Oh, the irony

In my last post, I responded to my wife's vision for the church; now, alas, I find myself commenting on a very different vision indeed, a vision in which the local church exists for the support and self-aggrandizement of the denominational hierarchy, as the property of that hierarchy. In that vision, if churches want to leave, the Powers that Be have the right to stop them by force; and if the presbytery refuses to go along with that, the synod can take them over, too. I don't, in general, agree with those who decide to leave the Presbyterian Church (USA)—I think their actions help to bring about exactly that to which they object—but I believe they have the right to do so; they aren't denominational property, and neither are their buildings, and for the denomination to put its own material wealth ahead of the spiritual health of its churches, even those which are seeking to leave, is little short of reprehensible. This is the sort of behavior that gives the church a bad name.

It also, incidentally, gives the lie to the argument (made by Greg Coulter of Eastern Oklahoma Presbytery in a letter to Presbyweb) that the Synod of the Sun, in establishing their administrative commission over the Presbytery of South Louisiana, had merely been “invited” into the situation “to partner with them in furthering the peace, unity, and purity of the labors of those serving Christ in South Louisiana.” Clearly, the skeptical among us were right: for the Synod, it's property über alles—and then they have the gall to call it “one part of the church body helping another part.” For shame.

It's a wonderful thing

being married to somebody smarter than me. I've said this many times, and will no doubt say it many more. At the moment, I'm saying it again because my wonderful wife has just put words to something very important, something we both feel very strongly, and done so better than I've yet managed to do. I've been talking through some of this with our elders, and preaching about it some, about what it means to be that kind of church, and how we get there; I've talked about how we become a church of square holes (and triangular, and star-shaped, and rhomboid, and . . .) so that people feel it's OK to be a square peg, and I've been encouraged to find people listening, and open. But there's no question, we can't get there on our own; to do that, we need a response from others outside ourselves. We need to find ways to earn people's trust (which means, of course, continuing to grow ourselves to be worthy of that trust), so that we can all be the Church of the Exploded Comfort Zone together.

Anyway, go read Sara's post; she really has said it better than I can.

"Unless the Lord builds the house, those who build it labor in vain . . ."

—Psalm 127:1a

Happy Happy birthday!

Or maybe that should be "Happy birthday, Happy!"—or . . . well, the permutations go on for a while. Anyway, it's not quite as good as an ambush from the waiters at a fine restaurant (though it is easier on the wallet), but I wanted to take this opportunity to wish a happy birthday and a wonderful year to one of the best people I know, and one of the dearest friends I ever expect to have.

"May the road rise to meet you,
May the wind be always at your back.
May the sun shine warm upon your face,
The rains fall soft upon your fields.
And until we meet again,
May God hold you in the palm of his hand.

"May the warm rays of sun fall upon your home,
And may the hand of a friend always be near.
May green be the grass you walk on,
May blue be the skies above you,
May pure be the joys that surround you,
May true be the hearts that love you."

Not a tame lion

"On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of the conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies' straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake some day and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return."

—Annie Dillard

That quote (from Teaching a Stone to Talk) is one of my all-time favorites; I thought I'd included it in a blog post once, but when I went looking for it, I hadn't. So, it gets its own post (since I don't know that anything I could say could add anything to it anyway); I encourage you to take some time to think about it, if you haven't recently.

More things in heaven and earth, indeed

Headline you never thought you'd see: Cat turns into woman in P/Harcourt - 5 killed as cultists clash

Nigerian Tribune learnt that three cats were crossing the busy road when the okada ran over one of them which immediately turned into a woman. This strange occurrence quickly attracted people around who descended on the animals. One of them, it was learnt, was able to escape while the third one was beaten to death, still as a cat though.

According to a source who witnessed what happened, the cat-woman said she and the two other cat-fellows had travelled from Abuja to Port Harcourt to kill three people. “The woman said they came to Port Harcourt from Abuja and that they came to kill three people. She said they had succeeded in killing two people, but the third person, whom I guess might be a pastor, was difficult for them and that they were preparing to go back to Abuja,” said the source.

I have absolutely no idea what to make of this; but I'm not going to rule out a priori that it might be completely real. I've never heard of any such thing, but I know there are many things I don't know; and I believe in God, I believe there is a Devil, and I've come up against demons before, so I have no real reason to say this sort of magic couldn't happen, given people who believed in it and were willing to give themselves over to it. There are indeed more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in most of our philosophies, after all.

Still, that's pretty weird.

Further evidence that we're winning the war on terror

comes from Simon Fraser University (in Burnaby, BC, a suburb of Vancouver, across the metro area from where we used to live); as that doughty and perceptive observer Fareed Zakaria noticed (and most of the rest of the American media haven't), if you drop the practice of counting civilian deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan as deaths from terrorism—which is to say, if you count them as what they are, which is civilian deaths in a war zone, which aren't counted as terrorist acts anywhere else—the international death toll from terrorist acts has gone through the floor (and that despite Israel, which has seen a rise in deaths from Palestinian terrorism since the withdrawal from Gaza). As regards the US, organized terror groups haven't managed a successful attack on us since October 2003. There are a number of reasons for this;

the most significant, in the study's view, is the "extraordinary drop in support for Islamist terror organizations in the Muslim world over the past five years." These are largely self-inflicted wounds. The more people are exposed to the jihadists' tactics and world view, the less they support them. An ABC/BBC poll in Afghanistan in 2007 showed support for the jihadist militants in the country to be 1 percent. In Pakistan's North-West Frontier province, where Al Qaeda has bases, support for Osama bin Laden plummeted from 70 percent in August 2007 to 4 percent in January 2008. That dramatic drop was probably a reaction to the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, but it points to a general trend in Pakistan over the past five years. With every new terrorist attack, public support for jihad falls. "This pattern is repeated in country after country in the Muslim world," writes Mack. "Its strategic implications are critically important because historical evidence suggests that terrorist campaigns that lose public support will sooner or later be abandoned or defeated."

In other words, going into Iraq and Afghanistan has been critically important to defeating al'Qaeda in that, by taking the war to them, we've provoked them to terrorist attacks not in the Western world but in Muslim countries, among Muslims, with Muslim victims; what their fellow Muslims could support or at least tolerate when it was out of sight, out of mind, with victims they didn't know or particularly care about, becomes intolerable when it's down the street and the victims are friends, neighbors, and relatives. (As a prominent Saudi cleric wrote last September, "Who benefits from turning countries like Morocco, Algeria, Lebanon or Saudi Arabia into places where fear spreads and no one can feel safe?" [emphasis mine]) Which is no criticism of Muslims—that's very human, and exactly what we see in Americans and Europeans as well. But it appears to be something that never occurred to al'Qaeda.

It might be worth noting one other reason why al'Qaeda specifically has lost a great deal of support: if you publicly declare, "Iraq is the most important of these fields," then get your butt kicked in Iraq, you're going to have a hard time convincing people you're worth supporting. As bin Laden himself said, "when people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature, they will like the strong horse." At this point, al'Qaeda is pretty clearly the weak horse.

The parable of laminin

“From the day we heard, we have not ceased to pray for you, asking that you may be filled with the knowledge of his will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding, so as to walk in a manner worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to him, bearing fruit in every good work and increasing in the knowledge of God. May you be strengthened with all power, according to his glorious might, for all endurance and patience with joy, giving thanks to the Father, who has qualified you to share in the inheritance of the saints in light. He has delivered us from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved Son,
in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.

“He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things were created through him and for him. And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together. And he is the head of the body, the church. He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in everything he might be preeminent. For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace
by the blood of his cross.

“And you, who once were alienated and hostile in mind, doing evil deeds, he has now reconciled in his body of flesh by his death, in order to present you holy and blameless and above reproach before him, if indeed you continue in the faith, stable and steadfast,
not shifting from the hope of the gospel that you heard.”

—Colossians 1:9-23 (ESV)

Laminin is a cell adhesion protein, one of a family of proteins which, according to Wikipedia, are “an integral part of the structural scaffolding in almost every animal tissue”; the article also says that “Laminin is vital to making sure overall body structures hold together.” Or, as a molecular biologist in Texas once put it to Louie Giglio, a story he tells in the clip embedded below, laminin is “like the rebar of the human body . . . the glue of the human body.”

Now, a great many folks out there already know this story, due to the wide audience the Passion conferences have had, so while this was new to me, it isn’t to many; but it’s still quite remarkable. Take a look—here’s the molecular structure of laminin:

So in other words, this molecule that’s vital to holding us together . . . is cross-shaped. The structure of our bodies, at a deep and fundamental level, is cruciform. What’s more, as my delightfully perceptive wife points out, it echoes the Trinity, as it’s a cross made up of three parts.

God has left testimonies to himself buried all through creation, little embedded parables for those who have eyes to see his hand and ears open to hear his voice; this, I believe, is one of them, just a little witness to and reminder of the truth Paul articulates in Colossians: Jesus Christ is the one who holds all things together. This is a spiritual truth, but it’s also a far greater truth about our whole world: Jesus is the one who holds everything together, who holds it all in his hand and sustains it all by his will. He’s the one who keeps the planets orbiting their suns and the suns moving in the vast dance of the cosmos, and the one who keeps protons bound to neutrons and electrons spinning joyfully in their orbitals; all that exists, including us, exists because he continues to will it to exist, because he holds it in his mind and heart and remembers it to itself. And in our own bodies, we have a little echo of that fact, a little parable to point us to that truth, in the tripartite cross-shaped molecule that is “the rebar of the human body.”

Thanks, Hap, for teaching me that.

National Geographic's thirty pieces of silver

Remember the big media story a while back about the Gospel of Judas? Remember the stories about how Judas was really a good guy? It appears now that the text (which is in any case a late Gnostic text, and thus not as significant as some people wanted to make it) was seriously misrepresented—and that National Geographic is in large part to blame. It's clear they wanted to make use of Judas for their own purposes, and that one of those purposes was to make their thirty pieces of silver off him. They wanted the media splash, they wanted headlines like "Ancient Text Says Jesus Asked Judas to Hand Him to the Romans" (that one courtesy of the Arizona Republic), and they wanted the profits that came with that, courtesy of the high-profile documentary, the DVD sales, and the book sales. And if proper scholarly procedures, and with them proper scholarly standards, went by the wayside as a result—taking a proper scholarly concern for accuracy and truth with them—then so be it.

On a lighter note

I don't know how many of the folks who read this blog will care one way or the other that Paul DePodesta, special assistant for baseball operations for the San Diego Padres and former GM for the Los Angeles Dodgers, started a blog this month, but I did think even those least interested in baseball would appreciate its title: It Might Be Dangerous... You Go First. (And if you do like baseball, this promises to be a great place to read about it.)

Skeptical theism

I linked to this by the by in my previous post, having discovered that it was up while I was looking for something else, but it really deserves its own: Edward Tingley has a stellar article in Touchstone called “The Skeptical Inquirer: If Only Atheists Were the Skeptics They Think They Are,” which I commend to your reading. It is, drawing on Pascal, a devastating frontal assault on the idea that the absence of scientific evidence for God is an argument against the existence of God. As Dr. Tingley says, “Skepticism raises the question, Is there any way forward after we have given up on material evidence? It certainly doesn’t answer it.”

Here are a few brief excerpts from the essay to whet your appetite:

Unbelievers think that skepticism is their special virtue, the key virtue believers lack. Bolstered by bestselling authors, they see the skeptical and scientific mind as muscular thinking, which the believer has failed to develop. He could bulk up if he wished to, by thinking like a scientist, and wind up at the “agnosticism” of a Dawkins or the atheism of a Dennett—but that is just what he doesn’t want, so at every threat to his commitments he shuns science.

That story is almost exactly the opposite of the truth. . . .

There are skeptical theists; Pascal was one. Skepticism and theism go well together. By a “skeptic” I mean a person who believes that in some particular arena of desired knowledge we just cannot have knowledge of the foursquare variety that we get elsewhere, and who sees no reason to bolster that lack with willful belief. . . .

Evidence is just not available to demonstrate the existence of God, said Pascal, who called himself one of those creatures who lack the humility that makes a natural believer. In that, he was of our time: We are pretty much all like that now. Three hundred and fifty years ago he laid out our situation for us: Modern man confronts the question of God from the starting point of skepticism, the conviction that there is no conclusive physical or logical evidence that the God of the Bible exists. . . .

This is where the modern person usually starts in his assault on the question, Is God real or imaginary?

This is base camp, above the tree-line of convincing reasons and knock-down arguments, at the far edge of things we can kick and see, and it is all uphill from here. Thus, it is astounding how many Dawkinses and Dennetts, undecideds and skeptical nay-sayers—that sea of “progressive” folk who claim to “think critically” about religion and either “take theism on” or claim they are “still looking”—who have not reached the year 1660 in their thinking. They almost never pay attention to what the skeptic Pascal said about this enquiry.

Instead, the dogmatic reflex, ever caring for human comfort, has flexed and decided the question already, has told them what to believe in advance of investigation and rushed them back to the safety of life as usual.

The modern thinking person who rightly touts the virtues of science—skepticism, logic, commitment to evidence—must possess the lot. But agnostics are not skeptical, half the atheists are not logical, and the rest refuse to go where the evidence is. None measures up in these modern qualities to Pascal.

I encourage you to read the rest—it’s truly a superb piece.

Thoughts on the nature of Christian faith

"What people don’t realise is how much religion costs. They think faith is a big electric blanket, when of course it is the cross. It is much harder to believe than not to believe."

—Flannery O'Connor

In his comments on the song inspired by this quote (video and lyrics below), Steve Taylor wrote, "The cost of discipleship—the ideal of taking up your cross everyday and following Jesus—makes it hard to believe, because Christianity demands things from us that we don't naturally want to give. In the words of playwright Dennis Potter, 'There is, in the end, no such thing as a simple faith.'"

This is pure truth, at least as regards Christianity. In the broadest possible sense, believing is easy: everyone believes something, because we have to. We can't ground our lives on reason alone, because a chain of reasoning requires a starting point; however far back you reason, that starting point recedes still further. We can't use our reasoning to provide that starting point, because we'd end up with circular reasoning, however great the circle might be. Our reasoning has to begin from ultimate premises which we cannot prove—such as "There is a God," or "There is no God"—but can only take as faith commitments. Once we've done that, we can interrogate those premises, and the conclusions we've drawn from them, and see if the whole thing is rationally consistent, if the beliefs we've developed are logically coherent with each other and accurately descriptive of the world as we know it; but we cannot remove the necessity of faith undergirding our reasoning. Indeed, even reasoning is in some sense an act of faith—faith in our ability to reason, and in the viability of reason itself. As St. Anselm put it, reason is faith seeking understanding.

That said, while believing something is easy, believing in Christ isn't. Far from it, in fact. And this isn't for the reasons atheists and others want to advance, about the problem of evil and the problem of miracles and suchlike; "scientific" objections like the latter are ultimately just assertions (no, science hasn't disproved miracles, you just want to believe it has), while philosophical and existential objections ultimately tell against atheists just as much as Christians. (If you think evil is a problem for Christians, just stop and consider the problem it poses for atheists. It's a different kind of problem, but no less real for all that.) I've known people whose decision to believe in Christ rested on logical argument, but very few; and I've never known anyone who was actually driven to atheism by reason. (Thus the philosopher Edward Tingley, comparing modern atheists unfavorably to Pascal, writes, "Agnostics are not skeptical, half the atheists are not logical, and the rest refuse to go where the evidence is.") Rather, in my experience, the main reason people choose not to believe in Christ is because they don't want to. As Chesterton wryly observed, "The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting, it has been found difficult and left untried."

The reason for this is that the Christian faith isn't designed to meet our "felt needs"; it isn't, as so many atheists smugly assume, just a matter of believing what we want to believe. As Flannery O'Connor put it, it isn't a big warm electric blanket, it's the cross—and we don't particularly want the cross. We don't particularly want a God who calls us to deny ourselves and take up our cross (which, you remember, was an implement designed to torture people to death) and then has the gall to say, "My yoke is well-fitted and my burden is light." We can't get to the point where we want that until we realize that our needs go much, much deeper than what we feel on the surface; we can't get to that point until we realize that the burden of taking up our cross is in fact light compared to the burden of our sin, and that Jesus' yoke is indeed well-fitted, not to doing what we want to do, but to doing what we need to do. Getting there, however, isn't easy; it's far easier to turn aside and believe something else instead.

And before you start to object that the behavior of many Christians is another major reason why people turn away from faith, let me say that that's just another example of the same problem: many of us in the church don't want the cross either. Even for many within the church, it's harder to believe than not to, and so it's all too easy for us to choose not to. Instead, we find something else to believe in—a structure of behavioral rules, a set of political commitments, a system of how-tos for "the life you've always wanted"—and call that Christianity instead. The thing is, that kind of belief can build organizations, even big ones, and it can attract followers, even committed ones, and it can do a lot of things that impress this world—but what it can't do is raise Christians. It takes a church to raise a Christian, and specifically, it takes a church that's trying to be the church; and churches that take those kinds of approaches are trying to be something else. They are, essentially, counterfeit churches practicing counterfeit Christianity—and, in the process, stifling people who should be trading in slavery to sin for freedom in Christ, so that they wind up escaping one mold merely to be squeezed into another. Follow that out too far and you wind up with the kind of thing Taylor satirized when he wrote,

So now I see the whole design;
My church is an assembly line.
The parts are there—I'm feeling fine!
I want to be a clone!

You also wind up with the kind of church, and the kind of church member, that turns people away from Christianity, without those people ever realizing that it isn't really Christianity they're rejecting.

The bottom line here is that true Christian faith is not just intellectual assent to a series of propositions, nor is it a commitment to pursue what we consider to be good and helpful behaviors (though in some sense, both of those are involved): true Christian faith is a belief in a Person, and a commitment to follow that Person, wherever he might lead us. To borrow from the old story about the Great Blondin, it's not just a matter of agreeing that if we get in the wheelbarrow, he'll be able to push us safely across his tightrope over Niagara Falls—it's a matter of actually getting in the wheelbarrow and hanging on. It's a whole-life commitment, giving everything we have to follow Jesus.

The great offense of the Christian life to us is that it's not about us at all—it's not about our goals, our desires, our felt needs, and how to get what we consider to be "our best life now"; it's not about making us better able to go out and be our best selves, so that we can take the credit for what wonderful people we are. Rather, it's about setting all that aside and casting ourselves on Jesus, living lives of radical abandonment to the grace of God, letting him have all the glory for what he does in and through us—and letting him decide what exactly that will be, and where, and when, and how. This is the only way to real life, but it isn't easy; in fact, O'Connor and Taylor are right: it's harder to believe than not to.

Harder to Believe than Not to

Nothing is colder than the winds of change
Where the chill numbs the dreamer till a shadow remains;
Among the ruins lies your tortured soul—
Was it lost there, or did your will surrender control?

Shivering with doubts that were left unattended,
So you toss away the cloak that you should have mended.
Don't you know by now why the chosen are few?
It's harder to believe than not to—
Harder to believe than not to.

It was a confidence that got you by,
When you knew you believed it, but you didn't know why.
No one imagines it will come to this,
But it gets so hard when people don't want to listen.

Chorus

Some stay paralyzed until they succumb;
Others do what they feel, but their senses are numb.
Some get trampled by the pious throng—
Still, they limp along.

Are you sturdy enough to move to the front?
Is it nods of approval or the truth that you want?
And if they call it a crutch, then you walk with pride;
Your accusers have always been afraid to go outside.

They shiver with doubts that were left unattended,
Then they toss away the cloak that they should have mended.
You know by now why the chosen are few:
It's harder to believe than not to.

I believe.

Words and music: Steve Taylor
© 1987 Soylent Tunes
From the album I Predict 1990, by Steve Taylor

Have an honorable Memorial Day

This might be from a beer company, but it's still right on. I grew up around the Navy, so I know our military's far from perfect, but still: we should be proud of those who served, and those who are serving now; we as a nation owe them far more than we could ever repay, and we should never forget that.

Bridging the culture gap

Calvin Miller has an excellent piece up on the Christianity Today website called "Rethinking Suburban Evangelism," which is of broader application than the title suggests. Though focused on "the push-button Zion of those who have made it and therefore have it made . . . the new Eden with little need for God: Paradise Found, where churches ulcerate themselves trying to sell self-denial to the pampered," when he asks, "Can the urgency of the Cross ever be made real to those who cocoon in front of an entertainment center and insist on defining hell as dandelions and heaven as the proper side of town?" he's raising a question that applies far beyond the bounds of suburbia—and his conclusion speaks to every ministry setting: "We become the most like Christ when our motivation is distilled love."

Moral arguments and the political process

I have believed for quite some time, as have many others, that one of the biggest problems with public discourse in this country is the insistence by folks on the left that religious and moral arguments are illegitimate in the public square; there are voices on the left who have sought to challenge this idea in a constructive way (as Sen. Obama did two years ago) but they’ve been few and far between. (There have been rather more who have followed the invidious lead of Jim Wallis in arguing that such arguments are permissible if they support liberal conclusions.) The idea that liberals should take the moral and religious arguments that undergird conservative positions seriously and engage them accordingly has mostly been anathema to folks on the left.

That's why it was so encouraging to see Austin Dacey’s book The Secular Conscience: Why Belief Belongs in Public Life, which came out two months ago from Prometheus Books. Fr. Richard John Neuhaus commented quite positively on the book at the time, writing,

On almost all the hot-button issues—abortion, embryo-destructive research, same-sex marriage, Darwinism as a comprehensive philosophy, etc.—Dacey is, in my judgment, on the wrong side. But he is right about one very big thing. These contests are not between people who, on the one side, are trying to impose their morality on others, and people who, on the other side, subscribe to a purely procedural and amoral rationality. Over the years, some of us have been trying to elicit from our opponents the recognition that they, too, are making moral arguments and hoping that their moral vision will prevail. But in the world of secular liberalism, morality is the motive that dare not speak its name. Austin Dacey strongly agrees. I expect he would not agree that the secularist moral vision entails a quasi-religious understanding of reality, but one step at a time, and The Secular Conscience is a critically important first step. . . .

Dacey recognizes the gravely flawed view of John Rawls that public decisions must be advanced by public reasons recognized by all reasonable parties. That is not the case with most questions requiring political decisions. He writes:

“A policy can be justified when it is favored by a convergence of citizens’ varying reasons, without there being any consensus on those reasons themselves. And there is no reason why the claims of conscience can’t be a part of such convergence. . . . So long as our reasons converge, the decision is justified to each of us and the ideal of legitimacy is preserved. There is nothing necessarily illegitimate about conscience.” . . .

On many questions of great public moment, most of us will disagree with Austin Dacey. At the same time, he should be recognized as an ally in his contention that these are moral questions that must be addressed by moral argument.

Two months later, the New York Times’ Peter Steinfels has taken note of the book (and also, incidentally, of Fr. Neuhaus’ comments on it); and though it seems clear that his main concern is whether Dacey’s approach will in fact benefit the liberal agenda, he lets Dr. Dacey have his say. This is important, because while Dr. Dacey, too, seeks to strengthen secular liberalism, he believes that having “a fundamental conversation” is important enough to risk the possibility that it might not produce the results he wants.

The most interesting part of Steinfels’ article, at least to my way of thinking, is the last paragraph:

“The Secular Conscience” glows with Mr. Dacey’s confidence in John Stuart Mill’s principle that every idea should be “fully, frequently and fearlessly discussed,” lest it “be held as a dead dogma, not a living truth.”

The thing that interests me about that is the implicit admission that secular ideas can be dead dogmas just as easily as religious ones can; which is a truth that points to the big admission that secularists need to make, that secularism is in fact a faith like any other, and no more rational than other types of faith commitments (though there are certainly forms of both religious and secular faith which are less rational). That way lies the recognition, which we all need, that we should regard those with whom we disagree as equals with whom we should argue with respect and from whom we have much to learn, rather than as inferiors whom we may freely mock, berate, or dismiss. If Dr. Dacey’s argument leads eventually to secularists abandoning their self-assumed (and self-congratulatory) assurance of superiority to argue with their opponents humbly rather than dogmatically, he will have done our culture a great service indeed.

HT for the NYT article: Presbyweb

Ten random things that make me happy

Pauline at Perennial Student posted her list, and it turns out it's a meme that's been going around (having started here, as best as I can tell), so I figured I'd pick it up and send it on; a little light-heartedness is good for the soul. Most of these things aren't really all that random, or unique to me, either, but never mind.

1. Worshiping God
2. Holding my wife
3. A little-girl hug from one (or more) of my daughters
4. Playing "my bunny!" with my youngest daughter
5. Preaching—when it's going well
6. Singing along with the music while I'm driving
7. Rereading a well-loved book
8. Baking a pie—if the crust behaves (if not, there is frustration along the way)
9. Watching one of my girls learn something
10. Sunshine on a windy day

I herewith tag:
Sara
Hap
Erin
Barry
Ruth
Jon

Prince Caspian

Last night, my wife and I went out to see Prince Caspian—it was our first movie date in years (it's nice to be able to go to the movies again)—and we loved it. I know there's been a lot of back-and-forth about the movie vs. the book; Frederica Mathewes-Green was actually so bold as to say the movie tops the book, while other voices have, much more predictably, argued the opposite. Douglas Gresham, Lewis' stepson and the movie's co-producer, said in an interview with CT that the movie "portrays probably even more strongly than the book the essential message of Prince Caspian," even as he concedes that the book itself isn't all that strong. I wouldn't go as far as Mathewes-Green, who calls it "a dud"—I think she needs to read Michael Ward's book Planet Narnia, which I'm looking forward to reading (soon, I hope)—but I do think it's the weakest of the books; in reading it to my older girls recently, I really felt the force of the anticlimax.

In light of that, while I don't want to wade into the fray over comparing the book and the movie (in part because I don't want to take the time to write a fully coherent review essay, just the movie-review equivalent of a notes column), I do want to offer observations in praise and support of the movie. Warning: spoilers ahead (I will pull no punches); don't click "Read More . . ." if you haven't seen the movie.

First observation: I thought the filmmakers took the Pevensies' dislocation and its effects far more seriously, and thought about its effects a good deal more, than Lewis did. Kudos to them on that. The introduction of the Pevensies, with Susan very much feeling a misfit and Peter getting into a fistfight because he can't adjust back to being a kid under (often-capricious, unjust) authority after spending however many years as High King, is spot-on, and lays the groundwork for much of what follows. Going from being adults and sovereigns in Narnia back in a moment to being English schoolchildren must have been like throwing the car into reverse at freeway speed; if you understand the Pevensies as actual human beings going through that experience rather than as figures in an allegory, that would be a traumatic moment that must have had noticeable long-term effects. (To put it mildly.) I appreciate the filmmakers noticing.

I especially appreciated the way they used it in character development, and especially with Peter and Susan. Peter has been struggling to adjust to not being High King, the general and warrior and statesman who is above all others under the law; for him, getting back to Narnia is, more than anything, about being back in charge, back on top. He's not willing to defer to anyone, or even to treat anyone as an equal (including Caspian, even though Caspian knows the situation far, far better than he himself does), and he's not willing to wait for Aslan, since to do so would be to acknowledge that even in Narnia, he is a man under authority. He doesn't see Aslan when Lucy does because he doesn't want to—he wants to do it himself; Lucy's right, he has indeed forgotten who really defeated the White Witch, and he's done so deliberately, out of pride. This drives him to put his faith in himself and his own judgment rather than in Aslan, with terrible consequences. He must be humbled, and have his faith properly oriented once again, before he can triumph; thus the capstone to his work is his surrender of his sword to Caspian, the final acknowledgement that it's Caspian who now rules in Narnia. In that, he has learned what he needed to learn, and returns to England a second time actually ready to transition back to living there.

Susan, by contrast—and by explicit, conscious (or semi-conscious) reaction against Peter—holds herself aloof from Narnia; she too, as Lucy tells her, doesn't see Aslan until the end because she doesn't want to. In her case, however, it's not because she doesn't want to submit to him, but rather because she doesn't want to surrender to him; she'll enjoy being in Narnia "while it lasts," but she knows it isn't going to and she's guarding her heart against it. In this, I think, the filmmakers are laying the groundwork for her defection from the friends of Narnia which is revealed in The Last Battle—groundwork which is, I think, implicit in the book, but which is shown more clearly in the movie. (I might add, by the way, that I've never felt "Oh, wasn't it fun when we used to pretend" was at all reasonable to have Susan say; her decision to turn her back on Narnia made sense to me, but not that she would actually forget, or come to believe it had never been real.) She refuses to fully yield to the reality of Narnia, choosing to protect herself by holding back from it; as a consequence, where Peter moves through their dislocation and comes out the other side, she pulls back from it. Where Peter has learned all Narnia can teach him, she has merely learned all she can learn.

Second observation: I've seen complaints that the spiritual meaning of the book is lost in the movie. Now, I'm just a simple country preacher, so maybe I'm just not smart enough, but I've never been all that sure what the overarching spiritual meaning of the book is. It's one of the reasons I'm looking forward to reading Planet Narnia, in hopes of seeing more in Caspian than I have to this point. As far as the book's message about faith goes, though, I think it's actually strengthened in the movie, because Peter and Susan's character arcs through the movie play into that. Peter's journey is especially relevant, because he starts off explicitly putting his faith in himself rather than in Aslan, and it blows up in his face; it's as he shifts to trusting and serving Aslan rather than himself and his own ego that things start to get better.

The climax of the movie, I think, is the summoning of the White Witch. Caspian has the wits, when she actually appears, to resist taking the last step to set her loose, and then the appearance of the Pevensies brings the whole plot crashing down—except that Peter allows himself to be half-seduced by the Witch. She's cunning enough to offer help, to present herself as an ally who would follow him, and despite the fact that he ought to know better, he's tempted. He still doesn't want to let go, he still wants to defeat Miraz' army himself and take the credit, and he's actually willing to consider allying himself with the Witch to do it (even if it means lying to himself that he can trust her). Fortunately, Edmund isn't going to make that mistake twice, and saves the day; and at that point, Peter seems to stop, take a good look at himself and how he's acting, and realize that he's been putting his faith in the wrong place. From that point on, he lets Lucy have the key role, and dedicates himself to buying the time for her mission to succeed.

Third observation: as Philip noted over at The Thinklings, the filmmakers do a lot more with Edmund, and give him a lot more scope to act, than Lewis did. His decisive action to save his brother (and all Narnia) from the White Witch is the high point, and I think adds another dimension to the Christian message of the story. In the Pevensies' first visit to Narnia, after all, Peter was the golden boy, while Edmund fell to temptation as the White Witch appealed to his pride; but that very success makes Peter vulnerable this time, to the point that he nearly falls to the same temptation that ensnared his brother, while Edmund is humbler and therefore wiser. This really underscores the story's argument for faith, I think, making it clear that pride and faith in ourselves is a false path, while humility and faith in the true God is the only real way forward. It's telling that in the last charge, the battle cry is no longer "For Narnia!": it's "For Aslan!" And though it's Peter who leads the way, and Lucy who makes the way, it's Edmund who shows the way; and, of course, it's Aslan who is the way.

Fourth observation: I have to differ with Renaissance Guy's complaint that "the characters just do their own thing and don’t work together much or discuss their problems to determine cooperative solutions, which definitely departs from the story Lewis wrote." That is indeed a problem when Peter shows up and takes over—and the result is a terrible defeat. As Peter is humbled, that changes; we don't see the discussion that produces the plan that wipes out the Telmarine cavalry at the Battle of Aslan's How, but it's a fairly complicated plan that depends on considerable coordinated effort and mutual trust. The fact that failure to cooperate produces disaster, while working and planning together and trusting one another produces success, is very much in line with the story Lewis wrote; and that arc is a lot more realistic, to boot. After all, trust doesn't usually come all that easily; it has to be built up, and we have to learn (and re-learn) our need to trust one another.

Fifth observation: I think the movie gives us a much better and more believeable Caspian than the book. Having him older, right on the cusp of his majority, is not only better for the plausibility of Dawn Treader (as Gresham notes in the interview), it's better for this story as well. I'm not sure I buy Doctor Cornelius having taught him so much less about the Narnians, but it's clear that he's much more prepared to be king, and this is good for the story. In the book, Caspian is a fairly passive figure, taken all in all, and really too young to be what the time demands that he be; that's why the summoning of the Pevensies is necessary. They essentially return to re-establish their own reign, serving as a sort of rightful king by proxy, then pass it on to Caspian. In the movie, Caspian is already on his own two feet, raising the Narnians as an army against the usurper; he may be a king in exile, but he is very much a king. The Pevensies are needed for the benefit of their experience (mixed blessing though that is) and of their relationship with Aslan (which in the movie is to say, primarily, Lucy's relationship); their blessing is valuable to give Caspian and his dynasty full legitimacy in the eyes of the Old Narnians, but it isn't necessary to make him what he already is. Indeed, Peter's surrender of his sword at the end probably does more for Peter, enabling him to let go of being High King (after all, his reign ended abruptly; one could say he needed more closure than that), than it does for Caspian.

Sixth observation: not a major point, but there are a lot more Telmarines in the movie than in the book, as there ought to be after all that time. The book gives us perhaps the smallest-scale coup I've ever heard tell of; in the movie, the sheer size of the task set before Caspian can be clearly seen, as it should be.

That's just a few observations; I may have more to post later, but that's enough to be going on with now. Taken all in all, though, I have no compunction in saying that, while no doubt the filmmakers could have done better, I think we can and should be happy with the job they've done.

Prayers needed

for the family of Steven Curtis Chapman, and for the family of Sen. Edward M. Kennedy; and also, as always, please keep praying for Zimbabwe.

Thoughts on the idolatry of relevance

“Never have Christians pursued relevance more strenuously;
never have Christians been more irrelevant.”

—Os Guinness

It’s an important belief of those who believe in and make use of contemporary worship forms that the church must be aware of the world in its public worship; from this belief, they argue that worship must be “contemporary” and “relevant.” Unfortunately, these two words misfocus our discussions of worship. If we aim to be contemporary, we end by elevating the new above all else merely because it’s new; our interaction with the world around us grows shallow and unanchored, for we can offer little more than a Jesus-colored version of the existing culture. While this may well make people comfortable with us, it doesn’t give them any sense of the difference between worshiping in the presence of God and being one of the folks in the culture at large. Similarly, if our goal is to be relevant in our worship (which includes the sermon), then we will focus on what people want to hear and feel and meeting those desires rather than on reaching to their central need, which is for God.

This is not to say that the church shouldn’t be aware of the world, or try to understand the world, as if somehow striving to be irrelevant would be better; clearly, that isn’t the case. Rather, the problem is the assumption that “relevance” means being relevant to the world on its own terms, and that if our worship is to connect with the world, it must do so on the world’s terms. This is essentially an assumption that in the relationship between the church and the world, the world is the senior partner, and that we must defer to the culture around us as the arbiter of what works and why. This tends to produce a plastic, results-oriented view of worship, in which worship is to be judged by numbers and approval ratings—by outward signs, rather than by inward realities—and thus in which we understand our worship primarily in technical terms, as a human act which is primarily designed to meet measurable goals.

This would be well enough, if worship were in fact a human act about human realities, for then the details of our worship would be negotiable with the various voices of our culture. This view of worship rests on the assumption that worship is something which we initiate for our own purposes, which may include but are not limited to the desire to please God, and thus is something which we have both right and reason to manipulate as we please in order to achieve our own purposes.

The problem is, this assumption is false.

Worship isn’t something we initiate, it’s something to which God calls us out from our own purposes and activities, and which exists wholly apart from them; in the words of the Baptist pastor the Rev. Dr. Bruce Milne, “worship doesn’t begin with us at all, it begins with God.” Properly speaking, it also ends with God, and is about him at every point in between. That’s why, in the classical Christian understanding, worship always begins with Scripture, “because God takes the initiative and we respond.”

As already noted, this doesn’t mean that the church should conduct its worship in ignorance of the world, or without taking the world and its conditions into account; rather, it’s the reason why we need to be aware of the world, and the proper frame for that awareness. As the Catholic priest Fr. M. Francis Mannion, president of the Society for Catholic Liturgy, put it in a remarkable article in First Things, “The Church is—or should be—never more intensely aware of the city than when at worship. In liturgy, the Church is opened out to the world, and the world in all its dimensions is drawn into the act of worship.” Indeed, Fr. Mannion goes further, arguing that “The task of the liturgy is to symbolize and sacramentalize the liturgy of the heavenly city in the midst of the earthly city. . . . The public worship of the Christian community gathers up the liturgy of the human city, [and] gives expression to the religious yearnings of the human city.” This is a viewpoint rooted in the ancient image of the two cities, the city of God and the city of this world, and the idea that the church is called to unite the two, bringing the heavenly city to earth and lifting the earthly city up to heaven.

It’s on the basis of this understanding that the late Yale professor Fr. Aidan Kavanagh wrote, “What the liturgical assembly of Christian orthodoxy does is the world. Where the liturgical assembly does this is the public forum of the world’s radical business . . . When the liturgical assembly does this is the moment of the world’s rebirth—the eighth day of creation, the first day of the last and newest age.” This is an astonishing vision for the worship of the church; rather than casting the task of the worship planner and worship leader as tinkering up a version of Christian truth which those outside the church will find familiar and comfortable so that they can come in and be at ease, this sees that task as something far greater and far more challenging.

The church is to be aware of the world in its worship, not to seek to match its style or to attempt to be relevant to the world on its own terms, but in order to offer its true relevance: to show and tell the world those things with which it is not comfortable, because it has forgotten them. Rather than being a public echo of the world’s familiar business, we’re called to be “the public forum of the world’s radical business,” the place where the world is called back to the root of every matter, the source of every existence, to confront the God who made it; our worship, insofar as it meets needs, should be meeting needs which the culture does not see. Insofar as it’s about us at all, which is only secondarily, it should be building us up as the people of God to go out to serve him in the human city as agents of the city of God, and not for any other purpose.

The reason for this is that just as our worship is not primarily of or about ourselves, neither is it primarily of or about our present time; rather, in our worship we act by faith as theological time-travelers, bringing the eschatological future of Jesus’ return into the present age. In our worship, we stand before God in “the moment of the world’s rebirth—the eighth day of creation, the first day of the last and newest age,” participating in that moment in faith even as we continue to live in creation’s unfinished seventh day; our worship is the point at which that future and our present collide, in which the heavenly city is enacted in the midst of the earthly city.

To be “relevant” as the world understands relevance is to collapse that, to seek to worship only in the present time; it is thus to fail to worship in the sure and certain hope of the world’s rebirth, the time when Christ will return and the Alpha and Omega will make all things new at last. That’s why “relevant” churches tend to be all about this-worldly concerns like your paycheck, your sex life, and your golf game, seeking to help you do better what you’re already doing—they’ve lost the vision for anything greater, because they’re only worshiping in this world. The church is called to be active in this world, yes, but in a very real sense, we’re called to worship in the next. As someone has said, we’re supposed to worship with bifocal vision, seeing both the kingdom of this world and the kingdom of our Lord, and of his Christ—simultaneously. It’s only if we seek to do this that we’ll have the vision we need to have as the worshiping people of God; and at the same time, it’s only if we seek to do this, rather than to give the world a vision which it’s already prepared to accept, that we’ll be able to show it what it really needs to see.

Morning prayer

In the beginning, O God,
when the firm earth emerged from the waters of life
you saw that it was good.
The fertile ground was moist
the seed was strong
and earth's profusion of colour and scent was born.
Awaken my senses this day
to the goodness that still stems from Eden.
Awaken my senses
to the goodness that can still spring forth
in me and in all that has life.

—J. Phillip Newell, Celtic Benediction: Morning and Night Prayer, 26.

What's the rush?

He doesn't look all that natural in front of a TV camera, and when he smiles, he tends to look as if he were doing an impression of Jack Nicholson playing the Joker, but John McCain has a good sense of humor for all that; he dropped by SNL recently for a brief bit on Weekend Update, encouraging Democrats to keep the primary contest going. Take a look:

This is noxious

My thanks to Pauline at Perennial Student for catching this. One of the more fun stories in recent years for those interested in the Constitution is the 27th Amendment, which was originally proposed as the 11th Amendment back in 1789; it wasn't ratified at the time, but no deadline was set for ratification, so when a student at the University of Texas discovered it, the states were still able to consider it, and it was ultimately ratified in May 1992. The Amendment states,

No law, varying the compensation for the services of the Senators and Representatives, shall take effect, until an election of Representatives shall have intervened.

The problem is, Congress is cheating, and the judiciary is letting them get away with it. Congress has continued to vote itself pay raises, it's just called them COLAs (cost of living adjustments) instead, and the courts have refused to call them on it. Never mind that COLAs still "vary the compensation for the services of the Senators and Representatives," the D.C. circuit of the Court of Appeals has ruled that the Amendment doesn't apply to them—a flatly unreasonable and illogical reading of the text—and the Supreme Court has refused to hear any challenge to it.

Why? Because Congress sets their pay. Congress can't cut their pay, but only Congress can increase it. Our federal judiciary is letting Congress circumvent the Constitution and keep voting themselves pay raises to ensure they'll keep raising the judges' pay, too. In the larger scheme of things, this isn't a big deal—but you know what? It's still unconscionable.

Technical note

For those who may not have registered this, on those posts which have a "Read More" link at the bottom, that isn't a link to the post page; rather, if you click on that, it will display the whole post right there in place on the main page of the blog. The guy who developed this calls it a "Peekaboo" link.

Thus, for instance, if you're on the main page of the blog, you'll see a "Read More" link just below this; if you click on it, you'll see the rest of this sentence appear in place. Click on the "Summary only" link to return to the shorter display form.

Skeptical conversations, part V: The person and work of Jesus

Continuing the conversation . . . Parts I-IV here.

A: So you believe Jesus was literally God, or part of God, or however you want to put it.

R: Yes, Jesus is God; specifically, the person of the Son. At the same time, he is a normal human male, with everything that means, except that his human nature was uncorrupted, unfallen. He is at one and the same time fully God and fully man.

A: Like the Red Queen, I, too, can believe six impossible things before breakfast; or at any rate, I’ll be to that point soon. It seems to me you have two problems: first, if Jesus was one of the persons of God, and he was down on earth in a human body, what does that do to the unity of God? After all, as you’ve noted, to be human is to be limited, and to be God is to be unlimited. Which raises the second question: how is it remotely possible that Jesus could have been both divine and human?

R: The answer to your first question is that just because the Son became a human being does not mean that he was in any way separated from the Father and the Spirit; they were still united with him, and the relationships between the three were just as close as they had ever been. This is because he was fully God and did not become any less so in becoming human.

A: Which still leaves the second question: how could he truly have been both?

R: Again, this isn’t something that can be explained propositionally; but again, I think it can be illustrated analogically. For one thing, remember light, which has two seemingly incompatible natures, a wave-nature and a particle-nature—and yet from all we can tell, it is both at once. For another (since there’s a piano over there against the wall) there’s the illustration Jeremy Begbie, the Cambridge theologian and pianist, uses.

A: Theologian and pianist? That’s an odd combination.

R: Yeah, he’s on the faculty in theology—or was last I heard, anyway—and he’s also a Fellow of the Royal College of Music, I believe. Given that combination of interests, it makes sense that he likes to use music to help explain Christology (that’s the term for the doctrine of Christ): when I play a note on the piano, where is the note?

A: Where is the note? Wherever the sound waves are, I suppose; everywhere in the room, though not precisely all at once.

R: Okay, now let me play two notes. Where are they?

A: The same as before—everywhere in the room.

R: But you’ll notice, they occupy the same volume of space; neither one excludes the other, and in fact, when you play them together, they become something more than just two notes. They still are two distinct notes, but they are also a unity. It’s the same way with Jesus; he is both God and man, and his two natures were two distinct notes, but also a unity: they are not blended together like a sauce, nor are they merely stuck together like a sandwich. As the Belgic Confession puts it, “the person of the Son has been inseparably united and joined together with human nature, in such a way that there are not two Sons of God, nor two persons, but two natures united in a single person, with each nature retaining its own distinct properties.”

A: I don’t understand how that can be. How can you have someone who is both infinite and finite, both omniscient and limited in knowledge, both omnipresent and localized, both omnipotent and limited in strength? It doesn’t make sense.

R: I don’t have a good answer. Some thinkers draw from a passage in Philippians 2 where Paul says that Jesus emptied himself, became a man, and took the form of a servant, and they argue that the Son gave up various of his divine attributes when he became human; since the Greek word for “emptying” is kenosis, this is called the kenosis theory. One problem with that approach is that if Jesus did in fact give up some of his divine attributes, he would no longer be fully God; so others have argued that while on earth, he gave up the right to use his powers freely, retaining all his attributes but submitting himself in their use to the will of the Father. To take omniscience as an example, when it was the Father’s will, he drew on it—in prophesying, for example, or in judging the hearts of people who spoke to him—but when it was not, he limited himself to normal human capabilities.

The idea that Jesus reconciled his divinity and his humanity by limiting his exercise of his divine powers makes some sense to me, but there’s a problem with it. It isn’t merely that Jesus was both divine and human, he still is; those two natures were united in him, and he didn’t leave his humanity behind when he left the earth.

A: I noticed that you were saying “is,” not “was”; I was going to ask you if you believe that Jesus is still human.

R: Yes. The Belgic Confession says that his two natures are so united that they were not even separated by his death or his ascension. The Son of God still shares our humanity. Given that, it seems to me problematic to reconcile Jesus’ two natures by saying, if you will, that he made it work on earth by turning down the volume on the God knob—that’s only a temporary solution to the problem. It may well be a true answer, but it isn’t a sufficient answer. So in the end, I have to say that I don’t understand how Jesus Christ could be both fully God with all his attributes and fully human with all our limitations; but I believe that he was.

A: Why does it matter?

R: It matters for a lot of reasons. For one thing, you might remember a song called “One of Us” that was a top hit around 1995 for Joan Osborne; the chorus asked this question: “What if God was one of us?/Just a slob like one of us?/Just a stranger on the bus/Trying to make His way home?” That question has an answer: God was one of us; the Son of God came down and took on everything that is involved in being human. He experienced our pains and our discomforts, our joys and our pleasures, our temptations and our struggles, our ups and our downs. He lived a fully human life, just like any of us, and that includes the full range of temptations; and the fact that he never gave in to any of them, and could not have, only means that he was tempted long past the point where we crumble and give in, making his struggles all the more agonizing.

That’s why Hebrews, which talks about Jesus as our high priest, says this: “We do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are—yet was without sin. Let us therefore approach the throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need.” Whatever we’re going through, he understands, because he’s been there himself.

A: Why the term “high priest”?

R: The high priest was the one who brought the petitions of the people to God, and he was the one responsible for the sacrifices; he was the only one allowed to enter the Holy of Holies, which he did once a year, on the Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur. Jesus has now taken over these functions. He is our mediator, the one who brings our prayers to the Father and intervenes on our behalf; and he has completed and finished the sacrifices through his sacrifice of his own life. Once for all, he made atonement for all our sins when he died on the cross.

A: I have a problem with that. There was a piece in the paper not too long ago about a new book that raises some important questions about the doctrine of the atonement. If God is appeased by cruelty, if he would torture his son to appease his anger at sin—well, then he’s a child abuser, to be blunt, and you have a religion that sanctions violence and abuse.

R: That’s a common conclusion among feminist theologians; Rita Nakashima Brock and Rebecca Parker, the two who wrote that book, have been making that argument for a decade now, and they aren’t the only ones. I think, though, that their criticism comes because their theology lacks a proper understanding of the Trinity, and so they are misunderstanding the doctrine of the atonement.

Let me take a step back here and lay this doctrine out, and then come back to this point. First, the problem: evil is real and must be defeated; human sin is real and must be dealt with. Partly, this problem is legal in character, that there must be a penalty paid for our sin, and partly it is relational, that our sin has alienated us from God. The penalty due is death; blood must be shed to pay the price and to satisfy the wrath of God against sin. No lesser price is enough.

God chose to deal with evil by paying that price himself. The Father sent the Son to earth to live among us, and then to die in our place. Jesus was sentenced to death for having broken the law of God, though he was not guilty of any sin at all, and he went willingly to his execution. Because he was fully human, he went to the cross in solidarity with us, for us; because he was fully God, his self-sacrifice was of infinite value. Because he was both, he was the only one who could ever pay the necessary price for us. He took all the sin in the world on his back, and he paid the price for all of it; he took our place under the curse of the law, and took away the power of sin to condemn us. He bore our sentence of death and left us free, and then after three days he broke the power of death by rising from the dead, sealing his victory over Satan.

A: You can see why the objection to this arises.

R: Yes, but as I said, the objection arises because of an insufficiently trinitarian understanding. The sacrifice of Jesus on the cross comes out of the relationships among the persons of the Trinity, and the whole Trinity is involved. As the German theologian Jürgen Moltmann has noted, this is not one member of the Trinity causing the suffering of another, as though the Father were standing aloof, using the Son as a whipping-boy; this is God intervening on our behalf, suffering for us, giving himself to pay the price for us. The Father sent the Son to the cross, but the Son went willingly; and remember, all three persons of the Trinity are interconnected, interwoven. The pain of the Son on the cross was shared by the Father and the Spirit.

A: How does this fit with the impassibility of God that you were talking about earlier?

R: You aren’t the only one to ask that question; the classical understanding of impassibility excludes the idea that God can suffer. Now, if that is the case, that brings you to the position that Christ experienced suffering and death only as man, not as God, and that is in fact what many if not all of those who hold to the classical position believe. There’s nothing necessarily problematic in saying that Jesus experienced some things as man and not as God, or vice versa; but it seems to me that to say that he suffered and died only as a man is fatal to the doctrine of the atonement, for it means that in the end, it was only a man who died—and that is not sufficient to save anyone. It also seems to me that the argument that God’s impassibility excludes the possibility of his suffering assumes that God is bound by our time stream in the same way we are; the argument really doesn’t follow otherwise, I think. If God is outside our time stream, then to say that he suffers is not necessarily to say that his suffering changes or lessens him, and there is no inevitable conflict.

A: But as I understand you, he came into our time stream as the man Jesus.

R: True. That is the mystery of the Incarnation, that the Second Person of the Triune God became human; and as a human being he wept and rejoiced, praised God and grew angry at those who fought him. He wrote himself into the story, if you will. The easy way to handle that is to say that all the messy human stuff, that was just Jesus’ human nature, and that is what those who deny that God suffered do; but in anything having to do with God, I am suspicious of answers I can fully understand, at least if they seem to leave problems behind. I am suspicious of collapsing the divine mystery into human rationality, because God is not fully comprehensible and any understanding of God which makes him so can only lessen him.

A: I can see that, I suppose. You certainly have enough mysteries lying about already.

R: True; but it seems to me, as I said, that any God big enough to truly be God is going to be too big to be humanly comprehensible, like a diamond with an infinite number of facets; we can’t possibly fit them all together out of our own wisdom and understanding. As such, I think it’s almost axiomatic that any theology which lacks mystery has sacrificed truth to comprehension at some point.

A: Though of course any theology anyone produces is going to be imperfect regardless.

R: Also true; that’s why humility is a virtue in theology no less than anywhere else. In any case, do you see the flaw in the feminist critique of the doctrine of the atonement?

A: I do. But I think it’s an understandable one.

R: I’ll grant that. Even leaving out the legitimate theological arguments, there is a lot of bad theology in the church, and I don’t doubt that some use the death of Christ on the cross in just the way that Brock and Parker see. But that doesn’t require changing our theology, only correcting those who abuse it.

At any rate, there are two other things to be said about the atonement. One is to define its results, which need to be described in several ways. First, Christ justified those who believe in him; to justify means to make righteous, to make right with God. In our own strength, we can’t stand before God’s just judgment, we can’t measure up to his standards, and so we stand condemned; but in taking the penalty for our sin on himself, Jesus gave us a new standing before God, and we have been declared righteous. Second, by his death Christ established a new covenant between us and God.

A: Covenant? I’m not familiar with the term.

R: A covenant is a solemn agreement—sometimes a negotiated agreement, sometimes unilaterally imposed on one party by the other—binding two parties together in a permanent defined relationship; each side makes specific promises and incurs specific obligations. Biblically speaking, for instance, marriage is a covenant, not merely a contract. Covenants are analogous to a contracts, but rather more serious and binding, and they tend to come with dire consequences attached for those who break them.

In any case, God has made several covenants with humanity throughout history, and in every case, he has been the one who has established the terms. Since the fall of Adam, each new covenant has built on the last, and each has been a covenant of grace—even the covenant established at Sinai, in which he gave Israel the Law. With Jesus’ death, he established a new and final covenant between God and his people, one which brought us into a new relationship with him.

A: A new relationship, legally speaking.

R: Yes, and more. Third, Christ liberated those who believe in him. He defeated sin, death and the Devil on the cross, taking away their power over us and breaking our slavery to sin; in paying the price for us, he redeemed us from slavery. Jesus gave us the freedom to choose to do the right and follow him, and thus to live as we were meant to live. Sin no longer rules us; rather, Jesus is Lord. Fourth, Christ did not merely free us from the power of death, he brought new life to those who believe in him; we are born again, spiritually, we have been adopted as children of the Father, and we have a new life with new power, which is the power of the Spirit of God living in us. We have been regenerated, made new people—not new and different, however. Rather, we have been reborn as the people we were created to be, and are thus more ourselves than ever before, though that process won’t be completed in this life.

One thing that I think you can see clearly from those four definitions is that they are all, in one way or another, relational language: through his death and resurrection, Christ brought about a new relationship between God and his people. This really speaks, I think, to the contemporary concern (at least among Generation X) with alienation; because it’s true, our sin alienates us from God, who is the source of life, and from our true selves, the people he created us to be—and, for that matter, from each other, as our sinfulness warps and breaks our relationships with each other. Jesus restored our relationship with God, he brought healing to our self-alienation, and in setting us free from sin he brings healing to our relationships with those around us.

Song of the Week

One of my very favorite songwriters is the Scottish folksinger Dougie MacLean; this isn't his best-known song by any means (that would be "Caledonia"), but I think it's the one I like best. This particular version benefits from the wonderful Kathy Mattea on backup vocals—they're friends, and it was recorded during a joint studio session. (I'd wanted to post another video from the same session as well, of Mattea singing lead on Dougie's song "Ready for the Storm," but embedding is disabled on that one.)

Turning Away

In darkness we do what we can;
In daylight we're oblivion.
Our hears so raw and clear
Are turning away, turning away from here.

On the water we have walked
Like the fearless child;
What was fastened we've unlocked,
Revealing wondrous wild.
And in search of confirmation,
We have jumped into the fire
And scrambled with our burning feet
Through uncontrolled desire.

Chorus

There's a well upon the hill
From our ancient past,
Where an age is standing still,
Holding strong and fast.
And there's those that try to tame it,
And to carve it into stone—
Ah, but words cannot extinguish it,
However hard they're thrown.

Chorus

On Loch Etive they have worked
With their highland dreams;
By Kilcrennan they have nourished
In the mountain streams.
And in searching for acceptance
They had given it away;
Only the children of their children
Know the price they had to pay.

Chorus

Words and music: Dougie MacLean
© 1991 Dunkeld Records
From the album Indigenous, by Dougie MacLean

Dawkins, analyzed

I've written on Dr. Richard Dawkins and the rest of the "new atheists" once or twice (or maybe three times, or even four), so I was interested to see Dr. John Stackhouse reflect on a recent appearance Dr. Dawkins gave at the University of British Columbia (UBC, pronounced "you-bys-sey"). His comments are in three parts, evaluating Dr. Dawkins as rhetor, ethicist, and mirror (of the style and flaws of a certain type of Christian apologist and preacher); he has some interesting things to say, especially regarding Dr. Dawkins' encounter with West Coast vegetarianism.

The importance of beauty in Christian ministry

Frederica Mathewes-Green has a blog post up on that subject titled "A Golden Bell and a Pomegranate: Beauty and Apologetics," which I think deserves careful reading and reflection. A lot of it is on the specific importance of beauty in worship; she has a distinct Orthodox slant to this, which is only to be expected, but I think her basic point is right.

In worship, it’s about God, and all signs must point in His direction. An atmosphere of beauty teaches wordlessly about the nature of God. It teaches that He is not just a concept to be endlessly discussed; that at some point our capacity to grasp him intellectually fails, and we fall before him in worship. Beyond all we know and cannot know about God, he reigns in beauty. Beauty opens our hearts, and stirs us to hunger for more, to hunger for the piercing sweetness of the presence of God.

As she notes, however, this applies beyond just Christians to the ability of non-Christian visitors to perceive the reality of our worship, and thus to be drawn by it; as such, she argues (rightly, I think) that beauty is actually important in evangelism as well:

What does it take to be a missionary? You need to know your stuff, and you need to have a tender heart toward the people you are trying to reach. But there is one more thing that Orthodox Christianity would contribute to the ministry of evangelism: beauty.

Again, I don't think this is purely an Orthodox contribution; I'll grant, though, that they've continued to make beauty, according to their particular approach, a priority where too much of the Western church no longer does. As such, I do think those of us in Protestant churches, especially, could stand to learn from Orthodoxy in this respect. After all, the poet had a point when he wrote,

"Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."

—John Keats, "Ode on a Grecian Urn"

If we don't show forth the beauty of God, we aren't being faithful to his truth.

Church as a missional community

One of the things that holds the church back in this culture, I believe, is that we think of it as a place. We have the idea that we go to church, we have church, and then we leave church and go back into the “real world”; which, however common it is, is completely unbiblical. We may talk about the important truth that we are the body of Christ, the covenant people of God, but we haven’t really grasped that fact until we realize it’s just as true on Monday afternoon as on Sunday morning. The church is not a place; the building’s just something the church has to enable it to do certain things, most notably to gather to worship God. The church is all of us together, and we are every bit as much the church when we’re out buying, selling, working, playing, and the like as when we’re standing together on Sunday morning singing. Together, we carry out the central part of our mission, worshiping God, but we also prepare for the rest of it—which happens out in the world at large. That’s part of really being the church, that we are as much the church when we’re apart as when we’re gathered together.

The problem is, we lose that when we let our walls define us. “Oh, those walls? That’s the Presbyterian church. And those walls over there, that’s the Free Methodists. And those walls down the road, that’s the First Church of the Brethren.” And those walls define out—everyone not within them doesn’t belong there. But Jesus didn’t define the church by walls, he defined us by our mission in this world—by, as you might say, the form which our daily lives are to take as the expression and outworking of our worship of him. It’s a mission which (like so many things) has three parts, which we can see in his farewell to his disciples in Matthew 28:16-20 and Acts 1:6-8.

First, go into the world. The church is not defined as a group of people who all like to worship in the same way, though you wouldn’t always know it from the way we do things; nor is it defined as a group of people with the same cultural expectations, though if you look at the way so many churches tend to segregate by age, you might come to think otherwise; nor is it defined as a group of people who all believe the same things, though our longstanding denominational boundaries could give you that view. The church is defined as a group of people who have obeyed Jesus’ call to go.

For some people, that means packing up and moving across the world; for more of us, it means sending and supporting those people, while at the same time remembering that we too are missionaries when we go down the street to buy milk. Wherever God leads us, whether Outer Mongolia or here in northern Indiana, that’s our mission field; wherever we are, we’re his missionaries. That’s what defines us as the church—not the details of our beliefs, not the details of how we do church, but the fact that we are a people on the way, following Christ in mission on the road to his kingdom. That’s why my other denomination, the RCA, defines its mission this way: “Our task is to equip congregations for ministry—a thousand churches in a million ways doing one thing—following Christ in mission, in a lost and broken world so loved by God.” That’s the church: a community of people, a community of communities, “following Christ in mission in a lost and broken world so loved by God.” That’s what Jesus meant when he said, “Go.”

Next, he says, “Be.” Specifically, he says, “You will be my witnesses.” Note that. He doesn’t say, “You will do witnessing”; he says, “You will be my witnesses.” We’re not just called to “save souls,” we’re called to share the life Jesus has given us with the people around us—and not just with our words, but by the way we live our lives. As St. Francis of Assisi put it, “Preach the gospel at all times. When necessary, use words.” That’s not an easy standard; our lives are to be sermons on the word of God, backed up by the things we say. Our call as disciples of Christ is to go out into the world and live in it as he did—talking with others about our Father in heaven, and just as importantly, showing his love to those around us in every way we can think of. We are called to do the work he did: to feed the hungry; to care for the sick; to welcome the outsider; to defend the oppressed; to lift up the downtrodden; to love the unlovable; to break down the barriers between race and class and gender; and to speak the truth so clearly and unflinchingly, when the opportunity arises, that people want to kill us for it.

After all, what’s a witness? Look at the justice system, which depends on witnesses—on people who have seen something important and are willing to tell others what they saw. That’s what we’re called to be. We too have seen something important—we have seen the work of Jesus Christ in our lives and the lives of others, through the power of the Holy Spirit—and we too are called to testify to what we’ve seen. In our case, though, our testimony is to be not only the things we say, but everything we do, the way we live our lives, because our lives must provide credibility for our words; a witness who isn’t credible convinces no one. To be witnesses, to bear witness to Jesus with our lives, means that at every point, our lives are to reflect the love and testify to the truth of Jesus Christ.

Which is impossible, for us; but what is impossible for us is possible with God. That’s why Jesus says, “You will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you,” and then says, “and you will be my witnesses.” Unfortunately, though, when the Holy Spirit fills us with the love and the grace and the power of God, we don’t stay filled; as the great evangelist D. L. Moody put it, we leak, and so we need to be constantly filled and refilled by the Spirit. That’s one reason we’re called to gather together each week to worship: when we spend time focusing on God, both by ourselves and together as a church, we open ourselves up for his Spirit to change our hearts and our lives, so that more and more we will be the people, and the church, he calls us to be.

So, Jesus says, “Go”; he says, “Be”; and he says, “Do.” Specifically, he calls us to do his work: as his disciples, to make more disciples. Our mission as the church is to go out into the world, not to hide behind our four walls—to live, in full view of the world, lives powered and guided and changed and being changed by the Spirit of God—so that people will be attracted by our example and thus be drawn to follow Christ as we follow him. We are God’s light in the window, calling home those who have wandered far from him, giving direction to people lost in the darkness; but when people come, it isn’t enough just to get them in the door. It’s our call at that point to nur­ture them as we nurture ourselves, to give them a place by the fire and feed them, body and soul, to share our life with them, and to disciple them so that they, too, can take up the call in their turn.

Now, this isn’t just a matter of teaching people to believe true things; by itself, that’s not discipleship. Discipling people is a matter of teaching them true things so that they will go out and live true lives. Our call and our purpose as disciples of Christ is to become like him: to think with his mind, to love the world around us as he loves it, and thus to act as he would act, to follow him in his mission in this lost and broken world so loved by God; and to do that, we need to place ourselves under the authority of his word, to obey his commandments and learn from his example. That’s why preaching and teaching are central to our life as the church, not just because we learn things, but because God builds what we learn into our lives, using it to form and shape us as his disciples.

Finally, Jesus says, “Remember, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.” This is, of course, a promise, but it’s also a framework and goal for our mission. We remember that Jesus is always with us by his Spirit, that we are never alone, without comfort, guidance, protection, or care; but we also remember that there is an end to this age, and that we don’t know when it will be. We remember that Jesus is with us to comfort us, yes, but also to challenge us; he’s with us not only for our sake, but for others’ sake and his own, to enable and empower us to be Jesus to the people around us. We remember that his purpose is in part to prepare us for the end of the age, when he will come again, and to use us to prepare others. We remember that he is with us, not to make us comfortable inside our four walls, but to take us beyond them to bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the brokenhearted and comfort those who mourn, to proclaim liberty to the captives, to declare the year of the Lord’s favor—and to warn of the day when his judgment will come—so that when we come home to his kingdom at last, we will hear him say, “Well done, good and faithful servant; enter into the rest I prepared for you from before the foundation of the world.”

Song of the Week

I'd meant to post this earlier in the week—it's perhaps my favorite Pentecost hymn; a former colleague of mine in Denver, the Rev. Dr. Tom Troeger, wrote the text.

Wind Who Makes All Winds that Blow

Wind who makes all winds that blow—
Gusts that bend the saplings low,
Gales that heave the sea in waves,
Stirrings in the mind's deep caves—
Aim your breath with steady power
On your church this day, this hour.
Raise, renew the life we've lost,
Spirit God of Pentecost!

Fire who fuels all fires that burn—
Suns around which planets turn,
Beacons marking reefs and shoals,
Shining truth to guide our souls—
Come to us as once you came;
Burst in tongues of sacred flame!
Light and Power, Might and Strength,
Fill your church, its breadth and length!

Holy Spirit, Wind and Flame,
Move within our mortal frame.
Make our hearts an altar pyre;
Kindle them with your own fire.
Breathe and blow upon that blaze
Till our lives, our deeds, and ways
Speak that tongue which every land
By your grace shall understand!

Words: Thomas H. Troeger
Music: Carol Doran
FALCONE, 7.7.7.7.D
© 1983, 1985 Oxford University Press, Inc.

“The great challenge in this decade . . . is social revival.”

So says David Cameron, leader of the British Conservative Party, who has brought about a considerable transformation in the party of Thatcher, a transformation he describes this way: “We used to stand for the individual. We still do. But individual freedoms count for little if society is disintegrating. Now we stand for the family, for the neighborhood—in a word, for society.” It seems to be working, since the Conservatives (or Tories) mopped the floor with the ruling Labour Party in local elections held across Britain two weeks ago—Labour even lost in London.

David Brooks certainly thinks there's cause and effect here, and sees a lesson the Republicans need to take to heart. Brooks wrote in last Friday's column,

The British conservative renovation begins with this insight: The central political debate of the 20th century was over the role of government. The right stood for individual freedom while the left stood for extending the role of the state. But the central debate of the 21st century is over quality of life. In this new debate, it is necessary but insufficient to talk about individual freedom. Political leaders have to also talk about, as one Tory politician put it, “the whole way we live our lives.” . . .

These conservatives are not trying to improve the souls of citizens. They’re trying to use government to foster dense social bonds. . . .

They want voters to think of the Tories as the party of society while Labor is the party of the state. They want the country to see the Tories as the party of decentralized organic networks and the Laborites as the party of top-down mechanistic control.

As Brooks notes, this isn't an isolated phenomenon, as center-right parties have risen to power recently in Germany, France, and Canada, among other places; the question is, as he puts it, “whether Republicans will learn those lessons sooner, or whether they will learn them later, after a decade or so in the wilderness.” I don't know if his analysis is right or not; but it needs to be considered. Carefully. Given that the direction he suggests is one that would suit John McCain well, I hope the McCain campaign is listening, and will give his analysis that consideration.