Who though he existed in the form of God did not regard equality with God as something to be grasped, but emptied himself by taking on the form of a slave, by looking like other men, and by sharing in human nature.
He humbled himself, by becoming obedient to the point of death - even death on a cross!
As a result God exalted him and gave him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee will bow - in heaven and on earth and under the earth - and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father. (Philippians 2:6-11 New English Translation)
So here's the question for the season: what is the most significant fact about the birth of Jesus? Some would point to the mean circumstances of his birth: no room at the inn, born in a stable surrounded by livestock and their offal. Some would point to the miraculous signs: the unnatural star that moved and guided the wise men (according to some scholars, Zoroastrians from Persia), the host of angels who lit the night sky with their glory and terrified the sheep herders with their thunderous song of declaration. Some would point to the virgin birth.
But I submit that the most significant fact is that in Jesus birth, God became man. This is a mystery so difficult to comprehend that it has presented an insurmountable obstacle to many through the centuries. Yet this is one of the central and indispensable truths of Christianity. This is where those heretical variants of Christianity that deny the deity of Christ break down, for if Jesus were not God, but rather a created being, his sacrificial death would not have atoned for any sins but his own. For God achieved what the law could not do because it was weakened through the flesh. By sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and concerning sin, he condemned sin in the flesh, (Romans 8:3 NET)
Religious mythology is replete with gods walking the earth or taking human form, most notably the avatars of the Hindu deities; but the language is always fanciful, the imagery fabulous or whimsical with most of them animals, chimeras, or, if in pure human form, kings or princes. But Jesus is rooted in time and place--Now in those days a decree went out from Caesar Augustus to register all the empire for taxes. This was the first registration, taken when Quirinius was governor of Syria. Everyone went to his own town to be registered. So Joseph also went up from the town of Nazareth in Galilee to Judea, to the city of David called Bethlehem, because he was of the house and family line of David. (Luke 2:1-4 NET)--and therefore grounded in a tangible reality unlike anything that came before. Who, other than a modern Western novelist exercising the contemporary techniques of verisimilitude, would invent a story so unlikely as the creator of the universe not just relinquishing his divine glory to suffer the relative indignities of mortality, but to be born to a family of poor tradesmen in a tiny village in a remote backwater of the prevailing power structure of the day. These very improbabilities lend credence to the truth claims of Jesus' birth.
But it is also the great marvel of the incarnation, that Jesus divested himself of his divine majesty, that he "emptied himself," as the scripture says, not just to take human form, but destitute human form. From the moment he agreed to the Father's plan, he knew the outcome: he who had spoken all that exists into being would be born a helpless babe, toil for years in obscure poverty, and end his short life in a hideous death of torture. It's a descent unimaginable, infinitely further than if you or I agreed to give up our lives to be reincarnated as insects. But he did it out of love for the Father, and love for us, all to redeem his fallen creation.
Finally, the incarnation establishes the knowledge of God engendered through solidarity. We can never say, as perhaps men did before, "you don't understand!" to God. He does understand, because he's been there himself. This is why the advocacy and mediation of Jesus is so infinitely profound: he knows us as creator, but also as brother, as "Son of Man," as one who experienced pain and was acquainted with illness. (Isaiah 53:3 NET)
If anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous One, and he himself is the atoning sacrifice for our sins, and not only for our sins but also for the whole world. (I John 2:1-2 NET)
Wednesday, December 23, 2009
Friday, July 10, 2009
Scrapbook From Hell
The heart is deceitful above all things,
and desperately sick;
who can understand it?
Jeremiah 17:9 ESV
My wife and I recently watched a documentary on the National Geographic Channel called Nazi Scrapbooks From Hell in which two picture albums from Auschwitz were examined. One was a book of pictures taken of Jews as they were forced from the cattle cars and segregated into the small group who would live as slave laborers, and the very large group who would be immediately taken to the gas chambers and murdered, the only known collection of such pictures in existence. The haunted looks of terror and despair of the faces of these people are the maker of nightmares.
But by far the bulk of the piece focused on a picture album only recently discovered in the effects of an American ex-military intelligence officer who had worked to determine the status of Nazi death camp guards and officials with respect to their subsequent prosecution. The album had once belonged to an SS officer named Karl Hocker, and is filled with pictures of smiling men and women, most of whom are SS officers, or SS Helferinnen (female auxiliaries) as they relax after a hard day of killing Jews. The theme explored is the juxtaposition of the unspeakable horror of what these people did against the ordinariness of their leisure activities--so banal, so human as they relax in chaise lounges on the deck of a lodge near Auschwitz, mug for the camera as they jostle one another on a wooden bridge, sit on the rail of a deck and eat bowls of blueberries while an accordionist plays nearby, drink, and laugh, and pose with a beloved dog. This is the point driven home. As monstrous as the things that were done by the Nazis, they were not monsters who did them, at least not in the sense that we would like to believe--monstrous in the sense of being other than human, or a different species of human. No, they were just as human as us, just as capable of love and tenderness. Much is made about the cognitive dissonance this creates, one young woman, an archivist at the United States Holocaust Museum, expressing her pangs of guilt at the touches of sympathy she involuntarily feels for the Nazi men and women when she looks at these pictures.
For the Christian this should not be a surprise, for the lesson here is not that we should sympathize with the Nazi's because they were human, but that we should guard our own hearts and minds and know that we are capable of every monstrous act committed by the Nazis. The human tendency is to search for some political, cultural, or sociological cause that turned the German people--the same people who gave us the printing press, the Reformation, and a scientific revolution in metallurgy and chemistry--into a deviation of humanity that allowed them to perpetrate the greatest horror of the twentieth century. But that's simply not true on several accounts.
First of all the changes in German culture that precipitated the holocaust did not change their humanity, it merely repudiated their Christian heritage and the Biblical moral truth upon which it was based by adopting a Nazi variation of Teutonic Paganism and the Übermensch (superman) ethic of Frederic Nietzsche. In abandoning Christian ethics they removed the legal, cultural, and moral restraints on behavior seething within every human heart.
Second, this was nothing new. Human history is saturated with holocaust, torture, and mass murder. Titus' sacking of Jerusalem resulted not only in the complete destruction of the Temple, and untold death, but the Jewish diaspora that spread the tattered remnants of the race to the far corners of the empire. Successive waves of Mongol invasion in the 13th century completely annihilated whole cities and all their inhabitants (to the last infant) in Russia, the Balkan states and on to the gates of Vienna. 40% of the entire population of Poland was exterminated by Batu Kahn and Subutai.
And third, despite the unprecedented Nazi use of modern technology to effect their attempt at systematic genocide, if we use number of killed as a measure of horror, then they weren't the greatest in the 20th century--not even close. Six million Jews killed? Compare that to the 16 to 20 million Russians that Stalin killed over his long rein of terror, many of whom (grandpas to nursing infants) starved to death by his engineered famine of the Ukrainian Kulaks. Or the roughly 50 million Chinese Mao Zedong is responsible for killing over his tenure as "president for life" of the People's Republic of China.
The point is, this evil is nothing sub, quasi, or non human: it is purely human. This evil runs straight through the human heart. As Jesus said:
For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false witness, slander. Matthew 15:19 ESV
The lesson for us here is that the only hope our society has is to keep our culture wedded to the Biblical moral truth that informed its founding. To the degree that we have already abandoned those principles we can see the degeneration of the values stated as most dear to us in our founding documents: liberty and equality. Freedom of speech is being superseded by a value of uniformity of thought and the prohibition of offense ("political correctness", "hate" speech laws). Equality of process and universal human dignity ("all men are created equal," in other words equal in the sight of God and of the law) is being superseded by an enforcement of equality of result, which necessitates an inequality of process, such as racial preferences and government seizure and redistribution of wealth. Our abandonment in regarding humanity a creation of God in his image has lead to abortion and assisted suicide in numbers unthinkable in the past.
And the only hope each of us has as individuals is in the grace of God and the redemption of Christ.
I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you shall be clean from all your uncleannesses, and from all your idols I will cleanse you. 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 36:25-27 ESV
Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come. II Corinthians 5:17 ESV
According to his great mercy, he has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead... I Peter 1:3 ESV
and desperately sick;
who can understand it?
Jeremiah 17:9 ESV
My wife and I recently watched a documentary on the National Geographic Channel called Nazi Scrapbooks From Hell in which two picture albums from Auschwitz were examined. One was a book of pictures taken of Jews as they were forced from the cattle cars and segregated into the small group who would live as slave laborers, and the very large group who would be immediately taken to the gas chambers and murdered, the only known collection of such pictures in existence. The haunted looks of terror and despair of the faces of these people are the maker of nightmares.
But by far the bulk of the piece focused on a picture album only recently discovered in the effects of an American ex-military intelligence officer who had worked to determine the status of Nazi death camp guards and officials with respect to their subsequent prosecution. The album had once belonged to an SS officer named Karl Hocker, and is filled with pictures of smiling men and women, most of whom are SS officers, or SS Helferinnen (female auxiliaries) as they relax after a hard day of killing Jews. The theme explored is the juxtaposition of the unspeakable horror of what these people did against the ordinariness of their leisure activities--so banal, so human as they relax in chaise lounges on the deck of a lodge near Auschwitz, mug for the camera as they jostle one another on a wooden bridge, sit on the rail of a deck and eat bowls of blueberries while an accordionist plays nearby, drink, and laugh, and pose with a beloved dog. This is the point driven home. As monstrous as the things that were done by the Nazis, they were not monsters who did them, at least not in the sense that we would like to believe--monstrous in the sense of being other than human, or a different species of human. No, they were just as human as us, just as capable of love and tenderness. Much is made about the cognitive dissonance this creates, one young woman, an archivist at the United States Holocaust Museum, expressing her pangs of guilt at the touches of sympathy she involuntarily feels for the Nazi men and women when she looks at these pictures.
For the Christian this should not be a surprise, for the lesson here is not that we should sympathize with the Nazi's because they were human, but that we should guard our own hearts and minds and know that we are capable of every monstrous act committed by the Nazis. The human tendency is to search for some political, cultural, or sociological cause that turned the German people--the same people who gave us the printing press, the Reformation, and a scientific revolution in metallurgy and chemistry--into a deviation of humanity that allowed them to perpetrate the greatest horror of the twentieth century. But that's simply not true on several accounts.
First of all the changes in German culture that precipitated the holocaust did not change their humanity, it merely repudiated their Christian heritage and the Biblical moral truth upon which it was based by adopting a Nazi variation of Teutonic Paganism and the Übermensch (superman) ethic of Frederic Nietzsche. In abandoning Christian ethics they removed the legal, cultural, and moral restraints on behavior seething within every human heart.
Second, this was nothing new. Human history is saturated with holocaust, torture, and mass murder. Titus' sacking of Jerusalem resulted not only in the complete destruction of the Temple, and untold death, but the Jewish diaspora that spread the tattered remnants of the race to the far corners of the empire. Successive waves of Mongol invasion in the 13th century completely annihilated whole cities and all their inhabitants (to the last infant) in Russia, the Balkan states and on to the gates of Vienna. 40% of the entire population of Poland was exterminated by Batu Kahn and Subutai.
And third, despite the unprecedented Nazi use of modern technology to effect their attempt at systematic genocide, if we use number of killed as a measure of horror, then they weren't the greatest in the 20th century--not even close. Six million Jews killed? Compare that to the 16 to 20 million Russians that Stalin killed over his long rein of terror, many of whom (grandpas to nursing infants) starved to death by his engineered famine of the Ukrainian Kulaks. Or the roughly 50 million Chinese Mao Zedong is responsible for killing over his tenure as "president for life" of the People's Republic of China.
The point is, this evil is nothing sub, quasi, or non human: it is purely human. This evil runs straight through the human heart. As Jesus said:
For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false witness, slander. Matthew 15:19 ESV
The lesson for us here is that the only hope our society has is to keep our culture wedded to the Biblical moral truth that informed its founding. To the degree that we have already abandoned those principles we can see the degeneration of the values stated as most dear to us in our founding documents: liberty and equality. Freedom of speech is being superseded by a value of uniformity of thought and the prohibition of offense ("political correctness", "hate" speech laws). Equality of process and universal human dignity ("all men are created equal," in other words equal in the sight of God and of the law) is being superseded by an enforcement of equality of result, which necessitates an inequality of process, such as racial preferences and government seizure and redistribution of wealth. Our abandonment in regarding humanity a creation of God in his image has lead to abortion and assisted suicide in numbers unthinkable in the past.
And the only hope each of us has as individuals is in the grace of God and the redemption of Christ.
I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you shall be clean from all your uncleannesses, and from all your idols I will cleanse you. 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 36:25-27 ESV
Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come. II Corinthians 5:17 ESV
According to his great mercy, he has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead... I Peter 1:3 ESV
Sunday, April 12, 2009
Meaning, Hope & Power
For I passed on to you Corinthians first of all the message I had myself received - that Christ died for our sins, as the scriptures said he would; that he was buried and rose again on the third day, again as the scriptures foretold. He was seen by Cephas, then by the twelve, and subsequently he was seen simultaneously by over five hundred Christians, of whom the majority are still alive, though some have since died. He was then seen by James, then by all the messengers. And last of all, as if to one born abnormally late, he appeared to me!
I am the least of the messengers, and indeed I do not deserve that title at all, because I persecuted the Church of God. But what I am now I am by the grace of God. The grace he gave me has not proved a barren gift. I have worked harder than any of the others - and yet it was not I but this same grace of God within me. In any event, whoever has done the work whether I or they, this has been the message and this has been the foundation of your faith.
Now if the rising of Christ from the dead is the very heart of our message, how can some of you deny that there is any resurrection? For if there is no such thing as the resurrection of the dead, then Christ was never raised. And if Christ was not raised then neither our preaching nor your faith has any meaning at all. Further it would mean that we are lying in our witness for God, for we have given our solemn testimony that he did raise up Christ - and that is utterly false if it should be true that the dead do not, in fact, rise again! For if the dead do not rise neither did Christ rise, and if Christ did not rise your faith is futile and your sins have never been forgiven. Moreover those who have died believing in Christ are utterly dead and gone. Truly, if our hope in Christ were limited to this life only we should, of all mankind be the most to be pitied! (1 Corinthians 15:2-19 Phillips translation)
Of all the truth claims of scripture perhaps the most contested over the centuries is the resurrection of Christ. After the resurrection the soldiers guarding the tomb who fled when the stone was rolled away were bribed by the chief priests to spread the story that they had fallen asleep and the disciples had stolen Jesus' body. They were given assurance that the priests would protect them from Pilate. This because, as Roman soldiers, they would have been under the penalty of death for falling asleep and then abandoning their post. But it was more important to the chief priests, and to Pilate for that matter, to keep them alive and spread the counter-resurrection lie. Why? Because all of the ruling powers instinctively understood that the resurrection was an event of such power and import that it completely divested their authority. The resurrection, morally and philosophically, rendered them impotent and irrelevant.
But for those who had witnessed Jesus' resurrection there was no turning back. James, Jesus' brother, who during Jesus' ministry had tried to convince him to stop preaching and come home, fearing he had lost his mind, after the resurrection became a leader of the early church, officiated at the council of Jerusalem, and was eventually martyred. The same happened to every apostle, except John. All went to their deaths, some in truly horrible fashion, refusing to renounce the resurrection.
The last line in the text was, if our hope in Christ were limited to this life only we should, of all mankind be the most to be pitied! Paul elaborates further in verse 32: if there is no life after this one, 'Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die!' This quotation of Isaiah 22:13 must have resonated with his Greek readers, because it seems to sum up the philosophy of the Epicureans who held that pleasure was the ultimate good and so devoted themselves to its single-minded pursuit. Paul seems to say, if there is no eternal dimension to our existence, no resurrection, no hope of eternal relationship with God, forget about Christianity, forget about moral constraints, forget about any greater meaning that your life might have because it doesn't have any; live for the moment, indulge yourself! This may describe a sad and pathetic existence, devoid of meaning, honor, justice and principle, but if true, that's all there is and all our longing for meaning and purpose is nothing but an empty delusion.
Yet isn't this what our culture now tells us? "You only go around once in this life, so grab all the gusto you can!" "He who dies with the most toys wins." These feeble aphorisms are the best it has to offer.
The Meaning
The whole meaning of the Christian faith hinges on the resurrection. As Paul told the Corinthians, if Christ did not rise from the dead, their faith was futile, their sins were not forgiven, and those who die, die in hopelessness. The resurrection is the validation of the eternal dimension of life. It gives meaning, not only to Jesus' death of redemption, but to morality itself. Only if the Big Bang had a Big Banger, only if ethical law had a Law Giver who, because of His nature of absolute goodness and absolute knowledge, can endow that law with His authority, does our existence have any purpose. Absent the Creator, what we call ethics and morality is nothing more than the pretense of personal preference and the tyranny of the majority, as changeable as clothing fashion.
But the greater question answered by the resurrection is the existence of mankind itself. As Paul told the Athenian philosophers in the Areopagus: "God who made the world and all that is in it, being Lord of both Heaven and earth, does not live in temples made by human hands, nor is he ministered to by human hands, as though he had need of anything - seeing that he is the one who gives to all men life and breath and everything else. From one forefather he has created every race of men to live over the face of the whole earth. He has determined the times of their existence and the limits of their habitation, so that they might search for God, in the hope that they might feel for him and find him - yes, even though he is not far from any one of us. Indeed, it is in him that we live and move and have our being. Some of your own poets have endorsed this in the words, 'For we are indeed his children'. If then we are the children of God, we ought not to imagine God in terms of gold or silver or stone, contrived by human art or imagination. Now while it is true that God has overlooked the days of ignorance he now commands all men everywhere to repent (because of the gift of his son Jesus). For he has fixed a day on which he will judge the whole world in justice by the standard of a man whom he has appointed. That this is so he has guaranteed to all men by raising this man from the dead." (Acts 17:24-31 Phillips translation) Jesus' resurrection serves as a supernatural guarantee, a kind of certificate of authentication, of the grand arc of creation and its overarching aim, that man should be in relationship with God. As it states in the very first question of the Westminster Catechism:
The Hope
The older I get and the closer to my inevitable death, the more acutely I feel that, "It's not enough!" I want more: more food, more sex, more travel, more art, more joy, more knowledge, more beauty, more creativity...more life. I can't even imagine getting tired of life. I tire of drudgery, of boredom, banality and mediocrity, and most definitely of pain; but life? Never!
All living things have an instinct for survival, but this insatiable desire for life goes far beyond that, indeed is of an entirely different character; not merely an urge to exist, but a hunger for something at the edge of our perception which all the superlatives of this life not only never satisfy, but only seem to hint at some deeper truth. C.S. Lewis put it this way:
Even more than the purpose of our existence, the resurrection explains life itself for it points to a transcendence and fulfillment to come, a healing and completion to that which seems sick and undone, a final judgement to the horrible injustice that reigns over the world, a knowledge to answer the ignorance that vexes us, a satisfaction, finally, for our desperate hunger. Rico Tice, the pastor of evangelism at All Souls Anglican Church in London, said that we feel so dissatisfied in this life because we were created by God with hungers and desires so intense that it will take an eternity to satisfy them. This is the hope of the resurrection: that we will one day, finally, enter that true country for which we were made; that one day our hunger for bliss, which every pleasure we've so far experienced only seemed to generate more hunger, will begin its fulfillment. "I came so they can have real and eternal life, more and better life than they ever dreamed of," said Jesus. (John 10:10 The Message)
The Power
Before the meaning of the of the resurrection can influence one's actions, before the hope of the resurrection can inspire one's aspirations, the power of the resurrection must transform one's spirit. Jesus said to the Pharisee Nicodemus, "No one can see God's kingdom without being born again. ...No one can enter God's kingdom without being born through water and the Holy Spirit." (John 3:3&5 The Message) The resurrection is the authentication of Jesus' redemptive death on the cross that did what we could not do: pay the price for our sin which then reconciles us to God and gives us access to the spiritual rebirth of which Jesus spoke. As Paul said in our text, Christ died for our sins, as the scriptures said he would; he was buried and rose again on the third day, again as the scriptures foretold. And the Apostle Peter said it this way: According to his great mercy, he has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead...(1 Peter 1:3 ESV).
This is the beauty of the Gospel (from the Greek word Euaggelion - yoo-ang-ghel'-ee-on, meaning, "good tidings" or "good message"), that it's not a message of how we can earn our way to God's forgiveness, but rather the good news of God's mercy and love; it's not a message of what we must do for God, but what He has done for us. Our part is simply that of acceptance, of surrendering ourselves to His design, of receiving His gift of redemption. As Paul said to his apprentice Titus: ...when the kindness of God our saviour and his love towards man appeared, he saved us - not by virtue of any moral achievements of ours, but by the cleansing power of a new birth and the moral renewal of the Holy Spirit, which he gave us so generously through Jesus Christ our Saviour. The result is that we are acquitted by his grace, and can look forward to inheriting life for evermore. (Titus 3:4-7 Phillips translation)
It's in this spirit of contemplating the meaning of the resurrection in validating moral truth and explaining our existence, the hope of the resurrection in the vision of our eternal destiny, and the power of the resurrection in conveying spiritual rebirth, redemption, and reconciliation to God, that I welcome you to celebrate the resurrection of Jesus Christ on this Easter. Together we join hundreds of millions of believers in Christ over this world who, in rejoicing in the hope we have been given that we too will be resurrected in the last day, can say, "He is risen! He is risen indeed!"
I am the least of the messengers, and indeed I do not deserve that title at all, because I persecuted the Church of God. But what I am now I am by the grace of God. The grace he gave me has not proved a barren gift. I have worked harder than any of the others - and yet it was not I but this same grace of God within me. In any event, whoever has done the work whether I or they, this has been the message and this has been the foundation of your faith.
Now if the rising of Christ from the dead is the very heart of our message, how can some of you deny that there is any resurrection? For if there is no such thing as the resurrection of the dead, then Christ was never raised. And if Christ was not raised then neither our preaching nor your faith has any meaning at all. Further it would mean that we are lying in our witness for God, for we have given our solemn testimony that he did raise up Christ - and that is utterly false if it should be true that the dead do not, in fact, rise again! For if the dead do not rise neither did Christ rise, and if Christ did not rise your faith is futile and your sins have never been forgiven. Moreover those who have died believing in Christ are utterly dead and gone. Truly, if our hope in Christ were limited to this life only we should, of all mankind be the most to be pitied! (1 Corinthians 15:2-19 Phillips translation)
Of all the truth claims of scripture perhaps the most contested over the centuries is the resurrection of Christ. After the resurrection the soldiers guarding the tomb who fled when the stone was rolled away were bribed by the chief priests to spread the story that they had fallen asleep and the disciples had stolen Jesus' body. They were given assurance that the priests would protect them from Pilate. This because, as Roman soldiers, they would have been under the penalty of death for falling asleep and then abandoning their post. But it was more important to the chief priests, and to Pilate for that matter, to keep them alive and spread the counter-resurrection lie. Why? Because all of the ruling powers instinctively understood that the resurrection was an event of such power and import that it completely divested their authority. The resurrection, morally and philosophically, rendered them impotent and irrelevant.
But for those who had witnessed Jesus' resurrection there was no turning back. James, Jesus' brother, who during Jesus' ministry had tried to convince him to stop preaching and come home, fearing he had lost his mind, after the resurrection became a leader of the early church, officiated at the council of Jerusalem, and was eventually martyred. The same happened to every apostle, except John. All went to their deaths, some in truly horrible fashion, refusing to renounce the resurrection.
The last line in the text was, if our hope in Christ were limited to this life only we should, of all mankind be the most to be pitied! Paul elaborates further in verse 32: if there is no life after this one, 'Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die!' This quotation of Isaiah 22:13 must have resonated with his Greek readers, because it seems to sum up the philosophy of the Epicureans who held that pleasure was the ultimate good and so devoted themselves to its single-minded pursuit. Paul seems to say, if there is no eternal dimension to our existence, no resurrection, no hope of eternal relationship with God, forget about Christianity, forget about moral constraints, forget about any greater meaning that your life might have because it doesn't have any; live for the moment, indulge yourself! This may describe a sad and pathetic existence, devoid of meaning, honor, justice and principle, but if true, that's all there is and all our longing for meaning and purpose is nothing but an empty delusion.
Yet isn't this what our culture now tells us? "You only go around once in this life, so grab all the gusto you can!" "He who dies with the most toys wins." These feeble aphorisms are the best it has to offer.
The Meaning
The whole meaning of the Christian faith hinges on the resurrection. As Paul told the Corinthians, if Christ did not rise from the dead, their faith was futile, their sins were not forgiven, and those who die, die in hopelessness. The resurrection is the validation of the eternal dimension of life. It gives meaning, not only to Jesus' death of redemption, but to morality itself. Only if the Big Bang had a Big Banger, only if ethical law had a Law Giver who, because of His nature of absolute goodness and absolute knowledge, can endow that law with His authority, does our existence have any purpose. Absent the Creator, what we call ethics and morality is nothing more than the pretense of personal preference and the tyranny of the majority, as changeable as clothing fashion.
But the greater question answered by the resurrection is the existence of mankind itself. As Paul told the Athenian philosophers in the Areopagus: "God who made the world and all that is in it, being Lord of both Heaven and earth, does not live in temples made by human hands, nor is he ministered to by human hands, as though he had need of anything - seeing that he is the one who gives to all men life and breath and everything else. From one forefather he has created every race of men to live over the face of the whole earth. He has determined the times of their existence and the limits of their habitation, so that they might search for God, in the hope that they might feel for him and find him - yes, even though he is not far from any one of us. Indeed, it is in him that we live and move and have our being. Some of your own poets have endorsed this in the words, 'For we are indeed his children'. If then we are the children of God, we ought not to imagine God in terms of gold or silver or stone, contrived by human art or imagination. Now while it is true that God has overlooked the days of ignorance he now commands all men everywhere to repent (because of the gift of his son Jesus). For he has fixed a day on which he will judge the whole world in justice by the standard of a man whom he has appointed. That this is so he has guaranteed to all men by raising this man from the dead." (Acts 17:24-31 Phillips translation) Jesus' resurrection serves as a supernatural guarantee, a kind of certificate of authentication, of the grand arc of creation and its overarching aim, that man should be in relationship with God. As it states in the very first question of the Westminster Catechism:
What is the chief and highest end of man?
Answer: Man's chief and highest end is to glorify God, and fully to enjoy him forever.
The Hope
The older I get and the closer to my inevitable death, the more acutely I feel that, "It's not enough!" I want more: more food, more sex, more travel, more art, more joy, more knowledge, more beauty, more creativity...more life. I can't even imagine getting tired of life. I tire of drudgery, of boredom, banality and mediocrity, and most definitely of pain; but life? Never!
All living things have an instinct for survival, but this insatiable desire for life goes far beyond that, indeed is of an entirely different character; not merely an urge to exist, but a hunger for something at the edge of our perception which all the superlatives of this life not only never satisfy, but only seem to hint at some deeper truth. C.S. Lewis put it this way:
Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for desires exists. A baby feels hunger: well, there is such a thing as food . A duckling wants to swim: well, there is such a thing as water. Men feel sexual desire: well, there is such a thing as sex. If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world. If none of my earthly pleasures satisfy it, that does not prove that the universe is a fraud. Probably earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy it, but only to arouse it, to suggest the real thing. If that is so, I must take care, on the one hand, never to despise, or be unthankful for, these earthly blessings, and on the other, never to mistake them for something else of which they are only a kind of a copy, or echo, or mirage. I must keep alive in myself the desire for my true country, which I shall not find till after death; I must never let it get snowed under or turned aside; I must make it the main object of life to press on to that other country and to help others to do the same.
Even more than the purpose of our existence, the resurrection explains life itself for it points to a transcendence and fulfillment to come, a healing and completion to that which seems sick and undone, a final judgement to the horrible injustice that reigns over the world, a knowledge to answer the ignorance that vexes us, a satisfaction, finally, for our desperate hunger. Rico Tice, the pastor of evangelism at All Souls Anglican Church in London, said that we feel so dissatisfied in this life because we were created by God with hungers and desires so intense that it will take an eternity to satisfy them. This is the hope of the resurrection: that we will one day, finally, enter that true country for which we were made; that one day our hunger for bliss, which every pleasure we've so far experienced only seemed to generate more hunger, will begin its fulfillment. "I came so they can have real and eternal life, more and better life than they ever dreamed of," said Jesus. (John 10:10 The Message)
The Power
Before the meaning of the of the resurrection can influence one's actions, before the hope of the resurrection can inspire one's aspirations, the power of the resurrection must transform one's spirit. Jesus said to the Pharisee Nicodemus, "No one can see God's kingdom without being born again. ...No one can enter God's kingdom without being born through water and the Holy Spirit." (John 3:3&5 The Message) The resurrection is the authentication of Jesus' redemptive death on the cross that did what we could not do: pay the price for our sin which then reconciles us to God and gives us access to the spiritual rebirth of which Jesus spoke. As Paul said in our text, Christ died for our sins, as the scriptures said he would; he was buried and rose again on the third day, again as the scriptures foretold. And the Apostle Peter said it this way: According to his great mercy, he has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead...(1 Peter 1:3 ESV).
This is the beauty of the Gospel (from the Greek word Euaggelion - yoo-ang-ghel'-ee-on, meaning, "good tidings" or "good message"), that it's not a message of how we can earn our way to God's forgiveness, but rather the good news of God's mercy and love; it's not a message of what we must do for God, but what He has done for us. Our part is simply that of acceptance, of surrendering ourselves to His design, of receiving His gift of redemption. As Paul said to his apprentice Titus: ...when the kindness of God our saviour and his love towards man appeared, he saved us - not by virtue of any moral achievements of ours, but by the cleansing power of a new birth and the moral renewal of the Holy Spirit, which he gave us so generously through Jesus Christ our Saviour. The result is that we are acquitted by his grace, and can look forward to inheriting life for evermore. (Titus 3:4-7 Phillips translation)
It's in this spirit of contemplating the meaning of the resurrection in validating moral truth and explaining our existence, the hope of the resurrection in the vision of our eternal destiny, and the power of the resurrection in conveying spiritual rebirth, redemption, and reconciliation to God, that I welcome you to celebrate the resurrection of Jesus Christ on this Easter. Together we join hundreds of millions of believers in Christ over this world who, in rejoicing in the hope we have been given that we too will be resurrected in the last day, can say, "He is risen! He is risen indeed!"
Sunday, March 15, 2009
The Devil's Delusion
In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. (Genesis 1:1 ESV)
This simple truth, fundamental to all orthodox believing Christians is under attack as perhaps never before. A new wave of anti-theistic writers have, in the last few years, peppered the best-sellers lists with bellicose and rancorous titles such as God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything by Christopher Hitchens, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon by Daniel Dennett, Letter To A Christian Nation by Sam Harris, and The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins. One of the challenges, both to these books and to a scientific community who seem to be closing ranks against faith in God, at least from the scientific community itself, is the Intelligent Design movement made up of scientists of whom some are Christian and Jewish believers and others who are merely skeptics of what they see has become something of a Darwinist cult in science.
I mentioned a number of months ago here a movie I had seen called, Expelled which outlines this struggle between the iron grip of Dawinist orthodoxy in the greater scientific community, and anyone who for any reason in the slightest challenges that orthodoxy. Prominent in the film is a mathematician and philosopher, trained in Princeton, now living in Paris, by the name of David Berlinski. I found Ben Stein's interview of him in his Paris apartment to be one of the most intriguing and enjoyable parts of the film, so I just read his book, The Devil's Delusion: Atheism and its Scientific Pretensions.
While The Devil's Delusion covers some pretty weighty and even overwhelming material from the standpoint of the layman, such a string theory, multiple universes, and the Anthropic Principle, Berlinski--who by the way is not a believer, but rather describes himself as "a secular Jew...my religious education did not take,"--always keeps the polysyllabic words to a minimum and the writing infused with wit and charm.
There seem to me three main arguments of the book: 1) the spokesmen of scientific orthodoxy are making claims for the settledness of Darwinism and cosmology and invalidation of God's existence and biblical accounts they have no warrant by evidence and logic to make, 2) Darwinists and cosmologists have constructed mathematical houses of cards and castles in the air, then dishonestly claimed that these fantastic inventions explain universal and human origins to the exclusion of God claims, and 3) the universal and human origin claims of orthodox science comprise a belief system just as reliant on faith and devotion to dogma as does theistic religion.
Here are some excerpts from the book that will give you a flavor of Berlinski's humor and reasoning:
Scientific pretensions indeed.
This simple truth, fundamental to all orthodox believing Christians is under attack as perhaps never before. A new wave of anti-theistic writers have, in the last few years, peppered the best-sellers lists with bellicose and rancorous titles such as God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything by Christopher Hitchens, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon by Daniel Dennett, Letter To A Christian Nation by Sam Harris, and The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins. One of the challenges, both to these books and to a scientific community who seem to be closing ranks against faith in God, at least from the scientific community itself, is the Intelligent Design movement made up of scientists of whom some are Christian and Jewish believers and others who are merely skeptics of what they see has become something of a Darwinist cult in science.
I mentioned a number of months ago here a movie I had seen called, Expelled which outlines this struggle between the iron grip of Dawinist orthodoxy in the greater scientific community, and anyone who for any reason in the slightest challenges that orthodoxy. Prominent in the film is a mathematician and philosopher, trained in Princeton, now living in Paris, by the name of David Berlinski. I found Ben Stein's interview of him in his Paris apartment to be one of the most intriguing and enjoyable parts of the film, so I just read his book, The Devil's Delusion: Atheism and its Scientific Pretensions.
While The Devil's Delusion covers some pretty weighty and even overwhelming material from the standpoint of the layman, such a string theory, multiple universes, and the Anthropic Principle, Berlinski--who by the way is not a believer, but rather describes himself as "a secular Jew...my religious education did not take,"--always keeps the polysyllabic words to a minimum and the writing infused with wit and charm.
There seem to me three main arguments of the book: 1) the spokesmen of scientific orthodoxy are making claims for the settledness of Darwinism and cosmology and invalidation of God's existence and biblical accounts they have no warrant by evidence and logic to make, 2) Darwinists and cosmologists have constructed mathematical houses of cards and castles in the air, then dishonestly claimed that these fantastic inventions explain universal and human origins to the exclusion of God claims, and 3) the universal and human origin claims of orthodox science comprise a belief system just as reliant on faith and devotion to dogma as does theistic religion.
Here are some excerpts from the book that will give you a flavor of Berlinski's humor and reasoning:
(quoting Nobel Prize winning physicist Steven Weinberg)
"Religion," he affirmed, "is an insult to human dignity. With or without it you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion" (italics added). In speaking thus, Weinberg was warmly applauded, not one member of his audience asking the question one might have thought pertinent: Just who has imposed on the suffering human race poison gas, barbed wire, high explosives, experiments in eugenics, the formula for Zyklon B, heavy artillery, pseudo-scientific justifications for mass murder, cluster bombs, attack submarines, napalm, intercontinental ballistic missiles, military space platforms, and nuclear weapons? If memory serves, it was not the Vatican.
On one such occasion somewhere in Eastern Europe, an SS officer watched languidly, his machine gun cradled, as an elderly and bearded Hasidic Jew laboriously dug what he knew to be his grave. Standing straight, he addressed his executioner. "God is watching what you are doing," he said. And then he was shot dead. What Hitler did not believe and what Stalin did not believe and what Mao did not believe and what the SS did not believe and what the Gestapo did not believe and what the NKVD did not believe and what the commissars, functionaries, swaggering executioners, Nazi doctors, Communist Party theoreticians, intellectuals, Brown Shirts, Black Shirts, gauleiters, and a thousand party hacks did not believe was that God was watching what they were doing. As far as we can tell, very few of those carrying out the horrors of the twentieth century worried overmuch that God was watching what they were doing either. That is, after all the meaning of a secular society.
In his Letter to a Christian Nation, [Sam] Harris argues that "qualms" about stem-cell research are "obscene," because they are "morally indefensible." And they are morally indefensible because they represent nothing more than "faith-based irrationality." These remarks are typical; they embody a style. And they invite the obvious response. Beyond the fact that it is religiously based, just what makes the religious objection to stem-cell research irrational? Those who find these questions troubling--me, for sure--find them troubling because atheists such as Sam Harris remain so resolutely untroubled by them. His convictions are as tranquil as his face is unlined. That bat squeak of warning that so many religious believers hear when they consider stem-cell research, abortion, or euthanasia sounds at a frequency to which he is insensitive. This is very odd considering that what moral philosophers have called the slippery slope has proven in recent decades to be slippery enough to seem waxed. It is, if anything, more slippery than ever. In 1984, Holland legalized euthanasia. Critics immediately objected that Dutch doctors, having been given the right to kill their elderly patients at their request, would almost at once find reasons to kill patients at their whim. This is precisely what has happened. The Journal of Medical Ethics, in reviewing Dutch hospital practices, reported that 3 percent of Dutch deaths for 1995 were assisted suicides, and that of these, fully one-fourth were involuntary. The doctors simply knocked their patients off, no doubt assuring the family that Grootmoeder would have wanted it that way. As a result, a great many elderly Dutch carry around sanctuary certificates indicating in no uncertain terms that they do not wish their doctors to assist them to die, emerging from their coma, when they are ill, just long enough to tell these murderous pests for heaven's sake to go away. The authors of the study, Henk Jochensen and John Keown, report with some understatement that "Dutch claims of effective regulation ring hollow." Euthanasia, as Dr. Peggy Norris observed with some asperity, "cannot be controlled." If this is so, why is Harris so sure that stem-cell research can be controlled? And if it cannot be controlled, just what is irrational about religious objections to social policies that when they reach the bottom of the slippery slope are bound to embody something Dutch, degraded, and disgusting? How many scientific atheists, I wonder, propose to spend their old age in Holland?
"Everything," the philosopher Alexander Byrne has remarked, "is a natural phenomenon." Quite so. But each of those natural phenomena is, Byrne believes, simply "an aspect of the universe revealed by the natural sciences." If what is natural has been defined in terms of what the natural sciences reveal, no progress in thought has been recorded. If not, what reason is there to conclude that everything is an "aspect of the universe revealed by the natural sciences"? There is no reason at all.
Questions such as this reflect in the end a single point of intellectual incoherence. The thesis that there are no absolute truths--is it an absolute truth? If it is, then some truths are absolute after all, and if some are, why not others? If it is not, just why should we pay it any mind, since its claims on our attention will vary according to circumstances.
Joel Primack, a cosmologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, once posed an interesting question to the physicist Neil Turok: "What is it that makes the electrons continue to follow the laws." ...Brandon Carter, Leonard Susskind, and Steven Weinberg understand the question as well. Their answer is the Landscape [their name for the system of multiple universes suggested by some string theory calculations] and the Anthropic Principle [a theory that explains the incredible fine-tuning of the universe that allows the possibility of life--in effect, if the necessities of life are necessary, they must be inevitable]. There are universes in which the electron continues to follow some law, and those in which it does not. In a Landscape in which anything is possible, nothing is necessary. In a universe in which nothing is necessary, chaos in possible. It is nothing that makes the electron follow any laws. Which, then, is it to be: God, logic, or nothing? This is the question to which all discussions of the Landscape and the Anthropic Principle are tending, and because the same question can be raised with respect to moral thought, it is a question with an immense and disturbing intellectual power. For scientific atheists, the question answers itself: Better logic than nothing, and better nothing than God.
At times, Dawkins asserts that God is an irrelevance because He has been assigned the task of constructing a universe that is improbable. If the universe is improbable, "it is obviously no solution to postulate something even more improbable." Why an improbable universe demands an improbable god, Dawkins does not say and I do not know. The difficulty with the arguments--they form a genre--is that they endeavor to reconcile two incompatible tendencies in order to force a dimemma. On the one hand, there is the claim that the universe is improbable; on the other, the claim that God made the universe. Considered jointly, these claims form an unnatural union. Probabilities belong to the world in which things happen because they might, creation to the world in which things happen because they must. We explain creation by appealing to creators, whether deities or the inflexible laws of nature. We explain what is chancy by appealing to chance. We cannot do both. If God did make the world, it is not improbable. If it is improbable, then God did not make it. The best we could say is that God made a world that would be improbable had it been produced by chance.
It is precisely these initial conditions that popular accounts of human evolution cannot supply. We can say of those hunters and gatherers only that they hunted and gathered, and we can say this only because it seems obvious that there was nothing else for them to do. The gene pool that they embodied cannot be recovered. The largest story told by evolutionary psychology is therefore anecdotal. It has no scientific value. We might as well be honest with one another. It has no value whatsoever.
Scientific pretensions indeed.
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