The Questions We Ask, Part II:
What Frames What?
What Frames What?
I first heard this question posed by Dr. Richard Horner, the director of The Christian Study Center of Gainesville, Florida. We might ask the same question in several ways:
- Which of these ideas is the organizing idea?
- Which is the lens through which you see the others?
- What are the most fundamental ideas at work in your life?
- What is the grid or filter through which everything else may be run?
This is the question that Jesus is asking when he says, “Was man made for the Sabbath, or Sabbath for man?” The former produces legalism, the latter freedom and rest.
Or consider the founding myths of various civilizations. The Babylonian creation myth, Enuma Elish, declares that the gods made men to be their slaves. The God of Genesis, on the other hand, created man in his image to imitate him, and work was to be a blessing resulting in human flourishing. Because of the fall of man and the disobedience of Israel’s kings, work often looked just as oppressive for the people of Israel as it did for the Babylonians.
The difference is that the Israelites had reason to hope that it should not and would not always be so; the Babylonians did not have any such hope. For the former, the toil of work was not by design but by rebelling against the design of their God; for the latter, the toil was built into the design itself. The God of Israel loved his people and longed for them to be free of their slavery and toil, and this produced in them an understanding of inherent dignity, nobility, and honor. The Babylonians understood that they were never designed to be anything but slaves. Where the God of Israel leads his people out of slavery…
“I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.” (Exodus 20:2)
…the gods of Babylon, impose slavery on the people they created so that they (the gods) might be free.
“From his blood he created mankind / On whom he imposed the service of the gods, and set the gods free / … the wise Ea had created mankind / And had imposed the service of the gods upon them…(Ea) showed mercy on the Bound Gods…And to spare them created mankind.” (From Enuma Elish, tablets VI and VII)
For Israel, work was a means of participating with YHWH in creation; for the Babylonians, work was a means of serving a selfish pantheon of petty gods who cared nothing for the people they created. On the one hand, the purpose of work is framed by the dignity of man, on the other, the dignity of man (or lack thereof) is framed by the purpose of his work.
The question “What frames what?” is the question that prevents mission drift, both corporate and personal.
The early YMCA (Young Men’s Christian Association) had no gym; it was a Christian reading room. The gym was added later to attract young men to enter, with the hope that after they had lifted weights for an hour, they would sit down and read the Bible or a Christian tract. We all know how that story ended. The Young Men’s Christian Association has become the Y, a place to swim or play basketball.
In the beginning, the Christian mission framed the physical activity, and though some Ys still hold Bible studies, that mission has been largely overshadowed by one that is primarily concerned with physical wellness. Missional frameworks are often overtaken by the means they use to achieve their ends. What frames what? is a question that is at once diagnostic and recalibrating. It helps us to step back and see why we are off course as well as directs us in the direction we should be heading. It clarifies our purposes and pursuits.
“What frames what?” is also a key question in the reading and application of Scripture. If Enlightenment science is your framework for reading Genesis then you will inevitably find yourself trying to shoe-horn the first chapter of the Bible into this or that scientific framework to prove a young earth or an old earth. If, on the other hand, you begin with Genesis in the context of the Ancient Near East and consider the intent of its author, you realize that Moses no more had in mind the age of the universe than he did the human genome or the iPhone. These were not the concerns of his day or his audience. Are you framing Genesis by today’s scientific questions or are you framing today’s scientific questions with Scripture?
C. S. Lewis wrestled with this very question when he wrote the now famously quoted line, “I believe in Christianity as I believe that the Sun has risen not only because I see it but because by it I see everything else.”
Here is that sentence in its context:
“I was taught at school, when I had done a sum, to “prove my answer”. The proof or verification of my Christian answer to the cosmic sum is this. When I accept Theology I may find difficulties, at this point or that, in harmonizing it with some particular truths which are imbedded in the mythical cosmology derived from science. But I can get in, or allow for, science as a whole. Granted that Reason is prior to matter and that the light of the primal Reason illuminates finite minds, I can understand how men should come by observation and inference, to know a lot about the universe they live in.
If, on the other hand, I swallow the scientific cosmology as a whole, then not only can I not fit in Christianity, but I cannot even fit in science. If minds are wholly dependent on brains, and brains on bio-chemistry, and bio-chemistry (in the long run) on the meaningless flux of the atoms, I cannot understand how the thought of those minds should have any more significance than the sound of the wind in the trees. And this is to me the final test. This is how I distinguish dreaming and waking.
When I am awake I can, in some degree, account for and study my dream. The dragon that pursued me last night can be fitted into my waking world. I know that there are such things as dreams: I know that I had eaten an indigestible dinner: I know that a man of my reading might be expected to dream of dragons. But while in the night mare I could not have fitted in my waking experience. The waking world is judged more real because it can thus contain the dreaming world: the dreaming world is judged less real because it cannot contain the waking one.
For the same reason I am certain that in passing from the scientific point of view to the theological, I have passed from dream to waking. Christian theology can fit in science, art, morality, and the sub-Christian religions. The scientific point of view cannot fit in any of these things, not even science itself. I believe in Christianity as I believe that the Sun has risen not only because I see it but because by it I see everything else.”
(from “Is Theology Poetry?” by C. S. Lewis)
Is God defined by Love or is Love defined by God?
“What frames what?” is also the question that Plato explores in Euthyphro, a dialogue between Socrates and the greek theologian Euthyphro about the nature of piety. Is piety that which pious men do or are men pious because they participate in some extrinsic norm called piety?
Euthyphro and Socrates might well discuss the phrase “Love wins” today. When people use that slogan, they are usually defining love as total acceptance, not only of one’s person, but also of one’s beliefs and behaviors. Much like tolerance — which today does not mean “the act of tolerating or putting up with” but rather “to affirm all positions as equally valid” (yielding the ironic and self-defeating consequence that if I don’t agree with that definition, my position is not as valid as yours)—love today implies no expectation of growth or change, but only acceptance. What a reduction! (I can’t imagine telling my wife “I accept you” as a substitute for “I love you.”)
If we say “God is a god of love” with today’s definition in mind, we have reduced him to affirming everybody’s beliefs and actions, no matter how vile or sinister. Stop and consider it: If love=acceptance without expectation of change then we have made a monster out of God and I am left to die in my brokenness, frailty, and sin. So often it seems “love wins” is used as a euphemism for “Don’t judge me” or “Affirm my lifestyle” or “Ignore their criticism, they’re just haters!” Certainly nobody should hate, and certainly the imago Dei—the image of God in which all humans are created—in all of us should be affirmed, but that is a very limited view of love. More than that, love never celebrates that which is antithetical to the imago Dei in each of us. Love cannot affirm sin.
If, instead, when we say “Love wins” we mean that the transforming love of God must and will have its way with us, we are submitting ourselves to something larger than ourselves—something we don’t completely understand, but we trust. If when we say it we mean “God’s word and will are difficult, but because he suffered and died in my place, I will trust him to transform me and others” we are getting closer to what it means that Love wins.
When our cultural, sentimental notions of love frame God, we diminish God, love, and one another; but when God, revealed in his word and the historical person of Jesus Christ, defines love we find ourselves in a much better place: Now we can love all people even when we disagree with their beliefs and actions. “I love you” does not need to mean “I agree with you.”
Now we can love self-sacrificially. Now we can say to others, just as I hope my friends and family would say to me, “I love you with the love of Christ, and because of that I want you to flourish by repenting of sin, receiving grace, and being transformed into the image of God that you were meant to be.” To love is to desire our loved ones to grow, mature, and flourish. Love does not leave the beloved in his or her sins. Love wins becomes infinitely more powerful when properly framed.
John’s first epistle is a great place to start to read about the robust, transforming nature of the love of God:
“Do not love the world or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him.” (1 John 2:15)
“For this is the love of God, that we keep his commandments. And his commandments are not burdensome. For everyone who has been born of God overcomes the world. And this is the victory that has overcome the world — our faith. Who is it that overcomes the world except the one who believes that Jesus is the Son of God?” (1 John 5:3–5)
Practice Reframing
What frames what in your thinking? What frames what in your relationships? What frames what in your educational choices or your vocation? What frames what in our cultural slogans?
If the incarnate Christ’s death and resurrection is not the lens through which we see all things, then our perspectives need reframing.
“Indeed, the simple truth is that the resurrection cannot be accommodated in any way of understanding the world except one of which it is the starting point.” (Leslie Newbigin)
