The Happiness of the People

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!

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

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

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

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)

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?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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)