Mitch Lewis

I recently wrote that the pulpit, the font and the table were essential to Christian worship space. I also like stained glass windows. Like music, art speaks to the non-rational parts of the human brain. As multi-faith worship spaces, recently constructed military chapels have rather generic stained glass. That's understandable, but I prefer something more concrete in dedicated Christian worship spaces.

What I want to see in a church's stained glass windows - or really, in any of its works of art - are pieces that depict scenes from the great Biblical drama.

Abstract designs that create a vague religious impression are often pretty, but I think they take the contemporary church in the wrong direction. In our post-modern culture, there are plenty of people who want to have religious feelings but are scandalized by the Bible's specificity.

Depictions of Biblical characters divorced from the context of the Biblical narrative also, in my opinion, fall short. Are these people to be worshiped? To be imitated? To be admired?

The focus, I think, should be on what God has done. Just as a mental exercise, I imagine commissioning twelve stained glass windows that together tell the story of God's salvation.

If you had to choose themes for twelve stained glass windows for a church's worship space, what would they be? Here's my list: six from the Old Testament and six from the New Testament.

1. God creates Adam and puts him in the garden. (Genesis 2:7-8)
2. Adam and Eve leave Eden (with the tree of life in the background). (Genesis 3:21-24)
3. Abraham and Isaac climb Mount Moriah. (Genesis 22:1-18)
4. Moses brings the tablets of the Law (with the Sea of Reeds in the background).
   (Exodus 31:18)
5. The prophet Nathan confronts David King. (2 Samuel 12:1-14)
6. Ezra and the returned exiles offer sacrifices in the restored Temple. (Ezra 8:35)
7. Jesus feeds 5000 who came for teaching and healing. (Luke 9:10-17)
8. Jesus eats the Last Supper with his disciples. (Luke 22:13-23)
9. Jesus dies on the cross. (Luke 23:26-49)
10. Women find the empty tomb. (Luke 24:1-9)
11. Peter baptizes Cornelius and his household (with signs of the Holy Spirit's presence).
    (Acts 10)
12. The Son of Man comes in glory to judge the world and reign over creation.
    (Matthew 25:31-32)

What 12 stained-glass windows would you want in your worship space?

I wish that all the pieces of my theology fit together seamlessly like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. When I gain an insight from the Bible or change my understanding of what a portion of the Bible means, I want to fit that understanding into the "big picture." How does my new insight fit into the rest of the pieces that I have assembled in my head?

Unfortunately, not everything fits neatly. I find gaps or overlaps in the picture. The pieces don't always fit where I think they should. I could take a hammer and pound the new piece into place, but I would wind up damaging something important in the process.

I think I expect too much.

Part of it is me. My little brain can't take it all in.

Part of it is the text itself. Some would have us see the Bible as one monolithic document; if we could only understand it correctly, the picture it would paint would be complete and internally consistent. But the Bible is not one document; it is a library. God has chosen to make himself known in a library of documents of varying genre, written in different ages for different purposes. (See God's Bookshelf)

Asking how to make the pieces to fit together seamlessly is like asking to where the pickle fits when you're building a bicycle.

There is a unity to the scriptures, but it is not the simple unity of pieces that fit together like parts of a machine. It's the kind of unity that an artist can perhaps appreciate more than an engineer.

And if we're going to use metaphors from the art world to understand God's self-revelation in the scriptures, we should probably think more along the lines of sculpture than of painting. That is, we should think in three dimensions, not two.

To understand a three-dimensional work of art, you have to look at from all sides. The same sculpture can look very different when you walk around it and change your point of view. Similarly, the various components of the canonical scriptures give us insight into God from a number of different perspectives. We need them all to get the whole picture.

Related follow-up: Rule of Faith

I subscribe to a form of Christianity that understands the Christian faith to to be a "revealed religion". In that, Christianity is distinguishable from those religions which are not founded on claims of divine self-disclosure, and from other "revealed religions" with quite different claims of revelation.

What do I mean by the phrase "revealed religion"?

In my first assignment as a chaplain, hundreds of Soldiers in Basic Training attended the weekly worship services and religious education classes I conducted. Many, if not most, came into the chapel with little or no Christian background. The first religious education class that I conducted for each new group of Soldiers always went something like this.

I asked a volunteer to stand behind a partition that divided the classroom. After the volunteers were separated from their peers, I instructed them to perform some action silently behind the screen. I then returned to the large group and asked what the volunteers were doing behind the screen. Some ventured a guess, and some of their suggestions were hilarious. Some said, "I don't know." Some asked if there was really anyone behind the screen. Perhaps I had sent them out the door.

Then I asked the volunteers to continue the activity but to step out from behind the screen. "Now," I asked the group, "who can tell me what the volunteer is doing? And how do you know?"

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Michael Bird at Euangelion points to a very interesting article  by Michael Holmes entitled "The Biblical Canon"  in the The Oxford Handbook of Early Christianity. The link leads to a Google Books version where the article can be found on pages 406-426.

Holmes distinguishes between 'scripture' (a sacred or inspired writing) and 'canon'. The word canon can have two meanings: 1) rule, norm, guide or  measure; 2) list, register or catalog. The Christian canon falls within the second definition ('list').

Is [the canon] 'a list of authoritative books' or 'an authoritative list of books?' In the former the emphasis is on the intrinsic authority of the books, whereas in the latter the focus is on the ascribed authority of the list.

The point is significant. Apart from Islam, Christianity and Judaism (and their offshoots), many religions have 'scriptures' but not 'canons' in the Christian sense of that word. There are various Buddhist canons of scripture, for example, and most are somewhat loosely defined. Holmes describes 'canon' in the Christian sense as a 'closed official list, incapable of alteration, that consciously both includes and excludes.' That is precisely what Christian canon became in the first centuries of Christianity.

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Speak to one another with psalms, hymns and spiritual songs. Sing and make music in your heart to the Lord, always giving thanks to God the Father for everything, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. Ephesians 5:19-20

How to Pray as a Christian

How can I learn to pray? Like many other evangelicals, I've given this advice: just pray whatever is on your mind. There is no right or wrong in prayer. We don't please God or earn his favor by saying the right formula (or feeling the right emotion or having the right spiritual experience) and God is certainly tough enough to handle our honesty in prayer. That's all true enough, but by itself this advice is somewhat misleading and unlikely to help one grow much in Christian prayer.

Christians pray with words. They may pray in other ways as well, but Christian prayer is basically verbal. For the most part, prayer in the Bible has to do with words and ideas. While there are instances of non-verbal prayer in the scriptures (e.g., glossolalia in 1 Corinthians 14:14-15), the passages which might refer to non-verbal practices in prayer are few and far between.

So when it comes time to pray, what do you say? The problem is not that we have too much wrong stuff to say to God; it's that we don't have much to say at all. In extemporaneous prayer, one can become lost in one's own emptiness and crushed by one's own shallowness.

Praying the scriptures is one antidote to the lack of direction in prayer. And within the scriptures, one section is stands out as the "prayer book of the Bible" - the book of Psalms. The Psalms are prayers. The proper response to the word of God in the Psalms is not just "what should I believe" but "what should I pray?"

What should I say, then, when I pray? The words of the Psalms are one answer to that question. Yet, when most Christians begin to pray the Psalms, they quickly come to Psalms that they know they cannot pray. It's easy to pray Psalm 23. It's much harder to pray the Psalms that claim innocence before God, that ask for the destruction of one's enemies, that cry out to God from a place of unparalleled suffering and so forth.

The secret to praying the Psalms is that you do not pray them alone. Only one man in all of history has been worthy to pray the Psalms. He lives and reigns at God's right hand and dwells in his people by the power of the Holy Spirit. When we pray the Psalms, we pray them with Jesus Christ.

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One approach to Biblical interpretation involves trajectories. As we look at the entire biblical text, what threads run from beginning to end and how do these themes develop over time? How do we see God's people move ever closer to God's intention as the story of the Bible unfolds?

With the issue of slavery, for example, we find the people of God coming on the stage of history in a world in which slavery is universally practiced. The people of God themselves practice slavery at first, but then fall into slavery in Egypt. God liberates them from bondage, changing their perception on slavery forever. The revealed law permits slavery (especially of non-Israelites), but limits it and controls it. Nevertheless, the people of God continue to exploit their neighbor's poverty and force the weak e them into slavery. The prophets denounce this, and God allows his people once to fall into bondage once again. And then once again, he liberates them. In the New Testament, we find Jesus proclaiming release to the captives with the words of the prophets. Christians adopt the word 'slave' for themselves and Paul teaches masters to treat slaves as brothers. Paul proclaims, in fact, that there is neither slave nor free in Christ. The arc of this trajectory, it is observed, ends naturally in the elimination of slavery altogether.

Applying that same principle of interpretation to sexual ethics, however, reveals something quite different. If the Bible's arc with regard to 'slavery' leads to ever greater freedom, the 'sexual ethic' arc leads to ever greater self-control and restraint.

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