I cannot get enough of it.  Theology.  I am willingly drowning in it.  I lose sleep over it.  I am sacrificing a great deal of money to learn more of it.  The “tolle lege” that rang in Augustine’s ear echoes in mine.  And the more I take up and read, the more intrigued, mystified, entranced I become.

This is not, as best as I can tell, pious boasting.  I am not intrigued with fanciful, populist platitudes easily emblazoned on mugs displayed among Christian bookshop trinkets (or easily chanted to signify piety amidst the pews).  The theology that has caught my eye and held it, that has seized me and to which I am now captive, is far from user-friendly.  The pleasure is more like the thrill from standing dangerously close to a precipice than the delight from a warm cup of tea on a cold day.  The  fascination is inspired not so much by some touching, sentimental scene but by the sight of of some swirling maelstrom tearing at the sea.

My captor is a theology of tender beauty but not without grim brutality.  Gospel Theology.  Theology that comprises the nailing of a naked Jew to a timber beam.  Theology that refuses to silence a raucous death-howl that—for St. Mark, at least—sounded like a demon in flight (Mk 15:37).  This theology also sings about holes exploded in sky and in stone, one a gash in the cosmic veil and the other a tomb now vacant.  Theologia Gloriae… et Crucis.

I am more textual than aural, but I listened to two audio clips this weekend: an excerpt from a lecture by Karl Barth on “Evangelical [read Gospel] Theology” and an interview of Lauren Winner about her new book Still.  The former a 20th c. theologian known for his incomparable sophistication in writing about the Cross and Empty Tomb, the latter a young 21st c. theologian writing about clutching onto something divine and holy in the midst of divorce and spiritual disillusionment.  Dogmatics and the daily grind of faith are inseparable.  Theology that cannot deal with the dull blankness of depression or the very real horrors of the night is a theology alien to Christian Scripture.  I write about this in my book:

[If the Gospel we preach] “cannot speak to Auschwitz, if it cannot speak to marauded villages in the eastern Congo, if it cannot speak in the ears of abducted children, if it cannot make sense to mothers digging for children in earthquake rubble, then it ought not send forth from polished pulpits in carpeted suburban sanctuaries” [1].

I am not trying to link Barth and Winner (and myself) together, necessarily.  I am just thinking about those sound clips along with my theological reading, thinking, praying, writing… and struggling.  Gospel Theology is theology that clings to the gasping breath of Christ Crucified (Mk 15:39) as well as to the recreating breath of Christ Resurrected (Jn 20:22).

This is the theology in which I am drowning.  Its mystery and strength intimidate and haunt me.  But only a theology so mysterious and strong encompasses ex-Eden reality and pre-Parousia hope.  The “Theos” of Gospel Theology is the only God who suffices for maelstroms at sea as well as those warm cups of tea.  Gospel Theology is about the “Theos” who hurled himself toward Death’s throat and then climbed out of the hole he exploded in Death’s bloated gut.

Tolle Lege.  Take up and read….

[1] Faith Without Illusions (Downs Grove, IL: IVP, 2011), 39.

I have mentioned before that I have a new book project underway, this time with Cascade Books.  The topic is media, so I am thinking a lot about how stories give shape to our lives.  When it comes to entertainment media, there are a lot of stories available.  Yet the story called to shape the life of the church is the sprawling, complex saga told by our Scriptures.  It is a story still unfolding—the denouement is on the horizon.

I get worried sometimes over which stories hold the greatest sway in the lives of my children.

We let them watch TV.  We let them watch movies.  We have a DVD case jammed full of flicks from Pixar and Dreamworks Animation.  They tell some really good stories.  We just finished “Family Movie Night”—the feature this evening in the Byers home was Disney’s Tangled.

My wife and I observed a momentous coming of age in our oldest son last year.  It was occasioned with the exchange of one epic story for another.  The sweet, nonviolent realm of the Island of Sodor faded before the glitter of stars in a galaxy far, far away.

The worst fate for the train characters in the Thomas the Tank Engine franchise was that someone got a little too cheeky or maybe a Diesel Engine was rude or maybe those Troublesome Trucks forced another derailing.  No matter the mayhem, though, the narrator could always say, “Luckily, no one was hurt.”

The same could not be said for Qui-Gon Jinn who my son would soon watch Darth Maul murder on Naboo.

Once a little boy has seen the glare of a light saber and heard the engines of the Millenium Falcon burst into hyperdrive, there is no going back to quaint land of Sodor.

I know what a powerful epic tale like Star Wars can do.  Such an expansive, well-crafted story ensnares our imaginations.  We are joyfully entrapped in its galactic setting.  We enfold ourselves as a character the author would surely have included had she the time and ink left before the publisher’s deadline.  Such tales grip us and become hermeneutical resources from which we draw as we interpret the world around us.

I teach my kids the Bible.  The context of the Shema (Deut. 6:4-9) looms large in my life.  After

“Hear O Israel, the LORD is our God, the LORD is one.  And you shall love the LORD your God with all of your heart and with all of your soul and with all of your might”

comes

“And these words, which I am commanding you today, shall be on your hearts.  And you shall teach them diligently to your children….

I wonder about how much time my children spend exposed to the storyworlds created by George Lucas or Hollywood’s best animators.  I can tell you they spend more time in front of a screen than they do reading their Bibles.

(So do most of the rest of us.)

But it is the story of Scripture that is to wield final sway, and the story by which we understand and appropriate all other stories.

So you can imagine my joy when I found what the photos show below.

My son, who just turned 7 (with a big Star Wars party where we made our own lightsabers and conducted an intensive Jedi-training course for his friends) had been reading the Jesus Storybook Bible by Sally Lloyd-Jones.  We alternate which Bible resources we use, but this morning my wife found that book opened to the page illustrating Roman soldiers gathering at Golgotha.  Positioned on the drawings were medieval and Roman era action figures, all pointing in the same direction from their platform on the book’s pages.  In front of them, facing the same direction, were Jedi action figures, all dressed in the characteristic plain garb (which sort of looks like the clothing popular in 1st century Palestine).  They were crying, our son explained.  And when you followed their somber gazes, you realized they were all affixed on Obi-wan Kenobi who was himself affixed to a makeshift cross-thing held up by the speeder he and Luke road in on Tatooine.  His Jedi cloak was on the ground, discarded by the Romans.  Something intended to replicate the crown-thorn was wrapped around the old Jedi’s head.

A beautiful instance of one story usurping another.

The standard comment from Sodor, “Luckily, no one was hurt,” cannot be said about the story of the Gospel either.

This is the day that Evil gets festive press.  Halloween caricatures Evil, dressing it up rather innocuously in ghostly face paint, plastic masks, fake fangs.  This is the day when it is okay to play-act as the terrifying mythical entities that, as we rationally explain to our kids, do not actually haunt the closet space.  This is the day when the numinous darkness takes a celebrated position on the pop-cultural stage.

I am not a Christian crusader against Halloween.  I do not endorse judgment houses as an alternative way to spend the evening.  I take my kids trick-or-treating and I have a blast doing it.  But my Halloween began with a distraught 6-year coming into my bedroom at 3:50 am—”Daddy, I had a bad dream.” I can comfort him with this: “The Gospel is violent.”

The Gospel is violent.

The Gospel is about salvation… but it is also about destruction.  It is the royal pronouncement in the dank, seething dark of a totalitarian state that an unexpected King from distant shores has just appeared in full force at the city gates.  Ring the bells, bang the drums, blast the trumpets: a new Lord has arrived on the scene of supernatural tyranny.  The Gospel is the siren-blaring, bell-clanging announcement that Jesus is here to shake his fist in the face of draconian forces feasting on the living corpses of humanity.  With his divine arrival comes not only saving but also destroying, for although “the Son of Man came to seek and save the lost” (Lk 19.10), he also came “to destroy the works of the devil” (1 Jn 3:8).

The Gospel’s etymology derives from military imagery.  Two armies are waging fierce battle over the hillside while the citizens wring their hands and pray for deliverance from the invading force.  And then, there on the horizon, someone makes out a moving shape, the shape of a man running from the scene of war.  This is the runner, the one come to announce the awaiting fate of those who have sent their husbands, fathers and sons bearing swords and clubs in service of their embattled king.  “Gospel” is the news through heaving breaths and trembling lips that their king has triumphed and that the enemies have been defeated.

The Gospel of Jesus is not about physical violence.  Gospel-violence is directed toward cosmic forces of Evil.  As we find in Ephesians 6:12, “we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.”  So wrestle not with other humans, but we do wrestle… and we do so violently.

The Gospel announces God’s gracious reign.  But this Kingdom is not coming into a vacuum.  The Gospel is violent because the reign of God is an assault on other reigns, the reigns of Disease, Death, Darkness and the Death.  When Jesus cries out at his death in a loud voice in Mark’s Gospel, readers will recall some sense of familiarity with other scenes earlier in the narrative.  This raucous death-howl was the pattern by which the demons fled.  Like Jesus, their departure was with the crying out of a loud voice.  Something terrible and mysterious—something cosmic and violent—is at work when Jesus dies on the cross beneath swirling darkness.

But whatever is going on behind the celestial curtain at the cross, we know that a closed up hole in the ground was burst open on the third day.  This is from my book Faith Without Illusions on the (violent!) Resurrection of Jesus—

When the Messiah vacates his tomb, something is stirring.  Something new and wild.  Something against the establishment.  Death‘s establishment.  At the voice of the resurrected Lord, the cosmic superstructure of evil detects a virus in the system.  A wrench has been tossed into sin’s machinery.  The foundations start to pop with fissures.  It’s time to plug up the leak, to contain the fire, to reseal any open tombs.  Time for chaos to panic.  Time for Satan to go beserk.  Resurrection is God shaking his clenched fist in death’s face. Resurrection is God whispering death threats in death’s ears.

The open tomb of Jesus is a hole in the system that cannot be patched.  The re-creating King has climbed up out of his grave.  He is out there, loose, at large, roaming free—and returning at dawn.  [1]

Halloween can serve as a reminder to my 6-year old that the images of Evil and death that he sees in storefronts or on other kids’ face—however plastic and silly and caricatured—are the images of a fading empire.  Jesus has come to de-fang the secretive, beastly dragon whose breath stinks with human carnage.  And one day, from the seat of a Throne, he will oversee that monster’s binding and eternal imprisonment as the everlasting King.

[1] Andrew Byers, Faith Without Illusions: Following Jesus as a Cynic-Saint (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2011), 210-22.

Karl Barth on the “reversing of roles” between us and Jesus on the cross that was such an unimaginable, inconceivable feat.  Read this slowly… soberly… yet also joyfully…

“…we may think of the darkness which we are told later came down at the hour of Jesus’ death (Mk 15.33), the rending of the veil of the temple (Mk 15.37), the earthquake which shook the rocks and opened the graves (Mt 27.51), as though—in anticipation of its own end—the cosmos had to register the strangeness of this event: the transformation of the accuser into the accused and the judge into the judged, the naming and handling of the Holy God  as one who is godless.” [1]

[1]  Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics; ed. G.W. Bromiley, T.F. Torrance (vol IV.1, The Doctrine of Reconciliation; tr. George W. Bromiley; London: T & T Clark International, 2004), 238-39.