Friday, December 23, 2011
Thursday, December 22, 2011
Gospel Wakefulness
An excerpt from Jared Wilson's book by this name:
Imagine you are driving down the road and your car stalls at a railroad crossing. You are understandably nervous as you try to reignite the car's engine, but you become even more so when you see a train turn the corner in the distance and begin quickly closing the gap between it and you. The train engine's horn is blaring and the engineer has thrown on the brakes, but you are too close and he's coming too fast. You move from trying to get the car to start to trying to unfasten your seatbelt, but fear has made your hands stiffen and shake. You can't get your seatbelt unfastened. the train is rushing toward you, and you know you're going to be hit. And you are. Suddenly and from behind. A man in a truck behind you has decided to ram into your car and push you off the tracks, even as he is destroyed by the impact in the very spot you once occupied.
You get out of the car, shaken and still frightened. You are terrified by the gruesome scene, in shock over your rescuer's sacrifice. You are grateful in a way you've never been grateful before. You wish you could thank the driver of the truck for saving your life. Even in your terrified awe, it feels good to be alive. You feel woozy, so you sit down on the trunk of your car, and as your trying to retrieve your cell phone from your pocket to call 911 and marveling at how little damage the violent shove did to the rear bumper, you hear a whimper from inside.
You didn't know that before you'd left the house, as your kids were playing hide-and-seek, your youngest son decided to hide in the trunk of your car. As you open it up frantically and discover that he is miraculously unharmed, you suddenly realize the total greatness of the loss you almost suffered. Your gratitude, your amazement, your new outlook on life takes a giant leap forward. That is the difference between the gospel wakefulness of conversion and the greater gospel wakefulness that often occurs later.
This passage was powerful to me. The book, which I commend, is about the difference between merely knowing the Gospel, and being gripped by it down in the heart so that it is the most precious truth in the world to you. Christ steps in and takes the punishment that we deserved. That is a simple truth. But the beauty and depth of it will take whatever weight we put upon it, and as we plumb the depths of the Gospel, we will never grow bored, and its resources will never dry up. God loves us so, so very much! May we awaken more fully to him. May we see his love anew in powerful ways!
Imagine you are driving down the road and your car stalls at a railroad crossing. You are understandably nervous as you try to reignite the car's engine, but you become even more so when you see a train turn the corner in the distance and begin quickly closing the gap between it and you. The train engine's horn is blaring and the engineer has thrown on the brakes, but you are too close and he's coming too fast. You move from trying to get the car to start to trying to unfasten your seatbelt, but fear has made your hands stiffen and shake. You can't get your seatbelt unfastened. the train is rushing toward you, and you know you're going to be hit. And you are. Suddenly and from behind. A man in a truck behind you has decided to ram into your car and push you off the tracks, even as he is destroyed by the impact in the very spot you once occupied.
You get out of the car, shaken and still frightened. You are terrified by the gruesome scene, in shock over your rescuer's sacrifice. You are grateful in a way you've never been grateful before. You wish you could thank the driver of the truck for saving your life. Even in your terrified awe, it feels good to be alive. You feel woozy, so you sit down on the trunk of your car, and as your trying to retrieve your cell phone from your pocket to call 911 and marveling at how little damage the violent shove did to the rear bumper, you hear a whimper from inside.
You didn't know that before you'd left the house, as your kids were playing hide-and-seek, your youngest son decided to hide in the trunk of your car. As you open it up frantically and discover that he is miraculously unharmed, you suddenly realize the total greatness of the loss you almost suffered. Your gratitude, your amazement, your new outlook on life takes a giant leap forward. That is the difference between the gospel wakefulness of conversion and the greater gospel wakefulness that often occurs later.
This passage was powerful to me. The book, which I commend, is about the difference between merely knowing the Gospel, and being gripped by it down in the heart so that it is the most precious truth in the world to you. Christ steps in and takes the punishment that we deserved. That is a simple truth. But the beauty and depth of it will take whatever weight we put upon it, and as we plumb the depths of the Gospel, we will never grow bored, and its resources will never dry up. God loves us so, so very much! May we awaken more fully to him. May we see his love anew in powerful ways!
Wednesday, December 21, 2011
Christian Identity as the Fuel for Christmas
Whoever humbles himself like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. (Matthew 18:4)
Each of you should give what you have decided in your heart to give, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver. (2 Corinthians 9:7)
Christmas is a very special time of year. It is a time full of tradition. It is a time filled with family. It is a time filled with laughs and smiles. The name of Christ is glorified when our celebration of his becoming human for us is marked with the deepest merriment. Christmas is a time of giving.
Christmas shopping can be crazy business. There are many people to buy for, lots of stuff to get. If you want a headache, try going near a mall on the weekend. Some people even get creative and make stuff for people... not me. (And they are thankful for it. Just ask Nicole or Michael Gilbert about my impeccable cookie decorating abilities.) Christmas is indeed a time for giving.
And a time for receiving. I believed in Santa Claus when I was little. He brought me a ton of stuff it seemed. My parents had already gotten me toys that were specifically from them, so the rest had to be from Santa, right?! Well, I remember the days leading up to Christmas being marked by great anticipation. I knew that I was going to be getting stuff, and if the pattern held true, lots of stuff!
You might expect me to bash Santa Claus as the Great Distractor, and materialism as the idolatry of stuff, but I am not. I'll save that for another, less cheerful blog entry, one that I hopefully won't get around to writing. Instead, I want to contend that Christians are best equipped to enjoy Christmas for several different reasons, the deepest of which goes to our very core, our very identity that we have been given.
I think there was something pure in our anticipation of Christmas as children, even when a large part of that anticipation was for Christmas morning when we would get toys. Kids don't even know to hide this delight, and I think it would be rather Scrooge-like to make them. As a kid, I had no money, and I had absolutely no way to effectively repay anyone for the gifts I was receiving. I am sure that the best gift I gave was a huge smile and a genuine joy in getting to play! I am sure my parents joy in Christmas morning was seeing the joy my brother and I had in receiving.
Joy is the best expression of thanksgiving, and thanksgiving was all I had to give. Christmas, indeed, was a giant exercise in receiving grace, though I didn't have all the theological apparatus in my brain to call it that. I know that we can be distracted by getting so much stuff that we neglect those who gave us the stuff, but as a kid, I wasn't even smart enough to make that distinction. Analyzing things is okay, and it is even very appropriate in many cases, but we should never let our analyzing suck the joy out of things. God calls us to love him with our mind, which definitely means using it, and he also commands our joy, so I know the two aren't mutually exclusive. There was such joy in receiving as a kid. (And I still anticipate Christmas for this reason, but sometimes I feel selfish for saying so. This blog entry is calculated to rid some of us over-thinkers from unnecessary guilt.)
Christmas is time for receiving, which is something we practice as children, and it is a great grace. But it is also a time for giving. God loves a cheerful giver. My wife is such a cheerful giver, and she gives such thoughtful gifts. I am blessed to be married to her.
There are many pitfalls and ways to sin, soiling the beauty of God's creative purposes. Within the context of Christmas, we can become selfish, we can covet, we can be stingy, we can fail to set our hearts on Christ's coming as the true meaning of the holiday... we can do a million different things.
The one I want to focus on is the way we can subtly turn Christmas giving into a mere checklist, a tug of war, a sort of graceless exercise in giving and receiving, a sort of Scrooge-like accounting system. Once we are actually old enough to make money, we realize that we ought to be giving back as well. We see that we have received from someone, and we try to give them something back. Giving is a hugely beautiful thing when it is done out of love and not out of obligation. Giving out of obligation is not cheerful giving.
I fear that many people try to make Christmas a zero-sum game. We don't want to be in debt to anyone. If someone gives us something, or if we think someone is going to give us something, there is an impulse within us to try to match that gift back if we can. We want to be even. But I think that if our motivation is to keep everything even, we have destroyed the idea of a gift. If what we have been given is really a gift, it comes with no strings attached, and the only appropriate response is thanksgiving and joy. Our response does not need to be that we go out and find something of equal value to give back. If the gift we have given to someone is really a gift, it goes with no strings attached. We are not expecting repayment. Do you give expecting in return? A particularly nasty way to twist giving is for a wealthier person to give to someone more than they can repay materially, and then the wealthier person will hold the other in their debt.
Christian identity is the fuel for Christmas. First, the most obvious way this is true is that we are celebrating Christ at Christmas. If we do not have faith in Christ, it is impossible to really celebrate the holiday in truth. If we do not have faith, it is impossible to have joy at Christ's coming.
Second, Christian identity radically fuels our receiving. As Christians, we have become something new, not because of our works or how smart we are or how effectively we repent or any such nonsense. We have become something new because we have been made something new; we have received a new identity from outside ourselves as the Gospel is proclaimed to us. We are now the forgiven, the freed, the sons and daughters of the Most High God. The debt we owed, that we were unable to pay, was payed in full by Christ our Mediator at the cross.
The nature of Christian grace is this: I have done absolutely zero to merit salvation. I did not earn it. I do not add to it. My salvation is by grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone. The moment I try to add to it, to improve my salvation, I distort it. At the core of our identity as Christians is grace. We see ourselves paralyzed, unable to move to improve our condition, picked up by our Savior, carried, given life. We are passive, and he is active in this. At the core of our identity as Christians is a radical dependence upon another. Before we are ever givers, we are receivers. We are always dependent on God, so we remain receivers. Those who give and receive best are those who are on their knees in the morning confessing their absolute dependence on Jesus.
Third, Christian identity radically fuels our giving. As we realize the fleeting nature of this world, stuff does not have a hold on us. We no longer feel the need to get rich and cling to stuff as our identity when we are heirs of a Kingdom. Therefore, we can loosen our grip on our stuff enough to give it away... joyfully. Jesus was not stingy with his own blood, which he shed as a gift to us, so how can I be stingy with anything. I cannot. Nothing I own is really mine anyway. It is all on loan to me for a time, and I am merely a steward. Everything I have is for the glory of God, and I can often bring him most glory by being very giving with it.
Let me conclude and put all this together. As Christians, we are radically freed to receive because at our core we are people who know we receive every breath as a gift. We know we can never repay God, so we are freed from the need to repay others. But we do! Not out of obligation. As Christians, we are radically freed to give, expecting nothing in return, because we have been shown such great love. When we behold our Savior, we transformed into his likeness, and he is such a good giver. We give like Christ gave, and we receive like little children - we must become like them to enter the Kingdom of God, right? Grace is the great ocean within which the Church swims - the only reason it exists - and in that ocean these things flow freely in both directions. The world knows only echoes and shadows of this great grace, but as Christians, it should be the center of who we are.
In our giving and receiving, may we have great freedom and great joy. In that way, may we glorify our Savior who gave us so much when he freely came to take on the sins of the world. Glory to God in the highest!!!
Each of you should give what you have decided in your heart to give, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver. (2 Corinthians 9:7)
Christmas is a very special time of year. It is a time full of tradition. It is a time filled with family. It is a time filled with laughs and smiles. The name of Christ is glorified when our celebration of his becoming human for us is marked with the deepest merriment. Christmas is a time of giving.
Christmas shopping can be crazy business. There are many people to buy for, lots of stuff to get. If you want a headache, try going near a mall on the weekend. Some people even get creative and make stuff for people... not me. (And they are thankful for it. Just ask Nicole or Michael Gilbert about my impeccable cookie decorating abilities.) Christmas is indeed a time for giving.
And a time for receiving. I believed in Santa Claus when I was little. He brought me a ton of stuff it seemed. My parents had already gotten me toys that were specifically from them, so the rest had to be from Santa, right?! Well, I remember the days leading up to Christmas being marked by great anticipation. I knew that I was going to be getting stuff, and if the pattern held true, lots of stuff!
You might expect me to bash Santa Claus as the Great Distractor, and materialism as the idolatry of stuff, but I am not. I'll save that for another, less cheerful blog entry, one that I hopefully won't get around to writing. Instead, I want to contend that Christians are best equipped to enjoy Christmas for several different reasons, the deepest of which goes to our very core, our very identity that we have been given.
I think there was something pure in our anticipation of Christmas as children, even when a large part of that anticipation was for Christmas morning when we would get toys. Kids don't even know to hide this delight, and I think it would be rather Scrooge-like to make them. As a kid, I had no money, and I had absolutely no way to effectively repay anyone for the gifts I was receiving. I am sure that the best gift I gave was a huge smile and a genuine joy in getting to play! I am sure my parents joy in Christmas morning was seeing the joy my brother and I had in receiving.
Joy is the best expression of thanksgiving, and thanksgiving was all I had to give. Christmas, indeed, was a giant exercise in receiving grace, though I didn't have all the theological apparatus in my brain to call it that. I know that we can be distracted by getting so much stuff that we neglect those who gave us the stuff, but as a kid, I wasn't even smart enough to make that distinction. Analyzing things is okay, and it is even very appropriate in many cases, but we should never let our analyzing suck the joy out of things. God calls us to love him with our mind, which definitely means using it, and he also commands our joy, so I know the two aren't mutually exclusive. There was such joy in receiving as a kid. (And I still anticipate Christmas for this reason, but sometimes I feel selfish for saying so. This blog entry is calculated to rid some of us over-thinkers from unnecessary guilt.)
Christmas is time for receiving, which is something we practice as children, and it is a great grace. But it is also a time for giving. God loves a cheerful giver. My wife is such a cheerful giver, and she gives such thoughtful gifts. I am blessed to be married to her.
There are many pitfalls and ways to sin, soiling the beauty of God's creative purposes. Within the context of Christmas, we can become selfish, we can covet, we can be stingy, we can fail to set our hearts on Christ's coming as the true meaning of the holiday... we can do a million different things.
The one I want to focus on is the way we can subtly turn Christmas giving into a mere checklist, a tug of war, a sort of graceless exercise in giving and receiving, a sort of Scrooge-like accounting system. Once we are actually old enough to make money, we realize that we ought to be giving back as well. We see that we have received from someone, and we try to give them something back. Giving is a hugely beautiful thing when it is done out of love and not out of obligation. Giving out of obligation is not cheerful giving.
I fear that many people try to make Christmas a zero-sum game. We don't want to be in debt to anyone. If someone gives us something, or if we think someone is going to give us something, there is an impulse within us to try to match that gift back if we can. We want to be even. But I think that if our motivation is to keep everything even, we have destroyed the idea of a gift. If what we have been given is really a gift, it comes with no strings attached, and the only appropriate response is thanksgiving and joy. Our response does not need to be that we go out and find something of equal value to give back. If the gift we have given to someone is really a gift, it goes with no strings attached. We are not expecting repayment. Do you give expecting in return? A particularly nasty way to twist giving is for a wealthier person to give to someone more than they can repay materially, and then the wealthier person will hold the other in their debt.
Christian identity is the fuel for Christmas. First, the most obvious way this is true is that we are celebrating Christ at Christmas. If we do not have faith in Christ, it is impossible to really celebrate the holiday in truth. If we do not have faith, it is impossible to have joy at Christ's coming.
Second, Christian identity radically fuels our receiving. As Christians, we have become something new, not because of our works or how smart we are or how effectively we repent or any such nonsense. We have become something new because we have been made something new; we have received a new identity from outside ourselves as the Gospel is proclaimed to us. We are now the forgiven, the freed, the sons and daughters of the Most High God. The debt we owed, that we were unable to pay, was payed in full by Christ our Mediator at the cross.
The nature of Christian grace is this: I have done absolutely zero to merit salvation. I did not earn it. I do not add to it. My salvation is by grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone. The moment I try to add to it, to improve my salvation, I distort it. At the core of our identity as Christians is grace. We see ourselves paralyzed, unable to move to improve our condition, picked up by our Savior, carried, given life. We are passive, and he is active in this. At the core of our identity as Christians is a radical dependence upon another. Before we are ever givers, we are receivers. We are always dependent on God, so we remain receivers. Those who give and receive best are those who are on their knees in the morning confessing their absolute dependence on Jesus.
Third, Christian identity radically fuels our giving. As we realize the fleeting nature of this world, stuff does not have a hold on us. We no longer feel the need to get rich and cling to stuff as our identity when we are heirs of a Kingdom. Therefore, we can loosen our grip on our stuff enough to give it away... joyfully. Jesus was not stingy with his own blood, which he shed as a gift to us, so how can I be stingy with anything. I cannot. Nothing I own is really mine anyway. It is all on loan to me for a time, and I am merely a steward. Everything I have is for the glory of God, and I can often bring him most glory by being very giving with it.
Let me conclude and put all this together. As Christians, we are radically freed to receive because at our core we are people who know we receive every breath as a gift. We know we can never repay God, so we are freed from the need to repay others. But we do! Not out of obligation. As Christians, we are radically freed to give, expecting nothing in return, because we have been shown such great love. When we behold our Savior, we transformed into his likeness, and he is such a good giver. We give like Christ gave, and we receive like little children - we must become like them to enter the Kingdom of God, right? Grace is the great ocean within which the Church swims - the only reason it exists - and in that ocean these things flow freely in both directions. The world knows only echoes and shadows of this great grace, but as Christians, it should be the center of who we are.
In our giving and receiving, may we have great freedom and great joy. In that way, may we glorify our Savior who gave us so much when he freely came to take on the sins of the world. Glory to God in the highest!!!
Tuesday, December 20, 2011
Plato, Marriage, and the Incarnation
Plato has had a large influence on the history of Christian thought. Some of it has been good, and some of it has not. Plato is known for his search for universals. He came up with a theory of Forms, and these forms were universal in nature, and the things we experience in our everyday lives are simply temporal and limited instances of these eternal forms. For Plato, the temporal and immediate bodily experience of things is inferior to these eternal forms, and the influence that Platonism has had on Christianity is to emphasize the importance of the soul to the exclusion of the body. According to a Plato-influenced Christianity, the body is bad, and we long to escape it, so that we can live eternity as our perfected souls. The immaterial superior to the material. True Christianity, of course, recognizes the corruption of the body, but our hope is for a resurrected body like Jesus' resurrection body. Heaven is not meant to be immaterial but a rescue of our material world gone bad.
I am not a philosopher, and I am sure the preceding paragraph includes some bad philosophy and gross oversimplifications. Nevertheless, I have noticed a Platonistic tendency within myself, and I have noticed this as I have come to see the differences between my wife and I. Let me explain what I mean.
In marriage two people come together as one. It is an awesome and a scary thing. I commend it. No two people are going to be alike, and I think especially in the beginning months and probably years, those two people begin to see their differences. You see the other person more clearly, and as you come to understand that person, you also come to understand yourself better, even and especially through your differences.
Nicole and I are different. I think part of that certainly is that I am a man, and she is a woman, and by virtue of God's creative plan, we are different in distinctive ways. Some of our differences are due to this gender difference, and some is due simply to the specifics of who we were created to be as different individuals. What are some of these differences?
Let me describe myself. In describing myself and what makes me tick, I do not mean to say that Nicole is disinterested in these things - only that they do not necessarily drive her in the same ways they drive me. I believe I am driven by a search for universals, a sort of Platonism. What are my passions? First, I am a math teacher, and I am passionate about math. I like the logic of it, and I like the way the whole structure of math can be reasoned forth from a few elementary self-evident assumptions. Euclid's Elements are beautiful. The structure of math is really beautiful to me because I believe it is describes something true about the universe, something that existed before man was around, and something that will exist after the world is over. Two plus two equals four, and the same would be true for aliens, even if they used different symbols or language to describe this underlying truth. In doing math, I am grasping for one of these universal Forms.
I enjoy physics for the same reasons; I am not as good at it. I enjoy chemistry a little less. I enjoy biology least of all the sciences probably. I do not enjoy memorizing data. I think I enjoy physics because it seeks to boil down physical reality to its most basic causes, and it gets the nearest to basic Forms. I am not a materialist; however, I think my mind does work like a scientist and engineer. There is a beauty in the idea that you can keep boiling things down to smaller and smaller constituent pieces. Take an animal. You can boil down the animal and what it does to billions of chemical reactions happening in its body and in its brain. And those chemical processes can be boiled down into smaller processes, and if you get small enough you get down to the level of atoms.
In a sense, biology sits atop chemistry sits atop physics sits atop math. Using math, physics holds out the hope of unification. There are basic forces, such as gravity and electromagnetism, and there is a sort of universal elegance to the way math can help explain the world. Along this spectrum, I have noticed in myself a draw to what seems more universal, the math and the physics, and I am not as interested in what seems so particular, such as the biology of how a caterpillar turns into a butterfly. Part of this (slight) aversion to chemistry and biology is that as we move into these particulars, there is a ton more specific and seemingly arbitrary information to know, and it is simply more attractive to describe it in simpler terms if possible, even if we are describing more general (or universal) principles.
I enjoy doing traditional manly things, like playing and watching sports, but unlike many, I have absolutely no interest in their statistics. In a sense, the sport itself is more of a universal, and the specific histories of people playing them are arbitrary manifestations of those universals. These histories are literally trivial to me. I get caught up in sports, though. But the part I actually get caught up in is the story of pursuit and triumph and sometimes redemption. I get caught up the story that is being told through the sports. But I believe these stories are pieces and echoes of a bigger Story. I feel and root for the characters in the story, but after the game, I will soon forget what happened in the bottom of the fifth inning or what happened on the 17th green. Who won the NCAA tournament the last few years. I honestly don't remember, but I watched them all.
I enjoy reading a lot. I used to read fiction, but my tastes have changed over time. I still do read some fiction, but I now read things to help me understand the Bible better. I love the gospel story. I believe that we ought not to waste our lives, and there is an eternity waiting, so everything I do I want to count in light of eternity. Therefore, I have less and less interest in fictions, and I want to improve my mind in things that will last. The gospel will last, and God's truth will last; therefore, I am interested in improving my mind in pondering those truths. A very, very regrettable side effect of this pursuit of eternal Truth in relation to the Bible is that I attempt too much to systematize and boil down to more basic truths. Instead of reading the Bible, sometimes I read others' organizing interpretations of the Bible. I am much more ignorant of the Old Testament than I need to be because it seems so full of what seems to be the arbitrary particulars of the lives of different people. I feel more at home in the logic of Paul than I do in the stories of the kings in the OT.
That is a lot of self-description, and I apologize. I just want to convey the sense I feel of this search for universals as opposed to particulars within myself. Nicole is different. Certainly not in the sense that she does not care for truth. On the contrary! Instead, she finds it more readily than I do in the particulars of life. While I spend my time pondering deep universal truths and searching more deeply the nature of the Gospel, she is showing practical giving and love to those who are near to her, giving hands and feet to the Gospel. She cares deeply for her mother, her father, and her Mamaw. She loves more freely and deeply than I do. What does she like to do? What gets her wheels turning? Arts and crafts and decorations! She is very good at that sort of thing, and I am definitely not. Crafts was my least favorite Vacation Bible School station. In my mind, all of that is arbitrary material stuff, and it isn't going to last into eternity, so I am not as interested in it. Like Plato, I tend to skip over the particulars for the universals.
Nicole also gets into stories more emotionally and deeply than I do. She likes to watch television and read stories, probably more than I do. And she gets much more involved with the characters. She empathizes with them more. Not just in fiction, but in real life, too. While I am loving the theoretical people I don't know in a foreign nation I haven't been to, she is helping and loving and sharing her particular creativity with people who need love right around her.
I want to conclude and bring these together. The Lord Jesus Christ is God over all. This includes the universals and the particulars. Christianity should not be filtered through the lens of Plato. Rather, Plato should be filtered through the lens of Christ's supremacy over all. I think that Nicole and I both have pieces of the puzzle, and that part of God's sovereign plan was to bring us together to complement each other and help each other grow. We both have much to learn from God and from each other.
Christmas is here, and the miracle of the incarnation shakes me out of some of this Platonic trance. It humbles me, that a God so great would stoop down into the dirty particularity of a single life. Jesus, eternal and universal, stoops down to take flesh and blood, humanity, parents, aches and pains, a Jewish identity, a single mother, and a road to a bloody cross. We see stories in the gospels, not just an emotionless force walking around spouting universal truths. We see particularity. We see deep love for us in God's sovereign particularity. Though we do not see his face today, we unmistakably know that God became a man and had a face. Though we do not hear his laugh, we know he had one. Though we know so little of his childhood, we know he had one. From my point of view, I tend to focus on the divinity of Christ, his eternality, but this is lopsided if I do not also see his humanity. In Christmas, the Universal becomes particular in a manger.
Every single topic and every single thing has significance because it is in God's world. Everything is meant to glorify God. This does not flatten out our choices into insignificance, but it is true nevertheless. I think each of our prayers should be that God would open our eyes to our own blindspots. How is God at work to glorify himself in the things that are not naturally as interesting to me? God, please help me. God, please give me the grace to listen and learn. Jesus, may my mind and heart exult in the amazing unity of things as I ponder your eternal purposes, but may that worship of you work itself out into practical love in the amazing complexity of your creation, especially those in need around me. Most assuredly, Soli deo Gloria!
I am not a philosopher, and I am sure the preceding paragraph includes some bad philosophy and gross oversimplifications. Nevertheless, I have noticed a Platonistic tendency within myself, and I have noticed this as I have come to see the differences between my wife and I. Let me explain what I mean.
In marriage two people come together as one. It is an awesome and a scary thing. I commend it. No two people are going to be alike, and I think especially in the beginning months and probably years, those two people begin to see their differences. You see the other person more clearly, and as you come to understand that person, you also come to understand yourself better, even and especially through your differences.
Nicole and I are different. I think part of that certainly is that I am a man, and she is a woman, and by virtue of God's creative plan, we are different in distinctive ways. Some of our differences are due to this gender difference, and some is due simply to the specifics of who we were created to be as different individuals. What are some of these differences?
Let me describe myself. In describing myself and what makes me tick, I do not mean to say that Nicole is disinterested in these things - only that they do not necessarily drive her in the same ways they drive me. I believe I am driven by a search for universals, a sort of Platonism. What are my passions? First, I am a math teacher, and I am passionate about math. I like the logic of it, and I like the way the whole structure of math can be reasoned forth from a few elementary self-evident assumptions. Euclid's Elements are beautiful. The structure of math is really beautiful to me because I believe it is describes something true about the universe, something that existed before man was around, and something that will exist after the world is over. Two plus two equals four, and the same would be true for aliens, even if they used different symbols or language to describe this underlying truth. In doing math, I am grasping for one of these universal Forms.
I enjoy physics for the same reasons; I am not as good at it. I enjoy chemistry a little less. I enjoy biology least of all the sciences probably. I do not enjoy memorizing data. I think I enjoy physics because it seeks to boil down physical reality to its most basic causes, and it gets the nearest to basic Forms. I am not a materialist; however, I think my mind does work like a scientist and engineer. There is a beauty in the idea that you can keep boiling things down to smaller and smaller constituent pieces. Take an animal. You can boil down the animal and what it does to billions of chemical reactions happening in its body and in its brain. And those chemical processes can be boiled down into smaller processes, and if you get small enough you get down to the level of atoms.
In a sense, biology sits atop chemistry sits atop physics sits atop math. Using math, physics holds out the hope of unification. There are basic forces, such as gravity and electromagnetism, and there is a sort of universal elegance to the way math can help explain the world. Along this spectrum, I have noticed in myself a draw to what seems more universal, the math and the physics, and I am not as interested in what seems so particular, such as the biology of how a caterpillar turns into a butterfly. Part of this (slight) aversion to chemistry and biology is that as we move into these particulars, there is a ton more specific and seemingly arbitrary information to know, and it is simply more attractive to describe it in simpler terms if possible, even if we are describing more general (or universal) principles.
I enjoy doing traditional manly things, like playing and watching sports, but unlike many, I have absolutely no interest in their statistics. In a sense, the sport itself is more of a universal, and the specific histories of people playing them are arbitrary manifestations of those universals. These histories are literally trivial to me. I get caught up in sports, though. But the part I actually get caught up in is the story of pursuit and triumph and sometimes redemption. I get caught up the story that is being told through the sports. But I believe these stories are pieces and echoes of a bigger Story. I feel and root for the characters in the story, but after the game, I will soon forget what happened in the bottom of the fifth inning or what happened on the 17th green. Who won the NCAA tournament the last few years. I honestly don't remember, but I watched them all.
I enjoy reading a lot. I used to read fiction, but my tastes have changed over time. I still do read some fiction, but I now read things to help me understand the Bible better. I love the gospel story. I believe that we ought not to waste our lives, and there is an eternity waiting, so everything I do I want to count in light of eternity. Therefore, I have less and less interest in fictions, and I want to improve my mind in things that will last. The gospel will last, and God's truth will last; therefore, I am interested in improving my mind in pondering those truths. A very, very regrettable side effect of this pursuit of eternal Truth in relation to the Bible is that I attempt too much to systematize and boil down to more basic truths. Instead of reading the Bible, sometimes I read others' organizing interpretations of the Bible. I am much more ignorant of the Old Testament than I need to be because it seems so full of what seems to be the arbitrary particulars of the lives of different people. I feel more at home in the logic of Paul than I do in the stories of the kings in the OT.
That is a lot of self-description, and I apologize. I just want to convey the sense I feel of this search for universals as opposed to particulars within myself. Nicole is different. Certainly not in the sense that she does not care for truth. On the contrary! Instead, she finds it more readily than I do in the particulars of life. While I spend my time pondering deep universal truths and searching more deeply the nature of the Gospel, she is showing practical giving and love to those who are near to her, giving hands and feet to the Gospel. She cares deeply for her mother, her father, and her Mamaw. She loves more freely and deeply than I do. What does she like to do? What gets her wheels turning? Arts and crafts and decorations! She is very good at that sort of thing, and I am definitely not. Crafts was my least favorite Vacation Bible School station. In my mind, all of that is arbitrary material stuff, and it isn't going to last into eternity, so I am not as interested in it. Like Plato, I tend to skip over the particulars for the universals.
Nicole also gets into stories more emotionally and deeply than I do. She likes to watch television and read stories, probably more than I do. And she gets much more involved with the characters. She empathizes with them more. Not just in fiction, but in real life, too. While I am loving the theoretical people I don't know in a foreign nation I haven't been to, she is helping and loving and sharing her particular creativity with people who need love right around her.
I want to conclude and bring these together. The Lord Jesus Christ is God over all. This includes the universals and the particulars. Christianity should not be filtered through the lens of Plato. Rather, Plato should be filtered through the lens of Christ's supremacy over all. I think that Nicole and I both have pieces of the puzzle, and that part of God's sovereign plan was to bring us together to complement each other and help each other grow. We both have much to learn from God and from each other.
Christmas is here, and the miracle of the incarnation shakes me out of some of this Platonic trance. It humbles me, that a God so great would stoop down into the dirty particularity of a single life. Jesus, eternal and universal, stoops down to take flesh and blood, humanity, parents, aches and pains, a Jewish identity, a single mother, and a road to a bloody cross. We see stories in the gospels, not just an emotionless force walking around spouting universal truths. We see particularity. We see deep love for us in God's sovereign particularity. Though we do not see his face today, we unmistakably know that God became a man and had a face. Though we do not hear his laugh, we know he had one. Though we know so little of his childhood, we know he had one. From my point of view, I tend to focus on the divinity of Christ, his eternality, but this is lopsided if I do not also see his humanity. In Christmas, the Universal becomes particular in a manger.
Every single topic and every single thing has significance because it is in God's world. Everything is meant to glorify God. This does not flatten out our choices into insignificance, but it is true nevertheless. I think each of our prayers should be that God would open our eyes to our own blindspots. How is God at work to glorify himself in the things that are not naturally as interesting to me? God, please help me. God, please give me the grace to listen and learn. Jesus, may my mind and heart exult in the amazing unity of things as I ponder your eternal purposes, but may that worship of you work itself out into practical love in the amazing complexity of your creation, especially those in need around me. Most assuredly, Soli deo Gloria!
Monday, December 19, 2011
Zombies, Life, and Jesus
Over the course of my time in college, I have watched a number of zombie movies - some good ones and bad ones - thanks in large part to the diverse cinematic tastes of my good friend and former roommate Chris Cassidy. I imagine that many in my reading audience may not have enjoyed this genre yet, but perhaps some of my musings may nevertheless prove stimulating for your thoughts.
Zombies are generally outside of the norm for the sort of thing my wife enjoys watching. However, she has recently discovered a great interest in the television show "The Walking Dead". I was invited by one of my fellow teachers who lives in our apartment complex to begin watching the show as a social thing with old friends one night each week; the show is off until February. But as Nicole and I were looking through our Netflix options one evening, we saw the first season of the show. I suggested we watch it to just check it out with the expectation that it would be too gross-sounding for her to want to watch. However, we watched the first episode, and she was hooked. We both enjoyed it enough that we watched all of the existing episodes, up to about halfway through the second season.
Mild spoiler alert to anyone watching or wanting to watch... The show's main character is a cop who went into a coma for some amount of time and woke up in a post-apocalytic world in which nearly everyone had been killed or turned into zombies by a virus. The world looks rough. Real live people are few and far between who have actually survived, and over the course of the show, you see them fighting and sometimes making difficult and morally challenging choices to stay alive. Keep a gun and be prepared to shoot; no mercy for the dead...
The cop, whose name is Rick, wakes up, and he journeys to Atlanta where he eventually finds his family alive with a small group of survivors. During the second season, his wife, Lori, discovers that she is pregnant. This introduces a moral dilemma for Lori, one that did not exactly endear her to us. She tries to decide whether or not to have an abortion. She begins to ponder... what kind of world will this child be brought into? What kind of horrors will he face? How long will he even be able to live? Will he be eaten by a zombie before he makes it to his first birthday? And even if he lives to old age, what will be his quality of life in such a world as this? In pondering whether to have an abortion, she wallows in hopelessness. You will have to actually watch to figure out what happens, but this dilemma caused me to think... (It is not my purpose with this blog entry to make a comprehensive case for life, but that is certainly the only position I believe is warranted by Scripture.)
Many of the questions she is wrestling with are the same sorts of questions that women face today. I hear it from pro-choice advocates who talk about how horrible the kid's life would be if he were born into poverty. How horrible to bring a child into such a hopeless situation. The fetus is the result of rape, so it is unfair to the mother to make her have the child, and given the circumstances, the child wouldn't have a life worth living anyway... goes the reasoning.
(An aside: Though you often hear this reasoning, I am sure pro-choice advocates would actually like to keep the argument far away from thinking about the potential life of the child altogether because it is easier to kill something you don't think is a person. It's a fetus, not a person. Within the context of the show, that is how the characters must come to think of the zombies. Though the zombies used to be their family members, the virus turns them into something else... something that can be killed. The Holocaust could only occur because most of the Nazis did not believe the Jews were real people. Brainwashing.)
I believe that every pregnant couple or mother should feel the weight of this dilemma and decide joyfully in favor of life and hope. But aside from just thinking about whether to bring a child into the world once you're pregnant, it might be instructive to consider when couples are deciding whether to try to bring children into the world period.
The world portrayed in this post-apocalyptic vision is bleak and horrible; however, the world as we know it today is also bleak if we look it straight in the eye. Consider that every person suffers. Every person born will someday die; some will die painfully, and some will die alone. Every person bleeds, and no one can go through this warzone of a world without physical and emotional scars. When we come into this world, we attach to people around us that we will necessarily have to say goodbye to at some point, whether through a move or through the inevitability of death on our part or theirs. And not everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved; sadly, for many the horrors of this present world are a mere precursor to an eternity of judgment separated from Christ. There is no guarantee that our children will find God, though we do everything in our means to help them; there is, however, there is a guarantee of suffering.
Yes, in zombieland death seems imminent, but that is merely sped-up zoomed-in version of our own world. In their world, the zombies are flesh-and-blood, and they can be shot in the head. Simple, right? In our world, we do face dangers that threaten physical death, like earthquakes, tornadoes, great white sharks, and cancer, but we do not need to fear those who can only do things to the body... we also face the essentially invisible, yet formidable three-headed monster of Satan, the spirit of the world, and our own flesh that pulls us into sin. Oh my! Worse than zombies, and like zombies, we basically don't believe these things exist. No one is free from this warfare. In the land of zombies, the people think more clearly about their own mortality than we do. Indeed, let us seek the truth that will set us free and think soberly, rightly for the sake of our prayers and for the sake of the Gospel.
Why bring anyone into this world?
The answer the show gives is perhaps close to a legitimate answer you and I also could give. It holds up, rather emotionally, the idea that there is still beauty in the world, and there is enough good in the world to outweigh the bad and make it worth it. Most of the time, most of us in this world would say the good outweighs the bad. But we don't always feel this way, and some of those who lose hope that the world could ever be good enough to outweigh the bad commit suicide and end their misery. Several people in the show "opt out" as hopelessness overtakes them. The good outweighing the bad is a compelling answer to some, but it is not the deepest answer. (We are not always adept at judging good and bad in light of eternity.)
As Christians we believe that God is good. We believe that God is all-powerful. We believe that he knows everything. We believe that he is eternal. We believe that he has a plan for everything and that he is bringing his plan to pass. Romans 8:28.
Why did God create the world? Let me state at the outset, that we cannot give a sure, clean, neat answer to this question. But let us think about the problem of this question. The problem of this question runs to the heart of the atheism of many people. How could a God who is altogether good and altogether powerful create a world where there is so much suffering? Can God and suffering co-exist? If God knew what would happen with Adam and Eve, and if God knew that many would reject his Son and spend an eternity in Hell, why did he choose to create?
Let me run down an answer that I know will leave many unsatisfied, but which I believe is profound. Our God is in the heavens and he does all that he pleases. Therefore, it pleased him to create the world, a pleasure that was not at odds with his attributes - love, grace, justice, holiness... It pleased the Father to crush the Son. The cross was at the center of God's plans all along, not as an afterthought to the Fall. The cross is the center of the universe, the center of history because it elevates God's love and grace. Christ's grace is magnified and glorified in his suffering for sinners. God's glory and our good are not at odds but find their deepest intersection on that bloody tree two thousand years ago. Therefore, God was pleased to create a world in which Jesus was crucified so that his love and grace might be displayed to completely undeserving sinners like us. Christ is glorified in this way. Though I don't understand it, I believe that God's glory - the apex of which is found in the cross - is at the center of God's purposes for this world he created.
We do not see into the mind of God, into his essence, beyond what he lets us in on in his revelation. We know some things for sure - God is passionate for his glory and he loves sinners, and he hates sin, and he hates suffering, and he suffered for us... but in the end, there is so much that we do not know. Nevertheless, we know that God loves us, that God knows everything, and that he did indeed decide to create, in spite of the suffering in the world.
In the end, God decided to create.
I think, therefore I am. Or rather, I think, therefore I AM created me.
Should life be brought into this world? There is so much suffering. Should I play God and choose to end a life that has already been started? I think that the most profound answer to this question posed in the context of a zombie show, yet relevant to real life, is that we should trust the God who was pleased to bring life into this world. Most certainly we don't see the whole picture. And if our position is one of humble trust, we are relieved of the burden of playing God. The miracle of life and birth is something of a pointer, a parable, a picture by us - who are in God's image - of his own creativity. To bring a baby into this world in spite of it's dangers and difficulties is a powerful declaration of trust in the God who calls us to himself - the Way, the Truth, and the LIFE.
And all the pain I have described in this blog, roll it all up and see it on the bleeding back of Christ on the cross, enduring the righteous wrath of millions of hells in the stead of those who are found in him by faith, all for the joy that was set before him. We look to the cross to see God's great love; we look to his resurrection to see his power. And his resurrection gives us resurrection hope to take the next steps and pursue the joy that is set before us, even when the world seems so monstrous and zombie-ridden.
We choose life because the one who gave us life did. (The end.)
Zombies are generally outside of the norm for the sort of thing my wife enjoys watching. However, she has recently discovered a great interest in the television show "The Walking Dead". I was invited by one of my fellow teachers who lives in our apartment complex to begin watching the show as a social thing with old friends one night each week; the show is off until February. But as Nicole and I were looking through our Netflix options one evening, we saw the first season of the show. I suggested we watch it to just check it out with the expectation that it would be too gross-sounding for her to want to watch. However, we watched the first episode, and she was hooked. We both enjoyed it enough that we watched all of the existing episodes, up to about halfway through the second season.
Mild spoiler alert to anyone watching or wanting to watch... The show's main character is a cop who went into a coma for some amount of time and woke up in a post-apocalytic world in which nearly everyone had been killed or turned into zombies by a virus. The world looks rough. Real live people are few and far between who have actually survived, and over the course of the show, you see them fighting and sometimes making difficult and morally challenging choices to stay alive. Keep a gun and be prepared to shoot; no mercy for the dead...
The cop, whose name is Rick, wakes up, and he journeys to Atlanta where he eventually finds his family alive with a small group of survivors. During the second season, his wife, Lori, discovers that she is pregnant. This introduces a moral dilemma for Lori, one that did not exactly endear her to us. She tries to decide whether or not to have an abortion. She begins to ponder... what kind of world will this child be brought into? What kind of horrors will he face? How long will he even be able to live? Will he be eaten by a zombie before he makes it to his first birthday? And even if he lives to old age, what will be his quality of life in such a world as this? In pondering whether to have an abortion, she wallows in hopelessness. You will have to actually watch to figure out what happens, but this dilemma caused me to think... (It is not my purpose with this blog entry to make a comprehensive case for life, but that is certainly the only position I believe is warranted by Scripture.)
Many of the questions she is wrestling with are the same sorts of questions that women face today. I hear it from pro-choice advocates who talk about how horrible the kid's life would be if he were born into poverty. How horrible to bring a child into such a hopeless situation. The fetus is the result of rape, so it is unfair to the mother to make her have the child, and given the circumstances, the child wouldn't have a life worth living anyway... goes the reasoning.
(An aside: Though you often hear this reasoning, I am sure pro-choice advocates would actually like to keep the argument far away from thinking about the potential life of the child altogether because it is easier to kill something you don't think is a person. It's a fetus, not a person. Within the context of the show, that is how the characters must come to think of the zombies. Though the zombies used to be their family members, the virus turns them into something else... something that can be killed. The Holocaust could only occur because most of the Nazis did not believe the Jews were real people. Brainwashing.)
I believe that every pregnant couple or mother should feel the weight of this dilemma and decide joyfully in favor of life and hope. But aside from just thinking about whether to bring a child into the world once you're pregnant, it might be instructive to consider when couples are deciding whether to try to bring children into the world period.
The world portrayed in this post-apocalyptic vision is bleak and horrible; however, the world as we know it today is also bleak if we look it straight in the eye. Consider that every person suffers. Every person born will someday die; some will die painfully, and some will die alone. Every person bleeds, and no one can go through this warzone of a world without physical and emotional scars. When we come into this world, we attach to people around us that we will necessarily have to say goodbye to at some point, whether through a move or through the inevitability of death on our part or theirs. And not everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved; sadly, for many the horrors of this present world are a mere precursor to an eternity of judgment separated from Christ. There is no guarantee that our children will find God, though we do everything in our means to help them; there is, however, there is a guarantee of suffering.
Yes, in zombieland death seems imminent, but that is merely sped-up zoomed-in version of our own world. In their world, the zombies are flesh-and-blood, and they can be shot in the head. Simple, right? In our world, we do face dangers that threaten physical death, like earthquakes, tornadoes, great white sharks, and cancer, but we do not need to fear those who can only do things to the body... we also face the essentially invisible, yet formidable three-headed monster of Satan, the spirit of the world, and our own flesh that pulls us into sin. Oh my! Worse than zombies, and like zombies, we basically don't believe these things exist. No one is free from this warfare. In the land of zombies, the people think more clearly about their own mortality than we do. Indeed, let us seek the truth that will set us free and think soberly, rightly for the sake of our prayers and for the sake of the Gospel.
Why bring anyone into this world?
The answer the show gives is perhaps close to a legitimate answer you and I also could give. It holds up, rather emotionally, the idea that there is still beauty in the world, and there is enough good in the world to outweigh the bad and make it worth it. Most of the time, most of us in this world would say the good outweighs the bad. But we don't always feel this way, and some of those who lose hope that the world could ever be good enough to outweigh the bad commit suicide and end their misery. Several people in the show "opt out" as hopelessness overtakes them. The good outweighing the bad is a compelling answer to some, but it is not the deepest answer. (We are not always adept at judging good and bad in light of eternity.)
As Christians we believe that God is good. We believe that God is all-powerful. We believe that he knows everything. We believe that he is eternal. We believe that he has a plan for everything and that he is bringing his plan to pass. Romans 8:28.
Why did God create the world? Let me state at the outset, that we cannot give a sure, clean, neat answer to this question. But let us think about the problem of this question. The problem of this question runs to the heart of the atheism of many people. How could a God who is altogether good and altogether powerful create a world where there is so much suffering? Can God and suffering co-exist? If God knew what would happen with Adam and Eve, and if God knew that many would reject his Son and spend an eternity in Hell, why did he choose to create?
Let me run down an answer that I know will leave many unsatisfied, but which I believe is profound. Our God is in the heavens and he does all that he pleases. Therefore, it pleased him to create the world, a pleasure that was not at odds with his attributes - love, grace, justice, holiness... It pleased the Father to crush the Son. The cross was at the center of God's plans all along, not as an afterthought to the Fall. The cross is the center of the universe, the center of history because it elevates God's love and grace. Christ's grace is magnified and glorified in his suffering for sinners. God's glory and our good are not at odds but find their deepest intersection on that bloody tree two thousand years ago. Therefore, God was pleased to create a world in which Jesus was crucified so that his love and grace might be displayed to completely undeserving sinners like us. Christ is glorified in this way. Though I don't understand it, I believe that God's glory - the apex of which is found in the cross - is at the center of God's purposes for this world he created.
We do not see into the mind of God, into his essence, beyond what he lets us in on in his revelation. We know some things for sure - God is passionate for his glory and he loves sinners, and he hates sin, and he hates suffering, and he suffered for us... but in the end, there is so much that we do not know. Nevertheless, we know that God loves us, that God knows everything, and that he did indeed decide to create, in spite of the suffering in the world.
In the end, God decided to create.
I think, therefore I am. Or rather, I think, therefore I AM created me.
Should life be brought into this world? There is so much suffering. Should I play God and choose to end a life that has already been started? I think that the most profound answer to this question posed in the context of a zombie show, yet relevant to real life, is that we should trust the God who was pleased to bring life into this world. Most certainly we don't see the whole picture. And if our position is one of humble trust, we are relieved of the burden of playing God. The miracle of life and birth is something of a pointer, a parable, a picture by us - who are in God's image - of his own creativity. To bring a baby into this world in spite of it's dangers and difficulties is a powerful declaration of trust in the God who calls us to himself - the Way, the Truth, and the LIFE.
And all the pain I have described in this blog, roll it all up and see it on the bleeding back of Christ on the cross, enduring the righteous wrath of millions of hells in the stead of those who are found in him by faith, all for the joy that was set before him. We look to the cross to see God's great love; we look to his resurrection to see his power. And his resurrection gives us resurrection hope to take the next steps and pursue the joy that is set before us, even when the world seems so monstrous and zombie-ridden.
We choose life because the one who gave us life did. (The end.)
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)