The New Morality, part 1

In response to the state of North Carolina amending its constitution to preclude state recognition of any marriage other than that between one man and one woman, Christian author Rachel Held Evans published a piece on her blog which you can access here. In her piece she bemoans the fact that, as she puts it, American Evangelicalism is "winning the culture war, but losing a generation" of the young. Her basis for this assertion is, first, research done by the Barna Group in which they questioned Americans ages 16-29 what words or phrases best describe Christianity; the first response was "antihomosexual." Her second source is a couple of books by David Kinnaman, "unChristian" and "You Lost Me" in which he says that one of the top reasons 59% of young adults with a Christian background have left the church is because they perceive the church to be too exclusive, particularly regarding their LGBT friends.


Ms. Evans, I'm afraid, is completely wrong in her assertion that Christians are winning the culture war. The amendment to the North Carolina constitution may represent one small political victory, but it is only that--a political victory, not a cultural victory. The statistics she quotes regarding the opinions of young Americans are indicative that on the cultural front we are indeed losing.


Her second error can be found in this quote from her piece:

My generation is tired of the culture wars. We are tired of fighting, tired of vain efforts to advance the Kingdom through politics and power, tired of drawing lines in the sand, tired of being known for what we are against, not what we are for.

Why would she, or anyone else for that matter, think that Christians believe they are advancing the Kingdom of God by voting to preserve traditional marriage? Jesus very clearly said that his kingdom was not of this world which is why his disciples would not engage in armed insurrection to save him. When I vote in favor of Biblical values, I do so not to advance the kingdom of God, but to preserve the social order of my country; because I understand that the abandonment of these values will--and has--lead to the debasement of is culture and the degradation of its community. This is a divine command, often called the cultural mandate; but it is not a command to advance the Kingdom of God, but rather a command by God to build a culture on Earth with the resources He has given. This cultural mandate is obeyed when we work at our jobs, when we raise a family--and when we exercise our political responsibilities to structure our laws and society according to Biblical moral truth.


The greater question of the culture war and the appalling statistics of attitudes toward Christianity by young Americans (including those raised within Evangelical Christian homes) is a crucial issue faced by the Church today. My assertion that we are losing the culture war is to a large extent based on the statics that Ms. Evans highlights in her piece as well as the work of sociologist Christian Smith presented in his book Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers. A synopsis of his findings can be found here. Smith, after exhaustive interviews of American teens of faith found them, in the vast majority, incapable of articulating even the most basic concepts of the religion in which they were raised, and, regardless of the home religion, holding to a sort of vague concept of God Smith dubbed "Moral Therapeutic Deism." The gist of this “moral therapeutic deism” goes something like this: “God wants me to be happy and wants me to be good. He mostly leaves me alone unless I’m unhappy or in trouble, then he’ll sort of help me out somehow. Good people go to heaven.” These nebulous ideas are apparently consistent across most faiths in which American teens are raised including all forms of Christianity, Judaism, Islam and Hindu. Notice that within this concept no reference is made to any Holy text or transcendent system of ethics—just, “God wants me to be good.” And this raises the essential question: how do American youth define “good”?


Further work by the Barna Group points to the answer. Here is a quote from an article citing their research on American trends with respect to morality (you can access the complete article here):

We are witnessing the development and acceptance of a new moral code in America," said the researcher and author, who has been surveying national trends in faith and morality for more than a quarter-century. "Mosaics [below aged 25] have had little exposure to traditional moral teaching and limited accountability for such behavior. The moral code began to disintegrate when the generation before them - the Baby Busters - pushed the limits that had been challenged by their parents - the Baby Boomers. The result is that without much fanfare or visible leadership, the U.S. has created a moral system based on convenience, feelings, and selfishness.
"The consistent deterioration of the Bible as the source of moral truth has led to a nation where people have become independent judges of right and wrong, basing their choices on feelings and circumstances. It is not likely that America will return to a more traditional moral code until the nation experiences significant pain from its moral choices.

Here we come to the crux of both the loss of the culture war and the loss of the youth generation to the Christian Church because of its identification with Biblical moral truth. What has happened is that starting with my generation--the Baby Boomers--and progressing--and intensifying--through successive generations of Americans, the country is abandoning traditional and Biblical morality and inventing a "New" morality. This new morality is completely detached from any guiding principles that informed Judeo/Christian morality or even other traditions of morality proceeding from Islam, Hinduism, or even Buddhism--namely sacred texts or a concept of morality emanating from divine command. Rather, this new morality is based on feeling, in essence the mood, whim, and sensations of the individual as they occur moment to moment. Not only is no reference made to any sort of transcendent code or ideal, many young people today seem incapable of making such evaluations, so bereft are they of such concepts. In a radio interview with a researcher studying this phenomenon, I recently heard him tell his host that when his young research subjects were asked when they last confronted a moral dilemma, they most often were confused by the question and would reply with a story such as being frustrated when they wanted to buy something from a vending machine and found that they didn't have enough change on them to make the purchase. Consider this shocking reality: they did not have the intellectual tools to even think in moral categories. Therefore their judgements are based on how their choices (or the choices of others) will make them feel. If an action makes them sad or angry or hurts their feelings, or the feelings of those for whom they care, that action is deemed "bad".


If this seems overstated consider the language used by Ms. Evans:

Most feel that the Church’s response to homosexuality is partly responsible for high rates of depression and suicide among their gay and lesbian friends, particularly those who are gay and Christian… We know too many wonderful people from the LGBT community to consider homosexuality a mere 'issue.' These are people, and they are our friends. When they tell us that something hurts them, we listen. And Amendment One hurts like hell… Amendments like these needlessly offend gays and lesbians, damage the reputation of Christians, and further alienate young adults—both Christians and non-Christian—from the Church.

Even Ms. Evans seems completely unconcerned with Biblical authority concerning this issue, choosing instead to merely separate people into two groups who have differing views, and pleading for group A not to hurt the feelings of group B.


Dennis Prager, writer and long-time radio talk show host, has for many years gone to high schools and colleges to speak with young Americans on issues of morality and ethics. He often recounts how that for more than 20 years now he has presented his young audiences with the following ethical question:

You are passing a body of water and see that a person who is a stranger to you and your beloved pet dog or cat are both drowning. You can only save one, either the stranger or your pet. Which would you save?

Mr. Prager says from the beginning of when he began posing this question, the majority of teens and young adults answer that they would save their pet—because they know and love their pet; the stranger is just a stranger. Furthermore, Mr. Prager says the percentage of the young who answer this way has consistently gone up over the years.


This is where we now find ourselves: in the midst of a culture war whose battles may often be fought in the political arena, but whose real source of conflict is two opposing forms of morality struggling for ascendancy. The out-workings of this new morality in our culture, legal system, and society—as well as our churches—I will deal with in my next post.

Answer to "What Would Jesus Cut"

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

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

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.