Dear reader,
I’ve been thinking about the word obedience, and the difference between it and faithfulness. I’m finding the latter used much more often in current writing and speaking about faith working out in action—myself included.
It’s not too hard to guess why. Obedience has negative connotations in our culture: it’s associated with acting without questioning, with putting ourselves under the authority of another, with giving up a measure of autonomy and independence.
Despite these negative associations, I’m wondering about the importance of obedience—alongside of, not in opposition to, faithfulness—as a part of the Christian life. How might the notion of obedience resist some of our foolish cultural tendencies?
We moderns, after all, resist any encroachment on our autonomy. We don’t like being told what to do, and in order to do something, we want to know why and for what purpose it’s to be done. Too easily the reality of being called “friends of God” can degenerate into a sense that we are trusted advisors, and that we can’t be expected to act unless we have fully understood all the particulars and are fully comfortable with the stakes.
To offer a personal example, at times over the past year and a half I have felt a kind of betrayal. When Ryan and I decided six years ago that yes, we would obey God’s call to move to Australia, we did so with every possible calculation. We wanted to act wisely, not impetuously. One of these calculations involved our connections with family: we planned on breaking up the time away with extended visits, and we knew that in an emergency we could make it home relatively easily.
And so, when the pandemic hit and international travel halted, one of my immediate responses was, “I didn’t sign up for this.” These conditions were not available for our consideration prior to our move, and they were not the conditions in which I had decided to practice faithfulness.
Writing it out so honestly reveals its silliness—I cannot dictate the terms of my life, let alone predict the implications of world-changing viruses, and declaring “thus far and no farther” is simply a failure to surrender my will to God’s.
Which brings us back to the importance of obedience as a way of understanding the Christian life. Obedience, as I said, involves surrendering our wills. Too often we conceive of this as a zero-sum game, in which our selves, including our desires and our wills, are subjugated violently, squashed under the impersonal force of God’s will.
But this image of subjugation is a hellish one, as C.S. Lewis so cleverly argues through his character Screwtape, an experienced devil. Speaking of God, Screwtape tells his apprentice, “When He talks of their losing their selves, He only means abandoning the clamour of self-will; once they have done that, He really gives them back all their personality, and boasts (I am afraid, sincerely) that when they are wholly His they will be more themselves than ever.” In contrast to Hell’s aim of devouring and absorbing humans into itself, God “wants a world full of beings united to Him but still distinct.”
This premise, of God’s seeking our obedience not for his enlargement but for our being brought into a sharing of his life, allows us to obey, to lay down our autonomy, to give up an insistence on understanding before obeying.
Lewis illustrates the importance of obedience in The Silver Chair. Jill and Eustace, sent on a quest to find a lost prince, find themselves in a castle with a man they believe to be under an enchantment. In order to protect others, he is bound to a chair during his daily fits of madness. After having agreed together not to be moved by his pleas for release, the heroes are shocked to hear him ask them to release him “by the great Lion, by Aslan himself.” Now, they are confronted with a crisis, because this situation was one of the signs given to them to direct their quest—they were instructed to heed the first person who asked them to do something in Aslan’s name.
The narrator explains their dilemma: “what had been the use of learning the signs if they weren’t going to obey them? Yet could Aslan have really meant them to unbind anyone—even a lunatic—who asked it in his name?” Puddleglum, Jill and Eustace’s guide, knows what they must do. And yet when Eustace asks, “Do you mean you think everything will come right if we do untie him?” Puddleglum claims no such certainty: “Aslan didn’t tell [Jill] what would happen. He only told her what to do. That fellow will be the death of us once he’s up, I shouldn’t wonder. But that doesn’t let us off following the sign.”
In this scene, Lewis skillfully illuminates the agony of obedience: so often, we don’t know what will happen. Puddleglum’s unquestionning obedience presses against modern understandings of what it means to follow Christ. Are we willing to submit to a God whom we do not fully comprehend, but whom we can trust?
Joanna Lisowiec, an illustrator and designer, created this illustration for a book on Tudor England, digitally imitating the period style of wood engravings. Some of the negative connotations of obedience, I think, come from the many ways the powerful have abused their authority. Henry VIII, pictured here, was one such king. Lisowiec portrays his arrogance through his posture, as he stands proudly, unwilling to even look at the woman kneeling before him. An eagerness to obey God despite the unknown is premised on what we do know—that God is no tyrant, but true goodness, and that obedience to him is not debasing, but moves us closer to becoming our true selves.
This month I joined the world-wide reading group 100 Days of Dante, hoping that my first failed, college-aged encounter with the famous poet would not be my final impression. A week and a half in, I’m confident that it won’t be—and it’s not too late to join if you’re interested!
I’m reading The Wind in the Willows aloud to the kids, and even though it is slow and meandering, the prose is beautiful and we are all enjoying it. I love the way Rat and Mole’s friendship is portrayed, and I love the longings for home that Grahame so gracefully expresses.
From “Choosing America”: [A] political community, even one of the size and scope of most modern nations, is not simply a state, that is, a system of power and the distribution of authority. A political community, as Aristotle argued, is its people, its citizens, organized by a shared view of what must be done and by whom in order for this very organization to persist. Each encounter with our fellow citizens – which, for most of us most of the time, will be in our neighborhoods and our homes, our houses of worship and our workplaces – offers the possibility of a renegotiation of this shared view. For that reason, each encounter contains the whole possibility of the nation, understood as the political community.
From “Why So Serious?”: And joy, like all deep and beautiful and true things, is built on the intimate trust that God is who he says he is and will do what he says he will do, though storms will rage. Hope rests on the belief that, entwined with God and one another, we can somehow be strong enough to withstand winds that would fell us on our own, and say even in the midst of the howling gale, “It is well, it is well with my soul.”
From “How I learned to Read Dante’s Divine Comedy”: Dante’s ideal reader turns out to be Don Draper in the opening of the sixth season of Mad Men, on the beach in Hawaii reading Inferno. Here is someone about to face the ugliness and disappointments of life, the ugliness and disappointments of himself, about to descend — always by escalator — into a hell of his own making. Dante’s hell is not other people; it is oneself. And we must not stay there.
My writing elsewhere this month: “Wounded Beauty” at Gentle Reformation, “Old Testament Threads in Gospel Stories” at Redbud Post, and “The Reformed Tradition and Suspicion of Visual Beauty” on my blog.
Merciful Lord,
you comfort and teach your faithful people.
Increase in your Church the holy desires which you have given.
Strengthen the hearts of those who hope in you.
Empower us to understand the depth of your promises,
that all your adopted children may see with the eyes of faith,
and patiently wait for the good things
you have not yet revealed;
through Jesus Christ our Lord.
Amen.
On the road with you,
Laura