Divine Plagiarism

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.

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.

“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.

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.

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 Plato’s Unmoved Mover. Cause links to effect, which in turn becomes another cause with its own effect and so on. All causes and effects link together into a stream of causality, which shapes events. Working forwards, there is no problem. Working backwards, though, you go from effect to cause, and it is elephants upon elephants all the way back. But the chain has to start somewhere. All effects are the result of causes. But to get the whole train moving, there has to be a locomotive. Something must be a cause that is not the effect of another cause. There must be an unmoved mover, that both causes itself and other things. Plato calls this the Unmoved Mover. Aquinas adapts this theory to Christianity and further refines it in his Summa Theologica, determining that God is pure actuality, no potentiality at all. Of course, God told this to Moses well before Aquinas did the math. ’I AM that I AM.’
- The second formulation is the Kalam cosmological argument. It comes from the Islamic world, circa 900 AD, possibly from Averroes. It tells us that negative infinite regress is impossible. Basically, if you ran into someone who told you ‘I’m going to count to infinity… 1, 2, 3, 4, 5,’ and so on, you could bet that they’ll get bored or tired or die of old age before they get there, but in principle it is a logically coherent statement. Now imagine someone shows up, and says ‘5, 4, 3, 2, 1... I just counted backwards from infinity.’ That person is obviously lying. He has nowhere to start. You can’t say ‘infinity, infinity minus one, etc.’ and expect to get back to zero. Infinity keeps moving. You need a fixed point of beginning if you are to get here at all. And we are here, so the universe began. Therefore, Someone began it.
- The last and most fun formulation is Anselm’s Ontological Argument. Think of something good. Like Ice Cream. Now think of something better. True Love, Princess Bride Style. Or Fast Cars. Or whatever. Now think of something better than that. Pretty much, if you keep going you’re going to end up at the Ultimate Good. And that is God. So if anything good exists, and some things are more good than others, then there is going to be a theoretical pinnacle of goodness. That Perfect Good must be God. Therefore, God exists because good exists, and it must have its ontological origin in Him.


5. The Gospels are a Trustworthy Account.
The Gospels describe God’s fullest revelation of Himself to mankind, the birth, life, death and resurrection of His Son. They speak clearly and unequivocally to the fact that a man was born at a specific time and place, claimed to be God in the flesh, died a criminal’s death, and bodily came back from the dead. If truth is knowable, and God exists, then God exists in truth. Since God is beyond death, and man is not, then death is subject to God. Any man who claimed Godhood wrongly would have no power over death, as a God of truth would not acknowledge such falsehood. Therefore, if a man had power over death, then he must be of God. Given that God does not appreciate blasphemy, if a man claimed to be God, and returned from the dead, then He must be God. If a Man was indeed God, then everything He said is truth. And He said the basic truths of Christianity over and over again: sin, repentance, substitutionary atonement, eternal life. In the person of Jesus Christ, as attested to in the Gospels, all the doctrines of Christianity, the creeds and the scripture have their root. If He is who He said He was, His words are inescapable and call all men into account. If the Gospels are true, He is who He said He was.

Threat: Neo-Gnosticism. None of the arguments are really that new. Postmodernism looks a lot like hedonism recycled, modernity looks a lot like materialism recycled. And neo-Gnosticism is just the Gnostics recycled. They make the same basic argument: Jesus never really claimed to be God, and He was a nice guy, but certainly not God. This shows up in so-called ‘quests for the historical Jesus,’ in the ‘Jesus seminar,’ in movies like Stigmata and books like the DaVinci Code. (This may have something to do with the seminar’s flawed methodology and their inability to win real arguments. If you can’t make your points, just go to the media. They’ll buy anything.) Basically, neo-Gnosticism tries to discredit the truth claims of the Gospels, and hence the basic doctrines of Christianity.
- Formal Attack: Jesus Seminar. This generally takes form in recycling some old controversy and calling it new. This often includes some flavor of ‘Jesus slept with Mary Magdalene,’ and incorporates some of the nonsense in the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas. This is especially strange, given that if some of the weird doctrines contained in that book ‘only men go to heaven, so Mary became a man,’ then Christians would be called misogynist and all sorts of nasty things. I guess you can have your cake and eat it too. Especially if you find a good publisher. A lot of this is just silly conspiracy theories. All these issues were addressed openly by people far closer to the original issues, and their reasoning and results were available for all to see.
- Informal Attack: Jesus was a good teacher. Just not a God. Acknowledging a form of goodness, but not goodness in full, this argument allows people to neutralize Jesus into some pedantic peddler of stale platitudes. But, as C.S. Lewis points out, you can’t neuter the Lion of the Tribe of Judah. He was no nice guy. Nice guys don’t say the things He said. And nice guys don’t change lives two thousand years later. God in the flesh does.

Arguments:

- Textual Criticism (Literature/Archaeology.) Josh McDowell’s Apologetics work is largely in the area of textual criticism of the Gospels. In fact, it was the overwhelming weight of evidence in this area that ended up bringing him to Christ. We can say with a very high degree of reliability that we are reading what was written, what was written checks with itself, and checks with external sources. Legendary development shows up in later pseudoepigraphia (like Gospel of Thomas,) but is conspicuously absent in the Biblical account. Furthermore, those who would have known best the veracity of the Gospels died for them, to the man. The only coherent answer is that the Gospels are a true accounting of events.
- First, there is the manuscript evidence. We consider Beowulf to be a rough accounting of the original oral poem. Hundreds of years passed before it was written down, and manuscripts are rare and vary greatly. Thucidides’ History of the Peloponnesian Wars is considered a reliable recounting of the original text. The text is derived from eight manuscripts dated generously to 800 years after the writing. Excluding the Bible, the Iliad is the considered possibly the most reliable text from antiquity from a manuscript point of view. There are 650 manuscripts available. There are over 20,000 manuscripts of the New Testament. They date very close to the writing of the writing of the originals. Additionally, discoveries of new manuscripts only confirm existing manuscripts. Dead Sea Scrolls, for instance, confirming OT. Similar discoveries confirm NT. A hundred years of openly hostile manuscript criticism has failed to bring down Scripture. The same could not be said for any other holy text. The telephone game argument simply fails in the face of the evidence.
- Second, the internal coherence of the work. Noting that the four gospels were all written from different authors, they do not contradict each other in any material way. Even if the synoptic gospels (all but John) cite each other as sources, they agree in the places that were not cited. There was an article in Harvard Law Journal, I believe, that analyzed the gospels from a legal point of view. Taking the testimony of the first-hand witnesses recorded, and the expert research of Luke, there would have been a legally airtight case that Christ rose, by any courtroom standard of proof. One even minute, almost irrelevant points of fact, the texts agree. The odds of this happening are extremely improbable, which points to the only real conclusion: the accounts synchronize because they are factual. Truth is coherent. Four witnesses all saw the same thing, and they do not contradict each other.
- Along with this, the idea of Legendary Development. Stories over time become legends. C. S. Lewis addresses this point well. When approached about skeptical NT scholars who called the Bible myth, he asked not how much NT had they read, but how much myth they had read. He responded something to the effect of ‘I am a professor of myth, and the Gospels don’t read like any myth I have ever read.’ Myth and Legendary Development have certain characteristics that develop over time. First, all the good guys are really good, and the bad guys are really bad. The would-be heroes, the apostles, look pretty dumb most of the time. They are hardly heroes, especially during the crucifixion. Second, all the extraneous details disappear. It was not until about two centuries ago that people put irrelevant details into fiction to make it more realistic. The Gospels are filled with seemingly extraneous details, ones that are consistent with the main themes, but largely tangential. This is indicative of a factual account, not a legend. Finally, a legend is retold with some sort of purpose to power, either to support or oppose existing power structures. The Gospels are not a politically revolutionary work, but they are certainly not a political status-quo work. Interestingly, legendary development shows up in all the Gospel of Thomas-type epigraphia, which is consistent with their dates of writing, 200+ years after the events.
- Finally, there is the External Consistency of the work. Comparing the Gospels with the historical records of the time, it checks. Roman records talk about a group following a slave Krestus who, it was claimed, died and rose again. This is too close for coincidence, and indicates that the doctrines of the early church did not dramatically change over time. Josephus discusses the early church, and recounts that the Nazarene sect of Judaism (what Christians were called at the time) believed the same things. Roman records check with the name of a city works administrator in Paul’s epistles. The claims of the Gospel explain the relevant citations better than any other hypothesis.
- The most significant external consistency check is the witness of the martyrs. If anyone would know the Gospels were a fabrication, the apostles certainly would have. Yet, all of them died as if they believed, as attested to by Roman records and other accounts. This would be the most illogical of actions to knowingly die for a lie. Especially to rejoice as they did so. Psychologically, something happens to the apostles between sitting in a room hiding from the Romans and dying horrible deaths joyfully. There is only one explanation: their account was true.

- The Trilemma. (Logic.) C. S. Lewis’ classic trilemma counters the claim that Jesus was just a good teacher. The Gospels depict Jesus claiming to be God. There is no other adequate explanation for His death other than the charge of blasphemy. So clearly He claimed to be God, and was understood to do so by the people of the time. This precludes the ‘good teacher’ hypothesis. He must be a legend, a liar, a lunatic or Lord.
- The first option, legend, can be largely rejected due to the tremendous amount of textual evidence for Jesus’ existence, both in the Gospels and outside of them. Even just using Josephus, you can prove to any reasonable standard that Jesus existed and claimed to be God.
- The next option is liar. A man who claims to be God, yet knows that he is not, is the very devil in hell. (plagiarizing Lewis) Yet, Christ’s moral philosophy is recognized as some of the most beautiful and good in all of history, even by non-Christians. The ‘good teacher’ claim even includes ‘good.’ Nietzsche was one of very few to call Christ anything negative morally, and Nietzsche is not really an example of kind and generous moral philosophy. So liar doesn’t check with the data.
- The next option is lunatic. To plagiarize Lewis again, someone who claims to be God, believes themselves to be God, and is not God, is equivalent to someone who believes themselves to be a poached egg. It would not be the first time a man claimed to be God. Unfortunately for this option, such men do not win arguments with the best scholars and lawyers of their time. Christ’s knowledge and powers of reasoning are still astonishing two thousand years later. This is not the mark of a man who belongs in an asylum.
- So the only remaining option is that He was who He said He was. That He is Lord of Heaven and Earth. The resurrection stands as proof. No other arguments about who He was can stand in the face of an empty tomb. And, once again, the people who would know whether that was true or not died to the man believe that it was (with the exception of John.)

- Gamaliel’s Argument (History.) Gamaliel, teacher of Saul of Tarsus, tells the Sanhedrin that if what the Apostles were doing was of God, then they could not stop it no matter what they did. If it was not of God, it would die out on its own. His argument stands. Christianity would have been stillborn if confronted with the corpse of Christ. It would have been the easiest thing in the world, if the apostles found the wrong tomb, to open up the right one and parade the body through the streets. That was never done, instead the authorities acted more like people trying to hush up a conspiracy. Neither was the faith killed by the Pharisees in Jerusalem, nor was it killed by the executioners of Rome. In the face of tremendous persecution, the church thrived. And two thousand years later, Jesus Christ still changes lives.
- From the viewpoint of history, Christianity should never have made it out of the cradle. Starting as a offshoot faith of a small and relatively insignificant Diaspora, it certainly should not have been able to withstand the attacks of the power structures of the time. It makes sense that Islam’s conversion by taxes and the sword took the Middle East by storm. It makes sense that Mormonism and its pyramid scheme layout prospers in a land of pyramid schemes. It does not make sense that eleven barely literate fishermen and a turncoat preacher overcome the greatest empire in all of history by spilling their own blood. And largely by accident at that. There is no explanation for that other than a miracle. Other than the hand of God. We should not be here. There is no power in the world that explains how these weak jars of clay could do so much in so little time.
- From a very personal viewpoint, Christ still changes lives. He is not some sterile Gautama. People still find Him daily. They encounter Him and He transforms their lives. I’ve seen it, in myself and in others. Dead men inspire, but they do not transform. Christ still transforms the world. He reconciles the irreconcilable. Nobody describes a personal relationship with Buddha, or Zoraster, or Mohammed. People describe Jesus in intimate terms. He is alive and well, and we all stand as evidence of that.
- One’s testimony is often their best apologetic argument. Because it is laced with the power of the Spirit, and it is real and breathing and in front of them.

6. Be a Samurai. There are two ways to fight. You can use the traditional Western style, hacking off limbs until one side wins. Or you can use the Eastern style, where two Samurai would stare at each other for hours, until one blinks, and the other would come in with an instant killing stroke. Samurai prepare, and they stay aware. They never bludgeon. This is the way to do apologetics.

- You are there to love on people. Your primary weapon is the Sword of the Spirit, which is the Word of God. Apologetics is a counter-stroke, a defensive move.

- In living our faith, we represent the trilemma over and over again. Either we are hideously evil liars, the greatest of all fools, or we are right. The enemy will counter this by trying to make us into well-meaning fools. For this we are instructed to always have an answer ready.

- Therefore, use apologetics to protect weaker brothers and sisters, or to deflect an attack. But after deflecting it, go right back to the primary weapon of love. Preach the Gospel. With words if necessary. But if necessary, make sure you have the words.

7. Further References:
Evidence that Demands a Verdict, Josh McDowell.
More than a Carpenter, Josh McDowell.
Jesus Among Other Gods, Ravi Zacharias.
When Skeptics Ask, Norm Geisler.
When Critics Ask, Norm Geisler.
The Case for Christ, Lee Stroebel.
The Case for Faith, Lee Stroebel.
The Case for a Creator, Lee Stroebel.
Mere Christianity, C. S. Lewis.

A friend told me about this over coffee the other day. We had a really interesting discussion on race and ethnicity, which is what he did his graduate work in. (He's from the Island, and still goes back every once and a while.) One of the great things about friends is sharing things with them that they would enjoy. And it is one of the worst things about unreconciled relationships. I have run across more than a few things in the last year or so that I think would have been a blessing to C. I am sad that I was not able to share those things. Nonetheless, this is an awesome poem. Hope you guys like it.



Child of the Americas - Aurora Levins Morales

I am a child of the Americas,
a light-skinned mestiza of the Caribbean,
a child of many diaspora, born into this continent at a crossroads.
I am a U.S. Puerto Rican Jew,
a product of the ghettos of New York I have never known.
An immigrant and the daughter and granddaughter of immigrants.
I speak English with passion: it’s the tongue of my consciousness,
a flashing knife blade of cristal, my tool, my craft.

I am Caribeña, island grown. Spanish is my flesh,
Ripples from my tongue, lodges in my hips:
the language of garlic and mangoes,
the singing of poetry, the flying gestures of my hands.
I am of Latinoamerica, rooted in the history of my continent:
I speak from that body.

I am not African. Africa is in me, but I cannot return.
I am not taína. Taíno is in me, but there is no way back.
I am not European. Europe lives in me, but I have no home there.

I am new. History made me. My first language was spanglish.
I was born at the crossroads
and I am whole.

If you haven’t seen the series Firefly, watch it. It’s awesome. Imagine the Millennium Falcon in the Old West. The movie Serenity picks up the story where the series leaves off.

If you’ve seen the movie Serenity, then you remember the scene where River saves the entire crew, single-handedly fighting off an army of Reavers. This half-schizophrenic and completely misunderstood girl who has been a strain on the crew’s social networks and a threat to their continued existence, this girl who has caused tremendous frustration in those around her just by being who she is, in that one moment is absolutely irreplaceable. She finds in that moment the one place in the universe where she and only she can fill the role set before her. The moment she can say, ‘This is what I was made for.’

Something deep within us yearns for that moment. We find that yearning in our favorite chapters in books, in our favorite scenes, in the stories that strike deep chords in our hearts. We identify with the with all the Solos and Skywalkers of myth because part of them lives within us. Or perhaps, those parts of us live within them; they exist to express something deep inside of their viewers. So a storyteller is one who speaks of echoes, they give us a mirror that reminds us of the nobler parts of ourselves that we have forgotten in the name of practicality. So if there is an element of myth that moves us, it does so because it is already present somewhere deep in our hearts.

Frodo is the only one who can take the One Ring to Mount Doom. The fate of all in Middle-Earth hinges upon this mild-mannered Hobbit, whose gifts would have gone largely unappreciated otherwise. Luke is the only one who can stop the Empire So with Wedge Antilles on his wing, he finds his ‘one place’ in the Death Star trench run. (Begin Irrelevant Digression. Though, apparently, X-Wing Starfighter Pilot training takes approximately thirty minutes, provided you already have your land speeder rating. After all, flying couldn‘t be that hard… with a Cessna 172 checkout, Doug Masters managed to fly across the world and kill like five hundred MiGs in a magical F-16 which apparently had the ‘invincibility’ and the ‘unlimited fuel and ammo’ cheat codes enabled. I think it has something to do with playing Twisted Sister really loud instead of listening to the radios. Hey, it’s a cool movie when you‘re five and you don’t know any better. Anyways…) Beowulf is the only one who can slay Grendel. (That is, if he can manage to say anything in words that are actually understandable and don’t sound like ‘ansgeltenshmacht.’ I don’t read Old English. So sue me. Sorry… I‘ll stay on topic. I promise. Sort of.)

As the heroes of myth find their quest, they find themselves. They find their ’one place.’ This is no less true for the characters of the One True Myth. Queen Esther finds herself wedded to the most powerful man in the world ’for such a time as this.’ His throne room is her ‘one place.’ Samson, despite his failings, finds his chance for redemption between two pillars of the temple of his enemies. What is true for the minor characters is certainly true for the Hero. Jesus Christ is both Author and Character. He steps into a role of His own creation. The world does not script His story, yet His story scripts the world. His ’one place’ was on the hill of Calvary, and He spent each day in anticipation of that fact. He is the first of heroes. Heroes want to save the world. He actually did.

We are made in His image. So we want to be heroes. We want to save the world. We want to find our ‘one place.’ Our hearts tell us that there must be a story under these skies for us. There must be a role, somewhere in this world, that we and only we can play. Whether we become somewhat important to many or tremendously important to a few, there is a place in this world made specifically for us. Somewhere, there is a story that is waiting for a hero. Our yearning pushes us toward that moment of passionate belonging, where we become a part of that story as it becomes a part of us. This is a good desire. Like any other desire, though, it has been corrupted in the fall.

It is the slow blade that penetrates the shield. (Yes, it’s from Dune. Not the cracked-out rock opera movie. The book.) Our enemy subtly turns this desire into pride. The thought goes something like: If there is one place for me, one story where I am irreplaceable, then it is my obligation to fill that role. It is not wrong on the surface, for to whom much is given, much is expected. But it was the Pharisees that piled obligations upon people’s backs and would not lift a finger to help. We have been given destinies as a joy and a privilege. Using the weapon of obligation, our enemy turns the joy of destiny into a burden. So we toil toward our grim-faced martyrdoms. But we forget so easily. It was Socrates, not Stephen, whose face was stern and determined as he drank his bowl of hemlock. Stephen‘s his countenance burned with joy and eager anticipation as he looked upon the face of His Savior.

Consider the One True Hero. Paul tells us that Joy and Love held Christ to the cross. Jesus’ one place was worse than any other place, and yet He embraces His cross. It was no detached sense of duty that drove Him along the Via Dolorosa; cold obligation held him to the cross no more than nails did. And He was the only one who was truly irreplaceable. He was the only one who could ever play His part.

Duty is an approximation of what perfect love would do in a given situation. It teaches us to act rightly when our hearts desire the wrong. Duty trains us to act with wisdom, it safeguards us from many dangers. There are times, surely, when you must say ‘if I loved you, I would do this. Therefore that is exactly what I will do.’ But you cannot say that all the time. Duty is the autopilot of love, it makes sure you keep going in the right direction even when your heart isn‘t where it should be. You can’t fly the whole flight on autopilot. Duty is tremendously valuable, but it cannot be an end in and of itself. And it cannot last forever without love. Love keeps duty malleable, breakable, reachable. Without love, duty crystallizes. It hardens and becomes impenetrable. It becomes pride.

Imagine an actor recruited to play a role for which they are completely unprepared and unequipped. The director makes sure the actor gets the props, the costumes and the training to play the part. Now imagine that the actor begins to believe that the story hinges upon him and his inherent aptitude for the part. He begins to believe that he is doing the director a favor to participate in his movie, even more, he believes that he is entitled to respect and privileges from the director in accordance with his essentialness. What tremendous arrogance! Yet we do this. Jesus was irreplaceable. We are not. None of us have a destiny that is truly and inherently irreplaceable. Obligation is borne of need. Therefore, none of us truly merit the burdens that we place upon ourselves. God has been writing history quite well since long before any of us were born. I’m sure that He is more than capable of doing so without our help. Obligation is borne of another’s need. He doesn’t need us.

Yet He loves us. So perhaps we are irreplaceable after all. Not because we have a certain skill-set, but because we are loved by Him. We are irreplaceable in a far more important way than just being another widget in the machine of destiny. God loves each of us enough to die for us. He demonstrated that in no uncertain terms. We are each unique and amazing to Him. So in this, we are all irreplaceable. And in this, we move from obligation back to joy. He allows us to participate in His will. He gives each of us a role sculpted uniquely to our gifts and personality. He prepares us for that role, and makes sure it finds us in His time. So destiny is an honor and a privilege, rooted in His love for us.

Perhaps destiny is like the gift of a parent to a child. The parent does not have any particular need to give a child a gift, nor do they need anything that might result from the child playing with the gift. But they give the child a gift, one specially chosen to match the desires and gifts of the child, to see the joy on the child’s face. But remember the parable of the bridegroom. Just because a gift is made for you does not mean that it cannot be given to another.

Perhaps it is like a parent inviting their child to participate in an important task. A mechanic, fixing his car, has little need to have his son pass him tools. In fact, the job might go quicker if his son didn’t take part at all, handing him the wrong kind of wrenches and the like. But he enjoys the joy his son gets from taking part in the work. Just as important, he enjoys seeing his son become more like him. So we are the jars of clay that the Scriptures talk about.

So we are Ender Wiggins, the child going off to war. We are protected by our innocence, and strengthened by our joy. This was the plan all along… we were to have the innocence and the joy of the reclaimer. We were to be the ones who fight from love and love the fight. The girl playing light sabers with sticks does not fight from duty, but from love. She believes herself the heroine, the one who will save us all.

As Dashboard Confessional reminds us, Ender will save us all. Why? Because Orson Scott Card is writing the book. And because Mr. Card knows the ending he wants. So even if Ender somehow failed or refused his role, the author will still make the ending work. If a finite human storyteller is able to craft a story to accommodate his characters, how much more story crafting skill must the One True Author have? And in this, once again, is our true irreplacability. Ender is not irreplaceable in his role because the author is depending on him. He is irreplaceable because he is made by the author to enjoy that role. No one else could love doing what Ender ends up doing in quite the same way that Ender does.

We are made by the One True Author with a role in mind. He makes a story for each of us where we are irreplaceable. It is a beyond me whether those roles are set in stone or whether they are fluid. I do know this, though, we will never enter into the joy of those roles as long as we do them out of a sense of obligation. When we gain the humility to realize He does not need us, we will find how amazing it is that He still loves us. Lay your duties down at His feet. Pick them up again as labors of love. After all, we are reclaimers. Only when we walk in love can we reclaim this world for love. And that was our destiny all along.

I don’t know if this is supported by scholarly sources or archaeological evidence in any way. So by the same token, I don’t know is refuted by them either. I paid my dues looking through scholarly journals about Russian History in Undergrad. So there. Anyways, this is the result of some random conjecture between myself and Russian-American at a coffee shop. Lots o’ fun.

Around 800 AD, all the Eastern Slavs lived in was called the Kievan Rus’. They were basically a bunch of city-states in what is now Ukraine. The relationship between the city-states was somewhat akin to that of the ancient Greeks during the time of Thucidides. Around 1000 AD, the Mongols rolled through the area. Kiev was the strongest and richest city in all of Europe at the time. So the Mongols send their emissaries to demand tribute from Kiev, and the Kievans send back the Mongol emissaries without their heads. Genghis Khan doesn’t take rejection particularly well, so he kills almost everyone in Kiev. Game over, Kievan Rus’.

There is a pretty interesting historiographical question here. The Soviets described the Kievan Rus’ as a feudalistic culture, so that it would fit into their model of dialectical materialism. The Ukrainians describe the Kievan Rus’ as a pinnacle of governance and culture, and proceed to take all of its symbology as their own (hrybna, the currency, and trizub, the symbol of the Kyivan grand princes.) Both the Soviets and the Ukrainians have (had) agendas wrapped around their perspectives on the Kievan Rus’, and that influences their respective viewpoints. Of course.

So here is my uninformed and relatively insignificant argument. First, feudalistic economies are fundamentally agrarian. The Kievan Rus’ economy was based around taxing the trade routes coming out of Constantinople. A large amount of revenue was generated by a large number craftsmen and merchants, who capitalized on the trade routes, importing and exporting large numbers of goods. These craftsmen and merchants were decidedly bourgeoisie, and were not particularly beholden to any feudal lords. A trade based economy with a large middle class points far more to an advanced capitalistic economy than a feudal economy.

Second, the Kievan Rus’ system of governance could be described as ‘frontier Athenian.’ Three branches of government, for lack of a better term, came together to produce policy. Any two could trump the third, and when they did so, people generally died. There was an executive-type figure in the Grand Prince (Veliky Knyaz,) who was a hereditary monarch. There was a legislative-type body in the Veche, a council of landowners and merchants who discussed and voted on all laws. There was a judicial-type entity in the Boyars, hereditary wealthy nobles independent of the Grand Prince. Each city-state had a different mix of these three (Novgorod had most of its power with the Veche, for example,) and while far from the staid Greek philosophers (Impeachment was accomplished by decapitation, usually,) it was far less authoritarian than any other significant European systems of the time.

There is a line of argumentation that believes Russia to be the ‘Third Rome.’ While now mostly a symbolic feature embraced by the Russian Orthodox Church, there was once truth in it. I remember writing a paper comparing the Kievan Rus’ with the Greek city states. I think I had only cited the parallelism, and I neglected to look to lineage. The primary influence on the culture, economy and governance of the Kievan Rus’ was Constantinople. There was a conscious choice to model the society on the Eastern Seat of the Church, stunning in its splendor at that time. Constantinople, in turn, owed its model of society to both the Romans and the Greeks. So there was something decidedly Greek that flowed into Kiev through the rivers that were its trade routes. Cyrillic, after all, was based on Greek.

How did we get from there to here? Moscow is my guess. Sergei Eisenstein aside, Moscow gained its power by collecting taxes for the Mongol Golden Horde. Though rivers and forests played some role in its defense, Moscow profited greatly under the Mongol yoke, evolving from a small outpost into a powerful city. As the Golden Horde declined, the Muscovites eventually became strong enough to drive the Mongols out. In the process, though, Muscovite governance picked up a strong flavor of corruption and authoritarianism, whether from the Mongols or from what had become of the House of Rurik. The rise of Moscow was at about the same time as the decline of Constantinople. Moscow’s distance from Constantinople and the decay of Byzantine influence meant that the Greek flavor that shaped Kiev would have little influence on Moscow.

The synopsis of my argument is that 1) There was a continuity between the ancient Greeks and the Kievan Rus‘ by way of Byzantium and 2) That continuity was broken under the Mongol yoke and the rise of Moscow. This is doubtless controversial, and sides pretty strongly with the Ukrainian historiography on the subject (with the notable exception of affirming that the Ukrainians and the Russians came from the same Kievan stock.) So, in terms of ‘the past that never was,’ Democracy is actually quite Russian. But if it is Russian the way we understand Russian still remains to be seen. The unique thing about a ‘past that never was’ is that if you recover it, you get to make it your future.

Ethicists talk a lot about the principle of ‘dirty hands.’ The principle of double effect and all that. It is a problem unique to a fallen world. The cords of death are wrapped around all things on this Earth. The life-giving oxygen we breathe ends up killing us, rusting our cells bit by bit over the course of a century. The taxes we pay go to as many ignoble causes as noble ones. Our labor is rarely pure, either. The farmer finances the landlord’s vices and predations with his rents. Farmers are not the only ones who have to pay the landlord. (Pilgrim’s Regress reference unintentional.)

The soldier picks up his weapon and heads off to war. He pays the landlord with his service. The professor picks up the approved textbook and teaches the core curriculum. Her words are her rent, the landlord gets his due. After all, it is hardly unexpected. The landlord owns the classroom, owns the weapons, and pays both the soldier and the professor. If they are going to work his land, he will certainly ask something in return. And here is the problem. It is his right to ask for recompense, but the recompense he asks for can be wrong.

We must ask ourselves: which is more deadly? The soldier who aims and fires his weapon in the course of duty, taking the life of his adversary, or the professor who teaches Nietzsche in the course of his philosophy survey class, introducing his students to the deadliest of drugs? To have your life snatched from you, or to have your soul stolen, either way you are dead. The soldier is directly and intentionally in a causal chain that leads to the death of another. Is he a murderer? The professor is just as directly and intentionally in a causal chain that leads to deception. Is he something worse? Our instincts tell us no. Let’s explore this.

Both the soldier and the professor serve in a fallen world. There is no place for weapons nor for Frederich Nietzsche’s philosophies in the New Jerusalem. This begs a pretty important question: is there a place for the soldier or the professor in the Heavenly City? Is there a perfected form of these professions? The answer in the latter case is the simpler one, clearly there will be learning and teaching in Heaven. In the former case, we must ask ourselves what it is that the soldier truly provides. The soldier’s purpose is no more to create war than the doctor’s purpose is to create incisions. Just as the doctor exists to create health, the soldier exists to create security. It just so happens that in a fallen world, that involves war, just as medicine has involved surgery ever since the curse. When the soldier sets aside the sword in the abolition of war, he will be no less a soldier than a doctor who has set aside the scalpel in the abolition of disease. For this reason, when the Scriptures say ‘the Lord is a warrior,’ it is said superficially. There is no verse that says ‘The Lord is a warrior (on this side of the fall, and only for a brief period of salvation history, and then He will stop being a warrior.)’ Long after the cross itself has turned to dust, the Lamb of God wears the scars from Calvary.

We are not yet granted license to practice our professions in perfection. We are still on this side of the fall, and there is still war and disease and false philosophy. Being in this world, there is no way to escape the taint of these things. But we still must manage to be not of this world. Stealing a page from Thomas Aquinas, let’s look to intentionality. Consider prostitution. There is no conception of a prostitute that does not involve intentional and willful sin. The very essence of the act is a betrayal of the laws of God. For this reason, Jesus and Luke both look upon women engaged in that horrific profession with compassion, but they instruct quite directly to go and change their line of work.

Now consider the scholar. Tremendous evil has been perpetrated in the name of academia and under the guise of scholarship in the course of human history. In the name of Peter Singer’s so-called ethics, much blood has been shed, and much blood will be doubtless continue to be shed. Or consider Comrade Gonzalo in Peru. It would be exceedingly difficult to keep you tenure at Professor Guzman’s university in Peru if you were teaching anything other than his virulent Sendero Luminoso philosophy. Peru reaped the bitter fruits of those ideas for the better part of two decades. We can hardly neglect to mention that it was the teachers of the Law and the scribes that orchestrated the crucifixion of Christ. So clearly, the scholar’s profession can be used for corrupt, terrible ends. This does not invalidate his profession. There is no condemnation of his profession by Christ, only condemnation of its abuses. The scholar’s pure intention is to provide knowledge of Truth. When his profession is used for less than that intended end, the results are catastrophic.

Our soldier’s pure intention is not death. He brings about death in the process of providing security, just as the doctor brings about wounds in the process of providing health. So his case is quite different from the scholar: in the process of the soldier doing his work, he must allow the consequences of systemic sin to manifest themselves. The philosophy professor may have to teach Nietzsche, but the physics professor does not. The soldier pursues death to bring about security when he goes to war. But the capacity for abuse is quite similar. Tremendous cruelty has been unleashed upon humanity under the reign of military dictatorships. Without the Panzers of the Wehrmacht, there would have been no Holocaust. Without the red-robed centurions of the Roman Legions, there would have been no crucifixion. When abused, the military has a tremendous capacity for destruction. Yet, neither John the Baptist, Christ, nor Paul, when asked directly about military service, provide any sort of prohibition. John tells soldiers to be content with their pay, and to use their power responsibly. He does not tell them to desert. He exhorts them to honorable conduct in the performance of their duties. So, clearly, there must be some conception of military service that is honorable in the eyes of Scripture. The abuses of the military profession invalidate it no more than academia’s abuses invalidate the profession of the scholar.

The question does not end here, though. If these professions have such a catastrophic capacity for abuse, then the Godly practitioners of these professions must have a way to safeguard themselves from the perversions of their callings. They must have a line. It is one thing to teach a core philosophy curriculum which requires teachers to explain the philosophies of Jean-Paul Sartre. It is quite a different thing when the core curriculum mandates that all faculty denounce any Christian philosophies. This would not be unheard of. Just ask any professor at MGU (Moscow State University) with more that 15 years of tenure. It is one thing for an OB-GYN to explain all the options to a mother with an unplanned pregnancy. It is quite a different thing when her hospital demands that she procure an abortion for her patient if she already has one child. Neither would this be unheard of. It is one thing to order a solider to strike high-value target in close proximity to civilians. It is quite a different thing to ask that soldier to attack those civilians. If we are to work the landlord’s fields, we must decide how much rent is too much.

There is a story about some Armenian soldiers in the Legions of Rome. I will not attempt to retell the story of the Thundering Legion, for my retelling would hardly do them justice. They had a line, though. Serving honorably under Marcus Aurelius, they carried out their duties with distinction. Note that those duties were basically invading and subduing free German lands. Nonetheless, they gained a reputation for bravery and honor. But a law was passed mandating that all soldiers worship the Emperor. This was their line. So, to a man, the Thundering Legion was martyred on the frozen surface of a lake.

We are never exempted from the consequences of our actions. There is little nobility in the college student raging against the machine with his placard while skipping class. It costs him very little to do so. Who knows, he might even end up with a few phone numbers of socially conscious girls. Not a bad exchange for missing a few hours of lectures. Rarely are the consequences of defying the landlord wrapped in so much vainglory. It may cost us our reputation, our jobs or our lives. Christians defied Roman law by not worshipping the Emperors, but they experienced the consequences in martyrdoms. They gave to Caesar what was Caesar’s, and in doing so, they overcame Caesar. The church lives on. Rome does not. They were vindicated by God.

Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s. Paul tells us that we should give what is due to the governing authorities, because they are placed there by God. Honor, taxes, or respect, as long as it does not contradict the laws of God. Taxes to the Caesars funded oppression and crucifixions. My taxes fund abortions. Yet I am not exempted from paying them, even though I believe with all my heart that abortions are directly against the will of God. After all, as a Jewish carpenter under the domination of Rome, Jesus paid taxes into the temple coffers and the Roman treasury that were later used to unjustly crucify Him. He who knew all things certainly knew what He came to do and how it would be financed, and He did not exempt Himself. If He did not, then we certainly have no right to claim that license.

This is not at all to say that we should not work to restructure institutions. But we would do well to retain a measure of humility as we do so. The Old Testament provided models for governance, and the intent is certainly still valid, but we need to understand that it was addressed to God’s Chosen People living in one nation set apart. It tells them how to live and manage their own affairs. It doesn’t tell them how to change Persia. Yet, when those Chosen People lived in Persia, they influenced it like salt and light, by their examples and their integrity. Joseph did not lecture Pharaoh on good governance. He just lived good governance where he was placed, and in doing so reshaped the governance of the country. Certainly there is a time and place for Hadassah, and she was used mightily by God. But we must remember that she risked her life for her hearing. How many of our complaints involve that degree of commitment? So where are we? We are not the nation of Israel. Neither are we the kingdom of Persia. We are the Church. We are somewhere between nation builders and exiles.

Systems interact. The actions of the soldier, Godly or not, will affect the doctor and the scholar. The scholar will affect the other two, as will the doctor. All of our actions are woven in threads of causality around each other. Given the brokenness of this world, many professions will find their interests opposed to each other. The actions the soldier performs in the execution of his duty will likely be found distasteful by many a scholar, just as the philosophies advocated by scholars will be distasteful to many a soldier. The factory worker and the factory owner will find themselves at odds, simply by virtue of what they do. There are legitimately broken issues that come about in a broken world that set us against each other. Philemon and Onesimus surely understood this, as did Paul. The glory of Christ was not in the elimination of those differences, for that will not be done on this side of the fall. Rather, the glory of His reconciliation was in fellowship in spite of those differences.

We are a church. Bricklayers and City Administrators have legitimate differences, they have real and significant issues between them. Yet Paul addresses his epistles to both of them, living together in unity. Through the power of Christ, these men were brothers. Onesimus and his master Philemon, divided by social injustice, were united in Christ. What allowed these men to love each other despite their differences? Humility. Humility is the parent of all love. Pride teaches us to pursue the good by fixing everyone else. Humility teaches us to look first to the plank in our own eye. If the scholar, the soldier and the doctor want to fight the sin inherent in this fallen world, the place they all should start is with themselves. The sin inside us is the sin we are most capable of affecting, it is the sin we are most responsible for. Once our own sin is undone, then let us speak to our brother about his sin. Knowing something about myself, I’m guessing it will take me quite some time before I’m in a position to lecture anyone else.

Humility will guide us both to righteousness and unity. Really, they are both the same. The more we are remade into the righteous image of Christ, the more we are at peace with each other. Pride always leads to disunity. As we lecture others about their problems, we blind ourselves to our own. We all live and work in a world of structural sin. Certainly there is more than enough brokenness to go around. But just as certainly, there is enough brokenness in ourselves to consume our time. The glory of the Church is unity. Scholars and bricklayers called each other brothers. I do not imagine that scholars were denouncing bricklayers nor telling them how to lay brick. Neither do I imagine that bricklayers were denouncing scholars and telling them how to do mathematics. They both had enough grace to let each other serve where they were placed, provided they weren’t doing anything that flew in the face of Scripture. Perhaps we should go and do likewise. Let us be salt and light where we are placed, and worry a little less about where others are placed.

When I think of syncretism, the worship of La Virgin de Guadalupe comes to mind. A fusing of old gods with the True God, a watering down of the Gospel, mixing it with old symbols of a world that refuses to pass away. It is a subtle trap, really. When a culture is transformed by the Gospel, the result is something that is distinctly transformed yet still distinctly of that culture. Syncretism grants the appearance of transformation without all the discomfort involved in actually going through with it. Instead of becoming something new, the culture gets to stay comfortably who they were. They just get a makeover.

All of us are in some way a mix of the sacred and the profane. Sinners saved by the grace of God. The law of sin and the law of grace are at war within us. In yielding to the will of God, He will ensure that the law of grace will win in the end. But until then, we will remain at war, for He gives no quarter to our rebellion. We should not try to negotiate a truce, not in the name of tolerance or moderation or any other name. ‘Stronghold’ is the name for any places in our lives where we have chosen coexistence and comfort over sanctification. Syncretism is simply a stronghold writ large; it is a place where the culture is unwilling to change, instead negotiating a truce between the profane and the holy. It can be reduced to a simple equation: True God plus cultural idol equals syncretism. So if each culture has different idols, each culture’s syncretism will be different.

Back to the Virgin of Guadalupe. I am not trying to argue the virtues or the vices of the veneration of Mary. I do know, though, that the Catechism of the Catholic Church does not condone many of the things that happen in the name of the Virgin of Guadalupe. So we look to that image, and the throngs worshipping it, and we point our fingers. You cannot mix old gods with the One True God. We reject out of hand any thoughts of mixing Christ and Krishna in order to reach India. Rightly so. Really though, it is not tremendously difficult for us to do so… to most Americans, the idea of worshipping gods with elephantine heads or large numbers of arms is quite foreign. It is quite easy to denounce the idols of another culture. It is much more difficult to cast down the idols of your own. Perhaps we should look to the plank in our own eye.

There is a fine line between a dream and a nightmare. Consider knowledge. A culture that values knowledge can use that cultural distinctive to bring great glory to God. All of that changes when they start to worship knowledge as an idol, even if it is an idol dressed in Christian garb. What, then, is our idol? We’ve all heard about the American Dream. ‘You will succeed if you keep trying and never give up.’ In and of itself, there is nothing wrong with this dream, and blessedly it has come true for more than a few. But in our dream, we find our nightmare. Success. This is our idol. Success promises us safety, it tells us who we are, it demands to be worshipped.

Our syncretism, then, is a mixing of the Truth of God with the idol of success. After all, everybody loves a winner. So we want to win. We do what was forbidden to King David. We take censuses, over and over. We analyze trends in church growth, trends in giving, looking to percentages to tell us who we are. We make four-step programs, quick and convenient ways to move people into the ‘saved’ camp. Then we count that camp, we refine our techniques, we measure and measure and measure. ‘How many decisions were there?’ Anyone in any form of ministry has likely heard this question. This is, after all, how we measure success. Really, the question is ‘did we succeed?’ Because success is important. And it is, no doubt. Thinking about success is not a bad thing, really. That is, until it becomes a means by which we remain safe.

George MacDonald, in his ‘Unspoken Sermons,’ critiques the man who becomes ’saved’ and proceeds to become satisfied with less than perfection. Certainly, there is something amazing and beautiful that happens when someone joins the fold of Christ. Far too often, though, we stop there. ’How many decisions,’ we ask. This is our unit of measure, our currency of success as a church. If you can produce mass decisions, you are a success. Successes are to be honored and emulated. We have created a system where we can still worship success in the name of worshipping God. We are guilty of syncretism.

Use what you got. Of course. Americans are good at innovating and optimizing. It is not surprising that we should turn these skills to the service of God. Please do not think that I am anti-megachurch. Many have been reached by the ministries of Willow Creek, New Life, and Saddleback. Praise God for that. Once again, though, the line between a dream and a nightmare is a fine one. God asks for a broken heart and a contrite spirit. All men are proud (save One, of course.) People in ministry are no different. The more successful you become, the more of a temptation pride becomes. Many fall victim. I think to the ‘my way is God’s way’ line of thought tragically attached to several successful ministries. Challenges are answered with statistics on conversions and percentages of church growth. The trappings of success are hardly the contrition and broken-heartedness that God asks of us. They are transient, as we have seen far too often. The wounds left by pride and betrayal last far longer. These are the bitter fruits of our syncretism.

American Christianity uniquely American. This is not bad, and it is important that we understand that. God chooses to express Himself through persons, and each individual personality reflects a slightly different piece of God, a piece no one else is capable of reflecting. He also expresses Himself through cultures, and each culture expresses Him slightly differently. But each culture, just like each person, has places where they have chosen to compromise, to mix the sacred and the profane. These unholy truces provide the appearance of holiness while denying its true power. Our culture values success. We idolize it. There is no room for idolatry in the church. Certainly not an idolatry in Christian trappings.

Perhaps, at least for a time, we would be served well by the prohibition the Lord gave to King David. No more censuses. If we don’t know how to succeed anymore, maybe we’ll have to ask Him. Maybe, somewhere beyond the limits of our own strength, we will find the contrition and brokenness He desires. Through His strength in our weakness, I think we’ll find more success than we had ever imagined.