Category: Spirituality

Today I’m working at home, preparing the final review lectures for all of my fall semester classes. It’s cold in my basement office (I need to finish that basement!) so I brought my laptop upstairs, built a fire in the fireplace, and started plugging away. My wife is at work and my youngest son, Garrett (4 years old), is home until noon, when he heads off to preschool. Garrett came by and gave me a big bear hug, and as I picked him up and turned around I saw the word “JOY” spelled out in Christmas candle-holders my wife placed over the mantle. Joy in the light of the fire, Joy in the warmth of this home, Joy in doing productive work, Joy in my little boy’s bear hug, Joy in the baby born on Christmas day!

I’ve been having a good discussion with Tom at Lean Left about finding meaning in an untimely death. I’ve been doing my best to present a Christian perspective, while his perspective is more materialist. I think we’ve both done a pretty good job of presenting our views, within the limits of blog comments, without acrimony. Check it out.

Last week I commented on a post by my friend Jeff about hope in the face of the recent tragic death of a young Christian man named Clete. Tom, a frequent visitor to Jeff’s site, who is not a Christian and keeps a site called “Lean Left,” also commented on Jeff’s post. Tom felt that the hope expressed by many of the young man’s friends and family was somewhat misplaced. Tom felt that “it would be infinitely better if the person hadn’t died at all.” Here are my thoughts:

Christians can make hopeful comments despite this kind of tragedy because we believe this life isn’t all there is. We believe Clete is in fact alive right now, more alive than he ever was before, and that his future is even more promising now than ever. This life, for us, is a pilgrimage towards a better country. It’s filled with joys that are only shadows of the joys to come, but it’s also filled with pains that pass away when we reach that better country. The Apostle Paul summed up our feelings about these things in his letter to the Phillipians: “For to me, to live is Christ and to die is gain.”

This hope is also portrayed beautifully in the book from which Jeff’s blog takes it’s title, C.S. Lewis’ The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. “Dawn Treader” is one of the Narnia books, which include “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe,” soon coming out on film. The “Dawn Treader” of the title is a ship that sets sail towards the ends of the earth. One of the characters in “Dawn Treader,” Reepicheep the mouse, is intent on sailing all the way to Aslan’s country. (Aslan the lion, a central character in the Narnia stories, is a picture of Christ.) When the group’s courage falters and begins to question the usefulness of their mission, Reepicheep admonishes them:

If by use you mean filling our bellies or our purses, I confess it will be no use at all. So far as I know we did not set sail to look for things useful, but seek honor and adventure. And here is as great an adventure as I ever heard of, and here, if we turn back, no little impeachment of all our honors.

I’d encourage you to read the lovely little “Dawn Treader” story for a bit more insight on how Christians think about death. For us Christians, life is a great adventure because we know we are sailing towards “Aslan’s Country.” We bear hardships like the death of a loved one with great hope, even in the midst of great pain, because of this.

Perhaps you think Christians are deluded for thinking this way. We think, though, that people who view this life as the end of the adventure are the sad and deluded ones. After all, if this life is all there is, when could anyone ever say that they’ve lived a long and full enough life? There is always more to experience, see, and accomplish, yet it would all vanish in an instant. Like the writer of Ecclesiastes, we could all say

What does man gain from all his labor at which he toils under the sun? Generations come and generations go, but the earth remains forever….I have seen all the things that are done under the sun; all of them are meaningless, a chasing after the wind.

For the Christian, the answer to this is our faith that all of our days are in God’s hands, and that He is building something wonderful in and through us that will last forever.

It’s been a long time since I read any of St. Augustine’s monumental City of God. I recently decided to pick it up again. What incredible brilliance! It’s hard to believe that something written in the Fifth Century can remain so erudite and fresh. Of course, most modern readers won’t always agree with Augustine, but many of his arguments apply as well today as they did 1500 years ago. There really is nothing new under the Sun. As I read through the City of God, I’ll post about the gems I find there. So here is the first one:

I heard a challenging sermon this weekend on the Christian’s relationship to “the world.” It was on the whole a well-balanced sermon, but it was particularly challenging to me because of the baggage I brought to it. I grew up, until my teen years, in a German Bretheren church that emphasized a retreat from “worldliness.” My emotional baggage about what constitutes “the world” is therefore heavy.

My friend Joe Carter at Evangelical Outpost raises some interesting questions about whether Christians, Jews and Muslims worship the same God. Joe’s answer, in short, is that we do not worship the same God because of Christianity’s triune understanding of God and specifically because of our belief in the divinity of Christ. I’ve heard this argument periodically bandied about in Evangelical circles.

I don’t buy this line of argument. I think it mixes who God actually is (ontology) with what we know and believe about Him (epistemology) and what sort of belief in Him results in salvation (soteriology).

God is no less God, as an ontological being, if our understanding and knowledge of Him is imperfect. If we follow this line of reasoning all the way, no one would truly be worshipping God unless the worshipper has a perfect knowledge of God. Since no one can claim a perfect knowledge of God, we’d all be excluded as worshipers.

We certainly can cite many passages in the New Testament that speak of salvation being made available only in Christ. Clearly, the New Testament scripture teaches that saving faith is only faith in Christ; no one is saved apart from Christ; no one who rejects the divinity of Christ can claim to have saving faith.

This soteriological question, however, is a different question, than the whether Muslims and Jews have at least some degree of knowledge of and faith in the same God, as an ontological being, that we Christians worship. Scripture reveals God’s nature progressively. The God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob clearly is presented in scripture as the same God we Christians worship. We Christians believe we understand more of His triune nature than Abraham, Isaac or Jacob did because of God’s progressive revelation of Himself in scripture and in the person of Christ. The epistle to the Hebrews certainly confirms the continuity between genuine faith under the Old and New Covenants. God has not changed, but we now know more about Him through Christ and are offered a new covenant based on that deeper knowledge.

So, I think it is more accurate to make a distinctions based on progressive revelation and what constitutes saving faith under the new covenant rather than to define a non-triune understanding of the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob as constituting a “different” ontological being than the God Christians worship.

This distinction between ontology, epistemology, and soteriology gives us Christians common ground with Muslims and Jews on many basic things relating to the nature of man, morality, and natural law, while leaving us free to differ on matters specific to soteriology without resorting to universalism.

Jeff at Dawn Treader and I are starting a series on Titus. Titus is one of the Apostle Paul’s “pastoral letters” and is part of the New Testament.

Paul’s pastoral letters were written to leaders of the early church. They include 1 and 2 Timothy as well as Titus. Timothy is probably the more well-known of the recipients of Paul’s letters. So who was Titus?

I read this in the Wall Street Journal yesterday: “If you’re in your 40’s, you are probably pulling down a bigger paycheck than ever before, and your portfolio has never been fatter.” This year I turn 39, so I’m not quite in the WSJ’s cohort. Still, I have to wonder how many people really fit this description.

I thought about this earlier this evening I ate a chicken sandwich at a Wendy’s overlooking Madison Square Park in New York. A little more than five years ago, I was part of a legal team representing a major financial services company with headquarters facing the same park. I probably looked at the same view from thirty stories up in one of my client’s conference rooms. I had no idea then that I’d be sitting today in a Wendy’s only a few blocks away, no longer a big-firm lawyer with Fortune 25 clients, but a junior Professor in a City University college. I had no idea five years ago that I’d be pulling down a much smaller paycheck, with no “portfolio” to speak of, as I approach my 40’s. I had no idea five years ago that I’d leave the “certainty” of a big law firm partnership for a risky new career in college teaching.

All of this reminds me of James chapter 4:

Now listen, you who say ‘Today or tomorrow we will go to this or that city, spend a year there, carry on business and make money. Why, you do not even know what will happen tomorrow. What is your life? You are mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes. Instead, you ought to say ‘if it is the Lord’s will, we will live and do this or that.'”

I have no idea where I’ll be five years from now. I’m grateful that God provided an interesting, flexible teaching position at a unique college in Manhattan, and that he’s given me some success in my academic writing. I’m grateful also for the new web development skills I’ve learned in my outside consulting work, and that I’ve recently been able to represent some clients again in small “everyday” legal matters. I hope I can build my academic reputation, earn tenure, and develop my side businesses to the point where I can start saving real money again for my kids’ futures. But all of this ultimately is out of my hands. God, help me to be faithful today, to rest in your good and perfect will, and to trust you for tomorrow.

School starts tomorrow in our town. This is a bit of a stressful time for us this year. My four year old son is starting a special preschool for kids with learning disabilities. He’s a wonderful, bright, friendly, golden little boy, who happens to have some sort of language delay. His speech, except for a few words, is mostly unintelligible, even to us. He often communicates through gestures. It seems that he has some problems with language reception as well; sometimes he seems not to understand simple statements (such as, “put your shoes on”), though sometimes he does. This can be quite frustrating; it’s given us a much deeper appreciation of families who cope with disabilities, and of the worth of each person who is in some way “disabled.”

We’re not sure what’s causing this delay, although we believe it’s related to seizures he’s periodically experienced. All the medical and neurological tests haven’t shown any particular anomalies (except the seizures themselves). The nuerologist classifies it as unspecified juvenile seizure activity, which often dissipates with age.

We’re grateful that our local school district has an excellent pre-school program that deals with issues such as language delay. We’re nervous, however, because our son is a stubborn little guy, and doesn’t always handle separation well. If he decides he doesn’t want to be in the classroom without mom or dad, it’ll be a long haul.

So, we covet your prayers that our little guy will take to his new school and that his language skills will develop well.

Gracious God,

We pray that you would sustain those who await rescue;

that you would guide and strengthen the rescuers;

that you would comfort those who have suffered loss of loved ones,
homes, possessions;

that you would support those whom you have appointed to preserve
order, and frustrate those who spread disorder;

that you would move and empower your Church to demonstrate your
love to those who are in need;

that you would remind many of the frailty of life and the transience
of this world, that they would turn in repentance and faith to you.

Amen.