general revelation of his creation—whether the witness of the natural world or the stories of individual members of humanity.

Ultimately, O’Donovan writes that in my truth telling I will experience “exclusion” as Christ did, to the point of death on the cross. It may be simple. A writing friend dared to question a message of another writer and was blocked from her Twitter account. When something like this happens, may we remember that our first love was the One who gave us the creative freedom and love of others to truth tell in the first place.

Questions

What are you called to name in your writing?

Where do you recognize Christ’s gift of creative freedom, his heart for love, and your need for dependence in your truth telling?

What tempts you from your first love of Christ in your truth telling?

Prayer: God you know our inward fears, weaknesses, and our callings. Won’t you give us the courage to face ambiguity, to look for nuancing? Help us with being intentional in our listening—whether time in prayer or in stopping our mouths or our fingers at the keyboard to hear others. Amen.

Image courtesy of kaboompics at Pixabay.com

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James K.A. Smith on “Liturgical Discipleship”

James K.A. Smith, professor of philosophy at Calvin College, addresses quetions regarding Liturgical Discipleship: Worship as the Center of Spiritual Formation. Moderator: Joel Scandrett, Director of the Robert E. Webber Center.

Discipleship, becoming Christ-like, empowered by the Spirit to image God to the world is not magic. Nor is it merely intellectual. It’s a matter of re-forming our loves, re-narrativing our identities, re-habituating our virtue. And that is centered in the practices of the people of God gathered by the Spirit around Christ’s Word and the table.

Love takes practice. Worship is our gymnasium. . . .

— Conclusion to James K.A. Smith’s presentation Liturgical Discipleship: Worship as the Center of Spiritual Formation at the 2014 Ancient Evangelical Future Conference (Theme: As We Worship, So We Believe: How Christian Worship Forms Christian Faith).

The 2014 Ancient Evangelical Future Conference, hosted by the Robert E. Webber Center at Trinity School for Ministry (Ambridge, PA), was a significant opportunity to

  • wrestle with As We Worship, So We Believe: How Christian Worship Forms Christian Faith – personally and with respect to the various communities with which I am connected
  • explore the development of A Theology for Higher Education for ESN
  • expand/deepen the Emerging Scholars Network (and our budding partnerships)
  • envision more of the framing of ESN’s Devotionals for/by Academics.

James K.A. Smith’s presentation on Liturgical Discipleship: Worship as the Center of Spiritual Formation (Youtube, ~ 1 hour) struck a deep chord and I am still giving it prayerful consideration. I encourage you to meditate upon it in preparation for the Lord’s Day. To God be the glory!

A few questions . . . [Read more…] about James K.A. Smith on “Liturgical Discipleship”

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Devotions: Bearing the Image of God (4)

“Just as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we shall also bear the image of the man of heaven” (1 Corinthians 15:49). The goal of a redeemed image of God in humans is complete and final restoration into the image of Christ. In Jesus as the “second Adam” we see human likeness to God as it was intended to be (1 Corinthians 15:45). Those “in Christ” therefore, are chosen by God to be “conformed to the image of his son” (Romans 8:29) so that, “when he appears we shall be like him” (1 John 3:2). This is not only awesome theology but an earth-transforming goal of redeemed work and effort.

Mosaic of Christ Pantocrator, from Art in the Christian Tradition, a project of the Vanderbilt Divinity Library, Nashville, TN. http://diglib.library.vanderbilt.edu/act-imagelink.pl?RC=54414 (retrieved May 31, 2014). Original source: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Christus_Ravenna_Mosaic.jpg.

There are many Christians who believe that we will live in a “new earth” during what is called Christ’s Millennial reign (cf. Revelation 20). We will have a thousand years of Satan’s corrosive work chained, of seeing the Good News of the gospel flourish and “the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the LORD as the waters cover the sea” (Isaiah 11:9). Whether this promise is symbolic or not, it gives great hope for the Christian bearing the image of God. Our labor is not only not in vain, but will redound to the glory of God. [Read more…] about Devotions: Bearing the Image of God (4)

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Devotions: Bearing the Image of God (3)

Walk in the Light, from Art in the Christian Tradition, a project of the Vanderbilt Divinity Library, Nashville, TN. http://diglib.library.vanderbilt.edu/act-imagelink.pl?RC=55796 (retrieved April 11, 2014). Original source: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Walk_in_the_lIght.JPG.

The Scriptures tell us that as Christians we have a new nature that is “being renewed in knowledge after the image of its creator” (Colossians 3:10). And Paul points out in 2 Corinthians 3:18 we are progressively being transformed into the “same image,” or as The Message puts it, “our lives gradually becoming brighter and more beautiful as God enters our lives and we become like him.” Redemption is not just deliverance from eternal destruction or merely moral reformation. It involves a re-orientation of our thoughts, assumptions, presuppositions, conclusions and the way we see and work with creation. [Read more…] about Devotions: Bearing the Image of God (3)

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Devotions: Bearing the Image of God (2)

Blake, William, 1757-1827. The Temptation and Fall of Eve (Illustration for Paradise Lost, by John Milton), from Art in the Christian Tradition, a project of the Vanderbilt Divinity Library, Nashville, TN. http://diglib.library.vanderbilt.edu/act-imagelink.pl?RC=50212 (retrieved April 7, 2014). Original source: http://www.mfa.org/.

Genesis 3 tells the tragic story of the famous (or infamous) fall of the first humans into sin and corruption. Because of a choice that took them out of their assigned place in creation, under God but like God, their insistence on being “gods” distorted the image of God in them. Instead of derivative, yet creative knowledge, they disobeyed their “prime directive.” The penalty was not merely final physical death, but painful, hard-won work, struggling with creation instead of working with God’s created order. Their created image was not destroyed, but it was marred and distorted. James 3:9 affirms that humans are still “made in the likeness of God.” What have been the consequences of a distorted, yet not lost, image of God? [Read more…] about Devotions: Bearing the Image of God (2)

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