Frank Turk » Evangel | A First Things Blog

In 1990, Frank received his MA in Literature in English from St. Bonaventure University, and years later became a Christian in the basement of his parents' house one night while contemplating suicide.He's married to a woman who's much smarter than him, has two kids who are way more compliant than he deserves, and he has been blogging with Dan Phillips and Phil Johnson at the PyroManiacs blog since 2006 -- so plainly, he rides on the coat-tails of others and the grace of God.By day he is a mild-mannered employee of [withheld to protect them], and by night he causes mayhem on the internet for the sake of the Gospel.When he grows up, he wants to be the Calvinist Gadfly.

My friend Doug Wilson has a great post today about American Exceptionalism. Here’s a piece of it:

If anyone could believe in exceptionalism, and have actual verses to point to, it would have been the Hebrews. And yet note that God warns them of this pattern, which is as old as dirt. He included them. Nothing is as ordinary and boring as nationalistic hubris. Displays of this sin with the stars and stripes waving in the background are just as obnoxious and just as wicked as when anybody else does it — and everybody else has done it.

Read the whole thing, including the comments.

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The last time we mentioned that if Joseph had never been sold into slavery, he would have never been in a position to become what he became.

And the wily atheist — the one who admits, btw, that even he might be willing to suffer for the sake of something, like being part of the 60 million who had to die to bring to an end the suffering of 6 million others in a small minority group — would probably say, “hey: that’s an overstatement at best. Maybe Joseph could not have made his way from Potipher’s house to the jail to the right hand of Pharaoh (granting, implausibly, that there is a shred of truth in this story), but to say there was no way for him to become Pharaoh’s agent to make the storehouses of grain without him suffering is far-fetched at best. He didn’t have to suffer to become king of the world: God could have just wedged him in there either by birth or by some other non-suffering method.”

But the thing that the wily atheist overlooks here is that this objection is speculative at best, and disjointed from reality at worst. He has abandoned his existential reasoning for fantasy exactly when the existential truth betrays him.

Let’s take Barack Obama for example — who didn’t get sold into slavery in order to become President of the United States. Someone might have the audacity of hope to say he certainly didn’t suffer to become leader of the Free World — but those people, frankly, have never tried to lead the life he lead to run for President.

Now, don’t get me wrong: I’m not hardly shilling for President Obama here. What I’m saying is that the reality check against the atheist claim that suffering is theoretically not necessary to achieve power must be weighed against the existential fact that he cannot produce one person in the history of the world who came to significant power without suffering, without making trade offs and giving up one thing in order to attain another. They had to pay some kind of price to get what they wanted, and usually it was not a small price.

See: the measuring stick here is existential fact. The “problem of evil” is measured by the atheist by the existential fact that there is pain in the world. Having pointed this out, and having set the groundwork for his complaint, if we allow his complaint to stand we cannot then walk away from its basis after he has finished complaining.

If the existential fact of pain is the problem, and it exists when we rule out God as a cause or a solution, we cannot then just toss out pain as a factor in the world. So to say then that Joseph should not have had to suffer to become something more than the second-youngest son in a family of ancient shepherds doesn’t make sense in an atheist, existential world. The problem is that the atheist thinks that God should not allow a bit of it.

Existentially, the story of Joseph makes sense. That is, it fits the pattern of the world we know to say that Joseph had to suffer some kind of hardship to become a close advisor to the ruler of Egypt – as anyone who seeks out power finds it will do. It fits the pattern we know, which is that sometimes 60 million people have to die to save 6 million Jews from the Holocaust; it fits the pattern that sometimes we have to take out the appendix to save the body. That is the world we have, and to say that it “doesn’t make sense” is to ignore that it does make sense to us every day. But when we talk about God we think that if God doesn’t value ease and comfort the way we do, He’s somehow a vile lie. Maybe it is simply true that God has a greater purpose than the immediate comfort of any one person.

One may then say, “well, fie upon the dreams and the miracles — those condemn that story as complete nonsense,” but that is a different complaint. The Bible uses the story of Joseph to make one singular point: in some way, men intend some actions for the sake of evil, but somehow those actions play out to redeem them in spite of themselves. The story of Joseph is not merely about how one boy suffered much and became king of the world. It is a story in which God intends to use even the bad intentions of those who ought to love each other in order to save the whole world from starvation.

The “somehow” in “somehow redeem them in spite of themselves” is critical to the point of the Bible as a whole — and it is the thing which the atheist must deal with in the end.

These men intended what happened to Joseph for evil — but because Joseph was sold into slavery, and was made a prisoner under false pretenses something which saves many is made to happen.

That’s not a moral magic trick: that’s the way we know the world works.

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From John Knight:

God does not fit into easy categories because only God is free and righteous and just and holy – all in infinite proportions. When he says he creates some who are disabled, he is speaking and acting out of his infinite depths of knowledge and righteousness, not our time-centered, sin-filled, finite perspective.

HT:@JohnPiper.

read the whole thing.

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So far we have reasoned through the atheist’s complaint and found that in truth, the problem of evil (the wily atheist may say “problem of pain”) doesn’t actually disappear when we snap our fingers at God to say He should have invented a universe without any suffering. If the complaint dismisses God as a cause, we are left with what the problem then leaves for us to do about it – that is, if pain is a problem that God must resolve because anyone can see that pain is a problem, if there is no God we must still admit that pain is a problem, and we as the ones left holding the bag have to do something about it.

But in asking that question, we come up with massive shortfalls, philosophically — like why 60 million people should be willing to lose their lives in a world war to stop the deaths of 6 million people of a small ethnic group. We discover that even atheism will admit that it turns out that for us some things are worth suffering for — and that somehow, one can self-determine to suffer for the benefit of something other than himself.
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I hate to admit it, but God built me up to be a blogger. I’m really at my best when I am at 3 pages or less in final content (about 1500 words) and I try to stick to one subject — even by analogy.

Kevin DeYoung may be my fellow blogger here at Evangel, but he’s not really a blogger. he’s at his best in the 10-12 page range (about one decent chapter of a book), and he shows us why with this review and rebuttal of Brian McLaren’s A New Kind of Christianity.

It’s a PDF, it’s very elegantly formatted, and it speaks directly to the Gospel and why it is important.

Yes: I know JT already linked it at his blog. I linked it here because it’s that important.

Carry on.

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So we’re at the place where we can say a couple-four things from the existential side of the problem of evil:

[1] from the perspective that pain exists, and we perceive it, we as human beings (you could say “people”) have an urge to do something about it when we see it.

[2] that urge even extends to the pain of others; we have the ability to empathize with the pain of others and therefore want to do something about it as well.

[3] Often – and I would make the case that almost always — the problem of pain results in our having to choose to suffer a greater loss to end one kind of pain or suffering. For example, to end the holocaust and the death of 6 million Jews, people were willing to pay the price of over 60 million deaths.

[4] Atheism in general doesn’t give us the philosophical tools to sort out when a greater loss is worth the price of ending the suffering of others – and in fact it can create dilemmas like the problem of what to do with children who are being indoctrinated by their parents into ideas we do not agree with.

And the atheist, as we have noted, would say this: “yes, fine – but that doesn’t get your idea of God off the hook. God should be good enough and smart enough and strong enough to have made a universe in which we shouldn’t have to choose between bankrupting a prosperous nation and feeding all the hungry children in the world. Your ‘God’ should be clever enough to sort out how to have made all of us all happy all the time – and in the very least, He didn’t. So in the best case for you, He’s not all you have cracked Him up to be.”

Yes, well: let’s hold the horses here. Before we stampede all over God’s goodness or wisdom or power, I think the Atheist has frankly left his barn door open before he can get to this critique.

Let’s consider something: if in the atheist existential case we can admit that in order to achieve outcomes which we desire we often have to pay a steep price for the sake of achieving what we intend to achieve, why must this be ruled out in the case of God? That is: let’s imagine for a moment that there are outcomes in the purpose of the universe for which God requires that there be some suffering. In order to achieve some of the goals of the universe, God may require that people suffer.

See: the atheist can look at this, and even imagine it, but in his mind the only way to judge this is to say, “if that’s so, God must be evil. Any God which requires suffering to make His objectives into reality is a cruel God who somehow enjoys our pain.”

The problem, however, is that the atheist, in saying this, credits God with less than the atheist would credit to himself. The atheist would admit that it is better to dig out a splinter than to let it fester and infect its victim – in fact, the atheist would call a doctor who refused to dig out splinters a cruel doctor for refusing to treat his patient. The atheist would demand that the law-breaker who committed a crime be incarcerated for his crime – even though the time of rehab or punishment would be far longer than the time it took to commit the crime, and the prime the criminal paid would in fact be far higher than the pain he inflicted.

At the same time, I suspect something about our hypothetical atheist: he would call the doctor who forbade all carpentry (as an example of splinter-causing events) cruel or inept; he would call the government which eliminated convenience stores for the sake of eliminating convenience store robbery oppressive.

Knowing this, it is a false accusation to posit that God is cruel if pain exists. The only way to know why pain exists in a theistic framework is if God tells us why pain exists, and at that point we have to assess only if God is telling the truth or if God is a liar.

And this is why we turn the corner from assessment of the atheist complaint and his own solution to the problem to actually advocating for God: theism – particularly, those who say, “know for certain that Jesus is both Lord and Christ” – have an obligation to speak to the problem of evil not merely from a philosophic standpoint, but from an existential standpoint. We have an obligation to tell people what God has actually said about this matter – because he has said something, and His view of things are authoritative because He’s the author.

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For the record, one of the reasons I’m a fanboy of apologetics is that I am a former atheist and former Roman Catholic – and, of course, I like a good argument. I like it when ideas clash and people have to engage in something other than a passive way to get to the resolution – especially when the refrain “agree to disagree” is shown up to be the sham that it is.

So I buy books which are trying to make a case for themselves – especially books which deal directly with the question of God and the question(s) of how we best serve him.

Which brings me to an ironic inner conflict: I have come to hate what passes for the average apologetic encounter. You know: it’s like the bell tower scene in the original Michael Keaton Batman movie – flamboyant adults sort of fighting past each other, trying to avoid the blame for their own failings and weirdness by pointing out the other guy’s purple pants or inane black cape. “I made you? You made me. What now?”

So I’m a wary fan of apologetics. Too many people get into the field with a love for the fight and a lack of real love for people – and they spend their time thereafter trying to win fights rather than people.

With that in mind, I have already recommended James S. Spiegel’s new book, The Making of an Atheist: How Immorality Leads to Unbelief. It’s an extremely-interesting psychological history of atheism by looking at the personal histories of some watershed atheist thinkers, and in many cases letting their own observations about themselves speak for the pre-philosophical reasons they may or may not have for believing (or not believing) in God.

And I recommend it for several reasons:

Not for nothin’, but it’s a short book – about 130 pages. As I told Jim in an e-mail, every author who says exactly what he means to say in the number of pages it takes to say it is a hero in my book. Fluffing up your manuscript to 200 pages because the acquisitions editor says you have to points directly to the problem of evil I have been talking about for a week now here at Evangel, and it inflicts pain on the reader to make him read your 40 pages of padding when he would have been extremely pleased to stop, along with your point, at 130 pages. (Nb. Dear Fellow Authors, fellow authors-in-preparation, and publishers of all stripes)

It’s also an insightful book. Prof. Spiegel didn’t invent his thesis: he learned it from Scripture. He takes seriously the Bible’s own apologetic toward unbelief, and while I think it’s a great insight into the problem of rank anti-theism, I think the mindful reader will see his own heart in the text even if he’s a full-blown Christian megapastor. That is: the roots of our unbelief are always found in the soil which Jim turns over here for us to see, so while we may gain an insight into how atheists are thinking or are being guided in their unbelief, we should in good conscience run our fingers through the clods of ground there to see the roots of the reasons we ourselves suffer from unbelief in all manner of contexts.

Lastly, it’s also a charitable book, in spite of the foundational issue being spelled out. It’s a hard thing to do to tell people, “you know: when you love your moral failings more than you love God, you’re going the wrong way.” But Prof. Spiegel does this with clarity, charity, and fact-based exposition. And he doesn’t fly over anybody’s head. But Jim makes the point that our inclination away from morality is an inclination away from God – and that historically, leading atheists really concede this point.

So in reading this, I give a firm thumbs-up to this book and to Prof. Spiegel’s effort here.

What I’m worried about, frankly, is you.

See: I think that people reading this book will go one of three ways:

The atheists reading it will be offended because it seems to be an ad-hom argument – but if it is, it turns out to be one they live on against the Christian faith. Reading Jim’s exposition of this is one of the better moments of the book, but that notwithstanding it will put atheists off.

Another group will receive this book and consider it’s implications on evangelism and the life of the church – and may these folks’ tribe increase. This is the audience Jim clearly had in mind in writing this book, and may this be the largest group affected by this book.

But my experience tells me that the third group will be the largest – the cottage industry of apologetic hobbyists who frankly make a lifestyle (and many: a living) misconstruing valid presuppositional and theological points and using them as clubs against unbelievers.

Read Jim Spiegel’s new book, but don’t use it the wrong way. Use it to get the right-sized compassion you ought to have toward people whom God is calling with the free offer of the Gospel. Be an ambassador and not a terrorist.

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Last time I proffered the idea that pain is a problem for the atheist because he has to figure out what to do about said pain – and some of you took that at face value, but I think some of you are rightfully scratching your heads.

“Frank – big thinkin’ and everything,” you ought to be saying, “but why is having to do something about pain a problem for the atheist? If I have a hand on a hot stove, I pull it off and the problem is solved. If my hand still hurts, I get a doctor to give me medicine, and again, problem solved. Why is taking action toward pain a problem for the atheist?”

That’s a great question – and it goes back to our example of the $700 billion bail-out of the auto or banking industry. I mean: $700 billion. Unless the government is essentially printing money (and I’d be willing to listen to someone who says that they are …), $700 billion has to come from someplace. And in real terms, $700 billion equals about $2400 for every person who is a citizen of the USA today. That means, for example, my house just paid $9600 to the banking industry – and I don’t know about you, but $9600 isn’t chump change for me. That hurts.

But when we look at the bail-out problem, that hurts, too. See: if the banking industry tanks and $700 billion in bad debt gets foreclosed and turns out to be worth about $450 billion is real value, we’re talking about $250 billion in cash assets disappearing from the US economy. To scale that for you, that’s like all of WAL*MART suddenly being vaporized; that’s like all pro sports plus all college sports revenues times one hundred suddenly burned up in a fire.

And it’s the money that really does drive, for example, your company’s ability to buy a new capitalized machine, or build a new building, or in some cases manage to pay payroll while your customers enjoy 45 or 60 or 90 day terms on the stuff you just “sold” them.

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Last time I left you off with something like this — The problem is what to do about pain. See: the common argument here — which John Loftus plainly used to dismiss God — is that all pain ought to be stopped whenever possible. A universe with suffering in it precludes the Christian God (he says), so the onus is now on John or anyone else who sees pain to stop pain. If that’s what we ought to expect from God to the place where we are ready to dismiss God from our philosophy, we have to at least hold ourselves up to that standard. We want an omnipotent God to preclude our suffering, so we should at least think we can use our own limited means to stop the suffering of those we meet.

John has actually posted a clarification by what he means here, and we should take note of it:

what I am focusing on is the intensive physical and mental pain that breaks people down to the point where some of them cannot take living in this world anymore.

Which is an interesting yardstick, is it not? For Loftus, if life just had bruises and bumps (he says), we couldn’t put God on the hook for that. (someday it’d be interesting to find out why) But because some people have pain which causes them to want to die, or ought to cause them to want to die, we have evidence that there is no God — because a sufficiently “good” and “powerful” and “aware” God would never let such a thing happen.

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I’m going to interrupt my little series on the problem of God’s jealousy and whay that matters to the local church because I’m about to review a book here on apologetics, and that review will, undoubtedly, start the inevitable attraction of internet atheists to this site.

I’m sure everyone will be glad for them to have finally made it here.

Anyway, one of the great points in Jim Seigel’s book is that atheists make much of the problem of “evil”. What I think Jim sells a little short is that many atheists may use “problem of evil” as shorthand for something which they are defining differently than the Christian must, so we should spend a little time on that matter before we engage anyone.

A fellow named John Loftus wrote a book (which I’m not going to link to; sorry John) about his journey into atheism, and he dedicated no less than two chapters (!) to the problem of evil. Let’s go to his book and listen to him for a minute:

I’ll be arguing here against the theistic conception of God, who is believed to be all-powerful, or omnipotent, perfectly good, or omnibenevolent and all-knowing, or omniscient. The problem of evil (or suffering) is an internal one to these three theistic beliefs, which is expressed in both deductive and evidentialist arguments concerning both moral and natural evil. [228]

So let’s think about something here: Loftus is of course reproaching the problem that if someone suffers and God does nothing about it — if God walks by it, like me stepping over a hobo to whom I could have given help to — God cannot be God because He is either not good, not aware, or can’t do anything about it.

Fair enough — we will get back to that eventually.

I want to look at Loftus’ definition for a minute, however, because it is clever enough that most people will probably not really grasp what he is doing. First, He is making the problem of evil one which only God has to deal with. That is, it’s only a problem “internal to theistic beliefs”, and not a problem for anyone else. It’s a problem about consistency for the theist, not an existential problem.

Unfortunately for Loftus, when he frames the problem, he uses existential examples. He leads the chapter with Eli Wiesel describing what brought him to a loss of faith — which is wholly an existential problem of what Wiesel calls “silence” in the face of great evil. Wiesel saw evil being done, and it didn’t stop when he wanted it to stop, so Wiesel took what he experienced to be true over any other option and concluded what he concluded.

And Wiesel is an interesting example to lead with, because the irony here is that Wiesel recognizes that the problem of evil is not resolved by eliminating God from your metaphysical puzzle. Wiesel, in spite of the rampant atheist citations of Night, is a theist who does not reject the existence of God on account of evil.

Now, many people I respect — like Doug Wilson for example — would point out that there’s actually no problem of evil if there is no God because anything goes. But Loftus’ definition of the problem really avoids that criticism well — because he doesn’t put a moral value on evil. He resorts to an empirical definition instead, because frankly everyone knows when they suffer. Pain is a stake in the ground for him, and I say good for him for recognizing it.

The problem is what to do about pain. See: the common argument here — which Loftus plainly uses to dismiss God — is that all pain ought to be stopped whenever possible. A universe with suffering in it precludes the Christian God (he says), so the onus is now on John or anyone else who sees pain to stop pain.

Right? If that’s what we ought to expect from God to the place where we are ready to dismiss God from our philosophy, we have to at least hold ourselves up to that standard. We want an omnipotent God to preclude our suffering, so we should at least think we can use our own limited means to stop the suffering of those we meet.

So we should do something about pain and suffering. I think I agree with John Loftus.

I think we should start with a $700 billion government-funded bail-out of the automotive industry.

I’ll have more to say about that next time.

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The Making of an Atheist: How Immorality Leads to Unbelief is a new book out by James S. Spiegel. I received it this week and read it last night.

This is an interesting take on the foundational issues surrounding the apologetic for atheism, and the Theist/Christian response.

I’ll have a review up in a few days, and what I suspect will be a multi-part interview with James in the near future. You can visit James’ book’s web site here, and James’ home blog here.

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If we look at Jesus, and we say he has something to do with God, we have to see that the God to whom Jesus points wanted Jesus to be crucified and therefore wants something which we cannot imagine on our own.

Which brings us back to what Peter was talking about 40 days after Jesus was crucified. “You killed him, and that’s what God wanted,” Peter said, “But God raised him up from the dead, and we are all witnesses to that fact. So you should know for certain that Jesus, whom you crucified, is both Lord and Christ!”

See: Peter is saying that this empty tomb changes the way we have to see the world.

Some people might see that as a set up for a great movie about zombies, right? You know: George Romero has made a career out inventing the consequences of a world where the dead come back from the grave and want to eat the living. For about 2 hours at a time, we can believe it good enough to get a good scare — or maybe a good laugh. We can suspend our disbelief and draw conclusions from it — in a way, we can have faith in a movie long enough for it to do what we think it is trying to do.

But here’s what you should consider: if we can understand what it means to have our world-view changed even briefly by believing in a movie long enough to get creeped-out by the zombies in it, we have to see what Peter was saying to the Jews — because he wasn’t asking them to suspend their disbelief: he was telling them things they had witnessed for themselves.

And the Israelis at Pentecost got it right away — because as soon as Peter had said all that, the account in Acts says, “they were cut to the heart.” They were profoundly sorry for what they had done. And in one moment they changed from people who were sort of mocking or shaming a bunch of guys who they thought were drunk, into people who were asking the question, “what can we do? Is there any hope for us?” So Peter gave them some instructions, but he also said this to them: “God is making a big promise here — a promise for you who are here, for your children who are not yet born, and for anyone who ever hears this news: because God is calling a people to himself!”

Listen to me carefully: Jesus died on a cross. That wasn’t something that was accidentally or unexpectedly done to him: it’s what he came to do in the first place. And the reason he did it wasn’t to show us an example of martyrdom, or a way to kick off a great idea by giving it your all by speaking some kind of “truth” to “power”. Jesus died on a cross because God was making a promise to all people. Some folks I have read say that this is the “objectivity” of Gospel — that is, it is an event which happens in a specific time and place which we can refer to historically and without regard to ourselves. That’s what I’ve been telling you for the last few installments in a very long way. But the “objectivity” is almost irrelevant unless it is happening to someone and for a particular reason.

So let me say this plainly: this Jesus was crucified for the sake of everyone who would believe, but that fact is not merely an event apart from our real lives. It is an event which calls people out of the world as it was before, and into the real world — the place where Jesus is factually raised from the dead for a particular reason.

And I hope it’s not too late to point this out to you: this is what God is jealous about.

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We love our stuff, and that makes God less-real to us. We want our relationship with God to be completely under our control the way all our stuff — everything from cars to boxes of paper — is under our control. And because Jesus is not in your face the way this blog is in your face, he’s just not that real. Because Jesus doesn’t actually sit in the car with you on the way to work, he’s not real. Because, unlike your boss at work, or your spouse, Jesus will not call to check up on you and give you the angry eyebrows when you are doing something other than you’re supposed to be doing, he’s just not that real. We are exactly like Oprah. And in that respect, we are exactly like Peter — the Peter whom Jesus called “Satan”. We want the relationship with God which we want, and we don’t want to see it from His perspective because He’s not actually completely real to us.

This is why wrapping your brain around the statement “this Jesus who was crucified” is so important. The kind of God we want, if we are honest with ourselves, is the one who gives us all kinds of things. For Oprah, it’s freedom and self-esteem; for Peter, it was a king he could trust (and who would maybe make him a dignitary of some kind, rather than a fisherman); for me, it’s a God who doesn’t care if I can’t park my car in the garage because I’m hoarding trash.

You know what kind of God you want. He might be a God who lets you mate all the socks in the dryer; it might be a God who will make you skinny and sexy (sic); it might be a God who tells great jokes; it might be a God who wants you to have your best life right now, whatever that might mean; It might be a God who hates alcohol, or who loves alcohol; it might be a God who would make every day Sunday so there would be sports on all the time — and that’s an interesting one, because that God would make a kind of local assembly you could really wrap your arms around. You’d wear that God’s Cheesehead, right? That’s a God who would be real. But if we look at Jesus, and we say he has something to do with God, we have to see that the God to whom Jesus points wanted Jesus to be crucified and therefore wants something which we cannot imagine on our own. What God sees are real, and necessary, we somehow can’t grasp on our own.

Whenever I say this to people, I know it sounds like crazy talk. I know it sounds like I’m saying something like, “Lex Luthor for President!” But the first reason it sounds that crazy is plain: the only way the demand to “know for certain” makes any sense at all is if Jesus is real the same way Barack Obama is real, or Oprah Winfrey is real, or that you are real. If Jesus is real, then we can talk about what He has done or what He requires. But that is actually the appeal Peter was making in the first place: Real Jesus was crucified, and now his tomb is really empty — and that changes everything! King David is dead, but Jesus is alive — and if Jesus is alive, …

Peter is saying that this empty tomb changes the way we have to see the world.

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From CBSNews.com:

Ten Americans were detained by Haitian police on Saturday as they tried to bus 33 children across the border into the Dominican Republic, allegedly without proper documents.

The Baptist church members from Idaho called it a “Haitian Orphan Rescue Mission,” meant to save abandoned children from the chaos following Haiti’s earthquake. Their plan was to scoop up 100 kids and take them by bus to a rented hotel at a beach resort in the Dominican Republic, where they planned to establish an orphanage.

Whether they realized it or not, these Americans – the first known to be taken into custody since the Jan. 12 earthquake – put themselves in the middle of a firestorm in Haiti, where government leaders have suspended adoptions amid fears that parentless or lost children are more vulnerable than ever to child trafficking.

“In this chaos the government is in right now we were just trying to do the right thing,” the group’s leader, Laura Silsby, told reporters at the judicial police headquarters in the capital, where the Americans were being held.

You should read the whole story. The web site for one of the churches with people who were arrested gives this brief statement:

A ten member church team traveled to Haiti to help rescue children from one or more orphanages that had been devastated in the earthquake on January 12. The children were being taken to an orphanage in the Dominican Republic where they could be cared for and have their medical and emotional needs attended to. Our team was falsely arrested today and we are doing everything we can from this end to clear up the misunderstanding that has occurred in Port au Prince.

It’s an interesting tension — a small group of Christians want to give the aid they are equipped for because there are many orphans, and many abandoned children. The Haitian government wants everyone to make sure that the completely heinous crime of child trafficking is thwarted.

I think they both want the same thing in theory, but they are using different powers to combat what is broken in this world. In a real way, this is a parable about the Christian life — if you read it closely.

So go back and read it closely. You might offer up some prayers about it from all sides.

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Jesus knew he was going to be crucified; he was actually crucified. Peter stood up in Jerusalem and told the people there — who at first thought he was drunk for shouting in public like that — that Jesus was crucified. For Peter, that’s a significant change — the kind of change we all really need to get involved with. It’s not a small change of mind to go from a guy who wanted Jesus to stop talking about going to Jerusalem to be killed to being a guy who wanted the city of Jerusalem to stop what it was doing — in very proper religious solemnity — and face up to the fact that this Jesus was crucified. It was a massive change. And Peter knew it required these people who were calling on the name of the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob to get changed as well.

After he got changed like that, Peter said: “Men of Israel, listen up: Jesus, from Nazareth, who worked out things we can only explain as signs of God — things he did in public, because you yourselves saw them — this Jesus was crucified and killed by you because that’s what God wanted.”

We don’t often think of it that way, do we? We read Stephen King’s The Green Mile and we think of Jesus being like John Coffey, an inmate on death row who was wrongly accused and tragically executed, and that somehow for Jesus things went terribly wrong that day. And in one sense, they did: because even Peter knew that Jesus was the son of David, the Messiah, and he deserved worship, not humiliation and punishment and death. Back when he was telling Jesus what kind of Messiah he was supposed to be, he thought it was simply wrong that Jesus should die for any reason. But at that moment, after the crucifixion, Peter was unafraid to tell all of Jerusalem, “This Jesus was crucified because that’s what God wanted.”

That’s not the end of what Peter said that day, and we’ll get back to that in a minute. But I think that we have to admit something to ourselves since we know we are like Oprah Winfrey. We have to admit that often, we don’t care about what God wants.

I think there are two reasons for this. For us, God isn’t real in the way we see ourselves as real. I have no idea if you have muddled through any of the self-help books Oprah has proffered through the years, but one thing is glaringly obvious in the religion of all of them: her philosophy is centered on the fact that she is a real person with real needs who can take real action. Anything other than that which might intrude on her choices and her self-actualization cannot be real in the same way. Because we are like her, we do the same thing to God — we make him into something abstract that might be true, but cannot be useful. For God to say something like, “be subject to one another,” or “mature believers should love and teach immature believers, and the immature believers should listen,” is unthinkable. It causes us to say, “yeah but …” in a thousand different ways. And while we might say that we believe in one God, the Lord and giver of Life, we treat Him more like the Prime Directive in Star Trek — a pre-eminent ideal which we say we order our lives around, but in daily practice we do what seems right to us, and nobody ever calls us on it.

We are exactly like Oprah, dear reader. Even those of us who are very conservative Christians, very serious about the historical and factual nature of the Bible, have a problem. While the Bible may be real, and we have all the copies of it we can manage in our homes, the Jesus it talks about and the God he is begotten by, and the Spirit who proceeds from them, are not. They are certainly not as real as a police officer we see in the rear view mirror — because for him, as soon as we even think about him, the traffic speed changes from 55 to 40 in a 40 MPH zone.

But why are we like this? I think it has to do with our second problem, which is that we have a lot of stuff. My wife and I used to live in a great place among fantastic people, and we moved there so we could raise our children there. Before moving there, we had plenty of stuff. When life did to us what it has done to many of you, and we found we had to move in order to continue putting food on the table, we found that we had accumulated far more stuff than we imagined. During those years when we thought we were just getting by, we were in fact living high on the hog, way above the mud line on the economic sow — and it was manifest in a collection of junk which two garage sales and a retail liquidation sale could not get rid of.

The problem with having a lot of stuff is that it takes a lot of discipline and fortitude just to throw things away. Just as an example, I have cases of greeting cards in my garage which we could not liquidate when we closed our business. Cards and envelopes — by the case, just colors on paper which are apparently not even worth 50¢ each. And yet, rather than throw them out, there they are in my garage.

What would it cost me, really, just to throw them away? I will never use them all — there are not enough days left in my life to use them all. But rather than toss them out and make room for, well, my car to go in the garage, I keep them sitting there. And sitting there. And sitting there.

See: those cards are real — I can touch them, and therefore I can imagine what I can use them for. Because they are actually in my garage, I think about them as things which either can cause me to take action, or things that I can do something to. They make sense to me because they belong to me, and they will do what I want them to do insofar as I want to keep track of them. You just can’t imagine what it would take for me to throw away those cards. I certainly can’t imagine what it would take.

And I am embarrassed to admit it: that’s just about cleaning out the garage, and being able to put my car away where any sensible person wants to put his car. Imagine what it would take for someone to spell it out for me that I should do something more substantive for an invisible God which would cost me more than a couple of boxes of greeting cards with zero resale value.

You know: me, the guy who is allegedly qualified or “gifted” to write on a blog like this for you so that you can garner some spiritual profit. It’s obvious that God is not real for me, and that I have too much stuff. How about you?

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When Oprah turns her back on her baptist upbringing for objecting to the jealousy of God, let’s not be too harsh toward her. The rest of us are not that different because we use the same kind of reasoning to sort of block out the parts of the story of our faith and the activity of the local church which we, frankly, don’t think much of. We’re just like her. Making her the bad guy for being a little more honest about her doubts than the rest of us doesn’t make our doubts any less serious, or any less damaging.

The cure for this, though, is not to give up and give in to doubt. While we should face our doubts openly, we shouldn’t just cave into them as if doubt disproves what is true. The massive factual obstacle for the person who is attracted to doubt is Jesus of Nazareth — this Jesus, as his friend Peter said, who was crucified.

It’s obvious, I hope, that I’m writing here for people who say to themselves, “There is something irresistible about Jesus.” For some of you, that’s a point which you make into an ideological cathedral — a point of doctrine which lines up in an acronym that summarizes the faith, your faith. For others, it’s a nagging thought — as you work out your faith on your own, you keep coming back to this Jesus, and you can’t make sense of him all the way, but you also can’t accept everything he says because it seems somehow too hard to live that way, or too complex, or too simple, or merely out of your grid of experience. For others, Jesus is a good way to summarize the right way to see the difference between right and wrong; you keep coming back to him in some way even though all of the people you meet who claim to love him don’t necessarily act like you think they ought to act — as some might say, you like Jesus, but not the church.

What I also hope is obvious as we work through this together is this problem for all of us of “this Jesus who was crucified”. It’s not like Jesus didn’t warn Peter and the other disciples about this. Before they returned to Jerusalem, Jesus asked his friends who they thought he was, and Peter, of course, said, “You’re the son of God, Jesus — the Messiah.”

And Jesus was very pleased with this — telling Peter that God himself taught him this truth, and that what this truth would mean is that Jesus would call together people who would storm the gates of death, and death could not stand the assault.

But then Jesus did something else: from that moment on, Jesus began to tell them that when he would go to Jerusalem, he would be tortured and tormented by the leaders of the Jewish people and the Romans, and that they would crucify him — but that he would also be raised to new life.

This was Jesus message to Peter, but Peter didn’t want to hear any of it. “This will never happen to you!” was Peter’s correction to Jesus — this Jesus whom he just called “Messiah” and “Son of God”. And this Jesus, in his lovingkindness, told Peter, “Get behind me, Satan, because you see things your way and not the way God sees them.”

And the reason Jesus says this is because he was preparing himself to be crucified. This is the place where Oprah’s problem with God starts to come apart at the seams — but it is also the place where all our objections and boredom and confusion and high-minded theological summaries come apart at the seams.

Jesus knew he was going to be crucified; he was actually crucified. Peter stood up in Jerusalem and told the people there — who at first thought he was drunk for shouting in public like that — that Jesus was crucified. For Peter, that’s a significant change — the kind of change we all really need to get involved with. It’s not a small change of mind to go from a guy who wanted Jesus to stop talking about going to Jerusalem to be killed to being a guy who wanted the city of Jerusalem to stop what it was doing — in very religious moment in the calendar of the city — and face up to the fact that this Jesus was crucified. It was a massive change. And Peter knew it required these people who were calling on the name of the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob to get changed as well.

Jesus being crucified means we have to get ready for what God wants, and we have to give up what we want.

Comments (7)

It’s sort of old news that Oprah Winfrey doesn’t think God ought to be jealous of anybody, but I think a lot of people agree with her. You can find the clip of her telling the world about her great moment of understanding on YouTube, but I found a transcript of that video at Oprah.com:

I will say I was one of those people who used to go to church every—I grew up, as I was sharing with the last caller, you know, in the South and so going to church every Sunday, Sunday School, Baptist Training Union, Wednesday night prayer service, the whole thing, choir, all of it. And when I moved to Baltimore, I was in my 20s, and I remember sitting in a church, you know, one of those big churches where you have to get there at, you know, 6:30 in the morning to line up for 8 o’clock service, … (more…)

Comments (17)

This is actually a post about the Gospel, but it may do one of these things to you:
– it may offend you (it ought to offend you a little at least)
– it may confuse you
– it may cause you to take the rest of the day off because you are utterly bewildered

I’m almost too squeemish to post this note, so you can imagine what kind of atrocity the link takes you to, so be forewarned. But as reported all over the the internet in the last week, The Boston Herald posts its take on Doug Hines’ new invention, introduced this weekend at the Adult Entertainment Expo in Las Vegas.

The least to say about this is that it is utterly un-nerving and particularly vile. And most people will let it go at that, except that those people aren’t thinking about the fact that someone is going to buy one of those things.

Listen: in the last two or three years there has been a bizarre trend — people are trying to invent robots to be home companions. One guy in japan has invented a manequin which is a servicable receptionist; another guy has been prototyping robot runway models. I am sure many teen-aged boys and comic-book shop owners are thrilled about the future happening today, but those of us who love people ought to be very concerned about this.

I could write about 1000 words about this topic today, but I am (again) snowed at work. Instead, I’ll let y’all talk about this issue under this umbrella: doesn’t this prove in some way that the church has failed to preach the Gospel, believe it to be true, and live as if there are necessary consquences to the work of Jesus Christ? Asked another way, how can robots possibly be better at loving other people than the people of God?

Think about that and discuss it in the comments.

Comments (8)

While the top 20 for each list is pending to post sometime on Friday, The Telegraph UK is publishing its Top 100 list of US Conservatives, and also of Liberals.

The list is interesting as it is an outsider’s perspective on the state of US politics — and I’m a fan of people who try to look in from the outside of anything. There’s usually a lot they don’t understand, but also there’s a lot that the “insiders” can learn from how they look from the outside.

This has absolutely nothing to do with the Gospel. But since the politics of the United States is a hot topic at this blog, I thought I’d mention it.

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My dear colleague JMR –

Thanks for your responses overall, including your exchange with my friend and fellow subversive Steve Hays. It’s good to see the extent to which you are willing to defend your position.

A clarification before I continue on the topic of this letter — in your reply “Men Should Crucify No Man”, you said:

Generally he thinks I am not Christian in my reasoning.

Let’s make sure that if this is how you are receiving what I have said, the other readers of this exchange will understand me to have said this:

While I think you are at best failing to show some of your moral calculus here, at worst you may be missing the point of the Bible itself by missing the key matter of the scope and force of justice in God’s economy. There’s much more to be said here, but I look forward to your response to this.

The status of the Christianity of your reasoning is not my concern: whether or not you’re referencing even broadly the Bible and its moral reasoning is. Let’s not derail this into a discussion about whether or not you are a follower of Jesus Christ. I’m willing to take that at face value and simply point out that your reasoning in this matter doesn’t include all the relevant citations from the OT, the Gospels, and Paul.
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My dear colleague JMR –

I think you are being a little more than a little cagey in your angling here to condemn torture outright. You say you are trying to narrow down what Paul means by endorsing the Roman “ministry of the sword”, but I think you’re simply trying to avoid the question of what is actually permissible.

I have already given you (once for sure; maybe twice) exactly what Paul means by saying what he said in Rom 13. Paul is endorsing the function of government which uses force to oppose those who cannot abide the prescriptions of law. If you want a finer-grain detail than that, I’ll add this: there is no question in my mind (and I hope not in yours either) that Paul’s view of justice is almost wholly-informed by the Mosaic law, which provides the death penalty often as the punishment for crime; insofar as the Roman law mirrors the Mosaic law, Paul would find it both right and just. If you don’t understand how I reach that conclusion, please re-read Rom 1-2 to see that Paul would say plainly that the Gentile who has never had the Mosaic law must indeed see the moral decrees of God in creation because he (the gentile) abides by them from time to time. This has to include those who judge others as Paul covers them in Rom 2 specifically.

In that arena for this discussion, your grasping at the atrocious to disqualify the obvious is uncalled-for. If we harmonize Rom 1-2 and Rom 13, we get a very easy-to-grasp view of what Paul means: government is, by virtue of its God-ordained role in the world, responsible to use violent means to deter and also to punish men who do not abide by the law.

Are there boundaries for that responsibility? Sure there are — not the least of which are the presuppositions of actual justice and actual relative offense. This is absolutely indicated by the Mosaic law as someone needs to be actually convicted of a crime before a penalty can be leveled against him — even for as little as a slap in the face against him. It is also indicated that death is not the only prescribed punishment in the Mosaic law — restitution and restoration to the offended also is demonstrated heavily, so there’s a scale of offense and a scale of punishment.

You know: if the mayor of your town set forth the principle that in every day that a crime is committed in Reynoldsville he will put one random person to death, that would certainly be a use of violence to deter crime — but there’s no justice in it. On the other hand, if the same mayor started putting people to death for speeding, there’d be no measure of the relative offense — the punishment does not fit the crime.

Your view simply overlooks this entirely — it comes out under the cover of words like “civilized” (as if that’s what it means to be “Christian”), and doesn’t make fair enough distinctions about justice and scope of offense to apply to any matter in particular.

But you keep resorting to the egregious to make your point. Even if all of them are valid examples of things we should not do, this doesn’t drive us to any biblical or principled understanding of the matter. At some point, there ought to be (there actually are) boundary markers to grasp what is at stake here, and how to act if you find yourself to be a Christian who is also the 5-Star General in charge of the Army or the Director of the CIA — or perhaps only the sergeant or agent who has an enemy combatant in custody.

Your discussion so far doesn’t help any of those people. You want to point out that we shouldn’t boil anyone in oil. Really? Why? “Well, imago dei, obviously,” but that’s not half as reasonable or obvious as you should think.

What I could do is line out all the things the Judges did to the enemies of Israel in the book of Judges, and what David did to those opposed to God and Israel, and then run through a handful of punishments the law of Moses defines as totally just when handed down in Israel. But rather, I want to turn to the Gospel of Jesus for a moment to point out something far more obvious than the response that boiling in oil is an atrocity.

The punishment Jesus received is the punishment we deserve, judicially. This is an unequivocal truth of the New Testament. So while we may want to call boiling in oil or running people into hungry wild beasts things the Romans did unjustly and without warrant, the Gospel Paul preaches tells us without any question that the just punishment we deserve as sinners looks like what Jesus received at the hands of the Jews and the Romans — a bloody beating, a public humiliation, a painful suffering, and death.

You cannot deny that Paul says that this is the punishment we deserve. And in that, in some sense Paul is saying this terrible fact of the punishment we deserve ought to change our minds. The rightly-just threat of punishment ought to have some psychological or emotional effect on us.

In that, Paul frames a theory of just punishment which is at odds with your view — but is manifest in Rom 13 where he says that we should not fear the government if we do good rather than evil.

What Paul endorses, you have plainly denied. And this is just about common civil order at this point — not about a theory of war and conducting a right act of violence against a nation or an army which has come to invade or plunder or simply to terrify and exploit.

The question of whether torture is permissible or even tenable for the Christian magistrate or military officer starts with the correct picture of justice — what is the right-sized punishment for a crime? To what lengths can the modes of punishment — including right-minded views of restitution and avenging a past crime — be employed under the umbrella of “justice”? You have not approached these questions at all, and your right-hearted fear of acting without grace or mercy has overcome what should be your right-minded belief (and fear) of God’s holiness and wrath as it ought to be exemplified in the acts of the government.

While I think you are at best failing to show some of your moral calculus here, at worst you may be missing the point of the Bible itself by missing the key matter of the scope and force of justice in God’s economy. There’s much more to be said here, but I look forward to your response to this.

~Frank

Comments (4)

I’m doing some research on the local church and what causes people to leave it, and I ran into this study from April 2009 about Changes in religious Affiliation in the U.S.

From that report:

Catholicism has suffered the greatest net loss in the process of religious change. Many people who leave the Catholic Church do so for religious reasons; two-thirds of former Catholics who have become unaffiliated say they left the Catholic faith because they stopped believing in its teachings, as do half of former Catholics who are now Protestant. Fewer than three-in-ten former Catholics, however, say the clergy sexual abuse scandal factored into their decision to leave Catholicism.

In contrast with other groups, those who switch from one Protestant denominational family to another (e.g., were raised Baptist and are now Methodist) tend to be more likely to do so in response to changed circumstances in their lives. Nearly four-in-ten people who have changed religious affiliation within Protestantism say they left their childhood faith, in part, because they relocated to a new community, and nearly as many say they left their former faith because they married someone from a different religious background.

I strongly recommend that you read the whole thing, even if it is old news to you.

The topic for discussion, as we think about this together, is this: how should we interpret the somewhat-serious reasons listed as common for leaving Catholicism against what I would say are the somewhat-circumstantial reasons for changing affiliation among Protestants?

My opinion is that it doesn’t speak well of Protestants, to be honest, but I’d like to see where the readers of this blog would take this discussion.

Comments (12)

It’s a Christmas tradition in many homes to read the Christmas story before the festivities begin, which is of course a good thing. Most of us open up Luke 2, read down to through the Shepherds, pray a brief prayer, and then we begin with the wrapping paper and the mixture of joy and disappointment which material things always bring.

About two years ago, my pastor asked me to open our Christmas day worship service with an extended reading of Scripture on the topic of Christ’s birth. As I started to put it together, it grew into this harmonization of six places in Scripture which seem to me to be directly related to the moment what God the Son was born in a stable, and almost no one noticed. These passages are taken from the ESV.

This year, I ask you to think about these things, and notice.

Merry Christmas, and may God richly bless you in the New Year.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made. In him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.

The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world. He was in the world, and the world was made through him, yet the world did not know him. He came to his own, and his own people did not receive him. But to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God, who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God.

For to which of the angels did God ever say,

And again, when he brings the firstborn into the world, he says,

“Let all God’s angels worship him.”

Of the angels he says,

But of the Son he says,

Now the birth of Jesus Christ took place in this way. When his mother Mary had been betrothed to Joseph, before they came together she was found to be with child from the Holy Spirit.
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