Category Archives: Religion and theology

Response to feetxxxl

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So on Friday, I put up a post which was sort of about homosexuality but not really; my primary interest was to use that argument to consider our popular theology of suffering, which from a biblical point of view is thoroughly deficient. Predictably, though, someone popped up to ignore the actual content of the post and mount a spirited if more than a little muddled defense of homosexual sex, at fair length—which I think served, ironically enough, rather more to reinforce my point than to challenge it. Much of the content of those comments, I’ll address in that thread; but there were a couple attempts at scriptural argument to which I wanted to respond at greater length.

to start with where is the “easy yoke and light burden” in your condemnation of homosexuality

The same place as in my condemnation of adultery, murder, gossip, lying, substance abuse, theft, cheating, idolatry, and every other sin. Jesus is not here saying that he will never ask us to struggle against our sin—after all, elsewhere, he says, “Be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” That’s clearly not in view. Rather, he’s saying two things. One, to pull from a pastor down in Florida,

The word “easy” simply means “fit for use” or “fits well.” Consider for a moment—in context, a “yoke” was used to harness one ox to another for working the fields. Jesus, being the master carpenter knew how to build well-fitted yokes that eased the burden on the oxen.

Did a well-fitting yoke mean the oxen would no longer be doing the work of plowing the field? No. Did it mean they would no longer be constrained to go only where the driver of the team told them to go? No. What it meant was that there would be no unnecessary difficulty and no unnecessary pain for them as they plowed, because the guidance of the driver—Jesus, in this metaphor—would be well-fitted to their size and strength as he sought to accomplish his will through them.

Two, to say that Jesus’ burden is light is not to say that if we follow Jesus, we’ll never have to carry anything that’s hard to bear; that’s just not life in this world. It certainly wasn’t for his disciples, most of whom would die painful deaths for their faith. But you see, a yoke holds together two oxen; the key is not the size of the burden, but the one who bears it with us. What makes the burden light for anyone who takes up Jesus’ yoke is that the believer is yoked together with the Spirit of God, and the Spirit provides the strength to bear the burdens we have to bear—and to bear them lightly, for all that they would be heavy to bear on our own. To find Jesus’ yoke well-fitted and his burden light, we have to actually accept it and put it on.

the fruit of the spirit of galatians the essence of the spirit of christ and the 2nd commandment( love your neighbor….) the summation of all new covenant law(gal,romans)

This comment betrays a very poor understanding of Scripture. It may be willfully so, since this commenter is trying to argue for a version of Christianity that has no vertical component to holiness, only a horizontal one (which, of course, would leave everyone free to define the latter as it suits them, without reference to the biblical witness). Here’s what Jesus has to say about that:

You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.

You see, the first thing before all others is these: Love the Lord your God with absolutely everything that is in you. Commit yourself to him wholeheartedly, without reservation, and with absolutely nothing in your life that’s more important to you than him.

Put bluntly, then: if you aren’t willing to give up homosexual sex to follow Jesus, then you’re in violation of the greatest commandment. That’s idolatry, and it’s a sin.

Of course, this is also true of everything else, including many things which aren’t sinful, so in and of itself, it doesn’t prove that homosexual sex is sinful. However, I’ve never met anyone trying to argue from Scripture in favor of homosexual sex who did so disinterestedly, with no vested interest in the argument; everyone I’ve ever seen argue that position had an a priori commitment to demonstrating that the scriptural witness conformed to the position they wanted to take, and they would not accept or even consider the possibility that the Bible might flatly contradict them. As I’ve already said, it’s my observation that their refusal rested on one proposition which they would not allow to be challenged:

God couldn’t possibly want me to do something that hard and that painful.

They valued that more than they valued God; they would only accept a God of whom that statement could be true. That’s idolatry.

Homosexuality and the theology of suffering

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It seems to me that all the theological arguments in support of the proposition that homosexual sex isn’t sinful boil down, ultimately, to one assertion:

God couldn’t possibly want me to do something that hard and that painful.

That’s really the bottom line right there, I think. All of the irrelevant arguments* about genetics are simply efforts to reinforce the second half of that sentence, to convince people that not acting on homosexual desires really is that hard and that painful. And yes, I do think this is the bottom line both for those who have desires and for those who don’t but who support the pro-homosex position—such folks would, on my observation, affirm this for themselves, and so they’re being logically and morally consistent in affirming that this must be true for others as well. (In that respect, I must admit they have a certain moral superiority to many who uphold the scriptural prohibition of homosexual activity, who are simply holding others to a moral standard which they would never dream of applying to themselves. The divorce rate among self-identified evangelicals bears eloquent witness to that.) In our suffering-averse, death-avoiding culture, I suspect you would find overwhelming agreement with this proposition: “God couldn’t possibly want me to do something that hard and that painful.”

To which I can only say: You have no idea. Our difficulty squaring a loving God with one who allows us to suffer—indeed, who actively sends us trials and uses suffering and struggle (and, yes, failure) for our growth—is ours, not the Bible’s. Consider how God tried Abraham, Ezekiel, Hosea, Job; consider how he answered the disobedience of Jonah; consider how he rewarded the faithful witness of Paul. Consider the testimony of Hebrews 11, which offers this summation of the life of faith:

These all died in faith, not having received the things promised, but having seen them and greeted them from afar, and having acknowledged that they were strangers and exiles on the earth. For people who speak thus make it clear that they are seeking a homeland. If they had been thinking of that land from which they had gone out, they would have had opportunity to return. But as it is, they desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared for them a city.

And ultimately, consider Christ, and the suffering God willingly endured for us. We have a hard time when James says, “Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds,” but to him, it makes perfect sense: “for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness. And let steadfastness have its full effect, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing.” His priorities are not our priorities, and indeed, God’s priorities are not our priorities; we’re focused on maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain—not necessarily in a crude, hedonistic sense, but even if the pleasures we value are intellectual and rarified, it doesn’t change the basic equation—while God is on about something else entirely in our lives.

For the sake of argument, grant everything the advocates of same-sex marriage and ordination of those who practice homosexual sex and the full societal normalization of homosexual practices claim and declare and argue about homosexual desire—grant it all, every last contention and conclusion, and set it against the biblical texts. Does it justify setting aside the historic interpretation of Scripture that homosexual practices are sinful? No, it doesn’t, because God doesn’t let us off that easily.

Indeed, as much as our culture tends to fixate on sex in various ways, and as powerful as our sexual desires and drives are, they aren’t our deepest or most fundamental desires, and they don’t fuel our strongest or most elemental temptations. When Paul references homosexual practice in Romans 1, it’s in the course of making a greater point about a deeper, more fundamental and more powerful temptation: the temptation to idolatry. Unfortunately, the 21st-century American church largely hasn’t followed him there, and thus hasn’t even confronted the lesson it truly needs to learn from that, which isn’t about sex at all: it is, rather, that yes, God could and does want me to do something that hard and that painful. He wants me to take everything, right down to the thing I most desperately do not want to give up—whatever that may be—and lay it at his feet in total self-surrender.

And here’s the kicker: he wants me to do it joyfully, and in fact he gives me every reason to do it joyfully; he wants me to lay it all down, as hard and as painful as it will be, because he has something far better to give me in return. In exchange for my life, he gives me his, which is a life that can face trials and sufferings and still sing hymns of praise from a jail cell at midnight. It’s a life that can see pain, and even struggles with temptation, not as something to be avoided or something of which we should only be expected to take so much, but rather as an opportunity to know the grace of Christ and share in his ministry.

*I say these arguments are irrelevant because they commit, ironically enough, the genetic fallacy. Desires are neither stronger nor more justifiable, nor for that matter more expressive of our sense of our own identity, for being genetic rather than the product of our experience and the choices we have made. Whatever conclusions one may draw about a neurological and neurochemical component to homosexual desires, and whatever answer one may offer to the chicken-and-egg question of whether that component is cause or effect of those desires (or, for that matter, stands in some other relation altogether to them), the whole matter is logically irrelevant to the question of what any given individual ought to do with those desires. Whatever their source, the desires exist, and they are what they are, and they must be considered on that basis. The rest is all so much smoke.

Meeting the challenge

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In our politically and culturally polarized society, those who care about issues—whether political or theological—tend to end up divided into parties, labeled accordingly, associated with the like-minded, and expected not to deviate. The assumptions of our “side” exist not to be challenged; the questions and challenges of the other “side” (or “sides”) exist to be defeated by whatever means necessary. This is unfortunate, because none of us is perfect; even if we do have the big things right (something which we can never simply assume), we’re bound to have lots of the details wrong, by virtue both of the fact that we still sin and of the fact that we’re limited in our understanding. To catch our errors, we do well to accept the help of those who are most motivated to point them out to us: namely, those people who think we’re wrong about everything.

In the current issue of Touchstone, Christopher Killheffer writes about this with respect to the Christian response to atheism. As he says, when Christians respond to atheists with hostility and the refusal to listen,

aside from what we’re losing in the public debate, we are also missing an opportunity to grow in our own faith, and perhaps even to have our faith purified. If we listen to atheist messages with curiosity rather than defensiveness, we will find that many of them are not simply poking us in the eye; their content is often interesting and may possibly even be useful in helping us better understand what we do and do not believe.

He illustrates his point well from C. S. Lewis and Benedict XVI, showing their willingness to listen seriously to the challenge of atheism, and thus to use it as an opportunity to sharpen and strengthen and purify their faith. As he says, we need that; and if we don’t let those who disagree with us ask us the hard questions, who will?

The countercultural Spirit

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Don’t become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You’ll be changed from the inside out.

—Romans 12:2a (The Message)

Whatever the culture is, if we’re following Christ, we’re going to be walking counter to it to some degree. That’s just how it is, because cultures are made up of people, and people are sinful, and thus every culture is sinful—even the best of them. Sometimes, if you’re in the right place at the right time, you can influence your culture and make that less so, as William Wilberforce and the rest of the Clapham Sect did; but no one has yet succeeded in turning even one earthly society into a miniature of the Kingdom of God, and no one will until Jesus comes again. Following Jesus is always going to put you at odds with the world in any number of ways, big and small.

As such, the depressing thing about so much of the church is that we’re so comfortable, and so predictable. We can always tell ourselves that we’re countercultural, that we’re standing up for truth, because we’re happy to stand up for the truths that matter to our particular in-group in the face of opposition from those whom we do not fear and whose good opinion we do not value; but that doesn’t answer the bill at all. Even the pagans do that. When it comes to making our own little corner of the world uncomfortable, to challenging the particular subculture (or subcultures) in which we move, we tend to be missing in action. Liberals do not question the validity of same-sex marriage, nor do conservatives try to move the American flag out of the sanctuary; it just isn’t done. Why, if you tried that, the next person mad at you might be somebody you actually care about—and while that might be just what that person needs, we don’t want to face it.

Jesus told Nicodemus, “The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear its sound, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.” Are we that unpredictable, or that uncontrollable? Are we that independent of the conventional assumptions and conclusions of our culture, or our family, or our particular set of close friends? Not really, no; most of us tend to conform pretty closely to the expectations of those whose approval we desire most. That is not Christlike living, however moral we might be by our own preferred standards; that is no sign of the life of the Holy Spirit in us.

Rather, the Spirit of God is at work in the people of God to break that conformity, to renew and transform and grow us into people who can no longer be confined by it. Being a Christian, living out the life of Christ, is not a matter of simply following a bunch of “thou shalt”s and “thou shalt not”s, as if outward conformity to some particular standard was sufficient; but neither is it about some free-form idea of “love” and “grace” that makes concrete standards of behavior irrelevant. Rather, it’s about something far greater than either: it’s about learning to walk according to the Spirit, opening ourselves up to be changed by the Spirit, from the deepest wellsprings of our behavior on out, so that our lives will be set free from the world’s mold, to be conformed instead to the character and the holiness of God.

If we’re truly living Spirit-filled lives, we’re going to make people uncomfortable.  In particular, we’re going to tick off people who, if it were up to us, we would try very, very hard not to tick off. We’re going to be countercultural, not in some cheap fashion, but in a way that truly costs us; we’re going to be reminded that we worship a Lord who said, “If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple.” We’re going to realize that Jesus could just as well have said, “If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own teachers and colleagues and close friends and best allies, yes, and even the community whose approval he most desires, he cannot be my disciple.”

That’s because Jesus doesn’t call us and the Holy Spirit doesn’t empower us to be counter someone else’s culture, but to be countercultural in our own, in the one in which we live and work and play. God isn’t satisfied for us to tear down the idols we don’t worship, he wants us to reject the ones we do, and the ones we’re tempted to worship, the ones before which our theological and ideological soulmates bow. He raises up conservatives to be labeled unpatriotic, and liberals to be questioned as anti-gay, for being unwilling to let sacred cows lie. He calls us to ask the questions we least want asked, and to be willing to accept—and to give—the answers we don’t want to hear. He commands us to speak the truth, in love, yes, but so clearly and unflinchingly that we risk being rejected by our own people. After all, we’ve been given the Spirit of Christ, and isn’t that what Jesus did?

Your Attorney General at work (updated)

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I posted a comment on this on a friend’s Facebook page and thought I’d note this here as well. It is honestly bewildering to me the way the Left refuses to recognize that the anti-Western wing of Islam, particularly its jihadists, is adamantly opposed to all that liberals profess to believe and hold dear. I don’t want to jump to the negative conclusion and assume that they’re all either moral cowards or secretly enamored of Islam’s totalitarian impulses, so I keep looking for a more charitable interpretation . . . but so far, I have failed to find one.

Update: Jonathan Gurwitz of the San Antonio Express-News has an excellent column up about this, pointing out an important truth:

About the same time Holder was refusing to utter the threat that cannot be named in the Obama administration, security officials in Indonesia—the world’s largest Muslim nation and third-largest democracy—foiled a plot to assassinate the president and top officials, massacre foreigners in a Mumbai-style attack and create a state governed by Shariah, or Islamic law.

That last goal provides a clue as to who was behind this violent conspiracy, though Attorney General Holder may not be able to recognize it. But it is important to do so because in spite of 9-11, Times Square and every event in between, Americans are not the primary victims of Islamic extremism. Muslims are.

Over the past decade, radical Islamists have carried out successful terrorist attacks in Amman, Baghdad, Casablanca, Istanbul, Jakarta, Karachi, Riyadh and Sharm el-Sheikh, to name a few Muslim targets. Muslim civilians and leaders, such as Benazir Bhutto, are their principal casualties. In the countries and forbidden zones where they have been able to establish Shariah rule, Muslim women are treated like chattel, Muslim gays are summarily executed and Muslim girls are doomed to illiteracy and honor killings.

America may be radical Islam’s fount of all evil. But more often than not, citizens of Muslim nations are their first prey.

Holder and the president he serves do no favor to the overwhelming majority of moderate Muslims when they refuse to identify our common enemy. You can’t delegitimize what you won’t even acknowledge exists.

The idolatry of moralism

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Tyler Jones, a church planter with Acts 29 down in Raleigh, has an interesting post up today on the Resurgence website called “The Poison of Quaint Moralism”; it’s addressed to his Southern context but has validity far beyond it. He writes,

The South has been poisoned, and the poison is “quaint moralism.” This poison has systematically infected tens of millions in the South and we are now in the midst of a moralistic pandemic. . . . Our churches are full of good-looking, upright, moral people. The tragic irony is that our goodness is our poison. A great many Southerners claim Christianity as their religion, mimicking righteousness on the surface while their hearts remain unchanged by the gospel of Jesus. I understand the gravity of that statement and do not make it hastily. Here in the South, the gospel has either been ignored or foolishly assumed. We have satiated our desire for God through quaint morality, allowing people to ignore their need for Jesus.

There is a common and deadly misconception that the church is supposed to produce people who live “good Christian lives.” This misconception spreads easily because it bears a strong superficial resemblance to the fruit of true holiness; but it just isn’t so. After all, it’s perfectly possible for most of us to be nice, moral people—good enough on the outside to make most folks happy, at any rate—in our own strength; and in this country with its Christian heritage, the world is perfectly happy to let you live a nice, moral life, as long as you are properly “tolerant”—which is to say, that you don’t do anything that makes anybody else uncomfortable. It’s a way of living that makes it easy for us to look at ourselves and think we’re doing just fine, and not realize how much we need God—while on the inside, our hearts remain closed to him. As C. S. Lewis said,

We must not suppose that if we succeeded in making everyone nice we should have saved their souls. A world of nice people, content in their own niceness, looking no further, turned away from God, would be just as desperately in need of salvation as a miserable world.

Moralistic religion is bloodless and powerless; it can affect behavior, but cannot touch the roots of sin in the heart. It directs our attention to ourselves and our own efforts, and thus away from God; it turns us away from grace and toward legalism, and thus waters the seeds of self-righteousness, arrogance and spiritual pride in our souls. The Devil is perfectly happy to make us moral, if only we will be moral to please ourselves (or other people) rather than God; what else, after all, was Jesus’ complaint against the Pharisees? Thus Michael Horton opens his book Christless Christianity with this story:

What would things look like if Satan really took control of a city? Over a half century ago, Presbyterian minister Donald Grey Barnhouse offered his own scenario in his weekly sermon that was also broadcast nationwide on CBS radio. Barnhouse speculated that if Satan took over Philadelphia, all of the bars would be closed, pornography banished, and pristine streets would be filled with tidy pedestrians who smiled at each other. There would be no swearing. The children would say, “Yes, sir” and “No, ma’am,” and the churches would be full every Sunday . . . where Christ is not preached.

If Christ is preached, everything else follows. If Christ is not preached, nothing else matters.

The clash of self-righteousness

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Of all the things poisoning our public discourse these days, I think the one that irritates me the most is the assumption—by people on both sides of our political divide—that we and our side (whichever side we stand on) are morally superior because of the policy positions we take. This is of course accompanied by denigration (sometimes sliding to contemptuous mockery) of the other side’s claims to moral superiority. This is, I think, just one more example of the human desire to look down on other people; it’s the use of dogmatic self-righteousness as a justification for arrogance and pride (which is why it so often goeth before a fall). The truth is, if you select a group based on any normal human characteristic—by their job, college, age, gender, pick one—you’ll find saints and knaves both, and a lot of pretty mediocre people in between, in a typical distribution; selecting by political persuasion is no different. Confusing Republicans for Christians or Democrats for right-thinking people (or the flip side of that) is nothing more than wishful thinking.

Of course, I would like to be able to say that the church is an exception to that typical distribution. In some places, it no doubt is. In America, in far too many places, it isn’t. It ought to be, but it isn’t. We must grieve our Lord something fierce; and yet, in spite of everything, Jesus loves the church.

You say that you believe in us—at times, I wonder why . . .

No small things

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Last week, Jared Wilson excerpted a post from a Christian counseling website, Counseling Solutions, called “Christ is not sophisticated enough for what I am going through.” It’s a remarkable post; the author, Rick Thomas, clearly advocates and seeks to practice gospel-centered counseling, which in my experience is not exactly the norm even among Christians in the counseling industry (and in fact seems to be actively discouraged by many who train counselors). Here’s how he opens:

Jeremy & Carol do not like each other. Jeremy is passive and Carol is hurt. Carol has been in therapy for many years and their problems have not gone away and their marriage is no better off today than it was when Carol began her therapy sessions. The fundamental problem with Jeremy and Carol is that they do not understand the Gospel.

When I shared this with them, they dismissed this notion with a wry smile. The Gospel is too simple and they had already “accepted Christ” twenty something years ago. From their perspective, they understand the Gospel, accepted the Gospel, and are now looking for something a bit more sophisticated to help them through their marriage difficulty.

Their attitude, unfortunately, is all too common among churchgoers in this country. We’re supposed to be gospel people—this is what we’re supposed to be on about, it’s what’s supposed to define us and give us our purpose—but somehow or other we’ve gotten the idea that this is kid stuff that we’ve outgrown. It’s not big enough or deep enough to apply to our grownup problems and struggles; we need something more.

I could be wrong about why that is, but I think it’s because we have far too small and shallow a view of our sin.Read more→

Random thought

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I only ask two things from those who disagree with me. I don’t ask that they claim not to believe me wrong; such a claim only dishonors both of us, and is dishonest besides. Nor do I ask them to censor themselves, which could only prevent true conversation. Rather, I ask that though they believe me wrong, they give me credit for being wrong in good faith and honest inquiry. And in addition, I ask that they be willing to listen honestly to my reasons for disagreeing with them, accepting the possibility that they might be convinced that I am in fact right after all. These are the things I seek to give in return to those who disagree with me, though I certainly do not claim to do so unfailingly or perfectly. They are, it seems to me, the necessary prerequisites for a truly open, honest, and constructive discussion; they are the characteristics we must have if we are to experience any kind of real and meaningful unity in the midst of our diversity.

Jesus is Lord

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Ever since the very beginning, the church has declared that Jesus is Lord; and I suspect that ever since pretty early on in there, large chunks of the church have proceeded to go out and ignore that proclamation. When we say that, we’re not saying any small thing. Rather, we’re saying that we acknowledge him not merely as the one who saves us, not merely as someone who blesses us, not merely as someone who loves us and whom we love, but also as the God of the universe, the one who created and sustains and commands everything that is; we’re bowing before him as the one who has the undisputed right to our wholehearted worship, our absolute allegiance, and our unquestioning obedience. No exceptions; no qualifications; no ifs, ands, or buts.

Which is easy enough to say; but of course, just saying it isn’t good enough. This is one of those things, if you just say it and don’t do it, you haven’t really said it at all. Making this confession commits us to actually living it out—and that’s the rub, because there are always places where we don’t want to do that. We tend to want to tell Jesus, “OK, you can be Lord of 95% of my life, or even 98%—but I have this thing over here that I want to hang on to, that I want to keep doing my way. It doesn’t bother you, it doesn’t affect anything else, so just let me keep doing this one thing and you can have the rest of my life.” To us, that makes sense; to us, that seems perfectly reasonable. We don’t understand why Jesus looks back at us and says, “No. You need to give me that, too”; but that’s what he does, every time.

In truth, whatever is the last thing we want to give up is the first thing Jesus asks of us, and the first thing that truly acknowledging his lordship requires of us. It may be a sin, or it may not; it may be something he intends to take away from us, or it may be something he intends to let us keep. Indeed, it may be our greatest gift, the one thing he will use most powerfully in our life for our blessing and the blessing of others. But whatever it is, good or ill, we have to give it over to him and let it be his, not ours. Anything we will not give up, anything of which we’re unwilling to let go, is something which is more important to us than Jesus is; and anything which is more important to us than Jesus is an idol, and God will not tolerate idols in our lives.

It’s tempting to look at this and say, “No, it really doesn’t matter that much.” Even if what we’re trying to hang onto is a sin, we can always convince ourselves that it’s not that big a deal; and if it isn’t—well, marriage, for instance, is a good and biblical thing, and if we’re married and love the person to whom we’re married, it doesn’t seem particularly unreasonable to tell Jesus no, this person is all mine. God can have the rest of my life, but my marriage is all mine.

Now, certainly, we have enduring allegiances in this world that are good and right. But here’s the rub: every single one of those allegiances, and every last one of those loves, has to take its proper place—behind our love for and our allegiance to our Lord Jesus Christ. We love our family, our friends, our church, our country, maybe our jobs, and then along comes Jesus and says, “Anyone who comes to me and doesn’t hate his father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, and even his own life, cannot be my disciple.” No, I didn’t make that up, it’s Luke 14:26. Obviously, “hate” is a strong word, especially when Jesus commands us to love everybody, but this is a rabbinic way of speaking—he’s saying that our love for everyone other than him has to come so far second to our love for him that we’ll put him and his will first, even if it means that others come away from it thinking we hate them. This is the degree of allegiance our Lord wants from us, and the totality of worship he desires from us—with no competition, no exceptions, and nothing else smuggled in.

That sounds pretty demanding, but it really isn’t; it’s simply what’s necessary. C. S. Lewis explained this well when he wrote,

God claims all, because he is love and must bless. He cannot bless us unless he has us. When we try to keep within us an area that is our own, we try to keep an area of death. Therefore, in love, he claims all.