Evans writes,

The Bible isn’t an answer book. It isn’t a self-help manual. It isn’t a flat, perspicuous list of rules and regulations that we can interpret objectively and apply unilaterally to our lives. (294)

And yet, amazingly, scripture is clear enough to Evans that she can determine it has been misread and misapplied by the evangelicals who advocate for a biblical view of manhood and womanhood.

This is just one of many fallacies in YWB. It’s just not true that evangelical advocates for biblical womanhood view the Bible as merely a self-help manual or a list of rules and regulations. This sort of misrepresentation is foundational to YWB, but it needs to be clarified that as evangelicals, we do believe the Bible contains helps and rules in the form of principles and precepts found within the various scriptural genres.

Read the full review here.

Doubt seems to be the pervasive doctrine of the young “evangelicals,” many who self-identify as emergent. As appropriated by this group, doubt is probably better described as a virtue, because to have doubt means not having answers, and not having answers means not being right (or wrong). By not being right about anything means we can continue to converse about the questions and develop relationships around the common ally of curiosity. Doubt should be a welcome guest in the life of faith, but doubt should not be a permanent disposition.

I Doubt, Therefore I Am
Over the weekend, Jay Bakker (son of Jim and the late Tammy Faye Bakker & gay-affirming pastor) appeared on CNN discussing the latest Pew Research report on belief in God. According to their 2012 findings, 68% of Millennials indicate they never doubt the existence of God while only 5 years ago that number was 76%.

Early in the interview, host Don Lemon posed the challenge “If God exists, prove it.” The point of the question was to elevate the reasonableness of doubt because if God can not be empirically verified then unbelief or doubt is rational. The question felt like someone knocked the wind out of me. Certainly Lemon wasn’t suggesting that our knowledge of God starts with us? Skepticism is not the result of investigation but the ultimate assumption, so its no surprise special revelation serves as no answer to the dilemma of knowledge of God. No wonder so much doubt prevails among the Millennial age group.

After catching my breath, Lemon continued his conversation with Jay Bakker, venturing into some areas even Lemon could not avoid describing as subversive. Bakker stated that even on the cross, Jesus doubted–”Christ was an atheist.”

I lost my capacity to breathe again. God didn’t believe in God (as Bakker put it). And this is based on what?

“Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?” that is, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matt 27:46 ESV)

In paying the penalty for our sin, Jesus had to be be separated from the favor of and fellowship with the Father that was eternally his. In quoting Ps. 22:1 Jesus probably had in mind the remaining passages of the psalm which moves on to a cry of victory. He may have quoted a question, but the doubt and unbelief attributed to Christ is nonexistent as he expresses belief quite clearly with the words “my God.” He knows why he must die–the ultimate purpose of the incarnation. In his cries he is not expressing confusion over the purposes of God the Father, but a message to those who are watching, that being forsaken was for the salvation of others. We can’t wrap our mind around this fully, what it was like for God the Son to experience a form of separation from God the Father, but to justify human doubt and unbelief on the basis of theistic-atheism is nothing short of tragic.

Bakker quoted Paul Tillich in the interview, asserting that doubt is not the opposite of faith but an element of it–a topic I will take up in a forthcoming post. Certainly doubt is a part of our journey in the faith and is something that each of us experience to varying degrees. But let’s not ordain doubt as the shepherd of our thoughts and allow it to lead us away from the possibility of knowing the God who has made himself plainly knowable. We need to challenge the distortion that somehow doubt is a neutral assessment. Doubt is not always innocent. It is often the starting point intended to challenge the truths that have already been revealed and redefine the gospel that fails the expectations of doubt.

On my book shelves are collections of great writings from early and contemporary Reformed theologians, books on women’s ministry, great biblical expositions, bioethics texts….and then there are the feminist writers. These are books I studied while in seminary, primarily for the purpose of completing my master’s thesis, though eventually I chose a different topic related to bioethics and presuppositional apologetics. (I feel like I have to explain why I have them!) But last week I decided to see if I could learn something about come present conversations from the writings of some of these clearly liberal feminist thinkers. Enter Carter Heyward.

At the time her book “Saving Jesus from Those Who are Right” (SJTWR) was published, Carter Heyward was a professor of theology at Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In 1974, she was one of 11 women whose ordinations eventually paved the way for the recognition of women as priests in the Episcopal Church in 1976 ( “The Women Priests”. Time Magazine. August 26, 1974). She retired in 2006.

Aspects of her writing strike in me an odd familiarity:

“In this study, I am especially attentive to the theological claims of ‘those who are right’ and to presenting an alternative way of thinking about what it means to be a Christian” (p 1).

“…Christians who are right often imagine that Jesus is an authoritarian Lord…In this book, I offer alternative images…I suggest that mutuality, passion, compassion, and forgiveness are more genuinely moral relational possibilities for our life together” (p 1).

“We are drawn selectively to certain images and stories of Jesus (and ourselves) on the basis of our cultures and communities, faith journeys, personal needs, and political commitments. The Jesus images in this book reflect such a selective process” (p 3-4).

But do I assume that “my” Jesus is the only true Jesus? I do not make such a claim…I can only tell you what I believe and am thinking about Jesus these days and invite you to think with me” (p 4)

Throughout her writings, it becomes clear that she has a view of God and scripture that doesn’t exactly cohere with a historical-grammatical reading of the Bible. In her work, God is defined as our power in mutual relation. In SJTWR, Heyward writes

Lifting Jesus up above us, giving him authority over us that he didn’t ask for and cannot bear, we miss the point of his life, of our lives and of the life of God.

Am I denying the divinity of Jesus? No I am denying the singularity of his status as Son of God. I am affirming the presence of divinity in him and moving through him…I have no doubt that you and I are as much God’s daughters and sons as Jesus was and, moreover, that this has been true not only human beings but of other creatures too, from the beginning.

Clearly problematic is her conception of God’s nature and being. Heyward may believe she retains Jesus’ divinity in her theological framework, but by elevating fallen humanity and “other creatures” to equality with Jesus when she writes “you and I are as much…as Jesus was…” we have a significant problem. You can’t escape Heywards problem with authority through the pages of SJTWR and that it serves as the basis for undermining the authority of scripture and the status of the second person of the Trinity.

My interest was especially piqued in terms of the influence of theological feminism in evangelical circles when I stumbled upon this in SJTWR:

We must give authority to our experiences as relational beings who share this planet as home. It is hard for most Christian readers to take human experience seriously as sacred source because our religious tradition has promulgated a strange notion that God and Jesus Christ are “above” or otherwise “outside” of human experience, life, history. We have learned that God and Jesus Christ have spiritual authority “over” us, as if they are Persons to whom we must look not only “outside” our bodyselves but over and against us in order to know what is right or wrong and even to know what or who we are. For us to be in right relation to such a God or His Son is to put our experiences, our lives and history, under His rule and will, subject to His authority.

For this reason, “good Christians” in general and good Christian women in particular have not on the whole experienced our bodyselves as bearing our own spiritual truths. Yet we do bear our own spiritual truths to the extent that our spiritualities are truly of the God whom Jesus loved. (SJTWR, p 34)

So what exactly does this mean? This implications are serious. Spiritual authority of God and Jesus over humanity in general is problemantic the Heywards pardigm given that spiritual authority resides at least in equal proportion to the authority of God or Jesus, and she continues “good Christian women in particular” have been deprived “considerable spiritual authority.”

If you were to continue reading, Heyward disputes the notion that sacred truth is universally applicable, “as if theology can be carried around and imposed on others, irrespective of their embodied cultures, experiences, lives, and histories…” She says this is “intellectual arrogance and theological stupidity.” It does not matter whether you are a Christian, atheist, “prince nor homeless mother,”

None of us…knows what is absolutely true about him or herself, much less about God, Jesus, or the rest of us. There is a way to know and love ourselves, the world, and God: We can truly know only that which we are not afraid to love, and we can truly love only that which we are not afraid to see. Only in relation to one another can we know and love what is true. (emphasis hers) (SJTWR, p 35)

The Body of Christ cannot fulfill its gospel-centered mission to make disciples if God’s authority is challenged by the authority of human experience, if truth isn’t universally applicable, and if we can make no claims to knowledge about God or anything else. Without knowledge, human existence is hampered, and in this case, its hampered by an epistemological generosity that wants to embrace its own selectivity while encouraging the same in others. The desire to ‘save Jesus from those who are right’ is a mission that continues within the boundaries of evangelicalism and at some point someone needs to step up under the authority of scripture and say no more. Saving Jesus from those who are right means, for Heyward and others of a similar mindset, that no one is right…or at least we simply cannot know. This is not a faith that can be lived out in any meaningful sense. It is a faith that’s a fraud.

Evolving in Monkey Town: How a Girl Who Knew All the Answers Learned to Ask the Questions

Asking questions about what you believe can be a very good thing. This is a truth I share with Rachel Held Evans (RHE). Having our beliefs spoon-fed to us without question is a risky approach to anything, let alone our faith in God.

While reading Evolving in Monkey Town (EMT), I thought for sure I had read this book before. The nature of the questions, the concern for God’s reputation, the credibility given to arguments outside of Christianity—I was positive the book was already on my shelf. Then I realized, I had read it before, and you have too if you’ve read Rob Bell’s “Love Wins.”

Evolving in Monkey Town is divided into three parts: Habitat, Challenge, and Change. It’s difficult—even unfair—to try to summarize RHE’s journey, but at the same time, there are clues in her writing that point to the person she is becoming. So I will let the words speak for themselves.

In Habitat, RHE describes her upbringing as a child of Christian parents—her father a theologian and college professor. She mentions that she “never felt trapped in a world of endless churchgoing” (29). About her mother, she writes that she noticed and loved “when she got a little fidgety whenever the pastor discussed wives submitting to their husbands.” She also talks about some instances in these early years where she experienced doubt about whether God was actually listening or if he even existed, a question she explains stayed with her “like a rock in my shoe” (35).

She talks about the city of Dayton, how “Christianity was so infused in the culture…that it served as a kind of folk religion” (42), a great segue into the second chapter on “June the Ten Commandments Lady.” For RHE, June illustrated the hypocrisy of those in the church who “claim Christ in one breath and then curses her neighbor in the next.” She’s right. But, here we get the first clear indication that RHE is questioning the exclusive nature of Christianity. She ponders how God might consider the evil in believers vs. the goodness of those outside of Christianity. She wonders about June’s faith profession, “Is it worth more to God than the faith of a Buddhist or Hindu or Muslim who practices kindness and compassion?”

In chapter 3, she explains the history of Dayton rooted in the historical event of the Scopes Monkey Trial. She provides a portion of the trial transcript showing how attorney Clarence Darrow undermined the “literalist” interpretation of the Bible in his examination of William Jennings Bryan’s testimony. RHE then describes another “Monkey Town moment” (62) when political leaders “passed a resolution calling for a ban on homosexuality and an amendment to state law that would allow the country to charge gays and lesbians with crimes against nature” (62). She discusses the terrible behavior of people in Dayton during this time, saying that the city “was again the laughingstock of the country, and rightly so.” The chapter concludes with this statement, speaking to the apologetics movement she is about to discuss: “The evangelical community has a curious reputation for resisting cultural movements before suddenly deciding to embrace them, and believers in Dayton are no different” (64). She continues,

“To survive in a modern world, [evangelicals] needed to be more prepared to respond to its questions. They could no longer simply resist evolutionary theory, secular humanism, higher criticism….they had to learn to effectively engage them…a funny thing happened to the evangelical community in Dayton and around the country: it evolved.”

Unfortunately, RHE gives the impression, hinting at the content of the next chapters, that apologetics is fairly new to the church and mentions only the apologists popular among later 20th century church-goers: Norman Geisler, Lee Strobel and Francis Schaeffer. She doesn’t account for the apologists throughout church history or even just the early 20th century. It’s a mistake to give the impression that apologetics has only been a modern-day phenomenon. In fact, a similar error is made as she discusses the Roe v Wade decision of 1973. She writes that it “left many Christians with the sense that their government had abandoned them.” She doesn’t provide a foot note for this so I don’t know exactly where she’s getting this from. But stating it this way ignores the fact that the church had abandoned government and culture in general since the early part on the century. It was Roe V. Wade that helped the church to recognize its departure from the cultural conversation was having adverse effects and we needed to re-engage. Carl F. H. Henry laments this in The Uneasy Conscience of Evangelicalism…in 1947. Henry, by the way, was another great defender of Christian orthodoxy.

In chapter four, RHE discusses her personal experience in apologetics with a chapter devoted to “Greg the Apologist,” who she first connected with in high school. She describes working with “Greg” during the summer between her junior and senior year of college at an apologetics seminar for college students. She talks about how, after listening to one of the speakers, she wondered if she “didn’t have a Christian-enough worldview” (67). She

“grew increasingly uncomfortable with how verses were lifted from the Bible to support political positions like gun rights, strong national defense, capital punishment and limited intervention in the free market….I waited for Greg to object, but he never did” (67).

Seeing her skepticism begin to develop in the previous chapters, it is no surprise in chapter five that we see it fully blossom into her “pick and choose” assessment of evangelicalism in general (80), a tool she continues to use to criticize evangelical points of view on at least one other topic—biblical womanhood. But RHE describes that the apologetics movement had in her, “created a monster” (79).

“I’d gotten so good at critiquing all the fallacies of opposing worldviews, at searching for the truth through objective analysis, that it as only a matter of time before I turned the same skeptical eye upon my own faith…We criticized radical Islam as a natural outworking of the violent tone of the Qur’an without acknowledging the fact that the God of Israel ordered his people to kill every living thing in Canaan…We sneered at the notion of climate change yet believed that God once made the earth stand still…We mocked New Age ambiguity but could not explain the nature of the Trinity. We claimed that ours was a rational, logical faith, when it centered on the God of the universe wrapping himself in flesh to be born in a manger in Bethlehem. More worrisome, however, was how we criticized relativists for picking and choosing truth, while our own biblical approach required some selectivity of its own” (79-80).

It was this statement in EMT that helped me to realize that perhaps RHE has had an over-exposure to apologetics. As strange as that sounds, I believe this is the situation. When apologetics borrows from the worldviews it is trying to critique, when it seeks to make arguments from the stance of “objectivity” while mixing it up with the language of worldview and presuppositions, I understand the confusion created. She wrote,

“Born of the necessity to more effectively engage modernism and avoid embarrassments like the Scopes trial, the apologetics movement in America represented a significant evolution within the evangelical subculture, an evolution away from blind faith, anti-intellectualism, and cultural withdrawal toward hard rationalism, systematic theology, and political action. You might say it was the culmination of Enlightenment values applied to specifically to religious dialogue.” (75)

An apologetic that starts with and depends upon the categories of philosophical reasoning outside and independent of scripture, and serve as grounds for scripture, can never quite make the argument for Christianity. Arguments from unbelief will never affirm the truth of Christianity. Couple this general evidentialist approach with worldview education that generally insists there is no objectivity, that we all have bias, I see why her journey has ended in skepticism. I understand why, for RHE, it is necessary to re-explain Christianity so that it makes sense out of her reality. She speaks to this a bit further, that possibly the better apologetic is belief acted upon. I don’t entirely agree (or disagree), but I get it.

“And yet, in the words of Jesus, all those apologetics courses and theology books and debating techniques are just castles in the sand without a commitment to love my neighbor as myself. I began to wonder if obedience—with or without answers—was the only thing that could save me from this storm.” (106)

In her search for consistency it is clear she has not experienced the liberation provided by a commitment to scripture first, and evidence and arguments second—presented in light of a proclaimed faith in Christ. This, I hope she finds, because every other worldview argues from within its system. I went through a struggle similar to hers and came to the conclusion that—though certainly not useless—the “objective” arguments I was utilizing to “prove” God or Christianity were actually creating a plausible argument for doubt. It is the truth of Christianity confirmed by my subjective experience with Holy Spirit and revealed to me by God in the objective form of scripture that liberated me from the necessity of these arguments as grounds for belief. And this is hardly against reason. RHE took the fork in the road labeled ‘doubt.’

As you might easily assume, I am coming from a very Calvinist perspective in my apologetic methodology, and since RHE struggles with the doctrines of grace, she likely will struggle with my words in this review. In EMT, she clearly dismisses the reformed theological perspective. Sadly, she resorts to an adolescent argumentation by referring to it in a later chapter as “pond scum theology.”

“I’d heard this response many times before and had affectionately dubbed it “pond-scum theology.” At the heart of pond-scum theology is the premise that human beings have no intrinsic value or claim to salvation because their sin nature makes them so thoroughly disgusting and offensive to God that he is under no obligation to pay them any mind…It’s a view resurrected by outspoken Reformed pastors who have argued that God can’t even look at us because he is so disgusted by our sin nature, one even suggesting that God sent the tsunami to wash some of this pond scum from his sight. Pond-scum theology effectively shifts the question from How could a loving God send anyone to hell? to How could an angry God allow anyone into heaven?” (116)

Pond-scum theology makes even less sense in the context of the Gospels. To believe that people are inherently worthless to God strips the incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection of all their meaning and power. It makes Jesus look like a fool for dying for us, and it leaves his followers with little incentive to seek out and celebrate the good in one another. (117)

Flattened theology. No understanding of the different senses in which God loves, no serious interaction with the atonement and the existence of sin. But most of all, here and in other places we see RHE’s presumption of innocence. In fairness to her, she would say that her argument isn’t with God, but with interpretations of scripture and maybe even the words of scripture themselves. I’m not sure how else she could talk about her knowledge of God except to be informed by scripture. To comprehend much of EMT, you have to understand that RHE likely does not hold to an inerrant view of scripture. On her blog, she writes that “The word ‘inerrancy’ makes my scalp itch.” That might make my quoting of Job a bit irrelevant to RHE, but to the readers who might care what God says about this kind of posturing, go back to Job.

“Shall a faultfinder contend with the Almighty? He who argues with God, let him answer it.” Job 40:1

The remainder of the book shares RHE’s journey from doubt to faith, but it’s difficult to understand the content of this faith as she questions both its source and interpretation of the source and, it seems, prefers a Jesus Seminar method to approaching scripture. As you read it, you will probably take note of some tendencies toward false dilemmas and dialectical reasoning, among other fallacies. But ultimately, it seems that RHE is trying to answer the problem of evil in a way that honors victims of evil by reconsidering their eternal destination. This is a noble cause and, I believe, is reflective of the image of God contained within her. We are supposed to be gripped by a sense of compassion, not only for those who suffer physically, but for those who suffer spiritually. This is the heart of missions. But when our compassion is the cause of abandoning scriptural truths, one needs to re-examine if it is compassion or pride that is the catalyst for investigation. I’ll leave with you with a few quotes that provide insight into her views on Christian exclusivism.

“But the idea that this woman passed from agony to agony, from torture to torture, from a lifetime of pain and sadness to an eternity of pain and sadness, all because she had less information about the gospel than I did, seemed cruel, even sadistic. God knew long before Zarmina was born—before her first giggle, before her first steps, before her first words—that this was her fate. He knew it from the beginning and yet created her anyway. I wondered how many millions of people like Zarmina died every day in similar circumstances. I thought about the Killing Fields of Cambodia, the gassing of Iraqi Kurds, and those terrible, haunting images of warehouses full of eyeglasses and shoes and prayer shawls left behind by victims of the Holocaust. Was I supposed to believe that all these people went to hell because they weren’t Christians?” (91)

My generation tends to be suspicious of absolutism. Speakers at apologetics camp like to say that we’re getting so open-minded our brains are falling out…I reexamined my positions on heaven and hell not because I wanted to be like Britney but because I was forever changed after watching Zarmina’s execution. (112)

“We do know that no person can be saved except through Christ,” he wrote in Mere Christianity. “We do not know that only those who know Him can be saved by Him.” (130)

I don’t know the degree to which God is present in the world’s many religious systems. I don’t know how God will judge the living and the dead. I don’t know if hell is eternal or if God will destroy evil for good. I don’t know what the new heaven and new earth will be like. I don’t know if I’m an inclusivist or a universalist or a particularist….All I know is that if the God of the Bible is true, he loves his creation and will do whatever it takes to restore it. (133)

This leaves me in an awkward position when it comes to always being ready with an answer. Gone are the black-and-white categories of “saved” and “unsaved,” “heaven-bound” and “hell-bound.” Gone are the old ways of determining who’s in and who’s out. Gone are the security of absolutism and the comfort of certainty. Gone is the confidence that comes with knowing that when Jesus said, “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven,” he of course couldn’t possibly mean me. (133)

I have to admit, I was very intrigued by the idea of an evangelical feminist woman living out a year of biblical womanhood even as just a thought experiment. But what Rachel Held Evans has done is not that.This could have been an opportunity to discover and experience some aspects of complementarianism not otherwise understood. Her experiment, however, was little more than a piecemeal approach. As I understand it, she didn’t not live the year consistently (as in every waking moment) with this as her newly adopted (though temporary) view of women’s roles. Not only did she not live it consistently, she added practices that don’t belong (camping out in her front yard, for example). She was not faithful to biblical womanhood as taught by its adherents.
Evans’ Year of Biblical Womanhood has actually been a year of an erroneous hermeneutic resulting in misrepresentation to the church and the public at large of what biblical womanhood actually looks like. She expanded on the literal approach of scripture practiced by complementarians by flattening scripture such that systematic theology is of no consequence. An initial statement at the front end of her post titled A Year of Biblical Womanhood is evidence enough of this.

On October 1, 2010, I committed one year of my life to following all of the Bible’s instructions for women as literally as possible—from the Old Testament to the New Testament, from Genesis to Revelation, from the Levitical purity codes to the letters of Paul.

The problem with this is that no evangelical expression of biblical womanhood demands women follow “all of the Bible’s instructions for women as literally as possible”–at least in terms of how she is using the term “literally.” This has nothing to do with any arbitrary decision–the “pick and choose” methodology–by complementarianism as she asserts on her website.  This is a hermeneutical matter that Evans has failed to devote any serious time to. In her post, Complementarians Are Selective Too,  she argues that proponents of the biblical womanhood model are sacrificing scripture’s meaning by picking an choosing in order preserve patriarchy. To be fair, she suggests egalitarians are also guilty of picking and choosing to make their case as well, but egalitarianism isn’t the target of contempt with her Year of Biblical Womanhood project.

Evans has failed to properly represent the teachings of biblical womanhood in what she has so for divulged of her one year experiment. If it is the case, in fact, that her issue is with the way complementarians handle scripture, she ought to have written a series of posts simply dealing with the hermeneutical problem she identifies, showing how proponents of biblical womanhood err in their literal handling of the biblical text.  Here, she might have shown systematic theology to work to her benefit while engaging the systematic theology foundational to the biblical womanhood model. But this requires a lot more work and doesn’t yield as many winsome blog posts. Instead, she created a straw woman by packaging together every biblical command having to do with women (whether it has anything to do with the theological structure of biblical womanhood), leaving readers with the impression that biblical womanhood demands the observance of Levitical purity laws among other practices.

An apology is owed to the evangelical community for an unfair representation of a view that can be argued from the biblical text in both scholarly and generous manner for all sides. But  now that our culture has been provided a skewed view of biblical womanhood from the inside,  they have no reason to work any harder to move beyond their present perceptions. At the end of Evans’ post on her Year of Biblical Womanhood, she writes

My purpose in embarking on this project is not to belittle or make fun of the Bible, nor is it to glorify its patriarchal elements. It is simply to start a conversation about how we interpret and apply the Bible to our lives.

A conversation has certainly been started. It would be nice, however, if we were all talking about the same thing.

Currently I am working on a series of articles on Christian ethics with a focus on moral epistemology from, yes, a Reformed Van Tilian perspective. Would love to hear from you on this work:

When we hear the term ethics, our minds often race to stories we have heard about bank fraud and other financial scheming. Bernie Madoff’s ponzi scheme that stole billions of dollars from unsuspecting investors is one textbook example of unethical business practices. We also think of ethics in terms of doctor-patient confidentiality or client-attorney privilege. In both examples, the patient and client enter into a relationship with the professional having the expectation of privacy regarding their personal information. If this privacy fails protected, a breach in ethics has occurred and the medical or legal professional may be held legally accountable.

There is more to ethics than what goes on in the public realm. There is also a very personal dimension to ethical living and has everything to do with our walk with God. When we speak of the Christian life in terms of obedience to God’s commands and applying the teachings of scripture to our everyday lives, often it doesn’t cross our mind that this is the realm of Christian ethics. Throughout the pages of scripture we discover obligatory appeals to God’s law, not as a means of salvation, but as a matter of sanctification. The Bible teaches us that as Christians we are to

put on the new self, created after the likeness of god in true righteousness and holiness. (Eph 4:24)

Righteousness and holiness are moral categories that describe our guilt or innocence as it pertains to our keeping of God’s commands. These are terms that speak to moral purity with a correspondence to God’s character and the sinless life of Jesus. When scripture calls us to a life without sin, to emulate the holiness of God, we are being called to an ethical life—the good life.

Teaching ethics has for me become more than an academic pursuit. I have discovered with delight and great satisfaction that the discipline plays an extremely important role in the church’s ministry of discipleship and evangelism. This is because moral questions prompt additional questions on authority and obligation. They invite us to think beyond doing the right thing to the question of how we know what the right thing is. What is our source for ethical knowledge? How authoritative is this source? Over whom is it authoritative? These questions exemplify the interplay of apologetics ministry with the task of ethics.
Apologetics is the ministry of the church that focuses on defending the faith in various ministry contexts. It is a ministry not just for pastors and church leaders, but for any believer asked to explain the basis for their belief in Jesus. The term apologetics is found in several New Testament passages; probably the most popularly taught is this one:

…but in your hearts honor Christ the Lord as holy, always being prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you; yet do it with gentleness and respect (1 Peter 3:15)

In this verse, the word defense is a translation of the Greek term apologia which refers to a reasoned statement or argument. But this verse doesn’t just call the Christian to give an answer without other considerations. The answer, or the defense, finds its motivation in a love for Jesus, a love for the lost, and a love for truth—not simply the desire to win an argument. The argument is not for the purpose of being argumentative, but to argue rationally and coherently. As well, “gentleness and respect” aren’t just a passing thought in these words written by Peter. With a deliberate interest that God’s truth be shared in a manner that serves well the reputation of the gospel and the church is how we are to understand this passage.

While it is possible to have all the right arguments and explanations that force a person to admit Christianity makes the most logical sense of any other known worldview, an apologetic must be absent of pride, arrogance, and gloating. God can use anything, but winning arguments at any cost is a risk to winning souls for Christ.

Already, the task of apologetics focuses our attention to ethics. There is a right way and a wrong way to defend the faith. We are immediately called to an approach with an obligation to love the person we are speaking with in such a way there is no mistaking our character, though there are times when some unfortunate perceptions cannot be avoided. We are called to strive for character that unmistakably demonstrates that we take seriously the requirement of God’s law to love our neighbor. Unfortunately, well-intentioned apologists often forget their motivation and the character expectations associated with the task, but this should not cause us to negate that ministry of apologetics.

But when I write that there is an interplay between apologetics and ethics, I am not just referring to the call to godly character anticipated by 1 Peter 3:15 and many other passages in the Bible. We also need to understand that the quest for moral truth often raises other questions every member of Christ’s body should be prepared to answer. For example, when teaching young women about dressing modestly and practicing abstinence, surely there are specific scriptural passages we will point them to, teaching them that these are not just our personal preferences but are moral expectations that God has for each of us.

Our society, however, has bombarded everyone with a buffet of moral choices, each rooted in a particular view of reality. Remember when you were little (or when your kids were little) and why? was always on the tip of your tongue? We have within us something that makes us want to know how things work. We don’t just want to do, but we want to know why we do. When it comes to ethics, the young women being taught modesty and abstinence are often wondering why they should do what the Bible says. How is it that the Bible has any special authority, especially when not everyone agrees that the Bible is all that special? For many people today, the Bible is simply a book used as a source for traditional values, but these beliefs are just the arbitrarily chosen beliefs of this Christian subculture. Are you prepared for these questions?

Even when these questions are not asked, it is important to be able to reinforce the moral teachings of scripture with the answers to these questions. This gives the person being discipled the ability to better communicate the reasons for obeying God’s commands, thus becoming a better disciple herself. Moral claims without the ability to give an answer may give the appearance of blind faith, one that’s viewed as illogical or against reason. But Christianity is far from unreasonable and Christian morality is far more than a set of customs.

Tomorrow: The Bible and Moral Authority

On par with Robertson’s views on disease, dignity and death is the embrace of reproductive technologies that willingly and knowingly risk the lives of embryos (small humans at the earliest stage of life) or the Terri Schaivo’s whose lives are deemed without worth because the quality of life and the relationship has been compromised. Both examples speak to the lack of commitment by able, responsible agents in the relationship. Parents don’t yet need to act like parents to their embryos because the embryos are not yet warm, cooing little people to be physically bonded with yet. Spouses no longer need to abide by the marriage vows because the other spouse is, sorry to be crass, better off dead—and so, too, is the quality of the relationship.

Though small or disabled, they are fully human—a sufficient argument for defending their life (without a vitalist mentality that makes no room for death). The personhood debate has only done harm to the way we view and value these image bearers. As a philosophical term, “personhood” has been imported into our theological conversation to account for human capacities, not as a way to address ontology. The fruit of it is rotten and I believe this is what we are seeing in Robertson’s “kind of death” message.

In Robertson’s comments, we see the coalescing of views on marriage, divorce and human dignity that we should have come to expect because, as he so aptly demonstrates, evangelical Christians neither understand how to think about medical ethics issues nor how they impact other areas of the Christian life. Every day pew dwellers have been offered little in terms of framework for how to live through these types of situations to the glory of God. Instead, they get “pat” answers for how to make life more immediately pleasurable.

There are plenty self-described evangelicals who likely agree with Robertson on the diminished moral obligation in an Alzheimer’s (or cancer) relationship. In fact, I’m sure some are grateful he is taking the heat for a stance that they have been secretly embracing. Some evangelicals, of course, have rightly come out in defense of sacrificial living within marriage, a position summed up in the age-old expression vow “til death do us part.” But with the recent tendency toward emotional-therapeutic approaches to ethical discourse—to the Christian life in general—“til ‘lack of consciousness’ do us part” is likely to become a morally sufficient argument for how Christians can choose to cope in similar circumstances. So as a matter of consistency, if our individual situations are going to have any determining weight in the rightness or wrongness of beginning of life questions, then Robertson’s view fits well within this new theological schema for end of life scenarios. If disease warrants the end of a parental relationship through diagnostic testing in utero or in the petri dish, certainly the prospect of terminal illness can justify the end of the marital relationship. May it never be.

If you’re unfamiliar with her work, Rita Charon is Professor of Clinical Medicine and founding Director of the Program in Narrative Medicine at Columbia University. A general internist, she earned a Ph.D. in English when she realized the centrality of stories in medical practice. She directs the Narrative Medicine curriculum for Columbia’s medical school and teaches literature, narrative ethics, and life-telling (more info).

Charon is also the author of Narrative Medicine: Honoring the Stories of Illness. In it, she describes the narrative approach to health care and its relationship to bioethics.

“Those who assist individual patients to navigate the moral channels of illness have discovered that training in health law and knowledge of moral principles do not suffice to fulfill ethical duties toward the sick…they also must equip themselves with sophisticated skills in absorbing and interpreting complex narratives of illness—the better to hear their patients, to accompany them on their journeys, and to assist them in making health care choices consonant with their values [emphasis mine]. Echoing its transformative force in other disciplines and professions, narrative practice has renewed and redefined the very enterprise of what used to be called bioethics.”[1]

The goal of narrative ethics is a noble one—to create an environment conducive to showing value to the patient and patient’s family by listening to and honoring their story of illness. In agreement, Charon appeals to the thought of a bioethicist whose work[2] I am intimately familiar with, H. Tristram Engelhardt,

“When health care professionals and patients meet as strangers … disclosures and safeguards must frequently be explicit and often detailed. … [O]ne needs a disinterested application of the rules to protect against misunderstandings and to guard against abuses of power.”[3]

Like Charon, Engelhardt holds that rules simply complicate things when the task is to be more focused on “accompany[ing] them on their journeys.” The communication of moral principles apparently shortens this excursion.

We can have a qualified agreement with Charon that “moral principles do not suffice to fulfill ethical duties toward the sick” because this work should encompass a ministerial component obvious to so many of us engaged in theological ethics. We should listen, we should discuss, but eventually we do need to advise and this involves the communication of moral principles as understood through scripture. As Christians with particular theological commitments, no good reason exists to avoid sharing ethical principles derivative of our theology in answering difficult life and death questions.

What is it then that narrative ethics is really proposing? This we need to ask because as a system, narrative ethics doesn’t fully resist principles. Rather, it insists that the principles that matter are ultimately those that line up with the values of the patient, and it is through discourse that those values are discovered. In other words, the task of the doctor, nurse, pastor, bioethicist, or family friend practicing narrative ethics does not involve bringing a normative moral framework into the discourse as a way that advises the individual, couple or family toward a decision. For Charon and Engelhardt, the pluralistic context rejects such a proposal, but within the context of Christianity, the communication of moral norms should not be problematic. We have been given the tools to minister to the whole person.

At CT’s Her.meneutics blog, the floodgates on this topic have opened wide, pouring forth the narrative ethic position of Ellen Painter Dollar. To give you a bit of background on Dollar, she is a “Christian woman with a genetic disorder called osteogenesis imperfecta (OI).”[4] This is a condition that causes extremely fragile bones. Because Dollar’s OI is caused by a defect in a gene, she and her husband opted for IVF and PGD (preimplantation genetic diagnosis) in an effort to conceive children without OI. PGD is the process of sorting “good” embryos from the “bad” embryos, leading ultimately to the destruction of the “bad” ones. But for them, this was a morally legitimate option because they were aware of the chances of genetic transmission—their first child is also afflicted with OI.

“After one failed PGD cycle, we decided to conceive our second child, and eventually a third, the old-fashioned way. Neither our second daughter nor our son inherited OI.”[5]

Dollar is an advocate of “narrative ethics” because of what she sees as the limitations of an approach she believes if focused exclusively on principles, a straw man she has created. She has been writing on reproductive technology for awhile, emphasizing this narrative ethic approach and even citing Rita Charon as someone who shares her belief that stories matter significantly in ethical discourse.[6]  At Her.meneutics, Dollar wrote,

“Traditional ethics uses a juridical process, in which experts consider the moral questions raised by a situation, explore those questions using established ethical principles, and render a judgment based on which principles are most applicable. Narrative ethics is less cut-and-dried. It allows room for amateurs to weigh and discuss the complexities of a particular person’s story, acknowledging that such factors as the person’s intentions and past experience are relevant.”

Not only has she created a false distinction between “traditional” ethics and the narrative approach, but she says that “traditional” ethics is too complicated for the “amateurs.” What she means by “traditional” ethics is what she perceives to be a cold-hearted principlism that never reaches into the life of the person entertaining the moral dilemma, whatever it may be. Moral imperialism, perhaps. What she is ignoring is that Christian ethics can be informed by scripture in both the content and method of delivery (because doing good theology isn’t just about moral correctness, but ministry to the whole person which involves listening). This, however, doesn’t preclude the responsibility to, when the situation demands, simply state that some of our moral choices are completely misguided and morally unadvisable.

In the comments on her piece at Her.meneutics, she indicates that taking a position on the moral status of the embryo is a “deliberate omission.” She says “But the moral status of embryos is, for me, not the central issue with reproductive technology, and I’ve observed that a focus on this one issue often blinds people to other concerns that are equally or more troubling.” Apart from the fact that this is an excellent point—that there are other troubling issues related to reproductive technology, it is impossible to agree that anything could be more troubling than what the industry (and those participating in it) is doing to the smallest of our kind. Only the exploitation of young women, risking their life, health, and fertility in order to harvest their eggs, can compare to the risk to and destruction of embryos. Can there possibly be concerns in reproductive technology greater than the protections of innocent human life? Indeed, she easily is placing the other values learned through “ethical discourse” as greater in importance than those concerned with the human life and dignity.

(If the Her.meneutics piece I’m linking to in this article is your only knowledge of Dollar’s views and you wonder if I’m taking her out of context, I challenge you to read more of her writings here.)

In the same piece (in the comments), she continues to defend her position on the primacy of narrative ethics over the straw man she created.

“But my experience has been that, when we raise ethical concerns with repro tech in a way that honors people’s experiences, recognizes diversity of theological interpretation, and doesn’t rest solely on one principle (such as embryos or choice), people are actually quite open to discussing these very hard and complex issues.”

When I first read this, I thought perhaps she was building a case for an open door to conversation that might eventually lead the person, with some gentle prompting, to make decisions in accordance with a high view of the embryo. And if she hadn’t written elsewhere that she is a proponent of abortion rights, I might still be generous in my understanding of this statement.

Also note that in order for ethical discourse to ensue, she calls us to adopt more of the Charon/Engelhardt model that calls us to give respect to or “recognizes diversity of theological interpretation.” Recognize is an interesting term here, because she’s talking more about seeing it. Narrow theological commitments are going to produce principles. Theologies with a lower view of scripture, a skewed sense of authority and a distorted view of humanity will produce a more “open-minded” approach to ethics that will allow the patient to not necessarily discover moral truth, but actually invent it. Charon and Engelhardt are disinterested in the imposition of values in a pluralistic context, and it appears Dollar has the same problem in a theologically diverse context.

But Dollar rejects this assessment.  She states,

“But there’s a problem with focusing exclusively on our and others’ stories: Humans are prone to self-absorption, self-pity, and a tunnel vision that puts our own pain, problems, and desire for happiness front and center. We are all too capable of justifying poor decisions and bending or obscuring the truth to suit our needs. In short, we are all sinful and overly caught up in the self.

So practicing narrative ethics does not mean that anything goes, that people have unlimited freedom to pursue whatever they want in isolation from moral, cultural, and emotional consequences. Rather, practicing narrative ethics means that we give weight to the myriad and significant circumstances that lead people to make ethically fraught decisions, and allow people’s stories to influence our dialogue and our language.”

The question remains, how much weight is to be given to individual circumstances? With the theological flexibility she insists upon as well as her own views on abortion rights and her own unqualified use of pre-implantation genetic diagnosis, it seems that the moral principles she’s willing to embrace are similar to those of Charon and Engelhardt, those that belong to the individual.

While God sent his son to pay the debt for our own sin, each of us entered into his story of redemption. But even within the story, God has provided moral guard rails, principles, that help us to become more like him and even protect us from the every day consequences of sin. The narrative ethics of Ellen Painter Dollar appear to be more interested in the experience of the story rather than the moral of the story.

At one point in my own life, I was seduced by the idea that maybe my views represented the truest form of feminism. After all, my view of humanity is one that embraces ontological gender equality. There is no qualitative difference between men and women and God’s love isn’t gender specific in application. Of course, my position as a complementarian is the cause for colleagues and acquaintances to wonder how I could actually claim the feminist moniker, because no one could possibly hold that there are different roles for the sexes while still holding a strong view on equality. But if complementarianism feels like inequality, it’s because feelings are the barometer.

As a seminary grad, I was proud to say I could play with the “big boys” in the world of evangelical theology. While many of my male peers in seminary were primarily focused on getting into the field to pastor without much concern for their grades, my desire and ability to excel academically proved that I was far from intellectually deficient. My appreciation for the authority of God and Scripture, however, set me apart from first wave feminist Elizabeth Cady Stanton who struggled with the idea spiritual authority to the point of believing that the Bible was the primary cause of the subjugation of women. This sad legacy from the first wave of feminism gets little acknowledgement from any kind of feminist today but certainly deserves bold rejection.

My claim to feminism also depended on my unapologetic pro-life stance with derivative positions against the use of IVF, egg donation, surrogacy, etc. If women have ever been the target of objectification before, what the fertility industry is doing at the risk of women’s health is sinister and hardly pro-woman because each year billions of dollars are made on the backs of financially and emotionally vulnerable women. The irony of it all is that the fertility industry finds its justification through the cultural legacy of secular feminism. If women had not been encouraged to aspire to career before or in place of family, or if women had not come to embrace the new concept of family without father, likely science would not have had the market motivation to provide for every possible situation of childlessness (at this point, not necessarily infertility). Certainly rejecting anything harmful to women in any manner makes me a “true” feminist.

After seeing the recent discussions on the rise of “evangelical feminism,” I have finally concluded that evangelical women are being taken for a ride in this conversation on who is the true feminist. To take cultural ownership of the term “feminist” seems to suggest that secular feminism has been disarmed and left powerless. Maybe this is some of what’s going on—women are wising up and finding the virtues of secular feminism really aren’t so virtuous after all. But perhaps in this conversation there’s been too much emphasis on “feminist” and not enough on “evangelical.” There is a sense of credibility with culture tied to who actually has the most right to the term “feminist,” but that plays into the hand of secular culture entirely. While the gospel-centered ministry of the church cares about conversations with culture, we ought not actively make secular culture more alluring through our dependence on language and definitions rooted in secularism.

While I don’t know anything about the spiritual lives of Bachman or Palin, I am pretty sure they are Christian based on things they have said or I have heard said about them. Whether they claim to be “evangelical feminists” is also unclear to me. But they are merely a blip in history and the course of women’s lives is not best impacted by the best representations of feminism, but rather the best representations of Christianity. I’m not sure that Bachman or Palin are the best representatives of either, but I do know that evangelicalism with a respect for the authority of scripture is the best there is to offer to any woman.

As written by John Calvin, we can embrace the view that truth is to be found among believers and nonbelievers alike. In his Commentary on Titus, Calvin wrote “All truth is from God; and consequently, if wicked men have said anything that is true and just, we ought not to reject it; for it has come from God.” Notice that his emphasis is not on the bearers of truth but on the source of truth. The point I am raising has nothing to do with the desire to reject true statements from unbelievers, or unbelievers embracing true statements from those who are expressly Christian. Having been created in the image of God, being the recipients of God’s common grace, we can all know that a square has four sides, the sky is blue and that the killing of innocents is wrong. Accounting for how we know each of these to be true is the challenge. One might argue that we know these things empirically. We can observe that a square has four sides and that they sky is blue. But where does the assumption of reason find its source? It gets a bit murky with the sky—how do we account for blue? And while I’m grateful believers and unbelievers can agree that the taking of innocent human life is wrong, without a basis for this knowledge, this is a position can turn on a dime. God’s truth is always under the threat of attack and distortion.

In response to my recent article, When an Oasis is Really a Mirage, one individual commented about the work of Pomegranate Place, that “We believe that all truth is God’s truth, and that all women have truth and wisdom to share. We listen intently and acknowledge the good we see in others and in our world.” There is nothing to argue with in this statement, except to say it is insufficient for truly reaching into lives of anyone. Certainly, in the course of ministry it makes sense to build bridges and create opportunities for the truth of Christ to eventually be presented. Paul modeled for us in his conversation with the Athenians at the Areopagus, ultimately answering for them the identity of their Unknown God (Acts 17). Paul could have left them with the limited truths that they understood, but he knew the insufficiency of this knowledge. When the goal is spiritual care to any degree, leaving Christ out of the conversation is never an option.

So what assistance is it in ministry to perpetuate the understanding that “all truth is God’s truth?” As the example in Act 17 proves, it can be helpful. But to use it as the reason to avoid any proclamation of Christ is erroneous. Of course, all truth is God’s truth, but without any acknowledgement of the source of truth, not only do the worldview divisions remain intact, but the contention of “God” remains ambiguous at best. Ironically, the assertion of “all truth is God’s truth” creates more questions than answers.

if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. (Romans 10:9 ESV)

But this Good News is not always received as such. All who reject the gospel do so because they have some other explanation for ultimate reality. But there are those who, in the name of spirituality, reimage the gospel to make it fit a particular moral view of earthly living. Redemption in this sense takes on the form of compassion in the name of neighbor love, but that’s as far as it goes. This essentially describes the social gospel, a public ethic concerned specifically with justice and generosity. The social gospel usually finds its basis in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 6) and other famed passages of scripture that reflect on peace, justice, and generosity toward others. Unfortunately, these passages of scripture are taken out of their original context and presented to both church and culture without reference to the Author of our salvation. The renowned quote attributed to St. Francis of Assisi sums up well the social gospel paradigm: “Share the gospel, use words if necessary.”

Imagine if those involved in the movement to end world hunger were instructed to “use food if necessary” or those seeking to end homelessness were instructed to “use shelter if necessary.” Likely you would think these directives are ridiculous. So why are words optional for the gospel? We should never find ourselves speechless when it comes to the gospel. Even further, we should always be prepared to respond with the words of the apostle Paul, “How are they to hear without someone preaching?” (Romans 10:14) In a social gospel/social justice paradigm, words are only incidental to the tangible displays of kindness and generosity, seemingly sourced in the finiteness of the human will.

Before going any further, let me be clear that the expected expression of the Christian worldview is of words and works. Ours is not a gospel without tangible mercies poured out on those in need, we are called to impact hearts, minds and lives. The book of James specifically reminds us any other practice is a dead faith. But conversely, a gospel with works and no message of faith and repentance is a sham.

Some try to reimage the gospel in the name of Christianity, holding that a truly loving God demonstrates love, not through the sacrifice of his Son but through the sacrifice of truth. This is expressed by God through intellectual generosity in the form of tolerance for religious and moral diversity. By appealing to arguments of Jesus’ marginalization during his public ministry, they seek to accommodate the “marginalized” of our time, a hermeneutical strategy instituted by churches that, for example, promote themselves as “queer inclusive.” Since Jesus was excluded from the ranks of general public acceptance, those with a moral perspective outside the moral schema of biblical Christianity claim to identify more closely with Jesus, and therefore, promote this gospel of radical inclusion. Theirs is a “gospel” concerned with an understanding of redemption that has little to do with eternity but encourages men and women to do what is right “in [their] own eyes” (Judges 21:25).The Jesus that accompanies this gospel would want to mingle with sinners simply for the sake of mingling with sinners without any eternal ulterior motives. He has no desire to challenge them to pursue holiness and experience renewal in His image. With this sort of pandering, this Jesus could make a successful run for office. Sadly, this Jesus does not call anyone to repentance and makes a mockery of the cross. This is a reimaged Jesus not found in the pages of scripture.

The truth is the Good News of scripture actually weeds out religious and moral diversity. His children are all brought, through justification and then the process of sanctification within God’s holy parameters. God’s character is the determiner of all that is good, so to tamper with the meaning and application of the gospel is ultimately to reimage the character of God according to fallen human specifications. The problem is, who wants to worship a god created in the image of fallen man, ultimately unworthy of worship?

In the recent book, Taking Flight: Reclaiming the Female Half of God’s Image through Advocacy and Renewal, contributor Linda Mader writes that

Jesus’ life exemplified unconditional inclusion, willing submission, humble service, and self-sacrificial love. His life demonstrated the way of the kingdom, not only with miraculous signs, but also with radical inclusion of those at the margins of society. (p. 18)

This raises several critical questions: Who are those on the margins of society? Is she referring to inclusion without expectation for change? While this book is asking the questions in the context of women’s leadership in the church, there are others “at the margins of society” clearly in mind for this “radical inclusion.” This book provides arguments for women’s leadership argued primarily from a cultural standpoint. From here, arguments for all kinds of positions can be made.

Christians—and those that claim to be—often find themselves attracted to the idea of religious and moral diversity because they have a romanticized view of God’s truth rooted in a frail understanding of his love. Because he is a loving God, they wonder how someone not lucky enough to be raised in a Christian culture could go to hell. Given the tendency to want to save God from his own character flaws, inclusivist practices are developed to make God appear more compassionate—the source of the social gospel—but without any sense of the spiritual damage being inflicted.

The Gospel was never intended to conform to our expectations; it is a message of unparalleled love that provides a source of hope in this life and the next—on God’s terms. The Gospel is about the cause of Christ, his work in us to make us presentable to the most holy God. We are called to renewal and to be conformed to the image of Christ. This requires a spiritual change, but what makes this radical is that the gospel anticipates changes in how we live—a radical exclusion of our former ways of living. Jesus wants us to come, but then to go and sin no more.

On a larger scale in our contemporary context, women are seeking other women’s voices to speak wisdom and insight into their lives. Though we don’t endorse them, this is why organizations like NOW and other feminist student organizations continue to make such an impact on younger, college-age women. It isn’t necessarily because these women are open to their ideologies from the start, but these organizations present themselves as a resource to fill the emotional, intellectual, and professional needs of women at this particular stage in their life, no matter the faulty philosophy they seek to advance. This is one of the reasons I started The Center for Women of Faith in Culture, and since its founding I’ve had the blessing, from a biblical worldview, to speak into the lives of women across the country on a wide range of issues including marriage, family, and career to questions in bioethics and theology. Recently, however, I’ve been disappointed to learn of a women’s center in Denver that could have a similar influence on the lives of women in their vicinity, being a source for wisdom from a Christian worldview, explicit or implicit. After all, their founder at the helm professes to be a Christian and has earned a Christian studies degree at a top-notch evangelical seminary. However, while receiving endorsements from other evangelical entities, this particular organization has opted for a pluralistic approach in its mission to women.

Allow me to introduce you to Pomegranate Place. Pomegranate Place is located in Denver, Colorado and is self-described as an “oasis for women.” From their website:

Everything we do at Pomegranate Place flows from our core values of compassion, justice, freedom and transcendence. We believe that women who embrace these core values and put into practice the character strengths associated with them, will live happier, more meaningful lives, and ultimately discover and live out the purposes for which they were created. We don’t always have control over what hand we are dealt in life. We can, however, choose how we respond. It is in the little choices that we make each day that our character develops and we move toward becoming all that we can be. We hope to encourage each other to make wise choices.

This doesn’t seem terribly alarming. In fact, Pomegranate Place looks like the kind of organization that could be a healthy resource for women all over the Denver area. Currently, resources available are in the form of classes and events led by professional women with varying backgrounds including those trained in counseling, psychology and religious studies. Beware, however, because looks can be deceiving. What appears to be an oasis for women may actually be a mirage. A closer examination reveals its proactive pluralistic agenda. As stated on their website, this is made abundantly clear—Pomegranate Place seeks to “embrace and honor diversity of views. We will celebrate differences and look with deep curiosity to respect and learn from one another.” [1]

Vaun Swanson is the founder and “catalyst” behind Pomegranate Place. To be clear, a catalyst is an agent that provokes or speeds significant change or action. Her biography describes her as having “served in helping professions for the past 30 years” and that she “recognizes both the challenges women face and the potential they have for changing our world for the better.” Swanson was been inspired “by women in history, awakened by sisters in third-world countries, and grateful for awesome mentors” so through Pomegranate Place, “she offers opportunities for women to connect and grow.”

A noble vision, I resonate with the desire to help women flourish in today’s world—spiritually, intellectually and professionally. I believe this same desire may be what motivated FullFill magazine to interview Swanson in their April 2011 issue, promoting Pomegranate Place and Swanson’s work as its leader. If you are unfamiliar with FullFill, this is an evangelical women’s magazine whose alliances include MOPS, Christian Leadership Alliance, Stonecroft Ministries, Moms In Touch International and Synergy. I’m not convinced at this point that Swanson’s work at Pomegranate Place was properly vetted by the editors at FullFill, and if this is indeed the case, that would explain why an organization that so prominently promotes pagan spirituality would be given that kind of real estate in an evangelical women’s publication. So what did Swanson tell Fullfill? The interview contained very little about Pomegranate Place itself and more about Swanson’s role as a leader, but she was asked “What challenges you as the founder and leader of Pomegranate Place?” She responded:

One of the most unexpected challenges has been a handful of neighbors and the city’s zoning and building codes. I know that sounds crazy, but it has consumed a tremendous amount of time and energy and the issues are still not resolved. What we are doing here does not fit neatly into any of the categories the city has on its books. We also don’t fit neatly into “faith-based” or “secular” categories. All women are welcome at Pomegranate Place and while Christian faith is not a prerequisite for teaching classes or leading, we hold a Judeo-Christian spirituality in our holistic approach to empowering women and helping them find their purpose in life. Fleshing this out from day to day can be challenging and requires a lot of conversations that go to the heart of women’s worldviews.

What exactly is a Judeo-Christian spirituality? She fails to explain further in the article and the only other specific reference to Pomegranate Place occurs at the end of the piece where she explains how she sees God at work:

There is a warm, calming, welcoming feeling that people get when they walk in the front door. Almost everyone mentions it. I believe it is the Spirit of God in this place. The conversations here are incredible. There are no taboo topics and women readily open up to share their lives and their struggles. I see Christian women laughing with neo-pagan women. Young lesbian women partner with older married women to raise funds for women in the Congo. A 78-year old woman reads her own poetry out loud for the first time. Hearts are softened, hope is renewed, understanding is fostered, hurts are healed and God is definitely at work here!

If a “Judeo-Christian spirituality” implies a Judeo-Christian ethic, then certainly this last paragraph of the interview shows kindness and generosity occurring in a pluralistic environment—as it should—though this version of spirituality is unable to account for the foundations for kindness and generosity. The core of biblical Christianity is what accounts for both the ability and desire to live as Jesus lived, and outside of Christianity individuals are left trying to reconcile the bits and pieces of various worldviews which are ultimately irreconcilable. For Pomegranate Place, there is nothing vague about their spiritual practices including the fact that they lack coherence with biblical Christianity.

No indication is given at the Pomegranate Place website that the women who enter into their presence will ever be presented with the gospel, or at the very least with a worldview outlook consistent with biblical Christianity. How can we know this? As stated in the Fullfill interview, Swanson indicates that the Christian faith “is not a prerequisite for teaching classes or leading.” So who are those that lead? What is their background?

The “Guiding Council” at Pomegranate Place is composed of women from a variety of professional backgrounds and traditions. They include IT professionals, business women, college professors, clergy (of unknown tradition), life coaches, therapists, and those with theological degrees. With all of this collective wisdom, one of the council’s primary responsibilities is the vetting of the “Affiliate Guides.” These Affiliate Guides serve the vision of Pomegranate Place by making their services available to women who seek them out. Who are they? Let’s look at a couple.

“Sue Burdette is a Certified Teacher of the Enneagram in the Narrative Tradition. She was introduced to the Enneagram 16 years ago and has been a student ever since. The Enneagram is a system of nine personality types describing nine distinct ways of viewing and interacting in the world. Sue has a heart felt desire to share the wisdom of the Enneagram so that others might benefit from this dynamic yet practical tool that can have a profound effect on the way we live our lives.”[2]

But the enneagram is certainly not considered part and parcel of traditional biblical Christianity and, in fact, is viewed entirely counter to it.

The roots of the enneagram can be traced to two men: George Gurdjieff and Oscar Ichazo. Both men were involved in occultic pursuits. Guurdjiieff learned of the enneagram from a sect of Sufis (mystical Islam). The Sufis used the enneagram for numerological divination. Oscar Ichazo later developed a personality theory around the enneagram and added it.

Ichazo was deeply involved in psychedelic drugs, shamanism, yoga, even studying mysticism in India and Tibet. Ichazo has received instructions from a higher entity called Metatron and members of his group are guided by an interior master, the Green Qu’Tub.

Another leading figure in the enneagram movement was psychiatrist Claudio Naranjo, associated with theNew Age experimental Esalen Institute.

There are many myths associated with the enneagram. One myth has to do with the alleged antiquity of the program when it actually dates in the 1960′s. Another is that it is scientific. Like many New Agepractices, its leaders are always trying to assign scientific credentials, but none exists.[3]

“Lizanne Corbit M.A. Lizanne has been in private practice as a psychotherapist since 1990. She creates tranformative [sic] space and sacred containers for women to be met as individuals or as they gather in community for the purposes of birthing their hidden potential, deepening their journeys, embodying their truth and celebrating their “instatus nascendi” [sic] jewels hidden with in matter. Described as a “midwife to the spirit” Lizanne’s compassionate and creative approaches help women know, own and claim their deepest essential selves and live with their full presence in the world.”

Lizanne’s personal website also indicates that included in her retreat themes is “Altered States & Shamanic Journeying.”[4] To better understand her worldview one needs to better understand what she means by this particular retreat theme. Here is a brief explanation of shamanism and what Corbit is bringing with her to Pomegranate Place.

In shamanism everything has a spirit (animism) and is alive, including rocks, clouds, trees, rivers, as well as animals and people. This means that all things that have spirits are equal with us. These spirits are everywhere, permeate our world, and can affect our lives. Shamans use altered states of consciousness to contact spirits which can be either good or bad in order to learn the future, make decisions, or attempt healings of people who might be oppressed by bad spirits. Shamanism uses spirit guides, contacting these guides in order to have them direct your life. Shamans use astral projection, where the spirit of a person leaves the body and travels into the spirit world, and various means of predicting the future such as throwing bones.[5]

Either the vetting system of Pomegranate Place has failed or the organization simply chooses to draw no lines in terms of what ought to be offered to women searching for encouragement in this complex world. Unimportant to their vision is consideration for the truth of any particular spiritual path. While this may seem to be a noble, generous approach to engaging the women in their community, it actually has another unintended consequence—the idea that no worldview makes any real difference in the every day lives of women. As Christians, we know this to be patently false.

Ironically, while women who venture through the doors of Pomegranate Place are in search of something, the expectation is that they are actually discerning enough to know what resources at Pomegranate Place they may or may not want to entertain.

Pomegranate Place, while feeling confident about its Affiliate Guides, is not responsible for issues that may arise in fulfilling their obligation to you. We trust in your ability to make wise decisions in choosing services and methods for your development and also in taking responsibility for those choices.

So the women seeking the support of Pomegranate Place need to at least have the means to discern properly whose services they should seek? What role does Pomegranate Place really then have as a resource to the women of Denver?

Denver Seminary has also lent their support to the work and mission of Pomegranate Place. On their homepage you can view the video featuring Pomegranate Place founder, Vaun Swanson (and Denver Seminary grad), discussing the purposes of Pomegranate Place as it is situated in the heart of Denver. As of today, May 19^th, 2011, this video is still posted, but you can also view it here. Why Denver Seminary, historically a solid evangelical academic institution, chooses to give voice to an organization with pluralistic intentions, where the gospel will likely never penetrate the life of a single woman, is beyond all understanding.

At the recent God, Faith & Culture women’s conference, one of the values we discussed is the importance of churches vetting all of the materials being utilized in the context of women’s ministry, because not for one moment do we want to give a platform to teachings that somehow compromise scripture. This is a value we urge every Christian to adopt, and is why today we urge Christians to take another look at any endorsement offered for the work of Pomegranate Place. The Center for Women of Faith in Culture embraces all positive efforts in reaching into women’s lives in both church and culture. But when the line is crossed in embracing other worldview perspectives with eyes wide open, we believe the core of biblical Christianity has been abandoned and no good can come from this.

When an Oasis is Really a Mirage (PDF)

At approximately 8:40 am on Friday, May 13^th, the Metra train I was riding struck a dump truck carrying a load of concrete that had managed to navigate onto the tracks at the very instant we were passing through the intersection in the city of Des Plaines, the train going roughly 50 mph. No horn, no breaking to avoid impact—it was as much a surprise to the train engineer as it was to the passengers. The impact was followed immediately by an explosion and fire pouring up through the train car vestibule floor. During these first seconds after impact, the train engineer in the lead car where I sat was struggling to gain control, the train violently lurching and jumping while trying to remain upright. From my vantage point—first seat in the upper deck by a southern facing window—my thoughts were in multiple directions with zero clarity. There was the real and strong possibility that the train car would tip over onto the center track and dozens, if not hundreds, would be hurt or killed due to the derailing itself or even the threat of oncoming train traffic.
It was within the train vestibule where the flames were shooting upward, an area where people commonly stand as they await to exit upon arriving at their stop. Upon seeing the flames and experiencing the persistent and increasing turbulence associated with the impact and derailment, I wondered if the train was breaking apart and if that floor of the vestibule was simply gone—along with people. Were passengers being trampled by the train? Were the rest of us next? There was no sense of slowing down from my recollection, and smoke was filling the car. The smell of diesel engulfed the train, and the flames and the accompanying heat persisted for what seemed to be an eternity. It seemed like I was frozen in time. While unsure if we were even going to safely stop, all hopes of getting off the train were going up in flames—literally. The windows weren’t an option at this point because as I looked at them I remember thinking I didn’t know how to open them. I never felt more alone, even with at least a dozen people sitting behind me in the upper deck. Though there was screaming, I don’t remember myself screaming. At one instance, I do remember thinking that things were getting worse and hope for escape was unlikely.

When the train eventually came to a near stop and the fire in the vestibule subsided, we began to pour toward the exit. A young woman next to me kept repeating, “I gotta get off this train, I gotta get off this train.” My first coherent thought was, “yes, we all need to get off this train!” But fear overtook us again in the vestibule as the conductor, who I know as Greg, pleaded with us to not exit because, while a door was open, it faced another two sets of tracks. At the same time, he was struggling to open the door through which we would eventually exit. From what I recall, Greg and the other conductor whose name I regret not knowing had to use the full force of their bodies to open the doors as they were jammed shut from the impact. My heart sank knowing the great responsibility they were undertaking when their normal day usually involves taking tickets and, at worst, chasing down those who like to get a free ride.

After exiting, I immediately turned to look at the train to see the twisted metal that was the lead car and the second car completely blackened from the flames that had also poured into my car. The conductors now underneath the car with fire extinguishers, the reality of the miraculous set in and the heroic efforts of the Metra crew fully recognized.

At every moment during the accident I feared, not necessarily death, but the nature of death and suffering and the lives of so many others that might have been lost. I was overcome with my own desire for self-preservation and sickened by it as I encountered the young woman at the exit verbalizing her need to escape, her honest words simply verbalizing what we were all thinking. Thankfully, many were helping others exit the train cars through emergency exit windows and through doors as they were being opened and strangers were comforting strangers as we reached safety. I would love to say that I remember many people thanking God for the miracle that had just occurred, but while I heard many mentions of the miraculous, I don’t recall the miraculous being attributed to God.

Being in this accident revealed with greater significance two great truths: 1) God is the protector and sustainer of all things and it is indeed miraculous that no one on this train was killed, but our understanding of the miraculous needs to be redeemed. We need to avoid using the term ‘miracle’ in the generic sense we have become accustomed to. Even as Christians, I find that we sometimes resort to the language of the miraculous with the ability to avoid any mention of God, because we assume that for everyone the idea of the miraculous always alludes to God. The way our culture ascertains the idea of “miracles” seems to more accurately connote an unexplainable interruption of fate, a very impersonal, unforeseen blip within a set of circumstances. Luck. I believe what we can best understand about this incident is not so much that people escaped virtually unharmed (no life threatening injuries apart from the truck driver who did die), but that God prevented harm from reaching them. A miracle, from our perspective, should be viewed as a deliberate intervening of God into our situation. 2) Sin has so corrupted our most basic sensibilities that even when we are in life and death situations, the times it would be easiest to cry out to God for help, we simply struggle to let go of ourselves. The cliché that “there are no atheists in foxholes” doesn’t seem to apply any longer and I think this has much to do with our society’s entrance into a post-Christian era. As this relates to our cultural engagement, our conversations and arguments must be as saturated in prayer as much as they contain logical statements or appeals to emotions. There is no longer a predilection to belief in God and as a result the natural man is clearly more dependent on himself. As “spiritual man” we need to keep this in perspective.

Love Wins is a difficult read—not to imply it was written for an academic audience, certainly it was not. The portrait of God in scripture is a bit more complex than the picture that Bell has painted. Scripture communicates different senses of God’s will (perceptive & decretive), different senses of God’s love (general love for creation, special love for the elect), different types of God’s self-disclosure (general & special revelation), and the aspects of God’s personality that show him to be both just and merciful without moral compromise. Bell’s rendition of God appears to be flat, and that is what makes the book so difficult to read. What I mean is that Bell is very often unable to comprehend how it is that God is perfectly able to transcend human limitations of rationality and being. This is because his starting point appears to be that God is simplistic (not to be confused with the doctrine of divine simplicity) therefore there aren’t different senses of God’s love or God’s will. For example, since Scripture teaches that God desires for all men to be saved, Bell argues (through his use of question) that according to traditional views of heaven, hell and salvation, what God desires cannot be achieved.

There are those…who put it quite clearly: “We get one life to choose heaven or hell, and once we die, that’s it. One or the other, forever.” God in the end doesn’t get what God wants, it’s declared, because some will turn, repent, and believe, and others won’t. (p. 103)

He does not say who it is specifically that is declaring God doesn’t get what he wants, but clearly he is attributing this declaration to those who hold to an exclusivist viewpoint and that God “in the end doesn’t get what God wants” is a logical outcome of their view of salvation. If this is an overstated speculation, it is because Bell provides little in terms of footnotes or even in-text references, but I believe the whole book provides ample evidence to back up my claim. Bell’s statement serves as an excellent example of how many attempt to understand a passage of scripture, attempting to save God’s reputation by going beyond the biblical text to resolve perceived problems by subjecting them to the rationalized conclusions.

Is God our friend, our provider, our protector, our father—or is God the kind of judge who may in the end declare that we deserve to spend forever separated from our Father? (102)

That God must be this way or that way is a false dilemma and, if permitted to stand, makes vulnerable a host of other doctrines. If God cannot be friend, provider, protector and judge, certainly God would also struggle to be Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Again, this flattened view of God’s nature prevents him from embracing the God who revealed himself in scripture. He is challenged to let scripture speak for itself.

For any Christian who has ever engaged a skeptic, much of what Bell has written appears to be a validation of the questions they often pose, but seeing them asked by one who professes faith in Christ is a bit disorienting. With many of these questions, you can almost hear the whisper of ridicule: Christianity rooted in a literal interpretation of the Bible is foolishness. In example after example, Bell tries to force a resolution or rejection of the content with little, if any, theological engagement. He does address interpretive issues in terms heaven and hell, but many of the questions he poses do not hinge on the accuracy or inaccuracy of his understanding of those terms but whether the human mind can actually reconcile views of God and ultimate reality that, on the surface, seem to contradict.

So I have my own question: How is it that Bell can stand on the boundaries of Christianity and evaluate it through the eyes of young or unbelief? While it might seem noble to adopt this vantage point, helping young or unbelievers by trying to look at Scripture the way they do, I fear his methodology has backfired. Because his overall theology does not consistently take into account the mystery and majesty of God, Christianity can’t help but to look ridiculous. In this respect, he has conceded to the natural man that their perceptions of Christianity are correct –it is foolishness. What follows are examples that make this point:

Really? Gandhi’s in hell? He is? We have confirmation of this? Somebody knows this? Without a doubt? And that somebody decided to take on the responsibility of letting the rest of us know? Of all the billions of people who have ever lived, will only a select number “make it to a better place” and every single other person suffer in torment and punishment forever? Is this acceptable to God? Has God created millions of people over tens of thousands of years who are going to spend eternity in anguish? Can God do this, or even allow this, and still claim to be a loving God? Does God punish people for thousands of years with infinite, eternal torment for things they did in their few finite years of life? This doesn’t just raise disturbing questions about God; it raises questions about the beliefs themselves. Why them? (p. 88)

Lurking behind his effort to reframe the conversation on heaven and hell, Bell accomplishes a great deal more. Questions similar to these are often raised by unbelievers intending to impugn the internal consistency of Christianity by suggesting that our view of God is inherently flawed because it makes no sense that God would create humans only to destroy them. During the first reading of the book, I found myself waiting for Bell to say something like “its man’s sin that ultimately separates him from God.” That’s how many of us would respond to anyone else asking these same questions. Sadly, Bell never went there.

And whenever people claim that one group is in, saved, accepted by God, forgiven, enlightened, redeemed—and everybody else isn’t—why is it that those who make this claim are almost always part of the group that’s “in”? Have you ever heard people make claims about a select few being the chosen and then claim that they’re not part of that group? Several years ago I heard a woman tell about the funeral of her daughter’s friend, a high-school student who was killed in a car accident. Her daughter was asked by a Christian if the young man who had died was a Christian. She said that he told people he was an atheist. This person then said to her, “So there’s no hope then.” No hope? Is that the Christian message? “No hope”? Is that what Jesus offers the world? Is this the sacred calling of Christians—to announce that there’s no hope? (p. 3)

While I’m quite sure the scenario described here isn’t the best Christianity has to offer, it is hardly helpful to conflate this tasteless interaction with the exclusive claims of Christianity. This is a tactic of distraction used frequently by those set out invalidate Christianity, but Bell has validated the tactic and empowered those who use it by offering it up for his own use.

So is it true that the kind of person you are doesn’t ultimately matter, as long as you’ve said or prayed or believed the right things? If you truly believed that, and you were surrounded by Christians who believed that, then you wouldn’t have much motivation to do anything about the present suffering of the world, because you would believe you were going to leave someday and go somewhere else to be with Jesus. If this understanding of the good news of Jesus prevailed among Christians, the belief that Jesus’s message is about how to get somewhere else, you could possibly end up with a world in which millions of people were starving, thirsty, and poor; the earth was being exploited and polluted; disease and despair were everywhere; and Christians weren’t known for doing much about it. If it got bad enough, you might even have people rejecting Jesus because of how his followers lived. (p. 6)

Bell’s point here is a little lost. His suggestion is that if we really believe what he says we believe, we would be less focused on the needs of others. It’s a bit confusing what Bell is doing here, but his assertion is that people who are so other-wordly, awaiting their “evacuation” from this planet, have little motivation to help those in need. And while the world does have millions of people who are “starving, thirsty, and poor,” I am apt to recoil in defense, but I know Christians can always do better—I just don’t think that the failures of the Church have anything to do with belief in the realm of heaven.  Without saying it, Bell seems to be suggesting that one cannot hold a traditional view of heaven and also hold that it matters how we live on earth—another false dilemma.

“How can they hear without someone preaching to them?” And I wholeheartedly agree, but that raises another question. If our salvation, our future, our destiny is dependent on others bringing the message to us, teaching us, showing us—what happens if they don’t do their part? What if the missionary gets a flat tire? This raises another, far more disturbing question: Is your future in someone else’s hands? Which raises another question: Is someone else’s eternity resting in your hands? So is it not only that a person has to respond, pray, accept, believe, trust, confess, and do—but also that someone else has to act, teach, travel, organize, fund-raise, and build so that the person can know what to respond, pray, accept, believe, trust, confess, and do? (p. 179)

Here is a critical example of Bell agreeing with the natural man that Christianity is foolishness. The problem is, natural man can’t rightly critique spiritual matters, which is why he will miss (or dismiss) the theological category of providence. This raises for us very serious questions: is Bell’s conception of God so flat that his theology doesn’t allow for an all powerful God that can work out his plans his way? Is Bell’s God actually limited by the weaknesses of fallen creation, or at least their hindrances to travel?

Many people find Jesus compelling, but don’t follow him, because of the parts about “hell and torment and all that.” Somewhere along the way they were taught that the only option when it comes to Christian faith is to clearly declare that a few, committed Christians will “go to heaven” when they die and everyone else will not, the matter is settled at death, and that’s it. One place or the other, no looking back, no chance for a change of heart, make your bed now and lie in it … forever. Not all Christians have believed this, and you don’t have to believe it to be a Christian. The Christian faith is big enough, wide enough, and generous enough to handle that vast a range of perspectives. (p. 110)

This quote is the crux of his argument, not so much that we believe Bell’s way on heaven and hell (even though he wants us to), but that it ultimately does not matter what you believe because Christianity is “big enough” for all of our beliefs. The next question one might ask is, what about the deity of Christ? Bell would say he makes no compromise on this, and I believe him. But the deity of Christ has no relevance in the here and now if he need not be worshiped by the “good people” represented by various worldviews.

Then there is inclusivity. The kind that is open to all religions, the kind that trusts that good people will get in, that there is only one mountain, but it has many paths. This inclusivity assumes that as long as your heart is fine or your actions measure up, you’ll be okay. And then there is an exclusivity on the other side of inclusivity. This kind insists that Jesus is the way, but holds tightly to the assumption that the all-embracing, saving love of this particular Jesus the Christ will of course include all sorts of unexpected people from across the cultural spectrum. As soon as the door is opened to Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, and Baptists from Cleveland, many Christians become very uneasy, saying that then Jesus doesn’t matter anymore, the cross is irrelevant, it doesn’t matter what you believe, and so forth. Not true. Absolutely, unequivocally, unalterably not true. What Jesus does is declare that he, and he alone, is saving everybody. And then he leaves the door way, way open. Creating all sorts of possibilities. He is as narrow as himself and as wide as the universe. (p. 154)

With few words but packed with lots of meaning, Love Wins is not an easy read. This should not be recommended reading for young or unbelievers, not just because of what it says, but how it models a method of theological thinking that suspends the authority of scripture and replaces it with a rationalistic approach to biblical interpretation. Don’t underestimate the ability of this book to actually shape not just what people think, but how people think about God and man’s relationship to him.

Invited to St. George’s Anglican Church in Colorado Springs to teach women core Christian worldview content to launch their season of Lent with a renewed focus on the life of the mind, I came home with a longing for Lent and liturgy. As I prepared for the conference, I focused on ways to communicate that Lent is about orienting the whole life toward  sacrificial living, not simply a small sacrifice for a short season to launch diets or meet personal challenges. This I had always known, but as a generic-sort of Baptist, Lent is not a part of our calendar and, frankly, fairly easy to ignore. Prior to the conference, my new Anglican friends were reminding themselves that Lent is not just a time to remove something from their daily routine, but an opportunity for greater sacrifice by replacing one or more things with other things that will nourish them in the immediate and longterm. We all seemed to be on the same page…but in different books?

The richness of Lent and the Anglican liturgy was unmistakably rich, offering an opportunity for a deliberate reverence that was impossible to not be fully engaged in. I’m inspired to a new way of embracing my faith as I return to my life this week and to church on Sunday…with another perspective on worship and sacrifice.