Blog

How are we to treat our Enemies?

Wed, 12 May 2010 10:38:09 -0400

How are we to treat our enemies? The question should make one give pause. Do I have enemies? What does an “enemy” look like in a society in which we are simply free to turn away from or ignore those who grate against us? For most of us, we are not called to face those who have murdered our loved ones, as did many after the Rwandan genocide of the early 1990’s. We must instead look to understand how to face those who have wronged us in both large and small ways.

Matthew 5:38-48 offers us a new approach to justice. Verse thirty-eight refers to the Old Testament law that prevented escalating retaliation. Instead of partaking in the common practice of paying back wrongdoing with greater retribution, God was calling his people to practice even-handed justice. In Matthew, however, Jesus points out that equal retaliation cannot work because the human heart always turns justice into vengeance. The more we are hurt, the more we justify escalating the wrongs. We are also unable to work out complete justice because there is a perpetrator in us all. The scales will never be even.

This new approach to justice also requires that we stand in battle against this escalating retaliation. The call to turn the other cheek does not mean to stand passively and receive wrongdoing. For a right-handed person to strike another person on their right cheek would require a backhanded slap. This was a cultural sign on disrespect. One would only use a backhanded slap against someone who was considered lesser than. “Turning the other cheek” is a call for the one who is slapping to acknowledge the other as an equal, not as an inferior. This reveals a refusal to compromise what is right, but also a refusal to resort to the cycle of escalating violence. This is not a retaliatory equality, but is instead the restoration of equality.

In this passage, Jesus also offers a new approach to love. Verses 46-47 reveal that loving those who love you will not confront the evil that plagues our world. It is easy for us to love those who are lovely to us. Love is not love if it merely responds to the beauty and goodness of others. Love is love when it creates a beauty in the midst of ugliness, goodness in the face of hostility.

Jesus is calling us love our enemies—the unlovely, the wrongdoing, the difficult to love. The following excerpt from “Loving Your Enemies” by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. exemplifies what this principle would look like.

“[The command to love your enemies is not] the pious injunction of a Utopian dreamer, [it is instead] an absolute necessity for our survival … [In the face of oppression] we are tempted to become bitter and to retaliate with a corresponding hate. But if this happens, the new order we seek will be little more than a duplicate of the old order. We must in strength and humility meet hate with love … Love is the only force capable of transforming an enemy into a friend … Of course, this is not practical … [but] My friends, we have followed the so-called practical way for too long a time now, and it has led inexorably to deeper confusion and chaos … [Instead] To our most bitter opponents we say: ‘We shall match your capacity to inflict suffering by our capacity to endure suffering. We shall meet your physical force with soul force. Do to us what you will, and we shall continue to love you … Throw us in jail, and we shall still love you. Send your hooded perpetrators of violence into our community at the midnight hour and beat us and leave us half dead, and we shall still love you. But be ye assured that we will wear you down by our capacity to suffer. One day we shall win freedom, but not only for ourselves. We shall so appeal to your heart and conscience that we shall win you in the process, and our victory will be a double victory.’”

Where then do we find the resource to employ this revolutionary type of love? The disciples would surely look back on this teaching of Jesus after the crucifixion and resurrection, and it would take on a completely different meaning for them. They watched as Jesus, and innocent victim, gave his eye and tooth to make retribution for every act of hatred we harbored in our hearts. They watched as he turned his other cheek again and again as we jeered at him, spat upon him, and brutalized him. They watched as Jesus was forced to walk an extra mile carrying not our cloak, but a cross. They watched as Jesus loved his enemies to the end, at the cost of his life. To their amazement, they watched Jesus, with his dying breath, prayed not for justice for his oppressors, but for their forgiveness.

In Christianity, God does not just command a new kind of justice, he accomplishes it for us first. While we were enemies, Christ died for us. He wore us down with his capacity to suffer. He won freedom, not only for himself, but also for us. By his death, he appealed to our hearts and won us in the process. He won the double victory, and redeemed us, his perpetrator, through his suffering. On the cross, Jesus was both Pain-Bearer and Sin-Bearer. He suffers with you as a victim and suffers for your perpetrator. That has transformed the world. That is what shapes the Christian view to how we treat our enemies.

Community

Wed, 12 May 2010 10:31:29 -0400

Recent studies have begun to explore the apparent decline in participation in communal activities over the past twenty-five years. Theorists have proposed this decline is the result of greater cultural mobility, increased work hours, and greater societal fragmentation pertaining to values. Yet, there are evident groups in our society. These groups, however, tend to be based not on communal activity, but on common theoretical ideologies.

Many secular groups spend most of their time showing the virtue of their views and how these views are the greatest good for the greatest amount of people. However, if you ever get them talking about religious groups, the conversation quickly turns bitter as they think faith and religions tend either to be bad for people or merely a crutch. They then, therefore, end up demeaning and ridiculing religious people.

On the other hand, religious groups tend to “tribalize” and retreat within their own sub-culture. They create their own dialect and language to know who is in the group and generally look down on anyone who is not in their religious group. To really create a tribal group they surround themselves with only people who think and act like them. This builds up their group, but at the exclusion of interacting with others.

What then would it look like to have real communal living? What does it take to create community amidst all this business and transience? How can distinct communities exist without demonizing the other?

Scripture answers this question in Matthew 5:1-6. In this passage, Jesus provides the blueprint for a radically different kind of community. First, Jesus presents a list of the blessed—poor in spirit, those who more, the meek, those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, the merciful, the pure in heart, the peacemakers, and those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake. Here we are challenged with a list of people very unlike those who make up our core communities. Community, therefore, is the opposite of what we would normally seek. It is inverted—the upside down kingdom. Anyone and everyone can be in this community. Secular success, physical beauty, material resources—these are not prerequisites to become a member of this community.

This radical community, however, is not merely supposed to exist as a closed community. Verses 13-15 reveal that this community is supposed to be salt and light. Most people think of salt and say, “I get it, this new community is supposed to spice up life, add some flavor.” Actually, this was written two thousand years ago when salt was too valuable to be used only as seasoning. Before refrigeration, salt was used to preserve food. That means Christians are suppose to go into the world to preserve it—to care for it. That is very different than creating tribal groups that huddle together and say away from others. Salt of course dissolves into the food. To infiltrate the meat it has to dissolve and spread, but not lose its saltiness. Therefore, the call to be salt means to go out into the world, to die to yourself, to dissolve, but to maintain your distinctive character.

These communities are also called to be light. Light of course shines forth, it reveals what is around it, it warms. This image speaks of a community that is caring and involved in the lives of those around them in a way that is productive and helpful to others. This kind of community is truth-revealing in its practice.

It is important to remember that the crowd Jesus was addressing would have consisted of Jews, including Pharisees. This crowd would have assumed that Jesus was praising the Pharisees; however, Jesus is instead calling into question the motives for seeking to be part of a community like this. Community like this should form not because of moral or religious rightness, but instead should form out of a true understanding of what Jesus did on the cross and the kind of community his sacrifice allows. In verse 12, Jesus says, “Rejoice and be glad for your reward is great in heaven.” That means rejoice in suffering and rejoice in persecution because your hope is heavenly. Notice Jesus does not say your reward WILL BE, he says your reward IS. The Pharisees and generally religious people do what they do because they are trying to earn their place. Jesus you have it all wrong. Your place in heaven is already there because of the work I did for you on the cross. This means that the way you act now is for completely different reasons. You are meek because you did not earn your place; it was given to you. You are merciful because God himself was merciful to you.

It all comes down to motivation? What motivates your heart? Religious people do the right thing, not out of a love and joy of relationships with the Father, but to use God to gain status, approval, and superiority. Religious people then use God to serve themselves. A Christian says my reward is already mine because he adopted me by grace. Now that I am his child, I live differently. This understanding would lead to radical community—a community of people who are meek and merciful, who are peacemakers, and who know what they believe, but are salt and light to others.

The One We Have Pierced

Sat, 03 Apr 2010 17:46:49 -0400

Richard John Neuhaus, the Catholic theologian, once wrote that “On a certain Friday afternoon it could truly be said ‘God is dead,’ and there is no catastrophe beyond the death of God.” In reading John 19, we watch as the greatest catastrophe in all of history unfolds before our very eyes. We look on as the Foundation was hung on a piece of wood. We stand with the crowds as life slowly escaped from Life himself. We listen as the eternal Breath breathed his last. We watch God die.

And yet what’s fascinating about the account is that the Apostle John seems strangely preoccupied with ceremonial details, doesn’t he? He dedicates half a verse (the end of v.30) to describe the death of Christ, and then he spends seven verses to make sure that we are crystal clear that Christ’s legs were not broken and that instead he was pierced through with a spear. It almost reads like a friend who, having been asked to give a eulogy, instead reassures the congregation that the deceased medical records were all in order. And we say “Well, that’s strange. How bizarre!”

But the Apostle John is up to something here. For he doesn’t just want to show us that Christ died, nor is he particularly interested in how Christ died. John, instead, is intensely concerned with showing us why Christ died. And to do that, he takes our attention away from the utter spectacle of Christ’s death. He takes us, just for a moment, away from the foot of the cross and takes us back in time to the feet of the prophet Zechariah.

And in his prophecy, Zechariah tells of a day that is coming when God will pour out a spirit of grace and mercy upon his people. And Yahweh, the God of Israel, tells his prophet Zechariah, here is how you will know that day is upon you. You will know that the decisive day of grace has come by this: “They will look on me, the one they have pierced, and they will mourn.” Do you see why the Apostle takes us here, to this prophecy? He is telling us that this Jesus that we have pierced through is none other than Yahweh himself, the Blessed One of Israel. And Zechariah tells us that when we realize what we have done, we will look with horror at the blood on our hands and we will mourn and weep bitterly. And yet in that very moment when we cry our “What have we done?!”, Zechariah tells us that that will also be the moment when “a fountain will be opened to the house of David and the inhabitants of Jerusalem, to cleanse them from sin and impurity.” The moment of our most condemnable crime will astonishingly also be the moment of our great redemption.

You see, John is trying to capture a heart-wrenching irony here in his 19th chapter. He tells us that Jesus’ legs were not broken because the bones of the Passover Lamb must remain in tact if he is to be the Passover Lamb. But then he tells us that this Lamb was pierced through by human hands … and with that damnable deed, we unknowingly punctured the fountain of life himself and what poured forth was the blood and the water that would become our salvation.

This is the astounding mystery and wisdom and glory of our God’s plan to have us back as his own. It defies all human logic. It staggers all human comprehension. It is a redemption that draws in our culpability and our sin and uses it to show forth a greater glory in the midst of a terrible and terrifying humiliation. It is a redemption so stunning, so breathtaking, that all that we can do is to utter to ourselves: “Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world.” May we look upon him, the one we have pierced, and rejoice with a bittersweet joy.

Does absolute truth lead to intolerance?

Thu, 01 Apr 2010 01:06:08 -0400

NIV Jeremiah 29:4-7 This is what the LORD Almighty, the God of Israel, says to all those I carried into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon: 5 "Build houses and settle down; plant gardens and eat what they produce. 6 Marry and have sons and daughters; find wives for your sons and give your daughters in marriage, so that they too may have sons and daughters. Increase in number there; do not decrease. 7 Also, seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into exile. Pray to the LORD for it, because if it prospers, you too will prosper."

All semester long we have been looking at relationships, and now we zooming out to look at relationships from a macro level. It becomes necessary to examine how we relate to individuals in society as a whole. Is it possible to believe in absolute truth and to still be considered good members of society? How can we in this huge world with so many different people around us relate peacefully if we believe in a particular absolute truth that stands in opposition to another's position?

In examining history and the contemporary world-wide climate, it is clear that religions rub up against each other and cause conflict, sometimes with catastrophic results. If one group of people believes they have "the truth," it follows that others who believe differently would not have the truth. This can often lead to arrogance, stereotyping, hatred, and oppression.

What then is the solution to this discord? What do we do? Many academics had hoped, and continue to hope, that with time and education people will stop believing in religious views, yet that has not actually happened. The percentage of people who say they are religious worldwide has grown over the last fifty years, not declined. In America there is a new fascination with spirituality today that was not present fifty years ago. In Africa, the percentage of professing Christians has increased from 9% to 50% in 50 years. In South Korea, in the percentage of professing Christians has increased from 1% to 50% over the past 100 years. In China, there is an explosion of people believing in Christianity even though the government has tried to stomp it out. Clearly it is not just going to go away.

Others claim that active education against religion will eradicate the oppressive and strife associated with religion. The New Atheism of Dawkins and Hitchins pushes a view of radical secularism where no faith views are allowed. These authors state that atheism is the best for humanity. Sociologists, however, have noted that atheists and secularists are the least giving of their money. If secularists are right and this is all there is in life and all values are relative and we are just the sum total of carbon, chemicals and oxygen, then one could care about people if they want to, but it would not be a social imperative. Based on the data, secularism does not seem to spur people on to caring for the greater good of society.

So what do we going to do? We are all part of a greater society but it seems religious people on the whole are tribal and intolerant of people who do not hold on to their own views, and secular people on the whole fail to make as much of an effort to give of their possessions and time. How are we to live in the world as a society? As Christians, we must also ask how we can believe in an absolute TRUTH without being oppressive or arrogant?

Christians tend to fall into the same arrogance as secularist and believers of other religions. It is easy to fall into the trap of self-righteousness and condemnation. Jeremiah 29 clearly calls Christians to engage with a different culture, to live with those who have different worldviews, and to work for the redemption and the peace of the city in which they dwell. Jeremiah 29 speaks to the experience of the Jewish population, God's people, who were taken away from their homeland by the Babylonians. The reason why they were brought there was to essentially breed them out, to have them be absorbed into that culture, into that society, and to become non-distinct. Interestingly, the Babylonians wanted the Israelites to lose their faith, much like our modern secularists desire a society in which religion is not present.

The prophet Jeremiah speaks for God and tells the Jews to build houses, plant gardens, eat, have sons and daughters, find wives, increase, and care about the peace and prosperity of the city. What? This is the city that is filled with the people that raped and killed your family members—the ultimate people who don't get your faith. Babylon in the Bible is always the place that is known for where violence and oppression comes from and yet:

a) In verse 4, God sent the people there "I carried you into exile" and b) now I want you stay awhile and care about this town and people who are different from you and even hate you. What God is doing in this chapter is revealing a completely different plan for the entire world. So how were these Jews going to be any different? They weren't. Not naturally. Augustine who lived in 400 AD, developed an idea about two cities: the city of God and the city of man. The city of man is characterized by pride, self-service, and the oppression of others. In contrast, the Bible speaks about a heavenly city that operates not on pride but on peace, joy, and justice. This heavenly city will come down to the city of man to restore it. That means all cities today are both broken places, but are also places for great hope of renewal. We are to take what is broken in money, power, relationships and work to bring about peace and justice.

The word here for peace is the Hebrew word shalom, which does not merely mean peace, but implies harmony and rightness and perfection. God is calling Christians to work for the perfection of the city that is where our ultimate hope lies.

Do we do this? Do we use our distinctions to serve others? In the Rise of Christianity, Rodney Stark writes of the early Christians who stayed in plague-ridden cities in order to care for the sick and dying often at the cost of their own lives. The power of their radical service led to a Roman empire that was largely Christian.

This desire to serve self-sacrificially can only be founded on a person who enters a city that does not love him, serves it, loves it and was cast out of it because of his care for them. Because Jesus gave His life, we are then able to live lives of service. How can Christians oppress others if at the heart of our faith is a person who gives everything for others by dying for them on a cross? Sure Christians do oppress others, and are self-righteous and prideful but only when they forget that they were forgiven by grace, that they do not deserve God's love because of their sin. He gives it to us anyway, and now we love and care for others not because we are better then others, but because we are in the same boat and with the same needs.

The resurrection shows us that God is fixing the world, bodily, physically, and so we can be apart of that fixing redeeming workforce. Pluralists and secularists say harmony can only happen if we get away from absolute truth. What if, instead, we believe we received grace? We are restored by what He did, not by what we do. This strips away pride and allows us to serve others because Christ served us.

So are you using this city for school only, or do you care about it more then that with all its warts and issues? Do you have a greater plan for why you are working and living here? What is the foundation you are trusting in?

Qualities to Look For in the Other

Fri, 19 Mar 2010 11:51:13 -0400

As we continue our conversation on dating, it becomes necessary to examine more specifically the qualities that we should be seeking in a potential significant other. Contemporary media reinforces stereotypes about what women and men should be, yet seems to leave out significant qualities. Women like Megan Fox are lauded for their beauty and sex appeal. Men like George Clooney and Gerard Butler are praised for their charm and party-boy ways. "Love affairs" between infatuated young women and brooding vampires have become the standard for true love. How then do we weed through all the cultural lies and hype and arrive at standards for who we are to be and what we are to look for?

The story of Ruth and Boaz provides a glimpse into the introduction, courtship, and eventual marriage of a couple who recognize the Biblical traits in a significant other that are crucial to a strong relationship. It is important to remember that Ruth has left her home after the death of her husband to follow and care for her mother-in-law Naomi. Why look at a story about a woman who goes to glean in a man's field when we're talking about dating? This story is their courtship. Ruth and Boaz end up married. As we examine both Ruth and Boaz, we can become more aware of the traits and characteristics that we should be looking for in the people we date.

Ruth 2:1-17 speaks to four character traits exemplified by Ruth. First, Ruth is loyal. In verse 2, Ruth acknowledges the importance of her relationship with Naomi by seeking her counsel. Furthermore, we know that Ruth left the shelter of her parents and her homeland to become a despised, widowed, foreigner in order to honor and care for Naomi. Secondly, Ruth is active and responsible. She does not sit at home bemoaning the death of her husband and her complete loss of social status, she actively goes out to glean in the fields to provide for Naomi and herself. It is also important to note that Ruth does not simply go out into the field, but she works diligently as verse 7 says, "she has continued from early morning until now, except for a short rest." Finally we learn that Ruth is both humble/dependent on grace and is faithful to God. Throughout the passage, Ruth acknowledges that she must find favor in order to obtain the gracious privilege of gleaning. Often landowners ignored the Levitical law that required they show mercy to the poor by allowing them to gather the leftover crops. It is clear that Ruth is able to go out boldly and humbly because of her faithfulness to the Lord. Because she recognizes that God is in control and is gracious, she is able to serve and work fearlessly for God's glory, not her own.

This passage also provides an introduction to the character of Boaz. Verse 1 reveals that Boaz is a "worthy man." He possesses moral character, social power, and wealth. We do not learn if Boaz is handsome. Instead, we learn that he is a man who is known for his character and his position of integrity within society. He is integrity is further reinforced in verse 9 when he orders his servants and workers to protect Ruth and not to touch her. Her honor is important to him. He has heard of what she has done for Naomi and seeks to honor that in how he treats her. Like Ruth is faithful to God in all aspects of her life, so Boaz is a man who maintains integrity with his faith. He greets his servants in the name of the Lord (v.4) revealing that, for him, there is no distinction between the secular and the sacred. His faith informs all aspects of his life. Finally, we see that Boaz is a man of generosity. Not only does he uphold the Levitical law, but he also goes beyond what the law requires. Verses 15-16 state, "When she rose to glean, Boaz instructed his young men, saying, ‘let her glean from even among the sheaves and do not reproach her. And also pull out some from the bundles for her and leave it for her to glean." He leaves extra for her and in verse 14 invites her to eat dinner with him and his workers ensuring that she is full.

The story of Ruth and Boaz shows a continual interplay between two people who understand their dependence on the Lord's grace. They are able to respond and act with humility and respect because they know that they are in the hands of a loving and wise God. Boaz realizes that he is related to Naomi, and therefore, can marry Ruth under the cultural practice of the kinsman-redeemer. He can take in both Ruth and Naomi and provide all that they need to regain right standing in society. The story, however, does not stop here. As we read further in the story of Ruth, we learn of the eventual marriage of Ruth and Boaz which then leads to the birth of their son. Interestingly, the genealogy of Ruth and Boaz leads to David who eventually leads to Jesus.

The marriage of Ruth and Boaz foreshadows the birth of one who would become the true Kinsman-Redeemer, Jesus Christ. Jesus becomes the redeemer who seeks after the orphan, the widow, and the foreigner. He came to restore justice and mercy. He came to woo his bride.

How then do we go about finding a man or woman of godly character? First, reevaluate yourself. Are you a Ruth or a Megan Fox? Are you a Boaz or a George Clooney? Secondly, reevaluate your priorities. Is what you find to be most attractive in line with what Scripture is calling us to seek? Remember these are not just stupid rules. Character is what has the power to transform. What traits can sharpen you and make you into the man or woman God has called you to be? Have these in mind as you go out and serve and meet others. These should be your non-negotiables.

Dating in a Hookup Culture

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 23:53:59 -0500

Throughout history the way in which people have progressed from not knowing one another to marriage has shifted. What began as a business transaction shifted to courtship and, finally, to contemporary dating practices. Recently, however, conventional dating practices seem to have given way to a culture of hookups and one night stands—a culture in which there are no rules. The lack of rules breeds insecurity and superficiality in "relationships." How then do students navigate the waters of forming a healthy relationship? Do we fall into the cultural norm of meaningless hookups or do we "kiss dating goodbye?" Neither of these seems to adequately establish a way in which to engage in a positive dating relationship. What then do we do?

It would be simple were the Bible to offer a how to on dating. It does not, however, provide such a roadmap. This does not mean that Scripture does not guide us on how to engage in meaningful and healthy relationships. On the contrary, we are given insight over and over again.

First, it is imperative that we strike a balance when it comes to dating. The old system of courtship was completely oriented toward character assessment with an eye towards marriage. Current dating practices exist merely for recreation and fun. This type of dating is done without serious consideration about the future of the relationship. So should we never date? If you try only to go on dates with marriage-seeking intentions, you will most likely overwhelm the other person in the relationship. However, if you only date for "fun" with no further intentions, then you risk playing with the emotions of others. The alternative then is to date people for fun, yet with clear communication about intentions. This can be challenging; however, it is the only way to honor the other person in the dating relationship.

Secondly, it is imperative to date only those with the same faith assumption. II Cor. 6:14 speaks to the importance of being evenly yoked. A yoke was a farming tool laid on top of two oxen to pull the plow. In order for the plow to function properly both animals have to be the same height and weight or one side of the yoke will pull the other side down. The same principle applies to marriage, and therefore, to dating (the process that should lead towards marriage).

What is the logic behind this? It is simple. If your partner does not share your faith, then he or she does not understand it. If Jesus is central to you, then your partner cannot understand the core of who you are—the main component of your life and the motivation for all you do. You will make decisions that your partner cannot fathom. Therefore, if you marry someone who does not share your faith, there are only two ways to go. Either you keep your convictions, and your partner finds you more and more weird and tedious because your faith really does affect all that you do, or you simply move Christ out of the central core of who you are. If you keep Christ central, you will feel isolated from your spouse.

Though the Bible does not speak specifically to dating, the principle of being evenly yoked does apply. To date someone of a different faith assumption reveals a misunderstanding of the purposes of dating and the role of faith in your life and relationships. Dating is not merely for your pleasure, because relationships are not meant merely for our pleasure. As anyone knows, good, deep relationships work when people not just in the relationship for what they can get out of it, but also for what they can give each other. While you need not marry the first person you date, every person you date should be someone that you could marry.

Finally, it is imperative to understand what the term "attraction" means in its fullest sense. Often, the first line of defense as we identify and disqualify dating candidates is physical attraction. Though physical attraction can be important, it is comprehensive attraction that we should be seeking. Comprehensive attraction is an attraction that is rooted in someone's character or spiritual fruit as laid out in Galatians 5. We must look to identify the person's future self—the person that they are becoming as they seek to know God better. The deepest attraction forms when we catch a glimpse of what the person is becoming and long to be a part of that transformative process.

Only when we are able to identify common vision and purpose can we then move forward. This awareness that we are part of a larger plan allows us to maintain a right perspective on our partner. We are then freed from needing our partner to be our savior because we recognize that we are working together to participate in a larger plan of salvation and redemption. Christ came to fix the broken and right the wrongs. He takes the brokenness and the pain and absorbs it himself. He is the Savior we need.

So if I'm in college, why should I care about marriage?

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 22:41:49 -0500

Ephesians 5:21-33

²¹Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ. ²²Wives, submit to your husbands as to the Lord. ²³For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior. ²⁴Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything. ²⁵Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her ²⁶to make her holy, cleansingher by the washing with water through the word, ²⁷and to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless. ²⁸In this same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. ²⁹After all, no one ever hated his own body, but he feeds and cares for it, just as Christ does the church— ³⁰for we are members of his body. ³¹"For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh."³²This is a profound mystery—but I am talking about Christ and the church. ³³However, each one of you also must love his wife as he loves himself, and the wife must respect her husband.

As we look to society today, we are confronted with myriad views on what marriage is and is not. Each week, newspapers, magazines, and the internet are strewn with images and headlines of engagements, weddings, infidelity, marital strife, and divorce. This should cause us to give pause and ask what is marriage? What is its purpose? How has contemporary society's view of marriage deviated from its initial intent? The passage from Ephesians 5 allows us to understand the purposes of marriage as: intimacy, holiness, and mission.

First, verses 21-23 speak to the intimacy of marriage as they recall the first marriage—that of Adam and Eve. In Genesis 2, we see God giving away a daughter to a marriage relationship in which Adam and Eve "were naked and they felt no shame." They were utterly vulnerable with one another before God. This is where the language of submission enters in. True love is always marked by self-forgetfulness—those moments when you are not obsessed with yourself, but instead are taken with another. This is a truly liberating and enthralling intimacy. You are free to desire someone else's good even at the expense of your own.

Often, this text can be uncomfortable because it seems so regressive. When we hear it that way; however, we misunderstand what is really being said. We clearly see that wives are called to submit to their husbands; however, this call is not only given to the wives. Verse 25 calls the husband to not only submit his own desires (v. 21), but also to give up his life for the good of his wife. He must be willing to lay aside his interests and his life "as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her." The way to intimacy is not demand that the other give you what you have rights to. It is instead laying down your rights to give someone else what they need.

Secondly, we see in verses 24-27 that one of the purposes of marriage is holiness. Holiness is just a fancy word for being set apart, and made distinct. We must be clear that scripture calls us to holiness, not happiness. Marriage, therefore, is not about making me happy. Instead, it is about making me loving. This completely changes things. If marriage is supposed to make you more like Christ, then there will be certain moments that will feel like death. As long as marriage is about self-fulfillment (happiness), then we will be unable to persevere when difficulties arise. We will quickly say, "I need to get out." When we realize, however, that marriage is about making us holy, we are able to handle difficulty in a different light. This does not mean that marriage is devoid of happiness; however, as Victor Frankl wrote, "... happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one's dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one's surrender to a person other than oneself ... in the long run, [happiness] will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think of it." The true joy of marriage comes as you see yourself and your beloved being transformed into the man or woman Christ intended them to be.

Finally, marriage is also a mission (v. 32). God is not saying here is married love now let me come up with a good analogy to explain it. Conversely, God is saying here is Christ's love for his church and marriage is God's analogy, a living breathing parable of that love. We are not meant to look at marriage to solve our problems. We are meant to look through it to a love supreme, the Love that is the root and source of this human love.

The New Testament tells us the story of this lover, who walked across the universe to win his beloved—the beloved who persistently ran, who persistenly resisted the love of this great lover. This came at an unspeakable cost to himself. It is ultimately a story of a bridegroom who did not just promise to give all for his bride. It tells us of a bridegroom who actually chose to give is all to win his bride's heart.

What Paul is saying here is remarkable: People are meant to look at marriage and say, "Maybe there is a God who actually loves us and desires right relationship with us."

Thoughts on Sex and New York City

Fri, 26 Feb 2010 14:40:20 -0500

I recently spent a weekend in the Hudson Valley with about fifty college students from New York City. The theme of our retreat was sex, and they spent the weekend learning from pastors about God’s design for sex as well as discussing it amongst themselves. I’m proud of them for being as vulnerable as they were and for their willingness to confront this issue head on, when it would be easier to simply live as though it isn’t an issue. We spent a lot of time discussing the overarching narrative for why we believe sex should be restricted to marriage. This is tough to understand because it seems so outdated. I’m still working on my own understanding of it, but one thing that helps me is looking at it from a negative point of view, i.e. observing the sexual habits and attitudes of those who claim no allegiance to God or religion and determining whether they are, in fact, more sexually healthy and fulfilled than I am.

This past fall, New York magazine published a cover story about their Sex Diaries feature (November 2, 2009). This feature was created as a digital peek inside the sexual minds of New Yorkers. Every week, one person is selected by the magazine's editors to chronicle his or her sex life for the week. This can mean sexual acts, thoughts, fantasies, or failures. These diaries are then posted on the website and opened to commentary by readers. This has been going on since early 2007, and apparently has become so popular that the editors felt a more in-depth analysis was warranted. They asked one of their writers, Wesley Yang, to read all 141 diaries and "develop some kind of taxonomy of contemporary sexual anxieties." He then proceeded to outline ten things that he found to be true across the board. What was so fascinating was that it all amounted to one thing: We all want and need the connection that sex affords regardless of how and when we've sought after it. And while Yang says that "virtually everyone under the age of 30 has grown up with their sexuality digitally enhanced," we can't seem to let go of the necessity of person-to-person connection. All of our digital enhancements are attempts to shield ourselves from exposure, and yet we haven't figured out a way to eliminate the need for exposure. No matter how good we get at hiding ourselves, what we really want is to be found, and so we will always be vulnerable. I couldn't help but be deeply saddened at the ways in which the Sex Diarists contorted themselves to avoid the appearance of need. What I hope we can learn from their stories is that living in a culture of sexual freedom has done nothing but alienate us from each other even more. Below, a commentary on Yang's analysis.

1. The anxiety of too much choice.

Yang says that since we are now using cell phones rather than little black books, the possibilities of people we could have sex with at any given moment are virtually endless. Seven or eight different people could potentially be texting you at one time, asking for various sexual encounters. The net of this is "the nagging urge to make each thing we do the single most satisfying thing we could possibly be doing at any moment." But when does that stop? Surely, no matter where we are or who we're with, there is someone else in the world who could provide a more empirically satisfying experience for us. So this embarrassment of riches has served only to make us long for monogamy. If only there were just one person in the world to be with tonight. "In the face of this enormous pressure," says Yang, "many of the Diarists stay home and masturbate." Crisis averted? No, we are not only lonelier than ever, we are also now quite literally alone.

2. The anxiety of making the wrong choice.

The problem with unlimited choice in sexual partners is that you can only be with so many of them at once. Granted, cybersex has made multiple partners a great deal easier, but the human brain can only be doing a certain number of things at one time. That means that there will always be frustration over the incompleteness of any sexual experience, and the regret that perhaps someone else would have met our needs more efficiently. Also, because each of these interactions happen between human beings with different points of view, misunderstandings are inevitable. We wind up putting ourselves out there in ways we never intended simply by allowing ourselves to be vulnerable to so many different people. They aren't all trustworthy. And if they're doing the same thing we are, namely, prowling about for the most mind-blowing sexual experience, the chance is just as good that they will find us to be the wrong choice. Ouch. Monogamous marital sexual relationships are by no means completely satisfying all the time, but if you have committed yourself to one person and refuse to allow anything to hinder that commitment, you can never be the wrong choice for one another. There is great security in that.

3. The anxiety of not being chosen.

This one is almost too easy. Of course, what we all want most in the world is to be chosen. It's a fundamental human need. And just about everything we do is in service of this need. We rarely pursue anything else. All our efforts to be pretty, successful, better than everyone around us, are because we long to be chosen - by whom, we're not sure. It's sad to think that these Sex Diarists, who seem to pride themselves on their lassez-faire approach to sexual activity, really just want what we all want, and perhaps are not so free after all. In fear that they will never be chosen by someone, "everybody is on somebody's back burner, and everybody has a back burner of their own." This is a perversion of the time-honored tradition of having a back-up in the event that you are still single at the age of 40 (I think I used to say 30, but I believe it's time to extend that deadline ...). Now, rather than simply having a back-up husband, we apparently have back-up booty calls as well. The fear of going home alone, going to bed alone, being rejected by the latest conquest, is so intense that there must be someone always waiting in the wings, to whom we can turn when all others have failed and we are in danger of admitting that no one has chosen us that night. The back burner is also where we "confine anyone who might become emotionally dangerous;" that is, anyone for whom we have authentically begun to fall. These people are safer on the back burner because then whatever feelings have come up can't irrevocably connect us to them and leave us vulnerable to them. The irony here is that without that legitimate emotional connection and vulnerability, we will never feel chosen. But opening ourselves up to the choice leaves us in a position to be painfully rejected. It would seem that the needs created by sex do not in fact go away when we attempt to meet them outside of the ways they're designed to be met. These Diarists may feel as though they are uninhibited, but to me they reveal themselves to be every bit as needy as those who restrict themselves, and delusional on top of that.

4. The anxiety of appearing overly enthusiastic.

This one makes me laugh because it is rampant among churchgoing singles, which is the group most likely to reject the Sex Diarist's lifestyle out of hand and pursue the complete opposite approach. It would seem that neither total sexual abstinence nor abject promiscuity protect us from this particular anxiety. I myself have been a victim of it on numerous occasions, and my girlfriends relate: when we are interested in someone, our most knee-jerk reaction seems to be to put as much distance as possible between ourselves and the person of note. The rationale behind this is that if we are interested in this person, said interest will be written all over our faces, and we will give ourselves away. This is the kiss of death - no man wants to be with a woman who reveals herself to be too excited about him. So we flee in the opposite direction. I don't quite think this is the answer, since the outcome is typically the man's never noticing us at all, but the anxiety behind it is very real, and the Sex Diarists seem to be experiencing the exact same thing. Keeping someone on the back burner is a delicate undertaking, because at any moment you might betray your true feelings and scare the person off, thus inciting that feeling of rejection you are so desperately trying to avoid. "Everyone's afraid disarmament won't be mutual." The fear of feeling this pain is what keeps us from emotional vulnerability. The fact that any of us can let our guard down for the time it takes to tell someone we're interested is truly a miracle, because our instinct is to avoid this environment of exposure at all costs. "The goal of any Diarist playing the game, therefore, is to withhold one's own expectations until one understands what is expected by the other party." Unfortunately, this cannot go on forever, if only because we live in an imperfect world and mistakes will eventually be made. Even if you succeed in holding out for the other person's initiation, your response in those first moments may betray "a level of emotional enthusiasm unmatched by the other party." In other words, "meaningless" sex does not appear to protect us from the dangerous prospect of developing legitimate feelings for someone, and not having those feelings returned.

5. The anxiety of appearing delusional.

I will freely admit that I suffer incurably from this particular anxiety. My self-awareness is one of my most-protected traits, and I expend great effort to make it visible to others, so that no one will ever catch me in a blind spot. Yes, I know that I am judgmental, self-righteous, outspoken, stand-offish, defensive. If I know these things about myself, and tell you that I know them, I absolve myself of a certain amount of blame. I can appear a great deal calmer in a confrontation, because you aren't telling me anything I don't know. And most of all, I can avoid the worst of fates: considering myself to be one way, but being regarded by others in quite another way. If I know all my flaws, I never have to be one of those people everyone else looks at and shakes their heads in sadness. See: Glenn Beck, Al Sharpton, Real Housewives of Anywhere. Self-referential people who don't take themselves too seriously at least earn the respect of others for not being deluded about who they are. Self-importance and an inflated sense of one's own goodness are to be avoided at all costs. The Diarists seem to understand this, although it is actually a learned behavior. Yang says that "over the years the journals have become increasingly reflective, with observational riffs and little bits of self-analysis." This is apparently due to the fact that those who comment on the diaries "descend on those oblivious to their own weakness." If we admit our weakness in advance, at least we are somewhat in control of our image. Isn't this true in our personal relationships as well? If we can beat the other person to any criticism they might have of us, we rob them of their ability to define us by our shortcomings. The Sex Diarists, so able to distance themselves emotionally from a sexual conquest, care very deeply about the opinions of anonymous commenters whom they will never meet.

6. The anxiety of appearing overly sincere.

Another side to not wanting to appear delusional or enthusiastic. The last thing the Diarists want is to seem as if they actually care what any of these people (those whom they pursue sexually, those who comment on their diaries) think of them. This is an essential component of the idea of free love. Sex is simply a way to have a good time, no emotional strings attached. It's very important not to come off as concerned about these people or whether they are interested in us beyond one night. In many ways, these diaries are one big middle finger to all those with whom the Diarists interact. "I don't really need you," they are saying. "I did what I came to do and now you're nothing to me." As Yang puts it, the people in the Diarists’ lives are "a means to an end" - sexual satisfaction. This attitude is especially important in the presence of those to whom we do not want to appear overly enthusiastic. This seems to have become an incredibly exhausting game that is not especially fulfilling in the end. After all, without some modicum of sincerity, it is impossible to present yourself to someone as genuinely capable of being in a relationship. These Diarists are trapping themselves in their own loneliness by virtue of their refusal to play by the emotional rules that exist whether acknowledged or not. An especially disturbing observation of Yang's: "This [distance] is particularly true for the female Diarists eager to portray themselves just as capable of using others as any man." Ladies, does it occur to us that we deserve better than that? What a sad thing to have been reduced to mere female Lotharios, in effect saying, "We see what you men do that's hurtful to us. We're going to do the same back to you." I fail to see how any of this leads to sexual satisfaction, much less to healthy relationships.

7. The anxiety of appearing prudish.

I think this might be a uniquely New Yorker problem, or at least a uniquely urbane liberal problem. There is a fascinating insistence in the Sex Diaries that no sexual thought, act, or partnership is out of bounds. This is something too which I can't quite relate, although I'll admit that's at least partially because I'm something of a prude myself (and unafraid of appearing so). Why do we need to prove to ourselves, or to anyone, that we are willing to do anything, sexually speaking? Whose judgment are we afraid of in that situation? Not God's, surely. This is why I say this is a problem unique to those who live in societies that have most assuredly rejected the Biblical model of doing anything (which is not to say there is necessarily more holiness in the places that have not done this). We seem to be expressly concerned with proving ourselves to be as far as humanly possible from that worldview. The interesting thing is that most people who have rejected the idea that there is a God with the prerogative to dictate human behavior claim to thrive on the "to each his own" way of life. The Diarists' unwillingness to seem uncomfortable with any sexual act only proves that they have merely traded one master for another. They don't want to conform to one set of sexual mores, so they have collectively decided to conform to another. Can we ever simply be our own people, without feeling the need to meet some larger standard? This indicates to me that we cannot. This need to appear to have "conquered modesty" is itself a need to please someone other than ourselves, whomever that person might be. A god perhaps? The god of New York sexual conduct?

8. Internet-enabled agoraphobia.

This one is especially easy for me to understand, because I hate being thrown into unfamiliar social situations. I am famous for begging off get-togethers that might involve large numbers of people I don’t already know. This social ineptitude extends to not wanting to interact with people I don’t know ever, including accountants, doctors, and salespeople. The invention of online food ordering has changed my life, and now I exclusively order from restaurants that offer this service. The fact that I don’t have to talk to someone over the phone to get food sent to me is a miracle. So for someone like me, there is something appealing about this new mode of communicating with people online. It creates a safe distance, from which I can present myself as anyone I want the other person to see. Physical flaws are easily hidden, personality flaws glossed over. Most importantly, people become commodities. Because I have no particular personal connection to the person with whom I’m communicating online, I feel no obligation toward them, and I can avoid, to an alarming degree, feeling even the most basic human concern for them. This callousness goes even deeper for those who use the internet as a tool for sexual conquest. Now I am meeting people for whom I care nothing and using them to satisfy me sexually. Even someone as introverted as I am understands the importance of human connection, and it’s disturbing to think where our sexual appetites can go after this.

9. Separation anxiety.

A very important component of most young people’s lives these days is online social networking. Yang notes an interesting consequence of this: “Collecting all of your friends onto a single page, as all social-networking sites do, alters the way you think about experiences. Formerly, you met people, did things with them, and selected a handful to carry forward into later stages of life. Life was a linear sequence of relationships that began and ended.” I can remember this “former” time of managing relationships because Facebook did not exist prior to my last year of college, and so I had no way of quantifying my friends in the way that Facebook allows me to. But the threat of very serious panic resulting from social networking is real. Everyone I know is familiar with the verb “Facebook-stalk,” which is what one does when one has recently become friends with someone on whom one has a crush, or with someone one’s significant other used to date, or any number of other possibilities. The amount of information you can find out about this person via Facebook is really staggering, and yet at the end of the day you don’t know them any better than you did and you have no security in that relationship. This is only more true when Facebook is used to trawl for sexual partners. Do I really want to friend this person so that, months after our one-night stand, he can still be privy to all the details of my other relationships? And does online social networking ultimately relieve any of the stress inherent in relationships? Probably not.

10. The anxiety of being unable to love.

It seems we have come full circle. I could be wrong, but as far as I can tell the prevailing sexual attitude in New York is that I own my sexuality, I can do with it what I please, and propriety be damned. It’s the 21^st century, and I’m a progressive urbanite. This might actually be credible if not for the fact that people STILL aren’t fulfilled. Why, if the best route to sexual satisfaction is total freedom to sleep with whomever whenever, are we still so unsatisfied? Wang calls the Diarists’ desire for love their “most surprising psychological attribute.” Why, after hundreds of generations of human beings, are we still surprised that this is what we need most? As the very wise Freddie Mercury once said, “Can anybody find me somebody to love?” This is what we want and what we are searching for, and no matter how hard we try to be people who claim autonomy, we can’t step outside the way we’ve been designed. Not to oversimplify, but birds cannot swim, no matter how much they want to. People, designed by God for intimacy with Him first and with one other individual of the opposite sex next, cannot find contentment outside of this design. It can’t be done, and if it could, surely one of these Sex Diarists would have found it. So why haven’t they?

Much more could be said, but I’ve already gone on much too long, so let me end by saying this. I acknowledge that plenty of people DO follow God’s design for sex and still wind up unhappy, unfulfilled, and damaged. This is inevitable in a sinful world. Relationships will not be fully healed and whole until Christ returns, and I know that sounds like a cop-out. But the bottom line is that I don’t see people finding health and wholeness in relationships through deviant sexual practices. Frequently I see them not finding it even while following all the “rules,” and I’m as good an example as any of someone who has followed all the rules and still hasn’t found everlasting love. Perhaps it’s a case of the lesser of two evils, for now. But the very same God that designed us to experience sex in a certain way promises that all will be made right in the future, and if you don’t believe that, well, I don’t think anyone could respond better than C.S. Lewis’s Narnia character, Puddleglum: "Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all of those things. Suppose we have. Then all I can say is that, in that case, the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones."

What does love got to do with it? What's romance?

Wed, 17 Feb 2010 00:54:32 -0500

Proverbs 5

¹⁵ Drink water from your own cistern, running water from your own well. ¹⁶ Should your springs overflow in the streets, your streams of water in the public squares? ¹⁷ Let them be yours alone, never to be shared with strangers. ¹⁸ May your fountain be blessed, and may you rejoice in the wife of your youth. ¹⁹ A loving doe, a graceful deer-- may her breasts satisfy you always, may you ever be captivated by her love.

After three weeks of exploring our need for relationships and the need for forgiveness implicit in strong relationships, this week, we turn the corner and begin to look at romantic relationships. In an op-ed piece from USA Today, Laura Vanderkam compares the contemporary approach to romantic relationships to that of how we view relationships. According to Vanderkam, romance is on the decline not only because of the abundance of choice before us, but also because we have become accustomed to control and customization.

Before continuing, it is important to define romance. Is romance something physical? Is it something emotional? It is material? Is it sexual intimacy? What does it mean? Polls reveal that over 80% of the students polled around the country agree that romance and sexual intimacy are not the same. In the book Sex and the Soul, the author found that Christian and religious students tend to separate romance and sexual intimacy as a way to maintain purity and to avoid sexual desire. Conversely, students who do not consider themselves to be religious, divide romance and sexual intimacy because of the pervasive "hook up" culture. It is simply easier to enter into sexual relationships without having to connect on a deeper level. Interestingly, both conservative and non-conservative students are in accord with defining romance as talking with their partner for long periods of time. Romance, as defined by students is simply getting to know one another while spending time face to face.

This begs the question: what then is the Bible's take on romance? Proverbs 5:15-19 combines does not separate sexual intimacy and romance, but instead links them in the context of a committed marriage relationship. Through the use of poetic Hebrew metaphor, Proverbs 5:15-19 describe an erotic view of romance. In Hebrew, poetry cisterns were always an image for female sexuality. You have to go into the cisterns and down into the well to get the water out. On the other hand, the writer says, "May your fountain be blessed"—this is not water you go down in and get, but this water spurts out—obviously a vivid image of male sexuality.

Proverbs, however, does not leave us only with sexually charged metaphors. The repetitive use of the possessive tense serves to fuse the sexuality with commitment. There is an implied safety to a committed, permanent relationship. We crave this safety because the knowledge that we will never be left leaves us with the ability to be vulnerable. We can be truly known because we feel secure. Biblically, a relationship can only be truly romantic when friendship (emotional closeness) and sexuality are fused through commitment.

If you lose one of these components, the relationship disintegrates. If you remove friendship, or the emotional closeness, the sexual relationship can only last so long. If you remove the sexual component, the friendship/commitment becomes challenging because there is no physical reinforcement. If you have friendship and sex without commitment to each other, you are always unsure if this is the last time, which breeds insecurity. Proverbs gets it right. Romance works when everything is kept together, but it falls apart when we attempt to compartmentalize.

Without jumping too far ahead, it is important to remember that even when all of the components are present, relationships are still challenging. We must recognize that relationships are not primarily about our personal fulfillment, but are instead about commitment to the growth of the other person. Lewis Smedes wrote, "My wife has lived with at least five different men since we were married, and each of the five was me." Relationships change us. They are challenging because people are flawed, and bring those flaws to those relationships A true romantic relationship is one in which both people spend a lifetime learning how to love the other. As we remember that Jesus loved us even when we were strangers from him and that Jesus has been and forever will be committed to us, we will then be able to truly love and be committed to others.

Is forgiving for wusses?

Wed, 10 Feb 2010 22:47:46 -0500

Forgiveness

Matthew 18:21-35

As we continue to explore real relationships, it becomes necessary for us to pause and admit that true, deep relationships are never free of conflict. If we truly know and allow ourselves to be known, periods of disagreement, periods of hurt, and periods of wrongdoing are unavoidable. Often, especially in consumer/vendor relationships, when incidents of discord arise, the relationship ends. How then can we enter into real relationships as well as persevere and grow when we are hurt or wronged? Study of Matthew 18 provides us with a look at Biblical forgiveness.

First, verse 23 reveals that we cannot forgive others without regard to God. In response to Peter's question, which essentially asks "How many times must I forgive a repeat offender before I become a doormat?," Jesus puts the question in perspective. Jesus takes Peter out of his own head, and provides him with a glimpse from God's perspective. From God's height, the difference between Peter and the offender are equalized. As Volf states, "Forgiveness flounders because I exclude the enemy from the community of humans even as I exclude myself from the community of sinners." Jesus is reminding Peter that we need a vantage point that enables us to see our perpetrators as part of the common community of humans, and also enables us to see ourselves as part of the common community of sinners. We must not think of ourselves as the king, and as others as offenders, but must understand that someone else is king. Before that King, we are all offenders. Without the understanding that the playing field is leveled, that we are all perpetrators, we will never be able to fully forgive.

Second, verses 32-33 reveal that we are only able to forgive to the extent, and only to the extent, that we have understood our forgiven-ness. This is important because in a world without God, we do not talk about our need for forgiveness. In "The Capital of the World," Ernest Hemingway wrote, "Madrid is full of boys named Paco, which is diminutive of the name Francisco, and there is a Madrid joke about a father who came to Madrid and inserted an advertisement in the personal columns of El Liberal which said: ‘Paco meet me at Hotel Montana noon Tuesday all is forgiven Papa' and how a squadron of [the National Guard] had to be called out to disperse the eight hundred young men who answered the advertisement." We have moved from this awareness that we need to be forgiven, to an assumption that wrongdoings are always the fault of someone else. We have become a culture of victims, a culture of people who lay the blame elsewhere. In this culture that relies so heavily on therapy, we must continually affirm our own "okay-ness." We must continually look to others as the reason why bad things happen. Jesus counters this self-aggrandizing mentality, and says that the path to forgiving is recognizing our own debilitating need for forgiveness. Like all of the young men who responded to the personal add in Hemingway's quotation, we must maintain an understanding of our own need to be forgiven. Individuals who have seriously wronged someone else and have had to seek forgiveness tend to be much more willing to forgive. Often those who have been "good" and "moral" find it more difficult to truly forgive because they have never felt the freedom of being forgiven. In this parable, the servant has been forgiven of his debt of 10,000 talents ($2.5 billion). He then fails to forgive the debt of 100 denarii (1/600,000^th of 10,000 talents) his own servant owes him, because he fails to recognize how greatly he himself was forgiven.

Finally, the way in which we forgive others reveals how we think God forgives us. Peter asks if we should forgive seven times thinking this stretches human moral ability. Jesus, however, says Peter's very question reveals that he has not seen and tasted God's manner of forgiveness. For Peter, even stating "seven times" shows that he is keeping track of wrongdoings.

How do you forgive? Do you harbor resentment? Do you simply never trust anyone but yourself? Do you make people pay for how they have wronged you? Do you get your pound of flesh? Do you give them the cold shoulder? Does God related to us in any of these ways?

How does God really forgive? Verses 34-35 can be a bit troubling. After reading these verses, the irreligious person throws out the entire passage. The religious person reads this and pronounces fire and brimstone. The Christian reads this and sees Christ. What do these verses say? The one who did not show mercy will be turned over to the jailers and tortured until he pays back all he owes. If we fast-forward to the end of Matthew, what do we discover? We find Jesus, turned over to the jailers. We see Jesus brutally tortured until he paid back all we owed. And yet, in the midst of the insult, injury, wrongdoing, injustice, Jesus did not utter curses. He did not pronounce judgment He did not vow revenge. Instead, Jesus said "Father, forgive them they know not what they do." He forgave his brother from his heart. That is how God forgives. The extent to which that becomes real to you, a living breathing reality, is the extent to which you will find that the call to forgive seventy times seven times is, of course, the only natural response.

C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

Christianity does not want us to reduce by one atom the hatred we feel for cruelty and treachery. We ought to hate them ... But it does want us to hate them in the same way in which we hate things in ourselves: being sorry that the man should have done such things, and hoping, if it is anyway possible, that somehow, sometime, somewhere, he can be cured and made human again.

Real Friendship: Cheesy or Needed?

Wed, 03 Feb 2010 16:28:19 -0500

What is friendship?

It is important to begin by identifying what friendship is not. Friendship is a not a relationship based upon the consumer-vendor model. In a consumer-vendor relationship, the consumer wants something, and the vendor provides it. We stay in this type of relationship as long as the other person is meeting our needs. If someone offers a better return, we have no obligation to say with that vendor. We committed to the product, not the person, and therefore, move from person to person ensuring our needs are met.

In the realm of business, this is a completely acceptable type of relationship; however, the moment this type of interaction permeates our friendships, we have a problem. Most researchers now acknowledge that the business model is the predominant model in all our relationships from family, to friendship, to marriage.

This consumer-vendor model has led to a lack of depth in relationship. The lack of commitment and vulnerability implicit in a business relationship has rendered our friendships shallow. We have become guarded, content to merely hang out without allowing others access to who we really are. We do not even think about wanting to go down deep. Why? Because consumers carefully control what others see. We spin how we come across, through our clothes, through how we act, through what we say, through whom we associate with.

True, open, vulnerable friendship stands in sharp contrast to the uncommitted, shallow, business-minded model of relationships evident today.

First, true friendship cannot be consumerist in nature, it must be covenantal—that is promised based. Biblically, we can look to the relationship between David and Jonathan. In I Samuel 18:3, Jonathan makes a covenant with David. The opposite of a consumer-based relationship is a covenantal based one. In a covenantal relationship, you are in it not as means to an end, but because the relationship in and of itself is the goal. A covenant is a promise. In a covenantal relationship, your needs come second to your responsibility to the other person. Jonathan desired David’s success and growth above his own. Jonathan valued David’s life and David’s kingship over his own.

Second, true friendship is marked by license and vulnerability. I Samuel 18:1 states, “the soul of Jonathan was knit to the soul of David, and Jonathan loved him as his own soul.” Jonathan granted David access to the depths of who he was. He was not guarded and controlling. He was open and free. The “knit soul” model is the opposite of the consumer-vendor model. This oneness flows out of a covenantal relationship and strips away all fear. Do you have these kinds of relationships? Do you let people see you when your life is not put together? When you are not dressed up? Do you let your friends see the cracks? Do you allow them to speak into your life? Do you allow them to challenge you?

Finally, true friendship is marked by a common passion—something over which you can relate. David and Jonathan had a common passion. They both wanted to see David as king. They both wanted to see the other live and not be killed. This is a similar passion—a similar goal. David and Jonathan were united over the Lord’s desire for their respective lives. Do you friendships help to mold you and the other person into the men and women the Lord intended you to be?

This type of relationship, however, is frightening. It is hard to be open. It is hard to be committed to someone through thick and thin. How are we able to love in this way?

This is where Christianity is unique in the way it frees us to have deep meaningful relationships; whereas, other faiths often leave us sputtering. Every other faith basically asserts that you have to earn your place in life—that you have to work to attain God’s favor or reach harmony. This establishes a consumer-vendor relationship with others as we "do" in order to achieve---to get. Christianity; however, reveals that God established a covenant relationship with his people before they did one thing---and if anything, they did not deserve this covenant relationship.

This covenantal relationship with God is what allowed Jonathan to enter into a covenant with David. This is what freed Jonathan to strip himself of his robe, his kingly status, and hand it willingly to David. This is what freed Jonathan to divest himself of his sword, his livelihood, and lay it in David’s hands. He made a promise, and he stripped himself of all his worth so that David could be king. That is friendship. That is faithfulness. Through this covenantal act, the line of David was established—the line that would usher in the true King.

If the God of the Bible has existed as God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit in perfect relationship for all eternity, then He is a God who is relational at His core. If we are made in His image, then it follows that we are meant to be in relationship.

We are free to have meaningful relationships because the true King took off his robe for us. He gave us his sword. He lay down his life to ensure that we might live. We are part of the ultimate covenantal relationship—the ultimate friendship; therefore, we have the ability to care for others in the same way—to make promises even when it is hard—because the God of the universe through Jesus made that same promise to us.

If you are afraid to be vulnerable with others you have to see how Jesus was naked and vulnerable for us on the cross. That will enable you to go the extra mile to do so. Without Christ at the core, our relationships with others will most likely be self-serving. With Him at our core; however, we can serve others and care for others even if they do not give us much in return because what we really need is already given to us in the person of Christ. Word.

Loneliness---Eh? So?

Wed, 27 Jan 2010 15:00:29 -0500

Why does Mark Twain call New York City "a splendid desert—a domed and steepled solitude, where the stranger is lonely in the midst of a million of his race"?

Ask the average American, New Yorker, or college student if they are lonely, and the response probably will be in the negative. However, a 2006 study by the American Sociological Review found that Americans on average have only two close friends to confide in, which was down significantly from 1985. The percentage of people who reported that they have no such confidant is 27% and only one confidant is 20%--meaning half the people in America have one or less real friends!

If most people in America report having less then two real friends, then how come most people say they are not lonely? The answer may be in the form of a 2008 New York Magazine article arguing that New Yorkers are less lonely than most Americas because they have more "weak ties" (causal encounters, or loose friends). That is, they do not feel lonely because they have so many connections and relationships they can fall back on--even if those relationships are not really deep. The article boasts that, "...New York especially, might be the best place to ride out that period of lonely toil because New York, like the Internet, also offers a rich network of acquaintances, or what sociologists like to call "weak ties."

These weak ties spoken of here are the same found in a thousand Facebook friends or hundreds of LinkedIn relationships. With so many connections and relationships, it is no wonder people do not feel lonely most of the time. So when do we? In my pastoral experience, loneliness usually comes when tragedy strikes and there are no deep relationships for individuals to turn to. There is no one who will stay that extra hour or two, who will listen when it is hard to listen, or who will comfort when the situation is no longer comfortable. Why, then, does it take pain and hardship to reveal that most of our relationships are shallow and unfulfilling? Usually, it is because we do not see the value of deeper relationships until we need them. Like a lot of necessary things in life, we do not realize how important meaningful relationships are to us until we need them.

How can we prove to ourselves the innate value of deep relationships? How can we teach and remind ourselves why we should go that extra mile to cultivate these time-consuming enterprises? There may be no better place then the Biblical narrative of creation. It is here that we see that humans are deficient alone.

The main passage used to show this is Genesis 2:18, 21-24. The first half of verse 18 states, "it is not good for man to be alone." What is the big deal about this? The important placement for this passage is that this is considered to be before the Fall--before sin and brokenness entered the world. Therefore, this means that in paradise, when everything was perfect, something was wrong! For something to be wrong in paradise reveals that God created Adam purposefully to not be "good" on his own.

Flushed out, it means if for the rest of time it was just God and Adam alone, things would not have been good. He needed a "helper" (the second half of verse 18). Now before people here freak out about the word helper, it is crucial understand how this word is functioning. In English, helper often refers to someone who is subservient or below you as in, "He is my helper." In Hebrew, however, the translation is much more literal. A helper is someone who brings something to the table that you do not have. It means "to add" or "a resource." Ninety percent of the time when this word is used in the Bible it is referring to how God helps humankind. Therefore, it is not being used here to belittle women, but instead to lift them up in a patriarchal society. A helper has something you do not have. A helper has something you need, that you do not have on your own.

The first thing we see here is that humans were created for each other and without each other "it is not good." Second, we need people in our lives that have something we don't have. We need a helper. Third, what happens when we do finally come together?

Look what happens to Adam when he finally sees Eve. He says in v. 23, "this at last!!" He says it is about time! Apparently, he has been feeling lonely for a while. His subsequent lines are filled with the repetition and parallelism characteristic of Hebrew poetry when he says, "this is bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh." Why does Adam become poetic in his language structure? Adam turns to poetry to express the beauty inherent in the fact that he is no longer alone. Have you ever gotten warm clothes out of the dryer when you were freezing and put them on? Or have you sensed that feeling of calm and completion after your last final that allows you to head back to your room and to finally sleep with nothing looming over you? It is that feeling that Adam talks about here. Things are right when he is no longer alone. Not only that, when Adam calls Eve, "bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh," he is saying I know who I am because I know who you are. In other words, many of us are running around trying to define ourselves by our achievements or our careers; however, Christianity says we only are able to accurately know who we are based on our relationship with Him and with others.

Finally, verse 24 shows us that this is not just about relationships in general, but it is also about marriage. We are going to talk about marriage later in the semester, but know this now: marriage is the metaphor used most often in the Bible showing to reveal the kind of relationship God wants to have with his people. Here, though, the Bible does a 180 degree turn on us when it states, "a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh." Why is this an amazing statement coming from a text that is thousands of years old? In the ancient Near East, you would never had heard a statement like this. Never. You would have heard, a WOMAN shall leave HER father and mother and hold fast to HER HUSBAND. It would have stressed the woman's leaving, not a man duty to "hold fast" to his wife. This is a paradigm shift. This is reversal of the normal and cultural way humans thought.

This passage is saying the way we think we about relationships are all backwards. From the very beginning of creation we are told we need relationships. They bring power into our lives that we do not have on our own, but the power is not the way we think—it is upside down and inside out. It is not through strength—it is a different power. That phrase is reversed to make us pay attention and to realize that God is different. Christian relationships are different. Christian relationships recognize that we are dependent on one another to make us who God intends us to be.

Most students today think marriage is way ahead in the future for you, but it is not. God is saying he wants that relationship with us now. Through the person of Christ we get someone who is like us, but also is not like us. We get someone who will never let us down, someone who is all in, and someone who, even if we fail, will not abandon us. He will not go looking for someone cooler, smarter, or nicer. He wants that kind of intimacy right now.

Why do we not reciprocate? Do we have more important things to do? Maybe we are not convinced that there is a God. If you are though can you see how our relationships are shallow without him?

I love Facebook (speaking of which join our fan page). I use it all the time, but 1000 Facebook friends does not mean we are not lonely. Everyone is lonely to some degree. Whether you are a Christian or not, loneliness is only solved by being known. Being known is only ultimately solved if we have relationship with the God of the universe.

The Character of Christmas

Mon, 14 Dec 2009 10:54:19 -0500

The Adoration of the Shepherds, Gerhard von HonthorstMatthew, the Gospel writer, helps us to understand the character of the Christmas story in his retelling of the events of that day in Matthew 1:18-25. Three things strike me from this passage.

1. Joseph and the Scandal of Christmas
One of the things that this text reminds us of is how different Christmas looked from Joseph's perspective. The census required by the Roman government meant that Joseph had to return to his home town. And as a result he found himself in the awkward position of having to face the people he knew growing up and introduce them to Mary, his betrothed--pregnant, with a child not his own. For Joseph, Christmas was a horrible embarrassment, a shameful stain on his otherwise good reputation, a terrible disruption to his otherwise respectable life.

But Joseph, being a righteous man, resolved to do the right thing by Mary and, instead of shaming her publicly, decided to divorce her quietly. And it was in the midst of this struggle that the angel comes to Joseph and tells him that God is doing a new thing through this child, a thing that he couldn't understand, a thing that would overturn all of his sensibilities and expectations. And Joseph's response is remarkable. He comes to realize that if this is what God was doing, then it was going to have to change all his allegiances, all that he values, all of his previously held beliefs. He understood that it was going to change his entire life. And so he takes on the shame and the scandal because he knew that God was doing something new. And in adopting the Only Begotten Son, Joseph opened the door for the adoption of mankind as sons of God.

The incarnation has scandalous implications for us all. For one, it means that if God has indeed come into the world as flesh, we are faced with a decisive claim--one that is scandalously exclusive. Michael Green in noting the implications of this scandal, writes: "What a claim, right at the outset of the Gospel … so ultimate, so exclusive. It does not fit w the pluralist idea that each of us is getting through to God in his or her own way. No, says Matthew. God has got through to us in his way.” It means that God has set the terms on how we might come near to him. It means that he has come to us and that has within it the scandal of objectivity. Christmas, if it is to be what it was meant to be, will be a scandal to us all.

2. Mary and the Wonder of Christmas
The second thing that we see in the gospel accounts of Christmas is Mary and the wonder of Christmas. We don't see it as clearly here in Matthew's account because Matthew was primarily concerned about establishing Jesus' Davidic lineage through his father Joseph. But in Luke, whose primary concern is different, we read again and again a phrase that essentially becomes the refrain of Mary's life: "she treasured these things up in her heart." All these wonderful, marvelous, unspeakable things were happening around her, to her, for her, and her response again and again was a sort of quiet wonder, a treasuring of these thing in her heart. Because from Mary's point of view, Christmas was a season of inexpressible wonder.

You see, for Mary, she was trying to come to grips with the reality that somehow the Creator of the Universe was growing in her womb. She was contemplating this new-found reality that the Lord of Heaven would need her nurture, her care and her love. That the Lord of Heaven, the one who held the entire cosmos in the palm of his hand, was the baby she held in her arms. God condensed to seven pounds and six ounces. She treasured these thing in her heart.

During this Advent season, I often stop to contemplate how potentially catastrophic Christmas could have been. What would happen to the delicate balance of the cosmos if its creator were to step into it? Would the universe collapse in on itself? Would infinity even fit inside the finite? Would creation be able to bear the weight of its Creator? And on Christmas day, I can imagine the hosts of heaven holding their breath, expecting the worst, whispering to themselves "This was a BAD idea." And yet, that day would go by virtually unnoticed. It would be marked by the birth of an unimpressive child, in the humblest of circumstances, and the cosmos would continue with business as usual, unaware that it was being visited by their Creator, Redeemer and King. This is the wonder of Christmas. These are the thing that we, with Mary, can treasure in our hearts.

3. Immanuel and the Purpose of Christmas
If Joseph shows us the scandal of Christmas and Mary the wonder of Christmas, then Immanuel embodies for us the purpose of Christmas. Matthew tells us that Immanuel means "God with us" and now, with the birth of this child, that word would no longer be a prayer of longing but the declaration of a new reality. God has now decisively declared that he has thrown in his lot with humanity. That from this moment on, whatever happened to the human race would also happen to God himself. That whatever suffering, tragedy or sorrow mankind would experience, God would take that up in himself and endure them with us--for us! He would be with us in ways we could not imagine.

C.S. Lewis talks about how the incarnation is not so much the invasion of enemy territory by a conquering king. Rather, it is more like the return of the rightful king to his subjects in turmoil and rebellion to restore peace and flourishing and harmony. That though we would have the king out, he would insist on coming back and being enthroned for our good. You see, the purpose of Christmas was that God would now be Immanuel--his indelible presence with those he loves.

Interesting WSJ article on the Puritans and Work

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 16:16:52 -0500

Recently there was a really interesting Op-Ed piece in the WSJ on work. The article notes that today our worth is wrapped up in what we do and for many unemployed people it means they are of no value. Take comfort....from the Puritans who many say are fairly harsh when it comes to a work ethic but in reality they actually had a good balance to keep work from becoming your life. Its a good quick read.

Can God be Good and our world look like this?

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 16:08:58 -0500

Yes-----But. Everything is a Yes but or a No but if you think about it. In this case the answer is Yes, God can be good and exist in the world---but. But we have to define who God is and but we have to define our relationship to who this God is.

You see for most, when we see the pain and suffering of the world and we claim that God can't be good if the world looks like it does--usually what is the image of God in the brain at that moment? What is the view of God? Usually it is a pretty generic fuzzy big-man-in-the-sky mentality. There is no personality connected to this God. There is no history of what he has done in the past. There is no character that we can know him by. Therefore, its pretty natural to question his goodness.

Christians though historically have claimed God was good. Perhaps you have heard of the true story of Allen Gardiner.

In 1852 there was a pretty important English missionary named Allen Gardiner. He was lost at sea for a while, so a search party went out to find look for him. The search party found him and his companions shipwrecked on Tierra del Fuego. Their provisions had run out and they had all starved to death alone, far from their families. However, they found Allen's body and his journal. Inside Gardiner wrote about the pangs of thirst that were intolerable. Still throughout the journal, amazingly, he wrote out Scripture. He listed Psalm 34:10—“The young lions do lack, and suffer hunger: but they that seek the Lord shall not want any good thing.” More amazing still was what he wrote at the end of his journal, when his handwriting was feeblest and faint. Gardiner managed to write one last entry: “I am overwhelmed with a sense of the goodness of God.”

Now how did a man, who was shipwrecked, starving, hungry, and in the pangs of thirst that are unimaginable---when he was feeling the worst—say he thought God was good? And how is it that so many people say God is not Good when they have suffered far less? What is the difference?

The answer, I think, is comes down to how we think God's character really is. Christians have always said God was good, and as their source they used Scripture which not only states God's goodness but also shows it in the deeds God does. The main trajectory of the entire Scriptures is a God who comes after, dies, and saves a wayward people who does not love Him, and does not care for him. This starts with God caring for Adam and Eve in the garden, but comes to a fruition in Christ's work on the cross. Christians then point to the cross and say, "I might not know why I am shipwrecked and starving to death, but it can't be because God isn't good and doesn't love me because look what he has done for me on the cross, dying for me, saving me from myself." In other words, because Christians claim that they know the character of God based in his deeds, they don't conclude that he is not good.

On the other hand, if God is our minds has no history, and has no character we see him merely as a Santa Claus God who is suppose to reward us when we are good, and punish us when we are bad. This is overly simplistic and doesn't treat God any better than a puppeteer. So the question we have to ask before, "Is God good?" must be, "What is God like?" That latter question will end up answering the former.

There is a great illustration from the book—“The Life of Pi” where the main character is exploring Christianity and trying to figure it out. He talks to a priest named Father Martin who says the most important thing in the Christian faith is God coming into the world to die on the Cross.

Pi thought: That a god should put up with adversity, I could understand. The gods of Hinduism face their fair share of thieves, bullies, kidnappers and usurpers. What is the Ramayana but the account of one long, bad day for Rama? Adversity, yes. Reversals of fortune, yes. Treachery, yes. But humiliation? Death? I couldn’t image Lord Krishna consenting to be stripped naked, whipped, mocked, dragged through the streets and, to top it off, crucified—and at the hands of mere humans, to boot. I’d never heard of a Hindu god dying. Devils and monsters did, as did mortals, by the thousands and millions—that’s what they were there for…But the divinity should not be blighted by death. It’s wrong….It was wrong for this Christian God to let his avatar die. That is tantamount to letting a part of himself die. For if the Son is to die, it cannot be fake. If God on the Cross is God shamming a human tragedy, it turns the Passion of Christ into the Farce of Christ. The death of the Son must be real. Father Martin assured me that it was. But once a dead God, always a dead God, even resurrected. The Son must have the taste of death forever in His mouth. The Trinity must be tainted by it; there must be a certain stench at the right hand of God the Father. The horror must be real. Why would God wish that upon Himself? Why not leave death to mortals? Why make dirty what is beautiful, spoil what is perfect? Love. That was Father Martin’s answer.

What is the character of your God? If you don't believe in God, then how can you talk about "goodness" at all if we are just the sum total of atoms and electrical charges that have been developed over millions of years with no greater purpose then to pass our genes on to someone else? In a world like that goodness is false, and reproduction is ultimate. So what are you going to believe as everyone is believing (re: hoping and trusting in something)?

What percentage of scientists believe in God?

Sun, 15 Nov 2009 19:58:51 -0500

This week a statistically significant major Pew Study revealed that most American scientists (51%) believe in some form of higher power deity. While this percentage is far lower than most average Americans, the study does note some very interesting data points.

The same questions that were asked in a 1914 survey to American scientists were asked in 1996. While American culture has become less influenced by Judeo-Christian values, surprisingly American scientists answered almost the same way as their 1914 counterparts.

The Pew Research Poll shows a trend that younger scientists are more likely to believe in God than their older brethren. This shows that increasingly the younger generation is able to fuse a belief in the scientific physical world with a transcendent metaphysical worldview.

Source: Pew Research Center for the People & the Press survey, conducted in May and June 2009. For complete question wording, see survey topline. Numbers may not sum to 100 due to rounding.

Science and the Christian Faith

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 10:04:53 -0500

One of the more important questions that many people who find it hard to believe in Christianity have is the question of how the Christian faith can be reconciled with science. In our culture and society, science seems to have become the singular source of absolute truth and all other truth claims are, rightly or wrongly, pitted against science. Furthermore, many who are skeptical about the Christian faith find it difficult to even consider the claims of Christianity because it seems to be so anti-scientific. Probably the first place to start is the question of how we make sense of Genesis 1, the biblical creation account. Without going into too much detail, I think the interpretation that is most faithful to the text is what has been termed the Literary Framework View (see the Wikipedia article for a quick overview: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Framework_interpretation_%28Genesis%29). What this view does is that 1) it most sensitively seeks to capture the literary and theological intent of the author of Genesis 1, 2) it make sense of apparent contradictions and difficulties of the text and 3) it opens up a space where we can begin to see that science and faith are not mutually exclusive. Given this view of the creation account, I think a few further thoughts are important to at least inform a discussion of science and faith.

First, we must admit that both science and Christianity are seeking to know truth but that they do so at different levels, so to speak. Here's what I mean. There are a number of different ways that you can get to know an person. At one level, you can get to know them biologically. You can examine their biochemical contents (which boils down to a couple of dollars worth of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen and some bits of phosphorous and nitrogen), their neurological and electrical impulses, their physiological systems, etc. and get a sense of who they are. All of this, of course, is accurate and extremely important information to have about humans. At another level, though, you can get to know someone by going through their diaries and letters and getting a sense for who they are. You can go through old photo albums and talk with people who knew them at various stages in their life and ask what they were like. Here you would get the information of a historian or a biographer. Again, accurate and important information. But the most satisfying and rewarding way of getting to know someone, of course, is to sit down with them over a meal and have them tell you all about themselves: their loves, dreams, hopes, fears, passions, etc. It is there that you will gain knowledge of them on a completely different order. And it is this sort of knowledge that is the most humanly satisfying.

Similarly, when it comes to understanding the cosmos and the created order (which includes homo sapiens), we can know truth at varying levels--all of which are accurate and important and not mutually exclusive. I might go one step further and say that it is only in a personal communication of what all of this is for that we find knowledge that is most humanly satisfying. This, of course, is what the Christian theologians have called "revelation"--that the Bible is God revealing personal knowledge about the Creator and his universe. Stephen Jay Gould, the preeminent Harvard evolutionary biologist (and agnostic) referred to this relationships between science and faith as "non-overlapping magisteria" and once put it this way:

"To say it for all my colleagues and for the umpteenth million time … : science simply cannot (by its legitimate methods) adjudicate the issue of God's possible superintendence of nature. We neither affirm nor deny it; we simply can't comment on it as scientists … Science can work only with naturalistic explanations; it can neither affirm nor deny other types of actors (like God) in other spheres… Either half my colleagues are enormously stupid, or else the science of Darwinism is fully compatible with conventional religious beliefs …"

Second, I think we need to make the distinction between science as a "physic" and science as a "metaphysic". Science as physics is a powerful tool to explain and explore the natural, physical world. But when science begins to go beyond its sphere of influence (its "magisteria") and begins to be used to function as a metaphysic (i.e. that which is used as an all-encompassing explanation for all of human experience), it begins to fail and groan under the weight of its new role. For example, if we assume science as our metaphysic, then we must explain love and romance (one of the things that we would say makes us most human) as merely the biochemical and neurological response we have when we encounter a member of our species of the opposite sex who provides for us the best prospect of propagating our genetic information into the next generation. While we might agree that, at one level, this may be a true and accurate explanation of what we call "love", it is not the most satisfying. Indeed, our greatest experiences of love enable us to have moments when we transcend ourselves and our self-concern. We would have to say that Shakespeare, Bronte and Austen help us understand human love better than this. The same could be said about human experiences of beauty, morality, purpose and justice. Where Christianity and science seem to conflict is when science is taken not merely as a physic, but as a metaphysic. At that point, however, we are not talking about science qua science, but "science" as an attempted worldview.

Third, from where I stand, I think that we can fit science into Christianity but we can't fit Christianity into science. C.S. Lewis once wrote this on the subject:

"This is how I distinguish dreaming and waking. When I am awake I can, in some degree, account for and study my dream. The dragon that pursued me last night can be fitted into my waking world. I know that there are such things as dreams: I know that I had eaten an indigestible dinner: I know that a man of my reading might be expected to dream of dragons. But while in the nightmare I could not have fitted in my waking experience. The waking world is judged more real because it can thus contain the dreaming world: the dreaming world is judged less real because it cannot contain the waking one. For the same reason I am certain that in passing from the scientific point of view to the theological, I have passed from dream to waking. Christian theology can fit in science, art, morality, and the sub-Christian religions. The scientific point of view cannot fit in any of these things, not even science itself. I believe in Christianity as I believe that the Sun has risen not only because I see it but because by it I see everything else."

It is also important to point this out from an historical perspective. Throughout the history of the human race, there were many very culturally advanced civilizations (e.g. Egyptian, Chinese, Indian, Incan, etc.). However, it is interesting to note that the modern scientific age did not grow out of any of these worldviews. Why? Because science required a specific view of the world that was unique to the Judeo-Christian faith. In other explanations of the universe, the physical world is either an illusion, a part of God, or God himself. In any of these worldviews, scientific exploration and discovery would either be a waste of time (an illusion) or sacrilegious (a dissecting of God). It is only when one believes that the world is a contingent (i.e. not-God), rational (i.e. can be understood by the human mind) reality (i.e. not-illusion) that space is cleared for the possibility of scientific exploration--which is uniquely found in the Judeo-Christian faith. This should at least point us to the likelihood of a fundamental compatibility between science and Christianity. Science, it seems, fits inside Christianity because Christianity was the thought world that birthed the scientific endeavor.

While much more could be said on this topic, these thoughts (among many others) have led me to conclude that much of the so-called conflict between science and Christianity is not between science and Christianity at all. It is a conflict between Science-as-metaphysic and Christianity-as-fundamentalism. If, however, we consider science as science and its relationship with a more nuanced Christian faith, I think we will begin to discover that the two need not be mutually exclusive.

Dostoevsky on the Problem of Evil

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 10:07:18 -0500

Excerpted from “Rebellion” in The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Ivan for a minute was silent, his face became all at once very sad.

"… For the hundredth time I repeat, there are numbers of questions, but I've only taken the children, because in their case what I mean is so unanswerably clear. Listen! If all must suffer to pay for the eternal harmony, what have children to do with it, tell me, please? It's beyond all comprehension why they should suffer, and why they should pay for the harmony. Why should they, too, furnish material to enrich the soil for the harmony of the future? … It's not worth the tears of that one tortured child who beat itself on the breast with its little fist and prayed in its stinking outhouse, with its unexpiated tears to 'dear, kind God'! It's not worth it, because those tears are unatoned for. They must be atoned for, or there can be no harmony. But how? How are you going to atone for them? … too high a price is asked for harmony; it's beyond our means to pay so much to enter on it. And so I hasten to give back my entrance ticket, and if I am an honest man I am bound to give it back as soon as possible. And that I am doing. It's not God that I don't accept, Alyosha, only I most respectfully return him the ticket."

"That's rebellion," murmured Alyosha, looking down.

"Rebellion? I am sorry you call it that," said Ivan earnestly. "One can hardly live in rebellion, and I want to live. Tell me yourself, I challenge your answer. Imagine that you are creating a fabric of human destiny with the object of making men happy in the end, giving them peace and rest at last, but that it was essential and inevitable to torture to death only one tiny creature—that baby beating its breast with its fist, for instance—and to found that edifice on its unavenged tears, would you consent to be the architect on those conditions? Tell me, and tell the truth."

"No, I wouldn't consent," said Alyosha softly.

Is Truth Relative? Well that all depends.....

Sat, 31 Oct 2009 11:49:13 -0400

Another major trouble people have with Christianity comes when we approach the topic of truth. The reason why a discussion about the importance of truth is relevant in the first place is because if there really is Truth out there with a capital T, and it matters, and it is meaningful--then there is something out there for us to live for, and care about, and discover and believe in. It means there are right and wrong ways to live. It means there are better and worse career decisions that go past just the superficial. However, if there is not Truth with a capital T, and there is no overarching Truth, but rather only localized relative truths, then most things in life are permissible. We can define things as we want. We can construct our own identities, stories, and even definition of existence.

This is actually exactly what the Supreme Court in 1992 did. They wrote (I can't find the exact place where right now, but here is the quote), "That the heart of liberty [is to] define one's own concept of existence, of the meaning of the universe." This is significant because based on this definition of freedom, we are the makers of our own purposes and existences. To be human than is to be free to develop our own truth/mean and purpose. This is freedom defined as freedom FROM any restrictions.

A naturalistic understanding of reality actually forces us to adhere to this position. The late evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould once said:

" We are here because one odd group of fishes had a peculiar fin anatomy that could transform into legs for terrestial creatures; because comets struck the earth and wiped out dinosaurs, thereby giving mammals a chance not otherwise available…. We may yearn for a "higher" answer--but none exists. This explanation, though superficially troubling, if not terrifying, is ultimately liberating and exhilarating. We cannot read the meaning of life passively in the facts of nature. We must construct these answers for ourselves…"

If this is true, that there are no truths objectively, but just what we construct then we are not bound to an overarching narrative for humanity. Christianity, interestingly, compared to above normal modern understanding of life---speaks rather differently. It states that we were created, and therefore we do not get to self-define, but rather we are defined based on how we were made. In addition, Christianity states there are right and wrong ways of living, and being. So the end question then is: Who is right? Is truth relative?

I suggest that Truth is actually more important than we think, freedom is more complex than we think, and and Jesus is more liberating than we think

Its more important than we think. How can we say this? It does not seem obvious, however in all our daily lives its hard not to make numerous truth claims. That is, we constantly are making claims to truth that are unverifiable, and applicable to not just ourselves, but also others. For instance, the truth claim that, "all humans are created equal" is in itself a claim to knowledge. How do we know this? On what grounds can we claim human rights? Most people in America will assent to this universal truth for everyone. Why do we do this? Because truth is that important to us.

This is why when people say the truth claim, "All truth is relative"---we have to point out that this itself is a truth claim. In other words, any assessment, any statement of fact is a competing worldview truth claim that wishes to be accepted by all. Its that important to us. The truth matters.

A good illustration of this comes from a NY Times article where a reporter shows the importance of truth.

Errol Morris: For those who truly believe that truth is subjective or relative, ask yourself the following question: “Is ultimate guilt or innocence of a crime a matter of opinion?” A jury might decide you’re guilty of a crime that you haven’t committed. You’re innocent. (It’s possible. The legal system is rife with miscarriages of justice.) Nevertheless, we believe there is a fact of the matter. You either did it or you didn’t. Period. If you were strapped into an electric chair, there would be nothing relative about it. Suppose you were innocent. Would you be satisfied with the claim there is no definitive answer to the question of whether you’re guilty or innocent? Or would you be screaming, “I didn’t do it. Look at the evidence. I didn’t do it.” Nor would you take much comfort in the claim, “It all depends on your point of view, doesn’t it?” Or perhaps you’re not the condemned man but just a visitor seated in the gallery preparing to witness the execution. You might say to the condemned, “You think you’re innocent. I think you’re guilty. But it doesn’t really matter because truth is subjective, and each one of our individual opinions about whether you’re guilty or not is true.” Or how about, “There is no such thing as truth. You’re just unlucky.” People often confuse the difficulties of ascertaining the truth with the relativity of truth. They are quite different. (We may have difficulty fixing the exact date of the Battle of Hastings, but that doesn’t mean that it didn’t happen at a specific time). Most post-modernist professors argue that truth is relative except when it comes time for tenure.Errol Morris: For those who truly believe that truth is subjective or relative, ask yourself the following question: “Is ultimate guilt or innocence of a crime a matter of opinion?” A jury might decide you’re guilty of a crime that you haven’t committed. You’re innocent. (It’s possible. The legal system is rife with miscarriages of justice.) Nevertheless, we believe there is a fact of the matter. You either did it or you didn’t. Period. If you were strapped into an electric chair, there would be nothing relative about it. Suppose you were innocent. Would you be satisfied with the claim there is no definitive answer to the question of whether you’re guilty or innocent? Or would you be screaming, “I didn’t do it. Look at the evidence. I didn’t do it.” Nor would you take much comfort in the claim, “It all depends on your point of view, doesn’t it?” Or perhaps you’re not the condemned man but just a visitor seated in the gallery preparing to witness the execution. You might say to the condemned, “You think you’re innocent. I think you’re guilty. But it doesn’t really matter because truth is subjective, and each one of our individual opinions about whether you’re guilty or not is true.” Or how about, “There is no such thing as truth. You’re just unlucky.” People often confuse the difficulties of ascertaining the truth with the relativity of truth. They are quite different. (We may have difficulty fixing the exact date of the Battle of Hastings, but that doesn’t mean that it didn’t happen at a specific time). Most post-modernist professors argue that truth is relative except when it comes time for tenure.

Secondly, Freedom is more complex then we think. There is no such thing as just freedom "from all constraints." When we get older we can't just eat whatever we want. We have to restrict our freedom to stay healthy. We have to restrict our freedom to get richer, by spending less money. College students have to restrict their freedom so they can study and do homework. Frankly, the idea that real true freedom is having no restrictions upon you is fairly naive. There are always restrictions, always constraints. The question is not how to get from under them, the question is which constraints are most freeing? Which ones will humanize us the most?

Out of all the restrictions that bind, the love relationship may be the most liberating freedom-loss of them all. We lose ourselves to the other, but we gain fulfillment, security, and a sense of worth. At the same time in a love relationship, you turn to the other and willingly say, "I will adjust for you, I will change for you." At first sight it seems that the Christian faith is dehumanizing because God asks people to change for him. While this may be true of other religions, Christianity in the most radical way has God adjusting for us through the person of Christ who becomes human, vulnerable, and suffering and dying in our place. The cross is the place where he submits to our condition and dies in our place. God in Christ changes for us to rescue us. Jesus then is more liberating than we think because God through Him, redeems a people who are in need of his love.

Therefore, since no one really operates like truth is relative, freedom is not just freedom from all restrictions, but we are bound always to something, then Christ is more liberating through God himself changing to bring us back into relationship with him.

To Hell with Hell?

Mon, 19 Oct 2009 09:53:44 -0400

Many people cannot even begin to consider the claims of Christianity because the idea of a God that sends people to a hell - a place of eternal punishment and torment - is so repugnant. Dan Barker, in a recent debate, put it this way: “A threat of violence, which is what Hell is; it's a threat of eternal torture, any system of thought that has that thought in it ... is a morally bankrupt system.” And yet when we look at the Christian Scriptures, of all the biblical writers, the one who spoke the most frequently and vividly about the reality of hell was Jesus. Mark 9:43-48 is just one example:

"If your hand causes you to sin, cut it off. It is better for you to enter life maimed than with two hands to go into hell, where the fire never goes out. And if your foot causes you to sin, cut it off. It is better for you to enter life crippled than to have two feet and be thrown into hell. And if your eye causes you to sin, pluck it out. It is better for you to enter the kingdom of God with one eye than to have two eyes and be thrown into hell, where 'their worm does not die, and the fire is not quenched."

As difficult a problem as hell is - and one certainly cannot presume to fully address the issue in a short post - there are at least three things that I think we have to keep in mind when we consider the problem of hell.

The first is the reality that justice demands it. Christopher Hitchens, in his characteristically acerbic wit, spoke with CNN's Anderson Cooper about Jerry Fallwell just after Fallwell's death. In that conversation, Hitchens said that he wished "there was a hell for him.” Regardless of whether we might agree with Hitchens on that point or not, the larger point is well taken: we instinctively feel there are some people who are so bad that death alone does not do justice. And this instinct is apparently present in people regardless of what they believe.

When we consider the atrocities committed by humans to other humans - the 6 million Jews exterminated by Hitler, the 500,000 people killed in the Rwandan genocide in just 100 days, the 3.5 million people starved to death under North Korea's totalitarian regime - justice seems to demand more. In fact, when we look at all of these atrocities, it seems that the proper question to ask is not "How could a loving God send people to hell?" but rather “How could a loving God not do anything?” Yale scholar Miroslov Volf makes this point and takes it a bit further. A Croatian by descent, Volf witnessed many of the horrors of the violence that took place in Eastern Europe. He writes:

"My thesis is that the practice of non-violence requires a belief in divine vengeance…My thesis will be unpopular with many in the West…But imagine speaking to people (as I have) whose cities and villages have been first plundered, then burned, and leveled to the ground, whose daughters and sisters have been raped, whose fathers and brothers have had their throats slit…Your point to them–we should not retaliate? Why not? I say–the only means of prohibiting violence by us is to insist that violence is only legitimate when it comes from God…Violence thrives today, secretly nourished by the belief that God refuses to take the sword…It takes the quiet of a suburb for the birth of the thesis that human nonviolence is a result of a God who refuses to judge. In a scorched land–soaked in the blood of the innocent, the idea will invariably die, like other pleasant captivities of the liberal mind…if God were NOT angry at injustice and deception and did NOT make a final end of violence, that God would not be worthy of our worship.”

If Volf is right, not only does justice demand a God who punishes evil, but world peace and human flourishing require it as well. That is all well and good, you might say, but for the most part we don’t know people as bad as Hitler and what Christianity claims is that unless you believe in Jesus you will share their same fate! Which is why we must also keep in mind a second point.

Not only does justice demand punishment, but people also choose it. Tim Keller, in his article on The Importance of Hell, makes this point powerfully and it goes something like this. C.S. Lewis reminds us that the doors of hell are locked from the inside first and then therefore locked from the outside. Here’s what he means by that. Hell is, at its core, utter separation from God. And all those who wanted nothing to do with the living God in this life finally get what they want in the life to come. J.I. Packer, in his Concise Theology says that "Scripture sees hell as self-chosen . . . [H]ell appears as God's gesture of respect for human choice. All receive what they actually chose, either to be with God forever, worshipping him, or without God forever, worshipping themselves." We tend to think of hell as a place where God sends people and locks them in. Both Lewis and Packer remind us that it is first the place where we have run to lock God out. Keller says "We wanted to get away from God, and God, in his infinite justice, sends us where we wanted to go."

Finally, we must remember that God himself has experienced it. The most terrifying part of the creed that Christians have confessed for centuries that Jesus "...was crucified, dead and buried. He descended into hell.” The thing that helps to begin to reconciles the God of love with the justice of hell is contained succinctly in this creedal formula. It tells us that God doesn’t just callously send people to hell from his sterile throne up on high. The Apostle's Creed tells us that, to our utter horror, God went through hell himself for the sole purpose of providing a way so that people wouldn’t have to. On the cross, we see Jesus, the eternal Son of God, separated from the Father. We see the Trinity being torn asunder from the inside. We see a terrifying separation from God. And it was even more hellish because Jesus never wanted to get away from God. Jesus never sought to be left alone by God. Rather, Jesus experiences this dreaded absence because of his great desire to be with us. In this act of unspeakable solidarity with the human race, Jesus is plunged into our hell so that we might have the face of God again.

If we keep these three things in mind, the conversation around hell could shift a bit. Remember we started this conversation with the objection: “I believe in a God of love who would never send anyone to hell. “ But the utter holiness of God’s love seems to demand something more. It says that God's love for us was so great that he didn’t destroy hell - he loved us too much to not deal with evil - but was himself destroyed in hell so that we would never have to be. A quote from that same article by Tim Keller sums it up well:

“So [if you want to believe in a God of love who doesn’t punish human evil] the question becomes: what did it cost your kind of god to love us and embrace us? What did he endure in order to receive us? Where did this god agonize, cry out, and where were his nails and thorns? The only answer is: "I don't think that was necessary." But then ironically, in our effort to make God more loving, we have made him less loving. His love, in the end, needed to take no action. It was sentimentality, not love at all.”

Can we rely on the Bible?

Sun, 18 Oct 2009 00:49:44 -0400

So why does it matter if the Bible is reliable? Well, if is what it says it is--which is a divinely inspired text--then it is authoritative for all and should be listened to. If it is a bunch of dreamed up legends and socially regressive teachings, then we should chuck it in the food processor with other less than divine teachings. Therefore, it matters if the Bible means anything to us today. Should we read it? Should it impact my life? These questions and others hinge on if the Bible is true. Naturally, there have been many who have tried to show the Bible as less than true.

This past Sunday we looked some of the normal critiques that are levied against the reliability of the Bible. There are three main categories that are normally used in these critiques. They essentially call into question the Bible's trustworthiness in relation to science, history, and culture. The outline we used is:

“We can’t trust the Bible scientifically”

Miracles

Evolution

“We can’t trust the Bible historically”

No original Texts

Gospels as Legends

Written to far past the original dates

Seemingly filled with contradictions

“We can’t trust the Bible culturally”

Race

Sexuality

Its important to identify these critiques, pose them in the best possible light, and then analyze each one of them for creditability. If you look at our handout from last Sunday, on the back I try to give a few starting (and I do emphasize starting as these are my no means complete arguments) bullet points. However, many of you guys wanted some other places to go to when it comes to these arguments.

For an overall summary, I recommend dad's book The Reason For God which has a whole chapter devoted to all three of these topics.

For further analysis about how Science and Christianity are not at odds see W. Christopher Stewart's “Religion and Science” in Reason for the Hope Within, ed. M.J. Murray, (Eerdmans, 1999). To see how today's scientific methodology was actually created through a Christian worldview take a look at Rodney Stark's chapter in To the Glory of God (Princeton, 2004), “God’s Handiwork: The Religious Origins of Science.” Also Francis Collins' The Language of God, written by a scientist, shows how one can be a Christian and a scientist at the same time.

As for the the historical viability of the Bible, a good readable response to The Da Vinci Code and its view of the Gnostic gospels can be found in Ben Witherington's book The Gospel Code (IVP, 2004). If you would like a very detailed account about how the gospels have to be of a historical genre, see N.T. Wright's book Jesus and the Victory of God (Fortress, 1998). Virtually all historians today agree that the gospels were written between 40-60 years after Jesus' death. This is the case because over the last century manuscript evidence has forced most critical scholars to conclude that they were written much sooner than how many 18th and 19th century scholars dated the gospels. The complete argument is laid out in F.F. Bruce's book The New Testament Documents: Are they reliable?

Lastly, for help when it comes to how the Bible is seen culturally its important to note that the Bible never did uphold slavery in how we traditionally think of slavery. See the quote below from Andrew Lincoln.

“Modern readers [of the Bible] need to free themselves from a number of assumptions about first-century slavery, including the assumptions that there was a wide separation between the status of slave and freedperson…and that all who were enslaved were trying to free themselves from this bondage….There was a broad continuum of statuses between slave and free in both Roman and Greek society. Slaves of Greek owners could own property, including their own slaves, and could obtain permission to take other employment in addition to their duties as slaves. [And] before slaves were manumitted [given their freedom] they had to sign a contract which could require them to provide various services to their former owners….It was frequently in the owner’s interest to manumit them, since their labor could be obtained more cheaply if they were freedpersons….Though there were undoubtedly far too many cases of cruelty, brutality, and injustice, there was no general climate of unrest among slaves.” (Andrew Lincoln, Ephesians Word Bible Commentary, 1990, p.416-417.)

Furthermore, Rodney Stark says:

“Of all the world’s great religions, including the three great monotheisms, only in Christianity did the idea develop that slavery was sinful and must be abolished. Although it has been fashionable to deny it, antislavery doctrines began to appear in Christian theology soon after the decline of Rome and were accompanied by the eventual disappearance of slavery in all but the fringes of Christian Europe. When Europeans subsequently instituted slavery in the New World, they did so over strenuous papal opposition, an fact that was conveniently “lost” from history until recently. Finally, the abolition of New World slavery was initiated and achieved by Christian activists….Slavery was once nearly universal to all societies able to afford it, and only in the West did significant moral opposition ever arise and lead to abolition.” (Rodney Stark, To God Be the Glory Princeton University Press, 2003, p. 291.)

As such, we have to be careful not to read back into the Bible our own cultural context (in this case taking 19th century race-based slavery and assuming that Biblical slavery was of the same fiber).

Religious Pluralism and the Elephant in the Room

Mon, 28 Sep 2009 11:44:24 -0400

Many sincere people earnestly asking questions about God often have difficulty even considering Christianity because of its exclusivity -- it claims to be the only way to God, the only right religion. Aren't all religions essentially different paths to the same God? Often the following parable offered as an illustration:

An enlightened king in ancient invited four men into his court who were blind and set before them an elephant and asked them to say what it was. The first man grabbed the elephant’s tail and said “It is long and flexible – an elephant is like a rope.” The second man took hold of the elephant’s leg and said “No, it is thick and round – an elephant is like a tree.” The third man felt the elephant’s side and said, “No, it is nothing like that at all. It is large and flat – an elephant is like a wall.” The fourth man grabbed the elephant’s tusk and said “No it is hard and sharp – an elephant is like a spear.” And the king described to all the hearers in his court how we all are like these men in our understanding of God. Indeed, all the religions of the world are but the gropings of blind men after a truth much too great for any human mind to grasp.

A wonderful, even elegant, story that captures the essence of religious pluralism -- the view that all religions are equally true (or equally wrong depending on who you ask!). But the parable is not without its problems. For we must remember that the one telling the story wants us to reject the claim that a specific religion can know the whole truth about God. But, in order to tell the parable, the storyteller has to claim that he know all there is to know about God. Somehow, religious pluralism knows that God is, in fact, an elephant and not a rope or a wall or a tree or a spear. Religious pluralism has placed itself in the seat of the enlightened king while the world's religions are blind men!

In fact, the story seems to take us a step further. Because the reason for even telling the story is to convince its hearers that religious pluralism is right, that it is true. And, that until all people agree that this version of God is true, we will remain blind! Until everyone becomes a religious pluralist -- unless everyone converts, if I may use the term -- the world is lost. Religious pluralism is claiming for itself the very thing that once made it impossible for them to believe Christianity: it claims to be the only way to God. You see, religious pluralism does not offer us a new inclusivity in place of our old Christian exclusivity. All it can do is offer us a new kind of exclusivity. Why? Because all statements that claim to be true must by nature exclude views that are not true.

So the choice we have is not between inclusive and exclusive. It is between different exclusives. So which one? There are two reasons why I think the Christian exclusivity probably leads us closer to truth than anything else: one logical and one pragmatic. The first I find in places like 1 John 1:1-3:

¹That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched—this we proclaim concerning the Word of life. ²The life appeared; we have seen it and testify to it, and we proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the Father and has appeared to us. ³We proclaim to you what we have seen and heard, so that you also may have fellowship with us. And our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son, Jesus Christ.

What the Apostle John says again and again here is the he himself has seen with his eyes, touched with this hand and heard with his own ears the faith that he now proclaims to the community. And in fact, he is also implying at this stage in Christian history that there are others in the listeners' community that can verify these claims as well -- eyewitnesses remain! The Christian faith is unique among all faiths in that it based upon an event in human history that is available to all to explore. It is not based on the private mystical experience of a founder, nor on a set of philosophical abstraction, nor even on the moral code of a community. The entire edifice of the Christian faith, all the centuries of its cultural production, is delicately balanced on a single historical event that is publicly verifiable (and refutable!) -- the claim that God has raised Jesus from the dead in the course of human history. The Apostle Paul affirms this as well in 1 Corinthians 15:17:

"And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins … [and] we are to be pitied more than all men." For many this might seem like a precarious foundation, but it is precisely its strength for it is a faith that is founded upon publicly verifiable fact, not upon "private values". It is either true for all or it is not true at all. After all, any truth claim worthy of the name ought to be verifiable, right?

The second reason is more pragmatic. Christianity is the only faith that has at its heart not just the command to love your enemies, but it says that God has died for you when you were his enemy. Someone who truly believes that has amazing resources to turn to those who believe differently and treat them with genuine love, respect and humility and not with disdain, hatred or violence. If you believe God died for you to win your heart when you were his enemy, you can do nothing but love your enemies in like manner. Your very identity is rewritten as an enemy won over by love.

Since we are left to choose between exclusives, a truth claim that is 1) publicly available for all to verify and 2) inherently built to love, serve and even die for those who disagree seems resonates with me with the ring of truth.

Everyone has faith. Even if you don't.

Mon, 21 Sep 2009 22:07:48 -0400

Everyone has faith. Eh? How so? It depends on how you define faith, of course. What if faith is merely those things that we believe and trust in? Defined that way, then we all have faith to some degree. For instance, we all trust chairs to some degree. We trust that they won't break when we sit in them. We trust our senses (unless you think we are all living in the Matrix) everyday. We trust that our senses are actually telling us the truth, and not giving us the wrong data. Can we prove our senses are always right? No. In fact, science shows us that our senses are often wrong. Can we prove a chair will hold us up every time we sit down in it? No. But we trust it.

So if we trust basic things day in and day out like our senses and our perceptions, is it not possible that we are also trusting in deeper more life-orientating things as well--like our smarts, our careers, or a special relationship to give us purpose? Sure, most of you will say. So what's the problem? Well the problem is, if we all have these various faiths, which one (or ones) will not fail us, will not let us down, will not abandon us in our time of need? In other words, which faith is the best one to really put our trust in? How can we tell?

Still don't buy the fact that everyone believes in something? Don't take it from me---below is a clip from a NY Times article quoting a Professor of Anthropology:

NY Times Article

"Call it God; call it superstition; call it, as [Scott] Atran does, “belief in hope beyond reason” — whatever you call it, there seems an inherent human drive to believe in something transcendent, unfathomable and otherworldly, something beyond the reach or understanding of science. “Why do we cross our fingers during turbulence, even the most atheistic among us?” asked Atran when we spoke at his Upper West Side pied-à-terre in January. Atran, who is 55, is an anthropologist at the National Center for Scientific Research in Paris, with joint appointments at the University of Michigan and the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York… [S]ometimes he presents students with a wooden box that he pretends is an African relic. “If you have negative sentiments toward religion,” he tells them, “the box will destroy whatever you put inside it.” Many of his students say they doubt the existence of God, but in this demonstration they act as if they believe in something. Put your pencil into the magic box, he tells them, and the nonbelievers do so blithely. Put in your driver’s license, he says, and most do, but only after significant hesitation. And when he tells them to put in their hands, few will.

If they don’t believe in God, what exactly are they afraid of?"

To Admit Doubt was Not to Lose Faith

Tue, 15 Sep 2009 22:39:47 -0400

Below is a great article that I came across in the New York Times in which a student reflects on how his college experience led him to deeply doubt, and almost lose, his faith. Tim Keller, in the introduction to his book The Reason for God says:

"A faith without some doubts is like a human body without any antibodies in it. People who blithely go through life too busy or indifferent to ask hard questions about why they believe as they do will find themselves defenseless against either the experience of tragedy or the probing questions of a smart skeptic. A person’s faith can collapse almost overnight if she has failed over the years to listen patiently to her own doubts, which should only be discarded after long reflection."

Wise words to go along with this article:

What My Faith in God Looks Like

By DUSTIN JUNKERT

I grew up quietly and without thought. My mom was a secretary at the Baptist church, and I led the worship team senior year of high school. My youth pastor was one of my best friends. I believed in God and my parents, my friends, and the four walls of my house. All things were within reach, simple and inspiring …

Eager to continue my spiritual journey, I went to a private Christian college in Oregon complete with a lifestyle contract. Freshman year, I met Frank, a lifelong philosopher. He was a couple rooms down from me. He asked me all sorts of wild questions I had never thought about before, like, “Well, why do you believe that?” Everything I said that year, Frank would ask me that question. Then I started asking myself that question about every thought I had …

I took a class called “The Problem of Religious Diversity” … It never occurred to me until then that people who believed something other than Christianity had the same reason for believing their faith as I did for believing mine. How about that?

I ran into an old Sunday school teacher sophomore year and told him I’d been thinking that maybe it’s not true that everyone who’s not a Baptist will go to Hell. He looked me straight in the eye with saintly gravity and said: “The Bible is very clear: if you believe that, you aren’t a Christian.” … [What he said] put me in a state of fear at first, then repentance, then confusion, and lastly anger. I rebelled from the religion that contained all the smallness of my childhood. I cursed my Baptist teacher [and] God … and fled to Russia for a study-abroad semester …

The first person I talked to there was Dan, a student at GraceCollege in Michigan. He immediately asked the last question I wanted to hear: “So what’s your faith look like?” I went cold. I wanted to bleat my usual Jesus-story and be done with it, but the ice on my ribs wouldn’t let me lie. I reluctantly collapsed and told him that honestly, I didn’t know anything anymore and nothing was real. Turns out, Dan was in the same place I was.

Together we raved and doubted and yelled and trembled all semester long. We felt the black blood of Dostoevsky and descended the dark stairs of Derrida and Sartre. Some nights, we would just sit across from each other and stare, estranged by the cold of a new, uncertain world. After one of these nights of existential fog, as I got up to go, I turned to Dan and said, “The only meaningful thing left to do in this world, it seems, is to sit quietly with a friend until dark and then say goodnight.”

Then, on a snow-gray Russian day, riding a packed bus, a song came on my iPod that froze me in time. In a sense, I’m still there on that bus listening to that song with watering eyes. It was a song called “Clouds” by As Cities Burn that said: “Is your god really God? / Is my god really God? / I think our god isn’t God / If he fits inside our heads.”

… I snapped and everything came undone. I resigned entirely. God won’t fit inside our heads, and if He does, we’re missing something. And I knew all I’d been waiting for was to know that to admit doubt was not to lose faith. A few simple lines of an Indie rock song pushed me to see hope amid uncertainty.

It snowed continually my last two weeks in Russia. I met Dan one morning at a small cafe, Biblioteca, where we drank bottomless black tea and watched the snow pile up on the street. He said he had prayed the night before. I said I was ready to step back into a church.

[In church the next day], I wrote in my journal, “God, see that I’m trying.” It was the first time I had prayed in more than a year.

What's the difference between chimps and humans?

Fri, 28 Aug 2009 13:44:56 -0400

We share 98.4% of our genetic code with chimps. This oft-cited figure can be misleading as the other 1.6% makes all the difference in the world apparently. Jeremy Taylor's new book helps shed some light on the facts about the differences between humans and other primates. This article highlights some of the cognitive and linguistic differences that makes humanity unique.

maturing to childhood

Sun, 26 Jul 2009 19:59:38 -0400

i had the thought today that much of life is attempting to recapture the magic and wonder of childhood. there comes a time in life when the chambers of imagination are closed off as silly and childish. We're told to "grow up" and to "act your age." So we move on to speak of much more serious, adult-like things ... mathematics, rhetoric, science, logic, religion. and we leave the play room for the study, thinking that we have developed into real men.

but a strange, even magical, thing can happen if ever one finds the courage to look beyond the cold, automated world of adult rationality. if we look closely enough, (perhaps we should say if we imagine closely enough) we would notice within us an unsupressible longing for wonder. we find that we have often secretly, almost sheepishly, longed to be transported into the day-dreamy worlds of fairy tales. isn't this the tantalizing dream that has mysteriously evaded the grasp of philosophers and politicians and social theorists and scientists alike? we find this strange instinct within us to try to reconstruct those magical worlds using the only tools we have left for ourselves: reason and rationality. so we construct theorems and philosophies and laws and religions, all in an attempt to make time turn around and take us back to the home we can almost remember.

but we are sad to find that we have ever been infected with that unshakable bug called sensibility. we find that we've lost the ability to truly be silly again. and we wish that Peter Pan would once again become more real to us than George Washington or Frankie Robinson or the man that lives downstairs from us.

i think it was snow that led me along this journey. there was a time when snow filled me with wonder, an almost giddy kind of euphoria. i suppose it was because i never had to think about shoveling out a car, or paying heating bills, or driving on slushy, slippery streets. but that's precisely it, isn't it? it's precisely these thoughts that I find keeping me from the thrill of wonder. maybe the soul can't help but ossify with age and really become so crusty and fragile that it must think on these rather silly things lest it fall apart.

or perhaps we've misunderstood what it means to be a "grown up." maybe being grown up was supposed be mean that we could actually live in these worlds of wonder and magic, only we could do it as late into the night as we wanted. maybe it was supposed to mean that we didn't have to live in a make-believe world that was the size of our playroom, but we could live in a make-believe world the size of the world. maybe maturity wasn't supposed to be about becoming less like a child; maybe it was meant to be about finally becoming fully a child.

Secularism is based on faith, says prominent atheist professor

Sun, 26 Jul 2009 22:55:42 -0400

Quote: Rather, modern secularism is a religious worldview, with its own narrative of testing and redemption, and shares the vulnerabilities of such views. The news that secularists also live in glass houses has implications for ongoing stone-throwing operations.

Written by secular humanist Andrew Koppelman, this article is one of the more honest evaluations of his own worldview. Koppelman in the article reviews Catholic Charles Taylor's book A Secular Age and agrees with his premise that modern Western secularism has its roots in Christian theology and that secularism's continued commitment to human rights does not logically flow from Atheism. The article continues to note that as a secularist he thinks his own worldview has a faith/hope underpinning, much like the religious views that secularism tends to mock. He notes that the "gap" in religions is the fact that one has to believe that in history amazing actions and events have happened, while the "gap" in secularism is that there is a normative commitment to human rights that does not seem to be able to be accounted for. Koppelman, while he acknowledges that all faiths require a "leap" he continues to argue that secularism has a smaller leap of faith as you don't have to believe in any historical event, just a common commitment to human life void of an overarching system. He says, "Secularists are committed to what one might call "Naked Strong Evaluation": the idea, unsupported by any particular metaphysical claim, that the commitment to decent treatment for all hyman beings is mandatory..." I appreciate Koppelman's honesty in the the article to acknowledge that his own position takes epistemic faith, much like Christianity. I also appreciate that he acknowledges that the idea of human rights did not originate in atheism, but in fact Christian doctrine. I would continue to argue that therefore secularism is borrowing from Christian capital to explain their own existence, however, Koppelman would counter by saying that just because human rights came from Christianity does not make Christianity true. In the end of his article, Koppelman goes to Martin Luther King Jr. and notes that it was his Christian faith that drove him to stand up for justice in the midst of oppression. He then looks at his own worldview and comments that he too can be committed to human rights, albeit with difficulty. A very good read.

What will cities look like in the future, and why live in them?

Sun, 26 Jul 2009 22:52:10 -0400

Richard Florida has come up with a marvelous piece in the Atlantic Monthly about the role of cities in the new economy. He details our current demise citing the good-natured intention of trying to get more Americans owning homes. This, of course, creates more civic responsibility and corporate solidarity while also giving people an investment and possible retirement package. It worked swimmingly until the housing bubble burst.

Now, says Florida, the new demographic makeup will not be built around cities that produce material things, but a commerce oriented around the exchange of ideas. The cities that best enable the creation and exchange of ideas will be the ones must apt to succeed. These cities, to facilitate the flow of these ideas, will have to cultivate markets that are dense and populated to generate the largest return and potential. Hence, large mega regions such as the Boston-New York-Washington corridor will come to power more so, while those areas in America less diverse will continue to lag. Clearly this piece is well thought out and very readable. I highly recommend.

Quote:

On one level, the crisis has demonstrated what everyone has known for a long time: Americans have been living beyond their means, using illusory housing wealth and huge slugs of foreign capital to consume far more than we’ve produced. The crash surely signals the end to that; the adjustment, while painful, is necessary.

But another crucial aspect of the crisis has been largely overlooked, and it might ultimately prove more important. Because America’s tendency to overconsume and under-save has been intimately intertwined with our postwar spatial fix—that is, with housing and suburbanization—the shape of the economy has been badly distorted, from where people live, to where investment flows, to what’s produced. Unless we make fundamental policy changes to eliminate these distortions, the economy is likely to face worsening handicaps in the years ahead.

Suburbanization—and the sprawling growth it propelled—made sense for a time. The cities of the early and mid-20th century were dirty, sooty, smelly, and crowded, and commuting from the first, close-in suburbs was fast and easy. And as manufacturing became more technologically stable and product lines matured during the postwar boom, suburban growth dovetailed nicely with the pattern of industrial growth. Businesses began opening new plants in green-field locations that featured cheaper land and labor; management saw no reason to continue making now-standardized products in the expensive urban locations where they’d first been developed and sold. Work was outsourced to then-new suburbs and the emerging areas of the Sun Belt, whose connections to bigger cities by the highway system afforded rapid, low-cost distribution. This process brought the Sun Belt economies (which had lagged since the Civil War) into modern times, and sustained a long boom for the United States as a whole.

But that was then; the economy is different now. It no longer revolves around simply making and moving things. Instead, it depends on generating and transporting ideas.

Where do you put your dead? Answer: The sewer

Sun, 26 Jul 2009 22:26:50 -0400

I am currently reading The Rise of Christianity by Rodney Stark which details some of the factors about why Christianity grew so quickly in the Greco-Roman Empire. One of the reasons noted is that Christians valued life and marriage much more so then non-Christians at the time. Infanticide, condoned by Plato and Aristotle as acceptable practices (p.118) was completely ruled out as a viable Christian practice. Still, discarding unwanted babies was very common even up to the 6^th century A.D. Stark quotes Lawrence Stager who while excavating an ancient villa said

“The sewer had been clogged and when we excavated and dry-sieved the desiccated sewage, we found bones…of nearly 100 little babies apparently murdered and thrown into the sewer.”

It was therefore interesting to read this article about the discovery of placentas in an Illinois sewer system. Are we becoming more like Ancient Greeks and Romans? Is that a good thing in this case?

Books and Music that make you dumb

Sun, 26 Jul 2009 22:48:33 -0400

Here is a great article detailing a guy who cross-referenced people's Facebook profile choices for music with the mean average for the SAT scores of the university they attended. Now I know the title of this post skews the difference between correlation and causation (yes! I remember something from my psychology classes!). Just because you listen to Beethoven does not mean you will get a 1371 on your SAT. But isn’t it interesting that those who were in the range of 1371 did like Beethoven. What does it mean? Some of my musical favorites Sufjan Stevens, U2, Guster, Radiohead are all on the “high” end. Does that make me smart? Or am I just a poser hoping to look smart? Regardless, this is an interesting sampling nonetheless.

To City or Not to City?

Sun, 26 Jul 2009 22:45:41 -0400

Brooks recent Op-Ed article highlights not just the interesting relationship Americans have to their land, but also our need for a frontier, space, and what we think is comfortable. The Pew Research data shows that Americans are not content where they are now, and look forward to going elsewhere. Also, we are a country who loves the idea of suburbs--being in close proximity to the city but having space as well. However, the most interesting statistic given is the one that notes that 45% of Americans younger then 34 want to live in New York City, but only 14% of Americans over 35 wish for the same. What does that mean? Brooks seems to allude to the fact that as Americans get older they look for more comfort, more sun, more space.

Yet, I think it may also be true that younger Americans are desiring more urban populations because they really do gravitate towards more concentrated spaces of human interactions. Cities are places where its most likely to re-create, or keep the "college" environment. That is, a place where you can be in close proximity with a web of relationships, where you can taste and try many new and different experiences (such as food, clothing, politics, etc), and where you can be constantly studying the human condition. The city can be just as comforting as the non-city, so why is it that younger Americans want to live in them?