Category Archives: Religion and theology

Three ways to live

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This short clip from the Rev. Tim Keller, working off an insight from C. S. Lewis, is as good as you’d expect given that combination.  He’s right that the contrast you hear from so many preachers between “living God’s way” and “living the world’s way,” or “living according to the Spirit” and “living according to the flesh,” is both wrong—because what many of those preachers are actually calling people to is really just another way of living according to the flesh—and unhelpful—because what non-Christians have learned to expect from such a call, in consequence, is really just another way of living according to the flesh.  If we’re going to preach the gospel, we need to start by making it clear to people (both outside the church and within it) that the gospel isn’t what they think it is.  Right now, an awful lot of churches are doing a better job of training future atheists than they are of training Christians.

HT:  Jared Wilson

A few thoughts for Ash Wednesday

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How easy it is to denounce structural injustice, institutionalized violence, social sin.
And it is true, this sin is everywhere, but where are the roots of this social sin?
In the heart of every human being.—Archbishop Oscar RomeroOn this Ash Wednesday, the first day of this Lenten season, I wanted to post these reflections from the Rev. Dr. Tom Sheffield, the Presbytery Pastor of the Presbytery of Denver (PCUSA), on this quote from Archbishop Romero.  I admire Tom greatly and was greatly blessed to serve in his presbytery for five years, and I think there’s a great deal of wisdom in what he has to say about this day.

On most days I can find ways to avoid what Archbishop Romero wrote. Most days I can think I am pretty good. I can believe that all things considered I am doing pretty well. And I can convince myself that if I am not, it isn’t really my fault. On most days I can say all that.But not on Ash Wednesday.On Ash Wednesday I am forced . . . and the word is “forced” . . . to look as squarely as I can at that sin. I am led forward to receive those ashes, a sign that what passes for life is passing very quickly away, a sign that God can take the remnants of my life, the tattered pieces of my days, the shredded hopes and dreams and bring about something good and whole and eternal, and a sign that without my ever doing much of anything I am marked with God’s grace and love.On Ash Wednesday may we all find again what is in our hearts and discover again, too, what is in the heart of God. May we find there the forgiveness that we need, acceptance for which yearn and hope for which we long. And in finding that forgiveness, acceptance and hope may we also find the strength daily to transform, with the love of Christ, the injustice, violence and sin that dwell in all our lives.

Statement of faith

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I’ve been mulling this post for a while, and I might as well go ahead and put it up.  I am, by temperament and reaction to experience, a pessimist; I’m the sort who thinks the problem with Murphy is that he tried too hard to look on the bright side of things.  When things are going well, I have a hard time relaxing and enjoying it, because I figure that every silver lining has its cloud and that the greatest danger in life is complacency.  I mistrust when things come too easily, or line up too neatly—the universe is simply too cross-grained to come up cooperative without a fight, or a trick.  The advantage of pessimism is that it greatly reduces (though nothing can eliminate) the number of unpleasant surprises; and as a recovering control freak, I don’t like unpleasant surprises.  I much prefer to have contingency plans in place, when I’m smart enough to come up with them.

This is, of course, not all there is to be said about me; I also have a weird optimistic streak, and sometimes I’m not sure how these two things coexist.  But it does mean that trust and faith come very, very hard for me; there are very few people in this world whom I could honestly say I trust more than provisionally, and I can’t honestly claim to trust God all that much either, a lot of the time.  I know people for whom faith in God comes easily, where I have to fight for it, and at times I’ve felt myself to be inferior to them; now, I just figure that it’s a matter of different spiritual gifts, and that their greater gift of faith serves one purpose where my weaker gift serves another.  After all, Jesus didn’t say you need a lot of faith:  even if you have barely any at all, that’s enough.  What matters isn’t the size of our faith, but the size of the God in whom we put our faith.

But if faith comes so hard, why believe at all?

Partly it’s because, as I’ve argued before, we’re wired to believe; we can’t stand nowhere, and we can’t hold ourselves in abeyance (not for very long, anyway)—we inevitably settle somewhere.  The only question is whether we realize it or not.  Better, as a matter of tactics, tochoose to believe—better to pick your ground deliberately than just to end up where you end up.  Better to actively interrogate the universe, to search for truth and ask the hard questions, to come to the best conclusions you can; one must do so with proper humility, in the awareness that one could always be wrong (especially in the details, even if one’s fundamental conclusions are correct), but “humble” does not in any way mean “timid.”  Pick your ground and argue hard—drive both yourself and anyone who disagrees with you to the limits—because if you’re wrong, you need to be proven wrong, insofar as that’s possible, and the only way that can happen is if there are no holds barred and no punches pulled.

I know there are those who say that no one was ever argued into faith; that’s not true.  It doesn’t, by any means, happen this way for everybody; even among Vulcans, not everyone lives by logic.  But there are those who are argued into faith, and there are those of us whose faith requires argument; and if that doesn’t make for easy faith, it has its own virtue about it.  At the very least, it makes it easier to talk with others who don’t find faith coming easily.

For my part, I didn’t have to be argued into faith:  I grew up in a Christian home, the grandson and nephew of pastors.  That said, while the assumptions of my childhood were unquestionably Christian, they were not required to remain unquestioned; when I had questions, they were always taken seriously and answered fairly.  If the unexamined life is not worth living, it’s certainly true that the unexamined (and unchallenged) faith is not worth holding; it’s the equivalent of a security program that’s never been tested by hackers.  My family, whether explicitly or simply by temperament and interest, understood this.  It’s one of the reasons I came out in such a different place in my faith from my grandmother the pastor (which, given the strong-willed, strong-minded and self-certain person that she was, made for some arguments that made the walls ring, let me tell you.

All this was a good thing, because it meant that I was free to interrogate my own faith when the time came that I needed to do so; and I did.  It was not enough that my family believed; not enough that I wanted to believe—indeed, I mistrusted (and mistrust) that desire, because such desire can easily trap you into betraying yourself.  As Bacon said, people prefer to believe what they prefer to be true—and if your preference leads you away from believing what really is true, that gives reality an opening to take you down from behind.  I want to believe what is true partly for noble reasons, and partly out of sheer self-defense, because everything we believe that is not so renders us vulnerable in some way.

(If it’s true that knowledge is power, it’s primarily in this:  that knowledge, which we may define as having what we believe about the world be in conformity with the reality of the world as it actually is in itself, means that we don’t misevaluate ourselves, our situation, and the challenges we face, and thus are able to properly determine how to use whatever actual power we possess as we seek to manage our situation and respond to those challenges.)

As such, I’m not ashamed to say that my faith is, or was, a faith of the intellect first; the affective dimensions developed more slowly, and later.  This is why believing with the mind and trusting with the gut are very different things for me; I’d fail the Niagara test nine times out of ten, I expect, a walking advertisement for the truth of Flannery O’Connor’s observation that “it’s harder to believe than not to”—even, at times, if one already does believe.

And I do believe.  I’ve read Calvin and Luther and some of the Church Fathers, the Enlightenment philosophers and their modern counterparts, and I’ve spent a fair bit of time thinking about existentialism in its various forms; and I have come to the conclusion, for whatever it may be worth, that the Christian faith, and specifically that understanding of it mediated through the teaching of Augustine of Hippo and Calvin of Geneva, offers the best, the truest and deepest, account yet managed by human beings of the reality of existence.  Theologically, I believe that this represents the outworking of God’s providential promise to my parents and to the church in which I was raised for my salvation; existentially, if you will, I say that this is the means by which God’s Spirit has worked in my life.  It all comes to the same thing, in the end.  As I say, this particular path has its own virtue about it; but it does mean that I find myself all too often crying out with the father of the demoniac, “Lord, I believe!—help me with my unbelief . . .”

That’s the reason why, not long after I started blogging in earnest, I posted Andrew Peterson’s song “No More Faith”:

I say faith is a burden—
It’s a weight to bear;
It’s brave and bittersweet.
And hope is hard to hold to;
Lord, I believe,
Only help my unbelief
‘Till there’s no more faith.

And it’s the reason why, a couple weeks later, I posted his friend Andrew Osenga’s song “We Are the Beggars at the Foot of God’s Door”:

We have known the pain of loving in a dying world,
And our lies have made us angry at the truth—
But Cinderella’s slipper fits us perfectly,
And somehow we’re made royalty with You.

O we of little faith, O You of stubborn grace . . .
We are the beggars, we are the beggars,
We are the beggars at the foot of God’s door.

That (sometimes despite myself) I believe, in trust that it’s not about my little faith, but about God’s stubborn grace:  we are (as Malcolm Muggeridge originally said) beggars at the foot of God’s door, if we can set aside our pride long enough to accept the position—and our joy is that he has welcomed us in.

Jerusalem, San Francisco, and the meaning of eyewitnesses

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In the comments on my post on worship and atheism, FVThinker is trying to argue (among other things) that “all the conflicting stories re: his resurrection” constitute sufficient reason to deny the Resurrection of Christ. Now, in the first place, I deny the assertion, which is just one more tired leftover from liberal German scholarship of a century and more ago; but let’s suppose, for the sake of argument, that we grant the point. Does this in fact constitute a compelling argument against the historicity of the Resurrection?No, it doesn’t. To understand why, consider a more recent historical incident, the San Francisco earthquake of 1906. If you’ve read Simon Winchester’s excellent book A Crack in the Edge of the World: America and the Great California Earthquake of 1906, then you probably remember that in the Prologue, Winchester quotes from five eyewitness accounts of the quake. Consider the following.

At the precise moment when the members of this quintet—three of them very distinguished men of science and two others of relatively modest social standing—were undertaking their very mundane activities . . . it was twelve minutes after five o’clock in the morning.However, this was a matter of provable fact only for the Englishman, so far as the record relates.  His name was George Davidson, and he, like his fellow scientists, wrote about the event that was to follow with a certain icy detachment.  He took care to mark the time that he first noticed something happening:  Suddenly and without warning his room, his house, and the very land all was standing upon began to shake, with a great, ever-increasing, and uncontrollable violence.It was, he knew full well, an earthquake.It came, he later reported,

from north to south, and the only description I am able to give of its effect is that it seemed like a terrier shaking a rat.  I was in bed, but was awakened by the first shock.  I began to count the seconds as I went towards the table where my watch was, being able through much practice closely to approximate the time in that manner.  The shock came at 5.12 o’clock.  The first sixty seconds were the most severe.  From that time on it decreased gradually for about thirty seconds.  There was then the slightest perceptible lull.  Then the shock continued for sixty seconds longer, being slighter in degree in this minute than in any part of the preceding minute and a half.  There were two slight shocks afterwards which I did not time.

Professor Davidson must have been as terrified as anyone, but he was a man trained to observe, and he knew in an instant what was taking place. . . .  the first full series of hard shocks, say his notes, lasted until 5h 13m 00s.  The shocks were slightly less from that point until 5h 13m 30s, then there was a slight lull, and by 5h 14m 30s all was quiet again. . . .  The official report on the earthquake said, in a tone that brooked no dispute, “We shall accept Professor Davidson’s time as the most accurate obtainable for San Francisco.

The second eyewitness account Winchester considers is that of the meteorologist Alexander George McAdie.

Professor McAdie was an ambitious and a punctilious man, and at the very moment that he was awakened . . . both his ambition and his scrupulous regard for factual observation . . . came promptly to the fore.  As had been his custom ever since he went through the Great Charleston Earthquake of 1886 (“for twenty years I have timed every earthquake I have felt,” he was later to write”), the instant he awoke and felt movement he clicked on his flashlight, noted the time on his fob watch, and recorded in his notebook everything that transpired.

I have lookt up the record in my note-book made on April 18, 1906, while the earthquake was still perceptible.  I find the entry “5h 12m” and after that “Severe lasted nearly 40 seconds.”  As I now remember it the portion “severe, etc.” was entered immediately after the shaking.

The only snag was that poor Professor McAdie somehow managed to misread his watch during all the confusion, and he wreathed himself in a magnificent maze of complications as he tried to explain the mistake.  He wrote that the day before the earthquake,

my error was “1 minute slow” at noon by time-ball, or time signals received in Weather Bureau and which my watch has been compared for a number of years.  The rate of my watch is 5 seconds loss per day; therefore the corrected time of my entry is 5h 13m 05s AM.  This is not of course the beginning of the quake.  I would say perhaps 6 or more seconds may have elapsed between the act of waking, realizing, and looking at the watch and making my entry.  I remember distinctly getting the minute-hand’s position, previous to the most violent portion of the shock.  The end of the shock I did not get exactly, as I was watching the second-hand, and the end came several seconds before I fully took in that the motion had ceased.  The second-hand was somewhere between 40 and 50 when I realized this.  I lost the position of the second-hand because of difficulty in keeping my feet, somewhere around the 20-second mark.However, there is one uncertainty.  I may have read my watch wrong.  I have no reason to think I did; but I know from experience such things are possible.  I have the original entries untouched since the time they were made.

The official report accepts that the unfortunate man did effect an error in making what was probably the most critical observation of his career—but, out of courtesy, adds that such a mistake would have been very easy to make.  The one-minute error is, then, officially compensated for, and Alexander McAdie enters the lists as having, essentially, timed the Great San Francisco Earthquake as beginning at 5h 12m 05s, recorded that it became extremely severe at 5h 12m 25s, and noted that it tailed off into bearable oblivion at 5h 12m 50s.  The whole event, in McAdie’s eyes, extended over little more than forty seconds—about half the time that Davidson had computed, from his observations that were made a little bit closer to town.

One of the other eyewitnesses Winchester cites is Fred Hewitt, a reporter for the San Francisco Examiner.

It was some minutes after five o’clock when he and his two friends crossed Golden Gate Avenue, spent five minutes talking to a pair of policemen—”blue-coated guardians” as he later wrote for his paper—and said their farewells.  Hewitt had turned north, the policemen back south down Larkin, when suddenly:

The ground rose and fell like an ocean at ebb tide.  Then came the crash . . . I saw those policement enveloped by a shower of falling stone.It is impossible to judge the length of that shock.  To me it seemed like an eternity.  I was thrown prone on my back and the pavement pulsated like a living thing.  Around me the huge buildings, looking more terrible becasue of the queer dance they were performing, wobbled and veered.  Crash followed crash and resounded on all sides. . . .The first portion of the shock was just a mild forerunning of what was to follow.  The pause in the action of the earth’s surface couldn’t have been more than a fraction of a second. . . . Then came the second and more terrific crash.

Now, in this collection of testimony from three different observers—including two professional scientists, people trained to observe, measure, and record things with uncommon precision—we see discrepancies in the details.  Indeed, between the two scientists we see discrepancies in their accounts of the start time and length of the quake which, given the level of precision to which they were trained and which they were attempting, can only be described as significant; and we have another witness who declares, “It is impossible to judge the length of that shock,” and offers another differing account of the quake’s progress.  We have here, at the least, “conflicting stories re:  the earthquake.”The question is, what can we conclude from these discrepancies?  Specifically, can we conclude that the earthquake didn’t happen?  Clearly, we can’t; the inference is logically unjustifiable—a point which is made helpfully obvious in this case by the fact that the earthquake is recent enough that we still have lots of other evidence as well which bears witness to it.  Even if several hundred or thousand years in the future, it somehow happened that the only record of that earthquake was these three statements, scholars of that future time would in no way be justified in concluding that because of these discrepancies, they could dismiss the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 as ahistorical—and if they insisted on doing so anyway, they would be arguing illogically to reach a false conclusion.What needs to be understood here is that whatever differences there may be in the details of these three reports, they agree on the core facts:  some little time past 5am in the cold morning of April 18, 1906, a major earthquake hit San Francisco, California, and their world was shaken, and their lives were never the same again.  Whatever they disagree on, they testify to that much with firm unanimity, and so their collective statements in fact provide strong support for the existence and significance of that event.The same may be said of the accounts of Jesus’ resurrection.  Even if we grant, for the sake of argument, actual discrepancies and contradictions in the details of the accounts, they agree on the core facts:  Jesus died on a Roman cross; his body was sealed in a rock tomb behind a heavy stone door; the following Sunday, the stone was found moved away from the tomb, and the tomb was empty; no one ever produced his body; and in fact, he appeared again alive on various occasions to various of his followers.  Whatever they might be said to disagree on, the reports agree that some time that Sunday morning, Jesus was raised from the dead, and their world was shaken, and their lives were never the same again; they testify to that much with firm unanimity, and so their collective statements in fact provide strong support for the existence and significance of that event.  To seize on alleged discrepancies as an excuse to conclude otherwise is every bit as logically unjustifiable as it would be to conclude from the eyewitness statements quoted above that there was no earthquake in San Francisco in 1906.The fact is, eyewitness testimony always varies—always. People see different things, perceive things differently, assign different levels of importance to various details, and yes, make mistakes and misremember things, even if they’re doing their best to be accurate.  Variance in eyewitness testimony is therefore to be expected.  Indeed, if you have a group of eyewitnesses who all tell the exact same story with no variation, that’s a pretty good sign that they’ve gotten together to get their stories straight, and thus that their testimony is probably unreliable in some way.  What the differences in the scriptural accounts primarily demonstrate is that there was no collusion between the witnesses—which is, on the whole, a good thing, and speaks more to their basic reliability than the reverse.

The absolute sovereignty of God

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I am the Lord, and there is no other;
besides me there is no God.
I equip you, [Cyrus,] though you do not know me,
that people may know, from the rising of the sun
and from the west, that there is none besides me;
I am the Lord, and there is no other.
I form light and create darkness,
I make well-being and create calamity,
I am the Lord, who does all these things.—Isaiah 45:5-7 (ESV)The Lord is in control in everything that happens—everything.  This is not to say that God desires bad things to happen, as if he enjoyed them; but it is to say that nothing happens apart from God’s power and his sustaining will. There is nothing good that does not come from his hand, and there is no trouble and no disaster that does not happen on his sufferance. God could, for instance, have prevented 9/11; he could have given Osama bin Laden a fatal accident years ago, or changed Bill Clinton’s mind to green-light bin Laden’s assassination, or had him knifed in the back by some Afghan tribesman. He didn’t choose to do that. He could have prevented our current economic crisis—fairly easily, in fact; he didn’t choose to do that either. I don’t know his reasons, for these or for any other disasters, and I won’t presume to declare the mind of God; but whether he decreed them for judgment or permitted them for other purposes, the testimony of Scripture is clear that they happened only by God’s will. Indeed, Scripture is clear that nothing happens, for good or ill, that is not in some way an expression of the sovereign will of Almighty God.This is a hard word for us. That God sends good things—yes, of course.  That only God deserves the credit for the good things that come to us—which is to say, that we can’t take credit for them ourselves—is usually not something we want to consider. Indeed, for many people, that’s a painfully hard idea to accept. But that God sends bad things—that’s something else again. Does that make God the author of evil?There are those who have believed so, and who have responded either by rejecting God or by rejecting the biblical testimony to his power and lordship. But the truth is, it doesn’t. God did not create evil—he could not do any such thing, because it’s completely contrary to his nature—nor did he ever desire that evil things should happen. However, when our first ancestors fell into sin, he chose not to obliterate them, toss out the world he’d made, and start over, but rather to put a plan in motion to redeem their sin; as a consequence, while he may at times prevent us from sinning and forbid disasters from occurring, there are other times when, for his own purposes, he doesn’t. The important thing is that there is no evil he permits in which he is not in some way at work in order to redeem it—and there is no suffering he allows in which he does not share, in the body of his Son our Lord Jesus Christ on the cross. God is not aloof from the pain of this world; in Christ, he has borne it all.(Excerpted from “God’s Mysterious Way”)

Audio from the Symposium

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I decided to wait to post my last reflections on the Worship Symposium, and especially on Craig Barnes’ workshop, until I could post the audio along with it; the audio still isn’t available for everything yet, but I hope it will be soon.  In the meantime, the audio is up for, among other things, the workshop I attended with Dr. Simon Chan, which was truly a remarkable session on the work of the Holy Spirit in the worship of the church; I’ve added it to the original post, and it’s below as well.

Simon Chan, “A Theological Understanding of the Liturgy as the Work of the Spirit”


• download

No other redeemer

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“You are my witnesses,” declares the Lord, “and my servant whom I have chosen,
that you may know and believe me and understand that I am he.
Before me no god was formed, nor shall there be any after me.
I, I am the Lord, and besides me there is no savior.”—Isaiah 43:10-11 (ESV)Then Peter, filled with the Holy Spirit, said to them, “Rulers of the people and elders, if we are being examined today concerning a good deed done to a crippled man, by what means this man has been healed, let it be known to all of you and to all the people of Israel that by the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, whom you crucified, whom God raised from the dead—by him this man is standing before you well. This Jesus is the stone that was rejected by you, the builders, which has become the cornerstone. And there is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among humanity
by which we must be saved.”—Acts 4:8-12 (ESV, alt.)This is the church’s message, it’s the word God has given us:  there is no other god in heaven and no other redeemer on this earth; there is no other name in heaven or on earth or under the earth by which anyone may be saved. There is no one else in whom we can put our hope and faith and trust. There is no other. Period, full stop, end of sentence.  That’s our message, to each other and to the world—and make no mistake, we always need to begin by reminding ourselves of that, because it’s so easy to get off into putting our trust in other things. We always need to make sure that we’re really living in the good news ourselves before we try to share it with others.It can be difficult to keep that focus, whether in hard times or in easy ones; but I do think that hard times like the ones we’re experiencing now are particularly opportune times to preach this good news.  Anyone who reads the headlines and watches the news has figured out something they might not have figured out before: they’ve come to the realization that the economy isn’t going to save them. Their jobs, their resumés, their paychecks, aren’t going to save them. The banks aren’t going to save them, and if they have any investments, those aren’t going to save them either.They’ve figured out that Congress isn’t going to save them; and judging by the opinion polls, folks are starting to figure out that the president isn’t going to save them either. With some of the rhetoric that got thrown around last year, I think a lot of people really believed we’d elected a new messiah; I think it’s starting to register that all we did was all we ever do, which is elect another politician. Which is something we should also remember two years from now, and four years from now—even if we end up with a new president and a whole new Congress, they aren’t going to save us either.  Regardless of party, politicians are still politicians—even the best of them.What’s more, we aren’t going to save ourselves. Our plans won’t save us. Our possessions won’t save us. Our big ideas won’t save us, and neither will our little ones. Our inspirations won’t save us, and our inventions won’t do the trick either, even if we can come up with any. All these are good things, and necessary; none of them are enough, even if we put them all together. We cannot save ourselves, and we cannot save each other; and none of the things we value can save us either. There is only one Savior, and he is Jesus Christ the Son of the Living God; there is only one God who redeems, and there is hope for the future—and for the present, for that matter—in nothing and no one else. This is the message God has given us for the world; our call is to share it freely.Interestingly, the importance of this was made clear recently by the great stage magician and avowed atheist Penn Jillette, of Penn & Teller.  I agree wholeheartedly with what the Anchoress had to say when she posted this clip last December:

With some understandable reservation, I have always liked Penn Jillette. Intelligence sizzles off of him the way I imagine it did with John Quincy Adams. He is articulate, urbane, insightful, mischievous and acerbically funny, and he manages to be all of those things without going into the condescension, dismissiveness and arrogance that some (think: Bill Maher) latch onto in college and extend into a sort of perpetually adolescent sneer-and-kneejerk.He is also, clearly, a guy who thinks—you cannot come up with an act like Penn & Teller with a closed mind—and, perhaps because his schtick is all about illusion and unreality, one gets the impression that Penn Jillette does work to keep the world around him, and himself, “real” by his own lights.So it is interesting, and moving, to watch this gifted man struggle to bring words and context to something that surprised him—to keep things as “real” as he can, while engaged in mild (but also real) wonder and awe.I like this video because it is a rare thing to see any man or woman expose themselves in this way—in a way that says, “I had a wow-experience and I am not afraid to tell you about it, even though half of you may say I’m a sentimental chump and the other half of you will say I’m hell-bound chum.” I like it because even though he resolutely insists that he’s still a good atheist, he is not too proud to say he was moved by a “good man” who believes very differently. I like it because he is not afraid of a fight, or to show us a moment where his intellect and his heart are engaged in a bit of a tussle.That’s courageous. It’s rare. Left or right, believer or atheist, it’s rare, and so I admire it.There is a message to Christians, here; two, actually. The first is passive: make note of the fact that it was a gentle Christian who was willing to accept Jillette where he was, as he was, with openness and a positive mien, who was able to touch him. Aggressiveness and negativity won’t get you there, which is why Christ eschewed it.The second message is as far from passive as you can get, and it comes from Jillette himself: “How much do you have to hate somebody to believe that everlasting life is possible, and not tell them that?”

Penn’s right. If we really believe this, we need to act like it.(Excerpted, edited, from “No Other Redeemer”)

A thought on worship and atheism

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I haven’t put up any posts on atheism in a while, so it’s been some time since I’ve gotten into a wrangle with an atheist (for some reason, though, that always does seem to happen when I post on atheism; there always seems to be an atheist blogger or two who finds it and drops in to complain); there have been a couple things I’ve intended to post on, but neither was available online when I went looking for them. The last go-round that way was on my post on “The atheism of presumption and the case for God,” which was last July; that one was primarily with a chap going by the handle FVThinker (who also seems to be, inter alia, someone else who’s bought the phony media narrative about Sarah Palin). I looked back at that thread for something else and noticed he’d made a comment which I failed to register at the time, and also that I had planned a follow-up post which, in the business of last summer, I never finished. I need to put up a post soon to address those lapses on my part.

This, however, is not that post. Rather, I want to comment on another approach he took which I didn’t address at all in that comment thread.  : In that conversation, FVThinker tried to frame his argument against Christianity by comparing God to the ancient Greek and Norse gods. That comparison doesn’t really hold water (as I tried to point out to another interlocutor in an earlier comment thread), because Christianity operates in a fundamentally different way, on a profoundly different basis, than the old pagan religions.

In the ancient world, people believed in religion about the way they believed in magic: you do the ritual the god requires, and you get the results you want. Worship was essentially a form of manipulation; its purpose, as the Old Testament scholar John Oswalt puts it, was “to appease the gods and satisfy any claims they may have on us so that we may use the power of the gods to achieve our own goals.” That’s not the worship God wants. The rituals he had commanded were essentially symbolic; what mattered was the spirit in which they were performed. What he wanted was for his people to give him their lives and hearts so that he could have a true friendship with them.

The problem is, they were taking their cues from the nations around them, and they thought all they needed to do was to do the ritual correctly, and they were fine. That didn’t work because it wasn’t the point at all, and so they complained that God was wearing them out with all his pointless demands. To that, God says, “No, I’m not burdening you, you’re burdening me, because you aren’t really doing this for me at all! You’re doing this for yourself. All you’re giving me is your sins and offenses—and I’m sick to death of them.”

Israel didn’t get it because they’d bought into the idea that worship is just a way to manipulate God—you do the thing, you pull the lever, and you get the treat. They’d bought the idea that our worship is all about us, and what we want, and what we can get out of it. They didn’t understand that worship begins with submission—with laying aside our pride, and our independence, and our own desires, and our own ideas of what we need and what we deserve. They’re not alone; too often, we don’t get it either. This is a universal human problem, because it’s a universal human tendency; it’s just another reflection of the desire to be in control of our own lives that drove our first ancestors into sin to begin with. This is the primal human error, that declares in the smuggest tones Frank Sinatra could possibly manage, “I did it my way.”

This is the reason, I think, that so many atheists really don’t understand Christianity; there are exceptions, of course, but most of the atheists I know or have had dialogues with have an essentially pagan understanding of religion, and don’t get that Christianity doesn’t fit that (or isn’t supposed to, anyway). I don’t blame them for that; all too often, the church in this country doesn’t give them any reason to think otherwise. Having people like Joel Osteen out there on the airwaves certainly doesn’t help. This is fundamentally not a problem with atheism, or with the arguments for atheism, but with Christianity and Christians: we can’t expect atheists to be open to believing in God if we only show them a version of God that isn’t worth believing in.

(Partly excerpted from “No Other Redeemer”)

Why do we never seem to learn?

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Granted, there are certainly individuals who learn from their mistakes—and, just as importantly, from the mistakes of others—and occasionally organizations that do; but if you take human beings as a whole, if you look at the national level and the world level, the record just isn’t good. The Spanish-American philosopher George Santayana is famous for teaching us that those who do not learn from the past are condemned to repeat it; the great British historian Arnold Toynbee is famous for his insight that history is essentially cyclical, the same patterns repeating over and over. What does this tell you? Nothing you didn’t already know, that’s what. To take one example, appeasement worked so well with Hitler in the 1930s that we tried it again with the Soviet Union—for a while—and then we tried it with Iran . . . and we kept trying it with Iran . . . and now we’re trying it even harder with Iran, apparently on the theory that we just haven’t groveled enough to make them play nice.  Meanwhile, the government of Iran just keeps getting crazier and crazier, so you do the math on that one.  But do we learn anything from this? On the evidence, no.This is not, of course, a new phenomenon—not even close. The disinclination to learn lessons we really don’t want to learn is very, very human, and we can always find some way to rationalize that disinclination, some sort of excuse to justify it. The thing is, though, when rationalizations meet reality, what happens? You ever dropped an egg on a hard floor? If you went up to the top of the courthouse building and threw that egg at the road, do you think the extra momentum would help it break through the pavement? No—you’d just get a bigger explosion. When we refuse to learn from what went wrong the last time—when we convince ourselves that this time, it will be different—that’s what we get. Those who do not learn from the past are condemned to repeat it.

7 quick takes, 2/13/09

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7 Quick Takes Friday is hosted by Jen F. over at Conversion Diary; I haven’t participated to this point, but it seemed like a good day for it.

>1<

I love being a pastor, but there are many days I couldn’t rationally tell you why.  Today would be one of those days . . . in fact, this week would be one of those weeks.  Our poor congregation is dealing with multiple major health issues (most of them in key people or families), on top of the economic issues that are hitting everyone, on top of some other issues in particular people’s lives, at the same time as we’re trying to develop a plan to revitalize the congregation and its ministry.  Suffice it to say, things are a bit overwhelming around here just at the moment.

>2<

My hope is that we’re dealing with all these stresses because we’re moving forward in our efforts to revitalize the church—that we’re under deliberate spiritual attack to keep those efforts from bearing fruit.  We want to be faithful to do what Christ calls us to do, and we’re praying that he will work through us to draw people into his kingdom, and to raise up mature, godly followers of Christ; if we’re truly beginning to make progress in that direction, one would expect the enemy to try to nip it in the bud.  So, from an optimistic point of view, this might be evidence that we’re doing things that will ultimately bring new life to our congregation.

>3<

Of course, it isn’t really our effort that will make that happen, if it does.  You’ve no doubt heard it said that “God doesn’t call the qualified, he qualifies the called”; that is, I think, truer in pastoral ministry than in most places, because there’s simply no such thing as being qualified for this job.  As David Hansen put it in his book The Art of Pastoring: Ministry Without All the Answers, being a pastor is impossible—except by the grace of God.  If we’re trying to do this in our own strength, we will fail.  True, there are those who will appear to succeed, because those who have the gifts to build great businesses can do that just as well in the church as on Wall Street; but they won’t be pastors.

>4<

The corollary to that is that we can only pastor well when God’s the one making everything happen.  I sometimes think that pastoral ministry is like the plot of The Phantom Menace.  The remarkable thing about that movie—I don’t say good, just remarkable—is that everything that happens on screen (aside from the emergence of young Anakin Skywalker) is diversion and subplot; the real plot, Palpatine’s deep-laid scheme to seize power, all takes place off screen.  It’s somewhat the same way being a pastor; we put all this effort into sermons, meeting with people, administration, planning, and the like, and all our work is just scaffolding for the Holy Spirit to do his work—and it’s his work that builds the church.

>5<

I respect my friends who are ministers of the gospel of Jesus Christ within the Catholic church, and I understand the logic behind a celibate clergy; but I don’t see how they do it.  Leaving the whole issue of sex all the way aside, I couldn’t survive in pastoral ministry without my wife.  I don’t say that she always gives me exactly the help that I need, and still less that she gives me everything I need; she’s not up to that standard any more than any other human being is.  But she’s an incredible source of strength and support and wisdom and love, and I really couldn’t live this life without her.

>6<

One thing about being a pastor is that it’s taught me a certain new respect for politicians.  That might seem strange, but it goes like this.  I have long been of the school of thought that I wouldn’t trust anyone to be president who actually wanted the office.  Then one day it occurred to me that I could really say the same thing about pastors—I wouldn’t trust anyone to be a pastor who wants the job.  By that I don’t mean that you should only seek to be a pastor if you really don’t want to do it; but someone who’s just doing it because they like the idea and find it appealing either will be fried by it, or will like it for all the wrong reasons and probably be all the wrong kind of success.  The only intelligible reason to be a pastor is because God is calling you to this ministry and you can do no other; it’s the only thing that can make it worthwhile to be a real pastor.

And then it hit me:  our nation needs political leaders, and especially a president, the same way that the church needs pastors; and therefore, it logically follows that God calls people to political life, and ultimately to the presidency.  And if God calls you to run for president, then by cracky, you’d better run—and that can make it worthwhile, when nothing else I can possibly imagine could.

>7<

Which is why, in the end, though I often couldn’t rationally tell you why, I love being a pastor.  The price is high, some days, and some days the return for your efforts seems pretty low; some days, you have to run faster and faster just to stay in the same place, and the hurrier you go, the behinder you get, and that’s just how it is.  But we have this assurance, that this is God’s church, and as solid and forbidding as the gates of Hell often look, they will not prevail against it—and that God has called us to play a particular part in their defeat; and if our part often looks improbable, well, we worship a God who specializes in improbable victories.