Category Archives: Religion and theology

Ephesians 5:18-23

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Don’t get drunk on wine, which leads to dissipation

          but

be filled up by the Spirit

    • addressing each other with psalms and hymns and spiritual songs
    • singing and playing to the Lord with all your heart
    • giving thanks always for everything
      • to God the Father
      • in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ
    • submitting to one another in reverence for Christ
      • wives to husbands as to the Lord

                  because

        • the husband is the head of the wife

                  just as

      • Christ is the head of the church
        • being himself the Savior of the body

(This is my own rendering of this passage, laid out in such a way as to show the development of this one, long, classically Pauline run-on sentence. Most English translations chop the sentence up; in particular, they chop it at verse 22 and insert a heading on the order of “Wives and Husbands,” making it appear that Paul is ending one section and starting a whole new thought. In actual fact, he’s still in mid-flight—verse 22 doesn’t even contain a participle, let alone an imperative verb.)

The tree of liberty is rooted in the soil of the gospel

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As Calvin Coolidge put it, in a remarkable speech delivered on the 150th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence,

No one can examine this record and escape the conclusion that in the great outline of its principles the Declaration was the result of the religious teachings of the preceding period. The profound philosophy which Jonathan Edwards applied to theology, the popular preaching of George Whitefield, had aroused the thought and stirred the people of the Colonies in preparation for this great event. No doubt the speculations which had been going on in England, and especially on the Continent, lent their influence to the general sentiment of the times. Of course, the world is always influenced by all the experience and all the thought of the past. But when we come to a contemplation of the immediate conception of the principles of human relationship which went into the Declaration of Independence we are not required to extend our search beyond our own shores. They are found in the texts, the sermons, and the writings of the early colonial clergy who were earnestly undertaking to instruct their congregations in the great mystery of how to live. They preached equality because they believed in the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man. They justified freedom by the text that we are all created in the divine image, all partakers of the divine spirit. . . .

If this apprehension of the facts be correct, and the documentary evidence would appear to verify it, then certain conclusions are bound to follow. A spring will cease to flow if its source be dried up; a tree will wither if it roots be destroyed. In its main features the Declaration of Independence is a great spiritual document. It is a declaration not of material but of spiritual conceptions. Equality, liberty, popular sovereignty, the rights of man—these are not elements which we can see and touch. They are ideals. They have their source and their roots in the religious convictions. They belong to the unseen world. Unless the faith of the American people in these religious convictions is to endure, the principles of our Declaration will perish. We can not continue to enjoy the result if we neglect and abandon the cause.

The cost of saying, “Peace, peace” when there is no peace

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From a great post by Ray Ortlund, “‘One anothers’ I can’t find in the New Testament”:

Humble one another, scrutinize one another, pressure one another, embarrass one another, corner one another, interrupt one another, defeat one another, disapprove of one another, run one another’s lives, confess one another’s sins, intensify one another’s sufferings, point out one another’s failings . . . .

In a soft environment, where we settle for a false peace with present evils, we turn on one another. In a realistic environment, where we are suffering to advance the gospel, our thoughts turn to how we can stick up for one another.

It’s a great list, very true and very much on point; but I think that second paragraph is even more important: when we make peace with the real enemy, when we refuse to confront (or even decide to accommodate) the evils of our day, we end up treating each other as the enemy instead. We cannot have gospel unity if we have sold out gospel clarity.

Criminalizing evangelism?

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You’ve probably heard about the Christians who were arrested last Friday night in Dearborn, MI and charged with disorderly conduct for attempting to give people copies of an English/Arabic Gospel of John outside the Arab International Festival. If not, here’s the video they took (though I’m not sure how, since their cameras were confiscated):

If you want to see a Muslim response to this, Allahpundit posted one, along with the above video; having watched it, I’d have to say he’s being exceedingly generous in calling that attempt at a response “singularly lame,” since it’s a collection of repeated assertions supported by non sequiturs and a brief video clip of dubious provenance and import.

I have to say, I have two reactions to this. On the one hand, from a constitutional point of view, I find this very troubling; while I certainly don’t support the “separation of church and state” read as government-mandated secularism, I’m also no believer in theocratic government—and in particular, the idea of agents of government aiding and abetting the de facto imposition of shari’a law in an American community is deeply problematic. Muslims are as welcome in America as anyone else—and they have to play by the rules, same as anyone else, that’s the deal. Our history has well established that “separate but equal” isn’t, that different rules for different groups is wrong, no matter the reason; Muslims have no more right to be insulated from the discord, dissent, and disagreement of a democratic society than anyone else. If they’re going to argue that their faith demands otherwise—well, in that case, we have a problem.

Considered as a case of Christian witness, though, I find this video very troubling in a different way. Though the professed purpose of the folks who made it is to share the gospel with Muslims, nothing about their actions actually seems to support that purpose aside from their copies of the Gospel of John. Rather, their actions in this case seem designed to test the Dearborn police; I’m not sure it’s necessarily fair to say they were trying to provoke a confrontation, but it certainly looks like they were trying to see if they would get one, and indeed that they were expecting to. From their comments during the video, and especially from the final section complaining about all the intersections where they aren’t allowed to hand out copies of the Gospel, it sure sounds like their real concern is not bearing gospel witness to Muslims, but the infringement on their constitutional rights.

Which I don’t deny, either as a real issue or as a fair complaint; as I say, I think there’s reason for real concern here. If in fact we’re starting to see Muslim communities in this country effectively seceding from the larger political and social structure, as many European countries have seen, that’s bad news. But it does make the whole thing more than a little disingenuous, in my judgment. It makes this supposed attempt at evangelism look like, not a true expression of Christian discipleship and witness, but a calculated attempt to use Christian practices to make a political statement—and that, as someone has said, is a kettle of fish of a different color.

The truth is that the life of Christian discipleship isn’t based on rights; as I’ve said elsewhere, in the Bible, “right” isn’t a noun, it’s an adjective. Christian doctrine certainly provided and provides the foundation and root for the political concept of human rights, and in its political implications, it requires us to stand up and defend the rights of others; but our contemporary insistence on standing on our own rights and insisting on our own rights against others is nowhere to be found in Scripture, and especially not in the example of Jesus. I can’t presume to judge the hearts of David Wood and the folks with him in that video, but from what I can see of his judgment, it’s pretty poor, and it looks to me like their priorities are out of whack.

In my judgment, what the folks in that video are actually advocating and bearing witness to is not the gospel, regardless of the texts they were holding; they showed none of the humility or willingness to meekly accept suffering for the gospel which Paul holds up as essential in Philippians 2, and most of what they had to say was about themselves. Rather, they were to all intents and purposes serving as advocates and defenders of a particular political and cultural position. In that role, it appears to me they succeeded, judging by the e-mails and blog posts I’ve seen. As evangelists . . . well, God moves in a mysterious way his wonders to perform (just read the book of Jonah), and I’m not going to say what his Holy Spirit can and can’t use—but the whole affair seems a lot more likely to turn the hearts of Muslims against Christianity than toward Christ. And shouldn’t that really be the bottom line?

On liking Jesus and building the church

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A church sign I passed today has up what I would guess is the title of this coming Sunday’s sermon: “They Like Jesus but Not the Church.” Of course, I know that isn’t original, but comes from Dan Kimball’s book of the same title, but it got me thinking. Taken purely as a cultural observation, that would seem to be hard to argue—there are indeed a great many people who like Jesus but don’t like his church at all, and there are certainly churches out there that make it easy to understand why. No question, the American church needs to do a better job in a number of ways at living out the gospel and representing Jesus to the world, starting with actually being committed to living out the gospel and representing Jesus to the world, instead of all the other junk we so often get on about instead.

But stop a minute. If we were truly a Christ-centered gospel-driven Spirit-actuated community of committed believers who hungered and thirsted for righteousness, would that mean that “they,” whoever “they” are, would like the church and we would all feel nicely validated? The thing about Kimball’s title, which our neighboring church pastor borrowed for his sermon, is that most people don’t seem to take it or offer it as merely an observation, but rather as a criticism—that if we just did this church thing right, whatever “right” is supposed to look like, that “they” would like us. The underlying assumption here is, I think, that it’s perfectly reasonable that the world around us should like Jesus, and that if we were just more like Jesus, the world would like us too, our churches would grow, and we would be more “successful.”

It’s a widespread assumption, in part because it’s a very comfortable one for an American church that, by and large, still hasn’t realized that Christendom is dead, has been given its eulogy, and is now feeling the thumps of the gravediggers’ shovels; but there are voices that demur. Above all, there is this one:

“Blessed are you when people hate you and when they exclude you and revile you and spurn your name as evil, on account of the Son of Man! Rejoice in that day, and leap for joy, for behold, your reward is great in heaven; for so their fathers did to the prophets. . . . Woe to you, when all people speak well of you, for so their fathers did to the false prophets.”

—Luke 6:22-23, 26 (ESV)

“If the world hates you, know that it has hated me before it hated you. If you were of the world, the world would love you as its own; but because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you. Remember the word that I said to you: ‘A servant is not greater than his master.’ If they persecuted me, they will also persecute you. If they kept my word, they will also keep yours. But all these things they will do to you on account of my name, because they do not know him who sent me.”

—John 15:18-21 (ESV)

“The hour is coming when whoever kills you will think he is offering service to God.
And they will do these things because they have not known the Father, nor me.
But I have said these things to you, that when their hour comes you may remember
that I told them to you.”

—John 16:2b-4 (ESV)

Of course, if “they” hate you, maybe they hate you because you’re shining the light of the gospel into the darkness of their hearts, and maybe they hate you because you’re a jerk; that phrase “on account of the Son of Man” is not one we can interpret however we please. But there’s a very important question here: if people outside the church like Jesus, is that actually an opportunity, or a sign they don’t really know him? As Jared Wilson has memorably pointed out, there are a great many counterfeit Jesuses floating around our culture, all of them very likeable; just pick your favorite and go with it. The real Jesus, by contrast, ticked so many people off so badly, he ended up crucified. To the extent that people like Jesus but not the church, it may just be that both halves of that statement are unfortunate.

The bottom line here is that the American church is, with very few exceptions, deeply culturally embedded, and its self-understanding is incorrigibly capitalist and consumerist; even those congregations which don’t consciously operate in terms of “market share” and “customer satisfaction” still think of themselves in these sorts of customer-response categories. There is the pervasive subliminal assumption that we can and should measure success by whether or not our customers are happy, whether or not they come back, and whether or not they draw in new customers. Of course we want them to like us—if they don’t, we’ll go out of business, and that would be failure, and is to be avoided if at all possible. And of course they like Jesus—after all, we like Jesus, and he wouldn’t have built such a big and successful brand if he weren’t likeable, would he?

It’s a hard thing to change this sort of mindset. It has to start, I believe, with the recognition that often, the main reason we like Jesus is that we’ve picked out the parts of him that we find congenial and are working determinedly to ignore the rest; we aren’t letting him confront the idolatries of our hearts, or the cultural idolatries in which we’re enmeshed, or the areas in which we indulge sin in our lives as a comfortable old friend. I think it was Stanley Hauerwas who said, commenting on Jesus’ command to us to love our enemies, that the greatest of all the enemies Jesus calls us to love is God—that if we truly take him seriously as Lord and God, he will often seem like an enemy to us as he challenges, rebukes, corrects and disciplines us, working to prune away the diseased, rotten, and overgrown areas in our souls . . . and as he prunes us, he calls us to the incomprehensible spiritual discipline of loving and praising him for the pain and suffering he’s causing us.

Our message to the world is not supposed to be, and cannot be with any integrity, “Come to Jesus and get what you want”; sometimes it seems like it’s just the opposite. We worship a Lord who traded success for failure, a home for homelessness, a good job for unemployment, social approval for the scorn of the elites, and ultimately life for death—how on earth can we present him accurately to a world to which none of this makes any sense at all and expect them to applaud? If you want success in the world’s eyes, according to its categories (building, attendance, budget, media profile, etc.), the very idea is nuts; clearly, you can’t grow a church that way. And indeed, you can’t. But then, you can’t grow anything that’s truly a church any way, and neither can I, and neither can anyone else. Only God can, and this is how he is pleased to do it.

For the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. For it is written,

“I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart.”

Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe. For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men.

For consider your calling, brothers: not many of you were wise according to worldly standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are, so that no human being might boast in the presence of God. And because of him you are in Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God, righteousness and sanctification and redemption, so that,
as it is written,
“Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord.”

—1 Corinthians 1:18-31 (ESV)

If our goal is to get people to like Jesus and like us, we’ve gotten both halves of it wrong. That is not the rock on which he said he would build his church, but the shifting sand against which he warned. We can’t judge what we’re doing based on results, because we can’t assume that the results we want are the ones Jesus wants to produce in us. All we can do is proclaim the gospel of grace and seek to live by grace in a manner according to the holiness of God—and if the world looks at that and tells us we’re crazy, and that maybe they don’t like Jesus either, well, results aren’t our business, they’re God’s. Ours is to be faithful and let him take care of the rest.

A thought on the Trinity

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In the course of preparing a sermon I did the other week on the Trinity, I was going through all the usual images and analogies people use to try to illustrate or explain it (a group which runs all the way from bad to incipiently heretical) when I ran across one I’d never heard before that actually has something to recommend it. Believe it or not, there are those who argue that the structure of our government was influenced by trinitarian theology. As history, I don’t know what to make of that—it’s an interesting idea, but I haven’t seen any primary sources that support it—but as an analogy, it has its points. There is a certain hierarchy and structure to our branches of government, but none of them are dominant; each does different things; and the relationship between them constitutes our government and makes things happen. Thus, for instance, laws are passed by the legislative branch, executed and administered by the executive branch, and enforced by the judicial branch.

Of course, like any analogy, this one has its dangers (including the temptation to snipe about the tendency of government to think it’s God) and its limits: God is unlimited and perfect, while our government is limited and imperfect (though it occasionally forgets the fact) because it’s composed of limited and imperfect people. It also, however, has this advantage, that it points us to one reason why the doctrine of the Trinity matters. The structure of our government is intrinsically relational—each branch acts on the others and is acted on in turn, and it’s those actions and relationships that actually constitute the workings of our government.

Unlike the Trinity, of course, no one would ever describe the interrelationships of the three branches as a dance, but like I said, every analogy has its limits. It remains clear even so that our government is fundamentally different from what one might call a unitarian government (such as a monarchy or dictatorship)—it’s not just a different version of the same thing, but something truly different in kind. In the same way, the Triune God is profoundly different in being from any unitarian god we might imagine, and that difference is of fundamental importance.

Jesus didn’t come to save your agenda

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I have learned in whatever situation I am to be content. I know how to be brought low, and I know how to abound. In any and every circumstance, I have learned the secret of facing plenty and hunger, abundance and need. I can do all things through him who strengthens me.

—Philippians 4:11b-13 (ESV)

What we tend to miss when we take just that last verse, just that last sentence, out of context is that “I can do all things” does not mean “Jesus will help me do whatever I want.” The promises of God are not promises for our worldly success, they are promises that he is just as much in control and just as much sustaining us for our good in times of disaster and pain as in times of wealth and health. As Jared Wilson sums it up in a great post titled “Kill Your Jesus Talisman,”

Jesus is no talisman. Crucify “Jesus as key to your personal achievement” and he will stay dead. But the real Jesus achieves a victory greater and far superior to any wish-dream of any man. He is life itself, and life eternal. Worship that Jesus.

In uncertain times, worship

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Yesterday, William Jacobson wrote,

Decades from now, we will look back on this time period as the bad old days. I hope.

Because if these are the good old days, we are in deep trouble.

I don’t disagree with him; as is probably clear from recent posts, I have a deep feeling of foreboding about the current state of our nation and the world. At the same time, though, I am being reminded day by day that that’s only half the picture. When it seems like the world is coming apart, it’s important to remember that’s nothing new—and that as Christians, our hope is not in this world. As Ray Ortlund brilliantly says,

This life we live is not life. This life is a living death. This whole world is ruins brilliantly disguised as elegance. Christ alone is life. Christ has come, bringing his life into the wreckage called us. He has opened up, even in these ruins, the frontier of a new world where grace reigns. He is not on a mission to help us improve our lives here. He is on a mission to create a new universe, where grace reigns in life. He is that massive, that majestic, that decisive, that critical and towering and triumphant.

We don’t “apply this to our lives.” It’s too big for that. But we worship him. And we boast in the hope of living forever with him in his new death-free world of grace.

Yes, we need to care about the troubles of this world, because God is at work in and through them—including in and through us. But as Christians, we don’t begin there. We begin by remembering that we are not first and foremost people of this world, but people of the risen King; and so, properly, we begin with worship. The rest will follow, as God leads and empowers, if we keep our eyes firmly fixed on him, and our focus firmly set on following Christ.

A deeply troubling development on the world scene

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is the accelerating pivot of Turkey from an ally of the West into the Islamist camp. It shouldn’t have been surprising, I suppose, given that its secularist parties were so corrupt; the effort to secularize a Moslem country was probably doomed to failure anyway, but when their corruption and incompetence left them with no moral legitimacy or political capital, there was no one to stand up to or counterbalance the radicals. The consequences are becoming increasingly dire:

To follow Turkish discourse in recent years has been to follow a national decline into madness. Imagine 80 million or so people sitting at the crossroads between Europe and Asia. They don’t speak an Indo-European language and perhaps hundreds of thousands of them have meaningful access to any outside media. What information most of them get is filtered through a secular press that makes Italian communists look right wing by comparison and an increasing number of state (i.e., Islamist) influenced outfits. Topics A and B (or B and A, it doesn’t really matter) have been the malign influence on the world of Israel and the United States.

For example, while there was much hand-wringing in our own media about “Who lost Turkey?” when U.S. forces were denied entry to Iraq from the north in 2003, no such introspection was evident in Ankara and Istanbul. Instead, Turks were fed a steady diet of imagined atrocities perpetrated by U.S. forces in Iraq, often with the implication that they were acting as muscle for the Jews. The newspaper Yeni Safak, Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan’s daily read, claimed that Americans were tossing so many Iraqi bodies into the Euphrates that local mullahs had issued a fatwa ordering residents not to eat the fish. The same paper repeatedly claimed that the U.S. used chemical weapons in Fallujah. And it reported that Israeli soldiers had been deployed alongside U.S. forces in Iraq and that U.S. forces were harvesting the innards of dead Iraqis for sale on the U.S. “organ market.”

The secular Hurriyet newspaper, meanwhile, accused Israeli soldiers of assassinating Turkish security personnel in Mosul and said the U.S. was starting an occupation of (Muslim) Indonesia under the guise of humanitarian assistance. Then U.S. ambassador to Turkey Eric Edelman actually felt the need to organize a conference call to explain to the Turkish media that secret U.S. nuclear testing did not cause the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. One of the craziest theories circulating in Ankara was that the U.S. was colonizing the Middle East because its scientists were aware of an impending asteroid strike on North America.

Given this, the fact that Turkey was behind the deliberate provocation that was the Gaza flotilla is an ominous sign (though the fact that the administration, in the person of Joe Biden, was willing to stand up to them on Israel’s behalf is an encouraging one); a country that was for many years a key ally of the US in the region is now well on its way to becoming another Iran—and while the Turks lack the mullahs’ oil money, they are in all other ways in a far better position to damage us and our allies. If their current moves toward Iran turn into a long-term alliance, that would be an extremely difficult radical Islamic power bloc to counter; if they end up as rivals with Iran, the resulting conflict could be even worse. It’s hard to see a way this turns out well.

For lack of better options, if Turkey continues to swing in an Islamist direction, maybe the US and Iraqi governments need to get together and figure out a way to strike a deal with the Kurds—see if they would be willing to make concessions to the Iraqis in exchange for all-out assistance against the governments of Iran, Turkey and Syria. After all, as nervous as the government in Baghdad is about the Kurds, at this point one would think Iraq and the Kurds could find real common cause here.

Fly, eagle, fly

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Trying, frying, fragmented day. This is good:

Note: before the song proper starts, there’s a (sort-of-related) spoken clip and a neat instrumental bit by Mark Gersmehl.