Don Mitchell

Answer to "What Would Jesus Cut"

2011-03-19T21:42:00.000-07:00

A couple of weeks ago a friend of mine, asking for my opinion, gave me a copy of an article by perhaps the foremost representative of the Christian left, Jim Wallis. Following is a reprint of Wallis' article with my point-by-point comments. The article will be indented in block quotes, interjected by my comments in normal text.

This is Not Fiscal Conservatism. It’s Just Politics.
by Jim Wallis 02-24-2011

The current budget and deficit debate in America is now dominating the daily headlines. There is even talk of shutting down the government if the budget-cutters don’t get their way. There is no doubt that excessive deficits are a moral issue and could leave our children and grandchildren with crushing debt. But what the politicians and pundits have yet to acknowledge is that how you reduce the deficit is also a moral issue. As Sojourners said in the last big budget debate in 2005, “A budget is a moral document.” For a family, church, city, state, or nation, a budget reveals what your fundamental priorities are: who is important and who is not; what is important and what is not. It’s time to bring that slogan back, and build a coalition and campaign around it.

The governor of Wisconsin, Scott Walker, says he only really cares about his budget deficit; however, it now appears that he proudly sees himself as the first domino in a new strategy for Republican governors to break their public employee unions. (We are already seeing similar actions in Indiana, Ohio, and New Jersey.) Governor Walker’s proposed bill is really more about his ideological commitments and conservative politics — which favor business over labor — than about his concern for Wisconsin’s financial health.

This is the first use of a liberal/leftist trope--that conservatives favor business over labor. It's a convenient accusation that coincides with leftist narratives that go all the way back to the earliest socialist movements: they care about the poor and working man, the right is all about exploiting the working man (otherwise called "labor") and further enriching the ownership class/investment class. However, when contributions to the respective parties is analyzed over the last several election cycles it's clear that the vast majority of big business and super-rich contribution has shifted to the Democrat party. The statement that the Republican party is the party of big business and the rich is simply incoherent now.

Thousands of working-class Americans are now protesting in the streets of Madison and have made this a national debate. Even protesters in Egypt are sending messages of hope (and pizzas) to the Wisconsin demonstrators.

The Republican governors’ counter parts in the U.S. House of Representatives are also not cutting spending where the real money is, such as in military spending, corporate tax cuts and loop holes, and long term health-care costs. Instead, they are cutting programs for the poorest people at home and around the world.

This is where I started to get frustrated. He had a link on one of these statements that I thought would take me to a break-down of the "cuts" (which from what I've read are really just reductions in the planned growth of programs) but after following it (and others) it proved to be just more statements in other blog posts of his on his own web site that have not a single attribution to any document or proposal or study that can be verified. So why should I take anything he writes seriously?

This is also just political and not genuine fiscal conservatism. It is a direct attack on programs that help the poor and an all-out defense of the largesse handed out to big corporations and military contractors. If a budget is a moral document, these budget-cutters show that their priorities are to protect the richest Americans and abandon the poorest — and this is an ideological and moral choice. The proposed House cuts, which were just sent to the Senate, are full of disproportionate cuts to initiatives that have proven to save children’s lives and overcome poverty,

which initiatives? He names not a single one. I'm dying for him to 1) name at least one government program being cut and then 2) prove that it HAS saved lives and, more importantly, "overcome poverty."

while leaving untouched the most corrupt and wasteful spending of all American tax dollars — the Pentagon entitlement program. This is not fiscal integrity; this is hypocrisy.

The "most"? Really? More wasteful and corrupt than Medicare/Medicaid? This statement is both fatuous and absurd.

U.S. military spending is now 56 percent of the world’s military expenditures and is more than the military budgets of the next 20 countries in the world combined. To believe all that money is necessary for genuine American security is simply no longer credible.

Considering that those other countries have gutted their own militaries in favor of increasing their welfare states--to the point that it is bankrupting their economies--and that as a result the United States military has become the de-facto policeman of the world, providing security for the world shipping lanes, the movement of oil and goods throughout the world, providing security for unstable and fledgeling democracies, it seems perfectly credible to me.

To say it is more important than bed nets that prevent malaria, vaccines that prevent deadly diseases, or child health and family nutrition for low-income families is simply immoral. Again, these are ideological choices, not smart fiscal ones. To prioritize endless military spending over critical, life-saving programs for the poor is to reverse the biblical instruction to beat our swords into plowshares. The proposed budget cuts would beat plowshares into more swords. These priorities are not only immoral, they are unbiblical.

Wallis and his organization "Sojourners" represent the most visible element of the Evangelical left, a minority variant of American Evangelical Christianity. What Wallis fails to say--but what explains his statements concerning the military--is that he is an absolute pacifist in his interpretation of the Bible. Now while pacifism does have a long tradition in Christianity, it has never represented a majority view nor, I would assert, an orthodox view. Just war theory has predominated in Christian theology, in both Catholic and Protestant variations, throughout the 2 millennia of its existence--and in the more than 3 millennia of its Judaic predecessor. One of the major differences between Judaism and Christianity is the Christian view of secular government; the Jewish scriptures make no provision for such whereas the Christian scriptures acknowledge both a separation between secular and church government and a definitive role for secular government. Jesus delineated the difference first by saying, "Render to Cesar that which is Cesar's and to God that which is God's," and the apostle Paul defined the role of secular government in his letter to the Roman church:
Let every person be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God. Therefore whoever resists the authorities resists what God has appointed, and those who resist will incur judgment. For rulers are not a terror to good conduct, but to bad. Would you have no fear of the one who is in authority? Then do what is good, and you will receive his approval, for he is God's servant for your good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for he does not bear the sword in vain. For he is the servant of God, an avenger who carries out God's wrath on the wrongdoer. Therefore one must be in subjection, not only to avoid God's wrath but also for the sake of conscience. For the same reason you also pay taxes, for the authorities are ministers of God, attending to this very thing. Pay to all what is owed to them: taxes to whom taxes are owed, revenue to whom revenue is owed, respect to whom respect is owed, honor to whom honor is owed. (Romans 13:1-7 English Standard Version)

Notice that Paul seems to define the central role of secular government as the bearer of the sword, in other words the administration of police and military force. Obviously the above scripture presents some challenges to a democratic republic such as ours in that the scope of government can be decided and changed by its citizenry. But most Evangelicals agree with the founding fathers of this country: that government should be limited. Our Constitution seems to agree with the above scripture (and essentially disagree with Wallis) that the central task of government is police and martial in nature judging by its preamble, "to establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense...".

Now some members of Congress seem to want to force a government showdown over all this. They are saying there will be no shared sacrifice for the rich, only sacrifices from the poor and middle-class, or we will shut down the government.

This is nothing but an unsubstantiated accusation, or rather a libel. NO ONE has said there is to be no shared sacrifices.

The only people whose lives have returned to normal in America are the ones who precipitated our financial and economic crisis in the first place. They have all returned to record profits, while many others are still struggling with unemployment, stagnant wages, loss of benefits, home foreclosures, and more. These representatives are claiming that we should restore fiscal integrity by protecting all the soaring billionaires, while forcing the already-squeezed to make more and more concessions.

Let me offer a word to those who see this critique as partisan. I’ve had good friendships with Republican members of Congress, but not the kind who get elected by their party anymore. But let’s be clear, when politicians attack the poor, it is not partisan to challenge them; it is a Christian responsibility.

The entire two previous paragraphs are filled with demagogic hyperbole designed to inflame class warfare and inspire feelings of "righteous" indignation at Republicans. The "Americans" who precipitated our financial and economic crisis were the members of Congress who forced the banks into making loans to people who could never repay them through the mandates of the Community Reinvestment Act and thereby lead to the invention of financial instruments such as sub-prime loans and mortgage-backed securities which eventually corrupted the entire banking system, and the federal banking regulators who allowed and perhaps even encouraged the banks to loan against ever smaller reserve ratios. He gives no example--and I can certainly think of none--of representatives protecting billionaires or attacking the poor.

This is wrong, this is unjust, this is vile, and this must not stand. Next week, thanks to your support, look for a full-page ad in Politico signed by faith leaders and organizations across the country that asks Congress a probing question: “What would Jesus cut?” These proposed budget cuts are backwards, and I don’t see how people of faith can accept them. And we won’t.

Wallis rightly asserts that it is a Biblical and Christian concern that the poor should be helped; where he is wrong is his belief that this is a governmental concern. Caring for the poor and needy should be strictly the province of the church and private charitable organizations (but preferably the church)—not the federal government. It’s a testament to how moved Christians are by this truth that the Americans—and specifically Christian Americans—give more in charity than any other group in the world—despite the fact that more and more of what had been the province of private charity has been taken over by federal agencies. This appropriation of charitable roles by governmental agencies has had a devastating effect on charitable giving in the welfare states of Europe. All of this is well documented in Arthur C. Brooks’ book,
“Who Really Cares: the surprising truth about compassionate conservatism."

The root of this problem is the Christian left’s long standing propensity to apply Biblical principles meant for the micro (i.e. personal) to the macro (i.e. government). One of the central proof texts for pacifism is Jesus’ injunction to “turn the other cheek.” But of course this is a micro/personal principle that simply makes no sense for governments. If Jesus meant this on a governmental level, why would he not have instructed soldiers to leave the army, instead of merely telling them, “Don’t extort money and don’t accuse people falsely—be content with your pay,”? (Luke 3:14) And of course turning the other cheek refers to personal insult, not attempted murder. Also, the "beating swords into plowshares" reference refers to the earthly kingdom of Christ which he will establish after the battle of Armageddon in which He will slaughter the armies of rebellion with the word of His mouth. (Revelation 19:11-21)

For further reading, see Mark Tooley's article in American Spectator, or my post on this blog, How Would Jesus Vote?

Mom's Eulogy

2011-02-20T15:40:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, we had a memorial service for my mother, Nancy Mitchell, who died a week ago Friday, February 11th. Following is the eulogy I gave for her.

In 1980 popular science writer Carl Sagan produced a multipart series broadcast on PBS called "Cosmos." He introduced the series with these words, "The Cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be." This, of course, is the premise of the materialist: that human existence is reduced to matter--only that which can be touched, tasted, smelled, seen and heard.

There's a couple of big problems with this idea, though. The first is that no one can really live that way. Even the most primitive cultures understand that life is more than chemistry and meat, that thoughts are more than electrical impulses in a brain. The most cosmopolitan urban sophisticates who profess a distaste for "organized religion" will nevertheless declare themselves "spiritual"--even though they couldn't begin to tell you what they mean by it. So what are they saying? They're saying that they understand, if only on an intuitive level, that we are more than our bodies and our brains.

The second problem with materialism is that it's self destructive--and by that I mean the idea destroys itself. Even the high priests of materialism--the scientist class--never look too closely at its philosophical underpinnings for fear of being crushed by its own cornerstone. So the acrimonious atheist Daniel Dennet may call Darwinism a "universal acid" that dissolves away religion and traditional ethics, but stops before seeing that, as C.S. Lewis wrote, "If my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain, I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true and no reason to suppose my brain composed of atoms." Even Carl Sagan, immediately after assuring us that life is only matter, goes on to say, "Our feeblest contemplations of the Cosmos stir us -- there is a tingling in the spine, a catch in the voice, a faint sensation of a distant memory, as if we were falling from a great a height. We know we are approaching the greatest of mysteries." You see what he's doing here? He's using mystical, almost religious language and imagery to give the material universe an illusion of spirituality.

Now, so far I've described two categories of people: 1) people who understand intuitively that there is a spiritual dimension to human life, but don't understand--or for the most part even care to think about what it is, and 2) those who deny that there is a spiritual dimension to human life, but nevertheless act as though there is. But there's a third category: those who know there is a spiritual dimension to human life, and understand its nature. Let me read this story from the Gospel of John, chapter 4:

When Jesus knew that the Pharisees heard He was making and baptizing more disciples than John (though Jesus Himself was not baptizing, but His disciples were), He left Judea and went again to Galilee. He had to travel through Samaria, so He came to a town of Samaria called Sychar near the property that Jacob had given his son Joseph. Jacob's well was there, and Jesus, worn out from His journey, sat down at the well. It was about six in the evening. A woman of Samaria came to draw water.

"Give Me a drink," Jesus said to her, for His disciples had gone into town to buy food.

"How is it that You, a Jew, ask for a drink from me, a Samaritan woman?" she asked Him. For Jews do not associate with Samaritans.

Jesus answered, "If you knew the gift of God, and who is saying to you, 'Give Me a drink,' you would ask Him, and He would give you living water."

"Sir," said the woman, "You don't even have a bucket, and the well is deep. So where do you get this 'living water'? You aren't greater than our father Jacob, are you? He gave us the well and drank from it himself, as did his sons and livestock."

Jesus said, "Everyone who drinks from this water will get thirsty again. But whoever drinks from the water that I will give him will never get thirsty again, ever! In fact, the water I will give him will become a well of water springing up within him for eternal life."

"Sir," the woman said to Him, "give me this water so I won't get thirsty and come here to draw water."

"Go call your husband," He told her, "and come back here."

"I don't have a husband," she answered.

"You have correctly said, 'I don't have a husband,' " Jesus said. "For you've had five husbands, and the man you now have is not your husband. What you have said is true."

"Sir," the woman replied, "I see that You are a prophet. Our fathers worshiped on this mountain, yet you [Jews] say that the place to worship is in Jerusalem."

Jesus told her, "Believe Me, woman, an hour is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. You Samaritans worship what you do not know. We worship what we do know, because salvation is from the Jews. But an hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth. Yes, the Father wants such people to worship Him. God is spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth."

The woman said to Him, "I know that Messiah is coming" (who is called Christ. "When He comes, He will explain everything to us."

"I am [He]," Jesus told her, "the One speaking to you."

Can you grasp the absolute confidence with which Jesus speaks? He begins by declaring that he can give a "living water" from God that will impart eternal life, an obvious allusion to the eternal attribute of the spirit, then immediately roots his authority to make such a claim in the physical realm by disclosing tangible details about the woman's life that he could have no way of knowing. He continues by affirming the spiritual nature of God and explains that, while the Samaritans may worship on an intuitive level, the Jews worship from knowledge because God revealed His nature and His law to Jews. The written revelation of the law and prophets came through the Jews, and God's plan to redeem and reconcile man came through the Jews in the person of Jesus, which brings us to His most astonishing declaration: "I am He, the One speaking to you."

The Gospels are filled with such jaw-dropping statements by Jesus, which is exactly why C.S. Lewis wrote:

You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as 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.

So, first of all, we can have confidence in our understanding of the spiritual because Jesus authenticated his words by performing the miraculous. As he said in John 10:38,

even though you do not believe me, believe the miracles, that you may know and understand that the Father is in me, and I in the Father.

And we have the account of His words and miracles passed on by eyewitnesses, the truth of which the men who wrote them maintained even as they were tortured to death in an effort to make them deny it.

Secondly, the Bible tells us very specific things about the nature of spirit, so 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 Jesus said, "God is spirit," we understand that he is telling us that God is not a physical, material, and finite being but rather eternal, supernatural, and transcendent.

We find in the Bible that the spirit, or the soul if you will--they are Biblically interchangeable terms-- can live without the body, but the body cannot live without the spirit. It's this capacity of our personal essence, our thoughts and memories and experiences, of that which makes us an individual to live on after our body dies which gives us our greatest hope. And by hope I don't mean something like wishing, I mean assurance and the comfort of expectation. I mean a peace born from the absence of fear.

So the Christian has the assurance that our spirits or souls retain our identities. We won't be subsumed into some sort of hive mind or cosmic consciousness as the pantheist believes. We will one day be reunited with our loved ones and we will know them -- as them -- and they will know us -- as us. This is one of the ways in which we share in the likeness of God: that we are distinct personalities. I will see my father again. I will see my brother again. I will see my mother again and we will remember. We will remember the times, when we lived in San Diego just down the street from the zoo and would go almost every week, and all the times we went to Sea World and the Scripts aquarium in La Jolla. We will remember when we would watch all of our favorite TV shows together, "Johnny Quest" "Outer Limits" "The Twilight Zone" and "Star Trek." We will remember when we lived in Phoenix in a motel and had no TV, and so every evening Mom would pop up a big batch of pop corn, and make a pitcher of lemon ice tea and read aloud to me from classic children's books. We will remember all the times we sang duets together in church. We will remember the time, when I was only 15 and had my learner's permit, that I drove all the way across the United States, from California to Florida as I followed Dad pulling the trailer and Mom sat next to me as the adult driver. (I'm sure that must have been illegal.) We will remember those and the thousands of other things that were our shared experiences.

To the materialist death is the worst of horrors. It is oblivion, a clanging iron door shut on existence, an absolute final end to all that you ever were, are, or ever will be. It is terror whose only mitigation is when it serves as a cessation of great pain. But to the Christian death is an end to one kind of life transitioning to another. Rather than a closing door, it is an opening door, as though passing from one room to another.

As Paul said in 1 Corinthians 15:55
"Where, O death, is your victory?
Where, O death, is your sting?" And in Philipians 1:21 "For me, to live is Christ, but to die is gain."

But the fact that the soul is immortal is, according to Biblical truth, a two-edged sword for it teaches us that there are two distinct, indeed opposite conditions in which that immortality will be experienced. Jesus himself had a lot to say about this and was very specific about it. The wonderful thing--the beautiful thing--is that Jesus assured us that if we put our trust in Him, if we accept the amazing gift of His redemption that He offers us, we can experience that immortality fulfilling all the desires we were created with for knowledge, beauty, joy, and love--and we will do it bathed in the light and presence of our creator.

I think the specifics of that existence are beyond our capacity to comprehend. But let me say that all the imagery used in the Bible is meant to convey beauty, peace, and contentment. If you had to sum it up in one word it might be: paradise. And so, in the account of the crucifixion in Luke Jesus turned to the thief who defended him from the insults of the other thief and told him, "Today you will be with Me in paradise." That's the promise of Jesus, that's the assurance to the Christian: with God. In paradise. Forever.

My mother understood this well, in fact had a rare empirical knowledge of it. She had become a Christian as a teenager, but as a young woman had, during a surgery, a cardiac arrest and became one of the first to have the now well documented "near death experience" with all its classic hallmarks: traveling through a tunnel, emerging to a bright light, the sense of God and her loved ones waiting for her just beyond a vail of light, until her heart was started again and she was brought back. For her death held no sting, no fear, only a promise.

I want to end with this amazing and uplifting story that Mom's hospice nurse, Karen Jackson, told us the morning of her passing. Two days before she died she had one of her rare lucid moments. Karen told us that Mom's face lit up and she said, "He was here."

"Who was here, your husband?" Karen asked, because Mom often talked about Dad, who has been gone now for 25 years.

"No, God," said Mom. " Is it okay if I go with him?"
Karen said she was very moved and told Mom, "If you're ready, yes, you can go with Him."

And, of course, that's exactly what happened: God came to her, and she left with Him.

The Happiness of the People

2010-06-07T14:11:00.000-07:00

There is nothing better for a person than that he should eat and drink and find enjoyment in his toil. This also, I saw, is from the hand of God. (Ecclesiastes 2:24 ESV)

I recently read the speech given by Charles Murray at his acceptance of the Irving Kristol Award at the American Enterprise Institute last year, entitle The Happiness of the People. You can find the full transcription of the speech here, which I urge, in the strongest possible terms, everyone to read in its entirety. The text of the the speech is taken from Federalist 62 most likely written by James Madison:

A good government implies two things: first, fidelity to the object of government, which is the happiness of the people; secondly, a knowledge of the means by which that object can be best attained.

Despite the title of the speech, the central theme is actually the challenge of the European model of socialist democracy to the present American political milieu, I think best exemplified by this excerpt:

The goal of social policy is to ensure that those institutions [family, community, vocation, and faith] are robust and vital. And that's what's wrong with the European model. It doesn't do that. It enfeebles every single one of them.

Later in the speech Murray introduces what he characterizes as two erroneous premises that are at the heart of the socialist democratic agenda driving the European welfare states, endorsed and rapidly being adopted by the present American administration: the "equality premise" and the "New Man premise." The equality premise, which proposes that in a just society--"different groups of people--men and women, blacks and whites, straights and gays, the children of poor people and the children of rich people--will naturally have the same distributions of outcomes in life--the same mean income, the same mean educational attainment, the same proportions who become janitors and CEOs," is indispensably supported by the New Man premise which proposes that the very nature of man is changeable through the application of government interventionist policy.

I was struck, upon reading this, by its intersection with a conversation I had a short while ago with a friend. My friend was belaboring leftist's unwavering faith in this very thing: the linch-pin of leftist ideology that a human utopia can be created through their wise implementation of governmental control over the affairs of society. He recounted how his own conversion to Christianity came when he decided to give it a fair hearing by reading the Bible from cover to cover. One of the major epiphanies he had from this was the realization that even though these stories were of events that occurred thousands of years prior he still recognized the same passions and motivations of human nature he saw in himself and his friends: man himself had never changed.

Murray makes his case admirably, but falls just short of making the point I see at the root of this matter: that the European model--and its American counterpart--are a repudiation of the Christian worldview. The Christian and Jewish system of moral ethics is the foundation upon which Western Civilization was built, informing everything from family structure to market economics to law. It was the underlying truth that gave meaning to Western culture. When that meaning is denied--as it is under the European model--the sinews, ligaments and connecting tissues of culture attenuate; in the words of Yeats:

Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

But if that seems too melodramatic for you, consider this from Murray:

Drive through rural Sweden, as I did a few years ago. In every town was a beautiful Lutheran church, freshly painted, on meticulously tended grounds, all subsidized by the Swedish government. And the churches are empty. Including on Sundays. Scandinavia and Western Europe pride themselves on their "child-friendly" policies, providing generous child allowances, free day-care centers, and long maternity leaves. Those same countries have fertility rates far below replacement and plunging marriage rates. Those same countries are ones in which jobs are most carefully protected by government regulation and mandated benefits are most lavish. And they, with only a few exceptions, are countries where work is most often seen as a necessary evil, least often seen as a vocation, and where the proportions of people who say they love their jobs are the lowest.

[The European] mentality goes something like this: Human beings are a collection of chemicals that activate and, after a period of time, deactivate. The purpose of life is to while away the intervening time as pleasantly as possible.

If that's the purpose of life, then work is not a vocation, but something that interferes with the higher good of leisure. If that's the purpose of life, why have a child, when children are so much trouble--and, after all, what good are they, really? If that's the purpose of life, why spend it worrying about neighbors? If that's the purpose of life, what could possibly be the attraction of a religion that says otherwise?

The same self-absorption in whiling away life as pleasantly as possible explains why Europe has become a continent that no longer celebrates greatness. When life is a matter of whiling away the time, the concept of greatness is irritating and threatening. What explains Europe's military impotence? I am surely simplifying, but this has to be part of it: If the purpose of life is to while away the time as pleasantly as possible, what can be worth dying for?

The process of disintegration of Western Culture has not happened over night. Societies can live for a while on borrowed cultural capital, so to speak, mores and attitudes which remain as holdovers for a time long after the beliefs upon which those attitudes were based have died out, in the same way that the moribund economies of Europe have existed for quite a while on borrowed money. But of course eventually it all plays out; the bond ratings plummet, the banks will no longer loan, the balloon payments come due--and a new generation is born distant enough from the last believers that all connection to meaning is lost.

Murray's point is that "the happiness of the people", or as he later calls it, "deep satisfactions" only come from important things done with much effort and for which one must be responsible for the consequences. He identifies these important things in four categories: family, community, vocation, and faith. Let me submit that apart from the Biblical worldview and perspective none of these things has any meaning. We are left with John Lennon's dream of narcissistic bliss,

Imagine there's no Heaven
It's easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people
Living for today

Well, we don't have to imagine it anymore because we can see it living in the flesh throughout the European Union today--and more and more in the coastal metropolises here in the United States. Life can certainly be pleasant, even pleasurable without meaning, but the "deep satisfactions" of happiness in the Aristotelian sense--of a "life well lived"--can never really be achieved.

My quote from Ecclesiastes embeds this truth within it. Just a few verses prior Solomon bemoans the futility of his work because of his bitterness at having to leave it, after he dies, to someone who didn't have to work for it. It's only when God is included in the equation, and the meaning the eternal perspective gives to life, that he is able to reconcile the goodness of his labor and can truly savor his accomplishments.

Merry Incarnation!

2009-12-23T15:46:00.000-08:00

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)

Scrapbook From Hell

2009-07-10T09:54:00.000-07:00

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

Meaning, Hope & Power

2009-04-12T16:05:00.000-07:00

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:

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!"

The Devil's Delusion

2009-03-15T13:07:00.000-07:00

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:

(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.

How NOT to help the poor (or "Unconditional" part 2)

2008-10-25T15:06:00.000-07:00

As a follow-up to my recent blog post, Unconditional, I emailed Dr. Marvin Olasky to ask him if there was some sort of list or clearinghouse for the type of early American-modeled, faith-based charities he described in The Tragedy of American Compassion. Dr. Olasky was gracious enough answer my email the very next day. After telling me that he had read my blog post, and complimenting my comments, he forwarded this link to Acton Institute's Samaritan Guide, an online guide that provides detailed information on hundreds of private charities around the country. This unique charities rating resource is intended to be a reference for charities and donors alike, encouraging good practices and prudent investments. In my email to Dr. Olasky I had expressed disappointment in my efforts to locate a faith-based charity here in the Portland area that followed seven principles of effective compassion:
Affiliation
Bonding
Categorization
Discernment
Employment
Freedom
God (Spirituality)

Alas, after reviewing the Samaritan Guide I remain frustrated as there seemed to be very few charities in the Portland area, or even in the state of Oregon, listed in the guide. I will have to continue my search, I suppose, by contacting local organizations and asking myself how closely if at all they adhere to those seven principles.

Searching the Samaritan Guide, and further, the Acton Institute web site, I did find this YouTube film posted on their blog, entitled, How Not to Help the Poor. Just click on the arrow in the middle of the viewing screen.

How would Jesus Vote?

2008-09-30T18:57:00.000-07:00

Would Jesus Be a Democrat or a Republican?

I encountered this question recently in a film for Church small groups, produced, written and directed by Lake Oswego's own Dan Merchant, called Lord, Save Us From Your Followers. The question was posed to passersby, street interviews being a large part of the film. Some of the respondents said, "Democrat," and some said, "Republican," but by far the most popular answer--at least as shown by Merchant--was, "He wouldn't care." A few who gave this answer seemed to breath it with a hint of sadness, brows knit with feeling, as though the question itself betrayed an uncharitable intent by the interrogator.

Biblically speaking the question is not so much uncharitable as incoherent, because of course if Jesus were once again here on this earth in physical form, Democrats and Republicans, Socialists and Libertarians, Communists and Anarchists, and adherents of every other political party, ideology or system of thought would either fall at His feet in worship or otherwise be forced to acknowledge that He is the final and complete ruler of the Earth. The time for voting will have ended forever.

His eyes are like a flame of fire, and on his head are many diadems, and he has a name written that no one knows but himself. He is clothed in a robe dipped in blood, and the name by which he is called is The Word of God. And the armies of heaven, arrayed in fine linen, white and pure, were following him on white horses. From his mouth comes a sharp sword with which to strike down the nations, and he will rule them with a rod of iron. He will tread the winepress of the fury of the wrath of God the Almighty. On his robe and on his thigh he has a name written, King of kings and Lord of lords. (Revelation 19:12-16 ESV)

A perfectly reasonable question, however, is, "what candidate or legislative policies can we vote for that will most closely align with God's mandates?" This question is not only reasonable, it's indispensable. But whether from Biblical illiteracy, or ignorance of issues and policies, many Christians are not asking this question of themselves. Even for those who are both Biblically and politically informed, it can be challenging to answer and almost always a matter of trade-offs. But then most of life's problems are. This is where Scriptural understanding of degrees of both sin and righteousness play a crucial role: without it we are helpless in weighing competing goods against each other, or discerning the lesser of two evils.

For the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and of marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart. (Hebrews 4:12 ESV)

All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness... (2 Timothy 3:16 ESV)

These choices may not be as difficult as they may seem at first blush, however. What can appear as an overwhelming task if one were to have to examine the minutia of each and every policy of a given candidate and submit those many details to Scriptural scrutiny, can be simplified greatly by looking at the underlying philosophy of government itself that competing candidates hold. Christian apologist Greg Koukl has a good article on this which you can access here. This reduces the argument to one of questioning what is the Biblical role of government. Koukl makes the argument--convincingly I would say--that the New Testament role of government is quite limited to that of justice (the punishment of criminals) and equity (that it should treat its citizens equally and fairly) quoting Romans 13:3,4

For rulers are not a terror to good conduct, but to bad. Would you have no fear of the one who is in authority? Then do what is good, and you will receive his approval, for he is God’s servant for your good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for he does not bear the sword in vain. For he is the servant of God, an avenger who carries out God’s wrath on the wrongdoer.

That this sounds remarkably similar to the opening paragraph of the U.S. Constitution--establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare-- is, I think, no accident but was rather by careful intent by the founders of our country.

So if the Biblical view of government is one of limited influence, what is the non-Biblical alternative with which we are most commonly presented? Allow me the conceit of quoting myself from a post on my political blog which I wrote at the beginning of this year:

Implicit in their speeches is the idea that government is a force for good, and if government, through the exercise of "progressive" ideals, is good, then more government is better. Implicit, too, is the idea that human problems can be--not ameliorated, but solved--through the wise and progressive application of government. Disease, poverty, ignorance, bigotry--perhaps even loneliness--are all human problems that can be eradicated by this redefinition of humanity and the politics of meaning. (You can access the entire post here).

To be sure there are definite single issues that are defining as coinciding with the Biblical and Christian worldview--the sanctity and dignity of human life in all its stages and conditions; the sanctity and uniqueness of monogamous marriage; the preeminence of moral obligation to God over obligation to the state--and those should certainly be taken into account. But in the ambiguous issues we can use this understanding to more easily determine the Biblical way to vote: is the underlying political philosophy of the candidate one of limited government, constrained in its sphere of authority, or is it a philosophy of government as panacea in which almost every part of human life it can play a constructive, benevolent, even parental role?

First, supplications, prayers, intercessions and thanksgivings should be made on behalf of all men: for kings and rulers in positions of responsibility, so that our common life may be lived in peace and quiet, with a proper sense of God and of our responsibility to him for what we do with our lives. (1 Timothy 2:1,2 Phillips translation)

Unconditional

2008-09-21T19:03:00.000-07:00

In all things I have shown you that by working hard in this way we must help the weak and remember the words of the Lord Jesus, how he himself said, 'It is more blessed to give than to receive.'" (Acts 20:35 ESV)

I can no longer remember when I first heard the phrase, "unconditional love." It seems like it might have been some time in the 60s or 70s -- I know it was nothing I heard as a child. I do know that for quite a while it seemed a perfectly acceptable usage to me, and filled me with the same sense of warm fuzzies that others appeared to get from the phrase. I still affirm the idea that God's love for us is separate from any merit or deservedness on our part.

Of late, however, I have grown increasingly uncomfortable with the phrase, and more so upon my reading of Marvin Olasky's book, The Tragedy of American Compassion. (Olasky holds a PhD in American culture, is a professor at the University of Texas at Austin, and is editor-in-chief of World magazine.) In 1989 and 1990 Olasky, funded by a grant from the Heritage Foundation, researched the history of American charity to the poor, from colonial times to present, at the Library of Congress, research upon which he based his book. He outlines the early American model of compassion, and describes the surprisingly successful programs of the time, run almost exclusively by religious organizations. He identifies seven "marks of compassion" which characterized this early American model and were essential elements of its achievement: affiliation, bonding, categorization, discernment, employment, freedom, and God.

To quickly define these terms, affiliation focused on restoring the broken relationships with family, church and community of the needy. Bonding was required by volunteers with those whom they helped, in the true spirit of the word "compassion": to suffer with. Charities of the day carefully categorized their applicants between those "worthy of relief" (children, widows, those able and willing to work, and those unable to work due to disease or handicap), and the "unworthy, not entitled to relief" (the "shiftless and intemperate" who were unwilling to work). Discernment was then thoughtfully exercised in the type, degree and duration of aid given with the goal, for all for whom it was possible, to secure employment, and thereby restore (or perhaps for the first time secure) self-sufficiency, dignity, and freedom. And all was done in the name and to the glory of God.

All of this occurred during a time when American society endorsed the classic Judeo/Christian view of fallen man and sovereign God. But with the advent of, first, liberal Protestant theology, and later, secular/humanist worldview that denied the fallen nature of man and rather affirmed a natural goodness in human nature that would assert itself once social and physical necessities were met, a new template of compassion assumed American charity. Almost all of the marks of compassion that had once governed American charity were abandoned, and with them the role of government aid eclipsed that of the faith-based organizations--and with it the success they had experienced. In effect, "bad charity" drove out "good charity". The zenith of this movement was seen in the 1960s with the passing of unprecedented welfare entitlements and the professionalization of social work. The decades of the 1970s and 1980s saw the devaluation of marriage, a horrifying rise in unwed childbirth, and the formation of a multi-generational underclass dependent on government largess. True, no one was starving anymore, a basic level of physical need was met, but the social and moral aspects of poverty, and the sheer numbers of the dependent class grew exponentially.

Perhaps the worst tragedy is that this model of compassion, stripped of affiliation, bonding, categorization, discernment, and employment, has infected many faith-based efforts of charity, with results that early American charity pioneers warned of when first establishing their model of compassion. Consider this excerpt from the book:

Shortly before Christmas 1989, a Washington Post reporter, Stephen Buckley, interviewed eight men who were living in Northwest Washington in a tent made by tying a bright blue tarpaulin over a grate that spewed hot air. Buckley noted that the men had sleeping bags, gloves, scarves, and boots, and lots of food: "Party trays with chicken and turnkey. Fruit. Boxes of crackers. Bags of popcorn. Canned goods. All donated by passersby." Some of the recipients probably were fathers, but they were not spending Christmas with their children.

Buckley also visited four men and two women who were camping on a heating grate on the eastern edge of the Ellipse, just south of the White House. The heat, along with "the generosity of private citizens who bring them food and clothes every night," meant that the campers "don't worry much about surviving the cold," Buckley reported. Indeed, visitors throughout the evening dropped off supplies; one woman brought fruit, nuts, and two dollars; three men brought a platter of cold cuts; and two other men hot chocolate, blankets, gloves, sweaters, and socks. One of the campers, a forty-one-year-old man who has been "largely homeless" for eleven years, noted that "the majority of clothes we have here now were dropped off by persons who were walking by and saw us here. They just thought they could bring something that would be helpful to us."

The unavoidable question presented by these stories is: do these indiscriminate gifts really help these people, or are they rather making things worse by enabling them to remain "homeless"?

Even evangelical programs of charity, done in the name of Christ, if devoid of the other marks of compassion in the early American model, are left only with freedom. But freedom to do what--roam the streets? Abuse drugs and alcohol? Continue to abandon one's children? Is this really demonstrating the "unconditional" love of God?

Consider another excerpt from the book which illustrates a different sort of contemporary faith-based charity organization that embraces the early American model of compassion:

Jim and Anne Pierson of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, for example, bought a large, old house named it House of His Creation, and over seven years provided shelter to two hundred pregnant women. The Piersons learned that the family structure of their home was crucial, because most the women who stayed with them had lacked a good family life. They had never seen a healthy mother-father or husband-wife relationship, and so had become cynics about marriage. Some of the residents at House of His Creation, freed from peer pressure to single-parent and able to see the importnace of dual-parenting, chose to place for adoption. Most also began thinking about marriage in a new healthy way.

The Pierson's next step was to act as catalysts for the development of family-base maternity homes. They formed the Christian Maternity Home/Single Parent Association (CMHA), which has thirty-two member homes, each with two house parents and six to eight pregnant women in residence. At one CMHA home, Sparrow House in Baltimore, houseparents draw each new resident into family life--for some, this is the only time in their lives that they have lived with a "mother" and a "father." The houseparents help each resident adjust to rules and responsibilities that may be new and hard to take at first. Since many of the young women have come from undisciplined lives, they are learning--maybe for the first time--to live with structure. They also learn to take their spiritual needs seriously. Sparrow House, like other CMHA homes, accepts needy women from any religious background, but the program's unapologetic base in Christian teaching is reminiscent of many in the late nineteenth century...The housemother spends many hours with the teenage mother but she does not assume babysitting responsibilities; if a teenage mother is desperate, the housemother takes over for a short time but only in exchange for doing laundry for the household or mowing the lawn. House-parents need to have inner strength and conviction that the child will be better off in the long run by maintaining a hands-off situation. They have to let the child cry longer than they would let him cry. The have to let his diaper be wetter than they would allow. The teenager has to learn that it is her responsibility. Christian Family Care Agency's tough love leads about half of the teenage mothers to realize that for both their good and their children's, they should choose adoption; the other half raise their children with a new appreciation of marriage and an awareness of their own limitations. Crucially, that knowledge has come in the safe environment of a family home, not it the dangerous terrain of a solitary apartment filled with the sounds of a crying child and a tired angry parent.

So perhaps this "tough love" is in reality a better expression of God's "unconditional" love than merely handing out food and clothing with no attendant personal responsibility required. And perhaps my own unease with the phrase "unconditional love" is in reality a disappointment with so many contemporary Christian charity programs that seem to have forsaken the classical view of compassion--that of suffering with--for the far easier, guilt-assuaging and self-congratulatory model of indiscriminate giving of food, clothing, or money.

For anyone considering faith-based giving or volunteer work, I urge you to read, and be challenged by The Tragedy of American Compassion.

Heart

2008-08-02T12:17:00.000-07:00

But what does it say? "The word is near you, in your mouth and in your heart" (that is, the word of faith that we proclaim); because, if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For with the heart one believes and is justified, and with the mouth one confesses and is saved. (Romans 10: 8-10 ESV)

The word "heart", in Western culture, in its symbolic or metaphorical sense, is used to mean the seat of emotions, or as a graphic substitute for love. Think of all the chintzy T-shirts, bumper stickers, baseball caps and various other miscellany of pop society that replaces the word "love" in the declaration of the object of affection (New York city, a baseball team, basset hounds, ad infinitum) with a simple greeting card picture of a red heart. But is this sense--the heart as the seat of the emotions, the one implied by the above verse? What does the Bible mean when it so often uses the word "heart"--or at least what is translated in English as such? The seat of the intellect? A combination of intellect and emotion? Something different, such as inner conviction?

The answer is no...and yes. No as to any one as being the answer, yes as to all of them--and more. Here is a partial list of the different meanings to the word heart implied by various scriptural texts:

The center of human rational-spiritual nature (I Cor. 7: 37, Rom. 6: 17)
The seat of love (I Tim. 1: 5)
The seat of hate (Lev. 19: 17)
The center of thought: it knows (Duet. 29:4), it understands (Acts 16: 14), it reflects (Luke 2: 19), it estimates (Prov. 12:25)
The center of feelings and affections: of joy (Isa. 65: 14), of pain (John 16: 6), of despair (Eccl. 2: 20), of fear (Psa. 143: 4)
The center of morality and conscience (Rom. 2: 15, I John 3: 19-21)
The seat of human fallen nature (Jer. 17: 9)
The dwelling place of Christ in us (Eph. 3: 17), and of the Holy Spirit (II Cor. 1:22)

The above list only begins to touch the depth of meaning in Scripture with regard to its use of the word heart. Here and here are a couple of links to online Bible dictionary resources for further study.

Familiar words can sometimes present a trap in that our eye passes over them without really engaging our thought. Whatever meaning lies closest to our consciousness--usually that which is culturally prevalent--is the one we "plug in" to the context. Let me, then, humbly suggest an alternate word to at least ponder; that one may temporarily substitute for heart to strip away the contemporary Western meaning and its limited implications, one that might help us grasp the more complete significance of its intent: essence. It denotes the inner, spiritual aspect of human nature, but also the all-encompassing mix of intellect, emotion, conviction, personality and identity. In such a thought experiment, the framing text above would read:

But what does it say? "The word is near you, in your mouth and in your essence." (that is, the word of faith that we proclaim); because, if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your essence that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For with the essence one believes and is justified, and with the mouth one confesses and is saved.

Give it some thought, and perhaps temporarily substitute a word of your own. My point is not a call for an alternate translation; just a clearer understanding of the meaning of the text.

Remembering Tom

2008-07-26T18:53:00.000-07:00

For those of you who are unaware, I had to move my mother into an adult care home recently. Nan and I (mostly Nan) just finalized the sale of her double-wide mobile home, and today, as I was going through some of her things in preparation to storing them up in my attic, I came upon the eulogy I gave for my half-brother Tom, November 22, 1996. My mother had printed it out and put it in a plastic sleeve with a cover sheet on which was printed a graphic of a dove, the words, "In Loving Memory", and to which she pasted the tiny notice from the Oregonian obituary page of his death and funeral services at Lighthouse Mission Church in Portland.

I hadn't read this since I spoke these words almost twelve years ago, but was once again moved by the emotion and sentiment that inspired me to write it, and so thought it fitting to share it here.

Tom Mitchell was my brother. Our father was a preacher, so I guess it was natural that we both wanted to follow that same path. For me it was a stroll that ultimately led to a cul-de-sac, but for Tom it was a journey that lasted most of his life.

Aside from the fact that Tom and I had different mothers, our upbringings were quite different. Throughout his adolescence, Tom was raised by our father's sister and her husband, Aunt Flora and Uncle Burl, during which time, if I correctly recall my brother's stories, he rebelled against all things religious. He did, however, discover athletics and, with some distinction, ran the high hurdles and played football in high school. Once, when I saw among his things an old slide-rule in a worn leather case, he confided in me that his mathematical abilities were such that Lockheed had offered him a full scholarship to M.I.T. But professional athletics and aerospace engineering were not to be for Tom: when he converted from that most common religion of American adolescent males--an "angry young man"--to Christianity, Tom knew that the ministry was to be his life.

I know little of the beginnings of his ministry. I know he didn't attend Bible school or college of any kind. As to how or where he acquired his considerable preaching abilities, I'm at a loss, other than the belief that it was Tom's gift from God. I remember him mentioning from time to time that he worked for a short while at the paper mill in Moss Point, Mississippi where he had lived with Aunt Flora and Uncle Burl. But I presume that after that he began to preach and through whatever opportunities were afforded him by local pastors, and by virtue of his ardor and drive, never looked back.

My first memory of Tom was of when I was perhaps five years old. Tom would have been 21 or 22 then. He seemed huge to me, maybe because he was almost half a foot taller than our father; and with his bright red hair, and broad smile, and abundant catalogue of funny voices and faces, I thought he was the most wonderful person I had ever met. I loved him almost more than I could bear. When I was seven he taught me to play chess...chess to a seven year old: how he had the patience I will never know. But from that moment on I would beg him unmercifully to play with me. He always beat me horribly, of course. Even after we were grown, I only recall capturing his king once. But I always came back for more. I was playing with my big brother: that was payment enough for the most grim defeat.

When I was eight I took a long trip with Tom. We traveled from Yuma, Arizona to Dallas, Texas where the Church of God (the organization with which he was ordained) held its general assembly. After a week there, we went on to my Aunt Flora's and Uncle Burl's house in Moss Point, Mississippi where I was introduced to traditional Southern afternoon "dinner" (supper is the evening meal in the South) of black-eyed peas with ham hocks and cornbread sticks. And finally we went on to Tampa, Florida where I met Tom's very gracious mother, and my sister Susan. Again I fell madly in love.

When I was nine my sister Joanne came to visit, and I discovered that my brother Tom's singing was a family trait. She was for many years a member and often soloist in the Tampa Metropolitan Opera. She sang on my father's local Sunday afternoon TV show and the switchboard at the station was flooded with calls for the rest of the day. They continued to receive calls for weeks after from people wanting to know when she would sing again. Now I had two sisters and a brother to love.

Two years later I took another trip with Tom; this time to travel with him on the evangelistic field. We drove each other a little bit crazy: I was a slightly precocious and insufferably obnoxious child away from his parents, and he was a bachelor, by now set in his ways and used to coming and going as he pleased. But during the day we golfed together and played board games and practiced the guitar. And every night at church I would sing and "testify"--usually anecdotes and metaphorical stories I had plagiarized...from Tom, of course--and then sit and glory in the fire and passion of my bother's preaching. Never did he fail to move me. Never was he clumsy or tongue-tied. Night after night he wove elegant tapestries of words, sermons like symphonies in which each movement and variation built to a final crescendo of emotion. When, a few years after that, I began to preach, it was Tom, not my father, who was my ideal and pattern.

Tom was never to marry. There were a few close calls, but the demands and rigors of his first love--the ministry--always seemed to conflict with courtship. I believe he would have been a wonderful father. He seemed to me to be much better with children than I am. I remember how happy he was when my sons were born, how he indulged them and took interest in their most minor achievements. But if he had no children of his own, he certainly had no lack of surrogates. Of all the children in all the churches I ever visited with Tom, I never saw one who did not seem drawn to him or was not amused by the same easy manner of his that won me over as a child.

For many years Tom was like a wandering nomad, possessing only the few modest items he could pack into the truck of his car, relying on the hospitality of the churches at which he preached to provide him a bed. It was often a lonely exhausting life and at times an exercise in deprivation. He had no security, no savings, no retirement fund, no insurance, and no mate with whom to share his life. But always he was meeting people, helping people, reaching out, lifting up. My brother probably had more fiends than anyone I've ever met. And finally things began to get a little better for him. Finally, here in Portland, he found a place to plant at least one or two roots; a place where he could travel from and come back to. He had a long tenure as assistant pastor of Peninsular Open Bible Church under pastor Pearl Short. And later, after more very hard times, Tom returned to Portland and found his final home at Lighthouse Mission Church. It was a homecoming in more ways than one for Tom, like a great circle in the arc of his life; Dan Wold (the pastor of Lighthouse Mission Church) tells me that it was with his grandfather, dear Brother DeVrees--a wonderful man of God whom many of us, including me, remember with great affection--it was with Brother DeVrees that Tom got his start in evangelism.

I witnessed a change in Tom as he finally settled here. The life of a revivalist is a troublesome one, especially at the minimalist scope at which Tom operated--a life with which I am well acquainted, for I lived it with my father and mother throughout my adolescence. It is often filled with concern verging on desperation. Where is your next meeting? How will you get there? What do you do when a church cancels a two-week revival two days before you were supposed to start, and your checking account is empty? I won't bore you with Tom's financial troubles other than to say they were many and seemingly endless. The many years he spent on the road had taken its toll. But here in Portland, at Lighthouse Mission Church, finally he could begin to relax. He could experience the small routines that for most of us comprise the bulk of life. And he got to experience a new kind of travel: one different from the scrabbling-for-survival kind he had done in that past. Now he was able to go places he had only dreamed of before. I know he loved going to those far-off places--Kenya, Israel, Greece, Hong Kong--he always brought gifts back to all of us, and told us about the sights he had seen, the people he had met. And best of all, he had a place to come back to, a home in which to unpack his bags, shelves upon which he arrange his mementos.

Perhaps the most poignant fact of Tom's life was the love he engendered in those around him. Not just his family, though we did indeed love him--more than we can express--but also the overwhelming number of people he affected. I am proud of my brother that the measure of his life is not his possessions--for he had almost none; nor his industry--for though often a craftsman, that was not his vocation; or even his artistry--for though he did write songs and sermons, that was not his most noble achievement. The truest measure of my brother's life is the hundreds of people who knew and cared for him, and whose lives were enriched by his fellowship. That is a legacy that will far outlive possessions, or structures, or artistry. It is a legacy embedded in the lives of those whom he touched. It is a legacy of life. It is a legacy of love.

Wedding

2008-06-23T17:48:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I had the honor and privilege of performing the wedding ceremony of my oldest son, Nigel, and his bride Janelle. I was quite moved when he asked me: first to be so considered by him, and second as it is a continuation of a tradition started by my father who performed my wedding ceremony.

I'm posting the ceremony here as a way of sharing my joy with anyone who wishes to read it. The greeting and vows are a slight reworking of traditional vows. The prayer and message were written by me.

Greeting

Dear friends, out of affection for Nigel Mitchell and Janelle Clark we have gathered together to witness and bless their mutual vows which will unite them in marriage. To this moment they bring the fullness of their hearts as a treasure to share with one another. They bring the dreams which bind them together. They bring that particular personality and spirit which is uniquely their own, and out of which will grow the reality of their life together. We rejoice with them as the outward symbol of an inward union of hearts, a union, blessed by God, created by friendship, respect and love.

No person should attend a wedding without giving thanks to God for the sacrament of marriage, and renewing in his heart the vows that are being taken for the first time by others. No person should leave without doing that for which he came..... praying that God's blessing may truly rest upon this man and this woman all the days of their life together. As you pray, so may you also receive a blessing. And so, let us pray:

Heavenly Father, as we have gathered to witness and celebrate the union of Nigel and Janelle in holy matrimony we pray your blessing and goodwill on their lives; we pray that your grace would envelop them, that your providence would protect them, that your word would guide them, and that your love would inspire them. This we ask in the name of Jesus. Amen.

Wedding message

Marriage has existed throughout human history, and whether we take the language of Genesis to be literal or figurative, the principle is the same: that God himself determined that it was not good for man to be alone. "So God created man in his own image; male and female he created them." Countless centuries later, Jesus clarified God's intentions and authenticated a Christian ethic of marriage which has informed Western Civilization's view, not just of the sacredness of marriage, but the responsibility and accountability of men and the dignity and humanity of women, elevated from the status of chattel characterized by so many pre-christian and non-christian cultures. In the Gospel of Matthew we read that Jesus said, "Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, 'Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh?' So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate."

Fundamental to this Christian ethic is that, rather than property acquisition, social status, or business or political alliance, marriage is to be based on love. The apostle Paul put it this way in his letter to the Ephesians: "Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, so that he might present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish. In the same way husbands should love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. For no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as Christ does the church..."

It's fitting that this, perhaps most radical idea of all--that this life-long commitment and bonding of family should find its source in mutual love--is the one we most revere. It fuels our stories--our literature, films, poetry, music--indeed almost all of our art. And it's why, today, we have gathered to celebrate this declaration of love, and these vows of commitment.

Wedding vows: Nigel & Janelle face each other join right hands

(to the Groom) Do you, Nigel Mitchell, in the presence of God,family and friends, promise to love and to cherish, in sickness and in health, in prosperity and in adversity, this woman whose right hand you now hold? Do you promise to be to her in all things a true and faithful husband, to be devoted to her, and to her only, as long as life shall last? And do you take her to be your lawful, wedded wife, as long as you both shall live? (He answers “I do.”)

(to the Bride) Do you, Janelle Clark, in the presence of God, family and friends, promise to love and to cherish, in sickness and in health, in prosperity and in adversity, this man whose right hand you now hold? Do you promise to be to him in all things a true and faithful wife, to be devoted to him, and to him only, as long as life shall last? Do you take him to be your lawfully, wedded husband, as long as you both shall live? (She answers, “I do.”)

Ring vows

Let us pray. Bless, O Lord, the giving and receiving of these rings. May Nigel and Janelle abide in Your peace and grow in their knowledge of Your presence through their loving union. May the seamless circle of these rings become the symbol of their enduring love and serve to remind them of the holy covenant into which they have entered today to be faithful, loving, and kind to each other. Dear God, may they live in Your grace and be forever true to this union. Amen.

(to the groom) Nigel, repeat after me: "Janelle, I give you this ring as a symbol of our vows, ...and with all that I am, and all that I have, I honor you. ...In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. ...With this ring, I thee wed."

(to the bride) Janelle, repeat after me: "Nigel, I give you this ring as a symbol of our vows, ...and with all that I am, and all that I have, I honor you. ...In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. ...With this ring, I thee wed."

Pronouncement

Nigel and Janelle, you are now man and wife according to the witness of this assembly and the law of Oregon. Become one, Fulfill your promises. Love and serve the Lord. What therefore God has joined together, let no man separate. You may kiss the bride.

Presentation of the couple

Ladies and gentlemen, may I present to you mister and misses Nigel Mitchell!

The Law of Love

2008-06-15T19:05:00.000-07:00

If you really fulfill the royal law according to the Scripture, "You shall love your neighbor as yourself," you are doing well. But if you show partiality, you are committing sin and are convicted by the law as transgressors. For whoever keeps the whole law but fails in one point has become accountable for all of it. For he who said, "Do not commit adultery," also said, "Do not murder." If you do not commit adultery but do murder, you have become a transgressor of the law.(James 2:8-11 ESV)

A prevalent concept among evangelicals is that the law of Moses was superseded by Jesus with a simple ethic of love; as though all one has to do under the new covenant of Christ is love God and all the rest will take care of itself. One unspoken implication of this is an interpretation of love as a sentiment. In other words, have the right emotions, feel a certain way, and you're okay. As if this were not bad enough, a more crucial implication is that this idea of loving God is something that Jesus introduced as distinct and different from the law of Moses. Nothing could be further from the truth.

When the lawyer asked Jesus what the greatest commandment of the Law was, and Jesus answered,"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,"(Matthew 22:37-40 ESV), Jesus was actually quoting the law himself, specifically Deuteronomy 6:5 and Leviticus 19:18. Consider, for instance, that in the Gospel of Luke the tables are turned and Jesus asks a lawyer, "What is written in the Law? How do you read it?", and the lawyer answers with the same two verses. What Jesus and all his Mosaic Law scholar-interrogators understood perfectly well was that love was not distinct from the Law: it was the law. All the rest of it, the rules, and commandments and prohibitions were merely the practical outworking of that law of love.

The radical part of Jesus' message was to identify how pallid and compromised human interpretation of that law had become, and how hopeless it was to achieve by self-righteous effort. When Jesus assented to the lawyer's answer, and the lawyer, desiring to justify himself, said to Jesus, "And who is my neighbor?" (Luke 10:29), Jesus answered him with the parable of the good Samaritan, an object of racial loathing by pious Jews of the day.

When Jesus told his disciples how difficult it would be for a rich person to enter the Kingdom of God, they despaired: "Who then can be saved" But Jesus looked at them and said, "With man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible." (Matthew 19:25,26 ESV)

This is the hopeless dilemma of man the apostle Paul spoke of: For I delight in the law of God, in my inner being, but I see in my members another law waging war against the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members, (Romans 7:22,23 ESV)

Judged by this law of love, when I look to my own self I see what a pathetic and degenerate sinner I am, thoroughly lost without God's grace and the justification of Christ; for if I am commanded, in the very first and most important commandment, to love God with all my being, I cannot in all honesty, identify even one moment when I have loved God with all my heart and all my soul and all my mind.

...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.
No condemnation now hangs over the head of those who are "in" Jesus Christ. For the new spiritual principle of life "in" Christ lifts me out of the old vicious circle of sin and death.
The Law never succeeded in producing righteousness - the failure was always the weakness of human nature. But God has met this by sending his own Son Jesus Christ to live in that human nature which causes the trouble. And, while Christ was actually taking upon himself the sins of men, God condemned that sinful nature. (Romans 7:24-8:3 Phillips translation)

But now we are seeing the righteousness of God declared quite apart from the Law (though amply testified to by both Law and Prophets) - it is a righteousness imparted to, and operating in, all who have faith in Jesus Christ. (For there is no distinction to be made anywhere: everyone has sinned, everyone falls short of the beauty of God's plan.) Under this divine system a man who has faith is now freely acquitted in the eyes of God by his generous dealing in the redemptive act of Jesus Christ. God has appointed him as the means of propitiation, a propitiation accomplished by the shedding of his blood, to be received and made effective in ourselves by faith. God has done this to demonstrate his righteousness both by the wiping out of the sins of the past (the time when he withheld his hand), and by showing in the present time that he is a just God and that he justifies every man who has faith in Jesus Christ. (Romans 3:21-26 Phillips translation)

Awe

2008-05-26T12:26:00.000-07:00

Holy and awesome is his name! The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom; all those who practice it have a good understanding. His praise endures forever! (Psalms 111:9,10 ESV)

It seems to me at times that with some of our contemporary forms of worship we are losing a sense of awe for God. The use of "boyfriend-girlfriend" language in worship songs can inspire many emotions--tenderness, affection, even gratitude--but not awe.

There is a sense of familiarity with God implied in Jesus' use of the pronoun "Abba," (which is more accurately analogous to "Papa" rather than "Daddy" as some have claimed), but there is a danger in overemphasizing this familiarity if, with it, we lose the proper sense of fear and self-abasement included in our necessary awe of God.

Trends within the American Evangelical movement pull in this direction, one of the most influential being the "seeker sensitive" template of church service pioneered by Willow Creek Community Church in one of the suburbs of Chicago. The motive behind it has the best of intentions: evangelical outreach. The theory was to make "church" less intimidating and off-putting to the non-believer. Willow Creek did extensive market research of the Madison Avenue type (surveys and focus groups) to arrive at a form of church obsevance that would serve that end. Music should be contemporary rock and pop styling, no old hymns or archaic language. Clothing should be casual--no robes for the ministers, no suits or formal dresses for the laity. And most of all, anonymity. Visitors should not be identified, acknowledged or approached by anyone before, during, or after the service, but all contact should be done strictly through a card the visitor can fill out on a voluntary basis.

To whatever degree this template has been successful in evangelical outreach, I find it troubling that little thought seems to be given to the result this has had on the body of believers. Obvious questions present themselves: is Christian worship service really the best venue for evangelical outreach? Should we really accommodate worship to the popular culture so as to make it palatable to the nonbeliever? Are we diluting worship and ministry to the body of Christ by appealing to a non-spiritual--or even non-christian--cultural common denominator?

Jesus often warned that aspects of the Gospel were loathsome to the world, warned that there was a cost to being his follower.

If the world hates you, know that it has hated me before it hated you.(John 15:18 ESV)

If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple. (Luke 14:26 ESV)

This last quotation--obviously, I think, an example of hyperbole--is ripe for misinterpretation, yet a perfect example of the appropriate self-effacement essential to an awe of God; also a perfect example of an attitude abhorrent to contemporary culture. If there is anything our culture affirms to us, it is that we should love ourselves, that we should put ourselves first, that we "owe" ourselves the best and the most. Against this backdrop Jesus gives the horrifying command that we place ourselves last.

But whoever would be great among you must be your servant, and whoever would be first among you must be your slave, even as the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many." (Matthew 20:26-28 ESV)

As I discussed this post with my wife, she challenged me: "how would you do things different?"

Fair enough. Let me offer these humble suggestions:

1. More depth and demanding lyric content in worship music. There is a long and established history of Christian worship music conforming to the prevailing style of the day; as the story goes, Martin Luther wrote A Mighty Fortress is our God to the tune of a common drinking song of his time, so I am not arguing against contemporary music, but rather contemporary lyric style. One of the marks of American pop music, whether it be rock, folk, country, or even show tunes, is repetition. Much of contemporary worship music has borrowed this lyric convention from popular music--to its severe detriment, I submit. And so we often have one or two short verses and a chorus that is repeated, sometimes ad nauseam. Some Christian authors engaged in this debate have called such music, "happy clappy." I have already made reference to "boyfriend-girlfriend" language in worship music; I think the avoidance of romantic and sentimental language in worship music would also be an important move. Let me offer this challenge as an illustration: find one contemporary worship song that demonstrates even half of the depth and theological content of the six verses of Amazing Grace.

2. More formality. I think it a testament to how counter to popular culture this idea is, that I feel almost self-reproachful in writing those words. (I imagine eyes rolling and the heaving of deep sighs from those of you who read this.) Nevertheless, I remain firm: yes, more formality: formality in dress, formality in speech, formality in manners. I'm not going to say much about this, I'd just like you to consider it, to ponder what this might mean, and what effect it might have on our children.

3. More sobriety in mood. What I mean by this is more of a balance or, perhaps a broader spectrum of emotion within worship. Contemporary worship seems almost entirely focused on the "up" side of the emotional range. An even cursory reading of the Psalms will demonstrate that Biblical worship encompasses all of human emotion, the dirge as well as the song of joy.

So then, my dearest friends, as you have always followed my advice - and that not only when I was present to give it - so now that I am far away be keener than ever to work out the salvation that God has given you with a proper sense of awe and responsibility. For it is God who is at work within you, giving you the will and the power to achieve his purpose. (Philippians 2:12,13 the J.B. Phillips translation)

Expelled!

2008-04-20T08:32:00.001-07:00

I just came home from watching Ben Stein's new documentary "Expelled." You might remember Stein from his performance in the 80s teen movie Ferris Bueler's Day Off as the dead-pan teacher asking hopelessly, "anyone? anyone?," or his TV game show on the Comedy Central channel, Ben Stein's Money, or his commentaries on the TV show Sunday Morning. In Expelled Stein examines the ideological stranglehold that the established scientific and academic communities have in deciding orthodoxy with regard to Darwinist evolution to the absolute exclusion of the incipient Intelligent Design movement. The previous sentence implies a dry sort of clinical approach, but Stein's demeanor, and especially the director's adroit use of inter-cut clips from old black and white films--quite a few of which seem to be 50s era grade school instructionals--give the movie real, at times laugh-out-loud, humor.

Stein interviews many leading lights in the Intelligent Design movement, as well as its most ardent detractors: Dennet, Hitchens, Dawkins and Eugenie Scott, head of an organization whose whole existence is devoted to excluding Intelligent Design from the American classroom and preserving Dawinism as educational dogma, the National Center For Science Education.

Perhaps his primary focus, however, is with interviewing scientists, academics,and even journalists who have been ostracized, ridiculed, denied tenure, fired and then blacklisted for the mere passing mention of the possible validity of Intelligent Design.

There is, as well, a fascinating, if disturbing and all too short, examination of the darkest historical consequences of Dawinism: the Eugenics movement in the United States in which, after the tireless lobbying of Margaret Sanger (founder of Planned Parenthood) many thousands of retarded Americans were forcibly sterilized, and in Nazi Germany 70,000 retarded, genetically handicapped, or people otherwise deemed by the state as "useless eaters" were gassed and cremated in the interest of strengthening humanity.

The film is capped off by an interview with Richard Dawkins that proves squirm-inducing with embarrassing humor when this most caustic and vituperative voice in opposition to all things God--author of The God Delusion in which he asserts that religious instruction of children is a form of child abuse and should be made illegal--finally admits that Intelligent Design might eventually prove to be true, but only if the intelligent designer turns out to be--(I'm not kidding)--an advanced extra-terrestrial race who must have itself derived from the non-determinate forces of natural selection (Dawinism).

I was thrilled at this movie because it's something I've never seen before: a film with nationwide release with excellent production values, humor and skill, from a conservative and monotheistic viewpoint. I want to see more films like this. Many, many more. With that in mind I'm encouraging all my friends, acquaintances, and anyone else whose ear I can get, to go see this film. Don't wait for it to come out on video. If everyone does that it will ensure that any similar future projects will only be released on video. The way to support good art, the way to encourage more good art, is to buy it.

Creature or Creator?

2008-03-15T15:30:00.000-07:00

It is not that they do not know the truth about God; indeed he has made it quite plain to them. For since the beginning of the world the invisible attributes of God, e.g. his eternal power and divinity, have been plainly discernible through things which he has made and which are commonly seen and known... (Romans 1:19,20 Phillips translation)
It's a long held understanding in Christian teaching that one of the ways in which man shares in God's image is that he creates; and certainly one of the things man creates is art. Sacred themes are so dominant in the history of the art of Western civilization that they far outnumbered secular subjects for many centuries. The Renaissance in Southern Europe and the Reformation in Northern Europe brought the most pronounced changes in this regard, but with different outcomes as argued by Francis Schaeffer in How Should We Then Live? Both still held God as the sovereign creator, and celebrated the sacred with perhaps the most superlative craft, artistic achievement, and beauty ever produced by human hands. See, for example, from Southern Europe, Carrivaggio's Madonna of the Rosary:

And from Northern (Reformation) Europe, Rembrandt's Abraham and Isaac:

However, Southern Europe perpetuated the secular/sacred divide taught by prior generations of theologians, followed the humanist philosophical thread of the Renaissance by such philosophers as Erasmus that eventually lead to the centrality of man in the Enlightenment. The Reformation theologians, by placing scripture in ascendancy over tradition and the hierarchy of the clergy, taught a worldview that denied a secular/sacred divide, that instead affirmed that all vocations were in equal service to God. In this view all representations of God's beautiful creation, that through the skill of the painter celebrated that creation, were acts of worship. So then even the domestic scenes of Vermeer, who, although he had converted to his wife's Catholicism nevertheless painted for a reformed christian clientele, were seen as glorifying to God. Or Albrecht Durer's Young Hare

is of equivalent reverence as his Praying Hands.

As the atheistic philosophers of the Enlightenment began to exert more and more influence in the circles of the intelligentsia of Europe, some of the first to reflect this thinking empirically in their work were artists. Detached from God and any consideration of his creation, the underlying motive was no longer a celebration of beauty and the extant creation, but a celebration of the artist's inner vision. The goal was no longer to represent the truth of an objective reality, but to conceive an object of originality from the artist's unique perceptions. This started first with mere distortion of the visible world with the Impressionists such as Monet, Renoir, and Degas. Post-Impressionists Van Gogh, Cezzane & Seurat followed quickly on their heels. Observe the fragmentation of form and color in Van Gogh's Starry Night, and its shattering difference from the paintings above:

Even at this, there was still a tenuous connection to the real world, distorted as it was--but it wasn't to last long. As the culture became increasingly removed from God, and any remnants of faith more compartmentalized in the artist's worldview, painting became more and more idiosyncratic so that all connection to reality was sacrificed to the goal of originality, novelty and the artist's conceptions. Abstract Expressionism, Cubism and a host of other "schools" of painting flourished in the fine art world. In the 1930s Jackson Pollock made a "splash" on the New York art scene with his drip style of painting.

It is something of the ultimate idiosyncrasy, born of whim, chance, and seemly thoughtless kinetic expression, without the slightest intent to represent anything other than what the observer sees: a random and disorganized mix of color and contrast that Pollock called simply, No. 5. But even this pales to Shawn Eichman's National Endowment for the Arts funded piece she called the "Alchemy Cabinet," which displayed her own dismembered second-trimester aborted baby next to the obligatory twisted wire coat hanger.

When we apply Paul's injunction to the Colossian church--Whatever you do, put your whole heart and soul into it, as into work done for God, and not merely for men - knowing that your real reward, a heavenly one, will come from God, since you are actually employed by Christ, (Colossians 3:23,24 Phillips translation)--we can exercise creativity, whether in the industrial, service, or fine arts, and know that we are participating in the nature of God, and even worshiping God by our work. If, however, we take the view that our work is something separate from our relationship with God, that our work life resides in a compartment delineated from our faith life, we run the risk of going down the path that has lead to the abominations that are so much of modern art.

...whatever you do, eating or drinking or anything else, everything should be done to bring glory to God. (1 Corinthians 10:31 Phillips translation)

Eulogy for Uncle Bud

2008-03-01T11:59:00.000-08:00

My wife's uncle "Bud" Throckmorton just passed away in Colorado Springs. The following is a eulogy I gave for Bud at a family memorial service we had here in Tigard, Oregon at my sister's-in-law house.

I knew very little about Uncle Bud other than his quiet demeanor and his occasional dry wit, so I called Uncle John the other night and asked him to tell me what he could remember. It seems John was a very young child when Bud shipped off to Europe in World War II, so he has no memory of him until his return from the war. He was able to tell me little about Bud's war experience other than he fought in the Battle of the Bulge and was awarded the bronze star, since Bud was reluctant to ever speak of what he had seen or done. He had had long talks with Grandma Throckmorton when he first got back, but then rarely ever spoke of it again. And whatever he told her went with her to her grave.

Soon after his return, Uncle John, Grandma and Grandpa Throckmorton went to Venezuela for a year, leaving Bud and Great Grandpa McChesney (Grandma Throckmorton's father) to take care of the farm. Bud found, during that year, that he loathed farming which he called "dirt grubbing."

He married his first real girlfriend, Aunt Jean, whose ambition was to have 10 children--they only made it to 7. With all those mouths to feed, hunting was a necessary supplement to the family food budget. It was a skill he had honed from prior necessity during his childhood during the Great Depression. John said that during hunting season, he would often leave before dawn during work days to hunt a few hours before heading to his job. Venison was a family staple.

I'm sure there a thousand examples of this kind of stoic practicality in Bud's life, a man who was typical of his time, who answered the call of his country to war and without complaint, endured its horrors, then returned and set about the business of raising a family, getting the things done that needed doing--but I can only guess at them. He didn't leave a written record, or, if the few pictures Nan was able to find of him is any example, much of a pictorial one either. But he left the legacy of 7 children and the 50 plus years as a faithful husband of one wife. I guess that will speak better than any words he might have written, or that any of us can say.

One bitter-sweet detail that John told me is that at the end, as Bud knew his time was short, he expressed the fear that the things he had been obliged to do during the war would prevent his entrance to heaven. I'm saddened to think that the gospel message had not been made clear to him that it is not our good deeds that gains us access to God's presence, but God's grace through Jesus Christ, as Paul said to the Ephesian Christians, "...he shows for all time the tremendous generosity of the grace and kindness he has expressed towards us in Christ Jesus. It was nothing you could or did achieve - it was God's gift to you. No one can pride himself upon earning the love of God. The fact is that what we are we owe to the hand of God upon us." (Ephesians 2:7-9 Phillips translation) And the apostle John said, "...the blood which his Son shed for us keeps us clean from all sin. If we refuse to admit that we are sinners, then we live in a world of illusion and truth becomes a stranger to us. But if we freely admit that we have sinned, we find God utterly reliable and straightforward - he forgives our sins and makes us thoroughly clean from all that is evil." (1 John 1:7-9 Phillips translation)

Uncle John said someone--I don't remember who--set his mind at ease. So now, after all the hardships and good times, the disappointments and joys, and after all the plain hard work of his life, I hope Bud has finally entered the rest promised in the letter to the Hebrews, "There still exists, therefore, a full and complete rest for the people of God. And he who experiences his real rest is resting from his own work as fully as God from his." (Hebrews 4:9&10 Phillips translation)

Benevolence or Ego?

2008-01-18T23:39:00.000-08:00

So, God created humans simply so that we could worship him? Why bother? That seems like the height of narcissism. (A comment from an atheist participant to an online forum on theology)

As our culture proceeds down the path of ever increasing secularism and the knowledge of Christian orthodoxy disappears from the popular psyche, statements like the one above will proliferate. Such sentiments are helped along by the new batch of belligerent atheists residing on the best-seller's lists who are not satisfied with simply repeating the arguments of Bertrand Russell against the existence of God, but seemed determined to indict the very idea of God as a fount of evil. So Richard Dawkins characterizes the instruction of children in Christian faith as a form of child abuse, and Christopher Hitchens titles his book, God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.

This kind of rhetoric can leave those of us who understand God as the source of all that is good and just and loving in our existence in a kind of stunned silence. It can be difficult to know where to even begin to defend God's fundamental goodness against this kind of rancorous assault, yet that is our challenge, and indeed our mandate from scripture: always being prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you(1 Peter 3:15 ESV).

Certainly some of the problem with answering such statements as the one above is that the truth of the matter is so self-evident it's hard to formulate an answer, such as when a child asks why the sky is blue followed by an interminable succession of "why?" questions; the temptation is to answer, "because I say so!" And perhaps in my analogy lies the real answer after all.

To think that our obligation to worship God means that God was narcissistic in creating us is equivalent to a child considering her parents narcissistic for having her and then demanding obedience. This attitude in the child is actually due to her inability to interpret the world around her by any other criteria than by how it directly affects her. She sees her parent’s demand of obedience as being unfair; indeed, if the world does not conform to her comfort and immediate desires, even the world is unfair. We call this self-centeredness. If she could see her situation from her parent’s perspective, she would understand that her parents had her as an expression of their love--that their love wanted to expand to include another, and that their demands of her obedience is for her good, and, in reality, another expression of their love.

The seed of seeing God as a narcissist is our resentment in having to give up the center stage. One can almost hear the petulant mewling of the child, "but what about me?"

Coupled with this is a constricted and anthropomorphic vision of God. If He is seen as the angry old man with the long white beard frowning at all our fun and casting down thunderbolts from on high--a common caricature by popular media--He becomes that much easier to resent.

Of course the biblical vision of God is one that stretches our perceptions to their limits, and perhaps beyond. It is a vision of unsurpassable power:

Who has measured the oceans by using the palm of his hand?
Who has used the width of his hand to mark off the sky?  Who has measured out the dust of the earth in a basket?  Who has weighed the mountains on scales?  Who has weighed the hills in a balance?  Who can ever understand what is in the Lord's mind?  Who can ever give him advice?  Did the Lord have to ask anyone to help him understand?  Did he have to ask someone to teach him the right way?  Who taught him what he knows?  Who showed him how to understand?
The nations are only a drop in a bucket to him.  He considers them as nothing but dust on the scales.  He weighs the islands as if they were only fine dust. (Isaiah 40:12-15 New International Readers Version)

But it is also a vision of incomparable love:

Dear friends, let us love one another, because love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born again because of what God has done. That person knows God. Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love.
How did God show his love for us? He sent his one and only Son into the world. He sent him so we could receive life through him.
What is love? It is not that we loved God. It is that he loved us and sent his Son to give his life to pay for our sins.
Dear friends, since God loved us that much, we should also love one another. No one has ever seen God. But if we love one another, God lives in us. His love is made complete in us.
We know that we belong to him and he belongs to us. He has given us his Holy Spirit.
The Father has sent his Son to be the Savior of the world. (1 John 4:7-14 New International Reader's Version)

Unlike the unitarian view of God, such as Islam, the trinitarian view of God revealed in the Bible shows us that God existed in a state of love within his own being expressed among the three persons of the Godhead. The statement written above by the Apostle John, "God is love," is never made about Allah, and indeed could not be made. But when we read in Genesis that God said, "Let us make man in our image, in our likeness," it bears a striking resemblance to the creation of children by a husband and wife who wish to enlarge the love already shared between to two of them. It is not the attentive and disciplining parents whom we characterize as narcissistic, but those who give over to hired help the raising of their children.

We worship God because He created us in an act of love, because He provided all the beauty and wonder of our world we enjoy, because even after we separated ourselves from Him in rebellion, He provided a second chance to be reconciled to Him through Christ. Does He demand our worship? Yes. He even demands our love. But just as loving parents must demand obedience and respect from their children, even that is an act of His love, and meant for our good.

"You are worthy, our Lord and God, to receive glory and honor and power, for you created all things, and by your will they were created and have their being." (Revelation 4:11 NIV)

Fall at His Feet

2007-12-15T18:41:00.000-08:00

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.

The Cult of Self-Esteem

2007-11-16T23:43:00.000-08:00

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.

The Measure and the Reward

2007-06-28T18:06:00.000-07:00

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

Dialogue with Dan, part 2

2007-06-19T00:28:00.000-07:00

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.

Euology for Gracie

2007-05-25T13:32:00.000-07:00

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.

An Answer to Dan

2007-05-12T22:57:00.000-07:00

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

A Modern Parable

2007-05-06T18:57:00.000-07:00

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)

Terror in the Night

2007-04-29T10:37:00.000-07:00

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)

Why?

2007-04-22T18:03:00.000-07:00

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.

Spiritual

2007-04-11T18:23:00.000-07:00

"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."

Perspective

2007-04-01T08:43:00.000-07:00

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.

New skin

2007-03-18T22:38:00.000-07:00

"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)

How much is that doggy in the window?

2007-02-24T21:54:00.000-08:00

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.

Imitation is the sincerest form of...Worship

2007-02-04T15:48:00.000-08:00

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."

What is truth?

2007-01-27T22:31:00.000-08:00

"...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.

Skepticism or Scandal?

2007-01-13T18:24:00.000-08:00

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)

Christ As King

2006-09-20T22:35:00.000-07:00

Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion! Shout aloud, O daughter of Jerusalem! behold, your king is coming to you; righteous and having salvation is he, humble and mounted on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey. (Zechariah 9:9 ESV)

Monarchs are something of an anachronism. Most of them still extant are nothing more than figure-heads who exercise no real political power but rather function as a national symbol of pride, harkening back to former glory days of empire, or embodying a sense of heritage and culture. Autocrats, regretfully, are in abundance in our world today, but rightfully in their very existence convey a basic quality of illegitimacy and despotism. Because of this, I think there's something lost in the translation of the concept of Christ as king that had much more immediate and pungent meaning to those of Jesus' time.

An essential sacred component of kingship in the ancient Hebrew world that carried over with Christianity to the European monarchies is that of anointing, the ritualistic pouring on of oil from a prophet or priest as a mark of consecration--the setting apart and dedication of one to God or the service of a sacred goal. The first instance of this was the anointing of Saul, the first king of Israel, by prophet/priest Samuel (I Samuel 10:1). But note that this only came about because the Israelites had rejected God as their king and demanded of Samuel that he "appoint for us a king to judge us like all the nations," (I Samuel 8:5). Saul was, as such, authorized to rule as a substitute for God's direct rule. The anointing was the emblem of that authority and the testament that this authority emanated from God. Saul proved to be a disappointment to God, and so he was replaced by David, a man directly of God's choosing "after his own heart," (I Samuel 13:14), and it was to be through David's lineage that divine rule by proxy would continue. In this way the concept of "divine right" of rule (conferred by heredity) was originated, and later illegitimately appropriated by Christian monarchs. Though Gospel writers Mark and John forego the exercise, Matthew and Luke carefully chronicle Jesus' lineage to David, both to validate his candidacy for fulfillment of the Messianic prophesy and authenticate his right to kingship.

But in a surprising convergence of meaning, Jesus realized not only the personage of final king of the Davidic covenant--the culmination of that covenant as the prophesied Messiah (literally "the anointed")--and as such, the ultimate substitute of God's direct rule, but, as the incarnate Son of God, also re-established God's direct rule. The whole idea has come full circle, all in the person of Jesus.

There's a complication, though. The Hebrews conceived of this final Davidic king, as prophesied by Zechariah, Isaiah, and others, in purely materialistic terms: he would come, crush all Jewish enemies, and establish an Israelite empire in which peace and prosperity would exist through the ages. But God had a much more comprehensive agenda than merely instituting peace between nations, and eradicating false religions. The divine plan was to first deal with mankind's eternal existence, to reconcile man back to relationship with God. That relationship had been broken by man's fallen nature and God had to deal with man's sin first.

So, at the brink of Jesus' fulfillment of God's plan of reconciliation, he was brought before Pilate who asks him, "Are you the King of the Jews?", and Jesus gives this answer: "My kingdom is not of this world. If my kingdom were of this world, my servants would have been fighting, that I might not be delivered over to the Jews. But my kingdom is not from the world." (John 18:36 ESV) Then began the ritual of his spiritual enthronement. What a terrible sort of coronation it was: the flesh of his back shredded by flogging, a purple robe then draped over the open wounds, a reed for a scepter, a wreath of thorns pressed into his forehead for a hideous crown, and his court a battalion of Roman soldiers who mocked and reviled him; and finally his truly appalling throne, the instrument of his death by torture--the cross. Yet by this horrible spectacle he freed forever his subjects from the dominion of sin and death, and ushered them into his spiritual kingdom. There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. For the law of the Spirit of life has set you free in Christ Jesus from the law of sin and death. For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do. By sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, he condemned sin in the flesh, in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not according to the flesh but according the Spirit. (Romans 8:1-4 ESV)

Does this mean there will never be an earthly kingdom of God? No; as it says in I Corinthians 15:24-25, Then comes the end, when he delivers the kingdom to God the Father after destroying every rule and every authority and power. For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. (ESV) We've seen the awful vision of Jesus' spiritual kingship in crucifixion; juxtapose that with the picture of his earthly rule in Revelation 19:11-16: Then I saw heaven opened, and behold, a white horse! The one sitting on it is called Faithful and True, and in righteousness he judges and makes war. His eyes are like a flame of fire, and on his head are many diadems,--(no more crown of thorns)--and he has a name written that no one knows but himself. He is clothed in a robe dipped in blood, and the name by which he is called is The Word of God. And the armies of heaven, arrayed in fine linen, white and pure, were following him on white horses. From his mouth comes a sharp sword with which to strike down the nations, and he will rule them with a rod of iron.--(his reed scepter has been replaced with something more fearsome)--He will tread the winepress of the fury of the wrath of God the Almighty. On his robe and on his thigh he has a name written, King of kings and Lord of lords.

Moving Forward

2006-09-02T09:58:00.000-07:00

My last post on this blog, "The Road Back", is to me one of the most important things I've ever written in my life. I sent out a lot of emails inviting friends and family to read it and comment, but it sort of stopped me in my tracks from writing anything else in this space. I want to keep this particular article easily accessible, since I feel so strongly about it, so I decided to create another blog just for it. I slightly altered the piece, making some additions at the end (including the posting on this blog), and have included the link to it on this and my political blog. I will also include a link to it in my email signature. I encourage comments on this and my other blogs. If you don't wish to register on Blogger, you can comment as anonymous, though, if you like you can include your name within the comment, and even your email address if you'd like to contact me. Or you can email directly: don@donmitchell.us (or just click the link "Email me" in the side bar)

Now, moving forward.

The Road Back

2006-08-26T14:10:00.000-07:00

When the attack of 9/11 occurred I was still working as a forman in the shop of the steel fabrication business with which I am employed. I had a small fabrication project of my own, so I was listening to Mark and Brian on KGON while I worked, having come in at 5:30 that morning as we were on an overtime schedule. Mark and Brian made the announcement on their show after the first plane struck one of the twin towers. At first I thought it was a joke, one of their twisted little comedy routines, but when they announced that the second plane had struck I knew instantly that it was the work of terrorists. When they announced the third plane had struck the Pentagon I knew we were at war.

I turned the radio to a news station and listened as often as I could for the rest of the day. When I got home I stayed glued to the TV, switching back and forth from station to station, desperate to learn the slightest bit of new information, and over and over again I saw the video of the planes striking the buildings and then the towers collapsing. Over the days and weeks that followed I abandoned any interest in entertainment and from the moment I would get home from work until I went to bed at night I would either watch cable news (I quickly gave up on network stations) or poured over internet sites in a search to find out who had done this horrible thing, and why.

The weekend after the attack I was driving around town on errands when it dawned on me that all the flags were flying at half-mast. It was like a moment of epiphany. My father was a World War II naval veteran, but I, one of the "baby boomer" generation, had looked on the reverence with which my father's generation held the American flag with a kind of self-congratulatory aloofness, even disdain, as though they were acting somewhat childish. I had a more sophisticated and nuanced view of America and its place in the world that put me above such simplistic sentimentality. But now, seeing all those flags flying at half-staff, a symbol of so many of my fellow countrymen dead, my country attacked with no other goal than death and horror, with no other motive than to create that horror, my eyes filled with tears, and I at last understood. My world was shifting beneath me. But this was only the beginning.

Before I continue with my story it might be helpful if I recount some of my past and how I came to be so cynical, sardonic--and at the brink of apostasy.

My father was an evangelist and pastor, so I grew up around the ministry. A very early memory of mine, from perhaps four years of age, is lying prone on the platform of a revival tent, coloring in a coloring book, and periodically looking out at the audience as my father preached. Dad came from the deep South (born in Georgia and grew up in Florida), was steeped in the Bible-belt culture, and began traveling as a very young man with his older sister in the evangelistic field. Soon after I was born, he stopped traveling, and started the Full Gospel Baptist Church in Yuma, Arizona (my home town). But when I was 12 Dad gave the church over to someone else and went back out on the evangelistic field. My adolescence was spent traveling the country from small church to church, holding revival meetings. Under the umbrella of my father's ministry, I began to preach as well. When I was 16, during a very long revival meeting we had in the Medford, Oregon Church of God, I began preaching every weekday on live radio from the Christian station in Ashland.

I had just finish sixth grade when we began to travel. There was no home school movement at that time, so I finished my education through a correspondence course designed for adult high school drop-outs called American School out of Drexel, Illinois. Many people began to encourage me to prepare for Bible College and seminary, but my father actually discouraged me from this idea. I realize in our present cultural climate this seems unthinkable, but my father was born in 1916 in the deep South and was a product of his time and region. In his time and socio-economic class in the South formal education was suspect, and natural--or "God-given"--abilities valued.

I was from another time and region, though. As I entered young adulthood and tried to establish a ministry of my own, separate from my father's shadow of authority, I found my lack of Bible college credentials an insurmountable obstacle. My arrogance and argumentativeness didn't help matters. I began to bridle at what I considered the small-mindedness of other preachers who were my seniors, and grew increasingly frustrated at my lack of opportunity to preach. In my early twenties I was married with two children, working a dead-end job, and doing nothing in the ministry but playing the organ in a small Open Bible church in Newberg, Oregon.

At the same time I was struggling with my place in the church and my frustrations and failure to establish a ministry as an adult, I was working with men who were attending George Fox college, a Quaker college in Newberg, Oregon. A couple of these men, coming from a different theological heritage than the fundamentalism I grew up with, were challenging my interpretation of Scripture--and my faith, at least certain tenants that I had taken for granted. Yet one of the greatest challenges to my faith came not from other believers, but from my first intimate acquaintance with true atheists.

I had been interested in writing from an early age, and several years prior to my crisis of faith, I had started writing Science Fiction short stories (virtually the only paying short story market left in the United States), trying to break into the field as a published author. Through contacts I made in a community college fiction writing class I found out about a Science Fiction writer's workshop conducted by husband and wife writers Damon Knight and Kate Wilhelm who lived in Eugene, Oregon. I submitted a story, was accepted, and for the next ten years attended their monthly workshop which they held in their home. They did this for many years for no charge, out of pure kindness and generosity. It's difficult for me to express what a profound cultural shock my relationship with Kate, Damon, and the other participants of the workshop was. Many aspects of my unusual childhood had matured me far beyond my age group, but only in certain regards; in others I had remained naive, sheltered as I was from certain types of people--such as atheist intellectuals and artists. It was cognitively dissonant, jarring to find these people, with whom I disagreed on so many of the most important issues of life--politically as well as philosophically (for they were extremely liberal politically)--so loving and kind and giving of themselves, so different from what I would have expected them to be; they were atheists!

Things finally came to a head several years later--the final straw, you might say--when the pastor of the Open Bible church I was attending, after having participated in one of Bill Gother's Basic Youth Conflicts seminars, announced that no one would have any leadership or ministry capacity in that church unless they went to and completed a Basic Youth Conflicts seminar course, I quit the church in a pique of anger. Basic Youth Conflicts had always impressed me as something of a commercial scam. Gother requested participants to keep the material secret from anyone who did not take the course directly from him (and therefore pay him) which gave it the odor of Gnosticism to me. I left the church that instant, only coming back once to get my Hammond organ and Leslie speaker. I never entered a church again for many years. Perhaps a year after I quit that Open Bible church I ran into a man whom I considered a friend from a different church I had attended a year or so prior, a church I had quit out of frustration when I was never allowed to preach or minister in any way other than music (and that not much). When he asked me where I was ministering, and I told him that I was no longer ministering or even attending church anywhere, he became sad, shook his head, and said he would pray for me. I remember becoming enraged at what I perceived as his condemnation. How dare he judge me for leaving the ministry when he and his church had never given me an opportunity, nor lifted a finger to help me? And the ultimate irony was I had found more acceptance, more help, more love from my atheistic teachers and friends than I had from those who were supposed to be my brothers and sisters in Christ.

I told myself at first that it was church that was the problem. They were all a bunch of small-minded hypocrites. They were charlatans, out for themselves, manipulative and petty. It was them I was mad at, not God. But little by little, as I isolated myself from other Christians, I began to question all my beliefs. Not with any sort of real intellectual honesty, of course; I just let it all go, quit reading the Bible, began to speculate that perhaps my upbringing and prior experiences were nothing more than the product of a "belief system". If I had been intellectually honest about my questions of faith I would have delved into it, studied, put it all to the test of genuine inquiry, but instead I tucked it all away and refused to think about it. It was easier to simply stew in my resentment of the church and finally forget about it all and focus on other things. I started out trying to punish the church for whatever real or imagined offenses they had inflicted on me, but I ended up excluding God from my life.

But this is not yet the worst of it. My greatest shame is that my falling away happened when my sons were mere toddlers, and as I abandoned first the church, and then God, I also abandoned their instruction in Christian faith.

The intervening years were devoted to my trade in the steel fabrication industry, and raising my sons. Oddly enough (and thank God!) my desertion of God didn't express itself in drug or alcohol abuse or any other number of self and marriage-destructive behaviors: I prospered at my trade; my marriage stayed intact (though I must give most of the credit for that to my wife); and I raised two fine sons of whom I am abundantly proud. My dreams of being a fiction writer eventually disintegrated. For sixteen years I studied the Korean martial art TaeKwondo, rose to the rank of 4th degree black belt, until a back injury at work ended that pursuit. But through it all I remained emotionally and culturally-or perhaps philosophically-isolated from my working and hobby acquaintances. I still believed in the existence of God and in the rightness of the Christian moral truth I had been raised with and this always seemed to distance me from my non-believing friends and co-workers. At the same time my disengagement from God distanced me from Christian friends and co-workers. I was, in many respects, a man without a country, a miserable state largely induced by my absurd attempt to cling to the moral truth of Christianity while ignoring and detaching myself from its source.

One of the results was a growing bitterness, a capitulation to the darker, sullen aspects of my nature. My language grew ever more foul and vulgar. I viewed the world through a smoky lens of pessimism and adopted the notion that the best way to endure this tragedy was to ridicule it. That was my state on 9/11: arrogant, misanthropic, and so suspicious of my own government that I was ready to quit voting.

* * * *

I inherited my mother's penchant for reading which has expressed itself in my desire to write, and also my almost obsessive habit of reading about any interest or activity I'm engaged in at any time in my life. My reaction to the 9/11 attack was no different; I began to read, first searching articles on the internet, then books from the library to help me understand the motivations of the jihadists. I read books on Muslim history by noted Middle Eastern scholar, Bernard Lewis, whom I discovered by watching C-Span II, which on the weekends is "Book TV", featuring interviews and lectures by non-fiction writers. This led me to read American history to better understand my own country and the origins of its culture. As I stated before, my immediate emotional response to the attack was an intense patriotism--something I think I shared with many Americans. But this also led to an investigation of conservative politics, as I was disgusted by the America-loathing and terrorist-excusing gist of so much that came from the popular media and especially the intelligentsia of the American political left. In my search for conservative political commentators on websites such as Nation Review Online and Townhall.com, I discovered writers who concerned themselves with the philosophical underpinnings of American conservatism such as Robert Bork in Slouching Toward Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline, and Thomas Sowell, a writer of enormous influence to me, especially with his triology of books on political science, Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy, A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles,and The Quest for Cosmic Justice. In reading books such as these I began to see the influence of Judeo-Christian moral thought on the American system of law, and so began to search out texts that would more clearly explain this to me.

One such book was Princeton professor of jurisprudence Robert P. George's The Clash of Orthodoxies, Law, Religion, and Morality in Crisis. In this important work he, "...demonstrates that the great conflicts of our day reflect not mere partisan disagreement, but a fundamental conflict in worldviews...and makes the case for the Christian intellectual tradition..." (as stated by Chuck Colson on the flyleaf). Here I was, for the first time, confronted with the idea of a Christian worldview, not the pejorative "belief system" I had come to see it as so many years ago. This was serious stuff. It demanded my attention.

On another weekend, while checking out Book TV on C-Span II, I saw a lecture by Nancy Pearcey concerning her book, Total Truth; Liberating Christianity from Its Cultural Captivity. A couple of years prior to this I would have immediately turned the channel on seeing the title of the book, but now I was riveted by what she was saying. Like professor George, she was presenting Christianity as a worldview, a concept of moral truth that speaks with authority to every aspect of our lives and culture, not just the private and purely subjective realm of our "values". Despite her extremely calm demeanor and moderate appearance, I was so energized by her talk that I ordered the book. This book was a major turning point for me. It presented me not just with philosophical arguments for my political views, but with the challenge of God's transforming grace. This was no longer just philosophy; I was now confronted with real Christianity and my responsibility to the real and living God. What had started out as an examination of my country, its history and place in the world, and my political beliefs, had now transformed to a question of my relationship to God.

Upon reading her book I found out that she was a long-time student of Christian philosopher, historian, and theologian Francis Schaeffer, and that her book (and a previous one she did with Chuck Colson called How Now Shall We Live?) was a continuation of Schaeffer's work on the development of a Christian worldview. I sought out and read his seminal work, How Should We Then Live? in which he looks at the historical arc of Western civilization, starting with the fall of the Roman empire and following all the way to our modern age. It traces the beneficial influence of Christian moral thought on culture, philosophy, and law, and then the decline of the same as Western civilization incrementally rejected Christianity.

I pulled from my bookcase and reread a book I had first read in my early twenties, the book that was instrumental in Chuck Colson's conversion, C.S. Lewis' Mere Christianity. This too had a profound effect on me. Of particular power was Lewis' argument that what he called the Law of Human Nature (but in more modern parlance might be called the human innate sense of right and wrong) is a proof of the existence of God, in that it can't be explained naturally--or in evolutionary terms, if you will--because it is not a law that describes how things actually work, as does the law of gravity for instance, but how we humans believe things ought to work.

Another influence, oddly enough, were two observant jewish radio talk-show host whose programs I had come to listen to on a daily basis. The fact that I do computer-assisted drafting allows me to listen to talk radio as I work, and for two years I had been listening to Michael Medved and Dennis Prager on a Christian talk radio station. Both of these brilliant men deal with cultural, as well as political issues on their shows, and Dennis Prager--especially--deals with moral issues from an unapologetically Biblical reference. Listening to these men day after day, speaking with intellectual integrity and uncompromising faith in their Judaism, and giving honor and respect to their, admittedly, mostly Christian audience had its effect on me. This was a phenomenon that had spiritual implications I could not deny.

While these influences were roiling within me, my wife and I were occasionally attending my father-in-law's Lutheran church. The liturgical services were strange to me, coming as I do from a fundamentalist background, and the sermons seemed anemic compared to the fiery preaching I had grown up with, yet even this was having its effect on me--inducing a hunger for something more substantial, if nothing else. As in Francis Thompson's poem, the "Hound of Heaven" was pursuing me.

* * * *

A little over a year ago my wife and I visited my best friend from childhood, Steve Schmelzer, who is now the pastor of Christian Joy Fellowship in Medford, Oregon. In adolescence and young adulthood (before my falling away) we had been very close, but had lost touch for many years. During the few times we had visited things had seemed odd and a bit strained between us. Now, on this visit, things were different; not quite the way it had been in our youth, but the closeness was returning on many levels. I shared with him much of what I had read, and how my faith in Christ was returning. Yet I still lacked the fellowship of other believers. Though my faith in God was reviving, I was not worshiping God, I was not serving God. As Steve and I talked during that holiday weekend, I finally began to see that until I took that step, until I was ready to worship God, to serve God, and to confess before men that Jesus Christ was my Lord and savior, my faith was nothing more than a private sentiment with no real consequences, a self-soothing exercise of moral cowardice.

Finally, as all these influences began to coalesce, I received a mailing from a local church (Countryside Community Church) announcing a sermon series called "God, the director's cut." It sounded intriguing. I checked the service times, and the services looked to be timed in at just about an hour long; the church was close--I had little to lose. The atmosphere of the church was very casual, the music contemporary, but the sermon was coherent and Biblically-based. The same screen on which the worship song lyrics were projected was used to show short clips from films at intervals during the sermon to illustrate key points. This was innovative, yet effective. Later, when I visited Countryside's website to find out more about their core beliefs and any denominational affiliations they might have, I discovered that they had a system of small groups tailored to any number of categories, i.e., age group, couples, singles, men or women only, etc.. I located a men's only group and contacted the leader by email. Soon I was meeting with this small group on Friday mornings.

The first few times I attended Countryside by myself, but my wife was soon attending with me. We joined a couples group that met on Thursday nights, and soon after that a 10 week class on Monday nights called "Christianity Explored." Inexplicably, in a just a handful of weeks, we both had gone from thinking of church as something we really "ought" to do (as in, "I really ought to floss my teeth every day,") to something to which we looked forward, something we were excited about.

At an earlier point in this journey, when my mother-in-law was still alive, but in failing health, she had requested that all of her family accompany her to a Christmas service at Our Savior's Lutheran church in Lake Oswego, Oregon. It took quite a bit of cajoling on our part to get our sons to agree to join us. Afterward, as we were driving home my oldest son, Nigel, asked me what I saw in Christianity. When I think now about my answer I blush at its insipidness--something about "the whole picture", "Western Civilization" and "moral values". But of course the real answer is, because it's true! Because it answers all of the most profound questions of human existence; because it confirms the deepest longings of human nature: for final justice, for forgiveness, for things to finally be made right as we perpetually yearn for, even as we are certain that they are not now right, for the authentication of the eternal, the transcendent and the sacred. And, perhaps most profound of all is the experience of discipleship in Christ, the empirical knowledge of its reality in the confirmation--the "stamp of approval"--of the Holy Spirit:

...you have been adopted into the very family circle of God and you can say with a full heart, "Father, my Father." The Spirit himself endorses our inward conviction that we really are the children of God. Romans 8:15,16 (Phillips translation).

Looking back now, I can't pinpoint a specific time in which I re-committed my life to Christ. There was no emotional or spiritual moment of epiphany. But slowly, bit by bit, I began to trust in God again, to pray again, to worship again. As I began to read the Bible again on a daily basis the fire of its truth began to burn within me, reawakening a craving I had almost completely forgotten. It was a process, as I believe it will continue to be throughout the rest of my life, as Paul wrote to the Corinthians in his second letter to them:

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. 2 Corinthians 3:18 (Eugene Peterson's translation/paraphrase The Message).

A Hierarchy to Sin?

2006-07-23T12:49:00.000-07:00

"...the subject of AIDS... brings out the best in the church, like you see today in response to these children suffering HIV...but if we're honest, it has also brought the worst out of the church. Judgmentalism, a kind of sense that people who have AIDS, well, they got it because they deserve it. Well, from my studies of the Scriptures, I don't see a hierarchy to sin. I don't see sexual immorality registering higher up on the list than institutional greed (or greed of any kind, actually), problems we suffer from in the West."
Rock star Bono to pastors, parents, and children gathered at New York's John F. Kennedy Airport a few weeks before Christmas as part of an airlift of 80,000 gift boxes to HIV-infected children in Africa, organized by Franklin Graham's Operation Christmas Child.

I came across this quote when I was reading a 2003 article from Christianity Today about Bono's expression of Christian faith. Perhaps I'm the last to know, and maybe this betrays my own biases, but the idea that Bono is a Christian was dumbfounding to me. Nevertheless, I have no intention of criticizing Bono's Christianity. I do plan on criticizing his theology, though.

From a purely secular and purely rational standpoint it should be clear to all that everyone's innate sense of right and wrong has a system of proportionality built into it; the very word value , which we use for guiding principle, has as its first meaning a degree of worth or how much something costs. And so our criminal system is categorized by degrees, the two main categories being misdemeanor and felony. Even within those larger categories, crimes are designated by degree (i.e., first degree murder & second degree murder) to denote the range of culpability, mitigating circumstance (was it provoked, premeditated or a crime of passion, etc.,) and therefore the severity of punishment to be meted out by the state. This innate sense of degree and proportionality built into our sense of good and evil is so obvious and rich with example it would be hard to argue against the idea that it is merely reflecting God’s moral principles, but there are cases in which God’s word, especially the words of Jesus, teach us to go against, if not our sense of right and wrong, at least our sense of fairness such as turning the other cheek when struck by an enemy. So we are presented with the question of what the Bible has to say about a hierarchy of sin.

Let me start by pointing out the clear hierarchy of God’s commandments. Consider this passage from Matthew 22:35-40 (Eugene Peterson’s The Message)
Hearing that Jesus had silenced the Sadducees, the Pharisees got together. One of them, an expert in the law, tested him with this question: "Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?" Jesus replied: " 'Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: 'Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments."

So we have it from no less than Jesus himself that there is a hierarchy to the commandments. It follows, therefore, that if there is a hierarchy to the commandments—God’s moral law—there must also be a hierarchy associated to breaking those commandsments—sin. And that's stated plainly here:

For instance, if we see a Christian believer sinning (clearly I'm not talking about those who make a practice of sin in a way that is "fatal," leading to eternal death), we ask for God's help and he gladly gives it, gives life to the sinner whose sin is not fatal. There is such a thing as a fatal sin, and I'm not urging you to pray about that. Everything we do wrong is sin, but not all sin is fatal. (I John 5:16,17 The Message)

John doesn't tell us precisely what this fatal sin is, but he does clearly establish the Biblical principle of gradation to sin. I propose that since Jesus has authenticated that the most important commandment is to love and worship God, then the greatest sin we can commit is to fail to love and worship God. And this is why none of us can stand before God with our own righteousness, why it was necessary for Jesus to pay the price for our sin and justify us in the eyes of God--because every man, woman and child of us has committed that worst of sins.

Indispensable Guilt

2006-07-09T18:32:00.000-07:00

Perhaps you're familiar with the movie, Seven? It was a very dark, even outre' film, yet powerful in its emotional impact, and, I think, in the implications of its themes to modern society. In it, a mysterious serial killer is "preaching" (as Morgan Freeman, playing an older detective investigating the case, calls it) by committing a succession of grisly murders, each with the theme of one of the seven deadly sins. When Freeman's character, on the verge of retirement, finally recognizes the pattern, he researches the sins and informs his superior and the young detective he is training to take his place (Brad Pitt) that the seven deadly sins were a common topic of medieval sermons, but have long since fallen out of style. Such is the skill of the writer, director and actors that as we watch the gruesome case take its course, we find ourselves almost sympathetic to the murderer as the sordid objects of his cruelty get their comeuppance--especially the lawyer and the child-molester. In this way the film engages in some interesting, and perhaps even useful, social commentary. But in the end we are convinced that the murderer is driven mad as much by his religious impulses as by his abhorrence of the depravity of contemporary society.

The overarching message of the film--that moral outrage at sin, or guilt for one's own sin--is a mental disorder, has been a recurring theme from popular media, entertainment...and the professional mental health community in western civilization now for many decades. This is not a new idea, however. We first encounter its most primitive form in the story of the fall. The serpent's statement to Eve concerning God's prohibition of eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge and his warning of fatal consequences was, "You won't die. God knows that the moment you eat from that tree, you'll see what's really going on. You'll be just like God, knowing everything, ranging all the way from good to evil." (Genesis 3: 4,5 Eugene Peterson's translation, The Message) In other words, "it's all a trick; God's just 'having one over' on you. No need to feel bad about it. We're all adults here." Sound familiar? Maybe something like, "guilt is just (insert authority figure of choice here, i.e. parents, society, organized religion, etc.)'s way of controlling you,"?

This concept has been inculcated with extraordinary success in modern western culture. Over and over, from thousands of different sources, sometimes overtly, often times subtly, we are instructed that much of what the Bible calls sin is just another socially valid variety of human behavior, and that any feelings of guilt that may arise from that behavior is pathology, a form of mental disfunction that we should purge from our thoughts to be truly healthy and well-balanced. In its most advanced stages, this vision of progressive orthodoxy expresses itself in a kind of moral inversion such that any public endorsement of Biblical behavioral prohibitions is itself condemned as sin--the sin of intolerance, bigotry and hatred. Nowhere is this more prevalent than with regard to sexual behavior. Western culture has come to esteem sexual indulgence of almost every kind to the point where it is celebrated as a virtue. The Marvin Gay song Sexual Healing comes to mind.

All of this begs the question: what is sin? The dictionary definition of, "a transgression of religious or moral law" (American Heritage) seems a bit thin, although I think by looking to the Ten Commandments we can get a clue as to its most essential meaning, specifically the very first of the ten. "I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. You shall have no other gods before (or besides) me." (Exodus 20: 2,3 ESV) And here's the crux of the matter. This very first law of God holds the key to all we must call sin. It's man's rebellion against God's right of sovereignty and the self-evident obligation to worship God that is (1) the greatest sin, and (2) the source of all other sin. This first and most deadly sin is the one that condemns us all; at the moment of our birth, innocent of all other things, with our first breath we cry out in a petulant scream of worship to ourselves as the center of the universe, a recapitulation of Eve's first sin. Eating the forbidden fruit? No, aspiring to break the obligation of worship and submission to God, to be, in effect, equal with God. Remember the serpent's words of seduction: "...the moment you eat of that tree...you'll be just like God." No need to worship your equal.

So, where does that leave us with regard to this modern secular view of guilt as pathology? If we take as a given that human existence is a spiritual battle to determine our eternal destiny (which I do because it's scriptural--see Ephesians 6:10-13); and that Christ's incarnation and death on the cross was the divine redemptive act to pay for our sin and re-establish our relationship with God; and that the spiritual forces of evil at work in this world want to keep us from accepting God's redemption--then it naturally follows that this widely disseminated view is an effective weapon in the arsenal of those forces working to keep us separated from God.

Look at it this way for a moment: sin is man's biggest problem. The smallest granule of human misery in this life is directly attributable to sin, and dooms man to eternal separation from God. Now God solved the sin problem through Jesus's incarnation and sacrificial death, but the one prerequisite to "cashing in" on that redemption is man must repent of his sin and accept the Lordship of Christ (I know that sounds like two prerequisites, but it's actually a package deal). Yet for man to repent of his sin, he must first be convinced of it. That's the role of the gospel (preaching) and the work of Holy Spirit. "God in his wisdom took delight in using what the world considered dumb--preaching, of all things!--to bring those who trust him into the way of salvation." (I Cor. 1:21 The Message), and, "...you know perfectly well that the Spirit of God would never prompt anyone to say 'Jesus be damned!' Nor would anyone be inclined to say 'Jesus is Master!' without the insight of the Holy Spirit." (I Cor. 12:3 The Message) So, if our spiritual adversary (that's the literal meaning of the word satan, by the way--"the adversary") wishes to keep us from redemption, one of his most potent tools is to persuade us that we don't need it, that sin is not a problem for us because there either is no such thing, or if there is, it's not anything that we have done.

"I've never killed anyone! I've never raped anyone! I'm basically a good person. And besides, if there is a God, he's a God of love, right? He wouldn't send me to hell. There probably is no hell anyway. That's just an archaic tribal superstition." With these and similar internal monologues the member of a modern western society can silence the voice of his conscience as the Holy Spirit tries to convince him of his sin.

"They live blindfold in a world of illusion, and are cut off from the life of God through ignorance and insensitiveness. They have stifled their consciences and then surrendered themselves to sensuality, practicing any form of impurity which lust can suggest." (Ephesians 4:18,19 Phillips translation) Muzzle the conscience for long enough, and it will go mute permanently. Guilt is more than useful, it's indispensable.

Danse Macabre

2006-07-04T20:30:00.000-07:00

One of the great tragedies for people living out of relationship with God is that so many of them think they are living a decent moral life, yet are in reality living a life of empty pretense. Paul confronted this situation in his first letter to the Corinthians, chapter 15 verse 19: "If in this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied." and again in verse 32: "What do I gain if, humanly speaking, I fought with beasts at Ephesus? If the dead are not raised, 'Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die.'" (ESV)

The central theme here, of course, is that there is an eternal dimension to our existence, and that our relationship with God, purchased for us by Christ's redemptive sacrifice, will not just be for the duration of our physical bodies. If this were the case, Paul says, if our relationship with God only lasted for the duration of this physical life and "...all we get out of Christ is a little inspiration for a few short years, we're a pretty sorry lot." (I Cor. 15:19 in Eugene Peterson's translation The Message). Paul's quotation of Isaiah 22:13 in verse 32 "Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die," 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 hedonism as an expression of that good. 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 and its moral constraints, forget about any greater meaning that your life might have because it doesn't have any meaning; live for the moment, become a hedonist and indulge yourself!

It's true enough that there are many people today who are doing just that, but I submit that most people are doing something different. They are playing a game, trying to pretend that their lives do have meaning and moral decency, while, in the ultimate tragic irony, they deny the very source of that meaning and are cut off the basis of all moral truth--which is, of course, God.

There's a good reason so many play this game. It takes some doing to completely abandon meaning and morality; man was created by God to desire meaning and morality, to seek God, to be in relationship with God. In times past we've called this the conscience. C.S. Lewis wrote extensively about it in Mere Christianity calling it the law of human nature, that innate sense of right and wrong that nobody seems to be able to live up to. The Apostle Paul spoke of this in his lecture to the Athenians, "And he made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place, that they should seek God, in the hope that they might feel their way toward him and find him..." (Acts 17:26-27 ESV), and again in his letter to the Romans, "When the gentiles, who have no knowledge of the Law, act in accordance with it by the light of nature, they show that they have a law in themselves, for they demonstrate the effect of a law operating in their own hearts. Their own consciences endorse the existence of such a law, for there is something which condemns or excuses their actions," (Romans 2:14-15 Phillips translation).

And this is the dilemma most of humanity finds itself in: people want to think of themselves as fundamentally good, they want to think that their lives have meaning; yet due to the fallen nature of humanity, they do not want to submit themselves to Christ's lordship. Many even deny the existence of God while paradoxically validating at least some of the moral code which only derives its authority from God.

If John Lennon's song Imagine is to be taken seriously, there are apparently some who yearn for a meaningless, moral-free life--"Imagine there's no heaven. It's easy if you try. No hell below us, above us only sky. Imagine all the people living for today ..." --but for the most part I believe this is adolescent self-pity expressing itself in a misguided attempt to be profound. Most people are trapped in the vacuous charade of pretending that their lives are connected to some greater meaning and moral value even as they disavow the origin of their existence, the source of its meaning and the authority of all moral truth, a self-delusional danse macabre that will result in their own eternal separation from God.