"Eat More Chikin?": Some Initial Thoughts about Chick-Fil-A and the Christian Kerygma

So often, people are so concerned with doing something right that they fail to act righteously.  In other words, people get so fixated upon the minute details that they lose sight of the whole picture. 

The whole Chick-Fil-A debacle is a prime example.  Christians are polarized over whether or not they should eat a chicken sandwich.  When a single chicken breast successfully wedges a gap between those who claim a divine unity, then there are clearly deeper crises at work within the Body of Christ than which restaurant to eat at after church. 

Jesus confronted the same problem with the Pharisees in the Gospel of Matthew:

You blind guides!  You strain for gnats and swallow a camel!  Woe to you scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!  For you clean the outside of the cup and dish, but inside they are full of robbery and self-indulgence!  Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!  For you build the tombs of the prophets and adorn the monuments of the righteous, and say, “If we had been living in the days of our fathers, we would not have been partners with them in shedding the blood of the prophets... (Matthew 23:24, 29-31 NASB)

In this instance, many are tempted to reduce righteousness to a single act:  eating or not eating chicken.  For so many  Christians, the choice which another Christian makes becomes the litmus test of his or her communion with Christ.  This temptation to sit in God’s place, as arbiter of God’s love toward His people, ensnared the Donatists in the 4rd and 5th centuries, and many well-intentioned Christians fall into its grip today.

To be clear, I think that it is appropriate for Christians to discriminate between unrighteous and righteous acts and attitudes:  I am most certainly doing so in this note!  However, we should not let the unrighteousness of others grant us license to withold love from another, for we, too have fallen short of the law:

If however, you are fulfilling the royal law according to Scripture, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself,” you are doing well.  But if you show partiality, you are committing sin and are convicted by the law as transgressors.  For whoever keeps the whole law and yet stumbles in one point, he has become guilty of all.  For he who said,  “Do not commit adultery,” also said, “Do not commit murder.”  Now if you do not commit adultery, but do commit murder, you have become a transgressor of the law. (James 2:8-11 NASB)

So often, one becomes so fixated upon one point of the law, that he or she deludes himself or herself into thinking that following that single point suffices for the whole law.  Yet,  the revelation of God is that He desires the utmost purity in all points of the law in order to be satisfied and that Jesus alone has obeyed the law. 

If this is the case, then the truly righteous Christian would not only declare certain attitudes wrong, but promptly admit that he or she contributes to the problem.  In fact, sinfulness, the very act of setting oneself up as the exemplar of God’s righteousness and arbiter of His love is the problem that God sent Christ to rectify! 

Regardless of our denominational background, we are united in a Baptism into Christ: a death to self and a resurrection to new life.  The solution, if it is to be truly Christian, will include a death to one’s preconceived notions of God’s expectations, openness to God’s actual expectations, eagerness to repent of one’s failures to meet those expectations, and an invitation to others to do the same. 

This universal solidarity of repentance and the redemption that it brings is God’s plan in Christ.  And that is a much bigger than a chicken sandwich.  

The Trinity: God in Dialogue, pt. 1

Christians are a curious sort of monotheist:  they worship one God who exists eternally as a community of persons.

It almost goes without saying that someone is bound to either misrepresent or misunderstand this teaching.  So many Church Fathers spilled so much ink explaining how Christians could believe in a Trinity without lapsing into polytheism or espousing logical nonsense.  I intend to tackle this topic rather carefully, because all of the series depends upon this foundational, three-part segment.  

In this post, I will set forth my understanding of the crucial term "person."  I will accomplish this first by briefly describing its etymology, then by exploring the implications of its etymological roots for the Christian Trinitarian dogma.

The word person originates from the Greek word prosopon, meaning "face."  More specifically, it referred to an actor's facemask, but came to refer more broadly to any human face.  This mask served two purposes:

1. It allowed the actor to assume the character's identity before the audience and in relationship to the other actors.
2. It amplified the actor's voice.  Romans referred to the same mask as a "persona", a word which evolved quite naturally into the English word.  

It is interesting to note that the word's etymology neither lends itself to a purely individualistic nor communitarian understanding of the human person.  The actor's prosopon lends him a new identity, but it is a specific identity within the whole.  He does not become Perseus per se, but instead becomes Perseus within the context of the particular play and in relation to the other characters.  He assumes a particular communal context.  On the other hand, he does not merely dissolve into the play, assuming an identical role as every other actor.  He truly adopts another, albeit contextualized, identity:  The actor can only become Perseus when he wears his given prosopon.

In light of this etymology, the term person speaks to what theologians and philosophers might describe as "intersubjective."  Each individual identity is distinct, but not self-contained.  Remove Perseus from this play, and he ceases to be the same Perseus.  If, for example, he were transferred from the myth of Medusa to another myth about his stunning chess game, he would cease to be "Perseus, slayer of Medusa."  He would be "Perseus, Bobby Fischer of the Aegean."

This understanding of prosopon greatly clarifies the Trinitarian dogma:  God eternally exists as three persons (personae, prosopa).  The Father is indeed the Father, but specifically in relation to the Son, and vice versa.  The Spirit is Spirit, but specifically and most fundamentally in relation to the Father and the Son.  They, together, are God, just as all of the actors together make the play.  However, each of the Persons fulfills a unique role within the God nature.

It is important to note that the Persons are not merely playactors, however.  The Son truly is the Son, just as the Father and Spirit truly are their personae.  None of them can simply abandon their role.  What is most important about the analogy is that their identities are all most fundamentally realized within their eternal relationship.  This relationship is the God that Christians worship:  One God who exists eternally as a communion of three Persons.

In the next segment, I will distinguish this view further from the modern Western conception of personality.  

Trinitarian Theology Series: God, Church, and the Human Person in Dialogue

A patch of infertile ground much lie fallow for a time before it can bear fruit again.  The same is true in the theological game:  some of the best insights only come after long periods of listening, prayer, and silence. 

It is has been several months since I have last posted, and I have been doing a lot of reading and thinking within the past month.  In particular, I have been meditating upon the thought of Jurgen Moltmann, a German Reformed theologian.  Two ideas of his have been rolling around in my brain more than any other:

1.)  Christians cannot forget that the Christ's crucifixion, as well as any other Divine intervention in human history, must be Trinitarian.  That is, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit always act together, even in the midst of Christ's, the Incarnate Son's, suffering.

2.)  Unless a proposed theological idea can be reconciled to the suffering and abandoned Christ, it isn't Christian theology at all.


Moltmann sought to connect the Trinity to human experience, because he believed that it had become increasingly irrelevant to contemporary people, Christians and non-Christians alike.  I, too, am convinced that the Church's dogma of the Trinity has been marginalized and quarantined from practical spirituality, eschewed as a pointless mental exercise for academics, rather than a foundational doctrine which has lies at the foundations of the Church's identity and that of the human person.  

In the upcoming series, my first series in a long time, I intend to reflect upon the following topics:

1. The Trinity:  A God in Dialogue
2. The Church:  The Society of "Other"
3. The Human Person:  Self-in-Dialogue
4. Church and State:  A Tale of Two Cities

As the cover of the Hitch-Hiker's Guide so aptly advised, "Don't Panic!"  Trinitarian theology might be daunting at first, but it is well worth all of the effort.