Posts filed under ‘Current Trends’
The Problem With The New York Times’ God Problem
God the Father by Cima da Conegliano, c. 1515
The polemical can sometimes become the enemy of the thoughtful. This seems to be what has happened in an opinion piece penned by Peter Atterton for The New York Times titled, “A God Problem.”
Mr. Atterton is a professor of philosophy at San Diego State University who spends his piece trotting out well-worn and, if I may be frank, tired arguments against the logical integrity of Theism. He begins with this classic:
Can God create a stone that cannot be lifted? If God can create such a stone, then He is not all powerful, since He Himself cannot lift it. On the other hand, if He cannot create a stone that cannot be lifted, then He is not all powerful, since He cannot create the unliftable stone. Either way, God is not all powerful.
This is popularly known as the “omnipotence paradox.” God either cannot create an unliftable stone or He can create an unliftable stone, but then He cannot lift it. Either way, there is something God cannot do, which, the argument goes, means His omnipotence is rendered impotent. C.S. Lewis’ classic rejoinder to this paradox remains the most cogent:
God’s omnipotence means power to do all that is intrinsically possible, not to do the intrinsically impossible. You may attribute miracles to Him, but not nonsense. This is no limit to His power. If you choose to say, ‘God can give a creature free will and at the same time withhold free will from it,’ you have not succeeded in saying anything about God: meaningless combinations of words do not suddenly acquire meaning simply because we prefix to them the two other words, ‘God can’ … Nonsense remains nonsense even when we talk it about God.
Lewis’ position is the position the Bible itself takes when speaking of God. Logically, there are some things Scripture says God cannot do – not because He lacks power, but simply because to pose even their possibility is to traffic in utter nonsense. The apostle Paul, for instance, writes, “If we are faithless, God remains faithful, for He cannot disown Himself” (2 Timothy 2:13). In other words, God cannot not be God. He also cannot create liftable unliftable stones – again, not because He lacks power, but because liftable unliftable stones aren’t about exercising power over some theoretical state of nature. They’re about the law of noncontradiction. And to try to break the law of noncontradiction doesn’t mean you have unlimited power. It just means you’re incoherent and incompetent. And God is neither. To insist that God use His power to perform senseless and silly acts so that we may be properly impressed seems to be worthy of the kind of rebuke Jesus once gave to the religious leaders who demanded from Him a powerful sign: “A wicked and adulterous generation asks for a sign” (Matthew 12:39)!
Ultimately, the omnipotence paradox strips God’s power of any purpose by demanding a brute cracking of an irrational and useless quandary. And to have power without purpose only results in disaster. For instance, uncontrolled explosions are powerful, but they are also, paradoxically, powerless, because they cannot exercise any ordered power over their chaotic power. Omnipotence requires that there is power over uncontrolled power that directs and contains it toward generative ends. This is how God’s power is classically conceived. Just look at the creation story. God’s power needs purpose to be omnipotence, which is precisely what God’s power has, and precisely what the omnipotence paradox does not care to address.
For his second objection against God, Mr. Atterton turns to the problem of evil:
Can God create a world in which evil does not exist? This does appear to be logically possible. Presumably God could have created such a world without contradiction. It evidently would be a world very different from the one we currently inhabit, but a possible world all the same. Indeed, if God is morally perfect, it is difficult to see why He wouldn’t have created such a world. So why didn’t He?
According to the Bible, God did create a world where evil did not exist. It was called Eden. And God will re-create a world where evil will not exist. It will be called the New Jerusalem. As for the evil that Adam and Eve brought into the world, this much is sure: God is more than up to the task of dealing with the evil that they, and we, have welcomed. He has conquered and is conquering it in Christ.
With this being said, a common objection remains: Why did and does God allow evil to remain in this time – in our time? Or, to take the objection back to evil’s initial entry into creation: Why would God allow for the possibility of evil by putting a tree in the center of Eden if He knew Adam and Eve were going to eat from it and bring sin into the world? This objection, however, misses the true locus of evil. The true locus of evil was not the tree. It was Adam and Eve, who wanted to usurp God’s authority. They were tempted not by a tree, but by a futile aspiration: “You can be like God, knowing good and evil” (Genesis 3:5). If Adam and Eve wouldn’t have had a tree around to use to try to usurp God’s prerogative, they almost assuredly would have tried to use something else. The tree was only an incidental means for them to indulge the evil pride they harbored in their hearts. If God wanted to create a world where evil most assuredly would never exist, then, He would have had to create a world without us.
Thus, I’m not quite sure what there’s to object to here. The story of evil’s entrance into creation doesn’t sound like the story of a feckless God who can’t get things right. It sounds like the story of a loving God who willingly sacrifices to make right the things He already knows we will get wrong even before He puts us here. God decides from eternity that we are worth His Son’s suffering.
The final objection to God leveled by Mr. Atterton has to do with God’s omniscience:
If God knows all there is to know, then He knows at least as much as we know. But if He knows what we know, then this would appear to detract from His perfection. Why?
There are some things that we know that, if they were also known to God, would automatically make Him a sinner, which of course is in contradiction with the concept of God. As the late American philosopher Michael Martin has already pointed out, if God knows all that is knowable, then God must know things that we do, like lust and envy. But one cannot know lust and envy unless one has experienced them. But to have had feelings of lust and envy is to have sinned, in which case God cannot be morally perfect.
This is the weakest of Mr. Atterton’s three objections. One can have knowledge without experience. I know about murder even though I have never taken a knife or gun to someone. God can know about lust and envy even if He has not lusted and envied. The preacher of Hebrews explains well how God can know sin and yet not commit sin as he describes Jesus’ struggles under temptation: “We do not have a high priest who is unable to empathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are – yet He did not sin” (Hebrews 4:15). Jesus was confronted with every sinful temptation, so He knows what sin is, but He also refused to swim to sin’s siren songs. The difference, then, is not in what He knows and we know. The difference is in how He responds to what He knows and how we respond to what we know.
One additional point is in order. Though I believe Mr. Atterton’s assertion that one cannot know certain things “unless one has experienced them” is questionable, it can nevertheless be addressed on its own terms by Christianity. On the cross, Christians believe that every sin was laid upon Christ, who thereby became sin for us. In other words, Christ, on the cross, became the chief of sinners, suffering the penalty that every sinner deserved, while, in exchange, giving us the righteous life that only He could live (see 2 Corinthians 5:21). In this way, then, Christ has experienced every sin on the cross because He has borne every sin on the cross. Thus, even according to Mr. Atterton’s own rules for knowing, in Christ, God can know everything through Christ, including every sin.
I should conclude with a confession about a hunch. I am a little suspicious whether or not this 1,140-word opinion piece in The New York Times decrying faith in God as illogical was written in, ahem, good faith. This piece and its arguments feel a little too meandering and scattershot and seem a little too clickbait-y to be serious. Nevertheless, this is a piece that has gained a lot of traction and talk. I’m not sure that the traction and talk, rather than the arguments, weren’t the point.
Whatever the case, Theism has certainly seen more compelling and interesting interlocutions than this piece. God, blessedly, is still safely on His throne.
Wise Decisions in a Crisis
It’s been a tragic couple of weeks in aviation. Following the crash of Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 two weeks ago, similarities began to emerge between this crash and the crash of Lion Air Flight 610 last October. Both planes went down only minutes after takeoff. Both crashes involved sudden changes in altitude with the planes crashing at a nose down angle. And both tragedies involved Boeing 727 Max 8 aircrafts.
An investigation by The Dallas Morning News uncovered five complaints, filed by domestic pilots, about problems with a new software system in the Max 8, known as MCAS. The system is supposed to force the nose of the plane downward if needed to avoid a stall. But erroneous data from a sensor might have forced the noses of the recently doomed flights down into their crashes.
It is also being reported that Boeing had been heavily involved with the federal certification process for the Max 8 in 2012. Boeing employees were able to help FAA officials in certifying the aircrafts for flight, and, according to The New York Times, senior FAA officials weren’t even aware of the new MCAS system. The FBI has now joined an investigation into the certification process as people wonder whether having a manufacturer play such a large role in the safety certifications of its own products presents an inherent conflict of interests.
With so many questions out there, people are scrambling for answers. Why didn’t the FAA ground the Max 8 aircrafts sooner? The FAA didn’t ground the Max 8s in the U.S. until days after nations like Canada, Australia, and the whole European Union grounded theirs. Why weren’t pilot complaints made months before heeded? Why didn’t pilots initially receive any specialized training on the MCAS system? And why, ultimately, did Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 crash? There are still no firm answers.
In a crisis like this, decision making can be difficult. Of course, safety concerns are paramount. But investigators don’t even know for sure whether there is a broad based safety concern. When one combines a lack of information about the recent Max 8 crashes with the inevitable confusion and suspicion that ensues when planes are grounded and investigations are launched, air carriers, aircraft manufacturers, and government regulators are left with no particularly appealing options.
Scripture is clear that, whether it’s with crisis over planes or personal problems with piety, people are not particularly skilled at making wise decisions that involve high stakes. Before following Him, Jesus invites people to carefully consider the cost of being His disciple:
Suppose one of you wants to build a tower. Won’t you first sit down and estimate the cost to see if you have enough money to complete it? For if you lay the foundation and are not able to finish it, everyone who sees it will ridicule you, saying, “This person began to build and wasn’t able to finish.” Or suppose a king is about to go to war against another king. Won’t he first sit down and consider whether he is able with ten thousand men to oppose the one coming against him with twenty thousand? If he is not able, he will send a delegation while the other is still a long way off and will ask for terms of peace. In the same way, those of you who do not give up everything you have cannot be My disciples. (Luke 14:28-33)
Jesus’ final line is jarring. What will following Jesus cost? Everything. And some people, after doing a cost-benefit analysis, find the cost unbearably high. Just consider the rich young man who, after Jesus invites him to “sell everything you have and give to the poor, and…then come, follow Me,” becomes crestfallen and walks “away sad, because he had great wealth” (Mark 10:21-22). The rich man thought the cost of following Jesus was too steep. Selling everything he had was too risky. So he chose to stay his course. And he was sorely mistaken to do so.
One of the reasons we make poor choices is because most of us tend to have a bias toward preservation over and against modification. The rich man did not want to modify his spending habits. The FAA, Boeing, and major airlines did not necessarily want to modify how they certify aircraft and how they train pilots. But so often, our bias towards preservation – maintaining the status quo – only makes matters worse.
Risk taking is a part of decision making. And sometimes, a decision that initially looks riskier – like the grounding of a bunch of planes and the launching of a thorough investigation into the airworthiness of these planes – is the decision that winds up being safer.
Thankfully, for most of us, these past couple of weeks did not involve decisions with stakes so high. But this does not mean we should not consider the costs of the choices that are laid before us. And, as the FAA and Boeing are learning, if our first decisions turn out not to be our best decisions, we need to be humble enough to make the right decisions. You’ll be better because of it. And the people around you will thank you for it.
Terror Strikes New Zealand
Credit: RTE News
“The wages of sin is death,” the apostle Paul writes in Romans 6:23. These words were horrifyingly instantiated this past Friday when a terrorist gunman opened fire on two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, killing 50. The crime was, in every way, monstrous. Minutes before he went on his rampage, he emailed top government officials a rambling and incoherent manifesto, outlining his ardent white nationalistic beliefs. He then strapped on a helmet camera so he could livestream his attack on social media. Finally, he shot many worshipers at these mosques, which included several children, at point blank range as they cowered in corners.
If anyone ever doubted the dastardly death that sin – including philosophical sin like white nationalism – can bring, now would be the time to become a true believer in the devastations of depravity.
Near the end of the book of Genesis, we read of a man named Jacob and his twelve sons, the favorite of whom is Joseph. Joseph’s brothers, Genesis 37:4 says, “hated him” because of his status as his father’s favorite son. Their hatred eventually spawned a plot among the brothers to kill their kinsman. And they would have, were it not for a last-second intercession by one of the brothers, Judah, who decided it would be more financially advantageous if, instead of killing Joseph, they sold him into slavery (Genesis 37:26-27).
Hatred is an acid that eats up the soul. This is why the Bible’s consistent and continuous call is to love – and not just to love those who are like us. The Bible’s consistent and continuous call is to love those who are very different from us and even hate us. As Jesus puts it:
Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you … If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? And if you greet only your own people, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that? (Matthew 5:44, 46-47)
White nationalism explicitly tramples on Jesus’ command. It not only fails to love its enemies, it actually creates enemies where there need be none and becomes an enemy to those who do not fit its arbitrarily contrived ethnic and philosophical strictures. It trades the foundational and universal sanctity of life for a hackneyed and exclusionary solidarity of race.
Blessedly, love did manage to rise up and break through when hatred was spraying a hail of bullets into two mosques in Christchurch. 48-year-old Abdul Aziz was at the second of the mosques. He was there with his four children to pray. When the terrorist began firing in the parking lot of the mosque, rather than running away, Mr. Aziz ran into the lot with the only thing he could find – a credit card machine. After firing off many rounds, the terrorist returned to his vehicle to grab a second weapon, and Mr. Aziz hurled the credit card machine at him. The terrorist then fired off another series of rounds at Mr. Aziz, who managed to protect himself by ducking between cars. When the terrorist returned to his vehicle yet again to grab yet another weapon, Mr. Aziz found one of the guns he had dropped and, after realizing it was empty, threw it at the windshield of the terrorist’s car. The windshield shattered. The terrorist was spooked. He sped off. And many lives were saved.
Mr. Aziz explained, in an interview with The New York Times, “I was prepared to give my life to save another life.” That’s love. And it stopped hate dead when hate was trying to speed death.
Christianity teaches that there was another man – a perfect man, who was also God – who was prepared to give His life to save other lives. His name was Jesus. And He not only was prepared to die. He did die. And He not only saved lives by His death. He bought for us eternal life with His death.
“The wages of sin is death,” the apostle Paul writes in Romans 6:23. But he continues: “But the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.” In Jesus’ death, love killed hate. May this be our confidence and our conviction as we mourn the tragic losses in Christchurch.
Venezuela’s Humanitarian Crisis
Credit: Wikipedia
Venezuela is in crisis. Nicolás Maduro, the nation’s president, stands accused of all sorts of heinous crimes against humanity. Luis Almagro, writing for the Washington Post, exposes some gruesome examples, including:
…subjecting opposition demonstrators such as Echenagusia Guzmán to electric shocks, beating them with nightsticks, kicks and fists and burning them with cigarettes. And [the Maduro regime will] continue to douse young men such as 18-year-old Marco Cello with gasoline, threatening to burn him, or fracture the skull of others such as Jorge León, beating him with rifle butts and helmets.
This is disgusting. But it is also only just the beginning. Mr. Maduro’s government stands accused of murdering some 8,290 people between 2015 and 2017. His penchant for corrupt governance has turned what was one of Latin America’s richest countries into an economic and humanitarian disaster.
Recently, however, the heat has been turned up on Mr. Maduro. Opposition leader Juan Guaidó is gaining political traction among the Venezuelan people and is now recognized as the interim president of Venezuela by the U.S. Still, Mr. Guaidó’s path to power is anything but certain. When the U.S. attempted to send some much needed aid to this desperately impoverished country, Venezuela’s neighbor, Colombia, stepped in to prevent it from reaching its desired destination, fearing a messy clash at the border between supporters of Mr. Guaidó, who were delivering the aid, and supporters of Mr. Maduro, who oppose all U.S. intervention.
In these types of situations, there are never any perfect – or, many times, even great – options. Unfortunately, this reality is often used as a justification for a failure to act against morally abhorrent realities in the name of a cynical realpolitik.
Genocide and starvation are simply not acceptable status quos – not only because they destabilize whole regions by creating floods of refugees, but because genocide and starvation are objectively and grossly immoral. Period.
Yes, other nations must think and carefully strategize before attempting to exert influence in a situation like Venezuela’s. But thinking cannot become a conveniently indefinite buffer against acting. Something has to change. Lives are at stake.
For us in the general public, perhaps the first step is simply paying attention. Our news cycles are dominated by domestic affairs – soap operatic machinations of a deeply divided Washington D.C. Special counsels, special investigations, salacious testimonies, presidential tweets, executive orders, and border walls fill our headlines. International crises often register only as a blip on our consciences, if at all. But they should and they must.
In Venezuela, people are needlessly dying. And as Christians, if there’s anything we should want to stand up to, it’s death.
A Vote Splits the United Methodist Church
In a world where views on human sexuality serve as wedges the drive deep disunity, the United Methodist Church voted last week in a special conference to retain its practice of not ordaining practicing homosexuals into ministry, according to the stance outlined in its Book of Discipline:
The practice of homosexuality is incompatible with Christian teaching. Therefore self-avowed practicing homosexuals are not to be certified as candidates, ordained as ministers, or appointed to serve in the United Methodist Church.
The UMC is almost certainly headed for a split. The vote was close: 53 percent to 47 percent were in favor of not ordaining practicing homosexuals. What is especially interesting is from where many of these more traditional votes came. The New York Times reports:
While membership has steadily declined in the United States over the past 25 years – a trend that is true for most mainline Protestant denominations – it has been growing in Africa. About 30 percent of the church’s members are now from African nations, which typically have conservative Christian views; in many of them, homosexuality is a crime.
What Methodists believe in the progressive West turns out to be very different from what Methodists believe in the African South.
In one sense, those who reject a traditional and, I would argue, orthodox view of human sexuality are stuck with a Gordian knot that is not easily cut. On the one hand, anything less than a full endorsement of all the causes célèbres of the LGBTQ movement is anathema in many progressive circles. On the other hand, the same progressive circles that demand an affirmation of all kinds of human sexualities also decry a Western cultural imperialism that seeks hegemony over other cultures that think and act differently. But it is difficult to see the reactions of many progressives within the UMC as anything other than a soft form of the very imperialism these progressives claim to reject. Take, for instance, the response of Will Willimon, a longtime prominent voice in Methodism, to the vote:
The traditionalists did a bang-up job of political organizing and counting the votes. The progressives were all busy talking about unity and community and listening and loving. The conservatives were on the floor getting the votes.
Willimon’s inference seems to be that traditionalists played politics cynically while progressives loved selflessly. I’m not sure this accusation adequately captures the truth of this debate – or this vote.
Those who claim Christ’s name are called to love, care for, listen to, defend, and invite in those who are LGBTQ while also upholding certain guidelines and guards around human sexuality. The only way to cut the Gordian knots of competing cultures is to look beyond these cultures to the One who loves all people from every culture.
As a Christian, I uphold a traditional – and, I would argue, biblical – sexual ethic because I have this hunch that the culture and the age in which I live does not always know what’s best for it. There are truths that are bigger than what we can see or know right now that stretch across space and through time. The Christian sexual ethic extends beyond my zip code, my state, and my nation. It also extends beyond my time. It was around before me. And it will continue on after me. Thus, I am called by Scripture to humbly submit myself to this ethic while also loving those who vehemently disagree with this ethic. After all, love is a really important Christian ethic, too.
So, instead of choosing the ethic of sexual restraint or the ethic of reckless love, I think I’ll keep both. For the Church needs both as it lives under the name of the One who displayed both.
The Case of Jussie Smollett
Credit: Wikipedia
An affirmation of the inherent dignity of humanity is a bedrock in any functioning society. This is why our nation’s founders unapologetically argued, “All men are created equal.” This is why Scripture – from front to back, from creation to restoration – celebrates and upholds the value of every life. People are created, Scripture says, “in God’s image” (Genesis 1:27) and are “fearfully and wonderfully made” (Psalm 139:14). The dignity of humanity is part of the reasoning behind Jesus’ golden rule: “In everything, do to others what you would have them do to you” (Matthew 7:12). Just as we expect to be treated with respect and esteem by virtue of our humanity, we ought to treat others likewise.
Sadly, the same human dignity the Bible upholds has been the dignity we, as humans, have violated. Racism in the forms of sketchy shootings and startling yearbook photos has violated human dignity. So has homophobia in the forms of bullying and lynching. We have plenty of work to do when it comes to loving each other better.
There is a difference, however, between uncovering evidence of racist and homophobic problems and creating evidence of these problems. This is what Jussie Smollett, an actor in the hit show “Empire,” is accused of doing. Mr. Smollett initially claimed that, while walking home one night in Chicago, two men attacked him by wrapping a rope around his neck and pouring bleach on his face, all while shouting racist and homophobic slurs. The story, on its face, was shocking and deeply disturbing. No one should ever be attacked because of their race or sexual orientation. But it didn’t take long for Mr. Smollett’s story to begin to unravel. Prosecutors now say that Mr. Smollett staged the attack, paying these two men to jump him, and even sent himself a threatening letter laced with slurs beforehand, all in an attempt to boost his acting career and command a higher salary. This, of course, presents us with a whole new set of problems.
In the twentieth century, there lived a self-styled archaeologist named Ron Wyatt. Mr. Wyatt claimed to have found everything from the Ark or the Covenant to chariot wheels at the bottom of the Red Sea, which he dated from the time of the Pharaoh during the Israelite exodus. These would have been spectacular finds – if they were real. But they weren’t. To this day, people debate whether Mr. Wyatt was sincere and incompetent or a charlatan and malicious. Either way, his fake archaeological finds, even if his intent was to bring attention to the truthfulness of Scripture, did not bolster Scripture’s credibility. They only provided fodder for those who doubted Scripture’s accuracy.
What is true of fake archaeological finds that supposedly support the Bible is also true of staged racist and homophobic attacks. A manufactured instance of racism and homophobia does not help the case for the reality of a broader racism and homophobia.
People often have very deep feelings, on all sides, on the current state of race relations and the treatment of those who identify as LBGTQ. It is incumbent upon Christians to seek to understand people’s feelings and positions and to engage in sensitive, non-combative conversation, drenched in love, for the sake of mutual understanding and societal reconciliation. But it is also okay, as a part of these conversations, to study and analyze facts around evils like racism and homophobia, as best as we can know them. Facts are our friends. And facts do not need our help. Our job is not to create facts, as Mr. Smollett has done. Our job is listen to them and learn from them. For when we understand reality better, we can love each other deeper – both by empathizing with each other’s pain and by speaking to each other the truth, even when that truth is difficult, in the name of the One who is the truth (John 14:6).
Both our charity and our honesty are needed if we hope to move toward a better society.
More Sexual Assault in Churches Comes to Light
Credit: Bill Nicholls
Although I find my theological and confessional home in the Lutheran Church – Missouri Synod, I have long been partial to the Southern Baptist Convention. I admire its commitment to the primacy of the gospel, the authority of Scripture, and the need for evangelism. This is why it disturbed me deeply when, last Sunday, the Houston Chronicle, in conjunction with the San Antonio Express-News, published a bombshell report chronicling decades of sexual abuse by hundreds of leaders inside the SBC. The report opens with the heart-shuddering story of Debbie Vasquez:
She was 14, she said, when she was first molested by her pastor in Sanger, a tiny prairie town an hour north of Dallas. It was the first of many assaults that Vasquez said destroyed her teenage years and, at 18, left her pregnant by the Southern Baptist pastor, a married man more than a dozen years older.
How did her church’s leadership respond when they learned she was pregnant by their pastor?
When Vasquez became pregnant, she said, leaders of her church forced her to stand in front of the congregation and ask for forgiveness without saying who had fathered the child.
She said church members were generally supportive but were never told the child was their pastor’s. Church leadership shunned her, asked her to get an abortion and, when she said no, threatened her and her child, she said. She moved abroad soon after.
The reporters who worked on this story uncovered 700 victims of sexual abuse in SBC churches over a 20-year time period. But, as the president of the SBC, J.D. Greear, noted in a blog post: “700 is not the total number.” He knows that for every case that has been uncovered, there is likely a case that remains under-cover.
Sexual abuse scandals in churches seem to be everywhere these days, and victims are left with lives that are shattered and, in some cases, lives that are ended. The report goes on to tell of Heather Schneider, a 14-year old girl who:
…was molested in a choir room at Houston’s Second Baptist Church, according to criminal and civil court records. Her mother, Gwen Casados, said church leaders waited months to fire the attacker, who later pleaded no contest. In response to her lawsuit, church leaders also denied responsibility.
Schneider slit her wrists the day after that attack in 1994, Casados said. She survived, but she died 14 years later from a drug overdose that her mother blames on the trauma.
“I never got her back,” Casados said.
This abuse is evil and it must stop.
The question, of course, is: How does it stop? Here are three thoughts that, though by no means exhaustive, may provide a starting place to address and curb sexual abuse.
Care for victims.
A common denominator in so many of today’s sexual abuse stories is that victims, rather than being supported and cared for, are dismissed, or worse, blamed. A congregation grappling with a sexual abuse scandal becomes so focused on protecting itself as an institution that it forgets about its people.
Jesus’ care for sexually broken situations can serve as our model when we are confronted with cases of sexual assault. In John 8, a group of religious leaders drag a woman before Jesus who has been “caught in adultery” (John 8:3). Even if her encounter with this man was consensual, as it seems to be, the fact that the religious leaders do not bring the man to stand trial with her speaks volumes. In a patriarchal culture such as this one, men could engage in sexual exploits and conquests, often, without repercussion. It was, in fact, a boys’ club. This case is no exception. The “boy” is nowhere to be found while the religious leaders are howling for this lady to be stoned. Jesus, however, sees through the religious leaders’ hypocrisy and cares for this accused woman by protecting her and ultimately rescuing her from her would-be executioners (John 8:7-11).
If this is how Jesus addresses a situation where a woman seems to have had some willful role in a sexual encounter, how much more should we seek to protect and rescue those who have had no willful role, as in cases of sexual abuse?
Bring darkness to light.
Sexual abuse continues because it is allowed to remain under the cover of darkness – many times for decades on end. Bringing it to light may be the single greatest strategy to stop sexual abuse before it starts. It sends a clear and present warning to any abuser that they will be brought to justice. President Greear’s invitation to victims to “get help” is supremely important. His list of crisis hotlines is worth reposting here:
- The National Hotline for Domestic Violence number is 1-800-799-SAFE (7233).
- The National Child Abuse Hotline number is 1-800-422-4453.
- The Rape, Abuse, & Incest National Network number is 1-800-656-HOPE (4673).
Again, Jesus can serve as our model for what bringing dark hurt into the light looks like. In Mark 5, when a woman who suffers from a form of hemophilia seeks to secretly steal a healing from Jesus by touching the edge of His cloak, Jesus will not let her remain in the shadows. He wants to speak to her in her pain. He wants her to come into the light. So, He seeks her out and, after she reveals herself, He tenderly calls her, “Daughter” (Mark 5:34). May the victims among us be met with the same tenderness as they bring their darkest secret hurts into the light of open truth.
Recommit ourselves to a biblical sexual ethic.
There is no way around it: the hypocrisy between what we who attend church say about sexuality and what we live out in our own sexualities is sometimes stunning. The Christian sexual ethic is good. It exalts commitment. It encourages tenderness. It dignifies humanity. Sadly, many in our churches have spent so much time criticizing what happens sexually “out there” in the world that we overlook the sexual assault happening “in here” among our congregations. Let’s remove the redwood-sized sin from our own eyes before trying to help others with the sawdust-sized sin in theirs (Matthew 7:3-5). Each one of us in the church should be asking ourselves: How am I falling short sexually? How am I tempted sexually? How can I get help?
The apostle Paul says that Jesus treats His Church like His bride (Ephesians 5:25). What does this mean? It means He loves her. It means He is faithful to her. It means He honors her. It means He exalts her. It means He seeks her purity. It means He is willing even to die for her.
To address and defeat sexual abuse, go and do likewise.
Moral Lessons from Virginia
It’s been a difficult couple of weeks for the political leadership in the state of Virginia. The state’s lieutenant governor seems to be in the most peril after he was accused by two women of sexual assault. His colleagues are now considering whether or not to impeach him. The state’s attorney general is embroiled in a scandal of his own after he admitted to dressing up in blackface at a party in 1980. But all the trouble began with the governor of Virginia, Ralph Northam. His name first hit national news after he ran interference on a local radio show for Virginia House Bill 2491, introduced by Virginia delegate Kathy Tran, which, according to the delegate herself, might theoretically allow for a baby to be aborted while a woman was in the process of giving birth. This sparked national outrage, with many arguing that the governor was defending nothing less than infanticide. But more trouble was on the way for the governor. Two Fridays ago, a website published a personal yearbook page of his from 1984, which featured one man in blackface alongside another man in Ku Klux Klan garb. When the photo came to light, the governor first apologized for the photo and then denied he was in the photo.
Many progressives remain supportive of the governor’s position on abortion, but stand aghast at the picture in which he, ostensibly at least, appeared. I have also read some conservatives who are outraged at his stance on abortion while remaining more agnostic about how offensive the explicitly racist photo on his yearbook page is.
The issue, morally, in both of these scandals surrounding Ralph Northam is, at root, the same: a person, either because they are in the womb or because of the color of their skin, is not worthy of the same status and security as they otherwise would be. A pregnancy can be terminated right up to the point of birth because the will of a person who is pregnant outweighs and outranks the life of the baby she is carrying. A portrayal of black person that uses explicit symbols of hatred, lynching, and murder can be chalked up to an awkward joke at a college party.
We must be clear. These things are wrong. These things are inexcusable. These things rob people of their dignity and have robbed people of their very lives.
I do not doubt that many people sincerely believe that abortion is a moral good because it is presented as empowering to women. I also do not doubt that students in their twenties in the eighties may have not fully understood how what they perceived as a bit of tomfoolery was really a deeply entrenched cruelty. This is why it is so important that we continue to describe and define the barbarous realities behind abortion and racism. More people must know. More people must understand.
Thankfully, there is a reflexive revulsion on the part of many to the idea of abortion in general and late-term abortion in specific as well as to the dismissive and diminishing attitudes involved in racism. We should heed what our reflexes are trying to tell us. In an article on the ethical entailments of human cloning, Leon R. Kass describes the importance of the human “gag reflex” in determining what is moral and what is not:
Repugnance is the emotional expression of deep wisdom, beyond reason’s power fully to articulate it … It revolts against the excesses of human willfulness, warning us not to transgress what is unspeakably profound. Indeed, in this age in which everything is held to be permissible so long as it is freely done, in which our given human nature no longer commands respect, in which our bodies are regarded as mere instruments of our autonomous and rational wills, repugnance may be the only voice left that speaks up to defend the central core of our humanity. Shallow are the souls that have forgotten how to shudder.
Theologically, we would say that our gut-level moral disgust at certain things is triggered by the requirements of God’s law, which Scripture says are written on every human heart (Romans 2:14-15). In this way, our guts can give us valuable insights into transcendent moral realities. But, as Leon Kass so critically notes:
Repugnance need not stand naked before the bar of reason.
Moral feelings are often astute, but they can also sometimes mislead us. We must check our moral feelings against the bar of moral reasoning. We can study the development of a baby in utero and we can draw reasoned conclusions about the life of a child. We can watch anyone of any race erupt in laughter, burst into tears, tremble in fear, or sacrifice for love, and we can draw reasoned conclusions about their humanity.
The hard question that stands before us, then, is this: have we really so clouded our hearts and minds by political ravings and selfish cravings that we have become blinded to what ails us? Are we overlooking what should be morally obvious?
Perhaps Ralph Northam’s blunders can remind us of what we should already know: that life is precious – be it the life of a baby in the womb, or the life of a person of any race. And perhaps, if we reflected on that moral reality for a while, we’d see more pictures of ultrasounds and fewer pictures in yearbooks.
That certainly sounds like a better world to me.
The Old, the New, and Andy Stanley
Credit: Willow Creek D/CH / Flickr
It’s not easy leading in a church. And when a church has an average of almost 40,000 people a weekend in attendance, the challenges of leadership become utterly unique. Yet, these are the challenges that Andy Stanley, pastor of North Point Ministries in Alpharetta, Georgia, is faced with on a day-to-day basis. In this church are not only people who are firm in their faith, but people who are questioning faith or even people who have no faith at all – at least in Jesus.
Reaching people who are on the outskirts of faith is Andy Stanley’s passion and a big motivating factor behind why he wrote his latest book, Irresistible. In it, he explains:
The decline of Christianity in America, the popularity of the New Atheists, and the meteoric rise of the nones underscore something that’s been true for generations but didn’t matter much until now. Modern, mainstream Christianity is fatally flawed. These flaws make it fragile and indefensible in the public square. (17)
Stanley’s desire is to make Christianity defensible and, as the title of his book declares, even irresistible to a modern’s ears. It is a noble desire and one which he and I share. Indeed, I have learned a lot from Stanley and have a great deal of respect for him and for all he has given the church-at-large. I do, however, have some concerns with – and have received some questions about – his book. His central claim, in his own words, is that:
…our current versions of the Christian faith need to be stripped of a variety of old covenant leftovers … We are dragging along a litany of old covenant concepts and assumptions that slow us down, divide us up, and confuse those standing on the outside peering in. (92)
In other words, out with the Old (Testament), and in with the New (Testament).
Stanley does not lack boldness in his proposal. He claims:
The church fathers…immediately went to work harmonizing the old covenant with the new to make it play nice with the teachings of Jesus and the apostles. The reinterpreted, allegorized, and rebranded them to make them line up with developing Christian thought and theology. (155)
The church fathers are certainly not infallible. Some of their interpretative moves are questionable. But to dismiss their collective wisdom on how the Old and New Testaments work together in favor of some long-lost insight you have just recently discovered strikes me as awfully dangerous. Stanley goes on:
The church fathers’ primary interest in the Jewish Scriptures was neither historical nor cultural. Their primary interest was Christological. They were convinced the Jews did not recognize and thus accept Jesus as Messiah because they didn’t know how to interpret their own prophets. No surprise, the church fathers had little interest in the interpretation of Jewish Scriptures. So they went looking for Jesus.
And they found Him.
Everywhere. (155)
This is true. The church fathers did have a habit of finding Jesus under every rock. Kind of like the apostle Paul:
The Israelites all ate the same spiritual food and drank the same spiritual drink; for they drank from the spiritual rock that accompanied them, and that rock was Christ. (1 Corinthians 10:3-4)
Wait. What? Christ was with the Israelites in the desert as they wandered on their way to the Promised Land? If you believe Paul, He was. The church fathers were simply doing what Paul had already done.
It is also true that the church fathers thought the Jews did not know how to interpret their own Scriptures. Kind of like Jesus: “If you believed Moses, you would believe Me, for he wrote about Me” (John 5:46). Maybe the church fathers were on to something.
Stanley makes other questionable claims about why we should unhitch our faith from the old covenant. For instance, he argues that the Old Testament has no real concept of life after death:
If you asked an ancient Jew how one could know for sure they were going to heaven, they may have responded by asking you what made you think anybody went to heaven. Most ancient Jews didn’t believe in an afterlife. Why? Their Scriptures didn’t assume one. In the Old Testament, when people died, it was assumed they went to Sheol. But Sheol wasn’t an actual place. It was the term used to describe the realm of the dead. (165)
It seems as though Stanley may have conflated “going to heaven when you die” with any kind of an afterlife. Just because ancient Jews didn’t necessarily believe in “going to heaven when you die” doesn’t mean they didn’t believe in an afterlife. Many of them – indeed, most of them – believed in a resurrection from death after death, à la the prophet Daniel:
Multitudes who sleep in the dust of the earth will awake: some to everlasting life, others to shame and everlasting contempt. (Daniel 12:2)
In fact, the resurrection was a major bone of contention between two religious groups in Jesus’ day: the Pharisees, who did believe in a resurrection, and the Sadducees, who did not (cf. Acts 23:8). So, I’m not sure how my promise of a resurrection from Jesus is better than the promise of a resurrection in Daniel. They’re the same promise. Probably because they were made by the same God.
Stanley spends a great deal of time arguing that Jesus, Paul, Peter, John, and others argued that it was time for the old covenant to go. But is this really what they argued?
In His Sermon on the Mount, Jesus declares:
Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished. (Matthew 5:17-18)
Stanley comments:
What did He mean by everything? And what happens to the law after “everything is accomplished”? The implication is that the law might “disappear” once everything is accomplished. And clearly Jesus was planning to be involved in the accomplishing. (108)
This is true. But notice the timer that Jesus sets for His final accomplishment. Everything will be accomplished when “heaven and earth disappear,” that is, on the Last Day. When Jesus returns, we will no longer need the law’s guidelines against sin because we will be perfected from sin. But until that time, the law still matters. This is why Jesus continues:
Therefore anyone who sets aside one of the least of these commands and teaches others accordingly will be called least in the kingdom of heaven, but whoever practices and teaches these commands will be called great in the kingdom of heaven. (Matthew 5:19)
Jesus then works through selected passages from the Old Testament and not only upholds them, but strengthens them. He not only teaches against murder, He gets at the root of murder: anger (Matthew 5:21-22). He not only teaches against adultery, He attacks the foundation of adultery: lust (Matthew 5:27-28). He not only upholds the principle of not escalating violence, taking only “eye for eye, and tooth for tooth,” He encourages the de-escalation of violence, calling His disciples to “turn the other cheek” (Matthew 5:38-39).
It is true that just because the Old Testament says it doesn’t mean we do it. For example, I – and, I would guess, you – are not slaughtering and sacrificing animals in our backyards. But this is not because the sacrificial system didn’t or doesn’t matter. It mattered and matters supremely because of what it points to: “the sacrifice of the body of Jesus Christ once for all” (Hebrews 10:10).
Stanley is correct that, over the years, Christians have misinterpreted and misapplied many passages from the Old Testament. In an interview with Outreach Magazine, he rattles off a catalogue of popular misuses of Old Testament passages and principles:
Some fundamentalist preachers rail about God’s judgment against America, preaching from the Hebrew prophets. Others view tsunamis as God’s punishment of Muslims, quoting texts about His judgment of “the nations.” Teenagers graduating high school end up thinking Jeremiah 29:11’s “plans to prosper you” is a promise from God straight to them, never mind the context. They’re just being quietly set up to lose their faith when that doesn’t feel like it pans out.
God’s promises to Israel are not God’s promises to Americans. Cherry-picking our way through the Old Testament just sets us up for problems.
This is most certainly true. But the misapplication of the Old Testament does not equate to the non-application the Old Testament.
To use Stanley’s own metaphor, what is truly needed in our application of the Old Testament is a professional cherry-picker – someone who knows what in the law continues, what in the law has been abrogated, and what in the law was never meant for us. Thankfully, we have a professional cherry-picker. His name is Jesus. Ben Witherington, in his book The Indelible Image, explains it well:
Jesus, as God’s Wisdom come in person, acts with sovereign freedom when it comes to the law. Sometimes He intensifies its demands, sometimes He sets aside its demands, sometimes He affirms its demands, sometimes He offers a new teaching that can in some cases supplement and in others supplant previous teaching. (32)
As I have already noted, Stanley’s concern with our use of and appeal to the Old Testament is in large part an evangelical one. The stories in the Old Testament are just so weird. They raise so many questions and are attacked by so many scientists, philosophers, and secularists. This is true. But, the story of a man who rises from death is pretty weird, too. This is why “the message of the cross is foolishness” (1 Corinthians 1:18). Eventually, we’re going to have to contend with some weird stuff and believe some weird claims.
Stanley is right when he notes that, for most people, even the objections of science, philosophy, and secularism aren’t their real objections against Christianity:
For post-Christians, science, philosophy, and reason are the go-tos for worldviews and decision making. Post Christians, especially post-Christian millennials, have low to no tolerance for faith-based answers to fact-based questions. At the same time, like most of us, they aren’t exactly on a truth quest either. They’re on a happiness quest. Many walked away from faith because faith didn’t make them happy. That’s never a presenting reason. Nobody wants to appear that shallow. But scratch beneath the surface and you’ll find the quest for happiness plays a big role. When faith becomes an impediment to happiness, good-bye faith. (269)
Amen and amen. So what’s the answer? How do we call people who are on a happiness quest to Jesus? By unhitching our faith from the Old Testament? I believe the answer is in calling people to faith in Jesus like Jesus:
Whoever wants to be My disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow Me. For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for Me will find it. (Matthew 16:24-25)
Wow. How many people today would ever take Jesus up on an invitation like this? By last count, about 2.3 billion.
Perhaps Jesus’ invitation has a power beyond our desire for happiness.
The Measure of a Man
When the American Psychological Association published its “Guidelines for the Psychological Practice with Boys and Men,” a maelstrom ensued. Some decried the guidelines as an attack on men generally. Others defended the report as long overdue so a new kind of masculinity can rise from an older masculinity’s ashes. Throw in an ad by razor legend Gillette that exhorts men to do better, and you have all the makings of a cultural explosion that feels like, ironically enough, a testosterone-laden WWE wrestling match.
The APA is right about this much: many men are struggling. In its summary, it explains:
Men commit 90 percent of homicides in the United States and represent 77 percent of homicide victims. They’re the demographic group most at risk of being victimized by violent crime. They are 3.5 times more likely than women to die by suicide, and their life expectancy is 4.9 years shorter than women’s. Boys are far more likely to be diagnosed with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder than girls, and they face harsher punishments in school – especially boys of color.
The challenges are real and broadly agreed upon. The disagreement comes in what we should do about all this. On the one hand, I struggle with statements like these in the APA report:
Psychologists strive to recognize that masculinities are constructed based on social, cultural, and contextual norms … Psychologists aspire to help boys and men over their lifetimes navigate restrictive definitions of masculinity and create their own concepts of what it means to be male, although it should be emphasized that expression of masculine gender norms may not be seen as essential for those who hold a male gender identity.
It is true that certain masculine norms are culturally conditioned. At the same time, it is difficult to deny that some of men’s drives and desires seem to be innate. It wasn’t that long ago when we were claiming that the innate differences between men and women ran so deep that it was like men were from Mars and women were from Venus.
There is a drive in many men toward things like physical strength, risk taking, and stoicism. To lump traditionally masculine traits like these into a category of “nurture” while denying components of “nature” is a relatively recent philosophical and psychological development, and, I would add, probably wrong.
On the other hand, I am also adamantly opposed to any attitude that revels in masculinity’s baser manifestations. Even if men do have certain innate desires and drives, this doesn’t make all their desires and drives moral. Many men, for instance, couple their desire for risk with a desire for sex – with disastrous results. Drives and desires, like everything else, have been degraded by sin. Indeed, Scripture has story after story on what happens when men succumb to their twisted innate desires. Lamech. Samson. David. All of these men may have looked manly, but they were also fools. Just because you feel something internally doesn’t mean you should act on it externally.
Christianity takes a unique approach to masculinity. While not denying that men have certain innate drives and desires, Christianity teaches that these are not determinative of what it means to be a man. Instead, Christian men are called upon to harness these drives and desires to fulfill a higher calling. True masculinity is about vocation. This is why, in the Bible, the word for “man” can be either a noun or a verb. On the one hand, the Bible refers to a man, in Greek, by the noun aner, which denotes someone who is of the male sex (e.g., Matthew 14:21). On the other hand, the apostle Paul exhorts the Corinthian men with the verb andrizomai, which can be translated, “be manly” (1 Corinthians 16:13). Men are called not just to act out of who they are and what they want, but out of who God has called them to be.
My favorite description of manhood in the Bible comes when Paul is talking to men about marriage: “Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave Himself up for her” (Ephesians 5:25). On the one hand, Paul encourages a traditionally masculine virtue of sacrifice, even to the point of death, on behalf of a man for his wife. This takes true toughness. On the other hand, Paul also calls husbands to love their wives, which takes plenty of intentional tenderness. In other words, the biblical calling of masculinity is not mindlessly macho, but it is not particularly woke, either. Instead, the biblical calling of masculinity looks like Jesus. And if there’s anyone who knows what masculinity should look like, it’s Him. After all, He was not only born a man, He willingly became a man. And He not only willingly became a man, He created men. That means He has the blueprints. Perhaps, then, as men, we should follow them – and Him.
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