The Courage to Protest

This week I have had the opportunity to ponder the general ethos of fear and uncertainty that exists among groups of Christians. It seems to me that many believers are struggling with a sense of identity. There is a general sense that we are standing on a shaky foundation, and the rug is about to be (or already has been) pulled out from under our feet.

I believe there is a general sadness, frustration and even bitterness amongst Evangelicals and this is caused by the loss of a place of prominence and dignity in Western society. Christianity played a crucial role in forming our world and its institutions: the ivy league schools were all Christian institutions when they began, our governments drew their principles explicitly from the bible, etc. It still says in the Canadian charter of rights and freedoms that “Canada is founded upon principles that recognize the sovereignty of God and the rule of law.” Our country’s name “the dominion of Canada” was named after a parliamentarian was inspired by a bible verse: “He shall have dominion from sea to sea.” Few people know the entirety of our national anthem: we only sing the first verse at hockey games, but as the song progresses, it becomes more expressly Christian:

“Lord of the lands, beneath Thy bending skies/ o’er field and flood, where ‘ere our banner flies/ Thy people lift their hearts to thee/ their grateful voices raise/ may our dominion ever be a temple to Thy praise/ Thy will alone, let all enthrone/Lord of the lands, make Canada thine own/Lord of the lands, make Canada thine own.”

But surveying the contemporary scene, the dominant institution of the west is no longer the church, the university has left the nest of Christianity and bourne wings of its own, and the government...well, the government does what it does best, follow the meandering river of popular opinion. I think all of this, even if not expressly known by Christians in all detail helps explain the sense of alienation among Evangelicals. We birthed much of Western culture. Now we’re empty nesters, and are left staring at each other what to do next now that our children don’t seem interested in talking to us.

Evangelicals need not be so mopey or confused. After all, our theology tells us that it is not we who did anything. All good things are from God, if any good plants grew that bore tasty fruit, all the glory goes to Him, for “a man can receive nothing unless it is given to him from heaven.” We are sowers: we plant seeds, we water “but God causes the growth.” In a sense, our mopeyness is caused by forgetting our own confession of faith.

So what is an Evangelical? Contrary to popular usage, it is not synonymous with Fundamentalism. The term “Evangelical” first surfaced around the time of the Reformation, and it was a derisive term used to refer to Lutherans. In fact, the term “Lutheran” and “Evangelical” were synonymous. It is my conviction that herein lies a powerful inspiration to re-ground those feet that feel like they are floating in mid-air. Let us not forget that the Reformers had no social trophies that hung on their walls to inspire them. Nor did the Apostles for that matter. They had one thing: the word of God.

Evangelicalism is in my mind, a term that designates a certain group of Christians within the history of Protestantism that sees itself as the inheritors of the theology of the Reformation, specifically as regards our theology of knowledge. The Reformers had a mighty foe entrenched in their day: the Roman Catholic Hierarchy. More important than the doctrine of Justification by Faith alone was the prior conviction that “the church” had departed from the teaching of the apostles. To be “protestant” was to protest, to have a heartfelt objection to the way things are going in the world. That “protest” is so profoundly believed in, one is willing to lay their life down for that truth. The protest was that the word of God, not the pope, had true authority over what is to be believed and how life is to be lived. Evangelicalism is essentially a holiness movement: calling the church and the world to fidelity to Jesus Christ through the teachings of the prophets and apostles.

Again, looking at the contemporary scene, it’s easy to see why we feel so disenchanted; Catholics and Evangelicals aren’t killing each other anymore (except in Ireland) -they actually get along to a substantial degree. But we still disagree as to the locus of authority, our “protest” still stands and hasn’t changed in over 500 years.

With the enlightenment, the protestant movement faced a new foe, ironically one that it helped give birth to: autonomous reason. Just as Protestants deemed it morally obligatory to cut ties with Roman Catholic authority, so Secularists followed suit and “protested” to the Protestant locus of authority, the bible. In it’s place “the goddess reason” was enthroned.

Protestants did not face up to the Enlightenment challenge nearly as effectively as they did to Catholicism. Shortly after the Enlightenment, Evangelicalism experienced a significant split within its ranks, and “Liberal Protestantism” was born. I would still squarely find myself within the Evangelical tradition, and I find autonomous human reason to be just as objectionable as the Papacy, if not moreso.

Reason alone makes a crappy God, because it is like the idol-worship the 1st century Christians faced down in the emperor cult. Reason is essentially a mute idol that has no eyes nor ears, doesn’t see, hear, or care. Autonomous reason gives us no content for what constitutes knowledge, just a set of propositions. By contrast, an Evangelical’s knowledge comes from a personal and loving God, not a dead principle.

Many Evangelicals are characterized not just by uncertainty and confusion, but biblical illiteracy. They have forsaken their confession, their spirituality, and really need to be awakened to what it was that gave the church such power to wield such persuasive influence and form a culture as strong and admirable as the Western world.

We now live in a post-Christian world, and I am not suggesting we sit around and mope about the glory days, nor even try to re-create them. The work to be done is ultimately God’s, and the consequences of the church being faithful to it’s mission will be played out in God’s providence. But first, we must get the basics straight, and re-discover the joy and strength that comes from having a God that speaks truth and gives us knowledge which we can live by.

The Law of Moustache

The Law of Moustache

"Nice chest hair." My wife says to me. A rather unexpected comment, considering I'm wearing a collared shirt. I brush it off and resume my work. A few minutes later; "Nice chest hair." My wife rarely comments on my appearance, (which probably says something) and why she was picking that feature didn't make any sense to me. "Whatever" I mutter as I leave the room, pre-occupied in thought with household bills.

And then I see it. My two top buttons have been undone! Now this is the bona-fide truth: I have no memory of undoing my buttons: I'm rather diligent with my buttons in fact, and this particular shirt has extra buttons that I like keeping done up, so this struck me as a surprise. The collared shirt with the low buttons and tuft of chest hair sticking out raised my sleaze factor significantly and I winced at my appearance.

I know that I didn't unbutton my shirt. This has never happened before. There is only one factor that is different in my life this month, and that is the fact that I have decided to grow a handlebar moustache. Suddenly, it all makes sense. No rational person could ever choose to create the abbhorent sleazy moustache-and-chest hair look. As I discovered this morning, The fact is that moustaches repel buttons. Sleazy facial hair begets sleazy body hair, like begets like, it all makes sense now. No one deliberately designed the sleazy look, it just kinda happens to a guy when he fails to shave his upper lip.

Moustaches can be likened to evil. Evil is the great inscrutable mystery: it defies rational explanation. Try if you will to even define evil. The greatest philosophers through the centuries have noticed that evil can only be described in terms of privation of the good. That is, evil isn't anything, it's a distortion, a lack of what the good is. Evil is disorder, lawlessness, irrationality. Evil is that which is juxtaposed to all that is good, benevolent and orderly. If evil could be explained, it would disappear, for if evil could be explained that would be conceding that it submits to rational categories and may be harmonized with a logically ordered universe. But evil is disorder, it is the very evilness of evil that defies explanation.

Moustaches are like that. They are a privation of good fashion sense, a violation of the laws of aesthetics, a senseless affront to beauty. Hence, they repel buttons and turn respectable gentlemen into perverted-looking sleazebags.

Moustaches are an evil that has chosen to bypass the female gender and afflict only males. However more depraved the world may be due to the presence of moustaches, it pales in comparison to another greater evil that afflicts only men: prostate cancer. This is why I have chosen to bear the Mo this month: to bear this unsightly burden as a reminder to the world that we men face a far greater peril than unsightly facial hair.

In Canada, 4,300 men will die of Prostate Cancer this year. For this reason, men all over the world are growing moustaches this month of "Movember" to proclaim the plight of our fellow men with oversized and diseased prostate glands.

The good news is that prostate cancer is preventable, and relative to a few other cancers, actually has a high survival rate. Possibly for this reason, it is often deemed an insignificant disease. Nevertheless, it still afflicts 1 in 6 men, and 24,600 men will be diagnosed with prostate cancer this year alone, not including undiagnosed cases due to an unwillingness on many men's part to get regular check-ups. The worst part is, like the moustache, prostate cancer death is preventable. I encourage you, if you have enjoyed this blog post, found it informative, or at least gave you a smile, please consider donating to Prostate Cancer Canada. http://www.prostatecancer.ca/ Every cent counts. Research must continue, prevention must take place, and awareness needs to be raised. None of this can take place without adequate funding. Last year Canadian "Mo bros" raised $7.8 million for Prostate Cancer Canada. Let's keep up this generous tradition.

Even if prostate cancer isn't a visible, in-your-face evil, the moustache is, and the sooner we rid the earth of this disease, the sooner we can get around to enjoying our Novembers moustache-free.

Miraculous Maturity

I have floated around a number of denominations and churches throughout my brief Christian walk ('bout 12 years now), and no group of Christians have struck me to be quite as incomprehensible as the “miracle chaser” group. Some of you may not have met these kind of people yet, but there is a distinct Christian sub-culture out there that is kind of like...well, miracle potheads. They can't stop thinking about miracles, and spend 99% of their extra-curricular time looking for the latest miracle revival service, or trying to figure out where the Holy Spirit is going to show up in some out-of-this world way. It can pretty stupid sometimes. Well no, that's not entirely accurate. It can get really stupid. I've seen people pick up glitter off the floor thinking God has just turned some of the dust of the room into gold. Others have gotten into such a miracle-buzz that they think catching a bus has been a miraculous intervention of the Lord. They're not joking either: it's not some off-the cuff comment about their inability to manage their time, they actually think God came down from heaven and miraculously caused the bus to come by when it wasn't scheduled to.

This group has puzzled me for awhile, and not a few times I have attempted to appreciate this movement from the inside. However, try as I might, I could not get into the “swing of things” by working myself up into a miracle-frenzy. There is a temperament disconnect there: obviously this movement isn't exactly friendly to those who enjoy reflection and asking philosophical questions. More than just temperament though, I couldn't in good conscience label as “miraculous” every day events that seem entirely natural, nor could I find in the bible any support for the notion that miracles are the meat and potatoes of the Christian's thought life and good works.

But what seemed so unappealing and patently false to me nevertheless holds great appeal for many others. For many years now, I could offer no explanation for why so many people jump headlong into this movement. To that extent, I have actually had alot of doubt about my rejection of the movement: it defies rational explanation. Could it be that God really is obsessed with performing random miraculous events to make people believe in him, and I should follow suit? I feel almost embarrassed admitting that this movement has held some sort of sway on my mind, but anyone who has attended these bizarre revival-healing-miracle get-togethers probably understands what I'm talking about. The sheer social energy of these meetings and the charismatic magnetism and rhetorical skill of some of the public leaders of the movement really has a force that wants to draw you in.

Is there a rational explanation beyond “social energy”? The group dynamic can be easily explained: you see it all the time at sports arenas, political rallies, and mass public protests. It makes sense that such group dynamics would show up in religious meetings as well. But what sway does it have for an individual?

A sermon I heard a few weeks ago helped me explain this. A few facts first.

Western culture is generally Naturalistic in its view of reality. Religion is seen as something private, and the public realm is the realm of “neutral” cause and effect. The workplace is governed by economic laws, the government by legislation and party politics, our physical world is governed by scientific law. If you want to believe in God, in miracles, in something beyond what you see and can measure, do it at home please.

Christians, insofar as they are Christians at all, do not find themselves driven exclusively by economic, scientific, and political realities. They are driven by religious ones, and to the extent that they see themselves as followers of Christ is the extent to which they will want to follow Christ out in public. We want God in our work, in our political views, in our science. More than any other name, God is referred to in the bible as “Lord”. The most important Christian confession ever penned, the Apostle's creed, begins with the hearty affirmation: “I believe in God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth.” To keep Yahweh hidden away at home is a violation of the central tenets of the faith we confess.

Christians believe in a supernatural world. The universe didn't pop into being out of nothing by no one for no purpose at all. It has a Creator, this Creator is good, and He governs the universe for a purpose towards an end. Nevertheless, there is a social alienation we Christians experience in a society where we are welcome to believe whatever we want, but we are expected to behave publicly within certain generally accepted naturalistic parameters.

I think the miracle-chaser movement largely grows out of a response to this alienation. It is not just mass groups getting together in a miracle-loving frenzy. It is private, genuine believers struggling to come to terms with how their supernatural faith is to be expressed in a naturalistic society. To the extent that a Christian feels pressure to live in a naturalistic world is the extent to which he will experience doubt over whether his faith in a Supernatural God is true. He needs objective confirmation that the world is not as the Naturalists say it is.

Herein I think lies a plausible explanation. It is one thing to experience a genuine miracle, or several. It is quite another to actively hunt for them, and to get oneself into miracle-hunting thought habits. But if one's faith is weak, and the pressure from naturalism is constant, I suppose it seems “reasonable” to feed oneself spiritually with a constant diet of miraculous occurrences. Bus arrivals become miraculous, dust bunnies become gold, frenzied emotions become a supernatural encounter with God. They need to, or else faith cannot survive.

In my 12-something years of following Jesus, I believe my faith has moved from baby-stage to something more mature. Not finished, but deeper, more well-rounded, informed and more consistent in its expression. (Though still wanting in many ways in all of the above) In retrospect, miracle-hunting is an expression of a baby faith, a faith under pressure, struggling to learn to walk. Eventually, a Christian needs to give up their baby faith and move onto maturity. This is a struggle: learning to walk is very, very hard in my experience. While miracles give us a glimpse of proof that the world is not as the Naturalists say it is, miracles alone cannot bring us out of the struggle with naturalistic doubts. One of the pieces of a mature faith is knowing why naturalism is false, knowing why “God the Father Almighty” is the only God and only Reality we are to acknowledge in our hearts and minds. It is not a raw display of God's power that brings us to maturity, it is truth that brings maturity to faith. “Sanctify them in the truth; your word is truth.” (Jn 17:17)

One caveat: this is not to say that maturity is just a matter of book-learning and sorting through competing worldview arguments. Part of learning the truth is doing the truth. God gives us commands, and we are to practice them, and grow towards excellence in obedience to them. If all of our exposure to the truth of the Word is merely theoretical, we will find ourselves with the same emaciated faith of the miracle-hunters.

Shawful

There was a knock on my door a few days ago, and I opened it up to find a young man dressed in a nice suit at my door. “Oh great, more Mormons” I thought. Close. It was a cable guy. He rehearsed his introduction to me and went over his official-looking clipboard noting what services his company was providing for me. He observed that I didn’t have cable and asked if I would like that service. I calmly declined the offer, explaining that I didn’t watch tv.

The young man stared at me blankly for a moment, trying to process my response. “Oh, you must get a lot of streaming video through the internet, right?”

“No” I replied, “I don’t watch tv.” The cable guy looked at me as if I had told him I would like to discontinue my oxygen services, for I have no need of breathing.

Since this young man was clearly unable to process this notion of not watching tv, and standing in awkward silence in the doorway was a waste of both of our time, I explained “My family is more of the book-type.”

“Oh!” A light seemed to go on for him, and he scribbled something on his clipboard: apparently “book people” is a demographic the cable company recognizes?

This got me thinking about the fact that there actually are people out there who don’t read much, and their lifestyles do indeed fit in those atrocious statistics I hear of, that the average North American family spends some 4-8 hours per day in front of the tube.

I think TV has its place, but there are a few things about the very nature of the flickering box that militates against something desperately needed nowadays: a lifestyle of informed reflection. The ability to think in linear terms. The ability to identify foundational principles and competing moral visions that lurk behind our actions. The ability to formulate sound arguments and communicate one’s ideas with clarity, force, and leadership. The ability to identify when a person doesn’t have their facts quite right.

Over the years, it has struck me how difficult it is to cultivate a well-educated mind. For starters, it takes information, and lots of information. Not just superficial facts, but depth of knowledge into history and human psychology. Acquiring such knowledge takes a lot of time and energy: we need to read, we need to listen, and we need to reflect. Learning is something that comes slowly. To learn and to love knowledge requires a good amount of discipline and energy, and a lifestyle consistent with those goals. All of this sounds a tad ascetic, and I suppose it is, but there are few things as satisfying and freeing as having a good framework of knowledge with which to understand what’s going on in the world around you. It’s freeing, liberating, a source of joy and peace. It also means work: often times the world around us is not good, and we need to work to change that. Knowledge gives us the needed information to know what to do, where to go, and how one ought to go about one’s business of doing good works.

Contrasted with this is the couch potato lifestyle. Generally living a life of informed reflection and good works makes the world of the couch potato seem quite offensive, shallow, and irrational. What argument could justify a duty to subject one’s mind to screenshots that change every 3 seconds, to be berated by a host of flickering advertisements and a general proclivity to toilet humour? Again, these all have their place: a well-educated mind needs periods of rest, passivity and laughter. But there is a vast difference between a season of rest and a lifestyle of stimulated passivity.

Television has a way of sucking us into ignorance: it is awfully enjoyable and entertaining, and to that extent can even be addictive. Even documentaries, which are a little more informative in nature than the sitcom or movie, leave us passive viewers of information imparted to us in the form of a dramatic narrative. The production of most documentaries is much more concerned with the rise and fall of a story than in cultivating a deep understanding of the subject matter. It’s informational, but it’s information placed in a dramatic narrative format and more often than not, it’s information that is sacrificed to the drama rather than the other way around.

So what does one typically do if one finds oneself caught in a dearth of knowledge? It isn’t much fun to be in the dark about what’s going on: ignorance is a powerful form of bondage, just as knowledge is a powerful tool for freedom. Learning is hard, while entertainment is easy, and entertainment has a pull to it that can numb the pain of bondage too much of it can bring.

As the proverb goes: “Taking the path of least resistance is what makes men and rivers crooked.”

Knowledge

I heard an excellent sermon the other week in which the speaker introduced the concept of “double knowledge” found in Calvin and Augustine. Calvin wrote in the institutes that in the act of knowing God, we also know ourselves and in the act of knowing ourselves, we also know God. These are the two sides of knowledge, hence “double knowledge”.

True? False? I would add a third category of knowledge “the world”, so that in every act of knowing the world around us we also know God and ourselves, and so forth. This is called multi-perspectivalism, and it basically regards “the entire body of knowledge” as consisting of three perspectives: knowledge of God, knowledge of ourselves, and knowledge of the world. In knowing one of these perspectives, we know the other two. Multi-perspectivalism, like double knowledge, is a statement about the nature of knowledge.

I imagine at this point that this post is sounding like a perfect example of why so many people despise philosophy and theology. I do have a practical point, and I hope in this post I can explain the relevance and importance of these ideas. I believe it to be of great practical import not just to Christians, but anyone interested in anything to do with knowledge, be it scientific, psychological, personal, practical, or theological.

Let’s start with the two “perspectives” Calvin has pointed out to us: that to know God, we must know ourselves, and to know ourselves we must know God.

The Angst which needed Relief

The force of this idea was one of the central reasons why I found a need to accept the existence of God. My “starting point” for this was at the height of a crisis over anxiety and my personal identity: my high school years. In the midst of stoners, metalheads, homeys and immigrants, the question “who am I?” naturally weighed upon me. Not having a stable home life (my parents being in the midst of a painful separation) directed my attention to this question all the more poignantly. Like many teens, my inner thought-life was regularly characterized by a sense of loneliness and a need for personal stability and identity. In a nutshell, I needed to know myself.

Numerous options were presented to me, directly or indirectly. I could find my identity through social conformity. This was very unappealing and smacked of rank shallowness. Of course, I was a shallow person, but relieving my anxieties by wearing the latest name brands and going with whatever the majority did struck me as a whole new level of shallowness I wasn’t willing to go to. (or so I reasoned in my teenage hubris)

So if a solid sense of personal identity wasn’t to be found in conformity to the majority, where was it? Band geeks? Jocks? Some other minority? Socially, this is the direction I went in (I wisely chose to be a quasi-metalhead D&D geek) but of course, this was no real solution, for it did not lend any clarity to the mystery of the value of an individual in a group. I merely identified myself with a particular group, and my individuality seemed to just dissolve into the morass of the social mores of that one group. What made me different, or what made me, me? I still found a stark lack of understanding about myself, other than an obvious felt need to belong.

What I found necessary for any kind of certainty in knowledge of myself was to find some sort of a measuring line that did not shift and change depending on my moods, my friends, or what anyone else, including myself, thought of me. I could compare and contrast myself with my surroundings: “Who am I compared to Joe? To a foreigner?” You get the idea. Exercises in “compare and contrast” are limitless, but none of my immediate surroundings provided an answer to what my heart craved: identity. Some solid standard of measuring me, which could not be found anywhere in the world, which consisted entirely of relativity.

Does Anyone Have a Ruler I could Borrow?

What I discovered was that I could not know myself truly without God. Until God entered the picture, there was no way to attain knowledge of me other than by comparing and contrasting myself with other relative objects and people in the universe. What could not be answered were crucial things like: “Am I a good person?” “What ought I to do with my time, talents, and energies?”

You can see how inevitable shallow answers are to these questions in a world without God. Q: Am I good? A: I am better than Bob and Suzie, but worse than Douglas. Q: What ought I to do? A1: What you decide for yourself you ought to. A2: What the majority says you ought to. A3: What a certain individual (parents, a professional, a cherished friend) says you ought to.

Briefly, let me break down the unsatisfactory nature of Answers 1-3 above.

1. This results in using yourself as a measuring stick to form an opinion of yourself. The problem is, in going on the search for meaning and identity in the first place, you have confessed from the outset that “yourself” is in need. The very cause of anxiety is the lack of solidness within the individual.

2. With the “ought” found in the majority, we are left with the question “which majority?” At that time in my life, this was the majority of high school students. Even if one finds a majority that’s a little more mature, the question then arises “Why ought I to conform to this majority?” Simply put, there is nothing in the nature of “a majority” that makes a majority obligatory to follow. This is similar to Answer 1, where I found there is nothing in the nature of an individual that commands obligations. There is nothing in the nature of majorities that commands obligations.

3. This answer (some other individual) bears the same problems as 1 and 2.

The only answer that rings plausible for coming to some sort of knowledge about yourself is in God, for God is not relative and changing in nature. When God speaks his evaluation of a person’s goodness, he speaks with authority. Unlike any human or worldly measuring tool, it is within God’s nature to be self-sufficient. The need I experienced (and I think we all experience and need) was for something without the quality of relativity. Only God fits this description.

If Rulers are Imaginary, Why do I Want one so Badly?

To be the philosophical irritant, we may throw the entire inquiry back further: why do I even care enough to seek an answer to these feelings and thoughts? Why seek such a thing as an identity, a solid ground to form some sort of knowledge about myself? If God does not exist, if there is nothing but matter and the shifting sands of relative existence, then how could relative matter possibly give rise to a being which seeks absolutes? Again, the very nature of the quest and inquiry can only be explained by the existence of a God who seeks us, and puts such quests in our hearts that we may find Him. Without knowing God, I find it is quite impossible to form a coherent picture of ourselves and so I agree with Calvin, that in knowing ourselves we know God, and in knowing God, we know ourselves.

Love

The third and most important xian virtue is love.

When speaking of the love of God, there is something about the term "love" that is well, corny. In the midst of a hurting world that looks at suffering and corruption with such serious denunciations, God’s love can sound like a pipe-dream of rainbows and lollipops. Where is God’s merciful intervention and concern? While love sounds nice, we need real answers, not a romantic fairy-tale.

Is the love of God a romantic love? I certainly wouldn't want to suggest it isn't romantic. Contrary to the often stoic portrayals of Jesus in the church's artwork throughout the centuries, I think we ought to be comfortable with a theology that asserts God as the ultimate romantic, and author of romance itself, romantic love being part of his very nature as God.

Though we do see illustrations of God's romantic love in scripture, romantic love is not the main emphasis, and a strictly Romantic view of God's love can be very meaningless to a lot of people.

Some verses of the bible have become "theme verses": verses that sum up well the overall message of the bible. As regards God's love, John 3:16 is one of those verses. Unfortunately because of the way it is worded, it can also be prone to misunderstanding. "For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish, but have eternal life." The part of this verse that is often misunderstood is the "so". I have often heard it interpreted that "for God so loved the world" is meant to be an expression of the grandeur of God's romantic feelings of love. Something like an infatuated, glassy-eyed "I love you sooooo much!"

I suspect that the popularity of this verse has contributed to abit of the uncritical use and presentation of the love of God.

In truth, the "so" of this verse is really speaking of manner, or kind. It would be more accurately (but less simply) translated as "For in this way, God so loved the world: that he gave his only begotten son."

Of course, this does not mean the romantic and emotional element of God's love is absent from the text, but the main thrust is the exemplary manner of God's love: the laying down of the life of God for the sake of a world in need of God.

I find this is a much more instructive and helpful summary of what is most important to know about the love of God: a willingness to lay down our lives for others. This is the love that God calls us to have in our hearts.

This is much more sober, practical, credible and winsome than the portrayal of this Christian virtue as a romantic fling with the Lord.

Given how frequently the Christian faith is subjectivized and privatized beyond recognition, it's important to remember the objective quality of God's love. God's love is identifiable and in some sense, measureable. So much so, it's almost unmistakeable, for it has definite qualities to it. “Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.” (1 cor 13:4-7) Why is this so important? Because in love there is a real, objective and practical tool to evaluate whether or not you are a good person.

The horrible temptation (I would even go so far as to label it demonic) is to delude ourselves with moral excuses. Many have an abundance of religious romance, church flings and a hodge-podge of cuddly cherub-like thoughts that never amount to any action. Not all have (or have been taught how) to cultivate genuine character.

While growing in the love of God doesn't fit into a tidy 5-step formula, the cultivation of the virtue of love must at least be wrestled free from foggy, unmeasureable notions of God's love as mere romance.

Contagious Hope

Christian hope is a contagious hope. It is more than something an individual thinks will happen, but is something Christians share corporately. Our future hope of eternal life is not a vision of a private mansion to compensate for all the comforts we missed out on in this life. Our hope is the hope of fullness of fellowship with God, fullness of human community, fullness of harmony with the creation. In this sense, Christian hope must be shared, and even demands that such hope be spread around.

There is an element of Christian hope that fuels an excitement, a zeal that is sometimes louder than the message itself. It is an excitement that reminds me of the charged trial dialogue wherein Peter and John replied to the council: “...we cannot but speak of what we have seen and heard.” (Acts 4:20)

All people, regardless of their worldview or religion at some point experience the logical conclusions of their views of the future. At some point in life, all people have to come to psychological terms with the future: that is, they have to come to a liveable peace with what they believe the future entails. This may be as simple as anxiety over one’s upcoming career, or as epic as wondering what awaits us after the grave. All worldviews say something about the future, even if they choose to remain silent about the future.

(A small aside on that last comment: even if one says the future is unknowable, that belief lodges itself into the mind as true, and therefore must find practical expression. If the future is entirely unknown, this results in certain obligations. For example, when encountering those who claim to know the future: claims of future-knowledge are then claims of falsehood, and we are to react to falsehood accordingly. So even agnosticism about the future entails obligations, and a lifestyle that is consistent with genuine ignorance.)

Consider what the Christian hopes is coming: justice to the wicked, fullness of fellowship, absence of death. Who can fail to be moved by God’s promise to “wipe every tear from their eyes”? (Rev 7:17) All wrongs will be righted, life will no longer have the curse of death upon it. Moreover, jerks, manipulative people, hypocrites, power-mongers, corrupt politicians, -everyone of vile character -will be excluded. (I feel I ought to elaborate on the exclusion of the wicked from heaven, but that's a topic for another post. For this post I'm satisfied with saying that the absence of evil people is a good thing to look forward to.) This hope is revitalizing, energizing. Life does not end in death, nor are we at risk of our good work ever being destroyed, nor is the future lost in agnosticism. If God’s promises are in fact true, any alternative one previously held seems all ashes and mire.

Herein lies the contagion of Christian hope. It seeks, even insists on being spread around. I think this gets misconstrued more often than not. To be sure, at times this becomes an adversarial issue, but at the core, what we proclaim in Christ (or rather, what God has proclaimed in Christ) is fullness of joy. This is the express motive stated by John: “...and we are writing these things so that our joy may be complete.” (1 Jn 1:4)

Missing out on Christian hope is like having to work on Christmas day. Having done that numerous years in a row, it gets pretty sickening to become socially sidelined on missing out in crucial moments of turkey and wine, presents and laughter, and late night conversations by the fire while the frost grows on the windows. Missing out on Christmas is to be left out in the cold, and the spread of Christian hope seeks to include others in the joy of Christmas fellowship.

Transforming Hope

I have often heard the notion that Christian hope tends toward evil behavior. Perhaps you’ve heard that too. Allow me to share a few examples that may have a familiar ring to them: “The Christian hope in a future state of heavenly bliss keeps Christians from seeing real-world problems: rather than finding practical solutions to human suffering, they just focus on a pipe dream of kingdom come.” Or perhaps this one, whom we’ll call “the senseless Christian”: “Jesus is going to come back soon, so there’s no sense bothering about all the nonsense going on now: he will right all the wrongs when he comes back in the next few years.”

How are we to respond to these propositions? The first objector claims that there is an incipient evil within Jesus’ teachings. The second, though a believer, seems to have come to a similar conclusion regarding mercy towards a suffering world. He doesn’t think Jesus’ teachings are evil, but let’s face it: his application of Christian doctrine certainly is.

My first response is to say that the bible teaches the very opposite of these things: that the future hope of God bringing justice to the world has the opposite effect: it promotes activity, compassion, benevolence, justice, etc. We may say to the first objector that at the very least, he must present his objections to the actual teachings of Jesus, not what he supposes their outcome will to be. The bible does indeed teach there is a future state of justice to come to the world, but this future hope transforms the way we live in the present for good. “Let us hold fast our hope without wavering, for He who promised is faithful; and let us consider how to stimulate one another to love and good deeds...encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the day drawing near.” (Heb 10:23-25)

To give this objector credit, I think he is correctly perceiving an evil tendency in the human heart, but this tendency is not within Jesus’ teachings themselves. There is a tendency we have to twist reason and good sense, to twist the good and holy into something profane and sinful. I don't find it implausible that someone will take a promise of justice to come and distort it into an excuse for moral laxness.

This objector assumes a spirit of hypocrisy within the believer: that since God will one day render justice to each for their misdeeds, the believer is exempt from such judgment. I think the fallacy here is plain: by this logic, we would be reasoning as follows: “God is going to judge all the world’s misdeeds: except mine.” I think it makes much more sense to reason that if God is going to right all of the wrongs in this world, and we find we have wrongs in our soul, isn't that strong motivation to get rid of those wrongs? Or are we supposing that God’s process of righting corrupt human hearts on judgment day will be all lollipops and rainbows?

To the second person, we may justly censure his passivity and demonstrate through a simple reading of the bible that his profession is at odds with the teaching of the Lord he claims to follow. His passivity is simply storing up judgment for himself.

The second person also seems to be assuming that God only cares about 100% success in our charitable efforts, rather than a heart of love that drives charitable energies. That is, the senseless Christian imagines God will come and say: “Well, you tried to do good, but the appointed day of judgment came, which ruined all your benevolent plans, so I’m not going to really look at what you did, or what was in your heart.”

It is true that many of our charitable efforts don’t succeed, (think of giving funds to a homeless person who simply uses it to buy drugs) or they simply aren’t as efficient a use of our time and energy as they could be. We should be giving thoughtful attention to genuinely useful and productive charity. However, I think the problem with the “senseless Christian” isn’t a heart that’s concerned about more effective charity. Rather, his mind seems to be looking intently for an alibi to keep charity out of his heart, and has twisted Christian doctrine in so doing. His hope is not set on a real idea of justice, (see my last post for my comment on how our hopes need to be based in reality) but on a justification of himself no matter what’s in his heart.

I think transforming hope concludes with the exhortation to hope in the truth, and live accordingly.

The Logic of Hope

Of the three Christian virtues, faith hope and love, hope is the virtue I hear about the least in sermons and books. I certainly have no memory of ever being directly exhorted to cultivate more hope in my life. Yet in numerous places in the bible, Hope is commended as one of the elementary staples of the Christian life. (Rom 5:5; 1 Cor 13:13)

“Hope” seems to stand out from the other two virtues. Faith is easy to grasp, for it is wedded directly to our basic concepts of religion. Whoever heard of calling oneself “Christian” but having no faith in the basic articles of belief, or whoever heard of a “faith” that had no expression of personal piety? Likewise, love is a pretty intuitive concept, for it forms the basis of Christian ethics: it tells us how we ought to treat one another. So Faith is foundational by definition. Love provides the practical relevance of Christianity. Why should hope have a place among these two fundamentals?

Perhaps one of the reasons hope is seldom discussed is because of an abundance of wealth. Hope is by nature a future thing, and since we have so much comfort in the present, why bother with the comforts of the future? What if we regularly faced real poverty, with bare bread and water, or with a regular risk of death by exposure? Hope does seem to have more gravity in a context of suffering, for though the destitute are helpless now, it comforts the sufferer to know that one day justice will be made reality. Though the present may be all death and disease, the future will be life abundant, which makes the present more bearable.

Nevertheless, I would like to argue that hope needs place of prominence in our minds regardless of our standards of living. Hope remains fairly shallow if it is only seen as an answer to present financial misfortune. It’s unfortunate that hope doesn’t get more air-time, and so I hope to throw out some seeds of reflection on cultivating the virtue of hope by reflecting on a few aspects of hope.

First off, I take it as basic that our hopes must be firmly rooted in reality. We have all now and then taken our pipe-dreams seriously, or been around people with wildly unrealistic personal ambitions for honor, power, and wealth. Such hopes tend to either be corrupting by nature, or be doomed to failure from the outset. Needless to say, we would do well to avoid such false hopes. Bad hopes corrode the soul, or they fizzle out and die in a crippling burst of disappointment. Genuine hopes fuel people with an energy that is difficult to quench. Idealy, those genuine hopes reflect a concrete reality to come that is more than just a private ambition or religious preference.

What this means is that the heart and mind must have a sense of assurance, a certainty that what we hope for will come to pass. It can’t be a passive wish, or a plausible theory. It must take its seat in our hearts with a weighty certainty that fixes our eyes. The author of Hebrews compares Christian hope to “an anchor of the soul”. (Heb 6:19) Hope is so essential because of its weightiness in the Christian life. It is that bedrock, that mass of iron below the surface that keeps faith alive in the midst of the howling tempest. Without that anchor, trials and distractions can capsize and shipwreck faith.

In a very general way, “certainty” is something often associated with empirical evidence. Again I wonder if one of the reasons hope isn’t the hot topic it should be is because the logic of hope fits uncomfortably with scientific investigation. The logic of Christian hope is not subject to surveys and scientists. It’s not something we can cherish by ourselves and get ourselves up into a state of certain hope by engaging in various sorts of “proofs”. Christian hope is based on the promise of God, and no Christian hope deserves to be called such, if it isn’t rooted in an encounter with the God whose Spirit inspires confidence. Simply put, God is good, and knowledge of God’s goodness, especially his love for us shown in Christ, I think is what forms the chief core of certainty that rallies the Christian heart to have an unwavering hope in an unimaginably wonderful future that is yet unseen.

Faith

Faith is a much maligned virtue. In common usage faith is often described as some sort of flighty mental activity that is the antithesis of evidence and reason. I can’t help but feel a little insulted at this misunderstanding of faith, as if one of the primary Christian virtues Jesus calls us to is shutting our minds off. Of course, genuine faith is nothing of the sort. Faith requires mental content, and well-reasoned reflection. I’ll briefly write about these aspects of faith in turn.

For starters, faith requires content, and is far from an empty-headed activity. I’m not sure if my experience can be applied to everyone, but I find it impossible to exercise faith in something I’m ignorant or uncertain of. Faith as an act requires some knowledge of the person we’re trusting. In fact, I would say it requires a lot of knowledge. How much would you trust a stranger? Would you trust a stranger to give you good directions? Would you trust a stranger with your wallet? How about your soul? Why then would anyone expect a person to come to a meaningful faith in God apart from any knowledge about him? If you're a particularly skeptical kind of person, you likely want some sort of reasoned evidence for faith, and faith just ain't gonna happen without some basic questions answered. In my experience, any kind of faith that isn’t accompanied by a good knowledge of God’s acts and commands, as well as clearly articulated reasons why a person believes, ends up showing itself sooner or later as a fragile faith, or worse, a counterfeit one.

This idea of a good knowledge of God’s acts and commands brings us to the next characteristics of faith I’ve chosen: reasoning. Faith is something that, the moment you try to do it, forces you to reason intensely about it. It’s one thing to say: “I believe in God”, but what is that faith in God unless it’s related to other things in your life? “Faith in God” is not a coherent concept unti it has a context, for it is not as if we are bodiless souls floating about in a void with the Lord. When faith is flexed it is flexed in places and relationships. What does it mean to believe in God in the workplace? What does it mean to believe in God in relation to friends, family members, governments, other religions? Faith demands reasoning because when faith is exercised, it is brought into conflict. A faith that does not reason is a faith that cannot act, and a faith that does not act cannot be faith, for faith is by definition a verb.

To be sustained, faith needs regular education. Knowledge must constantly be on the increase. Unfortunately, it’s not uncommon for a Christian to work hard at increasing their biblical knowledge-base (and their knowledge of the world where they are doing their believing) early on in their spiritual walk, only to cease studying and reflecting for many years. Some may suddenly find themselves having a crisis of faith in their early 40's as they try to get by on the faith of their early adulthood. Or perhaps more commonly, a teenager may find their Sunday-school faith irrelevant to their growing adulthood, and may cast off their childhood faith altogether. In a sense, we are supposed to cast off our childhood faith, but that is so we may embrace a more mature understanding of God. (1 Cor 13:11) Without regular content, reflection, exercise, and age-and-situation appropriate study, a person’s faith will not and cannot amount to much.

Book Review: Agenda For Theology

It just occurred to me that some people might find the title “book review” a trifle dull. As far as I’m concerned, Newspapers the world over would double their readership if they ran book-reviews as front-page articles. Perhaps I need a snappier name for my book reviews? Perhaps “Strolling through Prose: (insert book title here)" or “Epic Awesomeness!” I mean “Book Review” and “Epic Awesomeness” are essentially synonyms, right?

At any rate, I must say I heartily recommend this slim volume. I was introduced to the work of Thomas C. Oden through his 3-volume systematic theology, which I refer to regularly in my studies. This book is an earlier work, where he spells out his beef with contemporary theological method, and proposes an alternative. The meat and potatoes of Oden’s method is summarized by Vincent of Lérins: “What was at all times and everywhere believed by everybody”. (my paraphrase) In other words, there is a stress put on ecumenical consensus in doctrine, primarily as expressed in the first seven ecumenical councils of church history.

Oden lays down a lot of smack on Modernity. He makes the observation that if you put a bracket on the last 200 years or so of Christian theology, (i.e. theology written in the Modern period) you see an astounding amount of unanimity as to what the bible teaches. Now why is this significant? I think it’s highly significant for anyone who has driven down the street and noticed the Reformed church on one side of the road, and the Nazarene church on the other side, or the Lutherans and the Baptists a block away from the Catholics. I think the common (and superficial) reaction to this experience is to assume that there is no such thing as “Christianity”: no one really represents “Christianity”, because there’s so many different versions of it! I must admit that the most infuriating position I’ve ever argued against is the notion that the bible isn’t clear enough, or the Christian tradition clear enough to be able to identify a core orthodox theology. If I may wax graceless for a moment, may I say that this idea is complete unadulterated crap rooted in a positively inexcusable commitment to religious ignorance.

What is this “vital center” of Christian orthodoxy? Oden boils it down to 3 things. 1. An Interpersonal Encounter with the Living Christ. 2. The Will of God is Revealed in the Resurrection of Jesus. 3. A life growing into Christ and out of Sin. Now I personally find this list pretty minamalistic, and if that’s the vital center, it almost leaves the impression that everything else Christians say and teach is up for grabs as “unclear”. If I hadn’t read Oden’s systematic theology I would think that he would be in the business of holding closely to the above core 3, and then slipping in whatever ideas he wants to and excusing his flagrant rejection of Christian tradition by squeaking heresy in under the rubric of “not part of the vital core”.

The relentless slam on Modernity keeps Oden a straight-shooter though, and his work displays a remarkable amount of self-restraint. Particularly edifying is Oden’s rousing exposé of the Modernist obsession with anything new, as if it was a self-evident fact that we know more than our predecessors, or that we are smarter and more ethical people than all that have preceded us. One would think our culture teaches something like that, given how much little importance is given to soaking up classic literature.

Even if one has no interest in theology, Oden’s book is well worth the read as a social commentary. Oden himself spent much of his life as a political activist, and later as an academic trying to square up the discipline of psychology with Christian theology, only to find that dialogue with other disciplines is almost entirely one-sided: theologians desperately trying to buddy up the insights of psychology, sociology, etc, whereas these disciplines pay little or no attention to theological studies departments.

Most of the books I read are for personal interest and curiosity: this one I thoughtfully recommend to almost anyone interested in contemporary ideological and political issues.

Remembering the Circuit Rider

A few nights ago I had one of the most exhilarating bike rides. The weather network had forecast less than 1 mm of rain for the evening, and so I thought little of taking my bike to work when my shift started in the sunny afternoon. “So it might drizzle abit on the way home, no biggy.” Well, when 9 o’clock rolled around, the pavement had been replaced by puddles, and heaven was busy sending reinforcements to thwart the stalwart efforts of the city’s storm drains.

Forty minutes it took me: by the time I got home, I needed to change my clothes, much in the manner one peels a banana. Any garment that wasn’t covered completely by my raincoat was drenched through. My boots, my socks, my pants, and yes, even my undies.

Yet despite having much to complain about, the whole ride was encapsulated by an odd sense of gratitude and joy. My vision obstructed by fogged and rain-spotted glasses, slugging forward through yet another puddle up to my spokes; it all reminded me of something from a church history research paper I had done in college: the Methodist circuit riders.

The circuit riders (most of them Methodists, after the model John Wesley set in England) were the travelling preachers that made up an influential portion of the clergy of North America in the 18th and 19th centuries. We sing about these hardy ministers every Christmas in the song “Walking in a Winter Wonderland”: In the meadow we can build a snowman/Then pretend that he is Parson Brown/He’ll say are you married?/We’ll say No man/But you can do the job when you’re in town. With no local clergy to perform weddings, marriages would need to wait until the lone circuit rider next swung by on his circuit of the region. When he came, he would give sermons, perform marriages, funerals, baptisms, counselling, often all in the same day!

Among my in-laws, a tale is told (I’m not sure which generation) of a circuit rider who had come by the ranch late at night and showed himself in for some shelter. (This wasn’t a rude practice back in the day btw.) In the morning, he thanked the housekeeper for the pot of soup she had left out for him. “I didn’t leave any soup out” She replied. Dear old great-grandma had left out the pot of water she had used to boil some socks on the stove, and the circuit rider had consumed it!

The circuit riders braved rain and snow, and lived on what they could carry on a horse. The average life expectancy of these men was somewhere around 28-30 years old. Most of them died of exposure.

My rainy bikeride was a 40 minute exercise in imagination: my tires sloughing through the puddle was in fact the laborious efforts of my horse getting through the river. My tires didn’t skip over unexpected stones: it was my steed stumbling while trying to find a footing in the dark. The driving passion wasn’t a desire to get home out of the rain: it was the souls that needed Christ that drove me on and kept my spirit warm while my digits went numb.

In all my life, I have never suffered from real deprivation: I’ve always had a roof over my head and enough to eat. I don’t use my bike for any particularly noble purpose like reducing my carbon emissions or some such fad. I make myself bike to work because I’m lazy and cheap: I have a heck of a time putting regular exercise into my schedule, and I’ll do almost anything to lower my fuel bills.

Nevertheless, despite my existential reality, the experience brought to mind a different reality altogether: the reality of a life of sacrificial faith. A verse comes to mind, penned to the churches in Colossae by the apostle Paul while suffering in prison: “Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I am filling up what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the church, of which I became a minister”. (Col 1:24-25) I have always found this verse puzzling. Being a good Protestant, I wholeheartedly embrace the complete sufficiency of Jesus’ vicarious death. Redemption was completed at the cross, to teach anything less is to spit at God’s gift of grace. Apparently, here Paul thinks Jesus’ sacrifice is lacking something,
and he’s wrapping up those loose ends of vicarious suffering by doing time.

I think I come a little closer to grasping what Paul meant when I ponder the ongoing suffering love of so many missionaries and ministers. Theologically speaking, I understand that Jesus’ mission as the messiah didn’t end at Calvary. The Holy Spirit continues the work begun by Jesus, and so his ministry carries on even to this day in the life of the church. The heart of God that moves the Christian life of service is none other than the suffering love of Jesus that endures imprisonment, exposure, even death, for the sake of the ones He loves. In this sense, there is a lack in Jesus’ afflictions: while the atonement was once for all, each generation is in need of experiencing this longsuffering love in the flesh, and that task falls on the shoulders of Jesus’ disciples, who “fill up what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the church.”

Personal Creeds and the Problem of Evil part 6

My last post on this topic discussed the idea of God’s universal sovereignty, or governance of the world in relation to suffering. I summarized that God’s governance of the universe is necessary for the question of evil to be valid, for the question itself is really asking why God doesn't run things differently -specifically with less tolerance for evil and suffering.

The view I personally hold to is an unpopular one: that in some way God causes all events. A God that lets things run on their own is a much more amicable God. But he’s also a distant God, and the price for keeping God’s hands clean of the tragedies that happen in life is too much to pay.

Is God therefore evil? This is a silly question in a way, for God is himself the only absolute standard of all goodness. It’s from God’s being that goodness even exists. In the classic texts of Christian theology, evil is seen as simply a privation of good, not something that can even exist if goodness did not exist first. In another way, it’s not a silly question: for if God causes everything, and some of those things are evil, does it not follow that God is evil?

Classic Christian reasoning says no, for when I say “God in some way causes all events”, the phrase “in some way” is very important. God governs the universe in such a way that he never tells us exactly how he causes events. There is always secondary causes in Christian reasoning: immediately we see the cause and effect of plate tectonics, upsurges of magma, and evil human choices. God simply tells us that he’s intimately involved in superintending all of these events, directing them to his own ultimately good purposes. When we call into question his purposes, he simply tells us to trust him, and let him mind his own cosmic business. The gist of the reason why God is not responsible for evil is that we do not have enough information to accuse or excuse him. God never denies his involvement, but he challenges human autonomous reason for presuming to know the inner reasoning of God.

The bible is replete with examples of people throwing their cares, their anger, their questions, their deepest screams at God. It’s ugly, but so is life. Sometimes I think that we affluent westerners have lost touch with this element of Christian spirituality. Yelling at God seems impolite, perhaps even blasphemous. We do not empathize with the Haitian Christians, who in the aftermath of the earthquake were heard to be chanting “God forgive us/God, we forgive you.” Yet, it seems unmistakable to the sufferer that God is an appropriate wailing wall, a fitting target for our hurt and anger.

I wonder if part of the distaste for this teaching is a desire to present a more “pleasing to the eye” Christianity to an unbelieving culture? We have a nice, safe God that way, don’t we? But in silently condemning what the bible says is acceptable, we also misrepresent the appeal of an intimate walk with God through Christ, in all of its wonderful edgy aspects. Isn’t it the incarnate Son who takes the worst of our world’s abuses on his shoulders that we worship?

I suppose my overall point in this post is to Christians, myself included: beware of your personal creed, beware of building yourself a theological bomb-shelter that keeps God safe, but also keeps him out of your hurt and questions. Beware of denying God what he says about himself because it fits a tidier view of His ways. “The One forming light and darkness, causing well-being and creating calamity; I am the LORD who does all these.” (Isa 45:7) Beware of worshipping a G-rated deity in an R-rated world.

Personal Creeds and the Problem of Evil part 5

“The 'Removing God’s Sovereignty' Option”

In this post, I’d like to explore a creed that I have long wrestled with that often crops up as a response to the problem of evil. In the face of evil, Christians have a tendency to safeguard our God from evil by removing one of his attributes: his sovereign governance of the world. Often we’re not so bold as to say we remove an attribute of God. But I have read laborious intellectual attempts at explaining away the problem of evil by expertly finding some way of getting God out of this whole “governing an evil universe” thing.

Can this be done and still leave the Christian faith intact? Yes and no. I don’t believe in “domino theology”, where you knock one piece down and the whole thing crumbles with it, so this answer doesn’t undermine the Christian faith entirely. But these “God is not sovereign” explanations definitely impoverish the faith greatly by painting God as some far removed deity who just lets the universe run its course, so that evil occurences happen without his guidance, making them purposeless and meaninglessness chance events. I find these “God is not sovereign” answers are Christianized versions of the cause-and-effect answer.

Let me elaborate on that one idea of “meaninglessness”. Christianity has always put a premium on a loving, personal God who is involved in the world and has a purpose for the whole and the individual. When a sufferer asks why he is suffering, he is implying a faith that there is some sovereign power and purpose undergirding his life. That is, there is a reason such-and-such evil event occurred. This faith in the meaningfulness of life is not possible unless God’s hand is holding life, giving events a divine purpose and a meaning.

I find this both painful and comforting. On the one hand, life has purpose! I am not left alone in the universe, I am not abandoned to laws of causality and chance. God hears my thoughts and sees my actions, and considers them of such worth as to hold me accountable to them. I do not understand why evil things happen, but God is good, he is there, and though he’s not telling me the reason things happen, there is one. There is meaning, a plan, a purpose, and I can rest in that, all because history and matter are in the hands of a good God.

The painful part is that sometimes the suffering is so great, I cannot fathom a reason that could possibly justify this amount of evil. God becomes the cruel silent tyrant who smashes my plans, destroys my life, refuses to explain himself yet demands my praise. When C.S. Lewis lost his wife, he called God the great cosmic sadist. I have certainly felt that way towards God -I think Lewis was being nice in his selection of adjectives actually.

It is shocking to me how many times I have read the book of psalms and failed to observe how often the psalmist responds to suffering by reaming out the Lord: “O God, why do you cast us off forever?” (74:1) “...my soul refuses to be comforted, When I remember God, I moan...Has God forgotten to be gracious? Has he in anger shut up his compassion?” (77:2-3, 9) Job’s rants in particular strike me: “The earth is given into the hand of the wicked; he (God) covers the faces of its judges -if it is not he, who then is it?” (Job 9:24) Here we see Job suffering, describing God as a cruel man of war who delights in shooting Job with arrows, and in all the rebuttals Job’s friends give him, they never once consider the option that God did not cause Job’s suffering. The book of Job concludes with this shocking statement: “Then all of Job’s brothers and sisters came to him and all who had known him before, and ate bread with him in his house, And they showed him sympathy and comforted him for all the evil that the LORD had brought upon him.” (Job 42:11) God’s causality of all events is simply assumed, and why shouldn’t it be? The very question of evil and meaning in life assumes God is running everything. It is the necessary truth to make the question of evil possible, for only if there is an eternal governor with an eternal purpose can there be eternal meaning in our lives, our thoughts, and our sufferings.

Personal Creeds and the Problem of Evil part 4

I’d like to catch up on the train of thought I left off on February 26 with the topic of suffering. To save my readers some time, “part 3“ was about the so-called “cause and effect” response to the problem of evil. This answer replies to suffering by pointing out the means by which suffering and evil came about. Of course, it really is shocking to ponder what small decisions, actions and words can cause such extensive damage. Think of motor vehicle accidents, or firearm mishaps: here we see how empty it is to point out what the causal relationships of traumatic events are. These answers simply do not address the problem of pain at all. Nicolas Wolterstorff, a Christian philosopher who lost his son in a mountain climbing accident, found the numerous books on “the grieving process” to be obscene: he wrote that the problem isn’t the grieving process, but the grief itself. Somewhere along the line we have to face the evils, the traumas, the pain itself, rather than satisfy ourselves with answers that are simply sophisticated sounding avoidance patterns. These ideas, these thought patterns, these "personal creeds" I think belong in the category of answers to the problem of evil that seek to answer the question by avoiding it.

I was disappointed with what I wrote in part 3 in that I don’t feel I had space to flesh out the central argument I wanted to. I know, that sounds dry and stuffy, and going into detail over an argument (an argument in the sense of logic, not bickering) is kind of like aggressively pointing out the load-bearing beams of a beautiful building: drawing too much attention to the structure of an argument can draw attention away from the entire point of the argument. So I apologize to my readers for waxing perhaps too philosophical in this post.

Nevertheless, I do want to flesh out the logic of the argument I presented, if for no other reason than to share an argument that has caused me personally to rule out “Naturalism” as a legitimate way to think of the world around me.

The force of this argument is to take one of the heartbeats of atheistic evolutionary thinking and consistently apply its own way of reasoning to itself. For if the universe consists in nothing but matter, and we are the product of blind chance molecules bumping into one another, then it follows that this longing for an alternate universe with no pain in it was also produced by these chance molecule encounters.

Consider your own creeds about human nature. Non-theistic evolutionary thinking feeds on a particular line of reasoning: survival and adaptation. The Darwinian imagination explains much of our nature as humans by thinking about how attribute x is useful for survival: “We walk upright because it helped us see predators in the bush”, “We developed big brains because that helped us survive and adapt”, etc. But when applying this reasoning to the problem of pain, I found those explanations which make atheism appealing end up undoing its appeal. For to be consistent, it also must conclude that the experience of human reasoning about suffering is there because it serves some adaptive purpose: either that, or it is an unfortunate by-product of some other useful evolutionary development, kind of like that unfortunate bit of "evolutionary residue" we all carry around: our appendix. In the latter case, wishing suffering wasn’t there is an unfortunate and useless quirk of human nature.

Either way, the naturalist must conclude this: nature produced in us a profound longing for a reality that does not exist. Useful or not, nature created a powerful urge for which there is no satisfaction in nature.

Perhaps someone may not find this reasoning all that much of a blow to their atheism or skepticism. For my mind at least, it provides an argument that continually serves to remind me of where a world with no God must logically lead: those things in life that stir me the most, that churn up the strongest emotions and most rigorous mental and artistic exercises is nothing more than mere nature bustling about its own irrationality.