Month: March 2005

Messy Christian writes thoughtfully about how “weary” she has become with Christian in-fighting in the blogsphere. I feel her pain. It’s too bad that some folks in the blogsphere seem to think that right doctrine (and here in America, right politics) is the sine qua non of the faith. Doctrine is important, but what’s more important is how we live (as McLaren likes to say, “orthopraxy”).

In fact, our doctrine tells us so. I remember leading a Bible study on First John years ago and being unsettled by its emphasis on orthopraxy and it’s relative lack of emphasis on orthodoxy. Can it be more clear than this: “We know that we have come to know him if we obey his commands. . . . Whoever claims to live in him must walk as Jesus did.” (1 John 2:3, 6).

I’ve avoided commenting on the Terry Schiavo case because it’s such a hot-button issue and I haven’t studied it carefully enough. In my experience, cases like this are factually, legally, and ethically complicated, and seldom reduce to a single moral response. When I practiced law, I was involved in a few cases involving insurance and medical care. Usually I represented insurers that were denying coverage for care. On the surface, these cases seemed to present a classic moral situation: the big, evil insurance company against the suffering individual. Yet, most of the time, a detailed review of the facts, law and public policy involved in the case revealed significant moral ambiguity about the proper result. So, I try to reserve judgment in a case like Schiavo’s, unless I can dig into the underlying law and evidence.

I’ve gotten copies of some of the Schiavo court filings, and I hope to become better educated soon. Initially, though, there are two trends I’m seeing in the faith-based blogsphere that I’d like to address.

Today Christians around the world celebrate Palm Sunday, the start of the passion week. In my home church, the children’s choirs came down the aisles with palm fronds, a group of the kids performed a sweeping, graceful liturgical dance, and we sang great old hymns with the organ and trumpets blaring. In doing this we recalled Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem, as the crowd shouted “Hosanna! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord,” just days before Jesus would be crucified and rise again. (John 12:12)

It’s unlikely the crowd present on that first Palm Sunday appreciated how Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem represented an acceleration towards the divine telos of history. In fact, John 12:16 tells us that even Jesus’ disciples didn’t understand the triumphal entry until after Jesus had ascended to heaven. But here was the tip of the spear, thousands of years of waiting, finally arrived. Even as the lambs were being driven towards the city for sacrifice during the passover, the Lamb of God rode in willingly. Soon sin would be defeated once for all.

Now we wait for the final act of the divine telos: when Christ returns victorious, judges sin, and establishes His Kingdom in fullness. The final scene is described in Revelation 21: “Now the dwelling of God is with men, and he will live with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God. He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.” At the right time, Christ came to offer himself on the cross. At the right time, he will come again.

As we celebrate this passion week, those of us who name Christ as Lord eagerly anticipate his return, and proclaim the invitation Christ himself gives: “To him who is thirsty I will give to drink without cost from the spring of the water of life.” (Rev. 21:6.)

I hadn’t heard of Stan Grenz’s sudden passing until this morning. I didn’t know Dr. Grenz personally, but I appreciated and was greatly challenged by his book Beyond Foundationalism. I once e-mailed him to comment on a blog post of mine about his book, and he promptly e-mailed me back with some helpful comments. There are many moving eulogies on his web site from folks who knew him.

Here are pictures of me and St. Patty. She’s a labrador / something-or-other mix. We adopted her from a local shelter today. Isn’t she the sweetest thing!

Jeff at Dawn Treader posts a very nice summary of the different classes of presuppositions people might bring to the knowledge table, and asks whether there is a way to adjudicate among them. Here’s my take: not to pound a drum, but it seems to me that foundationalism breaks down for the very reason that it’s impossible to choose between competing foundational presuppositions.

One way to choose between competing presuppositions, as one of Jeff’s commenters suggested, might be by some criterion like falsifiability or testability. Even then, however, we have to presuppose that our criterion is meaningful and will lead to truth. A counter-example might suffice to falsify a claim, but only if the counter-example was observed and reported without significant bias, and there were no external factors affecting the example. You have to presuppose away observation and reporting bias as well as external factors. Presuppositions are built on presuppositions are built on presuppositions…. it never ends. Only God knows the absolute, total truth for sure, or, if there is no God, no one does.

For example, say we test the theory of gravity by dropping bowling balls from a roof. What if one bowling ball out of a hundred floats up rather than falling down, because of a miraculous intervention by God. If we presuppose naturalism, and eliminate any other naturalistic causes, we’ve falsified the theory of gravity. But we’d be wrong, because our presuppositions are wrong.

It seems to me this is where alternatives or adjuncts to foundationalism come in. A test of coherence, for example, can help. Which set of beliefs provides the most coherent account of human experience and history? We can ask, say, whether naturalism provides a more coherent account of altruism and the moral sense than Christian theism. If we combine the various tests available to us — reason, “common sense” perception, coherence — we can gain some anchors for the presupposition or faith commitments on which we choose to base our lives. At the end of the day, there’s always the possibility we could be wrong, but the hand we’re dealt as human beings is that we’re fallible and limited, so we have to make commitments based on probabilities using the tools available to us.