The Spirit of a Man

The spirit of a man is the lamp of the Lord,

searching all his innermost parts.

Proverbs 20:27

Today I caught the end of a PBS special called "The Human Spark." Allan Alda and a host of cognitive scientists and researchers tried to put their finger on what makes us distinctly human.

Alda's conclusion is insight and imagination. This was all couched in Darwinistic terms but was nonetheless immensely interesting.

With respect to insight, one scientist commented that we are the only animals who can learn apart from direct experience. "No one ever whipped up a batch of liver ice cream to taste if it was good or chewed on a handful of thumbtacks before they realized that this would be painful." Evidently, distinct parts of the brain think about what other people are thinking about. These same parts are engaged during down time, when we mull over our regrets, cherish certain memories, or prepare for the next time something happens. This is all uniquely human, as is our ability to use language symbols for writing or a few sounds to express the meaning of our insights to others.

To put this theologically, we surpass animals because we have souls created in the image of God. God imagines and creates out of nothing. We imagine and create out the the materials he spoke into existence. We form our words upon the forms he "worded" into existence. Every object is an incarnation of God's creative word. We sub-create with our imagination speaking words onto a page, into a debate, or into our lover's ear. We image God by creating our own images. We create artwork, music, a clean table, tasty food, laughter, tears, and complex technology, like my computer, that harnesses the resources of nature. We are fearfully and wonderfully made.

The Cult of the State

The Age of Enlightenment--considered in purely political terms--was itself merely the transition from one epoch of nationalist warfare, during which states still found it necessary to use religious institutions as instruments of power, to another epoch of still greater nationalist warfare, during which religious rationales had become obsolete, because the state had become its own cult, and power the only morality.

David Bentley Hart, Atheist Delusions, 86-87

The Absurdity of a Secular State

John Keble preached a sermon called "National Apostasy" in 1833. The Legislature of England and Ireland had just removed the religious test for membership so that the members were "not even bound to profess belief in the Atonement." The points of his argument against secularism run as follows:

1. By separating church and state you don't exclude the church from the state, you turn the state into a "mere parliament church." This is because the state has to legislate morality with reference to itself.
2. You cannot consider yourself a Christian nation if the civil realm is separated from the church. So realize what your giving up by embracing secularism.
3. Where does the state get its basis for law if it does not recognize the moral authority of the church?
4. Who are the King and Parliament under if they are not under the church's God?
5. By separating the church from the state, the church and its theology are singled out as posing a danger to the state.
6. Without the church, the state is left to follow a practical atheism. Legislating without reference to God is legislating as if he doesn't exist. So, practically speaking, there is no middle ground between a state religion and an atheistic state.
7. Separating civil life from the church encourages a national apostasy of its citizens from their churches. This turns politics into an idol for the people to place before God.
8. "One of the most alarming omens of an Apostate mind in a nation is the growing indifference ... to other men's religious sentiments." This reminds me of G. K. Chesterton's statement: "There's only one thing more absurd than executing a man for his religious beliefs, and that's saying that his religious beliefs don't matter." Thus the secular state is more absurd than Christendom, when it was at its worst.
9. When the state declares the church out of bounds in Parliament doesn't it make it "impossible for them to be loyal to their Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifier?"

To the extent that the state tells us to think in secular vs. sacred categories, aren't they telling Christians to think unChristianly? If so, mustn't we obey God rather than men.

A Canvass for Carnage

The other night I watched the film "Inglorious Basterds." It reminded me of why I normally avoid Quentin Tarantino movies--he glorifies violence. I can hear someone saying that the violence portrayed was for a good cause--the annihilation of Nazis. True, but even in pre-Christian Greek drama all the really graphic stuff happened off stage so that it could be muted by the imagination. It was the Roman gladiatorial games that took things beyond the pale and reveled in graphic violence.

This doesn't mean that there isn't anything to learn from the movie. The characters sacrifice their lives without thinking twice and Brad Pitt's character is cheerfully courageous in the face of danger. But their courage doesn't seem to be grounded in human dignity. The film is not so much about rescuing the dignity of the victims but about revenge on the perpetrators. The Basterds don't even plan to escape from the final destruction they are planning for the Nazis. They are going to touch off Vesuvius and die on its slopes in true Nietzschean fashion. The movie devalues human life by portraying bodies as objects of slaughter. Bodies are Tarantinos canvass for carnage. The film is permeated with the sense that since life is meaningless creative revenge is the only way to die.

This is obviously a far cry from the Christian courage that led Dietrich Bonhoeffer to put his life on the line. If we are created in the image of God we may stand for life and die with dignifying courage. Someone has said that "without mysticism man is a monster." Even the good guys in Tarantino's film are monstrous.

Repenting by Faith

Tonight I lost my temper on the phone with a lady in my doctor's office. They gave my pharmacy an incomplete prescription, and told me I would have to pay another copay to complete the prescription. I told them that they had "screwed up" and needed to "fix it." Things didn't go too well from there, but my son seemed impressed with way I raised my voice and got forceful. He retold the story to my wife with the emphases in all the right places and strode away like a hero.

I had to tell him that I didn't handle the situation properly. I would call back Monday and apologize. I will also respectfully ask them to take responsibility for their mistake, and work it out with our insurance company. He voiced his agreement with my new plan. Today is the fifteenth and Proverbs 15:1 reads: "A soft answer turns away wrath, but a harsh word stirs up anger."

Sin makes you feel rotten, but you can't live by feelings. We must live by faith, even when we don't feel forgiven. Sometimes we are tempted to work up a genuine repentance so we will feel forgiven. This is the antithesis of faith and makes the "feeling of repentance" and idol.

Dawson's Critique

It may, I think, even be argued that Communism in Russia, National Socialism in Germany, and Capitalism and Liberal Democracy in the Western countries are really three forms of the same thing, and that they are all moving by different but parallel paths to the same goal, which is the mechanization of human life and the complete subordination of the individual to the state and to the economic process. Of course I do not mean to say that they are all absolutely equivalent, and that we have no right to prefer one to another. But I do believe that a Christian cannot regard any of them as a final solution to the problem of civilization, or even as a tolerable one. Christianity is bound to protest against any social system which claims the whole of man and sets itself up as the final end of human action, for it asserts that man's essential nature transcends all political and economic forms. Civilization is a road by which man travels, not a house for him to dwell in. His true city is elsewhere.

(Christopher Dawson, Religion and the Modern State, 1938).

Two Pieces of Iron

The differences between a man and a woman are at best so obstinate and exasperating that they practically cannot be got over unless there is an atmosphere of exaggerated tenderness and mutual interest. To put the matter in one metaphor, the sexes are two stubborn pieces of iron; if they are to be welded together, it must be while they are red hot. Every woman has to find out that her husband is a selfish beast, because every man is a selfish beast by the standard of a woman. But let her find out the beast while they are both still in the story of “Beauty and the Beast.” Every man has to find out that his wife is cross—that is to say, sensitive to the point of madness: for every woman is mad by the masculine standard. But let him find out that she is mad while her madness is more worth considering than anyone else’s sanity.

Chesteron, G. K., Brave New Family.

Why Limit History to "What" and "How"?

Historians' Fallacies : Toward a Logic of Historical Thought by David Hackett Fischer

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Great critical thinking when it comes to historiography. The logic chopping is a little pedantic at times but the overall affect is greater clarity on how to reach responsible historical conclusions. I paraphrase Fischer's method in the following way:

The goal of the historian is a self-aware subjectivity

that seeks to see things as they are objectively,

by stating a problem

and seeking empirical solutions

through posing questions

that fit the subject.

His treatment of the fallacies of causation and misleading questions are especially good.

The problem however is that Fischer thinks historians should spend all their time answering "what" and "how" questions and avoid trying to answer "why" questions. Now "why" would he say that? Well he tells us. He says that the "why" questions deal with metaphysical issues that yield no fruitful or definitive results . Even if that is true, and I don't believe it is, the metaphysical questions are still the most interesting to beings who can't be reduced to the physical realm. Let me acknowledge that I do agree that there is a metaphysical fallacy, but it consists of abusing metaphysical questions not excluding them from the outset.

I don't believe that Fishcer's scientific "what-and-how-only-approach" is much better at producing certainty either. For instance, "what" kind of document is the Constitution of the United States and "how" did it come to be? Well, some say that it is primarily influenced by British Capitalism ("the pursuit of happiness"), others that its primarily influenced by French ideas of equality ("all men are created equal") , others that the classical idea of a well informed, upstanding citizenry is the primary influence ("the consent of the governed"), others say Christianity and the Puritan moral vision is still calling the shots ("endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights"). To complicate matters there are those who argue that the Constitution is a betrayal of the Declaration of Independence and others that it is basically faithful to it and still others who believe that it is an almost pure extension of its values.

"How" did it come into its final form is tricky as well, since fifty-five delegates operated behind closed doors and were hopelessly divided between two factions of independently minded men like Madison and Hamilton on one side and Sam Adams and Patrick Henry on the other with guys like Washington caught in the middle. To make this even more confusing, some think that Madison caved to the anti-federalists by drawing up the Bill of Rights and others that he was tossing them some hushpuppies to shut their mouths so that the Constitution would pass.

I also hope that this makes it clear that you may distinguish the "why" from the "what" and "how" and even "who" questions, but you will never separate it from those topics. What God has joined together, let no man, even a respectable historian, put asunder.

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An Overstuffed Straw Man

I recently heard an education expert giving a lecture on Book TV CSPAN2. He was revealing new data that showed that students with good verbal skills didn't test significantly higher than students with poor verbal skills on subjects where both groups were informed. The point was, "See, verbal skills are not equivalent to knowledge. So lets keep focusing on data transfer, technical knowledge and vocational training."

I must admit that I didn't watch the whole persecution, ... I mean presentation, but this straw man is not only bloated but begs numerous questions. For instance, did the study test for communication skills? You may have factual information and intuitive knowledge about a subject, but poor verbal skills trap that knowledge inside the airtight shell of your body.

Now for the corpulent man of straw. When did advocates of liberal arts training ever claim that verbal skills were equivalent to knowledge in all vocational fields? A knowledge of grammar is equivalent to a knowledge of grammar, and logic is equivalent to a knowledge critical thinking, and rhetoric is .... Well, you get the point. But who of our number ever claimed that a liberal arts education is equivalent to knowing how to program a computer?

A New Year's Sermon

Sermon—The Serpent and the Savior

M. Heckel, 1-2-10

I. Intro: We’ve all made New Years resolutions. Mine every year is to lose some weight. One of my students put his on facebook: “Don’t mess up.” I commented “Good luck with that one.” What if our New Year’s resolution was to keep the main things the main things? Then maybe all these other things would take care of themselves. I might be able to deal with stress better, sleep better, and quite overeating. My student might not worry so much about messing up. Well there’s good news this morning. We are going to read about the main thing and that’s the gospel of Jesus Christ our Savior.

II. The Serpent and the Seed of the Woman. Genesis 3:14-16.

A. The serpent tempted Adam and Eve to be as God, and decide good and evil for themselves.

B. First Eve ate of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, but nothing happened. She gave the fruit to Adam who ate, and then they knew they were naked and hid from God when they heard him walking in the garden.

C. When God declares judgment for sin he begins with the serpent:

1. v. 14, The serpent is cursed “above all” animals. It becomes a symbol of the fall, and explains our aversion to it.

2. The serpent is cursed to crawl on its belly, which implies that it is now a legless dragon.

3. v. 15, God will put enmity between the seed of the serpent and the seed of the woman.

4. One of the ways the world wages war is by trying to convince us that there is no antithesis. It is up to the seed of the woman to maintain the antithesis today and fight the good fight.

5. Right after the fall, God announces that there will be a decisive battle where the seed of the woman will bruise the head of the serpent and the serpent will bruise his heel.

6. Who gets the worst of it? Would you rather have your head bruised or your heel.

7. The head is a symbol of authority. The seed of the women will step on the serpents head and crush his authority but will pay a price. His heel will be bruised.

8. When was this prophecy fulfilled? Before we fast forward let’s take a look at one more aspect of the fall.

9. v. 16, God will multiply the woman’s pain of giving birth to her seed.

III. The Woman and the Dragon. Revelation 12:1-6.

A. vv. 1-2, Here is the woman clothed with the sun, and with the moon under her feet wearing a twelve starred crown for the twelve tribes of Israel.

B. She will fulfill the hopes of God’s people by giving birth but it will come with great pain as God had said. Sin causes pain but God will accomplish our redemption through the pain of the woman.

C. vv. 3-4, But there is an immediate threat to God’s promise. A great red dragon who sweeps a third of the stars out of the sky and is ready to pounce and devour her child.

D. vv. 5-6, She gives birth to a male child who was caught up to the throne of God and the woman flees to the wilderness.

IV. The Dragon and the Christ. Revelation 12:7-10.

A. vv. 7-9, Who is this dragon? It is that “ancient serpent, who is called the devil and Satan, the deceiver of the whole world.” It is the serpent in the garden who lost his legs.

B. The enmity between the seed of the woman and the seed of the serpent actually originated with a war in heaven. The Archangel Michael and his fellows angels do battle with the dragon and his angels and Satan falls from heaven.

C. After his fall the dragon succeeds in bringing about our fall. But he falls from heaven in another way.

D. v. 10, A loud voice in heaven announces that “the salvation and the power and the kingdom of God and the authority of his Christ” has come, and has thrown down the accuser of the brothers.

E. Christ has bruised his heel on the serpent’s head! The authority of Christ has smashed the serpent’s authority.

V. The Dragon and the Christians. Revelation 12:11-17.

A. v. 11, This means we can overcome the dragon. But what does that look like?

B. “They overcame him by the blood of the lamb and by the word of their testimony, for they loved not their lives unto death.”

C. After Jesus rose from the dead the Roman soldiers who had been stationed at the tomb told the Jewish leaders that the tomb was empty. So the Jews and Romans spread the story that the disciples stole the body. But the disciples effectively overcame this report by dying for their testimony that he had risen. In all cases but one, the disciples suffered gruesome executions at the hands of Roman rather than deny their experience with the bodily-resurrected savior.

D. Blaise Pascal said, “Believe those witnesses who get their throats cut.”

E. This raises the question for us today. Do we believe that the shed blood of Christ washes away our sin? Do we have a testimony that is more precious to us than life itself? If we do, we can win the dragon fight. If we do not we are still on the side of the dragon. There is no middle ground.

F. This text challenges us to ask ourselves, “Which side of the antithesis am I on?” Are we willing to die for the disciples’ testimony that Jesus rose bodily from the dead?

G. Dealing with doubt: There are many ministers today who do not believe that Jesus rose from the dead in his physical body (Sproul oridination story). The disciples didn’t believe it at first. Thomas said that he would be a skeptic until he put his fingers in Christ’s wounds. The disciples weren’t gullible. They didn’t fully believe Mary Magdalene until they say Jesus for themselves. After that, they couldn’t be stopped. If the tomb hadn’t been empty the authorities could have provided the body and squelched their preaching. So they tried to defeat the disciples through force, but they overcame because “they loved not their lives unto death.”

H. Illustration: I recently taught a history class at MoBap Univ., where we discussed the historical claims of Christianity. I pointed out that Christianity is unique among world religions because it is founded upon a single historical claim—the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ. One of my students gave a presentation on historical objectivity and ended by saying that since everyone is affected by their own subjectivity we can’t tell anybody that they’re wrong. When it came to the question and answer time some of the students challenged him by asking whether someone who denies the resurrection is wrong. He assured us that he believed in the resurrection, but he couldn’t tell someone else they were wrong for rejecting it. Then I added that he had the Word of God to stand on. But he said that he didn’t see God write the Bible. Then I pointed out that the apostles of Jesus Christ died so that he could call the Bible the word of God and he didn’t know what to say. They overcame by the word of their testimony.

I. Now that the woman has flown to the wilderness, Satan is making war against the rest of her offspring.

J. Are we ready to begin this New Year with a testimony on our lips, with some fire in our belly, and some fight in our gut?

K. v. 17, What do we fight with? We “keep the commandments of God and hold to the testimony of Jesus.”

VI. Application: Where do we begin? Here’s a good New Years Resolution: I Peter 2:2-3: “Like newborn infants, long for the pure spiritual milk , that by it you may grow up to salvation—if indeed you have tasted that they Lord is good.” Have you tasted that the Lord is good? Then let’s wash everything down this year with the milk of the word of God.

VII. Summary: Then we can’t resist the world’s temptation to forget about the fight. We can keep the antithesis between the seed of the woman and the seed of the serpent, we can overcome the world through our testimony of Christ, and we can truly live because we have something for which we are willing to die.

Scandalizing the Scandal

The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind by Mark A. Noll

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The Puritans who settled Massachusetts combined heart-felt devotion to Christ with a love of theology. They practiced a vigorous intellectual life centered on the Bible and embraced cutting edge science like inoculation against disease. By the time of the First Great Awakening however, this tradition had degenerated into a formal and lifeless orthodoxy. Noll argues that during the First Great Awakening evangelicals like George Whitfield tried to revive the church with biblical preaching and a theatrical style that appealed to the masses and called for an emotional response.

Whitfield unwittingly contributed to the anti-intellectualism of the time and promoted an anti-institutional Christianity that would abandon the intellectual centers of the culture. This "biblical democratism" meant that the Bible does not belong to me as part of a historical community known as the church, but it belongs to me as an individual. For most evangelicals the Bible became a book dropped from the sky for self-help purposes (97). Jonathan Edwards resisted the anti-intellectual tendencies of experience based revivalism, but evangelicals continued to abandon the life of the mind and have been paying the price in academic credibility ever since.

Noll cites creation science as exhibit A, because it fails to allow the book of nature to help us interpret the book of Scripture. Charles Hodge and B. B. Warfield were better in this regard than evangelicals who seem to think it's a virtue to abandon cutting edge scientific research to unbelievers and fight for a twenty-four hour creation days (which is not even the historical position of church fathers like St. Augustine). The abandonment of the front lines of research is one reason why evangelicals haven't developed any major research universities.

Where evangelicals did try to maintain intellectual credibility, they articulated Christian truth in the secular, rationalistic, and mechanistic language of the Enlightenment. This was a cultural accommodation that tempted the church give up the home field advantage it enjoyed during most of Western civilization. Noll calls Witherspoon, Hodge, and Warfield to account for making revelation dependent on reason for its plausibility.

In concert with the Enlightenment marginalizing Christian faith to the private sphere, Noll points out how dispensationalism, the holiness movement, and Pentecostalism compounded the scandal by putting forth a Christianity that turns the things of earth “strangely dim.” No one polishes the brass on a sinking ship, as they say. Noll reminds us that what is distinctive about American Christianity is not necessarily essential to the gospel. Thus evangelicals need to rediscover history.

Noll also points out that evangelicals have preserved the one thing that can revitalize the Christian mind--the gospel. Thus Noll is still a fan of his own tradition, and he calls evangelicals to scandalize the scandal by reentering the intellectual centers of cultural without compromising the gospel and the authorty of biblical revelation. This means reaffirming that since God is the author of both Scripture and nature the two books interpret each other as we press on. Noll also promotes a Reformation theology that embraces a comprehensive view of the world that affirms the goodness of creation and the need to redeem it with Christian action.

Since Noll published Scandal in 1994, evangelicals have continued to rediscover history and press forward with scientific research in intelligent design and the human genome project ( a la Francis Collins who doesn't seem to be a fan of Intelligent Design, :(). But much of the church growth movement continues to play to our radical individualism with its focus on self-help and personal success. Evangelical Christians still need to be challenged by Noll to scandalize the scandal.

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Do You Like Bacon?

How we treat nature depends upon how we view it? Do we view it as:

1. raw materials,
2. natural resources,
3. our environment, or
4. our co-created world over which we are meant to care and in which we are meant to thrive.

You can probably tell that I like the last choice.

The first two are products of the Enlightenment understanding of science and some, like Wendell Berry, point out that an environment is something that surrounds you but doesn't necessary mean that you are a part of it. In the Christian worldview, we are the crown of creation and, as such, are part of that creation. We are the crown because we are made in God's image and charged with cultivating it, so that it glorifies its creator in the fullest way.

For all of the environmentalism that is abroad today, there is still a large number of us who think that we can treat nature in any way we want because everything is undefined. There is no nature to nature that deserves our respect. Yes, it feeds us, but we can make it feed us mass quantities of genetically engineered, perfectly shaped, disease resistant, cardboard that resembles fruits and vegetables that our grandmothers used to feed us.

I argue that this resonates with the postmodern view that we can define ourselves and define everything for ourselves and goes back to the Enlightenment where all of our problems were magnified by our desire to control nature.

Listen to what Francis Bacon said:

"Science is the conquest of nature for the relief of Man's estate"

"We must put nature to the rack in order to render up her secrets"

But in 1623, at the twilight of his career, Bacon seems to forsake his earlier view of nature as something to be scientifically exploited.

Without doubt we are paying for the sin of our first parents and imitating it. They wanted to be like Gods; we their posterity, still more so. We create worlds. We prescribe laws to nature and lord it over her. We want to have all things as suits our fatuity, not as fits the Divine Wisdom, not as they are found in nature. We impose the seal of our image on the creatures and works of God, we do not diligently seek to discover the seal of God on things....

Wherefore if there be any humility toward the Creator ... if there be any love of truth in natural things, any hatred of darkness, any desire to purify the understanding; men are to be entreated again and again that they should dismiss for awhile or at least put aside those inconstant and preposterous philosophies, which prefer theses to hypotheses, have led experience captive, and triumphed over the works of God; that they should humbly and with a certain reverence draw near to the book of Creation...

This is that speech and language which has gone out to all the ends of the earth [Ps. 19] and has not suffered the confusion of Babel; this must men learn, and, resuming their youth, they must become again as little children and deign to take its alphabet into their hands....

May God the Creator, Preserver, and Restorer of the universe, in accordance with his mercy and his loving-kindness towards man, protect and guide this work both in its ascent to his glory and in its decent to the service of man, through his only Son, God with us (The History of the Winds, qt. in Noll, Scandal of the Evangelical MInd, 204).