The Royal Wedding

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

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?

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

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

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?

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

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?