Category Archives: Quotes

The gospel is resurrection

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My last post, being focused on the political and international scene, could give one the idea that my concerns are solely with the impending regime change in Washington, DC. That isn’t the case, though. While the foreboding I’ve been feeling is certainly partly due to the political situation, there are a number of personal elements in play as well; I just have the sense of some combination of things coming together, and I don’t know just what, or to what purpose, and it’s been weighing on me.

That’s why Sara and I, even though we’re still feeling the effects of this stomach bug that swept through our family, decided we needed to get up to South Bend last night to see Andrew Peterson in concert. He’s touring solo (absolutely solo, without even Ben Shive) in support of his new album, Resurrection Letters, Vol. II (apparently Vol. I will be coming later), which released on Tuesday. It was a joy to hear him sing his new songs, and a lot of fun to hear him talk about the stories and Scriptures behind each of them; it was a greater joy to be lifted up by the theme running through them, the celebration of the power of the resurrection of Christ in our lives.

This is critically important, because the gospel isn’t about empowering us, or fulfilling us, or satisfying us, or any of that; all of those are effects of the work of God in our lives, but they aren’t its essence or its purpose. The gospel is about a living God raising dead people to life. We were dead without him, we are dead without him, we become less alive every time we turn away from him; and every time we do, his Spirit is at work in us to raise us back up out of the depths into which we keep trying to cast ourselves. He isn’t simply changing us, he’s remaking us, and indeed has already remade us; he’s making all things new, and he won’t stop until he’s done, no matter what this world might do to try to stop him.

This is the answer to my foreboding: whatever may come—for our nation, for our world, for me personally and my family—it’s all in God’s hands, and all accounted for in his plan. It’s all a part of him making us, and all things, new. It’s all a part of the process, begun and sealed in our baptism, by which he’s putting our old selves to death and raising us to new life in him. And in him, by his grace, though things may be dark and troubled along the way, though we walk through the valley of the shadow of death, we need fear no evil, for he is with us; and we may be sure that in the end, as that great saint of the church Julian of Norwich put it,

All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.

Thought on belief

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If we stopped to count e-mail forwards, I wonder how many we’d come up with, and what we might learn by developing a taxonomy of them. It’s work that’s been partly done by sites like Snopes and TruthOrFiction.com, of course, but their concern is practical, aimed at helping people recognize bogus stories, not that of the researcher.

In an academic way, it’s remarkable just how many phony stories are being circulated out there as true. You might, for instance, have seen the e-mail blasting Target as a French company that’s opposed to veterans; I’ll admit that my dad likes to refer to Target as “Tarjet, the French store,” but that’s the only thing French about them (they’re headquartered in Minneapolis). They may have chosen to focus their corporate grant-giving on educational and arts projects, but that doesn’t make them anti-veteran. You might also remember the one about Procter & Gamble being a front for the Church of Satan—supposedly, the CEO went on a talk show and boasted about it, and pointed out the “666” hidden in the beard on the company’s logo. This one, it turns out, was started by a regional Amway distributor, and has been around long enough that older versions had this mythical executive making his confession to Phil Donahue and Johnny Carson.

Do you ever wonder why these things get around so well? They spread across the electronic landscape like kudzu, after all—there has to be a reason. Or maybe several, since we human beings tend not to do things simply, or for simple reasons. I don’t claim to know all of them, but I think I can name the big one: we’re wired to believe.

This isn’t to say that we’re wired to hold any particular belief—I think we were, originally, but our fall into sin broke that—but it is to say that when confronted with a proposition, with someone declaring something to be true, our deepest natural reflex is to believe it. We are innately credulous. That’s why Internet rumors spread the way they do: many, perhaps most, people grant them the presumption of belief, assuming them to be credible simply because they exist. It’s why the “big lie” propaganda strategy works, because it’s hard for us to credit that anyone actually would tell a lie that big, even when rationally we know that such things happen. And it’s why, as you might have seen in the news lately, research has shown that atheists are significantly more likely than religious folk to believe in UFOs, ESP, and paranormal phenomena; having thrown out religion doesn’t leave them able truly to believe in nothing. Thus the great Christian writer G. K. Chesterton said,

It’s the first effect of not believing in God that you lose your common sense, and can’t see things as they are.

Or, as another line attributed to Chesterton has it,

When a man ceases to believe in God, he does not believe in nothing. He believes in everything.

Now, obviously we don’t believe everything we hear (or at least, most people don’t); we learn fairly early that we can’t, because that would require us to believe many things which are mutually contradictory. Further, as we come to believe in certain things, that rules out believing in others. Over the course of life, we evolve a set of criteria for determining what things we believe and what things we don’t; we develop filters to strain out the things which don’t make sense, or don’t fit with what we believe, or contradict things which we know to be true. And yet, despite all this, we still have the predisposition, the reflex, to believe what people tell us. I spent most of a year working in inner-city ministry, right along the north side of one of the most blighted urban slums in the developed world, and in that time I had people lie to me and try to con me in more ways than I would have imagined possible. It was an education. And yet, when I had someone come up to me one rainy night outside our favorite restaurant and ask for money because he’d run out of gas, I gave him a toonie (a two-dollar coin, for those unfamiliar with Canadian money); I didn’t realize I’d been conned until the next week when I saw the guy referenced by one of the local columnists. I should have known better; but I was predisposed to believe his story.

The most basic reason for this is that God created us to believe him. Obviously, that was bent when we chose to turn away from God into disobedience, but it’s still there; and I think there’s something about living in our fallen world that reinforces it. It shows up in a lot of ways. Some are fairly unflattering, like the desire to know something that most people don’t—we like feeling special, like we’re smarter than the average Joe—while others are more noble, like the desire to understand the world. Behind them all, if we look, I think we can see a common root: this sense that everybody has, though some pay attention to it and some don’t, that there’s more to this life than what we can see. We can study how this world works in a lot of ways, through sciences like physics or social sciences like economics, or through disciplines in the humanities like history or literature, but there’s always more to understand than we can get to, and always a deeper truth that we can’t quite reach on our own. It’s the sense that there’s a mystery at the heart of life, one that we can’t understand without a deeper wisdom than this world has to give us; we need something better to believe in than money can buy, or power can win, or pleasure can produce.

 

Negligence? Or deliberate endangerment?

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Even as our government is supposed to be trying to support our economy through this difficult time in order to bring about a return to prosperity, we have a definite pattern among senior Democrats that’s working to undermine this. First, this past June, New York’s senior senator, Charles Schumer (D-NY), took deliberate action that sparked the run that brought down IndyMac. Time was, he would have been indicted for provoking the stampede. If he were a Republican, he probably still would be.Then, on Monday, having helped put a bipartisan agreement together on an economic rescue bill, the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco), gave her troops the tacit green light—and key lieutenants the explicit green light—to vote it down, thereby sending the stock market into a tailspin.As if that weren’t enough, on Thursday, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) told a group of reporters that “a major insurance company—one with a name that everyone knows” was “on the verge of going bankrupt.” The utterly predictable result was a sharp fall in stock prices across the insurance industry, since Sen. Reid’s vague comment called all those companies into question.The problem here is that, as every member of Congress ought to understand by now, “if we have learned anything amid the panic over Bear, Lehman, Merrill and adventures in naked short-selling, it is that rumors can obliterate economic value, instantly.” The fact that so many of our legislators (and not only Democrats, but including far too many senior members of that party) are behaving with so little care toward the institutions that are the engines that drive our national economy is deeply troubling. Rather like Barack Obama’s adventures in Iraqi policy, their behavior raises a couple possibilities.On the one hand, all this behavior could be absolutely deliberate: they could be intentionally working to worsen the economy at home and delay gains abroad in order to improve their own election prospects and those of their party. This could all be a willful effort with malice aforethought at political manipulation, putting the good of the Democratic Party ahead of the good of the nation.Or, it could be a combination of negligence, incompetence, and sheer folly. As Lois McMaster Bujold has her character Dr. Vorthys put it in her novel Komarr, “Carelessness, stupidity, haste, and ignorance are quite as powerfully destructive forces as homicidal intent. Though I must confess a special distaste for intent. It seems so unnecessarily redundant. It’s . . . anti-engineering.” I share his distaste; as such, I tend to agree with the principle, “Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity.” In this case, however (as in many), that isn’t terribly reassuring, as Jennifer Rubin explains:

But if we assume that they “meant no harm” we are left with an equally troubling conclusion: they are reckless and ignorant about the ways in which their words and actions may impact a fragile economy. Or to put it differently, their first consideration is invariably “How do we maximize the public’s perception that things are rotten?” rather than “What can we do to contain the conflagration?”It does remind one of their attitude on the Iraq war: every set back was gleefully trumpeted and every minor advance was dismissed. They never much cared how their rhetoric or votes might embolden the enemy or unnerve our ally. The sole consideration was domestic political gain. If they didn’t want to lose they certainly gave every indication it was low on their list of priorities. Bashing the President, rallying their base and positioning themselves for the next election was clearly more critical.Well, at least they are consistent.

On Iran: WWRD?

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Which is to say, what would Reagan do? It seems to me that the counsel he offered with regard to Khrushchev and the Soviet Union in his 1964 convention speech is well worth hearing today with regard to Ahmadinejad and Iran:

“A nation which can prefer disgrace to danger is prepared for a master, and deserves one.”—Alexander HamiltonIt seems clear to me that we cannot afford to continue our appeasement of Iran; we need to stand up now and tell the ayatollahs that we will no longer enable them in their pursuit of their agenda. We need to stand up, assert ourselves, and take the opportunity to strangle their adventurism while they’re still economically vulnerable to such an approach; we can cut them off at the knees by doing everything possible to bring crude oil prices down, and then cutting off their supply of refined fuel (gasoline, diesel, kerosene), and we need to do just that. We cannot afford to keep selling them the rope with which they intend to hang us.“Where then is the road to peace? Well, it’s a simple answer after all: you and I have the courage to say to our enemies there is a price we will not pay—there is a point
beyond which they must not advance.”—Ronald Reagan

Reformation from the DNA out

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Jared Wilson is always one of my favorite bloggers, and right now, he’s really on a roll. I’m particularly struck by a couple of posts which he doesn’t explicitly connect, but which I think do connect on a deep level. The first, “Ever the Cross,” is a riff on this line from C. J. Mahaney:

It is increasingly obvious that people are prepared to tolerate Christianity up until the point that it begins to define its terms.

The Rev. Mahaney’s right on with that, and not just with regard to the world outside the church—this is often the case within the church as well, and especially within congregations that seek to engineer success by accommodating themselves to that attitude. As Jared puts it,

Modern sermons and teaching that do not center or focus on the cross only reinforce this for us. Without meaning to, the church itself can support our error of judging God’s faithfulness to us based on our present circumstances, rather than on the great love he has shown to us in the past. Which is why we must always bring the glory of that past movement into our present worship and obedience. That’s the need for the call to a cross-centered life.

This is a critical point, because any other way of life leads us away from Christ, not towards him:

The call to follow Jesus is the call to die. Following Jesus means renouncing comfort, safety, and happiness in circumstances as the prime virtue of life. . . .What does it mean to remember the cross of Christ as a sign upon our right hand, between our eyes, and in our mouth? It means that Jesus is our way, Jesus is our truth, and Jesus is our life, and when the way, the truth, and the life heads toward crucifixion, we don’t part ways. We remember. We commemorate. We look to the cross like a pillar of cloud by day and to the empty tomb like a pillar of fire by night, the signs to follow. Where the world walks the wide path away from the point at which Christ defines his terms, the disciple continues on the narrow path into the way of the cross.

That’s powerful truth, and profoundly important. Unfortunately, as Jared notes in his post today on the missional reformation of the church, it’s also profoundly unsettling to many, many congregational (and denominational) leaders in this country, and profoundly threatening to their whole idea of how we’re supposed to lead the church, and what we as the church are supposed to be. For all that most of the fights in American churches are over style and programs and other matters that are superficial and therefore clearly visible, the real issues and the real problems are much deeper, and can be summed up in the statement that most churches don’t “remember the cross of Christ as a sign upon our right hand, between our eyes, and in our mouth.” We have not renounced comfort, safety, and happiness in circumstances as our goals, either in the church or in life in general, much less accepted the call to die. As a consequence,

What we are dealing with . . . is not a crisis of programming or style, but a crisis of culture. . . . Because of the state of the modern Church’s collective values and community identity, the call to reform cannot be met merely by offering alternative programming or adding an “emerging” service or what have you. We’re messing with DNA here.

This is long, slow work, which in most cases will not produce dramatic turnarounds suitable for book tours and TV appearances; that’s why so few people have the heart for it. It’s important work, though; I’ll never denigrate the valuable work of church planters, but it would be wrong to focus on church planting and just write off existing congregations because changing them would be too much work. Yes, there are congregations that simply will not change; but there are others that will, because the Holy Spirit is not going to abandon the people of God. And ultimately, the commitment to the work of the missional reformation of the church is not one that can be judged by results alone—even if it doesn’t “work,” that doesn’t mean it’s not worth doing. The task itself is worthy, whether “successful” or otherwise. As Jared concludes,

It is wearying trying to sell our churches on the notion that what they’ve been selling for so long doesn’t work. It is difficult suggesting that the service-centered approach to reaching the lost has failed. It is a delicate thing to suggest that we have not exalted Christ and we have not glorified God and therefore we haven’t really served the people we’ve claimed to.And yet for some of us inside this culture, slogging away at discipling the culture into a more vital discipleship, it is incumbent upon us to, in our hearts and minds, say “Here we stand. We can do no other.”

To which I can only add, “God help us. Amen.”

For a 90° turn: meditation on faith and reason

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OK, I’m going into overload here; I have to shift gears or I’m going to fry the engine, and besides, I have other things I need to be thinking about. So, while I will no doubt have more to say about John McCain, Sarah Palin, and their detractors before long, I’m going to take a deep breath and send my brain in a different direction: specifically, the issue of the relationship between faith and reason.

One of our best guides in this regard is St. Augustine, in whose writings this issue looms large. It’s only to be expected that this should be so; as a philosopher, he is committed to reasoning his way to truth, but as a Christian he must accept some things as true on faith rather than by his reason, and these two stances might seem incompatible. It’s a major part of Augustine’s task as a philosopher to reconcile these seeming opposites, to prove that Athens does indeed have fellowship with Jerusalem.

Before he can begin building his case, Augustine must define his terms. In doing so, he draws a sharp distinction between knowledge, which is the result of rational thought, and belief, or faith. Knowledge is “the rational cognizance of temporal things”; in other words, it is the understanding, brought about by reason, of the things of this world. Belief, by contrast, is a matter of “consenting to the truth of what is said.” Rather than being an act of the reason to discover something to be true, it is a decision of the will to accept something as true. However, the statement that faith is an act of the will rather than a product of human reason does not automatically make faith opposed to reason. This is a critical point; otherwise, reason and faith are irreconcilable and the entire enterprise of Christian philosophy is in vain. Augustine offers several arguments to show that faith is indeed reasonable, and thus that faith and reason can and do complement each other.

The first point is that faith does not spring out of nothing, but out of rational thought.

For who cannot see that thinking is prior to believing? . . . it is yet necessary that everything which is believed should be believed after thought has preceded; although even belief itself is nothing less than to think with assent. . . . everybody who believes, thinks—both thinks in believing, and believes in thinking.

This means that faith is not antithetical to reason but a possible product of it; reason can lead to faith.

Augustine further argues that faith leads to knowledge, not merely belief. He draws this argument from Scripture, citing the words of Christ in John 17:3 (“And this is eternal life, that they know you the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent,” ESV) and Matthew 7:7 (“Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you,” ESV). His point is,

One cannot speak of that being found which is believed without knowledge, nor does anyone become prepared to find God who does not first believe that which he is afterward to know.

The goal of faith, according to this interpretation, is to bring the believer to a point where it is possible to gain true knowledge of God, not simply to rest in believing things about God. Thus reason and faith complement each other in the quest for understanding.

The reason why this is so, according to Augustine, is that some truths are too big for the mind to comprehend them through reason alone. Citing Isaiah 7:9, he says,

We must first believe whatever great and divine matter we desire to understand.

Our minds are limited, and thus our reason cannot see all truths. Since reason lacks force to compel us to accept these truths, we can do so only by an act of the will.

As such an act isn’t grounded in our own reason, it must be based on authority external to ourselves. Augustine even declares,

For those who seek to learn great and hidden truths, authority alone opens the door.

As he sees it, while reason is higher and more fundamental than authority, authority must precede reason in operation, at least for human beings, in order to ensure that reason proceeds in the proper direction to reach truth. He sums up the relationship between the two by saying,

Authority demands faith, and prepares man for reason. Reason leads him on to knowledge and understanding.

For Augustine, then, the quest for understanding begins with faith in authority, which prepares the soul to use reason to gain understanding of that which is believed. This does not mean, however, that reason is “useless to authority; it helps in considering what authority is to be accepted.” This is very important to Augustine, because faith is worthless if it is misplaced. Those who place their faith in God are on the road to true understanding, because God, the creator of all, is the source of Truth Itself. Those who place their faith in a false authority, however, can never reach true understanding, because the foundation for their reason is flawed. Reason thus has an important part to play in finding a true authority to accept.

In Augustine’s understanding of the pursuit of truth, then, reason and faith are intermingled. Reason provides a basis for faith by determining which authority is worthy of acceptance. From that rational basis, the individual chooses to accept that authority as true. That authority in turn prepares the individual to seek understanding, and gives a foundation for the use of reason in that search. Thus reason and faith are integrated in the search for truth, keeping all of life together as a whole rather than splitting it in two.

It’s important to note here that for Augustine, a questioning faith is true faith because it is seeking to grow in understanding. That is the proper aim of faith, to apply reason to gain understanding of God and the things of God. While Augustine grants that those who fail to do so will still reach heaven, he does not believe that they are truly happy, for they are falling short of that for which they were made.

 

Seneca as advocate for the missional church

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For good or ill, I’m something of a quote freak; I like things said with some zing and a point on the end, and when I run across something that’s truly well put, I like to hang on to it. Over the years, I’ve built up a rather eclectic collection of favorites. I truly appreciate, for example, the wise counsel of the great pitcher Satchel Paige: “Don’t look back—something might be gaining on you.” Then there’s the Hall of Fame catcher Yogi Berra, who stressed the importance of community thus: “If you don’t go to somebody’s funeral, they won’t go to yours.” Lately, as things grow somewhat thin on the back of my head, I’m especially grateful for the Roman writer Seneca, who once observed, “I don’t consider myself bald, I’m just taller than my hair.”Amen.Of course, Seneca’s particularly quotable because he wasn’t just a great wit, he was also a formidable philosopher, and there’s considerable wisdom in his witticisms. He noted at one point, for instance, that one “who suffers before it is necessary suffers more than is necessary”—a point to which I can attest from frequent experience. He also declared, “A great fortune is a great slavery”—though I’m not sure how that fits with his statement that “a great mind becomes a great fortune.” His insight that “a well-governed appetite is the greater part of liberty” is one which our libertine society would do well to take to heart, along with his comment that “Modesty forbids what the law does not.” Of all his insights, however, the one I most value is this:

Our plans miscarry because they have no aim. When a man does not know what harbor he seeks, no wind is the right wind.

This, I think, is something which the church really needs to bear in mind. It’s inevitable and natural that the church should care about numbers—members, attendance, giving, volunteers—because they’re the only concrete information we have about how many people we’re reaching and how people are responding to what we’re doing. That is by no means all that matters about our work, because it doesn’t tell us whether people are growing as Christians or whether we’re doing what God wants us to do, but that doesn’t mean that this information is irrelevant, either. When you factor in that for most churches, the numbers represent our main practical limitation (we can’t do x because we don’t have enough people/money/volunteers to pull it off), obviously they’re going to take a lot of our attention.Where the problem comes in is when we focus on the numbers. As Christians, our focus should only and ever be on Jesus, and our primary goal should always be to be where he wants us to be and do what he wants us to do. Our aim should be to see Jesus and go where he is, and there to do what he’s doing. When (even for the best of motives) we come to focus instead on adding people, or raising more money, or developing more volunteers and leaders, we lose sight of our goal, our plans have no true aim, and we fix our eyes on the means: whatever works to improve the numbers. When we start to think that way, then we begin to seek any harbor that promises to give us more people and more money; and as Seneca said, when we reach that state, no wind is the right wind.

The Dark Knight of the soul

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“My subject in fiction is the action of grace in territory held largely by the devil.”—Flannery O’ConnorI have not seen The Dark Knight, nor did I ever really intend to; I don’t watch all that many movies (though it’s nice to be able to see them in the theater again), and I’ve never been a Batman fan. It does sound like a remarkable movie, though, judging from the reviews—and, no less, from the arguments over it in the Christian blogosphere. I know Thinklings Phil and Jared loved it, and I know Brant Hansen hated it, and their reactions seem to be pretty much representative. The most interesting response, though, has to have been the question Grant Thomas asked:What would Flannery O’Connor think?As he points out, given her artistic philosophy and her view of what it takes to communicate the reality of sin and grace to an unbelieving world, there’s good reason to think that she would have approved of the movie.

I think Flannery would say that Joker shows us that the world we are living in is in the territory of the devil. . . .I think in light of what I’ve been reading from Flannery O’Connor, that she would applaud the film for showing evil for what it is. Not only does it make evil look evil (rather than funny like in the old Adam West TV series), but I think Flannery would say that we need the Joker to realize how much we need grace. We need him to wear make up to realize that this kind of person should seem out of place in our world when most of the time we simply think this sort of thing is normal or at least tolerable.

As I said, I haven’t seen the movie to be able to judge, but what Grant says here makes sense to me. Read the whole post, including his several quotations from Flannery O’Connor, and see what you think.HT: Joyce

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, RIP

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“The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts.”—Aleksandr SolzhenitsynThe world lost one of its giants today: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn is dead of a stroke at the age of 89. Novelist, historian, poet, Soviet dissident, cultural critic . . . to try to sum up the meaning and significance of this towering modern-day prophet, one of the deepest thinkers and most powerful bearers of Christian witness of our age, is beyond the scope of anything so brief as a blog post, though John Piper took a good shot (thanks to Jared for the link); I’ve linked a few articles below in an effort to do what my words cannot do. For me, the least I can do is to say that our world would be vastly poorer had he never lived. Requiescat in pace, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn; you have earned your rest as much as anyone can.The Last ProphetTraducing SolzhenitsynSolzhenitsyn and Modern LiteratureAleksandr Solzhenitsyn: The Ascent from IdeologyPaul Weyrich: A Tribute to Alexander Solzhenitsyn25 YearsLions

When the bank is your sweetheart

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Apparently, when Sen. Barack and Michelle Obama bought their Hyde Park mansion, they got “an unusually low discount interest rate” on their $1.3 million home loan from Illinois’ Northern Trust Bank, well below what others could have expected to get. As political news, this isn’t in the same category as Sen. Christopher Dodd, D-CT, and Sen. Kent Conrad, D-ND, getting sweetheart deals from Countrywide Financial Corp.—unlike Countrywide, Northern Trust isn’t in the middle of a financial scandal—or even the news that Sen. John and Cindy McCain were four years behind on the taxes on their California beachfront condo (they had nearly caught up on their back taxes when the story broke); but it does highlight the fact that when you’re a rising star, when you have influence and your influence is increasing, everybody wants a piece of you, and everybody wants to get on your good side. It also highlights the fact that the appearance of impropriety, or of partiality, can be as damaging as the real thing. (Just ask Sen. McCain, who’s been criticized in some quarters for having lobbyists on his staff even though he’s never yet changed positions at a lobbyist’s behest.) This is yet one more thing at which Sen. Obama doesn’t have much experience; I hope for his sake (and for all of ours) that he’s guarding his heart, and his integrity, carefully.“Power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Great men are almost always bad men.”—Lord Acton