Should Come As No Surprise...

In case you missed it, or didn't believe it the first dozen times you read about it, Rob Bell has officially come out in favor of "marriage equality," or the legitimization of homosexual marriage.  Bell has been a lightning-rod figure in Christian circles for several years now, drawing loving adoration from some circles of (typically young) Christians and ministers who see his point of view as a new way of talking about the faith, and stinging criticism from others who see in him the seeds and saplings of heresy.

Part of Bell's allure has been his ability to not answer every question.  He is able to take direct questions about doctrinal and moral matters and answer them in slippery ways which have kept him from being quoted as directly contradicting Christian orthodoxy - at least the majority of the time, and at least until now.

The Huffington Post reports, "This Sunday Rob Bell spoke at San Francisco's Grace Cathedral and openly endorsed marriage equality... In response to a question regarding same-sex marriage, Bell said, "I am for marriage. I am for fidelity. I am for love, whether it's a man and woman, a woman and a woman, a man and a man. I think the ship has sailed and I think the church needs -- I think this is the world we are living in and we need to affirm people wherever they are."  So he is on record with both his conviction and his argument.

It should not surprise anyone who has read Bell and who has a grasp of Christian theology in the last 200 years that he has now openly contradicted clear teaching of Scripture and consistent teaching within the church for the last 2000 years.  When an individual drifts left-of-center with their theology, they necessarily begin to unmoor themselves from such things as Scripture and tradition and begin to wed themselves to the spirit of the age.  Bell is not nearly as concerned with doctrinal orthodoxy or truth (a topic he slides out from under later in the piece) as he is with acceptance from the latest fads among leftist elites.  And he will receive plenty of invitations to exclusive cocktail parties where grateful people will pat him on the back.

But the spirit of the age is a fickle and demanding deity.  What is in vogue today will become tomorrow's stepchild.  And this deity will not stop in its pressure for a self-proclaimed christian to accept one item in its buffet of political correctness.  It will demand all.  And it will eventually take all from Bell.

Though you will not be able to find the direct quote yet, it may not be long before Bell openly denies the uniqueness and divinity of Christ.  The spirit of our age can't swallow the Jesus of Christian orthodoxy, so, in time, neither will he.

And notice as well how weak his reason is for his decision, "I think the ship has sailed."  This isn't an out-of-context pull quote, it is the very spirit of the promotional video for his new book.  Traditional Christian beliefs are now like Oldsmobile cars - once useful but unable to keep up with social changes.

Don't let his gift of communication fool you - the power of the Christian faith is not in the multiplication of questions with no real answers, it is in faithfulness to Christ and the teaching once and for all delivered to the saints.

Sir Isaac Said What?

“…the true God is a living, intelligent, powerful Being…he governs all things, and knows all things that are done or can be done…He endures forever, and is everywhere present….As a blind man has no idea of colors, so have we no idea of the manner by which the all-wise God perceives and understands all things.” Sir Isaac Newton, Principia

Newton, Sir Isaac. 1934, Principia. Translated by Florian Cajori. 2 vols. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. 543-47.

Our Senses and Prayer

I was recently struck by a poem written by Gerard Manley Hopkins I had not read before, The Habit of Perfection.  It was written early in his career and so several commentators do not see it as refined a work as his later poetry, but I find it of incredible value when viewed through the lens of prayer and interaction with God.  Hopkins was a devoted Christ-follower, so it is entirely appropriate to read his work with Christ and discipleship in view.

As a whole, the poem treats all our bodily senses ironically as means of interacting with God.  As a result it is good advice to the believer who is wondering how to pray.  The first stanza:

Elected Silence, sing to me

And beat upon by whorled ear,

Pipe me to pastures still and be

The music that I care to hear.

Here, we catch a glimpse into how to use our ears to better hear God - and we begin with the fact that our ears are battered with cacophony, and thus are tuned to hear all the wrong things.  We grow accustomed to the constant din of meaningless - or even worse, destructive - noise.  We learn to process meaninglessness because we listen to it all the time.

So the power of silence becomes the power of re-tuning our ears to hear "The music that I care to hear."  Ironically, in silence from the noise of this world we find another song, and this time it is a symphony instead of cacophony, and our ears become attuned to a different sound.  God is not in the whirlwind of advertising or the earthquake of 24/7 news and social media.  He can be heard, however, in a whisper.  But I can only hear a whisper in silence and when I am listening for that voice.

Silence takes time.  Most of us are unaccustomed to silence - many of us find it hard to find.  But we ought to cultivate it.  For the good of our minds and souls we should find ways to disconnect from the noise of the world around us and learn to listen for a different voice.  Take the Word of God with you into silence - not to be read, but held in your mind and heart.  God has spoken through his written Word and the more comfortable you are with that language, the better positioned you will be to hear his spoken Word.

The music of the other world is beautiful - beautiful and transformative.  Find it and your life may begin to sing it.

A Hearty Slap In the Face

N. D. Wilson, Notes from the Tilt-A-Whirl: Wide-EyedWonder in God’s Spoken World (Nashville: Thomas Nelson 2009), 203 pages.

By its own admission, there is almost no need to classify this book.  Is it about God’s presence in this world?  Yup.  Is it about the beauty and pain in this world?  Yup.  Does it contain a letter by Hamlet, Prince of Denmark?  Yes.   Does it have a lot to say about ants and snowflakes?  It most certainly does.  This is, after all, a book about someone who believes he is on a tilt-a-whirl.  A perfect, spinning orb of a tilt-a-whirl.

N.D. Wilson’s book was, for me, a deep breath of fresh air.  I spend a lot of time with what some call ‘serious’ books on philosophy, theology, history and so forth and I was drawn to the sense I got that this book doesn’t take itself seriously, but simultaneously takes its subject matter seriously.  It delivered.  While the chapters will often take their own routs around the subject matter, they all lead you to the end of the book.  Wilson isn’t random in his “Notes,” but surprising, often humorous, and sometimes quite moving.

If I had to put the thesis of the book in a sentence it might be, “a hearty slap in the face to the problem of evil.”  Wilson knows his philosophers and theologians.  He does not neglect the age-old arguments and points of views on ‘either side’, but he does not take the strict philosophical tact to deal with this problem.  He is interested in the story the world is telling, the roles we all play (and by “we all,” I mean to include earwigs, mayflies, naked mole rats, and fat rabbits), and what God is up to in all of it.  He asks, “How could an all-good, all-powerful God allow evil in the world? Or, from a slightly different angle: how could an all-good, all-powerful God allow David Hume in the world?” (pg. 78)

Through his perspective on daily life and God in it, I found a deeply thoughtful reflection on what I would call relationship with God.  His book inspired and encouraged me to take in more of the things around me from a different, God-saturated, point of view.  When I got to the chapter on hell, the pastor and theologian within me was worried.  It was wonderful.

I think this is a great book for encouraging a meaningful and daily trust in the God who really is there, and happens to be here as well.

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A Great Shot In The Arm

Mitch Stokes, A Shot of Faith (to the Head): Be a Confident Believer in an Age of Cranky Atheists (Nashville: Thomas Nelson 2012), 272 pages.

In case you haven’t noticed, there has been a barrage of belligerent atheists writing volumes of popular works attacking religion in general and Christianity in particular.  And if you are not careful you can get the feeling that they have the upper hand right now.  Their books sell well, they make the debate rounds (well, most of them do), and many of them have been guests on a plethora of TV and radio shows.  They talk a great game and many have been lead down their primrose path.

It turns out, however, that only one or two layers beneath the overly confident surface lies a surfeit of good ideas.  With a little guided and informed examination it is revealed that their bark does not measure up to their bite.  Mitch Stokes’ book is that examination, and is a very well-guided tour of the problems with the so-called new atheists. 

But the book begins in an unexpected place.  In fact, I’m not sure I have read a non-technical or popular level book on Christian thought or apologetics that begins where he does.  You might expect a book like this to open by dealing with the major arguments for God’s existence or the reliability of Scripture or even a blow-by-blow examination of the new atheist’s arguments.  Instead, Stokes begins with the issues of argument, reason, and knowledge in the first place.  Specifically, he uses the epistemological work of Alvin Plantinga to argue against the evidentialism, Enlightenment rationalism, and scientific provincialism inherent (and necessary) to the work of the new atheists.  In essence, he pulls the rug out from underneath their entire scheme.

From there Stokes deals with what are probably the two most popular and potent attacks on the faith – the assertion that science has ‘disproved God’ and the problem of evil.  Both sections are rich with table-turning insight and are profitable for anyone who has confronted these arguments or even doubted because of them.

If you are accustomed to a Christian apologetic being primarily about various arguments, you might end up a little frustrated with Stokes’ take on their role and usefulness.  He does not get rid of the baby with the bathwater, so to speak, but he does see a need for good arguments to bolster the reasonableness of faith.  If I have a quibble with the book it is that I might place more emphasis on the power and usefulness of the arguments themselves, but that did not get in the way of the value of this work for me.

If you are worried because you don’t know what any of that means, you are in luck.  Though his book will force you to think and slow down a bit, it is entirely readable and accessible if you are ready to do so.  I thoroughly enjoyed discovering this book, its treatment of Plantinga’s ideas, and it thorough treatment of the new atheists and their arguments.

Stokes states that he wrote this book to encourage the believer and even possibly help anyone toying with doubt, and I think he has done a wonderful job.

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Learning To Talk Again

Larry Crabb, SoulTalk: The Language God Longs for us to Speak (Nashville: Thomas Nelson,2003). 266 pages.

The pressure to find solutions for people in pain is powerful.  A friend comes to you with a need or an emergency in a relationship and you feel put on the spot to come up with a piece of advice that will help ‘solve the situation.’ The pressure is even more powerful if you are a Christian talking with another Christian about the stresses and strains in life.  We have created an atmosphere of therapeutic solution finding that has put all of us in a bind.

Crabb believes we are missing the boat entirely.  He is not against finding solutions as such, but he is clear that we miss the mark more often than not in that we simply do not know how to talk with each other out of the depths of what God is doing in each of us.  We like to talk across the surface of things.  It is just easier to do that.  We feel the urge to jump into a conversation and offer some soothing piece of comfort, offer accountability, or the magic pill that will offer the solution to a deeply complicated problem.

So instead of talking out of our own wit, wisdom, or fear, Crabb offers a new way of looking at relationships and life – SoulTalk.  SoulTalk is his way of leading us into a conversation where God is at the center of every life and every relationship in every situation.  He argues that we do not really know how to talk this way and his book offers a series of steps that help us break bad, religious habits and enter into God’s way of working in people’s lives.

I found Crabb’s formulation of SoulTalk to be deeply freeing and rightly prioritized.  In my role as a pastor I am often with people who find themselves in over their heads, or who have finally decided to talk about God when life falls apart, and the unspoken expectation is that a conversation or two might just do the trick.  His advice is to stop talking and start learning how to listen to what the Spirit is doing and wants to do in an individual’s life.  The primary goal in each SoulTalk conversation is not empathy or solution-finding, but Spirit-finding.

Along the way he has a lot of things to say about the place of God in the Christian’s life that simply need to be heard in a Christian culture where we have exchanged Christ’s life for an expectation of blessing and prosperity.  What would happen if intimacy with God for Christ’s sake were more important to us than the cure to our cancer or the ‘fixing’ of a deeply hurting situation?  According to Crabb, when we put these kinds of things first, we find the greatest thing possible, and God begins to do the work in our souls that is needed.

I highly recommend this book for any believer interested in deepening their discipleship, understanding how to relate with others in Christ, and how to learn to listen to the Spirit in all things.

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An Expanded Vision of Pentecostal Theology - An Initial Thought

I have spent my entire life in the Pentecostal church and now pastor in the world’s largest Pentecostal denomination.  I have seen a lot come and go, I have attended a lot of local, regional, and national meetings of Pentecostals, and I think I have a fairly good handle on what many (if not most) consider to be Pentecostal theology.  The core for many is the matter of speaking in tongues, and depending on your background, it broadens all the way out to praying for miracles and unique manifestations of the Holy Spirit.

I think if that defines our theology, our distinctive as Pentecostals, we have missed most of what was intended by the gift of the Holy Spirit.

Let me first say that I believe in the reality of those things, experience and practice them, and even pray for them.  I believe they have a powerful role in the lives of individual Christians and in the body of Christ.  I am not going to deny any of that, but I am going to argue for something that might strike some Pentecostals as bordering on wanting to have my papers revoked: all those things are derivative truths of Pentecostal theology.  By derivative I mean they are the logical theological extensions of what we believe about the power and reality of the Spirit of God.  Our distinctive theology ought to begin with a pneumatology and then lead to charismata, miracles, and so forth.  A Pentecostal theology that begins with a few effects and uses them to categorically define the cause will miss a lot of biblical insight, and in all honesty, will leave a lot of people undiscipled and badly formed.

If, however, we begin at the beginning – the nature and power of the cause of Pentecost – everything will begin to fall into place, including the more spectacular and public gifts of the Spirit.  The beginning is simply this fact: Pentecostals believe in the imminent, active, and powerful action of the Holy Spirit among the disciples of Jesus Christ, in His church, and in the world today.  If we use a framework like this to begin discovering the role of the Holy Spirit among believers, we have available to us the whole of Scriptural teaching on the Spirit.  If we open this conceptual door first, we become aware of so much more than just a few manifestations.

For instance, the fruit of the Spirit are Pentecostal realities.  Paul describes that familiar list as the consequence of the work of the Spirit, not the achieved character traits of really successful Christ-followers.  They are fruit – the inevitable consequence of healthy trees.  As such, the fruit of the Spirit are the character traits of the third member of the Trinity having his way within our lives.  If this is achieved by even a small group of disciples, we have people living with each other, God, and toward the world in love, joy, peace, patience, and so forth.  A more powerful and spiritual group of people would be hard to imagine, and if this isn’t Pentecostal I don’t know what is.

Then, keeping this same group of fruitful believers in mind, imagine them exercising gifts like glossolalia and prophecy.  They begin with a divine power and wisdom behind what they do and say with each other, so their expression of these unique gifts is filled with kindness, gentleness, faith, and so forth.  Has not every Pentecostal pastor prayed that when people express the gift of tongues and interpretation in public that they do so in a Christ-like fashion?  Is that frustrated prayer the reason why so many churches that are Pentecostal in theology are not so in practice?  How can we expect fruit-less believers to suddenly handle a gift with that much power and potency as if they were fruitful?

And yet, the standard Pentecostal model ignores the primary work of the Spirit, building Christ-like disciples, and emphasizes the effects and then we are frustrated when they are consistently abused and used to abuse.

I am aware of these kinds of conversations taking place in some academic circles, but it needs to be brought to pastors and church leaders.  After all, these are the front lines where most of the training in Christ-likeness takes place and where it too often suffers it most grievous losses.  The Holy Spirit is now God with us to enact the will and kingdom of God among his people and in his creation.  This is a vision so much larger than any of us can imagine, and so much larger than a short list of our favored spiritual gifts can ever encompass.  Let us begin with the presence and power of God among us first and then learn to talk about the expression of the Spirit among us.

Christians and Funerals

The Huffington Post posted a short piece by Jaweed Kaleem about the importance of eulogizing the dead.  While it appears that the practice of eulogizing, making good or kind remarks about the dead at their burial, is not always done, it can be a rewarding exercise for all involved.  I have been involved with more than one funeral where the eulogy was the most powerful part of the event.

But few know that the act of holding funerals for everyone is a distinctly Christian cultural artifact.  It might seem disrespectful to most westerners now to imagine not holding a funeral for someone, even if we did not know them well.  We have been trained to believe that it is respectful to have at least some form of remembrance when people pass away, no matter their social or economic status.  You can thank your Christian roots for that part of your moral compass.

It was not always the case that everyone enjoyed a funeral or a moment of silence.  As the Christian church was growing under the persecution of the Roman culture, most people did not rise to the social strata where they were worthy of a funeral at their death.  Only the wealthy and powerful were remembered, and the rest were thrown mostly into unmarked mass graves.

Now this is what happens when a culture is formed by a religion or worldview that does not hold to the inherent value of every single human life.  To the Romans, and the Greek tradition before them, most humans were not worthy of notice and lived to serve the desires of the gods and the earthly powerful.  So what happens when a religious tradition (the Jewish and Christian religions) grows in size and begins having its impact on that culture?

Lactanitus,(AD 240-320) “We will not allow the image and creation of God to be thrown out to the wild beasts and the birds as their prey; it must be given back to the earth from which it was taken.”

Lactanitus was a Christian convert who previously had been appointed by Emperor Diocletian to be the official professor or rhetoric in Nicomedia.  He grew up, was well educated, and succeeded in the Roman cultural system before he converted to Christianity.  He knew the Roman system, and his values changed radically as a Christ-follower.  At one time he would have believed as all Romans did that most people did not deserve a funeral.  As a Christian his view of humanity changed and as a result a core precept of his ethic changed – every human life is created in the image of God and is of ultimate value.

Funerals for the “unimportant” and the “poor” are a vestige of the Christian ethic that helped shape Western Civilization and much of the rest of the world.  When we “pay our respects” for people we barely knew we do so because of the deeply rooted truth in our culture that every human being is due at least that.  And without this part of the Christian influence, things might be very different.  It is the Christian doctrine of creation that imparts value to every human being, and without that doctrine it becomes hard to see how that value would be justified.  And clearly, as history shows us, it was not.

Some references:

Church History in Plain Language, by Bruce Shelley

How Christianity Change the World, by Alvin J. Schmidt

Accompany Them with Singing – The Christian Funeral, by Thomas G. Long

A Naked Public Square?

‘Merry Christmas Charlie Brown' Performance Canceled Following Atheist Complaints

Lawsuit Threat Cancels Christmas Concert (to benefit African children)

These kinds of stories are becoming more frequent around the Christmas holiday.  Some Christian group or church somewhere does something about Christ on Christmas, some atheist group complains, public officials get worried and the public display of a Christian Christmas is somehow muted.  Each circumstance is different, but there is an underlying assumption that needs to be challenged.

The atheist public square is not a religiously or morally neutral public square.  It is a false assumption, though a powerful one in our culture right now, that removing religious influence from culture somehow makes it more ‘neutral’ when it comes to religion and morality.  Atheism as a public disposition (what some have called the “naked public square”) is just as much a religious and moral statement as is the expression of Christianity.  

Why would I believe that public discourse where God is not a possibility is better than one where God is?

I have had several conversations in which people want to claim that atheism is the “objective” point of view simply and humbly aimed at the truth of the matter, while Christianity is opposed to reason and inquiry and forces belief on people.  This is a position argued for by the so-called New-Atheists, but it lacks the value of sustainability.  In arguing against the worldview of Christianity and for the worldview of atheism, people accept, both explicitly and implicitly, a set of moral and religious beliefs.

Instead of, “there is a God,” or, “there might be a God,” their assertion is, “there is not a God,” or, “there is probably not a God.”  Every one of those propositions will have consequences in the public square, and to deny that is to plead a special exemption for your point of view.  So if each assertion about ultimate reality has public consequences, then what is each believer to do?

Stand up in public and present the best case you can for your point of view.  If each has consequences that affect our lives in powerful ways, and they all do, then it really matters how they are presented to everybody else.

What should we avoid doing?  Exactly what is revealed in these kinds of stories – whine about Christians, squeeze them out of the public discourse, and pretend everything will go along as usual.

People of the Book Who Don't Read

Christians have been called ‘People of the Book’ for centuries, which is ironic now because so few Christians read.  You might object that more and more books are sold through Christian book stores and online than ever before, but I would counter that most of what is sold is largely shallow and often even less useful than that, and how much of that is actually read?  I often run across Christians who want prayer and input on difficult situations in their lives and it is common for me and people in my position (pastors, etc.) to suggest books to help with the process.  More often than I would like to count, I receive the response, “I’m not a reader.”

It is an oxymoron for a Christian, someone whose faith is explained in the pages of a book, not to be a reader.  There are a myriad of reasons for why people read less and less, but I’m interested here with what happens to you when you don’t read – the Bible or good books.  You can’t not read and get away with it.

So, what happens to the Christian when they do not read?

Over time they can no longer understand their Bibles.

There is a lot of information in a Bible.  There are a lot of themes that trace themselves over hundreds of pages, through dozens of stories, several different forms of literature, and in plenty of doctrines and exhortations.  If a Christian’s primary source of analysis of the world comes in 6-minute increments with commercial breaks severed into even smaller segments then biblical comprehension will be difficult to say the least.

Over time they will misunderstand their Bibles and their faith.

Years ago I was teaching a college/young adult Sunday school class of about 60 people.  We did an exercise in which we traced a quotation from the Old Testament in the New Testament.  The plan, which I thought was highly useful, was to read the context of the OT passage and use that to help us understand the quotation in the New.  The first reaction I received was from a young school teacher who asked, “What do you mean by the context?” The exercise went downhill from there.

Modern media is almost utterly without context, or is at least designed to be consumed without context.  Sitcoms need laugh lines every few seconds.  Linear thought is unnecessary to consume most pop culture.  Popular songs are 3 ½ minutes long as opposed to the popular orchestral pieces played to the masses 250 years ago.  A Christian must fight against the soul malformation that happens in pop culture, tune out of it, and learn to read and think.

Over time they will be mislead about what their faith teaches.

Your Bible requires attentive reading.  Without it individual passages become bludgeons in the hands of all kinds of nefarious and heretical schemes.  Many aggressive atheists do not understand Scripture because they believe they have a handful of knock-down passages which show the Bible to be awful and irrational.  Every one of those I have encountered have been squeaky toys in the hands of children – a lot of annoying noise, no real damage done.  Cults twist passages in ways that make sense to Christians who don’t read.  Pop culture mocks Christianity in ways that frighten Christians who don’t read.

Over time they will stop reading their Bibles altogether.

Why continue to read something so large and difficult to understand when I can get a minute-long devotional from my favorite teacher addressing a practical need in my life which does not even need to reference Scripture or theology?  Isn't it all the same if I come out OK, act like a nice person, and learn how to be a better husband and manage my money a little better? A proof text without context is practically useless.

So what is a Christian to do?  Does it need to be said?  Read.  Read your Bible on a regular basis and read good books which help you understand what is going on in your Bible.  Read an entire New Testament Epistle in one sitting.  Learn to read everything through the lens of orthodox Christian doctrine.  Get used to finishing larger and larger books.  Find a few authors who are good at what they do and can challenge you to reach a little further.

You might be surprised how much better you will be for it.

An 8th Reason Why

In his post, “7 Reasons America Has Not Been Reached for Christ,” I believe Greg Stier has some very important things for the church to hear and fix.  In every point he is right about our neglect.  I would simply add one more that might be a bit more conceptual but crucial nonetheless – We don’t know the Gospel anymore.

Stier mentions that we are ashamed of the Gospel and that church leaders are no longer leading the cause of spreading the good news, and he is right.  In addition I believe a growing number of Christians (possibly an alarmingly large percentage of them?) no longer truly believe Christ is the way, the truth, and the life.  In other words it is quite possible that American Christians have lost their urgency to proclaim the Gospel because they no longer think it is necessary to do so.  They have become soft religious relativists.

I taught ethics on the college level for both a community college (younger students), and at a university adult education extension and I found both demographics struggled with making arguments for the rightness or wrongness of ethical points of view, not to mention the inherent exclusivity of truth itself.  And as a pastor for going on 20 years now, I’m not so sure I can label “them” as the only relativists out there.

A Christian does not know the Gospel when they do not believe it is the only message of good news and reconciliation between the Creator and his creation.  A believer does not have a solid intellectual grasp on their faith if they are willing to believe that other religions are basically the same, and in so doing, neglect the urgent task of being ambassadors for Christ.

In addition to his 7 Reasons, could it also be the case that American Christians are simply losing their grasp on several of the essential tenants of the faith?

Being Well-Rounded and Getting Coffee

You can overhear some of the most interesting conversations while standing in line for coffee.  We missed a some friends and I decided to get the coffee anyway, and while I was in line I heard a couple of people over my shoulder talking about having faith versus being a ‘well-rounded’ person.  The fella’s concern was about limiting himself as a person if all he did was have faith in Christianity.  The implication seemed to be that there was more to life – specifically his ‘reason’ – that could not be captured by faith alone.

I have a couple of thoughts about this relationship between faith and reason that seems to confuse and even frustrate a lot of people.

First of all, is there a genuine conflict between faith and reason, or more colloquially, between having faith and using your mind?  The right kind of faith is never opposed to reason or the use of your intellectual faculties.  How would you answer this question – what kind of person would you trust with your life?  You would probably tell me they would have to be someone reliable, someone you know and know to be trustworthy, and someone you believe will do what they say they will do in the future (especially at a moment of crisis).  And this answer is entirely reasonable.  You have based your faith (the same Greek word for ‘trust’ in the Christian Bible) in the right person on good reasons. 

So it is with faith in Christ.  The Christian has good reasons to believe in the existence of God, his good and powerful character, and the belief that he will keep his word in the future.  There is nothing unreasonable in that kind of biblical faith.

Secondly, Christian faith, rightly exercised, excites the life of the mind and intellect.  Though large segments of the Christian church in the last century have demeaned the life of the mind, for two thousand years many of the great figures in Western history (and not a few around the globe) have advanced civilization because of the love for Christ.  Rightly understood there is no conflict between the use of your capacity of reason and your faith in Christ, and through the lens of history, the two have been necessarily connected.  In fact, it would be reasonable for the orthodox Christian to ask another who has left behind the exercise of their rational capacities what is wrong with them.

There is no good reason to believe the popular point of view that religious faith, specifically Christian faith, is for the young or weak mind and science and reason are for the advanced and mature.  This has always been and continues to be a false dichotomy.  And the Christian should live and think in such a way as to demonstrate that.

Culture, Sex, and Foreign Affairs

I have one question and two answers: Why do we suddenly know so much about a sex scandal and almost nothing at all about the foreign policy disasters of Benghazi and Fast and Furious?

It is a provocative question, but I do think there are (at least) two fairly clear and simple answers which help us understand some of the culture shift around us.  First of all we are a sex-obsessed culture.  Sex scandals make more sense to us than the complexities of foreign policy.  We watch these kinds of tawdry affairs unfold in fiction and 'reality' TV every day of our lives, so we easily and quickly grasp who did what to whom.  In addition, there is not much difference between what is called the Mainstream Media and TV entertainment.  They are two different heads of the same creature.  The MSM has a cultural point of view to promote and a juicy sex scandal involving high ranking military personnel fits right in.  On the other hand it takes time and intellectual effort to reflect upon and absorb the details of who was in Lybia, what they were doing, what kind of help they asked for and were denied, who was involved in the attacks, and who bears responsibility.  It only takes a couple of brain cells to imagine an affair.

The second answer is that our prevailing philosophy of foreign policy, both in the current administration and in pop culture, is cultural relativism.  Cultural relativism is a horrible basis for a foreign policy, but it is where we are nonetheless.  For possibly two generations now the predominant educational point of view on other cultures has been officially labeled "multiculturalism" but is in effect a raw and reactionary belief that no culture is morally better or worse than another.  In fact, the only moral transgression this pop foreign policy recognizes is the denigration another culture.  As a result, our administration is loath to call murderous aggression what it is, and our culture would violently revolt if it did.  In the place of genuine moral reflection and even outrage, we have the pablum of pop culture and cultural relativism.

The sex scandal is terrible news for a lot of people, especially for the family directly involved.  Adultery destroys families, friendships, and trust and should never be taken lightly.  But the foreign affair bungles in the last few months have cost lives, require public deceit, are morally deplorable, and are (most likely) impeachable offenses.  Nevertheless, it seems we would rather suck on the lollipop of an affair than tear into the red meat of genuine public offenses.

The Call of Discipleship

A necessary reality to being a genuine disciple of Christ is recognizing the call it places upon your life.  When Jesus found the soon-to-be disciples along the Sea of Galilee, he called them to become fishers of men.  When John the Baptist’s disciples asked Jesus questions he told them to come and spend some time with him.  When Jesus ran across Matthew, he called him away from the life of a tax collector.  And on the story goes.  The call of the disciple is a call away from and toward: away from a life antithetical to the way of Christ and toward a way of life transformed into the image of the Son of God.

Christ went and found disciples and called them to be with him.  In the case of Mark’s story, they were average, probably young, laborers going about their task.  Christ found them in the midst of their family’s work, called them and changed everything about their lives and ours.  In the stories in John, Jesus took interested people and drew them into life with him.  For others, like Nathaniel, Jesus answered questions – even skepticism – and brought them into his power and kingdom.  In every case people became disciples because they left what used to be and became intimately aware of Christ.

But we need to be careful not to assume that discipleship is a call away from ‘normal’ life and a change of vocation into full-time ministry.  Christ calls us all, he demands a change of life from us all, and provides the power for that change for all of us.  The critical factor is not necessarily the change of job or vocation, but of life.  Following Christ changes our priorities and outlook on everything and it might change what we do for a living.  It will change how we do what we do and how we relate to everyone and everything around us, but it just might leave us in our job.

The disciple who remains in their vocation but whose priorities and perspectives are changed by Christ has answered the call. The disciple who leaves everything behind, yet whose priorities and perspectives remain unchanged, has not answered the call.  

So the significant question for the disciple may not be exactly, “what do I do now?” as much as it is, “how do I do it now?”  Christ’s claim on your life is complete and he will in all likelihood leave you in the place in life where he found you, so now the way you do everything changes.

In fact, Mark’s story of the calling of the disciples is instructive at this point.  They were working.  They were tending nets, preparing for the day’s catch, and probably reeked of fish and lake water.  Jesus did not hunt down the most pious among them or the ones who were already most of the way toward moral and spiritual perfection.  He sought the right people, who were average people, and changed everything.

Jesus did not look for what the world calls excellence when he called any of the disciples, but his call turns into excellence.  So it is with us.  We are not called because we are already the cream of the crop, but after the call there is an almost severe expectation – the work of Christ in you is a work of totality.  Dietrich Bonhoeffer said, “When Christ bids a man, he bids him come and die.”  And while the call of discipleship is a claim on your moment of death, it is also a claim on every breath between now and then.  Many a preacher has said that there is only one thing you do not say to your Lord, “No.”  So, the reasoning goes, if you have told Christ “no” then he is not, in effect, your Lord.  Something else is.

A sloppy and half-hearted disciple is one who has not come in contact with Jesus Christ.  They fit into a stale rhythm of church attendance or a cold routine of some prayer or simple observance, but their life lacks the fire of dedication and transformation.

A disciple rigorously devoted to their vocation and pursuits, but who languishes in their pursuit of Christ has misunderstood the beauty and truth there is in Him.  They are busy trying to find their fulfillment in other things, putting them ahead of the mind of Christ, thus misusing and misunderstanding both the God-given gifts of the world and the Giver himself.

Excellence is one of the missing ingredients in discipleship among American Christians today.  Maybe we have grown a little soft, maybe we have grown sloppy in the way we think about Christ and the faith, maybe we have had too much spoon-fed to us for too long. Maybe we simply have not grown into adulthood mentally, spiritually, and emotionally.  Whatever the cause, we simply are not, as a whole, excellent for Christ.  The church and the Christian family need to be places where the greatness and grace of God are on constant display.  Our God is Lord over all the spheres of life, but can we articulate the wisdom of God at all in any of them?  Is the church the center of cultural greatness and beauty in our communities?  Is the church a place where people are enamored of a Creator God and understand the truths of science?  Is the Christian family the house on the block where things simply are different by the grace of God?  The evidence of the majority of the Christian church seems to be on the side of mediocrity right now.  That has to change.

The American Church's Task

I believe the election of November, 2012 to be evidence of a deep cultural shift.  It has been happening in different ways for a long time, and many people have written, remarked, and even warned about it.  And while some may reasonably call the election itself a cultural shift for us, it is most certainly evidence of the shifts that have been taking place for a while now.

Demographers, sociologists, Christian philosophers, and many theologians have remarked on how radically different the church’s culture has become, and how the connections between an orthodox church culture and the non-church culture have either disappeared or changed in fundamental ways.  To take one well-known example, the work of Christian Smith and the National Study of Youth and Religion uncovered a remarkable shift among American and evangelical teens in which they no longer believed a version of their parent’s Christian faith. Their spiritual beliefs were different enough to be classified by the research team as a different religion altogether.  His now famous “Moralistic Therapeutic Deism” is the title he and his researchers gave to this new form of religious belief.

I bring this up here to highlight the simple fact that these are teens who have grown up in evangelical churches to evangelical parents and who no longer hold to the orthodox Christian faith.  What they (and so many others) believe in has been shaped more by the prevailing winds in education and culture around them than by the historic Christian faith.

This should be the kind of finding that rattles churches a bit, and add to it the numerous studies about the cultural and generational shifts taking place in younger generations, and we are lead to a conclusion.

The Church can no longer rest on its laurels.  We can no longer depend on cultural structures or commonly held morality to support an orthodox Christian view of the world.  We cannot assume that people in churches understand the core of their doctrine or the practical outworking of their faith.  We cannot hope that public structures (formal and informal) lend even tacit support to the place of church and the Christian faith in the public square.  Those structures may still exist in some places among some people, but the Church in America will make a serious error in simply assuming they are there as they always have been.

What we need to do as a result is twofold: relearn how to present the Christian faith to our culture and live as people genuinely transformed by Christ.  As Christians in time past have put it – we need to out-think and out-live the world for Christ.

To that end I want to propose a few places where the church (not just the Christian academy) needs to step up and do some serious work.

Discipleship

By this I don’t mean the generic sense of all Christians being followers of Jesus Christ.  That is obviously true, but as evidenced by study after study and anecdote after anecdote this affirmation alone is not doing the trick.  The church needs to regain a sense of the priority of discipleship, the absolute lordship of Christ, and a hatred for the idolatries of this world.  Christians need to be told by Christ how to be Christians, not sitcoms, newscasts, pundits, or political parties.

Work

The church has expected (maybe with good reason) that the culture would value industriousness, thus supporting the Christian doctrine of work, but that is simply no longer true.  We need to make a stronger and wiser case for a theology of work that emphasizes God’s design for flourishing human beings who work with the gifts God has given them to enrich their culture, work for His Kingdom, support their family, loved ones, and those around them in need.

Compassion/Social Justice

Welfare is not compassion.  Food stamps are not compassion.  The Nanny State is rightly called this because it creates a surrogate for both parenting and labor.  Traveling down a road of more and more entitlements that last longer and longer and which cover more and more people militates against the good of the human soul and family and a Christian simply cannot support such a system and at the same time hope for the best in families and individuals.

Marriage and Family

The belief that marriage is the life-long union between a man and a woman is one of the areas where recently we see the most cultural change.  It has been the case that the church could rely on public opinion to protect that definition, but that is eroding quickly.  Thus the church needs to relearn why it believes these things and why God’s design for families is good for husbands, wives, kids, and culture. And then we need to be bold and winsome enough to argue it.

Education

How many in the church (how many leaders in the church) can articulate a theology of education?  Do we understand the warp and woof of Wisdom Literature and its emphases on maturation and the value of knowledge?  Do we have a good grasp on a child as a whole human being and as someone who needs guidance and formation in a myriad of ways?  At the very least, Christian families should be given a chance to understand education through the lens of Scripture instead of being given a couple of pre-packaged secular options.

The Problems with Undefined Marriage

I’m not the only one who has argued that once the traditional definition of marriage is gone, then any combination of marital union is, in principle, possible. We were mocked, of course, as alarmists. Here is the first foray I have seen by the cultural left to add polygamy to the acceptable forms of marriage (by no small thinker, by the way).

SINCE the Supreme Court’s 2003 decision in Lawrence v. Texas, Americans have enjoyed unprecedented freedom in their lifestyles and private relationships. The decision held that states could no longer use the criminal code for social engineering, dictating the most intimate decisions of citizens in their choice of partners and relations. But even as states have abandoned laws criminalizing homosexual and adulterous relations, they have continued to prosecute one group of consenting adults: polygamists.

Jonathan Turley goes on to argue that it was only right for the Court to keep the government out of other people’s private business “so long as they do not harm others” and now this protection, initially intended for a pair of homosexuals, should be extended to consensual polygamous relationships.

First, I think it should be noted that the cultural conservatives were right in every regard: if the traditional definition of marriage is removed from the institution, then every imaginable permutation of relationship is possible under a now undefined label of marriage. Why limit it to two? Turley thinks we shouldn’t. Why limit it to adults? To humans? (The charge of speciesism is on the rise in many culturally left circles.)

Turley notes that Scalia dissented from the Lawrence decision by making this very point. But, Turley disagrees on the grounds that, “There is no spectrum of private consensual relations – there is just a right of privacy that protects all people so long as they do not harm others.” In other words, Turley thinks it misses the point to list and explicate all the possible marriage permutations because there are no such specific rights, just a general right to private, non-harmful behavior. By arguing thus, Turley ends up agreeing with Scalia, he just refuses to name the possible marriages we will want to allow in the future. It doesn’t make his point at all to simply not list them.

So the point seems made by both Turley’s positive argument for polygamy and his failed attempt to argue against Scalia: it will not end at polygamy. By removing the traditional definition of marriage (life-long, monogamous, heterosexual), no suitable definition has been put in its place. And without a definition there are no boundaries.

The attempt is often made to redefine marriage using vague terms like “adult,” “consensual,” and “love.” Who is to say who an adult it? In many cultures that age reaches down into prepubescence. What of cultures in which arranged marriages are made between children. Are the consensual adults in this case the parents and not the marriage partners? Is that OK with Turley? “Adult” doesn’t help us solve the problem of the slippery slope.

“Consensual” is a radically slippery term. On one end, some feminists argue that even traditional marriage necessarily includes rape. On the other end, the SIECUS (what is left of the Kinsey Institute, and very influential in sex education curriculum in public schools) argues that pedophilia is only wrong because our social norms have seen it as shameful in the past. The correction to shameful pedophilia is not to get rid of the pedophile but the shame. “Consensual” doesn’t help us either.

“Love” is not a definition – it is an emotion. Mom and son love each other. The members of NAMBLA love little boys. It is too broad and broadly applicable a term to be of any help defining any relationship out of bounds for our modern marriage sensibilities. It is not help to Turley either.

And then, finally, there is the old chestnut (and new bumper-sticker) that every sexual practice is OK as long as it doesn’t harm others. This line suffers from some of the same semantic malaise we rehearsed above. I would like to have Turley or others sufficiently define “harm” so as to allow polygamy and homosexual marriage while disallowing incest or bestiality. But without going into great detail, it has been noted in study after study that the much more common, but no less harmful, act of fornication, harms plenty of other people.

Single motherhood (which, outside of adoption, happens because of sexual behavior) is the single greatest predictor of poverty, criminality, prison time, socially dysfunctional behavior and unemployment. And those are the kids, not the moms. So, all that harmless sexual behavior that we shouldn’t say anything about has radical, negative and mesurable consequences.

I just don’t believe there are actions we engage in that don’t touch other lives, and negative behaviors, no matter how private, will have negative effects on others.

A Mushy, Fuzzy God?

I received this in an email newsletter the other day:

God is not a Christian

We should in humility and joyfulness acknowledge that the supernatural and divine reality we all worship in some form or other transcends all our particular categories of thought and imagining, and that because the divine -- however named, however apprehended or conceived -- is infinite and we are forever finite, we shall never comprehend the divine completely.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu

I know this will ruffle a lot of feathers, but I find this meaningless. From beginning to end it is full of nice-sounding puffery, but fails to provide any good insight into who God might actually be.

First of all, why would God be a Christian? Christians are humans who are followers of Jesus Christ. The title is category mistake masquerading as profundity.

Humility is not the same thing as ceasing to think about issues and draw boundaries, distinctions and judgments. Humility is more about a disposition to the truth, not our refusal to distinguish the truth from falsity.

The idea that the divine transcends all our categories is a popular way of stopping thought about who or what the divine really is. In one way Tutu is right, but in significant ways he is wrong. It is true, as the Christian tradition has always taught, that our conceptions of God are analogous – not exhaustive. Being analogous means we have a grasp on true ideas, but only a grasp. It is true that God is love, and that love has boundaries, but we will not know completely what that means until the next life. Where he, and so many others, goes wrong is concluding we can’t know anything about the divine with certainty.

We can know with certainty that the divine is not both triune and not triune in the same way at the same time. We can know with certainty that salvation is not both through martyrdom and not through martyrdom at the same time. The list of contradictory beliefs between different religious systems is longer than we care to acknowledge in our age of religious tolerance and to brush them aside with a slightly dismissive wave of the hand is to treat every religion on the face of the planet as insignificant and unserious. No religious system of any consequence ought to be happy with his assessment of their beliefs and practices.

This email was produced by the Emergent Village. I am frustrated, but not all that surprised, that this seems to fit well with their vision of the Christian religion.

Moral Outrage or Pop-Psychology?

The Casey Anthony trial has elicited a lot of powerful reactions from a lot of people, from the circus of the media coverage to the apparently shocking verdict of not-guilty. Now, let the cultural assessment games begin. Why were we obsessed? Why (in the minds of many) did the jury let someone so obviously guilty go free? What do we do with mothers and families that seem to be so negligent of their children and grandchildren? One recent column provides an initial set of thoughts on why we are so fanatical about, even angry at, Anthony.

That said, the real sad and unspoken truth is the reason why everyone’s been obsessed with this trial: because demonizing Casey Anthony makes us feel better about ourselves. The screams, shouts, and cries of outrage aren’t just damning Casey for what we perceive to be her actions, but in a weird way putting ourselves up on a pedestal for…well, not being Casey Anthony. Through the expression of our frustration, we bury our transgressions and sins by shoveling mounds of hate onto her.

So why are we so angry? It could be that like so many other things, we’re letting out anger and frustration over unrelated things and attributing it to this trial. Maybe we carry an insecurity that requires us to show other people that we’re a good person, and we think that rage against what we perceive as a great evil will do just that. Perhaps there’s something deep down that’s frustrated with Casey Anthony getting away with the unthinkable while we face consequences every day for far lesser misdeeds and mistakes in our own lives. Regardless of the reasons, all this anger can’t be healthy.

Though Marshall hints at our sense of justice and moral outrage being one of the reasons we are upset at the verdict, the cultural picture he paints is one largely devoid of genuine moral categories. Instead of our reaction being prompted by justice, we are psychologised into a box of “unhealthy anger.” His view of moral reaction, though common today, is radically shallow. It exchanges pop-psychology for moral reasoning and leaves us all poorer as humans than when we began.

Let’s try a different approach to our reaction.

We are indelibly moral creatures hard-wired to react against what we view to be a moral tragedy. We react against the moral wrong because we believe the good, beautiful and the true ought to win more often than they lose. Our anger is entirely healthy as long as it is moral indignation and leads us to work on a better way of doing things where justice is done more often. Moral outrage is not about me, it is about objective moral values and their integrity in our culture. I react, not because I want to demean another person, but because a moral law has been broken and I have the inescapable sense that something needs to be done about it.

Motivations and Reasons for Belief

The philosopher, writer and blogger, Mike Austin, has some important thoughts on belief in God. Particularly in the differences between motivations to believe God exists and reasons to believe God exists. He writes:

In my own case, I am partly motivated to believe that God exists and seek to live life as a follower of Christ because it works. I honestly believe that I flourish, my family flourishes, and I have a part in helping my community flourish as I seek to live out my faith in daily life. But there are many ways of life that work for individuals to one degree or another. I am also motivated to believe because I think that good reasons for such belief are available. The upshot is that while the possibilities concerning the afterlife can motivate people to believe in God, we should also consider what reasons can be given for and against the truth of such belief. From my own experience, when difficulties come, it is not enough to say "Belief works for me." Rather, I want all of my beliefs, including those about the supernatural, to be true. That, at least, is what I seek.

He is right that the distinction is important for both believers and non-believers to understand. While the accusation is sometimes made that Christians may believe for “fire insurance” – that they will simply avoid hell or wind up in heaven – that should not be mistaken for reasons why someone may believe. And while it can be the case that practicality or eternal consequences can be motivators for belief, they will not last long without a strong foundation of reasons to believe.

So, two things present themselves to me. First, the skeptic should carefully weigh their attacks on faith and aim at reasons and not motivations. And second, the believer ought to buttress their motivations for belief with good, solid reasons.

Correcting Bad Ideas, Clearing the Path for Formation

The Good and Beautiful God: Falling In Love With The God Jesus Knows

James Bryan Smith

C.S. Lewis once wrote to a friend that people like him, who are interested in spiritual matters, typically all make the same mistake of talking a lot about it and almost never doing anything about it. Smith’s book – and the trilogy – sets out to change things. And he does a wonderful job.

In fact, you might say there are two things accomplished in these books at the same time. First of all, Smith addresses a lot of core issues in our understanding of Christian spirituality, and secondly, he associates these chapters with practical instruction in the spiritual disciplines. The form of these chapter pairings are roughly: a misunderstanding and how to rightly understand it, and then how to engage in a practice that will actually bring your life in line with the right understanding.

The first target of Smith’s book is captured in his subtitle, Falling In Love with the God Jesus Knows. To that end, Smith raises several common misunderstandings about God. The first chapter, “God is Good,” sets the stage for the template of the rest of the book. Smith discusses what he considers to be the false narrative of the “Angry God” and follows up with the correction of that notion. God is good, and the better we grasp this truth, the deeper our spiritual formation will run.

One of the unifying concepts in his book is that our spiritual formation is stunted by our misconceptions about God. If we misunderstand who God is and what he is like, we will relate to him and to his kingdom improperly, and thus we will fall short of what God intends for us. I think there is a lot to be said for this idea, and it leads the reader through a very helpful set of discussions about God and who he is.

The second target of Smith’s book is something that sets it apart from many books on spiritual formation. For each misunderstanding/corrected understanding, there is a corresponding activity for the reader to engage in. They are what Smith calls “Soul Training” exercises, and are crafted to be done in the support structure of a small community of people doing the same things. It is good to read a book that combines the “why” of the principles with the “what” of habit so well.

I have not yet completed the trilogy, but it is off to a great start. The book will be especially helpful in small-group and one-on-one discipleship settings where people will be able to engage in some of the disciplines in a supportive and intelligent fashion.

[Review on Amazon]

Does God Command Rape in 2 Samuel 11-12?

Does the God of the Bible condone and/or command rape? I asserted below that I have been told as much, though no particular evidence has been produced to that end. In the comment section, I was told that in the story of 2 Samuel 11-12 God commands rape. Let’s see if that is true.

That section of Scripture tells the story of one of David’s most grievous sins – he takes another man’s wife as his own and arranges for the husband’s death. In response to this radical injustice, God sends the prophet Nathan into him to tell him what will be the consequences of his actions. As far as I can tell, the only passage that would be used to say that God commands rape here is 2 Samuel 12:11:

Thus says the LORD, 'Behold, I will raise up evil against you out of your own house. And I will take your wives before your eyes and give them to your neighbor, and he shall lie with your wives in the sight of this sun.

As I asserted below, context has a lot to do with what this passage actually says. David took another man’s wife from him, and there are textual hints that she might have been a more than willing party to their behavior. David did not rape Bathsheba – their sex was consensual. In response, David is told that several of his wives will be taken away from him and given to his neighbors and they will be brazen about their sexuality. David took Uriah’s wife, his wives will be taken. No rape indicated, hinted at or explicitly mentioned in either scenario.

We might get hung up on the idea that God will give David’s wives to his neighbors. Here it is helpful to have a sense of how the OT communicates things like punishment for sin. There is reciprocity here to be sure, but the phrase, “I will take your wives” is shorthand for the natural flow of events which will result from David’s behavior. The OT understands God as punishing sin, so it has no problem assigning the reciprocity to God’s judgment. It need not be a heavy-handed judgment, as if God is forcibly removing women from David’s home and handing them over to violent rapists. In fact, that reading is directly contrary to the plain sense of the text.

In addition, the verb for, “shall lie with,” shakab, is a very common Hebrew verb in the OT for consensual sex (it is such a straight-forward verb that if often means literal sleep with no sexual overtones). It is, in fact, the same verb used in 2 Samuel 11:4 to describe the meeting of David and Bathsheba. In neither instance is rape explicitly mentioned or implicitly hinted at.

The plain, straightforward, and natural reading of the 2 Samuel 12:11 text is that David’s wives will be unfaithful to him just as he was unfaithful to them. It takes a strained and quote-mining reading of the text to conclude that it supports the idea that God commands or condones rape.

Technology and the Church

Christians have often been called “People of the Book,” and there is no doubt that recent technologies are changing the landscape of the printed book, so are there inevitable consequences for believers who are tied to the authenticity of and interpretive work done in a book? Lisa Miller thinks technology may pose a serious threat to the very existence of the church itself. She titles this piece, “How Technology Could Bring Down the Church.”

She has a point. It appears that the more available the Bible has become both in print and in virtual form, fewer and fewer Christians read it any more.

According to a 2010 survey, more than a third of born-again Christians “rarely or never” read the Bible. Among “unaffiliated” people - that is, Americans who don’t belong to a religious congregation - more than two thirds say they don’t read the Bible.

Is it really a stretch to believe that our general trend to define genuine engagement down from face-to-face conversation all the way to tweets, will leave the Bible exempt? It shouldn’t surprise us that more Christians read large chunks of the Bible less. While it is becoming more popular to “share” favorite or inspiring verses online, that limits us to our software-induced character limit. Since when had a serious thought been limited by 140 characters?

Skeptics are not exempt from this malady. Often the quotations (or misquotations) used to attack the faith are short, misunderstood, and out of context.

Christians need to recapture the virtue of reading and taking the Bible seriously. Though I don’t believe the church as a whole will crumble under the weight of virtual communities, its value to the individual can be seriously threatened by the thoughtless and unreflective believer.

Skeptics on the Horns of Their Dilemma?

The biblical skeptic or the atheist will often cite some powerful sounding and emotionally tugging ideas in order to argue that the God of the Old Testament, and thus the God of the Christians, is a genocidal maniac. Often it is said that he condones genocide, and the Canaanites are a popular example of God’s wickedness. I was even told recently that he condones rape, though I can think of no specific evidence to support that claim.

Here are some thoughts on why the skeptic falls short here, or at the very least, has a tremendous amount of the argumentative burden to bear.

First of all, these claims are often in the form of “quote-mining,” or picking and choosing texts, pulling them out of context and misrepresenting them. This claim of mine does not say that there are no such verses or passages that sound like the skeptic wants them to sound, but I argue that they are misrepresentations of the overall picture. If the skeptic wants to talk about ancient near-eastern literature and culture, let them do the intellectually honest work of trying to understand it before they misunderstand it. In the end, the skeptic’s claim will be much stronger if they do the literary work to understand the works they are trying to eviscerate.

Secondly, I wonder if the skeptic is trying to have their cake and eat it too when it comes to these claims. More often than not, the same skeptic who makes the moral monster claim is the same skeptic who disbelieves in God because of some form of the problem of evil. So, in one instance it is said that God simply does not do enough to alleviate the evils we see and experience in this world and in the other instance, God is rotten for dealing harshly with ancient, evil, cultures.

Imagine a culture in which many of the first-born children are sacrificed alive on the brass arms of a demon-god over a pit of fire. Imagine the same culture in which, because their primary deity repeatedly rapes his sister while she is in the form of a cow, religious rape and incest are not just condoned but institutionalized. If you can imagine a culture that contains such injustices and horrors, you have imagined the Canaanite society. And one need not go to the biblical record to see that. The archeological evidence stands on its own.

So, what should a God do with such rampant evil? If the skeptic is consistent, he in a pickle. Either God escapes the problem of evil by dealing with real evil, or he escapes the moral monster accusation by justly judging an evil culture. I am no expert on formalizing arguments, but hopefully the following encapsulation helps to communicate the horns of this particular dilemma.

First, the skeptic usually holds to two claims about the existence of God simultaneously: 1) God does not exist due to some form of the problem of evil (eg. God does not intervene to our satisfaction when we see evil), and 2) the God presented in the OT is a moral monster for judging some cultures.

Second, to take one of the most common examples of the skeptic, the Canaanites, they were objectively evil and we know as much from extra biblical evidence.

Third, as a result of their own beliefs and historical evidence, the skeptic is impaled on the horns of their own dilemma. Either God did judge evil and therefore the problem of evil is shaken, or God justly judged an evil culture and therefore the moral monster accusation loses its force.

Are there ways out of this problem? There are, but I don’t think any of them are attractive.

To begin with, the skeptic could deny the Canaanites were the unjust, misogynistic, slave-holding culture I am claiming them to be, but that would require a lot of unique historical work. All the evidence points to them being a pretty rotten culture and a bad place to be if you were not among the powerful.

The next possible move might be to accept the historical data but adopt some form of cultural relativism – what we view as unjust or morally evil, was simply normal and acceptable to them. But cultural relativism is the philosophical version of moldy Swiss cheese, and this position would logically commit the skeptic to accepting pre-Civil War slavery and power-rape as “OK for them.” Not a tenable, or desirable, position. In addition, how many skeptics are willing to be that consistent?

The next set of moves seem to all fall into the same category – denying one or more aspect of the two claims attributed to the skeptic. For example, they might still hold to a version of the problem of evil, but deny the legitimacy of any and all biblical evidence about the events it records: rule them out of play simply for being recorded in the Bible. Or more specifically, the skeptic might be willing to admit into evidence all the “nasty” bits of the biblical record, but deny the reliability of the context and theology of the Bible. But that denial requires more than just skeptical assertion, it requires real literary work on the documents themselves.

Or they may still hold to the moral monster view and claim that the Canaanites (or other similar cultures) were not given a chance to change. God simply commanded that they be wiped out. The best record we have of these events in question, the Bible, does not support that claim. God often tells his people that after centuries of waiting patiently for the Canaanites to turn to him, it is time for judgment to come. The record, so selectively cited by the skeptic, claims God to be unusually patient.

Is God a Moral Monster? Abraham Sacrificing Isaac

Recently, I have been working my way through Paul Copan’s “Is God a Moral Monster?” It looks to be a promising book, and so far he has tackled some thorny issues very well. What I like about a book like this, is it is not afraid to take a close and honest look at some of the more contentious and difficult issues of the Christian Scriptures. Let’s face it – in the climate of the New Atheists the OT has become a popular target and it is incumbent on Christians to at least deal with the challenges. Not every charge leveled against the OT by the New Atheists is worth time and effort, but some are and Copan has taken up the task.

The first topic that really piqued my interest was the matter of Abraham being commanded to sacrifice Isaac. In all honesty, that is a difficult passage to deal with. God commands Abraham to sacrifice his son of promise, and Abraham essentially says, “OK.”

One of Copan’s first moves is to examine the text of Genesis 22 itself. Though this seems like an obvious thing to do, it is actually rarely done by stone-throwers. Through the text he arrives at four reasons why the event is not the child-abusing horror it is often made out to be. The one reason he lists that I found particularly convincing is that the whole event is described as a “test.” As such, the point of the story is not to actually take the life of Isaac, but to test Abraham’s trust in God. It appears God’s plan includes not actually taking Isaac’s life, and as such, the story does not include that particular indictment of God.

But Abraham seemed ready and willing to go through with it. Doesn’t that in and of itself make the story unpalatable? At this point, Copan cites the ethicist John Hare and a thought experiment. Abridging the thought experiment, imagine a world with different rules for life and death – like a world in which you were assured of being raised stronger and healthier if you were killed at the age of 18. The wise choice would be to have killing parties at 18, and the less wise choice would be to continue to live less strong and less healthy.

As odd as that may sound, it speaks to the plausibility structure of Abraham at the time of God’s command and what that structure actually made of his rational choice. The story itself tells us that Abraham believed God was able to raise the dead, that Isaac was a specific child given to him by God (the “child of promise”), and that Abraham fully expected the both of them to return home. Because Abraham believed in a God who would keep his promise made to him through Isaac and that he was able to raise the dead, his choice to sacrifice his son was not irrational, but an act of trust in God.

And as it turns out, Abraham trusted God, God had no intention of letting Isaac die at his father’s hand, and God did fulfill his promise through Isaac.

Seen through the lens of naturalism, the story of Abraham and Isaac seems worse than incomprehensible. Seen through the lens of the text itself and the existence of God, we can come to terms with what happened and why.