Category Archives: Religion and theology

Christianity and the wild

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My previous post, reflecting on some of the things I’ve read about Spike Jonze’ movie adaptation of Where the Wild Things Are, was largely sparked by Russell Moore’s post on the movie. Part of that was the paragraph I cited in that post, reflecting on what is good about the original book. Part of it too, though, was Dr. Moore’s comment about Christians who object to the movie on the grounds that it’s too scary—something which he seems to think (and I agree) is rooted in the tendency of so much of the church to sanitize our faith, and with it our worldview, to make it nice and safe.

I’m amazed though by the way some Christians react to things like this. They furrow their brow because the Max character screams at this mother, and bites her, even though this is hardly glorified in the movie. They wag their heads at how “dark” the idea of this wild world is. Of course it is “dark.” The universe is dark; that’s why we need the Light of Galilee.

Where the Wild Things Are isn’t going to be a classic movie the way it is a classic book. But the Christian discomfort with wildness will be with us for a while. And it’s the reason too many of our children find Maurice Sendak more realistic than Sunday school.

Too many of our Bible study curricula for children declaw the Bible, excising all the snakes and dragons and wildness. We reduce the Bible to a set of ethical guidelines and a text on how gentle and kind Jesus is. The problem is, our kids know there are monsters out there. God put that awareness in them. They’re looking for a sheep-herding dragon-slayer, the One who can put all the wild things under His feet.

Hallelujah! Amen.

Faith against the grain

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I made the point in a post Monday that faith works—that faith in God, by the essence of what it is, produces action. It’s not just a matter of mental assent; it’s not enough just to agree with the proposition that God exists—the demons believe that more strongly than anyone, and they’re certainly not saved. Their faith, if you want to call it that, doesn’t change anything for them, except to cause them great fear. True faith, by contrast, changes everything, because it’s not just believing with our mind, it’s believing with our whole being. It produces action in the same way that acorns produce oak trees—it’s simply the nature of the thing. If someone claims to have faith in God but shows no evidence of it in the way they live their lives, that faith is like a body without a spirit: dead.

This is not, however, the common understanding of faith in this country, even among many in the church. In truth, this understanding of Christian faith is really quite countercultural these days. The idea is widespread nowadays, even among Christians, that our faith should be a private matter, between us and God, which really shouldn’t mess up our public lives. It’s fine to be a Christian and go to church and all that if that’s what works for you, but people around you shouldn’t have to deal with that if they don’t want to; out in the “real world,” you ought to go about your business the same way as everybody else.

This is the way of thinking James calls “friendship with the world,” living in such a way as to keep the world happy; and as he makes clear, this is the exact backwards of the way of life to which God calls us. True faith cannot be merely a private matter; it cannot be something we keep restricted to safe times and places when there’s no one around who might object. It changes everything we say and everything we do, at every time and in every place, in every aspect of our lives. True faith isn’t concerned with whether we’re telling people what they want to hear, it’s concerned with whether or not we’re being faithful witnesses to the truth and the life of Jesus Christ—who, after all, often made people thoroughly uncomfortable by telling people exactly what they didn’t want to hear, because it was the truth they needed to hear.

(Excerpted, edited, from “No Private Matter”)

On agenda-driven orthodoxy and the need for humility

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In addition to my snark in the previous post, I do have a serious comment on the BBC’s admission that the Earth has been cooler since 1998—or perhaps I should say, sparked by that article. The remarkable thing about that article is that it’s a deviation from the liberal political orthodoxy on global warming (and it is a political orthodoxy, for all that it claims scientific status), which is not the sort of thing one expects from the BBC. Of course, it was a deviation driven by the facts; the author of the article did his best to uphold the global-warming storyline anyway, but facts are hard things to get around.

Which brings up the problem I have with the global-warming orthodoxy: it’s an orthodoxy based on an agenda. The agenda itself is not necessarily bad; in fact, I agree with its declared goals, though I disagree with the socialist/big-government approach to reaching them. From both a theological and a public-health perspective, as well as with an eye to future unexpected consequences, it’s obviously important that we continue to reduce pollution; I just think that encouraging innovation rather than regulating it is likely to be more productive in doing so.

The problem is, rather, that what we have here is an agenda in search of a crisis, because whipping up a crisis and motivating people by fear is considered to be the quickest and most effective way to drive action, particularly when that action involves expanding government control over the economy and people’s lives. The agenda comes first, and it looks for a plausible threat to which to attach itself, so as to be able to tell people that they must enact the agenda or Bad Things will happen. This is what we might call the Houghton Strategy, after Sir John Houghton, the first person to chair the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change: “Unless we announce disasters, no one will listen.”

Now, the problem with that is that even when it finds success at first, that approach will ultimately collapse. Eventually, as even a global-warming believer like Gregg Easterbrook recently noted, the facts refuse to cooperate, and the truth becomes inconvenient for the agenda. That’s when you get people rooting for disaster, because they’d rather be proved miserably right than happily wrong; getting their own way is the most important thing to them, and they react accordingly.

That’s when orthodoxy gets ugly, and when it fails. I am, obviously, not opposed to all orthodoxies as such; I believe there’s such a thing as truth, and that fact provides at least a philosophical and theoretical justification for orthodoxy (and, in my view, a good bit more than that). Humble orthodoxy that arises out of the search for truth and that recognizes that it is at best an imperfect grasp on that truth is, I firmly believe, a good thing; it’s also a flexible thing, able to discern what is truly essential and what isn’t. Orthodoxy that arises out of an agenda, however—that exists in service not to the truth and the desire for understanding, but to the desire to do certain things—is of necessity dogmatic and inflexible; it also tends to end up being shrill, because it’s forced to defend itself and advance its cause through denunciations and alarmist statements. By its very nature, it’s committed not to understanding what is true, but to winning the argument—and when winning is everything, it very quickly becomes the only thing, and all other concerns (such as truth and fairness) fall by the wayside, leaving behind only a naked power grab.

This applies to orthodoxies of all types—political, religious, cultural, scientific, legal, you name it. You can meet this in the church (whether the local congregation or the international denomination), in politics at every level, in business, and indeed in most spheres of human life. You can find it among the cynical and power-hungry, and in the hearts of the most selfless and altruistic. It is a universal danger for all of us who are strongly committed to any belief or set of beliefs: are we truly seeking to under-stand the truth, to pursue it and stand under it and allow it to shape us, or are we concerned with winning the argument, with being acknowledged to be right, whether in fact we are or not?

Prayer in the Roman world

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[Jesus said,] “And when you pray, do not heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do, for they think that they will be heard for their many words. Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him.”

—Matthew 6:7-8 (ESV)

This evening, my lovely wife discovered what looks like a fascinating blog, For the Sake of Truth, by a Ph.D. student at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary named Josh Mann. I’ll have to explore it a bit to see if I want to add it to the blogroll, but I can already say that the current top post, “How to Pray: Two Ancient Views,” is a keeper.

Commentators generally understand Jesus’ condemnation of “using meaningless repetition” (βατταλογήσητε) and “many words” (τῇ πολυλογίᾳ) as either (1) formulaic and legalistic repetition of intelligible prayers; or (2) pagan magical incantations (probably unintelligible gibberish). I lean heavily toward the first view, not least because of the prevalence of repetitious intelligible prayers carried out in the Roman culture (both private and public).

He then goes on to lay out examples of that (including a remarkable quote from Pliny the Elder), concluding,

It seems that in the Roman view, strict adherence to a formula would obligate the god or goddess to respond in kind.

This, of course, stands in the sharpest of contrast to the view of prayer taught by Jesus:

One should not think to obligate God by some formula. Rather, one ought to pray to God as a dependent child makes request to a Father (Matt 6:9-13). In my view, Jesus gives a model for prayer (rather than a strict formula!), but in any case, he clearly commands that prayer be done with sincerity and humility, recognizing one’s needs and the ability of the Father to provide for such needs. Prayer is no doubt petition at its core, but in Matthew 6, Jesus challenges the crowds regarding the attitudes and motives underlying prayer.

It’s a great post; go read the whole thing.

Faith works

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What good is it, my brothers, if someone says he has faith but does not have works? Can that faith save him? . . . Faith by itself, if it does not have works, is dead.

—James 2:14,17 (ESV)

One of the main emphases for those of us in the Reformed stream of the Christian faith is that salvation does not come by our own effort in any way, but is purely by faith, which itself is a gift from God. We know that we can’t earn our salvation, because we can’t live up to God’s standards; rather, we receive it as a free gift—what we cannot do, God did for us in Jesus Christ. This was a major theme of the Reformation, as Martin Luther and John Calvin challenged a Catholic Church that had grown corrupt, because it’s a major theme in the letters of Paul; it was a significant recovery for the church, for all the conflicts that came along with it.

Unfortunately, one of the divisions that arose, in the mind of Luther—and among Catholics as well—was between Paul and James. Luther saw James as contradicting Paul, and dismissed the book as “a right strawy epistle.” He didn’t quite go so far as to leave it out when he translated the Bible into German, but he’s said to have ripped it out of his personal Bible. His objection was based, however, on a misreading of the book.

It’s easy to see where that came from, as both Paul and James talk about faith and works and salvation; superficially, they sound very similar in their language, and seem to be addressing the same issues. If you read a little more closely, though, you see that though they use the same words, they aren’t talking about the same things. When Paul talks about faith versus works, he’s talking about “works of the law”—that’s his phrase; his point is that you can’t earn your salvation by keeping the law, because you can’t possibly keep it well enough to satisfy God. His focus is on the most basic level: how are we saved? How do we enter into the life of the kingdom of God?

James, by contrast, isn’t talking about “works of the law” at all—he never uses the phrase. Rather, he’s talking about works of faith. He’s not talking about how we get saved, about how we lay hold of the life of God—rather, he’s talking about what that life looks like, and about true faith versus false faith. Where Paul’s argument deals with what we can do, or can’t do, in order to be saved, James’ concern is with how our lives should look because we have been saved. Like the whole rest of the book, this is about what it means to live the Christian life—to live the life of God in this fallen world. All he’s really doing in chapter 2 is restating and expanding on a point he made in chapter 1: it’s not enough for us to hear the word of God, we need to submit our lives to its authority and do what it says, if we want to call ourselves Christians.

(Excerpted, edited, from “No Private Matter”)

We need an extraordinary savior

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Heidelberg Catechism
Q & A 16
Q. Why must he be truly human
and truly righteous?

A. God’s justice demands
that human nature, which has sinned,
must pay for its sin;1
but a sinner could never pay for others.2

Note: mouse over footnotes for Scripture references (does not work in IE 6).

This is the keystone of the dilemma: no one who is not truly and fully human, fully participating in human nature and human life, could possibly serve as the mediator we need and pay the penalty for human sin—it had to be one of us; what human beings had put wrong, another human being must put right. At the same time, no one who participated in human sinfulness, no one who was himself or herself guilty of sin, would have the ability to pay that price. “Pretty good” isn’t good enough for the salvation we need; not even the best human being we’ve ever known or heard of is up to the task. No one less than a completely perfect human being could do it.

Q & A 17
Q. Why must he also be true God?

A. So that,
by the power of his divinity,
he might bear the weight of God’s anger in his humanity
and earn for us
and restore to us
righteousness and life.1

Logically, then, we need a savior who is both fully human and fully God, since only God can be perfect enough to satisfy his own demands. And yet, there’s more to it than that. Only God could bear the weight of what had to be done; only God could endure bearing the near-infinite guilt of all human sin and suffering. Only God could lay down a life of infinite worth, in a deliberate choice of infinite love, as an act of infinite grace, to wash away that near-infinite guilt.

Speaking of conservative idolatry

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here’s an example that’s every bit as sickening, in a different but equally serious way, as the Obamadolatry we’ve been seeing: the “Conservative Bible Project.” What an astonishing fusion of conservative Bibliolatry with conservative patriolatry . . . just look at this:

As of 2009, there is no fully conservative translation of the Bible which satisfies the following ten guidelines:

1. Framework against Liberal Bias: providing a strong framework that enables a thought-for-thought translation without corruption by liberal bias . . .

4. Utilize Powerful Conservative Terms: using powerful new conservative terms as they develop; defective translations use the word “comrade” three times as often as “volunteer”; similarly, updating words which have a change in meaning, such as “word”, “peace”, and “miracle”. . . .

7. Express Free Market Parables: explaining the numerous economic parables with their full free-market meaning

8. Exclude Later-Inserted Liberal Passages: excluding the later-inserted liberal passages that are not authentic, such as the adulteress story . . .

10. Prefer Conciseness over Liberal Wordiness: preferring conciseness to the liberal style of high word-to-substance ratio; avoid compound negatives and unnecessary ambiguities; prefer concise, consistent use of the word “Lord” rather than “Jehovah” or “Yahweh” or “Lord God.”

Several things are clear at this point. In the first place, these people clearly know little or nothing of what they would need to know to produce a useful translation of the Bible—just enough to be dangerous, at best. (I’ll duel any of these fools—and I use the term advisedly, in its full biblical sense—over the authenticity of John 7:53-8:11, the story of the woman caught in adultery; there is no good reason to call it inauthentic, though on my judgment, it was probably originally a part of the gospel of Luke.) In the second place, their work is—deliberately—every bit as agenda-driven as the “liberal” work they condemn (much of which isn’t liberal at all).

And in the third place, their professed interest in the Bible is a sham and a delusion. They may well believe it to be sincere—they may well be self-deluded—but it’s a sham and a delusion nonetheless. Their whole approach demonstrates that they only care about the Bible as a tool to be used for their purposes; and that’s about as unbiblical an approach as there is. It’s also, I confess, an approach which I find completely intolerable. As I wrote recently,

If we have indeed been given birth through God’s word of truth, then to know who we are and how we should live, we need to under-stand that word of truth; which is to say, we need to stand under it, to place ourselves in position to receive and accept it. We must be quick to listen and slow to speak; we must receive and absorb the word of God, chew on it and swallow it and let it change us, rather than spitting it out whenever we don’t care for the taste.

Too often, however, we reverse this—we’re slow to listen and quick to speak. Too often we see ourselves not as the receiver but as the judge, standing over the word of truth to critique it. There are, for instance, those who feel they have the right to disregard or reject the parts of Scripture that say things they don’t like; but really, you can’t do that without rejecting all of Scripture, because the Bible itself won’t let you do that. Once you start doing that, you have rejected the word of God as the word of truth, and have instead set it up as something to be used when convenient to support what you already believe, or would like to believe.

I suspect from their comments that the folks doing this “conservative Bible” would assert that their project is necessary because liberals do this; but while I agree that liberals very often do, the answer is not for conservatives to do the same! That only worsens the problem, it doesn’t help it. This sort of exegetical obscenity is intolerable in the service of any agenda. The Bible isn’t “conservative” or “liberal” in the sense that it’s about any human agenda, for any person or group of people; the Bible is about God’s agenda, and his agenda alone, to which we’re called to submit ourselves. To do otherwise isn’t to “translate” the Bible but to distort and deform it.

One wonders why these fools can’t get this. Rod Dreher does, calling the project “insane hubris”; so does Ed Morrissey:

However, if one believes the Bible to be the Word of God written for His purposes, which I do, then the idea of recalibrating the language to suit partisan political purposes in this age is pretty offensive—just as offensive as they see the “liberal bias” in existing translations. If they question the authenticity of the current translations, then the only legitimate process would be to work from the original sources and retranslate. And not just retranslate with political biases in mind, but to retranslate using proper linguistic processes and correct terminology.

The challenge of Christian believers is to adhere to the Word of God, not to bend the Word of God to our preferred ideology. Doing the former requires discipline and a clear understanding of the the Bible. Doing the latter makes God subservient to an ideology, rather than the other way around.

It can’t be that difficult to understand that replacing liberal bias with conservative bias doesn’t make for better Bible translation, doesn’t it? Is “two wrongs don’t make a right” really that hard a concept? For my part, I’m with the Anchoress (whose post is a must-read) on this one: This is where I get off the boat.

Our hands-on God

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Don’t be deceived, my dear brothers. Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights, who does not change like shifting shadows. He chose to give us birth through the word of truth, that we might be a kind of firstfruits of all he created.

—James 1:16-18 (NIV)

The Father gave birth to us, says James; this is strange, striking language, designed to catch the ear and grab our attention. We shouldn’t press it too far, as if we might claim to share God’s DNA; one of the reasons the Bible uses male language for God is to keep Israel and the church from moving in that direction. Goddess worship tends to follow that track to its logical conclusion and assert that we ourselves are divine, gods and goddesses in our own right, and there’s just no room for that here—the Scriptures are careful not to leave any room for that at all.

And yet, it’s quite easy to fall off the way of truth in the opposite direction, into what we might call the equal and opposite heresy of distancing God from his creation. This is the heresy of modern Western rationalism, which might believe there’s a God in some abstract sense but feels free not to give a rip about him on the grounds that he really doesn’t give a rip about us, either. To this, James’ language gives the lie. How we imagine a father giving birth, I’m not sure, but this makes it very clear that God is personally, intimately involved in our creation, both our physical creation and our spiritual re-creation. He isn’t God at a distance; he’s God right here with us.

(Excerpted from “The Poem of Your Life”)

Scandalizing the church

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Over a couple weeks of being head-down with the congregation, one of the things I didn’t do was keep up with Jared Wilson’s blog, The Gospel-Driven Church; so now I’m catching up. I was interested to note that at the top right now is a post, which I think is a repost, dealing with the need to convert the church to the gospel. As Jared sums things up,

We are in a weird—but frequently exhilarating—position where the gospel is scandalous even to Christians.

The main thing I would suggest is that you go read the post—and also the one a couple posts down, which is a critical evaluation of Rob Bell’s statements in a recent interview, because I think they really tie together. Why is it that the gospel is scandalous to many in the church? Why is it that people have learned to look to the church for things other than the gospel? Because we’ve had an orientation in the American church for several decades now toward focusing on and addressing felt needs, whether in individuals (the conservative wing) or in society (the liberal wing), which makes people comfortable (and thus more likely to come, give $$$, etc.), rather than challenging people and making them uncomfortable by driving them to consider their true, deep need: their total inability to do anything on their own to please God, and their total need for the gospel of salvation through the grace of God alone, by faith alone, in Jesus Christ alone, through the power of the Holy Spirit alone, “not by works, lest anyone should boast.”

What’s the solution? Well, to complete the trifecta, I think Jared lays it out well in the next post down, a comment on his approach to preaching:

I believe our flesh cries out for works, we are wired to worship, and we want to earn salvation, so we know what deeds are good deeds. And we need to be helped with specific advice in specific situations and we need to be reminded to do good, but our most pressing need is to be challenged on that which we forget most easily, which is not more tips for a successful life, but that we are sinners who need grace to have life in the first place.

We all know what good works look like. We just don’t want to do them. And that is a spiritual problem exhortations to good behavior cannot solve. The clearly proclaimed gospel is God’s prescription for breaking a hardened heart. . . .

What I strive for (imperfectly, fallibly) in my teaching is to uphold Jesus and his atoning work as all satisfying, all sufficient, all powerful, all encompassing, and call others to uphold it as such in their hearts. My belief is that when someone really loves Jesus and has been scandalized by God’s grace, they will really follow Him into a life of scandalizing others.

Some will contend that spending most preaching time calling for listeners to savor the work of Christ, cling to the cross, find satisfaction in Christ’s work alone, and trust His grace for salvation does not offer real help because it doesn’t give a “takeaway,” it doesn’t tell people what to do. I say it does tell people what to do: it tells them to savor, cling, find satisfaction, and trust. That is real help. And that’s what I want people to take away. And my trust is that if people are actually doing that, because their affections have been transferred in repentance from self to Christ, their repentant hearts will bear the fruit of a living faith, by which I mean a faith that proves itself with works.

That’s right on.

We aren’t islands—we should act accordingly

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Tyler Dawn has a very good post up today, one which I encourage you to read, that reminded me of this wisdom from the preacher-poet Dr. John Donne:

The church is catholic, universal, so are all her actions; all that she does belongs to all. When she baptizes a child, that action concerns me; for that child is thereby connected to that head which is my head too, and ingrafted into the body whereof I am a member. And when she buries a man, that action concerns me: all mankind is of one author and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated. God employs several translators; some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by justice; but God’s hand is in every translation, and his hand shall bind up all our scattered leaves again for that library where every book shall lie open to one another. . . .

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were. Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

In keeping with this, I also note Tyler Dawn’s most recent post; I’ll be praying for her, and I hope you will be too.