Perhaps in part because of the recent election, the past week produced another round of finger wagging at conservatives who oppose gay marriage.  From the religion columnist of the Grand Rapids Press to Newsweek and Jon Stewart, we were reminded again that we are mean-spirited, afraid, stupid, and hopelessly out of date.

I support the human rights of all people, including (but not especially) homosexuals.  In the interest of advancing the conversation, I will ignore the name-calling and ask three questions which the left must answer if they seek public legitimacy for their views (rather than resort to their current strategy of argumentum ad baculum—i.e., appealing to the big stick).

1. What is our new and improved definition of marriage? If marriage is no longer a covenant between one man and one woman, then what is it?

2. What is the source of this new definition? It doesn’t come from the scriptures or tradition of any world religion.  It doesn’t come from natural law (as most junior high boys could tell you, the possibility of gay penguins does not overturn the basic facts of biology).  Are we grounding our new definition in social convention?  If so, is that a suitable foundation, or have we just taken a giant leap down the slippery slope?  If our definition of marriage is grounded in something as ephemeral as social norms, what happens when these social norms change?

3. While it is wrong to discriminate against homosexuals in most employment opportunities, the majority of our churches and religious organizations are constrained by the Word of God to not hire unrepentant, practicing homosexuals.  Are we committed to provide an exception to these groups?

Last week’s election in Kalamazoo included a referendum that would outlaw “employment, housing and public-accommodation discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identification.”  I am assuming the bill passed (is that true, Ray?), but what bothers me is that I didn’t read anything in the Press story about an exception for churches.  If a practicing homosexual pushed the issue and applied to become an associate pastor in Ray’s Kalamazoo church, could Ray be sued or jailed for dismissing the applicant for this reason?

Perhaps this is a moot issue for some reason that I’m not aware of.  I may be missing some key piece of information.  But unless our zeal for the human rights of homosexuals includes an exception clause for churches and parachurch organizations, I can envision a day when our pastors are in jail and our churches and schools are sued into oblivion.

One of the left’s arguments against criminalizing abortion is that we would have to arrest the numerous mothers who had one.  Well, this argument cuts both ways.  Are we prepared to jail thousands of pastors and presidents who refuse to hire practicing homosexuals on religious grounds?

Al Mohler has an interesting review of John Franke’s new book, Manifold Witness: The Plurality of Truth. Franke’s book seems to align with the emergent author I mentioned in “this conversation is over.”  Indeed, that author cites Franke’s book as support for viewing the Bible as our community library rather than our constitutional authority.

Reading Mohler’s review reminded me of something which came up in Barth class today.  Rudolf Bultmann attempted to distance himself from liberalism with these words:  “Shall we retain the ethical preaching of Jesus and abandon his eschatological preaching?  Shall we reduce his preaching of the Kingdom of God to the so-called social gospel?  Or is there a third possibility?”

Bultmann then went on to give his “third way,” which though technically different from liberalism in some aspects (i.e., his “de-mythologizing” program was slightly different from the liberal attempt to remove the Bible’s “myths,”), pretty much landed in the same place.

Here’s the lesson:  Beware of liberals who offer a third way.  It’s always something you’ve seen before.

Consider these converging lines of evidence:

1. The starting pitchers of tomorrow night’s Game 1 of the World Series are the last recipients of the American League Cy Young Award, an award they won while pitching for the Cleveland Indians—the team which apparently did not inform their brand-new manager of those trades, for he said yesterday that he was “looking forward to bringing a championship to Cleveland,” thereby proving that he has never lived in Cleveland.

2. The Browns are the only Cleveland team that has won a championship in my lifetime, a feat they accomplished shortly after they moved to Baltimore.

3. Our near misses have names:  the Drive, the Shot, the Fumble, and the Departure (LeBron, 2010).

4. Our sharp-shooting and mostly Christian Cavs team of the early 90’s would have won a championship if not for the emergence of Michael Jordan.  Now that we have the new MJ, his championship run has been derailed by a fine Christian and his band of shooters in Orlando.

5. The Cavs think they have located their missing piece in Shaquille O’Neal, who rather than work on the weakness in his game (hint:  there’s a reason that Hack-a-Shaq works), spends his summer getting “shallaqued” by stars in other sports.

I could go on, but there is enough here to convince Christopher Hitchens (though not Richard Dawkins, that guy is crazy) that all of this could not have happened by accident.  If there was no God, then certainly a Cleveland team would have won something in my lifetime, before they skipped town.  The only logical conclusion has its own website:  http://godhatesclevelandsports.blogspot.com.

So c’mon atheists and agnostics, get your heads out of the sand.  You don’t need any more evidence for God’s existence.  When Paul said that everyone knows there is a God (Rom. 1:18-23), he wasn’t talking about a sensus divinitatis or inferring God’s existence from rocks and trees—he was talking about Cleveland (sensus plenior).  Repent before a similar curse falls upon you.

Over the weekend I skimmed an advance copy of an important book by a leading Emergent which is not yet released, so I’m not free to comment in depth or even state the author or title.  But something the author said made it clear to me that any chance of fruitful dialogue is now lost.

The author declared that we who stand under the Bible as our authority are guilty of the same type of thinking that endorsed slavery, anti-Semitism, genocide, homophobia, the Inquisition, witch-burning, and apartheid (the author instead recommends using the Bible as a common library of diverse viewpoints rather than an internally consistent authority over our lives).

I have three brief responses:

1. You know you are out of arguments when you play the Hitler card.

2. D. A. Carson on his worst day never alleged that any Emergent was in the same class as those who commit genocide, so let the record show that for all their self-congratulation on their ability to dialogue, it was the Emergents who lobbed the grenade that killed the conversation.  Our view of Scripture puts us in the same company with those who burned witches?  Really?!

3. I suspect that this book will become a litmus test for the church.  It will be impossible to minister alongside those who hold its views, as the book essentially promotes a brand new kind of Christianity.  The division is now fixed.  There is no going back.  This conversation is over.

Yesterday I started Charles Taylor’s massive book, A Secular Age (874 p.) which won the Templeton Prize in 2007.  Taylor’s story of how western society became secular is the sort of history I like—he paints with broad interpretive strokes which, while leaving plenty of room for quibbling over this detail or that, also enables us to make sense of our world.  I’m only 90 pages into the book (introduction and chapter 1), but here’s what I’ve learned so far.

Taylor says that secularism can mean 1) the naked public square—omitting God from public policy and conversation, 2) the decline of religious belief and practice, or 3) the new conditions of belief.  The latter is the focus of this book.  How has the way we live and think about our world made it difficult to believe in God?

Taylor explains that while there have always been atheists or agnostics, our secular age is the first time in western history where belief in God is only one option among many, and it often isn’t the easiest one to embrace.  Belief in God is no longer the automatic default option.  It’s hard.  In the Middle Ages people might naively and unreflectively believe in God, but now every believer (and unbeliever) realizes that there are other viable options.

Taylor says that many people try but cannot bring themselves to believe in God.  They mourn their loss of belief, but they honestly cannot believe what they no longer think is true [I would argue from Romans 1:18-32 that there is more going on here than Taylor sees.  Paul declares that atheism/agnosticism is never entirely honest].

From what I’ve read so far, here is how Taylor thinks we got here:

1. The Medieval “enchanted” world believed that God and “charged” objects in the external world (e.g., sacraments, relics, bile) dramatically affected our “porous selves” (i.e., selves which are easily influenced by the objective world).  The relics bestowed miraculous power, sacraments delivered salvific grace, and excess bile caused disease.

2. Late Medieval Reform, including the Reformation, taught us that we could seize control and improve our world.  No longer at the mercy of forces beyond our control, our “buffered selves” learned that the supposed problem of bile was only in our heads and that relics and sacraments didn’t have the special powers the church had taught (and had used for nefarious purposes, combining them with indulgences to sell salvation).

3. The late medieval/modern reforms were successful at improving ourselves and our world, which led us to place more confidence in ourselves and less in external, magical powers, such as God.  [Although Taylor hasn’t explicitly made the connection yet, it was the West’s belief in the Christian God which inspired them to care for and improve his world.  But we got so good at it that we “discovered” that we didn’t need God after all].

4. Modern people didn’t remove God right away, but made room for him as the distant, watchmaker god of deism.  This transitional worldview was too unstable to last, and soon the distant god of deism became the non-existent god of naturalism/secular humanism.

5. Secular humanism is a new event.  There have always been people who cared only for their own pleasure and didn’t believe in God (e.g., Epicureanism), but our secular age is the first time in human history when this view is a widely available option.  Now great numbers of people believe that human flourishing is the only goal of life and that there is no God or nothing more beyond this life.

6. Secular humanism is the wedge which opened the door to a plurality of other religious beliefs.  Once orthodox Christian theism was no longer the only viable option, it was only a matter of time before other challengers sprouted.

Although Taylor doesn’t explicitly say it, his argument here implies that there is a direct line between Modernity (secular humanism) and Postmodernity (religious pluralism).  This is his most interesting point so far.  What do you think?

Here is my latest entry for Our Daily Journey, the really cool and longer version of Our Daily Bread for twenty and thirtysomethings.  I tried to build a devotional around a few thoughts from Karl Barth, just to see if it could be done.  Let me know (gently) what you think.

keeping up appearances

read > Philippians 2:5-11…that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.

Shen Jie was living high.  She resided in a private villa, danced her weekends away in foreign hotels, and had her own staff to clean her home and chauffeur her between parties in Beijing.  But she lost it all when new comrades rose to power and threw her father out of his government office.  Shen Jie did not go easily.  When friends offered to pay her rent or drive her places, she would say “Yes, I will allow you to purchase that for me” or “I grant you permission to do me this favor.”

Her feeble attempts to retain a charade of privilege annoyed her friends.  They would have preferred a simple, “Thank you, I don’t know what I would do without you.”  It’s easy to see that Shen Jie needed a good helping of humble gratitude, but don’t we act similarly toward God when we say that we permit Jesus to be Lord or we accept him into our hearts?

We enter this world needy and rebellious—under the curse of sin and death and bound for hell.  When we learn that Jesus gave his life to save us, we sometimes grudgingly announce that we will grant him this privilege.

Karl Barth noticed this tendency and explained that our professed “openness” toward God may actually be a spiritual way of remaining closed.  We concede that we need God’s help, but by granting permission for God to save us we try to retain the power in our relationship.  We refuse to admit that we are “this needy man,” but even in our poverty we strive to play “the rich man closed against God.”

Like Shen Jie, we are dying to be in control.  That is fitting, because our attempt to keep the upper hand is killing us.  Salvation comes when we confess that Jesus is Lord, with or without our permission.

more > Isaiah 40:18-26; Matthew 28:18-20; Revelation 11:15

next > Can you think of other spiritual ways—such as prayer, offerings, and obedience—where we might be tempted to assert our authority over God?  Do we ever use these good things to try to manipulate him into doing what we want?

Source:  Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics II/1 (Edinburgh:  T & T Clark, 1957), 130-31.

Interesting article in USA Today that is also a current blog topic at the New York Times.  Of course, the madness began the night that Tim Tebow passed over and ran through his fellow Christian Jim Tressel’s Ohio State defense.  I knew nothing good could come of that.

The big economic news last night and this morning was that numerous Wall Street executives of bailed out firms were going to pay large bonuses this year.  They justified this expense by saying that they have to compete with other firms to keep their good talent.

I recognize that the following may be an overgeneralization—which is why I put it on my blog—but here are a couple of concise thoughts which apply to many of these executives:

1.  You are competing with yourselves.  You sit on each other’s boards and vote pay raises for your competition, which then gives you the cover to increase your own salary.  You are abusing your power to rig the game in your favor.

2. You are not productive.  You do not make your money by increasing value for our economy but by taking money out.  Earning money for your firm on commissions, volume trading, and credit default swaps is not the same as investing capital in promising businesses.  You are parasites on our economy.  You aren’t helping.

3. You are broke.  Even if #1 and #2 are incorrect, the fact is that you are not successful enough to pay your bonuses with your own money, but are paying your precious talent with money you borrowed from us.

Our economy is approaching biblical proportions.  Open to any of the Old Testament prophets, put your finger down and start reading.  What they say is strikingly relevant today.  Here are a couple of passages from Isaiah:

Does this sound like America?  “Their land is full of silver and gold; there is no end to their treasures.  Their land is full of horses; there is no end to their chariots.  Their land is full of idols; they bow down to the work of their hands, to what their fingers have made.  So man will be brought low and mankind humbled….” (Isaiah 2:7-9).

Read this in light of the subprime lending scam:  “Woe to you who add house to house and join field to field till no space is left and you live alone in the land.  The LORD Almighty has declared in my hearing:  ‘Surely the great houses will become desolate, the fine mansions left without occupants’” (Isaiah 5:8-9).

Does this seem applicable to our elected officials and their lobbyists?  “Your rulers are rebels, companions of thieves; they all love bribes and chase after gifts.  They do not defend the cause of the fatherless; the widow’s case does not come before them” (Isaiah 1:23).

Today I received the latest copy of JETS, which includes an interesting example of doublespeak.  Its book review section contains a “peer review” which the late Stanley Grenz (professor at Carey Theological College in Vancouver) wrote for Jossey-Bass concerning Brian McLaren’s book, The Last Word and the Word After That (see JETS, September 2009, p. 663-65).

Grenz begins with an enthusiastic “My overall sense to this work is very positive.  …On the whole, I would voice a hearty ‘Bravo!’ to the volume.”  Then he proceeds to thoroughly dismantle the major premise and supporting arguments in the book.

Grenz disagrees with McLaren’s central thesis that “Jesus did not believe in hell.”  He wrote that “just because Jesus’ main point might have been to call for a change in the present does not mean that he used the idea of hell merely as a teaching tool.”

Grenz disagrees with McLaren’s claim, stated through his protagonist Neil, that the Old Testament saints did not have a concept of hell.  Grenz writes that though “the ancient Hebrews did not have the detailed conceptualization that later developed, they too gave thought to the possibility that some people might escape the realm of sheol—which was repeatedly viewed as a negative reality, an undesirable destiny—and be brought directly into the presence of God.”  And so Grenz says that Neil is wrong to dismiss “out of hand” OT passages which say as much.

Grenz disagrees with Neil’s “reinterpretation of eternal life” (p. 108 in The Last Word), for “what is presented in this context (and later as well) sounds like a page out of mid-twentieth century existentialist theology.  Although eternal life does indeed refer to a quality of life in the present, the idea that for Jesus or the NT it has no (or little) connection to life in the hereafter is a perspective that has largely been discredited.”

Grenz continues by calling McLaren’s approach “too dogmatic—too certain that the traditional view is beyond redemption”; too “weak” “on the importance of the church”; “inherently suspect” and “anachronistic” in its “historical sketch of where the church went wrong”; and given to “a stereotypical casting of those who are not on the journey that McLaren finds himself on.”  Grenz concludes that “the volume simply does not—perhaps cannot—provide the kind of responsible, nuanced engagement with the variety of views on various theological topics (especially eschatology) that one would prefer to see.”

This review caught my eye because I interact with McLaren’s book in chapter 9 of Don’t Stop Believing, where I make many of the same points as Grenz. However, my disagreement led me to conclude that McLaren’s book was deeply flawed, while Grenz’s acknowledgement of those same flaws led him to say “Bravo!”

I am not sure whether the lesson here is that Grenz disagreed completely with what his friend wrote or that he stuck up for him anyway.  Maybe it’s both.  The one thing I must assume is that “Bravo!” is like the dollar—worth a little bit less in Canada.

While I was driving into work just now I heard that Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.  Do you know what this means?  After years of getting it wrong, Jack Van Impe is now only a free space away from winning Antichrist Bingo.

I do wonder how you can win the Nobel Peace Prize on the same morning that you are bombing the moon.  But perhaps that is Obama’s secret.  He takes out his aggression on the moon rather than on other countries.  Maybe he was subliminally warning Iran?

Obama’s victory, though a surprise, was not a foregone conclusion.  He barely edged out Madonna, who also has made several comments which generally support world peace.

Perhaps the best perspective comes from Sam in Wichitaw, who responded to the news by saying “I also oppose genocide and want the Israelis and Palestinians to get along.  Award please!”

You’ve been great.  I’ll be here all week.