the ruthless monk

Why I am Not Sure That Christians Going to an Atheist Rally is a Good Idea (But I Could Be Persuaded)

2012-02-27T03:40:00.001-08:00

On March 24, an event billed as “the largest gathering of the secular movement in world history” will be happening in Washington, D.C. The Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science, in partnership with several other stateside atheist and humanist organizations, is sponsoring what they call the “Reason Rally.” Its purpose, in their words, is to “ unify, energize, and embolden secular people nationwide.”

In response to the Reason Rally, several Christian apologetics organizations have established True Reason, which will, in their words, “demonstrate a humble, loving, and thoughtful response to the Reason Rally.” True Reason's organizers makes it clear that they are not planning a counter-demonstration. “We are going there to share Christ person to person as opportunity arises,” the website says. “We will not raise our voices. We will talk with those who want to talk with us. We will offer gifts and materials to all, but we will not press ourselves on those who do not wish to converse.”

When I first heard about True Reason and their plan to hand out water bottles to thousands of atheists, my reaction was similar to Han Solo as he approached the Death Star and muttered to himself “I have a bad feeling about this.”

But then I asked myself “Why?” (Yes, I ask myself questions. A lot.) “Why am I having such an strong, instinctive reaction to something that a lot of smart, reasonable, loving Christians seem to think is a good idea?”

So I went in search of an answer.

The first thing I did was to read the blogs of people who support True Reason. What I found was that the most common reason (no pun intended) that people support the rally was their hope that it would counter the assumption held by many atheists that anyone who believes in God has, by definition, rejected the use of reason. Reason, according to these atheists, inevitably leads to the conclusion that God does not exist. Ipso facto, anyone who does not agree with them must not be using reason.

Now, it is a fact that some of the more militant atheists use this argument. And I reject this assumption from the bottom of my heart. To say that people as brilliant as C.S. Lewis, J.P. Moreland, William Lane Craig, and Ravi Zacharias don’t use reason is a simple denial of the facts—or at the very least a drastic alteration of the definition of reason. As Glenn Peoples, one of my favorite blogging philosophers, recently wrote:

What strikes me-in fact something that strikes me frequently and never gets any easier to explain-is the way that the rally's organizers so gratuitously co-opt the term "reason" as though just by describing their movement in terms of reason or rationality the listener will understand that they must be referring to people who don't believe in God.

So at this point in my research, I understood that atheists had co-opted the word “reason” and that True Reason’s organizers wanted to take it back. Fair enough.

But I still wondered if there was a rational explanation for my weird sense of foreboding. (Personally, I think the fact that I wanted a rational reason for what was essentially a feeling should demonstrate the fact that Christians use reason, but that’s another story.)

Then one day, I happened to listen to a podcast from Dr. Holly Ordway, the director of Athanatos Ministries' Literary Apologetics Program. (For more info about the program and Dr. Ordway's blog, click here.) Early in her academic career, Dr. Ordway was an atheist. And while she credits her conversion to the rational arguments of traditional apologetics, she attributes the fact that she even began asking questions to the power of poetry and the stories of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. Dr. Ordway describes her openness to the gospel as being kindled through an awakening of her imagination.

In the interview, Dr. Ordway talks about the split between reason and imagination brought about by the Enlightenment. The surgical separation of these two essential “modes of knowing,” she says, has resulted in the dysfunctional use of both. She also singles out C.S. Lewis as someone who realized that while society may separate reason and imagination at birth—esteeming one and sending the other into exile—this is simply not the way people function.

Here, finally, was the answer to my question. Quite honestly, it was something I should have been able to figure out for myself. Since I first started blogging, I have asserted that true, transformational faith requires that a person engage both his head and heart—intellect and experience. Now here was a scholar proposing a similar paradigm. What Dr. Ordway did was remind me what I already knew.

I now realize why I was so uncomfortable with well-intentioned Christians trying to demonstrate that Christianity is as “reasonable” as atheism: Trying to describe faith in Christ to someone who only values reason seems very much like trying to explain color to someone whose eyes only register shades of gray.

Let me make it really, really clear that I believe with all my heart that Christianity is as reasonable as atheism (more reasonable if it comes to that) and I will argue with anyone who says that a person must suspend his reason in order to have faith. But by engaging atheists (or anyone for that matter) using reason alone, we are engaging only half of the whole person. The imaginative, intuitive part—the part of the psyche that actually attaches meaning to purely intellectual concepts like propositional statements and syllogisms—remains unconvinced. And, assuming that the people at the Reason Rally value reason above all (regardless of whether we agree with their definition), it's not that they aren't willing to understand the language of faith. It's that they're not able.

I love reason. I love thinking. I'm studying Philosophy for goodness sake! But no apologist worth their salt (and I put the organizers of True Reason into this category) believes that a person can be "argued" into the kingdom of God. We do our part, but it is the ineffable working of the Holy Spirit that touches people's hearts and imaginations, allowing them to experience God. And maybe, in the final analysis, that's the best argument for True Reason.

After having thought this through for days, I am still not convinced that having a tent set up at an atheist's rally is a great idea, but I am less uncomfortable with it than I was before. I now understand what philosophical pre-commitments caused my "Death Star" reaction. But I also acknowledge that God moves in mysterious ways. It's possible that a conversation at The Reason Rally is the spark that ignites someone's imagination.

It's even possible that someone could convince me that it’s a good idea.

Conferences, Blog Tours, and BOOKS! Oh My!

2012-02-23T03:16:00.000-08:00

There are a couple of exciting things happening over the next few weeks. Even more thrilling is that they both involve one of my favorite things in the world—books!

On Friday March 2, the Mid-Atlantic Chapter of the Evangelical Theological Society is holding their annual meeting in Lancaster, PA. The plenary speaker will be Peter J. Leithart, author of Defending Constantine: The Twilight of Empire and the Dawn of Christendom. It’s somewhat of a truism in theological circles that the 4^th century Roman emperor Constantine was the worst thing that ever happened to Christianity, so Joel Watts and I are also going to blog through the book over at Unsettled Christianity and see what kind of trouble we can get into.

The following week, I’ll be participating in the How to Read the Bible Through the Jesus Lens blog tour beginning March 5. Of course I love all books, but I’m especially excited to read this one. I’ve come to a bit of an impasse in my Christocentric Hermeneutic project and I’m hoping this book will jump start it. Of course it’s possible that the book will be so good that it will answer all my questions. In that case, I can consider the project finished and move on to something else.

In conjunction with the blog tour, Zondervan is also sponsoring an online conversation with the author, Michael Williams, on March 6. For details, click here.

I encourage everyone to pick up whichever of the books strikes your fancy and read along with us.

How a Few Nice Atheists, Some Nasty Christians, and a Celebrity Pastor Came Together to Remind Me Why We Fight

2012-02-18T03:57:00.000-08:00

It all began with three blog posts:

Blog Post #1: As everyone knows by now, Richard Dawkins, one of the “four horsemen” of modern atheism, (although I guess there’s just three now that Christopher Hitchens has died) did an interview on British radio in which he forgot the full name of Darwin’s book (which, by the way, is On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life…No wonder he forgot it.) Well, British writer (and atheist) Mark Wallace is not nearly as concerned about Dawkin’s memory lapse as he is about the fact that Dawkins has become, in his words, “a frothing-at-the-mouth, bigoted zealot who is an embarrassment to his cause.”

Blog Post #2: Jessica Ahlquist is an atheist teenager at a Rhode Island High School who wanted a banner containing a prayer removed from her school. The case went to court and Jessica won. As a result local Christians bullied, threatened, and ostracized Ahlquist. This week, blogger Alise Wright wrote a guest post for The Friendly Atheist apologizing for not speaking up against the behavior of said Christians. “So to my fellow Christians?” she writes. “Stop it. Stop the name-calling. Stop the death threats. Stop the angry letters, the whining about attacks on religion, the accusations that Jessica is just a tool. Treat her the way you want to be treated by those who disagree with you.”

Blog Post #3: Late last week, The Christian Post published a portion of an interview by John Piper in which he answers the question "Why was it right for God to slaughter women and children in the Old Testament?" Piper responded “It's right for God to slaughter women and children anytime he pleases.” While he goes on to offer a perfectly orthodox explanation of violence in the Old Testament, Piper later says that “everything God does is just and right and good.” A few days later, Peter Kirk posted that “the God described by John Piper has the character of an arbitrary despot, one who asserts the right to do whatever he wants, even when this entirely contradicts the standards of behaviour he expects from others.” Bob Anderson wrote a lengthier response, calling Piper's statement "appalling."

I see a pattern here. As a Christian, I often disagree with other Christians about some non-essential doctrine, but the examples listed here go beyond a simple difference of opinion about predestination or infant baptism. Each of these examples illustrates the mixture of righteous anger and sadness felt by loving, reasonable people when their faith is not portrayed as loving and reasonable, but as spiteful and oppressive.

Now, back to Richard Dawkins...

Admittedly, I don’t follow the comings and goings of Richard Dawkins very closely. He doesn’t have a TV show in the US and I’ve never read his book. But Mark Wallace seems like a smart, reasonable guy and I have a lot of empathy for him. Neither of us wants other people to assume that they know what we’re thinking based on the actions of one or two very loud representatives of our faith. (I know there’s a debate about whether atheism is technically a faith, but cut me a little slack here).

As Mark writes about Dawkins “I hate, hate, hate the fact that this pompous, unpleasant, hectoring bully attaches his name ubiquitously to the belief that I happen to hold. Sometimes, it’s almost enough to make me want to change back to believing in God – half to escape association with him, and half just to spite him.”

On the flip side, Alise Wright’s apology for not standing up and opposing the unloving behavior of a small group of people who call themselves Christians is, I think, a wonderful demonstration of what following Jesus can and should be. Wright, like Wallace, is trying her darndest to show the world that the actions of a few mean-spirited bullies do not represent the views of most Christians—and certainly don’t represent Christ.

One of the most fascinating things about Alise’s posts were the comments. The Friendly Atheist’s readers, who seem to include a cross-section of atheists, agnostics, and people of faith, were overwhelmingly gracious and grateful for Wright’s post. And at least one of them asked her a question that, if I were an atheist, would probably be what I would ask: “So why do you still want to be a Christian?” (You have to read through the comments to find out Alise's answer)

Which brings me to John Piper…

Let me be crystal clear here. I am not equating Piper with Dawkins or unpleasant Christians in Rhode Island. What I am comparing is the dynamic of the three situations. Mark Wallace doesn’t want Richard Dawkins speaking for him. Alise Wright wants to make sure that people realize that real Christians don’t act like school-yard bullies. And neither Peter Kirk nor Bob Anderson nor I like the idea that the God we love is depicted by some people as an “arbitrary despot.”

The theological concept implied in Piper’s comment is called “divine command theory” or “voluntarism.” In it’s simplest form, divine command theory says that an action is not 'good' in and of itself, but only because God says it is. Whatever God does is, by definition, good. Now for someone like Piper, whose primary motivation is to preserve God’s sovereignty above all else, divine command theory offers few problems. It does, however, create problems for everyone else. In fact, in Good God: The Theistic Foundations of Morality, (one of my very favorite books) David Baggett and Jerry Walls list six specific problems with radical voluntarism, including the possibility that God could wake up tomorrow (metaphorically speaking) and make torturing children morally obligatory. In which case, how could he be described as "good?" (For more info on voluntarism and a short review of the book click here.)

I am not picking on John Piper here. It could just have easily been any of 20 prominent writers, pastors, or theologians who said this. What bothers me is that someone who knows nothing about Christianity could read Piper's interview and assume that all Christians believe that if God decided tomorrow that torturing toddlers was mandatory, that it would be OK with them. After all, whatever God does is by definition “good.” Right?

Talk about a skewed moral compass!

In the end, these three incidents intersect because the only thing I can do is exactly what Mark, Alise, Peter, and Bob are doing—keep speaking out. I can keep repeating that what a few people who share my beliefs are saying is not representative of us all.

I can’t do everything. Heck, some days I can’t even keep up with the laundry, but I can do what I can do. As can we all.

Blogging Through "Justification: Five Views" Progressive Reformed View

2012-02-16T12:17:00.000-08:00

In Part 3 of my review of Justification: Five Views over at Unsettled Christianity, I review Michael Bird''s essay on the Progressive Reformed View...

"As the author moves on to the exploration of the relationship between justification and works, he provides a perfect example of how one’s understanding of an esoteric concept like justification can have a direct impact on how they live out their faith. In my humble opinion, it is the traditional evangelical emphasis on the individual’s initial salvation—and the minimizing of Paul’s exhortations to actively live out one’s faith—that have created a Christian culture content to concern itself exclusively with its own comfort. Michael Bird seems to have a similar passion for stirring the pot in this regard."

Why Everyone Should "Own" Their Theology

2012-02-11T07:25:00.000-08:00

I’ve been blogging through Justification: Five Views over at Unsettled Christianity and thinking about how much I love multiple view books. When I’m working through a particularly sticky theology question, one of the first things I do is get one of these books, sit down with a freshly-sharpened number two pencil, (I have this weird obsession with sharpened pencils. I think it stems from elementary school) and start making notes in the margins.

I know Christian Smith isn’t a fan of these types of books. In The Bible Made Impossible: Why Biblicism is Not a Truly Evangelical Reading of Scripture, Smith writes, “The inability of Bible-reading evangelicals to come to anything like a common mind on a host of topics is turned into published scholarly debates conducted under the guise of helpful theological orientation and education.” Harsh words from a great scholar.

I, on the other hand, am encouraged by what these books represent. Not only are Christian publishers honest enough to admit that there are multiple valid theological options out there on a wide variety of topics, but these books are tailor-made for people like me who refuse to fall in lock-step behind a single label (emergent, conservative, neo-Calvinist, etc.) and want to think through these issues for themselves.

I have a name for this desire to figure out things for myself without a celebrity pastor breathing down my neck. I call it “owning” my theology. I saw faint glimmers of it during the recent John Piper brouhaha when the outrage did not come only from egalitarians and Armenians, but also from people who generally admire Piper. These brave people were able to publically admit that they agreed with Piper about unconditional election, but didn’t buy the notion that “Christianity has a masculine feel.”

Even as the celebrity pastor conundrum seems to keep getting bigger (not unlike the Christmas Tree from “The Nutcracker” or Alice after she drinks from the little brown bottle) I continue to see more and more Christians who realize that not only do they not have to commit to a specific Christian leader, but they don’t even have to commit to a label.

I am not talking here about someone flippantly picking and choosing what they believe. I’m talking about thousands of thoughtful Christians who are no longer satisfied with shallow and maudlin (or even deep and heartless) answers to serious spiritual questions. Instead of either walking away from their faith (a perfectly reasonable response to stupidity as far as I’m concerned), they’re reading Zondervan’s Counterpoints series, or IVP’s Spectrum Multiview series and finding out that there are ways of following Jesus that do not require checking their brain, heart, or some other necessary appendage, at the door. They are asking the hard questions and coming up with informed answers that resonate with all their body parts. They “own” their theology.

The problem is that it often doesn’t fit into tidy, pre-packaged categories.

When Frank Viola began writing about what he calls “Beyond Evangelicalism” he got push-back from people who thought he was creating arbitrary categories for the purpose of simplifying the issue. While I don’t agree with everything in Viola’s thesis, I think his description of the group he labels “beyond evangelicals” is an accurate portrayal of an increasingly vocal, loosely organized group of believers who are no longer satisfied with classical evangelicalism. But unlike Viola, I don’t want to add one (or two or three or four) more names to the already over-crowded list of hyphenated monikers. My faith is still characterized by what Mark Noll and David Bebbington call the four historic markers of evangelicalism:

• that the Bible is the authoritative, inspired word of God

• that conversion is necessary for salvation

• that Jesus' death and resurrection are the foundation of our relationship with God

• that we are required to live out our faith by actively serving those around us

I agree with Viola that how we understand and practice these markers is rapidly changing, but I prefer to stay under the single umbrella of “evangelicalism” precisely because, as Viola says, “it is so generalized that Jim Wallis and Al Mohler can both stand under it.”

And because keeping it wide allows people to “own” their theology.

Let’s look at a hypothetical example (It’s not all that hypothetical really. It happens a lot). Judy has attended a Young, Restless, and Reformed church for several years when she begins to question a few things. “How can God be considered good,” she wonders “if He chooses some people for eternal bliss and some for eternal suffering and there was absolutely nothing they could have done about it?” Judy asks her Calvinist friends, who give her all the earnestly thoughtful, standard answers. Still, she’s not convinced.

Finally, Judy picks up Perspectives on the Doctrine of God: Four Views (one of my personal favorites) and closely studies each essay. She prays about what to do. Finally she realizes (with an angelic choir singing in the background) that she can still be a Christian even if she's not a Calvinist. Equally exciting to her is that she can still be an evangelical and not be a Calvinist. By the time she’s finished her research, she not only knows the scriptural basis for her new theology, she knows it so well that she can confidently defend her faith when well-meaning Calvinists sadly accuse her of ignoring what the Bible clearly teaches in Romans 9. Judy “owns” her theology.

One of the most exhausting things anyone can experience is the pressure to believe something when they really don’t, especially when they think there aren’t any other options. And it can happen at any point in our walk with Christ. Can I reject unconditional election and still follow Jesus? Can I trust the conclusions of science and still follow Jesus? Can I be an egalitarian and still follow Jesus? Can I think Open Theism makes a lot of sense and still follow Jesus?

If and when these people come to the point when they must either confront their questions or walk away exhausted—and if they manage to get their hands on a copy of any of the multiple view books—they shouldn't have to give up their identity as evangelicals just because they don’t believe in unconditional election…or complementarianism…or a literal 6-day creation…or any number of non-essential doctrines.

My particular theology does not fit tidily into any one category, but I “own” it. I love Jesus. I believe the Bible is the authoritative and inspired word of God, but not an instruction manual. I am an egalitarian but I think the complementarians have better proof-texts. I believe that the Bible teaches that there is a Hell, but I don’t know what it will look like. I think Rob Bell is a smart guy who loves Jesus but whose exegesis is appalling. I agree with Greg Boyd on Open Theism but not pacifism (and please don’t confuse Open Theism with Process Theology). I believe in penal substitution and Christus Victor because I think both are affirmed in the Bible. Oh, and did I mention I love Jesus? I am an evangelical who “owns” my theology.

Blogging through "Justification: Five Views" Part 2: The Traditional Reformed View

2012-02-09T10:06:00.000-08:00

In Part 2 of my review of Justification: Five Views over at Unsettled Christianity, I review Michael Horton's essay on the Traditional Reformed View...

"This is, I think, is a great example of how discussion about something as seemingly esoteric as justification can impact the practicalities of day-to-day faith. While Horton tries to make the case that the Traditional Reformed View “gives rise to a spontaneous embrace of the very law that once condemned us,” experience has shown us that a minimalist version of this very same view can easily turn into a cocky confidence in a salvation that does nothing to kick-start the transformation process."

Blogging through "Justification: Five Views"

2012-02-05T04:57:00.000-08:00

Joel Watts and I have just started blogging through James Beilby and Paul Eddy's Justification: Five Views over at Unsettled Christianity. It's not too late to join in the conversation.

Signs of Hope over at TGC?

2012-02-02T16:20:00.000-08:00

Are there signs that The Gospel Coalition might becoming a little more self-reflective? Check out my guest post at Unsettled Christianity.

Toward a Christocentric Hermeneutic: A Brief Excursis inspired by Great Television

2012-02-01T03:03:00.000-08:00

I’ve just finished watching all six seasons of "Dr. Who." Actually, I have to qualify that statement—I’ve just finished watching most of all six seasons of "Dr. Who." You see, I watch "Dr. Who" the way I most TV series nowadays, which is not necessarily in order.

First, I watch about one and a half full seasons of a show, then I head over to Wikipedia and read the episode summaries of every single remaining episode to see which ones are integral to the metanarrative and contain significant plot points. Then I go back and watch only those episodes until I reach the end. Once I know how the show ends, I go back and watch the episodes I missed.

For people who hate spoilers, my viewing habits are shocking (I know this because I have friends who think that watching TV this way indicates some kind of moral failing), but there are two reasons why I do it this way. One is practical, the other theological.

Practically speaking, I want to know whether a book, TV show, or movie is worth getting emotionally involved with before I spend my time on it. If I grow to care for the characters, will they die? Or turn evil? If I get emotionally invested in a tale that takes six seasons to tell, will the ending be so unsatisfying that it leaves me traumatized and terrified of ever making that kind of commitment again? (Yes, I’m still complaining about the finale of LOST after almost two years).

I also want to know if something bad is going to happen so I can prepare myself for it. I can’t tell you how many times knowing that someone was going to die in advance on "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" saved me from becoming a quivering mass of weeping jello when it actually happened.

But there is a deeper reason why I want to get to the end of a story as fast as possible. Truly great stories make me want to go back and watch (or read) them all over again. Why? Because knowing the end changes our understanding of the beginning.

Truly great writers can plant themes, clues, and foreshadowing in the tiniest of details. These details usually pass by unnoticed the first time because we’re so involved in finding out what happens next. Once we know the ending, however, these short bits of dialogue or perplexing cut-aways contain deeper layers of meaning than they did the first time.

Of course, this only works with great stories told by great writers. It does not work with schlock. It works with "Dr. Who" and "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and "Harry Potter," but doesn’t work with "Twilight" or "Buck Rogers in the 25th Century" (google it).

It is also the way I read the Bible.

I can’t imagine reading the first few chapters of Genesis and watching God expel Adam and Eve from the garden without knowing in advance that God does, finally, redeem them. More to the point, there are details in the third chapter of Genesis that gain added depth and dimension only in the death and resurrection of Jesus a thousand pages later. Sure the Bible contains specific messianic images like the scapegoat in Leviticus 16 and the suffering servant in Isaiah 53, but the whole of the Old Testament plot shifts its perspective just a little once we know how it ends.

I have heard several thoughtful people suggest that reading the Old Testament like this—that using what might be called a Christocentric hermeneutic—comes dangerously close to reducing the Old Testament to nothing but a foreshadowing of Christ in which the original significance of the OT stories is lost. This is a valid concern and I can certainly see the danger in taking an allegorizing type of Christocentric hermeneutic too far. But I think this is only a danger if we demand that every single passage and event in the Old Testament somehow foreshadow Christ (no scholar worth their salt wants to be accused of allegorizing, anyway) rather than simply reading the original story with the perspective of someone who knows how it ends.

To return to my original example, most of us don’t go back and watch our favorite TV shows or re-read our favorite books thinking that everything leading up to the climax matters less now that we know the ending. It is, I think, exactly the opposite. Everything matters more. Meaning is added, not subtracted. The original narrative is not subsumed under whatever new meaning we’ve discovered; we simply realize how brilliant the writer was to have written a story with so much depth. And we want to go back and enjoy it again and again.

Why Our Definition of "Successful Ministry" Is Problematic

2012-01-28T06:01:00.000-08:00

It all started, like most things for the last few weeks, because of something Mark Driscoll said. Sure, Driscoll said a lot of silly things in the interview with Justin Brierley, but I’ve made it my policy not to spend any of my precious blogging time analyzing what one particular preacher (with whom I disagree most of the time anyway) says.

I have made an exception, however, for one set of statements he made because I think they reflect not just Driscoll's peculiar worldview, but the assumptions of much of the American church.

Both statements are famous by now. At one point in the interview with Brierley, Driscoll berates the UK church for being cowards. As proof of this cowardice, Driscoll demands that Brierley “name one, good Bible teacher that is known across Britain. You don’t have one, that is the problem." Then, later in the interview when Brierley reveals that his wife pastors a church, Driscoll responds by asking about the size of the church “You look at your results,” he says “and you look at my results and look at the variable that is the most obvious.”

Now, several bloggers that I read (and probably many more that I don’t) recognized the obvious cultural biases in these statements. To Driscoll—and thousands like him—the “success” of any church or ministry is measured by the number of people saved and the number of celebrity preachers who preach there. I would go one step further and say that not only do most U.S. churches see growth and celebrity as proof of success, but that many of these same people assume that our standard of success must, necessarily, be the measure of success used by the rest of the world. In his hubris, Driscoll reveals the American church's self-centered belief that our model of church should be the model for the church universal.

Later that same week, David Fitch posted an article called The Mark Driscoll Fiasco: What the Latest Flap Teaches us about the Neo-Reformed Movement. As a proponent of the missional movement, Fitch focuses on a few theological positions held by the Neo-Reformed movement which he thinks works against the mission of the church. Number Three on this list just happens to be the belief that success is measured by “the number of people gathering on Sunday to hear a male preacher preach.”

While I agree with most of what Fitch wrote, I would suggest that this numbers-oriented view of success is not just a characteristic of the Neo-reformed, but of the American evangelical church in general. I submit that a huge portion of American Christians measure the success of their church based on the number of people who attend weekend service and the celebrity status of their pastor. In fact, the seeker-sensitive movement, which many Neo-Reformed consider the great evil of modern evangelicalism, shares the very same assumption.

Unfortunately, history proves otherwise. We can all name any number of “successful” celebrity pastors who espouse bad theology. We can also all name any number of charismatic non-Christians throughout history with huge followings and evil intentions. History demonstrates over and over again that being famous and influential is not evidence that a person is speaking the truth.

Even Trevin Wax, the official blogger for the Elephant Room, recently made the following comment about the first session of this hugely popular pastoral roundtable:

It would have been better to see the major distinctions between these participants brought to the table and discussed. Instead, it seemed as if all arguments and debates fade away in light of one’s fruitfulness in terms of numerical growth of the church. The silent assumption seemed to be: We may be different, but as long as God is blessing you (numerically), we can’t really debate.

In 2010, I did an interview with Ajith Fernando, a plenary speaker at the Lausanne 2010 Conference for World Evangelism. After working in Sri Lanka for 30 years with the urban poor, Ajith has certainly earned the right to talk about what a successful ministry looks like. In a brilliant insight, he observed that every church reflects its own culture. In a highly productive culture like the U.S., says Ajith, the church will naturally reflect the idea that it should be productive. His concern, however, is that this emphasis on productivity as a mark of success causes people to prematurely leave ministry if they aren’t producing the expected number of converts.

In the interview, Ajith cautions against making Western management principles superior to the principles of Scripture. “The church is a sociological entity,” says Fernando, “and if it uses the principles that work within the larger culture, it will succeed as a sociological entity, but it then becomes defined by its numbers, by the idea that it needs to be branded and franchised.”

I submit that Ajith was more prophetic than even he knew. A model of church based on a charismatic speaker who attracts people by appealing to their felt needs works in the United States because American culture is built—at least partially—on the paradigm of advertising. But it is the height of hubris to assume that this same model should be exported to other countries.

In response to the Driscoll dust-up, Andrew Jones posted a wonderful piece about the differences between American and UK churches. In addition to being a world traveler with first-person experience in a wide variety of Christian communities around the world, Andrew lived in both the US and the UK for several years. In his post “The English Church that went up a Mountain, but came down a Hill,” Andrew lists several significant differences between the two countries, including a suspicion of religious celebrities. According to Andrew, the Fresh Expressions movement in the UK has established 3000 Christian communities in the last few years, they just haven’t produced a "big-name" teacher. By American standards, is this a "successful" ministry?

I have to wonder that if the cultural gap between England and the US is that wide, how much more difference is there between the US and non-European cultures. Andrew answers that question as well in his post “Practices of a New Jesus Movement.” In one Asian country, according to Andrew, 1000 new Christian communities have been created by an organic process of replication that includes only Bible Study and a few other "simple habits," none of which includes a large weekend gathering.

And if all this isn't enough to make the U.S. church stop assuming that it rules the evangelical world, sociologist Peter Berger points out that over 60% of Christians now live in either Africa or South America, in large part because of the explosive growth of evangelical pentacostalism.

The point here is that the church has always adapted to the local culture. The gospel message is universal in its power, but adaptable in it’s methods. The American church looks like the American church because people with good intentions wanted to make it as attractive to as many Americans as possible, not because there is anything inherently sacrosanct about how we do church.

We should not expect the rest of Christendom to look just like us. We should celebrate the fact that it doesn't.

Towards a Christocentric Hermeneutic Part 3: The Advantages of Reading the Bible Like a Novel

2012-01-17T03:54:00.000-08:00

At this point, my step-by-step method for teaching Joe and Mary church-goer how to read the Bible christocentrically is still in the analytical stage. In part 1 of the project, I asserted that the method that most evangelicals use to interpret the Bible—principlizing—has significant shortcomings. While it may warrant a slot in our hermeneutical toolbox, reducing everything in the Bible to easily-applicable propositional truths has too many pitfalls to be the primary method of interpreting the Bible.

In part 2, I addressed the assumption held by some scholars that evangelicals are so steeped in scientism that they cannot get their heads around how a narrative could be authoritative. In contrast to these scholars (but still bowing and scraping before their brilliance), I tried to demonstrate that evangelicals (in fact, most people) know “in their bones” that narratives can be authoritative.

In this post, I want to take a look at a few of the advantages of reading the Bible primarily as a narrative.

Several months ago, Roger Olson provided a very helpful explanation of narrative theology on his blog. Here’s my summary of what he said:

• The Bible is a narrative that reveals God’s character through His activity and interaction with men
• The Bible contains propositions, but those propositions are not superior to the narrative
• The Bible defines propositions such as “God is love” through actions. In other words, propositions are clarified by the narrative
• The Bible contains other genres (such as letters, poetry, proverbs, etc), but these genres are to be understood in light of how they fit into the story and its climax-—the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ
• Narrative is the primary way of understanding God. Doctrines may be necessary, but they are secondary and can be revised if needed
• The task of the church is to be so steeped in the worldview of the story that it can “improvise the rest of the story” in its own cultural context.

I want to make clear that I am not (nor, do I think, is Olson) advocating the more extreme brand of narrative theology that allows the faith community to decide what truth is. I still believe that scripture's "meaning" is what the original author intended it to mean. But I think that Olson aptly describes what it means to respect the fact that God gave His truth to us in a particular form. We can best understand what God wants us to understand, not by fighting against the Bible's genre, but by embracing it.

As far as what the Bible’s story actually looks like, several scholars have proposed various narrative frameworks to help the reader get a handle on things. In The Blue Parakeet, Scot McKnight proposes a four-act structure beginning with (1) creation, then moving through (2) fall, (3) covenant community (Israel), and (4) redemption. In Scripture and the Authority of God, N.T. Wright suggests a five-act structure beginning again with (1) creation and (2) the fall, but moving from there to (3) Israel, (4) Jesus, and (5) the church. In Four Views on Moving Beyond the Bible to Theology, Christopher Wright (one of my favorite theologians) also describes the Bible as having four major plot points within the narrative: (1) creation, (2) fall, (3) redemption, and (4) new creation. In this model, “new creation” begins at Pentacost and continues through the return of Christ.

However my favorite paradigm for illustrating the Bible’s story is the humble plot diagram many of us learned in high school.

In this diagram, Creation is the exposition of the story, while the expulsion from the Garden introduces the primary conflict. The rising action includes God’s choosing of Israel as the covenant community, and the climax—the moment in which God succeeds in redeeming His people—is the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ.

What matters, however, is not which specific structure one uses to chart the narrative of God’s story (because they all basically tell the same tale), but how reading the Bible as narrative transforms the reader’s view of scripture. Rather than being a flattened-out repository of timeless truths—all of which apply to me right now—narrative theology forces the reader to experience the story of redemption as something that either has happened or will happen. And with the death and resurrection of Jesus, what has gone before is drastically different than what comes after.

Reading the Bible as God’s story of redemption greatly reduces the self-centeredness inherent in the principlizing method. No longer does everything have to apply to the reader or have a “practical” application. If the Bible is God’s story, then the purpose of reading it is to become intimate with God and how He works, not how He can fix my life. Reading the Bible as narrative will greatly reduce the probability that the reader will wonder, as someone in one of my Bible studies once asked, “why put it in the Bible if it doesn’t apply to me?”

Another benefit of reading the Bible as narrative is that we don’t have to wonder what to “do” with the Old Testament. Most people who have attended a Bible study for more than a few months can provide at least one example of the quirky things people do to force whatever Old Testament passage they're reading to produce a “timeless truth.” Once freed from the expectation that every story must be directly applicable to the reader’s life, the Old Testament can tell the story it wants to tell—a much more powerful story of God's relationship with Israel, and through Israel, the world.

Finally, thinking of the Bible as a story allows it to become “authoritative” in a way that a set of propositional truths can never be. It is the nature of narrative to inhabit us so completely that we do not have to wonder what our heroes would do in particular situation. We know what Superman…or Harry Potter…or Buffy Summers…or Aragorn…or King Arthur would do. Allowing the Bible to come to life in this way releases the inherent power of story to shape the way we see the world.

Thinking of the Bible as a narrative shows the reader in no uncertain terms that something earth-shattering and paradigm-shifting happened with the death and resurrection of Jesus. It changed not only what came after, but also transforms how we understand what came before. When we go back and read the story again, the beginning of the story will have a deeper meaning than it did the first time we read it. Not different, but deeper. The original events still mean what they meant, but they also become the foundation upon which the writer has spread another level of meaning—a meaning we only get because we know how the story ends.

This then, is where we finally get the faintest glimmer of what a christocentric hermeneutic might begin to look like.

Excuse Me, But Your Moral Absolutes are Showing

2012-01-13T16:06:00.000-08:00

I've been watching the 2005 Dr. Who reboot for only a week and it's already providing a lot of fodder for my belief that moral intuition is inescapable-even in the TARDIS. Check out my guest post over at Unsettled Christianity.

Towards a Christocentric Hermeneutic Part 2: Can a Narrative Be Authoritative?

2012-01-09T04:08:00.000-08:00

This is part two of what I thought, in my naivete, would be a fairly straightforward little research project. The idea for the project came to me after reading Christian Smith’s The Bible Made Impossible: Why Biblicism in Not a Truly Evangelical Reading of Scripture. In the book, Smith argues persuasively that the traditional evangelical understanding of the Bible as some kind of instruction manual is wrong and should be replaced with what he calls a “christocentric hermeneutic.”

While Smith does suggest a few strategies for shifting one's presuppositions away from Biblicism and toward christocentricsm, there’s no way that Joe and Mary church-goer are going to make such a huge paradigm shift without a little help. My solution to this problem was to start investigating how, exactly, a person would go about reading the Bible this way. I figured that if a first-year seminary student could learn the 3 (or 4 or 5) steps of inductive Bible study, then there had to be a way to systemize a christocentric hermeneutic so that regular people (non-scholars with a life outside of conferences and research papers) could understand it.

In my first post, I took aim at the hermeneutical method used by most evangelicals—principlizing. Principlizing is a way of reading the Bible in which the primary goal is to discover what the “big idea” of the passage is, then restate the author’s point in “propositional principles that that can applied directly to the reader’s life.” One of the main problems with principlizing, according to Daniel Doriani in Four Views On Moving Beyond the Bible To Theology, is that the genre of the text (whether it's a narrative, a poem, or a letter) becomes only a means to an ends. “Once the principle has been discovered,” writes Doriani, “the story around it can just be thrown away like a corn husk.”

In contrast, Christian Smith asserts that one of the things necessary for developing a Christocentric hermeneutic is to admit that the genre of the Bible is essential to understanding it. Not only do we need to embrace the fact that the Bible is primarily a narrative, but we need to realize that a narrative can be just as authoritative as a propositional statement. The bad news for many evangelicals is that no amount of whining, rationalizing, or closing our eyes and wishing really, really hard will change the fact that Christianity’s authoritative document—the document that God intended us to have—looks more like The Lord of the Rings than The Collected Sayings of Gandalf.

Smith claims that one of the motivations behind Biblicism is the fear that if the Bible is not a foundationalist document from which we derive unambiguous, instruction-like directives to govern every area of our lives, then it cannot be authoritative. Along with N.T. Wright, Smith asserts that the modern evangelical is so steeped in the primacy of scientism that he cannot conceive how a narrative could be considered authoritative. So rather than accept the Bible in the form that God gave it to us, biblicists have tried to convince themselves (and everyone else) that the Bible is something that it obviously is not.

For the moment, I’m not going to explore what we might mean by the word “authoritative.” Right now, I just want to explore the assumption that evangelicals can't conceive how a narrative could have spiritual authority. I submit that evangelicals (and in fact most people) already know "in their bones" that narratives can be authoritative, they just don’t know that they know it. The challenge, then, is helping them realize what they already instinctively understand.

Stories are universal. Every tribe and culture since the dawn of time has told stories about who they are and why the world is the way it is. In the same way that all people everywhere possess a universal moral intuition, they also have a universal narrative intuition that instinctively drives them to tell and internalize stories. (My own view is that this narrative intuition is part of the imago dei, but that is a discussion for another day.)

Why is it that parents worry when their kids spend too much time playing Grand Theft Auto? Why do some conservative Christian parents try to ban Harry Potter from the school libraries? Why are scifi snobs (like myself) concerned about teenage girls who obsess over Twilight? It's because people instinctively know that stories can become so authoritative that they can infiltrate and inform a person’s worldview. We worry about (or in my case make fun of) something like Twilight because the beliefs and behaviors that are portrayed as positive in these stories, are, in fact, damaging. People intuitively understand that these narratives can become so powerful that they become the grid through which the world is filtered.

Stories are the easiest thing in the world to make authoritative. They get inside our head and become part of our cultural consciousness. I submit that one of the reasons that the Bible does not have the authority it used to—even for people who say they’re Christians—is because we have removed the one aspect of it that actually could infect, inspire, and transform us.

"It's like in the great stories, Frodo, the ones that really matter..."

I don’t think it would be hard to convince evangelicals that a narrative can be authoritative. Of all Smith’s specific suggestions as to how to begin reading the bible christocentrically, I think this would be the easiest one to start implementing. All we have to do is get people to consciously acknowledge something they already intuitively know. The problem is while people like N.T. Wright, Scot McKnight, Roger Olson, Kevin Vanhoozer, Christopher Wright, Christian Smith, and insignificant bloggers like myself have been banging this drum for a while, the word is not getting out to the local church.

So I’m asking for your help. What can we do to get the church to publicly acknowledge that authoritative narratives are alive and well, and living in our apartments? How do we get them celebrate the fact that the Bible is the greatest STORY ever told?

Will 2012 Be the Year of Bible Suffrage?

2012-01-04T03:49:00.000-08:00

Way back in October, before the National Meeting of the ETS…and Thanksgiving…and Christmas…and New Year’s…I read Christian Smith’s The Bible Made Impossible: Why Biblicism is Not a Truly Evangelical Reading of Scripture. In possibly one of the most inspiring chapters in any book that I’ve read in a long time, Smith wrote this:

A truly evangelical reading of scripture confronts us with a particular story and message that, if taken seriously, blows the doors off every assumption, outlook, and experience that we have ever had apart from Jesus Christ. The evangelical message of scripture shakes loose from us every misguided and idolatrous preconception about everything, literally everything, that we thought we knew, and then begins to rebuild us in the light of the singularly radical fact of who God is and therefore who we really are in relation to God and what he has done for us.

Wow! Who doesn't want that?

The problem was that after deconstructing what's wrong with the way most regular (read: non-scholar) evangelicals read the Bible, Smith admitted that he didn't really have any concrete alternatives except to throw out biblicism and read the Bible using what he calls a "christocentric" hermeneutic. Unfortunately, Smith provides few details about what this hermeneutic might look like other than a list of what presuppositions need to be tossed out, refurbished, or added. His suggestions include (1) employing critical realism as a philosophical paradigm; (2) accepting the Bible for what it is rather than what we wish it were (Amen!); (3) not starting the conversation with a preconceived definition of “inspiration;” and (4) reconsidering our definition of “biblical authority” in light of the fact that the Bible is primarily a narrative, not a set of propositions. (another Amen!)

After reading Smith's book, I was so excited by the prospect of being free of biblicism (and being able to liberate my friends), that I started a research project with the goal of providing Joe and Mary church-goer specific strategies describing exactly how to sit down and read their Bible christocentrically. I had intended all along to reboot the project after the holidays but was re-energized when I read a post by Daniel Kirk in which he itemized what he thought might be the key evangelical conversations in the coming year. His list (which I agree with, by the way) included gender, the question of human origins, and what is meant by "the gospel." He included “what the Bible is” as an afterthought, but revised his assessment in a later post when Rachel Held Evans got a huge response from her post "Loving the Bible for What It Is, Not What I Want It to Be."

As every Christian blogger knows, as Rachel goes, so goes the blogosphere. But the post that got my attention was James McGrath's "If You Can't Have the Bible You'd Love, Love the Bible You Have." In it, he suggests that forcing the Bible to be something it's not is a sign of profound disrespect.

Those who highlight places in the Bible where we encounter outmoded cosmology, historical problems, or simply things that seem weird to modern readers are frequently regarded as attacking the Bible. The irony is that most of us who highlight these things are interested in being honest about the Bible, not attacking it. For many of us, the acknowledgement that the Bible contains such features was difficult. If one one has to defend the Bible against people who are merely pointing out what it contains, then you aren't actually defending the real Bible, but an imagined one, made in your own image.

It is heartening that Smith, McGrath, Kirk, Evans, as well as many other scholars and bloggers are taking up the cause of Bible Suffrage. For the last century or so Western evangelicals have tried to squeeze the Bible into a Victorian corset in order to get it to look more like polite society. We have tried to remake the Bible in our own image: practical, no-nonsense, averse to the poetic instinct, and obsessed with compliance and productivity. And just like a woman in a corset, the Bible has been unable to breath, speak, or change the world like it would if it was allowed to be free.

Like most major paradigm shifts in the history of Christianity, the fight for Bible Suffrage will probably be a messy, contentious process. But I hope and pray that this will be the year that it finally breaks free of the blogosphere and spills out into the street.

To Any Women Called to the Christian Academy: Please Don't Walk Away

2012-01-02T04:58:00.000-08:00

Writing a plea does not come naturally to me. It goes against my personality to ask anyone to do anything. I am also not much of a fighter. I’ll stand up for what I believe in, but that’s more of a “don’t back down” mentality than a “full speed ahead” thing. But I can no longer keep silent about my growing suspicion that brilliant, gifted women are questioning whether it’s worth it to try to get a word in edgewise at the mainstream (read: male) academic table. So here is my plea to any woman who feels called by God to serve Him through the study and practice of theology or biblical studies in an academic setting—to any women who feels called to serve God in any environment dominated by men—don’t give up, back-down, or walk-away! Please!

While the whole question of whether women should preach, teach, or be in positions of authority cycles through the Christian blogosphere with dependable regularity, I usually try to ignore it. However, back in August I read a blog post by Ashley Moore in which she quoted Margaret Feinberg. When Feinberg was asked in an interview whether there was a “gender ghetto” in evangelical Christianity? Feinberg’s response was:

I wonder why we're even talking about this when there are so many needs around the world?…Now is not the time. When every starving person has food, when every homeless person has a place to live, when every well is dug, when AIDS has been eradicated in Africa, when all of our neighbors know Jesus, then we can sit and debate about titles and who should do what.

Moore’s response to this quote from Feinberg, which was much more restrained than what mine would have been, is that gender inequality in Christian leadership is a justice issue. No, it's not as critical or urgent as saving people’s lives, but social justice is not a tidy, self-contained list of problems that can be ticked off one at a time; it's an interconnected web of cause and effect. But more importantly, I sensed in Feinberg’s response more than a little rationalizing. If Feinberg can convince herself (and other women) that things like the gender ghetto within evangelical Christianity are superficial issues compared to world hunger, human trafficking and evangelism, then she can keep ignoring it as long as she wants to—and make other women feel guilty if we bring it up.

Fast forward to a few months later and the national meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society in San Francisco last November. Now, I knew that there wouldn’t be many women there, but a series of posts by Michael Bird and Brian LePort made me start to wonder whether I might, in fact, be stared at like some carnival oddity. By time I got on the plane for San Francisco, the charts illustrating how severely the ETS lags behind almost every other religious/academic organization in the number of female members had burned themselves into my brain. I wondered whether I would be sitting at dinner with a big invisible “quarantine” sign around me?

As it turned out, I was occasionally the only woman in the room, but more often I was one of two or three. And most of the men I met were downright giddy that a woman would want to pursue a PhD in theology, although they admitted that there was still a small contingent of hard complementarians who believed otherwise. My experience tells me that women would be welcomed at the ETS if they would come. The problem is that many women won’t feel comfortable until there’s a critical mass, and there won’t be a critical mass until more women come. As Michael Bird wrote in the post that started the whole ETS kerfuffle, “If you (women) don’t speak out for women’s issues among evangelicals, then who will? Don’t count on me, I’m male, and I’ll be too busy going to the various receptions and browsing the book exhibits, so it’ll have to be you girlfriend!”

By the time I got back from ETS, it was time to start prepping for the holidays. My days were spent in a haze of cleaning, shopping, and writing posts about Advent and the commercialization of Christmas. One day though, one of my favorite bloggers, Amanda Mac, wrote something that made me stop the holiday whirlwind. Apparently, another of those inevitable arguments had erupted on the blogosphere about whether women can lead or teach in church. The details really don’t matter, although you can read about it here. What mattered was Amanda’s response (paragraph returns have been removed for the sake of space):

I don’t know that there is any more fruitful discussion to be had about this topic around the blogosphere. It just ends up being a way for those who already know which side of the debate they’re on to affirm their position and sharpen their polemic against the other side. Part of me is tempted to do a self-imposed moratorium on writing about women and ministry issues on CW Theology. Part of me says, “Amanda are you nuts? Writing about women in ministry brings in the big page hits.” Part of me wants to throw everyone in a UFC cage and let them fight it out — The last person standing wins. All of me is tired.

In her post, Amanda links to another popular blog “Emerging Mummy,” in which Sarah Styles Bessey writes that she’s “leaving the men’s table:”

So I am no longer standing beside your table, asking for a seat, working and serving and hoping to be noticed and then offered a seat or arguing for my right to a seat. I don't care to sit here anymore. I have not desire to be indoors, in your neat boxes. Instead, I am outside with the misfits, with the rebels, the dreamers, the people of the second chance, the radical grace givers, the ones with arms wide open, the ones that you've rejected as not worthy of being listened to and I will be happy here.

This is a wonderful post, full of joy and triumph. And leaving, for Sarah, may be a gift that God has given her, but my concern is that she makes leaving the men’s table sound so empowering and downright sensible that women may leave who really need to stay.

It’s a ruthless truth that evangelical academics is an overwhelmingly (white) man’s world. Even the theological blogosphere, which should, theoretically, be a level playing field, is ruled by men. Biblioblog’s listing of almost 300 theological blogs is a testosterone fest. And as I’ve said before, the comments section of even egalitarian blogs like Scot McKnight and Roger Olson is populated primarily by men. Then there's Amanda Mac's Great Blog Experiment of last year in which she took all personal references off her blog, essentially making herself anonymous. When commenting on other blogs she used only her initials or some other genderless pseudonym. What she found was that people were more likely to click on the link to her blog when she was anonymous than when she used her real name and went back to being a girl.

Now other than a few specific hard complementarian sites and seminaries (and we all know who they are), I don’t think most of these guys are doing this on purpose. With a few notable exceptions, I don’t think there’s an active conspiracy to keep women out of the evangelical academy or the theological blogosphere. I do think that there is a centuries-old paradigm that continues to infect us all and that must be destroyed. It is a paradigm that assumes that men, and only men, can interact with deep theological topics, and that women always speak from their hearts rather than their heads.

I have, literally, sat around the table with these men and been part of the conversation. I have spoken and been spoken to and many (though admittedly not all) of these men are ready and willing to talk deep theology with a woman. But how will the rest of the masculine academic tribe ever have this experience if women don’t pull up a chair and start talking—regardless of the odd reactions they might get. The reason I feature my photo prominently on my blog and also started attaching my photo when I comment on other people’s blogs is because I want people to get used to seeing a woman’s face. Focusing that much attention on myself does not come naturally and still feels kind of weird (as it probably does to a lot of women), but I encourage female bloggers and commenters to start doing the same.

Back in September, Leanne Dzubinski wrote a wonderful post called “God Will Make a Way,” in which she challenges the frequently-held belief that if God intends a women to use her gifts in a non-traditional ministry that God will open a door for her to walk through. Dzubinski challenges this assumption on two fronts. The first problem, she says, is the assumption that if a women is not offered an opportunity to use her gifts that there is something wrong with her. The possibility that there might be something wrong with the system never enters her mind. The second problem is that it removes the responsibility of the woman to act, encouraging her to passively leave everything in the hands of providence. But the Bible tells us that God does not want us to be passive. God called Abraham, Moses, the prophets, and the New Testament Church (to name just a few). Then he expected Abraham, Moses, the prophets, and the New Testament Church to go and do what he asked them to do—regardless of the obstacles. “While God absolutely can and sometimes does miraculously change things for us,” writes Dzubinski “can we also consider that perhaps we need to work together to change the system?"

I ask any woman who has been called by God to study theology, hermeneutics, or apologetics (and you know who you are) to just do it. I encourage any women who feels discouraged or tired because she sits in a classroom populated entirely by men to remind herself that obstacles are not evidence that she should give up. I demand (and I don’t demand things very often) that if you are not called to “women’s ministry” that you do not let others channel you in that direction. And I humbly ask that if you want to blog about complex theological issues, do it. Do it often. Do it well. And let everyone know about it.

Revisiting the Argument for Egalitarianism

2011-12-30T15:09:00.000-08:00

In preparation for an upcoming post which will, among other things, plead with women NOT to walk away from evangelical academia or disengage from the theological blogging community, I am reposting a previous blog that explains my (rather unique) position on those problematic little passages from 1 Corinthians 14 and 1 Timothy 2.

The debate about whether women are biblically prohibited from being in positions of authority over men is framed by basically two groups. In one corner are those who call themselves complementarians and believe that the Bible teaches that men are given authority that women are not. Specifically, they believe that the Bible prohibits women from having authority over men in the area of theological and biblical teaching or in pastoral care. (This post does not address egalitarianism/complementarianism in marriage) In the other corner are the egalitarians, who believe that the Bible teaches that there is no differentiation of authority based on gender.

Both groups are made up of very nice, smart people who use scripture to support their arguments and disagree with each other in loving, Christ-like ways. They probably all say “please” and “thank-you” and send birthday cards to their siblings (which is more than I do). Most complementarians do not hate women and are not secretly trying to control them. Most of them truly believe that this is what the Bible teaches and are just trying make sense of it the best they can. Most egalitarians do not deny that there are basic differences between men and women and will readily admit that men generally have more upper body strength and that women are generally more likely go to the ballet.

I happen to have disagreements with both teams. Although I consider myself an egalitarian, I think my my brothers and sisters in arms are deluding themselves by believing that the scriptural basis for their argument is nearly as strong as that of the complementarians. If I approach the applicable scriptures (1 Corinthians 14 and 1 Timothy 2) as honestly as I can, I think the passages in question pretty clearly show Paul telling all women everywhere to be silent and submissive. The bending and stretching that some exegetes do in order to demonstrate that Paul isn't really saying what he seems to be saying is, in the words of the The Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood (CBMW) a “hermeneutical oddity devised to reinterpret apparently plain meaning of texts.” For the record, this is the very last time I will quote the CBMW in the context of agreeing with them, but I simply cannot explain away these passages based on exegesis alone.

On the other hand, complementarians pretend that Paul’s insistence that women be under male authority is not a justice issue when it obviously is. The CBMW website declares that men and women are “equal in the image of God, but maintain complementary differences in role and function.” It seems to me that the reason that complementarians go to such great lengths to claim that their viewpoint does not give women less intrinsic value is because deep down they know that it does. No amount of arguing that “men and women are equal in value and dignity” or that they “share equally in the blessings of salvation” changes the fact that saying that a women must never usurp a man’s authority necessarily makes her, in an essential way, lesser. Deep down, most people know that this just isn’t fair. As Leslie and Chad Segraves write in their Lausanne Paper The Partnership of Males and Females in the New Global Equilibrium, “The issue of how women can serve cannot remain in a sterile academic arena because it involves an issue of justice for over half the body of Christ and strikes deep at their personal identity.” (To read my complete response to the Segraves' article, go to http://conversation.lausanne.org/en/conversations/detail/10853 )

Of course, there are many people who will say "it doesn't matter what we think/feel, we must obey the Bible regardless of our personal feelings." One day I will write a blog about the huge problems with that particularly mindless Christian slogan, but for now, I'm just going to explain why I question the applicability of two passages that I just said were pretty clearly normative.

As in all the churches of the saints, the women should be silent in the churches, for they are not permitted to speak. Rather, let them be in submission, as in fact the law says. If they want to find out about something, they should ask their husbands at home, because it is disgraceful for a woman to speak in church. (1 Corinthians 14:33-35 NET)

A woman must learn quietly with all submissiveness. But I do not allow a woman to teach or exercise authority over a man. She must remain quiet. For Adam was formed first and then Eve. And Adam was not deceived, but the woman, because she was fully deceived, fell into transgression. (1 Timothy 2:11:14 NET)

For arguments sake, let's say that I do believe that Paul intends these two passages to apply to all women everywhere? What do I do with Phoebe, who was a deacon and probably the first person to read Paul's letter to the Romans in public? What do I do with the multiple examples of women who taught, prophecied, and lead in the early church? What, in fact, do I do with 1 Corinthians 11 where Paul refers to the fact that women were currently praying and prophecying during worship and there is no indication that he disapproves of the practice. I could be wrong here, but logic would dictate that if someone is prophecying in public, they have to actually be speaking. Most especially, what do I do with Junia, who according to Scot McKnight's book Junia is Not Alone was an Apostle. "Which means," says McKnight, "(because this is what apostles did) she was in essence a Christ-experiencing, Christ-representing, church-establishing, probably miracle-working, missionizing woman who preached the gospel and taught the church."

As a Christian, I am to read and take to heart ALL of the Bible, not just parts of it. And as someone who interprets the Bible through the character and work of Christ, I cannot grab hold of the two most restrictive verses about what women can do and use them as a grid through which I interpret the multiple other passages which describe women as vibrant leaders in the early church. My final assessment of 1 Corinthians 14 and 1 Timothy 2 is that there must be something going on in that situation that is not available to the modern reader—something that would solve the puzzle for us. And since we don't know what that something is, it just seems more reasonable to err on the side of freedom?

It’s an uncomfortable truth that the Bible speaks with different voices on many issues. It is this truth that makes the idea of using the Bible as some sort of "manual" so ridiculous. The Bible requires us to do the hard work of wrestling with God and constantly allowing Him to challenge us. The Bible demands that we interact with it, not just flippantly say we obey it. Complementarians seem to be taking the easy way out by hanging their entire argument on a few passages and claiming that the Bible speaks with a single voice on this issue when it does not. More importantly, it seems foolhardy to prohibit half the population from using their leadership gifts based on concepts that are not consistent even within the New Testament itself. As Craig Keener, Professor of New Testament Studies at Palmer Theological Studies writes "Given even a few clear examples of women's ministry in the Bible, is one text (or at most two), which may be situationally conditioned, enough to deny or substantially restrict a group of laborers for the kingdom?"

What to Do When Christmas Has Been Diagnosed with Multiple-Personality Disorder

2011-12-20T07:16:00.000-08:00

My life-long relationship with Christmas has gone through several phases. As a child, of course, my affection was based on waking up on Christmas morning and finding a pile of gifts under the tree. Our family was relatively poor compared to most of my friends, but seeing piles of presents under a twinkling evergreen on December 25 somehow made everything OK for the rest of the year.

After I had my own kids, the meaning of Christmas changed once more. Now, not only could I wallow in my own soft-focused 8mm memories, but I could become the creator of new memories for my children. Suddenly, the act of unpacking and displaying 30-year-old holiday decorations became a cherished ritual. I became obsessed with creating traditions that my own kids would remember when they reran their mental home movies years from now. Perhaps they would even become Christmas addicts like their mother.

But over the years, what began as a simple relationship based on glitter and packaging became more and more muddled. Jesus was part of my Christmas, certainly, but He had been combined with equal parts Santa, Charles Dickens, Frank Capra, Bing Crosby, and Charlie Brown. Whatever purely religious feelings that may have been prompted by contemplating the tiny nativity atop the piano as a child had long since been swallowed up by countless other mid-century Christmas pleasures. I still loved my favorite holiday, but I wasn't sure how to talk to it anymore.

In the last few years, my relationship with Christmas has changed yet again. I now have a renewed passion for celebrating Christmas as the Birth of Christ, Israel's long-awaited Messiah. But this renewal has happened not because of some well-meaning evangelical campaign to “put Christ back in Christmas;” it has happened because I have come to realize that Christmas is not the well-adjusted adult that I had thought it was. Christmas has multiple-personality disorder. I have to cut it some slack.

The problem was that while I thought I was in a relationship with only one Christmas, I was actually in a relationship with three (possibly four, but I’ll get to that in a minute).

The first, and oldest, of the Christmases is the Pagan Christmas, from which we get our modern traditions of decorating Christmas trees, hanging mistletoe, and feasting ‘til our buttons pop. The second holiday might be called the Religious Christmas which focuses on the birth of Jesus as the promised Messiah, fulfilling God’s purpose for Israel and reconciling the world to Himself. The third, and most recent, incarnation of this holiday dates only from about the mid-19^th century and is what I call the Family Christmas. When the industrial revolution began to transform the social fabric of England and America in the mid 19th century, a new emphasis on family and children changed the entire character of the Christmas holiday, creating the "I'll be home for Christmas" zeitgeist that we observe today. Two World Wars since then have only solidified Christmas' position as the ultimate celebration of hearth and home.

If there is a fourth Christmas, it is the holiday created by 20^th century marketers called the Commercial Christmas. It is this fourth Christmas that, for obvious reasons, I have turned my back on completely. In a recent post, Skye Jethani suggested that many of the conservative Christians demanding that we put Christ back in Christmas are not necessarily offended by the naked commercialization of Jesus’ birth, but only by the fact that it is Santa, rather than Jesus, who has become the “mascot” of Christmas marketing. If he’s right (and I suspect he is), it makes me want to get as far away as possible from anything to do with shopping from Thanksgiving through Jan 2.

Acknowledging the existence of the three Christmases has freed me to appreciate what is spiritually profound about each type of Christmas. Ironically, it is the traditions associated with the Pagan Christmas that have most re-energized my appreciation of the Religious Christmas. The Yule Log, the Christmas Tree, and the human instinct to come in from the cold and celebrate life when death is all around are all powerful symbols created by cultures whose lives depended on the cycle of the seasons. I respect these pagan mid-winter traditions because they are proof that no matter how corrupted we are by the Fall, our collective unconscious understands the significance of light coming into the world when it is darkest. Jeremy Myers makes a similar point in his blog post “Pagan Holidays Point to Christ,” and asks why so many Christians are uncomfortable with the idea of pagan myths prophetically pointing to Jesus? “Can nature point people to Jesus?” He asks “Can our conscience? How about art and music? Then why not stories? Especially when they reflect what we have seen in nature and felt in our conscience?"

It is hard for me to admit, but it is the Family Christmas that really vexes and perplexes me. From where I stand, the Family Christmas has replaced the Religious Christmas in the hearts of many Christians. Even if I disagree with him, it’s hard to argue with a devout believer who looks me in the eye and says “Christmas is about family.” And if churches close their doors when Christmas falls on a Sunday, the reason given is invariably so that the staff can spend Christmas with their families. At the risk of sounding like a hard-hearted Pharisee, I have to wonder which Christmas is being prioritized by telling people to stay home, open presents, and visit the grandparents?

I wonder if returning to a modernized version of the Old World calendar might work? If we once again observed Advent in the month leading up to Christmas, then celebrated the coming of Christ with Christmas Eve worship, it would allow the Family Christmas to take center stage on Christmas Day. Then some combination of the Family/Pagan Christmas could be celebrated for the entire twelve days after Christmas. (And it would really help if we all dressed up like we were going to the Renaissance Faire.)

Obviously, I don’t really expect anyone to listen to me. I don't think it would even necessarily solve the problem of what to do when Christmas falls on a Sunday. But a return to the Old World calendar would effectively separate the Religious Christmas from the Family Christmas and take the pressure off of those of us who enjoy both.

In the meantime, I am content to celebrate all three Christmases in their proper proportions (consciously rejecting the Commercial Christmas, of course). I will enjoy the traditions of a Family Christmas by writing letters to Santa and curling up on the sofa with my kids to watch “It’s a Wonderful Life.” I will celebrate the Pagan Christmas by hosting holiday parties, hanging mistletoe, and asking my rowdiest friends to come in from the cold for a turkey leg and some hot rum punch.

And I will remember the TRUE meaning of Christmas by preparing for and welcoming God incarnate into the world. A healthy relationship with Christmas has been restored with just a little holiday therapy.

Paganism, Capitalism, and the True Meaning of Christmas

2011-12-15T04:21:00.000-08:00

As I started to write a new post about Christmas, I realized that this post from last year says a lot of what I want to say this year...

I was talking with a friend recently who did not know that I was a Christmas junkie and gasped when she found out. “It just doesn’t seem like something you’d be into,” she said. “You’re so…..cynical.” I laughed out loud because she’s absolutely right. I am the type of person who stands in the back of motivational seminars and makes snide remarks about people’s lack of critical-thinking ability. But weirdly enough, I love anything to do with Christmas. I love Christmas movies, Christmas music (except for “The Christmas Shoes” of course), and Christmas decorations—even the kitschy ones. (The thing I have lost any passion for is Christmas presents, but more on that later).

Part of this love of Christmas comes from my parents. We were relatively poor growing up, but my mom and dad always made sure our Christmases were the best on the block. My mom grew up poor as well and I think that she wanted to make sure that we had at least one day of the year that was truly magical. My friends may have had heat in their bedrooms and been able to go to bed at night without wearing 3 layers of sweaters, socks, and mittens, but I was always surprised by the fact that they got fewer presents from Santa than I did. My mom is one of those people who intuitively understands that for a child, waking up on Christmas morning and seeing presents under the tree is not about greed or materialism; it's about wonder. It’s about the possibility that there is still magic in the world.

While I still believe in the symbolic power of holiday gift-giving for children and those truly in need, I have sworn off giving obligatory gifts to people for whom exchanging gifts is solely a social affectation or a status symbol. But neither am I going to preach here about how Jesus is the reason for the season or lament how Christ has been taken out of Christmas. It can be argued that Christ has only really been in Christmas for the last 200 years or so. The Puritans who came to America wouldn’t even celebrate Christmas because it had become such a wanton festival of debauchery back in England. Many scholars are pretty sure that Jesus wasn’t even born in the winter and it's probable that the early church chose to designate December 25 as the birth of Christ to coincide with mid-winter festivals that the pagans were already celebrating.

But I am still a fan of Christmas because the crazy combination of paganism, puritanism, and capitalism that we call the modern Christmas is deeply rooted in a profound spiritual truth. Mid-winter is the bleakest time of the year. There is more darkness than light and simply going outside one’s door can be life-threatening. So what does humanity do? It gathers together to burn a Yule Log and keep each other warm until Spring. It brings light into the darkness. I suspect that it’s this metaphor of bringing light into darkness that made the celebration of the Winter Solstice and the birth of Christ such an easy partnership. The idea of gathering together, of protecting and feeding each other, and of finding simple pleasure in each other’s company when we could just choose to curl up and let winter win is humanity’s way of saying that we will not go quietly into the night. We will light a fire and wait for Spring.

God says the same thing to us in the birth of Christ. Although it may not be historically accurate, it is intuitively appropriate that Christ comes into the world in the darkness of mid-winter, bringing just the first sparkle of light. Then we take that light and run with it. From candles to Christmas trees to Rockefeller Center, our celebration of the winter holidays requires that we light up everything. I will sit through a really bad Christmas cantata in order to experience being in the dark with 100 people then lighting up the room one-by-one with our hokey little Christmas candles.

I will not be giving a lot of presents this year, not because I don’t love my friends and family, but because I do. Instead I will be sharing light. I will be lighting candles, plugging in the Christmas tree, and even putting the kitschy 40-year-old plastic Santa Mouse on the porch. I will invite my friends and family to come in from the darkness and experience the true meaning of Christmas—that in the darkest, coldest season of the year, God sent His light.

A Christmas Addict converts to Advent (sort of)

2011-12-06T07:58:00.001-08:00

The noise and materialism of the modern Christmas is sending more and more Christians (including myself) fleeing back to the tradition of Advent. Check out my guest post at one of my favorite blogs, Cheese-Wearing Theology.

How Does a Compatibilist Watch "A Christmas Carol?"

2011-11-25T07:53:00.001-08:00

The 1951 "A Christmas Carol" with Alistair Sim is, hands down, the best film version of Charles Dicken's classic ever made. I have watched this film a hundred times since childhood and am always moved when Scrooge awakes on Christmas morning with the radically transformed heart of a redeemed man. Sim's portrayal perfectly captures the joyful giddiness of a man who has been undeservedly saved from the fires of hell. How often such joy resembles insanity!

But as I watched the movie last night, I wondered for the first time how a compatibilist would experience this story? For anyone fortunate enough not to be interested in these sorts of things, compatibilism is the theory that attempts to explain how God can meticulously control every human action, yet still hold people morally responsible for their decisions.

Compatibilism asserts that at any given moment, a person is not free to choose whether he will do one thing or another, but rather will always act in accordance with his deepest desire. According to compatibilists, man does not have the ability to choose anything contrary to that desire, but the fact that he is acting from his own inclination means that he can be held morally responsible for his choice. "Freedom," according to Bruce Ware, "is not freedom of contrary choice but freedom to choose and act in accordance with what I most want." Compatibilism does not allow anyone to ever choose anything other than what they most want.

I have said in a previous post that I don't understand how a consistent compatibilist can enjoy a story in which the central tension is whether or not the hero will choose to do the right thing. Returning to last night's viewing of "A Christmas Carol," if my understanding of compatibilism is correct, Scrooge will always, in every situation, choose what he most wants to do. He cannot choose otherwise. According to compatibilism, God adjusts each situation so that Scrooge will do exactly what God wants him to do, but only because it is what Scrooge wants to do anyway. So when Scrooge drops to his knees in front of his tombstone at the end of the story, it was not possible that he could have done otherwise.

My problem with compatibilism is not that it's not logical. I can understand how a compatabilist might deconstruct "A Christmas Carol." I could probably even replicate the entire plot using compatibilist assumptions about how each choice brought Scrooge inexorably to his final repentence. But why bother? If there is no point anywhere in the story where Scrooge could have chosen otherwise, where is the dramatic tension? I can understand how a compatibilist would appreciate the process by which God changes Scrooges' heart, but if the possibility does not exist that Scrooge might not repent, the theme of Dicken's story is foundationally altered and the climax is reduced to just one more behaviorist plot point.

One of my primary objections to compatibilism is that it flattens out—and ultimately destroys—narrative structure. The ability of the hero to freely choose between right and wrong is foundational to the universal human understanding of what it means to tell a story. If there's anyone out there who can provide a consistently compatibilist intepretation of "A Christmas Carol," I would be very interested to hear it.

Day Two at the ETS

2011-11-18T14:57:00.001-08:00

On the second day of the ETS meeting in San Francisco, I was introduced to something of an academic hullabaloo. In the morning, I attended a paper criticizing Peter Enns’ theory of divine accommodation. While this controversy is several years old, the presenter was still very much concerned about “progressive evangelicals” like Enns who are calling for a redefinition of biblical inerrancy. While I didn't agree with the presenter’s viewpoint, I found it encouraging that the paper was presented to a standing-room-only crowd from diverse theological backgrounds who all managed to behave like mature Christians. Yes, there were small traces of sarcasm throughout the presentation, but I had the feeling that had Enns been there, the audience would have listened respectfully and disagreed respectfully.

Following that session, I went to hear Michael Licona respond to the controversy surrounding his interpretation of Matthew 27:52-53. Licona, it seems, has written a book about the historicity of the resurrection in which he suggests that the description of people rising from the dead immediately after Jesus’ resurrection may not have been an historical event. In his book, Licona suggests that it is just as likely that Matthew intended it as a kind of apocalyptic symbolism designed to emphasize the significance of Jesus' resurrection. After the publication of the book, evangelical scholar Norman Geisler accused Licona of rejecting biblical inerrancy and just generally being a bad influence on everyone. (For more info on the original controversy, click here).

Licona’s concern—and the concern of most people in the session I attended—was the possibility that a specific interpretation of any text might become a litmus test for whether a person holds an “orthodox” view of inerrancy. Echoing N.T. Wright in Scripture and the Authority of God, Licona said in the session that our primary question as readers of scripture should be how the author intended the passage to be understood. Licona, for his part, is trying to be as respectful of the original intent of the text as possible. As far as I know, that’s what every evangelical scholar aims to do.

What has happened to Licona has caused ripples throughout the academic community. As Licona said in the session, when someone who simply disagrees with a specific interpretation of a particular passage is accused of rejecting the concept of inerrancy itself—and subsequently ostracized—scholarship itself suffers. People who might have published important research lock it away in fear of losing their jobs.

It does seem (to this outsider, at least) that the ETS is trying to maintain an open dialogue regarding this issue. Most of the people who attended the session fervently agreed with Licona about what is at stake here. In fact, most of them seemed to agree with his interpretation of Matthew 27:56-57. While there is certainly much more going on behind the scenes than this humble student can see, what I have experienced so far is encouraging. Of course scholars have different interpretations of scripture. It's hard for any scholarly organization to balance allegiance to its creeds with academic freedom. And while I respectfully disagree with the ETS' disparaging position towards something like Open Theism (for example), this kind of open dialogue is what scholarship is—and should be—all about.

Great Day at the ETS

2011-11-17T07:35:00.001-08:00

The first day of the Evangelical Theological Society (ETS) annual meeting is over. So far I’ve attended four small sessions, one book symposium, and the reception for the Evangelical Philosophical Society. By my calculations, approximately 8% of the attendees are female, but that figure also includes women who obviously fall into the “spouse” category. Although this statistic remains shamefully dismal, I am happy to report that, so far, no one has asked me where my husband teaches. I howled with laughter, however, when someone asked Jerry Walls (The Theistic Foundations of Morality) if he was my father.

My biggest frustration with the conference has been that there are just too many papers being presented at the same time. I had to miss “Emotion and Moral Knowledge” to attend the symposium on The Theistic Foundations of Morality and I’m going to have to miss both “Moral Responsibility and the Freedom to Do Otherwise” and “A Call to Moral Apologetics,” to attend the Paul Copan/Dallas Willard session. Friday will be even worse when I have to miss “Conceptual Backgrounds and Sacrifice Theology in Hebrews” and decide between “Seeing the Sacred in Film” and “A Discussion of VanHoozer’s Remythologizing Theology.” I really wish the organizers would dilute the density of the schedule just a little.

My biggest take away from the first day of ETS is how not to present an academic paper. The first session I attended could have been interesting, but I couldn’t tell. The author could have been reading a well-written paper containing solid evidence that supported a logical, compelling conclusion, but I couldn’t tell. The presenter read his paper so fast and so loud that it was impossible to follow what he was actually saying. In contrast, I also attended a paper by a much younger PhD candidate. This paper should have been harder to understand because the topic was more dependent upon discipline-specific terminology, but the presenter read his paper slowly, stopped often to clarify, and was more relaxed and conversational in his body language. This will all be helpful to remember when I present a paper….someday.

It has been a pleasant surprise that while the ETS attendees are overwhelmingly white, male, and over 40, there is a spirit of unity and openness that seems to permeate the event. The Calvinists and Arminians throw good-natured jabs (and occasional well-aimed body blows) at each other, and the scholars on stage often disagree, but their mutual affection is obvious. Everyone here loves Jesus and is committed to the importance of using one's intellect to serve Him.

I am beginning to suspect, however, that Paul Copan (Is God a Moral Monster?) needs an intervention. A group of loving Christian brothers need to come around him and help him overcome his compulsion to pun.

Hip Deep in Theology in San Francisco

2011-11-16T07:04:00.001-08:00

I'll be tweeting from the national meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society in San Francisco this week. Tweeting is not a natural thing for me, so I only do it when I'm at an event (or see someone famous, which doesn't happen very often in central PA). If you're interested, you can follow @lckeeneyMonk or #ETS11.

How Yentl, Tolkien, and Tom Petty influenced my decision to go to the ETS

2011-11-11T06:57:00.001-08:00

Do you remember your first trip to the amusement park? It was a new world of sensory overload and you got excited just thinking about doing all the things you’d never done before. Then one day some well-meaning adult relative decided to make sure you understood the risks. “Those rollercoasters are old and rickety and people get killed on them every year,” she said knowingly. “And if you get lost in a crowd of 1000 people you’ll be lost forever because your parents will never find you,” she added. Then just for good measure she threw in “Don’t drink anything because there’s only one bathroom and you have stand in line for an hour to use it.”

Suddenly, something that you were looking forward to became something you were dreading. Will the roller coaster fall apart while I’m on it? Will I loose my parents in the crowd? Will I get food poisoning or heat stroke? Will I have to go the bathroom and not be able to find one?

Something akin to this happened to me this week when several blogger/scholars that I respect posted this…and this….and this….about the upcoming annual meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society in San Francisco. For those who don’t know, the ETS is the primary professional organization for “Biblical scholars, teachers, pastors, students, and others involved in evangelical scholarship.” Technically, I belong to the Evangelical Philosophical Society which is, in my opinion, much cooler, but it’s part of the same organization and has its conference in conjuction with the ETS.

I really only decided to go to ETS when I saw that David Baggett and Jerry Walls were giving a symposium on my favorite book of the year Good God: The Theistic Foundations of Morality. But as I learned more about the conference, I was excited about listening to and learning from people like Paul Copan, Dallas Willard, and Kevin VanHoozer. Then I noticed a few papers that really piqued my interest, including one called "Conceptual Backgrounds and Sacrifice Theology in Hebrews" which seems, at least from the title, to be very close to my own thesis. Although I wouldn’t know anyone there, I was excited about the idea of going and just taking copious notes.

Then I read Michael Bird’s post (see first link above). According to Michael, women are such a rarity at ETS that many people will assume that any woman they meet is the spouse of an attendee and they will ask her where her husband teaches. From comments on other blogs, I also learned that there is a small contingent of complementarians who think women shouldn’t even be allowed to present academic papers at the conference. At the time of the writing of this post, statistics and charts illustrating how severely the ETS lags behind almost every other religious/academic organization regarding female representation had been posted on several popular theology websites.

Now, I am aware that theology as an area of study is dominated by men. There are popular theology blogs where I have, literally, never seen a comment posted by a woman. I have previously suggested (somewhat tongue-in-cheek) that there are more women theologians on the internet than people think because some of them are actually pretending to be men. My theory is that these women know that they’re not welcome in the theological community and are disguising themselves as men a la Barbra Streisand in Yentl. (If you haven’t ever seen it, you should.)

What bothered me about these posts was not that women would be in the minority at ETS; any woman attender already knows that and is prepared for it. But I was beginning to get worried that the sexism would be even more blatant than I was expecting. Would male scholars not want to sit next to me because people would assume that I was their spouse? Would people ask where my husband was before they asked what school I’m affiliated with? Would the sexism be so blatant that even I, who normally doesn’t have any problem being the only woman in a room full of men, would feel uncomfortable?

Then I came to my senses and remembered who I am. I am the person who when asked on Facebook what my life’s “theme song” was, replied Tom Petty’s “I won’t back down.” I am the person who loves the scene in “The Two Towers” at Helm’s Deep when the people of Rohan are hopelessly outnumbered. On top of the barricade, King Theoden turns to Aragorn and says with steely resolve “If this is to be our end, then we will make it such an end as to be worthy of remembrance.” I am also the person who tells my friends that fighting for what's right is important, even if we lose. Heck, I write blogs about it.

I am not tortured or persecuted for my faith. I have not been threatened with bodily harm for trying to join a segregated club. I think I can handle a few men pursing their lips at me in disapproval. I’m going to ETS. I'm going to take copious notes and listen to some of the most brilliant evangelical thinkers in the country. If you see me, I’ll be the woman that no one is talking to, but who just doesn’t care.

Arthurian Legend as Post-Modern Fairy Tale

2011-11-07T08:25:00.000-08:00

If you've been wondering whether the BBC series "Merlin" is worth watching, I have a guest review up at Christ and Pop Culture that might encourage you to take a chance.

Towards A Christocentric Hermeneutic Part 1: Against Principlizing

2011-11-07T08:23:00.000-08:00

In The Bible Made Impossible: Why Biblicism is Not a Truly Evangelical Reading of Scripture, Christian Smith argues that the way most evangelicals read Scripture needs a complete overhaul. According to Smith, biblicist presuppositions that the Bible is an exhaustive, internally consistent, perfectly clear, and universally applicable repository of propositional truths fly in the face of what God actually gave us.

While Smith frames the debate more aggressively than other scholars, he is certainly not alone in saying that many evangelicals unwittingly reject the Bible we actually have (a narrative about how God is actively redeeming the world) and replace it with what they wish it were (a handbook for life with clear, concrete instructions). “One of the strangest things about the biblicist mentality,” writes Smith, “is its evident refusal to take the Bible at face value. Ironically, while biblicists claim to take the Bible with utmost seriousness for what it obviously teaches, their theory about the Bible drives them to make it something that it evidently is not.”

One of Smith’s more subtle insights is that “inductive” Bible study, which is the method for reading and understanding the Bible that most evangelicals (including myself) would say they use, asserts that we should work to understand what God is saying without allowing our presuppositions to inform the text. Ironically, though, many evangelicals who say they study the Bible inductively, actually ignore the biggest presupposition they have—that the ultimate purpose of the Bible is to provide us with a set of principles to live by.

In Four Views on Moving Beyond the Bible to Theology, Walter Kaiser argues for what is, in my experience, the primary model of how evangelicals read the Bible—principlizing. The principlizing model is characterized by first discovering what the “big idea” of the passage is, then restating the author’s point in “propositional principles” that can be applied directly to the reader’s life. This principilizing approach is the foundation for most "how to read the Bible" books and I occasionally use the principlizing method myself. But I also agree with Daniel Doriani’s critique of Kaiser's essay in which he says that principlizing “privileges one genre over another,” automatically making propositional forms of scripture, such as Paul’s letters, the genre through which all other scripture is screened. The result of a principlizing hermeneutic, says Doriani, is that “there can be no abiding interest in the genre of scripture. Once the principle is extracted, the God-given form of scripture falls away like a wheat husk.”

In the same book, Kevin VanHoozer and Mark Strauss both agree that the appeal of principlizing is that people “get it.” Principlizing “preaches.” A principlizing hermeneutic is simple and practical, but should the fact that a paradigm works be the measure of truth? It can be argued that Islam and Buddhism both work for their adherents as well. As Strauss writes in his critique of Kaiser's essay, “Should establishing principles really be the goal of interpretation? The Christian life is not about asserting rules or principles, but enacting God’s word in real life.”

Outside of Kaiser, most scholars I’ve read seem to be in agreement that trying to flatten Scripture out into some kind of manual is to reject the Bible that God actually gave us. Unfortunately, this message does not yet seem to have made it into the average evangelical church. When Scot McKnight’s book The Blue Parakeet came out a few years ago, I had hoped that it would make a greater impact on how regular Christians read the Bible. McKnight’s book is a clear, persuasive argument against reading the Bible as "morsels of promises" or trying to use it to “map God’s mind.” He, like Smith, talks honestly about the inability of the biblicist paradigm (although he doesn’t use words like “biblicist”) to incorporate the pieces of the Bible that don’t fit into systematic theology. He, like Smith, argues that we must let the Bible be the Bible and not force it into a preconceived notion of what we think it should be.

My little mini-research project has been a lot harder than I expected it to be. What does a “Christocentric Hermeneutic” look like? At this point, I can still only talk about what it doesn't look like. A christocentric hermeneutic might occasionally use principlizing in the process of interpreting a particular text, but it should not be the primary paradigm through which Scripture is viewed. Not only does principlizing inevitably diminish the narrative structure through which God has chosen to speak, it also has a tendency to make the reader the focus of whether Scripture "works." If simplicity and (especially) practicality are the ultimate measure of truth, all that God has done—and wants to do—will be filtered not through Christ, but through what the reader can understand and apply to his own life.

So far, the first step in developing a Christocentric hermeneutic seems to be to let go of preconceived ideas about how God speaks and let the Bible decide for itself what story it will tell.

First Christmas Rant of the Season

2011-11-01T09:32:00.000-07:00

Since it's November 1, it's now close enough to December 25 that I can start ranting about the commercialization of Christmas. Let me make it clear that I am not one of those people who complain that secular forces are trying to take the "Christ" out of Christmas. As far as I know, up until about 150 years ago, Christmas was more of an excuse for a frat party than anything else. What I do object to is the idea that celebrating Christmas (or any holiday for that matter) requires spending money. What I object to even more is the idea that one's enjoyment of—and participation in—Christmas is in direct proportion to the amount of money one spends.

The first example of this showed up in my inbox this morning. According to their email, L.L. Bean has "Five Ways to Happier Holidays," all of which have something to do with buying gifts, shipping gifts, or being guaranteed that a particular gift will make the holidays more fulfilling than they would have been otherwise.

I am annoyingly moderate about theology, politics, and other things that people are too often not moderate about, but I am an extremist when it comes to fighting against the assumption that the amount of money a person spends must necessarily impact how much joy one finds in celebrating Jesus' birthday.

I know that I will see many more ads like this throughout the holiday season. And I will rant about every single one.

Paradigm Shift Part 2: Good in Theory

2011-10-28T04:08:00.000-07:00

Reading Christian Smith’s The Bible Made Impossible: Why Biblicism is not a Truly Evangelical Reading of Scripture is a frustrating experience. On the one hand, I agree with most (but not all) of Smith’s thesis. On the other hand, he offers little in the way of alternatives to the biblicism that he has just effectively demonstrated doesn't work.

Smith's thesis is that biblicism, as practiced by most evangelicals, is made untenable by what he calls “pervasive interpretive pluralism” (PIP). Biblicism, as defined by Smith, is a “constellation of beliefs” that describe the Bible as a complete compendium of everything that God has to say on a myriad of topics and is easily understandable to any reasonably intelligent person. This view of the Bible also includes the assumption that all passages on any subject can be pieced together to create a systematic structure of unified, internally consistent biblical truths. Biblicism, taken to its logical conclusion, leads to what Smith calls “the handbook model” in which the Bible is seen as a textbook of inerrant teachings on everything from science to diet and exercise.

Pervasive Interpretive Pluralism is a problem because “the very same Bible—which biblicists insist is perspicuous and harmonious—gives rise to divergent understandings among intelligent, sincere, committed readers about what it says about most topics of interest.” One of the most obvious examples of PIP is the current debate between Calvinism and Arminianism in which both groups continue to lob scripture verses at each other with equal speed and accuracy, but Smith provides many other examples of PIP in which faithful readers reading the same Bible come to totally different conclusions.

While I have a few quibbles about Smith’s definition of biblicism and how many of his criteria must be fulfilled in order for one to be considered a biblicist, I agree with the broad sweep of Smith’s critique. (As everyone who reads this blog knows, I have huge issues with the “Bible as manual” metaphor.) But the next logical question is "what do we replace it with?" One reason biblicism has such a hold over evangelicals, even with its obvious weaknesses, is that it’s easy to understand. Any Bible teacher can sit in their small group and read through a passage using the “What it meant? What it means? How do I apply it?” Bible Study technique. But what shifts will be required to adapt to what is probably a less structured, more amorphous process?

Smith’s best chapter, “The Christocentric Hermeneutical Key,” is one of the most inspirational things I’ve read in a long time and is alone worth the price of the book:

“A truly evangelical reading of scripture confronts us with a particular story and message that, if taken seriously, blows the doors off every assumption, outlook, and experience that we have ever had apart from Jesus Christ. The evangelical message of scripture shakes loose from us every misguided and idolatrous preconception about everything, literally everything, that we thought we knew, and then begins to rebuild us in the light of the singularly radical fact of who God really is and therefore who we really are in relation to God and what he has done for us.”

Well, who doesn’t want that? Where do I sign up?

But how exactly do we go about reading the Bible this way?

To his credit, Smith realizes that he doesn't really have anything concrete to offer in the (always problematic) transition to a new biblical paradigm. He does, however, have a few suggestions about what presuppositions need to be tossed out, refurbished, or added in order to work toward a Christocentric hermeneutic. His suggestions include (1) employing critical realism as a philosophical paradigm; (2) accepting the Bible for what it is rather than what we wish it were (Amen!); (3) not starting the conversation with a preconceived definition of “inspiration;” and (4) reconsidering our definition of “biblical authority” in light of the fact that the Bible is primarily a narrative, not a set of propositions. (another Amen!)

I’ll be exploring how these ideas might work in practice in later posts, but for now I'm just happy that someone has written a book that has all of us talking about them.

Paradigm Shift Part 1: Rethinking Biblicism

2011-10-25T07:26:00.000-07:00

Christian Smith’s book The Bible Made Impossible: Why Biblicism is Not a Truly Evangelical Reading of Scripture came out back in August and instantly became the topic du jour on evangelical blogs—for about a week. While I enjoyed watching the pie fight between Smith and Kevin DeYoung (probably more than I should have), I had no plans to read it until Roger Olson decided to blog through it chapter by chapter. The book, though short (why don't people write books with more than 200 pages anymore?) turned out to be interesting and well-written. Although not the deep, exhaustively-researched exploration of hermeneutics I had hoped for, it was a scathingly honest expose of a big problem that no one seems to want to talk about.

Smith’s central claim is that much of evangelicalism reads the Bible using a paradigm he calls “Biblicism” (which I’ll define in a moment). Biblicism is doomed, says Smith, because it cannot be logically or consistently implemented and it forces its adherents to “engage in various forms of textual selectivity, denial, and contortion which actually end up violating Biblicist intentions.” In Smith’s words, Biblicism is “untenable.”

While I am sympathetic to many of Smith's arguments, his definition of biblicism is problematic. He describes 10 specific beliefs about the Bible that when combined in the mind of the typical evangelical reader result in what he calls "biblicism", but he is unclear as to whether a typical biblicist must subscribe to all 10, or whether just one or two are sufficient to merit the name. For example, #5 in his “constellation of related assumptions” is what he calls “a common sense hermeneutic.” Smith describes this as the assumption that “the best way to understand biblical texts is by reading them in their explicit, plain, most obvious, literal sense, as the author intended them at face value…”

Now, if one removes the notoriously slippery word “literal,” I would say that this approach to scripture is the one that I usually use. Does agreeing with this one point make me a Biblicist? And what if I agree with two or three other assumptions on his list but in a much more nuanced way than he describes them? Am I a Biblicist? Apparently not, because to Smith, the hallmark of a Biblicist is the belief that the Bible is a “handbook” that “teaches doctrine and morals with every affirmation that it makes" and is "a compendium of divine and therefore inerrant teachings on a full array of subjects—including science, economics, health, politics, and romance.” As anyone who reads this blog knows, I hate, loathe, and despise the metaphor that describes the Bible as a “manual” or “handbook.” So while I might subscribe to a few nuanced versions of Smith’s 10 “Biblicist” views, I am probably disqualified from being a biblicist simply by merit of my vehement aversion to the handbook metaphor.

In the first half of the book, Smith explores in detail all the reasons why biblicism is a woefully inadequate way of reading the Bible and will ultimately always fail as a hermeneutic. While not all of Smith’s arguments are equally persuasive, he presents sufficient evidence to suggest that there is something drastically wrong with attempting to turn the Bible into “a holy handbook to help people live more manageable lives.” But it is in the second half of the book that Smith becomes more than just a social critic and morphs into an agent for change. In my very favorite chapter, “The Christocentric Hermeneutical Key,” Smith begins to offer alternative ways of reading scripture designed to reorient the reader away from a self-centered reading to a God-centered reading. “Truly believing that Jesus Christ is the real purpose, center, and interpretive key to scripture," Smith writes, "causes one to read the Bible in a way that is very different than believing the Bible to be an instruction manual containing universally applicable divine oracles concerning every possible subject it seems to address.”

Smith admits that this Christocentric paradigm is not new. He is not announcing some earth-shattering new model of Bible study that no one has ever thought of before. But what he succeeds in doing is making a case for why now is the time to start making the change. My biggest frustration with Smith's book is that it inspires me to look at scripture through new eyes, but gives me no practical methodology for doing so. It’s all well and good to motivate the reader to start reading the Bible through a christological lens, but how exactly do we do that? Smith provides little in the way of specifics, so it's the reader's job to put one foot in front of the other and figure out what to do next.

Which is just what I intend to do...

Keeping Up with the "Hot" New Paradigms

2011-10-19T10:18:00.000-07:00

I do not react immediately to most things. Whether it’s a bit of local gossip or a controversial new book, my first instinct is to wait, get all the facts (at least as many as I can), and only then come to a conclusion. While this habit certainly serves to keep me out of trouble, it also puts me at least a few weeks (and sometimes a few months) behind whatever the current “hot” issue is.

There are several exciting things happening in evangelicalism right now. Many of them, I think, will eventually turn out to have a positive (dare I say “significant?”) impact in the coming years. But as per my habit, I’m taking things slowly, doing my research, and listening to the dissenting voices before I start writing about it.

A couple of weeks ago, I read through Christian Smith’s The Bible Made Impossible: Why Biblicism is Not a Truly Evangelical Reading of Scripture. In his book, Smith raises some important issues that deserve to be honestly examined within the Christian community. But as often happens, the critical reaction to the book revealed a serious division within the faith community not only about the importance of the issues themselves, but also about whether evangelicalism was even ready to address them. So rather than do a straight book review, I decided to explore the wider world of contemporary hermeneutics by also working through Four Views on Moving Beyond the Bible to Theology. To round off my mini-research project, I also read through N.T. Wright’s Scripture and the Authority of God and pulled my dogged-eared copy of Scot McKnight’s The Blue Parakeet off the shelf.

If read in isolation, Smith’s book does not provide the reader with a whole lot of optimism about evangelicalism’s ability to deal honestly with the question of how we, as believers, are to read and understand the Bible. It is how Smith’s book fits into what seems to be a larger movement among evangelical scholars that makes me cautiously optimistic. I think I may be seeing signs that regular Christians are finally ready to stake the "Bible as manual" metaphor through the heart and give it the burial it deserves. I think I may be seeing signs that we are getting closer to a paradigm that will free people from trying to force the Bible into what they think it should be and allow them to embrace it as it actually is.

While these new paradigms are exciting, they are still in the theoretical stage, and thus not an easy sell for believers who are used to using the Bible as a systematic index for fixing their problems and figuring out how every Old Testament story applies to them personally. It will take a little more time before what is now just theological theory can be articulated clearly enough that regular Christians can use these methods to actually study the Bible. But I think it is coming soon.

In the meantime, I will be doing a series of posts exploring some of these new paradigms. What are they? How do they fit with the traditional inductive Bible study method that most of us use? And, for what it’s worth, I’ll give you my own humble opinion of the appropriateness and usefulness of the various "new" interpretation methods (some of which aren't really "new" at all).

Like I said, these are exciting times.

Murder Most Bleak

2011-10-15T02:11:00.000-07:00

I have a guest post up at Christ and Pop Culture about the moral perspective of the British murder mystery Midsomer Murders. Check it out if you get the chance.

Compatibilism, Casablanca, and the Cosmic "Otherwise"

2011-10-01T05:14:00.000-07:00

Calvinist thought includes a worldview in which God comprehensively and meticulously brings to pass every human decision. It is also committed to the belief that man can be held morally responsible for his actions. In order to resolve the tension between these two concepts, many Calvinists subscribe to something called “compatibilist freedom.”

In his essay for Perspectives on the Doctrine of God, Bruce Ware describes compatibilist freedom as the “freedom of inclination.” At any one moment, Ware says, humans will always act based on their strongest inclination or deepest desire. Man does not have the ability to choose anything contrary to that desire, but the fact that he is acting out of his own inclination means that he can be held morally responsible for his choices. "Freedom," writes Ware, "is not freedom of contrary choice but freedom to choose and act in accordance with what I most want."

In the same essay, Ware also describes the way in which he believes God brings about human actions:

God may know that certain influences will result in our acting in one particular way, but with a different set of influences we will be inclined to choose and act in a different way. Therefore, by knowing the sorts of influences that incline our wills or give us the strongest desires, he can know in advance what choices we will make. As a result, God is able to know not only what impact a certain set of influences will have upon our decisions, but as God he also is able to adjust and regulate the influences that come into our lives, so that by controlling the influences he can regulate the choices we will make.

Compatibilism is brilliant in its own way. It is internally logical and manages, in theory, to preserve both God’s sovereignty and man’s moral responsibility. The problem is that it cannot be lived. In his article “Why No Classical Theist, Let Alone Orthodox Christian, Should Ever Be a Compatibilist,” (yes, I admit it’s kind of an inflammatory title), Jerry Walls describes atheist philosopher John Searle, who could not resolve the conflict between his conviction that everything is causally determined by the relationship between particles and the powerful intuition that people are free to choose between "alternative possibilities." Searle, it seems, could not deny what Walls describes as a "vivid and immediate sense of free will,” so he was finally forced into accepting a kind of non-theistic compatibilism. While Searle did not believe that individuals could actually make free choices, he was compelled to admit that humanity has an intuitive—and overwhelmingly powerful—sense that we do just that.

I cannot conceive of what it must be like to live as a compatibilist. I function as if the possibility of alternative choices exists, not because I am committed to human empowerment, but because I intuitively assume that when a person makes a choice for good (or evil), it was truly possible that they could have chosen otherwise. I will also go a step further and assert that this intuitive belief in the cosmic “otherwise” is the heart and soul of many universal human activities, including (and perhaps, especially) the art of storytelling. Trying to hold a consistently compatibilist worldview can drastically impact something as simple as going to the movies.

The climax of most films is the moment when the hero chooses to rise above his own self-interest and do the right thing. Han Solo chooses to come back and fight when he could stay away. Jefferson Smith chooses to confront political corruption when he could give up. Harry Potter chooses to sacrifice himself when he could run away. Sydney Carton chooses to go to the guillotine uttering one of the most famous lines in literature: “Tis a far, far better thing I do than I have ever done.”

While a compatibilist can create a logical progression of syllogisms to explain how these heroes never actually had a choice and always acted out of their strongest desire, what does that do to the meaning of the story? If it was never possible for the protagonist to act otherwise, what is heroic about their decision? It is in the act of rising above one’s own desires and choosing the greater good that one becomes a hero. To say that Solo or Smith or Carton could not have chosen otherwise essentially changes how we understand the most climactic moment of a story.

By way of example, let’s imagine how a compatibilist might deconstruct one of the greatest American films ever made, Casablanca. First, the compatibilist will assume that the protagonist, Rick, will always act based on his strongest inclination. And while Rick tries to maintain the façade of a cynical bystander in the war against the Nazis, it is clearly implied that he has an innate tendency to fight for the underdog. From the opening sequences in which he protects his own self-interest by allowing a friend to die, through the final scene in which he chooses to become a freedom fighter, every situation has been manipulated so that Rick’s ability to choose based on what he most desires drives him inexorably toward his final act. By the climactic scene at the airport, Rick’s primary desire has become not to escape with the woman he loves, but to walk-off into the fog with Captain Renault and join the resistance. In a compatibilist reading of this scene, Rick does precisely what he most wants to do.

There is obviously a certain logic to this interpretation. If there wasn’t, compatibilism wouldn’t be a viable theological option. But in addition to its weaknesses as a philosophical and theological worldview (which are not the subject of this post), compatibilism destroys the dramatic impact of one of the most famous scenes in film history. With the airplane's propellers spinning in the background, Rick realizes that he must sacrifice his future with Ilsa in order to do the right thing. He tells her to leave Casablanca with her husband Viktor, a famous resistance leader, while he stays behind to fight. But if leaving with Ilsa and abandoning Viktor to die in Casablanca is not, at any point in the scene, Rick's primary desire, then what is admirable about his choice to sacrifice his self-interest and choose the greater good? And if Rick could not have chosen otherwise, is he, in any sense, a hero?

While I might concede the compatabilist's assertion that the process by which the greater good gradually becomes Rick's primary desire is....well...nice, it destroys the dramatic tension of the story. There must always be the possibility that the hero could choose not to be heroic or stories themselves lose their inherent meaning. Yes, a compatibilist can logically preserve their definition of God’s sovereignty by saying that heroes do not really have the option of choosing otherwise, but how can they ever watch a movie again?

A weird case of synergy

2011-09-27T03:05:00.000-07:00

In a weird case of synergy, Skye Jethani posted this article the day after I posted my take on The Gospel Coalition. While it looks like a respost from back in November 2010, I hadn't read it before. Maybe he just thought it was time to remind everyone that, as he says, "perception is not always congruent with reality and books, conferences, and blogs do not a grassroots movement make."

It's always nice to know that someone else is thinking the same thing I am.

My last post about Calvinism (hopefully)

2011-09-24T04:16:00.000-07:00

This post is not really about Calvinism; it’s about marketing. It’s a little about two theological movements called “New Calvinism” and “Young, Restless, and Reformed" (YRR), but it’s mainly about something called “The Gospel Coalition.”

The Gospel Coalition was formed in 2007 by D.A. Carson and Tim Keller and includes among its council members John Piper and Mark Driscoll. According to Carson, it was formed in reaction to what these church leaders saw as the “drift” of evangelicalism in the late 20th century. While one side of evangelical Christianity was trying too hard to merge faith with political influence, says Carson, the other side was making too many concessions to secular culture. In the middle of all this, he says, was a type of evangelicalism that focused so much on faith as a self-help tool that there was “almost no concern for saving people from an eternity in hell.”

I’m not sure, but I think this is code for the religious right, the emerging church, the seeker-sensitive movement and the prosperity gospel. If I’m right about the verbal code, then I agree with what Carson said. I think it’s fair to say that these movements, while drastically different, all have built-in worldviews that have negatively impacted the average Christian’s ability to think critically about their theology. I, too, am troubled by “the idolatry of personal consumerism," the "politicization of faith,” and “the unchallenged acceptance of theological and moral relativism.” (all quotes from TGC’s mission statement). I also sympathize with the desire of Christian leaders to shake believers out of materialistic self-absorbtion and put the focus back on Jesus.

The flagship of The Gospel Coalition’s marketing campaign is their website. It’s user-friendly, well-designed, well-organized, and chock full of helpful resources—kind of like a perfect homemaker from a 1950s sitcom. I read TGC blogs regularly and find much of the writing to be both insightful and relevant. But I do not link to it from my blog. Why? Because whether they intend to or not, TGC is so influential that they are slowly changing what it means to be an evangelical Christian.

Throughout their promotional videos, TGC members repeatedly emphasize that what they care about is “the gospel.” Their primary promotional video features TGC members repeating things like “the gospel coalition is about matters of first importance” and “we are committed to getting the gospel right and getting the gospel out.” In another video, D.A. Carson describes the founders as having a “shared concern that the biblical gospel needs to be elevated and the center out of which we think about everything else.” Their priority is to “articulate, preach, and live out the gospel.” But while TGC repeatedly says that they are only concerned about “the gospel,” they are, in fact, advocating two specific theologies that are not part of it—Calvinism (or what they call “Reformed theology”) and complementarianism.

Now, I am not for one second going to try to talk a Calvinist or complementarian out of their theology. I don’t question their salvation or wonder whether they can rightly be called “evangelical.” I have both Calvinist and complementarian friends and I am confident that in the final resurrection we’re all going to be lifting a pint with C.S. Lewis in some infinitely spacious Oxford pub. (in my version of heaven, anyway.)

Neither am I suggesting that TGC does not have the right to claim whatever they want or market themselves however they see fit. What I object to is the implication that the “the gospel” includes Calvinism and complementarianism. It does not. The gospel, or “good news,” is that we are separated from God and caught in an endless cycle of hopelessness that can be rectified by faith in the atoning death of Jesus. That’s it. Nothing I have read, heard, or experienced leads me to believe that “the gospel” also includes a belief in unconditional election or that women can’t teach a mixed-gender Bible study.

I don’t really think that the founders of TGC said “Let’s redefine orthodox Christianity so that anyone who’s not a Calvinist has to defend their right to be called an evangelical Christian.” Neither do I question the integrity of anyone involved. They are, like all of us, just trying to do the best they can to serve the church. But they are also some of the most influential leaders in evangelicalism. So like many things in the 21st century, evangelical Christianity is being redefined by a small group of people with a great website.

At the same time, there doesn’t seem to be a unified chorus of non-Calvinist evangelicals saying “Hey, wait a minute. I don’t believe in supralapsarianism, TULIP, or compatabilistic freedom, and that’s never been a problem before.” While there are a few individual scholars and pastors who are actively using the internet to balance the momentum of the Reformed juggernaut, there is nothing that can compete with it. At one point I asked Roger Olson if there was an equivalent Arminian website and he directed me to the Society of Evangelical Arminians. “Really?” I thought. “No wonder we’re losing the PR battle.”

When I first began thinking about all this, I quickly decided that what the unReformed needed was a really cool website with celebrity pastors who implied that Arminianism and egalitarianism were essential to the gospel. After I calmed down, I realized that the issue is not really whether a believer is a Calvinist, an Armenian, an Open Theist, or just a guy with a Bible trying to figure it all out. The issue is that Christians, like most people, feel more secure in a community where the boundaries are clearly defined. We appreciate being able to look to a person, a group, a church, or a political party, and let them do the hard work of deciding what orthodoxy is. In some cases it may be because we’re lazy, but more often it’s because we don’t have either the time or the talent (or both) to figure it out on our own. We just need somebody to trust. The need to identify with a group is part of what makes us human, but when combined with 21st century technology, it also means that a bunch of really smart, articulate people with a great marketing team can change public opinion in the blink of an eye.

I changed my mind about the need for a well-designed Arminian website because I think that history has shown us that Christians are at their best when they’re fighting against the status quo, not for it. It’s good for everyone to feel like an outsider every once in a while, especially if it forces us to refine and articulate just what we believe. The YRR may succeed at redefining evangelicalism to mean Calvinism—or they may not. If that day comes, it won’t be because my theology has changed, but because the world has changed around me. There will also be a lot of people in the same boat as I am—people who believe in the gospel but who have been recategorized by a marketing campaign.

We’ll survive. We just won't have a really cool website.

FATHOMABLE JUSTICE (or one reason why I am not a Calvinist)

2011-09-16T08:13:00.000-07:00

"Justice" is a wonderful word. According to the dictionary, it means “administering deserved punishment or reward.” Justice means that the innocent person goes free and the guility person is punished. At the very least it means that there are consequences for a person’s actions. Justice is at the heart of every cowboy movie and courtroom drama.

The Bible itself has many, many examples of what it means for God to act justly. In Genesis 18, Abraham tries to convince God not to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah, saying “Far be it from you to kill the righteous with the wicked, treating the righteous and wicked alike. Will not the judge of all the earth do right?” The rhetorical answer, of course, is “Yes.” It is unthinkable that He would not. Justice is one of the things that God prizes most. As Israel drifts farther and farther away from God, the prophets repeatedly call on Israel to “seek justice,” not only in its legal sense, but by protecting the innocent, helping the poor, and aiding the oppressed.

In fact, it is the need for God to satisfy both His love and His justice that in some way explains why Jesus had to die. God loves man and wants to be in fellowship with him (for some inexplicable reason), but man is sinful and cannot be in fellowship with God unless he has first paid the penalty for his sins. Since God is perfectly just, the penalty must be paid, but since He is also perfectly loving, He offers Himself up as the payment. It's a brilliant solution.

God’s justice resonates with us because, in these examples, God’s justice and our justice are based on the same archetypal paradigm. If, as David Baggett and Jerry Walls argue in Good God: The Theistic Foundations of Morality, God’s character is the foundation and ontological essence of the ultimate Good, it would be irrational to think that God’s definition of justice and our view of justice would not be recognizably similar. Our fundamental understanding of things like good, evil, truth, love, and justice are derived from God’s character.

The core difference between Calvinism and Arminianism is not that Calvinism emphasizes God’s sovereignty while Arminianism prioritizes man’s free will. Rather, the contrast is between Calvinists’ commitment to God’s sovereignty and Arminians’ commitment to God’s character. In Calvinist thought, man (in his natural state) is so saturated and controlled by sin that he is unable to take even a baby step toward a relationship with God. Unless God intervenes, an individual will inevitably receive the eternal punishment that he deserves. In His mercy, God chooses some people to be saved, but these people have not done—and never will do—anything upon which God bases His choice. It is only God’s freely-given and unmerited mercy that allows the individual to be saved (the technical term for this is “unconditional election”). The fly in the ointment is that while God has called some to salvation and eternal life, He has chosen to allow the rest of humanity to receive their deserved punishment in an eternal Hell, based on nothing but His sovereign choice.

Calvinism, like any other theology, has many facets and variations, but central to this worldview is the belief that God meticulously controls and actively ordains every aspect of human life. I have read several Calvinist thinkers, and while they manage to maintain man’s free will through a philosophical construct called “middle knowledge” (which we won’t go into here), it doesn’t seem to me that there is any meaningful way in which Calvinism allows individuals to actually make free moral choices. In Calvinist thought, every choice that a person makes is pre-ordained by God, including (and especially) the choice that will determine where that person spends eternity.

The fundamental contradiction here is that human reason, moral intuition, and the Bible itself, all portray justice as being predicated on what a person freely chooses to do or not do. It is also almost universally assumed that to hold someone responsible for something they had no control over is inherently unfair. The issue is not that those who are condemned to eternal punishment do not deserve it (most orthodox Christians would agree that all people are sinners deserving of Hell); it is the inherent injustice of making people winners and losers in the celestial lottery based on circumstances beyond their control. To quote Baggett and Walls:

“There are some for whom there is no hope, nor was there ever any hope. Before they were born, if Calvinism is true, God by his sovereign decree alone, unconditioned by any foreknowledge of these people and their free choices, abandoned them in the sinful condition into which they were to be born. Either Jesus did not die for them, or, even if he did, there’s no chance they can respond to God’ offer of salvation in Christ. Hell is the invariable home of the non-elect, ultimately because of God’s choice alone.”

When Justin Taylor appeared on Rachel Held Evans’ blog to answer questions about Calvinism, a reader named Charissa worded it this way:

The idea of God pre-destining someone to hell with no POSSIBLE way of anything other than that happening is repulsive to me and offends my sense of justice. And when I ask my Reformed/Calvinist friends if this bothers them as well, I usually get something like this, "God's ways are not our ways. Everything God does is just, so if someone is going to hell we can trust that God is still good even in that." So my question is this: How does that logic not make our understandings of right and wrong completely arbitrary and meaningless? What does it make of our God-given sense of right, wrong, justice, and mercy?"

Justin responded by appealing to Romans 9 and concluding that “God is God; we are not.” Putting aside the fact that I question his interpretation of Romans 9, Justin’s answer seemed to be a version of the idea that God can do whatever He wants to do because He’s the biggest bully on the playground. I don’t think Justin really thinks this and I don’t think any Christian really thinks this, but Calvinist thought seems to force a person into this position.

When talking about this topic, someone always invariably quotes Isaiah 55:9 and says "but God's ways are higher than our ways." The problem is that the Calvinist concept of unconditional election is so contrary to our intuitive understanding of justice that it is not even recognizably just. Like Baggett and Walls (and Charissa), I find it incomprehensible that God could suddenly and drastically change the rules—not because He’s not sovereign—but because He is constrained by His own character. Lest I be accused of compromising God’s sovereignty, I assert that He is so sovereign that His character defines the very essence of what is good and just. To say that God is being just when He sentences someone to eternal torment for something that they could not control is, quite literally, nonsense.

It seems to me that if both Calvinists and Arminians can muster philosophical arguments and biblical evidence to support their view (and I think they both can), it simply makes more sense to adhere to a theology that does not force me to compromise the character of God. I also really appreciate not having to quote the same verse from Isaiah over and over and over...

For anyone interested in reading more about the difference between Calvinism and Arminianism, I recommend the book Perspectives on the Doctrine of God, edited by Bruce Ware (yes, he's a Calvinist).

The Important Issue Behind a Theological Pie Fight

2011-09-12T03:21:00.000-07:00

For those of you unfamiliar with the cinematic Pie Fight, it usually starts with someone accidentally getting hit in the face with a pie. Then the person who just got hit picks up another pie and aims it at the person who threw the first one. That pie also misses its target and ends up in the face of an innocent bystander. Chaos and mayhem ensue until everyone is hitting everyone else with pie for no reason at all. Well, guess what? I just got to watch my first Theological Pie Fight.

A few weeks ago, one of the most popular Christian bloggers on the planet, Rachel Held Evans, invited Justin Taylor, another well-known Christian blogger, to be part of her “Ask a ….(fill in the blank)” series. The series is designed to allow people from various religious backgrounds a chance to explain their faith—and hopefully foster a little more understanding and patience in the process. Evans has had everyone from an atheist to a Mormon on her blog and as far as I can tell, everything was going fine until (gasp!) the Calvinist came.

Since Evans is an outspoken Arminian, I thought it was very gracious of Taylor to answer questions in front of an audience that he knew probably disagreed with him. Evans, for her part, always tries to be courteous, even with those with whom she disagrees. While I don't think Taylor did a stellar job of “defending” (for lack of a better word) Calvinism, I found many of the over 200 comments disproportionately sarcastic, with one comment calling Taylor and a few other Calvinists “bullies.” “Great,” I thought “now I can’t even pretend that Arminians have any kind of moral high ground." Just for the fun of it, I clicked over to Taylor’s blog to see if anything had shown up there. What I found was that the comments were, if possible, even nastier. “Rachel Held Evans makes a mockery of the Scriptures,” one commenter wrote, “which 5 minutes on her blog will make clear. I am opposed to granting her views any legitimacy or insinuating that she is a Bible-believing Christian; she is not.”

The thing about pie fights is that they manage to make everyone involved look like idiots. Nothing gets resolved and any serious issues are buried under whipped cream and pie crust. All the outside world sees is a bunch of unrecognizable religious nuts arguing about issues that don’t matter to anyone else. My question, though, is whether there are any valid concerns underneath all the silliness? And after researching what’s been going on within evangelicalism for the last year or so—and in spite of a few silly pie fights like this one—I’ve decided that there are some things about this debate that do matter.

Evangelical Christianity is usually defined by just a few very specific beliefs and doctrines, but the umbrella of evangelicalism actually covers a wide range of second-tier beliefs that are not essential to one’s relationship with Jesus. These second-tier doctrines are sometimes the kind of things that divide Christians into individual churches so that a particular doctrine can be freely taught. It should be noted, however, that there are also churches that focus only on the few core beliefs at the top and welcome any number of secondary doctrines within their membership. (I can happily say that I attend such a church).

Calvinism and Arminianism are both historically orthodox theories that describe how, exactly, a person moves from being a non-believer to a believer. The problem is that while both these doctrines have biblical support, they are significantly different from each other. While it is notoriously hard to do justice to the nuances of these two positions in a small space, I'm going to attempt a very truncated explanation just so anyone who has never heard of these doctrines (lucky you!) has some idea of what we're talking about.

Calvinism gives priority to God’s sovereignty. Calvinists believe that man is so spiritually deadened by sin that he does not, by himself, even have the ability to choose to follow God. God must take the initiative, saving whomever He wills. Some streams of Calvinism believe that God designated who would and would not be saved before the world (and consequently humanity) was ever created. Arminianism, on the other hand, give priority to God’s character, saying that man does have enough free will to either resist or respond to God’s call. This ability to choose makes man morally responsible for his own decision, thus protecting God from the charge of being unjust and arbitrary. There is much more to both these doctrines, including how meticulously God controls the world and in what way God knows the future, but you get the general idea.

One of the biggest problems when Calvinists and Arminians talk to each other is that both groups have a tendency to mischaracterize the other’s position, making it seem so preposterous that it becomes easy to ridicule. This is what’s known as creating a “straw man.” One of the most fair descriptions of what both Calvinists and Arminians believe was written by pastor and blogger Matt O’Reilly:

“Arminians often think Calvinists are committed primarily to a certain understanding of predestination. This, however, is not the fundamental commitment of Calvinists. Instead, Calvinists are first and foremost committed to the ultimate sovereignty of God in salvation. They are attempting to guard against the possibility of the glorious work of God in salvation being attributed to some form of human effort which, they think, is a consequence of Arminian theology.…In contrast, it is often thought that Arminians are primarily committed to the freedom of the human will. This, though, is not the case.… The fundamental issue and the starting point for our theology is the character of God. We believe that the concept of unconditional election necessarily implies the coordinate doctrine of unconditional reprobation. Such an implication, we claim, impugns the character of God by making him the author of evil.”

In one way, the Calvinism/Arminianism debate is not important. No matter where a person falls on the continuum—whether a Calvinist, an Arminian, an Open Arminian, or a Modified Calminian—they are still in relationship with Jesus. Anyone who says that what a person believes about total depravity or prevenient grace is a salvation issue is just plain wrong.

But there are some things about this debate that do matter. They matter because they frame how I view the God that I talk about. I can’t tell a person that God loves them if in the back of my mind I’m thinking “well, he might love you if he’s chosen you to be saved.” And when someone asks me if I think it’s fair that some people will go to hell for something they had no control over, I can’t in good conscience just shrug my shoulders and tell them “God’s ways are higher than our ways.” Of course God’s ways are higher than ours, but it’s a pretty big theological problem if our definition of love and justice bear no resemblance at all to God’s.

Probably the biggest reason why the current debate matters is that there are a few well-known, well-respected individuals and organizations who are either implying, or coming right out and saying, that Calvinism is the only biblically-sound option for someone who wants to follow Jesus. While these people are, I’m sure, well-intentioned, they are also creating an environment in which believers will be forced into an ever-narrowing definition of what it means to be an evangelical Christian.

Soon, hopefully, I can get back to writing about really fun stuff — like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and universal moral intuition, but for now at least, it's dead guys and pie fights.

Gomez, Morticia, and The Euthyphro Dilemma: A Review of "Good God" part 4

2011-09-08T11:44:00.000-07:00

There is a legendary interchange in philosophy called "The Euthyphro Dilemma." You probably haven’t heard of it. Almost nobody has. In philosophical circles, the Euthyphro Dilemma is used to demonstrate that trying to make the case for God’s existence by using universal morality as evidence is inherently contradictory. As far as we know, the Euthyphro Dilemma goes back to Plato (although I guess cavemen could have sat around the campfire at night discussing it too). In its simplest terms, the question is whether God is considered good because He decides what is good and then acts in a way consistent with what He has already decided (what is called the voluntarist position), or whether He is good because He freely chooses to do what is already considered good (nonvoluntarist).

While knowing the name of the Euthyphro Dilemma isn’t really of any use (except to impress people at parties), the argument itself can be used to demonstrate pretty convincingly that God’s relationship with morality is, at best, problematic. Also, like much of philosophy, the questions asked by the Euthyphro Dilemma are, in fact, things that normal people do on occasion talk about down at the pub. They just don’t use words like “fallacious” and “counterfactual.” So, like the brave fools they are, David Baggett and Jim Walls rush right into the middle of the fray in their book, Good God: The Theistic Foundations of Morality admitting that in order for the moral argument for God to make sense, the Euthyphro Dilemma must be addressed.

To many theists (people who believe in a personal, active God), the first option sounds like the obvious choice. “Of course God decides what’s right and wrong,” the theist says, “He can do anything He wants to. He’s God!” If someone else responds that the possibility then exists that God could decide tomorrow that lying or torture or murder was good, the theist might respond “But He never would do that.” But why? If God is completely sovereign and theoretically can do anything, what is to stop Him from changing the rules midstream? For that matter, what would have stopped Him from creating this world and telling us that lying, stealing, and inflicting pain were, in fact, good things? If the theist responds, “because God is good,” then he has just jumped from one horn to the other (which, I guess, is why they call it a dilemma), implying that God is measured by a standard that is outside of—and superior to—Himself.

The problem with trying to stay consistently committed to the idea that God can literally do anything He wants to is that it can pretty quickly deteriorate into what Baggett and Walls call “radical voluntarism,” the idea that things are considered good and evil only because God says they are. For the radical voluntarist, torturing toddlers for fun could become morally obligatory if God said so. (I don’t think the authors ever address this, but it seems to me that radical voluntarism eventually turns God into the ultimate moral relativist.)

The authors describe what they consider six serious problems with the voluntarist position, including the perplexing idea that if God could reverse his moral law tomorrow, turning good into bad and bad into good, He couldn’t really be described as “good” at all. In such a world, the word “good” becomes meaningless except to mean “that which God decides.” While this may seem like an esoteric argument, imagine living in a world in which the word “good” doesn’t refer to something that’s recognizably good, but recognizably bad instead. The reason why “The Adams Family” is funny is because using language this way is completely nonsensical. “Unhappy darling?” Gomez lovingly whispers into Morticia’s ears. “Yes, completely,” she says with a contented smile.

This is, admittedly, a very truncated version of the authors' very detailed argument, but the bottom line is that there are just too many problems with the voluntarist position for it hold up under examination. Unfortunately, the other horn of the dilemma isn’t any better. Yes, it preserves the natural understanding of what it means for God to be good, but it also ends up making God functionally inferior to a pre-existing moral standard that God Himself must answer to. To say that God is subject to an external morality inverts God’s relationship to creation to the point that He is no longer sovereign in one very significant sense. One of Baggett and Walls’ more subtle insights (and one likely to be missed) is that perhaps the reason why the voluntarist position continues to be prevalent in evangelical circles is that although people understand the problem with the voluntarist position, they have a harder time with the idea that God is irrelevant to morality.

At this point, neither horn seems to reflect the God of the Bible—a God who is sovereign and inherently good. “So in the face of all this,” the authors ask, “what’s an honest theist to do?” What the authors do is jump off the horns completely and land on a third alternative—that God is at the root of all there is; that God is, in His very essence, the ultimate good. In the author’s words “God and the ultimate Good are ontologically inseparable.” What’s good is good because it reflects God’s essential nature, and since God’s essential nature cannot be other than what it is, then good cannot be other than it is either.

The writers call their solution “theistic activism,” and lest anyone think that their idea is new, the authors site Augustine, Aquinas, Anselm, Descartes (and even Jonathon Edwards), as all having a similar conviction. In response to those who might say that they are compromising God’s sovereignty, the authors respond:

“If God could in fact, do just anything all at, then He could, say, sin, and God can’t sin. Or He could commit suicide, or lie, or deny himself, or make twice two five, or both exist and not exist in the same sense at the same time. The Bible itself makes clear that God can’t do everything. He can’t be tempted to sin, for example, we’re told, or deny Himself. Does this mean he’s not omnipotent? Not at all; it just means that we need a more sophisticated analysis of omnipotence than an affirmation of it so simpleminded that we end up spouting contradictions and incoherence.”

This short review certainly does not do justice to the authors’ thorough examination of their subject, which is explored with the insight and dexterity of trained, experienced philosophers. But it's my conviction that in order to be truly persuasive, an argument must also have an element of intuitiveness about it. The conclusion of any syllogism must resonate with people who can then respond “Yes, that is exactly what I think, although I’ve never been able to articulate it before.” That God is good and that He is sovereign is an assertion that almost every theist would agree with. What Baggett and Walls give us is the ability to respond to those who would say that He can't be both.

Yentl and the Great Blog Experiment

2011-09-05T03:51:00.000-07:00

Barbra Streisand as "Yentl"

I was scanning my regular theology blogs the other day and came across another discussion about “women in ministry.” Normally, this is a topic that I avoid at all costs, but for some reason this time I followed the maze of various and assorted links and found my way to Amanda MacInnis’ wonderful blog Cheese-Wearing Theology. Apparently, several months ago, Amanda conducted what she called the “The Great Blog Experiment.” For 5 months, she took all personal references off her blog, essentially making herself anonymous. When commenting on other theology blogs, she used only her initials or some other genderless pseudonym. What she found was that people were more likely to click on the link to her blog when she was anonymous than when she used her real name. One particular site (which she doesn’t’ name…good for her for taking the high road) dropped from 85 hits when she was anonymous down to 2 when she went back to being a girl.

Now, I admit that I can be a bit naïve when it comes to certain things, but it never, ever crossed my mind that people wouldn’t read a blog that is primarily about theology if they knew it was written by a female. For 20 years, I have frequently been the only woman in whatever professional or academic environment I was in. These experiences have given me an odd unselfconsciousness about the gender issue as well as a worldview that assumes that I will be judged by my performance, not my girly parts. I endlessly examine my own presuppositions and ruthlessly pick apart my own arguments because I assume that I will be judged by the quality of my thinking alone. (Although I also allow for the fact that people are occasionally judged by things like body odor.)

Normally, I avoid the topic of women in ministry not because I don’t think it’s important, but because I think it is. Most evangelicals acknowledge that there is a big leadership gap within Christianity. Those on the egalitarian side of things see this gap as a problem, while those on the complementarian side think of it as God’s design. (click here for a more detailed discussion of the egalitarian/complementarian debate). My concern is that while there are some brave, passionate people who have been called to address the issue of women in evangelicalism directly through conferences, blogs, and such, there are still very few world-class female theologians who are invited to sit down to talk about things like atonement theology, biblical hermeneutics, and philosophical apologetics.

Whether it’s that women aren’t getting PhDs, aren’t writing books, or aren’t being allowed to sit on panel discussions with male scholars, the fact remains that I can’t name the female equivalent of an N.T. Wright, a Christopher Wright, a Greg Boyd, or a Scot McKnight. Even something as legendary as the Lausanne 2010 conference did not do a good job of dealing with this issue. Since time is a limited resource, I choose to use the weird unselfconsciousness that God has given me to keep plugging away doing what God has called me to do—whether other people are comfortable with it or not. I will continue to muddle through the weirdly fascinating, often irrelevant, certainly male-dominated, world of evangelical theology. If I recall correctly, pretty much all the Christians in the New Testament made the establishment uncomfortable at one time or another too.

So why bring this up at all? Because there are high profile, evangelical Christian organizations that seem to be saying that anyone who follows Jesus and takes the Bible seriously must, by definition, also put limits on what women are allowed to do. They give the impression that “real” Christianity is completely united behind complementarianism (and a few other secondary doctrines,) when that is simply not the case. It saddens me because these are issues that may or may not become important after a person begins the amazing transformation that Jesus can perform in a life, but they should never be the barriers to beginning the process. There is a whole range of beliefs about non-essential doctrines into which a person can fall and still be considered a Jesus-follower. If you don’t believe me, check out some of the links on my blog. I’m adding more all the time.

After thinking about it, I actually like the idea of commenting on blogs using a pseudonym. It would allow me to test out the persuasiveness of my arguments on people without worrying about what they think of me personally. Perhaps there are actually lots and lots of women masquerading as men on theology blogs. Perhaps theology blogs are actually populated by hundreds of Yentls! At least that would explain where they all are.

Beware of Ideas...

2011-09-01T12:06:00.000-07:00

Sometimes what we intend to write about turns into something else entirely. I intended to finish off my review of Good God: The Theistic Foundations of Morality with one more witty, insightful description of the authors’ main thesis, then move immediately onto something else. Soon I realized that fully engaging Baggett and Walls’ ideas would take a lot more than just one more blog. And since much of the authors’ arguments directly address Calvinist presuppositions about God, I found myself sidetracked for a few days by the debate between Calvinism and Arminianism, which in some circles has deteriorated into a theological bar fight—fun to watch but not of any real interest to someone who hasn’t placed a bet. The fact is that I was so enamored by Baggett and Walls’ case against the Calvinistic view of God that I was beginning to be suspicious of my own motives. Did I think their arguments were persuasive because I already agreed with them? How far outside our own presuppositions do we have to get to be able to claim at least a modicum of objectivity? Is it even possible to answer this question? If I keep asking myself this, will I eventually go insane?

After days of examining these issues upside down and inside out, I was finally to the point where I felt able to return to finishing up the book review. Then I discovered that there were discussions about this same issue going on over at Scot McKnight’s blog about a different book. So now, in addition to several new books comparing and contrasting Calvinism and Arminianism that have just arrived from Amazon, I have another philosophy book on my wish list. On top of all that, I’m still only halfway through Eric Metaxas’ wonderful biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. (Let me just say that studying the life of Bonhoeffer makes anyone’s theological angst seem somewhat…shall we say…insignificant.)

What I can say is that I now have an even firmer commitment to a God who is both loving and just, but also a renewed confidence that He expects the best from both our hearts and our minds. Over the last week, I have read the arguments of scholars who seem to love God, but have lost any residual human feelings. And I have read the arguments of pastors who still apparently have normal human feelings, but assume that they must be ignored, buried, or otherwise put aside when talking about God. I have also read the arguments of writers who seem to have nothing but feelings and assume that as long as people are getting baptized, we can toss our brains under the wheels of the yellow bus to heaven.

I came across a short comment on one of the many, many blogs I read which said “Beware of ideas that can be argued, but cannot be lived.” I can’t find the original quote, or I would attribute it properly, but I think this statement is brilliant. There are lots of philosophical ideas that can be supported with logic, but do not describe the way people’s hearts and minds actually function. Which, finally, brings us back full circle to my review of Good God, one of the best recent examples I’ve found of a book in which emotion and intellect seem to be equal partners in a mature, committed relationship.

Early in the book, Baggett and Walls explore the debate between those who believe that morality has a real, independent existence outside the human mind (transcendentalists?) and those who think that morals only evolved after years of natural selection and social conditioning (naturalists.) In yet another example of the authors’ commitment to common sense, they admit that in order for transcendentalists to have a leg to stand on, there needs to be at least a few moral standards that pretty much everyone instinctively agrees on. The example they use throughout the book is the universal belief that it is wrong to torture children for fun (although they also make reference to forcing innocent people to watch reruns of “The Bachelor.”) It is refreshing for trained philosophers to have an unapologetic commitment to what goes on in the real world. The authors feel free to assume that this belief is true both because they instinctively know it and because most people in most places instinctively know it too. In response to a philosopher or theologian who might construct a syllogism in which God could issue a command to torture children for fun, the authors respond:

“The argument is a valid one. But the conclusion is unacceptable and we assert so unapologetically. If readers insist on further reasons for our confident claim, we submit that they are confused, for what could we possibly appeal to as more morally obvious than the falsehood of that conclusion? In order for an argument to get off the ground, there has to be an axiomatic starting point. The falsehood of the conclusion qualifies as a good one. So we consider ourselves justified to treat it as such.”

Unlike other Christian ethicists, the authors do not assume that morality must be monolithic in order to demonstratively exist. They don’t get bogged down trying to explain why one culture thinks that sex outside marriage is OK and another one doesn’t; they are confident that their argument will hold water as long at they can demonstrate the existence of a few “absolute, non-negotiable moral truths—” things like selflessness, courage, kindness, fairness, and yes, the belief that inflicting pain for one’s own pleasure is wrong. “The moral argument doesn’t necessarily need many such absolute, non-negotiable obligations,” they admit, “but it needs at least some.”

The authors’ commitment to common sense also extends to their short discussion of the new atheists. The fact is that no matter how you slice it, there is no logical way to preserve a belief that morals have any intrinsic existence without a belief in a source from whom those standards originate. In any other scenario, morality is nothing but a shared social contract. In such a paradigm, torturing children for fun cannot be considered wrong in any absolute sense. The authors agree with Nietzsche and Sartre’s recognition that atheism, if taken to its logical conclusion, must necessarily and foundationally transform what we mean by right and wrong, and they effectively characterize new atheists’ attempts to justify the existence of shared morality by attributing it to evolution as disingenuous. (Although I haven’t actually read Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens, it does sound a little inconsistent to say that our evolutionary predisposition toward generosity is a good thing when you’re also asserting that the concept of good itself has no objective existence.)

What is fascinating about this discussion is that no matter how much a moral relativist protests that right and wrong do not objectively exist, there are very few people—of any ideology—that seem comfortable with the idea that there are not some things that are just plain wrong. We can sit around thinking up brilliant philosophical syllogisms from dawn ‘til dusk, but the intrinsic value of self-sacrifice, kindness, courage, and love will never, ever change.

Faith vs. Reason (Review of "Good God" part 2)

2011-08-23T05:40:00.000-07:00

I attend a Saturday night Bible study and a Thursday night book club. I also occasionally lead a small group for a ministry called Alpha, which offers an opportunity for people with questions about faith to ask them in a relaxed, pressure-free environment. (Which means that, yes, a person could say “This is a bunch of crap” and I would smile sweetly and say, “OK, let’s talk about that.”) Without exception, all these environments require the use of reason. Reason, simply put, is our ability to think through a problem. It is "the capacity of the human intellect to carry out organized mental activity." Reason is not, by the way, the same thing as naturalism or scientism, which is the belief that only that which can be proven by science can be talked about as “true.” Nor is it empiricism, which is the belief that we can never be sure about external reality, only of our sense experience. I have to clarify this because I’ve heard the word “reason” used to mean both these things.

Philosophy is closely related to reason. It is, according to the Cambridge Dictionary Online, “the use of reason in understanding such things as the nature of reality and existence, the use and limits of knowledge and the principles that govern and influence moral judgment.” If reason is the ability to figure things out, then philosophy uses that reason to think through things like “what is real?” or “how do we know what we know?” and most important to this post, “what is good?” Everyone operates within some kind of an assumed philosophical system whether they realize it or not.

I thought it was important to first define these words because anyone who has hung around evangelical Christians for any amount of time has heard someone say that faith and reason are opposed to each other. The idea that faith is only truly faith when it believes something that doesn’t make sense has been around for a while. The logic (yes, I use that word on purpose) of this theory is that if faith is taken outside the bounds of reason, then it is immune to arguments against it. Recently, this idea has been taken in by post-modernists, dressed up in cooler clothes, and taught to say that God must, by definition, be outside the bounds of reason, otherwise He would not be God. The details of the argument are different, but the paradigm is the same: faith and reason are incompatible.

One of the things I truly appreciate about Dave Baggett and Jerry Walls’ book Good God: The Theistic Foundations of Morality is not something, I think, that they probably had in mind as a they wrote the book. What they end up doing is demonstrating that a person can, indeed, both think and believe—and do both with integrity. The authors spend just two short sections of the book discussing the direct relationship between reason/philosophy and faith, but the entire book is an exercise in using clear thinking to unapologetically explore the nature of God’s goodness.

A frequent criticism made about people who dare to examine the nature of God through the lens of reason is that man does not have the right to expect God to conform to man's limited understanding in any respect. Spend enough time around good-intentioned evangelicals and someone will invariably quote Colossians 2:8 or 1 Corinthians 1:19-20 to “prove” that we’re not supposed to appeal to reason or philosophy on matters of faith. The irony here (besides the fact that these two verses are found in books that use reason to explain faith) is that what these people are doing is using a reasoning process that is so basic to human nature that it’s unconscious. Christians appeal to scripture. The naturalist appeals to science. Both are using a reasoning process that appeals to evidence, makes logical connections, and comes to a conclusion. What makes Good God’s arguments so persuasive is that they are honest enough to say that reason is not only an integral part of who we are as humans, it is also essential to our knowing anything, including how to read the Bible.

“When someone suggests that we “don’t need philosophy,” either in this debate or more generally, their words at best reflect a huge misunderstanding. The sentiment wrongly assumes that we are even able to understand the Bible, let alone discern that it is the ultimate revelation from God, without the capacity to think. Philosophy, is, to put it most succinctly, clear thought.”

In the process of being blatantly honest about how humans think, the authors also manage to annoy evangelicals, post-modern Christians, and atheists, all at the same time. I can only hope to be as brave one day…

“There are aspects of God that transcend our reason to be sure, but God doesn’t call us to believe anything that’s opposed to reason. This distinction is one that some popular postmodern Christian writers often fail to grasp, and they thereby tend to make a virtue of incoherence. Donald Miller, for instance, in the chapter on worship in his best-selling Blue Like Jazz, writes that he wants a God of mystery and transcendence.” “Not making sense” is the obvious ambiguity here, so we would reply: “Exceed our reason, sure, but not go against it altogether. For example, we don’t want, nor could we in good conscience worship a God who commands the torture of innocents for fun, nor one who both can and cannot lie.” Such a God would contradict our reason and not make sense, but he would hardly be worthy of worship.”

What I appreciate about Good God (besides the fact that Donald Miller is someone that I've disagreed with before regarding his comment that "just thinking" is not a real activity) is that there is no attempt to try to simplify things that cannot be made to be simple. Some things in life are nuanced and complex—and cannot be reduced to a bumper sticker. Baggett and Walls are not ashamed to admit that these issues are hard, and they are not content to paste a label of “God’s ways are not our ways” on questions that directly impact our view of God’s character. These are important questions that affect our view of who God is and how we respond to Him. One thing this book does not do is shrug its shoulders, walk away, and "make a virtue of incoherence."

My New Favorite Book

2011-08-17T10:43:00.000-07:00

Every Christian book I’ve read in the last three years that’s been published as a conveniently-undersized hardback and released with a marketing campaign behind it, has not, in the end, even been worth my time. So now, when I’m looking for something to read, I first eliminate everything that’s only available in hardback. Then, I check to see how many footnotes a book has. Lots of footnotes means not only that the person writing it took the time to research their facts before putting them down on paper, but that they thought enough of the reader to provide them with the ability to crosscheck the information. The last thing I do is to thumb through the book to make sure that it is actually written in paragraphs, not single sentences set off by white space. (Does anyone actually think that this writing style communicates better than the old-fashioned way? All it tells me is that the ideas are so disjointed that they can’t logically be joined together.) The last thing I check when looking for a new book is how thick it is. An ideal book is at least 200 pages long… but I am flexible on this.

It’s probably obvious that my standards make finding something to read rather difficult. I will occasionally ask to borrow the latest Christian bestseller from a friend just so I can say I read it, but I never expect it to be something that I can wholeheartedly recommend to anyone. A few weeks ago, however, I began to see reviews of a book called Good God: The Theistic Foundations of Morality by David Baggett and Jerry Walls. The reviews were good and it was published by an academic publisher, so I decided to take the plunge. Now, after reading it, I can heartily recommend it as one of the best books I’ve read in several years. The only problem now is that my friends can’t borrow my copy because I’ve scribbled notes all over it.

The authors’ premise is that the existence of a universal moral intuition, and the philosophical conclusions drawn from the analysis of this intuition, necessarily lead to a belief in a good God. “In a nutshell,” said Baggett in an interview with the Evangelical Philosophical Society, “our aim is to show that the God of classical theism and orthodox Christianity is reasonably thought to make best sense of moral truths that most everyone—theists and atheists alike—claim to believe in.” Throughout much of the book, the authors dissect the classical philosophical objections to the existence of a good God and ask whether this logic makes sense in a world in which people do, in fact, believe that certain things are always right and other things are always, always wrong.

Like Baggett and Walls, I think that a moral apologetic—an argument for the existence of a good God based on the idea that all people share a common moral intuition—is “powerful and persuasive” and not given the attention it deserves. In fact, I think the fact that humans share an almost universal understanding of good and evil is better evidence for the existence of a good God than pretty much any other standard Christian apologetic. However, the thing I admire most about this book (and will be repeating throughout subsequent reviews) is the authors’ brave honesty. Not only are they unafraid to criticize people who have become the equivalent of Protestant saints, such as Luther, Calvin, and John Edwards, but they are confident enough in the reality that they see around them to make some basic assertions that they consider to be self-evident.

“If our goal is the pursuit of truth rather than winning an argument, then what good reason is there to deny what seems undeniable: that there are authoritative moral obligations? If one’s worldview does not adequately explain the nature of that authority, so much the worse for that worldview. If an alternative account can and does explain it, then that counts as positive evidence in favor of that worldview.”

In a world in which it has become fashionable in philosophical circles to assume that our shared, intuitive morality is determined only by genetics and environment, this commitment to common sense is refreshing—and makes the author’s arguments that much more persuasive. What can be more convincing than appealing to what we see happening around us every day? My only criticism (and it is a small one) is that I would like to have seen a short section exploring the sociological evidence of this shared morality. While I, myself, come to the book with a prior commitment that this morality exists (and have even written research papers on it), I think it might have been helpful to include some discussion of it for those people who come to the book with a prior commitment to the idea that morality is culturally relative. On the other hand, perhaps, not including any evidence for moral intuition simply proves that their premise is, in fact, universally understood.

I will be continuing my review of this wonderful book in my next few blogs. Hopefully, a few of you will get your own copy, because you can’t borrow mine.

The World's Worst Metaphor

2011-08-10T05:00:00.000-07:00

It has happened on several occasions that I have been in some class or conference listening to a teacher expound on this or that Bible story. Some teachers are more interesting than others, and yes, on occasion, my mind starts to wander and I find myself wondering how long I can wait to buy my daughter’s fall boots before they’re sold out. Then I hear the speaker say “the Bible is our owner’s manual.” I sit up straight, the adrenaline flows, and I am prepared for battle. Anyone, I assume, who still uses this metaphor, does not only not understand the Bible, but is causing needless confusion for those people who are still unsure as to how to understand what seems to be—let’s be honest, here-—a really strange book. I have spent not a few small group sessions passionately explaining why the Bible is not a manual, and have been rewarded with sighs of relief and expressions of gratitude from people who thought there was something wrong with them because they just didn’t get it.

I think I understand why people use this metaphor. Western society is predicated on the idea that everything functions in a predictable, systematic way. The car, the automatic litterbox, and the cat that uses the automatic litterbox, all operate in a way that can be fixed if something goes wrong. When they break, we reference the manual, do what it tells us to do, and it all works fine again. (In the case of the cat, the manual is a vet, but the principle is the same). This worldview also includes the assumption that the only valuable information is that which is immediately useful (or “practical”). While this worldview has been very successful at creating a comfortable, well-fed society, it has the added advantage of being quite simple. When something breaks, we read the manual and we fix it. I can easily imagine some pastor working on his weekly sermon late one evening and congratulating himself for coming up with such a clear, clever metaphor for how the Bible can be used to solve people’s problems. The problem with this metaphor, however, is that it just doesn’t work.

If I am getting an error message on my computer, I look up that particular message in the index, find the page in the manual where the problem is described, then use that answer to fix the computer. Then I close the manual and don’t open it up again until I get the next error message. In most instruction manuals, the information I want is topically organized and made up of clear, propositional statements. The Bible, however, is over three-quarters narrative (stories). The rest is poetry, letters, and some genres that don’t even exist anymore. Although I don’t know for sure, I suspect that the reason that God did it this way is that readers (or hearers) of a story become emotionally invested in the characters of a story in a way that people who read instruction manuals never do. If a person believes, as I do, that God is the main character of the Bible, then what better way to find out what God is like than to see how He interacts with His people? What better way to understand God’s love than to see Jesus hanging on a cross? I don’t often agree with Rob Bell, but I think his thoughts on this are worth quoting:

:And while I’m at it, let’s make a group decision to drop once and for all the Bible-as-owner’s-manual metaphor. It’s terrible. It really is. When was the last time you read the owner’s manual for your toaster? Do you find it remotely inspiring or meaningful? You only refer to it when something’s wrong with your toaster. You use it to fix the problem, and then you put it away. We have to accept the Bible as the wild, un-censored, passionate account it is of people experiencing the living God.”

We are a culture obsessed with the “practical.” If the listener doesn’t walk out of church with “Five Tips for Improving Their Marriage” or “The Secret to Reducing Their Debt,” they accuse the pastor of not being “practical,” (which is, apparently, the worst thing that a speaker can be accused of). This person’s definition of practical, however, is not whether something is useful or not (what, after all, is more useful than learning about the creator of the universe?), but whether it will immediately fix their problem. Calling the Bible a “manual,” reinforces the idea that its primary purpose is to instantly fix the readers needs. “The Bible contains all the information you need to be happy and healthy,” the teacher says. “Just do what it says and it will fix your problems.” Suddenly, the Bible's focus has been completely reversed. No longer is it a book that describes God's plan to redeem the world, but now sits on the shelf in the bookstore between Suze Orman and Deepak Chopra.

This self-absorbed view of the Bible was perfectly illustrated a few years ago by a person in my Bible study. While discussing God’s promise to Abraham in Genesis 12, someone asked me how these things applied to her. When I responded that this promise was made specifically to Abraham and was an important first step in God’s plan of salvation, she wondered aloud “why would God put it in the Bible if it didn't apply to me?”

There are multiple other problems with using the “Bible as manual” metaphor and they are all equally damaging. If the Bible is a manual, then every story in the Old Testament must have a moral that’s directly applicable to the reader. If the Bible is a manual, then any instruction to anyone in the New Testament is applicable to me, even if I can’t possibly do both at the same time. If the Bible is a manual, then it must be understood in concrete, literal terms, just like any other manual.

Most damaging of all, I think, is the implication that if the Bible is a manual, following it should be simple. To be sure, there are things about following Jesus that are simple, but the process of living the Christian life is not. And the Bible most certainly is not. A person who begins his Christian journey with the assumption that the Bible can be used like a how-to book will be confused within the first 10 chapters of Genesis. Frustration and disappointment can follow. At worst, the person turns their back on their faith because no one can give them an honest answer about why the Bible is so, well, weird. At best, they continue their Christian life loving Jesus but being afraid to open up God’s word because someone once told them it should be easy.

I can hear some of my friends say that I'm blowing the use of a harmless metaphor way out of proportion, but the fact is that the words we use matter. The words we use to describe a thing shape how we think about that thing. Words have power. l won't attempt to offer an alternative metaphor to describe the Bible because they would all fall short. I will just say that once the Bible is allowed to speak for itself, it is endlessly fascinating, exciting, frustrating, and inspiring. Nothing like an instruction manual.

"Bones," Nazis, and Universal Moral Intuition

2011-05-20T06:55:00.000-07:00

They killed off one of my favorite squinterns in last week’s episode of Bones. I knew it was coming, but it was sad nonetheless. In her grief, Dr. Temperance Brennan, an atheist, articulates the feeling that many people have after a senseless death. “If there was a God,” she cries, “then he would have let -- stay here with us.” (The name has been deleted just in case you haven’t seen it yet).

One of the reasons why I love Bones is that both the plots and the relationships on the show are built on the assumption that fully experiencing life requires a balance of both intellect and emotion. Head and heart. Instinct and reason. Although Dr. Brennan is brilliant, she cannot understand the complexity of the human experience without the emotional insight that she lacks—and which is supplied by the people around her. What I found fascinating about this particular statement was that although Brennan is an atheist, she still could not escape her own instinctive belief that God—if He existed—would be good. And good, as defined by Dr. Brennan, is allowing people to live rather than die, preventing the injustice of an accidental death, and protecting people from the experience of pain.

Brennan has said repeatedly that she believes only in what science can prove and that morality is only a means of preserving the social order, but in a moment of grief, she reveals a presupposition so basic that she does not even recognize it. What she shares with the rest of the world is an almost universal instinct regarding not only what is right and wrong, but what is good, what is fair, and what qualities a society should value and promote.

(Disclaimer: This is not to say that I think that people, left to their own devises, will actually do what is right. History proves otherwise.)

General revelation is the idea that God has revealed certain aspects about Himself to all people everywhere through what He has created. In recent years, it has become common to divide general revelation into three categories: (1) what God reveals about himself through nature and science (2) what He reveals about Himself through his providential guidance of history, and (3) what He reveals about Himself through the moral and spiritual qualities that He has implanted in man.

While I admit that I find discussing the scientific evidence of God’s existence a little tiresome (and a little bit too much like watching Kirk Cameron debate Stephen Hawking), the idea that God reveals himself in the moral and spiritual qualities of man is something that can be discussed by two friends over lunch. Almost everyone possesses values for which they have no rational proof but for which they would die. Almost everyone thinks honesty, altruism, and courage are superior to deceit, selfishness, and cowardice.

One frequently cited example of this shared morality is the world’s condemnation of the Nazi atrocities and the subsequent war crimes trial at Nuremburg. In his article Intuition and Moral Theology, Bernard Hoose argues that Western civilization’s universal condemnation of these acts demonstrate not only that there is a moral intuition in mankind, but that this intuition is assumed to be authoritative. Regardless of their status as soldiers and their defense that they were “just obeying orders,” says Hoose, the judge at Nuremburg believed that the Nazi soldiers had no excuse. They should have known that what they were doing was wrong.

In Mere Christianity, C.S Lewis suggests that there is universal understanding not only of right and wrong, but also of those qualities that humanity finds collectively admirable. Throughout history, Lewis argues, mankind has admired qualities such as bravery, unselfishness, kindness, justice, forgiveness, and self-sacrifice. Lewis calls this intuitive sense of how people should behave moral law and differentiates it from any evolutionary instinct of self-preservation by arguing that “feeling a desire to help is quite different from feeling like you ought to help whether you want to or not.” In The Reason for God, Tim Keller has offered a modern version of this argument:

People who laugh at the claim that there is a transcendent moral order do not think that racial genocide is just impractical or self-defeating, but that it is wrong. The Nazis who exterminated Jews may have claimed that they didn’t feel it was immoral at all. We don’t care. We don’t care if they sincerely felt they were doing a service to humanity. They ought not to have done it. We do not only have moral feelings, but we also have an ineradicable belief that moral standards exist, outside of us, by which our internal moral feelings are evaluated.

What Hoose, Lewis, Keller, and others are arguing is not that acknowledging this shared morality necessarily leads to a belief in the Judeo-Christian god, but only that this shared morality exists—throughout most of history and in almost all cultures. Of course, my very favorite examples of this moral intuition are those in the films, TV shows, and books that my friends and I watch and read every day. It may be trendy in some evangelical circles to assume that everyone in Hollywood is cynical and amoral, but watch any cop show, courtroom drama, or murder mystery. Read a best-seller. The truth comes out. Cruelty is punished. Justice wins because it has to. We need it to. So does Dr. Brennan.

No Thinking Required

2011-05-01T04:56:00.000-07:00

I read an article on Patrolmag.com a few weeks ago entitled Don Miller Thinks the Church’s Problem is Too Many Scholars. Amazed that someone would actually say what Miller was accused of saying, I visited Don Miller’s site and read the original article. Then, just to make myself feel better, I decided to re-read The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind by Mark Noll. (For some strange reason, this book always calms me down. I keep it on my nightstand for emergencies). For weeks after that I tried to avoid the obvious conclusion. I told myself that if I ignored it, it would go away. I felt like Mary Stuart Masterson in Some Kind of Wonderful when her best friend, an unpopular high school boy, tells her that the most popular girl in school has agreed to go out with him. “Did I miss something?” she wonders, “Is there some new world order?”

Finally, I had to blog.

Don Miller is a popular, somewhat post-modern, somewhat emerging evangelical writer. While I have not read Blue Like Jazz, Miller strikes me as a nice, smart guy who really wants to do the best he can for the church. In his original blog entitled Should the Church be led by Teachers and Scholars? he argues both that the contemporary church is led by scholars, and that this is a bad thing. Miller believes that academics and scholarship are given too much importance and that people should “just lead” without worrying about whether they’ve been trained. Miller is the ultimate pragmatist, valuing only what gets measurable results. Christians should be “practioners,” he says, not “scholars,” because what scholars turn out is “just thought,” not action.

“Just thought?”

Really?

Weeks after reading this, I still find it hard to get my head around the implications of this statement. Apparently, just thinking cannot be considered an actual activity—and certainly isn’t worthy of a productive society. Thankfully, I was not the only person to furrow my brow over Miller’s thesis. A few days after the initial post, Jonathan Fitzgerald posted his response on Patrolmag.com, arguing that not only is the contemporary church not, in fact, led by scholars, but that discouraging scholarship has done—and will do—long term damage to the church. The reader’s comments on Miller’s blog were just as encouraging. “The Protestant Reformation was purely academic?” one reader wrote. “The issues had no ‘practical significance,’ for the ordinary believer? Seriously?”

While I am concerned about the pervasive (and for the most part unconscious) anti-intellectualism in the evangelical church, I am encouraged that not everyone is falling in lockstop behind it. There is a growing understanding that while the emotional aspects of faith are certainly essential (and often come first), ignoring the mind has its own risks. Intellect without emotion creates Pharisees, but emotion without intellect breeds cults. If people are not given the tools to think critically about what they’re being taught, how will they respond to serious breaches of orthodoxy? Does Miller think that the early church fathers should have been less concerned about developing concepts like the Trinity and more concerned about “what gets things done?” Should Luther and Calvin have been less concerned about what Miller dismisses as “academic divisions” and more concerned about the measurable results of their ministry? The logic behind this argument completely escapes me. Then again, I’m probably just thinking too much.

Which brings me back around to the confusion I expressed at the beginning of this blog. Is thinking now a second-class activity? Has pragmatism so taken over the church that we now have to defend taking the time to sit down and think about what we believe before we act on it? I don’t think so. While this prejudice against thinking may temporarily take over in some circles, I am not overly concerned that it will rule the wider world. Call me an optimist, but I suspect that even the most ardent anti-intellectual can be convinced of the self-evident truth that what we think directly impacts what we go out and do. The problem is not that people cannot be convinced of this fact, but that many of the people who are capable of explaining it, like Miller and other talented writers of evangelical bestsellers, have given up the fight because it’s too much work. If I were a cynical person, I might begin to think that some of these guys enjoy the positive reinforcement they get when they tell people that it’s action that counts, not thinking. “I’m so glad you said that,” the person responds, “thinking is just so hard. Now I don’t have to do it anymore. Where can I buy your book?”

But I am not that cynical. I do think that Miller and those like him believe what they say and that a subtle anti-intellectualism is still very much alive in some evangelical circles, so I keep Mark Noll's book beside my bed.

Archetypes Everywhere?

2011-04-13T04:29:00.000-07:00

I just finished writing a paper called General Revelation: Engaging Culture at the Intersection of C.S. Lewis, Jung, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Originally, the title also included Paul and Calvin, but as usual I tried to cram too much information into a little 15-page paper. Admittedly, I feel somewhat sacriligious for removing Calvin and keeping Jung, but these are the hard choices a writer has to make. Hopefully, when I write my book, I won’t have to edit out anyone. But while I do think the paper suffered in the end because of too much editing, it did provide me with a lot of fodder for an idea that is near and dear to my heart—and somewhat offensive to a lot of Christians—the suggestion that popular culture can and does reflect God’s moral law and has important things to say about both moral intuition and our longing for transcendent spirituality.

The thesis of my paper is that moral intuition—the instinctive understanding of right and wrong—is a valid, compelling form of general revelation that is vividly reflected in the archetypes of Western popular culture. In addition, Christians should be willing and able to recognize and validate these archetypes, and in doing so, encourage dialogue that engages both believers and non-believers. In the paper, I explore the theories of Carl Jung (just love Jung!), C.S. Lewis, Tim Keller, and the moral messages of Buffy and Harry Potter.

I think one of the reasons that a lot of Christians are uncomfortable with the idea that culture might have anything of value to say to them is that for almost 100 years evangelicals have been taught that society at 14px is the equivalent of a glamorous prostitute just waiting to lure some unsuspecting country bumpkin to his downfall. Just one sip of a zesty California merlot and the hero walks zombie-like offscreen, forcing the audience to imagine him sinking farther and farther into moral quicksand. Oh, if only he had stayed in his virtuous small town—or even the local Christian bookstore—he would never have been tempted.

The fact is that throughout church history, most orthodox theologians have subscribed to some kind of general revelation—the idea that God has placed indicators of His character in creation. (I don’t like to use the word “clues” because it makes God out to be some kind of mad millionaire who has invited us all to his private island to solve a murder mystery). One aspect of general revelation (and by far the most interesting to me) is the idea that God has placed a universal moral intuition in all humanity. It is my contention that this universal morality comes bubbling up out of the ground in some form or another in almost all cultures. I also think that Christians who deny that this moral intuition exists and refuse to actively engage pop culture (books, films, and media) are throwing away a great opportunity to demonstrate the existence of this shared moral vision.

It might be hard for Christians who were brought up to believe that they must reject culture in order to be virtuous to accept the idea that modern media could be anything other than “a wretched hive of scum and villainy” (Star Wars reference) but think of the people who might be open to the Gospel if we just stopped telling them that what they're watching is “sinful,” and instead said, “You know I love that show because it really demonstrates that people can be redeemed through self-sacrifice.” The fact is that there is a lot more evidence of a shared, universal morality in pop culture than most of us realize.

The next few blogs will be dedicated to identifying these shared, intuitive values—things like right and wrong, good and evil, courage, mercy, self-sacrifice, and redemption. We will take a look at the biblical and philosophical basis for believing that these values are intuitively understood by almost all societies, then discover how to identify them in the most unlikely places. WARNING: there will be a lot of television, movie, and book quotes over the next few blogs. As Barbra Streisand said in The Mirror Has Two Faces, “myths and archetypes are alive and well and living in my apartment.”

The Essential Morality of the Buffyverse

2011-01-10T07:14:00.000-08:00

It's all Netflix's fault. Since both Criminal Minds and Burn Notice were on hiatus a few months ago, I decided to give Buffy the Vampire Slayer a try. I ended up spending two months of my life obsessively watching the entire seven seasons. Buffy turned out to be not only an epic modern-day parable about good vs. evil, but also funny, romantic, insightful, and—in the most basic sense—moral.

Buffy, as the title would indicate, is a girl who kills vampires. “In every generation,” the opening credits explain, “there is a chosen one. She alone will stand against the vampires, the demons, and the forces of darkness. She is the slayer." In the interest of full disclosure, anyone who has issues with the fantasy genre as a whole won’t get through the opening sequence before changing channels. Vampires crawl up out of their graves à la Thriller. Horned demons show up and wreak havoc on mainstreet. And there’s usually at least one giant snake monster each season. In the Buffyverse, vampires aren’t sparkly, angst-ridden romantic heroes (with the exception of two recurring characters); they’re demons who have taken up residence in the body of the person they’ve just killed. Vampires are evil. Buffy fights evil; ergo Buffy kills vampires.

You won't find a traditional Christian cosmology here either. Buffy lives in a town built on what is called a “hellmouth,” a portal between thousands of hell dimensions where demons rule and humans suffer eternal torment. (The other hellmouth is in Cleveland.) This evil is in constant danger of escaping, bringing about the apocalypse, and turning the world into one big demonfest. Buffy lives every day with the very real possibility that the world might be destroyed by an evil she can’t contain, and each season ends with a kind of mini-apocalypse. In Season One, the “big bad” is an ancient vampire with super powers. Season Three features a mayor whose goal is to become a giant snake god and feed on all the graduating seniors. By the end of the series, Buffy is fighting the First, the source of all evil. "If the apocalypse happens," she once said, "beep me."

For a Christian, the thing that makes BVS hard to watch is the very thing that makes it worth watching. Evil, in the Buffyverse, is not some post-modern, abstract concept. It is personified, visible, active, and powerful. As viewers, we are uncomfortable watching a Satanic ritual because we should be. Again and again, characters both large and small are tempted by the power that evil can give them. In the end, they are either ultimately destroyed by it or must live with the consequences. In Season 6, a trio of hilariously inept high school nerds barter with various demons so they can bask in the coolness of being supervillians. By the end of season 7, two are dead and one is spending all his time trying to make up for past mistakes. In Buffy's world, even the comic relief has to pay for their sins.

What raises BVS above the level of simple teen angst is that the “good” that the Scoobies (as they sometimes call themselves) are fighting for is not just a simple behavioral standard; it is the foundational morality of the universe. Death is bad. Life is good. Hate is bad. Love is good. Selfishness is bad and selflessness is the greatest good of all. Every character in the Buffyverse presumes an understanding of the greater good that is always implied but never articulated—and is simply woven into the fabric of creation. Jesus is only mentioned once or twice, and God even less, but His character permeates their world.

In one episode, a slayer named Faith has gone over to the dark side. She practices saying things like "you can't do that because it's wrong" in front of a mirror so she'll sound convincing when she pretends to be good. By the end of the episode, though, she is walking into a church to rescue people being held hostage by vampires. When one of the vamps asks her why they can't just kill innocent people, she replies "because it's wrong." The difference is that now she believes it.

The archetypal struggle between good and evil is so essential to Buffy's calling that it is never questioned. The four main characters are universally united behind the idea that vanquishing evil is worth whatever price they have to pay. And absolutely central to this intuitive morality is the assumption that while redemption is possible, sacrifice is always required to achieve it. Time and time again, Buffy and her friends offer up their lives not only to save the world, but to save each other. When his best friend has been seduced by the dark side and is on the brink of destroying the world, a character named Xander talks her down by simply repeating “I love you,” and silently accepting every blow that she inflicts on him. In another episode a demon god opens a portal to hell and a sacrifice is required to close it. While Buffy's sister is prepared to throw herself into the abyss, Buffy beats her to it and willingly jumps to her death.

While the Buffyverse may lack any kind of virtuous, omnipotent creator, the values it espouses are often more deeply theological than many more "family-friendly" shows. When Buffy wonders aloud why it always has to be a blood sacrifice, the vampire-on-the-road-to-redemption answers. "Because blood is life. It's what makes you other than dead. It's always got to be blood." While that may be the most theological statement ever made on television, it is made by a vampire who doesn't have a soul. In Buffy's world, everyone understands redemption.

Christian Stereotype #3: (Evangelical) Christians are Conservative

2011-01-04T08:21:00.000-08:00


"Inherit the Wind" 1960

In some ways, the stereotype that all evangelical Christians are conservative is easy to dispel. All that’s really necessary is to describe the diversity that exists within the faith community on issues such as teaching evolution in schools, abortion, feminism, and gay rights. Even the very question of how faith should influence one’s politics is a topic of debate within the Christian community. But it's no fun if we don't do a little deconstruction first. Where did this stereotype come from? Why does it still have such influence over how Christians are perceived? Why did I add “evangelical” to the title this time?

As I’ve tried to demonstrate in previous posts, it’s often either language itself or preconceived notions about language that cause miscommunication. We know what we mean when we describe someone as Christian, evangelical, or conservative, but it’s likely that we mean something a little different than the person we’re talking to, even if they’re also using the words Christian, evangelical, or conservative. I’ve personally witnessed conversations in which people continue to talk in circles around each other because they’re using exactly the same words, but intending different meanings.

Christian is a broad term used to describe someone who believes that the Judeo-Christian God exists, that Jesus was His son, and that the teachings of Jesus are trustworthy. An evangelical is a subset within Christianity with a more specific set of beliefs. An evangelical will usually say that salvation requires (1) a belief that Jesus died to pay for the sins of humanity; (2) that the Bible is the ultimate authority for belief and behavior; (3) that sharing one’s faith—and therefore allowing others to be saved—is essential. (Fundamentalism is an even more distinct subset of Christianity and doesn’t have a lot to do with our discussion.)

The word conservative is more problematic. It can mean someone to whom the most important value in life is stability and for whom the greatest evil is change. It can also mean someone who holds to a specific set of views on social issues such as feminism, gay rights, abortion, etc. To confuse the issue even more, conservative can also mean the philosophical belief that the individual alone is responsible to provide for and protect himself. The purpose of government is only to preserve individual liberty, not to make sure that everyone in provided for. This type of conservative usually believes in minimal government and the free market system of economics. Pretty much the only thing that most people do agree on is that conservative is the opposite of liberal, whatever that means.

For the purpose of deconstructing the stereotype that all Christians are conservative, I will use the term social conservative to mean those who hold to traditional views on social issues. The term political conservative will only be used to describe someone who believes in individual responsibility, small government, and the free market system. A person who hates any change on principle is just homesick. Hopefully, the term Republican and Christian Right are self-explanatory.

The rise of the Christian Right in the 1970s has been the subject of not a few doctoral dissertations and the philosophical underpinnings of social conservatism can be traced all the way back to the Puritan settlers. The split between mainline Protestantism and evangelicalism in the early 20^th century caused many evangelicals to withdraw from the culture-at-large, but the 1973 Supreme Court Decision legalizing abortion mobilized them once more. By the early 1980s, the Christian Right was led by men like Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and James Dobson. Unfortunately for everyone involved, what began as an earnest concern for the moral direction of the country got all mixed up with the belief that somehow the United States was God’s chosen nation. Soon faith and politics were just a big mishmash, leading to the assumption that to be considered an evangelical, a person must also be a social conservative, a political conservative, and a fan of "The Left Behind" series.

Fortunately, all that is necessary to dispel the stereotype that all evangelical Christians are conservative is to notice the many nuances that exist in both groups and individuals. There certainly are some evangelical churches that focus only on individual conversion and reject society-at-large, but there are also many churches that consider social justice an essential part of living out the mandate of Christ. Yes, there are evangelical churches that advocate political platforms from the pulpit, but there are also many that purposely avoid politics so that people from all political persuasions can feel welcome. To further complicate matters, an individual Christian can be an evangelical but not a political conservative. An evangelical can be a political conservative but not a social conservative. A social conservative does not have to be a Christian, and there are plenty of political conservatives who are not only not evangelicals, but not even Christian. Even more surprising, the same evangelical can hold a “conservative” view on abortion, but a “liberal” view on gay rights. As Ralph Waldo Emerson said, "a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds."

The simple fact is that honest, sincere evangelical Christians can and do hold a variety of views on both political and social issues. While embracing the stereotype may be easy (certainly easier than trying to follow the preceding paragraph), it simply does not accurately the truth about how nuanced Christianity can be.

Christian Stereotype #2: Christians are Judgmental (or at least more judgmental than anyone else)

2010-12-31T05:35:00.000-08:00

When I hear someone say “Christians are judgmental” I don’t assume I know what they mean. They could be saying that all Christians are angry, unloving people who (to quote The Philadelphia Story) “have no regard for human frailty” and who can find something to criticize about everyone. They could mean that all Christians live in some alternative reality where what is “good” equates with whatever behavioral norms they grew up with. For these (usually older) Christians, anyone who lives in suburbia and does things the way they’ve always been done (for the last 50 years anyway) falls within the accepted parameters. Anyone who does not is looked upon with suspicion. A third possibility is that they mean that Christians are not open to new ideas. “God said it. I believe it. That settles it” reads the bumper sticker. This Christian has already made up his mind about everything, including things he couldn’t possibly know, and cannot conceive of the possibility that he might be wrong.

The problem with these three stereotypes—the angry Christian, the homesick Christian, and the rigid Christian—is the assumption that they are the way they are because of their faith. I submit that these personality types would still be angry, homesick, and rigid regardless of what religion they were. The angry Christian is not angry because he’s a Christian. He’s angry because he’s an angry person. He could just as easily be an angry atheist. For the angry, the homesick, and the rigid, faith does not cause their personality weaknesses, it exposes them. As Joni Eareckson Tada once said “If a person was a jerk before the accident, he’ll be a jerk after it.” From a theological perspective, it would be more accurate to say that these three personality types have not yet experienced the real from-the-inside-out transformation that Jesus can achieve. To use these personality types as examples of what all Christians are like not only demonstrates a faulty logic, but also an unwillingness to examine one’s own prejudices.

A fourth option for what people mean when they say that “Christians are judgmental” is that anyone who has an opinion about what is right and what is wrong is a sanctimonious snob. The irony is that this statement is usually made by a person who also has a very strong opinion of what is right and what is wrong—just a different one. For example, let’s say that Uncle Owen, a Christian, is having a lively conversation with his nephew Luke, a non-Christian. Owen and Luke share a common family history and a firm belief that certain things such as stealing, lying, and wanton cruelty are wrong. (They’re also not too sure about decaffeinated coffee). As the scene opens, Luke has just informed his Uncle that he and his girlfriend have moved in together. Owen responds that he thinks this is morally wrong. Owen explains that he still loves Luke and understands that society accepts co-habitation as an acceptable living arrangement, but since the Bible considers sex outside marriage a sin, he must too. Luke then responds with “Christians are so judgmental.”

Owen and Luke agree on many moral issues. If Luke’s little brother had come to them and said “I just stole $100 from mom’s purse,” they would both have told him that stealing is wrong and that he should return it. So why does Luke feel justified in making a sweeping generalization about all Christians based on a single opinion held by his Uncle? Because it is different than his. If Owen does not approve of Luke’s choice, then he—Luke—can counter with a moral judgement of his own and say that his Uncle is intolerant. The irony is that both the Christian and the non-Christian in this scenario are making moral judgments. Both are making the claim that their moral standard is the superior one. The difference is that Owen recognizes that he is making a moral judgment, but Luke does not. The stereotype that Christians are more judgmental than other people can only be perpetuated if the person subscribing to it does not recognize that everyone makes moral judgments.

The point here is certainly not that making moral judgments is wrong. I would argue that moral judgments are both an integral, instinctive part of being human and absolutely necessary for a group to function as a community. Our instinctive moral standards are an echo of God’s image in us. But the assumption that Christianity—by definition—makes a person more judgmental than any other belief system is a fallacy. Even the person who says that there is no such thing as right and wrong is still demonstratively clinging to the idea that his belief is the right one. Yes, Christians have moral standards that they must invoke in order to be true to their own beliefs. But so does everyone else. In this case, to stereotype Christians is to stereotype everyone.

Christian Stereotype #1: Christians are Stupid

2010-12-29T06:18:00.000-08:00

It’s a common stereotype that in order to believe the story the Bible tells about a god who sent his son to die for the sins of humanity, a person must have an IQ no higher than Forrest Gump’s. Now I’m not arguing that there aren’t stupid Christians. In a country where the majority of people call themselves Christian, one is bound to run into a few that fall below the red line on the chart that says “normal.” It’s simply a statistical inevitability. It would have been just as likely for an ancient Egyptian to run into a stupid Ra-worshiper during prayers at Heliopolis. The problem is that many skeptics still subscribe to the stereotype that in order to believe what the Bible teaches—in order to read the Bible at all—a person must have checked his brain at the door when he walked into church.

Based on my anecdotal evidence, the assumption that Christians are, by definition, somewhat obtuse is made by skeptics—people who consider themselves agnostic or atheist. Skeptics question belief in a higher power of any kind. People of other religions who believe in God (or gods) tend to subscribe to other stereotypes such as “Christians are judgmental,” or “all Christians are Republicans,” or (my personal favorite) “Christians just can’t deal with the real world.” People of other religions do not think that faith in general is untenable, but that Christianity specifically has issues. Skeptics, on the other hand, hold to the belief that not only is faith of any kind intellectually unsupportable, but that Christians specifically aren’t smart enough to think critically about their own. As Michael C. Patton said in one of my favorite posts, “Good Question. I Will Find the Answer and Get Back to You”…and Other Stupid Statements...”

"How about this. They ask you how you know historically that Jesus rose from the grave and it is not just a Christian myth. You respond, “Good question. I am going to find out and get back to you on this.” You are going to find out how you know Jesus rose from the grave? You are going to find out how you know Jesus rose from the grave?? You are going to find out how you know Jesus rose from the grave???? You, a Christian, are going to go (future tense) to find out why you believe the central element to the Christian faith is true? And you expect this person to follow you?"

It’s my experience that while some skeptics may be forming their opinion of Christians based only on television preachers or second-hand accounts shared around the pub during their weekly atheist gathering, it’s also true that many skeptics have personal horror stories about growing up in churches that not only did not answer the big questions, but that looked down upon the person asking them. It’s a sad truth that there are churches that discourage any kind of critical thinking and if I had experienced that environment growing up, I might be at the weekly atheist gathering myself. The issue is not that skeptics have valid questions about Christianity or have been hurt by Christians, but that that they embrace the stereotype that Christians are all uneducated, barely-literate backwoodsmen who couldn’t put together a syllogism if their life depended on it.

I have a few very casual theories about why this stereotype is so easy to maintain. The first is that the most brilliant, humble Christian theologians usually do not end up on television. Brilliant, humble Christians understand the limits of what television can communicate. They have better things to do than struggle with a medium that was not designed to encourage nuanced one-on-one interaction. Brilliant, humble Christians write books, or occasionally, blogs. Consequently, what most people see on television is a small subset of preachers whose appeal is often based on personal charisma and whose message is delivered in sound bites. If a non-Christian is forming their opinion of Christians from watching television preachers, they should at least be consistent and assume that all brides are selfish tattooed heiresses and everyone from New Jersey is shallow and sex-crazed.

Another reason I think the stereotype that Christians are somewhat doltish is so easily embraced is that much of the last 100 years of preaching has focused solely on the concerns of the individual, ignoring the problems of the world at large. When evangelical and mainline Protestantism split in the early 20^th century, much of evangelicalism began to focus exclusively on either providing the assurance of individual salvation or fixing individual personal problems in order to live “your best life now.” Both of these strategies encourage believers to focus only on that part of their faith that has direct, immediate bearing on their own lives. Taken to the extreme, this exclusive focus on the “practical,” allows Christians to look upon any conversation that does not apply in a concrete way to their day-to-day lives as suspect. Asking a Christian to shift his focus from practical concerns to larger ideas—including, oddly enough, God—is, in some circles, considered suspiciously elitist. As anyone who has done a valley-girl impersonation can attest, there is nothing as easy to stereotype as complete self-absorption.

It is the sad truth that there is, in fact, a basis for the stereotype that Christians have given up using their higher brain functions. "The scandal of the evangelical mind," wrote Mark A. Noll in 1994, "is that there is not much of an evangelical mind." (And he's an evangelical.) The interesting thing about this particular stereotype is that whether one is a skeptic who perpetuates it, or a Christian who exhibits it, the remedy is the same. Read better books. Meet a wider variety of people. Listen without preconceptions. There are many, many thoughtful, loving Christians around and many good reasons to be open to the idea that the world is bigger than we know. A stereotype shouldn't stand in the way.

Why are Christian Stereotypes so Common?

2010-12-27T05:03:00.000-08:00

I have a whole lot of personality quirks that some people consider faults. I can’t cook. I can’t make small talk. I avoid confrontation like the plague. And I hate sports metaphors. One thing that people cannot say about me, though, is that I perpetuate stereotypes. I have friends who consider themselves Buddhist, Wiccan, Muslim, agnostic, atheist, and Christian, and I enjoy talking to each and every one of them. Of course, in order to qualify as my friends, they also have to be intelligent, funny, and not take themselves too seriously. I don’t have a lot of friends who aren’t real quick on the uptake, so I am forced to admit that I am also an intellectual snob. (add that to my list of faults). Because I actually know these people, I don’t have to buy into stereotypes about other religions. You will never hear me say “most atheists are just trying to be trendy” or “most Wiccans are just recovering from an abusive relationship.” You will hear me say that I think Buddhism does not have an adequate explanation of evil, but that’s a comment on the content of the belief, not the believer.

Though I am a Christian, I do not automatically have a lot in common with the church-goer down the street unless his belief has been refined in the fire of skepticism. Yes, I can worship with him, but I have more respect for an agnostic, Buddhist, or Wiccan that has wrestled with their own mortality and come to an honest, thoughtful conclusion than with a Christian who assumes the superiority of their own faith without ever having gone down into the cobra hole themselves and wrestled with the big questions. I think the most irresponsible thing a person can do is to hang their hat on a particular faith just because it fits the lifestyle they already live. “I think I’ll be Buddhist,” one friend said to me. “I was watching a TV show and Buddhism seems to be closest to what I already believe.” I asked him if he had actually investigated Buddhism to get the details before committing himself. “No,” he replied. “I’m just not that interested.” It’s the sad truth that a person can call himself anything and have given no more thought to it than picking out a Christmas present for a disliked relative.

Fortunately for all Buddhists, I do not paint a general portrait of Buddhism from this one example. At the same time, I must contend with people who bring the memory of one or two uncomfortable interactions with Christians into their relationship with me. For all my attempts to model a thoughtful, lively, loving, humble Christianity, I still have friends that are afraid to ask me anything about my faith for fear of hearing me channel my inner televangelist and ask them if they have accepted Jesus as their personal savior. Yes, stereotypes usually originate from somewhere, but most people agree that perpetuating those stereotypes is a universally bad thing. So why are stereotypes about Christians still so common? Not surprisingly, I have a few theories, which I’ll explore in the next few posts. To get started, I’m interested to know what stereotypes you’ve encountered? If you’re a Christian, what stereotypes have you been a victim of? If you’re not, what do you assume is true about Christians? (I promise I won’t be judgmental; I’ll just find it really fascinating.)