Author: Paul Louis Metzger

The movie Patch Adams addresses the subject of health care in a holistic manner. The movie is about the story of Hunter D. “Patch” Adams, whose Gesundheit! Institute “is a project in holistic medical care based on the belief that one cannot separate the health of the individual from the health of the family, the community, the world, and the health care system itself.”

This statement on the complex connection betwen the health care system and various other forms of health comes through loud and clear in the movie.  Adams, played by Robin Williams, claims that if you treat a disease, you may win or lose. However, if you treat a person, you are guaranteed to win regardless of the outcome. According to the movie, Adams gets the nickname “Patch” because he patched up a hole in someone’s cup. Patch wasn’t satsified with fixing only cups. He was concerned for fixing holes in people’s hearts and lives, including their physical health.

One instance of Adams treating the whole person occurs when he follows a group of medical students and their professor on a tour of the university hospital. They stop to analyze the chart/condition of a patient lying on a cart in a hospital hallway without engaging the patient. Adams interrupts the analysis to ask for the patient’s name. The woman lying there is not a lab experiment. She doesn’t simply have a condition. She has a name. His regard for her person changes the atmosphere in the hallway, as he humanizes and personalizes the situation.

What goes on in any health care system reflects and also shapes the state of health of the society at large in various ways. How personal are we in our engagement of people at the checkout counter at a store? Do I look into the eye of the clerk ringing up my purchase, as he or she hands me my receipt? Does the clerk talk to you or ignore you, conversing with a fellow employee? How do we drive down the road? Do we allow a fellow driver to change lanes, or do you and I speed up when we see their turn signal? How do we interact with one another over social media—socially or anti-socially? How healthy are we?

A few weeks ago, a group of my students, their families and I were talking about the upcoming conference we are hosting on health care at Multnomah University’s Institute for the Theology of Culture: New Wine, New Wineskins. One of the student’s wives shared about their major challenge with making payments for recent hospital expenditures concerning one of their children. They have good insurance, but their insurance only covers so much. Even so, I was struck by the wife’s comment: they will be able to figure out a way to handle the various bills, as long as they have friends by their side to walk with them through the ordeal. For example, just having someone close at hand as they sort through the various bills from this and that hospital department is healing. So simple—a personal touch.

As a society, we cannot ignore the plight of people as they try to bear up under the weighty cost of health care in America. We cannot brush the question of affordability aside with a wave of the hand. Still, the sense of touch goes a long way in helping people cope under the burden of the financial strain. As important as medical experts are, we don’t need to be medical doctors like Patch Adams to provide a healing touch. How relationally healthy are we?

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On October 19, The Institute for the Theology of Culture: New Wine, New Wineskins will host a conference on healthcare that will address the subject of healthcare from a variety of angles. We invite you to join us for open conversation, learning about the healthcare needs of our community, and efforts to address them. Register for the conference before October 1 to take advantage of early bird rates (just $20 for general public and only $5 for students!). Hope to see you there!

This piece is cross-posted at Patheos and The Christian Post. Comments made here are not monitored. To join the conversation, please comment on this post at Patheos.

The most dangerous force in the world is not Al Qaida, nor some Special Ops force, but the church that truly knows it is loved by God. The gates of hell will not prevail against such a church.

The movie To End All Wars is a moving tale of how Christian love conquers hate inside a prisoner of war camp during WWII. It is one of the most powerful movies I have ever seen. More powerful than such a movie, though, is living out the ideals such a movie conveys: can such Christian love conquer hate inside and outside church walls in our own day?

How do you and I respond to people’s indifference and hostility toward us? Do we seek to return the favor, or do we pray in view of our Lord who cried out from the cross concerning his enemies, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing?” (Luke 23:34) What will get us there? We can take comfort from the fact and live in light of the reality that Jesus does not get even with us; rather, he makes whole: “It is finished” (John 19:30). How then shall we live?The way the system often works is that we expect and even demand retaliation and retribution. We may even feel good when we watch it in a movie like Unforgiven, starring Clint Eastwood. But that good feeling may evaporate when we consider Eastwood’s character’s haunting remark, “We all have it coming, kid.” We all have judgment coming, but many if not all of us welcome forgiveness when it is offered to us.

We often think of forgiveness as weak. But actually, true forgiveness of one’s enemies, as in To End All Wars, is the scariest force in the world. There is no way of computing it. It makes no sense. It destabilizes and undermines all strategies of confrontation, even if one seemingly loses in the end.

But those who live in and out of Christ’s love will not lose in the ultimate end, for as Paul proclaims in Romans 8:31-39, nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ:

What then shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things? Who shall bring any charge against God’s elect? It is God who justifies. Who is to condemn? Christ Jesus is the one who died—more than that, who was raised—who is at the right hand of God, who indeed is interceding for us. Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or danger, or sword? As it is written, ‘For your sake we are being killed all the day long; we are regarded as sheep to be slaughtered.’ No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Divine love pouring through us is the most dangerous force in the world because it does not belong to this world’s order, but confronts and contradicts and overwhelms it in view of the end. Such love from above as revealed in Christ extinguishes the cycle of hate, whereby it loses its grasp on people. To end all wars, we must continue to try on the scariest though scarcest and most special force of all–love.

This piece is cross-posted at Patheos and The Christian Post. Comments made here are not monitored. To join the conversation, please comment on this post at Patheos.

How many decision makers passing the bill to cut $40 billion from food stamps over the next decade actually know someone on food stamps? Debate rages in Washington among lawmakers on whether or not the bill would impact only those trying to milk the system. I know people on food stamps—hard-working people, people in difficult situations, people who need food stamps to survive. They are fearful that they will not be able to obtain basic food necessities to stay afloat in the system if the bill that passed in the House of Representatives makes it past the Senate.

Someone close to me wrote that many people in his community depend on food stamps to cover a large percentage of their basic subsistence needs on a monthly basis. In his region, it is extremely difficult to find consistent and stable work. My friend finds it difficult to believe that in spite of his spouse’s and his education, work experience and positive work history, they can’t find employment. He finds even more difficult to believe that some conservatives in government tell people that the solution is to pull themselves up by the bootstraps. His response is that it’s great to pull oneself up by one’s bootstraps if one has bootstraps! Not only do many people around my friend not have bootstraps; many of them don’t even have boots. As my friend remarks, “What is the government to do with educated people like him and his spouse, who are willing to work, but are unable to find jobs?  It seems to me that underfunding these programs that provide basic essentials to struggling families is not the starting point for economic growth.”

The situation gets worse for my friend and his family. His mother-in-law had a major surgery a few years ago that left her body in a compromised position. She now needs regular doses of oxygen to stabilize her condition. Her oxygen provider has provided oxygen services to the poorest of the poor at no cost because of the lack of income. Recently, the oxygen provider slid the scale down further so that his mother-in-law, who barely makes minimum wage, is now required to pay a monthly charge for her oxygen.  Unfortunately, this charge is out of her price range. Depending on how everything works out, she may have to choose between her oxygen (which is an issue of life and death) and some other necessity.

A New York Times article claims, “The budget office said that, left unchanged, the number of food stamp recipients would decline by about 14 million people — or 30 percent — over the next 10 years as the economy improves. A Census Bureau report released on Tuesday found that the program had kept about four million people above the poverty level and had prevented millions more from sinking further into poverty. The census data also showed nearly 47 million people living in poverty — close to the highest level in two decades.”

My fear is that politicians will point their fingers at one another rather than make sure the poor don’t come under anyone’s thumb or foot. It will not do to point fingers at those across the aisle and say their economic policies force the poor to bear the burden of our financial challenges as a country. Why should the poor, especially those who try but who can’t get by, bear the brunt of governmental policies, whatever they may be? The day may come when those in power will slide down the social ladder and into poverty. Who will pick them up then if they fail to pick up the poor now? Even more disturbing, perhaps the poor who are trampled upon now will eventually get so fed up with the feds that they will pull themselves up by our bootstraps to bring us down. It is better that we work to pull one another up rather than tear one another down or let one another fall through the cracks. We can start by stamping out budgets that fail to provide food stamps for the poor.

This piece is cross-posted at Patheos and The Christian Post. Comments made here are not monitored. To join the conversation, please comment on this post at Patheos.

What difference does the Trinity make for Christian thought and life? While opinions vary, I share Lesslie Newbigin’s conviction that when many Christians think of God, they don’t call to mind the Father, Son, and Spirit, but the great divine monad. Newbigin maintains that Greek philosophy and Islamic thought have combined to shape the Christian imagination since the High Middle Ages, replacing the Trinitarian perspectives of the fathers of the first four centuries of Christian history.[1]

Newbigin is not alone in his critique. Michael J. Buckley argues that Christian apologists in the medieval and modern eras failed to debate their opponents in view of their Trinitarian heritage. According to Buckley, this lack of Trinitarian reflection was instrumental to modern atheism’s emergence. Beginning with Christian apologists’ critique of Baruch Spinoza, whose naturalistic perspectives on God and the world at large led to his Jewish community’s censure and the church’s harsh criticism, Buckley writes,

One of the many ironies of this history of origins [of modern atheism] is that while the guns of the beleaguered were often trained on Spinoza, the fortress was being taken from within. The remarkable thing is not that d’Holbach and Diderot found theologians and philosophers with whom to battle, but that the theologians themselves had become philosophers in order to enter the match. The extraordinary note about this emergence of the denial of the Christian god which Nietzsche celebrated is that Christianity as such, more specifically the person and teaching of Jesus or the experience and history of the Christian Church, did not enter the discussion. The absence of any consideration of Christology is so pervasive throughout serious discussion that it becomes taken for granted, yet it is so stunningly curious that it raises a fundamental issue of the modes of thought: How did the issue of Christianity vs. atheism become purely philosophical? To paraphrase Tertullian: How was it that the only arms to defend the temple were to be found in the Stoa?[2]

Further to Newbigin’s and Buckley’s claims, I find that there are many forces at work today that keep us in the church from thinking and acting in view of the Trinity. Some of these forces are rationalism, pragmatism, and individualism.

Let’s start with rationalism. One noted Christian thinker told me once that we should leave the Trinity alone since it is the greatest mystery of the Christian faith. I beg to differ. As the greatest revealed mystery, Christians must think and act in view of this doctrine. While the Trinity cannot be reduced to a mathematical formula of 1 x 1 x1 = 1 or a recipe involving an egg white, egg yolk and an egg shell, we Christians can and must approach everything in view of the God revealed in his personal Word, Jesus Christ, in the power of the Spirit.

How might this bear on the rational enterprise of modern science? There are many implications. I note several such possibilities in Connecting Christ: How to Discuss Jesus in a World of Diverse Paths. Here is one of them:

The creation of all things out of nothing by the personal Word of God safeguards science’s search for unity according to the canons of reason (affirming the link between minds and the universe as rational) as well as science’s free reign to pursue its course unhindered by an ideology that demands one recognize vestiges of God in creation or presumes that one must pursue science religiously. In his famous article on how Christian theology was instrumental in the rise of modern science, Michael Foster claims that modern science was able to arise and flourish when the quest for timeless frames of reference gave way to an empirical approach that focused on space and time forms. This involves the claim that God’s voluntary activity, which goes beyond the determination of reason, brings forth the creation in a dependent and contingent manner. What Foster points to as the voluntary will of God resonates in my estimation with the trinitarian doctrine of the creation of all things out of nothing by God’s Word. Just as God has relational space within his own being for otherness, God grants space for the creation to be the creation through the voluntary activity of God’s declaration by his personal Word.[3]

There is more to come. Let it suffice to say that for me—as well as for a growing number of Christian thinkers—the Trinity is not to be replaced with some great divine monad, removed to mysterious seclusion as irrelevant for broader consideration, or reduced to a recipe for how to make scrambled eggs.

This piece is cross-posted at Patheos and The Christian Post. Comments made here are not monitored. To join the conversation, please comment on this post at Patheos.

A professional clown informed a group of amateurs such as myself that “You don’t have to be in make-up” to fulfill the calling of a clown. She was talking about our calling as Christians to make ourselves vulnerable.

The clown in question, Trudi Sang, is chair of The Institute for the Theology of Culture: New Wine, New Wineskins‘ student community. Trudi was giving a talk to us on the New Wine, New Wineskins community formation retreat on how to be Christian leaders. She was drawing from her many experiences as a professional clown to appeal to us to be those who lead like good clowns as Christians. Trudi was not trying to be funny. In fact, she was making a serious case in view of the long history of Christians being conceived as clowns–not for clowning around but for imitating Christ–the ultimate court jester and holy fool.

Would you and I like to be professional or master Christian clowns rather than amateurs? We don’t have to wear make-up to be clowns, so you and I can save some money there. We can be clowns simply by being vulnerable with others.

If we want people to take off their masks, we will need to take off our own masks. Why is it that people have to put on make-up as clowns to get people to take off their masks of pretense and be vulnerable? Perhaps it is because they think the clowns aren’t real and so they can be honest with them. What do you think?

Of course, Hollywood has filled many of us with fear of clowns. As a result, many of us won’t even let down our guard with clowns for fear that the Joker from The Dark Knight might be lurking below the surface. So, we’ll need to prove to others that the vulnerability they see in us is for real rather than a thin veneer used to cover more pretense and to cause further pain and suffering in their lives.

I guess as Christians we’ll have to prove ourselves by clothing ourselves in Jesus. Easier said than done given how Jesus’ enemies mocked him, undressing him, then casting lots for his clothing, even as they left him hanging to die from a tree. But still, this is how we prove that we are professional or master clowns, like him. Instead of mocking others, we take upon ourselves the mockery and scorn, like him. Instead of hurting the defenseless, like some notorious clown pretenders have done, we lay ourselves down like Jesus did for the defenseless in their distress.

Jesus did not put on a mask to be vulnerable. In fact, in appearing before us face to face as God’s holy fool, he aims to aid us in taking off our masks so that we can be seen and known for who we truly are. We’re all clowns. The question is: what kind of clowns are we?

All of us are clowns. Either we wear masks in pretense to cover our foolishness or we expose our foolishness by taking off the masks so as to wear Christ. Jesus is God’s master fool whose cross makes a mockery of human sophistication and autonomy, which is nothing more than sophistry. If we try to be wise in our own eyes, we become fools.

We need to give up the circus act of performing for others’ approval rather than seeking to please Jesus. Only as we find our value in relation to God’s holy fool will we be able to become vulnerable and love others no matter how foolish we appear. Only as we die to ourselves and carry our crosses will we be free to live. Only as we give up trying to be wise in our own eyes, willing to look foolish to people who live by pretense, will we become wise in God’s eyes and prove to be of help to our fellows so that they can put away their masks. We don’t have to wear make-up anymore to be clowns, if we want to see Jesus and others face to face.

This piece is cross-posted at Patheos and The Christian Post. Comments made here are not monitored. To join the conversation, please comment on this post at Patheos.