Divine Plagiarism

"For a moment, she re-discovered the purpose of her life: … to call each thing by its right name.”
- Doctor Zhivago, Boris Pasternak

"How can [the gods] meet us face to face till we have faces?”
- Till We Have Faces, C.S. Lewis

It seems so much longer than five years ago, but I remember everything nonetheless. Two years of my life are pressed into these streets and carved into these chairs. Yet this is the strangest thing: I remember so many of the things that were said, but I hardly remember the boy who said them. I retrace my own steps, but not as a man reminiscing upon his own memories. I am my own historian, and with the intimacy of studied expertise I survey a long-quiet battlefield where other men fought.

As my mind fills in the gaps, I see these empty chairs filled with agitated students, elbowing into the millisecond gaps between competing monologues, desperately trying to add their own voice to the fray. Though the hum of the air conditioner is the only true sound in this sterile room, echoing in their silence, those arguments still ricochet off the walls. Like the serene green hill of Little Round Top, this room whispers to passersby of battles long ago, fought between men who have long since left this place. Anymore, I am more passerby than combatant.

But fought we had… bravely, valiantly and gloriously. In this vacant classroom, five of us stood against seventy for an entire semester. At this very table, five of us were forced to sit in front of the entire classroom and endure the abuse of student and teacher alike simply for believing in an unborn child’s right to live. A new Thermopylae each Tuesday and Thursday, we faced arsenals of arguments, ad hominem attacks, ridicule, contempt and scorn simply for standing up for our beliefs. We did more than just stand… we held. Of that much I am proud.

From this vantage point, though, I see now that not all the battles were brave. Certainly they were not all necessary. Veering around one of the perennial protests of Harvard Square, it occurs to me that it is not a worthwhile use of my time to argue with a sophomore who knows nothing about the complexities of Kurdistan and yet feels compelled to shout about the war in Iraq. What I have learned and what I know is threatened in no way by his ranting; his doubts about the legitimacy of my service do not diminish its legitimacy in the least. Who I was would have argued, or at least he would have allowed himself to become angry. With hair-trigger arguments in quick-draw holsters, I was more than eager to answer any challenge to the bastions of my identity. But not all challenges need to be answered. My people, I suspect, care little for the opinion of a teenager far removed from the consequences of his choices or any sort of real responsibility. They never needed me to defend them from the likes of him.

What is true of my people is even more true of my God. Like Peter, his sword drawn at Gethsemane, I stood ready with my well-rehearsed apologetics, never picking the fight but all too eager for the fight to pick me. Always be ready to give an answer, the apostle commands us. But love asks the question, and without a question, an answer is nothing. I do not doubt that in that garden Peter loved his Lord. I wonder, though, if the Apostle wasn’t defending his idea of the Messiah, rather than defending Messiah as He truly was. Perhaps if he had understood his Friend and Rabbi, he would have realized that the God of all the Universe was more than capable of defending Himself. And perhaps, had I known more about Him, I would have realized the same.

All at once, a blinding flash of the obvious hits me. I finally understand the feral rage behind my striving; I finally see who I was truly fighting for: myself. Perhaps more precisely, I was fighting for who I thought I was. It never occurred to me that who I thought I was and who I was might be two entirely different things. Rather than asking God to help me understand who I was in Him, I fought to the death defending these cornerstones my meticulously constructed identity. In this moment, I understand the space between who I was and who I am. In the journey of the last half-decade, God has disabused me of quite a few of my comfortable notions of who I thought I was. I had been shouting at the world so loud and so long about who I thought I was that I hadn’t heard Him whispering who I truly was.

It took me five years to run out of breath; five years until my flailing arms had no more strength to fight; five years before I found myself facedown and silent before Him. And in that moment, I could finally hear the things He had been whispering all along. I could at last hear Him telling my true name. In His words, I found the security I had spent so long striving for; with His pronouncement, all my arguments became unnecessary. My idols of identity had always been fragile and brittle, but a heart of flesh, the heart He wanted to give me all along, can be as hard as steel when it needs to be. With God vouchsafing my identity, I no longer feel compelled to defend it; now that I have a face, I don’t need to protect my masks. This is the heart of it all: we are made in the image of God, and the truer we become to ourselves, the closer we will get to Him. Life in Christ is simply the process of becoming real. We are learning to inhabit our true faces. He must teach us who we are.

Here is the space between the Centurion and the Pharisee. The Pharisee wore a hundred pious masks, but he would not face God wearing his true face. He was face to face with God, but he himself had no face. The Centurion put aside every one of his masks, his power and position and everything else he wore, and prostrated himself before a Jewish street preacher for the sake of one of his servants. He faced God in the flesh with his true face, and Jesus saw past the complications of oppression and power and position to find a man willing to face Him honestly. After all, God made both the Centurion and the Pharisee, and He gave both of them their station in life. The trappings of status mean nothing to the One who granted them. He came to this Earth to meet us face to face. We can only meet him when we wear ours.

First, though, He must cast down every false face we try to wear. This is the purpose of the Law. Paul tells us that the law brings death. “With the measure you use, it will be measured unto you.” The law demands consistency of our actions, and consistency is the death of all of our pretense, for we are all entirely inconsistent. Mother Teresa asked once how we could expect peace on our streets when there is violence in the womb. The law applies the same logic to every circumstance. The law draws the trajectory between action and consequence, and inevitably we find ourselves in the cross-fire of a thousand contradictions between our false faces. The holistic integrity of the law reveals our complete lack of consistency. Each of our contradictions flows freely from the first contradiction of fallen man: we are beings made in God’s image and we are trying to live our lives entirely free from Him.

Like an academic deconstructing some hallowed historical event, like a Dadaist describing the insanity of the whole artistic endeavor, the law demonstrates the absolute insanity of this broken world we’ve made. Nothing we make will make any sense, for we ourselves don’t make any sense; we cannot reconcile our actions to each other as long as we are unreconciled with God. The law calls things by their right names. Doing so, it pronounces this world unjust, terrible and cruel, and points out the tragic and terrible contradiction of mankind trying to live without God. The power of the law is paradox: we cannot live in a world where we follow our actions to their logical conclusions.

But we are as inconsistent with the law as we are with ourselves. We celebrate the parts of the law that conform to our dispositions; we discard the parts that prove more challenging. The Pharisees tithed a tenth of their cumin and mint, and neglected the weightier matters of mercy and justice. We are no different. How many times have we claimed desperation’s license in our moment of weakness, yet denied that same license to others when the balance of power shifted? We stand all too ready to wound others in the same exact ways we were wounded; too ready to break promises made in supposed empathy to the powerless during our moments of pain the moment it becomes expedient to do so.

I am no different. Denying the consistency at the heart of the true law, the law of my construction became consistent only through redaction. Cutting fabric from of robes of righteousness, I made a mask through which I strained gnats and swallowed camels. This is the tension: He gives us robes to wear, and we suffocate as we try to wear them as masks. Because He loves us, He must sometimes take them back. After all, He is the same God that both designed and destroyed the Temple, both for the sake of those inside its walls. There is a dignity in causality to be sure, but when we start believing that we can keep ourselves safe simply by doing all the math right, He has a way of keeping the numbers from adding up. And so, at long last I found the errors that kept showing up in my world were less a function of my math and more a function of the mathematician.

Expectations are at the root of much of our issues with relationships. Much of the tension in an immature relationship comes from individuals trying to reconcile their image of the other to the reality of the other person. In order to enter into maturity, you have to leave behind all your notions about the other person and dive into the reality of who they truly are. I believe the same is true in our relationship with God. We resent Him when He doesn’t accede to our demands to keep our world safe. Our world is not tame. Fortunately, neither is He.

When young C.S. Lewis went off to war, he found his already tenuous faith shattered by the reality of the violence in front of him. The god who took his mother from him, the god who took his best friend from him, the god who allowed all of this to happen; surely such a being was not worthy of recognition, much less praise. I wonder what he expected of God, of the universe, and of himself. Perhaps, as the great author would so eloquently refute later in life, he wanted a safe universe where all things lined up and pain was rare. Holding God accountable for the maintenance of such a universe, it is easy to see how young Jack grew disillusioned with his ideas of who he thought God was. It took a decade for him to realize that who he thought God was and who God actually was were two different things entirely. For me, it was less of a moment and more of a process.

I spent a decade looking for something without precisely understanding what I was looking for. There was a part of me that wanted to walk to right up to the ragged edge of where the clean lines of civilized society met the raw reality of the natural world and gaze out into the abyss, looking for God knows what. Maybe I was looking for something real, something more honest than all the things we have made. I can’t say for sure what I was looking for, and I can’t say for sure what I found. But I found something nonetheless. Where reason and logic fail, there are still pictures and memories. Here is one of those.

Volunteering for a few days in a trauma hospital in Iraq, I would bring linens and saline to incoming critical care patients. One night, a MEDEVAC chopper brought in a half-dozen or so victim of an IED blast. They were mostly Iraqi civilians, amongst them a man with his teenage daughter, and a critically injured two year old girl. The man’s injuries were relatively minor, but his daughter’s were not. She died within an hour. I cannot forget the sound of this man’s wailing as the translator told him that his daughter was gone. The two year old girl had a shrapnel wound through the head. The doctors were able to stabilize her, but they said she only would hold on for a day or two. They were right. And standing over this child, utterly helpless to do anything to make things right, the only thing that made any sense in the world was that Jesus loved this girl, and He was going to take her home. He was going to take her away from this world that had been so unbelievably cruel to this precious child; He was going to take her away from this place so undeserving of such beauty and such innocence. And I prayed over her without any words that made any sense at all, but I knew that He loved her, and that was enough. That one thing made all the sense in the world, and it was the only thing in that moment that could make sense of the world. And here, at the ragged edge of civilization, where the clean lines of the law meet the wreckage of this world we’ve made, one thing becomes perfectly clear: If you know it’s wrong, then it must have been right once. And it will be again. This is the Law and the Gospel all in one moment: this world is utterly and completely broken, and Jesus saves.

With the benefit of distance and reflection, a few more things come into focus. The power of the law is paradox: man cannot live without God and remain man. It demonstrates the insanity of this world of our creation, for we cannot live in the world we’ve made. But if the power of law is paradox, then Jesus Christ is its greatest paradox. If we as fallen men cannot live in a world of our own creation, then the perfectly holy God certainly cannot live in that world. And yet He did. He is the summation of the Law, and it is completed in Him. The contradictions of humanity have never been clearer than in our reception of Jesus Christ. We claim to love God, yet when He comes into our world, we utterly reject Him. If ever a man deserved to be treated as a king, it was this Man, but we treat Him with absolute contempt as we cheer the petty rulers that put Him to death. We put the one innocent Man in all of human history to death as a criminal in a murderer’s stead. The most beautiful person to ever walk this Earth, and Jew and Gentile alike, we hang Him from a tree in the cruelest death we can devise. This is the law, and it calls us by our right name: guilty. Here is its greatest paradox: the law brings death, and Christ died for us.

Just as the power of the law is paradox, the power of Christ is a greater paradox: God is good, and we are not, but He loves us nonetheless. He is the perfect paradox, and every other paradox breaks upon Him. Nietzsche once said that God is dead, and for three days, he was right. But death was too frail to hold Him. It could not reconcile Nietzsche’s contradiction, and it was itself destroyed. This much remains: love is thicker than death. Jesus Christ has one true face, for His face is the face of I AM, and that face is love. We are made in His image. Our only true face is the face of love, but we cannot find it on our own. Jesus Christ loves who we are, not who we think we are. He paid far too high a price with us to be satisfied with our pretense and masks. The law calls things by their right names. Jesus gives us true names. Lose your life and you will find it... seek after Him and you will find you.

As I leave the desert, I realize that masks become robes once you learn to wear them right. Moses was restored to his position of leadership when he was called back to Egypt, and Paul returned to preaching once God was done with him in the wilderness. Now that I no longer need them to tell me who I am, I find that I’ve achieved more than I ever expected within the identities that I once fought so hard to defend. And one last thing was restored to me… the other night, I felt God speaking to me about the two year old girl that I could not help. He told me that she grew up in His presence, strong and brave and beautiful. He told me that she knows her true name.

//


// The Umpire God //

The clockmaker God, they used to say. He sets the rules, and then He lets things run their course. If we just did the math right, we could figure out those rules and build a safe world. But we weren’t totally honest with ourselves; we only did the math half-way. ‘Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely,’ but maybe we were already corrupt, and power simply gives us means to express it. Whether on New York’s Wall Street, or some small town’s Main Street, power gives us the ability to act upon the desires of our heart (and the ability to insulate ourselves from the consequences of those actions.) We rarely get better when we get more powerful, but we often get better at fooling ourselves. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus does the math for us. ‘If you look at a woman with lust, you have already committed adultery with her in your heart… If you look upon your brother with hatred, in your heart you have already murdered him.’ If we were free to act without consequence, we would all be guilty of every deadly sin imaginable. Had we done the math all the way through, we would have seen that without God’s mercy, a perfectly just world has no room for any of us. We didn’t know what we were asking for, because we didn’t know ourselves.

Perhaps a more honest term would have been ‘the umpire God.’ We gave Him our rulebook for the universe, and expected Him to keep the peace and enforce the rules that we had made. When things don’t pan out along the lines of our expectations, we blame Him. ‘How could a loving God allow things like this to happen? Why doesn’t He fix it?’ Unimpressed by who we think we are, He knows who we are far too well to entertain this demand. Consider a child murdered in the course of a gang-land drug war. Imagine that God decides that we will be His avenger; we’ll be Denzel Washington’s character from ‘Man on Fire.’ We’ll go shopping for some AKs and RPGs and bring this thing back on the heads of everyone who participated, everyone who was involved, everyone who profited in any way from it. First, the murderers themselves die. Then their bosses, and their bosses. And then the drug lords with their minions. Next comes the consumers that kept the drug lords in business… which includes not a few upper-class white surgeons and intellectual elites, whose recreational cocaine use keeps the supply lines open for the ghetto drugs which created the drug war which claimed the child’s life. After the users come all the people who turned a blind eye to their rich, successful friends’ bad habit; after them, all those who colluded in the legal double-standard between rich and poor, which created gang-land in the first place. Throw in everyone who participated in our culture of violence by buying a ticket to an action movie, and you start running out of people. If we are true to our original plan, at some point we find ourselves in our own crosshairs. Even if we went back in time to undo the original murder, we would have to kill the original murderer for a crime he had not yet committed, making us the murderer. The center cannot hold… we cannot be consistent to even our own rules. God is too honest and too merciful to accede to our foolish desire for an umpire. He knows us too well, even if we don’t know ourselves.

//Law and Nations//

“With the measure you use, it will be measured unto you.” Merely by establishing a standard of consistency, the law points out our own inconsistencies. Mother Teresa asked once how we could expect peace on our streets when there is violence in the womb. The law applies the same logic to every circumstance. Treat those weaker with you with contempt, and they will treat you with contempt when you become weak. Rob the poor and one day they will take up arms and rob you. Worship your lusts and half of your marriages will end in divorce. Treat your children as a curse and those who treat them as a blessing will outnumber you in a few generations. The law draws the trajectory between action and consequence, and inevitably we find ourselves in the cross-fire of a thousand contradictions between our false faces. The holistic integrity of the law reveals our complete lack of consistency. If we truly listen to the message of the law, we would hear over and over again that the center cannot hold; we are not the people that we think we are.

The law is not a road map to a just society; it is a warning sign screaming ‘Bridge Out!’ From Hammurabi to Marx, Plato to Jefferson and all those in between, we’ve been trying to figure out how to make human governance actually work, as if we did all the math just right, then we’d finally achieve utopia and solve all of our problems. “Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains.” The philosopher is correct-for-data: we were born free, between the Tigris and Euphrates and two other rivers. We built our chains as we left. The equation simply cannot reconcile until we ourselves are reconciled. “If men were angels, we would not need governments.” But men are not angels, and this is the problem.

There is nothing nearly as unimpressive as the history of humanity’s attempts to govern itself. Yet our infinite unwarranted optimism in the endeavor of human governance continues unabated. We seem to have this irrational hope that if we figured out the perfect system of laws and government, then we would somehow escape the nightmare of all the things we’ve done and continue to do to each other. We forget that we had exactly that, and we still couldn’t fix ourselves. Moses came down from the mountain with the Divine Law written on stone tablets, and with them an entire manual of rules for governing a just society. Tort laws, civil laws, criminal procedure; laws for property, for marriage, for work, for accidents, for war, laws for every imaginable circumstance and we still couldn’t make it work. Surely those who live in accordance with His laws will prosper, but the fact remains: we simply didn’t have it within ourselves to be honest to the Law, just as we didn’t have it within ourselves to be honest to ourselves, each other, or God. The Law points out that dishonesty; its purpose is simply to relieve us of our ideas about who we think we are.

Like an academic deconstructing some hallowed historical event, like a Dadaist describing the insanity of the whole artistic endeavor, the law demonstrates the absolute insanity of this broken world we’ve made. Through the miracle of exchange rates, the global free market provides us more riches than our actions merit, yet we are surprised when the very same globalization empowers those who hate us to destroy the towers that were its symbols. Irgun claims the license of desperation in their guerilla campaign against the British, and its inheritors deny that same license to the Intifada when they find themselves in the same position. Yet the Intifada, enraged by the image of European-designed bulldozers razing Palestinian settlements, conveniently forgets the iron axes of their Mycean Greek ancestors (called Philistines long before they were called Palestinians) razing the homes of the Canaanite Gazans before them. An Aztec king is captured and killed by an invading army in the name of power and greed, just as his armies captured and sacrificed chieftain and villager alike to gain Quetzalcoatl’s favor. And how many times have the oppressed thrown off their chains only to become the new oppressors? Guilty and guilty, we are wrapped around each other in this tragic drama of human history. This is the world in our own image, and the law shows us just how utterly ludicrous it truly is. We were designed in the image of God. Until we are restored in that image, nothing we make will ever make any sense.

"The world has changed. I feel it in the water. I feel it in the earth. I smell it in the air. Much that once was is lost, for none now live that remember it." - Lord of the Rings.

Once upon a time, I had a Nintendo gaming console. Super Mario Brothers and all of that. I remember that the system used to lock up, generally when you were at some super-critical point in the game. At that point, you'd have no choice other than to press the reset button and lose all your hard-earned progress. The residual charge drained from the capacitors, all the carefully ordered ones and zeros all became zeroes, and all the lives and continues and power-ups you'd accumulated were all consumed in an instant by Ohm's law. As frustrating as it was to restart the game from scratch, it was better than staring at a frozen television screen with Mario stuck forever in midair. After all, the only way to beat a malfunctioning game is to press reset and play it through again.

Of course, Noah's Flood carries with it a bit more gravitas than a locked up game of Donkey Kong (given the minor little detail that 'pretty much everybody died.') It does have this one similarity, though: the post-reset characters know nothing about the progress made before the reset. Any prediluvian marvels of technology, architecture or scholarship would have all been consumed. Yet, with the sole surviving technological marvel of domesticated agriculture and livestock (three if you count boats and clothes,) it took humanity only a millennium or two to re-conquer the Earth. Ferocious tigers and enormous elephants populate our zoos; the great killer Smallpox still survives, but only at our own behest. Not only have we conquered the Earth, we've conquered each other. Families became tribes, tribes became cities, cities became nations, and nations became empires. And all of that only brings us to the dawn of history and the hazy memory of the Kiengir people (named Sumerians by their Akkadian successors.) It begs the question: if we did so much in so little time since the Flood, how far had we gotten before the big Nintendo reset?

What follows is nothing more than a whimsical intellectual exercise; I am not attempting to define any new doctrine. I just find it curious that for all the value we place on progress, the author of Genesis sees no need to record any of the marvels and monuments of the men that lived between Adam and Noah. I picture a Bedouin's humble tent pitched at an oasis within view of Ozymandias' statue. A thirsty traveler approaches the Bedouin seeking water and shelter, and takes no notice of the great and forgotten king who can offer neither. So whatever happened before the Flood is of as little consequence as Ozymandias' reign. Nonetheless, I find the prospect of forgotten marvels fascinating in the light of our triumphalist technological hubris. The very few documents that survived from the library in Alexandria demonstrate a very advanced understanding of mathematics and philosophy on the part of the ancients. The West's Renaissance was born out of the rediscovery of a few works of the Ancient Greek world. Imagine the Renaissance that would have been born from the complete set of ancient works. If that was only the ancient Antediluvian world, how many of Prediluvan man's marvels were claimed by the deep? We'll never know. And it doesn't matter in the least. Progress couldn't save prediluvian man any more than it can save antediluvian man.

Just for fun, though, we'll explore the possibilities for a bit. First, the Noah Almighty scenario. Imagine that God tells you to build a boat, and you and your family (along with all the animals) are the only ones that end up boarding. As a brief aside, notice the dimensions of the Ark. The man lived a long time, and he had his family to help him, but the fact remains that the guy built an aircraft carrier in his back yard. Even if I was in the best shape of my life, and had a couple hundred years to work with, I doubt I could amass the capital to build a boat of that size, much less build it myself. It causes one to wonder what kind of technology was available to Noah. Anyways, back to the experiment. You get to bring with you whatever you want. You can bring your hairdryers, iPods, toothpaste, wristwatches, books and even your espresso machine. Here's the problem. When you land, there's not going to be a 110V power grid, or AA batteries, or gasoline to run your generator. So pretty much you're back to sixth-grade-camp, no matter what you brought. Furthermore, even if you were smart enough to bring along some solar cells, within a generation or so they'll break and your kids won't be able to fix them. Even if they somehow get an entropy waiver and don't ever break, at some point your kids will forget how to use them, and there's no Internet for finding instructions. When you tell your grandkids about skyscrapers and TV shows and air conditioning, they'll have no frame of reference. They'll do well to spend their brain bytes learning how to hunt with spears, or plant barley, because they're going to get awfully hungry and hearing about McDonald's isn't going to make them any more full. Pretty much, if we re-ran the Noah scenario today with modern people, the story turns out about the same.

Now that we've explored the effects of the reset button, let's imagine how far we could have gotten in the game before it froze up. We'll set our constraints using a very literal interpretation of scripture. Adding together all the Prediluvian 'begats,' we set our timeframe's minimum bound at about a millennium and a half. We've got a good amount of time to play with at the very least. Now throw in the demographic differences of the world before the flood. Man lived to about nine hundred years or so, and was fertile between (at a minimum) 50 and 500. That's 450 years of childbearing, which when you throw in the geometrically expanded lifespan pretty much blows the demographic transition model right out of the water. Doing some very rough pilot math, you can easily surpass our present world population by orders of magnitude. Whether that was the case or not, no one can say. But it is at least a possibility. In addition to this, a millennium is a long time to learn. Imagine how much more progress we would make if our Newtons and Einsteins stuck around for a couple hundred more years. Add in the pre-Tower of Babel detail, where man can collaborate and communicate without having to invest in Rosetta Stone software, and the possible advances in knowledge would be staggering. Finally, newly-exiled mankind had fresh memories of the wonders of the Garden, and entropy had only just begun to wear away at him. Fallen man is certainly less than undiminished man; perhaps in the same way, tired long-fallen man wrapped in scar is not nearly as sharp as newly-fallen man with his wounds still fresh. Given just a millennium, prediluvian man could have easily overtaken our vaunted modern technologies.

This is not to say they would have followed the developmental paths that we've chosen. Every society and technology makes a number of largely arbitrary choices about which branches of technology they want to develop. Since technology is self-catalyzing, your next set of choices is determined by your last set of choices, so even one choice can shape your future developmental alternatives. AC power vs. DC power, rice or wheat, Betamax or VHS, oxcarts or human porters, all of these were relatively arbitrary choices in one place or another, and all of these shaped the development of future technologies. At some point, we decided that metal was the way to go, starting with an iron age, and then moving to bronze, and then to copper (or the other way around, I forget,) and then to steel, and then to gears, and axles, and aluminum. And from that construct, we used metal to shape our information technologies through magnetic fields and circuits. From there, we created human networking technologies tied irrevocably to the straight-line constraints of plastic and metal.

Perhaps a mankind with a fresh memory of the Garden would have opted for different choices. Perhaps they would have stayed with biotechnology, and used some mix of life and death (the building blocks of the post-fall world) to vicariously accomplish their will. Having forgotten the Garden, we use all-dead metal and plastic tools and consider agrarian technologies backwards and inferior. For all the wonders of the industrial age, I know of no factory that can convert solar energy, water and carbon dioxide into high grade carbohydrates with anything near the efficiency of the ancient wheat plant, nor of any process that can synthesize high-grade protein from low-grade carbohydrates nearly as effectively as old Bessy (or whatever you call your cows.) The ultra-nouveau field of nanotechnology attempts to build 'designer molecules' and particle-level machines. Cells have been doing that for as long as any of us can remember. The DNA-RNA protein synthesis process creates custom-built molecules perfectly suited for remarkably complex processes within an incredibly complex organism. The Krebbs cycle performs combustion far better than any high-bypass turbofan I know of. The pop-scientist (de-emphasis on 'scientist') Carl Sagan hails nanotechnology as the crowning achievement of technology. Even if we succeed beyond our wildest dreams in this field, all we will have done is recreate biology. Perhaps our forgotten ancestors skipped this whole circular process and found ways to directly subjugate nature to their will, rather than working via proxy as we do. Perhaps they would view our machines as clunky and primitive. The world is not Sid Meier's Civilization IV: there are many possible technological paths, and we choose them together through competition and cooperation. Nothing says that our ancestors had to choose ours. Nonetheless, whatever path they chose, they seemed to fare well upon it. In the course of two generations, Cain's children had already invented musical instruments, ironworking and cities. Given that they had at least twenty more generations before the flood, I venture to guess they would have gone pretty far down the path of technological progress.

And here is the problem with progress. Whether they used similar or different technologies than ours, they seemed to have used them for the same things that we use our own. We've achieved unprecedented connectivity through the Internet, integrating an incredible amount of real-time knowledge and reference material. We use that technological marvel to more efficiently exploit and objectify women and children. We set out to discover the world, and we proceed to enslave the men we discover. We finally vanquish Smallpox, and then we bring it back to life in order to kill each other. And what technological advancement have we not converted into a weapon? From the Genesis account, it seems the men of Noah's time were not so different from us. For whatever progress they had achieved, they could never progress beyond themselves.

Progress raises questions that it cannot answer. It's like a key. The question is whether you're using it to open a treasure chest or Pandora's box. Progress without an end becomes a monster: "We do what we must because we can." Technology is simply another means of power, and power is simply the ability to do stuff you want to do. But what tells you what you want to do? This is the problem… more often than not, humanity seems to want to destroy itself. Until the middle half of this last century, humanity did not yet have the collective ability to destroy itself. Are we any the better for having it? And were we not out of time, this would segue-way nicely into a discussion on the Tower of Babel. But we are.

You know, without Darcy and Lizzie’s embrace in the final scene of Pride and Prejudice, the rest of the story isn’t worth a hill of beans. The whole thing is, after all, a love story; the entire storyline exists solely to bring the two of them together in to that embrace. Until you understand that, all the literary analysis in the world won’t make sense out of Miss Austin’s book. To us, a love story is a two-hour escape from the day to day drudgery that theoretically eventually sums into the great events of history. I think we may have things backwards.

For all the consternation that the free will vs. predestination debate has caused, I find it fascinating that the Apostle Paul hardly discusses the controversy at all. Far from avoiding the topic, Paul unflinchingly and unashamedly uses words interchangeably that seem to support one side or the other, neither side, or both sides equally. Given the exquisite detail that the Apostle applies to other issues of dispute, Christ’s divinity, the role of circumcision and such, I find it extraordinary that he would introduce such a controversial topic without so much as an explanation. Perhaps we forget that Paul was not a twenty-first century American, steeped in two millennia of the rigid Greek teleological view of history (even the term ‘twenty-first-century’ reveals our hand.) Perhaps time has a different flavor to a Jew living in the time of the Herods. Perhaps through the Eastern eyes of the Apostle, there never was any contradiction to start with.

Sociologists use the terms monochronic and polychronic to describe how different cultures deal with time. Monochronic cultures are the most familiar to those of us in the West: the metronome of the wristwatch propels us from one event to the next. Cause links to effect, in turn becoming a cause itself, linking back in a long, linear chain to the very beginning of the world. Polychronic cultures, on the other hand, see time in a much more fluid manner. Any Westerner who has spent time in the Middle East knows (and has most likely become frustrated by) the phrase Insh’Allah. God willing, I’ll get the airplane fixed today. Or tomorrow. Or the next day. If it doesn’t happen today, it’s not because of some unbreakable chain of causality. It’s because God didn’t will it. Besides, you can’t let the day-to-day nonsense of work get in the way of important things like building relationships (an argument that has some merit.) To the Westerner, relationships are a means to achieve results, a way to get things done. To the Easterner, relationships are an end in and of themselves, and results they achieve are simply positive by-products. With the exception of Luke and Acts, the Bible was written by Easterners.

Remember the two trees of the Garden. The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil and the Forbidden Fruit. The funny thing is that the phrase ‘forbidden fruit’ isn’t even from Genesis. It’s from the Mosaic law. You are supposed to leave a tree alone for the first three years, and when it begins to bear fruit on the fourth year, you are to let the fruit fall to the ground. The law commands you to forgo this fruit as an act of humility and submission to God (which incidentally fits in quite well with God’s laws of horticulture.) In the fifth year and every year afterwards, you are free to eat the tree’s fruit. Of course, we never made it to the fifth year in the Garden.

Both of our comfortable Greek theories trip over the roots of the tree. Predestination almost makes God complicit in the fall. Put up the tree, knowing what we’re going to do, and you may as well have done it yourself. A man cannot put booze in front of an alcoholic and then plead innocence for the ensuing drunken rampage. Surely, God can do whatever He wants, but a simple appeal to authority here and you run the risk of defending an Islamic conception of the divine. The God of the Bible is faithful to Himself and to His covenants; there is no evil in Him. Evil must then be a result of an abuse of something beautiful that He made and meant for good. The tree’s purpose cannot have been the fall, yet we brought about the fall through the tree. If hard predestination applies in the garden, then God made a tree intended for its own abuse. But this is a contradiction in terms: a Creator cannot create something intended for its own abuse, as abuse is using something outside of the intentions of its creator.

Hard free will, on the other hand, almost makes God into a tempter. Love cannot be compelled, therefore there must be an option not to love someone. So the tree gives us that option… it stands in the center of the garden with its enticing fruit as the perennial ’road not traveled.’ But there is something disquieting about the whole thing: I don’t know any husband who puts a picture of a competing suitor on the bathroom mirror as a test of his wife’s fidelity. Free will is built into the wedding vows themselves; the couple’s love for each other needs no additional temptation in order to be true. The capacity for abuse need not be engineered into free will, but the possibility of abuse is simply a consequence of the power God gave us by creating us in His image. Boeing is not complicit in the September 11th attacks, even though it was their aircraft which were hijacked from their intended purpose. An airliner harnesses tremendous kinetic energy in order to move people to and fro. That same energy, twisted and applied to a much darker purpose, created the death and destruction that we knew all too well. Boeing did not need to build a red-guarded ‘suicide attack’ button into their aircraft in order to move people home for Christmas; the potential for abuse was implicit in the design by virtue of the power harnessed by the aircraft. I wonder if the same was not true for that tree.

You do not explain to your three year old the intricacies of AC power and voltage. You simply tell him not to put the knife in the electrical outlet. Yet, when your child is older, you will likely introduce him to the uses of electricity, plugs and outlets. We were simply told not to eat from the tree. God is not obliged to explain to us the entirety of His design, nor does He require our concurrence in order to execute His plan. So like Job, He doesn’t have to tell us why. But He does choose to bless us. I believe that His desire with the tree was to bless us at a time of His choosing. Instead, we hijacked His blessing and turned it into a curse. We abandoned our trust in His goodness, and infected the fruit with the venom of that choice. Eating the fruit was fatal, but the fruit‘s poison was our own. God made the tree. We poisoned the tree. We ate the fruit. We died.

The fall was about our failure to trust that God had our best interests in mind, in our choice to make our own way in the world and not in some piece of fruit. This is a story of relationships, and the narrative exists only as an expression of those relationships. You don’t need a tree to demonstrate fidelity. Simply by having a relationship with God, we had the capacity for free will. We walked with Him in the garden. We could have broken his heart there, even without a tree. After all, the Enemy thought of sin all on his own. But the tree is where it happened, no doubt, and in this we are twice the traitor. If the tree was the next step in a scripted tragedy, then we are merely actors playing a role. If the tree was the perennial arboreal tempted, then we simply gave in to the tree’s wiles. But we took a tree He intended as a blessing, a tree He was looking forward to blessing us with when the time was right, and not only destroyed it, but turned it to a means of destroying ourselves. We murdered two things God loved that day, the tree and ourselves, using the very implements of God‘s intended love. No longer the tragic hero, no longer the weak-willed fool, the twice-traitor creature man turns on his Creator and Lover. And the story writes itself to fit his betrayal. This is how history begins: a Lover betrayed by His beloved.

Tragically, the pattern seems to repeat itself. In the Hebrew symphony of polychronic time that is the Old Testament the same melody plays out time and again. God chooses a people, and they fall away. He rescues them from their oppressors, and they turn their back on Him. The Great and Ancient Lover, whose beloved chooses time and again to become a whore. You can hear it in His voice, His anger and His pain as He talks to His friend Moses atop Mount Sinai. The people He chose, He loved and He saved are reveling in their idolatry at the base of the mountain as He looks on with tears and rage. We take Plato and Aristotle up Sinai with us (Moses did not.) To the predestination reading, this is simply one more object lesson in God’s faithfulness. But the thick air of Sinai is not some clinical academic classroom, and God hardly sounds like a teacher here. God sounds as if He is in earnest when He threatens to destroy His people and start again with Moses. To the free will reading, God knows how Moses will respond, so He presents Moses with a teachable moment. But this is no fable of Aesop, and God does not present Moses with the moral of the story when he passes of the test. God speaks as a lover who has been betrayed, who in spite of the pain of a broken heart desires His beloved. Moses reminds Him of His promises and His love, and God relents. So despite the comforting Thomian axiom that ‘prayer changes me, it doesn’t change God,’ I can’t find anything of the sort in the text. God doesn’t ever change His nature, but it certainly looks like Moses changed His mind. I can’t say I understand it. More precisely, I can’t say I understand it with my head. But to my heart, it makes all the sense in the world. And God made my heart as well as my head. Pascal tells us that the heart has reasons the head knows not of. Those reasons of the heart can lead us to Him as surely as any reasons of the head.

History is God’s love story with humanity. Jesus Christ is the Lover. The narrative is nothing more than the outpouring of our relationship with Him. He is the center, the rock in the center of the stream. The water moves around Him, and He is unmoved. To our finite, linear minds, history is a snapshot of the stream and all things are fixed. But the river flows, and we choose whether we will let Him break us or whether we will be broken upon Him. There is no room for freedom within the foreknowledge of a finite mind, but infinite mind of Christ holds every possibility in the universe inside His omniscience.

It is too simplistic to say Plan A vs. redeemed Plan B. Still, human history seems to consist entirely of God redeeming foolish human choices. We were walking with God in the Garden. Which person of the Trinity is most relevant to man? I believe that when the Bible says that we were walking with God, that we were actually walked with Him the same way that we walked with Him on the shores of Galilee and the same way we will walk with Him on the streets of the New Jerusalem. Jesus doesn’t need the fall and the cross to be Jesus. We chose the fall. He made it beautiful. God set out a plan for His Chosen People. Seeking a messiah on their own terms, they rejected Him. Yet, they would have seen those terms met had they trusted Him… even the Maccabees could not have hoped for the victory over Rome that the catacomb Church enjoyed quite unintentionally. He prepares beautiful stories for us, yet we choose to go our own way, and somehow He makes even those ways beautiful.

None of this is to in any way diminish God’s omnipotence, foreknowledge, or prescience. God is never taken by surprise by anything that we could do. Yet we are still capable of breaking His heart. Like so many other mysteries, this seeming contradiction is swallowed up by the vastness of His infinite nature. God is like a husband who continues to prepare a home for the wife that has left Him, knowing that she will continue to break His heart, but hoping nonetheless.

Perhaps this is the last mystery, and the crux of the matter. God hopes despite knowing all things. So uncertainty is not a prerequisite for hope. Likewise, faith is not predicated on doubt. So why must love be predicated on the potential for sin? With all the free will I can muster, I desire to enjoy Him in the midst of a perfected creation finally free of every vestige of sin. In the new Garden in the New Jerusalem, I believe we will eat from all the trees God has made in His good time. My love for Him never hung upon a tree. But He hung upon a tree out of love for me. This is history… how it plays out is nowhere near as important as where it leads.

The latest Star Wars movie had some pretty amazing special effects during the battle scenes. The latest Lord of the Rings movies, on the other hand, had some pretty amazing battles. Special effects are a lot like spices in cooking… they’re at their best when they’re least apparent. Like too much Tabasco, overbearing SFX calls into question the quality of the storyline’s meat. Conversely, well-measured effects help the viewer overcome their disbelief and hence advance the story. I know that, at least in modern Florida, there is no such thing as a fawn. Still, when I watch Tumnus walk across the screen on life-like goat legs, I don’t have to try so hard to lose myself in Narnia’s storyline. Perhaps, then, this is another way to put it: effects bolster the viewer’s faith in the story‘s validity in order to hold their interest through to its conclusion.

Which, incidentally, sounds a lot like the purpose of signs, wonders and miracles. Jesus didn’t come to Earth to inaugurate a miraculous new vintage for a wedding, nor to make fast food for crowds of Galileans out of thin air, nor to resuscitate the dead only to see them die again. But those things definitely keep you on board for the rest of the story. How many times did the Old Testament prophets call Israel’s attention back to the miracles of the Exodus? The special effects, as it were, illustrated the Producer’s commitment to the storyline and His capability to see it through to a good ending. Even so, we should not take the God of the Universe as some conjuror of cheap tricks. Even the most playful of His miracles serve solely to advance His storyline. This is His elegant universe, and even in the extravagance of His greatness nothing is gratuitous. And certainly nothing is clumsy.

The Ancient Greeks were known for their playwrights. Notable amongst their innovations on the stage was the idea of Deus ex Maschina. Equal parts fast-forward and plot fix-a-flat, a god would appear in the middle of the play to explain away glaring holes in the storyline. While this device may have salvaged a number of otherwise irredeemable works, it is not exactly a highlight of elegance in story-craft. Instead of advancing the plot from within the mechanics of the story, the author has to introduce an outside element to move things along. Perhaps this is the difference between the petty contractor-gods of old and the One True Landlord. Producer, Director, and Chief Protagonist, this was His story from the outset and it is played out upon His stage. I have little difficulty imagining that the Creator made His stage sturdy enough to accommodate the requirements of His special effects.

A good friend of mine is completing her graduate degree in Biology. Her advocacy of Intelligent Design theory stirs up unending controversy amongst her colleagues. One day, another student approached her exultantly exclaiming that the plagues of Exodus could be explained away through natural causes. Apparently, he was a bit crestfallen when he discovered that a naturalistic explanation actually bolstered her faith in the veracity of the miracles. Her response, if more polite, was something to the effect of, “obviously Michelangelo didn’t make this thing… its got paint all over it.” Is it so impossible that Nature’s Creator would use His Creation to accomplish His will?

The naturalistic account of the Plagues goes something like this: a volcanic eruption turns the Nile red, which causes the fish to die, which leads to a spike in the fly population, which in turn provides food to frogs, and so on. Taking this account as given, the timing and the sequencing of the plagues still demands an answer. First, these plagues occur at a particularly propitious time for the nation of Israel, as evidenced by the undeniable historical result of Israel’s first nationhood. Second, the progression of the plagues systematically discredits the entire Egyptian pantheon of the time. What could be a more poetic curse for a culture with a frog god of fertility than an overabundance of overly fertile frogs? The naturalistic explanation points to a cause outside nature. The special effects serve the storyline, not vice versa.

Naturalism is predicated upon a certain view of nature. Hence the name. Unfortunately, our perspective on nature is skewed by the human propensity for overestimating our span of understanding. Like every generation before us, we assume that we are the ones who finally have things figured out. Do we really know everything yet? Is our sample size really large enough to justify the assertions that we are so comfortable making? Is our present encyclopedia of natural processes truly sufficient to explain everything in nature? Until we can answer these questions in the affirmative with certainty, naturalism must view itself with a certain degree of humility. And humility teaches us to look to others for help, especially in our shortcomings.

I imagine it would be remarkably tricky for a person living in a world of permanent eclipse to form a coherent theory of orbital mechanics. What if, for as long as we can remember, we have been living in a world under eclipse? This world is caught in an anomaly of discord with its Creator, and such a rift could cut all the way to the dynamics of reality itself. Our present thoughts on the nature of things would then be tremendously incomplete; they would hold true only for the area of the anomaly and deeply lacking for the rest of the universe. What if all of this is a blip in eternity, a momentary deviation from Things As They Are? All of our theories would then be deeply suspect, along with all of our definitions.

The Old Testament miracles seem to best fit the rules of the anomaly. This stands to reason: they are miracles for a world of Sin and Death, and they are themselves often miracles of death (even if to preserve greater life.) The plagues of Egypt, the selectively fatal Red Sea crossing, the flood of Noah, the fall of Jericho, all of these miracles involved the shedding of blood. The physics of a fallen world seem to suffice in explaining miracles of death. In contrast, the ultimate miracle of Christ’s resurrection defies all attempts at explanation. There is no process within our naturalism that can reverse death. Perhaps the fault lies with our definition of nature.

The ultimate and crowning miracle of death happened atop Golgotha. The invincible Creator dies at the hands of His creation, and this cannot be considered anything but miraculous. The last and most terrible miracle of the Old Physics. And it is followed by the first and greatest miracle of the New Physics. Death itself was turned backwards by love, the first and greatest of all governing dynamics. The resurrected Christ demonstrates in the flesh that the newly inaugurated law of love applies to biology, to physics, to time and space and everything. This is the true physics, this is nature restored to its true self. Thus, the miracle that defies the old naturalism fits perfectly into the new naturalism.

So perhaps it is Deus ex Machina after all. The actors have evicted the playwright and turned the play into a mockery. The stage itself is disfigured, incapable of bearing any story worth the telling. So God enters the play, and patches the holes the actors continue to tear in the plot. He moves the characters places that they could never get on their own, and He somehow crafts a good ending for one particularly bad play. This is the greatest miracle of all: the story actually makes it to its ending. How strange… a magnificent Producer and some spectacular special effects actually makes up for some absolutely pathetic actors.

This place that I’m supposed to be/
it’s not a chair or a desk in front of a mirror/
Can’t you see, man/ it’s not here, or there, or anywhere
But in speaking distance with God/
and where can you go that’s too far?
‘Cause I can worship Him anywhere…
- Plankeye, ‘Bicycle.’

There’s no better way to ruin a book than to read the last few pages first. Which would, of course, explain why it took me so long to appreciate Ecclesiastes. To steal a line from Switchfoot, I’m just like everyone else my age… I don’t wanna read the book, I’ll watch the movie. So the Cliff Notes version of Ecclesiastes goes something like this: ‘Everything is meaningless, except for serving God, so that’s what you should do.’ It’s almost like a rainy-day-realization that you can’t go outside and play, so you might as well stay inside do your homework. Hard to find a less exciting message than that.

The Teacher is right, though. His logic is impeccable and utterly inescapable. There is no denying the fate of the rich man. I’ve never seen a hearse pulling a U-Haul. Store it up for your children and they may squander it, but even if they don’t, they can’t take it with them any more than you can. So health is not an answer. Rounding out the ‘obviously not the answer’ category is immortality. Despite what the drug reps will tell you, survival is a fight you’re going to lose. The global mortality rate is holding rock solid at 100% with a standard deviation of zero. The rich man may buy off Cerberus for a bit and the healthy man may outrun him for a time, but you can’t escape the inevitable. Health and wealth are meaningless. But we already knew that (or at least should have.)

Perhaps legacies, then. Make a great name for yourself and become known amongst the nations for your great deeds. Known, though, is a tricky word. Do you remember the names of the one-hit-wonders of last year, much less the who’s who of the last hundred years? Say you make it to the history books. For a time, schoolchildren may have to learn the school-board-approved version of the things you did. Soon enough, though, you will be consigned to increasingly arcane texts, becoming one more data point in some grad student’s thesis about psychoanalysis or geographic determinism or some other sort of nonsense. Whatever echoes remain of your name will be inevitably consumed by eternity and entropy, whether in dramatic Alexandrian purges, not-quite-as-exciting computer crashes or not-exciting-at-all library budget cuts.

You yourself will be lost long before your name slips into the void of cultural amnesia. Even before your children pass away, the children of a hundred factions will be re-defining you in their image. The more famous you were, the worse they will squabble over your legacy; a rich man’s estate sale is always well attended, and a great man’s name is portioned out even at his death. They don’t make statues of you. They make statues of themselves in your image. And by the time they make statues of you, everyone who actually knew you won’t be around to argue with them about who you really were.

Consider C.S. Lewis, the legendary scholar of Christianity. Christendom’s factions seem to have a peculiar fancy for re-inventing Lewis into themselves. To an Evangelical, he becomes an intellectual version of Billy Graham, preaching the four spiritual laws in academic language. To a Catholic, he was just on the verge of a conversion his whole life; really, if he was born today he would have been (the same logic fits Martin Luther remarkably well.) To an American, he becomes an American, despite the fact that he was offered many trips to the States and steadfastly refused on all occasions (of course, his opinion of one specific American seemed remarkably high in his later days.) To a socially progressive Upper East Side preacher, he becomes a social progressive, in spite of Lewis’ remarkably Hobbesian views on politics, his support of the draft, his ambivalence toward animal rights and his open hostility toward Marxists. The real Lewis, if such a concept is even useful for the vast majority of us who never knew him, was a devout practitioner of mid-twentieth-century Anglicanism, which is distinctly different even from early-twenty-first-century Anglicanism, much less contemporary Evangelicalism or Catholicism. Knowledge of the husband Lewis passed away with Joy Gresham decades ago, knowledge of the father Lewis will pass away with Douglas Gresham in the hopefully-distant future. Lewis sets the bar very high indeed, but the point still holds: meaningless, meaningless, says the Teacher.

If not a name, then perhaps a cause. Invest yourself in something great, something beyond yourself. We’ll be Enjolras of Les Miserables, waving the flag atop the barricades, shouting, ‘Let others rise to take our place, until the Earth is free!’ There is, of course, a slight problem. Just as the rich man must pass his wealth to his children, the revolutionary must eventually pass the cause down to his followers. As the sins of the parents bloom in their children, the compromises of the revolutionary undermine the revolution in time. The more compromises there are, the less time it takes… just ask Robespierre. Even the best considered cause will come apart in time. In the name of women’s rights, Elisabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony outlawed abortion in several states, a practice they saw as exploitative and hurtful toward women. In the name of women’s rights, the second wave of feminism systematically eradicated those same laws only a few decades later. You never know what future generations will do in the name of your cause. Unfortunately, you won’t be around to set them straight.

What is true for a cause is true for a culture and a country. The parents make wise decisions and find prosperity, which endows their children with a sense of entitlement and isolates them from the consequences of their poor decisions for a time. By the time the children experience the logical outcomes of their choices, the fortune is squandered. Perhaps it was this tendency of things to veer from their intended purpose that inspired the framers’ dour predictions about the long-term viability of their newborn country. It is honorable, no doubt, to give your life for your country. But it is still not an answer. Veterans Day is no longer celebrated in Carthage, Sumer, or Songhai. People don’t last forever, and neither do peoples. This too is meaningless.

What about living legacies? Family is perhaps the most beautiful thing under the sun. That said, I do not remember the names of my great-great-grandparents. I only have a vague sense of where my relatives lived five centuries ago. I have no knowledge whatsoever of any ancestors beyond two millennia ago, save Adam and Noah. Even if I had scrolls tracing my lineage back to the Garden of Eden, it wouldn’t give me an answer. I would just have another chronicle of human fallenness passing from generation to generation; even the children of Abraham fall away. Some things are more meaningless than others, but moth and rust take their due here too. Even children are meaningless.

One meaningless thing remains. Saving the world. There’s a hundred different flavors of this one, each of them uniquely matched to a flavor of workaholism. The researcher that needs to find the cure. The general that needs to win the war. The minister that needs to reach the world. If you don’t do it, who will? It’s almost as if the world needs you, as if God needs you. You are Atlas, and the weight of the world rests upon your shoulders. But how many times has Atlas shrugged, tripped, or straight-up fallen on his face? The world survived each time. Ultimately, though, saving this world is a doomed endeavor: the Earth‘s not going to last forever and nothing we can do will change that. So if you fail or if you succeed, you still haven’t changed any of the fundamental variables. Saving the world is the biggest meaningless of all, because it’s the easiest to lose yourself inside of.

Consider Esther. Hers is a ‘save the world’ story if there ever was one. The fate of an entire people, the people of the promised Messiah no less, hinges upon this one young woman. Only her brave and well-chosen words can hold back the might of the Persian Empire…Hadassah, the lobbyist-queen upon whom so much rests. It’s almost easy to forget who is writing the story. Her uncle Mordecai does not forget. Rather than filling his niece’s head with a bunch of nonsense about how much she’s needed, He assures her that God will work salvation for Israel regardless of her choices. He tells her instead of the great role God has set out for her in His great drama of salvation, and invites her to take part. This is the key. Jesus has already saved the world, and nothing we can possibly do will add or subtract in the least from His salvation. God may set out a role for us in His great drama, but it is the role of actor, never director. He blesses us by inviting us to participate in His story. He does not need us in order for that story to be told. It is the pinnacle of human pride to think that the omnipotent God needs our cooperation to accomplish His plan; it is the apex of human arrogance to imagine that the will of the Most High could be thwarted by our failures. We are not Atlas, but neither are we afflicted with Atlas‘ curse. The sooner we realize this, the lighter our burden will become. Meaningless is a freeing word.

Solomon, wisest one, tell me what you have found/
under the sun/
He answered, get over the sun, where life is hidden.
- Shane & Shane, ‘Under the Sun.’

I am hardly a disciple of Siddhartha Gautama. He does have this much right, though: in order to achieve any sort of enlightenment, we need to get over all the things that we think are so important…and we ourselves are foremost amongst those things. You’re not going to find your answers in any of the meaningless things under the sun. So get over the sun. Start by getting over yourself. Like some petty Soviet bureaucrat awarding himself medals, like some silly popularity contest of a student council election, we invest our self worth in baubles. Isaiah mocked the idolater of the ancient world, cooking his dinner on half a piece of wood, and prostrating himself before an idol made from the other half. Are we any less foolish? On one piece of paper, we write a resume and ask it to tell us who we are; the next piece of paper we use to wipe ourselves after using the bathroom. The emperor has no clothes, but neither do any of his subjects. So long as we assess each other’s merit on the basis of these trinkets, we collude in the charade. So we weigh ourselves down with rules and regulations, success and ambition, and a hundred other empty things that we’ve decided are important. Every hiccup on our path toward proving ourselves becomes a referendum on who we are as a person. Thus, we willingly lock ourselves inside a prison of our own contrived self-image. Meaningless is the word by which we escape all the weight we have piled upon our own shoulders. Meaningless tears down the walls of our castles of identity. Meaningless teaches us to get over ourselves.

And here is where the Teacher departs from the Eightfold Path. Buddhism teaches that the man who has many cares has many heartaches, whereas the man with few cares has few heartaches. The Teacher teaches that there is a time for heartache, along with a time for happiness. Gautama seeks nothing and finds it, stripping away the self and becoming one with the universe. The Teacher seeks the Lord and finds Him, losing himself in the vastness of His universe. Instead of fading into one forever chord, the Teacher discovers the majesty of the symphony of God; ten thousand dancing interwoven melodies, new voices forever added to an eternally growing perfect harmony. He discovers a world real and thick and substantial, a world that sticks to you like peanut butter to bread, a world so different from the watery transient nothing that we mistake for life as it slips through our clenched fists.

It’s like a man who climbs a mountain hoping to find a great treasure. Reaching the summit, he finds out that there isn’t anything on top. Disappointed, the man sits down, and realizes all at once that he has just discovered the best view of his life. His desire for an answer propelled him up the slope, and perhaps he will find it there, if only because he brought it with him. He won’t find it until he stops, but he may need to climb the peak to find a good stopping place. And this is well and good... most of us need some sort of mountain in order to find ourselves in the ascent. Our problem isn’t generally in the climbing. It’s the sitting down part. As soon as we discover there is no treasure, we run as fast as we can to the next mountain to repeat the process again. Or we give up and head back down the mountain, head held low and eyes blind to the beauty around us. Our expectations cut us off from the joy around us. We have our ideas about how the universe should run, and we get angry when things don’t follow our little plan. So our ancient enemy of pride resurfaces once again. We would rather live in our suffocating little worlds than open our eyes to the vastness of God’s universe. The first step toward understanding that vastness is realizing your own insignificance.

Meaningless sets us free. Everything you’ve ever done is meaningless. Everything you’ll ever do and anything you could ever hope to do is meaningless. You’re not God. God doesn’t expect you to be Him. He only expects you to be you. Once you figure that out, you realize it’s actually a pretty good deal. You don’t need to run the company. In fact, you get to be executive vice president of doing things you love. The Teacher isn’t standing there with a somber face, lecturing you about responsible investment strategies. He’s telling you to live life like you are dying, because you are.

Enjoy life with your wife, whom you love, all the days of your meaningless life that God has given you under the sun--all your meaningless days.

Be happy, young man, while you are young, let your heart give you joy in the days of your youth. Follow the ways of your heart and whatever your eyes see, but know for all these things, God will bring you into judgment.
- The Teacher, Ecclesiastes.

In the West, we invest so much of who we are into what we do. Because of this, when the Teacher says ‘meaningless,’ we hear ‘worthless.’ But he doesn’t say worthless, and there’s a world of difference between the two. We enjoy a tremendous number of things we know to be meaningless. Moving pieces around on a chessboard isn’t going to somehow reveal the meaning of life or change the world. Knowing this, people still enjoy playing the game. I spent last weekend out on Santa Rosa Sound, desperately trying to hang onto a tube behind my friend’s boat. Absolutely meaningless. I had a great time nonetheless. And certainly not worthless. It was a good weekend and I would do it again. Here’s the thing: if you think water tubing, or work, or whatever else will tell you who you are, you will forever be disappointed. None of those things made you, and only your Creator can tell you who you are. Once you abandon that expectation, you might find out you actually love the things you’re doing. Meaningless is simply a direction sign… it tells you where you won’t find meaning. Meaningless teaches us not to ask things questions they can’t answer. Whatever you’re doing is meaningless. It’s not worthless…so enjoy it.

Think of it this way: God’s given you the keys to a sports car. It’s not a rental…He doesn’t expect you to bring it back. In fact, He promises that in about eighty years, it will break down. If you drive it foolishly, or if you don’t maintain it, it will probably break sooner. It’s a nice car, but it won’t last forever, so you might as well have some fun with it. Of course, God gave you the car in a spirit of respect and love, and He expects you’ll honor His gift accordingly, but that’s all He asks. And it’s not really that much. So pursue joy with all your heart, pursue it under God’s skies with the rational reckless abandon of someone truly in love with life.

It almost seems like license, like an excuse to abandon all responsibility. But it is quite the opposite. A five course meal is far more enjoyable than a really big bowl of ice cream. A loving physical relationship within the bounds of marriage is much more satisfying than any number of random hook-ups. A workout after a full day of work is much more fulfilling than a day sitting on my couch playing XBox. Theologians talk about liberating constraint, the idea that rules set us free to use things as they were intended. The immutable laws of physics allow me to push eighty tons of metal across the skies. Were it not for gravity and aerodynamics, I could not enjoy flying. It is the same for the rest of God’s laws. Joy can be found thickest in the center of His will, in accordance with His guidelines. This is the heart of the matter: humanity was made to enjoy God. He invites us to be part of His work, not because He needs us, but because He wants us to participate in the joy of His story.

I think of a couple good friends of mine who’ve been blessed with a two-year-old daughter. Whenever they clean up the house, they invite their child to take part (invite in the volun-told sense of the word.) In actual terms, they don’t need their child’s help to get the cleaning done. In fact, more often than not the kid makes more of a mess in her attempts to clean. They invite the child to participate because they want to include her in what they are doing. It is for her joy that they ask her to take part, not because they need her. So it is with God. The Ancient of Days is more than capable of writing history on His own. He doesn’t need our paltry contributions to bring about His plan. More often than not, our efforts to help seem to get in the way. But He invites us to participate nonetheless. He sets out our role in His plan for our joy, not for His needs. We are neither able nor asked to bear this world’s destiny on our shoulders. Instead, He spots us as we press against just a little more weight than we can lift. So we live and learn and grow, more and more into His image, which is where we were always meant to be. And there is no more joy than in the place where you are meant to be.

"I believe that God made me for a purpose, but He also made me fast, and when I run, I feel His pleasure."
- Eric Liddell, Chariots of Fire.

Winner of Olympic gold, The Flying Scotsman didn’t run because God needed him to run. He ran because God made him to run and because he loved running. His heart set free, Liddell felt God most deeply when he was doing what he was made to do. Running didn’t tell him who he was. God told him who he was, and then God set him free to run. Free to run, he ran all the way to China where he served as a missionary. Martyred twenty years later in a Japanese internment camp, Liddell’s last words perfectly express the freedom the Teacher speaks of, “it’s complete surrender.” Nothing under the sun will tell us who we are. Once we find who we are in Christ, He will set us free to follow our heart after all the completely worthwhile meaningless things under His sun. There is nothing more than that. So this is the conclusion of the matter: Fear God and keep His commands, for in loving Him and loving others you will find more love than you can imagine. In that love, enjoy every meaningless day of this life He has given you under the sun - all of your beautiful, amazing, astonishing, magnificent and utterly meaningless days.

Half of the trouble of finding something is figuring out what it looks like. The Cowardly Lion, the Tin Man and the Scarecrow all set out to find their missing pieces, only to discover at the end of the story that they had them all along. I don’t imagine it is so different with God. The Psalmist asks for vindication. Perhaps he has been vindicated all along.

There is an old Russian joke where a man with one eye, one leg, and a dead horse finds a genie in a lamp. The genie offers him three wishes, so the man wishes that his neighbor would lose an eye, a leg and a horse. I wonder if we are not so different from that man. We ask God to vindicate us, and we assume that we are asking Him to curse our enemies. We may not know what we are asking for. Our God is a God of plenty, not of poverty.

The Book of Job is a story of vindication. In the face of all seeming evidence to the contrary, Job holds out in his faith. He is torn in two, his wife telling him to curse God and die, his friends telling him that he is cursed by God. In the face of the disaster of his life, he holds to his seemingly contradictory belief that he is right and God is just. Wisely, Job submits to the God’s adjudication (even as he foolishly demands that God give an account for His actions.)

And Job finds his vindication. Everything taken from Job is restored twofold. And nothing is taken from his interlocutors. His far-from-supportive wife is blessed with twice as many children as she had before. His far-from-helpful friends are blessed by an audience with God. They receive as a rebuke no more harsh than the one given to Job. They do not receive his blessings, but that was never the point.

It’s all about perspective. We generally take the perspective of poverty. We measure ourselves against the well-being of our neighbors. There’s only so much to go around, and you’ve got to get yours. From that perspective, whatever hurts our enemies helps us. Since it is far easier to hurt our enemies than to help ourselves, that is where we spend our time and energy. Therefore, vindication must mean the fall of one’s adversaries.

Yet Job’s vindication does not mean that at all. Perspective, once again. Between man and man, the well only goes so deep. Between man and God, the well goes down forever. In Him, we leave our poverty behind and find plenty. So Job’s vindication was never between him and his friends, but between him and God. He is not vindicated by God striking down his friends, but by being blessed twenty times over.

Presumably, they notice. Presumably, he is vindicated in their eyes. But it doesn’t matter. The conversations were not between the two of them. Job’s prayers elevate the conversation. He sends his desires up, and God sends blessings back down. Some of the outpouring splashes into other discussions, but this is a side-effect, not the vindication itself. And it is a better ending. Perhaps Job invites his councilors over from time to time to share in his restored wealth. Perhaps their friendship is restored. Certainly, his relationship with his wife is restored (judging from the fact that they proceeded to have more children.) Job’s vindication leaves him richer in relationship than he was before. Bloody revenge does not.

Consider King David. Unjustly hunted and persecuted by Saul, he is a man in need of vindication. Reading the Psalms, he certainly asks for vindication in all its flavors. He calls fire upon his adversaries, and he asks mercy and blessing for himself. The latter prayers are answered by God. The former prayers are answered by Saul. Saul sets out on an ill-advised military campaign, and appropriately dies upon his own spear. The consequences of Saul’s foolish choices eventually sum into his death. God simply weaves it into His plan.

Remember that David had several chances to take Saul’s life. Perhaps it would have been permissible to do so. Our courts would have acquitted him, self-defense and all. But it would not have been for the best. David lets the story run its course. And in this he finds an unexpected blessing: he inherits all of Saul’s blessings. Striking Saul down, David would have found a measure of vindication. But all of Saul’s blessings would have died with him. Saul was strong. David becomes strong. Saul was respected. David earns Israel’s respect. Saul was a king. David inherits his crown. (I can’t help but think of Gandalf’s return. ‘I am Saruman. At least, I am Saruman was meant to be.’) Because of the manner of Saul’s death, David never had to face questions about his succession. His throne started secure, and he was able to focus his energies other places. So King David’s vindication was in his greatly blessed kingship. He is vindicated in his blessings, not in the cursing of Saul.

What holds true for patriarchs and kings holds true for each of us. In work, in relationships, in life choices, each of us desires some sort of vindication. We need to know what to expect. Until you look through eyes of plenty, all you will see is poverty. Look to His blessings, not to the cursing of others. We may find have already been vindicated a hundred times over.

I’ve heard it said that to someone with a hammer, pretty much everything looks like a nail. I believe the point of the illustration was something along the lines of ‘use the right tool for the job.’ But what if there isn’t a right tool for the job? What if you need to pound in a nail, and all you have is a wrench? I promise that if you hit a nail hard enough with a wrench, it will get the job done (I’ve tried.) Its not optimal, but it works if it’s all you’ve got… all you’ve got to do is stretch your concept of wrench a bit beyond its original conception.

Language is a tool we use in order to interact with our environment. It shapes and molds our experiences as is it shaped and molded by our experience. In that tension we find both the elegance and the limitations of language: it evolves along with our experience, yet it requires our experiences in order to evolve. As we change our worlds, we make new words and forget old ones, our language constantly keeping pace with the changes. Yet for that very same reason, we have a very difficult time describing things outside of our experience. The Sahel-dwelling Twareg, faced with a glacier, is forced to either borrow a word or create a clumsy composite word. The Norseman must do the same when he encounters a rainforest. Yet chunks of humanity live each of these environments, and each of these chunks have successfully fashioned words for their environment.

There are stranger things in this universe than deserts and jungles, things for which humanity as a whole has to borrow or stretch words in order to grasp. For instance, a black hole is something far stranger than the color black or the idea of a hole. Some things we can only describe using the language of mathematics, one far more frugal and precise than our daily speech. There are even concepts beyond our senses that we try to wrap in words. Yet there are things even deeper, higher and thicker for any of our words. Our words are vibrations carried by the wind or smudges of pigment smeared across paper. The Word of God transcends the crude mechanics of human language: His Word becomes flesh. The words of creation fall somewhere in between. We then find ourselves in something of a hermeneutical dilemma.

The Mechanics of Myth: High, Middle and Low Hermeneutics.

Speaking to the Corinthians, Paul uses infallible and inspired yet human and finite words to explain the things of God. Man speaking to man falls into the realm of traditional hermeneutics. Along the lines of C.S.L.’s brilliant counterpoint to the form critics, if the book of Job reads like an Eastern epic poem, it should be read as such. And if the epistles read like letters (hence the name epistles,) then they should be read as such. And if the Gospels look like documentary factual accounts, then they should be read as such. Let’s call this ’low hermeneutics:’ the study of inspired words between men. Prophecy pushes the bounds of low hermeneutics, for the words of the prophets are rawer, deeper and thicker than the words of men. Theirs are the unfiltered words of God to men about the events of men. Yet most of the things they describe are still within the bounds of human experience (if the upper bounds,) so they are still somewhat within the bounds of low hermeneutics.

And then there is ‘High Hermeneutics.’ Really, it has a shorter name: Jesus. The Word of God is beyond our imagination, beyond our comprehension, beyond the whole of human experience and knowledge and power and strength. There is no paper thick enough to bear the Word, no sound deep enough to carry Him, so He came to us wrapped in flesh. He came to us in humility, endured our slowness of speech, our unwillingness to learn, and became the Word to us. That is the only way we could ever speak of Him and the only way we could ever speak to Him. The only way a mind of flesh can wrap itself around God is for God to wrap Himself in flesh. Accordingly, the study of High Hermeneutics is the study by a man of his wife, the study of a dearest friend, the study of a lover. The study of Jesus is in and through relationship with Him, for only He can teach us of His words.

But there is a category in between. I know that I can speak in the tongues of men, that given enough study and time I can understand any of the words of man. I know that I cannot ascend to the mountain of the Most High, that I cannot play Hephaestus and wrench His Words from His hands. But I know that I can climb the foothills of the of mountain of Creation, even if I cannot ascend all the way to the lightning-covered peak. There, I may find words that come close, words that point at meaning even if they cannot encompass it, words that are useful if incomplete. Once again, words are tied to experience. There was not a word in English for the inside of a cloud (excluding fog, which isn‘t really the same) until the advent of aviation. There simply was no need for such a word, for the inside of clouds was not a normal part of human experience until then. As human artifice continues to advance and allow us access to more and more unexplored realms, we will undoubtedly think of more and more words to describe our growing environment. But just because we can go infinitely forward does not mean that we can go forever back. I can imagine a world before my own existence. I just take the world I know, and set it spinning without me. I can even imagine a universe without the earth. I take the universe I know, and set it spinning without this world. But when I start to push back through the laws of physics to the what-ever-it-was before linear time, I start running out of words. And when I try to rewind past the advent of energy, I have nothing at all with which to describe whatever is left of reality (if that is even a useful concept at that point.) My thoughts are constrained to words, and my words are constrained to my environment. So while I may be able to climb the foothills of Creation, I must still wait for God to come down from the summit and give my own words to me. This is ‘middle hermeneutics,’ the study of language describing things just beyond its fingertips. The hallmark of middle hermeneutics must be humility. The temptation is to make excuses for the pre-scientific language of the Bible, yet in reality the language of the Bible is making allowances for our minds of clumsy neurons and messy serotonin.

The idea of middle hermeneutics is not confined to the first chapter of Genesis. Ezekiel sees things beyond his imagination, beyond human events. He tries to wrap words around his experiences, and God gives him words as well. (What else would you expect from the throne room of the Most High? I’m pretty sure you can’t find His bathroom fixtures in the Ikea catalog.) Neither is it confined to the Bible, though it is most perfect and complete there. The Word calls to all mankind, for He is revealed in His creation. In the absence of the fullness of His Revelation in Christ, cultures find different ways to wrap ideas around these deep truths that lay just beyond their fingertips. So to the Norsemen, the god Baldur dies and is reborn. And in the East, the corn god dies and is reborn. So the Greeks and the Romans and the Mayans and a hundred other cultures all find themselves in agreement about the absolutely insane concept of a god who dies and is resurrected. And they are all right. God died on a tree outside Jerusalem and three days later He returned from death.

There are then two uses of middle hermeneutics. Within Scripture, middle hermeneutics teaches us to read passages that describe things well outside the bounds of human experience with humility. Outside of Scripture, middle hermeneutics allows us to connect extant myths with the One True Myth of Jesus Christ. In effect, we exalt the epics and myths of a culture into High Hermeneutics with Christ by way of the low hermeneutics of the Gospels. In this, we are both exalted and humbled, for it is the unreached culture who stands on the foothills pointing at the lightning-shrouded summit, and us who must descend from the summit to fill their words with the meanings they were grasping at. Exalted, for we are the light bearers descending from the mountain, and this is a great and high calling. Humbled, for we must abandon our own words to learn theirs, lest we precondition a relationship with Jesus upon learning our words.

Therefore the heart of middle hermeneutics is epic and myth. The error of many New Testament scholars (think Jesus Seminar) is the hermeneutic of distrust with which they approach the Scriptures. Lest we make the same error, let us reframe our concept of Myth with Lewis and Tolkien’s One True Myth (ref. On Faeirie Stories, JRRT.) The deepest things in this universe are the things of Christ. If something is moving, deep or powerful, then it is in some way drawing from the deep streams of God. In a fallen world, it may be horrifically twisted almost beyond recognition, but as long as it exists at all, it is drawing from God’s deep magic of Creation. Trace the stream through the rapids, past the pollution, and it will take you to His oceans.

With that said, let us look to the mechanics of myth and the failures of language. Let us explore this idea of middle hermeneutics. There are two complimentary formulations of this line of thought. The top-down view looks to the purpose of language within context. The bottom-up view looks to the assumptions that go into a given word, examining how the word changes when the predicate assumptions start changing.

Failures of Language: Words and their Forms (Top-Down View.)

(Note: this is not in any way an endorsement of form criticism. Form criticism assumes to know a great deal about the purposes of the author, often placing them within Chomsky-esque conspiracy theories (and evil shenanigans. Movie reference, sorry.) The text explains the text by way of the Spirit, certainly, but we should find the humility to allow Him to do so.)

Language does not exist in a vacuum. People develop language in the context of their environment. Hence, languages are as different as people groups. Yet, even within one language, there are many different forms of language. The language that one uses within a context of intimacy is hardly appropriate for a board-room. The grace-tempered words that may encourage the cook of an overdone casserole are not the words that one would use in a scientific context that demands precision. Truth is not situational, but different aspects of the same truth may be more appropriate for a given situation. The casserole may simultaneously be ‘great’ and ‘charred to a crisp.’ For instance, if the casserole exists in the context of the intimacy between a husband and a wife, and the casserole is an expression of one spouse’s love for another, then it is ‘great.’ But if the casserole exists in the context of a cooking competition between strangers, then the ‘charred to a crisp’ aspect should probably take precedence.

Even beyond social tact, beyond language in the context of relationship, there is a place for different forms of linguistic expression. In a heavily scientific society, we often place a premium on precision in language, viewing imprecise language as inferior. Let’s follow this to its logical conclusion. Take all of Shakespeare’s sonnets and constrict them to fit within the confines of scientifically precise language. They don’t quite keep the same ring, do they? There is a twofold tradeoff for precision within a language. First, precision squeezes out the non-quantifiable, which may be much of the richness of a thing. Second, precision confines you to topics which you already know nearly exhaustively. It does not give you room to flirt with ideas just beyond your grasp. Precision takes and holds ground, subjecting it to strict, linear confines. This is appropriate in certain contexts, but greatly inappropriate in others… imagine Solomon trying to write Song of Songs in the historically precise terms of Luke. Because of the tension between precision and metaphor, we have different literary forms. Applying a greatly simplified view, let us discuss documentary, poetical, and mythical forms of literature.

Documentary is our most familiar form, perhaps. ’I says what I means, and I means what I says.’ Documentary form assigns concrete terms to concrete events, attempting to recreate the facts of an event as precisely as possible, even if sacrificing some of the subjective experience in the process. It is concerned with objectivity, and not particularly concerned with the impact of the events upon the author. Accordingly, the reader can transport himself into the situation quite effectively by hijacking the authors five senses, but can hardly transport himself inside the emotions of the author. Hence, it is appropriate for events in which the situation is primary… consider the contrast between a history text on the First World War vs. ’All Quiet on the Western Front.’ Yet history texts have not superseded fiction or biography, and in many ways the forms complement each other.

Notice that we have not approached a discussion of truthiness or falsehood. Multiple forms can be equally true, though it may be difficult to transpose between forms. Imagine someone audio taping a car wreck and another photographing the same wreck. The tape and the photos are both accurate depictions of the event. Even so, a sketch artist would have quite a difficult time drawing the accident with only the audio tapes to draw from. This links to a much deeper discussion of postmodernity, Heisenberg and Schrödinger, which I am going to skip because I am lazy.

Consider the Gospel of Luke as an example of the documentary form (or for that matter, any of the other Gospels.) Luke places a premium on precision. Details such as specific names for specific people at specific times and places, random statements coherent to the account yet unrelated to the main themes, individual episodes such as the blood and water from the spear, all of these are the hallmarks of a factual documentary account. There is an intention behind the writing, surely, but the belief of the author is that if you can vicariously experience the same things he experienced, you will arrive at the same conclusions that he did. Hence he accounts his experiences. We should then read it as such. Starting with the assumption that he means the words in the exact same way that we mean the words, we should allow his words to transport us to the events he is describing and experience them through his eyes.

Now consider the poetical. Poetry is the difference between Ansel Adams and a passport photo. He could have photographed one of a hundred waterfalls, for it wasn’t the waterfall itself, but the experience of being there that he captured so effectively. In the same way, the words themselves are not the point of poetry, rather a means toward an experience. Therefore, precision in definition takes a back seat to a totality of feeling. Rather than attempt to transport the reader within the situation, the words and situation serve as a means to carry the reader into the heart of the author. Poetry is an expression of the author, not the situation, even if the situation causes that expression of the author. And this is the difference between poetry and documentary. In documentary, the author gives the reader his eyes. In poetry, he gives the reader his heart.

The exact name of the Shulammite is relatively unimportant to the Song of Solomon. What is important is the experience of being in love, and that experience is communicated quite effectively with very few specific details. This does not in any way mean that it is less true. I would wager a great deal that there was in fact a Shulammite woman that married Solomon. I would also wager that the two consummated that marriage. That said, we don’t need an exact play-by-play accounting of their marital bliss, as the physical dynamics of that interaction are generally figured out pretty quickly by newlyweds (hopefully… I‘ve never been a newlywed.) We are far better off with an experiential accounting of an ideal love affair between a husband and a wife. Poetry makes room for that experience.

Our last category is the mythical. If documentary and poetry exists along a spectrum between precision and metaphor, then imagine myth as the pinnacle of a triangle with that spectrum as the base. Both poetry and documentary are concerned with the accounting of our experiences, be it the experience of ourselves within the situation (documentary) or the situation within ourselves (poetry.) Myth is concerned with the description of things that are beyond our experiences. It is the link that connects the deep, the magical and the ethereal to our daily lives. Accordingly, elements of documentary fail, for precise words cannot transcend the environment which shapes them. And elements of poetry fail, for experience cannot transcend the self which shapes it. Therefore, myth incorporates elements of both, stretching precise words to hold ideas beyond their original intent, and stretching the bounds of human experience to take us to places we have never been. Once again, mythical does not mean false. Something becomes false by being mythical no more than it does by being historical or poetical or literal. It is simply another set of conventions for communicating ideas, and certain things are more appropriate to myth than to any other style.

Consider Job (pun half-intended.) I cannot imagine that God speaks in Iambic Pentameter when He addresses the adversary in Heaven’s throne room, interspersed with rhyming quartets from Job‘s councilors. The problem is that I cannot imagine at all what God says when He is in His throne room, nor can I imagine what it is like to hear it. So I’m pretty much stuck with Job’s accounting as the closest approximation to that experience that I can find. Therefore, I need to find the humility to accept Job’s accounting, realizing that I am not infinite and neither are my words. It may be that in Job’s culture, history and stories were retold in a certain format, and describing Job’s very real personal encounter with God mythically may have happened as readily as Luke describing his experience in documentary form. Job doesn’t read like Matthew or Chronicles, but it is not intended to be read like Matthew or Chronicles. (Note that no major theology is introduced in Job, though, rather a demonstration of the power of God and the benefits of faith.)

Which brings us back to Genesis. ‘In the beginning’ is not ‘in the third year of Herod the Great.’ Neither is it ‘once upon a time.’ I’ve never seen an unconstrained beginning. I can’t even imagine it. I mean, I can do the logic on it, and figure out that there is some sort of Unmoved Mover and all, but I can’t really wrap my mind around a beginning before time. ‘Beginning’ is the closest I can get to what happened, even if the word beginning, made by finite people to describe finite events, has to be widened a bit to capture the infinite. So this is True Myth: great events require great words. So great that existing words may have to be stretched beyond their traditional definitions for lack of better words. And this is the nature of myth itself: God describes things greater than us by taking our words and exalting them, as a parent would to a child. He humbles Himself to make our words great, in order to encompass the greatness of His creation. We must find the humility to allow Him to reteach us the exalted forms of our own words.

Failures of Language: Words and their Assumptions (Bottom-Up View.)

Each word is built on the shoulders of other words and ideas. Words are often composites or developments of root words, placed in orders with modifiers to form thoughts. Yet even the most basic words of a language incorporate significant basic assumptions about the nature of things. (The naming of anything at all incorporates an assumption of differentiation that complete monism would not allow for.) So we have general human assumptions that go into words, and culture-specific assumptions that go into words. For cultural words, we should look to variations in environment and economy to explain the root words’ assumptions. But there are other assumptions that are more universal. These may be rooted in human biology and astronomical cycles, or other unavoidable aspects of the human experience. We see the evolution of words within a culture as that culture modifies those basic assumptions through development or interaction with other cultures. It is far more rare to see the universal assumptions change. (Perhaps one example is the near universal adaptation of nautical terms to aviation.) Still, in either case, modifying the basic assumptions of a root word can shake a language to its core, as root words in turn modify composite words, and together the root and composite words reshape the culture’s experience and interaction with their environment.

Consider the Russian root word ‘Mir.’ It means both ‘world’ and ‘peace.’ The development of the word can be traced to the ancient word for village. It incorporates several cultural assumptions, rooted in the Russian experience of nature and history. It implies totality, and consequently becomes an unattainable ideal, though one with a eucatastrophic sense of permanence, expressed in both the Christian and the Marxist (Hegelian) views of history. This stands in contrast to the highly temporary yet attainable Arab view of peace. Mir also assumes collectivism, created and maintained by the village. This is in contrast to the American view of an individually created and maintained peace, which in turn ties into the Second Amendment controversy. Finally, Mir assumes a right ordering of things, an assumption inherited from autocracy and orthodoxy. In direct contrast, peace to a Cossack is an absence of constricting rules and regulations. Therefore, something will always be lost when translating the word ‘Mir’ into a language with different assumptions about the nature of things. There will still be enough commonalities to make the translation meaningful, of course. Mir as ‘World’ implies a totality shared by the rest of humanity, based in the assumption of ‘all-there-is-ness.’ So as long as there are certain shared assumptions, translation remains possible.

Now, let us look at an impossible translation: the Words of God to translated into the words of man. What assumptions do we share with Him? What assumption could hope to confine Him? What commonality can there be? Our problem extends beyond the idea of two different worlds, for His world encompasses our own and everything else, and more. The Mind that forms His thoughts is so far above our own as to be completely unrecognizable. His Words can make or undo our world, for with one word He spoke all of ours into existence, all that have been or ever will be. If looking upon His face is death, then what would hearing His words do? We simply can’t handle His words. So He humbles His words and stretches ours.

Imagine a mother expecting her second child. When the three-year-old firstborn asks ‘where do babies come from,’ the mother may answer ‘babies come from mommy’s tummy.’ At first glance, we would imagine that the mother is lying. But imagine that the mother began to explain the facts of life to the three-year-old. Before she can say ‘fallopian tube,’ the kid is bored and asking for a cookie and walks away with no meaningful understanding of childbirth at all. Now think through what happens when she tells him about ‘mommy’s tummy.’ The three-year-old walks away with some sort of knowledge of a causal link between mommy and baby, as well as a localized identification of the child inside mommy’s abdomen. This is about as good as he’s going to do at that point in his life. Remember, also, that the 30-year-old’s word ‘stomach’ is not equivalent to the three-year-old’s word ‘tummy.’ The three year old may conceive of the entire abdomen as the tummy, without any concept of its contents. So using his definition, his mother’s statement is quite accurate, even if she has a far greater understanding of the contents of the tummy. And this is the essence of myth: the mother humbles herself to the words of her child, yet she stretches his words to include things that he doesn’t yet understand. The mother understands the assumptions that go into the words of the child, yet she takes those words and refines those assumptions before giving them back to him. In the same way, God must enlarge our words when He teaches us of things beyond our assumptions.

Much hangs on the word ‘yom’ in Genesis. What does a day mean? A day means twenty-four hours, and upon this everything rests: if there were not twenty-four hour days during the creation, then the Scriptures are untrustworthy, and we can view every controversial point as metaphor, up to re-interpretation. Or perhaps, ‘day’ is poetry, simply an indication of the proper order of things in the universe. And here is where humility in hermeneutics becomes critical. The problem with both the documentary and the poetic view of Genesis is that they vastly overstate the human capacity for understanding. Perhaps neither reading is appropriate, but rather the True Mythical reading. Perhaps a better approach is: ‘I am an idiot child gazing with wonder upon the mountain of Creation, waiting for God to give my own words back so that I may achieve a glimmer of understanding.’ I can’t tell you exactly what ’yom’ means in Genesis one. But I can tell you that it’s as close as I am going to get with human language.

(I do not in any way mean to deride the recent tremendous advances in cosmology. Rather, I mean to reframe them within the design debate: I am secure that the nearer we come to the truth of origins, the closer we will approximate the words of Genesis, and the deeper we will grasp those words. Therefore, I do not need to fight to the death over each refinement of cosmological theory.)

Think about all the assumptions that go into the word ‘day.’ First, ‘day’ assumes hard causality, for each day will bring the next at its conclusion, which in turn will depart with the advent of the next. Second, ‘day’ assumes orbital mechanics, for the time period itself is based in the rotation of the earth upon its axis, causing the sun to rise and fall upon the inhabitants of the Earth (which, of course, assumes the Earth and the Sun.) Finally, ‘day’ assumes linear time, for if those rotations are not associated with a real and constant progression of events, it is relatively meaningless. So what happens if you change any of these assumptions? ‘Day’ becomes a word that you can’t find in Webster’s (or your lexicon for that matter.)

What is a day without linear time, without causality, without orbital motion? To answer this is to think outside of time, and to do so is to be God. Remember that the very dynamics of human thought involve assumptions about time, for it takes a fixed amount of time for neurotransmitters to move across synapses. What is linear time before linear physics? Time progresses relatively slower the faster you are traveling. Did the tribesman that decided on the sound ‘yom’ take that into account when assigning it to the period of light between the darknesses? Before there is an Earth, how do you measure its rotation? We have no words for such things. Therefore, Someone infinitely smarter than us needs to give us words for these things. But we can not understand any words but our own. Therefore, He stretches our words to fit. All words are a best-fit approximation for things. Epic words are best-fits for things for which there can be no human words.

So our problem all along was pride. Think of Einstein trying to explain general relativity to a group of children. Likely, they will later argue with each other, thinking they understand what he meant, reforming his words to fit their assumptions. But the more they do so, the farther they will get from his meaning. Instead, they should take his words at face value, while understanding that his words are deeper than their own. In this humility they will achieve the greatest understanding. Therefore, the text does not require the excuses of Theistic evolution, nor the straight-jacket of atomic-clock-24-hour-days. Genesis One isn’t written in some fumbling ancient pseudo-science. It’s written in Army-basic-training-style ‘point the gun this way’ pictograms. We’re a lot dumber than we realize, and once we realize that fact hermeneutics gets a lot easier.

Myth as a Bridge.

In the humility of myth-reading, we rediscover the sense of wonderment stolen by modernity. Certainly there are things to be learned from cosmology, but those things may not be the most beautiful or meaningful things. Dissect a cat and you will certainly discover all the parts of a cat. But you will no longer be able to discover its personality, nor its quirks, nor the experience of it curling up in your lap. (Of course, I would hope that the vet is familiar with all the parts of a cat, lest the cat get sick.) Surely it is useful to describe the language of creation using ever more eloquent equations. But if we forsake the experience of the awakening of the universe in the hopes of gleaning a theory that allows us to build a slightly-more-efficient toaster, then surely we have missed something. Myth is not science, and science is not myth, though both may be equally true. They are simply different. I would not describe a waterfall to children in terms of terminal water velocity and time of fall. I would tell them about the crashing of the water and the feel of the mist. And I would be telling them the truth. This is how we should read myth. No strait-jacketing the words, no excusing them, let it be what it is, and gaze upon it with wonder. You are invited to a front row seat for the premiere of a great film. Don’t ruin it by talking all the way through the performance.

Remember that the Chosen People were given two millennia to soak in the True Myths before that Myth wrapped Himself in flesh and dwelt among them. The Word wrapped Himself in myth to be carried by Moses long before He wrapped Himself in flesh to be carried by Mary. Yet what started in Myth ends in flesh; the first chapter of John completes the first chapter of Genesis. And this is the natural progression: from the words of Isaiah to the cries of an Infant. And thus, Matthew links the two, the prophecies and the Messiah.

It should not then surprise us that Paul links the Greek myths to the Messiah when speaking to the Athenians. He transforms a temple to an Unknown God into a gateway to the God who is known. It is the myths that tell us the things we know to be true, the myths that remind us of the One True Myth written upon each of our hearts. It is from that middle place of myth that we descend into Salvation history and climb into relationship with Jesus Christ. So perhaps, from that middle place of myth we can draw others into relationship with Christ.

Lewis once described the difference between pagan and apostate culture as that between a virgin and a divorcee. A pagan culture was speaking in myth of things they had not yet encountered in fact. The apostate culture has encountered both, and little of its innocence remains. But myth digs deep beneath the defenses of cynicism. It was through the innocence of myth that many cultures were introduced to Christ, so perhaps it will be through myth that we will find the innocence to re-introduce apostate cultures to Christ. Our own culture is ravenous for myth. St. Patrick found the Trinity in the Triquetra of Celtic Myth. Perhaps we can find Him in the Middle-Earths of our own myths.

So at long last we end up back at the title of this article. In an Irish pub in Reykjavik, I find myself chatting with an Icelandic opera star. In no uncertain terms, he makes it known that he doesn’t have any desire to talk about religion. Yet he is fascinated by the Norse myths. Much of God’s revelation through nature is documented by myth, and so it was with the Norsemen. So Baldur, the god of innocence and son of the chief god Odin, is destined to die and be resurrected, bringing with him a new world. And so we talk about Baldur, and Asian corn gods, and the Christ. And then we talk about C.S. Lewis’ crazy idea of myth-becoming-fact, and what it would look like. And a guy who expressed very little interest in the religion of Christianity finds himself quite interested in the person of Jesus Christ by way of the language of myth.

The language of science and history feeds the mind. The language of art and poetry bathes the heart. But the language of myth finds its way to the spirit by way of the imagination. It would serve us well to become multilingual. I suggest we begin with the One True Myth.

It is strange, really… sometimes your greatest strengths are hidden in the things that you hate most about yourself. We are taught to hate in ourselves the things that make us different, taught by everyone around us to hate the things that don’t belong. Yet, it may be that the Creator’s signature is in those very things, and in those very things He may have equipped us for the story He has prepared. Redemption works in funny ways sometimes.

We know much of the story of Paul the Apostle. We know less of the story of Saul of Tarsus. Please allow me a bit of artistic license with his story.

The accusation was born on the day he was, through no fault of his own. Half of it was born in his curly hair and brown eyes. The other half was inherited from his father’s citizenship, in the town of his birth and in the language he would grow up speaking. None of these things were meant with malice, of course. None of them were meant to threaten anyone. A child of Shem and a child of Abraham, Saul’s hair and eyes were just part of that birthright. Likewise, his father didn’t sell out the Maccabees, didn’t betray Israel, and didn’t make sacrifices to the Emperor. He simply wanted to provide security to his family, and Roman citizenship bought more security than gold, so he wisely bought Roman citizenship with some of his gold. Alexander, Xerxes and Nebuchadnezzar decided Saul’s birthplace, each of them scattering the Jewish community to the winds as they swept through. And that birthplace came with a language. Like anyone else, Saul’s parents just wanted to go to the market and buy grain and olive oil (and maybe a little wine,) and the merchants spoke Greek. So they spoke Greek too. Saul had no real choice about any of these things.

Nor did he have much in the way of choice in his early upbringing. Like any good father with the means to do so, Saul’s father sent his son to the best of schools. And those schools, most likely, were Greek. Logic, reason and Greek poetry was drummed into young Saul’s head. But just as he spent his school days with Plato and Aristotle, he spent his weekends with Moses and the Torah. His father, a devout Jew, would make sure that Saul understood his heritage. His father lived in a tension: he was of a successful businessman in a Gentile world, yet he was first a son of Israel, a follower of the Law of Moses. It is a tension that he managed for his household, as well. Inside the walls of his house, it was safe to be a Jew in a Gentile world. But Saul could not live forever inside those walls.

It is said that children are cruel. Perhaps they have not yet learned how to hide vicious intentions behind nice words. Perhaps they have not yet realized why it would be useful to do so. Regardless, they are brutally honest, and brutally ready to ostracize those who don’t belong. So young Saul spends his hellish school days hearing his classmates speak mock Hebrew to him, seeing curly-haired stick figures on camel back, watching other students make ‘snipping’ gestures at him in first-century locker rooms. He wasn’t a Greek, and they made sure that he knew it. ‘You aren’t one of us,’ they told him.

They weren’t the only ones to tell him that. Everybody knows that Jewish children don’t go to Greek schools: after all, are not the writings of Moses and David far superior to any pagan philosophers? Everybody knows that the son of a Roman citizen is Roman, not Jewish: after all, is not Rome is the evil oppressor of the Jewish people? And everybody knows that real Jews are born in Judea: after all, what kind of Jew would leave the promised land? So a child of a Roman citizen who goes to a Greek school in a Cilician town couldn’t possibly be a Jew. I’m sure that someone informed Saul of this fact. ‘We thought you were a gentile with a tan.’ ‘Whatever you are, you aren’t one of us,’ they told him.

Young Saul finds himself in the cross-fire of a war he never chose. Too Jewish for the Greeks, too Greek for the Jews, both groups gun him down as the most accessible representative of the other. So he chooses a side. His appearance bars him from the Greek side, perhaps, though he might pass for a Cypriot. Still, were he to choose the Greeks he will always face the question, ‘so, what are you? I mean, where are you from?’ It is easier to side with the outcasts. After all, that is what both sides keep telling him that he is. The Jews are the outcast group, the persecuted minority. So if the Greeks hate him for being Jewish, he will become everything that they hate. And he will prove to the Jews, beyond the shadow of any doubt, that he is more Jewish than any of them. If they speak Hebrew, he will speak Hebrew better. If they quote Moses, then he will quote Moses, Elisha and Ezekiel. If they keep the ten commandments, he will keep all three-hundred-some. By the sweat of his brow, he will earn entrance into the nation of Israel; by the fury of his works he will vindicate himself. And when he is done, nobody will ever, ever dare say that he is a ‘gentile with a tan.’ (That is, with the exception of the voice always whispering that exact thing in the darkest corner of his fears.)

He is successful beyond his wildest expectations. Saul, now a young man, has by now become a lion in the Sanhedrin, a Pharisee of Pharisees, the brightest rising star under the great Rabbi Gamaliel. Nobody would dare voice the accusation anymore, few would even think it. Saul’s identity is at long last secure. He has arrived. At least, he should have arrived. For some reason, his mad ambition still looks too much like rage. For some reason, it still looks like he’s trying to prove something. (Deep down, further than he cares to look, he still rages at the Jews for having once excluded him. He expresses this rage by beating them at their own game. He overthrew the leaders, superseding all the playground bullies in his meteoric rise. But he never really conquered them: their cruelty was reborn in him on a much bigger playground, covered by righteous and subtle words. I wonder if Saul ever really felt at peace with his identity as a Jew, with rage fueling his doubt and doubt fueling his rage.) If the young man stopped for a moment, he might realize that his efforts are the very thing that keep the accusation alive. The shadow of that realization keeps him running. But he runs into Someone he does not expect.

Something about the followers of the Nazarene got under Saul’s skin. (This something like saying that the Inquisition was impolite.) Saul’s rage and his driving ambition find themselves perfectly synchronized in his persecution of the followers of this new heresy. He gives some pretty good reasons. He may even believe them himself. ‘They divert worship away from the Holy Temple.’ ‘They are idolaters, worshiping this carpenter Y’Shua.’ ’They blaspheme Jehovah, saying that He has a son.’ These were enough for the Sanhedrin to send Saul with their sanction and a detachment of heavily armed Temple Guards.

If Saul had been honest with himself, he might have found his deeper reasons. The greatest crime of the Nazarene was his blasphemy against the laws. Not the Law. The laws. The hundreds of rules that Saul had so fastidiously kept, proving to any law-abiding Jew that he was surely a Jew. The Nazarene also spoke against the temple. The temple, that impregnable fortress of Saul’s identity, for his service there ensured him a place of honor with his people, a place where no one would ever question whether he truly was of his people. Most abominably, the Nazarene spoke against circumcision. The gift of Abraham, the gift that had caused him so much grief growing up, the one thing the world could never deny, the Nazarene called it worthless. For all of this, the Nazarene was put to death; for all of it, everything that remains of him must be burned to the ground. For Saul must protect all the bastions of his hard-earned Jewish identity at all costs.

Just as the original accusation had two halves, so did Saul’s rage: Jew and Greek. His rage for the Greeks was as overt as his rage toward the Jews was subtle. ‘Love your brother, but hate your enemy.’ They hated him, so he would hate them. If they hated him for being a Jew, then what a Jew he would be! He would be infinitely different from the filthy goyim who reveled in their lurid perversions and pagan idolatries. He would be as far above them as a man above a cockroach. And he would look upon them only with contempt, the same way they had looked upon him. But this Nazarene, this carpenter from nowhere, he looks upon the goyim with love. He goes to the Decapolis and wins their adoration with cheap magic tricks. He goes to the half-breed Samaritans and claims to be the Messiah. He compliments a Centurion while deriding the Scribes and Teachers of the Law… he is no Jew. For no Jew can love the goyim. Because the goyim hate Jews. Because the goyim hated Saul. To Saul, being Jewish meant not being a gentile, for his identity was forged in the war between the two groups. Anyone who sought to reconcile the two must then be an enemy. And thus, Paul’s civil war finds an outlet in his war against the Nazarenes.

Like any war, there are casualties. The first casualty is Saul’s integrity. It was nothing as simple as a bald-faced lie. The most dangerous lies never are: the deadliest falsehoods turn inwards. Self-deception always starts and ends in pride. And so it does with Saul. You see, he is in a bit of a quandary. The deepest and darkest parts of his heart all scream out with rage toward this sect. But he has amassed quite a bit of religious social capital, and certain things are expected of a ‘spiritual leader.’ Rage is not one of these things. So in obedience to his own pride, he finds the loftiest of words for the basest of emotions. He paints spiritual-sounding whitewash over his hatred, which brings with it the added benefit of inciting others to do his dirty work. So Saul stands watch over the cloaks of Stephen’s killers and looks on with approval, clad in white but red in tooth and claw. With every stone, he feeds both his rage and his pride. They are his stones, and this is his stoning. Thus the heretic Stephen dies at the hands of Saul, the next casualty of his civil war.

He does not stay dead. Stephen is reborn each night in Saul’s nightmares. Stephen’s face becomes the splinter in Saul’s mind, his words the hangnail in Saul’s memories. The more he pulls at it, the deeper a wound it becomes. This man received the greatest of rage with the greatest of peace. This man answered so much hate with so much love. How can such things be? Saul’s universe, boiling and frozen with rage, was safe in its own way. Stephen is the first crack in that ice, the first doubt that is not turned inward. And face with doubt, Saul does what he has always done: he runs. If he can silence these Nazarenes, then perhaps he can silence his doubts. So somewhere between Valjean’s Soliloquy and Javert’s Suicide, Saul sets out for Damascus.

He never gets there. In the sound of thunder, eyes without sight are blinded. In the sound of thunder, the crack Stephen began shatters Saul’s universe. In the sound of thunder, Saul of Tarsus is undone. The ancient Psalmist calls for God’s vengeance against his persecutors. Like Christ, Stephen called for God’s mercy upon on his enemies. He is avenged nonetheless. Saul of Tarsus does not survive much past Stephen‘s martyrdom. He is killed by a man named Paul of Tarsus. Like Javert, Saul drowns himself in the riverine springtime swells. Like Valjean, he is reborn rising from the waters of his baptism. Three entangled streams become one river: Saul dies, Paul is born and Stephen is vindicated.

Redemption happens in a moment. Sanctification takes a bit longer. For a surgery as deep as Paul’s, the incisions will take some time to heal. Mercifully, God gives him plenty of convalescent time in the desert. The man who once wove the scriptures into arguments is taught to weave hides into tents. Yet, in that weaving, he is rewoven. It begins with the humbling of his name. Sha’ul, a Jewish name for the first king of Israel, is replaced with Paulus, Latin for child. It ends with the breaking of his fears. Like the wayward lamb with broken legs, he no longer can run from his fears. Yet in this is the greatest miracle yet: the fears of the unbroken Saul break themselves upon the broken Paul. As the flotsam of the wreckage of Saul floats to the surface of Paul’s heart, he discovers that burdens become treasures in God‘s hands. In the course of two years in the desert, the very things he hated most about himself become his greatest strengths. The Pharisee of Pharisees becomes the Apostle to the Gentiles.

He is perfect for his role; he performs it magnificently. He wields logic and reason with the elegance of intimate familiarity, illuminating the Scriptures to a people who never knew Abraham or Moses. He meets the Athenians with their own poets, translating Christ into their culture. In the Aeropagus, he intuitively identifies where the ice is thinnest, preaching to them about their Unknown God. The Greek poets that caused him so much grief with the peers of his youth become his allies for the Gospel, Greek logic and culture become weapons in his arsenal. He may have been too Jewish for the Greeks of his youth, but he is Greek enough to get inside their heads. He may have been too Greek for the Jews of his youth, but he is Jewish enough to know the Scriptures like the back of his hand. The boy that was lost in the void between two worlds becomes the man that can bridge them both in the name of Jesus Christ.

Surely there were counter-attacks. The adversary reaches for his old accusations, his old weapons of identity. He hurls them at Paul, and they shatter upon him. He is undiminished. The accusations never surrendered, but Paul surrendered the accusations. Finding his identity in Christ, every other identity lost its power over him. He no longer has anything to prove; with nothing to defend he has robbed his adversary of things to attack. He is accused by the Jews as a traitor to the law of Moses. The accusation breaks upon his identity in Christ: ‘there is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, for the law of the Spirit of Life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and death.’ The greatest hopes of Abraham, Moses, and Elijah are realized in the Messiah. The law, the promise and the covenant are all completed in the Christ. He is accused by the Greeks as a backward son of a superstitious people. The accusation breaks upon his identity in Christ: ‘He was wounded for our transgressions, He was bruised pierced for our iniquities, the chastisement that brought us peace was upon Him, and by His stripes we have been healed.‘ The foresight of the Hebrew prophet Isaiah puts any Greek oracle to shame, the justice of his prophecy exceeds even the loftiest Aristotelian dreams. Beyond Jew or Greek, Paul is made whole in Christ.

In this wholeness, Paul becomes all things to all people. He puts on and takes off whatever robes will advance the Gospel; a Greek to the Greeks, a Jew to the Jews. A man who worked so hard to earn admission into his own culture lays it down freely, for he has found free admission to something beyond culture. He is free to lay one robe down and don another, knowing that God will safeguard each. He is free to lose himself in the security that he will never again be lost. In the light of that freedom, his hard-earned Hebrew resume amounts to little more than an accounting of wasted time. In Philippians, he accounts for each of his achievements, and then discounts them all in the light of knowing Christ. And so Paul is completed. The child Saul sets out to prove something to the world. The man Saul proves more than he had ever hoped. The broken Paul realizes that he has nothing to prove. The reborn Paul surrenders everything that he had proved. The most glorious chords of a symphony happen near the finale, so now the completed Paul must meet the completion of his story.

It ends as it began. The Saul was born in Tarsus to Roman Citizens. Paul dies in Rome as a Roman Citizen. Saul hid his Roman Citizenship, afraid of any association with the oppressors of his people. Paul claims his Roman Citizenship, convinced that the oppressors need the Gospel just as badly as the oppressed. So Paul becomes the freest man to wear chains, weathering storms and shipwrecks on his way into the heart of the people who hated him. Thus, Paul the Roman, Pharisee of Pharisees, proclaims the Gospel of Christ to the Emperor of Rome. And on a chopping block outside of the capital, the martyr Paul rejoins the martyr Stephen in the stream of Christ. Like Stephen, Paul is vindicated. Like Stephen, Paul is reborn in his once-enemies. Three decades later, the unthinkable happens: Christ rises in Rome from the seed of Paul‘s blood. Jove lies shattered on the ground as the Chi-Rho is lifted high. Paul triumphs over his childhood tormentors by loving them. In his weakness, Paul found his true strength. The gentile with a tan became the second most influential Jew of the last two millennia.

Ecclesiastes teaches that there is nothing new under the sun. Culture and identity, community and belonging are issues in 21st century America as much as they were in 1st century Judea. I do not think that Paul’s story is entirely unique. I have seen it happen, in bigger and smaller versions, in versions more and less complete. But as Aslan reminds Shasta, ’I am not telling you their story. I am telling you your story.’ So I will tell you mine.

‘Loser.’ That was what they called me. So I learned to succeed. And I succeeded with a vengeance. I disproved them time and again, until one day I had racked up so many successes that no one would ever dare make the accusation again. No one except myself. So I fought on with mad rage, proving something to the universe. I think they called it ambition. I think they were wrong. I think it’s called fear.

I expected to find a home at Grad School. I think I expected too much. I thought that in the self-proclaimed intellectual Mecca of the country, I would find people who understood what it was to be hated for being different. I was half right. They understood what it was to be hated. And they decided I looked a lot like the people doing the hating. Ironically, I learned to blend in so well that I became indifferentiable from my once-persecutors. ‘Oppressor’ completed the accusation. Caught in the void between cultures, I sided with the outcasts. If they hated me for being a warrior, then what a warrior I would be. So upon leaving, I set myself to winning the respect of my people while defying my interlocutors. I succeeded.

But I didn’t find an answer. Perhaps we are afflicted with Midas’ curse. We seek success, and we find it. But we never find what we’re looking for. Our need for success steals the life from our blessings. So I continued to amass joyless victories. And then I received a blessing I would never have asked for. I received failure.

I don’t think I would have opened the blessing, had I known what it was. Knowing this, God wrapped the blessing in everything I had ever wanted. Time and again, I would seek success. I fought with all my heart for a victory. But time and again I would find only defeat. And I would fight all the harder and lose all the harder. The last defeat is the only one I am proud of. In that defeat, I lost honestly, I lost before God, and I lost in the center of His will. And in that defeat, I found something I did not expect. I found brokenness.

It is amazing how much God can heal in the course of a year. Broken of success, I find that I now actually enjoy success. Now that I don’t have to succeed, I find that I want to succeed. Now that I have nothing to prove, I find that I actually value the many blessings I have been given. And I find that I have been blessed in ways that I would never have been able to understand.

Jesus calls the poor and the persecuted blessed. I would never have understood how before. It makes perfect sense, though. Christ was God in the flesh. Yet He chose to be a carpenter. The apostles were not much to speak of. Yet they unintentionally conquered the greatest empire this world has known. God has used the foolish things of this world time and again to humble the wise. He does not use pretensions of wisdom.

I hated being an outcast. I hated being a loser. But I do not anymore. I embrace the accusation. In my weakness, He makes me strong. And how many times have the outcasts won? How many times have the weak overthrown the strong? So for all the Frodos, the Skywalkers, and the Galileans, this is now my prayer. ‘For my inheritance, give me the poor, the sick and the weak.’

Perhaps weakness is such a great gift that it needs to be unlocked first. Perhaps it is a gift so beautiful that you must be taught to use it lest you hurt yourself. The most beautiful gifts are this way. And so before we can wield it, God must teach us His accounting of things. Blessed are the poor, the sick and the weak. The world hates us for our differences, but God loves us for them. This is redemption‘s deep magic. Yield your insecurities to Him and let Him astonish you. Perhaps His most precious artistry is hidden in the very things you are trying to hide. Perhaps you are a Paul.

I have to admit to plagiarizing the title from Joy Davidman Lewis’ ‘Smoke on the Mountain.’ My conscience thus clear, let’s get started.

‘A personal relationship with Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior.’ Carried on horseback by circuit riders a century ago, projected by Power-Point by Campus Crusade today, this simplest of creeds stands as the very foundation of Evangelical Christianity. Easily understood and easily shared, this phrase has introduced countless men and women to the Love of their lives. It is the merest of Christianities, ideal for introducing one individual to the person of Jesus Christ. There is, of course, a slight snag. You see, when a bunch of individuals have personal relationships with Christ, they start to have a corporate relationship with Christ too. A perspective optimized to win individual souls to Christ may find itself struggling with the intricacies of Christians trying to live in community. So Evangelicals’ greatest strength is also our greatest weakness; what we gain in Evangelism, we lose in Ecclesiology. And culture is more an Ecclesial question than one of Evangelism.

People and Peoples.

‘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.’
- Aurora Levins-Morales, ‘Child of the Americas.’

A Puerto-Rican Jew born in America, this poet speaks of being a hundred things all at once. She partakes in many identities, yet she cannot be entirely captured by any of them. In this simple truth, she speaks for all of us. Each of us encompass many things, but we are rarely encompassed by any one of them. I exist on many levels. I am a man. I am an American. I am a soldier. I am a human being. I am a hundred things. Some are insignificant. I am tall. Some are central. I am a son of I AM. All these things are true of me, and all at once. I am all of them together. Yet, even together, they are not all of me. I am a member of many communities, but I must first exist in order to exist in any communities. So there must be levels of existence.

Scripture confirms this conclusion. It is clear that God covenants with individuals, such as with Abraham (of course, that individual became a people in the course of that covenant.) God also covenants with nations, as the Old Testament unquestionably proves. And ultimately, He covenants with all of humanity. Genesis speaks to this, as does Revelation. Let us delineate our levels accordingly: individual, defined by the person themselves; corporate, the person in a community of culture; and universal, the person as a member of the human race. So now we have levels, but levels do not tell us what to do, nor where to start. For those answers, let’s turn to some wise council. With a Belfast accent.

C.S. Lewis, in his essay ‘Christianity and Culture,’ argues for the primacy of individuals vice cultures. (Please hold on the deconstructivist scalpels until you hear his argument. Or at least read ‘Bulverism’ first.) It has everything to do with permanence. A man lives, at most, eleven decades. A culture lives on anywhere from centuries to millennia. If this world is all that there is, then culture must logically be primary. Christianity, though, teaches that individuals live on forever. And if this is true, then the individual must be primary. It is St. Augustine, not Carthage, that goes to heaven. We must start at the person, and from there move to the culture and the universal. Even intuitively, this checks; many who are the first to point out the injustices perpetrated by humanity are the last to do anything about the injustices they perpetrate themselves. There are already enough demagogues who preach systemic ethics and practice little personal ethics. (Lewis again, ‘The Dangers of National Repentance.’) The plank in your own eye and all of that. Of course, the verse doesn’t stop there, and neither should we. ‘And then you can see clearly to remove the speck of dust from your brother’s eye.’ We are to work for social justice, but we must first pursue the justice that is closest and hardest, treating others as we would want to be treated. But I digress.

We must begin with the individual. But we cannot end there. St. Augustine goes to heaven, but he still goes as a Carthaginian. On some level, St. Augustine brings the best of Carthage (or Hippo) with him to heaven. Together with the other Carthaginian believers, they represent Carthage amongst every tribe and every tongue. There is a primacy of individuals, but it is not an exclusive primacy. We are all Ezekiel’s wheels within wheels. And salvation history plays out on every level upon which we exist.

Stories that you can’t read are just gibberish and music that you can’t understand is just noise. So we must learn to hear all the chords to understand the symphony. The individual may be the easiest to understand, as the boundaries of the identity are objectively definable and fixed in space and time. Individually, I am two hundred pounds of water and tissue. I can immediately identify where I begin and end. I can look at my outstretched fingertips and say ‘I go this far and no farther.’ My fingers are part of me. The keys upon which I am typing are not part of me. Like most people, I figured this one out before my first birthday and haven’t looked back. My identity as part of the universal is a bit more esoteric, but still one I feel as if I can nail down. Really, that one is pretty objective and fixed as well (generally only redefined in the ugliest of actions. Like Dred Scott. Or Roe.) My physiology and psyche are undeniably human. I think human thoughts and feel human feelings, and in doing so I am able to relate to other humans. Every cell of my body contains Adenine and Cytosine wrapped around each other in a uniquely human pattern, and all of those cells together are immediately recognizable to another person as a human being. While I may not exhaustively understand what it is to be myself individually or as a member of the universal, I can at least recognize the boundaries of those identities. I cannot say the same for my identity as a member of cultures. Corporate identity is written in grays, not in black and white, (even when it is defined as black or white.)

Cultural identities are the hardest for us to wrap our minds around, because it is the hardest to define. And this is why we have so many problems understanding each other: few of us even understand ourselves. Most cultural identities seem imposed on group members from within and without. You find yourself drafted without ever really being asked, people kind of assume your allegiances and run with the assumption. To try to make sense out of chaos, we write pasts-that-never-were that tell us who we are now and why. Unfortunately, we are fallen storytellers, and our stories reflect our fallenness. Many of our mythologies are simply fairy-tales to shield us from the scary complexity of the physics of a fallen world. We try to draw clear lines, generally where we are and always have been the righteous, the trespassed against, the ones-who-are-not-to-blame. And in our gerrymandered pasts, we forget the simple truth that for every time we have been hurt, we have hurt others. We live in a cascade of brokenness that reaches all the way back to the garden, and all of our identities are thus broken.

This is the challenge of cultures. There are a thousand fault-lines, and they change entirely based on context. The boundaries seem to always come down to some fuzzy definition along some mostly arbitrary distinction. The axis of the division is rarely objective, and the point of sundering along that axis is equally relative. It is who and what someone identifies with, and who and what others decide that someone should be identified with, and even those two things wrapped around each other. Americans, at least domestically, tend to see culture as an issue of race and ethnicity. But even that is hard to define… something that shows up conclusively in voting patterns cannot be defined concretely in any objective terms. There isn’t a critical concentration of melanin that predestines someone to think or act a certain way. Between contexts, the point of sundering changes; someone who is considered black in the United States may be considered white in Brazil. Economics is another fault-line, but there is no critical net worth which causes one to move from one group into another. In fact, the relationship may even be reversed at times: the nouveau riche may be ostracized from the rich-culture, while an old money blueblood, deeply in debt, may still retain their membership. Geography? It changes. The inextricably Irish Celts lived in the Carpathians in Alexander the Great’s day. Nobody’s really, truly indigenous anywhere on this side of the fall. Language? A third of the Knesset speaks Russian as their native tongue. Culture changes at every level: look at the rivalry between schools, and you will find that in each school there are punk rawkers, band geeks, jocks and preppies. Their fault-line is music, but where is the critical MP3 that moves you from one group to another? The military is almost an artificial ethnicity, almost impenetrable to an outsider, but just below the surface there are fault-lines between services: zoomies, grunts, squids and jarheads. There are always lines, but the lines are generally arbitrary. And even their gradations are relative.

There is, of course, one fault-line we haven’t discussed yet. Religion. The height of a tree has much to do with the soil in which it is planted. Plant a tree in shallow, sandy soil, and its growth will forever be stunted. Plant a tree in deep, rich soil, and its branches will reach the sky. There are few soils deeper than religion. (It can be a rocky soil as well.) It should not surprise us, then, that the identities that grow from that soil are thick and strong. I think of Orthodox churches in America. Almost invariably, next to any round-domed church, there is a cultural center of the corresponding people group. Be it Greeks, Ukrainians, or Armenians, culture is built upon a bedrock of religion. This is, of course, not confined to our Orthodox brethren. For Irish and Italian immigrants, Catholic churches served as a fortress to the beleaguered identity. And for Korean immigrants, Evangelical churches with services in Hangul served as a touchstone for identity. Synagogues have been the heart of Jewish Diaspora culture for two millennia; throughout a sixth of the world, Muezzinin broadcast culture from Minarets with their calls to noontime prayers. And lest we think ourselves immune, the ATL would be hardly recognizable without the hundreds of churches (and thousands of billboard advertisements.) I can hardly imagine a Colorado Springs without Focus on the Family, New Life Church or Glen Eyrie. There is undeniably an American Christian-ese culture, a unique religion-based identity that is not necessarily synonymous with the Christian faith. This is not a bad thing. Challenges are not necessarily bad. But they are challenges.

Growing up Christian-ese. It is remarkably easy to mistake your expression of something for a universal expression of that same thing. Especially when you haven’t encountered any different expressions of that thing. I think of Lucy Pevensee’s first meeting with Tumnus the Fawn in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Assuming that a handshake is a universal expression of greeting, she offers him her hand. And he stands there perplexed. Tumnus, of course, was well acquainted with the concept of greeting. He just didn’t see any reason that grabbing someone’s hand should have anything to do with it. Conversely, Lucy probably would have never realized the difference between a handshake and a greeting were it not for the fawn’s puzzled response. Fortunately, Lucy and Tumnus both find the goodwill and trust to understand each others’ expressions of greeting, and they are able to move from there into friendship (except for the slight complication of Tumnus kidnapping Lucy to deliver her to certain death at the hands of the White Witch. But that works itself out.)

In childhood, all the dichotomies are pretty straightforward. You go to church, church is good. Jesus is good. Jesus is associated with church. And church looks a certain way, meets at a certain time, and plays a certain type of music. You just assume these things are synonymous, because you don’t really see anything to challenge those assumptions. Truth is coherent, and A equals B equals C. Automatically, you start to build a framework for understanding your world. As you leave the comfort of the familiar, you find yourself in the middle of a complicated, chaotic universe. In the midst of that chaos, the structures do exactly what they are designed to do: bring order out of chaos. So we come back to our dichotomies. Christians talk a certain way, using words like ‘youth group,’ ‘saved,’ and ‘praise music.’ People who don’t talk that way aren’t Christians. So when you meet the kid who calls himself Catholic, you aren’t surprised to find that he doesn’t talk much about Jesus. Nor are you surprised that he spends his weekends getting drunk. Of course, you also probably don’t notice the other kid who wears a crucifix, the shy one who quietly prays every day before eating his school lunch. And until someone drives a eighteen-wheeler through your assumptions, you probably won’t even realize you have them. (In academic-ese, I think its called disturbing frameworks. I like the Big Rig picture better.)

Mine was nowhere near so dramatic. In college, I took a fascinating class on the History of Christianity. Though the subject matter was interesting, the most memorable aspect of the class was the teacher. If you’ve ever heard a pilot talk about their aircraft, it is something like a parent talking about their kid. They know all the facts, all the numbers, but it is deeper than that. It’s almost like the aircraft is a part of them. And this is how this man taught that class. He certainly knew the issues, the numbers and places, but it was deeper. It was like he was talking about his family. Really, nothing up to this point would have been particularly surprising… there were a good number of Christian professors at my college. But this professor happened to be a Lebanese Eastern Rite Catholic (and a Pave Low driver to boot.) Talking to him after nearly every class, I came to one inescapable conclusion. It wasn’t any specific doctrinal point, but he more than knew what he was talking about. Nor was it any Christian catchphrase. He didn’t really use any of those. But unmistakably, undeniably, this man loved the same Jesus that I loved. This was obviously inconvenient for my framework. Looking back, I was a bit like Lucy, realizing that there is a difference between a handshake and a greeting. A realization grew from between the cracks in my framework: Evangelical religiosity isn’t the same thing as knowing Jesus.

Denis de Rougemount tells us that love ceases to be a devil when it ceases to be a god. The same is true of cultures. There are a lot of good things about Evangelical culture. I deeply appreciate the passion in praise music, the way that we emphasize intimacy with God, the simplicity of our message. But that culture cannot be a god. It would, of course, not be a novel mistake. The Pharisees were given a perfect law upon which to build a perfect culture. Their mistake was when they made that law into a god; it was then they became devils. At the very heart of idolatry is the idea of a controllable god. And so it was there: the Sanhedrin pulled the levers and cables behind the image of the law they had constructed. It all came down to control, to pride. If they had ever found the humility to bow before the Lawgiver, they would have found Him far greater than the Wizard of Oz they had fashioned. We are no different.

When people want to hurt each other, they generally fashion some plowshare from their identity into a sword. Intellect, power and wit are all readily sharpened. And sometimes, they actually look you in the eye as they draw swords. When Christians want to be vicious to each other, we rarely allow ourselves the frankness of the profane. We usually invoke some sort of divine license. We turn the weapons of our churches, our authority and our theology against each other when we want to draw blood. Consider how many PKs ran and never looked back. Consider how many petty disagreements between elders have shattered churches. Consider how many unreached people we have turned off with our inability to be vulnerable and real. Our wars of pride have created more casualties than we care to consider.

Pride is the death of all things. It is at the heart of all discord, at the heart of every sundering. We are all undoubtedly too familiar with the ugliness of individual pride. And we should be familiar with the universal pride of humanity, blaming God for all the things that are our fault, refusing to thank Him for all the privileges we enjoy. That pride will get uglier before it is finally broken. (I hope not to be around for that chapter of history.) But there is a pride in cultures as well. Circumcision was an honor God gave to His people. It was intended to be an external expression of a circumcision of the heart. But without that true circumcision, the physical expression is absolutely worthless. Without an obedient heart, circumcision no more makes me a son of Abraham than an appendectomy makes me a son of Buddha. When circumcision became a god, it became a devil; those who worship it became, in Paul’s words, mutilators of the flesh. The Pharisees prided themselves on being children of Abraham. But Abraham was a child of God. When they got those two things out of order, they lost both. Their pride in the trappings of Abraham sundered them from Abraham and God. It is not merely an Old Testament problem. Pride has sundered the church at thousand times. A millennium ago, Eastern and Western Christians decided that they cared more about being Eastern or Western than they cared about being Christians. Fighting over the trappings of Peter, they abandoned both Peter and the God he loved. In the same way, our pride in the trappings of Jonathan Edwards sunders us from both that great saint and his God.

Culture becomes a devil when it becomes a god. But when it loses both the divine and diabolical, it becomes what it was originally intended to be: a gift. All identity is given to us as a gift, intended to adorn our reflection of Christ. Therefore, it only can fall into place when placed beneath our identity in Christ. The Church is simply many identities in Christ gathered together in fellowship. In that fellowship, there is transcendence, but the rule still holds. Individually and corporately, our identities are only beautiful when they reflect Him.

Churches vs. the Church. Circumcision does not a Jew make. But it certainly does make one easier to identify (at least in the first century equivalent of gym class.) Likewise, a Jesus Fish does not a Christian make. But it definitely makes one easier to spot in traffic. We’ll skip the whole anthropology discussion on ritual, totems and the like, but suffice it to say that every culture finds their own way to express the deep magic. The ritual deepens the experience of the deep magic, bathing it in the richness of space and time. Still, the magic and the ritual are not the same. Experience the magic outside the ritual, and you may miss out on some of the fullness, but try to practice the ritual outside of the magic and you will miss out on the entirety of both. Better to be a uncircumcised God-fearing Greek than to be a Pharisee of Pharisees and not know Him at all. Of course, better still to be a Pharisee of Pharisees and be head over heels in love with Him.

Theologians speak of a mystical communion amongst believers, a community between Christians that transcends the tangible. There is a deep magic that transforms a group of strangers infinitely estranged in their depravity into brothers and sisters bound together by the blood of Christ. As Abraham’s obedience is manifested in circumcision, this mystical communion between Christians is manifested in the visible church. There is a very real and very important dispute over whether that manifestation is rightly expressed in organic spontaneity or in sacramental hierarchy. Either way, though, that manifestation is undeniably real, made up of real people with real issues and real preferences. Complete with all the problems those things bring; redeemed people are still people.

Paul the Christian doesn’t look that much different from Saul the Pharisee (unless he somehow became taller falling off his horse.) After his conversion, he probably still liked the same kinds of foods and wore the same kind of tunic. He probably had much of the same personality quirks, as Barnabas clearly discovered. But something happens to Saul on the road to Damascus when he becomes Paul the Apostle. In the same way, something happens to a crowd of Ephesians when they become the Church in Ephesus. In the mystery of redemption, God gives us new names. Saul becomes Paul, a man becomes a Christian, a crowd becomes a Church. We live between our two names, the one that is passing away, and the one that awaits us. And in this is a tension.

I am a Christian, yet Christianity is not me. I am captured by Christ, He is not captured by me. When I get these things out of order, I become an idolater. Here is the paradox of the two names: Pursue the Name of Christ, and you will find your own name. Pursue your own name, and you will find neither. The same is true of cultures. There is undoubtedly an American Christianity, but Christianity is not American. Nor Roman. Humanity was created in the Image of God. We were made to be mirrors. Looking in a mirror, you focus on the image a mirror reflects, not the mirror itself. Focusing on the mirror itself, you only see smudges and cracks, the things that are least mirror-like about it. Focusing on the reflected image, you see both the mirror itself and the reflection. Still, even if you focus on the right Image, you have to clean off the smudges from time to time.

Remember back to the eighteen-wheeler disturbing our frameworks. The impulse to change usually starts with the still, small voice. Of course, if you don’t listen to that voice, it usually gets louder. We’re back to the tension… the old name tenaciously resisting change, the new name continuing its inexorable conquest. Paul tells us about the war between the old man and the new. The better angels of our natures, the speech goes. How telling that speech was written while this nation was at war with itself. What is true within each of us is true of all of us together. A culture sometimes follows the whispers of its collective conscience. More often than not, though, it takes men with megaphones. Often, those men are the ones who hear the whispers the loudest.

I think of the old monastics. Departing from the distractions of society, they tuned their ears to that whisper. They were the artillery, preserving society with their prayers from far behind the front lines. In the same way, the Old Testament prophets went into the wilderness to hear the words they would shout in the streets. In many ways, American Evangelicals live in the legacy of the Puritans. They, too, sought to preserve their church by retreating into the wilderness. When the holiness of their society was threatened, they withdrew into cities on a hill. These cities were intended to shine as examples of Godly society, inspiring the larger society back to holiness. Over the course of four centuries, Evangelicals have in this way maintained doctrine in the absence of a centralized decision-making body. There is a certain secessionist impulse to it, but it is not necessarily schismatic. (And even when it is, remember that the seditious colonists came back across the ocean two centuries later to save Britannia in her hour of greatest need. Catholics and Evangelicals owe more to each other than either side cares to admit.) To be holy is to be set apart. So from Plymouth Rock to L’Abri, we have set ourselves apart to find holiness.

A nation set apart. It is not a new idea in Salvation History. God calls Abram out of Iraq to father a great nation in a strange land. The Chosen People Israel, a holy nation built upon the Holy Law. The Law of Love completes the chord. God calls His chosen from all peoples, setting them apart as His own. Yet, even a people set apart sometimes need to be called back. This is the function of the prophets. They are set apart themselves to call their people back, sacrificing their own comfort to disturb the comfortable culture of their people. Elijah goes into the waterless wastes and John feasts on locusts and honey in the wilderness. But many who depart into silence come back with loudspeakers. So Elijah meets the prophets of Baal with words of fire, and Athanasius meets the acolytes of Arius with words no less fiery. The king Josiah rejoicing in his rediscovery of the Scriptures, calls his people back to the simplicity of God‘s intimacy. Martin Luther, rediscovering the Scriptures himself, chooses to confront the comfortably corrupt churchian culture of his day. There will always be those who challenge the culture of the church. We need to make room for them.

There will always be the Joseph Smiths, as well. Pelagius, Sun Myung Moon, any of a hundred names, there will always be prophets of newer, better Christianities. Without the pesky Christ part. I can’t imagine a man saying to his siblings, ’we all have different conceptions of who our father really is, but the only thing that really matters is that we all have faith in him.’ Family is not a esoteric concept. A man cannot be the son of many fathers. In the same way, as we enter into fellowship within the church we must ensure that we have the same Father, that we love the same Jesus. This is the function of the creeds. A line drawn with the blood of Christ, the creeds stake out the bounds of His family. Still, within a family, each child has a unique and distinctive relationship with their father.

So we return to churches and churchianities. The Church invisible, the mystical communion of believers, becomes manifest when those believers gather together in fellowship. They become the visible churches, and they are all as unique as the believers that comprise them. The Church in Corinth is made of Corinthians, and it has a undeniably Corinthian flavor. But they are not just Corinthians… they are Christian Corinthians. They have become a sub-culture. Accordingly, over time they will find ways to express that distinction, be it in rituals, practices, or customs. Like circumcision, these things are gifts to the local believers, physical expressions of the deep truths of their faith. Together, these become Corinthian churchianity, the culture built up around a local manifestation of the Christian religion.

Oops. We just said the r-word. What about ‘not a religion but a relationship?’ One word may mean two entirely different things to two different people. That word certainly does. We Evangelicals are ever distrustful of religiosity. Appropriately so, considering many of our backgrounds. For many of us, all we ever knew of religion was a suffocating set of spare rituals (props to Cross Movement) that gets in the way of knowing Jesus. It should not be surprising that we don’t look back on it fondly after we’ve actually met Him. To us, religion is the picture of the Tower of Babel: man trying to climb to divinity through his own strength and wit. A bunch of men make up rules, and they put them together into a religion, which in turn gives birth to a god. Like any idolatry, that god simply allows men to worship themselves. They end up right back where they started: nowhere. We don’t like religion. Given our definition of religion, we shouldn’t.

Ours is not the only definition, though. Consider a married couple. The way the story’s supposed to go, they meet, they fall in love, they get married, and they build a life together. If you believe the movies, the best parts are the ones leading up to the ‘ever after.’ If you ask an actual couple, though, they will most likely tell you that the most challenging and rewarding parts of their relationship were after that point. Who can forget Aragorn and Arwen’s reunion atop Gondor? But a reunion does not make a marriage. I’m sure that ten years hence they would have long since found more consistent ways to enjoy their relationship. Perhaps they read together before they go to bed, perhaps a visit back to Rivendell from time to time. Certain things become important over time as you build a relationship. This is just as true in our relationship with God, individually and corporately. You fall in love with God, you enter into relationship with him, and over time you learn to express that relationship in consistent ways. This is true religion. It is a third-order thing: the Church universal manifests in the local church, which in turn manifests their fellowship with these churchianities. And each church’s churchianities are as different as just as each couple’s love rituals.

It all comes back to Liberty in Christ. I think back to the Old Law. You did not adapt God to your culture, you adapted your culture to God. The way you did so was inscribed quite inflexibly on stone tablets. You don’t get to vote on it. If you love God, you will follow the Torah, and the Torah tells you not to eat pork. And, by the way, the Torah is written in Hebrew. So if you really want to understand God, you should learn Hebrew. And you cant understand a language without understanding its culture, so you really should learn Hebrew culture while you‘re at it. I just don‘t see the Sanhedrin sponsoring an Old Testament version of Wycliffe (Septuagint aside, of course.)

When the New Law comes, Jesus changes everything. The Jewish Carpenter Y’Shua Ben-Yosef Min Natz’rati more than understood the Torah in its linguistic and cultural context. The Word completed the words of Moses, giving them to every tribe and every tongue. Jesus showed up in one culture to redeem all cultures. Y’Shua, Jesus, Isus, Iesu, Jésuchristo, Yesua, or Isa, each Name is equally beautiful. As the sheet unfolds in Peter’s dream, the seed planted with the Court of the Gentiles bursts into full bloom. Every person and every culture is invited to the wedding supper of the Lamb just as they are. The invitation reads: ‘Come in your rags, and I will give you royal robes. Come by grace, through faith, and I will transform you. Come as Jews and Greeks, mystics and philosophers, fishermen and lawyers, and I will show you who you are in Me.’

It is for freedom that He has set us free, and He sets us free to pursue Him. Redemption’s song is free-form, a hundred different harmonies dancing around one Melody. He sets us free to write it. Augustine tells us to have charity and do as we will. Seek Him first, and He will guide your steps. So eat pork or don’t eat pork. Consume food sacrificed to idols or don’t. Drink or abstain from drinking. But whatever you do, do it for the glory of God. So one group of Christians partakes in the fruit of the vine, as Christ did at Cana. Another group of Christians, seeing only drunkenness and debauchery around them, chooses to abstain. Praise God. Both are right. A catacomb Christian is baptized by immersion in the Jordan River. A medieval Christian is sprinkled as he proclaims his allegiance to the cross. And a twenty-first century believer tells the world that he loves Jesus in the waters of Destin beach. Praise God for the gift of Baptism. Trust Him to know the hearts of those who practice it.

Liberty in Christ gives us the freedom to love God in any cultural context. So the first-century Christian wife wears a headscarf and lives in fidelity. And the modern Christian wife wears a wedding ring and lives in fidelity. God, our Lover, gifts each of us with special times and places with Him. A song, a story, a sunset, whatever it is He gives it to us to express intimacy. ‘This is this place I have made just for you.’ He does the same with churches. Circumcision to the people who would best understand it. Priests that choose to become like Paul. Praise music with electric guitars and drums. These are all gifts, specifically tailored to who we are culturally in Him. We cannot confuse these gifts with necessities. A first-century Syrian church service should look different from an contemporary suburban American church. Identity in Christ comes in many colors.

Created Equal vs. Actually Equivalent. There is a not insignificant counterpoint to all this multi-culti stuff. In the ancient world, people went to war with whatever weapons were at hand. One man shows up with a mace, another with a broadsword, a third with a dagger. Inevitably, any formation disintegrated into a brawl upon first contact with an enemy. Alexander the Great changed all of that. Standardizing the weapons of the Macedonian army, he formed his men into Phalanxes. Each man’s shield would interlock with the next, and the formation would move as one. Wave after wave of enemies would break upon their spears like water upon rocks. Perhaps we should do the same. Use one Bible translation. One language. One liturgy. Create a culture-neutral Christianity and rid ourselves of the problems of cultures. (Unfortunately, a culture-neutral Christianity would have to be made up of culture-neutral people, and I don’t know any.)

Like anything else, the Phalanx was eventually surpassed. It was overcome by a diversity of weaponry, the very thing it initially overcame. Heavy cavalry could easily outflank the monolithic formation, cracking it open. Infantry would then charge into the formation and tear it apart. Combined arms tactics were born. Pikemen, horsemen, archers, swordsmen, and musketeers, no army would ever again exclusively use one weapon. Still, there is all the difference in the world between a integrated medieval force and an archaic band of brawlers. Each pikeman moves as one with the other pikemen, each archer shoots as one with the other archers, each cavalryman charges alongside the rest of the cavalry. The unity of expression within each branch is matched by a unity of purpose amongst the entire army. The commanding general matches the unique strengths of each group against the weaknesses of their enemy. God has made us in diversity for a reason. The fisherman, the canon lawyer, and the Greek, the Synoptic Gospels are richer for being told from different perspectives.

There is an opposite and complimentary mistake. If culture is such a great thing, then all churchianties must be equally valid. Cultural relativism in a Christian guise, complete with all the same errors. Here’s a simple mathematical truth: whatever is relative is also absolute. Imagine two points on a graph. They are a certain relative distance from each other. Yet both are a fixed absolute distance from the origin.
In the same way, there are valid and necessary critiques of cultures. You just need to make sure you’re starting at the Origin when you make them.

It is a question of categories. Consider a forty year old man versus a four year old child. They are equal in terms of their humanity. Both are undeniably human, and over the course of their lives, both will achieve an equality in totality. But they are not equal right now. So the forty year old can vote and the four year old can’t. Appropriately so; I shudder to think of Teletubbies in Congress. When the forty year old was a child, he couldn’t vote either. When the child becomes forty year old, he will most likely continue to exclude four year olds from the body politic. The system’s justice is in the equality of totalities: equity within categories, not equality between categories. (For all you academics out there, I still don’t like Rawls. Here‘s why.)

Morality is a tough question in a fallen world. Humanity lives in depravity. The perfect light of God’s perfect law has long since been dimmed in our hearts. Within or between categories, there is no guarantee that someone with a corrupt sense of justice will ever accept a just rule as such. In order to anchor any system of morality, we must appeal to a perfect sense of justice. None of us have it. Such justice has to come down from Sinai in the hands of Moses. Or from heaven in the arms of Mary.

The Word of Life gives us words to live by. The Creator is the Lawgiver. He gives us every good and perfect gift, and He gives us the Law. So the Law is perfect, for a Perfect Creator creates in perfection. It is we who fall short. Even here is the question of categories and individuals. Humanity was created to be perfect, yet every son of Adam and every daughter of Eve chooses to fall short of that perfection. Still, even amongst sinners there are gradations. Both Adolf Hitler and John Paul the Second were carefully crafted in the womb by a loving Creator. Only a fool would argue for any actual equivalency between the two. Hitler stands as a testament to the magnitude of the fall. John Paul II stands as a testament to the redemptive power of Christ. Both are sinners, but only one chose grace. They are both creations, but only one was a new creation.

In the same way, each culture is created for perfection, and each falls short of it. In terms of categories, every culture is equivalent. Each is entirely fallen and each is completely redeemable. I imagine that a perfectly redeemed Aztec culture would have brought something beautiful and irreplaceable to the Kingdom, just as the perfectly redeemed Jewish culture of prophecy. But the streets of Tenochtitlan, wet with the heart-blood of sacrificed slaves, are in no way the same as the streets of the City of David, where freed slaves dance in the Year of Jubilee. There are distinctions within categories, and individual cultures in actual terms can be better or worse.

The same is true for Christian cultures. Consider the Book of Revelation. Each church is called to perfection, each church falls short. Each is redeemed by the Blood of Christ. Nonetheless, the Angel has a very different message for each of them. One is commended for their faith, another chastised for leaving their first love. Though we all need His grace, we should strive for His perfection. The culture of corruption and indulgences is a far cry from the catacomb churches of the first century. There are better and worse churchianties. We should seek the better.

Salt and Light. We return to Schaeffer’s immemorial question: how, then, should we live? Perhaps the answer is not as hard as we make it. At the very least, we should know Whom to ask. ‘You are the light of the world.’ In the days of the Apostles, there were Gentiles who chose to draw near to the culture of Judaism. Perhaps the Justice of the Law, perhaps the passion of the Psalms, perhaps the mercy of the Sacrifices, something drew these God-Fearing Greeks to the temple. There was light in the corporate life of those who dwelt in the old sacraments, and that light drew these men to God. The eighth chapter of Matthew tells of a Centurion who cared greatly for the Synagogue. Without knowledge of Jewish customs, I doubt he would have sought out a young Jewish street preacher to heal his servant. The culture of Messiah prepared him to understand and embrace Messiah. A culture cannot introduce you to Christ. But it can certainly can prepare you to meet Him.

‘A city on a hill cannot be hidden. In the same way, no man takes a light and puts it under a bushel. Instead, he puts it on its stand, and it gives light to the whole house.’ By its very definition, a city on a hill is set apart from the rest of the world. But a city is not a fortress. A city invites people in, while a fortress keeps people out. Culture has always kept people out as well as in. It has always been the invisible wall around communities. Walls are not always bad. Ancient cities built walls to guard against marauders and thieves. We face marauding neo-orthodoxies and thieving political agendas. Still, the walls of a city have many doors, while a fortress has only a very few. The doors of a city are closed only in extreme circumstances, while the gates of a fortress are rarely open. We cannot hide our city behind ever deepening fortifications. The walls of our churchianities must have many doors.

‘In the same way let your light shine before men, that they will see your good works and praise your Father in Heaven.’ As Evangelicals, we are well aware of the relationship between our walk and our witness. We know that we may be the only Jesus that many of our friends will ever see, and the way we live may either draw them to Him or turn them off forever. We are certainly called to be a light to the darkness. We are also called to be a light to other lights. The verse says ‘let your light shine before men,’ not just ‘before the world’ or ‘before the unreached.’ Our walk is no less a witness to the Body as it is to the world. Righteousness begets righteousness, and our righteousness strengthens our brothers and sisters. Righteousness begets reconciliation as well, for children who resemble their Father also look like each other. Thus, the best way to work for unity in the Body is for each part to chase hard after God. Light is light, regardless of hue. The brighter we shine, the easier it will be for us to recognize each other.

Christ’s command applies to all of us, not just each of us. Our corporate witness is just as important as our individual witness. ‘They will know we are Christians by our love,’ the song goes. Do they? How can a family that hates each other preach love to the world? ‘And if you greet only your brothers, how are you different from anyone else? Even the pagans do that…’ If we cannot achieve even this minimal level of human loyalty, how can we possibly love those who hate us or pray for those who persecute us? We have to start realizing we’re family. Brothers are not brothers because they see eye to eye, nor because they do things the same way. They are brothers solely because they have the same Father. The blood of Christ flows through all of our veins, and binds us together. We would do well to remember that. We’ve spilled far too much of that Most Precious Blood opening each other’s veins in our intramural vendettas already.

Neither one person nor one culture can hope to encompass all of Elohim‘s song. We must learn to reconcile all of our different movements within His symphony. We must sharpen each other, as iron sharpens iron, inspiring each other toward holiness. And we must learn not to break fellowship, even as He stretches us. It is a question of wineskins. Older vintages may be better, but new wine cannot be put into old wineskins. The new wine ages as the old wine is consumed. Both the new and old wines are good wine, for all bad wine is thrown out into the street. Praise God that there are many kinds of good wine. May we find joy in all of them.

E Pluribus Plurum. (The Church in multiculturalism.) ‘The Church in Ephesus.’ It sounds pretty straightforward. If you are a Christian in Ephesus, you are part of the Church in Ephesus. I mean, most of the people in Ephesus understood what it meant to be an Ephesian. They spoke the language, lived the culture, took part in the collective economic life of the town. But what if you didn’t? What of a Centurion from Cordova who comes to Christ? He speaks a soldier’s Latin (one that would eventually become Spanish,) his culture is Roman, and his paycheck comes from Caesar. Does he belong to the Church in Ephesus? What of a believing merchant from Thessalonica, just passing through on his way to Antioch? He is undoubtedly Thessalonian: is he not of the Church in Thessalonica? How many days would he have to live in Ephesus before his church membership changed? Perhaps he himself becomes the Church in Thessalonica in Ephesus. Perhaps it is not as straightforward as it sounds.

I don’t have any good answers. I just don’t think it should be that big a problem. Diaspora culture complicates things, certainly. But we must remember that Christianity itself is a Diaspora culture, a remnant born out of the Synagogues of Jewish Diaspora culture. Now we have the echoes of the colonial experience, the tidal wave of globalization, and economies sundered by technology into a hundred professional sub-cultures. So now we have a thousand diasporas. We are Black, White, Asian, Latino, HAPA, Arabs, Armenian, Greek, Jewish, upper-class, middle-class, lower-class, Westerners, Southerners, Northerners, IT professionals, professors, plumbers and soldiers, and a thousand other categories. Where does one church begin and another end? It would take a smarter man than I to draw those lines. I just don’t think we have to. Let the lines happen on their own. We just need to remember that we are family in His Blood.

Dr. Martin Luther King once said that it was a shame that Sunday morning was the most segregated time of the week in America. This begs a huge question: what do we do about it? One on hand, we could take the ostrich approach. Ignore it, hope it goes away. We’ll all just be the same kind of Christians (which will incidentally, given weighted averages and all, look a lot like the current majority Christians.) On the other hand, we could make culture a central focus of each ministry, where racial reconciliation seminars replace discipleship and evangelism at every Christian conference. The first answer is foolish, for race was given to us as irrevocably as any other gift of God. The second answer is equally foolish, for when one gift starts to displace all others, it begins to become an idol. What, then, is the third answer? Run as hard as you can after God, and then look beside you for someone running just as hard after Him (yes, kids, its not just for spouse-finding anymore.) Each church should pursue God’s best with all of their heart. And they should keep their eyes open for others who are doing likewise. Unity in the Body must start with Unity in the Spirit.

What does this look like? I’m not quite sure. I just think we could afford to show each other a little more grace. Going back to our Early Church Example, I could imagine a church plant from Rome to the Imperial administrators in Damascus. I would imagine that church would look a lot more Roman than the rest of the Syrian Church. I don’t see why this should be a problem, provided they didn’t break fellowship with the rest of the believers in Syria. So if InterVarsity wants to have LaFe, then praise God. And if the Southern Baptists want to keep a geographical region in their name, then praise God. If the a cop’s kid experiences the presence of God through loud music, simple chords and straightforward messages, then praise God. And if a genuflecting Northeasterner experiences His presence through an ancient liturgy with an intricate homily, then praise God. Praise music and the Eucharist were both given as gifts from God. We would be better served by rejoicing in both than by arguing over which one is better. We should break bread, not break fellowship.

Perhaps this is itself an answer. A hundred Diaspora churches, all in fellowship. A hundred churches, each so in love with God that one cannot tell where one ends and the next begins. A place where the Assemblies of God pray alongside the Armenian Orthodox, where Jesuits and military Chaplains break bread together, where the Veritas Forum and Focus on the Family rejoice in each other’s successes. We have always had our tales of two cities. Rome and Constantinople, London or Avignon, now it is Cambridge and Colorado Springs. We have forgotten that we are all in Diaspora. Our homeland is neither Colorado nor Massachusetts nor Italy nor anywhere else in this world. Our homeland was Eden. Our Lord has promised to bring us back home. Until then we are refugees.

There are differences between us. There always have been. There always will be. And there are supposed to be. Still, there is a tension between us. Only trust can bridge that gap. I understand in no uncertain terms that a Christian academic might have difficulty seeing how a Christian soldier could in good faith head into Iraq. And I understand in no uncertain terms how a Christian soldier might have difficulty seeing how a Christian academic could in good faith advocate divestiture from Israel. Perhaps if we started with trust, we might get somewhere. I suppose things were simpler when the household of Abraham was a hereditary family. Now, Father Abraham has many sons, and most of them are adopted. This is the challenge of the New Law: believers from every tribe and every tongue must together become one nation.

We have a long way to go. We need to at least know where to start. There may be a clash of cultures, but I’ve never met a culture. I’ve only met people. In the same way, Heaven will have every tribe and every tongue, yet heaven is not populated by tribes nor tongues, but by people. So we must start with people. We must encounter each others first as brothers and sisters in Christ. He must be the foundation, and we must build with the mortar of fellowship. When we begin to understand each other’s love for Jesus, we will build the trust to deal with these larger issues. Every reconciliation between groups starts with a thousand reconciliations between people. We have to start by realizing we’re family.

Perhaps this was the ultimate irony: the academics gave me a degree that equipped me to kill many people before I had killed my first man as a soldier. I am on some level grateful that I did the latter before being confronted with the former. With two security studies degrees, I could have easily been in a position where the ‘send’ button on my email would have been a live trigger. Black ink is much easier to stomach than red blood, so we spill it far more readily. I do not doubt that there are times to spill both, and by virtue of my calling I am willing to do so. But I am glad that I saw it first in red. In the International Security class on op-plans and strategy memos, they don’t show you the man lying in a pool of his own blood, fading on Infrared as it cools.

Nor should they. Starched suits should not be splattered with blood. The decision room is not the place for reflections on the horrors of the fall, lest those horrors be magnified through inaction. Reason must trump the fires of emotion, lest we fear war too much and become slaves. But reason cannot abandon emotion entirely, lest we fear war too little and become monsters. George Orwell tell us that we sleep safe in our beds because rough men stand ready to do harm to those who would hurt us. But there must be less rough men who stand ready to unleash those men, fully understanding the consequences of doing so.

‘Nasty, brutish and short,’ I think it goes. Hobbes’ famous apologetic for the structures of civilization. Under the shelter of governance, we are kept safe from the cruelties of the natural world. It is no doubt true to some degree. But ‘civilized’ people are generally just more subtle in their nastiness to each other. Brutish urges still dominate ‘civilized’ society, even when watered-down for their cinema, theatrical and literary presentations. I wonder if the cumulative costs of our prolonged longevity do not end up costing us more life once you subtract the time spent in traffic. This is the world after the fall… different flavors of nasty, brutish and short. But there are oases. So you make life where you find it.

This was the most surprising thing, initially: life at war was just life. You think that it would be some sort of a drastic departure from ‘normal life.’ On one hand, the medieval poets lauding the honor and glory of it all. On the other hand, the Platoon and Apocalypse Now decrying the horror, the horror of it all. It wasn’t either, just more of the same. This is not to say that it is boring. Just that it wasn’t all that different. This didn’t make it any less significant. A Centurion of the house of Caesar, I now know what it means to be an agent of wrath. I will not forget. (For a more ‘intellectually satisfying’ discussion of wrath, please see the last post on wrath, or the evolution of that line of thought in the note at the end of this post.)

I had one constant prayer, repeated each night and each mission. That all the crews would return home safely, that we would accomplish the things we set out to do, that my enemies would seek mercy before they found justice. I thank God for answering this prayer many, many times. Because of that grace, I didn’t have to deal with killing for quite some time. When things would start to spin up, I would pray, ‘God, this ends how you want. I’m in Your hands.’ Mercifully, it ended without bloodshed many times. But it is war, after all. And at some point it didn’t.

The act of killing itself was not that difficult. I’m no sociopath, just the choice was clear. In raising his weapon, he decided that someone would die that night. I made sure that it wouldn’t be my friends. There is a mercy in this ill-defined battlefield, I think. In the American Civil War, the Great Power Wars, even the First World War, I could imagine people of good will on both sides of the lines. You do your duty nonetheless, and the other man does his, I suppose. I imagine that would be more difficult. Knowing something of backgrounds and context (I am deliberately vague here,) that man wasn’t a freedom fighter, not a poor soul caught in the cruel grasp of fate and lack of opportunity. Blood cried out from the ground, from what they had already done, from what they were planning on doing. These were men I would never let anywhere near anyone I loved or cared about. My love for the people they had already hurt, and the people they would hurt made the choice an easy one. Yet there still and must be a tension: even in their choices they were still beloved children of God.

Killing a nameless, faceless monster is easy. All the Imperial Storm Troopers look alike. I imagine there isn’t much sorrow or nuance in the destruction of the Death Star. But this wasn’t a movie, and these were people, uniquely created to bear the image of God. So this is not as much the slaying of Goliath as the killing of Absalom. And Absalom was mourned. So I mourned these men.

I do not regret killing him. Far from it. But I mourn him nonetheless. I do regret that it had to be done, though. I mourned that precious creations of God chose a path that led to this end. That first night, I realized that something significant had happened, something that needed to be recognized. So I prayed. I asked God that somehow beyond my understanding that He would work outside of time. I prayed that something I could not imagine or understand had happened, and these men were somehow reconciled to Jesus. Like Emeth the Calormene. I closed in a prayer of mourning for each of them. This is a prayer I will repeat in the future, I have little doubt.

So this is life in the Physics of the Fall. Love comes with Pain here. And Wrath with Grief. I wonder what it would look like without it. The Lord is a Warrior, it says. I wonder what it will mean to be a warrior when there are no more wars to fight. Will wrath become a trophy on some heavenly wall, a no-longer-necessary remembrance of ancient battles? Like nail pierced hands and a wounded side? I cannot say. I will perhaps find those answers on the other side of these shadow lands. But I am here now. An agent of wrath. May my hands be His hands.