Break for Lent

I will be off Twitter and blogging for the duration of Lent. I hope that you all have a good Lenten season. I look forward to seeing you all at Easter time, hopefully with the first draft of a book on the theology of clothing completed!

How to be a Popular Blogger (by someone who isn’t)

Rachel Held Evans, one of the best conversation-starting bloggers out there, has posted on the subject of blog traffic and how to become a popular blogger. This is a subject that has interested me for some time, and I thought that I might post a few thoughts of my own on the subject.

I have been blogging on and off (generally on) since about 2003, and was following and engaging with blogs long before then. I have never had a huge following, nor have I courted one. However, I do have a very committed following: a significant number of my followers have been following me since I first began blogging. My daily hits are generally somewhere in the region of 200-1000.

I blog primarily as an aid to thinking through subjects – I think by writing down my thoughts – and secondarily to engage with my core audience. However, as I blog in several different styles, on numerous different subjects, it is interesting to observe the varying reactions to different posts. Sometimes a post will be spread widely on Facebook and Twitter and bring in a large audience for a few days, hardly any of whom stay to engage with future posts. Experience has taught me that it is easy to double my hits when I blog on particular subjects or in particular styles.

Watching other people’s blogs, and blogging myself, the following are the general things that I think mark out the most popular blogs from the rest of us:

1. Consistency, Predictability, and Reliability. The most popular bloggers blog regularly and consistently. It may not be daily, it might even be once a week, but you usually know when to expect something from them. The most popular bloggers also have a fairly clear and representative stance on a range of issues, and will generally fall down fairly clearly on one side or another of particular debates. In this way popular bloggers come to stand for particular positions in ongoing debates and discussions. Audiences like bloggers who are thought-provoking and stimulating, but who don’t throw them too many curve balls. If your audience feels betrayed by you, they won’t stick around.

The most popular bloggers also tend to show consistency in their post’s characteristics of style and length. Their blogs usually have a relatively well defined range of subject matter. People will read a particular blog for exegetical insight, another for observations about the life and character of the church and popular and relevant theological commentary, and yet another for deep theological commentary or creative writing. If you want a committed audience, it might be worth focusing your output, and not try to write about everything in the same place.

2. Engagement. The most popular bloggers engage with live issues, news, and debates that are widely relevant and topical. They make good use of social media to publicize their posts, often linking the same post three or four times. The most popular bloggers engage heavily with other popular bloggers and tend to publicize other people by having them as guests, or promoting their work. They encourage an engaged audience by posting things that are designed to spark conversation and facilitating that conversation with active comment sections. In other words, the most popular bloggers are people who are gifted conversation starters and formers, generous in making space for others, and not monologuers. They may not necessarily be the most stimulating voices in their own right, but the conversations that they create tend to be the liveliest. Most of the hits on a blog will come for the conversation that follows the post, not the post itself: one only needs to read the original post once, but the conversation constantly continues. Engagement is about creating a place for other people to say things, which generally means saying less yourself. It also means that, while responding to other people’s comments is great, the most popular bloggers tend to be fairly sparing on this front. They are trying to keep a good conversation going, not have the final or definitive word.

3. Emotion. This is perhaps the most important thing of all. The most popular bloggers write on subjects about which people feel strongly. They have an emotionally aroused readership. The primary criterion of sharing and engagement is the evoking of an elevated emotional response (sadness or contentment don’t really work in this regard). It doesn’t matter how much you make your readers think if you can’t make them feel. In my experience, by far the most popular and widely shared posts on my blogs have been the ones that provoke feelings of excited agreement (often coloured by moral or intellectual superiority – we never feel so right as when another party is so wrong), anger, a eureka moment, outrage, joy, shock, slam-dunk point-scoring over others, etc. In several cases, these have been posts of which I have been quite ashamed, more rants than careful and thoughtful responses, which leads to our next point…

The Pitfalls and Benefits of Popularity

Looking at these criteria for popularity, it seems to me that popularity has its dangers and pitfalls. The behaviours that bring popularity are not always the ones that will bring out the best in you as a thinker, a writer, and, most importantly, as a Christian. Seeking to be popular can lead you to conform to your principal audience, tickling their prejudices, failing to address issues that might polarize or alienate them, and losing integrity in the process. Seeking to be popular can lead you to focus on controversy and outrage in a manner that is reactive and unhelpful. Seeking to be popular can lead you to start conversations that are unedifying and fail to take a principled stand on certain issues in a way that would end conversations.

On the other hand, seeking to write a popular blog can encourage a generosity of spirit and speech, whereby you create space for other people to speak and to share. It can teach you self-control, learning when to be quiet or stop writing and leave words unsaid for the sake of others, resisting the urge to have the final word. It can teach you the art of conversation starting and hosting. Seeking to write a popular blog can make you a more engaged and receptive person, someone actively listening and responding to a range of valued interlocutors. It can make you more consistent and considered in your writing style. It can attune you to the issues about which people care and feel strongly.

The Importance of Knowing Why You are Blogging

I believe that much comes down to the question of why you are blogging in the first place. If engaging with a large audience and with issues that a wide readership cares about is a primary goal for you, then it is worth considering how to be more popular. If you believe that you can start conversations worth having, resist the pitfalls of popularity, edify many, and encourage mature engagement, popularity is worth pursuing. However, popularity is not necessarily a worthy end in itself. Much depends upon how you handle it.

If you blog primarily as an aid to your own thinking processes, or for a small and clearly defined core audience, seeking popularity would most likely hinder your chief aims, rather than help them. Consistency, predictability, and regularity can be constraining and unhelpful, and it may not be worth sacrificing the benefits of greater freedom in these areas for the sake of a larger audience.

The potential influence of your writing should also not be confused with the number of hits that you receive. Thought leadership is quite hierarchical. The most significant writers are often read only by a small readership. The most important minds in the world are usually people who are unknown to the general public, while public intellectuals can often be lightweights, lacking great influence within their own fields. Striving to reach an elite and very informed audience brings different benefits and popularity may not be the most meaningful sort of influence for you to strive for.

As this blog’s primary purpose is that of a thought tool, it is less oriented to a clearly defined audience, whether popular or elite, than many other blogs may be. Of course, I always have an audience – a highly valued one, not least because the audience’s engagement is one of the reasons why this blog helps me think certain issues through so well – in mind as I write, more or less the same audience as has been following me since I first started blogging. However, as my blog is primarily author or subject-driven, rather than audience-driven and having a clear sense of what I want to achieve through my blog, I feel freer to break the supposed ‘rules’, which almost invariably presume that popularity must be the goal of blogging. It ain’t necessarily so.

I would be interested to hear your thoughts on the subject of blogging. What are the key characteristics of your favourite blogs? What do you believe to be the keys to blogging popularity? If you blog, why do you blog? Is your blog primarily audience, author, or subject-driven? Or is it driven by something else?

A Better Gospel

In the comments following my previous post on the problems with a particular form of the evangelical gospel presentation, I was asked how I would go about presenting the gospel, and how I would capture some of the core gospel themes for which I argued in my conclusion. Given the importance of this question, I thought that it would be worth reposting and slightly expanding on my remarks here. The gospel should be at the heart of all that we are, do, and think as Christians, so getting it right must be of paramount importance for us. The following thoughts, which are presented in no particular order, are not a gospel presentation itself, but are some pointers to how we might best go about presenting it.

A Multi-faceted Gospel

First, I don’t think in terms of a single gospel presentation. The unity of the gospel does not reside in a particular presentation, logic, or formula, but in God’s gracious self-revealing saving work in Jesus Christ. The gospel is good news to us in innumerable different ways. Different aspects of the good news may be especially important for particular people or cultures at particular times. Rather than trying to force all people through one conveyor belt approach to presenting the gospel, I believe that we need to know the gospel inside out, so that we can improvise our presentation of it in a way that looks each person straight in the eyes, speaking God’s grace in Christ directly into their unique situation. Of course, this demands an intimate acquaintance with the gospel on our part and a profound reliance upon the guidance and work of the Holy Spirit as we bear witness to Christ to each person or context.

For certain people we might tell the gospel as the message of deliverance from the fear of death, loss, and failure and all that that entails. For others the gospel might be the message of a rescue from chaos, whether that is societal, personal, or cosmic. For others, the gospel might be less a message of rescue or deliverance, and more a message of transcendent beauty and joy and of the ultimate affirmation of the goodness of creation. For others, the gospel is the personal message of their value and place in the world and in the sight of God. For others, the gospel is the assurance of meaning and purpose in human life and action. For others, the gospel is the message of forgiveness for past sins, the overcoming of present ones, and deliverance from crippling personal and cultural guilt. For others, the gospel is the message of the liberation of the oppressed and the defeat of all tyrants. For others, the gospel is the message of the overcoming of all human divisions, the bringing together of all ethnicities, people groups, male and female, the generations, etc. The gospel is all of these things – and much more besides – for all of us, of course, but we may need to accent different dimensions of the message in particular times and places.

A Story, Not a Formula

Second, I would focus upon telling a story, rather than explaining some logic or formula. In the video in my previous post, much of the presentation consists of supposed logical demands of justice, which cannot actually be found on the pages of Scripture itself, and which are alien to much that is there. A logical system or a formula is akin to a mechanistic process that we go through. However, such a system cannot capture our hearts and imaginations. Rather than a system or formula, God has given us a drama, a drama which we are taken up within, a drama in which the script becomes embedded and embodied in us in Christ. Unlike a system or formula, this drama radically transforms us as subjects, in our identity, our agency, our subjectivity, and our actions. This drama makes us part of a body of actors in Christ, and reveals the whole creation to be God’s stage.

Most of the Bible is concerned with telling stories, stories within a great Story. Our world has lost its cohesion, its narratability, and all scatter to their private narratives. To this world, God has given a Word, a story, in which all of our disparate plots can become united, in one glorious dénouement. As we learn to tell the gospel as story, we will begin to recognize why the Gospels that God inspired are fundamentally stories. We will also start to appreciate the importance of Israel and the Old Testament within God’s story.

Restorative Justice

Third, God’s love for his creation, his determination not to let sin destroy it, and his commitment to restorative justice, setting to rights all that has gone wrong, would be central. Rather than a stress upon punitive justice, restorative justice would be the dominant theme. God’s justice is about wiping the tears from all eyes, about healing all harms, about repairing all breaches, and righting all wrongs.

God is faithful to his creation and to his people in covenant. The world wasn’t created in a neutral state, related to God purely in terms of absolute justice, but was created in an act of love and in a gracious relationship. Rather than bare and cold justice at the root, creation springs from divine love and gracious gift. God’s creation is one of peace and communion, of growth and fecundity, of joy and laughter, of blessing and provision. God’s justice is about restoring and perfecting this creation, about forming a creation so glorious that it bursts the humble seed casing of this present heavens and earth to burgeon and to bloom eternal.

The Place of Hell

Fourth, hell would have a very different place in the picture that I am suggesting. Rather than being the threat that frames the whole message of good news, hell would be entirely framed by the message of divine love and commitment to restoring creation. The possibility of eternal loss would be presented as something lying in far closer continuity with current dehumanizing patterns of life. In understanding hell, the focus would be on eternal loss as a consequence of rejection of God’s image in ourselves, others, and most particularly in Christ.

Hell would not be presented as being primarily about eternal ‘punishment’ inflicted by God upon the sinner, but about the natural consequences of our erasure of God’s image in ourselves and others. Punishment is an important part of the biblical picture, of course, but far more dominant is loss, separation, and fruitless regret. When hell is spoken of, it would have to be seen as bound up with God’s purpose to set the world to rights. Those who cling to wickedness and oppression and reject God’s good purpose in Christ risk the eternal consequences that result from spurning the source of all life and goodness.

The Perfection of the Creation, Not Just its Salvation

Fifth, God created a world that he desired to grow into the fullness of fellowship with himself. The world is created good, but immature and not yet perfect. The created world is like a toddler that needs to grow up into the fullness of adulthood. Sin throws this development off course and twists it. God’s purpose exceeds overcoming the effects of sin, being designed to bring the creation to its full stature and glory, and to flood it with his presence. This is a key dimension of the gospel message: a perfected and glorified new creation.

Christ at the Heart

Sixth, the purpose of God for creation is Christ. It is in Christ that we see the content of God’s will for us. It is in his communion with the Father, the loving faithfulness of his life, and the resurrection of his body that we see what God has in store for humanity and the creation. It is in Christ that we know the communion between God and the creation that was intended from the start. In presenting the gospel, Christ must always be in the absolute centre of our picture. Anything else is not the gospel.

A Gospel for Flesh and Blood

Seventh, in speaking of the problems of death and alienation, I would root these firmly in our physical existence. The alienation resulting from sin and death is an alienation between human persons, not just between God and the individual soul. It is an alienation that exists between us and our bodies. It is an alienation that exists between bodies. It is an alienation that exists between us and the creation. It is an alienation that is at work within the creation itself. It is not merely a matter of individual sins, but of evil systems and structures that oppress us. It is a matter of nations and powers, of ideologies and systems, of families and communities. Christ came to address all of these things. Christ came to save all of these things. A gospel that throws a lifebuoy to souls, but has nothing to say about the environment, racism, broken families, disabled bodies, wars, and famines is not a gospel that can really save me.

Humanity Made New

Eighth, God’s restoration of his image in man would be presented as integral to the gospel. Sanctification is not merely something that we do out of gratitude, or a work of God of secondary importance, but is integral to God’s purpose and our salvation. To be saved is to have God’s Law written on our hearts and to be conformed to his image. The good news of the gospel is that God has promised to accomplish and perfect this work in us, and that we can receive it by faith, and not as an autonomous work that we must accomplish for ourselves. When we see Christ, we will be like him. Are there many truths that are more exciting than that?

A God Who Welcomes Sinners

Ninth, people will only truly see their sin for what it is when they see Jesus Christ for who he is. Consequently, I would focus a lot less upon drawing people’s attention directly to their sin, and a lot more upon Christ as the Image of God, and the pattern of true humanity. I would present people with God’s overwhelming love, welcome, and salvation. Sin is revealed through this. As we enter into God’s light, we see ourselves for what we really are. However, within this way of presenting the gospel, our sins take on a very different aspect. Christ hasn’t come to condemn us, but to welcome us. As we are overwhelmed by God’s love and welcome, we will become increasingly aware of our sin as something holding us back and tying us down, and will long to be free of it, so that we can run to God with lighter feet. We do not need to feel condemned to bemoan our sin. We must teach a gospel of love and reconciliation, rather than one of condemnation and fear.

A God Who Makes All Things New!

Tenth, within the ‘gospel’ video in my previous post, the resurrection is merely a great miracle to prove that Jesus is God: ‘I rose from the dead to prove that I was God and that everything that I said was true.’ Everything focuses on the cross as a means of paying the price that means that we don’t go to hell. My approach to telling the gospel message would place the accent firmly upon the truth that Christ has risen from the dead, and is Lord of all. Christ’s death is not merely paying the punishment for our sins, but is the assumption of the full weight of death and alienation, so that it might be decisively and definitely overcome. The resurrection is the great victory. It is the exclamation mark of the gospel: ‘Christ is risen! Alleluia!’ It is the assurance and foretaste of God’s purposes for the whole creation. It is the promise that God will make all things new.

This, I believe, is truly good news.

What’s Wrong With The Evangelical Gospel?

Someone in my Twitter feed linked the video above earlier this evening.

Watching it, I was struck by two things. First, by how baldly and bluntly it presents the underlying narrative of the gospel message that is standard for many evangelical Christians. Second, how troubling, problematic, and flawed this message actually is when you look at it directly.

At the outset, I want to make clear that I regard myself as an evangelical. I have spent all of my life around evangelicals and it is among evangelicals that I believe that I belong. The supremacy and centrality of Jesus Christ, the final authority of God’s Word through the Scriptures, the necessity and efficacy of the atoning work of Christ at Calvary, the imperative of a life-transforming encounter with Jesus Christ, and the absolute gratuity of divine grace are not just truths that I hold, but are non-negotiable touchstones of my entire Christian consciousness. Consequently, in criticizing the video above, and the form of evangelical gospel messages that it represents, I am not seeking either to dismiss or to in any way diminish these core evangelical convictions. It is precisely on account of these convictions that I reject such an approach so strongly. The gospel is so much better, the gospel is so much bigger than this!

A comprehensive critique of the video would take some time. Rather than present such a critique, I would like to make a few brief points by way of criticism of it:

1. Gnostic Dualism

At the very heart of the message of the video lies a gnostic dualism, a dualism between physicality and the soul and the realm of its salvation. From the very outset the video makes clear that it is about the soul going to heaven and not going to hell. Heaven and hell are both treated as realities radically discontinuous with the current physical order, rather than being on a (punctuated) continuity with it. The soul – the ‘real you’ – must be distinguished from the body. The body can be disposed of by burying or by cremation, obviously a matter of complete unimportance as the body is utterly distinct from the soul. Salvation is about the incorporeal destiny of the incorporeal soul. Nothing about resurrection, a new heavens and a new earth, nothing about the way that sin and salvation are inextricable from the life and fate of the body and the physical universe. Nothing at all.

2. Justice vs. Love

The video presents us with an opposition between God’s justice and his love. Justice is presented in a purely punitive manner, as an obstacle to God’s love that must be overcome. The understanding of Law fits into this paradigm. The Law is not seen as a loving, but broken, covenant that God formed with his people, but as an eternal perfect standard of justice that must be met absolutely. The slightest infraction merits an eternity of torment. Justice determines the fundamental relationship that God bears with his creation, not love. Rather than God’s justice being inextricably connected with his loving commitment to his creation, justice comes first and then love comes on the scene as some extrinsic to it. Consequently, justice must be essentially punitive, rather than restorative.

3. The Nature of the Problem

It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the real problem or obstacle that must be overcome in this form of the gospel presentation is not our sin, but some logic of divine justice and holiness. Note, not the incompatibility of God’s holiness and our sin, but the incompatibility of our sin and some logic of divine holiness and justice. Let me explain what I mean. The ‘solution’ to the problem doesn’t really address the reality of sin and evil in human beings and the world at all, but only the legal consequences of human sinfulness. Now, while there are nuanced theological ways to present such a doctrine of justification that adequately avoid the charge of it being a legal fiction, I do not believe that this, or most standard evangelical gospel presentations for that matter, succeed on this front.

That we have some sense of the unsatisfactory nature of the proposed solution (and, by implication, of the entire framing of the problem), can be seen in our instinctive reservations concerning the ‘justice’ of a situation where the punishment and perfect record of one party can simply overwrite the actual sinfulness and guilt of another. Surely the notion that a judge could let a defendant guilty of murder go free on account of the actions of another innocent party in his stead is no less abhorrent to our sense of justice than the notion that a judge could simply forgive such a person. In other words, within this presentation it is as if the actual reality of sin is swept under the carpet of Christ, rather than truly and decisively being dealt with. Persons aren’t transformed save as an afterthought: the work of salvation focuses on bare legal statuses.

4. The ‘Bad News’

This message of the gospel is almost entirely framed in terms of the ‘bad news’, which in turn is framed almost entirely in terms of the legal demands of God’s justice, rather than the alienating reality of Sin. Almost a quarter of the video is devoted to arguing for the existence of Hell. Now, I believe in Hell, but the idea that it should be so fundamental to our presentation of the gospel does not seem biblical to me.

Part of the glory of the gospel is the superabundance of the gift of God, something that exceeds any mere solution to a ‘problem’. Divine love has erupted in our history in a manner that eclipses all of the questions and problems by which we might seek to put a measure to God’s gift. This overflowing excess of grace reveals that the problem of sin is also to be found in the way that this ‘problem’ might serve to frame and place a circumscription upon divine grace as its ‘solution’. Christ encompasses and swallows up our problems – they are lost within him, drowned in the flood of God’s goodness. Christ is never bounded by them as their solution. Indeed, our ‘problems’ only truly appear for what they are in the light of the gospel.

5. The ‘Good News’

The biggest problem with the good news is that it isn’t Jesus. Christ isn’t really the punch line of this gospel, just the one who makes it possible. The punch line of this gospel is that your incorporeal soul can go to heaven. And, given the fact that the ‘bad news’ provides the dominating frame for this message in practice ‘going to heaven’ really means little more than ‘not going to hell’. For this gospel, Jesus is amazing primarily because of all that he has done in saving our souls, not so much because he is God with us in human flesh.

6. Individualism

This ‘gospel’ is individualistic through and through. The church is merely a place where we can hear about how individual souls can be saved, not the new humanity in Christ, or temple of the Holy Spirit. Salvation is about the relationship between God and the individual soul. This gospel has little if anything to say about the restoration of relationships between human beings, about establishing justice and an order of peace. Salvation is something enjoyed by the individual soul in glorious detachment from others, not a new social reality (i.e. a relational and interpersonal reality) outside of us, which we enter into and which operates in and through us.

7. Sanctification

One of the problems with this presentation of the gospel is that sanctification becomes a sort of afterthought, rather than a central thrust of God’s saving work. As the key problem is a legal one, once we have the perfect record of Christ to take the place of our imperfect record, our record actually becomes rather unimportant. Although we are being transformed into the image of Christ, this part of the message is not central to the logic of the gospel, although it may dampen some of the instinctive sense of injustice surrounding the legal fiction that supposedly lies at its heart.

8. What we must do

The key action upon which this gospel hinges is the one in which we turn to God and ask for forgiveness and Christ’s perfect record, and surrender to God, who ‘deserves’ to be the central person in our lives. It is upon this action that salvation finally rests. The ‘gospel’ here is completely framed as the answer to ‘what must I do to be saved?’ The gospel is that God has provided a genuine answer to that question. This is in contrast to the biblical presentation of the gospel, which is not framed in terms of this question, but as the announcement of the once for all action of God in Christ. It is this once for all action upon which the biblical gospel hinges, not our response. Our response is essentially something that occurs in the wake of God’s once for all action.

Concluding Thoughts

There are several other things that I could address within the video, but I believe that I have presented some core criticisms above.

Watching this video, I was struck by how seriously we need to replace this popular formulaic gospel narrative with something so much richer and more biblical. We need an evangelical gospel message that does not undermine or undersell our convictions and our biblical instincts. We need an evangelical gospel message that leaves us dumbfounded by grace. We need an evangelical gospel message that leads to the profound transformation of our lives, communities, and world. We need an evangelical gospel message in which Christ is front and centre. We need an evangelical gospel message that captures the wonder of Christ’s body. We need an evangelical gospel message in which divine grace eclipses all of our problems. We need an evangelical gospel message that is all about astounding divine love in Christ, not impersonal divine logic.

We need to hear the message of a love that overcomes all death. We need to hear the story of a Father weeping with joy on the shoulders of his returned son. We need to be transfixed once again by the person of Christ. We need to hear a message dominated by joy and divine grace, not fear. We need to hear a gospel that is truly good news for the poor and oppressed. We need to hear of a Christ that is creating a new humanity, a new heavens and a new earth. We need to hear a gospel that is big enough to encompass the entire creation. We need to hear of a truth that breaks down all of the walls of our hearts and which drives us to share truly good news with others. We need to become the bearers and embodiment of a message that overwhelms us with God’s love, a message in which the identification of our sin is borne by the flood of God’s grace, in which our alienation is realized only in its overcoming.

We have such a gospel. We have a gospel in which we meet a Saviour in whom the overwhelming love of God is manifest in human flesh. We have a gospel that forms a new community and renews the face of the creation. We have a gospel that can free us from our guilt and our sin. We have a gospel that can free us to love one another and our world. We have a gospel in which we encounter and through which we come to share the very heart of God. My hope and prayer is that all of us would learn to live in this gospel, and how to speak it, not settling for anything less than what God has given to us.

I have written a follow-up post: A Better Gospel.

Eschatologically Weighted Ontology and the Fall

Maximus writes this section in a metaphysical idiom, but his argument helps fill out the importance of recognizing the eschatological aspiration that was inherent in Adam’s situation.  If Adam was fulfilled, perfected from the outset, then we are almost inevitably left with a “fortunate fall” paradigm.  If Adam were fully himself, all that he was going to be, from his first creation, but left that place of rest, then he needed the fall to attain his most precious possession.  But Genesis 1-2 indicates that Adam was created sinless but immature, a child who had to grow until he was ready to receive the privilege of the tree of knowledge.  He doesn’t fall from fulfilled humanness, or from perfected fellowship with God.  He sins and becomes estranged in childhood, before he has reached his rest.  The fall doesn’t initiate history, sequence, maturation; the fall makes the path of maturation more circuitous.

Read the whole post here.

Finding Joy in the Vapour

“Vapour of vapours,” says the Preacher; “vapour of vapours, all is vapour.”

Perhaps there are few more potent and fecund metaphors for human life, activity, and thought than that of vapour, breath, or mist. Life is like groping through a dense fog, which shrouds and veils reality, preventing us from seeing through to the heart of things. It is an experience of inscrutability: we can read neither the comings nor goings of being. We cannot neither grasp nor control it. It slips through our fingers, eluding all of our attempts at mastery. It is fleeting and ephemeral. It leaves no trace or mark of its passing, but passes into nothing. It produces no lasting fruit nor gain, and has no permanent effects. It is insubstantial, formed of nothing, and providing no bedrock for security against decay or change. Mankind’s attempts to fashion and understand the world for himself will always ultimately founder, as the unforgiving tide of time demolishes his kingdoms of sand.

It is this metaphor that lies at the heart of the book of Ecclesiastes: Ecclesiastes declares the ultimate futility of all of our attempts at building and figuring out the world for ourselves, comparing these to attempts at ‘shepherding the wind’. This is the character of life ‘under the sun’. God established a firmament, a veil between heaven and earth, and life lived beneath this veil is characterized by vapour.

Throughout the book of Ecclesiastes, Solomon is searching for some sort of ‘profit’ – some sort of lasting fruit or mark for his labours under the sun – but finds none. His attempts to find ‘profit’ through pleasure (2:1-11), wisdom (2:12-16) and work (2:17-23) all prove futile. Whatever he does will ultimately fall apart. None of our labours will have a lasting effect on the earth. The vaporous character of the worlds that man seeks to create for himself stand in marked contrast to the fixity and permanence of the world in which he finds himself (1:3-11). It is this contrast between permanence and ephemerality that manifests his activities as vapour. We might try to form and fill our own world, much as God formed and filled his world, but his will last, while ours will soon perish.

Some have read the message of Ecclesiastes as a dark and depressing expression of what the world looks like without God. I disagree with these readings. Ecclesiastes is founded upon a profoundly Christian vision of creation. The world that we live in is created out of nothing. It is held in existence by God’s Word and animated by his Spirit or breath. Our being is that of words carried on the wind, not of beings formed of some secure and self-existing ‘stuff’. Life within God’s world is lived out beneath a firmament, a veil that shrouds the realm of God’s presence. Beneath this firmament, human life, action, and thought are vaporous. To compound all of this, following the Fall, humankind labours under a curse, and the creation is subject to futility.

I find this message to be one of the most encouraging in the Bible. So much of our lives are characterized by the frustration of trying to master or grasp the vapour of our existence. Life becomes fraught with the failure of our attempts to shepherd the wind and gain leverage over our world and existence within it. Setting a Sisyphean task for ourselves, we condemn ourselves to constant defeat.

So what is the solution? When we take the true measure and account of our existence, and recognize ourselves as vapour (indeed, as vapour of vapours), we are no longer so tempted to live by sight. Fortunately, living by sight is not the only option. The person who trusts God’s Word and lives by his Spirit is living according to the deepest reality of God’s world: words on breath. The person who lives by faith is living according to one who does not live under the firmament, but is in heaven above the veil, above the vapour.

As we forfeit our attempts at mastery and absolute human providence, we can live according to God’s providence. No longer seeking for fixity and security in the creation itself, we can recognize the creation as a gift that can no more be grasped than our breath, but which constantly arrives as the divine bestowal of life. We can store up treasures with God in heaven, above the insubstantial and ephemeral realm of the vapour. Our human plans, knowledge, and actions may fail, but God’s word will always remain secure. The vapour will shift and disperse, with no trace of its departed presence, yet God never changes. We can never shepherd the winds, but God is the Spirit and makes the clouds his chariot.

As we seek security in God and his word by faith, rather than living by human sight and seeking security through our works, world, and wisdom, we are freed to adopt a different posture towards the creation. The message of Ecclesiastes is profoundly life-affirming. Since we cannot control or master life, we should live joyfully and thankfully, receiving it as a gift from God’s hand and trusting him for eternal ‘gain’. We should constantly allow ourselves to be ‘dispossessed’ of our world, to receive the vapour anew with open and non-grasping hands. This is the way of true wisdom and the path to genuine joy.

Lord, make me to know my end,
And what is the measure of my days,
That I may know how frail I am.
Indeed, You have made my days as handbreadths,
And my age is as nothing before You;
Certainly every man at his best state is but vapor.                  Selah
Surely every man walks about like a shadow;
Surely they busy themselves in vain;
He heaps up riches,
And does not know who will gather them.

And now, Lord, what do I wait for?
My hope is in You.
Deliver me from all my transgressions;
Do not make me the reproach of the foolish.
I was mute, I did not open my mouth,
Because it was You who did it.
Remove Your plague from me;
I am consumed by the blow of Your hand.
When with rebukes You correct man for iniquity,
You make his beauty melt away like a moth;
Surely every man is vapor.                                                      Selah

An Unromantic Thought for St Valentine’s Day

Although I may be untypical in this regard, as a single person, I have generally been very thankful for the fact that I do not have to participate in the yearly celebration of St Valentine’s Day (if and when I get into a relationship, please keep this to yourselves, OK?). I am thankful for the fact that I can steer clear of its clichéd and mawkish expressions and that I need have no dealings with its frequent sickly sentimentality. I am even more grateful for not having to undergo an annual wrestling with the prisoner’s dilemma in connection with it.

However, my main reason for feeling this way is due to my suspicion that St Valentine’s Day is in many respects an event that is primarily geared, not towards the celebration of a particular beloved person, but towards the celebration of Eros, one of the highest gods in our culture’s pantheon. As such it can often be about a self-reflexive and narcissistic (even though shared) love of being in love, rather than being about a unique individual that is loved by us.

This is how Eros becomes an idol, an idol to which we will sacrifice the wounded hearts of other persons. In order to fulfil its expectations of us and our desires for it, we will elevate it over everything else, ripping it apart from the rich and multi-layered fabric of shared lives to become a good that trumps all others and which justifies all sorts of crimes done in its name. It can involve an ‘unworlding’ of love, a losing of ourselves in the feeling of love and passion, divorced from the history and the world of a love that makes it so meaningful.

Eros can become a third party in a relationship, or its perverse superego. It commands that we ‘enjoy!’ and we can unwittingly become its oppressed slaves. As St Valentine’s Day is overly geared towards the celebration of Love, rather than our beloved, it can be this third party of Eros with its superego injunction that comes to dominate the day for us, rather than the other person. It is Eros and its expectations that we try to satisfy, rather than our partner.

In contrast to such a day that celebrates love, summoning up the emotion that Eros demands of us and emoting at our partners on cue, I believe that we should rather be seeking new ways to celebrate the particularity of our beloveds. Anniversaries and birthdays are far more suitable for this. They are about the person, not about the emotion, or the demands of undiluted enjoyment of love, romance, and sex that eros places upon us.

In many respects, this celebration of love on St Valentine’s Day can be similar to the way that we can celebrate ‘faith’ and ‘spirituality’ in a manner that obscures Jesus. Our worship can become about singing of our feelings towards Jesus to such an extent that we lose sight of him. It can be similar to the way that we celebrate the ‘feeling of community’ in a manner that is indifferent to the needs of our neighbours.

Thankfully, Christian worship need not be about whipping up emotions as a sort of ‘work’, but is a response to God’s gracious action towards us in Christ, occasioned by his own character as revealed to us. We celebrate the love of God every week in the Eucharist, and at key moments of the year we memorialize his past actions and the continuing reality of their presence in our lives as the people of God. By rooting our celebration firmly in God’s prior action and his person, we can resist the urge to make an idol of our faith, love, spirituality, or sense of God’s presence, and can rather fix our eyes upon the object of our faith and love, Jesus Christ.