Cootsona: Reflections on Culture, Life, and Faith

Notes on an Upcoming Paper, "C. S. Lewis and Science"

2012-02-01T11:08:00.000-08:00

At this weekend's Science and Religion Conference (February 3-4) at Bidwell Presbyterian Church, I'm presenting a paper on how C. S. Lewis interacted with science. Here are the notes toward that paper, and I'd love your feedback.

thesis: CliveStaples Lewis presented four arguments against scientism or “the ScientificOutlook” (his term), but he was not against “real science”:

In the historical development of modern science, the scientist often became “the magician” who could bend reality to fit his will (his introduction to Poetry and Prose in the Sixteenth Century).
The myth of evolution, conflates evolution with progress, by melding evolutionary theory with a preceding philosophy of progress. (“De Fulitate,” “Is Theology Poetry?”)
Materialism is often combined with science as “scientific materialism,” but this is self-defeating because it obviates finding truth. (Miracles, chapter 3)

Hemispheres by Sarah Sears, conference art work

Christianity fits best with science rightly understood. (“Is Theology Poetry?”)

Assumption: I amtaking C. S. Lewis as Christian intellectual and humanist scholar who attackedthis form of putatively scientific philosophy as incompatible with reason andalso with Christian belief. I seek to apply Lewis’s insights to the widerdialogue of science and theology.

God's Megaphone

2012-01-08T22:16:00.000-08:00

In light of my upcoming Wednesday night class on C. S. Lewis and the Lenten devotional I'm writing, "Faith, Hope, and Love in a World of Hurt," here's a rough entry from that devotional, which contains a famous quote from Lewis on how God uses suffering our lives.

Thisis a tough truth, but C. S. Lewis, at least, was willing to say that we areoften asleep, or at least, deadened to God’s voice. We can become complacent.So God uses pain in our lives to rouse us. True faith, Lewis asserts in The Problem of Pain implies full surrenderto God. Sometimes the only way to get us there is through suffering.

The human spirit will not eventry to surrender self-will as long as all seems to be well with it…. We canrest contentedly in our sins and in our stupidities; and anyone who as watchedgluttons shoveling down the most exquisite foods as if they did no know whatthey were eating, will admit that we can ignore even pleasures. But paininsists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks tous in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: It is His megaphone to rouse adeaf world.

As usual, I turn the question to you: What do you think? Can pain and suffering lead us to faith? Is it a useful tool in God's hands?

C. S. Lewis on the Hell of Not Loving

2012-01-01T05:00:00.000-08:00

As we start a new calendar year, there is no more important topic than love. So I begin with St. Clive, and his associated reflections.

C. S. Lewis wrote Four Loves and reflected on the different Greek words for love (storge or affection, philia or friendship, eros or romantic love, and agape or gift-love). In it, he reminds us that thenature of loving someone is that it opens us up to pain, but that the pain isworth the greater good of love. To not love is ultimately hell... and, really, that's not a bad definition of hell, separation from God, the place where there is no love.

Of all arguments againstlove none makes so strong an appeal to my nature as ‘Careful! This might leadto suffering.’

Tomy nature, my temperament, yes. Not to my conscience. When I respond to thatappeal I seem to myself to be a thousand miles away from Christ. If I am sureof anything I am sure that His teaching was never meant to confirm mycongenital preference for safe investments and limited liabilities. I doubtwhether there is anything in me that pleases Him less. And who couldconceivably begin to love God on such prudential ground—because the security(so to speak) is better? Who could even include it among the grounds forloving?... One must be outside the world of love, of all loves, before one thuscalculates….

Tolove at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainlybe wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact,you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefullyround with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it upsafe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket — safe,dark, motionless, airless — it will change. It will not be broken; it willbecome unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, orat least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside of Heavenwhere you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of loveis Hell.’

How's that for a definition of hell and a reminder of the importance, and cost, of love?

(Much) More on the Way to Heaven and Hell

2011-12-29T08:00:00.000-08:00

The Second Coming of Christ
(Note: This is the final in a series of posts on heaven and hell, or probably better, the "final things," for which theologians use the term, eschatology.)

Fewhave offered a more gripping introduction to the theme of the Second Comingthan the poet, W.B. Yeats (no friend to orthodox Christianity) in his 1921 poemof the same name:

TURNING and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

The Bible offers language no less world-ending, world-transforming, andworld-beginning event. It first foretells and then promises Christ’s SecondComing. The Hebrew Scriptures provide the backdrop for his return. Jesusemployed a key Old Testament concept, the Son of Man (here the traditional andliteral rendering of ben adam) to describe the event of his return. In the Bookof Daniel, the setting is Israel’s captivity under the oppressive thumb ofBabylon following the destruction of the prized city of Jerusalem in 586 BC.Daniel has visions of four kingdoms—Babylonian, Median, Persian, Greek—representedby a lion, a bear, a four-headed winged leopard, and a ten-horned dragon-likebeast. Then comes the establishment of a fifth, eternal kingdom. Jewishtradition interprets this final kingdom as the Messiah’s. (By the way,“Messiah” and “Christ” represent the same meaning in Hebrew and Greekrespectively. Both mean literally “the anointed.”) Christian biblical scholars,with an eye toward God’s coming as a human being in Christ, highlight thatanimals symbolized the previous kingdoms and that here the kingdom comes in a humanform as the Son of Man.

As I watched in the night visions,
I saw one like the Son of Man
      Comingwith the clouds of heaven.
And he came to the Ancient One
      Andwas presented before him.
To him was given dominion
      Andglory and kingship,
That all peoples, nations, and languages
      Shouldserve him.
His dominion is an everlasting dominion
      Thatshall not pass away,
And his kingship is one
      Thatshall never be destroyed. (Daniel 7:13-14)

Jesus reshapes this figure of the Son of Man and thus refashions expectationsfor Messiah (a crucial sticking point in Jewish-Christian dialogue). Instead ofone advent as a politically dominant liberator, the Messiah appears twice. Hecomes in the meekness of a baby and returns as the righteous and powerfulSavior and Judge. The first time arrives with the opportunity to turn our livesaround, “Repent, and believe in the good news!” (Mark 1:15). On the secondtime, the opportunity for repentance has passed. In Matthew 24 (told inparallel in Mark 13 and Luke 21), Jesus looks toward the end of history. Heforesees that signs and particularly suffering will proceed the end when theSon of Man will appear to gather the elect.

Immediatelyafter the suffering of those days

thesun will be darkened,

and the moon will not give its light;

thestars will fall from heaven,

and the powers of heaven will be shaken.

Thenthe sign of the Son of Man will appear in heaven, and then all the tribes ofthe earth will mourn, and they will see the Son of Man coming on the clouds ofheaven with power and great glory. And he will send out his angels with a loudtrumpet call, and they will gather his elect from the four winds, from one endof heaven to the other. (Matthew 24:29-31).

ButJesus quickly adds, “But about that day and hour no one knows, neither theangels of heaven nor the Son, but only the Father” (24:36).

In Matthew 25, Jesus follows this prediction with three parables. One concernsten bridesmaids, only half of whom prepared for the customary arrival of thebridegroom. The second describes three recipients of various amounts of moneyor “talents,” a huge sum in the first century. The boss gives them five milliondollars, two and half million, and half a million (in today’s terms). He thenencourages them to invest. Finally, a shepherd separates the righteous “sheep”from the unrighteous “goats” based on their good deeds toward society’soutcasts. Though each has its unique features, the similarities speak mostclearly. All depict a separation of two types of response—bold investing vs.fearful inactivity, attentive preparation vs. lazy indolence, unselfconsciouscompassion vs. inattentive hard-heartedness. Each parable encourages action inlight of a cataclysmic moment. All describe some period of delay during whichwe wait and work. All three parables remind us to be ready and awake. (A single Greek word, gregoreo, stands behindthis combination, and since it represents the root of my first name, I couldnot pass up the opportunity to mention it.)

Jesus does not command an emotion, but a healthy expectation that transformseverything we do. C. S. Lewis explains it this way:

Wecannot always be excited. We can, perhaps, train ourselves to ask more and moreoften how the thing which we are saying or doing (or failing to do) at eachmoment will look when the irresistible light streams in upon it; that lightwhich is so different from the light of this world—and yet, even now, we knowjust enough of it to take it into account.

Thiscall to be “gregoreo” encourages neither unreasonable excitement nor fearfulparalysis. Instead it calls us to act today because we live under the promiseof fulfillment. The parables all lead to greater rewards: attending a joyouswedding, receiving more money, “entering into the joy of your master.”

I imagine an analogy. I have seen many promising artists wait for their breakin New York City. You are a starving young jazz pianist. Every day you practice,hoping to be discovered. Most of your hours are filled with waiting tables inorder to pay the bills so that you can audition. And, even after years of hardwork, nothing’s happening. On a random Tuesday morning, you are in a churchsanctuary, working through your standard practice regime, engaging your giftand passion for the piano. Unceremoniously, a stranger walks in. He listensattentively, but without interruption. When you are finished, you are greetedwith applause and these words, “Hi, I’m Wynton Marsalis, and I need apianist for the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra. Are you free?”

(Even) More on the Way to Heaven and Hell

2011-12-26T08:00:00.000-08:00

TheResurrection of the Body

Afew years back, I saw a skit on Saturday Night Live in which acouple of cynical, chatty, and flip urbane New Yorkers interview contemporarypersonalities. In one segment, these interviewers questioned the guy whodisplays “John 3:16” at football games as a witness to the Gospel. Why does hedo it? He responded clearly, “So that others may believe in Jesus Christ and haveeternal life.” After this stark reply, one interviewer queried the other:

“Do you believe we’ll live forever?”

“I hope not in this body!”

Theyboth exploded in catty laughter, either masking deeper anxiety or revealing ashocking shallowness. In any event, that was the end of the conversation! Atopic like everlasting life treated with such mocking! The problem for themwas—with sagging jaw lines and increasing flab—do we really want this body totake us into eternity? Obviously they misread the intention of eternal life.The Christian church does not teach that we will live forever in this earthlybody. What then do the Christians mean by the doctrine of the resurrection of thebody?

The Apostle Paul concerns himself throughout his writings with the persistentquestion of suffering (a form of theodicy). Why must God’s people suffer whenwe are following God’s will for us in Jesus Christ? Romans 8:18-25 provides themost extensive responses. He begins by expanding the scope to the entirecreation, “the universe” in contemporary terms. (Paul uses creation three timesin verses 19, 20, and 21.) The people of God groan, with all non-humancreation, because our destinies have been wrapped together. But suffering doesnot have the final word. A cry arises in us as a sign of something more. We hopefor glory. For Paul, our hope does not represent vain presumption, but secureexpectation. That long-expected, glorious day will also dry all tears.

What does Paul say specifically about the new creation? He affirms that therewill be glory (verses 18 and 21)—a word for the divine Presence in fullness, inthis case unveiled in Christ’s final coming. Paul looks to freedom (verse 21)from decay—that the fallenness of the world will cease. And so we look forwardwith hope (verses 24-25), which is the theological virtue that corresponds toGod’s future, to the final triumph of the cosmic comedy. Finally, God’s Spiritrepresents the first payment of this new creation (verse 23)—there will be thefullness of joy of which we now only know in part.

Paul contemplates the resurrection of the body most extensively in 1Corinthians 15:35-44. Paul, as many after him, struggles with an apt analogyfor resurrection. His conclusion offers profound hope. Eugene Peterson’s freshcontemporary paraphrase, The Message, gives it directness:

Someskeptic is sure to ask, “Show me how resurrection works. Give me a diagram; drawme a picture. What does this ‘resurrection body’ look like?” If you look atthis question closely, you’ll realize how absurd it is. There are no diagramsfor this kind of thing. We do have a parallel experience in gardening. Youplant a “dead” seed; soon there is a flourishing plant. There is no visuallikeness between seed and plant. You could never guess what a tomato would looklike by looking at a tomato seed. What we plant in the soil and what grows outof it don’t look anything alike. The dead body what we bury in the ground andthe resurrection body that comes from it will be dramatically different.

You will notice that the variety of bodies is stunning. Just as there aredifferent kinds of seeds, there are different kinds of bodies—humans, animals,birds, fish—each unprecedented in its form. You get a hint at the diversity ofresurrection glory by looking at the diversity of bodies not only on earth butin the skies—sun, moon, stars—all varieties of beauty and brightness. And we’relooking at pre-resurrection “seeds”—who can imagine what the resurrection“plants” will be like!

This image of planting a dead seed and raising a live plant is a mere sketch atbest, but perhaps it will help in approaching the mystery of the resurrectionbody—but only in you keep in mind that when we’re raised, we’re raisedfor good, alive forever! The corpse that’s planted is no beauty, but when it’sraised, it’s glorious. Put in the ground weak, it comes up powerful. The seedsown is natural; the seed grown is supernatural—same seed, same body, but whata difference from when it goes down in physical mortality to when it is raisedup in spiritual immortality!

Certainly, every detail about our resurrection is not fully laid out. Paul istrying to understand and express the depths of the God. At several otherplaces—in 1 Corinthians 2:9-10, for example—he simply admits the limits of hisunderstanding:

But,as it is written, “What no eye has seen, nor ear heard,

Norhuman heart conceived,

WhatGod has prepared for those who love him”—

Thesethings God has revealed to us through the Spirit; for the Spirit searcheseverything even the depths of God.

Overall,Paul sketches the great promises, but leaves the details open.

But as a pastor, I know that church members remain unsatisfied with onlygeneralities. In fact, when I have taught this material in adult educationclasses, the specifics captivate the students. Once I presented the idea thatthe immortality of the soul was not a truly Christian teaching, but a loan fromPlato who taught that the body was mortal and decaying and the soul inherentlyimmortal. Once we died, Plato asserted, we thankfully freed ourselves from theshackles of the body. I countered thatHebrew thought conceives of human beings as a unity of body and soul. The classwas not pleased to hear this denial of our soul’s immortality. They did notwant to taste death. (It reminded me of Woody Allen’s quip, “I don’t want toachieve immortality through art. I want to achieve it by not dying.”) I had tomoderate my point by saying, when we are raised, it is God who does the work,not because of something intrinsic to our nature.

And then I have also been asked the practical questions: What exactly will bethe nature of my resurrected body? Will my father recognize me in heaven? Onother hand, can I cremate my grandmother? What will my disabled child looklike? From the sketch presented so far, the critical element in our resurrectedbodies as the New Testament understand it, is not our flesh and bones. It is ourconcrete selves. Generally, Eastern religious traditions, such as Buddhism andHinduism, describe a state in which our individuality disappears. Buddha talkedabout the transition from one life to the next (remember we keep migrating fromone body to the next in Eastern thought) as a flame being passed from onecandle to another. Alternatively, we become a drop of water in the ocean ofBeing. Instead the Christian faith believes that God will raise us as concreteindividuals, who altogether comprise God’s people. Ultimately, because it isGod’s work, we can cremate or bury because our resurrection does not depend onflesh and bones. (Specifically, how else can we understand God’s promise of aperfected, whole body in the resurrection for a victim of a violentdismemberment?) Our resurrected bodies will be us, but freed from the defectsinherent in a fallen world.

We will recognize one another in heaven. Who and what we are on earthrepresents the concrete self that God created. The body-soul unity that nowcomprises us will dissolve at death, but our individuality—the “pattern ofinformation” is another metaphor—will be instantly recreated at death into theresurrected body. The English writer, Susan Howatch—who made her own headlinesby funding a chair at Oxford in science and theology—describes this doctrine inher novel, The Wonder Worker. She presents a dialogue on the bodilyresurrection between a confused agnostic, Alice, and an Anglican priest,Nicholas Darrow, using the contemporary analogy of information. Alice’s aunthas just been cremated.

“Butif Aunt’s now ashes, how can one talk of a resurrection of the body?”

“‘Body’ in that context is probably a code-word for the whole person. When wesay ‘anybody’ or ‘everybody’ or ‘somebody’ we’re not talking about flesh andblood—we’re referring to the complex pattern of information which the medium offlesh and blood expresses.”

I struggled to wrap my mind around this. “So you’re saying that flesh and bloodare more or less irrelevant?”

“No, not irrelevant. Our bodies have a big impact on our development aspeople—they constitute to the pattern of information, and in fact we wouldn’tbe people without them. But once we’re no longer confined by space and time theflesh and blood become superfluous and the pattern can be downloaded elsewhere…Do you know anything about computers?” 

“No.”

“Okay, forget that, think of Michelangelo instead. In the Sistine Chapel heexpressed a vision by creating, through the medium of paint, patterns ofcolour. The paint is of vital importance but in the end it’s the pattern thatmatters and the pattern which can be reproduced in another medium such as a bookor film.”

(A Bit More) On the Way to Heaven and Hell

2011-12-21T08:00:00.000-08:00

TheLast Judgment

Michelangelo's Last Judgement

MichelangeloBuanorroti began painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel at the age ofthirty-five. It was 1510 and it would be seven years until Martin Luther’snailed his Ninety-Five Theses nailed to the Wittenburg Cathedral door toinitiate the Protestant Reformation. But from 1536 to 1541, as he labored onthe fresco of The Last Judgment, Rome was feeling the impact of the Protestantrevolt against its religious authority. In Michelangelo’s enduring artisticimage of the Christ’s judging the world, Christ pronounces the fate of allhumankind with awesome finality. The 314 figures clearly divide into twogroups. One is raised into the glories of heaven with the Apostles and thePatriarchs. The other, the damned, cower in abject despair. In light of thereligious controversies of the day, significantly one man is barely saved byhanging onto the rosary, a symbol of medieval Catholic devotion to the VirginMary.

In addition, as the Princeton theologian, Daniel Migliore, comments,

Themartyrs of the faith who surround Christ seem to take satisfaction in thetorment of the damned.

And thereMichelangelo—surely one of the world’s greatest artists andintellectuals—reveals a base flaw. His view of the final judgment—and oftenours as well—conflates a sincere devotion to God’s sovereignty with a touch ofhate for our foes.

Jesus Christ is the antidote to these unhelpful notions. In him, we certainlymeet our Judge. Yes, Christ will judge all people. Yes, he will root outevil. But this Judge is also our Savior. I gained a valuable insight from KarlBarth on the nature of Christ’s judgment: the only God we know as Christians isthe God who is for us, the God revealed in Jesus Christ. Or as Migliore writes,

the very same Christ who was crucified and raised for us will also be ourjudge on the final day.

Snap Shot of Paul taken on my iPhone

Jesus walked onthe streets and taught God’s grace. Jesus sat at table with his disciples,saying, “Take and eat. This is my body broken for you.” This judge gave himselffor us. Paul says it best in the final verses of Romans 8 as he lifts hisrhetoric to truly heavenly heights:

ForI am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor thingspresent, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anythingelse in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God inChrist Jesus our Lord. (Romans 8:38-39)

And to put a coda on this: As I prepare for my class this spring on Rob Bell's Love Wins and the Bible, I realize this is one of Bell's major concerns as well--that somehow we never forget that "God is love" (1 John 4:8). Our vision of our final destiny must always keep in mind that we will meet at loving God. And to be timely, this is the Jesus we also meet at Christmas, "the Word who became flesh and blood and moved into the neighborhood' (as Eugene Peterson paraphrases John 1:14).

And that brings me to my usual question, What do you think?

(A postscript: In March, I posted something on "Heaven and Hell" as I took in the controversy over Rob Bell's Love Wins. That post has dwarfed all my others in the number of hits it has received. As I noted, that post, as well as this one, is excerpted from the final chapter of my book, Creation and Last Things: At the Intersection of Theology and Science--I added the link to Amazon in case my publisher becomes a little uncomfortable with how much I'm putting into my blog.)

More on the Way to Heaven and Hell

2011-12-17T16:00:00.000-08:00

Earlier this year, I posted something on "Heaven and Hell" as I took in the controversy over Rob Bell's Love Wins. That post has dwarfed all my others in the number of hits it has received. As I noted, it's excerpted from the final chapter of my book, Creation and Last Things: At the Intersection of Theology and Science. (I added the link to Amazon in case my publisher becomes a little uncomfortable with how much I'm putting into my blog. Hey, I'll even add a picture of the book.)

Even this week, that particular post was by far the most popular. So I thought I'd excerpt a few subsections that lead up to my comments on heaven and hell. I'd also be interested in any comments you have. They could be especially helpful as I prepare for a class in April and May on Rob Bell, Love Wins, and the Bible.

The Science of the End

John Polkinghorne, the particle physicist and theologian,spoke to his assembled, attentive audience for the University of Edinburgh’sGifford lectures in 1993-94. He reminded them that cosmologists do not onlypeer into the past. They also attempt to discern the future. On a cosmic scale,he noted, science tells the story of the end of the universe. Its history is aenormous tug-of-war between the expansive force of the Big Bang, driving thegalaxies apart, and the contractive force of gravity, pulling them together. Ifexpansion continues, the galaxies will continue to separate, and the universewill decay into low-grade radiation. Continued contraction will collapse theuniverse into a fiery, big crunch. These two effects are so evenly balancedthat we cannot tell which will win.

WilliamStoeger, a world-class astronomer and staff scientist for the VaticanObservatory, has added a few possibilities for our earth’s demise in an articlewith the daunting title, “Scientific Accounts of Ultimate Catastrophes in OurLife-Bearing Universe.” They are destruction of earth by asteroids andcomets, the decline of our sun, and the explosion of a nearby supernova. However it arrives, the destruction of life on earth remains certain.

Butwe come then to a significant problem for Christian faith. These endings hardlyrepresent the glorious fulfillment of “a new heaven and a new earth” thatRevelation 21:1 promises. But John Polkinghorne reminded his listeners in Edinburghthat

Cosmic death and human death pose equivalent questions of what is God’sintention for his creation.

Only God offers hope. God’s new creation will be a transformation of thecurrent order, no less surprising than our resurrection, initiated by Jesus’resurrection at the first Easter.

Howcan Christians relate scientific cosmology and Christian eschatology? There isa comparable scientific phenomenon to God’s continual work in the world.Evolutionary science depicts the created order as constantly unfolding intoever-greater complexity. Quantum theory’s indeterminacy describes creation asirreducibly open-ended. I am reminded again of a jazz chart—the basic melodyand chord structure are written out, but the actual song has elements ofsurprise or improvisation. The future depicted by scientific cosmology displaysopenness to creating “new things” (as in Isaiah 43:19) and thus to God’scontinual action in the world.

Onthe other hand, science does not provide complete answers to the end of theworld. It offers an ending only in the sense of how the physical system willprobably run down. It does not, indeed cannot, speak of the end in the sense ofa goal or direction. Science cannot—if it remains true to its ownparameters—speak of forces outside of nature. Even with science in hand, theologianscome to the question of whether Christ’s return relates directly to thedestruction of the universe as a whole, of specifically the earth, or whetherthe end of this world is simply an act of God without natural precedent. Putbluntly, will Jesus return because an asteroid destroys the earth?

RegardingGod’s action, science must therefore remain silent. At best, scientific studymay lead us to the threshold but cannot open the door to God. Here we come tothe limit of general revelation, of God’s disclosure through nature. Only inGod’s revelation in Scripture can we find the new creation.

The Resurrection of Christ

Science describes only indirectly ways the world may end.The Bible, however, speaks clearly of God’s directing the final act of the cosmicdrama. Three times Revelation (1:8, 21:6, 22:13) calls the Lord the “Alpha andOmega,” which represent the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet.Nothing precedes nor slips away from God. God knows the entire history ofcreation. We can discern the script of this history through Scripture of bothold and new creation.

Theinitiating act of the new creation is the resurrection of Jesus Christ on thefirst Easter, the third day after his death on a cross. And there, at the crossof Christ, one must begin. There we find the most heavily attested historicalfact of Jesus’ life. Two historians, the Roman Tacitus, in about 110 AD andfirst-century Jewish chronicler, Josephus, clearly speak of Christ’s death on across. Besides the disciples had no reason to make it up. The cross representeda shameful, four-letter word in Latin, crux,since it signified a death reserved for political traitors and villains andnever for Roman citizens. Cicero’s Orations denounced both the reality of the cross and its usageby polite Romans. Death on cross was “the most cruel and abominable form ofpunishment”, and the very word “should be foreign not only to the body of aRoman citizen, but to his thoughts, his eyes, his ears."

Herethe science of medicine has much to say. A physician can describe death aspainful, as excruciating (from the Latin, excruciatus, “out of the cross”). Death by crucifixion damagedno vital organs, and the crucified sufferers could no longer lift themselvesand the weight of their body rested on their chest and did not allow them tobreathe. Death usually came slowly through dehydration or asphyxiation.

Outof this shame and surprise—for no Jew could conceive that the Messiah wouldever have died this death—a surprising testimony arose: “Christ died for oursins in accordance with the scriptures, and that he was buried, and that he wasraised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures.” Paul wrote thisearliest written record around 55AD in the First Letter to the Corinthians,saying that 500 others witnessed this appearance. In these appearances, Jesus’resurrected body at times resembles ours, such as when he urges Thomas to touchhis wounds (John 20:27). He also appears unlike a normal body when hedisappears suddenly (Luke 24:31). This new creation is both similar anddissimilar from the old creation. To the degree that one finds correspondenceto this world, science can offer insight. To the degree it speaks of a newcreation, science has little to add.

TheResurrection of Christ restored the disciples’ faith and hope and sends them ina mission. It also vindicated Jesus as Messiah, turning the shame of the crossinto God’s victory of death and sin. Finally, the Resurrection of Christinitiates the new creation. On that first Easter morning, as Jesus cracked openthe tomb and burst forth, the crack of the new creation spread through the oldcreation and has not stopped since.

Augustine's Prayer in a Time of Darkness

2011-12-15T10:10:00.000-08:00

Sometimes—or maybe often—theroad ahead seems really difficult and dark. Our faith is tested, and we can't figure it all out. So our only recourseis prayer. I have found this prayer, from the 3^rd and 4^thcentury Christian theologian and pastor, Augustine of Hippos, immensely powerful and comforting:

God of our life, there aredays when the burdens we carry chafe our shoulders and weigh us down; when theroad seems dreary and endless, the skies gray and threatening; when our liveshave no music in them, and our hearts are lonely, and our souls have lost theircourage. Flood the path with light, turn our eyes to where the skies arefull of promise; turn our hearts to brave music; give us the sense ofcomradeship with heroes and saints of every age; and so quicken our spiritsthat we may be able to encourage the souls of all who journey with us on theroad of life to your honor and glory.

Let me know what you think.

C. S. Lewis on the Value in Suffering

2011-12-13T08:41:00.000-08:00

I'm working on a devotional for Lent, "Faith, Hope, and Love in a World of Hurt," which reflects on how God forms these three virtues in us when we suffer. I'm scouring great insights from Christian thinkers throughout the centuries. Here are two gems from St. Clive. The first is when the senior devil, Screwtape, writes to his junior tempter, Wormwood, about how to lead a human astray. The second is one of Lewis's most famous.

Together they lead to a quote from the 19th pastor and writer, George MacDonald, that might be a summation of Lewis's insights into the value of pain and suffering,

The Son of God suffered unto death, not that men might not suffer, but thattheir sufferings might become like his.

So here are the two quotes from Lewis:

Do not be deceived, Wormwood. Our cause is never more in danger than when a human, no longer desiring, but still intending, to do our Enemy's will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys.

God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks to us in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: It is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.

What do you think? Do those help, confuse, or do something else?

C.S. Lewis on Why Naturalism is Self-defeating

2011-12-05T15:15:00.001-08:00

(Note: This is a paper I'm presenting at the December meeting of the Chico Triad on Philosophy, Theology, and Science.)

Naturalism (or the almost synonymous position ofmaterialism) represents the philosophical position that the natural world (orthe material world respectively) is all there is without remainder. At onepoint in his key argument against naturalism, Miracles: A Preliminary Study, Lewis states his definition succinctly, “Somepeople believe that nothing exists except Nature. I call these people Naturalists.”[1]In accord with Lewis, I will generally use “naturalism” because that is C. S.Lewis’s preferred term, but sometimes I will employ “materialism”interchangeably. This philosophical position obviously presents problems forChristian faith as it points to the Source of all being beyond this materialworld. In this chapter, I will look at Lewis’s apologetic strategy of arguingthat naturalism is self-defeating.

Whatever it is called, naturalismhas again returned with renewed vigor, though not always improved insight. Andwith it, a combative anti-theism has arisen in our country. The prominentHarvard neuroscientist Stephen Pinker has laid down the gauntlet in this way:

Theneuroscientific worldview—the idea that the mind is what the brain does—haskicked away one of the intuitive supports of religion. So even if you acceptedall of the previous scientific challenges to religion—the Earth revolvingaround the sun, animals evolving, and so on—the immaterial soul was always onelast thing that you could keep as being in the province of religion. With theadvance of neuroscience, that idea has been challenged.[2]

It seems that materialism haswon the day with scientists and that, according to many, it represents thecrucial contemporary argument against religious faith. It represents a crucialcomponent of the “New Atheism” that has resulted in millions of books beingsold by the likes of Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and Daniel Dennett.

Inthe conflict between Christian faith and naturalism, C. S. Lewis’s nextapologetic argument, even if he formulated it most definitively almost seventyyears ago, still takes hold. We have a contemporary culture that hears thesiren cries of naturalism. Lewis, as he moved into theism and then Christianbelief in the 1930s, continued to wonder about whether life ends and is simplyannihilated. I too, having grown up for my first eighteen years withoutreligious faith and now engaging in scientific literature that so often deniesa reality beyond nature, I find myself tempted by unremitting naturalism.Nevertheless, Lewis’s argument that naturalism is self-defeating is powerful,and I cannot escape its force.

Oxford in the 1940s

Though it can be argued thatidealism still maintained a foothold at Oxford in the 1940s,[3]Lewis nevertheless felt compelled to engage in dialectics against naturalism.For Lewis the big crises with naturalism first emerged in 1929, when heconfessed adult faith in theism and then in 1931 when he looked specifically toChrist. No longer content simply to remain the rationalist—and thusmaterialist—he found that life had more to offer. In some ways, it could beargued that Lewis had a strong line of idealism running through hisphilosophical veins, at least in the sense described by his friend, the Oxfordphilosophical theologian, Austin Farrer:

Lewis wasraised in the tradition of an idealist philosophy which hoped to establish thereality of the mental subject independently of, or anyhow in priority to, thatof the bodily world.

Farrer does note that Lewis“moved some way from such positions,” primarily by concluding that idealism didnot sufficiently take in the personal presence of the absolute in theIncarnation. He indeed calls this shift a move from “idealism,” by which hemeans that there is a transcendent Mind or Spirit, to full encounter with God.This God would never be contained solely by the interactions of the naturalworld.[4]

Nonetheless,there was sufficient idealism in Lewis’s convictions to butt heads with themore materialist currents of his day. For example, in Oxford’s SocraticSociety—where Lewis presented the two pieces (or at least parts thereof) I amanalyzing—Lewis found he regularly had to impugn the arguments of LogicalPositivists, who asserted that statements about a transcendent reality were meaningless.This represents a linguistic and philosophical complement to naturalism. As hewrote to his student, Dom Bede Griffiths on April 22, 1954,

Don’timagine that the Logical Positivist Menace is over. To me it seems that theapologetic position has never in my life been worse than it is now. At theSocratic the enemy often wipe the floor with us. Quousque domine? [How long, O Lord?][5]

Lewis, who in many waysgloried in moving against the grain of the culture, readily argued for theirrationality of materialism. I use “irrationality” advisedly because Lewisargued that materialism did not allow for rationality and thus obviated truthas well. In materialism, things just are;they are neither true nor false. And I mean this literally—Lewis concluded that,if we take nature to be all that there is, there is no place for rationalthought. That is why naturalism defeats itself. It cuts off the very branch onwhich it sits.

AsI mentioned above, we live in an age, remarkable similar to C.S. Lewis’s… atleast in this regard. The intellectual culture of the 1940s, out of which thetwo prominent writings, first “Is Theology Poetry” and then Miracles: APreliminary Study, I will analyze emerged,promoted the concept that matter was all that mattered.[6]For this reason, these two pieces are still pertinent.

Certainlynot all scientists today or in the early decades of the twentieth century, wereof similar minds. Some, even within the naturalist and therefore atheisticcamp, saw the problems inherent in arguing that “the mind is what the braindoes.” The famous geneticist and evolutionary biologist, John Scott Haldanewrote this,

It seems tome immensely unlikely that mind is a mere by-product of matter. For if mymental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain Ihave no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true. They may be soundchemically, but that does not make them sound logically. And hence I have noreason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms.[7]

It is noteworthy that Lewistakes up this citation directly in Miracles,probably to demonstrate that the self-defeating nature of unremittingnaturalism arose not just from a theological conviction, but from a logical oneas well.

Inow turn to Lewis’s specific encounters in the ‘40s with the naturalisticmindset of many scientists.

Two types of naturalism

Ultimately, Lewis was aprofessor of literature and therefore a specialist in the humanities and notthe sciences. Most of his arguments for faith in light of what he names “theScientific Outlook” take place in philosophy or the arts. Yet, this may be astrength because many arguments against Christian faith are presented byscientists as scientific, but are really philosophical in character.

Isthere more than one form of naturalism? If so, are all forms of naturalismself-defeating? We arrive at a nexus where confusion can arise. Sometimes lessscrupulous atheistic commentators may even use this misunderstanding as arhetorical shell game, treating all naturalism as coterminous and concludingthat God cannot exist in light of the advance of science. So I need to make adistinction. Science commits itself to methodological naturalism quite rightly. Science, at its core, commits to amethod in which scientists look for the interactions, interrelations, and thuscause and effect in the natural world. For example, when scientists ask thequestion, “What is the boiling point of water?” they keep testing,hypothesizing, testing, and hypothesizing, until they find the natural causesfor this effect. They conclude that, when water at sea level is heated to 100Celsius, it begins to boil. No god or spirit is needed for that specificphenomenon of nature (other than a Creator God who put together nature itself,by I will return to that theme below). The methods of scientists becomecomplicated in more elaborate theories—quantum theory comes to mind—but thebasic commitment to find solely natural causes remains. This is propermethodological naturalism.

Theissue is when this method of looking solely for natural causes elides into philosophicalnaturalism—that all that exists is nature.Just because science cannot test or number something does not mean it does notexist. It is here—not as a field of study, but as anunderstanding of the world or as a sense-of-life, where science oftenintersects—or even collides with—theology. Many evolutionists use the theory ofnatural selection and conclude that the natural world of cause-and-effect isnot guided, but evokes a mindless, “pitiless indifference,” to quote RichardDawkins in Journey Out of Eden.[8] He sets this view against the purposeful creation by thehand of God. But, as Albert Einstein once quipped about scientists’prediliction for numbering as an example of philosophical naturalism, “Everythingthat can be counted does not necessarily count; everything that counts cannotnecessarily be counted.”

And,though many scientists, and atheistic philosophers, casually linkmethodological naturalism with philosophical atheism, there is no sound reasonto do so. Here a distinction is helpful. There is a fundamental difference thestudy of God and the study of the natural world based. Simply there is primaryand secondary causation. God is the primarycause—God undergirds and establishes all being. As the great medievalphilosopher Thomas Aquinas taught, the nature of God as Creator is that beingitself continually flows from God. That fact defines primary causation. God isthe Cause that undergirds all other causes. Secondary causation is what humanbeings, and all other agents in the natural world, are given to do. Shakespearecreated Hamlet and Ophelia—that is the nature of authorship. They would notexist without him, but within the story they have real interaction. They existbecause Shakespeare, as it were, brought them into being. The analogy is notperfect because once the play is written, the real interactions between Hamletand Ophelia are fixed in a way that ours as real secondary agents is not.Nonetheless, the central analogical point lies here: if Shakespeare were tohave stopped writing Hamlet inthe midst of its creation, the entire story would have ceased. And so too withGod. God is the primary cause, but we are the real secondary causes. If Godwere to stop creating, we would no longer exist. At the same time, we can studythe real interactions among secondary in their own right without directreference to the first cause.

“Is Theology Poetry” on“the Scientific Outlook” and its contrast with science

I make these distinctions betweenprimary and secondary causation and between these two types of naturalismbecause they are consistent with Lewis’s own. So Iturn then to our first text at hand: “Is Theology Poetry?” really an oralpresentation to the Oxford Socratic Club—from 1945.[9] It is a fascinating lecture—as Lewis is wont to create—noton science per se, or even strictlyevolutionary science, but on the use of evolution to create a worldview, onethat challenges orthodox Christian accounts of the world. To repeat: Thisatheistic challenge confuses methodological naturalism (tbe basis of evolution)with philosophical naturalism. Or, as it appears in this essay, Lewisdistinguishes “science” (and “real science”) with “the Scientific Outlook.” Whenscientists grasp this distinction, no conflict between science and God needarise prematurely. Now there may be discoveries about creation and raisequestions about the Creator, but science by its nature does not have the powerand right to say that all that exists is what it studies. It is as if sculptorswere to assert that painting does not exist because they have never touchedpaint.

SoLewis held out great hope for science and faith. He held a positive assessmentof science. Worth considering is what he puts in the mouth of the devil,Screwtape, in the first letter of the Screwtape Letters, the imagined correspondence between a senior deviland a junior devil, Wormwood, on how to tempt a human soul.

Above all, do not attempt to use science (I mean, the realsciences) as a defense against Christianity. They will positively encourage himto think about realities he can't touch and see. There have been sad casesamong the modern physicists.[10]

Lewis’sargument here is that “real sciences” are philosophically anti-naturalistic, a point that finds agreement with the eminent physicistSir John Polkinghorne; quantum physics now raises up things that we cannot seeor touch. With the existence of quarks, no one can see them directly, but wehave to infer their existence because they make sense of material reality: “Well,quarks are, in some sense, unseen realities. Nobody has ever isolated a singlequark in the lab. So we believe in them not because we've, even withsophisticated instruments, so to speak, seen them, but because assuming thatthey're there makes sense of great swaths of physical experience.”[11]

Inanother brief essay, “Dogma and the Universe,” Lewis makes another connectionbetween modern physics and the defeat of “classical materialism,” that naturedepends on its existence on something else.

In one respect, as many Christians have noticed,contemporary science has recently come into life with Christian doctrine, andparted company with the classical forms of materialism. If anything emergesclearly from modern physics, it is that nature is not everlasting. The universehad a beginning, and will have an end.[12]

Hedoes note, however, “We should not lean to heavily on this, for scientifictheories change.”[13]

Inhis essay, Lewis takes up the question given to him: “Is theology poetry?”(This, of course, is also the title of the talk). He does not seem to enjoy thequestion as it stands before him, so he refines it to become whether theologyis merely poetry. He, first of all,argues that theology is not just poetry—it is not really artful enough, nor isit as good as the poetry of

The charge that Theology is mere poetry, if it means thatChristians believe it because they find it, antecedently to belief, the mostpoetically attractive of all world pictures, thus seems to me unplausible inthe extreme.[14]

Lewisthen analyzes the poetry of the Scientific Outlook presented by evolution (andespecially H. G. Wells) as a philosophy of progress that gradually andpainfully overcomes obstacles. What Lewis names the Scientific Outlookbegins with a humble of inanimate matter that gradually becomes life. Itgradually emerges as dinosaurs, who die out, replaced by Man, who is alsodestined to die. This great myth is finally “overwhelmed in ruin.”[15] It is a beautiful, tragic myth of Man fighting valiantlyagainst the odds, but ultimately losing.

Thereason Lewis rejected the “Scientific Outlook” lies in the self-defeatingnature of the two claims “we can think” and “nature is all there is.” Here wecome to the key theme of this chapter: the Scientific Outlook asserts the truthand reasonableness of its claims without thereby providing a place for reason.Or as he put it:

If minds are wholly dependent on brains, and brains onbiochemistry, and biochemistry (in the long run) on the meaningless flux of theatoms, I cannot understand how the thought of those minds should have any moresignificance than the sound of the wind in the trees.

TheScientific Outlook tries to fit in reason in an irrational—or maybe arational—world. Lewis concludes that this move is self-defeating.

Asan alternative, Lewis discovered in his own life (around his conversions in1929 and 1931) something he argues here: Belief in a Creator God who endowshumanity with reason makes entirely more sense. The divine Logos creates humanreason. The primary Cause ungirds all secondary causes. Lewis says that is whyhe does not believe in the “Scientific Outlook,” but instead believes inChristianity, which includes reason and science. As he closes the lecture, hewrites,

Christian theology can fit in science, art, morality, andthe sub-Christian religions. The scientific view [such as in H. G. Wells, and Iwould add, Pinker] cannot fit in any of these things, not even science itself.I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only becauseI see it, but because by it I see everything else.

Lewis believed that Christiantheology gave grounds for reason and thus reasoning about what is true.Therefore it makes sense of science. Put another way, if science bets itsexistence on naturalism, then it will ultimately undermine itself.

Hismore sustained argument can be found in the 1947 apologetic work, Miracles, a key chapter of which (chapter three) he revisedfor the 1960 edition, from which I will quote.

The argument in Miracles (1947, revised 1960)

Starting with Lewis’s argumentsagainst naturalism, I turn to his most sustained, discussed, and debatedpresentation, the opening chapters of Miracles, particularly the third chapter, “The Cardinal Difficulty with Naturalism.”As I mentioned above, Lewis defines naturalism simply as the belief that natureis all there is, and he also provides a more extensive definition in Miracles: Naturalism is “the doctrine that only Nature—thewhole interlocked system–exists. And if that were true, every thing and eventwould, if we knew enough, be explicable without remainder (no heeltaps) as a necessary product of thesystem.”[16]He continues the essence of the argument he presented in “Is Theology Poetry?”(and elsewhere)—that in order for reason to exist there must be somethinggreater or “above” (super in Latin) andthus there must be Supernature.

Lewispresents his argument against naturalism to kick away a support fordisbelieving in miracles. If there is nothing that supervenes over nature, thenmiracles are impossible. If there is, however, a Supernature, then it, or God,could act in ways contrary to the nexus of cause and effect in the naturalworld. That a central reason he argues against naturalism.

NowLewis’s argument against naturalism is reasonable simple. It starts with thepremise that

(1) Naturalism asserts that all that exists is part of thenatural, or material world, of cause and effect.

(2) Reason, being a part of all that is, must therefore be acomponent solely of the natural world.

(3) Yet, in order for reason to discover truth, it cannot besolely based on natural, or material, cause and effect.

(4) Therefore naturalists cannot fit reason into their system.

(5) Consequently, naturalism is false.

Asa result of the well-known debate with the eminent Oxford philosopher ElizabethAnscombe at the Socratic Club on February 2, 1948, Lewis conceded that Anscombehad pointed out flaws in his essential argument. He presented changes in the1960 revision to Miracles, noting a keydistinction between Cause-Effect and Ground-Consequent. She too, according tosubsequent reflection, felt that he had admitted problems, noting his “honestyand seriousness” as a philosopher. She did not, however, conclude he destroyed,as later commentators would assert. A. N. Wilson, who, in his 1990s biographyof Lewis, labored incessantly (and even cooked a few facts) to make Lewis lookunworthy of serious attention repeats a somewhat tired argument that Lewisretreated from apologetics (such as Miracles) to children’s literature (i.e., Narnia) after this encounter. (Below I will note howWilson’s mood changed significantly a few years ago.) He continues by assertingthat Lewis even patterned the evil White Witch of Narnia, Jadis, afterAnscombe. I find it difficult to take that sort of assertion seriously.[17]

I have presented the critical elements of hisrevised presentation, not to engage them directly (others have done soeffectively),[18]but to demonstrate more that Lewis more away from argument to story, fromjustification to signification. Or put another way, as Michael Ward does in PlanetNarnia, Lewis moved from Contemplation toEnjoyment. This is a key distinction that Lewis makes in Surprised byJoy, which he picked up from Alexander. Soin 1950, when he began the “Narniad” as it is called, he wanted to enjoy what reasoning implied (a first order experience),not contemplate reason, or thinkabout thinking (a second-order experience).[19]

Theapologetic force of this argument remains surprisingly relevant for today’santi-theistic—I have noted Pinker and Dawkins, but there are many others. Ihave found myself, as one committed to the glory of scientific insight alongwith my Christian faith, leaning on Lewis. He does not argue that one mustconclude that naturalism is self-defeating, only that that it is very likely tobe self-defeating. And I have not found a rejoinder, although many have beentried,[20]and the debate shows no signs of abating.[21]It is not exactly an argument for Christian faith, but as he concludes in “IsTheology Poetry?” he does offer that theism—specifically, the creation of theworld by a rational Creator—offers the best ground for human reason. For thisreason, Lewis brings together a rigorous reasoning alongside a robust faith in Godas Creator.

A final thought

Perhaps the best closer for this chapter comes from the penof A. N. Wilson, the brilliant, but cranky biographer of Lewis who remained,for decades, a committed, atheist. Just a few years ago, he changed his mind.In an April 2009 article in MailOnline, he wrote this,

Our bishops and theologians,frightened as they have been by the pounding of secularist guns, need that kindof bravery (like Sir Thomas More’s) more than ever. Sadly, they have all butaccepted that only stupid people actually believe in Christianity, and that thefew intelligent people left in the churches are there only for the music orbelieve it all in some symbolic or contorted way which, when examined, turnsout not to be belief after all. As a matter of fact, I am sure the opposite isthe case and that materialist atheism is not merely an arid creed, but totallyirrational. Materialist atheism says we are just a collection of chemicals. Ithas no answer whatsoever to the question of how we should be capable of love orheroism or poetry if we are simply animated pieces of meat.

That seems in the mode of C. S. Lewis himself. But Lewis didnot stop with simply impugning naturalism—a negative accomplishment—he alsopresented a positive argument for Jesus Christ. That is the subject of the nextchapter.

[1] Miracles, 5. Note: This,and in some of the following citations, are incomplete. That will certainly beremedied in a final draft of this paper.

[2] Atoms& Eden: Conversations on Religion & Science, edited by Steve Paulsen (Oxford, 2010), 239.

[3] “ThePhilosophical Journey of C.S. Lewis,” Stanford Online Encyclopedia.

[4] Surprisedby Joy: The Shape of My Early Life.

[5] TheCollected Letters of C. S. Lewis, 1950-1963: Narnia, Cambridge and Joy, VolumeIII, ed. Walter Hooper (San Francisco:HarperSanFrancisco, 2007), 462

[6] Perhaps notsurprisingly, as I picked up Orthodoxy,by Lewis’s great mentor, G. K. Chesterton, the latter contains an extendedsection on materialism

[7] PossibleWorlds and Other Essays.

[8] Dawkins, RiverOut of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life,132-33.

[9] Just to beclear: It was read on November 7, 1944 and published in The Socratic Digest in 1945.

[10] TheScrewtape Letters, Letter I.

[11] May 29,2008 National Public Radio interview with Krista Tippett. See http://being.publicradio.org/programs/quarks/transcript.shtml.

[12] “Dogma andthe Universe,” in God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics, edited by Walter Hooper (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans,1970), 38-9.

[13] “Dogma andthe Universe,” 39.

[14] TheWeight of Glory, 78.

[15] TheWeight of Glory, 81.

[16] Miracles,12.

[17] C. S.Lewis: A Biography.

[18] Cf.Reppert’s book, C. S. Lewis’s Dangerous Idea.

[19] MichaelWard, Planet Narnia, 218-20.

[20] Beversluis,The Rational Religion of C. S. Lewis.

[21] Oneprominent example is Daniel Dennett.

The Mystery of the Incarnation

2011-12-03T07:25:00.001-08:00

It’s the season of Advent.

I’ve been reading Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics I/2 on “Very God and Very Man,” and last night I experiencedthe profoundly theological Advent concert by Future of Forestry. Both Barth and Future of Forestry offer meditations on the event of Christmas, or more specifically, on the event of theIncarnation.

The doctrine of the Incarnation of the Word has alwaysfascinated me. C. S. Lewis dubbed it the “Grand Miracle,” and that’s preciselywhy it draws me—it’s the most radical claim made by the Christian Gospel.Contrast it, for example, with “love your neighbor,” which has profundity andamazing usefulness, which in its simplicity, challenges us not in theory, butin practice. Still, who really disagrees this command? Yes, there a few, but nothing like the reaction to this extraordinary—even offensive—claim that God, the one true God, became flesh. It has long beena scandal to the other monotheistic faiths of Judaism (who are still awaitingMessiah) and Islam (whose Dome of the Rock proclaims “Far be it removedfrom His transcendent majesty that He should have a son”). The claim is bold,unique, and offensive. It’s the sheer boldness of this claim that draws me andinspires me every Advent.

Indeed. That “the Word became flesh” (John 1:14) has been sochallenging even Christian theologians have danced around, or muted, theclarity of the New Testament Greek that somehow the eternal Word became—that there is a change in God’s history, thatsomehow divine fullness, and therefore perfection, can include alteration,that somehow the eternal God wants to get down into the muck of human historyin order to free us, and thus that the Word became flesh, became fallen human, concrete humanity—“Don’t get soclose, I want like the contemplate Principle of Beauty, Truth, and Goodness, or meditate respectfully on the Laws of Physics, but I don't want this meddling God.”

Nonetheless, there it lies right at the center of our faith:“The Word became flesh and dwelled among us.” It is a good news that we oftenconclude is truly too good to be true, and one we all seemed to want to removeor soften. Yet if the doctrine falls, the Christian faith falls too. To repeat C. S. Lewis, it is theGrand Miracle. And I believe it is the very linchpin that steadies all things,including ourselves.

Contentment and the Gift of Solitude

2011-11-03T14:47:00.000-07:00

(I'm working on my message for Sunday, "Contentment," and this is an excerpt from my book Say Yes to No that ties together contentment, technology, and solitude.)

The reason we're so often discontent and distracted is not just the lure of technology’s buzz; it’s the impossibility of concentrationwhen we’re connected to the Internet 24/7 or glued to the Tube. As the contemporaryrock band, Switchfoot cries out:

I'm a nervous wreck but I'll bet
that that TV set
tells us what we want to hear.

We need to disconnect from our techie toys and spend time alone. The psalmistwrites with obvious contentment, “I have calmed and quieted my soul.” But who doesthis? Henri Nouwen, a natural extrovert, learned the value of solitude. And yet timealone is not all easy. He employed a striking image to describe thisdifficulty: “As soon as I decide to stay in solitude, confusing ideas,disturbing images, wild fantasies, and weird associations jump about in my mindlike monkeys in a banana tree.” In fact, he formulated this frustration into amoving prayer:

Why, O Lord, is it so hard for meto keep my heart directed toward you? Do I keep wondering, in the center of mybeing, whether you will give me all I need if I just keep my eyes on you?

Please accept mydistractions, my fatigue, my irritations, and my faithless wanderings. You know me more deeply and fully thanI know myself. You love me with agreater love than I can love myself. You even offer me more than I desire. Look at me, see me in all my misery and inner confusion, andlet me sense your presence in the midst of my turmoil.

Sowhat does this tell us about the power of no? Technology, which promised free timeand peace, has torn us apart, and we have lost integration. We have forgottento listen to the rhythm of our bodies and souls. We have taken on the incessantroar of the machines that surround us. Instead of living with healthy rhythms,we only have what the popular, Grammy-winning pop duo, Steely Dan, describedwith utter succinctness, “I hear my insides, the mechanized hum of anotherworld.”

When we disconnect in order to seek solitude, we are on the way to finding contentment.

The World As Creation

2011-10-04T09:27:00.000-07:00

The God of nature, and the origin of all beauty, is my God

Elizabeth Rowe, Devout Exercises of the Heart

Broadly speaking, the secular scientist understands the material world as nature, as a system of cause-and-effect interlocking laws. A Christian, whether scientist or not, sees this world as creation.

What is the difference? Not that believers grasp beauty and the others don’t. It’s just that there is no source for that beauty. It just is. The existence of the world is a final brute fact. Put another way—and more philosophically—nature is eternal and bears no reason for its existence. The Christian sees nature as contingent and based on God’s necessary existence, the God who created for the purpose of joy and beauty.

The elders in John’s Revelation (4:11) sing this:

You are worthy, our Lord and God, to receive glory and honor and power, for you created all things, and by your will they existed and were created.

Since God is Beauty itself, when God decides to create, the world will be filled with beauty. Being contingent on God, it is by nature (as it were) beautiful.

Last week, I taught a course on spiritual life and the particular topic of visio divina (divine viewing, related to lectio divina, or “divine reading,” which I describe in an earlier post). Since I don’t know much about the topic (I was substituting for my wife Laura), I will tell you what I know: visio divina involves the use of our eyes as a means of perceiving God.

Usually this spiritual practice involves art, but what if we took this stunning version of spirituality—the one that the Puritan poet Elizabeth Rowe points to—and used the natural world as visio divina? I think we would begin to fulfill at least two things: 1) the reason we were created, and 2) a perception of the world as it truly is. We would see the world as creation in a way that satisfies our souls.

Seeing Nature as Creation

2011-09-08T10:01:00.000-07:00

I'm working on a chapter from a proposed new book, Worshipping God in an Age of Science, and I'm compelled by two different quotes, with two antithetical views of nature--one as simply a physical system and the other as God's creation.

First from Harvard astronomer Margaret Geller, who believes that it is pointless to mention purpose in nature, which is another way of describing that there was a Creator who created this world for a reason:

Why should [the universe] have a point? What point? It’s just a physical system, what point is there?

(Certainly, not all scientists express similar nihilism about creation. I remember a graduate seminar on genetics and ethics with the Berkeley biochemist David Cole. He showed us pictures of polymers and exclaimed—“Aren’t these beautiful! Look at the wonder of God’s creation!” I had never thought of polymers that way... I actually had really ever paid much attention to them at all.)

Second, William Shakespeare who, during the great flowering of modern science in the seventeenth century, found insights from the Book of Nature. It evokes, pays homage to, its Creator.

And this our life,

Exempt from public hands,

Finds tongues in trees,

Books in the running brook,

Sermons in stones,

And good in everything.

Science, as the study of the interworkings of the natural world, will never carry us directly to seeing nature as creation. But it doesn't necessary draw us away either. What do you think makes the difference?

Anscombe, Lewis, and the Dangers of Apologetics

2011-08-17T17:09:00.000-07:00

I’m still striving away at an article—or perhaps, chapter of a book—on C. S. Lewis and science. On the way there, I just worked through an essay (from Light on C. S. Lewis) by the brilliant Oxford philosophical theologian, and friend of Lewis, Austin Farrer, on Lewis as an apologist. His insights as friend and philosopher offer stunning insights and revealing quips.

One of the latter is that, at the Oxford Socratic Society, where debate on theological topics transpired for several years and of which Lewis was president, Farrer comments that “nobody could put Lewis down” because he was such a fierce and effective debater. I’m sure it was meant as a general comment, but I couldn’t help but recall the famous, or infamous, encounter with the brilliant Oxford philosopher, and believing Catholic, Elizabeth Anscombe, in which Lewis was indeed “put down” in his arguments that naturalism is self-defeating. By most accounts he left the debate dejected, though it seems clear, not destroyed. As a result, Lewis revised his argument and continued his work. For her part, Anscombe, though not convinced, appreciated the seriousness with which Lewis took up the philosophical dialectics and revised his argument.

Despite the experience of defeat in the heat of debate, I for one am convinced that Lewis’s argument is decisive. But my mind moves elsewhere—to a reflection on what it meant for Lewis to be a consistent intellectual winner. Lewis was indeed exceedingly brilliant, and I wonder if this brilliance and debater’s acumen sometimes imperiled his soul. To defeat the opponent of Christian faith is not coterminous with promoting the cause of the Gospel. One can defeat by destroying. It is a reverse Pyrhic victory. The work of the apologist ultimately should lead to conversion. And for the opponent (to even use that word belies a certain mistaken starting point) to slink away in intellectual ignominy hardly serves that greater purpose.

Perhaps this is simply the dangers of apologetics. It is a danger that Lewis himself pondered... no, better, feared. His poem, “The Apologist’s Evening Prayer” contains these piercing lines of self-reflection:

From cleverness shot forth on Thy behalf

At which, while angels weep, the audience laughs

Maybe that debate with Anscombe served therefore a more profound, providential purpose. It brought forth that critical Christian virtue—not invincibility, but humility.

A. N. Wilson on materialism

2011-08-04T08:00:00.000-07:00

I've been working on this piece, "C. S. Lewis and Science" (or whatever it'll eventually be called), and I ran across a somewhat recent quotation from A. N. Wilson, the brilliant, but cranky biographer of Lewis and, for quite a while, committed atheist. Just a few years ago, he changed his mind. Wilson points to "great saint Thomas More, Chancellor of England":

Our bishops and theologians, frightened as they have been by the pounding of secularist guns, need that kind of bravery (like Sir Thomas More’s) more than ever. Sadly, they have all but accepted that only stupid people actually believe in Christianity, and that the few intelligent people left in the churches are there only for the music or believe it all in some symbolic or contorted way which, when examined, turns out not to be belief after all. As a matter of fact, I am sure the opposite is the case and that materialist atheism is not merely an arid creed, but totally irrational. Materialist atheism says we are just a collection of chemicals. It has no answer whatsoever to the question of how we should be capable of love or heroism or poetry if we are simply animated pieces of meat.

I think that's fairly provocative stuff. What do you think?

An Interlude on "Lectio Divina"

2011-07-31T12:30:00.000-07:00

This entry accompanies my July 31 message at Bidwell Presbyterian Church, "The Savor of Scripture." (Click here to hear the message.) It's an entirely brief overview of the ancient spiritual disciple of lectio divina or “divine reading” of the Bible.

As writer and Presbyterian pastor Marjorie Thompson presents in her fabulous book on the spiritual life, Soul Feast, reading the Bible is like savoring a letter from a good friend. (There was a time when we used to write letters instead of whip off an email?) And in this case, our friend is God, who wants our best. It is therefore reading for formation over information. (By the way, a good form of literature for this practice is poetry, which forces us to slow down.)

The Benedictines (a monastic movement that began in the early 500s) have developed a four-step spiritual reading called lectio divina that works well for those who want to practice biblical meditation.

lectio (reading): Start with silence. Quiet yourself. Then read the passage several times, being careful to read slowly. Using other translations is helpful in this step.
meditatio (meditation): Think hard about the passage. Ask questions. Look up difficult words in an English or Bible dictionary. Mull over a verse or phrase that has arisen from the first step. Let it percolate.
oratio (prayer): Pray through the themes that God is bringing to your attention. This step may engage a wide range of emotions.
contemplatio (contemplation): Simply enjoy the place that God has led you through this reading, perhaps even simply being in God’s presence. You may also want to think through the action to which God is leading you.

Try this and see how it transforms your life.

C. S. Lewis on “the Scientific Outlook” and its Contrast with Science

2011-07-23T08:45:00.000-07:00

(This is the next installment of the chapter I'm working....)

Ultimately, C. S. Lewis was a professor of literature and therefore in the humanities and not the sciences. Most of his arguments for faith take place in philosophy or the arts. Yet, this may be a strength because many arguments against Christian faith are presented by scientists as scientific, but are really philosophical in character.

We come then to a confusion—or maybe the shell game—that exists, as well as a nexus for misunderstanding. Science commits itself to methodological naturalism quite rightly. Science, at its core, looks for the interactions, interrelations, and thus cause and effect in the natural world. It does not ask the question, “What is the boiling point of water?” Science keeps testing, hypothesizing, testing, and hypothesizing, until the conclusion is made that, when water at sea level is heated to 100 Celsius, it begins to boil. No god or spirit is needed for that specific phenomenon of nature (other than that a Creator God who put together nature itself, by I will return to that theme below).

The issue is when this method of looking for natural causes elides into philosophical naturalism—that all there exists is nature. Just because science cannot test or number something does not mean it does not exist. It is here—not as a field of study, but as an understanding of the world or sense-of-life, where science often intersects--or even collides with--theology. Many evolutionists see a mindless, “pitiless indifference” (to quote Richard Dawkins) against the entirely purposeful creation by the hand of God. “Everything that can be counted does not necessarily count; everything that counts cannot necessarily be counted,” as Albert Einstein once quipped. Though many scientists, and atheistic philosophers, link methodological naturalism with philosophical atheism, there is no sound reason to do so.

At this point, it might be worthwhile to delineate the difference between theology, which is the study of God, and science, which is the study of the natural world based on the distinction between primary and secondary causation. God is the primary cause—God undergirds and establishes all being. As the great medieval philosopher Thomas Aquinas taught, the nature of God as Creator is that being is always flowing from God. That fact defines primary causation. God is the Cause that undergirds all other causes. Secondary causation is what human beings, and all other agents in the natural world, are given to do. Shakespeare created Hamlet and Ophelia—that is the nature of authorship. They would not exist without him, but within the story they have real interaction. The analogy is not perfect because once the book is written, the real interactions between Hamlet and Ophelia are fixed in a way that ours is not. Nonetheless the central point of the analogy lies here: if Shakespeare were to have stopped writing Hamlet in the midst of its creation, the entire story would have ceased. And so too it is with God. God is the primary cause, but we are the real secondary causes. If God were to stop creating, we would no longer exist.

Returning to our text at hand: “Is Theology Poetry?” is a fascinating lecture—as Lewis is wont to create—not on science per se, or even strictly evolutionary science, but on the use of evolution to create a worldview, one that challenges orthodox Christian accounts of the world. To repeat: This atheistic challenge confuses methodological naturalism (tbe basis of evolution) with philosophical naturalism. Or, in this essay, Lewis juxtaposes science and the Scientific Outlook. Therefore, when scientists grasp this distinction, no conflict between science and God need arise prematurely. Now there may be discoveries about creation and raise questions about the Creator, but science by its nature does not have the power and right to say that all that exists is what it studies. It is as if sculptors were to assert that painting does not exist because they have never touched paint.

Therefore, Lewis held out great hope for science and faith. As he puts in the mouth of the devil, Screwtape, in the first letter of the Screwtape Letters, the imagined correspondence between a senior devil and a junior devil, Wormwood, on how to tempt a human soul.

Above all, do not attempt to use science (I mean, the real sciences) as a defense against Christianity. They will positively encourage him to think about realities he can't touch and see. There have been sad cases among the modern physicists (Letter One).

Notes Toward a Future Post

2011-07-19T11:55:00.000-07:00

I'm working on an article--as preparation for a class on the same topic I'm teaching this winter--of C. S. Lewis and Science. I'll simply put three key citations in juxtaposition on the way to a future post.

The prominent Harvard neuroscientist Stephen Pinker has laid down the gauntlet in this way:

The neuroscientific worldview—the idea that the mind is what the brain does—has kicked away one of the intuitive supports of religion. So even if you accepted all of the previous scientific challenges to religion—the Earth revolving around the sun, animals evolving, and son on—the immaterial soul was always one last thing that you could keep as being in the province of religion. With the advance of neuroscience, that idea has been challenged.

It seems that materialism has won the day with scientists and that, according to many, it represents the crucial argument against religious faith today.

Then from the famous mid-20th century geneticist and evolutionary biologist--and atheist--John Scott Haldane,

It seems to me immensely unlikely that mind is a mere by-product of matter. For if my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true. They may be sound chemically, but that does not make them sound logically. And hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms.

And then finally from C. S. Lewis (who was a contemporary of Haldane's), as he presents why Christian theology, reason, and science all come together.

Christian theology can fit in science, art, morality, and the sub-Christian religions. The scientific view [such as in H. G. Wells or Pinker] cannot fit in any of these things, not even science itself. I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.

Any thoughts? (This is especially helpful as I pursue this topic further.)

Some Assorted Thoughts on Freedom

2011-06-28T21:50:00.000-07:00

I've been thinking about freedom recently--perhaps because our country is just about to celebrate our Declaration of Independence. I've been meditating particularly on the way our search for freedom in the United States connects with Jesus's words in chapter 8 of the Gospel of John:

Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.

I'll keep my blog entry unsystematic, but two things have come to mind. First of all, although we can hear this as a generalizable promise about abstract truth, it's really about a relational truth. It's the truth of relationship, not of mathematics. Put in a question: how do we relate to the living God? Jesus offers us freedom when we are in relationship with the Living God.

Secondly, freedom here is not what we so often think as liberty or independence. It is not freedom from; instead it is freedom for. It not solely to be independent from external constraints, but the capacity to do what is right. Two citations help me on this, first from the ever-witty, G. K. Chesterton, who reminds us that being only free from may, in the end, make us less human:

Do not free a camel of the burden of his hump; you may be freeing him from being a camel.

And the second from Peter Marshall, who, I think, sets the the right tone and direction. It's a fitting summary statement, fitting enough that I think I'll just close with it.

May we think of freedom, not as the right to do as we please, but as the opportunity to do what is right.

Jottings on C. S. Lewis, Science, and the Argument from Beauty

2011-06-02T08:32:00.000-07:00

C. S. Lewis’s famous apologetic argument from desire is simple, yet powerful:

We have a desire for something that cannot be satisfied by this world. But our hunger demonstrates that we need something beyond this world. The object of that desire is God.

(This argument can be found throughout his writing, but he summarizes it in his profound sermon, “The Weight of Glory." Lewis himself finds the resolution of this desire most poignantly in his autobiography, Surprised by Joy.)

Another way to describe this apologetic approach is that it is an argument from beauty. We all desire beauty, and beauty, I contend, has been a motivating force for all human endeavors. It is, for example, a point of common interest for scientists and theologians. Here’s how my argument from beauty goes.

Beauty occurs when we perceive reality rightly. It arises for both theologians and scientists through rightly grasping and theorizing about their objects of study. Beauty thus leads to truth, and beauty provides a lure for study. In this sense, it is telic, leading human beings toward a preferred future. For theologians, it means grasping God’s true nature, God’s creation, and our ethical life. For scientists, it is rightly perceiving, and theorizing about, nature. When this perception is made there is discovery, which is accompanied by a sense of completeness. Therefore, the disciplines and vocations of theology and of science can be particularly beautiful. In these and other ways, beauty represents a common value for scientists and theologians.

In this post, I will highlight science. The great early 20th century physicist, Werner Heisenberg, reflected ont the connection between discovering the nature of quantum reality and its beauty. One should note the relationship between beauty and Heisenberg’s “coherence,” which is parallel to my formulation of rightly perceiving nature. Beauty for Heisenberg is surprising and objective. As he describes it, he did not impose beauty, but discovered—or perhaps better, un-covered—this beauty in the midst of looking at energy at the quantum level:

The energy principle had held for all the terms, and I could no longer doubt the mathematical consistency and coherence of the kind of quantum mechanics to which my calculations pointed. At first, I was deeply alarmed. I had the feeling that, through the surface of atomic phenomena, I was looking at a strangely beautiful interior, and felt almost giddy at the thought that I now had to probe this wealth of mathematical structure nature had so generously spread out before me.

This pursuit and discovery of beauty has certainly motivated key scientists. I could multiply quotes, but will simply note Einstein’s use of beauty in formulating both the special and general theories of relativity. Helen Dukas and Banesh Hoffmann summarized Einstein’s work: “The essence of Einstein’s profundity lay in his simplicity; and the essence of his science lay in his artistry—his phenomenal sense of beauty.” It was that sense of beauty that led him to reformulate our understanding of the cosmos.

I close with a summary from Lewis on this quest for the beautiful. In his sermon, "The Weight of Glory," he reflected on glory, and the related value of beauty, as the goal of human life:

We do not want merely to see beauty, though, God knows, even that is bounty enough. We want something else that can hardly be put into words—to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it.

Because I'm working on these topics right now, there will be more on this, I hope, in future postings...

Alister McGrath, Surprised by Meaning

2011-05-25T19:56:00.000-07:00

Alister McGrath is a compelling writer on science and theology. While pursuing a Ph.D. in chemistry, he initially set out to bolster his atheism, but in the process, became a Christian instead. He then received a doctorate in theology and is now a major voice in that field and in the theology-science dialogue. His Surprised By Meaning, though a slim, unpretensious book, surprised me with its insights. Below are a few from chapters 4, 5, and 10.

Science, McGrath asserts, seeks to make sense of nature in three significant ways:

Casual explanation: If A causes B, then A explains B.
The Best Explanation: How can these phenomena best be explained?
Explanatory Unification: Powerful theories bring together ideas once thought to be unrelated.

Nevertheless, ultimately, human beings seek a deeper order, a deeper level of intelligibility. McGrath writes that science cannot satisfy this deeper search; it is a search that only belief in God satisfies.

When McGrath pursued a Ph.D. in chemistry, he wanted to support his atheism with the insights of natural science (something like the contemporary "New Atheists" do). Instead he discovered that his atheism was not well established intellectually. In that process, McGrath came to make a distinction between "scientism" as a totalizing worldview (my words) and legitimate scientific theory. That seems accurate by my lights. For example, what Richard Dawkins proposes as the conclusions of scientific study are actually metaphysical conclusions dressed up with scientific decoration.

McGrath also concludes that, contrary to Jacque Monod and Richard Dawkins, some notion of teleology emerges from study of evolutionary processes itself. I agree with McGrath’s point—that nature, even with its random events, ultimately points toward a goal, a telos. The claws of a crab point toward the goal of grabbing prey. Nonetheless, in my experience with scientists, the word “teleology” brings significant resistance, probably because of the way previous philosophies employed the term. Still that resistance has intrigued me because science, and even evolution, does move in certain directions. "Such teleology," McGrath writes, "is empirical, grounded in a posteriori discernment, not a priori imposition."

These are all good points, which merit discussion. So I'll just leave you with some questions from these chapters...

Stepping back to the bigger issues of science and theology, how do the two fields come together in McGrath’s view?
What is the relation between the ways science and religion “make sense of things”?
How do you evaluate McGrath’s assertion that the case for atheism rests on “rather shaky foundations”?
Is the “warfare” thesis, as a way of understanding the relation of science and religion, increasingly discredited?
How do you evaluate McGrath’s statement, “Within a Reformed theological framework, for example, ‘random’ can be translated as ‘non-predictable,’ and thus contextualized within a generalized doctrine of divine providence”?
Does teleology naturally arise from the study of biological systems?

How Harold Camping Got Me on CNN

2011-05-21T13:30:00.000-07:00

As I type this entry, the Rapture hasn't yet occurred, as Harold Camping predicted. But I'm not entirely unhappy with Camping. He was responsible for my shot on TV. This is a brief excerpt from my book, Creation and Last Things, in which I comment on how many times I've heard that Jesus was going to return in my life. (At that point, Camping was third on the list.)

In summer 1994, I received a call from New College, Berkeley. CNN had contacted this school of theology to request a commentator on a current end times scenario. And so, in just two hours, unprepared and therefore dressed in shorts and a cotton sweater, I found myself on camera, interviewed by a rather congenial Craig Heaps about the engineer and radio commentator, Harold Camping. From Camping’s Oakland “Family Radio” ministry headquarters, he predicted the strong possibility of the Second Coming of Christ in 1994. (I was at least heartened by Camping’s realization that our Gregorian calendar had a serious flaw. He believed that Jesus was born in 6 BC.) Heaps asked me, “What do you think is the danger of this type of speculation?” My answer: that it would distract us from the task of preaching of Gospel and bringing about the Kingdom of God on earth. And that remains my concern.

So thanks for the break, Harold Camping, but let's hope that today's (apparently) mistaken prediction doesn't distract us from what God really wants us to do.

St. Clive, Science, and Theology

2011-05-17T10:25:00.000-07:00

I’ve been wondering how to bring together three of my favorite subjects: C.S. Lewis, science, and theology. (Or, counted another way, it becomes two topics: Lewis with science and theology.) Recently, I came across Lewis’s essay—really an oral presentation to the Oxford Socratic Club—from 1944 in which St. Clive takes up the question: “Is theology poetry?” And he refines the question to become to whether theology is merely poetry (which it isn’t), and then analyzes the poetry of the “Scientific Outlook” presented by evolution (and especially H. G. Wells) as a philosophy of progress that gradually and painfully overcomes obstacles.

It’s a fascinating lecture—as Lewis is wont to create—not on science per se, or even evolutionary science, but on the use of evolution to create a worldview, one which challenges orthodox Christian accounts of the world.

And I want to lean on this point just for a moment. It is here—not as a field of study, but as an understanding of the world or sense-of-life, where science often intersects--or even collides with--theology. Many evolutionists see a mindless, “pitiless indifference” (to quote Richard Dawkins) against the entirely purposeful creation by the hand of God.

The reason Lewis rejected the “Scientific Outlook” was this: it asserts the truth and reasonableness of its claim without thereby providing a place for reason. Or as he put it:

If minds are wholly dependent on brains, and brains on biochemistry, and biochemistry (in the long run) on the meaningless flux of the atoms, I cannot understand how the thought of those minds should have any more significance than the sound of the wind in the trees.

The Scientific Outlook tries to fit in reason in an irrational—or maybe arational—world. Belief in a Creator God who endows humanity with reason makes entirely more sense. Lewis concludes that’s why he does not believe in the “Scientific Outlook,” but instead believes in Christianity, which includes reason and science.

I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.

I suppose that’s where St. Clive, science, and theology all come together for me and why I subscribe to both the affirmation of Christian theology and the insights of science, including those of evolution through natural selection.

How about you? What do you think?

Something Still Worth Living For

2011-04-26T11:04:00.000-07:00

As I come to preaching at the final 545 worship service at Bidwell Pres and ponder what I'll tell the college students before they head off to summer or to life beyond the classroom, I remember the amazing quote (one of my favorites) from "St. Clive," aka C. S. Lewis

If we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the gospels, it would seem that our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling around with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in the slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by an offer of a holiday at sea. We are far to easily pleased.

The reward C. S. Lewis envisions is the "weight of glory," and for me, this pairs beautifully with Paul's description of what he lives for in his letter to the Philippians, chapter three:

Not that I have already obtained this or have already reached the goal; but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own. Beloved, I do not consider that I have made it my own; but this one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, press on toward the goal for the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus.

Following God's upward call to glory--that makes life worth living. What does that look like for you?

Science, Time, and Eternity: A Meditation on the Way to Easter

2011-04-20T15:25:00.000-07:00

(This entry is excerpted and adapted from my book, Creation and Last Things: At the Intersection of Science and Theology. Look right or click here.)

Time—one of the most fascinating topics for human reflection—arises from God’s creation. It was the brilliant fourth century North African rhetorician and philosopher, Augustine, who presented the question,

What, then, is time? There can be no quick and easy answer to that question, for it is no simple matter even to understand what it is, let alone find words to explain it. Yet, in our conversation, no word is more familiarly used or more easily recognized than “time.” We certainly understand what is meant by the word both when we use it ourselves and when we hear it used by others.

What then is time? I know well enough what it is, provided that nobody asks me; but if I am asked what it is and try to explain, I am baffled.

And so time is a puzzle, but also a gift. Without creation—and scientists would remind us that without matter—there is no time. God continues to relate to creation as the eternal God, as the One who is not limited by time, but encompasses time. To grasp this relationship with the temporal world, we have to look at God’s entering human history in Jesus Christ. There time is “baptized” so-to-speak—God touches time and surrounds it with eternity. Thomas Oden, a theologian who has done much to demonstrate the importance of classical insights from ancient thinkers, summarizes the connection between Jesus Christ and time this way:

The decisive Christian analogy concerning time is that between the eternal indwelling in time and the incarnation. Brilliantly, the classical exegetes taught that the creation of time is analogous to the incarnation in this way: The Father inhabits time, just as the Son inhabits human flesh.

In this light, God’s eternity surrounds our time-bound world. God is before all, in the present moment, and the One at the end of time. The Bible clearly presents God’s ability to act “before” all now exists. 1 Timothy 1:9—where on would never expect to find a metaphysical thought about time—describes God’s grace as “given to us in Christ Jesus before the ages began…” (my italics). In a similar vein, God comes “after” our current temporal sequence. God is described in Revelation 6:12 as the One “who was and is and is to come” (my emphasis).

God’s eternity therefore is not timelessness, but the fullness of time. You can imagine a piece of paper with a long, thin line written on it. In this analogy, time is the line, God is the surface on which it is written. One has to advance along the line to get from point A to point B. Yet using the paper, you can move between A and B without moving along the line. Or try another analogy: an author writing a play. The author can write in Act Two, then step back to Act One, then jump to Act Five, without any difficulty. She can even be writing more than one play at a time. God, whose eternity encompasses time, is not bound by a chronological sequence.

This understanding of time is reflected in the language of biblical Greek. Its two words for “time” create a distinction that instructs powerfully. Chronos is clock-time, the rhythmic advance of minutes, hours, and days, which surprisingly, I am told, has only dominated Western thought since public clocks became prominent in the late Middle Ages. “Does your watch keep good time?” That is the question of chronos. The other word for time, kairos can be translated as “opportunity,” or more literally “a decisive point in time,” and in it is contained the sense of divine appointment, a “God incident.” An event is kairos not because a watch says that it is five minutes before six on a Friday morning, but because all is in place and God is ready to speak. So God is not confined by the chains of time (chronos), but can fill any moment with divine Presence (kairos). We long for this fullness of time. We crave a ripple of Eternity in the waters of time.

The Oxford scholar and twentieth-century Christian apologist, C. S. Lewis, offers an electrifying analogy for this longing as a sign of our eternal life. Our constant surprise at the flow of time (which scientists call “the arrow of time”) means God created us not for temporality but for eternity. Lewis comments on the insight from 2 Peter 3:8 that for God, not only is a thousand years like one day (Psalm 90:4), but also “one day is like a thousand years.” He reminds us that the Eternal can meet us at any moment, “but we have touched what is not in any way commensurable with lengths of time, whether long or short.” Our hope then is to be removed from the sequence of time.

For we are so little reconciled to time that we are even astonished at it. “How he’s grown!” we exclaim, “How time flies!” as though the universal form of our experience were again and again a novelty. It is strange as if a fish were repeatedly surprised at the wetness of water. And that would be strange indeed; unless of course the fish were destined to become, one day, a land animal.

This “fish” is meant to swim in the waters of eternity. Doesn't that lead us right to the heart of Easter, the promise of resurrection to new life through Christ?

C. S. Lewis and the Humanity of Spirituality

2011-04-14T14:57:00.000-07:00

One of the persistent temptations for those who write about Christianity spirituality is to be too triumphant—to act as if, once we profess faith in Christ, life is “all kitties and bubbles,” as one friend put it. Or to quote another, “I once was bad and, sad and now I’m good and glad.” This impulse even led to an early heresy that has amazingly persisted in various forms: Jesus didn’t really walk on this troubled, trodden, earth, but he somehow managed to float above it. (I mean literally, he walked, but his feet never made prints.) Consequently, if we want to follow Jesus, we need to move above this earthly existence whenever possible. That concept, however, strikes me as singular inhuman.

Of course, there are great, amazing, ecstatic days of faith. But we know this unmitigated sugar-rush spirituality doesn’t last. Thankfully, C. S. Lewis agrees. And that’s what distinguishes his writing from the rest of the pack. In his imagined correspondence between a senior and junior devil on how to tempt a human soul, The Screwtape Letters, Lewis reminds us that life, by nature, has its highs and lows. Merely the fact that we are bodies, that we are physical means that we will experience waves these waves.

Their nearest approach to constancy, therefore, is undulation—the repeated return to a level from which they repeatedly fall back, a series of troughs and peaks.

And so a trough becomes not a point for despair, but for reaching to God and for God to develop our wills in the process. The prayers in dryness “are those that please Him best.” Why? Because we are freely choosing God. He closes the eighth Screwtape letter with a stunning allusion to the life of Jesus on the Cross, only too appropriate to mention as Good Friday looms in front of us: the senior tempter, Screwtape, writes to his junior apprentice,

Do not be deceived Wormwood. Our cause is never more in danger than when a human, no longer desiring, but still intending, to do our Enemy’s will, looks upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys.

So Lewis will not have an unreal spirituality, nor will he have it entirely other-worldly. God in Everyday Life. God in the Quotidian. God has given us true, good pleasures on this earth, and when we find those, we thankfully forget ourselves. Screwtape writes to Wormwood,

On your own showing you first of all allowed the patient to read a book he really enjoyed, because he enjoyed it and not in order to make clever remarks to his new [worldly] friends. In the second place, you allowed him to walk down to the old mill and have tea there—a walk through country he really likes, and taken alone. In other words you allowed him two real positive Pleasures.”

And those real pleasures come from God who created them, the One that Screwtape complains is “a hedonist at heart.” Pleasures have to be twisted for them to be of use as temptations—that is, put in the wrong context, or for the wrong motives, or wrong ends. But pleasures with the right context, motives, and ends are pathways to God and they connect us to God. The gifts lead us back to the Giver.

And so when we find pleasure in doing what we are created to do, we lose ourselves and the stinking self-centeredness that stifles joy. There a deep paradox emerges:

When He talks of their losing their selves, He means only abandoning the clamour of self-will; once they have done that, He really gives them back all their personality, and boasts (I am afraid, sincerely) that when they are wholly His they will be more themselves than ever.

So this is the theme in Lewis I’ve named the Humanity of Spirituality. Human comes from a root that means “earth.” And we are certainly tied to this creation. Our feet are firmly planted in this earth. Even, it’s true, when God’s finger touches our human life we never entirely leave it. I commend then this rule: Let’s be cautious about anyone who writes otherwise—who believes we can lift our feet off the ground, leaving no prints when we follow Jesus—and calls it Christian spirituality.

Fare Well, Rob Bell

2011-04-03T07:45:00.000-07:00

Rob Bell, being hip and optimistic

Hearing the controversies about Rob Bell’s new book, Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived, and then actually reading the book, I’ve been struck by how much better Bell would fare in a mainline congregation. (I’ve also been struck by how popular the book is—I think Love Wins hit #4 Amazon #4 last week and hovers at #7 as I type.) Why would Rob Bell fare better as a mainliner? It’s not because we mainline types are “libbed out” and don’t care about the Bible any more, it's certainly not because of the infallibility of the mainline, but because the questions he asks can find honest engagement without rancor here. And really, mainliners here just engage (at their best) with the whole of the Christian church in time (reading not only Calvin and Luther, but also Gregory of Nissa and Thomas Aquinas) and in breadth (taking in the insights of Roman Catholics and Orthodox, for example). It’s simply a way of engaging what C. S. Lewis penned as “mere Christianity."

Bell clearly writes from a contemporary American evangelical context. He talks about praying the “sinner’s prayer,” “accepting Christ” and therefore of “getting saved.” Good concepts, but very particular, coded language—as Bell points out, “personal relationship” with God is not found in the Bible. I have so much good to say about evangelicalism—and have been duly nurtured myself—but there’s simply a mean spirit that has emerged in response to Bell from some evangelical commentators (but certainly not all) that I’ve found neither beneficial for me or for Bell. So back to party-line evangelicals… Bell also asserts that the church is too often seen as “antiscience”? Yes… in certain circles. But I’ll speak personally: I’ve been in the mainline (in my case, Presbyterian) church and am working on engaging science with faith, first through my book Creation and Last Things, and more recently through a grant program particularly designed to engage scientific insight in local congregations, Scientists in Congregations. Have I met with disagreement? Yes. Outright dismissal? Never. And those are just my experiences and only two of them at that. It just seems a little better than what Bell’s experiencing. (But admittedly, who knows what would happen if my books hit the top ten? I’m willing to find out….)

Admittedly, Bell is a little too optimistic. As many other commentators have noted, he interprets Scripture in a particular direction. It’s a kinder, gentler Bible. For example on God’s condemnation, he seems especially concerned that Ghandi—Ghandi was so good; should go to hell? He was particularly annoyed by a response on a slip of paper to quote from Ghandi displayed at his church’s art show: “Reality check: He’s in hell.” Bell seems to infer that Ghandi could never be in hell. This makes certain sections of the Christian church go ballistic, but as I read Bell, and watch the promo video for Love Wins (which these days is more important than actually reading the book), his point is a little more subtle: Do we know for sure Ghandi’s in hell? No, we can’t say with absolute certainty. When Ghandi saw the full light of God's presence, how did he respond? As C. S. Lewis wrote so poignantly (which, incidentally, is one suggestion to Bell: include the chapter on hell in The Problem of Pain): the gates of hell are locked on the inside.

More can be written, of course, but I’ll close this post here: To understand the book we should take in the citation that alludes to the title: “God says yes, we can have what we want, because love wins.” Even in ultimate judgment, God gives us the dignity of rejecting the gospel. One of the most notorious responses to Bell has been John Piper’s tweet “Farewell Bell.” How interesting that judgment has been declared on a book that itself rethinks God’s judgment and emphasizes that God only says “Farewell” when we have shut the door on him. I say, keep it up Bell, but listen to the wider community of Christ. There you can fare well.

P.S. If you want a fresh perspective on Love Wins, read Donald Miller's review.

Heaven and Hell

2011-03-30T21:32:00.000-07:00

I've been reading--and enjoying--Rob Bell's book, Love Wins. Before I blog about the latter, I thought I'd lay out my own ideas, which appeared in the final chapter of Creation and Last Things: At the Intersection of Science and Theology. Find out more here.

An update: Since this blog post has proven to be, by far, my most popular, I started a series of prequels here.

At times, I've remarked that the gruesome portrayal of the damned in Michelangelo's "Last Judgment" reveals a common human desire for our enemies’ demise. Maybe that is not the whole story. Perhaps we can find another thread. When I first typed “hell” into my laptop a moment ago, “heal” came out. Significant? Perhaps. I—like many of us—hope that God will heal Hitler, and Stalin, and the obnoxiously loud next-door neighbor, and the rabid atheist professor so that they all would turn to the Light. In a word, I hope for a life with no hell.

The Bible is much more interested in the new heavens and earth than in hell. So we ought to start there. It is the direction creation has pointed from the beginning. In fact, with the consummation of creation in mind, Genesis 1-2 receives new light. The Lord calls the world “good,” not only in its initial form, but because God will remain faithful to creation and lead it continually toward perfection. Put in a different way, we fully understand the goodness of the first act of creation in light of the final act of new creation.

In the prophets, Isaiah stands out describing of the promise of the future and insights into creation. As Israel experienced increasing national trauma after its defeat and subsequent occupation by the hated and indomitable Babylonians in the sixth century BC, several prophets looked with hope to a coming day—the day of the promised victory by God’s Messiah. Several passages in the second part of Isaiah (chapters 40-66) link eschatological hope with the creation at the beginning. For example, Isaiah promises a new day of hope for the exiled people in which the natural order will return, subduing chaos as in Genesis 1, and restoring creation in some form to Eden:

For the Lord will comfort Zion;

he will comfort all her waste places,

and will make her wilderness like Eden,

her desert like the garden of the Lord;

joy and gladness will be found in her,

thanksgiving and the voice of song. (Isaiah 51:3)

The final chapters of the Bible, Revelation 21 and 22, provide a vision of another city, the City of God. In it ceaseless praise of God continues. Beautiful music--I'd like to think it's jazz--fills the heavenly city. And there is continual activity. We are not simply given rest in the new creation, but work without the curse of futility. (“By the sweat of your brow you shall eat bread until you return to the ground,” Genesis 3:19). The final words offer two great promises: “Blessed are those who wash their robes, so that they will have the right to the tree of life and may enter the city by the gates” (22:14). In this vision of cleansing and glory, we can take hold of the tree that Adam and Eve were forced to avoid after their disobedience (Genesis 3:24). As a final act of triumph, Jesus will return to right our turbulent world, where God’s people face persecution:

The one who testifies to these things says, “Surely I am coming soon.”

Amen. Come, Lord Jesus!

The grace of the Lord Jesus be with all the saints. Amen. (Revelation 22:20-21)

In 1994 the author (and now speaker) Betty Eadie sold boatloads of her book, Embraced by the Light, which describes her near-death experiences. Shortly after the book was published, I studied Eadie’s revelations with a church adult education class. We were struck by the specific and comforting details she described about heaven. In many ways, we simply wanted to believe them. On the other hand, we know the difficulty of assessing the truth of these descriptions by Eadie or other similar authors. Broadly, they confirm some type of afterlife. Nevertheless, the interest in Eadie’s book reveals that Americans crave to know precisely what happens “on the other side.” Will I see my mother again? Will I understand why my son died of cancer at age nine? Will my dog be in heaven? The Bible offers both a more profound answer, but does not satisfy every speculation. The Bible concerns itself foremost with God’s justice to right a world distorted by sin and secondly with God’s salvation of a people. We are left without exhaustive detail of what happens to each of us individually. God will create a fully just world where the people of God will—for the first time—live fully human lives, thereby glorifying their Creator.

And so we arrive at the unpleasant doctrine of hell. I would be glad to forget it all about it. It is not only unpopular (“There you Christians go again with your judging!”), but personally repelling (Remember I want everyone to be healed). But unfortunately we hear it in Scripture and particularly on the lips of Jesus. It also makes sense of free will (what if some continue to resist God?) and God’s sovereignty (can a good God allow the unrepentant to exist forever?). Some biblical scholars—notably the prominent English evangelical, John Stott—have taken a fresh look and determined that hell cannot be everlasting, conscious punishment. His work demonstrates the need to re-look at this terrible doctrine. My hope is that we will be able to put aside any notions we have read in Dante’s poetry or seen on The Omen and listen patiently to the Scripture.

First of all, what does hell mean? Beginning with the key words is often a good approach. Sheol and Hades are transliterations of Hebrew and Greek words respectively that simply mean the abode of the dead, not necessarily a place of punishment. In the New Testament, hell translates a Greek term, geenna, which originated as a garbage dump in the valley of Hinnon, in which children ritually were later killed and dedicated to the god, Molech and dumped as refuse. This pit burned day and night. At the time of Christ, it had became a symbol for a place of end times punishment.

C. S. Lewis, in his brilliant book The Problem of Pain, exercises his skills as a literary critic, by analyzing the key texts on hell in the Gospels. He demonstrates that there are three primary images: punishment (the “eternal punishment” of Matthew 25:46), destruction (Matthew 10:28’s “fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell”), and finally privation and banishment (“the outer darkness” where the slave who hid his talents in Matthew 25:30 is sent). Lewis comments, “it is not necessary to concentrate on the images of torture to the exclusion of those suggesting destruction and privation.” He continues by looking again at the conclusion of the parable of the sheep and goats (especially Matthew 25:34, 41).

[T]he damned go to a place never made for men at all. To enter heaven is to become more human than you ever succeeded in being in earth; to enter hell, is to be banished from humanity. What is cast (or casts itself) into hell is not a man: it is “remains.”

If there is existence in hell, it is a shadowy one. Lewis adds one final reflection on the biblical texts: Jesus emphasizes finality, not duration in these texts. “Consignment to the destroying fire is usually treated as the end of the story—not as the beginning of a new story.”

I must add one note to Lewis. There is also a tension in Scripture between final exclusion and an ultimate healing. 1 Timothy 2:4 affirms that God “desires everyone to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth.” A note of universalism also finds its way in the stirring conclusion to 1 Corinthians 15, “for all of us die in Adam, so all will be made alive in Christ.” And a cryptic verse in 1 Peter describes Christ preaching to perished souls. Verse 19 says that after his death, he “went and made a proclamation to the spirits in prison, who in former times did not obey.”

So in the end, will all be saved? Will “hell” finally end up in “heal”? John Calvin notoriously saw two rooms into which we were born and elected by the sovereign God—either heaven or hell. The doors are looked, and the decision irrevocable. But what if look specifically to the God we know in Jesus Christ? What if we begin with Christ as the elect Representative for all humanity? By his work, we begin in the embrace of God’s love and therefore in the party room of election. The room is, however, not locked. It is of course our choice to move out into the outer darkness. Will God’s ultimate plan for salvation triumph even over our bad decisions? Perhaps this question cannot be solved theoretically, but through prayer—that we are to pray for a redemption far beyond what we could imagine. Perhaps we are to pray for an embrace that includes our cynical co-worker, the rapist who terrorized our streets, and even the most hated and cruel, like the Emperor Nero and Adolf Hitler.

Incredible Foresight

2011-03-22T11:13:00.000-07:00

What makes a great author? Among attributes like winsome style and insightful content remains the uncanny ability to see cultural trends, the seeds of which are being sown now, but that won’t bloom for decades.

Read this and tell me if this isn’t today’s “postmodern,” pluralistic world?

Your man has been accustomed, ever since he was a boy, to having a dozen incompatible philosophies dancing about together inside his head.

Written seventy years ago in a religious newspaper called The Guardian, C. S. Lewis sought to describe the environment in which a devil-tempter tries to draw a human being, “the Patient” away from God. This is the environment Lewis brilliantly, poignantly described in first entry in a set of newspaper articles later published as The Screwtape Letters.

What do you think? Does that describe the world you live in?

Friendship, Just Friendship

2011-03-18T08:26:00.000-07:00

I've been thinking about friendship this week.

The precipitating cause is this: Philip Yancey (the quite well-known Christian author) is preaching at Bidwell Presbyterian this Sunday morning. But he's not bringing the word at our evening worship service, the 545. So that leaves a gap. And I need to fill that gap and preach in the evening. So I scoured the book of Philippians to find a text we hadn't used yet in our series and came across the beautiful section in chapter 2 where Paul describes his relationship with Timothy and Epaphroditus.

It's raining outside in Chico as I type.
Probably why I chose this image

The second inspiration is this: Eugene Peterson, as he led the consultation last weekend, reminded us that Jesus finished his teaching with his disciples by calling them friends in the gospel of John (chapter 15). "I'm no longer calling you servants because servants don't understand what their master is thinking and planning. No, I've named you friends because I've let you in on everything I've heard from the Father." As Eugene puts it, that's a relational way of describing God--the God we know who exists as a relationship among the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. I find that an excellent reminder about God and about a truly good life.

And it's a reminder that brings me back to Philippians 2:19-30 and these two friends of Paul, who supported him as he journeyed around the ancient Roman Empire, shared the message of Jesus, and eventually got imprisoned. When you do that kind of thing, you need some friends!

Let me focus on Timothy, particularly three characteristics that make him a good friend: Paul calls him isopsychos (literally, “same soul,” “equal”), which is an echo of Psalm 55.13, “But it is you, my equal, my companion, my familiar friend….” Timothy is also one who is "anxious" for the well-being of his fellow Christians in Philippi... which they need during a particularly poignant time. (It's the same Greek word as in Philippians 4:6, so “being anxious” as a general case is not a problem--we just have to decide what we're going to be "anxious" or "concerned" about.) His conclusion about Timothy? And I love this: “But you yourselves know that Timothy’s the real thing.” Timothy is authentic--the inside and the outside match. He's the kind of friends we all love to have.

So I go back to last weekend, and the consultation with Eugene Peterson and Albert Borgmann on technology. Here's the problem technology presents: it can take us away from real human relationships. We'd rather text than talk, or check Facebook than get together, let alone define "friends" as "Facebook does. When technology enhances what we do face-to-face, that's a different story, but we are created to have friends, and I'm grieved to see a society that has become increasingly lonely and separated, sometimes because it's technologically proficient.

Because the nature of God is relational, because God has called us friends, and because we are designed to have good friends. That's one thing the God's community, the church, at its best, can offer--real relationships.

I think I'll just post this and maybe revise it later... leaving it for now as essentially some random musings...

Jesus and Eugene Peterson Aren’t that Impressive. But Tech Is. That’s the Problem.

2011-03-14T18:07:00.000-07:00

One of the things about Jesus is that he’s not very impressive.

Now please don’t get me wrong—I (almost) never fail to marvel at Jesus’s stunning insights into our nature as human beings. Because of course Christ the Word became flesh, became human.

Somehow that brings me to the consultation on technology and faith I just took part in at beautiful Laity Lodge in the Hill Country of Texas. In truth, the speakers were a little bit disappointing. Or maybe better simply human. And the element of humanity is always a bit disappointing in light of the dazzle of technology. Like the new iPod--it's better than the first generation… the one I own. It’s faster, thinner, and doesn’t require any of that irritating boot-up time (like 2 seconds). That’s cool and exciting.

So, yes, it was in some ways disappointing. Borgmann was really nice and quite thoughtful. But I didn’t feel my heart pump faster when he lectured. Peterson’s voice is gravelly and a little underwhelming. I reported on Facebook that I received the Lord’s Supper from him. But I’ve had better celebrants. I’ve definitely heard more impressive speakers. In fact, one of his major themes is the unimpressive in the quotidian.

I learned that we need to be careful of technology because it so often promises immediacy and thrill and obscures the ordinary and the human. Borgmann rightly calls us back to “focal practices” based on the Latin word focus or “hearth” where we gather together for warm, for meals, and for human companionship. Peterson brought us back to Jesus’s language of “friends” in his last night on earth—an entirely relational language, where ordinary human beings relate to one another. He reminded us that Jesus took significant time in the last week of his life—as recorded in Luke’s Gospel—to spend hours and days with the Samaritans, those “bastards” of faith (to use Peterson’s language), those half-siblings of the Jews. He closed with the parable where the farmer doesn’t give up on the plant that doesn’t grow, but decides to add more manure. Manure—something that doesn’t impress. Or even attracts. But in this parable, manure offers the possibility of growth and new life. I heard a testimony from another participant who, in a time of deep personal crisis was riding a horse and saw a pile of manure with a tomato plant growing in it. (I’m not kidding.) At that moment, God spoke: “I can do much more through a pile of manure than I can do through you all your best efforts.” I hope I can capture how powerful a testimony that was.

And what was most significant at the conference? The human interactions with some people who subtly impressed me. People who listened. People who cared about God’s mission in this world. Some liked technology (the technophiles); others were more restrained, or even fearful (techophobes). But above all, they cared about people.

Do you know what was best? The musicians. It all began with singing the hymns—those great collections of faith that have sustained Christians in worship for decades. And then I heard from Andy (and later, his wife Jill) Gullahorn. The latter opened with a song that seemed to open a place in my heart, “Someone to You.” He sang, “I can be nobody as long as I’m someone to You.” Tears came to my eyes. There it was—in the end, we can be human (and, so often, unimpressive) to one another because we belong to God. That’s when we become someone. I can only paraphrase at the moment, but one of my great mentors of faith, Karl Barth, started the Barmen Declaration with something like this: Jesus Christ, as he is attested in the Scripture, is the one Word of God we have to hear and obey.

I wonder if all this is actually quite significant. Was Jesus’s voice unimpressive as Eugene Peterson’s? Might the center of life be as mundane as having the focal practice as sharing a meal together? Might technology bring us nice toys, which at their best enhance our work and life as we respond to God, but nonetheless represent some things—because they dazzles and impress—that we might tempted to worship as idols?

I close with this: I’m in the process of completing my forties, and I’m getting less and less willing to waste time in things that aren’t important and life-giving. May I be ready to find the truly significant. May I find something growing right in the midst of what is entirely unimpressive.

Do Things You Love to Do

2011-03-12T09:33:00.000-08:00

I'm at a consultation where the philosopher Albert Borgmann is speaking on technology and faith. Below is how I interacted with his thought in Say Yes to No:

One of the best steps to a healthy spiritual rhythm is to remember what you love to do and to do it.

Help for our imprisonment to our techie toys can come from unexpected places. At least it did for me. I first really began to engage in this topic when I was invited to a consultation with Albert Borgmann. Professor Borgmann represents an unusual type of professional philosopher—the kind who brings together running in the mountains of Montana with analyzing Martin Heidegger’s weighty (and largely incomprehensible) philosophical tome, Being and Time. In March 2001, I was invited to a consultation with Borgmann on science, technology and its effect on contemporary life. This bright-eyed, ebullient seventy-something has developed a powerful concept, a “focal practice.” What is it? “Focal” is derived from the Latin word for “hearth,” the focus, in the Roman world, where the family met for cooking, for warming the house, for conversing. Today instead we punch in the numbers for the digital thermostat; my daughters codes the microwave for her quesadillas at 5:45, I “nuke” Lean Cuisine at 6:20, and my wife warms pasta at 6:40. And it’s possible for no one to eat together. In the early days of TV, we at least used to sit together and watch Jackie Gleason in the Honeymooners. Now each member in a house has a separate monitor on a different cable channel or DVD. Borgmann says that our technology—which we believe has simplified life so that we could spend time together—actually draws us apart. But focal practices draw us to our true selves. They draw us together. He counsels the use of focal practices with the questions, “Would you rather be doing something else right now?” If so, you are not engaged in focal practices.

A focal practice is something of ultimate concern and significance, which is often masked by technology’s appeal. It must be preserved by its connection with actually doing it. Borgmann puts it this way: “Focal things require a practice to prosper within.” His examples include music, gardening, long-distance running, and “the culture of the table” (meaning taking more time than simply nuking leftovers or driving up to Jack-in-the-Box). These examples are often plain and inconspicuous, in contrast to the awe-inspiring things on which our ancestors were focused, such as temples and cathedrals. Borgmann adds a note of realism that technology seduces: “Countering technology through a practice is to take account of our susceptibility to technological distraction, and it is also to engage the peculiarly human strength of comprehension, i.e. the power to take in the world in its extent and significance and to respond through an enduring commitment.” Translated: it’s not easy to do. We even resist it. It’s easy to plop down with our kids in front of a TV, call for pizza delivery and watch Lord of the Rings on video. And sometimes that’s a great idea. But when technology single-handedly sets the agenda, we lose the key rhythms of life.

Use the Power of No to Restrict Technology’s Reach

2011-03-08T07:04:00.000-08:00

I'm about to attend a conference on technology and the spiritual life, where--among others--we'll hear from the philosopher Albert Borgmann. (If you want a quick intro to Borgmann, go here.) I was reminded of a related chapter I wrote in Say Yes to No, which I've "reprinted below." (And you can always feel free to buy the whole book. Just in case you were wondering....)

It seems we are more addicted to entertainment than previous generations. (It goes along with an affluent culture.) Nonetheless, there are similarities about the human condition through various times. We haven’t really gone further than the insights of the 17^th century scientist and philosopher, Blaise Pascal, who lived when modern science—and its promise of technological salvation—began to peer into our world. This brilliant scientist and devout Christian possessed such extraordinary sensitivity into human motivations that his four hundred year old collection of reflections, Pensées, remains a perennial bestseller. In it, Pascal offers this succinct and piercing assessment of our condition, “I have often said that the sole cause of human unhappiness is that we do not how to stay quietly in a room.”

That’s a hauntingly accurate insight and one worth attempting. Try sitting in a room. No TV. No stereo. No Internet. In a weird way, the lack of distractions is distracting. Our minds wander. We become twitchy and uncomfortable. So we seek distractions. Tellingly, in Pascal’s own language French, the word distraction means “separation, subtraction, absence of mind, inattention, heedlessness, diversion, hobby.” And so we seek increasing amounts of hobbies to make us inattentive. One Microsoft executive coined a term for this state, “continuous partial attention.” Or inattention. This drive is demonstrated most notably in the lives of the rich and famous and for—the hoi polloi—our tremendous fascination with them. Pascal believed that this inherent, uncontrolled restlessness drove women and men toward wealth and worldly success:

That, in fact, is the main joy of being a king [insert rock star, CEO], because people are continually trying to divert him and procure him every kind of pleasure. A king is surrounded by people whose only thought is to divert him and stop him thinking about himself, because, king though he is, he becomes unhappy as soon as he thinks about himself.

I suspect that’s one reason people want to win the Lotto: to seek distraction from their problems.

But at some point, the distractions cease and it’s just you. With palpable wit and humor, Anne Lamott reviewed her life of addictions and obsessions as a means of battling “aloneness.” Ultimately, she arrives at a strikingly similar diagnosis as Pascal with a different flavor. She tested all kinds of things to distract herself from aloneness “in sometimes suicidally vast quantities—alcohol, drugs, work, food, excitement, good deeds, popularity, men, exercise, and just rampant compulsion and obsession.” For awhile it seemed to work; “And I did pretty well, although I nearly died. But then recently that aloneness walked right into my house without knocking, sat down, and stayed a couple of weeks.” In find this last image of aloneness staying with us provocative. There comes a point where we can no longer hide and every technological device cannot keep out the demons. We do all we can to avoid confronting aloneness… which is one reason we need real friendships.

Nevertheless, all these technological advances are fascinating, aren’t they? And increasingly, they’re just cute. Something so small and endearing can’t be evil. The new iPod shuffle is advertised for its tiny-ness. Hardly bigger than a quarter. Up to 240 songs. Hangs on your back pocket.

Or pick a movie—the 1987 Wall Street for example—and grok that behemoth mobile phone on the ear of Gordon Gecko (Michael Douglas). While “Greed is good” Gecko walks on the beach, he controls the destiny of companies simultaneously and gets a workout. Compare that device with the parody in 2001 Zoolander of the micro-size cell phone, which looks about the size and heft of a matchbook. Technology in its cuteness and ease insidiously wheedles their way into our lives.

They’re also new. Imbedded in our thinking is the evolutionary dogma that newer is better. So we trust in the recent, the fresh. And with technology, I’d be hard-pressed to defeat the contention that my previous laptop zipped through my programs and websites as the one I’m typed on right now. I placed above the picture of what the RAND Corporation proposed in 1954 as the look and size of a potential “home computer” in 2004. By my lights, it was ten feet tall and twelve feet wide, and when you add the gargantuan dot matrix printer (and a steering wheel that looked like it was taken from Giligan’s Island’s S.S. Minnow), it would fill most of a small bedroom.

So what’s the immediate conclusion? “Look how fast science and technology move—even quicker than we could expect.” But, God and all things spiritual, seem, well, so old… and therefore inferior. I doubt we’d admit our bias that directly, but we might state that technology obviously progresses and religion just stays the same. So a technological prejudice lurks around our lives and can stifle spiritual health.

Now, as I’ve already confessed, I realize the difficulty at putting techie toys aside for me. I love gadgets. I don’t think they’re Satan with transistors and silicon chips. To have a portable device that carries hundreds of songs is still amazing. It almost achieves the category of “miracle.” I’m old enough to remember the advent of the Walkman and how astounding that moment was as we snuck into the library, studied for finals, listening all the while to Toto and Hall and Oates. I like to make calls when I’m in my car. To be connected is to be productive. I live in a technological world. As I type this into my laptop, iTunes plays music downloaded from the web on the hard drive, my cell phone rests in my briefcase, and two email accounts are retrieving messages (with an enormous quantity of spam).

So I find these gadgets really helpful. Despite how much I used the power of no to weed out unnecessary elements in my life, I’m still reasonably busy. And I have a lot of tasks to attend to. If I can save some time through email and cell phones, I may actually find some for activities I really enjoy. And technology can make me more productive, especially with all the options available for communication. I still marvel at email and the wonder of sending the same document with efficient simultaneity to a committee in preparation for a meeting, and of checking in briefly with friends across massive distances without stamps, envelopes, and annoying time delay. When I arrive at work, my first thought is whether I’ve received any exciting emails. (Naturally, I’m not nearly as thrilled about spam.) It’s a direct way to connect with hundreds of people. Office voicemail eliminates the problem of calling someone at 10pm (which frankly is when I often have time to return calls). And I have a particular weakness for cell phones. I mean, my wife, Laura, could reach me on my cell even when was biking home through Central Park.

And yet, to be honest, there’s a downside: these alternatives often complicate instead of simplify our lives. The ease of communicating becomes a curse. At times I feel obligated to check messages on the email accounts 24/7. ITunes doesn’t load properly, and I spend two hours of frustration making sure I can download my next recording effortlessly. Laura and I spend a week of frustration and experience collateral marital damage trying to load Windows.

Nonetheless, as Lamott and Pascal point out, it’s also about boredom. When I sit by myself, I’m challenged by silence, by inner desires and fears. I don’t like quiet. It’s disturbing. I want to be entertained. It’s probably also about fear. I’m afraid that deep down I’m missing something when I’m not plugging into the iPod or letting the music from my computer fill the air. I tremble at the thought of missing the up-to the minute Dow report or of having someone send an email that doesn’t get a 30-minute-or-less response. Will they think I’m inefficient? Will I miss out?

So, as a family, we have created a few guidelines to restrict technology’s reach. We ignore the phone at dinner. We limit our kids’ “screen time” (computers, TVs, iPods) during the day so that our lives aren’t one continuous video feed. We find that a couple of hours a day is a good target. And, as yet, there is not Wii or XBox in our house. A friend takes a weekly Sabbath from email, and so we too have blackout hours from Entourage and Outlook. The net result? A fuller, richer, more centered life.

Whose Are You?

2011-02-18T09:39:00.000-08:00

I've been thinking about citizenship recently as I muse on two passages from the book of Philippians. First the Apostle Paul's exhortation to this group of house churches in ancient European city of Philippi:

Only, live your civic or public life worthy of the gospel of Christ. (1:27; I added italics and elaboration)

And then Paul lays out the contrast between the life of the citizens of the "secular city" (to use Augustine's term) and that of followers of Jesus--particularly whose they are:

But our citizenship is in heaven, and it is from there that we are expecting a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ. He will transform the body of our humiliation that it may be conformed to the body of his glory, by the power that also enables him to make all things subject to himself. (3:20-21, again, my italics)

I've been thinking about this because I'm working on a sermon for our presbytery (the regional gathering of our denomination). I'm asking the question: What do we need to hear in light of some contentious political battles in our denomination? It seems to me we need to hear about freedom. We need to hear about our citizenship about how to answer "Whose are we?" The answer: we're free for God and therefore free from being defined by human associations so that we can be free to re-engage in this world with love and service. When we know we ultimately belong to God then we can serve this world more effectively, worthy of the Gospel.

At least that's how I see it. What do you think?

Real Stars

2011-01-30T07:16:00.000-08:00

"Then you will shine among them like stars in the sky as you hold firmly to the word of life" (Philippians 2:15).

I've been thinking about stars recently--you know the kind we see in movies and tv, the ones who sing. The ones whose names are in our minds as the Academy Awards loom. Someone like Aaron Rodgers, are homegrown Chico kid, who's leading the Green Bay Packers to the Super Bowl next weekend. Why do we idolize them? What's the basis of their star power? Here's what I think: At its best, the fame of stars makes us yearn for their influence, to make a difference in the world. (At the worst, they give us an excuse not to do anything with our lives... but I'll save that for another post.)

So that brings me to this passage from Paul's writings where he tells the early Christian community in Philippi (now in Macedonian) that they could "shine like stars," that they could give their light to the world around them. In other words, that their light wouldn't be for their own sake, but for the benefit of others.

And to the right are some real stars--some of our college students at Chico State and Butte (along with a few advisors) who took a week of their winter break (specifically January 16-22) to build houses for four poor families in Baja California. They took a week where they could easily have been skiing, sitting at the beach, watching video games, or a host of other distractions. Instead they decide to serve others. And I can tell you, it made a difference to those families who received the keys to their new houses with tears in their eyes.

And that gives me hope. In my eyes, those, and many like them, are the real stars.

The Glorious Mish-Mash

2010-12-31T09:03:00.000-08:00

I've just finished reading C. S. Lewis's The Last Battle, the final installment of The Chronicles of Narnia, and I'm thankful.

I'm thankful for the wonderful jumble of images and stories that Lewis strings together--the ones he combined in ways that offended his highly meticulous friend and co-writer, J. R. R. Tolkien. (What comes to mind first is the sudden emergence of Father Christmas in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.) Ultimately--despite all appearances to the contrary, the Chronicles ends well with The Last Battle.

I'm reminded that Lewis was a Renaissance and Medieval scholar (although he had some misgivings about the very existence of a "renaissance" in western Europe as a discrete period), a time when images, symbols, and stories ran together in a crazy potpourri.

I'm remembering that life really is a mish-mash, just like the Middle Ages reminded us. Have you ever been to New York City's Cloisters museum? It's a wonderful reconstruction of three cloisters. In those transcendent medieval quadrangles, each column is different. Their glorious mish-mash contrasts marked from the rational, homogenizing similarity of the Enlightenment.

I'm grateful because it draws me back to the reality of life--it's never too rational or too uniform, and yet somehow it's unified by the will of our good God. It's this God that promises us victory and meaning at the last.

That's why I love the glorious mish-mash narratives of C. S. Lewis especially on this final day of 2010, which is also my birthday, when I seek to make sense of the year that's passed. Too often things appear as a variegated jumble of experiences and moments, but I trust that God holds them together the glorious mish-mash of life.

C. S. Lewis and the Future of Forestry

2010-12-08T10:07:00.000-08:00

Just last night, I experienced an amazing concert at Chico's El Rey Theatre by the band, Future of Forestry (for more on them, go here). Since they derive their name from an obscure poem by that great Christian muse of the twentieth century, C. S. Lewis, it sparked my creative Lewisian juices and got me off my blogging butt. (This site has remained dormant for almost a month.) So here goes....

I start with the opening lines from Lewis

How will the legend of the age of trees

Feel, when the last tree falls in England?

When the concrete spreads and the town conquers

The country’s heart....

These lines, penned in 1938, presciently peer into our day and into my mind. When I lament the fixation of children today on Wii, the teens on their smartphones, and the college students on their iPods, and me on my omnipresent and omniscient iPhone, I wonder how disconnected we all have become from nature.

Lewis wonders if it's not only an alienation from nature but also from the certain stories. Has our mastery over nature through science and its scion, technology, not actually mastered us, by muting our essential connection with nature and thereby silencing the stories that nature inspires?

The questioning children, “What was a chestnut?

Say what it means to climb a Beanstalk,

Tell me, grandfather, what an elm is.

What was Autumn? They never taught us.”

Because, as Lewis points out, there is something almost magical--and certainly something divine--imbedded as an act of ongoing creation in the forests and in the mountains. I know this as I go walking among the hills and the trees of Chico's Bidwell Park.

And as the band Future of Forestry celebrated last night, in a glorious, wall-of-sound Christmas paean of praise, "Joy to the World," it is during this season, this time of celebrating God's coming and dwelling with us in human flesh, that "heaven and earth shall sing."

Just this morning, in an unrelated context, I read Psalm 50, verse 2 that describes the God who "shone forth from Zion" as "the zenith of beauty" (50:2). It is in nature where often I see God's beauty, where I find myself in a return to that unmitigated glory of original creation.

In the just-published Cambridge Companion to C. S. Lewis, Michael Guite finds a linking of Lewis's poetry and contemporary "deep ecology," where, Lewis presents that, through nature, and as we are redeemed in Christ, we become connected with nature's profound, primary truths. Lewis concludes his poem by wondering if, this industrial, technological age hasn't lost connection with the rest of creation and thus with something poignant and essential.

Of goblins stalking in silky green,

Of milk-sheen froth upon the lace of hawthorn’s

Collar, pallor in the face of birchgirl.

So shall a homeless time, though dimly

Catch from afar (for soul is watchfull)

A sight of tree-delighted Eden.

In sum: Lewis poses just the right question for us, What will be the future of forestry?

C. S. Lewis on death and life

2010-11-15T12:06:00.000-08:00

I, like C. S. Lewis, did not start my life with a robust sense of the afterlife. So, when I became a Christian a college--and even many years thereafter--this key question loomed (and still does at times): What do I do when I stand before my own death? And what do I really hold to when someone dies whom I truly love? Lewis grappled profoundly with that question when his wife, Helen Joy Davidman, died. (Need I add that it's a question we all will face.) You can see the poem Lewis wrote in response on his wife's tombstone.

While on a post-college celebratory vacation to France, I can remember reading Lewis’s insights about the afterlife from Reflections on the Psalms, that knocked me off my metaphorical feet. He pointed out human beings are not made for time, but instead, for eternal life. And I remember several years later in 1997--when I had to preach my first Easter sermon and sought to somehow make our hope for another, better life something real and vital for the congregation--I turned to Lewis to help me demonstrate where our recurrent human experience resonates resurrection. Here's that passage:

We are so little reconciled to time that we are even astonished at it. “How he’s grown!” we exclaim, “How time flies!” as though the universal form of our experience were again and again a novelty. It is as strange as if a fish were repeatedly surprised at the wetness of water. And that would be strange indeed; unless of course the fish were destined to become, one day, a land animal.

That passage is transcendent for me. Through it, I feel the reason and importance for the afterlife. But does it work for you? I'm curious....

Why C. S. Lewis Speaks to Me

2010-10-27T11:35:00.000-07:00

This is a draft (inadvertent typos and all) of the first chapter of a book I'm working on, C. S. Lewis in Crisis. I start with my story of how Lewis first helped resolve my crisis of doubt and subsequently many others. I'm interested to know what you think. GSC

A young man who wishes to remain a sound Atheist cannot be too careful of his reading. There are traps everywhere—“Bibles laid open, millions of surprises,” as Herbert says, “fine nets and stratagems.” God is, if I may say it, very unscrupulous.

C.S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy

Re-reading the journals

One of the first things I noticed when I looked through the journals from my freshman year at Berkeley was how I wrestled with doubt. I doubted my functional atheism, which was now wearing thin.

I had re-discovered these journals in my garage one morning as I began the day with a vigorous workout on the stair machine. Sweaty and winded, I looked slightly left and spied non-descript cardboard data boxes. I pulled these down from the metal shelves to discover hand-written pages of revelations, often written in cursive, contained in spiral bound, fifty-nine cent notebooks that described the crisis of doubt and of the vicissitudes of a college freshman with their florid introspection and excessive use of exclamation points. As I poured over these pages, I found the months between fall 1980 and spring 1981 in which my life had changed, when I suddenly seemed to wear unbelief uneasily. It was, as the philosophers call it, “an existential crisis.”

As I began to have a crisis about my doubting God, C.S. Lewis accompanied me and eventually led me out.

Not of course that Lewis was still alive and walking around Telegraph Avenue with me. He died a year before I was born, lived in another country, never visited the United States, and in many ways, had nothing to do with a California kid starting college in fall 1980. Moreover, it would even be self-centered to the point of narcissistic to say that Lewis had the same crises I had or that I’ve encountered since: Lewis grew up in a household of faith, namely the Church of Ireland, and after the death of his mother, when he was ten, he abandoned Christian faith and did not return for years. He grew up at the end of the Victorian era, spent time in the trenches of WWI, lived through the bomb raids of World War II in London, and spent his last two decades (more or less) in England as it rebuilt following these two world wars. He died before the “Sixties Revolution” hit its stride. In other words, he inhabited a different world from me.

And yet, I would still say that Clive Staples Lewis or “Jack” as he like to be called, helped me find God in Berkeley, California. Nursed on the casual secularism of the region now known as Silicon Valley, where, I’ve been told less than ten percent of its residents are found in a worship service on any given Sunday I grew up not needing God. Instead I found satisfaction in perfect, temperate weather, comfortable surroundings, a secure and happy family, a life rounded out with sufficient personal achievements. This is happy secularism, Californian-style, to be distinguished from an Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Samuel Beckett-cultivated atheistic existentialist, where I’d drink bitter French Roast, wearing peg leg jeans, and filling leather journals with reflections on Meaninglessness and the Abyss while atonal jazz plays in the background. I don’t remember specifically denying God’s existence exactly. God played no role in my life, and thus my term, “functional atheism.” I simply didn’t see it as relevant or useful. But when I got to Berkeley—postmodern, freewheeling Berkeley—I didn’t know what I was doing and why I was doing it. And that undid me.

In Lewis I found a kindred spirit—one for whom faith was by no means self-evident nor devoid of serious reflection, a person who struggled with Jesus as a unique revelation of God, who took religious faith seriously with all his powers of thought, and who knew the importance of wisdom. I found in his writings a fluidity of style and of mind that slowly engaged and even entranced me as a fellow lover of books and a soon-to-be undergraduate in comparative literature. And there in the University of California, I also found a fellow seeker, who spent his life in a secular, world-class university, a place where Christianity, if treated at all, was passé, a vestige of western civilization that had long ago thrown off this infantile belief.

The uniqueness of Jesus

As I read through those journals, one of the first things that struck me—besides the unbelievable emotional swings of a late adolescent—was my struggle with the uniqueness of Jesus. In a section from January 1981 named “My Belief in Religion: What Stops Me,” I have a very sparse but poignant entry: “So many religions.” And then a bit later this: “I’m having a lot of problems believing in Jesus Christ. It’s so narrowly defined.”

I needed to know about where Jesus fit. During that decisive, life-altering winter quarter, I took Religious Studies 90A, an introduction to the basic menu of “world religions”: Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam with some animism and Chinese religion thrown in. One thing struck me: I discovered that there was a pervasive reverence for Jesus among world faiths. Buddhism describes him as an “enlightened” figure. Hinduism easily fits him into their rather expansive worship of numerous deities. Islam considers him one of the prophets. Judaism? That provided a fascinating exception: it bestowed the seeds of his teachings and yet simultaneously denied that Jesus fulfilled Jewish messianic hopes. Of course, Christianity—the largest and most globally universal faith—centers on him, even worships him.

Here, on the subject of the uniqueness of Jesus, C.S. Lewis came as a mentor, or perhaps, in Lewis’s words, a “Teacher.” (In one of his later books, The Great Divorce, Lewis’s great Teacher, the pastor and fantasy writer, George MacDonald, accompanies him in the afterlife, revealing that he has been there throughout Lewis’s earthly life. Lewis, it seems, is my George MacDonald.)

The particular connection I felt toward Lewis I read years later in his description of a famous stroll on Addison’s Way in Oxford in September 1931, at age 32, that he offered to his childhood friend, Arthur Greeves. After walking with fellow Oxford professors, J.R.R. Tolkien and Hugo Dyson, he admitted that his struggle was between pagan “myths”—which, as a lover of classical literature, he cherished—and the uniqueness of the story of Jesus:

Now what Dyson and Tolkien showed was this: again, that if I met the idea sacrifice in a Pagan story I didn’t mind it at all: that if I met the idea of a god sacrificing himself to himself… I liked it very much and was mysteriously moved by it: again, that the idea of the dying and reviving god (Balder, Adonis, Bacchus) similarly moved me provided I met it anywhere except in the Gospels.

But in this early morning around Oxford, which lasted until 3am, these two fellow academics demonstrated something new, and this was a turning point for Lewis:

Now the story of Christ is simply a true myth: a myth working in us in the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference that it really happened: and one much be content to accept it in the same way, remembering that it is God’s myth where others are men’s myths: i.e., the Pagan stories are God expressing Himself through the minds of poets, using such images as He found there, while Christianity is God expressing Himself through what we call “real things.”

Notice that here Lewis was able to simultaneously sustain a deep appreciation for Pagan mythology, even describing them as a place where God is “expressing Himself” while upholding the ultimate nature of the story of Christ. Lewis’s view of the uniqueness of Christ was not that all other faiths were entirely false, but it might be called a fulfillment model—the Christian story fulfills the hopes and directions of other religions:

The question was no longer to find the one simply true religion among a thousand religions simply false. It was rather, “Where has religion reached its true maturity? Where, if anywhere, have the hints of all Paganism been fulfilled?

This approach struck me then as reasonable and still does. I will unfold this theme more in a later chapter. For the purposes here, Lewis led me to resolve the problem of the uniqueness of Jesus in a secular and pluralistic world.

But I didn’t really know much about Jesus, and here Lewis had a distinct advantage over me: he actually had read the Gospels—having been given a tutoring in his teens under the “Great Knock” William Kirkpatrick, he even read them in their original Greek. I had hardly even glanced at them in English. Growing up largely outside of the church, I had never really done that before. And so, at the end of my eighteenth year toward the end of 1980, I began to read the Gospels in earnest. My growing interest in Christianity had brought me to various conversations with Christians, all of whom directed me to the Bible. And there was this simple fact: So many religions talked about Jesus, so why not read the primary texts about his life? It was much later, during my graduate studies, that I would discover these are also the earliest and most definitive texts about Jesus of Nazareth. At that time, my best tools for interpreting these narratives were my budding skills as student of literature: I realized that Jesus, this central figure of the Gospels, wasn’t some fictional protagonist. For one thing, his depiction honestly wasn’t really literary. Mark, for example, writes his Gospel in very rough language. The Gospels included details that didn’t necessarily carry the story along, but had the hard authenticity of history, the man who runs away naked in Mark’s Gospel when confronted by the soldiers, or the one hundred and fifty-three fish that the disciples catch at the end of the Gospel of John. On the other hand, Jesus’s personality and actions never appeared to me as modeled by my expectations; instead they kept “pushing back” against my preconceptions. He wasn’t just some nice waspy, Sunday school kid. Jesus even talked about things that I didn’t like—serving others, shunning status, dying to self—that weren’t calculated to appeal to my baser desires, especially those that could be “monetized.” As a college student spoon-fed on the marketing culture of the U.S., where there was always some product to meet my needs, I should have been repulsed. Instead, I was allured. Jesus was no salesman. His utterances displayed the unrelenting character of truth.

One related problem for me was that Jesus’s death, I was told, somehow substituted for the penalty for sin I needed to pay. This didn’t make a great deal of sense. It didn’t make sense to Lewis either, and he struggled with how the death of Jesus two thousand years ago could have an objective effect on our lives today. After becoming a convert and even a Christian, Lewis could not easily subscribe to the notion that Christ “substituted” himself for us. “What I couldn’t see was how the life and death of Someone Else (whoever he was) 2000 years ago could help us here and now—except in so far as his example helped us” (Letters I:976),

Though I’ve come to appreciate the substitutionary death better over the subsequent years, I still would resonate with Lewis’s conclusion that he drew a little over a decade after his conversion. In effect, theories about Christ’s atonement are not the final issue. (Historically in fact, Lewis is in good company with the Church historically. Though it has defined who Christ is—or Christology—there has been no ecumenical statement on atonement.)

We are told that Christ was killed for us, that His death has washed out our sins, and that by dying He disabled death itself. That is the formula. That is Christianity. That is what has to be believed. Any theories we build up as to how Christ's death did all this are, in my view, quite secondary: mere plans or diagrams to be left alone if they do not help us, and, even if they do help us, not to be confused with the thing itself. All the same, some of these theories are worth looking at.

And Christ has made the world right—once I understood the uniqueness of Jesus I discovered why and how I could believe this. Lewis led me to see that the witness to Jesus in the Gospels demands that I respond. He is “either God or a bad man.” (This argument that Lewis would rework in his famous “trilemma”—Jesus is either liar, lunatic, or Lord—to which I will return in the fourth chapter.) Put simply, through the Gospels, I found that Jesus demands a response, and that his truth—ultimately though it is—does not invalidate other insights, but is “the light that enlightens everyone,” as John 1:9 puts it.

Christian faith: Serious, but not somber

Some of the roots of this crisis of doubt went back three years further.

It was sometime in 1979, as a wishy-washy junior in high school sixteen-year-old atheist-agnostic, that I picked up Mere Christianity, Lewis’s presentation and defense of Christianity (two tasks that almost always appeared together for him no matter what the subject). I had expressed a mild interest in Christianity, but felt reasonably self-assured that to believe implied that I needed to stop thinking. And it didn’t take the atheists to convince me that Christians weren’t intellectually engaged—it was the light-in-the-head church youth groups singing Jesus songs many didn’t believe accompanied by hand-signals that were totally mismatched with the message of denial, faith, and abandonment to God that I read in Jesus. (Although I had few experiences in church, I had been brought along to a church junior high youth group. I left dismayed after a few weeks.) Their flippancy in belief was all I needed to not believe myself. It wasn’t really hypocrisy; it was the frivolity that turned me away.

So when I began Mere Christianity, I was dumbfounded: Here a writer, a Christian at that, was somehow making the whole Christian faith reasonable. I mean, I had been taught that Christianity was anything but reasoned. The most reasonable author I had read to date was also a proponent of this severely unreasoned faith.

Lewis taught me that Christian faith requires and sustains serious reflection, but is not ultimately somber. The content of faith is important, serious, but never frivolous “Christianity, if false, is of no importance, and if true, of infinite importance. The only thing it cannot be is moderately important.” In fact, faith and the experience of God lead to joy.

And although I didn’t know who this Lewis guy was, nor what a truly world class mind he possessed, he made sense. It was so similar to a sentiment that Lewis himself would record—and which I read many years later—about his own reading, as a young atheist, of the Catholic journalist G.K. Chesterton:

Then I read Chesterton’s Everlasting Man and for the first time saw the whole Christian outline of history set out in a form that seemed to me to make sense. Somehow I contrived not to be too badly shaken. You will remember that I already thought Chesterton the most sensible man alive “apart from his Christianity.” Now, I veritably believe, I thought—I didn’t of course say; words would have revealed the nonsense—that Christianity itself was very sensible “apart from its Christianity.”

Even in this citation, Lewis demonstrates that, though funny (e.g., the irony of attempting to believe Christianity is sensible “apart from its Christianity”), he was never frivolous. He knew that Christianity was something worth our lives. I was not only dumbfounded, but I was hooked—hooked in subtle way. That is to say, the whole message went underground for a couple of years, made subterranean by senioritis, falling in love, and moving to college at Berkeley.

When I returned to look at the Christian gospel one more time in that freshman year with new eyes and redoubled vigor, it was Lewis’s writing—this self-described “dinosaur”—that made Christian belief come alive. To use William James’s memorable phrase, Christian faith emerged as a “live option.” What seemed relevant and distant before now became intensely personal. Lewis took Christian faith seriously, but not morosely. His Mere Christianity—with a subtext of his disenchantment with atheism and his conversion to Christianity—got under my skin with its reasoned and reasonable approach to Christian faith His friends would remind us that Lewis was a very funny man. As his former student, Alastair Fowler once remarked, “Lewis seemed always on the verge of hilarity—between a chuckle and a roar” (C.S. Lewis Remembered, 103). But he knew that humor could also lead to trivializing important topics. His humor supported his exposition, but never dominated or diminished it.

Christian faith, Lewis taught me could withstand serious intellectual engagement. In fact, as I interrogated other philosophers—the thought of French post-structuralist Michel Foucault was hot at Berkeley in those days—they actually didn’t stand up as well. And so I was being won over. And so I began to engage it. Or better God began to engage me. “I read in a periodical the other day that the fundamental thing is how we think of God. By God Himself it is not! How God thinks of us is no only more important, but infinitely more important” (Weight of Glory). And God, I was learning, apparently thought enough of me to send Christ and to take on this smart, but largely immature, eighteen year old and take his questions seriously. I was taken so seriously that I was being shaken.

Wisdom

Although I’ve emphasized the rationality in Lewis’s work, that certainly wasn’t the only element that sustained me. In fact, as I’ve learned from him over the past thirty years, and as I’ve seen him work in the lives of my congregations, his imagination (a topic for a later chapter) and wisdom have played major roles. Even in 1980-81, the wisdom of C.S. Lewis stood out. And being an eighteen year old, I needed a little wisdom. (I’m thankful now that today, this age is deemed “emerging young adulthood.”)

Reading through the journal pages from my late teens, I tried to construct my worldview of agnosticism or functional atheism. Although any important metaphysical commitment lurked casually in the back of my mind, I now realize the presence of this casual non-belief held the seeds of a problem. Atheism is effectively one large No: “No, God does not exist. Or at least if God exists, it’s impossible to prove or irrelevant to modern, intelligent adults. Therefore, No, the universe lacks purpose or meaning.” Or as the best-selling author, Richard Dawkins phrases it, the universe is “nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.” Thus my atheism could not solve one of its own dilemmas, namely the problem of meaning: If there is at the bottom, no God and no purpose, where can I find beauty and meaning? And why do we care? Why did I so deeply value love—not just romantic love, but true caring for another person?

As a first year student in this overwhelming university and pluralistic city, I was confused and undone by my newfound collegiate freedom. No parent or teacher could provide me with certainties, and quite frankly, the old ones didn’t work so well. The voice of self-sufficiency and selfish, personal fulfillment rang hollow. I found myself regularly strolling through Berkeley’s famous Sproul Plaza—where Mario Savio jumped on a police car, initiating the Free Speech Movement in 1964—and on every side I was surrounded by the free and cacophonous voices of various student group tables on every side. It was a veritable circus. All offered directions: the Spartacus Youth Party, gay and lesbian empowerment, animal rights, medical cannabis use, Green Party sign-up, Berkeley Free (medical) clinic, and the like. They all seemed at the same volume.

And so I searched for meaning, which to me is tied to wisdom, or to be biblical, skillful living—doing what’s right, what makes sense, and what works. Where was a wise voice to guide me that could speak more clearly than the others?

This must be the reason that the chapter that had early knocked me down was this chapter from Lewis, a vice I would never have concerned myself with as a fairly proud junior in high school—excelling in school and my advanced placement classes, doing well as a varsity tennis player. The following words rung in my ears like Jesus’s words—angular to what my culture was feeding me (“You can have your dreams; you create your destiny”) and for that reason, curiously true.

I now come to that part of Christian morals where they differ most sharply from all other morals. There is one vice of which no man in the world is free; which every one in the world loathes when he sees it in someone else; and of which hardly any people, except Christians, ever imagine that they are guilty themselves. I have heard people admit that they are bad-tempered, or that they cannot keep their heads about girls or drink, or even that they are cowards. I do not think I have ever heard anyone who was not a Christian accuse himself of this vice. And at the same time I have very seldom met anyone, who was not a Christian, who showed the slightest mercy to it in others. There is no fault which makes a man more unpopular, and no fault which we are more unconscious of in ourselves. And the more we have it ourselves, the more we dislike it in others.

The vice I am talking of is Pride or Self-Conceit: and the virtue opposite to it, in Christian morals, is called Humility.

And so, in the second quarter of my first year, almost three years after reading this for the first time, I decided I was proud, that I had to replace the idolatry of me and that Jesus was indeed the Son of God. I confessed faith in him. Lewis called himself “the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England” (Surprised by Joy, 228-9). I was more surprised and fearful. I knew that my fraternity brothers would ridicule me and my university professors’ post-Christian erudition would subtly mock my gangly, adolescent belief. I sought to kill my self-destructive pride by submitting to God. This also opened me to that critically important virtue of humility, which opened me to learning at a formative time (because I didn’t know it all) and to healthy relationships (I didn’t have to compete with others).

In sum, Lewis, as my mentor, led me to see that Christ’s uniqueness demands a response, but does not invalidate other truths; that Christian faith withstands and supports serious reasoning, but is never solemn or dour; and that Christianity leads to wisdom and much needed skill for a late adolescent and for a culture that’s still not fully emerged into adulthood. And this leads me to the reason for writing this book: I believe he can do this and much more for this generation.

C. S. Lewis, James Loder, and Transforming Moments

2010-10-12T11:19:00.000-07:00

One of my favorite--and most enduring (and endearing)--seminary professors at Princeton was James Loder, whose teaching and writing left an indelible impression on how I teach and how I understand the narrative of our lives, particularly those key events he called "transforming moments." The latter concept is collected in the book of the same name and later in my particular favorite, an insightful and provocative study of science and religion, The Knight's Move.

So here's the deal: Loder spoke about “transformational knowledge," in which we move through a five-stage process:

Incoherence or Conflict (we have a problem we can't quite figure out)
Search for Resolution (we're looking for an answer)
Constructive act of imagination (suddenly an answer emerges unexpectedly)
Release of energy (we're pysched that we've solved the problem)
Verification (we interpret or verify our insight, particularly integrating with past and projecting its implications into the future). (You can find this elaborated a bit more in The Knight’s Move, pages 230-2.)

If you need these five stages exemplified, think of Archimedes, who had to find the gold content of a king's crown without melting it down and who didn't know what to do. In the midst of pondering this conundrum, he took a bath, discovered the physics of the displacement of water and its implications for the gold content of the crown, and ran out into the street naked shouting "Eureka" (which means "I have found it!) Or for a slightly less scandalous example, think of Einstein, who puzzled over this question, "If I'm in an elevator that's moving at a constant speed and has no windows or doors, I won't know if I'm moving or not." And thus arrives the theory of general relativity.

This is powerful because it makes sense of those key moments in my life that transformed me, and--since I'm studying C. S. Lewis for an upcoming class and potentially a book--gives me an insight into those same transforming moments in Lewis's life.

Here's a critical moment: November 1908, the nine year-old Lewis experienced the first major crisis of his life. His beloved mother, Florence or “Flora” was diagnosed with cancer. Her condition worsened precipitously. This moment both traumatized and transformed him.

With my mother's death all settled happiness, all that was tranquil and reliable, disappeared from my life. There was to be much fun, many pleasures, many stabs of joy; but no more of the old security. It was sea and islands now; the great continent had sunk like Atlantis.

Though the young Lewis (or “Jack” as he liked to be called) was conventionally religious and a member of a Church of Ireland family, this trauma would lead him gradually to atheism. As he described it, this path to unbelief began with prayer. He prayed for a very specific reason (as he later wrote), “When her case was pronounced hopeless I remembered what I had been taught; that prayers offered in faith would be granted.” Despite these prayers, on August 23, his mother died. “The thing hadn’t worked, but I was used to things not working….” God, especially the Magician God was irrelevant to the crisis of suffering. His life was gradually transformed from this moment into increasing atheism, and with it, attendant despair.

Later--through his own conversion first to Theism in 1929 and then to Christian faith in 1931--this crisis would be reinterpreted, and a deeper, more profound transformation would occur. Lewis's resolution of this crisis found its way into a beautiful paragraph from his 1939 book, The Problem of Pain. I find this passage so overwhelming it's sometimes hard for me to keep reading. I find myself putting the book down and reflecting on the stunning mixture of wisdom, poignant emotion, and piercing insight that Lewis evokes.

The settled happiness and security which we all desire, God withholds from us by the very nature of the world; but joy, pleasure, and merriment, He has scattered broadcast. We are never safe, but we have plenty of fun, and some ecstasy. It is not hard to see why. The security we crave would teach us to rest our hearts in this world and oppose an obstacle to our return to God: a few moments of happy love, a landscape, a symphony, a merry meeting with our friends, a bathe or a football match, have no such tendency. Our Father refreshes us on the journey with some pleasure inns, but will not encourage us to mistake them for home.

This has been a long post. So I'll leave it there. As they say in Latin, res ipsa loquitur, "the thing speaks for itself." (At least for me... I hope it does for you too.)

Francis Collins, C. S. Lewis, and the Resolution of Crisis

2010-09-30T11:57:00.000-07:00

As I noted in my last post, C. S. Lewis's writings reflect his own crises. For that reason they have spoken to me. But since then, I've paused and wondered: Have CSL's insights helped others?

Here's one significant example I've found: Lewis’s writings resolved the spiritual and intellectual crisis for the famous geneticist and head of the NIH, Francis Collins, perhaps the most prominent scientist in the United States. Collins, in his important bestselling work, The Language of God, that seeks to reconcile Christian faith with contemporary evolutionary genetics, recounts his experience of reading Lewis as a seeker in medical school. Asked by a patient, whose faith supported her doing terrible heart pain, “What about you? What do you believe?” He could only mutter, “Well, I don’t think I believe in anything.” He realized that he had never looked at the evidence for or against God and found this a “thoroughly terrifying experience." Upon request, a Methodist pastor handed him a key apologetics text by Lewis.

The book was Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis. In the next few days, as I turned its pages, struggling to absorb the breadth and depth of the intellectual arguments laid down by this legendary Oxford scholar, I realized that all of my constructs against the plausibility of faith were those of a schoolboy. Clearly I would need to start with a clean slate to consider this most important of all human questions. Lewis seemed to know all of my objections, sometimes even before I had quite formulated them. He invariably addressed them within a page or two.

Collins represents exactly the kind of person Lewis so often becomes associated with—honestly looking for God in moments of deep intellectual and spiritual crisis. Lewis did speak, and continues to communicate powerfully, to these seekers. He can do the same today.

At least, that's how I see it. Do you think that's true? Have Lewis's writings given you new insights right when you needed them, at points of personal crisis?

C.S. Lewis and Crisis

2010-09-23T11:25:00.000-07:00

C.S. Lewis writing something cool

Somehow this paragraph from C.S. Lewis, with its winsome style and penetrating insight, summarizes the power of his work. This twentieth-century Christian mentor and Oxford intellectual (1898-1963)—who lived through the two World Wars, the intervening worldwide Great Depression, and later the death of his wife to cancer—describes beautifully how he resolved the crises that beset human life in general and his life in particular, where he found incredible points of “joy, pleasure, and merriment” in the midst of pain, and why the ultimate resolution lies ahead of this life.

The settled happiness and security which we all desire, God withholds from us by the very nature of the world; but joy, pleasure, and merriment, He has scattered broadcast. We are never safe, but we have plenty of fun, and some ecstasy. It is not hard to see why. The security we crave would teach us to rest our hearts in this world and oppose an obstacle to our return to God: a few moments of happy love, a landscape, a symphony, a merry meeting with our friends, a bathe or a football match, have no such tendency. Our Father refreshes us on the journey with some pleasure inns, but will not encourage us to mistake them for home.

What do you think? Does this insight from C.S. Lewis help you understand better why there's both happiness and pain in life? Why there's hope for something better beyond this life?

Things I Wish I'd Heard in College

2010-09-08T09:48:00.000-07:00

I thought I'd post the key points from my sermon last Sundy to our college outreach worship service, the 545. They're points of wisdom (which biblically means "skillful living") that I wish I knew when I started at Cal. I've put a verse in after each one, which is really just an indicator to check out the broader passage.

Things I Wish I’d Heard in College

1. Don’t go with the crowd, but do what you need to do and truly enjoy.

“Folly sits at the door of her house

… calling out to those who pass by” (Proverbs 9:14-15).

"Do not fret because of evil men

or be envious of those who do wrong;

for like the grass they will soon wither,

  like green plants they will soon die away" (Psalm 37:4).

2. Make decisions you want to live out for 20 years.

“Like a tree planted by streams of water… whatever they do prospers” (Psalm 1:3)

"The truly righteous man attains life,

  but he who pursues evil goes to his death." (Proverbs 11:19)

3. Take time for friendships.

“A man who has friends must himself be friendly” (Proverbs 18:24)

4. Learning is really cool—don’t take it for granted.

“We take every thought captive to obey Christ” (2 Corinthians 10:5).

"Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind" (Matthew 22:37).

5. Work on who you want to be, then on what you want to do

“By the grace of God, I am what I am…” (1 Corinthians 15:10).

Find who You are in Christ

What do you think? Anything you'd add?

Leadership Jesus-Style

2010-08-20T16:04:00.000-07:00

At a moment when his followers were haggling over which would be the greatest in the kingdom, Jesus took the opportunities to remind them of how understood power and leadership:

You know that those who are regarded as rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their high officials exercise authority over them. Not so with you. Instead, whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first must be slave of all. For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many. (Mark 10:42-45)

For many readers this is fairly familiar stuff. At least that's true for me, but it should strike as extremely offensive to my cultural heritage because--for all their differences-- Jesus is saying straight out that competition is the enemy of good leadership in the mode of Jesus is competition. And because both cultures love power and being first, being a leader like Jesus is as tough for 21^st century Americans as it is for his 1^st century Jewish followers.

I'm not saying it's not out there, but I am looking to lead like this and to see models of what leadership looks like, Jesus-style. Any places you see it?

A Return to C.S. Lewis

2010-07-28T19:57:00.000-07:00

As I begin the first day of life post-sabbatical, I’ve naturally returned to work at Bidwell Pres. I’m also working on a concept for a new book, which represents something of a happy repayment on a thirty-year old debt.

It was sometime in 1979, as a wishy-washy junior in high school sixteen-year-old atheist-agnostic, that a friend handed me C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity. I was dumbfounded: Here a writer, a Christian at that, was somehow making the whole Christian faith reasonable. I mean, I had been taught that Christianity was anything but reasoned. And it didn’t take the atheists to convince me that Christians weren’t intellectually engaged—it was the light-in-the-head church youth groups singing Jesus songs, which many of didn’t believe, accompanied by hand-signals that were totally mismatched with the message of denial, faith, and abandonment to God that I heard from Jesus. The flippant belief was all I needed to not believe myself. It wasn’t really hypocrisy; it was the frivolity that turned me away.

I didn’t know who this Lewis guy was, but he made sense. It was so similar to a sentiment that Lewis himself would record—and which I read many years later—about his own reading, as a young atheist, of the Catholic author G.K. Chesterton:

Then I read Chesterton’s Everlasting Man and for the first time saw the whole Christian outline of history set out in a form that seemed to me to make sense. Somehow I contrived not to be too badly shaken. You will remember that I already thought Chesterton the most sensible man alive “apart from his Christianity.” Now, I veritably believe, I thought—I didn’t of course say; words would have revealed the nonsense—that Christianity itself was very sensible “apart from its Christianity.”

Lewis, though funny, was never frivolous. He knew that Christianity was something worth our lives. And so—if plans proceed—I’ll be writing to invite others to the rich feast of Lewis’s writings where insights pierce the heart, where imagination takes us soaring, and where we might even touch God. The journey to get out those reflections sounds, not frivolous, but (excepting some of the times of hard work) entirely joyful.

Time for a Change, Time for View

2010-07-01T06:02:00.000-07:00

I type this from one my favorite places in the world--not mountain biking the Flume Trail above Lake Tahoe's north shore where this picture was taken yesterday, although that was amazing--but not too far away, at the Tahoe house where our family's stayed at for the past 25 summer vacations (and have loved being here every time).

It's time to change the blog a bit--I'm doing some alterations on the look and content, changing color and adding some new links, that sort of thing. My hope is that it will be more interesting and engaging. Other changes, I suspect, will emerge over time. But more importantly, I'm widening the swatch of topics for reflection, to include the sciences and the arts as components of my reflections on culture. I've spent a number of years studying these fields, and I want to bring them into this blog more intentionally. (We'll see how this plays out...)

All this makes sense (at least to me) as my sabbatical enters its final month, and as I seek to listen to new ways that God is directing me. I'm riding down some new trails, hoping to gain some new vistas. If Madeleine L'Engle was right--"we have points of view, but God has view." I hope I'll even get a bit of the latter. Time for view!

Saying Yes, Flow, and the Question of Selfishness

2010-06-19T16:15:00.000-07:00

I'm beginning work on a new book tentatively titled, Ten Beautiful Yeses: Further Toward What's Best in Life, Work and Love. Let's begin our search for the yeses in life, with what we really care about. In that light, I believe we can let our fears diminish in light of the scale of what we’re discovering and the joy and beauty we will experience.

To be sure, the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has on odd name—I once heard someone comment (though I can’t verify this) that he prefers “Mike” and that his last name sounds something like “Chick-sent-me-high.” All of this intrigues me… which in a way is what he’s after—that is, what is truly intriguing in life. In Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, Csikszentmihalyi presented a key idea for grasping how we find our passion. In the state of the mind he named “flow,” we experience deep enjoyment, challenge matched by our skills, creativity, and sense that time is moving in a different, and fuller way. How can “flow”—or “optimal experience” be described? He writes that “‘Flow’ is the way people describe their state of mind when consciousness is harmoniously ordered, and they want to pursue whatever they are doing for its own sake”(6). One key example for Dr. C is the work of a surgeon, who works within certain limits (defined by keeping the patient alive), for a specific goal (the improved health of the patient), with a task that's entirely demanding and rewarding. Although paradigmatic, flow doesn't just happen for surgeons. It's actually a reasonably universal experience. But how did he find this out? He developed a new form of research, the Experience Sampling Method, in which hundreds of subjects wore pagers that beeped at odd intervals throughout their days. When paged, the participants had to quickly fill out a brief survey that noted what activity they were engaged in and a series of questions of whether they were more or less in the “flow.” Were they in “optimal experience”?

Csikszentmihalyi’s research indicates some surprising results: for example, human beings more often experience flow when they are working than when they are at leisure (158-159). Although television requires mental processing, very little else mentally, like memory, is engaged. “Not surprisingly, people report some of the lowest levels of concentration, use of skills, clarity of thought, and feelings of potency when watching television” (30). Ultimately, he asserts, optimal experience makes life worth living. When we’re in the flow, we want to do nothing else. And we don’t really care about much else. “An activity that produces such experiences is so gratifying that people are willing to do it for its own sake, with little concern for what they will get out of it, even when it is difficult, or dangerous” (71).

Doesn’t this “finding your passion,” and looking for "flow" seem just a little too selfish and therefore illegitimate as a way of directing our lives? Not necessarily. I have learned from a distinction the Christian writer and literary scholar, C.S. Lewis, who delineated an important distinction: between being selfish and self-centered. Finding what we are called to do is, in a certain sense, selfish—we love doing it and therefore we find great joy—but entirely not self-centered—when we do what we love, we forget ourselves as we delight in the activity itself. Lewis writes

One of the happiest men and most pleasant companions I have ever known was intensely selfish. On the other hand I have known people capable of real sacrifice whose lives were nevertheless a misery to themselves and to others, because self-concern and self-pity filled all their thoughts. Either condition will destroy the soul in the end. But till the end, give me the man who takes the best of everything (even at my expense) and then talks of other things, rather than the man who serves me and talks of himself, and whose very kindness are a continual reproach, a continual demand for pity, gratitude and admiration. (Surprised by Joy, 143-44)

So, in a way, I’m asking us to be more directed toward what we like because there we have the power to become self-forgetful and even other-directed. Here I’m proposing a form of enlightened selfishness. The point is not, as we often fear, that when we like to do something it will make us less moral, but what we truly love to do helps us to turn our eyes off ourselves and toward others, which is the beginning of right actions. Don’t stay selfish—that, as C.S. Lewis points out, can also “destroy the soul,” but learn to follow what you truly enjoy and follow it toward something outside of us. And that leads to mission….

So tell me, what do you think of all this?

Growing Up in America

2010-06-16T11:40:00.000-07:00

Two things came together for me today.

First of all, I came across an article in the New York Times that described how the road to adulthood has gotten longer and that our country is extending adolescent later in life, go here. The article presented several factors such as a poor job market, more expensive college tuition, and the fact that we are delaying both marriage and having children. Still the reality is this: our culture today is not asking our children to grow up--to leave adolescence--until their 30s.

Second thing: I finished a really fine novel, "Lovely Bones" (Alice Seebold) that begins by describing the life of a family and a town from the perspective of a fourteen year old who's just been murdered. A pretty arresting start. And the scenes of family life--and this family's grief--are poignant. It's no surprise the American Booksellers Association award it "Book of the Year" when it was published.

But here's the thing: Seebold could describe the joys of adolescent life and especially teenage and twenty-something love, dreams, and sexuality. The lives of the adults, however, pretty much bottom out. Marriages fell apart (adultery, workaholism). Dreams were deferred and forgotten because of the relentless onslaught of the demands in adulthood. The book expressed little sustainable positive vision for what it means to go past this adolescence.

I'm not blaming Seebold. I don't know her work well enough--all I've read is "Lovely Bones"--and she might says she's just describing the U.S. But if that's the response, therein also lies the problem: our culture prides itself on excitement, adventure, self-expression, and staying young. Pretty much the description of adolescence. American doesn't want to grow up.

But where's the point where we say no to newness and self-orientation? When do we say yes to sticking things out and learning that, once the buzz of the "first time" wears off, that's when life really gets good? I treasure the moment when I first road my bike without training wheels, but I'm glad my skill level and mastery has improved over the intervening years. There's no way I could bike the trails I do today with the skills I had when I was six.

Those two things lead to a third: Being a kid, a teen, and an adolescent was great. But growing up has a lot to offer. And being an adult is sure a lot better than staying a child forever.

Prayer the Jesus Way

2010-04-29T22:26:00.000-07:00

I've been looking at the passage for this week's sermon (Luke 11). It's on prayer, it's by Jesus, and it starts in a reasonably unassuming way...

"He was praying in a certain place, and after he had finished, one of his disciples said to him, ‘Lord, teach us to pray, as John taught his disciples.’ He said to them, ‘When you pray, say: Father...'"

Then I came across this note in People’s NT Commentary, "The believer comes to God in prayer without flattery, bribery, or manipulation but already has God’s ear, just as a child has the attention of a good parent."

That stopped me, and I had to ask: Would that change the way we pray?

The Good Samaritan and e.e. cummings

2010-04-23T11:30:00.000-07:00

This week, at Bidwell Presbyterian, we're learning about how to follow Jesus through the parable of the Good Samaritan. Here's the stunning take on Jesus's words by the underrated 20th century poet, e.e. cummings.

I'll let the poem speak for itself:

a man who had fallen among thieves
lay by the roadside on his back
dressed in fifteenthrate ideas
wearing a round jeer for a hat 

fate per a somewhat more than less
emancipated evening
had in return for consciousness
endowed him with a changeless grin 

whereon a dozen staunch and Meal
citizens did graze at pause
then fired by hypercivic zeal
sought newer pastures or because 

swaddled with a frozen brook
of pinkest vomit out of eyes
which noticed nobody he looked
as if he did not care to rise 

one hand did nothing on the vest
its wideflung friend clenched weakly dirt
while the mute trouserfly confessed
a button solemnly inert. 

Brushing from whom the stiffened puke
i put him all into my arms
and staggered banged with terror through
a million billion trillion stars

Female Disciples and the Good Soil

2010-03-19T07:33:00.000-07:00

How much new could be said about the Parable of the Sower (Luke 8:4-15)? Jesus calls us to be good soil--not rocky or thorny soil--because that's the place where the seed of his word grows and flourishes.

"Not much new," I thought to myself as I pondered a blog entry. And then I re-read Luke 8, and pondered the section that precedes the parable, where women follow Jesus, and are thus by definition (though not the Twelve) his disciples. Check this out:

Jesus traveled about from one town and village to another, proclaiming the good news of the kingdom of God. The Twelve were with him, and also some women who had been cured of evil spirits and diseases: Mary (called Magdalene) from whom seven demons had come out; Joanna the wife of Chuza, the manager of Herod's household; Susanna; and many others. These women were helping to support them out of their own means.

Women following a rabbi? In the first century that was radical. Second, women bankrolling Jesus's itinerate ministry? Even radicaller. More radical of all? That these women are models for what it means to be good soil.

Let's see if we can hear the parable's conclusion one more time:

Still other seed fell on good soil. It came up and yielded a crop, a hundred times more than was sown. "When he said this, he called out, "Whoever has ears to hear, let them hear."

Jesus, Capernaum, and the Outsider

2010-03-07T07:02:00.000-08:00

Three months ago, I had the opportunity to visit Capernaum on the north shore of the sea of Galilee. In fact, here's a picture of my friends, Wally and Jerry, as they walk out the remains of this ancient Jewish city, having taken its guidelines with extreme seriousness.

This memory of Capernaum provides context for a story from Jesus's life in the Gospel of Luke (chapter 7, 1-3):

After Jesus had finished all his sayings in the hearing of the people, he entered Capernaum. A centurion there had a slave whom he valued highly, and who was ill and close to death. When he heard about Jesus, he sent some Jewish elders to him, asking him to come and heal his slave.

To ruin the drama of this encounter, I'll note that Jesus does in fact heal the slave. In the process, Jesus demonstrates that he's more than fine about moving beyond the confines of the Jewish people to do his work of healing. (This is a theme the Gospel of Luke loves.) But before that healing, another thing happens that's contained in these verses: somehow this Roman military officer--outside of the Jewish faith--heard about Jesus, which I suppose occurred through local people sharing stories about Jesus's messages and his healing. And that fact leads me to another question: How does this happen today?

My response is entirely too straightforward--people hear about Jesus through the witness of his followers. Sometimes it's through relating their faith. Sometimes it's through acts of kindness. If knowing Jesus is good, it's got to be shared. And I suppose the bottom line, as it follows the story here, is the goodness and beauty of Jesus isn't the sole property of the Christian community. Like a good infection, it just keeps moving beyond the boundaries we set up.

Foundations

2010-02-23T06:05:00.000-08:00

I want to simply set down, one after the other, a piece of Gospels (namely Luke 6:46-49) and a related comment from The People’s NT Commentary.

First from Jesus in the Gospel of Luke:

Why do you call me, 'Lord, Lord,' and do not do what I say? I will show you what he is like who comes to me and hears my words and puts them into practice. He is like a man building a house, who dug down deep and laid the foundation on rock. When a flood came, the torrent struck that house but could not shake it, because it was well built. But the one who hears my words and does not put them into practice is like a man who built a house on the ground without a foundation. The moment the torrent struck that house, it collapsed and its destruction was complete.

Then from Eugene Boring and Fred Craddock:

Our culture encourages us to be concerned about an impressive superstructure; Jesus encourages us to think about the foundation.

Any thoughts on foundations and how this looks for our culture, or maybe more particularly, for you?

"I Desire Mercy, Not Sacrifice"

2010-02-05T16:46:00.000-08:00

Jesus was a prophet. Therefore Jesus stood in the prophetic tradition--the great tradition of Hebrew Bible that emphasizes justice and mercy, especially for the oppressed. This means that if there was a decision to be made between our spiritual practices and mercy, he would always choose mercy.

And that's clearly the case when Jesus cites Hosea 6:6, "I desire mercy, not sacrifice" as he calls a tax-collector, Matthew, to be his disciple, thereby scandalizing some of the most prominent religious leaders and biblical teachers of his day, the Pharisees. (See Matthew 9:9-13.)

Now lest we think the Pharisees were bad guys, remember that they were a reform movement in 1st century Judaism that desired to do the right things--to study the Torah (the first five books of the Bible) and to live a life pleasing to God through rigorous observance of God's commands like eating kosher and practicing the Sabbath. It seems, however, they desired sacrifice--the sacrifice of right religious practice--more than mercy.

You see ,Jesus believed that caring for the hurting was more important, and when there was a conflict mercy must win over doing the right spiritual practices:

⁶On another Sabbath he went into the synagogue and was teaching, and a man was there whose right hand was shriveled. ⁷The Pharisees and the teachers of the law were looking for a reason to accuse Jesus, so they watched him closely to see if he would heal on the Sabbath. ⁸But Jesus knew what they were thinking and said to the man with the shriveled hand, "Get up and stand in front of everyone." So he got up and stood there. ⁹Then Jesus said to them, "I ask you, which is lawful on the Sabbath: to do good or to do evil, to save life or to destroy it?" ¹⁰He looked around at them all, and then said to the man, "Stretch out your hand." He did so, and his hand was completely restored. ¹¹But they were furious and began to discuss with one another what they might do to Jesus. (Gospel of Luke, chapter 6)

But Christians today would never be accused on that, right? We'd never rush to our Bible studies, church services, or committee meetings, and pass by someone in need, a neighbor who needs a listening ear, a fellow student who needs a hand, or a needy person in our path? Would we?

Maybe we need to remember again that there are times when we need to remember Jesus's emphasis: "I desire mercy, not sacrifice."

The Lesson of Flexico

2010-02-01T08:48:00.000-08:00

I just spent a week down in Mexico building houses for the poor 175 south of the border. Actually, we planned to spend a week, but it ended up lasting 11 days because the bridge just north of town (and our only way home), well, broke, under the raging torrent of a flash flood.

But the big story wasn't the bridge. It was the way that our team of 40 students and 10 adults lived into community--to be more biblical "koinonia," the fellowship of the Gospel (Philippians 1:5) where we learned to support one another, put one another first, and find that God is present through the Christian community he creates or what Philippians 2:1-4 describes so eloquently:

If you have any encouragement from being united with Christ, if any comfort from his love, if any fellowship with the Spirit, if any tenderness and compassion, then make my joy complete by being like-minded, having the same love, being one in spirit and purpose. Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit, but in humility consider others better than yourselves. Each of you should look not only to your own interests, but also to the interests of others.

It's a lesson I'll not soon forget.

And, by the way, we made it home...

The Whole Gospel or The "Hole in Our Gospel"? Miscellaneous Reflections

2010-01-08T11:40:00.000-08:00

This year, our church is taking seven and half months to study the Gospel of Luke. And though it doesn't appear until Luke 4, the key for understanding Jesus in Luke comes when he stands up and proclaims his mission in the little town of Nazareth (a place so tiny and insignificant with its 200-500 residents that it's only mention in the New Testament in the centuries of Jesus's birth). Jesus reads the biblical scroll and declares that Isaiah's prophecy is fulfilled in him and that five priorities will mark his mission:

He stood up to read, and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was handed to him. Unrolling it, he found the place where it is written:
    "The Spirit of the Lord is on me,
        because he has anointed me
        to proclaim good news to the poor.
        He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners
        and recovery of sight for the blind,
        to set the oppressed free,
       to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor." (Luke 4:17-18)

Good news to the poor, freedom for prisoners, healing the blind, setting oppressed free, and proclaiming God's favor: That's what Jesus went about doing. And that's also the task of the Christian community. Some, like Richard Stearns, CEO of the Christian relief agency World Vision, state that the church has missed the mark and that we have a "hole in our gospel." Full disclosure: I haven't read the book (yet) because I'm already convinced we need to put together care for the soul ("evangelism") and care for the body ("social righteousness"). But my friend Richard (actually I don't know him, but he sounds like a good guy) and I agree, when you bring together the caring for the whole person--when we bring the Good News of knowing God, when we build homes and set poor free from disease, when we proclaim God's favor to those the world discards--that's the whole Gospel.

Back to Nazareth for a moment... I've included a picture below of a recent--I mean as in last-month recent--excavation that found the first archeological evidence of a first century house in Nazareth. Now this may seem like I'm digressing. Well, first of all, I warned you that these are "miscellaneous reflections," but I promise I have a point: Jesus's hometown is small, God came to ordinary folk, and so when Jesus proclaimed his mission he did so without media blitz and far from a metropolitan center.

Why then was his mission remembered? Because of Jesus, who we was and what he did and what his first followers were committed to: namely, the whole Gospel. Maybe in a time when Christians feel marginal today--no less marginal than the little town of Nazareth-- here's why: we're stuck in the hole in our gospel.

The Purpose of Contentment, A Thought...

2009-12-10T08:53:00.000-08:00

Last week I was preaching on "Spend Less" as part of our "advent conspiracy" series. The key biblical verse came out of 1 Timothy 6: "But if we have food and clothing, we will be content with that" (v. 8). Here's the problem: as soon as I landed on contentment, I didn't stay there, but I moved into generosity.

That bothered me (and also made finding space for this Sunday's theme, "Give More" a bit more difficult). I've been wondering, Couldn't I just be content with contentment?

Well, yes. I've written numerous pages and taught or preached countless times on the importance of gratitude and how it leads us to contentment and happiness. I could have certainly camped out in a familiar wood.

But I also realized that I'm particularly concerned at Christmas, that we would be self-centered even in our contentment, that it would become something about soothing my soul, finding my inner peace. And so I, following 1 Timothy 6, I inadvertently moved on to directing those with money "to do good, to be rich in good deeds, and to be generous and willing to share" (v. 18).

So I missed my target last Sunday and ended up shooting at another bullseye. But as long as I'm there, I'll say this: I hope that, this Christmas, we find both contentment with what we have and generosity toward those who don't have much at all. The amazing truth is that there we will discover deep peace and happiness because I'm sure that's where Jesus will be right there with us.

Who or What Do We Worship this Season?

2009-12-03T08:38:00.000-08:00

This Christmas season our church has joined with the Advent Conspiracy www.adventconspiracy.org, in which many congregations throughout the US are moving away from the consumerism of this season, "Xmas," and come back to Jesus. There are four simple emphases: Worship Fully, Spend Less, Give More, Love All. My hope is that this will bring us back to what Christmas is really about.

The book of Matthew describes the coming of the "wise men" from the East so simply, "On coming to the house, [the wise men] saw the child with his mother Mary, and they bowed down and worshiped him. Then they opened their treasures and presented him with gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh" (2:10-11, I added the bold).

I don't know if the point comes across as directly as it does to me, but the gifts the wise men brought gifts to Jesus. They didn't give things to one another. Nonetheless, that's not what Xmas has become: we are consumed so often with what we want and what others want. Who's going to get the new iPod, or the robotic hamster, the soft leather shoes, or the Hugo Boss tie? What if we stopped and asked, "What does Jesus want me to give this Christmas to him?"

In a world, where over a billion people live on less than a dollar a day and where the United States spends $450 billion dollars a year on Christmas gifts, I think giving to Jesus means spending less on ourselves and more on helping the poor and the oppressed.

So I'm interested: Do you have any suggestions for how to give to what Jesus cares about this Christmas?

A Reflection or Two From Jerusalem

2009-11-20T04:25:00.000-08:00

I've been in Israel on a study tour with some members from Bidwell Presbyterian Church for the past few days and thought I'd log in just two brief reflections.

First visiting the Galilee (in northern Israel) was amazing for setting the Bible in context, and giving my biblical interpretations dimensionality. I would not have known what it meant that King Rehoboam made a “two golden calves” one of which he set up “in Dan” (1 Kings 12:28-29) not visited the site way up in northern Israel. I can now imagine the setting for Jesus’s healing the centurion’s servant at Capernaum (Luke 7:1-9) having visited the synagogue there. (The picture on the right shows the 3rd century version of that synagogue.)

The Wailing Wall was powerful, especially with all the bar mitzvahs in process—adolescent boys carrying the Torah scroll back and forth with obvious pride, while the women watched from over the partition. Most threw semi-chewy candy when it was all done. With the paper yarmulkes, the Israeli police with M-19s, and the video cams, it was a bit of a circus. But within that circus, I felt I could hear the yearnings of the Jews crying out to God. This active faith through the centuries that still resonated at the wall moved me.

More to come in future posts I hope....

David Was Prepped

2009-10-29T11:10:00.000-07:00

I know the main emphasis in the story of David and Goliath is about the little guy defeating the behemoth. It's even become part of our common language--when a start up takes on an established megalith corporation, the New York Times calls it a "David and Goliath." Nothing wrong with that, but it's better to add back into the mix that God fought for David in 1 Samuel 17.

But something else has hit me as I've been reading the story of David and Goliath: I've been struck by the way that David's life had prepared him for the big battle. He'd been prepped. First of all, he was an armor-bearer for Saul the king (so he knew battle), and secondly, he had fought bears and lions already. As David remarks to Saul just before battle (1 Samuel 17: 36):

Your servant has killed both lions and bears; and this uncircumcised Philistine shall be like one of them, since he has defied the armies of the living God.

I take something from this: God doesn't let us face the big moments in life usually without some preparation. A lot of times it's probably not all related to the later event--what do shepherding and fighting a gargantuan Philistine have in common? Still we're given the means now for what's coming tomorrow. The key is to learn today. Then we're prepped for the big moments to come.