Thinking God’s Thoughts After Him

It is day 26 of Lent. We are more than half-way through our journey to Easter. During this Lenten season I have done a lot of thinking. In a curious sort of way, I have been thinking about thinking or the lack thereof in many pockets of evangelical Christianity. Perhaps my thinking about thinking was sparked by Mark Noll’s scandalous opening to The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, where he writes: “The scandal of the evangelical mind is that there is not much of an evangelical mind.” Or maybe it was Christian Smith’s The Bible Made Impossible (I have added this book to my Lenten reading list) that has been challenging me to think about how I view Scripture. Maybe this thinking about thinking has come from N.T. Wright who is causing me to think about Jesus in his historical context in Simply Jesus. Or maybe it is because Lent is a time to reflect (thinking backwards) on the suffering of Jesus.

Maybe it is just me.

I admit that I have an intellectual bent. It is the sacred pathway I feel most comfortable walking down. Loving God with my mind stands out in the command to love God with all of our heart, soul, MIND, and strength. I have a bias towards an intellectual approach to the Christian faith; I admit it. I like books. I like books with footnotes. I like books with footnotes and big words that I have to look up in the dictionary. I like being challenged with thoughts that undermine my assumptions. I like connecting ideas in a new way. Engaging the faith with intellectual fervor is natural for me, but it is also a necessary component in following Jesus Christ. We are challenged in Romans 12 to allow our minds to be renewed:

Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect. (Romans 12:2)

Paul was not a detached, professional theologian disconnected from the life of the church or the life of the Spirit. He experienced spiritual gifts such as the ability to speak in tongues, but he said he would rather speak five intelligible words in the church so those who worship Jesus could mature in their ability to think:

Brothers, do not be children in your thinking. Be infants in evil, but in your thinking be mature. (1 Corinthians 14:20)

All of this talk about thinking is not simply to make people smarter or more educated, but to make people more devoted to Jesus Christ:

But I am afraid that as the serpent deceived Eve by his cunning, your thoughts will be led astray from a sincere and pure devotion to Christ. (2 Corinthians 11:3)

So here are my somewhat disconnected, somewhat related, thoughts about thinking.

• Thinking about God is the Christian art of meditation, an ancient Christian practice.

• Thinking about our own soul is subordinate to thinking about God. When we think about ourselves we do so with a lowly mind. We think of others as more important than ourselves. We call that “humility.” And humility is not thinking less of yourself, but thinking of yourself less.

• As our minds are renewed by the Spirit, we begin to change our way of thinking. The Spirit enables us to set our minds on things above where Christ is seated.

• The 17^th century German astronomer Johannes Kepler wrote, “I was merely thinking God’s thoughts after him. Since we astronomers are priests of the highest God in regard to the book of nature, it benefits us to be thoughtful, not of the glory of our minds, but rather, above all else, of the glory of God.”

• Thinking good thoughts about God is not worship; worship is something we do. However worship proceeds from and leads to fruitful thinking.

• Thinking is an internal monologue, a way we talk things out within ourselves. Is this a reflection of God’s inner dialogue within himself, the eternal conversation between the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit? Maybe.

• Our ways of thinking form a worldview, a lens by which we interpret the world around us. When we awake to our thought life we can begin to understand the difference between perception and fact, and begin to see things from another person’s point of view.

• “The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings.” – Wendell Berry

• When we think in reverse we tap into our memories. When we think forward we tap into our hopes.

• When listening to others we can choose to accept the information we are receiving, but this requires little thinking. We activate our thinking when we ask questions, when we challenge assumptions behind what they are saying, when we weigh the merits of the evidence they offer to make their point.

• Jesus challenged us to think with his oft-quoted phrase: He who has ears to hear, let him hear. He very easily could have said: He who has a mind to think, let him think.

• Thinking allows us to sort out truth from rhetoric, that is the “way things are” from the “way we would like things to be.”

• To grow in your capacity to think requires you to expand your vocabulary. Learning new words increases your ability to think and understand. This is hard work.

• “Kindness in words creates confidence. Kindness in thinking creates profoundness. Kindness is giving creates love.” – Lao Tzu

• There are limits to our thinking, no doubt about. We are finite beings dependent upon the Infinite One to reveal truth to us. Our thinking can only take us so far, but it can take us much farther than self-assured ignorance.

 

Incarnation: Holding on to Our Tradition

An appreciation of tradition puts us on the road towards humility.

Pride listens to the council of self-reliance. You don’t need to know how we got here.
Just do your thing. Like a 17 year-old rock n’ roller, who wants to start a garage band, but knows nothing of Hendrix, the Beatles, Clapton, Dylan, the Stones, Queen, Zeppelin, Chuck Berry, BB King, and the like.

We do what we do today because of tradition. We are standing on the shoulders of giants. We are only able to break out and do something unique (and new?) because of the tradition we are standing on. To reject tradition, to ignore it and give it the proverbial stiff arm is to walk the road of pride which always leads to destruction.

Our faith as 21^st century followers of Jesus, is built on a tradition.

A nearly 2,000 year tradition built upon creeds, councils, prayers, sermons, wars, sacrifice, bloodshed, tears, celebration, and worship. We cannot lose what those in this historical church have given us. John the apostle writes in his second letter: “Watch yourselves, so that you may not lose what we have worked for, but may win a full reward” (2 John 8).

While John may have been talking about many things, there is no doubt that he was talking about the Gospel and specifically the incarnation.

The incarnation is the fact that Jesus, who was the eternal Son of God, became a man. In becoming a man, he did not cease in being God. He was, and is, fully God and fully human.

We do not have to work as hard today to communicate the fact that Jesus of Nazareth was a real human being. Ancient historians have documented his brief life. The Jewish historian Josephus calls him a sophos aner, a wise man. We spend much more time communicating the truth that Jesus of Nazareth is God’s own son and the Savior of the world.

Nevertheless, we cannot lose this great doctrine of the incarnation. If we do, we lose the very heart of the Christian story. Here are ten reasons why the incarnation is so important.

1. Creation
Incarnation reminds us that God’s creation is good. Even though all of creation has been twisted by sin, the goodness of God has not been eradicated. We can still see God’s divine attributes in creation. We can still encounter God in nature, because the mountains, and trees, and flowers, and roaring oceans speak to us of God’s grandeur and holiness.

2. The Body
Incarnation reminds us that our physical bodies are good. We are a body as much as we are a spirit. There was a teaching that was popular in evangelical circles not too long ago that made the case that we are a spirit ( a spiritual being), that has a soul (whatever that means), who lives in a body. This is much closer to Greek philosophy (Platonism) than biblical Christianity. Our physical bodies are a part of who we are. We are not real human beings without our human bodies. We do have an immaterial component to our human nature, but to be a “spirit” without a body is to be exposed and naked.

3. Salvation
God’s salvation includes the salvation body. God’s desire is to save both our material selves and immaterial selves, both our spirits and our bodies. We do not “get saved;” we are being saved, rescued, and transformed. We currently in a process of spiritual transformation and when Jesus returns, we will experience physical transformation as our bodies our resurrected. Bodily resurrection at the end is foreshadowed now as God continues to heal people physically through his Church.

4. The Kingdom of God
God’s kingdom is physical. To say God’s kingdom is spiritual is to relegate it to mysticism or folk religion. For some time I would say that God’s kingdom was a spiritual kingdom, which confused the early disciples who were expected a political kingdom. However, what I meant by “spiritual kingdom,” is that the kingdom of God is not a militant kingdom. Jesus has waged war on a world gone wrong with the weapons of love and forgiveness and not guns and bombs. At the incarnation, God’s kingdom has broken into human history and it continues to expand as a physical kingdom through the Church.

5. Morality
What you do in your body is important. What you do physically affects you spiritually. There were people in the Apostle John’s churches who had left the orthodox faith, because they said they had not sinned (I John 1:10). They reasoned that since Jesus did not have a real body, then we could do anything we wanted to in our bodies without consequences. John argues against such theological nonsense. Jesus came in a real human body in order to transform all creation because of man’s sin (committed in physical bodies).

6. Redemption
God regained in the body what was lost in the body. Sin is physical and obedience is physical. Adam disobeyed, but Jesus obeyed. As Gregory of Nazianzus, the fourth century church father, put it: the unassumed is the unredeemed. That is, if Jesus Christ did not assume a real human body with a real human mind/spirit/will, then nothing of humanity can be redeemed.

7. Revelation
God chose to reveal himself in the incarnation. The word that the Bible uses for reveal or revelation means to “pull back the curtain. In the incarnation we see God in real life. Not God not a mystical religion, but God in human terms. He chose to reveal himself in a way so that we could begin to understand his character and nature.

8. Demonstration
Not only do we see who God is, we also see how we ought to be as human beings. Jesus is our example of a human living out his humanity to its fullest. When we question how we should live and how we should treat one another, we look at Jesus. He is the answer.

9. Righteousness
God is faithful to his promises to Israel. The OT promises salvation through a king, born of a virgin, born of the house of David, born in Bethlehem, born to put the government on his shoulders. God did not revoke those promises and disregard his covenant with Israel. He fulfilled his promises and remained in the “right” (thus the word “righteousness”) by send his son born of a woman born under the Levitical law.

10. Truth
God’s story from creation to consummation, from Genesis to Revelation is a story of God’s battle for truth. All idolatry is an attack on God’s truth. Idolatry is taking a good thing and making it a God thing. Taking something temporary and making it ultimate. God’s truth, which wages war against idolatry, is communicated through human relationships. This is not truth not as abstract philosophy, but truth as a person.

So yeah, I would say that the incarnation is pretty important. Let’s not lose it after the historic Church worked so hard to preserve it.

 

Nightline Face-Off: Does Satan Exist?

I finished watching the debate over the existence of Satan this morning. I watched half of it yesterday and the other half of it this morning. Apparently the debate was edited when it was aired, but you can watch it in its entirety here: http://www.abcnews.go.com/Nightline/FaceOff/

Be prepared to endure commercials before and after each clip. A couple of times the online media player started over at the beginning of the first clip. A bit annoying, but well worth it.

I wish every follower of Christ would watch this. I thought it was a great cultural/philosophical clash. It would be so helpful for Christians to watch and think deeply through the issues presented in this debate. And the greatest issue for me was not the existence of Satan, but the reality of truth.

The players in the debate formed two teams: Mark Driscoll & Anne Lobert on one side and Deepak Chopra and Carlton Pearson on the other side.

When I watched the first half, I thought Driscoll was the winner. He did have home field advantage however because the debate was at his church. Thus, the many rounds of applause after Driscoll’s comments. But the TRUE WINNER of the debate was “Red Shirt Guy.”

As you watch the debate, pay attention to the interaction between the audience and the panel. In particular, pay close attention to two audience members and how they address the Deepak. The two audience members are “Red Shirt Guy” and “Pony Tail Girl.” A please, please understand that if we are going to engage culture we all need to be “Red Shirt Guy;” he got it. He understood the underlying issues and gave the best rebuttal of the night. (See below for my transcription of “Red Shirt Guy’s” comments.) “Pony Tail Girl” took things way to personal and misunderstood the deeper implications of Deepak’s comments. She was right to become angry, because Deepak was saying she was at a “lower level of consciousness.” But for her to say that Deepak was attacking Jesus was the wrong way to respond. Deepak was attacking the nature of truth (which of course we know is Jesus). She would have done better to take a lead from “Red Shirt Guy.”

So here is my reaction to the debate. At the end I will sum up my thoughts about truth, but here are my random thoughts and observations:

“All belief is a cover up for insecurity.” — Deepak Chopra

I did not plan on taking notes, but this is the first thing I wrote down. I am glad “Red Shirt Guy” addresses this later on, because this is an attack on all people of faith.

“If something is real then you don’t need to believe it. You just experience it.” — Deepak Chopra

This is THE ISSUE in the debate for me. I know it was supposed to be about Satan and evil, but this is the issue. What is truth? What is reality? How do we know it? Deepak says that reality is that which we can experience. I agree. But what if we experience something inauthentic? What if two people experience the same thing and interpret it different? How we discern right reality and evil reality?

“The Bible is not the inspired Word of God it is the inspired word of man about God.” – Carlton Pearson

Oh how the mighty have fallen! Pearson’s descent into heresy began with a denial of hell and eternal punishment and it has led him to reject the authority of Scripture all together. Pearson did make a few (emphasis on “few”) good points, but for the most part his comments were wondering, off-topic, etymological, self-involved rambling. I know it sounds like I am hating on Pearson and really I am not. Often the moderator cut Pearson off, because he was headed off into la-la land. I feel so sorry for Pearson.

“Perception is the ultimate reality, but it not necessarily the ultimate truth.” – Carlton Pearson

Yeah, I know where Pearson is coming from. There is a difference between truth and perception. He is wrong to say perception is reality. Perception can be a “perceived” reality, but reality is that which is really real. This goes to the very definition of truth. Truth is that which corresponds with reality. More on truth below.

“Fairytale-like good god and bad god” – Carlton Pearson

The Devil is the “bad god” by the way. Oh and earlier Pearson called the Devil “hairy and horny.” I think he was referring to the caricature of the Devil who has horns, but I did laugh out loud when he said “horny.” My, my, the bishop is off his theological rocker.

Red shirt guy: “My question is for Deepak and the Bishop, You said, ‘All belief is a cover up for insecurity?'”

Red shirt guy: “Do you believe that?

Deepak: “Yes”

Red shirt guy: “Thank you”

Audience laughter

This was the best moment in the debate. Pearson laughed and looked at Deepak. Driscoll smiled. Lobert seemed to miss it. And Deepak tried to explain himself, but he never addressed the implication of Red Shirt Guy’s comment. And don’t miss this, but this is the leverage point in the argument of truth between Christians and pluralists.

Deepak is arguing that “belief” is somehow a more primitive way of knowing. Evolution, he is arguing, has brought us to a higher state of consciousness were we know by experiencing in a way that is consistent with science and philosophy. But here is the deal….DEEPAK’S ARGUMENT IS A BELIEF!

He is using a belief to devalue beliefs. In other words, he is using a belief system to say belief systems are no good. Tim Keller is right, “Every doubt is based on an alternative belief.” (Read Tim Keller’s Reason for God for a fuller explanation of these issues.)

As soon as you define god, you limit god. — Deepak

This is true, but it shouldn’t stop us from exploring God should it? Deepak is no atheist. He contends that there is a high probability of an intelligent being out there. So sure, for finite beings to try to define god we do limit him, but for followers of Christ, we believe Jesus is God and came to reveal to us (in part) who God is.

At one point in the debate a woman question’s Driscoll on how he reconciles the evil of pride with the exclusivity of his position. I don’t have the exact quote, but Driscoll is right to go to the heart of the matter, “But what if it is true.” This whole debate is about truth.

“My experience is more consistent with what we know about biology, evolution, and the laws of nature, in my opinion.” — Deepak

This was his response to “Pony Tail Girl” and it is a sophisticated way of say you are wrong, but in Deepak’s worldview you cannot call anybody wrong, because there is no constant, no fixed point of reality, no frame of reference.

Pony-tail girl: “Why would you come here tonight if not to attack him [Jesus]?”

This was the worst thing she could have said. The only thing worse thing for her to say would have been to say that Deepak’s mom is a prostitute. Antagonistic attacks on non-Christian people will never lead them to Christ. This is a good time to love our enemies. Deepak wasn’t attacking Jesus. He was attacking truth. As I stated above, we know that Jesus is the Truth, and so maybe by inference he was attacking Jesus, but in responding to a pluralistic culture we need to respond to people’s statements, and the worldview behind their statements, and not the inferences we draw from those statements, because like Pony Tail Girl we are then arguing against an idea in our minds that may not be in theirs. She had all the best intentions in the world, bless her heart, but she didn’t help our cause.

“You need these forces [creativity/evolutionary and entropy/destruction] to keep creation going.” — Deepak

Driscoll needed to push the issue with Deepak over why he would call Anne’s story “evil” and more importantly why are these entropy/destructive forces necessary for creation to go on? Maybe he should have asked “How is it both evil and necessary?” Anne had been brutally gang raped and Deepak agreed that this was evil, but he wanted to brush it off as the fault of cultural psychosis. As he described his worldview he said destructive forces are necessary. So does that imply that evil is necessary? Or that Anne needed to be raped and tortured? I wish Driscoll would have pushed this issue. It would have clearly shown the inconsistencies of Deepak’s worldview.

“I don’t trust my mind. I trust my spirit which is beyond all this” – Deepak

Driscoll did a great job in questioning how Deepak believed in the evolutionary process and yet Deepak admits that he doesn’t trust his mind. He trusted his spirit! This was a clear contradiction in Deepak’s form of pluralism. If he doesn’t trust his mind, then why use his mind to study biology, cosmology, and philosophy? Why not just meditate and stop writing books?

CONCLUDING THOUGHTS: This debate was not about Satan. The existence of Satan is what got the debate started. This was a debate about truth. What is there in the world of philosophy, religion, and theology that is true? What is it in those areas that corresponds with reality? For those of us who follow Jesus, we believe that he is the way, the truth, and the life, the only way to God the Father and eternal life. Jesus did speak these words in Aramaic, but when he spoke of “me” or “God” he was not referring to the “circle within the circle” or the great “spirit” in the sky. Deepak’s interpretation is not consistent with First century Judaic thought. It sounded intellectual, but his interpretation of Jesus is not consistent with what we know theologically or linguistically about the first century. What his followers heard him say is “God” and “me.” When Jesus said nobody comes to the Father except through me, the gospel writers wrote the word eimi in Greek. There only way to interpret that is through the very simple meaning “me.” Jesus was simple at this point. It takes a lot of religious and philosophical wrangling to make it more completed than that. For those of us who are Christ followers it is simple:

Jesus is the Truth.

He is our philosophical constant.

He is our moral framework.

He is what corresponds with reality.

He is not our experience of cultural/philosophical influences.

He is really real.

He really lived.

He really died on a Roman cross.

He really was buried in a borrowed tomb.

He really rose up from the dead.

He really sent the Holy Spirit to live in the hearts of those who are his.

He is really coming back.

Mark Driscoll did a great job of reading Scripture as his closing remarks. He read 1 John 5:19-20. I am closing this blog with that text:

We know that we are from God, and the whole world lies in the power of the evil one. And we know that the Son of God has come and has given us understanding, so that we may know him who is true; and we are in him who is true, in his Son Jesus Christ. He is the true God and eternal life. (ESV)

 

A Prophetic Community

I have recently finished reading Prophetic Imagination by Walter Brueggemann, a great little book (151 pages) on the role of Old Testament prophets. I have been reading Brueggemann to supplement my study of the book of Amos for my current teaching series “When God Roars,” a verse-by-verse preaching series through Amos. I have developed a wonderful habit of teaching through a New Testament book, then preaching a topical series, and then preaching through an Old Testament book. Preaching expository (i.e. verse-by-verse) sermons has been extremely beneficial for me and our church. I spent some time this morning in the sermon from Amos 4 entitled “Return to Me” developing themes I have learned from Brueggemann.
Here is the big idea:

God’s desire has always been to form an alternative community of righteousness and justice.

This was the mosaic vision. Moses led God’s people out of Egypt and received the torah in order to form an alternative community. God wanted to form a community as a reflection of his own nature. God is a holy community of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

God is a community builder :

• He built a family community (Abraham – Isaac – Jacob)
• He built a national community (Israel)
• He built a multi-ethnic community (the Church: Jews and Gentiles)

God wanted his community to be an alternative community, a community called out by God to be different. This is also a reflection of God’s nature. He is holy (separate, different, other) and he wants his alternative community to be alternative, utterly different than the pagan nations of the earth.

This alternative community is a community of righteousness and justice, where God’s people live in right relationship with God (righteousness) and in right relationship with other people (justice). The ultimate of God’s community-building enterprise was completed in Jesus. There is none righteous, no not one (Romans 3). We are completely helpless and hopeless within ourselves. The good news (gospel) of Jesus is that we are sinners. We are unrighteous, unholy, evil, bad, and morally bankrupt. Well that is the first part of the good news. The completion of the good news is that Jesus came to earth. He lived a perfect life. He died, was buried, and was risen from the death in order to make us righteous (2 Corinthians 5:21).

The role of prophets, according to Brueggemann is to form and reform this kind of community by both criticizing the status quo and energizing God’s people to reimage new kind of future, a hopeful future.

Brueggemann writes: “It is the vocation of the prophet to keep alive the ministry of imagination, to keep on conjuring and proposing futures alternative to the single one the king wants to urge as the only thinkable one” (40). Solomon’s empire-building vision destroyed the mosaic vision of the alternative community. Solomon build an empire like the empires of the pagan nations. This “royal consciousness” keeps God’s people distracted for God’s desire for the alternative community.

Prophets are critical in that they question the status quo both in the greater culture and within God’s community of faith. They do poke and prod the numbness of the empire (Bruegemann’s term for devotion to the empire is “royal consciousness.”) with a critical voice. Amos called the women of Samaria “cows of Bashan” (Amos 4:1). They do this in order to call God’s people to question the status quo.

Prophets are predictive, but their predictive ministry is designed to forecast a better future, one built on righteousness and justice. Their purpose is to energize God’s people by giving them a future filled with the newness of God.

God is still forming and reforming a community (or communities) of faith around the world. We would be well served if we remain open to God’s prophetic voices. I believe Brueggemann is one of those voices.

 

Great theological resources

So what are you listening to these days? This is a common question, right? We like to know what other people are listening to. What’s in your CD player? What’s on your playlist? What’s on your ipod? For me, I have been listening to Bob Dylan, Chris Tomlin, and Timothy Tennant. You probably know the first two guys, but who is Timothy Tennant? Is he the new lead singer for the Stone Temple Pilots? Not exactly. Timmy is a missions professor at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. I have been listening to his lecture series: Introduction to Islam.

I have stumbled across two wonderful places to get quality, theological teaching from biblically conservative guys who know there stuff. And let’s face it, it is easier and quicker to listen to their lectures than to read their books or obscure journal entries. These are great theological resources…it is the same stuff you would get by attending a seminary class and it is free. Here are the two links:

Biblicaltraining.org
This site is a hard to navigate, but once you register, you can download MP3s on a variety of theological topics. I have listened to one lecture by Bruce Ware and I will eventually download his whole Systematic Theology course. This is also where I got Tennant’s lectures on Islam.

Covenant Worldwide
This is provided by Covenant Seminary in St. Louis. Holy cow, there is a ton of great stuff here. It is easier to navigate and allows you to download lectures as a podcast. God bless those Presbyterians! God bless iTunes!

 

Cyprian Norwid

In preparing for a week full of activity (notice I did not use the word b*sy, which I have agreed to remove from my vocabulary when used with the first person “I am…”), I have found myself mulling over a statement from Polish poet, Cyprian Norwid. (I was reading Relevant Magazine and read this quote in an article by Craig Borlase…thanks Craig.) Norwid was born in Poland and traveled through out Europe before immigrating to the US in 1853. Pope John Paul II called Norwid “one of Christian Europe’s greatest poets and thinkers,” noting that Norwid’s thinking and writing “reinforced our hope in God” during the Nazi occupation of Poland. Nowrid died in poverty and obscurity, but currently there seems to be a revival of his work. Norwid’s statement is in the context of the three essential requirements for a fulfilling life. Norwid answers:

something to live on, something to live for and something to die for. The lack of one of these attributes results in drama. The lack of two results in tragedy.

My tendency would be to over-analysize this statement with fruitless questions like… “What does he mean by that….what does he mean here…etc.” I think it is better left unexamined. Instead, I want these words to roll around in my head in more of meditative form….something to live on, something to live for, something to die for… Is this the kind of life that I am living? This life/death kind of living is fulfilling because it is transcendent…it takes us beyond ourselves. Am I ready for that challenge? I want to go beyond myself, but I feel the kingdom of self pulling me back in…God help me! Those who inspire me and form our heros in film and literature are those who go beyond…who have found something worth living on, living for and dying for. I don’t want my life to be a tragedy…and I don’t want no drama.