Theology of Happiness

Faith, God, Joy 0

I’m convinced that the main obstacle to happiness is lack of faith. People are unhappy because they don’t believe in happiness. They believe in same-old-same-old. To undertake my experiment in joy, I had to change beliefs. From a stick-in-the-mud theology of sadness I had to switch to a theology of happiness.

For years I believed it was a good thing to be sad. Sadness was compassionate, pragmatic, often the most realistic response to life’s complexities. What a surprise to discover that a lingering, low-grade melancholy was actually my last line of defense against the love of God. Moodiness was how I got back at God for everything that had ever gone wrong in my life. Atheists get back at God by not believing in Him, but that option was closed to me. I couldn’t help believing in God; the evidence was too compelling. I knew the world was filled with wonders, that life was precious beyond words, that I was surrounded by signs and messages of the power and love of my Creator. In view of all this, how could I justify clinging to my self-centered moodiness?

The answer was simple: Believe in sadness. Believe that a certain degree of melancholy is inevitable in this world. Believe that joy is brief and unsustainable, the rare exception rather than the rule. A capricious blessing, not a commandment.

Are you unhappy today? Ask yourself what you believe. What is your excuse for believing you cannot live this day in joy? No one can be happy without believing that happiness is good, right, appropriate, and allowed. If we believe joy is in short supply and must be carefully rationed, we will not rejoice. The lavish abundance of God’s kingdom isn’t obvious to the naked eye; it can be enjoyed only by those who believe, with a faith intense enough to lead to action.

— Mike Mason, Champagne for the Soul, p. 53-54.

True Salvation

Forgiveness, God, Life, Redemption 1

The notion that the salvation of Jesus is a salvation from the consequences of our sins is a false notion. The salvation of Christ is salvation from the smallest tendency or leaning to sin. It is a deliverance into the pure air of God’s ways of thinking and feeling. It is a salvation that makes the heart pure, with the will and choice of the heart to be pure.

To such a heart, sin is disgusting. It sees a thing as it is — that is, as God sees it, for God sees everything as it is. Jesus did not die to save us from punishment. He was called Jesus because he should save his people from their sins.

— George MacDonald, Unspoken Sermons, Third Series, “Justice,” quoted in Discovering the Character of God, compiled and edited by Michael R. Phillips, p. 262.

Undeniable

Faith, God, Truth 0

I once heard someone say that my belief in Jesus makes them suspect that I intellectually suck my thumb at night. But I cannot pretend, as much as sometimes I would like to, that I have not throughout my life experienced the redeeming, destabilizing love of a surprising God. Even when my mind protests, I still can’t deny my experiences. This thing is real to me. Sometimes I experience God when someone speaks the truth to me, sometimes in the moments when I admit I am wrong, sometimes in the loving of someone unlovable, sometimes in reconciliation that feels like it comes from somewhere outside of myself, but almost always when I experience God it comes in the form of some kind of death and resurrection.

— Nadia Bolz-Weber, Pastrix, p. xvi-xvii

Called for a Purpose

God, Redemption 0

The normal Greek word for “sin,” namely hamartia, means “missing the mark”: shooting at a target and failing to hit it. This is subtly but importantly different from being given a long and fussy list of things you must and mustn’t do and failing to observe them all. In the story the Bible is telling, humans were created for a purpose, and Israel was called for a purpose, and the purpose was not simply “to keep the rules,” “to be with God,” or “to go to heaven,” as you might suppose from innumerable books, sermons, hymns, and prayers. Humans were made to be “image-bearers,” to reflect the praises of creation back to the Creator and to reflect the Creator’s wise and loving stewardship into the world. Israel was called to be the royal priesthood, to worship God and reflect his rescuing wisdom into the world.

— N. T. Wright, The Day the Revolution Began, p. 99.

Lies Don’t Get Along with Jesus.

Acceptance, Core Value, God, Love 0

That’s why the demons are afraid. Because Jesus always has something to do with them.

Which is exactly why our demons try to keep us from people who remind us how loved we are. Our demons want nothing to do with the love of God in Christ Jesus because it threatens to obliterate them, and so they try to isolate us and tell us that we are not worthy to be called children of God. And those are lies that Jesus does not abide.

— Nadia Bolz-Weber, Accidental Saints, p. 87

Work as to the Lord

Core Value, God, Life 0

Work is not, primarily, a thing one does to live, but the thing one lives to do. It is, or it should be, the full expression of the worker’s faculties, the thing in which he finds spiritual, mental and bodily satisfaction, and the medium in which he offers himself to God.

— Dorothy L. Sayers, Letters to a Diminished Church: Passionate Arguments for the Relevance of Christian Doctrine, p. 127-128, quoted in Called to Create, by Jordan Raynor, p. 51.

Plain Statements of Scripture

God, Universalism 0

The following pages are written under the pressure of a deep conviction that the views generally held as to the future punishment of the ungodly wholly fail to satisfy the plain statements of Holy Scripture. All forms of partial salvation are but so many different ways of saying that evil is in the long run too strong for God. The popular creed has maintained itself on a scriptural basis solely, I believe, by hardening into dogma mere figures of oriental imagery; by mistranslations and misconceptions of the sense of the original (to which our Authorized Version largely contributes); and finally, by completely ignoring a vast body of evidence in favour of the salvation of all men, furnished, as will be shown, by very numerous passages of the New Testament, no less than by the great principles that pervade the teaching of all revelation.

— Thomas Allin, Christ Triumphant: Universalism Asserted as the Hope of the Gospel on the Authority of Reason, the Fathers, and Holy Scripture, p. 3

Close and Caring

God, Love 0

We will begin to explore the grand mystery of how a kenotic, cruciform and Christlike God can reign — can be present, active and ‘sovereign’ — in the world, when he is neither coercive nor controlling, but nevertheless infinitely close and caring. We’ll notice together how such a God rules, saves and serves by grounding and filling all that is with the power of love — a divine love with a particular content defined as consent and participation.

— Bradley Jersak, A More Christlike God, p. 121