Dad-ISMs

Christian Singleness

2012-02-07T17:59:00.000-08:00

It is clear that the concept of marriage in American culture is confused and broken from a Christian perspective. The acceptance of homosexual marriage, the high frequency of births out of wedlock, and the high divorce rate all speak to that brokenness, but those are merely the symptoms that show the underlying disease of having no concept of what marriage is. As Pope John Paul II pointed out in his theology of the body, marriage carries the image of God to reflect the communion of the Trinity in the communion of male/female together, and to reflect God's creativity in our procreation. The male and female bodies themselves bear witness to this purpose and the body itself has a 'spousal' meaning in its very design. As the pope put it, 'the definitive creation of man consists in the creation of the unity of two beings' as male and female. As a result, according to Genesis 1-3 and re-iterated by Jesus in Matthew 5 and 19, marriage can only be between male and female and 'man' (Hebrew 'adam) is in some sense incomplete when either male or female is alone. Timothy Keller and his wife Kathy raise this point as well in their book The Meaning of Marriage in which they ask how can long term singleness be a good condition if males and females are in some ways incomplete alone?

In their book, the Kellers point out some ways in which our current culture of singleness is broken. Many have lived through their parents' divorce and so have a certain fear of a failed marriage for themselves; many see marriage as primarily a way to gain personal gratification (sexual or emotional) instead of lifelong love, care, and devotion and they see other ways to that gratification outside of marriage now; many have an overly idealized concept of finding the perfect 'soul mate' and will never 'settle' for anyone who doesn't live up to their impossible, imagined ideal; others are insistent that they should never have to change (or grow) and must be 'accepted as they are' and can't bear the thought of having to accomodate some else's disagreements with their habits. All of these are based on the idea that marriage exists to make them happy rather than to live out God's image and be shaped into closer conformity to that image (sanctification). It seems to me that any single person who remains single for any of these reasons is in fact incomplete and is failing to live out God's image.

The Kellers also point out that, perhaps for the first time, our culture no longer has a culturally supported pathway for singles to meet and marry. We have no arranged marriages; we have no formal courtship culture; the 'dating' culture of my youth (which had many problems of its own) has died away. There basically is no established cultural pathway to support the finding of a marriage partner now.

Is it possible for choosing singleness to be in conformance with God's image and Word? Yes, but only under certain circumstances. The pope points out in his theology of the body that Jesus speaks to this in Matthew 19 in saying that 'there are eunuchs by nature, eunuchs by the will of man, and eunuchs for the kingdom of God'. That is, some are single for the purpose of total devotion to God's work, as Jesus himself was. Paul says some similar things in I Corinthians. But this is legitimate only under certain circumstances and for a small minority, says the pope, which include that it is voluntary, fully and joyfully embraced, is done as a gift of self to the God just as in marriage both give themselves as a gift, is for the kingdom (not for personal autonomy), and bears spiritual fruit from the single vocation (rather than children). Most singles today, including Christian singles, would not meet these criteria. In particular, a great many would prefer to be married but find themselves in a single culture that seems to have no cultural pathway to marriage and lots of fears and overly-idealized criteria for marriage. They are not 'eunuchs for the kingdom'; they are just stuck. These have not chosen singleness but are just stuck with it. For those who are stuck, certainly they can still be God's servants and continue to seek Him. Their unchosen singleness is not dishonorable or a prevention of obeying God. They will need to break out of cultural norms to find suitable ways to get to know potential spouses since our culture has abandoned making it a priority to have established pathways toward marriage. But the fact that they desire marriage is evidence that it really is something of an incompleteness.

So, it seems to me that our culture is broken in regard to both marriage and singleness. Many single Christians who are avoiding marriage as a result of fears, unrealistic idealism, or idolatrous individualism seem to me to be out of God's will. Marriage will always be an act that requires faith; now it also requires more initiative and creativity than in the past since our culture is not very supportive.

More on the theology of the body

2012-01-29T12:54:00.000-08:00

As I mentioned last time, the body of 'man' ('adam', or mankind) itself bears witness to its meaning by being both male and female. As Pope John Paul II pointed out, man bears the image of God not only in his humanity but also in the communion of persons as lived out in marriage. Marriage, then, has the purpose of making visible the image of God, both in the communion of love between husband and wife and in the natural creativity, bearing children, that flows from that communion.

This then is how the body 'speaks' to us. As there is an inherent meaning in our body, there is also a 'language' that speaks to us. When lived out in the image of God, it speaks truth. When lived out in rebellion to God, it speaks lies. In that way adultery and fornication attack the image of God. In his reflections on this, the Pope noted that for the husband/wife bond to live out God's image it must be done in accord with what was taught in Genesis and re-iterated by Jesus: 'for this cause a man shall leave his father and mother and cleave to his wife, and the two shall be one flesh'..This involved the complete gift of self to another, irrevocably. It is not a complete gift if it is given to many others. That does not constitute 'cleaving' to the one. It is also permanent and irrevocable. Anything less is not a complete gift of self. Therefore the Bible says, 'what God has joined together, let not man put asunder.' God intends monogamy for life. Polygamy, adultery, and fornication all desecrate marriage, and in so doing desecrate the image of God in man. Homosexuality also desecrates God's image since it denies the meaning of the body as male and female and renders impossible the pro-creativity that reflects God.

Both heterosexual sin and homosexual sin share a propensity to ignore the meaning of the body by reducing the object of desire into an object. It is not possible to seek to live out God's image in our bodies, to make a complete gift of self, and to make the sanctification of our spouse as our goal and also to view them as an object for our own gratification. To live out the meaning of the body demands a high view of the integrity and value of the person to whom we make the gift of self. It also demands a high view of how the body itself was created as male and female. Sexual sin, both of the heterosexual and homosexual variety, degrades this meaning, which the pope calls 'the spousal meaning of the body'. You cannot live out God's image by using persons as objects.

This is one of the reasons that I refer to pornography as a lie. It treats people as objects, which is itself a lie even if they consent to such use. It also denies the very meaning of the body which can only be fulfilled in the monogamous, irrevocable gift of self within marriage, thereby telling another lie.

In their book The Meaning of Marriage, Tim and Kathy Keller raise this question: 'How can we claim that long term singleness is a good condition in light of the previous chapter's argument that males and females are in some ways incomplete without the other?" Good question, in light of the meaning of the body. We shall talk about that next time.

The meaning of our body

2012-01-21T06:19:00.000-08:00

At Christmas I mentioned how the incarnation of Christ connects biology with theology, and gives witness to the fact that our bodies were created to bear the image of God. Christ is Himself the ultimate example of how He uses the body to make visible what is invisible, the spiritual and divine.

I have been reading lately in Pope John Paul II's transcribed talks about what he called the 'theology of the body'. In that teaching he goes back to Genesis based on Jesus teaching about marriage. Jesus also goes back to Genesis (see Matthew 19). In Genesis 1:26 it says that God created man (Hebrew 'adam) in his image, male ('is) and female ('issa). That is, the complete man was the combination of male and female. One of them alone was incomplete. The pope concludes that man carries the image of God not just in his humanity but also in the communion of persons in the union of male and female. Just as there is an intimate communion in the Trinity, so is there to be intimate communion in man by the union of male and female. Just as the love of God in the Trinity is naturally creative, resulting in man, so is the union in marriage to be naturally pro-creative, resulting in children. Just as the love of God in the Trinity is expressed in the giving of self, as Christ showed in giving Himself, so marriage is intended to bear God's image by the gift of self to each other. He concludes that this meaning of communion is carried to us not only by the Word, but by the body itself. As Adam recognized when he first saw Eve in chapter 2 of Genesis, he immediately recognized that she was intended to complete him. This message was clear from the body itself. So the pope concludes that the body itself has a meaning, and that meaning he calls 'spousal', 'the spousal meaning of the body'. This also supports the very Biblical notion that we are a communion of body/soul, we are not just souls that happen to have a body temporarily. Just as Christ in His resurrected body shows how the body will be integral to our being in eternity, our bodies are integral to what it means to be persons, and integral to living out God's image on earth.

So then this means that marriage has a clear meaning. That meaning is not to make us happy, to give us companionship, or to provide self-actualization. Those are all aimed at individuals and the freedom and fulfillment of individuals, making self-actualization of the individual the highest good. This instead means that marriage is intended as a way to live out the image of God. The pope goes on to point out that it is possible to do this without marriage, as Jesus did, but that is not the norm. The norm is for marriage to be a way to live out, in the body, the complete/full image of God. And the work of marriage is sanctification.

I think he is right. In our focus on falling in love and happiness in marriage we have turned it into a self-centered thing rather than a self-giving thing. Jesus taught that to save your life you must lose it. Where should we look to learn what it looks like to give yourself away on a daily basis? We should grow up learning that in the home, observing it in marriage. If we hope to teach our failing culture the true meaning of marriage, we must re-learn it in the church first.

Christmas: When Biology Meets Theology

2011-12-25T08:21:00.000-08:00

It is Christmas, a time to remember the incarnation of Christ, when God came among us and demonstrated before our eyes to what good use these bodies we have could be put.

Pope John Paul II in his teaching on the theology of the body pointed out that it is in the incarnation of Christ that biology is taken up into theology, where the study of God includes the flesh. In our age, the current of popular opinion has been to continuously degrade the significance of our bodily existence. Our culture treats human existence as little more than an evolutionary accident, unborn children as little more than 'blob of flesh', and the body as a toy to play with for our own self-centered pleasure. It was this culture that the Pope hoped both to confront and to teach. On the first Christmas, as Christ entered a world dominated by a Roman empire both pagan and corrupt, it was not much different. His coming both confronted and taught the world, both in that time and ours, that He created these bodies of ours for better things, to reflect God's image in the world.

The apostle writes that He was 'the express image' of the Father. In his incarnation, we get to know God in a different way than in any other modes. The humility He expressed in taking on flesh to die on our behalf is in itself enormously humbling. The fact of the infinite taking on not just the finite but the form of a helpless babe is beyond my comprehension.

It is a somewhat academic question to ask, 'Which is the greatest miracle?' Yet to me the incarnation of Christ stands out. For the infinite Creator to take on flesh is as incomprehensible as the Trinity itself. It also makes possible the rest of his mission to redeem us, and confers upon our fleshly existence a dignity beyond what we could have imagined.

His Advent has shown us who He is, and also shown us who we are to be like.

Special before birth

2011-12-22T14:42:00.000-08:00

The prelude to the Christmas story in Luke chronicles the birth of John the Baptist. John, like Jesus, was announced to his parents in advance of his conception by the archangel Gabriel, and was given his name at that time as well. This made him one of a very few in the Bible who would be named before birth. Ishmael, Isaac, Solomon, Josiah, Maher-shalalhashbaz are agreed upon by most students of the Old Testament. Some say Moses, but that is not explicit in the text; some also say the emperor Cyrus, but that is a prophesy and not a naming event. Then in the New Testament we have John the Baptist and Jesus. Since name giving was a very important ceremony, a time in which the father essentially claimed the child as being his, this was a very special thing.

Even more special, though, was the fact that John is stated to have been filled with the Spirit before birth. (Luke 1:15). He also 'leaped for joy' in the womb when his mother heard the voice of Mary as she came to visit John's mother while carrying Jesus before his birth.

Several commentators have pointed out that this filling of the Spirit before birth is not something that happens to a 'blob of flesh', or an organ. It is a strong argument that the Scripture considers the unborn child a person, with the distinctive characteristics needed to be filled with the Spirit of God as a separate person from his mother. Our pastor brought this out in his sermon last week about John, and it does seem to me to support the dignity of the unborn child in a very unique way.

As we celebrate Christmas and the birth of the Christ child, it seems a good time to think about the dignity of every child, even before they are born.

A Blessed Thanksgiving

2011-11-22T17:50:00.000-08:00

At Thanksgiving we pause to give thanks for the manyblessings we have as well as feasting to enjoy those blessings. This makes it agood time to think about what it means to be ‘blessed’. We have recently beenstudying the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5 on Sunday mornings, which beginswith some unusual ‘blessings’: we are said to be blessed if we are poor inspirit, or meek, or merciful, or if we mourn, or are pure in heart. These are not the kinds of blessings we areusually giving thanks for. We say we areblessed when we are prosperous, have a good job, have good health, and havewell behaved children. Certainly thoseare things we desire but they are focused on our own comfort more than ourcharacter or ministry to others.

Some translations of the Bible replace the word ‘blessed’with ‘happy’. I think this misses thepoint completely. The passage is not about being happy. It is about having theright kind of character and about spiritual well-being. While the Greek word usedin the text can be translated ‘happy’, Jesus was Jewish and the idea of‘blessed’ is not a Greek idea: it is a Jewish concept. ‘Baruch’ is the Hebrewterm that goes with the idea, and it is the start of many Jewish prayers andappears hundreds of times in the Old Testament. Jesus is talking about an oldJewish idea, baruch, and that is the idea we must understand in order tounderstand the Sermon on the Mount. Matthew is simply seeking to translate that Jewish concept into Greek.

The Jewish people were the ‘elect’ and that was a greatblessing. They were blessed. Yet, that very blessing made them accountable in aspecial way and also led to suffering. Similarly, when Mary took Jesus to thetemple for His dedication, she was blessed by Simeon (see Luke 2). Thatblessing involves Simeon praising God for having lived to see the Messiah butalso the blessing he gives includes telling Mary that ‘a sword shall pierceyour own soul also’. The blessingincluded suffering. This is a different idea from ‘happy’. Using ‘happy’ in the Beatitudes instead of‘blessed’ strikes me as a case of what C.S. Lewis called ‘verbicide’: killingthe meaning in the word.

The Biblical idea of blessing has to do with being put in aspecial position, a position of special favor but also special responsibility. Theeldest son typically received a special blessing from the father before thefather died to pass on the inheritance, but with that blessing cameresponsibility to care for the extended family. At this Thanksgiving, it iseasy for us in America to focus on our material well-being due to the economicdifficulties, though our spiritualhealth is suspect. As a nation, we havespecial responsibilities to use our blessings for good and not just for ourcomfort. Let us be thankful for theopportunity to do good with the abundance God has given.

Jobs versus jobs

2011-10-19T16:15:00.000-07:00

The celebration of Steve Jobs continues, and today's USA Today had yet another opinion piece on his greatness. As with many prior articles that have appeared in various publications since his death, this one once again quotes from the Stanford graduation speech he gave a few years ago, which is excerpted here:

"The only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it," he told students at Stanford in a commencement speech in 2005."
"Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. … Have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary."

Today's article attributed this insight to his Buddhism and the manner in which Buddhism views death. Since he seems to have embraced Buddhism, it no doubt impacted his view of the world and of life. I do have some issues with this point of view, however.

First, Jobs' take on this is very modern, if not post-modern. He assumes that to do meaningful work requires loving that work. Unfortunately, for most of history the vast majority of people have had very little choice in their work. Constraints of education, poverty, tyrants, war, and culture have pushed most people into their work, most often just to provide the basic necessities of food and shelter. Jobs' philosophy reflects our very spoiled and privileged time and location in history, and when taken to its logical conclusion it would say that most work is not meaningful and that most people lived meaningless lives. That is quite opposite to what Christianity implies, which is that all work (assuming it is ethical and honest) can be done as an offering to God with inherent value and meaning, and all lives have inherent meaning. If circumstances consign us to menial labor, that job can still be offered to God and provide satisfaction in doing it well. (see Eccles.2:24-25). Having choice is a great privilege and luxury, but it is not what determines meaning.

Second, Jobs' philosophy is quite counter to Christ's teaching that 'to find your life you must lose it'. Jobs' emphasis seems to be on looking inside yourself to focus on what pleases you, to find what provides 'self-fulfillment'. Christ, on the other hand, taught that we must look to God and please Him, and then whatever we do will be meaningful. The one is very self-centered, the other very God-centered.

The fundamental difference, to me, seems to be why we work: do we work to please and fulfill ourselves, or do we work to glorify God? To work in order to glorify God is certainly not to 'waste your life', as Jobs said, but it is very much like 'living someone else's life', though the 'someone else' is really the 'Someone Else'.

The Death of the Pied Piper

2011-10-09T14:26:00.000-07:00

Steve Jobs has died. The outpouring of grief at his passing reminds me of when Princess Diana died. At this point I really should not be surprised at the cult of celebrity in our world. The current trial of Michael Jackson's personal physician has put another celebrity life into the news every day, and whenever a famous celebrity dies, such as when Liz Taylor died a few months ago, it seems to me that the media attention far exceeds the newsworthiness of the event. Despite this ongoing attention to celebrities, I still find myself at times surprised at the seemingly religious adoration that a few of them receive when they die. Princess Diana was one of those, and so is Jobs.

I found little in Jobs to admire. Clearly he was successful in business. He was also ruthless, angry, compulsively driven, and notorious for cheating his partner Wozniak in the early days. The success of the products from Apple since 2000 is unquestionable, but before his second stint at Apple the story was mostly about what might have been had he not been so stubborn, which allowed Windows(r) to dominate the 90's. He did seem to learn from his early mistakes the second time around, which resulted in much greater business success. His success as a human being seems much more in question to me.
Christianity Today recently observed in an article titled 'The Gospel of Steve Jobs' that he did preach a certain gospel. (here is a link to that article: http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2011/januaryweb-only/gospelstevejobs.html ) His gospel is best summed up in his Stanford graduation address of a few years ago, which is quoted in the article and has been quoted endlessly in the news media the past few days. That gospel is to live your own life, don't be 'trapped by dogma', be your own god. It is a purely secular gospel, as Christianity Today points out, and is all about self-fulfillment. In a culture that preaches that we should be our own god, even the secular long for someone to put on a pedestal for adoration.

Don't get me wrong: I take no joy at his passing. I like my iPhone, too. I just marvel at how much our culture longs for someone to idolize, and how very vividly that shows up at the death of a celebrity who has some sort of 'gospel' that he promotes. Even when his personal character is such that you would never want your children to grow up to be like him.

One Flesh

2011-09-26T17:13:00.000-07:00

"So God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them. "So says Genesis in 1:26-28 about the creation of mankind. It is an interesting text in that it says God created man (singular) by creating both male and female, obviously not singular. Yet this is consistent with the later passage in Gen. 2:24 that they would be 'one flesh'. In other words, it takes both male and female to make one 'man'. This, we are told in the 1:26-28 passage is at least part of what is meant by being made 'in the image of God'.

We had special services at our church yesterday on the topic of marriage. Last week was also related to this in addressing the idea of homosexual marriage. In the sermon last week it was pointed out that marriage does not exist primarily to make us happy. While happiness is generally a good thing, it is not the highest good. Marriage exists primarily to make us more like Christ. It also is an institution in which we live out the image of God, by which we demonstrate something about what it means to be created in God's image. It often yields happiness, but not always. Happiness is not it's primary object. As Christians, we see God as Trinity and therefore in an intimate and loving relationship among the Trinity, who are One. Marriage gives us a limited image of that union in marriage and the family, and gives us reason to look forward to that fuller union with Christ in heaven, as Paul describes the union of Christ and the Church. In marriage we learn to imitate Christ in putting at least one other (our spouse) ahead of ourselves, and usually more than just one other when children are born into the marriage. So to be more like Christ, and to live out the image of God in this world seem to me to be the primary goals for marriage. Both of those involve the idea of completeness.

Our culture, including in the church, generally doesn't view it that way, though. Most folks seem to think that the purpose of marriage is to make them happy. For some, it is to obtain financial security. For some, to obtain companionship. But it seems to me that all of these are self-centered, are subsets of 'happy', and none capture the essence of the Genesis passage about how it requires 2 to make 1. I think the gist of that is that the purpose of marriage is to make us complete. Male and female are both incomplete, and require each other to make one 'man' or 'one flesh'. Completeness is also our ultimate goal in Christ (see Col. 2:10), and Christian marriage moves us in that direction. Paul also points out that singleness that pursues a life more devoted to Christ can also move us in that direction of Christ-likeness, though marriage is the norm for most people.

If we as Christians proclaim the purpose of marriage to be the pursuit of happiness, financial security, companionship, or sexual fulfillment, and all of these are common, then our marriages are not different from non-Christians or from gays. But gay marriage cannot offer the completeness for which male and female were created as one male/female complementary union; nor can it share the image of God that requires the male/female combination that includes procreation as an image of God's creation. I think by focusing on happiness we have, within the Church, undermined marriage.

I read last week that the average age of marriage has increased still more since the current recession began, up to about 29 now. The same article said something like 40% of those 25-35 have not married. I must admit some concern about marriage in our culture, especially in the Church. Marriage seems to be less compelling for men and women yet more compelling to homosexuals. I wonder if part of that is because we have lost the vision of its purpose being completeness and have replaced it with the idea that marriage is just one way among many to pursue happiness.

The Cathedral of Liberty

2011-08-05T14:17:00.000-07:00

We just returned from Washington, D.C., and I am always struck by the national symbols in our capital city. Having been there several times before, on this visit we went to visit things we had not visited in prior trips, including the World War 2 memorial, the Native American museum, and the National Portrait Gallery. The WW2 memorial visit caused me to reflect not only on the service of so many of our countrymen in that vast conflict but especially of my dad who served in Europe from Normandy to Berlin, earning 5 battle stars and a Purple Heart along the way. The Native American museum has some interesting exhibits on the 3rd floor but overall was disappointing in its exhibits. I had hoped for more about key leaders of the various tribes and what they did to contribute to who the tribes are today. The National Portrait Gallery was spectacular and will be worth another visit. All of the U.S. Presidents have portraits on display along with many other notable Americans from throughout our history.

The layout of the National Mall again reminded me of a cathedral, which I am sure was intended. Consider this photo from Wikipedia showing the 1901 McMillan plan for the Mall:

If it were not labeled 'The Mall', you might think it was the floor plan of a cathedral. Notice that the reflecting pool between the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial was intended to be in the shape of a cross, though it was not finally built that way. The entire design is also in the shape of a cross, just like a cathedral. As in other cathedrals, as a nation was go there to honor and mourn our dead, to reflect on things that are true, to give thanks for the liberty we have. As I have pondered the words of Lincoln's second inaugural address, carved into the wall of the Lincoln Memorial, I have been moved to tears as he reflected on God's judgement of our nation for the evil of slavery. On this trip I had to wonder what additional judgements may come from our current pursuit of the slavery that results from the idolatry of self-actualization which has resulted in widespread abortion, pornography, homosexuality, and greed.

The Mall always make me think of a cathedral. We don't hear much about its resemblance to a cathedral nowadays, but I think it was intended that way, as a sort of cathedral of liberty. It reminds me of our blessings, the sacrifice it took to obtain those blessings, and the needed repentance to maintain them in an honorable way.

Polygamy and the Current State of Marriage

2011-06-05T13:49:00.000-07:00

The current issue of First Things magazine points out how polygamy seems to be less objectionable to some folks nowadays, what with the TV shows about polygamy and all. It is obvious that once society becomes accepting of dysfunction like homosexuality, polygamy is the next obvious step. The same issue has an editorial piece about how the current underclass is characterized not only by economic poverty but also by impoverished values. That editorial bemoans the editor's frustation with his liberal friends who seem to only be able to see the economic poverty but cannot see the moral and cultural deficits in the underclass that keep them in their poverty even when they are given the opportunity to get out.

It was striking to me, in reading both the article about moral poverty and the comments about polygamy in a separate article, how both polygamy and the absence of marriage that exists in the American underclass result in many of the same ills. One key point about polygamy really should be obvious upon slight reflection: when a significant number of men have multiple wives, another significant number cannot have wives. One huge problem with polygamy is that it creates an underclass of men who are not able to marry and they of course tend to be those who are less desirable in the first place. Something has to be done with them. They have to be driven out of the community, or killed off in wars, or made eunuchs (like in Biblical times) or something. When they are not dealt with, they tend to take up high risk behaviors to get access to women, like aggression or murder or drunkenness or seeking out prostitutes. As a result, polygamous societies have a permanent underclass of unmarriageable men, with high rates of violence and crime. Meanwhile the women in polygamous marriages get less respect, more abuse, have more children, and end up raising children mostly alone since the father is spread among multiple 'families'. And, yes, homosexuality is a problem, too.

It is striking to me how similar these results are to what we currently see in American low income society where marriage and the family is in crisis, where 70% of the children are born out of wedlock. There we also see a permanent underclass of men who are pretty much unmarriageable due to their high risk behavior, criminality, and lack of education,where women are often abused, where the children are brought up predominantly by women. Homosexuality is also on the rise.

Similarly, in China and India where the one child policy led to selective abortion of unborn girls, there is much concern over the rising generation of men who will not be able to marry due to lack of women as a result of abortion. While the circumstance causing the shortage is different than in polygamy and in America, the expectation and concern is similar for the resulting high risk behavior as men seek to gain access to women: there is great concern that China and India will become violent as this generation of men without wives comes of age.

So in our current world, we have 3 examples of quite different ways to create dysfunction in the basic family structure, but all have similar negative consequences in terms of creating men who are unmarriageable and who will almost certainly engage in destructive behavior.

It is remarkable how fundamental the basic one man/one woman family is to society at large, and how it's demise, no matter how that demise is created, wreaks that same kinds of havoc.

The Royal Wedding

2011-05-07T13:04:00.000-07:00

Just before the sudden killing of Bin Laden all the news was about the marriage of the British heir to the throne and his commoner bride. They certainly gave the appearance of a fairy-tale couple, he the prince charming and she the beautiful princess. While everyone knew that they had been living together for about 8 years already, the world just overlooked that as if it simply didn't matter. All the focus was on the fairy tale of the lovely couple who would live happily ever after.

To some degree I can understand why such fanfare was expected for a public personage like the heir to the British throne, as it would not look good to become king with a common law marriage. The laws around common law marriage have been changing as co-habitation has become more common, but when I was growing up in Ohio, the law was that after 7 years of co-habitation you were considered married for purposes of estate, health care, children and property rights. As far as I am concerned, the royal couple was already married, whether they admitted it or not. While it would be unseemly to talk about 'William and his common-law wife, Kate' when talking about the royal family, that was in fact the reality. What I do not understand is why the church would pretend otherwise in conducting a church wedding for them.

Back in the early 80's one of the shift supervisors at the paper mill where I worked was living with a woman and he was contemplating getting officially married. This was to be his fourth marriage, but he said he 'of course' wanted a church wedding. I asked him why. He did not attend church regularly and was not sure he believed in God. So then why, I asked, would he want a church wedding since he clearly was not part of the church? Well, it just seemed like the right way to have a wedding to him. It was the way you did it.

I recently read The Shadow of Almighty by Elizabeth Elliot, which is about the life of Jim Elliot, her martyred husband. Back in 1953 he complained that 'Twentiety century Christian weddings are the vainest, most meaningless forms. There is no vestige of reality.' He and Elizabeth were married in a civil ceremony in Quito, with 2 other missionary couples present as witnesses. Very simple. He simply couldn't abide the vain events that weddings had become. It has gotten worse since then.

The wedding ceremony is loaded with symbolism, most of it made a mockery in the recent royal wedding. The white dress represents the purity and virginity of the bride which was clearly not the case; the giving away by the father of bride shows that she is leaving his house to dwell now with the groom, obviously no longer appropriate; the vows are made before God to obey God, but His commands about fornication had long since been flagrantly discarded. The entire event made a mockery of what a Christian wedding should be, just like it would have been for my co-worker in Ohio back in the 1980's, but that is pretty much the norm today.

It was a lovely event. They make a lovely couple. And it was all meaningless. I hope their marriage proves to be more meaningful than their wedding.

Easter Reflections

2011-04-22T17:35:00.000-07:00

I have commented in the past on how much I love the Christmas season. It is easy to delight in the joy of the season, the festivities, the anticipation of the children, but also to be awed at the thought of the Creator taking on flesh to dwell among us. This Incarnation is such an enormous miracle, so unheard of in other religions that the infinite God would humble Himself to walk among us, that it makes the entire season one of unalloyed joy.

Many argue that Easter is the greater holiday, though. It is certainly clear that the Resurrection is the linchpin of Christianity. As the apostle Paul says, if Christ is not raised then we are yet in our sins and without hope in the world. And yet its joy is not unalloyed. That is the result, of course, of the great sorrow of Good Friday. At Easter, as at no other time of the year, we are confronted with the enormous ugliness of our own sinfulness. The crown of thorns, the merciless beating, the horrific death on the cross of Calvary all show us in a scene too horrible to look at the ugliness of our sin. When I have watched Mel Gibson's movie The Passion of the Christ, I have to look away during the scourging. It is depicted very accurately in historical terms, and I cannot watch it. It is too painful to watch, especially when I know all too well why it happened.

There were hints of this at the Passover. When Israel was delivered from Egypt, the Jews would also have had their firstborn taken by the death angel had they not sacrificed the Passover lamb; they too were guilty enough to die. A substitute was needed. Even as God was delivering them His justice required recognition of the fact that they, too, were worthy of death. When Jesus re-interpreted the Passover at the Last Supper He made that connection more clear; He would be the substitute, for the Jews and all mankind. He became the Passover for all of us. So whenever we take the Lord's Supper we celebrate a new kind of Passover.

But that sacrifice is always in view, at least for me, at Easter. I did not want to see Mel Gibson's movie, but I forced myself to see it. When I have attended Passion plays, I have forced myself to go. I know what I am going to be confronted with, and it is ugly: my own sinfulness.

I think we could do better on Easter morning, or at least I could. I have a hard time shaking off Good Friday. I think the women at the grave and the Disciples did, too. 'Where have they taken His body?' they asked. But He was not there. ' He is Risen!' replied the angel. He is risen indeed! Let us rejoice, for the ugliness now has been dealt with.

Completely Inclusive?

2011-04-17T13:43:00.000-07:00

In his book The Reason for God, Timothy Keller addresses one chapter to the accusation that Christianity is a straitjacket that robs people of the right to think for themselves and forces one set of values on everyone else. In the chapter he discusses the idea of truth and the issue of making a claim that a proposition or set of propositions is the truth. He points out that our Supreme Court has defined freedom as the right to define our own concept of truth; he also points out how people like Freud, Nietzsche and Foucault claimed that all truth-claims were just power-plays, seeking to control us while not noticing that they themselves were also making a truth-claim. All of this leads to an untenable position among modernists: they claim to have the truth while also claiming there is no truth. This led Chesterton to point out that modern rebels are total skeptics, never trusting anyone and denouncing anything that claims to contain 'truth'. The result is that such a rebel can never be a true revolutionary, because to be a revolutionary is to reform the status quo with a better system: and to be 'better' implies a moral doctrine of some kind, a claim to be 'true' in a more fundamental way. So modern rebels are truly, like the book title, rebels without a cause.

All of this leads Keller to conclude that no community can be totally inclusive. Every community has to have a set of moral constraints that hold it together which it considers true; it cannot tolerate those who ignore those constraints. Our system in the U.S. requires some basic beliefs about property rights, rule of law, freedom of speech, and so on that will not allow stealing, killing our children for changing religion, and other things. We cannot be inclusive of those who will not live within those boundaries. This calls into question the fallacious idea of a growing part of our society who seem to think that it is possible to be totally inclusive; that somehow we should tolerate most anything, failing to see where that could lead us in the long run.

This also raises questions about how we act in the broader world. Keller comments that 'every account of justice and reason is embedded in a set of some particular beliefs about the meaning of human life that is not shared with everyone'. A couple of weeks ago a nut-case in Florida burned a copy of the Quran; the radical Islamists in Afghanistan responded by killing a number of people in Afghanistan, both U.N. staff and some Afghans as well. Karzai, the ne'er-do-well head of the government, used the burning to incite the trouble, making no effort to calm it. While I think we were fully justified to depose the Taliban after 9/11 by evicting them from Afghanistan, it is fairly clear that the 'set of particular beliefs about the meaning of human life' there is far from ours. Should we be fighting for them? My feeling is that we need to limit our goals in the Islamic world to only matters that clearly involve our own security and interests. Their underlying values are not something I wish to defend. I think we had a legitimate interest in deposing the Taliban in the wake of 9/11; it is much less clear that the popularly elected regime there now is worthy of our support.

Defining Yourself

2011-03-30T17:18:00.000-07:00

The March 28 issue of Newsweek includes an article by one Roz Savage about how divorcing her husband and quitting her job to row across the ocean transformed her life of mundane existence into a life of meaning and value. I was amazed. It was all I could do to keep my jaw from hitting the floor. I have read some incredibly shallow and self-centered things in my life but this has to be near the top of the list for the 'most self-centered' award.

I hope there is more to her story than meets the eye in this one page article. Her brief recounting of how she graduated from Oxford, became an investment banker, got married, and found herself in a meaningless existence is not by itself surprising. I have a low view of the investment banking community anyway. Careers that have more value to the world than that are plentiful, so she could easily have changed career path to something more useful. What the issues were in her marriage are not stated, but she barely mentions the marriage as if it were little more than a trifle. She seems to indicate that the only reason she wanted out of the marriage was to avoid the risk of being defined as a wife. One has to wonder why she married in the first place. She clearly was making lots of life decisions without much reason for any of them.

What amazed me most, though, was that she viewed rowing across the ocean as a more valuable investment of her life than things like marriage and contributing to society. What she wanted was a life 'filled with spectacular successes and failures' and to define herself by whatever was left when she got rid of anything else that might be connected to her, things like a job and a husband. She clearly sees the ultimate value in life to be defining herself; never let her be defined by something outside herself, like maybe her Creator. God forbid. So having now found found her true self, she 'thanks her lucky stars' since she would certainly never be caught thanking God.

How strange. I hope she lives through her 'spectacular failures' long enough to understand how truly impoverished her self-defined values really are.

Book Learnin' for business and church

2011-03-30T16:47:00.000-07:00

The new April issue of Harvard Business Review is all about learning from failure in business, and how most businesses really don't. There is much to be learned from things like failed product launches and failed new business launches, but most often the pain of learning from them makes us hesitant to do the self-assessment that is required to learn from it. At the end of this issue is an editorial piece about an attempt to publish a book about an entrepreneurial business failure. The publisher commented to the author, 'All the evidence suggests that business books are not in fact about learning, but about escapism, just like a romance novel. The business book is about imagining yourself a success, not making yourself a success through learning from failure.' I had not thought of it quite that way, but that is one reason I read few business books: I try to carefully pick the ones that have a lot of analysis and learning involved (The Innovator's Solution is especially good, by the way) since I find most of them very superficial. In the case of failures, experience seems to be more the norm than 'book learnin', as my grandfather would say.

I think that is true of many popular Christian books as well, so they need to be selected carefully. Much of the popular press is superficial. C. S. Lewis said he tended to focus on books that had already stood the test of time. It is interesting how often we rehash the same issues over the centuries. The current debate about Rob Bell's latest book and his tendency toward 'universalism' is a recent example (in my opinion he has always had a rather post-modern point of view in which his concept of 'truth' is very mushy) where a rather shallow look is taken at an issue that has been debated in great depth through the centuries of the church (here is a link to an interesting overview of that history from a 2001 issue of First Things from the Catholic priest Richard John Neuhaus who leans toward Bell's view but recognizes that universalism can never be doctrine and points out the history:
//www.firstthings.com/article/2009/02/will-all-be-saved-30 He too caught much flak for this position though he makes clear the limits of his own hopes. This review of Bell's book in the online Christianity Today is very even handed and points out Bell's distortion of history: http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2011/april/lovewins.html?start=2 ). In a great many Christian books, the writer doesn't argue with himself enough, failing to bring up and discuss opposing points of view in a way that seeks to learn rather than to dismiss. We all tend to do that in conversation, but one of the purposes of writing is to be rather more thoughtful and complete than we are in everyday conversation. Another is to confront things like our failures that are too painful to confront in everyday conversation.

So I think there is much to be gained from 'book learnin'; but I agree with Lewis that those that have stood the test of time deserve priority. With newer books we should make sure they have made the effort not to re-invent what the church has already learned through the centuries.

Are all Christians Missionaries?

2011-03-09T16:37:00.000-08:00

Having just had our annual missions conference at church, we were once again challenged to consider our individual roles in carrying out the Great Commission to make disciples of all nations. Those were Christ's parting instructions when He ascended, and so they are taken seriously. We are told by some that all believers are called to be missionaries and personally fulfill this commission.

This is on the surface an appealing sentiment, I think 'sentiment' is exactly right. I agree with what I think is the spirit of the comment that 'we are all missionaries', but I think it is a sentimental approach that doesn't do justice to the reality of missions.

Back in 1979 I had the opportunity to sit in a class on missions under Dr.Herbert Kane at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School (TEDS). This sentiment was already on the rise at that time, and he addressed it both in class and in his book Understanding Christian Missions. He had served as a missionary in China for 15 years himself before the Communists evicted all the missionaries. He agrees that all believers are needed to be fully engaged in the missions effort, but not all are 'missionaries'. He defines 'missionaries' as those who serve full time in ministry of the Word and prayer (as spelled out in Acts for the apostles), who have crossed geographical and cultural boundaries to spread the gospel in areas where it is mostly unknown.
I generally prefer a simpler version: those who spread the gospel across cultural boundaries/barriers.

Many don't like these kinds of definitions. They feel that they create artificial distinctions among believers, separating secular work from the sacred. I disagree. Kane goes on to give what I think is a good illustration from World War 2. All of America was involved in the war effort. Everyone was needed for the war effort, and everyone experienced rationing, many sent their sons to war, many left the farm to work in munitions and equipment factories, many volunteered in the USO and bond drives and other volunteer efforts, many experienced hardships on the home front. But only those in uniform were soldiers. It was still clear that civilians were not soldiers, no matter how committed and involved. Kane suggests that it is the same in spiritual warfare. Many are highly involved and committed, but those who go across geographical and cultural boundaries full time are the 'soldiers'. I think he is right.

To say we are all 'missionaries' strikes me as making the word itself meaningless. We are saying that missionaries are no different than 'witnesses'. This kind of dumbing-down of our language is very much like what the secular world is doing to 'family' and 'marriage', reaching for a lowest-common-denominator approach to these words. We should not be doing that in the church. We devalue those who are missionaries this way, just as the secular world has devalued marriage and family. We should be more careful with our words: they really do have meaning.

Visions and Dreams

2011-03-06T15:56:00.000-08:00

We had our annual missions conference at our church during the last few days and I had a chance to hear some reports on work in countries that have majority Muslim populations. The most dramatic of those accounts was in a large meeting where a number of missionaries were making short comments about recent events in their area, and one talked about the murder of a local Christian pastor by a large mob after which a large number of those in the mob all had the same dream in which God showed them the blood they had on their hands but told them someone would come to tell them how they could get the blood off their hands; in a few days, a new preacher came and this large group became Christians.

On Saturday evening, we had a pot-luck supper with another missionary from a different area in the Middle East. We asked him about his experience in Islamic countries regarding visions and dreams, and he replied that until recently every one of those he had met who converted from Islam had done so as a result of a dream or vision. However, recently the arrival of the Internet and satellite television has allowed people in Islamic countries to hear the gospel in other ways so now, especially in Egypt, many have become Christians as a result of hearing the gospel through those media.

It is striking to me that these accounts, and others I have heard in the past from Islamic countries, are so very similar to the Biblical accounts of dreams to Jacob, Joseph (in Genesis), Joseph (in the gospels, telling him to marry Mary), Peter in Acts, and others. Those accounts seem so foreign and melodramatic in our western culture, but are so very current in the East and in Africa. Certainly those biblical accounts must seem more real to them than they do to us. It makes me wonder what else in the Scriptures are we out of touch with?

Why America confuses Europe

2011-02-27T18:44:00.000-08:00

The most recent issue of First Things includes an article that begins with 2 reflections on his past by the author. In the first he recalls asking a German friend in grad school what she found most remarkable about the U.S.. She replied with a story about an evangelical women telling her about her prayer journal. The prayer journal alone would be most unusual for a German, but she kept it on a very advanced home computer. This combination of piety and technology struck the German woman as troubling and at odds with what she thought the modern world should be. Piety was out of place with the modern, technological world. The second reflection was from an academic conference at which a Scandanavian woman spoke on the American interplay of religion and politics. Educated Europeans, she pronounced, understood that Freud was right, that religion is childish illusion and a form of neurosis.

We were recently visited by our friends the Conrads who have lived in Germany with Campus Crusade for the last 30+ years. I asked Duane to have a look at this article and whether he thought it was correct, based on his experience. He agreed: the American view that Christianity is compatible with both democracy and modernity is completely baffling to Europeans.

The article then revisits European history regarding how complete the rejection of Christianity was, from the French Revolution onward. He points out that in France, they even wrote a new revolutionary catechism to emphasize this, which included things like this:

Question:What is baptism?
Answer: It is the regeneration of the French begun on 14July1789 and soon supported by the whole French nation.
Question: What is communion?
Answer: It is the association proposed to all peoples by the French Republic henceforth to form on earth only one family of brothers who no longer recognize or worship any idol or tyrant.

This catechism no doubt went along with the new role of the cathedral of Notre Dame as a 'cathedral of reason' in which the church had been thrown out. They felt obligated not to just leave the church, but in fact to attempt to completely redefine its terms and its places.

As an American the experience of religion being completely free from any direction or coercion from the government is something I take for granted, but it is in fact quite exceptional. In Europe, the old monarchies were so allied with the organized church, with the church often playing the role of king-maker, the church was both identified with tyrants and in fact supported tyrants. In America the church has been free to hold the government accountable morally. In Europe, they were partners with the government and did not, could not, hold it accountable for its tyranny. Now, having lost all moral authority, they also cannot hold the culture morally accountable as it has collapsed into depravity. The quest in Europe is for the church to re-gain some moral authority.

It seems to me that the issue in the U.S. is for the church to keep its moral authority. The church must be the voice that holds our culture accountable morally, including the government but not only the government. That is one reason we must call out the immorality of our culture, whether it is abortion, homosexuality, adultery, pornography, or whatever. If the church does not stand as the voice of morality, holding both the government and the culture accountable, then no one will. No one else can. To speak with moral authority requires a life of moral excellence. Somehow we often lose sight of that in this very free nation, where our faith seems to be just one more consumer good. The morality of the church is not just a consumerist choice, or just optional. While the church is never free from sinful behavior, it is still held to a higher standard than those who reject the very idea of morality, as Europe has done.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out in the Islamic world. In places like Iran, the monarchy was overthrown and replaced by a religious tyranny, one tyrant exchanged for another. Will Islam also become viewed as incompatible with freedom, as the church was in Europe?

An Evening with Os Guinness

2011-02-01T19:17:00.000-08:00

Last week our church had Os Guinness speak and do a question/answer session. He is an interesting guy. His great-great-great grandfather founded the Guinness brewery in the U.K.; both his parents were medical missionaries in China, and he was born in China around the end of WW2. He was sent out of the country during the communist revolution while his parents were under arrest for 3 years, during which time they committed to memory about 75% of the Bible. He has a doctorate in social science from Oxford and has been in the U.S. for much of his adult life, working variously as a BBC reporter, a fellow at the Brookings Institution, and now running Trinity Forum. As a young man he spent 3 years at L'Abri with Francis Schaeffer, and his concern about culture and the life of the mind reminds me much of Schaeffer. He has written about 25 books, the most recent of which is about true civility.

It was an affirmation to me to hear him say that civility in America is bad but has been worse, specifically during the Jefferson/Adams presidential race and the entire early 1800's, really until the civil war. I agree...these are very partisan times, but not as bad as those days. He refers to civility as a 'republican' virtue, one that is vital to a healthy republic and for responsible citizenship. The lack of education on what it means to be a responsible citizen is one of his concerns. More importantly, he sees the culture as post-modern and thus the entire Western world must be re-Christianized. We must re-win the West, as it was won when the Goths, Vandals, Celts, Vikings, etc were Christianized centuries ago.

Unfortunately, he sees the modern church becoming post-modern just as post-modernism is being abandoned in the secular academy. He is Anglican in background and admits that the American Episcopal church must now be abandoned since it has abandoned the truth. Similarly, he sees the 'emerging church' and folks like Brian McClaren as also embracing post-modernism and also abandoning the truth. It seems he has debated this topic with McClaren publicly. I agree that the emerging church is soft on the very concept of truth. Interestingly, he also feels that much of the church is focused on some of the wrong things in this matter of truth. He mentioned 14 evangelical believers he knows at Oxford in the area of physics, all of whom he considers strong evangelicals who have no concerns about the science of an old earth
and evolution. He sees those as matters of science that do not contradict scripture and should be settled by believing scientists. His concerns are things like the fact that there are no evangelical journals about serious cultural issues (I think FIRST THINGS is that kind of journal but it comes from a conservative Catholic perspective generally; it has no evangelical equal). There is no evangelical university with graduate programs that are competitive with the better secular or Catholic schools, either. His book FIT BODIES, FAT MINDS deals with these things. Christian education in general, both home schools and private schools, generally do well to equal the public schools in the area where they are found. Since the whole nations seems to agree that public education is not up to snuff, just keeping up with them is certainly not providing a better option, at least not for content though it may be better in terms of the environment for the child.

As I look around at the church today, I agree with Os that we in the evangelical world continue to be behind the curve on matters of the mind. We do better than the liberal church or the Catholic church on evangelism and relief missions; we do worse on matters of the mind. Some, like the emerging church, who claim to be evangelical are now waffling on the very idea of 'truth'. If we are to re-win the West we will need to establish that there is such a thing as the Christian Mind.

Two Things I Cannot Do Without

2011-01-23T15:19:00.000-08:00

I recently finished the book American Lion by Jon Meacham, a biography of Andrew Jackson that is focused on his years in the White House. At one point in his second term in office, Jackson was enduring a bout of poor health, which was a recurring issue in his life. He was encouraging the doctor to be straight with him, to tell him clearly what action he needed to take. He was a strong willed man and he considered himself fully able to do whatever was necessary. He did put one limit on the doctor, however. He told the doctor that there were 2 things he could not do without: coffee and tobacco!

I laughed out loud when I read that, though I am sure the doctor did not! In my case I would say the two things are coffee and chocolate! That little vignette gives a key insight into the man in a few words, though. He was in many ways the quintessential American, a self-made man. He had been orphaned during the Revolution and had made his way in the world through sheer willpower and force of personality. He was both stubborn and self-reliant to a fault, which resulted in a great many fights and duels along the way. The fact that he survived long enough to be President is a marvel in itself.

Like many 'self-made' men, he came to see his view as the only right view. You were either for him or against him. If you were against him, he could be severe and haughty; if you were in his inner circle, no one was more loyal and caring than Jackson to you. As a result, his life was an ongoing battle. He was not a man convinced by reason and argument; once he decided, he doggedly pursued his goal no matter if he was shown to be incorrect. As a result, he accomplished a lot, though some of those things were right and some were wrong.

I began the book with a low opinion of Jackson. He had forced the eastern American Indians onto the Trail of Tears for no good reason, destroyed the national bank creating economic problems for the country for several generations, and defended slavery. I leave the book with a much greater appreciation for his humanity and his contributions to the Union in fighting off the early attempts of South Carolina to secede, and in his being the first President to use the veto to confront and lead a belligerent Congress. His legacy is mixed. In reading the book, though, it also became clear that bitter and extremely partisan politics is nothing new in our country. The battles that went on in his time and continued through the Civil War appear even worse than today. And the violence we recently saw in Tucson is also nothing new: Jackson was nearly assassinated himself, but the gunman's pistol's both failed to fire.

He strikes me as quintessentially American in another way. He would have viewed himself as a Christian throughout his life, and his beloved Rachel encouraged him to follow the Lord with her dying words as he entered his first term in office. Yet after he left office and retired he appears to have had a conversion experience. Apparently a sermon that used his own life as an example of Providence got his attention, forcing him to see that he was not as much in control as he thought. Shortly after that he did what he had never done before: joined a local congregation and stood before them to make a profession faith, leaning on his cane as he did so. As he neared death he apparently made special effort to talk about Christ to his household, telling them his conversation on this topic was for them. I have to wonder, had this happened earlier in his life, if there may have been a few more things that he could have done without.

Snowbound

2011-01-12T18:45:00.000-08:00

First wet snow, then snow, then freezing rain on top for a total of about 5 inches, which has shut down Atlanta and most of north Georgia for 3 days now. Today I managed a test run of about a mile down the road to the Publix grocery and found the roads passable at low speeds for low volumes of traffic, but speeds over about 25 mph would have been a disaster. The major intersection by the grocery store was solid ice and had to be crossed at about 5 mph. It was good that the schools were closed and traffic very light. Even at that several major roads were shut down on and off still today. Most have some lanes clear, but if the volume gets high at all, accidents multiply quickly. Still, 3 days being home bound has reminded me of some important things:

Those panics that clear out the grocery stores just before winter storms in the south, times like this make them seem not so unreasonable.
After shoveling my driveway, but taking about 4 sessions to get it done, reminds me of why short driveways are common and practical up north.
Thankfully few trees fell so power outage has not been a big problem. I should be more grateful every day for blessings like reliable electricity!
When I started my career I could basically get no work done at home at all; now I can do a great deal by computer. The productivity difference is startling.
I am amazed at how many folks do not have so much as a viable shovel for snow.
The government continues to confirm for me that they don't handle anything out of the routine effectively, even when it is predicted every day for a week in advance.

It has been a strange week, but the Christmas decorations did get taken down!

Waiting for Christmas instead of Making it Happen

2010-11-28T16:58:00.000-08:00

I was given a book with readings for Advent recently for my birthday (thanks Ashley!) and the reading for Nov. 28 was by Henri Nouwen and is about waiting. He discusses how Mary and Elizabeth went through their pregnancies expectantly (pardon the pun) waiting and supporting each other in that waiting period. He also points out how this was not passive and was hopeful for a promise to be fulfilled, but in our age we view waiting as passive and as the very opposite of hope. Hope has to do with making a plan, doing it, and hoping it works, not with waiting. As he says in the reading, 'We want the future to go in a very specific direction, and if this does not happen we are disappointed..we want to do the things that will make the desired event take place.' We want to take charge, make it happen!

Clearly there are times when we should take action. As C.S. Lewis has noted, some things only happen by our work. Our hands will not come clean by praying for them to come clean: we must go wash them. The dinner will not get prepared by praying for dinner: we must get up to cook it. But Lewis also points out that while some things only get done by our work some things only get done by prayer. Some only get done by marriage and family. Some only get done by humility and waiting.

It struck me in reading this that some areas of our lives have clear boundaries and others do not. In my work in R&D we are limited by the laws of physics and chemistry. No matter how often Marketing says, 'just go invent something: here is some money, go invent' that does not change the boundaries. Once we find an area of technology that looks to have promise for our applications, we are still bounded by what it can do within it's boundaries. We can only go where the technology is able to go. That may not be where the business wanted to go. In that sense we often 'wait' for the next thing, the breakthrough. Waiting is forced on us by our boundaries. This seems foreign to some other functions, though, where they decide to 'make it happen' and put on an ad campaign, run coupons, offer incentives, and so on. Money seems to be the only limit or boundary. But in science, more money will not necessarily get you where you want to go. You may need to wait, or you may need to realize it can't be done.

Many of us bring our 'make it happen' approach to Christmas. We will not take time to seek the Lord, to contemplate His coming, to make room in our hearts for that Coming to be refreshed in us. We just make it happen: we decorate, buy gifts, cook, send cards, go to events, and so on. But I, for one, need to wait, to set aside some time to just wait. Expectantly.

The Promise and Thanksgiving

2010-11-22T18:28:00.000-08:00

We are studying Hebrews in our Sunday morning Bible Study (aka, 'Sunday School') and this week in chapter 6 God's promise to Abraham is recalled, and the word 'promise' is used over and over again. This emphasis on the promise of God to Abraham is not just here, but is also talked about by Paul in Romans. In the Old Testament, the first inkling of this promise occurs as Adam and Eve are evicted from the Garden, and recurs over and over in both the Torah and tbe Prophets. We are often told that the Old Testament is about Law and the New Testament about Grace, but Dr. Walter Kaiser has proposed that a better understanding would be that the Old Testament is about the Promise and the New about fulfiling that Promise. I like that. Law is a sub-plot of the Promise.

Does this matter? Kaiser insists that it does, and I agree. Too many folks have understood the Law versus Grace dichotomy to mean a fundamental difference in how God deals with mankind between the Old and New Testaments. It almost looks as if the basic relationship of man with God is different, being accomplished by Law in the O.T. and grace through faith in the New. Not so says Kaiser. It has always been a matter of faith in God's ability to keep His Promise. During the O.T. the fulfillment of that Promise stood at a different place, but the issue was the same: will God keep His Promise, or not?

Thanksgiving marks the start of Advent. In the U.S. it stands as a day of thanks for our blessings, but as the start of Advent is ushers in the season of remembering the greatest blessing: the anniversary of God taking on flesh to make Himself known in the keeping of His Promise. He has kept His Promise. Let us give thanks!

White Space

2010-11-14T18:10:00.000-08:00

In the recent online version of Christianity Today magazine there is an article about viewing productivity in a Christian manner. One comment in the article is that to be truly productive we need some 'white space' in our schedules, unscheduled time that allows us time to think, ponder, and create as well as downtime to rest and recharge. I have always found that to be true, and I think it is more true for us introverts who need time alone to recharge than for extroverts who often can recharge with other people. I find the need for white space increasingly evident as I grow older.

The reason for this is that as I grow older, stress shows up more visibly. I was reminded of this again this past week. When I get overly tired or stressed, a condition called 'Iritis' in my eyes flares up, causing red and inflamed eyes. This is an autoimmune problem and it isn't really known what causes it, which makes it somewhat like psoriasis. As my eyes turned red this past week, I realized that I was more tired and stressed than I had thought. This sort of thing never happened to me until after about age 45, though I no doubt had as much or more stress in those earlier days. However, nowadays my phyical frame doesn't deal with that stress as well as it once did so I get stronger signals when I need to get some additional 'white space'. I am certainly less productive when I am forced to take time out to let my eyes recover!

So I have no choice at times but to leave some white space in my life. Good thing. I obviously need it.

Boston, the American Revolution, and the Current Election

2010-11-04T12:33:00.000-07:00

I recently visited Boston for a training conference and took an hour to visit the Old State House building downtown, which was the colonial capital building for the colony of Massachusetts and the seat of the first legislature after independence. When we had been here on vacation to walk the Liberty Trail we got to the statehouse just as it was closing, so this let me complete that part of the Trail. I have often pondered the American Revolution and wondered whether I could have supported that war. Going to war over taxation (Taxation with Representation!) always struck me as not a very good reason to go to war; war is a very extreme remedy for high and unfair taxes. However, in going through the Old Statehouse museum there were some quotes from colonists about how 'it isn't the taxes so much as the taxability' that angered the colonists. As I have pondered my own anger at the current direction of our government I think I have gained at least some insight into how the colonists felt.

The museum had displays about things like the Writs of Assistance (which allowed search and siezure of personal property at any time for any reason), forced housing of troops in homes, the Stamp Act to tax all pieces of paper, and other things that generally made the colonists angry. It was clear that the throne did not trust them, and they did not trust the throne to act for their common good. They felt abused and without recourse. A poll that was released this week on election day indicated that 75% of Americans were either angry or very dissatisfied with the government (about 25% angry, about 50% dissatisfied). Another 20% or so were neutral, and only 3 percent were satisfied. It seems that Americans neither trust the government to do what is right for the country nor feel that the leadership either trusts or represents them. Many just feel the government is not listening and does not 'get it'. The government treats the people as if they aren't smart enough to know how wonderful their direction really is. After all, we are 'hard wired not to think clearly when we are scared' and are 'clinging to guns and religion' according to the President. All of this results in anger, which I think must be how many of the colonists felt.

I for one am not scared, but I am angry. The election results were intended by the people to send a message to Washington. Listening to the news today, I am not at all sure that they will get the right message. I think many voters are angry for reasons similar to the colonists: a government that is out of control and limited ability to set them straight. That anger in the colonies grew over time due to a number of things, not just the taxes. I think that is the case now as well. It is not just the economy. It is an accumulation of things. If the next 2 years does not show an improved ability to 'listen' in both Congress and the White House, even stronger messages will get sent.

The Wall Street Journal today included an editorial by Daniel Henninger that discusses how this election has repudiated the direction the Democratic administration was forcing the country to go. It is not yet clear whether the GOP will do any better. The article ended this way: 'If the GOP blows this, one would just as soon not go where a volatile and angry electorate will take the United States.' I agree. It is time for both parties to get in touch with reality.

Arguing with Ourselves

2010-10-10T16:37:00.000-07:00

I recently read the book Radical by David Platt. It is a call to change for American Christians and has the subtitle 'Taking back your faith from the American Dream'. He makes a good case that the church in America resembles the 'American Dream' more than it resembles Christ and the early church. He has a lot to say about his ambivalence toward the megachurch situation in the U.S., and I share his ambivalence. Many of the very large evangelical churches have such opulent buildings, such entertainment-driven programming, and such rampant materialism in their membership that they are difficult to differentiate from some vacation resorts. The materialism espoused by Creflow Dollar, Joel Osteen, and others of their ilk are not the only megachurches with this problem (though they are the worst); it does seem to come with the 'success' mentality that drives the American dream and most of American culture. Growth, numbers, and prosperity are the measure of success both inside and outside the church. He contrasts that with much of what Jesus said which at times seemed to be intended to drive away those who were not ready to follow Him to crucifixion. Numbers were clearly not His goal.

There is much to agree with and to be challenged by in the book. I certainly agree with his proposal that we set a cap, an upper limit, on our lifestyle that we will not go beyond regardless of income we may earn. This has been espoused in the past by Larry Burkett and others but does not get enough play in the church in my opinion. He also espouses something C.S. Lewis recommended back about 50 years ago: when it comes to giving, if it doesn't cramp your style, if it doesn't hurt a bit, if it doesn't cause you to give up something, then it isn't enough. God prospers us so we may help others, not so we can over-indulge on ourselves.

What the author doesn't do enough of, however, is argue with himself. For instance, while the megachurch has its flaws, so do small churches. I have observed in past blogs that my parents generation was less interested in megachurches because they had more interest in pastoral care from the pastor while my generation has placed a premium on good preaching, and there aren't all that many good preachers. Will the next generation still support megachurches? Or is it just a generational thing? I don't know, but I would have appreciated a bit more discussion, more argument, on the pros/cons of megachurches.

Similarly, while he decries the way Americans apply their 'we can make it happen' attitude to church while ignoring the Holy Spirit, he then seems to imply that we should apply this same ' we can make it happen' approach to missions. That was a big disconnect for me, partly because I have commented before that it seems to me that missions have failed in some areas of the world, and I think much of that is due to misguided missions work where we have done exactly that.

Still, his challenges at the end to practice discipleship and giving to specific need areas around the world are compelling and the book is well worth reading.

Fall will get here, directly...

2010-09-19T16:12:00.000-07:00

It was 2 years ago, in the Fall, that I began to post on this blog. Time flies. I think it goes faster with each year, although this year summer seems to be holding on longer than I would like. I am tired of the endless days above 90 degrees and I am definitely ready for fall to get here.

For reasons I don't fully understand, Fall is my favorite season. Some of it may have to do with new beginnings. The start of the school year in the fall, though now the administrators have backed it up into mid-summer, was always a time of new beginnings and aspirations. The cooler weather, when it finally arrives, re-energizes after the dog-days of late summer. Maybe that is why I began this blog in the Fall. Or maybe it had more to do with Jon and Ash going to Oxford and using this to have some conversation, but since that was tied to a school year it still has a connection to autumn. Many of our major moves in life have come in the fall as well. We moved to Memphis to start working with Kimberly-Clark in the fall; we moved from Memphis to Roswell in the fall; we moved from Roswell to Pittsfield in the fall. Of course, when I went to explore seminary, since that had to do with school, that move from Appleton to Chicago also happened in the fall. It has been a time not only of changes in the weather, but changes in life.

This year fall seems to be lagging, though. We were chatting the other day about the word 'directly'. I heard it a lot from my grandfather, and from my father. I recall times sitting on the front porch at my grandparents house when my grandmother or my mother would call to us that supper was just about ready. My grandfather would commonly say, 'We'll be there directly'. It didn't mean we jumped right up and ran in: we just knew to 'mosey' that way shortly. And it was pronounced 'dreckly'. That way you didn't confuse it with something like the same word used for location, like 'he was directly in front of me' (pronounced 'DIE-rectly'). I expect good things from the fall season, so I am ready for it to get here. I guess it will get here directly.

You are what you were when...

2010-09-09T17:33:00.000-07:00

Back in the late 1970's, a professor at the University of Colorado ( I think in psychology) did a film series entitled 'You Are What You Were When'. The gist of it was that the culture, the key world events, and your personal life experiences during your growing up years shape you in a way that stays with you the rest of your life, and to understand any particular generation you need to understand the key events that shaped their life while growing up. For those of us whose parents grew up during the Great Depression, we heard over and over about how tough life was in the 1930's, how a job is not to be taken lightly, how important it is to 'save for a rainy day', how we need to understand 'the value of money', and so forth. The severity of the Depression, the 25% national unemployment, the malnutrition they endured, all of those things had a profound impact on how they viewed the world, and they wanted to transmit those values to us who lived in much more prosperous times. Then the Depression ended in a global war, that brought yet another kind of hardship, often too difficult to even talk about. They sometimes lamented that the message did not fully get through to us the way they had hoped.

Recently Beloit College published their annual list about the mindset of this year's entering freshman class at colleges around the country. The list takes note of things such as this new class thinks email is too slow, their phones never had cords to twist while you talk on the phone, Czechoslovakia never existed in their life, Russians and Americans always lived and worked together in space, and they never lived under the threat of nuclear missile attack. Even 9/11 is a distant memory to many of them now, half a lifetime ago. As with my parents, many of things that shaped my world view like the Cold War, nuclear attack drills at school, the Vietnam war, 'the pill', civil rights marches and riots, The Silent Spring, The Population Bomb, and double-digit inflation are all part of a distant history to my children, who are all older than this new class. Also like my parents, I know of no way to really transmit how those things impacted my thinking in a way that comes close to living through them. Again like my parents, I also sometimes wonder if I have done a good enough job in transmitting values about faith, money, defense, the environment (and skepticism in the predictions made about it), family and any number of things.

In that regard the current recession will no doubt have considerable teaching power for things I could only talk about. Attitudes toward debt, jobs, the stock market are undergoing shifts now that will be part of lived reality for this generation. It will no doubt have an impact.

Now I am glad that I heard those Depression stories over and over again. I heard it enough that I at least could understand why my parents and grandparents viewed things the way they did. It does remind me, though, that we older folks need to pause to think about what has shaped the lives of our children and how different it was to the things we often assume as 'givens'. And we need to keep on telling the stories.

The Way of All Flesh

2010-08-15T17:26:00.000-07:00

It is interesting how in the course of life you come to have different memories that relate to certain passages of scripture. I was reading in Joshua 23 today and was reminded of my college years. In that chapter, Joshua is giving his farewell address to Israel in his old age as he prepares to die. He reminds them of all the Lord has done for them and warns them to be obedient to the Torah and to follow the Lord lest they lose the blessing of the Lord. As he nears the end of his sermon he says " I am about to go the way of all flesh..." in reference to his impending death.

Whenever I read that passage I laugh. How inappropriate!! How could I do such a thing? Of course, this is where my college years come into the story. As with most campuses, on warm spring days the girls would often put on their swim suits, some of them quite skimpy, and head out into the quad to sunbathe. There were 3 main housing quads-East, North and South-plus a few smaller dorms in the central campus area. There was only one co-ed dorm on campus in those days. South quad in particular had a number of girls-only dorms grouped together, and on sunny spring days that part of campus was thick with sunbathers. The Campus Crusade staff members spent most of their days going to various parts of campus to have one-on-one or small group discipleship meetings, and one of our staff would comment from time to time when heading that way on a warm day, 'Pray for me. I am about to go the way of all flesh!' I laughed then, and I still laugh now whenever I read that passage.

There is more than one 'way of all flesh'. We, as humans, share a great many frailties and temptations. While that isn't what Joshua was saying, the comment by our Crusade staff member was still a valid one. Just as the fact of death reminds us of our human frailty, so did his comment! Even though I still laugh, it reminds me of the Truth nonetheless.

The Ceremony of Writing

2010-07-30T13:57:00.000-07:00

At our family reunion last week one of my uncles had a photo copy of a document from 1918, my grandfather's release from the draft for the armed forces. My grandfather had lost one leg below the knee in a logging accident when he was 12 years old, and was also legally blind in one eye, so he was exempted from the draft for World War I. The exemption was duly signed by the county draft board representative, who was the grandfather of my cousin's husband. My grandfather did not sign it himself: he had my grandmother, to whom he had been married for maybe a year, sign it on his behalf and then he 'made his mark'. She had been able to complete 5th grade, so her handwriting was better. Appalachia in 1918 was a hard place to grow up, and it got even worse during the Great Depression in the early 1930's.

In a time when many fewer people could read and write, signing an important document really was a ceremony. While my grandfather was able to do his own signature by the time I knew him, I don't really know if he was able to write in 1918 or if it was just slow and laborious so he had my grandmother do it instead. But in any case, to write your signature was an important thing in those days. For those who could not write, it could be an embarrassing thing. I can see how 'signing ceremonies', such as the President signing a new bill into law, would be a much bigger deal in those days than it is now.

This reminded me of what a powerful thing the written word can be. Through much of history writing was both expensive in terms of the cost of paper, ink, and pens, but also required education that many did not have. Writing is taken for granted now, and with computers it is being replaced by 'keyboarding'. In many ways that is a shame. While in college my mother would write to me sometimes, and she still does. But I only have one letter written in my father's hand. I saved it. Since he was born in 1922, he grew up in Appalachia when the value placed on education there was still not much different than when my grandfather grew up a few years earlier. Good handwriting was not a priority for them. For him to write a letter was unusual but I am glad he took the time to do that. I am sure it was a chore for him, but it was a blessing to me.

Family Reunions

2010-07-25T17:25:00.000-07:00

We had a family reunion yesterday up in Tennessee. We had somewhere around 100 folks show up, which I was very pleased to see. It was my mom's side of the family and all of her living siblings except one were able to attend. There were lots of cousins and their children and grandchildren as well. When I was growing up this side of the family had at least one, sometimes 2 or 3, of this sort of get together every summer since the family was less scattered geographically. It was generally at a public park in the early years, then later at my uncles farm. It was where many of us cousins got to know each other better. In a family like this (mom is one of 13 siblings) it was just about the only way to get everyone in one place, by having the event outside!

The fun and food that happened in those events played an important role in cementing family relationships, in keeping the family acting like a family. Several generations could spend a full day together every so often, talking, playing, eating, discussing all kinds of things: family events, religion, politics. Now that the family is scattered, this happens much less often. My cousin, who organized this one, did the work to organize it in part because she wanted her children to get to know her other cousins better, like she had been able to do when growing up. I think all of us in the family miss that.

I think that also describes part of what we miss in many churches today, especially mega-churches. I frequently ask my children and others of their generation what impacts their choice of a church to attend. One thing that comes up at times is the desire to know whole families and not just their own generation. In most large churches, we organize the groups outside of the large worship events by age, effectively segregating generations. Families are broken down into individuals.

In my last blog I discussed how Obama and indeed most of secular society since the Enlightenment have viewed the individual as the key unit of society and self-fulfillment as the key goal in life. The Bible uses the family more as the basic unit, with Abraham's family carrying the load in the Old Testament and the church as the 'bride of Christ' and the 'children of God' being the New Testament family. Individual sin and repentance is important, that is true; but the thing that holds society together is a family. Families require a lot of giving and caring, not just self-fulfillment. It is very different model than the individual of the Enlightenment view.

The reunion yesterday reminded me of that as we recovered some of that extended-family cohesiveness, at least for a day. We need to find more ways to do that in the local church, too.

Breakfast!

2010-07-18T16:37:00.000-07:00

I just watched a PBS program called The Breakfast Special. I have a couple of favorites on PBS that I like to watch every now then. A Hot Dog Program is one about little hot dog joints around the U.S.. The Varsity is included, but most of the others are small places with something unique about them. There is another one called The Ice Cream Program that visits stores that make their own ice cream, though again they include one big one (Ben & Jerry's, of course). I really love these shows, which I suppose is solid evidence that I am a little bit off mentally. I was able to con Sarah into watching the one about hot dogs with me one time, but otherwise it is a solitary venture that I enjoy nonetheless. This one about breakfast was a new one for me. It didn't quite measure up to the fun of the hot dog or ice cream shows, but I still enjoyed it as they wandered around the country looking for unique places for breakfast, so I took notes on the ones that were most appealing.

One called La Herencia in the historic section of St. Augustine (on Aviles Street) looked like a place for a new and different sort of breakfast. They have a Cuban theme and serve some interesting omelettes. The omelette with pork, black beans, salsa and cheese served on top of Cuban bread looked like a good one. The Breakfast Club on Tybee Island looked rather crowded from the lines outside the door that they filmed, but is one I may actually get a chance to try some time since it isn't that far away. The Maple Tree Inn in upstate New York, where they make their own maple syrup from the trees right behind the restaurant and where they are only open during maple syrup season looked like fun, too, though I doubt I will ever make it there at the right time of year. The Best Breakfast in Westerville, OH, looks to have fantastic home made bread and corned beef hash.

None of this is really the my ideal breakfast, though. At the end of the show they asked the various restaurant owners what their most memorable breakfast was, and they all recounted different stories. As I thought about that question I quickly landed upon the time when I was in junior high school and we had made our annual Thanksgiving trip to my grandfather's farm to help with hog-butchering time. The day of actually working on the pig was pretty disgusting, but the next morning's breakfast is probably my most memorable. My grandmother kept her own milk cow and made her own butter and buttermilk, which she used to make the world's most amazing biscuits. There was no shortening in the biscuits except her fresh butter an buttermilk. That particular day in addition to the amazing biscuits, we also had fresh bacon and pork chops (we are talking fresh here--it had been walking around the previous day), gravy, eggs, apple butter and probably some other stuff like fried apples. Amazing. And thus far unequaled.

This perhaps explains why I like Cracker Barrel. I keep looking for a place to come close to that ideal breakfast. Cracker Barrel is really not close, but the down-home atmosphere and just the fact that they generally have at least decent biscuits does bring it to mind. The Moose Cafe outside Asheville has good biscuits, but I am generally not there at breakfast time so I don't know how the rest of their breakfast measures up, though it looks good from the menu. I need to try that place for something other than lunch or dinner.

So what is your most memorable breakfast?

Why MBA is not a Professional Degree

2010-07-11T16:28:00.000-07:00

The July/August 2010 of Harvard Business Review has an article that finally faces the truth: the MBA degree is NOT a professional degree in the way that a medical, law, or engineering degree is. The author, Richard Barker, is a professor at the Cambridge business school in England, and it is quite refreshing to see a B-school professor ‘fessing up' to what should be obvious.

Much of his commentary is based on things that have been observed by others before, and applies just as much to schools of education as to business: that there is not a well defined body of knowledge to learn to become qualified, that the key to the education is the process and ‘case studies’ more than defined content, that there is no board to measure and license those who are qualified and to ban/discipline those who do not live up to it. All of these areas are quite different than in the professions, though most of them fall short on the part about holding practitioners accountable. He points out that the content of what a medical or law school teaches is what qualifies the graduates, whereas in B-school most alumni will tell you that the classmates and discussions were more important than the content. You hire a doctor or lawyer specifically for the technical knowledge they have but managers are mostly hired for their leadership skills. Professionals provide input and expertise in a defined area but managers mostly assemble input from various professionals and ‘connect the dots’. And as the collapse of the financial sector has shown, there is clearly no accountable and very little in the way of ethics.

This by no means means that management is necessarily an inferior pursuit. It does mean that getting an MBA is not what qualifies you to be a manager. For the most part, you should have already demonstrated the insight and leadership skills BEFORE you get an MBA, which is the reverse of professional degrees. An MBA can broaden your exposure to issues that might take many years for you to encounter on the job, but it does not provide qualifications. In contrast, you would never go to a lawyer, doctor, or engineer until AFTER they are trained. You would never trust a doctor who had spent much of his education just talking about case studies rather than gaining technical skills and technical knowledge. By way of contrast , a great many businesses are successfully led by entrepreneurs who are very effective but not the least interested in an MBA.

As a culture we have tried to make teachers and managers into a content-based skill like engineering, but it just isn’t so. In both cases the attributes for success have more to do with personal traits than with a degree, and much of it cannot be taught. Both teachers and managers should have a ‘real ‘ degree in an area of expertise, but becoming a teacher or manager is more about dealing with people, insight, and connecting inputs across various disciplines than about mastering a body of knowledge. The reverse of that, of course, is that many professionals have mastered a key body of knowledge but have poor interactions with people. There are a great many doctors and lawyers who are very knowledgeable but very inept as well.

Ministry degrees, like the Master of Divinity, have the same issue. For all our pretending otherwise, the M. Div. degree does not qualify a man for ministry. It can enhance the knowledge of one who already has the right insight and people skills, but it does not provide qualification. While academic theology may have to do mostly with particular areas of learning, pastoral ministry and teaching is more like management and teaching. Divinity schools would do well to follow the example of many MBA programs, not accepting candidates until they have already been in ministry for several years.

Nudges, Marriages, and Feminists

2010-06-26T08:35:00.000-07:00

I just finished reading the book Nudge, in which a couple of academic economists explore the idea of 'choice architecture' and what they call 'libertarian paternalism'. The basic idea is that many of the decisions that are made in both public and private spheres end up nudging us to choose in a particular direction, even if unintentionally, and that we can use that fact to help improve the choices people make by intentionally 'nudging' them in a better direction. However, they support doing so thoughtfully so that we intentionally seek to maintain freedom of choice rather than mandating things. They open the book with the example of how the way food is displayed in a cafeteria influences which foods are purchased, and that we can influence the choice of healthier food in schools by the way the food is displayed. This doesn't coerce anyone's choice but does give healthy food greater exposure. The way we design buildings and cities also nudge decisions on transportation, housing, etc. and such decisions must be made.

We use government in this way much of the time, via tax deductions and tax credits, subsidies, and rebates. It goes beyond nudging to mandates when we legally require things.I like the author's emphasis on seeking to maintain freedom, the libertarian part of it, as well as the idea that choices which must be made may as well seek to help us. Of course, we will not all agree on what is 'good' and what 'helps'. In many cases, though, like the default option for work or government benefits, this idea can be put to good use. For instance, many companies now automatically enroll you in the 401k savings plan if you do nothing, whereas in the past the default if you did nothing was to leave you un-enrolled. This is a 'nudge' and seems to me a good one.

However, the more the decision involves morality and values, the more diificult this use of 'nudging' gets to be. One chapter in the book proposes changing the societal approach to marriage, proposing that governments no longer sanction any marriages, that marriage be 'privatized'. The change would be that the government would only sanction civil unions, and marriage would be a private or religious matter exclusively. The authors contend that this would improve the freedom of religious groups as well as non-religious folks, as religious groups could be free to exclude whomever they choose and have standards as high as they want without concern about what impacts it might have on things like government benefits.

In many ways that is a place we have already arrived at, though not officially. The June 21 issue of Newsweek magazine, which has Sarah Palin on the cover, has 2 articles that impact this issue. The first article is about Sarah Palin and the renewed energy of women of the religious right and the other is an article that argues against marriage by 2 self-vowed 'secular, urban' women who rail against the evil of marriage. Palin's work is described as a different sort of feminism, one that 'gathers up the Christian women traditional feminism has left behind' and admits that 'mainstream feminism has had an antireligious bias for a really long time.' The other article is the voice of that 'mainstream feminism' which argues that 'marriage is ...no longer necessary' and that 'the idea of marriage has become so tainted...that we're hesitant to engage in it.'

It is interesting to me that secular, urban homosexuals are arguing they should get married while secular, urban women are arguing that they should avoid marriage. Neither of them are arguing on the basis of virtue. Both are arguing on that basis of what makes them more financially successful and more self-satisfied. There is very little discussion of what it means to be human, since being human means little more to them than 'maximizing our marginal benefit' in economic terms, which includes maximizing their personal power and liberty. I said above that in many ways we are already there because 41% of births are out of wedlock, divorce rates remain high, and benefits in both jobs and in government are readily available to both singles and homosexuals who live together or have children (whether adopted for homosexuals or out of wedlock for heterosexuals). The feminist article admits that for dual income marriages, there is no tax benefit to marriage. The battles today about marriage are really more about status and power than about economics and benefits, and it is interesting that the secular feminist argument and the homosexual argument so completely contradict each other. To me, one key weakness of the Christian discussion of marriage for the past 2 centuries, since the onset of Romanticism, is that we talk about marriage mostly in terms of self-fulfillment, not in terms of virtue, living out our humanness as God created it, or learning how to put other's needs ahead of our own desires. The feminist article admits that couples who marry for love find that '90% of couples have lost the passion they originally felt. And while couples who marry for love are less 'in love' with each passing year, one study found that those in arranged marriages grow steadily more in love as the years progress-because their expectations, say researchers, are a whole lot lower.' I think it has more to do with different expectations rather than lower expectations. Expecting to put someone else's needs ahead of your own and being surprised that doing so makes you a better and happier person seems like higher, not lower, expectations to me. The secular, urban feminists haven't figured that out.

All of this points out how very selfish and self-centered we are. The most difficult thing about marriage is that it demands putting our self-centeredness aside so often. The basic idea about Nudge that I like is the call to consider what is best for others, yet it quickly degenerates into defining 'best' as nothing more than maximizing our selfish desire for power or pleasure. And I think this is why Palin is touching a lot of Christian women. They see in her example with her Down Syndrome child and her out-of-wedlock grandchild a person who is still striving to do the right thing as a mom, and a lot of moms seem to relate to that. I am not a Palin political supporter because she still seems uninformed about a great many matters of state and policy. But I do see how she represents for many women an alternative to the selfish, secular, urban women of the political left.

Musings on Korea

2010-06-20T00:36:00.000-07:00

I just spent a week in Korea, my second visit there. Since I knew to avoid the kimchi this time and the hotel was more conveniently located, it was a good visit. Finding a Starbucks within a few blocks of the hotel was nice, too.

It is interesting to observe a culture in which there do not seem to be any significant racial minorities. Everyone in all walks of life, at least that I encountered, seemed to be Korean. There was not a clear divide, as there is in many countries, in which immigrants make up the taxi drivers, the hotel housekeepers, the janitors and farm workers. There also seems to be a strong service commitment in the culture: the taxi drivers often wear a tie, the hotel has several people near the front door to greet, help with luggage, give directions, call a taxi or anything else, much more available than in the U.S., and tips for service are not part of the culture.

I stayed in one of the cities in the metro-Seoul area, the city of Suwon. It is an old city on the south side of Seoul with an old fortress that is a well known landmark, and it also has a large Samsung manufacturing site. All the places I went seemed to be quite safe with lots of people around and usually lots of traffic. There are a lot of churches as well, and you see a lot of crosses on the top of steeples and roofs as you walk around. There continues to be a great deal of construction going on. In one area we drove past, something like 30 or so high rise condo buildings are going up at once. These are 20-30 stories each. It is like a whole, new city being built at once.

One of the most interesting things from this trip was the discussion on the current tension with North Korea about the sinking of a navy ship in April. I was surprised to learn that quite a large number of folks, which was estimated at something like 25-30% of the South Koreans by the folks I talked with, think the sinking could have been caused by the South Korean government. Some think it may have been an accident in war games and that the government is covering it up. Others think it may have been a deliberate attempt by the government to influence the elections that took place soon after the sinking. Many of the citizens clearly do not trust their government on this sort of thing, and most especially they do not trust the military. The view of this is much less clear cut in Korea than the way it is presented in the U.S. news media.

It was also interesting to me that there are very few semi-tractor trailers on the road. You see lots of trucks, but they are smaller than semi’s. I had to think about that for a bit, but since South Korea is about the size of Indiana, you can see how smaller trucks would work fine if all the trucking you needed to do were within the confines of Indiana. The only semi’s I saw were sea-going containers headed for a seaport to be loaded on a ship. However, there are buses everywhere. I used a bus to and from the airport, which is about 1.5 hours from Seoul at Incheon. Buses are a well used means of transport and take the place of the semi’s on the road.

Overall, I continue to be impressed by the amount of construction and development going on, despite the current economic issues; and I found it interesting that in a land with much less ethnic and racial diversity, and that appears to an outsider as much more uniform in thought, there is still a strong suspicion of the motives of politicians.

Slobs and Preppies

2010-06-17T05:19:00.000-07:00

Here we go again….there are 2 kinds of people in the world, slobs and preppies. I am sitting here thinking about Timothy Keller’s book The Prodigal God, which of course is about two kinds of people in the world, elder brothers and younger brothers. Those are the two brothers in the parable of the prodigal son. One of them is a preppie, the other one a slob. You may have other terms for them, like one is Party-er and the other a Do-gooder; one is a Pharisee and the other a sinner; one of them is liberal and the other a conservative; one is Ford guy and the other a Chevy guy. They are all related to each other.

I wrote last year about how irritating this ‘two kinds of people’ thing gets after a while. I think that maybe it is better to think that there are two kinds of people in the world: those that think there are two kinds of people in the world, and those who don’t. Unfortunately I was reminded again of how poignant this little device can be last Sunday morning. You see, I generally go to the early morning service in the sanctuary at our church, but every so often I go to the ‘contemporary’ (aka, ‘rock n roll’) service to help out with the offering and such. Last week I was at the contemporary service.

I am always amazed at the effort some folks put in to looking like slobs. Especially the guys in the band. There they are in front of the crowd with jeans full of holes, a shirt that is too small and looks like it was rolled up in wad for the past week, a stubbly beard, and hair that hasn’t been combed in who knows how long. These are not poor folks who can’t afford clothing without holes or don’t have access to a shower and a laundry. These are folks who work hard at looking like slobs. I don’t get it. Somehow it is ‘cool’ to look like the younger, prodigal son after he hit bottom.

Which reminded me of the prodigal son. Or rather, it reminded me of one section of Keller’s book in which he comments about how traditional churches chase away the younger-brother types by our elder-brotherness, which in turn raised in my mind the question of what church is supposed to be about anyway. Is church supposed to be designed to attract the younger brother, party going, slob types? Or is it supposed to attract the elder brother Pharisee types? Or neither?

My current vote is for ‘neither’. The reality is that we seem to be doing one or the other, with the ‘traditional’ service being to attract the elder brother types and the ‘contemporary’ to attract the younger brother types. Neither of these types want to venture outside their own comfort zone. Neither wants to be made uncomfortable. Both seem to me to go to church at least in part to demonstrate their own style rather than to worship God.

I think the idea of ‘seeker sensitive’ church doesn’t serve the purpose of church and doesn’t make much sense anyway. I am Calvinistic enough to think that there are no seekers without God first seeking us. But we should not be chasing people away either. We should instead be true to what worship is supposed to be, which is to cause us to recognize our own need for God and then respond by worshipping God. So, the goal of church is not to attract younger brothers; nor is it to attract elder brothers. Both brothers are in it for themselves. Both see their approach as best and both seek to put God in a position of owing them something.

The hard thing about church is to cause the Pharisee elder brothers to recognize their Pharisee-ism, repent of it, and respond in humble worship while also causing the partying libertines to recognize their libertinism, repent of it, and respond in humble worship. Instead we often just reinforce both of them by playing to their style. Maybe we should make everyone switch to the other service after they choose the one they want? As someone said, ‘to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted’ is what we should be trying to do. Not easy. It is certainly done best by the Spirit.

I actually enjoyed a couple of the songs we sang in that service, despite the band’s appearance. But I can’t say I left with a sense of having encountered God there. Some people appeared to have done so. Still, I wonder how we reconcile these ‘2 kinds of people’ in our church services.

I am re-reading the book Nudge as well. In it there is a blurb about a product called Clocky, a robotic alarm clock that ‘runs away and hides if you don’t get out of bed’! Such a product is needed because there are two kinds of people in the world: those who get up when the alarm goes off, and those who don’t. We need to get one of those for Daniel!

Carville Finally Gets One Right

2010-05-26T17:15:00.000-07:00

James Carville was on 'Good Morning America' this morning, and finally someone blasted the government not only for not responding quickly to the oil well blowout in the Gulf of Mexico, but for not paying attention to the families of those workers who were incinerated on that well. He made it clear that the President and other officials should be there meeting with those families and doing what they can to both console them and be actively directing efforts to stop the oil damage. It is the lack of empathy for the families that bothers me at the moment.

Last night on ABC news was the first time I saw any significant media coverage of the families of those 11 men killed in the explosion and fire on the oil rig. It had been35 days since the accident. Had it been a coal mine or an airplane, most of the media attention would have been on the families. The lack of attention to the families has been telling in my opinion. That lack of attention has made the national values clear: nature and wildlife matter more than people.

The oil well is clearly doing a lot of damage, and that is definitely an environmental disaster. No question about that. But the people matter even more. There is no reason for ignoring them. Certainly the coverage could have been both the horrible loss of life and also the environmental damage instead of focusing only on the ecological impact. It seems to me that the media focus on the loss of life with the recent coal mine cave-in was more focused on the people. Why? My opinion is that it was because that was the best way to show their opposition to underground mines. With underground mines, the environmental damage is less obvious so focusing on the people best accomplishes their agenda. With the oil well, they clearly want to focus on the opposition to the oil industry since the loss of life has been barely covered.

This is part of an overall tone in our culture that disturbs me: a woman's choice matters more tha a baby's life; avoiding the burden of a disabled child or parent is more important than the life of a Down's syndrome baby or a elderly and ill parent; ecological damage matters more than the fatalities in this oil well disaster. I am not a fan of James Carville at all, but he got it right this time. There is a least hope that we will deal with the oil spill, but those families will never be the same.

The Mystery of Women (Post-Mother's Day)

2010-05-11T16:15:00.000-07:00

It is ironic, or perhaps even a conspiracy, that as we celebrated Mother's Day this past Sunday the media was celebrating the 50th anniversary of the birth control pill. I commented a couple of weeks ago how 'The Pill' has had unintended consequences for women that are ingored by the left. Having this in the papers, magazines, and on TV during Mother's Day prompted a few questions on my part:

Why do women praise the sexual liberation and sexual equality they think is produced by the pill but then wonder why many men find marriage no longer necessary?

How is it a good thing that the pill, which was sold to the public as 'family planning', has resulted in a society where 40% (and still rising) of all children are born out of wedlock?

If women object to being treated as sex objects, why do they use the pill before marriage in order to be treated more like sex objects and less like potential marriage partners?

As my mind wandered, a few other thoughts related to Mother's Day occurred to me, which are not related to the pill, but here they are anyway:

Why do women who would never marry 'momma's boys' do all that they can to make their own sons into 'momma's boys'?

Why do women define 'helping' in a way that men define as 'nagging'?

Why do women who compete against men in the marketplace, sports, school, etc find it surprising when men come to view them as competitors instead of as marriage partners?

None of this is to belittle Mother's Day. I like Mother's Day. Our society, on the other hand, seems to be very confused about motherhood in general. Newsweek's Julia Bard wrote about how bad mothers can give us hope to 'lower the bar' from the thought of being a perfect mother, but goes beyond that, quoting the French philosopher Elizabeth Badinter (from The Conflict, the Woman and the Mother) that women are no longer oppressed by men, but rather by children. While she hedges by saying that she doesn't agree with everything in the book, she does find it 'bold' and 'refreshing'. This sort of thing, along with the continuing plague of abortion, simply reminds me that there are a great many bad mothers out there, mothers unworthy of Mother's Day. Which should make us all the more grateful for good mothers. So I once again say a big 'Thank You!' to my mom and my wife for their work as mothers.

The Great 'Caught Up' (or 'Catch Up'? Ketchup?)

2010-05-05T17:18:00.000-07:00

We recently had a sermon series on the book of Revelation and it necessarily included some discussion of what is called 'The Rapture' of the church. One of the books recommended by our pastor during the series is titled Three Views of the Rapture and is a debate on Pre-, Mid-, or Post-tribulation points of view by 3 seminary professors. Since they teach at Trinity where I attended seminary for a couple of terms, I decided to read it and I recently finished the book.

First I must vent a little, however. The first thing I dislike about this whole topic is the title. 'The Rapture'. I had never even heard of 'The Rapture' until I went to college and became friends with some folks who had been reading Hal Lindsey's Late Great Planet Earth. This doesn't prove much except that it is at least possible to be a serious Christian without caring a whit about 'The Rapture'. But why call it that? It comes from the Latin translation of I Thessalonians 4:17 where Paul says that at Christ's Second Advent those believers who are alive at that time will be 'caught up' to meet Him. 'Rapturos' is the Latin for 'caught up'. So 'The Rapture' is actually 'The Caught Up'. Huh? I suppose trying to talk in Latin makes folks think you are educated or something, like talking about chemistry to marketing folks. It might make you feel smart but it doesn't communicate anything. It reminds me of the way the media today is constantly turning verbs into nouns and vice versa. Rapturos is a verb, not a name for an event. 'The Caught Up' : yuck. If the aforementioned marketers had been involved, they would have quickly changed that (alas, 'morphed' it) into 'The Ketchup' just to make it more catchy. Talk about anticipation! But then I just realized that my kids probably don't even remember that great ketchup commercial that I immediately recall whenever I hear the word 'anticipation'. In any case, the very term 'The Rapture' irritates me.

I much prefer the words that are actually used for the event rather than for an action. Those words used often for Christ's return include apocalypse (revelation), epiphany (appearing), and parousia (coming). 'Apocalypse' and 'epiphany' are both transliterations of greek words in the Bible (apocalypsis and epiphaneia) rather than translations, though we don't use transliterations of 'parousia' in English. I like all of them better than 'rapture', though, since 'rapture' has lots of other meanings in English as well.

Enough venting. The book, though, was a more studious and non-hysterical approach to the subject than most of what is out there. It does point out the history of the subject, which is important since it has only been in the last century that this idea of a pre-tribulation 'Rapture' has gained any significant support among believers at all. My take on it is that the Post-tribulation view has by far the best argument that requires much less reading into the text than the Pre- or Mid- tribulation points of view. Basically, the Post-tribulation view is that 'The Rapture' and the Second Advent are one event, not two separate events. It is not an easy read and the writing style tries your patience at times, but it does a good job in pointing out the differences among these views.

Meanwhile I prefer to skip the ketchup and have the second advent instead.

Economics and The Pill

2010-04-22T17:06:00.000-07:00

The May issue of First Things has an interesting article that looks at the impact of birth control through the lens of economics ('Bitter Pill' by economist Timothy Reichert). The gist of the article is that the availability of the birth control pill starting in the 1960's dramatically changed the marriage 'market'. His contention is that prior to the pill there was essentially one market: a marriage market. After the arrival of the pill the market was splintered into 2 markets: a marriage market, and a sex market. The pill, he contends, reduced the incentives for marriage, especially among men, while siimultaneously putting more pressure on women to enter the sex market before marriage since it was now 'safe'.

Like most economic models, I find this one oversimplified but interesting nonetheless. It seems clear to me that there has always been 2 separate markets, else the 'world's oldest occupation' would not in fact be the world's oldest occupation. However, it does seems clear that there are now more incentives for sexual activity before marriage, though the rise of out of wedlock births make it clear that it is not necessarily 'safe'.

His contention in the article is that in fact it is not safe and this market shift has hurt women, not 'empowered' them. It is of course sold by both feminists and the playboy culture that the pill has 'liberated' women. In fact, we now have 40% of all births out of wedlock, and up to 70% in some ethnic groups, and it is well documented that being a single mom is the single most powerful predictor of poverty. By giving men fewer incentives to marry, this also keeps more women and their children in poverty. He supports his article with lots of charts and graphs, of course, as any good economist would. This includes fewer and later marriages, earlier sexual activity, more women in the workplace to support their kids, and declining rates of female happiness.

He does not talk about some of the additional factors that confound his data: legalized abortion coming near the same time, for instance, and declining church attendance. Still, I think he has a point. This technology that is touted as helping women has actually hurt them. However, in my opinion it has hurt them because they use the technology outside of marriage. He does not mention this either. Were it utilized only within marriage, it would be a very different story. There, too, is a message. The more freedom we have, the more important it is that the freedom be exercised by a virtuous people. When we lack virtue, our freedom comes back to bite us.

Remembering the Unthinkable

2010-04-13T14:38:00.000-07:00

This past weekend we went to hear a survivor of the Holocaust, Rose Price. She will be 82 sometime this year, but she was 10 years old and an Orthodox Jew in Poland when the Nazis invaded her homeland. Like our veterans who fought in WWII, survivors of the Holocaust are getting fewer every year as they die off. I had heard Rose back about 6 or 7 years ago, and she had more trouble staying on topic and not wandering this time than last, which was sad since there was a much larger crowd this time and the power of her story did not really come through as well as it could have.

She and her older sister both survived the death camps. Her mother, father, and younger sister all died there. She was chosen to be shot on two occasions: on those days the 'chosen' would be forced to dig a ditch, then line up in front of it to be shot. They would hold hands usually in those last moments. She held on and fell into the ditch with her dead compatriots, but had not been shot. She would crawl out later, only to be recaptured and put back in the camps.

One particular guard seemed to enjoy humiliating her and her sister. On rainy days he would force them to lie in the mud so he could walk on them to avoid getting mud on his boots. On fair weather days he would simply beat them. Though she left Germany after the war having abandoned faith in God, she later met the Messiah and went back to Germany to tell her story, and she met that guard there at a crusade where she gave her testimony. It was there that she really learned about the power of forgiveness.

There is much more in her book, and the other atrocities in the death camps, including the 'medical' experiments, are well documented in many places. Yet, today not only do the Palestinians and Iranians want to deny that all this happened, there also seem to be many even in the U.S. who are either ignorant or simply unconcerned that all this happened. They seem to have forgotten that Israel exists not because they conquered the Palestinians: it exists as a U.N. mandate, a mandate of the world community as a result of the Holocaust. The Arab world tried to overturn that mandate, and lost. The West Bank had been a location for Syria to shell Israel with heavy artillery until they lost that as well. The current leadership of the U.S. seems to have forgotten all that, apparently thinking that Israel should just give the land back and live with daily artillery barrages from those who to this day deny Israel's right to exist.

We dare not forget either the holocaust and the stories of those like Rose Price or the history of Israel's fights with the Arab world. To forget is to guarantee another holocaust will happen, this time in Israel.

The Church Arrogant

2010-04-11T12:02:00.000-07:00

The April issue of First Things had an interesting article about how economic theory can be applied to church, and along the way it shed some light on some of the mythology surrounding early American church attendance. In researching their book The Churching of America, 1776-2005: Winners and Losers in Our Religious Economy, the authors (Roger Finke and Rodney Starke) found that less than one-fifth of the American population claimed church membership at the time of the American Revolution. The rate of church membership then rose after the revolution, to about one-third by the mid-1800's and on up to about half in the 20th century. This is what they are refering to by 'the churching of America'. During this same time, Europe was rebelling against the church and beginning its long decline to today. Contrary to the theory of skeptics, the spread of education and industrialization in America did not force a decline in church membership or attendance. The skeptics insist that increasing education and prosperity necessarily lead to a decline in religion; the authors offer an alternative view.

Their alternative takes a more economic viewpoint, looking at both religious 'firms' (churches) and religious 'consumers' (members). In Europe, they maintain, the church was always a state church with a monopoly. Every nation had an established church so they did not have to compete for members, did not have to compete for funds, and did not have to be concerned about 'quality' or 'customer satisfaction', so the church could easily become focused on its own tradition and the desires of the clergy themselves. Since the 'consumers' had no other choice, they could either participate or stay home. This was also the case in the American colonies, each colony having its own established church and often persecuting dissenters. I well remember visiting Colonial Williamsburg some years back, and part of their living history drama on one of our visits included an intinerant Baptist evangelist being arrested and jailed for breaking the church laws of Anglican Virginia. No dissent allowed!

When the Constitution was approved, some states held on to their established churches for a while, but most of them were done away with in a few years. At this point, the churches had to raise their game to a higher level. Suddenly they had to give parishoners a reason to show up or they could go somewhere else. When that happened, membership began to grow.

This is not all sweetness and light, of course. This kind of religious competition also gave us Mormonism, Christian Science, Scientology, Jehovah's Witnesses and various other aberrations. Still, it does point out to me that established churches have other problems even beyond the very serious problem of tying the church to a political establishment. It also makes for a very self-centered, non-ministering church.

The history, though, also sheds light on our 'Christian founders'. 20% of the population as church members is less than most of those shouting about our religious roots would want to hear about. While no doubt some non-members were dissenters who would have been members if their church had been allowed, most of those would have moved to a different colony I would think. While the rural nature of the colonies resulted in many folks not being near a church, that held true much longer and into the period of fast growth of members and attendance.

In any case, the article shed some interesting light on American Exceptionalism in religion: it may have been the arrogance of the church more than education and progress that brought down religion in Europe.

This God is Different

2010-04-04T16:39:00.001-07:00

I just finished reading Walking the Bible by Bruce Feiler, which I had borrowed from my daughter. There is also a PBS mini-series based on the book, and my interest was piqued by seeing part of that a while back. The book is part travelogue, part history, and part personal introspection by a secular Jew trying to find his roots in the Holy Land. It is an easy read and it gives a nice view of many of the sites in Israel, Sinai, the Negev, and Egypt that are found in the Pentateuch as the author attempts to re-trace the path of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, and the Exodus. He is basically examining the path that led from one man and his family (Abraham) to a nation that God used to reveal Himself to show His work of redemption, which we Christians view as the start of a path that inexorably led to the Savior.

It was quite interesting to see how the author and his archaeologist-travel-partner-and-guide visited many of the sites mentioned in the Bible, as best they could find them (many are not known for sure) and would then read and discuss the Bible passages about that site as they experienced the place for themselves. I like to do similar things when I travel, such as reading Jefferson's biography when visiting Monticello. The book would be a nice prologue to a visit to Israel by providing an overview of the history and archaeology of many of the sites that pilgrims to the Holy Land visit. It is somewhat sad, though, that while the author does find in himself a strong emotional response to the Promised Land and biblical stories, he never quite gets to the point of seeing God as personal and knowable. He becomes convinced that the biblical stories that led to the creation of Israel as a nation are believable in a general way, but he does not fully resolve his own doubts about faith though he does reach some sort of peace with himself.

One question that recurs in the book has to do with the question of life after death. On the one hand the Torah makes it clear that God is eternal and His people are to somehow be with Him, these books of Moses do not say a lot about life after death. Job, which pre-dates the Pentateuch, does make mention of seeing God in person after death, and so do the prophets and psalms which come later. Moses says little, although when Moses dies it seems to imply that God took him (and also buried him in secret lest his tomb be worshipped). The author seems to think that this means that the Jews saw God as only the God of this life, and that there was nothing beyond this life.

This was a matter of debate among the Jews in Jesus' time as well, with the Pharisees believing in life after death and the Saducees not. Christians see this debate as being settled by Jesus' resurrection and promise of our resurrection as a result. So why the lack of discussion by Moses?

My opinion is that much of the first 5 books of the Bible has to do with demonstrating how different the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob(Israel) is from the other gods of that time. While other pagan gods demanded child sacrifice, this God demanded the same level of devotion but intervened to prevent the sacrifice of Isaac and provided his own sacrifice. While other gods are unpredictable and unknowable, this God provided his Law to make clear what behavior He expected and what he abhorred. While the Egyptian gods in particular, where Moses was leading them out, were obsessed with death and so built the pyramids and other enormous burial 'cities', this God was more focused on holy living. In other words, I think God was intentionally pointing out the difference between Himself and the Egyptian gods, after having His people live there for 400 years in the midst of their 'culture of death'. It was not to imply that there is nothing after this life; it was to say that the Egyptian obsession with death was minimizing the reality of this life, creating a very bizarre and off-balance culture.

We have our own 'culture of death' today, comprised of the combination of abortion and euthansia. Though quite different from the Egyptian distortions of reality, it bears its own consequences in minimizing the importance of holy living. Today is Easter, our annual reminder that there is One whose Life will overcome. He is Risen!

What defines Quality in Health Care?

2010-03-24T18:10:00.000-07:00

In the furor over the health care legislation there have been comments about 'destroying the world's best health care system' by some pundits, while others say America as fallen behind in health care as shown by longevity statistics in countries with government health care. Is longevity the best measure? Is short waiting time for procedures the best measure? Those 2 measures would give opposite rankings when comparing America and western Europe.

I was discussing this with a colleague at work who related his story. In 1989 he tore a tendon in his leg and had surgeons describe to him the incision that would be made from his knee to his ankle to repair it and the resulting 3 months on crutches. Not liking this, he found out that there was a new surgical group here and the founder used to play on the rugby team he was playing for when injuring his leg. This surgeon provided tendon repairs to the Atlanta Falcons and Braves with a then brand new procedure, an arthroscopic method with a very small incision and ability to walk without crutches in a day or two. He contacted him, and the surgeon was willing to take him on because of the rugby team connection. In 1993, the other leg was injured. This time, all the surgeons in town were using the new procedure. In 1999, he was Denmark on business and met a man on crutches who had been injured playing soccer, and there the surgeons were still using the old procedure. They were only 10 years behind. And he had to wait 3 months to have it done, so he 3 months to wait before the surgery then 3 more on crutches.

I have heard similar tales from folks that have moved here from Canada. These kinds of new procedures typically are developed in America and spread from here, though they apparently spread slowly to some countries. Why? Because here there is a payback for new procedures that are less painful, faster, and that return you to full productivity both without a long wait and with faster recovery. Yet none of this would show up in longevity. Is it better?

I don't think we have the right measures to evaluate it. The European approach appears to cost less, but doesn't the loss of 6 months of full productivity have a cost, in this example? The newer method may cost more at first, but does the improved quality of life have a value as well as the improved productivity by less lost time from the job, etc?

Someone has said (Churchill maybe?)that capitalism is the unequal sharing of prosperity and socialism is the equal sharing of misery. That comes close. In this case I think there is also something to be said about freedom having costs as well as benefits. Freedom is risky: this was true in the Garden of Eden, but God considered freedom to be worth the risk, even knowing it would result in the crucifixion of His Son. Freedom is highly valued in the U.S. despite its risk and its cost. In this example, when my friend returned home from Europe he met another athlete in a leg brace with crutches. The arthroscopic surgery was available, but he had no insurance and did not have the funds available just then to pay for it.

My opinion is that the U.S. has the best procedures in the world available, and with the least wait. That does not affect longevity outcomes for a variety of reasons, most of them having to do with diet, obesity, and overall sedentary lifestyles. The U.S. also has the most expensive healthcare in the world, pricing some folks out of the market. A better balance is needed: neither a move to be like Europe and abandon innovation and short waits, nor keeping the current situation. I don't think the current legislation does what is needed; I hope it can cause enough debate to get us on a better path.

The Virtues of Spittle

2010-03-11T17:49:00.000-08:00

I recently read Pagan Christianity by Barna (the pollster) and Viola, and while I was generally unimpressed by their arguments about the pagan origins of many church traditions, along the way there was some discussion of how Jesus intentionally confronted many of the traditions and practices of His day. One example of this is when He healed the man born blind by making clay with spittle and rubbing it on the man's eyes (John 9). A few days later, our pastor preached on this same passage. Both the book and the sermon pointed out that this healing was done on the Sabbath, which confronted the Jewish traditional teachings from the Mishnah that prohibited work on the Sabbath, including healing. In the book, however, they noted in a footnote that the Mishnah, which is the rabbinic interpretation of the Torah, includes a passage in the section about the Sabbath (Sabbath 108:20) in which spitting to make clay to anoint eyes (as well as pouring wine into the eyes) are specifically prohibited. How weird is that?

So what is with this fixation on spitting? How could spitting be important enough to anyone that the rabbis would make a specific rule about it regarding the keeping of the Sabbath? In searching around the internet to find out about this I came across some information that surprised me. It turns out that both Jews and others in ancient times considered that saliva could have healing properties (see JewishEncyclopedia.com under 'saliva'). This is recorded by the Roman historian Pliny as well, and Tacitus ascribes to the emperor Vespasian the healing of eye diseases with his saliva. The Greeks also held this view. The Jews held that a man who kept the law and had just been fasting as well could have special power in his saliva. In some contexts spittle was considered unclean, but for the most part it was not and was even viewed as having special powers. In this context, for Jesus to spit and anoint eyes would have been very much expected for a healer. While this passage strikes my modern sensibilities as very weird, Jesus was doing exactly what a healer would be expected to do in that time.

There are 3 passages that involve Jesus spitting to heal: this one in John 9, plus Mark 7:33 and Mark 8:23. It was not a 'one off' event. The gospels report these without comment, just as if it is behavior that one would expect, and such it is. Once again I was reminded of how separated our habits of mind are from that time and place, and how much more we would understand the subtleties of the gospel if we better understood the culture of that time and place.

As I discussed this with my daughter, she brought up a related case around baptism. Here is an interesting link discussing the Jewish mikvah (or mikveh): www.myjewishlearning.com/life/Life_Events/Conversion/Conversion_Process/Mikveh for reference. Mikvah is the cleansing by immersion that is used for several purposes in Judaism, but it is notably used as part of the process for a Gentile to convert to Judaism. It must be complete immersion so that every part and every hair is immersed. It is to be done in specified water, 'living' water, not stagnant or impure water. The comparison to being re-born is explicit, as one enters the water a Gentile and emerges a Jew, just as one born a Jew. So when Jesus confronted a devout Jew like Nicodemus in John 3 and tells him that he, too, must be 'born again' He was referring to something Nicodemus already knew about. However, Nicodemus would not have thought that what was required for a Gentile was needed for himself. He had already been born a Jew. But Jesus confronted him that a major, life altering change of heart was needed for the Jews to be truly God's people, just as is required for a Gentile to become a Jew in seeking the true God. This is not the sprinkling of babies that eventually emerged in the West at all. How much else do we misinterpret by westernizing the gospel teaching?

Call Me Ichabod

2010-03-01T17:17:00.000-08:00

I don't remember when I first read or heard Washington Irving's 'Legend of Sleepy Hollow' but it is a story I have always enjoyed, especially in the fall. When we moved to Lee, MA, to start up the first Hydroknit(r) machine we moved at Labor Day and it was a glorious New England fall that year. We were living just a few miles from the Hudson valley where the story takes place, so of course I dragged out an American Lit book from college and re-read it that fall. The description of Ichabod Crane is one of the memorable parts of the story, and his nose is among his many exagerated features. It is described as 'a long snipe nose, so that it looked like a weather-cock, perched upon his spindle neck, to tell which way the wind blew. To see him striding along the profile of a hill on a windy day, with his clothes bagging and fluttering about him, one might have mistaken him for the genius of famine descending upon the earth, or some scarecrow eloped from the cornfield.' With my ongoing nose problems of this past week, I was of course reminded of him with such a famous nose!

Ichabod is a biblical name, and its meaning in the Bible contributes all the more to the description in Irving's story. In I Samuel 4, the ark of the covenant is taken from Israel by the Philistines, and the battle included the death of the high priest Eli's 2 sons as well as Eli's death from shock at the loss of the ark and his sons. His daughter-in-law then dies in childbirth upon hearing of her husband's death and the loss of the ark but before she dies she names the child Ichabod, which means 'the glory has departed' or 'no glory'. Ichabod Crane's nose was just one contributor to his appearance having 'no glory'!

I suspect my colleagues at work and my family who have seen me the past few days with various things stuffed in my nose, hanging out of my nose, and taped to my nose would certainly be thinking that 'Ichabod' sounds about right! I flatter myself , no doubt, to think that my nose was not all that weather-vane like otherwise. A little crooked maybe, but not quite up to Ichabod Crane's standards, at least until the last few days. The extra adornment the past few days has put me 'over the top', though.

Having gone 4 of the past 5 days to see the Ear/Nose/Throat doctor (we took Sunday off), and 2 more days before that getting urgent care to try to stop the nosebleeds, I have a newfound respect for the poor nose. My deviated (deviant?) septum is now a matter of more thoughtful consideration. And poor Ichabod Crane gets more sympathy from me than I ever gave him before.

Counterfeit Gods

2010-02-21T17:58:00.000-08:00

Timothy Keller's latest book, Counterfeit Gods, was under the tree for me at Christmas along with several other books, so I have happily started the new year with a backlog of new books to read and recently finished this one. I had found his look at the parable of the prodigal son in The Prodigal God to be refreshing and insightful so I was eager to see what this new book might hold. I think overall I garnered more from his prior work, but I thought a couple of his points in this latest work very helpful nonetheless.

The book is a look at idolatry and how idolatry creeps into our lives in subtle ways which we may not recognize. Paul, of course, had pointed out in the first century that greed is a form of idolatry (Col. 3:5) that is much more subtle than offering a dead animal in a pagan temple, but is idolatry just the same. Most idols are 'good' things gone bad, like prosperity, success, liberty, truth, beauty, and intimacy. The greater the good, the more likely we are to think it will fulfill us. His basic definition is that counterfeit gods consist in 'anything so central and essential to your life that, should you lose it, your life would feel hardly worth living'. He points out the every human being must live for something and for some hope, and when we substitute for God anything else such that it becomes our reason to keep going, then we have an idol, a counterfeit god. Most of us in modern western culture have idols like self fulfillment, individual freedom, financial independence; in Biblical times their idols had more to do with family, passing on the heritage to an heir, and standing in the community. All ages and cultures, though, are prone to their own counterfeit gods.

He takes an interesting look at Abraham and Jacob and how their cultural icons became challenges to their souls as love (for Jacob,Leah) and family (for Abraham) were idols that God had to purge from their lives, but I thought some of his insights into our culture were especially compelling including:

Political activism: he says 'one of the signs that an object is functioning as an idol is that fear becomes one of the chief characteristics of life...if our counterfeit god is threatened in any way, our response is complete panic. We do not say,'What a shame, how difficult,' but rather, 'This is the end! There is no hope!'. Wow. How descriptive both of how Democrats responded to Bush's election and how Republicans responded to Obama's election! He goes on: 'Another sign of idolatry in our politics is that opponents are not considered to be simply mistaken, but to be evil.' Again, both sides of the political isle are guilty here. Politics has indeed become an idol in our culture, including our churches.
Enemies: quoting the 17th century English minister David Clarkson he points out that 'many make even their enemies their god...when they are more troubled, disquieted, and perplexed at apprehensions of danger to their liberty, estates, and lives from men' than they are concerned about God's displeasure. Again, for a 17th century preacher he surely described the current 21st century conservative American anxiety over liberalism to a tee.
Doctrinal correctness: he says, 'Idolatry functions widely inside religious communities when doctrinal truth is elevated to the position of a false god. This occurs when people rely on the rightness of their doctrine for their standing with God rather than on God and his grace...trust in the rightness of their views make them feel superior'. This superiority of views is similar to what causes political idolatry as well.
Love of your country and your people: in a discussion that began with the French Revolution and how it turned into terror he concludes that 'when love of one's people becomes an absolute, it turns to racism. When love of equality turns into a supreme thing, it can result in hatred and violence toward anyone who has led a privileged life.' How many times has that played out in the last century, in Russia, China, and the more recent Islamic revolutions?

All of this, he concludes, is due to preferring our own wisdom, our own desires, our own reputation over God's wisdom, desires, and honor.

I, for one, find it too easy to dismiss idolatry as an ancient vice, one not very applicable to me and current times. This book provided a check to that kind of modern bias.

Olympic competition

2010-02-18T19:13:00.000-08:00

As I sit in a hotel tonight I have the Olympics on the tv while I do some computer catch-up. They interviewed the American women's snowboard team a few minutes ago and the athletes were talking about how their toughest competition is from their teammates who are also their best friends, whom they travel with, train with, live with. Yet they strive to do their best knowing that if they win their friend does not win. Despite that competition, they love their teammates. The do not 'hate the competition'; they do strive to be the best and do their best.

It was a very good interview in my opinion. One of the things that irritates me enormously in the business world is when so-called experts like Jack Welch talks about things like 'don't fall in love with your team because some of them are turkeys' as well as things he and others say about seeing the competition as the enemy, 'kicking butt' (but more coarsely said than that), and the like. Coming from the likes of Jack Welch makes it all the more irritating. Here is a man who lied to and cheated on his wife, running off with a younger business colleague. Here is a man who played all the same kinds of financial shenanigans as Wall Street did to inflate GE earnings that have since imploded just like Wall Street, which is to say he lied to investors just like he lied to his wife. A friend of mine once told me that a man who will lie to his wife will lie to anyone. Welch is a good example of that truism. So we should listen to him on how to treat employees when he clearly doesn't know how to treat family and investors? I think not.

Any leader that does not love his team even when they are not performing is not a leader, just a tyrant. Welch got it wrong, the snowboarders got it right: we must love our people, but we must also insist on good performance. I think I have read about that somewhere else as well: the gospels. I have been very displeased with much of what goes on in the name of athletics, which has mostly been about extreme narcissism of the athletes and coaches. This group of snowboarders, though, got it right.

Breathtaking!

2010-02-07T12:04:00.001-08:00

We hear it used regarding everything from the latest movie to new cars, but driving through the Yosemite valley for the first time gives meaning to the word 'breathtaking'! Three days ago I had the joy of seeing this amazing valley for the first time, and even with significant portions of the park closed for the winter it more than lived up to its billing.

The park stands in stark contrast to the central valley of California, which I traversed to get there. I had been in Palo Alto Monday through Wednesday for business meetings, and after having dinner there with a colleague I drove across the valley to Merced, CA, Wednesday evening. It was a misty and moonless night, so I couldn't see much along the road, though I did get the umistakeable smell of manure wafted my way every so often. The central valley in Califormia is one of the most intensively farmed regions in the world, so I guess I should have expected that. I arrived at Merced for the night a bit after 10 pm and clicked on PBS while unpacking in the Hampton Inn, and sure enough the National Parks documentary was on and the episode about the founding of Yosemite was playing! It was the perfect way to start my visit.

I got underway at about 7 am the next morning for the 1.5 hour drive to the park, and now I could see some of the valley. At first it was mile after mile of orchards on a landscape so flat that it makes the corn fields of central Ohio seem hilly. I would have to describe this valley as the Appalachia of the west, except without the hills and with better productivity from the farms. There are many places I would never want to live, and this is one of them. Farms and food processing plants are the dominant industries, and from the looks of the housing it appears to be home to many of the region's poor.

After about 40 minutes the flatlands slowly gave way to rocky, rolling hills with scrubby trees and cattle grazing. This was more scenic but the land looked very poor. It was getting cloudy as rain and snow were expected that evening, so the mountains were not yet in view, but the road was climbing slowly uphill. Around the town of Mariposa, about an hour into the drive some tall Ponderosa pine trees began to appear and you could start to see some peaks in the distance. The last 30 minutes or so was along the Merced river bank and the terrain grew ever more rough, but still no snow. I arrived at the park entrance by 8:30 am and there was still no snow, the entrance being at about 3000 feet elevation. You could start to see snow on the distant peaks, though.

After entering the park, things changed dramatically. Within a couple of miles I was into snow covered country. The entire Yosemite valley is only about 7 miles long, but driving through it the first time took me about 2 hours. There was no traffic at all. I just had to stop every couple hundred yards to take pictures, walk to a water fall, or just stop and stare. You can almost hear yourself gasp as you go around each corner and your eye lands on yet another breathtaking view. There are a variety of vistas of Bridalview Falls, Yosemite Falls, El Capitan, and Half Dome as you move around in the valley. At about noon I headed up towards the Tioga Road to see the Tuolumne grove of giant sequoias. That road gave still more great views from above the valley. The hike to and from the grove, a bit over 2 miles roundtrip over a snow-packed trail, offered the quiet of a forest trail while the massive trees gave yet another perspective of how unique this place is.

The contrast to the central valley is so stark that it is almost overwhelming. In that way it is like the Grand Canyon and the Tetons/Yellowstone in that the views are so dramatic and in such contrast to some of the nearby flatlands that all 3 of them take your breath away. Just as my reaction to the central valley was that this was a place I would never want to live, these places make you never want to leave. They are very different from each other but they are all awe inspiring.

There are a lot of places I have been and a lot more that I would like to see, though for most of them I would not do everything I possibly could do to get there. Yosemite had been on my list of 'must see' places for quite some time, and it was a joy to finally get there. I hope to return to see some of the areas that were closed for winter, like Glacier Point and the Mariposa Grove of sequoias. It is one of only 3 places for which I think every American should do all that they can do to visit at some time during their life: Yosemite, the Grand Tetons/Yellowstone, and the Grand Canyon are unlike anywhere else in the world.

A New Year

2010-01-31T14:54:00.000-08:00

Today is the last day of January. Already. We got our Christmas tree taken down a couple of weeks ago and now the Valentines Day decorations have appeared. The new year season is officially over though I still want to take a last few moments to look back.

Several years ago as we headed into the first of what turned out to be 3 waves of downsizing at work I was wondering whether I would still be working there at age 55. This past summer was the 3rd wave and I hope the last for a long while, but I am a year past 55 now and I am grateful not to be on the job market at this time in life and in this economy. While there remains much turmoil in the economy and many questions about where our country and the world are headed, there is also much to be grateful for. The earthquake in Haiti this month reminds me in another way how fortunate I am to still have so much to be thankful for and things to look forward to. Entering the new year is a good time to pause for thanksgiving.

Among those things I look forward to is a visit to Yosemite in a few days. Last summer as I watched the Ken Burns documentary on the national parks I had made it a goal to get to Yosemite some day. As things have turned out, I will be traveling to the west coast this week for business meetings and will be able to take some vacation time afterwards to make a short visit to Yosemite for the first time. What a treat!

I had prayed a year ago that our national leaders would be 'mugged by reality' and some of that appears to be happening. Politics is never a place to put much hope, but a headlong rush in any direction, left or right, is cause for concern. The headlong rush seems, for now at least, to have slowed. I am grateful.

I take a lot for granted, but some of those things force my attention at times. This week the sewer line from our house to the street backed up due to roots growing into the pipe. Fortunately our house had a relief valve out in the yard so it did not show up in the bathtub! Among many things the builder did wrong in our house, they did that one right! Anyway, as the folks in Haiti go without even the most basic sanitation facilities, we still take sewers, water, and electricity for granted until they are missing for a short time. How great to have a working sewer system! How much more I should be thankful for other, more enduring things that I also mostly take for granted: life, family, forgiveness.

So, as January ends and I consider the new year, I have much to be thankful for and much still to look forward to. Happy (late) New Year!

Is Anyone Normal Anymore?

2010-01-16T05:26:00.000-08:00

Last weekend we had our annual deacons retreat during which the oncoming deacons who are beginning a new term of service share their testimony of how they came to faith in Christ. I was struck this year by the number of men who had at least one alcoholic parent. As with most years, a great many of them also had been through a divorce of their parents as a child. Since divorce rates have been high for almost 50 years now, the number of men having grown up in broken homes was not a surprise, but I was struck by the number of men with alcoholic parents and the result that had in terms of periodic abusive treatment of them or their mother, and how it led to many of them abusing alcohol and other substances later.

Then on Thursday of this week we had a dinner event from the men's ministry at our church at which a man in our congregation shared his story of growing up in an abusive home in which he and his brother first endured the divorce of his parents and then later his father used his girlfriend to sexually abuse both of his elementary age sons. Since so few men are willing or able to discuss this sort of thing in a public event, it was a story that elicited in me both shock and outrage. I can somewhat understand (though I don't condone)how a man might resort to alcohol or chasing women after a hurtful divorce, but I cannot comprehend how a father could intentionally drag his young children into the cesspool with him. Hearing this man's life story made me wonder, in our society where perversion of many kinds is pushed as simply alternative lifestyles, how many other children have lived through this sort of thing. It made me wonder whether anyone is normal anymore.

Sexual abuse and drug use, including alcohol, are nothing new of course. It is well documented how perverse Alexander the Great and the Roman emperors were. Some have used this to argue that these things are not perverse, that we should accept them as normal since they have such a long history among 'great' people. We should ask folks like this man who told his story on Thursday instead. He was very clear on the damage it did, and how he struggled to eventually extend forgiveness to his father. It was not normal, and it certainly was not good.

One of the reasons that early Christians stood out in the Roman empire was that their moral lives were so distinctively different from the perversion that surrounded them. One of the great impacts of Christianity is the way it improved the lot of women and children in terms of ending abuse when their husbands and fathers embraced Christ. It may well be that apart from a Christian culture the abuse of sexuality and alcohol may be 'normal', but it has not been normal in cultures that have been dominated by Christians. We can expect to see more and more of this if our culture continues on its current path of abandoning Christianity.

The Formality of Christmas

2010-01-03T17:33:00.000-08:00

It was cold in Atlanta this morning, 18 degrees F, which was about the same temperature that it was when we left Strongsville, OH, yesterday morning. As a result most folks dressed warmly for church today, although some teenagers remained obstinate and still showed up without a warm coat or wearing flip-flops since being cool was clearly more important to them than being warm. I am sure they were very cool indeed! Nonetheless, their overly-casual attire as well as some of the folks in my generation who showed up in jeans and sweatshirts reminded me of how very few formal events remain in our culture.

In one of his writings C. S. Lewis talks about the occasions in which formality is a good thing, though I don't recall where he says this at the moment. I agree with him that there is a proper place for formality, and I think our culture has lost track of that. Lewis pointed out that one of the functions of formality is to cause us to pay heed to the importance of the event or the vows or the issues at stake. It used to be that folks wore suits to conduct business, attend a conference, to attend church and take communion, to graduate from school, even to attend school. These were in addition to weddings, funerals, and events of state like inaugurations and coronations. In each case the intention seems to have been to make an issue of the importance of the commitments and decisions being made. It was felt that formality in both dress and behavior reinforced the need for seriousness, honesty, fair dealing, and the keeping of commitments whether in business, school, government, or interpersonal affairs. Now we more and more dress down for school, business, church and many other places that were once more formal. I wonder sometimes at the size and overblown expense of weddings these days which runs counter to this overall trend. It is as if all the weight of the need for fomality in our culture has fallen solely onto weddings, as we have abandoned it in so many other places. Yet even there the solemnity has started to fall away as some folks dance down the aisle or stand barefoot on a beach despite the extravagant expense for clothes and receptions. I do not think weddings will be able to bear this weight without a better understanding of why formality is in fact appropriate at times, and those times need to be more frequent than weddings.

I am not of the opinion that dressing more formally for church creates a more penitent heart or a more sincere worship. Nor do I think that anyone lacking money for nice clothes should be left out. I do think it better reflects the importance of the occasion, however, and most folks dressing down these days pay more for their jeans with holes in them than they would need to pay for more formal attire. I do think that attire contributes to setting a tone for an activity and reinforces expectations for behavior. Even kids at school are less likely to roll in the mud when they are wearing a tie.

All of which reminds me of Christmas. While I can get tired of dragging out the decorations and setting up the tree, I do think it sets a tone and an expectation. Special musical events with choirs and orchestras in formal dress focusing on Christmas are events I love. While I am often already tired by the time we leave to attend church on Christmas Eve, the candlelight service with its entirely predictable yet solemn candlelighting and Lord's Supper service sets a tone for the day that is formal yet right. This can be overdone, especially the decorations, yet the idea of special, formal events, special clothing, special decorations remind us of the importance of the event and cause us to pause and remind ourselves why we are celebrating. And that is a good thing.

Syncretism and Christmas

2009-12-24T06:53:00.000-08:00

There was an article in USA Today on December 10 based on a recent Pew religious survey that had some statistics from the survey on current U.S. religious beliefs. The findings included things like 1 in 5 Roman Catholics and 1 in 4 of the overall population believe in reincarnation, about 1 in 4 believe in astrology, and 65% have incorporated some elements of far eastern or New Age beliefs into their thinking. This mixing of contradictory beliefs is called syncretism, and it is nothing new even though the article seems to think it is.

This subject tends to come up at Christmas time because of the mixture of various Christian and non-Christian elements in our Christmas traditions. Things like Christmas trees have roots in pagan traditions in Europe, along with mistletoe, lights, and yule logs. There is also the often crass commercialism of the holidays that stands in stark contrast to the baby born in poverty on that first Christmas. The Pilgrims forbade things like Christmas trees along with overt feasting, feeling that it detracted from the spiritual significance of the day.

I think syncretism has always been a cause for concern, though I am not overly concerned about the Christmas traditions. Nowadays I am concerned about what I see as an easy acceptance by many Christians of things like abortion, homosexuality, and unmarried co-habitation whle at the same time ignoring things like the meaning of baptism, the Lord's supper, and personal holiness. While this is not an incorporation of different religions into Christianity, it is an incorporation of godlessness into their lives and a willful ignoring of anything beyond the very basics of the faith.
This is not exactly syncretism but it is a weakening of the faith in a manner similar to syncretism. And I have no doubt that there are also some who are so ignorant of the faith that they mindlessly include new age, eastern, and other beliefs in their beliefs as well as simple godlessness.

Christmas trees, lights, yule logs, and such do not bother me, though. Perhaps if I had been living at a time when those things were done by pagans who later converted I would have been more concerned. In those days, many centuries ago, the practices would have been associated directly with non-Christian beliefs. But these things have been practiced by serious believers for so long and their meaning so thoroughly re-interpreted (or co-opted some would say) that they do not carry pagan connotations any longer. Indeed, the Islamic world would no doubt reject them because they are so thoroughly associated with Christians.

Syncretism is and always has been an issue for Chritianity, but today it is not Christmas trees that should cause concern.

Visions

2009-12-15T16:51:00.000-08:00

In the sermon at our church this past Sunday the topic was Joseph and the announcement to him of Jesus birth by an angelic vision, convincing him to go ahead and take Mary as his wife despite her pregnancy. It is easy for me to relate to the idea that it would take something very dramatic to convince a man to go ahead with a marriage when he finds his betrothed to be pregnant, so the idea of God doing something very convincing is not hard to understand. However, visions seemed to be a thing that God used more often in Biblical times than we see now. We get detailed vision stories with Peter and Paul in Acts, one regarding 'unclean' foods and taking the Gospel to the Gentiles and the other for Paul's conversion. Paul mentions other visions later, being caught up to 'the third heaven'. There are many instances in the Old Testament.

One point in the sermon was that in undeveloped countries, especially where the Bible is banned or most people cannot read, missionaries sometimes meet people who claim to have heard about Jesus in a vision before the missionary arrived and are prepared to accept Christianity when the missionary shows up. This has been heard in a fair number of instances in these kinds of countries but not in developed countries where the Bible is readily available.

Jews were different for their day in that literacy was more common than in many countries because of their being 'people of the book', where the Torah was revered. But, we don't know much about Joseph, and don't really know if he could read. However, even if he could read the materials for writing were very expensive and most ordinary folks would not have any written material in their home. That would be all the more true in a backwater village like Nazareth. If their local synagogue were financially able to have a Torah scroll, it would normally have only one and it was very precious. Even for 'people of the book', having the scripture in the home was prohibitively expensive. Even after Gutenberg made printing more affordable, it wasn't until the industrial revolution with its mechanized papermaking that Bibles in every home could be practical. That would be 17 centuries later than Joseph.

I lose sight of things like that today, with our low cost access to all things written. Visions make a lot more sense to me, however, in the context of a time when very few could read and even those who could would go through life in most cases without ever having a written document in their own home.

Do You Hear What I Hear?

2009-12-10T16:14:00.000-08:00

When I was in the 5th grade at Pleasant Run Elementary school, I heard something new. As far as Christmas music was concerned, I had grown up with shape note music at a country church, with Gene Autry on the radio singing about Rudolph, with Alvin and the Chipmunks, and with American Bandstand playing things like Bobby Helms 'Jingle Bell Rock' and Elvis' 'Blue Christmas'. Just before we moved to the suburbs in the summer between 4th and 5th grade, we did a concert trip at Washington Elementary school in Camp Washington to see the Cincinnati Symphony and ballet do 'The Nutcracker', but that was not everyday fare for me. At church we did the usual hymns like 'Silent Night' but not with a choir, and with a distinct 'country' sound. So when my teacher in 5th grade played 'Do You Hear What I Hear' and 'Little Drummer Boy' from a brand new album release performed by the Harry Simeon Chorale I was stunned. I just had never heard anything quite like that before. I thought it was the grandest music I had ever heard.

I like a wide range of music. My collection of Christmas music covers country, classical, pop, and jazz. I like it all. But it wouldn't be Christmas without choirs. There is still nothing quite like it. I don't like most of what our church high school choir does, because it mostly isn't really choir music. It is rock n roll in disguise. Choirs don't really do rock n roll. At least, they don't do it well. To catch the magic of a choir at Christmas, it needs to be SATB parts at least; maybe more parts than that. And the music needs to be majestic. It can still be fun like 'Children Go Where I send Thee', but it needs to be majestic. Adult choirs do that best.

I have been to 2 choir performances so far this year, with one more 2 days from now. It's great. And Christmas just wouldn't be the same without it.

The Incarnation and Bodily Life

2009-12-02T16:17:00.000-08:00

As Christmas nears it is a good time to ponder the significance of the Incarnation, God becoming man. The December issue of First Things reviewed a new book titled Body, Soul, and Human Life: The Nature of Humanity in the Bible which tries to address some of the findings of neuroscience and how bodily problems (spine damage, Alzheimers, chemical imbalance) can seemingly change a person dramatically. The book reaffirms that we are not souls that happen to have a body, but we are thoroughly integrated, embodied creatures in which body, soul, and spirit are all critical. This is my greatest disagreement with the Grace Walk folks, who insist that we are souls that just happen to have a body. Not so. The Incarnation of Christ is one important part of understanding this.

This is not to say that our mortal bodies are not fallen. They are. And as Paul pointed out, this mortal must put on immortality to be worthy of being in the immediate presence of God, so it must be changed. Christ demonstrates this for us. He took on mortal flesh, to fully experience our bodily existence, and in His resurrection demonstrated how it must change. His body changed so much that the Emmaus road disciples did not recognize him even though his wounds remained visible. But even in His resurrecton He maintained His connection with us, with a body. And in all the Biblical discussion of eternity with God it is clear that our life will be bodily, but in a new body. Bodily existence is integral to our existence, and it will always be so.

This has lots of implications for mortal life. One reason that 'two becoming one' in marriage includes bodily union is that our bodies are integral to who we are. Marriages in which there is no bodily union are candidates for annulment in the Catholic church for that reason, and that is grounds for divorce in public law as a result of this even though secular philosophy would probably no longer acknowledge this. A marriage without bodily union denies a fundamental part of our identity. This is one reason that Paul in his writing on marriage warns against staying apart for more than short periods of time. In death, one reason we treat the body with respect even after the spirit and soul have departed is in recognition that this was an integral part of the person during life. It is also why recreational sex and promiscuity is a serious sin: it violates the sanctity of the total person and is not just 'something your body does' as if your body is separate from the real you. It is also a reason why homosexuality is fundamentally disordered: it violates the fundamental reality of who we are as people who were intended for 'one flesh' marriage with the opposite gender. Our bodies are in many ways integral to who we are. Pope John Paul wrote about this much more completely in his Theology of the Body (which could be on my Christmas list, for anyone so inclined!), but at Christmas as we ponder the coming of God in the flesh it is a good time to ponder if we are treating our flesh as the Creator intended.

Queueing Theory and Health Care

2009-11-24T14:48:00.000-08:00

I attended a seminar last week on improving R&D effectiveness and part of the discussion involved queueing theory. Wherever queues form waiting time increases and productivity goes down. Some things make queues worse, including things like 'free' resources: resources that are perceived to be 'free' or at least prepaid. These 'free' resources are nearly always over-utilized as folks seek to 'get their money's worth'. So, for example, if expedited testing costs no more than normal testing, everyone will try to 'rush' their testing. If a corporate testing lab is paid for by allocating the cost to everyone regardless of how much they use it then people will try to use it as much as they can to get their money's worth. All of this reminded me of the health care debate.

It seems to me that by rushing towards a plan that just provides more 'free' resources to more people we may be making things worse, not better. We have not taken time to define the problems with the health care system but have only been fixated with spreading more health care 'free' or prepaid benefits to more people at a time when everyone agrees that cost and overconsumption is already a big part of the problem. This is similar to the corporate problem mentioned above: when health care is prepaid or perceived as 'free', people will over-consume. If their cost is fixed to a set co-pay, they will not shop for a better price. When the provider is not penalizing his patient via higher cost to prescribe excess testing to cover himself against a suit because their co-pay does not change, he will also cause over-consumption. To provide more insurance to more people will simply provide the incentive for over-consumption to still more people without addressing any root causes.

Another R&D problem related to this is that some resources, like pilot plants, tend to be managed for high utilization of the assets. Excess capacity is seen as 'bad'. But for every 5% increase in utilization beyond about 70%, wait time doubles in the queue. As a result, high utilization results in slower product development. High utilization for low cost results in slow speed to market and lost sales. Often the cost savings are no where near compensating for the lost sales and growth that could have been. To lower health care costs there is much talk of better utilization of resources, and the queue time will necessarily increase exponentially when it is managed that way. This simply trades one problem, over-consumption, for another one, long wait times, without ever attempting to address the root causes.

We also have a resource allocation issue in health care. We have excess capacity in specialty areas where much money can be made while other areas like general practice and obstetricians go under-served. Much of this is due to malpractice issues and much to the cost of med school and the huge debt many doctors start with. Insuring more people does nothing to help move resources to underserved areas, though it may well drive out some of the specialists by dramatically cutting their pay if the government does as it proclaims it will to lower their fees. This may well simply make every area short of capacity.

It seems to me that we would do better to address some underlying issues before trying to add more people to coverage. Some things that come to mind include:

Move toward medical insurance that is primarily aimed at avoiding catastrophic costs and bankruptcy, while letting routine care be directly felt by the consumer. This would reduce over-consumption and promote shopping for price.
Provide incentives for practice in under-served areas by offering forgiveness of med school loans in return for service in rural areas; also limit malpractice liability.
Require posting of prices and quality ratings by doctors and hospitals. This may require some sort of Consumer Reports type of agency to standardize quality assessments, but this would allow patients to compare cost and quality.

Some of this has been mentioned in the current debate, but none of it seems to be getting addressed. The effort seems to be more about buying votes than about fixing the real problems.

Remembering

2009-11-18T19:44:00.000-08:00

Today is November 18, my dad's birthday. He would have been 88 today. He left us 51/2 years ago now on another birthday (Jonathan's). I have been at a seminar in Chicago this week, and one of the men at my table was from Luxemburg and we were chatting at a reception at the end of the first day about Europe and Switzerland came up for some reason, along with the watch industry there. Since I wear dad's watch most days that conversation reminded me of how he would never have purchased this watch for himself; it was a long service award from his work. He did eventually get accustomed to the idea of a fancy watch, though, and after not wearing it at all for the first few years he had it he eventually wore it most of the time for about 20 years. That makes it all the more valuable to me.

While I was there I was able to watch the documentary WWII in HD on the History Channel, and I find myself looking for him or his unit or the type of anti-aircraft half-track he manned whenever I watch those programs about WWII. It was on each night this week. Since I don't get the History Channel at home, that also put me in mind of dad.

I have been reading in Job recently and last night I read the famous passage in which Job comments, ' I know that my redeemer liveth...and after my skin has been destroyed, yet in my flesh I will see God; I myself will see him with my own eyes..' Dad had that same confidence, which in turn gives me confidence of a reunion with him someday.

Then today is his birthday. While I am reminded of him whenever I put on the watch, it seems that this week many things have brought him to mind. So, dad, I just wanted to let you know that I am thinking about you today. Happy birthday!

The Evil Rich and Righteous Poor?

2009-10-29T10:12:00.000-07:00

‘Blessed are the poor, for yours is the kingdom of God’; so says the Luke version of the beatitudes (Luke 6:20). The Matthew version says ‘blessed are the poor in spirit…’ and I suspect that Jesus used both versions. I was reminded of this recently in thinking about the current economic recession and as a result of seeing a PBS program a couple of days ago about the 1929 market crash that led to the Great Depression in which my parents grew up. This verse on the poor is in contrast to the passage on how difficult it is for the rich to be saved, like a camel going through the eye of a needle. A result of this contrast has been a teaching, especially of the social gospel proponents, of the ‘righteous poor and the evil rich’.

There is some basis in common experience for this, of course. Many rich have gained their wealth in unrighteous ways, whether from usury, trafficking in drugs or sex, extortion, slavery or any number of other evils including armed conquest. Until the industrial revolution, producing more than what you consumed was a difficult task indeed, which limited the ability to create wealth. As a result, when wealth was accumulated it quite often was due to unethical, if not illegal, means. We now have far more opportunity to create wealth than in most of history, but there is still much evil. The PBS program on the 1929 crash spent considerable time on how the market was manipulated by a few rich speculators who would collude to drive up a stock price, then sell after it went up by a multiple of 2 to 10x, and watch as other investors suffered huge losses when the price plummeted back down. This was not illegal at the time but it clearly was dishonest, literally stealing from those who were unaware of the collusion going on. This was so rampant for as much as 50 years before 1929 that it contributed to the severity of the crash. This was clearly an ‘evil rich ‘ scenario. Historically, the rich have indeed often stolen from the poor.

The current recession and the crash that started it has also been attributed to the evil rich, as bond rating agencies ignored the risk in the ratings they gave to bundled sub-prime loans and the banks excessively leveraged their balance sheets with subprime loans, resulting in collapse as the default rate rose. There is plenty of blame for the rich in this, but there is also plenty of blame for the poor. Those who took on home loans they clearly could not afford hoping to flip the house quickly, the enormous credit card debt buildup over the last decade, the negative savings rate: all of those were in the lower income groups. To me one of the differences in this current economic mess is that it is much more egalitarian in its causes than the Great Depression. I personally think the government’s pressure to make more subprime loans was the most serious root of the problem, but there was so much get-rich-quick mentality everywhere that rich and poor both have plenty of blame to go around. Of course, those we call ‘low income’ in the U.S. are not all that poor compared to those living on less than $5 per day in some parts of the world. But in the U.S. at least, the lesson in this current mess is not that the evil rich brought this onto the righteous poor; it is that ‘all have sinned and fallen short’.

Spiritual Discipline

2009-10-11T16:56:00.000-07:00

Our pastor at church recently returned from teaching at a new pastor's training conference in India and participated in outreach events there. He mentioned in the pulpit today how much more modest the attire is there, especially among young women, and that you realize how much American culture is overly sexualized when you visit another more traditional culture. As he was preparing to return to the U.S. he was in a restaurant that had an American export, a sitcom, showing on a television screen. One of the local Hindu men, there with his family, became so upset about the trashy content of the show that he stood up in the restaurant and demanded it be turned off.

Being immersed in our own culture 24/7, we can easily fail to see that the media is all that most of the world sees of America. If that is all you know about America you can only conclude that America is focused mostly on satisfying our own appetites, as we feel that we have the right to satisfy any and all appetites at will. That of course has all kinds of non-sexual ramifications, like taking on too much debt to chase immediate gratification of other kinds (cars, houses, vacations), obesity, and whole cult of self-fulfillment.

While the Hindu world of the man in the restaurant includes an understanding of God that I cannot accept, most of the world, including the Christian world for most of history, has recognized that humans are prone to falling into bad behavior, behavior that is bad both for his overall culture and for himself. To prevent that bad behavior requires the practice of discipline, which conflicts head-on with the pursuit of self-gratification. It also requires many other things: grace, forgiveness, understanding among them. But it certainly requires disciplining ourselves as well.

One of the things that our pastor saw vividly when leaving our culture for a while is how very unwilling we are to practice self-discipline. This affects many areas of our lives: financial, eating, sexuality, education, anger, and more. While many of these appear to be matters of the body or money, they seem to me to be driven by spiritual discipline. If we do not recognize that our desires and appetites are prone to go bad, then we will not see the need to control them. If we believe that we have a right to fulfill any sexual desire, no matter how disordered it may be, we will not strive to control that desire. If we do not see the use of our money as a way to do what is right and make the world better, we will seek to consume rather than invest in a better tomorrow.

I think the TV picture of America that the outside world sees is, sadly, all too true. As a culture we have decided to pursue the fulfilling of all appetites instead of passing judgement upon them and controlling them. That is fundamentally a spiritual problem. Too bad that folks here in the U.S. are not demanding change like that man in the restaurant. But then that would take some discipline.

National Parks and Tsunami

2009-09-30T16:34:00.000-07:00

This week the new Ken Burns series on the National Parks is airing. It is very good, and as I have been watching it I am both reminded of the experiences I have had viewing the handiwork of God in Yellowstone, the Tetons, the Grand Canyon, the Smokies and also find myself anticipating the time when I will get to visit Yosemite for the first time. The National Parks are indeed a national treasure and I agree with Teddy Roosevelt that the Grand Canyon and the Yellowstone/Tetons are so unique in the world and so breathtaking that all Americans should endeavor to visit them.

Yet I am also struck with the tone of the series that presents nature and wilderness as an unqualified good with no dark side. Though they mention at times how the frontier was in the 1800's viewed as something to be conquered rather than preserved, that point of view is presented as something to be looked down upon. This strikes me as a very recent point of view, and one that would fit into what C. S. Lewis calls 'chronological snobbery'. We take our own modern opinion to be so vastly superior to what came before that we don't even try to understand why our viewpoint is different.

Today the news provided a good opportunity to recognize the dark side of nature and reflect on our chronological snobbery as tsunami hit the Samoan islands and an earthquake hit Indonesia on the same day. Meanwhile the typhoon that hit the Phillippines a couple of days ago has now passed over southeast Asia and the death toll is starting to emerge. Among all of these some 1000 or so folks are now dead with the count likely to rise further in the days to come. The economic damage is huge as well.

While these kinds of storms and quakes are not the same as simply undeveloped land in parks, they do illustrate that nature is both enemy and friend. To the Pilgrims and all those after them who lived on the frontier, cutting down the woods for shelter and fuel and to allow farming was necessary to avoid death due to winter cold and lack of food. Killing grizzly bears and mountain lions and rattle snakes was to necessary to keep your children and milk cow alive. While nature provided wood and meat, it was also menacing in its ability to kill you and your family. It was to be conquered to stay alive. While many took this very much too far, slaughtering animals for feathers or hides, the threat of wilderness was clear to everyone.

In our sanitized, urbanized world we romanticize the wilderness and overlook the real threat the natural world posed to frontier families. Many early pioneers went to the opposite extreme, demonizing it. The truth lies in between. We are stewards of the earth, to both utilize its bounty and also keep it sustainable for the future. Nature is both beautiful and threatening, as people also can be. And so the apostle Paul concluded that both man and nature are fallen, and both are created by God and reflect His handiwork. Those two sides remain in tension as long as this earth remains.

Yom Kippur, Passover and the Lord's Supper

2009-09-23T18:37:00.000-07:00

The sermon at our church this past Sunday was about the marriage feast of the Lamb in the book of Revelation, chapter 19, which seems to occur immediately before Armageddon. Since the chronology of Revelation is rather hard to sort out, it may not actually be in that order in my opinion, and in the sermon the pastor discussed the various concepts of the second advent of Christ and whether it happens pre-tribulation, mid-tribulation or post-tribulation. I agree with him that the pre-trib point of view requires a very strained reading of Scripture and is rather in conflict with the rest of the teaching in the Bible about suffering. I tend to think that the church may have to endure the entire tribulation, not escaping even mid-tribulation, but the truth is that no one really knows. The excessive confidence of the pronouncements by Tim LaHaye, Hal Lindsey, and others are out of line in my opinion. We just don't know how all of that will unfold.

Anyway, after that discussion came the wedding feast of the Lamb and one of the points was that the Lord's supper anticipates that wedding feast. I commented here recently about how often the Bible compares Christianity to marriage, and this is another of those and this time the comparison has to do with when He is fully united with the Church, which is His betrothed until He returns. As we take the Lord's supper, we both look backward to the cross and forward to the marriage feast.

Since Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, happens in September the same week as this sermon, I was reminded of how that holiday relates to Passover, one looking back and the other more forward looking. The Passover lamb died to provide the blood for the doorpost in Egypt, protecting Israel from the death angel, causing him to pass over their homes. It is celebrated with a roasted lamb, bread, and wine as well as bitterherbs and salt water and looks back to that event in Egypt. Jesus became the Lamb who took away the need for more sacrificial lambs and took away our tears and bitterness, so the Lord's supper is celebrated with only the bread and wine. No other lamb will ever be needed. We look backward to His act of sacrifice in that way at the Lord's supper, and the absence of the lamb, bitter herbs, and salt water give testimony to what He did and it, as Paul said, 'proclaims the Lord's death until he comes' (I Cor 11:26).

And when He comes, we will do what Christ promised when He first celebrated the Lord's supper with the Disciples, saying about the bread and wine, ' I will not drink of the fruit of the vine again until that day when I drink it new in the kingdom of God' (Mark 14:25 but also Luke 22:18 and Matt 26:29). This could well be at the marriage feast of Revelation 19. I think of Yom Kippur as a fresh start, with the sins being carried off by the 'scape goat' and a chance to begin anew, and in that way the forward looking part of the Lord's supper, coming as it did in a sermon at the time of Yom Kippur, reminded me of that. Yom Kippur also comes at the start of the Jewish new year, which is a forward-looking time. Most often I only think about the backward looking part of the Lord's supper and omit the forward looking part. I appreciated, and needed the reminder about, the forward looking part.

Discipleship: Mentoring, Tutoring, or something else?

2009-09-22T16:27:00.000-07:00

Our men's group just finished reading and discussing the book Transforming Discipleship and I have reached a few conclusions based on that discussion and the book. Things I like in the book include the description of a disciple as 'a self-initiating, reproducing, fully devoted follower of Christ' and the diagnosis of some of the reasons why there is so little discipleship within the church, which has mostly to do with both pastors and the congregation not seeing making disciples as a primary reason for the existence of the church. Most act as if the Great Commission in Matt 28:18-20 says 'go and do church' instead of 'go and make disciples of all nations'.

As the book reaches its recommended course of action, though, the recommendations seemed to me to be pretty much the same as what happens on a college campus: commit to a one year small group, commit something like 5 hours a week to the overall effort (that includes group time, preparation, going and doing ministry), commit to the relationships and the risk of being transparent in the group, and committing to at least seriously consider leading a group the next year. This is to me a key issue: most folks with careers, mortgages, kids and some other basic commitments at church already don't have that time even if they are interested.

I had commented before on how discipling ministries seem to be effective on college campuses but much less so in local churches, and so here are some conclusions about what I think it would take for discipling to work within the local church:

First it needs integration within the church program. At least in evangelical churches there is already a lot of 'content' on offer through Sunday School classes, sermons, other bible studies, etc. Adding more content is not needed: making the current content more relevant would be much better than yet another, separate time of study.
I have commented elsewhere that I see discipling as different from mentoring. Mentoring is more about offering advice and sponsorship, less about training and doing things jointly. Discipling is more a group activity, less of a leader:follower activity. In that regard, a blog I saw today titled 'Mentoring is Overrated:Try Tutoring Instead' by Michael Schrage at Harvardbusiness.org made me think: maybe tutoring is a good paradigm for discipling in a church. If sermons and sunday bible study is the 'classroom', then the small discipleship group is more like a peer tutoring session (working on the difficult areas, asking the questions you can't ask in class) and peer tutors are not nearly so intimidating as a professor or a pastor.
The time commitment has to be manageable: integrating the content with sunday school can certainly help that. Integrating the 'peer tutoring' with other ministries would do even more. Why isn't the goal of discipling built into all the other church ministries? How does choir build disciples? How does the sports ministry build disciples? How does women's ministry build disciples? Integration will be a must for it to work. The current patchwork of programs that seem to be unrelated to each other and without a common theme should have a common theme of building disciples.
The content has to have more flexibility than in the book. An effort that takes a canned program of weekly meetings, works through it in a year, then moves those people out to do the same content with others next year is not likely to work for people who are out of school in my opinion. There is such a wide range of backgrounds in a church, folks with totally different gaps regarding how they could become 'self-initiating, reproducing, fully devoted followers of Christ' that one canned program is going to fit only a few.
To do all of this the pastoral staff will need to see building disciples as their key calling; not preaching, not worship, not pastoral care. Those others are important parts elements of being a disciple but are not ends in themselves.
All of this re-confirmed to me what a great window of opportunity are the college years. If those years are missed it is much harder to build disciples in small groups later.

More on Marriage in the News

2009-09-16T16:46:00.001-07:00

Continuing from last time, the current (October) issue of First Things has an interesting article titled 'What does Woman Want? The War between the Sexless" which discusses a number of recent articles by women in The Atlantic, Time, various blogs and books that have a common theme of middle aged women divorcing their husbands, claiming that their marriage is barren of sexual intimacy, and assigning blame mostly to things like extended life expectancy making marriage unsustainable, having been intended for a society where most people die much younger than now. The author of this article, Mary Eberstadt, effectively points out how bizarre this all is and makes some pointed observations, such as:

Wharton economists have assembled surveys over the past 35 years showing steadily decreasing female happiness in general. This is despite large advances in education (more in college now than men), in job equality, sexual freedom, longer life expectancy,closing the wage gap, etc. Instead of improving their happiness, women's happiness is steadily declining, now less than men though historically it had been higher than men.

Womens' and mens' narcissism is increasing. A study of 16,000 collegians personality tests showed a sharp increase in responses to such statements as 'I am an important person' (in 1950 12% agreed with this one; it was 80% by the 1980's)

Women are becoming more the instigator of divorce. A recent Parade poll showed 70% of men said they would never leave their spouse, versus 50% of women say they have considered leaving.

Men used to complain about sex-withholding wives and used it to justify affairs; now women do exactly that same thing. That is the whole gist of The Atlantic article 'Let's Call the Whole Thing Off'' by one Sandra Tsing Loh about her decision to seek a divorce.

Eberstadt could have done better in coming up with more clear conclusions from her survey of the angst this summer about marriage from female 'elites' in the media, but she does point out that much of this is the price of feminism, and part of the price of feminism has been its acceptance of pornography. As the article points out, pornography becomes an easy substitute for sexual intimacy in situations where that intimacy is strained by the pressures of life and marriage, and porn's easy availability now only makes it worse. Women have accepted porn in their quest for their own sexual license. Now it is helping destroy the intimacy they say they want, in addition to their own destructive work via promiscuity, abortion, narcissism, and career obsession.

I would add another point: competition. Loh paints a generality of the modern man as a sexless, sex-withholding 'competitor wife'. That is amazing since men historically have been blamed for being sex-obsessed and indeed that is why men are so vulnerable to porn. So what is going on? My opinion is that feminist women have been obsessed with competition with men to the point that they have made the home a place of competition instead of a place of acceptance. The word 'competitor' in 'competitor wife' is key. Men do not like to compete against women, especially their wives. Not in sports, not in school, not in a debate (see Hillary versus Barack for example), not anywhere. But now, men are competing with their wives to maintain their self respect as a provider, as a leader, and as a lover. In the home competition does not work. It shuts down intimacy and porn becomes an easy escape for many. I am not justifying porn: as I have said before, porn is a lie. But is an easy out for those tired of competing against their own wives. It is rather ironic that these feminists who have so strenuously insisted in competing against their husbands now find themselves in a no-win competition against the air-brushed, silicone-implanted, liposuctioned lie that is pornography.

Marriage in the News

2009-09-14T18:06:00.000-07:00

Today's USA Today included an op/ed piece about how secularism is saving marriage. Since I commented recently that 'marriage is on shaky ground' in the post about grace and the radical idea that is marriage, I thought I should comment on that article. In addition, the current issue of First Things (the October issue: yes, the magazine gurus have decreed that it is now October even though it is only September 14) includes and article titled 'What does Woman Want', which goes well beyond Mel Gibson's take on that.

First of all let's look at the USA Today nonsense: either Oliver Thomas, who wrote the article, simply doesn't understand statistics or he is living in a land of make believe. Here is a broader view of the statistics: yes, the divorce rate did drop to the lowest rate as a % of marriages since 1970. Unfortunately, several other trends have been going on for a number of years as well including:

The total % of unmarried women has moved steadily upward since 1960, from about 30% to over 40%. In 1960 the number of unmarried women was about half the number of married women; now the numbers are nearing equivalence and if the current trend continues, unmarried women will pass the number of married women in a decade or so.
The average age of marriage is increasing (up to 27 for men, versus 22 back when I got married)
The number of unmarried couple households has increased 10x since 1960

So how does this translate to secularism saving marriage? It doesn't. What it does imply is that fewer and fewer people are getting married, and those that do so marry later. This would more likely imply that those most committed to the idea of marriage are the ones getting married since the stigma of being unmarried, either alone or co-habiting, is now less. When the people most committed to marriage as a concept are the ones getting married, wouldn't you expect lower divorce rates? I would. And is there any evidence that the folks most committed to the idea of marriage are the more secular, non-religious folks? None.

To look at the long term trends in marriage statistics, visit www.biblenews1.com/marriage/marriags.htm . They have plotted the data from the U.S. Census Bureau, so this is not some survey skewed by the sampling plan. It is just census data, conveniently plotted. One thing you will note is that in 1982-83, during the last recession of similar severity to the current one, the divorce rate also dropped. There have also been several articles about how hard times force marriage partners to delay divorce and often to come together as a team.

So what is to be made of the drop in divorce rates? My opinion is that in light of the long term marriage statistics and the current recession combined, it was entirely predictable and has absolutely nothing to do with secularism. Quite the opposite.

However, there are some secular forces that are contributing to the long term negative trends in marriage, which the First Things article discusses. More on that next time.

Missions and Foreign Aid

2009-09-12T05:28:00.000-07:00

In finishing up Philip Yancey's book Finding God in Unexpected Places there was an essay on fund raising for Christian causes, and in the current edition (Summer) of The City (this is a free quarterly from Houston Baptist University, and well worth reading) there was an article on foreign aid and why it has failed so miserably, especially in Africa. I was struck again by how foreign aid and church missions are two sides of the same coin: those who are 'haves' seeking to help the 'have nots', though the one is more secular and driven by governments and celebrities (or the crooks at the U.N.) and the other by churches. Neither one seems to be working very well from my point of view.

The article in The City reviews the book Dead Aid: Why Aid is not Working... by Dambisa Moyo who was born and grew up in Zambia and has worked for both the World Bank and Goldman Sachs. The author seems well qualified on the subject of grants and loans to Africa, whether from governments, the World Bank or folks like Bono and Live Aid. The book concludes succinctly that those who think well of handing cash to corrupt and incompetent regimes are not focused on the facts and are more interested in salving their own conscience than in making a difference. Her gripe is not with emergency disaster relief after an earthquake or that sort of thing: more with the ongoing handing over of billions to local programs that consistently fail to make a difference, and have been doing so for years.

These are in contrast to the 'micro loans' efforts, which are mostly private and to individuals to start a small business, not done through government. These do seem to make a difference, but do not address huge issues for the most part (like Aids, building schools, and so on).

I agree that most foreign aid programs are 'broken', and I wonder if many missions are, too. Again in Yancey's book he comments on his visits to Africa and how even the church pastors admit to multiple partners outside their marriage in many places (72% of pastors in South Africa, by a World Vision survey there, with an average of 3-4 partners). Yet 70% of South Africans attend church. Something is seriously wrong. As I look at the history of missions, especially the short term mission trips so popular at the moment, I wonder what they have accomplished for the 'have nots'. They seem to be more aimed at the 'haves', to stir up their interest and emotions. I wonder if we would not be better off to focus on buidling water purification plants and sewer systems, for instance. Certainly just sending money instead of going on short term trips is not the answer, as the Dead Aid book clearly shows. We would not be able to just send money to build these things: we would need to go do it. And yet there also needs to be some amount of personal touch, person to person. Infrastructure alone won't do it.

It seems to me that both official aid programs and missions may be out of balance: the governmental and quasi-governmental efforts all about money and the church programs all about people, when a balance of both people contact and infrastructure (instead of money) is needed.

Faith and Grace in Marriage

2009-09-02T17:59:00.000-07:00

The Bible very often and very intentionally compares our relationship to God with marriage. Unfaithfulness to God is called 'adultery' in both the Old and New Testaments; the church in the New Testament is called the 'bride of Christ'; Revelation speaks of Christ's return as the beginning of the 'wedding feast'; and so on. In Corinthians we are told that marriage within the faith is the only permissible type of marriage since to marry someone who does not share the faith is to join Christ with Belial, uniting the concepts of marriage and our relationshi with God, not just comparing them.

With that in mind, Phillip Yancey in Finding God in Unexpected Places includes a few essays on what he calls 'the scandal of grace'. One of those scandalous parts of the faith is that grace is accepted 'in advance': that is, Christ ann0unces that our sins are forgiven once for all, and then provides the indwelling Spirit as a 'seal' to show it is permanent, before it is seen whether we will remain faithful. This is very much like announcing that marriage is 'until death do us part' in advance of seeing whether your partner remains faithful. So much of our culture is premised on performance: work, school, athletics all hinge on being accepted conditional on our performance. The 'scandal' of grace is that acceptance is offered in advance of performance, on the premise that if our heart is changed our actions will also change. Many religions remain performance based. So do many families.

For many this is a stumbling block for both marriage and Christianity. In his essay, Yancey points out that 'if a bridegroom on his wedding night sat down to negotiate terms of infidelity (saying) 'Ok, you have guaranteed the future, so just how far can I go with other women?" we would be shocked, and we would also know that this man does not understand what love involves. We know that in this marriage his approach of 'what can I get away with' will prevent him from knowing what love is really about and will prevent him from making the necessary commitment that allows marital love in the first place. We will question his heart. We accept the reasons for an up-front commitment in marriage but do not see how our relationship with God would be the same way: committing permanently at the front end while requiring ongoing grace and forgiveness in order to last.

Marriage in American culture, and western culture generally, is on shaky ground. I think that is in large part due to our approach to it with a consumer mentality, of getting what we want, rather than approaching it as a matter of faith and grace. Clearly the up-front commitment is an exercise of faith, not knowing what trials lie ahead but committing to do what it takes to remain faithful, just as Christ commits to keep and sanctify His Church. The ongoing grace to keep it alive seems to in short supply, however. We are hesitant to extend grace in everyday ways, to meet our spouses daily needs for respect or acceptance or affection, let alone in bigger things.

The idea of what we call 'the security of the believer' is indeed scandalous as Yancey says, but no more scandalous than the idea of marriage. Both ideas are losing traction in western culture, and that explains a lot of our problems.

Optimum versus Ideal

2009-08-26T16:10:00.000-07:00

We recently implemented at work our new Organization Optimization plan after completing a downsizing. First you downsize, then you roll out the optimum organization. Of course, about two and a half years ago we did an even larger downsizing after which we rolled out the Ideal Organization. It was so ideal that some folks never did quite figure out what their job was. So now we are un-doing the Ideal in favor of the Optimum. We have also done several other ideal organization plans over the past several years. The ideal never seems to remain ideal for very long. I expect that the Optimum Organization will fare similarly.

'Optimize' is an interesting concept and is much like 'utopia' only more technical. In the engineering world, where a response variable may be expected to follow a response curve across a range of conditions like varying temperature or pressure or concentration, it makes some sense. In that technical case, the curve may indeed have an 'optimum' point where it is best to operate a unit operation. Of course, even these technical 'optima' often only exist on paper: in the real world we are usually happy to have an 'operating window' as a range of conditions within which we get good commercial results. This is because almost every commercial process has many things varying all the time to some degree: raw materials vary, wear and tear of the equipment, temporary malfunctions, operator skill, and so on all vary at once, so the optimum conditions are rarely seen. And in reality, all products can be made better and all processes can be improved so today's 'optimum' is tomorrow's 'obsolete'. So while the concept has some value in identifying the response curve so you can avoid really bad places to operate, truly 'optimized' processes don't really exist.

Once you start talking about humans, there is truly no 'optimum'. There is no more an optimum organization than there is an optimum economy or optimum marriage. That is one of the great flaws in the current universal health care proposal: it assumes the government can do centrally for a huge economic system what communism was unable to do centrally for any portion of an economy. It is an attempt at utopia in one large area of the economy by means of centralized planning and control. Some areas (like Europe) claim to be doing this successfully for health care, but I see them as free-loaders, sponging off the American system where the vast majority of new drugs and treatments are funded and developed. If America loses the economic incentive to create new drugs and methods, no one will have that incentive and they will cease. That would certainly not be optimum. As with our Ideal Organization, however, it would take time for this to be clearly seen. It took a long time for communism to fail, too.

Prayer as Punishment

2009-08-25T17:36:00.000-07:00

On Monday morning this week as we discussed discipleship in our men's group we spent a few minutes on the concept of confession to each other for support and prayers as well as confession to God. I asked those in the group who had grown up in the Catholic church how they felt about the rite of confession. There were different takes on it but one of the men mentioned how the habit of the priests assigning a certain number of Our Fathers and Hail Marys to say after confession had created in him the impression that saying prayers was a form of punishment for having sinned and gone to confession. I don't know that everyone reacts that way, but I suspect a good many do. I thought it was a good insight on how we can create impressions of punishment or legalism very easily in the way we practice the faith. In a little book being passed around in our couples small group at church, A Man's Helper by Wilfred Grenfell, MD (published in 1910; he was superintendent of the Labrador Medical Mission) he has a chapter on prayer and mentions some other types of 'prayer obstacles' that includes long winded prayers, fancy words, and some others . Here are some of my personal prayer obstacles, which overlap his to some degree:

Prayer as information to God: droning on at length to tell God what He already knows, which is generally more to tell others listening what you think they need to know. For the most part they don't need to know.
Prayer as sermon: praying in public as a disguised form of preaching is still preaching just the same, not prayer.
Written prayers read without feeling or fervor: written prayers may be just fine, especially when sung. That is what the Psalms are, after all, and song is a fine way to express praise, worship and thanksgiving. But a monotonous reading or mindless repetition of a written prayer is much like 'prayer as punishment'.
Prayer as punishment: not only when assigned after confession, but what are we conveying when we 'make' kids 'say their prayers' at night? I suspect that it varies with different children, but sometimes it is punishment.
Prayer as King James vocabulary exercise: for some this is just habit, to others it is a performance.
Prayer as laziness: praying for what you need to get up and do. Some things can only be done by prayer, some can only be done by work. Some require both.May we have the wisdom to know the difference!

The worst prayer, of course, is no prayer at all. That is the one that is most common of all.

Back to School, Back to Discipleship

2009-08-17T16:31:00.000-07:00

I have commented before regarding my concern about the lack of discipleship in the local church and how I have wondered why it seems easier to for ministries centered on discipleship (like the Navigators and Campus Crusade) to thrive on a college campus than in a local church. As we continue to read and discuss Transforming Discipleship in our men's group, today the chapter for discussion focused on 'reproducing disciples' and made reference to the relationship of the Apostle Paul with Timothy and with Barnabas as well as the author's experience. While this was not in the book, it seems to me that one key element of what Paul did in his church planting and development of leaders as well as what Jesus did with the 12, is that they moved on after a short time. Paul might stay for a couple of years at most, but he then moved on. That of course forced the local followers to 'step up' and take on the leadership role(s) that Paul left vacant. That was also true for Barnabas, and Jesus left the entire fate of Christianity in the hands of the 12 after only 3.5 years!

This is also true of ministry on college campuses: the seniors graduate every year and the underclassmen have to 'step up'. There is a new freshman class every year, and if they are not reached then the ministry will be gone in 4 years. This makes for a dynamic of student leaders and new disciples both knowing that the leaders will leave and that the younger folks will of necessity take over. There is no option other than the ministry folding. I am wondering if this is indeed an important part of discipleship ministry. While one can ask new members up front for a 'commitment' to start another discipleship group themselves, this is not the same as a situation like graduation where it is clear that is an absolute necessity. My experience in the local church is that very few will make that kind of commitment: and when there is no driving necessity, as there is in a campus ministry, why should they?

Early in the book the author (Greg Ogden) had asked rhetorically what would happen if pastors new that they only had 3 or 4 years to establish a church and then they had to move on and leave it with the lay people? That is what Jesus did, and while Paul kept in touch by his letters to some degree, it is what he did too. How would that change the church? It is a good question. I am not suggesting that there is no need for ordained clergy. However, the dynamic of knowing that we are accountable to pass on the faith seems to me to be vitally important. I am not sure how to duplicate the sense of necessity that is clear on the campus, but it seems to be a good thing.

The Nature of Words, the Nature of Prayer

2009-08-09T16:46:00.000-07:00

In Phillip Yancey's book Finding God in Unexpected Places he recounts from Augustine's Confessions the history of how St. Ambrose had learned to read silently without moving his lips, and how Augustine and his friends would gather round to watch this incredible thing, amazed that Ambrose could understand and retain the unspoken words. This was a very unusual and groundbreaking feat, and turned out to be a somewhat controversial one as folks debated whether this was a good thing to do or not since words were clearly intended to be spoken. It was also a feat inaccessible to most people at that time since very few could read and write. As a result, reading was normally a group event and was done aloud. This remained the case until well after the arrival of the printing press. Interestingly, when reading silently became common, personal prayer also became more common. Until then, prayer was also normally a group event, done aloud.

This was not entirely consistent with Biblical practice, however, though it may shed some light on why the 12 Disciples asked Jesus to teach them to pray. It may well be that public prayers were their main experience with prayer prior to Jesus. Prayer aloud was indeed very common. Jesus, however, apparently did not limit Himself to prayer aloud or at least not to prayer in public. In Matthew14:23 we are told that he went up to a mountain by Himself to pray after feeding the 5000; Luke 5:16 says that He often slipped away to the wilderness to pray; Luke 6:12, Luke 9:28, and John 6:15 are other instances of His going off to pray alone. It seems to have been His custom. I don't know whether He spoke his prayers aloud or not when He was alone, but He may have. That may be how we we have the record of his prayer in John 17 and in Gethsemane. However, when He instructs the disciples in Matt 6 he tells them not to pray as the hypocrites do in public, but to go to an inner room, shut the door and pray in secret.

There is something about words that demand to spoken, and writing becomes a surrogate form of speech. It is understandable that prayer would at times be aloud and in groups due to that, especially among those who cannot read. And yet, Jesus clearly set the example for personal, private prayer, whether sp0ken aloud or not. It is interesting that His example did not seem to become the norm in the early church, however. As with other areas in life like education, it seems to be easier for us to talk about subjects of importance and depth in public, like in a classroom, than at home or in one on one conversation. How easily we relegate the matters of ultimate importance only to formal settings and do not attempt to deal with them with our children at home or our neighbors in daily conversation. I think for a similar reason personal, private prayer may also be harder than public prayer. Private prayer is too easily confined to our list of needs and wants. This is not to say that public worship is always deep and deals with ultimate issues; the public practice of our faith can also become trite if we allow it. But it often happens that we want the church or school to deal with the hard stuff.

This reminds me of the need for both the formal and the informal, the private and intimate as well as the public. The public can remind us of the hard topics that we otherwise avoid, the private challenges us to get beyond the merely public.

Health Care and Education

2009-08-04T16:21:00.000-07:00

In the debate over universal health care it seems to me that a number of things have not been included in the debate. I have seen articles and blogs that talk about whether health care is a right, some saying it is while others compare it to housing or other purchases that may in some cases be subsidized but are not rights. As I have written some months ago in this blog, health care is not a right but it is something that we all care about and would like to make available to as many people as possible. Because it is a service and not property, it seems to me that in many ways it is like education.

Education is also not a right, though most of us would agree that it is a good thing and critical to having citizens informed enough to exercise the right to vote as well as to effectively participate in the economy. It is an important thing, but not a right. Life, liberty, property, justice in the courts, voting: these are all rights. Having housing, clothing, food, and education are not rights, they are responsibilities for us to provide for ourselves, but they are important and in some cases we provide a safety net for those unable or only partially able to provide them for themselves.

In the case of education, public education is made available everywhere, though the local citizens have a say at the polls about how much is spent (by voting on tax levies and bond issues), have a say in how it is run by electing school boards, and put a cap on how much is provided 'free' to everyone by limiting free public education through high school only, not college. And many people want something better or different from the public schools, so private schools and home schools also are available. Beyond high school, all additional schooling is at the student's expense. The basic issue here is that everyone sees the value in basic education and are willing to pay for it--to a point.

It seems to me that many of these approaches should apply to public health care as well if it is to be done at all. It should be run locally; the local citizens should be able to control costs and management by voting on the funding and boards; it should cover basic health care, but not health care beyond a certain point; there should be options for private health care in addition to the public health care. These principles would make certain options, like a single payer system run by the government, off limits.

Public education was not intended to provide all the education needs of the country, just the basics, and that with accountability to voters on the results and the cost. It seems to me that health care should have the same kinds of accountability and limited scope.

Demonizing the Left

2009-07-21T18:04:00.000-07:00

As I mentioned in my last post, the books Velvet Elvis and The Prodigal God both comment on how we as evangelical Christians can set-up our children for a shock when they enter the real world. In the first case, Rob Bell talks about how those who are raised in evangelical churches and especially in Christian schools can come away from that with the impression that the only truth that exists is located in their church or school. In the other case, Timothy Keller talks about those same kinds of home and school environments in terms of the people who have liberal, leftist views about sex, politics, and culture and that anyone outside the circle of their faith is not to be trusted. The one is about truth, the other about people, but they are similar. When those children go off to college they find that there is some truth to be found in the liberal universities and some loveable people to be found, causing them to doubt what they had been taught, including their religious teaching. In trying to protect our children, we often go too far and demonize those we disagree with and it later comes back to haunt us when our children abandon the faith because it mislead them about truth and about people with too extreme a position.

In The Prodigal God Keller points out that the father of the prodigal son would have been the object of derision by his peers for giving the prodigal his inheritance early. He would have been told that he let that child walk all over him; he would have been called weak; he would have been told to stand up to those boys! Instead, he was more than patient and forgiving, taking the loss himself by allowing the prodigal to blow his inheritance and later accepting him back. He would have been told by his peers to refuse to take him back, that the son needed to live with the consequences of his actions. Indeed, that is exactly what the elder brother wanted. In other words, he would have been demonized by his peers for failing to uphold the honor of the role of father. Similarly today in the Arab world fathers are 'shamed' into killing their daughters who balk at their parents arrangements for marriage or who become Christians, among other things.

When we demonize the left, we do something similar to what peers of the father would have been doing; trying to cut them off, teach them a lesson. It is similar to what the Arab world does to those who embrace Christianity. We don't recognize the similarity to these things many times, but it is there just the same. To demonize those we disagree with we simply cut off or at least reduce the possibility of redemption.

I must admit that I do get tired of hearing how awful Obama and company are every day on talk radio. I disagree with most everything Obama does and, as with his predecessor Carter, most of what he does will have to be undone later. But demonizing does not help. As with the examples in these books about how demonizing the left sets up our children for a shock when they enter the world, this constant demonizing of the left sets us up for losing all support from moderates as they must get more tired of this than I do as conservative. And he may accidentally do something good along the way.

Disagree? Yes. Make the issues clear? Yes. Demonize? No.

Two Kinds of People in the World

2009-07-19T14:31:00.000-07:00

Someone has noted that there are 2 kinds of people in this world: those who think there are 2 kinds of people in the world, and those who don't. At times this does seem to be a very time-worn set-up for a comparing and contrasting of two alternatives. There are spenders versus savers; conservatives and liberals; Chevy guys and Ford guys. I didn't grow up on a farm, but I laughed out loud at a restaurant in the Midwest when I saw a green John Deere hat that said 'Friends don't let friends drive red tractors', so there apparently are also Deere guys and Farmall guys. The Chevy/Ford/Deere/Farmall thing has suffered of late, though, due to Toyota, Nissan, Kubota, and others so the next generation may not relate to that as well. Being of a certain age, though, I do still laugh at the line in Christmas Story about 'my dad was an Oldsmobile man!'

Yet the '2 kinds of people' comparison does have some validity, which is no doubt why it gets used so often. I just finished reading The Prodigal God by Timothy Keller and, lest there be any confusion from my last blog, I liked it very much. It is a fresh look at a very familiar passage of Scripture, the parable of the Prodigal Son. Most sermons on this passage that I have heard in the past focused on the licentiousness of the younger son; recently, I have heard more about either the hard-heartedness of the elder son or the sacrificial love of the father, but I think this book gives all 3 the most even treatment that I have come across for even a very oft-cited passage. He does, of course, use the 2 kinds of people paradigm; the younger brothers of the world, whom Kierkegaard calls the 'aesthetic', and the elder brothers, the 'ethical' in Kierkegaard's terms. I have heard them also called the 'party-ers' and the 'do good-ers'. I never related quite as well to this dumbed-down version of the comparison, I think in part because in college the 'party-ers' were clearly the Greeks, but the non-Greeks did not fit any neat category as far as I could tell. Keller comes up with slightly different terms: moral conformity versus self-discovery. I like this because I think it captures the spirit of the age rather well.

The younger brother, of course, was the self-discovery agent, out there to 'grab all the gusto he could get' and experience life! Meanwhile, the elder brother is demonstrating his moral superiority and self-mastery through his diligence. The book spends some time pointing out the cultural context, though, and how the actions of both sons would have been unthinkable in that culture: the younger because demanding his part of the inheritance while his father remained in good health was basically saying that he considered his father more valuable dead than alive, and the elder by his confrontation of the father's acceptance of the returning prodigal in telling the father what he should/should not do with his wealth. The elder brother knew that the younger one had squandered his fair share, and if he were accepted back he would start consuming the inheritance that would have come to him, so he challenges the father's right to control his own resources. Both sons were fundamentally self-centered, but they demonstrated it in very different ways. Both were seeking to be in control and escape the control of the father. Yet both were loved and pleaded with by the father, though the elder brother, as with the Pharisees in Jesus' day, had a much harder time being reconciled to the father. They, like the elder brother, were convinced that they needed no reconciliation. They had done all the right things. Only those profligate party-ers needed that. How hard it is for those who do all the right things to see their sinfulness!

I commented about Velvet Elvis a couple of weeks ago regarding why so many church-going kids abandon the faith when they go to college, and that topic comes up in this book as well. He mentions how he moved to New York city from the Midwest to start a church and how he met 'many young adults who had come from more conservative parts of the U.S. to take their undergraduate degrees at a New York school. Here they met the kind of person thay had been warned about for years, those with liberal views on sex, politics, and culture. Despite what they had been led to believe, those people were kind, reasonable, and open-hearted. When the students began to change their views, they found many people back home, especially in the churches, responded in a hostile and bigoted way. Soon they had rejected their former views along with their faith.' I would not limit this to just those that go to New York, and I think this does often happen. Keller points out the 'elder brother-ish' reaction of those back home, but there is more to consider here.

It also raises another, more fundamental question on those who lose their faith: were they simply 'elder brothers' as well, doing what is right because of what was viewed as right at home? When they went to a place where a different approach is considered 'right', they struggle briefly, but then fall into line. The hostile reaction from home pushes them along, of course, but it seems to me that if we lose our faith when it is challenged, then it must have been insecure all along. To say it another way, were they simply 'Church-ians' back home instead of Christians? Had their lives actually been changed by the invasion of Christ into their lives, or were they just following the rules like the elder brother? I tend to think the latter.

This all goes to say that I fundamentally believe that there really are just 2 kinds of people in this world: those whose lives have been invaded by the living Christ, and those that haven't.

The Purpose of Church

2009-07-15T16:46:00.000-07:00

I have started reading Timothy Keller's book The Prodigal God which I was recently given. The book is a re-examination of the parable of the prodigal son and he makes a good case for spending more time understanding the elder brother, who never went wild, along with the prodigal son. He provides a different look at the father as well, whose extreme love was 'prodigal' in its excess, as is God's love. Along the way he makes some comments about how Jesus attracted sinners and rebels while repelling and alienating the religious community. He comments that while Jesus attracted the irreligious and offended the religious, our churches today do not have this effect. 'The licentious and liberated or the broken and marginal avoid church' he points out. 'That can only mean one thing. If the preaching of our ministers and the practice of our parishioners do not have the same effect on people that Jesus had, then we must not be declaring the same message that Jesus did' he goes on to say. This raises the issue of what is the purpose of church services.

His implication is that organized church services should be aimed at attracting the irreligious, the marginal, the rebels, the alienated. Much of the 'seeker sensitive' movement has agreed with this approach, as does the 'emerging church' effort. I disagree.

Church services are not aimed at attracting unbelievers; they are aimed at worship by believers. Jesus did not reach out to the irreligious and sinners in His time of worship. As best I can tell, though, His worship was mostly either alone or at the temple, so I don't know that our conept of worship is all that great either. However, worship is not outreach. The sinners and irreligious were attracted to Jesus during his public conversations with his opponents or during his 'hands on' ministry times (healing, feeding, having one on one conversations, at dinner, etc), not during temple worship. To try to aim worship services at the irreligious is to deny believers a time of group worship and encouragement. Seeking to have teaching times that reach the unbelievers is a valid thing to do, but it should not replace group worship for believers.

Our church states that 'worship is our number one ministry priority' in its statement of core values. I personally think that discipleship should be our number one overall ministry priority, but worship is indeed the number one priority for public worship services. Our attraction to the irreligious should be in our 'hands on' ministry time (feeding the poor, helping the helpless, etc) and in events that raise issues in the public square, as Jesus did. Confusing the attraction of the irreligious to the active work of Christ with attracting them to worship services does worship a serious disservice.

Velvet Elvis, Discipleship and Truth

2009-07-06T16:02:00.000-07:00

I just finished reading Velvet Elvis by Rob Bell, who is a pastor in Michigan. I generally liked the book, though the style of it interfered with the message for me at times. The writing is a hybrid between a Powerpoint(r) presentation and prose, with lots of 'bullet points' (sentence fragments standing alone without a paragraph) mixed with paragraphs. It is something like reading half of a dialogue. While this was distracting, much of the content was good as I seek to understand the disconnect between my generation and my children's generation. I read in the paper last week that there is a bigger 'generation gap' now than at any time since the 60's. It certainly seems that way in church, so I hope to gain some insight into that over time.

I liked Velvet Elvis much better than Blue Like Jazz. The latter seemed to me much more existential, making comments about how Christianity can be experienced but not understood, that 'truth means much more than accuracy', that the 'mystery' of the Orthodox church was 'cool' just because it was different. The overall tone of Blue Like Jazz struck me as very existential, as if he had given up on the concept of truth as anything other than personal experience.

Velvet Elvis, while the style was neither fish nor fowl, was more truth-oriented. The book was worth the price (or more, since I got it at a discount book warehouse in Pigeon Forge for about three bucks) for the chapter on discipleship. I suppose you could call it a chapter; maybe it was a Powerpoint section. In any case, it was about discipleship. That chapter gives a terrific overview of how rabbis of Jesus' day had followers, how they were the best-of-the-best from the Torah schools, how the rabbi did not accept just anyone to be a disciple, and so on. This gave both a great context for what it meant in that culture to be a disciple, and how Jesus also made discipleship into a new thing, gave it new life, by calling as his disciples a group of men that would not have made the cut into the discipleship groups of the other rabbis of the time. Frequently in the book, Bell puts this kind of context around his point, illuminating how understanding the culture of the time changes how we understand many of the teachings of Jesus. He includes information about a place known as 'the Gates of Hell' in Casesarea Phillipi, and that the god Pan was worshiped there in obscene ways, and that His declaration that His church would be build on a different rock and the Gates of Hell would not stand against it was a reference to that place and that kind of worship. We usually miss that connection, even though we may have seen pictures of that place, as I have. The great grace of discipleship is that the Christ, the ultimate rabbi, thinks we can be like Him, and that we can carry on His teaching and ministry, even if we could not make the cut for the other rabbis.

He also directly addressed a question that has been on my mind: why so many kids who grow up in a Christian home and a sound church leave the faith when they leave for college. He suggests that one possibility is that they may have been taught that Christianity encompasses all that is really true, that all the truth in the secular world is suspect. Especially if they also went to a Christian school they may have gotten this idea. Then they find out that there is some truth out there in the world but are not prepared for the reality that all truth is God's truth. This can appear like a refutation of the faith they grew up with. It is an interesting thought, though probably not the only reason for this falling away of many at college. This emphasis on truth was much more palatable to me than the existentialism of Blue Like Jazz.

There is quite a lot in the book that still left me feeling the generation gap. His reference to being in a punk rock band while also a pastor is one example of that. The wedding at the lake for his friends who wanted it to be 'spiritual' but not 'Christian' was another example. At times he was a bit New Age-y, but he still managed to hold on to the concept of truth. 'If it is true, then it isn't new' he says at one point. Exactly!

Senior Week, Leadership, and Love

2009-07-02T07:35:00.000-07:00

We have been going through a downsizing at work and the folks who took the voluntary severance package just finished their last week on the job. Many of them were near retirement and the package gave them enough incentive to go ahead and move into retirement now. With so many senior folks leaving, this past week has reminded me of high school days when the seniors were getting ready to graduate. Deja’ vu all over again, as Yogi would say. In addition, my daughter turned 20 and so for the first time in 16 years we have no teenagers in the house. That passage out of the teen years also made me think of the milestones and passages in life. It was a strange sort of week in that way.

Of course, some younger folks who were considering a new direction in their life also left. One of those was a man who had worked in my team as a project leader and is moving to Canada to join his new bride. They were married shortly before this severance package was announced. He is from India, though he spent much of his teen years in Canada, and he met his wife on the internet via a match-making/dating service for Asian Indians. She lives in Canada. Since marriages in India are traditionally arranged marriages, that approach seems to fit. He is an avid reader, so I am giving him a copy of The Four Loves by C. S. Lewis as he leaves and begins his new life with his new bride. I suspect that those from cultures of arranged marriages have fewer unrealistic expectations about romantic love than those from cultures like America, so the message that ‘Eros makes promises that she cannot keep’ may not be as desperately needed in his case as it is in America, but I suspect he has lived here and in Canada long enough to have been corrupted by our culture.

That our culture desperately needs this message was made clear yet again this past week by the news of the Argentina affair carried on by Governor Sanford of South Carolina. While the press rarely gets anything right, the comments that have been in print about how he felt that this woman was his soul mate, that this is about love, and so on indicates that he certainly does not yet understand about Eros and her promises. There has been such an ongoing stream of these types of revelations among governors, presidential candidates, preachers, and others in power that I am beginning to wonder if there are other lessons here as well. So many of these ‘leaders’ have such enormous egos that it seems to me that we have a cultural problem in not being able to tell the difference between egotism and leadership. So many of our ‘leaders’ appear to be leading when they are mostly just serving their own ego. They seem to do the same in their relationships with women, serving their own ego and thinking they can talk their way out of anything. And so many women, for their part, seem to prefer this fast talking, outgoing, self-serving type, often choosing them over men who are more introverted but also more reliable and less self-centered. While the ability to communicate is important, it is not enough. For my part, I will take depth and integrity over skillful rhetoric any day. It seems to me that many women, like the electorate, do not recognize the difference between leadership and egotism either. It should not be a surprise that so many have swooned over the words of Obama regardless of his lack of having ever done anything of consequence and regardless of his arrogance. That seems to be the concept our culture has of leadership.

Meanwhile Gov. Sanford clearly still has lessons to learn. Perhaps I should have sent him a copy of The Four Loves too.

Father's Day and Sustainability

2009-06-24T16:48:00.001-07:00

It was Father's Day this past Sunday and it was good to be with extended family and children on that day. With the bankruptcy of GM and the talk of needing 'greener' cars, the high price of oil this past year, the debates about wind and nuclear power, climate change, and so on sustainability is all very much top of mind as well. However, still this few days after Father's Day I am thinking and wondering more about the sustainability of fatherhood in our culture. Perhaps it is bigger than that, an issue of moral sustainability.

In the news today Governor Sanford admitted he had been missing the past week due to an affair with a woman in Argentina. A few days ago Senator Ensign admitted to an affair with a staff member and gave up leadership roles. Both are conservative Republicans, the party less reputed for supporting such behavior. Of course, many in both parties have had the same problem, as does culture in general. Something like 40% of all children are now born out of wedlock in the U.S. , up to 70% among African Americans. The family itself is looking to be not very sustainable, regardless of what happens to Father's Day.

I heard in a sermon recently that something like 60% of kids who are active in church youth programs leave the church entirely when they graduate from high school and go off to college. These are not all kids, these are the ones that show up regularly and participate. This is clearly an unsustainable approach to building the next generation of Christians.

The Southern Baptist Convention is meeting this week in Louisville, KY, and the news there is glum; church membership and baptisms are falling. If the rate continues, the denomination will be half its current size in another 30 years or so. Unsustainable.

All of this is symptomatic to me of moral unsustainability. Someone has said that we are living on the fumes of prior generations morals, our own moral gas tanks having long since gone empty. The results seem to support that. We attempt to honor Father's Day while abandoning marriage and leaving our children with no father in the home. We think marriage is only about our own personal satisfaction so we cannot distinguish between so-called 'gay marriage' and the real thing. We do not live our faith daily so our children run away from the church at the first opportunity.

Rev. Johnny Hunt at the SBC Convention says we need revival. That is true, but it doesn't go far enough. We need to be actually living the faith, having it as our own. We need to be fueled with our own personal walk with God, not trying to live on the fumes left from the faith of prior generations. Nothing else will ever be sustainable.

The Private, the Secret, the Intimate

2009-06-15T16:24:00.001-07:00

The sermon yesterday at our church, one in a series about family life, was about sexuality and its proper role. Much of the sermon was about the current problems with internet pornography and how that is destroying many families. It may well be the biggest sin problem within the church. The fact that an addiction to internet pornography can be idulged in 'secret' is part of the problem, since many are lured into it thinking that it will always remain a secret, not realizing how indulging in this secret sin will eventually destroy their marriage or lead them to other less secret sins with prostitutes, underage partners, or other crimes.

Besides being a troubling reminder of how sexuality continues to be a point of vulnerability for most men and many women, it also made me think about the role of the secret things in life and how pornography turns that role on its head.

In years past it seems to me that I heard more sermons and discussion about how our secret, private life exists to empower our public life. This idea, that the role of prayer, meditation, and marital sexuality provide a foundation of strength to help us resist the temptations of public life, is a powerful concept that I think deserves more attention. At the same time, in parallel to this idea of a private life that strengthens you, was a parallel idea that if you instead had a private life of secret sin you could be sure that it would find you out. In fact, this came up in a family discussion recently, whether that quote 'Be sure your sin will find you out' was in the Bible or just was a saying , so we looked it up and it is in Numbers 32:23, telling the Israelites that if they did not do as the Lord commanded then they should be sure that their sin would find them out. Of course many of the Proverbs talk about this as well in regard to sexual sin and failure to learn the Law among other things. Our private failures eventually become public, even if we are not running for public office.

Today we instead treat the private portions of our lives as the area where we alone should be god. We insist that these are 'victimless crimes' rather than self-destructive behaviors. As the movie Fireproof pointed out, porn plays a role in the failure of many marriages now. Pastoral counselors confirm that they find it to be an issue when counseling marriage problems. Just as we seem as a society to be less and less willing to defer gratification until later (via saving money, for instance) we also seem not to recognize that there are behaviors with penalties that arrive later. There is such a thing as postponed penalties as well as deferred gratification.

Yet the private, the secret, the intimate can provide strength instead of weakness in its proper role. Marriage provides times for both sexual self-control and times for fulfillment that should strengthen our character and provide the fulfillment needed to resist temptation. Similarly, private devotions can provide the knowledge and strength to withstand spiritual deception. Secret sin like porn takes that which should enable our lives and instead undermines it.

Someone pointed out to me many years ago that porn is basically a lie. It is a lie in many ways: the airbrushed photos of 'perfect' bodies, the implants and other surguries to make 'perfect' bodies, the false implication of seductresses who are always available for pleasure, in addition to the lies that it is victimless, that it is just normal, that no one will know, that sex should be just for pleasure and nothing else. These are all lies. But in addition to telling us lies, porn turns our secret life which should be a source of strength into a source of weakness.

Time for Remembrance

2009-06-09T16:15:00.000-07:00

June is always a major time of remembrance at our house with birthdays and wedding anniversaries. This week in the news were some other major remembrances as the 65th anniversary of the D-Day invasion of Europe in WW2 was highlighted by President Obama's visit to that site. Since my dad went ashore there a day or two after the initial landing and went through a number of battles all the way to Berlin, D-Day is one that I always remember (also because of my wife's birthday!). This same week was also the 20th anniversary of the Tianenmen Square protests in China, causing us to reflect on the many changes that have taken place in China since that sad time.

This year is also the 25th anniversary of the death of Francis Schaeffer. It is hard to believe it has been that long. As I reviewed his book Genesis in Space and Time this week I was reminded again how very much his writing impacted the way I view the world, especially how I view the culture we live in. His writing on abortion, the arts, movies, literature, politics, and sexuality all caused to me to think more critically about how these things either reflect or deny Christianity. He more than anyone else I have read made me understand what it means to have a Christian 'worldview'.

One comment that I noticed more in this re-visit of his book than I did at the time was his comment that the church is by-and-large a middle-class institution in the western world, appealing to neither workers not intellectuals very much. That is quite unlike in Jesus' time or in other parts of the world like Africa, where the poor and working folks are the predominant members of Christian churches. Certainly as I was growing up the poor and the workers were all that I knew of the church, since that is where I was. As our prosperity has grown, we somehow have lost touch with the poor this country. I am not exactly sure how or what it means, but it is a concern.

As for the intellectuals, I think that they have always been a very small part of the church. Just as with the rich, I think they find it harder than the poor to view anyone but themselves as being in control, including God. Perhaps I should say 'we' instead of 'they'. It is a good time to remember my roots and not get too impressed by my own prosperity and education, which are enormous blessings that I should be more thankful for.

Poetry

2009-06-01T17:45:00.000-07:00

I have little patience for poetry. Most of what passes for poetry these days, and for art in general, seems to me to be mostly a rejection of the idea of art and poetry, rejecting form and structure as much as possible. In many cases, it rejects the very concept of truth rather than giving an insight into truth. Yet in the latest issue of First Things a poem caught my attention. That is hard to do. They publish some poetry in every issue, and most of it is really quite bad, but every year or so one will catch my attention. This one is quoted in full below (so it is obviously short). It is entitled 'I Did Not Come to Call the Righteous' and listsMatthew 9:9-13 in the subtitle. Here it is:

We ninety-nine obedient sheep:

we workers hired at dawn's first peep;

we faithful sons who strive to please;

forsaking prodigalities;

we virgins who take pains to keep;

our lamps lit, even in our sleep;

we law-abiding Pharisees;

we wince at gospels such as these.

-Julie Stoner

The allusions to so many various passages of Scripture, and the gathering of them together so succinctly, caught my attention. Being a person who values doing things right, following the rules, it pokes me in a place I need to poked every so often. Art should do that: give you a view of reality, of truth, that you need to see but often don't. My thanks to Julie Stoner for this reminder of the truth!

Europe's End of the Age

2009-05-30T18:35:00.000-07:00

Europe as we now know it continues to matter less and less. The current issue of First Things magazine includes an article on how Israel can survive and one thing is clear: Israel cannot depend on Europe. Neither can America.

Here are some startling statistics mentioned in that article: 'Of the 6,000 languages now spoken, half of them will disappear over the next century'. 'We stand on the cusp of a great extinction of the nations without precedent since late antiquity'. Europe cannot survive long in light of their current demographic decline: indeed birthrates in most of Europe are so low that some are saying that it cannot be reversed now and so it is just a matter of time until the current indigenous people are gone, replaced by either immigrants or no one. Even in the most Catholic area of Europe, Poland, the birth rates are below replacement rate and the population there will drop by a third by the middle of this century.

The author, David Goldman, makes this observation: 'The four millennium miracle of Jewish survival fails to impress the nations of Europe, who themselves cannot expect to survive long if their demographic decline continues' and 'why should gentile nations go out of their way to help Jews survive when they have neither the desire nor the capacity to survive themselves?' He also comments that 'the data indicate that many of the industrialized nations do not care to survive'.

That is really the crux of it. The end result of what is called 'liberalism' is a society that does not care to and is not capable of surviving. Israel, on the other hand, with its constant day to day struggle to survive, has the highest fertility rate and lowest suicide rate among the industrialized nations.

It is very clear that Israel cannot depend on Europe for much of anything. It ought to be clear that America cannot depend on them, either.

What is Discipleship?

2009-05-24T13:20:00.000-07:00

A while back I made some comments about discipleship. The brief 'definition' in Greg Ogden's book Transforming Discipleship is a good start: 'self-initiating, reproducing, fully devoted followers of Christ'. That does not capture the whole of it , but it is a good start. I am about half way through the book now and he adds more later, such as refering to discipling as 'a process that takes place within accountable relationships over a period of time for the purpose of bringing believers to spiritual maturity in Christ'. He also offers an interesting challenge to pastors: what if they, like Jesus, had only 3 years to serve and would have no one to replace them? How would that change their approach to ministry? Would that force them to build discipling processes instead of just 'doing church'?

I was reminded of all this, especially the part about 'spiritual maturity' by an article in the new June 2009 issue of First Things magazine. The archbishop of Denver, Charles Chaput, writes there, ' If 65 million Catholics really cared about their faith and cared about what it teaches, neither political party could ignore what we believe about justice for the poor, or the homeless, or immigrants, or the unborn. If 65 million Catholics really understood their faith, we wouldn't need to waste one another's time arguing whether the legalized killing of an unborn child is somehow balanced out or excused by other social policies'. He goes on to say that 'we need to stop lying to each other, to ourselves, and to God by claiming to oppose personally some homicidal evil-and allowing it to be legal at the same time'. He goes on to discuss the importance of truth, truth that is greater than this world, and how vital it is to what he calls 'Christian formation'. He decries the idea, so common today, that people can 'create their own truth and then baptize it with an appeal to personal conscience'.

While his viewpoint is Catholic and mine is evangelical Protestant, his concerns are very similar to my concerns about the lack of folks in the church whose entire life, whose total world view has been dramatically altered by the invasion of Christ into their life. Many claim to be Christian but the things they consider true, regarding abortion or justice or marriage or truth itself, are undistinguishable from those rejecting Christianity. As a result, they can in fact be ignored by the political power structure, even in a democracy. The article observes that 'There is nothing more empty-headed in a pluralistic democracy than telling citizens to keep quiet about their beliefs. A healthy democracy requires exactly the opposite. Democracy requires a vigorous public struggle of convictions and ideas. And the convictions of some people always get imposed on everybody else. That's the nature of a democracy.'

Someone's views will be imposed; shouldn't those views be based on truth? Our current culture seems to be more concerned about 'rights' (gay rights, abortion rights, animal rights, etc) than about either truth or the common good. But to make a difference in the debate, your faith must be more than a private thing. It must be something that impacts your whole world view so that you see clearly its implications in all areas of life, and can verbalize it.

So our concept and definition of discipleship must include more than self-initiating in our daily walk with God, and reproducing the faith via witness and evangelism. It must include this part about 'spiritual maturity', about living a life that is distinctively Christian, and about applying the Truth to all areas of life, not just to a compartment of life that we think of as our 'spiritual life'.

The Great American Road Trip

2009-05-24T12:46:00.000-07:00

We just returned yesterday from 9 days of driving around the Southeast U.S.. Some folks like to go one place and stay there for a length of time, and I can enjoy that sort of relaxation at times; but I also feel an urge to see many of sights and places in this vast country that I have not seen and get a feel for those places, their history, their lifestyle, the little things that set apart one area of the country from another. This time we did some of both.

The first few days we visited with family in Kentucky, just visiting family, seeing our 2-month old nephew, and enjoying home-cooked meals. Then we set out to the Smokies, a place to which we often return. This time we spent more time shopping at outlet malls and eating than in the park, but we did take a detour onto the Blue Ridge Parkway near the Carolina entrance to the park and drove through some of the towns along the Carolina side of the mountains that I had not visited before. Just driving along the Parkway with the rhododendrons starting to bloom was enjoyable. We stayed near Asheville one night as well and took a quick look at the little college town of Montreat near Ridgecrest, which is tucked under the forest canopy on the side of the mountains along the eastern continental divide. The World of Clothing in Hendersonville is a unique though somewhat dated outlet with some real deals if you can find what you like in your size. I settled for a khaki cap to protect my head from the sun. The searsucker suits were tempting, though.

Then on to Charleston! The restored historic homes are both majestic and inviting, with very walk-able neighborhoods around them. It is much like Savannah, but larger homes and a bigger area to walk though fewer parks. The city hall has a terrific collection of portraits in the assembly room for the city council that includes Washington, Monroe, Andrew Jackson, John C. Calhoun, and General Beauregard among others of more local notoriety. The parking is not very convenient , and the parking rules unclear to a visitor like me (hence my parking ticket), but once you understand the rules you can deal with it. Good seafood is easy to find. Overall, it gave me a better feel for how very different life in a prosperous seaport was in the South of the antebellum 1800's from the pioneer farmers in Appalachia, where my family roots are.

Overall, we did about 1700 miles on the trip, spread across 9 days: a relatively modest road trip compared to the nearly 5000 miles of our visit to the Grand Canyon. I still think that seeing the country by auto is a great way to travel.

Financial Peace

2009-05-06T18:24:00.001-07:00

Tonight was the final class in the 13-week Financial Peace University class that Dave Ramsey put together. Tonight was about giving and it was the best class in the series in my opinion, and the one he should start with (and repeat often throughout) rather than end with.

In general I agree with the prescription he gives in the class: get out of debt, live within your means, put aside an emergency fund covering at least 3 months living expense, set aside long term savings for retirement with a target of 15% of your pay each month, and give away at least 10%. I did, however, struggle with the spirit of the class giving constant emphasis to building wealth with only occasional reference to building godliness. The mantra he repeats over and over is 'live like no one else for a while (ie, frugally) so you can live like no one else later (ie, in wealth)'. The implication is that it is ok to lavish 'stuff' on yourself later once you attain wealth (and he amplifies that with examples of his friend who drives the Rolls Royce, his friends who are multi-millionaires, etc, etc). While that may be a sales pitch to get the attention of those who are indeed focused on their own desire for wealth, it is not a worthy motivation for a serious Christian. The mantra should be something more like 'live like no one else now so you can become more in God's image'. Our goal should not be to build wealth; our goal should be to be more like Jesus.

Now Jesus was not in favor of our being in debt head over heels from what I can see in the Scriptures. Being like Jesus would include not being enslaved to debt. But I don't think the class talked en0ugh about risk, either the risk that comes with investments or the spiritual risks that come with wealth. As I have commented before, freedom is risky business. The freedom that comes with wealth is certainly risky, as we can all see in the tabloids reflected in the lives of the rich and famous.

Another mantra he uses often is 'don't be normal; normal is broke'! I agree---don't be normal, but don't be normal because Jesus wasn't normal. Being serious about your Christian life isn't normal.

So, tonight's class was certainly the best since it said the most about the spiritual issues. Not enough was said, but more than the other classes. It reminded me of a sermon series we heard in Memphis over 20 years ago. There are only a handful of sermons I have heard that were that memorable. This series was about the nature of God, and there were some sermons on things about God's nature which are out of our human realm, things like His sovereignty, his omnipotence, his omniscience. But some were about the characteristics of God which we are expected to imitate, and which His children should be seeking every day. The sermons said it this way:

God is a worker, and so should we be
God is a lover, and so should we be
God is a giver, and so should we be

I would add another: God is a thinker, and so should we be.

I think it was Mahatma Gandhi who said that a great evil in this world is wealth without work. I agree, though I suspect on far less socialist grounds than Gandhi. I do not object to wealthy capitalists making even more money through investing their capital. I consider that a form of work. I do believe that we have a calling, a vocation, to carry out in order to live in God's image. Jesus said in John 5:17 'My father is working until now, and I myself am working'. He is still at work. He expects no less of us.

Of course, the most quoted Scripture is John 3:16: 'For God so loved the world that he gave'. This one verse, along with many others, addresses both God as lover and God as giver. Love is often expressed in gifts though not only in gifts. To be like Him, we must both love and give.

Got is also a thinker. Ramsey did emphasize on several occasions the importance of reading and thinking. In the beginning was the Logos we are told, and the Logos, though translated 'Word', is not something spoken. It is more akin to mind than speech. To say that God 'spoke' the universe into existence is really to say that He thought it into existence. I have commented before that the famous relativity equation should really be E=mc^2=I where I=Information; that is to say, God turned information, really His thought, into both mass and energy to create the universe. To say that all truth is God's truth, and that we are to seek truth, is to say in another form that God is a thinker, and so should we be.

As I said, I agree with most of the actions that Ramsey recommends. I just don't think doing it to build wealth is a good enough reason. I like to think he also thinks that but just doesn't say it enough. Ultimately, if we attain wealth, the whole pathway should be one that glorifies God, and our life style should be one that glorifies God and not just one that allows us to 'live like no one else'.

The Chicken Soup Rule

2009-04-26T15:03:00.000-07:00

I have been battling a nasty cold the last few days. Yesterday as I lay around the house trying to recover I decided to have some chicken and rice soup for lunch. It would be light, add to my needed fluids, and be comforting in a way that only hot soup can be. It also reminded me of The Chicken Soup Rule.

The Chicken Soup Rule goes like this: Can't Hurt, Might Help, Why Not? You always say it in your best imitation Yiddish accent, of course, trying to sound like the matchmaker in Fiddler on the Roof. I'm not sure, but that movie may be where I first came across the rule itself.

It is a good rule because it has so many applications. You can apply it not only to having soup when you have a cold, but to reminding your children to put on a jacket, or mittens, or comb their hair, or any number of things.

So I had the chicken soup yesterday and today I feel quite a lot better. Cause and Effect? I doubt it, but then again, who knows?

The Consumerist Bible

2009-04-19T16:22:00.000-07:00

I mentioned recently how consumerism has become ingrained in our lives and our churches and shows itself in the way we view the primary job of our pastors. This consumerist mentality certainly shows itself in the ever-expanding numbers and types of Bibles , offering something to suit everyone including the heretics.

Recently joining the list is The Green Bible. It wonderfully has the passages that seem related to the environment printed in green. Isn't that just precious. So, I did a quick google search on specialty bibles and found quite an abundance. There is a bible for just about all sportsmen (the fisherman's bible, the hunter's bible, the golfer's bible, etc); there are study bibles from any number of tv preachers; there are occupational bibles (the soldier's bible, the fireman's bible, the policeman's bible, the nurse's bible, etc); men's bibles, women's bibles, children's bibles, teen's bibles. On and on it goes. Some of the more ludicrous include the Princess Bible, so your little princess can feel special; one called Da Jesus Book; Hawaiian Pidgin New Testament looks intriguing but somehow I can't take it seriously; we mustn't overlook The Black Bible Chronicles which instead of opening with 'In the beginning....' opens with 'Now when the Almighty was first down with His program...the earth was a fashion misfit, being so uncool and dark...'. So this is what The Living Bible has led to? The old folks warned me about that; after all, if the King James was good enough for the apostle Paul it should be good enough for me.

So I started to wonder if the heretics had gotten into the act and I typed 'gay and lesbian bible' into the google search box, and sure enough there is one. Why am I not surprised? If there is a market for it, someone will sell it. Thomas Jefferson set the example 200 years ago with his own bible, deleting all of Christ's teaching about atonement and salvation, leaving just the moral teaching. If the real Christ doesn't suit you, just find one you can like.

Many of the specialty bibles seem harmless enough, like putting a camoflage cover on the bible for hunters, adding some notes from a bible teacher in the margins and such as that. Others are total heresy, like the gay/lesbian bible. Many are driven by our never ending consumerism, like the Princess Bible. I have to wonder how all of this builds the church. While I agree with our church in its mission statement that we accepting changing methodology but an unchanging message, there is too much of the consumerism message in much of this 'changing method' for my, taste even in most of the seemingly harmless ones. As for the heretics, well, 'these you have with you always' if I may borrow a phrase.

Churches, like companies, cannot disrupt themselves

2009-04-15T18:38:00.000-07:00

The current issue of Newsweek magazine includes an article about how GM was unable to allow Saturn to live up to its initial vision of being a totally separate and different kind of car company. This is a terrific case study that illustrates the point made in Christensen's book The Innovator's Solution that companies cannot change in a disruptive manner within existing businesses. The company culture will always treat a disruptive change like a virus and the corporate immune system will attack it. This can only be overcome by setting up a completely separate entity with separate funding, separate management, etc. Saturn had to compete within GM for product development resources, human resources, etc, so the GM immune system attacked it, as did the UAW union immune system. It was doomed from the start by not being a totally separate entity from GM.

This strikes me as similar to what goes on in churches when an existing church tries to make a disruptive change, like moving from a traditional worship approach to contemporary (or vice versa). Unless it does not compete for resources, does not force people to change their style, does not create competition against what was already there, it will be attacked by the immune system. Churches, like companies, cannot disrupt themselves. They can only launch separate entities without creating a cultural crisis.

Should this be? What does this say about the possibility for revival? I think that it is just human nature, and that we should be prepared to launch separate entities or at least separate services for large changes. One of the reasons that America has remained much more religious than Europe is that by not having a state church there have been few barriers to creating new churches or denominations in order to carry out big changes. The Catholic Church is equally (some would say even more so ) unable to disrupt itself and where it is the state church there is no option for disruptive change. So it has just died. But is change necessary in the Church? Isn't the church supposed to be timeless? As our church repeats often, the message is timeless, the methods changable. Nonetheless, human nature doesn't change and disruptive changes in church will continue to be hard to swallow.

For that reason I think it is wrong for a new pastor to come to a church and try to force disruptive changes on a local congregation. If he feels that strongly about a particular approach then he should be prepared to launch a new congregation, not nearly destroy an existing one. To accept the call to a church and then try to disrupt it is not really honest. However, the flip side is that those who refuse to change must be prepared for their congregation to slowly die. In most cases it should be possible to launch new approaches in completely separate services without creating a crisis. It is more work, but it certainly can be done.

The Church is not free from the problems of human nature, but it should be led by the Holy Spirit. The Spirit can revive in either contemporary or traditional settings if we allow it. But new congregations will be needed at times.

Our God concept and freedom

2009-03-30T18:58:00.000-07:00

On the last 2 blog entries, both the comments on miracles and on the Church as a consumer item relate to our 'God concept'. Our couples small group (not to be confused with the men's group that is reading the discipleship book) is reading a book by Bill Bright's son, Brad, entitled God is the Issue . We were discussing the first chapter last week and noted that quite often we Christians unwittingly communicating a concept of God that does not exactly match what the Bible teaches. For instance, when asked about why the World Trade Center was attacked we may say something such as its being a judgement of God, that God has removed His protection, or the like. Yet, we don't stop to think that there have been bad things that happened in America since the country was founded, including such calamities as slavery, the Civil War, World Wars I and II, the Great Depression, the flu epidemic, the polio epidemic, etc, etc. It might seem to imply that God's protection comes and goes rather often. We unwittingly communicate with these comments that our concept of God is that He exists to protect us, to keep bad things from happening to us. In fact, if freedom is to exist, then it must be possible for bad things to happen. Freedom is very risky. If we are to be free, there is the option of choosing evil, choosing for the bad. Without that, there is no freedom. It may or may not be a sign of God removing His protection that the World Trade Center towers fell. When Jesus was asked about a tower falling and killing a number of people in Luke 13, His response was not that those people were such sinners that God had removed protection; instead, He responded that the question is not why did they die but rather why didn't you die? We all deserve to die because of our sin, and the fact that we don't is purely grace. Similarly, the Islamic terrorists hate Christianity just like they hate America, so they may still have attacked had we been a more holy nation. These are things we cannot know.

When we look at the 'God Concept' that we unwittingly communicate, the larger Christian community often communicates that God exists to serve us rather than our existing to serve Him. We communicate that we became believers so that God would protect us, or make us prosperous, or provide fulfillment, or give us a good marriage. While it is true that God loves us, He also warned that His enemies would hate us, would think they were serving their god when killing us, would persecute us however they could. We are Christians first and foremost because it is true, and that truth has set us free from this world. And that freedom is risky.

MIracles and Easter

2009-03-22T16:18:00.000-07:00

Two weeks ago the sermon at our church was about Mark 4 and the miracle that occurred when Jesus calmed the storm on the Sea of Galilee. This was one of the miracles that was done with only the disciples present, and was one of the key miracles in building their faith that Jesus was in fact the Messiah, since He could rule over nature. Then last week the sermon was about the Transfiguration, where Jesus was transformed before Peter, James, and John into what may have been His resurrection body, talking with Moses and Elijah. As we move towards Easter, we will be coming to the greatest miracle of all, the Resurrection of Jesus.

Miracles are an interesting topic. On the one hand, God created nature and so it makes sense that He has power over nature. On the other hand, God is unchanging and consistent, and therefore He does not contradict Himself: to the extent that nature is made in God's image, as man is, God would not contradict Himself by doing something that is out of agreement with His own nature. That is to say, when God does a miracle, He does not do it in a way that contradicts Himself. He would not simply overrule nature and do something completely inconsistent with Reality. Of course, nature is only a small part of Truth, or Reality, since God is greater than nature. Reality includes nature, but also includes more than nature.

In light of this, C. S. Lewis has offered the idea that miracles simply do fast and up close what God is always doing slowly and out-of-sight. As an example he uses turning water into wine. God is always turning water into wine through the miracle of photosynthesis, taking water that carries minerals, sunlight and air and turning it into grapes. For Jesus to make water into wine was not inconsistent with nature, but did it much faster. God is always healing people through the miracle of our immune system, so when Jesus healed people He was not inconsistent with that. He did much faster what happens every day slowly.

But what about calming the storm? And the Transfiguration? Raising Lazarus? Does Jesus simply contradict nature here? I think not. Storms always end, so the fact that Jesus ended one very quickly is consistent with C. S. Lewis' proposal. And after the Resurrection, Jesus again appeared in a new and different body, so this was again consistent with the greater Reality mentioned above. Raising Lazarus is perhaps the most difficult case, since he did not return with a resurrection body; but if God will raise us all to a new body, then raising us to a 'used' body is not inconceivable.

The resurrection body of Jesus was apparently very different from our earthly body. In the garden, on the Emmaus road, and on the shore of Galilee were all instances of His going unrecognized by His own disciples. This greatest of miracles will apply to us as well, we are promised, and so we cannot ever 'walk away' from miracles as an inherent, fundamental part of our faith. Lewis points this out as well. Christianity is based on miracles and especially the miracle of Christ's resurrection, and with hope of a coming miracle for ourselves.

This is one of the issues with faith and science. We are having an ongoing discussion about evolutionary theory and faith in our family, and there are a couple of things relevant to both Easter and scientific theory:

Miracles are fundamental to our faith, especially the miracle of Christ's Resurrectoin. There is no escaping from miracles in Christianity. However, God does not act to contradict Himself or Reality in His miracles.

God does not contradict natural law, but natural laws are only a portion of Truth, of Reality.

To the extent that scientists insist that there are no miracles and that science somehow 'disproves' miracles, we must part ways; to the extent that Christians believe that God does miracles that are inconsistent with His own design of the universe and that Reality which is beyond this universe, we must question ourselves. God does not contradict Himself.

In all things we must seek Truth.

Easter is all about the Truth. Again as Lewis points out, I am a Christian (as he also was) because it is true. I am not a Christian because it is socially acceptable, a convenient way to keep social behavior under control, or any other sociological hogwash along those lines. If Christianity is false, then it should be abandoned. And that is where the key conflict arises with the materialist scientists , which is by no means all of the scientific community, who argue that there are no miracles and promote evolutionary materialism. They ultimately are insisting that there is nothing but matter, energy and chance. Easter is the demonstration in history that there is more.

The Church as 'Consumer Goods'

2009-03-16T17:59:00.000-07:00

We are reading and discussing Greg Ogden's book Transforming Discipleship in our Monday morning men's group at the moment. This morning we were discussing the author's thoughts on why there is not a clear focus on discipleship in most evangelical churches, even those that do some amount of talking about discipleship. We only got through the first of 8 potential reasons in the book today, but the discussion did help clarify some thoughts I have also wondered about in regards to why the megachurch has arisen in the past 25 years or so, and why more recently there have been changes to more of a 'worship' focus (I put 'worship' in quotes because the focus is mostly on music, and 'worship leaders' are music leaders; this strikes me as a very limited view of worship). In the book, one of the reasons for lack of discipleship in churches is that pastors have been diverted from their primary calling of' equipping the saints for the work of ministry. Rev. Ogden sees this issue as being that both pastors and members see pastoral care of the members as the top role of pastors. Our discussion this morning concluded that we in our small group felt this was true of an older generation (that fits with my observations of my parents generation); that my generation, though, has viewed preaching as the key role for pastors, and that my childern's generation sees worship as the key role for pastors. Not the only role, but the key role, for each of these.

It seems to me that the rise of preaching as the key role instead of pastoral care helps explain the rise of the mega-church. Smaller churches, such as my parents saw as the norm, were much better at pastoral care and were more accepting of mediocre preaching. My generation has been more demanding of excellent preaching, and then willing to accept the less personal pastoral care situation of a mega-church in return. My children seem much more interested in the worship experience.

None of this, however, makes discipleship the key role of the pastor and the local church. All of it, in all 3 of the generations mentioned, seems to be consumer oriented, though the targeted item for consumption has been changing.

One comment in the book hints at this when he observes that (p. 39 in my edition) 'in fact, the majority of participants in the (church) view their membership as optional, not a necessity for living by its principles'. That has also been striking to me in recent years; as churches become 'community churches', instead of specific denominations, membership is de-emphasized and viewed as optional. I see this 'church as optional' viewpoint more and more, first in my generation and more so in my children's generation, and this strikes me as another indication of our consumer mentality. The church is not a community of disciples depending on each other to be developing 'self-initiating, reproducing, fully devoted followers of Christ' (his description of a 'disciple'), it is rather an optional consumer good. This has a lot of causes, from membership being devalued by accepting anyone who walks down the aisle as a 'member' to wanting to be 'seeker sensitive', but to me it also shows how very engrained the consumer mentality has become in all of us.

Of course, there are varying degrees of consumerism among people. Seeing Christianity as 'fire insurance' in which we seek to be 'covered' but only just enough to be be safe is a classic example. This often shows up as CEO Christians (Christmas and Easter Only). That is not my concern here. The concern is that most churches, even if they say that their mission is to make disciples, end up making preaching,worship, or pastoral care their focus. All of those miss the point of the Great Commission of Matt. 28:18-20.

Daniel Boone, the Appalchians, and a certain kind of man

2009-02-21T05:37:00.000-08:00

As I rode the airplane to Wisconsin this week I began reading Boone by Robert Morgan, a biography of Daniel Boone. The Fess Parker version of Boone on TV was the myth I grew up with, but he was also still talked about by my dad and the folks where my dad grew up in eastern Kentucky. My dad's hometown, Williamsburg, KY, is along the Cumberland River not far from Cumberland Gap. Daniel led many groups of settlers, including Abraham Lincoln's grandfather, across that Gap, and as a 'long hunter' he made many hunting and trapping expeditions into the area where my dad grew up. Boone most likely ran trap lines along Jellico Creek and Beck's Creek in same areas where my dad later trapped muskrat, raccoon, and the occasional mink.

Reading about Boone has been somewhat like reading about my father. Morgan comments at one point in the first chapter that 'there was almost a Franciscan humility and reverence for life in the young Boone, yet he was a hunter, a killer of wild animals.' That description is true of a great many hunters I have known but especially of my dad. Later Morgan comments 'the young Daniel often demonstrated a tendency to wander off without much concern for the worry his absence might cause others'. When on a hunt or out fishing, that was certainly true of my dad, and also of my brother, who would wander off for hours some times when we were in high school, wandering through the woods until my mother thought he must have been in an accident or something. Later, Morgan quotes Thoreau from Walden saying, "There is a period in the history of the individual, as of the race, when the hunters are 'the best of men', as the Algonquins called them". I think this concept of the life of an outdoorsman like Boone as the best life, the life most in tune with God's world, resonated very much with my dad.

The book makes it clear how in Boone's day when game was plentiful this could also be an economically viable life. I had read of how the Appalachian settlers had pursued a 'farm and forest' economy where hunting trapping and farming were both vital parts of their income. The book points out how, during a winter hunting/trapping trip that might last several months, Boone would return with hundreds of deer skins and beaver/muskrat/mink/otter pelts that would provide as much income as an entire year of business for a blacksmith or weaver. By my dad's time, however, that kind of harvest from the woods had long since ended. Nonetheless, that ideal of the woodsman providing vital income lived on though the reality had died out.

That vision of the woodsman as the best of men and the best provider for his family never resonated with me as it did with my brother. Yet I can relate to it and understand it from having seen it so vividly in my dad while growing up. In some ways my dad and all those who share that vision must feel like they were born into the world at the wrong time. Yet I think that very balanced view of the natural world, both revering it and harvesting it at the same time, has an important lesson in it that both the environmentalists (who revere without harvesting) and the industrialists (who harvest without revering) get wrong. So I am grateful for having seen that view of nature lived out before me as I grew up. It is a very Biblical point of view.

I am also grateful for the love of the woods though I am not a hunter. Boone's love for the Appalachians in particular is shared by most of the people who live there. Growing up I both loved and hated the place. I hated the poverty that was so rampant, the lack of education and the lack of basic facilities even. I was in junior high school before my grandfather's house got indoor plumbing, and going outside to the outhouse in the dead of winter was no fun! Yet there is something about the mountains, the forests, the woods that still draws me to the place. I am awed by the American West, its canyons and majestic peaks. But there something about the Appalachians that seems to be in my blood. It was in my dad's blood, too, and in Daniel Boone's from what I can tell. From the Smokies in the south to the bluegrass in the north, it is a special place. I can understand why the Cherokee viewed as almost sacred.

Change you can REALLY believe in

2009-02-09T17:05:00.000-08:00

President Obama has been speaking today about how 'we can't keep relying the failed policies of the past' in regard to the economy. He is talking about tax cuts as a stimulus as the 'failed policies' as opposed to his 'new', enlightened approach (which is remarkably like FDR's, which was equally discredited). In reality, both the tax cut approach to stimulate consumer spending (as in last's years check's mailed to homes) or the current over-sized proposal, both fail to deal with the problem. The problem is one of a phony economy based on spending more than we earn. Until we adjust down to only spending what we can afford to spend, artificially trying to spend more than we have money for only prolongs the time when the real adjustment has to happen. No matter what, we cannot indefinitely spend more than we have. At some point we have to adjust downward in spending to allow positive savings (as opposed to the NEGATIVE savings rate of 2% the last few years). This is to say that we have to repent of our evil ways.

Repentance is not something we hear much about. In the broadest sense it simply means to renounce our bad behavior and change for the better. We most often think of it as a purely religious term--repenting of our sinful behavior and turning to God for a new way of life--but it applies to the economic mess as well. We have to change our ways. Our greediness, our demand for instant gratification, our refusal to live within our means all must change. Both parties have ignored this, they have just ignored it in different ways. Whether we send tax money back to households to spend a brief time longer, or create new government programs to 'create jobs', either way we still have to change our ways or when the spending ends we still have the same problem. We have just deferred it. The economy will still have to downsize to the amount we can actually pay for, not the size that has significant amounts of bad debt built into it. The portion beyond what we can pay for is the 'phony economy'. That can never be more than temporary.

Government is not the answer. Getting our personal and corporate finances right, to live within our means, is the adjustment that must happen. The question is when. That is the only change that will turn this around for the long run.

Baptism and the Office of 'Christian'

2009-02-01T13:26:00.000-08:00

A couple of weeks ago I made mention of the fact that both marriage and Christianity are an office as well as a relationship. Today at church we had a very special worship service in which those who had professed faith in Christ but had not been baptized since that profession of faith were invited to be baptized right then, in that same service. Provisions had been made for changes of clothes, robes, towels, make-up, etc. The response was terrific, with 32 folks stepping up for baptism during the early 8:30 am service, and many more in the other services that followed. (Addition on 2/2/2009: there were 226 baptisms across the 5 services!) It was really a wonderful thing to behold. Some were professing faith publicly for the first time, but most had been sprinkled as babies and had never been baptized after coming to a personal faith commitment.

I was pleased to be there and to hear this renewed teaching on baptism, since it is not often discussed from the pulpit or in Bible classes. As with marriage, we talk lots about the relationship but not much about the office to which we are commiting ourselves. The relationship is the prerequisite, of course. We do not get married, in our culture, without first establishing the love relationship before hand. It has not always been this way, though. Marriages have been arranged for people by parents in many cultures for much of history. It is debatable whether marriage by choice results in better marriages. However, even in arranged marriages the paricipants have to make a choice: will they choose to love this person they have married or will they simply co-habit without love? Some choose to love; some do not. But this choice still comes as an adult, as one capable of choosing. In some ways the choice is much more deliberate in an arranged marriage. When you are confronted on your wedding night by this person someone else has chosen for you, you are immediately confronted with the need to make a choice. When people fall in love, they often assume that 'love is all we need', and don't really come to the point of making a deliberate choice until, as they say, 'the honeymoon is over' and they realize that this marriage thing isn't so easy after all. As C.S. Lewis says about falling in love, 'Eros makes promises she can't keep'. Love ISN'T all we need. We need a personal commitment as well, a choice, a marriage., indeed a marriage that includes vows. In the end, that is what the wedding ceremony is all about:making a commitment.

Baptism is to Christianity as a wedding is to marriage. That is why infant baptism is similar to infant weddings. That is also why today's service was so special.

All sins are NOT created equal

2009-01-26T19:12:00.000-08:00

The current issue of Newsweek magazine includes an article on how Obama got elected and how young evangelical Christians have moved in his direction. The numbers of evangelicals that moved to Obama were not overly large, as the article admits. However, most of those were young and it does seem to confirm some direction in evangelical churches in recent years towards the 'emerging' church movement and a more existential approach to their faith. The article follows a young man who left his church, then came back, and now is starting his own non-denominational church. In what is presented as one of the 'clinchers' in why he left to start his own church, his former church has put up a sign during an election referendum on gay marriage to support the vote in favor of traditional marriage. His reaction was something like 'is this any way to welcome seekers?' and 'would we put up a sign like this for other sins?', so he left. The article goes on to say that according to some poll, most young evangelicals are accepting of gay marriage.

This a concern. It seems to indicate a common but incorrect teaching that 'all sins are equal' as he equates gay marriage with any other sin. Unfortunately, this is not particularly new with the current younger generation. The Scripture does not teach that all sins are equal. Some are worse, and homosexuality is one of those that are worse than many others.

How can that be? Well, first of all homosexuality is not alone; murder, adultery, and fornication would all fall in a similar category, and all except murder seem to be increasingly acceptable in both the church and in society in general. The Bible does not teach that all acts of sin are equal; it does teach that all humans are equally in need of forgiveness. These are 2 very different things. We are born sinful. That state of sinfulness requires God's intervention and we all equally need that. That sinfulness, however, shows itself in varying acts of sin at varying levels of severity. Some people have more self-control than others in controlling how their sinful nature plays out, resulting in less severe acts of sin. No one in their right mind would say that petty larceny is equal to murder.

So the thing that is equal in all of us is our sin nature. Specific acts of sin have a large range of impacts, however, some more serious than others, especially in their impacts here and now. To pretend that all acts of sin are equal is nonsense. Sins like homosexuality, adultery, fornication, murder are much more serious than petty larceny, for instance. However, among these serious sins, only homosexuality is insisting that society view it as something good, something equivalent to marriage. It is not just claiming to be no worse than other sins, it is claiming to be a virtue. To ignore this in the name of 'acceptance' and being 'seeker sensitive' is nonsense. We cannot say nothing while our culture tries to turn virtue on its head.

The Trinity of marriage

2009-01-21T17:04:00.000-08:00

The passage in Proverbs that a 'cord of 3 strands in not easily broken' is often quoted in marriage ceremonies, and the 3 cords are typically thought of as referring to the husband, wife, and the Holy Spirit. I think that is correct and an important concept in how marriage is holy to God and depends on God for sustenance. However, there is another type of 'trinity' I have in mind for this discussion as well.

Think of a marriage as supported by a 3-legged stool, to use a common illustration. Those 3 legs are the relationship of the 2 people, the office of marriage, and the truth of our nature. Relationship, Office, and Truth (or Nature). In writing from his jail cell during World War 2 to counsel a couple preparing for marriage, Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote, ' Up till now it has been your love that has protected your marriage plans; from now on it is also your marriage that protects your love.' This has to do with the office, the status of marriage. While love leads you to marriage, every love relationship waxes and wanes and will face some hard times. During those times the vows you make, the commitments, the responsibilities you take on, the children that are born all constitute the office of marriage and those things protect your love relationship during the hard times. Marriage is a relationship, but it is not just a relationship. As C.S.Lewis has written in The Four Loves, we all know that we must do the works of Eros (Lewis refers to being 'in love' as Eros after an ancient usage; he is not referring to the common contemporary use of the word 'erotic' in any way) even when Eros is not present; that is because of the commitments we make, the promises we need to keep, the office we need to uphold. As Lewis also points out, Eros makes promises that she cannot keep so we need the office to help us keep them.

There is also the matter of Truth and Nature. Man and woman are clearly designed for each other, for propagation as well as for mutual support. This is simply who we are, how we are made, and that is a foundation for marriage. All Truth is God's Truth, and this is one part of it. Simply put, we need each other as men and women.

Now, marriage cannot be what it should be with any of the 3 legs missing on the stool. Our contemporary culture, however, focuses only on the relationship part. However, if 2 people claim to be in love but refuse to marry, what conclusion do most people immediately reach about their commitment? It doesn't exist. The 'office' portion is missing. Similarly, if 2 of the same sex want to indulge in homosexual union, the Truth of our nature is missing. Gay 'marriage' denies the truth of who we are, and living together unmarried denies the need for commitments to be able to raise healthy children and reliable citizens. Marriage cannot be what it needs to be without understanding all 3 elements of the marriage union. We as Christians have contributed to the confusion about this by focusing our own marriage teaching and ceremonies too much on the relationship by itself.

The same is true of the church. Christianity is indeed a relationship, but like marriage it is not just a relationship. Just as the marriage protects the love of the bride and groom, the church protects the relationship with God. Especially when times get tough. It is no mistake that the church is 'the bride of Christ'. There is the personal relationship with Christ that must be a personal commitment, there is the office of church membership, and there is the truth of what Christ has done for us to make salvation possible. As with marriage, by focusing on just some of the 3 the church contributes to confusion. The sacramental churches focus on the office and the truth and pretty much ignore the relationship; the evangelical churches focus on the relationship and the truth and pretty much ignore the office.

We as believers have contributed to the cultural confusion on both marriage and Christianity by not keeping the stool firmly planted on all 3 legs.

Obama, Israel, and Motherhood

2009-01-18T15:50:00.000-08:00

As we approach the inauguration of President-elect Obama the euphoria of the press remains a bit 'over the top'. This is no surprise, of course, but it is getting old. It remains difficult to be happy about bringing in a president who has promised to increase abortions on his first day in office by removing any barriers that he can, even for the abomination of partial-birth abortion. Since the MLK holiday is tomorrow, the day before inauguration, it is instructive to look at some comments from MLK that were pointed out recently in the Winter edition of 'The City' ( 'The City' is a quarterly journal that you can subscribe to free from Houston Baptist University at www.civitate.org). In the article Ryan Anderson points out that MLK, in his 'Letter from a Birmingham Jail' refers to the philosopher Martin Buber in arguing that racial segregation substitutes an 'I-it' relationship for the 'I-thou' relationship that is intended by God, thereby relegating persons to the status of things. People are not to be treated like things. That is a powerful argument against racial injustice as well as against slavery, and it is, as Mr. Anderson points out, exactly the same thing that abortion proponents do, making the unborn child an 'it', relegating that new life to the status of a thing instead of a person. Their crime is no different than killing a slave that you 'own'.

As a racial minority, Mr. Obama as well as blacks in general should understand this. Yet it seems to be lost on them. Blacks continue to account for abortions at a rate about 3 times the rest of the U.S. population. It is maybe a strange connection, but with Israel in the news recently due to their fighting with Hamas in Gaza and with the Christmas holidays, I was reminded again of how Israel gave birth to the Messiah, Jesus the Christ. He was the promised child of Isaiah 53, and Revelation 12:1-7 paints a vivid picture of Israel as a woman giving birth to this child. It struck me that for a woman to kill her own baby is very much like Israel killing the Messiah to which she gave birth. Israel, of course, fails to see this just as abortion supporters fail to see their own crimes. If it is justified to view a baby has an 'it' to be terminated at our convenience, why not view black people that way? Or old people? Or sick people? We should point out this at every opportunity: for a black president to rejoice that he is no longer relegated to the status of a thing while doing his best to relegate thousands of others at the verge of birth to that status is hypocrisy of the highest order.

Fatherhood at Christmas

2008-12-23T12:16:00.000-08:00

In this time when over 70% of African American children, about 50% of Hispanic children, and 30% of causcasian children in America are born out of wedlock, it is always timely to talk about fatherhood since most of these children will be missing the influence of their biological father in their lives and many will never have a significant father influence. A fortunate few will be blessed with an adoptive father who accepts them as his own, which reminds me of Joseph.

J.I. Packer has written in his classic book Knowing God that if he had to sum up the gospel in 3 words he would choose 'adoption through propitiation'. It is our adoption by God into His family that gives us the hope of salvation. How appropriate that Jesus would be similarly accepted by Joseph by adoption into his family.

In the nativity story as told by Luke, we first are told about the annunciation and birth of John the Baptist, which preceeded Jesus' birth. When John was circumcised on the eighth day after his birth he was also given his name, as was the custom. The significance of this name-giving comes through in the story of John.

Fathers in our culture as well as in the Bible have always given their family name to their children. This is taken for granted, but in today's world of fatherless children it can no longer be taken for granted. Sometimes the father is not even known. By providing his name, however, the father takes responsibility for the child and claims the child. This was made more explicit at the circumcision of boys in Biblical times as the father also gave the child his full name and presented him to the Lord as his son.

For John, Zacharias had been stricken dumb at his annunciation due to his doubt and questioning of Gabriel, so he could not give John his name. So, the priests assumed that he would be named after his father and proceeded with this approach until interrupted by Elizabeth, objecting that his name was John. They would not accept this from the mother, however, as the father is the name-giver. They turned to Zacharias and he wrote, 'His name is John!' since he was unable to speak.

This makes the passage about Joseph in Matthew the more meaningful. Joseph had been ready to prepare a divorce from Mary, but an angel visited him to make it clear that he should take her as his wife because this child was of God, not of infidelity. And so in Matt. 1:21 the angel says 'and she will bear a son; and you (my emphasis) will call his name Jesus'; then again in 1:25, 'and she gave birth to a Son; and he (my emphasis) called His name Jesus'.

And so Joseph gave Him the name Jesus, which God had instructed but which required a father to give. So Jesus would be known in this life as the son of Joseph who had taken Him as his own and given Him a name. Father's are , among other things, name-givers. We, too, have been adopted and have been given the name 'sons of God' and 'Christian'. In our culture we tend to focus on Mary and overlook Joseph, as if he were irrelevant. God did not overlook him, but specifically sent an angel to him to make sure this special child had a father, a name-giver. In our day, fathers seem to be increasingly seen as irrelevant. Single mothers can choose in vitro fertilization and start a 'family' with no father at all, just a sperm donor who may even be anonymous. We do this at great peril. Even though Jesus had a divine Father, that Father made sure that He also had an adoptive father on this earth. We best not take that example lightly.

The Founding Fathers

2008-12-22T18:58:00.000-08:00

I just finished reading Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow which was not only a very thorough and even handed treatment of Mr. Hamilton but also shed more light on John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and George Washington. Having now read a number of biographies about the founders, including John Adams, Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson along with 1776 and Founding Brothers, a fairly consistent set of images of the founders emerges from these books and their various authors. Certainly these were men with feet of clay, and while they were all men of high principles they varied widely on matters of faith, fidelity to their spouses, treatment of their political adversaries, slavery, and more. Many of them, including Hamilton and Jefferson, left their families deeply in debt when they died. Several, including Jefferson, Hamilton and Franklin, had trouble controlling their lusts. Several, including Adams, Hamilton and Jefferson could be vindictive, spiteful, and full of rage in their political dealings. Although he was the least educated, least travelled, and least colorful of the bunch, Washington stands out as the one consistently in control of his temper, his passions, his money, his family life, and his decisions. He was the one most likely to see the strengths and weaknesses of all the other founders. He set the example of freeing his slaves which Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe could not bring themselves to do. After Washington's death, Hamilton seemed to lose some of the self-control and restraint he had showed until then, likely because of the influence Washington had upon him. While not a man making a lot of show of his faith, Washington seems to have been true to the faith. After his death, the partisanship that followed resulted in libel and slander that would more than rival the mud slinging we saw in the recent presidential campaign, which had been much more restrained while Washington remained. Washington stands out in this crowd of founders, not because of his intellect, his writing, his speeches, or even his military campaigns. He stands out primarily for his character and self-mastery. One has to think it was more than just his own personality at work here, that this was indeed the hand of Providence upon him.

The other characters that stand out in these books are Eliza Hamilton and Abigail Adams. The picture of both that emerges are women of serene and strong faith who support, defend, forgive, and encourage their husbands despite the evident failings of those men. They suffer all the slurs that were launched at their husbands and provided refuge and support while taking on much of the load of supporting their family while their husbands focused on the country and were often gone for months at a time. These two were clearly exceptional human beings.

The more one learns about Jefferson, on the other hand, the less one admires him. He is clearly the most disappointing of the founders and the least consistent with his own avowed values on matters of family, morality, freedom, and speaking the truth about his political foes. He and Hamilton emerge as tragic figures, Hamilton dying in a duel as a result of his own overblown sense of 'honor' and Jefferson so consumed by his own selfishness and ambition that he betrays his own lofty writing about freedom to maintain his lifestyle by slaves, consistently hides behind others in his malicious attacks on political foes, sires children by his slave, refuses to recognize the truth about the evil in the French Revolution, and leaves his family deeply in debt upon his death. All of this on top of his confused views of Christianity make Jefferson the most disappointing of the founders.

All of these books put the recent presidential campaigns into context. The personal attacks, the partisanship, the revelations of personal moral character and judgement that are disappointing are nothing new. Let us hope that Providence has a Washington out there somewhere for our time as well.