What Is Creation?

One of the few rules that I try to strictly follow is to not get upset at trivial concerns. Unless something matters – unless my believing or not believing something has true and serious consequences – I refuse to attack or get upset. I call it the “Meh Rule.”

Creationism versus Evolution is a prime example of the “Meh Rule.” In all the teachings of Jesus and in all the preachings of Peter and John and Paul, NOT ONCE is there any demand placed on people about what they believe about the origins of the universe. We are told to repent, to turn away from the dark, to set ourselves free from the bondage of sin and to turn wholly to Jesus Christ alone as our Lord.

I believe this – that Jesus Christ is Lord: my Lord and the Lord.

And here is where we come to the “Meh Rule.” When I get to heaven, if it turns out that the universe was created 10,000 years ago, that Jesus played with T-Rex as a boy, that the Earth and everything in it was created over 6 (24 hour) days . . . “meh!” OK, good to know, now where is Luther hanging out with all the good beer?!!

When I get to heaven, if it turns out the universe was created several billion years ago, that human beings gradually evolved from simpler forms of life . . . again, “meh.” OK, good to know, now where is John Knox hiding the Macallan (and in heaven, it better be the 25 year old)?!!

Simply put, in the grand scheme of salvation, it matters not one whit whether or not the Earth is 5,000 years old or 13 billion. In both scenarios, God has acted, decisively, to redeem it. In both scenarios, God is the prime Actor – the one who is both Wholly Other and yet intimately involved with what he has created.

And this is precisely why I find the Creation/Evolution argument inane: we fight with friends! IF this is an argument between Jesus-followers, then it is an intramural scrimmage. All Christians will agree that (1) there is a God, (2) this God is all-powerful, (3) this God is Creator (and able to act any way God sees fit), (4) that creation serves the purposes of God (it has a beginning and an end), and (5) human beings have a unique role within this creation of God’s.

What should matter most, in this debate, is a sincere pursuit of knowledge and truth – all the while practicing kindness. Christians should be the most genuinely open minded of people – will to assess and reassess the evidence wherever it leads. After all, if God is the source of all that exists and if God is also the source of all that is true – then we have nothing to fear in heaven or on earth.

So – it matters less to me whether or not you believe in creationism – what matters is . . . do you demonstrate love: “By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” It is time to STOP attacking our brothers and sisters in Christ over the issue of how GOD created our world. God has not elected us to snipe at each other – he has chosen us to serve him and proclaim his faithfulness. God is God – he does not need our help nor does he need us to “defend” him.

SDG

What Is The Trinity?

I believe that we make a mistake when we think that the Church’s teaching about the Trinity actually defines God. As we discussed last week, the very heart of idolatry is when we, as human beings, believe that we have captured or defined or fully grasped the infinite, Wholly-Other God. Indeed, we saw that even his name is a purposeful enigma – God is, “I will be who I will be” – ONLY God has the freedom to define himself.

So, it is important to see that the Trinity is not a definition of God as much as it is a boundary line. In essence, the Trinity warns Christians that to say anything different about who God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is to run into well-worn paths of trouble and error.

Let’s use a cowboy metaphor! Cowboys typically don’t force their herds into paths that they choose. Rather, in the Old West – before farmers and fences – they let their herds wander – letting them eat the grasses they enjoyed and pass by the weeds they detested. The purpose of the cowboy, most of the time, was to keep the herd away from certain danger. They kept their well-trained eyes alert for signs of predators. They paid attention to rivers and streams – guiding herds to easy, shallow crossings.

Good theology, of which the Trinity represents our highest and best thoughts, operates like the cowboys. It keeps an eye out on the Christian community. The closer our thoughts of God keep to their definitions, the closer we are to being on safe ground. The further we drift, the more we remain ignorant of the questions and answers of the Trinity, the greater the danger that we end up distorting who Jesus is and how significant his death and resurrection were.

Make no mistake, the doctrine of the Trinity is, in the end, all about Jesus – because the questions and debates that initiated the discussions about the Triune God began with Christians trying to take seriously the Biblical witness that Jesus was human and yet also self-identified with the Father.

As a boundary marker – the Trinity should not function as a final definition. Rather, the Trinity should function as our best effort to exhaust our human (and therefore limited) knowledge of God, as we best understand him through Scripture.

So don’t worry that the Trinity can be confusing (how can 1 be 3, how can 3 be 1?!!!). With the Trinity, we are reaching the absolute limitations of human comprehension. All that the Trinity is doing is trying to express the teachings of Scripture in such a way that the Old Testament and the New Testament, the teachings of Jesus and the teachings of Paul are put together in such a way that we, a Christians, continue to honor the Shema Israel (“Hear, O Israel, the LORD is our God, the LORD is one,” Deut. 6:4-9).

And this point needs to be stressed – the historic Christian Church has always understood that however we define God, we MUST end up worshiping one God. Despite Jewish and Muslim criticism that we believe in 3-gods, the truth of the doctrine of the Trinity is an absolute intention to stress the eternal unity and oneness of God.

This is precisely why the Trinity strains the limits of human comprehension. For while we will NEVER abandon the Jewish and Christian believe in ONE GOD, we are also compelled to make sense of Jesus’ own teachings about himself. How do we make sense that Jesus understands that he and the Father are one? How do we make sense that John’s Gospel begins with the understanding that Jesus (the Word) was in the beginning with God and was God (John 1:1)?

So I leave you with this – we believe in one God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. One in being, one in purpose, one in mission. And yet . . . there is a distinctness in their unity. They are one, but they are not the same. I believe this, I profess this, I don’t understand this!

“For we know only in part, and we prophesy only in part; but when the complete comes, the partial will come to an end. When I was a child, I thought like a child, I spoke like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways. For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known.” 1 Corinthians 13: 9-12

Who Is God?

Is it any coincidence (or surprise) that a God of judgment is something far from our worship, our theology, or our comfort? Most of us want a friendly god – a god that makes us happy, makes us feel safe and secure. A god who is going to love us – no matter what! Not a god of fire and damnation – not a fierce and awesome god. A feel-good god, not a hard and demanding deity.

This is an age-old dilemma – one that is at the very heart of the problem of idol-making. Even for the best intentioned among us . . . how do we know when we are approaching the true God and not merely some mascot we have created to help us deal with the things that go “bump in the night”?!!

Most of the idols we find in the Old Testament should not be that surprising to us. They make sense – especially in a pre-scientific world. gods to give us babies . . . gods to give us good weather and good soil . . . even dark and evil gods that demand sacrifice – after all (and we understand this), you’ve got to pay to play!

I don’t know about you, but I desire that my faith is placed in something REAL. I don’t need religion to feel good. I don’t need hopes of heaven to placate my worries about dying. I am equally comfortable knowing I will be resurrected in Christ or simply dissolve into nothingness.

An important theological concept in referring to God is that he is “Wholly Other.” What we mean by this is that God is SO far beyond human comprehension that we depend completely upon God making himself known to us. To say that God is Wholly Other is to affirm that God cannot be confused with his creation.

That is what we typically mean by saying that Christianity (along with Judaism) is a revealed faith. In order for human beings to have ANY accurate conception of God – God MUST reach out and reach down to us. The Reformers, including John Calvin, described God’s act of revealing himself as an act of condescension – God is using the limitations of human ideas, metaphors, images, et al, in order to help us know how to be in a relationship with God.

Believing that God is Wholly Other – that he must reveal himself to us in order to be known – creates an environment where we can learn how to avoid making a god of our own creation. We come to trust that he makes himself known uniquely in Scripture – and thus we have to wrestle not only with the images of God that make us comfortable, but also all the terrifying, mystifying, offending images as well.

Even in God’s revealed name, Yahweh, we see that God defines himself by NOT defining himself. Literally, Yahweh means “I will be who I will be.” God, in his very name, does not allow himself to be defined by human beings. He is the God who defies description, who prohibits images – he is the God who solely describes himself and his ways.

As we seek God out, professing that God is Wholly-Other permits us to regularly approach God with a mindset that resists idolatry. In our world today – it is essential that we guard our hearts and minds. OUR desires, OUR wishes, OUR hopes, OUR faith often lead us to form a god of comfort, a god of acceptance, a god of security, a god that is “just alright with me.” Approaching God, the Wholly-Other, demands that we fit our lives into God’s will rather than fitting God into what we wish he would be.

God is beyond our comprehension – and yet(!) we believe that God is indeed comprehensible. God is unknowable if we seek him out, however the God of Scripture depicts a God who is continually seeking US out. And here lies the key to the know-ability of God – GOD WANTS TO BE KNOWN! It is because God seeks us out, because he has acted in human history, because he has inspired the writing of holy Scripture, that God is reliably and truly knowable.

If we seek THIS God out – the God who has made himself known through Holy Scripture – then we will find that this God defies our attempts to tame him, control him, manipulate him and rather than fitting God comfortably into our lives, we will find that he will uncomfortably demand “my soul, my life, my all.”

SDG

What Is The Bible?

How do we know what God wants from us? How do we even know if the “thing” we pray to, sing about, fear, strike deals with is even God?!! I mean – there are Christians and Jews and Muslims and Buddhists, and Hindus. There are Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses, Jim Jones and David Koresh cults, Unitarians and Moonies.

Who is right? Does it matter who is right? And how do we know?

We are faced with essentially 2 approaches to the Bible:
> God is speaking / writing to us
> We are speaking / writing about God

If God is writing to us – the main question that remains is which holy book is God’s? The Jewish Scriptures (our Old Testament), The Bible, The Qur’an, the Upanishads, the Vedas?

If we are writing about God – the main question is how would we ever know if our thoughts about God were even remotely true?

Where most fundamentalists go wrong with the Bible is assuming that it is self-evident that the Bible is God’s “book.” Where most progressives go wrong with the Bible is assuming that human beings are capable in any way of grasping the eternal, the infinite, the unknowable Wholly-Other.

My own approach to this dilemma is to reject the idea that Scripture is merely human authored. This theory both bores me and raises far more problems than most adherents care to admit. If there is a god that does not care whether Buddhists, Hindus, Christians, Muslims, Jews, even atheists are correct, righteous, “saved,” or not – then this is truly a cruel and capricious “god.” After all, if any path toward the “sacred” is no better or no worse than another – what difference is there between Yahweh and Molech?

I also reject the idea that the Bible is the Protestant “Pope” – that somehow this Book glows-in-the-dark and sets itself up as the FINAL WORD on any and everything.

To understand the Bible is to already believe that Jesus is Risen! To me it is that simple – I believe that Jesus is God-enfleshed, crucified, and risen for my salvation. Once I have this faith – the faith of the Christian Church proclaimed for 2,000 years, it only becomes obvious that the Bible is God’s word – holy and trustworthy – because it is only in the Bible that I learn the full scope of God’s history with and for human beings.

As I expressed in my Personal Statement of Faith, I know what God has done for me in Jesus Christ because of WITNESS.

First, I have been told of what God has done for me. Having grown up in church, from the time I was a young boy I heard the “old, old story.” Indeed, I was never given an opportunity NOT to believe!

“Jesus loves me, this I know” – but NOT because the Bible told me so (at least at first). “Jesus loves me,” because my parents, because my great-aunt Marion, because Sunday School teachers and nuns and priests & pastors all told me so. “Jesus loves me,” because Carl, my 9th grade Sunday School teacher (who also introduced me to the music of Kansas!) took time to make me know he cared that I believed in who Jesus is. “Jesus loves me,” because Pastor Pete (the senior pastor of my church in high school) actually talked TO me – and not merely patted me on the head while he talked to my parents.

But . . . can’t this also be said of the children of many faiths?!! Mitt Romney believes in his religion – precisely because he shares a story with other Mormons. How is my faith any more valid than his? How is his faith any less valid than mine? My faith and his faith are both (in part) the result of shared stories.

You and I truly choose, every day, whether to permit the Bible to speak to us. The Bible has no authority over any person’s life. This is an inescapable fact. The Bible has never healed the sick, raised the dead, or forgiven sin. Only the living God has done these things! So to speak of the “authority” of the Bible is, in my opinion, misplaced. It is not the Bible that has authority – indeed(!) there is only one authority in heaven and earth to which all men and women must give account – the holy, living God.

And yet, it is this holy, living God who has “breathed” the Bible into existence. And so I can and do whole-heartedly profess the words of Westminster (Larger Catechism Q.157):

How is the Word of God to be read?
A. The Holy Scriptures are to be read with an high and reverent esteem of them; with a firm persuasion that they are the very Word of God, and that he only can enable us to understand them; with desire to know, believe, and obey, the will of God revealed in them; with diligence and attention to the matter and scope of them; with meditation, application, self-denial, and prayer

SDG

SDG – Soli Deo Gloria, was used by Johann Sebastian Bach on all of his sacred compositions. Soli Deo Gloria is a Latin phrase that means “for the glory of God” – and has been used through the centuries to emphasize that our lives, as followers of Jesus, should be directed solely to the glory of God. We are His – He has made us, willed us life and health and opportunity. God is also our destination – sooner or later – each of us will draw life’s final breath and will return to the Lord our God – our Maker.

It is expected to ask, at the beginning of any endeavor, what will I get out of this?!! And to be sure, you should add to your knowledge of our Christian faith. In fact, I truly hope you will come to love the men and women, the ideas and the debates, the good – the bad – and the ugly periods of the Church’s history. But all this will be a failure if you do not, over the course of this year, witness your faith deepen immeasurably.

The joy of theology is that you are about to set off on a journey. While we are reading the same materials, staying focused on a course of study, the joy and the unpredictability of this year is that your questions will be yours! How you react and how you are shaped by what you read will be the unique blending of your personality, your history, your interests, and (most importantly) how the Holy Spirit is directing and shaping you.

The joy of theology is that you are going to regularly think, reflect, probe, and question the God of our salvation! Imagine – the finite contemplating the Infinite! The sinner reflecting on her Redeemer! The creature wondering about his Creator! Don’t imagine that you can start on this journey without being changed.

As we begin this year together exploring our theological heritage as Christians, this is my invitation to each of us – that we will keep before us this theme of making our lives, our thoughts, our desires to be for the glory of God. The gift of theology is that it can create a mindfulness in your life – how God is already guiding you at work at play, at home.

Soli Deo Gloria!

NBC & “One nation under God”

Sometimes I just don’t get self-righteous Christian anger – disguised under the notion of “standing up” for God.

Why are so many Christians so piously angry that NBC cut “under God” from their US Open golf coverage?  And, for another thing, why do so many Christians make such a big deal about insisting on pushing this phrase on so many unsuspecting Americans?

I have been leading my congregation through a reading of the Bible in 90 days – so the last 2 weeks have found me spending a considerable amount of time in the Old Testament.  The Pentateuch is not a fun read – especially once you get into the Hebrews and their 40 years of wandering.  God is not to be messed with – I think that is a fair summary of what I have gleaned from page after page after page (!) of laws, rituals, measurements, genealogies, promises of blessing, threats of judgment, etc.

Scripture (Proverbs 9:10) says that “fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge.”  So let me ask a simple question – how many Americans (how many Christians) actually fear God?

So often Christians settle for sounding shrill – rather than thinking theologically.

I believe that we SHOULD remove “under God” from our pledge of allegiance – along with getting God off our money, etc.  After all, how many Americans really mean it?!  One nation, under God . . . and how many children are going to bed hungry tonight?  One nation, under God . . . that (according to the World Health Organization) leads the world in illegal drug use.  One nation, under God . . . where (according to a 1996 Promise Keepers survey) 50% of Christian men are addicted to pornography.

If we as Christians believe that God’s name is holy, if we believe that making a rash vow in God’s name is binding – why, WHY, would we want to subject so many ignorant, foolish people to possible discipline from a holy and righteous God?

Maybe it’s really not about God – maybe it’s about us – the holiness of God takes a back-seat to our silly need to hear “God” – even when no one means it.

“You shall not take the name of your LORD your God in vain, for the LORD will not hold him guiltless who takes his name in vain” (Exodus 20:7).

In my opinion, every time a group of Americans repeats the Pledge of Allegiance, we (as Christians) are guilty of standing idly by while watching a the name of our God being taken in vain.  Put quite simply, most people don’t mean it, don’t live by it, don’t care about it.  If you have time to whine about NBC cutting “under God” – you had better spend some time at a soup kitchen.  Do something that matters for the Kingdom!

The Least of These…

I finally started to read a book that has languished on my bookshelf for awhile now – Kenda Creasy Dean’s Almost Christian. Professor Dean teaches youth ministry at Princeton Seminary – and I quickly pre-judged this book to be relevant for “youth” – how wrong I was!  This is becoming one of the most important books on ministry that I have read in recent years.

The Scriptures say that we will know people by the “fruit” that they bear – and this seems to be the main point of Professor Dean’s book – that we see in our youth just how vital our ministry as churches are.  The fact is that our youth ARE learning what we are preaching and teaching.  If faith is benign, safe, inarticulate to our teenagers, chances are better than not that this is exactly the message we are giving them.  Highly religiously motivated teenagers aren’t accidentally produced!

The academic foundation of this book is based upon a study produced between 2003-2005 entitled the National Study of Youth and Religion, which was a study of teenage spirituality in the United States.  As Professor Dean writes, “the religiousity of American teenagers must be read primarily as a reflection of their parents’ religious devotion (or lack thereof) and, by extension, that of their congregations” (pp.3-4).

So, let me just simply and demonstrably commend this book to your attention.  The leadership of my own congregation will become all-too familiar with this book in the coming months – I promise you that it will shape our strategy of living out our church’s mission.

I have introduced this book to get to this story – Professor Dean begins chapter 5 with a story about how one Christian school in Texas decided to live out the mission of Christ – in sports of all places.  Rather than stumbling through a summary, I invite you to go to the link.  I have to admit that I am not the biggest Rick Reilly fan – but this is a story that is compelling despite him.  Please give this a read:

http://sports.espn.go.com/espnmag/story?section=magazine&id=3789373

Grace and Peace!

Rob