My dad just went from stage 3 to stage 4 squamous cell skin cancer on his head; this means it has penetrated his brain. This post will be written as tribute to my dad. My dad, Ron Grow, hails from Gardena and Lake Elsinore, California; currently residing in Wildomar, California. He is one of three siblings, my Aunt Sue, his older sister went to be with the risen Christ in 1985, and my Aunt Linda, his oldest sister, is still living in assisted living battling with dementia and other health issues. He is the son of Jacob “Buster” and Betty Grow, both in the presence of the living God where there are pleasures forevermore. My grandpa Buster was a hay dealer, starting in Gardena, and eventually moving out to the Lake Elsinore area back in the late 40s (as I recall). This is the household my dad grew up in; not a house where Christ was well known. My dad radically came to Christ out of drugs and alcohol just a few years out of high school in the late 60s (my dad’s household came to Christ as a result of his witness). He was mentored by a pastor at his Conservative Baptist church in Elsinore. From there my dad sensed the call to pastoral ministry, and entered Southwestern Conservative Baptist Bible College in Phoenix, Arizona in the early seventies. Here he met my mom, Bev, and here I came into existence; AFTER they married. Over the next four years my sister, Staci, and brother Jeff would come into the world as well.[1] My dad went on to pastor a variety of Baptist and Evangelical Free churches; he even started First Baptist Church of Tenino (Washington), being sent out from the mother church: Mt. View Baptist Church (in Centralia, Washington). He ended his pastoral career at Calvary Baptist Church in North Long Beach, CA; at this point I was in high school. He retired from formal pastoral ministry in and around 94. From that point on he went on to manage a Christian owned used car dealership in Bellflower, CA: i.e. Mike’s Auto Sales. In all of this ministry what characterized my dad’s approach was evangelism. Whether he was pastoring or operating as a hospital chaplain (which he did for a while), or as a car salesman, he has always been about proclaiming the gospel of the Kingdom to all who would hear.

With the ups and downs that attend each and everyone of our lives in this rough and tumble world, my dad has gone onward and lived out his life in retirement with a host of health issues. It has been a struggle and continues to be for my dad; fiscally, health-wise, and in other ways. My parents divorced after thirty-six years of marriage some years ago now, and so my dad has been living a solitary life in these last many years. In the midst of it all, no matter where my dad has found himself, no matter what the tough circumstances, he has borne witness to Jesus Christ. He points people to Christ even in the midst of his own tough circumstances; and they have been tough!! particularly over these last many months. There has been a convergence of circumstances that have helped to only exacerbate my dad’s current plight; and yet I know he has continued to share Christ with those he comes into contact with—even in the midst of the “real.” He has never lost his resolve to share Christ with anyone who will hear; this of all things, I think, is my dad’s legacy. And it is the legacy of the Spirit’s ministry; indeed, this is the Spirit’s ministry, to bear witness to the work and voice of the risen Christ.

While imperfect, like us all, my dad has lived, and continues to live in the very grist of the broken yet now resurrected humanity of the Son of Man, Jesus Christ. Here my dad finds the ground of all that he is all the way down. No matter what the swirls of this life bring my dad, he lives in the sweat and blood of the work of Jesus Christ for him. Here my dad gains his hope, and through the eternal Son becoming fallen human my dad finds his way eternal. Paul Hinlicky describes this work of Christ like this:

We are . . . to think that (per creedal belief) the man Jesus Christ rendered in the gospel narrative, qua this particular mortal being of manger and cross, is the coming to us of the Father’s Eternal Son; and we are to think (again a belief) that the Eternal Son, God from God and Light from Light, comes from the Father by the Spirit to seek and find us in this particular man’s journey to Golgotha. If we understand the exchanges of attributes entailed by this belief in the “one Lord, Jesus Christ” as the personal decision and various acts and passions of the Son in the Trinity’s love for us, we understand all that there is to be understood theologically about the Incarnation: we bend the knee, confess Jesus as the saving Lord, and give glory in the Spirit to the Father in anticipation of the redemption of our bodies by membership in His Body, harbinger of the Beloved Community.[2]

It is this ‘Beloved Community’ that my dad has been a contributing member to, and continues to be, for many many years. It is in communion with this man on the path to Golgotha whom my dad came into step with back those many years ago in Lake Elsinore, California. It is this Light from Light that my dad has seen and continues to see the Face of God in. It is in the ‘passions of the Son in the Trinity’s love for us’ that my dad has been swept up into the heights of God’s life, even as that very life continues to stoop down into the misery and suffering of this broken vessel if only to inject the power of resurrection into the life-blood of my dad’s aching body. My dad lives in this creed, and it is the Life of the creed that breathes His life into his, and springs forth an eternal well-spring of hope.

I love my dad, and always will for eternity. He has ultimately pointed me to Christ, and continues to, even in his besetting illness. My dad, even in the formation of many scars and bruises, has in his weakness, pointed me to the broken but raised body of Jesus Christ. As my dad has found his life in the living Christ, through the ministry of the Spirit therein, I too came to find my life in union with this same mysterious of God and humanity in the singular ‘face’ of this person from Nazareth. My dad’s legacy is that he has the Spirit of Christ at work in his life, and in that come-alongside ministry he has been able to point others to the ground of his life in Christ. This is my dad’s legacy, and it continues to build; his life is not over, and by God’s Grace and Mercy he might find many years of life and ministry as he lives with us ‘flatlanders’ together as we hasten the coming of Christ in love and good works to the praise of the everlasting Father.

In closing, and with reference to Hinlicky on Luther’s theology one more time: “To be truly human is to rise from the dead. Jesus Christ is this new, true Adam. In Him, we too, and we all, are becoming truly human.”[3] This is my dad’s hope, and all of humanity’s hope; it is the resurrection that brings the needed power into my dad’s life, alongside the rest of the Beloved Community. My dad is only human, as are we all, as he, and we participate in the indestructible life of the Lamb of God, the Lion of the tribe of Judah, Jesus Christ. My dad knows the voice of the Lamb; I know this because along with my mom he introduced me to it, and the voice lives on through the Spirit’s breath. To God be the glory, and the peace of Christ be my dad’s bread of life in these travailing moments of trial and tribulation.

[1] My mom and dad also gave birth to Nathaniel Douglas Grow in the early eighties while my dad pastored an Evangelical Free Church in Green, OR (Roseburg area). Nathaniel survived thirty minutes outside the womb, and then entered the presence of the Triune God due to an inoperable (which is now operable in the 21^st century) heart condition.

[2] Paul R. Hinlicky, Luther and the Beloved Community: A Path for Christian Theology after Christendom (Grand Rapids, Michigan/Cambridge, U.K.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2010), 54-5.

[3] Ibid.

It is just over nine years ago now that I was laid up in my hospital bed at OHSU in Portland, OR; I was being treated for an incurable, rare, and highly aggressive cancer known as Desmoplastic Small Round Cell Tumor sarcoma (DSRCT). The prognosis of this particular cancer is almost always imminent death (within two years of being diagnosed); there is no actual protocol or treatment for this cancer, so they often use a closely related protocol that is used for Ewing’s sarcoma. I was enduring this treatment with hopes of debulking my tumor (and lymph node) enough to make my tumor operable. It was in the early stages of this treatment that I was assigned a young nurse who would administer my chemo-cocktail every now and cycle. She was an upbeat person, and took special care of me. She noticed that I had my Bible next to my bed, and that I was often reading it; she said she believed in ‘the power of positive thinking,’ and that she encouraged patients to find that positivity from whatever source they could. This was dissatisfying to me, and my wife (who sat with me through it all). So, I told her I wasn’t attempting to wish myself better, but that I was entrusting myself to the living God who had risen in Jesus Christ for me and the world. She said she had problems with believing in a God who would allow someone like me, and so many of her other patients in the cancer ward, to suffer the ravages of cancer that she was surrounded by each and every day. She asked me how I and my wife could continue to believe in a God who ostensibly has the power to heal people, or not allow such sicknesses at all, and then doesn’t in fact heal or prevent such things. My response was that He already has come and healed the world from it all, even from death. That we simply must walk by faith rather than sight in the current moment, and know that God is drawing people to Himself in the midst of all the pain and suffering that WE have brought upon the world through our choice to go our way rather than God’s (as first initiated by our parents Adam and Eve). I told her that even though God didn’t cause all the sin and suffering in the world, but that we did; I told her that because He is a gracious and loving God, He freely chose to enter into that world for us, assume our humanity, and take all of that pain and evil with Him to the cross. I told her that He killed all of that evil and heinousness, and that the capstone of that is that He didn’t stay dead but that He rose again. That He ascended to the right hand of the Father, and from thence He always lives to make intercession for all those who will inherit eternal life. I told her that this is how I continued to believe in this God; the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. She took it all in, and we didn’t see her again tell another two cycles later. Next time I saw her I asked her if she had considered what we had talked about. She said she did, and that she could now believe in this God, and in fact did.

Some philosophers and theologians speak of Theodicy (the supposed problem of God and evil). But there is no problem, not for God. The problem is from our below perspective, and our false expectations for God to operate per our terms that we project upon the concept of God we think ought to be rather than actually is. God doesn’t answer to our questions. Instead He presents us with the questions that we ought to ask of Him, and in those questions He has provided the answer He has decided for us in Christ. We walk by faith not sight when we allow God to be the all in all; when we submit to His No to our sin, and then His Yes to our justification in and through the accomplishment of that through the assumed flesh of Jesus Christ for us. At the end of the day this is the reality that will prevail; the glory of God will cover the earth as the waters cover the sea.

¹³ Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go to such and such a city, spend a year there, buy and sell, and make a profit”; ¹⁴ whereas you do not know what will happen tomorrow. For what is your life? It is even a vapor that appears for a little time and then vanishes away. ¹⁵ Instead you ought to say, “If the Lord wills, we shall live and do this or that.” ¹⁶ But now you boast in your arrogance. All such boasting is evil. – James 4.13-16 (NKJV)

You know when I became the most acutely aware of the reality noted in James 4 (particularly the emboldened part)? It was when I was dying from a ‘terminal’ incurable cancer called Desmoplastic Small Round Cell Tumor sarcoma (DSRCT). This was back in late 2009, and almost the whole of 2010; many of you are aware of this season in my life. For the rest of this post I want to reflect back on the perspective that came as a result of walking through this time of the ‘shadow of death.’

After I realized exactly the gravity of what I was facing, what we were facing as a young family, the world took on a whole new hue. I can remember on a cold clear winter’s night going out to the car parked on the street, and doing something as mundane as putting oil in the car. I remember standing next to the car, and then looking up into the heavens to see the starry host all about; I can remember thinking how strange life is. Here I am doing something as mundane as this, and contrasting that with the reality that statistically I was facing an untimely and unseemly death; a death that would take me from my beautiful wife, and two young dear children—this was the most hellish thought of the whole thing to me; I could not bear it! But there I was, next to my car with the hood open, looking up into the dark sky as it twinkled with the shiny stars reflecting the winter’s Sun. I consciously thought of King David, in the moment, as he penned Psalm 8, as he too looked to the heavens, to the stars, and in their light wondering ‘who am I that Thou wouldest think of me, a man, Oh LORD?’ I remember in that moment, like Elijah hiding from the world in the darkness of a cave, God’s clear small voice piercing the darkness of the season, and saying ‘I am with you, Bobby, I love you, I will never leave you or forsake you; it is going to be okay, be not afraid.’ I remember being overwhelmed, in that moment, with the peace of Christ; being overwhelmed with the immensity of His presence, and making a connection between that, and the starry host above. I remember thinking that if my God could speak and all that I was seeing above simply leapt into existence by His powerful Fiat, then the cancer inside my body was of no consequence for Him.

Later, as I had been severely battered by the chemo—and I mean to the point of being right at death’s door—as my wife and I were driving to a local Fish House for lunch, I can remember looking around at all the people in their cars, zooming here and there, living life, I can remember feeling almost translucent. I almost felt, in a concrete way, like my soul had already detached from my body, and I was no longer a part of the land of the living that all these people around me seemingly were. I’d have to say this was one of the strangest experiences I had during this time. It is not easy to explain. I was full of utter shock, and it seemed as if my life of thirty-five years was simply vanishing away before my very eyes, as if it had almost vanished, except I was fully aware and conscious of it. I felt James 4 in a tangible way in this moment of time.

Another time I was in the hospital, I think after my 5^th cycle of chemo. At this point my body had been shredded by the extra hard chemo regimen I was undertaking. I was admitted to the hospital this time, for eight days. This became the normal thing for me; post chemo I would have to be admitted into the hospital simply to keep me alive with blood transfusions and other fluids (and drugs like morphine to try and manage the pain). All of these times have sort of blurred together for me now. But in one instance, I can remember being wheeled down in my bed to a hyper clinical and sterile room where they had to do a CT-scan on me. I received many CT-scans, but this one was special, as I recall. I don’t really remember exactly what this was for, but they needed to get it done. I was in a state of neutropenia, and so very susceptible to picking up sicknesses, beyond the neutropenic fever and C-diff I already had. So, this CT room was designed for folks like me, cordoned off from the public. My wife could not even go with me at this time, so I was all by myself. I remember being wheeled into this big white room full of stainless steel everywhere, and I was just left to lay there in the heavy pain I was struggling with; and the state of shock I lived in during this whole season. Finally, a single CT-tech came into the room, and she just sat there with me, talking with me. She was all gowned up, wearing a “bunny-like” suit, as if she was trying to protect herself from my toxicity; but more than likely she was trying to protect me from hers; or probably both. Anyway, in that moment, everything felt like Gattaca; it all felt very CLINICAL. Except for the fact that the CT-tech’s warmth came through and provided a level of comfort to me. Beyond her warmth, Who was ever-present was the living God; He was assuring me in that cold white and silver room. While the stainless table I was laying on, thinly covered with a sheet, was cold to my touch, God’s warmth filled my soul, and the room itself, with a cloudy presence that I could only identify as a presence I had known all my life as a child of God; even though, in the calm and ‘normal’ days of my life I didn’t always recognize it as such. Placed into the chaos and crisis that the clinical space I had come into represented, God’s Presence in Christ overcame these sterile moments.

I have more reflections, but these represent some snap-shots of what I was going through during this seemingly never-ending season of my life. I didn’t know if I was going to make it, in fact my type of cancer said I wouldn’t; but my type of God kept telling me I would. My God was right, and I lived through what most others (with this type of cancer) don’t. I came to realize what James meant in living-color; I learned that life is ‘but a vapor’ that could at any moment simply ‘vanish’ away into the ethereality of my own shadowy existence; save Christ!

This post will be like a miscellanies. I want to touch upon two issues that have recently come up on social media for me. 1) The relationship between theological exegesis and prima facie biblical teaching; and 2) I want to develop further upon something I tweeted a few days ago, this: “Theology can become a place where you get lost, if you’re not careful.” I will address these loci in corresponding order.

Biblical Teaching and Theological Exegesis

I am a proponent of what is called ‘theological exegesis,’ or more frequently ‘theological interpretation of Scripture’ (TIS). This means that I think Holy Scripture has an inner-theo-logic that allows it to assert the things that it does in its very occasional writings. This is not to say that Scripture’s apparent teachings can’t be taken at face value, but that often there is something more going on behind the outer reality of the text that ought to be laid bare and given full weight in regard to the total interpretative operation. But this is where things get somewhat tricky. One example that stands out to me currently is the issue of baptism. Adherents to paedobaptism—both the sacramental and covenantal proponents—I contend privilege ‘theological’ exegesis over against the face-value reading of Scripture. I would argue that they do so to the breaking point of theological-exegesis’s fruitfulness, and instead start the process of reading things into the text that even the inner-logic does not support, per se. And yet this obviously is not an easy balance to strike; it is not always easy to know when the theology becomes artificial and when it is actually present in the text’s underlying reality. One criterion that I refer to, though, is if I can give Scripture’s outer teaching the chance to stand on its own, as its own theological development, it is at this point that I will allow the so called ‘outer level’ of Scripture to impinge on any attempts to deploy theological exegesis as another canon by which I arrive at an exegetical conclusion. Clearly, what I am noting involves some serious and deliberative judgment calls. But I think that there are cases, like baptism, where this needs to happen. Another example is with the issue of so-called Christian Universalism. There are theological constructs out there, like PT Forsyth’s et al. wherein the coherence value of the construct makes it very seductive in regard to allowing it to become the broader lens through which I see all passages of Scripture that have to do with final salvation issues. But the outer-level of Scripture’s teaching is rather clear on this point; I believe. There are universalist and particularist passages in Scripture, but the former are always reigned in by the latter.

This is not a very thorough thinking out of this issue, but I wanted to register something. I think human beings, all of us, have the tendency to be drawn one direction or another. I think this is what has happened to many of us who grew up as evangelicals. We were taught one way, i.e. the Literal, Grammatical, Historical, to interpret Scripture; but once we realized its intellectual background, and understood why it seemingly gave us such sterile interactions with the text of Scripture, we wanted something more. When we started engaging with and listening to the past, we realized that the Church’s history of interpretation offers certain Christological and Trinitarian riches, in the biblical interpretative process, that we’d never known before. Once we tasted that, we fully abandoned the idea that the Bible could still be read in ‘critical’ ways, with reference to linguistic, historical, and other tools made available in that process. I think this helps explain, at least for me, why some of the evangelicals who I have contact with are seemingly so willing to go wherever their new teachers, in this mode, take them. I think we ought to slow down just a little.

Getting Lost in Theological Constructs

As I noted previously, I shared the following on Twitter in the last few days: “Theology can become a place where you get lost, if you’re not careful.” A thoughtful and fellow Twitterer responded this way: “Thanks! I believe that if theology is done from an honest quest to find truth and to find God, God will not let someone lose ground. Things might (or better: they’re certain to) get more complex and challenging though, when you move from “just” believing to doing theology.”[1] I thought her response succinctly captured what I was getting at; particularly the part I have emboldened. But let me expand a little more.

I often think about where I would be if I had simply stayed where I was as a Christian up an until I was about 21 years old. I was a pastor’s kid, with a genuine love relationship with Christ. I had many Bible passages memorized, had been involved in quite a bit of church and evangelistic ministry, and had a simple understanding of doctrinal realities; the ‘orthodox’ realities about who God is, and what salvation entails—what some call ‘the essentials of the faith.’ Now, I don’t think I’ve abandoned any of that, post-21, instead, by God’s grace there has been an expansion on these things; and all that is implied and tucked under them in the history of theological ideas. But it is interesting to me: I was never a Barthian, Torrancean, Calvinian, Luther[an], Evangelical Calvinist, or what have you; I was simply a Christian who was simply walking with Christ. As I have studied and developed, theologically as a Christian over the last twenty-four years, I have been confronted with a variety of ideas; some good for my soul, and some deleterious. But as Evelyne noted in her response to my tweet, ‘God will not let someone lose ground’; I think this is the case. This, though, doesn’t change the fact that some actually do lose ground. That seems ironic to say. What I mean is that there are people out there, who for whatever reason, get hooked up with bad teachers, and thus bad teaching. Some of these folks would have been better off, maybe, to never have treaded the theological waters to begin with. So, how can I agree with Evelyne, and then seemingly take that back?

You will have to visit again to see how I answer the seeming dilemma I just left with (in another forthcoming blog post). Ultimately, I think people who don’t attempt to enter the deeper theological waters as Christians end up living with worse theology than if they had. Indeed, to not engage with the ‘deeper theological’ realities as a Christian means that this Christian is settling for whatever is ‘given’ or “fed” to them; they are at the sheer mercy of whoever their teachers are. And, as is attested to by the various evangelical churches, at least in North America, in my experience, this is not a good thing. People are living lives under the specter of moralistic-therapeutic-deism; under the chains of a feel-good-God who reflects the person more than the living God; they are living under the weight of a folk religion that peddles in anecdotal constructs supplied by the popular culture, rather than the risen Christ who is Lord! I think the risk of ‘getting lost in theology’ is worth it because staying where we are is what will ultimately destroy our ‘walks’ and ‘fellowshipping’ with Christ. In this sense I think Evelyne’s point is right (which I will expand on further, later); we need to prayerfully seek God, and ask Him to lead us in the right paths. He will do that for us! And maybe this is my answer to the aforementioned dilemma. Maybe people who chart off into the “deeper theological waters” aren’t doing so for the right reasons; maybe they aren’t doing so prayerfully and humbly before God. Maybe their approach is driven by self-glorifying reasons; maybe it is simply a matter of pursuing intellectual knowledge, and then God allows them to reap the consequences of that sort of pursuit. This is something we can all fall prey to. So, maybe that’s the conclusion: This becomes an issue of how and why we are pursuing God; it is this mode that will then shape the sort of theology and theologians we get our hands on. Maybe this is a call for all of us to constantly be involved in what TF Torrance calls ‘repentant thinking.’

[1] Evelyne Baumberger