Christian Leaders Lead Bodily

The main task of being Christian leaders is to handle the truth, speak the truth, live in the truth, and follow the Truth (Jn. 14:6). Christian leaders should hate illusion and pseudo-comfort. Real leaders don’t live in denial and deny what is true. In The Conviction to Lead: 25 Principles for Leadership that Matters (Minneapolis: Bethany House, 2012), Albert Mohler notes:

The leader faces the facts, and this means that the facts must be determined and known. The leader must know the organization as it is, know its needs as they are, and face the world as it actually exists. The conscious denial of reality is a central danger of leadership, and the leader must defend against this temptation…The leader must be unafraid of data and facts, and he must surround himself with people who know the information he needs and will give it to him. (p. 61)

Unfortunately, I have met many Christian leaders who welcome illusion, enjoy pseudo-comfort, deny the world as it actually exists, and turn away people who know the information they need.

I despise and disgust positional leaders who are indeed losers. They are losers because they who are in leading positions are supposed to lead and empower others but they become their stumbling block. They are losers because they are supposed to be called to bless others but they neglect their callings and the callings of others. They are losers because their stubbornness, stupidity, and spiritual slothfulness minimize the (spiritual and physical) size of the body of Christ that is made up of different individuals who are entrusted with varieties of spiritual gifts to build up this body (Eph. 4:11-12).

The doctrine of incarnation is fleshy and messy. In the midst of messiness, we get a glimpse of God’s revelation. No one expects to find God’s revelation in bodily form. But all the fullness of his deity dwells bodily (Col. 2:9). The truth of incarnation exposes any human speculation of who God is and what he is supposed to be like. Whoever has seen the incarnate God has seen God the Father (Jn. 14:8-9). It destroys human fantasy. It deconstructs our construction of the Towel of Babel. We can’t reach up to God. On the contrary, he reaches down to us. He reveals himself to us as it is. It is what it is. To affirm what is is an incarnational thinking through which we may get a glimpse of God’s presence, revelation, and glory.

In Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places: A Conversation in Spiritual Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005), Eugene H. Peterson writes:

Popular forms of spirituality tend to avoid history, at least in its messier aspects, as subject matter and context for nurturing the soul…

History is bounded by birth and new birth, by the virgin birth of Jesus and the resurrection of Jesus—life, life, and more life. But between those two life-giving moments there is also death, death, and more death. When we are born we find ourselves in a world in which death and dying are major preoccupations; when we are born again it is still the same world. History consists of what happens in this world. History is the accounting we make of the human endeavor. More often than not it is an accounting of the mess we make of things: brutality, war, famine, hate, quarrelling, exploitation. History deals with what happens, what has happened, what is happening and what will happen. It means dealing with a world where things rarely turn out the way we think they should…Something is wrong here, dreadfully wrong. We feel it in our bones. The most conspicuous event in history that arouses within us this spontaneous sense of violation, of outrageous sacrilege, is the suffering and death of Jesus, a suffering and death in which eventually we will all find ourselves involved whether we like it or not. History. (pp. 133-134)

 
Christian leaders are historical, not ahistorical.

Christian leaders nurture the souls of others in bodily form.

The Enjoyment of God

“The good use the world that they may enjoy God; the wicked, on the contrary, wish to use God that they may enjoy the world,” said Saint Augustine.

The notion of the enjoyment of God is the end of the Christian living. God created us so that we can worship and enjoy Him in Christ through the fellowship of the Spirit. When we are able to enjoy the goodness of God in life, we place the creation in its rightful place in which we are mere stewards of God. We who enjoy God as the ultimate end are conscious of the fact that the world that God created cannot give us everlasting satisfaction. The world is a means to an end. The goal of Christian living is not to enjoy anything that is lesser than the Creator. The world itself is not the source of our happiness. True happiness comes from the Creator—the source of the world.

The wicked who wish to enjoy the world by using God deliberately choose the lesser god to worship. They are wicked because they worship the lesser god and give up the real source of happiness. The wicked choose the means by treating it as the end. They reverse the order of creation and devote themselves to this pattern of disorder. They then become what they worship: they are lesser than they were originally created in the beginning. They are wicked in this sense because they give up the goodness of God and allow the lesser gods to fill up their unfulfilled longings, which only God can satisfy.

For those who enjoy God as the end, they are found by God. Any knowledge of God is transformative. In order to find God, we are found by God. Once we are obtained by God, we are being gradually transformed into His likeness. Thus, the enjoyment of God is to know and be known by God. The knowledge of God ought to be a transforming power to savor our tastes to enjoy God. We enjoy God by knowing Him. Such an enjoyment will lead us to be like Him. Those who enjoy God as the end of being delightfully transformed into His likeness will never use God to enjoy the world, for they understand that the world can never give them such a delight in following, knowing, and being known by God.

For the good, the world is always a playground to enjoy God as the Creator, Provider, and Sustainer. The world is always the creation of God in which they live out the goal of their lives. In other words, apart from this world, the good cannot practice the enjoyment of God. However, while they are in the world, their enjoyment in God is far more superior to anything that the world can give.

Spiritual Theology

I am reading a few books at the same time. One of them is Eugene Peterson’s 翶翔的基督--畢德生談聖經靈修學 (校園, 2010) [Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places: A Conversation in Spiritual Theology (Eerdmans, 2005)]. I read the English version two years ago. When I am reading the Chinese version now, I get a different taste of the book.

I have been thinking about the subject Spiritual Theology. (Sometimes, I call it Biblical Spirituality.) I am fond of this subject. Perhaps, it has something to do with my realization of the great chasm between what we know about God and the way we live with what we know in Christian life. It is this chasm that drives me. I feel as if it were my vocation to fill up this gap in the life of the church. Sometimes I think about my work in ministry over the past five years. I tended to make most of my effort to shorten the distance between what we know and how we live out what we know. While I was in ministry, I didn’t think much, and I just did what I needed to do. Now when I recall, I realize that I was doing that kind of integrative work most of the time.

“The two terms, ‘spiritual’ and ‘theology,’ keep good company with one another. ‘Theology’ is the attention that we give to God, the effort we give to knowing God as revealed in the Holy Scriptures and in Jesus Christ. ‘Spiritual’ is the insistence that everything that God reveals of himself and his works is capable of being lived by ordinary men and women in their homes and workplaces. ‘Spiritual’ keeps ‘theology’ from degenerating into merely thinking and talking and writing about God at a distance. ‘Theology’ keeps ‘spiritual’ from becoming merely thinking and talking and writing about the feelings and thoughts one has about God.” (p. 5)

Spiritual Theology is about integration of theology and lived theology. Christ played with me in the Spirit through the congregation. On the one hand, I tried to integrate Christian theology into the life of the congregation. On the other hand, God has integrated me into Himself and His Word through the congregation. This is His surprising work in my life through pastoral ministry. I have been enriched by pastoral ministry. Such enrichment is shown through my understanding of the relationship between pastoral work and theological formation. I believe this is priceless, for I can’t learn it from school. I can only learn it through the church—a specific group of local people. The church is a tough place to live in. But it is indispensable for any Christians who want to grow towards maturity in Christ.

In God’s redemptive plan, the church plays a critical role in it. “To him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, forever and ever, Amen.” (Eph. 3:21) God’s glory shines forth in Christ as well as the body of Christ. The church, which is the extension of the incarnation of Christ, brings witness to the world through the person and the work of the Holy Spirit. God’s redemptive plan is that the world has been brought into restoration in Christ through Christ’s witnesses whom the Spirit empowers since the Day of Pentecost (Acts 2).