Pastor's Page: August 28, 2008

"What Is Christianity Mainly About?" (Part 2)

Bill Maher complained recently that religion (by which he meant Christianity) is "not mainly about doing the right thing or being ethical. It's mainly about salvation. It's mainly about getting your butt saved when you die."

I think I can understand why Maher would say that. He's probably heard some bad sermons over the years. I've heard them too. Ever since I was a boy I've heard invitations to receive Christ that were really only about getting into heaven and staying out of hell - and some of those were so crass that they deliberately gutted the gospel of any call to repent. Jesus was presented as a ticket to heaven rather than a Lord to be worshiped and served. He was that Thing You Had To Believe In in order to get to the unending fun you really cared about. "You want to go to heaven? Say this prayer!"

This problem of skewed Christian exhortation is an old one. When Cardinal Jacopo Sadoleto begged the citizens of Geneva to return to Catholicism in 1539, he made a point of appealing to their desire to go to heaven. He wrote: "I presume, dearest brethren, that...all...who have put their faith and hope in Christ...have done so for this one reason: that they may obtain salvation for themselves and their souls."

Was that really the only reason to believe in Christ - to obtain salvation for oneself and one's soul? Not for Christ's own sake, nor for his pleasure, nor even because he commanded it - but simply to get saved? I'm afraid so. Sadoleto even taught that personal salvation was the greatest thing a person could desire: "We all...believe in Christ in order that we may find salvation for our souls. There can be nothing more earnestly to be desired than this."

Sadoleto's letter was brought to John Calvin, who quickly wrote a response that merits careful study on the part of all proclaimers of the gospel. Attacking Sadoleto's notion that the best thing a man could desire was salvation, Calvin wrote: "It is not very sound theology to confine a man's thoughts so much to himself." Exactly. Instead, Calvin continued, we must "set before him, as the prime motive of his existence, zeal to illustrate the glory of God." That is and must always be the Christian's main motivation: to glorify God. The zeal to exalt God must overrule the natural - but purely selfish - zeal to save our souls. Or, as Calvin put it, "This zeal [for God's glory] ought to exceed all thought and care for our own good and advantage."

Calvin even warned that good people would find tasteless and boring a constant stream of sermons about getting into heaven. The following quote is worth reading twice: "It certainly is the part of a Christian man to ascend higher than merely to seek and secure the salvation of his own soul. I am persuaded, therefore, that there is no man imbued with a true piety, who will not consider as insipid that long and labored exhortation to zeal for heavenly life, a zeal which keeps a man entirely devoted to himself, and does not, even by one expression, arouse him to sanctify the name of God."

I don't know if it will do Bill Maher any good, but I hope that some day he gets to hear a bit of solid evangelical preaching that seeks above all else to magnify God. Glorifying God is what our faith is mainly about. Yes, there is that matter of getting our butts saved when we die, but that is icing on the cake.

Pastor's Page: August 20, 2008

"What Is Christianity Mainly About?" (Part 1)

Last night on Larry King Live atheist Bill Maher expressed a complaint against Christianity. He said, "One thing I don't like about religion is that - ask any of the truly devout - it's not mainly about doing the right thing or being ethical. It's mainly about salvation. It's mainly about getting your butt saved when you die."

By Maher's standards (certainly not my own) I think I qualify as "truly devout", but I do not give the answer, "This is mainly about getting our butts saved when we die" when I am asked what is central to our faith. What, would I say, is our faith mainly about?

It is mainly about glorifying God. Ethical behavior, doing the right thing, is certainly one aspect of that. How can you glorify God if you displease him? Christians believe that God has commanded us to be pleasant and kind and gracious and honest and noble and generous, and not to do things like cheat, lie, kill, steal, extort or insult. Moral goodness is bound up in all of Christian doctrine, and can't be bled or cut out of it. Ethics-less Christianity is no Christianity at all - it is a bloodless, boneless corpse.

Atheism, however, survives quite well without ethics. In fact, I have never been able to understand how atheism can build a theory of moral behavior that actually succeeds in urging us to do good. I am glad that Bill Maher wants to "do the right thing", and I hope he continues to want to do the right thing and does not think too hard about it. Because if he does think about it, he'll see (ask any atheist!) that morality reduces to social custom, which reduces to urges dictated by the competing claims of evolutionary biology, which reduces to chemical reactions in our brains and in our environment, which reduces to electrons jumping from the orbital of one atom to another under the precise laws of physics and the imprecise randomness of quantum mechanics, which reduces to, well, that's pretty much all there is! That is where the chain of moral reasoning stops. What then is to keep me from torturing Guantanamo detainees or falsifying evidence to convict innocent men if, when I ask why I shouldn't, all I've got to answer to (or even formulate an answer with!) are atoms in my brain knocking about like ping pong balls in a lottery glass cage? For the Christian, however, at the end of every chain of moral reasoning (which in some contexts we might call "temptation"), there is a holy God wagging his finger and saying, "You must not do that bad thing."

Doing the right thing is packed hard into Christianity and distributed through every feature of it like crude oil in Canadian shale. Dig into atheism, however, and keep digging hard and deep, and you will bore a hole right through the center and out the other side without ever having encountered a single thing to fuel good works with. Good atheists (I've known several) will then shrug their philosophical shoulders and say, "Well, I don't know why, but we should do good anyways." Bad atheists (though we can't call them logically inconsistent) will say, "Nietzsche was right," and, given power, will become our Stalins and Mussolinis and Pol Pots and Kim Jong Ils. Millions die. How can you appeal to the conscience of someone who knows in his heart that conscience is an illusion - the froth of an evolutionary heritage that the strong can sweep away with a wave of their hand?

I think there is a reason why, when you go around the world and look for those who are rebuilding schools in New Orleans, rescuing AIDS orphans in Kenya, helping lepers in India, rebuilding the shattered lives of rape victims in the Congo - what you find are Christians, Christians, and more Christians, and virtually nobody representing the atheist and freethinker societies. It is not just because Christians outnumber atheists - though certainly that is a factor. It is because our religion commands us to do good no matter what.

More next week, Lord willing, on what our religion is mainly about.

Pastor's Page: August 12, 2008

How To Fight Poverty

In a cover story this week on Pastor Rick Warren, Time Magazine reports that the influential pastor of Saddleback Church is "leading and riding the newest wave of change in the Evangelical community: an expansion beyond social conservatism to causes such as battling poverty, opposing torture and combating global warming."
I'll leave aside torture and global warming for another day, but as for battling poverty - is this a new cause for evangelicals? In the past all we cared about was social conservatism, but now thanks to Warren and others we have awakened to the campaign of ending global poverty?
Among the things I find frustrating about this "new evangelical emphasis" is its blindness to the fact that conservative Christians have always been the best poverty fighters the world has ever known! We own this topic. We've known how to prevent and stay out of penniless misery for thousands of years. All the principles are jam-packed into the pages of the Bible, and they are on display every time we open it up and proclaim its message. There is nothing new about how to fight poverty. Here in a nutshell is how not to be poor:
1) Work hard. (This includes studying hard to learn a skill - work hard at being educated).
The Bible says that "Lazy hands make a man poor, but diligent hands bring wealth" (Proverbs 4:10). You'll never end the poverty of those who refuse to learn, who drop out of school, who depend on the goodwill and productivity of others for their food. "If a man will not work, neither let him eat" (2 Thessalonians 3:10).
2) Don't have sex with anyone you're not married to.
The Bible's laws against adultery, fornication and all other sexual misconduct (Hebrews 13:5: "Let the marriage bed be undefiled") are great anti-poverty measures. Poverty results from the kind of immorality that produces fatherless children, sexually transmitted diseases, broken homes, etc. The other day I read an article about an African nation where the majority of children are raped. That is what their culture permits and expects. As long as this inhumanly cruel perverse sexual behavior continues, this nation will always be poor - no matter how many billions of dollars of aid are given to it, and no matter how often its debts are forgiven.
3) Don't have vices.
Let me personalize this one. The other day I shocked a man by telling him I'd never had a beer. It's true. Completely aside from any moral implications, do you have any idea how much money I've saved over the years by never buying alcohol, cigarettes, drugs, porn, or lottery tickets? A lot. This is one of the factors that helps explain the minor miracle of how I have been able, in the past few years, to raise two sons in the suburbs while taking home a preacher's salary of $543 a week. But for all those people who waste money on things that ordinary evangelical preaching warns against, well, it doesn't surprise me if they wind up poorer than I am.
If you have a life that obeys the principles above, and a society and environment that respects them, then in all likelihood you won't be poor. Of course there are exceptions. You might be poor anyways because of disease, handicap, natural disaster, oppression, or really bad luck. That's why we have charity, and must always act charitably toward the worthy poor. (Yes, the worthy poor - 1 Timothy 5:9-10 forbids helping widows who had been lazy or promiscuous; they had to have done good deeds.) I've been the thankful recipient of charity many times myself, and am all in favor of it.
We who take the Bible seriously have always known how to fight poverty in ourselves and others, and that fight has always involved an uncompromising message to act morally, work diligently and give compassionately. What then, is "new" about Warren's battle against poverty?
Nothing, really, except for the call upon governments to take action. This is why Warren is convening a forum with Barak Obama and John McCain in Orange County, California. This is why Mike Huckabee and James Meeks left their pulpits and their callings to proclaim Christ so that now they could really make a difference(!) by pushing for political solutions to public problems. This is why a number of evangelical leaders, including Warren, John Stott and Billy Graham signed an open letter to President Bush asking him to undertake the cause of the poor in global concerns.
It is a big mistake. Every government campaign to end poverty has only created more of it in the long run. Lyndon Johnson's well-intentioned programs created cycles of dependency that made and kept people poor. The same Time Magazine issue that features Warren has a stunningly honest article on Africa, "Pain amid Plenty", that outlines how the billions of dollars of charitable aid to Africa over the years has had the unintended effect of fostering perpetual starvation.
I can't understand why Christian clergymen are taking the cause for fighting poverty to governments when political institutions have been so bad at it and we have been so good at it! This isn't government's job. Governments are there to preserve order, protect the citizenry, punish evildoers and reward good behavior. Ask them to do more than that, or worse, give them the power to try to create the poverty-less utopias we like to dream of, and they will find ways to make people starve.

Pastor's Page: Jily 29, 2008

Not All "Fundamentalisms" Are The Same

If you take the words of Joseph Smith or Mohammed literally and try to pattern your life after theirs, you will be a violent sex offender. If you take the words of Jesus literally and try to pattern your life after his, you will be a celibate pacifist.
That is my basic answer to those who try to lump together all brands of fundamentalism into a single sinister phenomenon. Lately I have been reading the comments of some religion haters who find little to distinguish between Muslim, Mormon and Christian fundamentalism, and who claim that they are all roots of intolerance and evil. Here is why I think such judgments miss the mark:
Mohammed married a six-year-old girl and had sex with her when she was nine. (Look it up, her name was Aishah.) He was a child molester. As far as I am concerned, that is all we need to know about that pervert. Imitate Mohammed, and you will rape single-digit aged girls and call it marriage. And you will kill people too. Among Mohammed's countless atrocities, he ordered the beheading of the 800 Jewish men of Medina in 627. He had plenty of encouragement from the Koran, which says concerning infidels:
"Seize them and slay them wherever you find them: and in any case take no friends or helpers from their ranks." (Surah 4:89) "I will instill terror into the hears of the unbelievers, smite ye above their necks and smite all their fingertips of them. It is not you who slew them; it was Allah." (Surah 8:13-17)
(Read more about Mohammed's demented personality and violence in "Unveiling Islam" by former Muslim professors Ergun and Emir Caner.)
Joseph Smith, founder of Mormonism, was another piece of work. He committed adultery with Marinda Nancy Johnson when she was 16, and on March 24, 1832 a mob that included Marinda's relatives tried to castrate him. (Instead they merely beat, tarred and feathered him.) In 1835 Smith's wife Emma caught him sleeping with their housemaid Fanny Alger and kicked the girl out of their house. Smith went on to "marry" about 40 women between 1840 and 1844, including 14-year-old Helen Mar Kimball. Smith basically fornicated with anyone he could seduce or overpower and called it "celestial marriage."
He also incited followers to violence against opponents of Mormonism. In 1842 he preached that some sins were so heinous that they could only be atoned for if the guilty one were to "spill his blood upon the ground." He let his followers do the spilling. When he wanted former Missouri Governor Lilburn Boggs dead, he simply prophesied that the man would "die by violent means within one year." Mormon enforcer Orrin Porter Rockwell did his part to fulfill Smith's prophesy by firing three bullets into Boggs' head and neck.
But when it comes to trying to make Jesus the author of violence and brute sexual conquest, you draw a total blank. Jesus never married, was never accused of sexual impropriety, and taught that even mental adultery was wrong (Matthew 5:28). Imitate him and you will be a celibate. And where do you ever find Jesus practicing violence, or inciting his followers to it? He told Peter to put his sword away (Matthew 26:52), commanded us to love our enemies (Matthew 5:44), and told us to turn the other cheek when we are struck (Matthew 5:39). It is true that over the years many people have committed acts of perversion or violence in the name of Jesus, but the simple fact is they cannot find justification for such behavior in the example of his life or in any of his teachings.
As you can imagine, I really don't like mentioning Jesus in the same breath as Mohammed and Joseph Smith, because Jesus is Holy God Incarnate while Mohammed and Smith were evil clown freaks with followings. I only mention them together here because they are regarded in the popular, secular mind as "founders of major religions," and all equally dangerous if taken too seriously or followed too closely. That is just not so. Follow in the footsteps of Mohammed and Joseph Smith and you will impregnate young teenagers like Warren Jeffs or murder thousands (millions if you could) like Osama Bin Laden. Follow in the footsteps of Jesus and you will simply do good.

Pastor's Page: July 22, 2008

The Trouble With Adoration

A pastor friend told me that he was teaching his congregation to pray according to the ACTS formula (adoration, confession, thanksgiving, supplication), and that he was having trouble with the "A". He couldn't get them to pray prayers of adoration.

I think there is a reason for that which has nothing to do with lukewarmness or immaturity on the part of the worshippers. It is simply because adoration tends to demand accompaniment. Stripped to mere words it comes across awkward and flat. When I pray I only need standard prose to confess, or give thanks, or make a request. But the act of praise wants more - a musical instrument perhaps, or formal expression in poetry or song. It is possible that my stuttering over verbal adoration is due to my coldness or lack of love for God, and if so, then God forgive me and reform me, and may he dismiss from everyone's mind the analysis below. But here is how I see it.

We have an intuition of what makes for an appropriate response to a performance, or revelation of fact, or stimulus. It is the denial of this intuition that allows that stupid line of rhetoric we've all heard in sermons: "At the football game Friday night you cheered for your team and shouted yourself hoarse when they scored a touchdown - are you telling me you can get excited about football but you can't get exited about God?" It is a common preacher's technique for drumming up enthusiasm-by-guilt in a quiet congregation, and it is idiotic. We should not cheer for God the way we cheer a walk-off home run. I believe we can see that by imagining other attempts to gin up inappropriate responses. When I'm hungry, for example, and good food is set before me, I salivate like one of Pavlov's dogs - and you probably do too. Imagine a preacher indicting us watery-mouthed diners with: "You mean to say you can salivate over a plate of food but you don't love God enough to get any spit in your mouth over him?" We'd say, "Fool! God isn't something you salivate over, food is." Or, if you will permit a racy example (we're all adults here), a man's body will respond in certain God-designed ways to the sight of an under-clad, shapely woman. If a preacher said, "You mean to say you can get it on for a woman but you can't do that for God!" I'd just walk out of the church.

The point is that different things call for different responses, and a vehicle of expression that works perfectly well in one setting will not work at all in another. Words work well for some things - like communicating truth, but not at all for other things - like satisfying hunger. And, I contend, words only "kind of" work, clunkily and under handicap, for some other good things. Like expressing love. As you know, love is notoriously difficult to express with words alone. Jim Croce gave up trying to do so and solved his problem musically:

Well I know it's kind of late,
I hope I didn't wake you.
But what I've got to say can't wait,
I know you'd understand.
'Cause every time I tried to tell you,
The words just came out wrong.
So I'll have to say 'I love you' in a song.

There it is, in a song! (Of course, you have to hear the above words sung to get their effect.) Croce was right. Love demands a song the way apple pie demands (for me anyway) a cup of coffee. Lovers stumble over mere words, and find themselves waxing poetical and musical in attempts to get their expression just right. Thus it was and ever shall be.

I believe that adoration of God is like the expression of love. Confine it to words alone and you'll see that it is "not quite right" or "missing something." That sense may be so strong that you'll struggle to get out any words at all. So try singing your praise instead. I can sing "How Great Thou Art", but if I update the language and try to say, "God you're really great," the words seem to die on my tongue. Perhaps they should, because I'm not using the right medium. In a terribly inappropriate (but wickedly funny) skit in "Monty Python's Meaning Of Life" a clergyman played by Michael Palin leads antiphonal praise in a chapel service, saying, "Oh Lord...Oooh you are so big...So absolutely huge...Gosh we're all really impressed down here I tell you." This is a lampooning of the Psalms of praise of course, but remember: the Psalms were composed as poetry and performed as songs! Cripple the poetry and mute the music and of course you wind up with something that sounds funny and odd.

I'm recommending to my pastor friend (and if I'm wrong, God give him the wisdom to ignore me!) to leave the confession, thanksgiving and supplication as they are - verbal - but to flavor the adoration with something else. Music, probably. Sing a song of adoration, or perhaps listen in silence to sacred instrumental music. Read a devotional poem. In a charismatic congregation, tongues might do nicely here. Maybe there are visual ways too of provoking the heart's adoration (a friend of mine came to believe in God when he saw mountains!), but I don't know how to do that in a worship service. The main thing is to find a way to give to Adoration the non-verbal accompaniment it demands and deserves.

Pastor's Page: July 8, 2008

Think More

I was glad to hear a college-age friend of my son admit that thoughtful investigation was hard.

I had been explaining a cheap-trick method of argumentation that involved nothing more than postulating an underlying motive for an opponent's thesis. For example, suppose someone maintains that gun control laws are counterproductive because "Fewer guns mean more crime, and when municipalities permit conceal-and-carry weapons, the crime rate drops." An easy response to that is, "Well, you just say that because you're in the NRA and you've got a huge gun collection!" That may be true. But even if the NRA member only believes his statistics because they bolster his position, the question remains: "Are they accurate?" Because no matter what the gun-nut believes or why he believes it, statements of fact must be received or contested on their own terms. If he is wrong, then you can only demonstrate he is wrong by showing that his statistics are in error or that they are erroneously applied. His motives may be relevant for understanding how he came to believe as he did, but they are irrelevant for determining whether what he believes is true. To discern that, you have to investigate and think.

My son's friend said, "That's so hard" and I rejoiced. Exactly. Of course it's hard. Disciplined thinking is always hard - but like most things that require effort there is a payoff for engaging in it and a cost for neglecting it. Indolence is a vice that exacts a toll: physical laziness leaves you flabby and winded; occupational laziness leaves you poor and needy; intellectual laziness leaves you shallow and bigoted; spiritual laziness leaves you far from God. Work hard. That includes forcing your mind to work as hard as it can.

(While writing this paragraph I was interrupted by the doorbell ringing - it was two boys asking me if I wanted to buy something to drink at their lemonade stand. So of course I had to reward their industriousness by going over and buying two cans of pop and a cup of lemonade. Good for them. Now let's see - where was I? Oh yes, intellectual laziness):
Sunday I was asked about an archeological find featured in the New York Times. It was a Hebrew stone tablet with an apocalyptic message. Looking into the matter afterward I found that the scholar promoting his interpretation of the tablet has a long-standing ax to grind: the overturning of what he thinks is "our traditional understanding of Christianity." It would be easy enough to dismiss him on the basis of his motive. But in investigating further and plowing through arcane details of Hebrew orthography, I was happy to find that, though I believe his proposal lacks merit, it turns out that if he is correct his thesis actually supports standard evangelical belief about what would constitute valid messianic expectation on the part of the Jews! That was an eye-opener. (The original article and my response are available upon request).

My point is that I was able to come to this unexpected conclusion only through careful reading and thinking. Valid conclusions and supportable convictions are worth all the "mindly" effort you have to muster to attain them. Think more.

Pastor's Page: July 1, 2008

Our Curse, Another's Blessing

I have a new answer now to the question, "What's your favorite book?" The best book I have ever read is Volume 3 of the collected letters of C. S. Lewis.

It was never intended to be a book. Lewis did not keep letters mailed to him, and he did not expect anyone to keep letters he sent to them. But they did - friends, scholars, children, strangers, lunatics, pastors. They wrote him boatloads of mail from all over the world and he painstakingly responded to every one. They treasured his letters like gold and were able to produce them 30-40 years after his death when editor Walter Hooper went looking for them.

Many who received a personal letter from Lewis were ecstatic (and this encouraged them to write more!), but for him letter-writing was a constant woe. He called it "the bane of my life" when speaking in confidence to a friend. It ate up all his leisure time and bit into his work. He had to get up early every morning to respond to the previous day's mail. When he returned from a brief vacation he'd find an overwhelming stack of 60 letters waiting for him. Since he could not type, and had a genetically deformed thumb that would not bend at the knuckle, he had to do the best he could writing by hand (and he constantly apologized for his bad handwriting, especially as he got older.) For at least a decade he dreaded Christmas, because he would get hundreds of letters at that time, and he felt he needed to answer them all. He begged close friends to write him at some other time of the year.

But Lewis' curse is my blessing. I find his letters to be the best devotional material I have ever read. I noticed long ago that writing that is intended as devotional usually leaves me unmoved. But when I read Lewis dealing graciously with a confused child or correcting an errant scholar or appreciating a gift or simply expressing grief, it inspires me to worship. And as for his casual insights, oh my goodness they leap out from every page. You have no idea how many times over the past few months I've said to my sons, "Remember the other day when we were talking about plagiarism/ the gracious treatment of bores/ the foibles of Rev So-and-So/ the poetry of T. S. Elliot? Well listen to this paragraph I just read in Lewis!" It is as though he somehow listened to our conversation and nailed the point in 50 words or less.

In 2 Corinthians 12:7-10 St. Paul asked to be delivered from a thorn in the flesh, and God said no. Lewis' thorn in the flesh was a constant pile of correspondence he wished he could avoid, but his response to that thorn comes down to me as a source of great enrichment and delight. Now I have a follow-up prayer with regard to my own thorns: "Lord, please take this curse from me. It is the bane of my life. But if you will not, then would you be so kind as to turn it into a blessing for others? Thank you."