DISCLAIMER: Pastor Scott DID NOT ask me to write this — I got the idea for it before I read his blog entry, and I wrote most of it before hearing his sermon on 12/16.

I just read a fascinating article about what happens when relatively like-minded people get together (go here if you’d like to read it). Someone took a bunch of people who didn’t know one another and grouped them together according to whether they identified themselves as conservative or liberal. Before they were put into their groups, the participants each completed a short anomymous survey identifying their positions on a number of issues, like taxes, civil unions, climate change, and the like. The folks were then placed in their groups and encouraged to discuss the issues. After fifteen minutes, everyone repeated the anonymous survey. The result of the fifteen minutes of hanging out with like-minded folks was that nearly everyone became more extreme in their views. Those who opposed civil unions opposed them all the more, those who support action to reduce climate change became more strident in their support, and the like.

The point of the article was to indicate that in the early 21st century, it’s very easy to find your own niche group and to find folks who will draw you to the extremes. It’s almost impossible to find support for the middle position. This got me thinking about how this phenomenon ought to work in Lamb of God. I’m not really talking about political or social views, extreme and otherwise, although it seems to me that the input of our brothers and sisters ought to have a significant impact on how we form our own opinions.

But there’s one thing about which we should be extremists, and that’s the area in which we should be encouraging extremism in one another: we should be extremely, insanely, incredibly in love with Jesus and His people, and we should be extremists about furthering the Kingdom of God, whether we do so though evangelism, or prayer, or good works, or whatever the Lord has given us to do.

I’d like to say that I found this site while researching some profound theological or scientific truths, but I can’t — a friend sent it to me. In keeping with the season, it’s THE CAVALCADE OF BAD NATIVITIES!!

http://www.goingjesus.com/cavalcade1.shtml

And check out this YouTube video of Straight No Chaser singing(?) The Twelve Days of Christmas:

What is Pascal’s Wager? It’s an argument for belief in God based on the possible benefits of such belief rather than trying to prove whether or not God exists. Here is Pascal’s simplest statement of the argument:

“God is, or He is not.” But to which side shall we incline? Reason can decide nothing here. There is an infinite chaos which separated us. A game is being played at the extremity of this infinite distance where heads or tails will turn up… Which will you choose then? Let us see. Since you must choose, let us see which interests you least. You have two things to lose, the true and the good; and two things to stake, your reason and your will, your knowledge and your happiness; and your nature has two things to shun, error and misery. Your reason is no more shocked in choosing one rather than the other, since you must of necessity choose… But your happiness? Let us weigh the gain and the loss in wagering that God is… If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation that He is.

So to give a quick summary: 1. You bet that God exists. If you’re wrong, you’ve lost nothing. If you’re right, you’ve gained eternal joy. 2. You bet that God doesn’t exist. If you’re wrong, you’ve gained eternal misery. If you’re right, you’ve neither gained nor lost. So the better choice is to bet that God exists. Read the rest of this entry »

Terry Mattingly is a religion columnist with the Scripps Howard News Service — his column “On Religion” appears in about 350 American newpapers. He has also taught journalism at several major Christian colleges and universities. I find that he always has something interesting to say. This week’s column, which is concerned with charitable giving seems particularly appropriate in light of one the Black Dwarf’s recent posts:

http://www.lambofgodnj.org/blogs/black-dwarf/grieving-the-spirit-of-revival-by-gd-watson-1845-1924/

It seems to me that failure to provide adequate financial support falls under at least three of the eight “things that grieve the Holy Spirit and hinder Him in revivals”. Also, it’s clear from our brother Vinny’s recent report on the state of our building that availability of financial resources — ours or those of the Diocese — will play a major role in maintaining St. Marks in a usable state. Thus, I commend to your prayerful consideration this week’s On Relighion column: http://tmatt.gospelcom.net/column/2007/11/21/.

Please understand that I’m not accusing Lamb of God of failure in this area — we probably do better than most congregations. It’s just that we occasionally need a nudge in the right direction…

It’s comparatively easy to take shots at public figures or famous folks from the past. But if we’re going to talk about our day-to-day life, I think we can all agree that the sin that we experience the most in our own. 2 Samuel 11 and 12 is instructive here. Like David, we are seldom aware of our sin until someone else points it out to us, and usually we’re not very interested in hearing the news that there is a lot of darkness yet in our hearts, even though we know that it’s true.

Consider this: the primary means through which God speaks to us are the Bible, the preaching and teaching of the word, and the wise, biblically-informed counsel of our brothers and sisters. Most of us understand how the first two work, but the last of these may be a challenge to us. We have to learn how to give and receive correction from one another. The scriptures are explicit: we are repeatedly instructed to give correction, particularly in cases when we are the offended party. And Proverbs is loaded with stuff on the importance of receiving correction. So if your brother or sister comes up to you and points out to you an area of your life that needs attention and reformation, you are obligated to carefully consider what he or she says, whether or not you think that they’re right, and especially if the person correcting you is an Elder or similarly mature person in the congregation. In closing, remember Proverbs 12:1: Whoever loves discipline loves knowledge, but he who hates reproof is stupid. stupid! STUPID!!

I’ve been encouraged by a couple of folks to write on some topics. One wants me to talk about witnessing to Jewish friends, and another has encouraged me to say something really noisy and radical — to stir things up a bit, so to speak. So here’s my effort to satisfy both requests.

Jewish folks will often respond to witnessing attempts by saying that Christians have persecuted their people practically forever, and asking why they would want to join the ranks of their oppressors. It’s a valid question, and shouldn’t be blown off. Sometimes the conversation will go something like this:

Jew: Christians killed six million of us in the Holocaust [Jewish folks often don't distinguish between Christian and non-Christian Gentiles].

Christian: Those were Nazis, not Christians. Real Christians wouldn’t do something like that.

Jew: Oh yeah? What about the Catholic kids in my neighborhood who used to beat me up, calling me “Christ Killer”?

Christian: They were ignorant kids — you can’t generalize to all Christians based on the behavior of kids!

Jew: And their parents egged them on!

Christian: OK, so their parents were ignorant idiots too.

Jew: And what about the Inquisition? When we wouldn’t convert, we were murdered in the name of Christ. When we tried to escape, we were chased and persecuted everywhere we went, even to the New World!

Christian: But they were Catholics! They weren’t even necessarily Christians!

Jew: Luther wasn’t Catholic. He hated us too. In fact, the Nazis used his anti-semitic comments to justify what they did.

…and the conversation just keeps on deteriorating.

Here’s the thing, and this applies to pretty much any witnessing experience: Our brothers and sisters sin and act like jerks. Sometimes it’s just the ordinary folks who get caught while doing wrong — your neighbors or coworkers, for example. And sometimes it’s the big names, like major church or political leaders. Regardless, these sinners are still our brothers and sisters and we have to relate to them as such. In the context of witnessing to those whom our brothers and sisters have offended, we need to admit their sin and own them as family members — otherwise we end up constantly setting the bar higher and higher as to who is really a Christian. And the reality is this: How do you, or I, or anyone other than God know who is or isn’t a believer?

I could easily list a number of fairly well known folks whose historical or recent actions have made Christians look pretty bad, but what the heck — let’s go for the big names. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been thinking for quite some time about how we as Christians should relate to political issues. One thing that I’d like to see discussed has to do with the diversity of our politics: If we’re all starting from the same Bible, why do we have such different political views? It seems to me that we often let our background rather than the scriptures govern our views about such matters. With few exceptions, we seem to be as likely to seek scriptural backing for our political views as we are to allow those views to be formed by scripture. Liberals stay liberal, and conservatives stay conservative.

Recently, I’ve been considering some verses in Jeremiah 29, a passage familiar to most of us, I would think:

Thus says the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel, to all the exiles whom I have sent into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon: Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat their produce. Take wives and have sons and daughters; take wives for your sons, and give your daughters in marriage, that they may bear sons and daughters; multiply there, and do not decrease. But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the LORD on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare.

Jeremiah’s words to the exiles of Jerusalem apply to us as well: we are strangers and sojourners in this land, with our true citizenship in God’s heavenly Kingdom. Nevertheless, we are to live our lives as usual and do the normal things that people do: live, marry, have children, and participate in the life of the land. But God gives us a set of additional responsibilities: “seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the LORD on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare.” I did a bit of checking, and found that the word translated as “welfare” is the Hebrew word “shalom”, usually translated as “peace”. Thus, our engagement in the political process has a goal: the shalom of the town, state, and nation in which we find ourselves. And while this doesn’t necessarily resolve the conservative/liberal/democrat/republican baggage that we bring with us when we come to the Lord, it at least tells us what ought to be seeking. It seems to me that we should at least have a common definition of the welfare or shalom that we seek on behalf of where we live, even though the means through which we seek it may differ according to our respective politics.

Many of you know that I spend a week or two out of every year hiking a section of the Appalachian Trail (AT), a 2,100-mile footpath from Springer Mountain in northern Georgia to Mount Katahdin in central Maine. I’ve been doing this for about seven years now (a bit more than 900 miles), and I thought I’d post a few reflections on what the experience is like.

It’s somewhat demanding physically, but not terribly so. Yes, it helps to be in decent shape when you start (I hike a couple weekends every month throughout the year), but it’s not essential. Lots of folks start hiking the AT with no experience whatsoever — it just takes them a bit longer to get their “hiker legs”. I think that the greatest challenge is psychological — you have to be prepared to do pretty much the same thing every day: Get up at dawn, eat, pack up your stuff, and walk until the next campsite, set up camp, eat, go to sleep at dusk. And you repeat this almost every day, regardless of the conditions. Raining? Keep hiking. 95F and 85% humidity? Keep hiking. Muscles and joints yelling at you? Keep hiking. Boring section of trail with no views? Keep hiking. And most of the time you’re not even looking at the views or natural beauty anyway: you have to keep your eyes focused on the path so that you won’t stumble over a tree root and fall on your face, which I’ve done many times. The sameness can get pretty dull, so it takes some mental discipline to keep going.

But one of the things that I’ve discovered over the years is that my spiritual life improves a whole lot while I’m hiking. Not that I pray more — it’s just that it’s better. Since I spend most of my days going up and down mountains, I usually pray through several of the Psalms of Ascents (Ps. 120 – 134) every night. I start and finish each day with a recitation of the Sh’ma Yisrael (Deut. 6:4-10). And as I’m hiking — dodging tree roots, hopping rocks, and occasionally looking around to see what there is to see — I pray through a relatively short list of intercessions (basic personal, family, and church needs). So as you can see, there’s nothing special about what I’m doing, and I can assure you that I’m not having any profound spiritual experiences or anything like that. I think that the improvement that I experience in my spiritual life has mostly to do with the extended solitude. Even though I occasionally interact with other hikers over the course of the days (especially at the campsites, where there can sometimes be 10 or 15 folks in for the night), for the most part it’s just me, God, and the trail.

So consider this post a plug for solitude, particularly extended solitude. And yes, I recognize that not all of us can pull it off — for many of us the demands our current state of life may make such solitude an unaffordable luxury. But states of life don’t last forever — if at some point your schedule permits, give it a shot.

“God is slick, but He ain’t mean.”
– A. Einstein

When asked what he meant, Einstein replied:

“Nature hides her secret because of her essential loftiness, but not by means of ruse.”

Our ability to “do science” — to explore the physical universe, determine how it is organized, and figure out why things happen the way they do — is dependent on the uniformity of creation. In other words, if you do something in a particular time and place and get a particular result, you can count on the same thing happening in other times and places, provided that all other conditions are the same. Scientists call this concept reproducibility, and it’s impossible to do science without it.

So what’s this got to do with theism and intelligent design? Consider what I stated in my last post about the doctrine of Creation:

“God . . . continually upholds [His creation]: every particle of matter, every quantum of energy, and every physical law governing how matter and energy interact, all of these continue to exist because God holds them in His thought.”

The God in whom we believe is an orderly, rational, consistent being. That’s one of the reason why the Bible encourages us to trust in Him. And if God is orderly, rational and consistent, then the Creation, which He continually upholds in His mind, is as orderly and rational as He is. In fact, it works both ways: the Bible teaches us that God reveals Himself in nature (Ps. 19:1ff; Rom. 1:20); thus, the order and rationality of creation teach us that the Creator Himself is orderly and rational.

The scientists of the Renaissance and Enlightenment — folks like Newton, Copernicus, da Vinci, and others — viewed the world through the lens of theism. Regardless of whether or not they were Christians, they believed in a Creator God, and they considered their “natural philosophy,” their science, to be a window into the mind of God. They felt that the only reason why they could do science, why they could expect to find a set of orderly laws governing the behavior of the natural world was that the Creator Himself was orderly and rational. Some historians of science have argued that the scientific method could not have come into existence apart from the Judeo-Christian world view. And this way of looking at things is so integral to science that scientists who weren’t even theists, let alone believers, used the language of theism to express their belief in an orderly universe. Hence the opening quotes — Einstein believed in nature, not God; if anything, he was an agnostic. Nevertheless, he had to resort to the language of theism to express his belief in the orderliness of the universe.

More recently many (possibly most) scientists and science popularizers have rejected the theism of their scientific forebears and thoroughly bought into an arrogant, atheistic materialism. And many Christians have allowed their understanding of science to become distorted. Some have accepted a kind of dualism, acknowledging that God created the universe and occasionally tweaks things in response to prayer, but otherwise has little to do with the natural world, being more concerned with the spiritual. Others constantly seek scientific evidence for creation when there’s no reason why there would be any — it’s the fact the universe exists at all that argues for the existence of a Creator. As Christians living in the early 21st century, we need to renew our faith in God as the rational Creator and Sustainer or the universe, a faith that gives us (together with other theists) a rational basis for doing science and enables us to better behold the glory of God in the magnificence of His creation.

As promised, some comments on Intelligent Design and the nature of science. Of necessity, I’ll occasionally be using the technical language of science, philosophy, and theology, but I’ll try to define the more obscure terms as I use them.

Christians and indeed all theists believe in the doctrine of ex nihilo creation: God didn’t use any starting materials when He made the universe. God is separate from His creation, but He continually upholds it: every particle of matter, every quantum of energy, and every physical law governing how matter and energy interact, all of these continue to exist because God holds them in His thought. This is pretty basic stuff, and pretty much all believers who have given any thought to these matters will say, “Yeah, sure — of course we believe that.” Read the rest of this entry »