Finally, there's a new book of spiritual encouragement that Baptists, Presbyterians, Free Methodists, and Nazarenes can all read and enjoy. Quakers might even like Once Upon a Tree (Howard Publisher, 2002) by Calvin Miller. No matter what your denominational predisposition, Calvin Miller is on your side, as long as it's the side of the cross.

(Oh yeah, Cal's also written about a zillion other books - The Singer Trilogy (his most famous), Frost, Once Upon a Tree: Answering The 10 Crucial Questions of Life, The Empowered Leader: 10 Keys to Servant Leadership, The Christ of Christmas, Into the Depths of God, The Divine Symphony, The Empowered Communicator, Spirit, Word, and Story, Walking With Saints, The Unchained Soul, and Heart of a Roaring Lion: How The Door Magazine Transformed and Revitalized Modern Christianity. OK, maybe the last one is still in the rough draft stage ...)

CALVIN MILLER: We're not on the radio, are we?
THE DOOR MAGAZINE: Absolutely not. We'll tamper with the interview enough to make us sound articulate.
MILLER: OK.
DOOR: Once Upon a Tree sure didn't sound "Baptist." What happened to the doctrinal differences between the Calvinists and the Holiness folks?
MILLER: I think what happened was that in reworking this book the second time around, it comes across with a little feel of the Holiness doctrine about it because I tried to get myself involved in the book. The first time I wrote on the cross, I wrote fairly much like John Stott wrote on the cross-a good theological description of what it was all about. This time I tried to talk about encounter (and) the meaning of sacrifice. I tried to deal with Bonhoffer's concept. He says Luke 9:23, "Pick up your cross and follow me," should have been translated, "Come with me and die." I tried to write myself into this a lot more, and I think it picked up a good personal feel of what the cross is all about, far more than it had the first time around.
DOOR: When did you originally write this book?
MILLER: 1910. I don't know.
DOOR: Just make something up.
MILLER: I think about '67. It was the first book I ever wrote. It enjoyed modest success. Norman Peale and some of the people from the Foundation for Christian Living picked it up and gave it kind of a popular front for the first year or two it was out. But this time it was so new they assigned it a new Library of Congress number. It's a whole new book, even though the title is the same.
DOOR: How does the "death to self" theme fit in with Norman Peale's Power of Positive Thinking?
MILLER: Norman Peale can be quite a bit more conservative than today's megachurch pastors! Evangelicals used to be down on Peale, they'd say things like "Paul was appealing but Peale is appalling." But in recent years the theology of megachurches and the church growth movement has been so aqueous and insubstantial that Peale would look conservative by comparison.
DOOR: You write "the church growth movement has contributed to the loss of transcendence by offering a gospel that is user-friendly." We've lost some transcendence, too. Have you found it?
MILLER: People don't talk much about the cross anymore. This was front and center in the life of Dietrich Bonhoffer. It was very central, the theology of agony, of things gone wrong in the world, and how only Jesus could make them right. I don't think there's enough concern about that right now. Megachurches are theologically walking away from a great heritage. For many contemporary Christians in America, Christianity just started when their church formed in the suburbs. They have no martyrs, no traditions, no way their forebears said anything-they don't have any forebears!
DOOR: Right now Dr. Phil is very popular. He writes about finding the "authentic self." I guess that's the opposite of death to self.
MILLER: I'm convinced that we never find out who we really are except as we see ourselves reflected in interaction with other people. To sit down with ourselves and figure that out is impossible. It's like an inkblot where there isn't any blot; it's all ink. There's no interpretation possible.
DOOR: You refer to a lack of preaching in modern churches about heaven, hell, and the crucified life.
MILLER: The here and now hell we pass through does indeed conform us into the image of Christ, properly understood. I think our unanswered questions prompt in us a yearning, but usually there aren't any answers. That's why the questions are so horrendous. They show us an insufficiency in ourselves that we only find complete when we finally just surrender to the mysticism of the unanswerable God. We have to learn a level of acceptance that isn't easy for us. Without the here and now hell we wouldn't search for the answers.
DOOR: Your subtitle is "Answering the Ten Crucial Questions of Life." We can't even decide what to have for dinner.
MILLER: I don't ever start out to write how-to books. When I was working my way through the book, I considered the agony of the questions that I've experienced in my 66 years of life: How do I live? How do I die? What do I believe while I'm here? What does the cross mean? What do I do when I hurt? How can I compare this to the hurt of Jesus? I didn't think about how I could market this with ten keys to something. My ideas fell into categories.
DOOR: And each category has a perfect quotation from brainy guys like Dostoyevsky, Milton and Thomas à Kempis. But is there really any logic to the gospel?
MILLER: If things get too logical, they're not interesting. If I have some bit of a stable answer that's the same on Tuesday as it was on Monday, probably there's not much there. The great mysteries of godliness are the things that can't be answered, and they keep us addicted to God. When we can't answer 'em we hurt, and when we hurt we turn to God because nobody else has the answers. There aren't any answers. The answers themselves are only in terms of the personal Christ. The late Malcolm Muggeridge said that sexuality was the mysticism of the 1990s. He was right about that. The only place people feel any more is in the bedroom. They don't feel before the altar of a great church. God doesn't make them weep, or feel any kind of ecstasy, so the next best substitute is erotic or amorous.
DOOR: Your definition of humility is, "Getting a true view of yourself by standing next to Jesus." How do we do that?
MILLER: I'm convinced that the only way you can ever stand next to Christ is to enter through the doorway of solitude. Whole groups, denominations, can't stand next to Christ. Standing next to Christ is done one at a time by the ardent believer who wants to know Christ. We don't go to Christ to measure up, or feel humble, we go to Christ out of immense need. Humility is a natural corollary of coming close to God.
     Michael Card and I are kind of amateur astronomers, and he's much better at it than I am. We were in his backyard one night, and he gave me a book by an astronomer that opened my eyes. When you look through these telescopes you see a pinpoint of light, and you call it a star. We can chart big maps of where the stars are, but the truth is they're nowhere. They're moving horribly fast, but at these great distances at which we live they appear to be stationary. This book said something like, if you could just move close enough to them they would no longer be pinpoints of light. They're raging hydrogen explosions that would engulf you in flame and destroy everything. They're immense in size. But at a great distance they seem stolid.
     I think the same thing is true of God. A lot of Protestants see Him through a Sunday school quarterly at a safe distance. He seems to be locatable and knowable in these little logical terms and theologies that we throw at him, but up close He is indeed a raging fire. When we're near Him we understand what humility is.
DOOR: Recently Christianity Today said we'd lost our sense of humor. You used to write the column "Eutychus and His Kin" for them back when they had a sense of humor...
MILLER: I wish Christianity Today still had a sense of humor. I wish they'd call back and say, "You need to write for us again, people need to laugh once in a while when they read this magazine."
DOOR: Why is it so hard for Christians to laugh at themselves?
MILLER: I ask myself that all the time. I believe that humor and laughter are part and parcel of our comfortableness with a holy God. When Julian of Norwich was at her sickest, the devil came to her, and manifested himself to her. When she began to laugh at him, she began to understand that the devil hates more than anything else the sound of healthy laughter. It's derision unto him. What we give to God in honest and free laughter becomes a threat to all things evil. I don't see much of this in Christianity. I see morose people thinking about how to lacerate themselves. They flagellate themselves into some kind of wormlike theology where they're never really happy. They make miserable followers, I think, in many cases.
DOOR: Are you sure you're a Baptist?
MILLER: ----------
DOOR: You say, "The cross is insulted less by its declared enemies than by its pretended friends." What do you mean?
MILLER: It strikes me that a lot of people can answer a question about their own faith eagerly and rapidly, "Yes, I'm a Christian." But the issue of real encounter with Christ is very complex. I grew up in a Baptist church where every truth had a little place where you could locate it in the Bible and annotate it in your notebooks. Every blank in an interactive Bible study handbook can only be filled in with one word, one right answer. We developed kind of a flat view of God, highly parochial, very didactic, but without much kerygma. We missed the force of His person, the passion in Him. There is much more to Christianity than the average church member knows about-there's spiritual discipline that leads to a healthy life. People of prayer do laugh easily. Richard Foster laughs easily, yet he's always reading the great saints. Church members are often dead about what they ought to be passionate about.
DOOR: You write that one of Christianity's greatest truths is that all who believe are better off dead. How does that separate us from the Muslim suicide bombers who want to go to heaven right now?
MILLER: If I understand Islamic heaven right, it's about indulgence and reward. The best Christian picture of heaven is union with Christ, being completed in Him. We still hold some crazy notions that the streets of gold and gates of pearls are there to enfranchise us in some material way. The real truth is that it is heaven because Jesus is there. The longing of our lives is finally answered because we are face to face with His reality. We're not there to get something.
DOOR: Rats.
MILLER: When I read what Paul has to say about heaven, he certainly isn't going there to get the goods and the virgins. He's going there to know the final victory of his life-the eternal, unending presence of union with Christ. That's the difference. I don't like the health-and-wealth gospel. I don't like any suggestion for any world where we get stuff from God.
DOOR: You describe real Christianity as very inclusive when you say, "It has no choice but to become a community of acceptance" because of the cross. If this is true, why is Protestantism known for its extreme divisiveness? "Where two or three gather together ... someone starts a new denomination."
MILLER: You don't pick that up from Jesus. Jesus doesn't tell us to shun the Pharisees. He castigates hypocrisy, but he made friends with Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea. They were part of His community. There is a strong sense of inclusiveness in the New Testament. The words "all" and the words "every one" are used continually. God reaches out to embrace people through the arms and the sacrifice of Christ, which is why I have written this book. I'm not much in favor of churches that have no respect for the terrible cost of our salvation that was paid by Jesus. When Peter Jennings was interviewing a megachurch pastor on one of those ABC specials, he said something like, "I don't see a cross in your church." The pastor said the cross is offensive to some people. I think that's the whole point.
DOOR: You created a beautiful image of the cross driven as a wedge into time. But then you've got the time-dependent image of the Son returning to the Father with nail-scarred hands. How can we mix timeless salvation with temporal narrative?
MILLER: Unfortunately, the word "time" is the great dividing point between a human world view and God's view. Chronos is human time, calendar time. Kyros is God's time, where there isn't any past, present, or future: It's always now. God's time isn't divisible into segments. He sees it all at once. But to us, as Lewis said, we travel through the pipe, and all behind us in the pipe is past, and all ahead of us is future. But God, in a sense, holds the pipe in His hands, and looks at all of it at once. DOOR: What kind of a pipe is that?
MILLER: The Greek word for time comes from the god Chronos, a bandy-legged little fellow, with a scalp lock in front. He charged at you, and if you could catch hold of him while he faced you and grab his lock of hair in the front and hang on, you could control him and hold on to him. If you missed him, the back of his head was slick. There was nothing to hold on to, and he was gone on past you. That's the human view of time. It is slipping. We can't hold on to it, but with God it's quite another thing.
     We have a hard time reckoning with Romans 8, where Paul talks about the things that are coming to us, because what Paul's saying is that all God has for me or you as a believer is finished already. We have to wait our own agonizing, clock-ridden, second-hand way through it all, but in the mind of God it is complete. There's at least that much to be said for Calvinism. I don't object to their view of time. I'd be a better Calvinist if they didn't have such a need to be right about everything.
DOOR: So there's no real answer for our question...
MILLER: No, but I talked a long time!
DOOR: One last question. When the prophets of old spoke for God, they often used first person, even mixing it with references to the Lord in third person. Is it possible that Jesus spoke for God in the great "I am" passages?
MILLER: I think Jesus spoke for God always. He was incapable of speaking for Himself, in a sense. I truly believe that Jesus lived completely to please his Father. He had no agenda of His own. From that standpoint, He always spoke for God. He was completely without self interest-that's where sin begins.
DOOR: Any last words for our readers?
MILLER: I hope each of them will cherish the cross as the hope, and to seek to come to know the Christ who paid the price there, so that we may love him and know God personally.

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