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.