The Absurdity of Loving God in the Real World: Five Christians To Read These Days
I don't know about you, but I need wiser Christian ways of thinking about, seeing, and participating in my world for 2024 based on experiences in 2023 (and the years leading up to it). How about you?
What is it that Christ is calling you to do in 2024, where is God’s Spirit drawing you to be present, to be salt and light?
If you pay attention, it doesn’t take long to get discouraged regarding the absurdity that seems to drive decisions that affect you and those you love. But if God is love, and Christ Jesus holds all things together, and where the Spirit of the Lord is there is freedom, how do we live in that reality?
Who are the salty and spirited Christian leaders you are learning from these days as you seek to live in the real world through the church, the YMCA, your community?
Here’s a few of the leaders I’m reading (leave a comment with some you’re reading):
Dietrich Bonhoeffer is a necessary German Christian leader to learn from these days. The complexity of his political, cultural and religious reality, it’s violence, racism, fascist bullying and Imperial aspirations still resonate today for us - thus how he lived and learned, lead and loved, what he preached in word and action has significant relevance for Christians today in the USA, the Holy Land, and in many other countries around the world. Click here to learn more about him via the Bonhoeffer Society.
Simone Weil is a complex French Christian leader who lived and died young amidst the Great War and WW2, paying attention to reality and the role of the Church and the life of Christ for her and the world. Her meditations on suffering, freedom, power and love are becoming ever more necessary for Christians today who pay attention to our churning world. Click here for a Commonweal article on Weil
Saint Augustine was an African Bishop of Hippo, a city in Northern Algeria near the Mediterranean coast during the decline of the Roman Empire. Having lived in the heart of Rome, but born and leading on the fringes, Augustine writes brilliantly about the real world he observes and ministers within, striving to work out how Christians fully participate in the kingdom of God while living under the thumbs of kings wielding violence for their safety and security, their prosperity and legacy. For more context on Augustine read this review from the New York Times.
Nicolai Berdyaev writes about the spirit in a way I’ve never experienced. He’s a Russian Christian exiled to Paris in the years between the Great War and WW2, raised in the realities of the Orthodox Church but trying to come to terms with the disintegrating Europe around him. The YMCA provided safety and security for him, their publishing house empowering him to write about the human spirit and the Spirit of God in Christ Jesus through the lens of Scripture and his religious tradition and the politically violent times of his generation. Click here for a TIME magazine obituary very briefly summarizing his influence.
John R. Mott is an American Methodist from Iowa, one of the greatest Christian leaders in the world during his lifetime, yet today almost forgotten and overlooked. I started reading his autobiography during the pandemic: his personal love and loyalty to Christ Jesus, his commitment to calling young men to Christian leadership in association with the global church and missionary movements, his endurance in forging friendships between some of the most powerful men in the world as well as between enemy combatants who are prisoners of war. Born at the end of the Civil War, died in the midst of the Cold War: a disenfranchised world transformed by technology which both lifted up humanity but also exploded it into absurd meaninglessness. Click here for more on Mott via his Nobel Peace Prize information.
I’ve got other leaders I’m learning from as well, but these are five that resonate deeply with me as I try to make sense of this world and how to minister in it wisely, faithfully, in Christ.
But I must also mention a few of the other writers:
Albert Camus died to young, a French writer with strong convictions about Christ and the Church, about freedom and justice in this absurd world. Though no one thinks of him as a Christian leader, we ought to pay attention to his observations, his yearnings, his critiques, his aspirations for the Church.
Hannah Arendt’s writings as a German Jew continue to resonate deeply; her attempts to understand how her country and her people came face to face with the horrors of the holocaust are brilliant, yet somehow seem to be going unheeded. Christian leaders ought to take seriously her insights and learnings on the realities at work in our Western civilization.
Rene Girard is not known as a leader, but as a French Christian who emigrated to the United States, his writings on violence, religion, and mimetic rivalry are essential to understanding our world, our organizations, our families.
Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr continues to influence Christians in the United States and around the world due to his gritty leadership, seeking to put the principles of Christ Jesus into practice to build up a non-violent beloved community where black and white communities could experience “liberty and justice for all.”
Rev. Dr. Munther Isaac leads and writes courageously and unflinchingly from his Lutheran parish in Bethlehem, a Palestinian Christian seeking to lead the body of Christ to embody the peace and justice of God in the Holy Land. Pray for all the people of the land there, and pray especially for the Christians there, that they might be salt and light, even if it is just a few grains, a few rays.
Terry Wildman provided Christian leadership for the publishing of the First Nations Version of the New Testament, written in the heart-language of the indigenous tribes of North America. My regular reading of the Gospels and Epistles is essential; doing so in spirit with Christians who experienced violent trauma and bigotry from fellow Christians is humbling. This solidarity with suffering brothers and sisters in Christ is essential as we read the Bible and seek to live it out in the real world.