Divine Plagiarism

In many ways, individuals and cultures are similar. I suppose that it only stands to reason that the patterns in the microcosm would be reflected in the macrocosm. Both define identities for themselves, staking out a self distinct from the other. Both project that identity to others, carving out a place for themselves in the larger whole. And both are generally oblivious to the fact that their own identity changes over time. We live in the ‘forever now.’ Our concept of self is very rooted in today, and in order to maintain a coherent concept of the self, we assume that the us of today was the us of yesterday, and will be the us of tomorrow. While this assumption brings us stability, it is not entirely accurate. In reality, the ‘me’ changes greatly over time. In fact, the ‘me’ of right now probably has more in common with the ‘me’ of one of my current friends than the ‘me’ of myself in 1979. In my world of the ‘forever now,’ I am practically blind to this. I assume that I am unchanging, and therefore any change is to be feared, for change will destroy the ‘me’ of right now, which is the only ‘me’ I know at this point in time. And this is true, in a way. Each time I go to sleep, the ‘me’ of that day dies to make way for the ‘me’ of the next day. I constantly am passing away and being reborn. The moment I stop doing so is the moment I become stagnant. We can only hold our breath for so long. We have to let one breath pass away in order to make room for the next. Only the dead no longer exhale. Stagnation is death. So in order to live, I must allow myself to die daily.

We look at people groups with the same assumption. The lines we have today are the lines we have had and will have forever. But they are not. Cultures are constantly changing. Consider the Celts. When we hear ‘Celtic,’ we immediately think of Ireland. Alexander the Great would have been greatly surprised at that association. In his day, the Celts were the northern neighbors of his Macedonia, nestled snugly in the Carpathians. Over time, they move to the north and the west, and find their way to Eire. There, their characteristic red hair is donated by the Vikings through rather uncivilized means. Through St. Patrick, who is now an icon of Irishness now yet was not Irish at all at the time, another cultural distinctive is added to the island. On and on it goes, and at some point we end up with the Celts of Boondock Saints, the Irish that we know. As someone with Irish ancestry, I look at a Celtic latticework in many ways the same as I look at a baby picture of myself. I assume that the person in the picture is ‘me’ in a very real way, yet there is a universe of changes between me in diapers and me in a leather jacket. In the same way, the Celts that made that latticework would have very, very little understanding of a present day Boston Irish Heritage parade. The Celts of the Carpathians have passed away at least a hundred times to be reborn in the next generation over and over. But they were never reborn exactly the same. If a generation of Celts refused to let the Celt-ness of their ‘right now’ pass away, then all of Celt-ness would have passed away forever when that generation died out. A people group, just like a man, must die to itself over and over again if it is to live.

So it is with all cultures. No one is indigenous, ultimately. Humanity has one homeland, but we earned exile from that place long before any of us can remember. From that day on, we have been shuffling from one wasteland to another, shoving other groups of refugees out of the way. When we think of the Vietnamese, a certain people group comes to mind. Most likely, that group is not the Dega people, or Montagnards as they are more commonly known. They were the (more) indigenous of Vietnam. They were moved out of the way for the next group, as they moved the last group. Tragically, this people group largely only survives in the United States. They were exterminated for allying themselves with America in the Vietnam conflict. When we run, our friends die, for our enemies show far less mercy than we do. There is no ACLU to restrain them. This is not the point, merely a consideration. The fact remains that groups change, locations change, and customs change. Even bloodlines change. Consider Italian-Americans. Once Sicilians, Romans, men of Naples and of Parma, then united by Garibaldi into one people and one bloodline. That people finds their way to a new country, and eventually that bloodline mixes with others, and what once was a separate group becomes a part of a larger group. The old identity dies, and is reborn in its changed form.

Who is and who isn’t is never static, nor is what they are. Change is a natural part of things, for it is inseparable from growth. We make a dangerous error when we try to hold on to something that is passing away. (Reference C.S.L. in Perelandra.) To close our hand around where we are at, to wish to enshrine it in perpetuity is to call disaster upon ourselves. But we do it nonetheless. There are many sins, many mistakes that seem to be set in opposition to each other but in reality are only different facets of the same error. How many evils have come from man’s desire for immortality? It is no different with cultures. Cultural immortality tells one country that they should subdue and convert all cultures to their own so that theirs may last forever. Flip the coin over, and it tells a country that they can never do anything to change any other culture, so that all cultures may last forever. We have a bad coin on our hands.

Colonialism is the one face of the coin of cultural immortality. It comes in different flavors, French being the classic one. A country decides that their culture should be static, and they start exporting that culture by influence or force. Happening upon another people group, the classic flavor of colonialism rides roughshod over the (more) indigenous culture. Through language, music, philosophy and art, the native culture is crowded out and the native elites bought off. The colonial culture advances toward immortality through the obliteration of more vulnerable identities. There is, of course, a more concentrated form of this brew. When the Nazis overran Slavic countries, they had planned to liquidate upwards of seventy percent of the population of the occupied lands. The idea was to break the spirit of the culture so that the people could be used as slave laborers. For those who can’t quite stomach the espresso, there is a Caffe Americano blend. When the British went abroad, they brought roads and schools with their flags. They brought with them the idea of civilizing a place, defined by British standards of civilization. By civilizing the world with British political and social institutions, the most important aspects of British-ness would be preserved in perpetuity. Regardless of the brew, colonialism was a one way process.

Influence in a real relationship flows both ways. I change you as much as you change me. Colonialism did not allow its own culture to be changed in its changing of other cultures. The only way to justify such behavior is to declare your culture valid and the target culture invalid. Therefore, in order to begin its campaign, Colonialism must start with the assumption that its own culture cannot be wrong. This is an idolatry of culture, ascribing infallibility to the fallible. Colonialism ascribes to culture the place reserved for God, sometimes taking His robes to do so. The ‘imperial missionary‘ is amongst the greatest of villains for contemporary sociology. His faith is merely a Bangalore to breach the walls of the native culture, opening the way for the imposition of Spanish rule or British law, depending on the century. Or so the story goes. But even in the vilest of slanders there is an element of truth, and there is some truth here. There were those who could not leave their own culture behind when spreading the Gospel, and many of these chose to induct converts into their own culture when they introduced them to Christ. They mixed an eternal message of hope with a very temporal understanding of language and culture, lessening both in the process. And this returns us to the heart of the problem. Temporal things are not meant to be eternal. Just like in the Silmarillion, the desire for immortality leads the culture to steal from the Immortal. Colonialism is an idolatry of culture.

Cultural relativism is the other side of our cultural immortality coin. No culture on this side of eternity has a corner on absolute truth. Cultural relativism takes this one step further, asserting that no culture has any claim on any absolute truth. Therefore, no culture ever has the right to make a truth claim on the culture of another. Hence, no culture should ever do anything to try to change someone else’s culture. The greatest of all sins is intolerance. So if a people group decides to eat with their right hand, who are you to enforce forks and spoons on them? Or if a people decides to structure its society along rigid caste lines, who are you to tell them that social mobility is more just? And if a people group to your south feel like owning other people like property, who are you to tell them they can’t? Yet the abolitionists are heroes, not villains.

This presents a significant problem for cultural relativism, for the abolitionists were largely from the educated culture of the American Northeast. The slave owners were the landed gentry of the South, a different cultural group entirely. One group tells another that the basis of their economic system is unjust, and goes to war to change that system (an admittedly gross oversimplification.) We look back on these men as pioneers. Cultural relativism logically should be attacking these men for violating its prime directive of non-interference, but it cannot. Something inside us revolts at calling Gandhi and Dr. King enemies of mankind. In this problem we find the paradox of change within cultural relativism. Where colonialism ignored the right in the culture of the other, cultural relativism ignores the wrong in the other’s culture.

The similarities begin to show themselves. In order for the system to work, there can be no reformers. Cultures must remain forever fixed. In other words, cultural relativism demands cultural immortality. By each culture excusing the sins of every other culture, all cultures can go on forever unchanged. Culture trumps all other considerations, including morality, dignity and human rights. Cultural relativism tells us that that indigenous culture can never be wrong. Which means that culture takes the most important place in our universe, a place traditionally reserved for God. We are back to the idolatry of culture. Instead of deifying Western culture, now we deify (more) indigenous cultures. The primary threat to this new god is the real God. There can be no missionaries, imperial or otherwise, in cultural relativism. Except, of course, for the missionaries of the new religion of culture. In reality, sociology’s objections to the ‘imperial missionary’ is an intramural discussion: simply one idolatry competing with another.

This brings us back to first things and second things. Culture is a good thing, and it plays in to salvation’s history. But it is not itself salvation’s history. There is a difficulty here for us as Christians. On one hand, you have the Pharisees, who confused culture with worship, and incorrectly worshipped culture. On the other hand, Christianity has always changed cultures. As with any other first things question, we need to keep things in the right order. So we must respect culture, but we must respect God more.

We must not put our own culture on a level with the Gospel. It is a good thing to be proud of your own culture. Jesus was proud of His heritage as a Jew, embracing many of the cultural distinctives. But He never let culture supercede God. It was Jesus, the Jew, who healed men on the Sabbath. Jesus, the Jew, who called the prominent cultural figures of His day ‘children of the devil.‘ He was willing to lay down His culture to reach people with the love of God. The greatest missionaries have done likewise. Consider the mission to the Cherokee, who laid down their rights as citizens to die with the tribe they loved.

We must not fear the change of a culture as a result of the Gospel. It is a good thing to respect the culture of another. Paul learns enough about the Athenians to find that they have a temple to an unknown God. He quotes Greek poets to Greeks. But Christianity changes a culture. Consider Paul and the Silversmiths. With the changes that Christianity wrought, the once profitable business of idol-making fell into decline. He denounces the prostitution at the temple of Aphrodite in another letter. Paul was less concerned with preserving cultural distinctives, and more concerned with the Gospel. In a fallen world, there are evil things woven into every culture that must be cut out and discarded as God moves. The fruits of syncretism are bitter. There can be no compromise for ‘old times sake.‘

Sometimes, the solution is far simpler than the problem. The simplest solutions often slip past us because we are looking for something difficult. In the false dichotomy between colonialism and cultural relativism, we have another bad coin. So we should discard it and find a better one. The Great Commission will work, I think. Go ye into all the world and make disciples of men. We should not add anything to that command, but neither should we fear any changes the command brings.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God. - John, the Apostle.

Logos. The Word. The funny thing about doing something for a very long time is that sometimes you forget that you are doing it. It becomes so natural and so transparent that you start taking it for granted. When you start to walk, walking takes a lot of effort and concentration. You are conscious of every step. Keep doing it a while, and it becomes second nature. You just decide to go somewhere and your legs take you. The mechanics of walking never come to mind, unless, of course, you run into something.

Talking is much the same. It requires a tremendous amount of conscious effort for a two year old to wrap the word ‘mama’ around the person who has been their constant companion for their last two years, and just as much effort to move their vocal cords in a certain way as to give that word to another in speech. The child must identify one mass of feelings and sensations, differentiate it from all other masses of feelings and sensations (including themselves,) and store that distinction for future recall. The child must learn to encapsulate meaning in a form that can be meaningfully used and conveyed. As time goes on, the child gets more words and more rules for combining words into bigger and bigger ideas. Eventually, the child becomes so comfortable with words that they automatically wrap ideas with words as they think. Like walking, the mechanics of wording only come to mind when they fail. ‘You know, what’s the word...’ We only think about words when we lack one for an idea.

A word encapsulates meaning. It is a package of truth that can be conveyed, a manageable chunk of reality that can be meaningfully shared. I look at a small plastic vessel for holding water, and I think ‘cup.’ I identify certain characteristics of the thing (the vessel-ness, the small-ness) and discard the characteristics not deemed critical (the plastic-ness,) and associate it with a reference idea from my thoughts and memories. The archetypal cup shows up in my consciousness, and my mind transfers that thought pattern to my vocal chords. Through muscle memory and phonemes, my vocal chords turn it into vibrations through the medium of air, which carries it to the ear of the listener, vibrating against tympanic membranes and anvil-shaped bones. The ear turns the vibration into electricity, which through pattern recognition is identified as a word. That word recalls that idea, and the cup has been transferred from my mind to the mind of the listener. (Note the fundamental paradox of postmodernism: Language implies coherence to truth, even if it denies it with its words. If there is no coherence, then there are no words, only sounds. Postmodernism will lead to the abolition of man (C.S.L.) as surely as modernity if allowed to run its course. But I digress.)

The word is a unique thing. It is not just a sign, yet it signifies; not simply a pointer, yet it points to something else. A sign tells us where to look to find a thing, but it is not the thing itself. A word directs us in a very real way, but it is the thing itself in a very real way. It is a sign and the thing itself both at once. The image of a cup is no less or more a cup than the word cup, as long as the cup is named. Yet, the word cup will point us toward the image of the cup. Moreover, when the word ‘cup’ is invoked, it recalls a very real idea of a cup in the mind of the hearer. (Reference Greek Form theory for the idea of perfect reference things.) The cup is not just the idea, nor just the image, nor just the word. It is all of them at once, yet the idea and the image and the word are all separate from each other. The image invokes the word, which invokes the idea, which invokes an image, and the cycle goes on. So the word is fully the thing that it signifies, yet it signifies that thing still.

Words do not exist in a vacuum, they are made to be shared. In order to share a word, meanings must be decided by a community. A people come together and decide that a given set of phonemes means a certain word which encapsulates a certain idea. The whole endeavor is foolishness if the set of sounds I use to describe ‘cup’ is the set of sounds the listener uses to describe ‘dog.’ The image I break down into sounds must be reconstituted into the same image in the mind of the hearer if we are to communicate at all. So things must have names, and those names must be the same names, even amongst different people. Accordingly, societies enforce compliance with linguistic standards. Those who diverge from these standards are subject to reproach. ‘Only rednecks say ain’t,’ and the like. So we now have standards, and hence the ability to share thoughts.

What happens, then, when there is a new thought? It must be named if it is to be shared. Who should do the naming? The one whose thought it is. The one who created the thought, the one who exercises authority over it should name it (all legitimate authority has to do with creation, hence ‘author‘ity.) After all, it is theirs. In naming it, they stake their claim, for in order to convey the thought from then on, people will use their word. There are many ways this plays out. Edison calls his invention the light bulb. ARPA, the Internet. Leif Erickson (I think) discovers land in the North Atlantic, and deceptively calls it Greenland. Economists discover theories and name them after themselves. The dictator Turkmenbashi proceeds to use his authority to rename most of the nouns in the country after himself (marklar marklar the marklar to the marklar. It's from South Park.) Regardless, things must be named, and to name something is to claim authority over it.

If we have so many words now, than all of those things have been named. All the subdivisions of reality are staked out by linguistics, and the plots have been divided as long back as we can remember. Sometimes we move stones, as words and languages evolve over time. Sometimes one field is divided into two, when we create a new flavor or a new combination of things. Still, there must have been an original partition. Let’s look to origins. God makes things. He then names them. The Author exercises authority. He calls the light day (differentiated from the night by its lightness,) and the darkness night. Then He names Adam. He teaches words to Adam, and teaches Adam to name things. Adam then names with the authority of a viceroy. The first word leads to more words, for the naming of all things starts with the Word. All language came from the Mouth of God first. He taught us to speak.

Let’s take it back a step. There is a naming before all namings. We talk about God, so we must have a word for Him. Yet, how can we name God? We are the finite, and the finite cannot climb the mountain of eternity to affix a name to the infinite. Only one Being was there when the world was made. So if God is named, and He is, then He named Himself. (Reference Anselm about the inadequacy of all ‘sun god’ contingent names.) A Name is made to be shared. We cannot speak the language of the Most High, so the Most High must call Himself a Word that we can understand.

So the Word puts on flesh. We wrap a thing in words so that it can be understood, but what words do we have for Him? By what device can we wrap our words around Him? The only way a mind of flesh can wrap itself around God is for God to wrap himself in flesh. We cannot wrap our mind around the Father, so the Son wraps Himself around us. Through Him, we are given access to the Father and to the Godhead. So the Son is the Word. He is the package of Truth that can be conveyed. He signifies God and He is God. He is the Name by which all things are named.

Adam and Eve walked with God in the garden. Hearing this growing up, I pictured two people walking in the garden with some God-like cloud nearby that spoke with a booming, thunderous voice. I think I imagined that cloud sort of following them around, hovering in its God-ness. Because, for some reason, God had to be some inaccessible Monty Python style guy in the clouds. But if the Word was in the beginning, then the Word was in the garden. Which person of the Trinity would be the most relevant to mankind? I think we make this too hard. If the Bible says that Adam and Eve were walking with God in the garden, then they were walking with Him. The Apostles walked with the Son by the shores of Galilee. I do not think it was so different in the garden. Three sets of footprints, man and God walking together with real feel. The Word gives them words to give back to Him.

There is, of course, another major linguistic-historical event in Genesis. The tower of Babel. Man was given words to exercise and share authority. When man abandons God, he retains his language faculty, and promptly sets it to work in his war against God. We never did the math. If we get what we want, we destroy ourselves. Succeeding in our rebellion, we would cut ourselves off from Him entirely. We would throw away our only chance of salvation. So He puts another set of child-locks on us. After the flood, God shortened the life span of man from a thousand to a hundred years. He limited our ability to destroy ourselves by limiting the time we had to do so. So Babel was another curse that was a blessing. Speaking the same language, we were able to coordinate logistics in our war against God. In fracturing the languages of man, God takes one extra step to limit the power of man and his concomitant ability to destroy himself.

Child-locks aren’t meant to last forever. God promises Adam and Eve that the fall will be reversed. He promises salvation, that all things torn asunder will be reunited in Him. The languages of man were torn asunder at Babel. Only in Him can they be reunited. So God gives us one true Language. One we cannot use for war against Him. He sends back to us the Word that redeems all other words.

We use the word ‘Christophony’ to describe any appearances of Jesus before His birth. Associated with that word is the concept of a ‘Pre-incarnate Christ.’ We forget that this fallen world is ‘Plan B.’ There was nothing written upon all of eternity that said we had to fall. The Word was the Word before the cross; the Son was the Son before the manger. There always was one Name by which men are reconciled to God. We just made the process bloodier. Jesus was still Jesus in the garden.

Christ. The Messiah. The One who comes to save us from our sins. The dragon-slayer of myth. But St. George was who he was before the dragon. The dragon just showed who that was. Jesus is not bound to the cross; the cross is subject to Jesus. The cross was a backdrop against which He revealed who He was, an easel, a canvas upon which He painted the picture of love. The Artist is not bound to the canvas. He is the artist before the canvas. He is simply who He is.

The Word gave us all of our words. We used those words against Him, so our words were broken. The Word came again, and gave us new words. He taught us Agape. It is a hard word to say in such a broken world. But none of us said our first words with ease, yet now we wrap ideas in words with ease. So sanctification is learning to walk. One day we will learn to wrap our thoughts with love as easily as we wrap our ideas in words. On that day, we will give all of our words back to the Word as crowns cast at His feet.

So if it looks like I blatantly plagiarized Scott Hahn, I probably did without knowing it. I guess we would both be citing the same ultimate source. And anything I say that he said, he probably said better, because he’s a real academic and uses things like grammar and spell check and logic. Whatever. Anyways, so everyone always asks ‘why would a loving God make hell?’ It is a good question, certainly. Here is my half-witted attempt to answer.

It is an old question, but really not that old. Humanity assumed that we all sucked for most of history. So the question of a bad end of all things had little to do with proving or disproving the divine. After all, the Titans were old-school crazy, and neither they nor the Olympians really cared much for people. The Earth was the trash heap of the universe. That the residents of that refuse pile should die at the whims of the gods wasn’t super surprising. Same with the Norse myths, the trolls and the giants kill everybody. Game over, ends bad. Baal and Asherah didn’t really care much for people, nor did Krishna or Shiva. That people should die because they were in a bad mood did little to undermine their credibility as objects of worship. In fact, in a certain way it enhanced their stock as gods. Most tribal religions include gods that kill people when they are displeased. After all, it is the gods’ prerogative to do whatever they want, and we get stuck dealing with it. Most of humanity over the course of history would have little problem imagining that a Supreme Being would send people, even arbitrarily, into tremendous suffering for disobeying Him. Of course, there were some fundamental assumptions that most of humanity over the course of history probably needs to revise about the divine.

We generally assumed that the gods are cruel and care little for people. But something changed. God showed up, and it turned out that not only was He not cruel, but He loved us more than we could imagine. And as more and more people kept telling us this, as more philosophers revised our assumptions of the divine, we started to believe that God actually did love us. So a thousand years go by, and we get comfortable with this. God was not some temperamental being that sat on the top of some mountain waiting to consume anyone who annoyed him with bolts of lightning. Instead, He loved us personally and cared for each of us deeply. We got used to His mercy. So used to it that we began to think that we deserved it. So a few centuries later, we have twisted our comfort with His mercy into an argument against His very existence. If God loves everyone so much, then how could He exercise the His divine prerogative to punish those who disobeyed? C.S.L. tells us in God in the Dock that for most of human history, mankind has seen themselves as on trial from the gods. One of the unique legacies of the Enlightenment is that the courtroom is reversed. We reserve the right to try God for His very existence, judging Him according to the standard of ‘if I were Him.’ Lewis expounds upon this far better than I could.

Nonetheless, it is a legitimate question, and one with a legitimate answer. So there is a tension. 1) God loves everyone. 2) God sends people to a place of eternal suffering if they reject Him. Both of these have to happen at once, and we have a hard time seeing how they can. If a person really, truly loved someone, he would not want to hurt that person if they rejected his advances, right? I mean that’s just basic decency. So if God’s so good, why can’t He behave to a standard as low as that? I mean, really.

Now, instead of our thwarted lover, let’s imagine a twenty-year old who still lives under his parents’ roof. He eats their food, drives their car, and pretty much has a decent living through little effort of his own. After all, he is not a responsible young man. On his own, he would completely destroy himself though his foolish choices. Yet, his parents save him over and over again from himself. His parents are not fools, though. As long as their son lives under their roof, he is bound by certain rules. They constrain his actions to limit the amount of destruction that he can call down upon himself and others. The parents go to the young man ever day, tell him that they love him, and ask him to love them back. Every day, he says ‘I hate all of your stupid rules. I hate you more than anything else in this world. There is nothing I would like more than to never see you again.’ They do everything they can to win his love. But his answer never changes. So one day, when all hope for change runs out, they will have to give him his wish. After all, he is a grown-up. They would love him less if they were to treat him as a child and make for him all the choices that end well. So they treat him as an adult, and they allow him a world where he will never see them again, nor anything that would remind him of them.

But the young man does not realize just what that entails. He thought he had a right to live under a roof and to eat good food just because of who he was. He did not realize that it all of those things were gifts of his parents. When he gets what he wanted, and removes all vestiges of his parents from his life, he no longer has any of the things that he enjoyed. Even worse, he no longer has any of the constraints that prevented him from destroying himself. He will bring punishment upon himself simply due to the consequences of his own choices. Justice finds him, but finds him through his own actions. And his parents will grieve, because they still love him. But what else could they do?

The fall of man changed more than we realize, I think. Humanity was designed to reflect God’s power. I believe that after the fall, He tied our hands in many ways. We became constrained. We call it the curse. But just because it is a curse, does not mean that it is hateful. Parents will ground a child to keep him from hanging out with troublemaking friends. The child is constrained in his actions, and will likely view those constraints as unpleasant. The parents do it out of love, though. So we are all grounded. Or at least we have training wheels on.

Neither grounding nor training wheels are intended to be permanent. At some point, the child is released from the grounding, and at some point, the training wheels are taken off. So what happens then? What happens when God takes the training wheels off our world?

Imagine a group of people who follow after God with all their hearts, freed of constraints. They would make heaven, if allowed to run free. Now imagine a group of people who follow themselves and their own ways with all their hearts, freed from all practical constraints. Imagine all the worst parts of the Michael Crichton book Sphere. Or the Great Divorce. We would make hell.

He doesn’t want that for us. He asks us, over and over, will you accept My love? Do you want to be with me? We say no. So He sends His law to show us how He loves us and wants to provide for us. We say no again. So He sends prophets to tell us about how much He loves us. And we say no again. So He comes Himself. He dies for us. And we say no again. And again. And again. What else can He do? Our one wish is a universe without Him, and we express this wish over and over and over again. If we will not be dissuaded, He grants us that wish. With all the things that come with it.

So we get our wish. A universe where we are unconstrained. A universe without Him. But He is the only thing that brings beauty. And He is the only thing that keeps us from tearing ourselves apart. He is the only one who stops us from making Hell. We would make it right now if it were not for His mercy. And we would all be ‘tough-minded’ and forever alone. We would all trade away everything of value for more and more nothing. He gets in our way. If we ask Him to get out of our way long enough, He just may do that. But after all He want through to stop us, how dare we blame Him for the consequences of that choice. He doesn’t make Hell. We make hell. He just lets us do it.

Even then, He is merciful. Lewis points out that God ascribes boundaries to hell. He limits how far down it goes. It is awful and terrible and worse than we can imagine. But there is a difference between unimaginably bad and infinitely bad. Even in His wrath, He is merciful. Without His boundaries, we would make Hell infinitely bad. Every day would be infinitely worse than the last. Yet He gets in our way one last time. He says ‘this far, and no farther.’ Even when we have done all that we could ever do to hurt Him, He still cares for us.

If God is infinitely good, hell is the absence of God, and God is infinitely good, how can hell not be infinitely bad? Sin has no essence, it is merely a lack. The thing about having something is that you can have more and more of it forever. You can not have more and more a lack of something forever. You will hit the point of totally lacking that thing, and then there will be no farther down you can go. This is the way God made our universe, weaving mercy into the very laws of mathematics. Consider temperature. Heat is movement, cold is a lack of movement. You can keep getting hotter forever, but once you hit absolute zero, you can’t get any colder. Hell is the same way. You can diver further and deeper into God forever, but you can only lose so much of Him until there is none left. This is the worst universe possible, but it is still constrained. This is the world we would make. We would hit rock bottom. Yet, God is still kind in creating a universe with a bottom to hit.

We have been asking the wrong question. Our baselines were all wrong. We think we are entitled to this universe, with all of its joy and beauty mixed with pain and suffering. We gave that mortgage away a long time ago. What we would inherit on our own is a horrific universe. We get angry at God for allowing hell to happen at some point in the future. We forget the constant miracle that it hasn’t happened yet. It is His hand that stays it. Our hands would make it. We have Him to thank, not to blame.

So I’m talking to a friend during the latest meeting of the ‘Three Mile Dissertation Club.’ For all you non-members out there, basically it’s a bunch of guys from work who spend our mandatory physical training run talking about all sorts of arcane theories, from philosophy to engineering to theology. I know it’s not as witty a name as ‘the Inklings,’ but we’re not as smart as they were. They got paid to be professors. I get paid to drive airplanes. So sue me. I would pay money, though, to have seen Tolkien and Lewis talking about Middle Earth while trying to run. I bet we’re faster. Anyways, so the topic of the day was Theology. The question comes up ‘can the devil be saved?’ Which is, after all, a pretty interesting question. Why is redemption applied to only one order of creation? To the golf course sign and back… ready, set, go.

Problem number one: anthropomorphism. Before we can even meaningfully approach this question, we have to construct a platform from which to ask the question. Maybe they’re not the same as we are. In order to work forward, we’ll have to look backwards and unravel some of our species’ inherent assumptions about the universe. Guess what? You and I and pretty much everyone reading this are terminally human. So we get to argue by analogy. Good times.

Big deal difference number one: progression of time. Human beings generally experience time as a sequence ordered by set astronomical (hence agricultural) cycles. Our metronome is tied to the physical. The earth rotates on its axis in a physically constant period of time, and many of those periods can be ordered into a new period where the earth revolves around the sun in another physically constant period of time. The relationship between the number of rotations in a revolution remains constant, so there is a hierarchy of ordering. A thing happens during a rotation, in a certain revolution. That thing is now meaningfully located inside our frame of reference. In physical time, that thing now has an address.

Human beings are physical beings. It is fitting that our metronome would be grounded in the physical. Biologically, we need to eat and drink and engage in less pleasant activities a certain number of times per day in order to sustain our flesh. Therefore, we allocate different portions of the rotation to the individual daily needs (already briefed,) and different portions of the revolution to the long term sustainability of the cycle (planting, harvesting, being cold and miserable.) A system of ordering involves both hierarchies and positions. Our positions are set by rotation and revolution of the earth. Our hierarchy uses rotations to subdivide revolutions. By numbering both, we can fix a location.

Spirits are not physical beings. So it stands to reason that their metronome would be different. Perhaps events. Perhaps logical necessities. Perhaps something metaphysical. If metaphysical events are the constant, time looks very different. Thing are assigned locations by their positions within the working out of metaphysical imperatives. Surely, they adapt to their battlefield and manifest in human (physical) time. But I do not think it is their native ordering. Strangely, even for us the passage of time bleeds around the edges between metaphysical and physical orderings of things. There are days that take lifetimes. But we live at the intersection of the metaphysical and the physical. We should be about to feel and interact in metaphysical time, at least to some degree. This may be that sense that God is at work in something. Like a plant on the banks of a river, we are firmly rooted to the soil, but we have a sense of the movement of the stream. But the natural environment of the angels is the river itself. They can step onto the shore, and manifest themselves in physical time, but it is something they put on, not something they are. Therefore, they will experience the effects of time far differently than we will. Hence…

Big deal difference numero dos: Growth. Physical time seems to deliberately have empty space built into it. As if the rotations and the revolutions force time apart, prying apart events to make room for quiet. This has something to do with what we are. We need the empty space as much as we need the events themselves. In that space, we reflect, and we change. We grow. The very ordering of physical time seems to imply growth. Not just a logical unfolding of a mathematical equation, but a drama where the characters are changed by playing their roles.

We are unique in this regard. We were built with the capacity to become something more and more completely over time, to grow into bigger and bigger shoes. Which is appropriate, given Whose shoes we are supposed to fill. With infinite time, we can infinitely pursue God, becoming more and more like Him, yet always still have an infinite distance to go before we catch Him. And this is why we are the viceroys, and not the angels.

Angels are more crystalline. They are created the way they are. So even if they are created initially with much more glory, they do not grow like we do. Hence, they can not be made in His image the way that we are; if God were to create them to be like Him, they would be like Him since eternity, and like Him in His completeness. This is impossible, for there can be only one ‘I AM.’ So if God is going to recreate Himself, He must give that recreation the capacity to grow and the room to grow. Our grounding in the physical gives us the capacity to grow. Physical time gives us room to grow. Our capacity to infinitely approximate but never quite reach the Most High is our crown as kings and queens, and it is intimately wrapped in our physical existence.

This leads us to an interesting aside: the garden. We all remember the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. I think I’ve heard it implied that it was put there solely as a test. In a certain sense, this is true. Like in Perelandra, such a thing allows us to move outside of our own will. Still, it seems inconsistent that a God who makes all good and perfect gifts would make a Pandora’s Box just to tempt us. There has to be a better answer. Let’s look to growth. A six year old is very different from a sixteen year old. Imagine that the six year old finds his parents car keys. The parents will tell him ‘no’ if he tries to start the car. They don’t need to explain why. It is not that the keys are bad, it is just that the child is not ready for them. When the child is sixteen, he is ready to learn how to drive, and the ‘no’ becomes a ‘yes, and let me teach you how.’ But if the six year old does not listen to the ‘no,’ he will crash the car and hurt himself. The car, intended for joy, becomes a cause of suffering when the child takes it without permission. So it was, I think, with the tree.

Anyways, so we grow. Angels don’t grow, or at least they don’t grow the way we do. They are what they are. Their capacity to change is limited, compared to ours. We incorporate new information over time, and hence we grow. But we are not some cold, iterated dialectic resolving itself. We are not all electricity, but flesh and blood as well. And flesh changes much quicker than minds do. Which brings us to…

Big difference number threve: Emotions. They change a lot. And they are very tied to the physical. Moods come and go, and are affected by the weather, by things we ate, and by biological cycles. They change how we look at things. Our emotions interface with reason in harmony or dissonance. As they play off each other, they shape both. Ideally, emotions provide us the fire to propel us on our journey, the fuel to move the engine of reason. After the fall, they may try to tear that engine apart when unchecked. They are the motive force behind growth. Reason cannot be moved in the same way that the heart can. In order to change reason, you either need new information, or you need to have your errors explained. If neither of these things happen, you will make the same difference over and over again as long as you remain the same person. And here we see our answer begin to take shape.

Imagine we made a decision once. What could happen to change that decision? For starters, our emotional frame of reference could change. That won’t happen for a purely rational being. We could learn something new, and that could change our mind. Which wouldn’t ever happen to a being who already sees clearly. We could grow into a different person, who would make a different decision given the same set of data. Which would never happen for a being who was created complete. All the things that can make us change our mind would never change the mind of an angel. They would make the same decision over and over and over again. So it would not really matter much if they could come back or not. They would not change their mind even if they were invited back to heaven. The decision they made once is the decision they would make always. Hence, fallen angels cannot be redeemed the same way fallen men can.

It is not that the door to heaven is necessarily locked to them, although it may well be. It is their own natures that bar them from reconciliation. Imagine a malformed lump of clay. It will never be able to reform itself into something beautiful, but it can be reformed by a master’s hand. Now imagine a piece of glass, shattered on the ground. The glass must be swept up and thrown away, for it cannot be reformed. The steel in the angelic nature that makes them such effective servants also bars them from redemption. And this is why it is such a grave offense for man to harden his heart. If we become brittle, we become like the broken glass. In Lewis’ words, we become impenetrable and unredeemable.

Which leads is to a far more important question than the mere academic concern over the redemption of angels. There has to be a motive to the angelic fall. Or at least a cause. We generally chalk it up to thinking the enemy thinking he could take the Throne. But I think this is wishful thinking. I don’t think we really grasp the depths of the fall. So we must ask ourselves, if our enemy saw things clearly, why would he go after the throne? He must have known he would lose. I mean, even us foolish humans can see that there was never any no hope for that at all. Even with all the wishful thinking in the universe, that plan is doomed to failure. So it must have been something else.

Satan becomes a slave to pride. Pride causes him to start taking good things and placing them in incorrect order. He is a good thing, a beautiful angel of light. Until he places the good thing of himself above the higher good of God. And this leads to war. Satan wants to hurt God. He can run the numbers. God is God. The Throne is untouchable. There is nothing he can do to take away from Him. So the only thing he can do is hurt someone whom God loves. And the target closest at hand is himself. God loves Lucifer. Lucifer hates God. Therefore, the best way for Lucifer to hurt God is to hurt himself. This is the mind of the enemy. This is nihilism. Death just for death, destruction with no end but itself. This should terrify us. But it should not be unfamiliar to us.

I’ve heard it said that the creed of a truly honest atheist goes something like this: ‘There is no God (and I hate Him.)’ In my experience, most atheists have been angry with God on some deep level. One girl I knew blamed God for the death of a friend, and decided that a God that would let her friend die was no God at all. She went to war with Him, because He took from her something that she cared about. Denying relationship was her way to get back at Him. She was right. This is the only weapon in a Divine rebellion. But it is a horrible one. This is the ultimate irony. To try to place yourself above God is to fight a war where your only effective tactic is that of the Kamikaze. You must destroy yourself in order to win, which will ensure that you lose. Find your life and you will lose it.

Of course, there is a complimentary and much better irony. Lose your life and you will find it. But it means that you have to surrender your unwinnable war. And this is our privilege as members of the human race. We can change our minds. We feel. We learn. We grow. Through the blood of Christ, we can change the worst choice we ever made into the best choice we ever made. May we take advantage of that opportunity.

So I’m going to Urbana this year. It should be awesome, and a great chance to catch up with some friends scattered to the four winds. And a good place to think about and refine my evil missionary conspiracy. However, I figured I should probably clarify to myself some ground rules regarding my in-progress story. Here goes.

1) I am assuming that C. will not be there.

2) I am going to act accordingly, neither attending nor avoiding anything because of her.

3) God will give me sufficient grace to deal with anything I encounter, good or bad, if rule one does not hold true. I will trust Him.

4) Whatever happens, it happens according to His plan. I will let it unfold in His time.

Rules three and four are generally applicable, I think. I’ll have to keep them in mind even after the conference.

Jesus says that many will say ’Lord, Lord,’ and He will say ‘I never knew you.’ I think I had always taken that as more or less a theoretical consideration. I guess I never thought about how that played out. I don’t think I ever wanted to.

So a friend of a friend was caught in the middle of a pretty crazy situation a while back. Let’s call that friend J. J. is caught in the middle of a war zone, and tries to find her way out of a country that was coming apart around her. I have told this story before. Last time I told it, it was with a degree of annoyance about her attacks on my friends. That is gone in this retelling, replaced by a bone-chilling fear and a sincere desire to be wrong. One of my friends, reading the things J. wrote, commented on the tremendous rage that she had for Israel. I think I excused it, citing the whole ‘Israeli bombs falling around her’ thing and her histrionic tendencies. But it was so blind, so unthinking, that I wonder if there hadn’t been a darker note to that broken chord. I wonder if my friend was not right in thinking that J.‘s hatred was out of place for a Christian even given the circumstances. I’m not so sure I should have discarded my friend’s observation so lightly. I should have listened closer. There was one thing I should have heard, one thing I could not hear because it was silent. Looking back it seems very loud: She had no sense of God in the crisis whatsoever. Neither pleas for help, nor submission to His will, nor the rage of a lover spurned. Nothing at all. And this scares me more than I could have imagined.

My friend L. survived a helicopter crash a few years back. In the months before that flight, he had been on a spiritual plateau in his walk with God. He tells me that in the moments before the chopper hit the ground, he prayed ‘Lord, your will be done.’ Looking back, he finds it strange how much serenity he found in that moment. He expected to come to in His arms. God did not call him home that day. In that moment when all the layers were stripped away, Jesus was still there. With what L. thought was his last sentence, his first thought was to spend it in conversation with God. And a good conversation it was.

This is, of course, not the only possible conversation with God that one could have in those circumstances. I think of the deal-making prayers. ‘Save me from this, and I’ll give You whatever You ask.’ The Jean Valjean prayers, praying in earnest for delivery, pledging allegiance to Him in return. Or the less pious foxhole prayers, where the man under fire barters with God for his life. ‘I’ll straighten up and fly right, really I will, if you bring me through this.’ After God upholds His part of the bargain, the terms of the barter generally get re-negotiated. Regardless, the first instinct of the foxhole saint is to look to God. When he needs deliverance, something deep in his heart tells him where to go. When all the layers are stripped away, some sense of God still lives in that man’s heart of hearts. Even if his Divine conversation was not as enlightened, it was still a conversation.

There are even less positive conversations. Ones where accusations and lamps are thrown. I think of C.S.L.’s ‘A Grief Observed.’ When his life wife dies, he throws at God all the things that we think in our heart of hearts and never bring ourselves to say because of our religiosity. But all of Lewis’ layers are stripped away, and with it his religiosity. But Jesus is still there in his heart of hearts. So Lewis’ first instinct is toward Him, even if it is with the rage of a lover betrayed. He feels as if his Lover asked him to trust, only to break his heart. He fights with the resurgent rage of the atheist, once so well acquainted to him: ‘There is no God, and I hate Him.’ But at least he’s talking. A shouting match may not be the happiest of conversations, but it still is a conversation. And afterwards, the lovers often find themselves reconciled. Lewis did.

These men, whether in love or rage, still turned to God in their moments of deepest honesty. Lewis tells it well: a man at war with God is far closer to salvation that one indifferent. Christ tells is better, by way of John: ‘be hot or cold, or be spit out.’ J’s silence was deafening. In that hour when everything was stripped away, there was no thought about Him one way or another. It seemed like Jesus was left behind in one of the layers stripped off by the crisis. In her heart of hearts, it seemed there was no conversation with Him at all. As if He had never been there to start with. After the crisis, I think that she likely clothed herself in her discarded layers once again, and accordingly relearned how to express thoughts in Christian-ese. And this is exactly what scares me.

You see, by the numbers, J. is a good Christian. She has a good Christian resume, attending all the right campus Bible studies, going to the right churches. She has good Christian friends, who get along with her well, and she converses well with them in fluent Christian-ese. She has an excellent working knowledge of Christianity. She would be an excellent candidate for Christian leadership. And this is what scares the crap out of me: She may not know Him. When all of her coverings were stripped away, He was not there. There was an image of Him carried in those coverings, but He was not there in her heart of hearts. Here is what terrifies me: By the books, she should know Him. I would have assumed that she did, without question. I would not have witnessed to her, because I would have assumed she didn’t need me to. But I could have been wrong not to. She may have been the dying doctor surrounded by cures, and I would have never known on this side of eternity.

When that thought hit me, I forgot everything I had felt toward her. Compassion washed over me in a wave, but brought with it a cold, queasy feeling in the pit of my stomach. I just started praying. I prayed that if she does know Him, that she would grow in Him and that the experience would bring her closer to Him. I prayed that if she does not, that she would come to know Him in Spirit and in Truth. I prayed that God would reach this woman’s heart, whether or not she knows Him. I really don’t know. But it terrifies me. The prospect of a girl who I would have completely assumed I would see on the other side of eternity not going absolutely chills me. Because if it is true of her, then it is true of others. Of more people who are my friends, people I may even be at Bible studies with, or other people whose ticket to Heaven I assume is paid in full. I wonder how many of us, when all the layers are stripped from our hearts, would find that our relationship with God was only found in those external layers, not in our heart of hearts. This is not a happy thought, but I can find little in Scripture to banish it. I don’t want it to be true. So, at least in this one case, I pray that I am wrong. And if I was right, I pray that I would be made wrong retroactively by her finding Him even now.

The symphony never repeats, but you sometimes do hear the same themes again. Praise God when notes that once made a broken chord make a complete one, even if that chord is still in a minor key. More to follow.

'Step one you say we need to talk
He walks you say sit down it's just a talk
He smiles politely back at you
You stare politely right on through
Some sort of window to your right
As he goes left and you stay right
Between the lines of fear and blame
And you begin to wonder why you came

Where did I go wrong, I lost a friend
Somewhere along in the bitterness
And I would have stayed up with you all night
Had I known how to save a life

Let him know that you know best
Cause after all you do know best
Try to slip past his defense
Without granting innocence
Lay down a list of what is wrong
The things you've told him all along
And pray to God he hears you
And pray to God he hears you

Where did I go wrong, I lost a friend
Somewhere along in the bitterness
And I would have stayed up with you all night
Had I known how to save a life

As he begins to raise his voice
You lower yours and grant him one last choice
Drive until you lose the road
Or break with the ones you've followed
He will do one of two things
He will admit to everything
Or he'll say he's just not the same
And you'll begin to wonder why you came

Where did I go wrong, I lost a friend
Somewhere along in the bitterness
And I would have stayed up with you all night
Had I known how to save a life.'
- How to Save a Life, The Fray.

I’ve always had a hard time with trust. Let me revise that. I’ve always had a hard time with anything other than absolute trust or complete distrust. One hundred percent or not at all. It is not that I didn’t trust. Much to the contrary, I think that my trust was often given away far too easily. But it was never given in shades. I assumed someone to be absolutely trustworthy almost automatically, and I trusted them as such. When that trust failed, I would feel tremendously betrayed. The absolute trust would turn into complete distrust. Not forever, usually. With little or no real reconciliation, I would find myself completely trusting that person again. Repeat cycle. Over and over. Like a driver that only knows full acceleration and hard braking (or a pilot who uses full deflection control movements only,) I still made the journey from point A to point B, but only after all loose articles came dislodged and all nerves became frayed. I think I called it loyalty. I do not think this was ever good.

The hardest thing for me was when someone deserved trust by the numbers. When a parent, an authority figure, or a pastor failed me, the sting was the sharpest. By virtue of their role, they were supposed to act in a certain way. I trusted them to do so. When they fell short, it felt as if they deliberately betrayed me. At the Academy, I remember when a chaplain had stepped out of the way out of a bureaucratic steamroller, sacrificing a cadet Christian leadership group on the altar of his career. I was on the receiving end of that steamroller. Thus began one of the hardest years of my life. I had the hardest time wrapping my head around the fact that a man who wears a cross on his uniform could care so little about it. I expected a Jesus and found a Judas. So I must ask myself where the fault lies. I wanted it to be his fault for being a Judas. But I question whether it wasn’t my fault for expecting a Jesus.

The scriptures tell us to guard our hearts. Jesus never tells us to abandon discernment. Even in His relationship with us, He invites us to ‘taste and see.’ Paul commends the church in Thessalonica for checking His counsel against scripture. Discernment allows us to guard our hearts and still trust others. We are told not to throw our pearls to swine; we are told to discern in our trusting. If we decide to cast away our pearls regardless, we rob the people the pearls were meant for. Discernment tells us which is which. My deepest wounds have been from Christians. I guess I had assumed that it was safe to leave my defenses down when I was with family. I forgot that people called by His name are still people. Are still fallen. Like me. Here’s the rub. I had never asked whether I was myself worthy of absolute trust. I mean, you can’t really demand of someone else something that you aren’t capable of yourself. All blessings come with responsibilities. If one is unwilling or incapable of taking that responsibility, the blessing becomes a burden. By trusting someone absolutely, I am asking them to carry that trust. Absolute trust demands absolute perfection, and I only know One man who can bear that expectation. And He’s not me.

It would be easier at this point to split the question into two: one of intention and one of capability. It would be nicer to say that there are good people and bad people, but sometimes the good ones let you down. You may have the most kind-hearted five year old in the world, but you are a fool if you trust him with your life. He can’t handle his own, much less yours. I’m not sure, though, that we can exonerate ourselves simply on the claim of ‘good intentions.’ Very few people are, umm, tough-minded enough to really consider what they are doing as evil while they are in the process of doing it. We generally find some way to justify our actions to ourselves. Some things we may not yet be aware are wrong; we are all in different places. Accordingly, the distinction between intention and capability really is more a function of perspective, one that shows up in shades. As should our trust.

God has been challenging my assumptions on trust in a rather unique way. I’d like to provide you a window on my learning process. Here are two stories, prefaced with a personal note. The characters in these stories are people I respect, and two of them I know personally and care about deeply. I write with candor, but I pray not with unkindness. And if you know me, I hope you can’t tell who these people are.

Paul writes that an Church Elder should not be a new believer, as they are liable to fall victim to pride. I think a function of pride, or a symptom perhaps, is a need to control things. I think I finally understand why. My friend H. was heavily involved in campus ministry, occupying several Christian leadership posts. He is also a new believer, having accepted Christ three years ago. Thirty when he got saved, he read the Bible and Christian classics with a vengeance. He admirably seemed to want to make up for lost time, catching up in spiritual age to his physical and emotional age. He was still in his honeymoon with Jesus. The newly married couple is committed and fully in love. They may even know a lot about each other. But it isn’t till they have had a few real fights and learn how to reconcile them that they approach maturity together. Salvation takes time to permeate through one’s heart. It seems to spread, drawing in more and more parts of one’s life. But that spreading is not instantaneous, and you can’t rush it. There is nothing more dangerous than the Christian who paints whitewash over his heart, instead of letting the Spirit wash it from the inside. And this is the temptation for the new believer who finds themselves in leadership.

We expect Christian leaders to have all the answers. We expect them to have it all figured out. (Here we see our all or nothing again.) There is not room for them to have the fights with God that a young believer needs to weather. So the easy out is the whitewash. Paint everything in Christian-ese and throw Bible verses on top of whatever views you already had. Which is where the danger comes in. Plates in the Earth move against each other all the time. When they catch on an edge of rock, the tension starts to build, and build, until it lets go all at once in an earthquake.

So I think to the director of campus ministries for the university, and what the decision must have been like to bring H. on staff. Another laborer to work the fields. Good, and sorely needed. And he has done good, to be sure. But there is danger in this. I worry that perhaps the consequences of that choice will be harmful in the long run. I hope not. H. is my friend. But I would rather have him fall more in love with Jesus than to have him do all sorts of good things for Jesus. Spiritual maturity allows both of those to happen at once.

Recently, I was praying about getting involved in campus ministry again. I noticed a prayer request for help at a local campus with the same group, so I pray about it. It feels like a God thing, so I email H. He sends back the contact info for helping, but in the same email he tells me that I should probably focus my efforts elsewhere, that they wouldn’t need me. I email the local director anyways, and we get coffee two weeks later. He tells me that he had been praying for some volunteers about a week before I emailed him. It still feels like a God thing.

The point is not so much the sequence of events. I had learned. There was a time when I would have been hurt by H.’s discouragement. But I had learned not to trust him absolutely, but instead in accordance with his capacity to bear it. To steal Switchfoot’s words, he is a crooked soul trying to stand up straight. As am I. So I trusted accordingly, set my expectations and acted in accordance with that trust. I maintained the relationship and the terms. This may seem cold, but here is the other option. I trust her absolutely, he fails to deserve absolute trust, I feel betrayed and trust her not at all. I know that story from experience. I like the new story better.

Which brings us to our second episode. I have been reading a good deal about missions work recently. I ran across a Christian thinker who cared deeply about the indigenous missionary movement. Initially, I start reading his books and agreeing 100%. We do too much Jesus Camp instead of spreading the gospel. Certainly. We spend too much time and money on things that are not the Great Commission. Definitely. We need to rethink our methods. Yes. There is no place for Western Missionaries anymore. Hmm. His words start to sting a bit. I feel challenged, keep going with it. But some of the chords start sounding sour. Certain things don’t jive with my experience, some of his facts just don’t check. There is an undercurrent of something broken in his words. So I want to disagree completely, call him misguided and not listen anymore. This is a familiar story, even though it is outside the context of personal relationship. I pray for discernment.

I find it. The broken chords come apart, the sour notes isolated. First of three: the zeal of a man called. The man who sees the world through the eyes of a vision, but one who cannot understand how that vision looks in the eyes of the world. And he is called, I believe. The problem is that vision is so clear to him that he feels as if it should be clear to anyone following hard after God. So if they can’t see, it’s their lack of faith, or it’s sin. I am quite familiar with this failing, it is one of mine. So when people ask him legitimate questions, about accountability and the like, he responds poorly. Second of three: A man who feels strong resentment toward colonialism. And rightfully so. I was on the missions field, I saw it. But there is still anger there, and it still does hamper his work. You can hear it when he says things like ‘I will not yield the term missionary to them,’ and then he proceeds to define it in terms that exclude the people who he feels are excluding him. Third of three: A man who does not understand that church politics, though loathsome, are not personal. There is a lot of ‘not invented here’ syndrome in all churches, not just western ones. Believe me, as much as I like the Ukrainian Baptists, their church bureaucracy is slower than any other organization I have ever seen in accepting change. A man advocating radical change in church thinking should expect to run into resistance, especially when he uses the tack ‘what you have been doing is a waste of time and money.’ Nobody likes to hear that. This is simply a function of people. In reality, it wasn’t that everyone was against him, or that they were prejudiced, but just that there was a lot of stupidity and he was advocating for change. His insecurities in this regard also undermine his work. But insecurity, impatience and resentment are common flaws, ones I share. None of them are a reason to reject out of hand a man with a vision. But all of them are reasons to take that vision with a grain of salt.

This dear brother matures a bit in his second book. Praise God for the things he is doing. I hold him in high regard. But not absolute regard. He’s not Jesus. And once I got that straight, I could hear what he was saying without the inevitable cycles of expectation and disappointment. Judging from the recent well handled New Life Church controversy, I’d like to believe we have all grown up in this regard from the days of the Swaggerts. Praise God for that.

These are the stories. My conclusion sounds cold, I know. It sounds as if it is a reluctance to trust. But it is not at all. It is not just about pearls and pigs. It is about sustainable relationships between broken and fallen people. I am not deserving of the absolute trust of another. I do not know what dark closets there still are in my heart. Even with all of me I do know, I am far from perfect. I will fail you. I cannot bear the weight of anyone’s absolute trust. I am sure to disappoint, if anyone expects perfection from me. I am not perfect. Likewise, it would not even be fair for me to expect another to bear the weight of my absolute trust. We trust as much as we can, and a little more, as God teaches us to love more. Intention and capability come together to form trustworthiness. As He fixes the brokenness that makes us untrustworthy, we can trust more. So this is the best answer for a fallen world. May God reconcile two broken and fallen people to each other as He reconciles us to Him, for only He deserves absolute trust. Nor is this borne out of a fear of pain. There is a difference between trust and love. Both can get you hurt, certainly. But spend your pain well. Don’t just throw it away.

So this brings me back to the present story. C. By the numbers, she looks absolutely trustworthy. And I think this was one of the hardest things for me. When I told my good friend R. that I was praying for her again, he told me ‘I don’t trust her.’ I remember that now. I also remember arguing with a friend of mine over whether girls were worthy of respect at all. His argument was they were not, as most girls would like you in inverse proportion to the respect you showed them. I cited C. as my counter-argument, telling him that still, despite everything, I would have put my life in her hands. She proved me wrong. I should never trusted her to that degree. It was a trust she was not capable of bearing. In the strangest of ways, I burdened her with my trust. I would have loved her more by trusting her less. It is a lesson I have learned from. I do not trust her. I love her still. I told R. one thing right, at least. ‘I’m not trusting her. I’m trusting God.’ This is still true. Perhaps trust can still be built. This time, it’ll be built in shades.

Reading an old book yesterday, I run across a story of a young Jewish street preacher talking to a tax collector. ‘They said He was an outlaw,’ for those of you old enough to remember Larry Norman (which is not me, I heard the remix.) The Preacher invites the tax collector to dinner. At that dinner the tax collector turns away from his corrupt ways, giving half of his money to the poor and offering to repay all the people he has cheated. Thus, Zaccheus goes from lost to found.

A cardinal rule of sociology is verstehen, the idea that actions must be considered in their context. To take the act out of its environment is to lose much of its meaning. Hermeneutics is another big word that people pay a lot of money to learn. It basically means ’a method of reading and understanding a text.’ It shares with verstehen the concept of context. You can’t get all of what Jesus was saying just by running a BabelFish translation and cutting and pasting His words into 21st century suburban America. Really, it’s not so cosmic a concept. Imagine a man doing some home repair in the privacy of his garage. He misses with a hammer, and smashes his thumb with a hammer, resulting in a loud expletive. Now imagine the same man in the middle of a crowded coffee shop, shouting out the same word at the same volume after spilling hot coffee on himself. The very same act means something very different when the context is changed.

So to the story of the Tax Collector. Nobody likes a taxman. Especially not a corrupt one. And this is what we see when we hear this story without context. Through the lens of American suburbia, Zaccheus is something like Boss Hog from the Dukes of Hazzard. Unpleasant guy, always taking things that aren’t his, but we something of a comic character, especially given his diminutive stature. The kind of guy that would have oboes and goofy music as their theme on a movie’s soundtrack. Now let’s think about the real context. Go back to your idea of Boss Hog, but put him as a character in the atrocious film Red Dawn. (Attacking through Texas, come on. There’s enough shotguns and pickup trucks to stop an armored division. Assault weapons ban, whatever.) Imagine that he is a former citizen of the town who pledged his allegiance to the Russians. Now imagine that the Russians arbitrarily execute whoever they feel like whenever they think the town is getting uppity. And imagine that the Russians want to extract as much wealth as they can from the town, so they hire people like Boss Hog to do their extracting, and whatever he wants to take out on top is up to him. If you don’t like it, you get sent to a KGB prison. Maybe instead of any flavor of Boss Hog, think the Tory from the Patriot who burns his own people to the ground. Minus any sense of loyalty, duty, or honor. Puts it in somewhat of a different light, doesn’t it. Maybe instead of oboes and goofy music, the soundtrack shifts to the Imperial Death March.

Sell-out. Turncoat. Traitor. This is the tax collector in context. The villain in any Disney film, the coward who transforms into a bully when he finds a way to wield power over others. Even if he has to betray all loyalties to country, family and neighbor to do so. Even if he has to become an agent of Rome the oppressor. People like to level the charge ‘oppressor’ pretty freely these days. Rome legitimately was one. Not because they said mean things once in a while. Not because there was a glass ceiling, or systemic racism. Not because they didn’t tiptoe around a given, arbitrary set of rules labeled ‘politically correct.’ Rome was oppressive, using any definition. They sucked. They established their rule under the deadly force of the Legions, and anyone who resisted that rule were executed in the most cruel and brutal ways imaginable. Unless you were a Roman citizen, you lived and died at the whims of the Emperor. They took what they wanted, did what they wanted, and if you did anything at all to fight back, you found out exactly how oppressive they could be. They established governors to keep people in line, not to represent the people’s interest. Unless they were Roman people, of course. These governors commanded battalions of troops and a bureaucratic civil apparatus to maintain control. One element of this apparatus was the tax collector. Therefore, the tax collector is a breathing symbol of Rome, of political oppression, and of imperialism.

Back to Zaccheus. If there ever was a platform for Christ to confront the evils of imperialism, it was his confrontation with the tax collector. If ever there was a sermon to be preached on public morality, or on the evils of political oppression, or on the imposition of control over the will of the people, it was then.
Yet there was no such sermon. Jesus doesn’t lecture him on the evils of Rome. There are no lectures on the correct amount of tariffs, nor how Roman hegemony is the physical manifestation of the powers and principalities. I am sure that the God who established governments could have established a pretty good constitution or could have led a pretty successful workers’ revolution. He did neither. When He was confronted with Zaccheus, the breathing symbol of all that was evil about Rome, all He saw was a broken man in need of a Savior.

I find it interesting that Jesus didn’t tell him to quit collecting taxes. Much like the soldiers who asked John the Baptist if they should resign their posts, Zaccheus was answered simply, being told to be content with his wages. I find this especially interesting, given that Christ had little problem telling prostitutes that they needed to change their lines of work. He does not tell this to either soldiers or tax collectors. Zaccheus was the agent of an imperialistic, oppressive government. Yet, Christ turns Him into His agent in that same imperialistic, oppressive government.

We still have a ‘first things’ problem. We see political oppression and injustice as the disease. They are symptoms. We are faced with a man with cancer and we are trying to his halitosis. There is no way that a Jewish carpenter growing up in Roman-occupied Judea would not notice political injustice and oppression. Certainly the zealots around Him did. But yet, He hardly addresses it at all. He seems to go out of His way to avoid the issue. It is almost as if He expects political oppression to exist as a derivative function of a much graver oppression. As if He views that graver oppression as the real problem to be fixed. As if He thinks the war is against powers and principalities and the forces of this present darkness. I do not believe that Jesus did not notice the injustice of Rome. I believe He saw it as collateral damage from the real war, and that the way to undo that damage was to win that real war.

I believe with all my heart that God calls men and women to impact their culture for Him. Many abolitionists were driven by their faith in Christ to pursue social justice. Dr. King’s fight for civil rights drew heavily upon his faith in God to see him through. A large number of Pro-Lifers today see Christ as the center of their activism. Certainly we should be salt and light, but there is a danger in confusing the Great Commission with things that are not spreading the Gospel. It is a good thing to fight for the powerless, to confront the wrongs around you, or even to pour your time into humanitarian work. But none of these are the Great Commission. There is a temptation to use these things as a substitute for our real duty: ‘go in to all the world and make disciples.’ Here we see the seduction of the Social Gospel: it provides us a ‘conscientious objector’ clause to the Great Commission. It allows us to skip much of the discomfort and much of the persecution of the call. It is far easier to joust with invisible dragons at dinner parties than it is to tell those friends about Christ. But it will not yield the same result. The pen may be mightier than the sword, but the Spirit is mightier than both. Lose your life and you will find it. Know Christ and make Him known, and you will find the change you seek. The more people that become future citizens of New Jerusalem, the more our current world will look like New Jerusalem.

Give to Caesar. This is how Christ answers those who sought to draw Him into a political discussion. This should be our answer, as well. If you are a public servant, perform your duties well as unto Him. If you are a soldier, perform your duties well as unto Him. If you are a tax collector, perform your duties well as unto Him. If you are a citizen, perform your duties well as unto Him. We are called to serve Him where we are placed, not to talk about how we would change things if we were in charge of the political and economic structures. (Of course, if we are called to think about those structures, enact change in those structures, or reform those structures, then we should do those things just as well as unto Him.) He had more important things to do than to patch holes in a sinking ship. As do we.

I remember reading Francis Fukuyama’s End of History article a few years back. That was back when some people believed it. Even at that time, I felt like there was something suspicious about it. Perhaps such a sweeping statement about history would have carried more weight if there were some actual history behind it. Even so, there was something more to sour chord I heard than a mere lack of evidence. I guess I am always somewhat suspicious to anyone claiming an impending end to history. There is a certain irony in the parallels between the predictions of scholars and the prognostications of ranting street preachers. Honestly, I don’t really trust either.

So in 1995 or so, it was the End of History. Revision number thirteen or so. Totally unlike the End of History that was supposed to come from Alexander the Great, with Alexandrias springing up all over the place as all cultures enlightened themselves with Greek wisdom. And unlike the End of History that was supposed to come from the Pax Romana, where roads and civilization connected all people until they became one people. Or the abortive one that Napoleon foresaw, with the monarchies of the world giving way to the inevitable future. Or the inevitability of early 20th century globalization, which collided unpleasantly with the inevitability of the Great Depression and the inevitability of the First World War. Or the inevitable triumph of the ‘genetically superior’ fascists over all ‘lesser races,’ (quotes indicating that I’m being sarcastic, which should be totally obvious) and the 99.4% shorter than advertised thousand year Reich ‘End of History.’ Or the inevitable progress of dialectical materialism and the red-flagged ‘End of History,’ whose vanguard party showed itself quite adept at adapting the worst parts of capitalism in the collapse of the Workers’ Paradise. So call me crazy, but I’m a bit cynical of the ‘Democracy uber alles’ hypothesis. But it is not the inaccuracy of the claim that concerns me, rather the fact the claim was made at all.

Looking back at the ‘End of History’ roll, I have a hard time considering that list a recounting of heroes. Something about the ‘world-conquering ideology’ thing seems to draw out the worst in people. To the best of my knowledge, this is a new viewpoint for America. The United States has always (at least ostensibly) seen the spreading of democracy as in its national interest. Yet even the founding fathers did not see it as a world-conquering ideology. Jefferson was cynical as to whether it would even hold on here, much less spread. We always saw it as a tenuous experiment, not a historical inevitability.

Where did this idea of historical inevitability start? Gut instinct tells me to look to St. Augustine. After all, he was the one who revised historiography from a ever-repeating cycle into a path that leads somewhere. But it was the City of God that went somewhere, not the City of Man. Next guess is the Enlightenment. Progress is great. Progress will take us somewhere. Where exactly that is never quite gets answered. That is, never gets answered until Nietzsche. We are progressing toward perfection, toward invulnerability, toward godhood. It is inevitable. We make god, we use god, we outgrow god, we kill god, we replace god, we become god. One problem, though. There’s not really enough room for ‘we’ at the end of that inevitable progression. There might be just enough space for an ‘I.‘ Which, of course, makes nihilism not quite the most populist of philosophies. Like Everclear, the Will to Power is a spirit too intense for all but a few.

That is, until you mix it with something else. If you turn it into a cocktail, you open it up for mass consumption. And that is when it becomes dangerous. Kind of like Ridley Scott’s Alien, it implants itself in a host and shortly thereafter bursts out a monster. So nihilism finds economics by way of Marx.
Pretty soon, we have Communism, the idea that it is the inevitable destiny of the workers to rule. Next, nihilism finds science and implants itself by way of eugenics. Out pops fascism, the idea that it is the inevitable destiny of the genetically superior to rule. Conveniently, the founders of this philosophy discover that they themselves are that ‘master race.’ In the latest incarnation, nihilism grabs religion by way of Wahab and becomes Islamism. The inevitable destiny of Islam to rule. And all of these systems rule by any means necessary. After all, it is a duty to help along historical inevitability in the name of progress, and if it is inevitable, any means you use will be vindicated in the inevitable victory. But how many inevitable systems have failed? How many proved unsustainable when the amoral methods used to propagate them proved no longer effective? There is a certain irony to it. Inevitability gives you license to do whatever you want, which in turn lets your system succeed for a time. Yet when your end inevitably comes up short, you are judged on the means. And the ring betrays its owner, over and over again.

There was a strain of democracy which took the license of inevitability. The first French revolution, the legitimate daughter of the Enlightenment, believed itself to be one of the first steps in the unstoppable march of progress. The fire that revolution started burned itself out quickly, becoming a monster in the process. It vastly overestimated the security of its end, and in the process lost that end. It was left only with the consequences of the terrible means used to pursue that end.

The American framers understood the fragility of their own cause. They understood their experiment dangled by a thread upon the fickle nature of men. To overestimate the goodness of those men was to invite disaster. They considered the capacity of men to govern themselves to be self-evident. Not the quality of men to do so. The tenuous experiment reminded us that it was a dream, a whisper, a hope, something easily lost if we became irresponsible with it. Not an entitlement. When we view this gift as an inevitable result of our goodness, our badness will prove itself once again. We are on the first republic. The French are on the seventh. It is ironic that the group that viewed democracy as inevitable lost it over and over again, yet the one that saw it as tenuous held on to it for so long. And here is my fear. If we are seriously entertaining thoughts of the inevitability of our form of government, then we are closer than we ever were to losing it. We must remember how fragile, precious and rare a gift we have in self-governance. If we do not, government by the people, for the people may well perish from the earth. It is strange, really. Look for an end to history, and you get an end you don’t want. But lose your end, and you just may find it. I think I’ve heard that somewhere before.