Month: November 2025

“When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies? Perhaps to be too practical is madness. To surrender dreams — this may be madness. Too much sanity may be madness — and maddest of all: to see life as it is, and not as it should be!”
Cervantes, Don Quixote

If we have lost our minds, it is for God.
2 Corinthians 5:13

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The gospel is crazy talk. We have forgotten that. Subjected to centuries of erudite insistence that the church’s message is fundamentally rational, we have grown desensitized to the outright lunacy of our claims.

When we say that a person is rational, we mean that he possesses normal or sound powers of mind. This is the quality that Jesus restored to the man whom he delivered from the demonic Legion. Both Mark and Luke report that the man regained his right mind; he is once again a rational human being. When we say that some thing is rational, we mean that it aligns with the way things actually are, including with how our minds work; in other words, the thing makes sense.

The list of those defending the essential rationality of the gospel is a Who’s Who of Christian thought: Thomas Aquinas, Jonathan Edwards, John Calvin, G.K. Chesterton, R.C. Sproul, and the 20th century’s reigning champion, C.S. Lewis, to name but a few. In general, and with each allowing for miracles (those inescapable, embarrassing anomalies), they argue that the Christian belief system is founded on rational assertions and is logically coherent. Virtually every sermon I have ever heard presumes the rational intelligibility of the Christian message. We are convinced that the gospel is explainable.

However, in spite of the many intellectual heavyweights who have argued that Christianity is a rational faith, the New Testament writers are not so obliging. The gospel may indeed be the power of God to those who are being saved, but it’s not only the unbeliever who finds the church’s message foolishness. The god-smacked Paul himself admits to the folly of what we preach. As much as we might like it otherwise, the New Testament proclamation is neither rational nor reasonable nor relevant. There’s no way around it; the gospel of Jesus Christ is insanity on a stick.

Rational?

The biggest obstacle to a rational Christianity is Christ himself. If it weren’t for Jesus, X-ianity would parse just fine. But how do you solve a problem like Messiah? The gospel’s central assertion is that in Jesus, as Paul puts it, all the fullness of the Deity lives in bodily form. This poses an insurmountable issue for anybody who hopes to formulate a rational system of belief. Even Jesus can’t seem to get his theology straight. On one hand, he asserts that “God is spirit.” On the other, the risen Jesus shows himself to his disciples and reassures them that “a spirit does not have flesh and bones, as you see I have.” On one hand, John insists that no one has ever seen God. On the other, Jesus declares, “Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father.” This schizoid dance finds its culmination in Paul’s most succinct statement about the nature of Jesus Christ:

He is the image of the invisible God.

It doesn’t take a theological Einstein to note that this statement is pure nonsense. If something has an image, it’s not invisible; if it’s invisible, it doesn’t have an image. How is it possible to build a rational system on top of that? We have certainly tried. But as Oliver Wendell Holmes noted, insanity is often the logic of an accurate mind overtasked.

The wicket is so sticky that the late John Wimber, a professor at Fuller Theological Seminary and influential founder of the Vineyard movement, felt the need to coin a new word—transrational—to classify the gospel’s disregard for reason. But it is Festus, the Roman governor who listened to Paul’s gospel presentation, who tells it like it is. In the middle of Paul’s defense, Festus interrupts him and shouts, “You are out of your mind, Paul! Your great learning is driving you insane!” The governor has a point. There is nothing sensible about the gospel of Jesus Christ. It may be true, but it is decidedly not rational.

Reasonable?

For most, or for most Christians anyway, the absurdity of the gospel’s central claim is only a mild curiosity, a benign theological oddity of little, if any, practical concern. Far more problematic are the gospel’s demands, which Jesus summed up in a single devastating ultimatum:

“Anyone who does not renounce all that he has cannot be my disciple.”

This isn’t a one-off either. Jesus tells the rich young ruler who had come to him seeking eternal life, “One thing you lack. Sell all that you have . . . and come, follow me.” At many times and in many different ways, Jesus insists that those who wish to follow him must give up everything and take up the cross. The Twelve accept this at face value. Peter confesses to Jesus, “We have left everything and followed you.” For the first disciples the gospel of Jesus was an all or nothing proposition.

This is untenable for today’s Western Christians. To renounce all we have as a condition of discipleship reeks of fanaticism. Except for the mythical saint or religious whacko, to give up everything to follow Jesus is not only unreasonable but realistically impossible. No one in his right mind could entertain Christ’s demand literally.

So we don’t. Our preachers and commentators help us finesse away the brute force of Christ’s words and to shape a less literal, more amiable mandate. A sampling:

• It’s not a physical giving up but a mental and emotional letting go.
• Being a disciple of Jesus Christ requires us to let go of our own desires, interests, and priorities.
• This passage speaks to the importance of loyalty and allegiance to Jesus over all other competing loyalties, including family, self-interest, and possessions.
• This figurative passage means to let nothing stand between us and Jesus.

An unmitigated Jesus is not reasonable. His gospel is extreme, disruptive, and unworkable in the modern age. Apparently, he hadn’t foreseen that.

Relevant?

One of the hallmarks of the reasonable gospel is the promise of a better life. The sensible church is in the personal enrichment business and offers a Jesus whose main job is to make life better, as is evidenced by the standard issue sinner’s prayer which instructs us to “ask Jesus into our lives.” But according to Jesus and the New Testament writers, we have no life to ask Jesus into; humanity is as dead as a doornail. The kingdom of God is not relevant to the world; it has nothing to do with the kingdom of this world at all. Paul declares:

What do righteousness and wickedness have in common?
Or what fellowship can light have with darkness?

The answer is nothing. Absolutely nothing. The gospel does not enhance anything. Jesus did not come to improve the world’s system but to extract people from it. “My kingdom,” Jesus explains,“is not of this world.” C.S. Lewis refutes any balderdash that Christ’s teachings would make the world a better place: Let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to. The gospel of Jesus Christ is not a fix for the world’s problems; it’s the portal to another reality altogether. To market Jesus and his message as relevant is to miss the whole point.

Jesus said, “I praise you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth,
because you have hidden these things from the wise and learned,
and revealed them to little children.”

Crazy Cats

Groucho Marx famously quipped, I don’t want to belong to any club that will accept me as a member. The church might wish to take heed. The more we attempt to package Christianity as rational, reasonable, and relevant, the harder is the sell. A gospel sanctioned by human reason, propriety, and priority is no gospel at all. It is mere religion. Who wants that?

The Word made flesh defies understanding. The Holy Spirit repudiates logical suppositions. The church’s message is utterly preposterous. John Milton’s epic attempt to justify the ways of God to man was doomed from the start. The gospel cannot be explained, but it saves all who believe.

And we who believe are also inexplicable. We are insanity incarnate, the new images of the invisible God. We are impossible, and yet here we are.

For since in the wisdom of God the world through its wisdom did not know him, God was pleased through the foolishness of what was preached to save those who believe.

“Why do you stand here looking into the sky? This same Jesus, who has been taken from you into heaven, will come back in the same way you have seen him go into heaven.”
Acts 1:11

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Somewhere along the line we appear to have misplaced the Second Coming. Relegated to the backwaters of contemporary theology or made dubious by a perpetual parade of pious prognosticators, the return of Christ has faded from our front-and-center Christian proclamations. It has become a mere footnote to the modern gospel, a fuzzy ancillary legend of minimal immediate import. The venerable threefold message of a savior who died, rose, and is returning seems to have dwindled into a binary cross and cope formula: Jesus forgives you, now do your best. The promised second coming is a lovely notion, but it seems to have little, if any, practical value for walking out the Christian life. For the daily grind, church cuisine tends to favor ground beef rather than pie in the sky.

This reflects the modern church’s shift of emphasis from the hereafter to the here and now expressed by a gospel that seems more salve than salvation. And set against today’s urgent physical and social needs, talk of a better someday seems a scant provision for surviving this day.

But the return of Jesus is not a glamorous accessory to his sacrifice and resurrection, nor is it a door prize for those with tickets to the main event or a carrot on a stick for some simpleton saints. Far from it. The second coming of Christ is, in fact, an essential part of the gospel and as necessary to confirm its legitimacy as is the resurrection itself.

First, without the second coming, Christianity is a fundamentally subjective experience that cannot verify universal truth. A person’s experience with Jesus, as real and life changing as that may be, only verifies that he or she has had an experience; it is a true experience but may not point to a greater truth. (Psychiatric wards are filled with authentic experiences that do not align with objective truth.) Granted, signs and wonders—including healing, deliverance, and other miracles—historically attest to the objective truthfulness of the gospel, but those phenomena are exceedingly rare these days. (There’s a good reason for this, but that’s another discussion.) Jesus and the New Testament writers point instead to love as the greatest evidence. To be sure, love is a powerful witness, but as Jesus declares, the believers’ love for each other testifies “that you are my disciples.” What love does not do is prove that Jesus is the son of God and savior of the world. There are, after all, any number of cults and clubs that can boast a robust fraternity, but that doesn’t mean that their charters define truth.

Jesus himself underscores the subjective nature of Christianity. “The coming of the kingdom of God is not something that can be observed, nor will people say, ‘Here it is,’ or ‘There it is,’ because the kingdom of God is within you [or in your midst].” In other words, the reality of the kingdom resides only within those who believe. That the greatest truth would be made known on such a limited scale troubled some of the disciples. “Lord,” asked one. “Why do you intend to show yourself to us and not to the world?” To which Jesus replied, “Those who love me will obey my teaching. My Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our home with them.” Objective proof of the gospel will have to wait until the return of its author when every eye will see him, even those who pierced him. When the Son returns, both faith and unbelief will succumb to objective fact; the kingdom of God will be within and without.

Second, because the kingdom of God is for now a fundamentally subjective experience (no matter its outward expression) until the Lord’s return, the gospel can be falsified. Arguments against the veracity of the gospel are as authoritative as the arguments defending its truthfulness. It’s one subjective experience versus another. This does not imply that there are two sets of facts. Facts are facts. Disputes nearly always arise from differing interpretations of the facts at hand. A good example is the disagreement about what the earth’s archeological data suggests. Both parties observe the same empirical evidence, but they strongly disagree about what that evidence is evidence of. In the same way, the claims and experiences of Christians can be countered by those with different claims and experiences. Muslims have their own holy book and spiritual encounters, as do Hindus and Buddhists. Even atheists can point to authoritative sources and appeal to personal experience—even if it’s the experience of the absence of spiritual experience.

Every honest witness is a reliable witness of his own experience, whatever it is. If a madman is convinced that he’s Napoleon and says so, he’s not lying. We may disagree, but that’s our viewpoint, not his. We can argue with him, but for the madman all evidence irrefutably points to his Napoleonic identity. T.S. Eliot asserted that everything can be shown to be true from some perspective. (Einstein might agree to a degree.) Our madman may entertain delusions, but they are real delusions. Until the return of Christ, it’s testimony versus testimony.

Peter warns of those who doubt that the Second Coming will happen at all: You must understand that in the last days scoffers will come . . .They will say, “Where is this ‘coming’ he promised? Ever since our ancestors died, everything goes on as it has since the beginning of creation.” Their perspective, Peter maintains, is based on willful ignorance, but Paul insist that this is the case for everybody. No matter; until Jesus returns, everything is debatable.

Finally, not only is the Second Coming the last, necessary confirmation of the gospel and the vindication of the church, it is also—and maybe mostly—a rescue operation. Without the return of Christ, the church would be destroyed. Talk of a triumphant church often omits the sobering reality that the victory will come after the defeat of the saints, a defeat so profound that only the return of the King will deliver them. In his Revelation, John speaks of a great Dragon who enthrones a terrifying beast and empowers him in order to subdue all who are in the world:

The beast was given a mouth to utter proud words and blasphemies and to exercise its authority for forty-two months. It opened its mouth to blaspheme God, and to slander his name and his dwelling place and those who live in heaven. It was given power to wage war against God’s holy people and to conquer them.

In the end, Jesus will come again for a besieged people who are faithfully awaiting deliverance. No amount of spiritual bravado will save them from the enemy. In the face of the full fury of hell, all the saints can do is remain steadfast. “You will be hated by everyone because of me,” Jesus warned his disciples, “but the one who stands firm to the end will be saved.” The church’s triumph is the return of the King.

The grand finale of the gospel is not the resurrection of Jesus; it is the promised Parousia. We shall not be fully saved until he comes again for us. He will rescue us from a world destined for destruction and gather us to himself forever. This is the great hope and should be unapologetically proclaimed alongside the message of the Cross and Resurrection. The second coming of Christ is a hope beyond cope, a glorious impetus to righteousness, perseverance, and zeal—and we need to hear more of it.

The hour has already come for you to wake up from your slumber, because our salvation is nearer now than when we first believed.

Jesus answered, “Do you say this of your own accord, or did others say it to you about me?”
John 18:34

Recently, I had coffee with a local leader of a prominent Christian ministry. The meeting was prompted by a strange request—that I teach him how to pray. When he first brought it up via email a few weeks earlier, I was caught off guard. For one thing, the ministry that he is a part of has long been a prayer-forward organization, and I know that he himself considers prayer a top priority. That this experienced, committed leader would admit naiveté about something so fundamental to the Christian life seemed not only humble but extraordinary. Even more startling was that he considered me somebody who might help him learn. Most startling of all, he confided that I was the only person among his cohorts who stood out as someone who might be able to. I was honored to be considered such a resource but a bit unsettled by it too.

We met at a bustling coffee shop in town. After exchanging pleasantries, the conversation swerved to the matter at hand. He shared the significant ministry challenges he was facing and his determination to do what must be done in order to restore vision and purpose to his missional community. To my mind, that alone would warrant serious prayer. But then his tone abruptly shifted. With sudden and surprising passion (it was a public place, after all) he confessed a consuming desire to know God. His voice strained with emotion. But what really struck me were his eyes; they burned with a desperate and fierce hunger. His intensity staggered me. This earnest man, who had committed years of his life to raise up serious followers of Jesus, was himself famished for God. I cannot remember when I last encountered such furious spiritual longing in a Christian.

In fact, I am baffled by how satisfied most Christians seem to be. They are comfortably saved and generally content in their relationship with the Lord. If some do acknowledge a lack in their spiritual lives, it’s a minor one that they seem to tolerate well enough. Insatiable hunger for God is to them both alien and unintelligible. For most Christians, prepackaged affirmations and quippy lifestyle tips seem good enough.

This preference for second-hand revelation is nothing new. God has always proven a bit much for well-balanced types. Israel’s reaction at Mount Sinai to a turbulent visitation is a case in point and serves as the template for two thousand years of curated Christianity:

Now when all the people saw the thunder and the flashes of lightning and the sound of the trumpet and the mountain smoking, the people were afraid and trembled, and they stood far off and said to Moses, “You speak to us, and we will listen; but do not let God speak to us, lest we die.”

By the time Jesus arrives on the scene, it seems that God has recognized the futility of offering pearls to pork. Revelation is no longer disbursed by blunt instrument but is reserved for those who actually pursue it. Jesus informs his motley crew, “To you it has been given to know the secrets of the kingdom of God, but for others they are in parables, so that seeing they may not see, and hearing they may not understand.” Spiritual insight is awarded to the earnest seeker. “You will seek me and find me,” says the Lord through Jeremiah, “when you seek me with all your heart.” No amount of preaching and teaching can bring the complacent to the mountaintop. For the terminally satisfied the word of God is one word more than they want.

And so the Christian experience, like so much else in our culture, has become a matter of information rather than incarnation, explanation rather than impartation, validation rather than visitation. Energetic singing and sermons are surrogates for presence. (Has anyone noticed?) We are earnest but maintain a safe distance from the fire on the mountain. We gather to pay our respects, not to die.

I wonder, now, for whom I am writing this. The satisfied among my brethren will read this, if they read it at all, as a mere curiosity. For them there will be neither illumination nor motivation in it. But for the hungry—the famished—perhaps it will be a reassurance that they are not alone. Others among your spiritual kinsmen also long for the living God. Find them. And remember this, my starving friends: “The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field.”

Remember that.