Different Eyes: The Art of Living Beautifully

Praise for Steve Chalke and Alan Mann’s Different Eyes

Every now and then I bump into someone who doesn’t ‘tell’ me how to live my life, but shows me, by living their life ‘beautifully’. This book gives us an insight into some of the reasons why Steve Chalke is one of those people. Beware, it may well be contagious!

Ruth Dearnley, speaker, CEO Stop The Traffik

Vital, readable and winsome wisdom that calls us beyond mere goodness to beautiful living. Refreshing and inviting, this is an invaluable tool for us all as we live our faith in the moral maze.

Jeff Lucas, author, speaker, broadcaster

Also by Steve Chalke

Apprentice: Walking the Way of Christ (Steve Chalke and Joanna Wyld)

Change Agents: 25 Hard-learned Lessons in the Art of Getting Things Done

Intelligent Church: A Journey Towards Christ-Centred Community (Steve Chalke and Anthony Watkis)

The Lost Message of Jesus (Steve Chalke and Alan Mann)

Different Eyes

The Art Of Living Beautifully

Steve Chalke

+ alan mann

ZONDERVAN

Different Eyes

Copyright © 2010 by Steve Chalke

Steve Chalke and Alan Mann assert the moral right to be identified as the authors of this work.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of Zondervan.

EPub Edition © FEBRUARY 2010 ISBN: 978-0-310-57197-1

Requests for information should be addressed to:

Zondervan, Grand Rapids, Michigan 49530

All Scripture quotations, unless otherwise indicated, are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide.

Any Internet addresses (websites, blogs, etc.) and telephone numbers printed in this book are offered as a resource. They are not intended in any way to be or imply an endorsement by Zondervan, nor does Zondervan vouch for the content of these sites and numbers for the life of this book.

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Praise for Steve Chalke and Alan Mann’s Different Eyes

Also by Steve Chalke

Title Page

Copyright

Part One Clear Sighted

Section One Surprised

Section Two Imaginative

Thinking Christianly

Part Two Picture Perfect

Section One Revolutionary

Section Two Chosen

Thinking Christianly

Part Three Finding Focus

Section One Distinctive

Section Two Enlightened

Thinking Christianly

Part Four Eyes Wide Open

Section One Countercultural

Section Two Adventurous

Thinking Christianly

For Further Reading

Notes

Acknowledgements

Share Your Thoughts

About the Publisher

Part One

clear sighted

Section one

surprised

God is a common name.

There are thousands of them.

Like countless other common names – Jack or Olivia or Raj or Fatima – there is almost nothing you can tell about the character of any specific god just from the use of that label.

Think about it. Why was Moses so concerned to get clarification as to which god was addressing him from the burning bush?

‘Suppose I go to the Israelites and say to them, The God of your fathers [‘El’] has sent me to you, and they ask me, What is his name? Then what shall I tell them?’ (Exodus 3:13)

El (which in English is translated ‘God of your fathers’) was a fairly standard way of referring to local gods in the Ancient Near East. Every nation had its collection of gods who were, of course, known to them as the ‘gods of their fathers’.¹ It shouldn’t surprise us, therefore, that Moses asks the god of the burning bush for some illumination as to who exactly he is. God responds: ‘Tell them…I Am [Hebrew ‘Yahweh’], has sent you’ (Exodus 3:14 CEV).

Even today, there are all kinds of names for the gods who are worshipped around the world. And yet, how often do we get into conversations about ‘God’ and simply presume that everyone is on the same page as we are? How often do we unthinkingly assume that we all have in mind the same kind of God–the God who is revealed and experienced within the story of Israel and the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, the Jew from Nazareth?

The problem is that often people are not only on a different page than we are, they’re not even reading the same book!

In Alice Through the Looking Glass, in a rather unintelligible conversation with Alice about the meaning of the word glory, Humpty Dumpty says this: ‘When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean–neither more nor less.’

That’s the problem with the name god. It means just what different groups of people choose it to mean.

But it’s even more complicated than that.

If we’re honest, exactly the same problem has developed within the Church–there are lots of ‘Chris tian gods’. We have…

the God who approves of war and the God who is against it

the God who is for capital punishment and the one who is appalled by it

the God who opposes divorce and remarriage and the God who is accepting of both

the God who teaches ‘Walk with me and I’ll make you healthy and wealthy’ and the God of those who live in suffering and poverty

the God who gives us the technology for stem cell research and birth control and the God who is outraged by our development of both

the God who is against women in church leadership positions and the God who positively encourages them into such roles

Such views about who God is, what he’s like and how he wants us to live, not only impact our personal lives and our churches, they even affect the way entire countries are run – sometimes with devastating results.

Consider the Dutch Reformed Church of South Africa, which has been intimately bound up with the politics of the white Afrikaner community. The denomination even developed a whole theology to legitimise its support of the Apartheid system, the institutionalised separation of the South African people according to their race. Indeed, the South African Prime Minister, Daniel Francois Malan (1874 – 1959) – who led the campaign for complete segregation of the races in South Africa – was himself a Dutch Reformed minister.

What is known as ‘Ham theology’ made it possible for Dutch Reformed scholars to teach that the Afrikaners, as a race, fulfilled a role similar to that of the people of Israel in Old Testament times.

Dutch Reformed theologians viewed the curse that Noah placed on his grandson Canaan, the son of Ham (Genesis 9:20 – 27), as the biblical justification for Israel’s conquest and enslavement of the Canaanites. Afrikaners believed that black Africans, or ‘Hamites’ as they were sometimes called, were also descendants of Ham through Canaan.

Their theology also claimed that the Bible accepts racial and ethnic differences – and that this is clearly seen in the story of the Tower of Babel (Genesis 11) and was even recognised by the apostle Paul in his Areopagus speech (Acts 17), where he acknowledges that God has ‘determined…the exact places where they should live’ (Acts 17:26).

All this was then used as the justification for segregation and the decisions of white Afrikaners regarding the division of land and their tightly controlled allocation of living areas for nonwhites.

This kind of theology, in fact, was widely held by many European Christian groups throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and though it was abandoned by most in the mid-twentieth century, it was not until the early 1980s that the World Alliance of Reformed Churches declared Apartheid to be a heresy and expelled the Dutch Reformed Church from its federation. Perhaps partly as a result of this, in 1986 all congregations in the Dutch Reformed Church of South Africa were finally desegregated with the church expressing its repentance of ‘the sin of supporting Apartheid’.

Is there any wonder that George Bernard Shaw once famously observed that ‘God created man in his image – unfortunately man has returned the favour’?

Shaw’s contemporary, the influential sociologist Emile Durkheim, suggested that each ‘tribe’, or society, invents a god who reflects its values, standards, aspirations, hopes, ambitions and attitudes and then worships it – thus legitimising and endorsing its own moral choices and behaviours.

Durkheim has a point. His work is a powerful argument and offers important warnings to us all. The trappings of our culture too easily entice us – and when they do, our image of God inevitably becomes distorted. As Archbishop William Temple once put it, ‘The more distorted a person’s idea of God, and the more passionately they are committed to it, the more damage they will do.’

What’s in a Name?

One of the most significant prayers in the Jewish faith is the Shema – ‘Hear, O Israel: The LORD [Yahweh] our God, the LORDis one’ (Deuteronomy 6:4).

For literally thousands of years that simple prayer – or statement of belief – has been on the lips of generation after generation of Jews – from Moses to King David, from Jesus to Bob Dylan – it is the first creed they learn as infants, and for many it’s the last they utter before death.

Though the Shema is seemingly a simple text, it contains a depth of theology, with its chief task being to affirm monotheism. There is only one God – Yahweh is the God of the whole earth – without equal or rival. It’s a call for loyalty that has direct and concrete moral implications for the Israelites. It was a call for them to live their lives under the Lordship of one God.

The problem was, even though Yahweh had commanded that he should be Israel’s only God, in the Ancient Near East there was a pantheon of gods vying for attention – Asherah, Baal, Anath and Dagon, to name but a few.

In fact, as Joshua reminds the tribes of Israel, the worship of other gods was part of their history: ‘Long ago your ancestors lived on the other side of the Euphrates River, and they worshipped other gods’ (Joshua 24:2 CEV).

But if we read the story of the Old Testament carefully, we soon discover that Israel was frequently tempted to return to worshipping those ‘other gods’. Which isn’t surprising when you realise that, in their understanding – which had filtered into their worldview from the traditions of the cultures that surrounded them – everything depended on the favour of the gods. The gods decided such life-sustaining issues as the success of the annual harvest (which, in an agriculturally based society, was literally a matter of life or death), protection from natural disasters, victory in war, good health and so on.

Though these other gods were typically impersonal, angry, unpredictable and remote, and only accessible through complex and demanding ritual and sacrifice in designated holy places, they did claim to be all-powerful. So it still made sense that if they appeared to be doing a better job of protecting and prospering those who worshipped them than Yahweh was, then perhaps it might be time for Israel to make the smart move and switch allegiances.

Yahweh – often translated as ‘LORD’ (printed in capital and small-capital letters) in our contemporary Bibles – is the distinctive, personal name of the God of Israel.² In fact, Yahweh is the most frequently used name for God in the Old Testament, appearing over 6,800 times. There are various theories about the deeper meaning of the name Yahweh (I Am). According to one tradition it means ‘to be, to become’. Another regards it as meaning ‘He was; He is; He will be’. But as Michael Goheen and Craig Bartholomew have noted, ‘Perhaps the best translation of this expression is ‘I will be who I Am’.³

Whatever the exact content of the name, calling yourself ‘I Am’, on first hearing, seems very strange; indeed, rather than a response to Moses’ question, it’s actually more of a non-response. A veiling rather than an unveiling. ‘Who are you?’ Moses asks. ‘I Am’ comes the response. That’s it? ‘You are what?’ Moses could have retorted.

In reality, however, ‘Yahweh’ was not only the most intriguing but the most profound response that the God of Israel could have given to Moses’ question, for it leaves the whole question of who he is and what he is like totally open. Yahweh refuses to be labelled, boxed or summed up in a word – instead, he will only come to be known as, and if, the people of Israel choose to journey with him. Yahweh is who Israel will discover him to be as their relationship with him develops.

We see some of the significance of all this if we consider the context in which ‘I Am’ reveals himself to the people of Israel.

The ancient Egyptian sun god, Aten, was worshipped as ‘Creator of all…Valiant Shepherd’. Amon-Re, another Egyptian god, was hailed as

The lord of truth and father of the gods.

Who made mankind and created the beasts.

Lord of what is…Who made what is below and what is above…

The Sovereign.⁴

And Enlil, the Babylonian god, who Israel would encounter during their exile (586 B.C.), was

Judge and decision maker.

[Whose] word is…life’s breath…

Enlil, you are the good shepherd.⁵

So, if the god of the burning bush had said to Moses, tell the people ‘I Am the Creator of all’, ‘the great Shepherd’, ‘the Father’ or ‘the judge of all’, then actually he could have been easily mistaken for an array of other Ancient Near Eastern gods. He could have then been perceived as having the same kind of character and morality that all these other gods were known for – despite their grand titles.

Instead, what Yahweh does is to make it clear to Moses and Israel – ‘Don’t confuse me with any other god. And don’t try to box me in. At this stage you have no language for defining me. I Am different. So instead, let me surprise you. For I will be who I will be, and you will slowly discover just what this means in the unfolding relationship that develops between us.’

The very name Yahweh is an invitation to discover, an enticement to an adventure of slow revelation. Any other label at this stage would not only have been superficial, but even misleading. The god who speaks out of the burning bush is simply inferring, ‘I’m different; journey with me; you will not regret it’. As Terrence Fretheim wrote, ‘The name [Yahweh] will shape Israel’s story, but the story will also give greater texture to the name.’⁶

It is Yahweh’s differentness that is the foundation of Israel’s story and their moral framework and formation. But who this Yahweh is will only be discovered in an ongoing, committed relationship with him. His distinctiveness will not