Category Archives: Theology

Fundamentalism of a Different Sort

One variation of Vince Lombardi’s annual “back to basics” training camp talk went, “Gentlemen, this…is a football…Am I going too fast?” Anyone who’s played organized sports remembers related preseason and post-loss mid-season talks or drills. A musician’s scales, a singer’s “do-re-mi” and a ballet dancer’s five “positions” are all versions of the same, and most everyone remembers school textbooks titled “Fundamentals of…(Whatever).” Yes, fundamentals are fine – until you start talking about religion and add an “-ism.”

Christian fundamentalism in the late 19^th– and early 20^th-century was an attempt at recapitulating the basics of the biblical Christian faith in response to the wholesale acquiescence of liberal protestants to cultural mores and Enlightenment perspectives that seemed to militate against biblical truth. As is often the case, valid beginnings don’t guarantee staying on course. In just a few decades, some Fundamentalists began to unbiblically (1 Corinthians 5:10) withdraw (socially if not physically) from the still-changing culture. “Fundamentalist” has often been used pejoratively ever since for anyone with a conservative, biblical view of the faith.

Enter Islamic Fundamentalism. I’m not an expert on Islam, but I’ve seen Quranic views that extolled the “peaceful religion” of many, and those of fundamentalists, “extremists” and “radicals.” Whether the abhorrent behavior of terrorists is borne from right or wrong interpretation of their holy text, or from some other sociopolitical dynamic, I don’t know. I do know that comparisons between those who commit crime in the name of God (including some “Christians” today and over the history of the church), and those biblical Christians who “rightly divide the word of truth” (2 Timothy 2:15) are ludicrous.

Recently, Evangelical Christianity (the next “movement” attempting to rescue biblical Christianity from the last movement as it diverged) at least partly overstepped and conflated their faith and politics – it was called the Religious Right. Thankfully, the confusion cleared, but left a worry from the more secular that anyone who brought their faith to the public square was attempting to build a theocracy. Ours is “fundamentalism” of a sort, so a biblical Christian is unable to dispatch the resultant worldview from their politics, but we want no more than our voices heard and votes counted. If there’s such a thing as “Christian Jihad,” it’s to save lives, not take them. (Note: I still consider myself a Christian and an Evangelical, though “biblical Christian” saves so many words of differentiation from others who use the same descriptors.)

True, biblical Christians rightly decry tired, staid, lifeless churches, but we must be careful on how we define “lifeless.” Many faithful churches, with enlivened members, have been “doing it the same way” for many years. Our culture worships the “new and exciting,” but heaven’s population will be heavy with those faithful who found wonder in the weekly recitation of the gospel of grace by the preached Word of God and the right practice of the sacraments, despite living an otherwise mundane existence.

So I’ll take the label “fundamentalist” and even “extremist” since, by nature, that’s what the biblical Christian life is. However poorly I personally meet it, the call of the Christian is to love and service, to one another and to neighbors (Matthew 5:16), including the proclamation of the truth of the gospel (Mark 16:15). How “radical” this is, though, should be determined by the surrounding culture, not by some intentional effort to try harder. The brightness of the light often depends on the darkness of the night. Any aberrant need to stand out or be intentionally radical leads only to burnout and disillusionment when we fail, or self-righteousness when we believe we’ve succeeded.

Christianity’s PR Problem: Oh, What to Do?

Christianity has an image problem. Exclusivist claims are a turn-off, “puritanical” morality is behind-the-times, and we have some “crazy” beliefs about how humankind came into being. Further, the Church is saddled with all sorts of (true and false) baggage for reprehensible (and unbiblical) crimes committed under her banner. Finally, hawkeyed media outlets and others who glory in any hint of Christian buffoonery from a few, never miss the opportunity to proclaim it such that the reproach is universally shared. Who can blame them when some of us act in a manner to make parody superfluous?

It would seem major swaths of “Christians” have indeed hired PR consultants and have distanced themselves from presently distasteful stances by compromising with the world on creation, salvation, and morality (necessarily severing ties with much of the Bible in the process). “Get with it,” you might hear them say while their denominations race to conform. Their churches shrink with the contrast they now lack, and the spiritual food they serve is water soup to a starving world.

Others have used America’s one home-grown philosophy, pragmatism, and made Christianity more temporally useful than eternally crucial. With Christianity, you can “Have Your Best Life Now,” or take “8 Steps to Create the Life You Want.” Money, stress, health, drugs, marriage, raising children – every one of your problems can be “fixed” by this Christianity. Prosperity preachers preach, “You can have whatever you want,” with the escape clause, “if you have enough faith.” Otherwise orthodox pastors’ pulpit messages master in missing the point when they concentrate almost entirely on fixing the felt needs of the congregation over proclaiming the person and work of Jesus Christ.

Even biblical Christians can suffer this tendency to a small degree. When’s the last time you heard someone’s testimony that didn’t focus on how much better their life is since coming to Jesus? “I used to be ‘this,’ and now I’m ‘THIS!’” What about hearing from someone who grew up in church, always believed and never rebelled, but still understands deeply their need for a Savior? This is how it should be for our kids, but we discourage that when we celebrate the sensational. Besides, Tony Robbins or a juice cleanse may be just as likely to “fix” you.

So, if aping culture and offering practical/fantastical solutions to life’s problems isn’t the answer to our PR problem, what is?

Well, avoid joining the ranks of the thin-skinned “reactivists” with a featherweight chip on weak shoulders. Real, dangerous persecution happens overseas all too much for American Christians to complain. Did biblical laws inform our forefathers as they laid the foundation of this country? Of course and in many ways there is marked erosion, but this has never been a “Christian nation,” and as pluralism increases, liberties we once assumed can be assumed no longer. Sans paranoia, we can offer a calm and civil response when there are real changes to the freedom of speech or religious liberties intended by law.

So, is there a “war on Christmas” and on Christianity in general? Yes! There has been for two thousand years! Jesus said, “You will be hated by everyone because of me…” (Matthew 10:22a) He said it to his apostles in a specific context, but there is so much more biblical weight promising a hard road (cross-bearing, trials, persecution) for all who love and follow Christ.

Faithful, biblical churches will never solve their PR problem. We should be intentional in love, winsome in manner, but unyielding in truth. The cross is its own offense. It needs not our help.

Follow the Leader?

We live in a society of changing “norms” and diminishing distinctions. The New Tolerance has popularized the idea that truth is in the eye of the beholder. Instead of Truth, there is “my truth” and “your truth.” Even in contradiction, each remains equally valid. This sort of relativism sits atop the P.C. throne, and has made inroads into discussions of religion, ethics, politics and even gender. The idea comingles harder (more objective) and softer (more subjective) sciences to muddle “truth” such that personal preferences and mitigating circumstances affect perception. Physics is one of the harder sciences, and I have as yet not seen anyone able to relativize gravity. If you and I step off the 22-story Executive Office Building of the Capitol, our feelings/beliefs about gravity will have little to do with the mess we’ll make on the plaza. My contention here is that religious/spiritual “Truth” is as similarly hard and fixed and as unforgiving as gravity.

Whatever your position is on what happens to our ethereal selves when our bodies die, it’s nonsense to believe we could all be right. The naturalist believes we cease to exist at physical death. We biblical Christians believe heaven or hell await our (temporarily) bodiless souls until Christ’s second coming. We can’t both be right. You can add reincarnation, passing into “oneness,” or the ubiquitous idea that most everyone but despots, serial killers and pedophiles go to some type of heaven. “S/He’s in a better place” may provide opiatic comfort to us as a culture as we watch everyone die, but it begs the question why we try so hard to push death days or weeks as the precipice inevitably approaches. Death is batting around a thousand, and while we could all be wrong about our destination, we can’t all be right.

I might be wrong in my beliefs, but I’m not wrong saying that whatever is, is, and our beliefs and preferences, like in the case of gravity, don’t change the facts. The New Tolerance disagrees, riding in on a white horse named “Fairness,” proclaiming Sincerity as savior. All beliefs are equally (if only subjectively) true and valid and good. Religions, even nominally “Christian” forms, join hands with all who will agree to this wide, inclusive road to a wonderful afterlife and sing. Tra-la…la-la…la?

Here’s the real question: What do YOU believe? Why?

If you’ve thought about the eternal consequences of death for even a moment and settled your position, however tenuously, you’ve trusted someone – your parents or teachers or pastors or scientists or some amalgam of the world’s views. Whether religious/spiritual or areligious/naturalist, you have placed your “faith” in someone or some idea.

Consider this – some thirty years ago, I had a friend who was a fairly new pilot in the F-111. He was flying a night, low level mission with an experienced instructor. This aircraft had terrain-following radar with a type of “auto-pilot” so the plane could fly low and fast with the pilots’ hands off the controls. The system kept forcing the plane to pitch-up and climb (a built-in safety measure) when there was no apparent obstacle, so they assumed the system wasn’t operating properly. They toggled it off. Seconds later they flew into the side of a mountain at over 500 mph. This macabre example is a cautionary tale of death’s insidiousness, ignored warnings and misplaced trust.

So, again, what do you believe and why? By grace, confirmed by study, the biblical Jesus Christ has earned my trust regarding my eternal destination. Has whoever informed your view truly earned your trust? Much is at stake.

[This article originally appeared in the Tallahassee Democrat.]

Understanding the Gospel: What is Good News?

Everyone believes that they are right. Think of the well-worn religious parable of the elephant and blind men. Each has hold of a different portion of the elephant. Asked to describe the elephant, each is confined to his tactile perspective, where a leg “is like a tree trunk,” the tail “is like a rope,” the side “is like a wall,” the trunk “is like a snake,” and the ear “is like a leaf.” “So,” says the teller of the parable, “each has their own perspective, and likewise each religion has some portion of the whole truth.” Sounds compelling until you realize this “inclusive” storyteller is claiming to see the whole elephant! He’s not blind, everyone else is. One path or many? Are our divergent beliefs inconsequential? God only knows for sure.

It comes down to authority. Who or what informs our theological ethic? Unaided conscience? Present social mores? Biblical Christians believe that the Bible is our authority simply because it’s God’s revelation to us (Kevin DeYoung said about the parable that everything changes when the elephant speaks!). I could be wrong, but I have good reasons to believe that the Bible is true – all of it, not just my favorite bits. I know there are tough verses, but I have sufficiently studied the doubters’ accusations and believers’ responses. There remain tensions, nuances and depths of understanding that escape me, but I’m comfortable with the admixture of the rationally grasped, the spiritually understood and the mystery when I find neither. After all, the God of the Bible is a God who can be essentially, not comprehensively, understood (Is. 55:8,9).

While the Bible proclaims clearly that ALL are sinful (Rom. 3:23), or sick, if you will, many people don’t perceive their need for saving or healing. Others would save themselves with perfunctory religiosity – church membership, attendance, rituals – and/or they simply work their “balance sheet” accumulating good deeds and minimizing bad, or hope by comparison with others that they make the grade. “Hey, it’s not like I ever killed anybody.” It’s not a competition. If it was, we’d all lose.

You see, no résumé, no balance sheet, and no comparison of deeds will suffice to cancel the debt each of us owes. If we were true to ourselves, we’d rightly argue with Paul about who, indeed, is the “chief of sinners” (1 Tim. 1:15). I pity the person who cannot look inside and see something broken, something sick, something that needs fixing. I hope you can see that. If so, I have GOOD NEWS!

The gospel, or good news, is that “while we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Rom. 5:8). The God of the Bible is a holy God who hates sin. In his grace, he visited the punishment for sin on his sinless Son, Jesus Christ, on the cross. His death and subsequent resurrection “conquered the grave.” If we trust in the person and work of Jesus Christ on our behalf, we will be saved, adopted as sons and daughters. We have no righteousness of our own (Titus 3:5) – instead, we trust in Christ alone. Augustus Toplady wrote in his classic hymn, Rock of Ages, Cleft for Me, “Nothing in my hand I bring, simply to the cross I cling.”

I understand the exclusive claims of this gospel and the offense it is to some (1 Co. 1:23). Whether biblical Christians are right or wrong, we believe that our ability to truly love the world rests on the proclamation of the gospel. Are we clumsy, forgetting the grace shown us? Too often. Grace should be humbling, for it is not merited, not earned and not deserved.

[This article originally appeared in the Tallahassee Democrat.]

The Peanut Butter and Jelly…and Unemployment Diet

I have a new and exciting diet plan for those of you out there who wish to shed pounds. In fact, I’ll guarantee you lose weight! It’s easy, just follow the steps below:

Eat PBJ for lunch (on whole wheat with extra gluten) every day (not required)
Eat whatever else you want – I recommend no-sugar-added Blue Bunny Bunny Tracks ice cream (not required)
Run four miles a day on old knees with disintegrating menisci (not required)
Drink a “touch” of red wine or perhaps a “smidgen” of Scotch most nights (these terms are synonyms for “somewhat less than half your body weight” – not required, but highly recommended)
Most importantly, be in your “prime earning years” while earning, get this, nothing at all! (required)

Voila! Somehow – I think it’s magic – your stomach digests everything, including your stomach, at an amazing rate. You’ll shed pounds! You’ll shed hair!*
*(If you’re not already bald. And, unfortunately, you old guys won’t shed your ubiquitous ear and back hairs, your new unruly eyebrow/beanstalk hairs, nor your nose hair mustache.)

The Back Story

Through no fault of my own, except for most of the professional choices I’ve made in the last twenty-five years, I find myself in the unenviable position of “looking for work.” If you’ve read the About the Author paragraph on the home page, you’ll know that I voluntarily abandoned a sought-after position some years ago. My thought at present? Undo! Do-over! Mulligan! The people who say they have “no regrets” are either liars or stupid liars.

Most nights I’m awakened by Chicken Little running through my head screaming what Chicken Little screams. I say, “preach it, brother!” Then, Chicken Big follows him screaming, “Don’t worry about the sky falling, the Earth will open up and swallow us first!” (We do live in Florida, by the way, so this is more than 50% likely on a good day.) The whole situation has my gut in a knot. Frankly, it’s kind of a nightmare.

Beneath the Crashing Waves

My confession to you, and my testimony, is that this is not how it should be. Now, my situation is not how I want it to be, but it is my reaction that is not how it should be.

What should not be is the knot in my stomach. What should not be is the voice in my head and in my sleep. What should not be is the hand-wringing, faithless worry of which I’ve been guilty. What should be is the “peace that passes understanding.” (Phil 4:7)

Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, rejoice. Let your reasonableness be known to everyone. The Lord is at hand; do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. (Philippians 4:4-7 ESV, emphasis mine)

I am more than ashamed that I’ve been anxious – that my understanding of God’s providence, of his sovereign control, of his love and his promises, have not been brought to bear on how I’ve handled this setback. I guess the old epithet “those who can’t do, teach” is at least partly true in this case. I’ve taught Sunday school and Bible studies for almost 20 years, and in my study and experience, I’ve learned again and again the faithfulness of God. This faithfulness extends to far more than “fixing” my present lamentable circumstance, which he is likely to do in his good time. Regardless on the timing or outcome of this wait, I should appreciate and focus on the completed work of Christ on the Cross. If I never have another payday, or another meal, or share another laugh, or feel another hug, I should be content with what he’s done for me in his Son. My next breath, my next heartbeat, and all my future hopes are all of grace.

Providence

Many believers watch our lives for little “blessings,” or “miracles,” as if we need proof all over that God is real and he’s there and he loves us. Our tendency is to make something supernatural out of every event, as if that’s the only way God works. We need to have up-to-the-minute evidence on his résumé that he’s involved. We have “God sightings” or see “God at work” whenever there are fortuitous circumstances. Should we praise God for these good things? Of course! Just don’t manufacture evidences that make him seem more immediately (directly) involved than we can know for certain. First, it’s uncaring (and hubris?) to brag of his activity in your life to those who know no such privilege. Second, we train ourselves to imagine perpetually sunny days, and lose the ability to praise him for gray, hazy days, and imagine him to have abandoned us in the darkest storms.

Further, we often tend to connect, one-to-one, our circumstance to our performance or faithfulness. Those who prosper are being rewarded and those who suffer are being punished, or God is “teaching them something.” While it may very well be that I’m suffering my own poor choices, there are far too many situations we all know of where suffering is clearly not the fault of the sufferer (I know of some folks close to me in this category, further bringing my own “suffering” into perspective). That some real schmucks prosper ought also dispel that myth. So, how does God work?

There is far more to the biblical doctrine (teaching) of God’s providence than can be contained in a large book, much less a short post. Briefly, God uses means. We are fed by farmers and cooks and bakers, healed by doctors, taught by teachers, protected by soldiers, police and firemen and women. When we take the super-supernatural view, we lose the appreciation (and praise!) we should have for God’s providence in the everyday – the mundane, the ordinary. Think of it this way, if you wonder about God’s present activity, by the power of his might, he’s holding the atoms together that make up your body and the world around you. He’s always present and active, and yes, it seems there are sometimes “miracles” (supernatural intervention), but he mostly uses secondary causes (means – nature, you and me) to effect his perfect will.

[BTW, I recommend the book, Every Good Endeavor: Connecting Your Work to God’s Work for a good overview of work/providence.]

And yes, he has good purpose in all that comes to pass (Romans 8:28), but clearly some of what “comes to pass,” we wish would pass more quickly. So, he has some purpose even in our tragic, baffling, suffering. While I’m sure to touch more on this in later posts, I’ve come to the conclusion that we’re rarely able to discern with any precision what he’s doing and why (sometimes we get a clue after the fact). And finally, here’s my point: In all our circumstances, as Paul says, “in plenty and in want” (Phil. 4:12), we are to be content. What he is teaching us as we reflect on him and his promises and his faithfulness, and what we should practice to find contentment, are gratitude for what he’s done, and trust in what he will do.

I’m blind to the Lord’s plan for me. Fruitlessly, I strain to see farther than the fog allows. In one sense, I don’t sit on my duff (“Let go and let God”), but forge ahead, actively pursuing work, knowing in whose hands my future truly lies. In another sense, I rest, with gratitude for all he’s done, and trust for what comes next. Pray that it would always be so.