Robert Barron, the Strangest Way, Chapter 3Telford Work

Robert Barron, The Strangest Way, chapter 3Telford Work

“Realizing Your Life Is Not About You”February 3, 2004

“Strange, isn’t it?” (167). Well yes, it is. This book’s third chapter is especially strange. But study it closely and it turns out to be surprisingly familiar material.

Chapter 3’s main point is that the Christian faith is a big picture, a whole cosmic story in which each of us travels, rather than just billions of little personal stories added together. (This might take you back to Kallenberg's case for holism over individualism [Kallenberg 21].) Christian faith does not reduce to stories about ‘God and me’ or even ‘God and us.’ It is the story of the world in the context of God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. (Cf. McLaren in Kallenberg 71).

The story is strange – for three different reasons: first, because God is holy, meaning different and set apart from the creation; second, because we are sinful, meaning estranged from our Source, as well as each other and our own world; and third, because God is love, meaning compassionate and merciful not just to those like him but to the whole world. Please savor and protect this strangeness. Any theology that makes Christianity obvious gets it wrong, because our sinfulness and smallness have made God obscure. “The cross is foolishness to those who are perishing” (1 Cor. 1:18) – not because it is a myth, but because it makes us so uncomfortable.

The first reason explains the first path of finding the center; the second, the second path of knowing we are sinners. The third keeps the first two from devolving into Gnosticism, an ancient but still popular heresy that leaves the world out of God’s story and makes us imagine that “salvation is about us” (136). The biblical truth may come as a shock: “Your life is not about you, in a general sense, because it is related to the infinite mystery of God, but in a more pointed sense, because it is always about God’s missionary purposes” (118).

Mission is the point of reviewing O’Connor’s The Violent Bear It Away (123-136). God’s charge to us is to “go warn the children of God of the terrible speed of mercy” (133). This is not just about mercy to you, or even to me; it is about mercy to everyone and everything (139).

That mercy comes through Israel, Jesus, and the church, “the Israel of God” (Gal. 6:16).

The chapter is a great vehicle for transitioning from the themes of the lectures so far (creation, humanity, sin, and now Israel) to the ones that come next (Christ, Trinity, Church, salvation). After all, the overall dramatic structure of our course follows the Gospel of John. God, creation, humanity, sin, and Israel are the background that the Fourth Gospel takes for granted. John’s readers already know the setting. Jesus’ life is the twist in the story. It is both a natural extension of the story so far and a radical point of departure that casts everything in new light – his light – and draws them together into the story we know as Christian faith. Jesus does not leave any of God’s former work unaffected by his grace; “he addresses, not only particularly human problems such as violence, institutional oppression, and social marginalization, but also natural and cosmic ruptures such as blindness, deafness, and ultimately, death itself” (137).

Q: Have you or your churches made less than they should of Jesus’ mission to all people, all the world, and all the cosmos? Have you reduced Jesus to being only a “personal savior”?

How can we avoid slipping into Gnosticism? Barron lists practices for path three.

Discerning the will of God involves the seeking of greater understanding of who God is and what God is up to (145-151). Bernard Lonergan tells us to look in order to perceive details, to think in order to discover patterns and make connections, to judge the strength of our various insights, and finally to act on what we have found. The Church is equipped with the spiritual gifts and resources to make true discernment possible. Q: What role might your education play?

This call to act moves us to Barron’s next practice: works of mercy (151-158). These are nothing more than sharing in God’s mission to the world for the sake of Christ. They draw us outside ourselves and beyond the modern world that refuses to see itself as an object or means of Christ’s mission, and into the mind of Christ. A related practice is Christian nonviolence that follows Christ in refusing to retaliate in kind against violence, especially against fellow Christians (153-158). That basically means fighting with weapons of the Spirit rather than weapons of the flesh. Lee Camp will lead us further into this practice later in the course.

Finally, we remind ourselves of all we have already covered in this book and in this course, and all we will cover in the rest of our time together, when we gather to worship according to the Liturgy (158-162). In worship we act out the whole good news of God.

Q: Does anyone see resemblances to Kallenberg’s ways of gaining fluency? How about resemblances to the structure of this course?

Barron concludes by simply drawing together were he has taken us, through what we now see is a tour of discovering who God is, who we are, and how his life and ours play their parts in the Triune economy in which all is reconciled to all. I hope you find it as satisfying as I have.