Since I am awash in a sea of schoolwork and know not how to end it, I have no time to blog. So in lieu of an actual post I offer a few words from a mind far more attuned to the beauty of Christ than I:
Across my foundering deck shone
A beacon, an eternal beam. / Flesh fade, and mortal trash
Fall to the residuary worm; / world’s wildfire, leave but ash:
In a flash, at a trumpet crash,
I am all at once what Christ is, / since he was what I am, and
This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, / patch, matchwood, immortal diamond,
Is immortal diamond.
Philosophy professor Doug Groothius of the Constructive Curmudgeon foregoes traditional New Year's resolutions and instead gives us Fifteen Refusals for 2007. I enthusiastically concur with fourteen of these, although I must resolutely reject the first proposition expressed in number seven.
The desert fathers of old believed in demons because of their experiences in quest of the "narrow gate" that only few find. They sought to perfect themselves and so became involved as combatants in unseen warfare. They felt as if thwarted in their practices by opponents both malevolent and invisible. The moderns do not try to perfect themselves and so the demons leave them alone.
Consider this, anonymous reader: you may be under the impression that you are in charge of your life, that you are the captain of your fate and the master of your soul. But the classical Christian view is that your life was made for the glory of God, exists presently for the glory of God, and will be a shining display of the glory of God at some future date. In other words, the only reason you have a life is so that it can fulfill God's purposes, not your own. There is God's glory at the end of the road, and that is all. Your life was made for this. All other purposes of the Christian life - a restored relationship with God, everlasting joy and peace, the removal of the stain of sin - are encapsulated in this single monolithic purpose: that God should be glorified.
Now anyone with even the blandest apprehension of Christian theology ought to have their hackles raised at this prospect. They should know that the glory at the end of the road is reached in only one of two ways. The first way that God is glorified in the life of the individual is through the act of redemption. There is glory all along the way: in the transformation of a wicked human into a creation that is both holy and wholly new, in the perfect, restored relationship that comes into existence between the mortal and the divine, in the cohabitation of the community of the redeemed in the kingdom of God, and most of all, in the bloody show of the Son of God as he dies on the cross, the one event that makes all of the others possible. God is glorified in the display of both His love and His justice, and the Atonement is the wonderful, terrible display of both at once: His love being displayed in the fact that He would cast His own son into the jaws of death to save sinners, an act that also displays His justice in pouring out His wrath against sin.
But there is a second way that God's glory can be displayed in your life, dear reader, and here the story becomes less pleasant. If at the cross God's glory was shown in a display of matchless love, it is in the belly of hell that His glory is shown in matchless justice. For God to let sin go unjudged and unpunished would be a perversion of justice. Thus in the condemnation of the sinful there is also a display of God's majesty and grandeur, just as His glory was displayed in the spectacle of the cross.
Thus there are two possible endings for the road of life, both of them glorifying the Creator of all life in the end. There is glory for Him in the act of redemption - as well as peace, meaningfulness, and eternal life for us - and there is glory for Him in the act of condemnation. His eternal splendor is shown in both His boundless love and his terrible wrath.
Socrates told us that the unexamined life is not worth living, but the problem with the examined life is that it is lived under a terrible shadow. The shadow is the knowledge of our own finitude, our own limitation as weak, ignorant, and temporal beings. We have a bleary-eyed notion of something greater than ourselves that exists beyond the borders of the world, yet when we grasp for it we find that it is gone. We turn to the wisdom of the philosophers, those farseeing sages who have wrestled with such questions for two millennia, and yet they have nothing to say to us, their arguments over even the basic structure of reality a testimony to their ultimate impotence. We catch a glimpse of an uncertain splendor in the barest corner of our eye, but when we turn our head we see only the grey twilight. We turn to the politicians, who with shameful bombast declare that the light we seek lies just beyond the next wave of political revolution or within the latest social structure, only to discover their words to be as empty as the wind. With unblinking clarity we understand the type of person we ought to be, but find that becoming such a person is like fighting an enemy we cannot see, a phantom version of ourselves with deeper power and greater cunning. Our limitation is blindness. Our failures are emblems of human finitude.
In the light of this uneasy knowledge, what choice do we have for salvation? To whom will we turn for redemption from these awful states? Do we even have the ability to choose rightly? I don't think so. Our only hope is that God will reach into our world, and as Christians we believe that He has done so. He has reached down not only into history in the Incarnation, but He daily reaches into individual lives with the Spirit's transforming power. But even after this is accomplished and we remain in this mortal flesh, many of our own failures and inabilities remain. But now it is different. Now we can cry with Paul, "What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God—through Jesus Christ our Lord!"
In the study of epistemology, an incorrigible belief is one that can in no way be doubted. Descartes wondered what we could actually know, since he saw that most of us put far too much trust in the surety of our own beliefs. He began his program of philosophy by systematically doubting virtually all of his common beliefs - belief in the reality of the external world, in the internal logic of his own mind, even his belief in the truths of mathematics - until he came to that one belief he knew he could not doubt: the fact that he was doubting. His famous cogito ergo sum ("I think, therefore I am") is his statement of that bedrock belief in his doubting self.
For Descartes, his belief in the fact that he was doubting was an incorrigible belief. He could doubt many of his beliefs, but not that one. It might be debatable as to whether we should classify this belief as incorrigible, but there are some other cases that are more clear. Consider my present experience. I am sitting at a computer and I have a firm belief that the chair I am sitting in is real. That is, I believe it is a real thing in a world that is external to my mind and that it continues to exist even when I am not perceiving it. However, this belief can be doubted. It is at least possible (however unlikely) that I am a brain in a vat with images being piped in from a computer, or I could be in a Matrix, or I could be a psychologically disturbed god creating a false external world around me. All of these may be extremely improbable, but they are not impossible. Thus my belief in a real, actual chair is not incorrigible.
However, I do have an incorrigible belief in all this: my belief that an appearance of a chair is occurring to me. It seems impossible to say that this belief could somehow be false. My belief in the simple fact that I am being appeared to in a certain way - to say nothing of the reality that is or isn't behind that appearance - is an incorrigible belief.
Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see.
Hebrews 11:1, NIV
Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.
Hebrews 11:1, NASB
I confess the following: early in my Christian life, I was somewhat embarrassed by Hebrews 11:1. I think I was focusing too heavily on some Bible versions' translation of faith as being the "evidence of things unseen." How could it ever be rational to take faith - an inner conviction of the mind - as evidence of something that you couldn't see? Wasn't this a perfect example of Freud's view of religious faith as being nothing more than wish fulfillment? In Freud's view, we want there to be a God. We desperately wish the story of the living, speaking God to be true so that we can know the meaning of our lives, so we take as evidence of these things the very fact that we believe them. It all sounded so ridiculously circular, as if the writer of Hebrews were saying: your faith is warranted simply by the fact that you have it.
For a few weeks now, I've been trying (and mostly failing) to get up earlier so I can get my Bible study, workout, etc. done before the baby wakes up. I've been wondering how to make myself be more disciplined and consistent in this area, even going so far as to do some research into smelling salts as a way to get my lazy keister out of bed. But I just found this article which gives an interesting behavior-oriented approach to training your body to get out of bed as soon as the alarm goes off, and I just might try it. B. F. Skinner would be proud.
In his sermon on Sunday, my pastor displayed this image on the screen. It was taken during Sudan's famine in 1993 by a photographer named Kevin Carter. It shows a starving Sudanese girl collapsed on the ground as she tries to make it to a UN Feeding Center a kilometer away. The presence of the vulture speaks for itself. Researching this picture on the internet today I have discovered a few things. First, the photographer apparently chased the vulture away, but did nothing to help the girl. Second, the girl apparently resumed her trek to the feeding center, but no one knows what became of her. Third, Kevin Carter committed suicide only a few months after winning the Pulitzer Prize for the photo.
My pastor's sermon was about sharing the gospel, and his point was that there are many people who are spiritually impoverished and dying just as this child was physically impoverished and dying. The point was well-taken, and yet in the moment I saw the photograph, the only thing that concerned me was the terrible physical plight of this little toddler and those like her. This photo is apparently very famous, and yet its existence had escaped me over the last decade or so. Being a new parent myself, the sight of this poor child - whose fate is unkown - collapsed naked on a rocky field as she tries to make it to a feeding center, alone, with her bones protruding from her skin, was utterly devastating to me. Here I am, in my posh middle class suburban home and my nice job, pursuing my dreams, with a beautiful wife and daughter, and all the while there are people in the world whose suffering is beyond comprehension, as well as being beyond their control. As a seminary student I obviously have my finanical struggles, but compared to the plight of this child and those like her I am obscenely rich.
On Rush Limbaugh's radio show (no endorsement or condemnation implied), there is a mock commercial that often plays about how liberals just want to make people feel guilty if they are successful or rich, as if by having money or affluence you ought to be ashamed simply by virtue of the fact that there are those in the world who are impoverished and dying. Well, yes and no. Being successful or having a wealth of worldly possessions should not inherently entail a feeling of guilt. And yet many of the world's rich (of which I am one, at least when compared to how most people live) should feel guilty if they are basking in their riches while ignoring the wretchedly poor. Or perhaps we can say it a better way: being aflluent should not necessarily involve feeling guilty, but it should necessarily involve a responsibility to use riches to help others. Not guilt then, but responsibility. Guilt should only come if the responsibility is ignored.
On that note, count me the guiltiest of them all. One reason this image so affected me is because I realize that I have been doing abolutely nothing for the world's poor. As a seminary student on a single income, finances are always tight, and yet I am fully aware that I could be giving more than I currently do. This is an issue that will take more serious reflection on my part.
One more note on the photo. It ocurred to me how ridiculously powerful a single image can be. It is one thing to cognitively know that there are starving people in the world, and yet it is quite another to experience that reality through a simple image. Images are non-propositional. A powerful image can be like a powerful narrative: it does not present specific propositional content but it can wed itself to propositional content ("There are starving people in the world"), thereby producing strong emotion ("This is a tragedy!") and set the will into motion ("I will do something to help starving people like this poor girl"). Postmoderns - and especially postmoderns in the church - have much to say about the value of portraying truths and values in non-propositional ways: through art, or drama, or imagery, or whatever. And while certainly we as Christians should always keep the statements of theology foremost in our quest for and expressions of God's truth, we should not forget the value of image and story. Jesus Himself often made explicit truths implicit via narrative parables. It is one thing to say, "Christians should care for the poor." But the bones of that proposition are given real, feeling flesh when wedded to an image like the one above.
While digging around the Christian blogosphere recently, I came across a post about "The Problem of Mercy" by Gunner over at The Foolish Blog. Here's the gist:
The “problem of evil” has been debated for centuries. How can God allow evil and suffering to go on in the world? If He rules the world, why is there so much pain? Did He create evil? Or did He just allow it to exist (and how does that work)? Is evil under His control? If so, how can He be truly good since He allows so much of it? If not, aren’t we hopeless? A full spectrum of answers has been given to this question, both dark and discouraging answers as well as bright and hopeful answers. But none seem to have quelled the outcry of a sin-laden world that continues to demand an answer for the evil that we are affected by every day, and the pain and suffering that come with it. And so we continue to question, and often complain.
But no one seems to be complaining about God’s mercy. When there is a fork in the road of our thinking, we naturally choose the path that most exalts ourselves. Our philosophical questioning and theological interrogation is not objective. It’s partial—partial to us. When things are hard, it must be God’s fault. It couldn’t be ours. Therefore, we find ourselves able to question and discuss and debate and rail about the problem of evil while rarely humbling ourselves enough to recognize the problem of mercy. And there is such a thing as the problem of mercy.
Instead of asking, “Why is there evil in the world if God is so good?” why do we not ask, “Why is there salvation for the world if we are so evil?” Instead of vilifying God by passionately protesting the presence of pain and suffering, we ought to put our collective hand on our mouth and honor God for His mystifying mercy. It is not surprising that there is pain and hardship in this world, for “the wages of sin is death,” and “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” ( Romans 6:23; 3:23). We should expect misery to be widespread, because all have sinned, and we should expect it to be miserable, because its end is death. It should not surprise us. It is our just punishment. What should surprise us—what should shock us—is that God has saved so many of us from the eternal version of that misery. It is astounding that God has saved anyone.
What are we to make of this? When I first read the above post, bells went off in my head. Surely Gunner is on to something here, at least as it relates to the problem of evil.
But what is he on to? To answer, we need to distinguish between two senses of the problem of evil. I'll call them the philosophical problem of evil and the pastoral problem of evil. The philosophical problem gets the most press, as it is discussed and debated most in the worlds of apologetics and philosophy (there are actually two main types of the philosophical problem as well: the logical problem of evil and the probabilistic problem of evil, but I'll leave those for another post). The philosophical problem gives birth to the atheists' argument against the existence of God. God is supposedly all-powerful and all-good, and yet there is evil in the world. Thus God does not exist, or He is either not all-powerful or not all-good. The pastoral problem is quite different. It deals with how we as Christian believers cope with the fact that we believe in an omniscient, omnibenevolent God who chooses to allow evil and suffering in our lives.
Gunner's "problem of mercy" brings nothing to bear on the philosophical problem of evil. That's because it isn't actually an argument, and it isn't actually an argument because it starts with the assumption that God exists and that He has freely provided salvation and mercy for sinful humanity. The philosophical problem begins with the fact of evil, and from there proceeds via inquiry as to whether this fact is more consistent with atheism or theism. In other words, the philosophical problem seeks to answer the question of God given the fact of evil, and Gunner's "problem of mercy" conundrum begins with an answer to the question. Thus it must be asking a different question.
The question it is asking, then, is the primary question of the pastoral problem of evil. God is all-good and all-powerful, and yet He voluntarily allows evil and suffering in the lives of the children that He loves, and sometimes alot of evil and suffering. When we look at this question, we see where the problem of mercy derives its force. Surely, we could say, God is holy and just, and yet He voluntarily withholds justice against sinners and offers them the chance to repent. When we encounter suffering in our lives, the proper response is not to complain that we are being treated unfairly, for surely as criminals in the cosmic court of God we deserve much worse. The proper response is to view our own pains and adversities in the light of God's mercy, and to see how insignificant they are when compared to the bloody spectacle of the cross.
Pardon me if I get a bit cerebral here, but I want to try to work out something that has been on my mind recently. I've been thinking about human self-awareness and what it really means to be truly self-aware. My thought is this: one is only authentically self-aware when he views himself in the light of eternity. Please recognize that I am not saying that true self-awareness only occurs when an individual sees himself as an eternal soul. There is a difference. One does not need to believe in his own eternal soul to have eternal self-awareness in this sense.
I'll give two examples of the kind of person that does in fact possess this kind of self-awareness. First is the devoutly religious believer. She understands that she has an eternal soul, created by an eternal Being, for an eternal purpose. She values this present life but only as it is tangentially connected to her eternal life. She holds to the things of this world tentatively because she knows her true home lies in the world beyond the world. Second is the devout and well-informed atheist. He does not believe that his soul is eternal but he is aware of the vast eternity of time and space that surrounds him (assuming, of course, that it is proper to use the term "eternal" for time and the cosmos). He knows that his life is only a brief and accidental moment along the vast panoply of space and time. He recognizes that the sixty or seventy years he spends on this earth is inifinitesimally trivial when compared to the billions of silent years that have stretched out before him and the billions more that will pass after he is gone.
Now consider the person that is not authentically self-aware (in this sense). The prospect of what happens after he is gone does not enter his mind. The mystery of what lies beyond the wordless doorway of death does not touch his consciousness. He lives in the moment, and only for the moment. This momentary-living-of-life can take multiple forms. For the partying college student it may mean that the question of eternity poses no problem for her debauched lifestyle simply because she never thinks about it. But the same may be true for the hard working man who wants to provide for his family. He may be doing a good thing, but he does not consider how his good actions or his values fit into any eternal scheme.
I raise this issue because I believe part of the task of Christian evangelism is to make people eternally self-aware. The fact is that many modern secular people simply refuse to seriously consider the question of eternity. At least the atheist has considered it and rejected the possibility of any eternal aspect to himself, but many nonbelievers are ignorant of the importance of the questions that religion asks simply because they are ignorant about the existence of the questions themselves. The Gospel calls for a radical consideration of the question of eternity, but this consideration can only come when the questioner is is fully self-aware, when he understands that in this life he is not immortal.
I'm currently working on a sermon from Psalm 13 called, "When God Seems Far Away." It deals with how we as Christians should handle those long, dark nights of the soul that plague us from time to time. While doing some research today on this issue, I came across this amazing poem in an article over at First Things:
Friend, in the Desolate Time
Friend, in the desolate time, when your soul is enshrouded in darkness
When, in a deep abyss, memory and feeling die out,
Intellect timidly gropes among shadowy forms and illusions
Heart can no longer sigh, eye is unable to weep;
When, from your night-clouded soul the wings of fire have fallen
And you, to nothing, afraid, feel yourself sinking once more,
Say, who rescues you then?—Who is the comforting angel
Brings to your innermost soul order and beauty again,
Building once more your fragmented world, restoring the fallen
Altar, and when it is raised, lighting the sacred flame?-—
None but the powerful being who first from the limitless darkness
Kissed to life seraphs and woke numberless suns to their dance.
None but the holy Word who called the worlds into existence
And in whose power the worlds move on their paths to this day.
Therefore, rejoice, oh friend, and sing in the darkness of sorrow:
Night is the mother of day, Chaos the neighbor of God.
Erik Johan Stagnelius Translated from the Swedish by Bill Coyle
I've been thinking recently about what it actually means to encounter God, be it in prayer, or worship, or through an experience of beauty, or whatever. The biblical drama is essentially one long tale about God initiating encounters with humans in order to achieve His purposes in history. The defining event of my life was the inbreaking of God into my life when I was converted at age 19. It was an encounter with the personal God of the cosmos, the result being a Copernican revolution in the constitution of my thoughts, beliefs, and emotions.
It seems to me that evangelicals would benefit greatly if they devoted as much mental energy to the development of a theology of encounter, for lack of a better term, as they do to other areas of theology. I suppose that such a theology would best fit into our understanding of the doctrine of God, or the doctrine of the Holy Spirit, or even into our soteriology. It seems that we spend all of our energy into properly exegeting our reading of the Word of God, while shortchanging any inquiry into our experience of God Himself, even though the primary theme of the Bible is redemption. And redemption involves a restored relationship, and you can't very well have a relationship with someone if you don't encounter them every now and then.
I use the term "encounter" rather than "experience" because I am trying to ward off the feverish warnings against relying on "experience" that characterizes a certain block of evangelicalism. That sort of thinking seems entirely incorrect to me, based solely on the fact that it is nowhere found in the biblical record, and the whole message of the Bible is one of humans having divinely-initiated encounters with God. The writings of the Psalmist, even though he didn't have the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, provide a perfect example of a human's passionate devotion to encountering God, not because he loves the experience but because he loves God Himself.
Not only do I think wholesale warnings against mystical experiences are wrong, I think they can be downright dangerous. The simple fact is that if I only had access to the Word of God and never to God Himself, the Christian life would be unlivable for me. I can't express the relief it gave me to hear one of my seminary professors (who will remain unnamed) say that the only real Christianity is one that includes an experience of God. The emphasis on knowing and understanding the Word can come with a tragic cost if the goal of that activity is not the cultivation of a relationship with God that includes personal experiences with Him through the Holy Spirit.
The warning against the dangers of mystical experience is a legitimate warning if its goal is to eliminate the desire in some Chrisitians for an experience with God to be an end in itself. But having experiences with God as a means to an end - that end being a healthy, thriving relationship with the Living God - is not only helpful but vital to true Christianity.
The reason the development of a theology of encounter is so vital is so that Christians can properly understand, evaluate, and recognize genuine experiences of God. The answer to the problems that mystical experiences pose is not the elimination of those experiences but a proper understanding of them.
Now it's true that our Pentecostal and charismatic brethren have been writing about their experiences with God for years. But those writings tend to lack the exegetical and theological sophistication that characterizes much of the Reformed tradition, and the worst of them are examples of hyper-emotionalism and how not to seek an experience with God.
Perhaps someone could point out to me some high-level "encounter theology" that I am missing, but right now the closest thing I can think of are the writings of the Christian philosopher William P. Alston, who sees Christian mystical experience as being foundational to faith itself. I am more of a philosopher, and only an average theologian at best, but I hope that some bright young theologian out there will take on this task very soon.
In his sermon on Sunday, my pastor displayed this image on the screen. It was taken during Sudan's famine in 1993 by a photographer named Kevin Carter. It shows a starving Sudanese girl collapsed on the ground as she tries to make it to a UN Feeding Center a kilometer away. The presence of the vulture speaks for itself. Researching this picture on the internet today I have discovered a few things. First, the photographer apparently chased the vulture away, but did nothing to help the girl. Second, the girl apparently resumed her trek to the feeding center, but no one knows what became of her. Third, Kevin Carter committed suicide only a few months after winning the Pulitzer Prize for the photo.
Pardon me if I get a bit cerebral here, but I want to try to work out something that has been on my mind recently. I've been thinking about human self-awareness and what it really means to be truly self-aware. My thought is this: one is only authentically self-aware when he views himself in the light of eternity. Please recognize that I am not saying that true self-awareness only occurs when an individual sees himself as an eternal soul. There is a difference. One does not need to believe in his own eternal soul to have eternal self-awareness in this sense.
I've been thinking recently about what it actually means to encounter God, be it in prayer, or worship, or through an experience of beauty, or whatever. The biblical drama is essentially one long tale about God initiating encounters with humans in order to achieve His purposes in history. The defining event of my life was the inbreaking of God into my life when I was converted at age 19. It was an encounter with the personal God of the cosmos, the result being a Copernican revolution in the constitution of my thoughts, beliefs, and emotions.
