Monthly Archives: May 2008

Oh, the irony

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In my last post, I responded to my wife’s vision for the church; now, alas, I find myself commenting on a very different vision indeed, a vision in which the local church exists for the support and self-aggrandizement of the denominational hierarchy, as the property of that hierarchy. In that vision, if churches want to leave, the Powers that Be have the right to stop them by force; and if the presbytery refuses to go along with that, the synod can take them over, too. I don’t, in general, agree with those who decide to leave the Presbyterian Church (USA)—I think their actions help to bring about exactly that to which they object—but I believe they have the right to do so; they aren’t denominational property, and neither are their buildings, and for the denomination to put its own material wealth ahead of the spiritual health of its churches, even those which are seeking to leave, is little short of reprehensible. This is the sort of behavior that gives the church a bad name.

It also, incidentally, gives the lie to the argument (made by Greg Coulter of Eastern Oklahoma Presbytery in a letter to Presbyweb) that the Synod of the Sun, in establishing their administrative commission over the Presbytery of South Louisiana, had merely been “invited” into the situation “to partner with them in furthering the peace, unity, and purity of the labors of those serving Christ in South Louisiana.” Clearly, the skeptical among us were right: for the Synod, it’s property über alles—and then they have the gall to call it “one part of the church body helping another part.” For shame.

It’s a wonderful thing

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being married to somebody smarter than me. I’ve said this many times, and will no doubt say it many more. At the moment, I’m saying it again because my wonderful wife has just put words to something very important, something we both feel very strongly, and done so better than I’ve yet managed to do. I’ve been talking through some of this with our elders, and preaching about it some, about what it means to be that kind of church, and how we get there; I’ve talked about how we become a church of square holes (and triangular, and star-shaped, and rhomboid, and . . .) so that people feel it’s OK to be a square peg, and I’ve been encouraged to find people listening, and open. But there’s no question, we can’t get there on our own; to do that, we need a response from others outside ourselves. We need to find ways to earn people’s trust (which means, of course, continuing to grow ourselves to be worthy of that trust), so that we can all be the Church of the Exploded Comfort Zone together.Anyway, go read Sara’s post; she really has said it better than I can.“Unless the Lord builds the house, those who build it labor in vain . . .”—Psalm 127:1a

Happy Happy birthday!

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Or maybe that should be “Happy birthday, Happy!”—or . . . well, the permutations go on for a while. Anyway, it’s not quite as good as an ambush from the waiters at a fine restaurant (though it is easier on the wallet), but I wanted to take this opportunity to wish a happy birthday and a wonderful year to one of the best people I know, and one of the dearest friends I ever expect to have.“May the road rise to meet you,
May the wind be always at your back.
May the sun shine warm upon your face,
The rains fall soft upon your fields.
And until we meet again,
May God hold you in the palm of his hand.”May the warm rays of sun fall upon your home,
And may the hand of a friend always be near.
May green be the grass you walk on,
May blue be the skies above you,
May pure be the joys that surround you,
May true be the hearts that love you.”

Not a tame lion

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“On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of the conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake some day and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return.”—Annie DillardThat quote (from Teaching a Stone to Talk) is one of my all-time favorites; I thought I’d included it in a blog post once, but when I went looking for it, I hadn’t. So, it gets its own post (since I don’t know that anything I could say could add anything to it anyway); I encourage you to take some time to think about it, if you haven’t recently.

More things in heaven and earth, indeed

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Headline you never thought you’d see: Cat turns into woman in P/Harcourt – 5 killed as cultists clash

Nigerian Tribune learnt that three cats were crossing the busy road when the okada ran over one of them which immediately turned into a woman. This strange occurrence quickly attracted people around who descended on the animals. One of them, it was learnt, was able to escape while the third one was beaten to death, still as a cat though.According to a source who witnessed what happened, the cat-woman said she and the two other cat-fellows had travelled from Abuja to Port Harcourt to kill three people. “The woman said they came to Port Harcourt from Abuja and that they came to kill three people. She said they had succeeded in killing two people, but the third person, whom I guess might be a pastor, was difficult for them and that they were preparing to go back to Abuja,” said the source.

I have absolutely no idea what to make of this; but I’m not going to rule out a priori that it might be completely real. I’ve never heard of any such thing, but I know there are many things I don’t know; and I believe in God, I believe there is a Devil, and I’ve come up against demons before, so I have no real reason to say this sort of magic couldn’t happen, given people who believed in it and were willing to give themselves over to it. There are indeed more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in most of our philosophies, after all.Still, that’s pretty weird.

Further evidence that we’re winning the war on terror

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comes from Simon Fraser University (in Burnaby, BC, a suburb of Vancouver, across the metro area from where we used to live); as that doughty and perceptive observer Fareed Zakaria noticed (and most of the rest of the American media haven’t), if you drop the practice of counting civilian deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan as deaths from terrorism—which is to say, if you count them as what they are, which is civilian deaths in a war zone, which aren’t counted as terrorist acts anywhere else—the international death toll from terrorist acts has gone through the floor (and that despite Israel, which has seen a rise in deaths from Palestinian terrorism since the withdrawal from Gaza). As regards the US, organized terror groups haven’t managed a successful attack on us since October 2003. There are a number of reasons for this;

the most significant, in the study’s view, is the “extraordinary drop in support for Islamist terror organizations in the Muslim world over the past five years.” These are largely self-inflicted wounds. The more people are exposed to the jihadists’ tactics and world view, the less they support them. An ABC/BBC poll in Afghanistan in 2007 showed support for the jihadist militants in the country to be 1 percent. In Pakistan’s North-West Frontier province, where Al Qaeda has bases, support for Osama bin Laden plummeted from 70 percent in August 2007 to 4 percent in January 2008. That dramatic drop was probably a reaction to the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, but it points to a general trend in Pakistan over the past five years. With every new terrorist attack, public support for jihad falls. “This pattern is repeated in country after country in the Muslim world,” writes Mack. “Its strategic implications are critically important because historical evidence suggests that terrorist campaigns that lose public support will sooner or later be abandoned or defeated.”

In other words, going into Iraq and Afghanistan has been critically important to defeating al’Qaeda in that, by taking the war to them, we’ve provoked them to terrorist attacks not in the Western world but in Muslim countries, among Muslims, with Muslim victims; what their fellow Muslims could support or at least tolerate when it was out of sight, out of mind, with victims they didn’t know or particularly care about, becomes intolerable when it’s down the street and the victims are friends, neighbors, and relatives. (As a prominent Saudi cleric wrote last September, “Who benefits from turning countries like Morocco, Algeria, Lebanon or Saudi Arabia into places where fear spreads and no one can feel safe?” [emphasis mine]) Which is no criticism of Muslims—that’s very human, and exactly what we see in Americans and Europeans as well. But it appears to be something that never occurred to al’Qaeda.It might be worth noting one other reason why al’Qaeda specifically has lost a great deal of support: if you publicly declare, “Iraq is the most important of these fields,” then get your butt kicked in Iraq, you’re going to have a hard time convincing people you’re worth supporting. As bin Laden himself said, “when people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature, they will like the strong horse.” At this point, al’Qaeda is pretty clearly the weak horse.

The parable of laminin

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“From the day we heard, we have not ceased to pray for you, asking that you may be filled with the knowledge of his will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding, so as to walk in a manner worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to him, bearing fruit in every good work and increasing in the knowledge of God. May you be strengthened with all power, according to his glorious might, for all endurance and patience with joy, giving thanks to the Father, who has qualified you to share in the inheritance of the saints in light. He has delivered us from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved Son,
in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.“He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things were created through him and for him. And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together. And he is the head of the body, the church. He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in everything he might be preeminent. For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace
by the blood of his cross.“And you, who once were alienated and hostile in mind, doing evil deeds, he has now reconciled in his body of flesh by his death, in order to present you holy and blameless and above reproach before him, if indeed you continue in the faith, stable and steadfast,
not shifting from the hope of the gospel that you heard.”—Colossians 1:9-23 (ESV)Laminin is a cell adhesion protein, one of a family of proteins which, according to Wikipedia, are “an integral part of the structural scaffolding in almost every animal tissue”; the article also says that “Laminin is vital to making sure overall body structures hold together.” Or, as a molecular biologist in Texas once put it to Louie Giglio, a story he tells in the clip embedded below, laminin is “like the rebar of the human body . . . the glue of the human body.”Now, a great many folks out there already know this story, due to the wide audience the Passion conferences have had, so while this was new to me, it isn’t to many; but it’s still quite remarkable. Take a look—here’s the molecular structure of laminin:

So in other words, this molecule that’s vital to holding us together . . . is cross-shaped. The structure of our bodies, at a deep and fundamental level, is cruciform. What’s more, as my delightfully perceptive wife points out, it echoes the Trinity, as it’s a cross made up of three parts.God has left testimonies to himself buried all through creation, little embedded parables for those who have eyes to see his hand and ears open to hear his voice; this, I believe, is one of them, just a little witness to and reminder of the truth Paul articulates in Colossians: Jesus Christ is the one who holds all things together. This is a spiritual truth, but it’s also a far greater truth about our whole world: Jesus is the one who holds everything together, who holds it all in his hand and sustains it all by his will. He’s the one who keeps the planets orbiting their suns and the suns moving in the vast dance of the cosmos, and the one who keeps protons bound to neutrons and electrons spinning joyfully in their orbitals; all that exists, including us, exists because he continues to will it to exist, because he holds it in his mind and heart and remembers it to itself. And in our own bodies, we have a little echo of that fact, a little parable to point us to that truth, in the tripartite cross-shaped molecule that is “the rebar of the human body.”Thanks, Hap, for teaching me that.

National Geographic‘s thirty pieces of silver

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Remember the big media story a while back about the Gospel of Judas? Remember the stories about how Judas was really a good guy? It appears now that the text (which is in any case a late Gnostic text, and thus not as significant as some people wanted to make it) was seriously misrepresented—and that National Geographic is in large part to blame. It’s clear they wanted to make use of Judas for their own purposes, and that one of those purposes was to make their thirty pieces of silver off him. They wanted the media splash, they wanted headlines like “Ancient Text Says Jesus Asked Judas to Hand Him to the Romans” (that one courtesy of the Arizona Republic), and they wanted the profits that came with that, courtesy of the high-profile documentary, the DVD sales, and the book sales. And if proper scholarly procedures, and with them proper scholarly standards, went by the wayside as a result—taking a proper scholarly concern for accuracy and truth with them—then so be it.

On a lighter note

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I don’t know how many of the folks who read this blog will care one way or the other that Paul DePodesta, special assistant for baseball operations for the San Diego Padres and former GM for the Los Angeles Dodgers, started a blog this month, but I did think even those least interested in baseball would appreciate its title: It Might Be Dangerous… You Go First. (And if you do like baseball, this promises to be a great place to read about it.)

Skeptical theism

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I linked to this by the by in my previous post, having discovered that it was up while I was looking for something else, but it really deserves its own: Edward Tingley has a stellar article in Touchstone called “The Skeptical Inquirer: If Only Atheists Were the Skeptics They Think They Are,” which I commend to your reading. It is, drawing on Pascal, a devastating frontal assault on the idea that the absence of scientific evidence for God is an argument against the existence of God. As Dr. Tingley says, “Skepticism raises the question, Is there any way forward after we have given up on material evidence? It certainly doesn’t answer it.”

Here are a few brief excerpts from the essay to whet your appetite:

Unbelievers think that skepticism is their special virtue, the key virtue believers lack. Bolstered by bestselling authors, they see the skeptical and scientific mind as muscular thinking, which the believer has failed to develop. He could bulk up if he wished to, by thinking like a scientist, and wind up at the “agnosticism” of a Dawkins or the atheism of a Dennett—but that is just what he doesn’t want, so at every threat to his commitments he shuns science.

That story is almost exactly the opposite of the truth. . . .

There are skeptical theists; Pascal was one. Skepticism and theism go well together. By a “skeptic” I mean a person who believes that in some particular arena of desired knowledge we just cannot have knowledge of the foursquare variety that we get elsewhere, and who sees no reason to bolster that lack with willful belief. . . .

Evidence is just not available to demonstrate the existence of God, said Pascal, who called himself one of those creatures who lack the humility that makes a natural believer. In that, he was of our time: We are pretty much all like that now. Three hundred and fifty years ago he laid out our situation for us: Modern man confronts the question of God from the starting point of skepticism, the conviction that there is no conclusive physical or logical evidence that the God of the Bible exists. . . .

This is where the modern person usually starts in his assault on the question, Is God real or imaginary?

This is base camp, above the tree-line of convincing reasons and knock-down arguments, at the far edge of things we can kick and see, and it is all uphill from here. Thus, it is astounding how many Dawkinses and Dennetts, undecideds and skeptical nay-sayers—that sea of “progressive” folk who claim to “think critically” about religion and either “take theism on” or claim they are “still looking”—who have not reached the year 1660 in their thinking. They almost never pay attention to what the skeptic Pascal said about this enquiry.

Instead, the dogmatic reflex, ever caring for human comfort, has flexed and decided the question already, has told them what to believe in advance of investigation and rushed them back to the safety of life as usual.

The modern thinking person who rightly touts the virtues of science—skepticism, logic, commitment to evidence—must possess the lot. But agnostics are not skeptical, half the atheists are not logical, and the rest refuse to go where the evidence is. None measures up in these modern qualities to Pascal.

I encourage you to read the rest—it’s truly a superb piece.