Justice, Forgiveness, Restoration, and Truth-telling

 

This past year, we’ve spent some time talking about justice and forgiveness. The Bible shows that God loves justice (Isaiah 61:8; 16:7-8) and that Christians ought to forgive (Colossians 3:13). Yet, how forgiveness and justice relate to each other is not always obvious, as too often people (including and especially Christians) understand justice as an unnecessary part of forgiveness.

However, Rachael DenHollander, wisely argues that forgiveness that ignores justice denies who God is (and denies a bit of our worth as human beings, especially as people against whom injustice has happened). In an interview with Christianity Today, DenHollander, notes:

“I worked to get to a place where I could trust in God’s justice and call evil what it was, because God is good and holy. One of the areas where Christians don’t do well is in acknowledging the devastation of the wound. We can tend to gloss over the devastation of any kind of suffering but especially sexual assault, with Christian platitudes like God works all things together for good or God is sovereign. Those are very good and glorious biblical truths, but when they are misapplied in a way to dampen the horror of evil, they ultimately dampen the goodness of God. Goodness and darkness exist as opposites. If we pretend that the darkness isn’t dark, it dampens the beauty of the light.”

I agree with DenHollander that acknowledging injustice is an important part of recognizing who God is and how things ought to be. It is only in recognizing that God loves justice that we can truly forgive. When DenHollander speaks of forgiving Larry Nassar, she says:

“It means that I trust in God’s justice and I release bitterness and anger and a desire for personal vengeance. It does not mean that I minimize or mitigate or excuse what he has done. It does not mean that I pursue justice on earth any less zealously. It simply means that I release personal vengeance against him, and I trust God’s justice, whether he chooses to mete that out purely eternally, or both in heaven and on earth.”

Perhaps another way of looking at justice and forgiveness is through the lens of restoration and/or truth-telling. Both justice and forgiveness are about restoring the wrongs that have been done, especially in terms of restoring relationships between humans and in relationship to God. Truth-telling is about acknowledging that it was truly evil; forgiveness can’t exist outside of that acknowledgement. Nor can any restoration of relationship happen without acknowledging that something truly horribly happened (that deserves punishment.) Or as DenHollander puts it,

“It defies the gospel of Christ when we do not call out abuse and enable abuse in our own church. Jesus Christ does not need your protection; he needs your obedience. Obedience means that you pursue justice and you stand up for the oppressed and you stand up for the victimized, and you tell the truth about the evil of sexual assault and the evil of covering it up.Obedience costs. It means that you will have to speak out against your own community. It will cost to stand up for the oppressed, and it should. If we’re not speaking out when it costs, then it doesn’t matter to us enough.”

To hear more about Rachael DenHollander’s understanding of justice and forgiveness, you can watch her presentation at Calvin College’s January Series in January 2019. You can start at minute 6 if you’d like to skip the part of how she met her husband.

originally posted at Campus Edge blog

Loneliness, Meaning, and Hope

The Los Angeles times recently published an article by Varun Soni, who is dean of religious life at USC, highlights some of the changes that he’s seen among students during the eleven years he’s been in that role. In the beginning, the conversations he had with students centered on “quests for meaning and purpose. [Students] were striving to translate values into action, cultivate joy and gratitude, live extraordinary lives.”

However, more recently the conversation has shifted more often from “how should I live?” to “why should I live?” As Soni, notes that students today are more likely to “grapple with hopelessness and meaninglessness. Every year, it seems, I encounter more stress, anxiety, and depression, and more students in crisis on campus.” He goes on to present the research that has also noticed this shift on campus.

Soni notes that students are often overwhelmed and lonely, and they find it difficult to know how to make friends, a trend that Jean M. Twenge, who has done a significant amount of research on the generation entering college, has also noticed.

Soni further notes that, while we sometimes consider this generation to be coddled,

the reality is they face unprecedented challenges and circumstances. They are entering a world in which many of the career paths of their parents’ generation no longer exist or have changed drastically. They face escalating tuition costs with little sense of whether their future opportunities justify the outlay. They have participated in active shooter trainings and campus lockdown drills for most of their lives.”

In this challenging context, Campus Edge and other religious communities strive to provide community and support for people who are struggling, as well as speaking hope into people’s lives. Please pray that we might do that well, as well as praying for all those who are struggling.

originally published at the Campus Edge blog

God's presence is already on campus

While some might understand a campus ministry as being primarily about being God to the university campus, I’m part of a tradition that believes God is already present on campus. The task of campus ministry is then about recognizing and proclaiming how God is at work, and then coming alongside the good that God is already doing.

Paul Verhoef, a fellow Christian Reformed campus minister at the University of Calgary, ruminates what this looks like in his context. Most importantly, he “has always worked with the goal of trying to achieve mutual understanding among people, he added, because this is an important part of what it means to love.”

On top of this, Verhoef highlights how important it is that the campus ministry love the university. This includes a calling “to serve, to support, and to live in a mutually supportive relationship with the university,” but it also goes further:

“Can we appreciate its work, its research and teaching focus? Can we sympathetically understand its habits and concerns – and if we at times call it to task, can this be done as someone who supports the university, who is seen by the university as a person who loves it, a person who is part of the university?”

Not only ought we to love the campus, but we also need to recognize that God is already there. As Verhoef has noted, he “has seen how God is always at work — that the Spirit of God is always moving, breathing, creating life, reconciling God’s world back to God, and doing this on the campus in Alberta.” And we, as campus ministers, ought to be looking for how and where “the Spirit of God doing good and beautiful things.” And then, as Verhoef himself notes, we can ask how we might be able to “come alongside of those places and lend support, put my shoulder behind the work being done, and work side-by-side with other staff, faculty, and students to make something beautiful happen.”

originally published at the Campus Edge blog

God in unexpected places

Ethan Vanderleek, a Christian Reformed campus minister in British Columbia, recently wrote an article in Christian Courier about how God shows up in unexpected places. In the article he describes working together with another faith group in order to serve others - and how God, not surprisingly, is present in that action.

He closes the article by speaking about one of the things that is fundamental to my understanding of campus ministry from a (Christian) Reformed perspective. My calling as a campus pastor is not to bring God to the university. Instead, God is already present there. I simply have the task (and joy!) of highlighting how God is at work. Or as Ethan puts it:

"Since God in his goodness is at work in quiet and persistent ways, we ourselves should be willing to see God’s faithfulness at work in unfamiliar places – not in the places where we normally look. We should be willing to confess that we don’t always know where to look for God. We didn’t know to look for God in the suffering man on the cross, nor do we look for God often enough in the poor and lonely people of the world, nor perhaps in faith communities which seem so different from our own. But if goodness is an often shrouded and hidden thing, as the crucified Christ helps us to see, then these strange places are perhaps precisely where we ought to look for God and for goodness."

I'd rather not be known as nice

When I was in Seminary, a professor asked us to describe God. When someone said that God was nice, the professor almost lost it. God was a lot of things, but NOT nice.

I'd probably not go that far, but I would prefer not to be known as nice. I do want to be gracious and kind, a non-anxious presence, and generally pleasant to be around - but I'd still rather not be known primarily as being nice. For me, 'niceness' is too close to making other people comfortable, not speaking up for others (including oneself), and even not living or following God passionately.

A recent Christianity Today article explains well how niceness can be problematic. Sharon Hodde Miller notes that

"“Niceness” is a form of superficial kindness that’s used as a means to a selfish end. . . . My devotion to it has won me a lot of acceptance and praise, but it has also inhibited my courage, fed my self-righteousness, encouraged my inauthenticity, and produced in me a flimsy sweetness that easily gives way to disdain."

She goes on further to point out how this superficial kindness that we consider to be 'niceness' is antithetical to what it means to be a Christian:

"I cannot follow Jesus and be nice. Not equally. Because following Jesus means following someone who spoke hard and confusing truths, who was honest with his disciples—even when it hurt—who condemned the hypocrisy of the Pharisees and turned over tables in the temple."

I pray that I might not be tempted by my own tendencies towards niceness built of a desire to be loved and appreciated by others, as well as fitting in with those around me. Instead, I pray that my dislike for the word might push me to have courage to be full of truth, while still acting and speaking with grace.