The god that is failing

Posted on 18 April 201618 April 2016 by Rob Harrison | No Comments

The above image is a screenshot of an article from io9.com. Yes, the title is completely accurate. John Bohannon writes,

My colleagues and I recruited actual human subjects in Germany. We ran an actual clinical trial, with subjects randomly assigned to different diet regimes. And the statistically significant benefits of chocolate that we reported are based on the actual data. It was, in fact, a fairly typical study for the field of diet research. Which is to say: It was terrible science. The results are meaningless, and the health claims that the media blasted out to millions of people around the world are utterly unfounded.

At first glance, to the non-scientist, Bohannon’s assertion may seem very strange.

I know what you’re thinking. The study did show accelerated weight loss in the chocolate group—shouldn’t we trust it? Isn’t that how science works?

That’s certainly how modern education has taught us to think. The problem is, you can’t trust the results of a study if you only know the results. You need to be able to see the process. We might call this the Weasley Principle, following the words of J. K. Rowling’s character Arthur Weasley: “Never trust anything that can think for itself if you can’t see where it keeps its brain!” It’s quite easy to get whatever result you’re hoping to get if you let your results influence your process. Read more→

The freedom of facing our sin

Posted on 11 April 201617 April 2016 by Rob Harrison | 1 Comment

I have thought for some time that one of the greatest problems in the church in America is that our knowledge and understanding of ourselves as sinners is largely theoretical and abstract—and I’m not talking about the liberal wing of the church when I say this. (Not primarily, anyway.) We airily acknowledge that of course we’re all sinners, and each of us is willing to admit that he is a sinner or she is a sinner in some generic sense—but try to get most churchgoers to accept that they are specific sinners, that they are guilty of various behaviors and heart attitudes which merit the wrath of God and are deserving of his judgment, and you find out very quickly what it feels like to hit a stone wall at a hundred miles an hour.

As a consequence, our understanding of the grace of God and our need for grace is equally abstract and theoretical. We may agree that we have a generic need for generic grace, but that doesn’t often penetrate to the reality of the sin in our hearts. For ourselves, this goes one of two ways. On the one hand, we minimize our sin: it’s not that big a deal, God can’t really be all that bothered by it, and what right does that person over there have to get so upset? We brush it under the rug, where it can grow happily without interference and rot out our floorboards. On the other, we maximize it: if anyone knew, they could never forgive me, and God can’t possibly really forgive me either. Our prayers become desperate pleas to God to just give us more time or more help so that we can stop doing these things before he judges us in his wrath and utterly crushes us. We set our sin up like a statue in the middle of everything where it can dominate our thinking; we can never get free of it and move past it because we’ve identified it as the central reality of our lives.

Either way, our functional expectation is that we can’t, or perhaps shouldn’t have to, live by grace. Grace is for “salvation,” which we implicitly understand as simply a “get out of Hell free” card; for normal life, our pattern of living by law remains largely unchallenged and unquestioned. If we’re guilty of sin, we deserve to be condemned for it; therefore, either we accept that we’re guilty and heap condemnation on ourselves, or else we reject condemnation by insisting that we’re not really guilty in any important way.

Seeing the darkness

Posted on 8 February 20168 February 2016 by Rob Harrison | No Comments

Brother, if any man thinks ill of you, do not be angry with him; for you are worse than he thinks you to be. If he charges you falsely on some point, yet be satisfied, for if he knew you better he might change the accusation, and you would be no gainer by the correction. If you have your moral portrait painted, and it is ugly, be satisfied; for it only needs a few blacker touches, and it would be still nearer the truth.

—Charles Haddon Spurgeon

If the fear of the Lord is the beginning of both knowledge and wisdom, Spurgeon’s insight is the beginning of the fear of the Lord. This is in part because it’s the beginning of self-realism, and thus clears the decks for true knowledge of ourselves, and thus for true knowledge of God. Read more→

Song of the Week

Posted on 6 February 20166 February 2016 by Rob Harrison | No Comments

This is one of my favorites from Van Morrison. The video below, though, is of Phil Keaggy performing this song at Creation in 1992; yes, it’s a cover rather than the original, but I love Keaggy’s guitar work on this one.

When Will I Ever Learn to Live in God?

The sun was setting over Avalon
The last time we stood in the west.
Suffering long time angels enraptured by Blake
Burn out the dross, innocence captured again.

Standing on the beach at sunset,
All the boats keep moving slow
In the glory of the flashing light,
In the evening’s glow.

Chorus
When will I ever learn to live in God?
When will I ever learn?
He gives me everything I need and more
When will I ever learn?

You brought it to my attention that everything was made in God.
Down through centuries of great writings and paintings,
Everything lives in God,
Seen through architecture of great cathedrals
Down through the history of time,
Is and was in the beginning and evermore shall be.

Chorus

Whatever it takes to fulfill his mission,
That is the way we must go;
But you’ve got to do it in your own way:
Tear down the old, bring up the new.

And up on the hillside it’s quiet,
Where the shepherd is tending his sheep.
And over the mountains and the valleys,
The countryside is so green.
Standing on the highest hill with a sense of wonder,
You can see everything is made in God.
Head back down the roadside and give thanks for it all.

Chorus out

Words and music: Van Morrison
© 1989 Barrule UK Ltd.
From the album Avalon Sunset

God will not be without a witness

Posted on 2 February 20162 February 2016 by Rob Harrison | No Comments

. . . no matter how hard the world might try to make it so.

Muslims are coming to Christ in amazing and mysterious ways. Men and women have met Christ in a dream or vision. Many others read the Qur’an in their own language for the first time (they memorize the Qur’an in Arabic) and realized they were lost. When they turned to the New Testament and learned more about Jesus they decided to give their lives to Christ.

In spite of growing persecution against Christians and major challenges converts face, there is a growing movement of Muslims turning to Christ. Missionary David Garrison stated, “We are living in the midst of the greatest turning of Muslims to Christ in history.”

I’ve been hearing these stories for a decade now, more and more frequently as the years have gone on. There are some astounding stories related to visions of Jesus, including healings and people being raised from the dead. Where his church cannot go, he still can.

On naming the barbarians at the gates: A response to Mark Sandlin, Part I

Posted on 1 February 201615 April 2016 by Rob Harrison | 1 Comment

In my nine years pastoring in the PC(USA), I never ran across Mark Sandlin. I don’t just mean that I never met him, which is entirely unsurprising; it’s a big denomination, he pastors down South, and I never did. I also mean that for all the conversations/debates I got into online across various websites, I never noticed his name. (As far as I remember, anyway.) Apparently, though, he’s something of a big wheel in the liberal wing of the American church, and this week my amazing wife called my attention to a column of his which asks a provocative question:

At what point do we get to say parts of Christianity are no longer Christian?

Sandlin opens with a brief YouTube clip of a preacher bragging about leading a teenaged boy to the Lord by punching him in the chest. I don’t feel any need to repost the video; my own theology is sufficiently expressed by saying that whatever Lord this guy led that kid to, it isn’t one I know. Sandlin acknowledges that this guy is an outlier, but nevertheless takes him as the jumping-off point for his column. I think this piece deserves some careful interaction, and so I intend to respond to it in several parts; as you can probably guess, I have some critical things to say, but it seems right and proper to begin with some positive comments.

Addition to the sidebar

Posted on 29 January 201629 January 2016 by Rob Harrison | 1 Comment

A comment from my friend Kaleb Marshall prompted me to add a new site to the sidebar: Spiritual Friendship. I first discovered this group blog some time ago through the work of Wesley Hill, who’s one of the editors. Here’s how the blog’s other editor, Ron Belgau, summarizes its thematic center:

Reading Aelred of Rievaulx’s little treatise On Spiritual Friendship as an undergraduate was a life-changing experience for me. Aelred, a 12th-century Cistercian abbot, insists that we need to test our beliefs about friendship with Scripture. The treatise is a series of dialogues in which three monks join Aelred to examine their ideas about friendship in light of their Christian faith.

One of Aelred’s insights made a big impact on me. He points out that friendship is based on shared goals, and distinguishes between different kinds of friendship: carnal friendship, based on shared pursuit of pleasure; worldly friendship, based on mutual advantage; and spiritual friendship, grounded in shared discipleship.

The dialogues helped me to see that although Christian discipleship is costly, it need not be lonely. Our culture has become very fixated on sex, but sex and romance are not the same as love. Nor is Christian love the same as the kind of casual friendship that is common in our culture (Facebook informs me that I currently have 554 “friends”).

Aelred insists that, contrary to the transitory nature of so many contemporary friendships, a friend in Christ “loves always” (Proverbs 17:17). He and the other monks discuss how to select and cultivate lasting and Christ-centered friendships.

Growing up as a gay teenager, the only messages I heard from the church were negative. Most in our culture—including many Christians—uphold romantic and sexual love as the most important form of love. But God forbade the sexual and romantic love I desired. Was I just to be left out in the cold?

Aelred helped me to see that obedience to Christ offered more to me than just the denial of sex and romance. Christ-centered chaste friendships offered a positive and fulfilling—albeit at times challenging—path to holiness.

As Kaleb noted to me, the question “What should a same-sex attracted Christian do?” is a perfectly fair one to address to those who believe that sexual activity between two people of the same sex is intrinsically against God’s will, but it’s one which tends to be met with blunt-force answers that treat people as abstractions rather than as individuals. Hill, Belgau, and their co-laborers for the gospel answer that question better than anyone else I’ve seen, from the inside.

Enter the Carnival Sage

Posted on 27 January 201630 January 2016 by Rob Harrison | No Comments

The above image is a detail of a painting (oil on wood) by Don Swartzentruber, one of the art teachers at the high school here in town (and also, I believe, an adjunct art professor at Grace College). Don has an interesting side project going on, to which I’ve been meaning to link. He calls it the Carnival Sage project, and as best as I can summarize it, the idea is to use visual storytelling to explore various issues and prompt discussion which goes beyond (or around) the reflexive commentary that fills so much of our media. Check out the Facebook page and see what you think.

“God made me this way”? Not exactly [REPOST]

Posted on 26 January 201626 January 2016 by Rob Harrison | No Comments

(The original of this post is from 2009. I need to get back to blogging the Heidelberg soon.)

Heidelberg Catechism
Q & A 6
Q. Did God create people so wicked and perverse?

A. No.
God created them good¹ and in his own image,²
that is, in true righteousness and holiness,³
so that they might
truly know God their creator,⁴
love him with all their heart,
and live with him in eternal happiness
for his praise and glory.⁵

Note: mouse over footnote for Scripture references.

There’s a real tendency these days to appeal to genetics to explain behavior—and increasingly, to excuse behavior, as action is reframed as identity. The church can’t appeal to the word of God with regard to homosexual activity without someone (usually a good many someones) standing up and saying, “God made me this way, and therefore this is how I’m supposed to be, and therefore God can’t really have meant that.” Unfortunately, the steady repetition of that assertion has convinced a lot of folks (especially younger folks) who consider themselves evangelicals that it must be true. That has done considerable damage to the authority of Scripture in the American evangelical church.

I have no interest in the debate over whether or not or to what degree homosexual desires are a matter of genetics. To be blunt, I consider the whole question a red herring. We recognize this when it comes to other issues. From the studies I’ve seen, the heritability of alcoholism is about the same as the heritability of homosexual preferences, but nobody uses that as a defense for driving drunk. Certain cancers, we well know, come to us through our genes, yet we don’t tell cancer patients, “God made you this way, so he must want you to die of cancer.” (The federal government might, if Obamacare passes, but that’s another matter.) It would be quite consistent to label same-sex erotic desires just another inherited disease—but we don’t do that. This makes it clear that it’s not the genetic element that’s driving the argument, it’s the affective element. It’s the fact that those who practice such behaviors don’t want to give them up.

Since the appeal to genetics has been effective (whether logical or not), we can expect to see it raised as a defense for other behaviors as well. In time, it will become impossible for the church to call people to holiness without hearing, “God made me this way!” As such, it’s important to remind Christians that the Scriptures give the church a firm answer to this, to which the Heidelberg bears witness: No, he didn’t. We are all sinners, we are all bent to defy the will of God and to prefer evil to good in at least some areas of our lives, and all of our natural tendencies, preferences, orientations and desires arise out of sin-distorted hearts—but God didn’t make us that way. God created us good, in his own image. Our sinful desires are someone else’s fault altogether.

Just because something is natural to us doesn’t make it right. Just because we inherited it along with our hair and eye color doesn’t mean that God approves of it. All it means is that we’re born sinful—just like everybody else.

What do we mean by “the same God”?

Posted on 25 January 201625 January 2016 by Rob Harrison | No Comments

With the recent flap at Wheaton over Larycia Hawkins, we have yet another round of argument over whether or not Christians and Muslims worship the same God. This frustrates me, because there’s an obvious question that no one ever thinks to address in these disputes:

What the heck is that supposed to mean?

From a Christian point of view, there is only one God, for starters—a point on which Muslims would agree. Both faiths understand themselves to be worshiping the singular Creator of everything that is, who is the rightful Lord of all creation. There aren’t any other gods (let alone “Gods”) lying around whom we could be worshiping. It isn’t as if Muslims were worshiping Ahura Mazda, Nyame, Odin, Zeus, Vishnu, Marduk, Xhuuya, Ba’al, or Set. It seems to me the question we ought to be asking is, “Who is worshiping God in spirit and in truth?”

I’m not quite as alone in this as I thought, however. In response to Dr. Hawkins’ assertion that Muslims and Christians worship the same God, John Stackhouse responded,

I frankly don’t know what she meant by that.