Here is the Chuck Colson essay I referred to in this post. I really wish he’d stop using his bully pulpit to charicature the emerging church, which I think he doesn’t really understand because of a generation gap problem.
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Kitzmiller and First Things
Here is a copy of my letter to the editors of First Things concerning law professor Robert T. Miller’s essay on the Kitzmiller case, along with Miller’s reply to me. I’m very pleased to have had my letter published in FirstThings, a journal I esteem highly (notice that my letter follows one by Mike Behe).
In his reply to me, Miller says I understimate “how unusual Kitzmiller was.” Maybe, but I don’t think so. I don’t think it was an “unusual” case at all. Rather, given the record concerning the school board’s motivations, I think it was right in line with a long string of “creation science” precedents.
Miller also criticizes the notion that “intent” is enough for an establishement clause violation. He sides with Justice Scalia’s view of the establishment clause, which requires a substantive evaluation of a challenged policy, not merely an examination of legislative intent. I might agree with Miller that the establishment clause should be read as Scalia suggests (though I would probably disagree with him that this should compel a rejection of an ID-teaching policy), but that is not the law as it now stands or as interpreted and applied by Judge Jones. Judge Jones applied Justice O’Connor’s “intent” based test, found the school board’s policy wanting, and then went ahead and pronounced on the philosophy of science anyway. I think that was a misuse of the judicial office, even though I think the end result was problably correct under the circumstances of this particular case.
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Memorial Day Peace
This is a picture of my father (center), my uncle, and my aunt in 1945, after Japan surrendered to end World War II. Yesterday we properly honored the sacrifices of the men and women who fought and still fight for our freedom. And we long for peace. Those three children knew nothing then of who they would become and what would happen in the world as they grew older. Peace was followed by the horrors of communist / totalitarian regimes and the cold war, Korea, Vietnam (where that little girl’s future husband would perish), the Gulf War, 9/11, the second Gulf War, and other wars and conflicts around the globe. We know almost nothing of what the next 65 years will hold, but we pray for peace.
Chuck Colson reports that he recently shouted “No!” during a church service when the music director suggested the congregation repeat a fluffy worship chorus. He complains that contemporary worship music is too loud and lacking in content. Haven’t we heard all this before, say, back in 1982 or so? I think it’s time for a certain grumpy old man to increase his fiber intake.
Separately, in this months Christianity Today, Colson writes (“with Ann Morse,” the by-line of the one-page article says) again, about the Emerging Church and propositional truth. I really do like alot of what Colson has said and done in the past, but the anti-Emergent posturing is getting tiresome. I do agree, though, with the main point of his essay: Jesus is the Truth whether we experience him or not. We don’t construct Jesus through our culture or language. Jesus, and the Father, and the Spirit, the three-in-one, just is, and always was, and always will be, whether anyone knows it or proclaims it or not.
But if that’s Colson’s beef with the Emerging Church, I’m not sure where the beef is. I don’t think most folks who are part of or interested in Emergent would disagree with Colson on this point. Now, it’s one thing to say that Jesus absolutely, always, for everyone, is the Truth, and it’s another to say that I can completely, absolutely, capture that truth with my human mind and language. Can I express that truth in propositional form, even if inadequately? Yes. Are my propositions, in themselves, The Truth? Here I would say no. Jesus is The Truth, and my propositions about him — this one included — are only approximations, albeit sometimes reasonably clear and good approximations given my limitations.
BTW, I can’t link to Colson’s most recent CT column yet, because CT is now following the trend of providing full text online only for past issues. Blech.
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Meeting Brian McLaren
Tomorrow I’m having lunch with Brian McLaren. Yes, really. Jeff — not the Dawn Treader Jeff, Jeff the Pastor of Communion of the Arts, an “emerging” sorta church in NYC and recently elected member of the Emergent U.S. Coordinating Group — invited me. I met the “Emergent Jeff,” who’s a really cool and innovative guy, last fall when I started my pathetic attempt at a podcast that ended up being too much work and therefore died after two episodes. It should be fun, and I’ll be sure to report back so that my other friend Jeff (the Dawn Treader), who is a huge McLaren fan and who is one of the three people besides my family to read this blog, gets the scoop. 🙂
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Battle of the Bands!
Last night I achieved a life-long dream: I played a screaming Eddie Van Halen-like guitar solo in front of a cheering crowd at a battle of the bands. My brother is a high school teacher, and I sat in with the “teacher band” at his school’s annual “Battle of the Bands.” We had a blast playing classics by the Eagles, Van Morrison, Neil Young and U2. I never got to do this back in high school, both because I wasn’t as good then as I am now, and because I wouldn’t have been allowed to get involved in such a “worldly” thing. 🙂
The most amazing thing about this Battle, though, was the “Emo” group. “Emo” is characterized by machine-gun riffs using drop-D tuning and “singing” that is best characterized as “Cookie Monster growling into a loud PA system.” Fans of Emo “get low,” meaning they dance wildly in front of the band, spinning their arms like dervishes and often bashing into each other (kind of like “moshing,” but that’s so ’90’s.). Emo kids tend to dye their hair jet black and dress androgenously, with the boys wearing girls jeans and black leather boots. There was a vigorous group of Emo kids, some from another school district, at this concert. The school Principal looked horror-stricken as the kids began to “get low” and the decibels rose.
I have to say that the main Emo band that played was remarkably good for a group of high school kids. The guitarist had great tone and timing, the bassist and drummer were tight as, well, a drum, and the singer’s growl was remarkably consistent with the Emo style. Emo isn’t really my thing, but as a musician, I appreciate all kinds of musicianship, and I don’t want to sound like my mom (bless her heart) when I was 13: “THAT’S NOT MUSIC, IT’S NOISE!!!”
But…. my goodness, it’s hard for me to relate to the Emo crowd. The growl-singing just sounds EVIL, and I shudder to think what the lyrics are all about (it’s impossible to make out what the singer is actually growling when the band is playing). And these kids just seemed so lost. I suppose their parents think the kids need their space and freedom to experiment, and maybe there’s something to that, but it seemed so clear to me, taking in the whole scene, that these kids are trapped, not free. They think they’re embracing an honest nihlism that views explosive, angry self-expression as the greatest good and irony as authenticity. The real irony is that, for most of them, it doesn’t seem authentic at all. I wish there was a way, in my music or teaching or writing, that I could introduce them to Jesus, help them feel Aslan’s breath on their faces, see them smile without shame.
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Microscope Photo
I bought a decent microscope for my older son, along with a camera attachment. Here’s my first effort — it’s the cell structure of a flower petal.
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Judge Jones on Anti-Establishment
“The founders believed that true religion was not something handed down
by a church or contained in a Bible, but was to be found through free,
rational inquiry. They possessed a great confidence in an individual’s
ability to understand the world and its most fundamental laws through the
exercise of his or her reason. This core set of beliefs led the founders,
who constantly engaged and questioned things, to secure their idea of
religious freedom by barring any alliance between church and state.”
–U.S. District Judge John E. Jones, who outlawed the teaching of
“intelligent design” in science class, in his commencement address Sunday
to 500 graduates at Dickinson College, his alma mater.
My goodness, this is just awful. I despise “Christian America” rhetoric, but I despise this sort of revisionism even more. Some of the “founders” were rationalists, many were Deists, and a few outright rejected traditional religion. But most were Christians, and though they intended to establish a secular republic and not a “Christian nation,” they surely would never have accepted the trope that “true religion” is reason freed from the tyranny of quaint artifacts like churches and Bibles.
Nor would they have recognized “religious freedom” as “barring any alliance between church and state.” They viewed the church as fundamentally the ally of the state because they understood that a republican democracy is doomed without an informed, virtuous public, and they further understood that knowledge and virtue come fundamentally from institutions like the church and the home, and not from the government (or from government-run schools). They would have been horrified to learn that the first amendment, which was intended to secure religious freedom in part by prohibiting an official state religion, has been read to require the establishment of a state-run education system scoured of references to God and religion.
More and more it’s clear to me that Judge Jones is no friend of anyone who believes religion and science need not exist in perpetual conflict.
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Da Vinci Humor
Daniel Henninger’s entry in today’s Wall Street Journal Opinion section (sorry, WSJ.com doesn’t allow deep links without subscription) is hilarious. He suggests some plot lines using Dan Brown’s crazy consipiracy theory theme:
Bill Clinton is directly descended from Henry VIII; Hillary is his third cousin. Jack Ruby was Ronald REagan’s half-brother. Dick Cheney has been dead for five years; the vice president is a clone created by Halliburton in 1998. The Laffer Curve is the secret sign of the Carlyle Group. Michael Moore is the founder of the Carlyle Group, which started World War I. The New York Times is secretly run by the Rosicrucians (this is revealed on the first page of Chapter 47 of the Da Vince Code if you look at the 23rd line through a kaleidoscope). Jacques Chirac is descended from Judas.
Too funny!
Jeff and I have been having a good discussion about apologetics and certainty. I want to pick up on that discussion here.
As I’ve thought this through and read through some materials, I think one of the key issues for me is what we mean by “certainty.” I believe we should make a distinction between certainty and certitude or assurance. This distinction is helpfully made by the late Paul Feinberg (a former professor at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School) in his essay on Cumulative Case Apologetics in the book Five Views on Apologetics. Here is what Feinberg said:
Many apologists distinguish between certainty and certitude. Certainty looks at the strength of the external evidence for a belief. Certitude looks beyond the external evidence, recognizing that there is a subjective element which can alone explain the tenacity and stubbornness of belief. This stubbornness is not the result of ignorance or stupidity; it is the work of the Holy Spirit.
Feinberg elaborates on this point in a footnote as follows:
Nash makes well the point that I am trying to make here. He points out that because worldviews are about reality, we can never have logical certainty. Evidence for interpretations of reality can only have probability or plausibility as I have called it. Nash points out that some have taken this lack of logical certainty to be a sacrilege. He counters this claim that we can and often do believe matters that lack logical certainty with moral or psychological certainty. I have called this certitude to distinguish it from certainty. It is subjective, and it is the work of the Holy Spirit.
Feinberg touches on the heart of my issue with the term “certainty”: in my experience, all too often, logical or evidential apologetic arguments advanced by Christians are less than convincing. I do believe that there are a number of quite convincing logical and evidential arguments in favor of Christianity, but even these are not indubitably correct. There are any number of points at which even the best logical and evidential arguments could fail, even if the likelihood of such failure seems passingly small. And, there are a number of important questions, many dealing with the relationship between scripture and science, that simply are not resolveable given our present state of knowledge.
I am in agreement, then, with the presuppositionalist view that certitude or assurance is an internal work of the Holy Spirit. However, I do not think there is no role for external logical and historical evidence that can be ascertainable in some sense even to unregenerate people. On this point, I like Feinberg’s cumulative case approach, which sums various arguments to propose an overall case in favor of belief. Perhaps I like Feinberg’s approach because it essentially what we lawyers do when we present a case to a judge or jury.