Feature: L'abri

This week's feature is L'abri Fellowship. I would try to write a word or two explaining what L'abri is for those of you who've never heard of it, but I am finding I am having a hard time of it. For some reason it is hard to explain what L'abri is in a short blurb on a blog. You need to sit down and tell stories, or better yet, go live and study at one of the branches for a summer, then you'll understand. I chose it as the feature because L'abri and the writings of Francis Schaeffer have deeply impacted and shaped what Veritas is. Also to mention this: Every year Veritas takes a road trip up to the L'abri conference in Rochester Minnesota. This years conference
is coming up on the weekend after Valentine's day. Stayed tuned for more information about that and in the mean time here are some links for learning more about L'abri and Francis Schaeffer.



Perhaps it is best to let L'abri speak for itself. Here are some quotes about L'abri in their own words:

"L'Abri is a French word that means shelter. The first L'Abri community was founded in Switzerland in 1955 by Dr. Francis Schaeffer and his wife, Edith. Dr. Schaeffer was a Christian theologian and philosopher who also authored a number of books on theology, philosophy, general culture and the arts.

The L'Abri communities are study centers in Europe, Asia and America where individuals have the opportunity to seek answers to honest questions about God and the significance of human life. L'Abri believes that Christianity speaks to all aspects of life." -Labri.org

"People who have never visited a branch of L'abri ask what it is, what they are, what we do - they find it difficult to formulate the proper question. And in this we share common ground, because for those of us who have lived and worked at L'abri, even those who have been part of the fellowship for a long time, it's difficult to formulate just the right answer. Anything brief enough to keep the interest of the questioner is going to leave them with misconceptions. "Oh, it's like a school" "So, It's a retreat center" "Sounds like a commune" "Ah, I see, you are a missionary" some of these answer are more accurate than others, but none of them even begins to capture the spirit of this creature called L'abri Fellowship" -Wade Bradshaw, By Demonstration: God

"There have been perhaps four main emphases in the teaching of L'Abri.

First, that Christianity is objectively true and that the Bible is God's written word to mankind. This means that biblical Christianity can be rationally defended and honest questions are welcome.

Second, because Christianity is true it speaks to all of life and not to some narrowly religious sphere and much of the material produced by L'Abri has been aimed at helping develop a Christian perspective on the arts, politics and the social sciences etc.

Third, in the area of our relationship with God, true spirituality is seen in lives which by grace are free to be fully human rather than in trying to live on some higher spiritual plane or in some grey negative way.

Fourth, the reality of the fall is taken seriously. Until Christ returns we and the world we live in will be affected by the disfigurement of sin. Although the place of the mind is emphasized, L'Abri is not a place for "intellectuals only".

We are as concerned for living as we are for thinking and from the beginning the concern has been that the truth is as much exhibited in everyday life as it is defended in discussion. We do not do this perfectly of course but depend on the Lord to bring forth a measure of reality in our daily life." -L'abri.org

Merry Christmas

Save Their Bodies or Save Their Souls?

I heard a speaker at last year’s L’abri conference tell a story about something he saw while spending some time in Africa. He went to a missionary compound and it was obvious to see the quality of the facilities there that they had invested many resources on their bright buildings. He also saw that just outside the missionary compound there were Africans living beneath tarps strung up between trees. His point in telling that story was that often when the gospel has gone out it has focused solely on spreading a message of spiritual redemption and any kind of physical redemption has been completely neglected. The story is made particularly poignant (and tragic) by the fact that the missionaries had been there for thirty years. In thirty years their faith had driven them to do many things (and probably most of them were very good things) but had not compelled to provide a better shelter than tarps for the people within arms reach.

Another story (that I can’t help but think of paired with the story of the missionary compound) happened one night after a friend and I saw Blood Diamond and we got into a long conversation afterwards about what the responsibility of Christians was in light of the fact that there is so much injustice and suffering happening in the world, like the things going on in the film. He was frustrated with the fact that sometimes Christians can act like physical things don’t matter and said that it was pointless to act like all the problems were fixed if you share the gospel with someone who is starving and then walk away without giving them any food. “They don’t need Jesus,” he said, “they need food!”

Both stories illustrate a message of what the Christian’s priorities should be in the world. One message is that the spiritual is what is most important, and the gospel should heal people’s greatest needs, which are first and foremost spiritual needs. The other message is as the gospel goes out it should focus on the physical needs and have the healing of those as the first and foremost priority of Christians, as it is the foremost priority of the gospel.

I want to say that both viewpoints taken to the extreme are distortions of the gospel and in danger of committing opposite errors. It should never be a choice between either physical or spiritual needs and, in a sense, we have already gone wrong if the debate is even going on. It is a false dichotomy and an unbiblical one. But before I go on, let me add that in saying that I don’t mean that it is never appropriate to correct the one with the other. That is, perhaps, what is needed in cases where Christians have gone so far down the one direction they are completely neglecting the other. For example, what whoever makes the decisions in that missionary compound needs is to see is that they are misrepresenting the gospel by only caring for spiritual needs at the expense of the physical and begin to repent of that distortion of the gospel, starting with doing what they can to provide those people living in tarps with four walls and a roof. But that does not mean that it would be best for them to turn 180 degrees and commit the opposite error, neglecting people’s spiritual needs. What they need is to return to the practice of biblical Christianity!

As I said, I think it is a false dichotomy that is not present in the Bible. Look at the life of Jesus, who alone lived perfectly in line with God’s agenda for the world. What do we see him doing with his life on earth? We see him healing lepers, restoring sight to the blind, raising up people crippled for their whole lives, feeding thousands, casting out demons, having compassion on the pain of others, and showing that God cares for the physical hurts, afflictions, and suffering of all people. We also see him correcting people’s theology. He calls 12 men and travels everywhere with him for 3 years and teaches them about the kingdom of God. He gives sermons to thousands proclaiming the truth and correcting their false beliefs. He gets into countless conversations with people who come to him with questions and challenges them (with narrative AND propositionally…) to believe more truly. He shows that God cares about the landscape of every individual’s beliefs and the kingdom of God is one where people are growing in their theology and learning the truth more and more.

The two ways of thinking of the kingdom of God are really part of one whole, and to divorce them from each other is to distort the truth. Jesus can be used as a banner for each side of the debate. Those most concerned about the spiritual side of the gospel will make sermons that show Jesus trouncing the Pharisees and telling people that the he is the Good Shepherd and meditate most heavily on the passages where he preaches against he lies he encounters (a good thing). Those on the other side of the debate will make sermons showing that Jesus was deeply moved to compassion at seeing people hurt and basically walked around the countryside looking for people to heal and will pray to be more like Christ in this and try to reflect it in the way they live (a good thing).

The danger is not that there are no good aspects of either one; the danger is that neither is a complete version of what the kingdom of God is. They are Biblical in the sense that both of them site parts of the Bible as sources, but not Biblical in the sense that neither represent the unity of what the Bible teaches about what the kingdom of God looks like, nor how Jesus embodied it.

The task before the Church is to fight all the brokenness and injustice in the world and to do it zealously, as Jesus did, while not forgetting what our greatest enemy really is. Our greatest enemy is the sin that separates us from the source of all good, God, and we desperately need to be reconciled to Him and we need that infinitely more than we need food. The truth is that Christians are called to fight sin wherever it appears, whether that means institutional sin (injustice, poverty, homelessness, slavery) or confronting false belief in individuals and proclaiming the truth against the lies that set themselves up against God. The Bible does not give room for the church to abandon either front, and the world suffers when it does. The truth is that the kingdom of God is where the will of the King is done, and where that kingdom grows all things will begin to be aligned to that will. God cares about every inch of creation. God cares about every facet of what it means to be human. God cares about our struggles, our suffering and pain, our confusion, the lies we believe and our mistaken theology. There is not one inch of it over which he does not say “Mine.” And as the church does not care about any of those things it falsely represents God to the watching world.

Feature: Tim Keller Resources

More sermons on the web!

Tim Keller is an author, speaker, and the founding Pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City. His teaching on the nature of the gospel, contextualization of the Christian message, and the Christian approach to the city have had a huge influence on the shape of Christianity. Here are some links to blogs who have provided pages consolidating many of his sermons and teachings. Enjoy.

1. Reformissionary

2. DJChuang.com

3. Monergism

4. (For a little humor...)

Postmodernism and Christianity (Part 9)

Postmodernism #9

In the last post I talked about the central question in talking about postmodern Christianity is how to discern the line between what is changeable and unchangeable in Christianity.
To borrow an analogy from Mark Driscoll, a model that might help guide us in discerning that line is to think about it in terms of what parts of Christianity do you hold in an open hand and what parts do you hold in a closed fist. In one hand you have timeless truths of Christianity (Who created man, what is the fall, who is Jesus, what happened on the cross, to name a few examples) and in the other hand you have the way that you communicate those truths.

There are three options:
1. Two closed fists. Neither the timeless truths nor the methods of communication change.
2. Two open hands. Both sides are flexible. Both the truths themselves and the ministry of them are things subject to change with the changing winds of culture, time, geography, demography, etc.
3. One open hand, one closed fist. Here the timeless truths go in the closed fist and the timely ministry methods go in the open hand.

I am convinced that the third option is the calling of the Bible. It is also the most difficult, as John Stott said, “…it is comparatively easy to be faithful if we do not care about being contemporary, and it is easy to be contemporary if we do not bother to be faithful. It is the search for a combination of truth and relevance that is exacting.” This is our challenge: to faithfully preach an unchanging gospel to a changing culture. The first two options only lead to different errors, and the Bible has sharp critiques for both of them. I want to address the Biblical challenge to the first and second option, beginning with number one.

To those who live with two closed hands the challenge of the Bible is to open the hand of timely methods and truly endeavor to speak the gospel to our generation in forms it will understand. Jesus did not live with two closed hands. He held onto the timeless truths more truly than anyone ever has, but he lived with the other hand open. The most obvious evidence of this is the incarnation. As Jerram Barrs said in his class Apologetics and Outreach, “Jesus did not shout from heaven.” Christ became a man and entered into our fallen, broken world. He entered into a culture and spoke its language, learned its values and customs. He came and dwelled among the people he was sent to. He knew the hearts of his hearers and spoke to the unique stories of every individual he came in contact with. We see the same philosophy of incarnation in the ministry of Paul, who wrote “I have become all things to all people, that by all means I might save some” (1 Corinthians 9:22) Paul was an educated Jew and when he was among educated Jews his knowledge of their culture shone. His sermons are filled with quotations of the scriptures they had spent hours memorizing and praying over. His appeal to Christ was founded in the prophecies and promises they knew and he showed how the hope for a Messiah which their culture was built around was fulfilled in Jesus. In different audiences his messages change. The gospel he preaches does not change, but the way he preaches does. In Acts 17 we see him in Athens speaking to educated Pagans after a long day of walking in the marketplace in Athens and looking at their objects of worship. You can’t find a quotation of scripture in the sermon he gives to them. But he does quote the poets they loved. He references their local folklore. He shows his familiarity with their philosophical debates. He builds a bridge to Christ from the things that they hold dear. Paul was not selling out by preaching in this way; he was being a good missionary.
Why is it that if we send a missionary overseas and he or she adopts the culture of the mission field in order to communicate, we applaud, but we are not willing to do so at home? What is the difference between missionaries overseas and those at home? There is no difference. We must send missionaries into postmodern culture and teach them to be good missionaries in the same way that Jesus and Paul were. The alternative is irrelevancy. The world will not stop changing, and because of that it is silly to expect to continue to be able to communicate if we live with two closed hands. It is not enough to be “not of” the world, for Christ also called the Church to be in the world. Christ has not left us freedom to close ranks and close the second hand and withdraw from the world. We are to be salt and light. The Church must send missionaries into our postmodern culture. Wherever those missionaries go they must learn the unique landscape of the culture they are in, learn its sins and what parts of the truth it retains, and preach the gospel in the areas where it is under attack. They must, as Christ and Paul did, seek to remove every unnecessary barrier to the gospel. There are enough barriers to the gospel when preaching in a fallen world already without us adding our own.
It is a matter of compassion. There are real people out there in that changing world who are carried along in the current of the culture like sheep without a shepherd. These are people God made and loves and cares for. They desperately need the gospel and the Church must find them and enter their world. The Church must know them and tell them the truth in a language they understand.
Adoniram Judson was a missionary in Burma and faithfully worked for long, hard years to translate the Bible into Burmese. He experienced a higher cost for that faithfulness than most of us will ever be asked to pay. When the work was done people began to come to him from all over Burma and the neighboring countries because they had heard that there was a man who “had the words of God.” If we want our culture to come to the Church seeking the words of God then we also must be translators.
The Church must become a people with one hand firmly grasping the timeless truths of the gospel and the other hand reaching out to take hold of a culture which so desperately needs those truths.

Postmodernism and Christianity (Part 9)

In the last post I talked about the central question in talking about postmodern Christianity is how to discern the line between what is changeable and unchangeable in Christianity.
To borrow an analogy from Mark Driscoll, a model that might help guide us in discerning that line is to think about it in terms of what parts of Christianity do you hold in an open hand and what parts do you hold in a closed fist. In one hand you have timeless truths of Christianity (Who created man, what is the fall, who is Jesus, what happened on the cross, to name a few examples) and in the other hand you have the way that you communicate those truths.

There are three options:
1. Two closed fists. Neither the timeless truths nor the methods of communication change.
2. Two open hands. Both sides are flexible. Both the truths themselves and the ministry of them are things subject to change with the changing winds of culture, time, geography, demography, etc.
3. One open hand, one closed fist. Here the timeless truths go in the closed fist and the timely ministry methods go in the open hand.

I am convinced that the third option is the calling of the Bible. It is also the most difficult, as John Stott said, “…it is comparatively easy to be faithful if we do not care about being contemporary, and it is easy to be contemporary if we do not bother to be faithful. It is the search for a combination of truth and relevance that is exacting.” This is our challenge: to faithfully preach an unchanging gospel to a changing culture. The first two options only lead to different errors, and the Bible has sharp critiques for both of them. I want to address the Biblical challenge to the first and second option, beginning with number one.

To those who live with two closed hands the challenge of the Bible is to open the hand of timely methods and truly endeavor to speak the gospel to our generation in forms it will understand. Jesus did not live with two closed hands. He held onto the timeless truths more truly than anyone ever has, but he lived with the other hand open. The most obvious evidence of this is the incarnation. As Jerram Barrs said in his class Apologetics and Outreach, “Jesus did not shout from heaven.” Christ became a man and entered into our fallen, broken world. He entered into a culture and spoke its language, learned its values and customs. He came and dwelled among the people he was sent to. He knew the hearts of his hearers and spoke to the unique stories of every individual he came in contact with. We see the same philosophy of incarnation in the ministry of Paul, who wrote “I have become all things to all people, that by all means I might save some” (1 Corinthians 9:22) Paul was an educated Jew and when he was among educated Jews his knowledge of their culture shone. His sermons are filled with quotations of the scriptures they had spent hours memorizing and praying over. His appeal to Christ was founded in the prophecies and promises they knew and he showed how the hope for a Messiah which their culture was built around was fulfilled in Jesus. In different audiences his messages change. The gospel he preaches does not change, but the way he preaches does. In Acts 17 we see him in Athens speaking to educated Pagans after a long day of walking in the marketplace in Athens and looking at their objects of worship. You can’t find a quotation of scripture in the sermon he gives to them. But he does quote the poets they loved. He references their local folklore. He shows his familiarity with their philosophical debates. He builds a bridge to Christ from the things that they hold dear. Paul was not selling out by preaching in this way; he was being a good missionary.
Why is it that if we send a missionary overseas and he or she adopts the culture of the mission field in order to communicate, we applaud, but we are not willing to do so at home? What is the difference between missionaries overseas and those at home? There is no difference. We must send missionaries into postmodern culture and teach them to be good missionaries in the same way that Jesus and Paul were. The alternative is irrelevancy. The world will not stop changing, and because of that it is silly to expect to continue to be able to communicate if we live with two closed hands. It is not enough to be “not of” the world, for Christ also called the Church to be in the world. Christ has not left us freedom to close ranks and close the second hand and withdraw from the world. We are to be salt and light. The Church must send missionaries into our postmodern culture. Wherever those missionaries go they must learn the unique landscape of the culture they are in, learn its sins and what parts of the truth it retains, and preach the gospel in the areas where it is under attack. They must, as Christ and Paul did, seek to remove every unnecessary barrier to the gospel. There are enough barriers to the gospel when preaching in a fallen world already without us adding our own.
It is a matter of compassion. There are real people out there in that changing world who are carried along in the current of the culture like sheep without a shepherd. These are people God made and loves and cares for. They desperately need the gospel and the Church must find them and enter their world. The Church must know them and tell them the truth in a language they understand.
Adoniram Judson was a missionary in Burma and faithfully worked for long, hard years to translate the Bible into Burmese. He experienced a higher cost for that faithfulness than most of us will ever be asked to pay. When the work was done people began to come to him from all over Burma and the neighboring countries because they had heard that there was a man who “had the words of God.” If we want our culture to come to the Church seeking the words of God then we also must be translators.
The Church must become a people with one hand firmly grasping the timeless truths of the gospel and the other hand reaching out to take hold of a culture which so desperately needs those truths.

Feature: D. A. Carson Resources

Here is a link to blogger, Andy Naselli, who has tracked down a wealth of sermons and resources from D. A. Carson, professor of New Testament at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. Enjoy.

Postmodernism and Christianity (Part 8)

We have talked so far about what postmodernism is, what it is good and true about it as well as what is false in it, and how Christianity must respond to those places in the culture that clash with the truth. Is the discussion ended? No. To think that discussion is over when we have raised the problems and then dispensed answers like pills to be swallowed is to misunderstand the issue. Why? There are postmodern Christians.
No, I have not just written an oxymoron. I have not combined things that don’t mix, like oil and water. So far we have been talking about postmodernism as something that is “out there,” but the discussion is not ended. It is not something just “out there,” but it is something that is also within us. It is the story we have been soaked in and it has soaked into us.
The interaction between Christianity and culture is not such that the gospel pushes out the cultural values in the territory it enters like an invading army pushes out a rebel army in a war. We do not become blank slates and then become Christians; we are still products of our own culture. Instead the gospel redeems and renews whatever it touches, and the task for Christians is for the good in culture to be renewed and that which is false to be redeemed.
Because that is the way Christianity interacts with culture there will be postmodern Christians – people thoroughly influenced by postmodernism, yet deeply committed to Christianity. People influenced by postmodernism will begin to ask unique questions about their faith and understand it in different ways. Parts of Christianity will rub against the grain of postmodern sensibilities; while there will be deep agreement in other areas. There will be a temptation to shave off the rough edges in those places where there is friction.
This is where the challenge comes in. Christianity must be relevant to every culture it is in. By that I mean it must find a way to speak the truth of the gospel in a way that is winsome and understandable to every culture it enters. In other words, there are ways in which Christianity is changeable. However, the gospel is a constellation of truths which are timeless, which means that there are also ways in which Christianity is unchangeable. It is certainly true that you can change Christianity until it is no longer Christianity and adapt the gospel until the gospel is lost.
The central question postmodern Christians must find a Biblical answer to is this: Where is the line drawn by which we can know what is changeable about Christianity and what is unchangeable? The dangers of irrelevancy and the loss of the gospel lurk on either side.
So our discussion of postmodernism and Christianity must shift to the issues that are arising as people are trying to answer this question...

Postmodernism and Christianity (Part 7)

As I said, our culture’s conclusions on morality flow naturally from its conclusions about authority and truth. If there is nothing above us, morality is up for grabs. Morality is a matter of personal choice. Our culture has adopted this view of morality on such a deep level it has even affected the meanings of words. Tolerance has come to mean “accepting me as I am and condoning my choices.” Tolerance no longer leaves room for disagreement; if you think someone’s choices are wrong you are being intolerant. It is implied now that right means “right for me.” The idea of “right” no longer carries exclusivity with it. You and I can both be “right” even if we are talking about mutually exclusive things. The word judgment has become synonymous with condemnation, something which our culture hates. There is no longer a sense that judgment means “determining right from wrong,” but now the word only has a negative meaning. When the subtle shifts in the meaning of the words are complete half the battle is lost.
Look at what is taboo and politically incorrect in our culture: asserting that one way is true over another. This should be an alarming thing! This means that I can do whatever seems right to me no matter how destructive it is and the thing that ruffles more feathers is someone else saying to me “you are wrong and you need to change”. Such a statement is seen as arrogant, narrow-minded, and offensive, especially when it is a Christian speaking. The frightening thing about this should be that when the Bible speaks of people lost in the deepest wickedness the phrase that comes up over and over is “and each one did what seemed right in his own eyes.” The Bible doesn’t reserve this statement for utopias of harmony and love, but for a culture which is poised to devour itself. The Bible says that human soul is such that unrestrained freedom in the area of morality always ends in immorality which, in turn, always ends in destruction, but our culture has raised this phrase up above us and waved it above us like a banner.
Our culture needs truth in the area of morality; it needs God-given standards of right and wrong. God did not throw darts at a board labeled “human behavior” to decide on what sin was. Right and wrong are not arbitrary. Righteousness leads to flourishing. Sin destroys whatever it touches. God’s commandments are good, and we were made for them. Only in holiness do we find our joy. The role of the Christian in a culture such as ours is to hold out truth in the area of morals in the way we speak and in the way we act.
We must not fall into the traps of our culture in the way it uses language. Our culture says that it is not possible to judge without condemnation or label anything “wrong” without ugliness. However, Christians should be both more loving in their interactions with people they disagree with as well as better able to judge rightly what is true and false in their lives. We ought to live in such a way that makes the Biblical world view in the area of morality attractive to those who do not share it. What a wonderful thing if those on the outside could look at Christians and say “I do not share their morals, but they have treated me with such kindness and respect that I feel a great affection for them nonetheless.” Woefully, when people speak of Christian morality it is often the opposite of that statement.
It is a difficult thing to be both more loving and a truer judge, not compromising on the call to hold both grace and truth out to our world. Yet, that is exactly what we see in the life of Jesus, and that is exactly the calling which is before us. If the Christian capitulates to the cultures views on morality in order to reduce the tension of disagreement he unfaithful to the gospel. Our role is nil, and society is the worse for it. Instead, if the Christian lives as Jesus did there will be flourishing, as we show what it means to live under the Lordship of Christ in a fallen, morally confused world.

John Dominic Crossan's Jesus (and the birth of Moses)

Maybe some of you have read John Dominic Crossan's Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography. (I know that it's a textbook for at least one of the religion courses at Mizzou.) Even if you haven't read it, you may have heard of Crossan, who is an influential member (and founder) of the Jesus Seminar. Crossan, in this book and others, presents quite a few challenging claims—challenging, at least, for the average evangelical who considers the Bible to be largely reliable. Since some of you will likely encounter this book in one context or another, I thought it might be helpful to explore some of its more controversial claims.

My methodology is simple: I will read through the book (I haven't read it before, so we'll be learning together on this one), making note of and discussing any claim that seems particularly challenging or controversial. First I'll look at the implications of each claim: I'll try to figure out what it would mean if it were true. Then I'll look at Crossan's argument for each claim.

No questions? Good. Let's get started.

The first claim I'll deal with comes not from the story of Jesus, but from the story of Moses. Here's an extended quotation (from pages 10 & 11), with the key claim in italics:

Matthew, like Luke, is equally interested in connecting Jesus' birth with the ancient traditions of his people's sacred writings. But instead of imagining infertile couples and miraculous conceptions, he focuses exclusively on the infancy of Moses. The background story presumes both the basic narrative from Exodus 1–2 and the popular expansions of it current in the first century of the common era. In the biblical version, Pharaoh, the ruler of Egypt, attempted to exterminate the Israelites resident in his land by commanding, in Exodus 1:22, "Every son that is born to the Hebrews you shall cast into the Nile, but you shall let every daughter live." Moses happens to be born at this time and is saved only because his mother hides him after birth and eventually leaves him in a basket near the riverbank, where he is saved by Pharaoh's own daughter. Eventually, of course, he will deliver his own people from lethal danger in Egypt and lead them to their Promised Land. Anyone who reads that story can easily see two problems with its narrative coherence. First, why did Moses just happen to be born at that wrong time? Second, why did the Israelites continue having children if their newborn sons were doomed? Both those questions are answered as the Mosaic infancy was retold in expanded popular accounts.

So the claim here is that the story of Moses is not a coherent narrative. The implication of this claim, at least as I see it, is that the story of Moses, as told in Exodus 1–2, is probably not true. In other words, if Crossan is right about the lack of narrative coherence in the story of Moses, then Moses' birth probably didn't happen the way Exodus says it did. Hence, anybody who wants to affirm the accuracy of the biblical narrative should take a closer look at Crossan's claim. Does he give us good reason to think that the story of Moses is not narratively coherent?

In answering this question, we should first ask ourselves what it takes for something to have narrative coherence. To be honest, I'm not sure—perhaps those with more storytelling experience can help me out. But narrative coherence does seem to require, at a minimum, that none of the events recorded contradict each other. So a story in which Moses' mother left him in a basket near the riverbank and, at the same time, left him on Pharaoh's doorstep would not be coherent. Nobody can leave somebody in two places at once, so at least part of this story would have to be false.

Anyway, none of the events in Moses' birth narrative contradict each other, so it's not incoherent in that way. Instead, Crossan says that there are two questions which the narrative leaves unanswered. The first question is this: why did Moses just happen to be born at the wrong time? But this question isn't a very good indicator of narrative incoherence, because the same question could be asked no matter when Moses was born. In fact, it could be asked of anyone who has ever been born at any fortunate (or unfortunate) time in history. So this question can't by itself threaten narrative coherence, unless we're willing to challenge the birth timing of practically every important historical figure.

What about the second question? In this question, Crossan asks why the Israelites continued having children if they knew that their newborn sons were doomed. At least three answers come to mind.

1. The Israelites might have felt that they could hide their sons from Pharaoh and his henchmen, and were willing to make the effort to do so. This is supported by the fact that, earlier in Exodus 1, the midwives were reluctant to follow Pharaoh's orders to kill the Israelites' infant sons.
   
2. Given that the Israelites didn't exactly have access to modern methods of contraception and sex selection (you know, the centrifuge thing), they most certainly didn't have foolproof control over whether or not to have children, much less whether or not to have male children.
   
3. Moses' mother might have already been pregnant when Pharaoh decided to exterminate the Israelites' sons.

I don't know what the right course of action is when you find out that someone is intent on killing all of your sons; but it seems to me that a reasonable one would be to go ahead and have children, hope that they're girls, and try to figure something out if they're not. If Moses' parents took this strategy (or if Moses' mother was already pregnant), then it's fairly easy to explain why he was born despite the threat to his life.

So there are fairly easy ways to answer Crossan's questions. I'm not suggesting that these easy answers are the right answers, but the fact that answers are so readily available should indicate that unanswered questions, by themselves, aren't sufficient to undermine the coherency of the birth narrative of Moses. This point seems to hold in general as well: the fact that some narrative raises questions isn't by itself enough to show that that narrative has coherence problems.

I'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments, especially if you think that I'm misconstruing Crossan or reading him uncharitably. In the meantime, stay tuned for the next installment ...

Postmodernism and Christianity (Part 6)

There is a problem with truth. The problem is that we are subjective and finite beings, which our postmodern culture rightly recognizes. By “subjective” I mean that it is difficult to think clearly and without bias. Everything we know is shaped by who we are (where we were raised, our parent’s values, our education, our will and emotions, etc.). For example, I would say my closest friends know me very well, but there is a sense in which each of them sees me through a veil made of their own expectations, wishes, preconceptions, and experiences, leading them to come away with slightly different pictures of me. By “finite” I mean that our ability to know is limited in quantity and quality. We are not omniscient, nor do we have the ability to be so. As Paul said, we “see through a mirror darkly”. For example, take the question of “Can we know God?” There are must be disclaimers given when saying “yes” to that question. God is infinite and we are not, so always what we know of God will only be a small piece, and there will simply be some things which will be beyond us. Even the largest and clearest treatises on God will still have a last page, and there will always be places between the first and last page where the answer simply points toward a mystery that cannot be fully ironed out into words.

There are two things to do with the problem of our subjectivity and our finiteness.
1. Despair of knowledge
2. Humility of knowledge.

Postmodernism has largely taken the first option. It takes our subjectivity and finiteness as a given and then draws the conclusion that certain knowledge is impossible. It builds a bridge of uncertainty that ends in the abyss of the death of absolute truth. Then postmodernism bids people to cross that bridge, painting this as the only logical path to take given our human limitations.
But this is one place that the Christian cannot follow our culture, for the Christian the problem of truth must lead to a humility of knowledge. By this I mean that the Christian must acknowledge the difficulties inherent in the process of knowing anything, but not mistake difficulty for impossibility. Despite our subjectivity and finiteness we are still able to have confidence in what we know. I believe that this is the position of the Bible on the subject of truth, and it is the logical position given the nature of God.
What do I mean by that? Though we are subjective, God is not. Though we often see in shades of grey, God sees in black and white, discerning truth from falsehood and judging between the two. Where we see “as through a mirror darkly,” there is a God in the universe who sees all things clearly, and, as Francis Schaeffer said, “He has spoken”. This is the foundation for our own knowledge. We do not live in a universe where truth is spinning head over heels in a maelstrom of uncertainty. There is solid ground. What is needed in light of this reality is not to give up on truth in despair, but to put our feet on that solid ground. Because you cannot see the sun for the clouds does not mean the sun does not shine above them. God’s truth still reigns in the universe he made, though our vision of it is clouded by sin.
As for our finiteness, to cite Schaeffer again, we can know things truly without having to know them fully. Yes, we are finite beings and total knowledge is beyond us, but total knowledge is not asked of us, nor should that make us despair of knowing anything at all with certainty. Think of the example from above: my friends do not have to know every facet of my soul to be able to say true things about me. It’s said that extremes prove the point, so to take an extreme example: think again about the question of whether we can know God truly or not. It is one thing to say our finiteness does not lead us to despair in areas like math and science, but is that still true if we talk about knowing God, an infinite being who is utterly beyond even our best thoughts of him? God seems to think that it is possible for us to know him, even though we are finite. The Bible itself is an example of God speaking to his people, telling them true things about himself. The Bible proclaims that knowledge of God is not only possible, but it is exactly what God desires of us, so he has communicated to us in language that we can understand so that we might know him and worship him in truth.
In this light despair becomes an even lesser option. Because God exists there is hope that truth exists, and because he is such a God that he desires that we know him truly there is hope that we might understand and believe those truths. The Christian must hold out these truths to a postmodern culture without arrogance or presumption, but in humility. The Christian realizes that sin even affects our ability to know and see what is true, but this does not lead us to back away from God’s truth. We must say what God has said, and we must say it as he said it, in a way that is understandable, relevant, and winsome to our generation.

Jerram Barrs on Harry Potter

For those of you who couldn't make the Harry Potter lecture at the Crossing a few weeks ago here is a link where you can download the audio.

In it Jerram Barrs, professor at Covenant Seminary, talks about the redemptive themes in the final book of the Harry Potter Series. Warning: spoiler alert. If you haven't read the seventh book but are planning on it, don't listen to this lecture, he gives away the ending. If you have read the book then I recommend listening to what Professor Barrs has to say as it is both thought-provoking and enjoyable.

Postmodernism and Christianity (Part 5)

Martin Luther said, “We can preach the gospel with the loudest voice and in the clearest manner, but if we are not preaching the gospel at the point where it is currently under attack, we are not preaching at all.” This means that the places where truth is under attack in our culture must be challenged. So the question is how can we respond to those areas where our postmodern culture is saying something different than the gospel?
The church should not be only a voice of condemnation toward the culture, for to divorce the gospel from the love inherent in its message is to corrupt the gospel. But likewise, the church should not be simply condoning the culture’s misconceptions about reality as if it were not possible to come to wrong conclusions or the need to believe the truth was not an urgent one. Of course it is urgent. It is life and death, and the church must find a way to hold out the truth to whatever culture it is in. There must be a response, or else, as Luther said, we have not preached the gospel at all.
What is the response in the three areas of Authority, Truth, and Morality? I want to try and devote a little bit more space to each one of these separately, starting with authority.

Authority:
I saw a t-shirt in Wal-Mart the other day that said, “Your rules don’t apply to me.” It was meant to be glib, but if you think about that phrase as representative of the voice of our culture toward all authority it becomes a very sad phrase. I saw a fresh view of this while reading a biography of Jonathon Edwards, a preacher who lived at the height of Puritan New England. Life for Edwards was an ordered chain of authority that extended into every area of life, marriage and the family, the church, the government, etc. Children were raised to value submission to this authority structure; it was the air they breathed. Sermons were preached about the value of obeying the “fathers” meaning not only the Heavenly Father, but also earthly fathers which God had placed in positions of authority. Today we breathe a different air. As I read the biography I couldn’t help but wonder what would happen if you transplanted a preacher from that time to our time and put him on TV (perhaps Oprah…). He would probably be viewed as narrow-minded, oppressive, and offensive. Best case: he would not have a rapt audience for long. Worst case: the audience would start throwing chairs (maybe not on Oprah). Either way, the values of that time would rub abrasively against the grain of the hearts of his hearers.
We have shaken our shoulders free of such an ironclad authority structure, and it is anathema to us. Our feelings of earthly authorities are mirror images of our feelings for heavenly authority. In such an environment the idea of a God who rules is an offense. We find a God who is willing to serve us more palatable than a God before whom we must bow. This is a starting point for the conversation between Christianity and our culture. You cannot tell someone to obey the Bible if they do not see the Bible as an authority in their lives. Each individual must see God’s claim on them before they will bow to Him.
The Christian response to this message of the culture must be to tell the truth about the human situation. There is an authority above us, and our happiness is not found in bucking it, but in bowing to it. We did not create ourselves, nor are we products of an accident, but we were made by a Something larger than ourselves who knows our names. Every individual on this planet has the common origin of a Creator which we must relate to as creations. Not only is God the creator, however, but he is the savior. Christianity says that God gave himself for our redemption, a word which means “to buy back.” The story goes like this: we were made, we fell, and Christ's blood bought us back. We are doubly His, as 1 Corinthians says, “You are not your own, for you were bought at a price.”
We would think of ourselves as above every authority where our own lives are concerned, but this is not the reality of the human situation. Our place is to live under the Lordship of Christ, the one who has made us and redeemed us. I do not say this to diminish humanity or say we are nothing. We are not nothing. We are made in God’s image and he had endowed us with dignity, but it is the dignity of occupying our rightful place, one of bowing before God. It is the glory of humanity to occupy that place and our happiness lies in doing so faithfully.
If Christianity is going to be faithful in holding out the gospel to this generation then it must live and speak in such a way that shows that authority is not a dirty word. This will be a place of tension and of contrast with the culture and there will be great pressure to deemphasize the gospel at this point, but if we do that then we "have not preached the gospel at all." Rather, the Christian must declare that there is a God and that to him belongs all authority, as well as demonstrate in a winsome way what a life lived under the Lordship of Christ really looks like.

Keller: A New Kind of Urban Christian

Here is a link to an article by Tim Keller about his vision for how Christians should interact with the culture around them.

Here is an excerpt: "Once in cities, Christians should be a dynamic counterculture. It is not enough for Christians to simply live as individuals in the city. They must live as a particular kind of community. Jesus told his disciples that they were "a city on a hill" that showed God's glory to the world (Matt. 5:14-16). Christians are called to be an alternate city within every earthly city, an alternate human culture within every human culture, to show how sex, money, and power can be used in nondestructive ways."

Postmodernism and Christianity (Part 4)

A couple years ago I was at a lecture given by Jerram Barrs at the Rochester L’abri Conference (Labri.org). The notes I took have been helpful to me in writing this series (as have his lectures in “Apologetics and Outreach,” a class he teaches at Covenant Seminary). In the lecture, Professor Barrs divided history into three categories: premodern, modern, and postmodern. He spent time talking about the dominant ideas in each period and he insisted that as Christians we must learn to search out the glories in every new thing we encounter. One of my favorite bands, Over the Rhine, says the same thing in one of its songs: “I look for redemption in everyone/… there is so much untouched beauty/ the light, the dark both running through me.” Postmodernism, just like every other thing that comes out of humanity, has both light and darkness running through it. It can be a difficult thing to see the light at times, but we must learn to. To only see the darkness is an easy error to fall into, but it is one that forgets that we are made in the image of God and that image is indelible; it cannot be erased. We bear the stamp of our Creator and so it follows that everything we make will retain traces of the One who made us.

Postmodernism is no different. As we are each individually mixed bags, so are the cultures we create. Modernism set up human reason as the ultimate source of final answers to reality. It placed reason on the altar in place of God, putting its hope for redemption on the broken, scarred shoulders of Humanity. Postmodernism appropriately tore down that idol. It diminished humanity’s confidence in its power to come to the answers it needs by its own strength, insisting that our reason is clouded and our strength is limited. Postmodernism rightly said that clear, objective thinking is difficult because our knowledge is influenced by subjective factors and often prejudiced.

Postmodernism allows for greater diversity, as it respects the contributions each culture has to make. The postmodern mindset would not give rise to something like colonialism, for example. Colonialism was born out of the mindset that said one culture could be greater than another and the best thing for the lesser culture was to convert to the greater. Postmodernism seeks more to give voice to every culture, recognizing that there are things of value in every perspective and fearing the arrogance of a single culture believing that it contains all truth.

Postmodernism is realistic. It recognizes that things in this world are broken and bent and corrupted. It challenges modernisms unrealistic optimism, which said that Progress would soon carry humanity forward and our troubles would slowly erase themselves as we outgrew them. This is not so. At its worst postmodernism can embrace this sad fact too much and dip into despair, but at its best it simply takes a more realistic view of human selfishness and brokenness and rightly insists that humanity is far too hurt to simply heal itself.

It also challenges the idea that humanity’s needs are supplied by only the material, and says that there is an inescapable need for the spiritual. We are not only complex machines; man is a spiritual being. We are not objects. God has “set eternity within our hearts” and because of this we have spiritual needs. Modernism pulled the ceiling down low of the head of mankind, saying that it could find all the answers it needs without turning to the mystical and spiritual. This is false. Postmodernism tore holes in that low ceiling and said that humanity must look upwards to something outside itself.

It is a mistake to think that postmodernism (or anything humans create) is “all bad” or “all good”. Far too often people fall into one category or the other and postmodernism becomes synonymous with all evil and ugly things and is a blight on our society, or becomes the savior which will correct the sins of past generations and lead us toward a better future. This is foolish. Only Christ can save human culture and until He does all culture will have “both light and darkness running through it”. As Christians our goal should be to foster that which is good while at the same time responding to that which is bad in a way that is winsome and changes the culture for the better.

Postmodernism and Christianity (Part 3)

Q: How do I know postmodernism when I see it? What are its distinctives?

I don’t think the full answer to that question fits on a one-page blog, but something can still be said. Here is description of a few things in the postmodern family tree:

Authority:
Jerram Barrs said, “The most widely held view on anything in the United States is that ‘I have the RIGHT to control my own destiny; to think what I want to think.’” There is deep value in our culture for independence. It is one of the glories of our culture. However, the flip side of that coin is a deep cynicism of authority and a fierce defense of our independence, even when it is harmful to us.
Authority is a dirty word in a postmodern culture. It is a coin that has a diminishing value. The individual has a transcendent power; he is an authority to himself. The idea that the individual is bounded by things greater than himself is an idea that, at best, our generation does not understand, and, at worst, infuriates a postmodern culture.
I was watching a Mizzou football game recently (Nebraska was getting trounced, so the announcers started filling up the air time with some interesting banter) and the announcer told a story about how the coaching strategy of Mizzou has changed in recent years to involve students more in coaching decisions. He said something like “Gone are the days of ‘Yes, sir’ ‘No, sir’. Now the students want to be involved.” This should not be a surprise to anyone who knows the culture they live in. The football players, like the rest of us, are products of a culture which does not bow easily.

Truth:
Modernism understood truth as black and white; something which, ultimately, could be clearly understood. It believed in the power of reason to have access to those truths… not that it would always be easy, but it was possible. Or to put it in an image: imagine there are two ropes, one that represents truth and the other that represents our ability to know. Modernism tied those two ropes together. Postmodernism, however, has tried to untie that knot and throw the two ropes as far away from each other as it can.
Postmodernism says that we are too shaped by subjective factors (where we grew up, what our parents taught us, our own biases and tastes and agendas) to be able to see things clearly. It is like smearing mud on a window and then expecting to be able to see out through it. We cannot escape this subjectivity ever; it is part of the human condition. Thus there is always, in everything we try to know, interference involved in the process to the degree that postmodernism says we cannot know anything with certainty.

Morality:
What postmodernism has concluded about morality flows out of its conclusions about authority and truth. If there is nothing above us, then morality is up for grabs. If we cannot understand things with certainty even if there was an authority above us, then we must run on our best moral guesses, and one person’s guess does not have authority over anyone else’s. Morality is a matter of personal choice. Morally, each person is an island.
I remember a conversation with a friend in which he said that he would correct his children’s choices about their lives while they lived in his house, but he would never dream of doing that with another person. It was a horrifying thought to him to think that he could look at another person’s life and say what in it was good and what was bad. It was the most unloving thing you could do.
Judgment and condemnation are dirty words in a postmodern culture. The great evil is not falsehood, but judgment. The great good is not truth, but harmony.

This is by no means a complete rendering of postmodernism. I chose these three things because they are three places where our culture contrasts sharply with Christianity. I don’t want to paint the picture of postmodernism as being all bad, however. There is both good and bad in every one of us and so it follows that the cultures we create are streaked with both light and dark also. In the next post I hope to point out some of these strengths of postmodernism as well as talk about how Christianity must respond to those places where postmodernism runs false.

Veritas

Found this in an article about graphic design, and thought you folks might find it interesting. Apparently (according to the slideshow in the article) it ran in The New York Times last year.

Postmodernism & Christianity (Part 2)

About four years ago I was sitting in a Bible study on postmodernism, wondering why I was there. The leader of the Bible study was trying to help us understand what postmodernism was and how it affected our culture. I wrote a note on a piece of paper and passed it to the guy sitting next to me (I was very mature at the time…). Of course the leader saw it and called on the guy sitting next to me to read the note out loud so everyone else could hear what I had to say. The note said something like this: “I think we all agree that postmodernism does not exist. Why are we here?” The ironic things about that comment are: 1. I was very wrong and it took a couple years to really understand what we were talking about that night and 2. It was a very postmodern thing to write.
My problem was this: I didn’t understand what postmodernism meant and I didn’t understand how deeply affected by it our culture (and therefore myself too, as I am a product of my culture) is. My guess is there were some people who read the last post and had a similar reaction to the one I had that night four years ago, so this post is an attempt to begin to shed some light on the issue. (Disclaimer: the emphasis here is on the word begin…like a Reader’s Digest version of postmodernism.)

Q: What is culture?

There are many ways to define culture, but for our purposes it can be defined as a people’s view of reality. People of a similar culture will have similar answers to questions like: What is right and wrong? What is taboo and what is praiseworthy? What is the good life? What is the meaning of life? What offends me about the world? The questions cover every inch of life, not just the big picture ones I listed here. Culture affects everything from your view of God to what you will eat on Mondays
Think of questions like: Why do people in the south dress up for football games? Why are iPods so popular? Why do people who hunt watch more Nascar than people who drink lattes? Why will you lose your license for going 15 over in Scandinavia and speeding is almost expected in America? Why don’t the French use ice in their drinks? All these are questions about culture.

Q: So what is postmodernism?

Culture changes; it is not fixed. There are movements in culture. Imagine you are sitting in a stadium and 70,000 people are chanting something, then one loud section of fans starts chanting something else and that new chant spreads until the whole stadium has now taken it up. Culture is like that, except instead of a chant the thing that is spreading is a worldview
Sometimes a worldview is so thoroughly spread through a culture it has definable boundaries; it gets a name, an “ism”. You can say things about it like “Modernism is such and such a way” or “Those people are Modernists and so they probably believe such and such a thing”.
Sometimes the new chant that arises is a reaction to the one that it is replacing. Modernism becomes postmodernism. For example: where modernism sought certainty in a black and white world, postmodernism is more comfortable with mystery and paints a picture of a grey world, in which black and white certainties are not so easy to find. Where modernism was largely overly optimistic, postmodernisms answers are streaked with pessimism.

Q: How do I know postmodernism when I see it? What are its distinctives?

Stay tuned…

Postmodernism and Christianity

I read a book recently called "by demonstration: God" by Wade Bradshaw. In it, Bradshaw writes about the way our culture has become increasingly postmodern as reflected in the students who come to L'abri. A little background might be helpful here as to what L'abri is. Suffice it to say that it is a study center where students can come from every corner of the world and stay from a day to the whole of a three month term, studying whatever they choose and seeking the answers to their questions in the truth of Christianity. Because of this, at any given time there is a random sampling of the questions the culture is asking represented in the students who come to L'abri. L’abri, therefore, often has its finger on the pulse of the ever-changing landscape of our culture, making Bradshaw’s insights carry a lot of weight as he talks about his many years at L’abri and how postmodernism has affected the students.

Let me give an example from the book. Bradshaw has seen a shift in what students want to talk about in conversations; where once conversations would center around “ideas” now they are much more likely to center on “experience”. There is a distrust of knowledge that is seen as abstract, theoretical, or heady. Students are not interested in ideas that do not seem directly connected to their actual experience of life. On the other hand, knowledge which is personal, experiential, or rises out of their own or others’ stories finds fertile ground and eager ears. For example, the question “What do you think about how Christianity should interact with the culture it is in?” (…the question I want to begin to raise in this post) might lead to dead, awkward silence around the lunch table. Whereas, the question, “Who is a hero of yours and why are they heroic?” might lead to a conversation that runs for hours and the lunch table has to be set for dinner before everyone is done talking.

One of the themes of the book is that idea that as the culture of the students coming to L’abri changes, so too must L’abri change to continue to hold out the truth of Christianity to the culture it finds itself in. Think of it this way: if a missionary was sent overseas to a country with a radically different culture than his own, wouldn’t his first task be to learn about that culture he finds himself in? What is its language? What does it love? What are its taboos? How does it think? What does it fear and hate? What do its people want most deeply and what do they treasure most highly? What pieces of the truth does it retains, and what pieces has it abandoned? That is the challenge that Bradshaw writes about: how to hold out the ancient, beautiful truths of Christianity to a generation that is quite different than the one before it?

This is not a challenge unique only to L’abri; it is one that faces us all. Anyone who would speak of the truth of the gospel today speaks to a radically postmodern audience. That culture has affected what they value, as well as how they think, communicate, converse, love, believe, and trust. Just like a missionary freshly arrived in a new country, we must learn the culture of the people we are speaking to. What does it mean to be a part of a postmodern culture? We must find the answer to that question and call people to belief in the gospel in a language they can understand, and in a way that challenges their own unique ways they are tempted to turn away from the truth. If we do not we will be as effective as a missionary walking around rural China speaking English.

The Clues

This is the official treasure hunt answer guide... enjoy.

The first night you received two things: a rule sheet and a clock. The clock was covered in words and would give extra clues throughout the treasure hunt when you move the hands of the clock. There were a couple mysterious things about the clock and the rules and you gradually found out what exactly you got that first night as the hunt progressed. Mysterious thing #1 = there was a picture of a black tree with a red leaf in it. #2 = there was a map of campus on the back of the clock which had a secret message written on it in blacklight ink. #3 = the rule sheet was signed by C. T. Thorale written in scrabble tiles. All of these were keys to the rest of the treasure hunt, which everyone carried the whole time without knowing it.

The first clue was in the Missourian on Wednesday morning. It was a small ad that said "Wise shall be bearers of light" and had a picture of an X with a flashlight shining on it. This led to the J-School arch, over which is the inscription on the ad. On one of the stone lions was a tiny X which if you shine a flashlight on it glow letters appeared around it which said, "YouTube Thorale."

That led to a video clue on YouTube under the search phrase "thorale." The video split the treasure hunt into three parts, with each part coming together again two clues later. Each of the three paths gave you either 1. a building location 2. a locker number and 3. the combination to the lock. The first path led to the physics building to a photo case just outside the planetarium. In one of the scenes on the YouTube video there was a clock on the wall over Tom Hanks' shoulder which had the time 1:55 on it. When you moved the hands on your clock you received the first night you should have seen the words Harlow Shapely. Inside the photo case was a picture of astronomer and Mizzou grad, Harlow Shapely. The combination to the lock was taped to the back of his portrait in the photo case.

The second place the video led to was to Peace Park. There was a map in one of the sewers in the park. On the map were four shaded regions of campus and directions on the back explaining that in each of the shaded regions there was an X hidden. What you had to do next was find each of the 4 points, mark their location on the map, and then cross them with an X. X marked the building the locker was in, Tate Hall.

The third part of the video clue led to the actual locker number. In A&S there was an X on a ceiling tile. You had to find the X (Room 200... by the way), move aside the tile and find an address above it. The address was 909 Lowry Mall, the address of the Student Success Center. Inside the SSC there is a giant projector screen that scrolls through powerpoint slides on a 5 minute rotation. The clue was one of those slides.

Once you had the combo, the building, and the locker number you could go to the right locker and find inside it a word find. The things hidden in the word find were things like 400 degrees, iron, invisible, scorch, burnt, etc. (yes... all the three letter words were accidental). These words pointed to the fact that there was invisible ink on the word find. If you put the word find in an oven, ironed it, or heated it up in any other way an email address would have appeared in dark brown ink.

After emailing the email address you received an auto-response back telling you that the next portion of the treasure hunt was a timed section and to assemble your team at Memorial whenever you were ready to begin. Then, when everyone was together, you texted the word "Gauntlet" to a phone number and then received the first set of instructions back. This first task of the gauntlet was to find a set of numbers taped on the black posts around the tiger mosaic. These numbers corresponded to the rows and columns in a plaque just inside Ellis library. Teams wrote the numbers down then figured out what letter each number represented using the plaque. The sentence was "3:16 The Union of two hands points the way."

The two hands were the hands of a clock, the Memorial Union clock, which at 3:16 (when the two hands were right on top of one another) pointed directly at the next clue. It was on a balcony outside a room on the third floor of Memorial Union and was a reference number to a book in the west stacks in Ellis. After tracking down the reference number you would have seen a black book with the corresponding reference number and an X on the spine. Inside the book (in a cutout spot in the pages) was a blacklight that said "shine on the unseen map" on the side of it. When you turned it on and turned your clock over four X's and an email address appeared written in blacklight ink. After emailing the address you found out that the four X's were four riddles written on transparencies that you would also need the blacklight to read. The gauntlet ended when you solved each riddle and texted the answers to the same number you began the gauntlet with. If the team had completed that series of clues in under two hours then they received the next clue immediately, if not then they received it 12 hours later.

The net clue came in the form of a text message that had the address of a xanga site. On the xanga site was a picture of a display case in the art museum with the caption "Look Closer". The caption referred to the fact that the museum clue was hidden under the magnifying glasses on the display case counter. When you found the right display case you pulled up the little tray the magnifying glasses were sitting in and saw a picture of a bulletin that had been posted on a bulletin board somewhere on campus.

The bulletin board was in Middlebush and was three sheets of paper laminated together. On the outside of it, along with an advertisement for the treasure hunt, was a picture of a clock being cut by scissors. If you set the time on your clock to the same time as the clip art clock you received the hint "secret within", which was a clue to cut open the clock and take out the clue laminated inside.

The page you found was a picture of the Maryland state flag that said "Level 3 @ 10:37" The time was a clue that said "Water reveals the truth." If everything had worked out as planned when you found the appropriate spot in Maryland garage and poured water on it letters that had been written in clear sealant would appear, as the rest of the concrete around it would get wet and darker and the letters would stay light and dry. What you saw when you found that clue was the word mystical written seven times and also the word doorway. This clue led to the Mystical 7 display case in Memorial, where you would find an info card with an added clue (bracketed by X's) which said that Mystical 7's meeting place was Plaza amphitheater by night, near the lights.

In Plaza amphitheater there are round lights built into the sides of the walls. At night they would turn on and a message would shine through one of them. It was a cryptoquote, a word puzzle made by substituting letters for other letters. When unscrambled the sentence directed you to Townsend Hall in the Reflector. A time came along with this sentence that told you the background of the right computer in reflector and the search phrase to find the file on that computer.

The file was a video of two hidden places on campus. One was at the top of Switzler hall, where there were puzzles hidden. The other was beneath Arts and Science, where a decoder was placed. On the back of the puzzles there were many words written, which you would need the decoder to decipher. The only three words on the back of the puzzle that fit perfectly into the three cut out places on the decoder were "Sand" "S. E. Corner" and "Shovel".

This led to the volleyball courts, where there were two cryptexes buried. A cryptex is a cylinder covered in spinning rings. Each ring is covered in many letters and when the letters were lined up in the proper phrase the cryptex would open. The clue to what that phrase was was "My name is my password." This was a reference to the name that was signed on the rule sheet you received the first night. "C. T. Thorale" unscrambles into "Charlotte," which was the phrase that opened the cryptex.

Inside the cryptex was a clue that led you to begin looking for a single red leaf in a green tree with a key attached to it. The key was the key to the final treasure. The first team to find the leaf won.

Culture and Change

Culture and Change

"Mature Christians and Christians in places of responsibility, must summon the courage to distinguish, under the Holy Spirit, between unchangeable biblical truth and the things which have merely become comfortable for us. Often one hears people speak of "the simple gospel only," when in reality they do not really care enough... to face what preaching the simple gospel may mean in a changing and complex situation."

-Francis Schaeffer, The God Who Is There

I like this quote because implicit in it is the realization that there are both changeable and unchangeable parts in Christianity. Schaeffer saw that as the "changing and complex situation" we live in changed over time so too would Christianity have to change to fit it. Schaeffer wrote much about how he was afraid that Christianity did not see the changes in the world around it and so did not fully adjust itself to address those changes. In his mind this is a terrible thing because the Church continues to build up defenses on fronts at which there is no longer any battle raging, meanwhile other areas of the truth are under attack without anyone even seeing or fully understanding what is going on. But there is a danger here that it is clear that Schaeffer sees if you read the rest of the book, that is the danger of acting as though the church were a chameleon and is most truly fulfilling its calling when it fully blends in with its surroundings. As Christianity is in one sense changeable it is in another sense unchangeable. To embrace either one to the exclusion of the other is to risk either becoming irrelevant to the present culture or indistinguishable from it. In both cases the church loses the power to "preach the gospel in exactly the area where it is under attack," in which case "it has not preached the gospel at all." In the first scenario it loses that power because the culture has begun to ask different questions (and ask them desperately) than the church is holding out answers to. In the second scenario it loses its power because the church will begin speak with the voice of the culture, using all the same language but with the meaning of the words hollowed out to fit what the culture already values, and so it will be unable to awaken the world in any of the places where it sleepily walks toward slaughter.

So how does the church walk the line between the changeable and the unchangeable when "cliffs lie on either side," as Schaeffer said? He seems to say that the church must have the courage to look honestly at itself see those places where it is holding out a message that for any reason falls short of the full gospel. If that honest looks reveals something that needs to change, then the church must have the courage to make those changes. But in doing this it must avoid the danger of bowing to another master than God. The pitfall which is present if Christians begin to act as though the truth were entirely changeable is that something else becomes the master, something else begins to dictate what is true and how that truth must be lived out other than God’s revelation. The culture, however much it changes, must never hold supremacy. What our culture values at the time is not the grid by which we understand what scripture is saying or who God has revealed himself to be, the reverse is true. God’s revelation is the standard by which we judge what is true in culture and where culture has taken the truth and twisted it and begun to live by a different gospel.

At times parts of culture will agree with parts of Christianity, and at other times there will be sharp disagreement. The important thing is that we never make the mistake of marrying culture and Christianity in our minds and being more loyal to our own cultural biases than to the gospel. Yes, Christianity must be relevant to the culture that it exists in, but relevancy is not king; Christ is King. No cultural movement is the groom to which the church is promised, that place belongs to another and that is the promise the church must remain faithful to.

"God, use me!"

Have you ever stopped to think about the idea of praying for God to use you? This prayer is not an unusual one—in fact, Christians pray it all the time. The unusual thing is what we expect when we pray it (assuming that I’m not just speaking for myself on this one). Oftentimes we expect that God is going to provide us with this BIG thing. That he’s going to start working miracles through us, changing hearts and minds. However, this is rarely what happens. Usually what God brings us instead is a little opportunity to rejoice in some trying circumstance, or a little opportunity to love someone we know by representing Christ to him or her. When this happens, we get discouraged and upset that our “big thing” hasn’t come yet. However, the truth is that we are never promised a “big thing.” Instead, the Christian life (and the non-Christian life, for that matter) is made up of little things. Little opportunities to rely on God, little chances to display the character of Christ, little daily deaths as we humble ourselves when someone wrongs us or defames us or just pipes us off.

In John 12:24 Jesus says, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.” In this passage, Jesus was talking about himself, but it seems consistent with the whole of scripture that symbolically this is what must happen to us. We must “die to self.” Though this is a Christian cliché, it remains true. The question then becomes, What does it mean to die to self? The answer comes when we look at our view of God.

God is a personal God who is involved in all that we are part of daily. He is sovereign over all our circumstances and promises to “work all things together for the good of those who love him and are called according to His purposes” (Romans 8:28). Therefore, we should face the daily responsibilities, the daily trials, the daily interactions as they are directly placed in our lives by God. We should invest, even if it’s just in a small way, in everyone we know. We should truly care about the individual—no matter who they are—and desire for them to see the glory of the grace of God.

The next time I sit down to pray the “God, use me” prayer, I hope that I can meditate on the truth of John 12:24 and think about the ways that I can die to myself and choose to be humble and accept my daily interactions, struggles, and responsibilities in light of the truth of God’s sovereignty.

Predestination in Perelandra

I read C. S. Lewis's Perelandra for the first time this summer, and enjoyed it immensely. Among the many quotable passages, I found the following particularly interesting (I won't provide any context so as not to be accused of spoiling anything for those who haven't read it):

The thing still seemed impossible. But gradually something happened to him which had happened to him only twice before in his life. It had happened once while he was trying to make up his mind to do a very dangerous job in the last war. It had happened again while he was screwing his resolution to go and see a certain man in London and make to him an excessively embarrassing confession which justice demanded. In both cases the thing had seemed a sheer impossibility: he had not thought but known that, being what he was, he was psychologically incapable of doing it; and then, without any apparent movement of the will, as objective and unemotional as the reading on a dial, there had arisen before him, with perfect certitude, the knowledge "about this time tomorrow you will have done the impossible." The same thing happened now. His fear, his shame, his love, all his arguments, were not altered in the least. The thing was neither more nor less dreadful than it had been before. The only difference was that he knew—almost as a historical proposition—that it was going to be done. He might beg, weep, or rebel—might curse or adore—sing like a martyr or blaspheme like a devil. It made not the slightest difference. The thing was going to be done. There was going to arrive, in the course of time, a moment at which he would have done it. The future act stood there, fixed and unaltered as if he had already performed it. It was a mere irrelevant detail that it happened to occupy the position we call future instead of that which we call past. The whole struggle was over, and yet there seemed to have been no moment of victory. You might say, if you liked, that the power of choice had been simply set aside and an inflexible destiny substituted for it. On the other hand, you might say that he had [been] delivered from the rhetoric of his passions and had emerged into unassailable freedom. Ransom could not, for the life of him, see any difference between these two statements. Predestination and freedom were apparently identical. He could no longer see any meaning in the many arguments he had heard on this subject.

First, this is a great answer to someone who has concerns about predestination, right? "Don't worry—predestination and freedom are identical!"

Seriously, though, this passage raises some interesting questions (the first two more closely related than the third):

1. Is there any sense in which predestination and freedom are identical? (Or at least not in conflict?)
   
2. If they are identical (or merely compatible), how often do they coexist? Only in certain situations, like Ransom's above? In every situation, whether we realize it or not?
3. If you go with option #2 in the passage above ("he had been delivered from the rhetoric of his passions and had emerged into unassailable freedom"), does that shed any light on the sinless state that Jesus was (and is) supposed to have maintained, or that we at some point are supposed to reach?

Discuss amongst yourselves. Or, better yet, post a comment!

We can be Christians without believing in contradictions

I'd like to elaborate on a point Kermit made in his earlier post. I was reading the most recent issue of Touchstone Magazine and came across the following blurb:

I gave the last word in my dissertation to G. K. Chesterton. Part of the borrowed inscription was: "The ordinary man ... has always cared more for truth than for consistency. If he saw two truths that seemed to contradict each other, he would take the two truths and the contradiction along with them."

I have always believed this; one cannot believe the Bible otherwise, nor can he be a Christian, for our faith is built upon the ultimate contradiction: the God-Man, and many others besides. [emphasis mine]

This strikes me as a dangerous idea. In the first place, there’s a world of difference between seeming contradiction (as in the Chesterton quote) and actual contradiction—the latter being something which I do not expect God would want us to embrace. (And by 'contradiction' I mean two claims such that at least one, but only one, is true. So, for example, "God exists" and "God doesn't exist" together produce a contradiction: one of them is true, but they can't both be true.)

At any rate, regarding the God-man: There is nothing inherently contradictory about someone being both God and man. There would, of course, be a contradiction inherent in someone claiming to be solely God while being solely man. But nowhere does the Bible claim that about Jesus, and the apparent contradiction of the God-man, I would argue, can be resolved through careful study and theology (with a little help from philosophy).

I think Chesterton is right that we hold on to two things we know to be true; but instead of endorsing the idea that our faith is built upon a contradiction, let us look for a way to resolve the contradiction, while staying true to the received theological tradition, and so strengthen our witness to those who face intellectual barriers to the faith.

How can there be just one way to God?

After our discussion this past Sunday night at Bible study about the exclusivity of Christianity, I felt that I should write a blog about it. If you weren’t there, we started a new series on “Some Common Objections Considered” where we are looking at some of the toughest objections against Christianity. This week we talked about one of the most common objections: how can you believe that Christianity is the only way to God? What about all the other religions? Isn’t that arrogant and offensive to believe such a thing? Another way this objection is often put is this: it doesn’t matter what you believe as long as you are sincere. All religions are essentially the same and all the paths lead to the same God. We talked about the most common illustration used by adherents to this objection: the 3 blind men and the elephant. Each blind man feels a different part of the elephant and describes it differently (one says the elephant is long and flexible because he’s touching the trunk and the other that it is broad and flat because he’s touching the side, etc.), but they are all describing the same thing. So the illustration leads us to believe that all the religions are somewhat right and somewhat wrong but no one has the whole truth. It leads us to think that no religion has the right to look at the others and say they are the only right one. What can we affirm about this objection to Christianity? Several things: certainly that peace, tolerance, and inclusion is a good thing to strive for. Certainly that many atrocities have been committed in the name of religion. Also we must say that religion in general does divide people because it produces pride in the heart that we have performed the truth and others have not. We should be quick to affirm that this objection corrects a Western cultural arrogance toward all things not Western in the past. We should also be quick to affirm that many religions do share certain ideas and concerns. But ultimately, I think we must gently and respectfully challenge this objection to Christianity based on several things. First, it requires us to uphold ideas that are completely contradictory as equally true which contradicts logic. For instance A and non-A cannot both be true at the same time. Christianity says that Jesus is the only way to God and the Savior of the world whom we must believe in to receive eternal life, but Islam says that Jesus is only the fifth of six great prophets, not as great as Mohammed. It says that Jesus was only a good teacher and the way to salvation is through submission to the will of Allah. These things cannot both be true at the same time. Ultimately, we must say that 2 + 2 = 4 and not 5, 6, or 7. Any truth claim is by nature exclusive because it says that the opposite truth claim cannot be true at the same time and the same way. So we must acknowledge that this is not just a problem with Christianity but with any religion, or worldview for that matter, because they are all by nature exclusive. Second, if in our effort to promote peace, respect, and unity, we say that all religions are essentially the same, we actually do great violence to each individual religion. What I mean by this is that to say that all religions are essentially the same, you would have to gut each religion of major teachings, even to the point where that religions own followers could hardly recognize what is left. Again, if you say that Jesus is just a great teacher of morals as all the other religious teachers are (Mohammed, Buddha, etc.), then you are tearing out the very heart of Christianity which says that Jesus was not just a great teacher but God come in the flesh and to pay the penalty for our sins. In other words, the cost of this kind of unity is radical disrespect to each tradition. Is that really what we want to do? Lastly, the inclusivism that at first seems so humble and peace-promoting is actually just a “covert exclusivism” (see Dr. Tim Keller’s talk on “Exclusivity: How can there be just one true religion?”). What I mean by this is that for us to say that all religions lead to the same God would mean that we would have to believe that God is an impersonal force who really doesn’t care what we believe or how we worship him or choose to live. In actuality, this is a very narrow view of God and who He is; it necessarily excludes Christianity, Islam, and Judaism because of their beliefs in a personal God who does make certain demands of us (which, by the way, is excluding a huge chunk of the world’s population). And by asserting this view as the one true view of God that trumps all others, it seeks to convert us to its view just as any other religion does. Though they often say how arrogant it is to say that only one religion could be true, those who hold this view (even though many don’t realize it) are in actuality saying that only their view is ultimately true. So, what at first looks inclusive is, in reality, just as exclusive as any other truth claim. That leads me to my conclusion: all truth claims and religions and faith statements are by nature exclusive – we can’t get away from it. So the real question is: which exclusive truth claim will you and I believe and why? Which truth claim, as we consider them, is most intellectually credible and experientially satisfying? Which religion will by it’s necessarily exclusive beliefs best lead us to be the kind of people the world needs – people who love their enemies, pray for those who persecute them, and center our reality on a God who actually dies for and forgives those who kill Him? I submit that Christianity is the best answer.

The Slander of J.K. Rowling

With great shame and sadness, I have witnessed the church's reactions to the Harry Potter books over the last several years. This isn't so much a blog to defend the Harry Potter books- although I have read them all and will read the seventh one after it comes out tomorrow night. The Bible clearly calls witchcraft a sin- particularly looking to a supernatural power to control the circumstances of life for your benefit rather than looking to God. This is the story of I Samuel 28. The question is can stories that exist in a world where people use magical powers be edifying and appropriate for Christians. First, let me ask for consistency. If it's the use of magic that makes the Harry Potter books bad, then Disney movies, fairy tales, the Lord of the Rings, and the Chronicles of Narnia must also be regarded in like manner. The reality is all of these stories exist in worlds where we realize people have certain powers given to them that we don't have. We don't feel encouraged to try to seek out the wardrobe to find Narnia, nor to build orbs that will allow us to see as far as our wills will allow us, or to summon fairy godmothers. What these situations do is illuminate how people use the power they are given. Also, in the Harry Potter stories, the magic is taking place in an alternate universe that coincides with our own real world- much in the way that occurs in The Chronicles of Narnia. I don't want to go more into the biblical view of magic, imagination, and stories. Because in the attacks on JK Rowling, the author of the series, by Christians, they have not focused here. Instead, they have participated in the spread of lies to attack her character. In an article in the satirical, fictional, comedic paper, The Onion, they report how the Harry Potter books have increased the enrollment into satanism and quote several kids who are inspired by the characters of the story and demean Jesus Christ. Then, they even quote JK Rowling as even saying that she wants to lead people away from Jesus. This is all very satirical. The problem is that Christians have taken those quotes and spread them as real. There are websites that post them as if they are true. One sight claimed that the initials of JK stand for Jesus Killer. I have heard people tell them that they heard that Rowling's intentions were to have evil and darkness triumph in the end of series. On the eve of the seventh book coming out, I would be shocked if that were the case. This has been what has embarrassed and made me ashamed for the church. Nowhere is a Christian allowed to spread lies and slander about anyone in the Bible. Ephesians 4:31 says, "Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and slander be put away from you." Christians are called to point out things they disagree with, and to point out and warn against dangerous ideas that are in our culture, but never is a Christian allowed to show disrespect towards another human being or to communicate in an unloving way with someone. In an age of increasing celebrity tabloidism when we feel free to comment on the lives of assorted movie and music stars, it's easy to de-personalize celebrities- to treat them as if they are not someone's daughter, someone's mother, much less a being created in the image of God. Our human sinfulness always wants to make ourselves superior to other people. It's easy to do that with celebrities by assuming the worst about them and cutting them down with our friends. Shame on us. We must always speak about people, even celebrities, as if they were in the room with us- in a way that expresses love and concern for them as a person. Let us all be quick to listen and slow to speak- even about people we might disagree substantially with.

Living Counter-Culturally for the Kingdom of God...

Last night at the Artisan we talked about our culture's idols. I'd like to revisit that discussion and carry it forward in another direction. To catch up, at the Artisan we talked about how idolatry doesn't always look like golden calves and burning things on altars, and if we limit our search to those "idols" we will miss all the ways our culture and our own selves worship things other than God every day. An idol is anything that displaces God as the center of worship. Idolatry is asking created things to give us that which is only to be found in the Creator. It is bowing down and turning over the practical, everyday rule of our lives to lesser things than Christ.

I once heard a story about a pastor who went to India and had a conversation with the wife of a pastor planting a church there. He asked her if she would ever consider coming to America and visiting it. Her response was that she did visit once and never will again because she could not stomach the idolatry she saw there. Mind you, as they were having this conversation they were in a place where there were idols lining the streets, with blood and chicken feathers everywhere, and it was in that environment that she said that she would not return to America because she could not stomach the idolatry she saw there.

Idolatry is something we see elsewhere, but when we look around at ourselves we just think of it as entertainment, as climbing the ladder of success, as providing our security, as sport and hobby, as luxury and comfort, as efficiency. We do not see it as idolatry, but sometimes it is.

The idols of our culture might reveal themselves in what we sacrifice for. Or perhaps in what we spend our resources for. What is upheld as a valuable life in our culture? What is seen as a wasted life? What is our culture most proud of? What is heaven according to the culture? What would be hell?

Christians are called to worship the true God only and always, and as they fulfill that calling at times they will stand out from the surrounding culture that does not share that value, but worships and serves other gods. This "standing out" has always been a part of God's plan for his people, that they might be a light to the surrounding world, that they might live after the truth and be a demonstration of that truth to all who see.

My question is this: how are we to follow that calling in our culture today? How do we live counter-culturally and display what the worship of the true God looks like in this generation? Think about how you have answered that question in your life and then if you have something to add to the discussion, post a reply on this thread.