Winning & Bragging

My freshman year of college I coached a middle school boys basketball team and PE class. I remember that at the time I received a lot of advice about emphasizing a lot of things: equal playing time, enjoying the experience of playing, growing in skill, seeing others succeed, etc. - almost everything except winning. This was when protecting the self-esteem of students and players had come to its climax, or at least was as high a virtue as it had ever been in years past.

This kind of leading never appealed to me, though I didn't contest it often. I merely went about my business trying to win, as well as give equal playing time, emphasize personal improvement, and team-playing whenever appropriate. And then yesterday, while playing kick ball with some friends and my kids, it hit me: it's not that people don't like winning, we just don't like braggers, and the reason (I think) that winning has been demonized in recent decades is that we no longer know how to conceive of winners without also seeing them become braggers.

This distinction between winning and bragging makes a big difference, especially for the Church, for, being God's "own possession", she necessarily participates in his victory at the end of history and his is one in which we all, who are her members, will take great delight and will shout with joy and rejoice with trembling. But this will be no bragging-rights festival: she will have done nothing to effect her own victory over her sin, over her flesh, over her Adversary, and over her finitude - Jesus Christ will have done it all, and will then be seen as the Victor we now by faith claim him to be.

It will be a victory, but not her own, and thus she (we) will have a full and overflowing joy in winning and will simultaneously be kept from the kind of self-aggrandizement that is so destructive to the admiration of spectators. "Salvation is of the Lord," says the prophet, and such a truth will be seen on the Last Day, as will the distinction between winning and bragging, for every saint will explode with joy in the victory of Jesus and none will be found to brag. Till then, let us not throw the baby out with the bath-water. Winning is as much a part of playing the game as are the rules; there's no point without either. But who can say that a winner who exemplifies humility is not one of the greatest joys to behold in all the world?

BHT

Alcohol and Happiness: Get the Order Right

One of the great delights I have in reading writers from generations other than the present is the freedom they enjoy: they are unconstrained by our contemporary consciences or sensitivities to speak with clarity and conviction (and often did so even in the face of their contemporaries' sensitivities). G. K. Chesterton is certainly one such writer. His affinity for alcohol is no secret to those familiar with him, but the manner in which he revels in it while writing is as delightful as the drink he celebrates.

It is thought that one very wise and moderate position is to say that wine or such stuff should only be drunk as a medicine. With this I should venture to disagree with a peculiar ferocity. The one genuinely dangerous and immoral way of drinking wine is to drink it as a medicine, and for this reason: if a man drinks wine in order to obtain pleasure, he is trying to obtain something exceptional. But if a man drinks wine in order to obtain health, he is trying to get something natural.

The sound rule in the matter would appear to be like many other sound rules - a paradox. Drink because you are happy, but never because you are miserable. Never drink when you are wretched without it, or you will be like the grey-faced gin-drinker in the slum; but drink when you would be happy without it, and you will be like the laughing peasant of Italy. Never drink because you need it, for this is rational drinking, and the way to death and hell. But drink because you do not need it, for this is irrational drinking, and the ancient health of the world.

It goes without saying that these two paragraphs will eliminate no one's addiction to drink, nor does it address a hundred other problems associated with alcohol, but who can deny how well Chesterton has put alcohol in its place: a means to greater joys than drink itself. The Italian peasant he pictures is not the one that Corona or Budweiser will choose to push their stuff - his joy is too rich for them.

BHT

(The) Prayer's Problem

I usually like to write about issues in such a way as to not leave any "loose ends", but I don't know whether I'll be able to on this one. I recently spent some time praying with a few friends, and we began (as has been our habit) acknowledging "good" things about God. In some circles this would correspond to Adoration (per the ACTS protocol of prayer: Adoration, Confession, Thanksgiving, Supplication) and is thought to be an appropriate way to begin speaking with God.

But the more I thought about it, I began to see that an unbeliever could likely view this practice as a pious form of "brown-nosing" (to put it crudely), or at least an acceptable form of manipulation: favors for compliments. After all, what would you think of someone who called you at home, only to begin the conversation by fawning all over you, reciting all your good qualities and the good things you've done for them over the years. You wouldn't need a HS diploma to know they wanted something from you, and that they may well be lying through their teeth and mean none of it.

So my questions (which I'm not sure I will answer) are two: first, why don't more Christians see this incongruity? and, second, why are our compliment-laden prayers not considered by God to be manipulation and/or merely a buttering-up of the Almighty?

As to the first, one possible (and cynical) answer is that most pray-ers don't think about their prayers. I recently read an agnostic who said that meal-time prayers were instrumental in his apostacy because he realized that in thanking God for his meal he was admitting it was God's gift, and that since there were so many millions going hungry in the world, God must therefore have withheld food from them, which seemed capricious and incongruent with God's nature; thus he abandoned the Christian faith. Now, whether or not God can or does withhold food from some and give it to others, I myself appreciated the consistency with which this agnostic carried out his thinking. If you give thanks for food, you are necessarily acknowledging God's sovereign sway over all things - from farmers who grow, to truckers who deliver, to grocers who sell - which would seem to settle the whole "sovereignty of God" question within Christendom.

Another possible (and less cynical) answer is that there must be a way to pay homage to one (a ruler, a friend, a doctor, a tradesman) from whom you want or need assistance that isn't manipulation but that is instead a fitting manner of appealing to them. I think, for instance, of a skilled musician: compliments given to he or she are not merely a way to get them to perform, but can be a way of showing that their skill and talent are of such a unique nature and quality that no other's skill and talent satisfy us; theirs alone is what we love to hear and enjoy.

As to the second question (why God apparently has no problem with our compliments), I imagine that it has much to do with the fact that he, just like we, delight to hear worthy things and people duly honored. When a skilled musician is complimented and asked to perform, there is a sense in which even the musician himself need not be ashamed, for otherwise he would be denying that his skill and talent were really admirable.

There is something about greatness that we love to see and experience (sinlessly), both our own as well as that of others, and when our heart is right, we really don't give a fig whose the greatness is. It is enough to behold it, which is why we love to tell God how great he is: He is the Lord and there is no other, and no one does what he does. Such a God would surely be majestic to behold "in action", and surely no other could compare.

BHT

Getting Through to People

It came to me the other day: one of the ways that public speakers, and preachers in particular, have it pretty rough is their choice of words in speaking. It happened after I heard a biographical lecture on William Tyndale in which the speaker gave an example of the kind of linguistic training that Tyndale received in the 15th century. One assignment consisted of rewriting the statement "your letter delighted me very much".....(are you ready for this?).....150 times. It's not hard to see how one's vocabulary and facility with language would improve under such training, and how such an improvement would help usher one into the joys of compelling, powerful, vivid, precise, circumspect, nuanced, poignant, and helpful ways of expressing one's thoughts, not to mention the truths of the gospel.

However, not many today appreciate such skill or talent. If a preacher strives to give detail or be precise in his speech, he may be criticized for not speaking more "simply"; such speech, I imagine, may often be cited as "hard to understand" or to be in need of "fewer words and plainer ones". The mental stamina of the average person today is so deficient that this sentence may itself express more than he or she can apprehend in one reading (not to mention one hearing).

On the other hand, when a preacher, for fear of being perceived as an intellectual or of merely being misunderstood, resorts to the cliches and verbal ruts that are so common in contemporary news reports, sitcoms, movies, and increasingly in popular literature, he opens himself up to the accusation that he is "boring", "impractical", "unengaging", and, what is maybe most damning, "out of touch", since he couldn't put flesh on the bones of daily living.

How, then, shall he preach? Not having a pulpit of my own (though having taught for nearly 8 years), I can say that the harder one seeks to know one's hearers - to know what distracts their concentration most easily, to anticipate their objections, to begin thinking and speaking in their categories and know how to translate back into one's own - the more willing such hearers will be to give one a hearing.

In addition to this, read widely, and when you find yourself begnning to use - consciously at first, and then without knowing it - new words or familiar ones with nuanced meanings, expect a few raised eyebrows and praise God that he's not left you in a linguistically retarded state. One of the most tragic things I see today is an adult who is thought of as some kind of "genius" or "intellectual" merely for checking out books from the library for leisure reading that have nothing at all to do with professionaly development, personal improvement, or some immediate problem in their life (or someone they know). One of the most life-depriving mental states we can inhabit is to stop inquiring. G.K. Chesterton commented that "there are no uninteresting subjects, only uninterested people." It is possible to be blind to what others find infinitely attractive and interesting (just as others find some of our own interests without interest); however, it is impossible for the God who created such realities as blue, gravity, infinity, and infant giggles to have allowed into his creation anything boring. Even spoons, when correctly employed, can entertain us for hours.

Finally, expect to draw upon what you've read in casual conversation. Not that you want to shut down others' opinions who may be easily intimidated just because you now know how the Communists came to power in China or why Americans tend to be more individualistic than do Europeans; that's not the point. The point is that Communism and individualism have causes and factors that led up to them and that explain why events, people, inventions, and movements turn out the way they do. And it behooves human beings to understand these things to the best of their abilities. No, most of us will never get the kind of recognition that so many today seek as they pursue such knowledge, but it may just help you become a more informed voter, a more patient friend, and more disciplined student, and more admirable human being.

BHT

Needed: Leaders for the Church

I continue to plod through Wells' diagnosis of what ails the church and his prescription for her restoration and health. As I read him, I find myself "strangely warmed" by his vision of what the future leaders of the church will be called upon to be. Note: I said "be" and not "do", mainly because what I think is mostly wrong in the church is that we know all to well how to "do" and have lost what it means to "be" what God called us to be. From God in the Wasteland,

I believe the vision of the evangelical church is now clouded, its internal life greatly weakened, its future very uncertain, and I want something better for it. I want the evangelical church to be the church. I want it to embody a vibrant spirituality. I want the church to be an alternative to post-modern culture, not a mere echo of it. I want a church that is bold to be different and unafraid to be faithful, a church that is interested in something better than using slick marketing techniques to swell the numbers of warm bodies occupying sanctuaries, a church that reflects an integral and undiminished confidence in the power of God's Word, a church that can find in the midst of our present cultural breakdown the opportunity to be God's people in a world that has abandoned God.

To be the church in this way, it is also going to have to find in the coming generation leaders who exemplify this hope for its future and who will devote themselves to seeing it realized. To succeed, they will have to be people of large vision, people of courage, people who have learned again what it means to live by the Word of God, and, most importantly, what it means to live before the holy God of that Word.

First, the church is going to have to learn how to detect worldiness and make a clear decision to be weaned from it. ...unless we recognize the ways in which the world has insinuated its tentacles into the life of the church, unless we unmask its deceits, the church will continue to wander in the wasteland, weakened and bewildered.

Second, the church is going to have to get much more serious about itself, cease trying to be a supermarket serving the needs of religious consumers, and become instead a force of countercultural spirituality that draws from the interconnected lives of its members and is expressed through their love, service, worship, understanding, and proclamation. That is a tall order, for the tempo and organization of the modern world, which exact a heavy toll on all who attempt to keep pace with it, clearly mitigate against this happening. But it can happen. (214-15)

We must begin to see the ways in which we are already too much indebted to modernity's esteem and methods and ask what it is that the world needs and what the gospel provides: to believe that all is not as it appears in this present age of naturalistic, segmented, and discordant living. We are not homeless in the cosmos but are very much under the watchful eye and hand of God, and thus are in need of coming to terms with his reality. But the nature of his reality is precisely the question today, and that is why the biblical revelation is so valuable. In it, "God is there and he is not silent".

All the world will not embrace such a God proclaimed, but it cannot ignore him.

BHT

Intersection: Urban African-American Youth, Mathematics, & Religion

Once in a while, something comes up in class that just begs for questions, discussion, and dialogue. Recently, the name Pascal came up (not unnaturally, since it’s a senior math class). This time, however, I mentioned the fact that he was not merely a mathematician, but a mathematician turned theologian and philosopher, whose departure from academia was greatly lamented and even resented by many of his 17th century contemporaries. They were particularly interested to hear me say that I thought his thoughts are more substantial and helpful than many of those published today.

This last claim piqued my students’ curiosity such that they demanded proof. So I went home that night and put a page and a half of my favorite quotes of his from his work, Pensees. The one that caught the greatest attention was the following:

Man’s greatness and wretchedness are so evident that the true religion must necessarily teach us that there is in man some great principle of greatness and some great principle of wretchedness.

It must also account for such amazing contradiction.

Of the many observations that could be made after reading such a statement, I chose to note that Pascal is not making any explicit claim about God or religion, or even why those who disagree with him are wrong; rather, he’s making a claim about what the truth will do for people existentially. The truth, he says, will give an adequate explanation for why we see so much glory and so much blight, not on the world itself, but within man himself. The “true religion” will make sense of this paradox called man, and anything that doesn’t isn’t true.

Questions of how we determine truth are so unpopular in academia today (and are growing more and more out of favor even in pop culture) that criteria for truth are rarely discussed. But here I am, in a public institution filled with young black students, many of whom think that dead people know less than they do simply because the dead people came before them, who are intrigued, even captivated, by the truth-criteria of a 17th century European Catholic mathematician-turned-theologian. It’s enough to take my breath away. They are beginning to think existentially and reflectively about themselves as human beings.

We went through several other quotes over the next half hour, gaining their meaning before trying to decide whether or not Pascal had anything to say worth hearing, and in every case someone found what he said to be insightful, true, helpful, or corroborating their own experience. By the end of our time, they were wistfully lamenting that our school doesn’t offer a philosophy class.

Of course, I’m not so naïve as to think that if they took such a class that every moment would be so rewarding for them or their instructor; these kinds of discussions happen only infrequently, and usually only gain momentum on days when they’d rather find some reason not to do “work” (a pep-rally was scheduled for this particular day and had lightened the mood enough to make “work” optional and philosophy tolerable). However, it affirms again my convictions about them, as unlike myself as they are: if we are all, in fact, made in God’s image, then we ought to expect that such images wonder, even if only from time to time, who (or what) the Original is that they can’t help reflecting, and what's its all about.

Why Providence Has Fallen On Hard Times

In communicating the truths of Christianity, few efforts are more greatly rewarded than understanding why and how those truths may be difficult to believe or make little to no sense to one's hearers. In this regard, David Wells comments on why the traditional Christian understanding of Providence has become downright unintelligible to many today. The following quotations come from God in the Wasteland: The Reality of Truth in a World of Fading Dreams.

The question he asks is, “What is it in the modern consciousness that so militates against the historic Christian understanding of God’s sovereign, ‘inside’ relationship to creation, history, and our own personal narratives? The answer,” he says, “is complex because our social world is complex, but I believe it involves three main factors.”

Factor #1, from page 154:

First, there is little doubt that alongside the revelry that modern plenty and modern opportunity have provided [i.e. science, industry, capitalism, liberal democracy, innovative technology], a deep foreboding has also been churned up, an apprehension that our world has gone dreadfully awry, morally, socially, and spiritually. Our experience of the modern world produces the sense that there is no sure and steady purpose pervading life, that purpose, like life itself, has broken apart into small, unrelated fragments, that our daily routine is severed from the meaning that God once provided to it.

Factor #2, from page 158:

Second, the suffering and brutality arising out of man’s inhumanity to man [ironically, through his misuse of the plenty and opportunity that modernity has secured for us] have, as Wendy Farley says, "assaulted us in this century with terrible intensity. …" We gawk at more catastrophe than any previous generation has ever observed – perhaps more mayhem than the fragile human constitution can bear. Is it not the case that the sheer weight of all of this calamity also extinguishes our hope that somehow there must be some meaning that can be retrieved from these ashes?

Factor #3, from page 160:

Finally, divine providence was much easier to assert [it was not, however, necessarily easier to believe] when Western culture still believed in progress. Belief in progress [post-Enlightenment] was really a secularized version of belief in divine providence, … but it is now clear that it was never more than the opiate of Western intellectuals and had little basis in reality. … the death of the idea of progress has led many people to abandon all rationality, all purpose, all meaning. In this new context of general bleakness, talk about divine providence has a hollow ring to it for many people.

Knowing that these (and probably other) factors are influencing people's thoughts these days (including our own) is part of how we can become good listeners in order to be good helpers: we need to know how what we say is being heard if we are to say it in a way that can be helpful. And this won’t come by keeping people at arms length; it will require that we befriend and embrace all kinds of people that are (probably) already in our spheres of influence and who are just as in need of friendship, encouragement, help, and direction as we ourselves are.

Saw: Cutting Off Limbs For The Wrong Reason

Being older than 30 and without cable or satelite TV, there are many things of which I am ingnorant (and happily so!). But since I teach in a public high school, some things reach me anyway. One of them is movies I would never know about or see. Today, a few students came into class talking about the Saw movies and, interestingly, reflected on what the moral of the series is. After they talked about it for a few minutes, one student asked me if I liked them. I said that I had not seen any of them, but that I knew they involved graphic, gratuitous violence and gore, and were a collection of psychological horror plots. Having said that, I then said, "I don't care for the Saw movies." To which they remonstrated and asked, "Why not?" Then it hit me: I wasn't sure.

As I stood there in front of them, I knew it wasn't just the blood and bones, nor was it the obligatory foul language so common today meant to cover for our stunted public vocabulary. And then as one student began to speak, it hit me. She gave what she believed to be the moral of the stories: if you love your life enough, there exists a way to keep it and you'll be able to find it, as in the key placed in the tub (Saw) or in the tattooed numbers on the back the neck (Saw II). And then the words of Jesus came immediately to mind: "If anyone wishes to come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me. For whoever wishes to save his life shall lose it; but whoever loses his life for my sake shall find it." (Matt. 16:25-26) What struck me was not the blood and gore and screams and evil of the movies, but that, in the words of my student, "If you love your life enough, you'll do anything to live." This is only a paraphrase of Jigsaw's (the movie's serial killer) own moral: learn to appreciate the life you have, even if it means taking others'. In other words, there is no virtue or beauty or loveliness greater than the preservation of one's own life.

In the world of Saw, self-preservation is the highest virtue, which is directly opposed to the world that Jesus rules. Therefore, the gory and bloody scenes are not the biggest problem with the films: it's the lie that there's nothing worth laying one's life down for. The result is that the world that Jesus made begins to seem dream-like and fake, and what is most deadly of all, not worth taking seriously. I know that movies are not mainly a source for learning worldviews, but no one can deny that every movie has its own worldview, and that it is only from such a perspective that it can portray that which it sets up as good, virtuous, and noble, or evil, vicious, and ignoble. And when a person immerses himself in enough of them, its not very long before all perspectives begin to compete and seem equally valid, and believing Jesus becomes a matter of preference instead of obligation.

Only slightly less disturbing than this is the fact that in such films we are entertained by the hell that real people face elsewhere in the world. Between soldiers cutting off genitalia in Indthe tribal slaughters of Rwanda and the persecutions in Indonesia and India, or cutting holes in upper and lower lips to padlock a woman's mouth shut after raping her, I'm not sure why seeing similar brutality and evil is worth watching to pass the time, let alone pay money for. Only in America could we be nauseated by what we see on the news only to turn around and pay someone else to show us the same in a theater. This is moral confusion of the worst kind. People who live in a world in which we can be entertained, on the one hand, and then nauseated, on the other hand, by the same behavior are in a very dangerous world, one in which one hardly knows where to turn for true goodness and beauty.

The bottom line is this: Saw breeds moral confusion by celebrating and selling the kind of hell that we ought to loathe but that is real for too many people in the underdeveloped or impoverished places of the world today (not to mention the physical and psychological hell that sex-trafficking, rape, or child molestation inflicts on many today in the "modern" world). But more than this, the world of Saw offers nothing more than self-preservation and no hope of happiness beyond it. Cutting off one's leg may bring in the money at the box office, but it far from inspires emulation. Jesus, on the other hand, offered heaven, not disability, in exchange for one's limbs and eyes: "It is better for you that one of the parts of your body perish, than for your whole body to be thrown into hell." (Matt. 5:30) And the spirit in which he calls us to do so is not one of desperation or pathetic begging but one of sober and decisive love. Christians are called to give up their lives and their limbs, not merely to keep their present life but to get rid of that which would get in the way of eternal life, and to show the world that life and limb are not too high a price to pay for joy.

Lewis, The Virgin Birth, & Red Herrings

Once again, I thank God for the uncanny insight and clarity with which Lewis cuts away the debris of modern thought. In his book Miracles, he includes a chapter on Red Herrings - insubstantial objections to the possibility of miracles happening. Taking the virgin birth as an example of the sloppy thinking that most Philosophical Naturalists bring to the table, Lewis says,

...you will hear [modern] people say, 'The early Christians believed that Christ was the son of a virgin, but we know that this is a scientific impossibility'. Such people seem to have an idea that belief in miracles arose at a period when men were so ignorant of the course of nature that they did not perceive a miracle to be contrary to it. A moment's thought shows this to be nonsense: and the story of the Virgin Birth is a particularly striking example. When St. Joseph discovered that his fiancee was going to have a baby, he not unnaturally decided to repudiate her. Why? Because he knew just as well as any modern gynaecologist that in the ordinary course of nature women do not have babies unless they have lain with men. No doubt the modern gynaecologist knows several things about birth and begetting which St. Joseph did not know. But those things do not concern the main point -- that a virgin birth is contrary to the course of nature. And St. Joseph obviously knew that. In any sense in which it is true to say now, 'The thing is scientifically impossible', he would have said the same: the thing always was, and was always known to be, impossible unless the regular processes of nature were, in this particular case, being overruled or
supplemented by something from beyond nature. When St. Joseph finally accepted the view that his fiancee's pregnancy was due not to unchastity but to a miracle, he accepted the miracle as something contrary to the known order of nature.

For all of our differences with first century Jews (or any other people for that matter), we are more alike that we realize. Unbelief lurks now as it did then, only today we hide behind the pretense of "knowing better".

Modernity: The Worldliness of Our Time

The ways in which modernity has influenced and even altered human values and priorities are many and complex, and those who attempt to ellucidate such findings are like fish trying to tell other fish what it's like to be wet. Of course, fish are supposed to be wet, and human beings are supposed to have values and social customs (in a word, culture); but while being wet is no sin for a fish, being a worldly human being is. Thus, the many human cultures through time and around the globe will give manifold expressions of their fallenness (in addition to God's image in which they are still made, though fallen), and discerning such fallen expressions is both difficult and necessary. In his book God in the Wasteland: The Reality of Truth in a World of Fading Dreams, David Wells explains just how central this discernment of one's culture is and why it is so important if we are to understand the ways of unbelief and fight against them (p. 28ff):

The central issue I am seeking to deal with in this book [is] the relationship between Christ and culture. Is modernity one issue among many with which Christian faith must be engaged, or is it the issue that is encountered in every aspect of the modern world? Contemporary evangelicalism has, for the most part, assumed that modernity is simply one issue among many that may require some thought from time to time, that it is not a pervasive reality intruding on virtually every aspect of the inner life of faith. It is quite natural that evangelicals should adopt this view, because they typically think of culture as neutral and no more a carrier of implicit or explicit values than are the clothes that they wear. From time to time, modernity may raise its head, like atheism and humanism, and then the faithful must rise to denounce the danger, but for the most part modern culture seems a safe place in which to practice faith.

…modernity is not simply an issue; it is the issue, because it envelops all our worlds – commerce, entertainment, social organization, government, technology – and because its grasp is lethal. There is no part of culture that can gain any distance from it and hence no part of culture that is neutral or safe. All of culture is touched by the values and appetites, the horizons and hopes that modernity excites.

Modernity presents an interlocking system of values that has invaded and settled within the psyche of every person. Modernity is simply unprecedented in its power to remake human appetites, thinking processes, and values. It is, to put it in biblical terms, the worldliness of Our Time. For worldliness is that system of values and beliefs, behaviors and expectations, in any given culture that have at their center the fallen human being and that relegate to their periphery any thought about God.
Worldliness is what makes sin look normal in any age and righteousness seem odd. Modernity is worldliness, and it has concealed its values so adroitly in the abundance, the comfort, and the wizardry of our age that even those who call themselves the people of God seldom recognize them for what they are.

As if to anticipate his skeptical readers’ response, Wells then addresses those who are eager for a simple, straightforward answer to the challenge that modernism, as he’s presented it, poses for Christian faith:

Too often the quest for answers is driven by impatience, by a refusal to do the hard work in taking the measure of the problem first. Answers assembled apart from such work tend to treat symptoms rather than the disease; they are often little more than management techniques, mere Band-Aids. Those whose instincts are most in tune with modernity will be most inclined to rush to these sorts of solutions, because it is precisely these sorts of techniques that the modern world most prizes. The modern mind will be quick to conclude that evangelical faith is faltering because it is not efficient enough, for example, or because it is not appealing enough, because it has not adapted itself adequately to the inner needs of those in the modern world.

Then comes his conclusion and what Wells sees as the root of the problem for evangelical faith today and, implicitly, how we are to regain our vibrant and biblical heritage for the good of the modern world as well as the nations:

The fundamental problem in the evangelical world today is not inadequate technique, insufficient organization, or antiquated music, and those who want to squander the church’s resources bandaging these scratches will do nothing to stanch the flow of blood that is spilling from its true wounds. The fundamental problem in the evangelical world today is that God rests too inconsequentially upon the church. His truth is too distant, his grace is too ordinary, his judgment is too benign, his gospel is too easy, and his Christ is too common. (bold mine)

In hearing his criticisms of modernity, it is important to recognize that Wells is not so naive as to think we just need to return to the "good old days" of the pre-modern world. Rather, salvation is to be found in God and his Word, whatever the century. No, we don't need time machines; what we need is discernment: the kind of "spiritual insight that comes with Christian wisdom." (p. 55)

There is nothing wrong with organizational wizardry or public relations or television images ... per se. The problem lies in the current evangelical inability to see how these things carry within them values that are hostile to Christian faith. The problem, furthermore, lies in the unwillingness of evangelicals to forsake the immediate and overwhelming benefits of modernity, even when corrupted values are part and parcel of those benefits. What is plainly missing, then, is discernment, and this has much to do with the dislocation of biblical truth from the life of the church today and much to do with the dying of its theological soul.

It is not our embrace or employment of that which is new or that which works that is here condemned, but rather our uncritical embrace and our naive employment of the new and what works. In doing so without discernment, we unwittingly expose ourselves to their vices as much as to their virtues.

From Tribe to Print to TV to Tribe again

David Wells is an insightful author whose work I enjoy tremendously. Although he's been writing for several decades, I only discovered him last year. In No Place For Truth; Or, Whatever Happened to Evangelical Theology?, Wells comments on how the Age of Television (over against the preceeding centuries in which print was the dominant medium of knowledge) has been a major factor in changing how Americans in particular have come to think of themselves, life, and Truth (however we conceive it).

It is open to debate whether the invention of the printing press was by itself responsible for ending feudal society in Europe, but there is no doubt that where a print culture has flourished, so, too, has individualism. It is easy to see why. In the Middle Ages, people learned within a network of personal relations. In these largely preliterate societies, as in traditional societies outside of Europe even today, knowledge about life was transmitted by rehearsal, for there were no written documents that were widely accessible. The tribe or clan would relive its past together, reaffirm its meaning, reappropriate the old wisdom, and in some cases reaffirm fiath in the old gods [not unlike what Deuteronomy depicts in which Moses and Israel renew the covenant given them by Yahweh]. This was done collectively
through a variety of forms, such as dance, religious ritual, and stylized narrative. With the arrival of the printing press, it became possible and feasible to transmit all of the old wisdom through books rather than in the old ways. The book, as a result, rendereed the community redundant.

He goes on,

Under the aegis of television, however, a strange reversal begins to take place, ... . With our electronic wizardry, we are able to relay whatever meaning is to be found within the modern world by a means other than the printed page and in a way that replaces the printed page. We are creating a new trible based not on relational but electronic connections. We are creating a new tribal democracy that has the character of the tribe while retaining the form of a democracy. It is a tribe in which self-understanding comes less from the world and more from sight and sound, less from thought and more from experience.

What I find worth noting here is the recognition that there is a profound role for one's geographic and/or ethnic community to play in one's self-understanding; it does "take a village" in one sense. But this new "village" or tribe, as Wells calls it, is not the relational or personal one of ethnicity, geography, or even religion; the tribe of which TV makes us members

no longer bears much resemblance to the family, community, or religious tradition that used to serve this purpose. Now it is an impersonal society, as mirrored in the mass media, that typically confirms private choices and assures the individual that he or she is really not that different from others.

Faith and the Reason to Believe God

How would you sell a retirement fund? Would you persuade your client of its security by telling them the funds were already in it? If so, what motive could you give them that might compel them to invest their own? It seems to me that we often expect God to show us what the “pay off” will be in this or that situation before we will trust him in it; we expect to first see the money in the account before we put it there. Instead, the promise of the gospel is that the account is secure: in Jesus, God is now for us at all times and is never against us and will never disappoint those who believe such a promise – and if we are to enjoy the security and stability of such a God, we must believe that promise; we must “invest” our faith in him by believing such promises. And in doing so, we will discover the unfailing satisfaction and stability of God as our "desire" and "portion" (Ps. 73:25, 26). To expect to see God honor his promise without first believing him is not the exercise of faith but the denial of it.

Herman Bavinck puts it like this:

Christ secured [a] full, real, and total salvation. Faith, accordingly, is not a work, a condition, an intellectual assent to the statement “Christ died for you” but [the] act of [relying] on Christ himself, …. It is a living [i.e. “investing”] faith….

[H]umans are always inclined to reverse the God-ordained order [of faith and assurance]. They want to be sure of the outcome before using the means and in order to be exempt from using the means. But it is the will of God that we shall take the way of faith, and then he unfailingly assures us of complete salvation in Christ. (RD, IV, 37)

In wanting proof up front, it is as though we say to God, “You are not worth trusting in this or
that situation (let alone for eternity) till you show me what you intend to do today or tomorrow for me and I approve of it; till then, I will not trust you.” Faith that pleases God rests, like David,
in the goodness and mercy of God to be good and merciful toward us because of his Son, Jesus.

Artificial Equality A Necessity

In his sermon titled Membership in The Weight of Glory, C.S. Lewis drops yet another bombshell. He says,

You have often heard that though in the world we hold different stations, yet we are all equal in the sight of God. There are, of course, senses in which this is true. But I believe there is a sense in which this maxim is the reverse of the truth. I am going to venture to say that artificial equality is necessary in the life of the State, but that in the Church we strip off this disguise, we recover our real inequalities, and are thereby refreshed and quickened.

I believe in political equality. But there are two opposite reasons for [doing so]. You may think all men so good that they deserve a share in the commonwealth, and so wise that the commonwealth needs their advice. That is, in my opinion, the false, romantic doctrine of demoncracy. On the other hand, you may believe fallen men to be so wicked that not one of them can be trusted with any irresponsible power over his fellows.

That I believe to be the true ground of democracy. I do not believe that God created an egalitarian world. I believe [that] the authority of parent over child, husband over wife, learned over simple [is] as much a part of the original plan as the authority of man over beast. But since we learned sin, we have found, as Lord Acton says, that "all power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." The only remedy has been to take away the powers and substitute a legal fiction of equality. The authority of father and husband has been rightly abolished on the legal plane, not because his authority is in itself bad (on the contrary, it is, I hold, divine in origin), but because fathers and husbands are bad. Theocracy has been rightly abolished not because it is bad that learned preists should govern ignorant laymen, but because priests are wicked men like the rest of us. Even the authority of man over beast has had to be interefered with because it is constantly abused.

Equality is for me in the same position as clothes. It is the result of the Fall and the remedy for it. Do not misunderstand me. I am not in the least belittling the value of this egalitarian fiction which is our only defence against one another's cruelty. I should view with the strongest disapproval any proposal to abolish manhood suffrage, or the Married Woman's Property Act. But the function of equality is purely protective. It is medicine, not food. (p. 167ff)

This is refreshing. Not only because he recognizes what we too often complain of today (i.e. corrupt leaders, both civil and religious), but because his explanation makes sense not only of those things that appear to be natural authority structures (i.e. the state over citizens, parents over children, husbands over wives, teacher over student, etc.) but also because it gives us the freedom to affirm such structures in themselves and to recognize that we are the problem and not God's created authority structures. It is too easy today to fix the blame elsewhere and not first look within ourselves find the blame.

This is not to say that such structures can't be (or aren't now being) abused, but that if they are, it's not always because authority itself is the problem; it may more often be the case that the man or woman in authority is. Even here, though, the gospel informs us that neither the authority nor the person are the ultimate problem, and that both will one day "obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God" (Romans 8:21). The promise of the gospel is not that authority is the problem, but that there is a King - Jesus Christ - who has begun to rule and whose rule will one day be consummated over all things in the New Creation.

Mathematics as Beauty

Beauty - what is it? We can all point to things we find beautiful; we can even (sometimes) explain why we find them beautiful. But what is that quality called "beauty" in them that makes them so attractive, especially when "beauty is in the eye of the beholder"? Yes, it's a cliche, but it's true: so many people find so many different things beautiful.

Take mathematics, for instance. As a student of mathematics, I am sometimes asked if I studied it because I liked it or because I thought it would be useful. There is no question: I absolutely loved it. But then I'm asked, "Why?" Here, I crumble. Yes, I like "right" answers, and yes, I like logic. But is that all? Am I simply attracted to sterile and rigid ways of thinking? While I agree that there is, in fact, something comforting about knowing that "right" answers exist and that they can be found by the proper use of methods and reasoning, I've always cringed at "right answers" as my first answer; besides, meeting someone who likes getting 7 (every time!) from 4 and 3 doesn't usually make for engaging conversation.

So I'm left wondering why I like mathematics. I think it has something to do with the order and relationship of things. Think of music. There's a sense in which one must play the "right" notes in order to play the song in a way that makes it recognizable. On the other hand, there's no "right" way to play a song. One song may have dozens, or even hundreds, of arrangements, and all of them sound "good" in different ways and to different ears. But the point is this: every distinct arrangement will have enough of the "real" song in it to be recognized as an arrangement of "that" song.

Mathematics is as much about "hitting the right notes" as it is about "playing the arrangement" correctly. The difference is that instead of notes, mathematicians use particular facts, theorems, arithmetic rules, identities, etc., and their arrangement is in using various theorms or facts at various stages in the mathematical argument to arrive at particular conclusions; the song they play is what you see on the board. And I think this is where the beauty of mathematics comes in. It's not only getting the right answer that I enjoy, but in watching it unfold. I am not greatly moved by hearing middle C being played by itself, but I am greatly moved when a musician plays it (and all the other notes) at the right moment with the right strength and tone in the middle of a larger piece of music. Likewise in mathematics, knowing the Binomial Theorem itself is no big deal, but seeing how it can be used in statistical analysis to predict specific outcomes of a Binomial Random variable can be exhilirating! And all the more so when you've tried to predict such outcomes using only algebra and arithmetic.

The right order of things in relationship to each other is crucial in making awesome impressions on us. Movies and literature also illustrate this idea well. If you watched any one scene of a movie or read any one chapter from a book, its impact on you will likely be far less impressive than if you watched every scene of the movie or read every chapter of the book (this is why movie trailers entice people rather than satisfy). But even here, you could watch every scene of the movie out of the director's intended order (by using "scene selections" on your DVD menu) or read the chapters of the book out of order. By doing so, your understanding of the whole story would likely be better than if you had only watched one scene or read one chapter, but the emotive impact would likely be less than if you had viewed or read them in their "right" order; it's more enjoyable watching or reading from beginning to end.

If we only see the scene of Gandalf's fall in the Mines of Moria, its import is diminished if all we think is that an old man has fallen to his death. Frodo's tears will be misunderstood as only lamenting the death of a friend and not also the loss of his protective guide through lands unknown against foes unimagined. And the only way to "get it" is to watch from the beginning and learn who the old man with the beard is; then his loss will mean what it was intended to mean by both the movie's director and the book's author.

Not everyone likes movies, music, or mathematics - and that's OK; there's a lot of things whose beauty I don't appreciate, but that doesn't mean they're not there - it just means that I don't have the right "eyes to see." My point is that there does exist a beauty in each of them, and that it has at least as much (if not more) to do with the arrangement of the individual parts as with the parts themselves.

A Child Fit For Heaven

David Copperfield begins with young Davy's birth. He is born to his recently widowed mother, raised for several years by her and their beloved nurse Pegotty, and then sent away to a London boarding school upon his mother's remarriage to the abusive and unfeeling Mr. Murdstone. He remains there long enough for his mother to conceive and give birth to a younger brother, of which David knows nothing till his next visit home.

Following her marriage to Murdstone but prior to Davy's departure for London, his mother had been discouraged - prohibited, really - from the kind of affection with which she'd hitherto expressed toward him, and the reader is constantly frustrated by scenes in which his mother longs to shower him with maternal affection but which abort under Murdstone's disapproval. When Davy returns home on holiday, only to find Murdstone out for the day, the anticipation of the affectionate reunion of Clara, "my boy, Davy", and Pegotty is delicious. The scene is moving, mostly due to the involuntary and overwhelming rise of affection that Dickens describes (in the first person of Davy). I can't help but wonder if God has given, through the pen of Dickens, a very true (though certainly not exhaustive) picture of worship and abandone, in so far as a child loves and adores his mother:

I went softly into the [parlor]. [Davy's mother] was sitting by the fire, suckling an infant, whose tiny hadn she help against her neck. Her eyes were looking down upon its face, and she sat singing to it. I was [correct in thinking] that she had no other companion.

I spoke to her, and she started, and cried out. But seeing me, she called me her dear Davy, her own boy! and coming half across the room to meet me, kneeled down upon the ground and kissed me, and laid my head down on her bosom near the little creature that was nestling there, and put its hand up to my lips.

I wish I had died. I wish I had died then, with that feeling in my heart! I should have been more fit for Heaven than I ever have been since.

The Lost Art of Description

C.S. Lewis wrote a book titled Studies in Words that I only just recently discovered; it is an enjoyable read. On page 7 he defines 'verbicide' as "the murder of a word" and writes:

Inflation is one of the commonest [ways in which verbicide happens]; those who aught us to say awfully for 'very', tremendous for 'great', sadism for 'cruelty', and unthinkable for 'undesirable' were verbicides. Another way is verbiage, by which I here mean the use of a word as a promise to pay which is never going to be kept. The use of significant as if it were an absolute, and with no intention of ever telling us what the thing is significant of, is an example. So is diametrically when it is used merely to put opposite into the superlative. . .

Here we come to what has become so common since Lewis' day, in both private conversation and public debate (in which the open examination or testing one's political views or theological convictions is seen by the 'brethren' as treachery),

. . .Verbicide is committed when we exchange Whig and Tory for Liberal and Conservative. But the greatest cause of verbicide is the fact that most people are obviously far more anxious to express their approval and disapproval of things than to describe them.

Two things are worth noting here. The first is that Lewis calls our desire to approve or disapprove of something the cause of our verbicide and not the result of it. This signifies our willingness to kill words in order to offer our verdict on their referent, rather than our willingness to discover a thing's worth by the right use of words. In other words, we are more biased and less reasonable. We are more comfortable making our view palatable and persuasive, even if it means the abuse of language, rather than confront our views 'naked', as it were - to display them as they are in themselves - and in such an honest light let them commend themselves for others' consideration.

The second thing worth noting is that, in such an atmosphere of 'evaluation', we are not as free to describe things as we might think; we constantly feel the pressure to evaluate them and render judgments - often on the spot. Have you ever wondered how so many talk shows and pastors can possibly have so many opinions on so many issues? When was the last time you met someone who claimed to be a political Conservative or Liberal who couldn't refrain at some point in the conversation from injecting an evaluation of his own or the other party?

In so often depending upon explicit evaluations, I think we tragically neglect the most winsome form of commendation: honest and descriptive praise. This is no mere PR spin. What I mean is, at least in my own experience, that the things that have most captured my attention are those that have been commended to me by people whose main objective was not my conversion to their point of view, but rather the clear description of what they valued to much. It's as though my response to them was negligible to them - just as long as they could put before me that which they so greatly admired. We need more compelling descriptions today, not mere recruitment campaigns. If the cause is worthy, it will sell itself.

A Christian Humanism

In my limited but earnest adventures into the history of philosophy, I've learned that the term humanism hasn't always (or even primarily) carried the secular and negative connotations it so often does today. For most Christians, humanism means "man-centered" and the climax of rational arrogance; for many non-Christians, it means the discovery and pursuit of everything in life that is within the human grasp. Historically for many thinkers, though, to be a humanist was to believe that there exists some answer to the question, "What is the essence of Humanity?" (this is very similar to what Christians rightly ask). How one answered the question, of course, varied from one philosopher or theologian to another; but that an answer existed was axiomatic.

Descartes proposed that "to think" was humanity's defining quality and by using one's reason and methodical doubt, all knowledge and meaning could be derived (how one arrives at certainty by way of systemic doubt didn't seem to bother him or his followers). Pascal began from a similar point, but rather than assume reason's sufficiency as an instrument by which we arrive at all knowledge, he used his reason to examine the nature and limitations of reason itself. Thus, due to reason's 'reasonable' limitations and fallibility, humanity was dependent upon revelation for a fuller, more reliable, knowledge of itself, and in the Bible's revelation, said Pascal, we find the "glory and refuse of man" explained in both the dignified image of God ("glory") that he bears, and the ignominious ruin of Adam's fall ("refuse"). And so, Pascal saw our essence as being made in God's image that is presently distorted but will one day be restored.

Since these two thinkers, many have come and gone, but the most remarkable thing to mention of most of them is that they have rejected the claim that humanity has any essence. Instead, they have proposed variants on what I'll call non-essential or non-idealistic philosophies: 1) that there is no essence or purpose to which we are beholden and we are thus free to will our own existence in our pursuit of the passions and accompanying expressions that we desire most (Friedrich Nietzsche in Twilight of the Idols), or 2) that man has created God in man's own image, a God who then 'makes' man in his own (humanistic) image that then leads to man thinking of himself as the object of God's love, which is a love not unlike man's since everything of God is merely man's projection of himself onto God ( Ludwig Feuerbach in The Essence of Christianity), or 3) that man creates his essence by virtue of his choices, but that what he chooses does, in fact, result in some human essence that did not previously exist (Jean Paul Sartre in Existentialism is a Humanism), or 4) the quest to either answer the question of humanity's existence or to justify not having to ask it are both non-sensical, and the sooner we get over asking the question, answering it, or even explaining why we don't have to, the better of we'll all be (Richard Rorty in Trotsky and the Wild Orchids).

Now maybe this post's title begins to make sense. If the biblical account of man is to be heard, we must begin to speak of A Christian Humanism - that is to say, a Christian account of humanity's essence. Clearly, this is to use the term humanism in a very different manner than in the phrase 'secular humanism'.

The main reason, I would argue (as have others more learned than myself), that so many un-biblical accounts of humanity have gotten a hearing throughout history is because such fallen accounts of human experience have been able to make sense of so much of human experience to fallen ears, and (and this is key!) in ways that do not depend on the Bible's account. Do not misunderstand me: I am not saying that the human heart is neutral, just waiting for the most reasonable explanation of itself to come along. However, wrong ways of looking at situations appear more plausible as more and more facts and experiences can be explained by them. This is what false philosophies have done well: they give false accounts of reality in ways that sound compelling but that also do not require the Bible's input to make sense. It's actually very similar to good lying.

What we need is to find compelling ways, that accord with Scripture, to account for people's experience. This is no small task. Flannery O'Connor, Walker Percy, and David Wells have each, in their own unique ways, expressed that our main difficulty in doing this is (and will continue to be) the fact that in our Western, Rational, Industrial age, the gospel of Jesus Christ appears more and more preposterous. We have created a modern world in which reality no longer looks or sounds real, and in which fancy and distraction are only too welcome.

Mental Illness As Sin vs. Sin as Mental Illness

In commenting on some of the effects of the Enlightenment, the Dutch Reformed theologian Herman Bavinck praised the humanitarianism but also faults it.

His praise: "...the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century introduced a milder assessment of sin and crime, abolished instruments of torture, moderated punishments, and aroused a sense of humaneness everywhere...". This "...idea of humaneness and the sense of human sympathy have had a powerful awakening and have put an end to the crulety that used to prevail, especially in the filed of criminal justice. ...before (the Enlightenment) the mentally ill were treated as criminals,..." (Reformed Dogmatics, IV, 704-8)

I think many people, regardless of their religious affiliation or convictions, would welcome the recognition that human behavior, whether deviant or virtuous, is far more complex than what we suspected pre-Enlightenment. A man may steal bread, and in doing so may be guilty of a crime, but he does not always do it from envy or greed: he may simply be starving. Thus, recognizing how easily we can be tempted to do wrong (i.e. steal) for good reasons (i.e. provide for hungry children) but also recognizing that in doing so he is guilty of a moral (as well as civil) law, the Poet pleads with God to intervene in such a way that he neither starves nor steals: "Remove far from me falsehood and lying; give me neither poverty nor riches; feed me with the food that is needful for me, lest I be full and deny you and say, “Who is the Lord?” Or lest I be poor and steal and profane the name of my God." (Prov. 30:8-9) We may not throw out laws that prosecute such crimes, but we can sympathize with those who commit them and even work to alleviate the kind of suffering from which they may issue.

In Bavinck's words, there is another extreme toward which the Enlightened mind swings from its pre-Enlightened callousness: "...this humanitarian viewpoint also brings its own imbalances and dangers: whereas before (the Enlightenment) the mentally ill were treated as criminals, now criminals are regarded as mentally ill." Whereas before we had no catagories for the mentally ill rather than "criminal" (i.e. there were not thought to be psychological, sociological, or developmental explanations such deviant behavior), now, to think that there are any moral defects in a person that factor into such deviant behavior is a crime.

This is not to say that all mental illness is a fruit of moral defects per se; C.S. Lewis has a helpful chapter in Mere Christianity on Psychoanalysis in which he distinguishes between the "broken" mind that can't work right and the mind that operates fine but is put to wrong use. The former is in need of being "fixed" while the latter is in need of repentance. However, this is to say that we have lost our ability to see life in any moral terms and have adopted a more therapeutic stance; there's nothing morally wrong in crime, man just isn't healthy. Bavinck writes, "Before that time [of Enlightenment] every abnormality was viewed in terms of sin and guilt [this was not a good thing]; now all ideas of guilt, crime, responsibility, culpability, and the like are robbed of their reality [ and this is no better]. The sense of right and justice, of the violation of law and of guilt, are seriously weakened to the extent that the norm of all these things is not found in God but shifted to the opinions of human beings and society. In the process all certainty and safety is gradually lost. For when the interest of society becomes the deciding factor, not only is every boundary between good and evil wiped out, but also justice runs the danger of being sacrificed to power." (RD, IV, 708)

Man's conduct and behavior are complex: at times we are immoral and at other times we are subject to the limits of our own humanity, but often we are both simultaneously. This is what makes life so complex and difficult. The answer is not to throw notions of "sin" and "guilt", nor is it to ignore social, genetic, economic, or developmental factors at work in us. The answer, at least in part, is to look to the one who can explain us to ourselves. Everything else is just a powerplay: "And the same human sentiment that first pleaded for the humane treatment of a criminal does not shrink, a moment later, from demanding death by tortue of the innocent. Hosannas make way for a cross." (RD, IV, 708)

Nietzsche: Getting More Than He Bargained For

As part of the requirements for a class I just completed, I've been reading Nietzsche's Twilight of the Idols and C.S. Lewis' The Weight of Glory (the sermon within the book by the same title), and was struck by how much they both resonate with me, though for very different reasons. Nietzsche, of course, provokes a lot of well-deserved criticism from Christians, but some also not-so-well-deserved criticism from the same lot. He did, after all, seek to live life as consistently as possible as though God were really dead - this is no credit to him (not least because it's self-destructive). However, what many Christians have not appreciated is the value he assigned to the glories of aesthetic experience. In his usually ellusive manner, he describes it as having the "precondition of intoxication" that leads to the greatest of aesthetic experiences. Words like euphoric, enthralling, ravishing, intoxicating, exhilarating, passionate, and glorious all get at what he, and all people, find gratifying in life. Granted, he says that anything from bravery in conflict to cruelty to narcotics to sexual experience is a legitimate means by which one may pursue such intoxication that then leads to euphoria. What we miss, however, is how insightfully he has described our own experiences of pleasure and virtue: in a word, they are intoxicating, even at times addictive.

It is certainly true that my most gratifying experiences actually do follow from a kind of being "taken up into" or "intoxicated by" the moment. For instance, there's a kind of giddy thrill that can and often does come in meeting the need of another person, particularly when you both know that it's beyond repayment: and often such deeds of mercy carry more affection and emotion (for both parties) than any verbal statement could. And this is what Nietzsche is after in life: to get as much of these experiences as possible. What Christians disagree with in Nietzsche is not the pursuit of experiences of wonder and exhilaration per se, but in pursuing them at all costs and without regard for others. In fact, the Christian virtue Love is, in itself, the pursuit of such joys in such a way as to bring others into one's own experience of joy, not being indifferent toward or exclusive of the joy of others.

Enter Lewis. "If we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires, not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us. We are far too easily pleased." With Nietzsche, the pleasures of this life are all that there are and we do well to maximize our experience of them. With Lewis, the pleasures of this life are not ends in themselves, though good; they are pointers to the Greatest Pleasure, God. Elsewhere Lewis says (almost as if he was thinking of Nietzsche), "Aim at heaven, and you'll get the earth 'thrown in'; aim at earth and you'll lose them both."

Nietzsche might have been wrong in big ways, and he may have been crazy, but he was not stupid, nor was he completely out of touch with reality. He knew what it was, on some level, to be human. After all, he (like every other human being) carried the image of God in his being, and we should therefore not be surprised when thate image finds expression, even though marred and distorted (as it is in all of us). As those who bear the image of God, we were made for God and for each other, and this expereince of fellowship will (and ought to be) intoxicatingly delightful. Nietzsche's problem was not that he sought experiences of passion and exhilaration, but that he sought them as ends in themselves. He was, as Lewis says, "like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea." He was far too easliy pleased.

Flannery O'Connor, Dogma, & Mystery

The Catholic novelist Flannery O'Connor has recently been very encouraging to me. It has been said that historic Protestant orthodoxy has more affinity with Roman Catholic dogma than with liberal Protestantism's theology. Without having had reason to doubt this assertion, I have now tasted it, and agree wholeheartedly.


I recently read her Spiritual Writings and was surprised at how much I resonated with her thought. With respect to dogma and mystery she writes, "Dogma can in no way limit a limitless God. ... For me a dogma is only a gateway to contemplation and is an instrument of freedom and not of restriction." (p. 87) Elsewhere, "Christian dogma is about the only thing left in the world that surely guards and respects mystery." (p. 97) What strikes me in such claims is how unabashed she is in asserting them and in doing it often. For many today, theology with both wonder and clarity is either impossible or unfortunate, but for O'Connor (as with her British contemporary C.S. Lewis) the two not only coexist but the one (dogma) protects the other (mystery).


In the end, it becomes a question of which framing of life is most compelling. One wonders how to marvel with the heart at that which is not apprehended with at least some clarity with the mind.

Trees as Teachers

I reclined beside my 3 year-old daughter the other evening on the back patio while she finished her dinner. We had all finished eating, and the rest were cleaning up. As I lay there looking toward the sky, I noticed something I rarely stop to consider: the tops of the pine trees swaying in the breeze. They looked pleasant and lazy, bending with the wind.

Down the tree line behind my neighbor’s home, I noticed among the green tree-tops a brown tree-top: a fully mature tree that was thoroughly dead. And then I saw how still he was against his neighbors. At that moment, I marveled how much like the dead tree I am and how much like the green trees I want to be. If breezes are like small trials (you know the kind: inconvenient, troublesome, try-your-patience kind of troubles), then most of the time I’m like the hard, inflexible dead branches whose leaves make no pleasant rustle in the breeze, but instead are brittle and may only break off if the wind is strong enough. Green, life-filled branches are so much more pleasant to watch and learn from. Here’s a prayer: Lord, make me green with life, not hard and dead.

Christian Love Complicates Evolution

In thinking about the goal of evolution (namely, the preservation and improvement of species), it struck me recently how self-destructive Christian Love is in such a world. Christianity's goal of Love toward God and people (as the Bible expounds it) is certainly odd in a world that is improved by survival at all costs. In a world where self-preservation is the goal, self-denial is self-destructive.

Christianity's goal is not ultimately to survive, but to Love as long as one does survive. In fact, believing the gospel rightly will have exactly the opposite effect that believing evolution will have: the more you believe the Christian gospel, the more you will be inclined to let go of not only possessions but also your life. The promise of Christianity is not that competition with other species will secure more for one in this life, but that competition with one’s own unbelief in the gospel of God will free one from the struggle with other human beings for survival and will free them instead to lay down their possessions and their lives in love for the improvement of other’s lives.

Christian Love is inexplicable in a world explained by evolutionary models of human origin. Yes, we fight, but not with our enemies; we fight with our own unbelief and we labor in love so that others may overcome their own unbelief. The fact that so many professing Christian lives do not look like this surely betrays the fact that they have not believed the gospel very much. One need not be born again in order to love money, sex, power, or comfortable life styles. One must, however, be born again before one will love God more than money, sex, power, and comfortable life styles, and therefore be able and willing to let them go for the sake of others (though they are good and can be used in good ways).

If I'm a Christian, sacrifice is love; if I'm not, I'm a mercenary, receiving wages for my sacrifice in the form of a good reputation, status as "humanitarian", public or private praise, or even (especially in the West) media coverage and its attendant fame (which is growing shorter and shorter these days). No doubt, my humanitarian efforts bring signficant good to those who receive it, and they will be thankful, but it is of no redeeming value in eternity, nor will it bring God the honor he so rightfully deserves as the One from whom such good things ultimately originate. That honor I will have taken upon myself, and in so doing I will have distracted people's attention away from God. And in distracting people from God, I will have placed myself in the Savior Spot-light, and I can do nothing to save people from the wrath of God that is coming against their sin, no matter how many people I feed or educate or rescue from disease or war-ravaged country-sides. As good as these are, I will have only postponed their own eternal destruction, and even denied that it is coming. And that is not love.

Of course, if you don't believe that such a reckoning is coming, you won't understand love the same way, and you will hold up a different criteria for what it means to love people. In the end, one must ask oneself, "How do I know what love is?" Be careful, though: to ask is not enough. One must find an answer if one is to actually love. If you think you are loving me, but you are really killing me (as euthanasia's proponents are literally doing), you may think well of yourself - but I won't. I might wish that someone with a better vision of love had found me before you did. Don't make those in need more miserable than they are: discover what Real Love is: God himself, in Jesus Christ, reconciling humanity to himself and turning them into people who can love to the death - their own.

Atheism, Evolution, Science, & Rationality - Part 2

In line with my last post, reading Dennett's book has provoked subsequent thoughts along other lines, one of which is how evolution, on its own terms, can explain why the survival of a species is a good or desirable thing. As I understand it, evolution is defined as the random genetic mutation of species and the natural selection of preferred mutations that result in the peferred mutations surviving in certain species while the species that lack preferred mutations go extinct.

I ask, "If we suppose that random genetic mutation took place, what interest would Nature have in perpetuating a particular species?"

The answer comes back, "So that ecological balance is achieved", or "So that life continues, or advances, or improves..."

I respond, "Why does Nature care?"

(Note the personification of Nature, or evolution, as though some metaphysical entity called Nature or Evolution is choreographing life's origins and perpetuity - sounds a lot like God to me).

In fact, we'd have to ask why Nature would have any notion of "improvement" at all? This is one of evolution's insurmountable challenges, it seems to me: how there exists any notion of better/worse, improvement/decline, etc. in or of a species. I dont' deny that we live with such notions today, but I do deny that naturalistic philosophy should produce them from it's own principles.


Evolution can't explain how it moves from what is to what ought to be; things like injustice and obligations simply gum up the bloody evolutionary works. In fact, it can't even explain how it moves from Nothing in the first place to Life in the second, but that's another issue. For now, I simply wonder why so many people who believe that evolutionary theory explains life's origins get so upset by earthquakes, hurricanes, and cyclones when it may just be (according to their own theory) Nature's way of eliminating the less desirable members of the human species.


The evil of evolution is seen in that last sentence; it is blasphemy to belittle the image of the glorious God so. Oh, that more people would lay down their evolutionary and atheistic idols and embrace the dignity given to them by being made in God's image! Not to mention the redeeming dignity of being "renewed in knowledge after the image of our creator," by believing in Jesus, the incarnate image of God.

Atheism, Evolution, Science, & Rationality - Part 1

I've begun reading Daniel Dennett's Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenemenon and I find it frustrating. It's not the subject matter I don't like, but the style. Leon Wieseltier, in his NY Times review, expressed it nicely: "The orthodoxies of evolutionary psychology are all here, its tiresome way of roaming widely but never leaving its house, its legendary curiosity that somehow always discovers the same thing." Yes, I object to evolution as the explanation for life's origin and sustainability, but even the NY Times got tired of hearing that evolution is the answer to every human phenomena, whether biological, social, economic, religious, or otherwise.

Dennett's assumption is that rational people are obligated to believe the reality of empirically verifiable phenomena. But what naturalistic principle of evolution obligates me to believe something that is empirically verifiable? Now, it may be true that not believing a scientific "fact" leads to my demise, and eventually to my species' extinction, but that's not Dennett's claim: he places his readers under some kind of moral obligation to believe him when he's proven something "empirically" or "rationally". Why should they? In the deadly competition between species that are struggling to survive, there can be no moral obligation of any kind; all that remains is the surviving species (and for it to get in line for the next struggle). Surely our horror in the face of such natural calamities as the recent cyclone in Myanmar or the earthquake in China testify that our deep longing for meaning in life is more than mere evolutionary residue.

Christianity, however, makes no claim to be a non-natural religion, nor does it claim that natural phenomena are in conflict with God's supernatural (or supranatural) activity. Natural means (i.e. sexual intercourse toward procreation, digesting food toward physical growth, sensual observation and cognitive reflection toward learning) are everywhere affirmed and employed in the Christian faith. The medical advances alone that followed in the wake of the Enlightenment bear adequate testimony to the belief at the time that God had so ordered the world that natural explanations could be found for countless natural phenomena which would thereby provide widespread and acceptable remedies for disease, illness, and injury. Indeed, Christians have historically bound themselves earnestly to use as many natural means, in addition to prayer, for the relief of human suffering.

If we suppose that Dennett is able to explain every religious phenomena in purely naturalistic terms, the most it would prove is that religious phenomena can be correctly observed and explained (in scientific terms) but incorrectly understood by unbelievers. In other words, Christianity does not require a person to believe in Jesus before the secrets of human anatomy or oxygen or calculus open up to them. What it requires faith for is so that the believing person will see, in such secrets discovered by empirical methods, the purpose for which such secrets were entrusted to them: the honor of God and the good of humanity.

In the end, Dennett's faith in the verifiability of science is no more rational than anyone's faith in their own religion: both assume that when a truth claim is presented to the mind - whether it has been demonstrated empirically or logically - it is thus obligated to either embrace it or refute it - to neglect it is a moral foul.

Addendum: Parenting Like Marriage

In my haste to write the previous post on marriage, I failed to acknowledge that the thoughts therein are not orginal with or exclusive to me. Most recently, Dr. Jim Coffield (a professional counselor and adjunct faculty at RTS) spoke on the specifics of seeing marriage as part of a larger (more meaningful) whole. During the conference, reference was also made to the book titled Sacred Marriage by Gary Thomas, in which he gives a fuller exposition of the themes that Dr. Coffield raised so winsomely. Of course, the Bible is their source, and it extols marriage in the greatest terms in many places, such as Genesis 1-3 and Mark 12:18-27 (cf. Matthew 22:23-33 and Luke 20:27-40), and Ephesians 5:22-33 (cf. Colossians 3:18-25). Other sources could be cited, but my point is to give Dr. Coffield his due: thanks, Dr. Coffield.

How Parenting is Like Marriage

When my wife and I began having children, we believed that training them to obey us was the main goal. It wasn't until much later (our oldest was about 8) that we began to see obedience as a very poor end in itself. When we stopped believing that our children are "in training" for life till they're 18 or graduated, and started believing that they, just like every other person on the planet, is playing a role now in God's drama of redemption, our style of parenting changed a little, but the mood in our home changed a lot - and we began to enjoy each other more.

If perfect obedience is the goal, you'll be frustrated and angry every day - and I was for many years, it seemed. When loyalty (not perfection) becomes the goal (but only insofar as it's an end in a greater Goal - God's reputation in your home), set-backs and disappointments won't capsize the happiness of your home every night at dinner or bedtime, even though they still come almost just as frequently. You may also recognize that, as a parent, it's not all about you (or even your children or their future): it's about what God is showing the world about himself in your child's obedience or disobedience, and your response to it.

It was then that raising kids became fun and a joy for me.

The same can be said of marriage. The world needs more than obedient children, and it needs more than marriages that work: it needs to hear what marriage has to say about God, to see the greatness, beauty, and glory of God's covenantal love for his people. When marriage begins to take on Divine significance, it becomes interesting and meaningful, to say the least. When we begin to believe that our marriage, or children, or the yard, or neighbors, or puzzles on Saturday afternoons, or visiting invalids in nursing homes are all part of a larger move of God to say something to the world about himself and his glory and our place in it, things that formerly seemed insignificant, meaningless, or negligible begin to take on greater signficance and meaning, and are now worth the time and effort to do them well (i.e. diapers, groceries, neighborly chat, or a phone call).

The remarkable thing in all this is that by thinking less of obedience or marriage in themselves, they take on greater meaning and significance. When they cease to be the "end all", they begin to serve as ends to Christ as all in all. The meaning and significance we so much long for in the nitty-gritty of kids and marriage and work and friends will not appear until we see that, in themselves, they are nothing; but as they are players God's drama to display his glory as King and Judge and Lover of the world, they take on an eternal, incomparable, and wonderful significance.

Mind you, I don't hope for dirty diapers, dishes, or disobedience when I'm at home any more than I used to, but as they appear, the glory of God is not far away - and believing that makes all the difference.

Persons, Dignity, and Vindication

People are not just so many cattle. If cattle are mistreated, it is a shame to the abuser. My indignation, however, is not that this or that particular head of cattle was mistreated, but that cattle in general should not be so mistreated. If a human being is mistreated, my indignation is both with respect to human beings in general and that human being in particular. If every man and woman, boy and girl, has dignity, then their abuse (whether at home in private or in society and the public square) is an outrage not only because they are human, but because they are Robert or Cynthia, Bobby or Susie; their worth is personal and individual, not only collective.

I believe in heaven and hell and the final judgment of God on sin because human dignity is heavenly, human indignity is hellish and only God can judge. Someone may ask, "But if we stop racism or child abuse or genocide, won't that be enough to vindicate human dignity? Why bring God into it, not to mention heaven and hell?"

First, no one has ever stopped any of these abuses, they have only regulated them, and sins against human dignity are not OK just because I'm not suffering them. Second, suppose we could stop them: what's to prevent subsequent generations from resurrecting them again (especially since our present fight against them has been so difficult)? Third, my abhorance today of slavery or the Holocaust does nothing to affirm the worth and value of slaves or Jews to the dead and unrepentant slave owners or dead and unrepentant Nazis. There is a public vindication that is lacking without heaven and hell that we long for in all our calls for justice. We do not simply want to be vindicated in our own eyes of crimes and abuses against us, we also want the world to see that we are vindicated. And God promises such vindication (Luke 18:1-8, Matt. 25:31-46). Injustices that are righted are part of our joy, but not all of it. Those who are abused not only rejoice in the vindication of others (whether present or past), but they also long to participate in it by being vindicated of their own indignities as well.

The question I haven't addressed, though, is in what does human dignity consist? Why is human indignity so hellish? A worthy question to be handled later.

Would you have saved Jesus?

I was listening to a radio drama with my kids that portrayed the (mock) trial and execution of Jesus. In it, a boy who saw the injustice of it all screamed and yelled at people to "do something to stop it", and it hit me, would I have tried to stop it if I were there and saw how evil it was? But then, to stop it would have been to "gum up the works" of God's plan for the redemption of his people and the restoration of creation; surely those are good things, right? And yet, to stand by and let an innocent man die, the only truly man innocent of all things wrong and lawless in the world, would surely be presumptuous - "After all," I can hear myself saying, "God's going to save me by his death, so let him die so I can live." What kind of nonsense would that make?

It strikes me that the Gospels everywhere portray the disciples, the Jews, the Romans, and every other involved party as truly ingorant of the true significance of what was being accomplished in all this, and that's why they did nothing, ran away, or hid. The horror was too great to bear, but they had no means by which to oppose it. This may be why Jesus, when Pilate tries to pull rank with his "authority", says to Pilate two things that sound odd when juxtaposed: "You would have no authority if it were not given you from above," and "he who delivered me up to you has the greater sin." It's as though the human agent(s) delivering Jesus up to Pilate are to blame precisely because they are working from their own agenda and not God's - much like Assyria's role in the destruction of the northern tribes of Israel in Isaiah 10. God calls Assyria down, like a tool off the workbench, and then chastises it for it's arrogance in not recognizing God's greater purposes than Assyria's victory. God was at work to bring Assyria against his own people, just as he was at work to bring the Jews and the Romans against his Son. And yet, it truly was an evil event, for which the Jews, the Romans, and ultimately all of humanity are to blame. Paradoxically, Jesus's death, though evil, was glorious, because it demonstrated the righteousness of God over against the indignity we heap upon God and each other.

Maybe I'd hide like everyone else; maybe I'd become a martyr of sorts. Either way it goes, the abuse, torture, and murder of Jesus is paradoxically both an incomparably heinous evil and the wisdom of God: "...to those who are called, Christ [crucified is] the power of God and the wisdom of God." (1 Corinthians 1:21-25)

Worthy Posts

Now that I've entered Blogdom, the pressure to write is incredible. I'm amazed how often I'm tempted to check my own blog just to see what else I've written. It reminds me of television: TV rarely ever just records or documents events, but instead usually creates events that television can then capture and broadcast. Haven't you ever felt the sensation when someone turns the camera on you at home, outside, or in the classroom? There you are, feeling perfectly natural and not under any scrutiny at all, and then someone (without warning) turns a camera on, and all of a sudden you feel like the world has just stopped to watch you finish cooking, or push your kid on the swing, or pack up your books; it never feels "natural" and almost always feels "staged". I feel like a broadcasting company that's bought airtime and is now looking for something with which to fill it.

Lest my posts become mere performances and cease to be thoughtful and substantive, I will refrain from posting for the sake of posting, and will instead strive to post only when I have something to say (and my wife has had her quota of Great Thoughts for the day). If I have nothing worthwhile to say (that is, in my view), you'll find nothing to read but old posts or comments from others (which may be better than the post).

This brings up a related issue. Sustained and focused dialogue on an issue is hard to come by these days, no less in person than over the Internet. Personal exchanges, I'm convinced, are far more constructive and enjoyable, but in a venue such as blogs, it is possible to carry on a substantive and focused exchange even without the advantages of body language, tone of voice, "back and forth", etc. In this regard, I welcome questions, queries, challenges, and/or objections to anything I post, and hope to honor any thoughtful comments that a reader may submit. Since I'm still the only one reading my posts, this is easily done:). In the future, I hope not to have it so easy.

Double Meaning in Truth

In his book The End of Education, Neil Postman explains that the word 'End' in the book's title was deliberately chosen because it carries a double meaning: if education has no end, it will meet its end. So it is here. I chose the title "The End of Truth" because today, in the intellectual discussions of philosophy and epistemology in the West, "truth" as an objective reality has rapidly grown out of vogue and has been replaced by (an ironically dogmatic) epistemic and religious pluralism. Thus, Truth seems to many to have met its demise. And if God is true, then God has met his end. The issue of Truth, then, is no small issue, however difficult it is to tackle.

On the other hand, if Truth exists objectively, it exists as a testimony to that of which it speaks, whether of God or anything else; there is a purpose for its existence (beyond merely existing). That purpose, I believe, is so that all of humanity recognize and rejoice in the realities to which such truths point. In other words, all that is true is made true so that we will truly know something of reality, and in such knowledge will then offer a due response of affection back to God corresponding to such truth.

If Truth is, in fact, at its end, then there is no reality and everything is meaningless, for (ironically) there would still be one self-destructive truth: truth does not exist. However, if it is not at its end, then not only does it testify to something, but (having testified to some reality) it also calls for some response from those to whom it speaks. You and I are those who listen.

To love what we know is true about God and his Reality is the greatest joy in which we could participate, and this is precisely what he calls us to: our greatest joy founded on true knowledge. Questions of how we know things and which things we can know are inevitable and are worth addressing, especially for those who doubt my premises. But those questions are never ultimate, God is.

Trying to figure this out

Since I've been skeptical of the entire "blogging" phenomenon for the last few years, I'm reluctant to begin doing so now. However, I have my reasons, which may actually come out in subsequent posts. For now, I'll just experiment to see how this stuff works, and hope I don't embarrass myself (or anyone I know).