The Best Prefix Ever
Uncovering Fatalistic Ideas in our Spiritual Journey
We’re neck-deep in our exploration of the Discipleship Dilemma. To know God better, we also need to know ourselves better. Yet modern Christianity often ignores or rejects this interdependence.
As a result, we may find ourselves stuck in our spiritual journey, frustrated, or deconstructing. This deconstruction is not always evident – people spend decades in Christian settings, slowly unwinding without realizing it.
While we wrestle with the Discipleship Dilemma and the need to take an inward journey, it’s essential that we identify significant, subtle ideas that may be working against us. If the path to greater interior freedom and abundance in Christ involves mining our own hearts, we should investigate what other outside pressures may dissuade us.
The Reductionist Gospel
I’ve proposed here and in other places that modern Christianity is often presented as a reduced shadow of itself. God is bigger, the Gospel is broader, and human beings, creation, and culture are far more extraordinary and important to Jesus and His grand narrative than what we’re often taught.
I’m not arguing against our fallenness. I am arguing that Jesus’s life and work have far more significant personal and cosmic implications than we often assume. And He delights in inviting us to play a pivotal role in His soul-captivating adventure.
If we live in a reduced idea system of Jesus and His kingdom, our necessary inward journey will be that much more difficult.
In many cases, modern Christianity’s primary aim seems to be to “get people saved.” Just yesterday, I visited with a friend who recently returned from a church leaders’ conference. One of the closing speakers strongly reminded the large group of pastors and church staff that their only real responsibility is to “reach the lost.” The Gospel (or at least the speaker’s version) is only for people who haven’t yet “accepted Jesus.” Virtually no attention was given to the ongoing spiritual formation of those who desire to apprentice with Jesus or are curious about heart formation.
Beyond accepting Jesus, the goal may be to educate and activate people who have prayed the requisite prayer.
These steps parallel the first three theoretical stages of discipleship outlined in the book The Critical Journey, which I’ve mentioned before. We’re introduced to God, learn more about Him, and then engage in various ministries and service opportunities, generally through a local congregation or a para-church ministry.
Introducing people to Jesus is a beautiful engagement, though we may want to carefully consider our end goal.
Is our core purpose to get people saved or to make disciples? Is the idea to ensure people have their ticket to heaven or that they’re increasingly and passionately involved in bringing heaven to earth?
Many church leaders have argued that one precludes the other—that we can’t have disciples without first making converts. Respectfully, I disagree. We’d have far more converts if we intended to make disciples.
There are several profound differences between helping people get to heaven and helping people fall increasingly in love with Jesus, be transformed, and transform the world around them. Let’s explore a few.
We will talk about “ideas” again, so let me repeat the definition: an idea is an assumption, conclusion, or principle in which our hearts are rooted but of which we’re generally unaware. For example, if you live in the West, you live in a set of ideas that includes concepts such as consent, individualism, and private rights as powerful, governing assumptions. We typically don’t think about them – we experience them. They are the air we breathe.
Ideas are among the most (if not the most) powerful forces on the planet. That’s why Jesus spent so much time uncovering and transforming them and invites us to do the same.
Plato is Alive and Well
Various televangelists, organizations, and movements have thrived on the idea that the world is inherently bad and thus something to be escaped from. This conclusion drives much of the Christian culture we experience today. This idea sits beneath the surface in countless sermons, teachings, songs, movies, stories, and strategies.
Numerous reasons for the widespread acceptance of this idea date back to at least Plato. He held that true freedom is found in escaping physical reality. The body is a prison for the soul, and there is constant tension between the two. The physical world is decaying and dying, so true freedom exists only in the spiritual.
Platonism is alive and well today and operates subtly within various Christian systems. Author Randy Alcorn calls this mix “Christoplatonism.”
Years ago, Jessica and I attended a church where the pastor gave the same evangelistic sermon each week for years. His goal was to get as many people into heaven as possible. His church wasn’t interested in making disciples (though they were interested in making evangelists) because the world was to be rejected and escaped.
One or two theological systems promote the assumption that the world is winding down, sometimes with spectacular violence. Therefore, the Christian life is best expressed as a rescue mission – we are to spread the word about Christ’s salvation to as many people as possible so that we might jettison off this rock through death and enjoy a somewhat nebulous spiritual plane of existence for eternity.
Played out to its logical end, this platonic, fatalistic idea has little to do with the ongoing transformation of the human heart, families, communities, creation, culture, and societies. Most of these are assumed to be irredeemable. If the body is inherently bad and the world impossibly rotten, what incentive do we have to do anything but save others, keep our heads down, and live as good a life as we can until we die or the world ends?
False Fractions
Suppose we look for a reasonable example of how this fatalistic assumption influences us. In that case, we can just ask ourselves how many large, flourishing Christian environmental organizations or movements we can name. None comes to mind.
For many, the idea of ruling, stewarding, and caring compassionately for the earth doesn’t even cross their minds. Why? Because we’ve existed in the idea that caring for the planet is somehow divorced from the Gospel, or that the earth is doomed anyhow.
This is a startlingly strange conclusion, considering that the first recorded words of God to humans are an invitation to co-rule and steward His beautiful planet. It’s somewhat baffling that followers of Jesus aren’t the first to protect and care for nature and the earth, even while we work together to steward it for human flourishing.
The consequences of this reduced idea are catastrophic—we forget that Jesus is, right now, putting all of His enemies under His feet and making all things new.
We assume that divisions exist where none do: secular/sacred, Christian/non-Christian, church/state, body/soul, physical/spiritual, Christian life/the rest of our lives. We somehow accept that Jesus really is reduced: He is just our “personal Lord and Savior,” and even that tends to mean He has just provided us a blissful off-ramp from an otherwise unrelated existence.
Examples of these false fractions abound. Consider the pastor who refuses to talk about politics from the pulpit, even while Jesus asserts His authority and rule over governments and powers. The leader is, unconsciously, training his church that Jesus has nothing to do with anything outside of the Bible and the building. Though it’s impossible to hold to a political position without an underlying theological one, we’ve been trained to think they can be separated.
Several years ago, I was attending a large evangelical conference, and the keynote speaker passionately told us that evangelism and getting people saved were all that mattered because the body was inherently evil and the physical world was wholly corrupt. That’s more Plato than Jesus.
I wonder how the risen Christ would respond, considering He was and is fully embodied. His book teaches that our final destination is not a disembodied spirit but rather our bodies and souls reunited forever (on this planet). That’s sort of the point of the final resurrection.
There’s a reason why death is so distasteful and often frightening to us – we aren’t meant to be split apart. Our invisible elements aren’t supposed to be yanked from our physical elements. We intuitively know that death is wrong and unnatural. We are integrated beings living in an integrated world.
Platonism and the Spiritual Journey
What does this have to do with the Discipleship Dilemma and the inner journey?
The primary point of the journey inward is to grow our capacity to love God, others, and ourselves. Our hearts become increasingly formed into the heart of Jesus. Slowly and patiently, we act, relate, speak, and love the way Jesus does.
We do this (in part) by authentically uncovering and wrestling with the bedrock ideas and desires that govern us, accepting that the journey is sometimes painful and challenging.
But if the point is simply to get saved, manage my sins, and wait until the ethereal plane, why bother going through all the trouble? If I don’t really believe that my anxieties can cease, my marriage can thrive, my family can heal, my enemies can be loved, my money can be managed, my people-pleasing can ease, my arrogance can be tempered, or my desire for unity can transform, why would I not just learn more about Jesus and avoid engaging in overtly lousy behavior?
There is a presupposition to the inward journey: the hope that the suffering will be worth it, so much so that our current lives and those around us might be transformed. Perhaps we might experience contentment regardless of our circumstances, joy amid illness, a conversational relationship with God that includes Him talking back routinely, and a peace that startles those around us. Perhaps our sophisticated anger might be transformed into relaxed, calm acceptance and joy. And maybe this ongoing personal transformation might spill out into groups, communities, societies, systems, and nations, even if it hurts.
But if the body is bad, the world is hopeless, and my life after a prayer of salvation is essentially a gap between then and a spiritual-only existence somewhere down the road, the inward journey seems like something to avoid, not embrace.
This may not be the inner conversation we frequently have with ourselves. We may not be conscious that we live in a set of ideas based on a reduced version of the Gospel. We may not be centering our lives around our spiritual formation because we weren’t aware that we should. It’s not that we are intentionally ignoring Jesus’ invitation to become deep disciples – it’s that our hearts weren’t given a compelling reason to do so. Our hearts were trained to avoid it.
The Secret Kingdom
A deep disciple sees and experiences the world very differently. She refuses to let Jesus and His good planet be reduced. God’s original project, the Garden of Eden, remains His central project. He will dwell with His people on His planet and rule it with them. He already does. That’s why one of the ways He refers to people who follow Him is temples – the dwelling places of God on earth.
Yes, we tried to rule His project ourselves and fouled it up. But God came back to might it right and take His stuff back.
As Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote:
“Earth’s crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God,
But only he who sees takes off his shoes;
The rest sit round and pluck blackberries.”
The assumption that all is being made right again, as painful and hard a process as that often is, invites and encourages us to take the inward journey. If mining my heart with Jesus and a trusted friend to uncover my story, talents, idiosyncracies, wounds, harmful patterns, joys, and offerings is a means to growing my capacity to love and transform the world around me, so be it! If the path to an abundant life, contentment amid constant change, and relational shrewdness involves discovering God in both His books and in my inner life, let’s dig in!
The “Re’s” Have It
A quick look at how Jesus and His kingdom are described makes it plain that He is putting things back together – not ripping them apart.
If you think of your favorite word that begins with “re,” it probably describes Jesus and His kingdom: reconcile, redeem, renew, repair, restore, resurrect, rejoice, return. Jesus and His apprentices work together to join what’s been separated, to re-integrate what’s been disintegrated. To make new what has been torn into pieces. Yes, this sometimes comes with relational and personal costs and even fractures. However, the driving desire is always for love, unity, and flourishing, hoping that temporary brokenness may result in permanent wholeness.
What sort of things are subject to the power of His prefix? All things. Not just our future eternal destiny. All things. All people, all of creation, all of culture.
Whereas reduced versions of His good news include fatalistic and platonic ideas, Jesus is neither.
The Marketing of Fear
Sometimes, we are easily persuaded into Christian fatalism and platonism because fear sells billions of dollars in advertising and marketing, whether inside or outside various Christian ecosystems.
You may have noticed that your favorite news network or website doesn’t spend most of its airtime sharing good, edifying stories from around the world. An obscene amount of news we take in is negative and fear-stoking, be it scandals, wars, corruption, or hyperbolic characterizations of leaders and celebrities we’ll never personally meet. There’s no money in good news, so almost none is reported. Our media experience is ridiculously skewed toward fear-based messages.
If we grew up in Christian systems based on Platonism and Fatalism, our hearts have been groomed in essentially the same fear-based system. We’re unconsciously taught to fear the body, fear the culture, fear creation, fear each other, fear the future, and fear God (and not in the healthy way we should fear Him).
Modern-day prophets hawk a whole lot of books and clicks. There are millions to be made selling fear.
Though we should remember that the most popular command in the Bible is “Don’t be afraid.”
Fear is an idea – an unconscious assumption that governs and powers us. It impacts the way we think, feel, relate, and operate in the world. It affects how we function in our four relationships: with God, with others, with ourselves, and with creation and culture.
It’s an idea that strongly dissuades us from taking the inward journey. Fear is fueled, in part, by a version of Christianity that refuses to acknowledge the cosmic impact of what Jesus already did and continues to do, in addition to securing our existence with Him.
As we explored last time, the inward journey is much easier if we allow our hearts to receive, experience, and embrace God’s unconditional love. That in itself can be difficult.
However, taking the journey is also greatly aided by hope – a hope that the awe-inspiring “re” descriptions of Jesus and His kingdom are alive and operating right now.
And that, as we grow deeper and deeper in our spiritual formation, our lives become increasingly characterized by the same “re” words. Without even thinking about it, we increasingly become reconcilers, restorers, renewers, and repairers…in all things.
