Biblical Inerrancy

Biblical Inerrancy

A topic that comes up in conversation for me with some frequency is that of Biblical inerrancy. It is something that sneaks itself into various conversations on a wide range of issues and seems to be surrounded by all kinds of assumptions that I feel are simply not true. To that end, I have decided to write out my thoughts on the topic of Biblical inerrancy.

Before I begin, I feel that a disclaimer is in order. It must be said at the very beginning that I do not identify myself as one who subscribes to Biblical inerrancy (precisely for the reasons outlined below), but I would like to encourage, as much as I can, for anyone who reads this to do so knowing that this is in no way intended to be an anti-Bible essay. I believe the Bible to be remarkably important, it is truly the sole source and norm for our faith and practice and that it is an irreplaceable witness to what God has done that is vitally important for us to take very seriously and to submit ourselves to the radical critiques that it makes on our lives. Reading the Bible has had an absolutely transforming effect on my life. I continue to read and study the Bible and I continue to use it as the basis of my preaching as a pastor. It should also be noted at the beginning that, though I do not subscribe to Biblical inerrancy, neither do I identify myself as a theological Liberal. To me the Liberal tradition is just as deeply problematic. In fact, a large portion of my critique, though at a tacit level, is that Biblical inerrancy has Liberal roots, inasmuch as it is, in its modern form, just another way of dealing with the challenge of Liberalism and so bears its stamp.

A distinction must be made here between Biblical inerrancy and Biblical infallibility. From one point of view, the words inerrant and infallible are synonyms; from another, infallible is actually a stronger term because while inerrancy implies that there are no errors, infallible implies that there can be no errors. However, in spite of how the words might be used elsewhere in discourse, within the context of this issue, they have become technical terms. Specifically, inerrancy is a stronger term than infallibility. Biblical infallibility states that, in matters of faith and life that is, what we believe and how we live, the Bible is absolutely trustworthy and must be taken seriously. Biblical inerrancy asserts that every part of the Bible (down to the very words) is true in every sense of the word. The reason for this is because, if it were not true in any sense of the word, the whole authority of the Bible would collapse.

It should be noted that the mainstream of inerrancy, when pushed (or even just when clarifying their position), will qualify their position by saying that the Biblical texts are inerrant "in the autographs," which means the texts were inerrant when they were originally written. Now, why would someone feel it necessary to make that clarification? Why not just say the Bible is inerrant, especially since that is how it plays itself out in day-to-day Christian life? The reason is because even those who hold to inerrancy are not convinced that the copies we have today are really inerrant. The impulse for affirming that the autographs were inerrant is understandable because such a view needs to affirm that the text, at least as given by God, is perfect in every sense of the word, but it is my contention that such a qualification actually destroys the whole inerrancist position.

The point is made that the Bible must be affirmed to be true in every sense of the word because if any part is not true in any sense of the word, the authority of the Bible falls to the ground. The reason why this is the case is because, once you have made the argument that one part of the Bible may not be true, we are left with the question, "Why do we say that about this part and not about some other part?" Before long, a questioning of one part of the Bible becomes a questioning of the entire Bible. If we judge the text to be errant based on some extra-biblical criterion, why can't we apply that to the whole of the Bible? And yet, the admission that the Biblical texts are only inerrant in the original autographs brings the problem back in for this simple fact. We do not have access to the original autographs. It is true that the Bible is just as reliable, both from a literary and a historical point of view, as any other ancient text, but what we have is not identical to the original autographs. However, though we have a high degree of certainty that our copies are not the originals, we cannot be certain precisely which parts were in deviation from those autographs. After all, if we could, we could simply restore our copies to the original. However, if our copies are not identical with the autographs, and we can not point to precisely where those discrepancies are to be found, what can stop us from saying that any particular point is in deviation from the originals? Yes, there is an absolutely reliable source of doctrine, but if we have no access to it, we are back to square one.

Another interesting weakness to the inerrancist position is put forward by Donald G. Bloesch, a leading evangelical theologian who passed away just recently. In his Essentials of Evangelical Theology, he says this. "The rise of pseudo-Christian cults that champion biblical inerrancy has been a source of embarrassment to those who contend that this doctrine is the foundation stone and practical guarantee of orthodoxy." He names groups like the Jehovah's Witnesses and the Mormons in the endnote as concrete examples of this tendency. Clearly, Bloesch notes, inerrancy as such does not guarantee orthodoxy. It should be noted that, though the Jehovah's Witnesses and Mormons also have other authoritative texts outside the Old and New Testaments (or rely on a particular version of them), other groups such as Unitarian (Oneness) Pentecostals fall into the same boat.

There is one more methodological objection to Biblical inerrancy before I go into a concrete analysis of the shortcomings of the position and how I deal with the problems posed by the Biblical text. It is my greatest concern that, in point of fact, Biblical inerrancy ends up being an idolatrous position. My biggest concern is a theological one, not that it takes the Bible very seriously, allowing it supremacy over our culture and our own opinions, but because it also gives it supremacy over Christ himself and transforms him into nothing more than just one more of the doctrines that the Bible teaches and one we should affirm on the basis of that Biblical authority, rather than emphasizing that the Bible is the written witness to the living Word of God that actually encounters us.

An example is appropriate here. A local physician and leader in a nearby local church wrote an essay in defense of Biblical inerrancy which was made part of his church's official resources for its members. It is a fairly long treatment of the issue, but in my judgment only the first few paragraphs actually dealt with the issue of inerrancy and about the alleged difficulties that arise, merely from denying it. The overwhelming majority of the work was concerned with demonstrating the historical reliability of the Bible, especially as compared to other ancient writings. In this, I agree in every regard. There is a reason why, when archaeologists have wanted to locate an ancient city in the Ancient Near East, they go to the Bible first to try to find out where it may be located. There have been doubts about the existence of groups of people spoken of in the Bible that have been consistently cast aside by subsequent research. If we ignore the problem of induction (which plagues all science, not just historical science), there is much to compel us to conclude that any other parts of the Bible that are open to doubt will be vindicated eventually.

What is interesting is that, though this is a fairly common way to articulate and defend Biblical inerrancy, it actually undermines it and proves my point. The question is whether the position of Biblical inerrancy relies on justification from historical and archaeological science to stand. If it does not, it makes one wonder why so much effort is taken to demonstrate the Bible's historicity. If the Bible's authority is supreme, even over historical and archaeological science, why use the results of such science used as reasons one should believe in the inerrancy of the Bible? If the legitimacy of inerrancy does indeed depend on the findings of historical and archaeological science, it undermines the position altogether. After all, it implies that the Bible is, in point of fact, not of ultimate authority but rather that historical and archaeological science has the final word. It is my contention that, in this particular treatment of the issue, the amount of time and energy spent on defending the historical reliability of the Bible shows that inerrancy cannot stand on its own but must be bolstered by an outside authority.

I would like to move now to a concrete examination of how Biblical inerrancy plays itself out, but before I do so, I must make one more observation. The real problem that we are trying to overcome with a doctrine of biblical inerrancy is the problem of interpretation as opposed to looking at what the text actually says. Once we cross the gap from looking at what the words on the page say to what we say they must mean (that is, placing a particular interpretation on the words that cannot be reduced to the words themselves), we have given up inerrancy. Allow me to demonstrate.

1 Kings 7:23 is a relatively unexciting text. It lies merely in the account of the building of Solomon's Temple, specifically within the context of Hiram the bronzeworker making various items for it. It reads this way (NASB), "Now he made the sea of cast metal ten cubits from brim to brim, circular in form, and its height was five cubits, and thirty cubits in circumference." The problem that arises here, that many have noticed, is that the text says that the ratio of the circumference to the diameter of this circular object is 3:1, which is not true (that is to say, it is not true in the absolutely most strict sense of "true" which is what we are talking about when we are dealing with Biblical inerrancy), as the ratio is π:1. This is a more striking issue than even the evolution controversy, since we are not concerned here with a question of evidence, but the simple fact that such a ratio is not 3:1.

Now, many people have come up with explanations for this, most commonly by running to 2 Chronicles 4:2 where the same details are given and by pointing out that 2 Chronicles 4:5 names the thickness of the sea as a hand's breadth. The argument goes that, if we take into account the thickness of the brim and compare the inner diameter with the outer circumference, we get a result that is remarkably close to the value for Pi (though again, not exact, though we will not press this point). My concern is that this, first of all, does not deal with the text as it appears in 1 Kings but interprets it in light of another text altogether. At the very least, this technique demonstrates that all parts of the Bible are not evenly weighted, that 2 Chronicles 4:2, 5 is a more important text than 1 Kings 7:23 and the latter should be interpreted in light of the former and not the other way around. I think that this raises the question "Who decides which texts are more accurate and how can we determine which texts are clear and which are unclear?" but that is not the direction I plan to go with this.

The fact of the matter is that, in both texts, the diameter and circumference are mentioned in the same breath, without even so much as a hint that we are not dealing with two different circles. It certainly appears, based only on the text, that regardless of whether we are talking about the inner or the outer circumference, we are dealing with the same circle. To argue that we can use the diameter of one circle and the circumference of another requires that we make an argument that goes above and beyond the words on the page and stems from a preconceived notion of precisely how we must get the words on the page to work out. That is, the text does not stand on its own, but must be interpreted to bring it into line with mathematical observations, so it must be carefully interpreted to make it work out.

So, we are left with a few options if we hope to keep this text while still holding to the innerancist position. The first is to say that, whatever mathematicians have found, the ratio of the circumference to the diameter of circles in general is actually 3:1. This falls to the ground unless we wish to subscribe to a wholesale rejection of mathematics, which would be, in my judgment, a foolish thing to do. A more moderate position is to say that, whatever might be the case with other circles, this circle has a ratio of 3:1. This, however, does not solve the problem, because now we have an example where the events and items spoken of in the Bible have no real connection to anything else in our world, which undermines its authority to speak to us.

A third option (which encompasses the standard solution just mentioned above) is to say something along these lines. "Look, if we look at the history of mathematics, we find that human beings have always known that the ratio between the circumference and the diameter of a circle is a little more than 3:1, but they only began to get any kind of conceptual clarity around the issue until about 400AD. The text in question is describing events that took place around 1000BC, 1400 years earlier. Maybe, just maybe, God wasn't concerned with getting such minute issues exactly right, as they have no bearing on any aspect of life, and maybe when the text says 'circle' it means 'something pretty darn close to a circle.' In that case, what good would it have been for God to say 'Make it 10 cubits across and 31.4159265359... cubits around?' None at all. It would only have bewildered the people. What really mattered? Getting the thing built. What harm is there in saying that God simply said, 'Make it ten across and thirty around; it's close enough for jazz?'" This is a position that I wholeheartedly embrace, but there is a serious problem for Biblical inerrancy that only becomes clear when we play out its implications.

The fact of the matter is that I know of no Christian, inerrancist or otherwise, who would say that any aspect of Christian faith stands or falls depending on our interpretation of 1 Kings 7:23. But if we take this third option, we have made a tremendous step. We have said that the text as a text cannot stand on its own; we must interpret it based on what we know to be the case independently of the text itself (whether simply because of mathematical considerations or by saying it must be interpreted in light of another text and is inadequate on its own). We have made a significant leap away from the text as such into the world of interpretation. We have said, "The text might say that the ratio is three to one, but what the text means is that it is close enough or that there is some other explanation." Let us now move on and see what can become of this position.

What would happen if we were to turn to Genesis 1? What if we were to say, "The text might say that creation took place in six days (defined as the sun coming up and going down, implying a day of 24 hours), but what the text means is that creation took place in an orderly way that follows this general pattern but that the word 'day' must be interpreted as 'period of time.'" Not every Christian would object to this, but there are many that would. And yet, at the end of the day, the crucial distinction between what we did with 1 Kings 7:23 and what we have done here are not fundamentally different. We have taken a text and said that it cannot stand on its own but must be interpreted in light of something we know elsewhere. Nothing but a sheer force of will can make someone say, "We can take that step with 1 Kings 7:23 but we cannot take it with Genesis 1."

To take it a step further, let us look at the accounts of Christ's Resurrection from the dead. What if we were to say (as many have done), "The text might say that Jesus was bodily raised from the dead in glory, but what the text means is that, on Easter morning, the disciples had such a profound encounter with the spirit of Christ (not without parallel in the history of Hinduism) that it was as if he had been raised from the dead." This is where many (if not all) Christians, myself included, should stand up and say, "That is going too far." If there is one thing that is necessary to keep the New Testament documents from falling into unintelligibility, it is the physical, literal resurrection from the dead. The resurrection is not just another doctrine to believe, it forms the epistemological cornerstone of all our faith. If Christ was not really raised from the dead, as Paul says "We are of all people most to be pitied."

And yet, if we have made the leap into interpretation based on external insights back in 1 Kings 7:23 (or anywhere else, I might add), on what grounds can we stand and say that a purely metaphorical interpretation of the resurrection is unacceptable? I think that, ultimately, this gets at the heart of the whole impetus of the Biblical inerrancist position. Nobody thinks that the gospel stands or falls with the diameter of the sea in Solomon's Temple, but it certainly does with the resurrection of Christ. How can we be flexible (or even self-consciously non-literal) with the former and not with the latter? It is precisely because it is hard to find a way to do this within the interpretational worldview fostered by Western culture that we find ourselves pushed into an affirmation of inerrancy. We desperately want to defend the resurrection and the incarnation and the only way we can see to do this is to affirm inerrancy.

I think that the whole view of Biblical inerrancy is an inverting of how things ought to be and a simple observation from our most basic Christian experience should help to make it clear. Very few, if any, of us, became Christians because we had a high doctrine of the Bible first and then were convinced of the gospel because it was in the Bible. Most of us encountered the living Lord first and only after that were driven to the text. We do not believe in Jesus because the Bible teaches about him (as if the Bible was the supreme authority and Jesus was merely one of the many doctrines taught in it), but rather we read the Bible because we have been confronted by God in Christ and through the Holy Spirit and the Bible is the only place to turn for reliable information about Christ.

So, as I said at the beginning of this essay, I do not subscribe to Biblical inerrancy. For what it is worth, most inerrancists whom I have taken through this whole line of thought have said that they don't take as rigid a position as I portray. My response is that, in point of fact, whatever term they may use, they are not inerrancists in the classical sense, but are likely infalliblists, which is based on weaker claims (weaker in the sense that they do not claim as much, not that they are weak arguments). One might ask me, "If you reject Biblical inerrancy, do you affirm that the Bible is inspired?" My answer is that yes, I do indeed believe the Bible is inspired. My understanding, however, is that biblical inspiration is much more complex and dynamic that most people think.

As is clear by my argument so far, I do not think that the Bible is primarily inspired in its writing, that is, I do not think that God is the only author of the Bible in the sense that the words are merely a transcript of God's words to the human who actually put pen to paper. Some strands of inerrancy argue that the Bible is even a transcript of the very thoughts of God (a view that is not the mainstream and has disastrous consequences for our doctrine of God). I used to think that this view was a fairly recent one, that it only arose in protest of theological Liberalism. I have been convinced since then by Karl Barth that this has been present in at least a few thinkers throughout the whole history of the church (Barth's argument and historical survey is long, but culminates in his Church Dogmatics I.2, pg. 529-30).

I commented at the beginning that, though I am not an inerrancist, I am also not even close to what many would call a theological Liberal. I believe in a literal incarnation, virgin birth, resurrection, and miracles. In light of this, it should come as no surprise that I do not believe that the Bible is primarily inspired in its reading. That is, though I believe that God actually does speak anew to us as we read the Bible, I do not think that we can reduce all the inspiration of the Bible to the activity of the Spirit as we read the text. After all, if it were nothing more than the Spirit moving and the text is not involved, why should we expect God to speak through the Bible and not other works of literature (such as Huckleberry Finn, as a professor of mine suggested)? I think that, though we cannot reduce the inspiration of the Bible to the text on the page, it must involve it or else we will end up with a view that is even less satisfying than inerrancy.

My understanding of inspiration flows more or less directly from my doctrine of Christ. It is my contention that Christ is, in the final analysis, the real foundation of the Christian faith, that it is not on the inerrancy of the Bible but on the living Person of Christ with which the gospel stands or falls. This manifests itself in dialogue with some Christians as a need to place Sola Christus above Sola Scriptura or even Sola Fidei. It manifests itself in dialogue with others by modifying the statement, "God will never reveal anything to you through his Spirit that is contrary to what is written in the Bible," with "God will never reveal anything to you through his Spirit that is contrary to what he has revealed of himself through Christ." It is given tremendously clear expression in the words of T. F. Torrance. "Now if we think of Jesus Christ in this way as the Truth in his own Person, our statements about him, biblical or theological statements, cannot be true in the same sense as Jesus Christ is true, for they do not have their truth in themselves but in their reference to him away from themselves, and they are true insofar as that reference is truthful and appropriate" (Reality and Evangelical Theology, 124).

My understanding of the role of the Bible is also deeply connected to the Christian doctrine of the ascension of Christ. In Christ, God himself came among us in a particular place and at a particular time. During that time, he taught, he lived and he formed a community of redeemed sinners to take the good news out to the whole world. And then, after he was raised from the dead and met with his disciples for forty days, he ascended to heaven. There is not only a particular location in space-time where God came to meet with us, there is also a particular location in space-time where God departed from being physically present. By doing so, God has marked off the years of Christ's earthly life and ministry to be the covenanted place where he can be met; he has subordinated all theological activity, all pretended claims to inspiration to those concrete years and that concrete revelation of himself in our midst.

It is because of this, because of these Christological considerations, that we cannot do away with the radically important place of the Bible in our Christian lives. To try to avoid the Bible as the source and norm of our Christian knowledge is to try to avoid the centrality of Christ and to look elsewhere to find God, that is, to search for God where God cannot be found. Not only this (as one might claim that the argument so far only sanctions the use of the gospels), but the fact that God did not become incarnate in a cultural vacuum but did so in Israel as a Jew, "born of a woman, born under the law," we must take the Old Testament seriously for without it, we cannot rightly understand the revelation of God in Christ. Additionally, because Christ did not simply come and go, but specifically commissioned the apostles to go and proclaim, their post-resurrection activities and pastoral correspondence is of incredible importance and cannot be jettisoned without tremendous disaster (not to mention the arrogance of assuming that we can understand Christ from our foreign culture and language better than those who lived with him for years). Unless one can find another collection of texts that so comprehensively bears witness, not just to Christ, but to the whole historical context, both before and the generation after Christ, we are not free to dispose of Biblical revelation.

I do not expect that everyone will agree with these arguments, and some may even become angry with me as I have come from a decidedly Evangelical background and am self-consciously departing from orthodoxy as defined by that community. I only stress once again that my doing so is not rooted in any way, shape or form in a rejection of the Bible, but in absolutely radical devotion to Christ as the Lord and center, not only of my life, but of all.

Some Thoughts about the Nature of Illustration in Sermons etc.

Some thoughts about the nature of illustration in sermons etc.

I have just begun my fifth year as a pastor.  I must admit that my approach to preaching has changed over the years.  Those who attend the United Methodist Church in Hudson might be able to point out one or two things that have changed since I have been there, such as cultivating a somewhat milder tone, but there are others as well.  For example, before having to preach week after week, I thought of myself as an outline preacher.  I always thought it was neat when someone could just stand up with a few scribbles on a piece of paper and then deliver a passionate and engaging message.

The transition from outline to manuscript, in hindsight, was inevitable.  When I preached several times at my home church in Marshalltown as an intern, I only ever used outlines, but they steadily got to be far more detailed and each point turned into a paragraph.  Once I had to write a manuscript for my sermon that I had to give at licensing school.  One of the things I appreciated was the ability to think out in more precise terms what I wanted to say.  As I put it into practice, I found that the Holy Spirit worked just as much when I prepared throughout the week as it did when I preached from an outline.  In fact, I found that, by thinking out exactly what I wanted to say and seeing how it sounded out loud, I was able to use more precise language, reducing confusion and other good things. I found that I was more able to preach with boldness and conviction when I wrote out a manuscript than I ever was when I preached from an outline.

Though manuscript preaching is quite common in the mainline (or, at least, within some parts of the mainline), it was quite uncommon in the circles I found myself in before becoming a pastor.  In spite of the fact that I found a manuscript extremely helpful, there was still a nagging feeling that I had, at least in this way, abandoned my tradition.  I had to wrestle with this for quite a while.

All of this is to set the stage for some thoughts on illustrations in sermons, because this is also an area where I find myself at sharp distinction from, not only my tradition before becoming a pastor, but even among my seminary peers and throughout the mainline.  I have personally never been in favor of filling my sermons with illustrations.  The initial, gut-level reason why I have tended to avoid them is because I am simply not that creative of a person.  I have always had a hard time figuring out good illustrations, so I more or less let them go.  From time to time, someone (usually from outside of the church I serve) would talk about how helpful they have been in their lives, and I would begin to wrestle with the issue over again.

I found myself having conversations with people who love good illustrations in sermons and been able to discern my issues at a deeper level.  I began to realize that, when people would speak of really powerful illustrations they have heard used, they would not be able to recall the point from the Gospel that was the real purpose.  One person in particular related to me a youth leader he knew who frequently brought small items that were related to the message that they could take home to remind them of it.  There was one particular item that he kept in his room and had a lot of meaning for him.  But when I asked him, “What was the point of the message that went along with that item?”  The response was, “I don’t remember.”

Even in my own experience, I have found that this is the case.  Relatively recently, I used an illustration that I thought was better than most.  Not only did I make the point at the very beginning that the illustration was very limited, I also made sure to frequently point away from the illustration to the reality I was hoping to communicate.  The talk was very well received.  The young people who heard it loved it and really resonated with the illustration.  However, it became clear that their grasp on the illustration was far stronger than their grasp on the actual point made by the Gospel.  The talk was relatable, but I began to think that it could be argued that, since in practice, the illustration overshadowed the Gospel in the hearers, it was not truly a Gospel message, not truly the Christian faith proclaimed and received.

It is only recently that I found, in the course of my reading, a truly clear and deeply theological argument along these lines.  Let us say that we have an aspect of revelation, “Thing A.”  Because the ways and thoughts of God are not like the ways of human beings  (Isaiah 55:8-9), we should not be surprised that it is not easy for us to understand.  After all, it stands against the ways of the world and it stands against us inasmuch as we are sinners who are not fully conformed to the image of Christ.  In order to understand the revelation of Thing A, we introduce an illustration, “Thing B.”  The moment we try to illustrate Thing A with Thing B, our attention becomes divided between the two, if it is not wholly captivated by Thing B.

The problem is that, while Thing A is revelation, Thing B is not.  At its best, the illustration would intend to make a leap from Thing B (the illustration, created out of our own imagination) to Thing A (revelation, given by God).  But how is this possible?  How can we make a jump directly from something that is not revelation to something that is?  How can we say that the two Things are similar in any meaningful way for the church if one is revelation and one is invented by human beings?  It might be argued, “But Thing B is so much easier to understand than Thing A, so we should start there.”  I do not deny that Thing B is easier to understand.  How could it be otherwise?  Thing B stands far closer to us than Thing A because Thing A stands against us as the Word of God while Thing B was invented by the creativity of human beings.

When we illustrate the Gospel with images that we have thought up ourselves, what have we done?  If people walk away from the sermon or other message remembering the Gospel and the revelation from God and not the illustration, then the illustration was unnecessary.  If they walk away remembering the illustration and not the revelation, they have walked away with something, but it is something of fundamentally human creation and not the word of God.  There is a word for substituting something of human creation for the revelation of God.  Idolatry.

When I first heard illustration bluntly called idolatry, I thought to myself, “Well, I probably wouldn’t go THAT far.”  However, the more I think of it, the more I think that it is true.  What can we make of the desire to illustrate the Gospel to make it easier to understand by making it something of our own creation?  What are we to do if illustration is as important as we make it by our constant use of it?  What are we to say to those who think that illustration is so important for sermons and other Christian proclamation that it is not just helpful but necessary?

I cannot finally stand in judgment of others on this as it probably would not take someone long to find all kinds of other problems in my sermons that I post for all to see, especially if they were looking for them.  However, I have become more convinced than ever before that illustration is not where I should be putting my energy.  I refuse to feel that my preaching is inferior because it is devoid of illustration.  I hope that people would walk away from my sermons remembering nothing that was said than remembering something of my own clever invention that replaces the Gospel in their minds.

Probability and Meaning

Probability and Meaning

One of the things that well-meaning apologists for the Christian Faith do from time to time, is argue that the odds against the universe having the laws that it has, especially in the combination of these laws, is astronomically unlikely. This is a fact that everyone who is aware of the issues will grant. However, the conclusion that is often drawn from this is that such an incredible statistic should drive us to conclude that the Christian doctrine of creation (and who knows but all other traditional doctrines of Christian faith) is true.

The chief problem with this, as atheists are quick to point out, is that the argument trades on a conviction that "Incredibly Unlikely" => (that's "implies") "Designed by an Intelligent Source (or at least profoundly significant in some way)." In spite of the best efforts of such apologists, such an implication is simply not valid. Not valid, that is, as stated. There is an additional dimension that is taken for granted by the apologists that needs to be made explicit and, until it is, it will not hold any water at all.

Michael Polanyi, a Hungarian Physician/Chemist/Philosopher of Science, wrote his monumental work, "Personal Knowledge" based on the Gifford Lectures of 1951-52 on a wide range of topics, ultimately arguing that the goal of absolute objectivity (or, perhaps more accurately, "objectivism") that some claim for science is unattainable and should never have been viewed as the goal in the first place. It should be noted that Polanyi did not set out to undermine science in any way, but rather to help put it back on its proper foundations, where it functions quite authoritatively. In fact, he was trying to provide a more accurate account of how science actually works (which, as a scientist, he found was not the same as the way many scientists believed it to work) and promote more complete honesty among scientists. It should also be noted, for the sake of total disclosure, that Polanyi was himself a Christian, though his Christian faith does not enter into his writings on science and his views on evolution would not be agreeable to many particularly conservative Christians.

In the third chapter, on Order (and following a chapter on Probability), Polanyi suggests three scenarios. The first is that, at a particular village, when one enters by rail, there is a statement on the railway embankment in pebbles that reads "Welcome to Wales by British Railways." It is clear that those stones were placed by an intelligent human being who designed their location with some care. If someone were to challenge this view, how might we defend it? We would take the number of all the different ways that those pebbles could be arranged to make the phrase, and divide it by the total number of ways the pebbles could be arranged on the embankment (an incomprehensibly higher number) and say something along the lines of, "See? It is so improbable that it would have happened by accident; it must have been planned."

The problem arises if we imagine that, long after the person responsible for the phrase dies, the pebbles may find themselves scattered around the embankment in a haphazard manner. But what if someone were to argue that the evidence was just as strong that they are in this position by intelligent design than it was earlier. If we do the math, we find that the odds of the pebbles falling to this exact location is just as astronomical as before. Using a purely statistical approach, the evidence is identical on both sides.

Another example is that we would find it coincidental, interesting and incredibly unlikely (in the sense of "surprising") that someone was the 500,000 visitor to an exhibition, whereas we would not if they were the 573,522nd visitor, even though, if we do the math, the odds against being the latter are higher than against being the former.

The third example is to take twenty flips of a (fair) coin. Let us say they are all heads. What are the odds of this happening? Two to the twentieth power, or 1,048,576 to one. Sounds significant. But if we think about it, it turns out that every unique sequence of twenty throws of a coin are equally improbable. We now have over a million results that are, statistically, equally unlikely. Why single out one of them (or two if we also consider twenty tails in a row to be significant) to be particularly striking?

The point that Polanyi is getting at is that probability is not the only factor at work in this kind of reasoning. The striking thing about the first example is not that it is unlikely that the pebbles would be arranged at random, but that they were arranged at random and it resulted in an English phrase that made complete sense in that particular location where it wouldn't in nearly any other part of the world. The distinguishing factor is meaning. It isn't that we could pile a bunch of rocks in any particular way and have it happen to be unlikely how it turns out, but it is that it is incredibly unlikely that such a pile would be the carrier of a message (in whatever form this message may take) that has meaning for a specific group of people. The issue is whether the unlikely event is of no particular meaning, that is, it could easily have been different with no substantial impact ("noise") or whether it makes a considerable impact (a "tune").

This raises the key question. How can we tell whether what seems to us at first glance as random is a tune or whether it is just noise? That is to say, how can we know if there is a message, whatever that message may be, embedded in the details or whether it is nothing more than random facts with no significance? This is a real question (though the example is somewhat trivial) for those who cannot see the hidden images contained in Magic Eye puzzles. Everyone around them proclaims that there is an image to be seen; they can independently verify what it is and can even trace it out with their fingers, but, so long as the individual in question cannot see it, the dilemma remains: Is there really an image that I cannot see, or is everyone around conspiring against me?

Another example might be that of Stonehenge. Such a huge monument has attracted attention for years. If we were to forget everything we knew about the function of Stonehenge, we would have to ask the question, "Were these stones placed here for a reason, or is it merely random?" We might be inclined to the former conclusion because it might seem impossibly improbable to explain how the rocks ended up where they were merely by chance, but, since chance is not convincing evidence in and of itself, as we have noted above, it is not sufficient to tilt the argument decisively in one direction or another. It is only when we begin to say, "These rocks are here as a calendar," when we notice how it charts the solstices, that we are fully convinced, beyond all reasonable doubt, that the rocks are meaningful.

The problem still remains. How can we judge whether the object of our study is truly random, that is, purely coincidental or meaningful in a way we cannot yet understand? How do we know that what seems to be nothing more than white noise does not contain a message we have simply not yet learned the language to understand? The fact of the matter is that there simply is no surefire way to judge ahead of time which is the case. What is more, there is no way to ever prove that there is no message, even after countless trials. One can only prove, or make a strong case for, a message bring present; never that one is absent. After all, a message may emerge one day after years of fruitless research. Projects to understand a given reality may even be abandoned and yet be pregnant with a meaning that we have not yet been able to grasp.

This does not mean, of course, that we should operate with the assumption that every seemingly meaningless thing has a hidden, deep meaning. We simply cannot function if we look at every arrangement of rocks or grass as holding a deep truth about the universe. Sometimes things that appear meaningless are precisely that. Among scientists, there is only so much grant money available, there are only so many pages in a given journal, there are only so many lab technicians, which means some selection must take place. Not every lead can be followed; not every pattern can be analyzed in every possible way. Decisions must be made and they must be made knowing full well that by doing so, important discoveries that have hitherto been just beyond reach, might be missed.

So, to return to the question raised by apologists in our modern world, is the universe an accident or is it created? The decisive point in the argument is not on the improbability of the universe being precisely what it is and not otherwise, but on whether the universe being what it is is full of meaning that would be destroyed if it were not what it is. This often takes place around the issue of the so-called "anthropic principle." I do not mean to suggest that this observation will solve this or other problems easily, but that it must be taken into account and realized that the battlefield upon which much debate has raged is a false one and should be abandoned by both parties, so that we might start again and have more authentic, more fruitful, more honest discussions. The question is (we might say always) one of meaning. Not just "What is it?" but "What does it mean?"

Let God Be True...

11/20/11 Let God Be True... Grace UMC

The concept of truth has played a dominant role in the history of Western thought and culture. In their various ways, in spite of all their differences, the whole history of theology, philosophy and natural science, have been engaged in the search for truth and to understand how that truth impacts us as human beings. In the classical period and after the Enlightenment, truth was held to be the most beautiful of things. Truth and beauty were so connected, it was as if everything that is true is beautiful and everything that is beautiful is true.

But not everyone has thought that truth was beautiful. With the rise of postmodern skepticism and relativism, truth has taken on a different, almost sinister turn. There have been many thinkers who have concluded that the shocking truth is that there is no truth, at least no truth that can be agreed upon by everyone, which means no truth in the sense that we usually talk about truth. In this case, truth is far from beautiful, but can be ugly and even frightening. This kind of truth is something before which we tremble because we have deep desires that there are absolute things like love, goodness, value, meaning, and things like that. What are we to do if there aren't? It is a stark idea that many people have resisted, even if they have been convinced by it, if by nothing else than by a sheer act of the will.

When Jesus was standing before Pilate, he was asked, "So you are a king?" Jesus responded, "You say that I am a king. For this I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice." Pilate's retort to this is famous. He asks the question that has been on so many lips since that time and is more common now than perhaps at any other time in history. "What is truth?" Pilate merely did what so many skeptics have done. He attempted to dismiss Jesus' claims to the truth on the grounds that he could not find anything that he felt he could call truth.

Since I have begun my appointment here a few months ago, I have found myself asking a classical question about the nature of truth that goes back to Socrates. In his dialogue with Euthyphro, a man known as a prophet of the pagan Greek gods, Socrates asks this question. "Are things loved by the gods because they are holy, or are the things holy because they are loved by the gods?" Now, it must be said at first that this question has a lot of buckshot in it, because Socrates is, in his own way, attempting to make Euthyphro look foolish. After all, you do not need to read Greek mythology for long before you realize that there isn't hardly anything that the gods all agree on. If we define goodness in terms of what the gods think is good, we can never get started, because they can never agree on what is good and what is not.

This particular jab does not apply if we direct the question to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. After all, we do not affirm a plurality of gods who disagree, quarrel, and even wage war on one another, but only one God, who is absolutely united, even in his triunity. And yet, the question still needs to be asked. Are things good because God loves them or does God love them because they are good? To many people, this sounds like a silly question to ask when they first hear it. After all, what difference does it really make? What should we care which way we look at things, if they both say basically the same thing.

Of course, the real question is, "Where does truth come from?" Is truth something that is defined by and has its source in God, specifically the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, or is truth something that is even more basic, even more fundamental than God himself? To look at it from a slightly different point of view, is good what it is because, first and foremost, God is who he is and not otherwise? That things are objectively good or evil based on what relation they bear to God? In that case, we find we must listen hard to God in order to really know what good and evil are. Or, perhaps, are good and evil what they are independently of God, and we follow God because he is so good and being good?

Often, when I ask this question of people, the moment they realize that there is actually a difference between these two ways of thinking, they say, "God loves things because they are good." I think that the reason we do this is because we are so deeply aware of the realities of good and evil, we can see good and evil in our lives everyday in undeniable ways, because we want everyone to live according to our understanding of good and evil, regardless of whether they agree with our religious convictions. And yet, the Bible consistently portrays God as the source of everything, of everything that we can see and everything that we cannot see. And that means that God is also the source of the distinction between good and evil. Things that are consistent with God, that are in their proper relationship to him are good; those that are not, that defy God, that take authority that belongs to God, are evil. This distinction holds regardless of what we as individuals or as a community think about it.

Paul has something to say on this topic. In his letter to the Romans we find a careful and heartfelt exploration of the relationship of the old covenant to the new, of the nation of Israel to the church as a whole. There is a constant going back and forth between the Jewish situation and the Gentile situation. Paul explores and compares how the Jewish people have reacted toward Christ with how the Gentiles have. In the chapter before our text for this morning, Paul, a Jew, critiques the Jewish people and their failure to respond to God in obedience. He argues that the Jews, no less than the Gentiles, fall under God's judgment. Indeed, they are even more guilty, for they had been set apart by God, they had been given a law to live by, they were truly meant to be God's people, and yet they misunderstood when their God came among them.

After pointing all of this out, Paul asks his readers, "Then what advantage has the Jew?" Biblical scholar C. H. Dodd responds here by saying that, according to Paul's line of thought, the answer should be "Nothing at all!" If all of the laws and rituals don't necessarily make the people better, what good is it? But that is not Paul's response. What advantage does the Jew have? "Much in every way!" Why is this? Because the Israelites were entrusted with the oracles of God, the revelation of God from the very beginning. The Israelites had played a vital part of God's interaction with humanity and this cannot be forgotten. After all, later in his letter, Paul will say that Gentile Christians, like you and me, are like branches from wild olive trees that have been grafted onto the roots of Israel, and not the other way around. Whatever may have taken place, we are not free to discard the history of Israel, for in Christ, it has become our history, too.

Paul puts forward the counterargument that someone might make. "What if some were unfaithful?" What if the Jewish people, in spite of all the blessings they had received, in spite of the care and mercy that God had shown them, didn't react in faith, but rather in unfaithfulness? What if the people showed by their actions that they did not value God? Paul's response to this is, "What about it? What difference should that make?" After all, just because a whole nation of people, generally speaking, did not behave faithfully to God, why should that mean that God should be unfaithful? "Will their faithlessness nullify the faithfulness of God? By no means!"

This bold declaration by Paul is incredibly comforting, especially because it reminds us that we are simply not capable of undoing the love that God has for us. We might live inconsistently with it, we might not receive the benefits that we are meant to get from it, but we can never actually undo it, we cannot actually make God change his mind about the compassion and mercy he has decided to show us. Not even the murder of the Son of God could stop God from loving us and working out his redemption for us and in us. "Let God be true though every man be false" is encouraging because it reminds us that, even if we have dedicated ourselves to falsehood, it does not change the fact that God is still true and that the truth of God stands in spite of our falsehood.

There is a bit of potential discomfort that comes with the declaration that, even if every human being was a liar, God would still be true. Because, you see, it means that, if I am false, if I, in spite of myself, am a liar, it means that God stands against me as far as my falsehood is concerned. It means that, if I am to be put in the right with God, I must simultaneously be put into the wrong as far as myself is concerned. That is, I cannot be made right with God without being deeply changed. The same God who reveals himself to us in Jesus Christ is called, in the Old Testament, a consuming fire, a hammer that breaks the rock into pieces. When we are confronted with the truth of God, all our falsehood is exposed for what it is and, if we are honest, we don't really like that. We would rather avoid it.

Christians in every generation have wondered why it is that some people simply will not turn to God. We sometimes wonder if people are just not convinced that God really is good. I think that the opposite is sometimes the case. I think that sometimes, people do not avoid God because they do not know how good he is but precisely because they know exactly how good he is. It is precisely because, when they meet with God all their evil is exposed by God's goodness and all their falsehood is exposed by God's truth that they want to stay away. It is as Isaiah says. "We have all become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous deeds are like filthy rags. We all fade like a leaf, and our iniquities, like the wind, take us away." When we compare ourselves to the absolute truth and goodness of God, we shrink away; not because we have found out something about God that we do not like, but that we have found out something about ourselves that we cannot bear.

And yet, it is not as though this discomfort is the final word. God did not come among us to make us uncomfortable, though that certainly happens when we are challenged by his very being. God came among us to stare our evil and falsehood in the face and to overcome it. To endure it in all its depths and even to provoke it to new heights by offering himself to be betrayed and murdered by us, and to use that very manifestation of our human evil and falsehood as the moment where God's goodness and truth are most concretely manifest in our world of space and time. Jesus said once to his disciples, "I am the truth." He did not say, "My words are the truth," or "The scriptures are the truth," but "I am the truth." And how did humanity react to this truth in their midst? By nailing him to a tree and leaving him to die. And yet, in spite of the radical faithlessness that humanity showed toward the faithfulness of God, God did not turn away, but remained faithful, remained true, remained absolutely fixed on his goal to take us and make us his own.

"Let God be true, though every man be false" is a statement of the absolute reliability of God's promises to us. When all the world comes crashing down around us. when it seems that all our hopes and dreams for certainty, for joy, for meaning, collapse, God still stands. When we look around and see that all our heroes are crumbling into dust, when all those we thought we could trust turn out to be deceivers, when we realize that not everyone we thought was looking out for our best interest was actually doing so, when we realize that we ourselves were not always looking out for our best interests; when we realize that our falsehood goes down to the core of who we are, God remains true.
Being put into the right with God carries with it, simultaneously, the realization that we are in the wrong. The word of justification, the word of salvation, the word of redemption means that we, in and of ourselves, are unredeemed, that we are in need of redemption; that we are not who we ought to be.

The good news is that God is true, regardless of whether we are. That God is good even when we are not. That the Good News of Jesus Christ stands, regardless of whether anyone listens. God will not let us out of the implications of what he has done that easily. God is true, even if you are a liar; God is true even if I am a liar. God is true and has invaded this world of falsehood; and that is good news. Let us pray.

AMEN

Mark 4:21-34

11/16/11 Mark 4:21-34 GUMC Youth

Chapter four of Mark is something of a chapter of parables. It was in this chapter that we saw the first of Jesus' parables, the parable of the sower, and it contains almost all of the parables we find in the whole book. Tonight, we are going to look at three parables that Jesus tells, one right after another.

What is interesting to me is how many people I have met that are only interested in trying to understand the parables one at a time, in isolation from one another. That means, they would want to look at the first parable in our passage first, then the second, then the third, but never really all at the same time. The thing is, these parables aren't put side by side by accident. It is actually only when we look at the parables one at a time, but also look at them all together, that we really understand what Jesus is getting at. Parables are the kinds of things where, if you want to understand one of them, you really need to try to understand them all, preferably at the same time.

The first parable that Jesus says here is about a lamp. He says, "Is a lamp brought in to be put under the bushel basket, or under the bed, and not on the lampstand?" The answer, of course, is that it would be stupid to do those things with lamps, not least because, since lamps at the time ran by burning fuel, it would be dangerous. The point is that you don't light a lamp for no purpose (especially if fuel was expensive, which it was). You light lamps so you can see. And because you light lamps so you can see, you put them in prominent places in the house, high up so the light doesn't get blocked by all your furniture.

He continues on and says, "For there is nothing hidden, except to be disclosed; nor is anything secret, except to come to light." The point that Jesus is getting at here is that, as Christians, we are not saved, we are not indwelled by the Holy Spirit, to have it be our little secret. To be a Christian and to have nobody be able to tell is like lighting a lamp and then carefully hiding it so nobody can see it. It is simply pointless. Now, don't misunderstand me. I'm not saying that you should go to school and sports practices and make a really big deal about how you are a Christian. After all, a lamp doesn't stand on its lampstand and say, "Hey everybody, I'm a lamp!" Everyone can just tell that it is a lamp. Words are important and a willingness to talk about Jesus is important, but if people can't tell that there is something different about you, all the words in the world won't make a difference.

The other thing that Jesus says on this topic is, "The measure you give will be the measure you get, and still more will be given you. For those who have, more will be given; and from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away." The big point is of reciprocity, that what we receive and what we give are to be related to one another. If you give a lot, you will receive a lot. You don't always receive back the same kind of thing you gave, like, just because you give a lot of money, doesn't mean you will get a lot of money back, but you will receive joy, peace and love. If you don't put much into your relationship with God, you won't receive much in return. If you want your faith to impact your life, if you want to be someone who doesn't just go through the motions, but is actually impacted by the reality of God, you have to participate. You can't be surprised if God doesn't move in your life if you don't participate and take advantage of what you have already received.

There is another side to this. Not only is what we receive from God proportional to what we give, we are also called to give to God in proportion to what we have received. You see, God made the first move, took the first step. The fact that we can give anything to God at all is based firmly in the fact that we received from him long before we ever dreamed of giving anything to him. I want to give a somewhat silly example of this kind of thing. When I was in high school, I was in American History and I had just about the best teacher I'd ever had. We had real, hands-on projects, where we got to engage in the stuff we were learning. Like when we talked about the roaring twenties and the stock market crash, we all started with the same amount of money, and tried to trade with each other to end up with the most money.

Well, one project we did was we were each given a nation that fought in World War I, and we had to make alliances and fight battles with each other. As you can imagine, the people who had America, England, Germany, France, and places like that were able to conquer all kinds of people, they had hugely superior firepower and could easily win in battle. My partner and I ended up with some tiny country in the middle of nowhere. We couldn't get much done, but we did our best. At the end of the game, our teacher told us to take our scores and modify them according to a table that he showed us. As it turned out, the superpowers didn't do so well at the end of the day because they had to take away so many points. You see, anyone would have expected them to do well. They actually had to do really well in order to show that their victories were not simply because they started off with all the advantages. My partner and I ended up coming in like second or third place, not because we won the war, but because we did what we could with what we had.

We are held accountable for what we receive. If we have received only a little bit, God knows it and has tremendous grace. We are not judged according to what we don't have but what we do have. On the flip side, if we have received a lot, we are expected to give and live accordingly. I know that, from time to time, it seems like we really haven't received all that much, but we really have, especially in Spencer. Did you know that Clay County has one of the lowest poverty rates in Iowa? That doesn't mean that there isn't poverty, but that it is remarkably low, compared to places like Des Moines, Waterloo, and lots of places down in the southern part of the state. Simply looking at that, you can tell that you have received much. On top of that, you have been taken care of by your parents, which lots of young people simply haven't. The fact of the matter is that you have already received much. When you succeed, you don't simply succeed on the basis of your own natural talent, but because other people have paved the way for your success. You have received much. Will you give much with your life?

The other two parables don't take as much time to explore. Jesus says this. "The kingdom of God is as if someone would scatter seed on the ground, and would sleep and rise night and day, and the seed would sprout and grow, he does not know how." Now, any farmer will tell you that they don't just sit around after they've planted their seeds. Farming is hard work and, though there are seasons where it is less intense, there is always something to do. The point that Jesus is making is that, in spite of all the work that a farmer might do, the farmer really isn't causing the seed to grow, or even helping it to grow. The farmer is doing whatever he can to remove every obstacle to growth. The growth happens slowly and gradually. If you are like me and you don't spend all your time on a farm, when you get out into the country every few weeks, it seems obvious how much the corn, for example, has grown. I imagine that if you were a corn farmer, the difference in growth from the last time you looked at your plants to the next time is pretty small. In fact, you probably can't even tell, from to day to day, that they are growing at all.

I am always amazed at how closely this applies to my Christian life. One of the things that there is no shortcut for is establishing a relationship with God. The longer you've been a committed Christian, the more you know how God works in you. I have these times where it feels like I've completely plateaued, when I don't feel like I'm growing, but just kind of floating through the days and weeks. I'm still doing the things I should be doing. I'm still reading my Bible, I'm still praying, I'm still trying to put my faith in practice, but I don't feel like I'm going through any breakthroughs, like I have at certain points in my life.

At times like this, what I've tried to do is to force myself to remember where I've been. When I do this, I start to see that lots more was happening in those dry times than I ever imagined. To give an example of this, I talked last week about beginning to read my Bible and I said that, if you approach the Bible expecting to have your mind blown every single day, you will just get frustrated and quit. I spent a lot of those first years studying the Bible thinking that, in spite of my discipline, in spite of my desire to understand what was in the Bible, I just wasn't really learning it. Then, one day, I woke up and I found myself knowing the passages that the people around me were referencing. I started to be able to predict which passages people would use to make which points, I found myself being able to identify verses just from their references, which I could never do before. After all, like I told you, I was the worst Bible navigator ever. When you feel like God hasn't been moving in your life, take some time to remember where you used to be. Sometimes we just need to take a step back to see that God really has been at work.

The last parable is the parable of the mustard seed. It starts from a tiny seed, a seed so small that it takes 700 of them to even weigh a gram, which is not much. The mustard seed was so small that it was a common thing to use to emphasize how tiny something was. And yet, it grows up into a large bush that sometimes can even reach three meters high, which is like nine feet. We have had a phrase in English that gets at the same point. "Tall oaks grow from small acorns." At times, especially early on, our faith might seem amazingly small, so small that it couldn't turn into anything significant. Jesus' parable reminds us that the size of the seed doesn't tell us anything about the size of the plant. Our faith starts out small, but through a dynamic relationship with God, it grows and grows until it can even become a support for others.

Before we finish up tonight, I want to make a point drawing on all three of these parables. Faith cannot be hidden (like a lamp on a stand, like a growing plant, like a seed that is planted). It must be shown. It doesn't need to be shown because we will let someone down if we don't, it doesn't need to be shown because we have to force ourselves to do it, but it needs to be shown because that is what faith does. So, even though I'm not asking you to try to make a big deal about your faith (because that is counter-productive as well), I want you to think about whether anyone else can tell that you are a Christian.

I want to tell a story from my life to try to show what I mean. Now, you all have only known me as a pastor. It is probably pretty hard to imagine me as someone who is not a pastor, harder still to imagine me as someone who is not a Christian. And yet, as I have pointed out several times, I have not always been a Christian, and even after I became a Christian, I really didn't take it really seriously until I was in college. A few years ago, after I'd been a pastor for a while, a friend of mine from high school got married and I went to his wedding. While we were at the reception, we sat with some other folks we knew from high school There was one girl, a pastor's kid, who asked me what I'd been up to. When I told her that I was a pastor, she was astonished. She said, "Wow...um...wow. That really surprises me. I just never imagined that you would become a pastor."

Now, in my defense, I wasn't exactly that hard partying, heavy drinking, drug using wild man in high school. In fact, my first thoughts about her reaction were, "Wow. What did I do in high school that would make it so amazing that I could become a pastor." I really wasn't all that bad of a kid. And yet, that actually makes the point even stronger. Whatever my faith looked like in high school, it certainly didn't show itself to other people. I might have been a fairly good kid, and people might have noticed that, but there was nothing about who I was or how I lived that would have given anyone a clue that I had the Spirit of God dwelling inside of me and was following in the footsteps of Jesus.

Guys, that isn't what faith is supposed to be. Our faith is supposed to be like a lamp on a lampstand, it is supposed to be like a crop that, even though it starts small, grows up into a healthy, mature plant that everyone can see. It is supposed to be like the seed that might seem small at first, but grows into a mighty bush. The difference between someone who loves the Lord and one who does not is described in the New Testament as the difference between life and death. It can't be reduced to what we say or what we do, but it involves those things. Jesus Christ has given his life for us. The only thing that makes sense is that we would give our lives for him. Let us pray.

AMEN

Toleration

Toleration
 
Recently, I have been thinking about the issue of toleration.  It is very interesting being a Christian thinking about this topic because the church, it seems, has been on every conceivable side of this issue over the years.  At the very beginning, the church was a persecuted minority.  Occasionally, Christian thinkers wrote treatises about the practices of the church to show authorities that they were not downright evil people as some were saying (there were some rather disturbing rumors going around about what happened during the Eucharist, for example).
 
Later in Western history, you had the Protestant Reformation, where various secular leaders aligned themselves with different religious leadership, effectively choosing what brand of Christianity their domain would practice.  Those who dissented from the majority made appeals for toleration, that they might be able to continue practicing the religion they chose.
 
Now we find ourselves in the modern day, in a country that, in so many ways, was founded on the idea of religious toleration (or at least, such an idea was close to the main few ideas included in the Bill of Rights).  And yet, it feels like there is just as little toleration as there has ever been.  Sometimes, it is the church that persecutes people of other religions or people of no religion at all.  Sometimes, even, the persecution goes the other way.  What is fascinating to me as a Christian leader is to see that Christianity can be seen simultaneously as the dominant religio-cultural influence in America and yet also be a persecuted body, perhaps in some instances, as a persecuted minority, depending on the context.
 
When one glances back over Western history, the cry for toleration has been nearly ever-present.  Somebody always wants to be tolerated by someone else and does not feel like they are being so tolerated.  However, it has not always been the same groups.  What that means is that, as persecuted minorities become tolerated and eventually become more and more dominant, there seems to be a trend that they then deny other groups the toleration they battled so hard for.  Why should that be?  Should not those who have yearned for tolerance be that much quicker to show it?  Or perhaps, to be somewhat cynical, do those who have more acutely felt the need for toleration withhold it precisely because they were denied it in the past, a kind of “I’ll do unto you as they did unto me,” attitude?
 
There is much that could be said on this topic, and I do not pretend to have studied this particular issue as deeply as I might, but I have a few thoughts to share.  It seems that, when people refuse to tolerate others, it is because, to their mind, those others are wrong.  To tolerate people who are wrong, it would seem, is a disintegrating force in our society at its most basic level.  When people are tolerated, it is as if we are saying, “We don’t agree with you, but you might possibly be right.”  This is, of course, perhaps part of the reason why many people do not want to tolerate others in the first place.  Toleration can easily be read as tacit approval, and, if the opposing group is wrong, they ought not to be approved.
 
I think that this has done tremendous disservice to the idea of toleration.  It seems that to tolerate someone is precisely to tolerate them as someone who is wrong, at least from your point of view.  If I think that you might be right, it would seem that it is best to say that I conditionally accept you rather than say that I tolerate you.  But once I have conditionally accepted you, toleration is really not the issue.
 
It might seem that I am asking for people to be more harsh with one another, since I am not necessarily advocating “conditional acceptance” for all, but rather “toleration.”  The reason for this is because to insist that we all “conditionally accept” one another is, in practical terms, to superimpose a kind of uniformity (or at least a meta-uniformity) that just does not exist in everyday experience.  I think that, in order to really find unity among people, we need to allow the differences to be what they are so that those differences can be in dialogue with one another as differences.
 
What this means is that I still reserve for myself the right to think that someone else is wrong, but it also means that I reserve for others the right to think that I am wrong.  What it also means is that I will tolerate you, not because I secretly think that you are more right than I am, or that I, deep down inside, wish I could think like you do, but because you are another human being for whom Christ died.  It means that I don’t want you to tolerate me because you think that I have some secret key to happiness that you have missed, but simply because I am another human being, even if, from your point of view, I am completely wrong.
 
It is simply foolish that Party A should persecute Party B, then tolerate Party B so that it can gain a foothold in the culture and even rise to prominence or dominance, only for Party B to deny toleration to Party A because they are “wrong.”  Since when did “right” and “wrong” enter into the rules of toleration?  A toleration that says, “I will tolerate you so long as you fit into my definition of ‘right,’” is not toleration at all.

Let us strive for genuine toleration, that we might join together to seek genuine truth.

Some Reflections on Understanding People

Some Reflections on Understanding People
 
Something that has driven me crazy for some time within the church is the way we treat the Pharisees in the Gospel narratives.  I would hear sermons and other messages that would talk about how hypocritical the Pharisees were and that they were people who spent all their time trying to earn their way into heaven while, at the same time, imposing unbearable requirements on the people, seeking to eliminate the people who got in their way rather than give up their power.
 
What particularly bothered me is that it seemed clear to me that the problems that we see in the Pharisees have not gone away.  They are everywhere, perhaps more in the church than anywhere else.  The more I thought about it, the more I realized that these were not two isolated facts, but were deeply related to one another.  The prevalence of Pharisaic problems in the church makes perfect sense because they are problems that religious leaders are more likely to have than anyone else, precisely because of their status as religious leaders.  If this was indeed true, it seemed that our tendency to demonize the Pharisees did nothing but blind our eyes to seeing how we are just like they are.
 
After that, I felt I could no longer treat the Pharisees that way.  I began to realize that, just like most people who act like the Pharisees in our own day don’t realize they are doing it (and I can give you many examples from my own life where the same has been true of me), it is entirely possible that the Pharisees themselves did not understand the sinfulness of their behavior.  In fact, the more I got inside their heads, the more I realized that they weren’t being evil for evil’s sake, but were trying to act with integrity within their tradition as best they could.
 
This does not, however, mean that the Pharisees were any less wrong.  What it did, though, was help me to understand not only what they were saying and doing but why they were saying and doing it.  More than ever, it has taught me to see where I do exactly the same things, where I wasn’t able to see it before when I behaved as if there was no similarity between them and myself.
 
This has taught me the evils of demonizing people.  It has become more and more clear to me that a large part of our problem today is that we cannot have honest conversations with people and a large part of why we cannot do that is because we tend to demonize the people with whom we disagree.  So long as we refuse to understand why someone might come to a different conclusion than we do, we will never be able to take them seriously.  We will develop a caricature, a straw man, and then ruthlessly cut it down, without taking account of the fact that it bears no relation to reality, or, at least, not much of one.
 
Let me use as an example the issue of abortion, as the opposing sides, as I see it, are rather clearly expressed.  Those who think that abortion is always wrong call themselves “pro-life.”  Those who think that abortions are acceptable in one form or another call themselves “pro-choice.”  Now, pro-lifers will say that pro-choicers are “anti-baby” or something along those lines as, the argument goes, such people advocate the killing of babies (It must be noted that those who are pro-life often work with an understanding of embryonic and fetal life as equal to life outside of the womb, an understanding that is not shared by everyone else).  Pro-choicers, on their part, tend to say that pro-lifers are “anti-women” or something along those lines as, the argument goes, the forcing women to have their baby forces women to give up their dreams and is a financial burden (It must be noted here that the battle often rages the hardest over the issue of pregnancies that result from rape or incest, where the mother had no real choice in the preventing of the pregnancy).
 
The problem with this way of thinking is that it does not reflect the truth, or at least only a partial rendering of the truth.  It is entirely possible that some pro-life people are truly anti-women and some pro-choice people are anti-baby.  However, I have serious doubts that people lay awake at night thinking, “I really hate babies.  How can I act on this intense hatred of babies?  I know, I’ll support abortion!”  Or, conversely, “I really hate women.  How can I oppress women as best as I can?  I know, I will refuse to let them get abortions!”
 
This way of thinking emphasizes only the positive aspects of each view (that life and/or choice is good) and attacks only the negative aspects of the other (that there are bad side-effects that can arise from these views).  In practice, this completely eliminates any hope of real conversation and dealing with issues.  If a pro-lifer calls a pro-choicer a “baby killer,” how likely is that pro-choicer going to want to have real dialogue?  Indeed, how likely is that pro-lifer to want to have real dialogue?  After all, they have resorted to a caricature.
 
Why are do we do this to each other (and here I have stepped away from the specific issue of abortion)?  I think it is because we are desperately afraid.  In our increasingly polarized culture, to take a position that is not on one extreme or the other is to be seen as a traitor to both sides.  To take the opposing side seriously means to treat the people as if they may truly be human and, thus, may have some things in common with well-grounded, sensible people like us, which makes it much harder to take a hard line against them.  To really listen always carries with it the possibility, no matter how small, that we may be convinced by what we hear, or at least that we may begin to see varying shades of grey where we used to see nothing but black and white.  
 
It is difficult to toe the middle line when all around seem to be running as far from that middle as possible.  And yet, though I surely try to live in this tension and I certainly advocate that others do so as well, I do not think we should pursue moderation as if it were a kind of replacement ideology, as if an ideology of the middle is any better than an ideology of the left or the right.  I think that the reason that the extreme positions are destructive is because they are not true, because they distort the facts and then use power to try and enforce conformity to that particular distortion.  I think that we should see shades of grey, not just because I wish we could stop the bitter fighting but because I am convinced that the shades of grey are real and that thinking in terms of black and white forces us away from what really is.  I think that we need to stop demonizing people because it prevents us from experiencing them as they really are.

Strong Feelings in Our Contemporary Culture

Strong Feelings in Our Contemporary Culture:

We live in a culture today where many people have extremely strong feelings about various topics.  That’s fine.  Not only do I believe that people should have strong feelings about things, I myself have very strong feelings about certain issues.  However, what inevitably happens is that a person comes into contact with another person, or especially another organization, that disagrees strongly on the same issue.  This is where the problems come in.

Let’s say we have a person, let us call them “Person A” who has strong feelings in favor of an issue, let’s say, “Issue B.”  Eventually, Person A meets someone or reads an article or even just hears through the grapevine that some organization, “Organization C” is very much Anti-Issue B (Whatever issue B happens to be), ostensibly because of their own deeply held, strong feelings about the issue.  What is Person A to do?  They are now faced with something or someone who disagrees with their strong feelings.  Surely, they cannot simply remain silent about it.

So they write an article, or post a link to an article that someone else (who agrees with them) or just even a strongly worded status update on Facebook denouncing Organization C for taking a stance that deviates from the opinions of Person A.  However, this seems to seldom take the form, “I do not think that you should support Organization C because they are against something that I am in favor of or because they are in favor of something I am against.”  Rather, they are usually much more pointed than that.  Often, the strong feelings underlying the position of Organization C are acknowledged simply to be dismissed or, what is more often the case, demonized.  Words like “hate” and “evil” are thrown around with alarming frequency.  The impression one gets after reading something like this is that, if I find myself either agreeing with Organization C or even simply deviating slightly from the rigid position of Person A, then I must be equally hated by Person A and therefore am equally dismissed or condemned by them.  The other potential conclusion is that I may find myself completely in agreement with Person A and the writing has further empowered me to continue to hold my own strong feelings and condemn those of others without feeling the need to understand the other person.  This particular point is deeply related to the content of my previous note (Some Reflections On Understanding People).

It is important to point out that there are both liberal and conservative forms of this situation.  I have seen countless appeals from one group to completely boycott or fight against another group because of the views they hold.  I say this because, though it might seem that I am particularly picking on one side or the other, I am fully aware that this is a widespread issue and cannot be pinned only on one side of the political spectrum.

The question that I believe needs to be raised is, “How can we, in good conscience, do these kinds of things?”  I cannot express how many times I have seen someone write words to the effect of, “This person/organization supports/is against this particular issue.  They are so arrogant, closed-minded and exclusive.  You should avoid them or write letters of protest against them.”  How is this tactic any less arrogant, closed-minded and exclusive?  How is it that I can, on the basis of my own strong feelings, condemn someone else who, on the basis of their own strong feelings, acts accordingly?  Does that not seem as though I am doing precisely the same thing that I am condemning them for?  How are my own exclusive actions and words more noble than those I condemn?  Is it because the other group or person is wrong while I am right?  If so, how am I so sure that I am right?  I fear that, all too often, the determining factor of whether I am “right” or not is simply because I choose to believe that I am right.

This leads me to say a few words about what has developed in Western culture, particular in America, which I like to call the ideology of inclusivity or the ideology of pluralism, as the two ideas are deeply interrelated (There is some overlap here with a previous note on pluralism).

Inclusivity is something that is prized very highly within the various mainline denominations in America, not least the United Methodist Church, of which I am a minister.  There is a deep conviction that the church ought to be inclusive.  The rationale for this is that Jesus was remarkably inclusive, eating with sinners and Gentiles, ministering to women and the poor.  So far as we remain rooted in Christ, I have no problem with being inclusive.  However, when we take the statement, “Jesus was inclusive and we are called to be like Jesus, so let us be inclusive like Jesus was,” and transform it into, “Jesus was inclusive so inclusivity is a goal in and of itself,” insurmountable problems arise.

What does it mean to be inclusive in an ideological sense, that is, being inclusive for the sake of being inclusive?  Perhaps this can be best expressed by taking a look at the cognate idea of “pluralism” that has developed.  I am a Christian.  Someone who is a pluralist in the popular sense would say to me, “It is fine that you are a Christian.  However, you must not make any claims that Christianity is true, unless you limit it and say, ‘Christianity is true for me.’”  The reason for this is because it is clear that not everyone in the world is a Christian and to say that “Christianity is true,” is to say to the non-Christian, “Your religious convictions are wrong.”  This implication, that someone else might have a wrong opinion, is deemed as “not loving” and “exclusive,” and must therefore be eliminated.

This seems to be a consistent view at first, because it advocates and actually insists upon making room for other views.  However, it is, in practice, almost never consistent.  What does the ideological pluralist do, for example, with the neo-nazi or the member of the KKK?  If we are to make room for everyone’s convictions, religious or otherwise, on what grounds can we say that some people are wrong?  Those who advocate pluralism or inclusivity as an end in itself, find themselves condemning people, in spite of their own philosophy.  What began as a view that allowed everyone to have their own opinions and lifestyles transitions into a view that says that at least some opinions and lifestyles, are not allowable.

Why are some lifestyles allowable and others not?  It cannot be on any pretence to “truth” because the ideological pluralist or inclusivist is too postmodern to think that any community can have a monopoly on truth and that we must allow for those who disagree with us.  However, radically intolerant groups, if left unchecked, will tear society apart.  They must be opposed.  But on what grounds?  What seems to be put forward most often is an ideal that is stated with such confidence that it must not be questioned, “Ideas and lifestyles are alright if they do not hurt other people.  If they do, they are not acceptable.”  This is so widely believed, but on what is it based?  At best, purely Western values such as are enshrined in the American constitution; more often, simply on the whim of the speaker, who does not want to be hurt by others.”

The problem with this is that, once you have said that something is wrong and it is always wrong, regardless of the community to which a person belongs, a standard has been made by which every other view is judged to be acceptable or not acceptable.  In spite of the alleged “humility” that presses someone into a radically pluralist or inclusivist view, it actually becomes very paternalistic and judgmental because it claims that the radically pluralist or inclusivist view is “right” and any group that is exclusivist is “wrong.”

Let us put this into its clearest form.  Those who wish to be radically inclusive realize they must take a stand against those who are radically exclusive, so they take the stand, “Everything is relative, but pluralism is true!”  This solves their moral problem by condemning any person or group who is exclusive in their eyes.  However, this statement has shown that the radical inclusivist is indeed exclusive of exclusivists and therefore must be excluded by their own ideology.  If one must be exclusive of those who are exclusive, that same person is automatically excluded.

Professor Alan Torrance at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland, has written a profoundly insightful essay called “Toward Inclusive Ministry:  The Logical Impossibility of Religious and Theological Inclusivism, Pluralism and Relativism.”  Torrance, a committed Christian, begins by explaining the famous threefold typology of “Inclusive, Exclusive, and Pluralistic” popularized by Gavin D’Costa.  However, in the years following the publication of his book, D’Costa has completely changed his mind on this issue and now contends that it is only possible for human beings to have an exclusive stance, inasmuch as it is logically impossible to truly follow the implications of an inclusive or pluralist ideology.

Without going into all the details of this excellent essay, what is important for this discussion is that Torrance questions what we mean when we say that we should be “inclusive.”  Do we mean that we must be inclusive of ideas or that we must be inclusive of persons?  This is a significant distinction.  If we wish to be inclusive of all persons, we must consider certain ideas to be out of line, such as genocide and all forms of abuse.  However, if we wish to be inclusive of ideas, we cannot be inclusive of persons, as some ideas are defined by their stance against certain persons.  Torrance concludes by upholding this understanding of inclusivity, which is markedly different than the word is popularly understood, but as, he believes, is much more consistent with the gospel and much more productive of actual conversation with people of differing opinions.

To bring this back to the original point of this writing, our strong feelings are not intrinsically evil.  However, what ends up being destructive is our determined ignorance.  If I criticize someone else for running roughshod over my cherished beliefs and, by doing so, run roughshod over their cherished beliefs, I am just as much to blame as they are.  To complain that a person or organization is being closed-minded and discriminatory in such a way as to use primarily emotionally charged words without actually engaging in the issue in a calm and clear way is to be equally closed-minded and discriminatory.  Nothing will change so long as we continue to insist that we are always right and that any deviation is grounds to brand the other as “evil” or “hateful” or “closed-minded” or similar things.  We have to be the ones who take the lead, who treat others with love, even when we are not treated in a loving manner.  We must be the ones who allow our strong feelings to be what they are but refuse to let them isolate us from others, but put them to the test in dialogue with those who disagree with us.

Read Your Bible

11/09/11 Read Your Bible GUMC Youth

One of the single most important things you can do as a Christian is read the Bible. There is no shortcut to learning about God, knowing how you should go about your life and about the promises that God has for you that somehow lets you bypass the Bible and just listen to what other people have read. If you wanted, you could say that the whole message for tonight is a giant commercial for reading the Bible, but I hope it isn't boring.

Before we talk about some of the reasons why you should read the Bible, I want to share about my own experience reading the Bible. You see, I can give you all kinds of good reasons to read the Bible, but none of those reasons can possibly be as convincing as a personal testimony to how it has changed my life. Always remember that Christian faith does not always get a lot of good press these days. There are plenty of groups out there that make a lot of people decide that they want nothing to do with Jesus. With so many reasons not to believe floating around, we need to remember that the Bible is only convincing to people if they have already made up their minds that they even care what is in it. If the Bible is nothing more than a book, it is hard to get people to read it. It is only when you become convinced, either by your own experience or because you have been convinced by the experience of others, that God uses the Bible to speak directly to us today, that you will read it and make it a habit. Your personal testimony, your own growth, your own faithfulness, will do far more to convince the unbelieving world of the truth of the gospel than any academic argument.

Before I can say anything else about my growth through studying the Bible, you need to be reminded that I did not grow up in the church; not at all. I did not go to church and Sunday School until I was a sophomore in high school and I only went to a youth group for a little bit before that, and when I went to those things, it was just as much because my friends were going than because I was actually learning anything. So if that is you tonight, I know exactly where you are coming from. I know what it is like to sit in a youth room listening to someone talk about the Bible and have absolutely no idea what he is talking about, not sure where anything was in the Bible. I used to call myself "The worst Bible navigator ever." It didn't matter how many times we looked at a book in the Bible, I never learned where it was. I didn't know the difference between the Old Testament and the New Testament other than their names. I barely knew anything about Jesus. I went more because I didn't really have a whole lot of friends and it gave me something to do on a Wednesday night.

What this means is that many of you have a much better start than I had. Many of you have been raised in the church, you have heard the stories of the Bible from an early age and you have been put into a position where you can hear the word of God being spoken to you and heard by you. I don't know if any of you have maybe heard God speak to your heart, encouraging you to become a pastor or pursue some kind of vocational ministry, but you are afraid or feel like you couldn't do it because you don't know much about the Bible, think again. My first pastor asked me if I felt called to be a pastor. When I heard that, I laughed at him. I couldn't imagine that someone like me could be called to be a pastor. I didn't know anything about the faith at all! And yet, as you can all see, here I am. This is my sixth year as a pastor.

Alright, so here's my story. I started going to youth group because my older brother (who, by the way, is still not a Christian) was going and I wanted to go, too. He wasn't always excited that I was there, but I sure was. Eventually, someone I knew from that youth group invited me to come to an after school Bible study that met twice a week. All during this time, I wasn't going to church at all. One Sunday, I got a call telling me that a guy from the Bible study was getting baptized that morning and that there was a reception at someone's house. So, even though I wasn't there for the baptism, I went to the reception. When I was there, I heard that some people were going to a study with the pastor of this church and asked me if I wanted to come. When we got there, some of the people said, "Hey Travis, you should totally stay for youth group" (this was a different church than before) so I did. Then, one of the kids from the youth group who knew I played guitar said I should stay because they had a small band that practiced after youth group. So, I went from not going to church at all to going to church, Sunday School, a study group, youth group and a band practice every Sunday all in one day.

Eventually, I became a Christian. I would say that I really became a Christian when I went to Chrysalis and things started to sink in deeper than they ever had before. However, just a few months later, my family moved to Iowa. I got involved in a youth group that I am amazed my faith survived. Eventually, I got plugged into a group with a bunch of people I went to school with and I really started to grow more, but I wasn't really reading my Bible. During this time, I got involved in a small group, let by my youth pastor, where I learned how to pray and talk about my faith. What is kind of funny is that it seemed like everyone else in the group except for myself and my friend David were certain they were called to be pastors or other leaders full-time, and, as far as I know today, only David and I are in full-time ministry.

All of that is important so I can tell you about what happened when I was in college. I became deeply aware of the fact that I hadn't spent much time reading my Bible and I knew that I should do it. I kept trying to make myself do it, but it just never seemed to work. Over a few months, I found myself in two or three different groups of guys and, in each of them we realized that none of us were getting into our Bibles like we knew we should. In one group, we split up into groups of two and my partner and I decided that we were going to try to help each other stay on top of our Bible reading. We both thought that jumping into reading it a bit everyday would be too much to expect, so we thought about doing it just a few days and then getting back together to see how we did. I didn't do it. Neither did he. We never met again.

The next group I was in decided that we were going to read one chapter of the Bible every day, and we'd all read the same chapters together, then we'd get together at the end of the week and discuss what we'd read. Now, at the end of the first week, I had the seven chapters read, but I didn't read everyday. I had to do a lot of catch up. When we got back together the next week, there was this guy, Nick, there. I had met Nick before and I had realized that he was really the first person I ever met who really knew his Bible. I suppose that my pastors knew their Bible pretty well, but Nick the first person I had ever met in my life who took reading his Bible extremely seriously and applied it to every aspect of his life. I knew that, if you want good suggestions on how to do something, you ask someone who has actually succeeded in doing it. I knew that I needed to ask Nick how he read the Bible and see if that would help.

What Nick told me was surprisingly simple. He said that, when he got started reading the Bible, he followed a simple rule: "No Bible, no breakfast." If he didn't read his Bible, he simply didn't eat. Now there are people in the world who just don't eat breakfast, so it might seem that this idea wouldn't work for them, but then it would just become "No Bible, no lunch," which doesn't have a neat alliteration, but would still be effective. Anyway, I am someone who has always eaten breakfast, so I thought this might help me and I decided to give it a try.

The next morning, I got up, and before heading down to the dining center for breakfast or eating something in my room, I remembered: No Bible, no breakfast. I went and sat in my chair and read the next chapter of John, the book that group was reading. It seemed so easy to do. I got up the next morning and did the same thing again. After months of repeated failure, after trying time after time to find some way to get the job done, something as simple as "No Bible, no breakfast," finally worked for me. Not only did I start reading the Bible, a chapter a day, but I quickly began to really love the Bible and I started to read more than one chapter a day. I found out the next book we were planning on working through and I read that. I started to get so far ahead of the group that I had to figure out what I was going to read on my own.

I went through all that about how hard it was for me to start reading my Bible so the significance of the transformation can be as impressive to you as it was to me. I used to see those "read through the Bible in a year" plans and was amazed. How could someone read the whole Bible in just a year? It seemed like such a huge book. What I realized was that, because I got so excited about reading the Bible, I wanted so badly to know what was in it, that I read the whole thing, without really even trying to do it, in five months. People have asked me when I first knew that I was going to be a pastor. I don't know exactly when it was, but when I started reading the Bible, I knew for sure I was going to be a math teacher. When I was done, I knew that I was going to be a pastor. Now, that is not to say that, if you read the Bible, you will become a pastor. I can point out all kinds of people who have read the Bible, even very quickly, who have not been called to be pastors, but that is how it was for me.

The whole reason that I tell this story, the reason why I put my whole past in the Bible out for you all to see is not because I want you to think about how cool I was to read the Bible because, if you think about it, I really wasted a lot of time. I had been a Christian for about three years before I started taking the Bible seriously. I didn't start reading the Bible until I was nineteen years old. I've only been reading the Bible with any regularity for about eight years. I don't know if you think I know anything about the Bible, but if you do, think about how much more you will know by the time you are my age, because you started so much earlier. Think about how much opportunity you would give God to transform you if you started today, or stayed on top of it.

Now that I've shared my story and now that I have made it clear that I think that reading your Bible is something worth fighting for, it is something worth making sacrifices for, I want to try to explain the "why" behind the "what" of my story. Folks, there is nothing magical about the Bible. It isn't as though every single page is going to flood you with joy, simply because every word on it teaches you some great and glorious thing you never heard before. If you approach reading the Bible like that, you will get discouraged so fast. It is true that the Bible has lots of great teaching in it, teaching that will strike you like lightning when you read it. Sometimes, even, something you've read a million times will jump off the page and change you when you read it just that one more time. But there are lots of things in the Bible that aren't what we would normally call "Inspiring." There are lots of things in the Bible that are challenging, that are frustrating, that are even frightening. Very often, the passages that make us feel incredibly uncomfortable are the ones that mean the most to us, that change us the most.

We read the Bible for lots of reasons. We read the Bible to learn how to live but, contrary to what some people will say, it is not actually a handbook for daily life. There is almost nothing in it, short of the book of Proverbs, that is ready-made to lift out of its context and shoved into our own. We read the Bible because it points us to Jesus. We read the Gospels because they tell us about Jesus' actual life and history on earth. We read the letters because they point us to how the reality of the Gospel transformed the lives of those first Christians. We read the Old Testament because it is only when we understand the whole history of Israel, when we know the stories, and what the law and the prophets say, that we can really understand Jesus how we ought to. We read the Bible because, in all its parts, it is a comprehensive witness to all that God has done.

I have said over and over again that who we are is partially dependent on those we surround ourselves with and that, sometimes, in order to change what we believe, to change what we think, we need to change what we do. It is completely true that God can speak to you just as much on the sports field, or in a musical rehearsal as he can in church. But if you are seeking God, if you are hoping to hear a word from him, where should you go? If you were an alcoholic and you wanted to get sober, where would you go? Would you go to a bar? Of course not. You would go to a support group, to a counsellor. You would go where you had a chance to find what you were looking for. You would put yourself in a position to be changed.

That, in many ways, is the reason we read the Bible. We read it because it is the record of God interacting with countless people over countless years. We have the promise that the same God who was in relationship with all those people in the Bible is the God who pursues relationship with us. Just like you can't get to know someone unless you spend time with them, we cannot get to know God unless we spend time with him, with his word in our hands and getting into our hearts. Let us pray.


AMEN