锁国的代价

那些回避贸易的国家最终都停滞不前或逐渐衰败。1991年苏联解体以后，我向白宫请假，前去参观俄罗斯的圣彼得堡。在信步穿过艾尔米塔什博物馆破败不堪的大厅时，我意识到该国的问题不是无法跟上20世纪80年代美国不断提高的生活水平，而是没能跟上1917年俄国的生活水平。在菲德尔·卡斯特罗于1959年发动革命之前，古巴人均国内生产总值几乎排在拉丁美洲国家之首。在随后几十年的时间里，古巴经济下滑到拉丁美洲国家末尾，卡斯特罗的支持者们或许将这种下滑归咎于美国政府的贸易禁运政策。但这恰恰说明了我的观点：断绝贸易的国家（无论是主动的还是被动的）最多只能是停滞不前。总体来说，自1959年以来，拉丁美洲国家的生活水平翻了一番，但古巴的人均国内生产总值几乎原地踏步。如果你看到一些照片中瘦骨嶙峋的农民艰难地推着1956年的老式雪佛兰Bel Airs汽车，你就会明白谁应当为这种经济停滞负责。现在，美国开始解除贸易禁令，因此我们可以期待一个经济更加繁荣的古巴。

19世纪伊始，当令人恐怖的德川幕府统治者看到英国和葡萄牙商人乘坐着黑烟滚滚的燃煤商船驶进他们的港口时，他们感到惊讶、好奇和恐慌。日本统治者闭关锁国数百年，但他们当即意识到自己国家的经济和军事都受到了阻滞。

我们可以比较一下那些在20世纪八九十年代选择完全不同道路的国家。每一组中的前一个国家选择了面向全球开放的道路，后一个国家选择了故步自封：越南和缅甸、孟加拉国和巴基斯坦、哥斯达黎加和洪都拉斯。一般说来，选择开放的国家在80年代的年均增长速度是3.5%，在90年代的增长速度是5%。而选择闭关锁国的国家在80年代的增长速度只有0.8%，在90年代的增长速度是1.4%。随着时间的推移，当一个国家故步自封、闭关锁国时，其经济发展会变得年迈无力、衰败不堪，更像是一个通风不畅的动物养殖场，或者像一座潮湿阴冷的监狱。

1953年，朝鲜战争结束之后，北方比南方略微富有一些。日本人曾在三八线以北建过工厂，并且在20世纪五六十年代，苏联、中国、波兰，甚至阿尔巴尼亚都曾向朝鲜运送过大量援助物资。尽管得到过这么多社会主义国家的援助，今天的韩国却比朝鲜富裕17倍，韩国人的寿命比朝鲜人长10年，身高也高几英寸。韩国人称其为“汉江奇迹”。韩国现在制造出了超清三星平板电视、超智能化LG冰箱、性能优良的现代和起亚轿车，韩国魅力四射的流行音乐组合风靡全球。相较之下，朝鲜制造出了什么呢？

- 托德·布赫霍尔茨，《繁荣的代价：富有帝国的衰落与复兴》，2017.

The Caging of God

We have turned to a God that we can use rather than to a God we must obey; we have turned to a God who will fulfill our needs rather than to a God before whore we must surrender our rights to ourselves. He is a God for us, for our satisfaction - not because we have learned to think of him in this way through Christ but because we have learned to think of him this way through the marketplace. In the marketplace, everything is for us, for our pleasure, for our satisfaction, and we have come to assume that it must he so in the church as well. And so we transform the God of mercy into a God who is at our mercy.
 
In a psychologized culture such as ours, there is deep affinity for what is relational but a dis-ease with what is moral. This carries over into the church as an infatuation with the love of God and an embarrassment at his holiness. We who are modern find it infinitely easier to believe that God is like a Rogerian therapist who empathetically solicits our knowledge of ourselves and passes judgment on none of it than to think that he could have had any serious business to conduct with Moses.
 
The fact is, of course, that the New Testament never promises anyone a life of psychological wholeness or offers a guarantee of the consumer's satisfaction with Christ. To the contrary, it offers the prospect of indignities, loss, damage, disease, and pain. The faithful in Scripture were scorned, beaten, imprisoned, shipwrecked, and executed. The gospel offers no promises that contemporary believers will be spared these experiences, that they will be able to settle down to the sanitized comfort of an inner life freed of stresses, pains, and ambiguities; it simply promises that through Christ, God will walk with us in all the dark places of life, that he has the power and the will to invest his promises with reality, and that even the shadows are made to serve his glory and our best interests. A therapeutic culture will he inclined to view such promises as something of a disappointment; those who understand that reality is at heart moral because God is centrally holy will be satisfied that this is all they need to know.
 
Religious consumers want to have a spirituality for the same reason that they want to drive a stylish and expensive auto. Costly obedience is as foreign to them in matters spiritual as self-denial is in matters material. In a culture filled with such people, restoring weight to God is going to involve much more than simply getting some doctrine straight; it's going to entail a complete reconstruction of the modern self-absorbed pastiche personality. The cost of accomplishing this may well be deep, sustained repentance. It is our modernity that must be undone. Only then will the full weight of the revealed truth about God rest once more on the soul. Only then will we recover our saltiness in the world. Only then will God genuinely be known again in his church.
 

 - David F. Wells, God in the Wasteland: 

The Reality of Truth in a World of Fading Dreams, 1994.

 
 

Worshiping is Sentimental and Self-satisfying?

There is a deep hunger for wisdom in our time, but the church offers up little more than sugary nostalgia with a dash of fear. There is a yearning for redemption, healing, and wholeness that is palpable, a shift in human consciousness that is widely recognized—except, it seems, in most churches. 

Strangely, we have come to a moment in human history when the message of the Sermon on the Mount could indeed save us, but it can no longer be heard above the din of dueling doctrines. Consider this: there is not a single word in that sermon about what to believe, only words about what to do. It is a behavioral manifesto, not a propositional one. Yet three centuries later, when the Nicene Creed became the official oath of Christendom, there was not a single word in it about what to do, only words about what to believe! 

Thus the most important question we can ask in the church today concerns the object of faith itself. The earliest metaphors of the gospel speak of discipleship as transformation through an alternative community and the reversal of conventional wisdom. In much of the church today, our metaphors speak of individual salvation and the specific promises that accompany it. The first followers of Jesus trusted him enough to become instruments of radical change. 

Today, worshipers of Christ agree to believe things about him in order to receive benefits promised by the institution, not by Jesus. This difference, between following and worshiping, is not insignificant. Worshiping is an inherently passive activity, since it involves the adoration of that to which the worshiper cannot aspire. It takes the form of praise, which can be both sentimental and self-satisfying, without any call to changed behavior or self-sacrifice. In fact, Christianity as a belief system requires nothing but acquiescence. Christianity as a way of life, as a path to follow, requires a second birth, the conquest of ego, and new eyes with which to see the world. It is no wonder that we have preferred to be saved.
 

- Robin R. Meyers, Saving Jesus from the Church: 

How to Stop Worshiping Christ and Start Following Jesus.

Royal Kingship of Messiah

The term “Messiah” itself derives from the Hebrew word mashiah, which literally means “rubbed with oil”. This term, in English usually rendered “anointed”, and in Greek christos (hence the name “Christ”), denotes a ritual action used to designate and appoint someone for a special task. The two most important applications are the offices of Priest (e.g. Aaron, Exod. 28:41, etc.) and King (the most famous instances are Samuel’s anointing of Saul, 1 Sam. 10, and of David, 1 Sam. 16), but later also that of Prophet (Isa. 61:1).
 
By far the most powerful and formative influence on the early development of a Messianic expectation was the ideology of Kingship in the united monarchy of Israel and later in the Southern Kingdom of Judah. Antecedents of this can be seen in the leadership tradition expressed in the stories of Moses and Joshua, and later those of the Judges. The decisive influence, however, must be sought in the court theology of the dynasty of David.
 
Such a perspective on the monarchy is also found in the Old Testament, particularly in the so-called royal Psalms (especially Psa. 2, 18, 45, 89, and 110). Divine power was seen to guarantee the power of the king and to symbolize and apply the reign of Yahweh over Israel and all the earth, resulting in prosperity and success for his people. In this capacity, the king could even be called the “son of God”, a term which both distinguished him from the rest of Israel and made him the representative of his people (see especially Psa. 2:7; 2 Sam. 7:14; 1 Chr. 17:13, 22:10). Thus he had many divine privileges, but also a significant number of religious and moral obligations: he was the guarantor and enforcer of God’s covenant with Israel. Some kings fulfilled this role well and some badly: the Old Testament assesses them by exclusively moral and spiritual criteria, with little or no regard for their political prowess and achievements.
 
All this might simply have made Israelite royalty a powerful traditional institution with important religious roots, but not necessarily more than that. What planted the seeds of hope for a Messiah firmly in the royal ideology of Israel was the early belief in the permanent rule of the house of David. The key story here is of course Nathan’s prophecy to David in 2 Samuel 7:11–16: “Your house and your kingdom shall be made sure forever before me; your throne shall be established forever” (cf. 1 Kgs. 2:3f.; Psa. 18:50 (18:51 in Hebrew); 28:9; 89:4, 29–38).

- Markus Bockmuehl, This Jesus: Martyr, Lord, Messiah, 2004. 

When a Sinner Refuses to Listen

Jesus appears to give a four-step procedure that leads to the excommunication of an unrepentant sinner (Matt 18:15–17).
 

Step one: a disciple confronts another disciple who is sinning (obviously, a sin that is known to both of them). If the disciple “listens to him” (a vague response that could mean several things—from a respectful hearing to repentance), he or she has regained that disciple. If the sinner refuses to listen (whatever that means), then proceed to step two: bring in one or two more “witnesses” to rebuke the sinner. If the sinner refuses to listen to them, then move on to step three: take the matter before the church. Finally, if the sinner still refuses to listen to them, go to step four: “Let him be to you as a gentile and a tax collector” (v. 17). Following the progression (from individual confrontation to group involvement), it sounds as if Jesus were giving instructions to the church to excommunicate an unrepentant sinner, reading “to you” in this case as a plural pronoun.

 
But for those of us who read Greek, we know that’s not what Jesus was teaching here. The second-person pronoun of step four is singular. Jesus wasn’t giving advice to the church, instructing the assembly to kick out the rebel. Rather, throughout this passage Jesus was giving advice to one individual about another individual. In other words, Jesus didn’t teach the entire church to shun the unrepentant sinner. Rather, he told the concerned disciple to treat the disciple who refused to listen like a “gentile and a tax collector.” But what does that mean?
 
We could answer the question with a question: How did Jesus treat gentiles and tax collectors? Both groups were marginalized as outsiders in Jewish society. Bringing the kingdom of heaven to earth, Jesus treated outsiders like insiders, willing to go to the house of a Roman soldier and heal his slave or to eat with a bunch of tax collectors and “sinners” (8:5–7; 9:10). Despite the Pharisees’ objection, Jesus ate with “sick” sinners because they needed a physician (9:11–12).
 
Indeed, the Pharisees needed to learn a lesson from Hosea. According to the prophet, God wants mercy more than sacrifice (v. 13, quoting Hos 6:6). Therefore, when it comes to notorious sinners who refuse to listen to righteous people, the way of Jesus was to show them mercy. Besides, Jesus’s instruction concerning how to treat sinners who refuse to listen comes immediately after his teaching about recovering lost sheep—those who wander from the fold of God (Matt 18:12–14). In fact, he gave similar instruction to the twelve when he sent them out to recover “the lost sheep of Israel” (10:6). To restore the “harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd” (9:36 NRSV), Jesus sent his disciples to heal the sick—just like the Roman centurion’s slave—and proclaim that the kingdom of heaven “has come near,” going home with those who invite them to their table (10:6–13)—even lost sheep like tax collectors and sinners.
 

- written by Rodney Reeves, from Devotions on the Greek New Testament: 

52 Reflections to Inspire and Instruct

Ancient Wisdom for Contemporary Christians (3)

We could say that human beings are fundamentally erotic creatures. Unfortunately—and for understandable reasons—the word “erotic” carries a lot of negative connotations in our pornographied culture. Thus Christians tend to be allergic to eros (and often set up stark contrasts between eros and agape, the latter of which we hallow as “Christian” love). But that cedes the goodness of desire to its disordered hijacking by contemporary culture. In its truest sense, eros signals a desire and attraction that is a good feature of our creaturehood. Instead of setting up a false dichotomy between agape and eros, we could think of agape as rightly ordered eros: the love of Christ that is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Spirit (Rom. 5:5) is a redeemed, rightly ordered desire for God. You are what you desire.
 
This teleological aspect of the human person, coupled with the fundamental centrality of love, generates Augustine’s third insight: because we are made to love the One who made and loves us—“we love because he first loved us” (1 John 4:19)—we will find “rest” when our loves are rightly ordered to this ultimate end. But Augustine also notes the alternative: since our hearts are made to find their end in God, we will experience a besetting anxiety and restlessness when we try to love substitutes. To be human is to have a heart. You can’t not love. So the question isn’t whether you will love something as ultimate; the question is what you will love as ultimate. And you are what you love.
 

- James K. A. Smith, You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit, 2016.

Ancient Wisdom for Contemporary Christians (2)

A second theme worth noting is Augustine’s locating of the center or “organ” of this teleological orientation in the heart, the seat of our longings and desires. Unfortunately, the language of the “heart” (kardia in Greek) has been co-opted in our culture and enlisted in the soppy sentimentalism of Hallmark and thus equated with a kind of emotivism. This is not what the biblical language of kardia suggests, nor is it what Augustine means. Instead, think of the heart as the fulcrum of your most fundamental longings—a visceral, subconscious orientation to the world. So Augustine doesn’t frame this as merely an intellectual quest. He doesn’t say, “You have made us to know you, and our minds are ignorant until they understand you.”
 
The longing that Augustine describes is less like curiosity and more like hunger—less like an intellectual puzzle to be solved and more like a craving for sustenance (see Ps. 42:1–2). So in this picture, the center of gravity of the human person is located not in the intellect but in the heart. Why? Because the heart is the existential chamber of our love, and it is our loves that orient us toward some ultimate end or telos. It’s not just that I “know” some end or “believe” in some telos. More than that, I long for some end. I want something, and want it ultimately. It is my desires that define me. In short, you are what you love.
 
- James K. A. Smith, You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit, 2016.

Ancient Wisdom for Contemporary Christians (1)

The work of St. Augustine, a fifth-century philosopher, theologian, and bishop from North Africa who captured this holistic picture of the human person early in the life of the church. In the opening paragraph of his Confessions—his spiritual autobiography penned in a mode of prayer—Augustine pinpoints the epicenter of human identity: “You have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.”
 
Packed into this one line is wisdom that should radically change how we approach worship, discipleship, and Christian formation. Several themes can be discerned in this compact insight. Augustine opens with a design claim, a conviction about what human beings are made for. This is significant for a couple of reasons.
 
First, it recognizes that human beings are made by and for the Creator who is known in Jesus Christ. In other words, to be truly and fully human, we need to “find” ourselves in relationship to the One who made us and for whom we are made. The gospel is the way we learn to be human. As Irenaeus once put it, “The glory of God is a human being fully alive.”
 
Second, the implicit picture of being human is dynamic. To be human is to be for something, directed toward something, oriented toward something. To be human is to be on the move, pursuing something, after something. We are like existential sharks: we have to move to live. We are not just static containers for ideas; we are dynamic creatures directed toward some end. In philosophy we have a shorthand term for this: something that is oriented toward an end or telos (a “goal”) is described as “teleological.” Augustine rightly recognizes that human beings are teleological creatures.
 

- James K. A. Smith, You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit, 2016.

Love Orients Us toward the End Goal

As Blaise Pascal put it in his famous wager: “You have to wager. It is not up to you, you are already committed.” You can’t not bet your life on something. You can’t not be headed somewhere. We live leaning forward, bent on arriving at the place we long for.
 
The place we unconsciously strive toward is what ancient philosophers of habit called our telos—our goal, our end. But the telos we live toward is not something that we primarily know or believe or think about; rather, our telos is what we want, what we long for, what we crave.
 
To be human is to be animated and oriented by some vision of the good life, some picture of what we think counts as “flourishing.” And we want that. We crave it. We desire it. This is why our most fundamental mode of orientation to the world is love. We are oriented by our longings, directed by our desires. We adopt ways of life that are indexed to such visions of the good life, not usually because we “think through” our options but rather because some picture captures our imagination.
 
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, the author of The Little Prince, succinctly encapsulates the motive power of such allure: “If you want to build a ship,” he counsels, “don’t drum up people to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.” We aren’t really motivated by abstract ideas or pushed by rules and duties.
 

- James K. A. Smith, You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit, 2016.

Love is A Virtue

If we think about this in terms of the quest or journey metaphor, we might say that the human heart is part compass and part internal guidance system. The heart is like a multifunctional desire device that is part engine and part homing beacon. Operating under the hood of our consciousness, so to speak—our default autopilot—the longings of the heart both point us in the direction of a kingdom and propel us toward it. There is a resonance between the telos to which we are oriented and the longings and desires that propel us in that direction—like the magnetic power of the pole working on the existential needle of our hearts. You are what you love because you live toward what you want.

If you are what you love and if love is a virtue, then love is a habit. This means that our most fundamental orientation to the world—the longings and desires that orient us toward some version of the good life—is shaped and configured by imitation and practice. Then discipleship is a rehabituation of your loves. This means that discipleship is more a matter of reformation than of acquiring information. The learning that is fundamental to Christian formation is affective and erotic, a matter of “aiming” our loves, of orienting our desires to God and what God desires for his creation.
 
Calibrating the Heart: Love Takes Practice
 
If the heart is like a compass, an erotic homing device, then we need to (regularly) calibrate our hearts, tuning them to be directed to the Creator, our magnetic north. It is crucial for us to recognize that our ultimate loves, longings, desires, and cravings are learned. And because love is a habit, our hearts are calibrated through imitating exemplars and being immersed in practices that, over time, index our hearts to a certain end. We learn to love, then, not primarily by acquiring information about what we should love but rather through practices that form the habits of how we love. These sorts of practices are “pedagogies” of desire, not because they are like lectures that inform us, but because they are rituals that form and direct our affections.
 

- James K. A. Smith, You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit, 2016.

 

You Are What You Love (2)

Paul’s remarkable prayer for the Christians at Philippi in the opening section of his letter to them: “And this is my prayer: that your love may abound more and more in knowledge and depth of insight, so that you may be able to discern what is best and may be pure and blameless for the day of Christ, filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ—to the glory and praise of God” (Phil. 1:9–11). Notice the sequence of Paul’s prayer here. If you read it too quickly, you might come away with the impression that Paul is primarily concerned about knowledge. Indeed, at a glance, given our habits of mind, you might think Paul is praying that the Christians in Philippi would deepen their knowledge so that they will know what to love. But look again.
 
In fact, Paul’s prayer is the inverse: he prays that their love might abound more and more because, in some sense, love is the condition for knowledge. It’s not that I know in order to love, but rather: I love in order to know. And if we are going to discern “what is best”—what is “excellent,” what really matters, what is of ultimate importance—Paul tells us that the place to start is by attending to our loves. There is a very different model of the human person at work here. Instead of the rationalist, intellectualist model that implies, “You are what you think,” Paul’s prayer hints at a very different conviction: “You are what you love.”
 

- James K. A. Smith, You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit, 2016.

You Are What You Love (1)

What do you want? That’s the question. It is the first, last, and most fundamental question of Christian discipleship. In the Gospel of John, it is the first question Jesus poses to those who would follow him. When two would-be disciples who are caught up in John the Baptist’s enthusiasm begin to follow, Jesus wheels around on them and pointedly asks, “What do you want?” (John 1:38).
 
It’s the question that is buried under almost every other question Jesus asks each of us. “Will you come and follow me?” is another version of “What do you want?,” as is the fundamental question Jesus asks of his errant disciple, Peter: “Do you love me?” (John 21:16 NRSV).
 
Jesus doesn’t encounter Matthew and John—or you and me—and ask, “What do you know?” He doesn’t even ask, “What do you believe?” He asks, “What do you want?” This is the most incisive, piercing question Jesus can ask of us precisely because we are what we want. Our wants and longings and desires are at the core of our identity, the wellspring from which our actions and behavior flow. Our wants reverberate from our heart, the epicenter of the human person. Thus Scripture counsels, “Above all else, guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it” (Prov. 4:23). Discipleship, we might say, is a way to curate your heart, to be attentive to and intentional about what you love.
 
So discipleship is more a matter of hungering and thirsting than of knowing and believing. Jesus’s command to follow him is a command to align our loves and longings with his—to want what God wants, to desire what God desires, to hunger and thirst after God and crave a world where he is all in all—a vision encapsulated by the shorthand “the kingdom of God.”
 
Jesus is a teacher who doesn’t just inform our intellect but forms our very loves. He isn’t content to simply deposit new ideas into your mind; he is after nothing less than your wants, your loves, your longings. His “teaching” doesn’t just touch the calm, cool, collected space of reflection and contemplation; he is a teacher who invades the heated, passionate regions of the heart. He is the Word who “penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit”; he “judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart” (Heb. 4:12).

Our Approaches to Discipleship 

To follow Jesus is to become a student of the Rabbi who teaches us how to love; to be a disciple of Jesus is to enroll in the school of charity. Jesus is not Lecturer-in-Chief; his school of charity is not like a lecture hall where we passively take notes while Jesus spouts facts about himself in a litany of text-heavy PowerPoint slides. And yet we often approach discipleship as primarily a didactic endeavor—as if becoming a disciple of Jesus is largely an intellectual project, a matter of acquiring knowledge. Why is that?
 
Because every approach to discipleship and Christian formation assumes an implicit model of what human beings are. While these assumptions usually remain unarticulated, we nonetheless work with some fundamental (though unstated) assumptions about what sorts of creatures we are—and therefore what sorts of learners we are. If being a disciple is being a learner and follower of Jesus, then a lot hinges on what you think “learning” is. And what you think learning is hinges on what you think human beings are. In other words, your understanding of discipleship will reflect a set of working assumptions about the very nature of human beings, even if you’ve never asked yourself such questions.
 
While we might never have read—or even heard of—seventeenth-century French philosopher René Descartes, many of us unwittingly share his definition of the essence of the human person as res cogitans, a “thinking thing.” Like Descartes, we view our bodies as (at best!) extraneous, temporary vehicles for trucking around our souls or “minds,” which are where all the real action takes place. “You are what you think” is a motto that reduces human beings to brains-on-a-stick. Ironically, such thinking-thingism assumes that the “heart” of the person is the mind. “I think, therefore I am,” Descartes said, and most of our approaches to discipleship end up parroting his idea.
 

- James K. A. Smith, You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit, 2016.