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24 February 2007
Historiographies.
It is amazing how two different people can remember the exact same event in two completely different ways. This is especially true when that event was an argument between those two people. Retold a hundred times in the minds of each combatant, the story becomes sharper, the hero nobler, and the villain crueler. Of course, one story’s hero is the other’s villain and vice versa. Anthropologists call this legendary development. It usually takes about two hundred years for legendary development to reshape a historical text. It usually takes about two weeks for it to happen to our individual histories. So it should take somewhere between two weeks and two hundred years for legendary development to reinvent the history of a people group.
On some level, we all assume that if the Apostles to show up today, they would all be found safely within the confines of our own denominational group. We all claim to be the legitimate successors and heirs to the early church. The problem is that we all say that, and many of us belong to denominations that are not in full communion with each other. We cannot all be right. We could all be wrong.
I wonder how different it is from a spat between once-friends. ‘When he admits that it is all his fault, then we can be friends again.’ ‘When all the ‘born-agains’ come back to Rome Sweet Home, then we can be in unity.’ Perhaps more a family feud, where one sibling does not respect anything the other does that he does not understand. ‘If all the Catholics became Charismatic, then I’d be glad to call them brothers. Until then, they are step-children.’ Really, both sides are saying the same thing: we will accept you if and only if you become like us. If there is a more direct expression of pride, I am not aware of it.
Pride is the diametric opposite of love. Love is patient and kind, it always hopes, it keeps no record of wrongs. Pride is not patient enough to pursue understanding, not kind enough to be gracious in the interim, it does not hope enough to pursue others, it forever keeps records of wrongs. Where love seeks to redeem those outside its reach, pride mocks and destroys the things it cannot grasp. The lifeblood of the Church is the self-giving love of Christ. Only by His blood is man reconciled to God, and only by His blood is man reconciled to others.
Praying for reconciliation is really quite dangerous. God promises that He will give us whatever we ask in His will. In praying, we clear Him to tear down all the parts of us that get in the way of that prayer. So when we pray for patience, He tears down our impatience with trying times. When we pray for humility, He tears down our arrogance with a good dose of reality. And when we pray for reconciliation, He tears down our pride. This is the trouble with asking God to adjudicate something: He is rather like Solomon. The true mother of the child puts aside her pride, even in the face of tremendous injustice, to save her child’s life. In doing so, she shows herself the rightful parent and is hence reconciled to her baby.
It is rare that God reconciles two people by telling one, ‘you were right and they were wrong.’ Instead of magnifying the pride of one party at the expense of the other, God casts down the pride of both parties and glorifies Himself. He generally answers, ‘both of you are fallen and need my grace.’ In the abundance of that grace, both find the love to find each other again. Joseph was reconciled to his brothers in this way, and what was true for the children of Jacob will be true for his tribes. Only in humility will the Body of Christ will regain its unity.
I imagine that in the unpleasant parting of Joseph and his brothers, there was a breaking of stories. To Joseph’s understanding, he was betrayed and sold into slavery by his cruel brothers, simply because they were jealous of the love that their father Israel lavished upon him. Perhaps to his brothers, Joseph forced their hand. In telling them that he would rule over all of them, Joseph made clear his intention to usurp the inheritance, and they did the only thing they could do. Perhaps, to their eyes, selling him into slavery was not less wrong that the slavery that Joseph had promised to impose on all of them. Better one man a slave than all men slaves. In the hundredth retelling, doubtless all the nuance had long since passed from either side of the story. The two narratives were separated by an ever-widening chasm, across which no love or compassion could pass.
We, too, have our spilt narratives. The Council of Trent was no less bloody than Joseph’s day in the desert, and we all have our version of what happened. Retold by different people in different places over the course of five hundred years, all we really remember is that we were right and they were wrong. As with an argument between lovers, only the facts that support that conclusion make it to the final cut of the story. It is strange that the things that were the least clear in the initial telling of the story are the most clear in the legend that develops from it, and the things that were most clear become the least remembered.
We have different stories. One is a story of transference, of rebirth through grafting. That retelling of the story is the passing of the gospel to the Gentiles. The Pharisees, the inheritors of Moses‘ seat, bent the laws of God to the selfish ends of men. The commandments were twisted until they were unrecognizable, while those entrusted with the law used it to enrich themselves. The teachers of the law made sure that their robes were beautiful adorned, without a thought for the fatherless or the widow. When confronted with the Word of God, they silenced the Messenger with death threats, demanding that he repent from His blasphemy. So the law was torn from the hands of that people and given to another.
So the inheritors of the seat of Peter forget the words of the Rock. They hid the law of love from those it was meant to save, twisting and distorting it to enshrine their positions of power. And the red-breasted Cardinals in their gilden palaces knew nothing of the poor in the streets of their cities, as St. Peter’s was built with the blood of their parishioners. When a messenger armed with the Word confronts them, they demand recantations on pain of death. So the chair of Peter is ripped from their hands, and given into the hands of others. As Gamaliel would say, we would still be growing five centuries later if God was not with us. While there may still be a remnant from the old covenant, it is the Protestants who are in the center of God’s story.
Of course, there is another retelling. This one is a story of legitimate authority and rebellion, of those willing to submit to the fullness of God’s Truth, and those who only wanted Him on their terms. It is a story of Israel and Samaria. There was one Ark of the Covenant, passed down from the days of Moses. It had one legitimate resting place: the Temple in Jerusalem. There was only one Temple, only on Holy of Holies where the Spirit of God chose to dwell. And there was only one tribe of Levi, empowered to serve and celebrate the presence of God. There was only one faucet from which the grace of God flowed to His people, and you had to place yourself under that faucet to find the fullness of His grace. You could choose to worship at the Well of Abraham if you wanted to, but you were choosing to distance yourself from the center of His blessings. Still, there was such an overflow from the faucet that grace may splash all the way to Samaria. Nonetheless, the Samaritans were a proud people, unwilling to submit to the authorities established by God, and hence they cut themselves off from the fullness of His grace.
So there has always been one Faith, passed down from the Apostles, one Seat of Peter, passed down from one Holy Father to another, one Holy Communion, entrusted to the new Levites. There are those who find the humility to submit to the grace that flows from the one true Church, and there are those who refuse it because of their own pride. There is only one faucet, and under it grace flows down through the sacraments to the People of God. You can choose to worship outside the confines of the true Church, but you are choosing to distance yourself from the center of His grace. Still, there is such an overflow of His grace that it may splash all the way into Baptist and Pentecostal churches. Nonetheless, the Protestants are a proud people, unwilling to submit to the authorities established by God, and hence cut off from the fullness of His grace. While there may be some of them who truly pursue God as revealed in nature and Scripture, it is the Catholics who are in the center of God’s story.
Though told from two seemingly irreconcilable perspectives, something about these stories seems striking similar. They both sound a lot like, ‘I was right and you were wrong.’ Perhaps there is a different story, one that sounds a lot more like, ‘both of us are fallen and in need of a Savior.’ Perhaps there is a story we can tell together, one where we are humbled and Christ is glorified.
That story is one of Israel and of Judah. It is a story of a kingdom of God divided by the sin of men. There was once one Israel, a land of milk and honey, of prophecy and promise. The land of Joshua and of David and Solomon. A land with one King, one law and one tribe of priests. But Salvation History is written at the intersection of the perfect will of God and the sinfulness of men, and so it was here. The kings of Israel fell away from God, and in the process fell away from each other. And so Israel was divided into two. Both Israel and Judah had legitimate claims to the inheritance. Judah claimed Jerusalem, Israel claimed the majority of the tribes. The Northern and the Southern Kingdom both claimed to be the true people of God, and in a way, they both were. It just that neither of them were all of the true people of God. Because the kingdom is divided, both claims are incomplete. In a united kingdom, all the claims would have been reconciled to each other, for there would only have been one Claimant. One Man unites the claims.
In Return of the King, Tolkien tells of Aragorn, the Ranger who becomes King of Men. There are many kings, princes and stewards of men in Middle-earth at the end of the third age, many claims to the various thrones. Aragorn reconciles all those claims to each other. He is last of the line of Numenor, the legitimate heir to the kingship of men. He saves the Kingdom of Rohan, earning the allegiance of Theoden and Eomer, the rulers of Rohan. He saves the Kingdom of Gondor, winning the allegiance of Faramir, the Steward. He is the one man that all the princes of men will recognize as their rightful ruler, and he is the one man that unites all the free men of Middle-Earth.
Tolkien’s Aragorn reflects something of Jesus Christ. The Lamb of God unites all the claims, and all of His children are united in Him. He is the Lion of the Tribe of Judah, the prophesied King of the line of David, the Alpha and the Omega, the King of Kings and Lord of Lords. He is the Savior of the Catholics and Evangelicals, the Savior of Luther and Erasmus, of Hus and Ignatius, of Billy Graham and John Paul the Second. One Man would have restored the kingdoms of Israel. One day, He still will. That One Man will unite the church. As we draw in to Him, the claims become reconciled, and we start telling one story again. Therefore, in reconciliation, there must be a fusion of stories.
On this side of the fall, any great good is almost always associated with a great deal of friction. Without the terrible War of the Ring, Aragorn would not have been able to unite the claims to the kingship of Middle-Earth. His greatest enemy in doing so was not the armies of Mordor, but the pride of Denethor, the Steward of Gondor. Accustomed to the power and the position of ruler, Denethor is unwilling to relinquish Gondor to Aragorn, the rightful King. Instead, the kingdom is pried from his dead hands. The Pharisees were to be the Stewards of the Seat of Moses until the return of the King. When He came, like Denethor, they were unwilling to relinquish their position as rulers. And like Denethor, rulership was wrenched from their dead hands, as the Romans tore the Temple apart, brick by brick.
We are hardly immune to the temptation of the Steward. Pastors and priests grow accustomed to their position and their influence. Make it through Seminary, pay your dues as a youth pastor or a parish priest, and you finally find yourself in a good place. It is hard to let go of such a place. After all, that time should count for something, right? It should count for something to learn the entire Torah, to be of the tribe of Benjamin, to be circumcised in accordance with the Law, to be the Pharisee of Pharisees. Paul counts it all as loss. (Of course, only after having been wrenched off his horse by the Hand of God.) I wonder how hard it would be for many in the ministry to submit to a loss of power and prestige were God to reunite the claims of His Church. I wonder how much Faramir versus how much Denethor lives within each of us.
There is still a question of understanding. Imagine a restaurant with a newlywed couple sitting right across from an older couple. The newlyweds are all googly-eyed, hands all over each other, almost making out right at the table. The older couple sits all prim and proper, talking about how much they enjoy the weather this time of the year, and about their plans to go to the museum the next day. Looking at the older couple, the newlyweds can’t understand how two people who love each other can sit across from each other so bereft of emotion. The newlyweds express their love in their passion, and they are not wrong to do so. But they would do well to learn and appreciate other ways to express love. Looking at the newlyweds, the older couple doesn’t understand how two people who know so little about each other can truly love each other. You see, the older couple started going to the museum every Tuesday when they were a younger couple. As years of Tuesdays passed, museums were one of the things that lasted, along with their respect and appreciation for each other. Therefore, to them, that tradition is a more meaningful expression of love than is adolescent groping. But they, too, would do well to re-discover their springtime passions for each other.
We are like the two couples. Neither of us are particularly interested in learning how the other expresses their love for God. Until we do, neither of us will truly learn to respect each other, certainly not enough to call each other family. I venture to say that much of this has to do with our love affair with comfort. But Agape is hardly comfortable, it sends you across railroad tracks and across oceans. Agape teaches us to pour ourselves out as a drink sacrifice for others. Part of this is understanding the story of the other. A bigger part of it is letting go of our own.
For this, we return to Joseph. Sitting in a slaver’s pit, Joseph certainly had time and reason to ruminate over his side of the story. Instead, he does something far wiser. He lets go, and asks God to tell the story instead. Trusting in God, Joseph believes that God will work all things for good, and through that trust the Lord frees him of the power of pride and vengeance. God brought Joseph to a place where he could lead his brothers into that same freedom. It is for freedom that Christ sets us free, and Joseph uses his freedom to free his brothers. Through Joseph, both he and his brothers enter into God’s retelling of the story, and in that retelling are reconciled. Only when they found themselves back in the same story could they turn to the next chapter. Only in that next chapter does the rest of the story make any sense: Joseph was sold into slavery so that the lives of many, including his own family, could be saved.
We would do well to let God tell our stories. Trusting in Him, we will find ourselves free of pride and vengeance. We will find ourselves in a place where we can lead others to freedom. In that freedom, we will find reconciliation. We will once again be one people under one King. And when our stories becomes one again, we will finally be free to turn to the next chapter. I have a feeling it will be a good one.
23:29 Posted in Thoughts | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) | Email this
23 February 2007
A Reflection in Shards.
‘I pray also for those who will believe in me… that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you.’ - Jesus (as told by John.)
It is one thing to have a tarnished mirror, quite a different thing to have one that is cracked. Not better, not worse, just different. Tarnish robs the reflected image of its clarity. The more tarnished the mirror becomes, the less you can make out the thing being reflected. Cracks rob the image of its completeness. You can see the image quite clearly, but it no longer lines up with itself. Where lines should connect to lines, they instead shift along jagged edges at the fault lines of the crack. Each shard reflects a different and incomplete perspective of the whole. What was once one complete picture is now reflected in many fragments, each no doubt with its own idea of ‘fullness.’
We are the Body of Christ. We are meant to reflect Him to this world. So we are mirrors, both individually and corporately. And we are cracked, both individually and corporately. Individually, we are a hundred different and incomplete people, depending on who is watching us. We wear a hundred masks because we forget the one Person who always watches over us. We want to be seen as righteous in everyone’s eyes but His. Rather than trust His conception of us, we trust more in our own self-conceptions and self-deceptions. So instead of reflecting a complete picture of Him, we only reflect Him in jagged bits and pieces.
We stay shattered even as we come together in His Name. A hundred different churches, all reflecting Him in bits and pieces, all arguing about how their piece contains the true fullness of the Gospel. One is the church of the mind, where we pursue Him in Truth. One is the church of the heart, where we pursue Him in Spirit. One the church of compassion, another the church of orthodoxy; one the church of grace, another the church of justice. Is Christ divided? He is not. He is the Lion and the Lamb, the reigning king and the suffering servant all at once. Yet we are divided.
We are all made differently. Therefore, we will understand Christ in different ways; one may lead with the heart, another with the head. Consider the apostles. In many ways, Peter was the apostle of the heart, while Paul was the apostle of the mind. Paul illustrates a point using the various declensions of a word from the Torah; Peter simply says what he is feels. This is hardly a bad thing; only together are they all things to all people. Unfortunately, when Peter and Paul have a disagreement, the group hug hits a snag. Many people held the opinion that you first had to become Jewish in order to then become Christian. Peter, always the man of the people, allows himself to be swung to that viewpoint. So he and Paul are now at loggerheads. There is no way around the fact that somebody is right and somebody is wrong.
The wrong somebody happens to be Peter. To his great credit, when Paul confronts him, he yields. These two pillars of the early Church are reconciled in Spirit and in Truth. Peter and Paul were brothers, and each cared more about proving Christ right than about proving the other wrong. They both go on into their roles in Salvation History. I cannot help but wonder if their reconciliation is not in some part due to their membership in the same church. I wonder if they would not have gone their separate ways in a world of schism. Even then there was Paul and there was Apollos, even then there were fault lines. Nonetheless, there was one Jerusalem Council. There was one Name we were called, and one Name we called each other, even if there were different pronunciations. Nazarene Jews, Followers of the Way, we were all Christians.
Today we are Evangelicals and Pentecostals, Catholic and Orthodox, we are a hundred different fragments all arguing about who has the fullness and who does not. And here’s the rub: none of us are so much wrong as incomplete. All of our shards have different pieces of the reflection. A True Christian is an evangelical Christian: he preaches the Gospel to the nations. A True Christian is a Pentecostal Christian: she is filled with the fire of the Spirit. A True Christian is a catholic Christian: he is united with the universal Body of Christ in Spirit and in Truth. A True Christian is an orthodox Christian: she practices the one true faith passed down from the Apostles. A True Christian is all of these and more. He is known by many names, but the first of those names is always the Name of Jesus.
This is not to say the other names are not still important. Saul is renamed Paul. He is not renamed Jesus. He reflects Jesus as Paul in a way no one else can quite match. As does Peter. As do we all. So he is Paul, the Christian. The names converge over time, but as Christ becomes more real, so does Paul. He remains Paul, but Paul becomes more and more like Christ. Paul was made to uniquely image Christ, so it is only in Christ that he finds his true self. And so it is with Churches. The Church in Ephesus. The Church in Nigeria. The Church in America. Each are meant to be unique collective expressions of Jesus Christ.
Paul’s experiences mold the uniqueness of his reflection of Christ. Time, space and experience shapes Paul the Christian. His history has something to do with the way he fits into Salvation History. It also has something to do with the places he falls short of God’s plan. What is true for us individually is true for us corporately. Church history is writing in the intersection between the work of the Holy Spirit and the acts of fallen men. Constantine presides over the Second Nicean Council, weaving something of the Imperial bureaucracy into the fabric of the Church. It is neither inherently good nor inherently bad, merely a function of being the Church in Rome.
Imagine you are a Christian on the American frontier, circa 1820. In your town, there are basically two mutually exclusive options for entertainment. You can go to the saloon, dance with prostitutes, get completely plastered, and then come home and take out your frustrations on your family, or you can go to church. Paul talks about food sacrificed to idols and abstaining from things that cause a brother to stumble. For this reason, most of the Russian Christians I knew didn’t drink. Kind of hard to manage a functional model of moderation in a culture which lacks any other conception of drinking other than getting smashed. The newly-saved frontier Christian faces a similar dilemma. Dancing and drinking are inextricably linked with his previous lifestyle. It just makes sense for him to abstain from drinking and dancing, and it just makes sense for the frontier church to do the same. So a hundred years later, Baptists were abstaining from the same things, often without remembering the original reasons for doing so. In this way, tee-totalling was woven into that branch of the Church in America. This, also, was neither good nor bad, merely a function of being Christian in that place and that time.
Languages move along with the streams of history, as well. When one language becomes divided by a mountain range, though, it generally branches off into different streams. Rarely do the streams come back together, as the journey of the two streams takes them farther and farther from each other. The same is true for the Church. Our mountain ranges are our corporate sins. As they break our fellowship, we begin to follow divergent paths. So it is sin that always leads to schism. And like anything else that happens in relationship, rarely is that sin one-sided.
Sin is schism with God. The Church exists to reflect God to the world. Therefore, sin within the church is schism in the church. And it is more schismatic to pretend that it doesn’t exist rather than name it. Our Anglican brethren are discovering this even now. Sin gives birth to division one way or other. Adam chose unity with his spouse in sin, rather than schism with her. He instead chose schism with God. In sin there is schism, one way or another. If we choose to ignore the sin, the schism will be with God, instead.
Bend a mirror, you distort the reflection. Bend it even more, it breaks. You end up with a shattered picture, but the individual pieces may have a less distorted reflection. It will instead be incomplete. Sin always creates disunity, for the first unity is with and in Christ, and sin breaks us from Him. So there are many flavors of Schism. There are the declared Schisms, the break at the turn of the first millennium, ostensibly about filioque, but really about the tremendous pride of the Western and Eastern halves of the remnants of the Roman Empire. Pride was the sin that broke the Church the first time. It was that same sin that broke the Church the second time at Trent. And as beautiful as St. Peter’s is, we must ask ourselves if it was really worth the cost. We must ask if the indulgences which paid to gather the stones of that building were worth the scattering of the stones of the Church. Certainly, this sin was not one-sided. But it was sin, nonetheless, and it gave birth to division, nonetheless.
So we are a broken mirror. And while we are made whole in Christ, we are not all whole together. We are each incomplete in our shards. Yet God still works through us, such as we are. And He reconciles us to each other. The Holy Spirit draws all men toward Christ. Those who follow find themselves closer to each other.
I recently attended a Charismatic Catholic conference. Singing Vineyard worship songs there, I realize something. Vineyard churches have endeavored to bless the Body of Christ by reconciling Evangelicals to Pentecostals, but here God used them to bless Christians beyond the boundaries of those original intentions. Where there is brokenness, God seeks to heal. Where that brokenness is not ready to be healed, God works despite it. Where there was one land, there are now canyons. But He has made bridges across those canyons. And sometimes, where no bridges could be made, He does airdrops.
I have a few friends who were formerly Evangelicals and chose to convert to Catholicism. This was hard for me to reconcile at first. After a good deal of prayer, I feel as if God granted me a measure of understanding. Imagine a great military commander. He has a problem. His army, navy and air forces all don’t get along with each other. They seem more interested in fighting each other than fighting alongside each other. The forces were all designed to work with each other, but they are hardly willing to talk to each other. Say the air forces have some tactics that would be useful for the army. If you merely have the air forces write down their tactics and send them to the army, there’s no way the army will take the tactics seriously. It might work better to send an air force exchange officer to the army, and have him explain the tactics. He will run into the same problem, though. The army guys will instinctively distrust anything that comes from someone in a blue uniform. Really, there’s only one way to get the message through. You have to choose an air force officer and completely transfer him into the army, uniform and all. Then the message will get through in a language where it can be heard, understood and acknowledged.
Scott Hahn is one of the most prolific and influential contemporary Catholic authors. He writes clearly, using simple terms and simple analogies. He breaks down the Catholic faith into examples that can be easily understood and communicated, much like an Evangelical. There is a good reason for this: he used to be an Evangelical. Growing up Evangelical, attending an Evangelical college, involved in Evangelical ministries, he found himself drawn to ‘Rome Sweet Home,’ as he describes it. While thoroughly and undeniably Catholic, and very much of the opinion that other Evangelicals should follow a similar path, it is undeniable that God is using his Evangelical background to bless the Catholic Church. And praise God for that.
Really, the different branches of the Body of Christ owe more to each other than any of them care to admit. Without Evangelicals, there would be few Catholic Bible studies or praise songs. Without Catholics, there would be little of Evangelicals being salt and light in their nation on behalf of the weakest amongst us. We each have a place where we fit. In that place, we mesh perfectly with the believers around us. It is like a puzzle. When we find our place in the bigger picture, we become united with the pieces around us.
Continuing the military example, it is the mission that ties a combat crew together. It is not in symposia, not in discussions of differences or in debates or anything else where a crew finds their unity. It is in doing their job. The crew sorts out their differences because they need to do the mission. If they forgot that mission, pride and social dynamics would tear the crew apart. But they remember that their fates are tied together, one way or another. As ours should be. We were given marching orders, as well. Our mission was the Great Commission. In that mission, we have to reconcile ourselves to each other. We are forced to realize that there is something more important than our pride. We were to find each other in the harvest. If we sit here and try to sort things out it wont work. If we find each other on the missions field, we’ll have to make it work. And we will, through the power of the Spirit.
Returning to Paul, he was the most complete when he was the most Christ-like. Only then was he of one mind. Before, he was Paul the Pharisee. Paul the Scholar. Paul of the tribe of Benjamin. Paul of a hundred other things. Like the in Greek theater, our masks take one feature of the face and make it the only feature. But faces have many features, so we must have many masks, all of them incomplete. But in Christ, he is Paul the Christian. Paul the Christian is still a scholar, still of the tribe of Benjamin, still a Pharisee. But he is complete. Only in Christ does he leave behind his hundred masks and put on his real face. That face was Christ.
What was true for Paul is true for all of us. It is true for us as a Church. We wear many masks. One Catholic, one Evangelical, one Orthodox. And all these things are true of us. But they are all incomplete. We cannot face God until we have faces, to steal Lewis’ line. As a Church, we are to have one face. It is to be the face of Christ. Surely we will all reflect different aspects of that face, but we must reflect Him together. If this fractured army can stand against all the forces of darkness, imagine what a united army could do. If a cracked mirror can still reflect enough of the light of Christ to change lives, imagine what a reforged mirror would look like. It might just shine bright enough for the blind to see.
02:51 Posted in Thoughts | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) | Email this
12 February 2007
How to be Awesome: An Ontological Approach.
So it occurs to me that I wrote a bunch of serious stuff. Someone reading it might think I was some sort of philosopher, citing sources and speaking Latin over some half-caf double hazelnut macchiato. Tragically, that’s not me at all. I’m generally pretty retarded, and I find myself amusing nearly all the time, whether I actually am or not. In order to prove that beyond any doubt, in this post I’m just going to write about random, stupid crap that nobody probably cares about but me. In other words, it will read like a normal blog.
Kahlil Gibran was a famous poet from Lebanon. He wrote in the late 1800s. He looks a lot like Borat. He writes this book ‘Jesus, son of man,’ which describes Christ from the perspective of John, Pilate, Caiaphas and many others. And I can’t help but think about Larry Norman’s ‘The Outlaw.’ Of course, Gibran is one of the people Lewis talks about, hating on Paul but loving Jesus. He describes it like a proto-revolutionary who goes after all the king’s advisors, saving for the last step actually dethroning the king. But whatever. I don’t know Gibran’s heart. It just strikes me that two people from such different worlds and times end up saying the same thing in two completely different media. And it strikes me that a lot of the time the words are the same, and the words are what is important, not the medium. But most of the time, because we are arrogant, we spend a lot of time arguing why our favorite medium is cool and everybody else’s sucks.
Through a convoluted series of events, I was reminded of a post I read a year ago from someone who used to be my friend. They were talking about how unoriginal Top 40 stations were, and played two Nickelback songs simultaneously, where you could see that they used exactly the same rifs and chords. I’m not a big Nickelback fan, so whatever, but I think they’re actually hard rock, not top 40. Anyways, so I think its weird when people who are all ‘Im so multicultural’ only are sensitive towards the cultures they already like. After all, you can watch multi-culti dance from a safe arm‘s length, but actual multi-culturalism happens when the Manhattanite has to interact with the Campesino-American wearing the cowboy hat and boots, where people have to overcome actual prejudices, instead of jousting after institutional racism and the man. But that’s hard, so we do easy things that we want to do anyways and call them hard instead.
Things all have contexts. I can quote Durkheim or Weber or whoever you want, but it should be totally obvious. I think that citing sources is really just invoking power. It doesn’t add anything to the argument, really. Like saying ipso facto or q.e.d. It doesn’t say anything. It just invokes power. Like the court languages of the middle ages. A power language, used by the intelligentsia and the elites for self-identification. Language to power, would make an interesting post. Ill mull it for a while first. Regardless, I shouldn’t have to quote some guy to validate a statement. Judge it on its merits. Do the same for me. I get so sick of people looking at the groups I am part of and trying to do some freakin’ multi-variate regression, and then telling me who I am based on the results. Sure, people have backgrounds, and you can assume certain things. But leave your assumptions open to revision based on the data. If you think something about me because of where I’ve been or what I’ve done, than whatever. That makes sense. Just realize those thing may mean something quite different for me than they mean to an observer. And if you have a question, ask me about it. Ill be glad to explain. I’ve been trying to learn to do this with others. But I’m forgetful. So if I do that to you, please call me on it.
So the point, which I already forgot, is that I dislike snooty people who disdain things they don’t even try to understand. So Top 40 music is unoriginal to a Tchaikovsky listener. Kenneth Copeland’s works all sound the same to most Linkin Park fans. Baroque listeners disdained the early Classical composers for their vulgarity. So a passage of Rachmaninoff moves you? Social Distortion moves me. Who are you to tell me that my reaction is invalid? I don’t tell you your music sucks. I just don’t prefer it. But if you like it, and it moves you, then cool. Good on you. I hope you enjoy it. I am sure that Beethoven writes from his heart and from his passions in the symphonies he composed while deaf. I am also sure that Everclear writes with just as much passion when they’re singing about how their dad left them. Where do people get off illegitimating others just because their means of expression do not mesh with their own? So Brahms has stood the test of history? How many other people did he have to beat to win his recording contract (or equivalent of the time)? How many garage band composers were in competition with him? He was playing for the wealthy in courts. That’s a small slice of the population. The rest of the people were playing folk songs on improvised instruments. And the snooty types were looking down on them even then.
Yeah, its postmodern. Sort of. There is a difference between preferences and values. We should all eat some sort of food. But I really don’t care if you don’t like my sort of food. And I am not lessened in any way if you enjoy food that is not at all like mine.
As for the whole McWhorter thing, on good and bad music and all, you have to look at things in context. Im not saying that he does or he doesn’t. It was just a segue way. Most rap music is disrespectful toward women and authority. But Cross Movement is awesome, both in their technical musical skills, and in their message. I’m not judging context. I’m judging in context. I doubt that Mozart’s indiscretions were not reflected in his syncopations and chord progressions. And, oops I forgot, Wagner was appropriated by the Nazis, much to Lewis‘ chagrin. It‘s in God in the Dock. If music kills people, then it didn’t start with rap. So if punk rawk has a lot of yelling and like four power chords, then judge a punk rawk band by how well they capture the essence of the medium, and how well they use it to convey their message. And if Gregorian chants have like one chord, then do the same. Psalm 150, y’know. And the foolish things of this world. The pulse of a people can be found in their music. If you’re too cool to learn how to read that pulse, you will blind yourself to them. And the revolution may not be televised, but you’ll probably hear it on the radio.
It’s the same crowd that thinks using the word ‘problematic’ instead of ‘bad’ makes you smart, regardless of the content of your statement. Harvard-itis, I think it should be called. Just because you can inject obscure latin phrases doesn’t mean your argument doesn’t suck anymore. People want to say it’s booksmarts vs. common sense. I don’t think it’s that at all. I think it’s straight-up intellectual horsepower applied in a context. And I know some people who grew up surrounded by the practical who then applied their intellectual gifts toward practical uses, and excelled in doing so. And just because they don’t like expending 3.6 more seconds to use a word with more syllables to describe the concept of ‘bad’ doesn’t mean they’re one bit less smart. And they usually end up with something to show for it. Refer to Lewis’ ‘Good Works’ essay in God in the Dock.
Here’s another thing. I really dislike the ignorance of social scientists, ethicists and lawyers toward other academic disciplines. People who have no idea what a Fourier Transform is want to consider themselves the intelligentsia, and claim a lock on the ‘enlightened opinion.’ There’s one specific result of this I really don’t like: the stereotype of Evangelicals as uneducated. It is usually made by social scientist types, who took introductory college algebra at some liberal arts school, and would never make it through Georgia Tech or Cal Tech or wherever. If they had ever seen the inside of a Civil Engineering doctoral program, they would have likely noticed the significant number of Evangelicals occupying the adjacent seats. But whatever.
I’m so this. I’m so not that. Whatever. Poseurs all. Everybody’s so concerned with being better than each other. Its really stupid. Even if you could prove that you were better than everyone else, who would you hang out with? After all, you just proved you were too cool for everyone else. So now you get to be too cool for everybody alone. Have fun, schmuck. Just do what you like. Care less about what other people like and whether it sucks or not. It is childish to diminish other people’s identities in order to raise your own stock. Any identity based on that is impoverished.
So back to the ‘I’m retarded and I don’t care because I think it’s funny’ main theme, me and one of my friends who is still in training and his master’s program at the same time, because he’s crazy hardcore like that, and we were having a standard conversation that covered Augustine, Blade Runner, Quantum Physics, Epistemology, Gestalt, Race and Ethnicity, and Psychoanalysis within the course of five minutes, which includes a good amount of laughing and repeating things we found funny like fourteen times, and we started talking about how most philosophers were really talking about girls (except for Wittenstein, who was probably talking about guys. I’ll leave that one alone.) So, to the chagrin of the other guy at the table, who honorably endured an education in the classics, we start thinking of alternate titles for framing works of world history. Like ‘I’m okay even though I’m an Athenian general,’ by Thucidides, or alternately ‘Please don’t kill me.’ Also ‘I wish I hadn’t been a playa’ by Augustine. It was awesome.
Which brings me back to the title of the whole thing. ‘Awesomeness and Ontology.’ My and my friend decided that we would make a new philosophical system. It was almost as cool as the time some other guys decided to make up a rumor. No hostile intent, no slander, just pure social experiment. Just ‘cause it was stupid and it was funny. Anyways, so we decided that we could divide the world into ‘awesome’ and ‘not awesome.’ All things could be classified as belonging to one of the two categories. We’ll call it the ‘polarized dichotomy.’ So we decided that the best graduate thesis ever would be ‘How to Be Awesome: an Ontological Approach.’ And then we laughed about it a while. And then we repeated it. And then we laughed some more. And that all took about ten minutes.
So that should prove, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that I am not a sage philosopher. Really, I think stupid things are funny. And I almost always think I’m funny. Hmm. I’m intentionally not going to do the math on those two last statements. Anyways, so that’s that. Seeya. Out.
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11 February 2007
Desire Will Lead Us Home. (Thanks John Eldridge.)
Faith and Reason. The Heart and the Mind. People talk about them like they are entirely separate. Different, to be sure, but they are hardly separate. Quite literally, the heart without the mind soon becomes a vegetable; the mind without the heart soon becomes a corpse. An incandescent light makes more heat than light, a florescent bulb more light than heat. Increase the heat of either, you increase the light, cut out all heat and you lose all light. The more you are in love with someone, the more you want to know about them. The more you know about them, the more you fall in love with them.
The Classical Greek philosophers never really trusted the heart. Plato and Aristotle tell us that the passions war against the reason, and the only basis for civilization is the triumph of reason in that war. In their masterworks, Augustine and Aquinas did a tremendous job of adapting Aristotle’s works into a Christian context. Perhaps, though, we went a bit too far. Marcus Aurelius thought along Aristotelian lines, seeking balance in all things. He was right to hate Christianity. We upset all existing balances. Jesus does not bring peace, but a sword; He breaks all of the truces we have made with the brokenness of this world.
There was no St. Aristotle, any more than there was a St. Gautama. His may have been be a useful civic faith, but it was not Christianity. It is not the faith of Abraham, the great Middle Eastern mystic, into whose line we are grafted. It is not the faith that causes the great king David to dance undignified through the streets of his polis for sheer joy.
Surely the heart runs wild. Surely it runs astray. But no more than the mind does. All things are darkened after the fall, Paul makes that much clear. But our minds are no less darkened than our hearts. The atrocities and deceptions brewed in the mind of man are no less evil than the hatred that bubbles from our hearts. We need Jesus to redeem both of them. We need Him to give us the heart of a Savior and the mind of Christ.
Until He remakes us, though, our hearts and our minds run rampant. So we are given fences. Electric ones, sometimes. Our minds are bounded by the consequences of our actions. You can believe what you wish about aerodynamics, but if you build an airfoil upside down, your plane will crash. You can believe what you wish about sociology, but if you make a society where the most innocent are murdered freely, you will have violence on your streets. Pascal calls it the ‘dignity of causality.’ In a fallen world, that dignity is generally expressed in negative consequences. But the alternative is worse. Without concrete consequences to actions, we would get so lost in our own minds that we would never be pulled back out. So from time to time, our thoughts are broken by the laws of His universe. They prevent us from becoming satisfied with any answer that is not Him.
He does the same for our hearts. Laws will not break hearts, though. There must be something else. Something has to move us from the places where our hearts grow comfortable, something has to stop us stagnating. Something has to break all answers that are not Him. So He gives us the curse. He thwarts our desire, showing us the incompleteness in loving anything but Him.
We try to drown out the curse. It is trying to tell us something. Maybe we should listen. Love a friend, and he will hurt you. Love work, it will involve frustration and pain. Love a hobby, and you will eventually find it boring. Love a woman, she will eventually pass away. The curse tells us that we were made for a better world than this, because nothing in this world can truly and permanently satisfy our hearts.
I really like warm weather. I prefer 110 degrees to 40 by far. I remember joking that ‘Cold weather is due to the fall of man… if they were walking around naked in the garden, it couldn‘t have been that cold.’ Maybe was more right than I thought. I do not claim to be an expert in the hydrology of the early Earth, but from my limited knowledge, I understand that there was a vapor canopy that covered the Earth. There was eternal sunshine, eternal summer. I imagine it was great back then. I think that now, though, we would get lost in it. So He breaks summer and makes winter. Winter keeps us from getting lost in summer, from taking it for granted. It brings renewal in spring, and fall takes it away before we can get too comfortable. But even winter has snow. There is grace even in the brokenness.
Desire will lead us home, if we follow it where it leads. We see Him reflected in many things. Really, anything we truly love is a reflection of Him. That is, after all, what our hearts were made for: loving Him and being loved by Him. The curse makes sure that it cannot end anywhere but with Him, for in Him the curse is broken. So even the curse is His servant, His agent to prod desire from resting too long in one place. The curse is the counterpart to desire after the fall, the goad to our passions.
Lewis is still right, though. Our desires will not be fulfilled in anything other than loving Him, but that fact cannot become license not to love anything but Him. If you wanted to find the perfect artwork, you would not stop frequenting art stores, nor would you stop buying other artworks. As your tastes became more and more refined, you would buy better and better works, and in those works you would see more and more aspects of that perfect artwork that you truly desire. Without learning to appreciate the artwork available, you would never be able to appreciate the perfect artwork. You might not even recognize it if you saw it.
We love Him incompletely, safely, imperfectly. Through loving His works and loving others, He breaks us and perfects our love. You get love by giving it away. In approaching His love, we must give away more and more of our own. The more love we give away, the more He gives us. He just makes sure that our love is never completely satisfied with anything but Him.
In the Kingdom, we won’t need goads or fences. We will ride bareback, and desire will run free in His pastures. But as long as we live in a world of briar patches, the curse keeps desire from destroying us. If we listen.
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09 February 2007
Jesus, Hegel, and Car Repair. (The Power of Paradox.)
We talk about things existing in tension. Two seeming opposites pull at each other, and as they attempt to reconcile themselves, they create something entirely new. They do not simply reach a compromise; they find transcendence. A German philosopher named Georg Frederich Hegel wrote a good deal on this tension, calling it a ‘dialectic.’ A Jewish philosopher named Paul of Tarsus wrote on this as well. He called it ‘Jesus.’
Describing his relationship with his wife, C. S. Lewis notes that their points of greatest intersection were not where they were the same, but where they were different. It is one thing to be similar; quite a different thing to be complimentary. Men and women are tremendously different, but they are designed both in body and in spirit to complement each other. And in their reconciliation, they give birth to new life. The leaves of fall compliment the flowers of spring and they are both reconciled in growth. These dynamics are engineered into the universe, and they show up in our own engineering. Gasoline explodes against pistons to turn a drive shaft. Fire and fireproof come together to create motion. Two seeming opposites create something greater than either of them in their reconciliation. Reconciled paradox always points to transcendence.
From nothing, nothing comes. Everything in this universe exists as a reflection of something in its Creator. So it should not surprise us that when He showed up in our world, He showed up as the reconciliation of opposites. Fully Man and Fully God, the Suffering Servant was the Reigning King; the Lamb of God was the Lion of Judah. The King of Kings showed up as a carpenter. The First was Last and the Last was First. In more ways than we can count, He was the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. His life was no different. An old song goes something like this: ‘The Rose of Sharon wore a crown of thorns that day. The Carpenter had a nail through his hand.’ He lived, He died, He rose again. He is the thesis, the antithesis and the synthesis, all at once. He is the whole universe wrapped up in One Man.
The Man who was reconciliation lived reconciliation. He was no simple populist firebrand, no icon for some socio-economic faction. He crafted an army out of fishermen, lawyers, soldiers, religious leaders, tax collectors and former whores. Rich and poor, young and old, slave and free, Jew and Gentile, men and women were all united with nothing but Him in common. When He unleashed that army upon the world, the gates of hell could not prevail against them. That ragtag unarmed army conquered the best armed force of the known world; they were led by a Man who conquered hell itself without firing a shot.
Myamoto Mushashi was a Samurai in 1600 A.D. Japan. In his Book of Five Rings, he describes the way of the general as the way of the carpenter. And so it was. The Carpenter was the greatest General the world has ever known. The general matches strategies to strategies, tactics to counter-tactics, measures to countermeasures. So infantry are overcome by cavalry, and cavalry in turn by pikemen. Battleships overtake galleons, aircraft carriers overtake battleships, and so on. Every new battle discards old tactics and weapons and ushers in new ones. But the enemy has never designed an effective counter-measure to the Sword of the Spirit, nor will he, for it was forged before the world was made. No combination of metal, fire, or anything else in this world can undo the Power that made this world. Similary, scholarship surpasses scholarship, and theories come and go, but all words come from the Word. No word or combination of words can ever hope to undo the One True Word.
So the way of the general is the way of the carpenter. And Jesus is a Master General. The master carpenter selects many different woods to build a house: sturdy Redwood to build the supports, an attractive Cedar for the floor, and plywood for the attic. He reconciles many different materials to each other in building a house. The house becomes beautiful, not in the elimination of tensions between materials, but in their reconciliation. Christ, the Master Carpenter, reconciles many different people to each other in building His Church. We are made perfect not in our uniformity, but in His reconciliation of our differences. In that tension, we are strong, for we image Him more completely.
Let’s take a step back. Christ is God and God is Christ, so whatever is true of Christ is true of God. Christ exists in eternal reconciliation, so God must exist in eternal reconciliation. Three Persons in one Essence, the Trinity is the first Reconciliation. The Father is eternally reconciling Himself to the Son, Who is eternally reconciling Himself to the Spirit, who is eternally reconciling Himself to the Father. There are three notes. There is one chord. The notes are the chord, and the chord is the notes. They are inseparable. Theirs is a perfect reconciliation, a flawless harmony without any sin to get in the way. In reconciliation there is transcendence, and so it must be with the Trinity. In the reconciliation between Persons, there is an Essence. God is Love. This is His Nature, His Essence. In His eternal reconciliation, there is an endless fount of love, a love that creates so that it would have others to love. Christ invites us into that eternal reconciliation. He brings in new notes to magnify the original chord.
We chose to break the harmony. A note that goes sharp or flat ruins the whole chord. So the composer cuts it out of the symphony. But God is no mere human composer. The note that makes a broken chord into a minor chord will resolve it into a major chord as the broken notes cease to be flat or sharp. He invites us back into the original harmony. The resolution of the chord may be disconcerting, but the final symphony is glorious. So Christ invites us back to the song. His Story makes a minor chord of our broken notes, but as we lose our flatness or sharpness, He becomes the foundation of an entirely new and entirely old major chord. He is the perfect note in the broken chord. He partakes completely in the brokenness of our chord, even as He resolves it. So He is Fully Man and Fully God, all at once, as He is fully part of our chord, yet fully the perfect note. And in this we see something new: reconciliation in a broken world is always broken at first. Surely, He was first broken for our reconciliation.
Perfect reconciliation is like a circle forever wrapping around itself. The old Celtic Christian Triquetra symbol looks something like three Icthus fish placed with their tails interlocked. It images the perfect and eternal reconciliation between the Three Persons of the Trinity. We draw it on a flat piece of paper, but reconciliation is always transcendent: it always adds a dimension we never imagined. Instead of a flat plane, imagine a sphere. Chose three equidistant points on that sphere, and draw the shortest line from each point to the other two. Remember that the shortest path over a sphere is a curved line. Now look at the sphere again. You have remade the Triquetra, but in three dimensions. The reconciliation of the points in two dimensions tells us to look for a third, and that added dimension makes the picture complete. The Trinity is the Perfect Reconciliation of Paradox, the Infinite Transcendent.
For a simpler example, take a round coaster. Hold it so that you can only see the edge of it. Now trace your finger around the outside. You will see your finger go up and down, seemingly going to opposite extremes and returning. All you see is a line, yet somehow your finger goes from one end of the line to the other. Now turn the coaster flat, so that you can see all of it. Trace your finger around the edge again. Your finger will go in an unending circle (at least until you get bored of doing this.) Your finger wasn’t going to one extreme and back, it was moving in a complete circle. It was always just one finger. The fact that that same finger could go to both extremes tells you that something else was going on, something deeper that a flat line couldn’t quite capture.
So Jesus exists as the reconciliation of opposites. This tells us that there’s something else going on with Him, some dimension we haven‘t quite wrapped our minds around. And the Church brings opposite people together in one Spirit. The song goes, ‘they’ll know we are Christians by our love.’ Our unity should tell them that there’s something deeper going on than mere interest group politics. Note that unity is not the compromise between opposites, for compromise is not reconciliation. Compromise does not bring transcendence, only co-existence. And while that may be a good starting place for reconciliation, it is not its ending. Two enemies may compromise enough to live at peace, and this is better than living at war, but it is not until they reconcile that they become family. God calls us to become family, for we are bound to each other by His blood. All families are a bit dysfunctional, but vendettas within God’s family do little to inspire outsiders to seek adoption.
Christ lived what He taught, and He taught what He lived. He lived in the reconciliation between opposites, so He taught about the reconciliation of opposites. He teaches that a seed must die to yield a crop. He tells us that ‘the last shall be first and the first shall be last,’ and if one would lead, they must learn to be the servant of all. He was telling us this well before 31 A.D. He writes it into His law, mandating justice for the fatherless and the widow. He explains it to Solomon, who tells us how the proud will be humbled. He paints it upon nature, in spring and in fall, in death and rebirth. It is then not surprising that Gautama and Confucius would recognize it in nature. Like Aristotle, they are not so much wrong as incomplete. This universe does exist in a tension. And that tension points to its Creator.
When Paul teaches, he draws upon the same tension. When he gives a command, he often balances it with a complimentary and almost opposite command. Children, obey your parents; fathers, do not provoke your sons to wrath. Women, submit to your husbands; men, love your wives as Christ loved the Church. He tells one to submit in life, he tells the other to submit even unto to death. They are both submitting to each other in very different ways, and in that submission both find love. The power of paradox is tension translated into transcendence. In that transcendence, the commands counterbalance each other; without each other, they would become tremendously destructive.
Consider a car’s engine. You have a number of pistons pushing in sequence against a central shaft. One fires, the shaft turns, and the second fires. As long as they fire in sequence and opposite each other, the shaft keeps turning and the car keeps going. The cylinders are similar in certain ways, but they are different in some very important ways. In this mix of similarity and difference, we find complementariness. The cylinders compliment each other and together they make motion. They rely on each other for balance as the tension of their reconciliation produces something greater than the sum of their parts. Take one cylinder out of the mix and the engine becomes unbalanced. Take two parallel cylinders out and watch as the engine tears itself apart, the tension that once fueled its motion now only driving it to destruction. Break the dialectic, and the whole engine comes apart.
So this is the enemy’s tactic: pull some cylinders off the driveshaft, as it were, and watch the rest of the engine tear itself apart. Take complimentary commands and break them apart. Take good things out of the context of a relationship with God, and watch as they wreak havoc. Take Christians and set them at each others‘ throats. Break their trust, and watch as the tensions tear relationships apart. Stand back and watch as their differences, taken out of the context of Christ, drive them to war with each other. And what could have been a hallmark of unity becomes a case study in disunity, as the Body draws swords against each other.
The thing that makes reconciliation so beautiful and powerful in context is the same thing that makes it so catastrophic out of context. As the two forces pushed against each other, they created movement along dimension perpendicular to both of them. (Quick and boring physics refresher: Maxwell’s equations tell us that electricity and magnetism vary with each other, and propagate perpendicular to the plane of both. Electricity and magnetism push against each other, and that tension moves the wave on its way.) In tension, the forces tended to dampen out the worst parts of the other. Deny that added dimension for movement, and both forces set themselves directly against the other. They push farther and farther away from each other, with nothing to dampen or balance them.
Go to war, and both sides become polarized against each other. So immediately after the Council of Trent, any discussion of conducting the Mass in the vernacular was not to be entertained by any Catholic in good standing. And after seeing the abuses of the Virgin of Guadalupe, the Pentecostal gets squeamish when reading the passage about ‘most blessed among women.’ The excesses of one side feed the excesses of another side, and the cycle goes on as the sides become more and more estranged. Where they once balanced each other, now they feed each others’ unbalance. And eventually, the two sides become so distant that they forget what it is they are fighting about. They fight just to fight, and each attack just fuels the other’s war machine. It becomes less about ten years ago, and more about last Tuesday. Enough last Tuesdays go by, and you forget why the war even started. Or at the very least, you forget the part you had in starting the war. And the two sides end up with two completely different narratives, and all context is lost, along with any hope of either side being right.
World War One was fought this way. In 1917, it was not so much about what happened in 1914. I’m sure few in the trenches really cared what happened to Archduke Ferdinand by that point. It was more about whatever happened in the course of last week’s offensive. You lose some friends to some German machine guns, and you want to see all Germans dead. And they lose their friends to your mortars, and they want to see you dead. And on and on it goes, until everyone is dead. Nations will trade, one way or another. They can gain from each other’s differences and trade goods, or they can hate each other’s differences and trade bullets. (Don’t get me wrong, though, there are some things worth trading bullets over. This is not about current events, at least not directly.) We all have our Battles of the Somme.
We are built to be in relationship, and dynamic tension is the dynamo that keeps relationships going. When relationships are broken, that tension is turned on each other. We tear each other apart with the same tools we would have used to build each other up. There is not so much difference between a surgeon and an assassin, really. The surgeon uses a knife, chemicals and his knowledge of the body to heal. An assassin uses a knife, chemicals and his knowledge of the body to kill. We know more about enemies than we know about strangers, though hopefully we know more about lovers than enemies. That understanding which would have been used to heal and encourage is used to tear down and destroy. Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, so the saying goes. The passion that fueled her desire now fuels her rage. Hate may not be the opposite of love, but sometimes indifference might be less disastrous.
If your car’s engine started tearing itself apart, the first thing you would do is turn it off to prevent additional damage. Then you would take it back to the dealership, because the people who made the engine probably know best how to put it back together. If God made relationships, complete with complimentary parts and opposing tensions, He probably knows how to fix them. We are smart enough to trust our cars to their makers. In relationships, we should go and do likewise.
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06 February 2007
Adam and Doctor Faustus. (Thanks Jonathan Foreman.)
“What does it profit a man to gain the whole world and lose or forfeit his very soul?” - Jesus.
Jim Elliot said, ‘it is no fool who trades what he cannot keep for what he cannot lose.’ The converse holds true, I believe. It is a fool who trades what he cannot lose for what he cannot keep. It is a greater fool who sells himself into slavery to purchase things he could only use as a free man. So this is the Fall: we traded something of greater value for the lesser, but that does not capture the depth of it. In the name of dominion, we gave away our identity as kings and queens. In the most foolish of all moves, the successors to the throne threw away their crowns to become usurpers. Even if they were to gain the entirety of the kingdom, they would never be able to claim the legitimacy that was once their own. The best they could do was to steal all the things that were already rightly theirs.
Consider the essence of man. We were made in the image of God. Our essence is a reflection of His, and we are made to be in relationship with Him. Without Him, we are nothing. And this is the essence of sin’s trap. What is a branch without the tree? What is a mirror without something to reflect? The mirror just gets dirtier and more scratched, and it begins to consider its imperfections its identity. After a while, the mirror is so corroded and filthy that it cannot reflect anything at all. It must then either be entirely remade or discarded, for it has become of no value at all.
This is the nature of sin: it is not a thing, but a lack; not a thought but an error. Sin cannot create, but it can twist and warp good things into monstrosities. G. K. Chesterton tells us that the problem with this world is Christian virtues run amok. Actions are designed to exist in context. Take them out of context and they become evil. Half-digested food is a good thing in the context of a stomach. It is a bad thing in the context of a helmet bag. (Long story. You don’t want to know. It wasn‘t me.) The enemy takes good things and puts them in the wrong order. He breaks actions out of their proper context and lets them run rampant.
Consider cancer. It is a good thing for cells to reproduce. Cellular reproduction is designed to exist in a controlled context in a healthy organism. It is a good under the higher good of the health of the whole body. A tumor is a group of cells that decided that their reproduction is the most important thing in their whole world, even more important than the life of the whole organism. When cellular reproduction gets out of order, death results. Now consider Lucifer. He is created as a magnificent and beautiful angel of light. He is a good thing, created in the context of the service of God. But he takes that good thing out of context; he takes a good thing, himself, and places it above God, who is the Best Thing. And he becomes evil and cancerous.
Lucifer talks Adam and Eve into a fool’s bargain. He convinces man to trade his relationship with God for everything else in the whole universe. Even if the enemy had followed through on his part of the deal, we would be destroyed in accepting it. We break the order of things, we take good things out of context, we try to place ourselves alongside God. We become cancerous. Cancer requires the life of the body to live, for it is made in the image of the body. Yet the cancer’s one desire is independence, for it takes no part in the life of the body. In that independence, the tumor finds only death, for nothing remains to sustain it. We require the life of God to live, for we are made in His image. Yet our one expressed desire is independence. But like the cancer, in that desire we find only death.
In ‘The Magician’s Nephew,’ two children stumble across a frozen world. Jadis, the White Witch, destroyed her world in an attempt to maintain her rule. Blot out the sun to conquer your enemies, and conquer your enemies you will. You will also conquer yourself. Better to rule in hell than serve in heaven, the classic tells us. But it is incomplete. There are no rulers of dead worlds. We would have killed our world to rule it. And in our last battle, so we shall. But we will not be kings. King Nothing. It is a contradiction in terms. A king rules something. If there is nothing to rule, there are no kings.
The problem, in a way, is our own goodness. That is, our goodness run amok. It is the magnificence of Lucifer’s original creation that makes him so horrific in his fallen form. Likewise, it is our power and majesty as reflections of the image of God that make us such a hazard to ourselves in our rebellion. It is the magnificence of the cell that makes cancer the monstrosity it is. So we have chemotherapy. In order to save the body, we interfere with the reproduction of the cancerous cell. We break part of the magnificence of the body’s power of regeneration in order to save the whole. Anyone who has seen a loved one go through chemo knows the painful side effects of the therapy. Still, in breaking the majesty and perfection of the body, sometimes we save a life.
So the curse is chemo. Our error, our sin, was to take the good of the self and take it out of context, letting it run rampant. So the curse breaks the perfection of the good of the self. I’ve heard that it is remarkably easy for gifted people to hide in their gifts. Imagine a world of immortal people immune to pain and suffering, capable of thought unfettered by miscommunication. We would get so lost in ourselves that we would never come back out. There would be nothing at all to pull us outside ourselves, nothing to draw us back to God. We would suffocate as we buried ourselves in the depths of our gifts. So God breaks our gifts.
In Faust, it is the very powers for which Doctor Faustus traded his soul that end up destroying Him. It would have been a merciful man to restrain his hand, a merciful parent who does not grant their child’s angry demand to send them out on their own. Jesus, hanging from the cross, pleads with the father, ‘Forgive them, for they don’t know what they’re doing!’ He is right. We have no idea what we’re asking for. John Lennon asked us to imagine. He didn’t do the math all the way through. Imagine a world without rules, without restraints, without a Landlord. Now imagine as that world tears itself apart when nothing remains to hold back the darkness of the heart of man, the book Sphere a hundred million times over. We have no idea what we are asking for.
God frustrates Saul’s war against Him so that the man from Tarsus can be saved. In the same way, He frustrates humanity’s war against His Throne so that we can be saved. So we are interrupted, in the garden, at Babel, we are interrupted all the way to the end times. We are thwarted from reaching the deadly goals we pursue. We are asking for the same deal as Doctor Faustus. Thank God that He keeps interrupting the transaction.
The first Adam took a fool’s bargain. We gave ourselves away for nothing. The second Adam was offered the same deal. Lucifer offered Him all the kingdoms of the world, all the nothing that He could ever ask for. But Christ is the deal-breaker. His body was broken for us, and with it the deadly deal we made. Our accounts were paid in full and closed, our transaction cancelled. He offers us a better bargain. He asks us to give ourselves away for everything. May we all enter into His transaction.
16:50 Posted in Thoughts | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) | Email this
05 February 2007
When A Curse is a Blessing.
To the Ancient Greeks, Prometheus was a tragic hero, almost a martyr. He took the gift of fire from the gods and gave it to man. Enraged that he would take something of such precious value and give it to such a lowly creature, Zeus sentenced Prometheus to an eternity of suffering. From their reading, Prometheus is truly noble, truly a friend to man. He is the one who stands in the face of tyranny, defiant regardless of the consequences. A William Wallace of sorts. But there are always other readings, always another side to the story.
What if the gods were not petty and cruel? What if they had kept the gift of fire from man to protect man, not to spite him? What if they had known that man would turn the gift toward his own destruction? That he would learn to make more and more intense forms of fire, until he learned to split the elements themselves? That he would turn that fire against other men, until the world was utterly broken and spent? Prometheus, the tragic hero no longer, becomes the man who gives car keys to the ten-year-old. He is rightly arrested for gross negligence. We fashion ourselves like Prometheus. Perhaps we are more like Pandora.
I remember a scene out of Bruce Almighty where Jim Carrey accuses God of being like a kid standing over of an anthill with a magnifying glass. C.S. Lewis makes the same accusation in far more serious terms in A Grief Observed. The Divine Vivisectionist. There is a part of us that sees God in similar terms. If we stick our hand in the cookie jar, God will get angry. He doesn’t want us to be happy, and if we try to have any fun, He will make sure that we pay for it. Surely, there are spiteful fathers who want to keep their children small and dependent, men so insecure that they are threatened by the gifts of their children. But the God of the universe is not insecure. We flatter ourselves; He cannot be threatened by anything that we could possibly do, nor by anything we could possibly become. He simply has no need or reason to ‘get us back.’
The grounded teenager sitting in his room surely considers himself a Prometheus. His parents just don’t understand. ‘I was completely safe to drive… I only had a couple beers. It’s completely unfair that they took away the car keys. What do they know, anyways… they just want to stop me from having any fun.’ So he sits and stews and schemes, determined to liberate himself from his unjust imprisonment. Because, after all, it is far more comfortable to scheme than to consider the reasons his parents chose to restrict his freedom. And certainly more comfortable than deciding to change. Yet, in his zeal for ‘liberation,’ he never considers that he could never be un-grounded from a fatal wreck. In his current state, the worst thing that could happen to him is to get exactly what he wants.
In the Garden of Eden, there are two trees that are mentioned by name. One is the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. The other is the Tree of Life. Genesis tells us that after we ate of the Tree of Knowledge, God declares that we should not eat of the Tree of Life, lest we never die. So there is the Prometheus reading or the Pandora reading; God the Cosmic Killjoy or God the Grounding Parent. After all, trees are made for eating. So the tree is either a tease or a promise. If God is kind, then the tree is a promise, one that will be understood in the unfolding of His plan. If He is cruel, then the tree is a tease, placed there purely to provide unending frustration. The space between the two readings is trust. The eyes of trust see faith, hope and love. The eyes of distrust see only self-fulfilling promises of betrayal. This is no less true on this side of the fall.
The Prometheus reading gives us far too much credit. God has no need to establish who He is by belittling us. He is infinitely beyond that. He loves us, and knows us better than we know ourselves. He is not encumbered by any of our self-deceptions about our own goodness. He knows what we do with our freedoms. So He grounds us when we use it wrong, to stop us from hurting ourselves and to bring us back to Him.
Still, trees are made for eating. But a green apple may turn your stomach just as surely as a red apple will fill it. The fruit of that tree mixed with the bitter harvest our fall would have been a deadly combination. So instead of the death we chose, the death of our soul, He gives us the death of our bodies. He gives us a lesser death to show us our greater death, just as the parents of the drunk driver restrict him to his room to illustrate to him the much greater restrictions of a wheelchair. But no grounding is forever. Neither is the curse. So we leave the garden with His promise that the curse will one day be lifted and everything will be made new again.
Love in the time of Death and Suffering. Almost sounds like the title of a book. (Probably because I plagiarized Gabriel Garcia Marquez.) On this side of the fall, we have pain, suffering and death as our companions. But what is humanity’s clearest reminder that we are not God? Death. None of us were there when the skies were set above the world, and few of us will be here when they fall back down. Man is a vapor. We are not eternal. We are not God. God does not die. Or at least, He does not stay dead. Death is a constant reminder of our true place in the universe: higher than the beasts, a little lower than the angels, and much lower than God. After all, the whole problem started when we got those things out of order.
The curse brought with it many deaths. The heart can die many times, in a hundred little deaths. Even the body can die in little ways. Man is cursed to earn his living by the sweat of his brow, and woman is cursed to suffer during childbirth. We say we ‘spend’ our lives working. We are right to say that. We must burn a little life every day in order to sustain life. Childbirth burns life as well. Remember that before modern medicine, childbirth was a leading cause of death. In parts of the two-thirds world, it still is. And raising that child spends life as well. Surely there is as much plucking of thorn bushes and building of fences in parenting as in any other profession. This principle is engineered into the very physics of life. The oxygen we breathe burns away life, quite literally. Respiration slowly rusts our cells, even as it sustains life. Keep breathing and die a little each breath. Stop breathing and die a lot all at once. Burn a little life every day working, or stop working and starve. Suffering is death‘s younger brother. Few deaths are unaccompanied by suffering. And unless are we are caught up in the clouds first, our lifetime of suffering will eventually sum into a death.
(Though not all of those deaths are bad. For the Christian, death is a release from this world, and an entry into the ecstasy of the presence of God and into new life. It is only fitting that He engineered the same dynamic in smaller ways into His universe. So the French phrase for ‘the little death’ is appropriate. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, don’t worry about it. If you do, know that I do not speak from experience. After all, JPII wrote Theology of the Body without the direct experience of all of its expressions. But I will defer to him, certainly here at least. Anyways, back to the main point.)
The smaller deaths serve the same purpose as the greater. What is it us that brings us back to God? Pain and suffering, more often than not. We find Him on our knees. Pain and suffering often knocks us to our knees, where we can find Him. We hear Him when we are broken. It generally takes pain and suffering to break us, at least at first. Saul is blinded so that he can gain true sight. Without the curse, Saul never becomes Paul. Without the curse, he never finds the blessing. He is broken by the curse so that he can be made whole by God.
Can you imagine a world where we are fallen, but lack the curse? There would be nothing to break us, nothing to bring us back to Him. Nothing to limit our evil. In our seeming self-sufficiency, we would cut ourselves off from the only true Source. We would become as self-sufficient as a corpse, asking neither water nor food nor are nor love from anyone. Completely independent. And completely dead. So the curse is a blessing, something to break the self-reliance that would be untouchable if men were still immortal and unlimited. We would be lost forever if left to our own devices. So our devices were broken.
But we don’t learn. The grounded child loses even more privileges in his attempts to escape. And so did we. Man leaves the garden, broken by the curse. So he immediately applies himself toward breaking the curse. We decided to build a tower to heaven. The capacity to form words is the basis of communication, imagination and power. We used our words to war against God, coordinating our efforts with unbroken words, thinking with unbroken thoughts, setting our unbroken power against His. We completely abused our words, so they were broken. Not destroyed, but fractured. On that day, mankind was also fractured. One people united in their war with God became many people divided by their wars with each other. It was better for men to become unreconciled to each other than for them to be reconciled in their rebellion. God was not afraid of man taking heaven by force. He did it to keep us from destroying ourselves. The day Absalom took up arms against his father David, he was as good as dead. Surely King David would have rather have broken his son’s arms than taken his head. So our arms were broken, and we were set to war against each other. But fear for the day when humanity unites once again in its war against God. There is only one way that day will end.
And we still didn‘t learn. Men were given a thousand years to live. We couldn’t handle it. In our millennia, we became tremendously evil. The child who is cruel to animals, given twenty more years of life, becomes cruel to people. Imagine if he was given centuries. Little vices, repeated over hundreds of years, become gross atrocities. So there was another breaking. Once again, the world was broken, and once again, men were broken. The fountains of the deep tore out canyons and raised mountains, and the fountain of life became a creek. Our millennium became a century. ‘Since you couldn’t handle a thousand years, let’s try a hundred,’ you can almost hear Him saying.
Death is the great equalizer, and we became more equal. Imagine a world where we could live to a thousand. It is not that people wouldn’t die. Powerful people wouldn’t die. They would send others to die. Just like now. Stalin lived out the entirety of his life span. The people around him didn’t. A thousand-year Stalin would have ensured the life expectancy of the rest of the country remained about forty. As he grew older, killing off any competitors, he would amass even more power and become even more unassailable. Death is the ultimate check on tyranny. Fidel Castro seems to be currently discovering this fact. So the Caesars and the Windsors and the Kennedys find themselves subject to the same mortality as the peasant. Maybe they get 60 years more. But not 960 years.
Reverse the curse. No offense to the Red Sox, but that desire burned within the human will long before it was spray painted about Storrow Drive. Fighting disease, or suffering or miscommunication are good things. They become deadly when mixed with pride. We are like the child scheming his way out of his grounding without considering the reasons for the grounding. We want to undo the consequences of the curse without acknowledging the purpose of the curse. How many billions of dollars are spent on medicines to buy one more year of immortality? How much time and energy are spent on cosmetics and treatments to appear forever young? It is completely futile, but we try so hard to break death’s curse through our own power. The same is true of the curse of pain. We medicate ourselves with Novocain and Prosac, we self-medicate with alcohol and sex and chocolate, we try quite hard to escape suffering. But there are things more dangerous than anesthetic.
In Tolkien’s Middle Earth, the fall of Numenor came when men tried to undo the curse of mortality. The fall of this world will come from men trying to undo the curse of Babel. Mankind will find their Prometheus. And they will love him for it. In Revelation, the Beast gains power by networking economies, governments, and communications. He will bridge the fissures that God made at Babel, and humanity will turn back toward the hideous strength of that tower. They will finally get the last battle they sought for so long. They will get the conquering king, the Messiah they wanted. They will not like how they get Him.
A parent never enjoys seeing their child grounded. Curses do not last forever. If they are meant to draw men back to God, then they are no longer necessary when we come home. In Revelation, God promises us a world where there is no more curse, where everything will be made new again. The Tree of Life will grow, and He will invite us to feast on its fruit. Through the power of Christ, we receive a deposit on that promise. We are cursed with pain, but God gives us grace to bear up under it. When we do not have strength, He gives us His. We are cursed with miscommunication, but through the power of Christ, broken hearts are reconciled to broken hearts. In Christ, slave and free, Jew and Greek are reconciled. They learn to speak the language of the Word together. We are cursed with death, but the power of death is broken on the cross. Paul tells us ‘to die is gain.’ He asks, ‘Grave, where is your victory? Death, where is your sting?’ As the Orthodox say, Christ has trampled down death by death.
The chemotherapy of the curse keeps us breathing long enough for Christ to operate. We would have been lost in our gifts, unreachable, suffocating in our self-sufficiency. So He allows the good of the self to come subject to the curse to draw us out of that lesser good to the greater good of Him. He allows the death of the self in order to forestall the death of the soul. So when Christ comes, He completes the promise. Through His death, He gives life. The curse breaks us. He heals us. Praise God for the law of death, for it brings us to the place where we can be saved by the law of Love. The curse is a greater blessing than we give it credit for.
01:47 Posted in Thoughts | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) | Email this
01 February 2007
Brief Apologetics Overview. (Not as brief as advertised. Big surprise, coming from me and all.)
Hi everybody. So here's an outline from a talk I'm giving at the UWF IV group this Saturday. Lots of fun, hopefully I wont sound too silly. If it is at all 'intellectually satisfying' at all (oops, I violated my rule on not using pretentious words like 'problematic') its because it's entirely plagiarized. (I guess, if I cited sources, then it's not technically plagiarism. But I think 'plagiarism' has a nice ring to it. By the way, I forgot to mention I'm not an academic. Reference previous discussion on identity and irony.) Anyways, God's smart and I'm dumb, but hopefully He will continue to make me a little less dumb, bit by bit.
1. Apologetics: From the same word as ‘apology.’ Giving an answer.
- Biblical Root: 2 Cor 10:5, We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ. 1 Pet 3:15, 15But in your hearts set apart Christ as Lord. Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have. But do this with gentleness and respect.
- Giving an answer is not the same as asking the question. The question is ‘will you submit to God’s will for your life.’ It is expressed in the message of the Gospel.
- Often, people set up defenses to protect themselves from that uncomfortable question. They head off the question at the pass, as it were.
- Apologetics are about getting through the defenses to deliver the message of the Gospel. Defenses usually have to come on line before you shut them down. But you need to be ready when they do.
2. Classic Apologetics.
(Truth is real and knowable) + (God exists and created all things) +
(The Gospels are a trustworthy account) = orthodox Christianity.
- Sequential, building blocks of truth, all leading to the God’s fullest revelation of Himself in Christ.
- Almost all intellectual attacks on Christianity go after one of these three pillars.
- The best way to refute a lie is to know the truth. So let’s look at each of these three pillars.
3. Truth is Real and Knowable.
By definition, absolute truth exists. It exists in a form that the human mind can grasp. Even if exhaustive knowledge is impossible, even if human knowledge is influenced by perspective, we can speak meaningfully about truth and about God.
Threat: Postmodernism. Postmodernism basically assumes that all truth is relative. It approaches all ideas like onions: take off all the layers and you are left with nothing. Traditional Christianity approaches all ideas like softballs: take any idea, perfect or fallen, and unwrap all the twine and you will find a core of truth. There are two general ways that postmodernism can be used to attack Christians.
- The social attack: Tolerance as license. ‘Don’t ever tell me what I am doing is wrong.’ Tolerance as co-existence is a great thing. It allows us to put together societies with people who do not always agree on everything, and it allows us to resolve disputes without killing each other. Tolerance as license makes it an expression of pride. ‘I can do whatever I want and you can never say anything about it.’ And in this is its contradiction: tolerance as license is the most intolerant system imaginable. It cannot tolerate any systems with absolute truth claims, which is virtually every other system out there.
- The formal attack: Deconstructivism. You can never prove anything is true. You can only prove that it is false. Therefore, when analyzing anything, you should look for the motives that go into it, not the validity of what is being said. An argument can never be taken on its merits. The problem with this whole line of thought is that it is self contradictory. ‘My only rule is that you cannot write any rules.’ Even more so, apply its own methodology against it, and you find the motivations of the theorists have a lot to do with the theory. If there are no rules, I can do whatever I want. Therefore, Ill make a system of rules that lets me do whatever I want. (Because I want to be God.) Tracing it to its roots, we find a quite old and quite absolute rebellion.
Arguments:
- Self Evident Truths (Philosophy.) Certain things are simply true by definition. Any attempt to refute these things will only result in proving them.
- Consider the statement ‘everything is relative.’ Either the statement is meaningless (everything may be relevant to you, but they may be absolute to me) or it is self-refuting (everything is absolutely relative.) Therefore, absolutes exist is a self evident truth.
- A relative system cannot tolerate absolutes. Therefore, the only way to maintain the system is to prohibit all absolutes, which would, of course, be an absolute prohibition. The whole thing is built on quicksand.
- Next time somebody tells you that ‘everything is relative,’ ask them if everything is absolutely relative. If it is, then everything is absolute. If it isn’t, tell them that relative to you everything is absolute, and you plan on acting accordingly. By their own logic, they have disarmed themselves. They can’t tell you that you’re wrong, and your argument still stands.
- Human Actions. (Behavioral Science.) People act as if their actions have some bearing on reality. Though different cultures lead people to express drives differently, basic universal human drives exist independent of culture.
- All cultures have different kinds of food. But all cultures have some kind of food. When hungry, the standard human action is to seek out food. How they do so is highly culturally dependent. The fact that they do so is not. Similarly, languages are all different. But they all communicate thoughts and ideas about reality from one person to another. The fact that we use words at all implies a coherence to truth.
- Ravi Zacharias describes talking to a Buddhist monk. After the monk got done telling him that ‘everything was just an illusion,’ Zacharias picks up a nearby boiling tea kettle, and prepares to pour it on the head of the monk. The monk says something to the effect of ‘What are you doing?’ Zacharias asks him why the illusion of boiling water falling on his head would bother him. We move out of the way of cars. We don’t stick things in electrical outlets. We act to preserve our existence. Achieving Nirvana is self-critiquing and usually fatal.
- The Fact that We’re Talking About It (Common Sense.) If we’re bothering to have the discussion, then absolute truth must exist. An absolute system can tolerate relative truth within its boundaries, but if everything were relative, we would have no concept of absolute truth at all.
- Imagine boats on the ocean. They can float merrily on their way on the open seas, their positions only existing relative to each other. Boat A is 30 miles from Boat B, and the like. Their positions are all relative to each other, as they are all floating wherever they see fit. But the second one of the boats happens upon land, the position of all of the boats becomes absolute. The land is the absolute, and all the boats are absolutely defined in reference to it. Note that the boats still exist relative to each other, even as they exist absolutely in relation to the land.
- Lewis describes arguments as boats. There are three things we have to consider. First, does the argument make the point it intends; does the boat get to the port it is aiming for? Second, does the argument stay coherent; does the boat stay afloat? Third, and most usually forgotten, is why is the boat there in the first place? If we’re arguing, it must be about something; from nothing, nothing comes. If there is only relative truth, where would we even get the idea of absolute truth? There is nothing within a relative system that would spark the idea of absolutes, yet there are things within an absolute that would give rise to the idea of relative truths. So the fact that we’re having the discussion at all means that there must be some sort of absolute truth.
4. God exists and created all things.
There must be Something that gives rise to all other things. That Something must have will and personality, therefore that Something must be a Someone. That Someone must exist outside of the constraints of the physical universe, therefore He must be omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent. Additionally, that Someone desires to know and be known by man, therefore, that Someone is called God. Since He exists before time, He must have created all things. Since He exists outside of time, He must still be involved in the world He created.
Threat: Naturalism. Naturalism in modernity takes the opposite angle from postmodernism in attacking Christianity. Instead of denying the existence of truth, it presents itself as absolute truth and proceeds to deny the truth of Christianity. This attack did not originate with Darwin, but Darwin was modernity’s expression of the old idea of materialism. ‘There is matter and nothing more.’ The Greeks said this, and it too is self-refuting. The statement ‘there is matter and nothing more’ is itself more than matter. It is thought. Accordingly, Evolution never really had much of an answer for consciousness. This attack is generally expressed along two parallel lines: Darwin’s and Nietzsche’s.
- The scientific attack: Evolution. In order to answer the question of origins, naturalism needed a competing mythology. It found it in Darwin’s works, the abiogenesis theory with a new veneer. His acolytes proceeded to rewrite both human history and fossil history in order to fit their model. (entirely fictional yet mandatory reading Inherit the Wind, falsified wand wishful transitional forms, etc.) The entire discussion was framed by the use of a tremendous linguistic sleight of hand, using interchangeably ‘science as methodology’ and ‘science as the religion of progress.’ Carl Sagan was famous for this, who interestingly was not respected as a scientist, and is known for works of fiction and movie adaptations, not for any real research. He pushed a false dichotomy between faith and reason, specifically between religion and science. This dichotomy seemed to pose no problems to the openly Christian founders of most major branches of science. Refer to IVP’s ‘Six Modern Myths’ for more information.
- The philosophical attack: Nihilism. If there is nothing but the material world, nothing but natural selection, then mankind should follow natural selection as its governing dynamic. Nietzsche basically thinks this through. In a universe without God, there is nothing but will to power. Those with power should act as they see fit. The Melian Dialogue re-expressed in colder terms. Generally, Nihilism is too strong a drink to take straight, so it ends up mixed with some sort of populist philosophy. (Refer to Pilgrim’s Regress, C. S. Lewis) Mix it with social Darwinism, and you get fascism by way of eugenics. Mix it with economics, and you get Communism by way of Marx. Through Nietzche, though, modernity undoes itself. The horrors of the line of reasoning show up in his work and his progeny. In the light of the destruction of the world wars, the faith in progress and tremendous arrogance that marked the early 1900s gives way to the realization that progress leads nowhere as well. So the next logical choice was to embrace that nothing. Hence postmodernism.
Arguments:
- Irreducible Complexity (Biology.) Evolution requires a large number of incremental changes over time. However, most systems need to be fully formed if they are to work at all. Therefore, most life systems must have been fully functioning at their inception.
- Think about an airplane. You need about seven systems to work together all at once, or the plane never gets off the ground. Put together landing gear with engines, throw it up in the air, and boom, big mess. Even the most primitive airplane needs to have landing gear, engines, wings, controls, and a pilot, and all at once. And while the system changes over time, most of the changes have to show up in a completed form. A half-completed hydraulic system starts fires, it doesn’t become a complete system.
- The most basic form of life requires eight fully functioning molecular systems, all far more complex than any system on an aircraft. You have to get all eight systems at once, or your aspiring life form is nothing more than dust, and you have to start back at ground zero. No good.
- Even if you already have life, transitional forms still run into the same problems. A half fin/half foot is not very good at being either. Fully formed gills work great. Fully formed lungs work great. Halfway in between, you die. Evolution simply can’t jump the gaps between systems with small changes and random chance. There literally isn’t enough time in the world. Similarities between systems are far better explained by a common Engineer than a common ancestor.
- Cambrian Explosion. (Paleontology.) The nicely branching tree of life that is standard in most High School Bio textbooks is part and parcel to the nice, slow, eventual progression of Evolution. The problem is that it doesn’t much match the fossil record. If the fossil record was a football field (or, even better, a rugby pitch,) we would run 93 yards down the field, finding only bacteria and very simple worms, and those not changing much, if at all. Then, in the space of half of one step, every form of life now known bursts onto the scene, all fully formed as we know them now.
- There were forms of life that came about in the Cambrian Explosion that no longer exist. There are no forms of life that exist now that did not exist then. Therefore, biodiversity is decreasing over time, not increasing as evolution would predict. This also provides additional evidence that there was once a global catastrophe, of the type depicted in the time of Noah.
- Anthropic Principle (Cosmology.) People used to assume that we would find life all over the place, once we started exploring planets. We haven’t found anything like life on any planet we have explored. Instead, what we have found is how tremendously improbable it is that life exists at all. This is further evidence for a Creator.
- Imagine a global lottery. If the odds of winning are one in a million, about six thousand people will win. If you win, you are really lucky, but it isn’t that surprising that somebody wins. Now imagine the odds are one in a trillion, trillion, trillion. Nobody should win with odds like that. If somebody does win, you need to consider the possibility that the lottery was fixed. In fact, at that point, it really is the best answer. Now add fifty zeroes to those odds, and you have the lottery for life in this universe. The lottery was fixed.
- In order to have life, you have to have a planet with exactly the right size orbiting exactly the right kind of star in exactly the right position in the right place in the right kind of galaxy. There’s about twenty more variables you have to get exactly right in order for any sort of life to be even imaginable. Not whether evolution can happen. Whether life can happen at all. The odds end up at 10^121. The most generous estimate of planets in the universe is 10^80. You don’t even come close. 10^41 is far beyond statistically impossible. It takes more faith to believe in those odds than it does to believe someone fixed the lottery.
- The problem only gets worse when you look at it on a universal level. There’s at least thirty variables that have to be exactly right in order for any conception of life to exist at all in this universe. They are precise to a factor of 10^600. Change them at all and everything dies on every planet. And there’s only one universe (that we know of.) So the classic naturalist counterargument is to just up the number of repetitions. Say there’s 10^600 universes and one of them is bound to get it right. The problem is that’s just the gamblers’ fallacy all over again. There is no cumulative luck. Unless our universe is somehow benefiting from the failures of an infinite number of failed universes, then our sample size is one. Even more, if there was a ‘universe creation machine,’ it would probably exhibit tremendous design itself. You can’t explain away an artist by finding his brush. And if the artwork is exquisitely designed, the brush will be as well. That is the problem atheist cosmologists keep running into.
- Ontological Argument (Philosophy.) The fact that we’re here at all is significant. There has to be a sequence of cause and effect that arrives here. We know that sequence can move forwards forever. The problem comes when we try to go backwards. Ancient Hindu theology places the Earth on the back of an elephant. When asked the inevitable question, ‘what holds up that elephant?’ the answer was ‘another elephant,’ and so on. This merely delays the answer, but you can’t push it back forever. If we’re here at all, God must exist.
- The first formulation of this argument is Plat