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Saturday, December 15, 2007

Fall at His Feet

Then he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here; see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it into my side. Stop doubting and believe.”
Thomas said to him, “My Lord and my God!”
John 20:27,28 NIV

It is common these days (and I suspect, has been for quite some time) to view Jesus as something of a sage or philosopher, a guy who had a lot of good ideas about how one should live a just and moral life. It's possible that it's equally common for people who identify themselves as Christian, do so on the basis of their subscription to the wisdom and--well, "truth" is too restrictive a word due to the contemporary notions of moral relativism and the subjective nature of truth--let's say "appropriateness" of his teachings.

Many have pointed out that Jesus doesn't leave one this option. As C.S. Lewis said in Mere Christianity:

I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: "I am ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don't accept His claim to be God." That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not a be great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic--on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg--or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse."

But of course people rationalize this away all time by asserting that all the claims to divinity by Jesus were added later by either the writers of the Gospels or copiers centuries later. The wealth of scholarship affirming the reliability of the Biblical canon is ignored by such. Once this path is taken, its very difficult to retrace steps, and the argument changes to one akin to grappling with sand.

For anyone seriously addressing the question of our eternal status with God, however, it's essential to understand that this pallid concept of Jesus simply will not do. Our redemption, our reconciliation to God, our salvation will never be achieved by a belief in Jesus' teachings alone. A reliance on the resurrected Son of God, and a declaration, as the apostle Thomas, that Jesus in "my Lord and my God!" is required. As Lewis continued:

You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.

Friday, November 16, 2007

The Cult of Self-Esteem

First, a short aside. For those of you who are kind enough to read this blog, let me apologize for being absent so long. My wife and I bought the old house belonging to my father-in-law and over these months we have been doing an extensive remodel, and finally have moved in. We've settled in to the point where I have time to once again make my written contributions. Thanks for your patience, and please pray with us that we will sell our old house. The market is very slow right now...

But understand this, that in the last days there will come times of difficulty. For People will be lovers of self, lovers of money, proud, arrogant, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, heartless, unappeasable, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not loving good, treacherous, reckless, swollen with conceit, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God.
(2 Timothy 3:1-4 ESV)

I’m not sure when the “self-esteem” movement began.  I feel somewhat like the proverbial boiled frog when I look around at the ubiquity of the term these days (you know, put a frog in a pan of cold water and ever so slowly bring it to a boil so by the time he realizes he’s in trouble, he’s already cooked).  It seems that every personality, behavioral, and even financial malady these days is attributed to “low self-esteem”; but I confess to being truly astonished upon hearing that Crystal Cathedral pastor Robert Schuller wrote a book entitled: Self-Esteem: the New Reformation.  I have no desire to read the thing since the title alone is enough to make me queasy, but I can pretty much guess the sort of new-agy pseudo-aphorisms within.
 
Apparently there is a pop-Evangelical wrinkle of the self-esteem trend which goes something like this:  God has commanded us to love our neighbor as we love ourselves; therefore it’s necessary for us to cure ourselves from low self-esteem and learn to love ourselves so that we can love others.
 
The problem with this, of course, is that you’re not going to find anything even remotely similar to this in the Bible. Let's look again at this command to love our neighbor as ourselves. In reality it comes tied to another commandment which rightly precedes it:

And one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him.
“Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?”  
And he said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.”
(Matt. 22:35-40 ESV)

Jesus was here quoting two different places in the Torah, Deuteronomy 10:12, and Leviticus 19:18. So these are long-standing principles in which God expresses something irreducible in human nature--God didn't have to tell man to love himself. It was well-understood that man's self-love was so intrinsic, so self-evident, that God could use that fact as an essential clause in the second Great Commandment.

Yet now, thousands of years later, pop psychology (and for all I know, academic psychology) challenges this fact, and tells us that we need to "learn" to love ourselves, that indeed we need to nurture and cultivate our self-love, and only in this way can we be healthy and complete. I would like to dispute this whole notion of "low self-esteem" being the cause of so many of our modern ills with a radical submission: that all of the contemporary behavioral problems attributed to "low self-esteem", are rather due to an obsessive, all-encompassing surfeit of self-love. But what about depression? What about self-destructive behaviors, what about suicide?

Let me illustrate with myself. About four years ago I lost about 60 pounds. I was exercising daily, bought a new wardrobe, and felt great about myself. But little by little, I began to regain weight. Five pound here over a vacation, a couple more during the holidays, and during this remodel and move (eating fast food in the car as I drove to the new house after work to paint, and no time to exercise)...well, I've regained pretty much all I had lost, and I'm not very happy when I look in the mirror. Fair enough. Does this mean I don't love myself anymore? No, it means that when I see myself in the mirror, I am disappointed because what I see doesn't match the ideal picture I have of myself, the self-image of my conceit. If I didn't love myself, it wouldn't matter that the reality didn't match the concept.

Now as far as this goes, it's a fairly benign example, but the principle is the same for truly toxic or even self-destructive behaviors: they are born of disappointment, depression or rage at the short-comings of our reality compared to our narcissistic internal vision. Is it any wonder, then, that Paul warned Timothy of the self-lovers, "reckless, swollen with conceit, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God," ?

So what is the cure? Jesus' two Great Commandments: more love of God, more love of others--and, if not less love of self, at least less self-absorbtion.

Thursday, June 28, 2007

The Measure and the Reward

And Jesus said to him, “Why do you call me good? No one is good except God alone. Luke 18:19 ESV

The statement above was not an admission of sin or unrighteousness on Jesus' part, but rather a declaration that our very sense of goodness--right and wrong, if you will--comes from God. It is the holiness of God--His absolute purity, transcendent of human capacity--that is the measuring stick for goodness.

This is where systems of morality unconnected to God inevitably fail, for they all use man as the measure and the reward for their function.

Try as you might to pick a living man or woman as your metric of morality, you are sure to be disappointed. At some point he or she will fall short of your "real" measurement which, perhaps against your best conscious efforts, resides within you somewhere beyond the reach of your reason and maybe even your consciousness; it is that inexplainable "ideal" man or woman which attests to the right or wrong of an action or attitude. The irony, of course, is that this ideal is not a man or woman at all--it is God.

In my years as a fabricator, and now as a draftsman, I've dealt with tolerances--the allowable deviation from the standard. But this very concept presupposes that standard of perfection. If the standard itself varies then even tolerances become meaningless. This is the fatal flaw in using man as the measure of morality.

Man as the reward fails as well. The appeal to behave a certain way for the good of society, or as a type of solidarity with your fellow man, or even to make your own life a little easier in avoiding conflict, always seems to smash against the wall of ego. We inevitably think something like, that's fine and well for my fellow man, but what about me?

Reinhold Niebuhr in Moral Man and Immoral Society wrote the following:

Pure religious idealism does not concern itself with the social problem. It does not give itself the illusion that material and mundane advantages can be gained by the refusal to assert your claims to them...Jesus did not counsel his disciples to forgive seventy times seven in order that they might convert their enemies, or make them more favorably disposed. He counseled it as an effort to approximate complete moral perfection, the perfection of God. He did not ask his followers to go the second mile in the hope that those who had impressed them into service would relent and give them freedom. He did not say that the enemy ought to be loved so that he would cease to be an enemy. He did not dwell upon the consequences of these moral actions, because he viewed them from an inner transcendent perspective.

Perhaps it was this inescapable sense that nothing in our physical reality quite "measures up" that led Plato to formulate his philosophy of the ideal, but that is the paradox of our existence; that we are perpetually disappointed yet inspired to better things. Our inability to realize Jesus' injunction, Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect, (Matthew 5:48) is both the necessity for Jesus' redemption, and the promise that God's ultimate plan will, at last, make that perfection a reality.

It is God's perfect nature that is the measure of our morality. And it is our relationship with God that is, ultimately, our reward.

"If anyone loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him." John 14:23 ESV

Tuesday, June 19, 2007

Dialogue with Dan, part 2

It's probably obvious to those of you have been reading this and my other blog (thank you), that I've taken a break. A little explanation: in mid May Nan and I went on vacation. The first half of the week was great, then I got sick. This turned into one of the most debilitating cases of the flue I've had in many years. I'm finally feeling better, both physically and emotionally, so I'm back at the computer keyboard.

Dan, my Buddhist friend, was kind enough to respond to my last exchange. The following is his reply.


Don,
No problem on the delay in answers. I myself was a little too busy for a while to give you a properly thought-out reply.



To start with a latter point, I want to assure you I am not angry at Christians (I read “My-Road-Back” several months ago). I feel occasional twinges of anger at the collective members of a certain religious group nowadays, but it’s not Christians. When I referred to irritating habits, I was thinking of certain childraising customs, but those are neither universal among nor exclusive to Christians. And on the topic of things that are neither universal among nor exclusive to Christians, you won’t hear me accuse Christians of hypocrisy. That is a tired cliché.



I always chafed at the concept of original sin, but not being a particularly deep thinker, was only able to put a finger on it thanks to Ayn Rand. Let me get back to your reply, in the order of your points.



You must have heard the expression before, “Read your Bible. It’ll scare the hell out of you!” The *constant* fearmongering, the stories of deathbed conversions, which admittedly may be overemphasized in the materials presented to children, the handwaving over the fate awaiting those who lived without ever having the chance to hear the Biblical message, and the injustice that I mentioned in my previous comment was what convinced me that there was something essential missing. The “handwaving” was basically, “We need to trust in the mercy and wisdom of God, who will judge those who never had the chance to hear the Christian message on the basis of what they could have known.” This loophole made sense to me, and still does. If I tried to apply it to myself and what I knew, though, the Sunday school teacher immediately went back to the fearmongering. “Well, *you*’ve heard of it, now, so you have no excuse!”



Moving on, your point about faith being in actions rather than feelings, is commonly made among my sect of Buddhists. (See www.sgi-usa.org if you are curious, especially www.sgi.org/buddhism/buddhism.html)



I guess I confused you with my “anthropormorphic characterization of the universe”. I was attempting to use Christian terminology for “how the universe works”. What I have always believed, with or without the existence of God, is that there is a law of justice. I see karma as the manifestation of that. Why is a conscious Being necessary for a moral law of justice to function, any more than it is for the law of gravity to function? All that said, I certainly never believed in a purely material universe.



As for the origin of the universe, the stock answer in my sect is, that is a question for science, not for religion. Go ahead and consider that “weaseling out”. It is not a question I worry about; I assume that the universe was always here. There may well have been a Big Bang 15 billion years ago; very well, what was the thing that “banged”, and why did it hold together until that precise moment? That’s the scientific version of “If God created the world, then who created God?” I look at those questions as scientists and theologians chasing their own tails. I’m interested in what faith can do for me here and now.



I do my prayers in the morning and evening because I’m a better person for it. I’m happier (-chuckle- though that can be hard to tell; I am generally morose at the moral and political degeneration of this society and expect very hard times for us in a few years), more considerate, more productive, and smarter. This practice is a tremendous blessing.


A comment on your final paragraph; the above is an answer to your final question. You asked where Gautama derived his sense of what was right. Let me go into a bit of theology. Our term for it is his “Buddha nature” or “the world of Buddhahood”. Tien Tai, the great scholar who wrote annotations of the Lotus Sutra, identified ten “worlds” that describe the basic life-conditions: Hell, Hunger, Animality, Anger, Peace, Rapture, Learning, Realization, Bodhisattva and Buddhahood. The lower six worlds are characterized by a dependence of the person’s life condition on the conditions in his environment, while the upper four worlds are more self-determined. To describe the less self-explanatory names, “Realization” means the life-condition of a creator and “Bodhisattva” means the life-condition of a person dedicated to action to save others. “Buddhahood” means the life-condition characterized by wisdom, compassion, dedication and action. All of us spend most of our lives in one of these worlds, our basic life-condition, but can manifest any of these worlds at any moment. Our sense of right and wrong is innate within us and derives from our Buddha nature.


Dan in Corbett

My reply:

Dan, thanks so much for taking the time to continue this dialogue, and, once again, my apologies for the delay in my response.

I read much of the material on the website you listed, but I have to say my reading left me with more questions than answers. Perhaps this is, more than anything else, an issue of epistemology (the theory of knowledge and what distinguishes justified belief from opinion), but over and over again I read statements there--presumably about the nature of reality from the Buddhist worldview--for which, not only no evidence was offered, but, even worse in my view, no underlying system of logic was presented. For instance, on the Buddhist Practice page it says, "Buddhism teaches that a universal Law (Dharma) underlies everything in the universe. This is the very essence of life." Uh, okay. Why?

Another example on the Karma page: "Karma can be thought of as our core personality, the profound tendencies that have been impressed into the deepest levels of our lives. The deepest cycles of cause and effect extend beyond the present existence; they shape the manner in which we start this life--our particular circumstances from the moment of birth--and will continue beyond our deaths. The purpose of Buddhist practice is to transform our basic life tendency in order to realize our total human potential in this lifetime and beyond." Now I presume this alludes to the karmic wheel of life, the Buddhist doctrine of rebirth (or reincarnation, in Western terms), in which, if not the personal identity or "memories" of past lives (as in On A Clear Day You Can See Forever--in other words no transmigration of "soul"), the karmic balance sheet of right and wrong deeds that make up a person's life experiences is "recycled" in a new human life. Again, no explanation or underlying system of logic is offered for how or why this is so, only the circumlocutory declaration that it is.

What I'm getting at here is that for every system of thought there are first principles, presumptions or "givens", from which the other precepts logically proceed. The Declaration of Independence is something of a logical argument based on the "self-evident truths" Thomas Jefferson named in the second paragraph. So, in the Christian system of thought, a first principle is that over and above the natural world is a "supernature," that underlying the physical world, is a "metaphysical;" and that this "supernature" over and above the natural--or material universe--is personal. This not only resonates with things we know and sense, about our own existence--i.e., that we are personal, that we have a spiritual dimension--but also underpins the logical conclusions and deductions of our worldview as a whole.

So when I read in the gospels Jesus' instruction in how to pray, and that my prayer is to a personal God whom I am to call my Father in heaven, this concept is connected in an unbroken thread of reasoning all the way back to those first principles that inform everything from my cosmology to my most basic perception of self--that I am me.

This is what leaves me so totally at loss when reading the articles on the Nichiren Buddhism website, as well as some of your own statements. If you've never believed in a purely material universe, then what is the nature of the non-material that you do believe in? Did it evolve as, presumably, you believe the material part of our universe did? If so, what were the forces or mechanisms that shaped its evolution? When you direct your chant of "Nam-myoho-renge-kyo" to your Gohonzon to awaken innate capacities and "Buddha nature," how and why is that supposed to work?

Those are some of my questions. But one last statement before I finish. You posed the question of why a conscious Being is necessary for a moral law of justice to function, any more than it is for the law of gravity to function. In capitalizing Being, I presume you are alluding to the idea of a personal God as law-giver. My answer is that when we talk about the law of gravity, our use of the word "law" is a metaphor, a somewhat poetic way of describing how nature works; and that's what we're really talking about: how things really work. In other words, when we observe physical bodies moving through space-time, this is how they behave, and we call it "gravity."

But when we talk about a moral law of justice, we are talking about something that would not exist without consciousness or personality (in the sense of "personhood"), because we're no longer talking about how things really work, we're talking about how we sense they OUGHT to work. The tragic fact is that human existence is filled with examples of people committing the most hideous moral outrages and injustices for which they are never held accountable in this life. And if you doubt what I'm saying, then take humanity and sentient consciousness out of the equation--do you see anything like a moral law of justice at work in the animal kingdom?

You ended with the statement that our sense of right and wrong is innate, with which, with a few caveats, I agree (it also seems to be greatly malleable and subject to corruption), but this begs the question: "why?" Darwinist have twisted themselves into knots trying to justify morality as a product of evolution to frankly laughable results; a cursory examination of animal society and nature plainly demonstrate that our sense of justice, equality and morality are not a product of evolution, but rather an offense to it. We are clearly speaking of an idea. Ideas are products of minds. Minds are products of consciousness. Consciousness is a product of personality--self-aware, having identity, possessing the concept of "me" as separate from others. And that brings us back to that first principle--the personal "supernature"-- for no one has ever thought of a way of deriving personality from non-personal sources.

Friday, May 25, 2007

Euology for Gracie

I've been on vacation this last week. Nan and I just got back from the coast where yesterday, in something of a family reunion, we all boarded a boat at Depot Bay, motored out and around into Wale Cove, and spread the ashes of my wife's aunt Gracie into the ocean. We had a small memorial service there on the boat where family members shared thoughts and memories of Gracie, after which I delivered the following eulogy:


One of the many things that convinces me of the existence of God is the innate human need for meaning. If we were the product of a random universe and the accidental mixture of chemicals and electromagnetic discharge that Darwinism claims we are, there is and can never be any meaning to our lives. At times like these, when we celebrate the life of a loved one no longer present, our hunger for meaning is foremost in our minds: the meaning of our lives, the meaning of her life. When I think about Gracie, it seems that a lot of that meaning can be discerned from her name: Grace.

When Gracie's parents, Lester and Mildred, named her, perhaps they were thinking of nothing more than the clever inversion of Mildred's first two names, but reflecting on the course of her life and her beautiful personality, I can't help but think that in their action was an element of providence.

There's many definitions to the word, grace, but I think that two find particular expression in Gracie's life. The first is this: a disposition to be generous or helpful; goodwill. As we all know, Gracie had spent the better part of the last eight years of her life volunteering at the Pikes Peak Hospice, spending time and giving comfort to those facing their final painful days. What better testament could we find to Gracie's loving and giving nature?

But all of us who knew her had experienced it. Personal examples of her sweet and gentle character will endure with each of us. My own fondest memory is the last time I saw her, in her and Uncle John's home in Colorado Springs. She asked me to sing for her and tears welled in her eyes as I did. Then she showed me pictures of her daughter, played selections from Tatiana's CD, and spoke lovingly and with pride of her only child. A disposition to be generous or helpful; goodwill.

The second definition of grace I find fitting to Gracie's life is that of theology: the undeserved favor of God's redemption. At Uncle John's request we started this memorial with the Serenity Prayer, a prayer that had played a central and persistent role in Gracie's struggle with the darker chapters of her life. She wrote about this herself in a poem she called, "The Now." Let me read a few excerpts:

I struggled with life, and made it complex. I wandered in a fog, a chemical fog, where I kissed the door of death, and finally I had to die in order to find life. For years I ran from myself, never knowing the real me, yet always wanting to find myself. --and a little farther on in the poem-- Today I can accept those things I cannot change and strive to change the things I can. She finished the poem with this: I am living in the now-- Loving life on life's terms, one day at a time.

Gracie's life is an example to us all of God's grace; a life turned from the brink of death and the horrors of self-destruction, and transformed to the beauty that became the second half of her life. When she surrendered herself to God's mercy, relying, as all who follow the twelve steps do, on his "higher power," she experienced not only the blessing of her own life, but in turn blessed all of us who came to know and love her.

As much as we yearn for meaning, we also yearn for transformation, to be changed from our propensity for selfishness, and self-destruction. That which is commonly called our conscience is a universal human code that describes, not what we are, but what we know we ought to be--not our actual behavior, but what we inherently sense our behavior should be. The tragedy is we are helpless to effect that change on our own; we are trapped in a perpetual loop that the Apostle Paul described this way to the Christians in Rome:

After all, the Law itself is really concerned with the spiritual - it is I who am carnal, and have sold my soul to sin. In practice, what happens? My own behaviour baffles me. For I find myself not doing what I really want to do but doing what I really loathe.
When I come up against the Law I want to do good, but in practice I do evil. My conscious mind whole-heartedly endorses the Law, yet I observe an entirely different principle at work in my nature. This is in continual conflict with my conscious attitude, and makes me an unwilling prisoner to the law of sin and death. In my mind I am God's willing servant, but in my own nature I am bound fast, as I say, to the law of sin and death. It is an agonising situation, and who on earth can set me free from the clutches of my sinful nature? I thank God there is a way out through Jesus Christ our Lord.


It reminds me of a line in the film, As Good As It Gets, when Jack Nicholson's character tells Helen Hunt's character, "You make me want to be a better man." We all want to be better men and women, don't we? But we can't, not on our own. And even if we could, what about all the bad things we've done in the past? There's still a price to be paid, they don't just "go away" on their own. And that's where the grace of God comes in. Jesus paid that price, took our punishment upon himself, and, when we surrender to that grace, he begins the transformation of our lives we so long for.

Gracie experienced that transformation. Her life was a living expression of it. It was a process that began when she finally submitted herself to her "higher power," Jesus Christ. As Paul said to Christians in Corinth,

And so we are transfigured much like the Messiah, our lives gradually becoming brighter and more beautiful as God enters our lives and we become like him.

As we remember and celebrate Gracie's life and the blessing and joy she brought to all of us, I hope you'll join me in rejoicing that the transformation that started with her surrender to God's grace, is now complete; for we have this promise from the apostles. First from Paul's letter to the Christians at Philippi:

Jesus Christ will re-make these wretched bodies of ours to resemble his own glorious body, by that power of his which makes him the master of everything that is.

And then from the apostle John:

Dear friends, we are already God’s children, but he has not yet shown us what we will be like when Christ appears. But we do know that we will be like him, for we will see him as he really is.

Saturday, May 12, 2007

An Answer to Dan

A couple of Sundays ago a friend of mine posted a comment on my "Terror in the Night" post on this blog. I was very gratified that he took the time to post, and so I'm reprinting his comment, and my reply, in the hope that we can have further dialogue.

First, a short introduction of Dan. He's a great and interesting guy I met through a discussion group I used to moderate for readers of Townhall.com, the premier website of conservative political commentary. Dan makes his living translating between Japanese and English. The following are his comments:


For what it's worth coming from someone who fled Christianity when he was 18, I had the same night terrors for years as a child. I had been taught that one who died in a state of rejection of God would go to Hell, whereas one who died in a state of acceptance, Grace, to use your term, would go the other way ... **regardless of how they had actually lived their life**. Recall the constant refrain of "Good works do not get you into heaven."


I knew that (1) I was nowhere near as destructive and hateful as some other kids and adults in my environment, but (2) I found it impossible to sustain any faith in the Christian God for more than a few minutes at a time. The possibility of dying in a state of rejection of God was very real to me. This actually fueled a certain level of nihilism in me, because of the apparent capriciousness of God. After some years of my practice of Buddhism, I have lost nearly all my anger toward Christianity (this is not the time to discuss what I see as irritating habits of Christians). My view of how the universe works ("God", if you prefer) is that He/She is not really the cruel, capricious bastard I had "believed" in.


So what's the point of bringing this to the attention of Don and his Christian readers? I'd like to recommend that you address with your children the question that kept me up at nights. You may save them a lot of unnecessary misery. Whether or not it is true that "good works do not get you into Heaven", it is certainly true that good works tend to be the mark of a good character, and that will not be overlooked by any Force for justice.

My reply:

Dan,
First let me apologize for not getting back to you sooner.

I want to thank you for reading my blog, and especially for taking the time to comment on it. I always welcome comments, even if (or perhaps, especially if) they are in disagreement.

Reading your comments I can't help wondering what concept of God you were presented as a child to convince you that he was cruel and capricious. If it was the picture conceived and codified by John Calvin--the God who arbitrarily decreed before the advent of creation the select cadre of those whom he would irresistibly transform their will and thereby allow them to believe and be saved, but doom the rest to damnation--well, I can't believe in the fundamental goodness of that God either. I do believe that to give our existence and our relationship with God any meaning whatsoever, it was essential for man to be given absolute free will, and that an inevitable result of that free will is that many people choose to worship themselves rather than God.

My second question is regarding the concept of faith you were taught. Your comment that you were unable to sustain any faith in the Christian God for more than a few minutes at a time, causes me to suspect that you saw faith as a type of emotion or feeling, defined, perhaps, as the absence of doubt. But I think faith, just as courage, is rightly defined as action rather than feeling, a reliance, in the same way that I rely on a chair to hold my weight when I sit on it. My faith doesn't mean that I no longer have doubts, nor that I don't struggle at times with certain philosophical issues, but it does mean that, in conjunction with the extraordinary evidence for the resurrection of Christ and Biblical messianic prophesy, I see the Christian worldview as the most reasonable and logical system of thought that speaks to every facet of human reality, and also resonates with the deepest cravings of my inner life--my conscience, my longing for justice, my insatiable appetite for beauty and superlatives of all kinds.

Let me confess that I find your anthropomorphic characterization of the universe logically inconsistent with the "pure" Buddhist view that there is no god. From my, admittedly, meager reading about Buddhism, I understand that Siddhartha Gautama dealt with the question of the origin of the universe primarily by avoiding the question altogether. This seems completely inadequate to modern man. Whatever one can say about the various controversies regarding cosmology and the Christian doctrine of creation, at least we don't ignore it.

If I read you correctly, your anger at Christians--which presumably grew to encompass Christianity itself--was due to the injustice of Christians believing they could go to heaven regardless of what kind of life they lived: the doctrine of salvation by faith, not of works. First, don't feel alone in your anger at Christians. If you read my blog My-Road-Back, which is my story of return to practicing Christianity because of the events of 9/11, you'll see it was similar anger that drove me away from the church for so many years. But let me point out that the tension between the concept of God's redemptive grace and man's need to obey God's law has been present in Christianity since apostolic times. The apostles Paul and John had to deal with a heresy we have since called antinomianism whose adherents thought they should sin even more so God's grace would increase:

Shall we sin to our heart's content and see how far we can exploit the grace of God? What a ghastly thought! We, who have died to sin--how could we live in sin a moment longer? (Romans 6:1 Phillips translation)

My dear children, I write this to you so that you will not sin. But if anybody does sin, we have one who speaks to the Father in our defense--Jesus Christ, the Righteous One. He is the atoning sacrifice for our sins, and not only ours but also for the sins of the whole world. We know that we have come to know him if we obey his commands. The man who says, "I know him," but does not do what he commands is a liar, and the truth is not in him. But if anyone obeys his word, God's love is truly made complete in him. This is how we know we are in him: Whoever claims to live in him must walk as Jesus did. (I John 2:1-6 NIV)

What seems to me particularly ironic is that your disgust at the behavior of Christians was based on Christian morality: you were evaluating the justice of Christianity by the yardstick of Christian moral truth inculcated in you through your Christian upbringing and American culture steeped in Judeo/Christian values.

This brings me back to the question of cosmology. If we exist in a purely material universe, which is ontologically essential in the absence of a personal, creator God, then morality is not--and cannot be--anything more than an evolutionary construct derived from primate behavior that necessitated close-nit social bonds for survival; there can be no such thing as moral absolutes. Morality becomes a thing of personal whim, and any particular variant of morality only has authority to whatever degree of political or social power its adherents can acquire. No one can, in any objective sense, say that one variant of morality is "better" than any other except with regard to its success as a survival strategy. From this standpoint we cannot honestly say that Pol Pot's moral vision, which necessitated the butchery of 20% of the population of Cambodia in one year for the objective of creating a truly equal and classless society, was "bad"--just unsuccessful.

This leaves me asking: when Gautama created his eight steps in the path of enlightenment--right views, right aspirations, right speech, right conduct, right mode of livelihood, right effort, right awareness, right concentration--from whom, or what, did he derive his concepts of the right? And why should I give his concept any more weight or authority than Pol Pot's, or Confucius', or Mohammed's, or Jesus', or the Marquis de Sade's, or better yet, whatever I happen to decide on any given day, depending on the state of my digestion, or the difficult financial crunch in which I may find myself?

Don

Sunday, May 06, 2007

A Modern Parable

Once there was a man-we'll call him John--born in the country of Amerigo. Despite the fact that Amerigo was a wonderful country that had educated him, provided a police force and a fire department that protected his property, and a utility grid from which he purchased his power, sewer and water, John decided that he no longer wanted to be a citizen of his country of birth.

John decided to secede from Amerigo. He built a large fence around his property and dubbed his domain Johnistan. Then he notified the government that he renounced his citizenship, and declared his property a sovereign country in its own right.

John did business with his neighbors, used the currency of Amerigo, and proceeded with his life with the added benefit that he no longer paid taxes.

John grew old and contented, and eventually decided to retire. He went to the office of Amerigo's sate pension, and applied for his pension payments, upon which he was notified by the pension case worker that he was not eligible to receive a pension.

"But I've worked hard all my life!" John protested. "I've never broken any Amerigo laws, and citizens of Amerigo have benefitted from my labor."

"That may be true," said the case worker, "but you're not a citizen yourself. You seceded, remember? You renounced your allegiance to Amerigo many years ago, and quit paying taxes. The fact that you obeyed our laws and contributed to the larger economy in other ways simply has no bearing."

John went home in a rage, only to find that his house was on fire. He quickly called the fire department, but upon giving them his address, was told they could not fight fires outside of the borders of Amerigo: John's house resided in the country of Johnistan. John had to watch his house burn, and over the next few days, surrounded by its ruins, he found his neighbors picking through the rubble for valuables that had survived the fire. He tried to chase them off, but because of his age and weakness, they ignored him. When he appealed to police for help, they too informed him that they had no jurisdiction in the country of Johnistan.

* * * * *

A common misunderstanding of sin is that its just breaking rules and that there will be a sort of cosmic ledger that God will consult at our eternal judgement; that if we have done more good things than bad things, we will be allowed into heaven. It's a comforting thought to those who have never done anything really bad, you know, like murder, or rape, or robbing a bank.

But the problem is, this idea is just plain wrong. Rule breaking is merely a symptom of the real problem, which is our state of rebellion against God. Sin is a state of being, a condition, in which we have seceded from his sovereignty and renounced our allegiance. Appeals to God to be given entrance to eternal life in his presence because we are "good," will make about as much sense as our protagonist, John, trying to collect his social security benefits from the country from which he had seceded.

If one spends his whole life ignoring his creator, and especially the sacrifice that Jesus made to repair that breech and reconcile us to God, his reliance on his own "goodness" will get him about as far as John's pleas to the fire department and police force of fictional Amerigo.

As C.S. Lewis said in The Problem of Pain

In the long run the answer to all those who object to the doctrine of hell is itself a question: "What are you asking God to do?" To wipe out their past sins and, at all costs, to give them a fresh start, smoothing every difficulty and offering every miraculous help? But He has done so, on Calvary. To forgive them? They will not be forgiven. To leave them alone? Alas, I am afraid that is what He does.

Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life, but whoever rejects the Son will not see life, for God's wrath remains on him. (John 3:36 NIV)

Sunday, April 29, 2007

Terror in the Night

I had a dream that made me afraid. As I was lying in my bed, the images and visions that passed through my mind terrified me. (Daniel 4:5 NIV)

Recently I attended a men's retreat and, during one of the discussion groups, the following question was on a list for comment topics: "when was the time in your life when you felt farthest from God?" I had nothing to say at the time, but later the question came to mind as I wrestled with sleeplessness late that night.

Periodic insomnia is a curse I inherited from my father, though thankfully not to the degree he suffered from it. All through the decade of my 40's, long estranged from God and fellow believers, and deeply ambivalent as to the truth of Christianity, I would lie awake during my occasional bouts at the darkest and loneliest time of night--2 or 3 o'clock in the morning. At all other times of the day and night I was successful in pushing away the question of my eternity, but not then. A sense of dread and even terror would descend on me as I examined myself. I could feel my life slipping away from me, as if through my fingers. My thoughts would range far and wide, sometimes never coalescing into anything other than my sense of dread, but often they centered around my abandonment of God and the question of faith. If God didn't exist, my life was meaningless, hopeless, and inexorably leeching away. If God did exist, I was wasting my only opportunity to secure my relationship with him.

Despite the horror of those experiences, I never once awakened my wife in bed next to me, but lay there alone in my dread, heart pounding, sometimes sweating, sometimes chilled to the bone. It was then that I felt farthest from God, utterly cut off from his presence. Eventually I would fall asleep, and when I would awake the next morning, the terror of the night before would be pushed aside as I got on with the day.

On this sleepless night at the retreat, however, it occurred to me that ever since I had reconciled with God, I no longer experienced these night terrors. Sleeplessness had become an opportunity for prayer; self-examination an occasion for resolve and hope. Because I am confident in God's existence, his forgiveness, and his presence, I'm no longer tortured by the anxieties that once plagued me.

To Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and the other new breed of activists atheists, this phenomenon is a sign of the mental weakness of Christians, religion as a psychological "crutch", or surrogate father figure as Sigmund Freud asserted in his writings. The folly of this theory is clear when one asks how the three Christian men who were horribly tortured for three hours before having their throats slit by Islamic fanatics in Malatya, Turkey last week were made more psychologically "comfortable" by their Christian faith. Here is a link to the story, but be warned: the appalling medieval atrocities committed on their bodies is sickening. Even discounting the kind of persecution endured by Christians in other countries, there is the social exclusion and contempt from non-believing friends, and even family, that Jesus warned would be the cost of discipleship.

If the world hates you, you know that it hated me first. If you belonged to the world, the world would love its own. But because you do not belong to the world and I have chosen you out of it, the world will hate you. Do you remember what I said to you, 'The servant is not greater than his master'? If they have persecuted me, they will persecute you as well... (John15:18-20 Phillips translation)

The point is that as Christians we have hope: the assurance of God's forgiveness and an eternal existence with him. We also have the promise of peace of mind, whether in the midst of horrible persecution such as those even now experienced by so many believers in other countries, or the everyday doubts, or snubs, or social insults we may face in the relative safety of the United States.

No temptation has come your way that is too hard for flesh and blood to bear. But God can be trusted not to allow you to suffer any temptation beyond your powers of endurance. He will see to it that every temptation has a way out, so that it will never be impossible for you to bear it. (I Corinthians 10:13 Phillips translation)

We even have peace of mind during those sleepness nights when the inevitable questions arise about the direction of our lives, career, finances and accomplishments.

Don't worry over anything whatever; tell God every detail of your needs in earnest and thankful prayer, and the peace of God which transcends human understanding, will keep constant guard over your hearts and minds as they rest in Christ Jesus. (Philippians 4:6,7 Phillips translation)

Sunday, April 22, 2007

Why?

Thus they became fatuous in their argumentations, and plunged their silly minds still further into the dark. Behind a facade of "wisdom" they became just fools, fools who would exchange the glory of the eternal God for an imitation image of a mortal man, or of creatures that run or fly or crawl. They gave up God: and therefore God gave them up - (Romans 1:21-24 Phillips translation)

With the atrocity that happened at Virginia Tech at the hands of Cho Seung-Hui, many are asking, "why?" For those who believe in a sovereign God, this and a thousand other acts of human evil can be a test of that faith.

But the fact is that it is only from a place of faith in a sovereign God that the question has any meaning. To ask the question is to first borrow a whole set of presuppositions and system of values that come to us only through the God-revealed truth of Scripture.

In a Darwinian, godless universe, human beings, the human mind, and all our social constructs are the product of evolution for the expedience of survival. "Good" and "Bad" don't really exist objectively, they are merely illusions of social convention, the result of myth that worked themselves out from the dreams of slowly progressing social orders (bands, tribes, cities, nations, civilizations, religions, etc.) In this Darwinian worldview, "good" and "bad" should be replaced by "successful" and "unsuccessful," for those are the only real criteria for existence. The question "why?" in any sort of moral sense, has no meaning. This was merely another unsuccessful variant of evolutionary social process. Feel whatever rage, sorrow, or pity you like, but realize that those feelings are nothing but the interactions of chemicals and electrical impulses in your brain. Free will itself, becomes an illusion from this perspective. What humans subjectively think of as "choices" they make, are in reality nothing more than the effects of external causes, a type of Newtonian physics of action and reaction on a social level, or the mechanistic workings of biological drives and imperatives.

If you are stirred with compassion for the loved ones of those killed, outraged at this act of evil, and grieved to ask how a loving God could allow it, know that in the asking, you are, at least tacitly, assenting to God's law, "you shall not murder" as an objective moral truth.

Wednesday, April 11, 2007

Spiritual

"Sir," said the woman again, "I can see that you are a prophet! Now our ancestors worshipped on this hill-side, but you Jews say that Jerusalem is the place where men ought to worship -"
"Believe me," returned Jesus, "the time is coming when worshipping the Father will not be a matter of 'on this hill-side' or 'in Jerusalem'. Nowadays you are worshipping with your eyes shut. We Jews are worshipping with our eyes open, for the salvation of mankind is to come from our race. Yet the time is coming, yes, and has already come, when true worshippers will worship in spirit and in reality. Indeed, the Father looks for men who will worship him like that. God is spirit, and those who worship him can only worship in spirit and in reality."
(John 4:20-24 Phillips translation)

It has become fashionable these days to say, "I'm not religious, but I'm a 'spiritual' person." The problem with this, of course, is that few who make such statements could begin to define what they mean by "spiritual." Often it's used as a shield to hide behind, a way to avoid any serious question of faith, God, and human responsibility. Commonly the statement is followed with, "I just don't like organized religion," and finished off with, "more people have been killed in the name of religion than for any other cause," after which they nod with self-satisfaction, and the assurance that they are justly absolved from any further consideration of anything deemed "religious."

Even academics employ this verbal tactic. Francis Schaeffer wrote about this maneuver among the "new" theologians in his book The God Who is There:

But in the new theology, use is made of certain religious words which have a connotation of personality and meaning to those who hear them. Real communication is not in fact established, but an illusion of communication is given by employing words rich in connotation...So when the new theology uses such words, without definition, an illusion of meaning is given which is pragmatically useful in arousing deep motivations.

This is something beyond emotion. An illusion of communication and content is given so that, when a word is used in this deliberately undefined way, the hearer 'thinks' he knows what it means.
(pg. 56,57)


The Bible tells us very specific things about the nature of spirit, so as Christians, if we are Biblically literate, when we speak about our spirit, or God being a spirit, or "spiritual" things, we have a clear set of properties and attributes in mind: non-material, invisible, eternal, yet containing the true essence, personality, and constitution of the individual. When we read that Jesus said, "God is spirit," we understand that he is telling us that God is not a physical, material, and finite being but rather an eternal, supernatural, and transcendent being; that when he said those who worship God must worship Him, "in spirit and in reality," he meant we must worship God not just in physical, material ways, but also by engaging our essential being in faith--not just going through the motions, but in reality.

Perhaps the next time someone tells you he or she is not religious, but is a "spiritual" person, challenge them to define "spiritual" for you. And then respectfully confront them with the Biblical meaning of spiritual: to worship the one, true, and personal God, "in spirit and in truth."

Sunday, April 01, 2007

Perspective

Then Job arose and tore his robe and shaved his head and fell on the ground and worshiped. And he said, “Naked I came from my mother's womb, and naked shall I return. The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.” (Job 1:20,21 ESV)

I recently overheard a discussion between two women, one who is a professed Christian, the other who is not. The nonbeliever had started by saying she was "praying to God" that she and her husband would get the house they are trying to buy. When the Christian woman tried to explain the necessity of having a relationship with God for prayer to be effective, the nonbeliever bristled and said, "I pray to God all the time and he never answers my prayers!"

The absurdity of praying "all the time" to God, whom you believe "never" answers your prayers aside, the human tendency to blame God for everything bad that happens, yet fail to give Him credit and gratitude for anything good, is pretty much universal. Much of this attitude is a defense mechanism, a way to justify one's refusal to submit to God. Why submit to God when He is so cruel as to allow all these bad things to happen to us? Many, as Dostoyevsky wrote of his character Ivan in the The Brothers Karamazov use it as a rationale for denying the existence of God: "I renounce the higher harmony altogether," declared Ivan. "It's not worth the tears of...one tortured child."

C.S. Lewis dealt at length with this question in his (highly recommended) book The Problem of Pain. He starts chapter 2 this way:

"If God were good, He would wish to make His creatures perfectly happy, and if God were almighty, He would be able to do what He wished. But the creatures are not happy. Therefore God lacks either goodness, or power, or both." This is the problem of pain, in its simplest form.

This is not the place to re-state Lewis' arguments; I couldn't hope to match his eloquence and brilliance anyway. I'll just commend the book to all. But I would like to make the point that much of our struggle with this question, even as believers, is due to perspective: ours, as finite and mortal, is so limited.

The passage beginning this piece is probably the most quoted from the book of Job. And, while verse 22 tells us that, in all this Job did not sin or charge God with wrong, a careful reading shows that Job went on to vigorously "blame" God for the evil that had befallen him and others (see 9:23-24; 10:8,16,20; 21:17-26, 30-32; 24:1-12; 30:21), for which God roundly rebuked him.

Most of God's rebuke to Job is in the form of questions concerning the majesty and complexity of creation, but in 40:8 He says, "Would you discredit my justice? Would you condemn me to justify yourself?" (NIV) Of course this is exactly what most humans do who seek to escape surrender to God. But even those who have surrendered to God fall to the temptation of "blaming" Him for the evil that transpires in their lives.

To Job's accusation that God was responsible for his misery, God's answer seems to be that he should keep his mouth shut because he was speaking about the nature of reality whose vast complexity he was completely incapable of comprehending. When Job is given a glimpse of this divine perspective through God's discourse, he says, "Surely I spoke of things I did not understand, things too wonderful for me to know." (Job 42:3 NIV)

When I first overheard the woman's complaint that God "never" answered her prayers, I was tempted to say, "sure He did; He answered every one of them...with, 'NO!'" Such a frivolous statement would have done more harm than good, but there is a kernel of truth to it in that what we often conceive as divine silence, or worse, indifference, is always simply a lack of understanding or limited perspective of the reality. We make demands of God, or draw conclusions about His nature based on our desires and expedience.

In the Gospel of Mark we are told when Jesus was before the Sanhedrin, after they had condemned him as deserving death, some began to spit on him and to cover his face and to strike him, saying to him "Prophesy!" (Mark 14:65 ESV) Take note: they demanded a prophesy, not of honest motives, but from their own private incentive to mock and debase Jesus, and vindicate themselves. At perhaps precisely this instant, below in the courtyard, a prophesy of Jesus is fulfilled as Peter, at the insistence of bystanders that he must be a follower of Jesus, began to invoke a curse on himself and to swear, "I do not know this man of whom you speak." And immediately the rooster crowed a second time. And Peter remembered how Jesus had said to him, "Before the rooster crows twice, you will deny me three times." And he broke down and wept. (Mark 14:71,72 ESV)

Here, we too, like Job are given a glimpse of the divine perspective. Those who sarcastically demanded a prophesy from Jesus reveled in their perception of his failure, but from God's perspective their request was all too tragically granted.

Sunday, March 18, 2007

New skin

"Neither is new wine put into old wineskins. If it is, the skins burst and the wine is spilled and the skins are destroyed. But new wine is put into fresh wineskins, and so both are preserved." (Matthew 9:17 ESV)

This parable was told by Jesus to disciples of John the Baptist who questioned him as to why Jesus' disciples, unlike John's disciples and the Pharisees, did not fast. It was also right on the heels of Jesus answering the criticism of Pharisees for his fraternizing with "tax collectors and sinners," after he ate at Matthew's house.

The Pharisees (which means literally, the separated) were a sect of pious Jews that arose as a response to the Hellenization of Jewish culture after the Macedonian conquest by Alexander and the ensuing diaspora. The extreme apartheid character of Pharisaic practice and teaching was instrumental in preserving Hebrew identity, language and cohesion, and we can probably thank that system for the continuity and rigorous conservation of the foundational scriptures (or in Protestant terms, the "Old Testament"). But the drawback can be seen in conditions at the Temple to which Jesus would later react in his only display of violence when he overturned the moneylender's tables and drove out the animals installed there for sale. The key to his indignation can be found in his statement, "It is written, 'My house shall be called a house of prayer,' but you make it a den of robbers." (Matthew 21:13 ESV) The place where all this buying, selling, and money-changing was going on was the outer court of the Temple, called The Court of the Gentiles, named so because this was supposed to be where Gentiles "who feared God," as we read in a number of places in the New Testament, such as the Centurion who came to Jesus and requested healing for his sick daughter (Luke 7), and Cornelius whom God spoke to host Peter (Acts 10), would be able to gather and pray, hear teaching of the Law, and participate in worship of the one true God.

In his most recent book, Cities of God; the real story of how Christianity became an urban movement and conquered Rome, Rodney Stark recounts how this was common, and indeed many people of the day found Jewish monotheism compelling, and converted to a degree, worshipping, attending synagog, but unwilling to undergo circumcision and other aspects of the Law. This relegated them to a second-class and marginal rank within Jewish religious life.

The Court of the Gentiles was meant to be that place in the Temple where Isaiah's proclamation could be realized, "I will make you as a light for the nations, that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth." (Isaiah 49:6 ESV), but Pharisaic apartheid, and commercial opportunity had crowded it out. This is what infuriated Jesus.

In the parable of the wineskins Jesus refers to the practice of that time and region of fermenting wine in skins, rather than casks or tanks as we do today. As the wine ferments the living cultures produce gasses that make its volume expand. A new skin will expand with its volume of wine, but an old skin has already gone through the expansion process; it will rupture if subjected to the expansion required by a new fermentation.

Two lessons come to mind from this illustration. The first, on a macro scale, is that Jewish religious life, in its effort to save Hebrew culture and identity, had become so rigid and exclusionary that it could never be the vehicle through which God could fulfill the prophesy of Isaiah. A new "skin" was necessary to contain the new message. The second lesson is on the micro, or the personal level if you will; and that is that the individual must be a new person to contain the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. As Jesus told Nicodemus, "...unless one is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God." (John 3:3 ESV), and Paul said, For if a man is in Christ he becomes a new person altogether--the past is finished and gone, everything has become fresh and new. (II Corinthians 5:17 Phillips translation) Why? Because our old natures are too brittle and unyielding; it's necessary to have a "new skin" that can expand and take the shape of that which is within. But all of us who are Christians have no veils on our faces, but reflect like mirrors the glory of the Lord. We are transfigured in ever-increasing splendor into his own image, and the transformation comes from the Lord who is the Spirit. (II Corinthians 3:18 Phillips translation)

Saturday, February 24, 2007

How much is that doggy in the window?

He said to them, “Which one of you who has a sheep, if it falls into a pit on the Sabbath, will not take hold of it and lift it out? Of how much more value is a man than a sheep!" (Matthew 12:11,12 ESV)

One of my cultural heros, long time lecturer, writer, and talk radio host Dennis Prager has, for over twenty years, posed a hypothetical situation to groups to whom he has lectured that goes something like this: If you were passing by a lake and found that your beloved pet--dog or cat--and a person who was a complete stranger to you were both drowning, and you could only save one, and in doing so the other would certainly drown, whom would you save? Dennis says that over all the years he has posed this question the percentage of people, whether young or old, who answer that they would save their pet and let the stranger die has remained fairly consistent at about 60% to 65%.

Some of this can possibly be attributed to the urbanization of the United States over the last century: the farther away from the farm one gets, the easier it is to anthropomorphize animals, I suppose. But I attribute more of this trend to the decline of Christian moral truth as an influence to American law and culture. To be sure this cavalier attitude to human life is nothing new. Consider the ancient Chinese practice of deferring to name children until age two, for example. But this custom, generally credited to the high infant mortality rate and their reluctance to emotionally bond with a child who might then die, I would rather contend was a direct result of their worldview which based its value on human life relative to its utility.

A mere cursory review of human history can demonstrate that the Judeo/Christian value placed on human life is unique. Even Hinduism, with its image in the Western mind of non-violence and respect for all life, leads to a caste system and the horrors experienced by the Sudra (the "untouchable") caste, or Krishna persuading Arjuna to do his caste duty of killing his relatives in war, for the indwelling soul neither kills nor is killed (Bhagavad-Gita, II. 17-22).

The American trend of abandoning our legal and cultural definition of human life based on Biblical moral truth, to a secular/humanist view of utilitarianism, has lead not only to the distortion of our values--as the above Dennis Prager anecdote demonstrates--but also to the appalling rate of abortion, exceeding that of many European countries. Whatever direction our government takes on these issues, it's imperative that the Church remain steadfast to Biblical truth that man is not an animal, but rather a unique creation of God, made in His own image, and therefore due an intrinsic worth and dignity commensurate with that fact.

Sunday, February 04, 2007

Imitation is the sincerest form of...Worship

Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children. And walk in love, as
Christ loved us and gave himself up for us...
(Eph. 5:1 ESV)

I have played guitar since age 11--over 40 years now. At about age 30 I discovered jazz and began the arduous task of learning to improvise. As I explored the literature on the subject I found there were two main theories. One was the chord/scale approach. This is very much in vogue today; it's taught in most of the university jazz departments and consists of learning various scales that relate to the chords that make up the harmonic structure of the song. The idea is to practice these scales against their corresponding chords, and eventually use notes from those scales to create improvised melodies. The second theory is much older and was the way most of the musicians who created the jazz lexicon learned to play: it is to transcribe the solos of admired masters and learn to play them. To put it simply: it is to imitate one's heros.

I could go on at great length about why I think the older "imitation" system is better than the newer, in vogue, system, but this might illustrate it best: the new system seems to be like trying to teach one how to write stories by focusing only on the alphabet. The result is strings of letters that don't mean much of anything.

The older "imitation" style of learning is in reality the way we learn everything. The most rudimentary abilities of human life--speech, walking, even eating--are learned by imitating our parents.

The reason, I think, that this style of learning has fallen out of favor in the arts at least--music, painting, and writing to name just three--is the modern value placed on novelty (or it's more respectable term originality.) Such is the esteem given originality in modern art (or at least the perception of originality) that almost all other attributes--beauty, structure, meaning-- are willingly sacrificed to its preeminence. Personally I still find beauty, structure and meaning important qualities in art, which is why I probably find so much modern music, painting and fiction repellent.

To whatever degree beauty, structure, meaning--and above all, truth--are significant to the quality of art, they are incalculably more so to the Christian life. Christians, as disciples of Christ, are trying to learn from Him the way to live. Disciple means pupil, from the Latin discipulus. The Greek word matheteuo, often translated as disciple, means learner.

Jesus is our teacher in life; as his pupils the best way to learn is to imitate. Anti-Christian critics have ridiculed this principle by such slogans on bumper-stickers as, "What would Jesus drive?" and, "Who would Jesus bomb?", but this doesn't invalidate the very real and important question that Christians have been asking themselves for two millenia: what would Jesus do?

And if this life is the preparation for where we will spend eternity and what we are to become, which I believe Scripture teaches us, then this quote from a recent sermon by the brilliant preacher and theological writer, Doug Wilson, pastor of Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho--(you can access a downloadable mp3 of this sermon, entitled, "A Second Battle of Tours II", by clicking here)--is particularly poignant:

"...we need to recognize that if you're worshiping an idol, you are going to become like the idol you worship. If you're worshiping the true God, you're going to become like the true God...Paul tells us very clearly that we are being transformed from one degree of glory to another as we behold the face of God in Christ. And John tells us that when we see Him we're going to become like Him because we're going to see Him as He is. The one we worship, when we see Him most clearly in the resurrection, we're going to be completely conformed to His image when we see that image most clearly. And as we see that image through a glass darkly, now, we are being transformed in a process from one degree of glory to another. And if you worship an idol, the same process happens. You become more and more like that idol: deaf, dumb, and blind."

Saturday, January 27, 2007

What is truth?

"...For this purpose I was born and for this purpose I have come into the world--to bear witness to the truth. Every one who is of the truth listens to my voice." Pilate said to him, "What is truth?" John 18:37,38 (ESV)

This exchange between Jesus and Pontius Pilate is evocative of the modern tortured soul searching for meaning and authenticity in a life awash in moral ambiguity and relativism. As I read this I am almost tempted to visualize Pilate as a beat poet, clothed in a black turtle-neck and beret, with a cigarette between his fingers as he wistfully asks his profound question, "what is truth, man?"

Perhaps the reason for my mental picture is the way Pilate's question seems so different in subject from Jesus' preceding statements that he had come to bear witness to the truth, and every one who was of the truth would listen to his voice--implying that truth was a qualifying characteristic of his message--whereas Pilate's question seems directed not at the nature of Jesus' message, but at the nature of the concept of truth itself.

This is why Pilate's question is so timely to our age; it goes to the very heart of a crucial dilema of Christianity and the Gospel message in the present. We are inheritors of a culture that has fragmented our concept of truth to, on one hand a solid compartment of "fact", in which we house science, and on the other hand an amorphous cloud, in which we relegate "values". Facts are reliable; they are Newtonian physics. Values are capricious matters of personal taste, arbitrary and changeable. In modern Western culture it has become bad manners to state one's morality with any degree of certainty.

Yet central to Christianity is a complete, undivided concept of truth. As Francis Schaeffer put it in his book The God Who is There:

Before a man is ready to become a Christian, he must have a proper understanding of truth, whether he has fully analyzed his concept of the truth or not... Some who consider themselves real Christians have been infiltrated by the twentieth-century thought-forms. In reference to conversion, in a Christian sense, truth must be first. The phrase 'accepting Christ as Saviour' can mean anything. We are not saying what we are trying to say, unless we make completely clear that we are talking about objective truth, when we say Christianity is true and therefore that 'accepting Christ as Saviour' is not just some form of 'upper-story leap'. (emphasis mine)


In other words, when we as Christians say God exists, we are not talking about god as an idea, but God as a person, for whom one can properly use the pronoun He. When we say Jesus died for our sins, we aren't talking about a myth that illustrates the comforting idea of forgiveness, redemption and second chances; we are declaring that the real and personal God who exists, took on the incarnate human form of a man, lived for 33 years, and was actually crucified in the real Roman province of Judea some 2,000 years ago; that His death was a substitute for our real moral guilt before God as a way to reconcile us back to a proper relationship with Him.

One of the most exceptional aspects of Christianity--by which I mean distinct from other religions--is how it is solidly rooted in space-time. The Gospels challenge every reader with references to real historical people, places and events in ways that can--and have--been examined and verified.

To Pilate's question Christianity says truth is: scientific fact, Newtonian physics and objective moral absolutes as defined by God's righteous nature, revealed to man through His word.

Saturday, January 13, 2007

Skepticism or Scandal?

Now they had forgotten to bring bread, and they had only one loaf with them in the boat. And he cautioned them, saying, “Watch out; beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and the leaven of Herod.” And they began discussing with one another the fact that they had no bread. And Jesus, aware of this, said to them, “Why are you discussing the fact that you have no bread? Do you not yet perceive or understand? Are your hearts hardened? Having eyes do you not see, and having ears do you not hear? (Mark 8:15-18 ESV)

The default attitude of science is skepticism; a necessary posture, at least in the testing phase of the scientific method. However, with Western culture's deification of science, skepticism has become more than an essential ingredient to scientific inquiry; it has been elevated to a virtue. In the above text, we get a slightly different notion of God's attitude towards skepticism--at least with regard to our relationship to Him.

At this point in the narrative of Mark's gospel the disciples had witnessed numerous examples of Jesus' divine power, and yet they still failed to understand who he really was; indeed prior to this they had seen Jesus calm a vicious storm on the sea that had threatened to kill them all just by speaking to the wind and water and ...said to one another, "Who then is this, that even wind and sea obey him?" (Mark 4:41 ESV) A little later, after Jesus had fed five thousand people with five loaves of bread and two fish, they had seen Jesus walking on water, while they struggled in their boat against a fierce head wind. When Jesus got into the boat with them and the wind instantly died down, ...they were utterly astounded, for they did not understand about the loaves, but their hearts were hardened. (Mark 6:51,2 ESV)

The disciple's inability to perceive Jesus' true identity, which from our vantage point millennia later as readers of the gospel, makes them seem almost comically dense, was not a result of honest skepticism--but then again neither is modern man's rejection of God. It was--and is--rather a result of man's fallen nature which hardens his heart and makes him resistant to submission to God. The same impulse behind Eve's seduction to sin, to "be like God" and determine her own rules of right and wrong rather than follow God's rules, still impels us today in what we so often misinterpret as skepticism, but what is in reality our intractable defiance of God. It is the same impulse that Milton wrote of as the words of Satan in Paradise Lost, "...better to rule in Hell than serve in Heaven." And it is the same impulse which governs the scandal of the cross that Francis Schaeffer described in his book, The God Who Is There. "The true scandal is that however faithfully and clearly one preaches the Gospel, at a certain point, the world, because it is in rebellion, will turn from it. Men turn away not because what is said makes no sense, but because they do not want to bow before the God who is there. This is the 'scandal of the cross'."

This hard-heartedness is what Jesus was speaking of as the "leaven of the Pharisees"; it was what blinded the disciples to Jesus' identity for so long, and why, when Jesus finally confronted them with the question, and Peter answered, ...you are the Christ, the son of the living God,, Jesus said, ...flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in heaven. (Matt.16:17 ESV) It is why Jesus said, ...no one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him. (John 6:44 ESV) This is why any evangelical or missionary endeavor, or even the sharing of one's personal testimony, must by necessity be a collaborative effort with the Holy Spirit. For this reason prayer is indispensable (and the failure to pray is perhaps one reason why the Church is not growing in this country as it has in the past). But if we do collaborate with the Holy Spirit in prayer and in declaring the gospel, we have God's promise: And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to obey my rules. (Ezekiel 36:26-28 ESV)