The Way Home

Writing in the August 13 edition of The Atlantic, Luke Epplin asks, “Must every kids’ movie reinforce the cult of self-esteem?” Epplin bemoans the formulaic sameness of kids’ animated films in which, time and again, the protagonists must “surmount their biggest fears –and believe that their greatness comes from within.”

Epplin rattles of a list of films that stick to this theme, including Kung Fu Panda, Ratatouille, Wreck-It Ralph, Monsters University and two recent releases, Turbo and Planes. In DreamWorks’ Turbo, a snail of the same name works in the tomato garden by day but dreams of racing glory each night. In Disney’s latest kid’s-flick, Planes, Dusty the crop-duster longs to ditch the daily grind and win fame by competing in an illustrious around-the-world race.

Both Turbo and Dusty surmount their fears and achieve their dreams by believing in themselves. Epplin writes, “It’s enough for them simply to show up with no experience at the most competitive races, dig deep within themselves, and out-believe their opponents. They are, in many ways, the perfect role models for a generation weaned on instant gratification.”

Epplin believes that American young people have been stunted by a constant diet of this pablum. “Younger generations,” he says, quoting “Generation Me” by Jean Twenge, “simply take it for granted that we should all feel good about ourselves, we are all special, and we all deserve to follow our dreams.” But this leaves out important information and gives “the false impression that the road to self-actualization isn’t arduous and littered with speed bumps.”

Children are urged to believe in themselves when they should be taught to believe in something bigger than themselves. They are told to dig deep when they should be told to work hard, for unless they work hard they won’t find anything, no matter how deep within they dig.

What happens to the young glory seeker after he has dug deep and believed in himself and still turned out to be … ordinary? Will he find a way to be happy and productive or will his disappointment lead to despair? And even if he is successful in achieving his goal, will his success be enough to sustain a healthy self-esteem over a lifetime?

Consider basketball legend Michael Jordan. In an article this year in ESPN Magazine, Wright Thomson says that Michael’s “self-esteem has always been, as he says, ‘tied directly to the game.’” Jordan worked hard and dug deep, and achieved unparalleled success in his sport. But he no longer has “game,” and he’s restless. When he lost basketball he lost himself.

Unless Michael finds a reason other than basketball to value himself, he will be an unhappy man, vulnerable to depression and even despair. But if a healthy self-esteem cannot be founded on stellar achievements, still less on tired clichés, upon what can it be founded?

Value – whether of things or selves – is dependent upon the desirability of that thing or self to another. In other words, a thing’s value lies outside itself and in the desire of another. A company’s stock, for example, only has value if someone wants it. If no one wants it, it is worthless. But what about a person? Does a person have value if no one wants him or her?

It is often argued that humans are intrinsically valuable, but this does not go far enough. The value of a human self, like the value of anything, lies outside itself and in the desire of another. And humans are desired by another. This is the message of religion generally and of Christianity in particular: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son.”

We are valuable even when other people don’t value us, even when we don’t value ourselves, because God values us. The death of Christ bespeaks the great worth God places on us. He sees more in us than we see in ourselves. Or say rather, seeing a future for us that he intends to create, he invested himself in the reclamation of humanity. That investment makes us priceless. And faith enables us to live in anticipation of the day that investment reaches maturity.

What do Brad Pitt and Hugh Jackman have in common – that is, besides talent, good looks, popularity and wealth? They both grew up in strict Christian families, both went through considerable doubt in their adolescence and both eventually abandoned the faith.

Pitt has said that his doubts came early and revolved around the question of fairness: Why should people born into another religion not “have the same shot at heaven” as those born into Christian families? He eventually substituted faith in himself for faith in Christ: “I had faith that I’m capable enough to handle any situation.”

Jackman grew up in church. It was “sort of [his] life out of school.” His friends came from church. His girlfriends came from church. But when he was around 16 or 17, he began to be bothered by the idea that “all these nonbelievers” were “going to hell.” Jackman still believes in some kind of God and in an afterlife. He meditates twice a day for a half-an-hour at a time, but he has discarded his parents’ faith.

Not many people share the kind of talent and wealth that Pitt and Jackman possess, but many people have experienced the same kind of doubt, and were subjected to it at about the same time of life. Struggles like this with doubt are more common that most people realize.

But church leaders rarely talk about it. Perhaps they fear that talking about it will somehow legitimize it, so they remain quiet. It becomes an unwritten law in churches: Never admit you have doubts.

When a teenager has trouble putting together all the information he has haphazardly gathered over his fifteen or so years – he doesn’t, for example, see how God can be loving and still allow his grandfather to die or how God’s justice and the doctrine of judgment he has heard taught can be reconciled – he begins to experience doubts.

At this point, parents sometimes panic. They tell their teenager he mustn’t have doubts. They urge him to put such thoughts out of his mind and toss religious clichés at him. The apprehension of his parents and the silence of the church lead the young doubter to infer that experiencing doubt is a terrible sin.

None of this relieves doubts. If anything, it increases them. Trying to stifle doubts is like throwing water on a grease fire: it doesn’t put out the fire, it merely splashes it in all directions.

What doubters young and old need to know is that doubt is not a sin; or at least that it is not a sin unless it becomes an excuse – an excuse for laziness or self-indulgence. Doubt provides an opportunity for discovery – Pitt’s and Jackman’s doubts could have led them to further discoveries that might have confirmed their faith, had they only kept looking.

Too often people approach this issue with the idea that doubt and belief exist in an either/or relationship: if we doubt we do not believe and if we believe we do not doubt. They see belief as if it were a kind of light switch that is either on or off.

The reality is that in this life belief is always incomplete. There are areas of unformulated doubt, even in the sincere Christian’s life – though he or she is often surprised by them when they appear. Doubt wages guerrilla-style warfare against belief, waylaying the believer at unforeseen moments in unexpected places.

This should not unsettle the believer too much. Even died-in-the-wool-unbelievers experience doubt. The Oxford professor and former atheist Alexander McGrath has written that even in his vehement denials of faith “a still, small voice within me whispered words of doubt.”

When a person is ambushed by doubts he must not resort to evasion, still less must he give in. He must face his doubts, pray and search out the truth. Doubt will eventually subside, faith will grow stronger and he will be more capable of handling doubt the next time it appears.

Unless it is in a novel, a crime drama or on the big screen, Americans don’t care for mystery. Mysteries defy us, and we do not like to be defied. They perplex and confound us, and we would like to remove them from the earth. Mysteries are not practical, and we are such practical people. Mysteries do not make us money – they may even cost us money – and we really like to make money. Give us five steps to our goal. Don’t give us mystery.

One can see this distaste for mystery in the approach the current generation of Christians – particularly we Evangelicals – take to the faith. We have reduced Christianity to a program: three steps to repentance, four steps to effective prayer and five steps to salvation. Today we write practical books like “31 Days to Happiness” or “The Total Money Makeover,” but no one is writing “The Cloud of Unknowing” or, for that matter, reading it.

With their five alliterated points, our writers and preachers suck the mystery out of things. One writer promises to take the mystery out of the Holy Spirit’s work. Another claims to take the mystery out of knowing God’s will. Yet another offers to take the mystery out of prayer. We buy their books and listen to their sermons because our impulse to solve mysteries is rooted in an almost frantic need to control our environment – even to control God,

And it is right here where we run up against a brick wall. Make that a granite wall. The faith – the world, the universe – is full of mystery. You, the reader, are a mystery – a greater mystery than you have yet dreamed. “Philosophers of other ages,” wrote the philosopher Dallas Willard, “used to say that God had hidden from humans the glory of their own soul, that we might not be overwhelmed by pride.”

Mystery is everywhere, but God himself is the biggest mystery of all. No less an authority than the Apostle Paul tells us so. He writes of “knowing” – not solving – “the mystery of God, namely Christ, in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge” (Colossians 2:2-3). God is not a mystery to be solved. He is a mystery to be adored.

“Mystery” was one of St. Paul’s favorite words. Three out of every four times the word appears in the New Testament, he is the one who uses it. He felt himself surrounded by mystery, and was fascinated by it. He speaks of the “mystery of God,” the mystery of the faith,” “the mystery of Christ,” the mystery “of God’s kingdom,” “of God’s will,” “of the gospel” and “of godliness.”

Paul did not, like some Christian teachers, think it was his job to extinguish all mystery. Such an approach produces narrow-minded people who think that life with God can be explained in four simple laws. Our task is not to explain away the mystery of love, but to adore it. We enter into the mystery of faith the way a man enters the mystery of love for his bride. His goal is not to explicate love but to experience it completely.

The “Five-Points-to-Explain-Everything” approach to Christianity may give people helpful information, but it will not stir their souls. Tell a man that he can master prayer in three easy steps and he will probably not bother – he knows that anything that can be mastered in three steps is not worth mastering.

But tell him that he can spend the rest of his life exploring the mystery of prayer and living its adventure, and you will pique his interest. Call him to change the world by sacrificing himself on the altar of prayer, and you will win your man – if he’s worth winning.

Offer a person five steps to a better Christian life, and he may read them to see if he can learn something. You might possibly catch his attention, but you will not capture his heart. Learning five steps to anything will probably not change a person’s life, but encountering the incomprehensible, awesome and mysterious God certainly will.

The narrative goes like this: The little boy goes to Sunday School each week with his mother, and there he hears stories that stir his young mind. He hears about Adam and Eve, and their great mistake. He hears that their son Cain killed his own brother. He hears that a big fish swallowed a guy named Jonah, only to spit him out on dry land three days later.

The young boy wins prizes for Sunday School attendance and for memorizing Bible verses. When he is eight, he “accepts Jesus into his heart.” During his teenage years he attends the church’s youth group and even serves as its president.

Then at 18 he goes off to college to study English. (He thinks he wants to be a teacher.) But when he leaves college four years later, he no longer calls himself a Christian. He no longer believes in God. He has left all that behind him and now considers Christianity intellectually vacuous.

It’s true that no one actually argued him out of his faith; he was not driven to atheism by compelling arguments. He had begun his journey away from the faith before he knew any arguments, and only found the intellectual support for his departure later. But if reason did not drive him from the faith, what did?

The fact is, nothing drove him from the faith; he drifted from it, carried by the fashionable winds that blow through academia. Because he has since found intellectual support for his position, he likes to think that his decision was purely logical. In reality, he simply went along with the decision some of his professors went along with when they were his age, and for the same reasons.

According to numerous studies, people with high IQs are slightly less likely to be religious. But Jordan Monge, regional director for The Veritas Forum, explains that: “Intelligent people don’t simply reject religion because it’s wrong; they reject it because their social environments lead them to think it’s wrong.”

Monge notes that the sociologist Frank Furerdi, himself an atheist, has warned that in investigating the connection between intelligence and irreligion, “secular researchers are likely to discover what they already suspect, which is a co-relation between their values and high levels of intelligence.” With such a bias in play, “social science research turns into advocacy research.”

When college students hear the narrative repeated – smart kids go off to college and lose their faith – it can become a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. Monge quotes a recollection from the University of Chicago political philosopher Jean Bethke Elshtain, who left the faith for many years, before returning later in life.

In her student days, Bethke Elshtain recalled, “I had slowly but surely inched over to join the company of those who chided those who believed. I decided I was not gullible, like those folks, and if they wanted to cling to wishful thinking, they could certainly do that, but I was at university, after all, where I had learned skepticism, and indeed I had decided that I had become a skeptic myself, joining most of my professors in that designation.”

Bethke-Elshtain did not leave the faith because she decided it was false but because she decided she was not gullible. In conversations with those who have walked away, one often discovers a secondary reason (at least it is represented as such) for their departure. Few are convinced that the faith is untrue. More are convinced that the “faithful” are untrue, or, like Bethke-Elshtain, gullible, or, as is often claimed, hypocritical.

It has been said that Christians are the best evidence that Christianity is true. They are also the best evidence that that Christianity is false. And this is the case whether the person considering Christianity has a high IQ or not.

Published first in The Coldwater Daily Reporter, Saturday, September 7, 2013

Click “From the Pulpit” to find five recent sermons from the Gospel of Luke that have just been added. If you find them helpful, share them with a friend!

Check out the “Music ” page. I’ve posted Dan Hefner’s He’s the Rose and Kevin Looper’s Who’s a God like You? there. (I’ve finally figured out how to post music to the right page. Check it out from time to time.  One of these days – when I get the time and courage – I will post one of my own songs!)

A recently retired Christian college president and his wife were exploring the area surrounding their new home when they noticed a sign for a community church. Since they were looking for a church to connect to, they followed the sign and turned down a country road.

            As they drove slowly by the church, they saw the pastor walking across the lawn from the parsonage, and immediately decided to give the church a try. The reason (according to the college president): the pastor wore a beard.

            I was that pastor and the retired college president, Dr. William Shoemaker, has since become a close friend. The idea that a beard would influence a decision about which church to attend seemed odd, but it turns out that the history of beards and the history of the church are closely linked.

            Ted Olsen, the managing editor for news and online journalism at Christianity Today, has written a brief history of beards in the church. Olsen – who, it should be said, has an excellent beard himself – notes that beards have been a source of contention in the church since the second century. Apparently, the hypostatic union did not provide enough material for Christians to argue about; they also had to argue about the nature of men’s facial hair.

            According to Olsen, the second century Church Father Clement of Alexandria (routinely represented as having a long, pointed and curling beard) called facial hair “the mark of a man.” Other Church Fathers agreed, and some early monasteries refused admittance to beardless men, whom the Abbot Euthymius called “boys with female faces.”

            In the fifth century a rule was adopted stating “no cleric should grow long hair or shave his beard.” But the tide turned in 816 when the Council of Aachen required monks to shave every 15 days. Clergy in the East, though, ignored the ruling and continued to sport facial hair.

            As the years past, the Church in the East and in the West grew apart, and beards became a symbol of which side a particular cleric was on. The Eastern Church looked askance at Western leaders because they regularly shaved. One leader in the West argued that St. Paul’s injunction against long hair applied to beards as well, and pointed out that the prophet Ezekiel shaved.

            The battles continued over the next centuries. When, in 1054, the Patriarch of Constantinople was excommunicated, the list of Eastern heresies recited in the papal bull included the growing of beards. Things were different in the West, where clergy could be distinguished from laymen by their clean-shaven faces.

            In 1547 Thomas Crammer, the great Anglican archbishop, grew a beard as evidence of his break with Catholicism. But there was a price to pay. To increase national revenues, King Henry VIII had imposed a tax on beards. (Let’s hope Congress doesn’t find out about that!)

By the time of the 19^th century, Protestant beards were in full bloom. Many of the century’s most famous preachers wore beards: C. H. Spurgeon, William Booth, C. G. Finney, D.L. Moody, Andrew Murray and A. B. Simpson, to name a few. But beards became less popular in the pulpit as the 20^th century advanced.

During the turbulent 60’s, some Christian schools banned the wearing of facial hair, deeming the beard to be a symbol of rebellion. On my very first day at college, I met a professor who deeply lamented the fact that the administration had rescinded the ban, and he feared the college was headed for hell in a hand-basket – carried no doubt by a student wearing a goatee.

            To beard or not to beard, that is the question – or is it? “The Lord does not look at the things man looks at. Man looks at the outward appearance, but the LORD looks at the heart” (1 Samuel 16:7) Perhaps we should worry more about having a clean heart than a clean face.

For more on beards in Christian history, check out Ted’s Olsen’s article, Wars Over Christian Beards at http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2013/september/wars-over-christian-beards.html

Published in The Coldwater Daily Reporter, 8/31/2013

Related articles

• The Wars Over Christian Beards (christianitytoday.com)

Faith is transformative. Though it may take time for changes to become apparent, a person who comes to believe will be different than he was before he believed. A person who remains unchanged has not believed. This is true whether the object of belief is God or UFOs, though the degree to which one changes will depend on the relative significance or insignificance of the object of one’s faith.

True belief begins to transform a person by introducing a new and cohesive cognitive framework. The believer begins to think in ways that are new to him or her. These new thoughts lead to fresh insights into the way the world works, which makes possible more new thoughts – and so on. In this way, the believer constructs a new lens – German philosophers called it a weltanschauung or worldview – through which he or she sees and interprets the world.

Apart from this change of thinking, changes in behavior will be short-lived. This is why diets don’t work. I can say that I’m going to eat less, but if the way I view food and, especially, the way I view myself doesn’t change, my diet will only last as long as my willpower holds out.

People often think that if they just had more willpower, they could succeed in their efforts to lose weight or stop smoking or go to church. But this is a fallacy. Willpower is to humans what a starter motor is to a car: it gets us going, but it cannot propel us down the road. It takes a bigger motor to do that. For the human, that bigger motor is the mind, not the will.

This principle is apparent in the success of the 12 Step Program. When people “work the steps” they do not increase their willpower, they change their way of thinking. Those who do not succeed in changing their thinking do not continue in recovery.

The Christian faith validates the importance of a change of thinking. In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus’ first public address begins with the word, “Repent.” In biblical thought, to repent is not so much to change one’s behavior as it is to change one’s mind, which is what the Greek word translated “repentance” literally means. The call to repent is an invitation to see God, the world and oneself in a new light.

Jesus and the biblical writers believed that human thought had been corrupted. It could still function, sometimes remarkably well – brilliantly, even – but it was no longer trustworthy. Think of a computer hard drive with corrupted sectors. It can still operate, but will sometimes fail to function at the most critical moments.

The answer to the problem of a corrupted mind is first of all repentance – the gift of God that enables people to see with new eyes – followed by an intentional and gradual renewal of one’s thought processes. So St. Paul urges Christians to reject their former “futile” way of thinking and “be made new in the attitude of your minds.”

Only a renewal of the mind can provide a foundation for personal transformation – that is, for lasting positive change. When Paul urges his readers to resist the temptation to conform to society’s expectations, he explains that they can only do so by undergoing transformation, which depends on the “renewing of your mind.”

The transformation that takes place as one’s mind is renewed is a process. “We … are being transformed,” the apostle says, and we can expect the process to continue throughout life. The extent to which transformation can take place in this life is unknown, but the evidence suggests that sweeping change is possible.

From a Christian perspective, the tools of transformation include the Bible, prayer, meditation, solitude and worship. Wisely employed in the context of repentance and the atmosphere of grace, these practices can change a person’s thinking. And to change a person’s thinking is to change the person.

Published first in The Coldwater Daily Reporter, 8/24/13

I cannot count the times I’ve heard people say, “I don’t know how anyone can look at this world and not believe in God.” But I’ve also known people to say, “I don’t know how anyone can look at the world and still believe in God.” Why is it that two people, both intelligent and well-educated, can look at the same data and come away with different conclusions?

People in the first group look at the world and sees beauty, order and complexity. It is obvious to them that the universe is a work of art and that, therefore, there must be an artist.

People in the second group look at the world and see squalor, injustice and suffering. It is obvious to them that the universe is an accident, formed out of chaos and always on the verge of returning to it.

The first group sees in nature the incredibly delicate balance necessary for physical life, and concludes that the universe was planned by a designer. They see that an increase in the mass of neutrinos (which are 500,000 times smaller than an electron) from 5 x 10^-34 to 5 x 10^-35 would make the universe uninhabitable. They see that if gravity was the tiniest fraction weaker or electromagnetism the tiniest fraction stronger, stars like our sun would not exist – nor would we.

They see these and dozens of other exquisite balances in nature, without which life could not exist, and conclude with certainty that there is a creator. But equally intelligent people look at these remarkable balances and see mere coincidence.

One explanation for these contradictory conclusions may be that people are conditioned by temperament and upbringing to look at different aspects of a situation and so draw different conclusions. One person sees a glass that is half-full and hardly notices that it is also half-empty. A second sees a glass that is half-empty and is blind to the half that is full. A third couldn’t tell you whether the glass is empty or full, but sees every water spot the dishwasher left.

These people not only see different things, they cannot believe that others do not see them as well. The person who believes in God suspects that the unbeliever is willfully obtuse. Otherwise, how could he or she miss the evidence of an intelligent creator? Of course the unbeliever suspects the believer deliberately overlooks the chaotic randomness of disaster and pain. How could anyone believe in God after the 2004 tsunami? Or Hurricane Katrina? Or the genocides in Rwanda and Darfur? The list goes on and on.

Theologians offer a very different way to account for these differences. Rather than interpreting them in terms of temperament or upbringing, they explain them in terms of God’s work in a person’s life. Only if God grants a person the power (or “grace”) to believe, will he be able to do so. Whenever anyone believes, it is always because God has enabled him to do so.

According to this explanation, the difference between John Polkinghorne, the Oxford physicist turned Anglican priest, and Richard Dawkins, the Oxford biologist and outspoken atheist, is that one received grace from God and the other did not. In this view Polkinghorne believes because he has had supernatural help that Dawkins has lacked.

A subset of this view holds that, while a person can only believe if God helps him, God is ready to help everyone. In this version, if a person does not believe it is because he has not availed himself of God’s proffered help. God will leap to the aid of any person, Richard Dawkins included, who chooses to know the truth and pursue it.

Can a person who would like to believe, but whose doubts keeps getting in the way, do anything to get clarity? He can. Even though he isn’t sure whether God is listening, he can ask him for help. Then he can follow up by doing the thing he knows a good and loving God would want him to do. Jesus endorsed this procedure by laying down this principle: “If anyone chooses to do God’s will, he will find out whether my teaching comes from God…” (John 17:7)

First published in the Coldwater Daily Reporter, 8/17/13

Generations of people in the western world were brought up to believe in Jesus. They were taught that he was the good and loving Son of God who died for people’s sins and was resurrected three days later. They seldom think about these claims, but they do believe them.

And not only do they believe in the veracity of the claims, they believe in Jesus. They go beyond acceptance of the propositional truths of Christianity to form a trust-connection with Jesus. They rely on him for help in this life and put their hope in him for the life to come.

This idea of “believing in Jesus” is deeply rooted in the New Testament. The best-known verse in the entire Bible states: “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16). Believing in him (or “into him,” as the original language has it) indicates reliance on a person, not just acceptance of a proposition.

Millions of people – perhaps billions – believe in Jesus in this way. But is it possible to believe in Jesus without believing what he believed?

It certainly seems to be. Many people who claim to believe in Jesus have no idea what Jesus believed. They’ve never read the Gospel accounts of him, nor do they have the slightest idea what he taught.

This ignorance is due, in part, to the unfortunate rift in Protestant Christianity that left conservatives stressing Jesus’ role as savior almost to the exclusion of his role as teacher. The result has been disastrous. People who have rightly trusted Jesus to be their savior have, tragically, never trusted him to be their teacher. They expect him to save them when they die, but they don’t expect him to teach them how to live.

While it is possible to “believe in Jesus” without believing what he believed, it is impossible to obey Jesus without believing what he believed. One cannot consistently follow Jesus’ instructions while holding beliefs that are in conflict with his own.

This explains why so many people who profess faith in Jesus (and do so sincerely) lead lives totally unlike the one to which he called his followers. Whenever Jesus’ instructions are introduced into an incompatible worldview (such as the dominant worldview in western culture), they will seem unrealistic – and sometimes preposterously so. But within the context of Jesus’ own beliefs about God, himself and the world, his instructions make perfect sense.

Jesus told us, “Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth.” But we are storage experts. We store our surplus goods in rented storage units and our extra money in retirement accounts because we believe our future well-being depends on accumulating more and more. But Jesus believed in a God who was attentive to his needs and concerned for his welfare. He was at liberty to share his present resources, whether time or money, because he was confident that his heavenly Father would provide for his future needs.

Or take the requirement that his followers must deny themselves in order to follow him. This flies in the face not only of cultural wisdom, but of personal instinct. But if Jesus was right that self-denial necessarily precedes self-fulfillment – that only a person who loses his (counterfeit) life can ever find his true one – then this instruction is completely logical.

St. John says that “his commands are not burdensome.” That may be true, but they will certainly seem burdensome until the people who “believe in Jesus” actually believe what Jesus believed – and taught.

First published in The Coldwater Daily Reporter, August 10, 2013