Experience and Self-Deception

Experience and Self-Deception

A week ago, I was involved in an accident while driving a church van. The roads were incredibly icy and we ended up fishtailing off the road and tipping over on the passenger side. It was an amazingly surreal experience, something unlike anything I have ever experienced before (even though I had previously been involved in a one-car accident, it was of a profoundly different kind). It was one of those moments where the accident seemed to be over in a moment and yet seemed, simultaneously, to be in slow motion.

There is a fair amount of physical evidence that this accident actually happened. In addition to my own experience there were two other people in the van when we went off the road (other people's children. Thankfully, nobody was hurt). There is an accident report that was filled out by the state trooper, the bill from the tow truck who tipped the van right-side up again as well as physical damage to the van (of course, as the van is going to be repaired, this last evidence will soon be done away with).

The thing I have noticed in the week following the accident is that my memory of it is not like much of my memories of ordinary experiences. In the main, the things I experience are similar to other experiences I have had. This one, however, is markedly outside the realm of that ordinary experience. I find that, when I recall the accident, it does not feel altogether different than when I recall a particularly vivid dream. The questions that I have been asking myself in the past few days are these: "What if there were no physical evidence at hand to support my thinking that I was in an accident recently? Would that make that experience any less real?" Also, "In the absence of such evidence, would it be possible to convince myself that the accident had never happened?"

Granted, these are perhaps slightly artificial questions given the inherently physical nature of such an experience. When a full-sized van lands on its side, you lose the mirror on that side as well as suffer damage to the body of the van. But we can surely imagine a situation where the police were not notified and we can surely imagine a situation where, through some other means, the van was righted without such documentation as I received. If someone were to quickly repair the damage on the van, what is left? Just the personal testimony of three, admittedly shook-up passengers. How would such people justify their experience to one who didn't see it? It would be very easy for a hearer to doubt that the accident happened at all and that we simply made up the story, for attention perhaps.

And yet, that would not make our experience any less real. It still happened. Even if, in the absence of the physical evidence that I do, in fact, have, I were to begin to doubt the reality of that experience, that doubt would not undo it. Even if nobody ever believed me, the experience would stand, with or without "sufficient evidence."

When the time comes and the van is repaired and I manage to misplace my copies of the police report and tow truck bill, would it be possible for me to convince myself that the accident didn't happen? I could be told by others who heard the story that it happened, I could be reminded by the other passengers that it happened, but if my own experience is the yardstick of what I will or will not accept, is it not possible that I could refuse to be convinced, even by strong arguments and testimonies from outside of myself? After all, there is much in the experience that is easy to doubt. It was an incredibly bizarre day; many odd things that had never happened to me before happened. Again, the memory of the actual crash is not altogether unlike my memories of vivid dreams. How am I to know for sure that I did not make this "experience" up as well?

Granted, this is not the situation and, even if I were to feel that my memory is betraying me, I imagine that I will choose to believe the testimony of others and the physical pieces of paper that bear witness to the accident. But is not my appropriation of that evidence truly a choice, a decision I have to make? It is clear that evidence can be manufactured and I could convince myself that it has been so in this instance, or I could choose to believe that nobody would make up something as mundane as this (after all, people have accidents every day and nobody died or was injured). And yet, that does not mean that I was not deceived. At the end of the day, I have to put my trust in the belief that the external evidence bolsters my memory sufficiently to conclude that it was not a dream. It can never rise above radical skepticism, but it is a decision I make and live in light of.

I cannot help see the parallel of this line of thought with questions I have had regarding people who had profound religious experiences and then ultimately renounce any religious faith. It seems possible that such a person may really have had such a profound experience but have convinced themselves that they were mistaken, or that they manufactured the experience because of pressure from the rest of the community, or some such thing. It must be granted that this kind of thing does happen, from time to time.

The question is, on what basis can we decide for sure whether the experience (which, in spite of witnesses and others having similar experiences, is radically subjective in the actual event of the experience) was real or merely a deception, whether from ourselves or others? The fact of the matter is that there is no surefire way to decide. We are always having to do tacit statistical analysis to decide whether our experience was likely or not (though "likely" must never be actually equated with "real"). The unlikely happens, the real is often baffling. Though we must admit that most memories we have of experiences that are radically outside our everyday experience are false, it does not follow that all such experiences are false. The trick, for which there is no infallible method, is to discern the truth, from case to case.

Jesus Christ and Time

12/07/11 Jesus Christ and Time GUMC Youth

We live in a country that has been historically shaped by the Christian message. This shaping has been so strong that there are many who would argue that America is, at its roots, a Christian nation, a nation that does not just have a bunch of Christians who live there, but one that fundamentally is Christian. This, perhaps, goes even farther when we look at our culture here in Northwest Iowa. You have all told me about people who go to school with you who are atheists or otherwise hostile to Christian faith, but if you look around at much of the adult population, you will find that most adults presuppose that Spencer is a Christian town, one that is made up mostly of Christians, who believe in Jesus, who believe in God, and who go to church, or at least, used to go to church.

What I think we find is that, when we are in this kind of culture, we end up with a whole bunch of people who simply assume that everyone is a Christian, that being a good Christian is one and the same thing with being a good American, that right and wrong as understood by out culture must be the same as right and wrong as understood by the gospel of Jesus Christ. When this happens, we tend to lose sight pretty quickly of the things that really matter, the things that make Christian faith what it is. So as we get closer and closer to Christmas, I want to spend a bit of time looking at one of the most important things we are celebrating during Advent and Christmas.

How much thought do you give to time? I don't mean, how often are you late or early to places you need to be, nor am I talking about how you like to spend your time. I am asking, how often do you think about time itself, what it really is, how it functions, what to expect from it. The fact of the matter is that not many people really spend all that much time thinking about time. They don't see how it can matter to their lives and, in a lot of ways, they are right to do so. I have no interest in standing up here and going into a huge analysis of time, but there are some things about time, that have to do with Christmas, that I want to talk about because they actually are important; more important than most people realize.

Many, if not most, cultures throughout the ages have had a conception of time that it is kind of like a big circle. There is a certain way in which this makes perfect sense. After all, days go in a kind of circle. We have a day today, we had a day yesterday, and we will have a day tomorrow. Even our clocks reinforce this idea. Just like the hands of a clock keep spinning round and round, marking the passing of time that never really runs out, just keeps repeating itself over and over, we could say that the day and night cycle is like a circle. Never ending. You can just keep going around and it will never end, only repeat.

In a larger sense, our years follow a cycle. Right now we are in winter, but we don't imagine that the sun is going out, or that the world is just getting colder and colder. Instead, we realize that winter is not the end, but we will eventually get to Spring and Spring will give way to Summer and Summer will give way to Fall, until we get back to Winter again. There are some little differences from year to year, some winters are worse than others, for example, but the yearly cycle is basically the same. You can always count on the fact that the seasons are not just going to stop suddenly, but will keep going, like going around a circle.

What if we thought of time the same way? What if time never really began and never really ended, but just kept going on a loop, like a CD or a playlist left on repeat? There are many, but not all, scientists who say that the universe began with the Big Bang and that it will end with some kind of Big Crunch, where it could explode again in a new Big Bang. What if those big moments weren't just big moments, but the bookends of time itself, that the universe, after it collapsed, would explode again and everything would happen just as it has happened before? What if even this youth group, this message, had been given who knows how many times before and it will be given who knows how many times again, over the course of trillions upon trillions of years? What if the whole universe as we know it is just going to repeat itself over and over again, never ending, never changing, always just going along, like going around a circle?

This was, generally speaking, the view of many cultures throughout the years. It is kind of like the idea of reincarnation, where you never really die, you just become a new person over and over again. There is a certain comfort in this way of thinking. It takes a lot of pressure off, because nothing ever really changes. There really isn't anything you can do to make a truly lasting impact, since things will just repeat, regardless of what you do. For some, it might seem like life is just pointless, but for others, it can be liberating. Things have already happened before and they will happen again. I can just float along and let things happen.

What is interesting is that this is not the view of the ancient Jewish people and it was not the view of the first Christians. If we could say that this first view of time is that time is a big circle that repeats over and over again, we could say that the Jewish and Christian conception of time is like a big line that has a very definite starting point and a very definite ending point. I mentioned earlier that some scientists think that the universe will collapse one day. Not everyone thinks that. There are plenty of scientists who are convinced that the universe will just keep expanding. If that is the case, then the universe can never repeat. It can never get back to its starting point.

How many of you have heard that the Big Bang Theory is very much an anti-Christian idea? Usually, this is because there are many who think that this raises questions about the first chapter of Genesis, where we read that God created the universe in six days. What is interesting is that, when the Big Bang Theory was first put forward, it was suggested by a priest who was also a scientist. When he published his ideas, the mainstream of scientists were offended and said that he was trying to bring religion into science. What is interesting is that, even though the Big Bang Theory is not, I want to stress that not, the same thing as the Christian doctrine of Creation, it is actually closer to it than the idea of an eternal universe. At least the Big Bang allows for God to have created the matter and caused it to explode, where the other views do not. The Big Bang Theory is science agreeing with Christian faith that the universe had a concrete beginning. The universe hasn't always existed. There was a time before it came into being and, many scientists say, there is only this universe; there will never be another one. If something happens to this universe, thats the end of the story.

The point is that the single most important reason why Christians cannot really believe in a repeating universe or an eternal universe is, believe it or not, Christmas. That might sound like a weird thing to say, but Christmas actually has profound implications for the nature of time and how we understand it. First, I want to show you what it means for time and then I want to point out why this actually matters in our understanding of God.

What do we celebrate on Christmas? We celebrate the birth of Jesus, right? But what is the significance of the birth of Jesus? Its significance is that the God of the universe, who created all there is with a word from his mouth, who has interacted with people since the beginning of the human race, has actually stepped into his creation. Think about it, we are talking about God, the one and only God, the God who is all powerful, all knowing, and all-everything-you-care-to-mention coming here. Not here as in Spencer, Iowa, but here as in Earth! This is the Creator of the universe stepping into his creation, this is the maker of humanity becoming a human. This is the almighty God of all, whom the highest heavens cannot contain coming among us, not just as a human being, but as a baby, so small you could hold him in your hands.

What is amazing about Christmas is not only that God actually did this but that he did this for the very first time. It isn't that we had God come among us in our human flesh over and over again, just in different forms throughout the years. It isn't that, in Jesus, we are dealing with just one more human teacher. In Jesus, we are brought face to face with God in all of his majesty in a way that we never experienced before and we could not have experienced in any other way. Jesus is not just one more example of God coming to earth, but the only one there is. God came among us in a very specific place and time, lived in specific towns, met and spoke with specific people, ate specific pieces of food, and spoke specific human words in a specific human language. And not only that but he did this for the first time in all the eternal life of God and he has never done it before and will never do it again.

God coming into our midst is an absolutely singular and unrepeatable event that never happened before and will never happen again. It is because of this incredibly singular event that we cannot really believe that time is just a loop that keeps getting played on repeat. If that is really how time worked, it would mean that Jesus had come over and over again; it would mean that God is just as bound by space and time as we are, which would mean he was not the Creator of the universe, by the way.

So, what does all of this mean to us? Well, there are lots of people who emphasize the fact that Earth is not the only planet out there, that the universe is incredibly large. And yet, out of all those places that God has created, out of all the vastness of our universe, when God enters into it, he doesn't do it just anywhere, but here, on this planet where we live. Not only did God meet us here, but he met us now. I know its been a long time since Jesus came, but especially if we listen to the scientists who tell us the universe is about fourteen billion years old, we realize just how close to Jesus' time we really are.

The point is that God came here. Out of all the places he could have gone, he came here. He didn't go to Mars, he didn't go to the outer reaches of the universe, but came here. When he came, he did not come as just any creature, but came as one of us. By coming precisely when he did and precisely where he did, God in Christ has set that time and place aside and said to us, "Here I am, come meet with me here." And through the power of the Holy Spirit and the testimony of the Bible, we can actually stand with the original witness of God's self-revelation, the disciples, and actually meet him there and then in the here and now.

There are so many people in the world who talk about God as if he were someone who is far off, who does not actually meet with us, about whom there is not much that we can say. And yet, that is not what we read in the Bible and it is not what we believe as Christians. We believe that, in Christ, God actually came here to meet us and to transform us.

So how does this tie in with how we understand time? Well, remember that, because God actually came among us at a particular time, what the scriptures call "the fullness of time," we can't really believe in time as a circle. Instead, we need to think of time as being a line, with certain very precise points on it. The line starts at a specific point, with the creation of space and time by God and then, at another precise point, God came into this world in Jesus of Nazareth. But that wasn't the end of the line. The line continues on, doesn't it? It has continued to this day, where you and I are living and it may well continue on for a while. The point is that it does not continue on forever. There will come a time when time as we know it will be done away with. There will come a time when Christ will return and change the whole game. When will that happen? We don't know; nobody does. And if anyone tells you otherwise, they are mistaken.

The point is, as we celebrate this Christmas season, we should remember every day that Christmas, in many ways, is the center of all space and time. It is where God the Creator stepped into his creation and made it his own in a powerful way that was new, even for God. Christmas is a really, really big deal. It is such a big deal that it impacts all of time and space. So let us celebrate, not any less, but all the more, because our God has come to meet with us. Let us pray.

AMEN

The "Rational" Theory of the Atonement

The "Rational" Theory of the Atonement

A few months ago, between finishing seminary and moving across the state, a friend of mine who is not a Christian, but willing to have open and honest dialogue with Christians, invited me over to talk about faith and God. I always enjoy these conversations and this particular friend is a wonderful dialogue partner; he is always respectful and willing to listen, but he is also not afraid to ask the tough questions.

From my point of view, the most significant point in the conversation came when he said to me, "This is what my life looks like right now. I'm pretty darn happy with how things are going. Why should I believe in Jesus." All of a sudden, it struck me that there is a considerable portion of the church that would want me to bring up the doctrine of hell and use that as the reason why he should believe in Jesus. The argument being something like this. "You should believe in Jesus because, if you don't, you're going to go to hell."

The only problem with this is that it is radically unbiblical. By that, I don't mean that hell is not something spoken of in the Bible, nor that it is not real, nor that it is not a serious consequence that goes along with obstinate unbelief, but rather it is not biblical in the sense that nowhere do we see hell used as a threat to get someone to believe. Jesus warns people about it, pleads with them so that they need not go there, but he never threatens people with it. I mentioned all this to my friend and gave a different response.

I said (words to this effect, at any rate), "I think that you should believe in Jesus and the gospel because I have this deep and abiding conviction that it is true." Now, this might seem like something of a copout. After all, why should my personal convictions be the yardstick by which other people's opinions and lives should be led? And yet, I have become more and more convinced, not only that such a response was not fundamentally wrong, but that it really is the only responsible answer. Here is why.

At the end of the day, why should we believe in Jesus? Well, one strand of apologetics argues that we should believe in Jesus and be Christians because Christian faith is remarkably consistent with the deep ethical convictions of most Americans. Of course, this is somewhat begging the question, as our American culture has been deeply formed by the Judeo-Christian ethical tradition. How can we be surprised that our culture's approach to morality and ethics is remarkably similar to the tradition that shaped it. That is a basic insight of sociology, and not a distinctly Christian one.

Another approach is that we should believe in Jesus because, if we don't, we will be punished and sent to hell. This has at least one advantage over the previous view in that it acknowledges Christian faith to be more rich than, and irreducible to, morality, a problem that people on both the left and the right make (though it takes different forms). This also has an emotional element in it. After all, none of us want to go to hell, nor do we say that we want anyone else to go to hell (it is at this point that hell becomes not only a motivation for a personal decision but also the primary impetus for evangelism). However, as I mentioned above, I am more and more convinced that to make hell the primary reason to believe in Jesus is to put the cart before the horse. If Jesus talks a lot about hell, but never as a threat, it would do us well to follow his lead. Let us acknowledge hell, let us understand its seriousness, but let us never threaten.

The fact of the matter is that there is a stereotypical practice of evangelism that says, "Look at yourself. You aren't really all that good, are you? Compare yourself to the Ten Commandments, especially as interpreted by Jesus. You can't say you're all that righteous can you? No you cannot. You are in trouble and you need saving from beyond yourself. Now, here comes Jesus to do what you could never do yourself." Now, it is certainly the case that, if we take these elements separately, they are all in agreement with scripture. However, when taken as a whole, we find no precedent anywhere in the Bible. The closest we get is the beginning of the book of Romans, where Paul uses the sinfulness of the world to demonstrate how much we do, in fact, need saving. However, he is writing to an established church, and we cannot divorce those chapters from the rest of the letter, which is remarkably Christocentric and Trinitarian.

Christ is not, first and foremost, the solution to a problem. In fact, if Christ had never come, we never would have realized that we even have a problem that needed solving. It is only when we see God take up residence in our human flesh and live so radically differently than we do, when we see that sin is such a big problem that the only way it can be solved is by the second Person of the Trinity taking on human flesh (a tremendous sacrifice in itself), living a human life, being hated, mocked and mistreated, and finally killed, could wrench us out of the clutches of evil, that we understand that we need a savior. The realization of our need for salvation is historically identical with the culminating act of atonement. Nowhere do we see the Biblical writers work out a doctrine of sin independently of Christ and then use Christ as the solution to the problem.

At the end of the day, everything that we believe as Christians has its roots in Christ. It must be noted that by this I mean Christ as understood as an Israelite and in light of the whole witness of the Old Testament, not a kind of spaceless and timeless Christ (whatever that might be). Our understanding of morality is not primarily rooted in tradition or even the Ten Commandments, but in the actual life of Christ as the pattern and standard of rational human life. All false understandings of the world of space and time are revealed to be what they are because, in Christ, their faulty presuppositions are exposed for what they are. Even our doctrine of the Trinity is not independently generated, but is rooted in the belief in the Incarnation (that is, we would never have arrived at a doctrine of the Trinity if God did not take on human flesh and live among us).

In the systematic theology that I wrote, I included something that, in hindsight, is something of a summary paragraph of all my convictions. Here it is:

If it is true (as Christian faith has always proclaimed) that only in Jesus of Nazareth do we see God fully revealed to humanity, then all of our thinking about God must be utterly rooted and grounded in the person of Christ. When we declare that Jesus is Lord, we are not only saying that Jesus is truly God, but that God is truly Christ-like. This quickly becomes the overarching criterion or datum of all our thoughts and statements about God, humanity, and the interaction between the two, and we must begin our refection upon every topic by asking the question, “What does the Incarnation tell us about this?”

Those first four words, "If it is true," are of crucial importance. If, indeed this central conviction of Christian faith is true, if it stands firm, then all the rest of Christian teaching hangs together; if it is not true (which I would claim is harder to prove than some might think), then it all falls apart. Everything depends on whether God actually became a human being and lived among us in and as the man Jesus of Nazareth. It is precisely the conviction that this is indeed what has happened that is the reason we should believe, and any other benefits or reasons to believe must take a secondary position to this conviction.

It is really not altogether different from the way science works. As modern science has advanced and been forced to account for the objective status of reality (the same objective status that much of modern philosophy has been trying to doubt out of existence), we have had to deal with the radical challenges this advance has made on how our "reason" would like us to view the universe. The Copernican view of the universe won the day over the Ptolemaic view, not just because it proved to be a simpler way to account for the observational data, but because of a deep and abiding conviction that it actually was a more true way of looking at the universe. Relativity physics did not win out over Newtonian mechanics because the people just liked it better, because they didn't. It actually was quite confusing at first and forced us to revise our understanding of things that seemed so self-evident, like space and time.

For example, even secular science no longer believes that the universe is infinite, both in space and time. Rather, because of the belief that the universe had a specific beginning point and because there is a limit to how fast things can move (that is, the speed of light), the universe, in all its vastness, is not infinite. It does not matter how much our "reason" would desire it to be different than it is, it is finite and no amount of argument or wishful thinking can make it otherwise. Why should we believe that the universe is finite and not infinite? Because, at the end of the day, that is the way it is, and it would be irrational to think otherwise. Rationality and irrationality is not determined by public opinion but by reality itself.

Here again was my response to my friend that I mentioned earlier. "I think that you should believe in Jesus and the gospel because I have this deep and abiding conviction that it is true." It is because of this deep conviction that God actually has taken on human flesh that I think you should believe it, too. Not first and foremost because you will go to hell if you don't (I don't think we should make any decision, least of all major ones like this, based on fear), not because you can't do good things if you aren't a Christian (though I do believe that it is incredibly hard to take a real stand if our morality and ethics do not go back to Christ), but because this is what God has done, and if it is indeed true, it is of staggering significance. It means that God does not consider it to be too much of a sacrifice to step into his creation, to become one of us and one with us. It means that God is so far from being deaf to our pains and hurts, our trials and tribulations, that he stepped into the midst of them and made them his own, standing in complete solidarity with us, those who hated him.

That is why, for lack of a better term, I have chosen to call this the "Rational" theory of Atonement. Not because every other way of thinking about atonement is irrational, but because this places the impetus for faith on deep ontological convictions, without which the whole structure of Christian faith collapses. It is because our understanding of the universe is vastly different depending on whether or not God has come among us in and as Jesus Christ. It is from this conviction that God has indeed done this that everything else flows.

Why Christians Believe

The following is a response to a friend who has strong ties with pagan thought. He is particularly critical of the tendency of Christians to say, "We need to believe that Jesus is God because the Bible says so. We need to believe the Bible because it is inspired. You need to believe the Bible is inspired because we say so." He specifically asked for Christians to respond. Here was my response.


For right or for wrong, whether you find this convincing or not, here is my response.

I have thought about this issue and ones closely related to it for quite a while and I often find myself in self-conscious disagreement with how many American Christians approach this issue. But first, some history is necessary.

The predominant movement that we know today as "Biblical Innerancy" (with which I disagree, for the record) arose in the second half of the nineteenth century (it existed, in a different form, before that time, but we only get the radically militant form of it that we know today at about that time). It was developed as a response to what was seen as the attack of the "higher criticisms" of the Bible, which argued that we must not treat the Bible as somehow fundamentally different than other books, that is to say, we must be willing to examine the books of the Bible in their historical and cultural contexts, just like we do to other books, and try to understand them at that level as well. For people like me, such a move has only helped me to understand the texts better and to fully take into account the fact that God has moved through human beings, not by bypassing their humanity, history, or culture, but working in and through it (though it does yield some degree of transformation as well).

However, others felt that to do so was to "desacralize" the text and undermine faith as a whole. In order to combat this, conservatives/fundamentalists (they were effectively the same in those days. Fundamentalism was a much less militant movement in its early days) ratcheted up their doctrine of inspiration so that history and context no longer played a role in interpretation. The Bible became nothing more than free-floating oracles, independent of context, that all bear equal weight in interpretation.

Once this move takes place, the Bible becomes the ultimate authority and Jesus becomes a doctrine taught about by the Bible, on the same level as any other thing taught in it. This is precisely where I disagree with such an interpretation. I do not think that a text as a text (that is, as words on a page) can be the ultimate authority, nor do I think it was ever meant to be such. I think that ultimately, the text needs to be a witness to God (to use an idea of Karl Barth) or spectacles through which we look to discern what lies behind them (to use an idea of John Calvin). What matters is not the text as such, but at what the text directs us to.

I don't know how much confidence you have in natural science, but that is precisely the same kind of attitude that has been developing in natural science over the last hundred years or so. There is a tremendous conservative bias in science, when ultimate paradigms are concerned. There was so much support for Newtonian mechanics, both among scientists and laypeople, that Einstein's theories of Relativity had almost no chance of being heard or taken seriously. It was only the fact that, after long and careful scrutiny, it seemed to be a closer and more adequate representation of what really is the case (given concrete expression by its prediction of the change in the perihelion of Mercury) that made it win the day. It was not merely political power (for it certainly did not have that), but fidelity to the truth. If you doubt the hesitancy of scientists to adjust to new ideas, you should read "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" by Thomas S. Kuhn, and "Against Method" by Paul Feyerabend.

My point is that, at the end of the day, Christian convictions do not, ultimately, rest on what a particular text says. The ultimate conviction is that God stepped into our world of space and time (which is only incomprehensible if we begin by presupposing a dualistic outlook) as an actual human being. Not that God took human "form" and only "seemed" to be human, nor that it was something less than God who came to earth as Jesus of Nazareth, not that Jesus was just one more prophet, but that the human being, Jesus of Nazareth, was very God of very God. This is a conviction that is proclaimed as truth. I would argue that authentic conversion takes place only when a person becomes convinced of this truth, which I do not think happens by intellectual argument (or the authority of a text), but by a personal encounter with this Jesus who has been raised from the dead and lives even now. Because of this, authentic Christian experience is inherently Trinitarian.

Now, one might argue, "How do you know that someone had a genuine encounter with the risen Christ? How can we be certain that it was not simply an illusion, or wishful thinking, or anything of the kind?" If one means "certainty" as, "absolutely impossible to be doubted," like the kind of truth Descartes was searching for, then we cannot be. But, by that same token, the same can be said of anything, as Foundationalism is widely believed to have completely failed. Absolute certainty of that kind is an unattainable, and thus false, goal. There is always room for doubt.

However, if a person claims to have such an encounter and becomes liberated from destructive habits and lifestyles and their life is utterly transformed by it (which does happen), there is reason to believe that something has happened, call it what you will.

My ultimate answer is that real Christian conviction is reached by personal experience, not by argument from a text. The text of the Bible becomes the source and norm of Christian theology, as there is no other text that can not only present Jesus Christ in his time and place, but also present the whole historico-cultural context that led up to it, as well as the impact that he had on his first followers. That experience is always open to doubt, as every other claim to truth and knowledge is, but the Christian believes that their experience is not merely subjective, that it connects, in some way, to a deeper reality that is true, regardless of whether they believe it and acknowledge it or not. This reality might be only imperfectly understood and need to be revised in some way or another (as Newtonian physics had to be refined by Einsteinian thought), but the reality with which they have made contact is fundamentally reliable.

When done well, it is my conviction that Christian theology bears a much stronger resemblance to science than it does to many forms of philosophy.

To return, in closing, to your example of "Why Jesus and not Thor?" I must say that, on one level, there is no reason. After all, from the point of view of historical evidence, we can only learn about them from sources written by human beings, which might very well be wrong. However, my conviction is that Jesus is indeed alive and meets people, myself included (though that does not mean that I equate my theology with the truth, though I hope it bears some resemblance to the truth), whereas I do not believe the same is true for Thor. Could I be wrong? Absolutely. Is it possible that Thor has encountered me and I have just not noticed it? Certainly. I just do not believe it to be so. It can be doubted, but so can any other position, so dubitability as such is not condemning.

Those are just some thoughts. I do not imagine that you will be convinced, but you specifically asked for Christians to respond, so here is my response.

In Christ,
Travis Stevick

Mark 3:31-35

10/12/11 Mark 3:31-35 GUMC Youth

Tonight, we are going to look at Jesus in relation to his family and we are going to pay attention to how he reinterprets what it means to be family. What Jesus does here might be a bit surprising, it might even be shocking, depending on your own relationship to your own family, but like everything else that Jesus says, it certainly provokes some thought.

But before we get on to our text as it stands, we need to remember back to last week when Jesus got into a discussion with the scribes from Jerusalem. At the beginning of the passage, we read that Jesus was surrounded by a crowd, such a big crowd that he and his disciples were not able to sit down and eat a meal. There were so many people that there were people who couldn't get in to see Jesus. Some of the people who were kept out at that time were Jesus' family. We read, "When his family heard it, they went out to restrain him, for people were saying, 'He has gone out of his mind.'"

Now, I suppose we have to ask the question, did Jesus' family also think that he had gone out of his mind or were they just concerned about his public image, and thus, their public image? Either way, we have to think that they might just be misunderstanding exactly who Jesus is and why he had come. We need to remember that we are dealing with the Son of God, who has always existed with the Father and the Holy Spirit, but had come among us human beings. This is the same God who told his people through the prophet Isaiah, "Seek the Lord while he may be found, call upon him while he is near; let the wicked forsake their way, and the unrighteous their thoughts; let them return to the Lord, that he may have mercy on them, and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon. For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways, says the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts."

You see, we are talking about a God whose ways and thoughts are so much higher than our own, that we have a hard time really understanding it. To give an example from natural science, when Einstein developed his theory of relativity and he and other scientists were making breakthroughs in subatomic physics, the rest of the world looked on and said, "That's ridiculous. All of your findings are irrational." Now that we have taken more time to really understand it, we realize that the problem wasn't that physics was becoming irrational, but because we just didn't have the tools to understand it. Relativity and Quantum physics isn't irrational, it is so completely and fully rational that our weak rationality needs to be transformed and improved before we can make sense out of it. It is not something altogether different with Jesus here. We are talking about God in our midst. Let me give you another example.

I have here a topographical map. Do you know what all the lines on this map mean? They are lines that represent how high something is above sea level. Every line represents a certain distance. The closer together they are, the more the land slopes, and the further apart they are, the flatter the land is. That is easy enough to understand, but do you see what we have done? We have taken a hilly landscape and squashed it down from three dimensions to two. It is entirely possible to represent three dimensions in two in as much detail as you would like, and it is entirely possible to become so good at reading maps like this at a glance that you could know almost exactly what the hills or mountains would look like without actually going there. But the point is that if you've never seen a map like this, you need to learn how to interpret it. There is much more there than meets the eye, but we can't see it at first. We need to be guided out of our ordinary habits and learn to see what is really there.

Again, this is not altogether different than what we have in Jesus Christ. Here we have God meeting us in our world of space and time. Jesus is a completely faithful representation of God among us, but that doesn't mean that we can understand him at first glance. He is the fullness of God in human flesh just like we have. To imagine that we human beings, even Jesus' own family, can understand him without some serious restructuring of our thoughts and lives is to misunderstand that Jesus is really God. The point is that, even though it takes some hard work and even though we have to be transformed in our knowing of God in Christ, we really can do it. God has actually revealed himself to us and has done so in a way that we actually can know God. Even though God declares that his ways and thoughts are above our ways and thoughts, the whole point was that we should turn to God and be forgiven, even if we can't fit everything into our preconceived notions.

Our passage, though, makes us ask the question, "Who is Jesus' family?" which is another way of asking the question, "Who is on the inside and who is on the outside?" At first, we want to respond, "It should be clear who Jesus' family is. After all, they are the ones he grew up with." And yet, Jesus turns this whole idea upside down. We read, "And he replied, 'Who are my mother and my brothers?' And looking at those who sat around him, he said, 'Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother.'"

We need to make sure we understand this, because it is a big deal. In this moment, Jesus is saying that these people that raised him, that he grew up with, are not his real family, but that these other people, who he basically just met, are his real family. How many of you would do what Jesus did? How many of you would basically turn your back on your family in order to be with other people like this? Now, if you've got a pretty close relationship with your parents and siblings, the idea of cutting ties with them for any reason sounds ridiculous. Family is more important to you than anything else. Even if the whole world were to turn against you, you would still have your family who would love you and help you out. At one point, the whole world does indeed turn against Jesus, so the rubber really does meet the road for him.

In Jesus' day, we need to understand the incredible expectation that people had to respect and take care of their families. You probably remember that one of the Ten Commandments is, "Honor Thy Father and Thy Mother." If you wanted to, you could make an argument that Jesus is not upholding that commandment here, and it is likely that someone probably made it at the time, even though we don't read about it here. Jesus' response to his family would not only have been personally offensive, but socially unacceptable. I had a class in seminary where we were looking at this passage and there was a student from Brazil, which has family values that are more similar to those of Jesus' culture than ours are here today. He was asked how his family and friends would have responded if he behaved like Jesus did here. He was clear that it would not have gone over well.

But we need to understand what Jesus is really getting at here. The main point is not, repeat not, to simply talk back to your parents and use Jesus as your reason. What Jesus is pointing out to us is that there are certain relationships that are closer even than family. There was a time when I was the only Christian in my family. Now my parents are back involved with the church but my brother still isn't. There have been many times in my life that, when I need to talk to someone about an issue in my life, I don't turn first to my family, but to my close Christian friends.

The fact of the matter is that the question, "Do I choose God or my family," will not probably arise for many of you. As far as I know, none of you are coming to youth group in defiance of your parents' wishes. Some of you might be here more because your parents want you to than because you want to be here yourself, but I am not aware if any of you are here even though your parents wished you didn't come. But that doesn't change the fact that, for many people throughout history, and even in the world today, this is a real choice they have had to make. Even in the Bible, look at the apostle Paul. He was a Pharisee, one of the people who set themselves firmly against Jesus during his ministry. During his pre-Christian life, Paul spent his time persecuting Christians, locking them up in prison, and supervising their execution. When he encountered Christ on the road to Damascus, he had to choose between his friends and family and the God who had called him by name.

But it isn't just throughout history. I played music for the wedding of a friend in college who was from India. He came to America as a radical skeptic of the claims of Christian faith. He was culturally Hindu, but was not particularly religious in any meaningful sense of the term. He had a radical conversion, married a Christian, and became a full-time missionary around the world. If I recall, there was not even one member of his family at his wedding. This is partly because his family all lived in India and the wedding was in Cedar Falls, Iowa, but it was just as much due to the fact that, by becoming a Christian, he had chosen to be disowned by his family. This didn't happen in some far-off land in the distant past. This was like six years ago in Iowa!

Listen to the words of Paul in his letter to the Romans. "So then, brothers and sisters, we are debtors, not to the flesh, to live according to the flesh, for if you live according to the flesh, you will die; but if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body you will live. For all who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God. For you did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received a spirit of adoption. When we cry, 'Abba! Father!' it is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ - if, in fact, we suffer with him so that we may also be glorified with him."

What I want to lift up for you is the fact that we learn in the Bible that, when we are in Christ, we are made heirs of God and fellow-heirs with Christ. We are told that we are made children of God, brothers and sisters of Christ, knit together into a new family, a family that is so close, that the New Testament also talks about it as "the Body of Christ."

This is great, as long as we are talking about people that we like, but we don't always like everyone, do we? I want to make a connection that you may not have noticed. Last week, we talked about Jesus having conflict with the scribes who came from Jerusalem and now we have Jesus looking around and saying "Here are my mother and my brothers!" What you need to realize is that the scene hasn't changed. They are still in the same house, at the same time. We had read in the last passage that Jesus' family tried to get in earlier, but couldn't do it. Nobody has left and nobody has come in. It is the same group of people who were around last week and this week. That means that the people who came because they were interested in what Jesus had to say were there to hear Jesus say this, but it also meant that the scribes from Jerusalem were there, too.

Think about that, even though there were scribes from Jerusalem there, who had come for no other reason than to harass Jesus, he still said, "Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother." This doesn't mean that, magically, everyone present was a follower of Christ, but that Jesus didn't say to anyone, "You can't be part of my family." He didn't even say it to the people who were seeking to kill him. Jesus even called a Pharisee, one of the people who hated him the most, to be one of the most important Christian leaders in all of history. I had a professor who had a professor who said, "Jesus tells us to love our neighbors, but he didn't tell us that our neighbors are disgusting." Jesus calls us to love and to welcome, as family, even the people that we hate, that we would rather not be around. If Jesus can welcome and forgive the people who nailed him to the cross, surely we can welcome the people who annoy us.

The fact of the matter is that we are, in Christ, already bound to one another. You see, if I am in Christ, and if you are in Christ, then it doesn't really matter how different we are, we have one, incredibly important thing, in common, we are both in Christ. You and I are already family, you are all already family, not just with me and with each other, but with everyone who is in the other youth group, with everyone else in the church, with everyone in the youth groups around town, and with everyone in all the other churches. We don't always get along, but we are bound together by the blood of Christ, which is bigger than all of us. So, as we go into the world, and as we interact with one another, remember, day by day, that you are surrounded by family, because the people in this room as well as the people who go to other youth groups in town are all around you. But that isn't all. You are also surrounded by everyone else. But those people are not necessarily "not family." Rather, they are like the scribes in the audience; people who are simply not yet family. They are your long-lost cousins. Share with them the love and joy you have.

Let us pray.

AMEN

The Role of Community in Personhood

09/07/11 Role of Community in Personhood GUMC Youth

Last week, we spent some time thinking about the people that Jesus called to be his disciples. We noticed how incredibly different they were from each other and how they all had their own problems, just like we do, but that through following Christ, they were challenged to grow and become who God had called them to be. I want to take tonight and look at the big picture issue of the role that the communities in which we find ourselves shape who we are. It is particularly appropriate to do this now, since we were just thinking about the community that Jesus called into existence to follow him.

In America, we have a long tradition of seeing ourselves as isolated individuals, who do whatever we want. We tend to see the individual as more important than the community in which that individual finds itself. We have some basic rules about how we live together, but by and large, we consider our individuality to be more important than who we are in relation to others. We like our constitution because it shows us that our community values individuality.

In spite of that, what we are finding more and more is that the community plays an incredibly important role in who we are. Perhaps one of the most important ways it shapes us is in the way our community plays a role in what we can know. Did you know that there are some things that you simply can't know unless you are in a community of people who knows them? That you have to live in the right place and with the right kind of people, and live in the right way to even see certain things and to know certain things?

To give a somewhat simple example of what I am talking about, how many different words do we have in English for "snow?" Just one. However, even though we have only one word for snow, we can actually identify a few different types of snow, can't we? I have not yet experienced a Spencer winter, but I've been led to believe you get a fair amount of snow, so you might know more about snow than I do, but most people I've met can identify about four or five types of snow. There is light, powdery snow, there is wet and heavy snow, there is slushy snow that is hard to drive in, and a few others. But if we are really pressed, we can't come up with too many more types of snow that we experience.

But, if you were to travel into parts of Alaska and meet with certain tribes of Eskimos, you would find that they have over forty different words for snow. But if you looked at the different types of snow, you probably wouldn't be able to tell much difference between them. After all, you can only identify four or five kinds of snow. You wouldn't be able to tell the difference, in fact, you might even think that the whole tribe is playing a trick on you, but to the natives, it would be as plain as could be. They have absolutely no trouble telling the difference between the forty-odd types of snow they have; it is as natural to them as breathing.

So, what is the difference between them and us? Why can they see what we cannot? Is there really a distinction that we just can't see or are they just tricking themselves into seeing what isn't really there? Well, there isn't a real difference in their eyes or their brains, so there is no biological reason why they should be able to see what we can't, so what could it be? Well, if we were to move away from Iowa and move in with the Eskimos with the many words for snow, and we not only saw the same snow as they did, but lived the way they did and experienced snow like they did for a period of several years, you would start to be able to tell the difference between some more of them, but you still might not ever have quite as many words for snow as they do.

The reason for this is that the Eskimos have a deep need to be able to tell the difference between the forty types of snow. Their very lives depend on it. If they aren't careful about what kind of snow they go out in, they might very well die. But the reason I bring all this up is because, even though it is as clear as night and day to the Eskimos, people like you and me simply can't see it. They might be able to break down the differences so that you have some idea of what to look for, but even with a great guide, it would take quite some time before you were able to really see what you are looking for. You have to indwell, to use the term of scientist, Michael Polanyi, a way of life and experience before you can really know what is there. It is something like the process of learning an instrument or a sport, or any new subject. It takes time to get used to the rules or how you move your body before you can really do or know it.

The fact of the matter is that knowing is much more complex than we often give it credit for being. You will find militant atheists who try to hide behind the advances of sciences to be the reason why they can't bring themselves to believe in God. They say that, unlike the claims of Christian faith, anybody who simply does the experiment can see the truth of science. Well, this simply isn't true. As it turns out, most people, even if they had access to a world-class laboratory, couldn't actually reproduce the experiments and, even if they managed to pull it off, wouldn't even be able to see what they were looking for. It is only when people have spent years of their lives being trained in a particular field of inquiry that they can actually understand and experience what is really there. Unless you are a trained scientist, the claims of natural science are not any more accessible to you than the claims of Christian faith. You know, even if you were a trained scientist, only a small portion of the findings of science would be open to you. In fact, if you have been a Christian for a while and have your thoughts and life transformed by the gospel, you might be able to understand the claims of Christian faith far better than you could do lab work.

But the trick to all of this is that it means that you can only know the truth if you are part of the right kind of community. If you want to know the truth, you need to be surrounded by people who are also seeking the truth. If you want to really understand what Jesus says, you need to be in a community of people who are passionately committed to what Jesus says. One of the greatest thinkers in the history of the church, Athanasius, wrote a book on God becoming a human being in Jesus Christ. At the very end, after he had written for pages and pages explaining the biblical and theological issues, he says this in his last paragraph.

"But for the searching and right understanding of the Scriptures there is need of a good life and a pure soul, and for Christian virtue to guide the mind to grasp, so far as human nature can, the truth concerning God the Word. One cannot possibly understand the teaching of the saints unless one has a pure mind and is trying to imitate their life. Anyone who wants to look at sunlight naturally wipes his eye clear first, in order to make, at any rate, some approximation to the purity of that on which he looks; and a person wishing to see a city or country goes to the place in order to do so. Similarly, anyone who wishes to understand the mind of the sacred writers must first cleanse his own life, and approach the saints by copying their deeds."

I want to make absolutely sure that you understand what he is saying. He is saying that, if you insist on living in sin and doing what you know to be wrong and making a habit of breaking God's laws, you will never be able to understand what the Bible says. If you knowingly and lovingly engage in sin on a regular basis, don't be surprised if you can't make any sense out of the Bible. If we want to know things, we have to live in a way that is consistent with them.

You know, this emphasis on community really shouldn't surprise us all that much. After all, one of the core claims of Christian faith is that God is, in God's own life, a community of Persons: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. For God, community isn't just an extra options that he can choose to be in or not; community is rooted in the very being of God, and we are made in God's image. How can we be surprised when we find out that the communities in which we find ourselves make up part of who we are? God is who God is because of the community that God is.

You know what? Even natural science supports this idea that who we are is partly shaped by those we are around. It used to be, according to a Newtonian view of the universe, that everything could be broken down into atoms that just bumped into one another. They were individual particles that had no real connection to any other particles, unless they all just happened to move in the same direction at the same time. With the insights of James Clerk Maxwell, Albert Einstein, and others, we have come to see that we can't really think of things this way. All of what we call matter can be understood as knots of energy in a continuous field of energy. Remember the equation E = mc^2? It is saying that energy and matter are not finally separate things, but that matter is a form of energy and energy is a form of matter. The point is that particles aren't just free-floating individual things, but are only what they are in their interrelations with each other.

So, if we can only know certain things if we live in certain ways, and if God wanted to reveal himself to humanity, what would he have to do? Well, he would have to mould and shape a whole culture from the very beginning. So, he would have to pick one person and take him out of his context, so he could start to reshape their basic ways of thought and life bit by bit. God would have to establish a special relationship that is unlike his relationship with another nation, not because God does not also love those other nations, but because God has to start somewhere. Over thousands of years, God would have to teach the people how to live so they might be able to understand him. He would have to give them a law, a distinctive form of thought and life, would have to continually call them back whenever they went astray, and carefully and slowly reveal himself using these transformed words that mean something different in that nation than they do anywhere else. Only after this culture is shaped over a long period of time would God be able to really reveal himself in his fullness.

I don't know if you remember back to Sunday School and confirmation, but this is exactly what God has, in fact, done. God selected Abraham and took him from his home, gave himself to his descendants in a particular way, delivered them from Egypt and gave them a law, sent prophets to call the people back to faithfulness. Eventually, Jesus came, but he couldn't have come until Israel's culture was ready to understand him, at least brokenly. That is why Jesus came in Israel. Not because they were better than other people, nor because they were worse, but simply because they were better equipped to understand him and this is only because God had been moulding and shaping them, sometimes painfully, over the last several thousand years.

The question you might be asking yourself is, "What does all this have to do with me? What difference does this make for my life?" It actually makes a lot of difference, especially as someone who comes to youth group and goes to church. You see, youth group isn't just a place where we can come and hang out with friends or meet new people. It isn't just a place where we can eat some food and play some games. It isn't just a place where we can sing some songs. We are about the business of creating and shaping a whole culture, a community of young people who follow the Lord. There is a sense in which we are constantly trying to develop culture that has been established earlier, since none of us were here with this youth ministry was started, but it is also a culture which, through the power of the Holy Spirit, is continually being established anew.

Another reason why this stuff about community affects you is because you are profoundly shaped by your communities outside of youth group as well. If you surround yourself with people who love the Lord, who are passionately committed to the gospel and allowing it to impact every aspect of their lives, you will find that is is so much easier to be faithful yourself. When there are people you can go to for support, when you know that you aren't alone in your seeking after God, it is much easier to do what you are supposed to do, to live right, to read your Bible, to pray. If you, on the other hand, surround yourself with people who don't really care about God, who like to do all kinds of things that are contrary to what God calls us to do and be, you will find that it is incredibly difficult to be a faithful Christian. In fact, if you spend all your free time in destructive communities, it doesn't really matter what your influences are at home or at church, it will be nearly impossible to really follow Jesus.

This is why we need to all work together. If any of us decides that we are going to be lazy, to just show up and go through the motions, it affects the rest of us. It is only when we all work together and support one another in our daily lives that we can really be who God has called us to be. There is no substitute for being part of a group of people who love God. As we work together and as we grow together, do not be surprised if you begin to look at the world differently, that you begin to see and understand things that you never could before. I am going to challenge you to think hard about what you believe and why you believe it. The reason for this is because we simply cannot assume that our secular culture has prepared us to know God.

If we want to study the heavens, we need to go where the telescopes are. If we want to study exotic plants, we need to go where they are found. If we want to know about microscopic life, we need to put ourselves in the places where we can learn about them. As Athanasius said, if we want to see a particular place, we have to go there. If we want to know God, we need to meet with God where he has met with us, which is, above all, in Jesus Christ and in the Bible. Not only that, we need to do it together. So let us join together, as people of different ages, with different backgrounds, and help one another meet with and come to know God in deeper ways every day. Let us pray.

AMEN