Atheism as dogmatic fundamentalism

This isn’t a new observation around here, of course, but it’s interesting to see an atheist come out and say it—in this case, conservative commentator S. E. Cupp; and in case you think it’s because she’s a conservative, in my observation, conservative atheists (such as the Denver Post‘s David Harsanyi) are no better about this than liberal ones.

Which brings me to the problem with modern atheism, embodied by the likes of Harris and Hitchens, authors of “The End of Faith” and “God Is Not Great,” respectively. So often it seems like a conversation ender, not a conversation starter. And the loudest voices of today’s militant atheism, for all their talk of rational thought, don’t seem to want to do too much thinking at all. As James Wood wrote in The New Yorker, “The new atheists do not speak to the millions of people whose form of religion is far from the embodied certainties of contemporary literalism. Indeed, it is a settled assumption of this kind of atheism that there are no intelligent religious believers.” . . .

Though more than 95% of the world finds some meaning in faith, God-hating comic Bill Maher shrugs this off as a “neurological disorder.” His version of a quest for knowledge was a series of scathing jokes at the faithful’s expense in the documentary “Religulous.” . . .

It’s these snarky and condescending rejections, not of faith itself but of those who profess it, that reflect a total unwillingness to learn something new about human nature, the world around us and even of science itself. While the neoatheists pay only cursory attention to dismantling arguments for God, they spend most of their time painting his followers as uncultured rubes. The fact that religion has inexplicably persisted, even despite Copernicus, Darwin and the Enlightenment, doesn’t seem to have much sociological meaning for them.

The truth is, folks like Maher and Silverman don’t want to know about actual belief—in fact, they are much more certain about the nature of the world than most actual believers, who understand that a measure of doubt is necessary for faith. They want to focus on the downfall of a gay pastor or the Nativity scene at a mall. . . .

When the esteemed theologian David Martyn Lloyd-Jones asked C.S. Lewis when he would write another book, Lewis responded, “When I understand the meaning of prayer.” It was an acknowledgment that he—a thinker with a much sharper mind than, say, Maher’s—didn’t know everything. I implore my fellow atheists to take this humility to heart. There’s still a lot to learn, but only if you’re not too busy being a know-it-all.

God is in the real

I was reminded today of an observation I ran across somewhere—unfortunately, I have no idea where or whom to credit, and I know I won’t be able to put it as elegantly as the original—that has been very helpful to me. God promises to give us everything we need to face every trial he sends us. He does not promise to give us strength for possible future trials we conjure up in our own imagination. If we live in the present and face the trials he sends us as they come, he is with us; if we project ourselves into the future to worry and fret about all the things that might go wrong later, we go alone. And in truth, we don’t need to worry about the future, because God’s in control of it—and when it becomes the present, he will be enough for us then, too.

The air beneath our feet

I’d never thought of Road Runner as an example of faith until it occurred to me in the middle of preaching last Sunday’s sermon; but really, that crazy bird is exactly that. How often does he end up escaping Wile E. Coyote by running out into thin air—and then standing there with perfect insouciance while the coyote falls to the canyon floor? Whoever he’s putting his faith in (Chuck Jones, perhaps?), that’s a perfect illustration of walking (well, running) by faith: no visible means of support, trusting entirely in his creator to keep him up.

Walking by faith, living by faith, isn’t easy; it means, as Michael Card put it, to be guided by a hand we cannot hold, and to trust in a way we cannot see, and that’s not comfortable. It means looking beyond the measurables—not basing our decisions on what we can afford or what seems practical or what we know will work, but on prayer, listening for God’s leading, and the desire to do what will please him. It means taking risks, knowing that if God doesn’t come through, we’re going to fail. And it means setting out against the prevailing winds of our culture, being willing to challenge people and tell them what they don’t want to hear—graciously, yes, lovingly, yes, but without compromise and without apology—even when we know they’re going to judge us harshly for it.

This is not a blueprint for an easy, comfortable, “successful” life; often, it’s just the opposite. It defies common sense, because common sense is rooted in conventional wisdom, and living by faith is anything but. But it’s worth it, because this is what Jesus wants from us: to live in such a way that if he doesn’t take care of us, we will fall, to live in such a way that he’s our only hope—because the truth is, he is our only hope. We just need to believe it, and live like we believe it. It’s not easy, but it’s worth it, and more than worth it; there is no better way to live, because there is no foundation more sure than the promise of God, and no better place to be than in his presence.

False obedience

I really appreciated this brilliant little post from Ray Ortlund yesterday:

“The hard sayings of our Lord are wholesome to those only who find them hard.”

C. S. Lewis, “Dangers of National Repentance,” in God in the Dock (Grand Rapids, 1970), page 191.

Obedience that doesn’t cost us anything may be more natural and glib than Christian. After all, self-righteousness “obeys”—and wonders impatiently what’s wrong with everyone else.

As usual, the Rev. Dr. Ortlund takes a truth I’ve been trying to express—and this is something I’ve been talking about a fair bit lately, what with one thing and another—and puts it better than I ever could.

It’s about Christ, not burning Qur’ans

I’m sure you know that down in Gainesville, Florida, a church-like institution led by an individual impersonating a pastor is planning a bonfire of Qur’ans on 9/11. You probably know that his plan is opposed by public figures not just on the Left, but on the Right; I think Glenn Beck and Gov. Sarah Palin offered perhaps the best statements on the matter. Gov. Palin, I think, did a particularly good job of appealing to the better nature and judgment of Terry Jones, the guy who hatched this plan:

If your ultimate point is to prove that the Christian teachings of mercy, justice, freedom, and equality provide the foundation on which our country stands, then your tactic to prove this point is totally counter-productive.

However, I think she might have given him too much credit on this one, because as you may not have known, Jones and his Dove World Outreach Center are brothers-in-pickets with Westboro Baptist Church, the “God Hates Fags” people; when a group of folks from Fred Phelps’ nasty little “church” did a protest tour of Gainesville, Jones and his people used their worship time to join in.

I don’t know what this guy really thinks he’s going to accomplish, but one thing he’s certainly accomplishing is giving the media-industrial complex a chance to blacken the image of Christians—hence the repeated descriptions of Jones as “an evangelical pastor.” If this guy’s an evangelical, I don’t know the meaning of the word. Heck, if this guy’s an evangelical, I’m an egg-salad sandwich. As Beregond points out, this is really a pretty dubious operation:

50 members on 20 acres that are worth more than a million and a half dollars, a charismatic church not affiliated with any denomination, and a pastor who takes no prisoners. If someone were writing about such a church in a vacuum the 20 acres, church building, ministry for women, and outbuildings would be called a “compound.” But if you have a political agenda and are willing to smear conservative Christians to further that agenda then such hints of a cult can be ignored.

Jones invokes the name of God, and talks a lot about the devil, and shows a strong focus on America; but Christ seems to be absent from his vision. How can he have the gall to call what he’s doing “Christian” when he’s not in the least about Christ? Ray Ortlund’s post nails it:

What is Christian? What makes anything Christian? Not that it has to do with theology, not that it has to do with ministry, not that it has to do with church business, and so forth. What makes anything Christian is that it reflects Christ. It is “according to Christ.”

We reach the sacred watchword here, and pause to listen to it. “Not according to Christ,” not on His line, not measured by Him, not referred to Him, not so that He is Origin and Way and End and All. The “philosophy”in question would assuredly include Him somehow in its terms. But it would not be “according to Him.” It would take its first principles and draw its inferences, a priori and from other regions, and then bring Him in as something to be harmonized and assimilated, as far as might be. But this would mean a Christ according to the system of thought, not a system of thought according to the blessed Christ. . . . It must have Him for Alpha and for Omega, and for all the alphabet between. It must be dominated all over by Him.

H. C. G. Moule, Colossians and Philemon Studies (Grand Rapids, n.d.), pages 142-143.

The further we go with this comprehensively sweeping adjustment, this all-encompassing humility before Christ, the more Christian we will be, the more it will feel like revival.

And the further we go with anything else—however noble or important we may think our goal to be—the more we may talk about revival, but the further we’ll be from ever seeing it.

Gospel hope and gospel change

We have this as a sure and steadfast anchor of the soul, a hope that enters into the inner place behind the curtain, where Jesus has gone as a forerunner on our behalf.

—Hebrews 6:19-20a (ESV)

And we desire each one of you to show the same earnestness to have the full assurance of hope until the end, so that you may not be sluggish, but imitators of those who through faith and patience inherit the promises.

—Hebrews 6:11-12 (ESV)

The gospel rests ultimately on the fact that God is faithful. We have hope because God who cannot lie and who cannot go back on his word made a promise, and in Jesus, he kept it. In Jesus, we need not worry about being swept away by the storms of life or capsized by their waves, for our hope in him is a soul anchor, a sure and steadfast anchor for the soul that holds us firm and steadfast where we need to be in the face of the worst life can throw at us. Nothing in this world can pull that anchor loose, because it isn’t hooked onto anything worldly: it’s hooked onto the very throne of God.

This is, or should be, our reason for holding fast to our faith in Christ and pressing on even when it’s difficult; and it’s essential for trying to live life by faith rather than by control. Unfortunately, too often in the church we undermine it, because we’re trying to build the church ourselves, our way, rather than trusting Jesus to be faithful to build it his way, and so we go looking for motivational methods that “work.” Some opt for driving people with fear, leaning heavily on warnings about sin and Hell; others push with the language of duty and obligation, speaking in the tones of command, or try to whip people along with the lash of guilt. Still others use the carrot, trying to use people’s self-interest to produce the desired behavior. These can all be effective motivators for building successful organizations; but what they can’t do is make disciples of Christ. Disciples of Christ, people of the gospel, are built by hope which is rooted in trust, grounded in the assurance of the unending faithfulness of God our Father; we are built by the transforming work of that hope, as Jesus changes us by his Holy Spirit, not from the outside in (as law seeks to do), but from the inside out.

This is one of the key differences between the religion of the gospel and any merely human religion, even if that human religion uses the language of Christianity. Human religion is all about power and effort, command and control, bribery and coercion; it seeks, by one means or another, to make people behave in a certain way. It’s primarily about the outward self, because that’s what people can see. The gospel, by contrast, is first and foremost about our hearts, because God sees us as we are, all the way down, all the way through. It’s about shifting our deepest allegiances, freeing our souls from all the idols to which we’ve given ourselves so that we can give our allegiance totally and wholeheartedly to God; it’s about purifying and redirecting our deepest desires, the wellsprings of our motivation and conduct; it’s about setting us free from our fears and healing our distorted understanding of love. The gospel breaks the shackles of sin on our lives and changes the things that drive and steer us, changing what we do by changing why we do it and what we want to gain from it. The gospel says, “Fill yourself with the love and the grace of God, fill yourself with the full assurance of hope in Christ, and the rest will follow.”

(Adapted from “Soul Anchor”)

On not praying for a religious revival

A Mormon television star stands in front of the Lincoln Memorial and calls American Christians to revival. He assembles some evangelical celebrities to give testimonies, and then preaches a God and country revivalism that leaves the evangelicals cheering that they’ve heard the gospel, right there in the nation’s capital.

The news media pronounces him the new leader of America’s Christian conservative movement, and a flock of America’s Christian conservatives have no problem with that.

That’s Russell Moore’s brief summary of the rally Glenn Beck pulled together on the Mall in Washington, D.C. last Saturday (HT: Jared Wilson), and it seems to me to be more or less fair. It’s certainly generated a lot of praise and positive commentary for Beck from people in the American church; but it troubles me. Indeed—though I’m not one for theological purity tests in politics, like this guy seems to me to be advocating, as a precondition for working together for the common good—I have to agree with Dr. Moore: this is a scandal.

In order to be this gullible, American Christians have had to endure years of vacuous talk about undefined “revival” and “turning America back to God” that was less about anything uniquely Christian than about, at best, a generically theistic civil religion and, at worst, some partisan political movement.

Rather than cultivating a Christian vision of justice and the common good (which would have, by necessity, been nuanced enough to put us sometimes at odds with our political allies), we’ve relied on populist God-and-country sloganeering and outrage-generating talking heads. We’ve tolerated heresy and buffoonery in our leadership as long as with it there is sufficient political “conservatism” and a sufficient commercial venue to sell our books and products.

Too often, and for too long, American “Christianity” has been a political agenda in search of a gospel useful enough to accommodate it. There is a liberation theology of the Left, and there is also a liberation theology of the Right, and both are at heart mammon worship. The liberation theology of the Left often wants a Barabbas, to fight off the oppressors as though our ultimate problem were the reign of Rome and not the reign of death. The liberation theology of the Right wants a golden calf, to represent religion and to remind us of all the economic security we had in Egypt. Both want a Caesar or a Pharaoh, not a Messiah.

This points us to the heart of the problem here, which is thinking that “religion” as such is a good thing that should be encouraged. (Actually, I’ve been starting to think lately that there might be a deeper epistemological error here, that of thinking that “religion” as such is even a thing at all, rather than merely a category for organizing our thinking . . . but that’s a post for another time.) From a biblical point of view, this is pure tripe. Religion is simply an inevitable part of human existence, because we are created for worship and wired for belief. It’s not a matter of whether we have a religion or not—it’s whether our religion is true or not, whether we’re worshiping the one true and living God or a false and dead god of our own preference and design.

Nor is it a matter of whether our religion produces moral behavior. Even if one were to begin by assuming that all the values and standards and virtues that conservatives defend are in fact right, that would not in the least mean that a religion which produced such morality must necessarily be right and good. As Michael Horton tells the story,

Over a half-century ago, Donald Grey Barnhouse, pastor of Philadelphia’s Tenth Presbyterian Church, gave his CBS radio audience a different picture of what it would look like if Satan took control of a town in America. He said that all of the bars and pool halls would be closed, pornography banished, pristine streets and sidewalks would be occupied by tidy pedestrians who smiled at each other. There would be no swearing. The kids would answer “Yes, sir,” “No, ma’am,” and the churches would be full on Sunday . . . where Christ is not preached.

Satan’s main goal isn’t to make us immoral, it’s to turn us away from God in whatever direction works best. All else being equal, I would imagine Satan would prefer it if we were all engaged in making each other as miserable as inhumanly possible, but all else never is equal, and those sorts of situations have this one major drawback for the infernal one: they make the reality and gravity of human sin eye-blastingly clear, creating a desire for change. If human damnation is the goal, there are more effective and efficient ways.

The scenario the Rev. Dr. Barnhouse painted is one of them, in which the form of godliness is used to keep people from realizing the absence of its reality. In such a community, people could feel themselves perfectly good Christians without feeling in any way their need for Christ—no need for a Savior, because no apparent reason to need salvation. Such a city would be perfectly religious, in a way that would satisfy everything last Saturday’s rally seemed to be about; it would be full of the sort of religion that President Eisenhower famously declared is necessary for the American system of government to make sense. And doesn’t it look an awful lot like the vision Beck held out to his audience? And yet, it would be profoundly wrong.

This is the kind of religion that Satan loves: religion that’s all about us, that exists and is defended primarily because of its utility for human goals and purposes . . . and thus can be the means of enslaving us to those goals and purposes. That sort of religious revival would no doubt create many happy and self-satisfied churches, in the short run; but in the long run, it would bring the destruction of everything it promised. If I’m reading Beck right, this is the kind of religious revival he wants to see, and the kind of revival he’s trying to promote, because it’s a revival designed to do what he values. But it’s nothing I can get behind.

Do I want to see revival? Yes, but not of “religion” generally, or “faith” in some abstract sense. There is no value to “religion” if it’s a human religion or directed toward human purposes, and no value in faith that’s directed to anyone or anything other than Jesus Christ. Indeed, there’s no value to faith in God if we don’t immediately follow that up by saying that we mean God as revealed in Jesus. I don’t want to see anything that looks like revival if it isn’t all about Jesus as Jesus points us to the Father; I don’t want to see any kind of revival that can be created by scheduling and rallies and speakers and programs. And I most certainly don’t want any proclaimed revival that comes with, or on, a political platform. That kind of revival has the religion, but it doesn’t have the life.

The only kind of revival I want to see is one that can only be created by the Holy Spirit, who lives and breathes to talk about Jesus and the Father: the revival of the injudicious and incendiary proclamation of the radical gospel of grace, of the infinite love and unfathomable grace of God in Jesus Christ, capturing the hearts and minds of the people of God. That kind of revival—yes!—will have profound political and social consequences, should it come; but it will never be about those consequences, never be for those consequences. It won’t be about America, about restoring our honor or rebuilding our character. It will only ever be about and for glorifying and praising and giving thanks to God the Father for his Son Jesus Christ, who is ours by the work of his Holy Spirit. It will be for God and God alone.

A thought on keeping faith and politics straight

Musing on some of the posts I’ve read from Glenn Beck’s big D.C. rally today, I came back to an observation that occurred to me while I was writing last Sunday’s sermon. I have many times heard people give thanks that we live in a nation where we are allowed to worship God without having to worry about dying for it, and that is indeed reason to be grateful; but how often do we stop to give thanks to Jesus that we can worship God without dying for it? The fundamental freedom to worship God in spirit and in truth doesn’t come from our Constitution, it comes from Christ. Worthy is the Lamb who was slaughtered, because it’s only through his blood, it’s only because he allowed himself to be butchered, that we can enter the presence of God. We need to remember which is the greater gift.

Unfortunately, I think sometimes we lose sight of that, and it shifts our focus. We Americans should be proud of and grateful for our country, yes, because it’s the one God has given us, and because we’re fortunate to live here; but we should never, under any circumstances, for any reason, seek to use our faith for political purposes. We should never do anything that makes our allegiance to Christ secondary to our allegiance to any earthly flag. To do so is idolatry, and a betrayal of the one we claim to worship.

 

Photo © 2005 Kaihsu Tai.  License:  Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported.

Homosexuality and the challenge of idolatry

It would be a lot more pleasant, in some ways, to be able to support the pro-homosex position. It would certainly be easier. After all, the church is called to welcome everyone in the love and grace of Jesus Christ, and it’s a fair bit easier to make people feel welcome if one can simply affirm their choices and decisions. That’s one reason why so many churches wink at so many other sins.

Beyond that, though, in American culture these days—perhaps not here, but in our country in general—being a straight guy who supports gay rights is a pretty comfortable thing to be. After all, the bigots on the conservative side—and there certainly are some—might yell at you a little, but they save the real abuse for homosexuals; the price paid by heterosexuals who argue for gay rights is pretty minimal. Meanwhile, liberal bigots—and there are definitely those, too—will pat you on the back and tell you how enlightened you are. For that matter, so will most of the American intelligentsia, and most of our rich and famous. And if a lot of other Americans disagree with you—well, that just offers the chance to indulge the ancient vice of snobbery.

These are some of the things that would make it a lot easier to throw in the towel regarding homosexuality. And yet, I am committed to understanding the Scriptures—which means standing under them, letting them read me and control my thinking, not trying to read my thinking into them. I am committed, further, to the principle that the call of God is a radical one, that Jesus calls us to give up everything to follow him, and that anyone who hears the call of Christ and is not challenged on some point of sinfulness in their lives didn’t really hear his voice at all. As uncomfortable as it might make me, as risky as it might be, if I start backing down on the issue of homosexuality, it won’t stop there. After all, it would be a lot easier just to affirm gossips in their gossiping and liars in their lying, too.

I keep coming back to the Rev. Tim Keller’s point, in his sermon at GCNC last year, that we cannot truly preach the gospel if we aren’t identifying and confronting the idols in our churches. It’s not just a matter of confronting sin; if all we do is point out and condemn the behaviors people already acknowledge as sinful and for which they already feel shame, we aren’t doing anything but piling on. The crux of the matter, rather, is identifying the desires and behaviors and heart attitudes that people (including ourselves, no question) don’t acknowledge as sin, and don’t want to admit are sinful—not the ones people already hate and wish they could give up (the challenge there is to support and encourage them in that work), but the ones they love and to which they cling, because those areas of sin have become idols in their lives.

That’s a necessary task in ministry, but it’s one from which we too often flinch, because people usually don’t respond pleasantly to it. Try it, and you’ll be called every name in the book, and maybe even some that aren’t in there yet; and in particular, you’ll be called hateful, unloving, judgmental, and maybe even pharisaical (depending on the other person’s vocabulary). And yet, doing so isn’t unloving in the least; in truth, it’s a profound act of love. Too often, I think, we don’t love others enough to risk their anger and abuse by telling them something they don’t want to hear, even if they deeply need to hear it. Easier not to care that much, to just be quiet instead. It’s a shame, really; in fact, it’s a damned shame. Literally.