Pastor's Page: December 16, 2008

What Would Abraham Do?

Recently I read a broadside against biblical faith that focused on the story of Abraham nearly sacrificing his son Isaac. The author wrote, "What was Abraham thinking?...[He] receives the instruction to kill his son. But wouldn't he be mad simply to go ahead and do so?...It might not be God talking, but the devil; Abraham might be mad; the test might be to see if he refuses. All three of these possibilities seem more plausible than the idea that God wants his son dead, since what kind of loving God would command such a barbaric act?"

Researching the matter I found another writer who said: "Abraham is nothing less than that person who unthinkingly says 'Yes, Lord' when told to murder another human being...[H]ow can we possibly feel anything but horror at what he was prepared to do? Here is a man who was prepared to murder his own child,... - and this is the example which the Bible holds up as praiseworthy. Think about it: Nowadays, any parent who claimed she killed her child because God told her to would be thrown into jail, or into a mental institution...I challenge anybody to find one person who would hear about it and exclaim, 'Wow, I wish I had that much faith!'"

I think these writers make a good point. If any man today killed his son (or tried to) because God commanded it, we would not praise his faith but execute him or lock him up. And this isn't merely a hypothetical mental exercise - many people have indeed murdered family members for just such religious reasons. Jon Krakauer's amazing book Under The Banner Of Heaven tells riveting stories of Mormon Fundamentalists who killed because God told them to. And remember that poor psycho Andrea Yates? In 2001 she drowned her five kids because she thought that was what God wanted.

So, was Abraham a psychopath for believing that the voice in his head saying, "Gut and bleed Isaac for me" was the Lord's? And are Christians inconsistent for exalting him as a man of faith while imprisoning, executing or confining to mental institutions those who act upon the same instruction? Can we praise Father Abraham, but run and call the police when some parent starts wearing a WWAD bracelet?

I have a thought that I'd like to throw into the discussion. It seems to me that the disgust about Abraham and the voice-in-his-head-that-claimed-to-be-God fails to take into account the religious context of Abraham's day. Abraham was born into raw paganism and knew practically nothingabout God. Joshua 24:2 says that his father worshiped other gods. Abraham came to theology "green," we might say, with no Bible to read and no church or synagogue to attend. He not only lived before Jesus and the Sermon on the Mount, but before Moses and the 10 commandments. His template for understanding the supernatural would have been the pagan religions around him, and the gods of those faith communities - the Chemoshes and Molechs and Ashterahs - often demanded child sacrifice from the truly devout.

I don't believe that Abraham understood at first that the supernatural being who spoke in his ear and promised him good things was necessarily all that different from Molech. In fact, I see no convincing evidence that Abraham was even a monotheist! When did the Lord ever tell him that there were no other gods? Abraham only worshiped and served the Lord God, but that does not mean he necessarily disbelieved the existence of others.

So part of Abraham's theological education had to involve unlearning some of the elementary things he thought he knew about "gods and their behavior." And I believe that much of the significance of the story of Abraham nearly sacrificing Isaac is lost if we don't understand that God was at this point distinguishing himself from the gods of Abraham's acquaintance. We who occupy this spot on the timeline of revelation history don't need this lesson, because we know God - or should know him - well enough for something as simple as that. But from Abraham's perspective, it would have been a simple truism locked in his bones that all gods demanded blood somehow, even human blood. And when the order came to sacrifice his son, I suppose he was disheartened but not terribly surprised by it. "Oh. Of course. I might have known. So that's what you're like."

But that isn't what God is like. Molech may have been pleased with the smell of burning infant flesh, but not the God who spoke in the ear of Abraham. After proving (or, rather, after having Abraham prove to himself and to us) that he was no less devoted to God than pagans were to their demons, God provided a substitute. A ram sufficed/ As sacrifice/ To self-appease/ The great I Am. In this instance Abraham learned at least a couple things: (1) His God was much nicer than Molech, and (2) His God was nonetheless no softie. Just because he was good did not mean he had less of a claim to ultimate devotion from Abraham than the demon gods had from their worshipers.

While I believe the story of Abraham nearly killing Isaac makes sense in its context, it is still incomplete until you get to the New Testament. There God himself endures the torment he spared Abraham, giving up his Son - with no last-minute substitute, and it wasn't mercifully quick - so that sinners could live. In comparing the stories of Isaac's near-death experience with Jesus' crucifixion, we come to learn, and love, the shocking truth that God is kinder to us than he is to himself.

I think I can safely compare the revulsion that skeptics feel over Abraham's action with Isaac to the aesthetic revulsion we would all feel over examining just a square millimeter of a beautiful woman's face. I suppose you could press your eye up to a magnifying glass about an inch away from her skin, but no one is pretty at that distance. You must back up and take in the context. Take in the context of Abraham's religious environment, and also the great work that God would do 2,000 years later, and then you can appreciate the beauty of the whole.

And as for any evil psycho who claims today to murder at the command of God - "just like Abraham!" - I think the rebuff comes easily enough. "Oh no. We've known for 4,000 years now that God isn't like that. And even granting that he commanded Abraham to kill Isaac - in circumstances that do not hold today, and that foreshadowed the once-for-all sacrifice of Christ - don't forget that God provided a substitute ram that day, and that, in the end, Abraham never killed anybody."

Pastor's Page: December 9, 2008

Bank Error In Your Favor - Collect $200.

In his book The Pig That Wants To Be Eaten, Julian Baggini writes up and comments on "100 experiments for the armchair philosopher." Many of the thought experiments involve ethical quandaries. For example:
Richard went to an ATM to withdraw 100 (British) pounds from his account and received 10,000 pounds by mistake. Certain that the bank would catch the error, he put the loot away and waited. But after a couple months and no word from the bank, he took the money and went to put a hefty down-payment on a new luxury car. "On the way, however, he did feel a twinge of guilt. Wasn't this stealing? He quickly managed to convince himself it was no such thing. He had not deliberately taken the money, it had just been given to him...No, this wasn't theft. It was just the biggest stroke of luck he had ever had."
Baggini invites the reader to do some moral reasoning about Richard's actions. He notes, "In real life..., we might expect an honest person [to notify the bank]. But how many people would? Not that many, I'd guess."
Some would. I know someone who did. About 30 years ago, Baggini's hypothetical scenario actually happened to my parents. Even the numbers were the same, though the amount was in dollars rather than pounds. My mother deposited $100 in the family checking account and later found out that the bank had recorded it as $10,000. They had apparently left out the decimal point between dollars and cents.
So mom immediately notified them of the error. (In her letter she playfully suggested, "Of course, if it is too much trouble for you to adjust your records, we will gladly adjust ours!") The bank quickly corrected the mistake - though without thanking my mother for bringing it to their attention - and $9,900 that my parents could have made prudent use of was carried away by that steady-blowing wind of moral integrity that characterized their lives.
As I look back on it now, one of the early signs that I was marrying into a family of very different moral outlook was when my father-in-law-to-be told me about the time a teller made a huge error in his favor when he was cashing in some bonds - and boy did he walk away with a chunk of change! I hardly knew what to say. I didn't tell him my mother's story. Some years later, though, it made sense when my (now ex-) wife came home with a pair of jeans that a checkout clerk neglected to ring up, and I was the one who trudged back to the mall to pay for them.
Be scrupulously honest all the time. It is wrong to take advantage of correctable mistakes made in your favor. Any follower of Christ should know this instinctively, live accordingly, and train his children to do the same.

Pastor's Page: December 2, 2008

Dropping Off Your Kid In Nebraska

Outrage greeted the news that parents were abandoning their older kids at Nebraska hospitals this fall. A safe-haven policy designed for newborns actually set the age limit at 18, so instead of getting day-old babies from panicked young moms, hospitals started receiving teenage kids from parents in their 40s. Who could imagine a parent so evil? What mom or dad would just dump their kid like that?
Then we started hearing about some of the kids.
Melyssa Cowburn's 5-year-old "tried to bash in a baby's head with a hammer. Then he set the shower curtain on fire. The next day he plugged all the sinks and toilets in their apartment and flooded the place." (Chicago Tribune 11/21/08). This child was the offspring of a crack addict who had abandoned him when he was 16 months old. Melissa became his guardian and decided, "I'm going to love this little guy and it's just going to make everything better." Right. Despite Melyssa and her husband's loving efforts, the child remained a violent screaming monster who constantly got expelled from day-care programs. Melyssa tried everything - even a drug overdose to end her own life - but nothing worked. She drove him to Omaha, said good-bye, and cried herself all the way back home to Washington state.
Parents of older devils have feared, with good reason, that their sons would kill them in their sleep or rape their daughters. What would you do with such a son? I could see myself handcuffing him and throwing him in the trunk of my car and speeding westward on the I-80. I say "I could see myself" doing this because there's no reason it couldn't have happened to me, good parent though I am. Years ago a missionary friend told me, "My wife and I had three good kids and always thought that parents whose kids were out-of-control just didn't know how to raise them. Then we had our fourth...". He didn't even finish the sentence. The fourth was a candidate for a Nebraska hospital drop-off.
The Bible teaches that there is such a thing as evil you can't fix. I hope this provides some comfort - cold comfort, a "quantum of solace" - to parents of really bad kids. Scripture shows no naivete about the wickedness that can be bound up in the heart of a child. Deuteronomy 21:18-21 told ancient Israelites what to do with their chronically bad kids in a policy so fierce it makes Nebraska abandonment look like treacly indulgence:
If a man has a stubborn and rebellious son who does not obey his father and mother and will not listen to them when they discipline him, his father and mother shall take hold of him and bring him to the elders at the gate of his town. They shall say to the elders, "This son of ours is stubborn and rebellious. He will not obey us. He is a profligate and a drunkard." Then all the men of his town shall stone him to death. You must purge the evil from among you. All Israel will hear of it and be afraid.
No, I don't think we should kill bad kids. Even rabbinic tradition holds that the death sentence above was never actually carried out. (But what a powerful deterrent! Israelite parents never needed to tell their hellions that the boogey-man would get them: they could just point to the sacred scroll and say, "Listen, numb-nut. Me and the elders are going to pelt you with rocks.")
The larger point though should not be missed: some kids (like some grownups) are just bad, and the strongest measures must be taken concerning them - not necessarily for their rehabilitation (who knows if that is possible?), but simply for the protection and sanity of those around them. Such cases provide the more fortunate among us, the ones who have decent kids, with opportunities to extend the mercy of God to longsuffering parents, and judge them not, lest we be judged.

Pastor's Page: November 18, 2008

Philosophical Poison

Many of the philosophers who laid the foundations of modern and post-modern thought were profoundly bad men. This fact seems to surprise Nigel Rodgers and Mel Thompson, authors of Philosophers Behaving Badly. They write, "From philosophers...we expect, not unreasonably, nobler, wiser behavior, demonstrating some attempt to live up to their ideals." But, they note, "philosophers, while godlike in the intellectual sphere, can be the sorriest children in the world of power and money."

"Sorriest children" is too kind a label for the eight philosophers they profile in the book. "Demon-spawn" is more like it. A few tidbits:

Martin Heidegger, a father of Existentialism, was a Nazi. He concluded his lectures with "Heil Hitler!", and actively worked to make the university at Frieburg an institution subservient to the goals of Hitler and the Nazi Party. This included persecuting Jewish students and even the Jewish professor, Edmund Husserl, who had mentored him.

Jean-Paul Sarte was an apologist for Stalin, and so vigorous in his support of the Soviet madman that he criticized Krushchev for denouncing his predecessor! Even though Sarte knew about the gulags, he simply denied them the way some deny the Holocaust. To Sarte, heroic dissidents like Solzhenitsyn were mere criminals.

Michel Foucault, darling of postmodernism, was a drug-addled Peeping Tom. From his 8th floor apartment he used to train his binoculars on men undressing. He died of AIDS, but not before probably infecting many others because (1) he hid the fact that he had AIDS and (2) he refused to take precautions. Once while debating Noam Chomsky he maintained that he was willing to dispense with any principle of justice in order to achieve total victory for the proletariat. And if the proletariat needed to preserve power by violent oppression of the vanquished, so be it. Chomsky (no angel himself) "felt that he was debating with someone who did not even inhabit the same moral universe."

Bertrand Russell was the 20th century's foremost philosophical promoter of atheism, and though he had a reputation for non-violent pacifism he was actually such a war-mongering beast that he favored genocide. He considered defensible the extermination of North American Indians because they stood in the way of the spread of Western Civilization. In October of 1945 the famed author of Why I Am Not A Christian proposed that the US launch a massive pre-emptive nuclear strike on the Soviet Union, saying, "I should for my part prefer all the chaos and destruction of a war conducted by means of the atomic bomb to the universal domination of a government having the evil characteristics of the Nazis." Later, Rodgers and Thompson note, "he accepted that such a war might kill 500 million people and set civilization back centuries, yet thought this a price well worth paying." It seems to me that if this influential philosopher had possessed dictatorial power in the late 1940s, then the title of "Greatest Villain in the History of the World" would no longer be contested between Adolph Hitler and Joseph Stalin. Those pipsqueak knee-biters, with their millions of victims, would be nothing compared to Bertrand Russell and his hundreds of millions.

Time would fail me to relate all the cruelty, selfishness, mendacity, mean-spiritedness and grotesque immorality of the eight philosophers in Rodger's and Thompson's book. It is worth checking out of the library and reading for yourself. And it is worth thinking about a question the authors keep raising: "How could these men think so well but behave so badly?"

For the Christian, the answer lies pretty close at hand. The premise is wrong. These men were not great thinkers. Six of them (Foucalt, Heidegger, Nietzsche, Russell, Schopenhauer and Sartre) were atheists, and the other two (Rousseau and Wittgenstein) were not Christians. If you deny God and reject his incarnate Son, the worldview you construct will necessarily be out of whack. Why expect good behavior from that?

As I've said before, atheism can search for - but can never find - a ground for moral behavior. The best thing for a society with skeptics and atheists is to hope that none of them thinks too hard. Once they get to thinking and living by the results, watch out! They'll conclude (they always do) that the morality they learned in kindergarten is simply a creation of mankind, and, as such, can be reshaped like play-doh in their capable hands. They are free (Existentialists love to talk this way!) to construct their own realities and meaning. When they do that, why should any of us be shocked, shocked, that the behavior they find most reasonable is that which aggrandizes themselves and sacrifices all others to the attainment of that one goal?

Pastor's Page: November 4, 2008

The Cougar And The Ant

After I finish writing this I'll go vote, even though I know beyond doubt it won't matter. My individual vote is meaningless - not just in the national election, but in all the local ones too. Since no significant election I've ever heard of was decided by one vote, it is certain that the same persons will win public office tonight whether I go to the polls or stay home and drink hot chocolate.
The reason I vote then is not because I think it will matter. The reason is because I know that if lots of people are as lazy about voting as I am tempted to be, it will matter. Thousands of people, each making the unassailably correct assumption "My vote won't change anything," will in fact change everything. To avoid the political catastrophe that would result from the mass inaction of otherwise thoughtful people, I (and everyone else!) must flip a mental switch, if need be, and act in the mode of an ant-in-a-colony building a bridge rather than a lone cougar-on-a-prowl hunting for food.
There are thousands of cases where it is our obligation to be that ant-in-a-colony. Let me mention one especially dear to my heart: attending Sunday School and church.
I'll be honest: you may be in a position where going to Sunday School and church does nothing for you. You learn nothing because you've heard it before, and you may even know by heart the passage being studied. You're just one person anyway and you won't be missed - so why go? Go because when lots of people begin to think as self-centeredly as you, churches empty out and have to close their doors. The anthill collapses when all the ants start thinking like cougars.
I attend a Wednesday night Bible study at a church near my home. Two young associate pastors are leading a study of Hebrews. When a young woman found out I was pastor of another church, she said to me, "I just think that's so neat that a pastor would come to a Bible study to get fed himself!" Of course I received her gracious words without correcting her. The truth is, I'm not there to feed. I've read through Hebrews lots of times, have preached through it twice, have strong opinions about it. I'm just there as an ant lending my support. (I'm hoping, for example, that my being there will encourage an unchurched friend to come.)
A relative of mine attends a church pastored by a buffoon. I've tried to get her to leave that church a number of times, but her answer is always the same: she stays for the sake of other dear souls who go there. Not for her sake, and certainly not for the buffoon's - but for others and for the good of the whole. I can never argue with that. May her saintly (or antly?) attitude infect many others!
When you show up promptly this Sunday at 10 AM for the adult class at Faith Bible Church, I'll be aware, all too painfully aware, that it is probably not for your own sake that you do that. I'll live with that, and the pain of knowing that the severely dwindled attendance of recent months must mean I'm boring the snot out of people, as long as there are some ants who understand that their continued presence is crucial to the functioning of the whole. In both of the last two weeks we had Sunday School, two first-time guests showed up at 10 and talked to me alone for quite a while until a few others arrived. (And thank God for those later arrivals! It would have been a long hour without them.) It's like when I took lunch the other day at a newly opened Chinese restaurant where I was the only person in the place apart from the waiter and a cook. The food was great, but it would have felt more comfortable, more right, if others were there too.
Be one of those others. Sure, you have your individual needs - we all do - but while seeking to fulfill them, do not neglect to take up your assigned spot in the ant colony. You have to go to church. And Sunday School.

Pastor's Page: October 28, 2008

A Reason To Be Humble

One of the reasons we ought to be humble is that others have done so much better than we with far less help, far fewer resources, and far greater challenges.
A friend told me he has a spiritual fantasy: he wants to be called upon in the Final Judgment to "rise and condemn" adulterers who defend themselves by saying they were married to bad people. My friend was married to a bad person too, but did not consider that grief a justification for sexual license. Maybe at the throne of God he will rise to judge, joining the Queen of Sheba and the men of Nineveh (Matthew 12:41-42) who will condemn certain Judeans. (Sheba valued the wisdom of mere Solomon, and the Ninevites repented at the preaching of mere Jonah, while the Judeans rejected Someone Far Greater.) On the day when all souls are rendering account for deeds done in the body, and some adulterous creep cries out, "But I was married to a shrew!" God can say, "Well, concerning that, let us hear a word from my servant Doug..."
I can understand my friend's fantasy because I relate so well to it. For example, one of the reasons I find former InterVarsity President Gordon MacDonald so insufferable is because he cheated on a good and faithful wife - his partner in ministry! - while I stayed faithful to a hostile and frigid apostate. So, MacDonald, what do you suppose a guy like you has to teach a guy like me about Christian virtue?
But such fantasies receive a hard rebuke when we consider all the people who could rise up in judgment against us. The line of my just condemners would be long. Sometimes, for example, I sin by being discouraged, and in my spirit stare blankly at cinder-block walls of hindrance and captivity. Quadriplegic Joni Eareckson Tada could be called upon to rise (or in her case, sit) in judgment against me, saying, "How dare you be discouraged! At least you've got arms and legs that work - I can't even brush my own teeth!"
Or take the sin of indulgence and the virtue of generosity. If I hear one more WMBI preacher begging money one minute, and talking about his Alaskan or Caribbean cruise the next, I'm going to scream bloody judgment. At such times I feel a dark temptation to pray like the Pharisee in Luke 18:11: "God, I thank thee that I am not as other [preachers]." But then there come to mind the widow of Zarephath, who shared what she thought was her and her son's last meal with the prophet Elijah, and the widow at the temple in Jerusalem, who gave her last two pennies in the offering plate. I imagine these women rising in judgment against me, saying, "Yes, Paul, do tell us your great story of faithful stewardship of meager resources."
God sets us as examples to one another. When we are tempted to sin, and justify that sin because our situation is so tough, let us call to mind victors who have had it so much tougher. And when we do well, and because of doing well come to despise those who fail, let us call to mind the real heroes, the ones who probably would not find our moral accomplishments all that impressive.

Pastor's Page: October 21, 2008

My Living Will, Or, Heaven Ain't So Bad

Some years ago I wrote a Pastor's Page advising people to make out a living will. Today I thought I'd tell you what mine is. I have written (by hand) and distributed these words:
In the event of my incapacitation, I insist that no medical measures be taken other than those designed to relieve pain or that have a strong likelihood of restoring me to full, independent, unmedicated health. Hence no breathing machines, feeding tubes, dialysis, resuscitation, or anything else that medical science may invent to delay the inevitable. I mean it. See with what large letters I write with my own hand. [The last sentence is writ larger than the rest. You may recognize it from Galatians 6:11.]
I want to persuade you of the rightness of making such a statement. My case:
(1) When I die I will be received into glory, not by any merit of my own but by the same grace that Jesus promised the dying thief: "Today you will be with me in paradise." Though it is sinful to try to hasten heavenly bliss through suicide, is it not foolish to try to postpone it through grasping at straws? Is heaven so frightful that we must avoid being sucked into it until the last possible moment? Especially when those medical "lifelines" thrown to us from the shores of earth are often just flotsam that make us drown more slowly.
(2) The quicker we let go, the less we burden our children. They have jobs and families and burdens of their own. What used to be a few weeks of making grandpa comfortable have now become years and years of changing his diapers and hooking him up to tubes. I'd rather not do that to my kids if I can help it. Sure, the young have a responsibility to care for the old, and it builds character for them to do so - but don't the old also have a responsibility to make that care-giving period as short and simple and dignified as possible?
(3) The quicker we go, the less we burden the health care system. The cost of preserving (I know this is offensive, but I'll just say it) a human vegetable can run into millions of dollars, and that money is better spent on those who have a shot at productive health. The staggering costs of long-term maintenance will break Medicare someday. Our selfish clinging to earthly life makes medical costs go up for everyone, and renders insurance unaffordable. To borrow an image from global warming, I don't know if my "carbon footprint" will ever really damage the planet, but I do believe that my "medical care footprint" weighs down a system that will increasingly struggle to provide care for those who can actually benefit from it.
You may notice that I say nothing in my living will about my funeral. That is because I believe it is selfish for people to give post-death instructions about their remains. That is for the living to decide - why should we care about it if we're dead? When my soul is rejoicing before Jesus, I won't give two hoots if, for example, med school students are slicing up my dead body in order to learn how better to treat living ones. Won't bother me one bit - and if it helps them, well, glory to God.