Thursday, December 19, 2013

Phil

Okey dokey.  Well...  hmmm....

First, I am not at all surprised.  I am not surprised at the massive success of Duck Dynasty.  There are plenty of people who enjoy relating to a family who loves each other and jokes a lot and has a real faith.

I am not surprised that in our entertainment and Christian sub-culture we have idolized the Robertsons, put them on a pedestal, and bought all their stuff.  I am not a cynic, and I don't think that they were only ever in it for the money, but their faces and beards are on everything!  They have taken over Wal-Mart!  The market is saturated with them.

I am not surprised that Phil said the things he said.  He said them a little graphically, but he also stated what a lot of people actually believe.  Phil is pretty squarely evangelical, and though many denominations wiggle their way around the Bible's definition of sin, he seems to be taking the Scripture as much as possible at face value, and he doesn't care if this offends.  A little like a woolly-looking John the Baptist coming out of the woods, preaching repentance, and calling out people (like Herod) for their sexual sins.

I am not surprised at the backlash.  It is completely not okay within our modern day to say that homosexuality is wrong.  It is not okay to say the things that the Bible says.  (Whether it's true or false is rendered irrelevant, as the focus is wholly on how offensive it is.)  But Christians should hardly be surprised that this is the case.  The Bible clearly teaches that adherence to a Christian morality based on the plain words of the Bible will put us out of step with the cultural consensus at different points.

I am not surprised at the Christian backlash to the backlash.  This hearkens back to the day when all the good Christians went out to eat at Chick-fil-a to show their support.  I anticipate that this sort of thing will go on back and forth for a while at different points.  People on different sides, instead of talking to one another, wear their favorite cultural icons like a badge and go out and fight for their causes, boycotting and patronizing and face-booking.

But dear Christians, let us keep perspective.  There are real actual Christian martyrs around the world.  A lot of them.  I do not think we ought to feel sad for millionaire Phil Robertson.  Speaking his mind got him into the spotlight and earned the affection of millions, and speaking his mind has gotten him into hot water with his show's producers and the cultural gatekeepers.  He will continue speaking his mind, and I think he is wise enough to know that their moment in the spotlight wasn't going to last forever.

We live in a democracy.  And one that is primarily capitalistic at that.  Things will balance out.  If you've got to have more Robertsons, I am sure there will be a way to find them, even if they really do get the boot from their current spot.

As a Christian I think...

1) God is in control.  There is no need to be panicky or anxious.
2) we should get to know people to have real conversations.
3) we should recognize the real disagreement behind our disagreement - which is that God determines what is right and wrong, not shifting public opinion.

As a note on tolerance... nobody would say they are against tolerance.  But the idea is, what kind of tolerance are we talking about?  I think it is a loss and not a gain to step into a tolerance that would flatten everyone's opinions into a gray equal mush.  No one has a corner on the truth... how dare you think you're actually right... everyone should just believe what works for them...  But what about what's true?  If two people really disagree, it is possible that one of them is wrong (or maybe both of them), but how can they both be right if they are talking clearly to each other about the same thing?

I say abortion is morally impermissible.  You say it is morally permissible.  We are in disagreement.  Now we can't both be right.  Maybe we're both wrong if it turns out that there is no such thing as morality and we are forcing some foreign scheme onto the question.  (I don't believe that.)  Or maybe we want to say that it is not all black and white, that there are certain circumstances under which it would be morally permissible or morally impermissible.  But really that is just a sort of narrowing function, so that we can just re-ask the question in regards to that particular circumstance.  Under circumstances X, would abortion be morally permissible?  And maybe we find agreement, but likely we would find disagreement.  And once we have gotten it down to those particular circumstances, I am saying that it defies logic for the action to be both morally permissible and morally impermissible in the same sense, at the same time...  I find all this to be common sense, but our modern world has a knack for doing double-talk to evade what would otherwise be obvious.

So basically I am pleading for some intellectual honesty.  Let us be honest that we hold our opinion because we think it's right.  We do not hold our neighbor's opinion if we think it's wrong.  If we thought he was right, well I guess we'd be holding that opinion, too, by definition.  Why would you hold an opinion if you didn't think it was right or true?  (Again, to some this will seem incredibly like just basic common sense.)

So let's get down to Phil's issue.  Some people believe that the Bible teaches that homosexuality is a departure from God's good design for sexuality, and to engage in it is wrong.  And other people believe strongly that to hold such a view of sexuality is close-minded, bigoted, and wrong.  Those upset with Robertson disagree with him with a vehemence that clearly shows they don't simply have a difference of opinion such that they are all just holding different equally valid opinions.  They think he is dead wrong.  And not wrong as in... oh I just hold a wrong opinion about the answer to a math question.  Wrong, as in morally wrong, morally repugnant, must be stopped.

Both groups of people are appealing to some standard of morality.  They appeal to it and say the other is in transgression of this real standard.  How will a democracy, society judge between them?  I want the consideration of this to press on us the issue of where morality comes from in the first place.  Everyone, by virtue of the simple act of disagreeing or disapproving, operates on some standard.  But where does it come from?

I think that a real objective standard is best grounded in some absolute, like God.  How then do we know the standard?  We are obviously not great at keeping it because we violate even our own consciences all the time.  Our conscience evidences this natural law, but our consciences are malleable and not omniscient.  If God really is the source of the standard - which makes the best explanatory sense to me - then we will be in the dark if he does not teach us his standard and keep it somewhere so that it stands forth firm and unwavering despite our individual or societal wanderings.  And that is what I think the Bible does.  It is a testament that does many things and one of these is to teach us what God requires of us so that we are not in the dark.

And quite understandably a lot people are wary of such an explanation.  But what would you substitute as the source of the standard and how will I know?  Should I take my standard from society?  If we hold an idea of society progressing and getting better, better as judged by what?  And what is to keep me from getting stuck in this particular generation's morality if this is really just a step on the way to the next and improved generation?  Should I just follow my heart?  That seems completely subjective and a recipe for running off the rails.  Should I just listen to you?  Ehh...

Well...  I am on Christmas break and have time to write this sort of thing.  During the semester, I will be swamped with reading.  So I hope that this has been at least thought provoking to those of you who have taken the time to read.  And maybe I'll get in another post or two before Spring gets rolling.


Tuesday, December 10, 2013

Promises in Disguise

Romans 12:1 - I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.

In the Christian life, we are saved by grace through faith in Jesus Christ.  We are not saved by our works.  The Gospel is not a list of suggestions or commands.  It is an announcement of News, of Good News.  It is a proclamation of a Story that has deep meaning for us.  And when the Holy Spirit grabs our hearts through that Story - Jesus death, burial, and resurrection to save us for our sins - we are saved and changed. 

If you are saved, you know about the battle that is the Christian life.  We still have indwelling sin.  We are still finite and sinful creatures.  We still do things that displease God.  Romans 7 is a telling illustration of this internal battle.  If you are saved, you now have a principle within you that really hates sin because it is displeasing to God.  You want to please God now, not in order to be saved, but simply because you love him.  And you want to be done with the things that weigh you down.  This battle makes me long for heaven when sin is no longer present in any capacity.  What a sigh of relief and joy will come then.

Faith that saves is also faith that sanctifies.  If your faith does not lead you over time to increasingly hate your remaining sin, it probably isn't real faith.  Our faith may be tested by our fruits.  Jesus' pictures in Matthew of those who are not fruitful are quite scary.  (Jesus talks about hell a lot more than modern pastors, I think.)  The faith that unites us to Jesus is the same faith that sees us through, that sees us growing. 

What is the nature of that initial move of faith?  It is seeing what Jesus has done for us and believing it, knowing and stepping into the knowledge that he died for me.  And I couldn't have saved myself.  I am incapable of it because I am a poor sinner.  Without God's help I never would have found him or followed him.  Saving faith is a faith that trusts in Jesus and despairs of any attempts at self-salvation.  And I think sanctification involves that same basic look to Jesus.  As we look to Jesus and see what he has done, as we contemplate the grace he has shown us, as we see the true meaning of the cross and empty tomb, we are changed for the better.  We fall in love with God more!  And from that love we properly bear fruit where we were before fruitless. 

I think it does work that way, but I wanted to write this blog post because of a way I have seen myself look at things one-dimensionally.  The Gospel is deep and I never want to move beyond it, or set it aside, or feel like I have mastered it.  Contemplation of the Gospel is something I should do everyday for the rest of my life.  And I expect God will grow me through that. 

But what then to do with the law?  What to do with all the things God commands?  I am not talking, even, about all the Old Testament laws and what the new covenant does to our interpretation of that.  I am talking about the Sermon on the Mount and Romans 12 and Ephesians 4.  God clearly expects things of us.  He expects our obedience.  What place do these passages have in the way I look at things now?  One way - a correct way I think - of looking at it is like I described above.  We are saved by belief in the Gospel and further contemplation of the Gospel melts our hearts so that they become loving.  And this love is the fulfilling of the law, which will mean that we more naturally fulfill these commandments out of renewed hearts. 

But God works in many ways.  He is up to a lot of things.  And he can use a lot of different things to great effect in our lives.  And far be it from me to think I have figured out all the ways he can press the Gospel into his people...

Let me describe some periods of growth for me...

My walk as a Christian is not uniform.  It goes through periods of dryness, periods of great joy, periods of falling back into sin, and periods of refreshing and repentance. 

Seasons of dryness and sin are also typically seasons where I have been little in the Word and little in prayer.  I think they go together like oil and water.  I don't think we are ever sitting still.  We are either moving towards God or away from him, either slowly or quickly.  But we are not sitting still.

In some of the times of refreshing, I look back at something that sparked it, and it is not always a straightforward contemplation of the Cross.  Sometimes it has been that I have read a good biography.  (I think Hebrews commends this idea.)  I listened to Eric Metaxas' 7 Great Men to my benefit.  It had short biographies of people like George Washington and Jackie Robinson and Dietrich Bonhoeffer.  It wasn't scripture, but my heart was encouraged.  Doing this made me want to be a better man, and that desire was fuel for helping me to actually become a better man. 

I also have been distinctly helped by the writings of CS Lewis.  I mean writings from any genre.  I have read Mere Christianity probably three times now, and each time God speaks to me afresh.  I am emboldened to not go about my Christian walk out of duty but out of delight.  Reading the Chronicles of Narnia and The Great Divorce and The Screwtape Letters have all taken me into fictional worlds, but they have all, though fiction, helped me to see myself and my own world with fresh eyes. 

Sometimes I am refreshed by an extended meditation on a particular verse.  My Gospel-lens says I should connect every verse up to the storyline of the Bible, but I am not always smart enough about how to do that.  And yet God blesses his Scriptures in my life, in spite of my dim-wittedness.

Sometimes it is through service to others that I am taken out of myself and refreshed and changed.  I have experienced it and I know others have too, the sort of buzz that you get off mission work.  God is with us as we are pursuing the Great Commission in the world.  It is a fight coming off a mission trip to stay doing the right things at home, but that does not take away from the reality of God's presence that you felt in his mission in fellowship with his people.

And that brings me finally to a category that I want to commend to you.  I have entitled this blog entry "Promises in Disguise".  I want to commend God's commands as promises. 

I have had the same experience, and perhaps you have too, of meditating on God's law or commands, on a picture of righteousness, and being changed for the better into truly desiring to be the kind of person who can do those commands.  I think Psalm 119 is all about this.  The Psalmist delights to set his heart and mind on the commands of God.  In today's Gospel-centered subculture in the church, we will say explicitly that we should set our hearts and minds on the Cross and Empty tomb, but it seems foreign to our lips to say that we will set our hearts and minds on the law.  Isn't that what Jesus came to save us from?!

But I don't think that is an empty phrase to put on our lips.  Or an empty action to take.  We should set our hearts and minds on God's good commands. 

What does it mean that God has given us commands?  The Israelites were proud of the law in a good way.  It meant that God had not been silent towards them.  It meant that in love he had not left them to their own devices and moral confusion.  God's Law will either look precious or repugnant based on what you're looking for.  In our modern world, we are often looking for unfettered freedom, in which case the Law is going to look horrible and burdensome and... just let me look the other direction.  But if you have come to the point that you really want to do right, you want to be good, you hunger and thirst for true righteousness... you will delight if the one who knows the answer lets you in on the truth and shines a light for you into your moral darkness. 

Some of the Israelites took the Law and used it as a stepping ladder to try to fashion their own righteousness and please God by how good they were.  But not all of them.  Romans 4 talks about the way people were justified in the Old Testament, and it was the same way that they are justified in the New Testament, by faith.  The distinction between the Old and New testament dispensations is not so radically different as you may have been taught.  People in the Old Testament believed God and it was credited to them as righteousness. 

The Ten Commandments were a precious gift to the Israelites.  But God didn't give it to them as conditions for getting into heaven.  They were more like house rules for a people who had already tasted salvation.  The people of Israel had just been rescued from bondage and had been given the law.  This type of logic is paralleled in the structure of Romans.  God, in Romans 1-11, is gloriously working out a salvation for his people, and it isn't until chapters 12-16 that he gets around to telling them how to behave.  God saves and then answers the question of how we are to live. 

Why do I say that the commands are promises?

I think that some people have said "God won't ask you to do something that you are unable to do."  And I don't exactly agree with that.  I think God's moral law rests on our consciences before we are saved, and no one can keep the law.  Apart from the Spirit of God we cannot please God.  Our righteousness is as filthy rags.  What is our condition before Jesus becomes Lord in our lives?  No one does good.  No one seeks after God.  Our hearts are not merely sick, but dead, until the God who resurrected Jesus speaks life into us.  To our dead hearts God says obey, and we cannot... until he graciously chooses to wake us up.

But I do want to say just that about the Christian - "God won't ask you to do something that you are unable to do."  Of course, we can't do it in our own power.  We need the Spirit's help.  But as Christians we have the spirit, and we have a heart that is alive to God now.  We do sometimes fail, and humility would ask us to admit that we will probably fail again in the future.  But stepping up to any task of obedience that God requires, we now can meet that challenge in Christ.  There is no temptation that is greater than the power of God to deliver you from it if you throw yourself upon Christ. 

God is both glorified in and pleased with our obedience.  He gets the glory because it is so obvious that we could not stand obediently apart from his grace and help.  And our obedience is where our love is proven.  God doesn't want throngs of people who feign love with their mouths but whose lives show that it is a mere moving of the lips.

So then, every time God asks something of us, we can look at it as a promise from him as help to perform it.  You belong to the family of God because Jesus has purchased you with his blood.  We are family.  And the New Testament is filled with house rules because it is loving for God to guide his children.

When Christ died for his people, he was not merely purchasing their forgiveness, but also their sanctification and future glorification.  We are being remade into the image of Christ.  We are being transformed.  Each act of obedience is helping to shape us into the picture of ourselves that God can already clearly see. 

Let us treasure all of the Word of God.  The Gospel frees us to appreciate the commands of God in new ways.  Let us live lives of obedience, to the praise and glory of Jesus.  Soli Deo gloria!

Sunday, December 1, 2013

Refresh

I think every once in awhile we get caught in a rut.  We get used to seeing things from one angle.  We get comfortable in our relationships, in our position, in our faith.

Sometimes we become comfortable with sin creeping in.

Sometimes we become complacent.

I find that in those times I am not reading Scripture.

"The Bible will keep you from sin, or sin will keep you from the Bible."  A proverb.

Go be with God as soon as possible.  He is better than your other plans.

Sunday, October 20, 2013

Hezekiah and Us

Then Isaiah said to Hezekiah, "Hear the word of the Lord:  Behold, the days are coming, when all that is in your house, and that which your fathers have stored up till this day, shall be carried to Babylon.  Nothing shall be left, says the Lord.  And some of your own sons, who shall be born to you, shall be taken away, and they shall be eunuchs in the palace of the king of Babylon."  Then Hezekiah said to Isaiah, "The word of the Lord that you have spoken is good."  For he thought, "Why not, if there will be peace and security in my days?"  

Hezekiah was actually one of the good kings in Israel's history.  He walked in the footsteps of his father David.  (Father, as in his ancestor.)  But like David, we still see weaknesses.

Hezekiah had just gotten through showing off his wealth to an envoy from Babylon.  He did not spare showing them anything.  He was showing off.  And pride goes before a fall...

But the fall, in this case, was prophesied to happen years later to his house, his descendants.  The exile into Babylon is here prophesied.  This is surely not good news to receive.  How does he take it?

He seems to take it far too well.  Hezekiah is happy just to realize that it is not going to happen to him.  He breathes a sigh of relief to know that he isn't going to feel the consequences of his pride.  His descendants are out of sight, out of mind.

I don't follow politics too closely.  But it seems to me that in America we had a boom, we have had a lot of wealth, a lot of pride.  We have flaunted it.  And pride goes before a fall...

But maybe we could take the time to think about future generations.  What sacrifices and what discipline are in order in the present to hand future generations a better America?

And what about the Great Commission?  Many do not know the Gospel.  How could they know without hearing it?  These people become far too easily out-of-sight, out-of-mind for us.  But our love should be for these peoples, not for our own skin or our own comfort.

Jesus bore the curse of the sin of hundreds of generations who were not even born yet, including ours... He thought of those future generations as he shouldered the cross in all that it meant.  For this we should be thankful.

I thought this was just an interesting story from a part of the Bible I don't read very often, 2 Kings 20.

Thursday, October 17, 2013

Things the Enemy Wants for Me

1.  To feel I am too busy for prayer.
2.  To feel I am too unworthy for prayer.
3.  To feel that prayer is meaningless.
4.  To worry.
5.  To wear myself out trying to get rich.
6.  To assume I've already got all the Bible I need.
7.  To feel guilty.
8.  To fall slowly and stay stuck in patterns of sin.
9.  To believe what my heart says over what God says.
10. To be too busy to spend time with my wife.
11. To find my worth and security in success, instead of God.
12. To be too busy to realize there is spiritual warfare happening.

Friday, October 11, 2013

Walking

I ran across walking as a metaphor for how we walk through life's pain and suffering while reading a chapter from Tim Keller's new book on the subject.  I think this metaphor is helpful.  Let me briefly explain.

God wants us in this moment.  The past is the past, and the future is the future.  It is far too easy to get sucked into either one.  And life is long.  Sure, it will go past in the blink of an eye, but as it is lived, it is lived one day at a time, a marathon, putting one foot in front of the other one.

I want to live a good life.  I want to live a life that is honoring to God.  But I have besetting sin.  I have indwelling sin.  I have real struggles.  What to do?

My natural reaction is to want to have it all fixed at once.  And I put all my emotional energy into some resolution about being actually godly now.  But when I do that, I am relying on my own righteousness, instead of God's righteousness for me.  I look forward to the rest of my life and think, "Oh, what an opportunity I have to fix myself and make up for all the bad stuff I've done and thought and said in the past."  And I lean on that theoretical future as a way to make God happy with me.

But that is not what the Gospel is.  That is not the way the Gospel motivates.  I look at my sanctification as a sprint to get to the destination now - godliness - so that I may rest in it for the rest of my life and set up a nice clean record so that I will feel better about myself when I come to die.  No good.

God is good, and he is sovereign over our sanctification.  And I think walking is a good metaphor for showing trust and for showing the way God works.

By walking into the future a step at a time, I have an unhurried trust that God is with me and will care for me.  Eventually, enough of these small, slow, deliberate, God-ward steps will add up to something.  It will get me somewhere.  But there is no short-cut teleportation to glorification in the Christian life.  Oh well.

We are pilgrims.  Let's go with God, and lets go with each other.  Step by step.  We are not perfect.  But our God is.

Thursday, October 3, 2013

Evangelism

Christians are called to share the Gospel.  This can be difficult when the message is sure to offend some.

This calls for a balance.  Evangelism is telling people that they need Jesus, with as much conviction and as little coercion as possible.  There is a nonchalance, too easy to slip into, that takes the bite out of our message, that makes it seem like we really don't mean it, or it isn't all that important.  God is honored by our efforts to be wise, but I don't think he is honored by our efforts to be cool or liked.  God calls us to be peacemakers, but we are not to do that by being cowards or doing away with a love for and duty towards truth.

How must evangelism work in the modern world?  First, I think it must be said that it doesn't work in a way fundamentally different than any other time.  We don't need innovation for the sake of innovation.  People are people, and people are lost.  God works where he will, and he awakens faith in people's hearts, and the Gospel message is news about something that has decisively happened.  We preach the sufficiency of the resurrection of the Son of God yesterday, today, and until he comes back.  And God is pleased to awaken faith through the preaching of this message.

Nevertheless, we are called to bring the message into our time among the people we are with.  That requires some thought.

The secular pull in our world, in our country, in our time is powerful.  I imagine that to the average secular person, if I tell them the Gospel, they probably will not feel that they need it.  They probably will have questions and assumptions lurking in the back of their mind that are roadblocks to taking the Gospel seriously.  It is hard to feel that you need a God that you don't really believe exists.

How do we work towards making the Gospel seem at least plausible when it is heard?  I have three thoughts.  They come from the conviction that, while God may sometimes work through a single conversation or relationship to bring another to faith, more often it happens over time, over wrestling, in a web of various relationships.

1)  We need to cast our net wider.  There are plenty of Gospel conversations to be had outside of one that includes a "You need Jesus.  Would you pray this prayer?"  If we let the culture drift without showing that God is real and relevant, we are making our job in evangelism harder.  I do not mean that we need to shoulder the burden of making the wider culture Christian or perfect.  Rather, I think we ought to have the courage to speak the truth winsomely at different points.  To point out the absurdity of the world's way of thinking where we find it.  These don't need to be fights to the death; they are not the main thing.  We want to put a pebble in the world's shoe, one that is at least a small reminder that there is another Way.  Though we will probably convince few people in these conversations, we want them to be aware that there is a real, self-consistent, intellectually rigorous, and existentially satisfying solution and explanation to things.  And that more than an explanation, there is a Person.  We, with patience and grace and courage, take every thought captive for Christ.

2)  We need to live in a spirit of love.  Jesus says that love is the most important thing.  Jesus says that love for each other is how they will know that he was sent from the Father.  Love is the greatest apologetic.  Love is what will let people know that all the conversations we had pursuant to #1 above was not a mere moving of our lips, a running of our mouths.  How we love is the dish that we serve our message on.  If it stinks, our message will be a stench as well.  Authentic love will show people that there is something real here, something worth investigating, something worth having.  I think there is also a social aspect to the way people think and make decisions, and the Gospel will seem more plausible when we invite others into a community that has been truly shaped by the Gospel.  And the evidence of whether it has been shaped by the Gospel is whether there is love.

3)  Salvation is supernatural.  There is a Holy Spirit.  He has a lot to do with all of this.  There is a spiritual battle to be fought.  We ought not to think we can win people simply with the persuasiveness of our arguments, or with anything really, if Christ is not in the midst of our efforts.  He must do a work.  We are dependent on Him.  And this ought to drive us to prayer.  The unbeliever will not admit this - they will claim intellectual neutrality - but in evangelism there is a battle for the heart as well as for the mind.  The unbelieving heart is in charge of its own destiny and it likes it, and it does not want to admit a God that could have control over it.  The heart will put the mind to the service of preserving this status quo.  And such an unseating will be difficult.  Satan will not want it to happen.  The other person will not, at the time, want it to happen.  The world will not want it to happen.  God is the only one powerful enough to make it happen.

These are my thoughts.  I don't know why they were on my mind.  I haven't had much blogging time lately, but I hope you are edified.

Sunday, August 25, 2013

Statement of Purpose

I will always remain sinful and will fall short of the ideals and goals I set for myself.  I will never fully live up to a statement of purpose.  Wow, what an pessimistic way to start out a post like this, you might say.  I just know myself too well.

But at the same time I have Gospel hope.  He who began a good work in me will bring it to completion in Christ.  There are innumerable unfinished storylines in my life, weaving themselves together.  The same is true for you.

I also believe that our God is a God of order.  We experience cause and effect in our world because he set it up that way.  All the order we perceive in the world is a reflection of the ultimate order that actually exists within God himself.  As the Creator, his creation manifests and displays this truth about him.  God is also a God of truth, so we become Christians by believing in Jesus.  We have to know something about him in order to believe.  We learn this through sentences and words, under-girded and brought by the blood-sacrifice of Jesus and the blood sacrifice of martyrs and missionaries who have given all to see these glorious truths go forth.  We don't catch Christianity like we catch a cold.  We must hear the actual truth of Jesus preached, and we believe, and the Spirit takes residence in us, and we are changed into the likeness of Jesus.  There is an order and a necessary truth element to all of this.

So based on the orderliness of the way the world works and the hope that I have in God, I believe it is helpful to be thoughtful.  He calls us to love him with all our mind, in addition to heart and strength.  My thoughts shape the way I live.  Your thoughts shape the way you live.  And we ought to live in a way that is useful and pleasing to God.  We ought to live for his glory and not our own.  If our thoughts shape the way we live, and if we are to live in such a way that pleases God, thinking as clearly as possible about God's glory and desires for us is of great importance.

Praise be to God that we are not left in the darkness.  He has spoken.  He has given us his Word.  He has not remained nameless and faceless in the dark, but progressively out of love he has revealed more and more of himself, and he has done so ultimately in the person of Jesus, God and man.  It is to him that we are to be discipled.  His Word and his words are to shape the way we think about how to live with God and for God and by God.

All of our lives are different.  There is no single Christian life that we are all called to live.  We are not Stepford Wives.  We are not robots.  We are to live in strict conformity to the way everyone else is.  God paints with many colors, some of which we have not even imagined yet.  The beauty and challenge and excitement of the Christian life is that Jesus is real and true, he loves us, he wants to be in relationship with us, and he gives freely His Spirit to take up residence in us and live the Christian life specifically from our own spot.  I am not meant to be the next ____________.  I am meant to be Daniel Richardson, follower of God.

I think, based on all these things, that it is helpful to come up with a statement of purpose.  I know that my life is more complicated than may be captured in this sort of thing.  But I do not think it is worthless, and only time may tell how helpful it would have been.  It is good, nevertheless, at any stage to think about what is really important.

Here goes...

My purpose:  To love God by worshiping Jesus, submitting to Him as Lord, enjoying fellowship and prayer in the Spirit, and daily growing in reverential knowledge of the Word.  To love Nicole and others sacrificially by placing their needs above my own.  To consistently disciple others, share the Gospel unashamedly in all opportunities God grants, and sacrificially support the spread of the Gospel to all peoples.  To become a good, well-balanced, hard-working lawyer who cares deeply about justice for orphans, widows, and others in distress.

Maybe a little long, but it covers all the important things, I think.  They will be good reminders...

Friday, August 2, 2013

My Path to Law School

Dear readers of my blog,

I know that I am not a regular blogger anyway.  I don't try to write something everyday.  Sometimes I will write a whole lot in a month.  Sometimes I won't write anything for three months in a row.  Oh well.

In about ten days I am starting law school.

Why am I doing this? 

Basically because I want to.  I really want to.  I could try to make it sound high and mighty and theological, but that wouldn't be true to reality.  Last year I was becoming disillusioned with the idea of being a teacher for my life's work.  Teaching is for some people and it's not for others.  Some might say I didn't give it long enough.  Perhaps that is a fair criticism.  I don't know, and at this point I am going to law school either way. 

In high school I did mock trial.  It was an extracurricular that I put a whole lot of effort into, and I was good at it.  I enjoyed the competition of it.  I enjoyed the preparation of it.  I went to college planning to do law school afterwards.

In college I developed some bad habits.  In high school I was driven by the desire to succeed - and have a reputation for succeeding - at all the things I did.  I did that pretty well.  Going into college, I saw the emptiness of that, but I swung the pendulum too far in the other direction.  I knew relationships were more important and I poured a lot of new time into my relationships with my fraternity brothers, with my girlfriend (now wife), and with God.  I did ministry things.  I listened to a lot of sermons.  I didn't go to a lot of classes. 

My GPA dropped, and to retain my scholarship I took a single class the summer after my freshman year.  It was a pre-law seminar.  I had just listened to a lot of Francis Chan, and the idea of Christian ministry and giving away (almost) all your money had been painted very attractively in my mind - though I had no money really to give away and obviously had not spent any actual time earning any real money.  The seminar brought in practicing lawyers.  They talked about long, hard hours.  They talked about the difficulty of law school.  They conveyed the importance of earning money.  Working long, hard hours to earn it.  Though I didn't see it at the time, I had become quite lazy, and the worldly idea of earning money just seemed sort of sub-spiritual. 

And I decided to change career paths. 

I started in on Industrial Engineering.  I had good semesters and bad semesters.  I never finally applied myself in the way that I know I can.  I regret this.  Though I went through and graduated with this degree, I knew towards the end that I had no taste for actually becoming an engineer.

What to do? 

I wanted to find a job that would give me time for family, that would allow Nicole and I to live close to her mom, that would be fulfilling, in which I would feel like I was making a difference, a job that might give me time to pursue missions opportunities.  I have always enjoyed math tutoring, and teaching jobs are necessary basically everywhere.  Summers off would be awesome.  I knew I didn't want to do engineering. 

So I started going to Kennesaw and substitute teaching until I got a job teaching at Coahulla Creek in Dalton.  I may do some complaining here, but I am actually very grateful for that job and that time in my life.  It was their first year, and it was my first year, too.  Many factors combined to make this a difficult year for me.  It was my first year being married, and Nicole had a difficult time moving to Dalton.  I was doing my grad school, so about three nights a week I would leave from school to go over an hour away to Kennesaw before returning home late.  At Coahulla, I was teaching four classes out of four possible class periods, and I did not have a textbook to teach from.  Mainly that was due to the modern shift in thinking about how we should do effective teaching.  We should not rely on textbooks.  Very well and good, but also difficult for someone strapped for time as I was.  Probably the final straw that sealed my first year misery was the sheer class sizes, due I imagine to the fact that it was a public school.  All my classes were around 25-30 students. 

What did I learn during this year? 

1.  Margin is a good thing.  It is not worth it to cram your schedule to the point of exhaustion.
2.  Marriage is difficult but rewarding.  It builds patience and rewards with joy. 
3.  Teaching is like marriage as described in #2.
4.  I really enjoy math.  I enjoy teaching people who are interested in learning.  I do not enjoy the process of trying to get students interested in learning. 

It was in the midst of that spring that I halted my Kennesaw classes and decided I wanted to go for law school.  What precipitated this change?

1.  I was dissatisfied with who I was as a teacher.  I could not picture myself doing it for life. 

2.  I came to a more balanced view of the reasons for my original course change.  I do not think hard work is to be avoided.  I do not think earning money is a bad thing - as long as we do not make it an ultimate thing. 

3.  I realized the things I enjoy doing are reading, writing, and arguing.  Those are things I found myself doing on top of my normal job of teaching math.  Law school and the practice of law, as I figured and still do, are basically this - reading and writing and arguing.  A fit!

4.  Twice in my relatively young life I have been called to jury duty and ended up serving on the jury.  Both times it has given me an itch to get back in the courtroom.  It has made me long for mock trial.

5.  Since going to college, I have not scratched my competitive itch.  I have suppressed it.  The competition of a courtroom challenge is something I long after.  The competition of law school is something I look forward to.  Maybe my high school motivations were not simply depraved through and through but were a gift of God. 

6.  In teaching I was not making very much money.  I did not have prospects to make very much money.  I decided that I did in fact want to make more money, so that Nicole could stay home when we have kids, God-willing.  I look to my own Dad as an example of how this can work well and be a thorough blessing. 

7.  I think I may as well disclose some of my baser motives, too.  A shot at law school is a shot at redeeming myself in my own eyes.  I ended at Georgia Tech well enough but below my standards for myself.  In some sense, I want to prove to myself that I can still succeed academically and professionally.  I know that this is dangerous and that my identity must be found in Christ and not in my resume or success.  That can be a black hole.  Nevertheless, this motivates me.  And secondly, I think there has been some envy in my heart.  Far more envy that greed, I may say, though the lure of riches will be something I must guard against, too.  In regards to envy, I have seen friends continue on, and some of my mock trial colleagues go on to law school before me.  While teaching, just the thought gave me an itch to go. 

All of these things, the good and the bad, coincided to compel me to ask Nicole if we could do it.  It has been one of the greatest blessings and most exciting parts of my life that she has agreed so willingly to this career change. 

This last year we moved down to Brooks.  We finished the basement and are living with Nicole's mom and their three dogs.  I thought that this would be difficult - and certainly it has been sometimes - but for the most part it has been very good.  I have been welcomed, and Nicole and I have been able to grow together. 

I got a job this year - I couldn't go to law school yet - teaching at Trinity Christian School.  I also coached.  It was a much easier time for me this year, and much more enjoyable. I enjoyed smaller class sizes, more experience on my own part, and the Christian environment.  I am glad that I have had a good year because this allows me to feel even more confident in my decision to pursue a law degree. For me, this means that I have not run from teaching because it has been all bad.  I am instead pursuing something that I really want to pursue. 

Applying to law school was a humbling and a lifting experience.  I decided to go to Georgia State because it was the best and most cost-effective school closest to where we live.  I will be commuting.  Georgia State was the only one I applied to.  All my eggs in one basket, I guess.  My GPA was slightly lower than the average incoming GPA for Georgia State, so I knew I would need a higher LSAT score.  I studied for it, took it, and immediately cancelled my score, knowing that I could do better.  The Logic Games section was entirely novel to me, taking too much time, and having done poorly on an early section, I was distracted for the later reading sections.  But I regrouped, gave myself three more months and took it again.  I did well this time.  I figured there was a decent chance I could get in, but I wasn't counting my eggs before they hatched. 

I got an email that I was admitted!  Nicole and I quit our respective jobs on the same day, and Nicole had interviewed for a Trinity job that she was offered later on.  Financially we were stressed about how we could make it happen, but we knew we were going to try to do it either way.  And then I got a wonderfully unexpected voicemail.  I hadn't expected and hadn't even thought to pray for it, but the school awarded me a scholarship worth a whole lot of money!  They apparently considered everyone who applied. 

So I have spent the summer teaching summer school, relaxing, and doing some fun reading before I have do lots and lots of required reading.  I am thrilled to be going.  I know that God is going to teach me a lot and humble me a lot and use me in some ways unforeseen. This is all exciting.  Please pray for me. 

I said at the beginning of this that I am an infrequent blogger, and I imagine that in the near future I will become even more so.

Please pray that I will learn how to be good lawyer to the glory of God and that I will live for his glory and not my own during law school.

Tuesday, July 16, 2013

A Shorter List of Book Suggestions

1.  There is a God (Antony Flew)
2.  The New Testament Documents:  Are They Reliable?  (FF Bruce)
3.  Mere Christianity (CS Lewis)
4.  The Resurrection of Jesus (Mike Licona)
5.  The God Who is There (Francis Schaeffer)

That would be my short list to suggest for an atheist to read, perhaps even in this order.  I hope this is helpful.  This probably clocks in at about 1500 pages of reading.  About five pages a day, one could get through this in less than a year. 

Some Book Suggestions on Whether Christianity is True

There are a ton of potential apologetics books to read.  So if I were to make a handful of suggestions to an atheist friend, what would I suggest?  I think I ought to limit myself to five or six suggestions.  We'll see...


Let me start with the book I am currently reading.  The Resurrection of Jesus by Michael Licona.  This is a rather large book that seeks to ask whether Jesus was raised from the dead from a historical perspective.  Licona attempts to find a place of neutrality and apply normal historical methods to the question.  Part of this neutral attempt means that he does not assume that the Bible was inspired by God, and he does not assume that the books are inerrant.  He does quite a bit of discussion about the theory of history, methods of history, how this type of investigation should be done, and what all the relevant sources are.  Another book that I hope to get to is by NT Wright - The Resurrection of the Son of God.  This is another hefty tome on the resurrection.  Wright is a prominent New Testament scholar from England, and this book is the third in a series on the origins of Christianity.  It might be worth it to backtrack and do volumes one and two which provide some background.  Reading those three volumes would itself probably be a year-long project.  I think the resurrection is a good place to start because it is at the heart of the Christian claim.  Paul himself says that if Christ is not raised from the dead, we above all men are most to be pitied and our faith is worthless.  The spread of Christianity in Acts was based on the preaching of a resurrected Christ.  This was not a tack-on but rather part of the center of what was being proclaimed and what was being believed.  This, then, seems like a good place to start to me.  There are more popular level treatments of this topic, but for a thorough treatment, these two are probably the best place to go.

I think that a lot of skepticism towards Christianity today comes from science.  I do not think that is justified exactly, but that argument is for another post.  There are a few suggestions I would make in this vein.  First, I would suggest There is a God by Antony Flew.  Flew was probably the most serious and notorious atheist in the decades before Dawkins and company.  But later in his life he became a theist.  He did not subscribe to any particular form of theism, and he disbelieved in an afterlife, but this was quite a change, and the reasons that he gives were primarily based on scientific evidence.  This book is shorter and relatively easy to read.  It is a mixture of autobiography and apologetics from someone who was helped by science towards theism but never made the step toward Christianity.  Second, I know it is a little dated, but I would suggest Darwin on Trial as a step towards having a more balanced opinion on evolution, especially if evolution would be the hang-up for you towards coming to faith in Christ.  Johnson is a Christian, but he does not subscribe to a young-earth view, and he does not even argue for creationism in this book.  Instead, it is primarily a polemic against evolution as widely understood, poking holes and asking some questions that Darwinists would not much want to have asked.  (The link I have provided actually appears to be updated; it is merely my own edition that is dated.)  There are other books and literature on intelligent design that I could mention, but Darwin on Trial would be a good starting place for those interested in that vein of thinking.  Some of the other books are very technical, and it is easy to get bogged down in the science, as if I am missing a lot of prerequisite classes to truly understand what is being argued.  Finally, in this scientific vein I would like to suggest The Language of God by Francis Collins.  I read it a long time ago, and I don't think my views on things would line up exactly with him, but it is interesting, and Collins is the head of the Human Genome Project.  This book is part autobiographical as well, and Collins surveys several different options for the way that science and faith may relate.  (As a note, I may say that all three of these books are shorter and probably easier to read.  For something meatier to digest, and on my personal wish list is Where the Conflict Really Lies by Alvin Plantinga.)

A great question to ask is whether the Bible is reliable, whether it is true.  Certainly the books on resurrection above will deal with the question.  But there are some good books that center specifically on this.  The most concise and most widely read would probably be The New Testament Documents: Are They Reliable? by FF Bruce.  This book is barely over a hundred pages, but it gives a good answer to this question, and this would be the first place I would direct people.  Another book, longer but in the same vein, would be The Historical Reliability of the Gospels by Craig Blomberg.  Jesus and the Eyewitnesses is an important and newer book on the role of eyewitness testimony in the Gospels.  I also read a newer book before Christmas this year called Reinventing Jesus which dealt with the issues of how Christianity arose and how the documents would have been passed along.  Issues of corruption in transmission have recently been raised by guys like Bart Ehrman, and I think this provides some good common sense answers to the issues he is raising.  Admittedly, I have read somewhat narrowly in this area because I have not read as much on the reliability of the Old Testament.  But I think that the New Testament builds on and takes the Old Testament to be true.  If the New Testament is true, Jesus' trusting and referencing and fulfilling the Old Testament would imply the truth of the Old Testament.  Therefore, I think it is sufficient, at least for my own faith, to have good reasons for relying on the New Testament.  A very good book on the issue of whether we have the right New Testament would be Canon Revisited, although it is very clear that it asks this question from the perspective of the Christian.  Does a Christian have warrant for believing that we have the right books?  He answers yes.  Maybe not the best place to start, but a very interesting read.  I have also heard that Inspiration and Authority of the Bible by BB Warfield is a classic and a solid defense of the Bible; it is a little longer.  I have not ready any of them, but I would also personally be interested in obtaining and reading something on archaeology and the Bible:  The Stones Cry Out or The Bearing of Recent Discovery on the Trustworthiness of the New Testament or On the Reliability of the Old Testament.  Plenty to chew on here, but probably best to start with Bruce and move on from there.

Most of the books I have referenced would seek to cover some very specific ground, whether science or the resurrection or some particular aspect of the reliability of the Bible.  But there is also a place for a more big-picture overview.  Classical apologetics - there are different schools of thought on apologetics - would first argue for theism in general, then for Christianity in particular.  I would commend two books that are overview books but that are not aimed at making a bestseller list.  The Reason for God by Tim Keller would probably be an easier read in this vein, but for a more in depth look I would recommend Reasonable Faith by William Lane Craig and Christian Apologetics by Norman Geisler.  Both of these books seek to deal in a very detailed way with nearly all of the major issues in showing whether Christianity is true.  Craig's book spends two meaty chapters in the middle on arguments for the existence of God, which provides the type of argumentation he uses in debate, but in much greater detail.  Geisler's book does a survey of different philosophies and ways of knowing, critiquing along the way and commending theism.  Again, very detailed overview.  I have not made it all the way through either of these books, but I have benefited from portions out of each of them.  Geisler and Craig both have written a lot of other books, some popular, some scholarly, but these are probably their two most foundational books to the rest of what they write.  If you are a glutton for punishment or if you want an even greater level of detail, I would first recommend Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview by Craig and Moreland.  This book widens the scope from merely making an apologetics argument to looking at the foundation that Christianity provides for looking at nearly every imaginable question.  Craig and many of today's Christian philosophers and apologists have benefited from influence by a man named Alvin Plantinga who helped to bring God back into the philosophical conversation in the 1970's.  He has written a number of books, but the one I have and intend to read is Warranted Christian Belief.  He deals at length with the issue of when a person may be said to have warrant for a belief and additionally whether the Christian is warranted in his religious belief.  A popular level digest of Plantinga's thought may be found in A Shot of Faith to the Head by Mitch Stokes.  I read this book in a single day and enjoyed it immensely.  It is much easier to read than Plantinga's tome.  Another suggestion on the way out of this paragraph - Knowing Christ Today by Dallas Willard.

(It would appear that I write very long paragraphs and that I failed in epic fashion to contain this to five or six suggestions.)

Let me land this plane... I want to finish with three book suggestions that I might classify as classics of apologetics in the 20th century.  CS Lewis is probably the most famous apologist of the 20th century, and he wrote a number of books in a number of genres.  He wrote Miracles, The Abolition of Man, and the Problem of Pain.  All of these deal with some aspect of apologetics.  But my all-time favorite suggestion to make from Lewis would be Mere Christianity.  This book has probably had more influence on me and the way I think than any other book outside the Bible.  I have read it at least three times.  I highly recommend it.  In it Lewis gives a fresh look at what Christianity really is at its heart and why we should believe it.  I find it to be compelling.  He does not wade into all the details of all the potential rabbit trails that some of my listed books might, but he puts the big-picture together for me in a way that grabs my heart as well as my head.  One of the reading influences in Lewis' conversion - he was an atheist until later into his career as an English professor - was a man named GK Chesterton.  The book of Chesterton that I have enjoyed the most would be Orthodoxy.  Again, this is one of those big-picture books, but I recommend it because it literally makes me laugh out loud.  It is probably the only book that consistently makes me do that.  I find Chesterton to be hilarious, sarcastic, and incisive about ultimate matters.  A third suggestion would be The God Who Is There by Francis Schaeffer.  Schaeffer is valuable in detailing the history of Western thought to show how we have arrived culturally, socially, religiously at our current location in history, and he is valuable in helping to push people to see the inconsistencies within their own worldviews.  He helps us to be disciplined to see the logical effects of our presuppositions. 

I hope that this list is helpful.  I extend the invitation to anyone who is not a Christian but would like to read and discuss with me - please select one of these books and I will purchase it for you and work through it with you.  I believe Christianity is true, and I believe that it is important, and I believe that I ought to share it.  Thank you for your consideration and time spent reading this.  Have a great evening!

Sunday, July 14, 2013

The Volume Dial on My Radio and Its Implications...

I turned the radio on by turning the knob.  Before I could do anything, my ears hurt from the audio blast.  I looked at the volume.  It was on about level 4, but it sounded like it was on level 20.  I turned it back off.  Then I flipped it on level 1.  It sounded clear and loud as day.  A jump to level 1 and level 2 sounded normal...

I must have done something to it, and I don't know what.

It stayed that way for a couple of weeks.

Then today, inexplicably, it was fixed.  I didn't do anything in particular to it, but now I needed to put it back on level 8 or level 10 for it to sound normal and comfortable. It went back to the way it always was.  I don't know why.

So for two weeks - and I don't know why - my dial meant something different, it worked differently.

Now my question is this: why don't the constants of the universe do this?  And maybe a second question: why do we expect them not to do this?

What I mean is... why wouldn't the force of gravity work with three times as much strength tomorrow as it did today?  Why wouldn't the attractive forces in the nucleus of an atom be a little bit different when I go to bed tonight?  Why shouldn't the boiling point of water rise five degrees next week?  My list could go on with any number of different questions...

Now my point is this: to do science we presuppose an order to the universe.  We presuppose that my experiment should work in a lab in New York just as well as London if I can replicate the conditions.  We presuppose that my experiment should work the same tomorrow as it did today.  We presuppose the universal power and constancy of the law of gravity.  The next time I walk outside, I expect that I won't float off into the atmosphere.  I expect to weigh about the same...

If I didn't expect these sorts of things, if I didn't expect the universe to work orderly and according to law, science wouldn't make much sense.  What is science if it is not trying to discover these laws and principles and underlying truths about our world?  How could science get going and make sense if it didn't think that order was actually there to be found and examined and explained?

Why should I expect tomorrow to be the same as today?  Well, today was the same as yesterday...

This is the principle of induction.  We observe patterns, and we make hypotheses and draw conclusions.  Inference works.  It gives us insight into the way the world works.  It is the way we do science.  It is the way we do history.  It is the way we must practically live our lives.  We observe patterns and we see what works.  We trust in it as we move about and do things in our world.

But why should induction work?  Why should induction give us insight into the way the world actually is?  Again, how do I know that induction, which may have been valid from eternity past up until today will remain valid tomorrow?  (How do I know that the laws of logic will still hold tomorrow?)  I dare you to defend the inductive method without relying on induction in your explanation.  I dare you to defend logic without using logic.  (Everyone will find some circularity as they are defending their ultimate authority, their final resting point, their most basic basis for belief.)

...I think that theism provides a better explanation than atheism for why we should expect these things.  If atheism is true, what reason is there to expect anything besides chaos and randomness?  If atheism is true, what reason is there to expect the world to work according to laws?  What reason is there to expect that we have minds that can investigate these laws?  I know that we do expect these laws to work tomorrow, but why should we expect that?  It would seem that if we do expect it, we are assigning both universality and eternality to physical laws, both attributes that might have traditionally been assigned to divinity.

The goodness, power, and plan of a Creator can account for natural laws governing the universe, and his faithfulness and consistency are displayed in the consistency of his laws.  If God created the universe with order, it makes sense to believe that he will maintain that order.  Because he is a God of law and order, and because we have been created as rational creatures in his image, we are warranted in concluding that induction makes sense and can give us true information about reality.  God is at the bottom of the validity of induction as a method.

I think that the atheist must make a leap of faith to obtain the presuppositions necessary to do science or to make inductive inference.  I think it is a leap of faith for the atheist to believe that tomorrow's world will not see all the cosmic dials go awry, that a world that is supposed to work according to chance will not go random in some rather unexpected ways...

Sunday, June 30, 2013

Two Thoughts on Noah

#1  -

Tonight I began reading through Genesis again.  I came once again to the story of Noah.  This is not a kid's story.  It is about the destruction of all flesh because of the evil of humanity.

God saved a remnant.  Noah was found to be a righteous man, blameless in his generation.  Noah and his family alone survived.  Untold numbers, including many, many animals perished.

To me, this is a reminder of our need to share the Gospel.  This is a reminder of the sinfulness of man.  This is a reminder that God's wrath is real.  This is a reminder that I deserve destruction.  This is a reminder that God has provided a way.  This is a reminder that God's way is the only way.

Could God really mean it that Jesus is the only way to the Father and that all other ways lead to death...?  Could God really have meant that everyone was going to perish except Noah and his family?

#2  -

In reading Genesis, I am comforted by the genealogies.  I am comforted by the detailed lists of years of how long people lived.  I am comforted by the specificity of detail about dates for when things happened in regards to the flood.

This - like the Gospels - are told in such a straightforward fashion, without any evident literary flourishes, and it is so earthy, so linked to details that we find no theological use for, other than they happened to note them. I am not one of those people who look into the Bible and expect to find some secret code or secret messages hidden within layers of meaning.  I think God wants to communicate truth, that he is able to, and that he has created us with the ability to receive truth.  Will we continue learning?  Will we exhaust the Bible's treasures in our lifetime?  Not likely!  But the digging we must do is not a gnostic kind of digging.

It seems so plain to me that the genre here is history, and if I take seriously what the text presents me with, I am presented with a sovereign God of holiness and love.  My faith drinks in the fact that the God presented in the Scriptures is powerful enough to bring me the Scriptures as he wants to.  The Holy Spirit does a confirming work in my heart.

And he does it in genealogies of all places!  How awesome!  And it is precisely because I couldn't throw them into a pot and boil up a theological argument that I like them.  They contain an air of mystery, but not one that flies into myth, one that humbly sinks its roots into the earthy ground of real people who just wanted to keep a family history.

As I read some of the details about Noah, I can easily imagine that Noah may have recorded some things, knowing that he and his family were the only link to a prior humanity.  I can imagine these records being passed on to people and God bringing these records into Moses' hands as God inspired the writing of the Pentateuch.

I think basically I am just in a mood right now in which I am thankful for the Scriptures, and I want to spread that feeling around.  What a treasure!

Sunday, June 2, 2013

Renovation of My Heart

This summer I made up a list of books to read.  Some of you may have taken a look at that list.  I have been in many facebook discussions with one of my friends, Austin, who recently proclaimed to the facebook world that he has become an atheist.  Prior to that, in January I had taken an agnostic friend with me to Passion.  In regards to these friends and conversations, I have spent a lot of time reading apologetics.  I believe I must be able to give reasons for the hope that is within, and I want to be prepared when friends ask me questions or when they attack my faith.  A lot of the books on my list have grown out of these discussions.  I have planned to read a lot of apologetics. 

Apologetics is a good thing.  Blind faith does not glorify God.  It says more about your raw willpower than about the object of your faith.  If I ask, why are you a Christian, and your response is, "just because I believe", or "I take on it blind faith", you have done nothing to distinguish your God from any other god.  It would be like saying you closed your eyes and just picked this one.  How happy would your wife be if, when asked, you said you just closed your eyes and picked one.  If asked, why do you love her, you should have a good response. 

Faith should not be divorced from reason, but faith centered only on apologetics misses the point.  If all I did was read apologetics and argue with atheists, I would be entirely missing the point.  I would be neglecting to enjoy the Reality - the Person - that I am arguing for.  I would be standing at the door inviting people into a house that I had neglected to really live in and make a home of. 

All that to say, I am making some revisions to my reading list.  I have moved one book to the top of it.  Renovation of the Heart by Dallas Willard.  I have been surprised afresh at the sinfulness of my heart and at my ability to be easily angered, to resent, to indulge, to be prideful, to be impatient.  My heart continues to need rescue.  I have revised my list to attend to issues of my heart. 

Dallas Willard very recently died, and his legacy has been a good one.  He was a professional philosopher and author of some quality books on the spiritual life and on discipleship.  He did not feel the necessity to churn out a book every year, and the books that he has left are worth reading so far as I can tell.  I recommend them.

I like reading Dallas Willard because he reads differently than some of the other authors I frequent.  He is not Calvinist, and it seems like a lot of the more modern authors I read, like John Piper and Tim Keller and Francis Schaeffer, are Calvinist.  He, like CS Lewis, is a refreshing change of pace.  I am glad to be alive and hopeful for what God has in store for my life when I read any of these authors, and that is my feeling now as I am reading this book.

I am two chapters into the book.  I am trying to force myself to go at a slower pace to actually digest what I am reading.  I wanted to use my blog as a forum to write into my own words some of the insights I am gleaning.  I hope you are helped...

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1.  In order to properly care for something, we must understand it.  If I am going to properly care for a dog, I must know something about dogs and perhaps about this particular dog, what it is like, what its needs are, what its habits are.  If I want to live life well, I need to grow in my knowledge and understanding of what a human is and who I am in particular.  The heart is at the center of who I am, so I need to grow in my understanding of the heart.

2.  Many of the things we attempt to do to fix ourselves are shallow attempts.  They aim at our outer behaviors, or maybe they even get deeper to aim at specific things we think.  But we need to aim at the heart, which is really the control center of our selves, the deep-seated place from which we act.

3.  Our actions indicate our heart.  If we blow it, we are the sort of person who blows it.  This is a painful realization.  Our actions indicate the sort of people we are.  What is within comes out. 

4.  Humans are complex and have the following aspects: thought, feeling, choice, body, social context, and soul.  Redemption will involve a rescue and proper ordering of all these aspects.

5.  Our world today teaches us to live from our feelings.  We are accordingly at the mercy of circumstances that produce certain feelings that control our actions.  This is a type of bondage that Christ would free us from.  For freedom Christ has set us free.

6.  "Passivity was for the Israelites, and it is for us one of the greatest dangers and difficulties of our spiritual existence.  The land promised to them was one of incredible goodness - "flowing with milk and honey," as it is repeatedly described.  But it still had to be conquered by careful, persistent, and intelligent human action, over a long period of time.  In the beginning of the conquest of the Promised Land, the walls of Jericho fell down, to make clear God's presence and power.  Welcome to the Kingdom!  But that never happened again.  The Israelites had to take the remaining cities through hand-to-hand warfare, though always still with divine assistance.  What was then true of the Promised Land of the Israelites is now true of individual human beings who come to God."  (Willard)

More to come...

Friday, May 24, 2013

Pi, Fractals, and Reality

I am a math teacher.  (At least, I have been.)  And I think that math gives us a fascinating lens through which to examine and understand our world.

What is a circle?

A round thing, you might say.  If you were my student, I would press for a better definition.  What makes a circle different from an oval?  Both are round.  If you are intelligent, or if you simply remember the definition...  a circle is the collection of points that are equidistant from a given center.  It involves the idea of a fixed radius.

Have you ever seen a circle?

Yes, you may say.  Duh, you may say.

Pardon me, but I think you have not.  No circle you have ever drawn is perfect.  Close maybe.  Perhaps very close.  But they are still approximations.

Well, if I can't, the computer can, you might say.  Not so fast.  What the computer projects onto the screen is a grid of pixels.  It is, and someone might be able to correct me on this, something like a square grid.  At least, as I press my face towards the screen, that seems to roughly be the case. The computer probably gives a good approximation, better than we can do by hand, yet it is still an approximation in the end.

How many points comprise a circle?  Infinitely many.  Supposing the computer could draw a true circle, how long does it take to calculate the location of infinitely many points?   If it could locate and draw a billion, billion, billion, trillion points in a second... it would still take an infinite amount of time.  Dividing infinity by a finite number still leaves you in a lurch.

Supposing you had a perfectly steady hand and a mind for drawing perfect geometric figures, would you even be able to see the circle you had drawn?  A circle is a curved line comprised of points.  How wide is a point?  It has no width, or height, or depth, or breadth.  A point is simply a location.  No thickness, weight, nothing.  But in order to draw a point on a piece of paper, you draw a dot.  But for you to see the dot, the dot has to be extended in three dimensions.  The dot itself is like a tiny, colored-in circle, which we would recognize as a two-dimensional figure.  But it actually needs a little bit of height, too, a third dimension, however thin, for the ink or graphite to pop off the paper, to be distinct for our eyes to see it.  The dot, then, is not a point.  It is a way that we have decided is convenient to graphically represent a point. 

What we would draw as a circle and recognize as a circle is not actually a circle.  It is an approximate representation of a circle.

Are circles real?

I would say yes.  We do have a definite idea of what a circle is.  We didn't simply make it up.  We recognized it.  We recognize it pressing its way into reality, though the physical world can never quite give it to us without some slight bit of stretching or pulling, some slight bit of approximation, some slight bit of deviance from the ideal that we now have within our minds. 

We could do the same bit of mental gyration for any number of things.  Geometric objects especially.  Take a straight line, for example, and start asking questions about it.

We wouldn't need to stick merely to geometric figures.  What about negative numbers?  What about formulas like the quadratic formula?  What about...?

Lots of math is being done now that is beyond my current ability to comprehend.  A lot of what is being done has no obvious correspondence to something in the real world.  Complex analysis, for example deals with imaginary numbers.  What is an imaginary number?  I cannot hold an imaginary number of things in my hand.  (Certainly, on occasion, it turns out that advances in pure mathematics will turn out to have physical applications in the real world.  Though I can't hold an imaginary number of things, imaginary numbers are powerful tools in things like digital signals processing, which some of my friends from Tech can attest to.)

Is my idea of a circle a real thing?  Is my idea of the number 8 a real thing?  Is my conception of the quadratic formula a real thing?


This really is the type of question Plato was seeking to answer in his Platonic Forms.

The idea of a circle does seem to be a real thing.  The mathematical structure behind the quadratic formula does seem to be a real thing.  I say this because they do not seem to be things that we were free to make up as we wished.  To pick a simpler example, 2+2=4.  That is true whether or not I want it to be true.  That was true before there were human minds around to comprehend its truth.  The Chinese were not free to discover that 2+2=5... unless 5 were really a symbol that meant what we mean when we say 4, (assuming 2 and + and = still mean the same thing).  Though different peoples might use different symbols, they are referring to the same underlying reality that is simply true.

I conclude, then, that there is an objective nature to mathematics.  It is what it is.  Mathematicians are discoverers.  They are not writers of fiction.  They are not symbolic conspirators.  They have gotten in touch with things that are really there.  They have quite definitely stumbled upon this true idea of a circle that we have never actually met in our experience of the physical world.

Mathematicians have gotten in touch with something that is really there.  But where?  If not in the physical world, in our minds?  Yes, these mathematical truths are in our minds.  But they were there first.  It seems that they were somewhere already, embedded in things, awaiting for our minds to pick up on them, to discover them.  So they are not merely in our minds.

The existence of these ideas is not a physical existence.  Again, you can't hold them in your hand.  And they appear to be timelessly true.  2+2=4 was around before we were.  And it is not going out of style tomorrow.  And any aliens who show up on my doorstep tomorrow are bound to agree.

What a can of worms!  What a thoroughly disconcerting notion for the pure naturalist, the devoted materialist!

In math we have found a multitude of non-physical, timeless things that have an objective reality.  And they are things that the human mind is suspiciously well-suited to grasp and explore.

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I actually started writing this entry to explore the following analogy, and I got a little sidetracked by circles...

Consider pi.  Pi is an irrational number.  That means it cannot be written as a fraction of two integers.  There are infinitely many such irrational numbers.  Take any irrational number and add 1 to obtain another irrational number.  And now you have a quick and easy way of producing infinitely many of them.

Not being able to write pi - or any other irrational - as a fraction means also that its decimal expansion will admit no repeatable pattern.

Pi derives its existence from the idea of a circle.  Consider that a calculation of pi from any drawn or observed circle in the physical world is going to be an approximation... because those circles are not exact.  But for an exact circle, pi is the ratio of the circumference to the diameter.  This ratio holds for any size circle.

Pi, then, is firmly anchored in the idea of a circle, and it proves its usefulness in our world because of how often "circles" pop up.  Pi is what it is, and I cannot wish it any different, and it will never go out of style.  It will always be what it always has been.  It is a non-physical, timeless constant woven into the fabric of reality.

There is a grandness to it.  Because in it we approach the idea of infinity.

3.14159265358979323846264338327950288419716939937510582097494459230781640628620
8998628034825342117067982148086513282306647093844609550582231725359408128481117
4502841027019385211055596446229489549303819644288109756659334461284756482337867
8316527120190914564856692346034861045432664821339360726024914127372458700660631
558817488152092096282925409171536436789259036001133053054......

If you start walking this road... you will never finish.  

Here is a reality that is non-physical, timeless, infinite, simple and yet complex, objectively there regardless of whether we think about it or choose to approach it, hidden within things that we must deal with every day, exerting an undeniable influence on things we must deal with every day, able to be grasped truly, though not exhaustively or comprehensively known.  

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Staring down pi might hold fascination for some, like myself, who enjoy that sort of thing.  But fractals are another, more geometric way, of staring down the infinite and experiencing awe at objectively eternal objects...

From some simple equations, Benoit Mandelbrot discovered a set that now bears his name.  Fractals are interesting because you can zoom in on them.  You will never exhaust them.  They are not atomistic.  There is not a lowest level of zooming.  They are simple, yet incredibly complex... and in them we find a beauty. 

Mandelbrot discovered this set.  He did not create it.  It was there from eternity past and will continue on.  The following video gives just a taste of this complexity, this inexhaustible infinity, this beauty...




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In an earlier post, I did a thought experiment on analogies with time travel. I ended up talking a great deal about the cosmological arguments for the existence of God.  

I pressed on the question of why there is something rather than nothing.  

Now, I think the question of the universe itself is a different sort of question from the truths of mathematics.  I can easily imagine the universe being different from what it is, and I can easily imagine the universe not existing.  It is possible, I suppose, that it might just have never gotten started. 

But not so, at least as far as I can tell, with the truths of mathematics.  It seems like the eternality of the mathematical truths would make them true independent of the universe itself.  They are necessarily true, which means that they would be true in any conceivable universe.  

But is it off the cards to ask, why are the mathematical truths there at all?  Why are they there instead of not being there?  Why are they what they are, instead of something else?  Why is pi not 3.16?

The Leibnizian Argument calls for an explanation of the existence of anything, either by a necessity of its own nature or in some external explanation.  Why then do the mathematical truths exist?  We are on the edge of mysteries that probably few in high school math care to think about...
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Let me give a brief account of mathematics from a Christian worldview.

There are truths in the world that appear to have necessity.  They are not dependent on what we think or do for them to be true.  Yet, the only necessary being is God himself.  All other necessary truths are grounded in who God is and what he thinks.  

Because God is eternal, immutable, unchangeable, we can expect his thoughts on reality to reflect this.  Hence, the unchanging nature of math.  

The language of mathematics is suited very well to describe our world.  Dogs and cats don't do math, but people do.  We can do math because we are rational beings created in the image of a rational God.  The truths of mathematics are grasped by minds.  Yet they are not dependent on any of our finite and passing minds.  They were prior to us.  But that does not mean that they are wholly independent of Mind or Rationality.  They are the outworking of God's eternal Mind.

The infinite complexity of math is a clue that we cannot exhaust the riches of who God is.  Because he is infinite, he alone can traverse every digit of pi and every crevice of Mandelbrot's fractal.  We will never be able to do this.  Though our existence may never end with God, he alone has existed infinitely in both directions of time.  He is above and beyond time.

What do we do with all of this?  We worship our Creator, and we recognize our creaturely dependence for our knowledge upon his superior knowledge and wisdom.  

Though it is awe-inspiring, we dare not worship mathematics or science.  

Math is in the same position we are... a creature who exists to point to Creator in our own way.

For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse. For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things.

Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen. (Romans 1:18-25, ESV)

Thursday, May 23, 2013

Bahnsen on Where to Start

"The Christian's final standard, the inspired word of God, teaches us that 'the fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge' (Prov 1:7).  If the apologist treats the starting point of knowledge as something other than reverence for God, then unconditional submission to the unsurpassed greatness of God's wisdom at the end of the argumentation does not really make sense.  There would always be something greater than God's wisdom - namely, the supposed wisdom of one's intellectual starting point.  The word of God would necessarily (logically, if not personally) remain subordinate to that autonomous final standard.  The situation is pictured well by C.S. Lewis:  'The ancient man approached God (or even the gods) as the accused person approaches his judge.  For the modern man the roles are reversed.  He is the judge:  God is in the dock... The trial may even end in God's acquittal.  But the important thing is that Man is on the Bench and God is in the Dock.'"

(Greg Bahnsen in Van Til's Apologetic)

Wednesday, May 22, 2013

My Soul's Prayer

My soul thirsts for God, for the Living God.  (Psalm 42:2)

God, in the midst of our busy-ness, in the midst of our difficulties, in the midst of our doubts, in the midst of our discussions, in the midst of our Christian living, in the midst of our relationships, in the midst of our duties, in the midst of our joys, draw us near.  Do not let us forget that you are most important.  Do not let us forget your love.  Do not let us forget your cross.  Do not let us forget your grace.  Do not let us forget our need for you.  Draw us mightily and bind us to your heart.  Grant repentance where our hearts have been hard.  Grant obedience where we have chosen ourselves over you.  God, help me to value you over every other thing.  Help me to worship you as supreme.  

God, how can I live apart from you?

God, what wisdom do I have of my own?  None.

God, how could I repay you?  I cannot.

God, I place my trust in you.  I trust you for my eternity.  And I trust you for tomorrow.  And I trust you in this moment.  Your sovereign hands are hands of love, and you hold me unshake-ably, and you are a strong refuge for me when my heart quakes.  My trust in you, O Lord, is well-placed.  

God, strengthen me to do your will for your glory.  Strengthen me and keep me dependent on your Spirit for my fight against sin.  Strengthen my trust in your Word.  I am weak.  Lord, you are my strength.  

God, pierce my heart with longing for you.  Awaken my soul to cry for you.  Do not let my heart sleep.  Do not let me slumber when I might enjoy your presence.  Banish apathy from my heart, and banish laziness from my hands and feet.  Bid me to come to you.  Bid me to run to you.  Bid me to come, and give me ears to hear your call.  Give my heart a desire to run that it did not have in its deadness.  Thank you Lord for giving me life, abundant life, and may your Spirit help me to keep from wasting it.  Lord, my life will be not be waste if it is kept in your sweet Presence.  Oh, Lord, that I might know you more.  I would know anything less, if I might know you more.  

Grant that these prayers would issue from a believing heart in sincerity.  I offer these prayers in Jesus name.  Amen.