The knowledge of God is very far from the love of Him.

8 Jun 2010

Evangelism at the Plaza

Christianity & Church, Culture, Writing

I’ve noticed that the studios lately have been experimenting with new ways to promote their movies. In both Chicago and Minneapolis, street teams have approached me to ask if they could take a picture of me holding a promotional item of some sort. I’ve worked out that they’re paid for each one of these photos, so it’s in their best interest to spend time where the people are, like Minneapolis’s downtown and Chicago’s Millennium Park. The kind of places we tend to go when we visit big cities.

So this past weekend at the Plaza in Kansas City, I was sitting on a bench with my friend Kyle when two people in their early twenties came up to us carrying a stack of literature. It amused me afterward that my first thought was to wonder what movie they were promoting. It turns out they were just evangelizing.

If you could call it that. Reading from a Chick tract, they explained to us the emptiness of worldly pursuits such as backbiting and whoremongering. After that, one of them asked if we drank alcohol. We answered factually that we did. He then asked if he could pray for us about that. Kyle said No. I don’t want you to pray for me because you don’t know me and I don’t know you. I’m Kyle. What’s your name?

And so we talked. We talked for about ten minutes. Jake told us he was a brand-new intern at a local missions organization who had left everything behind in Indiana when he recognized that the environment in his hometown was restricting his growth as a Christian. He also learned that Kyle and I were Christians and not in any way alcoholics. He ended up praying that God would give us signs and visions and went on his way.

The word evangelize comes from the Greek word euangelizo, which means “to bring good news”, and Jesus’ good news was always “Repent, for the kingdom of God is near” (see Mark 1:14-15). It had little to do with saving us for the sake of freedom from sin, and much to do with preparing our hearts for the inevitable arrival of Jesus’ future kingdom.

But here I am using rhetoric to excuse my inaction, as I often do. I can pick apart their methodology all I want, but they were spending their Friday evening in faithfulness to God. I, on the other hand, didn’t proclaim the good news to anyone.

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2 Jun 2010

Rerun: Objections, and Kenosis

Philosophy, Spirituality & Faith, Writing

These were originally posted September 26 and 28, 2008. I combined them into one entry here. Hopefully this will be the last of the reruns.

If I doubted my faith, it wouldn’t be due to scientific evidence or philosophical reasoning. The most compelling arguments against my faith are the practical ones, the arguments based on things that can be observed rather than those that can be reasoned.

Christianity is a last resort for desperate people. Most high-profile conversions, like Brian Welch from Korn a few years ago, are due to a person reaching the end of his rope. Alcoholics Anonymous uses a belief in God as a starting point for overcoming an addiction. And many who are terminally ill will turn to religion for the few months they have left. People use the idea of God as a psychological crutch because they are weak and they need something to help them cope with the darker side of life.

Christianity is not rational. It is an unnecessary cure for a fabricated disease. Sin can easily be explained in purely natural terms as our survival instinct. Animals are greedy, promiscuous and even murderous, and we don’t call it sin. We don’t really need to be “saved” from anything – we just need to abandon the concept of sin and quit feeling bad about what we do.

The Bible isn’t very distinctive from a literary standpoint. In the Old Testament, the poetry is often dull, the prophecies incoherent, and the narrative awkward. Parts of it are wonderful, but maybe 75% of it is skippable. If God wrote a book, couldn’t he have done a better job?

The Christian view of the world is too narrow. Christians set up camp on a hill overlooking a valley; the intellectual elite—scholars, leaders and artists—are always climbing higher up the mountain, and from that vantage point they can see that there is much more to the world than that valley. To them, the Christian worldview is something to be passed through, not stopped at. In other words: those who are inside the box of religion are afraid to go outside, but those who make it outside never want to go back in.

How do I answer these objections? The poem in Philippians 2 is the key to everything:

Your attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus:
Who, being in very nature God,
    did not consider equality with God something to be grasped,
but made himself nothing,
    taking the very nature of a servant,
    being made in human likeness.
And being found in appearance as a man,
    he humbled himself
    and became obedient to death—
        even death on a cross!
Therefore God exalted him to the highest place
    and gave him the name that is above every name,
that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow,
    in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord,
    to the glory of God the Father.

If our faith isn’t always rational, consider that it wasn’t rational for the Creator of the universe to die for his creations.

If our faith is especially attractive to the lowly and weak, consider that when the God of the universe became a baby, he could not even hold his head up on his own.

If the Bible is not distinctive, consider that Jesus was born to poor parents in a filthy stable in an unimportant town in an oppressed nation.

If our faith is not taken seriously by the rich, the powerful, and the intellectuals, consider that Jesus’ birth was announced only to a group of shepherds.

For the word of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. For it is written,
    ”I WILL DESTROY THE WISDOM OF THE WISE,
    AND THE CLEVERNESS OF THE CLEVER I WILL SET ASIDE.”

Where is the wise man? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since in the wisdom of God the world through its wisdom did not come to know God, God was well-pleased through the foolishness of the message preached to save those who believe. For indeed Jews ask for signs and Greeks search for wisdom; but we preach Christ crucified, to Jews a stumbling block and to Gentiles foolishness, but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. Because the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men.

For consider your calling, brethren, that there were not many wise according to the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble; but God has chosen the foolish things of the world to shame the wise, and God has chosen the weak things of the world to shame the things which are strong, and the base things of the world and the despised God has chosen, the things that are not, so that He may nullify the things that are, so that no man may boast before God. But by His doing you are in Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God, and righteousness and sanctification, and redemption, so that, just as it is written, “LET HIM WHO BOASTS, BOAST IN THE LORD.”

1 Corinthians 1:18-31

The word kenosis comes from the Greek word for “emptiness”, and it refers to the idea that Jesus emptied himself of his divine glory and dignity in order to be incarnated as a human. He gave it all up so that he could become what he wanted to save. Even apart from his words and actions, the very nature of Jesus Christ’s incarnation shows us how we should conduct ourselves as Christians.

We follow a foolish faith. We are fools for believing it. But God has chosen the foolish things of the world to shame the wise! His wisdom is above all others, but it is not merely an enhanced version of our own; it is altogether different.

And God, in his wisdom, engineered a world in which faith and trust are valued above all else. He will never allow his existence to be proven; he’s given enough evidence to satisfy those who already believe, but not enough to convince those that do not, so that it is impossible to reach him without faith.

If you require proof in order to believe, you will never find it, but if you believe first, you will find that you have all the proof you need. And this is foolishness.

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25 May 2010

Rerun: Plastic Jesus

Christianity & Church, Spirituality & Faith, Writing

Amanda’s cell phone is four years old. It’s an old monochrome Nokia from before the days of flip phones, and it works better than any phone I have ever seen.

Despite its age, it holds a battery charge for a week, and gets reception in places you wouldn’t believe. It has been dropped a few times, but you couldn’t tell from looking at it. It has never caused her a problem.

Meanwhile, Joel is on his third RAZR in six months. Look at how far cellular technology has progressed in the last few years: We now have hand-held phones that play music, take pictures, and fall apart if you shake them too hard.

How quickly we abandon quality for convenience. It’s not hard to see in our culture. Even though the food at McDonald’s or Taco Bell is a nutritional nightmare, it’s fast and cheap; low-quality and overpriced digital downloads have replaced the crystal clarity of CD audio; wireless technology is dominant, even though it is unreliable and slow compared to wired alternatives.

It has permeated every aspect of our culture – technology, environmentalism, art, relationships, and perhaps more inconspicuously, religion.

Because when it comes down to it, Jesus is inconvenient. He is impractical. He always seems to get in the way of my affairs, reminding me that the harder road is usually the right one, or telling me that I am not worthy of Him if I love anything else more than Him.

Jesus is inconvenient, and so those who do not have Him do not want Him, and those of us who do have Him are usually guilty (to varying extents) of trading the real Jesus for an innocuous, manufactured version of Himself. We do this by taking certain of His sayings seriously while ignoring others that do not fit into our already-established lifestyle. Make him white; make him handsome; make him political; make him tolerant. This plastic jesus is convenient because he agrees with us, but he is fragile and easily broken.

But the thing about Jesus – the inconvenient, real Jesus – is that He is forgiving. No matter how many times I exchange the truth of God for the lie that I can find happiness in anything but Christ, I am still His missing son. He lovingly awaits my return, and when I do find my way back into His arms, He throws a celebration party.

This is the Jesus I will always come back to.

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18 May 2010

Rerun: Clifford’s Principle

Philosophy, Writing

This was originally posted March 25, 2009.

At the last Grab a Brew, someone asked a question: “Would you rather be right with no evidence to back you up, or wrong, but with good evidence for it?”

I had never heard or considered this question before. My own answer was immediately obvious, but as he continued, it became clear that this is not only another area in which our beliefs differ, but that it is actually the source of our differences. It is the question at the root of all other questions.

I did some research the next day to get some background information. I found that the idea was first proposed in 1877 by William Kingdon Clifford in his essay called “The Ethics of Belief”, and came to be called Clifford’s Principle. Quoting Clifford:

The question of right or wrong has to do with the origin of his belief, not the matter of it; not what it was, but how he got it; not whether it turned out to be true or false, but whether he had a right to believe on such evidence as was before him. … It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.

In his essay, Clifford argues that it is morally wrong for someone to believe in something he cannot prove, regardless of the outcome. In a purely rationalistic worldview, it is true that we can only make progress if we build on a foundation of that which can be proven. It follows that if I believe something that I can’t prove is worth believing, then it is not worth believing. This is why Grab a Brew always comes back to the same three topics. We believe a lot of unverifiable things about the universe and the nature of reality. They see this as a moral travesty.

But what is truth? Is it that which can be proven, or is it that which corresponds to reality? This is our disagreement, and in the end, it reduces down to the question of whether or not God exists. If he doesn’t, the universe must be purely rational, and truth can only be that which is proven. However, if God does exist, who is to say truth is rational?

How much is truth worth? If a man says, “I’ll only look for my lost object in the well-lit corners of the house”, and further still, “If my lost object is not in the well-lit corners of the house, then I don’t want to find it!”, it’s clear that he does not place much value on the lost object. But when he determines to find what is lost, even if it means tearing apart the house panel by panel—then we can be assured that he values the lost object more than anything.

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12 May 2010

Rerun: Some New Thing

Culture, Writing

Due to some unforeseen circumstances, all of my writing energy lately has been directed elsewhere. I hope to start writing here again in the next two or three weeks, but until then I will be “airing reruns” from the past five years.

This one was originally posted February 10, 2007.

I have been working retail for the past four years, putting myself through school and gaining valuable insights into the human nature. From day one at Hy-Vee back in 2003, all the way to Target in 2007, it has been for me nothing more than a means to an end. I needed a job to help out with college expenses, and they needed a faithful worker that they could underpay, and that was the extent of our relationship.

I knew from the start that I could never actually make a career of it. It was just a feeling I got when I thought about myself in ten years, still putting cans on shelves and showing customers where the macaroni is. But I never really understood why.

Last week I brought my 1910 hardcover copy of Pensées to work so I could read it during my breaks. With all the wedding planning, and working two jobs, I haven’t had much time to read. (I started it way back in July.) And as I sat reading a book that was printed nearly a hundred years ago, filled with words written before 1662, it hit me all at once that I was holding the oldest thing that has ever been inside the walls of the building.

Target rotates the sales plans about every three months and clearances out all the “old” merchandise to make way on the shelves for whatever new items are coming in. There isn’t a single thing in the whole store that is more than a year old. Even the building itself was constructed in 2001.

I finally realize that this is why I have always hated retail so much. Its sole focus is new. Something that is three months old must be replaced with something new because it’s not new enough. If a package is opened, we can’t sell it because it’s not new anymore. Old stuff doesn’t sell very well, isn’t popular enough, so it has no place there.

When Paul went to Athens to proclaim Christ, the city’s residents were described in this way: “All the Athenians and the foreigners who were there spent their time in nothing else but either to tell or to hear some new thing.” When I hear my coworkers spend most of their conversations talking about the latest movie or a new restaurant, I realize that things haven’t changed much. We are a consumeristic society: We consume newness, in the form of new ideas, new products, new news.

What a contrast: God spent a fifteen hundred years writing a book in such a way that it would stay applicable for at least two thousand more, having no need of a replacement until everything in its pages has come true.

I put in my two weeks’ notice at Target last Saturday. I start work at SMART Public Safety Software down on Main Street in Cedar Falls on the 19th… I guess I just needed something new.

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28 Apr 2010

List: Tone Changes Meaning

Spirituality & Faith, Writing

Without realizing it, we read dialogue in the Bible with an imagined tone of voice. Here are three things Jesus said where the meaning changes depending on how I hear him saying it.

1. “You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your eye.” (Luke 6:41-42)

I always thought of Jesus saying this in a stern, almost reprimanding way. But doesn’t this fit the words better? Given his reputation as a winebibber (Luke 7:34, NKJV), he had to have at least known how to entertain a crowd.

2. “Unless you repent, you too will all perish.” (Luke 13:3)

This is the source of the turn or burn attitude that many have adopted toward unbelievers, especially in the last 50 years. But I don’t think Jesus was ominously threatening hell on those who didn’t accept him. He was telling them the truth, but with love and genuine concern.

3. “God, I thank you that I am not like other men.” (Luke 18:11-12)

This is the opposite of #1: in Jesus’ parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector, I tend to imagine a caricature of the Pharisee, speaking in a fake British accent with exaggerated hand gestures. Because of this, I immediately identify myself with the tax collector—a grateful sinner saved by grace—and the purpose of the parable is lost on me. But when I imagine the Pharisee praying sincerely to God in plain speech, it hits much closer to home. Jesus didn’t criticize him for the way he prayed, but for the content of his prayer.

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20 Apr 2010

Informed Apathy

Culture, Writing

It’s hard to imagine how different life was two hundred years ago. The telegraph had not yet been invented. Information only travelled as fast as the person who carried it, and it was valued in proportion to how far it had to be transported. Local news was abundant and travelled quickly, and it usually directly affected those who heard it. On the other hand, news coming from the East Coast to the Midwest was slow, but if it was worth making the trip then it probably also affected the recipients in some way.

Today, information is so easily transported that it has almost no value at all. I can turn on the television and hear about foreign elections, trainwreck celebrities, collapsed mineshafts, topsoil erosion, and dozens of other things that are happening right now; and while some of these news items are very serious, they won’t change what I plan to do with my day.

In his prophetic book Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman describes an idea called the information-action ratio, which is a measurement of the correlation between the things we learn and the things we do. He argues that with the technological advancements in the past 150 years—the telegraph, the telephone, and the television—this ratio has changed drastically. (The Internet was still about ten years away when he wrote the book, but it’s probably had a bigger effect than the other three combined.) We now know a lot more about what goes on in the world, and we do much less with what we know.

Information has become just another commodity in a capitalist system, and it must compete to get our attention. Most of the information that is delivered to us via headlines, blog posts, or the evening news had to fight to get there. As a result, most interesting has replaced most useful as the measure of the value of information—not what’s worth knowing, but what will get the most viewers or mouse clicks. This is paradoxically both the effect and the cause of the imbalanced information-action ratio.

We are told that as responsible citizens, it’s good to be informed. And this is true to the extent that the information affects what we do or how we live. But I’ll go on record as saying that it is not good to be too informed. Information that doesn’t affect our actions is worthless, and there are much more important things that God would have us fill our minds with than the endless cycle of novelty.

For my own part—we don’t own a television or subscribe to the newspaper, and I wrote a custom Firefox extension to hide the news headlines from Yahoo Mail. I just couldn’t handle it anymore. My working theory is that any news that’s important enough for me to act on will find its way to me some way or another, and that’s proven accurate in the last six months since I started limiting my information intake.

I mention this not because I want to sound superior to anyone, but because I thought it was important to show that all of the above information actually has affected my actions. Other people probably deal with information differently than I do, and these extremes may not be necessary, but this is how I decided to attack the problem of infomation overload.

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9 Apr 2010

C. S. Lewis: Longing

Spirituality & Faith, Writing

In speaking of this desire for our own faroff country, which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you—the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence; the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both.

We cannot tell it because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience. We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly suggesting it, and we betray ourselves like lovers at the mention of a name. Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that had settled the matter. Wordsworth’s expedient was to identify it with certain moments in his own past. But all this is a cheat. If Wordsworth had gone back to those moments in the past, he would not have found the thing itself, but only the reminder of it; what he remembered would turn out to be itself a remembering. The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing.

These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.

—C. S. Lewis in The Weight of Glory, pp. 29-31

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7 Apr 2010

Kurt Vonnegut: Everything Good As New

Culture, Quote

Billy looked at the clock on the gas stove. He had an hour to kill before the saucer came. He went into the living toom, swinging the bottle like a dinner bell, turned on the television. He came slightly unstuck in time, saw the late movie backwards, then forwards again. It was a movie about American bombers in the Second World War and the gallant men who flew them. Seen backwards by Billy, the story went like this:

American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses, took off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France, a few German fighter planes flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen. They did the same for wrecked American bombers on the ground, and those planes flew up backwards to join the formation.

The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers, and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes. The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own, which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck more fragments from the crewmen and planes. But there were still a few wounded Americans, though, and some of the bombers were in bad repair. Over France, though, German fighters came up again, made everything and everybody as good as new.

When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were taken from the racks and shipped back to the United States of America, where factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals. Touchingly, it was mainly women who did this work. The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas. It was their business to put them into the ground, to hide them cleverly, so they would never hurt anybody ever again.

The American fliers turned in their uniforms, became high school kids. And Hitler turned into a baby, Billy Pilgrim supposed. That wasn’t in the movie. Billy was extrapolating. Everybody turned into a baby, and all humanity, without exception, conspired biologically to produce two perfect people named Adam and Eve, he supposed.

—Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five, pp. 75-76

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5 Apr 2010

Jeff Crump: Mesmerized by the Promise

Culture, Quote

Three quotes this week. They all share a common theme despite their diverse sources.

Marketers know what we want. There is hardly an industrial-grade fast-food burger that is not advertised with images of dewy, plump tomatoes, wholesome bread straight from the oven, some kind of premium beef. The reality of flaccid vegetable matter, a soggy bun and tasteless meat is, of course, rather different. But that’s not really news—jokes about fast food that doesn’t look anything like the commercials aren’t even funny anymore. What is significant is that we are so mesmerized by the promise of fresh, wholesome food that we can be tricked into eating something else. Packages wouldn’t be decorated with images of traditional farms and contented animals, and commercials wouldn’t depict chefs and italian grandmothers carefully tasting this or that “authentic” recipe, if these weren’t the things we all think of as important.

The desire for food grown and prepared with care is not elitist or limited to a band of hippies. It’s what we all want.

Similarly, just as no one says they want tasteless, truck-ripened vegetables or feed-lot beef, no one deliberately plans a rushed meal. And yet, again, that is what we end up eating, wolfing down burgers in our cars or slurping a plastic tray of microwaved pasta as we stand hunched over the kitchen sink. Fast-food companies rarely show lonely people eating in their cublicles at work, or solitary figures heedlessly munching as they watch television at night. As usual, the marketers seem to know what we really want: they show smiling families gathered around the dining-room table. Talking, laughing, spending time together. If marketers know what we want, why don’t we get what we want?

In other words, we’re promised one thing, and we get something else. We end up gulping down food of dubious provenance when what we really want is to linger with friends and family over a meal of fresh, wholesome ingredients, carefully prepared. Fast food is sold to us on the merit of its illusory resemblance to Slow Food.

—Jeff Crump, from the introduction to Earth to Table: Seasonal Recipes from an Organic Farm

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