“Heaven” is one of those words that when you say it, people think they can stop listening because they already know what you’re going to say. When we die, our bodies aren’t us anymore, and our immortal souls go up to heaven where we watch over the people we’ve left behind. Add in the usual clouds and harps and pearly gates, with St. Peter standing outside them behind a lectern with a huge book—and what on earth did poor Peter do to get stuck with that, anyway?—and you have the basic picture that floats around in the back of most people’s minds; that’s what “heaven” means to us.
Personally, I don’t believe a word of it. I don’t believe I have an immortal soul, and I don’t believe it’s going up to heaven when I die, and I most especially don’t believe we'll be playing harps then if we don't in this life. (If you want to tell me heaven would be a place where I’ll play bassoon well enough that it will still be heaven for everyone else, we can talk about that, but I’m no harpist.) Obviously, if by “heaven” you mean the place where God lives and is fully visibly present, yes, I believe in that, but I don’t believe in heaven as most people think about it; and the reason I don’t is because the Bible doesn’t either. The Bible, instead, promises us two very different and very much greater things: the resurrection of the dead, and the new heavens and the new earth. Jesus didn’t come to Earth just to save our souls, he came to redeem us as whole human beings, body and spirit; indeed, he came to redeem his whole creation, not just us. God isn’t in this just for souls, as if he’d be happy to let the rest of the world he made go to rot; he’s in this to take it all back.
The ascension makes this clear, and underpins what Paul is saying about the resurrection from the dead in 1 Corinthians 15, because it shows us that Jesus’ resurrection was no temporary thing. He came back to life as a flesh and blood human being—albeit one whose body could do things that ours can’t—and when he left, he didn’t leave that body behind and go back to heaven as a spirit; he returned in the body, as a human being. That shows us what God is about in our own redemption. To raise us as spirits and leave our bodies behind would leave death with some measure of victory in the end; and it would devalue the world God has made, the world which he pronounced good. God isn’t interested in letting either of these things happen. Rather, his intent is to absolutely undo all the damage done by our enemy when he led Adam and Eve into sin, and absolutely destroy all powers opposed to him, leaving them no scrap of accomplishment at all. The absolute destruction of all death, and the absolute victory of all that is life, under the rule of Jesus Christ our Lord is what we have to look forward to—nothing less.
Tuesday, April 15, 2008
Not so new after all
So Barack Obama is now looking to turn his back on public campaign financing in favor of a “parallel public financing system”—which is to say, on the same old way of raising money; and why not, really, when he can spend a day hobnobbing with billionaires and raise $3 million. The thing is, though, given some of the things Sen. Obama has said in the past, that starts to look more than a little like rank hypocrisy; as Zombie contends,
Michelle Obama (and other Obama campaign spokespeople) aren't telling the truth. It seems that a signficant portion of Obama's monthly campaign contributions are coming from “large donors”—i.e. rich people, not just the “$20 to $50” donations they're constantly bragging about. . . . The single most insidious aspect of American politics is that candidates often must pander to and do the bidding of the wealthiest Americans, who have the funds to get the candidate elected. It's so commonplace, we no longer think of it as “corruption,” but that's basically what it is. So when Obama spends all day doing nothing but going to a series of private fundraisers populated exclusively by the wealthy, the only “change” I feel are the coins jangling at the bottom of my pocket.
And I don't like hypocrisy.
Neither do I; which is why, when you combine this with the evidence that Sen. Obama is, in the end, just another Chicago machine politician, I'm coming to the point where I agree with Peter Wehner:
Early on in this campaign I was impressed with Barack Obama as a thoughtful, inspiring, and admirable (if far too liberal) political figure. As the months have worn on, it’s become increasingly apparent that the candidate is projecting mere shadows on the wall. Our Republic deserves better.
Monday, April 14, 2008
Sen. Obama inserts foot in mouth, commences chewing
You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, a lot of them—like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them. And they've gone through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. So it's not surprising then that they get bitter, and they cling to guns, or religion, or antipathy toward people who aren't like them, or anti-immigrant sentiment, or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.
So says Barack Obama, as of April 6 in San Francisco, in an astoundingly condescending moment which demeans many Americans on multiple levels; and in defending himself, his response has essentially been, “Why all the furor? All I did was say what everyone knows is true.” Paging Thomas Frank . . .
To this, Hillary Clinton responds,
You know, Americans who believe in the Second Amendment believe it’s a matter of Constitutional rights. Americans who believe in God believe it is a matter of personal faith. Americans who believe in protecting good American jobs believe it is a matter of the American Dream. . . The people of faith I know don’t “cling to” religion because they’re bitter. People embrace faith not because they are materially poor, but because they are spiritually rich. Our faith is the faith of our parents and our grandparents. It is a fundamental expression of who we are and what we believe.
And,
I saw in the media it's being reported that my opponent said that the people of Pennsylvania who faced hard times are bitter. Well, that's not my experience. As I travel around Pennsylvania, I meet people who are resilient, who are optimistic, who are positive, who are rolling up their sleeves. They are working hard every day for a better future, for themselves and their children. Pennsylvanians don't need a president who looks down on them; they need a president who stands up for them, who fights for them, who works hard for your futures, your jobs, your families.
On Commentary's “Contentions” blog, Jennifer Rubin called that first comment “probably the smartest thing she’s said in her entire political career”; I think Rubin is right. Of course, John McCain's campaign is on top of this as well, as witness this quote from one of his advisors:
It shows an elitism and condescension towards hardworking Americans that is nothing short of breathtaking. It is hard to imagine someone running for president who is more out of touch with average Americans.
The theme is clear here: Sen. Obama is an out-of-touch ivory-tower elitist snob who looks down on ordinary folks. As David Paul Kuhn put it,
Last year [Sen. Obama] responded to an Iowa farmer's concerns about crop prices by asking if “anybody gone into Whole Foods lately and see what they charge for arugula?” There are no Whole Foods in Iowa. Recently Obama tried to bowl in Pennsylvania and looked like the sort of Democrat who thinks of Whole Foods when discussing crop prices. Now Obama talks about what drives rural voters' cultural concerns and ends up looking like the kind of Democrat who bowls a 37 in seven frames. Soon there is a storyline. The silly is now serious.
It seems that every time Obama makes a mistake he brings it up again, offers context, laughs about it, and then defends it. No matter, the bowling and arugula mistakes were still small time. But the bitter remark was a game changer.
Unfortunately for the Obama campaign, this is a theme that reminds a lot of folks of the Jeremiah Wright diatribes against America and Michelle Obama's “the first time I've ever been proud of my country” comment; it seems to fit with them all too well. The question is, is this his helmet-in-a-tank moment? Certainly it looks like it might be in Pennsylvania; and while it's too early to tell for the long term, you can be sure that if Sen. Obama manages to hang on and win the nomination, we'll be hearing a lot about this from now to November. Sen. Obama shot himself in the foot good and proper; now he'd best just hope he doesn't get gangrene.
On praying for heart attacks
As Robert Mugabe continues to dig in his heels, I'm reminded of a conversation I had a while back with a couple folks I know in Zimbabwe. When we asked them how we should pray for them, one of them said, "Pray that God will strike Mugabe with a lightning bolt." We were rather taken aback by that, but they know their country can't begin to recover until Mugabe is gone, and in their view, the only way he'll leave is feet first. As long as he's alive, they don't believe he'll ever relinquish power. It's hard to argue with them.
There are those who would have trouble with the idea of praying for the death of our enemies; that point of view came up last summer when the Thinklings discussed this question. Certainly I understand the concern, given that Jesus tells us to love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us; but he doesn't tell us what to pray for those who persecute us. Clearly, we should strive not to pray anger and hatred against our enemies, but I don't think that means we can't or shouldn't pray that God would bring them down, one way or another. I remain convinced as I was at the time of that discussion that David's prayers serve as a model for us on this point, boiling down roughly to this: "God, either bring my enemies to repentance or strike them down, I don't care which, but remove them as my enemies." As Jared put it at the time, "in extreme cases, in unrepentant, ongoing, debilitating situations of abuse on those who cannot protect themselves, I am driven to pray for God's justice in a radical deliverance. So the motivation is not 'kill this person'—it's 'make them stop or make them gone.'"
That's where I am with regard to Robert Mugabe. If God wills to strike him dead, good. If God wills to strike him to his knees in full repentance, good—indeed, better; better that he be redeemed, and besides, with all he's done, I think for him, repentance would hurt more. But whichever kind of heart attack God may send, I'm praying he sends it soon, for the sake of my friends, and the sake of all Zimbabwe. Amen.
There are those who would have trouble with the idea of praying for the death of our enemies; that point of view came up last summer when the Thinklings discussed this question. Certainly I understand the concern, given that Jesus tells us to love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us; but he doesn't tell us what to pray for those who persecute us. Clearly, we should strive not to pray anger and hatred against our enemies, but I don't think that means we can't or shouldn't pray that God would bring them down, one way or another. I remain convinced as I was at the time of that discussion that David's prayers serve as a model for us on this point, boiling down roughly to this: "God, either bring my enemies to repentance or strike them down, I don't care which, but remove them as my enemies." As Jared put it at the time, "in extreme cases, in unrepentant, ongoing, debilitating situations of abuse on those who cannot protect themselves, I am driven to pray for God's justice in a radical deliverance. So the motivation is not 'kill this person'—it's 'make them stop or make them gone.'"
That's where I am with regard to Robert Mugabe. If God wills to strike him dead, good. If God wills to strike him to his knees in full repentance, good—indeed, better; better that he be redeemed, and besides, with all he's done, I think for him, repentance would hurt more. But whichever kind of heart attack God may send, I'm praying he sends it soon, for the sake of my friends, and the sake of all Zimbabwe. Amen.
Saturday, April 12, 2008
Score one for SCOTUS
The Supreme Court of the United States struck a blow for national sovereignty recently—and along with it, a blow for the separation of powers. Medellín v. Texas is a decision that deals with some weighty issues of domestic and international law, but I think the Court made the right decision; I appreciate that they stood up to an attempt by the Bush administration to overreach the authority of the executive branch, and even more that in doing so they didn't claim more authority for themselves, but rather upheld the proper sovereignty of the legislative branch. Most of all, I think they were right to say that while the US must honor its treaty obligations, it's the principles of our own Constitution rather than the diktat of international organizations which determine how we do so.
A further point of interest to this decision, noted by the article to which I've linked here, is that it deals a body blow to the efforts of pro-abortion activists to use international organizations and treaties to overrule pro-life laws here in the US; this too is a good thing. In general, I'm not a believer in surrendering any part of our sovereignty to international organizations which all too often don't have our best interests at heart; I particularly oppose allowing the opinions of folks in other countries to determine important issues like abortion policy.
A further point of interest to this decision, noted by the article to which I've linked here, is that it deals a body blow to the efforts of pro-abortion activists to use international organizations and treaties to overrule pro-life laws here in the US; this too is a good thing. In general, I'm not a believer in surrendering any part of our sovereignty to international organizations which all too often don't have our best interests at heart; I particularly oppose allowing the opinions of folks in other countries to determine important issues like abortion policy.
Further thoughts on the Ascension: the value of our humanity
The most basic significance of Jesus' ascension is that he returned to heaven as a human being. This was a controversial statement in the early church—that’s why the creeds explicitly affirm that Jesus ascended into heaven, because there was a lot of argument about that point. The reason for the argument is that a lot of people just couldn’t deal with the idea that anything as gross and physical and material as a human body could be in heaven, in the presence of God. They were very “spiritual” people, in the same way as many people nowadays are very “spiritual”—which is to say, they saw “spiritual” reality as very different from, and superior to, mere physical, material reality. They’d be very happy to talk about their immortal souls going to heaven when they died—but the body? Ugh. No thanks. That was just a temporary thing, even a temporary prison, which they believed their souls would eventually escape to live a purely spiritual existence with God, who himself was pure spirit, and therefore superior to us physical beings.
Obviously, on such a view, Jesus couldn’t possibly have returned to the presence of God as a human being—that would defeat the whole purpose, and contaminate heaven. Yet this is precisely what the Scriptures affirm: the first-century Jewish human being Jesus of Nazareth ascended bodily into heaven, and at the end of all things he will return to this earth in exactly the same way. His human body, his human identity, wasn’t just something he put on for a while and then set aside—it’s a permanent part of who he is. The Son of God is still, seated in heaven at the right hand of God, the Son of Man, Jesus of Nazareth, a first-century Jew with nail scars in his wrists and feet and the wound of a spear in his side, and so he shall ever be; he didn’t just wear a human suit for a while, he became fully human, and he remains fully human.
This isn’t something we tend to think about very often, but it’s a profound and critically important truth. Jesus took our humanity with him when he returned to his Father; which means that in Jesus, God has taken our humanity into himself. He has not discarded our flesh, nor has he separated himself again from this world we know and love; rather, the stuff of creation is inextricably woven into the being of God. This is why the author of Hebrews can declare that we have a high priest who understands our weaknesses and our struggles. It’s not just a matter of Jesus remembering what it was like once upon a time to be human, powerful a thing though that is; his humanity is not merely a memory from the past, it’s a present reality. He still knows what it is to be human, because he still is human.
If Jesus cared so much for us human beings that he was willing to identify that completely with us in order to save us, it suggests that we should probably value our humanity rather more highly than we often do. We tend to value ourselves for what we do, what we have to offer, what we can contribute—and to value others on the same basis; there are even those voices which say that if people have nothing to offer, because they're too disabled or too old or too sick, then we're justified in getting rid of them. We don't tend to value ourselves or others simply for being human beings. But God does. Jesus does. In fact, he values us so much—he loves us so much, just for ourselves, just because he made us to love—that he became one of us. Maybe, rather than measuring ourselves and each other by the world's standards, we ought to learn to look through Jesus' eyes instead.
Obviously, on such a view, Jesus couldn’t possibly have returned to the presence of God as a human being—that would defeat the whole purpose, and contaminate heaven. Yet this is precisely what the Scriptures affirm: the first-century Jewish human being Jesus of Nazareth ascended bodily into heaven, and at the end of all things he will return to this earth in exactly the same way. His human body, his human identity, wasn’t just something he put on for a while and then set aside—it’s a permanent part of who he is. The Son of God is still, seated in heaven at the right hand of God, the Son of Man, Jesus of Nazareth, a first-century Jew with nail scars in his wrists and feet and the wound of a spear in his side, and so he shall ever be; he didn’t just wear a human suit for a while, he became fully human, and he remains fully human.
This isn’t something we tend to think about very often, but it’s a profound and critically important truth. Jesus took our humanity with him when he returned to his Father; which means that in Jesus, God has taken our humanity into himself. He has not discarded our flesh, nor has he separated himself again from this world we know and love; rather, the stuff of creation is inextricably woven into the being of God. This is why the author of Hebrews can declare that we have a high priest who understands our weaknesses and our struggles. It’s not just a matter of Jesus remembering what it was like once upon a time to be human, powerful a thing though that is; his humanity is not merely a memory from the past, it’s a present reality. He still knows what it is to be human, because he still is human.
If Jesus cared so much for us human beings that he was willing to identify that completely with us in order to save us, it suggests that we should probably value our humanity rather more highly than we often do. We tend to value ourselves for what we do, what we have to offer, what we can contribute—and to value others on the same basis; there are even those voices which say that if people have nothing to offer, because they're too disabled or too old or too sick, then we're justified in getting rid of them. We don't tend to value ourselves or others simply for being human beings. But God does. Jesus does. In fact, he values us so much—he loves us so much, just for ourselves, just because he made us to love—that he became one of us. Maybe, rather than measuring ourselves and each other by the world's standards, we ought to learn to look through Jesus' eyes instead.
Friday, April 11, 2008
“The oboe as an instrument of torture for oboists”
Slate has a perfectly wonderful piece up titled “Death by Oboe: How acoustic instruments torment their players.” Speaking as a double-reed player myself (albeit one on a fairly lengthy hiatus just at the moment), I particularly appreciate this bit:
In the modern world, nothing in music is more tragicomic than the subject of double-reed instruments like the oboe and bassoon. If you're an oboist or bassoonist in a high-school band, you buy ready-made reeds. Otherwise, you make your own from scratch, using expensive aged cane from particular terroirs, preferably in southern France. Cutting and trimming and binding and shaving reeds consumes a good deal of your days, while other musicians are practicing and regular people are having fun or making love. If you play the oboe seriously, much of your free time is spent making reeds, not love. Besides being ridiculously fragile, reeds are also sensitive to humidity, which on a soggy night can turn an orchestral woodwind section into a squawkfest.
A professional oboist will tell you more than you need to know about what constitutes a Mozart reed, a Mahler reed, a Stravinsky reed, and so on. If he plays in a pops orchestra, there's probably a Lennon/McCartney reed. If he wants to show you his reed knife, which is razor sharp, you should keep an eye on the exit. Reed making and the pressure on the brain that comes from blowing into an oboe can do unpredictable things to a person.
The strangest person I ever met was an oboist, the younger brother of one of my fellow bassoon students; when he had a reed he was making turn out badly, he would stand it on end, stand all his other reeds around it in a circle, facing inward, and set the offending reed ablaze with a lighter—pour encourager les autres.
(The title of this post is taken from Isaac Asimov's Black Widowers story “The Missing Item.”)
HT: Alan Jacobs
The church, the prophet, the whale—and God
The latest issue of Touchstone has a remarkable article surveying children's versions of the story of Jonah—and showing just how badly wrong they get the book, on the whole. (About halfway through I got up to check our copy of The Jesus Storybook Bible, which I posted on a while back, to see how it answered the challenge; it did better than most, but was not without flaw, cutting Jonah's story off before chapter four.) There's no question that most adults (even in the church!) have a seriously distorted mental picture of the book of Jonah, one which rarely gets beyond the question, “Was it a whale or was it a fish?” (Answer: to the ancient Jews, they were both fish.) From Ronald Marshall's survey, it's not hard to understand why.
What I particularly appreciate about the piece is that his analysis of the matter goes beyond anything I'd thought of. I'd always figured that most of the sanitizing of the book was rooted in the fact that Jonah, as an anointed prophet of God, ought to act like a hero and doesn't—that the primary concern was squeezing him as much as possible into that mold. Wouldn't do, after all, to admit that one of God's prophets could be such a whiny, priggish, self-righteous, hateful jerk. The Rev. Marshall goes further, though, suggesting that “Jonah is a horrifying book”—which he's right, it is, though I've never particularly felt that—and that the main concern has been to neuter it, to remove the horror and render it “safe for children.” (C. S. Lewis would have had a pungent comment about that, I think.) The problem is, as the article's subhead puts it, “In removing the fear from the story of Jonah, children's versions remove the gospel, too.”
This is because the great truth at the heart of the book of Jonah is the juxtaposition of God's holy fury at human sin with his holy will to show mercy to human sinners. God's hatred of the evil practiced by the Assyrian Empire was so great (with good reason) that he wanted to destroy Nineveh; yet he preferred to destroy them as his enemies by bringing them to repentance, so he sent Jonah to preach a message of warning to them. God's hatred of Jonah's rebellion was such that he sent a storm to drive him into the ocean, into the terror of drowning and the hell of the stomach of the sea-beast; yet he desired to show mercy to his recalcitrant prophet, and when Jonah prayed for forgiveness, he relented, and Jonah was vomited up onto the shore. And when Jonah sat down to try to shame God into destroying Nineveh despite its people's repentance, God made the shade tree grow, then killed it, in an effort to bring Jonah around; where Jonah's motto seems to have been, “Hate the sin, hate the (non-Jewish) sinner more,” God seeks to teach his prophet to love mercy.
In all this, of course, God isn't nice to Jonah; one could easily argue that he's far more considerate of the Ninevites who would destroy his people than he is of the prophet whom he called to serve him. But then, Jesus wasn't nice to those who were leading his people astray, either—nor was God the Father nice to Jesus. God's purposes are far, far bigger than being nice to us and making us comfortable and happy; his hatred of our sin is no less real and great than his hatred of the sin of others, nor is his desire to show mercy to those others any less than his desire to show mercy to us. If we're seeking a God who's “on our side,” we're looking in the wrong place. The Bible doesn't give us a God who's on our side, it shows us God and calls us to be on his side. (This is the greatest error in all typically American forms of theology, including even black liberation theology, which is rooted in the great truth that God lifts up the cause of the oppressed.) To the extent that we resist what God is doing, he isn't on our side at all. As Rev. Marshall puts it, working from Kierkegaard:
What I particularly appreciate about the piece is that his analysis of the matter goes beyond anything I'd thought of. I'd always figured that most of the sanitizing of the book was rooted in the fact that Jonah, as an anointed prophet of God, ought to act like a hero and doesn't—that the primary concern was squeezing him as much as possible into that mold. Wouldn't do, after all, to admit that one of God's prophets could be such a whiny, priggish, self-righteous, hateful jerk. The Rev. Marshall goes further, though, suggesting that “Jonah is a horrifying book”—which he's right, it is, though I've never particularly felt that—and that the main concern has been to neuter it, to remove the horror and render it “safe for children.” (C. S. Lewis would have had a pungent comment about that, I think.) The problem is, as the article's subhead puts it, “In removing the fear from the story of Jonah, children's versions remove the gospel, too.”
This is because the great truth at the heart of the book of Jonah is the juxtaposition of God's holy fury at human sin with his holy will to show mercy to human sinners. God's hatred of the evil practiced by the Assyrian Empire was so great (with good reason) that he wanted to destroy Nineveh; yet he preferred to destroy them as his enemies by bringing them to repentance, so he sent Jonah to preach a message of warning to them. God's hatred of Jonah's rebellion was such that he sent a storm to drive him into the ocean, into the terror of drowning and the hell of the stomach of the sea-beast; yet he desired to show mercy to his recalcitrant prophet, and when Jonah prayed for forgiveness, he relented, and Jonah was vomited up onto the shore. And when Jonah sat down to try to shame God into destroying Nineveh despite its people's repentance, God made the shade tree grow, then killed it, in an effort to bring Jonah around; where Jonah's motto seems to have been, “Hate the sin, hate the (non-Jewish) sinner more,” God seeks to teach his prophet to love mercy.
In all this, of course, God isn't nice to Jonah; one could easily argue that he's far more considerate of the Ninevites who would destroy his people than he is of the prophet whom he called to serve him. But then, Jesus wasn't nice to those who were leading his people astray, either—nor was God the Father nice to Jesus. God's purposes are far, far bigger than being nice to us and making us comfortable and happy; his hatred of our sin is no less real and great than his hatred of the sin of others, nor is his desire to show mercy to those others any less than his desire to show mercy to us. If we're seeking a God who's “on our side,” we're looking in the wrong place. The Bible doesn't give us a God who's on our side, it shows us God and calls us to be on his side. (This is the greatest error in all typically American forms of theology, including even black liberation theology, which is rooted in the great truth that God lifts up the cause of the oppressed.) To the extent that we resist what God is doing, he isn't on our side at all. As Rev. Marshall puts it, working from Kierkegaard:
Kierkegaard stunningly ties this story to Jesus’ instruction in Matthew 5:44 to love our enemies. When God destroys the tree, he is being “so terrible” to Jonah. If this is the way God loves his servants, there are no “syrupy sweets” in it at all. Rather, the “strenuous and sacrificial” marks this love.
Because God is so rough on us, Jesus said we should love our enemies—knowing full well that God is our “most appalling enemy.” Loving our enemies is primarily about loving God. Therefore, Kierkegaard concludes, “God wants you to die, to die to the world; he hates specifically that in which you naturally have your life, to which you cling with all your zest for life.”
God makes Jonah miserable, but for his own good. He breaks apart his worldly hopes and dreams and pushes him into a new life. He shows him that his own comfort does not matter. He calls Jonah to set his mind “on things that are above, not on things that are on earth”—things like some wilting shade tree (Col. 3:2). And for all this cruel treatment, Jonah is to love God anyway, simply because Matthew 5:44 says we are to love and not hate our enemies.
This is the hard truth of the life of faith, that following God isn't about “our best life now” and God helping us realize our potential as we see fit, according to our own desires; it's about denying ourselves, even dying to ourselves, and God killing that part of us that needs to die. Granted, he does so in order “that we might have life, and have it abundantly,” but it isn't our best life, it's his; and getting there means confronting our darkness, and the horror of which we're capable, head on. It means understanding both the full measure of the awesome wrath of God against sin—and the fact that our sin deserves that wrath—and the awesome depth and breadth of the mercy of God for sinners, which took that wrath upon himself on the cross. Just as Jonah sacrificed himself to save the sailors from the wrath of God (though he did so because he preferred death to obedience), so Jesus sacrificed himself to save “the entire boat of humanity” (in St. Jerome's words). And as Jared's been arguing over at The Thinklings, and as C. J. Mahaney talked about with Sinclair Ferguson, it's only if we understand that fact in its full significance that we truly understand the gospel.
Thursday, April 10, 2008
Keep praying for Zimbabwe
Mugabe's decided to dig in and fight; the opposition is still standing up to him, but I guess he's figuring if he just terrorizes Zimbabweans enough, he can make them more afraid of voting him out than of letting him stay in power. Pray he's wrong—pray the people of Zimbabwe stand up to him and to these tactics and vote him out anyway. And pray that when they do, that somehow, he'll go quietly. Please keep praying.
Skeptical conversations, part III: The problem of evil (full post)
Continuing the conversation . . .
A: Maybe it’s just me—though I doubt it—but something doesn’t fit together here. First you say that God is perfectly good, and now you say that when bad things happen, he’s responsible for them. So is he evil as well as good?
R: No. Whatever happens, happens because God does it—in Isa. 45:7 he declares, “I form the light and create darkness, I bring prosperity and create disaster”—but God is not the author of evil; whatever happens, happens because human beings, or the Devil, or some other creature brings it about. Both statements are true.
A: I don’t understand this. Let’s back up and try a different line of approach. If God exists, if he is completely good, all-powerful, and in complete control, then why is there evil?
R: That is an important question. Shortest answer: I don’t know. Even at the very beginning, if you look at Genesis 1, creation is portrayed as God’s victory over evil—not moral evil, but what Dr. Waltke, one of my Old Testament professors, calls surd evil: the power of chaos. Where does that come from? And what about the Devil, who tempted humanity into sin? Where did his evil come from? I really don’t have answers to those questions.
A: You referenced the Devil a minute ago, too. Do you really believe in the Devil?
R: Yes, I believe that there is a personal agent of evil who is at war with God; he’s already lost, but he won’t admit it yet.
A: Huh. Well, I suppose that if you believe in God, there’s no reason not to believe in the Devil as well.
R: No. What I’m getting to, though, is that the fact that I can’t explain evil isn’t necessarily a bad thing. You see, evil isn’t a positive reality, but a negation. Are you familiar with Madeleine L’Engle’s book A Wrinkle in Time?
A: I’m sorry, no.
R: Oh, well; that would have made explaining this a little easier. It was Augustine’s insight, I believe—he was one of the great theologians of the early church—that if God is the one who is and the creator of all that is, if he is the source of all good, and evil is the opposite of good, then evil is ultimately the negation of being, uncreation. As Henri Blocher, a French theologian, put it, “evil is disruption, discontinuity, disorder, alienness, that which defies description in creational terms (except negatively!).” Blocher makes the point that human reason is designed to understand the order God created, to trace out the patterns. A rational explanation of the existence of evil could only be possible if evil had a place in the rational order of creation; this could only be the case if evil were in fact an original part of creation. This in turn would mean that God was the source of all evil as well as of all good, and thus that evil, too is eternal. But this is not the case: evil is outside the rational order of creation, and has no part in God.
Blocher goes on to say that evil is not there to be understood, it is there to be fought, and that God has in fact already defeated it; we are living with the death throes of an enemy that has not yet accepted that it has lost.
A: So what you’re saying is that evil is as incomprehensible as God is.
R: Yes. God is beyond the ability of our reason to comprehend because he is too big, great and good beyond the scope of our reason; evil is beyond our reason because it is fundamentally opposed to the created order, and thus fundamentally arational.
A: Intuitively, that makes sense to me; but I think that answer leaves a hole, because it doesn’t address the continued existence of evil, to say nothing of its continued success. If, as you say, God is perfectly good and all-powerful, once evil came to be—or to not be? on your terms, I’m not sure how to phrase the question—why didn’t he simply defeat it at the beginning? Why leave evil to do all the damage it has done?
R: Again, I don’t know; I can’t answer that. I’ve heard one preacher suggest that once the Devil rebelled, God decided to let his rebellion play itself out in order to ensure that no one would ever try it again; I don’t know that I would offer that as an answer, but it does make a certain amount of sense. Origen, another of the Church Fathers, held that in the end, God would redeem all of creation, that even the Devil would eventually be restored. He was condemned as heretical by later councils of the Church, and I won’t offer that as the right answer either, but again, it makes some sense; and I’d like to believe it, whether or not I do.
In the end, though, the only answer I can offer is this, that God is a creator and a lover, not a destroyer, and that he chose to fight evil accordingly by bringing good out of evil. In the end he will bring the curtain down on evil once and for all, but for this time he has chosen to answer evil with self-sacrificing love; and he has given this world time while he carries out his plan, spreading his word throughout the world to claim all those who belong to him. The number of those to be saved has not yet been completed.
What the question of evil comes down to, then, is the question posed by another of my professors, John Stackhouse: can God be trusted? Can we trust his wisdom, that he does indeed know what he is doing and why, and can we trust his heart, that his love is indeed unflawed? To me, the answer is clearly yes, we can; the fact that the Father was willing to go so far as to send the Son to the cross, and that the Son was willing to go so far as to endure it, and that the Spirit was willing to bear that loss—that is proof enough for me. But it’s a question everyone has to answer themselves.
A: This still leaves the question of human evil; if we grant for the moment that evil is allowed for whatever reason to exist and that we are limited beings, then certainly bad things are going to happen. There will be errors in judgment, which will lead to accidents, things we have made will break, which will produce more, natural disasters will occur. The forces of chaos, as you referenced a few minutes ago, are at work—fine, we’ll accept that for the moment. But what really concerns me is why we humans do so much evil to each other and our world, and I don’t think you’ve answered that. Why is evil allowed so much influence over us?
R: That’s partly a question about God, but it’s also a question about us—after all, human sin comes out of human nature—so I think there are a couple of things that need to be said before trying to answer that. In case you’re interested, the formal terms theologians use here are anthropology, which is the doctrine of human nature, and hamartiology, which is the doctrine of human sin.
A: Every field has its own jargon, I suppose.
R: And the jargon has its uses—at the very least, it helps you keep track of what part of the discussion you’re in. Now, God created Adam and Eve in his own image.
A: So you believe there really was a literal Adam and Eve?
R: I do. I’d rather not get sidetracked into a discussion of possible interpretations of Genesis 1-2, which I read as a poetic and liturgical text, rather than a scientific description of creation, but I will say this: if one believes as I do that God created everything, then there is no reason not to believe that he created human beings in the way that the Genesis text recounts; I’ve already said that I have scientific as well as theological reasons for rejecting the various theories of natural evolution, and again, I’d rather not get off into that discussion. What’s more, from a Christian perspective there is good reason to believe that God created the human race directly, even if one does accept evolutionary theory. Namely, there is the biblical statement that God created human beings, male and female, in his image. This separates us from the animals.
A: Come now. We’re animals, too, after all.
R: Physically, yes, but we’re more than that. We’re spiritual amphibians, to borrow a phrase from C. S. Lewis, a fusion of body and spirit like no other animal.
A: Ah, yes; when we die, our souls go to Heaven or Hell, is that it?
R: Umm, no.
A: No?
R: I didn’t say we’re spiritual Oreos—screw off the top, eat the filling, and leave the chocolate cookie behind. We are embodied souls, ensouled bodies, the union of the two, we are in total made in the image of God, and we don’t separate out; we aren’t just our bodies, but we’re not whole without them, either. The face you wear is as much you as the thoughts you hide behind it. That’s why I say we’re spiritual amphibians, because we belong to two worlds at once, that of cats and dogs and that of angels and demons.
A: Angels always seemed so wishy-washy to me. But if you don’t believe that your soul will live on after death and go to Heaven, what do you believe?
R: We’ll get there. As for angels—well, Western culture tends to sentimentalize them something awful these days; I think we have the Victorians to thank for that one, with their simpering fainting-girl angel paintings. Not at all the biblical idea. But as I was saying, we were made in the image of God, which means both that we were made like God and that we represent him in the world—we were made to be his agents. Like I said earlier, part of that is that we reflect his communicable attributes: we are personal beings; we are moral agents; we were created good; we are capable of love; we are creative actors, and we have the ability, to some degree, to carry out what we plan to do. As Tolkien would say—
A: Tolkien? What does he have to do with this conversation?
R: Besides being a devout Christian—
A: He was?
R: I believe he was Catholic, to be precise. In any case, Tolkien in his essay “On Fairy-Stories” called human beings “sub-creators,” because God has given us the ability and the right to create within his creation. We cannot create out of nothing as he did, but we can create much from the materials he has given us, and we were meant to do so to his glory. Dorothy Sayers—yes, the mystery writer, she knew both Tolkien and Lewis—argues in her book The Mind of the Maker that this is what Genesis means when it says that we’re made in the image of God, because at that point in the biblical story what we know of God is that he creates.
I think, actually, that there is more to see than that from the beginning of Genesis; God is presented as rational, personal, and capable of relationship—after all, God is quoted as saying, “Let us make man in our image.”
A: “Us”? Interesting. I hadn’t thought the doctrine of the Trinity was that old.
R: It isn’t. This passage allows for the Trinity, but whoever wrote it had no such conception. There are arguments about what the author was thinking, but I don’t want to get into them. Anyway, we can also see from the creation story that God is good, since he is creating everything good, and that he rules over everything. So in part, to say that we are in the image of God is to say that we reflect his character, and in part it is to say that we reflect his activity as creative beings; and in part it is to say that we represent him in this world, that we are not only small creators but small rulers, responsible for managing the world which he made and which therefore belongs to him.
A: I can’t help thinking that this would be a very different world if Christians actually believed what you’ve been saying; from what you’re saying, pollution is a sin.
R: I believe polluting the earth is a sin. But seeing that isn’t enough, even if everyone in the church did. After all, even if our understanding of God were perfect in every respect, we would still be sinful people; and given that self-deception is a sin, and one that we as a race are pretty good at, the contradiction between our beliefs and our behavior would corrupt the purity of our understanding in short order anyway. We were created perfect, but we didn’t stay that way.
A: Maybe it’s just me—though I doubt it—but something doesn’t fit together here. First you say that God is perfectly good, and now you say that when bad things happen, he’s responsible for them. So is he evil as well as good?
R: No. Whatever happens, happens because God does it—in Isa. 45:7 he declares, “I form the light and create darkness, I bring prosperity and create disaster”—but God is not the author of evil; whatever happens, happens because human beings, or the Devil, or some other creature brings it about. Both statements are true.
A: I don’t understand this. Let’s back up and try a different line of approach. If God exists, if he is completely good, all-powerful, and in complete control, then why is there evil?
R: That is an important question. Shortest answer: I don’t know. Even at the very beginning, if you look at Genesis 1, creation is portrayed as God’s victory over evil—not moral evil, but what Dr. Waltke, one of my Old Testament professors, calls surd evil: the power of chaos. Where does that come from? And what about the Devil, who tempted humanity into sin? Where did his evil come from? I really don’t have answers to those questions.
A: You referenced the Devil a minute ago, too. Do you really believe in the Devil?
R: Yes, I believe that there is a personal agent of evil who is at war with God; he’s already lost, but he won’t admit it yet.
A: Huh. Well, I suppose that if you believe in God, there’s no reason not to believe in the Devil as well.
R: No. What I’m getting to, though, is that the fact that I can’t explain evil isn’t necessarily a bad thing. You see, evil isn’t a positive reality, but a negation. Are you familiar with Madeleine L’Engle’s book A Wrinkle in Time?
A: I’m sorry, no.
R: Oh, well; that would have made explaining this a little easier. It was Augustine’s insight, I believe—he was one of the great theologians of the early church—that if God is the one who is and the creator of all that is, if he is the source of all good, and evil is the opposite of good, then evil is ultimately the negation of being, uncreation. As Henri Blocher, a French theologian, put it, “evil is disruption, discontinuity, disorder, alienness, that which defies description in creational terms (except negatively!).” Blocher makes the point that human reason is designed to understand the order God created, to trace out the patterns. A rational explanation of the existence of evil could only be possible if evil had a place in the rational order of creation; this could only be the case if evil were in fact an original part of creation. This in turn would mean that God was the source of all evil as well as of all good, and thus that evil, too is eternal. But this is not the case: evil is outside the rational order of creation, and has no part in God.
Blocher goes on to say that evil is not there to be understood, it is there to be fought, and that God has in fact already defeated it; we are living with the death throes of an enemy that has not yet accepted that it has lost.
A: So what you’re saying is that evil is as incomprehensible as God is.
R: Yes. God is beyond the ability of our reason to comprehend because he is too big, great and good beyond the scope of our reason; evil is beyond our reason because it is fundamentally opposed to the created order, and thus fundamentally arational.
A: Intuitively, that makes sense to me; but I think that answer leaves a hole, because it doesn’t address the continued existence of evil, to say nothing of its continued success. If, as you say, God is perfectly good and all-powerful, once evil came to be—or to not be? on your terms, I’m not sure how to phrase the question—why didn’t he simply defeat it at the beginning? Why leave evil to do all the damage it has done?
R: Again, I don’t know; I can’t answer that. I’ve heard one preacher suggest that once the Devil rebelled, God decided to let his rebellion play itself out in order to ensure that no one would ever try it again; I don’t know that I would offer that as an answer, but it does make a certain amount of sense. Origen, another of the Church Fathers, held that in the end, God would redeem all of creation, that even the Devil would eventually be restored. He was condemned as heretical by later councils of the Church, and I won’t offer that as the right answer either, but again, it makes some sense; and I’d like to believe it, whether or not I do.
In the end, though, the only answer I can offer is this, that God is a creator and a lover, not a destroyer, and that he chose to fight evil accordingly by bringing good out of evil. In the end he will bring the curtain down on evil once and for all, but for this time he has chosen to answer evil with self-sacrificing love; and he has given this world time while he carries out his plan, spreading his word throughout the world to claim all those who belong to him. The number of those to be saved has not yet been completed.
What the question of evil comes down to, then, is the question posed by another of my professors, John Stackhouse: can God be trusted? Can we trust his wisdom, that he does indeed know what he is doing and why, and can we trust his heart, that his love is indeed unflawed? To me, the answer is clearly yes, we can; the fact that the Father was willing to go so far as to send the Son to the cross, and that the Son was willing to go so far as to endure it, and that the Spirit was willing to bear that loss—that is proof enough for me. But it’s a question everyone has to answer themselves.
A: This still leaves the question of human evil; if we grant for the moment that evil is allowed for whatever reason to exist and that we are limited beings, then certainly bad things are going to happen. There will be errors in judgment, which will lead to accidents, things we have made will break, which will produce more, natural disasters will occur. The forces of chaos, as you referenced a few minutes ago, are at work—fine, we’ll accept that for the moment. But what really concerns me is why we humans do so much evil to each other and our world, and I don’t think you’ve answered that. Why is evil allowed so much influence over us?
R: That’s partly a question about God, but it’s also a question about us—after all, human sin comes out of human nature—so I think there are a couple of things that need to be said before trying to answer that. In case you’re interested, the formal terms theologians use here are anthropology, which is the doctrine of human nature, and hamartiology, which is the doctrine of human sin.
A: Every field has its own jargon, I suppose.
R: And the jargon has its uses—at the very least, it helps you keep track of what part of the discussion you’re in. Now, God created Adam and Eve in his own image.
A: So you believe there really was a literal Adam and Eve?
R: I do. I’d rather not get sidetracked into a discussion of possible interpretations of Genesis 1-2, which I read as a poetic and liturgical text, rather than a scientific description of creation, but I will say this: if one believes as I do that God created everything, then there is no reason not to believe that he created human beings in the way that the Genesis text recounts; I’ve already said that I have scientific as well as theological reasons for rejecting the various theories of natural evolution, and again, I’d rather not get off into that discussion. What’s more, from a Christian perspective there is good reason to believe that God created the human race directly, even if one does accept evolutionary theory. Namely, there is the biblical statement that God created human beings, male and female, in his image. This separates us from the animals.
A: Come now. We’re animals, too, after all.
R: Physically, yes, but we’re more than that. We’re spiritual amphibians, to borrow a phrase from C. S. Lewis, a fusion of body and spirit like no other animal.
A: Ah, yes; when we die, our souls go to Heaven or Hell, is that it?
R: Umm, no.
A: No?
R: I didn’t say we’re spiritual Oreos—screw off the top, eat the filling, and leave the chocolate cookie behind. We are embodied souls, ensouled bodies, the union of the two, we are in total made in the image of God, and we don’t separate out; we aren’t just our bodies, but we’re not whole without them, either. The face you wear is as much you as the thoughts you hide behind it. That’s why I say we’re spiritual amphibians, because we belong to two worlds at once, that of cats and dogs and that of angels and demons.
A: Angels always seemed so wishy-washy to me. But if you don’t believe that your soul will live on after death and go to Heaven, what do you believe?
R: We’ll get there. As for angels—well, Western culture tends to sentimentalize them something awful these days; I think we have the Victorians to thank for that one, with their simpering fainting-girl angel paintings. Not at all the biblical idea. But as I was saying, we were made in the image of God, which means both that we were made like God and that we represent him in the world—we were made to be his agents. Like I said earlier, part of that is that we reflect his communicable attributes: we are personal beings; we are moral agents; we were created good; we are capable of love; we are creative actors, and we have the ability, to some degree, to carry out what we plan to do. As Tolkien would say—
A: Tolkien? What does he have to do with this conversation?
R: Besides being a devout Christian—
A: He was?
R: I believe he was Catholic, to be precise. In any case, Tolkien in his essay “On Fairy-Stories” called human beings “sub-creators,” because God has given us the ability and the right to create within his creation. We cannot create out of nothing as he did, but we can create much from the materials he has given us, and we were meant to do so to his glory. Dorothy Sayers—yes, the mystery writer, she knew both Tolkien and Lewis—argues in her book The Mind of the Maker that this is what Genesis means when it says that we’re made in the image of God, because at that point in the biblical story what we know of God is that he creates.
I think, actually, that there is more to see than that from the beginning of Genesis; God is presented as rational, personal, and capable of relationship—after all, God is quoted as saying, “Let us make man in our image.”
A: “Us”? Interesting. I hadn’t thought the doctrine of the Trinity was that old.
R: It isn’t. This passage allows for the Trinity, but whoever wrote it had no such conception. There are arguments about what the author was thinking, but I don’t want to get into them. Anyway, we can also see from the creation story that God is good, since he is creating everything good, and that he rules over everything. So in part, to say that we are in the image of God is to say that we reflect his character, and in part it is to say that we reflect his activity as creative beings; and in part it is to say that we represent him in this world, that we are not only small creators but small rulers, responsible for managing the world which he made and which therefore belongs to him.
A: I can’t help thinking that this would be a very different world if Christians actually believed what you’ve been saying; from what you’re saying, pollution is a sin.
R: I believe polluting the earth is a sin. But seeing that isn’t enough, even if everyone in the church did. After all, even if our understanding of God were perfect in every respect, we would still be sinful people; and given that self-deception is a sin, and one that we as a race are pretty good at, the contradiction between our beliefs and our behavior would corrupt the purity of our understanding in short order anyway. We were created perfect, but we didn’t stay that way.
Skeptical conversations, part II: What is God like? (full post)
Continuing the conversation . . .
R: Anyway, God is a diversity, and he is also a unity; you might say that God is unity in diversity. The Father, Son and Spirit are three different, distinct persons, and they fulfill different roles, but at the same time they are a unity. They have different functions, but every act involves all three, and they are one in being; they are utterly united in love. This is why John can say in 1 John 4 that “God is love,” because in the very being of God, the Father, Son and Spirit are and have always been in relationship, loving each other, dedicated to each other. It is that love between them which is the central element of God’s nature and character, and it is that love which drives everything he does.
A: Everything? What about sending people to Hell?
R: As regards Hell in particular, I’d like to come back to that later; but to speak more broadly, yes, I think God’s judgment and wrath are very much consistent with his nature, which is love. Stop and think a minute. If someone was trying to undermine your relationship with your wife and daughter—to take the extreme case, think Iago—what would your reaction be?
A: I’d be furious. I love them, I would never let anyone come between us.
R: And if someone tried to hurt them?
A: Just the same. I would defend them to the best of my ability, and whoever had threatened them would deserve whatever happened.
R: Well, that’s how God reacts to sin. He is perfectly good—the Bible says that “God is light, and in him there is no darkness at all”—and he made the world good; he made us good. The Father made us so that he, the Son and the Holy Spirit could expand the circle and share their love with us, and he gave us the world as a gift so that we might enjoy its beauty and care for it.
A: Now you’re getting close to environmentalism.
R: I am, and I think rightly so; I think our theology needs to address environmental questions. (I’m not the only one, either; if you’re interested, look up Steven Bouma-Prediger or Loren Wilkinson, for starters.) We were given the earth to be its stewards, and I think we will be held accountable for what we have done with our charge; but the threat to the earth from which we must defend it is our own sin. Sin, you see, threatens everything that God has made, and most especially all of humanity, whom he loves; sin mars his creation, and hardens our hearts against him. His response is jealousy and wrath against sin—the same jealousy and wrath you would show to anyone who tried to hurt your family or your relationship with them.
A: Jealousy? Come now, I’m not a jealous person.
R: Jealousy is a threat reaction. In people we think of as “jealous,” it’s set off by anything and everything, causing all sorts of unjustified behavior; but when someone really is threatening your relationship with your wife or daughter, jealousy is the appropriate response, as long as it is within bounds.
A: It sounds rather like antihistamines in the body; when they’re set off by false threats such as pollen, they give us allergies.
R: But when germs set them off, they are an important part of the body’s defense system. Exactly. And they will not stop until the germs are dead, and the same is true of God’s reaction—something akin to an allergic reaction, I suppose—to sin: his wrath is ferocious and uncompromising. He does not tolerate sin in any way, shape or form, and he will not settle for anything less than the absolute defeat of sin. Which is where Hell comes in.
A: That I can accept. It’s the absolute defeat of sinners I find hard to take.
R: Well, as I said, we’ll come back to that. In any case, God is love, which makes sense because he is three in one. I suspect you’ve thought of God as egocentric, to demand our love and worship?
A: Yes.
R: It would be a fair charge, were he just a single person; and in fact, I’ve heard a preacher defend God against that charge by admitting it and then saying he’s justified in being egocentric because he’s so wonderful. But in truth, it isn’t that God is all wrapped up in himself, some sort of cosmic Narcissus—rather, the Father, Son and Spirit are all wrapped up in each other. Except that they invite us into their circle, to share their love, which is the reason why he created us.
The fact that God is perfect, self-giving love is the root for everything else that we can say about the character of God. His love is unflawed, and so he is good in everything he does. His wrath against sin arises out of his love, as I’ve said, as does his command that we be holy just as he is holy—he does not want us to settle for less than what he intended for us. At the same time, though he hates sin and is perfectly just, he shows great grace and mercy and patience in dealing with sinners, because even in our broken, sinful state, he still loves us greatly. He is perfectly faithful to those who follow him, for the same reason. And note that all of these statements describe him as a personal, active God; he is no impersonal force (this isn’t Star Wars, no midichlorians here) nor a distant, uncaring, uninvolved God, but three persons who relate to us on a personal level out of love for us.
A: Sounds like you see God as pretty involved in your life.
R: Not just in mine—in everyone’s, in one way or another. He is Lord over everyone, in every moment, whether they acknowledge him or not; he created everything, and he sustains it—the universe only continues to exist because he keeps it so.
A: I might have to come back to that last statement of yours. But this all reminds me of an essay I read recently called “Why Smart People Believe in God”; the author is a smart man who doesn’t, and poses the same question I asked you. Along the way, he sets out two poles: either God is a God “who pokes his finger into the muck of human experience”—I think that’s exact—who tests people, makes strange demands, tells his follower to kill his son and takes vengeance on those who cross him, or he is infinite beyond imagining, “a circle whose circumference is nowhere and whose center is everywhere,” as someone said; and if he is the latter, then why would he pay attention to us? As I recall, the author concludes that most people who believe in God believe in the little one who cares about us, not about the big one who, it would seem, shouldn’t. You were talking earlier about God in cosmic terms, but now you’re using much more local terms, for lack of a better phrase; do you really try to hold those two together?
R: Yes. God is infinite—without end, without limits, and utterly uncontrolled by anyone or anything—and so, as theologians will say, he is transcendent, going far above and beyond our limited being and understanding; as such, he is also incomprehensible to us. We can’t understand God solely through our own reason, but only as far as he reveals himself to us, though our reason has a part to play in that. At the same time, God is immanent—
A: “Imminent”? He’s arriving shortly? By train, perhaps?
R: No, not “imminent,” but “immanent”—it’s a term coined by some past theologian: it means that God is right with us, that he is present with his creation.
A: Well, yes, if God is everywhere, then logically that would include here.
R: I don’t just mean that he is present in that sense; I also mean that he is emotionally present, that he cares about all his creation, and most especially about people. As I said, God is love. It really is a staggering thought, that a God who can hold a universe billions of light-years across in the palm of his hand would care about us; but he does.
A: It’s incomprehensible, in fact. Which you just said is one of God’s attributes, so at least you’re being consistent.
R: Yes. Of course, trying to conceive of God as both infinite and personal at the same time—it’s harder to be consistent on that. But anyway, you used the word “attribute” a moment ago; the attributes of God can be broken up into two kinds, according to my theology professor. The attributes I’ve been talking about, those which relate to the character of God and what he is like, are called communicable attributes because they are attributes he can share with us. He is personal, powerful, good, loving, faithful, etc. So, too, we are personal; we have a certain amount of power to do what we intend to do, though we are limited; and while we are sinful, we were created to be good, loving, and generally like God in character. This is part of what the Bible means when it says we were created in the image of God, but I’ll come back to that.
The rest of God’s attributes are called incommunicable attributes, and they have to do with what he is in himself. A lot of these are statements of negative knowledge—we can’t grab hold of what God is, because he’s too big for us, so we define him in part by what he is not. For instance, he is atemporal, which is to say he is not within our time stream. Does he experience time? I don’t know for sure, but I am quite certain that he is not bound to ours; he is in the past, he is in the present, and he is in the future, he sees all times at once, and all are the same to him. God is immutable—he does not change and cannot be changed; he is who he is, yesterday, today and forever. He is also impassible, which is to say that he does not experience fluctuating emotional states, nor does he feel sinful passions. This doesn’t mean that God is emotionally inert, however—after all, he is love.
More positively, he is omniscient, omnipresent, and omnipotent—all-knowing, everywhere present, and all-powerful. This goes back to his being the author of all creation; even in human terms, the author (or authors) of a book can be omnipresent and omnipotent to their characters, though even such limited omniscience eludes us. As well, he is self-existent, as I said before, and self-sustaining; he is completely independent, needing nothing and no one else to be complete—which makes the decision of the Father, Son and Spirit to create us and love us all the more significant, because they were complete in and of themself and did not need us for anything.
A: “Themself.” Now there’s a word I never thought I’d hear.
R: God isn’t limited by our grammar, either. After all, he are one God.
A: All right, enough already.
R: I find it helps on occasion to say things like that—it jars the ear, and so jars the mind out of its ruts, which is an important thing to do whenever one is thinking about God. Anyway, I’d add one other attribute: simplicity. God is never at war within himself the way we are; he may be three persons, but in anything God does, they are totally integrated and interinvolved; the Father, Son and Spirit are each fully present and completely of the same mind and purpose in anything they do. There is no self-doubt, no disagreement, no indecision, no double-mindedness and no second-guessing.
The last thing to say about God is to go back to a couple of points I touched on earlier, that God is sovereign—he reigns as Lord over all creation—and active. This leads to the statement that everything that happens in the world happens through the providence of God. He created everything that is, and it is his will that keeps all of it in existence; he is at work in everything that happens, and nothing happens apart from his will. As the Belgic Confession, one of the confessions which my denomination affirms, puts it, he “leads and governs [all things] according to the holy divine will, in such a way that nothing happens in this world without God’s orderly arrangement.” Nothing happens by chance, nothing takes God by surprise, nothing happens apart from his will, and nothing happens despite his work; he is sovereign in everything.
A: Maybe it’s just me—though I doubt it—but something doesn’t fit together here. First you say that God is perfectly good, and now you say that when bad things happen, he’s responsible for them. So is he evil as well as good?
R: No. Whatever happens, happens because God does it—in Isa. 45:7 he declares, “I form the light and create darkness, I bring prosperity and create disaster”—but God is not the author of evil; whatever happens, happens because human beings, or the Devil, or some other creature brings it about. Both statements are true.
R: Anyway, God is a diversity, and he is also a unity; you might say that God is unity in diversity. The Father, Son and Spirit are three different, distinct persons, and they fulfill different roles, but at the same time they are a unity. They have different functions, but every act involves all three, and they are one in being; they are utterly united in love. This is why John can say in 1 John 4 that “God is love,” because in the very being of God, the Father, Son and Spirit are and have always been in relationship, loving each other, dedicated to each other. It is that love between them which is the central element of God’s nature and character, and it is that love which drives everything he does.
A: Everything? What about sending people to Hell?
R: As regards Hell in particular, I’d like to come back to that later; but to speak more broadly, yes, I think God’s judgment and wrath are very much consistent with his nature, which is love. Stop and think a minute. If someone was trying to undermine your relationship with your wife and daughter—to take the extreme case, think Iago—what would your reaction be?
A: I’d be furious. I love them, I would never let anyone come between us.
R: And if someone tried to hurt them?
A: Just the same. I would defend them to the best of my ability, and whoever had threatened them would deserve whatever happened.
R: Well, that’s how God reacts to sin. He is perfectly good—the Bible says that “God is light, and in him there is no darkness at all”—and he made the world good; he made us good. The Father made us so that he, the Son and the Holy Spirit could expand the circle and share their love with us, and he gave us the world as a gift so that we might enjoy its beauty and care for it.
A: Now you’re getting close to environmentalism.
R: I am, and I think rightly so; I think our theology needs to address environmental questions. (I’m not the only one, either; if you’re interested, look up Steven Bouma-Prediger or Loren Wilkinson, for starters.) We were given the earth to be its stewards, and I think we will be held accountable for what we have done with our charge; but the threat to the earth from which we must defend it is our own sin. Sin, you see, threatens everything that God has made, and most especially all of humanity, whom he loves; sin mars his creation, and hardens our hearts against him. His response is jealousy and wrath against sin—the same jealousy and wrath you would show to anyone who tried to hurt your family or your relationship with them.
A: Jealousy? Come now, I’m not a jealous person.
R: Jealousy is a threat reaction. In people we think of as “jealous,” it’s set off by anything and everything, causing all sorts of unjustified behavior; but when someone really is threatening your relationship with your wife or daughter, jealousy is the appropriate response, as long as it is within bounds.
A: It sounds rather like antihistamines in the body; when they’re set off by false threats such as pollen, they give us allergies.
R: But when germs set them off, they are an important part of the body’s defense system. Exactly. And they will not stop until the germs are dead, and the same is true of God’s reaction—something akin to an allergic reaction, I suppose—to sin: his wrath is ferocious and uncompromising. He does not tolerate sin in any way, shape or form, and he will not settle for anything less than the absolute defeat of sin. Which is where Hell comes in.
A: That I can accept. It’s the absolute defeat of sinners I find hard to take.
R: Well, as I said, we’ll come back to that. In any case, God is love, which makes sense because he is three in one. I suspect you’ve thought of God as egocentric, to demand our love and worship?
A: Yes.
R: It would be a fair charge, were he just a single person; and in fact, I’ve heard a preacher defend God against that charge by admitting it and then saying he’s justified in being egocentric because he’s so wonderful. But in truth, it isn’t that God is all wrapped up in himself, some sort of cosmic Narcissus—rather, the Father, Son and Spirit are all wrapped up in each other. Except that they invite us into their circle, to share their love, which is the reason why he created us.
The fact that God is perfect, self-giving love is the root for everything else that we can say about the character of God. His love is unflawed, and so he is good in everything he does. His wrath against sin arises out of his love, as I’ve said, as does his command that we be holy just as he is holy—he does not want us to settle for less than what he intended for us. At the same time, though he hates sin and is perfectly just, he shows great grace and mercy and patience in dealing with sinners, because even in our broken, sinful state, he still loves us greatly. He is perfectly faithful to those who follow him, for the same reason. And note that all of these statements describe him as a personal, active God; he is no impersonal force (this isn’t Star Wars, no midichlorians here) nor a distant, uncaring, uninvolved God, but three persons who relate to us on a personal level out of love for us.
A: Sounds like you see God as pretty involved in your life.
R: Not just in mine—in everyone’s, in one way or another. He is Lord over everyone, in every moment, whether they acknowledge him or not; he created everything, and he sustains it—the universe only continues to exist because he keeps it so.
A: I might have to come back to that last statement of yours. But this all reminds me of an essay I read recently called “Why Smart People Believe in God”; the author is a smart man who doesn’t, and poses the same question I asked you. Along the way, he sets out two poles: either God is a God “who pokes his finger into the muck of human experience”—I think that’s exact—who tests people, makes strange demands, tells his follower to kill his son and takes vengeance on those who cross him, or he is infinite beyond imagining, “a circle whose circumference is nowhere and whose center is everywhere,” as someone said; and if he is the latter, then why would he pay attention to us? As I recall, the author concludes that most people who believe in God believe in the little one who cares about us, not about the big one who, it would seem, shouldn’t. You were talking earlier about God in cosmic terms, but now you’re using much more local terms, for lack of a better phrase; do you really try to hold those two together?
R: Yes. God is infinite—without end, without limits, and utterly uncontrolled by anyone or anything—and so, as theologians will say, he is transcendent, going far above and beyond our limited being and understanding; as such, he is also incomprehensible to us. We can’t understand God solely through our own reason, but only as far as he reveals himself to us, though our reason has a part to play in that. At the same time, God is immanent—
A: “Imminent”? He’s arriving shortly? By train, perhaps?
R: No, not “imminent,” but “immanent”—it’s a term coined by some past theologian: it means that God is right with us, that he is present with his creation.
A: Well, yes, if God is everywhere, then logically that would include here.
R: I don’t just mean that he is present in that sense; I also mean that he is emotionally present, that he cares about all his creation, and most especially about people. As I said, God is love. It really is a staggering thought, that a God who can hold a universe billions of light-years across in the palm of his hand would care about us; but he does.
A: It’s incomprehensible, in fact. Which you just said is one of God’s attributes, so at least you’re being consistent.
R: Yes. Of course, trying to conceive of God as both infinite and personal at the same time—it’s harder to be consistent on that. But anyway, you used the word “attribute” a moment ago; the attributes of God can be broken up into two kinds, according to my theology professor. The attributes I’ve been talking about, those which relate to the character of God and what he is like, are called communicable attributes because they are attributes he can share with us. He is personal, powerful, good, loving, faithful, etc. So, too, we are personal; we have a certain amount of power to do what we intend to do, though we are limited; and while we are sinful, we were created to be good, loving, and generally like God in character. This is part of what the Bible means when it says we were created in the image of God, but I’ll come back to that.
The rest of God’s attributes are called incommunicable attributes, and they have to do with what he is in himself. A lot of these are statements of negative knowledge—we can’t grab hold of what God is, because he’s too big for us, so we define him in part by what he is not. For instance, he is atemporal, which is to say he is not within our time stream. Does he experience time? I don’t know for sure, but I am quite certain that he is not bound to ours; he is in the past, he is in the present, and he is in the future, he sees all times at once, and all are the same to him. God is immutable—he does not change and cannot be changed; he is who he is, yesterday, today and forever. He is also impassible, which is to say that he does not experience fluctuating emotional states, nor does he feel sinful passions. This doesn’t mean that God is emotionally inert, however—after all, he is love.
More positively, he is omniscient, omnipresent, and omnipotent—all-knowing, everywhere present, and all-powerful. This goes back to his being the author of all creation; even in human terms, the author (or authors) of a book can be omnipresent and omnipotent to their characters, though even such limited omniscience eludes us. As well, he is self-existent, as I said before, and self-sustaining; he is completely independent, needing nothing and no one else to be complete—which makes the decision of the Father, Son and Spirit to create us and love us all the more significant, because they were complete in and of themself and did not need us for anything.
A: “Themself.” Now there’s a word I never thought I’d hear.
R: God isn’t limited by our grammar, either. After all, he are one God.
A: All right, enough already.
R: I find it helps on occasion to say things like that—it jars the ear, and so jars the mind out of its ruts, which is an important thing to do whenever one is thinking about God. Anyway, I’d add one other attribute: simplicity. God is never at war within himself the way we are; he may be three persons, but in anything God does, they are totally integrated and interinvolved; the Father, Son and Spirit are each fully present and completely of the same mind and purpose in anything they do. There is no self-doubt, no disagreement, no indecision, no double-mindedness and no second-guessing.
The last thing to say about God is to go back to a couple of points I touched on earlier, that God is sovereign—he reigns as Lord over all creation—and active. This leads to the statement that everything that happens in the world happens through the providence of God. He created everything that is, and it is his will that keeps all of it in existence; he is at work in everything that happens, and nothing happens apart from his will. As the Belgic Confession, one of the confessions which my denomination affirms, puts it, he “leads and governs [all things] according to the holy divine will, in such a way that nothing happens in this world without God’s orderly arrangement.” Nothing happens by chance, nothing takes God by surprise, nothing happens apart from his will, and nothing happens despite his work; he is sovereign in everything.
A: Maybe it’s just me—though I doubt it—but something doesn’t fit together here. First you say that God is perfectly good, and now you say that when bad things happen, he’s responsible for them. So is he evil as well as good?
R: No. Whatever happens, happens because God does it—in Isa. 45:7 he declares, “I form the light and create darkness, I bring prosperity and create disaster”—but God is not the author of evil; whatever happens, happens because human beings, or the Devil, or some other creature brings it about. Both statements are true.
Wednesday, April 09, 2008
Skeptical conversations, part I: Who is God? (full post)
I owe my wife another debt of gratitude, which is no surprise to any of you who know us. I've been trying for a while now to figure out how to make expandable post summaries work on this blog, but Blogger's FAQ didn't seem to work. Turns out it's a consequence of the switch to New Blogger, and they haven't caught up with the change. So, my wife went hunting and found Hackosphere, a blog which (among other things) provides the necessary instructions and code—and we're in business. I've already tested the code on the longest post I've written to date, and it worked perfectly.
In celebration, I'm going to repost my credo posts, this time with the credo actually in the post, below the jump. As I noted earlier, this is something I wrote as part of my ordination process; I wound up writing it as a conversation between myself and a friend of mine who was an avowed agnostic. This conversation is of course my own creation, but a lot of it comes out of discussions we actually had. (Again, these chunks are quite long—in MS Word, around seven double-spaced pages of 12-point Times New Roman, somewhere shy of 2,000 words.)
A: I’ve been meaning to ask you something for a while now. As we’ve discussed baseball and life and other minor issues, your Christianity has come up now and again, but we’ve never pursued that issue very far for its own sake; and it has always puzzled me why intelligent, educated people believe in God. That just doesn’t make sense to me, and I’ve always wanted to ask why that should be. The problem is, you have to be careful who you ask that sort of question, since it’s a very personal matter; but you seem to me to be someone who wouldn’t mind. So tell me, why do you believe in God?
R: What do you mean?
A: For one thing, your belief seems so unnecessary. Since Darwin, we have no need of that hypothesis, as someone said. More importantly, though, if you don’t need him to prop the system up, how can you believe in him? The Christian God, so far as I can tell, wants to restrict your freedom to think and your freedom to act; he wants to rule certain lines of thought and opportunities for self-expression and self-fulfillment out of court before you ever get the chance to consider them. It seems to me that all believing in God does is narrow your life and your mind. Why on earth would you? Is what you get in return really worth it?
R: Do you really want answers to your questions, or are they just rhetorical?
A: If you have good answers to offer, I’m interested to hear them, if that’s what you mean.
R: Have a couple hours you aren’t using? Because I think the most basic thing underlying your question is that you don’t really know what I believe; if you want an answer with any depth, you need to understand where I’m coming from before you understand why.
A: Well, I have the time, and I’ll admit I have more to learn about Christianity; but I don’t have a great deal of patience with theology, “how many angels can dance on the head of a pin” and that sort of thing.
R: Theology gets a bad rap, unfortunately, from people who associate it with those kind of abstracted discussions. But really, theology is a pretty practical thing. It’s just whatever you believe about God; a friend of mine calls theology the science of God, and I think that’s a good way to put it. If you don’t believe there is a God, that’s the center of your theology—or atheology, I suppose—and then whatever your belief that there is no God does to your view of the world would be part of your theology as well. If you say that because there is no God, we human beings need to work our hardest to take care of each other and the world because we’re on our own, we’re all there is––
A: I do believe that, you know that.
R: Yes, I do—well, that’s a theological statement. That’s your theology, or part of it.
A: I hadn’t thought of my beliefs in those terms before.
R: And mine begins at a very different place, with the belief that there is a God, and a very particular God at that, and that God stands in relation to us and to the world in a very particular way. Specifically, it begins with the belief that God created all of everything, and that as a result he is God over all of everything.
A: Interesting. You say he’s God because he created everything, not just because he wants to play God.
R: Right. Think of a novel for a minute. The person who wrote the novel created those characters––
A: Even if they only cut them out of cardboard.
R: True. But the author created those characters, wrote every word that comes out of their mouths, set every decision they make, and determined how the book would end. You might say that the author was God to those characters. But does that make that author any more Godlike anywhere else? No. His authority, or hers, comes from the fact of authorship. In the same way, only in a much bigger way, God has authority over everything and is in control of everything that happens because he is the author of everything.
A: I’d never noticed that word linkage before. But are you suggesting that God might be just a member of a race of gods?
R: Umm, no. In fact, that’s an important point. God is not one of a race of anything; he is unique. One of the names for him in the Bible is “I Am”—as it’s rendered in Greek, “The One Who Is.” He is the one who was not created by any other, and he is the source of everything else that exists. He didn’t come from anywhere; he has always been.
A: So the universe started out with God, surrounded by nothing. How can that be? That doesn’t make any sense. God must have come from somewhere, and he must have been someplace.
R: But then where did that place come from? Who made it? Who came before God, and where did they come from? No, if you stop and think about where everything came from, you only have two possible answers: either the universe has always existed, in some form or another, in which case it has no beginning or end, or there was a point in time when the universe did not exist and there was nothing—in which case there must have been someone there to create it out of nothing, and that someone must have always existed, without beginning or end; and we can argue back and forth, but we can’t wrap our minds around either possibility. Either way, our minds aren’t that big.
The point I’m trying to make is that our relationship to God begins with the fact that he created us, and the whole world in which we live. Wait, I can see you wanting to argue that point, but if we head off on the whole Darwin-evolutionism-creationism argument, we’ll never come back to your question. That’s an argument for another hour. I believe, for reasons both biblical and, yes, scientific, that God created all that is and as such has both complete authority and complete power over all that is. Having said that, you hit the question: who is this God?
First and foremost, he is triune—three in one.
A: Ahh, the Trinity. I never have understood that.
R: Well, that’s partly because it isn’t all that understandable by our limited minds. We do the best we can to explain the Trinity and understand how God can be both three and one, but in the end it’s a mystery.
A: Isn’t that just like a Christian. You get hit with a question you can’t answer, you just say, “It’s a mystery.”
R: It makes sense, though. We are limited creatures, after all; if God is big enough to be God over the whole universe, wouldn’t you expect him to be too big for us to completely understand? And if he were small enough for us to wrap our minds around, would he still be big enough to be God?
A: I’ll have to think about that.
R: Anyway, the doctrine of the Trinity is central to our understanding of God, for a lot of reasons, so it’s essential to come to some understanding of it. I like the way Stan Grenz, one of my professors, explains this doctrine in one of his books. He says that the doctrine of the Trinity can be summarized in four statements: “God is one,” “God is three,” “God is a diversity,” and “God is a unity.”
First and most basic, God is one. We worship only one God, not many, and we assert that there are no others. But second, God is three: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. This isn’t just how we perceive him, it’s how he is; the one being of God exists in three distinct persons.
A: That doesn’t make any sense.
R: Like I said, our minds aren’t big enough to understand it. But then, you’re an educated man, you have a solid understanding of science for a non-scientist, right?
A: Yes, but I don’t see your point.
R: You know what physicists have determined about the nature of light, that light is both a wave and a particle? Can you explain how that can be, since the two seem to be mutually exclusive?
A: No, I can’t, but that’s what the evidence says. And yes, I see where you’re going; I’ll grant that the nature of light presents similar problems to the doctrine of the Trinity.
R: Reality is bigger than we are; someday we may be able collectively to understand how everything in the world fits together, but even then no one person will be able to grasp more than a small part of that understanding. And it’s entirely possible that we will never fully understand the nature of light, or quantum mechanics, or other such questions. But whether we do or not, God will still remain orders of magnitude greater than his creation in which we live, too great for us to control.
A: Control?
R: Knowledge is power, right? I think the reason we aren’t content with a God we can’t fully understand, analyze, and describe in comprehensible terms is that any such God is beyond our ability to predict and control. That’s much of the drive behind the hard sciences, after all—the desire to reduce all the mysteries of the universe to things we can identify, label, explain, and control. I’d say it’s most of the drive behind psychology, the desire to extend our control over ourselves and others so that we can fix whatever we decide is broken. But if God remains beyond our understanding, he’s a threat, because we can’t control him—we can’t predict what he’ll do next.
A: Fine; point taken. Back to the subject, please?
R: Sorry for the digression. God is one; God is three. He is one being; he is three persons. It’s important to keep those in balance. Sometimes those of us in the Western church—Catholics and Protestants—tend to talk as if “God” is a single person, the “real” person above the three members of the Trinity. I knew a man in my denomination, a candidate for ordination like me, who rejected the doctrine of the Trinity for just this reason: he asked, “If there is the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, then who is ‘God’?” The answer is that God is Father, Son and Holy Spirit, three persons, but he couldn’t find that balance; he concluded that “God” must be a fourth person and rejected the doctrine of the Trinity as a result.
Anyway, God is a diversity, and he is also a unity; you might say that God is unity in diversity. The Father, Son and Spirit are three different, distinct persons, and they fulfill different roles, but at the same time they are a unity. They have different functions, but every act involves all three, and they are one in being; they are utterly united in love. This is why John can say in 1 John 4 that “God is love,” because in the very being of God, the Father, Son and Spirit are and have always been in relationship, loving each other, dedicated to each other. It is that love between them which is the central element of God’s nature and character, and it is that love which drives everything he does.
In celebration, I'm going to repost my credo posts, this time with the credo actually in the post, below the jump. As I noted earlier, this is something I wrote as part of my ordination process; I wound up writing it as a conversation between myself and a friend of mine who was an avowed agnostic. This conversation is of course my own creation, but a lot of it comes out of discussions we actually had. (Again, these chunks are quite long—in MS Word, around seven double-spaced pages of 12-point Times New Roman, somewhere shy of 2,000 words.)
A: I’ve been meaning to ask you something for a while now. As we’ve discussed baseball and life and other minor issues, your Christianity has come up now and again, but we’ve never pursued that issue very far for its own sake; and it has always puzzled me why intelligent, educated people believe in God. That just doesn’t make sense to me, and I’ve always wanted to ask why that should be. The problem is, you have to be careful who you ask that sort of question, since it’s a very personal matter; but you seem to me to be someone who wouldn’t mind. So tell me, why do you believe in God?
R: What do you mean?
A: For one thing, your belief seems so unnecessary. Since Darwin, we have no need of that hypothesis, as someone said. More importantly, though, if you don’t need him to prop the system up, how can you believe in him? The Christian God, so far as I can tell, wants to restrict your freedom to think and your freedom to act; he wants to rule certain lines of thought and opportunities for self-expression and self-fulfillment out of court before you ever get the chance to consider them. It seems to me that all believing in God does is narrow your life and your mind. Why on earth would you? Is what you get in return really worth it?
R: Do you really want answers to your questions, or are they just rhetorical?
A: If you have good answers to offer, I’m interested to hear them, if that’s what you mean.
R: Have a couple hours you aren’t using? Because I think the most basic thing underlying your question is that you don’t really know what I believe; if you want an answer with any depth, you need to understand where I’m coming from before you understand why.
A: Well, I have the time, and I’ll admit I have more to learn about Christianity; but I don’t have a great deal of patience with theology, “how many angels can dance on the head of a pin” and that sort of thing.
R: Theology gets a bad rap, unfortunately, from people who associate it with those kind of abstracted discussions. But really, theology is a pretty practical thing. It’s just whatever you believe about God; a friend of mine calls theology the science of God, and I think that’s a good way to put it. If you don’t believe there is a God, that’s the center of your theology—or atheology, I suppose—and then whatever your belief that there is no God does to your view of the world would be part of your theology as well. If you say that because there is no God, we human beings need to work our hardest to take care of each other and the world because we’re on our own, we’re all there is––
A: I do believe that, you know that.
R: Yes, I do—well, that’s a theological statement. That’s your theology, or part of it.
A: I hadn’t thought of my beliefs in those terms before.
R: And mine begins at a very different place, with the belief that there is a God, and a very particular God at that, and that God stands in relation to us and to the world in a very particular way. Specifically, it begins with the belief that God created all of everything, and that as a result he is God over all of everything.
A: Interesting. You say he’s God because he created everything, not just because he wants to play God.
R: Right. Think of a novel for a minute. The person who wrote the novel created those characters––
A: Even if they only cut them out of cardboard.
R: True. But the author created those characters, wrote every word that comes out of their mouths, set every decision they make, and determined how the book would end. You might say that the author was God to those characters. But does that make that author any more Godlike anywhere else? No. His authority, or hers, comes from the fact of authorship. In the same way, only in a much bigger way, God has authority over everything and is in control of everything that happens because he is the author of everything.
A: I’d never noticed that word linkage before. But are you suggesting that God might be just a member of a race of gods?
R: Umm, no. In fact, that’s an important point. God is not one of a race of anything; he is unique. One of the names for him in the Bible is “I Am”—as it’s rendered in Greek, “The One Who Is.” He is the one who was not created by any other, and he is the source of everything else that exists. He didn’t come from anywhere; he has always been.
A: So the universe started out with God, surrounded by nothing. How can that be? That doesn’t make any sense. God must have come from somewhere, and he must have been someplace.
R: But then where did that place come from? Who made it? Who came before God, and where did they come from? No, if you stop and think about where everything came from, you only have two possible answers: either the universe has always existed, in some form or another, in which case it has no beginning or end, or there was a point in time when the universe did not exist and there was nothing—in which case there must have been someone there to create it out of nothing, and that someone must have always existed, without beginning or end; and we can argue back and forth, but we can’t wrap our minds around either possibility. Either way, our minds aren’t that big.
The point I’m trying to make is that our relationship to God begins with the fact that he created us, and the whole world in which we live. Wait, I can see you wanting to argue that point, but if we head off on the whole Darwin-evolutionism-creationism argument, we’ll never come back to your question. That’s an argument for another hour. I believe, for reasons both biblical and, yes, scientific, that God created all that is and as such has both complete authority and complete power over all that is. Having said that, you hit the question: who is this God?
First and foremost, he is triune—three in one.
A: Ahh, the Trinity. I never have understood that.
R: Well, that’s partly because it isn’t all that understandable by our limited minds. We do the best we can to explain the Trinity and understand how God can be both three and one, but in the end it’s a mystery.
A: Isn’t that just like a Christian. You get hit with a question you can’t answer, you just say, “It’s a mystery.”
R: It makes sense, though. We are limited creatures, after all; if God is big enough to be God over the whole universe, wouldn’t you expect him to be too big for us to completely understand? And if he were small enough for us to wrap our minds around, would he still be big enough to be God?
A: I’ll have to think about that.
R: Anyway, the doctrine of the Trinity is central to our understanding of God, for a lot of reasons, so it’s essential to come to some understanding of it. I like the way Stan Grenz, one of my professors, explains this doctrine in one of his books. He says that the doctrine of the Trinity can be summarized in four statements: “God is one,” “God is three,” “God is a diversity,” and “God is a unity.”
First and most basic, God is one. We worship only one God, not many, and we assert that there are no others. But second, God is three: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. This isn’t just how we perceive him, it’s how he is; the one being of God exists in three distinct persons.
A: That doesn’t make any sense.
R: Like I said, our minds aren’t big enough to understand it. But then, you’re an educated man, you have a solid understanding of science for a non-scientist, right?
A: Yes, but I don’t see your point.
R: You know what physicists have determined about the nature of light, that light is both a wave and a particle? Can you explain how that can be, since the two seem to be mutually exclusive?
A: No, I can’t, but that’s what the evidence says. And yes, I see where you’re going; I’ll grant that the nature of light presents similar problems to the doctrine of the Trinity.
R: Reality is bigger than we are; someday we may be able collectively to understand how everything in the world fits together, but even then no one person will be able to grasp more than a small part of that understanding. And it’s entirely possible that we will never fully understand the nature of light, or quantum mechanics, or other such questions. But whether we do or not, God will still remain orders of magnitude greater than his creation in which we live, too great for us to control.
A: Control?
R: Knowledge is power, right? I think the reason we aren’t content with a God we can’t fully understand, analyze, and describe in comprehensible terms is that any such God is beyond our ability to predict and control. That’s much of the drive behind the hard sciences, after all—the desire to reduce all the mysteries of the universe to things we can identify, label, explain, and control. I’d say it’s most of the drive behind psychology, the desire to extend our control over ourselves and others so that we can fix whatever we decide is broken. But if God remains beyond our understanding, he’s a threat, because we can’t control him—we can’t predict what he’ll do next.
A: Fine; point taken. Back to the subject, please?
R: Sorry for the digression. God is one; God is three. He is one being; he is three persons. It’s important to keep those in balance. Sometimes those of us in the Western church—Catholics and Protestants—tend to talk as if “God” is a single person, the “real” person above the three members of the Trinity. I knew a man in my denomination, a candidate for ordination like me, who rejected the doctrine of the Trinity for just this reason: he asked, “If there is the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, then who is ‘God’?” The answer is that God is Father, Son and Holy Spirit, three persons, but he couldn’t find that balance; he concluded that “God” must be a fourth person and rejected the doctrine of the Trinity as a result.
Anyway, God is a diversity, and he is also a unity; you might say that God is unity in diversity. The Father, Son and Spirit are three different, distinct persons, and they fulfill different roles, but at the same time they are a unity. They have different functions, but every act involves all three, and they are one in being; they are utterly united in love. This is why John can say in 1 John 4 that “God is love,” because in the very being of God, the Father, Son and Spirit are and have always been in relationship, loving each other, dedicated to each other. It is that love between them which is the central element of God’s nature and character, and it is that love which drives everything he does.
Song of the Week
In his weekly links post yesterday, Jared quoted a hymn that I'll have to look up, because I love these lines (thanks to Sinclair Ferguson for quoting them):
O Jesus! full of pardoning grace,—
More full of grace than I of sin.
That's perfectly put, and well worth remembering. It reminded me, though, of a hymn I haven't thought about in ages, one which Dr. Packer used to quote us from time to time in class; so I decided to post it.
I Sought the Lord
I sought the Lord, and afterward I knew
He moved my soul to seek Him, seeking me;
It was not I that found, O Savior true;
No, I was found of Thee.
Thou didst reach forth Thy hand and mine enfold;
I walked and sank not on the storm-vexed sea;
'Twas not so much that I on Thee took hold,
As Thou, dear Lord, on me.
I find, I walk, I love; but O the whole
Of love is but my answer, Lord, to Thee!
For Thou were long beforehand with my soul;
Always Thou lovedst me.Words: The Pilgrim Hymnal, 1904
Music: George W. Chadwick
PEACE, 10.10.10.6
The life of faith vs. the life of politics
"A person has to be thoroughly disgusted with the way things are to find the motivation to set out on the Christian way. As long as we think that the next election might eliminate crime and establish justice or another scientific breakthrough might save the environment or another pay raise might push us over the edge of anxiety into a life of tranquility,
we are not likely to risk the arduous uncertainties of the life of faith. A person has to get
fed up with the ways of the world before he, before she, acquires an appetite for
the world of grace."
—Eugene Peterson
This quote was at the head of The Thinklings yesterday. It is, I think, one of Eugene's more important insights (which is saying something); grace is truly an acquired taste. I think this is particularly important because it points us a bit beyond Eugene's own point to its corollary, that it's as easy to lose that appetite as it is difficult to acquire it; the world is always trying to pull us back into valuing its own ways and solutions as much as it does, and if we aren't careful, we tend to go along with that pull. Falling back into old habits of mind is easier than holding fast to new ones rigorously developed.
That, I think, is why so many Christians who really ought to know better are so wrapped up in politics, because we've lapsed back into thinking that the next election will solve the problem (whatever we understand the problem, or problems, to be); we've forgotten that the tools of human beings will not accomplish the righteousness of God, and we've gotten into the habit of thinking that the work of the kingdom of God depends on electing this or that candidate, or winning a majority for this or that party. It isn't so. Yes, we need to do politics to the glory of God, just as we're supposed to do everything else to his glory; yes, God calls people to serve him in the political arena; yes, politics done to the glory of God is kingdom work. But in saying that, we need to remember two things:
1) Politics done to the glory of God is conducted in humility, remembering that it's not about us or what we can accomplish—and that God's plans and purposes are bigger than what we can see, let alone understand; the plans of God are not to be identified with our own plans and dreams and ideas.
2) Politics done to the glory of God is fundamentally different than politics done to the glory of getting re-elected, or of "winning" the issue. Indeed, sometimes the two stand diametrically opposed; when that happens, the desire to win must be set aside.
Monday, April 07, 2008
Respect: the lubricant of good politics
This happens to be a Web ad for John McCain, but that's not the important thing about it; the only thing that makes it a McCain ad is that it was Sen. McCain's campaign that released it. I think that fact speaks well of him, but this exact same ad could be released, unchanged except for the substitution of new images of a different candidate, for either Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama. Indeed, I could wish that both their campaigns would do that, as long as they then sought to campaign in accordance with the philosophy articulated in this ad.
The basic point is that we should feel free to argue, even fiercely, over our disagreements, but that we should do so with respect, remembering that our fellow citizens aren't our enemies, but are our compatriots—we're all on the same side. We need to learn to argue as friends and allies who are all seeking the good of our common nation, rather than as political opponents seeking to vanquish each other. (For help in doing so, see Timely Tips for Having a Civil Political Conversation.)
The basic point is that we should feel free to argue, even fiercely, over our disagreements, but that we should do so with respect, remembering that our fellow citizens aren't our enemies, but are our compatriots—we're all on the same side. We need to learn to argue as friends and allies who are all seeking the good of our common nation, rather than as political opponents seeking to vanquish each other. (For help in doing so, see Timely Tips for Having a Civil Political Conversation.)
Sunday, April 06, 2008
Thoughts on Jesus' ascension
Is there a less-noticed Christian holy day than Ascension Day? If there is, I can't think of one. (Mind you, I'm not including saints' days in this category, for various reasons.) Part of that, no doubt, is that it falls on a Thursday, so it can't even get the casual-mention-in-the-bulletin kind of notice—you have to schedule a special service for it, which it seems nobody much does. (Of course, many Protestants never did; but though Catholics are supposed to, from what I can see, a lot of them don't anymore either.) More than that, though, I don't think most Christians in this country see the point; I would expect that most of us would affirm that Jesus died and rose again would also affirm his ascension, but have no sense whatsoever that it matters. To us, it seems more like a clerical detail than anything else. Jesus left, but he didn’t die, so, OK, he just sort of took off and disappeared, instead. If anyone came along and said, “No, no, he didn’t ascend into heaven, he just did thus-and-such,” we wouldn’t think it was all that important; we don’t think this matters.
The thing is, though, it does matter, because the ascension is important—quite profoundly so, in fact. It’s no mere afterthought to the resurrection, nor is it just a footnote to the work of Christ on the cross; rather, it’s the necessary completion of that work. Without the ascension, the resurrection is incomplete; it’s only in the ascension of Christ that all that he accomplished in the resurrection is truly fulfilled.
Now, I imagine that sounds strange to a lot of folks; it’s certainly not the way we tend to talk at Easter, or the kind of thing we usually say about the resurrection of Christ. There’s good reason for that, because the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus are the central event of human history, and it’s there that the saving work of God was accomplished; we don’t want to do anything to take the focus off that truth. However, if in emphasizing the resurrection we forget about the ascension—as we too often do—then we risk losing much of the meaning of the resurrection as well. It’s only in strongly affirming that Jesus ascended into heaven that we can truly say with the people of God throughout the ages that he is risen from the dead.
There are several reasons to say this, but they all come down, ultimately, to one key truth: Christ didn’t come just so we could be “saved” in the sense that we get to go to Heaven instead of Hell. That's certainly part of the story—part of what Christ did on the cross was take our unrighteousness and give us his righteousness, so that by his sacrifice our sins could be forgiven—but there's more to it than that. Jesus’ purpose, his mission in this world, wasn’t only to make us legally right with God so that we could skip out on going to Hell—it was to make us right with God in order to heal our alienation from God, to remove the obstacle that kept us from having a right relationship with him. This is where the importance of the ascension comes in, because while Jesus’ death and resurrection are the core of that work, the ascension was necessary for its application to us.
You see, while Christians these days are accustomed to thinking of the Old Testament priestly system as merely a relic of a dead past, it isn't really; as Hebrews tells us, it's just been relocated, to a different priest, of a different priestly order, in a different temple. Jesus is our great high priest who offered the final, ultimate, total sacrifice for human sin; and under the Old Testament law, the Torah, what was to be done with the sacrifice for the nation that was offered on the Day of Atonement? The blood was brought into the Holy of Holies, into the presence of God, and presented before his throne. That's what Jesus was doing in his ascension: he was bringing his sacrifice before the throne to be presented to the Father. Having done that, he then took up his place as our high priest, bringing our prayers to the Father and interceding with him on our behalf.
Of course, all this was only fully completed and realized at Pentecost, when God poured out his Spirit on all his people; but that's a post for another day.
The thing is, though, it does matter, because the ascension is important—quite profoundly so, in fact. It’s no mere afterthought to the resurrection, nor is it just a footnote to the work of Christ on the cross; rather, it’s the necessary completion of that work. Without the ascension, the resurrection is incomplete; it’s only in the ascension of Christ that all that he accomplished in the resurrection is truly fulfilled.
Now, I imagine that sounds strange to a lot of folks; it’s certainly not the way we tend to talk at Easter, or the kind of thing we usually say about the resurrection of Christ. There’s good reason for that, because the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus are the central event of human history, and it’s there that the saving work of God was accomplished; we don’t want to do anything to take the focus off that truth. However, if in emphasizing the resurrection we forget about the ascension—as we too often do—then we risk losing much of the meaning of the resurrection as well. It’s only in strongly affirming that Jesus ascended into heaven that we can truly say with the people of God throughout the ages that he is risen from the dead.
There are several reasons to say this, but they all come down, ultimately, to one key truth: Christ didn’t come just so we could be “saved” in the sense that we get to go to Heaven instead of Hell. That's certainly part of the story—part of what Christ did on the cross was take our unrighteousness and give us his righteousness, so that by his sacrifice our sins could be forgiven—but there's more to it than that. Jesus’ purpose, his mission in this world, wasn’t only to make us legally right with God so that we could skip out on going to Hell—it was to make us right with God in order to heal our alienation from God, to remove the obstacle that kept us from having a right relationship with him. This is where the importance of the ascension comes in, because while Jesus’ death and resurrection are the core of that work, the ascension was necessary for its application to us.
You see, while Christians these days are accustomed to thinking of the Old Testament priestly system as merely a relic of a dead past, it isn't really; as Hebrews tells us, it's just been relocated, to a different priest, of a different priestly order, in a different temple. Jesus is our great high priest who offered the final, ultimate, total sacrifice for human sin; and under the Old Testament law, the Torah, what was to be done with the sacrifice for the nation that was offered on the Day of Atonement? The blood was brought into the Holy of Holies, into the presence of God, and presented before his throne. That's what Jesus was doing in his ascension: he was bringing his sacrifice before the throne to be presented to the Father. Having done that, he then took up his place as our high priest, bringing our prayers to the Father and interceding with him on our behalf.
Of course, all this was only fully completed and realized at Pentecost, when God poured out his Spirit on all his people; but that's a post for another day.
Song of the Week
I'm preaching a series on the Ascension this Easter season, inspired by the Rev. Gerrit Scott Dawson of First Presbyterian Church (EPC) in Baton Rouge and his work on the subject; this hymn is one we'll be singing this morning as we begin the series. It's a text by my RCA colleague James L. H. Brumm, and I appreciate it because it captures the significance of Jesus' ascension for us.
God Has Gone Up with Shouts of Joy!
God has gone up with shouts of joy!
Christ claims the throne of glory:
Immortal Word in mortal flesh
To share with God our story
Of humans lost to death and sin
Who ache to be invited in
To Love's eternal blessing.
Christ has gone up, still bearing wounds,
Still bound to race and gender;
His royal robe all crimson blood;
His triumph all surrender.
Now we, though bound to who we are,
Can follow, with our pain and scars,
To Love's eternal blessing.
Christ has gone up! Now Christ in us
Leads all the world to glory.
The Word finds voice on Fiery Breath;
Our lives relate the story
Of how God went through death and Hell
That we might have Immanuel
And Love's eternal blessing!Words: James L. H. Brumm
Music: Bohemian Brethren's Kirchengesänge, 1566
MIT FREUDEN ZART , 8.7.8.7.8.8.7.
Saturday, April 05, 2008
Just for grins
I remember reciting this poem in 7th grade, because I thought it was funny; it still amuses me, though it sounds a bit formal to my ear now. It was written, I believe, by a woman named Carolyn Wells.
The Overworked Elocutionist
There was once a little boy whose name was Robert Reese;
And every Friday afternoon he had to speak a piece.
So many poems thus he learned, that soon he had a store
Of recitations in his head, and still kept learning more.
And now this is what happened: He was called upon one week
And totally forgot the piece he was about to speak.
He brain he cudgeled. Not a word remained within his head!
And so he spoke at random, and this is what he said:
“My beautiful, my beautiful, who standest proudly by,
It was the schooner Hesperus–the breaking waves dashed high!
Why is this Forum crowded? What means this stir in Rome?
Under a spreading chestnut tree, there is no place like home!
“When freedom from her mountain height cried, ‘Twinkle, little star,’
Shoot if you must this old gray head, King Henry of Navarre!
Roll on, thou deep and dark blue castled crag of Drachenfels,
My name is Norval, on the Grampian Hills, ring out, wild bells!
“If you’re waking, call me early, to be or not to be,
The curfew must not ring tonight! Oh, woodman, spare that tree!
Charge, Chester, charge! On, Stanley, on! and let who will be clever!
The boy stood on the burning deck, but I go on forever!”
His elocution was superb, his voice and gestures fine;
His schoolmates all applauded as he finished the last line.
“I see it doesn’t matter,” Robert thought, “what words I say,
So long as I declaim with oratorical display.”
Brief meditation on gratitude and discipleship
“See, I believe that if you were chosen—that if you were elected—I believe that if God has anything for you it’s not just to make you happy. God did not choose you and call you out of this world just to make you high. And God didn’t choose you and God didn’t call you out of this world just so that you could be pious. Because there are enough pious people
and there are enough happy people in the world. What God called you for
and what God called you to is to make a difference in the world.”
—Rich Mullins
Happiness is a good thing, and piety is a good thing. (Piety has a bad name with some folks, but that's only because they've come across distorted versions of it rather than the real thing.) The limitation to each of them, though, is that they're inner-directed. That's not bad, it's not a flaw, it's just a simple fact: every person and every thing is limited, and this is their limitation (or one of them, anyway). Happiness is about me and my life and my circumstances, and piety is about me and my life and my relationship with God. Both are good and perfectly appropriate things; they just aren't enough in and of themselves. God doesn't call us to be primarily inner-directed (not that you'd know it from a lot of American spirituality); he calls us to be directed outward, in love, and grace, and gratitude.
Indeed, the primary response God asks of us for our salvation is gratitude for what he has done for us and given us; out of that gratitude, then, he asks us to share what we have been given, and to love as we are loved. He calls us to make a difference in this world not out of a grim sense of duty, but out of a deep sense of joy, in simple thankfulness for the opportunity.
Honor, reputation, and sacrifice
I wrote a while back, with reference to John McCain, about the difference between honor and reputation, arguing that Sen. McCain knew the difference even if the New York Times didn't (and presumably still doesn't). Now Sen. McCain's campaign has released a rather extraordinary Web ad which, inter alia, proves that he does indeed know that difference well. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about this ad is that it's all about how he learned that difference—and that it's unsparing about just how much he had to learn, and how much growing up he had to do, before he went to war. He's not pulling any punches about the kind of person he was before his stay in the "Hanoi Hilton," and I respect him even more for that.
Friday, April 04, 2008
Martin Luther King Jr.: yad vashem
Forty years ago this evening, at the Lorraine Hotel in Memphis, America lost one of her great-souled sons when the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was gunned down by an assassin. The memorial at the hotel appositely cites Genesis, from the story of Joseph:
They said one to another, “Behold, here cometh the Dreamer. Let us slay him and we shall see what will become of his dreams.”
—Genesis 37:19-20 (KJV)
Perhaps the greatest tragedy of the Rev. Dr. King's death is that so much of his dream died with him. Too much of the church, too many of his brothers and sisters in Christ, have set aside his call, which is the call of Christ, that we are to be one in our Lord across all our divisions, racial no less than any other—and for what? For business as usual, and the easiest, most expedient ways to grow congregations. There's no denying, the “homogeneous unit principle” serves the cause of numerical church growth; what it doesn't serve is the cause of the gospel, the work of the kingdom of God on this earth. On this point, more people should listen to Markus Barth:
When no tensions are confronted and overcome, because insiders or outsiders of a certain class or group meet happily among themselves, then the one new thing, peace, and the one new man created by Christ, are missing; then no faith, no church, no Christ, is found or confessed. For if the attribute “Christian” can be given sense from Eph. 2, then it means reconciled and reconciling, triumphant over walls and removing the debris, showing solidarity with the “enemy” and promoting not one’s own peace of mind but “our peace.” . . . When this peace is deprived of its social, national, or economic dimensions, when it is distorted or emasculated so much that only “peace of mind” enjoyed by saintly individuals is left—then Jesus Christ is being flatly denied. To propose, in the name of Christianity, neutrality or unconcern on questions of international, racial, or economic peace—this amounts to using Christ’s name in vain.
It's easy to blame the white church for this, of course, but it's not only the white church that's guilty of leaving the Rev. Dr. King's vision behind; as Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, one of his good friends and coworkers, writes, those who claimed the role of leadership of the black community did the same, and did so intentionally. Where the Rev. Dr. King preached the gospel of Jesus Christ for all people, many of those who would claim his mantle “were in no mood for reconciliation, and are not to this day.” The year after his death would see the beginning of black liberation theology with the publication of James Cone's book Black Theology and Black Power, which argued that
In the New Testament, Jesus is not for all, but for the oppressed, the poor and unwanted of society, and against oppressors. . . . Either God is for black people in their fight for liberation and against the white oppressors, or he is not.
The following year, Dr. Cone took his seat at Union Theological Seminary in New York and published his second book, A Black Theology of Liberation. In that book, he wrote,
The black theologian must reject any conception of God which stifles black self-determination by picturing God as a God of all peoples. Either God is identified with the oppressed to the point that their experience becomes God's experience, or God is a God of racism. . . . The blackness of God means that God has made the oppressed condition God's own condition. This is the essence of the Biblical revelation.
That's how we got from the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr.; and it's why so many folks who looked at Barack Obama and thought they were getting the incarnation of the Rev. Dr. King's dream are now wondering if they were sold a bill of goods. The good thing in all this, though, is that Sen. Obama is right—words do matter—and that however the name of Martin Luther King may be used or misused, and however his work and legacy may be invoked or distorted to whatever purpose, his words remain, and they ring with power. Whatever else he was, the Rev. Dr. King was a preacher of the gospel of Jesus Christ, and he spoke the word of God to America—and when God sends out his word through one of his followers, that word will not return to him empty-handed, but it will accomplish the purpose for which he sent it. As such, it is not too great a thing to say, as Fr. Neuhaus does, that the Rev. Dr. King's words will continue to echo until their purpose is fulfilled.
As long as the American experiment continues, people will listen and be inspired by his “I Have a Dream,” and will read and be instructed by his Letter from Birmingham Jail, and will once again believe that, black and white together, “We shall overcome.”
Amen. In the house of God and within its walls, he has a memorial and a name that shall not be cut off. May Jesus Christ be praised.
The need for ritual
Heather McDougal, who blogs at Cabinet of Wonders, has a brilliant post up on ritual and the reasons that drive us to create rituals—including, especially, why children do. I won't even try to summarize it—I'll just encourage you to go read it—but I will say that of the various points she makes, I think I appreciate this one most:
Mindfulness is not a bad thing, and making up rules to make one's life more interesting can be a good thing. Eating your apple and raisin tart in small bites, and dividing each raisin in half to get at the sweet bit as you go, can be a way to help bring yourself into the present, to pay attention. It means you are tasting, exploring, nodding to each part of what you're eating. Going through life like this can mean you are not gulping down experiences, not rushing yourself, but making a way to see things, feel things, notice things.
Responsibility
“For nothing is fixed, forever and forever and forever, it is not fixed; the earth is always shifting, the light is always changing, the sea does not cease to grind down rock. Generations do not cease to be born, and we are responsible to them because we are the only witnesses they have. The sea rises, the light fails, lovers cling to each other, and children cling to us. The moment we cease to hold each other, the sea engulfs us
and the light goes out.”
—James Baldwin
In this world as we know it, that's about it. God is fixed, and so as Christians we have hope of something better coming; but for now, we must live in this world as it is, without trying to pretend it's anything different. Our call is simply to reflect God's light in this shadowed world as brightly and clearly as possible.
Thursday, April 03, 2008
Another poem for the week
George Herbert is one of my favorite poets, and I think this is my favorite of all his poems. I thought about it last night going to prayer meeting.
Prayer (I)
Prayer the Church's banquet, Angels' age,
God's breath in man returning to his birth,
The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage,
The Christian plummet sounding heav'n and earth;
Engine against th'Almighty, sinners' tower,
Reverséd thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear,
The six-days world transposing in an hour,
A kind of tune, which all things hear and fear,
Softness, and peace, and joy, and love, and bliss,
Exalted Manna, gladness of the best,
Heaven in ordinary, man well dressed,
The milky way, the bird of Paradise,
Church-bells beyond the stars heard, the soul's blood,
The land of spices; something understood.
Wednesday, April 02, 2008
Charity begins . . . where?
Arthur Brooks, the academic who discovered that conservatives give more time and money to charity than liberals, has a thought-provoking piece up on NRO titled, "Barack as Scrooge?" Most of the attention I've seen in the blogosphere has been focused on the comparison he cites to make his point:
After Mr. and Mrs. Obama released their tax returns, the press quickly noticed that, between 2000 and 2004, they gave less than one percent of their income to charity, far lower than the national average. Their giving rose to a laudable five percent in 2005 and six percent in 2006, with the explosion of their annual income to near $1 million, and the advent of Mr. Obama’s national political aspirations (representing a rare case in which political ambition apparently led to social benefit).
According to an Obama spokesman, the couple’s miserly charity until 2005 “was as generous as they could be at the time,” given their personal expenses. In other words, despite an annual average income over the period of about $244,000, they simply could not afford to give anything meaningful. . . .
In 2006, another wealthy political couple with significant book royalties was Mr. and Mrs. Cheney, who had a combined income of $8.8 million, largely due to Mrs. Cheney’s books and the couple’s investment income. Just how much did the Cheneys give to charity from their bonanza? A measly 78 percent of their income, or $6.9 million. (No, that is not a misprint.)
Certainly, the comparison is interesting, but it really isn't that surprising. All it really says is that the Obamas have the attitudes typical of upper-class liberals, which is what we should have expected of them, since that's what they are. As such, I'm much more interested in where Dr. Brooks goes with this comparison:
This last fact does not generally square with the well-cultivated liberal trope of the blackhearted Cheneys. Unless, that is, you believe that private charity is not an important value that defines one’s character, compared with government taxation and welfare spending (which Mr. Cheney generally opposes, despite the profligate ways of the Bush White House). . . .
[Many] political liberals simply don’t believe that redistribution is very effective at the voluntary level; rather, redistribution is so important that it should be undertaken at the large-group level as a matter of law.
From this perspective, private charity, while a lovely thing, is still a dispensable extravagance. This might help explain the Obamas’ relatively meager giving before they got rich. . . . For many Americans, however, this view of charity as an expendable luxury is anathema. Giving is a necessity, not a luxury—a year-in and year-out necessity.
Which view of giving is correct? The answer is the kind of values question we should hope to debate in this November’s election.
And all I can say is, may the best giver win.
HT: Jared Wilson
Update: by way of comparison, Hillary Clinton released her 2000-07 tax returns today, and they paint a rather different picture from Sen. Obama's; of the $109 million she and her husband earned over those eight years (mostly from speaking fees and book royalties), they gave around ten percent to charity.
HT: Power Line
Hillary Clinton's chickens coming home to roost
When the Antoin “Tony” Rezko story broke, followed by the ABC News report on the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah Wright Jr., a number of pundits responded by saying, “This is why Hillary Clinton is still in the race—if she hangs in long enough, something may come up that knocks Barack Obama out of it.” Now, however, it looks like that might have backfired on her. Having first undermined her own credibility (and taken some of the heat off Sen. Obama) with her Tuzla story, which gave the Obama campaign a wonderful opportunity to call her a liar who can't be trusted, now she's facing an accusation from the past along the same lines. As a 27-year-old lawyer, thanks to a recommendation from one of her former law professors, Hillary Rodham was given a job on the staff of the House Judiciary Committee, working on the Watergate investigation, under the supervision of that committee's chief of staff and general counsel, a lifelong Democrat named Jerry Zeifman. When President Nixon's resignation ended the investigation, Zeifman unceremoniously fired her and refused to give her a recommendation.
Why?
“Because she was a liar,” Zeifman said in an interview last week. “She was an unethical, dishonest lawyer. She conspired to violate the Constitution, the rules of the House, the rules of the committee and the rules of confidentiality.”
The reason for her “unethical, dishonest” behavior was an attempt to deny President Nixon legal counsel during the investigation, a point which was ultimately rendered moot by his resignation. Whether it makes matters better or worse that her motives were political rather than personal, I'll leave to others to decide; but as Ed Morrissey observes, “all of this forms a pattern of lies, obfuscations, deceit, and treachery.”
And for anyone who might want to argue that it's his word against hers, or that Zeifman is making stuff up, not so fast: he kept a diary at the time in which all this is recorded, and at the time, “he could not have known in 1974 that diary entries about a young lawyer named Hillary Rodham would be of interest to anyone 34 years later.” Voters may well decide that this doesn't really matter (especially since it was only Nixon, after all), and Sen. Clinton's campaign may survive this; but there's no honest way to pretend it didn't happen, and to my way of thinking, it casts a truly ugly light on both her character and her judgment.
HT: Power Line
Tuesday, April 01, 2008
The Dumbfounding
(I'm just in a Margaret Avison mood all of a sudden, for whatever reason. For those not familiar with her work, she was a Canadian poet, whose Christian faith was a powerful force in her poetry. She died last July at the age of 89, having been lauded as one of Canada's national treasures; the Globe and Mail rightly called her contribution to Canadian literature "incalculable." This poem is the title piece of her second collection, which was the first one published after her conversion to Christianity in 1963. It seems an appropriate piece for the Easter season.)
The Dumbfounding
When you walked here,
took skin, muscle, hair,
eyes, larynx, we
withheld all honor: "His house is clay,
how can he tell us of his far country?"
Your not familiar pace
in flesh, across the waves,
woke only our distrust.
Twice-torn we cried "A ghost"
and only on our planks counted you fast.
Dust wet with your spittle
cleared mortal trouble.
We called you a blasphemer,
a devil-tamer.
The evening you spoke of going away
we could not stay.
All legions massed. You had to wash, and rise,
alone, and face
out of the light, for us.
You died.
We said,
"The worst is true, our bliss
has come to this."
When you were seen by men
in holy flesh again
we hoped so despairingly for such report
we closed their windpipes for it.
Now you have sought
and seek, in all our ways, all thoughts,
streets, musics—and we make of these a din
trying to lock you out, or in,
to be intent. And dying.
Yet you are
constant and sure,
the all-lovely, all-men's way
to that far country.
Winning one, you again
all ways would begin
life: to make new
flesh, to empower
the weak in nature
to restore
or stay the sufferer;
lead through the garden to
trash, rubble, hill,
where, the outcast's outcast, you
sound dark's uttermost, strangely light-brimming, until
time be full.
Reason for optimism in Zimbabwe
My thanks to everyone who has been praying for Zimbabwe (whether in response to my previous post or for any other reason)—it looks like God may be answering our prayers in the affirmative. According to the latest reports, Robert Mugabe and his aides are looking at the results and beginning to realize that accepting and admitting defeat is their only good option. Of course, they may resist that realization and refuse to do so—they may decide to fight to stay in power—but there's reason to hope they won't. There's reason to hope. Keep praying.
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