What Does It Mean To Be Human?

The phrase "human nature" has negative connotations. When someone says "that's just human nature" they are usually talking about something sad. When someone says, "I am just a human" they are usually excusing their own limitations. But the word human ought not to mean something small or ugly or evil. It is glorious to be human. As Jerram Barrs said, "Human beings are more glorious than the earth, the stars, and the universe." There is a lot of truth to that statement. The human who is simply being human is being something wonderful. Humanity is called to be humans. We are not animals. We are not machines. We are not angels. We are simply humans, and that is a good thing! Simply put, being human is being holy, and holiness is just being human.

Which brings up the question: What does it mean to be human?

When we look around at humanity today there is much in it that should not be there, but Genesis gives us a picture of what we were made to be clear of the fog of the fall. At the center of the answer to what it means to be human is this amazing fact found in Genesis: we are made in the image of God. Certain things we share with God, and these are the core of our humanity. When we look at Genesis and the fact that we are made in the image of God what do we find in way of an answer to what it means to be human?

• Rational: We are thinking beings. Someone once said, "Human reason is the greatest gift of common grace that God has given to man." God has graced all people with the ability to think. We invent philosophies. We solve problems. We wonder. Animals are not rational in the same way that we are, and to deny this part of our humanity is to deny something vital to what it means to be human.
  

• Relational: We do not live in an impersonal universe. We live in a place which in its most basic nature is relational. The reality of the Trinity means that personhood is not an accident. It has been said that creation was born of the "laughter of the Trinity." God is himself relational and we are his image bearers in this. There are times and places for isolation in human life, but being immersed in the lives of others is part of what we are called to at our most basic level. It is part of what we are made to me, and a way that humanity can image and glorify God.

• Moral: There is also a moral fabric to the universe and to our souls. When we violate this moral nature we become like a frayed cloth. It is no wonder that the things that the Bible says make up the moral life and the things that make for a healthy, loving marriage are the same. It is because morality, like all parts of humanness, are essential to human flourishing. Immorality is dehumanizing. It is not just breaking a rule on a list; it is going against the grain of our very nature.
  

• Spiritual: The material is not all that there is to us. Francis Schaeffer used to hold up an apple when he was speaking to a group of people and liken it to the interaction between the material and the spiritual world. You cannot see the far side of the apple, but that does not mean it isn't there. The apple is a single whole although you can see only half of it. That is what reality is like and that is what humans are like. There is more to us (that really is there) that you cannot see.

• Embodied: We are spiritual but we are also embodied. We are physical. We live in the world of sunshine and dirt and food and that's a good thing. We should rejoice in our bodies. They are not evil - they are a part of our humanness. We should take care of them and honor others bodies. Our bodies are subject to frailties, sicknesses, deformities, injuries and it all makes us long for a time when our full humanness is restored. That is exactly what the Bible promises - that not only our bodies, but the full gamut of the human experience will be restored and glorified and free of brokenness.

• Dependent: We did not make ourselves nor do we sustain ourselves. We are dependent beings in every direction we look. This is a hard lesson for our culture to learn. We praise independence and self-sufficiency. Dependence is a dirty word, synonymous with weakness and neediness. The gospel, however, is only good news for the dependent and the weak and needy, and this is not a bad thing. It is good. We do not make the sun shine or the wind blow or seeds turn into fruit bearing plants or the atoms of our own bodies cohere together. God does this. We are the dependent ones and the attempt to transcend our dependency can lead us into ruin.

• Limited and Finite: Edith Schaeffer said, "It is not a sin to be limited." This is another hard lesson for our culture. As we try to transcend our dependency we also try to leave behind our finiteness. We work long hours and push our bodies to the limits. We associate limitation with failure. The idea of living at a pace in line with human limitations is seen as laziness. Those products, like Blackberries and email, that let us stretch our limitation in some small way, spread like wildfire. Christians should resist that tide. God made a day of rest and made it holy. Despite our drive to become as close to infinite as we possibly can we still spend 1/3 of our lives completely inactive in bed sleeping, and if we try not to sleep we literally fall apart.

• Work: Work is not part of the fall. It is not an accident or a sin. We are meant to work. Adam had work before he ate the fruit. It is the curse on our work, not work itself, that is a result of the fall. Humans should use their hands and minds to make their world a better place, to give themselves to some work that will be a blessing.

• Dignity and Honor: The fact that we are made in the image of God means that incredible dignity and honor is involved in being human. We are not a random collection of atoms that came to being by cosmic chances. We are created! We are shaped! The infinite God has bestowed his care on humanity and put something of himself in us and that means that because of the fall each of us wears a veil, however, behind that veil is a being who, as C. S. Lewis said, "If you could see it now you would be tempted to worship." To quote Lewis again, "Other than the blessed sacrament itself your neighbor is the holiest object presented to your senses."

• Creative: God is a creator and, as bearers of his image, so are we. In Genesis God commanded our first parents to multiply and subdue the earth. That was a command to create wonders that did not previously exist. We are supposed to make art and beauty and bring goodness into the world. We are supposed to work at creativity and exercise our imaginations. J. R. R. Tolkien called humanity "sub-creators". It was the idea the informed his work in creating the Lord of the Rings. He viewed making those stories as part of his calling, part of his responsibility as a human, and also they were his great delight.
  

Art Wednesday: Where is all the good Christian art?

Good Christian art is not an oxymoron, although anecdotal evidence and a survey of the statistics might make it seem that way. The fact is that there are good Christian artists making good art, but they are the exception rather than the rule, and the leaders in the fields of art seem to be non-Christians. Why? There is no single explanation, but rather many forces that have contributed to the present situation.

1. Christian churches have largely failed at teaching people how and why to love art. This results in masses of people who are stirred up in good ways, but are not being moved to the world of art. In so many instances, they are actually being moved away from the world of art or from cultivating a knowledge and appreciation of it. Simply put, lots of Christians are ignorant of art. What makes it good? What it is saying? What is the history of the conversations that have occurred in the world of art?

2. The Church is known for sending out missionaries into the mission field in pursuit of obedience to the great commission, but it is not known for viewing the art world as a mission field. We have not sent, trained, and equipped new artists. Young people are not being sent into the world of art with a commission to embody the gospel and create works of art informed by their faith. Artistic young people must find answers to the questions in their mind about art elsewhere. They have to learn their craft from "secular" masters, and they will not only learn the fundamentals of their craft, but they will also learn the worldview that comes along with it. They will sometimes find sharp disagreements with the Christian worldview and they have not been taught how to think through those questions Christianly and deeply.

3. The Church has often held a false dichotomy between the sacred and the secular. In this view the "spiritual" activities such as prayer, church attendance, Bible studies, and read the scripture, hold a higher, honored position than all the other activities of daily life. The Bible doesn't leave room for such a division. It calls Christians to live their spirituality out in the warp and woof of daily life and in every human activity, including art. If this is true then an artist is practicing a spiritual profession and if that artist is Christian than she should bring a Christian worldview to bear on her art.

4. There is a lie abroad that Christianity makes a person less creative and less artistic rather than more. The false dichotomy of sacred and secular contributes to this because the world notices the exodus of Christians into a spiritual Christian bubble. The Church has also largely believed that lie of itself! This is not the way it should be. God is an infinitely creative creator and mankind is made in his image. The goal of Christian spirituality is to become conformed to his likeness, and that includes his creativity. If there is any truth in Christianity then we should also become conformed to that aspect of God. The more Christian a person is, so to speak, the more they should crave beauty like food, and the works of their hands should bring it into the world whatever they do. Christianity should make you more creative, not less! Christian artists should be the ones who most relentlessly pursue goodness and beauty through telling the truth in their art.

5. Christian art is undercut by an inappropriate ideal of sentimentality. Walk through a Christian book store and you will see what I mean by this. There is a sense that the works of art that you see are disconnected from the real mess of daily living. It seems like Christian art sometimes paints a picture of life as though it believed we were already living in heaven and it was a sin to make something ugly. But there can be beauty in making something that is ugly if what you are making is telling the truth. We live in a fallen world and artists who set out to tell the truth must tell this part of the story also. We do not live in heaven yet. We live in a world where there is much sadness and brokenness and hurt. The fall has fractured every area of life and the Christian artist must be present in that brokenness and bring all their creativity and sensitivity to bear on it.

6. Christian art is all to often driven by the market. When artists do not create new art and fresh thought they abandon their field to the market. Art still sells even if it is bad or unoriginal, but the questions the market asks are not the ones that will bring human flourishing. The market asks what people want to see and what they will pay for rather than what people need to see and what it true. When the market speaks the voice of the artist is drown out, and it is exactly the voice of the artist in the role of prophet that the world needs. When the market rules, everyone suffers.

Lessons from a day spent watching technology

Recently, in preparation for a talk I was giving, I tried to make a list of every piece of technology I came across in a single day. The list got very long, very quickly. I wrote down everything from the pen and Post-Its I was making the list on to things like the internet or television. The list was made up of not only high-tech things like a cell phone, but low-tech things like the screw on the cap of my tube of toothpaste. The act of watching my life that closely, examining it for ways it is affected by technology was an unusual but eye-opening process. Here are a few thoughts I had while I was making the list:

• My list was nowhere near long enough. I quickly came to realize that even the things I did write down were themselves products of a long chain of technology. The Post-Its began as trees and then were cut, milled, processed into paper, then shipped, packaged, and sold. The pen in my hand came from a factory full of technology. It was designed and engineered to precise specifications. Hundreds of hours of human creativity went into producing that single pen. The real list would be both wide and deep. Not only that, but some things were too dense with technology to possibly list all the technologies that made them up. For my car I just wrote "car," yet how many hundreds of pieces of technology are involved in driving my car? Everything from the fuel that the engine burns to the seat belts and airbags.
  

• Every inch of my life has been shaped by technology. Every thing I touched, tasted, saw, and heard, and smelled. From the toothbrush I cleaned my teeth with to the internet is a product of human creativity. There is no escape from it. From the first moment I woke I was surrounded by it. I had 20 items on the list before I left my bed. The air that I breathe, the chemistry of my body, the content of my thoughts, the waves passing through my body are all shaped by technology.

• This is what we were made for! We are made in God’s image and he set us down in the world and bid us to be fruitful and multiply. God commanded humanity to subdue the earth. The word subdue here has so many negative connotations, but in its essence it means to make the world livable. To create those things which will contribute to human flourishing. We have used our minds and hands to come up with such a wonderful array of things. The fact that we create is a good part of what it means to be human. Technology is a gift, not something to be ashamed of.

• That means not only building things, but improving them. It is a good thing to improve on the things we make. Don’t just build houses, but build houses that keep you more dry, more safe, more warm, more comfortable physically and mentally. Build houses that foster human community, houses that are places your children will love and then really live in them, make memories. Have Christmas morning in them and make them beautiful spaces to inhabit.
  

• Despite the wonderful array of our creativity, our creation is nothing compared to God’s. I found myself thinking about how all of this was only re-arranging what he had made. We are, as Tolkien put it, sub-creators. This is not to diminish our work of creating, this re-arranging is what he made us for, but his work is on a completely different level. In the morning I sat in the kitchen and heard the birds singing and realized that he was the one who made the songs of the birds. He made living things that reproduce themselves. He made the atoms in the table I was sitting at and the things that make up those atoms, and he did it all from nothing.

• Finally, if you really think about the list you begin to praise God. The earth is the Lord’s and everything in it and all of it reflects his glory! The fact that it exists at all is a testament to God’s glory and what we have done with it is too. The Bible says that God made all things and not only that, continues to sustain their very existence because he is committed to them, knows them, and cares for them. If that even my nail clippers are a testament of God’s care for me, and if that doesn’t make you thankful you aren’t paying attention.
  

8 Reasons Theology Should Make People Humble, Not Proud

The words "theology" and "doctrine" can make people today cringe. They bring up associations of arrogance and pride, of theological divisions that cause disharmony within the church, of "ingrow-ness" and arguments that mean little to those outside the church. In general there is a distrust that theology can actually make people more humble and more loving, a sense that "knowledge puffs up, but love edifies" and never the twain shall meet.

The great sadness of the association in people's minds between theology and arrogance is that theology ought to make us incredibly patient, loving, and humble. After all, doesn't Christian theology boil down to simply learning about Jesus, who perfectly embodied those characteristics? Because of this, if theology makes a person proud, the fault is in the theologian, not theology itself. There are massive spiritual resources in Christian theology that point those who would know God towards humility and love. Here are just a few:

1. The Bible teaches that each person is an object of God's love and care. At every moment in their lives, they are the receiver of God's good gifts. He has given them life and gladness and everything else. God patiently is leading all of us through a process realization, and continues to give his people gifts despite their misunderstandings of him. If he treats people like this with such a greater understanding of where they disbelieve and misunderstand him than we have of each other, can we not do the same?

2. Each person is made in the image of God, as such they are the bearers of glory, dignity, and honor. Our interaction with one another must always reflect that. There are no people whom we may allow ourselves to treat with disdain or contempt. As C. S. Lewis said, "Your neighbor is the most holy object presented to your senses." As we come to understand that more and more we will not abuse one another with our knowledge. People are more than just ideas - we are people made in the image of God - and we should not view them simply through the lens of their ideas, but through the lens of their creation.

3. The gospel is essentially the story of how we also have received gifts, how everything we have has been given to us because we could not obtain it on our own. That's what makes being proud of theological knowledge so ironic! The Bible says that even that knowledge is a gift from God, and, apart from the Spirit's work on our lives we would not only not understand the knowledge of God, we would hate it and flee it.

4. Jesus was not short with people, rather, he became incarnate in their lives. Jesus taught people and corrected people - humble theology does not mean you release truth or the desire for people to believe truth. Jesus knew far more about where the people around him fell short than we ever will about anyone in our lives but did not see that as grounds to make them feels less than. Their misunderstandings of him drew him to them in love, not the opposite. He came to save the lost and to heal the sick. When we come across people who may grossly misunderstand the God of the Bible, it should draw us also to them in love and service, in the manner of the one who not only corrected people's ideas through teaching, but gave his life so they might be given what they needed most desperately, himself.

5. Christianity throws the door open on the amount of total knowledge because it says that the universe was made by an infinite God. Because God is infinite the amount that we know about him is always infinitely outweighed by the amount that we do not know about him. This should not lead us to adopt the mentality that God is unknowable, because he has spoken - he has revealed himself in language that we can understand (and an infinite God would be able to communicate clearly to his creations) (he made them, after all). As Francis Schaeffer has written, "We cannot know him fully, but we can know him truly." So we should have a high confidence in our ability to know true things about God, as well as a high humility. Knowing God is not like knowing geometry because he is an infinite field of study, and it will be our delight to spend eternity in Heaven continually learning new things about him. In view of that, it seems silly to be proud of our knowledge of theology, as if we had come to a stopping point and had finished the course.

6. All truth is God's truth, this lets us pursue the knowledge of God wherever it is found, even if it is not in the "camps" the come with Christian labels. Some time ago a friend experienced a profound spiritual crisis because he was shaken up by the sheer weight of truth and loveliness outside of things which hold the label "Christian" to the point that he was truly considering giving up the Christian faith. It seemed to him that if Christianity is too small to contain all truth, then he must find a larger worldview. In the end, however, he came out of it with a greater commitment to the Christian worldview, not a lesser one because he realized that all truth is God's truth. If that is true then we should expect to find truth that belongs to God in places we might not expect to find it. We should expect to find it in people we speak with who are not believers and in places that are (as far as they know) completely secular. God has scattered his truth abroad and given his creations an instinctive love for it. If this is true then it leads us not to beat people into our camps and into worldviews with Christian labels, but to see the truth that they love is really God's truth and to interact with them on that basis.

7. People are full of "wiggle room." Most people's beliefs are an incredibly complex web. When we abuse people with our theology it is often because we over-simplify what they believe, or over-simplify the process of becoming committed to a belief. We are not monolithic doctrinal statements, we are people.

8. Our beliefs rise out of the stories of our lives. Our experiences shape what we can naturally understand and what is easy to believe. Some experiences can act as an open doorway for a certain understanding of God. Others as a fortified castle gate, making that person extremely resistant to what we are saying. It is inconsiderate to try to fit people into molds without trying to first understand where they have come from. God himself is leading each individual we will talk to through a story that he has prepared for them. Again, this leads us to approach people with humility and patience and with more questions than answers until we come to understand them.

L'abri Marginalia (4)

• The Cultural Myth of Love: Our culture believes a myth about love that it is possible to find the perfect person, so we quickly tire of mere good people and relentlessly pursue an idea of perfection that does not exist. The stories are culture has told us about love have taught us to follow our gut, and our gut is not easily pleased (or very good at being content for long). Attaining romantic feelings of love become the highest good in a relationship, but, as Lewis said, "Love becomes a demon the moment it becomes a God." Or, as Rob Gordon said more bluntly in the wonderful film, High Fidelity, "I have been following my gut since I was 14 years old, and, frankly speaking, I have come to the conclusion that my guts have shit for brains." This pursuit of the ever-receding goal of that perfect person leads to heartache and eventually a deep cynicism toward love and relationships. David Richter takes it one step further, "Combine our culture's cynicism with the postmodern idea of the fluidity of the self (the idea we can change ourselves at any point) and it makes for extreme lack of commitment." This is the landscape of romantic love that we find ourselves in. The Bible makes people realistic, however. It leaves no room for the belief that there is another human out there who is perfect in every way, who will never let us down, with whom we will experience no problems. It makes us dive in to the mess of life and enter the real problems in hope of the belief that it is on the far side of that mess that there is true love and true community. It gives us strength and succor when the pain of love is too much, for it gives us something to hang our identity on other than finite, frail, fickle humans. It tells us a story of love that is about sacrifice and patience and endurance, not mere feelings of love, nor a fantasy of love unbroken by the fall. There is nothing unbroken in this world, but neither is there nothing that cannot be mended. Christianity bids us enter the mess of one anothers lives and let the wonderful work of the mending begin.

• The Hard Part of Believing: "The hard things about Christianity are not the hard things, but the simple things that take a moment to understand and a lifetime to believe deeply enough for it to become true of you."

• The Gift Economy: A gift can be a powerful thing. Gift can create gratitude. A gift is not acquired through any act of the receivers will. In this sense, even creation is a gift. Creation is superfluous - it did not come to us because we were owed it or we bought it. It is simply a lavish gift of God. A gift creates indebtedness. A gift creates a bond of attachment, which has reciprocation at its heart. This can be uncomfortable - it can feels though we are losing our freedom - but it is not necessarily a bad thing. This is contrasted with a market economy, where everything is bought and sold. In a market economy you leave each transaction at equilibrium and everyone remains free. This indebtedness leads to the next consequence of the gift economy, it creates community. Gifts abolish boundaries and create unifying bonds. These gift communities cannot function without a real community, and no there can be no real community without a real circulation of gifts in the community. Gifts create motion. Gifts have to keep moving within a community or they become commodities. Gifts can be like the manna from heaven - if you keep them, they perish. Turning gifts into commodities distorts the very nature of the gift economy. When one person uses a gift up they pass it one and the transformative motion of the gift continues. Gifts create increase. When we participate in the gift economy we are sometimes left with the holes of the gift's absence, this is a commitment to it's increase. A gift is like a seed that you have to scatter into the ground for it to grow. If you hoard the gifts, the wither and die. Think of a tithe - a tithe is a loss for you, but an increase for the kingdom of God. In God's gift economy there is always enough for tomorrow, so we operate with hope and also with disinterest because we believe in the power of the gift and of God.
  

• Laughter: There are many kinds of laughter and many kinds of smiles. Personally, my favorite kind is laughter in a group when you are not supposed to be laughing. There is something contagious and irrestistible about it, especially when people start to notice. At that point they can have one of two reactions: 1. become annoyed and shake their heads or hush you or 2. join in the laughter themselves. In my opinion the latter option is one of the great graces of the world...
  

L'abri Marginalia (3)

More assorted notes from the L'abri conference:

• Ethos: Sometimes the most powerful thing in a person's words is the character of the speaker you can see behind the words, his or her ethos. The words themselves are the sails and the ethos is the wind which moves the ship. This is something that grows over time and can either make the words themselves much more powerful and beautiful than they would have been otherwise, or it can completely undercut the words and render them irrelevant. Ethos is who the speaker is when he or she is not speaking, not on stage, not being watched. It is how they treat their spouses and children, what happens when they get cut off in traffic, when they are betrayed, when they make a mistake. Ethos is not something that anyone can hide - it shows through. Logos is the content of the message. Pathos is the emotion in it, the heart in it. But of all three ethos is the most powerful. A beautiful life hardly needs to speak at all. When a human being is living as God made humans to live, brimming with love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, self-control, and all the rest that kind of life is it's own testimony.
  

• Implications of Common Grace: God has been lavishly generous to the world, and this is known as his common grace. The world is filled with evidences of his grace. It is in everything from the rain that falls and waters crops to the capacity of mankind to reason and think. The Bible tells the story of a world that derives it's every good aspect directly from a loving, kind God who is committed to his creation. If this is true then a few things follow: 1. God calls us to honor people whenever we meet them. God has been extremely gracious to everyone alive, including his enemies. If God gives his gifts with such a broad hand, and extends dignity and honor to everyone, we must also. We must see every new person as a being made in the image of God and for whom God cares and watches closely. That is grounds for much honor on our part. 2. We must receive the gifts unbelievers give us with gladness. Something is not good just because it is Christian. Things are good because they are true and beautiful, and Christianity does not have a monopoly on that. 3. We must be affirmative of human culture. At the end of things all nations will carry their glory into the kingdom of God. 4. We must work happily alongside non-believers in all settings. 5. Christians above all must care for this world because God is in the midst of caring for the world. This is something that non-believers have led the church in. 6. The general response to God's common grace should be praise and adoration to God.

• Repugnant People: If the above is true the question rises: how do you live Christianly with repugnant people and still treat them in the light of the fact that they are image bearers of God? The answer, it seems, is the cross. As Lewis said, "On the cross, justice and mercy kiss." Jesus spent his life mingling with those whose ideas were detestable, and he gave his life to make those very people beautiful. Christians are called to live out God's redemption in the way we too love people. “Our commitment as Christians should be to seek and save those who are lost, that’s why Jesus came. Not to save, nice, decent people. That’s not why he came. We need to think very differently that we are sometimes taught to think. People’s repugnance is not to alienate me from them. It is to draw me towards them in love.” – Jerram Barrs.

• What Can We Know?: "There is mystery in that there is much that we don't know, but there is much also that we can know... No one has a God's eye view, but we can get God's point of view if he tells us. All reality is a mystery. We walk into like a fog, trusting God." -Jock Macgregor

• Cynicism: Cynicism is an over-confidence in suspicion. It is the belief that you can see through people, look at their motives and see their hypocrisy. In our culture there is a delight in cynicism. It is the delight of being in the inner ring which is formed by putting others outside. There is cynicism towards God, the thought that God does not "walk his talk. "God's only excuse is that he does not exist." -Camus. What is needed is for the flow of cynicism to be reversed and to be cynical of cynicism. You need incredible x-ray psychological vision to see inside the inner workings of another's soul. In fact, the only way to justly be cynical is if you have reach the positition of omniscience, and what do we see of the only one who is truly omniscient? God is not cynical at all. He hopes. He acts in faith and trust. Think of the parable of the Prodigal Son. The father has all the reasons in the world to be cynical of his son, but he runs to greet him and it is the father's joy that is the focus of the story, not his suspicion of his son. The limitations of cynicism lead us to humility. We do not even always know what is going on inside our own heads, let alone another's.
  

L'abri Marginalia (2)

More notes from the L'abri Conference:

• Beauty: "My exposure to extreme beauty makes it more difficult to love the true beauty all around me... Don't hold the forces of decrepitude at bay, embrace them... When you are real you cannot be ugly except to those who don't understand." -Richard Winter.
  

• Perfectionism: The pursuit of perfectionism creates an appearance of perfection, but not the reality of it - it creates a rose-tinted reality, minus the warts, which is not reality at all. There are assets and liabilities of perfectionism. It is good for a surgeon to strive for perfectionism, it will heal people, but when the surgeon goes home and demands perfection or nothing in her relationship with her husband or her children, she will have the nothing.

• Modernism and Postmodernism: The church will move through many countless cultures across history. The church's commitment is to God and the unchanging truth of the gospel speaking into a changing culture. The church's commitment is not to any one of those cultural movements, neither modernism nor postmodernism nor anything else. Christianity must not swear fealty to any culture, though the church itself is filled with people who see the world through the lens of how their culture sees the world. Christians must be transformed, able to live between two worlds. The choice between either modernism or postmodernism is a false choice. We need the glories of both, but our tendency will be to fall into one or the other. It is not a question of which is better. God employs both equally. There are three option, it seems, for the future: A. Hold to the sinking ship of modernism B. Embrace postmodernism and move toward paganism in Christian language C. Be aliens and strangers. The third option means to repent of all unchristian commitments to the sins of modernism and postmodernism and live holding the glories of both in two hands. "Let us pray that the bride remain true to her groom." -Jeff Dryden

• The Christian Mind: "We must have our thinking shaped to take on the contours of the Christian mind." -Denis Haack. This means seeing all things through a Christian worldview, and knowing something of the story that it is a part of, that of creation, fall, and redemption. It means looking for the glories in anything that we encounter because it is a part of God's world and the it's goodness cannot be entirely erased no matter what it is. It means being realistic about the brokenness in every new thing, and being able to see and name the wrong in things.

• The Power of Story: Stories can help us see through another's eyes, which is a real grace. Stories can allow us to see inside a faraway global reality. They can show us images that it is right to have burned into our imaginations because this is the reality of our world. Stories can allow us to see cultural shifts. Artists cannot escape putting their worldview into their art, and artists are often the most sensitive of the population. If something is changing in a culture it will be reflected in the art. Stories allow us to see into hearts, our own included. The view inside ourselves is hard to come by, except by the grace of God.

• Real Humanity: It is hard to see what is a real man or a real woman in this fallen world. Ask 100 different people and you will get 100 different answers. It is like trying to tell left from right and up from down when you are spinning in a free fall. In this sense, we have never stood on solid ground, but when we do what it means to be a man and what it means to be a woman will plainly address itself to our senses. We will each be what God made us to be in the fullness of our genders without the confusion that comes from living in world where even your relationship with yourself and others has become fractured.

• Technology and Community: Technology and social changes have built division into our lives, but the need for community has not left. We needed something else to come in and fill the vacuum. We have developed new technology that will fill the void and give us a sense of community and connectivity. TV, internet, cell phones, ipods, etc. let us hear the voices and see the faces of people in our lives and so fill that felt need of community. They also create new problems, however. I question whether or not they truly and deeply fill our need for community or if they just give us enough of a dose of surface community to sate a felt need, without us ever having to really engage real loving, real sharing, or real vulnerability. In the pursuit of connection we have drawn a bubble around us that actually serves to insulate us from the depth of connection we need, and we stop looking when the edge is taken off of the loneliness. We have been too easily satisfied.
  

• The Problem With Africa: "The problem with Africa is a lack of a biblical worldview." -Darrow Miller. The gospel has come to Africa but not a biblical worldview. For missionaries the gospel has relevance for Heaven, but not for this world. The West pours money into Africa, but that won't solve the problem. What it needs is to see that God's truth applies to every aspect of the human life. Not only what you do on sunday morning, but what you do when you are working, loving your wife, raising children, driving down the road, haggling for a price, etc. If Africa learns this lesson, she has the potential to lead the world.
  

Art Every Wednesday (36)

The True/False Film Festival has come again!

The festival is one of Columbia's major cultural events every year. It is one of the nations growing documentary film festivals and runs from February 26 -March 1.

Check out the list of films at truefalse.org. Here are some highlights:

Burma VJ
"Armed with pocket-sized video cameras, a tenacious band of Burmese reporters face down death to expose the repressive regime controlling their country. In 2007, after decades of self-imposed silence, Burma became headline news across the globe when peaceful Buddhist monks led a massive rebellion. More than 100,000 people took to the streets protesting a cruel dictatorship that has held the country hostage for more than 40 years. Foreign news crews were banned, the Internet was shut down, and Burma was closed to the outside world. So how did we witness these events? Enter the Democratic Voice of Burma (DVB), aka the Burma VJs. Compiled from the shaky handheld footage of the DVB, acclaimed filmmaker Anders Ostergaard’s Burma VJ pulls us into the heat of the moment as the VJs themselves become the target of the Burmese government. Their tactical leader, code-named Joshua, oversees operations from a safe hiding place in Thailand. Via clandestine phone calls, Joshua dispenses his posse of video warriors, who covertly film the abuses in their country, then smuggle their footage across the border into Thailand. Joshua ships the footage to Norway, where it is broadcast back to Burma and the world via satellite. Burma VJ plays like a thriller, all the more scary because it is true." -Sundance Film Festival

At the Edge of the World
"At the Edge of the World chronicles the controversial Sea Shepherd Antarctic Campaign against a Japanese whaling fleet. The international volunteer crew, under-trained and under-equipped, develop a combination of bizarre and brilliant tactics with which to stop the whalers. But first they must find the Japanese ships, a far more difficult challenge than ever imagined - long-time activist Paul Watson and first-time captain Alex Cornelissen employ an array of strategies in the hopes of finding an elusive adversary in the vast expanse of the Ross Sea. With one ship (the Farley Mowat) too slow to chase down the whaling fleet, with their second ship (the Robert Hunter) unsuited for Antarctic ice conditions and with no country supporting their efforts to enforce international law, the situation becomes increasingly desperate. Against all odds, however, a real-life pirate tale unfolds - a modern-day "David vs. Goliath" adventure." -Imdb.com

Extremities (shorts)
A sensational tour of the world, stopping to hang out with gangsters in Poland, shoppers in a vast Chinese mall, blind people in Brazil and coca farmers in Colombia.


I Will Survive (Shorts)
From displacement to language barriers, these five films illustrate the ways people strive for self-preservation.



No Impact Man
From displacement to language barriers, these five films illustrate the ways people strive for self-preservation.

L'abri Marginalia (1)

The L'abri Conference in Rochester, Minnesota is coming up again and I thought I would put up some marginalia from notes from past conferences. The conference weekend has been an intensive time of learning and encountering new ideas - I've heard it equated to trying to take a drink from a fire hydrant - and the notes I take away every year are full of new ideas. These posts will be for sharing some interesting ideas and to whetting the palate for the conference. Don't look for a theme in them, rather, they are a random collection of interesting thoughts.

I recommend the L'abri conference to you if you can make it. You can register on the website.

2006 Conference Notes...

• Worldview: What is a worldview? It is a set of examined and unexamined assumptions which act as a mental filter that determines what we see. We are all in the business of filtering what we see. It happens without our being aware of it along the channels of our worldview. There are basically 7 questions every worldview seeks to answer: 1. What is prime reality (who is God?) 2. What is the nature of external reality? 3. What is a human being? 4. What happens after death? 5. How can we know things (epistemology)? 6. How do we know right from wrong? 7. What is the meaning of human history?

• Limits of human reason: Christianity is not antagonistic to reason, but it does say that there are mysteries into which reason cannot penetrate. As thoughtful believers we must know the limits of our reason, and that is not to say that we must sit in ignorance and not walk to the end of the road of reason, but it does mean that our journey extends past the places where the paved road of reason ends. You still have to walk out over thin air, and because it is the truth you will still walk on solid ground. Because you can't see it doesn't mean it isn't there. Because our reason cannot completely grasp something doesn't mean it doesn't exist or it is nonsensical. "You can have true knowledge without having exhaustive knowledge," -Francis Schaeffer. This is not something to fear (we walk by faith, not be sight) but it can be dangerous as a starting point and tends to produce unexamined thought.
  

• The Value of Art: C. S. Lewis said that pain was God's megaphone to rouse a deaf world, perhaps art is also. Why do we not simply read tracts for sermons? Because the people who hear are asleep and we can be creative and winsome and attractive. Jesus engaged the culture in parables. When he spoke to a crowd of unbelievers whose lives were intimately connected to the earth he told stories that began, "Once there was a farmer..." Christ used art as a splinter of the minds of his hearers. Paul walked among the idols of the Athenians and came to their debating forum and quoted their own poets. Paul met them where their understanding ended and showed them the way forward - he built bridges from the truth they understood to the truth they needed.
  

• Engagement with culture: Battles are lost by default if they are never fought. There are entire segments of our culture today that have experienced an exodus of Christian engagement and Christian thought. The consequences can be slow in showing themselves in those segments, but they will always be a drift away from the truth and a resowing of the soil with other thoughts and ideas. The people of the present live on the food that those who came before us sowed into the ground. We live in the world made by those we inherit it from. For this reason and many others Christians must engage the culture as a hope for the future. Those who affect the next generation win, so to speak. The life of the earth needs the oxygen of Christianity. As a church, we must be careful about the theology and philosophy that teaches Christians to not give that oxygen.

• Feelings: Christians should be ones that feel better, not in the sense of feeling happiness more, but in the sense of the ability to feel the right emotions to the right depths. We should be able to mourn with those who mourn and rejoice with those who rejoice. It is a tragedy when the Church looks on the sufferings of the world with a stone heart. There are things that should make us weep. We should long for rightness in the world so much and have such a clear picture of what it would look like in politics, family life, relationships, business, and every area of life that it should be a sharper hurt when we see how often the reality of what we see falls short of it. We should long for rightness so much that when we see some area of life moving toward it it should make us rejoice. Christianity is not a stoic, cold religion. It is a religion of celebration and feasts and joy as well as tears and hard, hard prayers. It makes us realistic without becoming cynical. It makes us joyful without being naive.
  

• Total Depravity: Sin is not a popular idea. The Christian teaching of original sin is seen as oppressive and regressive, causing more evil than good. How do you talk about sin with a culture that has forgotten what the word means? It is not the individual acts of evil, but it is something deeper. It is our tendency to bend inward. It is our tendency to be selfish. This is not to say that there is nothing good in us, nor that we are "as full of sin as our skin can hold." That is not the Biblical worldview. The truth is something closer to what Schaeffer said, "We are glorious ruins." There is so much that is good and glorious in us because before we were sinners we were very, very good, and the remnant of that original glory cannot be eradicated. The Church so often talks about sin as though it is what we were meant for, but we were not, nor is it how the story began. But it is the condition we find ourselves in today. There is a reality of evil in the world, and the idea that we are not the way we are meant to be and cannot entirely change that is a foundation for explaining where it came from and why there is still so much good in us and how to be healed of our tendency to bend inward. Without a robust understanding of evil insisting that we are good seems naive, because it is so clear that we are not. But neither does Christianity allow for us to fall into the opposite extreme of falling into cynicism. We are glorious, but the world we see today is ruined.

• Friendship: A friend is someone who identifies those prayers that you need to hear to make you go where you must - but fear to - go, finds a way to say them, and then goes to those places with you.

• Justice: "I dethrone God in my heart if I demand that he act to satisfy my notions of justice." - Elizabeth Eliot