Land of the Dying

Over the years I’ve heard social commentators discuss our culture of death, how we are obsessed with death, and yet more terrified of it than nearly any other culture, and Christians are not exempt. I have to agree in large part with them.

Funerals used to be fairly simple affairs, but today they are a huge business, and the variety of ‘options’ one can select from is, well, remarkable, given the guest of honor is completely oblivious to them. One has to ask if it really helps those left behind.

We hide ‘public executions’ inside the prisons because they are considered poor taste, yet movies like “Faces of Death” show the most dramatic and disturbing life-endings caught on film, and many enjoy violent movies with a visceral desire to see the bad guys offed. (I have to confess I fall into this category more than I’d like to admit, cracking my own glass house.)

One reason our medicine is so advanced is because of our obsession with prolonging life and its quality. This is not inherently wrong, and indeed can be very Biblical, but like any ‘good’ thing, our motivations are revealing.

We worship the young, partly out of our fear of growing old, being less able to function, and closer to the grave.

So, it was with a pleasurable revelation on many levels that a guest bluegrass/Gospel band in church today played a song with the following chorus:

“I am leaving the land of the dying

To lay hold on eternal life

And the moment you see I’ve departed,

You’ll know I’ve safely arrived.”

It is worth a few minutes to meditate on these words.

Amen.

SDG

A Simple Reminder to Banish Fear

"If I could hear Christ praying for me in the next room, I would not fear a million enemies. Yet distance makes no difference. He is in the next room praying for me." - Anthony Coniaris

SDG

Spirit of Fear

I read an article today that discussed, from a politically conservative viewpoint, how pastors are afraid to address political issues from the pulpit. His point was that secular authorities seek to minimize the effect of the Church (i.e. the Gospel) on society. One way is to penalize churches who get too politically vocal for someone’s taste.

Another way is to minimize the respectability of Christian scholarship. Whether this is done subtly through comments during lectures to undergrads, or through the tenure and promotion process, or other more direct and/or vocal methods, folks opposed to the Gospel are typically more evangelical in their opposition than Christians are about the Good News.

The Cost of Joy

In Bible Study this week, we looked at John 16: 16-24:

“Jesus went on to say, ‘In a little while you will see me no more, and then after a little while you will see me.’”

“At this, some of his disciples said to one another, ‘What does he mean by saying, ‘In a little while you will see me no more, and then after a little while you will see me,’ and ‘Because I am going to the Father’?’ They kept asking, ‘What does he mean by ‘a little while’? We don’t understand what he is saying.’”

“Jesus saw that they wanted to ask him about this, so he said to them, ‘Are you asking one another what I meant when I said, ‘In a little while you will see me no more, and then after a little while you will see me’? Very truly I tell you, you will weep and mourn while the world rejoices. You will grieve, but your grief will turn to joy. A woman giving birth to a child has pain because her time has come; but when her baby is born she forgets the anguish because of her joy that a child is born into the world. So with you: Now is your time of grief, but I will see you again and you will rejoice, and no one will take away your joy. In that day you will no longer ask me anything. Very truly I tell you, my Father will give you whatever you ask in my name. Until now you have not asked for anything in my name. Ask and you will receive, and your joy will be complete.’”

Here, and throughout Scripture, God seems to bind fast together sorrow, grief and suffering inextricably with joy. It seems to be a divine, spiritual version of “no pain, no gain.” This spiritual truth is particularly troubling for the affluent mind.

Joy is not an emotion; it is an attitude, as state of the mind and heart. It is a promised fruit of the Spirit (Galatians 5:22), just like another popular fruit of the Spirit:  patience. As most of us know, ‘it is a fearful thing to ask the living God for patience.’ That is one prayer He often joyfully answers…by giving us trials that test and stretch our patience. It is very much like a gym workout, and you know it’s working when you can ‘feel the burn.’ If that is what He does for one Spiritual fruit, it stands to reason that He will do similar for the others.

Surrendering Territory

It is said that bureaucratic programs are easy to create but impossible to destroy. It is said that they develop a life of their own. There is some truth to this. As I have written before, when decision making becomes ‘policy,’ it becomes unowned—no one has responsibility for the decisions and their consequences anymore, they are ‘just following procedure.’

This also occurs because egos of those involved can feel failure if the program they created, manage or are part of is no longer needed, so they seek to justify its existence.

Paradoxically, programs and policies live on because no one wants to risk sticking their neck out to take responsibility for a potentially unpopular decision or other display of true leadership. Sometimes it happens out of a desire to save their careers because they don’t want to expend the energy to search for a new opportunity or are fearful of losing the security they have in their current position.

In both cases, the root cause is fear. Fear of losing prestige, a job, authority, influence and so on. Fear of taking a risk and making a mistake. Fear of making others angry or unhappy.

The motivation has switched from achieving a goal to self-preservation. This results in innovation becoming stagnation, and leadership degenerating into management.

Ten Years

It is right and appropriate to jump on the bandwagon of everyone remembering 9/11. It has fundamentally shaped how we have interacted with the rest of the world, almost as much as WWII. Yes, I still maintain that WWII has so far had a greater impact that 9/11, but it had a 60 year head start. Given time, 9/11 may well surpass it, though both world wars set the stage for 9/11 in how the Middle East was carved up by the fading colonial powers. We did very little to alleviate those problems and thus have inherited them.

It has shaped my life directly as well. While I don’t know anyone personally that was lost that day, one very close friend lost a friend in the towers. Another acquaintance lost a brother I think in the Pentagon. Friends from grad school were on the observation deck the Saturday 3 days before. Mike remarked to me in an email shortly afterwards, “I remember standing on the roof and thinking how solid it was.”

Requirements for a Faculty Ministry 2: Evangelism

Like prayer, evangelism is a touchy subject for faculty, probably more so. In the academy, Christianity is viewed as out of date, intolerant, and pushy. This is primarily because of the exclusive truth claims it makes. Evangelism as traditionally understood and performed exacerbates nearly all of the issues our colleagues have with our faith.

How dare we say that Jesus is the only way! How dare we even consider telling others that they should convert from their own worldview! It is a beautiful expression of their culture and individuality. How dare we declare that certain activities are unacceptable and even sinful. Morality is outdated. Ethics are the new standards and if my personal choices do not directly harm you, then what right do you have to tell me they are wrong?

Large Nobility

On my mother’s desk is the following quote by Abraham Lincoln, “We should be too big to take offense and too noble to give it.”

Today's post comes from observing how a major incident costing many people their jobs escalated from an unwise but relatively minor comment made in a meeting. How many troubles would be avoided if we would ignore offensive things said by others and sought to minimize the opportunities for others to take offense at our words. In today’s culture, the burden for avoiding conflict lies almost exclusively with the speaker and the hearers are rarely expected to let things slide by. In fact, much of the “politically correct” mentality seeks to hunt for any potential opportunity to infer offense in someone’s words. Author intent and gracious forgiveness are not options. To me, what is even more diabolical is when a hearer is offended on behalf of some hypothetical person not even present who might be offended had they heard the comment.

The Fellowship of the King

Today, I had lunch with a Christian colleague contemplating ministry opportunities from within the academy. She shared several things of interest that I will put under the categories of fears and fellowship.

Under fears, she was concerned about her academic reputation, and asked me if I had similar fears about doing an openly Christian blog on the public Internet. I told her that it was definitely something I thought through before starting, but that I wasn’t terribly worried about my reputation among my colleagues, but not for the reasons you might think. As a non-tenure track lecturer whose only responsibility is teaching undergraduate labs, the reality is that I am considered second class faculty, so they are grateful they don’t have to do my job, but some seem to assume that I do it because I’m a subpar scientist. I’m no Nobel Prize winner, but the truth is I enjoy shaping the rocks of student skulls more than asking the NSF for money. Also, as my colleagues pretty much all know I’m a Christian (sort of by accident) and a few of them are dismissive of me as a result, I don’t have that much of a reputation to lose in that regard.

Fear doesn’t have much hold over you when you don’t really have anything to lose by failure. In that regard, fear is a blackmailer. To conquer them both, the answer is the same—honesty and sacrifice. Go ahead and sacrifice in your mind (or in reality) the object of value they are holding against you, and they lose all power. When you are blackmailed over a skeleton in your closet, the solution is to expose the skeleton yourself. It’s there whether it is exposed or hidden, so the sooner it is exposed, the sooner and cheaper it can be buried, and that is freedom.

There is another antidote to my friend’s fear—God. Ok, yeah, that’s the Sunday School answer, sure. But it is also the right one. Paul says in one of my favorite passages in Scripture in I Corinthians 1:17-31:

For Christ did not send me to baptize, but to preach the gospel—not with wisdom and eloquence, lest the cross of Christ be emptied of its power.

For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. For it is written:

“I will destroy the wisdom of the wise;

the intelligence of the intelligent I will frustrate.”

Where is the wise person? Where is the teacher of the law? Where is the philosopher of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since in the wisdom of God the world through its wisdom did not know him, God was pleased through the foolishness of what was preached to save those who believe. Jews demand signs and Greeks look for wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those whom God has called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than human strength.

Brothers and sisters, think of what you were when you were called. Not many of you were wise by human standards; not many were influential; not many were of noble birth. But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. God chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things—and the things that are not—to nullify the things that are, so that no one may boast before him. It is because of him that you are in Christ Jesus, who has become for us wisdom from God—that is, our righteousness, holiness and redemption. Therefore, as it is written: “Let the one who boasts boast in the Lord.”

This doesn’t mean it will be smooth sailing; probably quite the opposite. Studies have shown that soldiers who care more about winning the battle than surviving it actually have higher survival rates than those who are trying to live through it. There is something about total commitment that makes obstacles able to be overcome that reservation simply can’t do.

This actually leads to my friend’s second issue, that of fellowship. She admitted to me that she really feels lonely in her department because the spiritual attitude of so many is antithetical to hers, and this is with 1-2 other Christians in her department! To my knowledge, none of the other faculty in my department are, so I understand that. We are often small islands in our fields, and that isolation makes fearless commitment that much harder to make and hold onto.

God knew this from the beginning, as evidenced by the reason He gives for creating Eve—“it is not good for the man to be alone.” He created us to be social beings. In Ecclesiastes 4:12, there is an oft-cited verse at weddings, “Though one may be overpowered, two can defend themselves. A cord of three strands is not quickly broken.” And, finally, in Hebrews 10:24-25, “And let us consider how we may spur one another on toward love and good deeds, not giving up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but encouraging one another—and all the more as you see the Day approaching.”

Studies have shown that it is possible to become so chronically dehydrated that you don’t even feel thirsty, and you are operating under a water deficit that is extremely unhealthy. Some of the chronic issues that develop are that cells lose their cohesion, nerve impulses don’t fire correctly, and blood doesn’t move through the body to oxygenate the cells properly.

One of the hardest things, it seems, for faculty in today’s ivory tower is to be able to recognize their dearth of fellowship in the academy. Part of this is due to the sheer busyness of demands on us that we feel we don’t have time for it. Part of it is that we don’t expect it at work, especially in the academy, so we look for it outside of work and tend not to prioritize it even when offered.

Yet, the church is a body and fellowship the cohesive water. In much of church history, churches were known by the neighborhood or locales of that group of believers who lived and worked in the same communities. They weren’t the buildings, but the people. Even in Acts and Paul’s letters, there are descriptions of ‘churches’ at places of employment, such as the believers in the praetorian guard and the believers in Caesar’s household.

By these descriptions, Christian faculty on a given campus are just as much a church as the folks at First Corner Church, and it is not inappropriate to act as one, even while being a worshipping member at FCC. We understand the pressures we are facing and can meet them together, influencing our culture both individually and together, simply because we know we are not alone and have folks to support us when struggles come. There is synergy in fellowship and it is silly not to take advantage of it.

SDG

Faith and Fear

Continuing yesterday’s discussion on faith and fear, I’d like to suggest that faith is a muscle or tool to be used and strengthened through that use, not a porcelain trinket that must be protected and hidden away.

When we protect our faith from all attacks, real or perceived, we run the risk of actually turning it into an idol, lifting it above the God with whom our faith is meant to be the vehicle of relationship. It is like sleeping with a marriage license and keeping the spouse in a file cabinet.

Paul called our faith a shield for quenching fiery darts, and sometimes believers seem to prefer to keep it polished in storage so it won’t get scratched. Then, logically, if we are not carrying it with us, we become afraid to come out.

There is a second mistake believers make with our faith shield. We hunker down behind it because the rest of our armor is missing or we don’t feel we know how to use it. We are afraid to use the sword of Scripture because we feel we aren’t prepared for the clever tricks of the enemy attempting to disarm us, so we curl up and let our faith get beat on or run from the engagement.

Again, this is all summed up in the one word, fear. Robert Kiyosaki of “Rich Dad” fame calls fear, “False Evidence Appearing Real.” Not bad, even with the strong whiff of aged cheddar coming off of it. But that is exactly why Paul talks about Scripture being a sword, testing for truth versus falsehood. Faith without truth is under siege. Faith with truth advances.

In college, I took a fencing class and loved it. I’ve always been fascinated by swords and swordplay. One thing about swordplay, you are limited by the number of strokes or moves you know. If you only know one way to block an attack, then your opponent will use others and you become defenseless. If you only know one type of lunge or slash, your opponent quickly learns how to block you completely. To become proficient, you need different teachers who teach different styles, you need to spar with different opponents, you need to be familiar with different types of blades, and so on.

It is the same with our study of the Bible. Most of us do not speak ancient Hebrew or Koine Greek. We don’t understand the different approaches to translation and the effect of the translator’s theology on the nuances of translation. We listen to just a few Bible teachers and come to rely on them rather than critically evaluating what they say. We don’t spend time in commentaries or reading theologians with whom we disagree. We don’t discuss with each other the hard things and examine them in a safe, controlled environment before facing them in life.

As a result, we become very one-dimensional in our ability to apply Scripture to the challenges of our lives and the challenges by our culture and education, and thus have less proficiency in addressing difficult issues. We become afraid, and our faith shrivels or becomes the only tool we have and try to make it do more than it is meant to. This is not the abundant life to which Christ calls us.

The solution? Practice with your sword like your life depends on it. It does.

SDG

A Different Trumpet Call

In some ways, this is a difficult post to write, because I feel the need to address a room-filling elephant in the American church. In surfing the web this week, I came across this chart on an atheist website. After a little hunting, I found the original source, a blog evaluating various aspects of data from a dating website. If you are interested in what it says, scroll down nearly halfway to where it tells you how to circumspectly find out if your date is religious, and you’ll be able to skip the parts about how preference for beer correlates to sex on the first date. Hardly a scholarly site.

So why am I giving it any credence at all? Simply because it is consistent with empirical evidence I have observed as well as that observed by folks with whom I shared the chart this week. So rather than being the authority on which this post is based, it was merely the spark that ignited my concern into action (or at least into the words of this post).

If the suspense hasn’t yet driven you to either of the links to see what the chart says, I applaud your fortitude. Basically, the chart indicates that the more religious you are, the less likely you are to be proficient in reading and writing. The chart compares different religious viewpoints and degree of self-reported devotion to one’s faith and their literacy grade level. If you are atheist, Buddhist, Jewish, or agnostic, you were the most literate. It goes downhill from there, in order: Hindu, Muslim, Catholic and finally Protestant.

Apparently, the ‘researcher’ compared the proficiency of spelling and grammar of all of the folks using the dating site and correlated it with stated faith and how seriously the person claimed to adhere to it. That’s about as much detail as was given in the article. I have no idea how they assessed grade level to the quality of writing, so don’t know the validity of the assessment. So why give it my attention?

Again, it is because it is consistent with my empirical observations. It grieves me to realize that the portions of our country that are associated most strongly with our faith strongly correlate with the worst educational statistics. When this country was founded by predominantly Protestant folks seeking religious freedom, one of the first and most important (in their view) things to do was to establish schools and universities so that their children could be educated in order to understand and advance their faith. Get that? Their faith was the goal of their education, not its enemy.

My friend, Dr. Robert Woodberry, a subject of a recent Scholar Redeemer post, is a sociologist who has found extraordinarily strong correlations between the work of Protestant missionaries around the world and a profound increase in the standard of living of the native population.

And yet, and yet, I see evidence all around me of folks who fear ‘secular education,’ and see faith as separate from and superior to anything the ‘world’ has to say on topics, and who see anyone who doesn’t hold to their interpretation of Scripture as deceived, wrong, evil, or of Satan, and therefore will not engage with them but retreat into holy huddles.

Why?

Bob’s the sociologist, not me. However, I think the Big Event that did the most to shatter the Protestant (and to a lesser extent, Catholic) confidence was Origin of Species. Basically, someone floated a plausible theory that casts doubt on the special Creation of humanity, and we crumbled. Why? One possible reason is that Christians had grown accustomed to their dominant role in American society and grew intellectually lazy, and thus their faith was more cultural than living and vibrant. They lifted their understanding of what the Bible says above other possible interpretations. They failed to read and appreciate the wealth of diverse interpretations of difficult passages by 1800 years of church thinkers, limiting themselves to rather simplistic interpretations. Thus, many were ill-equipped to intellectually engage evolutionary theory on a scientific, academic, or even logical basis, and surrendered the discussion with blind insistence on their interpretations. They had already ceded the intellectual rigor of the academy and hadn’t realized it, so perceived an attack rather than an attempt to fill the vacuum of quality scholarship.

What was the result? Christians as a rule began to advocate ‘blind faith’ (a term I despise), and that the truth of our faith trumps any evidence apparently against it. When this should have emboldened them to seek out data all the more strongly, instead they turned inward and suspicious, discouraging the brightest among them from pursuing those studies. Ignorance and fear multiplied, causing the church to stop trying to answer the difficult questions raised by science (and other academic fields) and insist on spiritual platitudes. The result was almost a Hindu like dualism—the physical world was deceptive illusion and the spiritual one the only reality. Yet, the Bible is the holy book that is one of the most grounded in the real world. The Jewish and Christian faiths are meant to be lived in the daily grind, not divorced from it.

When our young grew up in this environment, then went ahead and entered the secular educational system, the rationality God put into their brains received a shock like falling into an icy river and they realized they didn’t know how to swim, so they succumbed to the philosophy that their faith didn’t have the answers and was empty. They had been discouraged from asking questions in church, and in the academy, not only were they encouraged to ask, they were given answers that made sense of the information given, not knowing there was more out there to be discovered that would bolster their faith as reasonable. Their faith was revealed to be weak and powerless, and therefore God must be also, if He even existed after all. When word of this falling away reached home, folks just held on tighter in panic, their fear reinforced, and a vicious cycle began.

The church in effect agreed with the naturalist philosophy that faith was irrelevant and couldn’t be defended in the marketplace, so it exiled itself underground. Is this the picture of the church Christ painted to Peter of a force tearing down the gates of Hell? Are these the believers in whom perfect love casts out fear? Or is it the picture of those who hold to the form of religion but deny its power? Instead of the Church victorious, we have the Church anemic, afraid of getting bruised, afraid the atheists might actually be right that God does not exist and their faith is in vain.

I didn’t realize until seeing that chart how deeply I was aware of this phenomenon. Ever since high school, I was passionate about not wanting to study at a Christian college because I knew I needed my faith to be challenged in the world in which I would spend my career and life. I was passionate that I would send my kids to public school so they would be equipped to engage their culture from the beginning—I would train them in the faith at home and through church in such a way that they would be prepared for what they would face and they would get immediate practical application of it with their peers.

There are some truly wonderful Christian schools at all academic levels and some truly backwards ones. Within each category are faculty who are either wonderful or blind-faithers and everywhere in between. However, I wanted to be in the secular environment, fleeing the holy huddle, being a shelter for Christian students, and engaging the secular ones, providing an alternative. We still need folks to do that.

What I realized this week, is how badly we as Christian faculty, the exceptions to those in the graph, need to reach ‘in’ to the Body, to ease their fears, to enable them to stand, to open the eyes of their blind faith, showing them that faith is truly the assurance of things hoped for, because of what we have seen in God’s faithfulness. We do not need to be afraid for God’s power or reputation—He is the Lord All Mighty. Faith is supposed to give us the confidence to seek out the truth in the world and proclaim it in all of its forms, not cause us to run in fear in case it gets crushed.

Faith and fear are opposites. It is time for us as Christian scholars to lead our brothers and sisters out of fear and into faith. We need to help them to see their view of God is too small, a god of the gaps, not the Conqueror of Death and Author of Life. We need to restore a love of learning and study of Creation within the Church, to reignite the idea that scholarship is a holy calling, and reinforce the command that intellectual integrity is not only possible, but expected in a person of faith.

SDG