Who Is A Person--Legally?

On the Colorado ballot this time around is Amendment 48, sometimes called the “Personhood Amendment.” It is a very simple amendment, stating that in all the appropriate places in the Colorado Constitution, the term “person” or “persons” shall apply to any human being from the moment of fertilization. Clearly, this will have profound consequences on the pro-life/pro-choice debate, and once it is given some thought, some possibly radical legal and legislative consequences.

This amendment gets right to the heart of the pro-life issue. Not too many people argue anymore that what is in the womb of a human mother is not biologically human or potentially human. Because the DNA evidence is insurmountable, the debate has now largely moved to the social or legal status of the fetus/embryo/zygote in terms of whether it is a person with all the rights and privileges thereof, or not.

Most pro-life positions contend that what is in the womb is “human” in the sense that it ought to bear all the social and legal rights we grant all out of the womb humans. What is in the womb is human life, the deliberate taking of innocent life is always murder, and therefore, the deliberate taking of innocent life in the womb is murder. Probably not too many people will argue with parts two and three of the preceding sentence, so it is part one that is at stake.

Amendment 48 will, at least legally, answer that issue.

Should a pro-lifer vote for it? My short answer is “yes.” If you are pro-life in the sense outlined above, this amendment is a legislative move totally in concert with your philosophical and theological convictions. It is not an overreaching religious belief because it does not make any explicit religious appeal, and can be defended on totally non-religious grounds. Thus it does not breech any serious worry of the separation of church and state. (For the record, I find that concern highly suspect anyway.)

Many worry about its passage because some of the ramifications of this amendment could be far-reaching and even radical. Will the state then need to prosecute both mothers and doctors for murder? Will Planned Parenthood become an “illegal” organization? Will pharmacies which distribute abortion inducing birth control be complicit in murder? Some argue that Amendment 48 is unwise because of these potential consequences. But is that a valid concern?

In general, if a law is in right relationship with reality, it should be enacted. Even if it causes us pain as we grow accustomed to it, truth is more important than practicality. Take, for example, a world where a product called, “Kansas-Style Whole Grain Bread,” is lethal. This bread is unusually tasty and even very cheap to purchase. Families have been feeding it to their kids for years, and though there have been worries that childhood mortality rates may be connected with the bread, it has not been proven until now. It is in the state’s best interest that families and kids are protected from this nefarious whole grain bread, but to enact legislation outlawing it would be devastating to many sectors of the economy. It is worried that family farms will go under, bankruptcies will increase to a level that will threaten local banks, employment will tank as distributors and grocery stores quit selling the popular product. We can imagine a world where the ramifications are broad and even painful, but we probably consider the legislation more important than the consequences.

Secondly, I don’t have to answer all the potential consequences before I take a principled stand on an issue. I may not be able, for example, to detail all the economic ramifications of outlawing gambling in Las Vegas, but I can be totally rational coming up with a good argument saying it should be outlawed. Likewise, proponents of Amendment 48 do not need to detail exactly how all the laws regarding murder will work in the future in order to support the amendment.

In fact, if one is deeply concerned about murder laws now applying to abortion cases, they need only to look at the some two-thirds of U.S. states that already have fetal murder laws on the books. It is the case in most states that if you are careless behind the wheel and hit a pregnant woman, killing both her and the unborn child within her, you can be guilty for double homicide. How vastly different would these new laws in Colorado be if Amendment 48 is passed?

This amendment is a big one. It potentially carries a huge package of philosophical dynamite, but sometimes existing structures need to be brought to the ground.

I Was Plagiarized

With the availability of sermons and sermon helps over the internet—for free—the problem of pastoral plagiarism is more pronounced than ever. I was plagiarized, and I know it because the guilty party proudly, if utterly ignorantly, proclaimed it to me face-to-face.

A little over ten years ago I taught a series based on Summit Ministry’s Understanding the Times curriculum and added my own module on truth in a postmodern world. A pastoral friend three hours north of me thought it sounded like a good series, his mom sent him the tapes, and he taught my material class for class. As fate would have it, a member of his church was an editor for a pastoral magazine. He asked my friend to write an article based on the postmodern material. And here is where it gets fun.

My friend told me the story, said he was about to send the editor to me (because he knew he didn’t do the work and probably couldn’t have) until he heard the article paid. Then, he said, he went ahead and wrote the article. There was jovial laughter all around.

Just this past month, his article appeared in the footnotes of our denomination’s latest journal in the Editor’s Letter at the front of the edition. My old friend is now being cited as a kind of expert/good source on this issue.

What should I do? Reactions from friends and family range from writing him a frustrated letter and demand he clear the record to suing him for (what is likely provable) plagiarism. Chances are pretty slim my plagiarizer will be tapped as an expert on these matters and asked to write more articles on the subject, but what if he is?

I don’t know yet what benefit I will receive by pressing this issue. I must admit I am frustrated at what plagiarism has done to my material, but I’m not sure any official action will gain me anything. On the other hand, I believe this is a serious issue among most pastors. Maybe I am a little cynical at times, but I don’t think most evangelical pastors have the chops to do their own work and apply it to their own congregations. If the tape, CD, podcats and mp3 market disappeared tomorrow, how many pastors would have anything to say the following Sunday?

Emergent Worship?

Recently there has been a growth of worship coming out of the migration of young people into Reformed theology. People enthralled with Piper, Edwards and Calvin are touring the nation writing and singing songs like "Indescribable," and "How Great Is Our God." Add the David Crowder Band on top of Chris Tomlin and Passion and throw in a mix of hymns being redone, and you have a recipie for a new generation of worship.

Where are the emergent worship song writers? Maybe you can point me in their direction, but I have a hunch. There probably aren't many (or even any) who are genuinely emergent, becuase there is no one to worship if emergent theology is to be believed. According to emergent leaders, there is a god who is our most important conversation partner, the great moral example to people who just need to do the right political things to be OK, and one who needs a 5 year break in talking about homosexuality, but not a transcendant and incarnate God who graciously extends His love to unlovable creatures.

A Scourge In Our Age

In her speech on Wednesday night, the Republican nominee for Vice President, Sarah Palin, referred to her 5-month old baby as, “perfectly beautiful.” Just about every parent of an infant would say that, but what makes her statement extraordinary is that Trig has Down syndrome.

Abortion is an epidemic and smear on our culture, but the reality is even worse among pre-born children diagnosed with physical and mental disorders. With the advent of prenatal testing for pregnant women of all ages, 90% of children diagnosed with Down syndrome are aborted. We are deciding what “normal” people look like and the kinds of kids we want to raise, and we are disposing of the rest.

What makes this form of abortion especially abhorrent is that it is not only murder, it is murder in the name of eugenics. Eugenics is the act of deciding what kinds of people are superior to others, who deserve to live, and marginalizing the rest. The most blatant form of eugenics is the legacy of the Nazi regime, which underwent a bloody policy of genocide and medical experimentation. Not only did the Nazis try to rid the world of Jews and Gypsies, they rounded up the mentally and physically handicapped, experimented on them, took them out of the normal stream of society, and exterminated thousands.

In the same morally audacious category is the current trend of aborting the same kinds of people the Nazis tried to rid the world of. In the article cited above, the accompanying video quotes the couple as worrying about the world in which their child will grow up. If there are fewer and fewer of her type around in the near future, they worry the world will be less accepting and loving of her. And I think their fear is well-founded. If we are this intolerant of these pre-born infants, how long will it be before we are that intolerant of them after they are born?

The nebulous and propagandistic slogan, “choice,” is a really bad way to justify eugenic murder. Part of what makes morality a discipline is that sometimes the right choices are hard. Families who chose to give birth to and raise a special needs child make some very hard choices, but often tell stories of unbounded and surprising love. “Choice” is lesser moral good than life, even when that life is different than ours.

The Sermons We Endure

Last week our church hosted a missionary couple and over lunch one of them told me something fascinating. He referred to my sermon that morning and said that it had been years since he heard an expositional sermon. In other words, as he further explained, it had been years since he heard a sermon in which the minister opened the Bible, took a chunk of Scripture and explained it to people. The fact that this came from a missionary is important: in our denomination missionaries “itinerate.” That means they travel from church to church raising their support and are often in 4-6 different churches in a month.

They had not heard a sermon serious about a passage of Scripture in years.

I have actually heard this often in recent months. My style of preaching has always been expositional. So much so (to prove the depth of my commitment), we recently spent two years in the book of Jeremiah, and it was probably the most powerful two years of work I have ever done. As more people become accustomed to my style, they tell me it has been a long time since they needed to open their Bibles in a service or that they are excited that they hear people in the sanctuary flipping the pages of their Bibles during the sermon.

What is your experience? I worry that the “non-biblical” sermon is becoming more and more common in our evangelical services. A decade or two ago it was probably the influence of the seeker-sensitive movement with its self-help pop-psychology approach that dethroned the Bible in our pulpits, and today my guess is that the social liberalism and literary deconstruction of younger evangelicals and emergents is behind much of it. (A sermon on being green and recycling is, in my opinion, not a sermon but a platform—it’s not hard to find those mp3s on many church websites.)

Frankly, if the Bible isn’t the primary source and Jesus isn’t the primary target on any given Sunday, then what are we doing and why are we doing it? My basic contention is that what happens in the church should be the kind of thing that can only happen in the church. If you have accomplished something that could have been done at a political rally, a local community organization, or anywhere else, then what you have done, no matter how nice, wasn’t really church.

Emotional Deconstruction

Many in the emergent movement are fans of deconstruction. They may be drawn to the promise of new theological and sociological horizons promised by deconstructing the recent past, but as Jonathan Brink notes, that may come with a price. For him, deconstruction is an emotional endeavor. As soon as we begin to call beliefs into question, we are bound to experience things akin to anxiety, even fear, as the things we were brought up with fall off one by one. As a good deconstructionist, he notes that the more people he reads and encounters, the more conclusions he comes in contact with.

Problem is, the older I got the more I realized that there isn’t really one great conclusion. There’s several conclusions.

He even sees problems with other points of view:

You see, the more I walk down the path of deconstruction, the more I’m beginning to see the holes in the fabric.

But, he assures us, we shouldn’t worry too much about his deconstruction. He doesn’t apply it to Scripture, only the interpretations of Scripture.

And to be clear, I’m not talking about deconstructing Scripture. Oh what a beautiful gift is Scripture. I’m deconstructing human attempts to understand Scripture.

That is a nice reassurance, but I am curious about how that gets fleshed out. It seems to me it will be difficult to protect Scripture from the blade of deconstruction while deconstructing the interpretation of the thing. So when Jesus says, “I am the way, the truth and the life, no person comes to the Father except through me,” and someone takes that to mean, “Jesus is the only way to the Father,” how is the second subject to deconstruction without immediately subjecting the first?

Deconstruction is a dangerous path to walk down for a believer who might be described as one of the “People of the Book.” How can we avoid subjecting Scripture to the deep subjectivity of this interpretational technique? After all, it is a compilation of books written by people who, for the most part, are now dead, and who, every one of them, was part of a radically different culture from anyone alive today. Scripture is tailor-made for deconstruction.

It seems to me that deconstruction has few to no upsides and suicidal downsides. Each alleged positive has an analogue in thoughtful analysis, and each downside does nothing but cut its own throat. In other words, it is possible to get all the gains of deconstruction without committing intellectual hari-kari. Concerning the downsides, a theory that alleges interpretive value is in the reader and not in the text leads to obvious and unavoidable absurdities. Deconstructionists disagree with that all day long, but that only makes their position even that much more ironic.

As for possible upsides, as Brink notes, there is the promise of openness to different conclusions and different points of view; even an irenic interaction with new ideas. Fundamentally, I see no difference between that and thoughtful analysis aimed at the truth. The deconstructionist may retort, “ah, but we do it with humility.” To which I might say their definition of humility needs to be reconstructed. Humility does not refer to truth, it refers to character. Humility does not forbid a person from sound and firm belief, it forbids them from vanity.

I also experience an emotion with deconstruction: intellectual repulsion.

Apologetics: Dead Yet?

With the rising of the emergent church movement and talk of living in a postmodern world, the subject of apologetics has been all the rage in some circles. Some are happy to declare traditional apologetics irrelevant in our new world where the best thing a Christian can do is invite another to share in their story. On the other end of the spectrum is the belief that the rational defense of the faith not only serves the purpose of discipleship, but even evangelism. In his recent article in CT, God is Not Dead Yet, William Lane Craig argues that apologetics are not only not irrelevant, but as useful now as they have ever been.

After Craig assesses the bulk of the traditional arguments for the existence of God, he asks, “Why Bother?” Craig makes the bold and provocative assertion that we do not live in a postmodern world, despite all the declarations to the contrary. In fact, he argues, to bend the subject of Christian apologetics to postmodernism would be catastrophic as it would reduce the truth of Christ to just another voice among a cacophony of views. He notes:

This sort of thinking is guilty of a disastrous misdiagnosis of contemporary culture. The idea that we live in a postmodern culture is a myth. In fact, a postmodern culture is an impossibility; it would be utterly unlivable. People are not relativistic when it comes to matters of science, engineering, and technology; rather, they are relativistic and pluralistic in matters of religion and ethics. But, of course, that's not postmodernism; that's modernism! That's just old-line verificationism, which held that anything you can't prove with your five senses is a matter of personal taste. We live in a culture that remains deeply modernist.

As a matter of practical fact, I think Craig is right. I have students who are knee-jerk relativists until they come face to face with reality themselves—they learn they can’t really live out the relativism they have been muttering about religion and ethics most of their lives. But, on the level of belief, I may not be inclined to agree with Craig wholeheartedly. I think the relativism in our culture has lead to an unusual condition where most people (especially most younger people) are content to live with the deep cognitive dissonance Craig cuts through with his evaluation. In other words, more and more people are content to live as if the world is not relative (morally or religiously) while believing (on at least some significant level) that it is.

Nonetheless, Craig is right to remind us of the social, evangelistic, and even discipling benefits of the apologetic tasks. I think if we dismiss it as no longer relevant, we do ourselves more harm than good.

The Shack: Don't

This brief entry in the Christianity Today blog, Out of Ur, documents some of the various reactions to the vastly popular novel, The Shack. I would like to add my voice to those who think this is not only an amateur piece of fiction, but also a really, really bad piece of theology.

You can find point-by-point remarks on the book’s various and multiple problems elsewhere, so I want to highlight two overarching problems I found with the book. First of all, as fiction it is able to lure the reader into a false sense of security. I believe the average reader takes in fiction through a different set of filters than they might a non-fiction work on something like the doctrine of the Trinity. As a result, readers are able to sugarcoat the toxic pills in the book by thinking to themselves, “after all, it’s only fiction.” Instead of thoughtfully engaging the concepts in the book (and there are plenty of clear, theological concepts in the book), a reader is more inclined to swallow the pills as part of the literary effect. No matter their form, bad doctrinal positions are bad doctrinal positions, and if a book can get someone to swallow bad doctrine without reflection, then…well, you can imagine what I think.

Secondly, and this is raised in Out of Ur, an author should never try to put too many words in God’s mouth or try and represent the Trinity too closely. The great pieces of Christian fiction over the centuries have approached God with great care and sparring explanation. The theology in those books is worked out in “real life” among humans who are struggling to understand and live out their faith or lack thereof. The more an author puts words in God’s mouth, the more they are in danger of saying things God would never say. Well over half of The Shack is dedicated to God speaking. Admittedly there are some touching moments—even really well-done moments—but there is too much wrong in the book for those moments to save it.

Life is too short to labor over something like this for the hope of enjoyment or edification. If your friends are reading it and you are worried, I suggest you read it. If you are a leader in your church and the other congregants are reading it, I suggest you do the same. If you want to write frustrated blog posts about the poor state of theological education and communication in our world, then definitely read it. Otherwise, pick up Pilgrim’s Progress, or Lilith, or The Man Who Was Thursday, or Out of the Silent Planet, or the Lord of the Rings, or…

A Precious Death

Standing there in the Critical Care Unit, it was sobering to watch her caress his hand, probably like she caressed it for years. He had died twenty minutes earlier, but she sat there surrounded by friends showing her love and devotion to her life-long husband the only way she knew how.

There is something precious about the passing of a life-long Christian spouse. It’s not easy; it’s not to be taken lightly. But there is something unique about it.

As their pastor, I was called in early in the morning while he was dying and had a chance to talk with family and friends and pray with him. He had just enough strength left to be aware of me for a little less than a minute. He listened to me as much as he could, and I learned again in that moment there is nothing small or flippant about prayer. They called again about three hours later to let me know he died.

Several times she said they were soul-mates, and no doubt they were. They were married to each other for decades—the example of the kind of marriage being lost at an alarming rate. Together they were committed to Christ and to their local church through thick and thin—an example of the kind of dedication to faith and community so rare in our Christian world right now.

So when he died, that is the kind of life he left behind. That is the kind of life she shared with him and stood as a monument to there in that hospital room. When she took his hand, it was a hand she knew. It was hers as much as it was his. She sat next to a man she knew and loved through every season in life, and though death separated them for the moment she still loved him.

And then there is our confidence in his faith in Christ. He died a child of God, which means he is no longer confined to that hospital bed connected to respirators, IVs and monitors. She knew, and we were able confidently to encourage her, he was with his Savior. The apostle Paul says we long for our heavenly dwelling as we groan under the weight of this life. As more of our friends, mothers and fathers exchange this life for the next, the more attractive our heavenly reunion becomes.

“Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his saints.”
Psalm 116:15

Take Me To Your Leader

This is a good post about the spate of "Jesus and Corporate Leadership Tips and Tricks" literature out there in the evangelical world: Jesus is not a CEO.

To add to what the author said, I think one of the fundamental errors most pastoral leadership litertature makes is beginning with an assumption akin to philosophical pragmatism.

Pragmatism is a distinctly American philosophy, "who can argue with success?" It is a view that sees success and numerical results as more important than abstract concepts like "truth" or "morality." The most recent philosophical pragmatist, Richard Rorty, famously wrote, "truth is what your peers let you get away with."

Though very few evangelical pastors are hard-core pragmatists, they are primarily concerned with measurable results nonetheless. And that makes them vulnerable to bad philosophy.

Enter the concept of Jesus as corportate leader. If successful corporations are our measure of accomplishment, and we want to be successful leaders following Christ, we are tempted (deeply tempted) to view Jesus as a successful corportat CEO.

Ultimately, it is a deep corruption of the life of Christ and the Kingdom of God here on earth.

The Next Breed of Evangelical Leaders

At the National Religious Broadcaster’s convention recently, Dr. James Dobson lamented the passing of several prominent Christian leaders who have been activists for several social causes. With the deaths of people like Ruth Graham and D. James Kennedy, and several others getting closer to the ends of their careers, Dobson wondered what was going to happen to broadly conservative Christian activism.

“The question is, will the younger generation heed the call? Who will defend the unborn child in the years to come? Who will plead for the Terri Schiavos of the world? Who’s going to fight for the institution of marriage, which is on the ropes today.”

Dobson, Kennedy, Colson and others have made great social strides in several ways, but more often than not their causes have either explicitly or implicitly been tied to political activism. According to some culture watchers, the younger breed of evangelical is less apt to align themselves politically, or at the least, less apt to openly associate with conservative politics. The article goes on to note:

Christian activists and other observers of the movement say that the next generation of leaders isn’t as interested in polarizing debates and wants to broaden the evangelical agenda beyond divisive issues like abortion and gay marriage. “Who in the next generation will be willing to take the heat, when it’s so much safer and more comfortable to avoid controversial subjects,” Dobson said.

Among that next generation of evangelicals is the emergent movement. If you follow it closely, you know emergents claim to have avoided the same political “errors” of their predecessors. But they have, in fact, committed the same error on the other side of the political aisle. If you are looking to avoid political entanglement, they are not much more help.

I agree with Dobson that our culture needs a new generation of evangelical leaders to stand up for the right things. Here are some thoughts on what ought to characterize those leaders.

First, they need to resist relativism in all its substantial forms. Epistemological and religious relativism are slow-acting poisons that destroy their consumers from the inside out. The Christian worldview needs some form of objectivism to really do its work.

Second, they need to be committed to Jesus Christ and him crucified: from behind pulpits, in vocation, in the public eye, in personal witness, and in family life. For instance, some have gone the route of substituting social justice for the theology of atonement, and are going the way of 19th century theological liberalism. We need to regain a full-orbed sense of being a Christian in this world (including social causes) beginning with the clear messages of the nature of Christ and the nature of humanity. Despite all appearances, those are not mutually exclusive goals.

Thirdly, the next wave of leaders needs to keep their kingdoms straight. Good theology will inevitably have social and political consequences. Political activism without good theology reduces to propagandizing. A major mistake Christians make (in both political directions) is treating parties and figures as surrogate messiahs. “If only Senator So-and-So is elected, then we can get some real work done for the Kingdom of God” is a confusion of kingdoms. In reality, the church often flourishes most when the powers that be are openly opposed to it. Maybe that is because in those seasons Christians have a better grasp on the true identity of their Savior.

Don’t get me wrong: I have no specific distaste for Christians making their views open to political debate and public vote. What I don’t like are the tendencies that sometimes comes to the fore when Christians get too tied to politics. The kingdoms of the world are fading away, but the Kingdom of our Lord will last forever.

The Rise of the "Nones"

A recent survey done by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public life has made quite a splash in several circles. Among other things, the study shows that there are significant numbers of people switching religions or religious affiliations during their lifetime. One may grow up Baptist, but it is becoming more likely that they will spend most of their adult life as unaffiliated with a denomination or a religious title.

In USA Today, Stephen Prothero has some insightful things to say about how the religious landscape is changing, and aside from some rather silly political barbs, I think he has some important things to say. First of all, he is right when he notes:

The USA is rapidly becoming a culture of customization.

Not just with our careers, fast food and clothing, but with our own brands of spirituality as well. He also notes what may be the vital reality for churches to understand:

The key subplot here is the rise of "nones," a category growing faster than any other religious group. Of all adults in the USA, 16% say they are religiously unaffiliated, while 7% were raised that way. Moreover, 25% of younger Americans (ages 18-29) report no religious affiliation at all.

And:

What does the rise of the "nones," particularly in Western states and northern New England, demonstrate? Not the sickness of religion in general but the health of a new kind of religion — a more personal and less institutional form often parading under the banner of "spiritual but not religious," an option that, among my Boston University students at least, seems as popular as the smoothie stand in the student union.

So the “nones” are not committed to nothing, or even to atheism, but to not being committed to a denominational or religious structure. Due to whatever sets of reasons—dissatisfaction with the authenticity of churches and pastors, recent moral scandals, the way churches spend or don’t spend money, or just the raw individualist drive—more and more people are avoiding close association with churches.

But there was another finding that Prothero noted:

Another story buried in the data of this new survey is the power of evangelical Protestantism, and particularly non-denominational churches. Of those surveyed, 44% called themselves "born again" or "evangelical" Christians, and among religious options non-denominational Protestantism is one of the fastest growing.

So there may be some bright spots in this after all. But the question needs to be posed and answered well: what is a church to do in this kind of atmosphere?

HT: Albert Mohler

"New" Sins

The Vatican has issued an updated list of sins.

I first became aware of this news item the other day, and what impressed me the most about it was the seriousness with which the Vatican is taking bioethics and the frontiers of biotech. Among the expanded list of mortal sins are: genetic modification and carrying out experiments on humans.

This raises at least a couple of really interesting issues. First of all, in what sense are these “new” sins? I might be wrong, but the tag “new” seems to be something that has come from the reporting and not necessarily from the Vatican, but it is, after all, an updated list of sins. And in that sense at least, they are “new.”

It might be that the action of genetic modification is new. We just didn’t have those technologies 50 or 100 years ago. But humans still “sinned” while experimenting on other humans and enacting eugenic projects on large or small scales.

While it may be true that humans have sinned in these ways in different forms in the past, I think it is important to these new technologies to be labeled the same way we would label the Nazi experiments on prisoners. The way human experimentation was done decades and centuries ago wrenches our emotions and sympathies when we see the brutal and bloody equipment used and the grainy photographs of the horrible results.

Now, we can experiment on humans in very clean and clinical environments that illicit emotions of friendliness, reason, and progress. The photographs of the humans are tiny, unrecognizable circles of stuff in petri dishes that fail to arouse our sympathies.

Thus, it is important for theological organizations like the Vatican, to label these actions for people.

The second issue is a bit broader. More and more denominations and church organizations should be just as clear about these things. We all need to be doing the work of exegeting culture and applying the timeless truths of Scripture and the Christian faith to the important issues of our day. Before the technology goes too far to be stopped (some may say we are there already), we need to apply real and critical reflection to the technologies and consequences.

Attitudes on Tithing

This article is an interesting view into the world of church finances in our local newspaper. The premise is that tithing and giving are down in local churches, and it details a few reasons why that might be the case.

First of all, there really are several statistics that show this to be the case across the board. Fewer and fewer people are giving to churches. One reason detailed in the article was:

Young people don’t give as regularly as their parents might have, and many people of all ages are giving to charities rather than to religious organizations.

There seems to be a “bang-for-your-buck” mentality on a certain level. It is easy to see the impact of a food bank or a clothing give-away, but young people may not as readily “see” the benefits of giving to a church.

This raises the question of why Christians give. Do we give to churches because we expect them to be social welfare programs? Churches should not shirk their responsibility there, but that is not why believers ought to give.

Another anecdote in the article:

“If your church is going to have a bigscreen TV, what is the point?” Cruz said.

This church-hunter was growing tired of the opulence of megachurches. I can certainly see his point, but it is a point that should be pressed. How much spending is too much for a church? A bigger TV for the youth group? A $10,000 bank of stage lighting? Really comfortable chairs in the sanctuary? My sense is that Mr. Cruz’s tolerance for spending would be different based on what he personally found beneficial to his family. Who really wants churches to go back to wooden pews?

Again, there is nothing wrong with churches being good stewards, but, again, this raises the question of why Christians ought to give. Do we give so we can tell a church board how to spend our money?

Good Short Discussion on Truth and the Emergent Movement

This is a great video of three very solid thinkers discussing postmodernism and the emergent movement. They say several things that need to be said and heard about the necessity of truth (what Schaeffer called “true truth”) for a Christian worldview and the inability of the emergent movement to handle it.

Much of the emergent reaction I have seen to this clip is a little silly. Many accuse the presenters of having never read any of the basic emergent literature when they, in fact, discuss what they read specifically in the clip. I have also found that to be an emergent tactic when you find a soft spot—“you didn’t really read what he wrote.” And even more emergenty is the smarmy sigh of disappointment that the presenters were not irenic or circumspect in presenting their views on the matter.

But this is one of the core problems with an emergent point of view. Because of their postmodern commitments, they are unable to take a serious stand on anything except a stand against anyone who takes a stand on anything. To them, a catch phrase like “irenic” is synonymous with, “you can’t make judgments.” And that, to be sure, is a really bad place to begin building serious and life-transforming theology. Not only is it a view that commits suicide (it is itself a judgment), it is not what any emergent thinker actually believes or practices.

What the world needs is not more fuzzy thinking about god-in-general or spirituality-in-general. It needs Christians who know how to speak the truth in love—beginning with the truth, and also beginning with the love.

I read a commentary on Mark 8 the other day that I thought summarized well one of the places where the emergent movement is going wrong. In the context of Peter’s confession that Jesus is the Messiah, Jesus’ acceptance of the title, Jesus’ description of his life and then his description of the life of the disciple, the scholar wrote, “A false view of Messiahship leads to a false view of discipleship.” In other words, if we are unable to come to grips with the truth Jesus spoke about himself, our life of following Christ will miss the mark.

But that doesn’t sound irenic to me.

Intelligent Design and the Beatles

One of the strengths in the Intelligent Design movement is its close, conceptual proximity to common sense and scientific procedure in other fields of inquiry. In other words, we are naturally and deliberately always looking for order in things and inferring intelligence: archeology, information theory, freshman ethics papers, etc.

If the premises behind ID are wrong, why did NASA beam a couple of Beatle’s songs into the cosmos? Why not utterly random, meaningless noise? Why not just a simple, repeatable pulse? Because we know there is a substantial, even meaningful, difference between naturally produced phenomena and the artifacts of intelligence.

Even though the current scientific community continues to cudgel ID in the press, it relies on its basic principles to perform its most basic of tasks.

McChurch: Not Lovin' It

Ironically, after dumping a bit in my last post about pastors and a corporate model for church, I ran across this item in the Out Of Ur blog. In “McChurch: I’m Lovin’ It,” a pastor in a church in Nashville is highlighted. He has wholeheartedly embraced a franchising model of building churches. He openly admits to following a handbook and rarely deviating from it. After all, who can argue with success?

He wants all the new churches to have the same beliefs, vision and mission the “mother” organization has. That way, thankfully, when church members move across country they can find a familiar church home right next door to their favorite and familiar fast food restaurant. Whew!

My first reaction was, how is this dramatically different from a denomination? And after a couple moments of reflection, I decided the difference may be subtle but monstrous. In general, denominations are grouped according to doctrinal issues. The reasons Lutherans are not Catholics does not have to do with a difference in mission statements. These new McChurches, however, will be characteristically marked without deep doctrinal issues in mind. The pastor highlighted in the blog was not concerned with theological or ecclesiological orthodoxy. He was worried that the hamburgers—sorry, the worship services—looked and felt the same.

This is a terrific gauge for where we are in the evangelical pastorate. I think it’s really pathetic. This is one of the reasons why Americans are staying home from our churches in apathetic droves. We are actually trying as hard as we can to offer nothing different from the neighborhood Starbucks. If I can have a good cup of coffee, read/listen to an interesting self-help book, have a stimulating conversation at Starbucks or at church, and there is no other substantial difference between the two, I will choose Starbucks 9 times out of 10. The coffee will inevitably be better.

The blog author closes by asking some really good questions:

Are Cumberland Church and other franchised congregations the wave of the future? Are Chick-fil-A and McDonalds the right model for the church to be emulating? Are franchised mega-churches going to be the denominations of the 21st century? Or, is this consumer Christianity taken to its logical and disturbing extreme?

These are good questions that need to be dealt with, but I am not sure the pastors enamored with this model feel their importance. This really is the shallowest form of consumer Christianity taken to its ludicrous extreme, but I am afraid that to too many pastors it is appealing and promising.

Pastors and Middle Management

My brother was recently telling me the latest “upper management” horror story to come out of his job. In stereotypical fashion, a once nice guy got a whiff at a higher paying job and more authority and became an idiot. My experience in the corporate world verifies his story as not atypical. No doubt, many of you have similar stories and could tell them with gut-wrenching detail.

Why is this important to me? Most evangelical pastors are trying to be just like my brother’s former boss. They are not sharp enough to know it, and they would deny it with every fiber of their being, but they are patterning their ministry careers after ladder-climbing middle management.

In fact, they are patterning their pastorates after the most successful of the ladder-climbers. And if you have any experience in the corporate world, you know that most of the most successful are not the kindest sweetest people you know. It is almost axiomatic that to advance in the business world you have to treat others as means to your personal ends and treat your customers as profit centers.

The patterning I am concerned with is almost as sure as imprinting experiments with lab rats and cheese. Ask your average pastor who they are reading right now, or who their favorite “leadership” authors or, or which authors their colleagues are recommending to them, and I guarantee you that there will be more masters of industry than pastors or theologians on that list. And the more evangelical pastors read and pattern their lives after these management types, the more our churches become half-baked corporations where the staff is treated as means to ends and congregations are treated as customer profit centers.

Far more than young leadership, far more than better marketing techniques (think Reveal), and far more than relevance, our churches need pastors who know what it means to follow a divine call to stand behind the sacred desk and see people as a shepherd. We need a renewal of what church means, beginning with God and his revealed Word, among the leaders of local congregations. We desperately need to recapture the title of “pastor” as a title that conveys real, spiritual meaning.

The Consequences of a Malformed Soul

I was working through Dallas Willard’s Renovation of the Heart recently, and something he said stuck out to me as an important insight concerning our formation as Christians specifically, and even for our formation as humans generally.

In encouraging people to pay attention to the most important parts of themselves (heart, soul, will, etc.), Willard notes what happens when we lose sight of our spiritual formation and try to compensate. When the human soul is malformed, our thoughts feelings and inevitably follow and we try to replace a dysfunctional soul with bodily fulfillment. Willard says:

“The human body becomes the primary area of pleasure for the person who does not live honestly and interactively with God, and also the primary source of terror, torture, and death.”

In the malformed soul, bodily fulfillment is our highest hope and bodily discomfort is our greatest fear.

And we see this everywhere. As a culture, we have no idea what a well-formed soul looks like, but we can describe in pornographic detail what a well-formed body looks like. The heroes of our popular culture may or may not have souls worth emulating, but they must have bodies and sensual lives worth copying. Our paragons of virtue and lifestyle are the exact opposite of what they ought to be. A young woman who sleeps around, has kids outside of marriage, is drunk more often than not can still be worthy of our attention and praise if she is physically beautiful. If a young man treats women like disposable diapers, fails to be a father to his kids and flaunts the laws of the land, he can still be a hero to millions if he is rich and muscular.

In the properly formed human, the body serves the virtue of the soul. What does it mean for the pleasures of the body to follow dutifully behind the forming of the mind, will and emotions? And even more difficult, what does it look like for the suffering of the body to be understood in terms of the soul’s formation? Which is worse—the suffering of the body or the dysfunction of the soul?

An Expression of Compassion

There is a phrase used only of Jesus in the NT to describe moments when he was deeply moved by the human condition. In the Gospels it says Jesus was “moved with compassion.” In many places it represents the moment where Christ turns to heal an individual. In one interesting case, it moved Christ to teach all day long.

In Mark 6:34, he and his disciples are surrounded by a large crowd of people. When Jesus sees them Mark says he had compassion on them, saw them as sheep without a shepherd, and taught them many things. All day long.

I am fascinated by this display. How did Jesus’ compassion reveal itself when he was faced with a motley group of people with empty stomachs mixed motives for searching him out? (John 6:15 says some of them were political zealots.) He taught them for a very long time. Then he broke the bread and miraculously fed over 5,000 people.

A reoccurring theme in Mark is that before the bellies are filled, before the healings and exorcisms take place, Jesus teaches people about the Kingdom of God. What good does it do to perform the miraculous or correct social conditions before people understand the who and the why?

One of the first arguments Dallas Willard makes in his book, Renovation of the Heart, is that the “Jesus revolution” is not primarily about correcting institutions or organizations, but is a matter of character change. We live from our hearts, he says, and when those hearts are formed in the right way, we begin to make real headway in the human condition.

Another theme, rising again in emergent circles, is that the “Jesus revolution” is primarily about social justice, filling bellies, and affecting institutional change. That would not be a problem (after all, Jesus did feed the 5,000), but given the emergent proclivity to avoid the kinds of things that Jesus taught, I am not sure they have the stick by the right end. And what did Jesus teach? Mark is quite clear, if not minimalist, on this point: “The time is fulfilled, the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the gospel” (1:15).

I think Mark agrees with Willard and the view that first and foremost hearts and lives ought to be formed to the truths of the Gospel before the rest of the “revolution” can make real sense.

I love Mark 6:34. It is a genuine expression of Christ-like compassion to teach people the truths of the Kingdom of God, even if it takes a very long time.

The Power We Wield

In case you haven’t been paying attention, we really do live in a Brave New World.

My favorite segment in the ethics classes I teach is our time spent on bioethics. I tell my class at the beginning of the semester that I am going to blow their minds in a few weeks, and sure enough, it is not hard to get stunned reactions out of the unsuspecting students.

Along those lines, comes this story from the Washington Post. For decades now, scientists have been manipulating bits and pieces of DNA for all kinds of reasons (a sizeable portion of the food you buy has been modified for some reason). But now, scientists have the ability to create whole strands of DNA, or create the right combination of chromosomes that when implanted in the right way can “recreate” the host DNA structure.

Scientists in Maryland have already built the world's first entirely handcrafted chromosome -- a large looping strand of DNA made from scratch in a laboratory, containing all the instructions a microbe needs to live and reproduce.

In the coming year, they hope to transplant it into a cell, where it is expected to "boot itself up," like software downloaded from the Internet, and cajole the waiting cell to do its bidding. And while the first synthetic chromosome is a plagiarized version of a natural one, others that code for life forms that have never existed before are already under construction.

What does this mean? As with almost all biotechnologies, it is a double-edged sword. Many of the applications can be harmless, silly, or genuinely helpful. Imagine scientists in their lab coats creating simple “bugs” to do their bidding when stimulated in the right way. The article notes companies that do just that:

LS9 Inc., a company in San Carlos, Calif., is already using E. coli bacteria that have been reprogrammed with synthetic DNA to produce a fuel alternative from a diet of corn syrup and sugar cane. So efficient are the bugs' synthetic metabolisms that LS9 predicts it will be able to sell the fuel for just $1.25 a gallon.

At a DuPont plant in Tennessee, other semi-synthetic bacteria are living on cornstarch and making the chemical 1,3 propanediol, or PDO. Millions of pounds of the stuff are being spun and woven into high-tech fabrics (DuPont's chief executive wears a pinstripe suit made of it), putting the bug-begotten chemical on track to become the first $1 billion biotech product that is not a pharmaceutical.

Imagine that! Your next suit might not mean the discomfiture of sheep somewhere in Ireland. Your next fashion statement might be fabrics woven from the excretions of artificially created bacteria in Tennessee.

But as fate would have it, there are at least two deeply serious problems. The first is frightening on a practical level, and the other is frightening on a more fundamental level.

While the government regulates harmful microbes and bacteria (in the noble goal of avoiding super-bugs, biological Armageddon, and things like that), the regulations do not apply to the DNA structures required to build them. And, as it turns out, you can find instructions on how to create those on the Internet.

ETC is a kind of biotechnology watch-dog group. Their program manager, Jim Thomas, notes, “The fact is, you can build viruses, and soon bacteria, from downloaded instructions on the Internet.”

The more fundamental problem has to do with the meaning of life. Not the kind of “meaning of life” intended when existentialists opine in their angst, but the kind of “meaning of life” that actually defines who and what we are.

Along with a technology that has the power to create completely fabricated and pre-designed life come the looming evils of eugenics. In the case that one is tempted to dismiss the radical realities of large numbers of individuals or governments deciding how people should look when they are born, keep in mind that less than 100 years ago the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of forced sterilization for the mentally handicapped. And who needs to recount the eugenic horrors of the Nazi regime? On a more immediate level, advances in biotechnology have lead to a new wave of abortions of children with downs syndrome. It may not produce the same visceral reaction that the Nazis and their genocidal policies receive, but that is eugenics nonetheless.

More than ever before, we need to wean ourselves from our addiction to technological and scientific progress for the sake of it. We have grown comfortable with scientific advancement—after all, its promise and much of its delivery has been to the ease of my life.

We need to listen to those in the public square who call for deep, careful, and even time-consuming thought on what it means to be human, and how these technologies either need to be regulated or simply disallowed.

And in addition to that, we need the Christian church to step up and meet the challenges of our culture. Instead of piddling with postmodern sensibilities and the consumer fancies of the people around us, we need to meet these deep and disturbing realities head-on with all the tools the Church has at its disposal.

Stem Cells and Politics

In the tussle and bustle of stem cell politics, there are those who make their stand for political reasons, and there are those who are more likely to make their stands for ethical and scientific reasons. With the recent breakthrough in stem cell research, not only can the scientific and ethical requirements be met, but some of the political views are now dinosaurs, on their way to extinction.

At least one political dinosaur on the NYT editorial board has decided to look directly into the plummeting comet and shake his or her fist. Here I stand, I can do no other! The scientific reason researchers have backed embryonic stem cell research so vociferously is that it has the potential of pluripotency—their stem cells can possibly be harvested and chemically manipulated to match any problem in any human body. The political reasons for backing embryonic stem cell research are much more fuzzy. Ethically, of course, the debate is difficult because, as the editor so calmly put it, “Religious conservatives deplore the research because tiny, days-old embryos are destroyed.”

The editorial is full of high-minded language about scientific potential and possibility. And it is true. Researchers in the field of embryonic stem cells see a great deal of possible application. On the other hand, researchers in the field of adult stem cell research have seen over 80 real-life actual applications and solutions to a wide range of disease and sickness. So far, embryonic stem cell application has resulted in no known cures, and a lot of benign tumors (Embryonic stem cells, when actually applied, don’t turn off their growth rate at the right time; they become tumors). I would argue that those in the shoes of the NYT editor are not backing embryonic stem cell research for scientific reasons.

Ethically, there is literally no debate over the use of adult stem cells. And all smarmy dismissals aside, there are serious ethical questions about the destruction of embryos for their stem cells. The current breakthrough not only has the benefit of the science of embryonic stem cells, it has the benefit of the morality of adult stem cell research. If the new research pans out, it is literally the best of both worlds.

And politically? My view is that in the dance between politics and truth, truth should lead and politics follow. For this poor dinosaur, however, their politics lead them into the La Brea Tar Pits of history.

Gospel of Judas Revelation

Last year there was a great brouhaha raised with the National Geographic Society’s publication of the Gospel of Judas. According to the scholars who translated it, it was a critical look into the belief system of Christianity (Judas was a good guy, and so on), and according to the buzz on the street and among the blogs, it was a kind of blow to the credibility of Christianity.

The blog buzz has been answered over and over (granting that the scholarship of the translation was right). Now, it turns out, the scholarship has been called into serious question. April D. DeCondick, a professor of Biblical Studies at Rice has published a new look into the translation of the Gospel of Judas and written a piece for the NYT detailing some of the serious problems with the original NGS’s publication.

Among other things she notes:

Several of the translation choices made by the society’s scholars fall well outside the commonly accepted practices in the field. For example, in one instance the National Geographic transcription refers to Judas as a “daimon,” which the society’s experts have translated as “spirit.” Actually, the universally accepted word for “spirit” is “pneuma ” — in Gnostic literature “daimon” is always taken to mean “demon.”

And:

Perhaps the most egregious mistake I found was a single alteration made to the original Coptic. According to the National Geographic translation, Judas’s ascent to the holy generation would be cursed. But it’s clear from the transcription that the scholars altered the Coptic original, which eliminated a negative from the original sentence. In fact, the original states that Judas will “not ascend to the holy generation.” To its credit, National Geographic has acknowledged this mistake, albeit far too late to change the public misconception.

At the end of her article, she notes that the NGS broke a handful of academic protocols when handling an ancient text. Instead of making it available to the appropriate community, the NGS carefully controlled their release. Instead of blowing up copies of the text to make them easier for others to read, they reduced them by 56%.

It is a short piece, so I will leave the rest of the details to you.

HT: Is This Thing On?

You Can't Argue With Success?

I was trying again this morning to listen to some of the local Christian music stations, and did not receive any surprises. The reason I don’t listen to popular Christian music is that I find most of it (what gets air-play) trite, shallow, and woefully homogenous. Not only is there not much originality out there, there is very little depth. This morning, one fellow was thanking God for “being by his side.” He also noted how God kept him safe as a child and then “let me go.” Just like a good, hands-off earthly father, God raises us, lets us leave the nest and then wires us money when we get desperate. From a religious tradition that has produced the best music the world has ever heard, we are currently an embarrassment to our heritage.

Reflecting on this, it dawns on me that there is at least one serious culprit to the state of affairs in Christian pop music, and that this culprit is also complicit in why many evangelical churches are in the same place.

This simple practical equation rules the day not only in our culture at large, but among many Christians in position of leadership and influence as well:

Money = Success = Right

If a Christian band comes along, sells a lot of CDs and has a successful tour, producers and companies are prepared to copy that success to make more money. And because we are good American Christians, we like to tag on the thought that we must be putting the right message across if Christians are buying the CDs and t-shirts. As a result, more and more of the music sounds the same and because homogeneity is friendly to radio stations, the plainness spreads like a virus.

The same is true if you follow the trends in evangelical ecclesiology. I use the word “ecclesiology” loosely here. Where our forefathers once wrestled with the question of what a rightly-ordered church looked like, we now wrestle with how to unblinkingly assimilate corporate structure and managerial trickery into the body of Christ. How did we get here? A very small handful of churches successfully assimilated church and corporate success, and because of the equation above, became very influential.

As a result, we have homogenous churches, many of whom have very little character or depth. Being different doesn’t sell very well. Being like the other big guy on the block but with a different colored building does tend to sell.

Is there a solution? I think there is, but it will have to rise like an underground swell from individual musicians, artists, pastors and churches dedicated to what God called them to be in the culture God placed them. The lure of money and success has too much of a hold on us generally to hope for a sweeping correction. Individuals will need to show some spiritual courage and refuse to drink the kool-aid. Christian leaders and influencers will need to have the moral and intellectual wherewithal to pay attention to the character and nature of God and be driven by what he wants done in the here and now.

Like the wise parent responding to their teenager telling them that everyone else is doing it, I think God wants to tell us, “you are not everyone else!”

Stem Cell Breakthrough

The latest news in stem cell research is very encouraging both on a scientific and an ethical level. Scientists in Japan have recently found a procedure they believe will give adult cells the kind of pluripotent ability possible in embryonic stem cells. In other words, scientists (including Ian Wilmut of Dolly fame) believe they have found a way to benefit from the potential of embryonic stem cell while avoiding all the ethical concerns.

What is most encouraging to me in this article and in others I have perused is the sense that the scientific community seems poised to embrace this development with a significant amount of gusto. For all the years while adult stem cells have been successfully applied and embryonic stem cells have failed, all the press and money have gone for the embryonic stem cell research.

More ethical issues lurk around the corner, however. According to the article, this breakthrough puts us one step closer to human cloning. In fact, according to a recent U.N. study, we might only be 20-30 years away from living, breathing, lab-created human clones.

There is still a lot of ethical work to be done!

Only a Philosopher...

While reading Flew’s book, There is (no) a God, I read this anecdote about a lecture by Wittgenstein on the Oxford campus. Wittgenstein is a very influential, if not difficult to understand, philosopher in 20th century thought. This story buttresses my theory that philosophers can be some of the funniest people around.

I personally witnessed Wittgenstein in action at least once….His announced subject was “Cogito ergo sum,” derived, of course, from the French philosopher Rene Descartes’s famous statement “I think therefore I am.” The room was packed. The audience hung on to every one of the great man’s words. But the only thing I can now remember about his comments is that they had absolutely no discernible connection with the announced topic. So when Wittgenstein had finished, Emeritus Professor H. A. Prichard got up. With evident exasperation, he asked what “Herr Wittgenstein”—the Cambridge Ph.D. [Wittgenstein has earned] was apparently not recognized at Oxford!—“thought about Cogito ergo sum.” Wittgenstein responded by pointing at his forehead with the index finger of his right hand and saying only, “Cogito ergo sum. That’s a very peculiar sentence.”

Antony Flew's Tergiversation

On the occasion of Antony Flew’s new book, There is (no) a God, there has been a small flood of comment from both sides of the aisles: Christians seem very pleased that one of the most respected philosophical atheists of the past century has come to a form of deism, and atheists are not so pleased. When Flew originally produced his transition for an interview with Philosophia Christi, the Christian reaction was quite excited. But now with the publication of this new book, the atheists are having their say.

First of all, I heard about this NYTimes piece on Flew through the CU graduate philosophy e-mail list. The message said that this article is about “Flew’s conversion to Christianity.” The author of the e-mail clearly did not read to the third paragraph where the author noted, “Flew still rejects Christianity.” The e-mail got it wrong for reasons inherent in most of the atheistic reaction to the whole matter: they would rather label and personally attack him than deal with any of the argumentation behind his change of mind.

Before discussing certain portions of the NYTimes article by Oppenheimer, I think it is useful to mention that it appears that Flew did not have as much to say in his own book at it might seem. Through Oppenheimer’s research, he seems to have discovered that much of the book was ghostwritten for and edited through Flew, instead of the other way around. It also does seem that Flew suffers from a certain kind of memory disorder that keeps him from remembering names and dates. Although that is a little disappointing to me (I am currently reading the book), a couple of other things should be noted. Many more books than we are aware of are ghost written and very little is made of it. If the author has the final editing say about what is published, we tend to not be too upset. Secondly, if the philosophical tables were turned, I am not so sure memory lapses about names and dates would matter all that much. And thirdly, by the time Oppenheimer reaches that point in the article, his severe personal distaste for what Flew has done is transparent. The article he writes is the worst form of sophomoric ad hominum bludgery possible.

Oppenheimer attacks the academic qualifications of Flew’s coauthor, Varghese by noting he has none in particular. Oppenheimer’s qualification to asses the arguments involved, according to his byline, is that he, “is [the] coordinator of the Yale Journalism Initiative and editor of The New Haven Review. He last wrote for the magazine about the Hollywood acting coach Milton Katselas.” Not exactly who I would pick to asses the facts if Alvin Plantinga converted from Christian Theism to deism.

Throughout the article (and the book cites several other similar examples of this kind of behavior on the part of leading “new atheists”), Oppenheimer treats Flew like a doddering old fool. These excerpts are only a taste of what Oppenheimer’s journalistic training has taught him about assessing a situation:

Flew himself — a continent away, his memory failing, without an Internet connection — had no idea how fiercely he was being fought over…

With his powers in decline, Antony Flew, a man who devoted his life to rational argument, has become a mere symbol, a trophy in a battle fought by people whose agendas he does not fully understand.

When at last Flew speaks, his diction is halting,…

This is all in contrast to the one brave atheist who tried to keep Flew in the fold:

Richard Carrier, a 37-year-old doctoral student in ancient history at Columbia, is a type recognizable to anyone who has spent much time at a chess tournament or a sci-fi convention or a skeptics’ conference. He is young, male and brilliant, with an obsessive streak both admirable and a little debilitating.

According to Oppenheimer’s account, Carrier is the genius who is on top of things, and Flew is the puppet who has been coerced into belief in his old age. In fact, Oppenheimer is quite clear about Flew being coerced:

But it seems somewhat more likely that Flew, having been intellectually chaperoned by Roy Varghese for 20 years, simply trusted him to write something responsible.

Intellectuals, even more than the rest of us, like to believe that they reach conclusions solely through study and reflection. But like the rest of us, they sometimes choose their opinions to suit their friends rather than the other way around. Which means that Flew is likely to remain a theist, for just as the Christians drew him close, the atheists gave him up for lost.

Seriously? Flew was blindly lead by the hand for 20 years like a diminutive German attracted to a crazy woman’s candy house in the middle of the forest?

And then there is this gem of cultural projection:

Flew also had a longstanding affinity for conservative politics — he was an adviser to Margaret Thatcher — that made him unusually approachable for some Christians. In the light of his natal comfort with religious folk and his agreeable politics, Flew’s eventual alliance with Christians doesn’t seem so strange.

So apparently, we should not be surprised that an old man, barely able to speak or think clearly should wind up in the hands of Christians because he has a “longstanding affinity” for conservative politics. Not only is that the kind of childish assertion I would disallow in my college-level philosophy papers, it is factually false. For the first several years of his adult life, Flew was a card-carrying member of the Communist party.

So the article was a farce.

So far, the book has at least been enlightening. The first few chapters and sections are dedicated to the various steps in his philosophical atheism, his core arguments, and the reactions he received from all sides. For me, the book has been far more educational than this ridiculous article. I am actually getting a clearer grasp of his atheism than I had before.

The core principle Flew asserts in the beginning of this book is that we all have a duty to follow the evidence where it leads. He may have done exactly that for very real and meaningful philosophical and scientific reasons. If you are to believe Oppenheimer, however, we should follow evidence until it points us toward a God. Then we should start flinging mud.

Open Letter to the Holiday Display Task Force

This is too crazy to pass up. There are those out there who still don’t think there are concerted efforts across the country to rid Christmas of all Christian overtones. Here we have another example of absolute goofiness by a city council just 2 hours north of here.

And so far, the prize for trampling on First Amendment rights goes to Fort Collins, Colo., which is considering banning red and green lights from city property because they might be linked to religion.

The city's Holiday Display Task Force soon will make recommendations to the City Council on a policy that allows only white lights and "secular" symbols such as icicles, snowflakes and unadorned greenery.

I love that touch: Holiday Display Task Force. What kind of training and special qualifications does it take to make it onto the Holiday Display Task Force? What is boot camp like for these lovers of everything Scrooge? Do you need to have a signed copy of The God Delusion?

Apparently you can be discriminated against based on red/green colorblindness. In fact, I would like to submit an open letter to the Supreme Director of the Fort Collins, Colorado Holiday Display Task Force:

Dear Sirs and/or Madams—

I applaud your sense of civic duty and willingness to volunteer your time in what is doubtless one of the great struggles of our time: the color of Christmas lights. My personal delight at your efforts is marred only by the unfortunate geographical reality that I am not within your fine Municipality’s taxing district so that I could revel in the fact that the next time I purchase a Hitchens book, a percentage of my cost would support your valiant cause.

Nonetheless, I am mildly concerned about my personal prospects of being admitted into your fine Task Force in the future (if I felt I had what it takes to join your superlative ranks). You see, red/green colorblindness runs in our family. I, personally, do not have a severe case, but am worried nonetheless. Additionally, my nephew certainly does have red/green colorblindness, and I am concerned that he might feel discriminated against if your Task Force focuses only on red and green lights. What did he ever do to you to be excluded from your Holiday Display Task Force like that?

There are a lot of lights out there, like orange, blue, white, blinking (which might discriminate against me because of my migraine headaches), those kind that change colors when you plug them in, purple, and many more. Maybe your Holiday Display Task Force might consider expanding their color and variation considerations so I (and the dozens in my position) might not feel so left out.

Thank you for your gracious consideration, and God-speed!

Fighting for the Cause-

Phil

Church Planting to the Extreme!

If you don’t know anything about church planting theory, this story will act as a really good primer into the faddish and surreal world that is how you ought to grow your church. If you have suggested this form of church planting theory, this might give you a chuckle or two as you critique the various marketing and leadership mistakes made by the young church. If you have had this form of church planting theory imposed upon you, laugh along with me as we enjoy the reductio ad absurdum in hilarious harmony.

Mini-Church Acts Mega: Lark News

OAK RIDGE, Tenn. — On Sunday morning at Horizon Christian Fellowship, a 15-member worship band cranks out praise songs and the pastor preaches with the aid of stadium lighting and jumbo-size screens. But the church, which is only eight months old, has an average attendance of just 28.

"If we build it, we believe they will come," says pastor Rick Allen, 26, a recent Bible college graduate.

Oops! My Bad!

What do you do when you have been the national, even worldwide leader of a particular vision of doing church, and you discover that your methods did not live up to the hype? How about if you have profited from franchising your numerical success across the evangelical world only to find out you were headed in an unprofitable direction the entire time?

If you are Bill Hybels and Willow Creek, you write a book and confess.

I don’t mean to be too sardonic. I am glad Hybels and his executive pastor are coming out and revealing the results of their recent study with humility. They took an extensive look at their marketing-style, consumer and program-driven way of doing church and discovered that the massive numbers they (and others) boast in their church do not indicate genuine discipleship. You can catch a glimpse of the report at Out of Ur.

The blog notes:

Having put all of their eggs into the program-driven church basket you can understand their shock when the research revealed that “Increasing levels of participation in these sets of activities does NOT predict whether someone’s becoming more of a disciple of Christ. It does NOT predict whether they love God more or they love people more.”

They quote Hybles later:

Hybels confesses: We made a mistake. What we should have done when people crossed the line of faith and become Christians, we should have started telling people and teaching people that they have to take responsibility to become ‘self feeders.’ We should have gotten people, taught people, how to read their bible between service, how to do the spiritual practices much more aggressively on their own.

I think what I am most concerned with is how shocking this appears to be to the evangelical world. For years I was a bit of a black sheep in some pastoral circles because I refused to believe that marketing the Gospel to fickle consumers with testimonials and slick shows was a good way to go.

I think the shock value in this apology is a result of the enculturation of the evangelical pastorate. Because it really can produce large numbers, large budgets, and large national recognition, we have bitten down on the belief that looking and acting like a fast-food restaurant is in accord with Christian witness and discipleship. Because we are so eager to put numbers on our “successes,” we are naturally drawn to reproducible church-packages like moths to a flame. In his under appreciated book, Under the Unpredictable Plant, Eugene Peterson refers to this attitude as "Ecclesiastical Pornography."

I am interested to see how large the reaction market to this is going to be. Where there was money to be made in books and seminars about how church needs to be done, in the wake of this apology I am guessing there will be a lot of money to be made in books and seminars telling us again—with the opposite emphasis, of course—how church should be done.

Banning Bibles In Beijing

This recent piece ran in the New York Sun describing the Chinese government’s attempt to ban Bibles from the Beijing Olympics:

The organizers of the 2008 Olympic Games in China have put the Bible on the list of items that athletes are banned from bringing with them to Beijing, we learn from a report in the Catholic News Service, picking up an item in the Italian daily La Gazzetta dello Sport. This would seem to undermine claims by a Chinese government official, Ye Xiaowen, who told Reuters last month that China would accommodate the religious needs of visiting athletes. The Chinese official claimed to Reuters that restrictions on Bibles were intended "to prevent illegal vendors from driving up prices, which are kept extremely low by government subsidies." Only a Communist would buy that economic explanation, which makes no sense.

Has anyone read 1984?

In any event, the NYS interviewed a democratic reformer from China who happened to be a Catholic. Not only did he understand the weight of what was at stake, but the NYS seemed to grasp it as well:

An editor of the Sun asked whether the same [persecution essentially] applied to those fighting for freedom in Hong Kong and China. Mr. Lee replied, "As a Catholic, I don't mind dying. I go up to heaven. I know somebody is up there, guiding me." It is the fear of sentiments like that that no doubt explains why Chinese Communist authorities would try to keep the Bible out of their country. Once it gets in, there is no telling where the ideas will spread or what will be the consequences.

Exactly. I wonder what those consequences might be…

HT: Stand To Reason

The Christian Faith Lifts the Human Cause

I have been making my way through Dsouza’s book, What’s So Great About Christianity, and thoroughly enjoying his kind of defense of the Christian faith and worldview. Essentially, he (and others as well) argues that the Christian worldview is the necessary intellectual underpinning for the values and institutions we believe advance the human condition. In clear opposition to this view is the “new atheist” line that, as Hitchens puts it, “religion poisons everything.”

In a recent column, Dsouza remarks on a recent debate he had with Hitchens. He says that at one point in the Q&A, an enlightening question came from the crowd:

One of the most interesting questions in the debate was posed to Hitchens by a man from Tonga. Before the Christians came to Tonga, he said, the place was a mess. Even cannibalism was widespread. The Christians stopped this practice and brought to Tonga the notion that each person has a soul and God loves everyone equally. The man from Tonga asked Hitchens, "So what do you have to offer us?" Hitchens was taken aback, and responded with a learned disquisition on cannibalism in various cultures. But he clearly missed the intellectual and moral force of the man's question. The man was asking why the Tongans, who had gained so much from Christianity, should reject it in favor of atheism.

I think this is a powerful confluence of events. Dsouza is defending the humanizing worldview and intellectual rigor of the Christian faith, Hitchens is taking the opposite view, and a clear example of Dsouza’s position appears in person from the developing world. In his book, The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity, Phillip Jenkins takes a sociological survey of the spread of Christianity and concludes that contrary to what we tend to hear “on the street,” Christianity is growing by leaps and bounds beyond the growth of other world religions. And, to add insult to injury, the forms of Christianity most popular around the world are of the charismatic/supernaturalist sort.

As Jenkins notes specifically, and as came out implicitly in the Dsouza debate, there is a powerful ethno-centrism among western liberal atheists. Hitchens and others clearly believe they are more intellectually and culturally advanced than religious believers, not to mention religious believers in backwards nations.

That ethno-centrism has lead to a serious information gap: the new atheists are totally unaware of how the Christian faith and worldview is advancing the cause of humanity across the globe. They apparently do not want to recognize the lifting effects of Christianity, either in another culture or in our own.

How Christianity Built The West

I picked this book up after reading one of D’souza’s articles on the new atheists, and how backwards they seem to have reality. While there are some points where I feel he overreaches the singular value of this book, I think it is an important kind of argument to make for Christianity in light of the spate of atheists writing about how evil religion in general and Christianity in particular is.

It is not a book about traditional arguments for the existence of God or the historical reliability of the Bible, but in the vein of Rodney Stark, it is a demonstration of how foundational the theology and worldview of Christianity is for the world of scientific advancement, human rights, and political pluralism. Contrary to the “new atheist” line, Christianity is not only not evil, it is culturally necessary for the values we hold dear today.

D’Souza argues, among other things, that the notion of the value and inherent rights of every individual is a Christian innovation. In addition, the value of scientific reasoning is due to Christian theologians and dedicated believers who searched nature for God’s laws and glory. In one provocative citation, D’Souza notes that medevial scientists were theologians who turned their attention from God and Scripture to nature.

If for no other reason, the book is worth its effort when it debunks the notion that science is an advancement beyond Christianity, and that the fabled “war” between science and religion is finally being won by atheists who “do” science apart from the coercive attention of the Catholic Church. I especially enjoyed his chapter debunking the standard mythology of Galileo. I have read about the real story a couple of times, but he goes into the greatest depth, describing the geo-political realities and Galileo’s stubbornness in a convincing manner.

As someone who keeps in touch with Christian apologetics, I enjoy watching this kind of argument for the truth of Christianity rise to the surface. If you believe a true worldview will enhance the lives and cultures of those who follow it, this book will be a great insight into how Christianity (necessarily) shaped our most treasured traditions.

Infant Christians; Infant Leaders

Aristotle argued that in order to flourish as a human being, you need to cultivate the virtues. He further argued that the best way to understand how the virtues work is to observe and imitate the virtuous. If you can’t find virtuous people in your life, you need to find them quickly.

Gordon MacDonald notes in his article, So Many Christian Infants, that we have a shocking lack of mature and wise believers running around in our world. He says:

Now mature, in my book does not mean the "churchly," those who have mastered the vocabulary and the litany of church life, who come alive only when the church doors open. Rather, I have in mind those who walk through all the corridors of the larger life—the market-place, the home and community, the playing fields—and do it in such a way that, sooner or later, it is concluded that Jesus' fingerprints are all over them.

I think he is exactly right. We should not confuse jargon-laden with wise and mature. Being a disciple is about following Christ through the real world, not acting at church.

One possible solution to spiritual infancy MacDonald offers is mentoring. The older, wiser Christians who have learned a bit about what it means to be alive in this culture as a faithful Christ-follower should deliberately model that wisdom and behavior to younger Christians. Aristotle might be proud of that option.

However, MacDonald notes what he thinks is a lack of willing and able mature Christians who can fill that role. Let me offer another set of possible mentors where I think we fall woefully short.

By very definition of the calling and office, pastors must be people who resist the rising tide of Christian infancy. They are the ones God has called to lead people through their relationships with Christ; through their struggles in seeing the world the way God wants us to see it; through their wanderings in and out of Scripture; through their stuttering attempts at prayer and devotion; through their journeys as souls infinitely precious to God.

More often than not, however, the modern-day pastor is expected to know just enough about how to visionize and market to be dangerous. They are expected to be dim shadows of their corporate counterparts, who read and reference more books by professional sports coaches than by the pillars of orthodox theology. To know what Phil Jackson says about leadership is more relevant than what Spurgeon said.

How can we follow in spiritual virtue a class of people who are no longer expected to be spiritually deep and virtuous? I teach drum lessons, and I often tell my beginning students to listen to and imitate good drummers on the radio. That trick works because on your average song good drummers play at about 50% of their real capacity. And because radio singles utilize only a fraction of a good drummer’s skills, they are able to play the song really, really well.

I love to listen to a pastor who is much deeper than a single sermon. I can usually tell whether there is a reservoir from which the pastor is drawing, or if they purchased a powerpoint sermon from the internet. One of those two sermons models for me what it means to be spiritually mature, and the other leaves me fat and happy as an infant feeding pre-chewed, spoon-fed food.

"Who will replace Billy Graham?"

Hearing about the Billy Graham television special tonight got me thinking about the public place of Christians in our culture today. God continues to grant us the presence of Graham, but D. James Kennedy recently passed away, and we were recently reminded of the life of Mother Teresa through a Time Magazine article detailing the struggle of her dark night.

These figures, and others like them in their generation, tend to represent a Christian public figure who is public because of their devotion to their faith. In my classes at a secular college, when you mention Mother Teresa, there is still a general recognition of her faith tied to her life’s work in India. When Graham and Kennedy are remembered as Christians visible to the public at large, it tends to be in the context of their orthodoxy and their passion for evangelism. These guys were and are pastors in a recognizable, biblical sense and that is how the world knows them even if the culture can’t associate that category with them.

Excluding recent scandals, the evangelicals who are visible to the public eye now tend to be those who are known for their corporate acumen. This new breed of pastoral leader is much easier for the culture at large to categorize because we are very comfortable with the notions of manager and CEO. There are exceptions to be sure, but I just don’t know that there are currently any individuals who are in the public eye for being pastors in the biblical sense of the word.

There is another category of visible Christian, but that ilk tends to be prosperity, self-help preacher who, in my opinion, lost any semblance of orthodoxy a long time ago.

Why is this the case? I think there are two, symbiotic reasons. First, our culture has simply changed. We are losing our corporate capacity to categorize “pastor.” Our common church culture is further and further in our past, and we are moving more and more in a secular direction. So, it could be argued, even if there are visible pastors out there, our culture would not know exactly what to do with them except to maybe marginalize them.

The second reason is that pastors have followed the cultural trend. Conventional ecclesiastical wisdom is more influenced by corporate technique than by biblical mandates and definitions. According to some best-selling books about church, the sizes of our parking lots have more to do with our weekend “success” than the careful handling of Scripture and souls. And as the pendulum swings to an inappropriate extreme in one direction (the corporatization of congregation) so it swings to another inappropriate extreme in the form of social gospel emergent leadership. As emergent logic tends to go, if our culture is more accustomed to political liberalism than theological orthodoxy, the appropriate response is to pick up the former while dumping the latter. We must be relevant, after all.

Sometimes the students I teach at Christian colleges wonder who will replace Billy Graham. I think we are long way away from “replacing” the role Graham has played in our world. But a good first step would be for the evangelical world to recapture the profoundly transforming, world-changing, and even outrageous, category of pastor.

Mother Teresa's Dark Night

A new book chronicling the correspondence and interior life of Mother Teresa, Come by My Light, has spurred an article in Time magazine in which her doubts about the faith are highlighted. I did not expect it, but the article does a pretty good job of at least surveying the opinions of those who realize her doubts are an inevitable part of growth in the Christian faith. As soon as Christians began commenting on their walks with God, they openly and faithfully described those seasons in life in which God felt distant. Commonly referred to as the “dark night of the soul,” it is a universal experience among those who seek a deeper and stronger personal walk with Christ.

What may not be explicitly stated in the article is that more often than not, the faithful pilgrim comes out of the dark night into a deeper and almost inexpressible relationship with God. Instead of being some kind of deep realization that God does not exist, it is a passage into an intimacy with the Creator that many have a hard time describing once they get there.

The Christian reading about Mother Teresa’s doubts should not be discouraged—far from it. They should be encouraged that another follower of Christ went through their own season of doubt and questioning. We are not alone when we struggle and question, and the way to the other side—a deeper relationship with Christ—is through the issues we face, not around them.

In addition, Christians should take comfort in the fact that there is a great cloud of witnesses about us who testify to this reality of faith, and of God’s existence, grace, and love.

Predictably, however, is the quote from one of our village atheists, Christopher Hitchens. His position is that her doubts are proof that religion is a fabricated illusion. Time notes:

Says Christopher Hitchens, author of The Missionary Position, a scathing polemic on Teresa, and more recently of the atheist manifesto God Is Not Great: "She was no more exempt from the realization that religion is a human fabrication than any other person, and that her attempted cure was more and more professions of faith could only have deepened the pit that she had dug for herself."

In his gift for impaling himself on his own arguments, Hitchens seems to posit that doubts about a belief belie their falsehood. I wonder how he would handle the actual change of position for Anthony Flew, the rigorous and philosophically respectable former standard bearer for atheism? His doubts about the coherence of atheism in the face of the argument for Intelligent Design lead him to openly move away from his former position to a form of theism. The professing atheist can only write more and more books professing their faith and deepening the pit they have dug for themselves (to paraphrase a bit).

Assembly of God/Evangelicalism: Identity?

Some of you might know that there is change brewing in the Assemblies of God, and that there are a lot of people, especially younger ministers, who are wrestling with what it means to be part of this denomination. One blog in particular, FutureAG, is acting as a clearinghouse for discussion and comment as well as prayer. I am very appreciative for this effort, and applaud its demeanor as being part of the AG and part of the effort to lead the denomination into further health in the future.

Many of the issues faced by the AG right now are also of larger concern to evangelicals. One post in particular, Identity Crisis, strikes one of those chords. As evangelicalism sways like a tree in cultural winds, what defines our roots? What keeps us in place and keeps us united in common cause? In addition to the thoughts in that post, I would like to throw some of my thoughts on the table as well.

One of the primary concerns for the AG is what is known as its “doctrinal distinctive”: speaking in tongues. From time to time this doctrine has been emphasized to the detriment and maybe even the exclusion of the other, more universally orthodox, doctrines. Paul notes:

“The truth is that the key to the Pentecostal movement was never tongues but a passionate pursuit of God for an empowering work of the Spirit to carry forth the Great Commission of Jesus.

Meanwhile, as we held tightly to our distinctive doctrine, we gave up many of the things that really made early Pentecostalism special. Our distinctive doctrine became all that defined us and the real character, contribution, and impact of the movement was lost.”

I think it is true that an overemphasis on a single doctrine has hindered us by narrowing our vision too much. What would, in my opinion, broaden our vision is a much deeper emphasis on the core doctrines and theological development available to Pentecostals. Theological work, when done correctly, broadens the vision of a denomination or a movement and sinks roots that stand the test of time. Documents like the Westminster Confession and the Nicene Creed have acted as solid foundations for millions of believers over nearly, well, thousands of years. And as cultures come and go, those theological works have proved up to the task of handling any one of them. I am not sure we have that kind of body of work behind the AG just yet.

In my view, the primary mistake in the trajectory of the AG has been in trying to rekindle feeling and emotions as a foundation for our present and future growth and in identifying our denomination too closely with that particular kind of spirituality. We may have, from time to time, mistaken the sovereign move of the Holy Spirit in the form of revival with emotionalism. Emotionalism is a poor foundation for anything, and hoping to control the Holy Spirit or recapture “what was” just doesn’t work.

Paul also notes:

“If the AG is going to continue to grow in the future, we need a paradigm that can better reflect the unique qualities of our past -- qualities that could better fit a post-modern paradigm than a modern one.”

I am not sure exactly what that would entail—qualities that fit better in a postmodern paradigm than a modern one. But I would add the caveat that we need to think critically and thoroughly about the philosophy of postmodernism before we dine with that devil.

Paul finishes his thoughtful post with a string of questions:

“What do you think? What is it that truly defines us? Why are we in this fellowship with each other?”

The very fact that these questions should be taken seriously betrays our need as a movement to strengthen the foundations upon which we call ourselves a fellowship.