Christianity Archives - Page 10 of 12

How to Love Your Neighbor

In Cat’s Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut demonstrated the absolute absurdity of everything, that the world is just one meaningless act after another. (A review of Cat’s Cradle is here.)

What then? His next novel presented a challenge. Does he simply double down on the meaninglessness of everything or is there some way out of this trap?

That novel was God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater. Vonnegut’s universe is still meaningless. But, a meaningless universe creates a new problem.

There are still people living in that meaningless universe. What do you do about all the people living meaningless lives in a meaningless universe but who do not know the universe is meaningless and so don’t know they are just supposed to laugh at how meaningless everything is?

The temptation is just to ignore them. After all, if you are faced with a meaningless universe, why not just enjoy yourself? And if you have wealth and live in a meaningless universe, then why not just hang out with all the Beautiful people, and you and the other wealthy Beautiful people can enjoy a beautiful life in a meaningless universe?

Should you worry about all those other people? Why bother? They are all sort of…repulsive and low-class, anyway…right?

Eliot Rosewater, the Mr. Rosewater of the title of the book, has more inherited wealth than he can spend. And he makes a discovery.

“I look at these people, these Americans,” Eliot went on, “and I realize that they can’t even care about themselves any more—because they have no use. The factory, the farms, the mines across the river—they’re almost completely automatic now. And America doesn’t even need these people for war—not any more, Sylvia—I’m going to be an artist.”
“An artist?”
“I’m going to love these discarded Americans, even though they’re useless and unattractive. That is going to be my work of art.”

That was published in…1965. Imagine a large swath of Americans who have become largely irrelevant. As the Vonnegut surrogate in the novel explains:

“In time almost all men and women will become worthless as producers of goods, food, services, and more machines, as sources of practical ideas in the areas of economics, engineering, and probably medicine too….Americans have long been taught to hate all people who will not or cannot work, to hate even themselves for that. We can thank the vanished frontier for that piece of common-sense cruelty. The time is coming, if it isn’t here now, when it will no longer be common sense. It will simply be cruel.”

So, imagine a society divided with the Good, Beautiful People on the one side and Pointless, Pedestrian, Boring, Low-class people on the other side. Imagine a person from the Good, Beautiful side of the tracks decided to love the latter set of people—and love them not from afar, but actually move into the neighborhood and help them out whenever they had a need, a real immediate need, like needing someone to talk with at 3 AM or someone to help out on the volunteer fire department.

If you knew someone who did that, who walked away from an Ivy League Education to move to a small town in the middle of nowhere, just to live there and be with those people, what would you call someone like that? Insane, perhaps?

And therein is the plot of this Vonnegut novel. Is Eliot Rosewater insane?

It is an eerie book to read these days, by the way. This idea of a whole set of Americans who are angry because they feel useless and ignored and don’t like feeling useless and ignored, well…what would happen if they actually existed and then 50 years later they still actually existed and they were still angry that they felt useless and ignored? Not a rhetorical question, obviously.

So, Vonnegut is providing an interesting answer to his problem from Cat’s Cradle. It is all well and good to say that we live in a pointless world, where there are no higher goals or causes which can give our lives meaning; in fact if you are one of the wealthy, beautiful people, the type of people who have nice college educations and buy books by Kurt Vonnegut, then it is even fun to think about a world like that and imagine we live in a world like that, and even live as if we live a world like that.

But, if you are one of those people out there living in a small town like Rosewater, Indiana, well, you might not be enjoying your life as much as those people reading Cat’s Cradle and laughing at the pointlessness of it all.

And, maybe, just maybe, those people reading Cat’s Cradle should think about what it must be like for those other people and do something crazy like, you know, love them. Not love them from afar in some abstract, “I love humanity” way. But, love them enough to set aside all their privileges and become like one of them.

A radical idea that. Imagine the Social Justice Warrior who instead of joining a non-profit in Downtown Manhattan or a nice College Town and working to solve the world’s problems from a nice one-bedroom apartment near cute vegetarian restaurants, imagine that person just deciding to move to Rosewater, Indiana or the equivalent town in Nowhere America and get a job at Wal-Mart and just live with people and love them. That would be a radical act.

Of course this is all just silly talk. What kind of person would voluntarily set aside all the trappings of a very nice life and endure such humbling as to actually live with, among, and like the lowly, unworthy beings?

Empty yourself and become a servant? Yeah, that would be insane.

The World is Watching the Church

Sometimes a book from a half-century ago is the best way to see the problems of the modern age.

Francis Schaeffer’s The Church Before the Watching World is a book like that.

Schaeffer begins by noting there are two seemingly conflicting principles governing the church:

1. “the principle of the practice of the purity of the visible church in regard to doctrine and life,” and
2. “the principle of the practice of an observable love and oneness among all true Christians regardless of who and where they are.”

So far, so good. It would be very hard to argue that both of those things are not important. If the church abandons any attempt to have correct doctrine, then it is not a church; it is nothing other than a social club. If a church does not manifest observable love and oneness, then it is not a church; it is nothing other than a debate club.

In this short book, published in 1974, Schaeffer is very concerned about the first principle. He looks out at the world and sees the increasing influence of “liberal theology” in the church. In Schaeffer’s telling, liberal theology follows the currents of the secular world. When the secular intellectual world latches onto a new idea, the liberal theologians are right behind exclaiming, “We Christians agree with that too!” Over time, liberal theologians drift farther and farther from orthodox faith.

This worries Shaeffer mightily. How much? Shaeffer describes the worship of Molech, in which parents would place their infant first-born children into a fire burning inside the idol of the god. Pretty gruesome practice. Schaefer: “Modern liberal theology is worse than following the Molech of old.”

Set aside for a moment whether an argument like that was needed in the mid-1970s. Is it needed today?

If you look at the language of church discussion, it is fairly obvious that most Christians believe that is exactly the right sort of language to use. It makes no difference whether the church is Fundamentalist Baptist or a Hip Episcopalian. Both churches spend quite a bit of time making sure everyone knows they are not like those other churches.

And, let’s be honest here, the problem has magnified in the Age of Trump. Sometimes it seems like people pick their church based on which side of the political divide they believe the church falls. Could you go to a church where the pastor or priest supports Trump? Could you go to a church where the pastor or priest opposes Trump? Did you answer either of those questions knowing nothing else about the church in question?

This is a problem. A big problem. And interestingly, Schaeffer describes the problem perfectly.

All too often young people have not been wrong in saying that the church is ugly. In the name of our Lord Jesus Christ we are called upon to show to a watching world and to our own young people that the church is something beautiful.

The world is watching the church. What does it see? “Your children will see the ugliness, and you will lose some of your sons and daughters.”

Finding right doctrine is incredibly important. A godly Christian should never cease in the quest to find a pure, perfect doctrine and to live a pure, holy life.

Showing Love to other Christians is incredibly important. As the 1960’s hymn says, “They’ll know we are Christians by our Love.”

We are one in the Spirit, we are one in the Lord, and we pray that all unity may one day be restored.
We will walk with each other, we will walk hand in hand, and together we’ll spread the news that God is in our land.
We will work with each other, we will work side by side, and we’ll guard each one’s dignity and save each one’s pride.
And they’ll know we are Christians by our love.

Faced with those two important principles, keep pure doctrine and demonstrate love, the church will constantly struggle when they seem to conflict. We should all be able to agree that abandoning one principle or the other is wrong. So how do we navigate?

Let us also agree, at some points in church history, establishing doctrinal purity is the paramount task. This is exactly why the Creeds were written. This principal led to the break between the Roman Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox churches. It led to the Reformation.

But, might there not be other times when showing the unity of the church, showing love to other Christians, might not become the paramount task?

We are at such a moment right now in American society. The political divide is deep and increasingly bitter. You undoubtedly have a very strong reaction to the phrase “President Trump.” Should the Church mimic that divide?

The world is watching. If the church looks no different than the political divide, then why do we need the church? Can anyone watching the church actually agree with Jesus when he said, “By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another” (John 13:35)?

Let me be very clear. This is not an argument for abandoning the quest for doctrinal Truth. This is not an argument that there are not sharp disagreements on theology across churches or that we should pretend that those differences are not incredibly important.

It is an argument for something more fundamental. Love one another. And that means love those Christians in churches who have theologies which you firmly believe are wrong. Love those people in churches which seem to be dominated by people on the other side of the political spectrum.

If Christians cannot love, truly love, across the political divide, then may God help us all. If Christians cannot demonstrate that love transcends the political divide, then Christ is not with us.

The world is watching. At this moment, it is time to rise above politics. It is time to demonstrate love.

You Are a Creator

Imagine you were going to describe God to someone. What is the first thing you would say about God?

Compare your answer to this: what is the first thing the Bible tells us about God?

God is a Creator.

Dorothy Sayers’ The Mind of the Maker is an extended reflection on this idea. Like many a Great Book it roams all over the place, but for a moment, think about her central thesis. If we want to understand the Trinitarian God, we can begin by thinking about the creative human.

Genesis actually tells us to do this. On the sixth day, when God creates Human (which is what the Hebrew word ‘adam means), Genesis tells us God creates Human in His own image.

And what is the only image of God which the text has presented to this point in the narrative? God is a creator. God the creator creates Human in His image. God creates creators.

How does Creativity work according to Sayers?

First there is the Idea, the controlling thought.

Then there is the Energy, the actual implementation of the idea.

Then there is the Power, the effect of the implementation of the idea.

Think of a book. There is the idea in the mind of the author (what is this book attempting to say?), the actual words of the book (how can the author’s idea be communicated?), and the effect the book has on the reader (what does the reader think or feel after reading the book?).

God the Father is the Idea; God the Son is the energy; God the Holy Spirit is the Power. All work together as one creator, no part can be removed and still have the Creator intact, each part is distinct and yet fully the being of the Creator.

Like all analogies of the Trinity, this one breaks down if you lean on it too hard. But, the importance of Sayers’ book is not as another attempt to explain the Trinity. Rather, the book is a marvelous examination of the idea of Creativity.

If Sayers is right, then we, created in the image of God, are created to be creators. All of us.

We will not all become Michelangelo or Shakespeare or T.S. Eliot or Bach. We will not all be famous. But, there is inside each of us an inner creator screaming to be let out.

Our problem is that we often do not let out the creator within.

As Sayers notes, the image of the perfect Creator is one in which all three parts are equally there, an equilateral triangle. We need the controlling idea, the means to cause the idea to become incarnate, and the power to enable the creation to work in the world.

But we are all too often scalene triangles (unequal sides). Artists fail when they are either too driven by one part of that trinity or when one of the parts atrophies.

(Remember when you took Geometry? When you asked why you need to learn the subject, did your teacher say, “So you can think about God”?)

Sayers notes the distinction between
1. the Father Driven artists, possessed of an intellectual idea but never learning the craft of expressing their ideas;
2. the Son Driven artists with the tools to express, but nothing to be expressed; and
3. the Spirit driven artists who imagine they can work their Power on the world with neither Idea nor a Means to express an idea.

(Sadly, Undergraduate artists are almost always that last group—nothing to say, and no skill at saying it, yet they spew their emotions onto the page.)

None of us are perfect Creators. Indeed, most of us are very bad at it. But, our lack of moral perfection is not an excuse to cease from trying to do the right thing. Similarly, our lack of creative perfection should not stop us from creating.

So, create something today. Write a poem, even a bad one. Draw a picture. Put a plant in a pot or arrange some flowers in a vase. Cook a meal you have never made before. Tell a friend about something you read and awaken in that friend the desire to read it too.

You are made in the image of the Creator God. So: Create.

The Quest for Answers

During graduation weekend, I gave a talk encouraging the students to never cease asking the important questions in life. Questions like: Does your life have a purpose? What is a Good life?

A student stopped by the next day to talk about it. She was worried. How could she possibly ever find a definitive answer to hard questions like that?

My student’s question is an interesting one, but not for the reason she imagined.

In the final chapter of Dorothy Sayers’ The Mind of the Maker, she makes a distinction between problems of the sort found in detective novels (of which she wrote some truly great ones, e.g., Gaudy Night) and “life-problems.”

She notes there are four characteristics of a detective mystery. People want to find these same characteristics in real life. But, “because we are accustomed to find them in the one, we look for them in the other, and experience a sense of frustration and resentment when we do not find them.”

The four characteristics:

1. The detective problem is always soluble.

2. The detective problem is completely soluble.

3. The detective problem is solved in the same terms in which it is set.

4. The detective problem is finite.

Sayers is entirely correct about detective problems. A mystery novel is completely unsatisfying if there is no solution, if there are loose, unexplained ends, if there is some deus ex machina needed to wrap the thing up, or if there is no finality. We like mystery novels exactly because they give this sense of completeness.

But, then when we turn to the problems of life, none of these things exist.

The answer to my student is quite simply that she may indeed never find a definitive answer to the important questions of life.

That does not mean, however, that she should not constantly strive to find those answers. The quest to find the answers matters.

Why should we spend our lives wrestling with overwhelming questions for which we may never find a satisfactory answer?

First of all, we don’t have a choice. Our minds seem to be built to be constantly peering into the unknown to learn just a little bit more. Our minds seem to be built to stare at the world in wonder. Our minds seem to be built in a way the leaves us asking, “Why am I here?”

But, perhaps more importantly, we need to think about the unanswerable questions because it is very important to constantly remind ourselves that is it perfectly OK if we don’t have it all figured out.

You see people all the time who try to wrap up all of life in a neat little ball, who have an answer to everything, who never want to say, “I don’t know. I haven’t figured that out yet.”

Such people, without really realizing what they have done, have set themselves up as a local deity, all knowing and all wise.

Sooner or later, however, the person who has it all figured out meets a question for which they do not and then what happens? The walls go up. The question is ruled out of bounds or trivialized or corrupted into something answerable.

Theology is far too often like that. When we contemplate God, should we ever expect to figure Him out?

You will never have all the answers. Acknowledge the existence of mystery. And then. never cease exploring that mystery even knowing you will never find all the answers.

Hopes About Eternity

Hope is one of those virtues about which we don’t often think. Somehow, it doesn’t even seem like a virtue.

We talk a lot about how to love more or be more faithful or trustworthy or just. But hope?

Indeed, it seems a bit strange to imagine encouraging people to have more hope. Hope is one of those things that silly optimists have, right?

Level headed realists and practical pessimists surely don’t need hope. Life is what it is. Life is a tragedy. Why do you want hope?

But, once you start thinking about it, you realize this: you do want hope. Indeed, you need hope. If you really believe that nothing good is on the horizon, then this world is a very poor place.

John Eldredge in All Things New wants to give you hope. Not just a small amount of hope, though. He wants to give you a massive, overwhelming, tear-inducing joyful kind of hope.

The book has a simple argument. It is one of those books that makes its argument by a long string of anecdotes, both real and literary. (Middle Earth and Narnia are frequently referenced.)

Eldredge’s argument begins with gospel of Matthew:

Truly, I say to you, in the new world, when the Son of Man will sit on his glorious throne, you who have followed me will also sit on twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel. And everyone who has left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or children or lands, for my name’s sake, will receive a hundredfold and will inherit eternal life. (Matthew 19: 28-29, ESV)

“In the new world.” Or, as the NIV puts it: “At the renewal of all things.” Eldredge wants you to notice that life after death does not take place in Heaven. It takes place on the New Earth, with all things made new, all things renewed or restored.

From that observation, Eldredge spins a tale telling you how much you should be looking forward to, hoping for, that new world. So far, so good.

What is that new world going to be like? To hear Eldredge tell it, the new world is a super-amazing version of the current world. Think of your favorite spot on Earth and imagine going to that spot in the future when that spot is perfect.

You don’t have to imagine only spots you have been. You’ll get to go to every spot on earth in the infinite length of time in which you will live in that new earth. You can hear Eldredge on every single page saying, “It is going to be awesome.”

Will it? Not, “will it be awesome?” That question is easy. If the new Earth is going to exist in anything resembling the way Christian theology discusses, it will, by definition, be perfect.

Will it be the way Eldredge describes it? To hear Eldredge talking, the New Earth is like the greatest place imaginable to spend eternity hiking and camping. Lo and behold, Eldredge really likes hiking and camping. So, much of the book is Eldredge imagining a new world made exactly to his specifications. He is going to love it.

Late in the book, he lets everyone else know that even if they don’t want to go hiking and camping forever, there will also be great things they can do on the New Earth.

You can learn to play a musical instrument or listen to the most amazing people playing the most amazing songs ever. You can take classes with Aquinas and learn some theology. You can have Galileo teach you about astronomy. Lincoln can tell you stories about the Civil War. (Yes, those are really his examples.)

It all sounds really nice.

If you buy into it, then Eldredge has just given you hope, which is undoubtedly the reason Eldredge wrote the book. Not only will you be able to spend eternity with the people you love who are no longer living, but you will get to spend time with them doing all the things you really wanted to do with them here on earth if only they had lived a little longer. And, you will get to do those things in a more amazing version of the Earth than the one in which we currently live. It will be great. Stand firm, have hope, and someday this will all come.

But, is this true?

Here is where I get stuck. Will time and space exist in eternity? I have no idea.

If we accept the Christian narrative, then God created time and space when he created this world. Eldredge is reading Mathew 19 and the account in Revelation of Heaven and the New Earth as telling us that time and space do not pass away, that we continue to live in them forever.

Maybe that is true. Or, maybe that language is figurative, meant to convey to us that our future will be every bit as amazing as Eldredge imagines it to be, actually even better than Eldredge imagines it to be, but there are no words in human language to describe the reality of what we will experience. So, the language used in the Bible is there because it is as close as we can get in our language to describing that future reality.

Eldredge’s book is wonderful in reminding us to have hope. Life is painful; indeed, as Eldredge notes, if we are being honest, it is very, very painful. But, a future standing in the presence of Christ will be joyful.

All that is true. But, will that future be exactly the way Eldredge describes it? I still suspect it will actually be much better than this.

Why Creation Matters

“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” Why does this matter?

From the debate over this sentence, one would think the whole purpose of this sentence, indeed the whole purpose of the first two chapters of Genesis, is to fight a war over evolution. However, such a fight completely ignores the theological importance of that sentence.

Set aside for a moment the question of the age of the earth and evolutionary mechanisms. For a moment, imagine that the point of the first two chapters of Genesis is something other than answering historical scientific questions about the formation of the universe. Instead, imagine that this passage in Genesis is there to teach us something about God, and how God relates to humans.

‘In the Beginning…’ A Catholic Understanding of the Story of Creation
and the Fall, by Joseph Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI) is such a reflection.

The Moral Importance of Creation

Consider, just for a second, the following possibility. Over a very long period of time, there was an evolutionary process which resulted in homo sapiens emerging on earth. Then the question is, “How did this process happen?”

One answer is that it was pure random chance.

But, again, imagine just for a second, that there is something about the evolutionary mechanism, something about the way that species evolve over time, something about the initial conditions for this evolutionary process which made it inevitable that homo sapiens would emerge on earth. In that case, we could say that humans were created; not directly in a flash, but created nonetheless.

Would this fact of creation mater? Absolutely. Ratzinger writes:

Human life stands under God’s special protection, because each human being, however wretched or exalted he or she may be, however sick or suffering, however good-for-nothing or important, whether born or unborn, whether incurably ill or radiant with health—each one of us bears God’s breath in himself or herself, each one is God’s image. This is the deepest reason for the inviolability of human dignity…

This point is far too rarely appreciated in the grand debates about evolution. Which matters more: 1) how humans arrived on earth or 2) the moral status of human life?

If humans are purely a product of blind chance, then there is nothing inherently worthy about your life or mine. Then there is also nothing inherently wrong with valuing some lives more than others. Indeed, there is no reason not to privilege some lives more than others.

But, if everyone is equal in moral status because everyone was created somehow, someway in the image of God, then there is good reason to treat everyone with dignity, accord everyone the moral status of being fully human.

Creation of the Non-physical World

The theological importance of creation is not limited to how it affects our conception of the moral worth of the individual. Creation also has enormous implications for what we think of as “Nature.” As Ratzinger notes, there are two ways to think about the term:

Nature is understood exclusively in the sense of the object of science; any other definition of the world is dismissed as meaningless. Theological arguments about the “nature of humans” or “natural rights,” resting as they do on the concept of creation, meet a look of blank incomprehension; in fact, they seem nonsensical, the relic of an archaic “natural philosophy.”

The only natural things that emerge from a blind evolutionary mechanism are the brute facts about the physical world. But, if the world is created, if those evolutionary mechanisms were somehow predetermined in the very fabric of physical matter, then it is possible that there are other, non-physical, things that are also part of nature. If creation is real, then there may be a natural philosophy and natural rights and human nature, all of which are every bit as much a part of nature as the tree growing by a river in a forest.

Far too many Christians have lost sight of the importance of Creation. When creation is treated as a weapon in the war over the existence of God, then creation is not very interesting. The first two chapters of Genesis do not prove the existence of God, nor is that their intention. By looking at these chapters purely as expressions of the mechanism of creation, Christians and non-Christians both miss the point.

Why Creation Matters

In the beginning, God created…us. Since we are beings created in the image of God, we owe both to our Creator and to all those others who were also created in the image of God all the love and respect and dignity we can give.

We are a part of a created order, not just a physical order, but a moral and spiritual order as well. When we live our lives in accordance with that natural order, when we live our lives as part of this created order, both physical and non-physical, we live our lives as fully human.

You were created. You were created in the image of God. Live your life accordingly.