August 27, 2008: "What Is Christianity Mainly About?" (Part 2)
Bill Maher complained recently that religion (by which he meant Christianity) is "not mainly about doing the right thing or being ethical. It's mainly about salvation. It's mainly about getting your butt saved when you die."
I think I can understand why Maher would say that. He's probably heard some bad sermons over the years. I've heard them too. Ever since I was a boy I've heard invitations to receive Christ that were really only about getting into heaven and staying out of hell - and some of those were so crass that they deliberately gutted the gospel of any call to repent. Jesus was presented as a ticket to heaven rather than a Lord to be worshiped and served. He was that Thing You Had To Believe In in order to get to the unending fun you really cared about. "You want to go to heaven? Say this prayer!"
This problem of skewed Christian exhortation is an old one. When Cardinal Jacopo Sadoleto begged the citizens of Geneva to return to Catholicism in 1539, he made a point of appealing to their desire to go to heaven. He wrote: "I presume, dearest brethren, that...all...who have put their faith and hope in Christ...have done so for this one reason: that they may obtain salvation for themselves and their souls."
Was that really the only reason to believe in Christ - to obtain salvation for oneself and one's soul? Not for Christ's own sake, nor for his pleasure, nor even because he commanded it - but simply to get saved? I'm afraid so. Sadoleto even taught that personal salvation was the greatest thing a person could desire: "We all...believe in Christ in order that we may find salvation for our souls. There can be nothing more earnestly to be desired than this."
Sadoleto's letter was brought to John Calvin, who quickly wrote a response that merits careful study on the part of all proclaimers of the gospel. Attacking Sadoleto's notion that the best thing a man could desire was salvation, Calvin wrote: "It is not very sound theology to confine a man's thoughts so much to himself." Exactly. Instead, Calvin continued, we must "set before him, as the prime motive of his existence, zeal to illustrate the glory of God." That is and must always be the Christian's main motivation: to glorify God. The zeal to exalt God must overrule the natural - but purely selfish - zeal to save our souls. Or, as Calvin put it, "This zeal [for God's glory] ought to exceed all thought and care for our own good and advantage."
Calvin even warned that good people would find tasteless and boring a constant stream of sermons about getting into heaven. The following quote is worth reading twice: "It certainly is the part of a Christian man to ascend higher than merely to seek and secure the salvation of his own soul. I am persuaded, therefore, that there is no man imbued with a true piety, who will not consider as insipid that long and labored exhortation to zeal for heavenly life, a zeal which keeps a man entirely devoted to himself, and does not, even by one expression, arouse him to sanctify the name of God."
I don't know if it will do Bill Maher any good, but I hope that some day he gets to hear a bit of solid evangelical preaching that seeks above all else to magnify God. Glorifying God is what our faith is mainly about. Yes, there is that matter of getting our butts saved when we die, but that is icing on the cake.
August 20, 2008: "What Is Christianity Mainly About?" (Part 1)
Last night on Larry King Live atheist Bill Maher expressed a complaint against Christianity. He said, "One thing I don't like about religion is that - ask any of the truly devout - it's not mainly about doing the right thing or being ethical. It's mainly about salvation. It's mainly about getting your butt saved when you die."
By Maher's standards (certainly not my own) I think I qualify as "truly devout", but I do not give the answer, "This is mainly about getting our butts saved when we die" when I am asked what is central to our faith. What, would I say, is our faith mainly about?
It is mainly about glorifying God. Ethical behavior, doing the right thing, is certainly one aspect of that. How can you glorify God if you displease him? Christians believe that God has commanded us to be pleasant and kind and gracious and honest and noble and generous, and not to do things like cheat, lie, kill, steal, extort or insult. Moral goodness is bound up in all of Christian doctrine, and can't be bled or cut out of it. Ethics-less Christianity is no Christianity at all - it is a bloodless, boneless corpse.
Atheism, however, survives quite well without ethics. In fact, I have never been able to understand how atheism can build a theory of moral behavior that actually succeeds in urging us to do good. I am glad that Bill Maher wants to "do the right thing", and I hope he continues to want to do the right thing and does not think too hard about it. Because if he does think about it, he'll see (ask any atheist!) that morality reduces to social custom, which reduces to urges dictated by the competing claims of evolutionary biology, which reduces to chemical reactions in our brains and in our environment, which reduces to electrons jumping from the orbital of one atom to another under the precise laws of physics and the imprecise randomness of quantum mechanics, which reduces to, well, that's pretty much all there is! That is where the chain of moral reasoning stops. What then is to keep me from torturing Guantanamo detainees or falsifying evidence to convict innocent men if, when I ask why I shouldn't, all I've got to answer to (or even formulate an answer with!) are atoms in my brain knocking about like ping pong balls in a lottery glass cage? For the Christian, however, at the end of every chain of moral reasoning (which in some contexts we might call "temptation"), there is a holy God wagging his finger and saying, "You must not do that bad thing."
Doing the right thing is packed hard into Christianity and distributed through every feature of it like crude oil in Canadian shale. Dig into atheism, however, and keep digging hard and deep, and you will bore a hole right through the center and out the other side without ever having encountered a single thing to fuel good works with. Good atheists (I've known several) will then shrug their philosophical shoulders and say, "Well, I don't know why, but we should do good anyways." Bad atheists (though we can't call them logically inconsistent) will say, "Nietzsche was right," and, given power, will become our Stalins and Mussolinis and Pol Pots and Kim Jong Ils. Millions die. How can you appeal to the conscience of someone who knows in his heart that conscience is an illusion - the froth of an evolutionary heritage that the strong can sweep away with a wave of their hand?
I think there is a reason why, when you go around the world and look for those who are rebuilding schools in New Orleans, rescuing AIDS orphans in Kenya, helping lepers in India, rebuilding the shattered lives of rape victims in the Congo - what you find are Christians, Christians, and more Christians, and virtually nobody representing the atheist and freethinker societies. It is not just because Christians outnumber atheists - though certainly that is a factor. It is because our religion commands us to do good no matter what.
More next week, Lord willing, on what our religion is mainly about.
August 12, 2008: How To Fight Poverty
In a cover story this week on Pastor Rick Warren, Time Magazine reports that the influential pastor of Saddleback Church is "leading and riding the newest wave of change in the Evangelical community: an expansion beyond social conservatism to causes such as battling poverty, opposing torture and combating global warming."
I'll leave aside torture and global warming for another day, but as for battling poverty - is this a new cause for evangelicals? In the past all we cared about was social conservatism, but now thanks to Warren and others we have awakened to the campaign of ending global poverty?
Among the things I find frustrating about this "new evangelical emphasis" is its blindness to the fact that conservative Christians have always been the best poverty fighters the world has ever known! We own this topic. We've known how to prevent and stay out of penniless misery for thousands of years. All the principles are jam-packed into the pages of the Bible, and they are on display every time we open it up and proclaim its message. There is nothing new about how to fight poverty. Here in a nutshell is how not to be poor:
1) Work hard. (This includes studying hard to learn a skill - work hard at being educated).
The Bible says that "Lazy hands make a man poor, but diligent hands bring wealth" (Proverbs 4:10). You'll never end the poverty of those who refuse to learn, who drop out of school, who depend on the goodwill and productivity of others for their food. "If a man will not work, neither let him eat" (2 Thessalonians 3:10).
2) Don't have sex with anyone you're not married to.
The Bible's laws against adultery, fornication and all other sexual misconduct (Hebrews 13:5: "Let the marriage bed be undefiled") are great anti-poverty measures. Poverty results from the kind of immorality that produces fatherless children, sexually transmitted diseases, broken homes, etc. The other day I read an article about an African nation where the majority of children are raped. That is what their culture permits and expects. As long as this inhumanly cruel perverse sexual behavior continues, this nation will always be poor - no matter how many billions of dollars of aid are given to it, and no matter how often its debts are forgiven.
3) Don't have vices.
Let me personalize this one. The other day I shocked a man by telling him I'd never had a beer. It's true. Completely aside from any moral implications, do you have any idea how much money I've saved over the years by never buying alcohol, cigarettes, drugs, porn, or lottery tickets? A lot. This is one of the factors that helps explain the minor miracle of how I have been able, in the past few years, to raise two sons in the suburbs while taking home a preacher's salary of $543 a week. But for all those people who waste money on things that ordinary evangelical preaching warns against, well, it doesn't surprise me if they wind up poorer than I am.
If you have a life that obeys the principles above, and a society and environment that respects them, then in all likelihood you won't be poor. Of course there are exceptions. You might be poor anyways because of disease, handicap, natural disaster, oppression, or really bad luck. That's why we have charity, and must always act charitably toward the worthy poor. (Yes, the worthy poor - 1 Timothy 5:9-10 forbids helping widows who had been lazy or promiscuous; they had to have done good deeds.) I've been the thankful recipient of charity many times myself, and am all in favor of it.
We who take the Bible seriously have always known how to fight poverty in ourselves and others, and that fight has always involved an uncompromising message to act morally, work diligently and give compassionately. What then, is "new" about Warren's battle against poverty?
Nothing, really, except for the call upon governments to take action. This is why Warren is convening a forum with Barak Obama and John McCain in Orange County, California. This is why Mike Huckabee and James Meeks left their pulpits and their callings to proclaim Christ so that now they could really make a difference(!) by pushing for political solutions to public problems. This is why a number of evangelical leaders, including Warren, John Stott and Billy Graham signed an open letter to President Bush asking him to undertake the cause of the poor in global concerns.
It is a big mistake. Every government campaign to end poverty has only created more of it in the long run. Lyndon Johnson's well-intentioned programs created cycles of dependency that made and kept people poor. The same Time Magazine issue that features Warren has a stunningly honest article on Africa, "Pain amid Plenty", that outlines how the billions of dollars of charitable aid to Africa over the years has had the unintended effect of fostering perpetual starvation.
I can't understand why Christian clergymen are taking the cause for fighting poverty to governments when political institutions have been so bad at it and we have been so good at it! This isn't government's job. Governments are there to preserve order, protect the citizenry, punish evildoers and reward good behavior. Ask them to do more than that, or worse, give them the power to try to create the poverty-less utopias we like to dream of, and they will find ways to make people starve.
July 29, 2008: Not All "Fundamentalisms" Are The Same
If you take the words of Joseph Smith or Mohammed literally and try to pattern your life after theirs, you will be a violent sex offender. If you take the words of Jesus literally and try to pattern your life after his, you will be a celibate pacifist.
That is my basic answer to those who try to lump together all brands of fundamentalism into a single sinister phenomenon. Lately I have been reading the comments of some religion haters who find little to distinguish between Muslim, Mormon and Christian fundamentalism, and who claim that they are all roots of intolerance and evil. Here is why I think such judgments miss the mark:
Mohammed married a six-year-old girl and had sex with her when she was nine. (Look it up, her name was Aishah.) He was a child molester. As far as I am concerned, that is all we need to know about that pervert. Imitate Mohammed, and you will rape single-digit aged girls and call it marriage. And you will kill people too. Among Mohammed's countless atrocities, he ordered the beheading of the 800 Jewish men of Medina in 627. He had plenty of encouragement from the Koran, which says concerning infidels:
"Seize them and slay them wherever you find them: and in any case take no friends or helpers from their ranks." (Surah 4:89)
"I will instill terror into the hears of the unbelievers, smite ye above their necks and smite all their fingertips of them. It is not you who slew them; it was Allah." (Surah 8:13-17)
(Read more about Mohammed's demented personality and violence in "Unveiling Islam" by former Muslim professors Ergun and Emir Caner.)
Joseph Smith, founder of Mormonism, was another piece of work. He committed adultery with Marinda Nancy Johnson when she was 16, and on March 24, 1832 a mob that included Marinda's relatives tried to castrate him. (Instead they merely beat, tarred and feathered him.) In 1835 Smith's wife Emma caught him sleeping with their housemaid Fanny Alger and kicked the girl out of their house. Smith went on to "marry" about 40 women between 1840 and 1844, including 14-year-old Helen Mar Kimball. Smith basically fornicated with anyone he could seduce or overpower and called it "celestial marriage."
He also incited followers to violence against opponents of Mormonism. In 1842 he preached that some sins were so heinous that they could only be atoned for if the guilty one were to "spill his blood upon the ground." He let his followers do the spilling. When he wanted former Missouri Governor Lilburn Boggs dead, he simply prophesied that the man would "die by violent means within one year." Mormon enforcer Orrin Porter Rockwell did his part to fulfill Smith's prophesy by firing three bullets into Boggs' head and neck.
But when it comes to trying to make Jesus the author of violence and brute sexual conquest, you draw a total blank. Jesus never married, was never accused of sexual impropriety, and taught that even mental adultery was wrong (Matthew 5:28). Imitate him and you will be a celibate. And where do you ever find Jesus practicing violence, or inciting his followers to it? He told Peter to put his sword away (Matthew 26:52), commanded us to love our enemies (Matthew 5:44), and told us to turn the other cheek when we are struck (Matthew 5:39). It is true that over the years many people have committed acts of perversion or violence in the name of Jesus, but the simple fact is they cannot find justification for such behavior in the example of his life or in any of his teachings.
As you can imagine, I really don't like mentioning Jesus in the same breath as Mohammed and Joseph Smith, because Jesus is Holy God Incarnate while Mohammed and Smith were evil clown freaks with followings. I only mention them together here because they are regarded in the popular, secular mind as "founders of major religions," and all equally dangerous if taken too seriously or followed too closely. That is just not so. Follow in the footsteps of Mohammed and Joseph Smith and you will impregnate young teenagers like Warren Jeffs or murder thousands (millions if you could) like Osama Bin Laden. Follow in the footsteps of Jesus and you will simply do good.
July 22, 2008: The Trouble With Adoration
A pastor friend told me that he was teaching his congregation to pray according to the ACTS formula (adoration, confession, thanksgiving, supplication), and that he was having trouble with the "A". He couldn't get them to pray prayers of adoration.
I think there is a reason for that which has nothing to do with lukewarmness or immaturity on the part of the worshippers. It is simply because adoration tends to demand accompaniment. Stripped to mere words it comes across awkward and flat. When I pray I only need standard prose to confess, or give thanks, or make a request. But the act of praise wants more - a musical instrument perhaps, or formal expression in poetry or song. It is possible that my stuttering over verbal adoration is due to my coldness or lack of love for God, and if so, then God forgive me and reform me, and may he dismiss from everyone's mind the analysis below. But here is how I see it.
We have an intuition of what makes for an appropriate response to a performance, or revelation of fact, or stimulus. It is the denial of this intuition that allows that stupid line of rhetoric we've all heard in sermons: "At the football game Friday night you cheered for your team and shouted yourself hoarse when they scored a touchdown - are you telling me you can get excited about football but you can't get excited about God?" It is a common preacher's technique for drumming up enthusiasm-by-guilt in a quiet congregation, and it is idiotic. We should not cheer for God the way we cheer a walk-off home run. I believe we can see that by imagining other attempts to gin up inappropriate responses. When I'm hungry, for example, and good food is set before me, I salivate like one of Pavlov's dogs - and you probably do too. Imagine a preacher indicting us watery-mouthed diners with: "You mean to say you can salivate over a plate of food but you don't love God enough to get any spit in your mouth over him?" We'd say, "Fool! God isn't something you salivate over, food is." Or, if you will permit a racy example (we're all adults here), a man's body will respond in certain God-designed ways to the sight of an under-clad, shapely woman. If a preacher said, "You mean to say you can get it on for a woman but you can't do that for God!" I'd just walk out of the church.
The point is that different things call for different responses, and a vehicle of expression that works perfectly well in one setting will not work at all in another. Words work well for some things - like communicating truth, but not at all for other things - like satisfying hunger. And, I contend, words only "kind of" work, clunkily and under handicap, for some other good things. Like expressing love. As you know, love is notoriously difficult to express with words alone. Jim Croce gave up trying to do so and solved his problem musically:
Well I know it's kind of late,
I hope I didn't wake you.
But what I've got to say can't wait,
I know you'd understand.
'Cause every time I tried to tell you,
The words just came out wrong.
So I'll have to say 'I love you' in a song.
There it is, in a song! (Of course, you have to hear the above words sung to get their effect.) Croce was right. Love demands a song the way apple pie demands (for me anyway) a cup of coffee. Lovers stumble over mere words, and find themselves waxing poetical and musical in attempts to get their expression just right. Thus it was and ever shall be.
I believe that adoration of God is like the expression of love. Confine it to words alone and you'll see that it is "not quite right" or "missing something." That sense may be so strong that you'll struggle to get out any words at all. So try singing your praise instead. I can sing "How Great Thou Art", but if I update the language and try to say, "God you're really great," the words seem to die on my tongue. Perhaps they should, because I'm not using the right medium. In a terribly inappropriate (but wickedly funny) skit in "Monty Python's Meaning Of Life" a clergyman played by Michael Palin leads antiphonal praise in a chapel service, saying, "Oh Lord...Oooh you are so big...So absolutely huge...Gosh we're all really impressed down here I tell you." This is a lampooning of the Psalms of praise of course, but remember: the Psalms were composed as poetry and performed as songs! Cripple the poetry and mute the music and of course you wind up with something that sounds funny and odd.
I'm recommending to my pastor friend (and if I'm wrong, God give him the wisdom to ignore me!) to leave the confession, thanksgiving and supplication as they are - verbal - but to flavor the adoration with something else. Music, probably. Sing a song of adoration, or perhaps listen in silence to sacred instrumental music. Read a devotional poem. In a charismatic congregation, tongues might do nicely here. Maybe there are visual ways too of provoking the heart's adoration (a friend of mine came to believe in God when he saw mountains!), but I don't know how to do that in a worship service. The main thing is to find a way to give to Adoration the non-verbal accompaniment it demands and deserves.
July 8, 2008: Think More
I was glad to hear a college-age friend of my son admit that thoughtful investigation was hard.
I had been explaining a cheap-trick method of argumentation that involved nothing more than postulating an underlying motive for an opponent's thesis. For example, suppose someone maintains that gun control laws are counterproductive because "Fewer guns mean more crime, and when municipalities permit conceal-and-carry weapons, the crime rate drops." An easy response to that is, "Well, you just say that because you're in the NRA and you've got a huge gun collection!" That may be true. But even if the NRA member only believes his statistics because they bolster his position, the question remains: "Are they accurate?" Because no matter what the gun-nut believes or why he believes it, statements of fact must be received or contested on their own terms. If he is wrong, then you can only demonstrate he is wrong by showing that his statistics are in error or that they are erroneously applied. His motives may be relevant for understanding how he came to believe as he did, but they are irrelevant for determining whether what he believes is true. To discern that, you have to investigate and think.
My son's friend said, "That's so hard" and I rejoiced. Exactly. Of course it's hard. Disciplined thinking is always hard - but like most things that require effort there is a payoff for engaging in it and a cost for neglecting it. Indolence is a vice that exacts a toll: physical laziness leaves you flabby and winded; occupational laziness leaves you poor and needy; intellectual laziness leaves you shallow and bigoted; spiritual laziness leaves you far from God. Work hard. That includes forcing your mind to work as hard as it can.
(While writing this paragraph I was interrupted by the doorbell ringing - it was two boys asking me if I wanted to buy something to drink at their lemonade stand. So of course I had to reward their industriousness by going over and buying two cans of pop and a cup of lemonade. Good for them. Now let's see - where was I? Oh yes, intellectual laziness):
Sunday I was asked about an archeological find featured in the New York Times. It was a Hebrew stone tablet with an apocalyptic message. Looking into the matter afterward I found that the scholar promoting his interpretation of the tablet has a long-standing ax to grind: the overturning of what he thinks is "our traditional understanding of Christianity." It would be easy enough to dismiss him on the basis of his motive. But in investigating further and plowing through arcane details of Hebrew orthography, I was happy to find that, though I believe his proposal lacks merit, it turns out that if he is correct his thesis actually supports standard evangelical belief about what would constitute valid messianic expectation on the part of the Jews! That was an eye-opener. (The original article and my response are available upon request).
My point is that I was able to come to this unexpected conclusion only through careful reading and thinking. Valid conclusions and supportable convictions are worth all the "mindly" effort you have to muster to attain them. Think more.
July 1, 2008: Our Curse, Another's Blessing
I have a new answer now to the question, "What's your favorite book?" The best book I have ever read is Volume 3 of the collected letters of C. S. Lewis.
It was never intended to be a book. Lewis did not keep letters mailed to him, and he did not expect anyone to keep letters he sent to them. But they did - friends, scholars, children, strangers, lunatics, pastors. They wrote him boatloads of mail from all over the world and he painstakingly responded to every one. They treasured his letters like gold and were able to produce them 30-40 years after his death when editor Walter Hooper went looking for them.
Many who received a personal letter from Lewis were ecstatic (and this encouraged them to write more!), but for him letter-writing was a constant woe. He called it "the bane of my life" when speaking in confidence to a friend. It ate up all his leisure time and bit into his work. He had to get up early every morning to respond to the previous day's mail. When he returned from a brief vacation he'd find an overwhelming stack of 60 letters waiting for him. Since he could not type, and had a genetically deformed thumb that would not bend at the knuckle, he had to do the best he could writing by hand (and he constantly apologized for his bad handwriting, especially as he got older.) For at least a decade he dreaded Christmas, because he would get hundreds of letters at that time, and he felt he needed to answer them all. He begged close friends to write him at some other time of the year.
But Lewis' curse is my blessing. I find his letters to be the best devotional material I have ever read. I noticed long ago that writing that is intended as devotional usually leaves me unmoved. But when I read Lewis dealing graciously with a confused child or correcting an errant scholar or appreciating a gift or simply expressing grief, it inspires me to worship. And as for his casual insights, oh my goodness they leap out from every page. You have no idea how many times over the past few months I've said to my sons, "Remember the other day when we were talking about plagiarism/ the gracious treatment of bores/ the foibles of Rev So-and-So/ the poetry of T. S. Elliot? Well listen to this paragraph I just read in Lewis!" It is as though he somehow listened to our conversation and nailed the point in 50 words or less.
In 2 Corinthians 12:7-10 St. Paul asked to be delivered from a thorn in the flesh, and God said no. Lewis' thorn in the flesh was a constant pile of correspondence he wished he could avoid, but his response to that thorn comes down to me as a source of great enrichment and delight. Now I have a follow-up prayer with regard to my own thorns: "Lord, please take this curse from me. It is the bane of my life. But if you will not, then would you be so kind as to turn it into a blessing for others? Thank you."
June 24, 2008: "The Lord Has Been Good To Me"
In an email recently I praised an individual for her sunny appreciation of God's blessings. She has to have a sharp eye for those blessings, because in many ways she has a difficult life. In fact, her general situation is so hard that I mentally reference her example when I quote to myself the proverb, "I cried because I had no shoes till I met a man who had no feet." She's the one without feet, and I'm just temporarily shoeless.
But while praising her peace I recalled a time when I was 17 and a friend told me how impressed he was with my mother's spiritual calm when she lost her husband. "She has such a look of the peace of the Lord on her face," he said, and I was shocked. "Oh no - you haven't seen her tears," I told him. "I see her anguish at home all the time."
I also recalled a moment when I was 14 and my mother was deeply upset over the fact that a family member had fallen into sin. Foolishly I said to her, "Mom - look at Dad! He's calm about this. He's taking it well." She told me, "No, he is not taking it well." And she explained how outraged and grieved he was, along with examples of how he expressed that in private. I hadn't known. I simply had not seen his sorrow. He had thought it wise - and certainly he was right - to hide that from his son.
We are like icebergs sometimes. I read somewhere, and suppose it's true, that only about 10 percent of an iceberg floats above the surface of the water. The rest sits heavily below where less sunlight can reach.
But it is good if that 10 percent of us that can bask in and reflect light is also the public side that people can see. This is not hypocrisy but good manners. Joseph washed tears from his face before appearing to his brothers (Genesis 43:31). Nehemiah only once gambled sorrow in the presence of Artaxerxes - otherwise his policy was never to be sad before the king (Nehemiah 2:1). While we must sometimes speak of our burdens in order to give others the privilege of bearing them, we do well to remember that they have their burdens too, and may well find their sorrows eased more by our expressions of gratitude than our cries of complaint. May God give us grace so that, like my saintly friend, our public face manifests a resolve to count our blessings more than we bemoan our curses.
June 17, 2008: The Gracious Gift Of Obligation
Do you ever feel tied down to duties from which you wish you were free?
Those duties might be God's grace to you. To be relieved of them - if no fresh duties took their place - might be more numbing than pleasant. What happiness you have may depend in no small part on things that, if taken away, would not leave you saying, "Thank God I'm free!" but rather, "What in the world do I do now?"
Lately I have been reading through the private letters of C. S. Lewis (and what great devotional reading that has been!). In 1956 Lewis married a dying woman, Joy Gresham, mostly as a favor to her so that she could remain in England rather than be forced to return to America when her visa expired. He was her caretaker. Then she had a miraculous recovery, and they had a blissful two years together before her disease returned and she passed away. Shortly after she died Lewis wrote the following to a pastor friend:
I'd like to meet. Perhaps I could come up to town some day when you are in town and take you to lunch...For I am - oh God that I were not - very free now. One doesn't realize in early life that the price of freedom is loneliness. To be happy one must be tied.
To be happy one must be tied! Those words hit me so hard I had to put the book down. I know them to be true. A kite, if it could think, might say, "This string pulling at my chest is annoying. If only I could cut it I could fly free!" But if the string were cut the kite would fall. The same string that holds it down also holds it up.
About a year ago I had a dream that had a strong emotional impact on me. In the dream I found myself in a line where people were buying tickets for some kind of entertainment. I happened to spot a lady friend there, greeted her and suggested (or assumed) that we go to the event together. But it turned out she was waiting to meet some other people and would attend with them. Feeling awkward, I excused myself, left and drove away. In the car I thought, "Well, now I can do anything I want." It was early evening and there was nothing on the agenda, so I was free to drive anywhere, eat anywhere, see a movie or go for a walk or anything else. But in the same moment I realized there was nothing that I really wanted to do by myself, and the thought filled me with sadness.
Solomon's near-absolute freedom wound up depressing him, and he wisely concluded that it was good for a man "to find satisfaction in his toilsome labor" (Ecclesiastes 5:18). Not from his toilsome labor, but in it. If you have things you must do, people you must care for, duties you must discharge, toilsome labors you must complete: give thanks. To be happy you must be tied to things for which people depend on you. Those duties, disguised as burdens, are often a gift from God.
June 10, 2008: As For Me And My House
Do parents matter?
Seriously. I'm asking this for real.
I found out the other day that a devout Christian friend of mine never knew his father, because the man abandoned his family when my friend was young. A pastor friend of mine, an example to me of holy good cheer, had a father who was angry and bitter. My father's father was a nasty unpleasant grouch - but somehow my dad wound up with a personality as warm as the sun.
Leon Powe of the Celtics grew up fatherless, and his mother, who had trouble with the law, died when he was a junior in high school. But Powe turned into a saint. Jim Daly, current president of Focus On The Family, was raised in foster homes - some of them really bad - after his parents divorced and his mother died and his stepfather abandoned him. But Daly turned out good.
Jerry Falwell's father tried to make him an atheist, and Madeleine Murray O'Hare tried to do the same with her son William. They failed, and their sons became outspoken evangelists of the gospel their parents hated.
And then there are all those good, godly parents whose children are evil. A missionary couple I know had a daughter who tried to poison them. That is extreme, of course, but I know plenty of cases not too far removed from that. Ever since God created Adam good people have begotten villains.
I find especially instructive those cases of close-in-age siblings, raised in the same home under the same conditions by the same parents, where one sibling is good and the other bad. A friend of mine (a good man) has told me that if his brother ever shows up on his doorstep, he will call the police (and I'm sorry to say he would be right to do so). Another friend who leads a moral life agonizes over a brother who has turned into a criminal bum. This friend happened to mention to me that his parents went out of their way to raise him and his brother just the same.
So, seriously: do parents matter?
After observing life and families and studying the Bible a lot, my answer has become, "Not nearly as much as we think." In the last few decades, parenting and family matters have become an obsession of the evangelical Christian subculture. The topic dominates Christian radio, is featured in a thousand sermon series, has launched millions of books and dozens of institutions. This fosters the illusion that we can control much of the way our kids turn out. The question I have been wanting to ask for a while is, "Why do we say so much about parenting when the Bible says so little?" Read through the whole Bible yourself and you will see what I mean. It is not that the Bible says nothing about parenting, but relative to other topics it is actually pretty low on the priority scale.
Consider this: can you name even one child of a disciple of Christ? Can you name any of their wives? The apostles managed to write a whole New Testament and never mention their family members once!
I believe the apostles knew in their bones something we are in danger of losing: every one makes his or her own decision for Christ. Good parenting does not sanctify, and bad parenting does not doom. Do not take credit for your little saints, and do not beat yourself up over your little demons. Do your best as a parent, and remember always that your children will have to answer to God for themselves just as you will.
June 3, 2008: Suffering And Faith
Have you ever known someone who lost faith in God because of suffering? I mean his or her own personal suffering - not somebody else's.
I raise the question because people I know or know of who don't believe in God often point to suffering as the reason for their disbelief. The odd thing is, it always seems to be somebody else's suffering. Former evangelist and Billy Graham colleague Charles Templeton indicated that his conversion from Christianity to atheism involved outrage over the plight of starving multitudes in Africa. Templeton himself, however, led a long prosperous life in the United States and Canada. Chicago Tribune columnist Eric Zorn wrote a "How can anybody believe in God?" essay after the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami - but wrote it, of course, from the comfort of a desk in Chicago a half a world away from the killer waves.
At that time I wrote, "It just isn't the case that those who have suffered the worst lack religious faith while those who live at ease embrace it." Last week I came across a couple news stories that illustrate the point. The Tribune said that Rabbi Bob Schreibman began to lose his faith in 1988 when he had to conduct the funeral of 8-year-old Nicholas Corwin, who had been murdered in a random act of violence by a psychotic individual who shot up a school classroom. Schreibman, now retired, describes himself as a skeptic. Within days of reading about Schreibman, I saw a report on Bill and Linda Correira, who lost their daughter Bethany to a murderer-rapist in May of 2003. Bill and Linda, deeply religious both before and after the tragedy, have forgiven their daughter's killer.
Schreibman did not lose his own son, but the fact that another couple lost their son was enough to erode his faith. The Correiras, however, actually did lose their daughter - and in just about the most horrible way imaginable. But they have kept on worshipping God.
Though the cases of Schreibman and the Correiras are anecdotal, I do not believe they are merely so. As I pile up lots of consistent anecdotes over the years I begin to suspect that they reflect real tendencies. It would be going too far, and it would be uncharitable, to conclude, "See! No one who ever really suffered lost faith in God because of it." But what I think I can confidently say is this: Though suffering is perhaps the most frequently invoked reason to reject God, there is, in general, no positive correlation between one's own suffering and one's disbelief.
While I don't know a single person who became an atheist because of personal suffering, I do know people who became Christians that way. Some 23 years ago when I was working in a grim warehouse where it seemed that most of my co-workers were neither nice nor law-abiding, I prayed, "Lord, if there are any Christians here, please help me to find them!" Then one day I was in the cafeteria when I spotted a Bible on a table and sat down next to it to see who was reading it on break. It turned out to be a soft-spoken, kind-hearted black gentleman who explained to me how he had become a Christian. It was after his 4-year-old son died of a brain tumor.
May 20, 2008: Imaginative Works Where Holiness Dwells
In a sermon I recommended finding exemplars of holiness in great works of fiction. For men there is Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird and Jeremiah Land in Peace Like A River. For women: Jane Bennet in Pride and Prejudice and Desdemona in Othello. For children: Lucy Pevensie in The Chronicles of Narnia and Charlie Bucket in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. For the imaginative: Reepicheep the Mouse and Puddleglum the Marshwiggle in Voyage of the Dawn Treader and The Silver Chair respectively.
Recently I found to my delight what I think might be an example of virtuous life imitating virtuous art. Just before the great battle scene in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, C. S. Lewis has the Christ figure Aslan give the following order: "Those who are good with their noses must come in the front with us lions to smell out where the battle is." The other lion in the scene, the merely mortal one, is exultant. He "kept running about everywhere pretending to be very busy but really in order to say to everyone he met, 'Did you hear what he said? Us lions. That means him and me. Us lions. That's what I like about Aslan. No side, no stand-off-ishness. Us lions. That meant him and me.'"
Lewis wrote that in 1949. In May of 1955 he was writing one of his many letters to Mary Shelburne, a neurotic American who constantly complained to him about illnesses and money troubles and all the injustices that others had inflicted on her. She also wrote bad poetry. Out of the blue, Lewis dropped the following:
Between ourselves, as one rhymester to another, it is a great pity that the word "world", such a good important word and often so emphatically demanding to come at the end of a line, has so few rhymes in English.
One rhymester to another! Goodness. Lewis should have been poet laureate of England, whereas Shelburne (bless her heart) was an irritating fool. When she got this letter, did she go around to her friends and say to them, "Do you see what Lewis wrote? One rhymester to another. That means him and me. One rhymester to another."
I'm reminded of the hymn "Oh What Matchless Condescension the Eternal God Displays," and the Bible verse that says that Jesus "is not ashamed to call them brothers" (Hebrews 2:11). This is that gracious, unpatronizing virtue found in noble kings who treat mere peasants like fellow royalty - or themselves like mere peasants. Could the grace of Lewis's Aslan have been in the back of his mind when he stooped to Shelburne's level, or raised her up to his?
Jesus liked to use fictional stories (The Good Samaritan, The Compassionate Father of a Prodigal Son) to inspire good behavior in real life. With holiness in the real world so rare, fiction is a great place to find it. Read Pride and Prejudice (or watch the A&E miniseries), and in some situation you may soon be asking yourself, "What would Jane Bennet do?"
May 13, 2008: The Privacy Of Darkness And The Innocent Plea For Light
Three cheers for Wheaton College firing Professor Kent Gramm for refusing to talk about his divorce.
He's not getting fired for divorcing his wife, or being divorced by her. He's being fired for refusing to divulge details to college administrators. Wheaton has a policy that professors sign saying that they will abide by certain standards of Christian conduct, including marital conduct. You can divorce your spouse if you have biblical justification for it - but you have to explain yourself. Gramm refuses to explain himself. He believes he should not be held accountable to the conduct code that he signed, and that the college has no business asking him about it. Now he has taken his case to the media. "I think it's wrong to have to discuss your personal life with your employer," he told the Chicago Tribune. He even dares to frame his case as an example for his students: "I feel that it's important for [the students] to know that they're not somehow rejected by God for having more or less normal lives and for having lives that didn't work out the way they intended them to turn out," he said.
Hey Gramm, got news for you. Christians aren't supposed to lead "more or less normal lives." We're supposed to be holy (1 Peter 1:16). Divorce isn't holy. God says he hates it (Malachi 2:16).
As a divorced man myself, I am blessed with an inside perspective here. When my wife renounced her faith and left me and divorced me against my will, I was eager for the spotlight of investigation. I made plain to all (and still do): "Ask me anything. And don't take my word for anything - here's her phone number and email and address; ask her anything about me. Ask my children about me. I have nothing to hide. I despise this putrid monstrosity of divorce - even as I despise rape and torture and genocide and all manner of evils that provoke the wrath of the Almighty. I have no part in this sin."
When charged, the innocent welcome investigation to clear their name while the guilty hide in the darkness of privacy. Jesus said, "[M]en loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil. Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that his deeds will be exposed." (John 3:19-20). Wickedness fears exposure even as innocence longs for vindication.
Suppose for example we find out that a man was present at a Nazi concentration camp, but it is unclear whether he was one of the guards who incinerated bodies or one of the Jews who struggled to survive. So we ask him about it. He responds, "I think that's a personal question. It is really none of your business. Look, Auschwitz was messy and unfortunate and sometimes life just does not turn out the way you expect. The important thing is that God loves us all no matter what." That is not what a victim says. The persecuted Jew rolls up his sleeve and shows you the number tattooed on his arm.
We should look at divorce the way we do a dead body hanging from a noose. It is ugly and awful and we hope we never see it. But if we do see a hanged corpse, and have no other information, we can only conclude that a terrible sin has been committed. We don't necessarily know what it is or who committed it. Maybe the dead man was guilty of evil and justly hanged by duly appointed authorities. Maybe he was innocent but set upon by murderous thugs. Maybe he was guilty but hanged by a lynch mob contemptuous of due process, so there was wrongdoing on both sides. Maybe he committed suicide. There are all kinds of possibilities, ranging from 0 to 100 percent guilt on the part of the hanged man. While we don't know where the guilt lies or to what degree, we do know that somewhere, somehow, a moral outrage has been committed.
The one thing that passersby may not say when observing that body twisting in the wind is, "Well, that's certainly none of my business. These things happen. We live in a fallen world. Let's all agree not to talk about it. (Hey, I might want to lynch somebody myself some day, and the last thing I want is nosy people asking me questions about it.)" And if a possibly suspicious character near the body tries to shoo us away saying, "Move along! There's nothing to see here. This has nothing to do with you," then we have a duty to stand right there unmoved and insist, "I'm not going anywhere. I've got some questions first."
May 6, 2008: Can You Guage Your Spiritual Progress?
"How are you doing spiritually? Do you feel you are making spiritual progress?"
These were the questions that my pastor would ask during a yearly home visit when I was young, and they would always annoy my mother. She never knew how to answer. How do you gauge your spiritual progress, and is it appropriate to do so? Do you respond, "Well, last year I prayed about 15 minutes a day but now I pray 20; and there were some occasions when I resisted my husband's leadership, but recently I haven't done that, so I'd say that while I used to be a 7, spiritually speaking, now I'm about an 8"? Mom found the practice of grading yourself in the things of the Lord to be distasteful.
All saints do. Their focus is on Christ, not on themselves and how well they are following Christ.
I have learned to distrust self-evaluation, having seen good people bemoan their depravity and bad people pat themselves on their spiritual backs. Forty-one years ago my father saw the church that we were attending utterly fail to respond in a godly way to a crisis in its midst, and he said, "This church will die." He was right, it did. He could perceive the spiritual decay, but the decaying ones could not see it in themselves. They were like the ghosts in M. Night Shyamalan's The Sixth Sense: they did not know they were dead.
Those who are spiritually alive, on the other hand, may be only vaguely aware of that life. The less aware the better. It is like playing basketball. A point guard who thinks, "I'm playing well now! Seven assists and two steals and even a blocked shot!" is more likely to commit a turnover in the next minute than the one who is simply focused on his job running the offense and listening to his coach's instructions.
Having carried with me all these years my mother's suspicion about the value of grading one's walk with God, imagine my delight the other day on finding the same thought beautifully expressed in a letter by C. S. Lewis. He wrote to his young friend and protégé Walter Hooper:
We should, I believe, distrust states of mind which turn our attention upon ourselves. Even at our sins we should look no longer than is necessary to know and to repent them: and our virtues or progress (if any) are certainly a dangerous object of contemplation. When the sun is vertically above a man he casts no shadow: similarly when we have come to the Divine meridian our spiritual shadow (that is, our consciousness of self) will vanish. One will thus in a sense be almost nothing: a room to be filled by God and our blessed fellow creatures, who in their turn are rooms we help to fill. But how far one is from this at present!
Indeed, we are far from this at present. But maybe, by looking to Christ and not ourselves, we'll inch ever closer to it.
April 29, 2008: Was His Death The Judgment Of God?
Recently I received the following question from a ministry colleague:
I lead a small DivorceCare group. In my group there is a sweet, godly woman (Anne) who leads a preschool program at a Baptist Church. She divorced her philandering husband after twenty years while he was in his fourth affair. He has a PhD in Psychology but is an arrogant bully. She receives relatively little support and only has the kids half the time. She read and liked my book "The Prayer of Revenge," and has been confident that God would accomplish justice on her behalf.
I just found out that the bed-hopping 40-something ex-husband dropped dead last night - somehow related to diabetes. The kids heard a crash in his bedroom, but ignored it, and found him this morning.
She's probably going to ask me: was this an act of God's judgment?
How would you answer her?
And here is my answer.
Interesting!
My short answer is no.
I think that unless we are prophets legitimately claiming inspiration from God, it is simply too difficult to make the connections between "misfortune" (including illness, suffering, poverty, death) and behavior. Job was good but had it bad while the evildoers of Psalm 73 enjoyed all the good luck in the world. Righteous Jim Elliot died at 28; the evangelist of atheism (and serial adulterer) Bertrand Russell lived to 99. (For that matter, Hugh Hefner is still going strong in his 80s! Why on earth doesn't he get judged?)
I gave up long ago trying to figure out what God is doing or what message he is sending when he grants long or short lifespans to people. A few weeks after we arrived in Colombia we were told point-blank by an Ika leader that the tribe would never accept our translating the Bible: we could stay there only if we never translated. Within a year this man was kidnapped by paramilitares, tortured and killed. I thought at the time that God was clearing away the obstacles so that his Word could reach the Ika people. But then this leader was replaced by another who was even more adamantly opposed to our mission! My prophetic guesswork about God's judgment was proven false.
Jesus said that the Galileans whose blood Pilate mixed with their sacrifices, and the 18 who died when the tower in Siloam fell on them, were not worse sinners than any others (Luke 13:1-4). My opinion is that the 40-something bed-hopper was probably no worse than millions of other bed-hoppers who have all gone where bed-hoppers go (see Revelation 21:8: "the sexually immoral... - their place will be in the fiery lake of burning sulfur"). Ironically, the philanderer's early demise may actually have been a mercy from God, because he was by death prevented from piling on another 50 years or so of sin which would only have raised the temperature of his personal hell.
I have a serious practical concern for those who are inclined to draw connections between things like death (or any other seeming misfortune) and the judgment of God. My fear is that they'll become very discouraged - or even doubt their faith - when things turn out the opposite of what they were led to expect. Painful as it might be for someone like Anne to hear, it must be said at some point: There is nothing in our understanding of God that would make it impossible for Anne to be the one who drops dead in her 40s (or worse, comes down with paralysis or a degenerative nerve disease), while her son-of-hell ex-husband lives a long healthy happy life! It is not till the life after this one when all wrongs will be set right, and justice (tempered with mercy) will be done, and many of the last shall be first and the first last. This requires perseverance on the part of the saints.
At the same time, I'm very happy for Anne (assuming the recent events are not disturbing to her!), and if you would, please pass along my greetings and best wishes. I don't know what her state of mind is, but I know a Christian man who confided in me, "If my ex-wife passed away now I don't think I'd feel any grief. All my grieving went on during the years she became a denier of God and a hater of me." A painful sentiment, but an understandable one. My prayers will be with Anne as she (perhaps very quietly) rejoices, even as her children grieve, and as she figures out how to manage with them on her own.