Try an experiment with me. Open your Bible and read Galatians 2:20:

“I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.”

Now turn to 1 Peter 1:5:

“. . . who by God’s power are being guarded through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time.”

See anything different from the last hundred times you’ve read those verses? I didn’t either till recently.

I am undergoing a paradigm shift and I don’t think it’s a mid-life crisis: When I read verses that have the word “faith” in it—or related words like “believe” or “trust”—I think I need to try hard to see that they refer to active, present, this-moment-on-the-clock believing what God says. Whenever I do that, vive la difference!

With this in mind we go back to Galatians 2:20: “The life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son. . . .” Make that: “The life I now live in the flesh I live by . . . actually believing right now this minute on the clock that God has truth to tell me about this anxiety I’m feeling regarding my meeting in Maryland on Monday.”

The “faith” that “I live by” is not something in the far-off domain of religious ideas. Nor is it some old dusty voter registration card faith. It is not the old decision I made in some excited mood in my 20s. I am believing the Son right now—I am going to believe Him against all the other voices swirling in my head at the present moment.

1 Peter 1:5: By God’s power I am guarded “through faith.” That is to say, the “guarding part” is operative as long as the “through faith” part is operative. To be sure, God has mercifully guarded me many times that I was slumming in unbelief. But to know the full benefit of God’s guarding promise, the means prescribed by God is the instrument of faith. If I want to be guarded by God’s power, then the way to do it is through believing Him this moment, and then the next.

Francis Schaeffer writes in True Spirituality:

“If we are to bring forth fruit in the Christian life, or rather, if Christ is to bring forth this fruit through us by the agency of the Holy Spirit, there must be a constant act of faith, of thinking: Upon the basis of your promises, I am looking for you to fulfill them. . . .”

Faith is always believing what God has said.

To hear commentaries by Andrée Seu, click here.

I must have seen one too many pictures of Jesus as a kid—the Resurrection Jesus of Eastern Orthodox iconography. The image settled into theology in my mind, the unexamined notion that Jesus spends all his time just frozen on a throne, posing for portrait artists.

This is the kind of failure of imagination that we smile at in children but that is not amusing in adults: “When I was a child I thought as a child . . .” (1 Corinthians 13:11). In fact, my adult perception of God has embarrassingly remained one of remoteness, and a Savior as lacking in affect as the Vlidimir Madonna.

All this is changing gradually as God ferrets out error with multiple surgical instruments, as is His wont. First I started meeting Christians who live as if God is so near that one might expect him around each corner of the house, putting tea on for an afternoon conversation. And now, he has peeled away one more scale from my eyes, to reveal for the first time a verse I have read a hundred times:

“We know that Christ, being raised from the dead, will never die again; death no longer has dominion over him. For the death he died he died to sin, once for all, but the life he lives he lives to God” (Romans 6:9-10).

Jesus is not sitting or posing. He “lives life.” And when the Bible says Jesus “always lives to make intercession for” us (Hebrews 7:25), it is not as some bored functionary slumped in his chair and pushing papers on his desk. Jesus is busy, occupied, traveling, ordering, dispatching. He is “the living God” (Daniel 6:26); presumably as active as He was when His dusty feet plied the streets of Israel—and with a newly unleashed authority.

Faith will never rise higher than one’s perception of who God is. “The life he lives” is a phrase full of hope and feistiness. It invites prayer. Aslan is on the move, both bringing in His kingdom in lands I’ve never seen, and always ready for that cup of tea with me.

To hear commentaries by Andrée Seu, click here.

I was reminded recently that Christians should be civil—to each other as well as to unbelievers, I presume. I am all for that. “The Lord’s servant must not be quarrelsome but kind to everyone” (2 Timothy 2:24).

Let’s make sure civility is not a cover for cowardliness. I for one have been so darned civil all my Christian life that few would suspect my orientation. I never breach the social situation. I respect the feelings of others. I would stifle my impulse where Brit Hume blurted his faith on national TV—this was a news show, come on. My etiquette in restaurants is unimpeachable: I have prayed before meals with such discretion that an onlooker would think I had bowed my head to pluck a hair from my soup. I have waited so long for the subject of God to come up naturally with my neighbors that families have moved in and moved on in the meantime.

And whereas in the company of certain stripes of Christian I am expansive in my praise of God, and I pray at the drop of a hat, with other kinds of Christians I hold back—and I have a keen sense of which kind I am in the presence of. With the latter I am able to look indistinguishable from a worldly woman except that I don’t curse and am ignorant of most popular culture.

All the while, the unbelievers of the world are themselves. They act freely. They make no effort to restrain their manners for my sake or stifle their opinions in religious company, no matter how outlandish these behaviors and opinions seemed only a generation ago.

I think Brit Hume just finally got fed up with the double standard on the day he violated an unspoken social contract on Fox News when asked his opinion of the Tiger Woods imbroglio.

So what is the right and wise way? How do we Christians avoid falling off the horse on the one side of incivility and the opposite side of dereliction of duty? I think the prophet Daniel provides the clue.

The jealous satraps were out to get him, so they tricked King Darius into making a law that they knew his governor Daniel would eventually be found in violation of. The decree stated that anyone found petitioning any god except the king would be cast into the den of lions.

“When Daniel knew that the document had been signed, he went to his house where he had windows in his upper chamber open toward Jerusalem. He got down on his knees three times a day and prayed and gave thanks before his God, as he had done previously” (Daniel 6:10).

Daniel got caught, of course, and was thrown into the den, which all ended happily. But I note with edification that he didn’t change a thing in his normal routine. He did only what he had done all along. (See Galatians 2:11-14 for a negative example.) This, to my thinking, is the definition of integrity—being the same person in any company. As a policy it has several advantages: First, it is less exhausting than changing our face to suit every cultural situation. Secondly, evangelism tends to flow organically.

In other words, the question of civility versus boldness disappears. The thing to attend to—the first order of business—is not how we should conduct ourselves toward men but how we should conduct ourselves toward God. The horizontal relationship question tends to take care of itself.

But let us take heed: If we continue to be so “civil” and restrained and (let’s say it) chameleonlike in the world, we had better not imagine that all our forums on “transforming culture,” which are all the rage today, will make a whit of difference for the kingdom of God.

To hear commentaries by Andrée Seu, click here.

My mother is not much for jogging, so we go to the movies. There isn’t a lot out there for 78-year-olds in mainstream theaters, so we do artier films, mostly semi-historical romances involving British queens, it seems.

This time it was Russia, mediated by British actors: Christopher Plummer, Helen Mirren, and James McAvoy (the wonderful Tumnus in “The Chronicles of Narnia”). It concerned the last days of Tolstoy and the question of whether his legacy belongs to family or to Mother Russia. Whatever you feel about that, it’s not why I’m writing.

There were two sex scenes in The Last Station, gratuitous but more or less expected in this day and age. (I have always been grateful for Quiz Show [1994], as proof that you can make a great film without skin.). I would like to go on record in this column as saying that it is self-delusional to think you can watch graphic sex in a movie “redemptively” and “interactively,” as has been lately alleged.

I, to this day, have a sharp memory of a porn movie I saw in high school, as well as an image conjured in my mind in 1975 while leafing through a paperback on one of those stands in the drug store in Hyannis. And my parenting years are a blur. Whatever else that says about me as a person, that is the power of image. One does not “interact”; one is acted upon.

Incidents from the end of the book of Judges are often adduced—either by Bible-haters, to show what a bad book the Bible is, or by people who well-meaningly think that gives us permission to depict the crassest form of “real life” in movies. I would have to say that I have read the book of Judges innumerable times, and I have never once been caused to stumble by the imagery in it. One can only wonder at how God managed to tell a tale so awful without inciting titillation.

The director of The Last Station, as any director, is God in his production. His scripting of the events tells you how to think about them too. You don’t even notice the cheat. What in real life (i.e., God’s world) is the despicable act of having an affair with a “happily married man” is made to seem innocence and an act of independence by a young woman formerly shackled by the suffocating structures of either Russian Orthodoxy or Tolstoyism gone doctrinaire.

“Whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things” (Philippians 4:8).

To hear commentaries by Andrée Seu, click here.

While downtown on an errand, Joann and I impulsively stopped in on Picasso, or what remains of him. He was contained in four or five rooms in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. His paintings are pretty, I think. I like all the funky little boxes and randomly dissecting diagonal guitar strings. My favorites were the more monochromatic ochre compositions.

Other cubists were on hand to pad the $20 show. In 1913, Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase was greeted by one New York Times critic as “an explosion in a shingle factory.” American Art News offered $10 to anybody who could identify either the nude or the staircase, but I spotted it right away. I knew it had to be either a nude or an explosion in a shingle factory.

It was necessary to pass through the Cézannes and Monets to get out of the building, and though the Impressionists are always my fallback guys, they looked almost academic after Chagall and Lipchitz. I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to like Picasso. I was trying to remember if I had been disturbed the first time I saw a canvass with an eye where a nose should be, and if I should pay more attention to my initial instincts than my “refined” ones.

I mean, what is Picasso all about philosophically? Does he represent a fragmenting or dismantling of truth and absolutes? I don’t know. On the one hand, he expands our minds in a positive way by depicting objects and people from different perspectives. And that can be a good thing. It is always well to remember that there is another way of looking at someone or something—inside, outside, sideways, upside down.

But is Picasso saying there is no truth, only opinion? Only perspective?

The cubists’ breakthrough in style could mean nothing more than that they were sick of painting apples and oranges on a folded tablecloth, or setting up easels in hot fields in Provence. Whether in drawing or music, persons of genius can only play their scales the orthodox way so many times before they get a mischievous urge to break out. Theolonious Monk got bored with traditional jazz and played around with dissonant harmonies.

Whatever the case, I am firmly convinced of one thing, that The Three Musicians would look good in my living room. I would have to change the drapes, of course.

To hear commentaries by Andrée Seu, click here.

The randomly selected Bible passage I drifted off to sleep memorizing last night was 2 Timothy 2:1-4:

“You then, my child, be strengthened by the grace that is in Christ Jesus, and what you have heard from me in the presence of many witnesses, entrust to faithful men who will be able to teach others also. Share in suffering as a good soldier of Christ Jesus. No soldier gets entangled in civilian pursuits, since his aim is to please the one who enlisted him.”

Something surprising—I say supernatural—happens when one stops to commit to memory Scripture that one has been in the habit of skimming heretofore. My apologies to all the Christians I found “quaint” for so doing. What they knew all along was that to memorize the Word of God is to watch a frozen two-dimensional scene on the wall spring to life, and all the characters turn and look you straight in the eye. The Word yields its secrets only to the seeker.

In verse 1 I learn that the grace for strength and personal transformation is already available to us. It’s just a matter of believing it and walking in it. So much for the school of thought that passively waits around for God to change my foul mouth or my sense of powerlessness. I dare say He’s waiting for us.

Verse 2 speaks to an issue that has recently come up for me: What would the Apostle Paul talk about if you invited him to your retreat or seminar? My impression from this present verse is that Paul never “evolved” as a theologian—if you call “evolution” this prevalent phenomenon I see in Christian circles that are enthralled with arcane theo-philosophy brainstorming methods of cultural transformation. Paul is still “stuck” on the things he’s been stuck on for ages, the things he has said before many witnesses. Just in case there’s any doubt about what that is, he is plain in verse 8:

“Remember Jesus Christ, risen from the dead, the offspring of David is preached in my gospel.”

In a single phrase—“the offspring of David”—Paul distances himself from any misconception that he now preaches a highfalutin, abstruse, gnostic theological abstraction. This Johnny-one-note will go on talking about Christ crucified till they cart him away.

Verse 3: If you would not be disappointed in your prayer life, don’t ask for the wrong things. Do not seek a life free from suffering.

Verse 4: Now for the question for which I titled this post, from a verse that brings it into sharp focus: Is the call of Christ universal or two-tiered? Are only certain persons (say, pastors, missionaries, elders, and other special individuals) called to obey the exhortation of verse 4 to be set apart as a “soldier” and not entangled in civilian pursuits? Or in regard internal rather than external calling, is it only those who are aware of an inner calling by the Holy Spirit? Or do we eschew that exclusive interpretation and understand that everyone is exhorted to this radical separation?

On the one hand, the letter is a personal correspondence to one man—Timothy. That would argue for a particularistic interpretation. On the other hand, it is patent that the letter has become canon, and so ipso facto is addressed to us as well. It is evident that at least some elements of the letters to Timothy are very specific to that first century singular recipient—he is exhorted to use the gift he received when Paul laid hands on him; he is exhorted to take a little wine for his illness.

I know it would go too far to say that only certain Christians are called to “warfare.” Ephesians 6 and other Scripture obviate that possibility. And yet the call does seem extreme: Paul is making a case for refraining from “civilian pursuits.” Well, of course, he would say that to a pastor, wouldn’t he? Some will try to solve the matter by saying that the call is made specifically to Timothy and others with manifest callings, but that the principle applies to all. That may well by the answer, though it leaves me in my puzzlement a bit.

Personally, I would like to embrace these verses as my own. I wonder if that desire is itself a kind of answer to my own question.

To hear commentaries by Andrée Seu, click here.

I would have thought that when Big Brother finally came it would be against our wills.

On the other hand, I do remember in third grade when Soeur St. Edouard de la Croix told us the following story about our counterparts in the Soviet Union schools.

She said the teachers there would put the little Soviet tykes through an instructional exercise. They would tell the children to pray to God for candy. Then they would have them close their eyes at their desks, as teachers quietly went around the room putting a piece of candy on each desk. Then, the teachers would exclaim, “Open your eyes! Look, God answered your prayer!”

Some clever child would inevitably say, “No, teacher. I peeked and saw you put the taffy on my desk.” The teacher would close in for the kill: “That’s right, little Igor Ivanovich. Now you understand that everything good that we have comes from ourselves—there is no God.”

The surrendering of freedom and privacy is not that hard fought after all. Last week’s Newsweek has at least two articles that demonstrate the trick. One shows how our cell phones are “snitching” on us: Federal agents are almost routinely accessing our personal data and monitoring our comings and goings via the handy gadgets we keep in our pockets. Nobody likes this, but nobody is about to give up his or her cell phone, either.

A second example of easy surrender is the Google and Facebook phenomenon. No one has to pry personal information from us. We are not only sharing it outright with strangers but prostituting it to pay for the online services we received. Googling and social networking are free—but the Faustian price is that these services read everything about you so that they can target their ads to you with laser precision. We let them do it because it makes shopping so easy. Like Esau, we sell our souls for potage.

I have always assumed that when the time came we wouldn’t be able to buy or sell without the mark of the beast (Revelation 13:17-18), and it would be under duress. But maybe not. Maybe we will smile and say, “This is so convenient.”

To hear commentaries by Andrée Seu, click here.

I wrote a little essay for the print magazine about why I don’t like to call myself “Reformed” more than 10 times a week, and it prompted this good question from one reader:

“OK, I agree that labels can obscure the Lord, but can you suggest an alternative for discerning a speaker’s orthodoxy? There are many out there claiming to be Christians, but their doctrinal views are dangerous, if not downright heretical. You know what I mean: “Name it and Claim it,” “Psychobabble Christianity,” “Non-Lordship Salvation,” et cetera. Surely they should not be left in error, if we can correct them. Additionally, some, although they love Jesus fervently, may need to have the way of God explained ‘more accurately’ (Acts 18:24-26). And others may have a ‘zeal for God, but not according to knowledge.’ Theology matters.”

I started to imagine, à la John Lennon, a Christian world without labels—just for one week. Say we are all thrust together in a giant auditorium with no name tags identifying us as OPC, PCA, RPC, SBC, UPC, AOG, etc. Suppose we had no way of knowing, ahead of time, right from the get-go, who was who? Suppose we had no tidy way of pigeonholing somebody’s theology and “getting his number” and pegging him. Would it be a train wreck? Would it be a colossal waste of time having to go around and talk to each person individually for at least an hour or two, say, over coffee, to find out what he thinks and believes about Jesus? Would we have to go so far as to crack open a Bible together? To risk studying the Bible with a guy who’s an “unknown quantity,” who might even hold dangerous views?

Is it possible we might learn a couple of things ourselves that we hadn’t seen before in the Scriptures? Is it possible we would find that our own denomination had a blind spot or two?

To hear commentaries by Andrée Seu, click here.

On Saturday I sat with Mrs. S, who is 85, while her daughter was out. I suggested playing Scrabble but Mrs. S said, “After my coffee,” so we talked instead. One thing led to another and her face suddenly clouded over and she confided that she was afraid to die. When I asked her what she was afraid of, she said, “I don’t want to be alone. And it’s all darkness.”

I remembered a true story that Anne Lamott related in her book Operating Instructions, so I told Mrs. S and now I’m telling you:

“I have a friend named Anne . . . who took her 2-year-old son up to Tahoe during the summer. They were staying in a rented condominium by the lake. And of course, it’s such a hotbed of gambling that all the rooms are equipped with these curtains and shades that block out every speck of light so you can stay up all night in the casinos and then sleep all morning. One afternoon she put the baby to bed in his playpen in one of these rooms, in the pitch-dark, and went to do some work.

“A few minutes later she heard her baby knocking on the door from inside the room, and she got up, knowing he’d crawled out of his playpen. She went to put him down again, but when she got to the door, she found he’d locked it. He had somehow managed to push in the little button on the doorknob. So he was calling to her: ‘Mommy, Mommy,’ and she was saying to him, ‘Jiggle the doorknob, darling,’ and of course he didn’t speak much English—mostly he seemed to speak Urdu.

“After a moment, it became clear to him that he mother couldn’t open the door, and the panic set in. He began sobbing. So my friend ran around like crazy trying everything possible, like trying to get the front door key to work, calling the rental agency where she left a message on the machine, calling the manager of the condominium where she left another message, and running back to check in with her son every minute or so.

“And there he was in the dark, this terrified little child. Finally she did the only thing she could, which was to slide her fingers underneath the door, where there was a one-inch space. She kept telling him over and over to bend down and find her fingers. Finally somehow he did. So they stayed like that for a really long time, on the floor, him holding onto her fingers in the dark. He stopped crying. She kept wanting to go call the fire department or something, but she felt that contact was the most important thing. . . .

“I keep thinking about that story, how much it feels like I’m the 2-year-old in the dark and God is the mother and I don’t speak the language. She could break down the door if that struck her as being the best way, and ride off with me on her charger. But instead, via my friends and my church and my shabby faith, I can just hold onto her fingers underneath the door. It isn’t enough, and it is.”

Mrs. S listened attentively and said the story was interesting. And then she wanted to tell me other things about her life and to ask me questions, and finally she asked me to pray for her, which I did. And I was very glad afterward that she had not taken me up on the Scrabble idea.

To hear commentaries by Andrée Seu, click here.

It has been pointed out to me that back to back-to-back snowstorms is not a disproof of global warming, and this is true. We who are grownups and no longer think as children have seen enough of life to know that there are hiccups of good in overall bad times, and of bad in overall good times.

So I am not at all impressed that a nearly unprecedented snow dumped on Copenhagen during the opening days of the international summit there on manmade global warming. I am not impressed by a similar dump on D.C. just prior to and during the return of Obama and Pelosi from said summit. I am not impressed by the NASA satellite photo of the snow-white silhouette of Great Britain, nor by pictures of children making snow angels in Florida.

It is purely anecdotal that this, in turn, has been followed by two record-breaking snowstorms on and around our capital city where a consortium of globalist-minded political leaders, lobbyists, corporate VIPS, and businessmen, in conjunction with their international counterparts, are quietly but feverishly working behind closed doors to pass global warming-based cap-and-trade legislation. It means nothing that snow shut down the administrative offices of the federal government for days.

And it’s just bad science to extrapolate from my marathon snow shoveling of the last few weeks that global warming is nonsense.

I just think God is having a good laugh at climatology experts who think we humans have that much power:

“God thunders wondrously with his voice; he does great things that we cannot comprehend. For to the snow he says, ‘Fall on the earth,’ likewise to the downpour, his mighty downpour. . . . From its chamber comes the whirlwind, and cold from the scattering winds. By the breath of God ice is given, and the broad waters are frozen fast. He loads the thick cloud with moisture; the clouds scatter his lightning. They turn around and around by his guidance, to accomplish all that he commands them on the face of the habitable world. Whether for correction or for his land or for love, he causes it to happen” (Job 37:5-13).

To hear commentaries by Andrée Seu, click here.