Missing the mystery

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Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I am filling up what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the church, of which I became a minister according to the stewardship from God that was given to me for you, to make the word of God fully known, the mystery hidden for ages and generations but now revealed to his saints. To them God chose to make known how great among the Gentiles are the riches of the glory of this mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory. Him we proclaim, warning everyone and teaching everyone with all wisdom, that we may present everyone mature in Christ. For this I toil, struggling with all his energy that he powerfully works within me.

For I want you to know how great a struggle I have for you and for those at Laodicea and for all who have not seen me face to face, that their hearts may be encouraged, being knit together in love, to reach all the riches of full assurance of understanding and the knowledge of God’s mystery, which is Christ, in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. I say this in order that no one may delude you with plausible arguments. For though I am absent in body, yet I am with you in spirit, rejoicing to see your good order and the firmness of your faith in Christ.

—Colossians 1:24-2:5 (ESV)

I argued earlier today that we have a predisposition to belief, one which is driven in large part by the sense that, however much folks like Richard Dawkins might tell us otherwise, there is more to reality than the material and physical—that there’s more to this life than just what we can see and hear and manipulate. I believe everyone feels the pull of this, though some people do their level best to stuff it down where it won’t bother them; even then, though, you can often still see its effects (even in folks like Dr. Dawkins). This, it seems to me, is one of the points of entry for the church in an age like ours.

Unfortunately, this isn’t all that common an approach in the American church. If we look at churches around this country, we see a lot of them that are so determined to be relevant and with it and cool that they’ve adopted a strategy of giving the world what it already knows it wants; they mimic its sounds, its approaches, its strategies, in an effort to address the needs it’s already aware of and already understands. Thus we get worship services where a playlist right out of the Top 40 leads into sermons about how if Jesus is your CEO, you can follow these three surefire principles to prepare your children to lead successful lives. The music and the principles may be fine as far as they go—but they don’t go far enough, because they don’t go any farther than the world goes. They don’t even acknowledge the mystery, let alone aim for it; they leave that need unaddressed and unfilled.

I don’t know if this was the problem with the Colossian church, but from some of the things Paul says, it sounds like it might have been. Certainly, their understanding of Christ seems to have been pretty shallow—and as a consequence, though they’d been given the riches of the glory of the knowledge of God’s mystery, though they’d been given the keys to the treasury of heaven itself, they didn’t know it. They didn’t understand what they’d been given, and so they went chasing off after other things. They went a different direction than most of our churches today, off into a weird esoteric form of legalism instead of into the therapeutic moralistic legalism that’s the big attraction these days, but they had the same root problem: they didn’t really know and appreciate Jesus, and so they thought they needed something else. They’d missed the mystery, passed it up for a handful of flashy trinkets.

This is why Paul says that he struggles that the Colossians, and the other Christians of the Lycus Valley, “may be encouraged . . . to reach all the riches of the full understanding of the knowledge of the mystery of God, which is Christ.” Indeed, he expresses this desire for all those who haven’t seen him face to face, for this is his hope for all the church—not just for the people to whom he initially wrote this letter, but for everyone who reads it across the length and breadth of the people of God. The world tries to keep us from that, either by leading us off down the rabbit trail to chase illusions, as the Colossians did, or by keeping us so focused on the practical things of life that we forget our sense of mystery, that we forget there’s anything more to life than just getting through it. Paul calls us away from both mistakes; he calls us to remember that there is more to this life, and to dive into the mystery of God, to seek the glory of the knowledge of God in the face of Christ.

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.

 

The Mystery of God

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(Proverbs 2:1-11; Colossians 1:24-2:5)

How many of y’all use e-mail regularly? How many of you regularly get e-mail forwards? How many of you send those on to other folks? There are a lot of them out there; unfortunately, a lot of them are purely phony. Maybe you’ve seen the e-mail blasting Target as a French company that’s opposed to veterans; now, my dad likes to refer to Target as “Target, the French store,” but that’s the only thing French about them—they’re headquartered in Minneapolis. To be sure, they’ve chosen to focus their corporate grant-giving on educational and arts projects, but that doesn’t make them anti-veteran. Or perhaps you’ve run across the one about Proctor & Gamble being a front for the Church of Satan? Supposedly the CEO went on Oprah and confessed it, and pointed out the “666” hidden in their corporate logo. Turns out, though, that rumor was invented by a regional distributor for Amway—long enough ago, in fact, that in older versions of the story, the confession occurred on Donahue.

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. That’s just the way we’re made. 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 Adolf Hitler’s “big lie” propaganda strategy worked, because it’s hard for us to credit that anyone actually could 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 far more likely than religious folk to believe in UFOs, ESP, and paranormal phenomena; having thrown out religion, they have to find something else to believe in. Thus the line attributed to the great Christian writer G. K. Chesterton, “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—and 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, I’m sure, 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.

Unfortunately, if we look at churches around this country, we see a lot of them that are so determined to be relevant and with it and cool that they’ve adopted a strategy of giving the world what it already knows it wants; they mimic its sounds, its approaches, its strategies, in an effort to address the needs it’s already aware of and already understands. Thus we get worship services where a playlist right out of the Top 40 leads into sermons about how if Jesus is your CEO, you can follow these three surefire principles to prepare your children to lead successful lives. The music and the principles may be fine as far as they go—but they don’t go far enough, because they don’t go any farther than the world goes. They don’t even acknowledge the mystery, let alone aim for it; they leave that need unaddressed and unfilled.

Was this the problem in the Colossian church? We have no way of knowing for sure, but it sounds like it might have been. Certainly, from the things Paul feels the need to say to these folks, it sounds like their understanding of Christ is pretty shallow—and as a consequence, though they’ve been given the riches of the glory of the knowledge of God’s mystery, though they’ve been given the keys to the treasury of heaven itself, they don’t know it. They don’t understand what they’ve been given, and so they still feel the need for something more; as a result, they’re vulnerable to these teachers who’ve come along and promised them a new and greater wisdom, a new and greater experience of God, and a new and greater insight into his mystery. They don’t understand what Paul understands, that the supposed wisdom of those teachers is in fact false, a counterfeit, that serves only to draw them away from God.

This is why Paul says that he struggles that the Colossians, and the other Christians of the Lycus Valley, “may be encouraged . . . to reach all the riches of the full understanding of the knowledge of the mystery of God, which is Christ.” Indeed, he expresses this desire for all those who haven’t seen him face to face, for this is his hope for all the church—not just for the people to whom he initially wrote this letter, but for all of us who read it across the length and breadth of the people of God. The world tries to keep us from that, either by leading us off down the rabbit trail to chase illusions, as the Colossians did, or by keeping us so focused on the practical things of life that we forget our sense of mystery, that we forget there’s anything more to life than just getting through it. Paul calls us away from both mistakes; he calls us to remember that there is more to this life, and to dive into the mystery of God, to seek the glory of the knowledge of God in the face of Christ.

His desire is that we will learn that there is a deeper wisdom than this world can offer, and a deeper meaning to life than it knows of, and that both are found in Christ, in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge, to be revealed only to those who seek him. If we would pursue understanding, if we want to live wisely, if we desire to see ourselves and others clearly and truly, we must look to Jesus, for we will only find what we desire in him. There is no better way, there is no other option, there is nothing more that needs to be said or done; Christ alone is wisdom and righteousness and sanctification and redemption, as Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 1:30. That is the mystery of God: that such a thing is possible; that God would actually become human, to live with us and die for us, and then to rise again to set us free; that the gap between us and God has been bridged—from God’s side!—and we don’t have to earn our way into his presence, for we are freely invited there by his grace. This is the mystery we celebrate at this table, the mystery the world calls foolishness that is in truth the root of all wisdom.

Trading excuses for grace

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Ray Ortlund, as usual, goes right to the heart of things:

The world is a mess, and it’s always someone else’s fault. Every rational person on the face of the earth knows something is wrong, and every single one is pointing at the next guy saying, “He’s to blame.” Everyone is an exception. This is our natural moral psychology.

This is why we need to hear the Law of God, because it renders this self-deception impossible and forces us to see our own guilt and our own responsibility; it drives us to admit and reckon with the real problem, so that we can hear the gospel of Jesus Christ as the good news that it truly is—and so that we’re ready to accept the only true healing available to us, which comes only by his grace. We need to come to the point where we realize that we have no excuses for this mess, so that we can receive as a gift his answer for it.

All need a new heart, created by the Holy Spirit. All need a grace from beyond themselves that flies in under their radar with humbling self-awareness that bows low and says, “I fall short of the glory of God. In fact, there is no justification for my life at all. God, be merciful to me, a sinner.” This is the one who is justified by God’s grace, as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus.

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.

Second time is the charm

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Following the House defeat of the modified Paulson bill—a defeat not merely enabled but actively encouraged by the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi—and the subsequent cratering of the stock market, the Senate decided to stand up and act like the adults on the Hill, passing a modified version of the bill in pointed fashion. Amazingly, it was even a more conservative version of the bill (despite the added pork), though I doubt it was enough so to be worth the cost of the bill’s failure the first time around. In any case, this time, Speaker Pelosi took the hint and actually decided to do her job, and the House fell in line and passed the bill, 263-171. It’s always nice to see our politicians acting like grownups for a change. (Even so, I still think a lot of these folks—Speaker Pelosi first and foremost—need to be swept out like yesterday’s dustbunnies.)Update: obviously, the rescue bill hasn’t stopped the stock market’s slide to this point; part of that, I expect, is the market principle “buy on rumor, sell on news,” which has always seemed stupid to me but is very much part of the pattern of the markets. Part of it, too, is that the markets expect an Obama victory and don’t like what they think that will mean. Even so, I remain convinced that those who opposed the bill on the grounds that it was bad for the free market were wrong; rather, as an editorial in Investors’ Business Daily, argued, the bill gave the government necessary tools to help heal the free market. Here’s hoping they’re used wisely and proactively.

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

And another one bites the dust

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Another one of Barack Obama’s friends, that is, who was just raided by the FBI; this would be Larry Walsh, his poker buddy, a good friend from his days in Springfield, for whom he’s requested millions in earmarks. Given that Walsh’s use of federal grants appears to be at the heart of the federal investigation, this does not reflect well on Sen. Obama’s judgment. (It does, however, suggest a plausible reason why Sen. Obama didn’t have any of his friends involved at the convention in Denver: he doesn’t want the public to recognize their names when things like this happen.)

Sarah Palin’s greatest qualification: integrity

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Thanks to Beldar for pointing this out, because I wouldn’t have found it: the Baseball Crank has a great post on Gov. Palin’s long and strong record of integrity as a politician (one which, along the way, refutes a number of media misrepresentations from primary sources). Apparently, this is the first of a three-part series examining each of the four main national-ticket candidates in this regard, so I’ll be interested to see the next two as well. It truly is a superb piece, and well worth the time it takes to read it (it isn’t short).It should also be noted that the whole site is worth exploring, especially (but not only) if you like baseball; I’ve been a big fan of serious analysis of baseball ever since I first ran across Bill James 20 years ago, so I think I’ll add this one to the blogroll. I was particularly intrigued by his short post on “Bill James, Sabermetrics, Conservatives, and Bloggers” (which, as you can probably guess, generated a heated response from liberal baseball fans wedded to the stereotype of conservatives as nasty, irrational Neanderthals); I don’t know that he’s right in his conclusions, but he offers some interesting thoughts.

Vindication 2.0

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Strong debate performance tonight from Sarah Palin (and maybe the best of Joe Biden’s life as well); aside from Internet trolls, the worst anyone can say is “she helped herself but she didn’t help John McCain.” It may well have been a draw, but given the strength of Sen. Biden’s performance (which was helped by his willingness and ability to twist the truth into pretzels), that’s no knock on Gov. Palin; and where it matters most, it was a clear win for her—namely, giving clear evidence to her mishandlers in the McCain campaign that they need to let her be herself rather than trying to reshape her.Count me in with those who wish she’d had the freedom to depart from the McCain campaign’s unprofitable lines on things like Fannie, Freddie and the financial crisis, though.