{"id":9319,"date":"2012-07-07T01:48:00","date_gmt":"2012-07-07T01:48:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/?p=9319"},"modified":"2026-10-02T01:35:56","modified_gmt":"2026-10-02T01:35:56","slug":"grape-juice-and-strong-wine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/?p=9319","title":{"rendered":"Grape Juice and Strong Wine"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

On one of our sightseeing trips around Seattle a few weeks ago, guided by my brother Ryan, we stopped at a great little used book store.\u00a0 I was looking for a good vacation read and, on Ryan’s recommendation, picked up a book called “A Severe Mercy” by Sheldon Vanauken. It’s a true story about Sheldon’s romance with his wife.\u00a0 In the beginning of their relationship, both were unreservedly pagan.\u00a0 Not long into their marriage, while living for an extended time in England, first his wife and then Sheldon became Christians. There’s an extended quote from midway through the book that struck me and I want to share it here, even though it does not really give a true flavor of the main concern of the book (which I hope to say a bit about in a future post).\u00a0 Vanauken raises a good question:\u00a0 Why do people who don’t really BELIEVE want to call themselves Christians anyway?At this point in the story, Vanauken relates the culture shock of leaving the vivacious Christian community\u00a0he and his wife\u00a0knew in England and returning to the United States – as relatively new believers, viewing the American religious landscape for the first time:“Now it appeared to us that there was very little interest in living a life centred in the Incarnate Lord.\u00a0 People went to church of course, but their conversation was about the convivial Couples Club or the radical racial ideas of the bishop.\u00a0 No doubt Christ was in the churches somewhere, but He was not easy to find.<\/em>“Even more dismaying, in other circles, was the watering-down of the Faith to little more than a few of Christ’s moral precepts.\u00a0 ‘Yes,’ said these unbelievers who called themselves Christians, ‘yes, indeed, Jesus was the divine Son of God; so are we all, divine Sons of God.\u00a0 Of course there was an incarnation:\u00a0 each of us is the incarnation of God.\u00a0 If St. John suggests anything else, or St. Paul does, they are not to be depended on.\u00a0 Miracles – well, no, we happen to know God doesn’t work that way.\u00a0 No, of course our knowledge of how God works doesn’t come from the Bible, but we know all the same.\u00a0 There was no resurrection, except in some very, very spiritual sense, whatever those naive Apostles thought they saw.\u00a0 Of course we’re Christians – how could you doubt it? – though, naturally Buddhism and Islam and all religions except the Catholic Church are equally Ways.\u00a0 Truth?\u00a0 What is truth? What has truth got to do with it?’<\/em>“All this, to us who had accepted\u00a0 the ancient Christian faith, was depressing.\u00a0 It was about as far from the strong red wine of the Faith as grape juice.\u00a0 The Faith was too strong:\u00a0 the wine must be turned to water in an anti-miracle.\u00a0 In other ages people who could not believe in Christianity (and, admittedly, it takes some believing) had called themselves Deists or Unitarians, but these people, for reasons we did not understand, were intent to shelter under the name of Christianity and at the same time to reduce the Faith to a hollow thing that required no believing beyond a mild theism.”<\/em>I know a lot of our founding fathers self-identified as “Deists”.\u00a0 I wonder how and why that label faded away?\u00a0 And I wonder how many folks in church pews every Sunday morning would more accurately be called “Deists” or “Unitarians” than “Christians”?\u00a0 An even sadder thought:\u00a0 How many pulpits are filled with Deists and Unitarians?\u00a0 How does the true Gospel penetrate a church where the preacher works “an anti-miracle” every Sunday from the pulpit?\u00a0 I will never forget a sermon delivered in my home church when I was\u00a0in my early teen years.\u00a0 The pastor explained away the miracle of the feeding of the 5,000.\u00a0 Our pastor was much smarter than the Gospel writers.\u00a0 He had figured out (or read somewhere) that the people who came to hear Jesus preach\u00a0commonly smuggled food in the sleeves of their robes, hidden away so that hungry neighbors would not make any demands on their personal supply.\u00a0 When\u00a0the disciples started passing\u00a0around the baskets at meal time, the crowd’s\u00a0selfish hearts had already been softened by Jesus’ preaching and so, as\u00a0each individual\u00a0pulled out their own\u00a0bread and fish\u00a0to eat, they actually dropped a portion or two\u00a0into the basket to feed those who had brought nothing.\u00a0 And THAT was how the baskets were overflowing when they were collected at the end by the disciples!He finished with this summation:\u00a0 “It WAS most certainly a miracle.\u00a0 It was a miracle of SHARING!”He seemed proud to have done away with the pesky supernatural elements of the story – which can be so hard for modern, civilized folks to believe – but in the back of my teenage mind, plenty of other questions sprouted up:**So human beings did the miracle, not God?**Did the Gospel writers intentionally mislead their readers into believing Jesus worked the miracle supernaturally or were they just rubes themselves?**Is the Bible inspired by God or not?**If Jesus was the Son of God, why should we consider the multiplying of bread and fish to be a feat that was obviously beyond him?I\u00a0didn’t begin this post intending to finish\u00a0this way, but maybe I’m ready to take a stab at answering Vanauken’s question as to why the Deists and Unitarians continue to “shelter under the name of Christianity.”Maybe it’s wishful thinking on my part, but perhaps the answer is that deep down inside they WANT to believe in the ancient Christian faith.\u00a0 Perhaps they know that the grape juice does not satisfy and they truly desire the strong wine, but they fear taking that step of faith.\u00a0 Maybe they know that to declare themselves as nothing more than Deists or Unitarians would cut them off from the chance, however remote they think it might be, of connecting with a sovereign God fully capable of the miraculous.I truly hope that is the case.\u00a0 I’ve been there myself, seemingly content with a shallow faith, but wanting to know a God worth dropping everything to follow.\u00a0 A God who inspires passion.\u00a0 A God for whom I’d be willing to suffer and even die.\u00a0 A God who really knows each hair on my head.\u00a0 A God who calls me to urgent work in his Kingdom.You know the feeling?\u00a0\u00a0It’s the same one that finds you sitting in a pew\u00a0and wanting to see a bonafide miracle,\u00a0solely for the glimpse of the greatness of God,\u00a0and yet\u00a0all the while disbelieving in miracles deep down inside!You want to see a paralyzed person walk, and THEN you’ll believe.Which reminds me: I saw a quadriplegic walk a few weeks ago.She also sings … about God’s glory and power.\u00a0 I’ll\u00a0tell you more\u00a0about her next time…<\/p>\n\n\n

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Perhaps the pastor is a Deist…<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On one of our sightseeing trips around Seattle a few weeks ago, guided by my brother Ryan, we stopped at a great little used book store.\u00a0 I was looking for a good vacation read and, on Ryan’s recommendation, picked up a book called “A Severe Mercy” by Sheldon Vanauken. It’s a true story about Sheldon’s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":9320,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9319","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9319","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9319"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9319\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9321,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9319\/revisions\/9321"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/9320"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9319"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9319"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9319"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}