Flatlander's Doxology

Music for Focus

2011-10-15T09:15:00.000-07:00

I have a couple playlists published on Spotify that I've been curating (and constantly updating) with "Work Sounds" music that I enjoy listening to when I need to focus.

I have eclectic taste, so these lists are a mix of music genres including ambient, world (Celtic, Middle Eastern, etc.), electronica, chant, baroque, 20th century minimalism and more. I recently updated the playlists with artist recommendations made by fellow Lifehackers.

FOCUS MIX RADIO

This is my master list of music for focus. I call it "Radio" because the playlist is huge and will continue to grow indefinitely (at over a day's worth of music right now). Whenever I find (or someone recommends) a new artist that fits this playlist, I add some of the artists music to this playlist. Because of the size of this playlist, it's not one you want to make available offline (for paid users), but it's great if you're online. Also, I think it is nice resource to discover artists who make music that is good for listening when you need to focus.

FOCUS MIX SOUNDTRACK

This is basically an abridged version of the Focus Mix Radio better suited for offline availability. Right now it consists of a few tracks from each of the artists on the Focus Mix Radio. It's currently about 5 hours worth of music, but I'm in the process of paring it down to about half that length.

If you have any recommendations of artists you like to listen to, let me know and I'll check it out!

A rabbi on being angry with God

2011-02-17T12:12:00.000-08:00

150 years before the holocaust, Rabbi Levi Yitzchak of Berditchev taught that God can be found even in anger.

On Yom Kippur, a tailor sought forgiveness from the great rabbi for having talked disrespectfully to God. The tailor told him:

“I declared to God: you wish for me to repent of my sins, but I have committed only minor offenses. But you O LORD have committed grievous sins: You have taken babies from their mothers and mothers from their babies. Let’s call it even: if you will forgive me, I will forgive you."

Said the Rabbi, “Why did you let God off so easily? With that argument, you could have forced him to redeem all of Israel.”

(Adapted from documentary on Hasidism in America, and The Genesis of Justice by Alan M. Dershowitz)

Celtic Poets

2010-12-13T08:34:00.001-08:00

Here is a little excerpt from Celtic Myths and Legends (p. 119)that I thought was interesting about the history of Celtic poets.

To be the subject of a curse from a poet is a terrible thing. In ancient times, the poet had high status at the king's court and could argue with the High King himself. Everyone sought the poet's praise and dreaded his satire. In the Annals of Ulster it is recorded that, in the year ad 1024, the chief poet of Ireland, Cuan Ua Lothchain, was unlawfully killed in Theba. As he lay dying, he uttered the poet's curse, the firt filed they called it, and the bodies of his murderers were said to have rotted within the hours. To challenge a poet or displease him or her - for there were banfili, women poets, equal with men in Ireland in those days - would be like playing dice with fate.

The poet's curse was not something to be chanced lightly. The Annals of Connacht record that, in the year ad 1414, John Stanley, the English viceroy, sent to rule in Ireland, died from a poet's curse.

When Tomas O Criomththain (1856-1937) wrote his best-selling autobiography An tOilednach (The Islandman) he wrote that he would abandon his day's work to go to listen to the island poet, for fear of being satirised and cursed by him.

The fear of the poet's curse caused High Kings and kings to promise the poet anything that was demanded of them to avoid the curse.

God’s Graces and Parking Places

2010-11-04T05:42:00.001-07:00

Although I would consider myself a “spiritual person,” I am admittedly one of those who have an allergic reaction when people try to “spiritualize” everything – particularly every good thing – by attributing it to God’s good grace.

You know, stuff like:

“God helped my team to win the game.”

“By God’s grace, my candidate or party won the election.”

“God just gave me the greatest parking place.”

…and so on.

I just find it a little difficult to comprehend why God would take special time aside to open up that parking place when there are millions of people dying every day from starvation, disease, natural disasters, etc.

And I know I’m not the only person who thinks this way. One of my Facebook friends recently updated his status with:

“…thinks we should stop confusing good luck with God's grace. God isn't the reason you found that awesome parking space.”

Normally, I guess I’d rank among the 15 other people who “Liked” his status. I certainly know where he’s coming from, and I think that he is touching on valid point. However, I’ve been pondering this subject for a couple weeks now, and my view on this was challenged – yes, in the parking lot!

I was going to a coffee shop the other day, and was a little concerned about whether or not I’d get a parking spot since it was a busy time of day, and it doesn’t have the greatest parking space available. I’m new to this particular coffee shop, and wasn’t sure where to park if there were no spaces. Sure enough, when I pulled into the parking lot, all the spots were taken.

Fortunately, someone was pulling out of a spot just as I was pulling in. I pulled into my spot, and despite myself, I was washed over in a sense of thankfulness. I wasn’t sure what to do with that. While I seriously doubt that God took special energy to provide me this parking place, I couldn’t help but to want to thank God for it nevertheless. So I did.

My friend’s Facebook status prompted me to think about this some more. Something about it didn’t seem to be right about the statement, and it kind of bothered me that so many people seemed to be jumping on board, making smug comments criticizing people who “confuse good luck with God’s grace” in this way. And yet, to an extent, I agree with them.

How do I make sense of that? How can God be responsible for things like this (and thus worthy of receiving my thanks), yet without taking special effort aside to make this particular good thing happen?

Grace: Common vs. Special

I think that this might be best explained through the helpful distinction theologians (especially in the Reformed tradition) have made between “common” and “special” grace.

“Common grace” can be explained as the grace of God that extends to everyone, indiscriminately. In the Sermon on the Mount, for example, Jesus exhorts his followers to be like God who “causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous” (Matt 5:25). You might say that common grace is that grace of God that was imbued and inherent within the framework of Creation itself.

In contrast, “special grace” is a way of describing those particular times when God seems to do something “special," when God graces his Creation in a way that goes above and beyond the norm (i.e. “common grace”). The best example of this in Christian theology is the special gift of God given to us in the person of Jesus Christ.

I think this distinction between “special” and “common” grace is an extremely helpful way to resolve many tensions that we face when trying to explain how God interacts with Creation.

So if I were to refine the theological precision of my friend’s Facebook status, it might read something like:

“…thinks we should stop confusing good luck with God's special grace; God didn’t interrupt the natural order of things just so that you could find that awesome parking space.”

I think that’s probably what he was trying to say anyway. I appreciate that he is prodding his friends to reconsider the way they understand God’s interactions in their daily lives.

And yet, there is something in me that thinks it would be wrong to tell everyone that they are ignorant for thanking God for that awesome parking place (or whatever). Seems that there at least some sense in which, as the song from Godspell (and James 1:17) teaches us:

“All good gifts around us
Are sent from Heaven above;”

I’d say, yes.

“So thank the Lord, thank the Lord, for all his love…”

Photo by Russell Heiman, used under Creative Commons license.

Game On

2010-10-26T03:29:00.000-07:00

So here I go again. Trying to start blogging again...

I don't know how many times I've tried, posted a few things, and then nada.

FAIL.

There's many reasons why I fail. Hmmm... maybe that's something to write about?

Yes.

I was at a writer's retreat earlier this month. It was an amazing experience, but the entire time I kind of felt like I didn't belong or something. At first, I thought that the feeling was that of being a poser. But then I decided that wasn't it. I do write. I love to write – even when it kills me. And every now and then I actually write something worth reading. So maybe I can consider myself something of a writer.

I decided this feeling of inadequacy was coming from somewhere else. Even if I call myself a writer, the fact remains: writing is a tremendous struggle for me. I love it, and I hate it. Sometimes through writing, I find myself. But sometimes I lose myself. And I seldom know which will happen when I start pounding those keys.

I've heard many writers talk about how slow the writing process is for them. I doubt they really know what "slow" is.

At the retreat, I participated in an incredible non-fiction writing workshop with a group of incredible writers. We were supposed to come having read a sample of everyone's work. Part of the time, we discussed each other's work. Every now and then we would do writing exercises:

"For the next seven minutes, write something that evokes these words: peace, envy, falling in love, etc."

While everyone else was busily writing witty, profound, and wonderful things in their notebooks, I just sat there for about five minutes with a look of blank horror on my face. Seven minutes!? Yeah... sure. Okay... Hmm... words... words... evoke those words... umm.... "Peace." Yeah. That one. hmm....

Before we were told to stop, I had written all of,

"And in that moment, it was as though the cracks of --"

FAIL.

I finally decided that this feeling of inadequacy was probably best described as that which must be felt by a guy in a wheelchair just learning to play basketball with a bunch of others on a court in which he is the only person who hasn't played varsity. I'm not saying that to sound funny, or to be self-deprecatory. And I'm certainly not saying that to suggest that people in wheelchairs can't play basketball; I have seen many that do, and are so good at it that the sight is something truly sublime. But I don't think anyone in a wheelchair would deny that they face obstacles that others don't. In fact, those obstacles are part of what makes what they do so beautiful.

So I guess that's what I'm saying: I think that I face some obstacles as a writer that most people don't.

My senior year in college, I was diagnosed with several lovely "disorders," after which I began working with the Office of Learning Accommodations both in my undergraduate and graduate education. I was afforded "accommodations" under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). So I guess you could say that in a sense, I am a disabled writer. At least I am according to the psychologist.

But that's the weird thing about my "disorders": they aren't anything as tangible as something like the visually or physically impaired. Which just leaves me wondering, "Am I really 'disabled' in this sense? Or am I just stupid? Or lazy? Or both?" I often took advantage of those learning accommodations I was afforded in school. And yet, it was probably just as often that I didn't. Because I felt like I didn't deserve them. I felt like I was cheating or something.

Who knows? Maybe one day something will finally click. Maybe one day, some piece of the puzzle will fall into place, and I will finally be "normal."

I hope so.

*adds missing puzzle piece to Amazon wish list*

Until then... here I go again, limping my way into the blogosphere and onto the court.

Hmm….

Game on.

On "Changing the World"

2009-08-18T02:57:00.001-07:00

In our artist small-group Monday night, we were discussing Andy Crouch's book Culture Making: Rediscovering Our Creative Calling. Afterwards, as I was working on an essay for a class on cross-cultural missions, I tried to summarize a little bit of how I perceive culture, in the process of cultural transformation.

We, myself included, speak a lot about "changing the world" and/or "transforming culture." However, it is perhaps more precise to speak of this cultural engagement as the participation of the Church in the evolution of its broader culture.

Cultures are always evolving. It is a mistake to think of culture as something that is static, and in need of being transformed from one static shape to another static shape. Rather, any given culture is in a continual process of evolution.

As such, it is not so much a matter of “culture being in need of transformation” as much as it is a matter of in which direction an already-transforming culture is going to evolve.

There is a sense in which everyone -- whether Christian or not -- is "on mission" to their own culture. This is essentially the human vocation: to cultivate and create culture, influencing it in the direction they see most fitting.

The Christian church is only one of many collective voices who seek to exert influence in this way. Thus for the Church to be "on mission” to its culture is essentially to say that it is participating in that culture's evolution. Likewise, for a Christian to be "on mission" to her culture is essentially to say that she is carrying out her calling, her vocation as a human being.

Also, the reality needs to set in that it is not only we who are influencing culture; we are ourselves being influenced and transformed by our culture in ways we may not even be aware. And while this may be inevitable, it is not necessarily deplorable. In fact, I would suggest that along with seeking to influence our culture for Christ, we should also be seeking to find the fingerprints of Christ that already exist within our culture, and open ourselves to being shaped by that influence instead of another.

Technorati Tags: Culture making,Andy Crouch,transforming culture,changing the world,missions

"In the Waiting": a sermon on Ps 13 (audio)

2009-05-15T13:12:00.001-07:00

This is an audio version of a sermon I did on Psalm 13, "In the Waiting," which will be published in the next issue of the Truett Journal of Church and Mission.

(Photography: "A Magazine in the Waiting Room," by Keith Maniac)

A Christian Worldview

2009-04-26T22:26:00.000-07:00

There is some debate, even among Christians, as to whether or not there exists such a thing as "a Christian worldview."

The concern, I think, is that if a (single) worldview is pointed to as "Christian," it will homogenize the beautiful diversity that exists within the body of Christ.

I, however, tend to think that there is indeed such a thing as a Christian worldview. We might possibly describe it, as follows, by adopting (and adapting) a metaphor of Michael Polanyi's:

A Christian worldview is what emerges when all the noise of reality is heard as the polyphonic symphony of God in Christ.

Detweiler on the Role of the Arts Pastor

2009-04-24T11:50:00.000-07:00

I love Craig Detweiler...even if he does get a little bombastic at times :)

The kind of Christian TV Program I would actually watch...

2009-04-16T09:55:00.001-07:00

Today, Phil Cooke asks an interesting question:

If you could produce a TV program that would impact people's lives with a message of faith - the kind of program you would watch - what would that look like?

This is my answer.

I'm not sure exactly what this might look like, but I think there is tremendous potential to construct a TV program that fleshes out C.S. Lewis's famous quote from "Is Theology Poetry?":

"I believe in Christianity as I believe that the Sun has risen, not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else."

About this statement, Alister McGrath explains:

"For Lewis, the Christian faith was like an intellectual sun, illuminating and irradiating the rich conceptual landscape of the natural world, enabling the observer to make sense of, and hence appreciate, the intricate patterns of the tapestry of human experience and thought. Cultivating the art of seeing is the key to unlocking the meaning of the world." Alister McGrath, A fine-tuned universe (Westminster John Knox Press, 2009), 21.

It would be, I imagine, a documentary, or perhaps even a talk show that speaks to various topics concerning Christianity, culture, vocation, the arts, the Bible, etc. The primary goal would be to, as McGrath says, "cultivate the art of seeing."

I think it would be important to have a diversity of Christian perspectives represented in the show. Of course, no program can ever be completely unbiased, but Christian television seems to often be very one-sided (and mostly right-wing conservative). It would be cool to have a program that fosters dialogue, building bridges of understanding between Christian faith traditions. Perhaps end the program not with a "This is the way it is!" but with a picture of the possibilities. And perhaps most importantly, end the program with a prayer imploring the Holy Spirit to give us eyes to see, and ears to hear, thus acknowledging, together, before each other and before the Lord, that we will never be able to figure all of this out by ourselves, but we are utterly dependent upon God's grace to light our path, and his mercy to pick us up when we stumble.

Image: Seated woman viewing red Western Sun (2008) installation by Mark Handforth, Miami Art Museum, Florida

Technorati Tags: TV,Christianity,C.S. Lewis,Alister McGrath,Culture

Nouwen, the mystical way, and artist ministry

2009-04-04T15:00:00.001-07:00

In his book the wounded healer, Henri Nouwen offers a picture of what he calls "nuclear man," what many might seem more or less the archetypal postmodern. He writes:

Nuclear man no longer believes in anything that is always and everywhere true and valid. He lives by the hour and creates his life on the spot. His art is a collage art, an art which, though a combination of divergent pieces, is a short impression of how man feels at the moment. His music is an improvisation which combines themes from various composers into some thing fresh as well as momentary. His life often looks like a playful expression of feelings and ideas that need to be communicated and responded to, but which do not attempt to oblige anyone else.

Nouwen then describes two ways -- the mystical Way and the revolutionary way -- by which the nuclear man tries to "break out of his cocoon and fly." Both of them, he says, can be considered "modes of experiential transcendence" and "open new perspectives and suggests new lifestyles".

I want to just point at the first of these he talks about, which is "the mystical way." Of this, Nouwen writes:

The mystical way is the inner way: Man tries to find in his inner life a connection with the "reality of the unseen," "the source of being," "the point of silence." There he discovers that what is most personal is most universal (cf. Rogers' On Becoming a Person. Houghton Mifflin, 1961, p. 26). Beyond the superficial layers of idiosyncrasies, psychological differences and characterological typologies, he finds a center from which he can embrace all other beings at once and experience meaningful connections with all that exists. [...] In what ever way we try to define this mode of 'experiential transcendence," it seems that in all its forms man tries to transcend his own worldly environment and move one, two, three or more levels away from the unrealities of his daily existence to a more encompassing view which en the Ark ables him to experience what is real. In this experience he can cut through his apathy and reach the deep currents of life in which he participates. There he feels that he belongs to a story of which he knows neither the beginning nor the end, but in which he has a unique place. By this creative distance from the unrealities of his own ambitions and urges, nuclear man breaks through the vicious circle of the self-fulfilling prophecy that makes him suffer from his own morbid predictions. There he comes into contact with the center of his own creativity and finds the strength to refuse to become the passive victim of his own futurology. There he experiences himself no longer as an isolated individual caught in the diabolic chain of cause and effect, but as a man able to transcend the fences of his own predicament and reach out far beyond the concerns of self. There he touches the place where all people are revealed to him as equal and where compassion becomes a human possibility. There he comes to the shocking, but at the same time self-evident, insight that prayer is not a pious decoration of life but the breath of human existence.

I once suggested that if the evangelical church is serious about helping people like this to encounter God on their spiritual journey, it will take its patronage of the arts, and its cultivation and shepherding of the community of artists among them very seriously. And by "the arts", I do not mean a church agenda for proclaiming "the gospel" through the arts -- at least not in the sense of using the arts as propaganda. What I'm thinking about particularly is a cultivation of mature aesthetic sensibilities in the body of the church, and in the practice of corporate worship.

Now the evangelical church isn't particularly known for its mystical bent. And some might even argue that mysticism and evangelicalism don't mix. I tend to disagree. Some might suggest that instead of trying to add a mystical element to corporate worship in an evangelical church, it would be better just to send most people to another church altogether. The idea behind this would be that no church can necessarily be all things to all people. But I'm a little bit skeptical about perspective. Now I would agree that the church will never be a place in which everyone is happy all of the time, and everything happens just as everyone wants it to happen. But there's something really attractive to me about the idea of a church that is eclectic in its worship experience. We divide ourselves into categories of "mystical" and the lack of a better word "anti-mystical," and we try to send people of one inclination somewhere else, what is that saying? In my mind, it tends to create an "us versus them" mentality. I think this us versus them mentality can be remedied at least to some degree when these different kinds of people share the same space, the same physical location. I think there's even something to be said if there were different services held at that same location, and under that same church name. That establishes a common ground. Of course to be ideal if everyone could share the same space at the same time, and that might be something that the church could be aiming at, but I think there's value even that just the space is shared.

But the goal, I think, would be that those who aren't naturally inclined in the direction of mysticism might possibly be able to grow in such a way that they can appreciate that. I kind of see it analogous to developing taste for food or for drinks. Then on my own experience, for example with coffee, I had to grow into that taste. And now I really love coffee. There are ways in which we can grow and develop the ability to appreciate experiencing God in different ways. The psalmist says "taste and see that the Lord is good." My imagine here is a community of believers that are committed to tasting and seeing that the Lord is good, and willing and open to exploring new ways to taste, and new ways to see. That is, I think, part of the work that should go into arts ministry.

The arts don't have to be propaganda in order to help people to come to know the gospel. I remember reading a quote from Bono that said something like "I don't understand why people try to make music evangelical; it's intrinsically evangelical." I think what Bono was trying to get at here is that mystical quality that music and the arts often have. Now I would not want to say that all art has to be mystical and quality, but that is a feature that much art -- especially much of the best art -- seems to possess. When the church purposes to cultivate artists into being the best that they can possibly be, one result is going to be art with this mystical characteristic being produced, thus creating space within the evangelical Christian community for Nouwen's "nuclear man/woman" to be able to break out of his or her cocoon.

Toward a missio Dei Model of Abundance...

2009-02-13T22:44:00.000-08:00

This is a response to a response of David Fitch to a response of Ben Sternke to David's interview of Frank Viola... This is a model of missio Dei theology that I'm working out. Take it for what its worth (which is probably not much at all compared to what these guys bring to the table!).

I'm particularly responding to this statement of Ben's:

In the end, I think that any paradigm that seeks to place missiology "ahead of" or "prior to" ecclesiology (ala Hirsch) is problematic, because the church always ends up being provisional and/or optional.

To put it bluntly: Yes, God needs the church.

It seems much, much more "problematic" to me to think of God a

s needing anything than it is to think of the church as ending up "provisional and/or optional." It is a problematic dilemma of which I am sure anyone can spot: How can God, a perfect being, need anything?

In our theology of the missio Dei, it seems clear to me that a paradigm of Divine abundance would be far superior to a paradigm of Divine need.

This is a model of abundance that seems to make more sense to me. It seems to make more sense to me that God doesn't need the Church (the corpus Christi) in the process of re-creation and redemption any more (or any less) than he would need the Adam (the imago Dei) in the process of creation. As I see it, it was not out of a lack in Himself, or a 'need' for human co-creativity that he created the Adam. It was out abundance, out of the overflow of God's joy and ("It was good") pleasure in His creative activity. Out of the excess (not need), He wanted to share this joyful vocation of creativity with humanity.

As there seems to be a striking analogy between the imago Dei (the Adam) and the corpus Christi (the Second Adam), it appears also that this analogy might hold true between the missio Dei via imago Dei and the missio Dei via corpus Christi. It would likewise not be out a lack or need that God in Christ missions through the Church. It is out of excess and abundance of joy. We are graced by the overflow--not recruited because of the need--to be participants in the joyful, life-giving re-creativity of Christ.

At least that's what seems to make sense to me. But this is, of course, based on a chain of reasoning into which I could not go in depth here.

Technorati Tags: missio dei,missiology,ecclesiology,imago dei,mission,missional church

Why 'Arts Ministry'?

2009-02-04T11:13:00.001-08:00

Technorati Tags: arts ministry,arts pastor,david taylor,theology,art,artist,aesthetics

David Taylor is really a pioneer in the vocation of Arts Pastor. I love the guy. I have known him now for several years, and in Summer 2007 had the privilege of having him as my mentor for my semester of mentorship as a part of my M.Div at Truett Seminary. David earned his M.A. and Th.M. from Regent College, Vancouver.

Although there are many churches who have positions with titles such as "Creative Arts Director" or "Fine Arts Pastor," the function for the vast majority of these positions is specifically to incorporate the arts into Sunday Morning worship. This is a task that needs to be done, and it is a blessing to the church to have ministers performing those important functions. However, David's decade-long task as "Arts Pastor" of Hope Chapel's arts ministry (Austin) was as shepherd--shepherding artists, and shepherding the arts in general outside of the scope of Sunday morning worship. He is currently writing a book for Baker Academic that is going to be the first of its kind (so far as I'm aware) addressing this task of shepherding. Yet this pastorate does not only have implications for artists, but for the body as a whole, for we all can be served by a someone to help us navigate the complicated waters of the the cultures of art (from fine art to popular art) that have such a profound effect upon our lives. Moreover, we can all benefit by someone helping us to be better able to "taste and see that the Lord is good."

This locus of ministry is something that I think is drastically needed in the church today, and this for many reasons. I don't say this flippantly, and I have much reason to believe I am not saying this naively: I foresee this sphere of ministry as being a next logical step for the evangelical church (and seminary). It is, in fact, already happening. It is a hunch I've had since the beginning of my career here at Truett Seminary, and the need for this kind of ministry has since been confirmed time and time again in almost every class I've taken--from missions, to practical theology, to scripture, to homiletics, to pastoral ministry, etc..

It just makes too much sense for me to ignore. With respect to the Platonic triad of Truth, Beauty and Goodness, the Evangelical Church has traditionally paid tremendous attention to Truth. It has more recently also seen the importance of Goodness, engaging quite effectively with social justice. This is evinced in the rise of publications such as Sojourners, the M.Div/Social Work degree at Truett, and the evangelical political support of policies addressing social justice. What there has not yet been widespread evangelical attention given to is the locus of Beauty. The Arts have a special connection to Beauty that seems to be obvious. However it is also inextricable from Truth--as Paul Tillich was particularly apt to point out to us--and also Goodness--as some such as Iris Murdoch and Elaine Scarry, as well as all the poet-prophets from the ancient Hebrews until today make manifest to us. Even disciplines as oft-reductionistic as the sciences have turned their attention more and more to the important place Beauty--elegance, parsimony, etc. The reality that seems to be making itself heard is that all of these things--Truth, Beauty, Goodness--exist in a kind of perichoresis, interpenetrating one another. As such, a truncated approach that specializes in only one or two of these elements will only end up depriving itself even of a true understanding of those two elements. A holistic approach is necessary for a proper grasp of each part.

I could go on (and on...and on) about the matrix of reasons supporting why this locus of ministry makes sense, but the short of it, as far as I see it, is this: the signs of the times for the evangelical church point quite forcefully in the direction of this kind of arts ministry. I think it behooves Christian seminaries, colleges, and churches to seriously consider this, and start more intentionally seeking ways to engage in the conversation that is already going on regarding this locus of ministry, and to educate ministers and laity in this regard. Fuller Seminary and Regent College--among others (most recently Duke Divinity)--have already done significant work in this regard, even offering graduate and post-graduate degree concentrations in the arts.

If you can't tell, I am passionately convinced of the importance of this. I trust that if I am misguided in writing this, and if this is not in the best interests of the Church, then the Holy Spirit will make that clear to the reader. Yet if I have indeed been prompted by the Spirit to share this, I trust that the Spirit will make this need perceivable to you as well.

Grace and Peace,

Adam

Academic Research Tools, Tips, Software, Applications, etc., etc., weeeeeeee!

2009-01-25T20:22:00.000-08:00

So... I've kind of started a quest for academic research tools and tips! I haven't had time to go into great depth with it, but what I've thus far discovered has been very interesting.

To go on a quick tangent... There is apparently a lot of effort being done right now toward Web 2.0 academic research, building communities of academic research through various tools. I'm fascinated with this idea. It really confounds me why academic research and writing seems to always be approached so autonomously and individualistically (that's so "Enlightenment" era...). I really hunger to see theological academics approached communally, with "many members of one body" coming together, balancing out each others' weaknesses. End tangent....

Just last night I did some more searching and found what looks to be a very interesting program called NoteScribe (http://www.notescribe.net). I watched a few introductory videos on it last night, and tested it out the demo version of it today. It's pretty cool. You can organize notes under different keywords and categories and subcategories. You can also attach files (like .pdf of articles or books), and use it as a bibliographic manager as well, but it's strongest attribute is its ability to organize a database of notes, and access them in many different ways. Quite worth checking out for academics, novelists (background research, notes on characters, etc.), and pastors (it would be an awesome bank for illustrations, etc.), etc.

But the program that looks most impressive to me (especially since it is FREE) is Zotero (http://www.zotero.org/). I was introduced to this when I found this video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CmKKFvKxXj4) that demonstrates Google Scholar, OneNote, and Zotero. Zotero is an add-on to Mozilla Firefox web browser you can use to easily download bibliographic info from the web to Endnote and into Word (you just download the plugins for Firefox and MS Word). In fact, you don't even need another bibliographic manager (like Endnote or Refworks), because this does all of that. The only advantage having EndNote that I could think of is the "cite while you write" feature, which makes Endnote easier to do the actual writing/citing. But it's not that much harder to use Zotero's plugin for Word. For each bibliographic item in Zotero, you can make limitless notes, keywords/tags, and even attach files (like journal articles, etc.), or attach a hyperlink to wherever the file is on your harddrive, or attach links to the web...whatever. In addition to all of that, you can also capture web pages, attach them to the biblio. entry, and highlight and make notes in the margin. Plus, you can do simple or advanced searches that will actually search the *content* of your documents attached (however much you decide to index). That is just phenomenal. Similar programs I have seen cost $200-$400. This Zotero demonstration video knocked my socks off (http://www.zotero.org/static/videos/tour/zotero_tour.htm). It would be great to use with NoteScribe.

I'm very interested in how MS OneNote might be utilized for managing academic research and writing. It has great promise especially for outlining. Lately I've been using ActionOutline (http://www.actionoutline.com/) for outlining, and I like it better than OneNote for outlining because you can very easily move information around. While it has been very helpful, I'm not entirely satisfied with it. It doesn't seem to really intersect well with other applications (drag and drop functions, etc.), and it needs a more user-friendly highlighter functionality.

Okay, that's all for now. If you discover any helpful tools or strategies for academic research, please let me know. Leave a comment about it.

-Adam

** I am going to try to keep this blog post updated as I continue to figure things out.

UPDATE: 1/28/09

For searching full texts of documents (including .pdf, .doc, .docx, and more), I think Google Desktop looks about as good as anything, and it is free. It might help to get this plugin for desktop that allows you to tweak the indexing a little bit.
For hyperlinking to certain points in a Word document (e.g. "Chapter 3"), you can create a bookmark. Copy that bookmark, and then paste it into another program (like OneNote), and you have a convenient little hyperlink. I can't figure out how to do this with .pdf though.
I highly recommend Foxit PDF viewer for research purposes. It is free, much faster than Adobe, and takes up less space. But what I REALLY like about it is that you can actually highlight the .pdf text. There is only one thing that I really wish they could change on the product. When you highlight something, and then copy it, and paste it into another program, it does not carry the highlighted aspect of the text, but pastes it as plain text. If there was a way to fix that, that would be perfect.
http://www.pdf-search-engine.com/ This is a cool little tool for those who like to keep a eBook/article library.

UPDATE: 1/29/09

Some other excellent tools to use for research...
scholar.google.com : search tool for academic articles and texts
books.google.com: search full texts of thousands of books of all kinds
Amazon.com: also has capability of searching full texts of many books.
Other Search Engines: This link has a thorough list of many academic search engines.

GatewayArts New Exhibit: "Fruit"

2008-08-04T09:55:00.001-07:00

I’ve been working this summer in the budding arts ministry at Gateway Community Church, and this last weekend, we just opened our new visual art exhibit: “Fruit.” The goal of the exhibit is to creatively explore and enflesh the “Fruit of the Spirit.” But we tried to do this in an untraditional way. Alex Villareal did an excellent job of conceiving the exhibit, and encouraging everyone to create. One thing he urged us to try to do was to contrast the “fruit” against whatever its opposite would be.

This was my first time to create a piece to be hung in any exhibit. Visual art is not a skill I have spent a long time developing in myself. I have always loved to draw. I wanted to be an animator for Disney when I was a little kid. But I soon discovered that there were far, far better artists (like my friend Scott Hickmon!) than myself, and they could produce art much more quickly than I could. That’s about the time I started focusing more on acting. But art is still something I enjoy doing, whenever I actually do it. So I thought I’d give it a “go.” I’ll try to post an image of my piece, and tell about the process that went into making it in another blog.

Anyway, I really enjoyed observing people checking out the art in our exhibit. I especially liked watching people’s reactions to Alex’s installation “In Search of Peace” (snapshot by Elizabeth Wright pictured here). Installations are so big, they demand people’s attention. And how could you not take a gander at anything surrounded by hundreds of black ants? He was trying to capture the way people try to find peace in the midst of anxiety through escape, such as the escape of watching TV shows like Leave it to Beaver.

While people’s reactions to Alex’s piece were most acute, it seemed like all of the pieces in our exhibit had the effect of somehow bringing people to life—especially Sunday morning. People didn’t really come to church expecting to see a new art exhibit. I think they were pleasantly surprised. Some people were bothered by some of the pieces. Others were amused by those same pieces. In both reactions, I think there was a kind of “waking up” involved. It gave people something to talk about. It caused them to think. It stimulated their senses and imagination. It helped bring them alive, I think.

What better way to start a week?

Why the Cross-born King?: a sermon on John 12

2008-07-29T15:50:00.000-07:00

I've been trying to blog more lately. Well... more precisely, I've been trying to publish on my blog(s) what I've been writing outside of it. This seems to be the only way I'll ever have a remotely consistent blog. My writing seems to be mostly occasional--written to someone in particular about something in particular. While those thoughts are never fleshed out perfectly, or thought through perfectly, there is great care given to them, and they reveal a bit of who I am and what I'm about--at least at the moment.

One reason I haven't been posting things like this on my blog is simply because I want things to be perfect before I post them. It's finally sinking in that that is never going to happen, at least for me. So why not just post things that aren't perfect? Why not essentially put the label "In development" or "rough draft" on everything I post in my blogs? Perhaps being okay with my own imperfections is itself a step in the process of perfection? At very least, it helps me overcome some of my obsessive perfectionism.

The following is a sermon I did this past semester for a class on preaching. Let it be said: I am not a preacher. I did not go to seminary to become a preacher. If I had to do a sermon every week, I think I would nearly kill myself. I don't know how REAL preachers do it. But I do fancy myself as an aspiring writer. I enjoy the writing process, and the research process. I don't mind the actual preaching either, if I have plenty of time to prepare for it. This sermon is, of course, not perfect. But it does unpack some things that I have been thinking about. Here you go...

Why the Cross-born King?: a sermon on John 12

Delivered: 4/28/2008

Monday night, I pulled another all nighter trying to get my work done for this week. So I packed up my stuff, and left my house about 3:45 AM, and drove up to Waco. About 5:15 or so, I pull into the parking lot of the Pilot Travel Center/Gas station just south of town on I-35 (it’s where I go to pull all-nighters when I’m in Waco).

Before my car is even in the parking space, a guy in a Camaero pulls up next to me, looking at me with his window rolled down, and I just knew he was going to ask me for money.

I got out of my car, and of course he did just that: “Hey man, my mom is in ICU in Austin, and I need money to make the trip cuz I’m out of gas… think you can help me at all?”

I’m thinking: “Fantastic! I just made a $45 trip up to Waco, and now this lying idiot wants me to give him free gas.” I’m so sick of these people who try to take advantage of people like me, who think they can actually fool me into believing them. But I have this principle that I give them money anyway, because Grace is not about what people deserve.

I gave him $10 worth of gas, but I made sure he was clear that this was going to hurt me financially, that this was a sacrifice. But I didn’t do it out of love, but out of wanting to make him feel like crap for lying to me. And that was vain. Because I bet he just drove away in his Camero with a grin on his face saying, “Ha ha, See ya, sucker.” He didn’t feel guilty. He played me; I was his victim.

I wonder… I can’t help but to wonder if they said the exact same thing to Jesus when they put him on the Cross: “See ya, sucker.” I wonder if they thought they had played him?

But I don’t think Jesus felt like a victim. Somehow… somehow what Jesus did on the Cross transformed his “being a victim” into “victory” itself. Even as the victim, He won, and he knew it. He knew what was going to happen on the Cross all along, and he knew it was going to confuse a lot of people, because not at all what they were looking for.

At least that’s what we see in the Gospel of John. Over, and over again, Jesus predicted what would happen to him—that he would be ‘lifted up’—and he warned that most people would be confused. And the crowd never got it.

You see, the people in the crowds were looking for this thing we call the Kingdom of God to come, except they were looking for something the same shape of all the other ‘kingdoms’ of the world they knew. They were looking for a King who would rule by the Sword with strength and force.

And this was exactly what they thought Jesus was going to be. This guy astounded them. His fame was spreading throughout the lands because of the amazing wonders he performed, turning water into wine, healing the lame and sick and blind, walking on water. He fed five thousand people—that is a legion of people—out of one kid’s dinner! In fact, it says in 6:14 that when he did that, he had to slip away because the crowd was going to (quote) “make him king by force.” And then, as if that wasn’t enough, he raises some guy from the dead whose been gone from this world for three days! I mean, that is pretty stinking awesome (pun intended, Lazarus), and everyone who saw was so blown away, the text says that they couldn’t stop talking about it!

It says in chapter 12 that (quote) “great crowds” of Jews were coming to see Jesus (and Lazarus) because the news of Lazarus that was being spread so rapidly. Now if there was already a legion of people who had come to see Jesus because of some healings, you can imagine the kind of support he could muster up with a resurrection.

Honestly: Who else could you possibly imagine would be a better candidate for overthrowing Caesar, and taking Israel back for Yahweh?! If a warrior messiah was literally what they were looking for, and they just saw Jesus raise Lazarus from the dead, you know they had to have been talking to each other like:

(surfer accent) “Dude, think about it. This guy leads a couple of Legions of people against Rome… I mean, so what if Caesar’s army is bigger, cuz Jesus is a necromancer, man: people die, and he’d just zap ‘em back to life, you know? I’d be like ‘There’s one Jesus.’ Zap ‘There’s a few more over there.’ Zap. Zap. ‘Oh, you missed one Jesus.’ Zap. You know? It’d be awesome!”

That’s obviously what I’d be thinking, anyway…

So people came in swarms to welcome him into Jerusalem with palm branches and praises:

“Hosanna! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord—

the King of Israel!” (Jn 12:13)

So many people had come to see Jesus, it says in verse 19 the Pharisees, who were plotting to kill him, just basically told each other that they might as well give up, because there is no way they could get to Jesus now.

So far, with all these signs and wonders, Jesus fit the crowd’s bill. So far, the Messiah they were expecting, and the Messiah Jesus was, were the same thing. And now was the time of the Passover! How perfect! Just as Israel was freed from Egypt, they would now be freed from Rome!

It all made sense to them. Jesus’ miraculous feats just kept getting bigger and better as if they were building up to the glorious climax, and it would make sense for that climax to be the overthrow of Rome.

But that wasn’t the climax he was building up to. And they were going to be extremely disappointed.

See, the glorious climax Jesus was building up to was something inconceivable to them: Christ (Messiah), King, crucified.

And now, in 12 verse 23, Jesus makes this clear:

²³Jesus answered them, “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified.

²⁴Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. ²⁵Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life. ²⁶Whoever serves me must follow me, and where I am, there will my servant be also. Whoever serves me, the Father will honor.

²⁷“Now my soul is troubled. And what should I say—‘Father, save me from this hour’? No, it is for this reason that I have come to this hour. ²⁸Father, glorify your name.” Then a voice came from heaven, “I have glorified it, and I will glorify it again.” ²⁹The crowd standing there heard it and said that it was thunder. Others said, “An angel has spoken to him.” ³⁰Jesus answered, “This voice has come for your sake, not for mine. ³¹

Now is the judgment of this world;

now the ruler of this world will be driven out. ³²

And I, when I am lifted up from the earth,

will draw all people to myself.”

³³He said this to indicate the kind of death he was to die.

Well, the crowd still doesn’t get it. Jesus was going to be “lifted up”; Jesus was going to die, and that death is going to be the glorious climax that he has been building up to this whole time—his death was going to be his glorification. His death would be his Kingdom Come.

Instead of being a warrior messiah who strides into Jerusalem swinging a sword to drive out the ruler of Rome, Jesus is the suffering servant who “drives out the ruler of this world” by hanging on a Cross. Instead of being the mighty king who usurps his Kingdom by force of arms, Jesus is the mighty king who draws “all people” to himself when his arms are forced to a tree.”

Oh yes, Jesus is glorified in this hour. This hour is his glorious inauguration, but you have to have the eyes to see it as he is crowned in thorns, and takes his throne on two wooden beams.

The absurdity of it demands that we ask: why in the world? Why would he do it like this, when he could have done it exactly like everyone expected him to? Why? What is it about the Cross that makes it superior to the Sword?

There are a lot of theological reasons I think you could justifiably list that make the Cross superior to the sword, but I’m going to focus on one thing that I don’t think is really talked about enough, but has radical implications on how we live our lives as agents of the Kingdom of God.

You see, the Cross is inextricably connected to God’s Love for the world (Jn 3:16). God’s love for the world wants the world to be made whole, to be healed from its brokenness—that is what Christ being “lifted up” is referencing: the Golden Serpent that was “lifted up” on a pole so that anyone who looked at it would be healed of their snake bites. But because he loves us, God wants the whole human being to be healed, both internally and externally.

The Sword simply can’t do this.

Greg Boyd says it best, I think:

“The power of the sword…can never transform a person’s inner being. While the use of the sword tends to deepen the resolve of the punished rather than transform it, Jesus’ aim was to transform hearts and, by that means, transform the world.”[1]

The Kingdom of the World, you see, wields the Sword. The Sword gives us the ability to control these external factors, which very honestly make life easier for us much of the time. It is something that is reliable, and for the most part manageable, and we like that in the world. When the Sword is applied to Government, it makes laws, and punishes lawbreakers. With our vote, we can even have a say in which laws are created.

But we don’t just apply the sword to Government; it happens all the time with Religion as well. I recently came across a list of rules that one Christian High School has for its students. It had lots of stuff like “No physical touch between the sexes.” I think there were about thirteen paragraphs concerning the length and type of clothing girls are allowed to wear. What really amused me was this one: “Any behavior that is not consistent with the Bible will not be tolerated.” Really? Well, have fun figuring that one out…

You see, this is an example of the sword, manipulation, control. Sure this helps to get us the results of external compliance, but what we see time and time and time again is that kids who grow up in these environments often end up rebelling against that oppressive religious regime. Sure these kids don’t look like they are ‘sinning’ on the outside, but they were not healed on the inside. Their appearance of healing was superficial and caused by fear of punishment. And when they get out on their own, once that fear is removed, so is their ‘good’ behavior. They have not been healed, because they have not been Loved. They have not been loved, because they have not been shown the Cross.

Now, I don’t want to say that rules and laws and everything that goes along with the Sword should necessarily be done away with absolutely. If I was older and wiser, maybe I would say that. As for now, I think maybe it is something that is needed sometimes. Maybe a balance needs to be found. But what I think I can say with confidence is this: it is not the ideal. If used at all, the Sword must ever be a last resort, and never be our default mode.

That said, it remains true that rules and punishment can only promise external change. It may often bring better tangible and certain ‘results,’ but the change it brings is not lasting, and it is caused out of fear of suffering—fear of the Cross that we are threatening them with!—and that has got to bother a people who are disciples of the one who was on the receiving side of the Cross.

In Jesus “lifted up” on the Cross, we see a loving King who does not rape, but woos. The Sword can only command us externally, but the Cross can captivate our hearts. The King on the Cross shows us love, respects our freedom, and inspires and awakens the Kingdom of God from within us. When our hearts are freely his, everything else follows. This is a change that, unlike the extreme external discipline of that Christian school, remains even when fear of punishment is lifted. It is a change that has the quality of “eternity”—it has an “eternal” kind of life to it.

The Cross is not as certain, and not as “safe” in the way the world prefers; in fact it is risky. But Jesus tells us that risk is not necessarily a bad thing, because life results from death, just as a fruit-bearing plant results from the death of a seed. Jesus not only tells us this, but he shows it to us on the Cross, when He is lifted up, and brings healing, and draws all people to Himself.

The Martinez family used to have a quiet, comfortable life, living in a beautiful home, secluded in the Colorado mountains. But in 2000, they decided to trade their comfortable life for a home in one of the most violent and troubled neighborhoods in Albuquerque, NM. This was a neighborhood flooded with drugs, and prostitution, and gang violence.

Why did they move? Because they—even their kids, all younger than 15, wanted to bring change and healing to these people.

In an interview with the children, the girls said that it was scary sometimes because there would always be people walking through their yard, and there were shootings. One time, they said, their dad got beat up by a gang. The gang took him, and beat him senseless with 2x4s and beer bottles. He came back to his wife, bruised and bloody, and her reaction was, “We are not going to lose this. We are going to stay here, this is our calling, our purpose.”

Instead of turning them into the police, the family reached out to the attackers. They made friends with them, loved them, welcomed them into their home, and by becoming completely vulnerable to these people, they inspired change within them. The crime rate in that neighborhood has now dropped 50%.

This is the way of the Cross. It does not make us as safe and comfortable as the Sword does, but is often risky and painful. We can’t control the results of the Cross, because transformation can only happen when the Holy Spirit gives them eyes to see its worth. Many people will walk away unchanged, just like they walked away from Golgotha with a hardened heart. In others, change may happen, but we will never see it because it doesn’t happen right away. The world demands to see results, but we cannot live that way if we follow the Cross.

And a lot of times, people will look at what we have done through the Cross, and they’ll only see how they have ‘played’ us, and they’ll walk away saying, “See ya sucker.”

I’m never going to see the results of my little encounter with Camero guy. I seriously doubt it will have any results, because I did not bear the Cross in love like I should have. I didn’t want to inspire him to greatness out of my love, I just wanted to make him feel like trash for lying to me. I essentially turned the Cross into a club, and beat the guy over the head with it—that’s just another version of the Sword. I was the victim, and I made him a victim as well.

But if I would have practiced the Cross out of love, neither of us would have been the victim. I would not have been a victim because, just as G.K. Chesterton once said, “You cannot defeat the Cross, for it is defeat.” The Cross turns victim into victory. But much more important than me not being the victim is this. If I would have practiced the Cross, this last Tuesday morning at 5:15 AM, Adam Langley might have died a martyr’s death, a death that bears witness to the beautiful life-giving Grace of God.

The Cross is not just about not using the sword. It is about dying, dying a kind of death that—like the death of a seed—might have sprung forth life out of the dead soil of that guy’s heart.

As agents of the Kingdom of God, we have to let the question remain in our minds on constant vigil: Is this the way of the Cross or the Sword? Am I trying to coerce the Kingdom to happen externally through strength and determination of the sword? Or am I trying to inspire the Kingdom to happen internally through the love and sacrifice of the Cross? In what instrument am I placing my hope and my trust? Do I find my hands with a hammer? Or do I find my hands with nails?

[1] Myth of a Christian Nation, 33.

2008-07-28T13:04:00.000-07:00

My Two Cents on “Jesus Mythicism”

This is a cut-and-paste response to a Christian friend of mine, Mr. James Panetti, who was wrestling with this thing sometimes called “Jesus Mythicist” theory, which maintains not only that the Jesus represented in the Gospels is not historical, but that there was never even a historical figure known as “Jesus of Nazareth.”

Yeah, I think you are reckoning with some of the same things that I have been investigating. The underlying question you are dealing with is "How do we know stuff?" (That is what epistemology is all about.) What you are essentially pointing to is two different channels of "knowing" reality: "heart" and "head." You might even differentiate them as "intellect" and "imagination." There are probably several ways you could distinguish them.

For a long time, the two trajectories of knowing have characterized "art" and "science" separately. Science, employing the intellect, has been about the business of "objectively" withholding belief until "proof" has been offered to it. What I was touching on in my own note was the fact that they naively ignore the fact that they have not applied this methodology to the scientific method itself. My point has been essentially to show that science is not as strictly "scientific" as it assumes itself to be. The very method it asserts is assumed through a kind of intuitive "leap". In your own terms, you might say that they assume this scientific method because it is appealing to their "heart." Another way of saying it: they assert the scientific method because they find it beautiful.

Here is a very interesting excerpt from a biography on Einstein called Einstein: His Life and Universe:

---------

One day during the 1930s, Einstein invited Saint-John Perse to Princeton to find out how the poet worked. "How does the idea of a poem come?" Einstein asked. The poet spoke of the role played by intuition and imagination. "It's the same for a man of science," Einstein responded with delight. "It is a sudden illumination, almost a rapture. Later, to be sure, intelligence analyzes and experiments confirm or invalidate the intuition. But initially there is a great forward leap of the imagination."

---------

There have been several books and articles written that deal with this role of the imagination in scientific discovery, and the "leaps" that are taken in order for science to advance.

The particular struggle you have been wrestling with sounds like what has been called the "Jesus Mythicist" movement. This movement has come about in conjunction with the "New Atheism" that has recently emerged with Dawkins and Harris and others. I have two or three cents to say about both of those movements, and I’ll share that in generalizations that do not necessarily hold true for each person individually, but it might be said characteristic of the movements as a whole. They are often called "fundamentalist atheists," and for good reason: they characteristically ignore most of the significant intellectual advancements that have developed in postmodernism and what might be called post-postmodernism (we don't quite know what to call what comes after postmodernism yet!).

This atheism (and the Jesus Mythicist movement along with it) is a popularized rehashing of old out-dated enlightenment assumptions about reality. What is strikingly (and absurdly) ironic about it is that it wears the guise of "intellectualism", but it really practices what might be called "emotionalism." You will notice in debates between many of these atheists and Christian apologists (for example, the debate between Christopher Hitchens and Alister McGrath) that the atheist will depend largely upon wise-cracks, insults, over-generalizations, and charisma, whereas the “irrational” Christian they debate is raising powerful intellectual points to reckon with, which the atheist completely ignores, or else shrugs off with yet another wise-crack. I’ve noticed too that many of these atheists seem to absolutely relish in being as crass as possible (for example, the “Christ-my-ass” day of the “Rational Response Squad”) which is, of course, very cool, objective, and rational…not!).

As far as Jesus Mythicism goes, it assumes that if Jesus was indeed who the Church says he was, there would be scores of undeniable historical documents proving this. They assume a "Foundationalist" epistmeological posture that refuses to believe anything unless it can be proven (but only in the way that they happen to prefer things to be proven), and this with nearly absolute certainty. Because the other extrabiblical accounts of Jesus' life can be questioned (if you really think about it, is ANY historical document immune from doubt?), they reject them as proof.

What is happening, I think, is that these Mythicists are emerging in an age of information revolution. With the internet, everyone is a published writer, and any bit of information you could imagine is at your fingertips. My impression is that mythicists quite naively assume (though they wouldn't admit as much) that the ancient world was at least somewhat the same way: "If there really was a miracle-working Jesus, surely Joe Nazereth would have blogged about it." The fact is, however, that the process of documentation and writing, etc., was extremely time consuming and expensive, and there were not many people who even had the literacy to undertake such an endeavor.

Yet even if they did have the time and resources to write about Jesus, there would also need to be the additional requirement of people preserving that document for 2000 years. People would need to think this document was important enough to take the trouble of preserving it, and making copies of it, etc., in order for us to be able to have a copy to point to today.

It is nothing new to doubt that the Gospels portray the actual history of a man named Jesus from Nazareth. The whole "quest for the historical Jesus" movement tried to deconstruct the "historical Jesus" from the "theological Jesus." These guys didn't doubt there was an actual historical person based upon which the Gospel writers told tall tales, they were just trying (unsuccessfuly) to figure out which tales were tall, and which were short.

It's one thing to say "If Jesus did all the things the Gospels say he did, then you would expect to see extrabiblical materials documenting his existence." But I imagine that part of the reason why those in the historical Jesus quest didn't go so far to claim he never existed is because that if Jesus didn't really do all the fantastic things claimed of him, then there would be absolutely no reason whatsoever for the historians contemporary to Jesus' day to document his life. Even if he did do all the things the Gospels claim, it would not be justified to expect scores of extrabiblical accounts talking about Jesus. How much less if he wasn't extra-ordinary?

There are many other methodological assumptions concerning history that factor into this discussion; this is only the tip of the iceberg. But it is also, as I mentioned, assuming a foundationalist methodology: "I don't believe something until I have proof." The reality is: that is not even what they practice themselves concerning their assumptions of right methodology. They reject the "leap" the Christian makes into belief of Jesus' existence, but they make a "leap" themselves into the assumption that some absolute proof is required for belief in Jesus' existence.

The point that Alister McGrath is making in The Open Secret is that these "leaps" are required in the epistemic process--even with science. When we make the "leap" of belief in Jesus (which is not a "blind" leap that is completely without reason), and we are undergirded with good theology, we see from the inside that it is beautiful (in your terms, we "know with our heart" that Jesus is real).

There is a subjective element to that, but it is not relativistic, nor is it (necessarily) completely unobjective. The objectivity of it can possibly be found in this idea of "resonance" or "best explanation." McGrath points out that the Christian worldview has a powerful explanatory power, not only concerning the world, but even the very existence of other worldviews. There is a quality of resonance or equilibrium that Christianity (at its best, not its corrupted forms) can offer that other worldviews and religions do not seem to possess. But that is a whole other discussion....

Einstein on Science and Poetry

2008-07-27T20:38:00.000-07:00

The following is an excerpt from the book Einstein: His Life.

One day during the 1930s, Einstein invited Saint-John Perse to Princeton to find out how the poet worked. "How does the idea of a poem come?" Einstein asked. The poet spoke of the role played by intuition and imagination. "It's the same for a man of science," Einstein responded with delight. "It is a sudden illumination, almost a rapture. Later, to be sure, intelligence analyzes and experiments confirm or invalidate the intuition. But initially there is a great forward leap of the imagination."

A dialog on scientific and theological methodology: “Proof” vis-a-vis “Presupposition” in Synergistic “Resonance”

2008-07-26T15:40:00.000-07:00

The following is from a dialog I’ve been having with an atheist on this discussion board thread: http://www.rationalresponders.com/forum/14534. The atheist’s responses follow the colons: “::”

It is a somewhat technical (albeit amateurish) discussion on epistemology. These responses are “off the cuff”, not exquisitely refined. They are nonetheless a little window into what I’ve been exploring recently, especially in critical realist epistemology, and Alister McGrath’s approach in his new book “The Open Secret: A New Vision for Natural Theology”. I’d, of course, love to hear your thoughts, if you’re interested in this kind of nerdy stuff, and have the tenacity to tread through this whole thing!

Here goes…

I do not disagree that the empirical method is a reliable and extremely helpful tool for knowing and understanding reality. The reason I harp on its limitations is because it is, for many atheists I’ve discovered, assumed to be the ONLY reliable and helpful tool for knowing and understanding reality, or indeed the tool that trumps all other competing ways of knowing and understanding reality.

The question that was naïvely ignored by modernity (and many atheists…and Christians, too, for that matter) is: “But how do we know the empirical process itself?” You see, I would say (following many respected epistemologists) that all knowledge comes through the use of certain tools or channels or methods. The empirical process is one channel for knowing reality. But what is the channel or process through which we come to know the empirical process? What lies tacitly beneath your statement “There is no reason for doubting my senses”?

This is simplified and imperfect, but I think it looks something like this:

(a) data is transmitted to your senses

(b) your senses transmit data to your brain

(C1) That the data transmitted to my senses is accurate

(C2) That my senses work properly in transmitting that data to my brain?

(C3) That my intellect capable of properly interpreting this data?

(d) You discover that those assumptions seem to be reliable and resonate well with the big picture of life.

Again this is oversimplified, but it is somewhat helpful for our conversation. The reality is that the process of knowing is both top-bottom as well as bottom-top. There is a kind of synergism involved here. Only through this synergistic process can you say “There is no reason for doubting my senses.”

So to say “I believe because there is no reason not to believe” is to assume that the default position of the human knower is to believe that which is presented to him (again, an oversimplified statement). I would agree. This is true not only of our senses, but also the testimony of others, and—I would say—even our intuition. (There are probably more things we could throw into that “default” as well.)

We assent to things until some kind of cognitive dissonance is introduced into the picture to make us question the validity of that thing. As such, we believe p because p “resonates” with everything else we understand concerning reality. When we are presented with a choice between p and q, we decide between them based on which option resonates best with our experience of reality.

I understand that this process is very similar to what Thomas Kuhn describes in Structures of Scientific Revolutions. McGrath points to Jean Piaget’s model of “equilibration” as another example of this. Here is an excerpt from McGrath’s book The Open Secret, the chapter on “The Psychology of Perception”:

The account of perception that we have given thus far is of a dialectic process in which sensory input is made sense of in terms of pre-existing perceptual schemas, which have themselves developed as part of the process of acting on sensory input. The perceiver both acts on the world and is acted upon by the world. Processing is both top-down and bottom-up. The perceiver organizes data, but the organizational system employed is itself inﬂuenced by the type of data it is required to handle, and has some invariant features or predispositions built into it, presumably as the outcome of natural selection.

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McGrath:

The two sides of this process have been referred to as “assimilation of” and “accommodation to” the world by Piaget. For Piaget, there exists a process of “reﬂecting abstraction” through which human beings interact with their environment. Human beings are not born with such structures, nor do they absorb them passively from their environment: they construct them through a process of interaction (which Piaget terms “equilibration”), in which equilibrium is achieved between assimilation and accommodation. Assimilation may be deﬁned as the “act of incorporating objects or aspects of objects into learned activities,” where accommodation is “the modiﬁcation of an activity or ability in the face of environmental demands.” Generally these two processes balance each other, but accommodation to the world begins to dominate when the perceiver encounters phenomena that do not readily ﬁt into existing schemas. This sort of situation involves cognitive challenge and possibly stress, but the outcome may often be a reorganization or development of schemas so that they are more differentiated, complex, and in keeping with the sensory phenomena. Thus there is a cycle of assimilation–challenge–accommodation–assimilation–challenge–accommodation under-

pinning the process of perception and its development.

(end of excerpt from McGrath)

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So anyway, this is essentially the process through which the empirical method is appropriated and affirmed as a reliable epistemological tool. The ideas of “resonance” and “equilibrium” are essentially the same, I think.

:: I only claimed certainty regarding FACTS, nothing more! Facts are certain, unless you can present evidence that facts and our senses are untrustworthy. Your only argument for this was the fallacy from inductive uncertainty when you said that we could not be absolute certain about our senses. This is a red herring. That fact our senses are not absolutely certain does not mean they are not untrustworthy.

I never said that our senses are “untrustworthy” because we cannot be absolutely certain about them, did I? My only contention was that you cannot be absolutely certain about them, not that they are untrustworthy. Those are two completely different things. “Trustworthiness” does not necessarily entail “absolute certainty.”

This is a trustworthy, but not “absolutely certain” statement: “When I turn the key in my car’s ignition, its engine will start.” It’s trustworthy because that is what usually happens, and I do not have reason to doubt it will happen. It is not “absolutely certain” because something could have happened to my car without my knowing that will cause it not to start (e.g. someone siphoned the gas from my tank, etc.).

I would agree that (per your definition) “facts” are trustworthy. I do not agree that “facts” are “absolutely certain.” There is absolutely no fallacy in that recognition whatsoever, so far as I can see. If you think there is, then please justify that statement rather than stamping it with a so-called fallacy. Explain why it is a fallacy. Show me the error in this argument:

1. That the sky is blue is a “fact” (per your definition).

2. We know the sky is blue because our senses tell us so.

3. We cannot be absolutely, 100% certain that our senses give us accurate information about reality

4. Therefore we cannot be absolutely certain about “facts”

Note, again, that this says nothing about “trustworthiness” of the senses. It is merely the recognition of a threshold limiter to our certainty that cannot be surpassed into “absolute certainty.” The lack of recognition of this epistemic boundary is one of the weaknesses of Enlightenment Foundationalism, pointed to by theistic and non-theistic philosophers alike.

:: This is already been explained to you! We know [that the scientific method is reliable] via the scientific method.

No. All you have done is demonstrate circular reasoning. To justify the validity of the scientific method with the scientific method itself is circular. That should be obvious to you. It is like me saying “I know that the Bible is true because it says it is true.” That is circular too. My point is that, to a certain degree, circularity is a necessary aspect of the epistemological process. This has been demonstrated by Jean Piaget, as well as Michael Polanyi (both of whom were both very scientific epistemologists who include a significant amount of scientific research in their arguments, and neither of which had a theistic agenda to their work) and many others.

:: The scientific method limits/removes bias, is the most objective method we have, and it is continuously successful.

It is very helpful in the search for objectivity, but it does not limit/remove the bias of its own assumed truth-bearing nature; it is not (indeed cannot be, I don’t think) objective with relation to itself. The only reason you can say it is “continuously successful” is because you once assumed it to be reliable, and it has not proven otherwise. It is “continuously successful”, but only “from the inside” of presupposing that it is true.

:: And you've presented no alternatives.

Yes I have. Testimony, for example. I even provided you links to some excellent writing on the epistemology of Testimony (the last issue of Episteme journal, for example). Intuition is another factor worth seriously considering, rather than dismissing it categorically without good reason. As I understand, epistemologists such as Alan Goldman have defended intuition (with qualification) through Reliabilism. There are other factors in the process of knowing too, such as prioritization and the fact that a person has to feel like something is worth knowing before they seek knowledge of it. “Resonance” and equilibrium also play into this process. And that’s the tip of the iceberg. McGrath gives an excellent assessment of the psychological aspects of this process in his chapter on the “Psychology of Perception” in The Open Secret: a New vision for Natural Theology (the chapter is actually written by Joanna Collicutt, who is a lecturer in psychology).

Seriously consider the Matrix movie. Try to put yourself in the position of Neo. It is a hypothetical situation in which the very signals being sent to our brains, giving us data about reality, is called into question. This data typically goes without being questioned at all because, as you point out, we don’t have a reason to doubt it.

Think of the expression “the squeaky wheel gets the oil.” When we drive our car, we are not really consciously aware of all the mechanisms that work together to put us into motion, until something goes wrong. When something does go wrong, we pop open the hood and try to see what is the matter, and notice our oil is low, or radiator fluid is leaking, or whatever. When things work well all the time, we can easily take things for granted as being much simpler than they really are. When things go wrong, it forces us to think about these things we take for granted.

The Matrix/BIV analogies are really just a helpful way of causing us to stop and think about the epistemic complexities that we take for granted. If someone we had known for a long time, who we really respected, who had always proven to be a reliable source of information were to tell us in all seriousness that our experiences of reality were really just fabrications of computers being transmitted to us via electronic signals to our brains, we would be forced to reckon with (among other things, such as the epistemic nature of testimony) why we should or should not trust our senses. We couldn’t use science to prove that our friend was mistaken, because science itself would be called into question; science itself would be part of the illusion.

In the process of seeking objective truth, it should be our goal to bring our attention to the tacit epistemological processes that usually do not get our attention. It should not necessarily take a “squeaky wheel” to get us to think critically about it. We should be seeking it anyway. No we don’t have a reason NOT to believe our senses, but that should not keep us from trying to explore the process behind why we DO believe it.

Objectivity is explicitly concerned with thinking critically about our presuppositions. If “our senses tell us the truth” is a presupposition (which it is), then we should be critically examining it. That is exactly what postmodern epistemologists (and philosophers after them) have done. That has been what I understand Alister McGrath has been concerned with in his three-volume Scientific Theology: looking closely and thinking critically about the methodology behind science and theology that has often gone unexamined.

That methodology consists (at least in part) of what I outlined in my last post. But there are many places in which people explain it far better than me (such as McGrath’s chapter on psychology of perception).

:: You've STILL not presenting reasons for why our senses are untrustworthy. You're only making naked assertions!!

I’m not saying they are untrustworthy. Nor is it relevant whether or not there are those “reasons” (see above). Consider the fact that you are making the “naked assertion” that we should let our belief in our senses remain without question unless we have good reason to doubt them.

:: I however can make an argument for the reliability of our sense: our senses are repeatably and independently confirmed via the scientific method to such a degree that there is not reason to doubt them.

Again, in the Matrix scenario, your argument would be irrelevant, because the scientific method would be irrelevant as “proof” (though not irrelevant as “resonance”). You must come to grips with this, but as of yet you have not. All those scientific “confirmations” you point to would be alleged fabrications of the machine to which you’re hooked up. Yes, it would be “reliable”, but that reliability would only be “from within” the Matrix. It would be “reliable” in that it is intrinsically/internally consistent and thus “resonant.”

The reason I don’t believe I’m in a Matrix is not because of the scientific method per se, but ultimately because that belief would not be useful in anyway to help me live my life. If I do not see proof, or other good reasons to believe in the Matrix, then the proposition of the Matrix does not disturb my “equilibrium” enough to force me to adjust the paradigm of my worldview. The best “resonance” is achieved, then, through NOT believing in the Matrix, believing instead in the truth-bearing nature of the signals sent to my brain. I maintain that paradigm (“I can trust my senses”) until equilibrium is disturbed, or an alternative with greater equilibrium and resonance is found.

:: Unless you can present a method that is as good as, if not better than empiricism, at verifying claims, then your complain is a red herring. So far you've failed to to this. What you presented was not only not on par with empiricism, it could not even be used to verify the truth of claims..

I beg to differ. Not only is it “on par” with empiricism, it is what empiricism itself demands and employs. The “method” of which I’m speaking is the very method we use in order to affirm empiricism. I recommend you re-read what I’ve said about “best explanation”, “resonance”, etc., as well as the process of “equilibration”. Better yet, go read some of the articles I posted, or buy or check out from the library McGrath’s book The Open Secret, or look into his Scientific Theology series.

:: The default position is to withhold belief unless we have evidence/reason to accept. We are to assume it is wrong until we have reason to believe otherwise. With our sense and the scientific method, we DO have evidence of reliability, we thus are justified in holding them as trustworthy.

Ok, now think about this. You now say the default position is to withhold belief. If that is the case, then you should be applying that to the scientific method itself. The process would look something like this:

Step One: Withhold belief that the scientific method is true

Step Two: Find evidence that the scientific method is true.

Step Three: Believe that the scientific method is true.

Again, the problem with this is that you are applying the scientific method itself as “evidence” for Step two. This is circular reasoning.

Take the same approach to the Matrix/BIV scenario:

Step 1: Withhold belief that the signals being sent to your brain accurately reflect reality.

Step 2: Find evidence that the signals being sent to your brain accurately reflect reality.

Step 3: Believe that the signals being sent to your brain accurately reflect reality.

Here too you are applying the scientific method to step 2. The problem is that the scientific method rests upon these signals (you get data from the scientific method via these brain signals). If you are “withholding belief” from these brain signals, then you would also, necessarily, be withholding belief from the scientific method. If you are withholding belief from the scientific method, then you cannot use it in step 2 in order to get to step 3 without your reasoning becoming circular.

Your approach is (unbelief-evidence-belief). But as I’ve pointed out, this process is viscously circular. But as I think about it (at 4:21am!!!), it seems that the converse (belief-evidence-unbelief) actually avoids that circularity (at least the “visciousness” of it). You see, your approach explicitly demands non-circularity, but tacitly employs it, and is thus self-contradictory. The converse approach does not demand non-circularity, but acknowledges the necessity of a degree of circularity (at least in the “leap” that is necessary to step into the proposition and test its resonance), and unabashedly employs it. You don’t necessarily have to find absolute proof in order to believe it. You find the evidence to believe it (at least partly) from the inside of that belief—the evidence being that it is a reliable process. No, that reliability is not “proof” (for example) that signals sent to the brain are true to reality. But the more you find yourself in equilibrium from within that position, the more you see it as reliable, and the less it really matters that you find that “proof.” The proof then only matters when dissonance (i.e. evidence against it) is introduced.

But that (above), again, is an over-simplification. The reality is that the process is quite complex and synergistic. Your approach (doubt-evidence-belief) might be called a “bottom-top” approach. The converse (belief-evidence-doubt) might be called a “top-bottom” approach. I think that the process of knowing is synergistic, incorporating both “bottom-top” and “top-bottom,” somehow. We process data (or evidence) using pre-existing schemas; and yet those schemas are also shaped by data. Which comes first: the chicken or the egg? It is difficult to say. Perhaps it is best to think in terms of synergistic process than an absolute starting point? I don’t know.

Sorry this is so long (and took me so long). I’m really trying hard to communicate clearly, but at the same time, this is a process of discovery for me even while I’m writing. I’m certainly not a pro at this (in case you couldn’t tell—ha!). Thanks for your patience! Have a good day!

Meditations Part III: a Faith Among Many Faiths

2007-01-16T17:33:00.000-08:00

I apologize in advance if this seems is the most stream of consciousness blog you've ever read, but this is how I process things. I'm not even sure what I want to write or say, but something is in there that needs to come out. So here it is.

So, obviously, this question about Faith has been haunting me lately. This thing called "faith" is so ethereal, so cloudy and elusive—how could something so intangible be so important? And yet, I think, it is. It is how we live, whether we realize it or not.

My faith, as a Christian, creates a great tension for me in the way I engage my world. Many Christians try to engage our culture—its arts, sciences, and religions—with sanitized rubber gloves on. If it weren't for this "evangelical" component of Christianity, these Christians would very likely cloister themselves up in a iron wall-fortified Christian ghetto where all that ever happens is Bible study while they would wear Christian t-shirts, Christian shoes, Christian watches, eating Christian chicken fried chicken, and Christian after-dinner mints. The Bible, this "special revelation" we have from God is the only Truth that is important to them.

But this is a problem for me. Even as I accept Christianity by faith, I study the Bible and find that God reveals Himself in many ways, not just through the Bible. There are such concepts as "common grace"—grace given to all of humanity ("He makes his sun rise and set on the evil and the good")—and "general revelation"—the revelation of God to all of humanity, a revelation that happens much through his Creation ("the rocks cry out," see also in Rom 1), and as these concepts emerge in the Biblical text, it makes me realize that the Bible claims no monopoly on Truth. The only monopoly that Christianity has any claim to, perhaps, is "saving grace" or "special" revelation which happened mostly through Christ. But this saving grace is not the only thing that matters in life.

I would say that it is the most important thing because it carries with it eternal implications; you can have all the "common grace" in the world but you can't take it with you unless you inherit eternal life. Yet, I don't understand why anyone would want an eternal life of getting to know their Creator, if they have ignored a vast portion of His work while they were here on Earth. We can learn about God and love Him by observing what he has created, and we can do this, I think, through the arts, sciences, philosophy, theology, and even other religions because religions often reveal truth about Humanity. Now if you have a friend whom you love deeply, you naturally get to know this person's work. How could you tell an artist friend that you love him, and yet you never look at his art? He asks again and again, "What do you think? Do you find it lovely?" but instead of looking, you turn your head and close your eyes, and think about how much you love him, or read a letter that he wrote you once. Meanwhile, he stands there in your presence, watching you read, waiting for you to look at what he is holding up to show you. This is how I think God must feel with many Christians who have no interest in exploring his Creation and getting to know Him by looking at what He has done for all to see. Such beauty lost.

This mentality of some Christians that I find disturbing is not, however, without its valid concerns. As I begin to look at Creation, my senses are overloaded with the abundance of what is out there, much of which seems, at first glance, to go against what I understand to have been revealed to me—this "special revelation" from God that has been recorded in the scriptures. These cloistered Christians see these dark horizons and gather their children under their wings, fearful that their young ones may get lost in the darkness and lose their faith.

I can't pretend to know how to raise children, and it would be completely presumptuous for me to cast any judgments, but I can at least speak of what seems to make sense to me without assuming that I'm right. What seems to make sense to me is that there is some goodness in this way of protecting their children. I don't think it is good for children to go about roving in the darkness until they can understand how to navigate this darkness. Yet one day, perhaps far off into the future, these little children will be grown up, forced out into the world, taking their steps now without holding the hand of their mother and father. It is necessary, as a part of growing up, for them to let go of their parent's hands and walk "on their own." But I am afraid that many of these cloistered parents, in their fear of exposing their children to the dangers of the darkness, have not prepared their children with good advice on how to navigate the shadows. "If you see a shadow, run from it!" is perhaps the best advice they offer.

But this seems to me to do a disservice to the shadows, and to the people who live in the shadows—these ways of thinking about life that seem foreign to the Christian faith. I have particularly encountered these shadows as I have tried to discuss my faith with people who do not share the same faith as myself. I remember as a young boy in the third grade going to my elementary school counselor (who happened to be a Christian) and asking such questions as, "How do we know that we Christians are right? I mean, if I had grown up in India, I would be just as convinced that my religion there was right."

How can we know if we are "right"? Ah, but that's a modern question. The post-modern question then, I suppose, is "Is there such a thing as 'right' when it comes to religion?" I think my questions as a young boy gave me this sense of finitude and inadequacy to make bold assertions that I still have today. This causes some tension with the fact that my faith is an "evangelical" faith, a faith that wants to multiply itself. It is not out of arrogance that my faith wants others to believe the same—it is the only response Love can have to receiving this Gospel of salvation: we want to share this good news of salvation with others. I've shared my faith several times throughout my life, but every time I've run into this little "bump" along the road: people don't just accept what I have to say because I have said it! Go figure! Just as I assumed when I was a young child, these people are just as confident in their faith as I am in mine! And even more surprising, many of these people wanted to convert me to their way of thinking as well! How astonishing! The way they see is best to live life, they want to share with me so that I can have what they think is the best life I can have! The nerve!

Of course it is only out of love (usually) that these people want me to change my way of thinking, but I found myself resisting them without even considering what they have to say—"If you see a shadow, RUN!" But then I stopped myself thinking, "If they have the same attitude toward my faith, spreading the good news is impossible with these people!" I found myself extremely frustrated that others wouldn't consider my faith, while at the same time I refused to consider theirs! It didn't take very long for me to see the hypocrisy in my approach to Faith, and it made me realize that it was really my moral obligation to change the way I encounter these other worldviews.

It is not an easy thing to do to seriously consider other worldviews. Not at all. Often it means that some of the things—even THE thing—that you hold most dear are called into question. Not long after this, I found myself being encountered with ways of thinking that very seriously challenged my own, ways of thinking that seemed to make more sense to me—at least in some respects. "Ok, this makes sense, I've seriously considered it…now what?"

There were several things that kept me from trading in my Christian worldview for another. First of all was the residue of the "run from shadows!" approach that still remained in me, but I think this "run" mentality really had more to do with love than it did fear. My Christianity, my God, is so much more than just a "worldview," a way of thinking—it is a relationship, a very meaningful relationship to me. It is my identity. It is me. One should never be so quick to trade something so important in. I'm glad I didn't. Yet if it is this important to me, surely it would be that important to others as well.

Yet my love for God is not the only reason why I held on. It also had greatly to do with my love for my family and my close friends. I knew that if I were to let go of my faith, my relationship with my family and these friends would undoubtedly be changed dramatically, creating a tremendous tension where there wasn't such tension before. It would have torn me completely for something like this to happen. My life would never be the same. My love for God and for my family and friends, thank God, made the giving up of my faith a colossal task not to be taken flippantly in the least. And because of this realization, I cannot help but to approach the evangelization of another with a great humility, patience, respect, and understanding for the difficulty of the proposition I have given them.

Again and again, I have encountered challenges to my worldview as I explore this world of light and shadows in order to carry out my relationship with God. Again and again, these challenges that lurk in the shadows have been extremely convincing, offering great "proofs" and compelling ideas that make my Faith seem to appear weak when compared to them. And yet I held on. Besides my love for God and how much my Faith composes my identity, the other thing that keeps me from letting go is the fact that there are so, so many Christians throughout history whom I greatly respect that have held on to their faith in spite of these same oppositions, Christians who are far more intelligent and accomplished than myself. Surely the chief of these Christians in my esteem since high school has been C.S. Lewis. I thank God for that man. Absolutely brilliant. Question after question that I and others in my life would ask, challenges to the Christian faith that seemed insurmountable, Lewis would provide excellent and insightful possible answers for, pointing out ways of thinking that I would have probably never considered myself. Inevitably, there would be difficult questions that I couldn't find answers for from Lewis. But these previous experiences of having seemingly insurmountable questions overcome made me realize that it is quite possible—even most likely—that there were answers to these questions that I just hadn't found yet.

All of these factors—love for God, love for my family and friends, respect for other Christian thinkers, and the realization that there could be trajectories of thought I've not yet considered—all served as a "buffer" for my faith, a cushion that immensely softened the impact of opposing ways of thinking that seriously challenged my faith. I wasn't aware of this in the beginning of my faith journey, but this cushion seems to make the shadows not near so terrifying to me. I now face challenges to my faith on a regular basis, and I do so without fear. Yet, there are many Christians who are not aware of this cushion that exists for matters of Faith. While the cushion of Love may be inherent to them, the other realities that can serve as a cushion may not be self-evident. Thus, when they encounter the first or second serious challenge to Faith, their world is shattered. An immediate answer is not found to a question that they have, and thus they assume that the answer must be, "There is no Christian answer for this, therefore it must not be true."

There is one question that I have not mentioned yet, a challenge to faith more ominous than any "way of thinking" that I could ever encounter, and that question is simply, "Where are you, God?" I remember in college, I encountered this challenge with full force, and it brought me to the ground in tears. That God which I had once experienced in such a "real" way had seemed to withdraw his presence from my life. That warmth and comfort that once held me together seemed absent. I was cold and naked. I felt forsaken, left alone, orphaned. More than mere ways of thinking, this felt reality of abandonment seemed to make all other challenges to my faith seem like they were the philosophical musings of Jessica Simpson. THIS was reality for me: God was not there. That was the reality I felt and lived in. And yet I held on to my faith. There were only two things that kept me from giving that faith up: the memory of that experience with God that I longed to have again, and a U2 song.

Yes, U2 helped save my faith. I could sound really pious and say, "this passage out of the Psalms saved my faith," but in all reality, it was not the Psalms that echoed in my mind but the chorus of U2's "40," a chorus that cries out to God, "How long to sing this song? How long? How long? How long? How long?" When I was on the verge of giving up on God, that chorus was what kept me holding on, a chorus that is taken from Psalm 40 as David was crying out to God, feeling abandoned. "I waited patiently for the Lord…" Patiently. I don't know how patient I really was, but I waited anyway, all the time singing, "How long? I'm dying here, God…HOW. STINKING. LONG!!???" I held on.

A friend of mine once pointed to an author who encouraged a young friend to "Live the question." When I first read this, I thought it was nonsense. "Live the question? What is that supposed to mean? That's stupid." Now, I think I see what this author was talking about. In fact, what I once thought was nonsense, I now think is sage advice for a young Christian—or any person for that matter. There you go, me making another shift in thinking that occurred after about a month of contemplation. I have so much to learn. "Live the question." I guess I interpret this now to mean, "Don't be so quick about coming to conclusions about things. Let the cushion do its job. Don't be so quick to forsake your love for your God, your family, your self. Don't be so quick to think foolish what so many intelligent people have thought was the highest truth. Don't try to be so quick when, in reality, what you are is slow. We are all slow. Be slow, and let slow happen. Let the question happen. Live the question." I don't think that means, "Don't listen for answers, and don't seek out answers." Indeed, to not seek answers is not to ask a question. We seek. The question is the journey. And then we weigh all the answers that come along before we exchange who we are for another "Me."

"Live the question." For how long though, I wonder? I don't know. But that is what I'm going to do as I am trying to seriously consider what the Eastern religions (namely, Taoism for the present) have to say about God and Truth. It seems to be the best way of both respecting my own experience and understanding as well as respecting and considering these other perspectives that are so important and meaningful to other people. It's not dismissing other perspectives out of hand, but neither is it embracing them uncritically. It's the middle way—the way of Love, I think.

Meditations Part II: On the Nature of Faith, Certainty, and the Existence of God

2007-01-16T17:30:00.000-08:00

For example, I do not have to have an absolute certitude that my office chair will hold me up when I sit on it. I could even watch as person after person sits in that chair, the chair holding them up, yet still I cannot be absolutely certain that the chair will hold me up. Perhaps there is a screw that has been about to fall out the whole time the others sit, but when I sit that screw will finally give and collapse under me. It is possible. There is always a first time. But should that lack of *complete* certitude keep me from sitting? No. That would be absurd and irrational to let such a slight possibility keep me from sitting down. In fact, I wouldn't even stop to consider such a possibility unless I was forced to stop and think about it--it's just not something that you do. It's silly. So I don't dwell on that. Rather, I believe it will hold me up, based on that belief I sit. In that act of sitting, I have acted out my complete faith and confidence in the chair that it will hold me up.

As I said, there is always the possibility (however unlikely) that the chair will break when I sit on it. However, my faith in the chair is not negated by my realization of that. I could be mistaken to place my faith in that chair because (a) I do not have an exhaustive knowledge of the chair (i.e. of the chairs engineering and if everything in the chair's engineering is in the right place and unbroken) and (b) I cannot see into the future of what will happen if I sit in the chair. But my faith is demonstrated and completed in the act of sitting. There is no need for absolute certitude; there is only the need for a confidence (assensus) that the chair will hold me up (noetitia) that provokes an act of faith (fiducia).

I think it is the same way with our faith in Christ. I am not omniscient, thus I cannot know with absolute certitude that the Gospel of Christ is true. However, based on my experience with the Spirit of Christ and from what I have learned in history and logic, the only proper response for me is to have a faith in Christ and the claims of His Gospel. Placing my confidence in Him, I aim to trust Him with my heart and my obedience. I have yet to be disappointed in my decision to place my faith in Christ, however that doesn't mean that I am not wrong to do so. The one and only way we can know for sure is when we die and are/are not resurrected. But in the meantime, what matters is not that I have an absolute certitude that Christianity is true. What matters is that I have the kind of confidence (assensus) in Christ that provokes act of Faith (fiducia).

I could be wrong, but it seems to me that any claim of "absolute certainty" would be roughly equivilent to the claim of being God--a claim of omniscience. This admittance of lack of absolute certainty is, I think, an appropriate recognition of humility before an infinite God.

...still pondering...

Meditations on God, Faith, and Atheism

2007-01-05T15:45:00.000-08:00

Perhaps I've been living in a bubble for the past 7-8 years, but I had come to believe that Atheism had become completely passé with the dawning of Post-modern subjectivism along with its evaporation of intolerant, absolutist statements. Perhaps Atheism has waned over the past decade. Indeed, in all my internet discussion, it is not atheism that I've found myself in dialogue with but rather agnosticism. However, thanks to my friend Pheirser for bringing this to my attention, it appears that Atheism may again be on the rise in secular thought with much help from Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris. Not just atheism, but a sort of atheist fundamentalism with the kind of heated rhetoric (and sometimes the kind of logic) that you might see from the religious fundamentalists they so harshly criticize. I've been thinking about reading Dawkin's popular book, The God Delusion, and offering my criticisms of it, but that is something I think would be fun to do with a small group of people.

My own worldview has been shaped with much thanks to a brief discussion (even though I'm sure I misunderstood him) with a college Philosophy professor who helped me to see the epistemological (i.e. our ability to know things) limitations of human beings. He really only hinted at this, never speaking in great detail on it, but the reality of it has sort of haunted me ever since. What can we really know for sure, without a shadow of a doubt? We have great limitations on what we can know for sure, simply because we are not God, we are not omniscient.

On "Truth," "Belief," and "Certitude"

First off, to define my terms:

Truth—what is, objectively, the content and order of Reality.
Belief—the body of knowledge concerning Reality a person considers to be True.
Certitude—one's notion that, without a shadow of a doubt, his belief is 100% true, leaving absolutely no room for the slightest possibility that he is wrong.

In college, before I talked to my professor, I thought that Certitude was inherent to Belief in Christianity—that one could not have Belief without Certitude. Now, I think differently. Now I think that Certitude about almost anything is actually impossible for humans simply because humans are not infinite in their knowledge of reality. [1] Therefore, when approaching almost any subject matter, humans should practice epistemological humility, realizing that they could be wrong. Let me give an example.

[WARNING: LIFE OF DAVID GALE SPOILER!] Think of the movie The Life of David Gale. The jury was pressed to make a decision, and because of the partial video they saw in addition to other evidence, they were convinced that the evidence convicted Gale of murder. However, the full video reveals the fact that Gale did not murder his colleague at all, but it was, in fact, a suicide. Likewise, we need to make a decision in life as to what we believe about the Gospel of Christ. The evidence and experience can be overwhelming that the Gospel is true (and it is, I think, overwhelming), and on that evidence we make a decision to follow Him -- we put our faith into practice. However, I will not know until I die whether what I believe is indeed true or not. By saying that I cannot accept the Gospel of Christ with Certitude, I am simply acknowledging the fact that I don't know everything. If I don't know everything, then it is possible in that shaded area of my ignorance there could be some Truth (i.e., "What actually is" not "what appears to be") I am missing that -- like that final piece of evidence in Gale -- tells a different story than what appears to be the case as I see it now.

As far as I see it, the only true rational or scientific verification of whether or not the Gospel is true will happen at the Second coming of Christ. The Gospel says -- among other things -- that at this time, there will be life after death for those who believe. Using the scientific method of verification is impossible here. We cannot conduct an experiment that proves there is eternal life for those who believe. We cannot cause the Second Coming to happen, and then record the results. Real and final verification is impossible. However, there is plenty of evidence that suggests the Gospel is true, and on this evidence we believe that it is true, and live our lives in faith that it is true.

The Faith of Atheism

However, this is a sore rub for atheists. Atheists seem to like to think that they have a philosophical worldview that is completely absent of Faith. My atheist friend told me that any belief that is based on Faith is "irresponsible." The problem for the atheist is that Faith is inherent to their worldview as well, whether they realize it or not. Now I need to define a couple more terms in this context:

Faith—a Belief (see above) that is based on an experientially unverifiable presupposition [2]
Presupposition—something that is an assumed and necessary foundation for a philosophical argument.

As far as I can tell, Atheists exercise Faith in these (if not also other) presuppositions:

1) That their physical senses are not deceiving them, that their experiences are an actual (and not fictional) reality.
2) That the scientific method is the best way of discerning Truth
3) That there is no reality beyond our spatio-temporal existence

Presupposition 1 is a presupposition that both Christians and Atheists share. The movie The Matrix is an excellent example of this. If it is true that all of our experiences are essentially electronic impulses in our brain that could be reproduced through other means, this very response that you're reading could be a fictitious fabrication of artificial intelligence. Of course, there is no real reason to believe that the Matrix exists, but there is also no way (that I'm aware of) to prove that the ideas of the matrix are false. Therefore, all science is based on the "faith" or "presupposition" that we are not in something like a matrix and that scientific experiments are not fictitious images produced by contrived electronic impulses. Therefore, if it is "irresponsible" to believe anything based on faith, then we are all in trouble. [3]

Regarding Presupposition 2, How do you verify that the scientific method is the best way of discerning Truth? A gut feeling? Do you use scientific method to prove that scientific method is True? You see, it becomes a circular argument because their foundation of scientific method is itself an unverifiable presupposition that requires Faith.

Presupposition 3 is especially unique to atheists. Christians have the opposite presupposition, that Reality does extend beyond our spatio-temporal existence. Now, by "spatio-temporal" what I mean the experience we have of space-time. For example, we experience three space dimensions (i.e., up-down, left-right, forward-back), and one time dimension (i.e., time only moves forward). But Christianity (and other religions) claim that there is more to reality than meets the eye, that there are aspects of Reality that extend beyond our tangible grasp. Now the problem this presents for Atheists is the fact that scientific method is entirely based upon empirical data. If there is Reality that extends beyond our spatio-temporal existence, it is, by definition, impossible to empirically test and thus beyond scientific method. Thus Atheists have to presuppose by Faith that there is no Reality beyond the spatio-temporal, because there is no way through scientific method to prove that it does or doesn't exist.

That is all for now. I'll try to write more on this later. Please, I welcome any comments, critiques, or suggestions!

__________________________

Footnotes:

[1] I say this in keeping with my lack of absolute certain. That is, even in this statement "humans can say almost nothing with absolute certitude," I realize that I could be mistaken, and I welcome any insights on how I could be wrong in this regard.

[2] This is a very contextually-confined definition of Faith. In other contexts, I will use the word "Faith" in a very different sense.

[3] This is, as I understand it, the epistemological reality that Descartes was dealing with in his Meditations and Discourse on Method. I just started reading his Meditations, so please forgive me if I'm mistaken on this, but as I understand it, Descartes concluded that the only thing that you cannot doubt, that you can know with absolute certainty, is that you exist. The only thing that Descartes could be certain of was that he was, indeed, doubting. "If I am doubting, there must be an 'I' to exist."

"Creation Will Be At Peace"--a Sermon

2006-12-25T01:19:00.000-08:00

Last week, I threw together, at the very last minute, a sermon to preach at my dad's church. I am not a preacher, and I've only preached about 3-4 sermons in my life, but they were all class requirements. Anyway, my dad knew I had just taken a preaching class, and so he asked me earlier in the week if I wanted to preach when I got home, and I was really interested in doing it because it was to be a sermon concerning the Christmas message of the angels and the lighting of the angel candle, in celebration of Advent.

You see, I've been really stirred by the idea that we are in community with angels at any moment of any day. A very bizarre thought that nobody ever preaches about, but something that appears to be true nonetheless. I wanted to write a sermon that touched on that somehow. I also wanted to touch on the idea that the message of Peace that the angels brought was both an allusion to the peace of Eden, and a foreshadowing of the eternal peace to come at the second Christmas when Christ comes again to make a new heavens and a new earth. But alas, time ran out, and we had to pack up and leave for Arkansas before I could really figure out how to tie it all together into a sermon.

I'm not sure I ever did figure out how to tie it together well, but this is what I threw together in about three hours the night before I preached it (along with a little polishing up). It basically breaks every single rule I was supposed to have learned in my preaching class...but ah well. So if there is anyone out there who would like to randomly read my first Christmas sermon (heck, my first sermon I've ever written that was not for a class) enjoy!

And before I forget... Merry Christmas!

“Creation Will Be At Peace”

Luke 2:8-20:
And there were shepherds living out in the fields nearby, keeping watch over their flocks at night. An angel of the Lord appeared to them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified. But the angel said to them, "Do not be afraid. I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the people. Today in the town of David a Savior has been born to you; he is Christ[a] the Lord. This will be a sign to you: You will find a baby wrapped in cloths and lying in a manger."

Suddenly a great company of the heavenly host appeared with the angel, praising God and saying,
"Glory to God in the highest,
and on earth peace to men on whom his favor rests."

When the angels had left them and gone into heaven, the shepherds said to one another, "Let's go to Bethlehem and see this thing that has happened, which the Lord has told us about."

So they hurried off and found Mary and Joseph, and the baby, who was lying in the manger. When they had seen him, they spread the word concerning what had been told them about this child, and all who heard it were amazed at what the shepherds said to them. But Mary treasured up all these things and pondered them in her heart. The shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all the things they had heard and seen, which were just as they had been told.

I want to tell you a story. It is, in a way, the same kind of story that you see in almost every movie you go to. It is “the” story really—the story of which all other stories are really only copies. Have you ever noticed that many movies you go to work kind of like this:

Act I: As the movie begins, life is generally good. Everyone is pretty happy. You watch the characters as they laugh together. You watch the father scooping the little girl off the ground and raising her into the air, and then looking wistfully over at his wife with a cheesy smile on his face because he loves it. Ah… life is good. But then… huh oh… then something bad happens like…say…the wife and the cute little girl are kidnapped. Well, this ushers in Act II, and this takes up most of the movie. In Act II, the father sets out with all of his wit and macho-ness to save his wife and daughter from these bad men who have captured them. The hero-father goes through several trials and tests, almost dies several times, but always comes out alive. A lot of times, it is right when things look the worst for the hero that he begins his victory over the bad guys. Perhaps it is only a hair’s breadth separating him from his fate as he is knocked hard to the ground by the enemy…but wait! Then something happens… like say, he remembers his little girl’s laugh, his wife’s warm embrace, and these thoughts give him the energy he needs to get up off the ground and really take charge. He beats his enemy this time, and comes out alive. Act III. In this final thirty minutes or so of the movie, the father takes charge, beats all the bad guys once and for all (well…unless, of course, there’s a sequel where he does it all again), and he saves his family from the bad guys. And in the last scene, like the first scene, there are lots of giddy laughter and cheesy smiles as we see the family back to “life as normal”…but not quite the same as before because they have grown closer in a way, and a bit wiser.

This is, essentially, the story. Now we often don’t think about this, but it is also the story of God and man. Just as life began in Act I of the movie with everyone happy… so also our life began, in the Garden of Eden. What if we could catch a scene in a movie of Adam and Eve’s life? What if…? I can just see Adam and Eve in that glorious garden. Adam is in the back yard…maybe he just finished building a shed to put his new riding lawnmower in…who knows? Eve is in the kitchen with her 1950’s cooking apron on, maybe she’s baking some cookies for Adam… maybe she’s making some fruit salad… who knows? Well, Adam comes inside, wipes the sweat off of his forehead as he lets out a sigh of relief. “Ahhh… air conditioning.” Hmm… there’s a problem here… I don’t mind giving Adam a riding lawnmower and air-conditioning, but we can’t have kids yet, because they don’t have kids until they get kicked out of the Garden, right? Ok, so instead of kids…of course! They have animals! Ok, so Adam walks in the back door, and their little malti-poo (that is, of course, a maltese-poodle mix—Kara and I have a little malti-poo named Libby, and she’s really cute…)… so their little malti-poo comes running into the kitchen, and goes absolutely crazy with glee, jumping all over Adam and barking anxiously until Adam picks her up. And so, Adam picks up the little white furball of a dog, snuggles it close, and looks wistfully over at Eve with a cheesy smile, and she give him a cheesy smile back. Adam reaches over to the freshly baked batch of cookies, but Eve slaps his hand saying, “No! Don’t you remember, we are having God over to dinner dear… you can have as many as you want once he gets here, because, well… you know, he’s God and he just works like that.” Ah yes, life was good.

Ah, but wait… you see, life doesn’t stay good. You know the story, you know what ushers in Act II… God said to Adam and Eve, “Of all the grocery stores in Arkansas, you can buy as much fruit as you want—on my credit card even. But there is one store I ask you not to shop at, for if you shop at this store—the store down on 1st street with the picture of a pig, yeah that one—you will surely die. But what do Adam and Eve do? Some lawyer (you know… snake…) came along persuaded them that they should go ahead and shop at the Piggly Wiggly, and because of this, they are kicked out of the Garden of Eden.

Now the point of this familiar narrative God gives us in Genesis 1 is not the specifics such as, “What kind of fruit did they eat?” I don’t even think that the fruit was the really point. The point is that Adam and Eve disobeyed God. And you see, when you disobey someone, fellowship is damaged with that person, peace is broken, and thus fellowship and peace was damaged between God and Man when Adam and Eve fell. You see life went from “good” to “hard.” Very hard. All the sudden pain and suffering and death are introduced into the story. Tears fall to the ground. Blood spills onto the earth. People get angry at each other, and fight, and kill, and lie. Hearts and promises are broken. Life is hard.

This is Act II. However, there is another difference between THE story and the hypothetical movie I mentioned earlier. You see in THE story, God’s story, it is not Adam who goes out to defeat the wicked lawyer who tricked them into shopping at Piggly Wiggly… it is God Himself. God is the Father who is trying to save his loved ones from the death that was brought about by the enemy—which is Sin, disobedience, broken fellowship. All through Act II, which lasts pretty much through the rest of the Old Testament, God is trying to restore this community he once had between Himself and Humanity. The Laws given in the Old Testament were a way to help restore this community so that the presence of God could dwell among the people of Israel again. But this is still an imperfect community between God and Man. In fact, because humans are just so stupid and can’t get it right, God’s presence leaves the temple forever, and eventually the people of Israel are sent into captivity. That is where the song “O Come, O Come Emmanuel” comes from—captive Israel, waiting, longing to be freed from their captivity by the Messiah, longing also for that restored community with God, a community of peace and wholeness.

You see, community was, essentially, Act I in the Garden. The Garden of Eden was this perfect community between God and Man, between Man and Man, and between Man and the Creation God placed Man in charge over. Community. But this community was broken because of Sin, and everything God has been doing since then has been to try to restore this perfect community, trying to bring the story on to the conclusion of Act III when life will be good again.

Well, Act III began 2000 years ago in the city of Bethlehem. You see, in Bethlehem, God Himself came to His loved ones from disaster, which is an astounding news considering that, for the thousands of years during Act II, God had been trying to redeem mankind to Himself more or less from a distance, sending prophets and angels to carry his proclamations to the people… Angels—yes. That is the advent candle we lit today: the angel candle.

At this point we have to interrupt the story and ask ourselves, “What is an angel?” Well, the word, “angel” literally means “messenger.” Now, we’re talking about God re-establishing community here, so I’m going to do something crazy here that I think might just help us sink into an idea of community with the people who have come before us: the Hebrews. This is the word the Hebrews would often use when they spoke of angels: “mahlaka.” Hear that as the Hebrews, thousands of years ago, would hear that, and try to feel the community between you and them: “mahlaka.” When Rome dominated the world in the first century, the Roman world spoke Greek. They would read these Gospels and letters of the New Testament we have in the churches. And when they would read anything about angels, they would use this word: “angellos”. Again, try to hear that as if you were a first century Christian, sitting on the dusty floor in a crowded room: “angellos.” “Angel.” “Messenger.”

Many people think that an “angel” is more of an office, a kind of position, than it is a type of spiritual being. I think this is probably true, because if we look at all the different times “angels” are seen in the Bible, there are various reactions. Sometimes angels just look like anyone else. The author of Hebrews even says that many people have entertained angels without even realizing it. But then on the other hand, you get these completely different reactions, such as we get from these Shepherds in the Christmas story who are scared to death when they see the angels. So some angels seem to be scary looking…others not so much…This could mean any number of things such as that angels can assume different appearances, or that it is an office for different kinds of spiritual creatures (such as Seraphim and Cherubim). They could be scared at the startling way in which they appeared all of the sudden… or heck, it could be that some angels are just ugly…like Jay Leno. Who knows? We do understand that demons are fallen angels, so this could further support the idea that “angel” is a kind of office.

Whatever the case…we just don’t really know all that much about angels, but we do know that they know a lot about us. We do not realize this on a day to day basis, but we are being observed, you see, not just by God…but by a whole host of spiritual creatures. I know this sounds like a science fiction movie, but it’s really not. If we believe what the bible and Christian tradition has to say about it, Angels do watch us, and care for us deeply because God cares for us. In a really confusing passage in 1 Corinthians where Paul talks about wearing coverings on heads, one of the reasons he gives is “because of the angels.” People think that this is implying that angels watch us as we worship, and they are exhorted and disturbed even as we do what we do in church and in worship of God. Whatever “angels” or “heavenly beings” are, we are, somehow, in community with them, right now… even though we don’t realize it.

Now you’ve heard all of your life that there are such a thing as angels, but it’s not something that seems truly real, is it? But I imagine that the shepherds heard similar stories of angels, maybe even believed them, but nothing could have prepared them for what they saw. They were scared to death as the angels appeared and they heard them say:

“Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace to men on whom his favor rests.”

I can just imagine those words, “Peace on whom his favor rests” echoing in their minds. Peace. No more hardship. No more suffering, pain, loneliness. Peace. The good life. Eden. This was a proclamation of Eden—the perfect life of perfect community. And where did the angels say they would find this savior who will bring peace? “lying in a manger.” A manger! Of all the places in the world, the son of God, the messiah, the one who was to bring peace back into the world, bring Eden back to the earth… was born in a cow’s feeding trough? And yet, I wonder if, as God was writing out the story, this movie starring his only begotten son, he added this whole “manger” and “sleeping in a stable” thing, surrounded by all the animals, as a nod to Eden. Could it be Eden? Paul calls Christ “the Second Adam,” and here this second Adam sleeps in a cow’s dinner. Is that just coincidence? I wonder…

Peace on earth. When the Jews would hear the word, “Shalom” or “Peace,” they understood it as a kind of “wholeness” or “complete-ness”. “On Earth, wholeness…” It is a picture of mankind being whole, complete, being just as God planned for us to be, kind of like before we messed it all up, breaking fellowship and peace with our sin. But this is Act III—and thank God for Act III! This is where peace and wholeness begins to happen again as the enemy begins to get defeated little by little.

Do we see absolute peace on earth in our lives today? No. But we do a little. And we have the Gospel that Christ brought to us that gives us a new life of hope, hope of eternal life in perfect community with God, and this is a hope that can make even the darkest hour on earth just a little brighter, an “eternal weight of Glory,” as Paul says. A glorious peace.

“Peace on earth.” It began with Christ, so it is happening right now already, but it is not yet fully completed. That will happen on the second Christmas when Christ comes not as a babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, but as a mighty warrior. Ultimate peace happens in the life to come. Peace. Wholeness. It’s already here, but not fully, but that is okay because we have hope. But humanity cannot horde this peace to ourselves. As it fills us, we let it overflow into the rest of Creation! And this is essentially the picture that we see in Isaiah 11. Many people interpret this simply as allegory, symbolic of the peace to come. But I think there is reason to believe that there is good reason to believe that there is more to it than symbol. I am not alone in thinking that this is more like a photograph of the messianic peace that is to come. Please, look at this picture of peace the prophet Isaiah gives us:

“The wolf will live with the lamb,
the leopard will lie down with the goat,
the calf and the lion and the yearling [a] together;
and a little child will lead them.

The cow will feed with the bear,
their young will lie down together,
and the lion will eat straw like the ox.

The infant will play near the hole of the cobra,
and the young child put his hand into the viper's nest.

They will neither harm nor destroy
on all my holy mountain,
for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the LORD
as the waters cover the sea.”

You see, just as God created the heavens and the earth and filled it with all kinds of life—both in the heavens and the earth—he is working to bring that full life of peace to all of his creation, not just to mankind. I’m convinced that the end of God’s story in Act III will look much like His story began in Act I, much like this picture Isaiah gives—a “new heavens and a new earth” when not just man, but all of Creation will be at peace.

But that peace comes to us, little by little, even now, and it can fill us. Peace, yes, as it overflows from all “on whom his favor rests” to the angels who watch over what is happening in this wondrous story that their God, our God, is writing. Joy to them, I’m sure, as they got to play a part in it, “messengers” bearing God’s glorious message to the shepherds. And peace, also, to the animals who so graciously shared their beds with Mary and Joseph and the little baby Jesus that night. Peace to them, as they slept side by side with the people, feeling the warmth and the joy that came from the new parents.

This Christmas message the angels bring to the shepherds is an allusion, a reminder of the peace in the Garden of Eden, and it is a foreshadowing reminder of the peace that is to come once and for all when Christ comes again and we enter into eternal, perfect Fellowship and community with him and his Creation once again on that blessed second Christmas.

Now imagine, if you will, that hope of life that we have for a second. Imagine all the pains and worries of this world as they pale in comparison to the glory that awaits us. Imagine the peace you feel as you watch these daily sufferings you experience fade away like a mist fades in the penetrating rays of the sun, a mist that you have forgotten was even there by the time you eat lunch. Imagine that peace, and imagine it forever. Let this hope fill you as much as you can stand with peace and joy and hope as we remember the message of these angels this Christmas. Peace. And don’t horde that peace.

Imagine that peace overflowing from you into the angels that are watching you, even when you are alone. Say that something goes terribly wrong, and you are alone, and about to get really frustrated. Think of this Peace proclaimed by the angels on that first Christmas, the Peace of eternal life, and watch that frustration melt away, and imagine that peace and joy overflow into the angels that are watching you, perhaps even those very same angels that came to the shepherds.

As you experience that peace yourself, imagine that peace overflowing from you even the animals that you’re around. Perhaps you have a dog or a cat in your house. Imagine the kind of community Adam and Eve had with the animals, and recognize that this is the kind of community that God wants to restore you to. I know this sounds crazy, but nevertheless, let that community happen between you and your pet, or you and the squirrel climbing up the tree. Be Adam and Eve and bless the life around you, all life. Be creative with it!

Let joy and hope overflow from you in your relationships with people. Imagine the true insignificance of those little annoying things that happen around people—A waiter gets your order wrong, or you have to stand in line for an hour, or someone hides the remote control somewhere and you can’t find it—imagine as all these annoying things fade completely away in eternity. Instead, focus on the thing that will last even into eternity: Love. Let that perfect community that is to come once again start to happen in your relationships with people.

But finally, and most importantly, Give thanks and glory to God. This is part of your community with God, a communication of Thanks and Praise to Him. Follow the excellent example of the angels and say, “Glory to God!” Let His peace and His joy flow more and more into you as you give Him glory for what he has done in this wonderful, unimaginable blessing of a thing we call Christmas.

“Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace to men on whom his favor rests.”

Eloquent Preaching: Good Thing or Bad Thing? (C&P)

2006-12-06T22:43:00.000-08:00

So... apparently I am sinking into a pattern here. Most of my contemplative writing seems to be done in response to other people's blogs. I suppose it is because I feel more of an impetus, an urgency about writing it because it is done in the context of a specific situation with a specific person. Well, I hate to leave all of that stuff just out there in various places, so I think I'm going to try, when I can and when it is appropriate, to just copy and paste my responses. Here is one such thing "C&P," and it was written in response to this blog.

As I understand it, your argument is essentially: Paul is an example telling us that the Gospel Myth should not be eloquently decorated with rhetoric. Am I on target? Now I would agree with this statement: It is not necessary for the Gospel Myth to be eloquently wrapped to be effective. However, I am not sure I can agree with the former statement.

The question, I think, lies in whether or not Paul's example is to be the rule to which everyone else in every situation should follow. I'm not entirely convinced this is the case with this particular issue, though it is somewhat convincing because Paul points to his weakness as a seal of apostolic authenticity. Suppose, however, that it was simply not Paul's gift to speak extemporaneously (I can identify!). Suppose he was much better with rhetoric in his writing than his oratory skills.

I think a quite compelling case can be made for this. This seemed to be the overall impression that several people had of Paul, and Paul had of himself, based on 2 Corinthians 10. Also, consider what is (to my knowledge) his only real attempt at oral rhetoric when he spoke to the Athenians of the "unknown god" met very little success. Furthermore, I think that a compelling case could be made that the elusive "thorn in the flesh" may be referring to his lack oral eloquence. He does seem to make a connection between the thorn and his weakness, and then his weakness with his unimpressive nature in person. Lastly, Paul's letters are quite often rhetorically eloquent, even utilizing poetry and metaphor.

Then on the flipside, we seem to have another Christian, Apollos, who is traditionally understood to have impressive and persuasive oratory skills, although we have nothing ostensibly written by him (though its contended by some that the very-eloquent Hebrews is authored by him). Considering these things, a quite compelling case, I think, can be made that God uses and blesses eloquently packaged preaching as well as more simplistic preaching.

Lewis seems to make a similar conclusion regarding eloquence and myth in Experiment in Criticism in his chapter on Myth. He does say that it is not necessary for Myth to be packaged eloquently for it to serve its purpose, but he also points out that it often has been expressed eloquently (pointing to Virgil as an example). Here, he seems to be impartial to whether Myth is decorated or no. However, Lewis does believe in the intrinsic goodness of well-crafted form, and says that it is important to note not just the content (the logos) of a piece of art but also recognize it as poeima (something made). And although he is not speaking directly about homiletics, he does ironically end the chapter VIII by pointing favorably to the examples of eloquent sermons that even botch exegesis of the text. "…what he expounds of his author's philosophy may be well worth reading, even if it is in reality his own. We may compare him to the long succession of divines who have based edifying and eloquent sermons on some straining of their texts. The sermon, though bad exegesis, was often good homiletics in its own right." (87) Thus, we can infer that while Lewis would say well-crafted poeima is not necessary to homiletics (any more than it would be necessary in a recipe book), it does not detract from it, but is rather a good thing.

Thus for this and other reasons, I would conclude that if it is a persons gift (e.g. Apollos), that gift should not be buried but exercised, and God will bless it. If eloquence is not your gift, no problem—the Gospel Myth will work even in spite of clumsy words because of the message that is being preached. Eloquence should never be an excuse for bad exegesis, but there is something inherently good in it, something that perhaps reaches into the concept of Sehnsucht which shoots people with a pang of longing for Christ. This combination of Sehnsucht and good theology might greatly contribute to the process of theological application because it not only points people to a particular truth, but it gives them the Sehnsucht, the Desire to carry that truth out in their lives, pointing themselves Heavenward: "Further up, and further in!"

The Gospels: Literality, Reliability, and Myth

2006-12-01T13:47:00.000-08:00

Ok... so this was written in response to a blog. I thought I would recycle it in my blog, because it holds many kernals of thoughts I'm trying to work through right now concerning the scriptures and understanding what, perhaps, we can learn from Art and Myth when thinking about the scriptures. And know this, that I don't pretend to have answers here, these are just things I'm trying to think through and seek the truth about. I post these things here on my blog so that other people can help me think through these things--so I really appreciate your comments. So... here goes:

New Testament Book Copies and Original Manuscripts

Regarding point #2 "Several hundred years separate the original from the earliest Gospel manuscript we have", this is, to my knowledge, a factual error. There have been discovered several manuscript excerpts from various books of the New Testament that have been discovered and dated within 200 years of their assumed date of authorship, the earliest of which is the John Rylands Fragment (John 18:31-33,37-38) dated 125 A.D. (within a century of the death of Jesus). When compared to discovered copies other ancient writings, the narrow span of 100 years between archetype and ectype is staggering. In Plato (427-347 B.C), the span is 1200 years. Ceasar (100-44 B.C.)? 1000 years. Homer's Illiad (100-44 B.C.) does a little better at 500 years. (For a more detailed comparison see this page on carm.org).

Thus, rather than the span from original to copy being a discouraging thing to faith in the reliability of the Gospels containing the accurate words of Christ, I find it rather encouraging for the authenticity of the New Testament manuscripts. Indeed, there are differences among manuscripts, especially in the NT, however the Old Testament manuscripts have an extremely surprising uniformity. But even in the NT, the vast, vast majority of discrepancies are theologically impotent.

But still, you pose good questions that demand examination.

"Does absolute, infallible transmission of manuscripts really matter?"

I think not. First of all, as you point out rightly, we are in trouble if it is vital to faith because there are, unarguably, discrepancies between manuscripts. But second of all, I think that the imperfection of the scriptures really fits quite well when considering Christianity from a theological perspective.

If we did have all of the original manuscripts of all the books of the Bible, held perfectly in tact with every "jot and tittle," we would be in grave danger of idolatry. It would be even more of a heinous situation if Jesus himself wrote a book preserved in such a way. It would be such a thing, I imagine, that wars would literally be fought over in order to possess. The focus would be so transfixed on this tangible relic of Christ and Christianity that the true nature and purpose of Christianity--community of love and faith--would be overshadowed. The incongruence of the scriptures, then, ideally spurs the Christian to embrace the other important aspects of Christianity such as the community of faith (the Church) and the Holy Spirit.

Jesus: the bridge between Jew and Pagan

I am very heavily affected theologically by C.S. Lewis and his Oxford friends (a.k.a. "The Inklings"--Tolkien, Barfield, Williams, etc.), and so I'm certain what follows will be very biased by that fact.

Consider that Christ is the one who unified Jew and Greek. The religion of the Jews was one of letters, tightly sewn to what had been written in the Law, the Torah and the Prophets. It was a very moralistic religion, a religion primarily consisting of regulations that were to be followed. Although the Jews were certainly not without their stories, the "real" importance (especially around the first century) was on "keeping the Law." Things were very "crystal", clear-cut, and definite.

But then there were the Pagans (i.e., essentially, the non-Jew). Most other religions at that place and time (to my knowledge) placed the emphasis much more heavily on stories--e.g., the Egyptian, Greek, and Roman god-myths. Not that these religions were without their own "rules" (indeed, sacrifice was a major element), but there was not the same kind of extreme emphasis placed on a "God-given, written Law" that was written and studied and followed to the letter.

Enter Jesus--the "Word become Flesh". Rather than writing more rules to be followed, he spoke of morality in parables, stories, thinking it best to that others to pass his words along rather than writing them down himself (a much less "definite" way of doing things). The words of Jesus, these parables (connected to the word "Parabola"), were more ambiguous, slippery, not the kind of crystal, clear-cut laws the Jews received in the Torah. So in this respect, it seems as though he has one foot in the Pagan world (ambiguity), and one in the Jewish world (morality), thus bringing them together.

Yet, Jesus himself was not ambiguous--he was flesh, tangible, factual. Lewis referred to the life of Jesus as "Myth become Fact". Here we see in Jesus a tangible story, a literal consummation of what had been foreshadowed in all prior myths of dying and rising gods. So in this respect, Jesus again has his foot in both the Pagan world (story) and the Jewish world (literality).
The writings of the Christian NT then, having feet in both Pagan and Jewish worlds, would seem to logically have --in contrast to the great pains taken for accurate transmission in the OT--much less emphasis on "exactness" in the transmission. Not that accuracy isn't important, but it is not all-important to Christianity. You see, I think that if everything concerning the historicity of Jesus was absolutely crystal-clear and undebatable, where would the Myth go?

Myth and Fact

In common language, we use the words "Myth" and "Truth" as antonyms, completely unrelated to each other. But is this really the case? People such as Lewis and Tolkien beg to differ. First of all, Myth and Art (I use this term in the broad sense of the arts in general) reveals Truth about life. Just as the very best Art is tied to reality, so Myth is tied to reality. Myth helps us to understand reality with our imagination (which Lewis calls "the organ of meaning").

But also, there is something, they say, that happens in Myth as in the Arts such as story, poetry, etc.: Truth is experienced. There is a kind of "slipperiness" to Myth and much good art, and this "slipperiness" places it just beyond our reach, just outside of the kind of tangibility that breeds manipulation, and this seems to be integral to the experience of Truth. This, I think, is why it was so important for Jesus to ascend and the Holy Spirit to descend. Note that the Spirit is a very ambiguous kind of thing—unseen, almost chaotic. Both Greek and Hebrew words for "spirit" (Greek pneuma, and Hebrew ruach) both also mean "wind." The nature of wind is very "slippery." "The wind blows where it pleases." It is almost chaotic, refusing to be ordered. You cannot hold wind in your hands. It is tangible and yet, in a way, intangible. In The Pilgrim's Regress, Lewis talks about a "Dialectic of desire" that served for him as a kind of empirical, experiential, ontological proof of God's existence, and this dialectic was brought about by an experience he called—among various names—Sehnsucht (a German word for "the desire for something that is out of your reach"). His experience of truth was integral to its being out of his reach—and this the thing that spurred him from atheism to a belief in the transcendental Other (which he later realized was the God of Christianity). Buechner speaks of something very similar in Telling the Truth: Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairytale.

The sort of paradox we get in Christianity presented to us in the 21st century is that the Gospel is both historical and mythical, tangible and intangible. It is tangible in the sense that we do have some proof of its accuracy and reliability, but it is ultimately out of the reach of a kind of "scientific" fact that proves it absolutely, once and for all, without question. This paradox of tangible-intangibility helps us both to infer—based on the evidence we have—that it is true, as well as experience that truth through the slippery, mythical quality it has.

"Does [the fact that we don't have the exact words of Christ and his disciples] matter?"

Yes and no. It does matter that we can at least infer that the essence of what is recorded in the Gospels is historical. It does not matter that it is exact, because that unexactness, that slipperiness, is what gives it more of the quality of myth. Even the stories that we do not think were in the original manuscripts (such as the woman caught in adultery) are worthy of reading because it is essentially true to the Myth of Jesus.

"Does it bother you that we can never truly know what Jesus may have said and what was the creation of some later editor?"

No, because this adds to the mystery behind Christ which creates a sort of transcendental experience. It seems somewhat obvious that Christ did not intend for us to know his exact words. That is why he left it up to other people to pass it on. It is a more organic and, really, personal way to do it, really. It lets Man be partners with God in his work here on earth.

I guess this all presupposes that the scriptures were not written verbatim by God—whispering every single word to the NT writers as they penned their Gospels and books, but that is a WHOLE other discussion, and it is an ideal that, I think, most theologians do not hold today. I could be wrong.

I don't know… let me know your thoughts on this, and where I need to clarify what I'm thinking about.

Thanks!

Truth and "Joy" in the Art of Homiletics

2006-10-04T16:02:00.000-07:00

I cannot help but to think of C.S. Lewis when I read about “the Fox” in Til We Have Faces. No, Lewis was not a Stoic as the Fox was. However, he was an atheist – which might be comparable in some respects, especially the common disdain for “superstitious nonsense.” Both Lewis and the Fox had a great affinity for stories, poetry, myth, music, and beauty in general, and this affinity was ultimately the Achilles heel of their atheistic philosophies. The Fox, a Stoic who’s very philosophy of life is to avoid desire because it leads to “passion” and suffering, cannot help but to become enraptured in the mythical poems he shares with his little princess pupils. Something is awakened in him – a great desire and longing for it to be true – but each time he quenches the flames of this would-be passion with his no-nonsense Stoic philosophy.

In this same way Lewis suppressed his longing for God with his rationalistic Atheism – as long as he could anyway. In his autobiography Surprised By Joy, Lewis recalls three points in his life that awakened this sense of unexplainable longing for something:

“…it is that of an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction. I call it Joy, which is here a technical term and must be sharply distinguished both from Happiness and from Pleasure. Joy (in my sense) has indeed one characteristic and one only, in common with them; the fact that anyone who has experienced it will want it again. …I doubt whether anyone who has tasted it would ever, if both were in his power, exchange it for all the pleasures in the world.” (72-73)

All three of the events he mentions were encounters with someone’s artistic creation. The first experience was when his brother Warnie crafted a humble garden on a tin lid and then showed “Jack” (the name Lewis gave himself) his wonderful creation. Again he was enraptured with this “joy” unexpectedly as he was reading Longfellow’s poem “Tegner’s Drapa.” Upon reading the opening lines, “I heard a voice, that cried, / ‘Balder the Beautiful / Is dead, is dead!’” Lewis says:

“… instantly I was uplifted into huge regions of the northern sky; I desired with almost sickening intensity something never to be described (except that it is cold, spacious, severe, pale and remote) and then...found myself at the very same moment already falling out of that desire and wishing I were back in it.” (17-18)

Yet again, Lewis encountered this overwhelming sense of “Northernness” as he saw an illustration by Arthur Rackham:

“A vision of huge, clear spaces hanging above the Atlantic in the endless Twilight of a Northern summer, remoteness, severity...and almost at the same moment I knew that I had met this before, long, long ago, in Tegner’s Drapa, and that Siegfried belonged to the same world as Balder and sunward-sailing cranes.” (72)

Just like the Fox, Lewis was drawn to this inexplicable truth, but he fought it with his cerebral cortex. Lewis was a man torn in two directions: romanticism (not the Eros type) and logic, and his logic tied pinned him from the supernatural. Yet the romantic in him kept tugging and tugging until the pins popped. At last, it was a discussion on myth that finally led Lewis to the cross. Tolkien and others convinced him that this myth of a dying and rising God had, in fact, become a reality in Christ. “Checkmate.” He did not become a Christian that night, but when he finally laid down his defenses against Christianity, he called himself “the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England.”

In these experiences of Joy there was a powerful and compelling truth communicated to Lewis, “something,” he said, “never to be described.” It was a truth one cannot prove through logical argument or a didactic outline with three alliterative points – it was a truth that must be experienced. And Lewis, like the Fox, experienced it through art. Now, throw in the fact that both of them were tutors, and you practically have an allegory on your hands! Ha!

Art has profoundly impacted me. This is my first semester in seminary, and I have come here specifically to try to discover what role the fine arts play/should play in the Christian life and church. I am studying homiletics (preaching) this semester, and I am asking myself questions like, “What role, if any, does art play in a sermon?”

I am learning a lot from the fascinating novelist/theologian Frederick Buechner. He also sees that art can convey something of truth that cannot be explained. In his book Telling the Truth: the Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale, Buechner talks about how the prophets would speak in poetry as well as prose, thus conveying not only “particular truths” but “truth itself which cannot finally be understood but only experienced.” Likewise, he says that the preacher should do the same. It is okay, he says, to use words to convey “particular truths,” but:

“in addition to using them to explain, expound, exhort, let him use them to evoke, to set us dreaming as well as thinking, to use words as at their most prophetic and truthful, the prophets used them to stir in us memories and longings and intuitions that we starve for without knowing that we starve.” (23)

This sounds eerily similar to Lewis’s description of “Joy.” Indeed, I think that is what Lewis would call what Buechner is describing. This Joy, this longing, this desire is itself an experience of truth that, at least in my experience, has largely not been provided from the pulpit or from Church itself. Instead what we get are only sermonic points, arguments, exegesis, and apologetics.

Even though Lewis was one of the greatest apologists of the twentieth century, he too saw that argument has its limitations and is even sometimes dangerous. He once commented in a letter to Dorothy Sayers that he was frequently uneasy because, “…apologetic work is so dangerous to one's own faith. A doctrine never seems dimmer to me than when I have just successfully defended it." Indeed, the Gospel that has been presented to us has been a feast of fact, but a fast of fiction along with this longing Lewis calls “Joy” and Buechner calls “Truth.” How sad. No one here is advocating that we throw aside the importance of logic, facts, and loving God with our minds, but to do that and neglect the rest of what composes us makes our faith and our love anemic, not compelling.

We need to experience and feed in a way we have largely not been fed from the pulpit, fed not with mere points, arguments, and propositions, but with joy, hunger, and longing: truth itself. Many people who are not Christians experience truth in this kind of joyful way, but they do not know where it comes from. In this kind of truth God only whispers and He never uses His name, so they put the best name to it that they can – whatever that may be. We Christians say that we know where this slippery and joyful truth comes from, the same place all other good gifts originate – God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. We need to know God experientially with that really indefinable part of us that is so hungry, a part of us that is fed through well-done stories, paintings, songs, and movies.

And I’m left to wonder, “Can this happen at the pulpit?” Buechner seems to think so. Indeed he made it so in his own spellbinding sermons that dripped imagination, imagery, poetry, narrative. Brian McLaren describes Buechner’s sermon narrative as “a far cry from telling little anecdotes to illustrate points… the story is not like an orange rind, but … is itself the point, or at least the thing that points beyond itself to something more….”

I cannot help but to desire to see this Joy happen more frequently through the efforts of the church and at the pulpit -- whatever that looks like. And although I am not exactly sure how it should be done, I am eager to keep exploring and reading and listening and learning. Maybe I’ll figure it out. Maybe not. Whatever the case, I think there is a need that cries out to be met: many Christians have the opposite of what we see in Lewis’s and the Fox’s battle between joy and intellect. Lewis and Fox were compelled by joy, but could not intellectually assent. Many pew warmers on Sunday mornings intellectually assent because their intellect has been fed, yet they never have this evoking experience of truth that compels them to Joy. We have been cheating, in a way, stuck in our heads, reading the Cliff's Notes instead of the novel. Like Buechner said, we are starving for this truth and we don’t even realize it. We are in a mansion on a hill with many rooms. The banqueting table of Christ is abundant and His breadbasket is bottomless, but we are having trouble finding our way from the study to the dining room.

"We are his Body" ...So What Do We Wear?

2006-10-04T15:57:00.000-07:00

I wrote this over a period of days following a class period in which the professor and students talked for about ten minutes about how Christians should always dress up to go to church on Sunday. People who do not dress up for church on Sunday, they said, are not showing respect to our Lord and King. "If you were to meet the Queen of England you would dress up, and Jesus Christ deserves no less courtesy than that." Well, I tried -- very unsuccessfully -- to explain to them some of the very sound theological reasons for coming to church "as you are," but alas my voice was drowned out in the crowd. And so I wrote what I could not say. And here it is:

I began writing this as an apologetic or "defense" for coming to church in ordinary clothes. It was meant not as a thrust to tear down dressing up for church, but rather as a parry, but it was still meant aggressively and defensively. I spent over ten hours working on this, reading, writing, researching, defending. But then I set down the laptop, and stopped. I couldn't believe that I had just spent ten hours doing this! I had so many other things much more pressing that I needed to do. I was so zealous to defend not just myself, but this idea that God has used so obviously to bring so many thousands of people into a relationship with Him. You must understand, I go to a church where I look to my right, and I see a single mom wearing a biker outfit who just recently almost died in a car accident, and I know that the only reason she is now a child of God is because this crazy church said, "Come as you are," and was thus a comfortable place for her to come and check out the Christian faith. I look all around me, and I see hundreds and hundreds of people – from dapper to casual – who came here for the exact same reason: because our church is approachable and not intimidating. One of the key factors to that approachability is that people feel free to come in their ordinary clothes. It pains me deeply to hear people chastise so harshly what I have seen God so abundantly bless.

Yet in this process of making a defense, I also found myself very concerned about defending myself and my own contempt for having to dress up for church as a child. This weekend, God has revealed to me a glimpse of just how far I have yet to grow in my walk with the Lord, how self-centered I am, and how much I really need to learn the discipline of "submission" – not having my own way. And I told the Lord that I was ready and willing to practice "submission" with this "apologetic," to leave it unspoken. But that did not seem to be what he was pointing me to do. As I listened to Him, I realized that he does not want me to parry; he wants me to parley. He does not want me to defend, but rather to humbly plea for you to understand where this "ordinary clothes" idea comes from practically, culturally, and theologically. And it is my hope not that you be converted to my way of thinking, but that you can recognize this as a "disputable matter" (see Rom 14:1-11), and learn to praise God for this approach as much as your own approach.

I begin by acknowledging the cultural climate in which we live. As we have discussed in class, we live in a materialistic society of rabid consumerists, a plastic jungle in which brand names and Who's Whos prey upon the gluttony of the "haves" and the envy of the "have nots." Wherever we go, we cannot seem to escape the unholy chant, "Buy. Buy. Buy. Buy." The "dress up for church" requirement can sound to many just like another voice in the chant, giving many "haves" another reason to indulge in garment gluttony, and giving many "have-nots" a cause for envy as well as the inadequate feeling of being out of place.

Many of us see a very real danger in this external emphasis on "dressing up." In a culture that is already demonically and obsessively focused on the external and temporal, dressing up for church can be just another point at which the demonic Uncle Screwtape can easily twist the holy into the profane. For those who can afford to buy such clothes, "respecting the King" can very easily be twisted into "impressing the King" and "impressing the Court." For some, this may be even more of a temptation than others, and if it is an unnecessary temptation it would be prudent and wise (perhaps necessary!) for those people to flee from that temptation by not dressing up for church, even if they can afford it.

Concerning those who cannot afford to dress up many say, "But the church will understand that. They will not judge the person who cannot afford nice clothes, and exclude them from fellowship." Ideally, no they wouldn't. Yet it has happened. Also, the problem is that while that approach may be a platinum theory, it is rubbish in practice because it is not only the mind of the dressed-up church that is in question, but also the mind of the casual newcomer. As the only one not dressed up, that person will most often feel out of place even if nobody says so. Sometimes this feeling of inadequacy can be severe in a person, especially in a person who has grown up being mocked and ridiculed by adolescent classmates because he does have the right clothes, the right shoes, or the right backpack. It is easy for Screwtape to work in this person as well whispering, "This is just another place in where you don't belong, another place where you don't meet standards. Just give it up." And that is exactly what happens most of the time.

Of course Screwtape can just as easily bend "dressing casually" to his appetite, but that will inevitably be harder to do in some than others. Thus, it is my conviction that there should be room in the Christian church for both people who want to dress up and for those who do not – each according to his or her own conscience. In my church, people "come as they are," meaning "dress however you feel like dressing today." There are many people who dress up as they would to any other church, and there are many who come wearing shorts, flip flops, and even (horror of horrors!) hats. And surprisingly enough, even though over 55% of the people who come were previously unchurched before they became a part of our church, in the three years I've been there, I've never seen anyone dress vulgarly. I suppose it may be an anomaly that both kinds of people can be comfortable in the same place, but if it is, I think it is a wonderful anomaly. To have an exclusive policy that leads in either direction would, I think, most likely lead to the temptation of "Christianity and…[dressing up, dressing casual, etc.]." This is something I think we should be very careful of.

I now move to more theological reasons for coming to church in ordinary clothes. One of the major themes in Jesus teachings was a shift of focus from external to internal. The Jews were expecting an external Kingdom of God – deliverance from the Romans – but Jesus showed them instead an internal Kingdom, telling Pilate, "My kingdom is not of this world," (Jn. 18.36). He reveals a God who looks at the heart and what is done in secret, not just on what is seen. In Christ, we see the age-old indictment against Israel: "These people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. They worship me in vain; their teachings are but rules taught by men," (Matt 15:8-9).

This shift from external to internal shows us that appearances can be deceptive. One can look holy on the outside, but not on the inside. Paul picks up on this and even flips it around: one can look holy on the inside, and not look holy on the outside – one can have a "circumcision of the heart" and not have a "circumcision of the flesh." (Rom. 2.29) In Romans 14, Paul points out how two people can do the same external deed (e.g. "eating meat"), and one would be sinning in his heart while the other is not. What is holy for one can be a stumbling block for another. In this same way, I believe that requiring a person to dress up can be a stumbling block. For some it can be a stumbling block into materialism, as I mentioned earlier. For others it can be a stumbling block into vanity – impressing others. Still, for others it can be a stumbling block into legalism. Someone who has grown up in a very legalistic church may associate "dressing up" so strongly with "earning righteousness" that it could be a sin against the conscience for this person to dress up, just as it was a sin for the Christian from a pagan background to eat meat sacrificed to idols.

Coming to church in ordinary clothes can also be a way in which that person represents Christ to humanity. We are the church, the image and body of Christ in the world, and thus we are to look like Him. So what does He look like? In the Gospels we see a man, Jesus of Nazareth, the very essence of humility who was at the very same time also Lord and Christ – a paradox of imminence and transcendence, humility and glory. The Gospels reveal a King who was completely approachable. Children, lepers, tax collectors, the infirm, prostitutes, and "sinners" as well as doctors, Pharisees, and soldiers all approached him freely and without intimidation. In fact, he seemed to relish when people would come to him and to God as they are, and detest when they tried to be something they were not. He was the very embodiment of Grace. He does not tell people to go straighten themselves up before he would accept them; he simply says, "Come." Wearing ordinary clothes to church can help a person to be an embodiment of this utterly approachable King.

In his book What's So Amazing About Grace, Philip Yancey points out that the church has failed miserably to be this embodiment of Christ's approachability. He tells a tragic story – one of many – in which a prostitute who has been renting out her two-year-old daughter for kinky sex came to him, unable to buy food. In their conversation, he asks, "Have you tried going to church for help?" He writes, "I will never forget the look of pure, naive shock that crossed her face. 'Church! she cried. 'Why would I ever go there? I was already feeling terrible about myself. They'd just make me feel worse.'" (11). It is a staggering shift in paradigm from the example we see in Jesus Christ – prostitutes running toward him. In his chapter on "Creating a Culture of Acceptance" in No Perfect People Allowed, John Burke (my pastor) writes:

"Church must re-present to others the Body of the One who is willing to accept rather than condemn – who draws near in relationship – who is for them, not against them. Everybody longs to know this – that despite everything, they can be accepted and forgiven. But words alone won't do. Theological statements like 'Christ died for your sins' and 'God so loved the world' have been leached of all meaning for seekers today by what they have experienced. Many people can't believe God will accept them and love them until those who claim to know God start to show them." (92)

Sunday morning remains the primary window for those who are seeking Christ to come to him, and those Churches who try to create a "come as you are" culture of acceptance are simply trying to be that approachable, unintimidating, unexclusive embodiment of Christ to them.

Yet this is not only an important thing for seekers; it can also be important to the Christian as well. The process of sanctification is ongoing, and so the process of approaching the throne of mercy is unending. We often sin, and then feel so dirty and guilty because of our sin that we run away rather than run to our King. Yet, this is the opposite of what we should do. Instead, we should come just as we are – even and especially in our dirtiness – and penitently approach the throne of forgiveness asking for healing. To come to church in whatever clothes are natural to you is a way for some to act out physically how we are to approach that throne every day spiritually.

Coming "as you are" can also lead to a greater continuity between the person you are on Sunday and the person you are the rest of the week. It is a mystery how the body and spirit are inextricably connected to one another. To some, dressing up can disconnect the worship experience on Sunday from the rest of the week, and lead to a very compartmentalized spirituality. The body remembers, "When I am dressed up, I am spiritual; when I am not, I am not." This kind of compartmentalized spirituality is not desired as a Christian, and so the "come as you are" approach is a way to help prevent that disconnect and let the Shalom of God – which is peace, deliverance, wholeness – penetrate our lives.

Those who choose to dress up on Sunday mornings do so "to the Lord." Likewise, those of us who choose not to dress up do so "to the Lord." I hope that this essay has helped to explain that wearing ordinary clothes is not irreverent sloth, but has many beautiful practical and theological motivations behind it. As the body of an immanent and transcendent Christ—his representatives to the world—we would do well to welcome a juxtaposition of clothes into our assembly. Why not strive for Orthodoxy against being Ebionite or Docetic and let blue jeans and shorts represent the humanity of Christ while slacks and dresses represent His transcendence?

So I plead with you to consider that yes, we serve a mighty and glorious God and King who deserves all honor. But let us not forget what that King looks like. We are the court of Jesus Christ, the sovereign assembly of a king that was born in a feeding trough and worshipped by both well-dressed Magi bearing expensive gifts and lowly shepherds who came straight from their pastures bearing dung on their sandals. According to the flesh, our king looked very ordinary in many respects. He grew up in the sticks of Nazareth – a place out of which people thought nothing exceptional could come out. Raised in a very ordinary blue-collar family, our King was (and is) a friend of social rejects and a bunch of goofballs he called his disciples, as well as the well-to-do. Our king was baptized by a grungy weirdo wearing a dead camel, and he has been known for washing crusty fishermen's feet. We serve a very strange king, an unexpected king, a king unlike anything else the world has ever seen. The King of Kings is, in fact, whom we worship, and yet He rode a donkey instead of a steed. And lest we forget, in the final hours before his crucifixion we saw on our King's body the most blessed, disturbing, and beautiful juxtaposition of fine and feral apparel this universe has ever seen: a purple robe and a crown of thorns.

"We are His body."

Worship: "Meeting People Where They Are"

2006-10-04T15:36:00.000-07:00

The following is a response to a conversation we had in a class in response to an article in the Baylor Lariate regarding the nature of the chapel service at Baylor. The chapel organizers are making an effort to have chapel "meet students where they are," making it more "customer-friendly." The the general consensus of the class was that "meeting people where they are" violates the true nature of worship. This is my response to that charge.

I regret that the conversation today regarding chapel was so one-sided. It is my own fault as much as anyone. I agree with very much of that “one sided” conversation, yet I think that a couple things should be said that were not said, and I will attempt to do that now, and perhaps play a bit of a “devil’s advocate.” Now I must preface this by admitting that I have not gone to the Baylor chapel yet (being a Truett student, we have our own chapel to attend), however, I can vividly remember the chapel services during my undergraduate studies at Ouachita Baptist University, and I hope this can relate.

First, I must respectfully disagree with Dr. Wood when he seems to equate “chapel” with “church.” Perhaps I am “picking nits” alongside Mr. Roberts, but there are several rather large differences between the two. In fact the only two similarities I can think of is that there is (1) a sermon and (2) songs that are sung as a corporate body. The primary and most obvious difference between the two that stares us blankly in the face is the fact that people are required to go to Chapel in order to receive their diploma, in contrast to going to church which is (as Dr. Wood has pointed out all virtues to be) a free choice. As a result, you have several people attending this Chapel service who would by no means attend a worship service in a church under any other circumstance. And this has a natural effect on homiletics (which can be defined as “The branch of rhetoric that treats of the composition and delivery of sermons”), which brings me to my next point.

Second, one of the most fundamental aspects of homiletics is to consider your audience. This is advocated in several books on homiletics (see Fred Craddock’s Preaching¸ Haddon Robinson’s Biblical Preaching, and Frederick Buechner’s Telling the Truth: the Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale, as well as many others). Walter C. Kaiser even advocates that the audience should be taken into consideration even during the process of exegesis – (which can be defined as “the study of the text of Scripture in order to bring out the meaning of it.” See chapter 7 “Homiletical Analysis” of Toward an Exegetical Theology). The most commonly explained objective of a sermon is to bring the truth of the “then” (the Biblical text) through the process of exegesis and homiletics into the “now” of the audience. However, many preachers (and those in the congregation) seem to have the notion that this cannot be done, and this notion results in two “sins” at the pulpit: (1) speaking only of the “then,” thus leaving the past in the past instead of bringing it into the present and (2) speaking only of the “now,” thus failing to connect the “now” to the truth contained in the textual “then.” Of course there are also many shades of mistakes between these two extremes as well.

I am convinced that it is a mistaken notion that you cannot effectively bring the “then” into the “now.” I think those in our class (including myself!) lean more toward favoring the “then” approach to homiletics. We tend to want more Biblical knowledge, we want our understanding to be increased, and this is not a bad thing at all. We are to love the Lord with our minds. The purpose of bringing the text into the now is to make it (and yes, I am also beginning to hate this word too, but it is true) “relevant” (i.e., “What does this knowledge mean for me?”).

I have seen several examples of preachers bringing the “then” into the “now” quite effectively in Chapel. It may be difficult, but it is not an impossible task. I remember watching in awe as the late, great theologian Dr. Stanley Grenz took the basic thrust of his systematic theology (Theology for the Community of God) and connected even with the most remote and usually disinterested people in our chapel. I was astounded and moved! A preacher can (and should!) take a biblical text and bring it to a communicative level that can reach most of the listeners wherever they are. On that note, I think it is ridiculous to say “By meeting someone where they are, you cannot take them anywhere.” How preposterous is that! What, I cannot take my friend to the airport by meeting him at his house? Nonsense! You meet them where they are, and then you take them (or at least point them) to where they should be.

Frederick Buechner and others would agree emphatically that the preacher is, in a sense, “on the same level” as the listener, and must speak to the listeners “where they are.” The beginning of the article in the Lariate states the fact that the students who come are required to, and they typically come to chapel with the presupposition that it is “not worth their time.” It also points out the fact that many of the students who come are not Christians. This is “where they are,” and it would be a grave mistake of a preacher to not take that into consideration when developing their sermon. This is the difference between Chapel and Church – at church the people who come (save the children) do so as a free choice. And here lies the great weakness and challenge of chapel sermon – this yawning chasm between the disinterested unbeliever and the eager and hungry believer. How does a preacher meet both of these listeners “where they are”? I do not envy this ominous obstacle to the chapel speaker. I think it is possible to navigate this obstacle, but it must be tremendously and overwhelmingly difficult. And so the preacher (and the Chapel planner) is usually left playing to either one or the other listener: the non-Christian (one might use the word “seeker,” however this is a misnomer since they are required to come) and the Christian.

During my years in the church, I have noticed that different people respond dramatically to different approaches to worship, each approach resulting in staggering spiritual formation. I have heard critics of the “seeker sensitive church” (I’ve even been one!) say that this type of church has no place in Christianity. But I have seen literally thousands of people who have been dramatically changed and grown surprisingly strong in their Christian walk who came to know Christ simply because someone thought that it was important to speak these transcendent Gospel Truths in a way that they could understand and connect with, a way that many a “Traditionalist” would consider “un-Christian.” Likewise, I have heard the critics of the “Traditional” or “high church” worship service, and have to disagree with them as well. I have also seen people who grow dramatically as a result of a more Traditional or “high church” approach to worship. I hate to play the part of the post-modern relativist in this way, but if it is true that “You will know a tree by its fruit,” I have seen fruit as a result of both forms of worship, and must conclude that both approaches are valid and pleasing to the Lord.

Although ideal, I’m sure it would be rare to find someone that can effectively preach to the full spectrum of listeners present at chapel. So I would think it would be good for Chapel planners to compromise at this point and have variation in the Chapel services. On this point, I would say that it is even a holy act for believers on both ends of the spectrum take the example of Christ in Philippians 2 and “consider others interests instead of only their own” when it comes to attending these chapel services. A wise person once told me, “It is an act of holy submission and unity with other believers to say cheerfully ‘Have it your way,’ during the worship service.” However, take heed to Screwtape Letters and beware of the spiritual pride that comes with this act of humility. I fear that temptation even as I write this, but I think it would be a sin for me to omit what I feel is the truth out of fear. But there is another perhaps even more important point I think worth considering. My pastor once pointed out to me that we often mistake “learning something new” with “being spiritually fed.” I may not learn something new in a “seeker friendly” sermon, but I am always reminded of something that I have not mastered in my walk.

One final thing I think we should remember: the unbeliever in the Chapel service does not go to church on Sunday whereas the believer does. If by compromising my desire for a theological lecture, the Truth of the Gospel is then successfully communicated and received by even one unbeliever, it is well worth it.

I don't intend this post to be an apology for the Chapel planner's decisions or comments in the Lariate, but I think that we must recognize that even if it is to an extreme, there is a goodness behind their objective to "meet people where they are." We must not fall into either of the extremes. The answer to the question “What should a Christian worship service look like,” still remains a great mystery to me. I do not pretend to have all the answers, and I am eager to hear your perspectives on this issue because I yearn to grow in my understanding. Please, if you had the patience and fortitude to read this whole thing, share with me your thoughts, and help point me in the right direction where I have (I’m sure!) missed the boat!

Faith and Certitude

2006-05-24T16:40:00.000-07:00

In my understanding (and the understanding of several prominent theologians) of what "faith" means in Christianity, there is really no need for an absolute certitude (i.e. "I know without a shadow of a doubt that I am correct in saying 'Christianity is true.'"), there is only the need for (a) a knowledge (Notitia) of the Gospel, (b) an assent (Assensus) that the Gospel is true and (c) an act of faithfulness (Fiducia) to that assent.

For example, I do not have to have an absolute certitude that my office chair will hold me up when I sit on it. I believe it will hold me up, based on that belief I sit. In that act of sitting, I have acted out my complete faith and confidence in the chair that it will hold me up.

There is always the possibility (however unlikely) that the chair will break when I sit on it. My faith in the chair is not negated by my realization of that. I could be mistaken to place my faith in that chair because (a) I do not have an exhaustive knowledge of the chair (i.e. of the chairs engineering and if everything in the chair's engineering is in the right place and unbroken) and (b) I cannot see into the future of what will happen if I sit in the chair. But my faith is demonstrated and completed in the act of sitting. There is no need for absolute certitude; there is only the need for a confidence (assensus) that provokes an act of faith (fiducia).

I think it is the same way with our faith in Christ. I am not omniscient, thus I cannot know with absolute certitude that the Gospel of Christ is true. However, based on my experience with Christ and from what I have learned in history and logic, the only proper response for me is to have a faith in Christ and the claims of His Gospel. Placing my confidence in Him, I aim to trust Him with my heart and my obedience. I have yet to be disappointed in my decision to place my faith in Christ, however that doesn't mean that I am not wrong to do so. The one and only way we can know for sure is when we die and are/are not resurrected. What matters is not that I have a certitude that Christianity is true. What matters is that I have the kind of confidence (assensus) in Christ that provokes act of Faith (fiducia).

All the rest is gravy. No?

The Da Vinci Code "Skubala"

2006-05-11T22:21:00.000-07:00

"Skubala." Great word. If you lived in the Roman Empire in the first century, you would have probably seen the once-famous chariot bumper sticker with the Greek word "Skubala" followed by the Greek equivalent of "Happens." If you were Paul, you would have said that you count your many works as "skubala" compared to knowing Christ.

If Paul was with us today, I think that he might say of the Christian reaction to The Da Vinci Code: "The skubala has hit the fan." Indeed.

You know... if you would have asked me two weeks ago, "Adam what is the proper way to react to the DaVinci Code coming to the theaters?" I would have said, "I can't wait. I'm definitely going to go see it, and I am going to talk to people about it like crazy, defending the faith in a very winsome way!

"But then I get this e-mail containing a rant on DVC by Barbara Nicolosi. It is an extremely sharp-tongued and berating indictment on this whole "dialogue" approach to DVC. "What the heck??" I thought. If I would have seen this from any other "fundamentalist" schmuck, I would have shaken my head, sighed, and prayed for them to get a grip...but Barbara Nicolosi??? Act One Barbara Nicolosi??? Church of the Masses Barbara Nicolosi??? What the heck???!!!

And thus my comfortable "dialogue-hey-I-can't-wait-for-this-movie-to-come-out" stance was shattered. She is not someone you can sweep under your rug. She must be listened to and considered. And so that's what I've been doing the past two weeks -- considering, researching, praying, listening, arguing, meditating...perspiring! aggravating! perplexing!

And that's where I am. Still. I'm still processing this. I'm arguing "Dialogue" with the "Othercotters" and I'm arguing "Othercott" with the "Dialogue-ers." And then I process some more. Rinse. Repeat. Hope (that I come to a conclusion before opening weekend!).

I'm trying (trying) to weigh this all against the scriptures, "What did Jesus do? How would he react today? How did the church react to similar things back then?"

What is really frustrating to me right now is that the Othercotters (so far...) seem for the most part to be completely apathetic (or worse?) to the idea of trying to find a Biblical foundation for their reaction. Now sure, anyone can "prooftext" a "biblical foundation" for anything. Churches in the South (both of America and Africa) were infamous for having a "biblical foundation" for slavery and apartheid. Yes, you can prove almost any point through "prooftexting", but you can't prove any point through solid exegesis, and that is what I'm talking about.

What is equally frustrating for me right now is how flippantly the "dialogue-ers" are taking the DVC, and how freely and unquestioningly they are willing to toss their money into the coffers of a false-teacher, and "vote" for more blasphemous movies like DVC (which, according to the Machine that is Hollywood, is exactly what you are doing by buying that ticket) to be produced.

I think the real answer to all of this begins with the questions:

"How should Christianity interact with culture?"
"Is there a disconnect between a heretic and the art of a heretic? Should we treat both the same way?"
"When the art of a false teacher becomes a major component in our culture, is that a point of withdrawal from culture?"

...and I'm not sure right now what the Biblical answers are...if there are any.

I cringe at the ideas that Dan Brown is so unapologetically sowing into the soil of our culture, I really do. But there is also something in me that resists a boycott of art (or even pseudo-artistic entertainment). It has long been a question of mine, "How can I honestly expect people to listen to my ideas and to receive my art if I am totally unwilling to listen to and receive theirs?" I don't know, but it seems almost hypocritical to encourage and hope for "non-believers" to go see Passion of the Christ, Narnia, Left Behind (er...well... you get what I mean...), when we refuse to go see anything that differs from or challenges our own beliefs. It seems like hypocrisy to get irate over and boycott (or "othercott" -- "a rose by any other name...") DVC and then get upset or disappointed when people steam and boycott over the next Christianity-kosher movie.

Perhaps our axiom should be "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." It is interesting that Jesus reverses this from a negative into a positive axiom. "Because I want you to listen to me, I am going to listen to you." "Because I want you to see my movies, I'm going to go see your movie...even if you don't ever come see my movie." Jesus doesn't promise that the Golden Rule practiced will cause those good things to come back to you. Nope -- that's karma. Jesus kicked Karma's butt with Grace.

Hmm.... ARRRGH!! It's so frustrating and perplexing...Where is Neibuhr when you need him?...still processing all of this...I will be sure to blog when I have found all the answers to this.

Don't count on ever seeing that blog...-adam

Spritual Autobiography: My journey thus far

2006-05-01T21:26:00.001-07:00

So I'm applying to start seminary in the Fall, and in the application they ask for your "Spiritual Autobiography". Some of you already know this story, but most of you probably don't. Of course, this is a very, very brief spiritual biography and very much is left out, but this is my best attempt at trying to "break it down" to around 750 words...hehe. Ask me again 20 years from now, and I will probably tell this same portion of the story completely differently.

I was born deep in the Bible-belt of West Texas to a Southern Baptist pastor and his musically-inclined wife: a perfect small-church ministry team. I grew up in both the North and the South, living in Texas, Indiana, and Arkansas. One Sunday when I was almost five years old, I walked to the front of the sanctuary and asked Jesus into my heart, which officially began what was really already in the works since I was born a life in Christ.

All analogies break down at some point, but I suppose you could best describe my life in Christ as an artist trying to paint a beautiful picture, a commissioned painting for a person he dearly loves. However, whenever the dearly-loved patron described what he wants in the painting, he spoke in parables that were difficult to interpret. Then the patron went away on a long trip, but he promised to be back when the artist least expected it, and when he returned, he was eager to receive the painting. The artist, then, (without the Patrons cell number) is forced to find the meaning of these parables by examining what he knows and what he can find out about the life and history of the Patron, getting to know His word and his works, and stealing as many secrets from the Patrons wife that he can. I am the artist. The LORD Jesus Christ is my dearly-loved patron. The scriptures are the Patrons parables and the record of his word and his works. My life is the painting. The patrons wife is the Holy Spirit. The rest of my biography should be read with that in mind.

Shortly after my profession of faith, I started singing in church, and Ive been singing in church (and elsewhere) ever since. Perhaps this is also where my passion for the Arts began. The Lord has given me many talents. Gifts. Things I did not train in or earn or work hard to achieve. Gifts. Over the years, I have won awards for singing, acting, fiction writing, poetry, script writing, essay writing, drawing, print design, and even journalism. The Lord has gifted me in the arts, and my life has been spent enjoying those gifts and trying to discern how to use them for His glory (as well as trying to figure out what exactly His glory means).

Also, I have always been full of questions about God like, What makes me think my religion is true? and all of that questions inevitable subfolders. I talked to my parents about these questions and they would give me answers that only slightly placated my ridiculous and relentlessly probing mind, yet the answers were good enough for me to be able to sweep it under the rug and carry on with life as normal for a while.

The discovery of C.S. Lewis was perhaps the most influential part of my development on almost every level of my identity. Lewis inspired me and, in a way, mentored me academically, spiritually, apologetically, theologically, and artistically, while I lived in a small town where such a dynamic combo was almost impossible to find. In Lewis, I saw what I would want to be myself one day: an artist/theologian.

I went to college and started out as a music major. However, my love for music was overshadowed by the many questions I still had about faith and Christianity, so I switched my major to Theology, and minored in music. I encountered a very fresh Christianity at Ouachita Baptist University. I grew up with the (perhaps self-induced?) conception that Christianity was mainly about sacrifice and duty, "dying to yourself," giving up things you like for the one who gave up His very life for us. In college, I was lead to encounter Christianity not as a faith based on rules and duty, but a faith based on love and desire. It was like my faith became alive at that point. It had purpose, relevance, and more than anything Truth.

I met my wonderful wife, Kara, in college. We were blessed with the opportunity to go on a mission trip to Southeast Asia together. There, a new passion for the spread of Christs influence across barriers came to fruition in my heart. The Lord gave me a vision of the film industry as a sort of mission field. I wanted to see Christians going into the industry as "tentmakers" similar to going into a closed country where evangelism is prohibited blessing and influencing the industry through meaningful relationships and quality work.

So that's what we did. I graduated college with a B.A. in Theology, earning the highest G.P.A. in the Pruett School of Christian Studies that semester despite my AD/HD. Then, my wife Kara and I moved to Austin, TX where I began immediately working in the film industry, trying to approach it in the way I mentioned above. I learned quite a bit about life in "the industry", and what it means to be a Christian there. Even more questions aroused -- practical questions that can really only be asked and understood by those who have been there. I have learned first-hand from many failures and accomplishments, yet I still hunger to understand, and not just to understand but to know how to wisely influence and shepherd other people who have the same struggles. Yet still, I want to engage culture myself, influence it, create quality art, and be a respectable presence that can be a channel through which the grace and love of Christ can freely flow.

A Reaction to Frederica Mathewes-Green on Art and Church Tradition

2006-04-30T00:37:00.000-07:00

Today, I attended the third C.S. Lewis Conference in Austin, TX on Truth, Goodness, and Beauty with speakers William Lane Craig, Peter Kreeft, and Frederica Mathewes-Green. This blog is a reaction to her speech on "Beauty" in the Christian faith in the form of an e-mail that I just sent to her.

------

Hello!

I didn't get to meet you at the conference. I used to be the person that shot like a laser to the front of the auditorium after the speaker was finished, but in recent years I have tried my best to respect the time of the speakers unless there is something incredibly urgent I need to share or ask.

Thank you so much for your words! It is not an everyday occurance to have a brush with the Eastern Orthodox church. What a blessing!

My e-mail is in regards to your comments on art in the church. I have spent quite a deal of time ruminating on this issue, though I've only scratched the surface. I am about to embark on Masters work in Theology and the Arts, and I am looking very much forward to plowing into this beautiful and rich field. I'm sure you have been asked these things before... in that case please feel free to copy and paste your answers to my questions.

The thought that kept beating in my brain was somewhat of an echo of Craig's speech on Objective Truth. It was mentioned that there is objective truth, and there is subjective truth (e.g., allergies and matters of "taste"). Postmodernism is making the mistake of saying that matters of objective truth are really matters of taste. It seems to me that you are making the opposite mistake.

My reasoning is as follows:

(1) Normative absolutes can sometimes be subjective in Christianity, as we see in Romans 14 in the matter of eating "meat," etc. (we are "many members of one body")

(2) Matters of taste (e.g., art, music, etc.) are also perhaps always subjective

(3) It would seem to follow that music (which is so closely -- perhaps inextricably -- connected to matters of taste) in the church practice would also be subjective

A second, parallel line of reasoning following the history of musical evolution from which I can reasonably draw conclusions concerning other branches of the fine arts:

(1) What I know about music history seems show only a very gradual evolution of musical style throughout the centuries, but as time progresses, the speed of the evolution exponentially increases, and things are "out of fashion" (or "outside the realm of the collective contemporary taste") very quickly.

(2) I would assume that the music of the early church was formed around the collective contemporary taste of their day, though I would also assume that the "collective musical taste" of the Hellenistic church would have differed the Jewish church. Thus, the music in the church at this time would be a descriptive, not normative issue.

(3) Because musical style and collective taste only very slowly evolved at that time, I would postulate that there would be little question or contest over what "style" of music to play in church.

(4) The more time that passes, it seems only natural that what was once only a descriptive issue would evolve into a normative issue by means of the flesh (we are creatures of habit) not necessarily by means of the Spirit, and thus become a normative part of authoritative tradition. (of course, this is all based on the Protestant presupposition that Tradition is not authoritative).

Also, you mentioned that what is important is not that we have a marketable service that is appealing to the masses, but that we truly worship. I think you are making a false dichotomy here, assuming that "what is marketable" cannot be "truly worshipped" to. On the contrary, this "marketable music" is exactly what many people most "truly worship" too (whatever "truly worship" means). Again, this results in matters of taste. To one person, a chant might be most conducive to "true worship"; to another, a contemporary praise song; to another a Charles Wesley hymn. I personally prefer a combination of them all: (1) songs from the past that remind us that there were Christians before us, thus tying us into a sense of historical unity with the Universal Church and (2) newly created songs from the present to acknowledge that we are a living and breathing and growing community of faith, not a record played over and over again, thus following the exhortation of the Psalmist "Hallelujah! Sing to the LORD a new song, his praise in the assembly of the saints." (Ps 149:1. Note that "new song" here is in the context of corporate worship. cf. "new song" Ps 33:3, 40:3, 96:1, 98:1, 144:9, Isaiah 42:10, Revelation 5:9, 14:3).

I suppose that any real dialogue on this subject between an Orthodox and a Protestant would be quite restricted because of the foundational differences in the authority of Tradition. Nonetheless, I felt like I should share my thoughts anyway so that you could hear yet another Protestants perspective on the subject matter of your very eloquent speech.

By the way, I love your voice! I could listen to it all day!

Blessings...

Adam

My Poor Excuses

2006-04-02T09:27:00.000-07:00

I have always had the following rationalizations for not giving money to the poor. Mind you, not necessarily because I just wanted to keep my money (though this is probably an underlying motivation), but because I wasn't sure that giving them money is the best thing to do for them. Instead, for a while, I toted several canned foods in my back seat for the sign-holders at street intersections. Perhaps I was right to do that. Perhaps wrong. I still think it is the best thing to do. But I've since made these curious observations about my excuses and Jesus' words and actions. Do with them what you will...

Excuse 1: "But I'm thousands of dollars in debt! I'm technically poorer than them!"

Jesus Response: The Widow's Mite Mark 12:21-44

Jesus sat down opposite the place where the offerings were put and watched the crowd putting their money into the temple treasury. Many rich people threw in large amounts. But a poor widow came and put in two very small copper coins,worth only a fraction of a penny.

Calling his disciples to him, Jesus said, "I tell you the truth, this poor widow has put more into the treasury than all the others. They all gave out of their wealth; but she, out of her poverty, put in everything—all she had to live on."

Excuse 2: "But they'll just spend it on drugs and booze." Jesus' Response: The Benevolent Father (a.k.a. "The Prodigal Son) Luke 15:11-31

I won't post the whole thing here, but I'm struck by the fact that the Father just gave it to Him, knowing (I'm sure) full well what his son would spend the money on. And yet he gave it to him anyway. He didn't even give his son a "Now, don't spend it all in one place." He just gives, extravagantly, wastefully, non-sensically, and yet lovingly.

Excuse 3: "I've worked for this money! He/she doesn't deserve it." Jesus' Response: Grace on the Cross.

"I tell you the truth, anyone who will not receive the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter into it." Mark 10:15

Grace is just this: giving to someone something they do not deserve. We did not deserve His grace. We didn't earn it. We cannot earn it. He just gave it. And if we are to enter into the life he offers, we must do so like a child, completely empty of any thought of "earning it" or "deserving it." Likewise, are not we supposed to be Christ to the world, like the Benevolent Father, dispensers of Grace completely undeserved?

THE TRIUNE NATURE OF ART

2006-02-07T09:41:00.000-08:00

Last night in our class on the Arts in the Church, David Taylor spoke of the Triune nature of creation, echoing some thoughts of Dorthy Sayers. It stands this way:

1. Idea = God
2. Formation = Christ/Logos
3. Animation = Spirit

The idea comes from God, Christ is essentially "the hand that forms", and the Spirit is who gives life to the creation.

This is the Triune nature of Creation that is somewhat analogous to the triune nature of an Artist's creation. As I was reflecting on this, I also thought about the first chapter of the book Art and Fear which explains that the importance of art is different between the Artist and the Receiver. It occurred to me that it also seems like the Triune Nature of Art is different between the Artist and the Receiver. I think the Triune nature of Art for the receiver might look something like this:

1. Idea = God
2. Communication = Christ/Logos
3. Inspiration/Response = Spirit

There are essentially three things involved when we humans encounter/receive the Christian God: God, God as seen by/heard by/revealed to Man (i.e., Jesus), and the moving power of God that changes Man as a result of this encounter (i.e., the Spirit). There is the same kind of Triune quality in our reception of Art. There is (1) the Artist's idea/concept that he/she wants to communicate (2) the medium through which that idea is communicated which we see, hear, touch (i.e., the "idea as communicated" through a painting, a story, a film, etc.), and then there is (3) the inspirational power that the communicated idea exerts on the receiver, the way it moves him, affects him, changes him. I don't know...but it's fun to think about.

A Precis: Art as Adaptation

2006-01-31T12:26:00.000-08:00

I was brainstorming further on this idea of Art as Adaptation (i.e. Art ex mundi?) vis-a-vis Art as Creation (i.e., Art ex nihilo). The following is a basic outline of the logic I'm toying with. This is just an idea I'm exploring rather than a dogma I believe in. I'm sure there is fallacy in one or more of these points, and I'd love your insight as to how I could polish this up (or flush it down the artistic Toilet…lol).

Logic: Human Art as Adaptation

1. IF our Art can be described as the creative expression in aesthetic form of what "Is"

2. IF what "Is" can be described as the Creator and His created order including all its physical, metaphysical, and historical-sociological manifestations.

3. IF the created order can be described as the Creator's Art.

4. IF "adaptation" can be described as a rewrite or reworking of a piece of art for another medium.

5. THEN all art is essentially an *attempted adaptation, parody, or satire of the Creator's art.

*Modifier "attempted" because human art is that artist's understanding of what Is, which is not always accurate.

CHRISTIANS AND THE ART OF ADAPTATION

2006-01-24T13:55:00.000-08:00

Adaptation. Every time it is announced that a widely-loved book is going to be adapted into a film, the reaction it causes among the book-lovers is like a drop of soap touching the surface of dirty, oily water -- it scatters. There is always, instantly, a wide circumference of opinions on how it should be done, why it should be done, and even if it should be done at all. Yet these opinions are many branches shooting out from the trunk of the same sincere love for the book, the same reverence for the author, the same hate for the idea of an adaptation that blasphemes the original art and author.

Interesting, I think, that we get the same sort of reaction to the arts in the church. We have the Catholics who embrace the arts, images of Christ's body hanging on the cross, stained glass windows telling Bibles stories, magnificent architecture, ornate robes. On the other extreme we have those who -- like Calvin and Zwingli -- have completely rejected the arts within the church, and stripped their church buildings of anything beautiful because they were afraid that it would lead to -- among other things -- blasphemy. Then we have those who lie somewhere in the middle, which is probably what we see in most Baptist churches today -- hymns, the occasional drama skit, a banner here and there, etc. All perspectives on art in the church stem from the same love for God, and the same respect, the same fear.

I do not think it is an accident that the reactions of Christians appear similar to the reactions of the book lovers. And I wonder if, perhaps, there is even a shared motivation as well.

An idea occurred to me this weekend that I have never heard mentioned before (although I am sure it has been thought of):

"Everything we create as artists, every painting, every song, every story, is really either an adaptation, parody, or satire of the original art of God."

When we paint a picture of Christ we are making an adaptation of God's art in Christ to a painting. A film about Jesus is taking God's original story and adapting it to film. It is only natural and proper, then, that we should pay this adaptation the same kind of reverence -- yes, even more -- that we pay to the adaptation of, for example, the Chronicles of Narnia. C.S. Lewis was utterly repulsed at the idea of a film with Aslan as a man in a lion suit; this, he thought, was blasphemy. What would God think of our art depicting His Christ, I wonder?

Yet, perhaps the same principle should apply when we do any type of art. I used to think of artists as "creators", and that by creating art, we are becoming like the Creator. But now I am not so sure. Now I wonder if not every piece of art we create is really an adaptation of God's original art. The preacher in Ecclesiastes said, "There is nothing new under the sun." (Ecc 1.9) And then Paul writes "For from Him and through Him and to Him are all things." (Romans 11.36) I wonder, are these just passages taken out of context that have absolutely nothing to do with our creations as artists? or are we indeed adapting our Creator's original art in everything we make? If it is the latter, I wonder, how do we keep from blaspheming Him and His art in our own adaptations, our parodies, and our satires?

I welcome any comments as I continue to reflect on this idea. Thanks!

HAMBURGERS AND HOLLYWOOD: LEARNING HOW TO RECEIVE ART

2005-12-22T22:57:00.000-08:00

Recently, I have been thinking a lot about artistic criticism, so I thought I'd share some thoughts that I've been having.

It seems to be a temptation of the intelligencia (I will use this term to describe "people who think and consider things") to artistically define ourselves by what we dislike. I admit that I have often tried to find things that I dislike about something, simply to make myself feel "superior" to those who like it. I remember in high school beginning to think that the movies my dad liked were "so shallow" and "lacked true substance" or "quality form" -- these same movies that only a year before I really enjoyed. When I began working in the film industry, I tried to establish further ideas of what is "bad" in film and art in general, because that is what I saw others doing, and it seemed like a "smart" or "cultured" thing to do -- to not like bad things. I think it also had to do partly with the great dislike I had developed for very BAD Christian art that was so forced and contrived it made me embarrassed to be a Christian.

I suppose this came to a head (or face?) this year in a close friend of mine (who is probably reading this -- Hi! hehe) who dislikes many things that I thoroughly enjoy. The most vivid example is U2: I have experienced such an extraordinary amount of pleasure and spiritual insight by receiving their music, it is unexplainable. But my friend cannot stand to listen to them (Bjork is his preference). My reaction to this was less offence, and more sadness -- a very deep sadness that he will never be able to see the beauty in their music, and we will never be able to share that joy with each other.

Likewise, we watched a movie together this week that I like (Orange County -- not one of my absolute favorites, but one that surprised me with its unusual depth). He didn't like the movie at all. He thought -- among other things -- that there were some illogical decisions by the characters (I pointed out that humans don't always make logical decisions), he doesn't like Jack Black and that kind of humor, and he didn't like "the message," which he thought was "People should stay where they are and not go anywhere else to do anything with their lives," (I argued that the message was "You don't always have to go to some 'ivory tower' to do what you want in life; humble yourself and see beauty where you are). He couldn't receive the joy of this movie at all because of his dislikes, and because of his dislikes, there is a channel of fellowship on which we will never be able to connect.

Thus I have found that the results of my (and other people's) "I don't likes" have been (a) broken channels of connection between myself and ones I love and (b) that I'm now unable to enjoy things I once could enjoy. I can't remember a time that I have NOT been able to enjoy an "artsy" movie -- those movies that are always nominated for Academy Awards and/or get shown in Sundance, etc.. My "artistically-critical evolution" has not been defined by what I enjoy, but rather, what I do NOT like. This may not be the case for everyone, but it has been for me.

This seems to be a very strange thing, indeed it seems to work against the nature of reality as I understand it as a Christian. Broken fellowship is a fundamental thing that Christ works against, indeed the entire salvation story is about the restoration of broken fellowship. We are beckoned by Christ to love each other. And also, it seems like the experience of joy and pleasure is (in the right context) a Godly thing. My dislikes prevented me from experiencing joy, which prevented me from touching the hem of God's garment.

I can put my finger on two things that have been hindrances to me when I watch these movies and listen to this music that I consider to be "bad." The first thing, as I discussed already, was a sense of pride and status I was trying to attain by my dislikes. This is obviously so vain and gratuitous I don't feel the need to discuss it any further.

The second thing... I have come to realize that I seem to be disliking a peach because it is not an orange. This may be true of others as well, but I'll speak in the first person. I think that movies and fiction and perhaps the visual arts should not only fall into different genres but different "types," in the same way that McDonalds and, say, Fuddruckers are different "types" -- both are in the "genre" of "hamburger joint", only one is fast-food, and the other is a restaurant. You don't expect restaurant-quality food when you order something through the drive through, that is not the point of a fast-food restaurant. Fast-food sacrifices quality and (sometimes) cost for convinence, and it does so on purpose. People generally do not get fast food because it is the best tasting food, they do it so that they can have more time to do other things. Likewise most people (though -- as a former waiter -- I have certainly seen exceptions!) do not go to a sit-in restaurant and expect their food to be out within two minutes.

When I expect the wrong thing, I am disappointed. When I try to receive fast food as I would a nice restaurant, I will be disappointed and I won't experience the "pleasure" for which fast food exists (i.e, saving time). When I go to a restaurant and get steamed when my food doesn't arrive in five minutes, my disappointment poisons the entire experience of the restaurant and the food, leaving a bitter attitude in my heart toward the restaurant hence forward.

I believe it is the same thing when I approach, say, an MTV movie and try to receive it as I would something in Sundance -- or vice versa -- I'm going to be disappointed. I need to position myself in such a way that I receive art as it is intended to be received. I brace myself one way when someone hands me a coke; I brace myself another way when someone hands me a sandbag. An MTV movie, or a lifetime movie, is not really intended to be the most artistic, innovative, inspiring work a person has ever seen; it is meant to entertain a generation. When it entertains AND inspires or innovates, it is something extra, something special. It is the same kind of experience I receive when I am surprised by fast food that is actually quite good.

I don't think it is a good idea for me to make an entire diet out of fast food (see Supersize Me). It is not intended to be used that way. Likewise I do not think it is a good idea for me to make my entire artistic diet out of MTV movies or John Grisham -- art that merely entertains. Nor do I think its a good idea to make my artistic diet completely out of movies shown at Sundance, Academy Award nominees, etc. that are more substantive and artistic because I need to be able to "keep it real" and not lose touch with the rest of the community. There needs to be a balance: mere entertainment is good; so is substance. Also, I know that I, personally, should make every effort to widen (not narrow) the scope of art that I can take joy in.

I'm curious to hear what everyone else thinks about this...

Shadows and Similarities

2005-12-12T08:37:00.000-08:00

Just a thought...

Hebrews chapter 10 talks about how the law and the elements of the law were all simply a shadow of what was to come in Christ and the new covenant. It is a beautiful concept that really sheds light on our Creator as "author" and "storyteller"!

This sort of Platonic ideal of "shadows of ultimate reality" made me consider the similarities to the Christian story found in myths and other religions. The gluttony of present academics in comparitive religion and the disciples of Joseph Campbell seems to say either, "Look, they're all similar, so they must all be the same thing," or "See, this myth came way before the Gospels were written, so the evangelists must have stolen the ideas from them." No one in those specialized fields (that I know of) seems to consider the -- albeit metaphysical, but quite logical -- possibility of these other religions and myths being an imperfect shadow of the reality that was to come in Christ. It seems to be what Lewis and Tolkien believed, anyway. If anyone reading this knows of any theologians or religious academics that have written on this, please let me know. Thanks!

NARNIA CONTRAVERSY: IS NARNIA "CHRISTIAN" (AND DOES IT MATTER)?

2005-12-09T14:09:00.000-08:00

The second source of controversy is the issue of whether or not the Narnia books (and thus the movie) are "Christian," and if Lewis has a Christian agenda (i.e., evangelization, teaching theology, etc.) with his books. I will handle these questions separately.

Both questions regarding the "Christianity" of Narnia seem to me such a silly thing to debate about. Who cares? However, what I think is serious is that people are refusing to see the movie based on the answer to that question. They are robbing themselves of so much.

The first people are those who are not Christians, and refuse to allow themselves and their children to be subjected to the "subliminal teaching" of Christian dogma through the film. However, what they do not consider is that if a dogma is to be considered "Christian" and not merely "religious," then it must consist of ideals that are uniquely Christian and not shared with any other religion. The only elements in the story that could be considered "Christian dogma" (that I can remember at the moment) are (1) reference to the children as "Sons and daughters of Adam and Eve," (2) the presence of Christmas and (3) the death and resurrection of Aslan.

In reference to the first point, the belief of Adam and Eve is held not only by Christians, but Islam and Judaism as well. Yet still, the story does not revolve or hang upon this point at all. It is simply a way -- I think -- to enrich the story with myth. Also, these people do not consider that there are many other mythologies besides the Christian myth that are similarly spoken of in a matter-of-fact way; we see fauns, dryads, and centaurs frolicking the Narnian fields as well. In the book, we even see the Greek god Baccus as well, and Mr. Beaver speaks of Adam's first wife -- Lillith -- as the origin of the White Witch. The mythology of Lillith is not at all a widely held belief by Christians, and is found nowhere in the Christian scriptures. Thus, to think that the reference to Adam and Eve is a didactic theological tool is, I think, inconsistant and illogical.

The second element -- Christmas -- is uniquely Christian (in origin), yet today's Christmas is hardly more tied to Christianity than Halloween. To most, it is simply a time when people get and give presents to each other, and decorate their homes and businesses in green and red. And really, the giving of presents is all that we see in Lion, and that through the myth of St. Nicholas. Christmas could also be tied to the coming of Aslan into Narnia, but again, I think this connection (if he meant one) was more for the sake of enriching the story with mythos -- Aslan being clearly a Christ figure -- than a didactic tool.

Which brings us to the third point -- the death and resurrection of Aslan. This is the point that most people raise when speaking of the Christian dogma in the story. However, theologically the death and resurrection of Aslan serves a different purpose than the death and resurrection of Christ. The death and resurrection of Christ was for the express purpose of restoring community between God and man (i.e., through faith in Christ we can spend eternity in fellowship with God). God is the central figure in the purpose of Christ's crucifixion. However, the crucifixion of Aslan was not to restore community between God and man, it was to allow Edmund to live in spite of his sin; fellowship with God (or "The Emperor Over the Sea") has nothing to do with it. Truly, you can no more call Lion a Christian book because of Aslan's death than you can call Harry Potter a "Christian story" because of Harry's mother dying to save him from death by Voldemort. As far as the resurrection is concerned, that concept is not exclusive to Christianity either but is found in Norse, Egyptian, and Greek mythologies as well.

Therefore, I think it is a logical fallacy to call Lion a "Christian story" or to say that it teaches Christian dogma. And it is a sad case that anyone would miss the wonder and enchantment of Narnia based on that charge. On that note, I think it is sad that people would get offended by the Christian story at all simply because it is different than their religion (or lack of religion). The Gospel is, in itself, a touching and enchanting story of love and sacrifice. Many other religions have very interesting stories as well: the story of the Dahli Lama, the Greek myths, the Jewish Maccabean revolution, etc. Just because it is a story from a different religion doesn't mean that it is empty of meaning or enchantment. They are certainly far from "uninteresting." So why deny yourself these rich stories?

However unfortunately, using the same explanation for the non-Christianity of Narnia above, many Christians refuse to see the movie. To these people, about the only thing that makes a "good movie" is if it has someone converting to Christianity, "accepting Jesus Christ as their personal Lord and Savior." This is equally sad, because these people are also missing the powerfully enchanting story of Lion, and countless other stories.

These Christians are looking for truth, and good for them. All Christians should be seeking to know Him more and more. However, Christian truth is not only found in the four spiritual laws. It also encompasses love, sacrifice, consequence, honesty, bravery, beauty, and so much more, all in the Lion.

And beauty, especially, is such a vessel of God's truth. C.S. Lewis came to believe in God not because someone shared with him the four spiritual laws, or even because they proved God's existence through apologetics. God made Himself evident to Lewis through moments of wonder and joy he experienced through art, music, literature, and nature (see Lewis autobiography Surprised By Joy), mediums which no one would consider "Christian" in the strictest sense. This is how God revealed His presence to Lewis. Also in Lewis' conversion from Theism to Christianity, God chose to use Viking myths (among other things) to help show him that the story of Christ must be true. Beauty and fantasy creates a sense of awe in a person, and a deep longing for that which no one can find in this world. It makes us hungry for God. We could all use a bit more hunger in our lives.

Whatever faith, whatever creed, whatever life you live, and whether Narnia is "Christian" or not, please do not rob yourself of these Narnia stories, or any good stories of any kind for that matter. As a Christian, I see that God is the ultimate storyteller. No one can match Him. The entire salvation history has played out in a beautiful story. The scriptures tell us that Christ came at the appointed time, meaning that God was waiting for the perfect place in the story to send His Son. The law with all of its specifications was nothing more than a foreshadowing of what was to come in Christ, and what is yet to come in the eschaton, the apocalypse. He loves good stories, and so should we. God and Truth can inspire and be revealed in all sorts of shapes and sizes, and this can be easily seen in Romans 1.

He is not a tame lion, you know.

NARNIA CONTROVERSIES: Should Narnia be made into a film?

2005-12-07T23:46:00.000-08:00

[I do want to try to keep this blog within circle of theology, but I simply can't help but to address some issues I see coming up with this Narnia film. And besides, part of the study of God is understanding how He relates to culture...so here goes!]

With the looming advent of Aslan’s incarnation on the big screen, my favorite author -- C.S. Lewis -- is becoming almost annoyingly ubiquitous in the media, and Barnes and Nobles is waist-high in books on and by the man. Yet alas, I do have my ticket to the 12:01 a.m. showing of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, and I’m very eager to see it.

Yet however exciting this advent may be, I find it unsettling that there are so many heated discussions and grave misunderstandings going on as to (a) whether or not Narnia books should be made into movies and (b) whether or not the Narnia books are “Christian.” I thought I would enter my two cents on it, and my perspective of what “Jack” (the name Lewis gave to himself) would think. I will take great pains to quote Lewis and authorities on Lewis as much as possible because…frankly… who cares what I think? I will do this in two parts.

I. SHOULD NARNIA BE MADE INTO A LIVE ACTION FILM?

This first issue deals with a letter by Lewis that you can read here (you can also read a relevant article here). Among other things, Lewis says:

“But I am absolutely opposed – adamant isn’t in it! – to a TV version. Anthropomorphic animals, when taken out of narrative into actual visibility, always turn into buffoonery or nightmare. At least, with photography. Cartoons (if only Disney did not combine so much vulgarity with his genius!) wld. be another matter. A human, pantomime, Aslan wld. be to me blasphemy.”

It is the same mistake people have when they try to interperet the Bible -- they are not considering context before they come to their conclusions. People are reading this then imagining Lewis and Tolkien having just left the premiere of Return of the King. Instead, they should be imagining Lewis and Tolkien having just walked out of Journey to the Center of the Earth starring Pat Boone in 1959. Yeah... quite a difference.

This summer I was graced with the privilege of meeting with Walter Hooper (former secretary to Lewis and literary adviser to the Lewis Estate) twice while we were visiting Oxford. During our tea, we talked about film as art, and I remember him saying that Lewis did not really like movies (though he did frequent the theatre), however this was probably because films overall were not very good. They did not have the technology we have now. I also had the tremendous privilege of spending a week of this summer working at the Rathvinden, the home and ministry of Douglas Gresham (stepson of C.S. Lewis and co-producer of Lion). I asked him about what Lewis would think about Narnia being made into a film, and he said he would have abhorred the idea back then, but with the technology we have now, it is a totally different story. In a recent e-mail, Doug said, "I wouldn't have wanted to make the film with the technology available in those days either."

All-in-all, it is really a non-issue, but the media is trying to make an issue out of it. Idiotic. However, with retrospect, I have no idea how the BBC movies in the late 80's were approved. Of these, I remember Doug saying, "...and I'm proud to say I had absolutely nothing to do with those." I remember enjoying those movies as a kid, however, the technical quality was poor, and Aslan -- very underwhelming.

Oh, and if you want to get really technical -- Lewis approved cartoon animals/Aslan. Well...what is CGA but computer-drawn cartoons?

Welcome

2005-12-03T11:41:00.000-08:00

Welcome to my blog! This blog will focus primarily on theological ramblings. So, please enjoy by either marveling at my mysterious theological insight or by pointing fingers and laughing at my absolute stupidity.

For those of you who are not familiar with it, "Flatland" comes from the book "Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions," written by Edwin Abbott. It is a sort or "what if" about people that live in a 2 dimensional world that come into contact with 3 dimensions, an I idea that -- I think -- has curious ramifications on how we think about God and the supernatural realm in general. If you would like to read the book, it is now in open domain and can be found here. I am a Flatlander, and am earnestly trying to wrap my mind around this person of God. And this blog is where I have my theological catharsis... a way to glorify God with my mind.