Category: Uncategorized

On Jesus Creed, guest blogger RJS is exploring the relationship between faith and reason. Here are the categories she proposes:

(1) Faith requires the renunciation of intelligence. Any elaboration here would detract from my principle point – so I will forbear.

(2) Intellectual integrity requires the renunciation of faith. This is a growing view in our world today. Secular humanism and atheism may not be in ascendancy (Alister McGrath, NT Wright, Tim Keller, and Brian McLaren all make this point in various ways) – but the view has become the de facto operating principle for many; the point of departure. More importantly, the accepted alternatives to atheism or materialism do not usually include orthodox Christian faith.

(3) By the skin of one’s teeth one can hold to both faith and integrity. But within this position there is a constant tension. We bracket off the questions and continue to function – barely. Many stories – both of those who “lost faith” and those who “retained faith” include this approach in the mix.

(4) Intellectual integrity demands faith. A modernistic “evidence that demands a verdict” approach. (Lee Strobel, Josh McDowell, Hugh Ross, …)

I would add a fifth response to this taxonomy:

(5) Intellectual integrity is fully compatible with faith but requires honest interaction. There is no proof – some ambiguity remains. Of course honest grappling with all the questions and issues is somewhat unnerving to many. It seems inevitable that some views will be refined or even abandoned in the process and this prospect causes concern. Perhaps it is not true that everything is clear cut. Nonetheless there is a way forward. Exploring the issues does not lead inevitably to deism or liberalism or apostasy.

I grew up with category 4. I’ve moved towards 5, and at times I’ve thought I’ve been there, only to get beaten back to 3. Here’s my question: can you get to 5 with an orthodox Christian faith, or does 5 require that the big challenges between faith and intellectual integrity must be resolved by moving away from orthodoxy?

On the Brian Lehrer show yesterday, Doug Rushkoff suggested that the U.S. Constitution and the Talmud are open source projects. This strikes me as, well, overstated.

In the context of open source biotechnology, I’ve written about the “hacker culture” required to support open source norms. This sort of culture, I think, is very different than a contractual community established by a constitutional document or an interpretive community surrounding a set of canonical sacred scriptures.

It’s true, as Rushkoff noted on Lehrer’s show, that constitutions usually provide procedures for amendment, and of course the U.S. Constitution has been amended numerous times. Those procedures, however, typically reflect the agreement of the community governed by the constitutional document that amendements should be difficult and rare. Article V of the U.S. Constitution, for example, requires a two-thirds vote of Congress or an application by the legislatures of two-thirds of the states, followed by ratification by three-fourths of the states. If this is “open source,” then “open source” simply means “possible, though exceptionally difficult, to change.”

The Talmud presents a more interesting example, because there is significant diversity in the various Talmudic traditions, although the Orthodox tradition resists the notion of historical editorial change in the oral law reflected in the Talmud. However, the Talmud expounds and interprets the written law, the Torah. The Talmud therefore reflects the activity of interpretive communities connected to a “closed source” written law. I think most of the writers of the Talmud would have been horrified to have been portrayed as “hacking” the Torah. If the Talmud was an “open source” project, then we can apply the term “open source” anachronistically to every interpretive community that ever existed — which might include everyone who has ever read a text.

Westminster Seminary has announced the supension of Peter Enns due to the controversy over his book Inspiration and Incarnation. What a shame.

Pete’s book was and is very important to me personally, and I believe the questions he raised are vital to the future of evangelical faith. We cannot ignore the humanity of the Bible. People need meat, not just milk. We have learned to integrate the emotional aspects of spirituality into our practice through praise music and small support groups, and that is a good thing. But educated, urban people also need food for the mind.

The shamanistic recitation of magical dogmatic phrases such as “inerrancy” is not meat. Meat is actually digging in to the Bible God gave us, in all of its maddening situatedness, strangeness, and diversity. Meat is recognizing that what it means for God not to “err” in communicating to human beings might not be exactly what we would expect. Meat is working to understand the authority of scripture in the context of the whole of God’s revelation, including what He reveals to us through the natural and social sciences, literature, the arts, and philosophy.

If we evangelicals can’t move on to the meat, we’ll starve. If we can’t learn to eat the meat, how will we be different than the thousands of other fundamalist sects of the world’s religions that lack contact with reality? If we can’t learn to eat the meat, how can we expect our young people to hold onto their faith? If we can’t develop a more robust and well-rounded consensus on the nature, authority, and interpretation of scripture, a consensus that isn’t just rigidly formulaic, evangelicalism will become an irrelevant emotionalist backwater. At least that’s my two cents as a moderately educated lay person.

An excellent article in this month’s Economist surveys the many problems with the Iraq war. The concluding paragraph is true and poignant:

It is not enough to say with the neocons that this was a good idea executed badly. Their own ideas are partly to blame. Too many people in Washington were fixated on proving an ideological point: that America’s values were universal and would be digested effortlessly by people a world away. But plonking an American army in the heart of the Arab world was always a gamble. It demanded the highest seriousness and careful planning. Messrs Bush and Rumsfeld chose instead to send less than half the needed soldiers and gave no proper thought to the aftermath.

What a waste. Most Iraqis rejoiced in the toppling of Saddam. They trooped in their millions to vote. What would Iraq be like now if America had approached its perilous, monumentally controversial undertaking with humility, honesty and courage? Thanks to the almost criminal negligence of Mr Bush’s administration nobody, now, will ever know.

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In a prior post about Dostoevsky, I mentioned Isaac the Syrian, a Christian mystic and ascetic who lived in Seventh Century. I picked up a lovely little book called Daily Readings With St. Isaac of Syria. It’s part of a “Daily Readings” series published by Templegate Publishers, a small independent publisher of classics in Christian spirituality. I definitely plan to pick up more of the volumes in this series.

As evangelicals, we’re tempted to shy away from ascetics like Isaac. Weren’t they trying to earn God’s favor? Wasn’t their abuse of the body more Gnostic than Christian? I think it’s helpful, though, to think of them on their own terms as people of their times. We think the world is chaotic, difficult and uncertain today — imagine what it was like to live in the 600’s! Surely there are aspects of the theology and practices of the ascetics that we would consider out of balance, but surely Christians living 1400 years from now will say the same about us (if the Lord doesn’t return before then). At the same time, there are beautiful themes in many of their writings that can inform and deepen our faith. In their writings, we often see that, within their own contexts, they were trying to understand faith, grace, repentance and the Christian life, just as we are today.

So, here is a selection from Isaac, on weakness:

Blessed is the person who knows his own weakness, because awareness of this becomes for him the foundation and beginning of all that is good and beautiful.

For whenever someone realizes and perceives that he is truly and indeed weak, then he draws in his soul from the diffuseness which dissipates knowledge, and he becomes all the more watchful of his soul.

But no one can perceive his own weakness unless he has been remiss a little, has neglected some small thing, has been surrounded by trials, either in the matter of things which cause the body suffering, or in that of ways in which the soul is subject to the passions. only then, by comparing his own weakness, will he realize how great is the assistance which comes from God.

When someone is aware that he is in need of divine help, he makes many prayers. And once he has made much supplication, his heart is humbled, for there is no one who is in need and asks who is not humbled. ‘A broken and humbled heart, God will not despise.’

As long as the heart is not humbled it cannot cease from wandering; for humility concentrates the heart.

As I’m working on some research this morning, I’m listening to Rutter’s Requiem. Rutter mixes aspects of the Catholic Requiem Mass with some texts from the Book of Common Prayer. A Requiem is a Christian funeral liturgy. There are aspects of Rutter’s setting that are somewhat dark and intense, though never so broken as something by, say, Arvo Part. The truly moving of Rutter’s setting, though, is the Kyrie. It resolves beautifully into a melodic, major tonality. The sense is not of desperately pleading “Kyrie Eleison” (“Lord have mercy”), but rather of experiencing a mercy already known. Maybe it’s just because I’ve been feeling a little wiggy this week and wrestling with my faith a bit, but when I heard Rutter’s Kyrie this morning I could close my eyes, take a deep breath, and feel it massaging those deep knots in my soul.

The National Association of Evangelicals has released an important declaration against torture. I have to confess that I have a minor jurisprudential quibble with the Declaration’s heavy reliance on “human rights” concepts. I certainly believe in the sanctity of life and therefore in basic and inalienable human rights, but I might want to be a little more careful about grounding those notions explicity in the imago Dei. Nevertheless, this is a Declaration to be warmly embraced by all evangelicals concerned about social justice.

Here is a key section:

The abominable acts of 9/11, along with the continuing threat of terrorist attacks, create profound security challenges. However, these challenges must be met within a moral and legal framework consistent with our values and laws, among which is a commitment to human rights that we as evangelicals share with many others. In this light, we renounce the resort to torture and cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment of detainees, call for the extension of procedural protections and human rights to all detainees, seek clear government-wide embrace of the Geneva Conventions, including those articles banning torture and cruel treatment of prisoners, and urge the reversal of any U.S. government law, policy, or practice that violates the moral standards outlined in this declaration.

On the God’s Politics blog, Jim Wallis posts some encouraging thoughts, following up on his suggestion that he and James Dobson debate evangelical political proirities. Wallis says:

In his letter [calling for the resignation of National Association of Evangelicals public policy director Rich Cizik, over Cizik’s emphasis on the global warming problem], Dobson named the “great moral issues” as “the sanctity of human life, the integrity of marriage and the teaching of sexual abstinence and morality to our children.” I [Wallace] said in my last blog that I believe the sanctity of life, the integrity and health of marriages, and the teaching of sexual morality to our children are, indeed, among the “great moral issues of our time. But I believe they are not the only great moral issues.” As many writers have been saying in this blog, the enormous challenges of global poverty, climate change, pandemics that wipe out generations and continents, the trafficking of human beings made in God’s image, and the grotesque violations of human rights, even to the point of genocide, are also among the great moral issues that people of faith must be – and already are – addressing.

Wallis also notes that the NAE just concluded its annual meeting, and that

The only mention of Rich Cizik, whom the Dobson letter had singled out and called upon the NAE to fire, came with these words in the official NAE press release:

Speaking at the annual board banquet, Rev. Richard Cizik, NAE vice president for governmental affairs, quoted evangelical theologian Carl F. H. Henry in his wake up call to evangelicals sixty years ago: ‘The cries of suffering humanity today are many. No evangelicalism which ignores the totality of man’s condition dares respond in the name of Christianity….
Speaking of a new generation of evangelicals that has responded to those cries, Cizik said: ‘We root our activism in the redemptive work of Jesus Christ on the cross and are giving it a proper temporal focus by emphasizing all of the principles that are found in the Bible. We come together in a positive way as a family bonded by the love of Christ, not as fractious relatives. We desire to be people known for our passionate commitment to justice and improving the world, and eager to reach across all barriers with love, civility, and care for our fellow human beings.’

Wallace senses that

the NAE Board, and its president Leith Anderson, know that a new generation of evangelicals wants that same sound theology and good balance, and believe that Christian moral concerns (and God’s concerns) go beyond only a few issues. Recognizing how their broader agenda is resonating with evangelicals around the world, the NAE announced that at its fall board meeting in Washington, D.C., October 11-12, “the association will host an ‘International Congress on Evangelical Public Engagement,’ drawing prestigious leaders from around the world to meet with American leadership around the principles of the Association’s ‘For the Health of the Nation’ document.” It seems the broader evangelical social agenda has solid support and is moving forward.

So, Wallace says, “let’s have the big debate; and make it into the kind of deep and necessary conversation among the people of God that it needs to be.”

Amen to that.

Last night I attended the “Watering Hole,” a men’s ministry at the new church my family has started attending. There was an informal talk with a pastor from Uganda with whom the church has a ministry partnership. It was very interesting to hear about the struggles of men and families in Africa. Many of them are the same struggles we face here in the U.S.

At the end of the evening, the Ugandan pastor gave all us guys a blessing in his native language. We all stood with arms open to receive his blessing. It was a deeply moving experience. I of course couldn’t understand the actual words of his language, but I understood in my spirit the love and power of his blessing. This is what the Church is all about — people of different races, languages and nations worshiping together and blessing each other in the peace and unity of the Spirit.