Incarnation, by Will Willimon

Chapter 4

1. The Incarnation is not proved in complex thinking, but rather in faithful living as we attempt to embody in our earthly, human lives the divine mystery of the God who refused to be God without us.

- Why is incarnation more about embodiment than mere thinking?

2.We learned in Jesus that God is so completely loving, so determined to tabernacle and to have relationship with us, that God shows up often at the most inopportune moments and in the most unlikely places.  The Trinity is relentlessly determined to self-reveal.

- What is our motivation for limiting God’s reach in our lives?

3. There is no soul apart from the body, no Holy Spirit without the Incarnate Son, no resurrection without the body.  If Jesus had not taken on flesh, we would not have known that God is embodied.  We would not have known where to look for God in human history.  As for us, we are bodies groaning for redemption of our bodies (Rom. 8:22-23.)

- How might we interpret the truth of each sentence above?

4. The Incarnation also implies that truth is personal, embodied.  What is the Christian faith about?  It is about Jesus, the one who said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life.”  We do not worship principles, abstractions, propositions, or an ancient book.  We worship the man, Jesus.  His voice calls to us, seeking out his lost sheep, inviting us to his table.

- Who is Jesus to you?  How have you come to know & love him?

  

5. The humility of Christ reveals the divine precisely in its manner of being human. We are most human not in our heroic, Promethean achievements, our vaunted intellect, or our will to power; we are most human in our loving, humble, self-sacrificial service to others in need. Just like Jesus.

- Why is the degree of our humanity measured by outward rather than inward goals?

6. It is somewhat of a jolt...to find that Jesus grows, learns, and has ambiguous interactions with his parents.  Young Jesus asks questions, but he also answers them.  How sad that some Christians (like those who would never take the trouble to read a book on the Incarnation) think they do not need to grow and learn.

- What does it mean that even Jesus depends on learning curves?

7.  Most of the time, the church seems aloof from their lives and unaware of their need.  The Christian faith appears complicated, judgmental, and arcane.  God? A vague, remote enigma.  But on Christmas Eve, when a young lector pronounces, “The Word was made flesh and dwelt among us,” they understand that this is a word from God to them.  The truth about God is that God is for us.  Love moves the world, all the way down.  Our destiny is communion rather than oblivion.  Jesus Christ is God With Us.  This is the most important word Christians have to say to the world.  This, the grandeur of Incarnation.

- How has this book helped you to further understand and value Incarnation?

Incarnation, by Will Willimon

Chapter 3

1.  Quite early on, the church realized that to get Christ wrong is to get God wrong. It took us four centuries to find ideas commensurate with the reality of Incarnation. We tried simpler solutions but none of them worked.

- What do the ancient heresies of Adoptionism, Docetism, & Arianism have in common with today’s confusion over the Incarnation?

2. The Doctrine of the Incarnation is opposed to all theories that surmise Jesus as a mere theophany, a transitory appearance by God in human form, such as we often meet among the world’s religions.  Jesus is actually the full truth about God, God’s descent to us, because we could not progress up toward God.

- Why are some resistant to Jesus embodying the full truth about God?

3.  His own experience of the Incarnation led Paul to tell the struggling little band at Corinth that even in their difficulties they must not forget that “the world, life, death, things in the present, things in the future—everything belongs to you, but you belong to Christ, and Christ belongs to God” (1 Cor. 3:22). It’s a rather preposterous claim to make for the poor Corinthians—unless the Incarnation is true.

- How does Paul’s claim clarify our ultimate need of belonging?

4.  Look at, “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him won’t perish but will have eternal life.”  Sometimes the church acts as if what Jesus said was, “For God so loved me and my church friends who resemble me...” thus limiting the scope and salvation in Incarnation.

- Give some examples of when we do the latter.

5. Incarnation is an aspect of the Atonement, God’s setting right things between us and God.  Bethlehem and Golgotha are linked.  

In Jesus Christ, God said a divine, dramatic, loving yesto us; the God of the cross also said a resounding, decisive noto how we were living and to what we made of the world.  Christ loved us enough to become one with us as we are, but Christ loved us enough not to leave us as we are.  As the creed proclaims, he became incarnate, “for us and for our salvation,” not simply to affirm our humanity or to condone our continued sin. 

- In your own words, describe how Bethlehem & Golgotha are linked.

6. In the rhythm of the church’s worship, we experience Incarnation.  The pattern of prayer and praise that we follow on Sunday morning is a very human activity that takes place in earthly space and time.  We dare to believe that God uses these thoroughly human activities – bathing, eating, and drinking – to come very close to us in all of God’s holy otherness.

- How do the sacraments of Baptism & Eucharist shape our contextual relationship with this present, living God?

7.  I asked a distinguished new church planter what virtue he most admired in a potential new church planter.  “A robust theology of Incarnation,” he replied.  “Only someone who believes that God is relentlessly reaching out to save the world has the drive to birth a new church.”

- How does your understanding of Incarnation motivate you to reach out to others in the spirit of the gospel?

Incarnation, by Will Willimon

Chapter 2

1. We are forever saying that we want God to show up. “If only you would tear open the heavens and come down!” pleads the prophet (Isa. 64:1). We find ourselves in a mess and know that the mess is so great that no one could get us out but God. A consistent biblical claim is that God always shows up, not always when we demand, but shows up nevertheless.

- What examples can you share from your life where God showed up?

2.These days, the challenge of believing the Doctrine of Incarnation is not in believing that God might come. After all, we are such adorable creatures, we modern people. The challenge today is the same as it has always been in our reception of God: to receive God as God comes to us. The jolt is not so much that God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself; it’s that God was in Christ.

- Where have you bumped into difficulty receiving God in this way?

3. Perhaps last Sunday there was a respectable number at your church to worship God. But even a big crowd is still a minority of people in town. Most of these non-attenders are not hostile to the Christian faith; they just don’t get it. For them, Christmas is a holiday, a grand time to eat and to drink too much, to spend too much, and to travel too far. When Christians gather to sing, “Joy to the world, the Lord has come!” the majority of the world he came to save just doesn’t get it. The people “comprehend it not.”

- As Christians, what might our response be to this lack of response?

4. So if my exposition of the Incarnation is incomprehensible, relax; take heart. That’s a typical reaction to the Word Made Flesh. If, however, as strange as this word sounds, you hear an address to you, John says that you are a new creation; like Genesis 1–2 all over again, the light really does shine in the darkness for you. 

“Those who did welcome him, those who believed in his name, he authorized to become God’s children, born not from blood nor from human desire or passion, but born from God” (John 1:12). Furthermore, if you stick with these words, words that you cannot speak to yourself, they become the very source of your life: “If you continue in my word . . . you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free” (John 8:31 NRSV). These words proclaim God’s gracious solution to the problem between you and God: “You have already been cleansed by the word that I have spoken to you” (John 15:3 NRSV). You are a new creation. You carry God’s light with you in a dark world.

- How would you describe the “light” you bear?  Where does it shine?

5. I’ve seen the world try to turn a child into a grasping, materialistic, self-centered dolt, the embodiment of some people’s “American Dream,” only to watch God work through the church to transform that child into a caring, compassionate Christian. The world tried to overtake the Light of the World, and surprise, the world got overtaken!

- Share an example of this transformation in someone you know well.

6. As the Word spoken by the prophets, made manifest in the commandments, becomes flesh in Jesus Christ, the Word is then preached and given flesh and blood in the preaching, hearing, and active witness of the congregation. When you consider all of the possibilities against the faith, it’s amazing that so many—when faced with a strange, inexplicable wonder like Incarnation—comprehend the truth, believe, and bow before it. That you are taking the trouble to read this book about the Incarnation, that you are able to stand and sing at the Feast of the Nativity, “Hark! the herald angels sing, ‘Glory to the newborn King,’” is a virtual proof of the reality of Incarnation. Shine, Jesus shine.

- How have you seen the Word preached, heard, and witnessed among us at church and in our community?

- Why is this “power” so influential and transformational?

Incarnation, by Will Willimon

Chapter 1

1. Every religion offers to help us finite creatures climb up to or dig deep into the infinite. Only Christianity contends that the infinite descended, taking the form of our finitude—Incarnation. This book is the good news that we need not climb up to God; in Jesus Christ, God comes down to us. God is inaccessible to us not only because God reigns in highest heaven and we are down here in the muck and mire of earth. God is inaccessible not only to human sight but also to human reason. Incarnation is the counterintuitive, not-believed-by-nine-out-of-ten-Americans assertion that even though we could not avail ourselves of God, God lovingly became available. God condescended to be God With Us.

- How does Incarnation theology stack up against modern forms of self-designed spirituality?

2. Not that Jesus Christ—as the visible image of the invisible God—is obviously, self-evidently God. From the first, most people who encountered Jesus said not, “That Jew from Nazareth is God!” but instead, “That’s not the way God is supposed to look.” A word of warning: most of us have been indoctrinated into the modern, Western conviction that we already have the ability to think clearly about anything. We have all we require innately, on our own, to think clearly and truthfully about whatever we choose. Our democratic sensibilities are therefore offended by the thought that the meaning of God is a gift given to some, a phenomenon that we lack the innate skills to comprehend on our own. God must reveal the truth to us or we can’t know it.

- “Why isn’t Jesus Christ’s divinity more obvious?”

3. The Scriptures tell us the truth about Jesus, who is in turn the truth about God. If any of us limited creatures is able to comprehend, to believe, and in believing to stake our lives upon the one who was “the way, the truth, and the life” (John 14:6), that believing is also a miraculous work of God among us. Thus we, by the grace of God in our lives, become living testimony of the truth of Incarnation. 

Theologian Karl Barth said that if you are able to believe in the strange, wondrous birth, your belief is a miracle akin to the miraculous birth of Jesus.

- Why is our faith in Jesus described as a miracle?

4. However, in the Incarnation, God (as Gregory of Nazianzus put it) “remained what he was and took up what he was not.” God became human without diminishment of God’s divinity; God’s divinity thoroughly embraced our humanity. Thus, our reconciliation to God is affected not by something we do (as in Mormonism’s theology of human ascent) but by something that God has done and continues to do in Jesus Christ (God’s gracious descent).

- How do you get your head around this truth and how does it shape your relationship with Jesus?

5. Jesus was no disembodied spirit fluttering above human life. Clearly, he cared about real people who were caught in real, earthly, human binds—babies to be birthed, children to be raised, bills to be paid, and an upper room to be prepared. He gathered disciples and embraced the hungry multitudes. He healed the sick, cast out demons, and invited ordinary folk to walk with him. When he noted hunger, he offered bread. When the wine ran out, he made more. Rather than providing people an escape route out of this world, he intruded into the full, tragic human condition, modeling a new way of living in this world. You can almost taste the dust as he walks along Galilee’s roads. The Gospels speak of him not in the fashion of a “Once upon a time in a faraway land,” but rather by locating him in real time, such as “during the reign of Caesar Augustus,” and in real places like Bethlehem and Golgotha. He not only brought a message that was addressed to real people and their real-people problems; he also fully embodied that message in his life in this real world. He thereby showed us that his “kingdom” was no dreamy fantasy but a place to be lived in here and now.

- In what ways is Jesus most “real” to you on a daily basis?

6. Even as I attempt to describe the basics of Hegel’s panentheism, you may be thinking that you have previously encountered Hegelianism and didn’t know it. Much of what passes for “Creation Spirituality,” or “New Age Spirituality” these days is panentheism in new garb. If we are thinking about God, or matters of the spirit, there must be a way to think without recourse to the grubby particularities of earthly matters, so Hegelians of every age have argued. Religion progresses (or more accurately, recesses) into ever more vague platitudes, ever more distant from the death and decay of worldly existence.

- Where have you encountered such pantheism?  What tipped you off?

7. There is no veil we must lift and peek behind, no set of undiscovered sacred texts, no archaeological discovery yet to be made that can tell us more than God has graciously revealed to us about Christ. Of course, knowing about Christ—facts and figures, the stuff of human knowing—is not enough. Post-Resurrection, we “know” Christ as fully human and fully divine by a way of knowing that is more adventurous than most of what passes for knowledge in the modern world. Only faith can lead us to be able to declare with the whole church down through the ages, “God was reconciling the world to himself through Christ” (2 Cor. 5:19).

- How is faith able to surpass knowledge?  

- Why is it preferable to the latter?

8. Faith is the name for what happens when human reason encounters and submits to the nature and reality of God as God is self-disclosed in Jesus Christ. Fortunately for sincere seekers after God, the Incarnation demonstrates that we have a God who relentlessly self-discloses.

- What does this insightful statement say to you about your own relationship with God in Christ?

9.  An aloof, allegedly caring but inactive, spiritual, vague deity is perfectly designed for modern Western people who have been conditioned to organize the world around themselves. A self-fabricated “god” (that is, idol) is always easier to get along with than the true and living God who is considerably more than a figment of our imagination. The shear strangeness of the Doctrine of the Incarnation makes it difficult to say that here is an idea of God that we came up with on our own.

- How does this assessment speak truth to cultural trends of idolatry?

Incarnation: The Surprising Overlap of Heaven & Earth, by William Willimon

Incarnation

William Willimon

Meeting/Reading Schedule

October 10 – Chapter 1

October 17 – Chapter 2

October 24 – Chapter 3

October 31 – Chapter 4

November 7– No Class 

Creation: The Apple of God’s Eye

November 14 – Chapter 1

November 21 – Chapter 2

November 28 – No Class

December 5– No Class 

December 12 – Chapter 3

December 19 – Chapter 4

December 26 – No Class

January 2 –No Class

January 9 – Chapter 5

January 16 – Chapter 6

January 23 – Chapter 7

Trinity: The God We Don’t Know

January 30 – Chapter 1

February 2 – No Class

February 9 – Chapter 2

Paul, by N.T. Wright

Chapter 15

1. For Paul there was no question about the starting point. It was always Jesus: Jesus as the shocking fulfillment of Israel’s hopes; Jesus as the genuinely human being, the true “image”; Jesus the embodiment of Israel’s God—so that, without leaving Jewish monotheism, one would worship and invoke Jesus as Lord within, not alongside, the service of the “living and true God.” Jesus, the one for whose sake one would forsake all idols, all rival “lords.” Jesus, above all, who had come to his kingdom, the true lordship of the world, in the way that Paul’s friends who were starting to write the Jesus story at that time had emphasized: by dying under the weight of the world’s sin in order to break the power of the dark forces that had enslaved all humans, Israel included.

- In what ways is Jesus the starting point & goal for Christians today?

2.The point of being human, after all, was never simply to be a passive inhabitant of God’s world. As far as Paul was concerned, the point of being human was to be an image-bearer, to reflect God’s wisdom and order into the world and to reflect the praises of creation back to God. Humans were therefore made to stand at the threshold of heaven and earth—like an “image” in a temple, no less—and to be the conduit through which God’s life would come to earth and earth’s praises would rise to God. Here, then, is the point of Paul’s vision of human rescue and renewal (“salvation,” in traditional language): those who are grasped by grace in the gospel and who bear witness to that in their loyal belief in the One God, focused on Jesus, are not merely beneficiaries, recipients of God’s mercy; they are also agents. They are poems in which God is addressing his world, and, as poems are designed to do, they break open existing ways of looking at things and spark the mind to imagine a different way to be human.

- What does it mean to be God’s image-bearers, agents, and poems?

3. Paul directs us to think and act with the “mind of the Messiah.”

- Where are you invited and challenged to think/act in this way?

4. Paul invites us to calculate ourselves as being dead to sin and alive to God in the Messiah, Jesus...and to live accordingly, trusting in the resurrected life to come.

- How does this “calculation” shape your attitudes & expectations when faced with life’s challenges & disappointments?

5. Wright attributes Paul’s success to his sheer energy, his blunt way of telling it as he sees it, as well as many other personality traits.

- Which of Paul’s traits have most affected your faith & your life?

6. Paul’s letters and writings allowed the early churches to flourish and expand...creating a new sense of community, a new definition of family.

- How has Paul’s witness to complete inclusivity in Christ reshaped the Christian landscape of our day?

7. Paul ultimately lived and died in constant prayer.

- How does Paul’s life of prayer motivate us to do the same?

- Looking back over the past 15 weeks of reading, what will you take away from this remarkable book?

* Our next book will be, Incarnation, by William Willimon.  Since Pastor Mark is away on sabbatical in July, August & September, we will begin our new book on October 10at Panera Bread.

Paul, by N.T. Wright

Chapter 14

(This is our discussion for May 16!)
(See previous post below for May 9.)

1. Luke has constructed Acts in such a way that chapter 27, the great voyage and shipwreck, functions as a kind of parallel to the climax of his Gospel, which is obviously the trial and crucifixion of Jesus. That had been the moment when “the power of darkness” did its worst. This, now, is the moment when Paul has to face the worst that the powers can throw at him before he can arrive in Rome to announce Jesus as Lord. His rescue and his arrival in Rome thus have the character of “salvation,” a major theme of the chapter; in fact, Greek words related to “saving” occur seven times in quick succession. Luke seems to view the whole episode as a kind of dramatic enactment of the spiritual battle Paul described in Ephesians 6. It is always risky to jump too quickly to the view that Luke and Paul, being close friends and travel companions, must have held the same views on all subjects, but on this point, I think they would have been close. Nor will Luke have ignored the fact that the shipwreck, with the entire ship’s company in danger of drowning, was like a dramatic though distorted version of the crossing of the Red Sea—a Passover moment, a baptismal image in itself.

- How do these interpretations & parallels help you understand Paul?

2. Fortunately, the centurion has learned a deep respect, perhaps even affection, for his brilliant if bossy prisoner. (Perhaps it was moments like that that made Luke, in his writings, give centurions the benefit of the doubt.) In any case, he gives a different order: those who can swim should swim, and those who can’t should grab a plank and do their best. The ship, their home for the last few terrifying weeks, is falling apart under the battering of the waves. Two hundred and seventy-six frightened men—merchants, businessmen, ship owners, soldiers, apostles, sailors, slaves, and prisoners alike, in the sudden egalitarianism of emergency—gasp and splash their way to shore. There is no distinction: all are soaked, scared, freezing, and exhausted. Rank and wealth mean nothing as they crawl or stagger onto dry land. But the trial by water is over. All have been saved.

- Imagine what it must have been like to be a passenger upon this ship. 

- How would you have reacted to your survival in this extreme manner?

3. The book of Acts has focused, up to this point, on the way Paul was perceived in Jerusalem and on the charges that were brought against him in relation to undermining the Torah and defiling the Temple. These were, in other words, charges of radical disloyalty to the Jewish world and its ancestral heritage, charges that of course Paul rebutted in both his letters and the various legal hearings. But there was a large synagogue community in Rome. Having returned from the banishment under Claudius, this community might well have been sensitive about someone who might look outwardly as if he spoke for the Jewish people but who might actually be undermining their ancient culture and threatening their national security. Their question would have been one that resonates to this day: Was Paul really a loyal Jew?

- Based on your observations, how would you answer this question?

4. Paul waited two years, under house arrest, for his case to come before the emperor. A strange Jewish prisoner would not have rated highly on Nero’s list of priorities. Paul was, however, free to welcome people to his quarters and to go on making the royal announcement, the true “gospel” of which the imperial “good news” was, as he believed, simply a parody. Nobody stopped him; he told anybody and everybody who would listen that the One God of Israel was the world’s true king and that he had installed his son Jesus, Israel’s Messiah, as Lord of the world. Paul taught, says Luke, “with all boldness.”15 We are not surprised; “boldness” had been the keynote of Paul’s self-description, even in the tense and contested atmosphere of 2 Corinthians 3 when the “boldness” of his apostolic proclamation had been a major theme. He had never tried to hide things. He never tried to curry favor. (Here is, no doubt, one root of what comes across in the account of the voyage as bossiness and interfering; Paul was used to saying what he thought.) He was much more afraid of not being true to the gospel than of any consequences a “bold” proclamation might have had. He was loyal to Israel’s traditions as he had seen them rushing together in the Messiah. He was loyal, ultimately, to the Messiah himself, faithful to the one who had himself been faithful to the point of death. 

- Paul was sustained by his unflappable faith during this two-year period of house arrest.  

- What has sustained you during long periods of waiting and watching for God’s deliverance?

5. So, as with Paul’s putative trip to Spain, I have become more open to the possibility of a return visit to the East after an initial hearing in Rome. The problem might then be that these two, Spain and the East, might seem to cancel one another out. If Paul was to be back in Rome by the time of Nero’s persecution, facing additional hearings in difficult circumstances, two years would hardly be enough for the relevant trips, both west and east. But perhaps that is the point. Perhaps the persecution would not need any legal trappings. The emperor had laid the blame for the fire on the Christians, and that would be enough. Perhaps, then, one or both trips might after all be feasible; Paul might have been away either in the East or in the West when Nero was rounding up the Christians. Perhaps Paul came back sometime after 64 to find that it was all over, but that the social mood had changed and that, citizen or not, appealing to Caesar or not, he was straightforwardly on trial as a dangerous troublemaker. Perhaps. Paul had to live with a good many “perhaps” clauses in his life. Maybe it is fitting that his biographers should do so as well.

- Where does this shroud of ambiguity surrounding Paul leave us?

- Do you have a sense of direction here?