Category Archives: Martin Luther

Unspoken Absolutes: What Lies Beneath All the Outrage

About 1,960 years ago, The Gospel of Matthew was penned, offering collections of the words and works of Jesus of Nazareth. Central to all the teachings presented are the Beatitudes found in Chapter 5. They constitute foundational dispositions and disciplines for followers of Jesus the Christ. One of these pithy and profound sayings is found in Matthew 5:9: “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God.” The “blessed” (happy, to be congratulated, under divine favor) actively pursue peace (concord, harmony, end of conflict, enemies becoming friends).

This peacemaking includes personal conflicts, peace among contentious groups, warring nations, and rival powers. Jesus was building on the Wisdom traditions of Israel calling the faithful to, “seek peace and pursue it.” (Psalm 34:14) and the Apostle Paul would highlight both the individual and relational facets of peace with God and among humankind (Romans 5:1; Galatians 5:22; Colossians 3:16). Jesus’s words have inspired intercultural and interracial harmony, as well as reconciliation movements throughout history. The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in the 1950s and 1960s, and President Nelson Mandela in the 1990s are examples of peacemakers bringing justice and calm to intense struggles.

In our contentious public square, peacemaking is needed more than ever. The agitation propaganda, apocalyptic hyperbole, outright anger, and egregious personal insults are not fostering concord and harmony! Why is it so hard for people of conscience to ignore the reactive emotionalism and forge principled compromises and offer proximate justice? The answers are complex, but we can unearth the unspoken absolutes that create the conditions of contention. Underneath all the “be a good person” and “we ae all one” and “be kind” sayings are pillars of post-modern anarchy and subjectivism that make consensus hard. Here are a few of these new “absolutes”

  • Knowledge is not objective, but subjective. Pursuing the truth of a matter is now replaced by “my truth.” Even the words, “fact(s)” and “objectivity” are considered oppressive and racist.
  • The human person is now a malleable creation of the autonomous self, not an identity to cultivate and refine as a human being who is male or female. Gender anarchy is a deliberate subversion of the divine image and everyone is now their own god, manufacturing new narratives of victimhood and pseudo-liberation. Of course, anyone affirming the commonsense view that all humankind is one race (with many ethnicities, of course) with binary female and male characteristics is ignorant at best and evil at worst.

These crises of knowledge (epistemology) and human identity (anthropology) make peacemaking quite challenging. Part of peaceful relations is living civilly with our deepest differences, desiring for all freedom of conscience and opportunity to flourish. But the purveyors of the aforementioned axioms purposefully cultivate conflict so they can rage against the machine forever, instead of offering principles and pathways for a preferred future.  There are two more unspoken absolutes that govern this grievance culture:

  • Morality is subjective and traditional religions are the enemy of human freedom. Marxist ideology aims for a “new person” free from economic and spiritual history with the state in control of every detail of life. One set of absolutes is now replaced with “liberation” through class struggle…and history tells us this is disastrous!
  • History must be shaped to promote political agendas, regardless of the tapestry of narratives and the beauty and brokenness of humankind in all cultures and all eras. “Presentism” is the fashionable ideology of making today’s wokeism the lens by which all people at all times are evaluated.

Is there a way forward? Yes! Peacemaking requires values and virtues shared by diverse groups. People of conscience and common sense must affirm that pursuing the truth is noble and possible. We must allow science to speak loudly about the DNA of human identity, without imposing cultural idols. We must affirm that there are moral standards we can agree on. And we must learn all historical narratives and allow them to inform our decisions. I pray we will find the courage and wisdom for peacemaking rooted in enduring principles.

The Hope of Christmas: The With-Us-God

The influence of Christianity and celebrations of winter solstice came together by the 5th century. From that moment to the present, Christians of every tradition have celebrated the Advent Season and Christmas as the dawn of hope, the moment where the Eternal stepped into time and God forever became one of us in Jesus of Nazareth.

For much of history, commemorations were solemn, with Advent, like its Spring counterpart Lent, understood as a time of prayer and sacrifice. With the work of St. Francis and others in the 13th century, Madonna and Child become iconic and celebrations begin, albeit in modest forms. Martin Luther commended lighting the Tannenbaum (Christmas tree), transforming a pagan ritual into a celebration of Jesus as the Light of the world.

The Victorian era is the source of most Western/global Christmas imagery and festivities and only in the late 19th and early 20th century has Christmas become the holiday we know and love today. Many devout Christians still resist this celebration, disliking the pagan influences and the excuse for excess.

The Hope of Christmas is the promise of salvation and peace through the coming of Jesus. This humble son of a carpenter is declared by angels and shepherds, aging prophets and faraway magi as King of the Jews and Savior of humankind. Songwriter Michael Card declares:

“Behold the mystery fantastic and wild; A Mother made by her own Child.”

Author G.K. Chesterton offers this as we ponder the Incarnation:

Gloria en Profundis

There has fallen on earth for a token
A god too great for the sky.
He has burst out of all things and broken
The bounds of eternity:
Into time and the terminal land
He has strayed like a thief or a lover,
For the wine of the world brims over,
Its splendour is split on the sand.

Who is proud when the heavens are humble,
Who mounts if the mountains fall,
If the fixed stars topple and tumble
And a deluge of love drowns all-
Who rears up his head for a crown,
Who holds up his will for a warrant,
Who strives with the starry torrent,
When all that is good goes down?

For in dread of such falling and failing
The fallen angels fell
Inverted in insolence, scaling
The hanging mountain of hell:
But unmeasured of plummet and rod
Too deep for their sight to scan,
Outrushing the fall of man
Is the height of the fall of God.

Glory to God in the Lowest
The spout of the stars in spate-
Where thunderbolt thinks to be slowest
And the lightning fears to be late:
As men dive for sunken gem
Pursuing, we hunt and hound it,
The fallen star has found it
In the cavern of Bethlehem.

The Biblical Story is not one of human ascent to the divine, but of divine longing and pursuit of our race of rebels. It is God that reaches out, God who searches, God who invites…and finally, God who comes in Jesus and makes the ultimate sacrifice for our eternal life. In the words of Linus, “That is what Christmas is all about, Charlie Brown.”