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?

Why America confuses Europe

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

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.