Is it Time for a New Morality?

Posted on December 31, 2016 by salooper57

Attitudes about the morality or immorality of various lifestyle choices are in constant flux. It may be that opinions about what is morally acceptable have always been fluid, but the current of change is moving faster today than ever before.

The increased speed of change is arguably related to society’s connectivity through broadcast and social media and to its lack of connectivity through the more permanent institutions of family, church and community. Today’s Americans are exposed to a continual storm of public opinion, and many no longer find refuge in home or church.

According to recent Gallup polls, what Americans think is moral or immoral has been changing across all age groups. The number of people who believe it is morally acceptable to view pornography has jumped by 30 percentage points in little more than a decade, including nearly half of those between 18 to 34.

Acceptance of premarital sex in general and sex between teens in particular has risen dramatically since 2002. Having children outside marriage, once under strong moral prohibition, is no longer even regarded as a moral issue by most people. Americans today are far more likely to grant the morality of gay and lesbian relations than they were just a decade ago.

Opinion shifts regarding issues of human sexuality are most obvious, but there have also been significant changes of opinion regarding non-sexual matters. For example, more people now consider doctor-assisted suicide to be a morally acceptable option. Fewer people regard the use of embryonic stem cells as morally unacceptable.

It is not just that people are accepting, frog-in-the-kettle like, behaviors that were once considered morally reprehensible. They are also rejecting behaviors that were once considered morally acceptable or at least neutral. Using ethnically insensitive language is now considered a serious moral failure. A growing number of people see the death penalty as morally reprehensible. The number of Americans who consider medical testing on animals to be immoral has increased by 14 percent since 2002.

What was once considered grossly immoral by most of the population now enjoys moral acceptance and, conversely, what was once considered normal by most people is now regarded by many as immoral. The North Carolina bathroom law is a case in point.

Based on the fluidity of moral opinion in history, some people have concluded that morality is a merely human construct and is entirely subjective. Others maintain that the great body of moral beliefs has remained consistent over time, suggesting an objective morality exists that transcends human opinion. They argue that moral beliefs are like the ocean. The surface is often roiled and undulating but the great depths remain the same.

Although ethicists have not been able to come to agreement on the nature of morality, it is hard for anyone to deny that humans are moral beings through and through. In the 1950s, many people (including ethicists) considered homosexuals to be moral degenerates. In the second decade of the 21st century, many people (including ethicists) consider homophobes to be moral degenerates. What remains true, however, is that humans cannot escape the sense that some things are right and some are wrong. Whether new morality or old, there is always some morality.

Some biologists have tried to explain this inescapable moral compunction through evolutionary theory, though many ethicists have found their explanations philosophically unsophisticated and unconvincing. Even if evolutionary theory could explain how behaviors came to be considered right or wrong on prudential grounds, it fails to provide a bridge capable of supporting the weighty transition to genuine moral values.

It is highly unlikely that an evolutionary past could push us into our current moral state. It is also doubtful that morality has simply been thrust upon us from above by the threat of divine judgment, for this too would reduce morality to nothing more than prudent self-interest.

That’s not the morality we know, which always develops relationally. At its core is the longing to be right with others, including (most notably) the Creator. An evolutionary past cannot push us into morality nor can divine fiat pressure us into it, but God’s gracious invitation to relationship and to wholeness can draw us to it.

First published in The Coldwater Daily Reporter, 12/31/2016

Posted in Christianity, Faith, In the News, Lifestyle, Marriage and Family | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

The Day That Christmas Died

Posted on December 24, 2016 by salooper57

The so-called “War on Christmas” has been prosecuted for the past few years around the United States. It started with community leaders removing nativity scenes from town squares because of complaints from non-Christians, mostly atheists. Then came Walmart’s notorious instruction to employees to wish people “Happy Holidays” rather than “Merry Christmas.” Last year, when Starbuck’s changed the design of their holiday cup (which changes every year), some people saw it as another sneak attack on Christmas.

Whether any of this denotes a war on Christmas is a matter of debate. Non-Christians think their Christian counterparts need to stop being so paranoid, and some Christians agree. The popular Christian author Rachel Held Evans made light of Christians who feel persecuted because someone wished them a happy holiday rather than a merry Christmas: “You are not being persecuted,” she wrote. Yet others disagree, claiming that the “War on Christmas” is just one battlefield in a larger war on Christianity.

Is there really a war on Christmas? It is hard to be sure. We may be witnessing an intentional assault on Christmas or we may just be seeing the collapse of Christian traditions generally, brought on by stress or old age, crumbling like a medieval cathedral. That is just the kind of thing Malcom Muggeridge predicted in his prophetic lecture series from 1978 entitled “The End of Christendom.” As Christendom collapses under its own weight, valued traditions will inevitably fall with it.

Whether we are currently living through a “war on Christmas” may be up for debate, but there can be no debate that Christmas has been victimized by war in the past. It was on December 25, 1647 that Christmas was reportedly killed.

“Christmas” (probably an assumed name) was a demonstrator in Ipswich, England, who had taken to the streets to protest a law passed in June of that year that made the celebration of Christmas a punishable offence. “Christmas” was reportedly killed by police in the ensuing riot, just as Christmas had been reportedly killed by an act of Parliament in the House of Commons.

In London on that same day, a crowd of laborers decorated the water tower with holly and ivy. When the police ordered them to disperse and they refused, troops were sent in to quell the riot. On that same day in Canterbury, where Christmas celebrations were an integral part of the city’s identity, rioters smashed the windows of shops that opened on Christmas Day.

The war on Christmas had begun eighty years earlier in the anti-popish Kirk of Scotland. There was a truce in the early 1600s, but it broke out again with a furor in the 1630s. In 1642 there was a genuine civil war between the king and Parliament, in which the royalists upheld the celebration of Christmas and the Parliament, led by Cromwell and others, rejected it.

The fascinating thing is that both sides, the pro-Christmas demonstrators and the anti-Christmas legislators, insisted that their views represented a biblical perspective. Unlike the current so-called “war on Christmas,” this one was being waged by so-called Christians. The celebration of the birth of Christ had become the occasion of violence against Christians, and had done so without any help at all from antagonistic “heathens.”

If we are indeed going through another war on Christmas, it is hardly the first. Christmas has been attacked by Puritans in England, by atheists in France (who referred to it as “Dog Day” after the revolution), by Soviets in the wake of Red October, by Chinese communists and many others (including, incidentally, the City of Boston during the late 17th century).

What should people who care about Christmas do when they see its importance being challenged? They should remember the distinction between Christmas and the event it celebrates. Throughout history, the celebration of Christmas has been marked by absurdities from within and violence from without. It has experienced the ebb and flow of popularity. But the event it commemorates stands undiminished. No assault on Christmas can ever undo what has been accomplished through the birth of Christ.

And that’s something to celebrate.

First published in The Coldwater Daily Reporter, 12/24/2016

Posted in Christianity, In the News, Theology | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Need Help Getting Ready for Christmas?

Posted on December 21, 2016 by salooper57

If you’re been wrapping presents but haven’t really wrapped your head around Christmas yet, you might want to listen to the Christmas sermons from Decembers 4 (The Story Behind the Story), December 11 (The Man from Heaven) and December 18 (The Counter-Attack). You can listen here.  http://lockwoodchurch.org/media

Merry Christmas!

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

A Christmas Case of Mistaken Identity

Posted on December 17, 2016 by salooper57

You either love Christmas or you hate it, or you do both at different times. The playwright George Bernard Shaw clearly hated it. He wrote, “Christmas is forced upon a reluctant and disgusted nation by the shopkeepers and the press; on its own merits it would wither and shrivel in the fiery breath of universal hatred.”

Christopher Hitchens was another Christmas-hater. He referred to it as a “moral and aesthetic nightmare.” His ambition was “to write an anti-Christmas column that becomes fiercer every year …” James S. Henry wrote that “the Grinch has it right,” and called Christmas “a short-run-oriented economic experiment that has been tried and found wanting.”

Christmas is brought up on the same charges annually: greed, corruption, misappropriation of funds, and contributing to the delinquency of minors. And Christmas is annually found guilty in the court of public appeal, not just by intellectuals and atheists but by our neighbors and friends who sit down the pew from us. They say, “I can’t wait until Christmas is over. The whole thing is just insane.”

If I were the public defender assigned to represent Christmas, I would begin my defense by admitting that a crime has taken place. Shaw was not wrong: The corporate shopkeepers have bullied and lied and coerced people into misappropriation of funds. Monies that should have been used to save for college or pay taxes have been spent on ridiculous and transitory Christmas gifts that will be forgotten or lost before Easter.

I’ll even agree with Hitchens. For many people, Christmas is a moral nightmare. When the Black Friday gang tramples and swears and engages in hand to hand combat in order to get Tickle-Me-Elmo for their two-year-olds, the moral universe has turned upside-down.

I will not deny the fact that these crimes and moral outrages have taken place. But I will deny that Christmas was the perpetrator. This has clearly been a case of mistaken identity.

Christmas bears no responsibility for the secular frenzy that takes place each December. It is not the Spirit of Christmas but the spirit of greed that stirs up the ravenous appetite for more and bigger gifts. It is not the Spirit of Christmas that causes mini-van driving moms to bust jaws over some Walmart door-buster. Christmas has never forced people – or even invited them – into the feverish pursuit of holiday perfection that characterizes December in America.

It is not Christmas that does these things, but an imposter. Christmas was and still is the celebration of the birth of the savior God sent humanity. Christmas is like the commemoration of D-Day in France: a grateful celebration of a rescue. But this invasion took place in Bethlehem not Normandy, and liberation came through a baby not an army.

We celebrate Christmas because it marks the beginning (from our perspective, not God’s) of the most remarkable and costly rescue effort in history. Jesus was born, it will be remembered, to “save his people from their sins” and bring them peace with God. The birth of Jesus is the promise of liberation.

Christmas, like D-Day, was an opening volley. There would be pushback and various campaigns. There would be allies and adversaries and, in the end, a decisive battle. But Christmas remains the watershed moment that marks not only the liberation of humanity but of all creation.

Imagine what it would be like if the commercialization of Christmas were to infect the annual celebration of D-Day. Try to envision the French and U.S. presidents, the crown prince of England and dignitaries from all over the world gathered at the American cemetery in Normandy. While the Archbishop of Rouen says an invocation, hawkers peddle souvenirs? People ring bells and ask for money. Raffle tickets are circulated. Crowds gather not to remember D-Day but to buy worthless trinkets and vote on the best decorated veteran.

None of that would change what happened on Utah Beach, nor could you blame the gauche celebration on the men who landed there. Likewise, our Christmas celebration doesn’t change what happened in Bethlehem, and you certainly can’t blame the baby for it. That’s not on him. It’s on us.

 

First published in The Coldwater Daily Reporter, December 17, 2016

Posted in Christianity, Faith, Lifestyle, Theology | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

“Red Letter Christianity” and the Bible

Posted on December 10, 2016 by salooper57

Tony Campolo and Shane Claiborne recently published an op-ed piece in the New York Times titled, “The Evangelicalism of Old White Men Is Dead.” They write that evangelicalism (or at least its reputation) is a “casualty” of the recent presidential election. They believe it is time to bury evangelicalism and replace it with a more authentic expression of Christian faith.

Campolo and Claiborne regard the fact that 80 percent of white evangelical Christians voted for Mr. Trump as evidence that evangelicalism has been poisoned by self-interest. Its reputation “has been clouded over.” How, they wonder, could people who take Jesus seriously ever vote for a man whose campaign was marked by “racism, sexism, xenophobia,” and “hypocrisy”?

Campolo and Claiborne have been heroes to young evangelicals. They have consistently called Christians to live in obedience to Jesus’s words, stressing above all the care for the poor that Jesus advocated. In calling Christians to actually do what Jesus told them to do, they have done a service to the church generally and to its evangelical arm in particular.

But when they go on to call for a new movement to replace evangelicalism, a movement they refer to as “Red Letter Christianity,” I fear they are doing the church a disservice. If they ‘re calling people to listen to Jesus’s instructions and obey them, great. That is key to a flourishing life, and the heart of being Jesus’s disciple. But if they are suggesting that Jesus’s words “trump” the rest of the Bible or that they can be used to negate earlier and later revelation, they are propagating a dangerously misguided idea.

The people I’ve known who have identified as “Red Letter Christians” have done just that. They have attributed to Jesus’s words, as recorded in the gospels, greater authority than the words of Moses, the prophets and the apostles. This tends to play out in a particular way: what Jesus said is granted divine authority (as it should be) and what he didn’t say is regarded as a subject non grata. The absence of words from Jesus on a particular subject are taken as the last word on that subject.

The “Red Letter Christians” I have known have not taken Jesus’s words more seriously than other Christians. They have just taken other biblical words less seriously and, in some cases, refused to take them at all. I don’t think this is what Claiborne and Campolo are advocating, but others may.

Much of what Claiborne and Campolo say is thoroughly biblical and, what’s more, is biblical in a way that evangelicals in the age of Trump need to hear. But presenting it in a way that plays Jesus’s words against the rest of scripture is a theological error of the first order.

For one thing, Jesus’s words, spoken in Aramaic, were translated into Greek and later into Latin and the modern languages, which means that we have Jesus’s words only through the medium of others. The idea that Jesus’s words exist in some kind of vacuum is neither biblical nor logical.

For another, Jesus’s words were remembered and passed on by some of the very people who wrote other parts of the Bible, parts that some “Red Letter Christians” choose to ignore. We are dependent on others. Without the testimony of the apostles and the painstaking research of the evangelists, we would know nothing of Jesus’s life and teaching. If it wasn’t for the people who wrote the black letters, we wouldn’t have the red ones.

The idea that we understand Jesus better than his contemporaries and can interpret what he said through our cultural lens more accurately than the people he chose to be with him and carry on his work is a self-conceit.

It is a first principle of Christian theology that the entire canon of scripture is God-inspired and is of a piece. Yes, there is progress to the revelation, and one scripture can cast light on another, but one scripture cannot be used to contravene another. Not even if it is written in red letters.

Campolo and Claiborne are right about failures within the evangelical movement and may even be right about it being time to move away from it. But it is not time to move away from the Bible – red letters or black.

First published in The Coldwater Daily Reporter, 12/10/2016

Posted in Christianity, Faith, In the News | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 4 Comments

An American Brand of DIY Spirituality

Posted on December 3, 2016 by salooper57

For decades pollsters consistently reported that 40 percent of Americans were in church on any given Sunday. But a long-term count of actual attendance in real churches suggests that good Christian people weren’t telling pollsters the truth, and actual church attendance was only half of what was being reported.

So are fewer people going to church today than in the past? No, there are about the same number of people attending church today as were attending in 1990. But the population in the U.S. has grown by more than 25 percent since then, which means there are not fewer people going to church but there are more people not going to church. The overall percentage of worshipers has dropped significantly.

And according to some experts, the people who do attend church regularly are attending less often than they did in the past. One church denominational executive told me that it is now necessary for a church to grow by ten percent a year in order to maintain last year’s average attendance.

People who once attended church weekly are now attending every other week. People who went twice a month are now attending once a month. This change in behavior indicates more than a lifestyle change. It reveals a theological shift. In the past these people saw church attendance as essential but they now see it as optional.

It needs to be said that this theological shift may not be all bad. If people thought of church attendance as a kind of extortion money paid to God to stay on his good side, losing that belief was a step in the right direction. Likewise if church attendance was merely a means to an end like social acceptance. Nevertheless, the idea that gathering with the church is merely one option among many is theologically unsupportable.

There are undoubtedly many factors driving this change in church attendance. One of those factors may be the rise of a new kind of spirituality in America, influenced by the spread of Eastern religions and New Age mysticism, and coupled with a robust American individualism. This rise in Eastern philosophies has coincided with a decrease in denominational identity and influence, and has manifested itself in a particularly American brand of do-it-yourself spirituality.

In do-it-yourself spirituality, church attendance is entirely optional. Such thinking betrays a serious theological confusion. Of course God’s acceptance is not conditioned upon whether a person sits in a pew every week, but then sitting in a pew was never about God’s acceptance in the first place. Christians don’t gather with the church to raise their credit rating with God.

Theologically speaking, church is not something people do once a week or once a month, depending on preference. Church is something people are, or at least something people are a part of. The idea that a Christian can have Christ without the church disregards the biblical witness. Christ and his church are a package deal.

That’s not to say that attendance is the sole mark of membership in the church. It is not. Some who are the church cannot attend its meetings. Some who attend its meetings are not the church. But when those who are the church do not want to gather with the church, something has gone seriously wrong.

The church – not the building or the organization, but the people united to Christ by faith and in consequence are united to each other – are being fashioned into the perfect instrument through which God can make himself known. This is what St. Paul was talking about when he wrote, “We are carefully joined together in him, becoming a holy temple for the Lord … a dwelling in which God lives by his Spirit.”

This is not DIY spirituality. It’s a fallacy for people to think they can encounter God on their own terms. It’s more than a fallacy; it’s idolatry. If they want to meet God, they would be wise to go where he has chosen to meet them. True, that does not mean a church building or church service, but it does mean the community of children, women, and men who are united to Christ and to each other by God’s Spirit. It means the church.

First published in The Coldwater Daily Reporter, 12/3/2016

Posted in Christianity, Church, In the News, Lifestyle, Spiritual life, Theology | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

On the Anniversary of the Death of C. S. Lewis

Posted on November 26, 2016 by salooper57

A Google search for C. S. Lewis will produce nearly 58 million hits. If a person were to look at each site for 30 seconds, then go on to the next one, and do this without stopping to eat or sleep or take any kind of a break, it would take over 50 years. But by then there may be an additional 50 million hits, and so one would have to start over.

The celebrated Oxford don is more popular today, 53 years after his death, than ever before. Over a hundred million Lewis books have been sold. His Narnia fantasies have been made into major motion pictures, and Lewis’s story has been told on television and in theaters. Scholarly papers subject his work to academic scrutiny at colloquiums and conferences all over the world. C. S. Lewis has become an industry.

What would he think of all this? The answer, I think, is that he would try not to think of it. Once, when Walter Hooper asked Lewis if he ever gave thought to his bourgeoning reputation, Lewis answered in a “low, still voice, and with the deepest and most complete humility I’ve ever observed in anyone, ‘One cannot be too careful not to think of it.’”

I have been a student of C. S. Lewis for many years. I’ve read his fiction, his Christian non-fiction, his academic books on literary criticism, his essays and even his collected letters. Lewis has been one of the two or three most important teachers in my life. So when I recently was asked to be guest instructor for a home school co-op class on Great Christians, with the assignment of introducing students to C. S. Lewis, I jumped at the chance.

Students were impressed by the fact that the celebrated scholar suffered painful loss and ongoing trials, just like all the rest of us. The “joyful Christian,” as he has been called, endured great hardships, beginning with his childhood in Belfast, Ireland, and continuing until his premature death, one week before his 65th birthday.

Lewis’s mother died when he was nine. A short time later his attorney father sent him to a boarding school, the first of several disastrous school experiences to which he was subjected. The relationship with his father was always distant, and frequently trying.

Lewis succeeded in winning a scholarship to University College, Oxford, but within a few months of his arrival was inducted into the army and sent to fight in France in the First World War. The young Lewis, now an avowed atheist, was wounded at Somme. His friend, “Paddy” Moore, was killed. Lewis had promised Moore that he would take care of his mother, which he did until her death, but it was a complicated relationship that became very vexing.

Lewis was a man with many friends, but his “dearest and closest friend” was his brother Warren. Warren (or Warnie, as he was called) was a career military man, but when he was in England the brothers shared a house. Lewis was deeply devoted to his brother, but his brother’s ongoing battle with alcoholism was a painful trial that sometimes left him at a complete loss.

There were other losses and trials. Lewis grieved deeply the sudden and unexpected death of his “great friend, friend of friends…Charles Williams.”  At Oxford Lewis was continually passed over for a professorship because of his very public Christian faith. His friend J.R.R. Tolkien complained that “Oxford has not…treated [Lewis] very well.”

Lewis faced grief, relationship problems, and professional disappointments, but his greatest hardship was the death of his wife Joy. Lewis didn’t marry until the last decade of his life, but he developed a profound love for his wife. She was diagnosed with cancer, went briefly into remission (in what may have been the happiest time in Lewis’s life), and then suddenly died.

The brilliant thinker, remarkable scholar, engaging writer, and influential Christian was also a man who suffered trial and loss. Yet he remained joyfully hopeful. It was this Lewis who impressed my students, and who has impressed me. It is this Lewis I hold in highest esteem.

First published in The Coldwater Daily Reporter, 11/26/2016

Posted in Faith, In the News | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | 4 Comments

Now That the Election Is Over, What Should We Do?

Posted on November 19, 2016 by salooper57

I refused to support Donald Trump in the primaries and in the general election. I was sure he was the wrong person for the job. (For clarification: I was equally certain that Hillary Clinton was the wrong person.) So what should I do now that Mr. Trump is President-elect Trump? I should support him.

Don’t get me wrong. The election did nothing to change my mind. I still think he is the wrong person to sit in the oval office. The support I am ready to offer is not contingent upon any change of mind Mr. Trump might make or change of policy he might institute. It is based on my responsibilities both as a citizen of this country and as a disciple of Jesus. Had Mrs. Clinton been elected instead of Mr. Trump, I would do the same thing.

The fact is, I did the same thing when Mr. Obama was elected in 2008. Though I was impressed with the man, I was not impressed with some of his policies, and voted for his opponent. But when he was elected, I gave him my support and publicly encouraged others to do the same.

It would be a mistake, however, to confuse giving support with giving approval. Over the last eight years, I have both supported the president and objected to his policies. Support does not imply turning a blind eye to wrongs and injustices. That is not support at all; it is partisanship.

I intend to show Mr. Trump the same support I’ve shown President Obama, and would have shown Secretary Clinton, had she been elected. Furthermore, I think it is incumbent upon every Christian to do the same. In fact, I think it is a rejection of biblical teaching to do otherwise.

St. Paul ministered and wrote during the reigns of at least two Roman emperors, Claudius and Nero. It was during the reign of the latter, who was infamous for his hostility to Christians, that the apostle wrote, “I urge, then, first of all, that requests, prayers, intercession and thanksgiving be made for everyone—for kings and all those in authority,..” Paul urged Christians to pray for the very emperor who provoked anti-Christian sentiment, sanctioned persecution and eventually (either directly or indirectly) ordered the apostle’s execution.

Prayer is a big part of the support Christians are required to give their nation’s leaders, but it is not all. St. Peter, who may also have been martyred during Nero’s reign, told his fellow Christians to submit themselves “for the Lord’s sake … to the king, as the supreme authority.” Likewise, St. Paul wrote, “Everyone must submit himself to the governing authorities…”

This submission is not docility or mindless obedience. It helps where it can, by prayer and by compliance and, sometimes, even by prophetic rebuke. It is possible to submit and speak one’s mind at the same time, for submission is not silence. There is a long history in the biblical faiths of speaking inconvenient truths to national leaders in the name of God and for the sake of people.

Biblical submission is thorough-going but it is not unconditional. It is conceivable that situations could arise in which Christians must respectfully refuse to comply with governmental rulings. When the authorities arrested the apostles Peter and John and placed them under a gag order, the apostles refused to obey. They said, “Judge for yourselves whether it is right in God’s sight to obey you rather than God. For we cannot help speaking about what we have seen and heard.” When obedience to the civil authorities requires disobedience to God, civil disobedience is not only permitted, it is required.

Another way Christians provide support to the governing authorities is by treating them with respect. I have sometimes been horrified by the disrespect and contempt self-identified followers of Jesus have shown President Obama. St. Peter commands Christians to “honor the king.” We don’t have a king, but the principle applies. Disrespect and contempt are never appropriate from a Christian, not toward a Democrat or a Republican, a president or a child. It is simply not the way of Christ.

First published in The Coldwater Daily Reporter, 11/19/2016

Posted in Christianity, Faith, In the News, Spiritual life | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | 7 Comments

Confessing Jesus Is a Revolutionary Thing to Do

Posted on November 12, 2016 by salooper57

A paradigm is a mental model about how things are or how they work. Until recently (in historical terms), almost all humans held a mental model in which the earth was the center of the cosmos and around it the sun and stars moved in their orbits. Copernicus suggested that this was a false paradigm, an inaccurate model of how things actually are.

People initially scoffed at the suggestion. They could not visualize a model in which a spinning earth moved around the sun. Theologians, long accustomed to a geocentric universe, even deemed the idea blasphemous and unbiblical. After all, hadn’t Joshua commanded the sun – and not the earth – to stand still?

When we humans see something a certain way for any period of time, our brains begin to filter out any information that does not correspond to our understanding. Even when we realize that some facts don’t fit, we take for granted that the problem lies with the facts and not with our understanding. This is true of all people, whether modern or primitive, religious or irreligious, highly intelligent or mentally challenged.

There is a paradigm, which persists even in the irreligious world, in which humans earn a reward by doing enough good deeds to outweigh their bad deeds. In western cultures the reward is usually eternal life in heaven. In eastern cultures the reward is sometimes an upwardly mobile reincarnation. In both cultures, the world in which these good and bad deeds are carried out is viewed as morally neutral.

When I first became a Christian, churches were still singing a children’s song that fit snugly into this false paradigm. It went like this: “Climb, climb up sunshine mountain, heavenly breezes blow. Climb, climb up sunshine mountain, faces all aglow. Turn, turn from sin and doubting, look to God on High. Climb, climb up sunshine mountain, you and I.”

In this paradigm people are faced with an arduous task (climbing higher) in what can be a difficult place (a mountain). But the sun is shining down on them and they just need to keep climbing – keep improving. The biblical paradigm is somewhat different. People may be on a mountain or they may be in a valley but in either case, the mountain and the valley are in enemy-held territory. The world is not neutral.

In the biblical paradigm, people may be born into pleasant circumstances or painful, wealth or poverty, polite society or brutish savagery, but whatever their immediate circumstances, they are born into a rogue spiritual state under illegitimate rule. This is why C. S. Lewis said that “fallen man is not simply an imperfect creature who needs improvement: he is a rebel who must lay down his arms.” Conversion in the biblical paradigm is laying down arms, not turning over a new leaf. It involves believing in a new leader, changing sides, and giving loyalty to a different kingdom.

Conversion is analogous to a person who is born in a nation under an illegitimate government. All her life she’s been told and has believed that things are the way they should be—she just needs to be a better person. But she’s begun to realize this is not true. Then she hears there is an underground, an insurgency, and she’s been invited to join. Will she trust the rightful leader? Will she join him and his side?

Confessing Jesus as Lord is a revolutionary thing to do. It means joining the kingdom of God with its different values and rules and culture. It means trusting God’s acceptance, in spite of one’s offenses, because he offers pardon to rebels through Christ. Conversion doesn’t mean becoming a nicer person but becoming a new person, God’s person, under his rule.

In this paradigm, faith is not just an intellectual assent to a set of dogma, but a life-commitment to God based on confidence in Jesus Christ. That’s why “Genuine conversion is a wrenching experience,” as Dallas Willard once wrote. We who have experienced it are no longer the same, not because religion has improved us but because God has removed us, in St. Paul’s words, “from the kingdom of darkness and transferred us into the Kingdom of his dear son.”

First published in The Coldwater Daily Reporter, 11/12/2016

Posted in Christianity, Faith, Peace with God, Theology | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Election 2016: There Is Still a Ray of Hope

Posted on November 5, 2016 by salooper57

If the philosopher and diplomat Joseph de Maistre was right and every nation gets the government it deserves, one has to ask, in the light of the 2016 election, what America has done to deserve this.

Mrs. Clinton has been around long enough for Americans to know her. She is the wife of a two-term president, has served as senator from New York and has been America’s chief diplomat, the Secretary of State. Anyone who has been in the public eye that long can’t help but provide opponents with ammunition, but Mrs. Clinton has given them weapons of mass destruction.

The list of Mrs. Clinton’s questionable conduct goes back decades: Whitewater, Travelgate, Filegate, and continues into the present with the Clinton Foundation’s pay for play controversy and the email server/email deletion debacle the FBI is currently investigating.

Then there’s the other candidate, Mr. Trump. If I had a daughter, I would not want her to be alone in the same room with him. His deplorable conduct toward women has been documented and broadcast in his own words. But that is only the start. He has repeatedly used lewd and offensive language to talk about women. In a televised presidential debate the man actually boasted about the size of his sexual organ.

Over the course of the campaign, Mr. Trump has questioned a judge’s integrity on the basis of his ethnic background; suggested that the Mexican government is dumping rapists on America in the form of illegal immigrants; mocked Senator John McCain’s experience as a POW in Vietnam; urged people to watch a sex tape featuring a woman who has accused him of harassment; mocked a reporter’s physical disability; and the list goes on and on.

Donald Trump has an overweening pride. He told the press that he could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and wouldn’t lose any voters. On Twitter he wrote, “Sorry losers and haters, but my I.Q. is one of the highest — and you all know it! Please don’t feel so stupid or insecure, it’s not your fault.” At the Republican Convention he claimed that he, and only he, can fix the system.

It is hard to believe that Americans will place one of these two people in the Oval Office. Most people I know are justifying their choice as a vote against a candidate rather than for one. A friend said to me recently, “We aren’t presented with the lesser of two evils. We’re presented with the evil of two lessers.”

When I see Donald Trump in action, I know I can’t vote for this guy. If God opposes the proud, as Bible repeatedly states, where will that leave us if Donald Trump is our leader? It will leave us in a mess. We just can’t have Donald Trump as our next president.

And then I think of Hillary Clinton. If she does what she says she will do, religious freedom will be restricted in unprecedented ways, protections for the unborn will be rescinded, and Supreme Court justices will be appointed not to uphold the Constitution but to advocate liberal views on abortion and LGBT rights. We just can’t have Hillary Clinton as our next president.

But either Clinton or Trump will be our president, banning some inconceivable occurrence. What has America done to deserve a self-righteous, deceitful, greedy, arrogant, or sexually obsessed leader? I suspect that de Maistre would say that America will choose the leader who looks most like her. And that brings us to a painful realization: our candidates are projections of ourselves. In the final analysis, they are not the problem. We are. It’s our deceit and greed and arrogance and sexual obsession that has brought us to this place.

But that painful realization also provides a ray of hope. If the presidential candidates are not the problem, neither are they the solution. We are. If we will humble ourselves and admit this – even if only those of us who claim to be followers of Jesus will do this – we can begin to change the situation. Change doesn’t start in a voting booth. It starts in homes and schools and factories. It starts with us.

First published in The Coldwater Daily Reporter, 11/5/2016

Posted in In the News | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 4 Comments