Turn signals and repentance

I was on the interstate the other day when I saw ahead of me a minivan in the right lane. It had its left turn signal on. Must be changing lanes, I said, so I slowed down not to get in its way.

But the minivan did not change lanes. It just kept blinking and cruising along in the right lane. After about 30 seconds I became incredulous. I don’t think that person realizes that their turn signal is on. They’ve had plenty of time. After 60 seconds I decided to re-accelerate in my lane.

Sure enough, as I pulled alongside the minivan, I saw a rather elderly lady hunched over the steering wheel, intent on the road ahead, entirely oblivious to her turn signal. Sure enough. She had never meant to change lanes at all!

I think the process of my realization says something to the nature of professions of faith. (Now let me explain.) A turn signal is the outward expression of my intent to turn. A profession of faith, whether it be telling a friend that I’ve changed, or going forward in a church service, is similarly an outward expression of my intent to turn – turn away from sin, and to God.

And just like a turn signal left on without an actual turn soon seems to be a mistake, so claims to faith without action in keeping with them soon become dubious. Intentions which are initially projected by the symbol must lead to action upon those intentions. If there is no action, our faith in the intentions “expires” and we see them as fake.

Generally, in life, sincere decisions are always accompanied by action and follow-through. We do not accept claims without evidence. Neither should not call people Christians who do not obey his commandments. I don’t think that’s judgmentalism, just common sense.

Ungentile, unwhite, unborn

“Hey dude – fair comparison?” called the guy in the middle of George Mason University’s courtyard. He was holding a big poster.
“Well, actually, no,” said the graduate student he had caught traveling between buildings.
“Why not?”
“I don’t want to get into it. We will get nowhere.”

“I just stood there looking at it for a few minutes, describing it to my sister on the phone,” said my friend as he concluded his story, “I really found that offensive. It was propaganda. But I know it’s his right to free speech. Still….” He shook his head. “Makes me frustrated.”

“Did they use graphic pictures?” asked another friend.

“Yes, the other two were in black and white, to highlight the picture of the fetus, all bloody and stuff.”

“It’s offensive,” agreed a third friend. “I think they mean for it to be offensive.”

* * *

My friends are well-thought people. The discussion that ensued between them hinged not on whether abortion of itself is good or bad, but on whether the right of the mother to choose what to do with her body is greater than the right of the embryo to its life. Let me take a stab at expounding the rhetoric of the poster, to get to the heart of the ethical question of which right is greater.

Ungentile = “A Nazi does not think that a non-Aryan Jew is fully a person. Nevertheless, it was wrong for the Nazis to kill Jews.”
Unwhite = “A racist white man does not think that a black man is fully a person. Nevertheless, it is wrong for whites to kill blacks.”
Unborn = “Like the racists, a woman (and her man) who aborts does not think her baby is fully a person. Nevertheless, in the same way as it is wrong to kill an ‘inferior race,’ it is wrong to abort a baby.”

The rhetoric hinges on the concept of personhood, that is, what it means to be fully or optimally human. Before any value can be assigned to “fully a person” or “optimally human,” we have to answer to enormous question, “What is a person?”

The materialist says that a person is merely a physical organism whose mental synapses get firing so intricately that there eventually rises a byproduct, like smoke from a fire, called a consciousness. To him, the right to life is a property of this consciousness. Therefore, before any self-awareness has surfaced, the fetus is not entitled to human rights. I knew a guy in high school who said that infanticide was okay until about age one and a half.

The theist says that a person is not only a body like all animals have, but also an essence, breathed into the body by the Divine, and capable of relating to God and other humans in an immaterial plane of reality. To him, human rights are a property of this “soul” or “spirit.” Furthermore, the standard position of the Big Three monotheistic systems (Islam, Christianity and Judaism) is that the spirit enters the body at conception.

The answer to the question “is the right of the mother or the baby greater” depends on whether you say that the baby is fully a human. If it is a person, with all the rights pertaining thereunto, then it’s an easy step to Pro-Life beliefs. One need only agree that, of the rights to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” the right to life is the most fundamental, and outranks the rights to liberty and the pursuit of happiness, which might be violated for the mother. If the fetus or embryo is not a person, then the mothers right to liberty trumps the “organism’s right to life.” We permit women to go hunting and kill deer, which are organisms, but not persons.

One the friends who engaged in the discussion above said it best (and I paraphrase): “There’s no way you can be a Christian and not be Pro-Life. There’s no way you can be an atheist and not be Pro-Choice.” The two sides of the political issue follow from the deep-rooted worldviews they derive from. So that sign in the courtyard and my friend’s response uncover a deeper question at hand: Does God make a person, or is a person the byproduct of his body?

Holy texts as unholy weapons: rephrasing the question

October 10’s USA Today featured an article by Tom Krattenmaker in the “On Religion” column that was quite an interesting read. The title: “Holy texts as unholy wapons”; the main idea: “The Bible, as well as the Quran, has some accounts of God commissioning barbaric violence.” Krattenmaker illumines the discussion between Biblical scholars such as Lucado, Frazee, and Jenkins on passages of the Old Testament. For example, when God tells the Israelites to destroy all of the Amalekites – every man, woman, boy and girl. Even every animal.

Krattenmaker conveys the flavor that this God is arcane and embarrassing to Christians. Not only that, but belief in such a God could open the door to modern-day violence. The prescription? Krattenmaker cites Jenkins:

Situate the bloody passages in their place and time – a place and time with a vastly different moral understanding of violence and its justifications. A useful takeaway for Christians today is the imperative to spiritually smite…anything that corrupts one’s faith or devotion to God.

For the most part, I agree. The way that God dealt with the nations surrounding the Israelites cannot be imported wholesale today. We must understand the cultural filtering that hermeneutics and Biblical history require. “What would my ‘Amalek’ be today?” Some abstraction and internalization of the meaning of these stories is necessary, if only for the reason that the New Covenant moved God’s presence from the outside of His people to the inside.

I would ask, though: does Jenkins’ reponse carry some subtext? His answer sounds like one made by a person who believes that the commands of annihilation were contrived, and the holy books compiled, by men who only thought they were hearing from God. Is there a whispered message? “That’s what was right for them, in that time, with their slightly archaic understanding of the divine. The question is, which parts do you feel comfortable garnishing your own spirituality with?” What’s the problem with that? It assumes that God was merely a cultural imagination. If those commands really were delivered by an unchanging God, we cannot just relegate our explanation to culture.

Understanding why some misguided, devout people thought that their God wanted them to murder a nation would be rather easy. Delusion. Inferior evolution. Does Jenkins really believe that God exists as he is discretely described in the Bible, and that he was saying what the Bible says he was saying? I wonder whether he would give a straight answer to this question. (It feels to me that Krattenmaker is perhaps insidiously indicting the moral consistency of the Bible, and to the extent that this is the motivation behind his article, we should get a coffee and talk about his objections to the existence of an objectively real God and whether God can actually reveal himself in the world.)

For those (and only those) who accept the Bible as the actual penetration of the revelation of YHWH into a race of doomed souls, the question of what to do with these Biblical passages gets a little harder. We believe in an all-powerful, all-righteous, all-loving God. How God might be exercising fierce wrath as well as unrelenting mercy boggles the mind. Especially for the modern man. Did God really say that the Amalekites were a stench in his nostrils, and did he really command the Israelites to commit a genocide? Our global culture (and many of Jesus’ teachings) champions acceptance, tolerance, and peace. How do we explain actions which at first seem like they come from a being with a radically different disposition than the God of the New Testament? That’s the real question that emerges from this USA Today article. It’s not a question I have satisfactorily answered. But I’m committed to finding an answer that works. So…onward in my quest toward Immanuel.

Jonah, and what we deserve

Recreation and walking with God

I had a conversation last night with a friend, in which we agreed that we should always strive to live a life of excellence, never turning up an opportunity to please the Lord and do good. We used Micah 6:8 as a benchmark verse for defining “good,” or what God expects of us.

He has shown you, O man, what is good. And what does the Lord require of you, but to do justice, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God?

We disagreed, however, on how one applies this verse. This issue really arose around the question, “Can recreation for personal enjoyment be an optimal way to walk with God?”

Take, for example, a man who has the choice one evening between watching a movie (as a champion archetype for all things recreational) or reading the Bible (as a champion for all spiritual disciplines). Which action is better than the other? We could claim that reading the Bible is always better than watching a movie, thereby eradicating recreational activity for the devout (since we presumably always have access to Bibles), but that is quite a heavy claim.

We are left, then, either to determine that we cannot make the judgment, or to judge based on his motivations. “The movie is an idol.” How can we make this determination without the ability to see into the heart of the man? Only by saying that recreation is always an idol. In other words, obeying Micah 6:8 and acting for one’s personal enjoyment are mutually exclusive.

Are they?

I don’t think so. Consider this response to the man’s dilemma: “Lord, I could be reading my Bible right now, but this movie would be more relaxing. I know you have given me the freedom to enjoy things in life without fear of condemnation. Thank you for buying this movie for me with your blood. Thank you for joining me with your warming, intimate presence as I watch it.”

Could it be that watching a movie is, at times, the way to be most satisfied in Christ? Are there times when reading the Bible becomes a legalistic chore? Now I know that we are to exercise discipline beyond the level of our emotions, but I’m talking about the kind of obedience that says, “Well, I should…” with the undertone of “…or God will wag his finger at me.” There are times in my life when I’ve just read the Bible (or done whatever kind of spiritual discipline you please) out of a fearful sense of obligation. And there have been times when I have heard God say, “Just go watch the movie, kid,” and I exhaled a big sigh and said, “Thanks, God!” That movie was a wonderful, God-given gift, in which I “walked humbly with God.”

I am closer to God because of the freedom he gives me and the generosity with which he gives it. Since I have been given the right to be called his son, God is pleased when I am pleased. How incredible, that he is genuinely concerned with my happiness! Whenever I am open-handed and humble before him, he gives me the world as a playground of grace. And this does not produce in me self-centeredness. Rather, it makes me love him more, and wish that others shared in the blessing.

Praise be to our God and Father that he has made a time for everything, and with the giving of Himself has given us every good thing in this life. Drenched in gratitude, even my recreation is worship.

As always, thoughts of any sort are welcome!

If God is all good and all powerful…

…then why do bad things happen? This is one of the most common objections to the Christian God.

What if I say, “Because people have free will”? I would object to myself. God is sovereign, and no one’s free will is outside his ordained and chosen plan. Therefore, if I’m choosing to sin, he has chosen (in a sense) that that sin should exist. An atheist becomes a staunch Calvinist when given this answer, and he has the right to do so.

So if God is ultimately responsible for the pain, evil and suffering in this world, what can we say? There’s only one way I can see to avoid concluding that God is either twisted or impotent, and that is to say that bad things really aren’t bad things. Huh? We have to reassign the point of reference by which we evaluate good and evil.

What if pain is not bad, but a neutral thing, which in fact creates good by drawing people to kneel before the throne, or to demonstrate the un-ultimateness of the world? What if neediness is not a violation of my rights before God, but a revelation of my true nature, and how much I am insufficient but God is sufficient? What if evil is simply the state of something that lacks God’s influence? And what if God has chosen, for mysterious reasons, to create some things and then remove his influence over them? What if death is not bad, but a neutral thing that consummates the nature of a man to be forever what he has become. And what if, having become bad, he glorifies God forever as an object of justice?

Questions about why bad things happen can usually be found to rest upon the presupposition that man is the center of the universe. If God really is the point, the epicenter, the purpose of everything, then our definition of “bad things” alters drastically.

Therefore, we could answer the question this way: Inasmuch as God uses all things for his glory, and his glory is the ultimate good, then all bad things are ultimately good things, even though they may be bad things from the man’s perspective to whom they occur.

That answer might have some problems of its own, but it’s the best one I’ve got at the moment. Further challenges welcome, as we continually seek to better carve out our vision of the truth.

The gifts of prophecy and tongues as divine endorsement

Acts 19, where the believers in John’s baptism are baptized in the name of Jesus and then they speak in tongues and prophecy, is sometimes used as an argument that you can receive a special filling of the Holy Spirit that is not necessarily part of being born again. Of course I believe that the Spirit can move upon people in special ways during special times. However, this might not be the lesson we are to learn from the passage.

Whether those disciples were “absolute” believers before is up for debate. They were called “disciples”; but they hadn’t yet optimally believed yet. You have an outdated version of this software. Please upgrade. The point is, there was some question as to their status beforehand, and the Holy Spirit gave a public mark of their membership in the kingdom of God.

Tongues and/or prophecy is a mark of anointing (cf. Numbers 11:25 and 1 Samuel 10:10). In these Old Testament passages they occurred when people were being “endorsed” by God. Perhaps in Acts, the semi-believers need a similar endorsement to show that they are full believers. The endorsement hypothesis would also fit with the circumstances surrounding the gifts in Acts 10:44-48. This interpretation would invalidate the argument that the prophetic gifts are a second phase of sanctification; rather, they are special tools employed by the Holy Spirit when a particularly overt manifestation of his presence is called for.

Frosty the Snowman and the meaning of life

I recently brought up with some friends the question, “Where do you find meaning, apart from God?” One friend said meaning can be found in relationships – learning to love others and love well. Another said that she was uncomfortable with swallowing that whole, because she was unsettled by the idea that when we die, that is the end of us. Relationships with other people are too transient and temporal to be the ultimate seat of purpose.

I respect these two people very much, because I believe that, even without faith in God, they are perceiving and speaking his truth. I would like to push toward a fuller definition of the meaning of life by fusing aspects of these ideas: The purpose of life is to have permanent relationship.

I do believe that life is about relationships.
And I think that, like Frosty the Snowman, the meaning in a relationship is found in the hope of its permanence.

For Frosty the snow man
Had to hurry on his way,
But he waved goodbye saying,
“Don’t you cry,
I’ll be back again some day.”

In fact, that’s right where God comes in. We were made for a relationship with someone, an everlasting relationship in a place where there will be “no more crying, and no more pain.” My friends are striking all around the edges of God, hardly knowing what they’re bumping up against. That gives me great hope.

Good? Says who?

There seem to be several kinds of good. We have a rather general use of the word, like “This pie is good.” We mean a little more when we say, “It is good to rescue girls from sex trafficking.” And perhaps there is a third good in “John is a good person.” Let me unpack the distinctions.

The key is, good for who? What is this value judgment relative to? The first good is personally relative. (Pie seems good to me.) The second is stronger because it is socially relative. (Freedom from sex trafficking seems good to sex slaves.) But I think there is still yet a difference between the good in “John is a good person” – it seems to be relative to some value standard higher than society.

I am not just saying that John’s behavior benefits society; rather, I am making a motivation judgment. For example, consider Peter, a business owner who gives 30% of his assets to support the fight against sex trafficking. He does this so that he will look generous and like he “cares” in the eyes of his stakeholders, as a sort of necessary tribute to the poor, so that he can ensure the stability of his empire. In this case Peter is doing good, inasmuch as it is still good to fight against sex trafficking; but his giving does not cause us to say that he is a “good person.” Why? We see that his motivations for helping others were not really for the others’ sake. Alternatively, if Mary wishes desperately that she could help sex trafficking, but is poor and doesn’t have the money to do so, we could still give her the “good heart” award. We can think of many such examples of people doing good things without good motivations, or not doing good things yet still having good motivations.

What we uncover in such instances is that the third “good” takes into account motivation and intention. Therefore this third “good” refers to a less utilitarian standard. “John is a good person” is a claim of clean motives, of a certain inner innocence and virtue, which cannot be perceived by outward actions, indeed, which cannot be fully judged by a man at all. So when I, a man, make the statement, I am aspiring to a higher court.

Insodoing, I let slip my subconscious awareness that I am not the ultimate authority in the universe. This third good is governed by a higher power, namely God, who judges man, because he alone knows everything that is in man’s heart. Only He can see whether “John is a good person.” And yet we shirk his authority, and claim that we can sit as judge instead. We fight to vindicate ourselves on our own grounds.

Alas, if only we would kneel to him, and say, “You alone, God, are good,” then we would find him quick to poor out the grace he is waiting to give us.

Jesus said to them, “If you were blind, you would have no guilt; but now that you say, ‘We see,’ your guilt remains. – John 9:41

How to be a doer

For if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man who looks intently at his natural face in a mirror. For he looks at himself and goes away and at once forgets what he was like. – James 1:24-25

I never understood the comparison. How is disobedience like forgetting what you just saw in a mirror? It finally clicked for me when Erik Bledsoe spoke on it this weekend at Summit Lake.

“The Bible is a mirror. It shows you who you really are.” There are two ways to walk away from that book.

I could agree and can say, “Amen, that is true. I believe that.” Yet I walk away still cherishing the wounds, nursing the sores, drug down by my analysis of the situation. “That’s true in general, but in my case…” “I know God can do that. He can do anything. But…” Two seconds of focusing back on the problem, and our grasp on the Rescuing Hand slips, oiled by worry.

Or, as I walk away with a fresh realization of who I am, I can boldly leap onto the blessed promises. “I am a child of God. I am specially chosen. He delights in me. He thinks I am good, likeable, worth dying for. Right now, not because of my track record, but just because he made me. And yes, it’s true that I am despicable, in and of myself, but he has died so that I can stand now, by faith, washed from guilt and released from sin-slavery, and wrapped around by his loving squeeze hug.”

And then, when my mind has been filled with truth, I seal it with the simplest words. “Thank you, Lord.”

That is remembering what you look like in the mirror – what the Bible says about your identity. And that is the powerful force that alters your life and your behavior: you act like the person you truly believe you are. And so you become a doer.

Being a doer of the word is the process of the active remembrance of my identity.