Holy extrapolation

Psalm 77 is the story of a troubled man’s lament. He questions whether God has permanently forsaken him, languishing on his bed. For 10 verses he speaks depression, until, at last, the rhetorical questions give way to a declaration of remembrance. “I shall remember the deeds of the Lord.” He proclaims, to himself, the mysterious ways of God, and yet how in those inscrutable ways, He has been faithful to Israel.

“Your way was in the sea, and your paths in the mighty waters, and your footsteps may not be known. You led your people like a flock by the hand of Moses and Aaron.”

May l have such faith, when there is no present deliverance to speak of, to extrapolate from the countless and constant faithfulnesses of God in situations where I have been similarly troubled, and declare the goodness of God, to his glory.

Jeroboam’s son and “the age of accountability”

Arise therefore, go to your house. When your feet enter the city, the child shall die. And all Israel shall mourn for him and bury him, for he only of Jeroboam shall come to the grave, because in him there is found something pleasing to the LORD, the God of Israel, in the house of Jeroboam.

In 1 Kings 14, Jeroboam’s wife inquires of the prophet Abijah about the fate of her ill son. God tells her that he’s going to destroy Jeroboam’s entire bloodline, and that the child will die a natural death because God sees something in him that’s better than the rest of the line, that’s worth sparing.

What’s interesting here is that, as far as we can tell, this child might be younger than the “age of accountability” – the hebrew is yeled which simply means child, son, boy, offspring, or youth. The Lord saw virtue of some sort in even a young lad.

A child’s character begins to show early. There is something in us other than what our environment has formed there. There are some with inexplicably good hearts, whose disposition seems remarkably different from those who have grown up under the same circumstances. Maybe the “age of accountability” is too contrived; perhaps accountability is a gradient.

This passage seems to indicate that even in a child, there is a kernel of character, of self, strong enough to be regarded by God. An interesting thought.

Paradoxes Part 2: The Problem of Evil

The Problem of Evil, as a Syllogism:
Premise 1: The Christian God is both infinitely good and omnipotent.
Premise 2: Bad exists.
Therefore: The Christian God cannot exist.

We can argue against either of these two premises in order to neutralize the argument.

What is the difference between doing and ordaining?
For we say that God ordained, or divinely decreed, evil (and he must have) yet God cannot cause or do evil, nor even tempt one to evil.

In defense of small government

I don’t usually talk about government and politics. However, I’ll venture there today with a claim: Small, limited government is essential to liberty. Why? I suggest that it is the embodiment of the best option out of the following three.

Some of us rule
We all rule
None of us rules

Option 1. Some of us rule (totalitarianism, monarchy etc. )
The undesirability of this option needs little explanation to our society, drenched as we are in the language of equality and tolerance. Out of “some of us rule” comes order, but also the undesirable stratification of society into classes, slave-owner relationships, and general oppression/suppression.

Option 2. We all rule (communism, pure democracy etc.)
These systems are the best option in a world where man is fundamentally a generous and others-centered creature. But alas, he is not. The masses cannot and will not rule themselves – leaders will coalesce. “We all rule” works for a little while, but all too quickly slides, as if on a smooth inclined plane, down into “Some of us rule.” A system that relies on man voluntarily helping his neighbor for the “common good” ends in the domination of those who have the responsibility of defining and managing this common good.

My Chinese classmate tells me that even the high communist language of China has beneath it today the unquestioned rule of the ~80 million members of the “party” over the many other millions who dare not disagree with them. No one is content, he tells me, but no one dares say so.

Big Brother always gets too big for his britches. That is not liberty.

Option 3. None of us rules (constitutional republic)
The only satisfactory conclusion is really one of stalemate: the only way to maintain our liberties is if nobody gets the reins all to themselves.Why? Basic premise of human nature: Man is primarily motivated by his own self-interest. Thus the ideal government is one in which checks and balances distribute power in such a way that every person and group’s self-interest checks the self-interest of every other group. This is the only way to keep certain groups from gradually accumulating and wielding power over other groups. Man’s selfishness can play off itself and keep everything relatively fair. (I’m not good at holding myself accountable, but I’m quite good at holding you accountable.)

Checks and balances

It’s the basic idea behind capitalism, too: The best way to get everyone to be productive is to let him reap the benefits of his work, because men are interested primarily in their own benefit. If a man sees he can get benefits without working (e.g. welfare) or that working more than a certain level will not bring additional benefit (e.g. taxation of income over a given cap), his productivity will decrease.

The U.S. was remarkable in being the first country to achieve this. However, having become quite fat in our abundance, and we are in danger of forgetting the value and price of this liberty. Compare the cycle of a civilization, attributed to Alexander Tyler:

From bondage to spiritual faith;
From spiritual faith to great courage;
From courage to liberty;
From liberty to abundance;
From abundance to complacency;
From complacency to apathy;
From apathy to dependence;
From dependence back into bondage.

I’d say we’re cresting the hill of complacency now, into the yawning abyss of apathy. Apathy says, “Okay, Mr. Leader, you just go ahead and take care of everything. You got this.” Pretty soon, we become dependent on Mr. Leader, and we forget how to manage our own liberties. He who cannot lead himself quickly becomes bound to the one who can.

A none-of-us-rules government would be a small government that interfered minimally in the functions of society. It would uphold the Bill of Rights and the Constitution, and operate within their borders. It would keep the onus of exercising liberty, with its rights and responsibilities, on the American people themselves, instead of assuming it. Ultimately, it says to the apathetic American, “I will not rule you, you must rule yourself. Come, pick yourself up, remember your liberty! I will not do it for you.”

Do we the people want to govern ourselves or to be governed? If we claim our rights, the government will yet give them to us; but if we do nothing, there is coming a day when it may be too late.

A philosophy of marriage

“If two people love each other and are committed to each other, then why do they have to be formally married?

I am getting married. Why have I chosen to do this?

I would see no reason why my chosen path were better than a personal, heartfelt commitment, if I did not believe certain presuppositions, namely: (1) Marriage is a spiritual union over which God has agency and authority. (2) The church exercises this authority. (3) Marriage is also a function of the culture/community.

First, if marriage is nothing but a social contract between two consenting adults, then indeed God or the church has no right to meddle. But I think marriage is something more. Jesus’ teaching on marriage is centered around his discourse with the Pharisees, as recorded in Matthew 19.

And Pharisees came up to him and tested him by asking, “Is it lawful to divorce one’s wife for any cause?” He answered, “Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’? So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.”

Jesus presupposes here that when marriage happens, God fuses the two people together with a “divine welding device.” When two people are married, their commitment to each other is only one aspect of what happens. They do not only join themselves — God also joins them. There is a spiritual significance and sacredness to being married. It is not “being official” like two people dating.

I’m not entirely sure what this means for people who have consummated their love before being married. Have they already been “married in the eyes of God”, as some put it? I think this might be true. The Mosaic law is interesting: the remedy for a rape scandal was for the man to marry the girl. On an personal aspect, I have been told by people close to me that a little piece of one’s soul is left with every person he/she has been intimate with. In contrast, I suppose there can be no union sweeter than that of two virgins, who can give each other their whole and unadulterated affection. The point is simply this: God acts in marriage to bind together two souls, and because of this divine action, marriage is sacred.

“Why would they need to be married by the church?”

At this point in our philosophy, a monogamous yet not officially married couple would be perfectly fine. I am getting officially married by an ordained pastor (although not physically in my church). Why have I chosen this, not as optional but as essential?

The first premise is simply that, since marriage is sacred, I desire to receive God’s blessing. I can think of no better example than in Braveheart. After William Wallace has secretly married Murron and she has been killed by the English because of it, he approaches her father at her funeral and kneels, head low, before him. The man, who had never given blessing of the marriage, extends his hand, trembling. He almost withdraws it, but finally, with a release of spirit, places it on William’s head. What he gave William there was his blessing on the marriage, and with it his forgiveness for the tragedy. The bittersweetness we feel in that scene is derived from the value of paternal blessing and sanction of marriage–a sanction most important to receive from our heavenly father.

The answer to why the church has to sanction marriage is that the church has been instituted by God with the authority and responsibility to vicariously administer his divine blessing on marriage. I do not believe that God’s authority is in any way limited to the channel of the church, but his people are called the Body of Christ, and God has chosen to work in the world through us (both an honor and a weight). We are given the image of servants managing the assets of the master until his return. A young lad could not easily say that he was serving the master in his absence while evading and undermining the trusted servant whom the master had given charge. Therefore, acknowledging God’s preferred means of communicating his blessing, is essential for those seeking the blessing of God to seek the blessing of the church, unless they are in such a place where there is no church (as in certain Middle Eastern countries, for instance).

I will add a note of comparatively less importance, about why it is fitting to have family and friends at a wedding, or at least, as has been the traditional bottom-line, witnesses. Inasmuch as marriage is primarily an institution given by God, it is also a function of culture, community, and clan. The idea that, having risen to adulthood, two individuals are entirely independent of their relatives, is quite a western idea. Many cultures in the world think of everyone as connected; they see themselves not as individuals, but as inextricable representatives and members of their families and communities–and I think there is some truth to that. My fiancee has said, “You know, when we get married, you’ll be a Gorenflo [her mother’s side].” I have acquiesced. Try as you might, you marry a family, not just an individual. Especially in the wedding ceremony, there is a process of “leaving” as well as “cleaving,” and it seems sad to ignore the sacrifice of the parents in giving their child away to form another family unit, focusing only on the new family unit. I imagine I would want a better sense of closure if I never attended the wedding of my daughter–if I could never take her down the isle, look her man in the face with an eye of understanding and trust, and dance with her one final time. As much as a wedding is essentially about the bride and groom, it is not just about them. No couple is an island.

So that’s why I’m getting married the way I am, as far as I can think of it right now. I’d love dialog on this–comment or email me if you like.

Paradoxes Part 1: The Trinity

Or, 2D Personhood and the Possibility of Love

The doctrine of the Trinity says that God exists simultaneously as one being yet as three persons. How can a being be one yet three? Well, I suggest that Nescafe has produced a product capable of this (right). However, if we are unsatisfied in equating the nature of God to a coffee-cream-sugar mixture,
a direct explanation is not forthcoming.

Nor should it be, if I am not omniscient. Perhaps my inability is the explanation. For example, imagine a 2-dimentional flat man like Mr. Game and Watch from ye old Nintendo. Suppose I want to pass through his world as a 3-dimentional creature. Well, because he can only see a 2D slice of me at any point, I would first appear as the tip of my nose, a hand, a foot – then a cross sectional slice of my body would appear and morph bizarrely until my butt and the back of my heel finally popped out of existence. I would seem to be a strange, mutating blob of parts, and those parts would appear at certain moments to be separate, disconnected blobs. For a visualization of this, check out this video on the 10th dimension, especially 1:25-1:45.

In the same way, I suggest, God’s personhood is beyond us. His transcendent nature can only be perceived by our limited “two-dimensional” personhoods as 3 persons or 1 person depending on our perceptual aspect or point of view, but the full nature of his personhood is beyond our ability to comprehend, simply because our perception is limited.

So what does this paradox give us? What is the benefit of accepting it? The Trinity turns out to be essential, for the reason that it alone enables love. Think about it. God is love, right? His character has always possessed this sublime virtue. Yet love cannot exist without an object other than the self, because love is the preference for another to oneself. How then could God, being the only being in existence, have possessed love in eternity past, before he created the world?

But if the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit have been forever engaging in a dance, each encircling in love around the other persons of the Trinity, face to face, bringing glory to each other, relating to each other, then love could exist within the Trinity, and thus love could be an eternal virtue.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
(John 1:1)

Jesus was “with God” – the Greek word pros carries the idea of “toward” or face-to-face, relationship. Reciprocal direction, if you will. And yet the Word was God. We get both unity and yet relationship internal to the unity. The Son is said to have been “in the bosom of the Father,” i.e. close upon his chest (John 1:18).

If you think about it, the fundamental building blocks of the material world are interestingly similar. Atoms are indivisible (under normal circumstances), yet they are made of particles orbiting closely around each other – relating to each other, if you will. I like the parsimony and pattern of the thought that at a very core level, both the material and the divine have intrinsic relationship. In fact, I suggest that this patterns the whole purpose of life and humanity – man was made for relationships, with God and with others. But I’m getting ahead of myself – that will have to wait for Part 2.

The sum of the idea is that the Trinity enables love and relationship to be woven into the fabric of the eternal character of the divine. It gives room for and explanation for the highest virtue known to man.

Religions that propose a strict monotheism (Islam, Judaism), or an otherwise-single divine essence (Buddhism, New Age) have no ultimate explanation of where the love of the Supreme Being came from and what it truly means. Religions that propose no Supreme Being at all have an even greater task – explaining the origins of love in total and what it is, other than a mechanism of social cohesion and survival.

So, the Trinity might not just be a strange paradox of person, but the genesis of the possibility of others-centeredness, the root from which comes all the love in the world.

Paradoxes: Intro

I am glad that Christianity doesn’t make sense. If it could totally fit inside my rational mind, I would wonder whether it could have been invented by some other human mind. As it is, I don’t think any man could have (or at least would have) invented a system so baffling. Yet it is mysteriously beautiful and coherent. Christianity is built on top of several paradoxical claims about reality. The best way to see the heart of the Christian message is to understand (not resolve) these paradoxes. I choose four big ones.

The Trinity: God is one being, yet has three distinct persons.
The Problem of Evil: God is both infinitely good/loving and omnipotent, yet evil exists.
Sovereignty vs. Free Will: God ordains everything that happens, including men’s decisions, yet man has the responsibility to choose what is right.
The Hypostatic Union: Jesus was fully God and at the same time fully man.

These are perhaps the four biggest intellectual objections to Christianity – many Christian sects have attempted to tweak their doctrine in order to alleviate the pressure of the apparent incoherence in these paradoxes. But I suggest that it is inside these very paradoxes where lie the core truths and enrapturing beauty of the story that Christianity tells.

Not in persuasive words of wisdom

This post is a stub, a question I’m asking myself, not an answer. Paul says the following in 1 Corinthians 2:

And when I came to you, brethren, I did not come with superiority of speech or of wisdom, proclaiming to you the testimony of God. For I determined to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and Him crucified. I was with you in weakness and in fear and in much trembling, and my message and my preaching were not in persuasive words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power, so that your faith would not rest on the wisdom of men, but on the power of God.

What does Paul mean? What is the role of rhetoric in the proclamation of the Gospel? “Persuasive words of wisdom” are something I’m passionate about. Do I need to settle for a simpler (or more arcane) idea of what it means to apologize the gospel? Or what kind of attitude is Paul decrying here?

Hmm….

Psalm 25:12-15

Who is the man who fears the LORD?
He will instruct him in the way he should choose.
His soul will abide in prosperity,
And his descendants will inherit the land.
The secret of the LORD is for those who fear Him,
And He will make them know His covenant.
My eyes are continually toward the LORD,
For He will pluck my feet out of the net.

Amen, amen, amen. May it be true of me, Lord.

The Power of Now and Christianity

Below is a humble attempt at an objective worldview comparison of Eckhard Tolle’s book and Christianity.

QUESTION	ECKHART TOLLE	CHRISTIANITY
Nature of the Supreme Being	God is everything, or the universe.	God is the creator of the universe, a personal being distinct from it.
The purpose of life	Life is a game God plays with himself in which he forgets part of himself (man), then inflicts pain on it, to lead it into the process of remembering it is part of God.	Life is a story God tells to his creatures of their fall, their hopeless depravity, his rescue of them, and their future union.
Nature of man	Man is part of God.	Man is part of God’s creation.
Pain/evil	Man’s mind-induced delusion of “self” as a separate identity causes him pain. The mind/thought is evil.	Man’s selfish compulsion to supplant God causes him pain. Placing ultimate value on an improper object (any creature) is evil.
Enlightenment / the good news	Realize that you are not your mind, perceive that you are Being, and accept the world as it is as perfect	Realize that, without any merit of yours, God has redeemed you by Grace through faith in Jesus.
How to live	The goal of life is to regain awareness of Being and to abide in that state of “feeling-realization.”	Believe that Christ has redeemed you, and seek to consistently bring glory to Christ.