To Call Darkness Home

To love is to know God precisely because God is love. The emerging community, at its best, can teach us again that love must be the first word on our lips and also the last, and that we must seek to incarnate the sacred word in the world. I recently heard a well-known speaker say that if faith does not cost us something, then it is nothing. Only much later could I respond: if faith does not cost us everything, then it is nothing. Orthodoxy as right belief will cost us little; indeed it will allow us to sit back with our Pharisaic doctrines, guarding the ‘truth’ with the purity of our interpretations. But orthodoxy, as believing in the right way, as bringing love to the world around us and within us…that will cost us everything. For to live by that sword, as we all know, is to die by it.

We can approach Christianity as a grounded faith, rooted firmly in the soil of the world. It is as we live fully in the world, taking full responsibility for our actions, that we demonstrate our faith.

In the Gospels according to Matthew and Mark we read of Christ crying out in agony, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ This is a profoundly personal, painful, and existential atheism. Not an atheism that arises from some rational reflection upon an absence of divinity but rather one that wells up from the trauma of personally experiencing that absence. It is not some precursor to the atheism of people like Richard Dawkins. It is not a comfortable theoretical rejection of the divine. Christ expresses a deeply felt loss, one that has more in common with the atheism we see expressed by Friederich Nietzsche. On the cross, Christ undergoes the deepest, most radical form of divine loss, one that is experienced.

… Christians are not called (merely) to believe in the Resurrection but rather are called to be the site where Resurrection takes place—the site where Christ’s presence is testified to in action.