this one a bit higher-profile than most because it’s Sarah Palin’s church, Wasilla Bible Church; the fire is estimated to have caused $1 million in damage. There is, of course, already speculation that the arson was political in nature, but as John Hinderaker of Power Line notes, “There are many possible motives, and arsonists don’t necessarily need what would normally be regarded as a motive.” What he doesn’t say but is worth adding is that church burning has been an increasingly common crime in recent years; it’s not at all necessary to explain this arson in political terms. Indeed, even if the church was selected because Gov. Palin attends there, the motive might not have been any sort of animus against her; it might simply be that her high profile attracted the attention of someone who otherwise would have burned a different church. We’ll probably never know one way or the other unless the arsonist is caught, and for now, any speculation is unwarranted; we just need to pray for the leaders and people of Wasilla Bible Church for their recovery from this attack.
Category Archives: Religion and theology
Wise words on pride
Pride is a blossom of ashes—bitter in the mouth, sharp to the nose, stinging to the eyes, and blown away on the first wind from the mountains. Plant no pride, lest you harvest shame.—Proverb of AltiplanoThis proverb (and the whole society of Altiplano) comes from Elizabeth Moon’s novel Once a Hero; Moon’s one of the better writers of military science fiction around, and this is one of her best. I note the irony of posting a proverb from a fictional society so soon after posting the title sequence for a non-existent sitcom, but for all that it was created in the service of a Secondary World (to use Tolkien’s term), it has the ring of old truth, and is well worth remembering.
The root of disorder
If we’re going to deal with life in any truly productive way, we need to begin by facing and accepting the reality that this world is neither what we want it to be nor what it was meant to be, and neither are our lives. It wasn’t always this way. God created the world good, in harmonious order, blessed with everything necessary for life. He made us in his image and gave us the world to manage and care for, to tend and steward for its benefit and our own; he created us for relationship with him, to know him and love him as our Creator and ultimate Father. All he asked of us in return was to accept his authority—to accept that he’s God, and we’re not.That’s why, when the enemy wanted to bring us down, he started where he did. What was the bait he used on Adam and Eve? No, contra Woody Allen, it wasn’t about sex; rather, it was about pride, and the desire to escape that authority. The serpent’s temptation was simple: “Do this and you will be like God. You won’t have to trust him to tell you what’s right and wrong—you’ll be able to decide that for yourselves.” You will be like God. Why was that the first temptation? Because the keystone of the created order was, and is, that God created everything and rules over everything, and all of his creation finds its proper place under his authority. To disobey, to reject his authority, was to break that order and plunge creation into chaos. We cannot find our way out of that chaos on our own, no matter how hard we try, because as long as we’re trying to do it on our own, we’re still contributing to the problem. The only way out is to surrender our desire for autonomy—our desire to be gods of our own lives—and let God lead us.(Excerpted, edited, from “Out of Chaos, Hope”)
God uses waiting
Advent is a season of waiting. It’s about waiting for God’s redemption, for his promised deliverance from the power of sin and death. It’s about learning to wait faithfully and patiently, trusting God to keep his promise; it’s about preparing ourselves to celebrate Christmas by using the time leading up to that celebration to examine our hearts and discipline our impatience. Especially in our broadband microwave instant-oatmeal society, it’s about stepping back from our culture’s emphasis on fasterfasterfaster and learning to slow down, to understand that just because God doesn’t give us what we want rightnow doesn’t mean he isn’t at work; it’s about learning to understand the work he does in our lives while we wait.And it’s about learning to understand the importance of trusting God in the waiting, and for the waiting. The Exodus gives us a great example of that. You may remember the story of how Joseph was sold into slavery in Egypt, and eventually rose to power as the right-hand man of the Pharaoh, the king of that nation; and how in a time of famine, Joseph’s father and brothers and their whole household came down from Israel to live in Egypt. For a long time, this worked out well, and Joseph’s family grew into a large and flourishing tribe, known as the Hebrews; but then a Pharaoh came to power who hated and feared them, and made them slaves as the first step in destroying them. They cried out to him to deliver them, and did he swoop down right away and set them free? No. People were born in slavery and died in slavery. The Pharaoh who first enslaved them died, and his heir took the throne, and their slavery continued. But in the proper time, when everything was right, God acted, and they were set free.And notice who he used: Moses. Though a Hebrew, Moses grew up in the palace as Pharaoh’s grandson; he was a golden boy. On the one hand, he could have settled in to his position as royalty, turned his back on the people from whom he came, and joined the oppressors; certainly many, many people in his position would have done so, given the chance, and many throughout history have. He didn’t do that. On the other hand, if he was going to be the one to free his people from slavery, you might have expected that he’d do that from his position of influence, as one of the heirs of the man who held the reins of power. That didn’t happen either. Instead, Moses’ life went all wrong: he let his anger get the best of him and killed an Egyptian who was beating one of his fellow Hebrews, and ended up having to flee to the desert to avoid being put to death. He had it all, he had the perfect opportunity to do whatever he wanted to do, and instead he ruined the whole thing—or so it must have seemed at the time—and left himself no choice but to run for his life. Sure, his early life had seemed promising, but he’d squandered that promise, and now he’d spent forty years out in the wilderness tending sheep. He was a nobody, a has-been, a footnote to history. He was a sermon illustration in the temples of Egypt on what happens when you lose your temper. That’s all.Except, he still had one thing: he still had faith in God, for whom he had chosen the side of his enslaved people over the side of luxury and privilege to begin with. He spent those forty years in the desert waiting, and maybe he still had ambitions or maybe he figured that he’d be a shepherd in the wilderness for the rest of his life, but he never stopped believing that God would be faithful to set his people free from their slavery in Egypt; and so when the time was right, God came to him and said, “Moses, I’ve chosen you to go tell Pharaoh to let my people go.” To be sure, Moses argued with him, but in the end, he went and told Pharaoh to let his people go; and in the end, Pharaoh didn’t really, but God delivered them anyhow, with Moses leading the way.There’s an important lesson in this, I think: when we’re waiting for God’s deliverance—from whatever we might need him to deliver us from—our waiting isn’t wasted time, and it isn’t unnecessary. It’s God preparing the ground, and preparing us—not only for our own deliverance, but to be his agent of deliverance for others as well. This is how he works, in this time between the times, when Jesus has come to begin the reign of God on earth but not returned to complete that work; he has left us in place here as his body, the body of Christ, his hands and feet through whom he works to carry on his ministry. What God is doing in us and for us isn’t just about us; as we wait for the answers to our prayers, he’s lining things up to answer them in the proper time, but he’s also preparing us to be the answer to other people’s prayers. We wait, not only for God to deliver us, but for him to work through us to deliver others; and even the waiting is part of his work.(Excerpted, edited, from “Deliverance”)
Further thought on Islam and Christianity
Whenever Christians start arguing about Islam, it always seems to come down to assertions as to whether or not Christians and Muslims “worship the same God.” Broadly speaking, liberals will assert that we do, and conservatives will assert that we don’t, with the sides pointing to different Scripture passages and historical facts to make their case.Every time this happens, I have the same question: what on earth does that statement mean, anyway? From the typical Christian point of view, there only is one God, and the question is how truly or faithfully or properly one worships this God; there simply aren’t any other deities out there. With that in mind, granted that Muslims are seeking to worship the one true God rather than something of this world, we might say that the real question is whether they’re doing so in a way which God finds acceptable.That said, one might say that the Muslim and Christian conceptions of God are so different as to be mutually exclusive, which seems to me to be a perfectly reasonable conclusion. All that proves, however, is that they’re different religions—which is to say, it doesn’t tell us anything we didn’t already know (since I don’t think anyone’s under the illusion that Islam is merely one among many Christian denominations). For the statement that “Muslims and Christians worship the same God” (or “don’t worship the same God”) to be in any way meaningful, it has to say more than that; it has to be a statement about the relationship between the two religions. Maybe it’s intended to be; but if so, what is it intended to mean? I’ve honestly never been able to figure that out. As far as I can tell, it’s just an unhelpful bit of rhetoric deployed not to convey real meaning, but merely for emotional effect; and if that’s all it is, it would be better to drop it from the conversation.
Holy dread
I live with the dread of tame, domesticated Christianity. I fear for my students that they will chase after what they want—and therefore miss what God wants.—Dr. Howard HendricksWhat a remarkable statement. My thanks to the Rev. Dr. Ray Ortlund for posting this. It is, I think, far too rare a realization that missing out on what God wants for us is a far greater loss, and far more to be feared, than missing out on what we want. As C. S. Lewis said in perhaps his greatest single work, “The Weight of Glory,”
Indeed, if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires, not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.
May God deepen and strengthen our desires, and expand our vision.
Why we need Christ coming
Joseph Bottum again, from his powerful piece “Christmas in New York”:
It’s not my fault—the cry we’ve made every day since Adam took the apple. Down somewhere in the belly, there’s an awareness of just how wrong the world is, how fallen and broken and incomplete. This is the guilty knowledge, the failure of innocence, against which we snarl and rage: That’s just the way things are; there’s nothing I can do; I wasn’t the one who started the fight; it’s not my fault. What would genuine innocence look like if it ever came into the world? I know the answer my faith calls me to believe: like a child born in a cattle shed. But to understand why that is an answer, to see it clearly, we are also compelled to know our guilt for the world, to feel it all the way to the bottom.
Reader’s guide: posts on grace
A few weeks ago, I wrote that “The developing center of this blog, I think, is a core of reflections on the interrelationship between Christian theology and praxis and American politics.” That said, there are other major themes running through these posts as well; of those, surely the most important thing I think and write about is the grace of God, and why it’s so hard for us to live by.
Umm, what was that about grace?
One of the biggest mistakes we can make is to forget the difference between grace and justice, and start to imagine that we have earned God’s favor.
1 Timothy and the misdirected conscience of the West
The word “gospel” means “good news,” and the gospel of grace truly is good news . . . but we often don’t receive it as good news, because it isn’t what we want to hear
.The Christian discipline of forgiveness
Forgiveness, repentance, and the Gordian knot
We not only need to receive grace, we need to give it—for our own sake as well as for others’.
Justice and mercy
A thought on the relationship between the two.
The lust of the world, the grace of God, and the heart of the church
Why do we keep sliding into legalism? Because legalistic religion lets us take the credit.
The crucial challenge of living by grace
The key to living by grace is gratitude to God.
The cost of grace
On grace as God’s free gift, and why it isn’t cheap.
No matter how far you run, the Father’s heart goes farther
We’re all prodigals in need of grace—and we’re all offered it, whether we want it or not.
The cost of grace
A week or so ago, I posted a quote from Dan Allender:
The cost for the recipient of God’s grace is nothing—and no price could be higher for arrogant people to pay.
Bill over at The Thinklings picked that up and posted it there as well, being kind enough to tip the hat to me; in so doing, he sparked a bit of an objection from Joseph D. Walch, whom Thinklings readers will recognize as the site’s resident Mormon commentator. His concern, as it seems to me, was that Dr. Allender’s quote promotes cheap grace; but though his concern is laudable, I think he misunderstood the quote. Walch wrote,
I do believe there is one (and only one) thing that we can offer God that is truely our own: our will (as C.S. Lewis has so beautifully and repeatedly illustrated). Release man from indebtedness to God by saying we owe God nothing; and Man will find other gods ‘worthy’ of his time.
He’s right, but he’s also talking past Dr. Allender here, I think. The point of Dr. Allender’s quote, it seems to me, is that it’s impossible to earn God’s grace, because we cannot do enough or be good enough to merit God’s approval. This is the truth which is so bitterly hard for the arrogant to accept, that we have nothing to be arrogant about. This is the sense in which grace is absolutely and utterly free.
The distinction between cheap grace and costly grace, drawn so well by Dietrich Bonhöffer, deals with what you might call the other side of salvation: not how we’re saved, but what our salvation means for how we are to live (in technical terms, not justification but sanctification). The latter aspect, I think, is what Walch is concerned about here. The key is, though, that to say that grace is a free gift which we can do nothing to earn is not to say anything about whether we owe God anything in return. Indeed, I think it underscores what we do owe God, which is a debt universally acknowledged to anyone who sincerely gives a gift: gratitude to the giver appropriate to the gift (remembering always that “it’s the thought that counts”). What Bonhöffer calls cheap grace is, I believe, a matter of insufficient gratitude—of gratitude which doesn’t understand (or care about) the magnitude and meaning of the gift God has given us. When once we begin to understand, dimly, how great that gift is, and how much reason we have to give thanks, we end up in the same place as Isaac Watts:
But drops of grief can ne’er repay the debt of love I owe;
Here, Lord, I give myself away—’tis all that I can do.
In this sense, as Bonhöffer says, grace is costly indeed; but this doesn’t contradict Allender’s point. If anything, it reinforces it. The greatest cost of grace is the cost to our ego of accepting that it’s free.