"The Bible Project" Readings and Video for Wednesday, Jan 3

Here's a link to today's video from "The Bible Project." It's a little less than 8 minutes long, and it's so good.

Readings for this half of the week are Genesis 1-3 and Psalm 1. 

The free "Read Scripture" app allows you to access this video and the Scripture passages (in ESV) with a simple click.

The Book of Genesis Ch. 1-11 explained with illustrations Want to see more? Our Website: http://www.jointhebibleproject.com Say hello or follow us here: Twitter: http://twitter.com/joinbibleproj Facebook: http://fb.com/jointhebibleproject This video explores the main ideas and flow of thought of Genesis Ch. 1-11. The Bible Project is a non-profit creating animated videos that explain the narrative of the Bible.

The Foolbearers (Genesis 1: 3-8)

"And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness. And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day. And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters. And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so. And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day."

 (Genesis 1:3-8, KJV)

by M.C. Escher

A subtle but fascinating distinction occurs in these six verses. 

After God created the light, he “saw” that it was good. Does this mean God had a sudden realization? Of course not. This Hebrew verb connotes certification. It shows us that whatever God declares a thing to be determines what it actually is. 

God's division begins with the obvious. Light and dark are different, and light is good. Who would disagree? Who confuses day and night? Then He ups the ante.

“And God said, “Let there be an expanse in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters.” (ESV)

The Hebrew concept conveyed by the word "expanse" (raqia) isn't common in our era. I actually prefer the bolder term chosen by the translators of The King James--“firmament”-- because it connotes solidity like a sheet of gold stamped into a physical arch. This term harkens back to an ancient mode of perceiving the universe, a primitive belief that a solid barrier held the upper realms apart from the lower realms.

Moderns are sometimes embarrassed about this part of Genesis because we know that the concept isn't scientific--a hard, physical boundary does not separate atmosphere from space. In fact, Young Earth Creationists try to get out of this pickle by arguing that the Septuagint was influenced by Egyptian cosmology, which influenced Jerome. I find this posture self-contradictory and desperate--a distortion of the Word of God driven by eisegesis.

It's strange that conservatives could fall into the eisegesis trap when they are trying to be faithful to the text, but this mistake happens so easily. Most of us don't realize that when the Space Race of the 1950's shifted the values of American public education, our nation began to elevate physical sciences above the humanities. America needed schools to produce scientists so that we could maintain global dominance, so the epistemological values of our nation shifted. Instead of looking to rational or philosophical principles to answer the question, "What is most true?," validation moved to the empirical sciences.

Readily, the church embraced the secular culture's values--if science was most important to America, Christianity would find a way to make the Bible scientific. Instead of letting the text lead, Christian scientists began to ravage the Scriptures, defying principles of literary interpretation and genre because they were intent on maneuvering the Bible to help win culture wars.

What I think they failed to realize is that far more convicting truths can be gained by letting these verses be what they naturally are, inside of the genre and language that God gave us--even if that leaves some tension with secular values/epistemological systems. Accepting the inspired word inside of its own narrative context may not allow us to beat our chests in Bill Nye's face, but it can lead us to mighty, God-given, soul applications than are far more likely to renovate our nation by the Spirit of the Living God than piddling around with culture wars. 

A "conservative" should never believe that he is doing something noble when he reorients Scripture to accommodate the epistemological systems of humanism. es, many principles of science were hidden inside the Bible thousands of years before humans discovered them. But when we are driven by fear or insecurity--needing Genesis to operate like a scientific manual so that we can fight the atheists, we have become idolators. Our utmost goal with the Bible should be glorification and enjoyment of a holy God which leads us to union and obedience.If we focus on this, the rest of the work God has prepared for us (Ephesians 2:10) will fall into place.  

Looking closely at the actual text of Genesis 1, verse 7 repeats the Hebrew word for “divide”--the same word used a few sentences earlier to divide light from darkness. This time, however, God is dividing LIKE THINGS—“water” from “water.” The Hebrew term used here can mean water (as we know it), or it can indicate other liquids like urine, semen, or any juice of any substance.

In his previous act of Creation, God created a distinction between entities that are obviously different—light and darkness. In this section, however, he draws a firm boundary between entities that seem similar to human eyes: the waters above and the waters below. God creates a firm (even as solid as hammered metal) separation between what seems identical to us.

I find this passage breathtaking in a world like ours.

Even non-believers are usually comfortable with light/dark moral distinctions that seem obvious. Don’t murder. Don’t steal. These issues are generally as clear as day and night. Who wouldn't agree?

But what do we do with a God who creates a separation between choices that feel morally similar in a relativistic world? What if a holy God decides to make a moral boundary as firm as metal arch, dividing choice from choice? What if he says, “This fruit you may eat,” and “This fruit you may not.” What then?

In these two first acts of creation, we find a scenario more powerful (humbling, convicting) than any empirical, scientific claim. We are given two images that reveal the extent of God's authority--a theme which repeats again and again throughout the remainder of the Bible.

In chapter 24 of The Call, Os Guinness describes “the foolbearer,” as a Christian who is willing to embrace God’s definitions for good and evil in the midst of a relativistic world. Guinness writes that “sin”  is “the claim to the right to myself”—and therefore “the claim to my right to my view of things.”

The progressive American church wrangles over the delicate moral dilemmas of our time as if defining sin is sort of new challenge for the modern man, but believing that humans are bright enough to redefine good and evil isn’t new. From the very first chapters of the Bible, we find Eve facing a temptation to trust her own judgment, opting for her own definition of good over God’s. 

The forbidden fruit looks good to her—according to the workings of her mind and the evaluation of her own senses. As far as we can tell there’s nothing the least bit empirical or rational about God’s command to stay away from it. So when the serpent asks, “Has God really said?” Eve decides to trust her own gut instead—finding a way to chase goodness that doesn’t involve yielding to God’s authority.

She was unwilling to trust the foolishness of God over the wisdom of man. I have been, too. So many times.

This is not a call to "flagrant anti-intellectualism"--the "Credo quia absurdum ('I believe because it is absurd')" (Guinness 206). However, it does involve active submission to a Messiah who said, "Not my will but Thine."  And I think that many progressives fail to admit that this sort of compliance is likely to be costly, for this Messiah also said that those who wanted to save their lives would need to lose them first.

So when I read this section of Genesis, I find myself struggling at the pinch of it before I find myself resigned. Genesis 1:3-8 reminds me that I sit before a God who has the authority to divide the world into categories that may or may not always align with my human reason.

Most of the time, God seems to say, "Light and darkness are different, and the light is good." Most of the time, his declarations seem rational to me, so I readily agree with them. But are other times when he divides water from water with a solid boundary, and his logic feels obscure and difficult. There are times when he calls a division "good," that I call baffling. 

"Here is the fruit, Eve. I say don't eat it. What will you do with that?

"...when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate."

I get that choice. Sadly, I make it every day.

Luke 1 shows us two different personality types standing in the intersection of the holy mysterious. Zacharias the cynic hardened and Mary the simple softened, though the risk of her faith was far greater. Almost immediately she yielded: "Behold, I am the servant of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word.”  

She is the anti-Eve, the willing foolbearer, who opens like a flower in the presence of the sun. Simple people like Mary may not make a big splash in the culture wars. They may not build a giant ark or stand on a university stage debating Richard Dawkins while trying to save America.

But in some hidden, lower-class bedroom, a Mary might stand toe-to-toe with the realization that a scientifically-impossible pregnancy will cause everybody she knows to think she's either bat crazy or a lying slut. She will know how much faith is likely to cost and yet resign the womb of her soul to a living God with a whispered, "Not my will, but Thine."


 

When Your New Year Begins with Old Chaos (Monday: Genesis 1:2)

“The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep.  And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.”

"The Tempest" by Ivan Aivazovsky (1886)

"The same word used for the “earth” in Genesis 1:1 is used again here. This time, however, we are shown that the creation story is beginning in medias res. You might remember that term from literature class--it's an ancient mode of epic storytelling that means "in the middle of things."  When an author begins in the middle of exposition instead of with a detailed preamble, readers are thrown into the energy of activity, and the larger context is provided later through flashbacks, conversation, and additional dialogue.

Though this may be a shock to some readers, Genesis 1:2 doesn't open with a physical vacuum. It claims that some sort of material “deep” was in existence before the six days of creation--and we are not told how long that substance had been existence. Because of Genesis 1:1, we can assume that God also created all that pre-existed, but an exegetical approach to the text shows us some sort of realm that preceded every day of innovation that God describes in subsequent verses.

Looking at the actual words Scripture provides here helps us see that the focus of Genesis 1:2 isn't origin so much as quality. Whatever this pre-existing substance of the earth was, formlessness prevails. The chaos is rife with confusion. Hebrew roots for the descriptive words used in this verse connote unreality, emptiness, void, and waste. The darkness that was over the surface of the deep wasn’t a neutral vacuum. It was the darkness of misery, destruction, death, ignorance, sorrow, wickedness.

I have often wondered why these words are weighted so negatively. If there is no back story preceding Genesis 1:2--if the non-universe is only an inert blank canvas upon which God designs all that is-- why would such gloomy language be necessary? What happened before the story we are told? God doesn't tell us. Yet from the remnants we are shown, an English word comes to my mind here--“ache.” 

We will learn more tomorrow about the word "waters" upon which God hovers, but for today, let's say that Spirit of God brooded over a potential, aching universe with the calm of relaxed control. He hovered over the chaos and spoke, “Let there be light.” And there was light.

God separated the light from the darkness—he tore those two things asunder like ripped fabric. Like the flicker of a match in a dark cave, Genesis ignites when the invisible becomes visible.

This morning, I woke up with a heavy heart and a headache, bone-weary from appeals that I have made over and again to God.

Yes, it's a new year, but I feel more exhausted by the turn of the calendar than inspired by it. I dreading facing more prayers that seem to go nowhere and that meet with only silence. I am tired of reaching out in faith, tired of the patience and trust God is developing in me. I am tired of the attacks of shame my enemy uses against me--he kicks us when we are down, and he has no mercy.

God allowed me to face the situation I knew I couldn't survive, then he didn't let me die.

Despite my protests, he began using it to expose my sin, my unbelief, and my idols. How I want this process of growth to be over. I want to see results now. I want to fall asleep just one night, knowing that my beliefs have become sight instead of having to intentionally choose to transfer my hope from myself to an invisible God.

But as I opened a Bible app to read this morning, this verse appeared. "Behold, I am doing a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it? I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert."

The wilderness. The desert. Here is the backdrop of Genesis 1:2, the context upon which God is brooding, growing soft and relaxed as a competent artist who knows he has the ability to bring a heavy, aching chaos to order. He has a plan. He is not frantic like I am. He is not weary.

At any moment, he can make rivers in this desert. At any moment, he can speak, "Let there be light." And so I lay down my despair once more at the feet of The Light of the World--this embodied flash of clarity.

Immanuel. God is with us. And this time, instead of hovering over the waters, he has walked inside of them, absorbing the crashing waves of confusion, misery, destruction, death, ignorance, sorrow, and my own wickedness even into his own flesh—and rising like emanating daylight.

He is my way in this wilderness. He is my river in this desert. He recreates slowly this time, teaching me to lean into his resources, removing my grip from my own power, and encouraging me to sit in the worship of expectation.

Sunday: Genesis 1:1

“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.”

https://stardate.org/sites/default/files/images/gallery/IR_orion_nebula.jpg

Two realms are created here--the distant ether in which the celestial masses revolve and an intimate terrain that we can touch, feel, and see.  

As I think about my own life, these two categories hold a lot of meaning. Most days of the week, I'm concerned with the close and the small, relationships and responsibilities, familiar faces and rooms that I know by heart. Yet, all that is dear to me sits tucked inside of a vast expanse. My life is also subject to a colossal cosmic machine in which the forces of nature, human politics, and spiritual powers dwarf all the strength I possess.

I rarely spend time outside these days, staring into dark and distant skies that remind me how small I am. But sometimes when I am feeling weight I cannot carry, I’ll get on the NASA website and look at photos of star nebulae and think about what it means that God made both the close and the far. Here are light-years full of burning and glorious details, and yet, God told us that not even a sparrow falls without his notice. 

Which is harder to believe? The God of the nebulae or the God who cares about the broken wing of this tired year's hope?

The book of Genesis regularly juxtaposes binaries to set the stage for the story it tells. Light and dark. Good and evil. Large and small. And this very first sentence begins with a fast zoom in--the Mysterious Everything is divided and subdivided until we arrive in a single garden. 

We are carried through the cosmos to a little landing place we can understand, among two people very much like us.

Atheists sometimes suggest that fear of death and the unknown propelled the human race to invent religion. They say that the human soul couldn’t bear to look up into the night sky and feel so vulnerable, so it created "a god" or "gods" to pacify itchy nerves. But there’s another way to look at this impulse as well. A newborn baby will cry in hunger for milk because milk exists. 

This is the ontological argument, of course, a concept which originated in the 11th century with Anselm, then was revised and resurrected through Descartes's theory of innate ideas. Because Descartes was attempting to appeal to an audience saturated in formal logic, his work mimics the syllogism (major premise, minor premise, conclusion). He argues that while some people are naturally axiomatic and will perceive God intuitively, others are more clouded and must engage in labor to see the stuff of God--yet once this work of seeing clearly is done, God will be “self-evident” (per se notam). Descartes contradicted Augustine in this, an early leader of the church who had suggested that all who wish to deny God's existence may find a way to do so.

Over the years, I've rolled both possibilities around quite a bit. While I see why Descartes (the mathematician) was attempting to quantify proof of God's existence, I think the testimony of the Created Order works best when it's held in a child's palms.  Some things can't be reduced to an equation.

So hello, you bundle of bones and flesh. Here are the heavens and the earth, the far and the near. What do you see as you watch them revolve? 

More importantly, what do you want to see? What does this impulse reveal? 

Before We Begin Reading the Book of Genesis

In preparation for January's study on Genesis, I spent this morning reviewing common theories of Creation. Every time I study this topic, one observation strikes me, but because it's complicated, I’ve never taken the time to unpack that thought in writing. Today, however, I’m going to give it a try.

Like so many other matters these days, the Creation debate has been bifurcated into extremes: science and faith. Of course, extremes serve a handy rhetorical purpose--they allow leaders to rally the simple-minded into heated support. The downside, however, is that extremes overlook vital nuances.

For example, over the past year, quite a few of us have been told: "Either you call Trump a national hero, or you wanted Hillary to be President." It's a false dilemma, of course, and in classical logic, we address such a bifurcation fallacy (among other options) by "going between the horns," which means that we expose the false nature of the dilemma by arguing that neither Trump nor Clinton was a true conservative.

In discussions of Creation theory, a similar dilemma is often created. Christians are told: either you are a text-centered believer, or you are a secularized, empirical coward who lets science determine your beliefs. To address this bifurcation, I’d like to show you an outline that I swiped from The Blue Letter Bible site, an outline which represents a relatively common method of addressing theories of Creation. As you see, two general categories are created: (1)“Science-Based Methods” and (2) “Exegetically-Based Methods.”

Upon which fundamental assumption is this divide based? What does this split create?

A REVIEW:

Before I address those questions, I want to take you into a quick review of Greek oratory, and particularly into a review of how syllogisms/enthymemes work. Why? Because this chart is fundamentally enthymematic, and that’s a crucial observation for understanding its weakness.

An enthymeme is a syllogism with a missing part--an argument that relies upon an assumption from the audience.

For example, a full syllogism would be:
 

MAJOR PREMISE: All humans are mortal. 

MINOR PREMISE: Socrates is human. 

CONCLUSION: Therefore, Socrates is mortal. 

The enthymematic version of this same premise would be truncated to:
 

Socrates is mortal because he is human.

In the enthymematic version of the syllogism, the major premise, “All humans are mortal,” has been assumed.

Whenever we find an enthymeme, it’s important to go back and look clearly at the part that has been removed because simply naming the missing premise often reveals assumptions that we would never accept if they were stated more directly.

So, looking back at the outline from the Blue Letter Bible, let’s create a syllogism from the enthymeme which drives this information.

MAJOR PREMISE: Only two methods of interpretation are possible, empirical science and hermeneutical interpretation. 

MINOR PREMISE: Interpreting the Creation narrative is dependent upon one of those two methods. 

CONCLUSION: Therefore, interpreting the Creation narrative must rely upon either empirical science or on hermeneutical interpretation. 

 

The Blue Letter Bible leaves out (but implies) the major premise:  "Only two methods of interpretation are possible, empirical science and hermeneutical interpretation." 

Is this implication legitimate?

A LITTLE BACKGROUND ON HERMENEUTICS/EXEGESIS

Without going into too much detail, the term hermeneutics generally refers to methods of interpreting Scripture--and hermeneutics is often dependent upon exegesis, a text-oriented exploration of the actual words of the Bible.

I am actually an exegesis junkie for several reasons, primarily because I trust the Word of God deeply; but secondarily, as a literary critic, I know how important a text-oriented mode of interpretation is. In the discipline of literature, we often refer to a text-oriented method of interpretation as Formalism (or New Criticism, or Textual Criticism). These schools of analysis argue that the text itself should be used as the primary means for finding meaning.

In the realm of theology, exegesis applies trust in the words of the ancient text—a posture which stands against more eisegetical approaches to Scripture that place less trust in the Word of God and more in human instinct or bias.

As I look at the Blue Letter Bible outline, I think it's understandable that the divide presented here has occurred. At present, conservative Christians feel pressure from two primary groups: (1) secularists who trust human reason, and (2) liberal Christians who elevate human instinct above God's authority. Given these choices, Conservatives have chosen to stand in firm allegiance to the Word of God, a stance I find admirable.

What we may have missed, however, is that a Greek, humanistic assumption also undergirds our counter stance: an assumption that human beings can access the true meaning of Scripture by rationalism alone.

I’m wary to address this assumption because unpacking it can turn into a bit of a Pandora’s box. Challenging trust in reason often leaves a vacuum, which leads to a trajectory of bizarre, ever-shifting, touchy-feely interpretations of Scripture. At some level, Christian theologians have a very practical need to believe that God is logical and that he has presented us with a book that can be unpacked by strictly rational means.

In general, I agree that God gave us reason, and he expects us to use it. (Why would I be writing a post like this if I didn't?) I also agree that the Bible is our ultimate guide for what is true. Yet God also leaves some tension here, and I think he does that intentionally.  He's left mysteries and paradoxes in His Word alongside what is open and clear. Why? Probably because the very first sin of humans was an attempt to be Godlike without God. Trust in the ability of our own minds was our first idol, and we default back to this impulse every day of our lives.

To help protect us from this impulse, God gave us a complex Scripture that can't be reduced to a flow chart. In the story of Christ chiding people who believed that searching the Scriptures could be done by reason alone, he shows us that spiritual knowledge can't be obtained fully apart from dependent fellowship with him.

“You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that bear witness about me, yet you refuse to come to me that you may have life.” (John 5:39-40)

Over and again in the Word, we see evidence that pursuing religious activity apart from union with God leads to destruction. God uses rationalism, but he also limits it. Our Lord has created a faith that is not simply dependent upon the workings of the mind, but even more so, upon the posture of the soul.

So even though the outline provided by the Blue Letter Bible serves some good purposes, it fails to acknowledge the complexity of a truly Christian epistemology. We cannot know the way without actively knowing The Way.

AWARENESS OF OUR BIASES

While the Western church has been quick to attack empirical science, we regularly fail to see how much our own methodologies have been influenced by secular humanistic philosophies. In fact, in some ways, the simple bifurcation presented by the Blue Letter Bible reveals the prime epistemological error of the Western Christian church.

This outline claims that humans have two options:

(1) knowledge obtained by empirical science.
(2) knowledge obtained by hermeneutics which deals with the science of interpreting scripture.

Category 1 can be traced pretty easily back to David Hume, the father of empiricism (trust in the scientific method). But Category 2 can also be traced back through secular Western philosophy.  In fact, Category 2 agrees with Plato and Descartes--that the prime essence of human beings is rational.  

The Bible certainly affirms that part of the human nature involves the rational mind; however, even passages such as Romans 12:2 ("Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind") tend to fall in the larger context of what immediately precedes it: "present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God."

The human mind is woven inside of a larger, affective faith in the Scriptures. We don't just think truth, we swim it out in the activity of our belief. This is why Jesus embedded the work of the mind inside of the larger work of love: "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself.” (Luke 10:27)

Christ spoke this radical statement about 350 years after Plato's Divided Line theory had been created, and he spoke it inside of a Roman-dominated culture that was pregnant with Greek values. In the very face of all secular understanding of the essence of the human, Jesus is arguing that being human involves more than just thinking, we are creatures of being and doing. What we love and what we chase is a diagnostic.

For the most part, modern Christians have lost this connection. In general, we assume that what we think equals what we believe.


THE DOMINOES FALL

Every idea has a trajectory, and the trajectory of idolizing Christian rationalism has grave consequences. When Christianity becomes a purely rationalistic exercise, fulfilling the Great Commission shifts to dependence upon human arguments. We aren't simply Paul in Athens, using rationalism as a tool under the guidance and power of the Holy Spirit--we transform into flesh-powered, independent warriors, reduced to only the power of our own minds, attempting to fight fire with fire. We think we are serving God, but in truth, we are ignoring many warnings given to us in the New Testament--warnings urging us not to attempt to complete the works of God in the power of the flesh (Galatians 3:3).

Evaluating language used by certain Young Earth Creationists can provide evidence of this idolatry.  These leaders threaten us openly, telling us that losing the battle of evolution will mean losing the great culture war of our faith. They ask us to forget what the Bible says about the gates of hell never prevailing against the church--we are told (and shown) that arguments alone will protect us from the aggression of the non-believing world. Nervous believers have embraced this fear wholeheartedly, rallying behind teachers who promise to protect our beliefs from the forces of atheism.

This entire approach is deeply secular. It's fear-driven, faithless, and false.

WHY IT’S UNNERVING TO EVEN TALK ABOUT THIS

Yet anyone who attempts to unpack this matter in our part of the country is likely to be faced with rash assumptions that "you are one of those 'librul'-old-earth creationists." In fact, just a few weeks ago, I overheard some silly gossip about my husband that was spread in our community--a dismissive claim that he didn't believe in a literal Genesis.

That comment made me laugh because I have never seen anyone hold the Bible in as high regard as my husband. It also made me sad because here was more evidence that vulnerable and uneducated people have been pumped full of pride and haughtiness without solid facts.

In seminars and debates, limited information has been packaged into drive-through Creationist meals. Men and women swallow the goods then walk out of those experiences with a saunter, often feeling far more confident than they should. They bloviate in the spirit of our age, quickly dividing the world into blacks and whites.

I wonder sometimes what these folks would do if they could look beyond Happy Meal theology—how would they process the God about whom John Donne wrote:

“ETERNAL God—for whom who ever dare
Seek new expressions, do the circle square, 
And thrust into straight corners of poor wit
Thee, who art cornerless and infinite—

Could they handle reality that is more nuanced than the explanations they have been given? In fact, even St. Augustine (354-430 AD) taught that the Genesis narrative was written to suit the understanding of the people of the time, suggesting that creation occurred in a single moment instead of over six literal days. He wrote:

“Perhaps we ought not to think of these creatures at the moment they were produced as subject to the processes of nature which we now observe in them, but rather as under the wonderful and unutterable power of the Wisdom of God, which reaches from end to end mightily and governs all graciously. For this power of Divine Wisdom does not reach by stages or arrive by steps. It was just as easy, then, for God to create everything as it is for Wisdom to exercise this mighty power. For through Wisdom all things were made, and the motion we now see in creatures, measured by the lapse of time, as each one fulfills its proper function, comes to creatures from those causal reasons implanted in them, which God scattered as seeds at the moment of creation when He spoke and they were made, He commanded and they were created. Creation, therefore, did not take place slowly in order that a slow development might be implanted in those things that are slow by nature; nor were the ages established at plodding pace at which they now pass. Time brings about the development of these creatures according to the laws of their numbers, but there was no passage of time when they received these laws at creation.”
 

Likewise, St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274 AD) wrote:

“On the day on which God created the heaven and the earth, He created also every plant of the field, not, indeed, actually, but “before it sprung up in the earth,” that is, potentially.…All things were not distinguished and adorned together, not from a want of power on God’s part, as requiring time in which to work, but that due order might be observed in the instituting of the world.”

The church fathers allowed for such complexity. They didn't tie up heavy burdens on the backs of their disciples--they understood ancient literature, genre, and language at a level that most modern believers cannot and allowed the Bible to be what it is.  How grievous that we moderns rarely have the humility to admit that our cultural fears and our lack of knowledge have driven us to demand very particular results from Bible... fears and ignorance that lead us to commit some of the same interpretational errors that we accuse liberals of committing. We regurgitate distortions of the text that we have been given in seminars, trusting a secularized machine of Christianity that drives us into culture wars and away from resigned communion with the Holy Spirit.


THE BOTTOM LINE FOR ME:

Even as I write, I can feel a circle of wolves gathering, asking for my bottom line. Do I believe in six days of creation? Well, how about I take that request and raise you one.  Why not ask me if I could believe in Augustine’s "instant of creation?” Might I dare to believe something so very radical as this?

Gladly and without flinching. Neither a one-day nor a six-day creation model would be a stretch for the God I know, for he is not confined by time. Time is a dimension, after all (like length, width, and depth), and God transcends dimensionality. 

However, I will also stand firm on this point: militarizing six-day-creation in an attempt to gain cultural power is not God’s plan for the book of Genesis. In fact, I think that a manipulative application of scriptural literalism is one of the most secular activities Christians can embrace. To adopt such a posture is not an act of faith; it’s trust in the Greek dialectic. It’s trust in the strength of humanity to accomplish the purposes of God. While I am eager to believe any wild miracle God sets before me, I will not link arms with Christianized humanism, nor will I give the slightest allegiance to such an endeavor. 


ANOTHER WAY TO APPROACH THE BOOK OF GENESIS

A few days ago, a friend of mine posted a longish story in a Facebook status, and to tease her, I commented on a little detail she mentioned but that wasn’t central to her main post.

“That’s not the point!” she responded, and I laughed, because I knew it wasn’t. I was distracting instead of reinforcing what she was trying to say.
 
This distraction was (kind of) funny in the context of a casual dialogue, but there's little to laugh about when diverting the book of Genesis. When we major on the minors, we commit idolatry, worshipping rationalism, and worshipping our own ability to think our way through our present culture wars. We WANT this book to somehow fit into the categories that we create for it because we are scared, angry, and insecure. Our hearts are full of the Scopes Monkey Trial, and the nervous desire for Christian liberties. We tremble before every threat we’ve ever heard about the ability of hell (or the ability of progressives) to knock down the church of Jesus Christ.

All this fear undermines our focus-- preventing us from coming to Scripture as recipients, ready to commune with a living God who will use his Living Word to convict and guide us. When we flatten a book like Genesis to fight our personal wars, we miss the greater good it can do when we kneel before it and receive what it has to offer.

A few paragraphs ago, I mentioned one literary critical method—Formalism. What I didn’t mention was that Formalism is best balanced by a second method of literary interpretation called “New Historicism.”

New Historicism understands that every text falls into a historical and social context; for example, without understanding the larger historical concepts of “the landed gentry” or “entailment,”  a reader might miss a great deal of the meaning in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. So while the text itself is vital, a responsible and humble reader also does enough background work to accurately orient a work in time and place.

In light of this, why was Genesis written? Was it given to Israel to help them fight the Philistines--who just happened to be raging Darwinian evolutionists? Of course not. It was given to help Israel understand its origins--not simply its material origins--but perhaps even more so, its hamartiaology--the origins of mortal posture toward an immortal God.

From whence did humans come? From a first mother Eve who chose to be like God apart from obedience to and communion with God. From whence did humans come? From a first father Adam who chose to be passive, to hide, and to blame.

When we read Genesis and immediately say, “Those blasted evolutionists!” we fail to learn what Israel was supposed to learn from its words-- a recognition that we are still Eve, worshipping our own minds. We fail to learn that we are still Adam, deflecting responsibility and blame instead of owning our own weakness.

If we encounter this text and immediately move into societal attack instead of allowing it convict us as it convicted the original audience, we have largely missed the point of the whole narrative.

I will always be an advocate of exegesis because I see grave dangers in intuition-based, eisegetical approaches to Scripture. Yet there is also a way to approach hermeneutics in living faith— with a far deeper commitment than that afforded by the Cartesian/Platonic rationalism that runs rampant through evangelicalism at present.

Ultimate allegiance to the text is determined by embodied believers who sit in deep submission to the Word of God— lovers of God who let his truth saturate down to the heart, soul, strength and then the mind.

Disciples of Jesus are not just thinkers, but active swimmers in the vast ocean of a living God--men and women who are willing to use rationalism as God gives it, but who plant their deepest trust in the Living Lord who goes before us into the World. He has not given us a spirit of fear, but power and love to accompany our sound minds.

That indwelt life will always align with the Word of God--it will never become a progressive do-what-feels-good deconstruction of orthodoxy. It will also involve far more than simple intellectual assent.

In the book that C.S. Lewis considered his masterpiece, a protagonist named Orual is trapped in a primitive culture that worships a wild god called Ungit. Because Orual is an intellectual, she spends most of her life trusting a foreign Greek rationalist teacher, a father-figure who embodies a linear, syllogism-based approach to truth.

During most of the book, the worship of Ungit is presented as superstitious and foolish, and the reader happily sides with Orual’s prejudices against her. And yet, in the end, Lewis pulls the rug out from under our feet. The wild god of the mountain must be known by trust and not simply by reason, and those who were willing to chase love end up being wiser in the end than those who trusted their own minds.

I was stunned when I realized what Lewis was doing with this book. Of all people, Lewis had such a rare ability to reason and debate. He was one of the great apologists of the faith, and yet, here he was, advocating for embodied trust with the greatest work of his life.  

In this book he writes: “Holy places are dark places. It is life and strength, not knowledge and words, that we get in them. Holy wisdom is not clear and thin like water, but thick and dark like blood.”

I agree. And I think this deep wisdom should carry us through the book of Genesis. We should approach this book on our knees-- not with arms akimbo, sauntering through our culture as we point our fingers out there at “those bad guys.”

Let’s sit under it, friends. Let’s wade into it with longing for the God who made all that exists. When the good text says, “The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters,” let’s shiver with awe, allowing those words to raise the goosebumps on our arms, for it is an image which falls like “shining from shook foil.”

Let it make us small before a great God. Let it lead us to sit before him and ask, "What am I that You are mindful of me? And yet..."

Let’s not be distracted by lesser pursuits and allegiances, nor by battles already won by an omnipotent God, but whisper like the wisest women in Lewis’s best novel, “The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing — to reach the Mountain, to find the place where all the beauty came from — my country, the place where I ought to have been born.”

“Do you think it all meant nothing, all the longing? The longing for home? For indeed it now feels not like going, but like going back.”

 

An Invitation to Explore The Bible Project

Now that my book is finished, I’ve been thinking about how I want to use this blog in the future.

For months, I’ve been wanting to find some way to get my readers back to basic Bible study. In the political flurry of the past year, devotion to God seems to have been swallowed up by lesser allegiances, and as I look around at the limping church, I realize that we need the Bible now more than ever.

We need to study it properly, though, digging into the correct narrative and historical context. A thousand times over the past year, I've seen random verses yanked out of the Bible and manipulated for political purposes. It's exhausting and maddening to watch. No wonder Jesus said it was possible to search the Scriptures while missing him entirely. I get that now.

So, as I have been thinking/praying about this, I have been looking through different reading schedules and materials, waiting for God to show me how to address this need in my little circle of influence. Then, last night, I found this. The Bible Project.

The format reminds me a little of Radio Lab, which I love. There’s a bit of teaching, but there’s also an opportunity to read the Bible for yourself. And if you have a device that is app-compatible, there’s an application that invites super-convenient reading/study.

I'm including a video below that gives you a little introduction to the material, and I'm also including a few links so that you can watch a bit of the content yourself. I really think you're going to love this. 

So, here’s my proposal. Over the next few months (starting in January), I want to go through The Bible Project with any of my blog/Facebook readers who are interested. I’m thinking twice a week, Saturdays and Wednesdays, might provide a reasonable pace for most of us. (A schedule through February is provided below.)
 

If you are looking for some sort of devotional to do with your families or small group study, you're welcome to invite others along.

On my end, I plan to post a little reaction to the day's video/reading after watching/reading it myself. Then you guys can interact in the comments below and on my Facebook writer page. While I’d really like to do this all year, I want to give it a test run first, just to see how it goes. So for now, let’s just try January and February.  If you end up enjoying this, we can continue beyond that.
 

As broken as the church is sometimes, I love how God still raises up individuals and teams to address the needs of an era.  The Bible Project seems to fill such an important niche in our culture, and I'm awfully excited about introducing you to it. Hopefully, we can dig in together and learn some things along the way.

Watch: "Literary Styles in the Bible" by clicking here: 

Watch "Genesis 1-11" by clicking here: 

What I almost missed today

From a 45-year-old to the 20-something-year-olds.

This is the decade when you're going to start to learn who you can't trust. I wish there were a way around this, but I don't see one.

So, I want to give you a few thoughts to hang on to while you're walking through the weirdness of investing yourself in people, realizing your trust was misplaced, and then trying to get over that hurt into the next stage of your life.

As you try to figure out "adult you," you're going to land in different types of friendships. Those friendships might be platonic; they might be romantic; or they might involve older people who take on a coaching role in your lives.

Because adulthood can feel a little isolated sometimes (nobody is forcing you to sit in a classroom of your peers everyday, right?), it can be easy to get stuck in whatever friendships come to you in your first few years of starting out alone. You find yourself making do with the connections you already have because the world out there feels random and anonymous. I mean, where would you even begin with beginning all over again? That would take so much work. And who's to say you'll find anything better than what you have already?

So you start to overlook things. You adjust yourself to put up with more and more that isn't quite right. You ignore the fact that you have a headache every time you leave the house of that friend. You say, "Every relationship has stuff. This is just our stuff."

If you're in that cycle and feel sort of embarrassed that you have let your relationships get this bad, please don't beat yourself up. Finding trustworthy people is difficult. It's not like strangers come with a big warning sticker on their foreheads. Controlling boyfriends start out as Prince Charmings. Emotionally-abusive mentors start out as kind older people who project the confidence and wisdom to be able to help you grow. Toxic friendships begin over coffee with warm smiles and laughter.

One of the strangest quirks of adulthood is realizing that certain unhealthy people have managed to secure positions of power and influence in society. I remember how shocked (and even frightened) I was in my twenties when I realized that a couple of leaders others considered "heroes" were actually nasty and abusive people in private. I couldn't understand why the world continued to affirm them. I didn't understand why they hadn't been exposed. I felt small and helpless as I struggled to admit the truth to myself while the mighty force of those personas loomed so large. It was disorienting to stand on my own two feet, feeling pretty much alone, with the heavy task of saying, "No, this isn't right."

I'm sorry that this often comes with the territory of being in your twenties. Maybe it will help to have someone who is older tell you that you aren't crazy if you find yourself there.

Also, you're not stupid if you've invested your heart into an intense relationship that has become weird and unhealthy. If you have slowly become trapped by emotional manipulation, abusive criticism, narcissism, or disrespect, know you aren't alone.

So many of us went through this in some form in our twenties. For some of us, getting over it felt like the end of the world. But I want you to know that you're going to grow from this pain. This heartbreak is going to make you wiser and more discerning. Someday it's going to help you help others who find themselves trapped in bad relationships.

This pain will also help you clarify what you actually believe. These sharp hits of the chisel are knocking off bits of confusion in your worldview. You're finding out what you value. You're finding out what is worth fighting for. You're finding out where you stop giving in and where you draw the line to say, "No more." Those are vital discoveries.

Lastly, I want you to know that it's possible to have friendships that are healthy. I get it if you need to be cynical and defensive for a while. That's a normal reaction after getting hurt like this. But when the grieving time is over, know that the world is an awfully big place.

When I was devastated over what didn't work in my twenties, I couldn't have anticipated the richness of new friendships that would form in my thirties and forties. Yeah, I've had some disappointments later in life as well. But I've also found generous friends who are worthy of trust--people who love me selflessly, who fight for me, who put up with me, who believe the best of me, and who make my life so much richer. So don't let six or seven rotten eggs determine what you believe about 7.6 billion.

The wounds you have received in this stage are making you smarter and stronger. Don't feel shame over what didn't work. Just own your scars--we all have them. Name what you've learned. Mourn what you need to mourn. And get back in the game. Twenty-something is good. But there's a lot more good life to live at thirty-something, forty-something, beyond.

The God Who Offends Me

My heart skipped a beat when she said it.

“When I was a kid, you mostly told us about the love of God, so it threw me for a loop when I found out that He had wrath, too. I didn’t know how to process a God who could do some of the hard things he did. It seemed like this was a different being than the one I had been taught to worship.”

She was right. The accusation was fair. I gave our kids children’s Bibles full of cartoon drawings that simplified and softened the stories of the actual text. I wasn’t trying to hide anything; I was just trying to be age appropriate. Some of the stories in the Bible are difficult--how do you tell a six-year-old that a Levite’s concubine was raped to death then cut into twelve pieces and shipped bit-by-bit across the nation?

I think I made a subconscious choice, too. I grew up in the 70’s and 80’s, years when consumer-driven mega-churches were exploding. We used words like “equipping,” “relevance,” and “felt needs,” subtle indications that we needed to make the Bible more palatable for a non-believing world.

It’s not that we were trying to be deceptive—we were just trying to operate inside of a culture that had been given a hateful, legalistic, and judgmental distortion of Christianity. We were trying to show the world that we didn’t serve an angry God who hated dancing, beer, and women. So we talked about the aspects of God that resisted those voices most strongly, trying to separate ourselves from false teachers.

But somewhere along the way, we revised Jesus. Somewhere along the way, we reworked the Bible instead of just correcting those who were teaching it poorly.

Evidence of this mistake is found all over the place. The tale of Noah’s ark—a story about the destruction of most of humanity--has become material for Precious Moments figurines and Fisher Price plastic toys.

We sing “Jesus Loves the Little Children,” without any awareness of the fact that God also commanded genocide for the Amalekites—even little children and nursing babies were to be killed” (I Samuel 15:3-4).

We talk about the healing of a blind man instead of a God who commanded that anybody who skipped the Sabbath be stoned.

The lyrics to so many of our modern worship songs could almost be make-out-with-your-boyfriend lyrics. “Heaven meets earth like a big sloppy kiss” stands a long way from Isaiah’s first response when he experiences the presence of the God of Heaven, “Woe is me! For I am lost; for I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; for my eyes have seen the King, the LORD of hosts!” (Isaiah 6:5).

CCM stars groan and sway, staring into the camera with soft, sexy eyes, as if it’s doing God a favor for cool dudes to be on Team Jesus. We are so casual, so comfortable, so relevant, the hard passages of the Bible feel odd when we stare at them.

We don’t say it out loud, but we grow afraid that if we linger too long, the God of the Old Testament will feel cruel, selfish, and unfair.

In the 80’s and 90’s, apologists spent months creating resources that would help Christians prove God’s existence to the world. These training programs and debates argue in terms of history, science, and epistemology. However, many of these programs do not address the real hang up modern atheism has with the faith. 21st century unbelief doesn’t wonder if God exists—it stands convinced that the God of the Bible is not good.

“Would you really pick up a stone and throw it at a gay friend of yours?” he asked me. “If God commanded you to do it, would you do that--because homosexuals were supposed to be stoned! You realize this is the God you worship! How can you worship a God who could tell people to do something like that?”

The question threw me for a loop because I’d never had to think about it. Post New Testament, all those laws are wrapped up. I know that God wouldn’t ever ask me to do anything like this because Jesus has completed in his own body what those rules could not.

I also know that when God appeared on earth in human form, when the command to stone a woman for a violation of sexual law was sitting there in the flesh, Jesus said, “Are any of you sinless? If you are, then you throw the first rock at this woman.” He said that because the Law was supposed to humble us all, not turn us into hateful, angry mobs.

So yeah, I would drop the rock and say, “I know how this works. I know the state of my own heart. I cannot throw a thing.”

I wonder if maybe that was always the telos of the command.

But still, thinking that way doesn’t take the sting away entirely. There are still some passages in the Old Testament that cause me to bristle in silence. Some of the things God demands hurt.

I’m a GenXer after all.

I’m not one of those Baby Boomers so smitten with politics that I let party affiliation determine which men are called perverts and which are called heroes. I don’t automatically march in line, excusing my team and calling the other team names. I expect integrity all around.

I don’t speak in that high and holy disconnected church language that says, “Well, we just have to trust the Lord.” For decades I've heard people say that who actually mean, “I’m so scared of hardship that I’ll call a sexual abuser 'God’s man' if that means keeping my comfortable lifestyle.”

No. That isn’t trusting the Lord. That’s bowing to a golden calf.

And so it’s been lonely and strange to grow to adulthood in the shadow of an incorporated, politicized religion. I understand why Millennials are disillusioned and hurt. I understand why they are leaving the church en masse, why they don’t trust a church that dismisses the hardest teachings of the Bible.

I understand why they feel like their morality is better than anything gained by exegesis, for the secular world is ravenous for a beautiful human ethic, and consumer-church hasn’t given it to them. You and I stand at the intersection of self-protecting religion and self-righteous secularism, and those two cannot mix.

You and I stand at the intersection of self-protecting religion and self-righteous secularism, and those two cannot mix.

This past week, a friend asked me what I thought about predestination. I took a deep breath, nervous about getting into it because so many conversations about Calvinism/Arminianism are proud and pointless.

But she was insistent, so I tried to explain.

First came five years of ravenous, ecstatic study—I was giddy back then, thrilled to finally find a theology that fit my intellectual capacity—an engineered system in which everything finally made sense. Piper. Grudem. The Puritans. Stacks and stacks of books, hours of research. It all clicked!

Well, it clicked until it didn’t. When I finally admitted that several key principles of Calvinism were derived from logic and not exegesis, I was stunned and disappointed. This machine was rooted in humanism, in the supremacy of the mortal mind, in the elevation of logic. And while I loved logic and trusted Reformed teaching (mostly), I also had to admit that the core presupposition behind Calvinism wasn’t “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life” so much as “Humans are able to figure all this God stuff out.” This fundamental flaw was skewing the trajectory of the the belief.

So I spun into the mystics, never trusting them entirely, but thirsty for a correction to the errors I had been making. I didn’t find systematic theology here, but I did find the story told by C.S. Lewis in Till We Have Faces. Some of the mystics offered unorthodox theology that I could not accept, but still, I was heartened to find the mystery and wildness of a free and living God—a God who was good but not necessarily safe.

Next I fell deep into the writings of Lewis and Chesterton, into German Romanticism, into a world that allowed me to keep the full force of my mind engaged without worshipping my own ability. These writers talked about Sehnsucht, a German word that means something like homesickness for a country we've never visited. As my view of God grew greater, as my heart began to engage as well as my mind, I began to welcome the whole Bible in all of its mystery. I found room for a God who made sense to me sometimes and sometimes didn’t.

I found room to ask hard questions. I found room for Romans 9 in which Paul attacks the demands of my human ethics by saying, “What if God makes certain people to be vessels of wrath prepared for destruction? Wouldn’t he have the right to do it?”

Really think about that question. What if God has the right to create people knowing they will be objects of wrath?

If you can read that without it shaking you up, you are missing what Paul is actually doing here. He’s intentionally shoving this problem in your face. He’s trying to rile you up.

I know some Christians who brag about being resigned to predestination, but they don't impress me at all. Most of those folks are selfish and proud—they aren’t bothered by election because they aren't empathetic. If you watch them walk through life, other people’s pain doesn’t bother them. They don't weep with those who weep or mourn with those who mourn. Their resignation to election isn't spiritual--it's myopic.

I don't want to disengage like that, nor am I convinced that Paul wants us to. I think he's intentionally letting this shake us up. My first impulse is to roar over Romans 9.

I cry out because I am always expecting a Bob Ross Jesus, a deity who passes out happy little salvations—not this holy entity who is strange and dangerous—perhaps beautiful—but terrifying, too.

Paul gives us a mysterious and difficult God who isn’t easy unless you are self-absorbed or dense. He boldly sticks his apostolic snoot in my face and says, “If God does something that feels wrong to you, he is still right”

How can I worship a God like that?

I can see why the atheists brace at such a suggestion. Don't mock those who bristle here; they might be understanding the point of Paul's argument better than you do.

Yes, there is more to the story. Paul doesn't end here.

But I want to pause to let the terrifying rights of such a God sink in before I explain that this same Divinity had all the strength in the universe, all the power to condemn, all the ability to create and destroy without accountability to any other creature, all the right to create impossible laws and command the death of nations—and instead, He used that power to come down and take on a human body; He used his power to absorb every ounce of severity that he could rightfully dish out on the most vulnerable into himself.

If that seems like a tame story, you’re not reading it clearly.

It’s not just Cinderella; it’s savage, and flattening, and epic. The God who welcomed little children to sit on his knee, this small man so gentle that he would not break a bruised reed---he could have come as a merciless judge. He could have, but He did not.

The final chapters of Job make a lot of people uncomfortable and discouraged, but they are a lodestar to me. They show me the fullness of the God I often dilute--the God I associate with only logic, love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithfulness, and self-control. They show me the capacity of the God who tells me to do unto others as I would have them do unto me, who urges me to turn the other cheek, to care for the poor, to go unto the least of these and minister with respect, conveying dignity to those who feel no worth.

This is the same God who has the right to say,

Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation?

Tell me, if you understand.

Who marked off its dimensions? Surely you know!

Who stretched a measuring line across it?

On what were its footings set,

or who laid its cornerstone—

while the morning stars sang together

and all the angels shouted for joy?

On and on the Lord goes in those chapters. He’s relentless. He shows Job how far above humanity He reigns, and something about his ferocity clears away the fog from my eyes. As those chapters progress, my heart pounds with excitement and longing. I find that I, like Hwin, tremble and say to the Lion, “I'd sooner be eaten by you than fed by anyone else.”

He is God and I am not. It’s shocking, I suppose, because I so naturally assume that I am.

This is the God who chased self sacrifice, gentleness, tenderness, generosity--not because he had to, but because he so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son. The blinding force of holiness, a force which is so strange to me, so other, so flattening, so offensive even--that it makes grace a sonic boom, a wonder that rattles my walls and my windows with the full rights of a divinity who has come to wash the dirty feet of the desperate.

What wondrous love is this, O my soul, O my soul!

What wondrous love is this, O my soul!

What wondrous love is this

That caused the Lord of bliss

To bear the dreadful curse for my soul, for my soul,

To bear the dreadful curse for my soul!

- - - - -

“I will have mercy on whom I have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion.” So then it depends not on human will or exertion, but on God, who has mercy. For the Scripture says to Pharaoh, “For this very purpose I have raised you up, that I might show my power in you, and that my name might be proclaimed in all the earth.” So then he has mercy on whomever he wills, and he hardens whomever he wills.

You will say to me then, “Why does he still find fault? For who can resist his will?” But who are you, O man, a to answer back to God? Will what is molded say to its molder, “Why have you made me like this?” Has the potter no right over the clay, to make out of the same lump one vessel for honorable use and another for dishonorable use? What if God, desiring to show his wrath and to make known his power, has endured with much patience vessels of wrath prepared for destruction, in order to make known the riches of his glory for vessels of mercy, which he has prepared beforehand for glory— even us whom he has called, not from the Jews only but also from the Gentiles?

--from Romans 9

At the Intersection of a Messiah-Complex Friendship and Depression

The problems start with good intentions, I think. Friend B is going through a rough patch with clinical depression, and Friend A wants to help. Friend A offers to take on the project, opening her emotional and physical resources to the crisis.

The first few days, Friend A knocks it out of the park. She listens to long and complicated stories. She empathizes, and she verbalizes support. She comforts. She becomes a doctor and a mother.  If things keep going this well, Friend B should be up and running in no time.

But by the end of the second week, Friend A is tired. She’s heard all the stories twice or  three times. The weight of this depression is starting to feel...well... annoying. It would be different if she could reach down into that darkness, say a few positive truths, and fix the problem. But this... this feels like a bottomless pit, and it seems like there’s nothing she can pour into Friend B that will be enough.

Friend A is ready for Friend B to hurry up and figure this out so life can get back to normal.

So, Friend A googles “tough love” and takes on a coaching posture. She starts to make direct, honest statements that she hopes will jolt Friend B out of her funk. Instead of opening her whole, soft self up to Friend B’s wounds, she tries to implement boundaries, pacts, and procedures to regulate the danger.

"This is when we will talk."
"This is when we will sleep."
"You have to promise me that you won’t hurt yourself."
"You have to promise me that you won’t drink."

After all, she’s invested now. She’s earned the right to wield some leverage.

The shift unnerves Friend B. She feels pressure to perform, but she doesn’t know how. This isn’t like trying to resist a second piece of chocolate cake--this is like trying to stand against the force of a tsunami.

Friend B hates herself for being too needy. She hates herself for pushing everybody to exhaustion. She feels guilty, hopeless, tired. It’s always going to be like this; she will always be too much for everybody. So she experiments with giving up... writes a letter... takes a few steps toward trying to check out. Maybe she just needs to get out of everybody’s way.

The threat of suicide, then. The threat of suicide is the weight Friend B holds over Friend A. “If you aren’t a good enough friend to me, if you don’t have the right answers, if you can’t figure out how to heal my disease, I’ll kill myself,” and the terror of that thought is so overwhelming to Friend A that she starts to feel anger as well. What kind of card is that to play? How dare you? Suicide is a power move. It’s immature and selfish. It’s narcissistic. It’s cheating.

Friend A tries to live her life knowing that at any minute, she could get a phone call saying they’ve found a body. How is she supposed to carry that? How is she supposed to maintain any sort of normalcy with this in the wings?

Friend A realizes she can’t do this anymore. She wants out.

She’s full of shame because she feels like a failure. She wanted to be a messiah, and she ended up being a fool. She made promises she couldn’t keep. She tried to be a physician and couldn’t heal. She needs space. She’s ready for somebody else to take this—somebody who knows what she’s actually doing.

- - - - -

I don’t know how many times I’ve seen a similar dynamic play out in friendships over the past twenty years.  I’ve seen this happen between friends, and I’ve also been involved in messiah-friendships gone awry. Until you’ve dealt deeply with depression, you don’t realize how complicated it really is. Even if you’re smart and sensitive, even if you have a knack for identifying truth and saying the right things, you might not be able to “fix” someone who is depressed with your presence or your words.

You and I would never offer to do an living room appendectomy on girlfriend who was suffering with gut pain, but we might try to stand the role of an emotional physician, jimmy-rigging psychological surgery on a friend with severe depression. But so often when we get into the bowels of the problem, we find that the infection is too deep, that it’s spread too far for us to heal. And when that happens, we sit with a royal mess on our hands, not knowing who to call to sew things back together.

So I just want to write down a few thoughts about friends tending friends with depression.  These thoughts don’t come from clinical experience, so if you have training in the field and want to add a few thoughts or corrections below, go for it. But maybe this post will at least put a few words on a common problem and get a healthy conversation started.

FOR THE MESSIAH FRIEND

1. At the outset of the situation, don’t promise more than a human can give. You can offer to listen. You can offer to walk with your friend. You can pray and provide an occasional landing place. But be careful not to put yourself in the position of solitary savior for a deep, old problem.  That’s a promise you won’t be able to deliver. If your friend knows Jesus, she has a messiah. If you try to take that weight from the Lord, even your best intentions will land in a bad place.  

2. Consider your motives early. Why are you wanting to help? What needs exist in your own heart that you are carrying into the crisis? Do you need to feel smart? Do you need to feel helpful? Is anyone watching that you want to impress? This stuff matters because the intensity of caring for a depressed friend will force these motives to the surface. If possible, it’s better to examine your own heart at the outset and get honest with what you are trying to gain as you try to give yourself away.

3. Are you trusting Jesus to work through you, or are you trusting yourself to work for Jesus? This feels like a subtle difference, but it’s crucial. The epistles constantly place religious works in opposition to works of the indwelling Lord. Especially in a situation like this, you need to keep your union with Christ at the forefront of everything you do in the friendship. Maintaining awareness of your ultimate dependence can prevent you from attempting what you cannot, and it can protect you speaking with false authority.  Because depressed people can sometimes be emotionally-manipulative (out of desperation), holding firm to union with Jesus can also help those friends feel healthy boundaries that they may not always want... but need. Even though those boundaries may feel insensitive at first...in the long run, they will help you run a marathon instead of checking out after a quick sprint.

4. Have the humility to encourage your friend to get professional help. This just makes sense when you think about how depression works. The problem could be chemical. It could involve factors you aren’t trained to recognize or heal. There’s no failure in admitting that you don’t have the skill set to identify and untangle every wound. Your role as a friend is vital, and you just need to do that role well. Think about how important it is for friends and family to show up for encouragement at a hospital. That’s your work here. You don’t have to be everything.

FOR THE DEPRESSED FRIEND

1. This monster inside you is huge. You know it is, and that’s why you’re so scared. I know it feels like you are drowning and that you just want to find someone to grab on to, but let me use a word picture to explain what might happen if you do this. Sometimes drowning people will try to climb the bodies of lifeguards because they are desperate to reach the surface of the water. In doing this, they can drown both the rescuer and the person in distress. When this happens, a lifeguard is trained to dive down into the water, not because he is going to let the desperate person drown, but because he needs the victim to let go so he can better grip on her to save her.  Please don’t feel ashamed of your impulses to climb your rescuer—those impulses are just normal for hurting people. But do know that your friend might have to make space now and again so that he can come back and help you more effectively.

2. Don’t beat yourself up for being messy. Depressed people make embarrassing mistakes that we would never make in easier times. We might write ugly letters and texts. We might lie. We might manipulate. We might explode in anger or fear. We might try to escape. We might indulge in wrong behaviors that give us at least some little endorphin rush to break hour after hour of suffering. I’m not saying these mistakes are morally right--sin is still sin. But reactive responses are super normal in seasons of intense pain. We wouldn’t expect a trauma patient in the ER to behave with perfect civility—we would understand if a man who had just been shot in the abdomen were screaming in panic. So if you’ve been stupid or awkward in depression, instead of adding the weight of condemnation to the emotional baggage you already carry, take God seriously when he tells you to confess your sins and trust him with forgiveness. He knows your weakness. He’s not freaked out by what you’ve done, and he doesn’t want it to define you for the rest of your life.

3. Admit what your friends can’t do to help. They are great people, I know they are. But as much as they love you, your friends don’t have the training to fix what’s broken. There’s probably not a lot you feel like you can give your friends right now, but there is one thing you can do for them. Give your closest friends a role where they can win. Let them be your cheerleaders, your prayer support, your peers. Let them give everything they have in a way that fits their skill set. Even if they offer, don’t let them try to be your messiah. That rarely works long term. Let these people be your companions because that’s what you need most from them. Love them enough, and love yourself enough to find professional help that understands how to get into the deep places. Let doctors be doctors so that friends can be friends.

FOR THE FRIENDS WHO HAVE GOOFED THIS ALL UP

A lot of us have goofed this up, right? Either we’ve been too needy or too explosive in seasons of depression, or we’ve tried to be a savior to someone we ended up not being able to carry. Maybe we got scared or angry and abandoned ship, and now we are ashamed of bailing. Maybe we’ve used blame to try to recreate the whole narrative so that we don’t have to admit our failures. If any of that’s been you, don’t shame yourself. It’s not like we all had lessons in how to handle depression in friendships. This stuff hits out of the blue, in real time, and we do the best we can based on our instincts and the little bit of knowledge we’ve collected in life.  If/when we fail, then we struggle to understand everything that’s just happened--often making more mistakes while trying to patch together an explanation of the past.

Can I just relieve some pressure here and say, there’s grace for all that? Your depressed friend was hurting. The friend who tried to help was confused and totally overwhelmed. Give each other permission to be human in all of this. Confess weird motives (everybody has them), say sorry, be quick to release blame, and move on. And in situations where the other friend (the messiah or the wounded) isn’t ready to admit all this stuff, the work of simply getting honest with yourself will help a lot. What you don’t want to carry is a narrative of shame and chaos. It’s okay to define what happened clearly, tell the truth, confess what you did wrong, and move on in freedom from the past. Who you were in one terrible situation of trauma doesn’t define who you are forever.

Again, if you or someone you know is a professional counselor who wants to correct or add to any of this, feel free to message or comment. I’m speaking from experience, not from training, so I’m open to new insights. But maybe just getting the conversation started will be helpful to those who are trying to recover from a bad experience.

When the people who should love you don't.

The whole first day is like a bad dream.

Your tectonic plates have shifted, leaving a vast expanse of wild sea where there was solid land. Your world will be different from now on. You know that, but you can’t believe it.

You go through the rhythms in a daze. You make the meals. You drive the kids. You try to stand outside and get your bearings.

But all the while, your brain keeps going back over and over that terrible moment when you realized everything had changed.

Maybe there were words spoken. Maybe written.

"I’m done with you."

"I’m moving on."

"Leave me alone."

"You’re fired."

"You’re dead to me."

Cruel words. Words coming from a face that you thought you knew better.

When this happened to me, I remember the sensation of falling. Somehow my body felt the crash of my soul.

I had dreams that night of stumbling into an old, moss-covered well that tunneled thousands of feet down into the earth. As I plummeted into the darkness, faces emerged from the moss, faces of people I loved and trusted, faces that smiled at first then morphed into monsters.

It was like a death, but worse somehow. In a death, you get to keep the person you loved. Betrayal steals the past, stains it, destroys every memory.

You want to fight. You want to explain. You want to redo.

You want to retract the hope you once had so that the throbbing can stop.

But before the pain subsides, wave after wave of new consequences come.

Doubts rise

Accusations begin.

Fears develop.

A tape begins to self-construct as the enemy of your soul circles above death with a carrion’s cry.

“You are damaged.”

“If you had only been more...”

“God doesn’t see you. He doesn’t care. He won’t intervene…”

“This is how the whole world works. “

“Nobody is safe.”

“You are incompetent.”

“You are damaged goods.”

“This rejection defines you.”

“This rejection names you.”

When it happened to me, I got in my car and drove through tears, yelling and shaking.  I had to go to the place it had happened, and I had to see with my own eyes. I had to feel the walls with my two hands.

I grieved so hard for so long.  I was angry. I was disoriented. I was lost. I grasped for whatever would float.

They should have loved me better. And they should have loved you better, too.

I want you to know that rejection is unjust. You’re right to be shocked, right to be struggling to breathe.

There’s no shame in your knees buckling.

I also want you to know that this will become an opportunity. It will become an opportunity to stare your worst fears in the face and learn to stand your ground. This sorrow will not be wasted.

Truth you have recited with your lips, truth you have embraced with your mind, this is about to get real. You’re about to learn to walk in two worlds at once.You’re about to face the Balrog. You’re about to feel the hot wrath of hell. You’re about to find out how much your soul’s enemy hates you.

You’re also about to look behind the temple curtain and find that what you always hoped would hold firm is firm indeed.

Soon you’re going to hear the voice of God telling you what is true of you, and this time, that voice will sound different than it ever has sounded before. It won’t be muddled up by background noise--this time your world will grow still and dark, and He will whisper over you, “Let there be light.”

And there will be light, and that light will be good. I want you to believe the name he gives you when this happens. It will be a clean, strong name. It will be regal, and intimate, and bright.

His name for you will seem too good to be true because you will feel wrong, all wrong, and filthy, and ugly, and worn, and unwanted.

You will be tempted to let the pain of human rejection limit God's embrace, but listen to me—tell Him those lies that throw themselves up like arms before a blow—give Him the lethal words you are tempted to believe—and then be willing to hear beyond them. 

Trust what He says, not what you feel.

When you have learned to recognize the voice of the Shepherd, I want you to go stand under an open sky with wind in your hair and the peace of God swelling up in your heart. Say, "The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away--then the Lord giveth again. Blessed be the name of the Lord, the God who sees me."

Blessed be the God who anoints your head with oil. Blessed be the God who lifts your chin and claims you as His own.

That is the end of your pain: love, and love, and love forever more. Lo, he is with you now and always, even to the ends of the loves of a bruised and battered earth.

Your Background Tape

On road trips in the 80’s, we’d push a cassette tape into the console, hit rewind, then play an entire album over and over again. None of this MP3 song-by-song stuff. We listened track by track, and in this way, entire records became the backdrop of our lives.

So it's kind of funny now to sit at Chilis and watch the faces of my friends when Metallica, Randy Travis, Billy Joel, Erasure, or Bon Jovi, start playing. We don't just hear a song; we hear a record. We don't just hear a record; we hear an era. We get flashbacks of high school dances; crazy summer nights with friends; sitting in our bedrooms whispering into a phone with a long, twisted cord.

Some of those memories are good. Some we wish we could erase.

I was twenty the summer I spent exploring London while listening to Enya’s Shepherd Moons on a Walkman. Two-and-a-half decades later, the buoyant ache of these haunted vocals still makes me smell the diesel of double-decker buses. I taste Earl Grey with milk, hear my own footsteps in the Tate, and feel the thrill of two beautiful older men from France asking me for a phone number I refused to give them. That summer was exhilarating, dangerous, and beautiful, and so that record knocks down a domino train inside me. It pulls me back through time and revives old joys and old temptations.

Repetition gets in our bones, see. It links us to experiences, to values, to desires; and I think about this a lot when I consider how the enemy of our souls works.

A few weeks ago, I was talking to a group of young friends about how scary it is to grow up. My heart grew soft listening to their concerns because I have felt so many of these struggles myself over the years.

“I’m not the sort of person anybody could love.”
“Something is wrong with me.”
“The world is too messed up for my generation to live a good life.”
“Everybody is just grabbing what they can get. There’s nobody left who would wait for me.”
“Nobody could want me as I am—I have to find an angle.”

These weren’t small, passing concerns—they were hard confessions of silent threats that had been spoken in the background of their young lives over and over again. These young people were brave enough to verbalize the amorphous but particular sense of doom that hung about them: You’re alone. You’re ugly. You’re incompetent. You’re a fake. If anyone could see the real you, he would hate you.

Here were tapes that had been rewound and restarted over and over again. Each conclusion began as a single suggestion on some hard, past day long forgotten. A twinge of doubt had grown there, and that doubt had repeated itself until “What if” became “This is who I am. This is where my whole life is going.”

As I listened, I began to think about the strategies of darkness—about how important it is for our enemy to create negative records to rewind and replay over our lives. He knows how ideas get stuck in our guts, so he works to knit little events together that cause us to define ourselves and our possibilities, note by note, phrase by phrase, creating choruses that eventually become so common to us that we live by them.

I encouraged my young friends to take a moment and stare even more directly at the tapes that were being played behind the scenes of their own hearts. Why were these words being repeated? Why would a spiritual enemy work like a military general seeking weak spots that maximize attack? I encouraged them to name what has become subconsciously accepted even behind their felt doubts and to take each assumption back to Jesus, asking him directly if it were true.

I wanted them to do this because when we let such tapes drone in the background unchallenged, we are carried into more decisions than we realize. If we will only take a straight, hard look into what the hater of our souls is trying to use to paralyze and discourage us, we can uncover so much. What insecurities is he using? What fears is he using? How is he attempting to monopolize loneliness and shame? How has he tried to hit the root of our identity, and what is he doing with the names he has assigned to us? What labels has he tried to write upon us and our world?

This morning I read the story in Luke about Mary and Martha. It’s almost embarrassing to see Martha’s internal tape exposed by Jesus. While Mary sat at Christ’s feet listening, Martha was up doing all the hard work until the responsible sister finally cracked, “Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to serve alone? Tell her then to help me.”  

How many years of being “the good one” had gone into that single complaint? Martha assumes that Christ couldn’t possibly disagree, and that’s telling. This is the confidence that grows after many years of self-righteous martyrdom. How often had Martha harbored silent criticism of her daydreamy sister? How many times had little bits of random praise affirmed her internal narrative? Since childhood, she had been the sister who kept things in line.

But in an instant, this old recording of pride was exposed by a sharp rebuke. “'Martha, Martha, you are anxious and troubled about many things, but one thing is necessary. Mary has chosen the good portion, which will not be taken away from her.'”

Ouch. Just like that, the tape was ripped out and shredded. Here’s your heart in the bare light, Martha. You’re nervous. You’re unsettled. You’re trying to get your worth through performance.

It’s emergency surgery on the part of Jesus. He’s able to look at the core of the records we play and call a spade a spade so that we can get out of a bad rut. It had to sting to hear what Martha heard, but what freedom was waiting for her after the truth settled? Was she finally able to feel loved for who she was instead of for what she did? Was she able to serve from that moment onward with a heart that was giving instead of trying to fill her own cup?

It's a little bit unsettling to think about the tapes running in the background of our lives. There's no telling what we might learn. But when we identify the whispers that drive us, bonds can fall off, and we can begin to know freedom of the good portion that cannot be taken away.

The Posture of a Christian

I attended my first creation/evolution debate in the late 1990’s, and even as a believer in Jesus, I was turned off by what I witnessed. I wasn’t overwhelmed by data. After spending the first half of my life studying biology, I was accustomed to technical scientific dialogue. If anything, the scientific aspects of the debate were too general for me--a smattering of details a mile wide and a few inches deep.

At the time, I thought Scripture allowed for both theistic evolution and old earth creationism, so most of the arguments raised by these men felt peripheral. I had no doubt that God had orchestrated the origin of the universe; everything I had studied about biology in secular environments (ranging from cancer research at UC Berkeley to a symposium at the University of Florida) indicated the presence of a creator.

On both sides, these men seemed to make mountains out of molehills. I left that night feeling like the heart of Christianity had been missed, and as I fell asleep, I wondered how anyone might find a living Jesus through a venue such as that.

These were strange and lonely years for me as a believer. In the 1990’s, the main purpose of evangelical Christianity seemed to be winning the culture wars. During those years, I attended several seminars that promised to equip Christians to stand firm against the assaults of secularism, and when I remember the body language of those teachers, I remember a lot of swagger and pomp. I think these teachers were trying to demonstrate a confidence that would help young Christians feel assured about their beliefs, but it always felt odd to me. The undercurrent to this body language was: “Those dumb atheists. Those dumb secularists. We’ve got the real answer. We’ll show them.”

I was in my 20's then, so maybe I was just waking up to how theological conversation has always worked, but it was here--during the dawn of internet forums--that I watched dominant, cavalier postures take root in many areas of the faith. A haughty spirit ran through creation/evolution debates, through Biblical gender roles debates, through Calvinism/Arminianism debates, through Rapture/amillennialism debates. Christians didn’t just have an opinion, they had a spirit of bravado. Above all things, in all areas, Christians were certain about everything.

Discernment bloggers began to bless and curse with directives: Christian women should have more babies. Christian families should homeschool. Christians should vote for Candidate X. Only young earth creationism respects the inerrant text.  So many lines were drawn in the sand with a swagger, and some of those directives were bizarre. I was smart enough to banter, so I jumped in the fray. Like little billy goats wrestling on the side of the hill, we used one another to try to get stronger. In a crude and untrained form, we were attempting to grow by dialectic.

It wasn’t until I began to reread Western philosophy that I realized the great irony of these matches. Essentially, we were adopting the core premise of secular humanism: we were agreeing that humans are essentially thinking creatures, and that by the power of our minds, we could achieve enlightenment.

This belief—this belief about what we were and what we were capable of doing—was the prime influence on our posture. It was causing us to puff ourselves up. It was causing us to trust ourselves. It was causing us to create a secondary “religion” of the human mind that could operate without God's living, active force in our day-to-day operations.

By saying all this, I’m not making an argument for anti-intellectualism. My favorite theologians are thinkers who have researched deeply. But these dear souls also pursue knowledge with a living awareness of the limitations of humanity. They leave room for a real God to adopt an active role in reaching the world with the gospel--as a result, their posture is different. They understand what they can do, and they also understand what they cannot.

This morning, I was reading the book of Luke and ran across this uncomfortable glimpse into the life of Jesus:

“In that same hour he rejoiced in the Holy Spirit and said, ‘I thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that you have hidden these things from the wise and understanding and revealed them to little children; yes, Father, for such was your gracious will.’”

God hides truth from some people. He reveals it to others. He's that active.

If this is true, it impacts our ability to argue our way out of the culture wars.

It teaches that our best efforts at evangelism will come to nothing, if God doesn’t reveal himself.

It teaches that truth that can’t be forced through the best debates in the world.

It shows us that Paul's brilliant rhetoric in Athens and in the book of Romans will come to nothing if the Lord doesn't go before his words.

It shows us that when C.S. Lewis or Tim Keller are used to woo a soul to Christ, that the Holy Spirit has been involved. Without the Lord's active hand, not even these great evangelists could make progress for the Kingdom.

This passage shows us that our dependence upon Christian bravado, upon debate, upon proof, upon a condescending and dominant posture is foolish—because the revival of a culture is ultimately a product of the outpouring of the Lord's quickening. America is dead, and we will stay dead until he revives us. We will remain dry bones until the Spirit of the Lord hovers over the surface of the deep. Here is the true state of our dependence. We cannot save ourselves.

While we should always be ready to give a ready defense, and while we can be good stewards of reason and research, we must root our ultimate dependence in a Holy Spirit who must go before us to open eyes and hearts, or else all our efforts will be in vain. This is humbling information. It doesn’t allow us to swagger into a secular culture with fancy, intellectual guns-a-blazing. It calls us to get up early and pray before we engage. It calls us to cry out to the Lord before we cry out to our lost friends. It calls us to step every step in utter reliance.

Understanding our reliance calls us to a posture that is not confident in our own readiness but confident in the near presence of our King. When I find teachers who set bravado aside and adopt a posture of dependence upon the living God, I'm enthralled because these men and women point beyond their own abilities and goals to a God who fulfills more than intellect, to a God whose Kingdom extends beyond today's culture wars. These teachers shift my focus from gaining immediate dominance to keeping communion with a God who made specific plans for my life long ago (Ephesians 2:10).

Reliance protects me from self-worship and self-salvation and reminds me that I am a branch in a vine that must wake up every morning and look for sustenance. Apart from Him, I can do nothing of eternal significance--no matter how intelligent I am, no matter how prepared I am, no matter how confidently I stand. All that will come to nothing if I do not abide in the God who goes before me.





 

The Posts I Never Publish

This morning I spent two hours writing a post that I am not going to publish on my blog.

It was the sort of post that would have connected with people. If I had put it online, readers would have immediately said, “Me too!” and they would have forwarded it to their readers who would have forwarded it to their readers. I’ve been writing long enough to know how these things multiply.

Because I was writing out of strong emotion, I stumbled into several metaphors that were powerful and unusual. Here were the sort of images that make readers say, “Aha! You put into simple words what I have been carrying around for months! Look here, everybody!”

The post was honest enough to make readers feel like they could trust me. It was relevant enough to connect with the mood of social media this week. In terms of platform-building, it was a gold mine.

The post was also reckless.

It was mostly right, mostly selfless, mostly Christ-centered—but running under the surface were fear, pride, and anger.

I didn’t write it in faith. I wrote it trusting my own feelings and wisdom. And as far as the world's standards go, it was darned good writing.

One unexpected benefit to an extended time away from big Facebook has been the growth of my sensitivity to dilemmas like this. Because I am keeping more company with myself and my God, I’m starting to develop more of an inner dialogue about how and why words are used in public. Lines of distinction are starting to grow between what I give the world and what I allow to develop in quiet.

I'm starting to get more of a feel for when a piece is ready to be spoken aloud.

I’m not fully grown here yet. Several times a week, I still lash out in frustration or offense. But through trial and error, and through limiting my venue--through days of waiting, I’m starting to at least begin to feel the edges of that distinction.

So this morning’s first post is going in the drafts folder, a place for writings devoted to wrestling with God in private.  That drafts folder is becoming a sacred space for me, a realm in which I unpack my most convincing arguments with the full force of emotions and intellect and then sit to wait in the dark for my Lord, knowing that the morning light may expose what is right and what is wrong with what I have felt.

I'm learning love for an audience of one. Not 20 likes. Not 20,000. 1.

This is a novel concept for a click-to-publish world in which we've come to expect to say and hear everything. But there are also secret and beautiful ways to write--there's a worship that comes from a lavish and holy waste of time--writing poured out in trust and patience, like perfume on the feet of Christ.

http://www.thistleandtoad.com/wwwthistleandtoadcom/writings/2017/10/15/the-posts-i-never-publish

Delay, Lord Jesus

https://www.wikiart.org/en/morteza-katouzian/grief-1983

They pray, "Come quickly, Lord Jesus," but I cannot pray with them.

My heart wants an escape hatch, a beam-me-up-Scottie, some ruby slippers to click.

There's no place like home.

There's no place like home.

But my spirit resists.

"Delay, Lord," it prays.

"Delay. Lord, and protect me from asking for the end before its time."

Oh Father, I want to be with you. How I ache to recline on your chest, to hear your eternal heart beat with my own ears, to walk in the rooms your artistry has made for me, to revel in your creativity and thoughtfulness, and to rest forever in your joys.

But if today were that great and terrible day of your coming, how many souls would pass into an eternity void of even the simplest pleasures?

No sun on their arms forever and forevermore.

The wind in their hair. Lost.

The sound of a whippoorwill.

Forgotten.

The feeling of clean sheets on their legs. Gone.

Music. Gone.

Beauty. Gone.

Light. Gone.

A hot shower. Gone.

The taste of a strawberry.

Only fear and regret and darkness and pain forever and forever...only the great sucking void left by the absence of God's bright presence.

Only the eternal echo of, "My will be done!" resounding in empty halls of an empty castle

Creation revels in the glory of God, but hell is an alien horror.

Hell is the cyclical praise of the natural earth come to a sudden stop.

Come, Lord Jesus?

No, no.

Wait, Lord Jesus. Wait.

We can wait.

Because if today were that great and horrible day, how many would be caught unprepared? How many would pass into a realm in which today's sick fear and despair have no end?

Yes, I see this violence. Yes, I taste on my tongue the bitterness of the hater of humans.

I can barely stand to see the chaos.

I can barely breathe.

Is hell so bad as even this? Worse too?

Oh, then delay, Lord Jesus. Delay.

Delay though it burns us to stay on this sin-scorched planet. We can bear it. We can endure for their sake

Receive all prayers that you might come with an outpouring of your Spirit. Come in invisible ways. Read every plea as, "Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven."

While we linger like the grass that fadeth,

come to make us more focused.

Come to make us more courageous.

Come to make us more reliant.

Come to help us see through the glass darkly so that we spend every resource well.

To die is gain, but to live is Christ? Then delay our gain. Hold our rest. Wait. Wait. And though these brief years of sorrow break us, make our sorrow yield a spiritual harvest beyond what we can ask or imagine.

Don't rescue us yet.

Let us stay, instead, for the rescue of the lost.

Let us take rush into the fray with the gospel

Send us into this darkness to tend the wounded.

Use our weary, war-torn souls to bring your children home.

Investing Small

When I realized that I had a serious gift for writing, I felt a moral obligation to become a “writer.” By “writer,” I don’t mean someone who does the work of tilling words and ideas like a farmer tills wild ground; I mean the labor of identity development--the labor of trying to get large numbers of people to recognize me as someone who writes well.

That goal sounds so strange now that I look at it directly, and I’m not sure where this pressure originated. Maybe I noticed what other writers were doing and felt the need to follow them. It’s also likely that I was still carrying the burden of “saving the world,” either from some long-past Baptist revival or from the plot of a superhero movie.

But the work of writing and the work of trying to be a writer are not the same thing. The former involves long, solitary hours of reading, thinking, praying, connecting images and thoughts to words—work that is complete when the chasms between what is perceived and what is communicated are spanned.

Trying to be a writer, however, involves attention-getting strategies and branding. It means:

Posting twice a week

on certain days

in less than 800 words

using lots of pictures

focusing on a theme

building a platform

asking strategic questions to make your readers feel connected

maximizing social media

developing a persona

networking with other famous writers.

You tell yourself that you do all this because the world is dark and because if you get famous enough, you will at last have the power to wield the one ring in such a way that Middle Earth is saved.

Perhaps that's the calling God has given some people. I don’t doubt that these strategies have been used well in some lives, but over the past few months, I’ve found liberty and purpose in another viewpoint.

It’s also possible to invest small for the glory of God.

Going small opposes so many ideas I was taught as a young evangelical. I was trained in strategic planning, target audiences, the identification of natural leaders, spiritual multiplication, megachurches, megaconferences, and superstars. The Baby Boomer generation applied corporate strategy to every possible angle of the gospel of Jesus, and this made a certain amount of sense to me in my twenties.

But in my 40’s, I’m no longer sure that the ends justify the means.  If 2016 gave me one good gift, it was permission to finally admit the inherent dangers of an incorporated Christianity. 2016 showed me the deformed end of a church that relies upon the stuff of earth to accomplish the will of heaven, and I want nothing more to do with it.

I’m finally ready to look for something different. And out of frustration with the mechanics of the American church, I've withdrawn significantly in the past few months to focus on my work and to figure out how I want to invest the last 1/3 of my life.

This morning I was reading Wendell Berry’s essay, “The Body and the Earth,” and I found a quote that applies to the stewardship of a writing gift. In this paragraph, Berry explains that for all our talk of global citizenship, we serve the world best by living well in a small area. We don’t give best by becoming influential on a national scale or by becoming known. The world is changed when citizens are faithful in local realms. Berry writes:

To forsake all others does not mean--because it cannot mean--to ignore or neglect all others, to hide or be hidden from all others, or to desire or love no others. To live in marriage is a responsible way to live in sexuality, as to live in a household is a responsible way to live in the world. One cannot enact or fulfill one's love for womankind or mankind, or even for all the women or men to whom one is attracted. If one is to have the power and delight of one's sexuality, then the generality of instinct must be resolved in a responsible relationship to a particular person. Similarly, one cannot live in the world; that is, one cannot become, in the easy, generalizing sense with which the phrase is commonly used, a "world citizen." There can be no such thing as a "global village." No matter how much one may love the world as a whole, one can live fully in it only by living responsibly in some small part of it. Where we live and who we live there with define the terms of our relationship to the world and to humanity. We thus come again to the paradox that one can become whole only by the responsible acceptance of one's partiality.

https://pages.stolaf.edu/sustainabilities/files/2014/08/Berry-BodyEarth-1.pdf

This bit in particular applies to what I am learning:

No matter how much one may love the world as a whole, one can live fully in it only by living responsibly in some small part of it. Where we live and who we live there with define the terms of our relationship to the world and to humanity. We thus come again to the paradox that one can become whole only by the responsible acceptance of one's partiality.

I can’t save the world through my blog. I can’t save the world through a book release. I can’t save the world through becoming famous enough to bear the weight of this planet on my own shoulders like some evangelical Atlas.

I can be a good teacher in a classroom of 20 students. I can listen to a teenager who is having a bad day. I can unpack a novel in light of the lavish love of Jesus. I can be fair. I can be kind. I can be patient. I can speak up for four people who are being treated unfairly. I can write notes of encouragement with a real pen on real paper, and I can use my gift by God’s power to  resurrect one dead soul.

Now and then I can write an encouraging post for five people--or I can write a post for one person who is struggling.

I can wait to post until I have something important to say.

I can let the gospel apply small. I can let God be God and trust Him to place my labors in the context that is most useful to him.

I can live small then smaller still, encouraging my readers to do the same.  

I can do all this because the gift of writing doesn't offer an identity that springs into being with a publishing contract, or with a following in the 100’s of thousands. Writing well is simply a tool to utilize in the context of an identity that was secured long ago by the work of Jesus. We have nothing to earn; we have only to wake up each morning and say, "In every small step I take, Thy will be done."

The Rare Opportunity of a Worn Out Heart

God hasn’t fulfilled two of my most urgent requests for two decades.

One of those prayers is so important to me, my faith has shuddered and failed while I’ve been waiting for God’s help. As days have turned to weeks, as weeks have turned to months, as months have turned to years, I’ve wrestled deeply with theological assumptions that were once easy for me—assumptions that God is real and that he is kind.

Intellectually, I have enough evidence to know these things. Historically, scientifically, inter-textually, I can show you why God exists and that he is tender. In an academic sense, it would be impossible for the Bible to be false. Still, reason and proofs can’t medicate certain types of sorrow.

When I am hurting, I don’t want evidence. I want relief.

When I hear atheists talk about religion being the opiate of the masses, I wonder if they realize what they are actually saying. The process of learning to trust God is profoundly beautiful at times, but it can also be agonizing. When Jesus urged us to take up our cross and follow him, he was serious. Faith leads to life, but it also involves suffering and death.

Christians are given a paradox—a light and free burden of salvation that sometimes involves long nights in Gethsemane wrestling, sweating, and crying out, “Not my will but Thine.” We have been told that the new wine will burst the old wine skins because the old life and the new life cannot coexist.

It's true that union with God leads to eternal delight, and we can experience some of those joys now. Some days we get flickers of vision that drive us onward and upward. But when the foretaste of those joys fades, we inevitably endure the painful shedding of old skins. Salvation may be instant, but sanctification takes a long time.

After walking through several long seasons of emotional suffering, I can see why books that promise the secrets of harnessing God's immediate relief sell millions. The agony of trusting the Lord while faith is yet unseen can be overwhelming, and the thought of a shortcut is so sweet.  

Yet there are also opportunities in the midst of waiting that come at no other season in our journies with God. Only now--when things seem most impossible, most chaotic, and most unbearable—can we offer the unique sort of worship that such times allow.

First, in long seasons of pain, we come face-to-face with our idols.

Maybe fifteen years ago, I cried as I prayed, “Give me one pure and holy passion,” trying to imagine what it would be like for someone as scattered and earthly as I am to love God supremely. I wanted that sort of love for Him, but I had no idea how to focus my wild, artistic heart.

It didn't matter if I knew how to do it. All that mattered was that I had asked. Over the next season of my life, methodically, God began to expose my idols.  I didn’t realize what was happening at first. I thought my life was just falling totally apart. But through taking what I loved away, or through destabilizing it, God allowed me to see how many good things I had prioritized over him.

This may sound cruel and selfish, but it isn't. God isn't a narcissist or an egomaniac. He is a realist who wants my ultimate worship because he is worth loving more than anything. He is for me, and he knows that core devotion given to any lesser object will be ultimately harmful.

The expressions of love and trust that we can offer God after much has been taken away are different from the prayers we pray when all seems well. As we sit in heartbreak and overwhelming loss, we find that we are still able to whisper, “But you are here, and you are ultimate." We might not feel this at first, and it will be tempting to run away before we get there. But in moments when this truth settles, we begin to see how unstable any other form of joy truly is. When such sorrow ends in trust, we find a cornerstone upon which we can build the remaining days of our lives--and we can know (finally) that this cornerstone cannot be shaken.

Secondly, in long seasons of pain, we can offer up a quality of praise that is impossible at any other point in our walk with God.

Praise comes spontaneously when I can see the obvious workings of God’s hand. In nature’s beauty, in relief, in abundance, it takes no faith to rehearse the goodness of my Lord. But when all is darkness, loneliness, and emptiness, I have an opportunity to worship that I might never have again in my life.

Here I have the opportunity to get very still before my Creator and say,

“You were master over the void. From the void you brought life. In this void, I trust you.”

Here I have the opportunity to say,

“All I cared about is gone, and yet, I have your company. In this utter poverty, even as I cry out that I am ruined, I find you here--and I see that I have all I need.”

I can pray,

“Great surgeon, I resign. Whatever it takes. Finish what you have begun in me.”

At this level of brokenness, we can stop simply asking God to work and begin to implant the core of our trust in the fact that he is working already.

At this level of brokenness, we can begin to take a few steps in the heavenly realms in which we are already seated, a realm that has no end.

Our school verse of the year is Hebrews 12:28a: “Therefore let us be grateful for receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken.”  I love this verse because it anchors me in this mad world in which secondary loves yank me like a boat on wild seas. My devotion and my agony toss and turn, and yet always, always, my home remains steadfast.

According to Hebrews, our proper response to this unshakable kingdom is worship. We worship God in reverence and in awe because our He is a consuming fire--a fire that burns away everything that can be destabilized. If you are here, you are in a sacred space. If you are here, you are loved enough to be shown a portal into some of the deepest mysteries of this life.

If you are here, you stand with one foot on earth and the other in eternity. "Give me one pure and holy passion." It is a radical prayer, a dangerous prayer--for Aslan is not safe, but he is good."

Thanks be to God.

Your Hardest Belt is Your White Belt

I'm sitting in a cafeteria in Maryville, Tennessee, waiting for my daughter to finish her All-East Choir tryouts. She's not nervous this year like she's been in the past. She's a senior, and she knows the ropes. She has learned that life goes on after you make it to State, and she has learned that life goes on after you don't.

Before her sophomore tryouts, she practiced obsessively in the car on the ride down. That was the year I tried to ease her jitters by pointing out all the cute, red-headed tenors before the big audition. She giggled, and paced, and got through her first big scare, but there's no need to do any of this this go around. This year, she's a couple years older than almost everybody. The ginger that would have turned her head three years ago now looks like a little brother.

She's grown, see. She's learned to jump in and do the hard thing and manage the jitters. That's the goal--it's why we encourage our children to belly flop into all sorts of risks at this age. It's the grown-up version of holding our baby's hands while she takes her first few barefoot steps on the hallway carpet. "Go. You can do this. And you can survive and try again if you can't."

This year my daughter also started Brazilian JiuJitzu, which has been a quirky and hilarious journey. If you know anything about the art, you know that people don't "like" JiuJitzu. They fall in love with it.

Frankly, I'm astonished that a teenage female has the courage to walk into a practice room with ten huge adult males twice her size and learn to flip them on their butts, but she does it. I sit on the bleachers to watch, biting my nails and holding my breath. I pray for her bones, and I laugh, and I yell things I never thought I'd say in public--things I've only ever yelled at a television while watching Rocky.

Over my past few months of hanging out with ninjas, I've picked up one of my favorite sayings from the martial arts community:

"The hardest belt you'll ever get is your white belt."

Blue, purple, and black belts say this to newcomers as a statement of affirmation because it takes a long time (two years) to rank up in this complex martial art. Yet all those experts want beginners to remember that 99% of people in America never even achieve a white belt because they aren't willing to walk into the room to try something new.

You win the first day you show up for class, feeling stupid and awkward. You win even bigger when you show up for the second class after spending your first session feeling like a fool. You failed, and you were worse than everybody, and you'll never get this right, and it's too hard... yet here you are again not giving up. Bravo.

As I wait for my daughter to finish her choral tryouts, I am watching clusters of rural Tennessee families pass in and out of the cafeteria doors. Little bands of teenagers are walking out of their auditions, some with tears in their eyes, some complaining about the sight reading, a few saying they aced "Ave Maria" or botched the Whitaker. From their accents, it seems that more than a few come from tee-niny towns in the mountains, but here they are, glorious and brave because they've learned to sing a few lines of Bach in German.

One girl just passed me singing still, singing what she just sang in a tiny room full of tension, a song now pouring from her lungs in relief and delight. She likes that song. It's part of her now.

She showed up here this morning because she was willing to invest in beauty. She showed up because she was willing to believe that her small voice had a shot at something wonderful. She might never make it to All East or to All State, but that little songbird was a flutter of levity as she nearly danced through the doors. It's over. She did it. I'm so darned proud of her.

I got tears in my eyes a few minutes ago--maybe because I'm a teacher, maybe because I'm a mom--I can't tell. I was trying to grade reasearch papers, but I couldn't focus because I kept wanting to grab these kids and tell them what they've accomplished already.

I kept wanting to make all the choral teachers and parents stand and make an ginormous arch with their arms for all these kids to run through. I want to applaud for them, and find cheerleaders to call out their names, and assure them all that no matter what results they get two weeks from now--showing up today was practice for the rest of their adult lives. This stuff is so much more important than any of them realize. No matter what happened in there, they've won already.

Our school's cross country team keeps a meme in the hall of our school. "Run the mile you are in," it says. I think about it all the time. I remember those words and tell myself, "Do the next thing, and do it in faith and with all your heart. Trust this minute's resources. Eat today's manna. That's all you have to do right now. That's it."

Jump in. Try. Engage. Look stupid. But keep going.

Get a cramp in your side. Fall on loose gravel. Then finish that mile. That's a win.

Goof up the sight reading. Mispronounce the German. Walk out of that room on your own two feet and promise yourself you'll do better next year. That's a win.

Botch the MLA citations. Forget to match your pronoun and antecedent in number. Wreck your verb tenses. Then go in to writing lab to learn to do it better. That's a win.

Stand up for a lost cause. Have the conflict. Pray and leap. Be willing to apologize if you mess things up. That's a win.

Ask the girl out who rejects you. Try out for the role in the play you'll never get. Love your someday enough to flub up your now. Believe that there is grace enough from Jesus for your weakness, grace enough to begin what we can't learn without failing some along the way.

Then get back up. Run one more mile. Do the humiliating, awkward, faith-laden work of a white belt. Receive the awkwardness of learning, knowing that some failures are victories in themselves. This is where all of the greatest things begin. I'm proud of you for taking a single, wobbly step. I'm even more proud of you for taking a second.

- - - -

(This post is dedicated to my brave friends Mitzi Pierce and Jessica Rogers and their warrior children. It's especially dedicated to Xander, who has taught me more this week about the fierce, proactive work of reconciliation and forgiveness than any book I have ever read. Miss Becca loves you, X-man. And kiddo, you have no idea how much I needed your example this week.)

http://www.thistleandtoad.com/wwwthistleandtoadcom/writings

A Few Thoughts on the Nashville Statement

I should start by saying that I understand why evangelical leaders felt compelled to make such a declaration. This past week, a first grade student in California was sent to the principal’s office for using the wrong name for a trans classmate. After children were trained in gender fluidity by a state-funded school, parents were told that it would not have been possible for their children to opt out of moral training that their school offered.

I’m not citing that incident to ignite shock, anger, or fear but to demonstrate that the legal and cultural demands of the LGBTQ world do not simply exist within the realm of private, individual rights. They are moving actively into culture while demanding the authority to inflict punitive consequences upon anyone who fails to comply to one, specific morality. This movement declares that the state's authority trumps the wishes of parents--a posture which (historically) rubs feathers the wrong way, no matter what the flavor-of-the-month worldview issue happens to be.

Atheist parents don’t want a public school shoving young earth creationism down their children’s throats just like Christian parents don’t want a public school forcing assumptions about gender fluidity into their families. Americans generally dislike it when state institutions function in a morally-didactic role. But since worldview can’t be neutral, any government stance that feels like baseline, essential human respect to one group will feel oppressive to others. And these issues are not just impacting adults who can ignore what other adults do in their private bedrooms--they involve captive children being forced into vocal compliance.

The California situation is only one example of an aggressive cultural agenda promoted by certain activists within the LGBTQ community. And while some LGBTQ folks are fine living private lives that don’t intrude upon the private convictions of others, I have listened to other speeches by LGBTQ leaders who are now working a strategy, infiltrating power structures within America and positioning themselves to force (yes, force) the general public to comply with the one interpretation of human morality that those leaders feel is ultimate.

This extreme agenda of aggressive gay activists doesn't extend to my closest gay friends--men and women who would never bully me or my kids into forced agreement. Likewise, I would never attempt to wield human power to change the views of my gay friends. I don't put my trust in politicized evangelism--I trust the Holy Spirit to show up in individual, heart-to-heart engagements. This works small scale. As individuals, my friends and I are able to love each other and respect one another as we are. But in different circles, among different people, conservative and liberal forces struggle to gain dominance at the legislative level. Even if it's not my style to try to effect life change there, I cannot ignore that the struggle exists among others.

For this, among other reasons, it makes sense to me that evangelical leaders would want to create a definitive document naming a clear, Biblical stance on sexuality. As random as the timing of The Nashville Statement feels to many of us--as peripheral as the subject may feel while Houston is flooded and racial wounds are infecting--this is not an out-of-the-blue document falling upon a neutral culture. Despite yesterday's barrage of scoldings from condescending leftist Christians, there are legitimate, active tensions driving the creation of such a statement.

After acknowledging this, however, I think it’s also important to look at the way the Nashville Statement reads to a large segment of thoughtful evangelicalism.

Many of us have spent the past year watching evangelicals rally around one of the most perverted, crude, and ungodly leaders America has ever seen. For decades, Donald Trump has flaunted a lifetime of gross sexual exploitation. He has bragged about instigating adultery and voyeurism. His third wife was a nude model. He was divorced multiple times. He has objectified and commodified sex. It would be difficult to find any man in America who has demonstrated less respect for traditional, Biblical marriage—yet all this has been ignored and excused away.

As President, Trump has offered the public ongoing and unapologetic pursuit of flagrant sins of the flesh. He has celebrated pride, cruelty, materialism, violence, and dishonesty, leading scores of others to embrace such evils. Yet evangelical leaders have looked the other way and celebrated this man, regardless of his past, present, or promises for the future.

It’s incredibly ironic to think about how several signatories of the Nashville Statement have excused away Trump’s abominable character. And when I go back to reread the “Declaration concerning religion, ethics, and the crisis in the Clinton presidency”--the 1998
document created and signed by dozens of theologians after Clinton’s sex scandal (https://www.layman.org/news86fd/)--I can’t help but feel a sinking sort of political despair. When it suited our political ends, we were bold to decried moral offenses that we now excuse en masse because the offender is a Republican.

After watching the 2016 election, I can't help but believe that men like Eric Metaxas, Jerry Fallwell Jr., Franklin Graham, and James Dobson would rally around a LGBTQ candidate in 2024, comparing him to Biblical heroes and calling him God’s salvation, if that candidate were simply Republican enough. Maybe that’s too cynical. But if you had told me that James Dobson would be campaigning for Donald Trump back in the good old days, I would have thought you were absolutely nuts.

So, if the evangelical right had any business drawing up a statement on LGBTQ morality (which we probably did), we had just as much business drawing up a statement on the perverse behavior of evangelical pastors during election season. That’s not just a cheap tu quoque, it’s an acknowledgement of a massive elephant that stands in any room in which evangelicals attempt to talk about morality post Trump. I might read the Nashville Statement and agree (technically) with most of it—but I’m also reminded of a mom I once saw smacking her kid in a Wal-Mart while angrily yelling, “Don’t you EVER lose your temper and hit people again!”

So I see both sides of this one. I see why theologians are feeling the need to unite and resist the punitive tsunami of the politically-active side of the LGBTQ movement— a movement that will not be satisfied until it saturates every corner of American culture with its single, unrelenting angle on human morality. I also see why thoughtful Christians think a written statement feels thin and hypocritical—especially now—and especially after all the wrongs we’ve done.

I understand why thoughtful Christians are agitated by the whole thing, wishing for more active reliance on the Truth embodied--why they are tired of words and politics, thirsty for the living gospel, feeling little hope that any mega-statement signed by a troupe of famous white men might have any sort of power to change the world.

I get this ache--not because I'm a relativist who is tremblingly nervous about declaring homosexuality unBiblical--but because I don't know that evangelicals post election 2016 have enough cultural credibility left in the bank for words to do much good. So much of American culture is inflamed to extremes right now, and evangelizing our nation is going to require a far more embodied gospel than any written treatise can provide. I see why the document was created. I'm also skeptical that it might bring any meaningful sort of change to our nation.

What do we do, then? Well, I think it's a super good time to be reading Andrew Murray, Corrie ten Boom, and the New Testament. All those good promises about Christ living in us, indwelling us, directing us moment-by-moment couldn’t fall upon a more thirsty, desperate season. Because If Jesus isn’t real---if the Holy Spirit isn’t guiding hearts that are wholly yielded to a God who has a plan for every step we take--all the networking and posturing in the world won’t get us out of this. America is too messed up for political strategies to work now. We need God’s active rescue, his daily leadership, his constant provision desperately.

No matter how brave we are, no matter how smart we are, no matter how united we are--nothing else but the indwelling presence of Jesus is able to save us now. Even if a legitimate political threat drove the creation of the Nashville Statement--we must not trust it to do what only the living Truth can.

Karl Marx and Our Divided America

I received one of the best questions I’ve ever received from a blog reader this week, so instead of replying in a comment, I’d like to devote an entire post to my answer.

A reader named Allen wrote to say:

“I would love to hear your thoughts on the influence of Social Marxism and the efforts to foment and manipulate some of the deep connotations of both the left and the hard right to bring chaos and deconstruction.”

First off, it did my heart great good to hear that someone in America is even thinking along these lines. Bravo.

Secondly, I wish I had time and space to devote to a longer answer, but the best I can do at this super busy stage of life is throw out a few bullet points and related comments. Perhaps these will at least give you direction for more research.

1. Marxism vs. Marxism vs. Communism and Socialism

If you’ve read Karl Marx’s writings, you know that they vary enough to be organized into at least two eras (pre-Engels and post Engels). Marx’s early manuscripts (known as the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts or The Paris Manuscripts) were published in 1844 and were hidden from the public eye for almost 100 years. Marx never referred to them in his later writings. Those early manuscripts had a big impact on Western intellectuals.

Marxist theories that resulted from Marxist writings split into more subcategories after his death. When we talk about Marxism today, we might be talking about Classical Marxism, Marxism-Leninism, Western Marxism, Libertarian Marxism, Structural Marxism, Neo-Marxism, Cultural Marxism, Analytical Marxism, Post-Marxism, Marxist Humanism, or Marxist Feminism.

And while there are similarities among Marxism, Communism, and Socialism, Americans tend to err by using these terms interchangeably. I am not going to distinguish between these philosophies in this post, but I want to at least acknowledge that there are differences.

2. Some Time Well Spent

When the Emergent Church began to appear on the landscape of evangelicalism, I was concerned that modern voices were beginning to echo the Social Gospel of Walter Rauschenbusch (early 1900’s). In fact, I found uncited sentences that were nearly verbatim Rauschenbush in several emergent writings. While it’s true that the church should bring the the Kingdom ethic to the earth, the Social Gospel is riddled with grave theological error. I won’t make time to unpack those errors here, but I will urge you to spend time with two sources that may shed light on how political evil intends to commandeer the church.

The first is an interview with former KGB agent and defector Yuri Bezmenov (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zgmg2VFX058 ). Yes, this video is old. Yes, every single American should spend the hour and a half needed to watch Bezmenov explain how enemies of democracy can maneuver a government and its people to gain power. Even if you think Russian aggression is no longer a threat to the United States, the practical instruction you will gain from hearing about Russian cultural strategy is vital. Every Christian (Republican, Democrat, and independent) needs this information to grow in awareness about how the cause of Christ might be manipulated for worldly ends.

The second resource is a little more obscure. It's a list of 45 Communist Goals entered into the Congressional record in 1963 after they were given in a speech by U.S. Representative Albert Sydney Herlong Jr.. (Liberal readers might find it interesting that Herlong was, in fact, a Democrat. As you read the list, remember that.) http://nwlibertyacademy.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/communist_goals.pdf . Whether or not these goals were ever official, it’s fascinating to see how many have come to pass in the past 54 years. And it's helpful to at least think about why each step might (or might not) be important in undermining a democracy.

3. Intentional Unrest

Stirring up internal cultural chaos is almost always a declared goal of opposition forces, and we should be aware of the vulnerability of our own reactivity. When discussing this matter, our fingers should not simply be pointed at young people taking to the streets en masse, but also to the highest office in the land, and to every political leader who has built a platform on vitriol.

I do not know where the deep, secret allegiance of our leaders takes root, but even an unintended personal weakness (such as Narcissistic Personality Disorder) can feed the chaos that is beneficial to America’s enemies. This is why it is vital that our leaders maintain a dignified and mature presence on social media. Words have consequences, and any true patriot would be wise to remember that while rhetorical boldness can be as inspiring as one of Churchill's speeches, it can also be as foolish as any "Hold my beer" redneck with a handful of lit firecrackers on YouTube. Loud and proud doesn't equal wise and trustworthy.

4. None of this complexity excuses Americans from taking a stand for essential human morality.

The proper response to this tenuous social context is not silence. We are to speak truth—even hard and costly truth—into the public sphere firmly, wisely, and repeatedly. Furthermore, the evasive move of answering the KKK with “But BLM...” does not remedy the essential problem America faces. We must call evil evil and not allow reactive bifurcation fallacies (which benefit our enemies) to determine our course.

That’s all I have time to offer for now, but I will try to give more another day.

Allen, thanks for your good question. For now, readers, please be shrewd as serpents and innocent as doves. Not only is it right and good to take the time to be informed about the complexity of our situation, educating ourselves is the second-most patriotic effort Christians can make for our nation at this time. The first, of course, is to live in complete submission to our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.