Ultimate Outrage of the Universe

Why is it that people can become emotionally and morally indignant over poverty and exploitation and prejudice and abortion and the infractions of religious liberty and the manifold injustices of man against man, and yet feel little, or no, remorse or indignation or outrage that God is disregarded, disbelieved, disobeyed, dishonored, and thus belittled, by millions and millions of people in the world? And the answer is: sin. And that is the ultimate outrage of the universe.

–Piper

New York Times: The Christmas Revolution

You might not have noticed, but the world has been rocked ever since…

BECAUSE the Christmas story has been told so often for so long, it’s easy even for Christians to forget how revolutionary Jesus’ birth was. The idea that God would become human and dwell among us, in circumstances both humble and humiliating, shattered previous assumptions. It was through this story of divine enfleshment that much of our humanistic tradition was born.

For most Christians, the incarnation — the belief that God, in the person of Jesus, walked in our midst — is history’s hinge point. The incarnation’s most common theological take-away relates to the doctrine of redemption: the belief that salvation is made possible by the sinless life and atoning death of Jesus. But there are other, less familiar aspects of Jesus’ earthly pilgrimage that are profoundly important.

One of them was rejecting the Platonic belief that the material world was evil. In Plato’s dualism, there was a dramatic disjuncture between ideal forms and actual bodies, between the physical and the spiritual worlds. According to Plato, what we perceive with our senses is illusory, a distorted shadow of reality. Hence philosophy’s most famous imagery — Plato’s shadow on the cave — where those in the cave mistook the shadows for real people and named them.

This Platonic view had considerable influence in the early church, but that influence faded because it was in tension with Christianity’s deepest teachings. In the Hebrew Bible, for example, God declares creation to be good — and Jesus, having entered the world, ratified that judgment. The incarnation attests to the existence of the physical, material world. Our life experiences are real, not shadows. The incarnation affirms the delight we take in earthly beauty and our obligation to care for God’s creation. This was a dramatic overturning of ancient thought.

The incarnation also reveals that the divine principle governing the universe is a radical commitment to the dignity and worth of every person, since we are created in the divine image.

But just as basic is the notion that we have value because God values us. Steve Hayner, a theologian who died earlier this year, illustrated this point to me when he observed that gold is valuable not because there is something about gold that is intrinsically of great worth but because someone values it. Similarly, human beings have worth because we are valued by God, who took on flesh, entered our world, and shared our experiences — love, joy, compassion and intimate friendships; anger, sorrow, suffering and tears. For Christians, God is not distant or detached; he is a God of wounds. All of this elevated the human experience and laid the groundwork for the ideas of individual dignity and inalienable rights.

In his book “A Brief History of Thought,” the secular humanist and French philosopher Luc Ferry writes that in contrast with the Greek understanding of humanity, “Christianity was to introduce the notion that humanity was fundamentally identical, that men were equal in dignity — an unprecedented idea at the time, and one to which our world owes its entire democratic inheritance.”

Indeed, Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount (blessed are the poor in spirit and the pure in heart, the meek and the merciful), his touching of lepers, and his association with outcasts and sinners were fundamentally at odds with the way the Greek and Roman worlds viewed life, where social status was everything.

“Christianity placed charity at the center of its spiritual life as no pagan cult ever had,” according to the theologian David Bentley Hart, “and raised the care of widows, orphans, the sick, the imprisoned, and the poor to the level of the highest of religious obligations.” Christianity played a key role in ending slavery and segregation. Today Christians are taking the lead against human trafficking and on behalf of unborn life. They maintain countless hospitals, hospices and orphanages around the world.

We moderns assume that compassion for the poor and marginalized is natural and universal. But actually we think in this humanistic manner in large measure because of Christianity. What Christianity did, my friend the Rev. Karel Coppock once told me, is to “transform our way of thinking about the poor and sick and create an entirely different cultural given.”

One other effect of the incarnation: It helps those of us of the Christian faith to avoid turning God into an abstract set of principles. Accounts of how Jesus interacted in this messy, complicated, broken world, through actions that stunned the people of his time, allow us to learn compassion in ways that being handed a moral rule book never could.

For one thing, rule books can’t shed tears or express love; human beings do. Seeing how Jesus dealt with the religious authorities of his day (often harshly) and the sinners and outcasts of his day (often tenderly and respectfully) adds texture and subtlety to human relationships that we could never gain otherwise.

Christians have often fallen short of what followers of Jesus are called to be. We have seen this in the Crusades, religious wars and bigotry; in opposition to science, in the way critical thought is discouraged and in harsh judgmentalism. To this day, many professing Christians embody the antithesis of grace.

We Christians would do well to remind ourselves of the true meaning of the incarnation. We are part of a great drama that God has chosen to be a participant in, not in the role of a conquering king but as a suffering servant, not with the intention to condemn the world but to redeem it. He saw the inestimable worth of human life, regardless of social status, wealth and worldly achievements, intelligence or national origin. So should we.

–Peter Wehner, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, served in the last three Republican administrations and is a contributing opinion writer. A version of this op-ed appears in print on December 25, 2015, on page A27 of the New York edition with the headline: The Christmas Revolution.

An Evolving Government

The order of the unalienable Rights in the Declaration of Independence is significant: Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. Each element’s value surpasses any subsequent. Life is granted above Liberties granted. And Liberty is greater than rights which guarantee a pursuit of Happiness. So when, in the course of an evolving government, these rights begin to become redefined and reordered, so too must the government itself.

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Holiness: Dreary or Sweet?

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It is a dreary holiness that is merely resisting sin. The joy of holiness is found in having heard a sweeter song… This is the true meaning of grace. Grace does not demonize our desires nor destroy them nor lead us to deny them. Grace is the work of the Holy Spirit in the transforming our desires so that knowing Jesus becomes sweeter than illicit sex, sweeter than money and what it can buy, sweeter than every fruitless joy. Grace is God satisfying our souls with His Son so that we’re ruined for anything else!

~ Sam Storms

Feeding on the Bread of Life

God is born in Bethlehem (the house of bread), wrapped in swaddling clothes (He is fully human), and has been laid in a food trough, a sign that He has been offered up for consumption — and not just any consumption, and not even implying reverent consumption, but animalistic…beastly consumption.
 –svidgen, stackexchange comment
Although taken by some (including the above author) to be a literal “Eucharist,” John 6 clearly links this bread as a metaphor to God’s words (v. 58 linked to 63), which is consistent with Mt. 4:4 and Lk. 4:4 that “man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God” (it’s not “this do to literally eat me,” but rather “this do in remembrance of me”). John clearly presents his entire book by showing us that Jesus is the Word. Therefore, my very real reliance for life ought not to come from food only, but from truth. This is not something to be taken as a religious rite, but rather a mental and heart “object” to which we must cling and “feed” regularly–daily, hourly, or more! Do we really believe…

How to Change

1 Blessed is the man
     who does not walk in the counsel
          of the wicked
or stand in the way of sinners
     or sit in the seat of mockers.
2 But his delight is in the law of the
          LORD,
     and on his law he meditates day
          and night.
3 He is like a tree planted by
          streams of water,
     which yields its fruit in season
and whose leaf does not wither.
     Whatever he does prospers.

– Psalm 1:1-3

Three major movements to this passage are as follows:

  1. Remove participation
  2. Refocused participation
  3. Results

The verbs used within the first verse encompass all waking positions of mankind: walk, stand, sit. That’s a sermon by itself. In the second verse, the participation is constant as it encompasses day and night. If we overlay Jesus’ words in Matthew 7, we find that Jesus fulfilled the law, and so we can substitute “Jesus” for law: our delight must be in Jesus, and it is upon Jesus which we meditate day and night.

Verse three gives us a simile to show our plant-likeness. The roots of the tree by a stream drink in the nutrients provided in the flow. The part that hit me recently had to do with yielding fruit in season. As in–it doesn’t necessarily produce fruit immediately; at least not mature fruit. In Leviticus, the Israelites were to regard any fruit from overtaken lands as forbidden for some years before they were to partake:

When you enter the land and plant any kind of fruit tree, regard its fruit as forbidden. For three years you are to consider it forbidden; it must not be eaten. In the fourth year all its fruit will be holy, an offering of praise to the Lord. But in the fifth year you may eat its fruit. In this way your harvest will be increased. I am the Lord your God.

– Leviticus 19:23-25

Saul, turned Paul, spent 14 years “somewhere” between his conversion and ministry as an apostle. Jesus spent about 18 years from the last time we hear about him as a 12-year-old until his ministry around 30 years of age with the only description: Jesus grew in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and man (Luke 2:52). David spent about 15 years between the time he was anointed to the time he became king. Joseph spent around 13 years in Egypt between the time he told his dream and was subsequently sold by his brothers to the time the opportunity came for the interpretation of Pharaoh’s dream. Moses is close to 40 years old when he tries saving the Israelites in his own strength. He spends another 40 years in the desert before God empowers him to lead Israel out of Egyptian slavery. Almost 20 years pass from the time Abraham is promised offspring to the time Isaac is miraculously born. There are about 24 years between the time Jacob steals Isaac’s blessing from Esau and when God blesses him and renames him Israel.

So then, just as you received Christ Jesus as Lord, continue to live your lives in him, rooted and built up in him, strengthened in the faith as you were taught, and overflowing with thankfulness.

– Colossians 2:6-7

Knowledge is Power?

Knowledge is power, so the pitch goes. Therefore, education is the key to success, the passport to the future, the door to a career. Bow down to us, and we shall give you the objective science, the value-free technology, and the business savvy to plunder the world of its goods. Enter the fold, and we shall give you the capacity and the skills to surround yourself with nice things. You will be respected, admired, and envied. Thus administrators, teachers, and above all students have been placed on a market of exchange, where the things bought and sold are not only the idols we pass off as consumer goods but also human souls. All too often the schools deemed to be the “good” ones are those that are good for the economy, attracting industry, grant money, and droves of bodies. The more numbers we have entered into our computers–indeed, the greater the number of the computers we have–the better we think we are. Hence we have fallen into a terrible confusion between quantity and quality: numbers mean everything. “Successful” programs are those that demonstrate “growth,” and growth is nearly always measured quantitatively. And so the numbers numb us into the sleeping sickness of complacency, where we bask in the illusion of knowing something for having increased our stores of information.

–David Patterson

Broken Connection to Earth

…when Hercules had to do battle with him, Antaeus could be defeated only when his contact with his origin was broken. Then, of course, there is Oedipus, whose name means “lame foot,” indicating a problematic contact with the earth…in education our link with the origins of life is not only a contact with the sacred texts that lie at the origin of truth in life, but also with those human beings who have newly entered life, with children…for the learned men of Wannsee, children were primary targets for extermination…in the Midrash on Psalms we are told that at Sinai God asked “the sucklings and the embryos: ‘Will you be sureties for your fathers, so that if I give them the Torah they will live by it, but that if they do not, you will be forfeited because of them?’ They replied: ‘Yes’”…thus we see what, according to Jewish tradition, is at stake in our adherence to the sacred texts that underlie the highest in higher education. And we see what was lost in the miscarriage of education manifested at Wannsee.
–David Patterson

Pursuing the Tree of Knowledge vs. the Tree of Life

I am rooted in the Tree of Knowledge
I want to know my pleasures
I want to know my rights
I want to find myself
I want to know of evils in the world–and fixate–
I want to know myself as god
I balk at the Tree of Life
at Truth
at absolutes
at repenting
at renewing my mind
at submitting
at Christ himself
I’d rather know evil and die
than believe the Truth and Live

Oh my soul, AWAKE!

Trees: Contented with God’s Provisions

I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree.
A tree whose hungry mouth is pressed
Against the earth’s sweet flowing breast;
A tree that looks at God all day
And lifts her leafy arms to pray;
A tree that may in summer wear
A nest of robins in her hair;
Upon whose bosom snow has lain;
Who intimately lives with rain.
Poems are written by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree.

~Joyce Kilmer, “Trees,” 1914