Restless till we rest in You

Like a Stone

2010-12-24T13:33:00.001-08:00

In the bleak mid-winter
Frosty wind made moan,
Earth stood hard as iron,
Water like a stone;
Snow had fallen, snow on snow,
Snow on snow,
In the bleak mid-winter
Long ago.

As Lindsay reminds us, the church chose to celebrate Christmas in the dead of winter[1], when the nights were at their longest, the weather at its coldest, and (in pre-modern societies) the food at its scarcest. It is in that context that we can best feel the full brightness of Christ’s coming into the world – “The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; those who dwelt in a land of deep darkness, on them has light shined.”

That is the world that Christ burst into, and it explains the exuberance of Zechariah, Mary, Simeon, Anna. Bowed down by burden and oppression, in long expectation of the Messiah who was now come.

It also explains why the church keeps Advent, a time of watching and waiting, in anticipation of Christmas (which is 12 days long, by the way!). My favorite Advent carol puts it this way:

Oh come, oh come Emmanuel
And ransom captive Israel
That mourns in lonely exile here,
Until the Son of God appear

Those are timeless words, not only for the Israel of long ago, but for anyone living in this sad and broken world. We too long and look for his coming.

What can I give Him,
Poor as I am?
If I were a shepherd
I would bring a lamb,
If I were a wise man
I would do my part,
Yet what I can I give Him,
Give my heart.

I can give him my heart, but what kind of a gift is that? Like the wintry earth in the first stanza it is hard as iron, like a stone.

As it turns out, that is the perfect thing to give him. For he can be born in my heart, bringing light to the darkness. The dawn from on high shall break upon us, to shine on those who dwell in darkness and the shadow of death, and to guide our feet into the way of peace. Come, Lord Jesus!

------------------------
[1] And, traditionally, the dead of night

Behold, I am making all things new

2010-11-30T18:12:00.001-08:00

The following was written for the funeral of my Grandmother-in-law

so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith-that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.
Eph. 3:17-19

Paul's prayer for the Ephesians is that they might move from love to Love - that their own love, an expression of Christ dwelling in their hearts through faith, might lead them to be filled full with the love of God. There is no other way to know the love of God which is so far beyond our knowledge.

Grandma has completed that journey, from love to Love. Her faith in Christ and love for her family were well known. When Emily was born she gave up smoking, cold-turkey, for her granddaughter. She was always ready to show her love for us by preparing food and feeding us as much as she could manage when we came to her house. Even when age prevented her from cooking full meals, she was always careful to have something prepared at family gatherings. And she showed her love to us in her gift-giving, which was always done with great generosity.

Rooted and grounded in this basis, she has passed from her own faith in Christ and love for her family to now standing in the presence of Love Himself. The love whose height and depth fills all things and now completely fills her, the love that sacrificed itself for her sake, the love that moves the sun and all the stars. She is now filled with all the fullness of God in a way that we can only dream of, and she possesses that understanding of the love of God which is beyond knowledge.

But even now the full expression of God's love for her has not been completed. Her soul has been parted from her body which, worn out like a garment, she has left behind. In her old age it restricted her and failed her, but God created it to be a part of her and she is incomplete without it. The Psalms speak of the faithfulness of God to save us from death, and to rescue our bodies from the grave:

O LORD my God, I cried out to you,
and you restored me to health.
You brought me up, O LORD, from the dead;
you restored my life as I was going down to the grave.
Psalm 30:3

For you will not abandon me to the grave,
nor let your holy one see the Pit.
You will show me the path of life;
in your presence there is fullness of joy,
and in your right hand are pleasures for evermore.
Psalm 16:10-11

But God will ransom my life;
he will snatch me from the grasp of death.
Psalm 49:15

These passages express a confidence in God's power to rescue His people from death. Our God is a God of Life, and it is a natural expression of His character to make us sharers in that life. He does not simply offer us blessings after death, he offers to save us from death itself.

Similarly, the New Testament promises us that because of Christ's triumph over death we too will triumph over death - not by avoiding it, but by something much greater: by emerging victorious on the far side of death as God raises and renews our bodies. "For this is the will of my Father, that everyone who looks on the son and believes in him should have eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day" John 6:20. Our eternal life comes through and because of Christ's life. Because we belong to him we share in his death, his power over death, and his resurrection life.

Someday soon the God that Grandma put her trust in will raise her body from the ground, renewing it and glorifying it. No longer worn out, no longer sick. She will run and not grow weary, she will walk and not faint. For the breadth and length and height and depth of God will fill her and be her strength. She will be more Grandma than she has ever been.

And this is what God promises to all His people. This is the life that we will share with Grandma at the resurrection of the dead:

Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away.... And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.” And he who was seated on the throne said, “Behold, I am making all things new.”
Rev. 21:1,3-5a

You have Searched me and Know me

2010-09-13T21:57:00.001-07:00

“Before I formed you in the womb I knew you,
and before you were born I consecrated you;
I appointed you a prophet to the nations.”
Jeremiah 1:5

O Lord, you have searched me and known me!
You know when I sit down and when I rise up;
you discern my thoughts from afar.
You search out my path and my lying down
and are acquainted with all my ways.
Psalm 139:1-3

I’ve been reflecting on these passages recently. Somewhere inside me, amid the churn of my choices and my past, my thoughts and actions, successes and failures, sins and virtues and more sins, is the Gabe Moothart that God knew before I was born. The person that he planned and intends to complete. God has great plans for this person:

And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose. For those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he might be the firstborn among many brothers.
Romans 8:28-29

Notice that God’s foreknowledge is not of specific events, but of persons. He foreknew me, as a whole. But where is this person that God foreknew?? Partially obscured by my mistakes and my sins, my virtues which I’ve turned into vices, a hard heart that says “my will be done”. But he is in there nonetheless.

My job is to let him come out, to labor with God to remove the obstructions that I’ve placed in his way, to dig and dig, to become more like Christ and more like myself at the same time. And the payoff is to be reborn, to receive from God’s hands the identity that he has known since before I was born, which he has prepared for me:

‘To the one who conquers I will give some of the hidden manna, and I will give him a white stone, with a new name written on the stone that no one knows except the one who receives it.’
Rev. 2:17b

What will my name be? What will yours be?

The Hallowing of Matter

2010-08-31T23:21:00.001-07:00

One of the things I find most puzzling about how God reveals himself to us is His decision to do so primarily through physical means. God is a Spirit, after all. And it seems strange to talk of matter being holy.

Nevertheless, God is actively engaged in hallowing and making Himself known through the common, physical material of the world. The Bible testifies to this throughout both the Old and New Testaments. Imagine living in a world in which events like these are part of how you understand reality:

A dead man comes to life when his body falls onto Elisha’s bones (2 Kings 13:31). Multitudes are healed when they reach out and touch Jesus’ robe (Matt 14:36, Luke 6:19, Mark 5:27-29). Jesus frequently heals by touch (Matt. 8:3 and elsewhere). The sick are cured when Peter’s shadow passes across them (Acts 5:15). Uzzah is struck dead when he reaches out and touches the ark of the covenant (II Sam. 6:6-7). God appears in a burning bush and hallows the ground on which Moses is standing (Ex. 3:5). Moses’ face shines after his encounter with God on Mount Sinai (Ex. 34:29-30). Handkerchiefs that touched Paul’s skin are used to heal the sick (Acts 19:11-12). The Israelites are warned, on pain of death, not to touch Sinai when God comes upon it (Ex. 19:10-12). The priests of the new temple are instructed to change clothes when leaving the sanctuary “lest they transmit holiness to the people with their garments” (Ezek. 44:19). The Holy Spirit (Acts 8:16, 19:6) and real spiritual power (I Tim. 5:22, II Tim. 1:6) go out to people through the laying on of the Apostle’s hands. Jesus tells his disciples to “take, eat” and to baptize with water.

Nor do such examples end with the New Testament. The history of the church records many instances in which the bodies of holy ones gave off a sweet smell after death or did not decay.

But the supreme act of matter-hallowing is the Word made flesh. Our entire redemption rests upon the notion that God, in order to save us, united Himself permanently with a real human body and was really crucified at a specific point in the history of the world! If there is no hallowing of matter, there is no redemption.

One of the benefits of looking at the incarnation this way is that it becomes clear that it is not an anomaly or a one-off event but a culmination and outgrowth of the way in which God has always worked with his people. There’s a certain inner logic to it that might otherwise be missed: the God who comes to us through matter purchases our redemption through the ultimate act of hallowing matter, by uniting it to Himself.

This understanding of the hallowing of matter emphasizes God’s presence in the mundane, the everyday. He comes down to meet you where you live (and again this has its ultimate expression in the incarnation). He is not too good for your normal life. He meets you in your normal life!

Having understood all that, it becomes clear just how important our bodies are. They are not just temporary containers for our souls, but part of who we are. This is why the church and Jesus himself practiced spiritual disciplines like fasting and solitude. It is why the liturgy is so active, involving all the senses. And it places an often-missing emphasis on the resurrection of the body. Revelation is clear that after the resurrection heaven will come to earth (another example of God hallowing matter!), and we will live for eternity with him in our new bodies on a new earth, not in a disembodied “heaven”. When you look at the history of God’s dealings with man, this is really the only way it could be.

One last comment on what it means to live in this kind of world. In the gospel story of the woman with an issue of blood who is healed by touching Jesus’ robe, he says to her “daughter, your faith has made you well.” At first this seems like a strange thing to say – if all she needed was faith, why did she have to touch Jesus’ robe? – but it provides a needed corrective. The hallowing of matter does not mean that God does magic for us when we do or say the right things and it does not mean that we can manipulate God by manipulating the matter through which he works. Faith was the reason for the woman’s healing, even though touch was the means by which the healing came to her. These two things, faith as the reason for grace and touch as the medium through which grace is communicated, can and do coexist. I think this insight explains how it is that the sacraments are means of grace to us – but that is a subject for another post.

Paper Plates and the Wisdom of the Liturgy

2010-08-25T21:48:00.001-07:00

Trevin Wax’s blog post Steak on a Paper Plate and various responses have caught my eye (thanks Matt!). Wax worries that the focus on being casual and making people feel comfortable in many evangelical worship services is in tension with the centrality of the Word and the majesty of God. He’s not advocating a return to liturgy, but it is hard not to read his post without thinking about it. Clearly he’s calling for something more like liturgy. This is very much an inter-evangelical discussion, so I am something of an outside observer. But I can’t resist commenting.

In some responses, and even in Wax’s post itself, there’s a theme that style and structure are not the important parts of a service:

When it comes to worship, we are frequently told that form doesn’t matter. Style is not what’s important. I get that. I’m not downing contemporary music or advocating a return to liturgy, organs and hymns. --Trevin Wax

…You don’t have to be wearing a suit and tie to get a healthy sense of the grandeur of God’s beauty, sovereignty, and holiness. Again, this has more to do with the men leading the service and less about what structure they choose to use for the service. –-Zack Nielson

We must worship God in Spirit and in Truth, and He looks on the heart. Certainly. But the benefit of a good liturgy is not that its form is so good that heart attitude doesn’t matter. The benefit is that it embodies a lot of knowledge about human nature and how best to prepare ourselves to approach God.

We don’t enter the church in silence just because we’ve always done it that way. We do it because it has been discovered to be a powerful way of preparing the heart for worship. Likewise, we kneel during prayer because generations of Christians (and Jews before them) have found it a powerful way of humbling the heart. We read a passage from the Gospels, Psalms, New Testament and Old Testament every week because it is important as the people of God to be exposed to the breadth of Biblical teaching, and also to put special emphasis on the words of Jesus and the Psalms. We sing old music and take special care for the vessels of the altar and the aesthetics of our service as an offering to God of the best we have. We use incense because it is a strong picture of our prayer rising before God. We pray written prayers corporately because they have been found by many generations to powerfully express the thoughts of our hearts, and to be helpful in drawing us toward God. We involve all 5 senses in our worship because it has been found to be an excellent way to drive home what we are doing.

All of these things are grounded not in the details of a particular culture but in the details of human nature. To understand the wisdom of the liturgy is to understand that we are whole persons, that our bodies are part of us, and that what we do with them (kneeling, dressing them up, etc.) actually matters. It is to realize that the tradition and ritual of the church are grounded not in anachronistic legalisms but in living truths.

Which is not to say that you can never change anything, only that you must be careful. Like writing your own wedding vows, it’s easier to make it worse than to make it better. How you construct your service can have unintended consequences. Wax puts it this way: “Form and content mirror one another.” The early church had a phrase for that: lex orandi, lex credendi. As the church worships, so she will believe. You say a lot about your theology in how your service is constructed, and your members will pick up on it.

But I’m not trying to convince evangelicals to embrace liturgy, really. I just get carried away. I’m trying to spotlight some of the truths about how we humans relate to God that are not emphasized by most evangelical forms of service. Many of these could be fixed without subjecting your poor members to a King-James prayer in Ben Stein monotone. Here are some unsolicited suggestions on how Evangelicals might incorporate the wisdom of the liturgy into their services:

Ask your members to keep pre-service conversation in the foyer. When you enter the sanctuary, spend your time in silence or quiet prayer until the service starts.
As you plan your sermons, remember that the lectionary places special emphasis on the Psalms and the Gospels. Never let your members get too far away from them.
Make Holy Week a little less spartan. For heaven sakes, institute a Maundy-Thursday footwashing service!
Try kneeling occasionally in corporate prayer or when receiving communion.

A Short Catechism on Prayer

2010-08-12T21:18:00.001-07:00

None of the catechisms I recently examined contain a section on prayer that highlights all of the things that I think ought to be highlighted. So, with a great sense of inadequacy and a certain amount of fear and trembling, I decided to write something myself.

Q1 What is Prayer?
A conversation with God about what is important to him and to us. More than that, it is working together with God to accomplish those things.

Q2 What are those things which are important to God and to you?
First, the increase of God’s rule in the world. And secondly, everything that we need both spiritually and physically.[1]

Q3 Are these two things or one thing?
One thing! God created us for Himself, so our best and perfect good is only in Him. But because of our sin and blindness, they look like two things.

Q4 If your sin keeps you from seeing what you truly need, how can you pray the right way?
By myself, I can’t. But Christ teaches me to pray and helps me to value what He values[2]. Also the Holy Spirit, who lives inside me, prays to God for me when I don’t know what to say[3].

Q5 Why is prayer a conversation with God?
Because the Bible encourages us, by many examples and by Jesus himself, to be active in prayer. We should argue our case[4] and not give up[5], reminding God of his character and promises.

Q6 Can we improve God’s plans or change His eternal decrees?
Certainly not!

Q7 Then why do we pray?
Because God as he reveals himself to us does indeed change his mind[6]. The examples of prayer in the Bible teach us to contend with God for the sake of his revealed will, working hard for God to grant our request[7].

Q8 Why is prayer a working-together with God?
Because when we pray we participate with God and his plans for the world. As a loving Father he lets us in on what he is doing. By praying we work alongside God’s will toward the same goal.

Q9 What is the benefit of prayer?
God lets us help him in a real way with his plans for the world. As we pray we grow closer to Jesus, and as we grow closer to Jesus the gap between our will and God’s will narrows. This happens not because God’s will changes to conform to us, but because our will changes to conform to God’s.

[1] Matt. 6:8-13
[2] Matt. 6:8-13
[3] Rom. 8:26-27
[4] Gen. 18:22-33, Ex. 32:9-14
[5] Luke 11:5-13, Luke 18:1-8
[6] Ex. 32:15, Isaiah 38:1-5
[7] Col. 4:12-13, Gen. 32:24-30

Exploring Catechisms: Heidelberg

2010-07-30T21:20:00.000-07:00

As much as I enjoyed the catechisms of Luther and Westminster, the Heidelberg catechism is simply in a class by itself. Nothing else is remotely close to as good as it is. Heidelberg is a Reformed catechism, but it was intended in part to keep its sponsor from being executed by the Lutherans, so it is consciously ecumenical (Nothing against the Lutherans. Killing people over theological differences is just what you did in the 16th century). Reformed distinctives are present, but often not front-and-center. Election, which you would expect to be prominent in a Reformed catechism, is mentioned only twice in passing (qq 52, 54) – and even then the wording is drawn directly from the Bible. You’re unlikely to be offended by it if you aren’t offended by Paul.

This fidelity to the Bible is the defining characteristic of Heidelberg. The Scripture references are copious, and in strong contrast to Westminster it chooses plain Biblical language over abstract theological categories. Whereas Westminster speaks very specifically of the federal headship of Adam, Heidelberg says simply that our sin nature comes from “the fall and disobedience of our first parents”. Westminster describes the Trinity precisely, but Heidelberg simply affirms “these three distinct persons are the one, true, eternal God”.

This simplicity and clarity are its best features. Not only do they provide a theological grounding in the thought and language of the Bible itself, but the wording and concepts are easier for children to follow. It makes me wonder how much of an improvement systematic theology really is.

There is a warmth and joy throughout the catechism that speaks to a child and reminds me, as I read, that I must become like a child to inherit the kingdom of God. Its first question sets the tone for the whole catechism, and is even better than Westminster’s:

Q1 What is your only comfort in life and in death?

That I am not my own,
but belong—
body and soul,
in life and in death—
to my faithful Savior Jesus Christ.

He has fully paid for all my sins with his precious blood,
and has set me free from the tyranny of the devil.
He also watches over me in such a way
that not a hair can fall from my head
without the will of my Father in heaven:
in fact, all things must work together for my salvation.

Because I belong to him,
Christ, by his Holy Spirit,
assures me of eternal life
and makes me wholeheartedly willing and ready
from now on to live for him.

You can just feel the warmth, joy, and delightfully evangelical spirit. That spirit is further on display in Q60 (“How are you right with God?”) and others.

I was surprised to hear hear echoes of John Piper’s Christian Hedonism in the catechism. Joy and comfort are the ever-present and motivating themes throughout, and it made me realize that Piper did not just hit upon a cool idea but is standing in a long Reformed tradition.

Following Colossians 1 and 2, the primacy of Jesus is evident throughout. He is the totality of God’s revelation to us. We know God the Father as the Father of Jesus (Q26), and the Spirit as the Spirit of Jesus (Q1). Our redemption is not just one of the things that God chose to do but the thing that He does, the only context in which we know Him and the lens through which we must understand everything about Him.

Heidelberg’s definition of faith is the best in any of the catechisms I read, and the only one to describe it rightly as a kind of knowledge:

Q21 What is true faith?

True faith is not only a knowledge and conviction that everything God reveals in his Word is true; it is also a deep-rooted assurance, created in me by the Holy Spirit through the gospel, that, out of sheer grace earned for us by Christ, not only others, but I too, have had my sins forgiven, have been made forever right with God, and have been granted salvation.

I cannot think of a better way to ground young children in theology than exposing them to the Heidelberg catechism. It is written to them, but rather than feeling watered down the gospel message actually feels concentrated and purified. Which makes sense when you think about it - the gospel is for children and a simple explanation in the simple language of the Bible is more powerful, more true, than a precise theological definition. And as I read it I feel like a child.

Exploring Catechisms

2010-07-26T21:19:00.001-07:00

In preparation for the theological education of my children, I’ve been studying catechisms. Since we’re a classically protestant family, the obvious place to look is the catechisms of the Reformation. I picked up Luther’s shorter catechism, the Heidelberg catechism, the Westminster shorter catechism, and (more for reference than use) Calvin’s own Geneva catechism.

Catechisms flourished during the Reformation because it was a fundamentally educational movement. In an age when the laity didn’t have access to Bibles, theological education was minimal, and the liturgy was in Latin which in some cases the priests didn’t even understand, the Reformers sought to pass on as much theological and Biblical knowledge as possible. Services were done in the local languages, Bibles were translated and printed, and catechisms were written and used. Here is Calvin’s justification for his own:

It has ever been the practice of the Church, and one carefully attended to, to see that children should be duly instructed in the Christian religion. That this might be done more conveniently, not only were schools opened in old time, and individuals enjoined properly to teach their families, but it was a received public custom and practice, to question children in the churches on each of the heads, which should be common and well known to all Christians. To secure this being done in order, there was written out a formula, which was called a Catechism or Institute... What we now bring forward, therefore, is nothing else than the use of things which from ancient times were observed by Christians, and the true worshippers of God, and which never were laid aside until the Church was wholly corrupted.

The big take-home of my study is how incredibly good the Heidelberg catechism, but there are good things to be said about the others as well, so I’ll start there.

Lutherans and the Reformed place different emphases on the law as summarized by the 10 commandments. Lutherans stress its role in condemning us and showing us our sin, as our schoolmaster to lead us to Christ. Without denying that, the Reformed are more likely to stress the Law as the standard of God’s perfect righteousness, at which Christians aim in their pursuit of holiness.

Nevertheless, the treatment of the 10 commandments in Lutheran and Reformed catechisms is remarkably similar. Heidelberg, Westminster, and Luther all present the 10 commandments through the lens of Christ’s summary of the law (love the Lord your God and love your neighbor as yourself) and his interpretation of the spirit of the law (Matt. 5:17-28). They both present the first table (commandments 1-4 or 1-3. Luther’s numbering is non-standard) as related to loving God, and the second table as related to loving neighbor. They both interpret the spirit of the commandments as not only forbidding vice but enjoining the opposite virtue. So the sixth commandment forbids not only murder and hating your neighbor, but requires love for your neighbor. In the most interesting and wonderfully holistic application of this, Westminster interprets the seventh commandment as requiring us to support and work for the chastity of our neighbors as well as ourselves.

Of the catechisms I read, Luther’s is best designed to integrate family and church spiritual instruction. He presents a condensed series of questions and answers specifically for fathers to use in instructing their children, which is expanded and explained in more detail by the full catechism for use in a more formal examination by the pastor.

The Westminster catechism is very good as well. Although I loved the content, as a product of the 17th century it has a precise and propositional feel that makes it rather unsuitable for use with young children. Only Calvin’s is less accessible (his reads more like a dialog, is not very memorizable, and I can’t imagine it being used with anyone short of a bright high-schooler).

Westminster’s famous opening question - “What is the chief end of man?” – is adapted from the opening question of the Geneva catechism - “What is the chief end of human life?" Calvin’s answer - “To know God by whom men were created” – is affirmed but also expanded upon: “To glorify God and enjoy him forever”. The additions are definitely an improvement in their focus on the personal benefit of redemption.

Particularly surprising is the high view of the instrumentality of baptism in the Geneva Catechism. It is not Lutheran, but doesn’t shy away from attributing efficacy to baptism:

Master. – ...what is the meaning of Baptism?

Scholar. - It consists of two parts. For, first, Forgiveness of sins; and, secondly, Spiritual regeneration, is figured by it. (Eph. v. 26 ; Rom. vi. 4.)

Master. - What resemblance has water 'with these things, so as to represent them?

Scholar. - Forgiveness of sins is a kind of washing, by which our souls are cleansed from their defilements, just as bodily stains are washed away by water.

...

Master. - But do you attribute nothing more to the water than that it is a figure of ablution?

Scholar. - I understand it to be a figure, but still so that the reality is annexed to it; for God does not disappoint us when he promises us his gifts. Accordingly, it is certain that both pardon of sins and newness of life are offered to us in baptism, and received by us.

...

Master. - How are these blessings bestowed upon us by Baptism?

Scholar. - If we do not render the promises there offered unfruitful by rejecting them, we are clothed with Christ, and presented with his Spirit.

Next time: Heidelberg!

I am willing, be Clean

2010-07-12T22:29:00.001-07:00

In the gospels, Jesus performs many of his his healings by touch. A leper (5:12-14), a dead boy (7:12-15), a bleeding woman (Luke 8:43-48), Jairus’ daughter (Luke 8:51-55), and many others (Luke 6:19).

But it isn’t often realized what a radical statement Jesus is making with his touch. Each of the above examples (touching the dead, the leprous, a bleeding woman) are supposed to make Jesus ceremonially unclean. But they don’t! Instead of uncleanness flowing to Jesus, his cleanness overcomes and flows out to everyone he touches. N.T. Wright, commenting on Jesus’ healing of the leprous man, has this to say:

Nobody has touched this man, we may suppose, for years. His body was now riddled with the disease; it had clearly been, quite literally, eating away at him for a long time. And now Jesus reached out and touched him. We can only imagine the sense of awe and joy that this brought to the Leper.

In theory, this action should have made Jesus both ceremonially unclean and liable to contract the actual disease. But, as with so many of his healings, it worked the other way around. His cleanness, his healing power, ‘infected’ the man, just as the love and grace of his touch must have gone through his whole personality like a hot drink on a cold day.

N.T. Wright, Luke for Everyone

Mary arose and went with haste

2010-07-12T20:12:00.001-07:00

After the annunciation, Mary does an intriguing thing:

In those days Mary arose and went with haste into the hill country, to a town in Judah. And she entered the house of Zachariah and greeted Elizabeth.
Luke 1:39-40

Which raises the question, why? Why go with haste, why straight to Elizabeth? What is running through her mind as she hurries to the hill country?

We don’t know for sure, of course, and even without knowing this is one of the personal touches that makes the gospel story so compelling. It is about real people, real emotions, real motivations, and that shines through to me in Mary’s reaction to the angel’s news.

Nevertheless, there are some clues in the narrative. We can know a few things about how Mary responded to Gabriel’s announcement. There was some doubt in her question “how can this be, since I am a virgin?”, since Gabriel finds it necessary not only to explain literally how it can be (v. 35), but also to provide Elizabeth’s pregnancy as a proof of God’s power - “for nothing will be impossible with God” (vv. 36-37).

It seems likely that Mary had not known about Elizabeth’s pregnancy. Gabriel says “Behold, your relative Elizabeth in her old age has also conceived a son”, as if he is telling her rather than reminding her. Also, Elizabeth “kept herself hidden” for the first five months of her pregnancy (v. 24).

So Gabriel has given Mary a clear, verifiable sign of the power of God that is at work in her: Elizabeth is 6 months pregnant (v. 26, 36), and she will have a son.

Mary’s haste can be partly explained, then, by a need to confirm the angel’s sign. That also explains why she stayed 3 months (v. 56), probably until shortly after the birth of John the Baptist.

This needn’t be taken as act of skepticism (“is Elizabeth really pregnant?). Although there was some doubt in her question, her submission to the will of God is total (“Behold I am the servant of the Lord, let it be to me according to your word” v. 38). Also, Elizabeth greets her with “blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her from the Lord” (v. 45), words that confirm her faith and contrast her with Elizabeth’s own husband, who reacted with skepticism to the angel’s announcement of John’s birth (v. 18).

Mary must go and see with her own eyes this thing that God is doing. Even in the midst of her words of submission to the angel, you can’t help but feel her mind racing, the inner turmoil that impels her hasty journey to Elizabeth. Perhaps the Spirit at work in her was calling to the Spirit at work in Elizabeth - they certainly greeted each other with outpourings of the Spirit (vv 41-45, 46-55).

Knowing your Children

2010-06-30T21:43:00.001-07:00

It took me a while to realize this, but one of my primary tasks as a parent is to know my children better than they know themselves, and to help them learn why they act the way they do.

Young children are tiny, raw balls of emotion. For good and bad, they haven’t learned the control over themselves that we take for granted. Most of the time they do not even understand why they feel what they feel.

This can be hard to deal with emotionally. My first reaction to misbehavior that I don’t understand is to take it personally and ascribe it to capriciousness or malice. If I approach a confrontation with a child from this perspective, my goal will be to win, to get him to obey by exercising my authority over him.

But my job as a parent is not to win. My job is to cultivate good behavior, and often there is a better way to cultivate good behavior than winning. Maybe he is upset because he is hungry. Maybe he is over-tired. Maybe I’ve asked more of him than he is currently capable of (though as a rule children are more capable than we think they are). Maybe he needs something specific.

When faced with misbehavior, it is my job to find out why. And doing that is hard. It requires really knowing my children, paying close attention to them, actively trying to understand them, and a good deal of experimentation. I’ve been able to stop a fit mid-scream just by asking my son if I could give him a hug. Other times, a small concession on my part (that does not violate the spirit of the original request) or a little more patience than he ought to require has been enough to defuse a situation, calm him, and get him to obey. If I had been busy disciplining him for his disobedience, then giving him a hug is the last thing I would think of even though it was exactly what he needed.

To parent this way, you have to evaluate each of your children individually. One of my children will just exploit any extra chances I give him, in a careful attempt to see just how much he can get away with – so that is not a good strategy with him.

Learning to understand my children this way has also improved how I understand my peers. Human beings are complex creatures, and our behavior has complex motivations. But for some reason I typically insist on interpreting other’s actions extremely narrowly, assuming that anything I don’t know about their motivation is unimportant. Adults, like children, need more charity than I by nature want to give them – or would give them, if my knowledge were more complete. Just as my frustration with a screaming infant dissolves into sympathy the moment I realize he is teething, I ought to realize that conflict at work or elsewhere usually has roots I am unaware of. The best strategy is to always remember that I know in part, and to understand others with the charity that I would want to be given.

By Grace Alone

2010-05-27T12:19:00.001-07:00

A spiritual autobiography of my college years

The four years I spent in college were incredibly formative for me. I grew a lot, met my wife, developed some ideas on manhood and fatherhood that I am still working out, joined an Anglican church, and became (more or less) a Calvinist.

Despite all the changes, there’s a coherence to my journey – ways in which my experiences in high school paved the way for the earthquakes of college. In this post I will attempt to trace the influences, circumstances, and arguments that characterized my largest theological shift – from a broadly Evangelical Arminian to an John-Calvin-loving Anglican. This is more for my benefit than yours – I want to catalog it before it recedes from memory - but you are welcome to read along.

The largest shock of college was discovery the astonishing breadth of theological opinion. In high school I didn’t know that there were people who weren’t dispensationalist, that most of the Reformers (Luther/Calvin/Cranmer) practiced infant baptism and believed in some sort of Real Presence of Christ in the Lord’s Supper, that the early church practiced a form of Christianity that looked significantly different than my own. I discovered that there are people who take the authority of scripture just as seriously as I did, but who arrived at radically different theological conclusions.

So all of a sudden I was surrounded by an incredible breadth of theological opinion that I couldn’t dismiss out of hand as “unbiblical”. I even discovered that most of my reasons for objecting to Roman Catholicism were based on radical, uncharitable oversimplifications that couldn’t survive meeting or reading actual Catholics.

At the same time, I was dragging around a lot of guilt. I had spent most of high school feeling guilty for my besetting sins, for not having the will to get rid of them, and (especially) for being thought of by others as much better than I was.

One criticism of evangelicalism is that the gospel is generally used just to get you in the door. God has saved you (from hell) by grace through faith, but once that is accomplished the emphasis on God’s grace drops off precipitously, mostly replaced by moral imperative and law. The teaching focus, once you’re “saved” (in this narrow sense of eternal destination), is on Christian practice and growth in holiness as our work in response to God’s incredible love and sacrifice rather than on the continuing work of the gospel – God’s free and unmerited grace that saves us from sin by transforming us into Christ – in our lives.

Whether that is a valid criticism or not, it certainly describes my experience of evangelicalism (although, to be fair, it was filtered through a personality prone to working). Exhortation to holiness was often motivated by the magnitude of Christ’s sacrifice – as if we owed it to Christ to be holy because of what he’d done for us. This suggested a mode of sanctification in which our efforts come from our guilt at the disparity between God’s love for us and our love for God.

I spent many years in an attempt to grow through my own effort, impelled by a sense of guilt and responsibility to God. In case you are wondering, this does not work. It only weighs you down so that you cannot stand. Although I didn’t know it, I came to college desperately in need of the gospel. I found it in two unexpected places.

Calvinism

I like arguing as much as (maybe more than) the next guy, and on my college’s bulletin-board system I discovered real live Calvinists just begging to be argued with. Near the end of my freshman year, I found myself in the middle of just such an exchange. Sitting in my dorm room, reading a new reply to one of my posts, I thought in frustration “Why do they always respond to my philosophical objections to Calvinism by quoting the Bible!??”

Uh oh.

I caught myself immediately, of course, and had a horrible thought for the first time. “Oh no… what if it’s true?” That kicked off an investigation that lasted at least 6 months. I read Augustine, Calvin, John Cassian (for a semi-pelagian perspective). I re-read most of the New Testament. I did a word study examining every one of John’s usages of kosmos (world) in an attempt to figure out how to read John 3:16.

Augustine was actually more influential than Calvin in the final analysis. He helped me to really think about election for the first time. Prior to this I thought of it as code for “God sending people to hell because he wants to”. Here was another perspective: predestination originating not out of the raw power of Divine sovereignty but the utter sinfulness and complete inability of man; predestination as new life for those dead in their sins; predestination as completely free, extravagant grace to sinners so lost they are unable to even respond to God on their own.

This resonated. Left to myself, I certainly felt completely unable. That explains it! But along with the bad news came much better news. Here, finally, was something I could rest in. Here was a place to lay my burden down and let myself be carried. I could pray with St. Augustine “Lord, grant what you command and command what you will”. I felt like I understood the words to Amazing Grace better than I ever had before. His grace has brought me safe thus far, and grace – not my own efforts - will lead me home.

In the end what pushed me over the edge was John Piper’s article Are There Two Wills in God? and the realization that my strongest objection to Calvinism (“Why does he then find fault? For who resists his will?”) was responded to explicitly by Paul in Romans 9:19ff. It seemed to me, not that Calvinism made perfect sense of all of the Bible, but that it made more sense of more of the Bible than did Arminianism.

Because my exploration was all very ad fontes, I felt (and still feel) somewhat outside the Calvinist mainstream. I didn’t see any need, for example, to embrace the formalized, systematic “5-point” formulation of Dordt. “Predestinarian” is probably a better label for me than “Calvinist”, but for brevity and convenience (and because John Calvin was such a swell guy) I usually settle for the less accurate title.

Anglicanism

At roughly the same time I discovered Anglicanism, almost by accident. I attended an Anglican service with a group of friends because one of them suggested it and, hey, why not? That Sunday the sermon mentioned Gregory of Nyssa, who we were currently reading for class. Here was a convergence between what I was learning in college about the early church, and Sunday morning. I was immediately interested. There are places with a sense of community and continuity with the historical Church!

I found in the middle way of Anglicanism something that I didn’t know existed: fidelity to Scripture and the solas of the Reformation, alongside a continuity with and respect for the saints, traditions, and wisdom of the Church. Further, I found that this placed me closer to the Reformers theologically than I had been before. At a high mass with incense and vestments and sacraments, I was surprised to find myself feeling more rather than less Protestant.

More than anything else, though, what attracted me to Anglicanism was the Real Presence of Christ in the Lord’s Supper. My experience of communion prior to that had been as a memorial – a personal remembrance of Christ’s death. It was something that I did, not something that God did. I usually found myself trying to work up enough emotion in my heart to make the experience worthwhile. And as before, the responsibility of success and guilt of failure was a weight that I carried. Something was missing.

In Anglicanism I discovered it was God that was missing. I learned to understand the Lord’s Supper as an act of grace in which Jesus feeds and strengthens his people with his body and blood, and I learned that this was dependent, not on my inconstant will, but on God’s unchanging promise.

This objectivity was something I could rely on. I might come to the Table in fear and trembling, in wonder, in tears, or in dead unfeeling. But I always came to hold out my hands and receive something from the Lord. And I knew that I could trust him to fulfill his promise. Another weight fell from my shoulders.

Postscript

And that is how my college-years yearning for the gospel was satisfied. I came to realize that sanctification isn’t about paying God back for saving me, it’s about God turning me into a new person. And I learned to rest in the electing grace of God and the grace of Holy Communion as the means by which the good news of the gospel continued to work in my life to root out sin and establish virtue.

That was more than seven years ago. The dust has settled now, and although my theology is something of a moving target, it hasn’t changed drastically since.

I’m still predestinarian, although I’m even less interested in “Calvinism” as a formalized theological system than ever. I’m also suspicious of systematic theology in general. Grand systemizations build a rigorous, logical framework based on a certain understanding of some key passages, which encourages passages that don’t fit to be shoehorned in somewhere. If your main concern is systemization, you might not even notice that you are doing violence to the plain meaning of a text in your attempt to get everything to fit neatly together. You can see examples of this everywhere you look – Calvinists, Arminians, Protestants, Catholics.

Instead, I’ve come to think that it is best to stay as close as possible to the Bible, letting your interpretation be informed by the doctrines and teaching of the historic Church. This means that not everything will fit together neatly. But that’s exactly what we should expect of a transcendent God. It’s not a bug, it’s a feature! It is far better to stay close to the words of Scripture, even if that leaves you with unresolved questions and apparent contradictions.

So I’ve learned to live with uncertainty and ambiguity much more than my college self would have. And I am always re-learning my need to sit down at the foot of the cross and rest.

Living in the Kingdom

2010-05-24T20:09:00.000-07:00

While Jesus was on earth, his central teaching was that the Kingdom of God has come. It is among us, in our midst (Luke 17:20-21). It is available to everyone, including the poor and the outcast (Luke 6:20-26, 14:15-24) in a special way, and can be entered into just by throwing in your lot with Jesus and following him.

It is important to emphasize that the kingdom is not a future reality. It is here, now, with us. Jesus promised his disciples that some of them would not die before seeing the kingdom of God coming in power, and in all three of the synoptics the very next story is the transfiguration (Matthew 16:28-17:9, Mark 9:1-8, Luke 9:27-36). Translation: we don’t have to wait for the kingdom! Jesus made it available to us with his ministry. His favorite title for himself is “Son of man”, a phrase borrowed from Daniel 7 (especially v13-14) in which “one like a son of man” comes before the Ancient of Days and receives a kingdom. The comparison is most explicit when Jesus is on trial before the Sanhedrin (eg. in Mark 14:62). He died, rose again, ascended to the right hand of the father, and is now reigning (Luke 22:69).

But what is this kingdom that Jesus inaugurated? Essentially, it is the rule of God on earth. Dallas Willard defines the kingdom of God as “the range of God’s effective will”, and it exists wherever that will is heard and obeyed in the hearts of Jesus’ followers.

I’ve argued that the kingdom is in our midst, but clearly God’s rule is at best fragmentary on earth and even in his church. The kingdom has an already-but-not-yet character, so that Jesus can both inaugurate it and teach us to to pray “thy kingdom come”. It is begun but not completed, here but not fulfilled. For the completion of the kingdom, we must work and wait.

Jesus’ work in his Church means that there are tiny mustard-seeds of kingdom in every area of our lives where he is acknowledged as King. The kingdom is alive in our churches, our Awana clubs, our homes, our families, our marriages, and inside everyone who has surrendered his life to Jesus. Our job, in light of this reality, is to labor with Jesus as he transforms those centers of kingdom into fuller obedience. To make our homes safe, peaceful places and to welcome others into them. To exhibit transformed lives in our workplaces. To model the relationship between Christ and the Church in our marriages. To surrender our own wills.

I like to think of these kingdom-centers as worm holes or portals – tiny places where space/time breaks down and a little bit of heaven leaks into earth. God has chosen us to be the centers and agents of those leaks. In every sphere of our lives, our goal is the same: to widen the worm hole, to spill more and more of heaven out into earth, until heaven is everywhere.

While he was still speaking

2010-04-30T20:36:00.001-07:00

One phrase that stood out to me during my recent study of Luke was “while he was still speaking”. It’s used a few times in Luke and elsewhere throughout the Bible. The phrase evokes a sense of emergency, immediacy, and intensity for me. But beyond its narrative purposes, I think it points outside the story to a God who is orchestrating events. Whenever I read that phrase I thought “Aha, God is at work here”.

I think what I find so compelling about this providential immediacy is that I recognize the motif. I can recall a few times when God has answered a prayer of mine immediately, while I was still speaking. This Biblical phrase provides a “hook”, a point of contact, a tangible confirmation that the same God who was at work in the pages of the Bible is at work in my life as well.

Parenting Like Zebedee

2010-04-27T20:51:00.001-07:00

And going on a little farther, he saw James the son of Zebedee and John his brother, who were in their boat mending the nets. And immediately he called them, and they left their father Zebedee in the boat with the hired servants and followed him.

Mark 1:19-20

The Bible doesn’t tell us much about Zebedee. He is mentioned only as the father of James and John. But what we do know and can infer from watching his sons reveals a model of Christian parenting that there is much to learn from.

We know the pain he must have felt as his two sons, at a moment’s notice, abandon the family business to follow a new itinerant preacher – leaving him alone in their boat. We know he taught his children to recognize God’s voice and to respond to it. Their response to Jesus’ call was not a foregone conclusion; many people greeted the call with excuses and indecision (Luke 9:57-62). I am stepping outside the text a little here, but I think that (if his sons are any indication) he understood James and John were responding to God’s call, and let them go.

We know that his two sons were part of the “inner ring” of disciples, who (along with Peter) were chosen by Jesus to be present at the transfiguration and to pray with him in the garden, among other things. Certainly this reflects well on the training they received in the Zebedee household.

To parent like Zebedee is to teach your children about God so that they can recognize his voice when he calls. It is to provide vision and point them toward God and let them follow him, even when he takes them away from your protection and plans for them. And that may hurt – it certainly hurt Zebedee deeply. The call of God cost him not only his plans for the family business but his son’s life as well (Acts 12:1-2). You can be sure, though, that his pain was tempered by incredible pride in his sons.

In the end, Zebedee faded into the background. He is known to us only indirectly, through his faithful sons. That is a position, though, that any parent would be happy to be in.

Gregory of Nyssa on Easter Joy

2010-04-13T21:33:00.001-07:00

The following passage, from Gregory of Nyssa’s “The Holy and Saving Pascha” (apparently an Easter vigil sermon) conveys a sense of Easter joy better than anything I have ever read. It is a bit long, but eminently worth your time and meditation.

The true Sabbath rest, the one which received God’s benediction, in which the Lord rested from his own works by keeping Sabbath for the world's salvation in the activity of death, has now reached its final goal. It has displayed its own grace alike to eyes and ears and heart, through all those features of the festival solemnized among us, by which we have seen, by which we have heard, by which we have welcomed joy to the heart. The light seen by our eyes was torch-lit for us in the night by the cloud of fire from our candles. The night-long word resounding in our hearing with psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, like some flood of happiness pouring into the soul through our ears, has made us full of good hopes. The heart shone brighter as it portrayed the unspeakable blessedness of the things said and seen, hand-led by perceptible things toward the invisible; so that the benefits of this day of rest, relied upon because of their own inexpressible expectation of what lies in store, became a picture of those other benefits “which eye has not seen nor ear heard nor have they entered into the human heart.”

This night of life, mingling its candle-rays with the dawning beams of the sun, has made one continuous day, undivided by intervening darkness. Let us consider, brothers and sisters, the prophecy which says, “This is the day the Lord has made.” In it there is no laborious work, but happiness and joy and gladness, as the word puts it, “Let us rejoice and be glad in it.” What kind commands! What sweet legislation! Who postpones obedience to such commands? Who does not reckon the slightest delay in the commands as loss? Joy is the task, gladness the injunction, and by these the condemnation for sin is lifted and sorrows are transformed into happiness. This day brought forth the forgetting of the previous sentence against us, or rather its annulment; it destroyed every single trace of our condemnation.

Our childbearing once brought us pains, our birth is now free from labor. Once we were born as flesh from flesh, now what is born is spirit from spirit. Once we were born mortal children, now as children of God. Once we were dismissed from heaven to earth, now the Heavenly One has made us heavenly. Once death reigned through sin, now justice has taken over power through life. There was one once who opened the way into death, and there is one now through whom life is introduced instead. Once through death we fell away from life, now it is by life that death is destroyed. Once for shame we hid behind the fig tree, now for glory we approach the tree of life. Once for disobedience we were evicted from the garden, now for faith we come within the garden. Again the fruit of life lies open to our grasp for our enjoyment. Again the garden fountain, dividing fourfold in gospel rivers, waters all the face of the Church, so that the furrows of our souls, which the sower of the word cut with the plough of teaching, are cheered with drinking, and the harvest of virtue abounds.

So come, let us rejoice in the Lord who destroyed the might of the foe and set up the trophy of the cross for us. Let us cheer, for cheering is the triumphal shout raised by the victors against the vanquished. Let us say, “The Lord is a great God” and “a great king over all the earth” is he who “has crowned the year with his goodness” and gathered us into the spiritual choir in Christ Jesus our Lord, to whom be glory forever. Amen.

The Parable of the Mustard Seed

2010-04-05T21:18:00.001-07:00

He said therefore, “What is the kingdom of God like? And to what shall I compare it? It is like a grain of mustard seed that a man took and sowed in his garden, and it grew and became a tree, and the birds of the air made nests in its branches.”

Luke 13:18-19

One of the glories of Jesus’ parables is that they are written on multiple levels. You do not need to be an expert to understand them; Jesus knew the human ability to apprehend apprehend truth through story (the emphasis on narrative is one of the few things that post-modernism gets right).

This parable is no exception. On the surface, it teaches that the kingdom starts out small and apparently insignificant, but soon grows from a humble beginning to become great. This is certainly true of Christianity, which in a few hundred years spread from one executed Jewish carpenter throughout the Roman empire. And it is true as well of those who choose to live in the Kingdom and let it change them. But why compare the Kingdom of God to a tree? And what do birds have to do with it?

If you’re familiar with the right portions of the Old Testament, these questions resolve themselves and give a surprising depth to this short parable. Compare it, firstly, to Nebuchadnezzar’s dream in Daniel 4:

10 The visions of my head as I lay in bed were these: I saw, and behold, a tree in the midst of the earth, and its height was great. 11 The tree grew and became strong, and its top reached to heaven, and it was visible to the end of the whole earth. 12 Its leaves were beautiful and its fruit abundant, and in it was food for all. The beasts of the field found shade under it, and the birds of the heavens lived in its branches, and all flesh was fed from it.

Daniel interprets the tree as Nebuchadnezzar himself (4:20-22) and, by extension, his kingdom. The details in Nebuchadnezzar’s dream explain why a tree is such a good metaphor for a kingdom: it provides food, shelter, and safety to the animals (kingdom subjects), who are drawn to it.

Let’s incorporate this into our understanding of Jesus’ parable. The kingdom begins tiny and seemingly insignificant, but when it is grown it provides safety and protection and sustenance to those who live in it. The kingdom promise of safety and protection goes out to all who seek shelter.

It may be stretching things, but I think I hear an echo of Jesus’ sacrifice in the parable. Jesus, in hanging upon a tree, draws all men to himself (John 12:32) and feeds them with His body and blood. In other words, his death accomplishes what the kingdom mustard-tree symbolizes.

An even clearer Old Testament echo is found in Ezekiel 17. For complete context you really need to read the whole chapter, but the most relevant portion is at the end:

22 Thus says the Lord God: “I myself will take a sprig from the lofty top of the cedar and will set it out. I will break off from the topmost of its young twigs a tender one, and I myself will plant it on a high and lofty mountain. 23 On the mountain height of Israel will I plant it, that it may bear branches and produce fruit and become a noble cedar. And under it will dwell every kind of bird; in the shade of its branches birds of every sort will nest. 24 And all the trees of the field shall know that I am the Lord; I bring low the high tree, and make high the low tree, dry up the green tree, and make the dry tree flourish. I am the Lord; I have spoken, and I will do it.”

This is a promise that God will restore Israel. He will take a small, tender twig and plant it, water it, care for it. It may not look like much to begin with, but God will make Himself known through it. He will “make high the low tree”. The birds figure prominently in the metaphor, and the tree’s shade serves to emphasize the protection and rest that it offers.

It seems certain to me that Jesus had this passage in mind. With this background, we can say a few more things about the parable. Jesus is declaring that the Kingdom of God which he preaches will bring the restoration of Israel promised by the prophets. Also, God is watching over and tending the growth of the Kingdom-tree. He intends to display his glory through it, to show how superior this tree is, which at first seemed insignificant, to all other trees, all other kingdoms. God brings low the high tree, dries up the green tree, but this tree alone has been chosen and will stand forever. Come, all you who are weary and heavy-laden, and find rest in its shade.

The Great Inversion in Luke

2010-03-30T22:17:00.001-07:00

There are many distinctive themes in Luke’s gospel: his focus on women, his concern for social justice and the poor, his extra detail on the birth of Christ. But I think I’ve found something that ties them all together. Dallas Willard calls it the Great Inversion – the teaching of Jesus that the last will be first and the first will be last, that he who is great must be a servant, that God’s mode of judging is not just different but opposite ours.
That is evident from the first chapters. Mary, a simple girl from presumably a simple family (Luke doesn’t tell us) responds with humble belief and submission to Gabriel’s announcement (1:38,45), while the priest Zechariah demands a sign (1:18). Mary’s song of thanksgiving emphasizes God’s care for the humble and the poor (1:46-55). Jesus, the son of God, is born in a stable (2:7). God invites lowly shepherds to His birth (2:8-20). The first story that Luke tells us about Jesus’ ministry is that He declared that He was the fulfillment of Isaiah 61:1-2: good news to the poor, release to the captives, liberty for the oppressed(4:16-21). The first disciples that Jesus calls are fishermen (5:10-11) and a tax collector (5:27). Luke’s version of the sermon on the mount (blessed are the poor, the hungry, those who weep, the hated and excluded) is counterbalanced by woes (woe to you rich, woe to you who are full, woe to you who laugh) (6:20-26). Jesus declares that he who is least in the kingdom of God is greater than John the Baptist (7:28-30). Jesus contrasts a prostitute’s love with a Pharisee’s, and judges the prostitute’s to be greater (7:47). Luke makes special note of the women who accompany Jesus (8:2-3). Jesus teaches that to be His disciple means to follow him to execution (9:23-24). When the disciples argue over who is greatest, Jesus tells them that the one who is least is greatest. A widow’s coins are worth more than the great surplus of the wealthy (21:1-4).
Luke tells us that the Pharisees were lovers of money (16:14). They provides a foil to Jesus’ extensive teaching on feeding the poor (14:13-14, 12:33) and giving up everything to follow him (14:33). Compare also, the rich young ruler (18:18-24), who was reluctant to sell his possessions and follow Jesus, with the disciples who “left everything” (5:11, 5:28). And of course the crowning example of this inversion is Jesus, the spotless lamb, being slain in place of the sinners who deserved His death.
I could go on, but hopefully you get the point. In short, Luke is saying on nearly ever page of his gospel that when Jesus burst upon the world He turned it upside down and overturned everything we thought we knew. In the divine reality of His Kingdom to be first is to be last. To be greatest is to be least. To lead is to serve. To be poor is to be rich.
This is good news for everyone except the rich and important, which is perhaps why it is so hard for them to get in (18:24-27) and why Jesus repeatedly counsels them to renounce their goods (18:22, 14:33, 12:21, 12:33-34). His warnings against the dangers of possessions are strict: “A man’s life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions” (12:15), “What does it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses or forfeits himself?” (9:25). “Everyone to whom much was given, of him much will be required” (12:48).
This is where I come in. While I’m not rich, I have a reasonably good job. I get to work with my mind, and am pretty good at what I do. I like to think that I’m fairly intelligent, and I’m not too bad at this holiness thing. When I read these passages prayerfully, this is what they say to me: “Gabe, by Kingdom reckoning you are not nearly as important as you think you are. Those people you like to look down on are actually way ahead of you in line. The homeless and the mentally retarded will be hearing ‘Well done, good and faithful servant’ while you’re way back in the parking lot.” But in the kingdom of God, the back of the line isn’t such a bad place to be.

Book Study Aids

2010-03-22T21:41:00.001-07:00

I have found two resources incredibly helpful when studying a book of the Bible. The first is my audio Bible. One of the difficulties of studying a book is that you really need to go over it several times in order to get a feel for its flow and notice parallels between earlier and later portions of the book. For longer books, it is just not practical for me to do several close reads.
I can, however, very easily listen to the book. Listening is not a good way to pay close attention to the text, but it is a great way to get a high-level overview. That broader context is very helpful when doing a close read. Even a longer book can be listened to in at most a few hours, which is just a couple days worth of commuting for me.
I recommend the KJV read by Alexander Scourby. You can get it in mp3 for less than $25. I know the KJV language is archaic, but like a good Shakespearean actor (which he is), Scourby reads it so well that you hardly notice and his voice is unparalleled. Not even James Earl Jones did a better job.
The second resource is N.T. Wright’s For Everyone series on the books of the New Testament. I have not found anything else that comes close to matching it for combining serious scholarly insight with a genuine pastoral concern for applying the text. Most commentaries are not meant to be read straight through, but these are best that way. Rather than doing a verse-by-verse commentary, Wright devotes 2-3 pages of commentary for every few paragraphs of Biblical text. They are easy to read in quick, bite-size segments and when you are finished you will have a great feel for the major themes of the book, the basic flow of the narrative or argument, and will have picked up many insights along the way that you couldn’t have noticed by yourself.

Lukan Repetition

2010-03-22T21:07:00.001-07:00

I’ve noticed, as I’ve been studying Luke, that he tends to repeat similar stories and themes more than once. This is quite a change from Mark, who carries on at such a good clip that he sometimes seems to barely have time to say things once – immediately! at once! and then! immediately!

Luke, on the other hand, appears to be taking his time. He wants you to understand this man Jesus, who he was and what he taught. To that end he picks his themes and dwells on them, using the repetition for emphasis. In Luke’s gospel I also feel that I catch a glimpse of Jesus the itinerant preacher, who makes a point in more than one way and grabs on to favorite pictures to teach more than one principle and never says the same thing twice in quite the same way.

Here are the repetitions I have noticed, with minimal commentary:

The disciples argue over who is the greatest (9:46-48, 22:24-27)
Jesus heals on the Sabbath (6:6-11, 13:10-12, 14:1-6)
Each time, Jesus gives an argument from the law about why this is permitted.
Jesus sends out the disciples (9:1-6,10 – the twelve, 10:1-12,17-20 – the seventy two)
Jesus laments over Jerusalem (13:33-35, 19:41-44)
Jesus is invited to dine at a Pharisee’s house (7:36, 11:37, 14:1)
Jesus dines at a tax collector's house (5:29 - Levi, 19:5 - Zacchaeus)
Jesus heals a leper (5:12-13, 17:11-18)
Nothing is hidden that will not be revealed (8:17, 12:2-3)
Acknowledging Jesus before men (9:26, 12:8-9)
These two passages complement each other nicely, with the first focused on the negative (if you are ashamed of Jesus, he will be ashamed of you) and the other on the positive (if you acknowledge Jesus before men, He will acknowledge you).
He who is faithful in little is faithful in much (16:10-12, 19:17ff)
In this case Luke presents a teaching of Jesus once as a saying and once as a parable.
To the one who has, more will be given (8:18, 19:26)
This is parallel to the previous point, and helps to explain it. He who is faithful will be given more, and he who is unfaithful will have what he has taken from him.
The Pharisee's outrage at Jesus forgiving sins (5:20-21, 7:48-49)
Jesus raises a young child from the dead (7:11-17, 8:50-56)
Jesus praying alone with sleepy disciples (9:28-32, 22:39-46)
Jesus teaches that this generation is worse than, and will be judged by, pagan nations (10:13-15, 11:30-32)
Take up your cross and follow me (9:23, 14:27)
Jesus tells a parable about persistence in prayer (11:5-9, 18:8)
Everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, but the one who humbles himself will be exalted (14:11, 18:14)
Jesus tells a parable about a dead rich man (12:16-20, 16:19-31)
This one is more similar in main characters than in teaching. Jesus uses a similar idea to illustrate two different teachings, much as he uses a mustard seed for two different analogies (13:19, 17:6).

Eating Bread in the Kingdom of God

2010-03-08T21:00:00.001-08:00

Blessed is everyone who will eat bread in the Kingdom of God

Luke 14:15b

At my church this sentence is said every week before communion is distributed. I’ve been studying Luke recently, though, and this last Sunday I recognized the context. The comment is made to Jesus by a dinner guest. Jesus responds with a story that explains just who it is that will eat in the Kingdom: the parable of the great banquet.

Hearing that one sentence at church brought all of this flooding back. The great man’s bountiful generosity – “bring in the poor, the blind, the lame, the crippled” – and the incredible openness of the offer: “master, there is still room”.

Any time that conflict arises in the church, it’s hard to observe carefully and avoid the conclusion that we are all broken. Theology, pride, conviction, and general sinfulness are so intermixed that it is hardly possible to separate them.

But we broken ones are exactly the people whom Christ invites to His table. And watching us file up to the front for the Lord’s body and blood on that Sunday reminded me that we are a part of Christ’s church not because He has been formed in us, but because we know He has not. So I limped up to the altar rail, one cripple among many, to eat bread in the kingdom of God.

Opening the Windows of Heaven

2010-03-02T20:58:00.000-08:00

On one occasion, while the crowd was pressing in on him to hear the word of God, he was standing by the lake of Gennesaret, and he saw two boats by the lake, but the fishermen had gone out of them and were washing their nets.Getting into one of the boats, which was Simon's, he asked him to put out a little from the land. And he sat down and taught the people from the boat. And when he had finished speaking, he said to Simon, “Put out into the deep and let down your nets for a catch.” And Simon answered, “Master, we toiled all night and took nothing! But at your word I will let down the nets.” And when they had done this, they enclosed a large number of fish, and their nets were breaking. They signaled to their partners in the other boat to come and help them. And they came and filled both the boats, so that they began to sink. But when Simon Peter saw it, he fell down at Jesus' knees, saying, “Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord.” For he and all who were with him were astonished at the catch of fish that they had taken, and so also were James and John, sons of Zebedee, who were partners with Simon. And Jesus said to Simon, “Do not be afraid; from now on you will be catching men.” And when they had brought their boats to land, they left everything and followed him.
Luke 5:1-5

This passage has come to represent for me the unbounded extravagance of God's blessings: "Now to him who is able to do abundantly more than we can ask or imagine", as Paul says. Or, from the Old Testament, "See if I do not open the windows of heaven, and pour you out such a blessing that there shall not be room enough to receive it".

But the thing that really gets me is the last sentence. They left all that fish in the boat! When you come face-to-face with Jesus' power, all that fish is a small thing compared to following Him. "You shall see greater things than these".

A School for the Lord's Service: Thoughts on Benedictine Fatherhood

2010-02-15T16:03:00.000-08:00

We intend to establish a school for the Lord's Service -St. Benedict

When I first read the Rule of St. Benedict, in a small room during a parish retreat, I skimmed quickly over the chapters about the qualities of an Abbot. I found much that was immediately relevant in Benedict's guide for 6th century monasteries, but an Abbot I certainly was not and that role seemed most removed from my daily life.

Soon after, however, I realized that those chapters I had skipped were more relevant to me than anything else in the Rule. I may not be in charge of monks, but I am the abba of 3 young boys and directly responsible for their spiritual and moral development. Our home is not a monastery, but it is a community and Benedict's insights into communal life are unparalleled.

Like Benedict, I intend to establish a school for the Lord's service. And as he says, my job is more like caring for the sick than exercising authority over the healthy. It does not take very long to discover that your children are sinners in desperate need of the great Physician. Here is some Benedictine wisdom that has been particularly helpful to me:

They [abbots] should reflect on what a difficult and demanding task they have accepted, namely that of guiding souls and serving the needs of so many different characters; gentle encouragement will be needed for one, strong rebukes for another, rational persuasion for another, according to the character and intelligence of each. It is the task of the superiors to adapt with sympathetic understanding to the needs of each so that they may not only avoid any loss but even have the joy of increasing the number of good sheep in the flock committed to them. (ch. 2)

Strangely, almost eerily, the Rule comes up in many of the discussions about discipline that I have with my wife. His insight here is indispensable: you simply cannot parent your children as if they were all the same. Incentives that work for one may not be best for another. Punishments appropriate for one may be too harsh (or too lenient) for another.

Benedict's comical description of how boys in the monastery may need to be "smacked" for disobedience (ch. 30) lays out the primary justification for spanking: some children are too young to understand why they ought not do something, too young too understand punishments that would be appropriate for older children - removal of priveledges, etc. But they can understand "when I do that, it hurts". The immediacy and shortness of spanking is why it works: quick, just after the disobedience, take a moment to repair the relationship with the child, move on. This is good for young children who are always living in the moment.

Young children need to be taught proper behavior before they can understand why. As they age, "don't do this because it hurts" gives way to "don't do this because it is not good for me". This is also how Benedict describes spiritual growth: obedience to Christ is formed in us by obeying even (especially) when when we do not want to. Through that obedience we grow into desire, understanding, and love, but obedience comes first. The purpose of punishing children, like monks, is to form Christ in them and teach them to be whole, moral people. It is not to win - inordinate strictness beyond what the child can understand or reasonably obey is not helpful to their formation. Proper discipline is not at all easy - it requires a Benedictine care and gentleness and, most of all, a deep knowledge of your child.
When any business of importance is to be considered in the monastery, the abbot or abbess should summon the whole community together and personally explain to them the agenda that lies before them... We have insisted that all the community should be summoned for such consultation, because it often happens that the Lord makes the best course clear to one of the youngest. (ch. 3)

One of my besetting temptations is to underestimate my children. This seems to get worse as my family grows, so that I'm more prone to underestimate my youngest than my oldest. It's not uncommon for me to discount something a child says as silly nonsense, only to realize later that they had seen something that I had missed. Children have a lot to teach us about how to relate to God - He is very fond of using foolishness to confound "wisdom".
The oratory must be simply a place of prayer, as the name itself implies, and it must not be used for any other activities at all nor as a place for storage of any kind. At the completion of the work of God all must depart in absolute silence which will maintain a spirit of reverence towards the Lord so that anyone wishing to pray alone in private may not be prevented by the irreverent behavior of another. (ch 52)

A home with many children is a noisy place and likely won't have room for an always-quiet space like a Benedictine oratory, but as they grow children need to be taught the value of silence, self-reflection, and prayer from their parents.
But if even this [severe punishment] does not bring reform and if - may God forbid it - the guilty one is puffed up with pride to the point of wanting to defend wrongful actions, then the superior must follow the practice of an experienced doctor. After applying dressings and the ointment of exhortation and the medicine of divine scripture and proceeding to the extreme resource of cauterization by excommunication and strokes of the rod, and if even then the superior sees that no such efforts are of any avail, yet another remedy must be brought to bear which is still more powerful, namely the personal prayer of the superior and of all the community that the Lord, who can do all things, may himself bring healing to the delinquent. (ch. 28)

I am not anticipating the need to kick any of my children out of the house, but the simple faith in the power of prayer that Benedict describes is a powerful reminder that the strongest tool we have in the training of our children is not what we do for them but what we ask God to do for them.
Further frequent reflection on that future reckoning before the Good Shepherd who has committed his sheep to them [abbots] will, through their concern for others, inspire them to greater care of their own souls. By encouraging through their faithful ministry better standards for those in their care, they will develop higher ideals in their own lives as well. (ch. 2)

The youthful joy of fatherhood

2009-08-09T21:00:00.000-07:00

Puff, the magic dragon lived by the sea
And frolicked in the autumn mist in a land called honah lee.
...
A dragon lives forever but not so little boys
Painted wings and giant rings make way for other toys.
One grey night it happened, jackie paper came no more
And puff that mighty dragon, he ceased his fearless roar.

His head was bent in sorrow, green scales fell like rain,
Puff no longer went to play along the cherry lane.
Without his life-long friend, puff could not be brave,
So puff that mighty dragon sadly slipped into his cave.

--Leonard Lipton & Peter Yarrow

One of the chief glories of fatherhood is that it re-awakens in your soul a joy that has long lain dormant. Young children make grown men behave in ways that they never would otherwise. They make ridiculous noises. They crawl around on all fours. They smile in a giddy way that hasn't been seen on their face since boyhood.

When a boy transitions to manhood, he leaves behind something special. Perhaps more importantly, though, he forgets what he loses. My boys help me to remember the carefree attitude and wild imagination of youth. Without them I think I would let my infinite seriousness, my consuming drive to make a difference and to know, overwhelm me. But children don't take themselves very seriously. Nor do they take you very seriously. And that can be a great boon, especially if you are tempted to gravity like I am.

Just to be a father is my most serious and most lighthearted calling. That is hard to remember sometimes, but when I am looking with joy into the smiling faces of my children, it is all that I can think about.

A Prayer for Judgement

2009-07-28T20:52:00.001-07:00

Lord God of hosts, you are truth and light. Before you falsehood is exposed and the darkness flees. Look down from your judgment seat upon the actions of the Episcopal Church. Hear how they have profaned your name by worshiping the spirit of the age, rejected your Son as the only Way, and exalted a false gospel.

Why do you stand so far off, O Lord? Stretch forth your hand and act. Consume all that the Episcopal Church has set up in opposition to you with the fire of your holiness. Save those who are responsible for apostasy, but as through fire, that their works may be burned up.

Cleanse us, O Lord, and nourish in America a pure expression of the faith of Cranmer, Herbert, and Lewis. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.

As I wrote this, I had (among other passages) Ezekiel 22:13-15 in the back of my mind:

Behold, I strike my hand at the dishonest gain that you have made, and at the blood that has been in your midst. Can your courage endure, or can your hands be strong, in the days that I shall deal with you? I the LORD have spoken, and I will do it. I will scatter you among the nations and disperse you through the countries, and I will consume your uncleanness out of you. (emphasis mine)

The message that stands out to me is that the fire of sanctification and the fire of judgment are the same thing. It burns up everything that rebels against God. When that fire comes, you had better be sure there will be something left.

Expanse: Theology and an Old Earth

2009-07-22T20:26:00.000-07:00

The heavens are telling of the glory of God; their expanse is declaring the work of His hands. —Psalm 19:1

While I was in college I began to be convinced by the scientific arguments for an old earth (something on the order of 5 billion years, and 14 billion or so for the universe). This was further cemented in grad school. It didn't line up with how I prefer to interpret the Bible, but I thought the Biblical evidence for a young earth less conclusive than the scientific evidence for an old earth (some remarks on that below). One thing that I never had, though, was a theological justification for why that should be so. It was an inconvenient belief, one that I did not know how to fit properly into the rest of my theology.

That changed when I compared the antiquity of the universe with what we are learning about God from the other sciences. As astronomy looks out it discovers unfathomable distances that testify to the magnitude of a God who fills it all. As Biology looks deep into the cell it discovers engineering far better than ours: ever-richer complexity, large interwoven networks of protein interactions, several overlapping layers of data storage in DNA, efficient energy transmission in photosynthesis (by way of quantum tunneling!). As Physics looks deeper, into the nature of reality, it finds an underlying order which bears witness to its Orderer. Below even that, we can see Divine whimsy in the chaos which this order is balanced precariously on top of. One could hardly think of a more counter-intuitive foundation than quantum physics, perhaps the richest paradox in the sciences. And when astronomy looks back on the incredible age of the universe, it tells us something about the Ancient of Days, old beyond human reckoning and seated on his throne.

In other words, the sciences are converging on Psalm 19:1. God is showing off! Everywhere we turn we see an expanse so massive that it displays a reckless disregard for our ability to understand. The heavens declare the glory of God, indeed. They have been singing it in ways that were not discovered for 14 billion years, and in ways that will never be discovered.

And that is why I think God took His time in creation. He poured Himself into it. It cannot hold his infinitude, of course, but it can give us a glimpse. And that tiny glimpse is enough to drown us a thousand times over. The great age which we find in astronomy and geology testifies to a God who is not slow as some count slowness. He is patient, eternal, and waiting for us.

Appendix: The Age of the Earth in Science and Genesis

This post is not about whether creation is old or not, it is about why an old creation is consistent with (and perhaps expected by) God's character. But I know there are lots of people (probably most of my 7 readers :-) who are still back at whether, which is a prior question to why. Briefly, this is why I think it makes sense to believe in an old creation:

About the accuracy of radiometric dating: yes, those methods are based on assumptions and any of them could be incorrect. However, the rocks which are used to help date the earth were tested by several different radiometric methods, and all of them gave roughly the same answer (you can find this out in 5 minutes by googling "age of the earth"). If radiometric dating methods are unreliable, wouldn't you expect them to give wildly different age predictions?
A shameless appeal to authority: J.P. Moreland gives an able defense of an old earth, and points out that some exceptional Hebrew scholars think the days of Genesis 1 aren't literal for textual reasons.
Some thoughts on the Genesis account from an old-earth perspective (take with a grain of salt, I am not an expert): Genesis does not record the creation of the earth. "In the beginning" it is formless and void, apparently covered by water. Interestingly, this corresponds more or less to the scientific account of the early earth being, well, covered by water. So even a literal reading does not provide an absolute beginning date for its creation (how long was the earth "formless and void"?). Also, the order of creation corresponds very roughly to the order in which we find animals in the fossil record - plants (including photosynthesizing bacteria?), fish (birds don't seem to fit?), land animals and finally man.
On the length of days in the Genesis account: the presence of evening and morning in the 3 days before the sun and moon were created argue against a literal reading, I think. The events of day 6 in Genesis 2 would be hard to fit into a 24 hour period (God creates land animals, man. Adam names all the animals, feels lonely, God creates Eve before sunset). This account (2:4-24) does not even mention the "days" of chapter 1, but it does use "day" in another sense: "in the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens" (2:4). Also, there is good reason to think that the seventh day was not 24 hours. It is never closed out by the "evening and morning" formula of the other days (2:1-3), and Hebrews 3:18-4:10 make a convincing case that the seventh day is eternal: there remains a "Sabbath rest" for the people of God, in which we enter in to His rest. Verses 4:4,10 make it clear that God's rest in this passage refers specifically to His 7th-day rest from creating.

I've glossed over some of the serious theological problems caused by an old earth. The best and most honest attempt to resolve these issues that I know of is this book by Bill Dembski[1]. I obviously don't think the problems are worse than those confronting a young-earth view. However, given the theological difficulties and my preference for interpreting Scripture straightforwardly, I respect those who hold to a 7-day creation. Sometimes God requires us to trust Him in pitch darkness when all of our reason cries out against it[2]. This kind of complete submission to the Word is a virtue, and it could be that I am wrong and the age of the earth is one of those areas where God requires it of us.

[1] Disclaimer: I've read a paper on which the book was based, not yet the book itself
[2] The faith of the thief on the cross is one of the most vivid examples of this.

Heresy and Authority: On the Viability of the Anglican Option

2009-06-10T21:12:00.000-07:00

I have watched for the past 10 years as the Anglican middle way, which I have come to love so much, has been turning into the broad way. Times of heresy are not new to the church - she has denied Christ's full deity and tried to sell the forgiveness of sins - but I am hard pressed to think of a time when the departure from Orthodoxy has been so total as it is today in the Episcopal Church. It is no longer surprising when they deny the uniqueness of Christ, approve every sort of immoral behavior, profane Christ's body by offering it to Hindus, or elect a Buddhist bishop. I call myself Anglican because I am ashamed to admit I attend an Episcopal church. I can't overstate the burden of oppression that weighs on my soul. I live on a tiny island of orthodoxy, in the midst of this abyss of heresy, called Blessed Sacrament. What are we to do?

My model for responding to heresy has always been the early church's reaction to the Arian heresy which nearly engulfed her. The few orthodox bishops who remained appointed several "replacement" bishops in Arian dioceses, so that there were in some places 2 people claiming to be the rightful Christian bishop. I infer from this that one can forfeit his spiritual authority by embracing heresy. A diocese with an Arian bishop is a diocese without a bishop.

The closest thing to this "dueling bishops" model that is available to us is the newly-formed Anglican Church of North America (ACNA), a confederation of conservative breakaway groups, a potential and hopeful 39th province, a way to be Anglican in the United States (and Canada) under bishops who confess the faith of the apostles. I see ACNA as a way for orthodox bishops to stand in the vacancies left by the apostacy of the Episcopal Church (TEC), rather than as a formally different church. I also expect the distinction between TEC and ACNA to be temporary. TEC is shrinking rapidly, as the liberal, Christless Christianity it has embraced is demonstrating itself to be unsustainable. When you jetison the gospel, you don't leave any compelling reason to want to be a Christian. I think my children will live to see this reunification.

But how do I, as a member of Blessed Sacrament, align myself with ACNA? It seems to me that by far the best course would be for the entire parish to leave TEC and join ACNA. But that is not going to happen. There are many in my parish who feel strongly about staying. The church belongs to God, after all, not General Convention. And they aren't about to let heretics kick them out of their church.

I've already explained how I don't see ACNA alignment as a fundamentally different church, but the fact remains that there are irreconcilable differences in the parish on this point. This forces a critical question for me: is full ACNA membership important enough to warrant leaving Blessed Sacrament? On the one hand, I desperately want to be part of an ACNA parish in repudiation of my bishop's authority. Some people who I respect are leaving for this reason. On the other hand I deeply want to stay. I courted here, I was married here, I've had 3 children here. The community is orthodox and nurturing, and I can't think of a better environment in which to raise a family. There is hardly any hope of making an unbiased decision.

I have decided, though, that whatever I do I cannot give up attendance at Blessed Sacrament[1]. It seems to me that there are two conflicting goods before me: being a part of an orthodox, nurturing community, and completely removing myself from the authority of a heretical bishop. It is not clear to me that I can't do the second without doing the first, or that the good of joining an ACNA parish justifies breaking fellowship with an orthodox body of believers who agree with me on most doctrinal matters except the proper response to systemic heresy in the church - which, as theological differences go, is fairly minor. I'm just not sure that the best way to decisively stand againts TEC heresy involves leaving an orthodox parish. If it sounds like I'm trying to have two contrary goods at the same time, it's because I'm Anglican. We've been doing it for 500 years.

There's another reason I can't leave Blessed Sacrament. One of the things I've picked up from Anglicanism (and the Rule of St. Benedict) is the importance of obedience to authority in church life. When I call my priest Father, it implies a certain spiritual authority over me and over the life of our parish. He has been very supportive of those of us who feel we need to re-align, but has also been constant in not supporting any courses of action that would split the parish. I am not convinced that removing myself from his authority for the sake of removing myself from my bishop's authority is productive or (for me) allowable. The question here is not "is this the best course?", but "is this course so wrong that I must reject my priest's leadership on the matter?" For me, it is not.

Having said that, it is obviously very important for me to be removed from the authority of TEC to the degree possible. What might that look like for those of us interested in the "Anglican Option", as we're calling it, who want to align with ACNA but can't leave Blessed Sacrament? This is still being worked out, but here are some of my thoughts:

1) Blessed Sacrament is already doing this to some extent. 3 of the priests who regularly help with the service are under ACNA bishops. It would be nice for one of them to co-consecrate the elements as often as is practical.
2) It's important for me to have an ACNA priest associated with our enclave. He could be from Blessed Sacrament or a local ACNA parish, and hopefully would provide a regular (bi-weekly?) evening mass - possibly piggybacking on an existing service.
3) It is also important to financially support both ACNA and Blessed Sacrament. That could mean the Blessed Sacrament vestry allocating a piece of the budget to regularly support them (which I would prefer), or perhaps the enclave could work something out internally.
4) This one is admittedly a little vapid. For years I've wanted to take down the "The Episcopal Church Welcomes You" sign outside the church. That won't be happening, but I wonder if we couldn't put up an "ACNA welcomes you, too" sign next to it.

I know there are some people for whom these or similar steps are insufficient. I hope we can work together so that the ACNA parish they land at is the same on the enclave associates itself with, so that we can maintain contact and establish a certain amount of fluidity between it and Blessed Sacrament.

[1] Thanks to Tim Motte for helping me think through some of these issues.

On Fathering

2009-03-17T20:52:00.000-07:00

Parenting young children is hard, but incredibly rewarding. As a father, you have enormous responsibility: to model the fatherhood of God to your children, to guide their behavior through discipline and (what is infinitely harder) by example, to love them when they are least loveable. You must model those two attributes of God which are so hard to reconcile: nearness and authority, friendship and otherness. Your mercy must sometimes be severe, though you cry out against it. Your task is impossible, which is actually a comfort: If it were not so you might be tempted to think that you could actually do it. Instead, you just stumble along asking your children to forgive you when you fail and asking God to cover your mistakes.

The magnitude of your task bows your head in humility, but it does not crush your shoulders under a weight too heavy to bear. For your yoke is easy, and your burden is light. You have the enormous priveledge of watching a young life grow up and mature under your care. You see a new personality emerge, and you rejoice in every new thought, every new ability. Fatherhood spans the range of human emotion: joy, laughter, anger at defiance. Tedium as you correct a fault for the thousanth time, sadness when your child is hurt by the world you have brought him into, compassion when you hold him sick in your arms.

Along my journey, I've picked up some principles which guide how I try to raise my children. Caveat emptor: since I'm making this up as I go along, I don't really know anything about parenting children older than four. I should also mention that as a rule I don't pay much attention to parenting advice. Thoughtful and prayerful introspection on your child is worth more than a thousand books. That said, it does have its place.

One of the things I've been most surprised by is the degree to which children respond to consistent parenting. The "why can't my children act like that"? thought which every parent thinks almost always has a simple answer: it hasn't been important enough to you to instill that behavior. Of course children will fight you when you tell them to do something they do not want to, but if you hold your ground you will be surprised at how quickly they get the idea.

This has an interesting corollary: your children are probably not misbehaving for the reasons you think they are. This will make a big difference in how you react to them, so it's important. It's really easy to take defiance personally, as an affront to your authority. But children just want to know where their lines are and they will keep pushing until they find out. Young children do not listen to what you say. They listen to what you do. Instead of being upset that they ignore you, just follow through on your words with action and wait for them to get the picture. It doesn't take very long.

Rarely raise your voice at your children. As a tool for teaching them to behave, it is mostly useless. Children, remember, do not listen to what you say. You can't change this, so you might as well accept it and move on. If you yell when your children disobey you, they learn that they do not have to obey you when you use a normal voice because you never actually punish them until after you start yelling. Children are very good at finding out just exactly how much you will let them get away with. Much better for both of you to just give the command in a normal voice, and follow through if they disobey.

Yelling also gives your children control over you. If you show them that they can alter your mood by acting in a certain way, you give them a power that they should never have. Children manipulate each other like this all the time (cf. the sibling's smug, satisfied smile), and it weakens your authority to submit to it.

One more thing. Your children almost always understand more than you give them credit for. This seems to be especially true for younger siblings, because we as parents want to cherish their youth. Shoot over their heads by asking them to think about things that are too advanced for them and do things they can't yet. They will surprise you, and the effort is good for them even when they fail.

Young children enter the world as sinners. As soon as they are old enough to know you want them to do something, they are old enough to not do it. Like St. Benedict says of Abbots, our job as parents is more like caring for the sick than exercising authority over the healthy. But with care and love we can allow our children's personalities to bloom under the careful constraints of moral instruction, which makes them more rather than less free.

Whisperings

2009-01-09T15:32:00.000-08:00

I find arguments for the existence of God to be academically interesting and engaging, but I don't expect them to be very good at converting people to Christianity. Most are inductive and probabilistic, which means their force is largely dependent upon the subjective weight that an individual gives them. This weight is determined by the individual's worldview, and accepting Christianity induces a huge change on a worldview.

I think a better strategy is to confront a person with truths about human nature which every reflective person must acknowledge. Given these truths, which worldview offers the best explanation of them? And which worldview offers the best advice about what to do about them?

These are subjective questions, of course. But they are more immediate. More personal. Less cerebral. Christianity makes certain truth-claims about history and the nature of reality, and they are important. But at bottom it is a Way, not a Proposition. Commenting on Jesus' words in John 14:6 ("I am the way, the truth, and the life", Thomas à Kempis says "Without the Way there is no going, without the Truth there is no knowing, without the Life there is no living".

In Christianity's answers to the deepest questions of humanity (Who is well off? What does it mean to be good? What is the good life?) I hear whisperings, resonances, intonations. Something deep inside me responds "ah yes, only that can explain who I am, who I ought to be, and why I am not". Someone who does not hear the same whisperings is unlikely to convert. But you can challenge them to listen, and let the Holy Spirit take it from there.

Here are some observations that evoke those deep questions in me, and how Christianity whispers a response that my soul recognizes.

Consuming does not make us happy

Inside everyone is a voice that says "if I just had a little more money, enough for X and Y and Z, then I would be happy and content". But that voice is lying. This experiment has been done many many times, and it has never worked. If you're honest with yourself, you should be able to verify that the voice is never satisfied. It always wants "just a little more". Studies have shown that, above a certain income level necessary for basic needs, having more money does not make you happier. But even basic reflection should show you that this is the case.

Sexual freedom does not make us happy

You'd never know it from how the culture portrays it, but promiscuity and uncommital sex does not make you happy in any ultimate sense. This is also fairly well-confirmed. People that follow basic, conservative (Christian) sexual moral rules are just happier and more satisfied than those who don't. It is not even hard to see why. The fact that we are increasingly divorcing sex from commitment, at tremendous cost to ourselves, only shows that we are not very reflective and we trust what we see in movies more than our own experiences.

We do not do what we know is best for us

This one is strongest and, in a way, most shocking. Not only are we constantly pursuing courses of action which do not make us happy, but we know we are doing so and do it anyway. Furthermore, we choose not to pursue those things which we know do make us happy. Again, you should be able to confirm this easily by self-examination. Here are some examples to get you started:

TV/YouTube/the Internet. Have you ever squandered an hour, or an evening, or several evenings, watching television you didn't even like, or YouTube videos you immediately forgot, or browsing internet sites you do not even consider that interesting? And have you ever thought afterward how you really should have been doing something else, which you actually prefer?
New-Years resolutions. Everyone makes them. Everyone knows that keeping them would make him happier, more fulfilled, and a better person. Everyone breaks them. Swiftly.
Conscience. Everyone has a conscience that gives them basic moral principles, and everyone violates it. Everyone knows they are flawed, everyone does things they know to be wrong.
As an extreme example, there are many homeless persons who would rather stay homeless than give up their booze. I know of some. Surely it must be clear, even to themselves in moments of sober honesty, that this is wild foolishness. Is there a dark part of you that is almost that crazy?

Anyone reflective person concerned about living well should be deeply concerned about these features of human nature. Where did they come from, and how do we overcome them? Why do we have a longing to make ourselves happy by continually doing things that we know will never make us happy?

Surely there are several possible explanations, and you will have to evaluate their explanatory power for yourself. You could construct a story according to which this is all a product or byproduct of an evolutionary process of competition and survival. But this is the Christian explanation: We are sick - no, we are dead. The voice that cries out for more and is never satisfied, like an Ungoliant in our breast, is bearing witness to a real need - but it is a need we cannot satisfy unless we are reborn. It is a need that shows we are incomplete. We are not what we were intended to be.

What Christianity offers is, in part, a vision of how to be transformed. How to fill the empty place that your inner voice alerts you to by, paradoxically, nailing that voice to a cross. Because only once it is dead can it be satisfied.

That is what I hear, when I listen. What are your whisperings?

To Thomas Nathanael Moothart

2008-11-28T17:50:00.000-08:00

Son,
Your mother and I take names seriously, and wanted to choose one for you that signified something important - a name that partly describes what we hope for you, but also one that is open enough for you to attach meaning to, and decide what it means for you to be a Thomas, a Nathanael, a Moothart. Names are funny like that - they both define us and are defined by us. Our culture has lost most of the importance attached to names, but you only need to turn to the Bible to see it - in Joshua, Isaiah, Abraham, Peter, Jesus.

Your are named primarily after the apostle Thomas and Philip's friend Nathanael. Both of them responded to Jesus with initially skeptical reactions, but (more importantly to your mother and I) both made great professions of faith when confronted by Him.

Nathanael's skepticism ("can anything good come out of Nazareth?") is overcome by Philip's invitation - "Come and see". And when he came and saw, he declared "Rabbi, you are the son of God! You are the kind of Israel!".

Thomas' skepticism of the resurrection ("unless I see...") is likewise overcome by Jesus, as he leaps ahead of the other disciples and declares Jesus to be not only Lord, but God. This confession hearkens all the way back to the prologue of John's gospel: Jesus is the Word, not only with God but also equal to God (1:1). And in the paradox of the trinity, Jesus who declares the unseen God to us (1:18) is himself God - the invisible Word made visible, touchable flesh.

You are also named after Thomas Aquinas. He lived during a time of real cultural, military, and intellectual challenge to Christianity from the Muslim world. Against the prominent Islamic scholars of the day, he argued that all truth is one, that two truths can't be at variance with each other. He also labored to place the newly-rediscovered works of Aristotle in a Christian context.

The third Thomas you are named after is my father. You have inherited his smile - use it wisely. With great power comes great responsibility. He's influenced who I am and how I parent in ways I don't know and am still discovering, but one of them is a desire to help you grow by not being overbearing and letting you make as many of your own decisions as possible. I want to give you the freedom to make mistakes on your own, to prayerfully decide how to grow into manhood without pressure from me to do or be anything specific to gain my approval. I want to provide guidance, advice, prayer, and help (and occasionally the rod - though less of that when you're older).

We don't know what kind of man you will become, but we are praying that in your journey you will confess the faith with the passion of the apostles, defend it with zeal, and face all of your labors with your grandpa's smile.

To Jonathan Phineas Moothart

2008-09-26T17:03:00.000-07:00

Son,
Your mother and I took the task of naming you very seriously. We wanted to give you a strong name, a Biblical name, a name with meaning and purpose, and a name that wouldn’t be a source of excessive teasing in grade school. Your mother vetoed Hector for exactly that reason. At any rate, your middle name serves the same purpose, and more besides – more on that later.

You share your first name with two uncles and the Jonathan of the Bible. Jonathan is a strong name, and the Jonathan of the Bible exemplifies this. He was strong and true in his friendship to David. He was strong and brave in battle against the enemies of God’s people, going alone with his armor bearer to a Philistine garisson and igniting with God’s help such a panic that the battle was won for the Israelites that day.

You are called Phineas after the third High Priest of Israel - son of Eleazar, son of Aaron. When the people sinned by taking to themselves foreign women and foreign gods, God sent a plague among them in His anger. Phineas stopped it by taking up his spear and running it through a man who had done this publicly and the Mideanite woman he had taken. And God stayed the plague because of the zeal Phineas had shown for His glory.

In our world zeal and strength do not take such forms, of course. But warfare remains a helpful metaphor, in the New Testament and today, for the struggle between God’s people and spiritual evil.

Lastly, you are a Moothart. You are the son of Gabe, the son of Tom, the son of Harvey. I need hardly tell you who I am – my actions will say more than my words anyway. But I will say a little about what I feel your grandpa has passed on to me (although there is certainly more than I can list or recognize), and that is a sense of duty to and sacrifice for family. Grandpa sometimes worked a lot of overtime when I was growing up, and wasn’t home as much as I would have liked. But it was always clear to me that he was doing this for the family – so that Grandma could stay home with us, so that we could have nicer things, go to camp in the summer, and later go to a Christian school.

I once seriously considered a job offer which would have been challenging and fulfilling for me, but required long hours away from home. It doesn’t do me credit that what your Grandpa did for the family I wanted to do for myself. But the moment of clarity cam when I compared myself to him (and to you).

Neither Grandpa nor I ever really knew your Great Grandfather. He died when Grandpa was 4. I don’t know much about him – only snippets, really. He was a teacher. He joined the navy late in WWII, but the war ended before he saw combat. Great Grandma’s photo album shows him fixing up their first house, and beside pictures of her he had scrawled “my gal”. They had 4 children (Grandpa was the second) in their 6 years together.

I guess I’m saying this because I think it’s important for you to know where you come from, and who has gone before you. I do not in any way mean to be telling you who I expect you to become or place borders around what you can do. You’ll have to make those decisions and follow God’s call yourself. In fact, recently I was meditating on Jesus’ call to James and John, wondering how Zebedee must have felt to be left in his boat like that. But when God calls you, I hope that I can let you go with grace.

Vocation aside, however, I do hope for you to grow up a moral and righteous man. I already see in you passion, intensity, and, yes, a temper. It is my prayer that through your choices and helped by our parenting, you may learn to focus your passion, direct your anger against those things which God hates, and be used by Him – like the sword of Jonathan and the spear of Phineas.

Favorite Children's Books

2008-08-12T21:15:00.000-07:00

My friend Ben has asked for my list of favorite children's books. Keep in mind that my oldest is 3, so these are mostly appropriate for young children. Luckily for you I have good taste, so all of the books on this list are worth picking up.

In no particular order, but progressing generally from younger to older children:

The Very Hungry Caterpillar, Eric Carle
Jamberry by Bruce Degen
Colorful and fanciful, with a fun rhyme
Carl's Afternoon in the Park (and the other books in the Carl series), Alexander Day
Excellent illustrations, which tell the story well. No words.
God Bless Me and Thank You, Dear God!, Helen Haidle
But Not the Hippopotamus, Sandra Boynton
I generally recommend everything by Sandra Boynton. Cute, simple words, clever and funny.
Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus!, Mo Willems
Funny and very interactive.
Llama llama Red Pajama, Anna Dewdney
Frog and Toad are Friends, Arnold Lobel
This is an early-reader book, with simple words and sentences. Unlike most books of this kind, however, the stories are actually good: funny, clever, endearing, and with likeable characters. Definitely worth reading to your toddler.
Harold and the Purple Crayon, Crockett Johnson
I think I like this one more than my kids do. They might need to be older to appreciate how clever it is.
Rain, Peter Spier
Emily and I have a lot of children's books, but the ones by Peter Spier have far and away the best illustrations. Rain is absolutely beautiful, and is told (like most of his books) entirely through pictures.
Professor Wormbog in Search for the Zipperump-a-Zoo, Mercer Mayer
Fun story with illustrations so packed that you notice something new every time you read it.
Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel, Virginia Lee Burton
Who doesn't love this book?
Curious George, Margaret and H.A. Rey
The Curious George stories are fun and meandering. Definitely a favorite of Jonathan's.
The Apostle's Creed, Illustrated by Vicki Pastore
A great way to teach your children the foundations of the faith in an engaging way. Worked well for us as part of the bedtime routine.
Thomas the Tank Engine, Rev. W. Awdry
The Thomas stories are entertaining and teach good Christian virtues better than almost anything else on this list. Highly recommended. The original videos, narrated by none other than Ringo Starr and very close to the books, are also great.
The Jesus Storybook Bible, Sally Lloyd-Jones
I simply cannot praise this one highly enough. The tone reminds me a little of C.S. Lewis' in the Chronicles of Narnia. And, (also like the Chronicles of Narnia), some of the insights are so deep that I find myself learning new things and thinking about God's plan of salvation in new ways.

Corporate and Individual in Romans

2008-04-14T21:06:00.000-07:00

Recently I've been studying Romans, and I'm gaining a whole new appreciation for it: the way Paul weaves his themes together, a brief treatment in one place giving way to a fuller explanation later on. N.T. Wright calls this a symphonic structure, and it is really beautiful.

I'm also gaining a new appreciation for how hard Romans is to interpret. As I study I've been consulting a 1,000 page commentary. Incredibly, there are places where the exegesis feels rushed, where complex counter-arguments are glossed over in a few sentences. In those places I catch a glimpse of the larger world of Romans interpretation that could fill volumes, and into which 1,000 pages can only present a tiny window.

The difficulties notwithstanding, however, I think I've found a broad principle that focuses many of the disagreements: Paul's treatment of corporate and individual. That is, which passages in Romans have personal, individual application? Which refer specifically to redemptive communities (eg. Jews, Gentiles, the Church) and can't be directly applied to individual Christians?

This question is at the heart of some of the most controversial passages in Romans: ch. 7 (is Paul describing himself, or speaking archetypally of the nation of Israel?), ch. 9 (does God elect individuals, or communities?), and many others.

These are not easy questions. The line between corporate and individual in Romans often seems very thin. As an example, consider Rom. 11:17-21:

But if some of the branches were broken off, and you, although a wild olive shoot, were grafted in among the others and now share in the nourishing root of the olive tree, do not be arrogant toward the branches. If you are, remember it is not you who support the root, but the root that supports you. Then you will say, “Branches were broken off so that I might be grafted in.” That is true. They were broken off because of their unbelief, but you stand fast through faith. So do not become proud, but fear. For if God did not spare the natural branches, neither will he spare you.

In context, this seems clearly to have corporate application: gentiles as a people-group are being grafted into the nation of Israel. And yet to read the passage strictly in this light implies that Paul is threatening the gentiles en masse, as a group, of expulsion from the people of God if they (corporately) do not stand firm in their faith. This flies in the face of everything Paul has said previously about the inclusion of the Gentiles as the culmination of God's plan of salvation, and sounds plain weird besides. It seems much more likely that Paul is warning individuals against the danger of apostasy, even though his metaphor is corporate.

The observation that many of Roman's interpretive issues involve discriminating between corporate and individual application doesn't make those decisions any easier, but it does link them in an interesting way. Assuming that Paul has more or less the same focus in mind throughout the letter, one's opinion on whether or not Paul is describing himself in Romans 7 may have implications for Romans 9, and vice versa. This widens the relevant context significantly: it may be really hard to understand a particular passage, but getting a feel for what the entire letter implies about the corporate and the individual may impose an interpretation on the passage in question, or at least limit the viable options. And this can be a significant help in navigating the depth and breadth of Paul's letter to the Romans.

Religious Affections, etc.

2007-12-17T23:05:00.001-08:00

The Christian Audio free audiobook last month was Jonathan Edwards' The Religious Affections, and I've been listening through it slowly. The experience has sparked some thoughts (as good books always do):

Audiobooks are good for you

Listening to a long, careful and cohesive argument (as The Religious Affections is) or even a classic novel (with more complex sentence structure than modern fiction) sharpens your brain. It requires you to focus on what you are hearing in a way that stretches you, in a refreshing way. I often worry that modern movies and television are conditioning us to have ever shorter attention spans. This is a good way to fight back.

As a bonus, I wonder if it might also help in prayer. In The Divine Conspiracy, Dallas Willard notes that when our thoughts wander during prayer, they are only doing what they usually do. Consciously gathering your thoughts and focusing them while listening to something that requires concentration might train them in a way that helps you concentrate during prayer. So far this is just a conjecture, though. No results to report yet.

Read The Religious Affection

The Religious Affections is a penetrating analysis of religious experience by one of the brightest and best theologians ever born on this continent. It was written in the fallout of the second great awakening, and Edwards is trying to come to grips with what he experienced during that time: many extremely fervent religious experiences which withered and died, leaving no lasting devotion.

Its description of the relationship between emotion and the Christian life is very helpful and should be required reading, I think, for worship leaders. It is incredibly important for them in particular to think about what differentiates true religious affection from mere emotion, which can flare up quickly and die just as quickly, and which has no religious significance. Several practical suggestions could be gleaned from the book on how to focus a worship service with this in mind.

Also, it is helping me formulate a better understanding of the nature of religious experiences. Recently I encountered a few examples of strong experiences which I would have thought could come only from God, but which communicated messages I don't think God would communicate. Edwards' book gives me a better feeling for the nature of religious experience and how to discern true from false ones.

Modern Neuroscience isn't all that Revolutionary

This one caught my attention mostly because of my ongoing interest in the sciences and Christianity's place within them. It seems like every other week someone is publishing a paper which supposedly provides a causal explanation of some facet or other of religious belief: stick somebody in an FMRI machine, tell them to think about God, jot down the areas of the brain that light up the most, and presto! You've reduced religion to brain chemistry and explained it in completely naturalistic terms.

Ok, so that was uncharitable. But it is certainly true that neuroscience in general is accumulating proof of correlations between certain brain states and certain beliefs, thoughts, or personality characteristics, and reasoning from that data to the conclusion that the brain states in question provide a physical explanation of the mental events they're correlated with. I'm pretty convinced that this assumption is uncritically inherited from the current academic climate, not deduced from the data.

But what does all this have to do with The Religious Affections? Oh, yes. It turns out that the correlation between brain states and mental states, which modern neuroscience usually portrays as breaking news which finally disproves the existence of the soul, have been believed by Christians for hundreds of years.

Edwards spends a lot of time discussing mental phenomena, as his subject is religious experience. And in different places throughout the book he makes plain that he envisions a deep, 2-way connection between the soul and the body. He says that he is doubtful whether there is any thought however small which does not affect the body in some way. He argues that the devil cannot read our minds, but can introduce thoughts into us by placing impressions in our brains. He says that certain physical sicknesses can weaken our reason by weakening the control the soul has over the brain. And, while I'm on the subject, C.S. Lewis mentions in The Discarded Image that the medievals believed different areas of the brain were associated with different cognitive functions.

So the idea that belief in a soul is threatened by modern neuroscience is groundless. On the contrary, we've been predicting these sort of results for hundreds of years.

Update: I've run across another ancient Christian reference to physical brain changes affecting our mental state: Evagrios the solitary, a 4th-century monk:

... this illusion results from the passion of self-esteem and from the demon's touch on a certain area of the brain.
....
[the intellect] then mistakes for a divine manifestation the appearance produced in it by the demon, who cunningly manipulates the brain and converts the light surrounding the intellect into a form, as we have described. [emphases mine]
On Prayer, texts 73 & 74, Philokalia vol. I

New Blog!

2007-10-03T13:09:00.001-07:00

Not like I can manage to keep this one updated in a timely fashion, but I've started a software development blog for those of you who happen to be interested in that sort of thing. Check it out.

Province 39

2007-09-29T15:01:00.001-07:00

This is a week of historic significance in the Anglican Communion. The House of Bishops of the Episcopal Church (TEC) released a statement on Tuesday responding to a request from the leaders of the 38 worldwide Anglican provinces to:

Clarify that they would not ordain any more noncelibate homosexual bishops
Stop blessing same-sex unions
Put in place a way for conservative episcopal parishes to place themselves under the primatial authority of a "pastoral council" made up partly of bishops from more conservative provinces
Stop lawsuits against those parishes who have left TEC

In response, the Bishops issued a statement last Tuesday (9/25) that they would "excercise restraint" in ordaining noncelibate homosexual bishops, refrain from authorizing an official liturgy for blessing same-sex unions, and allow Episcopal parishes who asked for alternative oversight to place themselves under one of a few pre-selected Episcopal bishops.

You don't have to read between the lines to see that this is not exactly what they were asked to do. And it is going to cause quite a ruckus in the communion. It seems probable to me that the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, is not going to be withdrawing any invitations to next years Lambeth Conference, a gathering of all the world's Anglican bishops. Which means at least that many of the African and South American provinces will not be attending, and might mean schism. Some are already downplaying the importance of Canterbury to Anglican identity.

But right on the heels of that meeting came another one, the Common Cause meeting of several conservative Anglican groups: Episcopal bishops as well as churches that have broken away from TEC in the past and some Canadian groups. And out of that meeting came an incredible statement - a pledge to form a unified Anglican body with (hopeful) ties to Canterbury. They have scheduled meetings every 6 months toward accomplishing this goal.

I was very hopeful that something like this would happen, but I expected it to be top-down - that is, for the Primates to create a new non-geographic province, or allow us to operate permanently under the jurisdiction of another Primate. But that would be a very slow process. There will most likely be a meeting of the Primates to evalue TEC's response (though as far as I know it's not scheduled yet) and then more meetings, talks, wait-and-see.

The Common Cause partnership is much more ecumenical and grass-roots: a bunch of different Anglican groups getting together and more or less asking Canterbury to bless it after the fact.

I can't describe how exciting this is. Schism is a lot like sin: It's always easier the second time - and the third, and the fourth. And putting the pieces back together, even with substantial doctrinal agreement, is never as easy as one would thinkg it ought to be. The fact that so many Anglican groups are committed to reconcilation and reunion is amazing.

Even more amazing is that the Reformed Episcopal Church is a Common Cause member. The REC left the Episcopal Church not over women's ordination but more than 100 years ago in protest over the more Catholic elements being incorporated into it. They seem to have resolved their differences, however.

One name I was sorry to not see on the list was the Anglican Catholic Church. St. Mary Magdalene, in Orange, is an ACC parish that was formed when Blessed Sacrament underwent a church split in the 70's over the Episcopal Church's ordination of women. I can't describe how much I would like to see that division healed.

Nevertheless, great things are happening in the communion. Change is in the air, and the spirit of unity. I don't know what worldwide Anglicanism will look like when the dust settles, but I see a lot of reasons for hope.

Benedictine Spirituality

2007-08-10T12:11:00.001-07:00

I fell in love with the Rule of St. Benedict a few weekends ago, on a church retreat at Prince of Peace Abbey[1 ]. In my simple but comfortable room was a copy of The Benedictine Handbook, which contained the Rule as well as several essays on Benedictine spirituality, some example liturgies for the daily office (abbreviated for lay use), and a brief history. St. Benedict had my attention after the first paragraph of the prologue:

My words are addressed to you especially, whoever you may be, whatever your circumstances, who turn from the pursuit of your own self-will and ask to enlist under Christ, who is Lord of all, by following him through taking to yourself that strong and blessed armor of obedience which he made his own on coming into our world.

That weekend I attended as many of the monk's daily services as I could[2 ] and read most of the rule in addition to several of the companion essays. The tender, fatherly spirit drew me. Most of my exposure to monasticism has been from the Eastern church. And, while there is much to commend in it, I had never run across anything so compassionate, or so immediately relevant.

Of course, I am still not a monk and I can no more sing through the psalms 8 times a day than I can recite the Jesus prayer 17,000 times. But I am called to renounce my own will no less because of that, and St. Benedict's spiritual advice is directly relevant. It struck me that there is no time specifically set aside for individual prayer in his Rule. It is expected to follow from the daily rhythm of manual labor, contemplative reading, and the services of the daily office. And that is something that I can learn from, because I too have a daily rhythm. His advice on prayer is likewise comforting:

We really must be quite clear that our prayer will be heard, not because of the eloquence and length of all we have to say, but because of the heartfelt repentance and openness of our hearts to the Lord whom we approach. Our prayers should, therefore, be free from all other preoccupation and it should normally be short, although we may well on occasions be inspired to stay longer in prayer through the gift of God's grace working within us.

St. Benedict is acutely aware that the monastic life is lived in community, and much of the Rule is devoted to structuring community in such a way that the members are drawn together toward holiness. Now, my home is not a Benedictine monastery. But there are more parallels than you might think. Like an abbot, I am in some sense responsible for the spiritual care of my children. And the spiritual discernment which St. Benedict requires of abbots is both frightening and challenging.

My idea of the character of monasticism changed that weekend. As I read, I scribbled on a nearby scrap of paper: "Monasticism is not solitude. Monasticism is obedience." Obedience (to Christ and one's superiors) is, I think, the heart of Benedictine spirituality. It is in setting aside our own wills and enrolling in a school for the Lord's service, such as Benedict meant to establish in his monastic community (and I in my home), that we learn to take upon ourselves the easy yoke and light burden of the Father.

[1 ] This was a Roman Catholic monastery, but luckily there are Anglican Benedictine orders.

[2 ] These were almost entirely sung, roughly a half-hour in length, and consisted primarily of chanting the psalms. I usually find that chant distracts me from focussing on the meaning of a text, but that didn't seem to be the case here. Maybe because I was participating instead of listening, or maybe because it was just done better. At any rate, the chant had a quality that stayed with me long after the service was over.

Niezsche on Christian Hypocrisy?

2007-07-20T13:14:00.000-07:00

I have occasionally heard Nietzsche quoted as saying that he would be more inclined to believe in Christianity if Christians looked more redeemed. Well, I just ran across that section in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. It is completely out of context! Here is the quote, along with the previous paragraph just to show how good Nietzsche is at framing his thoughts. Speaking of Christian self-denial:

They have called "God" what was contrary to them and gave them pain; and verily, there was much of the heroic in their adoration. And they did not know how to love their god except by crucifying man.
As corpses they meant to live; in black they deck out their corpses; out of their speech, too, I still smell the bad odor of death chambers. And whoever lives near them lies near black ponds out of which an ominous frog sings its song with sweet melancholy. They would have to sing better songs for me to learn to have faith in their Redeemer: and his disciples would have to look more redeemed![1]

It is pretty clear that Nietzsche is not objecting to Christian hypocrisy, which is what he is usually quoted as having meant. He is working with his own definition of "redeemed". Redemption, for Nietzsche, means embracing life and the body, and their limitations, as all there is. It means not "hiding" in the promise of divine reward, punishment, or life beyond this one. Nietzsche mentions, in a few places, that Christians need redemption from their redeemer. This is what he is saying here. And when he says "They would have to sing better songs for me to learn to have faith in their Redeemer", he means the same: not that they need to sing better Christian songs, but that their songs are melancholy and they don't look redeemed precisely because they are Christian.

[1]Thus Spoke Zarathustra Part II, "On Priests"

Nietzsche's Overman and the Meaning of Life

2007-07-09T21:28:00.001-07:00

"I create meaning for my life"

You often hear this from atheists explaining how it is that they live without any sort of higher purpose. It usually means something like "I have found something I love to do, and I have devoted myself to it. I need no more 'purpose' than the ability to do what I enjoy." Usually there is a subtext of nobility to their explanation, implying that their creation, their willing of purpose exhibits an inner strength not possessed by those who (must) look outside themselves for purpose[1].

I think I've found the root of this idea in Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra[2]. Zarathustra, the prophet Nietzsche chooses as mouthpiece for his message, preaches the coming of the overman, a breed of human which, having cast off the values of Christendom, embraces the body and the will as primary and regards any attempt to transcend them as weakness:

A new pride my ego taught me, and this I teach men: no longer to bury one's head in the sand of heavenly things, but to bear it freely, an earthly head, which creates a meaning for the earth.

A new will I teach men: to will this way which man has walked blindly, and to affirm it, and no longer to sneak away from it like the sick and decaying.

Also, a little later:

May your virtue be too exalted for the familiarity of names: and if you must speak of her, then do not be ashamed to stammer of her. Then speak and stammer, "This is my good; this I love; it pleases me wholly; thus alone do I want the good... Once you suffered passions and called them evil. But now you have only your virtues left: they grew out of your passions[3].

The meaning which the overman creates for himself is a supreme act of will in which existing cultural values are re-valued. Virtue is that which is chosen, freely and unconstrained by cultural norms, from within oneself. The "thou shalt" is nothing and the "I will" is everything.

This is the radical individualism out of which meaning-creation was born. For if the will creates meaning, what else does it create? what doesn't it create? Is there anything to which it is subordinate?

Nietzsche's answer was "no", and it led him to envision a world led by men who are their own highest good.

[1] I can't resist interjecting personal commentary: I find this idea that one can life a fulfilling life by just doing what he happens to like highly insufficient and not even very thoughtful. Classical paganism is light-years ahead and far preferable. The Greeks and the Romans understood that man has a nature - that there are certain things which are true of us whether or not we want them to be. They understood that education was necessary to train the faculties to appreciate the highest goods, and to live the best life. He who spurns this teaching in order to follow his own will foolishly disregards the wisdom of the ages on what kind of being man is, what his limits are, and what can make him happy. He does so to his peril.

[2] Incidentally, there is a fantastic series of posts on Jim's blog under the title Thus spoke the Platypus. It's a brilliant way to response to Nietzsche, loosely parodying the style of Thus spoke Zarathustra. The most recent installment is here.

[3]Thus Spoke Zarathustra book I, speeches 3 and 5

No PhD for You!

2007-06-20T16:41:00.001-07:00

In April I received a letter informing me that my application to the PhD program in Computer Science at UCI had been denied. This was pretty disappointing, as I had really been looking forward to it.

But it forced a time of self-examination that I am really grateful for. I had to decide whether to spend the next year working to improve my qualifications and apply again, or to take this as a "no" and move on. The decision was one of the most difficult ones I've ever made, and it took a long time. There were good reasons to choose both paths.

Working on a PhD would be incredibly rewarding. It would allow me to do something challenging and intellectually stimulating in the intersection between computer science and biology. I love both fields. It would let me participate in some really exciting work going on right now, and contribute to what I think is a coming revolution in how we do biology. Academics is part of who I am, and this would allow me to exercise that part. It would re-orient my work around something I am really passionate about. Also, a lot of my thinking has been moving in this direction for the past 2 years during my Masters. Not getting a PhD would mean leaving behind unformed thoughts, ideas, promising projects, and half-finished journal notes. It would mean leaving a part of my life that I have grown to sincerely enjoy in a very abrupt, unfinished state.

But there are other considerations. Emily and I feel strongly that our first calling is to family. The question for us has never been whether to focus on family or my schooling, but if we could fit my schooling into our family. And a lot of factors would make that difficult to do. First, the delay: assuming I could improve my application enough to get accepted to a graduate program, I wouldn't start until fall '08. That means finishing a year later, which almost certainly means one extra year of PhD work with 3 kids. And, as Emily pointed out to me, we could conceivably have 4 before I was finished.

Jonathan would be at least 6 years old, and we would be home-schooling him. If I'm not working on a PhD I can be much more involved in that process. For example, I'd like to set aside a significant chunk of time for developing a philosophy of education: both at a high level (what is education?) and a low level (how does it apply to a hyperactive first-grader?). I'd also like to teach him Latin eventually, but I can't do that unless I become at least familiar with it. That would take time.

Also, PhD work is really grueling. Long hours are expected, and that would leave me feeling very torn. It would certainly place some stress on my marriage and leave me with less time for Emily and the kids. Money would be very tight, as well.

But the primary thing that I feel is threatened by a PhD is my holiness. My last quarter at UCI, especially, I was sort of in survival mode: eat, sleep, work, make it through a token Bible chapter in the morning, and that was about it. This Lent, especially, when I gave up science, I remembered what I had been missing. And since then I have spent much more time in prayer and Bible reading. I'm making a concerted, purposeful effort to be close to Jesus. I feel more like a monk than I have in quite a while.

So, after a few months of prayer and discussion with Emily and others, I've decided that it would be best for my family and my soul to not pursue a PhD right now. I won't pretend that I'm not secretly hoping to be able to come back to it someday. Or that I'm not a little sad at giving up such a dream. But sacrifice is a part of living well, and I'm also excited about the challenge ahead of ordering my life, simplifying, and re-orienting it around the most important things right now: my family and my journey toward holiness.

Scriptorium Daily

2007-05-05T21:31:00.001-07:00

Fairly recently, Scriptorium Daily has undergone a major facelift and I am consistently impressed with the quality of the content. It used to be a news portal of sorts, with links to articles on various and sundry topics relevant to the culture, politics, etc. It also hosted Middlebrow, a blog run by three of the Torrey tutors.

They've been merged now, with the blog promoted to the front page and the news stories relegated to a sidebar. In addition there are several new contributors, including J.P. Moreland. It is definitely worth you time. Two recent articles to whet your appetite:

A Two-Fold Cultural Crisis (Dr. Reynolds)
Two Empty Slogans (J.P. Moreland)

Where 0 Meets 15

2007-05-04T13:19:00.001-07:00

My car broke down in Arizona,
have to ride the bus again,
at ten-o-clock on Tuesday night,
with thirteen cents and a broken pen.
I put my backpack on the bench,
tell two people I don't smoke,
see the cop across the street,
he thinks that I am selling dope.
I could have walked another block,
to get away from the scene.
Why does it always come to this,
where zero meets fifteen?
And so I gave my thirteen cents,
to the man who peed his pants.
He passes out and falls on me,
I watch my change fall from his hand.
I see the lady next to me,
holds her baby black and blue.
The junkie gutter-punks keeps asking,
where I got my new tattoo.
What does it matter anyway,
thirteen cents or all I own?
How can I ever save the world,
on cup-o-soup and student loans?
I want to try and save the world,
but it never goes that way.
God I don't know what to do,
down at Colfax and Broadway.
Now the man with no shoes on,
says I don't know how to play.
He says I fumble all the time.
He thinks that I am John Elway.
I put my face down in my hands,
water wells inside my eyes.
What do I have to give them?
Does it matter if I try?
I can't stand to see you suffer,
I try to intellectualize,
a formula to end you pain,
it doesn't work,
God knows I've tried.

Sometimes my cup is overfilled.
Sometimes I'm too afraid that I'm going to spill.

-Reese Roper

Thomas à Kempis

2007-05-03T12:35:00.001-07:00

I just bought a new copy of Thomas à Kempis' devotional The Imitation of Christ. The copy I owned previously was inherited from the pastor of the Baptist church I grew up in. But it is probably at least 50 years old, and falling apart. I now wish I'd retired it while it was in a better state of repair and bought a new copy for daily use, but it certainly shows the signs of being well-loved and well-used.

The Imitation (written in the 15th century) has more broad ecumenical appeal than almost any work I'm aware of. I was introduced to it through a Baptist minister, whose edition was published by Moody press (which felt compelled to included a disclaimer that, although the author referred to priests, the advice was equally beneficial for pastors). And Pope John Paul I was reading the book when he died. It doesn't really get any broader than that.

My new copy is published by Vintage, and I think I liked the Moody edition better. The Vintage edition is excellently bound (in fact everything they publish is. The paper is just right, and the book falls open in your hand. It just feels right), and more academic than the Moody edition. A helpful preface and introduction are included, the paragraphs are numbered, and when Thomas quotes from the Bible or classical literature the reference is italicized and footnoted. For devotional use the footnotes aren't really necessary, and the frequent italicizing feels jarring.

But what I liked best about the Moody edition was the translation. This may, of course, be just because I'm a snob and happen to prefer thees and thous over modern English. Here's a couple of my favorite passages from each edition, so you can decide:

Vintage
What good does it do you to be able to give a learned discourse on the Trinity, while you are without humility and, thus, are displeasing to the Trinity? Esoteric words neither make us holy nor righteous; only a virtuous life makes us beloved of God. I would rather experience repentance in my soul than know how to define it. If you knew the entire Bible inside and out and all the maxims of the philosophers, what good would it do you if you were, at the same time, without God's love and grace?
....
Follow Me! I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life. Without the Way, there is no going; without the Truth, there is no knowing; without the Life, there is no living. I am the Way you are to follow; I am the Truth you are to believe; I am the Life you are to hope for.

Moody
What will it avail thee to dispute profoundly of the Trinity, if thou be lacking in humility, and art thereby displeasing to the Trinity? Surely high words do not make a man holy and just; but a virtuous life makes him dear to God. I had rather feel compunction than understand the definition thereof. If thou didst know the whole Bible by heart, and the sayings of all the philosophers, what would all that profit thee without the love of God, and without grace?
....
Follow thou Me: "I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life." Without the Way, there is no going; without the Truth there is no knowing; without the Life, there is no living. I am the Way, which thou oughtest to follow; the Truth, which thou oughtest to trust; the Life, which thou oughtest to hope for.

A Prayer for Faithfulness

2007-04-25T22:40:00.001-07:00

O God, in You truth and love are perfectly united. So unite us in your Son that we may reflect on earth the perfect unity of the Godhead.

Give us the courage to proclaim the good news that Your salvation is freely offered to all men without distinction, and the strength to hold unswervingly to the faith handed down to us by the saints. Forgive us when in our zeal we pass by the wounded on the far side of the road. Forgive us when in our compassion we approve what you have forbidden. Restore us, O Lord, and breath new life into us for Your name’s sake.

You are the God of our fathers and our children. Give us the wisdom to discern Your will for our community. Go before us that the light of Your word may illuminate our path in this time of darkness. Remind us when we despair that Your word is eternally fixed in the heavens, and strengthen us in the way of faithfulness. Preserve us from the winds which threaten us, calm the storm that engulfs us, and establish us in safety that we may bear witness to Your holy name for generations to come.

For you are the Ancient of Days, and unto You every knee must bow, and every tongue confess.
Amen.

Currently Reading

2007-04-14T22:09:00.001-07:00

I've just started Dostoyevsky's short novel The Double. It's the first pre-incarceration[1] Dostoyevsky I've read, and I'm interested to see if I can pick up any differences in his philosophy from the later novels. So far all I've gleaned is that he writes madmen really well.

I really like his description of Petersburg, the setting of the story. He portrays the atmosphere so vividly that Petersburg is almost a character. Two examples:

the gray autumn day, dull and dirty, peeked into his room through the dim window so crossly and with such a sour grimace that Mr. Goliadkin could in no way doubt any longer that he was not in some far-off kingdom but in the city of Petersburg.

the snow, the rain, and all that does not even have a name when blizzard and blackness break loose under the November sky of Petersburg, at one blow suddenly attacked Mr. Goliadkin.

It's interesting to compare this to Crime and Punishment, which is also set in Petersburg, but in a hot, oppressive summer rather than the winter. In both cases the Petersburg weather is instrumental in setting the backdrop for the story, but that backdrop is completely different in each.

[1] Early in his life, Dostoyevsky was part of some sort of subversive political movement. He was arrested and sentenced to death, then reprieved at the last moment and sentenced to penal servitude in Siberia. The experience changed him dramatically.

Interview with Bishop Ackerman

2007-04-04T13:21:00.001-07:00

A week and a half ago, Bishop Ackerman visited Blessed Sacrament. Fr. David has called him the last conservative bishop the Episcopal Church will ordain (which, especially given the current situation, seems pretty likely to me).

While he was here, he gave an interview with AnglicanTV. It is a little long (35 minutes), but absolutely worth it. Bishop Ackerman is amazing.

Things are heating up in the Anglican Communion

2007-03-27T13:56:00.001-07:00

In February, the primates of the 38 worldwide Anglican provinces met in Tanzania and issued a unanimous communiqué to the Episcopal church, effectively:

Establishing a council composed of 5 bishops (2 of them Episcopal) which would operate as alternative representation for the conservative dioceses and parishes which cannot accept the leadership of the presiding bishop of the Episcopal church, Katharine Jefferts-Schori. The primates mandated this, they did not ask the Episcopal church's permission to do it.
Requesting the house of bishops to unambiguously affirm its intention to refrain from authorizing more same-sex union ceremonies.
Requesting the house of bishops to unambiguously affirm its intention to refrain from consecrating more noncelibate homosexual bishops.

The house of bishops was requested to reply by Sept. 30. This comes at the end of more than 3 years of turmoil, following the consecration of Gene Robinson as bishop in 2003, and is not the first such request (although it is the most strongly worded).

It has been described as an "ultimatum", but it really doesn't ask anything of the episcopal church but an unambiguous response to the Windsor report, which December's General Convention failed to give.

Well, the Episcopal bishops met in Camp Allen last week and explicitly rejected the primate's pastoral oversight scheme as being "damaging to their polity" or somesuch.

I suppose I didn't expect good news, but I was still surprised at the strength of the rejection. I have a hard time seeing how there will be any conservative parishes left in the episcopal church a year from now.

This actually makes me sad. To tell the truth, I would sincerely like to stay in the Episcopal church (if the Episcopal Church was a denomination I wouldn't feel like that. But it is part of a global, and largely conservative, Anglican communion). I feel like we are doing a fantastic job of bearing witness to the ancient faith in a dark place. In Blessed Sacrament we have something like 8 people pursuing ordination as priests or deacons. We are incredibly alive, and we have a lot of young children in the parish. And we are not alone - the largest Episcopal parishes are mostly conservative.

I also think that liberal Christianity is incapable of sustaining itself, and will eventually whither of its own accord. In two generations, perhaps, I wouldn't be surprised if there could be a conservative majority again.

Unfortunately, conservative Episcopalians could be extinguished long before we have a chance to win by default, and the leadership of the Episcopal church seems intent on doing exactly that. In fact the persecution seems to have actually increased of late[1]. They seem to be circling the wagons in response to conservative pressure from the worldwide communion.

A few weeks ago, the election of a conservative as bishop of the diocese of South Carolina was ruled null on a technicality. Also recently, the bishop of Colorado removed the conservative priest of the largest church in his diocese. The church has responded by seceding from the Episcopal church and re-aligning with another Anglican province. Why, exactly, would the bishop of Colorado want to alienate his largest church?

The messages sounds clear to me: despite their talk of inclusivity, the leaders of the Episcopal church will not tolerate deviation from the party line. They may tolerate us while they wait for the last conservative bishops (only 3!) and priests to retire, but they have shown no desire whatsoever to support the ordination of new ones.

Which leaves only one option that I can see for those who value the preservation of traditional Anglicanism in their parishes: re-align with overseas provinces in which they will not be persecuted. Several have done this by themselves already, but this crisis has yet to play itself out. We are no forgotten by the Primates, and I'm sure they will provide an officially sanctioned way for orthodox parishes to remain fully Anglican, even if (as seems likely) the Episcopal church is excommunicated.

[1] I need to make a caveat about the bishop of Los Angeles. Bishop Bruno, although squarely in line with the popular liberal thread of the Episcopal church, has shown nothing but unqualified support for Fr. David and Blessed Sacrament. The only reason we have 8 people pursuing ordination is because he has allowed us to. In the past no one from our parish was allowed as a candidate for ordination.

People vary in their estimation of his motives, but Fr. David calls him a true liberal (that is, he is consistent in actually valuing diversity) and that seems most likely to me.

If I could be ensured of this kind of support in the future and across the Episcopal church, I might feel differently. Unfortunately, Bishop Bruno seems to be an exception to the rule.

The Law in the Psalms

2007-03-24T15:49:00.001-07:00

One major interpretive question in the Psalms is how to understand its high view of the law in a Christian context. Take, for instance, Psalm 19:7-9:

The law of the LORD is perfect, converting the soul; the testimony of the LORD is sure, making wise the simple.

The statutes of the LORD are right, rejoicing the heart; the commandment of the LORD is pure, enlightening the eyes.
The fear of the LORD is clean, enduring for ever; the judgments of the LORD are true and righteous altogether.

The feeling toward the law expressed her is so foreign to me that I don't know how I ought to respond to it, or how it is relevant to a time in which the law has been fulfilled in Christ.

Calvin makes some helpful remarks on this point which are worth quoting at length:

But here a question of no small magnitude arises; for Paul seems entirely to overthrow these commendations of the law which David here recites. How can these things agree together: that the law restores the souls of men, while yet it is a dead and deadly letter? That it rejoices men's hearts, and yet, by bringing in the spirit of bondage, strikes them with terror? That it enlightens the eyes, and yet, by casting a veil before our minds, excludes the light which ought to penetrate within? But, in the first place, we must remember... that David does not speak simpy of the precepts of the Moral Law, but comprehends the whole covenant by which God had adopted the descendants of Abraham to be his peculiar people; and, therefore, to the Moral Law - the rule of living well - he joins the free promises of salvation, or rather Christ himself, in whom and upon whom this adoption was founded. But Paul, who had to deal with persons who perverted and abused the law, and separated it from the grace and the Spirit of Christ, refers to the ministry of Moses viewed merely by itself, and according the the letter. It is certain, that if the Spirit of God does not quicken the law, the law is not only unprofitable, but also deadly to its disciples... The design of Paul is to show what the law can do for us, taken by itself... but David, in praising it as he here does, speaks of the whole doctrine of the law, which includes also the gospel, and, therefore, under the law he comprehends Christ.

I don't think I'm willing to follow Calvin all the way here and say that the gospel is included in the law in the Psalmist's usage, but I think the observation that Paul was dealing with a perverted understanding of the law is crucial. I should mention, by the way, that I am not going to consider any interpretations which claim that these verses are simply not relevant to the Christian because the law has been done away with. I have a higher view of the law (and the Psalms) than that.

This is what I think may be going on: A full understanding of the law, which the early Jews possesed, understands that it is not possible to obey the law simply by trying to do it. That Judaism was a life and not a strict adherence to a set of moral and ceremonial laws is made explicit many places: Rend your hearts and not your garments. The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit. Psalm 19:9 even seems to equate the fear of the Lord with the law itself, which I take to be more confirmation that the doing of the law was intimately connected to and founded upon a person's holiness.

In fact the very existence of Hebrew wisdom literature testifies to this. Why did the Hebrews develop wisdom literature? Wouldn't you have expected reams of legal literature instead[1]?

Not if they understood that the only way to please the Lord was to be formed into the sort of person whose obedience flows from his righteousness, and not the other way around.

This is why I can proclaim with David "the statutes of the Lord are right, rejoicing the heart". In doing so I am not swearing fealty to a set of laws as the path to salvation. The law has never been that, and Judaism ay its best recognizes this. In extolling the law alongside the Psalmist, I am declaring both the beauty and perfection of God's unchanging moral decrees and the importance of the character transformation which will allow me to follow them. But unlike David, I can look beyond the law and see in those words He who pefectly fulfilled it. Jesus is a more accurate picture of the moral character of God, and so much more than that. The New Testament infuses the phrase "the statutes of the Lord are right, rejoicing the heart" with meaning far beyond anything dreamed of by David. As the author of Hebrews tells us, "all these [holy men of old], having gained approval through their faith, did not receive what was promised, because God had provided something better for us, so that apart from us they would not be made perfect."

[1] Of course, they did produce this legal literature later. But it was not their immediate response to the law.

Reflections on the Psalms

2007-03-18T22:43:00.001-07:00

As it turns out, the Psalms are hard to write about. I find them easier to just soak in than study, although I've run across several passages that could certainly benefit from study.

One benefit that I've discovered of "soaking" in the Psalms is that I start to pray like the Psalms. They are such a comprehensive expression of human experience that they really need no updating. Who hasn't cried out to God in pain, asked where He was in a trial, praised Him joyfully in abundant blessing? The Psalms assure you that these are not novel experiences, but a normal part of the life of God's people.

A few highlights which I have found especially helpful:

90:12-17:

So teach us to number our days, that we may get a heart of wisdom.
Return, O Lord! How long? Have pity on your servants!
Satisfy us in the morning with your steadfast love, that we may rejoice and be glad all our days.
Make us glad for as many days as you have afflicted us, and for as many years as we have seen evil.
Let your work be shown to you servants, and your glorious power to their children.
Let the favor of the Lord our God be upon us, and establish the work of our hands upon us; yes, establish the work of our hands!

I'm not sure exactly what to do with it, but I think that the entirety of Psalm 90 merits some very close study. One thing that makes it hard (for me) to study the Psalms is that many of them seem disjointed, jumping from one topic to another with nary a word by way of transition. Psalm 90 is not like that. It is very thematic, dealing with the passage of time: how we experience it and how God does, how it is a gift and how we ought to use it wisely. I get the feeling that there is a lot there, lurking under the surface. Teach us to number our days, that we may get a heart of wisdom. I don't know what that means, but I want to.

127:

Unless the Lord build the house, those who build it labor in vain.
Unless the Lord watches over the city, the watchman stays awake in vain.
It is in vain that you rise up early and go late to rest, eating the bread of anxious toil; for he gives to his beloved sleep.
Behold, children are a heritage from the Lord, the fruit of the womb a reward.
Like arrows in the hand of a warrior are the children of one's youth.
Blessed is the man who fills his quiver with them!
He shall not be put to shame when he speaks with his enemies in the gate.

This is a famous Psalm, and I was already aware of most of its contents. But I didn't quite realize how it cohered. The first three verses can be applied to just about anything, but I think that in the context of the latter verses it is speaking metaphorically of the work of building a home. Unless the Lord build my family and watch over it, I labor in vain. I know this, of course, but Pelagianism is a pernicious heresy. I often catch myself sucumbing to it even when I know better.

This verse also really struck the overworked student in me: It is in vain that you rise up early and go late to rest, eating the bread of anxious toil; for he gives to his beloved sleep. If the Bible is the word of God, then this is really true. Test it. Lay your workload at the feet of Jesus and go to bed. God giveth the increase, not your effort - no matter how many hours you work. Unless the Lord do the homework, they labor in vain who caffeinate themselves.

73:3-5, 16-19:

For I was envious of the arrogant when I saw the prosperity of the wicked.
For they have no pangs until death; their bodies are fat and sleek.
They are not in trouble as others are; they are no stricken like the rest of mankind....
But when I thought how to understand this, it seemed to me a wearisome task,
Until I went into the Sanctuary of God; then I discerned their end.
Truly you set them in slippery places; you make them fall to ruin.
How they are destroyed in a moment, swept away utterly by terrors!

This Psalm is fascinating as a window into the author's outlook and how it changes in "the Sanctuary of God." I think I can hear a hint of a reference to the afterlife in the final end of the wicked. The author is looking with different eyes when in the house of God. He does not just remember calamities that he had forgotten before. He understands what it means to live well in a different way - a way that is, I think, less focussed on the external metrics of worldly success and more on what it means to be truly, fully satisfied.

Our Place in the Anglican Communion: The Community We Share

2007-03-07T23:37:00.001-08:00

Blessed Sacrament is an incredibly special place. I don't think I quite realized how much our community means to the older members of our parish. But after the first meeting of our discernment committee, I have a better idea.

Many have been Episcopalean all of their lives, and have been forced to move from parish to parish several times as they became increasingly liberal. Blessed Sacrament is not just a home for them - it is a refuge that has taken many years to find.

As for myself, Blessed Sacrament is the best place I can imagine for raising a young family. I suspect there are few other places that are so welcoming and supportive of us. It is an oasis of life in a culture of death.

In addition to our love of the community we have found, everyone on the committee loves the Church and the apostolic faith that has been handed down to us. I don't know what will happen, but I have to believe that we are going to be ok. As Jessica told me last week, "my prayer is that, at the end of all this, we end up together and still in the Anglican communion". Amen.

Our place in the Anglican Communion: Background

2007-02-25T15:59:00.003-08:00

The question of how to respond to the increasing disregard for the historic Christian faith in the Episcopal Church has been on a lot of minds lately at my parish, Blessed Sacrament. Some think it might be time for them to leave. Some are committed to staying.

For my part, however, I hadn't (until now) spent a lot of time trying to decide whether it would be best to stay or go. I find both arguments persuasive, in their way. I could fully support a decision to stay and cause such a holy ruckus that they are forced to kick us out or convert. On the other hand, I could see expressing my zeal for the truth of the gospel by separating myself from a body which has shown such egregious disregard for it.

I never really felt the need to decide between the two. Fr. David is, as his title implies, the spiritual father of our parish. And, as a good Anglican I was content to submit to his authority in this matter. So long as he manifests a clear commitment to orthodoxy (and he does), it would take quite a lot to convince me of the necessity of making my own decision.

Up until quite recently Fr. David had never given any indication that we would do anything but stay. That changed after last year's general convention (which largely ignored the Anglican Communion's request that TEC (the Episcopal Church) repent of electing an openly gay bishop and stop blessing same-sex marriages). When Emily emailed him about the outcome of general convention, he responded that whatever we did, we would not act alone. While he hasn't fundamentally changed his position (you don't change the faith, and you don't break the church) I think he feels that some action may be required to stay in the church, as TEC is walking away from it and may very well be kicked out of the Anglican communion.

Also rather surprising to me was his announcement that he was forming a discernment committee to investigate what, if anything, Blessed Sacrament should do in response. In retrospect I think it was a very wise decision, but it did kind of shatter my plan to just following his leadership :-).

At any rate, I signed up for the discernment committee and am excited about serving on it. These are very formative times for the Anglican communion, and while the big decisions are completely out of my hands it is still nice to be able to participate in a small part of the global discussion.

A Tithe of Days

2007-02-21T22:23:00.001-08:00

A besetting problem of mine is that I am just interested in a whole lot of things and I have very little time to spend on any of them (Lent always seems to bring this tension in my life to the fore. See this post from last year on the same topic). Despite the fact that they are all worthwhile, I've found a need to accept the fact that I can't do everything, and ruthlessly simplify. For example, I've long since stopped pretending to be a philosopher. But lately just about everything else has been pushed aside for one of my loves.

I spend most of my time now thinking, reading, and occasionally writing about the intersection of computer science and biology (it's much bigger than you think) and the relationship of science to Christianity. I have an application in to the PhD program at UCI, and am finding myself more and more focused on academia and preparing myself for doctoral work than on anything else. It will honestly be very disappointing if I'm not accepted, and I am probably orienting myself in that direction more than is entirely wise for someone not yet formally admitted to a program.

Nevertheless, I think everything that I am doing is eminently worthwhile. It has, however, meant the atrophy of one of my other loves: theology. Looking back at the archives on this blog gives me a sense of loss. My thoughts do not frequently turn in those circles anymore.

Which brings me to Lent: because I spend a fair amount of time studying, and very little time studying the Bible specifically, last year I devoted the 40 days of Lent just to Mark's gospel. I read it several times, consulted commentaries, and took copious notes. It was such a positive experience that I decided to make it a regular Lenten discipline to immerse myself in a book of the Bible. This year it is the Psalms.

It seems especially appropriate this year, as I find myself so far from theology. In fact I have another theology-related commitment this Lent (and beyond): I am serving on a discernment committee at Blessed Sacrament charged with charting a course for Blessed Sacrament's response to the increasing liberalism within the Episcopal Church. But more on that in another post.

So this Lent I'm setting aside science and coming back to theology. A few days ago I realized that Lent is 40 days long, which is just over 10% of a year. This is probably a coincidence, but I still find the analogy to tithe compelling because that is how I see my lenten focus: as a sacrifice of time specifically to God, not because what I do with the rest of it is not worthwhile but because it is necessary to give some things directly to God anyhow.

Thomas Nathanael Moothart

2007-02-21T12:08:00.001-08:00

Our second son was born Saturday, Feb. 10 at midnight-30 in Whittier Presbyterian hospital, weighing a healthy 7 lbs. 11 oz.

The birth story is long, convoluted, and more stressful than anyone's ought to be. Either Emily or I will get around to posting it sometime soon. For now the best source of new pictures and information on Thomas is at her blog. But here are a few that I have on hand:

Christianity: As large as life

2006-12-05T10:38:00.001-08:00

It [Christianity] is not a philosophy because, being a vision, it is not a pattern but a picture. It is not one of those simplifications which resolve everything into an abstract explanation; as that everything is recurrent; or everything is relative; or everything is inevitable; or everything is illusive. It is not a process but a story. It has proportions, of the sort seen in a picture or a story; it has not the regular repetitions of a pattern or a process; but it replaces them by being convincing as a picture or a story is convincing. In other words, it is exactly, as the phrase goes, like life. For indeed it is life.

G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man

How Long?

2006-11-03T17:38:00.001-08:00

Reading Chesterton and Dostoyevsky really makes me realize how little has changed in the past few hundred years. What they have to say is almost as relevant today as it was when it was written. The modernism that Chesterton opposed has been somewhat battered by postmodernity, but the faith that science and materialism will lead us into all truth is alive and well. Communism has come and gone, but the secularism that Dostoyevsky feared and which so devastated Russia is still with us.

Isn't it time for secularism to move along? I'm not sure what will replace it, and whatever does will probably not be any friendlier to Christianity. Still, though, it seems like it's about time for something new.

In the meantime, however, I am enjoying the fact that we stand on the shoulders of giants - there is a few centuries worth of Christian thought that speak directly to the issues we now face.

The Historicity of Jesus

2006-10-30T21:51:00.001-08:00

Recently, I ran across the God who wasn't there, a "documentary" claiming to prove that Jesus never existed.

This idea is way outside the mainstream of historical scholarship. Even most of the liberal, Jesus-seminar types take for granted that Jesus was a historical figure. In fact, the point is so established that I'm tempted to think there's no reason to spend any time defending it.

However, there are still apparently people who question it, and it couldn't hurt to compile the evidence for possible future use.

As far as I know, the historical sources which support Jesus' existence are the four Gospels, Paul's letters (I Corinthians in particular), the Jewish historian Josephus, and the Roman historian Tacitus. Let's examine them one at a time:

1) Tacitus
In The Annals of Imperial Rome (early second century), Tacitus gives Christians a passing mention, commenting that they are a Jewish sect who follow a teacher that Pontias Pilate crucified. Tacitus considers Christianity harmful to Rome and he gives them a slightly sympathetic treatment only because he hated Nero even more, and nobody deserves to be burned alive just for sport. It is unlikely that Tacitus was relying solely on Christian accounts about a specific execution in a specific place at a specific time. If there was no other reason to think it was true, he would not have reported it uncritically and mater-of-factly, as he does.

2) Josephus
The Jewish historian Josephus mentions Jesus twice in his work Antiquities of the Jews (late first century). Although there is some debate over the authenticity of one of the passages, it is clear that Josephus viewed Jesus as a historical figure.

3) The Apostle Paul
Paul's letters represent the earliest extant references to Jesus, at least according to mainstream contemporary dating. Paul clearly believed that Jesus was a real, historical figure. He refers for instance to "the man Christ Jesus", and "all the fullness of deity dwelling in bodily form". I Cor. 15:3-7 is poetic in structure, and it is generally agreed that Paul is quoting an early creed of sorts, attesting that Christian belief in the death and resurrection of Jesus dates to the earliest times. Since I Corinthians was written in the mid to late 50's, this dates this early creed to less than 20 years from the time of Jesus' death.

4) The Gospels
Mark is generally considered the earliest of the gospels. The latest date scholars suggest for it is the early 70's, 40 years after Christ's execution. It is well established that Mark is acting as an editor, drawing on earlier material to create his gospel. According to tradition, Mark is compiling Peter's memoirs. I think this is unlikely on textual grounds, but at any rate he is drawing much of his material from pre-existing sources.

The trailer for the God who wasn't there quotes someone to the effect that Mark was making a symbolic point and probably didn't believe that Jesus was a historical figure. This is utter nonsense and, again, way outside the mainstream. In the last 30 or 40 years, there's been a renewal in Markan scholarship as people realized that Mark wasn't simply acting as a dumb editor, throwing previous sources together in a more or less haphazard way, but was extremely careful and thorough in the way he composes his material. He had a definite theological agenda in mind, and it shows. I suppose this is what the movie is referring to when it says Mark's point was "symbolic". But this in no way suggests that he didn't think Jesus was a historical figure, and it certainly doesn't mean that Mark's sources from less than four decades after Christ's death were composed as myth rather than history.

If you are making a theological point by re-telling an existing myth, you choose as your subject Zeus or Achilles or some other well-established figure. You do not choose a person who died 40 years ago, because a person who died 40 years ago is not a myth. In fact there are still people walking around who can testify to the fact that your story is a bunch of hooey because they were there at the time.

On the other synoptics: Matthew and Luke were written after Mark, and use his material as the basis for some of their material. However, there are several respects in which Matthew and Luke agree with each other on material not found in Mark. The standard way to resolve this is to posit a second source (call it 'Q'), which Matthew and Luke had access to, but Mark did not. This would be another relatively early source about the life of Jesus.

Furthermore, even when Matthew and Luke follow Mark's account, they occasionally differ from him on minor details. The most obvious way to interpret this is to assume that Matthew and Luke believed they had additional information about the event which was not available to Mark himself. This attention to detail powerfully suggests that they are writing history.

One last point: Matthew occasionally makes reference to contemporary facts which his readers are presumably aware of. In 27:8, he explains that the field Judas hung himself in is called the field of blood "to this day", and in 28:14-15 he explains the origin of the "disciples stole the body" explanation for the resurrection, which "has been spread among the Jews to this day". These are not the kind of specific, easily falsifiable historical facts that you put in your gospel if you are not writing a history.

I don't have any special comments about John's gospel, except to say that it is yet another (late first century) testimony to Jesus' existence.

So there are several independent sources (Paul, Mark, Q, Tacitus, Josephus) which confirm the historicity of Jesus, some of which contain material that dates to within a few decades of Jesus' death in the 30's. If this is not convincing historical evidence, than nothing is.

In order to affirm the non-existence of Jesus, it is necessary to assume that, around A.D. 40-50 (remember, by the late 50's Paul was converted and quoting an early creed), some disgruntled Jews got together and decided to invent a teacher who was supposedly crucified publicly in a specific place by a few specific people just 10 or 20 years prior, and these disgruntled Jews managed to not only survive but flourish in Jerusalem, the very city in which this mythical teacher was supposedly crucified, in which almost everyone over 30 could easily testify to the falsity of the story, and in which several of the historical figures who supposedly played a part would still have been alive. Over the next few decades, several stories and primary documents about this fabricated teacher emerged and were consolidated in the writings of Paul and the gospels that we have today. Despite the fact that the founders and (one must assume) a great deal of the early followers knew Jesus had never existed, they were willing to endure the early Jewish persecution and Nero's later (A.D. 60's) persecution, in some cases choosing to be burned alive and eaten by wild animals rather than renounce their faith in an imaginary savior.

Despite the alarming ease with which this story could have been shown to be false, the Christians also managed to hoodwink even non-Christian historians like Josephus and Tacitus into thinking that Jesus actually existed. This stretches the bounds of credibility.

I could go on, but I think you get the point. I'll close with a quotation from St. Augustine's City of God:

It is incredible that Jesus Christ should have risen in the flesh and ascended with flesh into heaven; it is incredible that the world should have believed so incredible a thing; it is incredible that a very few men, of mean birth and the lowest rank, and no education, should have been able so effectually to persuade the world, and even its learned men, of so incredible a thing. Of these three incredibles, the parties with whom we are debating refuse to believe the first; they cannot refuse to believe the second, which they are unable to account for if they do no believe the third.

Jesus was Smart

2006-09-17T21:26:00.000-07:00

I'm re-reading Dallas Willard's The Divine Conspiracy, and Emily and I just finished Proverbs together. Reading the two concurrently was enlightening, because they both share a central theme: the intelligence of holiness.

One of Willard's most striking observations is that Jesus is usually not thought of as smart, even by Christians. They would not explicitly deny it, of course, but intelligence is not a characteristic typically associated with him. Just a moment of reflection, however, ought to convince you that this is a vital prerequisite to discipleship. As Willard puts it:

Our commitment to Jesus can stand on no other foundation than a recognition that he is the one who knows the truth about our lives and our universe. It is not possible to trust Jesus, or anyone else, in matters where we do not believe him to be competent.

and

The world has succeeded in opposing intelligence to goodness.... And today any attempt to combine spirituality or moral purity with great intelligence causes widespread pangs of "cognitive dissonance." Mother Theresa, no more than Jesus, is thought of as smart - nice, of course, but not really smart. "Smart" means good at managing how life "really." is.

The bulk of The Divine Conspiracy is an exposition of the sermon on the mount from this perspective: it is instruction on how to live in the kingdom of God (which is the smartest way to live) from the one who knows it best. One example of many is Willard's remarks on the passage about laying up treasures in heaven (Matt. 6:19-34):

The first thing that Jesus tells us with respect to treasures is that to treasure things that are "upon the earth" is not a smart strategy for treasuring. Treasures of the earth, by their very nature, simply cannot be held intact.... So the wisdom of Jesus is that we should "lay up for ourselves treasures in heaven" ([Matt.] 6:20), where forces of nature and human evil cannot harm what we treasure.

and a few pages later:

But of course if we do value "mammon" as normal people seem to think we should, our fate is fixed. Our fate is anxiety.

Emily and I used to have a neighbor with a very nice truck. One day, we walked out to our car to see a note on the windshield. Apparently we had parked too close to his truck and he was afraid we might accidentally ding his $3,000 paint job. After that we were careful to park far enough away so that it was not even possible to hit his truck by opening the car doors, but even so he started placing a pvc contraption next to his truck in order to protect it from us. He moved a little while later, in part because he wanted a private garage for his truck. I can't help but think that, however much he liked his really nice truck, it just wasn't worth the anxiety it caused him. Wouldn't he be happier in an old, beat-up Ford pickup?

Laying up your treasures on earth, where they might be taken from you (or you from them) at any moment, is not smart. Wouldn't it be fantastic if there was a way to be certain that the things you value are absolutely secure, that you do not need to worry about losing them because they cannot be lost? Well, there is! Follow the advice of Jesus and re-orient your life to value eternal rather than temporal things.

To a large extent, the theme of Proverbs is the same as Jesus' advice for living in the sermon on the mount. The Proverbs are practical instructions for living well, and if you read them with that in mind (rather than with the assumption that they are concerned with "holiness" or "wisdom" as esoteric concepts not connected to real life) you'll be surprised at how smart they are.

The principles of Christianity are not arbitrary rules for what you must do to be acceptable to God. They are instructions on how to live a holy life, which is the best way to live by all the standards that matter. This is not an unverifiable statement which Christians must simply accept. We are invited to test Jesus' teachings. If he really is smart, and if what he says is true, then we will never look back.

2006-09-05T20:05:00.000-07:00

The narrow gate is not, as so often assumed, doctrinal correctness. The narrow gate is obedience - and the confidence in Jesus necessary to it. We can see that it is not doctrinal correctness because many people who cannot even understand the correct doctrines nevertheless place their full faith in him. Moreover, we find many pople who seem to be very correct doctrinally bur have hearts full of hatred and unforgiveness. The broad gate, by contrast, is simply doing whatever I want to do.
-Dallas Willard, The Divine Conspiracy

Proverbs and the Internet

2006-08-29T09:59:00.000-07:00

Last night, Emily and I came across this Bible verse in our reading:

When a wise man has a controversy with a foolish man, the foolish man either rages or laughs, and there is no rest. (Proverbs 29:9)

It struck me that this is a fantastically accurate description of the internet - only the wise-to-fool ratio on the internet is really low. If you spend any time at all following exchanges on blogs, message boards, etc., you find a whole lot of anger and laughing and no rest. These are the standard responses in debates about any highly-charged issue: either the respondent gets really angry at a particular argument, or they simply laugh it off as undeserving of serious consideration. It just goes to show that human nature doesn't change, and the wisdom of Solomon is as relevant today as it was when it was written.

The God Who Answers by Fire, He is God

2006-08-28T13:37:00.000-07:00

A month or so ago, the sermon at church was given by a new assisting priest at Blessed Sacrament, Fr. Fox. It was fantastic. Apparently this guy has spent most of his life thinking about science and religion, and fighting liberalism in the episcopal church.

Most of the sermon focused on the harmony of science and Christianity, grounded in the fact that God is a God of truth. One of his primary examples was the showdown on Mt. Carmel between Elijah and the prophets of Baal, in which Elijah proposes a test:

Let two bulls be given us, and let them [the prophets of Baal] choose one bull for themselves, and cut it in pieces and lay it on the wood, but put no fire to it. And I will prepare the other bull and lay it on the wood and put no fire to it. And you call upon the name of your god, and I will call upon the name of the Lord, and the God who answers by fire, he is God. (I Kings 18:23-24a)

That is an experiment. Elijah is designing a test for his hypothesis (the Lord is God, Ball is made out of wood) and making a prediction. The message, Fr. Fox said, is that God is a God of truth. He isn't afraid to be tested and we shouldn't be afraid to test what He says.

While there are plenty of examples of God offering this sort of empirical proof (c.f. Gideon, Thomas), however, it seems to not be how he prefers to operate. Most of the examples involve God giving proof to stubborn people who ought not have needed it. John's gospel speaks disparagingly of those who follow Jesus because of the miracles He does, and seems to imply that those who believe because of His words have a greater faith. And then there is the parable about Lazarus and the rich man, in which Abraham says "If they did not listed to the law and the prophets, they will not believe even if someone rises from the dead." Apparently unbelief is so strong that it resists even empirical evidence. Nevertheless, there seem to be some some people that need it. And God, in his grace, condescends to them.

There is one respect, incidentally, in which the evidence God offers is not properly "scientific": it is not repeatable. If you go out to a field and make two piles of rocks, you are not likely to get Elijah's results. This undercuts one of the greatest perceived strengths of science: the fact that you don't have to take anyone's word for it. You can just run the experiment for yourself. Not so with God. I think this is partly because His miracles are specifically for the people to whom they are given. And, at any rate, what would happen if they were repeatable? We would study them, and as the detail in which we could describe them increased, we would flatter ourselves that we understood them. And we would call them Law - axiomatic features of the world that can have and need no explanation, divine or otherwise.

The Decline of Liberal Christianity

2006-07-13T08:13:00.000-07:00

Liberal Christianity is paying for its sins

This opinion piece (from, astonishingly, the L.A. Times) is hard-hitting and spot-on about the demographic problems facing the mainline protestant denominations. It turns out that (gasp!) if you reject the exclusivity of Christ and preach a social gospel, you can't provide any compelling reasons to actually be a Christian and no one wants to go to your church.

Divorce among Christians

2006-07-08T15:06:00.000-07:00

This morning I had breakfast with a group of men from my church. The discussion was lively and fun, but one thing that stuck out to me is that 3 of the men had been divorced - in each case, their wives had left them against their will.

This is a common theme in the divorce cases of which I am personally aware. A lot of times (though not always), the man is in ministry and doesn't even know there is a problem until too late. Between us, Emily and I could only think of one case of Christian divorce among people we know in which the husband divorced the wife.

Now, my sample size is relatively limited so it could be that this isn't the norm in Christian divorce (what is your experience? Similar or different than mine?), and I am certainly not suggesting that the husbands in these failed marriages are not partly responsible for the divorce - I am sure they made lots of mistakes and missed lots of warning signs. But that doesn't make it any less disconcerting that they felt so blindsided.

I'm extremely lucky to be married to someone so straightforward that it is practically unthinkable that she would hold a problem inside and let it fester.. but this seems to have happened to a lot of the men I know. Why?

I talked with Emily, and we came up with a few tentative explanations. When men leave their wives, it is usually for an overtly evil reason like another woman (I think - this is another of my statistically insignificant observations). It is hard to justify that at all in Christian circles. Men tend to be rather stoic, and all of the men I know (I think and hope) would have no sympathy whatsoever for a man who did this, regardless of the circumstances.

On the other hand, a woman who divorces her husband because her emotional needs are not being met (or because her spouse feels distant and unloving) seems to have a less evil motivation. Emily thinks that even in the church it would not be hard to find women who would, if not condone the divorce, at least be sympathetic and not condemn it. She also tells me that a hobby among married women is to get together and complain about their husbands, which might provide some emotional support (though not explicit consent) for a woman considering divorce. Conversely, among the men I hang out with the failings of each other's wives is simply not a normal topic of conversation.

I really don't mean to beat up on women... I'm just trying to explain the patterns I see in Christian divorce, so that I can both avoid them and (God forbid) help any friends who might go through it. If you disagree with my analysis or have thoughts of your own, please share them!

Darkness in Art

2006-06-29T20:50:00.000-07:00

I finished Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground recently. It was good, as all of Dostoevsky's books are, but it was also a downer. Spending 130 pages inside the mind of a sick, wicked man is mildly depressing.

Whenever I finish one of Dostoevsky's books, I involuntarily ask myself if it was worth it. They are always well-written, compelling, and deeply Christian. But they are also invariably dark. I'm not sure whether the former qualities justify the latter.

I would love to think they do. Dostoevsky is one of my favorite authors, and the darkness always has a purpose in his novels. Sometimes it is redeemed or overcome in the end (as in The Brothers Karamazov and Crime and Punishment), and Dostoevsky is also good at writing hope and redemption. But usually you have to make it through a clear look at deep, deep depravity to get there.

Dostoevsky is fantastically good (too good?) at writing evil convincingly[1]. I think I'm afraid that I enjoy being drawn into the dark worlds he creates a little too much. What do you think? What amount of darkness is it healthy for our souls to digest? Is it ok as long as it serves a larger point? As long as it is redeemed?

[1] Dostoevsky, by the way, was aware of the problem that writing evil well is so much easier than writing good. The Idiot is his attempt to over come this by writing a wholly good character.

Episcopal Trouble

2006-06-21T07:43:00.000-07:00

http://www.livingchurch.org/publishertlc/viewarticle.asp?ID=2195
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/5100640.stm

The vast majority of Anglicans have not accepted the concept of the ordination of women as bishops and the vast majority of Catholic Christians around the world don’t accept women’s holy orders at all. To think that she is going to educate people on what the Catholic Church has believed for over 2000 years is feminist hysterics.

-Jack L. Iker, Bishop of Fort Worth, on the election of Katharine Schori as Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church.

The Episcopal Church has essentially refused correction over the ordaining-a-homosexual-bishop issue. This is the latest in a long line of actions in defiance of the beliefs and practices of the worldwide Anglican communion. And this may be the one that gets us kicked out (to be honest, I really hope so). After Gene Robinson was ordained, there was a lot of caution. A few rogue parishes pulled out (thereby immersing their congregations in protracted legal disputes over the church property), but the general conservative consensus was, "wait and see." The Anglican church put together a comittee to examine the issue, and they produced the Windsor report, calling the Episcopal church to repent and not ordain any more homosexual bishops.

But we had to wait until now (the next general convention) to see how the Episcopal church would respond. They did so by electing a woman as their presiding bishop and voting down a resolution promising not to ordain any more homosexual bishops.

I think this act of defiance was the last straw for a lot of people. Entire dioceses now want out, and it seems very possible that the Anglican communion will excomunicate the Episcopal Church. Lord, have mercy on us.

It's times like this that make me wish I was Catholic. Of course, there are plenty of conservative protestant denominations... but the mainline churches used to be conservative, too. What I wouldn't give sometimes for the rock of the Catholic magisterium.

This is how we do it in Turlock

2006-06-08T10:30:00.000-07:00

Doug Tennapel's graphic novel Creature Tech is entertaining and unique. I've just read through it (twice) and I'm pretty impressed. This man has the wildest imagination you could possibly imagine. Somehow, though, you don't quite notice how wild the story is while you're reading it. I think this is because the wildness isn't random. Tennapel is not just weaving a whimsical tale about space eels and parasitic alien life forms and a mad scientist who sells his soul to the devil. He is telling a story about faith and a man's journey from naturalism to Christianity. And, somehow, the space eels and alien parasites and mad scientist fit so perfectly into that story that you don't notice how crazy it all is. Until you try to explain the story to someone else. My explanation to Emily of a scene I liked went something like this: "So, this mad scientist has unleashed a bunch of demon-cats on Turlock, and a couple of local hicks are driving around in a truck with a giant mantis killing them. One of the locals pulls out a shotgun and says 'Time to excercise my second-ammendment rights. This is how we do it in Turlock' as he blows a hole through one of the cats." Needless to say, Emily is unconvinced by my claims that there is actually anything serious going on amid all the craziness.

But there is. Creature Tech is the story of Dr. Michael Ong, a genius who dropped out of seminary and became a world-class scientist, relocated by the government to an X-Files-like institute (nicknamed Creature Tech by the locals) in his out-of-the-way hometown of Turlock, CA. When the ghost of an english scientist named Jameson steals the Shroud of Turon from Creature Tech and uses it to resurect his corpse, Michael sets out to stop him from... well, if I told you I think you would stop taking me seriously. Along the way he falls in love with a deformed girl he used to make fun of in high school, picks up a symbiotic alien organism which attaches itself to his chest, and finds himself drawn back to the religion he rejected as a teenager.

Creature Tech can be a little preachy at times, and there are a few moments when the dialog feels forced, which is unfortunate because religion is so integral to the story that I can't help but think it could have been written more naturally. Nevertheless, on the whole Michael's journey to faith is subtle and, if anything, understated. Usually Tennapel lets his art to do the talking, to good effect.

The graphic novel is not exactly the highest art form known to man, so if your literature standards are high don't expect a masterpiece. The characters are interesting and likeably, but not especially deep. Do expect an entertaining, funny, bizzare, and deeply Christian journey through the imagination of Doug Tennapel.

Limmericks

2006-06-04T21:30:00.000-07:00

Just for fun, here are a few of Sheldon Vanauken's limmericks:

On his frustration with students who only cared about getting a degree:

He believed that degrees were essentia,
So he entered the realm of scientia,
But the books proved arcane
And, discov'ring no brain,
They conferred his degree in absentia.

On his opinion of the 1976 revision of the Prayer Book:

There were some old clerks who said, "Oh!
The Prayerbook's a bore and must go:
For the spirit of prayer
As to fun can't compare
With our NEW 'church variety show'."

On his aversion to the desecration of the English language by certain feminists:

Her unisex temper would worsen
If as chairman she wasn't 'chairperson':
She required that we ban
Those damned suffixes, 'man'-
So now she's become a woperson.

The Future and the Fatherhood of God

2006-06-02T13:20:00.000-07:00

I'll be finishing up my Master's in Computer Science at UCI in the Fall. This was a little unexpected. I had thought it would be another quarter or two, because a few required classes hadn't been offered yet. But it turns out that I can substitute them rather than waiting around to take them.

Strangely enough, the realization was a little scary. The post-Masters stage of my life is just around the corner, and I have to decide, well, what I'm going to do. Beg Google to hire me, pick up, and move to Mountan View? Stay on at my current job for a while? Look for work closer to home? Stay at UCI and get a PhD?

I've known for quite a while that, if I could, I'd stay for the PhD. The problem is that there's really no obvious way to pay for it. PhD students have their tuition and fees paid by the university, and get a monthly stipend. But the stipend is just barely enough for one person to live on. It is certainly not enough to support a family on. So I hadn't thought much about it. After all, my options were: 1) stay at my current well-paying job; 2) find another well-paying job; 3) quit my job and work for next to nothing for the priveledge of earning a degree which will also, by the way, overqualify me for future jobs.

Nevertheless, it was never quite out of my mind. So, one evening a few weeks ago, I asked Emily what she would think about me getting a PhD - provided we could find a way to pay for it. Rather than saying "you are nuts!", she immediately started budgeting. By the end of the evening we had figured that, given what we had in savings plus my stipend plus a little bit of magic, we could get by for almost two years - and with my coursework out of the way, a PhD in two years is doable.

I don't exactly have a word from the Lord on this - that is, I'm not hearing "get a PhD" loud and clear. But it does seem like the last 8 years or so of my life have been pointing in that direction. In high school I was really interested in biology and computer science... and I'm still really interested in biology and computer science. Plus, Emily feels like it might be what we're supposed to do, too. At any rate, none of my other options have the same appeal (though Google would be pretty cool), and they would be temporary anyway. As much as I love developing software, it is not something I want to do full-time in the long term. So taking another development job would just be defering my questions, not answering them.

Emily and I are trying to look into the future, and not seeing very far. I'll be finishing the Masters this fall, then starting the PhD in the fall of '07 (assuming UCI re-admits me). After the PhD, then what? A postdoc maybe. And then? I have some vague ideas, but nothing concrete. And how exactly are we going to put food on the table again? It feels disturbing, scary, and insecure. But... I think that is ok. Since Emily and I had Jonathan, I've come to see the church more as a family than I had before. I'm relating to God more as a son to a father, and less as a servant to his lord (which used to be my primary metaphor). And the fatherhood of God for his children has profound implications. In George MacDonald's At the Back of the North Wind, the main character Diamond once wanders into a bad part of town. Just as he is about to be robbed, a policeman shows up and saves him. "You should be more careful", the policeman warns. "What if I hadn't been here?" "But you were", Diamond replies.

This is how children operate. They simply expect to be taken care of. Children never worry about what they are going to eat or wear or where they are going to sleep. They just expect to be provided for. And they are.

This is what understanding the Fatherhood of God means, I think. It means expecting to be provided for. It means doing things that would be foolish if you are the only one looking out for yourself. It means depending on events that seem contingent and uncertain to the rest of the world. It means listening to the words of Jesus:

Therefore do not be anxious, saying, 'What shall we eat?' or 'What shall we drink?' or 'What shall we wear?' For the Gentiles seek after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them all. But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you.

Modern Ecumenism IV: Ecumenical or Wishy-washy?

2006-05-29T20:11:00.000-07:00

Despite the fact that I think a person's life is the best indicator of his Christianity, I realize that it is a really easy position to distort by relegating all doctrine to second-class status. It is possible to be ecumenical for all the wrong reasons, and any ecumenism which ignores or minimizes doctrine as unimportant is seriously flawed. In fact, there is a whole lot of that going on now. Several months ago, I was trying to explain the emergent church to Emily. In part of my explanation, I said “they're more tolerant of Catholicism than traditional protestants.” “So,” Emily asked, “does that make them ecumenical or wishy-washy?”

It's a good question, and one that has to be asked. I've been hearing quite a bit from the Emergent church and certain corners of evangelicalism that doctrine is essentially reducible to a person's subjective and fallible interpretation of the Bible, and it is for that reason relatively unimportant how you happen to interpret certain Biblical passages, as long as you “love Jesus”. This is not what I am suggesting, and it is not what Jesus taught. He doesn't tell the Pharisees “Oh well, so you misinterpreted the law. No big deal, it's hard to understand anyway”. On the contrary, “Have you not read...” is a common refrain of His. Jesus does not simply invoke divine authority when confronting the pharisees, he argues with them from the scriptures – sometimes expressing surprise that they could call themselves experts in the Law and be so mistaken about it.

Nevertheless, this indifference toward doctrine is fairly popular. It owes its inspiration less to the Bible than to the Zeitgeist, the Spirit of the Age. The spirit of the age, influenced heavily by Postmodernism, values narratives, community and conversation over propositions and any sort of didactic truth claims. It is very tentative, preferring to express thoughts merely as personal belief, and is quick to admit the validity of other points of view. This is why some evangelicals think doctrine is not that important for the same reason the average person on the street thinks no one religion could possibly contain all truth: there is just so much disagreement about it. Both are, to varying degrees, merely expressing the Spirit of the Age.

On the other hand, there are a lot of things which are good in the emergent/postmodern approach to Christianity. The emphasis on community and on the narrative structure of much of divine revelation is welcome. Postmodernism also serves to temper certainty about doctrinal distinctives. This can be a good thing or a bad thing depending on the extent to which it is taken. It is certainly detrimental when it is used as an excuse to discount doctrinal truth as relative and irrelevant – it is hardly likely that God would provide us with revelation and remain indifferent as to how we interpret it.

But I think there is another way which appreciates the postmodern caution about certainty without reducing everything to subjective opinion. This middle way softens rather than destroys. It keeps the doctrinal distinctives uncompromising and fierce, but prefers to see the Church as those persons whose lives exhibit fierce devotion to Jesus Christ rather than as those persons who have signed a particular statement of faith.

The Protomen

2006-04-30T13:25:00.000-07:00

I have just discovered the coolest thing ever: a Mega Man rock opera by The Protomen. Don't laugh. This is not some lighthearted, silly homage to an old 8-bit video game. It is a serious project with a serious message. While the world in which The Protomen immerse us is obviously indebted to and based on the Mega Man universe, it is not a slave to it. It is a world with pain, fear, doubt, and failure. It is a world that does not follow the neat good-triumphs-in-the-final-cut-scene formula of the video games. This is a much darker, more complex Mega Man.

The opening scene shows us an apocalyptic world in which Dr. Wily and his army of robots rule over the oppressed mass of humanity. Dr. Light, alone in a run-down apartment, labors to create a machine capable of overthrowing Dr. Wily's robots and freeing humanity – thus is Proto Man born. The men of the city rally around Proto Man as he marches toward Wily's fortress, but merely watch as he stands alone against the army of robots. Proto Man fights well, but is overwhelmed in the end and defeated:

The crowd had gathered there to watch him fall, to watch their hopes destroyed. They watched them beat him, they watched them break him, they watched his last defense deployed. There was not a man among them who would let himself be heard. But from the crowd, from the collective fear, arose these broken words: We are the dead.

This is the world into which Mega Man is born. A disillusioned Dr. Light tells him of the failure of his brother, and warns him against making the same mistake: Though it's something that you may not understand – they can't be saved by just one man. These words of Dr. Light's express a major theme of the album: the impossibility of saving from tyranny those who refuse to resist it. This is especially interesting because it is exactly opposite of what happens in the video games: one person, mega man, defeats evil and saves the world mostly by himself. Those whom he saves are off-screen, hardly mentioned.

The Protomen bring them on-screen, and the sight isn't pretty. In the process, they answer a question the video game leaves unanswered: why is Mega Man the lone defender of freedom? Why is it that hope ride alone? The answer seems to be that those being saved simply aren't willing to stand against their oppressors. They cry for liberation but would rather live under tyranny than risk their lives overthrowing it.

Dr. Light's warnings go unheeded by Mega Man, however, and in the best track on the album, The Will of One, he resolves to avenge his brother's death and save mankind, rejecting his father's pleas:

If you say this is how it has to be, you are no better than the fools of this burning city

I won't walk though the entire album, or give away the final climactic scene in front of Wily's castle, but Mega Man's mission ends in failure, as he realizes the truth of his father's words. He removes his helmet (an action usually associated in Mega Man lore with triumph and peace) and it falls from his hands as he turns his back on the crowd and walks slowly away, leaving them to Wily's mercy.

I have to admit being disappointed with the ending. I'm not exactly a Mega Man purist, but fighting Wily is part of his ethos. The concluding scene has more in common with the despair of 1984 than it does with Mega Man. On the other hand, I'm not sure how much that counts as a criticism since it is exactly the point. The ending is as powerful as it is precisely because it departs from the Mega Man formula in such an unexpected way.

At any rate, the album is worth checking out, especially if you have fond memories of defeating Dr. Wily when you were 10. You can download 3 tracks at their website, and listen to 2 more on their myspace page to get a feel for what the music is like.

Semper Renovanda?

2006-04-28T16:47:00.000-07:00

There is an interesting and thoughtful take on the reformation principle Semper Reformanda (always reforming) here. One of the highlights:

Yes, restructuring of doctrines and institutions is needed from time to time. But historically, these restructurings generally create as many problems as they solve. Real progress takes place, I believe, when Christians learn to live more deeply into what they have been given. Any restructuring necessary proceeds from this inner renewal, and when reformation works the other way around it doesn't work very well.

Modern Ecumensim III: A Framework

2006-04-22T18:46:00.000-07:00

The basis of Christian unity was never meant to be doctrine. The basis of Christian unity was meant to be Jesus Christ. -Norm Wakefield

I used to be very upset that some of the same people who had nothing but the highest praise for C.S. Lewis were deeply concerned about my orthodoxy when I started attending an Anglican church. I would have thought that being part of the church of C.S. Lewis would make me relatively free from criticism in evangelical circles. Not so, apparently – Lewis gets a special exemption from the errors of Anglicanism.

This inconsistency is not confined to Lewis. Some of the same people who are extremely critical of Catholicism have nothing but praise for J.R.R. Tolkien and the deeply Christian world of Lord of the Rings, or G.K. Chesterton's robust defense of Christianity against modernism, or Mel Gibson's The Passion. The point is, many people are inconsistent in who they accept as Christians. Even the Catholic church has waffled on this. The council of Trent pretty unambiguously condemned as heretical fundamental protestant doctrines like justification by faith alone, but Vatican II considerably softened the official position on whether or not protestants can be saved.

The tension illuminated by these inconsistencies is this: Christianity is fundamentally credal, but it is also fundamentally about a relationship with Jesus Christ. What do you do when you run into someone who seems to sincerely love Jesus, but has his creed wrong? The default position of many seems to be to define the church in doctrinal terms, but make special exceptions for any devout persons they happen to know who fall outside this doctrine box. It is easy to call the Catholic doctrine of justification foreign to scripture. But excluding Peter Kreeft from the ranks of the church because he is Catholic is another matter. The fact that his books and talks exude a love for Jesus and he claims to be trusting in the all-sufficiency of Christ to save him from his sins gives me the feeling he's being disqualified on a technicality.

There are some ruthlessly consistent people who use some sort of standardized doctrine test to declare people either inside or outside of the kingdom of God, but those people are usually nutcases. If you have ever read a polemic against the false teachings of C.S. Lewis, you know what I mean.

Despite the consistency problems (what a protestant, for example, thinks of the errors of Rome is often largely determined by the character of the Catholics he knows), I think that the intuitive approach described above reveals a fundamental insight: a persons life is the best indicator of his Christianity. It is certainly true that we may misread a person's life, but we also misread the Bible and the amount of error God wills to cover with His grace.

Part of what attracts me to this conclusion is a secret fear that when I stand before Christ at the last judgment, all of my tidy deductive arguments about this or that point of doctrine will fade into irrelevance as I realized that I completely missed the point. I am sure this will happen to quite a lot of people. Thomas Á Kempis expressed the sentiment behind my fear well in The Imitation of Christ:

What does it avail to discourse profoundly on the trinity if you void of humility and therefore displeasing to the trinity? Surely profound words do not make a man holy and just; but a virtuous life makes him dear to God. I would rather feel contrition than know the definition thereof. If you knew the whole Bible by heard, and all the sayings of the philosophers, what would all that profit you without love?

He is Risen!

2006-04-16T05:42:00.000-07:00

The tomb is empty, and the risen Christ has made all things new.

Jonathan was so excited that he got up at 4:30 this morning :-)

Good Friday

2006-04-14T08:34:00.000-07:00

Go to dark Gethsemane,
Ye that feel the tempter's power;
Your Redeemer's conflict see,
Watch with Him one bitter hour;
Turn not from his griefs away,
Learn of Jesus Christ to pray.

Follow to the judgment hall;
View the Lord of life arraigned
O the wormwood and the gall!
O the pangs His soul sustained!
Shun not suffering, shame, or loss;
Learn of Him to bear the cross.

Calvary's mournful mountain climb;
There, adoring at His feet,
Mark the miracle of time,
God's own sacrifice complete;
"It is finished" hear Him cry;
Learn of Jesus Christ to die.
-James Montgomery

Modern Ecumenism II: What is at Stake?

2006-04-04T21:22:00.000-07:00

Before we examine the question of how to formulate a theology of Christian unity, it would be helpful to know what exactly is at stake. What are the benefits of ecumenism that its supporters are trying to embrace? What are the dangers that its critics are trying to avoid?

The most helpful way I know of to think of these issues is to set them in a continuum with truth on one end and love on the other. Those at the “love” extreme view doctrinal correctness as nearly irrelevant. This is the “I'm ok, you're ok, God is love so let's just hold hands” attitude of liberal theology. On the other end are those who tolerate no deviation whatsoever from their understanding of Christian theology. Those who err on the side of love anathematize no one, those who err on the side of truth anathematize everyone.

Both extremes are clearly in error, but there is a lot of gray area between them. How wrong is too wrong? At what point does an error become heresy? An offense against God's truth? Worth breaking fellowship over? These are difficult questions, and there are a lot of answers to them. Any stance is liable to be criticized for being either too strict or too lax. Nevertheless, a line must be drawn somewhere. Which element, zealous defense of God's truth or loving inclusion of differing interpretations, deserves more consideration?

The dangers of erring too far on the side of love and inclusion are, I think, sufficiently obvious. Christianity is and always has been fundamentally creedal. It is grounded on certain truths, expressed in the early creeds and elsewhere, without which it cannot stand.

The dangers of falling too far on the side of truth may not be as obvious, particularly to most Protestants. What is so important about Christian unity that it would justify any compromise on doctrine at all? The importance of unity lies in the fact that schism is not an act without negative consequences. It is divorce. It is always a tragedy, and the benefits of doctrinal purity must always be weighed against the damage of schism.

The importance of unity among believers is given a lot of emphasis in the Bible. In John 17, the only place in the gospels where Jesus prays specifically for the Church (those who will believe through the apostle's testimony), His one request is this: “that they may all be one, just as you, Father, are in me, and I in you, that they also may be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me.” The call to unity is high: the Church's oneness is to mirror the eternal oneness of the trinity. The benefits of unity are also high: oneness among believers gives credibility in the eyes of the world to Jesus' identity.

We are no closer to a solution, however. It would be ideal to never have to decide which evil, schism or heresy, was the lesser. But that is not the position we find ourselves in. We find ourselves part of a Church assailed by both. How do we live in such a Church? How do we value both doctrine and unity, as best we can, in an world constantly demanding us to choose between the two?

Idleness

2006-03-28T23:10:00.000-08:00

John Calvin had an incredible work ethic. On top of preaching 5 times a week on average for much of his time in Geneva, he wrote commentaries on most of the Bible, various other theological treatises, including the magisterial Institutes, and many volumes worth of letters.

By most accounts Calvin was a classic over-achiever. Despite his high workload, he would frequently lament his weakness and sloth. His seal bore a hand holding a flaming heart (borrowed from Augustinian iconography) and the words pompte et cincere in opere domini (promptly and sincerely in the work of God), highlighting the importance of diligence for him.

In fact, this diligence most likely shortened his life significantly. While on his deathbed and in incredible pain, a friend recommended that he take a break from study to rest himself. Calvin replied angrily, “What! Would you have the Lord find me idle when He comes?”

Calvin probably took his work ethic to an unhealthy extreme. But there is much that we could learn from his life of self-sacrifice. Working too hard is not a vice most of us are likely to struggle with, and the exhortation to not have the Lord find us idle when He comes is something we would do well to keep in mind.

This Lent has me thinking a lot about idleness. It seems that no matter what time-wasting activity I give up, I find something else to take its place. Emily and I don't own a TV, in large part because we find that TV makes it much to easy to spend large amounts of time doing neither what we ought to do nor what we enjoy doing. But this hardly works to my credit if I simply increase my time on the internet to compensate.

Emily and I are on a crusade to live well. We talk often about how the most fulfilling things in life are also the easiest to avoid in favor of something empty and mindless, and about how strangely difficult it is to live well. Sometimes it feels like we are fighting our bodies, and despite our attempts it seems that we are not making much headway.

This is why I am glad for the church year, which gives shape to time. If I wasn't called by the Church to prepare myself for Easter through fasting and self-sacrifice, I might never notice that subduing my body to my will by means of the spiritual disciplines, and my will to Christ, is in fact the best way to live. May the Lord not find us idle when He comes.

Modern Ecumenism I: The Current Landscape

2006-03-22T13:30:00.000-08:00

Several months ago, Emily and I attended a lecture by Peter Kreeft at Biola. As we walked into the auditorium, I remarked to her “This has got to be the first time that Biola has invited a Roman Catholic to speak.” I have no way of verifying that, of course, but it is at least a very rare (and therefore significant) event. I'm not suggesting that Biola is going soft on the errors of Catholicism, but the spirit of ecumenism which the invitation embodies has been showing up in more and more places lately as a wide swath of Protestants become more accepting of Catholicism. The breadth of traditions that this move covers is remarkable: high-church Calvinists, standard Evangelicals, and Emergent Church postmodernists. Many young people are leaving the evangelical churches they grew up in for high-church Protestantism, Roman Catholicism, and Eastern Orthodoxy.

Signs of the change are all over the place. In 1994, First Things published the declaration Evangelicals and Catholics Together, which refers to Evangelicals and Catholics as “brothers and sisters in Christ.” The document, which was signed by such prominent evangelicals as Charles Colson, J.I. Packer, and Bill Bright (founder of Campus Crusade for Christ), encourages cooperation between the two traditions, emphasizing their similarities and common goals.

The ecumenical movement in Evangelicalism has so much momentum behind it that it has prompted Mark Noll (also a signer of ECT, by the way) and Carolyn Nystrom to write a book titled Is the Reformation Over? examining the improving relationship between evangelicals and the Catholic church.

All of this is well-represented in the blogsphere. Sites like ReformedCatholicism offer what they call “A reformational contribution to catholicity”. The Internet Monk (a southern baptist, though not a theologically typical one) is on record admiring the Christianity of many Roman Catholics (in particular he's a huge fan of Thomas Merton). And the emergent movement has more blogs than churches.

All of this rabid ecumenism has caused a backlash in the Reformed blogsphere. If you don't know, it seems to be part of the Reformed ethos to be rather bulldoggish about doctrine. There is a party line, and the gatekeepers are very strict about any deviation from it. I'm not sure if it has always been this way, but it is now. Anyway, an ecosystem of Reformed bloggers has sprung up whose entire purpose is to combat whatever deviates from the party line. The most common targets these days are the emergent church and those who flirt with calling Roman Catholics Christians.

The dialog between these party-line Reformed and the more catholic (small 'c') regions of the blogsphere can be uncharitable and vindictive. There is a lot of name-calling on both sides, and rhetoric that is frankly unbecoming of Christian believers. This is the current landscape of ecumenical dialog in America. It is a mess, but a hopeful mess. The hope does not lie in convincing everyone to just get along. The hope as I see it lies in crafting a theology of Christian unity which acknowledges that Christianity is wider than many Protestants have traditionally believed, while maintaining the doctrinal distinctives of historic Protestantism. Do the recent ecumenical trends outlined above represent a break from the fundamental principles of the Reformation? Are they a denial of our heritage as Protestants, and the truths the Reformers fought for? Is the Reformation, indeed, over? They needn't be, and it isn't.

The Faith of the Thief on the Cross

2006-03-15T15:32:00.000-08:00

When you enter your kingdom, Lord, remember me.

Because we are so used to understanding the kingdom of God in a spiritual sense, I think we miss the import of the confession of the thief on the cross. His understanding of the kingdom would have been no different than that of the rest of the Jews of the day, the disciples included: they expected the Messiah to take up arms, drive out the Romans, and establish an earthly kingdom.

With that in mind, the thief's confession is much more powerful. You can almost hear the other thief taunting him: “Don't you get it? There isn't going to be any kingdom! Your Messiah is being executed, just like your last 20 messiahs.” Despite all this – despite the fact that his Messiah was dying – the thief on the cross makes the ultimate confession of faith: “I know you are the Messiah, and you will inaugurate the kingdom of God on earth.” He didn't know how that was going to happen. It seemed the most unlikely thing in the world at the time. But God's ways are not our ways, and His thoughts are not our thoughts.

This is precisely why God demands faith of us. He is our Father, and He ought to be trusted and obeyed for that very reason alone. It demeans His authority for us to require that He give us an explanation, just as it would demean the authority of an earthly father for his son to demand an explanation for why he should not play in the street in order to determine whether or not it was worth obeying.

Update: I should also mention that the faith God expects of us is faith in Himself and His words, not faith in a particular interpretation of those words. The thief on the cross had faith that Jesus was the messiah and that he would establish the kingdom of God, not that He would do so in a particular way at a particular time. This is important, because interpretations can be and often are wrong. The Jews got the messianic prophecies fantastically wrong because it was difficult or impossible to get them right except in retrospect.

A sense of modesty and an emphasis on the fact that faith in scripture and the God of scripture is not the same as faith in an interpretation of scripture would go a long way toward toning down the many overly dogmatic interpretations of (for example) the apocalyptic books. It does no violence to inspiration to admit that some portions of Daniel and Revelation are really bizzare, and that their proper interpretation is anything but straightforward.

Stay Tuned

2006-03-10T13:04:00.000-08:00

I'm currently planning a 4-6 post series on ecumenism in the near future. The outline is still in flux and subject to redaction, expansion, or consolidation at any time, but currently it looks like this:

The Current Landscape
Who Cares?
They will know we are Christians... by our catechisms? A Framework
The Contribution of the Emergent Church
Objections
Outworking

This is the fruit of some 6 years of thought, so I hope it will be really good. I also hope I have not raised expectations beyond what I can possibly meet.

From Population Bomb to Empty Cradle

2006-03-08T12:04:00.000-08:00

Touchstone has run an article in its March issue on The Population Bomb by Paul Ehrlich, the massively influential (and massively wrong) 1960's book predicting that an exploding world population would be causing mass starvation by now. The author seems to have been freaked out by the baby boom, and done his extrapolations based on that. But he also didn't account for advances in agriculture which have dramatically improved yield.

Apparently the book is also really critical of the Catholic Church's stance against contraception. The Population Bomb and Humanae Vitae were released at almost the same time, and Ehrlich accuses John Paul II of contributing to the future mass starvation of billions of people. History seems to have vindicated John Paul II.

This whole issue really interests me because the reversal from Population Bomb to Empty Cradle has happened in the last few years. Emily and I can still remember growing up in a world that looked down on our parents for having large families. It would be a mistake, of course, to make a lot of crazy prophecies of doom. World population is not in trouble now and likely never will be. But Europe, Russia, Japan, and several other countries are in very real danger of losing their cultural identity, because the only thing that appears capable of sustaining their population (and their welfare systems) is massive immigration.

It will be interesting to see how this all plays out. Mankind has never before been in such control of his reproduction, and it makes me wonder: are men so inherently selfish that, given the choice, they will breed themselves out of existence for an extra boat or RV? The only thing so far that seems capable of motivating people who have access to contraception to reproduce above replacement level is religious belief (Mel Gibson has 7 children. How many does Richard Dawkins have?). I have to admit, it brings a smile to my face to think that secularists may actually be removed from the gene pool by natural selection. John Paul II has called this culture the culture of death, and that may prove to be true in the most literal sense, as its rejection of the life-affirming act of procreation chokes it out of existence.

The Root of All Evil

2006-03-06T07:44:00.000-08:00

While roaming about in the blogsphere, I came upon a recently-broadcast (in England) 2-part “documentary” by Richard Dawkins titled The Root of all Evil. I was intrigued enough to download and watch them (they're available via bittorent, but I'm not sure I recommend you waste your time). The topic is the evils of religious belief. Dawkins pulls no punches: evangelicalism is the “American taliban”, the religious education of children is child abuse, Moses is comperable to Hitler, etc.

Dawkin's main concern seems to be that religion promotes a feelings-based, blind adherence to a few ancient texts and eschews rationally examining and testing our beliefs (which is what scientists and atheists do). Since religious believers are so sure that they are right, and because they have such blind faith in authority, they can be persuaded easily by their religious leaders to do all sorts of horrible things like blowing up mosques and killing abortion doctors.

Dawkin's argument could be interpreted one of two ways: either as a plug for science as the only means of knowing, or as a more complex argument centered around testability and verifiability of beliefs, with science as a prime example. I think the most charitable read of Dawkins is the latter. The first interpretation is called logical positivism, and it died as soon as people realized it was self-refuting (the statement “only scientific facts count as knowledge” can't be scientifically verified). I assume Dawkins knows this.

On the other hand, to the extent that his objections weren't based on science they were sloppy, unoriginal, and completely ignored 2,000 years of first-rate Christian scholarship. If all it takes to defeat Christianity is quoting a few of the bloodier passages of the Old Testament and making an offhand comment about how God must have been trying to “impress Himself” by sending Jesus to die for our sins (since he could have just forgiven them without all that nonsense about an atoning sacrifice), then we're in trouble. But this sort of critique represents the opposite of the critical thinking that Dawkins prides himself on. He relies instead on proof-texting and one-liners for most of his arguments, and makes no effort whatsoever to ineract with the texts he quotes out of context.

The usually very secular Guardian has an interesting commentary on Dawkin's documentary here:

There's an aggrieved frustration [by atheists] that they've been short-changed by history; we were supposed to be all atheist rationalists by now. Secularisation was supposed to be an inextricable part of progress. Even more grating, what secularisation there has been is accompanied by the growth of weird irrationalities from crystals to ley lines. As GK Chesterton pointed out, the problem when people don't believe in God is not that they believe nothing, it is that they believe anything.

This is right on. Dawkins does indeed complain that he expected us all to be atheists by now. He seems very concerned that people could be so irrational as to still believe in religion in the 21st century. Of course, the possibility that the flaw is in his analysis of religion, not in religion itself, is not something he considers.

Remember that You are Dust

2006-03-01T09:08:00.000-08:00

Almighty God, you have created us out of the dust of the earth. Grant that these ashes may be to us a sign of our mortality and penitence, that we may remember that it is only by your gracious gift that we are given everlasting life; through Jesus Christ our Savior. Amen.
-Ash Wednesday liturgy, Book of Common Prayer

The most powerful thing about this morning's Ash Wednesday service was watching Fr. David place a cross of ash on my 10-month-old son's forehead and whisper “remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” Even little Jonathan was born under the curse. The stain of sin and death touches him also. He may be too young to understand Lent, but he is not too young to need a savior.

Goodness, Truth, and Beauty

2006-02-23T19:59:00.000-08:00

This is a good iconic representation of my life right now: trying to incorporate a Torrey education into having a family and being a father, working, and changing the world in my spare time.

Total Truth

2006-02-19T22:34:00.000-08:00

I just finished reading Nancy Pearcey's Total Truth. It was reviewed very well, so I decided to read it even though it is a book about worldviews, and I normally cringe whenever I hear the word (often it seems to be just a catchphrase with little substance). Pearcey has some good insights about the holistic nature of Christianity: how its truth ought to encompass and inform everything we do, not just certain activities artificially marked “sacred”. This is certainly something I need to be reminded of. I have a lot of interests, and integrating them into a unified whole so that I am more than just an amalgam of unrelated hobbies is a challenge.

However, I felt the signal-to-noise ratio in the book was pretty low. I found myself wading through a whole bunch of text to reach the point, skimming yet another “Bobby had always thought that religion and science occupied different spheres of authority, until he learned that Christianity is a holistic worldview” story, etc.

To be fair, I am probably not Pearcey's target audience. The idea that Christianity ought to inform how I do everything is not news to me. And I'm already familiar with most of the critiques of Darinism as a worldview that she offers (which is a large part of the book). Still, I couldn't shake the feeling that the book would have been much better if it had been, say, 200 pages instead of 400.

Purpose

2006-02-13T20:53:00.000-08:00

A few days ago I was in the library reading a marginally over-my-head academic paper on learning Bayesian Networks. Halfway through, I stopped and asked myself "what the hell am I doing?"

It was a great question. The paper had to do with a topic I took a class on a few quarters ago. While the topic somewhat interests me, it wasn't directly related to anything I'm working on now, and I doubt I could have picked much up without applying it immediately.

So, why was I reading that paper? That's what I want to know. Maybe I just thought it might possibly come in handy some day. Maybe I thought it would make me cool to read an academic paper that was over my head and not relevant to anything I was doing at the moment. Whatever the reason, though, it outlines a problem I've been working on lately: filtering out crud. You see, I have this insatiable desire to know everything. This makes it easy to justify reading a wide range of materials that are in themselves interesting, but a waste of my time nevertheless.

It is easy to justify this unquenchable thirst to know as a high desire which ought to be indulged. But indulging it would just eat me up inside. The preacher says that God has set eternity in the hearts of men (read this in context. It is not a good thing), and that is what I find in my heart: an eternity that is never satisfied, that always wants more, that is trying desperately to fill itself by learning something else, and then something else, and then something else.

Does the pattern sound familiar? It is the pattern of sin. It is the pattern of addiction. It is a sure indicator that Satan has conned you with the hollow promise of fulfillment "next time", if only you persevere in what is sure to make you miserable and leave you empty.

Now, it is a good thing that I will never run out of material to study. It is a good thing that God made me an academic. But it is not good to lose myself in academia, to look for my identity there and neglect the weightier things. So this Lent I am going to put aside all my articles and books, study Mark (somehow in my thirst for knowledge the Bible always gets last priority), and attempt to develop a framework for how I ought to spend my study time. This will probably include more writing (something which is good for me, but hard) and hopefully I'll come away with a philosophy of education that places my studies where they should be: subservient to the gospel, not the other way around.

Purgatorio

2006-02-02T16:02:00.000-08:00

I have just discovered Purgatorio. When I read the "hyper" post linked below, I said to myself "there is no way he can come up with this stuff on a regular basis." Well, he does.

Some of my favorites:
Liturgical Bingo
Choose a Caption
Help, I'm going hyper

The Life is in the Blood

2006-01-23T13:21:00.000-08:00

Emily and I had a theological epiphany last Saturday. We were talking about why it is that God demanded sacrifice as payment for sin. Why wasn't there another way for God to forgive our sins than by sending Jesus to die for us? I pointed out Lev. 17:11:

For the life of the flesh is in the blood, and I have given it to you on the altar to make atonement for your souls; for it is the blood by reason of the life that makes atonement.

In context, Lev. 17:11 is the justification for the command against drinking blood. Emily pointed out that, while God commanded the Jews not to drink blood, Jesus commanded us to drink His blood for the exact same reason - because the Life is in the Blood. This gives Lev. 17:11 a deeper, fuller meaning than the ancient Israelites could have possibly imagined. You just can't make this stuff up.

Dostoyevsky and assisted suicide

2006-01-17T20:36:00.000-08:00

I'm reading through Dostoyevsky's The Idiot right now, and one of the characters, Ippolit, is sick with consumption and has only a few weeks to live. He has also been heavily influenced by European nihilism. Ippolit decides he would rather kill himself than live out his few weeks. In a manifesto, he explains his reasons for wanting to take his own life:

Now to begin with, there is this curious consideration: by what right, with what motive, would anyone think to dispute my right to these two or three weeks I have left? What business is it of any court of law? Who actually wants me not only to be condemned, but to behave nicely while I endure the term of the sentence? Surely no one really wants that? For morality's sake? I could understand if I was a picture of health, and attempted my life when it "might be of use to my neighbor" and so forth, then morality might reproach me in the old-fashioned way for disposing of my life without asking permission, or some such reason. But now, when my sentence has already been read out to me? What sort of morality is it which not only demands your life but your last gasp too, as you yield up the final atom of your being, listening to the prince's consolation?

Ippolit goes on for several pages. The point, though, is that on my way home from work today I was listening to the radio. In a news piece about the recent Supreme Court ruling that Oregon's assisted suicide law was constitutional, the station played a short interview with a woman who has terminal cancer, and who has been fighting for the constitutionality of the law. When asked why she wanted to be able to choose to end her own life, she gave basically the same answer that Ippolit, Dostoyevsky's European nihilist, gave. It was really eerie to watch what Dostoyevsky was fighting so hard to keep out of Russia be established by the Supreme Court of the United States.

New Years

2006-01-01T14:36:00.000-08:00

It's New Years Eve and I'm full of empty promises,
I half pretend to keep this time, just like last year.
The band is loud and I'm wandering the shadows,
wishing I was never here.
I persevere.
A crowded room, these whitewashed tombs,
they raise their glasses high, they kiss the past goodbye.

This New Years Eve, I'm waiting for tomorrow.
My heart is on my sleeve,
and yes I still believe, this New Years Eve,
will turn out better than before,
I'm holding on, still holding out,
until they close the door... on me.

It's New Years Eve and I feel my insecurities,
are haunting me like ghosts, this sinking quicksand.
And then with thunderous praise and lofty adoration,
a second passes by, yet nothing changes.
I hate my skin, this grave I'm standing in.
Another change of years, and I wish I wasn't here.

A year goes by and I'm staring at my watch again,
and I dig deep this time,
for something greater than I've ever been,
life to ancient wineskins.
And I was blind but now I see.

This New Years Eve, something must change me inside,
I'm crooked and misguided, and tired of being tired.
This New Years Eve, I'm waiting for tomorrow.
My heart is on my sleeve, and yes I still believe, in You.
--Reese Roper

I'd like to say something inspiring about how the transforming power of God's grace can allow you to be a new person and how you can change your life this new year, purging the dross that still clings to you and entering into the triumphant life of God in a fuller way than before. That would sound incredibly empty, though. New Year's resolutions are famous for being broken because, with some rare exceptions, people want to want to change far more than they want to change. Or perhaps they want to change more than they are able to change? I'm not sure what the proper distinction is, but there is a disconnect between how the average person lives and how they wish they lived.

There's a profound insight into the human condition lurking behind that observation. Why should it be so? It is strangely difficult to motivate yourself to do the things that you actually enjoy doing, and frighteningly easy to spend your life replacing the things you really enjoy with things that are far less satisfying. TV is a prime example of this, but there are others. The statistics on how many hours a day people spend watching television are absolutely horrendous. I've never met anyone that thinks that spending long hours in front of the TV every day is a good way to live, so why do so many people live that way?

Because they are trapped. Satan does not want you to be happy, he wants you to be miserable. Sin enslaves you to something which you do not like doing but cannot stop. TV is, again, one of the most obvious examples, but it is true of enslavement to any sin. The world is full of people who do wicked (and not-so-wicked) things not because they enjoy doing them, but because they are unable to stop (and, perhaps, because they're still hoping for the promised payoff). That is why new-years resolutions are so hard to keep. In the end, the fundamental New-Years-Resolution problem reduces to the fundamental human problem: bondage to sin.

While this is true of the fallen human condition, how is it relevant to the believer, who has been set free from the power of sin? In the first place, it is important to remember that while you may be a Christian, you still suck. In other words, the fact that you are redeemed means that Christ's grace is working in you to make you a new man. It does not mean that you are magically given the self-motivation to correct all your faults. Becoming holy is not like losing weight. In other words, Sanctification is not primarily an act of will but an act of grace. Because of this, praying for God to change your heart is probably more effective than vowing to turn yourself into the person you want to be.

Jesus took on flesh and conquered death to make all things new. And, as we celebrate the newness of the year, we can pray that the kingdom He inaugurated would come in more fullness to our lives in 2006.

church or unchurch?

2005-12-27T22:03:00.000-08:00

On my drive to work I pass a Calvary Chapel. Today I noticed a banner in front of the church advertising their Christmas services. The top of the banner read “Calvary Chapel Christian Centre.” Not church. Centre. The fact that seeker-sensitivity can be taken to such an extreme that communities of believers stop calling themselves a church makes me really mad.

Not only is this indicative of the "whatever it takes to get people to attend on Sunday morning" attitude which has relegated the gospel to second-class status in many churches, it promotes an “us-vs-them” perspective of the church. An article in the November/December '05 issue of Modern Reformation put it this way:

The unchurch tells the unchurched, “Yes, everything you’ve suspected about the church is true. The church is backward, lifeless, boring, and self-serving.” The unchurch survives and thrives by reinforcing the popular negative stereotype of the church.

When we lived in Corona, we were just down the street from Crossroads Church, whose prominent slogan was "A church anyone can come to". In other words, “We’re not like those backwards Lutheran and Anglican churches down the road who still use vestments and liturgy. You’ll feel at home at our ‘Christian centre’, which is much more contemporary than those other churches whose services only focus on worshipping God in the same way Christians have been doing for 2,000 years.”

I should clarify that I’m not accusing either of the churches I mentioned specifically of not preaching the gospel. I’ve never attended a service at either of them, and I know similar churches in which the gospel is most definitely preached. I am accusing them of being so concerned with attracting unbelievers to church that they are willing to promote a divisive stereotype which brands other forms of Christianity (i.e, those that have been around for more than 50 years) as passé, undesirable, and irrelevant.

Nietzsche on modern ethics

2005-11-20T16:19:00.000-08:00

In all “science of morals”, so far one thing was lacking, strange as it may sound: the problem of morality itself; what was lacking was any suspicion that there was something problematic here. What the philosophers called “a rational foundation for morality” and tried to supply was, seen in the right light, merely a scholarly variation of the common faith in the prevalent morality; a new means of expression for this faith; and thus just another fact within a particular morality; indeed, in the last analysis a kind of denial that this morality might ever be considered problematic – certainly the very opposite of an examination, analysis, questioning, and vivisection of this very faith.
Beyond Good & Evil, 186

Nietzsche is spot-on here. Most modern attempts to provide a basis for morality that is not grounded on any sort of religion or teleology come out sounding deeply confused. They have, as Nietzsche points out, an after-the-fact feel to them. What they are attempting to do is come up with a grounding for the basic ethical standards everyone assumes to be true. The problem is, in the West moral sentiment is grounded in Christianity. Taking away that grounding while leaving the morality intact is a tall order – one that Nietzsche saw to be impossible. To the question “why ought I be moral”, the modern answer is little more than “just because”. Nietzsche is right to call foul at this.

On the usefulness of being Smart

2005-11-06T15:40:00.000-08:00

Over at Mere-Orthodoxy, Keith Buhler asks why we should want to be intelligent (I'm going to use "intelligence" to mean not inborn talent but a cultivated appreciation of and interaction with the Great Ideas. I think this is more or less what Keith meant by the term). This is a good question, and something I have a lot of reason to wonder about. You see, my to-read list is very long and getting longer. It spans subjects as diverse as computer science, theology, philosophy, history, and math. It's becoming clear that, despite the fact that I am a young guy with (God willing) a lot of years ahead of me, I am going to die long before reading everything I would like to – and that says nothing of the books that deserved to be read several times.

So the questions "why do I read?" and, more to the point, "why do I value the learning and intelligence that can be gained through reading?" have immediate significance. Why is it, exactly,that I spend so much of my time reading? The answer had better be good, or I am wasting my time.

"Intelligence is an end in itself" is not a good answer. There are worse ways to spend your time, of course, than amassing intelligence for its own sake. A life spent reading is surely more fulfilling than a life spent watching TV. Nevertheless, there is a certain futility in intelligence-for-its-own-sake. "Of the writing of books there is no end", says the Teacher, and the same might be said for the reading of books (I'm indebted to a conversation with Andrew Johnston for this observation). Drinking blindly from the firehose of western literature, trying to catch as many drops as possible, is liable to make you mad and leave you empty. Knowledge-just-for-knowledge will never satisfy.

If this is so, then my lust for knowledge must submit itself to something higher – something that is worth pursuing for its own sake. And herein lies a practical approach to my problem of deciding how to sample the entire canon of western literature: do so not with the purpose of simply making myself smarter, but with the purpose of making myself more fit to be a citizen of the kingdom of God. This may not immediately shave my reading list down to manageable size, but it does give me a goal at which to aim.

A Confession

2005-11-03T15:18:00.000-08:00

I have a confession to make. I read Nietzsche for fun. I know what you're thinking: doesn't Nietzsche represent the antithesis of Christianity? Well, yes... let me 'splain.

Nietzsche's works are about as anti-Christian as it is possible to be. His most popular quote (in Christian circles, at least), "God is dead", is among his less inflammatory statements. As a result, I credit him with completely desensitizing me to all anti-Christian rhetoric. Anger clouds judgment, so it is beneficial to be able to argue (especially over something you feel passionately about) in a calm, collected manner. Nietzsche helped me to do this.

Nietzsche's assault on Christianity (and all value systems, really) is not an argument in any traditional sense of the word. When I first met him, I was tempted to try refuting him point by point. This is a frustrating task because he gives you precious little to go on by way of premises and conclusions. In a way, refuting him was too easy. But that is because it entirely misses the point – it is trying to get Nietzsche to play a game he refuses to play. He is presenting a myth, not an argument, and the power of this myth is more important to Nietzsche than it's truth-value.

That is what I enjoy most about Nietzsche: his ability to craft a compelling narrative. C.S. Lewis was right when he said "Nietzsche was a better poet than a philosopher. I give Plato superior marks on both papers"[1] (with the possible qualification that Nietzsche never intended to do philosophy in Plato's sense), but it is hardly an insult to say that his myths (i.e., poetry) are not as good as Plato's. Nietzsche presents the reader with this fascinatingly cohesive alternate picture of reality: human history understood entirely as will to power, and Christianity as the worst thing that could have happened to the human spirit.

The mythic quality in Nietzsche allows me to approach him with a more relaxed attitude than I would, say, an atheist arguing for the irrationality of Christianity. Nietzsche doesn't really present arguments (that he intends to be taken seriously), so reading him is a much more laid-back experience.

I suppose I might still be offended by the place Christian theism has in Nietzsche's universe, but to be honest I have trouble taking him seriously for long enough to be offended. Who really believes this stuff? Parts of Nietzsche's philosophy, certainly, have been adopted here and there (by Freud, post-modernism, etc.), but few if any people have adopted him wholesale. At any rate, I find the Christian narrative much more compelling than the one Nietzsche is peddling. The God-man simply trumps the über-man in terms of narrative power. G.K Chesterton has done a good job of presenting Christian-truth-as-myth, in Orthodoxy and elsewhere, in a way that engages Nietzsche squarely on his own terms and, I think, wins.

And that's why I like Nietzsche so much: precisely because he's so wrong. It takes a lot of intelligence and creativity to re-interpret reality and all of human history in a way that is both amazingly internally consistent and amazingly false... and the result is fascinating.

[1]The quote is a paraphrase from memory. I was unable to locate its source. Although I am pretty sure Lewis is the author, and it sounds like something he would say, I can't be positive because my memory has been known to play nefarious tricks on me. In any cause, someone said it because it's too smart for me to have come up with.

Happy Reformation Day!

2005-10-31T08:57:00.000-08:00

To get you all in a Reformin' mood, I present The Reformation Polka by Robert Gebel
(Sung to the tune of Supercalifragilistic-expialidocious)

When I was just ein junger Mann I studied canon law;
While Erfurt was a challenge, it was just to please my Pa.
Then came the storm, the lightning struck, I called upon Saint Anne,
I shaved my head, I took my vows, an Augustinian! Oh...

Chorus:
Papal bulls, indulgences, and transubstantiation
Speak your mind against them and face excommunication!
Nail your theses to the door, let's start a Reformation!
Papal bulls, indulgences, and transubstantiation!

When Tetzel came near Wittenberg, St. Peter's profits soared,
I wrote a little notice for the All Saints' Bull'tin board:
"You cannot purchase merits, for we're justified by grace!
Here's 95 more reasons, Brother Tetzel, in your face!" Oh...

Chorus:
Papal bulls, indulgences, and transubstantiation
Speak your mind against them and face excommunication!
Nail your theses to the door, let's start a Reformation!
Papal bulls, indulgences, and transubstantiation!

They loved my tracts, adored my wit, all were exempleror;
The Pope, however, hauled me up before the Emperor.
"Are these your books? Do you recant?" King Charles did demand,
"I will not change my Diet, Sir, God help me here I stand!" Oh...

Chorus:
Papal bulls, indulgences, and transubstantiation -
Speak your mind against them and face excommunication!
Nail your theses to the door, let's start a Reformation!
Papal bulls, indulgences, and transubstantiation!

Duke Frederick took the Wise approach, responding to my words,
By knighting "George" as hostage in the Kingdom of the Birds.
Use Brother Martin's model if the languages you seek,
Stay locked inside a castle with your Hebrew and your Greek! Oh...

Chorus:
Papal bulls, indulgences, and transubstantiation -
Speak your mind against them and face excommunication!
Nail your theses to the door, let's start a Reformation!
Papal bulls, indulgences, and transubstantiation!

Let's raise our steins and Concord Books while gathered in this place,
And spread the word that 'catholic' is spelled with lower case;
The Word remains unfettered when the Spirit gets his chance,
So come on, Katy, drop your lute, and join us in our dance! Oh...

Chorus:
Papal bulls, indulgences, and transubstantiation -
Speak your mind against them and face excommunication!
Nail your theses to the door, let's start a Reformation!
Papal bulls, indulgences, and transubstantiation!

On Faith

2005-10-23T21:42:00.000-07:00

<Aside>I apologize for the recent dearth of posts. Grad school has been keeping me very busy. So busy, in fact, that I’m dreaming about O-notation and bayesian parameter estimation on a regular basis.<Aside/>

Jonathan Bryan’s post about faith got me thinking about the subject. Both Aquinas and Calvin define faith as a kind of knowledge. Aquinas goes so far as to state explicitly that it is impossible for something held on faith to be incorrect, and I think Calvin would agree. This definition flies in the face of the modern (secular) understanding of faith as blind and irrational. So far from being blind, faith is another set of eyes. It is a way of knowing independent of reason. Truth cannot contradict truth, of course, so reason and faith ought never to contradict – but one need not be supported by the other to be legitimate.

As true as I think this understanding of faith is, something has always bothered me about it. I severely dislike the “you wouldn’t understand because you’re x” method of dismissing arguments. For example, a Marxist might dismiss any objection that happens to come from a wealthy person by saying “of course you disagree, you’re a member of the oppressive bourgeoisie.” Feminists could reply the same way to a man who objects to feminism, no matter what the content of his objection. This strategy has always struck me as manifestly unfair.

However, it seems that with the definition of faith given above, we can only respond to unbeliever’s questions about the legitimacy of faith in a similar manner: “well, you just don’t understand because you don’t have faith.” Of course this is going to sound anti-intellectual to an unbeliever, because they do not recognize faith as a valid means of knowing. But it is impossible to give reasons for the legitimacy of faith... if you could do that it would not be faith. In other words, the means of knowing (reason) which both Christian and unbeliever share is fundamentally inadequate to establish the validity of faith as a means of knowing. So it seems that about all we can do is say “Well, you just can’t understand unless the Holy Spirit gives you the gift of faith.” And despite the fact that I think that is true, it strikes me as cheating.

The Kingdom in Reverse

2005-10-08T21:32:00.000-07:00

I was at the Supertones’ last concert ever on Friday night with JD, who is back from Spain trying to iron out some visa nonsense. At one point in the middle of the show, Matt (the lead singer) summed up what he had been trying to get across through 10 years of ministry and songwriting: lay up your treasures in heaven, not on earth.

That is something I worry about periodically with regard to grad school. There are lots of warnings in the Bible about not laying up treasures on earth, the wisdom of men being foolishness to God, the first being last, etc. I’m somewhat afraid that I will wake up one day and discover that, instead of pursuing the kingdom of God, I have spent myself following after what I happened to enjoy doing, and in my pursuit of what the world deems first, suddenly find myself last by the only reckoning that matters.

Everything I learn about algorithmic time complexity and machine learning is excrement apart from the kingdom of God. This is not to say that learning about those things has no value – all elegant algorithms are God’s elegant algorithms. There is a lot in computer science which is both beautiful and useful. It just seems so much easier to find yourself last in the Kingdom-in-reverse when what you do is so involved with what the world considers wise.

Christians in Computer Science

2005-09-25T15:39:00.000-07:00

I just finished reading Design Patterns, which is one of the best books you’ll ever read if object-oriented design gets you really excited. Anyway, when starting the book I noticed the following dedication by John Vlissides, one of the four authors:

To Dru Ann and Matthew
Joshua 24:15b
-J.V.

“Huh, there’s another one”, I thought. There seem to be a lot of prominent Christians working in computer science. Other notable examples include Donald Knuth (pretty much the father of computer science), Fred Brooks[1] (author of The Mythical Man-Month, and one of the most famous minds in software engineering), and Larry Wall (designer of the popular programming language Perl).

I’m not sure why this is so. There could be something about the creative aspect of computer science that appeals to the Christian belief in a divine Creator who has made man in His image. This recognition of humans as sub-creators is not unique to computer science, of course. It touches the way humans were designed to function and manifests itself in many different ways. Despite the differing manifestations, however, there is a common underlying reality. This is why, for example, Knuth, in Things a Computer Scientists Rarely Talks About, can reference Dorothy Sayers’ The Mind of the Maker. He recognized the same activity in computer science that Sayers was referring to, even though Sayers is an author and Knuth a computer scientist.

It could be, of course, that I’m just imagining the relative prevalence of Christians in computer science. They may be no more prominent than they are in other disciplines – I probably don’t know enough about those disciplines to have come across them. There are certainly plenty of Christian intellectual heavyweights in philosophy (Plantiga, Swinburne, Craig, and Moreland to name a few). I’m hopeful that the sciences and philosophy (which have been mostly devoid of Christian influence for quite a while now) are in the beginning stages of a renaissance in Christian scholarship. We’ll have to wait and see, though.

[1]In fact, Fred Brooks is my role model for integrating faith and cs. It is obvious from reading his work that he is a Christian, but he never jerks you out of software-engineer mode, and he doesn’t go out of his way to make a reference to Christianity. It just flows naturally out of who he is, as a person and as a computer scientist.

On Schism

2005-09-17T23:04:00.000-07:00

Protestants with a high theology of the church, such as myself, are faced with a dilemma: on the one hand, we value and strive to further unity within Christ’s body; on the other hand we’re, well, protestants – and as such affirm that the church of Rome has gone astray in essential Christian doctrines which warranted schism. To the question “which is worse, heresy or schism?”, it seems the protestant answer must be that heresy, the offense against truth, is worse than schism, the offense against love.

But this does not, I hope, mean that protestants cannot hold to a doctrine of the church that treats schism as a grave and serious offense – despite the fact that the fragmented character of protestantism shows this has not been typical. The reformers themselves believed that the church was distinguished by just two things: the preaching of the word and administration of the sacraments (a lot of good that did them, though. They couldn’t agree on what counted as administration of the sacraments).

I think I’ve found a metaphor to ground a high but still protestant view of schism. When asked about leaving the episcopal church over the liberal nonsense that has been making headlines recently, my priest, Fr. David, responded: “I can’t leave. I’m married to this church.” If this is so, then schism is divorce. It may be permissible under the direst of circumstances, if the church has been unfaithful to the gospel of Jesus Christ, but it is always painful and destructive.

What is most painful for me is not my divorce from the Roman Catholic church (though there is plenty of room for sorrow about that), but my divorce from brothers and sisters with whom my differences are relatively insignificant. One of the sad consequences of the reformation was a breakdown of authority structures and an “everyone did what was right in his own eyes” individualism, which has led to a practically no-fault attitude toward the grave sin of severing oneself from the body of Christ.

This should not be so, and despite the fact that 500 years of protestant history suggests otherwise, it need not be so. The problem is that, having once chosen divorce over heresy, it is so much easier to do it again... and again, and again. After a while you’re so consumed with preserving Truth that schism seems like an appropriate response to just about any dispute. Well, it is not. This is a distinctively protestant outlook. The range of theological opinion within the Catholic church is astoundingly diverse; much more diverse than most evangelical churches are from each other. But there is only one Catholic church because they understand that doctrine is not what unites the church; Jesus Christ is what unites the church. Protestants would do well to remember that.

Plantiga's Defeater for Naturalism

2005-09-05T08:34:00.000-07:00

The Summer '05 issue of Philosophia Christi contains three papers on Alvin Plantiga's evolutionary argument against Naturalism (EAAN, since philosophers are obsessed with acronyms). The argument runs something like this: According to evolutionary Naturalism (N&E), human cognitive powers developed by a process of natural selection acting on random genetic variation. Since what natural selection "selects" for is survival/reproduction, that means that the purpose of our reasoning ability (R) is to allow us to leave more offspring. But if this is the case, says Plantiga, then R, our reasoning ability, need not be truth-based at all. Natural selection will select for some R that produces reproductively advantageous beliefs, regardless of their truth-value. Therefore (skipping a few steps), P(R|N&E) (read: the probability that our reasoning faculties are reliable given naturalism and evolution) is either low or inscrutable. And if this is the case then N&E is self-defeating: if you accept it, you affirm that the reasoning process used to arrive at that conclusion that N&E is true is unreliable.

A few years ago, Plantiga spoke at Cal State San Bernardino, and Libby and I got to hear him speak. His talk wasn't about the EAAN, but he brought it up during the Q&A almost as an aside: "Oh, by the way, Naturalism is incoherent." The reaction among the mostly secular audience was, I think, one of suspicious incredulity - similar to my reaction after hearing the ontological argument for God's existence for the first time: "No way it was that easy... something must have been slipped past me under the table."

Plantiga's argument has been attacked from just about every conceivable angle by philosophers who think they know what Plantiga is smuggling past them. I think the two main lines of attack are to deny that P(R|N&E) is really low/inscrutable, and to deny that Naturalism is irrational even though P(R|N&E) is low.

The latter argument is surprising to me because it seems, well, indefensible. Nevertheless, the two arguments against Plantiga mentioned in PhilChristi take this approach. The more interesting of the two, put forth by a guy named Beilby, argues that while P(R|N&E) is low under current evolutionary models, there is no reason to assume that no suitable evolutionary model will be discovered which provides a high probability for the reliability of our reasoning faculties. So P(R|N&E) is not really low, even though it is low according to current evolutionary theory. We ought not to abandon evolutionary theory, furthermore, because it is a fruitful research program and it is unrealistic to require a theory not to have holes which require further study. In order to be successful, according to Beilby, "Plantiga must argue not only that P(R|N&E) is low, but that we have good reason to think it cannot be high. This is a truly formidable quest."

Call me crazy, but I don't think the quest is quite so formidable. What undiscovered resources could evolutionary theory possibly posses that would produce faculties aimed not at survival of the fittest but at something completely unrelated, truth? Any such resource would, by definition, not be evolutionary.

Perhaps truth-based faculties are themselves reproductively advantageous? Again, this seems absurd. Does being really smart improve your chances of out-reproducing the other guy? I don't think so.

There is a third option: perhaps there is a high probability that evolutionary processes directed at survival of the fittest produced truth-based faculties as a byproduct. But here again we are at a loss to describe how exactly reliable abstract reasoning could possibly arise from a process directed only at survival. The problem is not that evolutionary theory does not yet know how reliable cognitive faculties evolved, the problem is that evolutionary theory provides no resources with which to evolve them.

Moby Dick

2005-08-30T20:20:00.000-07:00

I just finished reading Moby Dick. It is amazing. Melville submerges the reader in a flood of symbolism so hauntingly powerful that, even though the meaning completely eludes you, still hits you with such force that at the end, as the last ripples are emanating from the spot recently occupied by the Pequod, the only appropriate response is “whoadang”.

Moby Dick is part enthralling narrative, part rote description of whaling details. In fact, there was less attention paid to Ahab’s maniacal pursuit of the white whale than I expected. Large sections of the book are devoted to the physiology and behavior of whales, the practice of whaling, its history, an apology for it, etc. Moby Dick is an epic not just about the white whale, but about whales and whaling in general. And that’s not all. Libby suggested to me half jokingly that the novel was about everything. Whaling, religion, fate, free will, obsession, man vs. nature, etc., etc., etc. Yeah, “everything” sounds about right.

I’ve heard it suggested that the primary theme is man vs. nature. There is certainly an element of that in the novel’s descriptions of sailing and testosteron-laced whale-killing, but I think the central pursuit of Moby Dick is about something else. The white whale actually strikes me as more deity than nature. He possesses astounding, malicious intelligence, is impervious to harpoons, is occasionally spoken of as a god by the sailors, and seems to act as a guardian of the whales – more than once appearing out of nowhere to bring doom upon a whaling party, allowing the whales being hunted to escape¹.

Even in the sometimes tedious descriptive sections, something is going on. Melville will suddenly wax metaphorical and relate some obscure detail of whaling to an aspect of life. I began to wonder if there was any part of whaling that wasn’t like life. At first I suspected there was some common thread tying all these whaling metaphors together ,and if I could just grasp it the novel would fall into place as a unified whole in one of those brilliant moments of clarity that makes reading good literature so worthwhile. But later I decided that there probably was no thread. The point of those metaphorical side-notes, I think, is to establish whaling as a microcosm. The world we encounter over the course of the novel stands for the whole world, Unfortunately, that doesn’t get me any close to an “I get it!” moment of clarity. It just engenders more questions.

Everything seems to have some inscrutable meaning in Moby Dick. Why are all the harpooners pagan? Why do they go down last, each clinging to the top of one of the Pequod’s masts? What in the world is going on between Ahab and Pip? Why did Starbuck get a chain of coffee shops named after him?

That just about exhausts my musings on Moby Dick. I miss being in college and being able to brainstorm with a bunch of smart people who were all reading the same books that I was.

¹Of course, nature can appear malevolent and impervious, too. I'm currently reading Into Thin Air, about the tragedy in the summer of '96 when 19 climbers froze to death at the top of mount Everest. The storm that cost those climbers their lives certainly seemed malevolently intelligent and overwhelmingly powerful.

Birth Control

2005-08-25T21:39:00.000-07:00

The Journey
Over the past few months, several things have happened to form the way Emily and I think about birth control. From a mostly ambivalent “what could possibly be wrong with it?”, Em and I are now more or less in line with Roman Catholic opposition to contraception¹. The event that really started Em and I on this path was her bringing home a book by an über mom of 8 (see here). That first got me interested in welcoming children as a blessing from God, and having a large family. Em thought I was nuts. A few months later, we subscribed to Touchstone. Our first issue was devoted to the family, with an emphasis on the traditionally Christian opposition to contraception. I was intrigued; Em was unconvinced. A few months later (admittedly at my prompting), we discussed birth control at white martyrs, a group of young married couples we are a part of. During the course of the discussion Em wound up persuading herself to be opposed to birth control. By the end of the evening she was more convinced than I was. At this point both she and I were more convinced that large families were a very good thing than that we ought to strictly avoid artificial birth control. There are lots of good reasons to space babies for the health of the mother, and Em and I were planning on using birth control for that purpose. But when it came down to it, we just couldn’t. It felt wrong somehow, despite all our theoretical justifications. Before we had Jonathan it never bothered us, but somehow after experiencing the life-giving aspect of sex, we just couldn’t intentionally sterilize ourselves.

So our theoretical objections to contraception post-dated our feeling that something was wrong with it. For me, the theoretical framework was solidified by another Touchstone article on the purpose of sex, and the late Pope John Paul II’s encyclical Humane Vitae.

The Justification
You may be suspicious that my objectivity was compromised by the fact that a gut feeling preceded my reasons for thinking birth control was wrong. I do not think this is the case, but you will have to judge for yourself.

There are two distinct issues at stake: whether (and under what circumstances) it is ever right to intentionally prevent a marriage from being life-giving, and if so what means are appropriate to that end. The argument I am about to present is based primarily on natural law rather than the Bible. It is premised on the belief that we can draw valid conclusions about nature (our bodies in particular) by reasoning from how God has created them. In particular, the following assumes that the way God designed our bodies to function is the way they ought to function, and that it is therefore wrong to intentionally alter this created function. If you disagree with this, you are unlikely to find the following very convincing.

The first issue is whether (and under what circumstances) it is ever right to prevent/postpone pregnancy. To this, the answer must be a reserved yes. God has given us reason so that we may exercise control over our bodies. None of our body’s functions and desires are bad, but they must be ruled by reason – in fact, our ability to do so is one of the things that distinguishes us from animals.

Nevertheless, temporarily preventing a marriage from being life-giving is a serious decision. Children are a blessing from the Lord, and having lots of them (by contemporary standards) is a good thing, as Hebrew and classical Christian culture realized. It is true that our society makes it difficult to have a large family, but this is a bad thing. John Paul II warned the world against embracing a “culture of death”, and I think you can see just that in the declining birth rates in developed nations. Insofar as the culture we live in is imperfect, living rightly in it is an act of counter-culture. I think large families represent just that kind of appropriate cultural rebellion².

The next issue is what means are appropriate to the end of controlling births, to which the catholic (and my) answer is that only those methods which work with the woman’s natural periods of fertility (usually called natural family planning or NFP). This flows rather naturally from my starting premise that the way God designed the body to function is the way it ought to function. NFP, rather than altering the way God designed sex to function, instead works with the body as designed. The Catholic church has been widely criticized for inconsistency in allowing NFP but not artificial methods, but this criticism misses the fundamental reasoning behind catholic opposition to birth control. There is a world of difference between using reason to control one’s body and altering the way God designed the body to work. Allowing couples to space/limit their children by not having sex does not sunder sex from procreation in the manner that contraception does.

There are, of course, downsides to NFP. It has a somewhat higher failure rate than artificial methods, and it has the obvious downside of celibacy for several days a month. Nevertheless, this is the cost that God has ordained (through the function of the human body) for spacing children. The fact that it is difficult and inconvenient highlights the fact that God meant us to have children, and any decision to limit them is a serious one that must be made for equally serious reasons.

Objections
In the process of changing my mind about this issue, I wound up answering several of my own objections to the practice, which are standard enough that they might be your objections, too. The first of them is that the catholic position is just a holdover from Augustine’s stodgy view of sex (roughly summarized: “sex is bad. It’s just barely ok if it’s for procreation and you don’t enjoy it”). Sex, the argument goes, is not just for procreation – it is also for spousal unity, and is valid in that context regardless of whether or not it is live-giving.

It is certainly true that procreation is not the only purpose of sex, but the position I am defending has never claimed that it is. Instead, we hold that all the purposes of sex (pleasure, spousal unity, procreation) are important and necessary components of a sexual relationship. In fact, this objection falls back on itself. It is not the NFP position which exalts one purpose of sex over another, but the artificial birth-control position. If it is obviously wrong to have sex for pleasure to the exclusion of unity, and to have sex for procreation to the exclusion of unity, why is intentional sterilization, which allows a couple to have sex for unity and pleasure to the exclusion of procreation, not wrong?

The second objection is that, since the fall has damaged our bodies, it is not valid to reason from how our bodies ought to function because they no longer function that way. However, the fact that our bodies are fallen is not a blank check to ignore their design. I don’t know of any good reasons to think that we aren’t capable of reasoning faithfully about what was and what wasn’t affected by the fall, and it seems obvious to me that the relevant features of the reproductive system were unaffected – although they do not perform their function as well as they were created to.

But, it may be argued, this is precisely the point. Because childbirth is very hard on the body, we are justified in utilizing artificial birth control to counter the effects of the fall. The number of couples who utilize contraception to space or limit births based on an objective analysis of the woman’s physical health is, I suspect, rather small. Nevertheless, it is a possible use of contraception.

Implicit in this objection, however, is the assumption that in order to compensate for an alteration of the body’s function caused by the fall (pain in childbirth, wear and tear, etc.) it is acceptable to further alter the body’s created function. This seems backwards to me. Why should one violation of the body’s created function be an acceptable cure for another? It is a good thing to utilize science and medical technology to alleviate the damage the body incurs because of the fall, but artificial methods of birth control do not do that. Instead, they replace one imperfection with another.

Conclusion
The traditional Christian opposition to birth control is as relevant today as it has ever been. It is tempting to think that the classical Christian opposition to birth control was an artifact of the particular methods available at the time, and that as such it is an antiquated position which ought to be discarded. I have argued that this is not so. The opposition of Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, Wesley, et al. (four names you do not usually see together!) to birth control, which I have attempted to defend, is just as relevant today as it was five hundred or a thousand years ago. The discovery of new methods for controlling births and the cultural embracing of the practice has no effect on the reasons Christians have traditionally rejected it, and they do not constitute a justification for discarding the Church’s teaching on this point.

¹I say Catholic because they are currently the most outspoken advocates of the position, but in fact it is just as classically protestant as it is Catholic. Until the 1930’s opposition to birth control was practically unanimous among all Christians. The Anglican church was the first to allow it, and the rest of the protestant churches followed suit soon after. It is interesting that the protestant churches embraced birth control right as it was culturally convenient to do so, and that the move was spearheaded by the liberal wing of the Anglican church. Whenever church leaders “discover” that a traditional Christian teaching can be safely discarded just in time to keep pace with the culture, I raise my left eyebrow in suspicion.

²Please do not misunderstand me. I am not accusing everyone who has a small family of being worldly. I am suggesting that the tendency toward small families is a product of the culture of death rather than Christian values, and that furthermore a good way to counteract this tendency is to have large families.