“Let not your hearts be troubled. Believe in God; believe also in me. In my Father’s house are many rooms. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, that where I am you may be also. And you know the way to where I am going.” Thomas said to him, “Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?” Jesus said to him, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. If you had known me, you would have known my Father also.
From now on you do know him and have seen him.”—John 14:1-7 (ESV)These words are much loved and much quoted, and I’m sure have been for as long as there has been a church. Perhaps the most interesting thing about this passage, though, is the basis for Jesus’ promise: it isn’t based on what he’s taught them so far, or even on his crucifixion and resurrection, but on the fact that he’s going to leave them. It’s his going away that makes the fulfillment of his promise possible. There are various aspects to this, but perhaps the most reassuring is that when Jesus ascended, when he returned to heaven, he wasn’t leaving us, he was leading us; he was going ahead of us to prepare our way, to show us the way, to be our way. That’s why he says, “If I go to prepare a place for you, I will come again and take you to myself, that where I am, there you may also be”; and that’s one reason why he sent us his Spirit, as the agent through whom he leads and guides us in this life, on the way toward the kingdom of his Father. Remember, “the earth is the Lord’s, and all that is in it,” and he’s actively at work in and through all of it. Thus for us, the world is not silent, nor is God silent; rather, God is always speaking to us, and all of life is the medium through which he speaks.Most basically, of course, and most importantly, God speaks to us through the words he inspired, which include the record of the life he lived for us on this earth; it’s through the Bible first and foremost that Jesus leads us by his Spirit, as he continues to speak to us by his Spirit through these words, and he will not say anything that contradicts what he has already said. But that’s not the only way he speaks to us; it’s not the only way he guides us. He speaks through us sometimes as we talk with each other, making us agents of his wisdom; sometimes he may speak truth to us through people outside the church; he touches our minds and hearts through his creation, the natural world; and sometimes he speaks to us directly, in the back of our minds and the quiet of our hearts. I’ll never forget one time I was absolutely furious at someone—a couple someones, actually—and in my mind I heard Jesus say, “Show them grace.” I knew it was God, since it wasn’t what I wanted to hear, and I protested angrily, “They don’t deserve it.” To which he responded, “I know. That’s why it’s called grace.”Granted, most of the time God doesn’t speak to us quite that clearly; I suspect I was being unusually dense that day. But he does speak to us, and he does lead us, and we can trust that fact no matter what; what’s more, we can trust that he’s good enough at leading us to overcome how bad we often are at following him. We don’t need to worry or be anxious about that, for we can trust God for his grace; we simply need to do our part. We need to spend time with him, in reading his word (the main way we come to know him and recognize his voice) and in prayer—not just talking to him, though that’s important, but also being silent, listening for his voice—so that we learn to know him when he speaks; and we need to learn to expect him to speak, because he is at work leading us by his Spirit every day, in every moment. Christ came down to seek us out in our sin and rescue us from the power of death, and he’s busy right now bringing us home; and what he starts, he finishes. Period. End of sentence.(Note: those with a philosophical bent might find Edward Tingley’s article “Gadamer and the Light of the Word” a valuable reflection on this matter; though Gadamer was not a believer, he gives a better account of the Spirit’s work than many Christians, and Tingley has some excellent things to say on this.)
Politics is crazy . . .
. . . and more so this year than any I can remember; but at least there are other places where it’s even crazier than here. I’d hate to be Ehud Olmert these days.
With friends like these, who needs enemies?
When Steve Sailer wondered back in January if the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. was trying to submarine Barack Obama’s presidential candidacy, I could see his logic, but I thought it was a classic case of logic subverting reason. When Michael Barone wondered the same thing a month ago, building on Sailer’s argument, I started to consider the idea, because Barone’s just too good an observer to dismiss—but still, the idea seemed crazy. Occam’s Razor seemed to suggest that the Rev. Dr. Wright was saying and doing the things he was saying and doing not out of any ulterior motive, but simply because this is who he is; this is what he preaches because this is what he believes. (He also believes, it appears, that black folks and white folks have different brains, which is a bit of racist crackpottery I’d normally expect out of the very KKK he attacks.) He might have been damaging Sen. Obama’s campaign, but it didn’t seem necessary to conclude he was doing so intentionally.After the Rev. Dr. Wright’s media offensive this past weekend, however (I use the term advisedly), I’m not at all so sure. Marc Ambinder says that “Wright is throwing Obama under the bus” (an ironic return for Sen. Obama’s attempt to save his pastor by throwing Granny under the bus), while Clive Crook, Dana Milbank and Joe Klein have now come to the same conclusion as Sailer and Barone. Indeed, Klein takes it a step further:
Wright’s purpose now seems quite clear: to aggrandize himself—the guy is going to be a go-to mainstream media source for racial extremist spew, the next iteration of Al Sharpton—and destroy Barack Obama.
Certainly it’s hard to come to any other conclusion than that the Rev. Dr. Wright deliberately “reignited a controversy about race from which Obama had only recently recovered—and added lighter fuel.” Some people are even wondering now if the Clintons put him up to it.The sad thing is, it may very well work—and I do truly believe it will be a sad, sad day for this country if it does. Granted, I had no intention whatsoever of voting for Sen. Obama, but I wanted to believe in his integrity and his vision even if I can’t accept his political ideas; I wanted to believe that win or lose, he could help America take another step or two away from the racism of the past. Now, after all we’ve seen of his friends, his view of the people of this country (which echoes his wife’s bitterness at America) and the way he plays politics, I can’t respect him anymore, and I definitely want him to lose on his merits. That said, if 15% of the electorate votes for John McCain simply because Barack Obama has dark skin, as some sharp observers think will happen, that would be a shameful thing, and I don’t want to see that. But that’s where the Rev. Dr. Wright is heading us—that’s where he’s driving the bus—and it seems, increasingly, that he’s doing so because he’d rather inflame and exacerbate our nation’s internal divisions than be proved wrong about them. If so, that’s despicable. Barack Obama should have exercised much better care in his choice of friends; he shouldn’t have wasted his time on a pastor who could betray him (and his country) like that.
“Winning” doesn’t mean “easy”
Unfortunately, our quick-fix minute-rice instant-oatmeal fast-food culture has largely lost touch with the fact that some struggles take a long time, and that even tough, long-term fights may well be not only worth fighting but necessary to fight. I think most of our churches have lost the stomach for that, which is why the long victory of discipleship, with the lifelong struggle to put sin to death in our lives and replace it with trust in Christ, is foreign to so many who consider themselves Christians; and I’m quite sure we’ve largely lost the stomach for it in our politics. We may talk the talk of long-term effort, but we don’t often walk the walk. That I’m sure is at least part of the reason (along with partisan opportunism) why the war in Iraq became so unpopular: it stopped being easy. Once it no longer looked like a cakewalk, a lot of folks stopped supporting it.
I’m glad, though, to see President Bush (finally?) call that attitude out:
I have to wonder (not originally, I know) what that reporter, and our press corps as a whole, would have made of World War II, or the Civil War . . . (According to Wikipedia, the American death toll of the entire Iraq War through the end of this month stands at 4,058 deaths, 3,320 in combat. In World War II, the Battle of the Bulge alone claimed 19,000 American dead.)
HT: Ed Morissey
The relevance of liturgy
I argued yesterday that rather than trying to stop being alien to the world and start looking normal on its terms, we need to be forthright about our alienness; rather than trying to tame the strange language of Christian faith, we need to actively teach it to those who don’t know it. This afternoon, I sat down to read Mark Galli’s article in the latest Christianity Today, “A Deeper Relevance,” and found this:
A closer look suggests that something more profound and paradoxical is going on in liturgy than the search for contemporary relevance. “The liturgy begins . . . as a real separation from the world,” writes Orthodox theologian Alexander Schmemann. He continues by saying that in the attempt to “make Christianity understandable to this mythical ‘modern’ man on the street,” we have forgotten this necessary separation.It is precisely the point of the liturgy to take people out of their worlds and usher them into a strange new world—to show them that, despite appearances, the last thing in the world they need is more of the world out of which they’ve come. The world the liturgy reveals does not seem relevant at first glance, but it turns out that the world it reveals is more real than the one we inhabit day by day. . . .In what’s now an old essay, F. H. Brabant put it this way: “All liturgical acts . . . have a double function: one directed Godwards, expressing in outward form the thoughts and feelings of the worshippers, the other directed manwards, teaching worshippers how they ought to think and feel by setting before them the Church’s standard of worship.”We have to pay attention to cultural context, no question. The history of liturgy has been in part about finding words and ritual that help people in a given culture express their thoughts and feelings to God in ways that make sense. The liturgy has always had freedom and variety within its basic structure.But it has steadfastly refused to let the culture determine its shape or meaning. Liturgical churches know that as profound a reality as is the surrounding culture, there is an even more profound reality waiting to be discovered. The liturgy gently and calmly gets us to open our eyes to the new reality, showing us the “necessary separation” from the old. Suddenly, in the blink of an eye, we find our gaze directed away from ourselves and toward God and his kingdom. When we return to our homes, we are never the same.
That’s thick stuff, and profoundly important for the health of the church. I look forward to the article going up; what’s more, I look forward to reading the book from which the article was adapted, Beyond Smells & Bells: The Wonder and Power of Christian Liturgy. This is a message the American church needs to hear—and not only the “contemporary” churches that have stripped their liturgy down to the bare minimum, but also those churches being told they have to abandon their liturgy to be “relevant.” Relevance is not about coming to the world on its own terms; to the contrary, we are most relevant when we tell the world what it needs to know and does not, and when we give it what it needs to have and does not. May we have the courage to stick to that mission.
Humble knowledge
A lot of people think that a belief in absolute truth necessarily leads to dogmatism; that is, it seems to me, the main thing that moves people to conclude that truth is relative, because the alternative produces such unappealing behavior. Really, though, it’s not the belief in absolute truth as such that produces dogmatism, but the combination of a belief in absolute truth with a belief that the self is absolute; and it’s to defend that belief in the absolute self that people declare the truth to be relative. For my own part, I believe that the truth is absolute, and I am relative; my certainty is necessarily limited, not by the absence of absolutes, but by my own limited ability to perceive and apprehend them accurately. As John Stackhouse says, we may be pretty sure we’re right, but we lack the ability to get outside ourselves and our own limitations enough to be absolutely sure. We should believe what we believe firmly and with conviction; but also with humility. After all, the fact that we believe something doesn’t guarantee that it’s true; as Dr. Stackhouse says, it’s about confidence in God who is truth, not about certainty in ourselves, who aren’t.
The audacity of Bill Cosby
The May issue of The Atlantic is one of their best in a while, maybe the best since Michael Kelly’s much-lamented death. Of all the articles, I think the most interesting is Ta-Nehisi Coates’ take on Bill Cosby and his mission to transform the American black community. Read the article, watch the accompanying video, and see what you think:
I don’t know enough to evaluate Coates’ intellectual history, though his tracking of the arguments and influence and political descendants of Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. DuBois makes sense to me on first read; and I don’t think racism is as endemic (among people of any skin color or ethnic heritage) as Cosby thinks it is, though my pessimistic streak tells me it’s probably more common in general than in my own experience. I find Cosby’s mission largely admirable, even if there are points on which I would disagree with him; I’m not sure how concerned I should be about those points, especially when it seems to me his message is fundamentally one of encouragement, and encouragement is in far too short supply. There’s a lot to chew on here—especially, I think, for the church.
HT for the video: Ray Ortlund
Shameless plug
I’m finally starting to get to work on my page on my church’s website; I don’t have a whole lot on there yet, but I do have the texts for this sermon series up. (No audio, though—at least, not yet.) Check them out, if you’re interested; while you’re there, feel free to explore the site a bit. It’s an interesting congregation.
The best and worst of the Presbyterian Church (USA)
In a couple days’ time, the denominational press managed to show me both the best and the worst of the PC(USA). On the one hand, there was a deeply inspiring story from Flint, MI about three congregations—from different parts of the city and different backgrounds; two were predominantly white, one mostly black—that voted to merge and build a new church together. What they’re doing isn’t easy; it involves a lot of sacrifice and a lot of time and a lot of unselfish hard work to set aside your comfort zones and your old identity and culture and come together to grow a new identity and culture. The fact that they’re doing it, and committed to doing it, for the sake of the gospel is a truly beautiful thing.
On the other hand, I also saw a depressing story of the institutional greed that drives too many of the decisions of this denomination: the Synod of the Sun voted to establish an Administrative Commission to take away some of the responsibilities of the Presbytery of South Louisiana. Specifically, they’re taking away the presbytery’s right to make decisions regarding the property of its congregations. Why? Because the presbytery was showing too much grace to congregations which wanted to leave, and too much concern for the welfare of the church of God as a whole, and not enough two-fisted insistence on keeping everything of value it could possibly lay a claim on. As Bob Davis wrote in his post today, “If ever there was a statement of institutional distrust, this would be it. Presbyteries are not to be trusted with the decisions the constitution specifically entrusts to presbyteries.” And why are they not to be trusted? Because they follow their own best judgment, not the diktat of the party apparatchiki.
(Update: according to a letter to Presbyweb from Greg Coulter of Eastern Oklahoma Presbytery, on the request of the presbytery council of the Presbytery of South Louisiana, the Administrative Commission was not given the authority to assume original jurisdiction. This is good to know, though I don’t think it ameliorates the picture as much as Mr. Coulter thinks it does. He categorizes this as “one governing body invit[ing] another governing body to partner with them”; but given that the presbytery had, potentially, a gun to its head, and knew it, it seems to me that categorizing their letter as an invitation is dubious.)
This sort of thing is the reason why, as Davis also writes in that post, the effort to make the PC(USA) more missional by revising our polity is completely wrongheaded and doomed not merely to failure but to actively worsening the problem: it’s an effort to use structure to fix a behavior problem. As someone has said, no constitution can withstand those charged to administer it; changing our constitution without changing the hearts of those in positions of authority may change their justifications for their actions, but it will not change those actions. To quote Davis, “polity reflects behavior. Polity does not initiate behavior.”
In the end, it all comes back to that quote from David Ruis: “The worship God is seeking relies completely on His initiative, knowing that the only true expression of worship is through the abandonment of all our agendas for His, as we trust in His sovereign power and unlimited grace.” The mission to which God calls us flows out of the worship to which he calls us. Until those who govern the PC(USA) are willing to abandon their own agendas for his, trusting in his sovereign power and unlimited grace—as those folks in Flint did, to their eternal credit—they will never be agents of his mission, no matter what else they do; and until that changes, the part of God’s church for which they are responsible will never prosper.
HT: Presbyweb
Answering Islam on its own terms
Though I know he’s out of favor these days, and I’ve learned not to trust his account of modern philosophy as much as I once did, I still must confess a great debt and greater admiration for Francis Schaeffer; though I might have learned the presuppositional approach to apologetics from Cornelius Van Til or other figures in my own Reformed tradition, I learned it from Schaeffer, and I’m deeply grateful for that.For those not familiar with this approach, here’s a very brief summary, taken from the Wikipedia article: “The goal of presuppositional apologetics . . . is to argue that the assumptions and actions of non-Christians require them to believe certain things about God, man and the world which they claim they do not believe. This type of argument is technically called a reductio ad absurdum in that it attempts to reduce the opposition to holding an absurd position.” I appreciate this approach both for its recognition that none of us ever really starts from a neutral position—we all begin with a particular point of view, from a particular standpoint—and for its understanding that we can’t “prove” the Christian faith simply by piling evidence on people; we need to take their standpoints, their worldviews, more seriously than that.This is, I believe, the best way to contend for the Christian faith in any context, but especially in the Islamic world, given the nature of the Muslim faith and its view of non-Muslims; which is why Fr. Zakaria Botros is such an amazing and critically important witness to Christ. A Coptic priest and Arabic TV personality, Fr. Botros challenges Islam in its own language, on the ground of its own teachings, from its own texts.
Each of his episodes has a theme—from the pressing to the esoteric—often expressed as a question (e.g., “Is jihad an obligation for all Muslims?”; “Are women inferior to men in Islam?”; “Did Mohammed say that adulterous female monkeys should be stoned?” “Is drinking the urine of prophets salutary according to sharia?”). To answer the question, Botros meticulously quotes—always careful to give sources and reference numbers—from authoritative Islamic texts on the subject, starting from the Koran; then from the canonical sayings of the prophet—the Hadith; and finally from the words of prominent Muslim theologians past and present—the illustrious ulema.Typically, Botros’s presentation of the Islamic material is sufficiently detailed that the controversial topic is shown to be an airtight aspect of Islam. Yet, however convincing his proofs, Botros does not flatly conclude that, say, universal jihad or female inferiority are basic tenets of Islam. He treats the question as still open—and humbly invites the ulema, the revered articulators of sharia law, to respond and show the error in his methodology. He does demand, however, that their response be based on “al-dalil we al-burhan,”—“evidence and proof,” one of his frequent refrains—not shout-downs or sophistry.More often than not, the response from the ulema is deafening silence—which has only made Botros and Life TV more enticing to Muslim viewers. The ulema who have publicly addressed Botros’s conclusions often find themselves forced to agree with him—which has led to some amusing (and embarrassing) moments on live Arabic TV.Botros spent three years bringing to broad public attention a scandalous—and authentic—hadith stating that women should “breastfeed” strange men with whom they must spend any amount of time. A leading hadith scholar, Abd al-Muhdi, was confronted with this issue on the live talk show of popular Arabic host Hala Sirhan. Opting to be truthful, al-Muhdi confirmed that going through the motions of breastfeeding adult males is, according to sharia, a legitimate way of making married women “forbidden” to the men with whom they are forced into contact—the logic being that, by being “breastfed,” the men become like “sons” to the women and therefore can no longer have sexual designs on them.To make matters worse, Ezzat Atiyya, head of the Hadith department at al-Azhar University—Sunni Islam’s most authoritative institution—went so far as to issue a fatwa legitimatizing “Rida’ al-Kibir” (sharia’s term for “breastfeeding the adult”), which prompted such outrage in the Islamic world that it was subsequently recanted.
Islamic leaders have proven unable to challenge him, because he’s beating them on their own terms; combined with Fr. Botros’ presentation of the truth of the gospel, the result has been millions of conversions to Christianity every year. There have been threats against his life in consequence, but he will not back down, and so far, no one has been able to make him. A billion cheers for Fr. Botros, indeed.The success of Fr. Botros’ flank attack on the Islamic world, coming as it does at the same time as the frontal assault Pope Benedict XVI launched with his Regensburg address in 2006, highlights an important point: the West cannot answer Islam by purely political means, whether military or diplomatic. Indeed, Islam cannot be addressed on any sort of secular grounds, because the liberal secular mind does not understand religion. As Spengler argues and as the case of Magdi Allam demonstrates, the West can only respond effectively to the Islamic challenge by returning to its Christian (and thus Jewish, and thus Eastern) roots, because “one does not fight a religion with guns (at least not only with guns) but with love” (a point made also by Chuck Colson) The great struggle for the soul of the West against Islam, though it surely must involve military efforts at times against the likes of al’Qaeda and Hizb’allah, will most basically be a struggle for the souls of individual Muslims, and thus for the lives of those who seek to leave Islam for Christianity. To quote Spengler,
Where will the Pope find the sandals on the ground in this new religious war? From the ranks of the Muslims themselves, evidently. Magdi Allam is just one convert, but he has a big voice. If the Church fights for the safety of converts, they will emerge from the nooks and crannies of Muslim communities in Europe.
The parallel he draws to the conversion of the pagans who overran the fading Roman Empire is a compelling one; those tribes conquered Europe, and thus the Western church, but the church in turn absorbed them by conversion. Faith conquered where military power failed. The key, as Wretchard points out, lies in your presuppositions, the foundations of your life, and having a place to stand that you know is worth standing for.
Challenging Islam’s roots requires the challenger to have an irrational [or better, superrational] loyalty to roots of his own. Faith is a special kind of information that arises from providing answers to questions that are undecidable within our formal logical system; that lie beneath the foundations of our civilization rather than in a development of its precepts. It lies within our choice of axioms rather than the theorems that arise from them. And because axioms cannot be proved, “our way of life” will always rest on prejudice—or if you will—faith. Like Camus, we can never rise completely above all our attachments and still retain our capacity to act.
HT: Presbyweb, BreakPoint