+ Brenna Hesch, alumna, preaches on hospitality in Luke 14: 7-14, reflecting on the subtle ways Christians can seem humble but miss Christ’s heart for the stranger, the temptation to put an asterisk on the gospel, and a call to open our table to those who make us uncomfortable.

This audio is a recording from Fuller’s All-Seminary chapel on April 27, 2016.

Music at the beginning and end of this audio stream is taken from a recent album entitled REVERE I RESTORE, created and recorded by members of the Fuller community under the leadership of Ed Willmington, director of the Fred Bock Institute of Music at Fuller’s Brehm Center for Worship, Theology, and the Arts.

The post Radical Hospitality | Brenna Hesch appeared first on Fuller Studio.

+ Joy Moore, assistant professor of preaching, reflects on the midwives Shiphrah and Puah in Exodus 1:8-22, preaching on injustice, naming marginalized people groups, and faithful responses to oppressive political systems.

This audio is a recording from Fuller’s All-Seminary chapel on May 31, 2017.

Music at the beginning and end of this audio stream is taken from a recent album entitled REVERE I RESTORE, created and recorded by members of the Fuller community under the leadership of Ed Willmington, director of the Fred Bock Institute of Music at Fuller’s Brehm Center for Worship, Theology, and the Arts.

The post Midwifing Hope and Justice | Joy Moore appeared first on Fuller Studio.

Let me say first that I write this as an observer and a guest, a Westerner who has taught biblical studies in sub-Saharan African theological colleges for more than a decade. I am deeply indebted to the abilities, passions, and commitments of my African colleagues. They have helped me see God at work in and through our institutions and our students, and they have taught me more about the gospel than I ever would have grasped from my own limited viewpoint. But along with my colleagues, I have struggled with the gap between what happens in our classrooms and what happens when our students return home. We painstakingly train students to understand and use the Bible, honing their skills in grammatical-historical exegesis and helping them articulate a careful, reasoned understanding of the meaning a biblical author intended to communicate to his original audience. But when our students return to their home churches, many in their congregations find little interest in this way of reading the Bible. The students’ more scholarly contributions may even be met with scorn by congregations longing for a fresh and active word from God, a word spoken by God through the Bible directly to their own situations. In fact, some consider our students “unspiritual” because their reading of the Bible seems to lack spontaneity and immediacy. Emmanuel Obeng has said that in Ghana, for instance, “It is commonplace to hear statements that there is no need to prepare for sermons; the Holy Spirit will give u erance to the anointed people of God at the time of delivery.”¹

While there are many factors contributing to this mismatch between theological classrooms and the church, one thread leads back to the 20th-century history of evangelical missions in sub-Saharan Africa. Many of the current Bible colleges and seminaries in Africa were established with the involvement of Western missionaries who came with pre-formed understandings of biblical truth. Other African training institutions have been influenced by the ethos that these missionaries helped to create. As a missionary myself, I’ve heard a good deal of well-intentioned discussion about the need to enculturate the Bible for African audiences. Certainly, many early missionaries took bold and insightful steps to reach across cultural divides. Unfortunately, what sometimes slipped through unnoticed was that the biblical message, in its ancient Near Eastern, Jewish, and Greco-Roman settings, had already been interpreted and selectively enculturated for Western readers. None of us is the recipient of an objective or “pure” reading of the biblical text or has a culturally neutral perception of the gospel, an objective reading that we might then dress in African clothes. We all pick and choose what we notice in Scripture based on our own needs and interests. We all make sense of what is written in the Bible by filling spaces in the text with our own understanding and experiences. Too many early missionaries, however, not only taught their interpretations of the Bible as though they were of equal authority to the texts themselves, they also enshrined their methods of approaching and reading the Bible—that is, their hermeneutics—as the definitive way to perceive how God speaks to us in and through Scripture.

To unpack this a bit more, we can use a hermeneutical paradigm drawn from the “sender-message-receiver” model of communication. Applying this paradigm to the Bible, scholars speak of an “author-text-reader” model, in which the author is the human author of a biblical book speaking in his own time to his original audience, the text is the Bible as we have it in written form, and the reader is us, the contemporary audience. (God, the divine author of Scripture, is understood to be active by means of the Holy Spirit in all three components of this model.) Through the centuries Christians have placed differing emphases on the relative roles of authors, texts, and readers as they have read the Bible and sought to hear God’s authoritative revelation.

Through most of the late-19th and 20th centuries, biblical scholars in Western universities found their academic discipline dominated by an approach to the Bible that focused on the author-text end of this model. The goal of peering behind biblical texts to explore the historical world of the author and the author’s community tended to supersede interest in the text itself as the Word of God, and often this approach even precluded such an interest. Confronted with the skepticism about God’s role in producing biblical texts that accompanied this “historical criticism,” more theologically conservative scholars began to use the “grammatical-historical method” in interpreting the Bible. This is a more text-centered subset of historical criticism that focuses on the text as a product of the author and his historical age, while leaving room for belief that the human authors who wrote biblical texts were divinely inspired. Such an author-text approach allowed evangelical scholars to engage in academic study of the Bible. But it also kept their attention on the author-text side of the hermeneutical equation, rather than the text-reader side. Even today, or at least until very recently with the renewed interest in theological hermeneutics, evangelical hermeneutics textbooks tend to say more about how to recover historical author meaning in a biblical text than about how to make living connections between the text and contemporary readers.

In addition, African biblical scholars trained in Western theological institutions have often been influenced, even unconsciously, by the historical approaches they learned there. As David Adamo puts it, “Although one appreciates the opportunity to study in many of these great Western universities and seminaries, one thing is certain, the overseas training in biblical studies and theology is one of the ways by which African biblical scholars have been colonized.”² As a result, mission-related Bible colleges and seminaries may continue to reflect primarily Western approaches to, and assumptions about, interpreting the Bible, even when the teaching faculty and institutional leadership have been nationalized.

Am I advocating a rejection of historicaland grammatical study of the Bible? By no means. But a more comprehensive approach to biblical interpretation that takes into account the author, the text, and the reader in God’s choice to communicate with his human creatures through written revelation motivates a more profound and honest look at how reading takes place and who the Bible’s readers are. Gordon Fee and Douglas Stuart remind us that “whether one likes it or not, every reader is at the same time an interpreter.”³ Or, as W. Randolph Tate says, “Readers always wear tinted glasses and make sense of a text according to the particular shade of the lenses.”⁴ The point is that readers have always been involved in making sense of the Bible, even when they mistakenly believed their understanding of biblical texts to be objective or absolute. Through much of the history of evangelical missions in sub-Saharan Africa, it was Western readers interpreting the Bible for their African converts. My point is that African readers—and especially today’s African biblical scholars—have an important contribution to make to our understanding of biblical revelation by offering a different set of lenses through which to encounter God’s truth in Scripture.

As it happens, Western evangelical biblical scholarship has in recent years moved beyond its focus on author-text approaches and begun to explore more reader-centered ways of approaching the Bible. In light of increasing global and cultural awareness and a growing value placed on the contributions of diverse viewpoints, Western scholars are eager to hear the insights that biblical interpreters in Africa and elsewhere in the Majority World bring to our understanding of God’s revelation. The door is wide open to the voices of African readers of the Bible. But ironically, little has been produced thus far by evangelical African biblical scholars about ways to engage the reader’s view-point in biblical interpretation. What has appeared comes largely from university circles in South Africa and beyond, interpreters who may express suspicion of the Bible itself as an inherent source or tool of imperialism, patriarchy, and oppression.⁵ This suspicion runs counter to evangelical convictions about divine revelation and the Bible’s unique authority. In fact, the association of reader-centered, contextual interpretations of the Bible with these more ecumenical practitioners may have tainted such hermeneutical approaches with a “liberal” label that inhibits their use by more conservative biblical scholars in Africa.

How might we envision an evangelical African biblical interpretation that takes seriously the divinely inspired authority of authors and texts, while acknowledging the role of readers in completing the process of God speaking? In bringing their insights to global biblical interpretation, African evangelicals offer significant contributions as readers in at least two ways. First, because of cultural a nities with pre-industrial, agrarian, and/or communalistic societies like those within which the Bible was wri en, African biblical interpreters can sometimes clarify practices and values that Western readers misunderstand or ignore. I personally have gained from the expertise of research students at Nairobi Evangelical Graduate School of Theology, who have explored the resonance between biblical texts and their own social and cultural contexts in practices as general as community worship, sacrifice, and polygamy, or as specific as familial curses (Noah in Gen 9:20–27) and respect for the tombs of ancestors (Nehemiah in Neh 2:1–5).

Secondly, because of their own experiences, African biblical interpreters often challenge other readers in terms of what they notice and prioritize in biblical texts. Conceptual frameworks such as honor and shame, poverty and power, patronage, or extended family relationships may be central to the interests and concerns of the biblical authors themselves but overlooked by Western readers for whom these are not daily categories of concern. That Nehemiah was motivated by a sense of shame and his desire to restore honor to his ancestral homeland, as mentioned above, is one such example.⁶ In terms of leadership and power, my students in Nairobi were intrigued by the framing of the relationship between Paul and Apollos in 1 Corinthians 16:12: “Now concerning our brother Apollos, I strongly urged him to visit you with the other brothers, but he was not at all willing to come now. He will come when he has the opportunity.” All too familiar with hierarchically organized societies where a senior leader (like Paul) might be threatened by a successful younger figure (like Apollos) and take steps to suppress his activity, these students noticed the mutual respect, openness, and deference shown by Paul in inviting Apollos to continue connecting with the Corinthians, and by Apollos in choosing not to get involved at that point. What I had barely noticed, or taken as a simple statement of fact, my students recognized as a model of generous relational détente between two church leaders. Similarly, in Paul’s letter to Philemon, they recognized that Paul’s seeming humility is actually the rhetorical cloak of an established leader gracefully and perhaps humorously telling subordinates what to do: “I, Paul, do this as an old man, and now also as a prisoner of Christ Jesus….So if you consider me your partner, welcome him as you would welcome me…I say nothing about your owing me even your own self” (vv. 9, 17, 19).

I have also observed that at times Western interpretive traditions block my African students from identifying similarities between the biblical text and their own contexts. Sometimes these readings need to be unlearned—or “decolonized,” as Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and others have so famously said.⁷ For example, Luke’s focus on the poor in his Gospel is well known, but white middle-class Westerners, to select just one set of readers, may too readily assume this refers simply to material poverty, that is, the situation of not having enough money. In fact, a closer look at “the poor” in Luke (and the passages in Isaiah from which he draws) highlights Jesus’ a ention to social and economic injustices that create material poverty while benefitting an elite few, as well as his concern for the social and religious marginalization—that is, relational poverty—that the poor experience. This reading of Jesus’ attention to poverty and poor people in Luke’s Gospel is not only truer to the historical author’s intent, but also offers a much richer resonance for African readers who have their own experiences of social and economic injustice on a national or global scale, and for whom cohesive relationships with family and local community are an essential element of daily existence. When we reread these passages in a New Testament class in Kenya, in an attempt to filter out Western assumptions absorbed through previous Bible studies and textbooks, students felt challenged to reimagine their own roles as Christ-followers in addressing poverty in their local settings.

It is that alignment between God the Holy Spirit speaking into the situation of the biblical author and his community, as it is then recorded in the biblical text, and God the Holy Spirit speaking similarly into readers’ own parallel situations that completes the process of divine communication through written revelation. Tate suggests, “The words on the page never change, and in one sense neither do the worlds of texts. But readers must always approach the textual world and make sense of it in relation to their own world, a world constantly in flux,”⁸ while at the same time the text provides a limited playing field of possible meaning.

A brief walk through 1 Corinthians 8–10 illustrates what this might look like in terms of African evangelical hermeneutics. I’ve noticed that many Western Christians fragment Paul’s teaching in 1 Corinthians 8–10, not recognizing the topical continuity that flows through these three chapters. More concerningly, they tend to miss the unfamiliar (to them) concrete historical issue of sharing food in the context of pagan worship. Not so my African students. Christians who regularly encounter marriage ceremonies, infant naming ceremonies, burials, and the like, where social and family celebrations are interwoven with traditional animistic or syncretistic rituals, are very familiar with the sorts of questions Paul and his audience raise about participating in temple feasts in Corinth. That is, African readers tend to understand the author’s world in this situation and therefore may be more likely to notice how Paul responds in this text. I’ve listened to many lively discussions among my African students about the tensions faced by young Christian couples who resist participating in such practices, yet who want to be part of celebrations that knit together their families and communities while at the same time being fully convinced of Jesus Christ’s superiority over the spirit world. (Not to mention that that roasted goat slaughtered by an uncle murmuring incantations to the spirits tastes pretty good. Otherwise, when do we get to eat meat?)

In addition, living in a multireligious context like Kenya means being invited to share food with neighbors and colleagues when the food offered may have been part of Muslim or Hindu worship. One student told us about going with church members to the home of a Hindu woman with whom one of them had shared a hospital room the week before. A follow-up visit to check on her health and pray for her was an open door to a relationship in which they might share the gospel with her. But when they arrived, they saw the family’s Hindu shrine. And when they were served tea, they knew the milk in the tea had previously been poured over the idol as an offering. Should they drink the tea, or not? It’s at this point that God speaking through Paul into the Corinthians’ situation, as we find it in the text of 1 Corinthians 8—10, aligns with God’s message to these Kenyan readers in their own multireligious context, and the Holy Spirit brings written revelation to life as divine communication.

But there’s more. With such understanding, African readers have the power to remind readers elsewhere that these chapters in 1 Corinthians are not merely about the possibility of offending the sensibilities of other Christians (“should Christians drink alcohol?”). They also address more troubling issues of syncretism and potential demonic activity for believers to consider when we participate in social practices with religious or quasi-religious overtones—whether it’s Halloween in Europe and North America, the Day of the Dead in Latin America, the Hungry Ghost Festival in China, Asian practices directed toward ancestors, Christians in India confronting the multitude of Hindu temples and festivals that surround them, or any of us receiving thoughtful gifts of holiday food from Muslim friends and neighbors on Maulid (Mohammed’s birthday) or Eid (the end of Ramadan). My goal here is not to prescribe the decisions Christians should make in any of these situations, since circumstances vary substantially, but instead to point out the opportunity for a confluence of author, text, and reader in African evangelical hermeneutics that can offer important insights from the Bible not just to African readers, but to all of us in the global church.

In Africa, where people long for the Bible to address daily needs for identity, security, health, prosperity, and defense against dark spiritual forces, an evangelical African biblical hermeneutic that weaves together the divinely inspired authority of authors and texts with the role of the readers to whom God is speaking today opens new possibilities for the Holy Spirit to bring written revelation to life as divine communication. And as the numerical center of Christianity moves to the Global South, especially to Africa, the understanding they draw from God’s inspired Word will flow north and west, enriching us all.

ENDNOTES
1. Emmanuel A. Obeng, “Emerging Concerns for Biblical Scholarship in Ghana,” in Interpreting the New Testament in Africa, ed. Mary N. Getui et al. (Nairobi: Acton, 2001), 39.
2. David Tuesday Adamo, “The Task and Distinctiveness of African Biblical Hermeneutic(s),” Old Testament Essays 28, no. 1 (2015): 34.
3. Gordon D. Fee and Douglas Stuart, How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth, 4th ed. (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2014), 22.
4. W. Randolph Tate, Biblical Interpretation: An Integrated Approach, 3rd ed. (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2008), 220.
5. See, e.g., some of the essays in Gerald O. West and Musa Dube, eds., The Bible in Africa: Translations, Trajectories and Trends (Leiden: Brill, 2000).
6. Peter Yuh Kimeng, “Shame and Honour in the Nehemiah Memoirs: A Hebrew and African Comparative Analysis,” PhD dissertation, Africa International University, 2010.
7. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (London: J. Currey, 1986).
8. Tate, Biblical Interpretation, 269.

The post Hermeneutics for the African Century appeared first on Fuller Studio.

“Every single page [of the Bible] is filled with the creativity of God and creativity given as a gift to his broken people to exercise. It is literally a book about making—God as an artist and creator, and we are mini-creators . . . partaking in the new creation that is coming and somehow tapping into that future reality now.”

+ Mako Fujimura, visual artist and director of the Brehm Center for Worship, Theology, and the Arts, reflecting on the relationships among culture care, beauty, and suffering. A community of artists and theologians reflected on these themes at the Brehm Center’s second annual Culture Care Summit, and explore more below. Listen to all of the lectures here.

“Think about the metaphor of a garden when you think about culture care. . . . We are as gardeners who cultivate the soil; we tend to those plants so that they bear fruit. The vision of the Brehm Center is to provide a resource-rich ecosystem that allows for students and artists to understand their calling in the world. It’s for them to go out from here to the communities that they serve and bear fruit, thinking generatively about creating new things in those communities but also generationally, thinking about investing in the people in their community.”

+ Nate Risdon, director of operations for the Brehm Center for Worship, Theology, and the Arts (pictured), elaborating on the Brehm Center’s vision for caring for culture.

+ We’re happy to offer a free download of the first chapter of Mako’s book Culture Care, and you can learn more about culture care and our worship, theology, and the arts curriculum here.

Reflecting on Silence and Beauty

“The people of God are simply meant to be culture carers. I think this is the outgrowth of what Jesus means when we are light and salt, that we bring light and salt to contexts that are in decay or in need of light in the midst of darkness. Those are culture-caring demonstrations, enactments, embodiments of what it is that we really about.”

+ Mark Labberton, president of Fuller Seminary, reflecting on themes of culture care through the lens of exile in the Old Testament and today’s culture. Watch his full lecture or listen above.

“It’s so crucial to understand that God is on the side of the one who suffers and not the one who causes the suffering. . . . Jesus always responds with comfort, compassion, and healing. Sometimes art can be that solace, that channel of God’s grace, and sometimes words help as well. What we as Christians are called to do is bring that note of comfort and hope.”

+ Celebrated author Philip Yancey and Brehm Center director Mako Fujimura discuss Shūsaku Endo’s novel Silence and reflect on the role of art to respond gracefully to cultural trauma and suffering around the world. Watch their full conversation or listen above.

+ Scott Cormode, director of innovation, lectures on culture care, the marketplace, and sharing stories of hope to encourage those entrusted to our care. Watch his full lecture or listen above.

Bearing Witness to Culture

“I learned to listen to the struggles that needed to be told. . . . We are not the ones in exile right now; we are the ones tasked with listening to voices of exile, to bear witness with radical embodied intention.”

+ Caitlyn Ference-Saunders, speaking on the role of the arts to help foster deep listening in her Emerging Voice lecture, a lecture series offered by students and alumni during the Culture Care Summit. Listen to these students bear witness to culture in their specific contexts below. Pictured above: members of the All-Seminary Chapel team lead attendees in worship (left to right: students Megan Moody, September Penn, Melba Mathew, and Director of Chapel Julie Tai).

Further Reading

The Earth Is God’s: A Theology of American Culture
William Dyrness (Wipf & Stock, 2004)

Visual Faith: Art, Theology, and Worship in Dialogue
William Dyrness (Baker Academic, 2001)

Silence and Beauty: Hidden Faith Born of Suffering
Mako Fujimura (IVP Press, 2016)

Culture Care: Reconnecting with Beauty for our Common Life
Mako Fujimura (International Arts Movement and the Fujimura Institute, 2015)

Refractions: Further Thoughts on Art and Faith
Mako Fujimura (NavPress, 2009)

On Becoming Generative: An Introduction to Culture Care
Mako Fujimura (International Arts Movement and the Fujimura Institute, 2013)

Reel Spirituality: Theology and Film in Dialogue
Robert Johnston (Baker Academic, 2006)

Available Classes

A Theology of Beauty – William Dyrness and David Taylor
Capstone Course – Maria Fee
Dante’s Comedy – William Dyrness
Theology and Culture – Barry Taylor
Theology and Film – Rob Johnston, Catherine Barsotti, and Kutter Callaway
Theology and Literature – Rob Johnston
Theology and Popular Music – Barry Taylor
Theology in Song – Roberta King
Theology, Worship, and the Arts – William Dyrness
Touchstone Course – Todd Johnson, Kutter Callaway
World Religions in Art and Symbol – Evelyne Reisacher
Worship and the Arts in Theological, Biblical, Historical, and Contextual Perspective – David Taylor

The post Culture Care | Beauty in Exile appeared first on Fuller Studio.

+ In this episode of “Conversing,” theologian and writer J. Kameron Carter discusses the complex interplay between racial logic and theology. He examines beliefs about possessions, the language of “master” and “lord” in scripture, and the “alternative practices of the sacred” within black Christian communities.

Carter is the associate professor of theology, English, and African American Studies at Duke Divinity School and the author of Race: A Theological Account. He writes and lectures widely on theology, race, and black studies. Hear him speak at the Pannell Center’s 2017 Martin Luther King Jr. Lectures.

The post J. Kameron Carter on black poetics appeared first on Fuller Studio.

+ Phil Allen (MAT ’17) reflects on Haggai 1:4-9, preaching on rebuilding the house of the Lord, the difference between carrying a banner and carrying our cross, and dying to ourselves and our political opinions for the sake of unity in the Spirit.



This audio is a recording from Fuller’s All-Seminary chapel on May 24, 2017.



Music at the beginning and end of this audio stream is taken from a recent album entitled REVERE I RESTORE, created and recorded by members of the Fuller community under the leadership of Ed Willmington, director of the Fred Bock Institute of Music at Fuller’s Brehm Center for Worship, Theology, and the Arts.

The post A Banner or the Cross | Phil Allen appeared first on Fuller Studio.

+ Alexis Abernethy, professor of psychology, suggests a psychologically healthy approach to spiritual practices that emphasize self-compassion, curiosity, and the support of a church community.

The post FULLER voices | Alexis Abernethy on Spiritual Practices appeared first on Fuller Studio.

+ Jude Tiersma Watson, associate professor of urban mission, reflects on a culture of distraction and shows how we can cultivate the spiritual practice of attentiveness, especially in urban contexts.

The post FULLER voices | Jude Tiersma Watson on Listening appeared first on Fuller Studio.

+ Learning to articulate the cultural context for his own faith has helped Amos Yong, professor of theology and mission and director of Fuller’s Center for Missiological Research, to develop new theological skills to engage other religious traditions.

The post FULLER voices | Amos Yong on the Religious Other appeared first on Fuller Studio.

+ How does the Sabbath shape gender and economic equality? What can chronic pain teach us about suffering? How can we learn to see ourselves as significant and worthy of love? These are the kinds of questions three faculty members lectured about recently, and we’re happy to share their insights with you. Click below to hear from them:

“The Sabbath has nothing to do with works. It’s about rest. You don’t have to perform, you don’t have to show it, you don’t have to work, you don’t have to impress—you just have to be. Be with the Lord, be with the cat, be with your family, be with your neighborhood, be with your city, be with this planet—but be in rest. Are you able to rest?”

+ Johnny Ramírez-Johnson, professor of anthropology, draws on scripture and personal experiences to argue that keeping the Sabbath brings gender and economic equality to communities.

“My identity had become so bound up in my pain that it was this constant companion and friend, and I realized it at that moment for the first time when these words of Christ came up in my mind: ‘Do you want to become well?’ My answer was very loudly and clearly: no.”

+ Kutter Callaway, assistant professor of theology and culture, reflects on chronic pain, the fear of getting well, and the transformative gift of sharing our weakness with a hurting world.

“It’s easy to find all the negative messages about ourselves, but it’s really difficult to find those positive messages. Those negative messages inhibit our ability to answer fundamental questions like, ‘What are we about?’, ‘What are we meant to do?’, and ‘Who are we?’ . . . The lies derail us from living out our true identity.”

+ Migum Gweon, director of clinical training for marriage and family, describes restoration therapy, the struggle to accept ourselves as loved and significant, and the ways a church community can facilitate self-acceptance.

The post Voices on Restoration appeared first on Fuller Studio.

+ President Mark Labberton reflects on the parable of the persistent widow in Luke 18:1-18, preaching on the difficult challenge of trusting and not losing heart while we wait for God to act.

This audio is a recording from Fuller’s All-Seminary chapel on May 4, 2016.

Music at the beginning and end of this audio stream is taken from a recent album entitled REVERE I RESTORE, created and recorded by members of the Fuller community under the leadership of Ed Willmington, director of the Fred Bock Institute of Music at Fuller’s Brehm Center for Worship, Theology, and the Arts.

The post Waiting for God in the In Between | Mark Labberton appeared first on Fuller Studio.

+ Steve Yamaguchi, dean of students and assistant professor of pastoral theology, reflects on Moses’ struggle with identity in Exodus 2:11-20, preaching on erasing ethnicity, racism, and the need to repent from marginalizing others.

This audio is a recording from Fuller’s All-Seminary chapel on May 11, 2016.

Music at the beginning and end of this audio stream is taken from a recent album entitled REVERE I RESTORE, created and recorded by members of the Fuller community under the leadership of Ed Willmington, director of the Fred Bock Institute of Music at Fuller’s Brehm Center for Worship, Theology, and the Arts.

The post Learning to See With Christ’s Eyes | Steve Yamaguchi appeared first on Fuller Studio.

“The answers that gave me solace as a child no longer do. . . . It would be easy to stop asking questions, but I feel that if I did stop asking those questions a little light would go off in my life, and I need to have some degree of mystery that I’m still curious about. Having that curiosity makes living my life better even though I don’t have the answers I thought I once did.”

+ David Lowery, American filmmaker and writer, at Fuller’s screening of his new film A Ghost Story, a meditation on time, grief, and attachments—all witnessed through the eyes of a ghost. Sponsored by the Brehm Center’s Reel Spirituality initiative, he was interviewed by Barry Taylor, Brehm Center’s artist-in-residence, after a screening, and the evening created space to reflect on mortality, nostalgia, and more.

+ We’re happy to share a selection from the new book God in the Movies: A Guide for Exploring Four Decades of Film. Click here for a free download of the first chapter on the robust dialogue between faith and film.

“There’s a very clear sense for a lot of people that answers we used to find helpful aren’t as helpful anymore. So we go back to ask the same questions—and maybe we get some of the same answers, or maybe we’re at a point where the answers aren’t as important as the nurturing and guarding of the questions themselves.”

+ Barry Taylor (pictured left), Brehm Center’s artist in residence, reflecting with David Lowery (right) on the connections among ghost stories, the search for faith, and our current social context.

“There is an extraordinary sequence involving his Ghost passing through ages, yet stuck still in the grand canvas of all that is and is to come. He has become our Virgil, our prophet. And I came to think that sometimes, movies can serve as a kind of tool for self-awareness, birthing from the ethereal a change of a heart once chained in a desperate stage of weariness to a kind of enduring happiness in an often heavy harsh-hardened existence.”

+ Lennox Lugo, a writer for Reel Spirituality, in his review of A Ghost Story available here.

+ Pictured: Casey Affleck as C. Photo credit: Bret Curry, courtesy of A24.

The post A Conversation On A Ghost Story appeared first on Fuller Studio.

Before their first child was born—as a kind of final hurrah—Jon and Jan Huckins signed up for a trip that would change their lives forever. It was 2010, and the couple had just made a courageous decision: that Jon, after ten years in pastoral ministry, should attend seminary. Feeling the need for more training and a stronger intellectual foundation, he had enrolled in Fuller’s MA in Theology program. Now with a baby on the way, they decided to take a trip to Israel through Jerusalem University College before being homebound by school and parenthood.

Their time in the Holy Land became much more than a “final hurrah” for Jon (pictured) and Jan when they befriended their hotel server. Milad and his wife were expecting their first baby at the same time the Huckins expected theirs. Jon and Milad ended up hanging out on the hotel rooftop one night, talking World Cup soccer and impending parenthood while overlooking Herod’s Palace in the Old City of Jerusalem. In the middle of their joking and conversing, Milad grew somber. He looked at Jon and asked, “Why do your people think I am a terrorist?”

Jon, stunned, had no response.

“How can you thank God for your breakfast every morning and hop on a tour bus to holy sites while, five minutes away, your brothers and sisters in Christ are experiencing daily occupation and oppression?”

Milad was an Arab Palestinian Christian, his family displaced by Israeli military advances in 1948 when thousands of Palestinians fled in terror. He now lived in Bethany—the place of Lazarus’s resurrection in John 11—in the West Bank, where tensions between Israelis and Palestinians often erupted with thrown rocks and flying bullets. At Milad’s invitation, Jon and Jan began visiting Milad and his community. After their Holy Land tour came to a close each day, the two Americans would get on a public bus and pass through military checkpoints into the West Bank.

What they saw shattered their perceptions about Israel and Palestine, politics and theology, theology and ethics. Jon realized that he had always understood Israel-Palestine relations through the lens of a subtle yet embedded Christian Zionism—and now, everything was turned upside down. His mind started spinning with new questions about God and discipleship: “Does peace fit into theology? How has my inherited theology been an obstacle to peace rather than a mandate to pursue it? What does a theology of peace look like? How is that practically lived out such that both Milad in the West Bank and my neighbors in San Diego flourish?”

Milad and his community busted open a door in Jon’s mind, and he stepped through to find out what it means to follow Jesus in the midst of very real and physical conflict.

. . . . . . . . . . . .

In 2005, when a 7.6-magnitude earthquake shattered the region of Azad Kashmir at the base of the Himalayas, the damage in that rural area of northern Pakistan was catastrophic. Emergency response teams were disabled. Almost 90,000 people died and nearly 4 million were displaced. Much of the farming region’s livestock were killed.

In the aftermath of that disaster Jer Swigart (pictured), a young man who had come to take part in the relief effort, was struck by a realization. Working alongside others to clear rubble, distribute aid, and assist with communications between the villages and United Nations representatives, he discovered a God whose presence preceded him everywhere he went—even into areas he had previously considered “enemy territory.” For him it was an epiphany: God and God’s kingdom were much bigger than he had ever thought or imagined. Rather than bringing God to others in any way, it became clear to him that he was joining a very present, compassionate God in merciful action among those in need. While the infrastructure of Pakistani villages was being rebuilt, Jer found himself—and his perceptions of God—being undone and reshaped by a simultaneously global and personal deity.

His convictions about God’s power and presence only deepened as Jer, serving as a communications liaison for the UN, became involved in the negotiations of a peace treaty between two Pakistani villages that had waged war against each other for decades. When he watched men who had once sought each other’s annihilation shake hands in peace, the gospel went into “high definition” for Jer. He realized that in Christ, God waged a decisive peace; as a result, people who previously were subject to destruction were given new life.

BRAINSTORMING PARTNERS

When Jer returned from Pakistan to his home and pastoral work in California’s Bay Area, his expanded understanding of God, enemy-love, and mission convicted him of his deep need for further theological training and leadership formation. At the same time, his boss approached him: “With your skill set and what God is up to in you,” he said, “I want to encourage you to consider seminary and an MDiv as your next step.” As Jer discerned, prayed, and researched, he realized that every major mentor in his pastoral career had been a graduate of Fuller Seminary. He enrolled at the Fuller Northern California regional campus.

During one online class, Jer found himself consistently pushed, encouraged, and challenged by a classmate in San Diego. When the quarter finished, Jer wrote an email of gratitude to the student, saying he hoped they would get to meet in person one day. When, later, Jer arrived at his hotel in Jerusalem for a Fuller immersion course, he found—much to his surprise—Jon Huckins (pictured right) from his online course sitting in the lobby. Jon was back in Israel, this time with Fuller. Famed ethicist and then-Fuller professor Glen Stassen, known for his “Just Peacemaking” philosophy, was leading the trip, focusing on what it means to live as an agent of reconciliation in the name of Christ.

Jer and Jon spent the next two weeks as travel companions and brainstorming partners. Pakistan and the West Bank collided as the two learned together in East Jerusalem, wondering how to incorporate what they learned—rebuilding from earthquakes, forging peace, sharing meals with the displaced, listening to intellectual giants—into their church ministries at home. Back in the United States, as their discussions continued over Skype and weekend trips, a central question emerged: why had peace—not personal serenity, but the pacific coexistence of and resolution between persons, communities, and even nations—been decoupled from their understanding of the gospel, discipleship, and mission?

This question led to another: “Why have we, as pastors, never taught about peace?” As daunting theoretical questions sprung up in their own backyards, they began to imagine ways they could train their own congregants for lives of peacemaking. Dr. Stassen’s class took on flesh and bones. Finally, Jer and Jon committed to a plan—its end goal being a lived theology for themselves, their people, and their communities.

FORMING EVERYDAY PEACEMAKERS

As an initial experiment, the two tried out their plan with their congregations. Ten individuals from Jer’s church in the Bay Area and ten from Jon’s in San Diego engaged in several weeks of preparatory study and discussion, and then flew to Israel and the West Bank. This was not a mission trip, but a formation trip. The end result was not to convert others to Christianity, but to meet and learn from Christians, Jews, and Muslims on the front lines of building peace in hostile environments. Jon and Jer hoped their congregants would experience the same sort of internal transformation they had undergone. Much to their surprise, it worked. More than that, it was bigger than expected.

Others from their congregations, from neighboring congregations, and from churches across the nation heard about the trip. Before Jon and Jer had even debriefed, the wait list for the second trip was long and growing. They realized this was more than a program; they had started an organization. The Global Immersion Project was born. Jer and Jon continued their peacemaking training and formation trips—now called Learning Labs—to East Jerusalem, and added Tijuana, Mexico, as another with a focus on the immigrant experience. Over time they developed workshops, webinars, and e-courses as further platforms for meeting their mission of “cultivating everyday peacemakers.”

Both Jon and Jer came to Fuller with their own dramatic experiences, but their time in seminary helped them process and grow out of those experiences as leaders committed to peace. “Fuller created the space for questions I couldn’t ask elsewhere,” Jon says. “The professors there taught me how to think, not what to think. At the same time, they showed me how much bigger God’s kingdom was. I realized that the world and God’s activity stretched far beyond the American-centric Christianity I had been steeped in. I was formed to think bigger and see more.”

Jer also credits Fuller with encouraging him to step out and experiment with those bigger ideas. The biggest experiment, of course, became the Global Immersion Project, but that was only one outgrowth of the commitment to applied theology Jer drew from Fuller. Another was Jer’s own dedication to “become a student of both the Word and the world,” a commitment drilled into him by Fuller President Mark Labberton. Jer built a diverse library of Christian voices from around the globe, helping him to remember the God who precedes him everywhere.

The Global Immersion Project is just a half-decade old, but it is continuing to expand beyond Jon and Jer’s predictions. They see their work as an equipping of the American church to “embrace its identity as the reconciled beloved and vocation as beloved reconciler.” They desire the church’s transformation and activation as an instrument of peace in the world, a testament to a core tenet of the Christian faith. As they witness the growth of this movement through Global Immersion, they pray it continues to grow. “When Christians in the United States follow the Jesus we talk about—the one who commanded us to love our enemies, to pray for peace, to be peacemakers—the world will be a different place.”

+ Since publishing this story, Jon and Jer co-wrote a book about their peacemaking efforts. Learn more.

The post Blessed are the Peacemakers appeared first on Fuller Studio.

+ Russell Moore, president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, reflects with Mark Labberton on the impact of the civil rights movement, the need for a new moral imagination in American Christianity, and more.

As a public theologian, Russell Moore speaks and writes widely on the intersections of evangelical faith, politics, and social issues. Prior to serving as president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, he was the dean of the School of Theology at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.

Moore also discusses Carl F. Henry, an important voice in early American evangelicalism and one of the founding members of Fuller Theological Seminary. For more on the beginnings of Fuller Seminary, visit here.

The post Russell Moore on Courage appeared first on Fuller Studio.

+ Alexis Abernethy, professor of psychology, considers the role of suffering in spiritual formation and shares her own research on the stigmas that keep Christians from responding honestly to pain.

The post FULLER voices | Alexis Abernethy on Struggle appeared first on Fuller Studio.

+ Laura Harbert, affiliate professor of clinical psychology, reflects on the story of Zacchaeus in Luke 19:1-10, preaching on Jesus’ radical love that crosses social and political boundaries—and teaches us to do the same today.

This audio is a recording from Fuller’s All-Seminary chapel on June 1, 2016.

Music at the beginning and end of this audio stream is taken from a recent album entitled REVERE I RESTORE, created and recorded by members of the Fuller community under the leadership of Ed Willmington, director of the Fred Bock Institute of Music at Fuller’s Brehm Center for Worship, Theology, and the Arts.

The post The Boundary-Crossing Jesus | Laura Harbert appeared first on Fuller Studio.

“If indeed God is reconciling all things to himself, he’s not only talking about the evangelical mandate in reconciling all humans to himself, but also all of nature and all of the cosmos. For some reason in the church especially, we seem to separate those two things. My role as an artist is to point to what’s already pointing. I join St. Augustine who said, ‘Everything in creation points to the Creator.’”

+ Berenice Rarig is an international installation and performance artist, founding director of FUZE, and a friend of the Brehm Center at Fuller Seminary.

The post Culture Care and Art | Berenice Rarig appeared first on Fuller Studio.

+ Jude Tiersma Watson, associate professor of urban mission, argues that we can cultivate a “posture of stillness” just as easily on a busy street as a monastery

The post FULLER voices | Jude Tiersma Watson on Stillness appeared first on Fuller Studio.

“Silence.” Once we have said it, we have destroyed it.

“Mildred has died.” The three-word message from CC was waiting by the phone as I stepped in the door, home from a two-day conference. I drove immediately to the Turner horse ranch, ran through the light rain to the family-room door, saw my friend CC sitting on the far side, withdrawn, uncomfortable with gathered family and neighbors pressed around him. I stepped inside. His flat palm gestured stay, and he made his way across the room, collecting his coat. “Glad you came; I’ve got to get out of here. Can we walk?” I nodded. We stepped back out into the drizzle, and he set off down the lane to the road with me walking silently beside him.

As a young freshly minted pastor out of seminary, I had first called on CC three years before. He was an outcast alumnus, a myth, and chief of sinners from my congregation. Theologically trained, a repeated candidate for the ministry, he had gotten into conflict with church leaders, dropped out, and never returned as his show, race, and stud horse ranch became nationally successful. His lifestyle had changed as well: a line of mistresses, then a secret second family, total cutoffs from most old friends. He was the whispered butt of stable or water cooler jokes linking his sexuality to his blue ribbon stallion; his was the prize scalp to be won by visiting evangelists; among the truly good people, he was a pariah. We, however, somehow connected. A brilliant man, widely read, with a photographic memory—if we allude to Shakespeare, he recites the scene; if one of us quotes a Scripture, he repeats the whole context; if we explore philosophy or theology, he has forgotten little, having immediate access to virtually anything he once read—Augustine, Luther, Calvin, Menno, Wesley, Finney, Hodge, Bonhoeffer, Barth. Our conversations were playful for him, a seminar for me. Our friendship had cemented. And at last, Mildred, his wife of fifty years, has finally left him.

Now we are trudging through rain on muddy country roads—one mile west, one mile south, a mile back east, then north to round the block. My suit is slowly getting soaked, my Italian leather shoes coming apart; we walk. He is silent in his mourning. He is shamed before the community that has ostracized him who are now gathering to remember her, to declare her a saint. He walks, head down, sighing now and then, soul frozen in complicated grief. I feel all this in the silence. We round the final corner, turn back to the big house streaming light and people. He will have to go in and face them again.

I have spoken no more than a half dozen words, and felt that they were unnecessary. But step by step, I am searching for the right thing to say as we end our walk. I need to talk. He does not. But certainly my seminary training has something to offer? I find nothing. We stop at the door; he throws an arm around my sodden shoulders. “You’re wet,” he says. “Go on home.” “Yes, but it was worth every drop of it.” That is the best I can come up with.

He shakes the water from his broad-brimmed hat, slaps it against his thigh, then looks me in the eye. “I’ve been outside far too long,” CC says. “When the funeral is over, can we talk about how I can come in again?” My answer is a second silent hug. I drive home, feeling a total, utter failure as a pastor. An hour walking on the road, and I said nothing. Silence. I tell no one about my pastoral shame. It will be later, much later, before I realize that, in spite of myself, silent presence was probably the best pastoral care I could have given.

To every thing there is a season . . .
A time to weep and a time to laugh,
A time for mourning and a time for dancing,
A time for silence and a time for speech. (Eccles. 3:4, 7)

Silence is the gift we give when words are untrustworthy, unnecessary, unwise.

“Those who know do not talk; those who talk do not know.”
—Chinese wisdom from the Tao Te Ching

“If your speech is no better than silence, be silent.”
—Dionysius the elder, 4th century BCE

“Better to remain silent and be thought a fool, than to speak out and remove all doubt.”
—Abraham Lincoln

Silence precedes speech: only one who has learned to be silent is prepared to speak.

“No moment of silence is a waste of time.” 
—Quaker Rachel Needham

“It is often more effective to fast with words than with food.” 
—Medieval Rabbi Vilna Gaon

“The deeper one’s nature, the more time is necessary for solitude.” 
—Søren Kierkegaard

Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote, of silent reverence: “In every moment there is something sacred at stake, and it is the reason that the approach of the pious to reality is in reverence.” Reverence, he defines, is recognition of the extremely precious—morally, intellectually, spiritually, all that we revere—the sacred. “To sense the sacred is to sense what is dear to God,” he says. “Just to be is a blessing: just to live is holy.”

“Nothing in all creation is so like God as silence.” 
—Meister Eckhart

“Those who hear the word of God can also hear his silence.” 
—St. Ignatius of Antioch

Richard Rohr’s Prayer from Psalm 46:10:
“Be still and know that I am God.
Be still and know that I am.
Be still and know.
Be still.
Be.”

“In silence and hope shall be your strength.” (Isa. 35:15)

When we learn how to speak and what to say, how to articulate our theology, how to translate our theory, we must earn the right to say it—through the practices of silence, patience, presence. Silence is the language of respect; patience of waiting; presence of solidarity.

“Be quick to listen, slow to speak.” (Jas. 1:19)

“Love is patient. . . . There is nothing love cannot face, there is no limit to its faith, its hope, its endurance. (1 Cor. 13)

Job and friends: seven days of silence waiting for the sufferer to speak first.

Ezekiel: at the end of his journey, to be present with Judean exiles: “For seven days I sat in silence dumbfounded” (2:15).

Jesus apparently practiced thirty years of silence until he “opened his mouth and taught them.” After the Jordan call, forty days of desert silence.

Paul: after radical change, retreated to a silent retreat to Arabia (Gal. 1:17).

SILENCE: THE LANGUAGE OF THE SOUL

Silence has its own taxonomy of meanings and uses, so each culture, each group, each person perceives and attaches meanings in encountering a silent other. Communications theorists have parsed twenty meanings of silence. They range from “I have nothing to say, I don’t have anything to contribute” all the way to “Nothing needs to be said, we understand each other intimately.”

Silence has its own grammar; it is a form of speech—ante-silence, the “before-silence” that anticipates words; present silence; and post-silence, the “after-silence” that responds to the spoken—silence is continuous with the stream of communication. Silence is a language of great eloquence. It is our continuous response to life, to the neighbor, to the other, since we cannot not communicate.

There is a silence of denial and a silence of truthfulness. There is a silence of anger and a silence of peace. There is a silence of pride and a silence of humility. There is a silence of hate and a silence of love. There is a silence of distance and a silence of intimacy. There is a silence of resentment and a silence of acceptance. There is a silence of despair and a silence of hope.

Silence is the core of our being, Silence is the voice of the soul. Silence is the strength of interior life, Silence is the inner well of charity. Without silence, our moral convictions are only words. Without silence to preserve them, all virtues become corrupt. Without silence our best intentions are mere noise. Silence is at the center of our moral agency. One who loves God loves silence also. One who loves Christ loves the silence of the desert. One who knows the Spirit knows the winds of silence. If we root our lives in silence we grow deep into God.

Flannery O’Connor, the great Catholic novelist, said of the Eucharist, “Well, if it’s a symbol, to hell with it. . . . It is the center of existence for me; all the rest of life is expendable.” When I’m among Quakers, I discover that they feel that way about silence. “Holding holy silence,” gently, like holding a baby bird, they say, is worship, is reverence, is the practice of the Eucharist. The silent presence of the Holy Spirit working within is called “sifting silence.” It separates the worthwhile from the worthless. If we are never silent, then we never have to look at the truth about ourselves. Noise keeps us from confronting self; noise lets us avoid. Spiritual silence is a scalpel. It cuts through layers of our fears and insecurities. Unlike surgery, we are not anesthetized during silence, we feel each cut. Holy silence cuts through obfuscation, it is painful—which may be why there aren’t many desert fathers today. Or Quakers.

When you have learned the gift of silence, learned how to listen deeply to another, you will offer active, not passive, silence. Silence is a high form of activity—attending in patience; attuning in solidarity; imagining and empathizing in presence. What if you offered others a hospitable and welcoming silence, a wild and enduring patience, a nondefensive and vulnerable, loving presence?

PATIENCE: THE LANGUAGE OF LOVE


Patience means waiting; it means quietly and without protest awaiting your turn. Being patient is, in some sense, being like the supremely patient God. Being patient means waiting for a God whose patience outdistances and outlasts our own—we have only a brief span of life to wait; God has eternity.

“Patience is waiting. It is sitting uneasily in a “not-yet” without control of its own fulfillment. Patience knows that it waits for what is to come, but it does not know if what is to come will ever be present. If it were not so, it would not be patience. Patience is something that we may not truly have until we are impatient with it. Hence I cannot conclude by assuring you that your patience—our patience—will be rewarded in the way we would like it to be. We know that it will be rewarded insofar as we have been promised this by the one in whom we trust . . . it makes us tremble. As we pray for patience now, perhaps we will tremble. Indeed, we should do both. We should pray and we should tremble.” 
—Peter Blum

“Christians believe that through cross and resurrection we have been given the time to be patient in a world of impatience. I am often in a hurry and busy, but this is not the same thing as impatience. Patience does not mean “doing nothing.” Rather, patience is sticking to ‘what you are doing because you believe that it is worthy and worthwhile.”
—Stanley Hauerwas, citing John Howard Yoder

“One’s willingness to be wronged, to absorb evil patiently without retaliating, helps to break the cycle of vengeance and opens up the possibility for healing and peace. Hence though forgiveness is a constitutive practice of peace (the act of forgiveness itself helps to constitute peace), forgiveness is unimaginable apart from patience.” 
—Philip Kenneson

“Learning to weep, learning to keep vigil, learning to wait for the dawn. Perhaps this is what it means to be human.” 
—Henri Nouwen

“Love is patient.” (1 Cor. 13)

“The fruit of the Spirit is love—the evidence of love is patient longsuffering.” (Gal. 5:22)
(Makrothumia is patience connected to love; 
hupomeno is endurance rooted in hope.)

“Waiting patiently in expectation is the foundation of the spiritual life.” 
—Simone Weil

When we learn the virtue of patience, we let go of control. When we have learned the necessity of patient waiting before God, and practice that silence in awareness of divine presence, we may then begin to use words, cautiously, carefully: “In your prayers do not chatter, like those who think the more they say the more likely they will be heard” (Matt. 6:7).

Attentiveness to the presence of God requires patient silence; the door to such solitude opens only from the inside; patient silence and solitude allow us to attune to God who is there. (Oh, it’s You again, You!) In solitude one is not alone, but in solidarity with a great company of spiritual co-travelers, people from the great extended past, people present who dwell in my inner community. We meet and in meeting are met by One who knows us all. (You again, You!) And in the presence of other worshippers, in solidarity as we gather as God’s people, we can have eyes to see the presence of Christ appearing in the circle center. (You, You again, You, always You. You, You.)

Practicing the virtue of silent awe. A devout Jew is to recite one hundred blessings (berakhot) a day. At minimum, the eighteen blessings of amidah, three times a day. This is to embody “the practice of amazement.” A spirituality of “oohing”and “aahing”calls for one hundred ooohs and aaahs a day. How often have you oohed and aahed today?

PRESENCE: THE PRIMARY METHOD OF GIVING CARE

Bishop John V. Taylor puts it well: “The Christian, whoever he or she may be, who stands in the world in the name of Christ, has nothing to offer unless he or she offers to be present, really and totally present, really and totally in the present.” Presence is not a method; it is embodying grace, incarnating love; it is fleshing out the steadfast love of God. “We are not free to choose or reject a theology of presence. Presence as incarnation is fundamental to all witness. All ministries of the church are rooted in being present” (Wilbert Shenk).

The care-response, what Martin Buber called “being for others,” or “being there,” states that personhood is realized only in the presence of another. Presence is the medium in which selfhood is realized. The cowboy philosopher Texas Bix Bender, in Don’t Squat with Your Spurs On, states: “A body can pretend to care, but they can’t pretend to be there.” Jewish philosopher Woody Allen: “Ninety percent of life is just showing up.”

The primary reality—not method—of care-giving is faithful presence that provides support, nurture, and respectful care. To care for another is to bid another to grow. Mayeroff (On Caring) has taught us that faithful presence has no agenda other than the growth and personhood of the one receiving care, and the character and content of the caring relationship is more important than its successful outcome. Out of our experience of God’s faithfulness, we learn how to be faithful to one another in our willingness to be present with all our vulnerabilities. Our presence to one another mediates God’s presence to us. The abiding certainty of God’s presence is not and cannot be a substitute for our presence—being the face of God to each other.

God’s compassionate presence is mediated in the caring presence of God’s people. Just as we know that nothing—pain, suffering, even death—can separate us from the compassionate love of God, so we stubbornly refuse to let anything intervene in our presence with those who suffer. “Presence,” says Wendy Farley, “demonstrates that nothing can separate God from us, but that suffering can be a veil that hides this loving presence. In the midst of suffering, compassion labors to tear the veil.”

The profound need to be listened to, to be heard, the longing for a listener who will be silent enough to practice the hospitality of listening, is an essential part of our humanity. The need to tell one’s story and for one’s story to be heard, recognized, validated, is an essential element of creative and healing community. Hearing, not just listening, creates community; hearing, not just waiting for one’s turn to take the stage, creates a bond, a commitment to life together, and becomes an invitation to live, to grow, to become.

When we embody presence, we lower defenses so the other can see through to the soul. The defended self is barely, perhaps rarely present.

“Make your ego porous. Will is of little importance, complaining is nothing, fame is nothing. Openness, patience, receptivity, solitude is everything.” 
—German poet Rainer Maria Rilke

“When we put ourselves at the opposite pole of the ego, we are in the place where God is.” 
—Abraham Joshua Heschel, Man’s Quest for God

“The turtle lays a thousand eggs with no one knowing;
When a hen lays an egg, the whole country is informed.” 
—Malay proverb

Loquacious egotism is the anesthetic that dulls the pain of stupidity. The capacity to be nourished by silence is a primary indication of size and weight as well as height and depth of soul. Great souls find peace in silence; small souls seek to be distracted by chatter and anaesthetized by noise.

PATIENT PRESENCE: HEARING SILENCE INTO SPEECH

We may speak of various types of silence in the face of domination or oppression:

Apathetic: silence of despair
Embarrassed: silence of shame
Confounded: silence of confusion
Empowered: silence of discovery
Patient: silence of endurance
Awed: silence of hope
United: silence of courage

So as a result, one is

Dumb
Helpless
Voiceless
Voiced
Sustained
Articulate
Powerful

Pre-discourse silence . . . post-discourse silence.

It is risky to confront silencing—dominant groups who silence marginalized groups through coercion, hegemony, entitlement/privilege, are even more willing to silence those who point out how oblivious we are to the obvious: “The emperor has no clothes.” Small wonder the brightest and best among us are willing to hide behind silence. Heidegger, for example, the genius who wrote the most brilliant treatise on authentic silence and Dasein (being there), was conveniently silent before the Nazis.

“We shall have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people.”
—Martin Luther King Jr., “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”

Who dares break the silence by speaking the truth about world domination, inhuman exploitation, racial fantasies of entitlement, historic institutionalization of brutalities, and dehumanization? Doris Lessing, Nobel Prize winning South African novelist, in The Sirian Experiments, constructs a cosmic history of the earth told from an extra-planetary perspective. As two leaders on the star Sirius are discussing the future of earth, one runs his finger along a map of Eurasia and says:

“Here, in the Northwest fringes, in these islands, in this little space, a race is being formed even now. It will overrun the whole world. . . . This race will destroy everything. The creed of this white race will be, if it is there, it belongs to us. If I want it, I must have it. If what I see is different from myself then it must be punished or wiped out. Anything that is not me, is primitive and bad . . . and this is the creed that they will teach to the whole of [Earth].”

Soares-Prabhu, the Jesuit theologian from Puna, India, who was killed by a lorry hitting his bicycle on the day of his retirement, after citing Lessing, asks, “‘Everything that is not me is primitive and bad.’ Could there be a neater description of the Christian-colonial prejudice that inspired conquistador and missionary alike? . . . The roots of the great tree of Christian prejudice run deep, and its fruits, to those who have tasted them, are bitter. We need to look at the tree squarely and ask ourselves how it is that the seed sown by the unprejudiced and nonviolent Jesus has grown to this? What evil force has nurtured its monstrous growth?”

Catholic theologians who have taught us to speak of “the Divine preference for the poor” remind us that God is in every encounter with the poor. They stand in for God: what we do to/for them, we do to/for God. They mediate God to us. As Jon Sobrino says: “Oppressed persons are the mediation of God because, first of all, they break down the normal self-interest with which human beings approach other human beings. Merely by being there the oppressed call into question those who approach, challenging their being human, and this radical questioning of what it means to be a human being serves as the historical mediation of our questioning of what ‘being God’ means. That is why those who approach the oppressed get the real feeling that it is they who are being evangelized and converted rather than those to whom they seek to render service.”

The qualification for graduation is not just “have you found your voice?” But, as theologian Nelle Morton asks, “Can you hear others into speech?” When you listen, it is not just to understand, but to hear the other into self-discovery and self-understanding.

“Moving from silence into speech is for the oppressed, the colonized, the exploited, and those who stand and struggle side by side, a gesture of defiance that heals, that makes new life and new growth possible.” 
—bell hooks, Talking Back

When we have heard the stifled cries of the oppressed, seen the silent pain of the poor, sensed the hidden wound of the abused, we dare not be spectators; we must be advocates. The silences of injustice are ours to break.

“The silence of the victim is one thing, that of the killer another. 
And the silence of the spectator, still another. 
There is a creative silence; there is a murderous silence.” 
—Elie Wiesel, Somewhere a Master

Our task is to give pain a voice, to hear and give voice to the cries of hell.

Rowan Williams cites the gutsy words of Martin Luther: “Luther asks . . . ‘do you know what it is like to be in hell, because only if you have been in hell can you be a theologian’ (a statement which I think is true [Williams adds], and should be engraved on the portals of every theological institution in the world).”

A lifetime of silence, patience, and presence, Thomas Merton wrote, “is ordered to an ultimate declaration, which can be put into words, a declaration of all we have lived for.” Life is not to be regarded as an uninterrupted flow of words that is finally silenced by death. Its rhythm develops in silence, surfaces in moments of expression, returns to deeper silence, culminates in a final declaration, then ascends quietly into the silence of Heaven.

We must all die. If the spirit that kept the flame of physical life burning in our bodies took care to nourish itself with the oil that is found only in the silence of God’s charity, then when the body dies, the spirit itself goes on burning the same oil, with its own flame. But if the spirit has burned all along with the base oils of passion or egoism or pride, then when death comes, the flame of the spirit goes out with the light of the body because there is no more oil in the lamp. 
—Thomas Merton, No Man is an Island

Let your life burn brightly with the oil of God’s quiet, patient charity. Love God lavishly; love your neighbor sacrificially. Be nourished with the oil of divine love. Go out and hear the silent into speech
by seeing the face of Jesus appear among the least of these, our sisters and brothers. Go out and care for the poor and the oppressed
by joining with God in a preference for the poor. Go out and offer the presence of such love and compassion
that it can be mistaken for the presence of Christ. Let your silence be attendance and reverence, not absence or avoidance. Let your patience be endurance and perseverance, not acquiescence. Let your presence be the practice and experience of God-with-us.

+ Dr. Augsburger  originally delivered “Silence, Patience, Presence” as the Baccalaureate address to Fuller’s graduating students May 2012. Listen to the full address here.

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